Issue 35, December 2017

© Wyrm Publishing, 2017
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forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the December 2017 issue of Forever Magazine!

Last month, I spent almost two weeks attending various science fiction events and conferences in China. First in Chengdu and then Beijing. The trip was sponsored by Science Fiction World (Chengdu) and my partner in the Clarkesworld Chinese science fiction tranlation project, Storycom (Beijing).

Over at Clarkesworld, my editorial goes into some detail about some of the strengths I observed in the Chinese science fiction community. I was very impressed with the amount of energy and enthusiasm I saw for science fiction—in all forms—there and believe we’re going to see some tremendous growth there over the next few years. I wish them all the best and hope to return sometime soon. The trip was a bit overwhelming, with so many things to learn. With some of that hurdle out of the way and some idea of what to expect, I’ll be able to plan better next time. I’ve been back a little over a week and I still feel like I’m recovering.

And of course, a small mountain of things to do piled up while I was gone. Meanwhile, I’m in the final throws of editing The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Three and have some special projects in the works with my friends at Storycom. It’s good to be busy and at fortunately, I enjoy the work.

Happy holidays to all that will be celebrating this month!

Until next time . . .

-Neil

The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary

Ken Liu

Akemi Kirino, Chief Scientist, Feynman Laboratories:

[Dr. Kirino is in her early forties. She has the kind of beauty that doesn’t require much makeup. If you look closely, you can see bits of white in her otherwise black hair.]

Every night, when you stand outside and gaze upon the stars, you are bathing in time as well as light.

For example, when you look at this star in the constellation Libra called Gliese 581, you are really seeing it as it was just over two decades ago because it’s about twenty light-years from us. And conversely, if someone around Gliese 581 had a powerful enough telescope pointed to around here right now, they’d be able to see Evan and me walking around Harvard  Yard, back when we were graduate students.

[She points to Massachusetts on the globe on her desk, as the camera pans to zoom in on it. She pauses, thinking over her words. The camera pulls back, moving us farther and farther away from the globe, as though we are flying away from it.]

The best telescopes we have today can see as far back as about thirteen billion years ago. If you strap one of those to a rocket moving away from the Earth at a speed that’s faster than light—a detail that I’ll get to in a minute—and point the telescope back at the Earth, you’ll see the history of humanity unfold before you in reverse. The view of everything that has happened on Earth leaves here in an ever-expanding sphere of light. And you only have to control how far away you travel in space to determine how far back you’ll go in time.

[The camera keeps on pulling back, through the door of her office, down the hall, as the globe and Dr. Kirino become smaller and smaller in our view. The long hallway we are backing down is dark, and in that sea of darkness, the open door of the office becomes a rectangle of bright light framing the globe and the woman.]

Somewhere about here you’ll witness Prince Charles’s sad face as Hong Kong is finally returned to China. Somewhere about here you’ll see Japan’s surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Somewhere about here you’ll see Hideyoshi’s troops set foot on the soil of Korea for the first time. And somewhere about here you’ll see Lady Murasaki completing the first chapter of the Tale of Genji. If you keep on going, you can go back to the beginning of civilization and beyond.

But the past is consumed even as it is seen. The photons enter the lens, and from there they strike an imaging surface, be it your retina or a sheet of film or a digital sensor, and then they are gone, stopped dead in their paths. If you look but don’t pay attention and miss a moment, you cannot travel farther out to catch it again. That moment is erased from the universe, forever.

[From the shadows next to the door to the office an arm reaches out to slam the door shut. Darkness swallows Dr. Kirino, the globe, and the bright rectangle of light. The screen stays black for a few seconds before the opening credits roll.]

Remembrance Films HK Ltd.

in association with

Yurushi Studios

presents

a Heraclitus Twice Production

THE MAN WHO ENDED HISTORY

This film has been banned by the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China and is released under strong protest from the government of Japan

Akemi Kirino:

[We are back in the warm glow of her office.]

