Issue 34, November 2017

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

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the November 2017 issue of Forever Magazine!

As I mentioned in last month’s introduction, I’ll be off to China for a couple of weeks this month. I’ll be attending the Chengdu International Science Fiction Convention (in Chengdu). Next, I’ll head up to Beijing for a meeting and event with Storycom followed by the Chinese Nebula Awards. Aside from being the home of Science Fiction World, the world’s largest SF magazine, Chengdu is well-known for its pandas, so I’ll be spending some of my spare time checking them out. While in Beijing, I hope to get out to the Great Wall. Can’t be all SF all the time!

When I come back, I’ll hit the ground running as I need to wrap up work on The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 3. My publisher moved up the publication date, so it looks like my book will be the first of the year’s best anthologies out of the gate this year. I’m not sure that has an actual impact on anything, but we’ll see.

Oh and my android anthology, More Human than Human, comes out this month. I hope you’ll consider checking it out!

Until next time . . .

-Neil

Incarnation Day

Walter Jon Williams

It’s your understanding and wisdom that makes me want to talk to you, Dr. Sam. About how Fritz met the Blue Lady, and what happened with Janis, and why her mother decided to kill her, and what became of all that. I need to get it sorted out, and for that I need a real friend. Which is you.

Janis is always making fun of me because I talk to an imaginary person. She makes even more fun of me because my imaginary friend is an English guy who died hundreds of years ago.

“You’re wrong,” I pointed out to her, “Dr. Samuel Johnson was a real person, so he’s not imaginary. It’s just my conversations with him that are imaginary.”

I don’t think Janis understands the distinction I’m trying to make.

But I know that you understand, Dr. Sam. You’ve understood me ever since we met in that Age of Reason class, and I realized that you not only said and did things that made you immortal, but that you said and did them while you were hanging around in taverns with actors and poets.

Which is about the perfect life, if you ask me.

In my opinion Janis could do with a Dr. Sam to talk to. She might be a lot less frustrated as an individual.

I mean, when I am totally stressed trying to comprehend the equations for electron paramagnetic resonance or something, so I just can’t stand cramming another ounce of knowledge into my brain, I can always imagine my Dr. Sam—a big fat man (though I think the word they used back then was “corpulent”)—a fat man with a silly wig on his head, who makes a magnificent gesture with one hand and says, with perfect wisdom and gravity, All intellectual improvement, Miss Alison, arises from leisure.

Who could put it better than that? Who else could be as sensible and wise? Who could understand me as well?

Certainly nobody I know.

(And have I mentioned how much I like the way you call me Miss Alison?)

We might as well begin with Fahd’s Incarnation Day on Titan. It was the first incarnation among the Cadre of Glorious Destiny, so of course we were all present.

The celebration had been carefully planned to showcase the delights of Saturn’s largest moon. First we were to be downloaded onto Cassini Ranger, the ship parked in Saturn orbit to service all the settlements on the various moons. Then we would be packed into individual descent pods and dropped into Titan’s thick atmosphere. We’d be able to stunt through the air, dodging in and out of methane clouds as we chased each other across Titan’s cloudy, photochemical sky. After that would be skiing on the Tomasko glacier, Fahd’s dinner, and then skating on frozen methane ice.

We would all be wearing bodies suitable for Titan’s low gravity and high-pressure atmosphere—sturdy, low to the ground, and furry, with six legs and a domelike head stuck onto the front between a pair of arms.

But my body would be one borrowed for the occasion, a body the resort kept for tourists. For Fahd it would be different. He would spend the next five or six years in orbit around Saturn, after which he would have the opportunity to move on to something else.

The six-legged body he inhabited would be his own, his first. He would be incarnated—a legal adult, and legally human despite his six legs and furry body. He would have his own money and possessions, a job, and a full set of human rights.

Unlike the rest of us.

After the dinner, where Fahd would be formally invested with adulthood and his citizenship, we would all go out for skating on the methane lake below the glacier. Then we’d be uploaded and head for home.

All of us but Fahd, who would begin his new life. The Cadre of Glorious Destiny would have given its first member to interplanetary civilization.

I envied Fahd his incarnation—his furry six-legged body, his independence, and even his job, which wasn’t all that stellar if you ask me. After fourteen years of being a bunch of electrons buzzing around in a quantum matrix, I wanted a real life even if it meant having twelve dozen legs.

I suppose I should explain, because you were born in an era when electricity came from kites, that at the time of Fahd’s Incarnation Day party I was not exactly a human being. Not legally, and especially not physically.

Back in the old days—back when people were establishing the first settlements beyond Mars, in the asteroid belt and on the moons of Jupiter and then Saturn—resources were scarce. Basics such as water and air had to be shipped in from other places, and that was very expensive. And of course the environment was extremely hazardous—the death rate in those early years was phenomenal.

It’s lucky that people are basically stupid, otherwise no one would have gone.

Yet the settlements had to grow. They had to achieve self-sufficiency from the home worlds of Earth and Luna and Mars, which sooner or later were going to get tired of shipping resources to them, not to mention shipping replacements for all the people who died in stupid accidents. And a part of independence involved establishing growing, or at least stable, populations, and that meant having children.

But children suck up a lot of resources, which like I said were scarce. So the early settlers had to make do with virtual children.

It was probably hard in the beginning. If you were a parent you had to put on a headset and gloves and a body suit in order to cuddle your infant, whose objective existence consisted of about a skazillion lines of computer code anyway . . . well, let’s just say you had to want that kid really badly.

Especially since you couldn’t touch him in the flesh till he was grown up, when he would be downloaded into a body grown in a vat just for him. The theory being that there was no point in having anyone on your settlement who couldn’t contribute to the economy and help pay for those scarce resources, so you’d only incarnate your offspring when he was already grown up and could get a job and help to pay for all that oxygen.

You might figure from this that it was a hard life, out there on the frontier.

Now it’s a lot easier. People can move in and out of virtual worlds with nothing more than a click of a mental switch. You get detailed sensory input through various nanoscale computers implanted in your brain, so you don’t have to put on oven mitts to feel your kid. You can dandle your offspring, and play with him, and teach him to talk, and feed him even. Life in the virtual realms claims to be 100 percent realistic, though in my opinion it’s more like 95 percent, and only in the realms that intend to mimic reality, since some of them don’t.

Certain elements of reality were left out, and there are advantages—at least if you’re a parent. No drool, no messy diapers, no vomit. When the child trips and falls down, he’ll feel pain—you do want to teach him not to fall down, or to bang his head on things—but on the other hand there won’t be any concussions or broken bones. There won’t be any fatal accidents involving fuel spills or vacuum.

There are other accidents that the parents have made certain we won’t have to deal with. Accidental pregnancy, accidental drunkenness, accidental drug use.

Accidental gambling. Accidental vandalism. Accidental suicide. Accidentally acquiring someone else’s property. Accidentally stealing someone’s extra-vehicular unit and going for a joy ride among the asteroids.

Accidentally having fun. Because believe me, the way the adults arrange it here, all the fun is planned ahead of time.

Yep, Dr. Sam, life is pretty good if you’re a grown-up. Your kids are healthy and smart and extremely well educated. They live in a safe, organized world filled with exciting educational opportunities, healthy team sports, family entertainment, and games that reward group effort, cooperation, and good citizenship.

It all makes me want to puke. If I could puke, that is, because I can’t. (Did I mention there was no accidental bulimia, either?)

Thy body is all vice, Miss Alison, and thy mind all virtue.

Exactly, Dr. Sam. And it’s the vice I’m hoping to find out about. Once I get a body, that is.

We knew that we weren’t going to enjoy much vice on Fahd’s Incarnation Day, but still everyone in the Cadre of Glorious Destiny was excited, and maybe a little jealous, about his finally getting to be an adult, and incarnating into the real world and having some real world fun for a change. Never mind that he’d got stuck in a dismal job as an electrical engineer on a frozen moon.

All jobs are pretty dismal from what I can tell, so he isn’t any worse off than anyone else really.

For days before the party I had been sort of avoiding Fritz. Since we’re electronic we can avoid each other easily, simply by not letting yourself be visible to the other person, and not answering any queries he sends to you, but I didn’t want to be rude.

Fritz was cadre, after all.

So I tried to make sure I was too busy to deal with Fritz—too busy at school, or with my job for Dane, or working with one of the other cadre members on a project. But a few hours before our departure for Titan, when I was in a conference room with Bartolomeo and Parminder working on an assignment for our Artificial Intelligence class, Fritz knocked on our door, and Bartolomeo granted him access before Parminder and I could signal him not to.

So in comes Fritz. Since we’re electronic we can appear to one another as whatever we like, for instance Mary Queen of Scots or a bunch of snowflakes or even you, Dr. Sam. We all experiment with what we look like. Right now I mostly use an avatar of a sort-of Picasso woman—he used to distort people in his paintings so that you had a kind of 360-degree view of them, or parts of them, and I think that’s kind of interesting, because my whole aspect changes depending on what angle of me you’re viewing.

For an avatar Fritz’s used the image of a second-rate action star named Norman Isfahan. Who looks okay, at least if you can forget his lame videos, except that Fritz added an individual touch in the form of a balloon-shaped red hat. Which he thought made him look cool, but which only seemed ludicrous and a little sad.

Fritz stared at me for a moment, with a big goofy grin on his face, and Parminder sent me a little private electronic note of sympathy. In the last few months Fritz had become my pet, and he followed me around whenever he got the chance. Sometimes he’d be with me for hours without saying a word, sometimes he’d talk the entire time and not let me get a single word in.

I did my best with him, but I had a life to lead, too. And friends. And family. And I didn’t want this person with me every minute, because even though I was sorry for him he was also very frustrating to be around.

Friendship is not always the sequel of obligation.

Alas, Dr. J., too true.

Fritz was the one member of our cadre who came out, well, wrong. They build us—us software—by reasoning backwards from reality, from our parents’ DNA. They find a good mix of our parents’ genes, and that implies certain things about us, and the sociologists get their say about what sort of person might be needful in the next generation, and everything’s thrown together by a really smart artificial intelligence, and in the end you get a virtual child.

But sometimes despite all the intelligence of everyone and everything involved, mistakes are made. Fritz was one of these. He wasn’t stupid exactly—he was as smart as anyone—but his mental reflexes just weren’t in the right plane. When he was very young he would spend hours without talking or interacting with any of us. Fritz’s parents, Jack and Hans, were both software engineers, and they were convinced the problem was fixable. So they complained and they or the AIs or somebody came up with a software patch, one that was supposed to fix his problem—and suddenly Fritz was active and angry, and he’d get into fights with people and sometimes he’d just scream for no reason at all and go on screaming for hours.

So Hans and Jack went to work with the code again, and there was a new software patch, and now Fritz was stealing things, except you can’t really steal anything in sims, because the owner can find any virtual object just by sending it a little electronic ping.

That ended with Fritz getting fixed yet again, and this went on for years. So while it was true that none of us were exactly a person, Fritz was less a person than any of us.

We all did our best to help. We were cadre, after all, and cadres look after their own. But there was a limit to what any of us could do. We heard about unanticipated feedback loops and subsystem crashes and weird quantum transfers leading to fugue states. I think that the experts had no real idea what was going on. Neither did we.

There was a lot of question as to what would happen when Fritz incarnated. If his problems were all software glitches, would they disappear once he was meat and no longer software? Or would they short-circuit his brain?

A check on the histories of those with similar problems did not produce encouraging answers to these questions.

And then Fritz became my problem because he got really attached to me, and he followed me around.

“Hi, Alison,” he said.

“Hi, Fritz.”

I tried to look very busy with what I was doing, which is difficult to do if you’re being Picasso Woman and rather abstract-looking to begin with.

“We’re going to Titan in a little while,” Fritz said.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Would you like to play the shadowing game with me?” he asked.

Right then I was glad I was Picasso Woman and not incarnated, because I knew that if I had a real body I’d be blushing.

“Sure,” I said. “If our capsules are anywhere near each other when we hit the atmosphere. We might be separated, though.”

“I’ve been practicing in the simulations,” Fritz said. “And I’m getting pretty good at the shadowing game.”

“Fritz,” Parminder said. “We’re working on our AI project now, okay? Can we talk to you later, on Titan?”

“Sure.”

And I sent a note of gratitude to Parminder, who was in on the scheme with me and Janis, and who knew that Fritz couldn’t be a part of it.

Shortly thereafter my electronic being was transmitted from Ceres by high-powered communications lasers and downloaded into an actual body, even if it was a body that had six legs and that didn’t belong to me. The body was already in its vacuum suit, which was packed into the descent capsule—I mean nobody wanted us floating around in the Cassini Ranger in zero gravity in bodies we weren’t used to—so there wasn’t a lot I could do for entertainment.

Which was fine. It was the first time I’d been in a body, and I was absorbed in trying to work out all the little differences between reality and the sims I’d grown up in.

In reality, I thought, things seem a little quieter. In simulations there are always things competing for your attention, but right now there was nothing to do but listen to myself breathe.

And then there was a bang and a big shove, easily absorbed by foam padding, and I was launched into space, aimed at the orange ball that was Titan, and behind it the giant pale sphere of Saturn.

The view was sort of disappointing. Normally you see Saturn as an image with the colors electronically altered so as to heighten the subtle differences in detail. The reality of Saturn was more of a pasty blob, with faint brown stripes and a little red jagged scrawl of a storm in the Southern hemisphere.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get a very good view of the rings, because they were edge-on, like a straight silver knife-slash right across a painted canvas.

Besides Titan I could see at least a couple dozen moons. I could recognize Dione and Rhea, and Enceladus because it was so bright. Iapetus was obvious because it was half light and half dark. There were a lot of tiny lights that could have been Atlas or Pan or Prometheus or Pandora or maybe a score of others.

I didn’t have enough time to puzzle out the identity of the other moons, because Titan kept getting bigger and bigger. It was a dull orange color, except on the very edge where the haze scatters blue light. Other than that arc of blue, Titan is orange the same way Mars is red, which is to say that it’s orange all the way down, and when you get to the bottom there’s still more orange.

It seemed like a pretty boring place for Fahd to spend his first years of adulthood.

I realized that if I were doing this trip in a sim, I’d fast-forward through this part. It would be just my luck if all reality turned out to be this dull.

Things livened up in a hurry when the capsule hit the atmosphere. There was a lot of noise, and the capsule rattled and jounced, and bright flames of ionizing radiation shot up past the view port. I could feel my heart speeding up, and my breath going fast. It was my body that was being bounced around, with my nerve impulses running along my spine. This was much more interesting. This was the difference between reality and a sim, even though I couldn’t explain exactly what the difference was.

It is the distinction, Miss Alison, between the undomesticated awe which one might feel at the sight of a noble wild prospect discovered in nature; and that which is produced by a vain tragedian on the stage, puffing and blowing in a transport of dismal fury as he tries to describe the same vision.

Thank you, Dr. Sam.

We that live to please must please to live.

I could see nothing but fire for a while, and then there was a jolt and a Crash-Bang as the braking chute deployed, and I was left swaying frantically in the sudden silence, my heart beating fast as high-atmosphere winds fought for possession of the capsule. Far above I could just see the ionized streaks of some of the other cadre members heading my way.

It was then, after all I could see was the orange fog, that I remembered that I’d been so overwhelmed by the awe of what I’d been seeing that I forgot to observe. So I began to kick myself over that.

It isn’t enough to stare when you want to be a visual artist, which is what I want more than anything. A noble wild prospect (as you’d call it, Dr. Sam) isn’t simply a gorgeous scene, it’s also a series of technical problems. Ratios, colors, textures. Media. Ideas. Frames. Decisions. I hadn’t thought about any of that when I had the chance, and now it was too late.

I decided to start paying better attention, but there was nothing happening outside but acetylene sleet cooking off the hot exterior of the capsule. I checked my tracking display and my onboard map of Titan’s surface. So I was prepared when a private message came from Janis.

“Alison. You ready to roll?”

“Sure. You bet.”

“This is going to be brilliant.”

I hoped so. But somewhere in my mind I kept hearing Dr. Sam’s voice: Remember that all tricks are either knavish or childish.

The trick I played on Fritz was both.

I had been doing some outside work for Dane, who was a communications tech, because outside work paid in real money, not the Citizenship Points we get paid in the sims. And Dane let me do some of the work on Fahd’s Incarnation Day, so I was able to arrange which capsules everyone was going to be put into.

I put Fritz into the last capsule to be fired at Titan. And those of us involved in Janis’ scheme—Janis, Parminder, Andy, and I—were fired first.

This basically meant that we were going to be on Titan five or six minutes ahead of Fritz, which meant it was unlikely that he’d be able to catch up to us. He would be someone else’s problem for a while.

I promised myself that I’d be extra nice to him later, but it didn’t stop me from feeling knavish and childish.

After we crashed into Titan’s atmosphere, and after a certain amount of spinning and swaying we came to a break in the cloud, and I could finally look down at Titan’s broken surface. Stark mountains, drifts of methane snow, shiny orange ethane lakes, the occasional crater. In the far distance, in the valley between a pair of lumpy mountains, was the smooth toboggan slide of the Tomasko glacier. And over to one side, on a plateau, were the blinking lights that marked our landing area.

And directly below was an ethane cloud, into which the capsule soon vanished. It was there that the chute let go, and there was a stomach-lurching drop before the airfoils deployed. I was not used to having my stomach lurch—recall if you will my earlier remarks on puking—so it was a few seconds before I was able to recover and take control of what was now a large and agile glider.

No, I hadn’t piloted a glider before. But I’d spent the last several weeks working with simulations, and the technology was fail-safed anyway. Both I and the onboard computer would have to screw up royally before I could damage myself or anyone else. I took command of the pod and headed for Janis’s secret rendezvous.

There are various sorts of games you can play with the pods as they’re dropping through the atmosphere. You can stack your airfoils in appealing and intricate formations. (I think this one’s really stupid if you’re trying to do it in the middle of thick clouds.) There’s the game called “shadowing,” the one that Fritz wanted to play with me, where you try to get right on top of another pod, above the airfoils where they can’t see you, and you have to match every maneuver of the pod that’s below you, which is both trying to evade you and to maneuver so as to get above you. There are races, where you try to reach some theoretical point in the sky ahead of the other person. And there’s just swooping and dashing around the sky, which is probably as fun as anything.

But Janis had other plans. And Parminder and Andy and I, who were Janis’s usual companions in her adventures, had elected to be a part of her scheme, as was our wont. (Do you like my use of the word “wont,” Dr. Sam?) And a couple other members of the cadre, Mei and Bartolomeo, joined our group without knowing our secret purpose.

We disguised our plan as a game of shadowing, which I turned out to be very good at. It’s not simply a game of flying, it’s a game of spacial relationships, and that’s what visual artists have to be good at understanding. I spent more time on top of one or more of the players than anyone else.

Though perhaps the others weren’t concentrating on the game. Because although we were performing the intricate spiraling maneuvers of shadowing as a part of our cover, we were also paying very close attention to the way the winds were blowing at different altitudes—we had cloud-penetrating lasers for that, in addition to constant meteorological data from the ground—and we were using available winds as well as our maneuvers to slowly edge away from our assigned landing field, and toward our destined target.

I kept expecting to hear from Fritz, wanting to join our game. But I didn’t. I supposed he had found his fun somewhere else.

All the while we were stunting around Janis was sending us course and altitude corrections, and thanks to her navigation we caught the edge of a low pressure area that boosted us toward our objective at nearly two hundred kilometers per hour. It was then that Mei swung her capsule around and began a descent toward the landing field.

“I just got the warning that we’re on the edge of our flight zone,” she reported.

“Roger,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Janis. “We know.”

Mei swooped away, followed by Bartolomeo. The rest of us continued soaring along in the furious wind. We made little pretense by this point that we were still playing shadow, but instead tried for distance.