Because we have not yet solved the problem of how to travel faster than light, there is no real way for us to actually get a telescope out there to see the past. But we’ve found a way to cheat.

Theorists long suspected that at each moment, the world around us is literally exploding with newly created subatomic particles of a certain type, now known as Bohm-Kirino particles. My modest contribution to physics was to confirm their existence and to discover that these particles always come in pairs. One member of the pair shoots away from the Earth, riding the photon that gave it birth and traveling at the speed of light. The other remains behind, oscillating in the vicinity of its creation.

The pairs of Bohm-Kirino particles are under quantum entanglement. This means that they are bound together in such a way that no matter how far apart they are from each other physically, their properties are linked together as though they are but aspects of a single system. If you take a measurement on one member of the pair, thereby collapsing the wave function, you would immediately know the state of the other member of the pair, even if it is light-years away.

Since the energy levels of Bohm-Kirino particles decay at a known rate, by tuning the sensitivity of the detection field, we can attempt to capture and measure Bohm-Kirino particles of a precise age created in a specific place.

When a measurement is taken on the local Bohm-Kirino particle in an entangled pair, it is equivalent to taking a measurement on that particle’s entangled twin, which, along with its host photon, may be trillions of miles away, and thus, decades in the past. Through some complex but standard mathematics, the measurement allows us to calculate and infer the state of the host photon. But, like any measurement performed on entangled pairs, the measurement can be taken only once, and the information is then gone forever.

In other words, it is as though we have found a way to place a telescope as far away from the Earth, and as far back in time, as we like. If you want, you can look back on the day you were married, your first kiss, the moment you were born. But for each moment in the past, we get only one chance to look.

Archival Footage: September 18, 20XX. Courtesy of APAC Broadcasting Corporation

[The camera shows an idle factory on the outskirts of the city of Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China. It looks just like any other factory in the industrial heartland of China in the grip of another downturn in the country’s merciless boom-and-bust cycles: ramshackle, silent, dusty, the windows and doors shuttered and boarded up. Samantha Paine, the correspondent, wears a wool cap and scarf. Her cheeks are bright red with the cold, and her eyes are tired. As she speaks in her calm voice, the condensation from her breath curls and lingers before her face.]

Samantha:

On this day, back in 1931, the first shots in the Second Sino-Japanese War were fired near Shenyang, here in Manchuria. For the Chinese, that was the beginning of World War Two, more than a decade before the United States would be involved.

We are in Pingfang District, on the outskirts of Harbin. Although the name “Pingfang” means nothing to most people in the West, some have called Pingfang the Asian Auschwitz. Here, Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army performed gruesome experiments on thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners throughout the war as part of Japan’s effort to develop biological weapons and to conduct research into the limits of human endurance.

On these premises, Japanese army doctors directly killed thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners through medical and weapons experiments, vivisections, amputations, and other systematic methods of torture. At the end of the War, the retreating Japanese army killed all remaining prisoners and burned the complex to the ground, leaving behind only the shell of the administrative building and some pits used to breed disease-carrying rats. There were no survivors.

Historians estimate that between two hundred thousand and half a million Chinese persons, almost all civilians, were killed by the biological and chemical weapons researched and developed in this place and other satellite labs: anthrax, cholera, the bubonic plague. At the end of the War, General MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied forces, granted all members of Unit 731 immunity from war crimes prosecution in order to get the data from their experiments and to keep the data away from the Soviet Union.

Today, except for a small museum nearby with few visitors, little evidence of those atrocities is visible. Over there, at the edge of an empty field, a pile of rubble stands where the incinerator for destroying the bodies of the victims used to be. This factory behind me is built on the foundation of a storage depot used by Unit 731 for germ-breeding supplies. Until the recent economic downturn, which shuttered its doors, the factory built moped engines for a Sino-Japanese joint venture in Harbin. And in a gruesome echo of the past, several pharmaceutical companies have quietly settled in around the site of Unit 731’s former headquarters.

Perhaps the Chinese are content to leave behind this part of their past and move on. And if they do, the rest of the world will probably move on as well.

But not if Evan Wei has anything to say about it.

[Samantha speaks over a montage of images of Evan Wei lecturing in front of a classroom and posing before complex machinery with Dr. Kirino. In the photographs they look to be in their twenties.]

Dr. Evan Wei, a Chinese-American historian specializing in Classical Japan, is determined to make the world focus on the suffering of the victims of Unit 731. He and his wife, Dr. Akemi Kirino, a noted Japanese-American experimental physicist, have developed a controversial technique that they claim will allow people to travel back in time and experience history as it occurred. Today, he will publicly demonstrate his technique by traveling back to the year 1940, at the height of Unit 731’s activities, and personally bear witness to the atrocities of Unit 731.

The Japanese government claims that China is engaged in a propaganda stunt, and it has filed a strongly worded protest with Beijing for allowing this demonstration. Citing principles of international law, Japan argues that China does not have the right to sponsor an expedition into World War Two–era Harbin because Harbin was then under the control of Manchukuo, a puppet regime of the Japanese Empire. China has rejected the Japanese claim, and responded by declaring Dr. Wei’s demonstration an “excavation of national heritage” and now claims ownership rights over any visual or audio record of Dr. Wei’s proposed journey to the past under Chinese antiquities-export laws.

Dr. Wei has insisted that he and his wife are conducting this experiment in their capacities as individual American citizens, with no connection to any government. They have asked the American Consul General in nearby Shenyang, as well as representatives of the United Nations, to intervene and protect their effort from any governmental interference. It’s unclear how this legal mess will be resolved.

Meanwhile, numerous groups from China and overseas, some in support of Dr. Wei, some against, have gathered to hold protests. China has mobilized thousands of riot police to keep these demonstrators from approaching Pingfang.

Stay tuned, and we will bring you up-to-date reports on this historic occasion. This is Samantha Paine, for APAC.

Akemi Kirino:

To truly travel back in time, we still had to jump over one more hurdle.

The Bohm-Kirino particles allow us to reconstruct, in detail, all types of information about the moment of their creation: sight, sound, microwaves, ultrasound, the smell of antiseptic and blood, and the sting of cordite and gunpowder in the back of the nose.

But this is a staggering amount of information, even for a single second. We had no realistic way to store it, let alone process it in real time. The amount of data gathered for a few minutes would have overwhelmed all the storage servers at Harvard. We could open up a door to the past, but would see nothing in the tsunami of bits that flooded forth.

[Behind Dr. Kirino is a machine that looks like a large clinical MRI scanner. She steps to the side so that the camera can zoom slowly inside the tube of the scanner where the volunteer’s body would go during the process. As the camera moves through the tube, continuing toward the light at the end of the tunnel, her voice continues off camera.]

Perhaps given enough time, we could have come up with a solution that would have allowed the data to be recorded. But Evan believed that we could not afford to wait. The surviving relatives of the victims were aging, dying, and the War was about to fade out of living memory. There was a duty, he felt, to offer the surviving relatives whatever answers we could get.

So I came up with the idea of using the human brain to process the information gathered by the Bohm-Kirino detectors. The brain’s massively parallel processing capabilities, the bedrock of consciousness, proved quite effective at filtering and making sense of the torrent of data from the detectors. The brain could be given the raw electrical signals, throw 99.999 percent of it away, and turn the rest into sight, sound, smell, and make sense of it all and record them as memories.

This really shouldn’t surprise us. After all, this is what our brains do, every second of our lives. The raw signals from our eyes, ears, skin, and tongue would overwhelm any supercomputer, but from second to second, our brain manages to construct the consciousness of our existence from all that noise.

“For our volunteer subjects, the process creates the illusion of experiencing the past, as though they were in that place, at that time,” I wrote in Nature.

How I regret using the word “illusion” now. So much weight ended up being placed on my poor word choice. History is like that: The truly important decisions never seemed important at the time.