Ground Control on the landing area took longer to try to contact us than we’d expected.

“Capsules six, twenty-one, thirty,” said a ground controller. She had one of those smooth, controlled voices that people use when trying to coax small children away from the candy and toward the spinach.

“You have exceeded the safe range from the landing zone. Turn at once to follow the landing beacon.”

I waited for Janis to answer.

“It’s easier to reach Tomasko from where we are,” she said. “We’ll just head for the glacier and meet the rest of you there.”

“The flight plan prescribes a landing on Lake Southwood,” the voice said. “Please lock on the landing beacon at once and engage your autopilots.”

Janis’s voice rose with impatience. “Check the flight plan I’m sending you! It’s easier and quicker to reach Tomasko! We’ve got a wind shoving us along at a hundred eighty clicks!”

There was another two or three minutes of silence. When the voice came back, it was grudging.

“Permission granted to change flight plan.”

I sagged with relief in my vac suit, because now I was spared a moral crisis. We had all sworn that we’d follow Janis’s flight plan whether or not we got permission from Ground Control, but that didn’t necessarily mean that we would have. Janis would have gone, of course, but I for one might have had second thoughts. I would have had an excuse if Fritz had been along, because I could have taken him to the assigned landing field—we didn’t want him with us, because he might not have been able to handle the landing if it wasn’t on an absolutely flat area.

I’d like to think I would have followed Janis, though. It isn’t as if I hadn’t before.

And honestly, that was about it. If this had been one of the adult-approved video dramas we grew up watching, something would have gone terribly wrong and there would have been a horrible crash. Parminder would have died, and Andy and I would have been trapped in a crevasse or buried under tons of methane ice, and Janis would have had to go to incredible, heroic efforts in order to rescue us. At the end Janis would have Learned an Important Life Lesson, about how following the Guidance of Our Wise, Experienced Elders is preferable, to staging wild, disobedient stunts.

By comparison what actually happened was fairly uneventful. We let the front push us along till we were nearly at the glacier, and then we dove down into calmer weather. We spiraled to a soft landing in clean snow at the top of Tomasko glacier. The airfoils neatly folded themselves, atmospheric pressure inside the capsules equalized with that of the moon, and the hatches opened so we could walk in our vac suits onto the top of Titan.

I was flushed with joy. I had never set an actual foot on an actual world before, and as I bounded in sheer delight through the snow I rejoiced in all the little details I felt all around me.

The crunch of the frozen methane under my boots. The way the wind picked up long streamers of snow that made little spattering noises when they hit my windscreen. The suit heaters that failed to heat my body evenly, so that some parts were cool and others uncomfortably warm.

None of it had the immediacy of the simulations, but I didn’t remember this level of detail either. Even the polyamide scent of the suit seals was sharper than the generic stuffy suit smell they put in the sim.

This was all real, and it was wonderful, and even if my body was borrowed I was already having the best time I’d ever had in my life.

I scuttled over to Janis on my six legs and crashed into her with affectionate joy. (Hugging wasn’t easy with the vac suits on.) Then Parminder ran over and crashed into her from the other side.

“We’re finally out of Plato’s Cave!” she said, which is the sort of obscure reference you always get out of Parminder. (I looked it up, though, and she had a good point.)

The outfitters at the top of the glacier hadn’t been expecting us for some time, so we had some free time to indulge in a snowball fight. I suppose snowball fights aren’t that exciting if you’re wearing full-body pressure suits, but this was the first real snowball fight any of us had ever had, so it was fun on that account anyway.

By the time we got our skis on, the shuttle holding the rest of the cadre and their pods was just arriving. We could see them looking at us from the yellow windows of the shuttle, and we just gave them a wave and zoomed off down the glacier, along with a grown-up who decided to accompany us in case we tried anything else that wasn’t in the regulation playbook.

Skiing isn’t a terribly hazardous sport if you’ve got six legs on a body slung low to the ground. The skis are short, not much longer than skates, so they don’t get tangled; and it’s really hard to fall over—the worst that happens is that you go into a spin that might take some time to get out of. And we’d all been practicing on the simulators and nothing bad happened.

The most interesting part was the jumps that had been molded at intervals onto the glacier. Titan’s low gravity meant that when you went off a jump, you went very high and you stayed in the air for a long time. And Titan’s heavy atmosphere meant that if you spread your limbs apart like a skydiver, you could catch enough of that thick air almost to hover, particularly if the wind was cooperating and blowing uphill. That was wild and thrilling, hanging in the air with the wind whistling around the joints of your suit, the glossy orange snow coming up to meet you, and the sound of your own joyful whoops echoing in your ears.

I am a great friend to public amusements, because they keep people from vice.

Well. Maybe. We’ll see.

The best part of the skiing was that this time I didn’t get so carried away that I’d forgot to observe. I thought about ways to render the dull orange sheen of the glacier, the wild scrawls made in the snow by six skis spinning out of control beneath a single squat body, the little crusty waves on the surface generated by the constant wind.

Neither the glacier nor the lake is always solid. Sometimes Titan generates a warm front that liquifies the topmost layer of the glacier, and the liquid methane pours down the mountain to form the lake. When that happens, the modular resort breaks apart and creeps away on its treads. But sooner or later everything freezes over again, and the resort returns.

We were able to ski through a broad orange glassy chute right onto the lake, and from there we could see the lights of the resort in the distance. We skied into a big ballooning pressurized hangar made out of some kind of durable fabric, where the crew removed our pressure suits and gave us little felt booties to wear. I’d had an exhilarating time, but hours had passed and I was tired. The Incarnation Day banquet was just what I needed.

Babbling and laughing, we clustered around the snack tables, tasting a good many things I’d never got in a simulation. (They make us eat in the sims, to get us used to the idea so we don’t accidentally starve ourselves once we’re incarnated, and to teach us table manners, but the tastes tend to be a bit monotonous.)

“Great stuff!” Janis said, gobbling some kind of crunchy vat-grown treat that I’d sampled earlier and found disgusting. She held the bowl out to the rest of us. “Try this! You’ll like it!”

I declined.

“Well,” Janis said, “If you’re afraid of new things . . . ”

That was Janis for you—she insisted on sharing her existence with everyone around her, and got angry if you didn’t find her life as exciting as she did:

About that time Andy and Parminder began to gag on the stuff Janis had made them eat, and Janis laughed again.

The other members of the cadre trailed in about an hour later, and the feast proper began. I looked around the long table—the forty-odd members of the Cadre of Glorious Destiny, all with their little heads on their furry multipede bodies, all crowded around the table cramming in the first real food they’ve tasted in their lives. In the old days, this would have been a scene from some kind of horror movie. Now it’s just a slice of posthumanity, Earth’s descendants partying on some frozen rock far from home.

But since all but Fahd were in borrowed bodies I’d never seen before, I couldn’t tell one from the other. I had to ping a query off their implant communications units just to find out who I was talking to.

Fahd sat at the place of honor at the head of the table. The hair on his furry body was ash-blond, and he had a sort of widow’s peak that gave his head a kind of geometrical look.

I liked Fahd. He was the one I had sex with, that time that Janis persuaded me to steal a sex sim from Dane, the guy I do outside programming for. (I should point out, Dr. Sam, that our simulated bodies have all the appropriate organs, it’s just that the adults have made sure we can’t actually use them for sex.)

I think there was something wrong with the simulation. What Fahd and I did wasn’t wonderful, it wasn’t ecstatic, it was just . . . strange. After a while we gave up and found something else to do.

Janis, of course, insisted she’d had a glorious time. She was our leader, and everything she did had to be totally fabulous. It was just like that horrid vat-grown snack-food product she’d tried—not only was it the best food she’d ever tasted, it was the best food ever, and we all had to share it with her.

I hope Janis actually did enjoy the sex sim, because she was the one caught with the program in her buffer—and after I told her to erase it. Sometimes I think she just wants to be found out.

During dinner those whose parents permitted it were allowed two measured doses of liquor to toast Fahd—something called Ring Ice, brewed locally. I think it gave my esophagus blisters.

After the Ring Ice things got louder and more lively. There was a lot more noise and hilarity when the resort crew discovered that several of the cadre had slipped off to a back room to find out what sex was like, now they had real bodies. It was when I was laughing over this that I looked at Janis and saw that she was quiet, her body motionless. She’s normally louder and more demonstrative than anyone else, so I knew something was badly wrong. I sent her a private query through my implant. She sent a single-word reply.

Mom . . .

I sent her a glyph of sympathy while I wondered how Janis’s mom had found out about our little adventure so quickly. There was barely time for a lightspeed signal to bounce to Ceres and back.

Ground Control must have really been annoyed. Or maybe she and Janis’s mom were Constant Soldiers in the Five Principles Movement and were busy spying on everyone else—all for the greater good, of course.

Whatever the message was, Janis bounced back pretty quickly. Next thing I knew she was sidling up to me saying, “Look, you can loan me your vac suit, right?”

Something about the glint in her huge platter eyes made me cautious.

“Why would I want to do that?” I asked.

“Mom says I’m grounded. I’m not allowed to go skating with the rest of you. But nobody can tell these bodies apart—I figured if we switched places we could show her who’s boss.”

“And leave me stuck here by myself?”

“You’ll be with the waiters—and some of them are kinda cute, if you like them hairy.” Her tone turned serious. “It’s solidarity time, Alison. We can’t let Mom win this one.”

I thought about it for a moment, then said, “Maybe you’d better ask someone else.”

Anger flashed in her huge eyes. “I knew you’d say that! You’ve always been afraid to stand up to the grown-ups!”

“Janis,” I sighed. “Think about it. Do you think your mom was the only one who got a signal from Ground Control? My parents are going to be looking into the records of this event very closely. So I think you should talk someone else into your scheme—and not Parminder or Andy, either.”

Her whole hairy body sulked. I almost laughed.

“I guess you’re right,” she conceded.

“You know your mom is going to give you a big lecture when we get back.”

“Oh yeah. I’m sure she’s writing her speech right now, making sure she doesn’t miss a single point.”

“Maybe you’d better let me eavesdrop,” I said. “Make sure you don’t lose your cool.”

She looked even more sulky. “Maybe you’d better.”

We do this because we’re cadre. Back in the old days, when the first poor kids were being raised in virtual, a lot of them cracked up once they got incarnated. They went crazy, or developed a lot of weird obsessions, or tried to kill themselves, or turned out to have a kind of autism where they could only relate to things through a computer interface.

So now parents don’t raise their children by themselves. Most kids still have two parents, because it takes two to pay the citizenship points and taxes it takes to raise a kid, and sometimes if there aren’t enough points to go around there are three parents, or four or five. Once the points are paid the poor moms and dads have to wait until there are enough applicants to fill a cadre. A whole bunch of virtual children are raised in one group, sharing their upbringing with their parents and creche staff. Older cadres often join their juniors and take part in their education, also.

The main point of the cadre is for us all to keep an eye on each other. Nobody’s allowed to withdraw into their own little world. If anyone shows sign of going around the bend, we unite in our efforts to retrieve them.

Our parents created the little hell that we live in. It’s our job to help each other survive it.

A person used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.

Certainly Janis isn’t, though despite cadre solidarity she never managed to talk anyone else into changing places with her. I felt only moderately sorry for her—she’d already had her triumph, after all—and I forgot all about her problems once I got back into my pressure suit and out onto the ice.

Skating isn’t as thrilling as skiing, I suppose, but we still had fun. Playing crack-the-whip in the light gravity, the person on the end of the line could be fired a couple kilometers over the smooth methane ice.

After which it was time to return to the resort. We all showered while the resort crew cleaned and did maintenance on our suits, and then we got back in the suits so that the next set of tourists would find their rental bodies already armored up and ready for sport.

We popped open our helmets so that the scanners could be put on our heads. Quantum superconducting devices tickled our brain cells and recovered everything they found, and then our brains—our essences—were dumped into a buffer, then fired by communication laser back to Ceres and the sim in which we all lived.

The simulation seemed inadequate compared to the reality of Titan. But I didn’t have time to work out the degree of difference, because I had to save Janis’s butt.

That’s us. That’s the cadre. All for one and one for all.

And besides, Janis has been my best friend for practically ever.

Anna-Lee, Janis’s mom, was of course waiting for her, sitting in the little common room outside Janis’s bedroom. (Did I mention that we sleep, Dr. Sam? We don’t sleep as long as incarnated people do, just a few hours, but our parents want us to get used to the idea so that when we’re incarnated we know to sleep when we get tired instead of ignoring it and then passing out while doing something dangerous or important.)

(The only difference between our dreams and yours is that we don’t dream. I mean, what’s the point, we’re stuck in our parents’ dream anyway.)

So I’m no sooner arrived in my own simulated body in my own simulated bedroom when Janis is screaming on the private channel.

“Mom is here! I need you now!”

So I press a few switches in my brain and there I am, right in Janis’s head, getting much of the same sensor feed that she’s receiving herself. And I look at her and I say, “Hey, you can’t talk to Anna-Lee looking like this.”

Janis is wearing her current avatar, which is something like a crazy person might draw with crayons. Stick-figure body, huge yellow shoes, round bobble head with crinkly red hair like wires.

“Get your quadbod on!” I tell her. “Now!”

So she switches, and now her avatar has four arms, two in the shoulders, two in the hip sockets. The hair is still bright red. Whatever her avatar looks like, Janis always keeps the red hair.

“Good,” I say. “That’s normal.”

Which it is, for Ceres. Which is an asteroid without much gravity, so there really isn’t a lot of point in having legs. In microgravity legs just drag around behind you and bump into things and get bruises and cuts. Whereas everyone can use an extra pair of arms, right? So most people who live in low- or zerogravity environments use quadbods, which are much more practical than the two-legged model.

So Janis pushes off with her left set of arms and floats through the door into the lounge where her mom awaits. Anna-Lee wears a quadbod, too, except that hers isn’t an avatar, but a three-dimensional holographic scan of her real body. And you can tell that she’s really pissed—she’s got tight lips and tight eyelids and a tight face, and both sets of arms are folded across her midsection with her fingers digging into her forearms as if she’s repressing the urge to grab Janis and shake her.

“Hi, Mom,” Janis said.

“You not only endangered yourself,” Anna-Lee said, “but you chose to endanger others, too.”

“Sit down before you answer,” I murmured in Janis’s inward ear. “Take your time.”

I was faintly surprised that Janis actually followed my advice. She drifted into a chair, used her lower limbs to settle herself into it, and then spoke.

“Nobody was endangered,” she said, quite reasonably.

Anna-Lee’s nostrils narrowed.

“You diverted from the flight plan that was devised for your safety,” she said.

“I made a new flight plan,” Janis pointed out. “Ground Control accepted it. If it was dangerous, she wouldn’t have done that.”

Anna-Lee’s voice got that flat quality that it gets when she’s following her own internal logic. Sometimes I think she’s the program, not us.

“You are not authorized to file flight plans!” she snapped.

“Ground Control accepted it,” Janis repeated. Her voice had grown a little sharp, and I whispered at her to keep cool.

“And Ground Control immediately informed me! They were right on the edge of calling out a rescue shuttle!”

“But they didn’t, because there was no problem!” Janis snapped out, and then there was a pause while I told her to lower her voice.

“Ground Control accepted my revised plan,” she said. “I landed according to the plan, and nobody was hurt.”

“You planned this from the beginning!” All in that flat voice of hers. “This was a deliberate act of defiance!”

Which was true, of course.

“What harm did I do?” Janis asked.

(“Look,” I told Janis. “Just tell her that she’s right and you were wrong and you’ll never do it again.”)

(“I’m not going to lie!” Janis sent back on our private channel. “Whatever Mom does, she’s never going to make me lie!”)

All this while Anna-Lee was saying, “We must all work together for the greater good! Your act of defiance did nothing but divert people from their proper tasks! Titan Ground Control has better things to do than worry about you!”

There was no holding Janis back now. “You wanted me to learn navigation! So I learned it—because you wanted it! And now I’ve proved that I can use it, and you’re angry about it!” She was waving her arms so furiously that she bounced up from her chair and began to sort of jerk around the room.

“And do you know why that is, Mom?” she demanded.

“For God’s sake shut up!” I shouted at her. I knew where this was leading, but Janis was too far gone in her rage to listen to me now.

“It’s because you’re second-rate!” Janis shouted at her mother. “Dad went off to Barnard’s Star, but you didn’t make the cut! And I can do all the things you wanted to do, and do them better, and you can’t stand it!”

“Will you be quiet!” I told Janis. “Remember that she owns you!”

“I accepted the decision of the committee!” Anna-Lee was shouting. “I am a Constant Soldier and I live a productive life, and I will not be responsible for producing a child who is a burden and a drain on resources!”

“Who says I’m going to be a burden?” Janis demanded. “You’re the only person who says that! If I incarnated tomorrow I could get a good job in ten minutes!”

“Not if you get a reputation for disobedience and anarchy!”

By this point it was clear that since Janis wasn’t listening to me, and Anna-Lee couldn’t listen, there was no longer any point in my involving myself in what had become a very predictable argument. So I closed the link and prepared my own excuses for my own inevitable meeting with my parents.

I changed from Picasso Woman to my own quadbod, which is what I use when I talk to my parents, at least when I want something from them. My quadbod avatar is a girl just a couple years younger than my actual age, wearing a school uniform with a Peter Pan collar and a white bow in her—my—hair. And my beautiful brown eyes are just slightly larger than eyes are in reality, because that’s something called “neotony,” which means you look more like a baby and babies are designed to be irresistible to grown-ups.

Let me tell you that it works. Sometimes I can blink those big eyes and get away with anything.

And at that point my father called, and told me that he and my mom wanted to talk to me about my adventures on Titan, so I popped over to my parents’ place, where I appeared in holographic form in their living room.

My parents are pretty reasonable people. Of course I take care to keep them reasonable, insofar as I can. Let me smile with the wise, as Dr. Sam says, and feed with the rich. I will keep my opinions to myself, and try my best to avoid upsetting the people who have power over me.

Why did I soar off with Janis on her flight plan? my father wanted to know.

“Because I didn’t think she should go alone,” I said.

Didn’t you try to talk her out of it? my mother asked.

“You can’t talk Janis out of anything,” I replied. Which, my parents knowing Janis, was an answer they understood.

So my parents told me to be careful, and that was more or less the whole conversation.

Which shows you that not all parents up here are crazy.

Mine are more sensible than most. I don’t think many parents would think much of my ambition to get involved in the fine arts. That’s just not done up here, let alone the sort of thing I want to do, which is to incarnate on Earth and apprentice myself to an actual painter, or maybe a sculptor. Up here they just use cameras, and their idea of original art is to take camera pictures or alter camera pictures or combine camera pictures with one another or process the camera pictures in some way.

I want to do it from scratch, with paint on canvas. And not with a computer-programmed spray gun either, but with a real brush and blobs of paint. Because if you ask me the texture of the thing is important, which is why I like oils. Or rather the idea of oils, because I’ve never actually had a chance to work with the real thing.

And besides, as Dr. Sam says, A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what is expected a man should see. The grand object of traveling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean.

So when I told my parents what I wanted to do, they just sort of shrugged and made me promise to learn another skill as well, one just a little bit more practical. So while I minor in art I’m majoring in computer design and function and programming, which is pretty interesting because all our really complex programs are written by artificial intelligences who are smarter than we are, so getting them to do what you want is as much like voodoo as science.

So my parents and I worked out a compromise that suited everybody, which is why I think my parents are pretty neat actually.

About twenty minutes after my talk with my parents, Janis knocked on my door, and I made the door go away, and she walked in, and then I put the door back. (Handy things, sims.)

“Guess that didn’t work out so good, huh?” she said.

“On your family’s civility scale,” I said, “I think that was about average.”