Yes, the brain takes the signals and makes a story out of them, but there’s nothing illusory about it, whether in the past or now.

Archibald Ezary, Radhabinod Pal Professor of Law, Codirector of East Asian Studies, Harvard Law School:

[Ezary has a placid face that is belied by the intensity of his gaze. He enjoys giving lectures, not because he likes hearing himself talk, but because he thinks he will learn something new each time he tries to explain.]

The legal debate between China and Japan about Wei’s work, almost twenty years ago, was not really new. Who should have control over the past is a question that has troubled all of us, in various forms, for many years. But the invention of the Kirino Process made this struggle to control the past a literal, rather than merely a metaphorical, issue.

A state has a temporal dimension as well as a spatial one. It grows and shrinks over time, subjugating new peoples and sometimes freeing their descendants. Japan today may be thought of as just the home islands, but back in 1942, at its height, the Japanese Empire ruled Korea, most of China, Taiwan, Sakhalin, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Malaysia, and large parts of Indonesia, as well as large swaths of the islands in the Pacific. The legacy of that time shapes Asia to this day.

One of the most vexing problems created by the violent and unstable process by which states expand and contract over time is this: As control over a territory shifts between sovereigns over time, which sovereign should have jurisdiction over that territory’s past?

Before Evan Wei’s demonstration, the most that the issue of jurisdiction over the past intruded on real life was an argument over whether Spain or America would have the right to the sovereign’s share of treasure from sunken sixteenth-century Spanish galleons recovered in contemporary American waters, or whether Greece or England should keep the Elgin Marbles. But now the stakes are much higher.

So, is Harbin during the years between 1931 and 1945 Japanese territory, as the Japanese government contends? Or is it Chinese, as the People’s Republic argues? Or perhaps we should treat the past as something held in trust for all of humanity by the United Nations?

The Chinese view would have had the support of most of the Western world—the Japanese position is akin to Germany arguing that attempts to travel to Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1939 and 1945 should be subject to its approval—but for the fact that it is the People’s Republic of China, a Western pariah, which is now making the claim. And so you see how the present and the past will strangle each other to death.

Moreover, behind both the Japanese and the Chinese positions is the unquestioned assumption that if we can resolve whether China or Japan has sovereignty over World War Two–era Harbin, then either the People’s Republic or the present Japanese government would be the right authority to exercise that sovereignty. But this is far from clear. Both sides have problems making the legal case.

First, Japan has always argued, when it comes to Chinese claims for compensation for wartime atrocities, that the present Japan, founded on the Constitution drafted by America, cannot be the responsible party. Japan believes that those claims are against its predecessor government, the Empire of Japan, and all such claims have been resolved by the Treaty of San Francisco and other bilateral treaties. But if that is so, for Japan now to assert sovereignty over that era in Manchuria, when it has previously disavowed all responsibility for it, is more than a little inconsistent.

But the People’s Republic is not home free either. At the time Japanese forces took control of Manchuria in 1932, it was only nominally under the control of the Republic of China, the entity that we think of as the “official” China during the Second World War, and the People’s Republic of China did not even exist. It is true that during the War, armed resistance in Manchuria to the Japanese occupation came almost entirely from the Han Chinese, Manchu, and Korean guerrillas led by Chinese and Korean Communists. But these guerrillas were not under the real direction of the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong and so had little to do with the eventual founding of the People’s Republic.

So why should we think that either the present government of Japan or China has any claim to Harbin during that era? Wouldn’t the Republic of China, which now resides in Taipei and calls itself Taiwan, have a more legitimate claim? Or perhaps we should conjure up a “Provisional Historical Manchurian Authority” to assume jurisdiction over it?

Our doctrines concerning the succession of states, developed under the Westphalian framework, simply cannot deal with these questions raised by Dr. Wei’s experiments.

If these debates have a clinical and evasive air to them, that is intentional. “Sovereignty,” “jurisdiction,” and similar words have always been mere conveniences to allow people to evade responsibility or to sever inconvenient bonds. “Independence” is declared, and suddenly the past is forgotten; a “revolution” occurs, and suddenly memories and blood debts are wiped clean; a treaty is signed, and suddenly the past is buried and gone. Real life does not work like that.

However you want to parse the robber’s logic that we dignify under the name “international law,” the fact remains that the people who call themselves Japanese today are connected to those who called themselves Japanese in Manchuria in 1937, and the people who call themselves Chinese today are connected to those who called themselves Chinese there and then. These are the messy realities, and we make do with what we are given.

All along, we have made international law work only by assuming that the past would remain silent. But Dr. Wei has given the past a voice and made dead memories come alive. What role, if any, we wish to give the voices of the past in the present is up to us.

Akemi Kirino:

Evan always called me Tóngyě Míngměi, or just Míngměi, which are the Mandarin readings for the kanji that are used to write my name. Although this is the customary way to pronounce Japanese names in Chinese, he’s the only Chinese I’ve ever permitted that liberty.

Saying my name like that, he told me, allowed him to picture it in those old characters that are the common heritage of China and Japan, and thus keep in mind their meaning. The way he saw it, “the sound of a name doesn’t tell you anything about the person, only the characters do.”

My name was the first thing he loved about me.

“A paulownia tree alone in the field, bright and beautiful,” he said to me, the first time we met at a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences mixer.

That was also how my grandfather explained my name to me, years earlier, when he taught me how to write the characters in my name as a little girl. A paulownia is a pretty, deciduous tree, and in old Japan it was the custom to plant one when a baby girl was born and make a dresser out of the wood for her trousseau when she got married. I remember the first time my grandfather showed me the paulownia that he had planted for me the day I was born, and I told him that I didn’t think it looked very special.

“But a paulownia is the only tree on which a phoenix would land and rest,” my grandfather then said, stroking my hair in that slow, gentle way that he had that I loved. I nodded, and I was glad that I had such a special tree for my name.

Until Evan spoke to me, I hadn’t thought about that day with my grandfather in years.

“Have you found your phoenix yet?” Evan asked, and then he asked me out.

Evan wasn’t shy, not like most Chinese men I knew. I felt at ease listening to him. And he seemed genuinely happy about his life, which was rare among the grad students and made it fun to be around him.

In a way it was natural that we would be drawn to each other. We had both come to America as young children and knew something about the meaning of growing up as outsiders trying hard to become Americans. It made it easy for us to appreciate each other’s foibles, the little corners of our personalities that remained defiantly fresh-off-the-boat.

He wasn’t intimidated by the fact that I had a much better sense about numbers, statistics, the “hard” qualities in life. Some of my old boyfriends used to tell me that my focus on the quantifiable and the logic of mathematics made me seem cold and unfeminine. It didn’t help that I knew my way around power tools better than most of them—a necessary skill for a lab physicist. Evan was the only man I knew who was perfectly happy to defer to me when I told him that I could do something requiring mechanical skills better than he could.

Memories of our courtship have grown hazy with time and are now coated with the smooth, golden glow of sentiment—but they are all that I have left. If ever I am allowed to run my machine again, I would like to go back to those times.

I liked driving with him to bed-and-breakfasts up in New Hampshire in the fall to pick apples. I liked making simple dishes from a book of recipes and seeing that silly grin on his face. I liked waking up next to him in the mornings and feeling happy that I was a woman. I liked that he could argue passionately with me and hold his ground when he was right and back down gracefully when he was wrong. I liked that he always took my side whenever I was in an argument with others and backed me up to the hilt, even when he thought I was wrong.

But the best part was when he talked to me about the history of Japan.

Actually, he gave me an interest in Japan that I never had. Growing up, whenever people found out that I was Japanese, they assumed that I would be interested in anime, love karaoke, and giggle into my cupped hands, and the boys, in particular, thought I would act out their Oriental sex fantasies. It was tiring. As a teenager, I rebelled by refusing to do anything that seemed “Japanese,” including speaking Japanese at home. Just imagine how my poor parents felt.