Her eyes narrowed (she was so upset that she’d forgot to change out of her quadbod, which is why she had the sort of eyes that could narrow).

“I’m going to get her,” she said.

“I don’t think that’s very smart,” I said.

Janis was smacking her fists into my walls, floor, and ceiling and shooting around the room, which was annoying even though the walls were virtual and she couldn’t damage them or get fingerprints on them.

“Listen,” I said. “All you have to do is keep the peace with your mom until you’ve finished your thesis, and then you’ll be incarnated and she can’t touch you. It’s just months, Janis.”

“My thesis!” A glorious grin of discovery spread across Janis’s face. “I’m going to use my thesis! I’m going to stick it to Mom right where it hurts!”

I reached out and grabbed her and steadied her in front of me with all four arms.

“Look,” I said. “You can’t keep calling her bluff.”

Her voice rang with triumph. “Just watch me.”

“Please,” I said. “I’m begging you. Don’t do anything till you’re incarnated!”

I could see the visions of glory dancing before her eyes. She wasn’t seeing or hearing me at all.

“She’s going to have to admit that I am right and that she is wrong,” she said. “I’m going to nail my thesis to her forehead like Karl Marx on the church door.”

“That was Martin Luther actually.” (Sometimes I can’t help these things.)

She snorted. “Who cares?”

“I do.” Changing the subject. “Because I don’t want you to die.”

Janis snorted. “I’m not going to bow to her. I’m going to crush her. I’m going to show her how stupid and futile and second-rate she is.”

And at that moment there was a signal at my door. I ignored it.

“The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute,” I said.

Her face wrinkled as if she’d bit into something sour. “I can’t believe you’re quoting that old dead guy again.”

I have found you an argument, I wanted to say with Dr. Sam, but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

The signal at my door repeated, and this time it was attached to an electronic signal that meant Emergency! Out of sheer surprise I dissolved the door.

Mei was there in her quadbod, an expression of anger on her face.

“If you two are finished congratulating each other on your brilliant little prank,” she said, “you might take time to notice that Fritz is missing.”

“Missing?” I didn’t understand how someone could be missing. “Didn’t his program come back from Titan?”

If something happened to the transmission, they could reload Fritz from a backup.

Mei’s expression was unreadable. “He never went. He met the Blue Lady.”

And then she pushed off with two of her hands and drifted away, leaving us in a sudden, vast, terrible silence.

We didn’t speak, but followed Mei into the common room. The other cadre members were all there, and they all watched us as we floated in.

When you’re little, you first hear about the Blue Lady from the other kids in your cadre. Nobody knows for sure how we all find out about the Blue Lady—not just the cadres on Ceres, but the ones on Vesta, and Ganymede, and everywhere.

And we all know that sometimes you might see her, a kind smiling woman in a blue robe, and she’ll reach out to you, and she seems so nice you’ll let her take your hand.

Only then, when it’s too late, you’ll see that she has no eyes, but only an empty blackness filled with stars.

She’ll take you away and your friends will never see you again.

And of course it’s your parents who send the Blue Lady to find you when you’re bad.

We all know that the Blue Lady doesn’t truly exist, it’s ordinary techs in ordinary rooms who give the orders to zero out your program along with all its backups, but we all believe in the Blue Lady really, and not just when we’re little.

Which brings me to the point I made about incarnation earlier. Once you’re incarnated, you are considered a human being, and you have human rights.

But not until then. Until you’re incarnated, you’re just a computer program that belongs to your parents, and if your parents think the program is flawed or corrupted and simply too awkward to deal with, they can have you zeroed.

Zeroed. Not killed. The grown-ups insist that there’s a difference, but I don’t see it myself.

Because the Blue Lady really comes for some people, as she came for Fritz when Jack and Hans finally gave up trying to fix him. Most cadres get by without a visit. Some have more than one. There was a cadre on Vesta who lost eight, and then there were suicides among the survivors once they incarnated, and it was a big scandal that all the grown-ups agreed never to talk about.

I have never for an instant believed that my parents would ever send the Blue Lady after me, but still it’s always there in the back of my mind, which is why I think that the current situation is so horrible. It gives parents a power they should never have, and it breeds a fundamental distrust between kids and their parents.

The grown-ups’ chief complaint about the cadre system is that their children bond with their peers and not their parents. Maybe it’s because their peers can’t kill them.

Everyone in the cadre got the official message about Fritz, that he was basically irreparable and that the chance of his making a successful incarnation was essentially zero. The message said that none of us were at fault for what had happened, and that everyone knew that we’d done our best for him.

This was in the same message queue as a message to me from Fritz, made just before he got zeroed out. There he was with his stupid hat, smiling at me.

“Thank you for saying you’d play the shadowing game with me,” he said. “I really think you’re wonderful.” He laughed. “See you soon, on Titan!”

So then I cried a lot, and I erased the message so that I’d never be tempted to look at it again.

We all felt failure. It was our job to make Fritz right, and we hadn’t done it. We had all grown up with him, and even though he was a trial he was a part of our world. I had spent the last few days avoiding him, and I felt horrible about it; but everyone else had done the same thing at one time or another.

We all missed him.

The cadre decided to wear mourning, and we got stuck in a stupid argument about whether to wear white, which is the traditional mourning color in Asia, or black, which is the color in old Europe.

“Wear blue,” Janis said. So we did. Whatever avatars we wore from that point on had blue clothing, or used blue as a principal color somewhere in their composition.

If any of the parents noticed, or talked about it, or complained, I never heard it.

I started thinking a lot about how I related to incarnated people, and I thought that maybe I’m just a little more compliant and adorable and sweet-natured than I’d otherwise be, because I want to avoid the consequences of being otherwise. And Janis is perhaps more defiant than she’d be under other circumstances, because she wants to show she’s not afraid. Go ahead, Mom, she says, pull the trigger. I dare you.

Underestimating Anna-Lee all the way. Because Anna-Lee is a Constant Soldier of the Five Principles Movement, and that means serious.

The First Principle of the Five Principles Movement states that Humanity is a pattern of thought, not a side effect of taxonomy, which means that you’re human if you think like a human, whether you’ve got six legs or four arms or two legs like the folks on Earth and Mars.

And then so on to the Fifth Principle, we come to the statement that humanity in all its various forms is intended to occupy every possible ecosystem throughout the entire universe, or at least as much of it as we can reach. Which is why the Five Principles Movement has always been very big on genetic experimentation, and the various expeditions to nearby stars.

I have no problem with the Five Principles Movement, myself. It’s rational compared with groups like the Children of Venus or the God’s Menu people.

Besides, if there isn’t something to the Five Principles, what are we doing out here in the first place?

My problem lies with the sort of people the Movement attracts, which is to say people like Anna-Lee. People who are obsessive, and humorless, and completely unable to see any other point of view. Nor only do they dedicate themselves heart and soul to whatever group they join, they insist everyone else has to join as well, and that anyone who isn’t a part of it is a Bad Person.

So even though I pretty much agree with the Five Principles I don’t think I’m going to join the movement. I’m going to keep in mind the wisdom of my good Dr. Sam: Most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.

But to get back to Anna-Lee. Back in the day she married Carlos, who was also in the Movement, and together they worked for years to qualify for the expedition to Barnard’s Star on the True Destiny. They created Janis together, because having children is all a part of occupying the universe and so on.

But Carlos got the offer to crew the ship, and Anna-Lee didn’t. Carlos chose Barnard’s Star over Anna-Lee, and now he’s a couple light-months away. He and the rest of the settlers are in electronic form—no sense in spending the resources to ship a whole body to another star system when you can just ship the data and build the body once you arrive—and for the most part they’re dormant, because there’s nothing to do until they near their destination. But every week or so Carlos has himself awakened so that he can send an electronic postcard to his daughter.

The messages are all really boring, as you might expect from someone out in deep space where there’s nothing to look at and nothing to do, and everyone’s asleep anyway.

Janis sends him longer messages, mostly about her fights with Anna-Lee. Anna-Lee likewise sends Carlos long messages about Janis’s transgressions. At two light-months out Carlos declines to mediate between them, which makes them both mad.

So Anna-Lee is mad because her husband left her, and she’s mad at Janis for not being a perfect Five Principles Constant Soldier. Janis is mad at Carlos for not figuring out a way to take her along, and she’s mad at Anna-Lee for not making the crew on the True Destiny and, failing that, not having the savvy to keep her husband in the picture.

And she’s also mad at Anna-Lee for getting married again, this time to Rhee, a rich Movement guy who was able to swing the taxes to create two new daughters, both of whom are the stars of their particular cadres and are going to grow up to be perfect Five Principles Kids, destined to carry on the work of humanity in new habitats among distant stars.

Or so Anna-Lee claims, anyway.

Which is why I think that Janis underestimates her mother. I think the way Anna-Lee looks at it, she’s got two new kids, who are everything she wants. And one older kid who gives her trouble, and who she can give to the Blue Lady without really losing anything, since she’s lost Janis anyway. She’s already given a husband to the stars, after all.

And all this is another reason why I want to incarnate on Earth, where a lot of people still have children the old-fashioned way. The parents make an embryo in a gene-splicer, and then the embryo is put in a vat, and nine months later you crack the vat open and you’ve got an actual baby, not a computer program. And even if the procedure is a lot more time-consuming and messy I still think it’s superior.

So I was applying for work on Earth, both for jobs that could use computer skills, and also for apprenticeship programs in the fine arts. But there’s a waiting list for pretty much any job you want on Earth, and also there’s a big entry tax unless they really want you, so I wasn’t holding my breath; and besides, I hadn’t finished my thesis.

I figured on graduating from college along with most of my cadre, at the age of fourteen. I understand that in your day, Dr. Sam, people graduated from college a lot later. I figure there are several important reasons for the change: (1) we virtual kids don’t sleep as much as you do, so we have more time for study; (2) there isn’t that much else to do here anyway; and (3) we’re really, really, really smart. Because if you were a parent, and you had a say in the makeup of your kid (along with the doctors and the sociologists and the hoodoo machines), would you say, No thanks, I want mine stupid?

No, I don’t think so.

And the meat-brains that we incarnate into are pretty smart, too. Just in case you were wondering.

We could grow up faster, if we wanted. The computers we live in are so fast that we could go from inception to maturity in just two or three months. But we wouldn’t get to interact with our parents, who being meat would be much slower, or with anyone else. So in order to have any kind of relationship with our elders, or any kind of socialization at all, we have to slow down to our parents’ pace. I have to say that I agree with that.

In order to graduate I needed to do a thesis, and unfortunately I couldn’t do the one I wanted, which was the way the paintings of Brueghel, etc., reflected the theology of the period. All the training with computers and systems, along with art and art history, had given me an idea of how abstract systems such as theology work, and how you can visually represent fairly abstract concepts on a flat canvas.

But I’d have to save that for maybe a postgraduate degree, because my major was still in the computer sciences, so I wrote a fairly boring thesis on systems interoperability—which, if you care, is the art of getting different machines and highly specialized operating systems to talk to each other, a job that is made more difficult if the machines in question happen to be a lot smarter than you are.

Actually it’s a fairly interesting subject. It just wasn’t interesting in my thesis.

While I was doing that I was also working outside contracts for Dane, who was from a cadre that had incarnated a few years ahead of us, and who I got to know when his group met with ours to help with our lessons and with our socialization skills (because they wanted us to be able to talk to people outside the cadre and our families, something we might not do if we didn’t have practice).

Anyway, Dane had got a programming job in Ceres’s communications center, and he was willing to pass on the more boring parts of his work to me in exchange for money. So I was getting a head start on paying that big Earth entry tax, or if I could evade the tax maybe living on Earth a while and learning to paint.

“You’re just going to end up being Ceres’s first interior decorator,” Janis scoffed.

“And that would be a bad thing?” I asked. “Just look at this place!” Because it’s all so functional and boring and you’d think they could find a more interesting color of paint than gray, for God’s sake.

That was one of the few times I’d got to talk to Janis since our adventure on Titan. We were both working on our theses, and still going to school, and I had my outside contracts, and I think she was trying to avoid me, because she didn’t want to tell me what she was doing because she didn’t want me to tell her not to do it.

Which hurt, by the way. Since we’d been such loyal friends up to the point where I told her not to get killed, and then because I wanted to save her life she didn’t want to talk to me anymore.

The times I mostly got to see Janis were Incarnation Day parties for other members of our cadre. So we got to see Ganymede, and Iapetus, and Titan again, and Rhea, and Pluto, Callisto, and Io, and the antimatter generation ring between Venus and Mercury, and Titan again, and then Titan a fourth time.

Our cadre must have this weird affinity for orange, I don’t know.

We went to Pallas, Juno, and Vesta. Though if you ask me, one asteroid settlement is pretty much like the next.

We went to Third Heaven, which is a habitat the God’s Menu people built at L2. And they can keep a lot of the items on the menu, if you ask me.

We visited Luna (which you would call the Moon, Dr. Sam. As if there was only one). And we got to view Everlasting Dynasty, the starship being constructed in lunar orbit for the expedition to Tau Ceti, the settlement that Anna-Lee was trying her best to get Janis aboard.

We also got to visit Mars three times. So among other entertainments I looked down at the planet from the top of Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system, and I looked down from the edge of the solar system’s largest canyon, and then I looked up from the bottom of the same canyon.

We all tried to wear blue if we could, in memory of the one of us who couldn’t be present.

Aside from the sights, the Incarnation Day parties were great because all our incarnated cadre members turned up, in bodies they’d borrowed for the occasion. We were all still close, of course, and kept continually in touch, but our communication was limited by the speed of light and it wasn’t anything like having Fahd and Chandra and Solange there in person, to pummel and to hug.

We didn’t go to Earth. I was the only one of our cadre who had applied there, and I hadn’t got an answer yet. I couldn’t help fantasizing about what my Incarnation Day party would be like if I held it on Earth—where would I go? What would we look at? Rome? Mount Everest? The ocean habitats? The plains of Africa, where the human race began?

It was painful to think that the odds were high that I’d never see any of these places.

Janis never tried to organize any of her little rebellions on these trips. For one thing word had got out, and we were all pretty closely supervised. Her behavior was never less than what Anna-Lee would desire. But under it all I could tell she was planning something drastic.

I tried to talk to her about it. I talked about my thesis, and hoped it would lead to a discussion of her thesis. But no luck. She evaded the topic completely.

She was pretty busy with her project, though, whatever it was. Because she was always buzzing around the cadre asking people where to look for odd bits of knowledge.

I couldn’t make sense of her questions, though. They seemed to cover too many fields. Sociology, statistics, minerology, criminology, economics, astronomy, spaceship design . . . The project seemed too huge.

The only thing I knew about Janis’s thesis was that it was supposed to be about resource management. It was the field that Anna-Lee forced her into, because it was full of skills that would be useful on the Tau Ceti expedition. And if that didn’t work, Anna-Lee made sure Janis minored in spaceship and shuttle piloting and navigation.

I finally finished my thesis, and then I sat back and waited for the job offers to roll in. The only offer I got came from someone who wanted me to run the garbage cyclers on Iapetus, which the guy should have known I wouldn’t accept if he had bothered to read my application.

Maybe he was just neck-deep in garbage and desperate, I don’t know.

And then the most astounding thing happened. Instead of a job in the computer field, I got an offer to study at the Pisan Academy.

Which is an art school. Which is in Italy, which is where the paintings come from mostly.

The acceptance committee said that my work showed a “naive but highly original fusion of social criticism with the formalities of the geometric order.” I don’t even pretend to know what they meant by that, but I suspect they just weren’t used to the perspective of a student who had spent practically her entire live in a computer on Ceres.

I broadcast my shrieks of joy to everyone in the cadre, even those who had left Ceres and were probably wincing at their workstations when my screams reached them.

I bounced around the common room and everyone came out to congratulate me. Even Janis, who had taken to wearing an avatar that wasn’t even remotely human, just a graphic of a big sledgehammer smashing a rock, over and over.

Subtlety had never been her strong point.

“Congratulations,” she said. “You got what you wanted.”

And then she broadcast something on a private channel. You’re going to be famous, she said. But I’m going to be a legend.

I looked at her. And then I sent back, Can we talk about this?

In a few days. When I deliver my thesis.

Don’t, I pleaded.

Too late.

The hammer hit its rock, and the shards flew out into the room and vanished.

I spent the next few days planning my Incarnation Day party, but my heart wasn’t in it. I kept wondering if Janis was going to be alive to enjoy it.

I finally decided to have my party in Thailand because there were so many interesting environments in one place, as well as the Great Buddha. And I found a caterer that was supposed to be really good.

I decided what sort of body I wanted, and the incarnation specialists on Earth started cooking it up in one of their vats. Not the body of an Earth-born fourteen-year-old, but older, more like eighteen. Brown eyes, brown hair, and those big eyes that had always been so useful.

And two legs, of course. Which is what they all have down there.

I set the date. The cadre were alerted. We all practiced in the simulations and tried to get used to making do with only two arms. Everyone was prepared.

And then Janis finished her thesis. I downloaded a copy the second it was submitted to her committee and read it in one long sitting, and my sense of horror grew with every line.

What Janis had done was publish a comprehensive critique of our entire society! It was a piece of brilliance, and at the same time it was utter poison.

Posthuman society wrecks its children, Janis said, and this can be demonstrated by the percentage of neurotic and dysfunctional adults. The problems encountered by the first generation of children who spent their formative years as programs—the autism, the obsessions and compulsions, the addictions to electronic environments—hadn’t gone away, they’d just been reduced to the point where they’d become a part of the background clutter, a part of our civilization so everyday that we never quite noticed it.

Janis had the data, too. The number of people who were under treatment for one thing or another. The percentage who had difficulty adjusting to their incarnations, or who didn’t want to communicate with anyone outside their cadre, or who couldn’t sleep unless they were immersed in a simulation. Or who committed suicide. Or who died in accidents—Janis questioned whether all those accidents were really the results of our harsh environments. Our machines and our settlements were much safer than they had been in the early days, but the rates of accidental death were still high. How many accidents were caused by distracted or unhappy operators, or for that matter were deliberate “suicide by machine”?

Janis went on to describe one of the victims of this ruthless type of upbringing. “Flat of emotional affect, offended by disorder and incapable of coping with obstruction, unable to function without adherence to a belief system as rigid as the artificial and constricted environments in which she was raised.”

When I realized Janis was describing Anna-Lee I almost de-rezzed.

Janis offered a scheme to cure the problem, which was to get rid of the virtual environments and start out with real incarnated babies. She pulled out vast numbers of statistics demonstrating that places that did this—chiefly Earth—seemed to raise more successful adults. She also pointed out that the initial shortage of resources that had prompted the creation of virtual children in the first place had long since passed—plenty of water-ice coming in from the Kuyper Belt these days, and we were sitting on all the minerals we could want. The only reason the system continued was for the convenience of the adults. But genuine babies, as opposed to abstract computer programs, would help the adults, too. They would no longer be tempted to become little dictators with absolute power over their offspring. Janis said the chance would turn the grown-ups into better human beings.

All this was buttressed by colossal numbers of statistics, graphs, and other data. I realized when I’d finished it that the Cadre of Glorious Destiny had produced one true genius, and that this genius was Janis.

The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.

Anna-Lee determined her, all right, and the problem was that Janis probably didn’t have that long to live. Aside from the fact that Janis had ruthlessly caricatured her, Anna-Lee couldn’t help but notice that the whole work went smack up against the Five Principles Movement. According to the Movement people, all available resources had to be devoted to the expansion of the human race out of the solar system and into new environments. It didn’t matter how many more resources were available now than in the past, it was clear against their principles to devote a greater share to the raising of children when it could be used to blast off into the universe.

And though the Five Principles people acknowledged our rather high death rate, they put it down to our settlements’ hazardous environments. All we had to do was genetically modify people to better suit the environments and the problem would be solved.

I skipped the appendices and zoomed from my room across the common room to Janis’s door, and hit the button to alert her to a visitor. The door vanished, and there was Janis—for the first time since her fight with Anna-Lee, she was using her quadbod avatar. She gave me a wicked grin.

“Great, isn’t it?”

“It’s brilliant! But you can’t let Anna-Lee see it.”

“Don’t be silly. I sent Mom the file myself.”

I was horrified. She had to have seen the way my Picasso-face gaped, and it made her laugh.

“She’ll have you erased!” I said.

“If she does,” Janis said. “She’ll only prove my point.” She put a consoling hand on my shoulder. “Sorry if it means missing your incarnation.”

When Anna-Lee came storming in—which wasn’t long after—Janis broadcast the whole confrontation on a one-way link to the whole cadre. We got to watch, but not to participate. She didn’t want our advice any more than she wanted her mother’s.

“You are unnatural!” Anna-Lee stormed. “You spread slanders! You have betrayed the highest truth!”

“I told the truth!” Janis said. “And you know it’s the truth, otherwise you wouldn’t be so insane right now.”

Anna-Lee stiffened. “I am a Five Principles Constant Soldier. I know the truth, and I know my duty.”

“Every time you say that, you prove my point.”

“You will retract this thesis, and apologize to your committee for giving them such a vicious document.”

Anna-Lee hadn’t realized that the document was irretrievable, that Janis had given it to everyone she knew.

Janis laughed. “No way, Mom,” she said.

Anna-Lee lost it. She waved her fists and screamed. “I know my duty! I will not allow such a slander to be seen by anyone!” She pointed at Janis. “You have three days to retract!”

Janis gave a snort of contempt.

“Or what?”

“Or I will decide that you’re incorrigible and terminate your program.”

Janis laughed. “Go right ahead, Mom. Do it now. Nothing spreads a new idea better than martyrdom.” She spread her four arms. “Do it, Mom. I hate life in this hell. I’m ready.”

I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.

Yes, Dr. Sam. That’s it exactly.

“You have three days,” Anna-Lee said, her voice all flat and menacing, and then her virtual image de-rezzed.

Janis looked at the space where her mom had been, and then a goofy grin spread across her face. She switched to the redheaded, stick-figure avatar, and began to do a little dance as she hovered in the air, moving like a badly animated cartoon.

“Hey!” she sang. “I get to go to Alison’s party after all!”

I had been so caught up in the drama that I had forgot my incarnation was going to happen in two days.

But it wasn’t going to be a party now. It was going to be a wake.

“Dr. Sam,” I said, “I’ve got to save Janis.”

The triumph of hope over experience.

“Hope is what I’ve got,” I said, and then I thought about it. “And maybe a little experience, too.”

My Incarnation Day went well. We came down by glider, as we had that first time on Titan, except that this time I told Ground Control to let my friends land wherever the hell they wanted. That gave us time to inspect the Great Buddha, a slim man with a knowing smile sitting cross-legged with knobs on his head. He’s two and a half kilometers tall and packed with massively parallel quantum processors, all crunching vast amounts of data, thinking whatever profound thoughts are appropriate to an artificial intelligence built on such a scale, and repeating millions of sutras, which are scriptures for Buddhists, all at the speed of light.

It creeps along at two or three centimeters per day, and will enter the strait at the end of the Kra Peninsula many thousands of years from now.

After viewing the Buddha’s serene expression from as many angles as suited us, we soared and swooped over many kilometers of brilliant green jungle and landed on the beach. And we all did land on the beach, which sort of surprised me. And then we all did our best to learn how to surf—and let me tell you from the start, the surfing simulators are totally inadequate. The longest I managed to stand my board was maybe twenty seconds.

I was amazed at all the sensations that crowded all around me. The breeze on my skin, the scents of the sea and the vegetation and the coal on which our banquet was being cooked. The hot sand under my bare feet. The salt taste of the ocean on my lips. The sting of the little jellyfish on my legs and arms, and the iodine smell of the thick strand of seaweed that got wrapped in my hair.

I mean, I had no idea. The simulators were totally inadequate to the Earth experience.

And this was just a part of the Earth, a small fraction of the environments available. I think I convinced a lot of the cadre that maybe they’d want to move to Earth as soon as they could raise the money and find a job.

After swimming and beach games we had my Incarnation Day dinner. The sensations provided by the food were really too intense—I couldn’t eat much of it. If I was going to eat Earth food, I was going to have to start with something a lot more bland.

And there was my brown-eyed body at the head of the table, looking down at the members of the Cadre of Glorious Destiny who were toasting me with tropical drinks, the kind that have parasols in them.

Tears came to my eyes, and they were a lot wetter and hotter than tears in the sims. For some reason that fact made me cry even more.

My parents came to the dinner, because this was the first time they could actually hug me—hug me for real, that is, and not in a sim. They had downloaded into bodies that didn’t look much like the four-armed quadbods they used back on Ceres, but that didn’t matter. When my arms went around them, I began to cry again.

After the tears were wiped away we put on underwater gear and went for a swim on the reef, which is just amazing. More colors and shapes and textures than I could ever imagine—or imagine putting in a work of art.

A work of art that embodies all but selects none is not art, but mere cant and recitation.

Oh, wow. You’re right. Thank you, Dr. Sam.

After the reef trip we paid a visit to one of the underwater settlements, one inhabited by people adapted to breathe water. The problem was that we had to keep our underwater gear on, and that none of us were any good at the fluid sign language they all used as their preferred means of communication.

Then we rose from the ocean, dried out, and had a last round of hugs before being uploaded to our normal habitations. I gave Janis a particularly strong hug, and I whispered in her ear.

“Take care of yourself.”

“Who?” she grinned. “Me?”

And then the little brown-haired body was left behind, looking very lonely, as everyone else put on the electrodes and uploaded back to their normal and very distant worlds.

As soon as I arrived on Ceres, I zapped an avatar of myself into my parents’ quarters. They looked at me as if I were a ghost.

“What are you doing here?” my mother managed.

“I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but I think you’re going to have to hire a lawyer.”

It was surprisingly easy to do, really. Remember that I was assisting Dane, who was a communications tech, and in charge of uploading all of our little artificial brains to Earth. And also remember that I am a specialist in systems interoperability, which implies that I am also a specialist in systems unoperability.

It was very easy to set a couple of artificial intelligences running amok in Dane’s system just as he was working on our upload. And that so distracted him that he said yes when I said that I’d do the job for him.

And once I had access, it was the work of a moment to swap a couple of serial numbers.

The end result of which was that it was Janis who uploaded into my brown-haired body, and received all the toasts, and who hugged my parents with my arms. And who is now on Earth, incarnated, with a full set of human rights and safe from Anna-Lee.

I wish I could say the same for myself.

Anna-Lee couldn’t have me killed, of course, since I don’t belong to her. But she could sue my parents, who from her point of view permitted a piece of software belonging to them to prevent her from wreaking vengeance on some software that belonged to her.

And of course Anna-Lee went berserk the second she found out—which was more or less immediately, since Janis sent her a little radio taunt as soon as she downed her fourth or fifth celebratory umbrella drink.

Janis sent me a message, too.

“The least you could have done was make my hair red.”

My hair. Sometimes I wonder why I bothered.

An unexpected side effect of this was that we all got famous. It turns out that this was an unprecedented legal situation, with lots of human interest and a colorful cast of characters. Janis became a media celebrity, and so did I, and so did Anna-Lee.

Celebrity didn’t do Anna-Lee’s cause any good. Her whole mental outlook was too rigid to stand the kind of scrutiny and questioning that any public figure has to put up with. As soon as she was challenged she lost control. She called one of the leading media interviewers a name that you, Dr. Sam, would not wish me to repeat.

Whatever the actual merits of her legal case, the sight of Anna-Lee screaming that I had deprived her of the inalienable right to kill her daughter failed to win her a lot of friends. Eventually the Five Principles people realized she wasn’t doing their cause any good, and she was replaced by a Movement spokesperson who said as little as possible.

Janis did some talking, too, but not nearly as much as she would have liked, because she was under house arrest for coming to Earth without a visa and without paying the immigration tax. The cops showed up when she was sleeping off her hangover from all the umbrella drinks. It’s probably lucky that she wasn’t given the opportunity to talk much, because if she started on her rants she would have worn out her celebrity as quickly as Anna-Lee did.

Janis was scheduled to be deported back to Ceres, but shipping an actual incarnated human being is much more difficult than zapping a simulation by laser, and she had to wait for a ship that could carry passengers, and that would be months.

She offered to navigate the ship herself, since she had the training, but the offer was declined.

Lots of people read her thesis who wouldn’t otherwise have heard of it. And millions discussed it whether they’d read it or not. There were those who said that Janis was right, and those that said that Janis was mostly right but that she exaggerated. There were those who said that the problem didn’t really exist, except in the statistics.

There were those who thought the problem existed entirely in the software, that the system would work if the simulations were only made more like reality. I had to disagree, because I think the simulations were like reality, but only for certain people.

The problem is that human beings perceive reality in slightly different ways, even if they happen to be programs. A programmer could do his best to create an artificial reality that exactly mimicked the way he perceived reality, except that it wouldn’t be as exact for another person, it would only be an approximation. It would be like fitting everyone’s hand into the same-sized glove.

Eventually someone at the University of Adelaide read it and offered Janis a professorship in their sociology department. She accepted and was freed from house arrest.

Poor Australia, I thought.

I was on video quite a lot. I used my little-girl avatar, and I batted my big eyes a lot. I still wore blue, mourning for Fritz.

Why, I was asked, did I act to save Janis?

“Because we’re cadre, and we’re supposed to look after one another.”

What did I think of Anna-Lee?

“I don’t see why she’s complaining. I’ve seen to it that Janis just isn’t her problem anymore.”

Wasn’t what I did stealing?

“It’s not stealing to free a slave.”

And so on. It was the same sort of routine I’d been practicing on my parents all these years, and the practice paid off. Entire cadres—hundreds of them—signed petitions asking that the case be dismissed. Lots of adults did the same.

I hope that it helps, but the judge that hears the case isn’t supposed to be swayed by public opinion, but only by the law.

And everyone forgets that it’s my parents who will be on trial, not me, accused of letting their software steal Anna-Lee’s software. And of course I, and therefore they, am completely guilty, so my parents are almost certainly going to be fined, and lose both money and Citizenship Points.

I’m sorry about that, but my parents seem not to be.

How the judge will put a value on a piece of stolen software that its owner fully intended to destroy is going to make an interesting ruling, however it turns out.

I don’t know whether I’ll ever set foot on Earth again. I can’t take my place in Pisa because I’m not incarnated, and I don’t know if they’ll offer again.

And however things turn out, Fritz is still zeroed. And I still wear blue.

I don’t have my outside job any longer. Dane won’t speak to me, because his supervisor reprimanded him, and he’s under suspicion for being my accomplice. And even those who are sympathetic to me aren’t about to let me loose with their computers.

And even if I get a job somewhere, I can’t be incarnated until the court case is over.

It seems to me that the only person who got away scot-free was Janis. Which is normal.

So right now my chief problem is boredom. I spent fourteen years in a rigid program intended to fill my hours with wholesome and intellectually useful activity, and now that’s over.

And I can’t get properly started on the non-wholesome thing until I get an incarnation somewhere.

Everyone is, or hopes to be, an idler.

Thank you, Dr. Sam.

I’m choosing to idle away my time making pictures. Maybe I can sell them and help pay the Earth tax.

I call them my “Dr. Johnson” series. Sam. Johnson on Mars. Sam. Johnson Visits Neptune. Sam. Johnson Quizzing the Tomasko Glacier. Sam. Johnson Among the Asteroids.

I have many more ideas along this line.

Dr. Sam, I trust you will approve.

Originally published in Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann.

Missionaries

Mercurio D. Rivera

I teeter on the edge of the precipice. The yawning gulf is so vast, so dark, it’s like an infinite black sea.

The alien hovers in front of me. Released from its shell, it’s too beautiful, too hideous for me to fathom.

“Take the leap, Cassie,” it says/thinks/sings.

I extend my trembling foot forward and breathe deeply, but I can’t do it. I’m afraid. “No!”

I turn and run.

Shhhhh.

The ritual requires us to approach the Outpost on our knees, crawling across a frigid, rocky terrain. The thin band of light that skims the horizon creates the illusion that the sun has just set. Except there is no sun here. Even in my safesuit, my back aches and my legs burn from shuffling forward in the kneeling position. God give me strength. My tongue is sandpaper-dry. Bodhi Bendito had directed us to turn off our suit’s hydration system at the commencement of the Crawl. “Challenging tasks lie ahead of us,” he had said. “Our agony must prove worthy.”

I can’t see him, but Bodhi’s mantra pipes over the commlink. I try to focus on his humming and to contemplate God’s plan for us but my mind wanders instead to Mom and Dad. What would they have thought if they could see me now? How would Thomas have reacted to the sight of his twin sister scrabbling across an alien landscape?

As we drag ourselves over a ridge, a valley opens up below us and the Outpost comes into view. It shines so brilliantly against the backdrop of the tar-black sky that I have to blink away tears and tint my helmet plate blue.

Behind me, the Saved One floats in its lead-lined sphere, basking in a cloud of Bose-Einstein condensates. It seems unfair that it can’t share in our physical pain. At least I don’t think it can. During the months of this mission the Saved One has produced an increasing number of gurgles and grunts—and occasional piercing screams—through the sphere’s voice-generator, but since landfall it has lapsed into an ominous silence.

“It’s glorious,” Nicolai whispers over the commlink. He shuffles on his knees to my left.

And next to him, as always, crawls his lover Antonio.

Their silver safesuits gleam in the light of the Outpost. The station’s phosphorescent polyplastics cast a bright orange glow that fools my brain into believing, if only momentarily, we are on the shore of a beach rather than the dry terrain of a rogue planet that millennia ago escaped Cancri 55’s orbit and now roams the universe in perpetual darkness.

“Mind-boggling. They exist in places we could never even dream of,” Nicolai says. “Isn’t that right, Saved One?”

The Saved One floats silently.

Antonio opens up a private link with me and Nicolai. “Couldn’t Bodhi have landed us a bit closer? Maybe downhill? This is beginning to smart.”

“Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of the Crawl?” I say.

“You think?” Antonio says. “Lighten up, Cassandra. I’m kidding.”

I have to admit that my sense of humor isn’t what it once was. The extended pause that follows makes me think that he and Nicolai have continued their banter over a private commlink.

Bodhi’s mantra stops.

Two specks emerge from the Outpost’s docking doors. They wave us forward, flashing beams crisscrossing in our direction. Their red suits identify them as members of the exploration team that discovered this hotspot, this free-floating planetoid where aliens like the Saved One lurk.

Mom and Dad call us into the kitchen and break the news. Thomas and I are taking a year off to travel—three Jovian moons in one whirlwind trip—before beginning university next year. They think this is an opportune time for a family vacation.

“We booked tickets on the lunar shuttle for next week,” Mom says. She pauses. “The Reverie departs to the A’burain Shrine on Monday.”

“A pilgrimage?” Thomas throws his hands up.

“And I don’t want to hear any whining about it!” Dad adds, just as I’m about to voice my own objection.

I can’t believe it. Mom has been a Savior for as long as I can remember, but she’s always been discreet about it. The last thing I need is for my friends to think I’m religious too.

“Look, I’m financing your road-trips over the next year,” Dad says. “The least you can do is show a little respect, and give up one week of your life for something that’s very important to your mother.”

Mom puts her hands on Thomas’s shoulders. “Open your mind, Tommy. Every able-bodied person should expand their horizons and go on a pilgrimage at least once in their lives. Don’t you want that unique experience? To feel that you’re part of something that’s bigger than all of us?”

“That’s right,” Dad says. He nods his head vigorously as if he believes every word of Mom’s nonsense. Even though I’m sure he finds the idea of a pilgrimage as silly as Thomas and I do, he always makes a point of supporting Mom’s beliefs, which I’ve heard him describe at different times and in various states of sobriety as “quaint,” “adorably earnest” and—this I really didn’t need to hear—“mysteriously sexy.”

“What if my friends find out about this?” Thomas says. “I’ll never live it down.”

“Do you have to report your every bowel movement to your friends?” Dad says.

Great. Dad’s familiar “bowel movement” remark means that he’s serious about this. So we’re going on a pilgrimage to the A’burain Shrine on the dark side of the moon, where visions of the Virgin Mary, Mahatma Ghandi—and probably Santa friggin’ Claus, for all I know—were all said to have appeared at different times to oxygen-deprived believers searching for the meaning of life in the lunar debris.

“And what do you have to say, Cassie?” Mom says to me.

I run through a laundry list of smart-aleck responses before settling on, “Should I bring my bathing suit?”

Mom smiles and gives me a hug.

I slip into my black tunic and pantaloons and run a towel over my bald scalp. My knees still ache from the Crawl and my lower back throbs. The cancer has spread to my spine so I’m supposed to avoid physical exertion. But God will protect me.

I’m tracing my index finger along the jagged purple scar that runs down my right cheek when a knock on the door startles me. A doctor enters the changing room. He’s in his mid-twenties, with a toothy smile and the dark complexion of someone who’s grown up far away from here. Something about his grin reminds me of Thomas. He pulls out a water canister from the pocket of his white lab coat. “Here, drink some more. You’ve been through quite the ordeal.”

I rub my sore knees. “I’ve had my fill, thanks.”

“Dr. Michael Byars.” He sets down the flask and extends his hand. From his sideways glance at me, I can tell he’s trying not to stare at the scar on my face.

“Cassandra Quiles.” I hold onto his hand for a bit longer than I should and say, “You’ve got a lot of faith in your decontamination showers, I see.”

He stares at his open palm for a long second and chuckles, taken aback by my joke. Not what he expected of a Savior, I’m sure. Antonio would be proud of me.

“Bodhi Bendito and the others are finished with their chem-showers. If you’re ready, I can take you to them.”

He doesn’t mention the Saved One. Outpost security had demanded that it remain in a lead-lined holding cell, though in truth there’s no way to know whether anything could stop it from escaping if it wanted to. I have no doubt they are running every conceivable scan on it. No matter, it won’t make a difference. Teams of astrobiologists, linguists and physicists had spun their wheels for years trying to communicate with its kind at Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Yet we had managed to break the aliens’ century-long silence in just a few days, prompting the Saved One to splinter off from its kind and join us. In the process, we’d made a name for ourselves. The Outpost’s interstellar signal inviting us to this rogue planet referred to us as the legendary “Saviors of Sagittarius A.”

I follow Dr. Byars out of the changing room.

“Are you sure you’ve had enough water? Dehydration isn’t good for someone in your . . . condition,” he says, and I feel the air rush out of me as if I’ve been sucker-punched. He knows my medical history. That means he would’ve read all about the accident, about Mom, Dad and Thomas. My hands turn into fists. I suppose it made sense that they’d researched our personal backgrounds given what we’d accomplished with the Sagittarians.

As I trail him, the ache in my left knee intensifies and I limp slightly.

“I should take a look at that.”

“Let’s not waste any more time,” I say.

Dr. Byars’s smile fades and he escorts me through a web of corridors until we reach a large circular door that irises open. We step onto a balcony overlooking the station’s ground floor, which extends a quarter mile across and teems with activity. Thousands of monitors glow green and red inside an endless catacomb of cubbyholes. In an open area in the center of the floor a massive telescanner points up at the glass-domed ceiling. Bots scurry about and scores of workers in red jumpsuits tinker with an array of metal pipes stretching hundreds of feet from floor to ceiling. The nearest workers stop what they’re doing to observe us.