Evan told the history of Japan to me not as a recitation of dates or myths, but as an illustration of scientific principles embedded in humanity. He showed me that the history of Japan is not a story about emperors and generals, poets and monks. Rather, the history of Japan is a model demonstrating the way all human societies grow and adapt to the natural world as the environment, in turn, adapts to their presence.

As hunter-gatherers, the ancient Jōmon Japanese were the top predators in their environment; as self-sufficient agriculturalists, the Japanese of the Nara and Heian periods began to shape and cultivate the ecology of Japan into a human-centric symbiotic biota, a process that wasn’t completed until the intensive agriculture and population growth that came with feudal Japan; finally, as industrialists and entrepreneurs, the people of Imperial Japan began to exploit not merely the living biota, but also the dead biota of the past: the drive for reliable sources of fossil fuels would dominate the history of modern Japan, as it has the rest of the modern world. We are all now exploiters of the dead.

Clearing away the superficial structure of the reigns of emperors and the dates of battles, there was the deeper rhythm of history’s ebb and flow not as the deeds of great men, but as lives lived by ordinary men and women wading through the currents of the natural world around them: its geology, its seasons, its climate and ecology, the abundance and scarcity of the raw material for life. It was the kind of history that a physicist could love.

Japan was at once universal and unique. Evan made me aware of the connection between me and the people who have called themselves Japanese for millennia.

Yet, history was not merely deep patterns and the long now. There was also a time and a place where individuals could leave an extraordinary impact. Evan’s specialty was the Heian Period, he told me, because that was when Japan first became Japan. A courtly elite of at most a few thousand people transformed continental influences into a uniquely native, Japanese aesthetic ideal that would reverberate throughout the centuries and define what it meant to be Japanese until the present day. Unique among the world’s ancient cultures, the high culture of Heian Japan was made as much by women as by men. It was a golden age as lovely as it was implausible, unrepeatable. That was the kind of surprise that made Evan love history.

Inspired, I took a Japanese history class and asked my father to teach me calligraphy. I took a new interest in advanced Japanese language classes, and I learned to write tanka, the clean, minimalist Japanese poems that follow strict, mathematical metrical requirements. When I was finally satisfied with my first attempt, I was so happy, and I’m certain that I did, for a moment, feel what Murasaki Shikibu felt when she completed her first tanka. More than a millennium in time and more than ten thousand miles in space separated us, but there, in that moment, we would surely have understood each other.

Evan made me proud to be Japanese, and so he made me love myself. That was how I knew I was really in love with him.

Li Jianjian, Manager, Tianjin Sony Store:

The War has been over for a long time, and at some point you have to move on. What is the point of digging up memories like this now? Japanese investment in China has been very important for jobs, and all the young people in China like Japanese culture. I don’t like it that Japan does not want to apologize, but what can we do? If we dwell on it, then only we will be angry and sad.

Song Yuanwu, waitress:

I read about it in the newspapers. That Dr. Wei is not Chinese; he’s an American. The Chinese all know about Unit 731, so it’s not news to us.

I don’t want to think about it much. Some stupid young people shout about how we should boycott Japanese goods, but then they can’t wait to buy the next issue of manga. Why should I listen to them? This just upsets people without accomplishing anything.

Name withheld, executive:

Truth be told, the people who were killed there in Harbin were mostly peasants, and they died like weeds during that time all over China. Bad things happen in wars, that’s all.

What I’m going to say will make everyone hate me, but many people also died during the Three Years of Natural Disasters under the Chairman and then during the Cultural Revolution. The War is sad, but it is just one sadness among many for the Chinese. The bulk of China’s sorrow lies unmourned. That Dr. Wei is a stupid troublemaker. You can’t eat, drink, or wear memories.