I’m relieved to see Bodhi waiting for me with Suri Chandra, a short squat woman who is the head of the Outpost. I’d read about her. Once we’d come through the wormhole-stretch, the Outpost’s decades of datafiles streamed into our ship’s computers and became accessible to us. Nicolai and Antonio join us a few moments later.

“Welcome,” Chandra says. “Shall we get started?” The wall behind us shimmers into transparency, revealing that the Outpost sits on the edge of a great, bottomless gulch. I suppress a gasp. The canyon spans so many miles that the other side isn’t visible. It’s a bottomless pit. A precipice to infinity.

“We discovered them here about five years ago,” Chandra says. “Invisible, intangible, detectable only by the faintest traces of radiation and the familiar etchings they leave on baryonic matter.”

Etchings? And then it occurs to me. The great gulch. The Sagittarians have sculpted this vast global canyon, just like they had shaped the dust clouds that orbited the black hole of Sagittarius A into planet-sized pyramids and octagons and endless geometric designs.

Chandra continues. “Their radiation signature is identical to that of your ‘Saved One.’ And they’ve ignored all our entreaties, just as their kind did at Sagittarius A. It’s as though we don’t exist to them. We’ve tried every conceivable strategy to get their attention without success: laser pulses, radio transmissions, nanobeams. Yet they did show an interest in you at Sag-A.” She wears a mask of befuddlement, as if she’s been contemplating this particular riddle for years and the answer now lies within her grasp. “How? How did you do it?”

“You’ve uploaded our files. You know precisely how we made contact,” Bodhi says.

“Yes, prayer,” Chandra says. “Rituals.” There’s a desperate edge to her voice that makes me think they’ve tried replicating those rituals without any luck.

“We would like to open a dialogue with them, Bodhisatva,” she says.

“As would we,” Bodhi says with a smile. “But to be clear, my brothers and sister and I have traveled all this way for a very specific reason. The same reason we went to Sag-A. To help the Sagittarians commune with God.”

“I see.” Chandra purses her lips. “And has the ‘Saved One’ lived up to its moniker? Has it benefited from the wisdom of your teachings?” Just for a microsecond, her mask dissolves and she and Dr. Byars make brief eye contact, exchanging a dismissive and contemptuous look. I’m not surprised by her condescension; we’re under no illusions. We’re just a silly cult in their eyes, a remnant of the final gasps of organized theistic religion from planet Earth.

“Well, I suppose that remains to be seen,” Bodhi says.

“You haven’t been able to communicate with your so-called ‘Saved One,’ have you?”

“We don’t understand it, true,” Bodhi says. “But who’s to say whether it can comprehend us?”

She paces along the railing, staring into the great gulch. “I know that your order holds certain . . . beliefs about a supposed personal deity. Which is all fine and good. Who am I to judge?” Chandra says. “But we’ve sought a dialogue with the aliens for almost a century now. Most everyone has given up hope.”

A century? I keep forgetting about realtime and relativity. We’d lost nearly eighty years during our mission to Sagittarius-A.

“We want to learn about their culture, their science,” Chandra says, “while you want to save their ‘souls.’ I believe we share common ground. We both need to find a way to communicate with them if we’re to achieve our respective goals. And since you’ve already had some success in drawing their attention, and the environs here, harsh though they may be, are less hostile than at Sag-A, it might make sense to pool our efforts.”

Pool our efforts? I’m tempted to remind her that they’re the ones seeking our help, but Bodhi has counseled me to be tolerant above all else, to avoid reacting, so I keep my mouth shut.

Bodhi bows his head. “We would welcome your assistance.”

I awaken with a start, sitting up and gasping for air. I’ve just had a nightmare that I can’t remember. I look around me. Where am I? It hurts to breathe. My arms and legs are bandaged.

My bed has safety rails and dimmed fluorescent bulbs light the room.

I surrender to the panic as if I’m a little girl again, and scream.

I expect Mom and Dad to come racing into the room, but instead a man enters. He’s bald and wears teardrop earrings and a black tunic cinched with a red belt. A Savior. I recognize him. He had come to me a few days ago, when I was drifting in and out of consciousness and had requested, of all things, religious counsel. What was I thinking? What had happened to me? I couldn’t remember.

Long pink scars brand his forearms like tattoos. His face is smooth and clean-cut—he can’t be more than thirty years old—and his eyes have a warmness in them that instills immediate trust. His soft voice and gentle manner immediately calm me.

“It’s okay, child.” He sits on my bed and pushes me back down. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

“Where am I? Where’s my mother, my father?”

“You’re in the Armstrong Hospital on Luna. Don’t you remember the accident?”

The memories flood back. Hysterical passengers stampeding through the Reverie’s corridors in search of lead-lined bunkers. Bodies trampling me. Chaos. Across from me, a woman calmly staring out the plexi, a beatific grin plastered on her face, welcoming death. I couldn’t breathe.

“A solar flare,” the Savior says. “The ship’s shields failed. I’m sorry, Cassandra. Your parents and your brother are dead.”

“No!” I whisper. “No!” The whisper grows into a sob.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, child.”

I don’t want his sympathy. I want my parents; I want Thomas. I slap his face and claw at his chest. I try pushing him away but he holds my arms tight. Then he pauses and releases my arms and allows me to strike him again and again until I press my face into his shoulder and shriek and shriek until the nurses arrive and administer a sedative.

We sit at ridiculously long tables with over fifty members of the Outpost’s exploration team, including Chandra and Dr. Byars, for our final meal before commencement of the fast.

Nicolai and Antonio sit across from me, Dr. Byars to my left and Bodhi to my right.

Bodhi had insisted on the Saved One’s presence for the meal—not that it could eat or speak or do anything but hover in its sphere and emit an occasional gurgle or bloodcurdling scream through the voice generator. From her expression it is clear Chandra does not approve of the Saved One being here. I find it ironic that someone so desperate to communicate with the Sagittarians can disapprove of sitting down to dinner with one of them.

Bodhi asks for a moment of silence while we pray. We clutch the medallions of truth dangling from the end of our beaded necklaces. Soon our murmurs become a mantra. When we finish, we leave our seats and crouch low to the ground while facing in the general direction of Earth.

I catch a glimpse of Dr. Byars and Chandra from the corner of my eye, pity and disgust etched across their faces.

When we return to our seats an awkward silence follows. Bodhi says warmly, “You’ve prepared quite the feast for us. We’re grateful.”

Everyone begins eating. Knives and forks clank against dishes and I direct the bots to fill my plate with stewed spinach and broccoli. All eyes at the table are fixed on the Saved One, which hovers at the head of the table. Its silver ovular shell sparkles in the bright lights. Its center band remains translucent, the churning gases within visible.

“So it’s never spoken to you?” Chandra asks, raising her chin toward the Saved One.

“Only occasional sounds,” I answer.

“What exactly is inside the sphere?” Dr. Byars says.

“Don’t be coy, doctor,” Nicolai says. “Surely you’ve run your scans by now. They’re Bose-Einstein condensates, sodium atoms so cold that they can slow a beam of light to a fraction of its velocity.”

“Don’t look so surprised,” Antonio adds. “We’re astrophysicists, Nicolai and I. We met on Southern Titan at Singleton.”

“I’m well aware of your credentials,” Dr. Byars says. “I was just surprised—”

“That men of science could be so foolish as to go on a religious mission?” Nicolai says.

“Is there much of a difference between science and religion?” Antonio says. “At the quantum level, I mean. Even at the macro level, we live in a universe with physical laws fine-tuned precisely ‘so,’ to allow life to exist. Some might consider the Big Bang a—”

Byars raises his hands. “There’s no need to be defensive. We’re all religious people here.”

I’m taken aback. When I left Earth, religion was condemned as the reason-killer, the root of prejudice and narrow-minded thinking. Had the pendulum swung back in the other direction over the past eighty years?

“Oh?” I say. “Religious scientists?”

“Well, perhaps not religion as you know it,” Chandra says, smiling. She sips a glass of wine. “We’re Quantists. Closely knit communities that explore the mysteries of existence together. Hardly mystics.”

“Quantists?” I say.

Dr. Byars smiles. “You’ve missed a lot.”

“So you believe in God?” Bodhi says.

“Not in the simplistic way—I’m sorry, no offense intended, Bodhisatva—that you do. We don’t believe in a personal deity, but in a unifying theory of reality—rooted in quantum phenomena beyond our ability to understand. Something we call the Creative Force.”

“You have proof of this . . . Creative Force?” I say.

Chandra laughs. “It’s not something that can ever be definitively proved. But we have absolute faith in its existence. And through our exploration of the universe and an immersion in physics we hope we can grasp a tiny piece of that Creative Force. Doing so as part of a community. It drives home the fact that we’re part of something larger than ourselves.”

“Well, at least on that we can agree, Doctor,” Bodhi says.

“Even if we can’t agree on . . . ” Chandra struggles for the word. “A ‘God.’”

“So the B-E condensates worked to attract the alien?” Dr. Byars says, changing the subject.

“We know that the Sagittarians are a form of dark energy,” Nicolai says. “A self-aware aspect of the quintessence field concentrated in complex patterns we never thought possible. We also know that they can interact with matter. So it made sense to provide them with a medium that would allow them to slow down to a level where they might be able to communicate with us.”

Dr. Byars crunches on a large carrot. “We have about a hundred chambers on this station filled with every imaginable type of B-E condensate. Yet no alien ever jumped into one of them.”

The Saved One shrieks. It’s a bone-chilling howl that reminds me of a dog caught under the grav-field of a transport vehicle.

Several workers drop their utensils and a half-dozen jump up and flee the table.

I struggle not to laugh at their reaction. I suppose I’ve grown accustomed to the Saved One’s sporadic wailing and burbling.

“What the hell . . . ?” Dr. Byars says.

“Why does it do that?” Chandra says.

“We don’t know for sure,” Nicolai says. “Personally, I think it’s experimenting with the voice generator, trying to learn human language.”

“It sounds like it’s in agony,” a red-bearded man at the far end of the table says. He’s standing, ready to run at the slightest movement by the Saved One.

“’Show me a life with no suffering,’” Bodhi says, “and I’ll show you a life not lived to its fullest.’” Bodhi looks at me out of the corner of his eye when he speaks these words, one of the central tenets of our faith.

“In that case, I’m not so sure I want to live life so . . .  fully,” Dr. Byars says with a smile. Several people laugh softly and others take their seats again.

“What about you, Miss Quiles?” Chandra says to me. “You’re the most recent member of this clique, aren’t you? Do you believe in this philosophy of suffering, of communing with a personal . . . God?”

I gulp down a string bean and meet her stare. Then I roll up both my sleeves and show her my other scars.

When the doctor enters the room accompanied by Bodhi Bendito, I know the news can’t be good.

“I’m sorry, Cassandra,” the doctor says. “As with the other survivors of the Reverie disaster, you have terminal cancer . . . ”

I’m only able to register random phrases after the word ‘terminal’: “Nanotherapy can help . . . Another year and a half, two years perhaps, if you’re lucky . . . Other experimental treatments are in development . . . A positive attitude is important.”

Bodhi Bendito walks past the doctor and puts his arm around my shoulders. “You’re not alone, child. I’m here. The Saviors are here.”

After the oncologist leaves, I sit cross-legged on the floor with Bodhi for a long while without saying a word. When he speaks again, he says, “Your personal agony is beautiful, child. With every ache, every jab of pain, you’re living. Never forget that.” And then he rolls up his two sleeves and displays the scars on his arms. They start at his elbow and run all the way to his wrists, overlapping purple marks, hideous upraised tissue in lieu of normal skin. “There have been so many times in my life when I felt . . . inconsequential. There’s nothing worse than that. Pain is God’s way of reminding us that we matter, child.” He runs his index finger across each scar and I wonder how many other wounds are hidden beneath his tunic. “My father was a Savior priest, and his father before him. They taught me about the Prophet Merkel’s moment of enlightenment atop Olympus Mons, about his great vision of truth. That our suffering allows God to take measure of our sacrifice and bestow his blessing on us. It is a great honor, Cassandra, to take on that pain. It’s perhaps the greatest honor a person can know.”

“So by hurting yourself, you think you’re helping others?” I say. He sounds insane, but I have no doubt about his sincerity, his kindness.

He laughs softly. “I know so, child. I believe it with every fiber of my being. And my father and grandfather also understood this truth. At a point in both their lives, each of them undertook missions to commune with God.”

Missions? My heart skips at the word.

“My grandfather traveled to the ancient colonies on Southern Mars, and my father to the domed cities of Titan to spread the Prophet’s message. I’ve reached that juncture in my life, Cassandra, when I too need to go on my great mission. I’d been planning this for some time when I was called to the hospital to help you. So far there are three of us in our conclave. I believe you are destined to be our fourth, Cassandra.”

I’m struck by the irony. Mom also dreamt of a great trip, a pilgrimage. I miss her so much. And I think about dying alone in a hospital. It isn’t fair. I haven’t had a chance to do anything important with my life.

“Where are you going?” I say.

“It’s an ambitious mission, Cassandra. We’re traveling to Sagittarius A, the center of the Milky Way, to commune with the aliens.”

“The aliens?” I was seven years old when the discovery of the alien “sculptors”—a form of living, sentient radiation—had shaken the world to its foundation, finally proving once and for all that humanity was not alone in the universe. They were said to live at the center of the galaxy in a dust cloud that swirled on the edge of an event horizon, and they had ignored all our attempts at communication.

“This mission will allow us to spread our teachings to other beings.” His face is glowing. “Join us, Cassandra.”

It all sounds crazy. But I could spend my final days doing something Mom would approve of, something of consequence. I think again of how little time I have left, of being alone.

“There are Savior conclaves visiting human colonies across the cosmos,” Bodhi says, “trying to make them remember what it is that makes us human. What they’ve lost amidst all the so-called advancements. The sense of the sacred. Of being part of something. Something greater than ourselves. God teaches us that suffering shared is suffering assuaged.”

Something greater than ourselves. Like Mom said. And as he sits there and brushes a strand of hair out of my eyes, I tell him that I’m not sure about any of this, but I already know that I’m going with him. Mom would have wanted me to. I do want to be part of something bigger than myself in the time I have left. I need this. But most of all I need Bodhi.

Chandra and Dr. Byars have agreed to allow us to proceed with our ceremony. We prostrate ourselves in a central room that faces out into the great abyss through a plate-glassed window. Each of us sleeps on the cold metal floor and we pray all day and night. Three times a day we drink from a tin cup of water that washes down the stims that keep us awake. We eat nothing.

Within two hours, my back aches from lying on the floor. On the second day, I don’t feel hunger any more, just a constant vertigo that makes it impossible to stand. By the fourth, I don’t know whether it is the advancing cancer or the effects of fasting, but I feel weaker than I ever have before. I can only pray silently, though strangely the Saved One makes more noise than usual, squeaking and buzzing and hiccupping. Nicolai and Antonio place a second sphere next to it, hoping this will invite another of its kind to join us.

On the eighth day of fasting, Dr. Byars intervenes. Two bots move me onto a gurney and lift me out of the room. My fellow Saviors protest, but there is nothing they can do in their weakened state.

I try to object, but the world spins so furiously when I attempt to speak that I have to close my eyes, just for a second.

I empty out the drawers and pile Thomas’s clothes in a big stack along with Mom and Dad’s. Bodhi plans to donate them to the poor.

Antonio activates the autovacuumers that scuttle back and forth, sucking up dust.

“Do you need any help over there?” Nicolai says. He has thick blond eyebrows and dimples that magically appear when he smiles. As a result, ever since I met him I’ve found myself trying to make him laugh. He’s about twenty years too old for me—even if he weren’t married and gay. Maybe that accounts for Antonio’s acerbic humor. He always manages to find a way to get the usually taciturn Nicolai to muster a smile.

“If surrounding me with handsome men is Bodhi’s way to get me join the Saviors, I have to confess it’s working,” I say.

Dimples appear.

“Do you have everything you need?” Antonio says.

All I care about is the dataspeck I carry in my earring, which contains family photos and videos.

Thomas kept a jar full of holodots from the performances we’d attended, and as I pull them out one at a time and activate them, the title of each play rotates in the air and music gently echoes. I think of all the Thursday nights we’d spent at the theater together. He was born exactly four-and-a-half minutes before me, but he always treated me like a much younger kid sister. I trigger another holodot and a mournful ballad from “Delightful Introspection” plays. I recall the time Thomas and I ditched our skimmer and ran through the traffic in a heavy downpour, just making the curtain call. I open another and remember the time we’d stayed in our seats debating the ending of “The Epiphany,” and whether it was intended to be literal or metaphorical, until the ushers shooed us out of the theater.

I squeeze the holodot and don’t want to let it go.

Nicolai puts his hand on my shoulder.

Antonio pulls open the disposal drawer and I tilt the jar so that the holodots spill over the edge and disappear into its gullet. There’s no room for extra possessions on our upcoming mission.

When I finish, Nicolai takes my left hand and Antonio the right. I pray, the way that Mom used to. I pray for the strength to get me past this. For the clarity of vision to see the new path that lies before me. For the fortitude to commit myself fully to the Saviors on our upcoming mission to Sagittarius A.

And then, after a lifetime of denying God, after weeks in the hospital mourning my family, I finally open my heart and let Him in. I thank Him. I thank Him for the support, the love, afforded to me by my new family.

When I awaken, I’m in the infirmary, a cutaneous nutrient patch attached just below my left clavicle. Dr. Byars sits at my bedside and offers me a cup of juice. “Here, drink this. You’ve been unconscious for the past forty-eight hours, Cassandra.”

I slap the plastic cup out of his hands.

“What did you do? You’ve jeopardized our mission!” I say.

“And you were jeopardizing your life. You said that the Sagittarians had previously responded within seven days after you started your little ceremony,” he says. “I waited until the eighth day. In your already-weakened condition you were in serious danger.”

“I’m dying! Who are you to decide how I choose to live my final days?

“Listen to me,” Dr. Byars says. “Listen carefully. In the time that you’ve lost in interstellar travel, there have been advancements, Cassandra. The form of cancer you developed from the solar flare is treatable now.”

I’m so surprised, I don’t know what to say.

“Chandra didn’t want me to tell you. She didn’t want to do anything that might undermine your . . . commitment to our project.”

There’s a long pause. I’ve become so used to the idea of dying that I still can’t process his words.

When he turns around, he has a square, black tablet in the palm of his hand. “These will eradicate the cancer from your system. A steady dosage can cure you in about thirty days.”

I stare at it. I’m at a loss.

He grabs my hand, places the tablet in my palm and closes my fingers over it. “Whatever hold that man has over you no longer exists.” He leans closer. “I know the way his kind operates. Lurking in hospitals, seeking out those who are sick and most susceptible to his unique propaganda.”

“You’re wrong.”

“He’s exploited you. He’s preyed on your vulnerability to get you to join his cult.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about! The Saviors go to hospitals because that’s where we can help most. It’s where people are hurting, where they need the comfort of prayer, where they most need God. Yes, ‘God.’ Do you have to flinch every time I say the word?”

He shakes his head and smiles sadly. “The concept of a personal God is silly, Cassie. Primitive. The Creative Force that shaped our universe, that reveals itself through quantum phenomena, that’s real.”

“Can’t you even conceive that there might be a different way of viewing the universe?” I say. “That we might play a bigger role than that?”

He pauses. “Have you had sex with him?”

I slap him hard.

He raises his hand to the red mark I’ve left on his cheek. “You need time away from the man, Cassandra. After you’ve undergone treatment, if you still want to roam the universe saving alien ‘souls,’ that’s your prerogative.”

“You have no right . . . ”

“On the contrary, I have an ethical duty to treat you given your diminished mental capacity. You’re staying here.”