Nie Liang and Fang Rui, college students:

Nie: I’m glad that Wei did his work. Japan has never faced up to its history. Every Chinese knows that these things happened, but Westerners don’t, and they don’t care. Maybe now that they know the truth they’ll put pressure on Japan to apologize.

Fang: Be careful, Nie. When Westerners see this, they are going to call you a fenqing and a brainwashed nationalist. They like Japan in the West. China, not so much. The Westerners don’t want to understand China. Maybe they just can’t. We have nothing to say to these journalists. They won’t believe us, anyway.

Sun Maying, office worker:

I don’t know who Wei is, and I don’t care.

Akemi Kirino:

Evan and I wanted to go see a movie that night. The romantic comedy we wanted was sold out, and so we chose the movie with the next earliest start time. It was called Philosophy of a Knife. Neither of us had heard of it. We just wanted to spend some time together.

Our lives are ruled by these small, seemingly ordinary moments that turn out to have improbably large effects. Such randomness is much more common in human affairs than in nature, and there was no way that I, as a physicist, could have foreseen what happened next.

Scenes from Andrey Iskanov’s Philosophy of a Knife are shown as Dr. Kirino speaks.

The movie was a graphical portrayal of the activities of Unit 731, with many of the experiments reenacted. “God created heaven, men created hell” was the tagline.

Neither of us could get up at the end of it. “I didn’t know,” Evan murmured to me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

He was not apologizing for taking me to the movie. Instead, he was consumed by guilt because he had not known about the horrors committed by Unit 731. He had never encountered it in his classes or in his research. Because his grandparents had taken refuge in Shanghai during the War, no one in his family was directly affected.

But due to their employment with the puppet government in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, his grandparents were later labeled collaborationists after the War, and their harsh treatment at the hands of the government of the People’s Republic eventually caused his family to flee for the United States. And so the War shaped Evan’s life, as it has shaped the lives of all Chinese, even if he was not aware of all its ramifications.

For Evan, ignorance of history, a history that determined who he was in many ways, was a sin in itself.

“It’s just a film,” our friends told him. “Fiction.”

But in that moment, history as he understood it ended for Evan. The distance he had once maintained, the abstractions of history at a grand scale, which had so delighted him before, lost meaning to him in the bloody scenes on the screen.

He began to dig into the truth behind the film, and it soon consumed all his waking moments. He became obsessed with the activities of Unit 731. It became his waking life and his nightmare. For him, his ignorance of those horrors was simultaneously a rebuke and a call to arms. He could not let the victims’ suffering be forgotten. He would not allow their torturers to get away.

That was when I explained to him the possibilities presented by Bohm-Kirino particles.

Evan believed that time travel would make people care.

When Darfur was merely a name on a distant continent, it was possible to ignore the deaths and atrocities. But what if your neighbors came to you and told you of what they had seen in their travels to Darfur? What if the victims’ relatives showed up at the door to recount their memories in that land? Could you still ignore it?

Evan believed that something similar would happen with time travel. If people could see and hear the past, then it would no longer be possible to remain apathetic.

Excerpts from the televised hearing before the Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 11Xth Congress, courtesy of C-SPAN

Testimony of Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth, witness:

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify here today. I would also like to thank Dr. Wei and Dr. Kirino, whose work has made my presence here today possible.

I was born on January 5, 1962, in Hong Kong. My father, Jaiyi “Jimmy” Chang, had come to Hong Kong from mainland China after World War Two. There, he became a successful merchant of men’s shirts and married my mother. Each year we celebrated my birthday one day early. When I asked my mother why we did this, she said that it had something to do with the War.

As a little girl, I didn’t know much about my father’s life before I was born. I knew that he had grown up in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, that his whole family was killed by the Japanese, and that he was rescued by Communist guerrillas. But he did not tell me any details.