“Damn you,” I say. But even as I curse him, I stare at the bottle of black pills he’s left on the stand next to my bed and wonder whether this man has saved my life. Maybe God doesn’t intend for me to die yet? Maybe I’m not meant to spend my life with the Saviors. I push away the thought and silently curse him again, this devil who has poisoned my heart with doubt.

I must be hallucinating.

These can’t be dust clouds! They’re too magnificent, too wondrous, to be real. Planet-sized sculptures: triple-helixes, an electron orbiting an atom, honey-combed concentric circles like a bull’s eye, a replica of the Pillars of Creation! The endless designs are staggering, and they stand out starkly against the absolute darkness of the black hole.

“How can they maintain those elaborate shapes while in the orbit of a singularity?” Nicolai says.

Antonio focuses on navigating the ship while Nicolai tends to the various instruments that measure radiation and gravity.

Bodhi continues humming, like he has for so many days. His throat must be raw.

Our ship streaks in the direction of five pyramids—the first the size of Jupiter, and each subsequent one double the size of the preceding one. Along the sides are etchings of patterned geometric shapes, decahedrons, rectangles, circles and occasional mountain-sized protuberances along its base that resemble fingers.

Antonio and Nicolai have placed the B-E sphere in the center of the praying room and Bodhi and I sit cross-legged to one side of it. The top hatch of the sphere is open.

We’re all weak from hunger. Bodhi runs the sterilized blade into his forearms and thighs, slicing through scar tissue. He grits his teeth. For a moment I don’t know whether I can go through with this. I hold a lancet in my shaky hand and look over to Bodhi for reassurance. He nods.

I plunge it into my left arm and split open the pink skin, which gushes blood. The excruciating pain almost makes me stop the mantra.

He pats my shoulder and then I stare into his loving eyes. Blood is splattering onto the holy mat we’d laid down beforehand.

My head is spinning. I lean into Bodhi and kiss him. He returns my kiss for just a second and then puts his hands on my shoulders and pushes me away.

I’m too embarrassed to even mutter a response. He stares at me more intensely than anyone ever has before in my life. “Saying no to you, Cassie . . . Now I know what it is to suffer. Now I truly know agony.”

His gaze holds mine and with my heart bursting with love, with total devotion, I run the blade from my forehead to my right cheek causing blood to stream down my face.

Bodhi flinches.

“There’s an energy fluctuation,” Nicolai announces. “The radiation signature matches that of the Sculptors.”

“It peaks further ahead. I’m taking us five kilo-kliks closer to the event horizon,” Antonio says.

“We’ll lose significant realtime,” Nicolai says. “Decades.”

“Just for a few seconds.”

“Careful, Toño, careful . . . ”

“We’re in,” Antonio says. “Ten seconds, fifteen seconds . . . ”

The ship shakes violently and the lights blink and all at once the B-E sphere shudders and glows. A loud static emanates from its speakers. It sounds at first like a soft groan, then like the agonizing scream of childbirth.

I leap to my feet and wipe the blood out of my eyes.

Bodhi stands shakily, totters toward the orb, and seals the top hatch.

“Contact!” Nicolai says. “We’ve made contact! Get us the hell out of here, Toño.”

Shhhhh.

A woman sticks her head into the room. “Can I have a word, Dr. Byars?”

“What is it?”

“We have a situation. One of the missionaries, the one called Antonio, donned his safesuit and went outside.”

“In his weakened condition?”

“Yes, and . . . we can’t be certain . . . but it appears he’s taken his own life. He hurled himself into the great gulch.”

What? Vertigo hits me again.

“The other one, Nicolai, has also left the Outpost and is following the same path. The Bodhisatva is talking with Chandra. He’s preparing to go after them.”

Dr. Byars turns to leave, then stops at the doorway. “I’ll let you know what’s going on as soon as I find out.”

I hear the security guards racing in the same general direction as Dr. Byars.

The minute the footsteps recede, I drag myself out of bed. My head still spins but I know that my safesuit is stored separately from the men’s suits not far from here.

I chase Thomas around the acacia tree, and he stumbles and falls and scrapes his knee.

He’s sobbing, pressing both his hands against his right leg. Fat tears roll down his cheek and he’s blubbering.

“Shut up, Thomas!” I hiss. I look around. No sign of Mom. “Don’t be such a baby!”

He bawls more loudly.

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

Bodhi breathes heavily through the commlink. He trails far behind me as I sprint ahead, the Outpost’s glow lighting the terrain. My safesuit targets Nicolai about fifty meters in front of me. There. In the distance. He stands at the very edge of the precipice.

As I close ground, Nicolai turns to face me. Then he leans back and drops over the side of the cliff.

“No!” I scream.

I run to the gravelly ledge and lean precariously over the side. It is as if I’m dangling off the edge of a flat world, over an infinite abyss. There’s no sign of him.

Then I hear it. A voice. A voice that echoes all around me and penetrates the marrow of my bones.

“Cassie? Can you hear me?”

My heart stops. It’s Thomas’s voice.

That’s when I see it hovering over the void.

A blur, a micro-rip in space and time that fills me with both dread and wonder. Although my mind can’t make sense of what I’m seeing, I instinctively recognize it, even outside of its shell.

The Saved One.

Although it floats directly ahead, the voice it’s using, Thomas’s voice, comes from all around me, from inside me. It resounds in my temples.

“You can speak?” I say.

“Not really. But what’s important is that you can finally hear me.” He giggles. “I was rescued by another of my kind who noticed my pain and lifted the veil.”

“The veil?”

“Yeah, silly. The veil. You know, the substance in here.”

“The Bose-Einstein condensates?”

“Uh-huh. I decided to experience life as you do, in this slow, limited manner and sort of lost myself in the process.”

I still can’t believe I’m hearing Thomas’s voice. But it’s Thomas’s voice from when we were much younger.

“Why are you . . . here?” I point to the yawning chasm.

“Your kind is, well, crippled, Cassandra. But don’t you worry, I’m here to help.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Precisely!” He titters. “See, you’re unable to grasp reality. Your senses are warped, kiddo.”

“What did you do to Antonio and Nicolai?”

“They’ve seen the light, so to speak. I saved them. Transformed them.”

I take a step back. “You’re scaring me.”

“Don’t be afraid, Cassie. Hmm, how can I put this so you understand? You know how a light particle flits around in a fuzzy state, everywhere at once, until the moment you observe it?”

Yes, basic high school physics. The uncertainty principle. The observer effect. Any particle, until observed, exists in all possible states simultaneously. But what does this have to do with anything? I once overheard Nicolai and Antonio discussing the wave function of photons and wondered what that concept might mean to aliens that consist of dark energy.

“Open your mind, Cassie.”

I stand in front of the full-length mirror dressed in a black tunic with red slippers and Bodhi Bendito hands me the shears. I cut off my ponytail at its base. And I keep on cutting until I have only half an inch of hair shorn close the scalp. I hand the shears back and he places the electric razor in my other hand. I push it down the center of my scalp, leaving a wake of white flesh.

“Imagining a possibility is enough to collapse a wave function, to cause a reality to fluctuate into existence,” the Saved One says, only now it sounds like a more mature, teenaged Thomas. “You see, there is no actual, objective universe, Cassie. There is no physical reality, at least not in any meaningful sense, without consciousness, without observation.”

I’m standing in front of a mirror again, but I’m not me. I have a different face. I’m taller. My hair is honey-brown and falls past my shoulders.

Who am I?

My very being is the end product of uncertainty. I’m the outcome of a random spermatozoa—one of millions—fertilizing an egg. Random genes in a random combination.

I embody uncertainty.

Dr. Byars and Bodhi lean over the edge of the precipice as my body plummets. Bodhi’s outstretched hand reaches for me.

They aren’t listening to the Saved One. The man of science. The man of faith. Both too afraid to take the ultimate leap.

Have faith, Bodhi! Jump!

His eyes widen and he takes a step back from the edge.

“The flow of time isn’t real, Cassie.” The Saved One laughs. “Your perception of the ’past’ and ’future’ is generated by the filter of your unevolved senses. You delude yourselves into believing that the individual moments you experience come and go, swept away in an endless stream of such moments. But in actuality, Cassie, the sea of time is frozen and every instant that has ever been or ever will be, every ripple, every wave, stretches out before you forever preserved, right here, right now.

“Do you follow?”

We’re dodging traffic, racing through the streets in the heavy rain. Thomas is holding on to my hand, and pulling me along. I’m laughing, out of breath. My hair is drenched.

“The fundamental truth is that the universe didn’t create life. It is life that spawned the cosmos. You’re both the particle and the observer, Cassie. Do you understand? Do you?” It sounds excited.

“Yes, I—I think so.”

I allow myself to fall backwards over the edge into the abyss. Wasn’t I already falling? No.

I never stepped off the precipice. No one did.

I rejected Dr. Byars’ nanomeds and embraced my faith.

Nicolai sits at my bedside. My entire body feels numb. I can’t speak. I reach up to touch my face and I trace jutting cheekbones and eye sockets.

Antonio anxiously faces out the window of the hospital room as if he can’t bear to look at me.

Nicolai reaches out and holds my claw of a hand.

I try speaking but the only sound I can generate is a raspy inhuman moan. I’m struck by the fact that I sound like the Saved One, trapped inside the B-E sphere.

“It’s okay, Cassie. It’s okay. We’re here.”

And as I take my final breath it dawns upon me with the last electrical impulse that courses through my grey matter: it isn’t suffering that brings us closer to God; it’s compassion. But how can there be compassion without suffering?

“Why us? Why did you choose to speak to us?” I say.

“Because your pain, Cassie, is so pure, so sincere that it shines like a beacon, beckoning for compassion.”

“So then God exists?” I say.

“Everything and nothing exists! Haven’t you understood what I’ve been telling you? When you conceive of Him, you collapse a wave function and make it so. God is real. And you created Him.”

“I didn’t know. I couldn’t know,” I say. “Your people . . . ” I’m so overwhelmed I start to cry. “Your people must truly care about us.”

A pause.

“My people . . . No, they care nothing about stunted life-forms like you. But I felt the need to help you. I felt the calling to ease your suffering and open your minds to the light. That’s why I came to you when I sensed your pain. To bring you the truth.”

There’s something so familiar about its words. And that’s when it hits me. The Saved One.

My God, it’s a missionary.

Thomas stuck bubble gum in my hair.

Tears run down my cheeks as Mom pours oil onto the brush and pushes it through my hair. It catches and pulls, and I sob more loudly. “Shh, it’s okay sweetie. I know it hurts.” Mom holds my hair at the roots and brushes the tangled ends with quick strokes. “Shhhh.”

Epiphany. Transcendence.

I was. And I could be. I am. And I will be.

“It’s okay, Cassie. It’s okay,” Dad says. “We’re right here. We never left.”

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

Inevitable

Sean Williams

CAPTIVE

The prisoner was both young and male, which suited Master Bannerman perfectly well. She had encountered his type before—headstrong, shallow, visceral—and refined numerous techniques for extracting what she needed. He would give her what she wanted, and possibly more besides. It was only a matter of time.

For his part, Braith Kindred was still struggling to wake up. His head ached, and his body was covered in bruises beneath an unfamiliar uniform. The air seemed as thick as honey, but only when he moved in a particular direction, encountering resistance when he sat upright, but none at all when dropping his arms to his sides. That his inner ear told him he was in free fall was another puzzling detail.

He rubbed his forehead, taking in the details of his cell. It was rectangular, six meters long and three wide, with white walls and a square cross-section. The cot he sat on was bolted to the floor. He noted circular holes where furniture had once been mounted at points on walls and ceiling as well. Clearly “down” was variable.

That triggered a memory. He raised and lowered his right arm, testing the honey effect. He had heard about such things. “Weird fields,” they were called. They were never used inside the Structure.

There was only one place he could be.

A Guild ship. In the belly of the beast.

“How did I get here?” he asked the empty room, certain that someone would be listening.

“Play him the recording.”

Master Bannerman stood with her arms folded tightly across her chest, watching the prisoner’s reaction via life-size hologram.

The sound of his voice filled the brightly lit cell. The strain in the words, the effort it took to get them out.

“I strike this blow against the Guild of the Great Ships in the name of Terminus and all the free people of the Structure.”

The prisoner frowned.

“Now do you remember?” Bannerman asked him.

He remembered setting the last of the charges and testing the trigger that would simultaneously ignite them. There had been a break in one of the relays. He had been on his way to fix it when he had stumbled over the intruders: a pair of them, moving stealthily through the empty lower tunnels. They had no business there; Hakham topside had been abandoned for weeks. So he had fired at them, hitting one, and then hurried back to the hub to trigger the demolition ahead of schedule. Faulty relay be damned; he wasn’t about to blow the mission on account of Guild agents getting in the way. Fortunately, the hub hadn’t been interfered with. He had entered the codes and braced himself to read the script. This was his big moment. In seconds, it would be all over—for Terminus and the free people of the Structure, but most of all for his brother, who had died at the hands of a Guildsman and deserved the honor.

Then what?

His captors played the message again. It was his voice, all right. The words were his, too. The script was so deeply embedded in him that it had become part of his skeleton.

He didn’t remember saying it, though. Not on Hakham. Not ever. He had rehearsed the speech in his head a thousand times. It had never once issued from his mouth.

Perhaps, he thought, the shockwave had given him amnesia.

Or perhaps a much stranger solution awaited discovery.

“You pulled me from under the wreckage,” the prisoner said. “Or you beat me up. Which?”

She studied him closely. He held himself still, very still, as though thinking for his life. What new treacheries was he planning behind those cold blue eyes?

“The former,” she said.

“So I did push the button. Good. What are you going to do now? Interrogate me?”

“No amount of interrogation will reopen the shaft. Hakham is closed forever.”

“Execute me, then?”

She let him ponder that possibility for a moment, imagining the fear of ignominious death eating into his certainty like acid. He would reach the obvious conclusion, given time.

“You’re soldiers on a war footing,” he said slowly. “If our roles were reversed, if I was the one pulling you out of the rubble, I would’ve shot you on the spot. You haven’t done that, so you must want something from me. What is that, exactly?”

“Just one thing,” Bannerman said. “By blowing those charges, you cut yourself off from everyone you know. More: you stranded yourself a thousand light-years from your fellow conspirators. I’ve kept you alive because I think you’ll come to realize just how stupid that was.”

“You want to watch me suffer?”

“No. There are other ways into the Structure. We know of two, and Terminus has sealed both of them. You’re going to help me find a third.”

“Why would I do that?”

“It’s the only way you’ll ever get back inside.”

“Well, that’s true.”

A slow smile crept across his face.

Whatever he was thinking, she didn’t like it.

Kindred wished he could see the woman addressing him. Guildsmen he was familiar with; they were uniformly compact and handsome, practically indistinguishable from each other, like clones. No one had ever seen a Guildswoman before. What strange hive queen might she be?

She was right about him, anyway, whoever or whatever she was. He did know another entrance to the Structure. More than one, in fact. He had memorized his brother’s charts, even added to them himself, once he too had become a Terminus agent. Exits weren’t commonplace, and they were sometimes difficult to map, but they weren’t impossibly rare.

The truth of his situation was settling heavily into place, like a shipwreck coming to rest on the bottom of a sea. The detonation of the charges, the script, and his own voice reading it aloud—amnesia had nothing to do with his predicament. There was about as much point fighting it as there was fighting time itself.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll take you where you want to go.”

“With the intention of betraying me when you arrive, I presume.”

“I don’t doubt that you’re planning something similar for me.”

She didn’t reply. He sat waiting for a quarter of an hour, elbows holding his illusory upper bodyweight on his knees. Then he gave in to his body’s need to rest and eased back flat upon the cot. Closed his eyes on the bright white-ness of the cell and tried his best to ignore the feeling of falling. He had a lot to think about. Whatever his captor was doing, displaying impatience would only give her a sense of satisfaction he intended to withhold forever.

The prisoner had capitulated much more quickly than Master Bannerman had expected. She trusted him even less for that, but his verbal concession gave her enough to convince the Grand Masters that her plan should proceed. Once the flurry of FTL packets between her Great Ship and the parent world ebbed back to vacuum noise, Master Bannerman handpicked two Guildsmen and went immediately to where the prisoner lay waiting.

“I am Master Bannerman,” she said. “I speak for this Great Ship.”

She came two long paces into the cell, giving him time to look her over. A full head taller than the average Guildsman, she was easily a match for the prisoner’s stature and strength. When he stood up, moving warily through the artificial gravity, they faced each other eye to eye.

“Braith Kindred,” he replied, glancing at her escort, which had taken position by the open door. “But you knew that already.”

“We have a vedette waiting.”

“A what?”

“A scout ship.”

“And you’ve come to ask me for a destination, I suppose.”

“You wouldn’t possibly tell me now. The information is all that’s keeping you alive.”

She indicated that he should turn around. One of her two Guildsmen moved forward to fasten restraints around his wrists.

“You’re going to show me, rather than tell me,” she told him. “So long as you honor the terms of agreement, you will be permitted to live.”

“What about your ship?”

She wasn’t about to reveal the intricacies of her existence to him. The Great Ship would be well looked after by another avatar of herself, identical in every respect to the one searching for the Structure. Let him think that she was abandoning her station to go roaming on a fool’s quest, and that the treachery he planned would make the slightest difference to the Grand Masters’ war.

“Attempt to harm me,” she told him, “and you will be instantly killed.”

He didn’t doubt that Bannerman possessed that capacity. The Guild might have installed a dozen lethal devices into him while he was unconscious, which she could activate with a gesture.

When the Guildsman working on his wrists had finished the job, he turned to face her again.

“Oza,” he said.

“Explain that remark.”

He enjoyed her puzzlement, just as she had no doubt enjoyed his.

“The place you’re looking for. That’s its name.”

“It does not appear on our charts.”

“Oza is beyond your borders. Still in the galaxy, but a long hike from Hakham. You’ll need a fast ship if you want to get there any time soon.”

Her expression didn’t change. “You are testing the capabilities of the Guild.”

“I’m giving you what you asked for. Take it or leave it.”

He waited while she thought about it. The Guild had searched all its worlds for other entrances to the Structure, and found only Gevira and Hakham. Any obvious destination, therefore, she would likely recognize as a lie. That didn’t have to make her happy, though. When she met the Decretians, her unhappiness was certain to compound, but he wasn’t about to tell her about them yet.

His fear was gone. It had been replaced by a cool, confident certainty. She would accept the deal and they would go to Oza. Or if not Oza, then somewhere more distant still. They would get in, and she would not kill him. She couldn’t kill him, and neither could the Decretians or anyone else. He was protected by the Structure now, no matter how far he roamed from it.

If she turned him down, another possibility would present itself. The universe had, for him, become a maze with a multitude of paths and only one exit.

“The vedette is ready,” she said. “Come.”

Master Bannerman moved off with long, confident strides. He found his field-legs after a dozen steps and did his best to keep up.

HARDWARE

More FTL packets flashed. More decisions were made. Master Bannerman secured the ship she needed—the Guild’s fastest razee—and received in return a warning that, should she fail, her surviving avatars would be stripped of Ship privileges and demoted to brood service. That risk was acceptable. She was asking a lot, after all. If the razee were to fall into the wrong hands . . .

She quelled that misgiving and pressed on.

The vedette was waiting for them with airlocks open and a complement of twelve Guildsmen at the ready. A mixture of astrogation, maintenance, and security, they saluted as she entered and made space for her and the prisoner in the forward passenger compartment. Kindred didn’t struggle as he was secured to an acceleration couch. Master Bannerman took a couch opposite him, and sat patiently as the small shuttle craft disengaged from the Great Ship.

Over the staccato drumming of reactionless thrusters and the rising hum of ultralights, the prisoner broke his silence.

“Don’t you want to know the course?”

“Eventually, yes.”

“But not now, so we’re headed elsewhere. Care to tell me?”

“No.”

Artificial gravity shifted with a lurch as the vedette switched to internal life support.

“You may view our departure, if you would like to.”

“Yes, I would.”

She instructed the forward bulkhead to present an illusion of transparency, and together they watched the looming, star-shaped bulk of the Great Ship recede. There was nothing over Hakham that he had not already seen. The world was drab and reddish, made remarkable only by the ancient mines its citizens had stumbled across three centuries earlier. Apparently bottomless, their mysteries had only begun to be fathomed by the Guild before Braith Kindred and the terrorist organization called Terminus had destroyed the uppermost levels and the machines maintaining the so-called “transcendent shafts” that led to far more mysterious spaces. The crater left in their wake was just visible from orbit, a yellowish dimple several degrees south of the equator. Now Hakham had returned to being utterly uninteresting, and she was glad to be leaving.

The vedette’s thrusters propelled them a safe distance from the Great Ship, at which point the ultralights kicked in. She felt a giddy sensation in the pit of her stomach as life support worked hard to preserve her from the unnatural forces at work around the vedette. Furious energies, understood in full only by the Grand Masters and their architects, smashed the usual laws of physics and propelled the vedette at speeds not possible since the moments of creation, when the universe had boiled and time and space were one.

The prisoner was fascinated, although he tried to hide it. His eyes never left the bright points of light gliding smoothly by: the stars of the Guild in all their glory, as fragile-seeming as glass baubles.

She took the time to tell him that, were he ever to be exposed to their radiance as it truly struck the perpetually regenerating hull of the vedette, he would be destroyed in an instant.

He nodded distantly, no longer smiling, and she was satisfied.

Their journey lasted six hours, relative, while, outside the vedette, two days passed. Kindred had access to basic telemetric information—granted, he supposed, in order to awe him into submission. In that time, they crossed twenty light-years, which accorded well with the intelligence Terminus had gathered about the Guild’s technical know-how. Stars shifted smoothly around them, forming and breaking constellations with eerie transience. One star became brighter and ballooned into a vast red sun. Cool by stellar standards but seeming hot to a human’s eye, it boasted no habitable worlds, just a complex tangle of asteroid and cometary haloes. Among the cosmic debris, he saw an orbiting construct that was to the Great Ships as a mighty tree was to leaves. The ships jostled alongside its many tapering limbs, docking, refueling, undergoing repairs, exchanging material and personnel—doing everything the vessels of an interstellar empire needed to maintain their functionality.

He performed a quick mental calculation, starting with the thousand-meter reach of a Great Ship’s arm and ending with a figure in the tens of thousands of kilometers.

“Impressive,” he said, because it was. “Makes me wonder why you’re going to so much trouble over the Structure, when you have something like this to play with.”

She stared coolly at him. “Do you truly have so little conception of the Structure’s worth?”

“Do you? You haven’t asked me any questions about it. You don’t seem curious at all.”

“We already know what it is.”

“That puts you one step ahead of us, then.”

His remark pricked her steady reserve. “You and your kind cross leagues in a single step, thanks to the artifact you have inherited from makers unknown. But you don’t understand the physical principles behind the technology you use. Your inheritance is one of ignorance. What wisdom can you, a terrorist, offer the Guild of the Great Ships? We have worked for our dominion; we have earned the right to expand. Our knowledge will inevitably prevail over your dumb luck.”

He lacked the energy to argue with her. Words weren’t sufficient to describe how wrong she was.

The vedette joined a steady stream of support vehicles looping in and out of the construct’s fractal docking points. Thrusters kicked in again, and the drumming they caused kept perfect time with the strange gravity nudging his insides. They descended into the construct’s forest of antler-like branches. When they docked, it was to a relatively small outcrop that was over thirty meters thick.

With one last tattoo, the vedette came to a halt. The airlock slid open and a Guildsman stepped up to release his bonds. He stood warily, flexing his limbs, still aching in every joint and sinew, and now tired as well. He wondered what they would do if he asked for something to eat. Luckily, he could survive on internals for weeks, if he had to.

They led him into the echoing complex, which boomed and hummed with ceaseless industry. A short ride on an electric transport brought them to another docking point, and from there to the ship that he assumed would take them the rest of the way. According to the telemetry data he had glimpsed, the vedette’s reserves had been almost completely exhausted crossing barely 1 percent of the distance ahead of them.

The new ship was sleek and silver and small: fifty meters long from stem to stern and barely three wide, its every angle broadcast speed. He doubted there was a single wasted molecule anywhere in its pared-down frame. Light slid off its rolling skin in bizarre curves and knots. It looked brand-new.

“Is this thing safe?” he asked Bannerman. When she ignored him, he pressed, “At least tell me it has a name.”

“Guild ships do not require names,” she stated.

Seals hissed and the variable hull flowed elegantly open. Inside the cramped cockpit were just two acceleration couches.

“Cozy.”

“Get in.” She took his shoulder in a tight grip and propelled him through the airlock. She seemed tense, and he wondered if she was nervous about the mission ahead or just impatient to get going.

The weird fields ceased within, fading out with a chaotic flutter that made him feel briefly nauseous. There was nowhere to step but on the couches and transparent instrument panels. The ceiling was so low he banged his head as he folded himself awkwardly into the seat, telling himself to relish every free movement while it lasted. He would be effectively supine until they exited the coffin-like space. At the velocity the vedette had managed, it would take five hundred days to reach their destination.

“How fast did you say this thing is?”

She ignored him again, taking the couch next to his and activating the ship’s internal systems. Lights flashed in unreadable patterns; the airlock closed; internal life support kicked in, but still no strange gravity. An unnecessary luxury, he presumed.

“Now,” she said, “the course to Oza.”

He gave it to her. The coordinates placed the world on the far side of the galaxy, approximately thirty thousand light-years away in a straight line, almost fifty if they were to curve around the complex foams and tangles of the Bulge.

“Six days, relative,” she said.

He didn’t believe it.

“I told you,” she said. “We have earned the right.”

LONG HAUL

The razee surged away from the staging area, and Master Bannerman turned the cockpit’s interior walls to full apparent transparency, giving her and her prisoner an unparalleled view. The fat, red sun burned balefully behind them, painting the instrument panels in blood. She checked and triple-checked the course, mindful that she was heading into unknown territory at the urging of an enemy combatant.

He covered his eyes when she engaged the ultralights. The sudden acceleration took her by surprise too. Stars leaped out at them and swept past with alarming speed. She fought the urge to take manual control, knowing that this would only make matters worse. One incautious move and they would plunge right into the heart of a sun. The inbuilt navigator could fly better than any mere human, even the Master of a Great Ship.

With shaky commands, she altered the plotted course, urging the razee out of the galactic disk and into the relatively sparse halo. It shed and gained momentum with all appearance of resistance, as though it resented her interference. It was made for near-misses and wild maneuvers. She was fighting its nature.

“I can’t die,” the prisoner breathed as a neutron star crackled past, so close tides rocked and pulled at them. “I can’t die.”

A mantra, she assumed, designed to soothe in the face of his helplessness. Or a prayer, if he was religious. It wasn’t important enough to query.

He instantly relaxed when she opaqued the cockpit walls. Some of her own tension evaporated too. Out of sight remained out of the primitive layers of the human mind, even in this age of avatars and galactic empires.

“If you’re trying to intimidate me,” the prisoner said, wiping a tremulous hand across his brow, “you’ve very nearly succeeded.”

“That wasn’t my intention,” she said, despite knowing it to be an incomplete truth. His admission did please her. “This is simply the fastest ship I could commandeer at the time.”

“I don’t think so. If ships like this were commonplace, you’d have found Oza already.” His shrewd eyes regarded her closely. “You must really be keen. Why?”

“That is no concern of yours.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the enemy. Everything about you is my concern.”

“You will learn nothing from me.”

“Maybe you’re fighting on another front, worried someone’s going to get into the Structure first and attack you from the rear. Is that what this is really about?” He swiveled awkwardly in his seat to face her. “The enemy of our enemy would not be our friend. You should know that. We resist everyone equally,” he said, “everyone who wants to use the Structure as a weapon.”

“The Guild wants access to the Structure purely for its scientific value.”

“Yeah, right.” His scorn filled the cockpit. “We’ve heard that before. No spacer has ever managed to claim the Structure successfully. What does that tell you?”

“That none of them belonged to the Guild of the Great Ships.”

He laughed.

Bristling, she returned the walls of the cockpit to their former state. A trio of golden suns swept by in balletic silence.

“The instruments of this vessel are linked exclusively to my implants,” she said coldly. “Attempt to take control or interfere with my commands and it will self-destruct immediately.”

He sighed. “Six days, huh? It’s going to be a longer trip than I thought.” Folding his arms and easing back into the couch, he closed his eyes on the ever-changing view. “Wake me when we get there.”

His nonchalance needled her as much as mockery. “Aren’t you afraid that I will jettison you the moment I confirm our destination?”

“Not at all, Master Bannerman.” One eye opened a crack. “You can’t kill me.”

“I could stop your heart with a thought.”

“You could try. It wouldn’t happen. Trust me.” The eye closed again. “I can’t die.”

Those words again. His confidence was both irrational and infuriating. She stilled her tongue behind a cage of grinding teeth, and let him go.

Six days of dreams.

His brother featured in them, of course. There was no escaping him, not even now that he was dead. Their childhood on Alalia had been a hard one, and their relationship had been strained. Not for them an easy bond in the face of hardship. Huw, the eldest, had fled shortly after his eighteenth birthday, seeking his fortunes down a mineshaft and never returning.

Braith Kindred had followed him, less out of loyalty than from a need to compete that found itself without expression, then as now. He supposed in his more self-aware moments that the Guild of the Great Ships had become the focus for all the fears his brother had once embodied: of being ignored, of coming last, of being unworthy. Learning of Huw’s death had stripped his life of meaning, until Terminus had given him a chance to fight against the spacer incursions.

The sabotage on Hakham had very nearly killed him, judging by the hammering his body had endured. It wasn’t supposed to have gone that way. Neither, of course, was collaborating with the enemy—but life was nothing if not interesting. In one dream, Braith tried to explain to Huw why it was so important he stay dead. If Huw wasn’t dead, Braith wouldn’t have set the bombs, and if Braith hadn’t set the bombs, the Guild wouldn’t have captured him, and if the Guild hadn’t captured him, he wouldn’t now be coming back. Huw wasn’t getting it, though, and wouldn’t lie back down. Sometimes, just to confuse the issue, Huw looked like Master Bannerman. Sometimes he looked like Braith himself.

In his dreams of Alalia, the sky was never blue. It was gray and heavy, like an ancient marble roof on the verge of collapse. He had seen other skies on other Structure worlds, but never the stars as Bannerman had shown him. He dreamed that they leaked in through the crater on Hakham and filled the Structure with thousands of glowing sparks. He pursued them with a net but couldn’t catch them all. When they touched him, they burned. Fleeing in flames, he trailed new stars behind him in their thousands.

The view from Bannerman’s couch was no less spectacular. Passing over the Bulge, she appreciated the galaxy from a perspective few people ever saw with their own eyes. She wept on realizing the boldness of the Guild of the Great Ships’ aspirations. Its present tally of ten million stars was of no significance at all against the total number in the galaxy. Were the Guild to disintegrate that very day, the arms would go on turning, the bar wouldn’t shred and dissipate, the thick dust lanes would coil unchecked, spawning still more stars with their cold, hard light.

That mood lasted less than a day. The Guild had once claimed just three suns, and would maintain its present growth until something stopped it. Some other power, perhaps, or the internal rift that the Grand Masters feared. Their architects warned of a time when even cutting-edge ultralights, of which the razee was a prototype, would be insufficient to knit the aspiring empire together. Lacking the means to bind the stars, all would unravel and turn to ash.

The Structure would unite such an empire, allowing it to expand beyond all projections. If the architects could only fathom the principles behind its transcendent shafts, there would be no limit to the Guild’s reach. Great Ships would explore every corner of the universe, and her avatars would be among them.

All that stood between her and that grand dream were people like Braith Kindred.

She watched him sleep, learning the planes of his guileless face and the angles of his limbs. His bruises faded to yellow and disappeared like clouds on a summer day. Pristine, he looked even younger and all the more vulnerable for it. Over three days she tested his body’s defenses, searching for the source of his bizarre confidence in her inability to kill him. Something new, she thought, something developed by Terminus that the Guild had not seen before. Proceeding carefully, wary of sentinels and snares, she explored every vein, every muscle, every synaptic pathway, and found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. He was defended, yes, but no more than she.

Tendrils of her will reached the valves of his heart. He had dared her to do this, to try to kill him, and now she had the capacity. How long would his brain last if she shut down his circulatory system? An hour or two at most, less if she began severing links in his brain stem and cortex as well. She could rewire his glands to produce neurotoxins instead of hormones, if she chose, or send powerful acids coursing through his stomach wall into his chest cavity. There were a thousand ways to end someone from within.

The only certain way to test his assertion was to actually try. She came close on several occasions. A mixture of fear and excitement welled in her, tugging her in both directions. Each time, she backed away from the brink, following the call of duty. She might need him if his directions proved unreliable. The Guild might need the knowledge still trapped in his skull.

She was glad she had refrained when the razee reentered the galactic disk and began detecting signals of an unknown government in the vicinity of their destination. They were rapid-fire, sharp and powerful, like radio spikes during a thunderstorm. And there were a lot of them.

The razee decelerated like a tiny sun, drawing attention from all sides.

COMPLICATIONS

“Wake up, Kindred.”

The voice intruded on his dreams, wrenched him from the well of unconsciousness with an urgency that was utterly irresistible.

“Damn you, Kindred, wake up!”

He woke gripping the arms of his acceleration couch. Powerful forces were tugging him from side to side. Stars rolled and flared through the cockpit’s transparent walls. Something bright that he had mistaken for a nearby sun exploded with a flash of blue light, sending the ship tumbling like a twig in a waterfall.

“What the hell—?”

“You didn’t tell me there would be people waiting for us.” Bannerman was rigid beside him, all of her conscious mind focused on what was happening outside the ship, apart from the small segment talking to him. Her hands twitched as she brought the ship back under control. “You dropped us right in the middle of an ambush!”

That couldn’t be right. He thought desperately, trying to make sense of the situation. Oza was abandoned, bombed by the Decretians and left to lie fallow. The idiots didn’t know what lay hidden below the surface levels of the mine. If they were attacking now, it had to be for another reason.

A second missile exploded nearby. The view blacked out for an instant as a blast of hard radiation struck the ship. He fought a wave of automatic fear. There had to be a way out of this. There had to be.

The prisoner reached out with his implants and found that she had revoked his small telemetry privileges.

“Don’t be an idiot, Bannerman,” he said. “You woke me to see if I could do something. At least let me try.”

She relented. There were three short-range fighters on their tail, with a long-range raider of some sort bringing up the rear. She didn’t recognize the design, but he nodded on seeing them.

“They’re Decretians,” he told her. “Very nasty sorts. We have no contact with them, but there are Terminus agents stationed on Oza to keep an eye on them, ready to blow the shaft if they ever look too close. The Decretians must have left a monitoring station in the area, which spotted us when we powered in.”

She nodded. That theory matched her observations. “We can outrun them, but that won’t help us get any closer to the Structure.”

“I know. Give me a minute.”

She wasn’t certain they had a minute. On a 3-D grid, blue-gray Oza was receding behind them as the Decretian fighters drove them away. The drumming of the razee’s reactionless thrusters was relentless and numbing.

“Are we armed?”

“Not for heavy or sustained combat.”

“I didn’t think so. A ship like this, on the cutting edge of your technology, must be for covert surveillance, not attack-runs.”

She didn’t grace that with a reply.

“Whatever. We’ll work with what we’ve got.”

“You are suspiciously unconcerned,” she said. “You planned this.”

“I swear I had no idea what was waiting for us. The empire, yes, but I hoped to get in unnoticed. Whatever happens now, though, I do know we’ll make it. Trust me.”

“You say this, but I have no reason to do it.”

“Your choices are limited, Bannerman.”

She fumed in silence for a second, and then gasped as another missile detonated dangerously close to the ship.

When the spinning starscape had stabilized, she found herself agreeing to at least hear his suggestion, if he had one.

“I think I do,” he said, hoping against hope that his wild plan would succeed. “Here’s what you’re going to do. This ship accelerates faster than anything I’ve ever seen. I presume it can decelerate just as quickly. When I give you the word, I want you to hang on the brakes as hard as you can. Drop us back level with those three fighters. Come in firing.”

“We can’t defeat all three at once.”

“Not with conventional weapons. I know.” He studied the disposition of the fighters, wondering if he was insane to place so much trust in something over which he had so little control. He wasn’t a space combat expert, and he certainly didn’t know how the Structure did what it did. All he could do was take a chance. “Once we’re in the midst of them, you’re going to turn the ultralights on full.”

“Are you insane?”

“Maybe, but it’s either that or abandon Oza and go somewhere else. What’s the range of this thing, exactly? Fancy another hop across the galaxy with me in tow?”

She answered neither question, not with words. Furious—at him, he supposed, for getting her into this mess and at herself for letting him—she looked forward again, at the starscape ahead, and prepared the ultralights for activation.

“I don’t know what this will do,” she confessed. “So close to a gravity well, the ultralights could explode, taking us with them.”

“If it makes you so nervous, why don’t we try ramming instead?”

“Now you are testing my patience.”

He smiled, wishing he could banish the butterflies from his stomach. “It’s a serious suggestion. Given the speed this thing flies at, its anti-impact shields have to be pretty effective. A collision or two could be survivable, especially if—”

The ship’s thrusters hammered deafeningly, cutting him off in mid-sentence. Light blurred around him. His seat shook, throwing him from side to side. For a small eternity, it was all he could do simply to hang on.

Master Bannerman felt utterly disconnected from the actions of her body. She knew that Kindred’s plan was madness of the highest magnitude. Activating experimental ultralights in the middle of a solar system was a recipe for instant annihilation. No sane Ship’s Master would ever put a vessel at such risk. It couldn’t, therefore, be her behind the commands that were even now dropping the battle-hungry razee back into the midst of the Decretian fighters. It couldn’t be her laying down a pattern of covering fire intended to mislead the enemy. It couldn’t possibly be her locating the optimum point to activate the ultralights, in the hope of taking out the heavy-raider as well. She felt as though there were two avatars in her head at once, wrestling for control of her fate.

The fighters flashed by, tumbling wildly as they recalibrated their weapon systems. Thrusters flashed and flared. The optimum point arrived.

One Master Bannerman activated the ultralights while another stared in fascinated horror, dying to see what happened.

The razee screamed, and both of her screamed with it, fused back into one as a bubble of energy radiated out from the heart of the ultralights, tearing space into ribbons as it went.

The cockpit walls went black. All the instruments and virtual feeds died in the same instant. Smoke filled the cockpit. She heard Kindred crying out—not in fear or alarm, but crying the same three words that had haunted her all the way to Oza.

Without questioning the impulse, she found herself praying for the first time that he might be right.

I can’t die!

I can’t die!

I can’t die!

Her acceleration couch eased its grip the very instant fresh air reached her nostrils. Sobbing with relief, Bannerman sagged forward, eyes blinking in the stroboscope light of the revived instrumentation panels. Her implants located several active streams among the dozens that had once issued from the razee, now filled with noise. A quick glance over the status indicators told her everything she needed to know. Red was the dominant shade. The razee would soar no more.

Of the fighters and the raider, there were no signs.

A hand groped for hers and she jerked out of the data, startled.

“We made it.” Kindred’s voice was raw with relief. “I told you we would.”

She surprised herself by not immediately pulling away. “We got lucky,” she said, “and we’ll need to get lucky again soon. The ultralights are dead, burned completely out. Thrusters are down to half a percent capacity. We’ll be doing well to hit Oza, let alone land on it.”

He was unflappable. “That’s all we need. Don’t you see? No matter what the universe throws at us, we’ll come through just fine.”

She withdrew her hand. “I don’t share your confidence.”

“That’s because you don’t understand the Structure. You think you do, but you don’t.”

“So explain it to me.” When he didn’t answer, she dismissed the mystery with an irritated snort. “I thought not. You’re as ignorant as I am.”

“No, wait. Give me a second. I’m thinking.” He tapped his right index finger on the side of the couch. “Yes, why not? You’re caught up in this now. The only way back to your ship is through the Structure. You have a right to know what you’re getting yourself into.”

He spoke so seriously, so earnestly, that she braced herself against the back of her chair, as though the revelation might convey a physical impact. When she noticed what she had unconsciously done, she cursed herself for being so gullible. This was what he wanted, to throw her off-balance even further than she already was. Striking when she was weak was a sensible tactic. She gave him credit for trying, even as she hardened herself to resist his web of lies.

He told her everything he knew. It didn’t take long, and he could tell she didn’t believe him. The story did sound crazy; he had once thought it impossible too, until it had happened to someone close to him.

Living in or near the Structure tangled people up in time, sometimes. No one knew why, or how. It just happened, and people lived with it. Some found a comfort in it, as he told himself to, now. Until the loop in which he had found himself unraveled—until he was back on Hakham, so he could read out the script and push the button that he had failed to push the first time around—he was untouchable. How could he die anywhere when he knew he would be alive later?

She said: “You are telling me that you did not, in fact, set those charges to detonate.”

“No. It was me. Must have been. I just haven’t done it yet.”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

“The Structure makes you do that. It’s unavoidable.”

“Knots in time cannot exist. The laws of temporal entropy forbid such things.”

“Is that your best comeback?”

“I don’t need another. What you are telling me is impossible.”

“So was FTL travel, once. Hell, so was flying! I don’t think the word is in the universe’s dictionary.”

The ship was nearing Oza’s tenuous atmosphere. Soon, she would be too busy to argue. He guessed that she would keep pondering it, though. Maybe another near-death experience would convince her of his claims.

She seemed to be thinking along the same lines.

“If I did try to kill you now, what would happen?”

“The command would fail somehow. Or you’d die of an aneurism before you could issue it. I don’t know. Do you want to try?”

“Not right now.”

“Good,” he said, “because at this moment, I might be the only thing protecting you from dying when we crash-land.”

Her brown eyes narrowed. They were so dark that in the dim light of the cockpit they looked completely black.

“Thanks for your concern,” she said, “but your faith would be better placed in my ability to pilot this ship.”

He smiled. “Either way, I’m looking forward to going home again.”

Home, she thought, even as she wrestled with the controls of the moribund razee. For all she had studied the Structure and its inhabitants from afar, she had never once thought that people might actually consider it such. Was that, perhaps, why they fought so vigorously to keep it to themselves? Not because of its military or scientific value, but out of love?

The Guild of the Great Ships was made of clones and avatars, but love was just as powerful a force to them as it had ever been to any human. For the first time, she began to wonder if the campaign to take control of the Structure might prove more difficult than even the Grand Masters had imagined—hypothetically unkillable Terminus agents notwithstanding.

SACRIFICE

They came down hard a kilometer from the ruins that had once been Oza topside. Kindred and Bannerman stumbled from the new crater they had made, leaning on each other’s shoulders and brushing themselves down as best they could. The walk to the apparently lifeless shaft wasn’t a long one, but under a diamond-colored sky and with no liquid water anywhere on the planet, it wasn’t one Kindred was looking forward to. He took only a small consolation from the fact that he was back under real gravity again.

“When we get there,” he said, “let me do the talking. My access codes should still work. Once we’re in, it’s just a matter of hopping from level to level until we get where we need to go.”

She glanced over her shoulder at the crumpled wreckage of the ship. Her expression was unreadable, but he thought he could guess what was going through her mind.

That guess was confirmed when she said just one word in reply.

“Hakham.”

“Back to your ship.” He nodded. “Also, if the shaft is open, you’ll know I’m telling you the truth.”

“And then what?”

“Then you’ll wonder if you’re as good a pilot as you say you are.” He smiled. “You’ll have to be if I’m wrong, because that’s the only way you’ll ever get back home.”

The Terminus agents stationed at Oza didn’t once question her status. Master Bannerman watched closely for any sign of deception as Kindred walked up to the security cordon hidden deep in the ruins, braving a trio of upraised weapons without flinching and talking his way smoothly into their confidence. He showed no inclination to betray her just yet. She assumed he wanted to prove himself to her first, and that was perfectly in line with her own objectives. She had no doubt that before long his talk of time-loops would be revealed as the fantasy of a very lucky man.

They entered a dank, stuffy mine, traveling first by wheeled vehicle and then by elevator. The way was only intermittently lit, and they relied on infrared to pick their way when visible light was absent. Strange smells assailed her. Mud and dust soon coated her Guild uniform almost beyond its capacity to clean itself. Far behind her lay the antiseptic glamour of interstellar travel. To date, the Structure had proven disappointing and uncomfortable.

Only when they reached the first of the transcendent shafts did she realize that they hadn’t actually entered the Structure proper. At a sliding, airtight portal, Kindred entered a complex code into an alphanumeric keypad. The portal slid aside, revealing an elevator carriage large enough for thirty people.

“After you,” Kindred said, waving her inside. “From here on, we’ll make good time, better than that ship of yours. In fact, we’ll arrive before we left. If that doesn’t make you curious, nothing will.”

He pushed the carriage’s only button, and they stood at opposite sides of the carriage as it began to descend.

“Descent,” however, wasn’t the right word for what she felt in her gut. They were undeniably moving, but she couldn’t accurately pin down in which direction. Guild training had given her many ways to assess acceleration without instruments. Something about the shaft confounded all of them.

A wave of dizziness passed through her. With no other warning than that, the carriage came to a halt. When the portal opened and she stepped through, she noticed immediately that the ambient gravity had changed.

At a five-level stack three transcendent jumps away from Oza, Kindred called the first halt on their journey. He had never been to Shosori before, but he remembered the name from the charts he had memorized and knew some of its basic geography. It was harmless enough, except for newbies.

“Are you okay?” he asked Bannerman.

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

He knew she was lying. Her expression was too blank. Her eyes and hands moved abruptly and too quickly at the slightest stimulus. Maybe she thought her self-control was impeccable, but he could tell. He’d seen this kind of reaction before.

“Let’s stop here for a bit.”

They were in an observation deck that clung to the underside of ceiling made of roughly carved, reddish stone. Below them, visible through a bulging transparent blister, was the surface of a solid world, its gray features obscured by drifts of frozen atmosphere except where deep fissures had been carved by mineral-seeking engines, each as large as a Great Ship. They watched it for five minutes. In that time, the world within the Structure rotated thirty degrees.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

“You want me to say that it’s impossible.”

“That word comes to mind, you have to admit. Something like this, inside a mine—”

“Is not beyond an engineering solution, however extreme. The Guild of the Great Ships could accomplish it, given the need.”

“What if I told you that this lump of rock didn’t come from your universe, the one containing the Guild of the Great Ships? Could you manage that as well?”

She looked at him through eyes wakened from their numb sightseeing. “You say ‘your universe’ as though you are not part of it.”

“I’m not. My birthplace wouldn’t appear on your maps no matter how far you explored.”

She waved that away with some of her old fire. “The multiverse is no mystery to us. Cross-continuum jumps will be within our grasp, one day.”

“Engineering again, huh?”

“I stake my life on it every time I board the Great Ship.”

“You’re not on the Great Ship anymore, Master Bannerman.”

She found his attempts at repartee clumsy but distracting. The ponderous rotations of the captured world below no longer seemed so threatening. This was the Structure, exactly where she had wanted to be for so long. Each “stack,” as Kindred called the named locations they passed through, had a unique character. Some were close and utilitarian, while others were more like giant shopping malls. Occasionally, she detected evidence of earthworks, as would be expected of a mine. Diligently and thoroughly, she recorded every detail for her avatar back at the Great Ship.

“Shall we get moving again?” she asked.

“Of course. Adrigon’s next, then Malmelia—and then Estes, where they suck minerals out of the bottom of a planet-wide ocean . . . ”

The names meant nothing to her, his attempt to awe likewise.

Between transcendent shafts, they moved invisibly among the crowds. The strangest thing she had seen so far wasn’t the evidence of science far in advance of the Guild’s—for all that she bluffed regarding the architects’ ability to mimic it—but the people who inhabited the Structure. They had passed hundreds of all ages, living and working under artificial lights in halls large enough to hold thousands. They grew flowers. They raised children. If they cared at all about the universe beyond, it didn’t show.

“This is it.”

Kindred pressed his palm against the portal ahead of them and spread his fingers wide. The white plastic was inert against his skin. If anything was active on the far side, it neither vibrated nor radiated any heat.

All the times he could have died meant nothing, now. He had had only to count them down until he reached the loop’s end—which was, of course, its beginning. And then, once he blew the charges and the loop closed, he would be mortal like anyone else, but safely rid of Hakham and the Guild of the Great Ships, for now.

“What are you waiting for?”

He didn’t know.

The strange thing was that his return to the Structure hadn’t touched him as deeply as he had thought it would. The tunnels seemed cramped and crowded to him now; there were no distant horizons, no far vistas. Although every level was different, there was a homogeneity to it all that he could swear hadn’t been there before.

He couldn’t tell Bannerman. She would think that she was responsible, and he couldn’t have that.

“Nothing.”

He keyed in his access code. The doors slid open.

They stepped inside. The doors slid closed.

With a hint of movement, they were on their way.

“Well?” Her silence irked him. “This shaft is supposed to be destroyed, isn’t it?”

“You don’t understand the technology, Kindred. We might be going somewhere else, or nowhere at all.”

He nodded and settled back to wait. Words would not convince her. Only the cold, hard evidence of her senses.

Bannerman’s insides shifted as the carriage came to a halt. Not nerves, she told herself; surely just a side effect of the Structure’s arcane technologies.

The portal opened. Kindred waved her ahead of him. She stepped into a boxy antechamber with gray walls, floors, and ceiling. A functional space that smelled of abandonment. The air was still and quiet. Kindred’s footsteps as he came up behind her were the only sounds.

He radiated satisfaction. “Now what do you say?”

“This proves only that your demolition charges failed to do their job down here,” she said. “Assuming this is Hakham.”

“Of course it is. If we can get to the surface, you’d see your Great Ship in orbit above. Hell, you could try to talk to yourself, if you wanted to.”

“Is that possible?”

“No—unless you remember such a conversation taking place, in which case it’s not only possible; it’s compulsory.”

A yearning to try filled her, regardless of the apparent absurdity of the notion. To reconnect with her avatar, to see the Great Ship again, both were possibilities she had been preparing to abandon on the other side of the galaxy. She could do more than just say hello, too. She could stop Kindred from setting off the charges and prevent herself from going with Kindred on a crazy odyssey across the stars. She knew the location of Oza now, so there was no need to go through that charade anymore. She had everything the Guild needed right here in her head.

But she didn’t remember having such a conversation with herself before she left the Great Ship, and the charges had gone off. Those were facts. If Kindred were right and it was truly impossible to change history, what consequences might she inadvertently provoke by trying? The knowledge she had earned might disappear completely, leaving the Guild back where it started and her avatars doomed to an ignominious fate.

“Take me up,” she said. “I need proof, not suggestion.”

He shrugged and obeyed, apparently unconcerned that—if he was right—the area they were walking into was full of deadly explosives.

They took a rattling elevator cage up to the next level. He experienced a powerful sense of déjà vu as they went. It seemed a lifetime since he had followed this very path on his mission to blow Hakham topside to pieces. It seemed like yesterday.

He looked for evidence of the charges, and found them exactly as he remembered them, anchored to stress points and beams where they would cause the most damage. His plan had been to blow the upper layers first, then the shaft itself on a timer, once he had gotten away.

They stepped carefully through an unlit area, heading for the next elevator. This location rang a definite bell. Something had happened in this place the first time around—but what?

Bannerman grabbed his arm and hissed into his ear.

“There’s someone ahead.”

A figure moved at the far end of the passage, deep in the shadows.

Acting instinctively, Kindred took Bannerman by the shoulder and put himself in front of her.

Coherent light flashed once, twice.

The first shot missed them both. The second caught him low on the left shoulder, just above his heart.

He fell, remembering too late the two intruders he had surprised in Hakham’s lower levels. Enemy agents, he had assumed, since they had both been wearing Guild uniforms.

Remotely, as though through a thick glass window, he heard footsteps receding into the distance.

PARADOX

Master Bannerman stared after the fleeing figure, shocked into immobility. The man who had shot Kindred was moving quickly through shadows, but she recognized his profile, the planes of his all-too-human face. It was undoubtedly, impossibly, Kindred himself.

For an instant, she could not move. Everything he had told her was true. They had crossed from one side of the galaxy to the other and returned before they left. Her prisoner had looped back along his own time line, protected from her, from the Decretians, and from the crash-landing on Oza . . . but not from this.

Kindred gasped. The shot had made a ruin of his chest. Each breath caused him agony. It was amazing his heart was beating at all.

His right hand came up, reaching for her.

“Didn’t—” he tried to say, “—get to—”

Bannerman leaned over him, blurry but real.

He clung to the sight of her even as the rest of his world unraveled.

“—finish—”

“Quiet. You’re only hurting yourself more.”

Kindred shook all over. He was afraid for an instant that this was his body’s last gasp, that death was upon him, too soon by far.

She put a firm hand on his forehead and the pain went away. He was dying: that certainty remained, but all fear evaporated. In its place, a new understanding grew. He had crossed his own path again and closed the loop earlier than he had expected—and how fitting to signal the end of his indestructibility by mistakenly shooting himself! His journey was over.

Bannerman’s journey, on the other hand, still had some way left to run. In her own way, she was as trapped as he was. She just didn’t know it yet.

“Do it for me,” he said quickly, while he had the strength. “Two levels up. Wait until he’s inputted the codes, then—don’t kill him. Put him—the Guildsmen—need him afterward. Get back here—now, later.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The script,” he said. “The charges. Only you can do it.”

The reassurance of her warm palm disappeared, and he knew that at last he had gotten through to her. Causality was tangled in a knot. If he died before he could enact her past—their immediate future—then she would have to do it herself.

They hadn’t betrayed each other as they had originally intended to. Time and the Structure did it for them.

“You expect me to blow the charges?”

“Yes. Record me. I—I strike—” He broke into a fit of bloody coughing. When it subsided, he tried again. In the recording she had played him, he had sounded strained but hadn’t stumbled. “I strike this blow against the Guild of the Great Ships in the name of Terminus and all the free people of the Structure.” For Huw, he added silently to himself. And now for me, too. “Got it?”

She nodded, and he let his head fall back. He had no strength left. The pain had started to return. His lungs couldn’t seem to get enough air, no matter how he strained.

“And then what?” he thought she asked, leaning low over him with anxious eyes. “Kindred, and then what?”

Whatever you want, he wanted to say. You’re free now, or soon will be. Close the loop and decide for yourself. It’ll be easier now I’m out of the equation.

But all he could manage was one word.

Kindred stiffened and died, leaving Bannerman alone in the basements of Hakham.

“Why should I?” she had asked. “Kindred, why should I?”

The answer he had given her made no sense at all.

She crouched over him, spattered with his blood, too stunned by the sudden turn of events to think. He who had claimed invulnerability was now dead, and she was trapped in a paradox of her own making. Why had she thought to test his bizarre theory? Hadn’t she ever wondered what it would mean if it turned out to be true?

A cold fatality swept through her. She could either die trying to change history or do exactly as Kindred had said. What other choices did she have? Perhaps he had faced just such a dismal dilemma on realizing that he had to help the Guild in order to see his own mission through. She vowed not to die as he had, bleeding in the dirt, knowing that she, his enemy, possessed the only opportunity to finish the job for him, the last thing she wanted to do.

The other Kindred was still loose, heading off to blow the charges.

Think, she told herself. Find a way to stop him.

Everywhere she turned she foresaw terrible consequences, not just for herself but for the Guild of the Great Ships as well. The Grand Masters had no conception of what a concerted assault on the Structure might cost them. An indestructible resistance would be much worse than an agent or two armed with bombs. In such a battle, the full weight of the universe’s laws would be on the Structure’s side—just as they were arrayed against her now. Losing such a war would cause deeper instabilities than mere internal discontent.

She stood up and raised a hand to her temple, feeling light-headed. She saw now that she would blow the charges, exactly as Kindred had asked, but not out of sympathy with him and the terrorists of Terminus, or out of fear of the consequences of breaking the time-loop. She had all the free will she ever had. The choice was entirely hers, now she saw what it needed to be.

Being silent wasn’t enough to save the Guild from harm. Averting open conflict with the Structure had to become her first priority, which meant closing the only remaining exit in the Guild’s territory, on Hakham. If the Grand Masters still wanted to tackle the Structure, they would have to find the entrance at Oza and win a very different conflict with the Decretians first. That could take decades, perhaps centuries—in which time, new technologies might evolve to tackle the time-looping menace.

She would save the Guild by betraying it—and herself.

“The Structure makes you do that,” Kindred had once said. “It’s unavoidable.”

He had been talking about speaking gibberish, but the thought held in both contexts. She was in two places simultaneously, caught in a loop, as he had been, and she had no choice but to turn her back on everything she held dear. But a perverse hope remained that she might redeem herself. Kindred would have prepared an escape route; she was sure of that, for he had displayed none of the characteristics of a suicide bomber. Now that her indestructibility was assured, who knew what she could learn before fate brought her inevitably back? She could only take the opportunity given to her, and try, as Kindred had, to make everything right.

The corpse’s cold, blue eyes were still open, staring up at an invisible sky.

“Stars,” he had said, and she wondered if he had meant it as a warning or an entreaty.

Pausing only to close his eyelids, she headed up the tunnel in pursuit of Kindred’s earlier self—the young man who had given her far more than she had wanted, and taken an equal amount in return.

Originally published in New Space Opera 2, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan.

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

Walter Jon Williams

Walter Jon Williams is the author of thirty volumes of fiction, in addition to works in film, television, comics, and the gaming field. Williams has appeared on the bestseller lists of The Times and The New York Times. He is a world traveler, scuba diver, and a black belt in Kenpo Karate. He has twice been awarded the Nebula Award. His latest novel, Quillifer, is in stores now.

Mercurio D. Rivera

World Fantasy Award-nominated writer Mercurio D. Rivera’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in a wide range of markets, including acclaimed venues such as Asimov’ Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Interzone, Black Static, Nature, Abyss & Apex and anthologies such as Year’s Best SF 34, Year’s Best Science Fiction 17, Unplugged: The Web’s Best SF and Fantasy, Solaris Rising 2, Other Worlds than These, Paradox, and Crises and Conflicts. You can find him online at mercuriorivera.com.

Sean Williams

Sean Williams has written several original award-winning space opera series as well as six novels set in the Star Wars universe, many co-written with fellow-Adelaidean Shane Dix. These include the Astropolis, Evergence, Orphans, the Geodesica series, and the computer game tie-in The Force Unleashed—the first such adaptation ever to debut at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. A series for young readers, The Fixers, pitted an increasingly lost protagonist against zombies, cyborgs, and vampires across numerous parallel universes. Twinmaker (Jump in Australia) came out in 2013, the sequel Crashland (Crash) in 2014. Hollowgirl (Fall) concluded the series in 2015, to critical acclaim and a nomination for the Aurealis Award. He is currently working Have Sword, Will Travel, the first book in a new series with Garth Nix.

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.