Only once did Father talk to me directly about his life during the War. It was the summer before I went to college, in 1980. A traditionalist, he held a jíjīlĭ ceremony for me where I would pick my biăozì, or courtesy name. That is the name young Chinese people traditionally chose for themselves when they came of age and by which they would be known by their peers. It wasn’t something that most Chinese, even the Hong Kong Chinese, did anymore.

We prayed together, bowing before the shrine to our ancestors, and I lit my joss sticks and placed them in the bronze incense brazier in the courtyard. For the first time in my life, instead of me pouring tea for him, my father poured tea for me. We lifted our cups and drank tea together, and my father told me how proud he was of me.

I put down the teacup and asked him which of my older female relatives he most admired so that I might choose a name that would honor her memory. That was when he showed me the only photograph he had of his family. I have brought it here today and would like to enter it into the record.

This picture was taken in 1940 on the occasion of my father’s tenth birthday. The family lived in Sanjiajiao, a village about twenty kilometers from Harbin, where they went to take this portrait in a studio. In this picture you can see my grandparents sitting together in the center. My father is standing next to my grandfather, and here, next to my grandmother, is my aunt, Changyi. Her name means “smooth happiness.” Until my father showed me this picture, I did not know that I had an aunt.

My aunt was not a pretty girl. You can see that she was born with a large, dark birthmark shaped like a bat on her face that disfigured her. Like most girls in her village, she never went to school and was illiterate. But she was very gentle and kind and clever, and she did all of the cooking and cleaning in the house starting at the age of eight. My grandparents worked in the fields all day, and as the big sister, Changyi was like a mother to my father. She bathed him, fed him, changed his swaddling clothes, played with him, and protected him from the other kids in the village. At the time this picture was taken, she was sixteen.

What happened to her? I asked my father.

She was taken, he said. The Japanese came to our village on January 5, 1941, because they wanted to make an example of it so that other villages would not dare to support the guerrillas. I was eleven at the time and Changyi was seventeen. My parents told me to hide in the hole under the granary. After the soldiers bayoneted our parents, I saw them drag Changyi to a truck and drive her away.

Where was she taken?

They said they were taking her to a place called Pingfang, south of Harbin.

What kind of place was it?

Nobody knew. At the time the Japanese said the place was a lumber mill. But trains passing by there had to pull down their curtains, and the Japanese evicted all the villages nearby and patrolled the area heavily. The guerrillas who saved me thought it was probably a weapons depot or a headquarters building for important Japanese generals. I think maybe she was taken there to serve as a sex slave for the Japanese soldiers. I do not know if she survived.

And so I picked my biăozì to be Changyi to honor my aunt, who was like a mother to my father. My name sounds like hers but it is written with different characters, and instead of “smooth happiness,” it means “long remembrance.” We prayed that she had survived the War and was still alive in Manchuria.

The next year, in 1981, the Japanese author Morimura Seiichi published The Devil’s Gluttony, which was the first Japanese publication ever to talk about the history of Unit 731. I read the Chinese translation of the book, and the name Pingfang suddenly took on a different meaning. For years, I had nightmares about what happened to my aunt.

My father died in 2002. Before his death, he asked that if I ever found out for sure what happened to my aunt, I should let him know when I made my annual visit to his grave. I promised him that I would.

This is why, a decade later, I volunteered to undertake the journey when Dr. Wei offered this opportunity. I wanted to know what happened to my aunt. I hoped against hope that she had survived and escaped, even though I knew there were no Unit 731 survivors.

Chung-Nian Shih, Director, Department of Archaeology, National Independent University of Taiwan:

I was one of the first to question Evan’s decision to prioritize sending volunteers who are relatives of the victims of Unit 731 rather than professional historians or journalists. I understand that he wanted to bring peace to the victims’ families, but it also meant large segments of history were consumed in private grief and are now lost forever to the world. His technique, as you know, is destructive. Once he has sent an observer to a particular place at a particular time, the Bohm-Kirino particles are gone, and no one can ever go back there again.

There are moral arguments for and against his choice: is the suffering of the victims above all a private pain? Or should it primarily be seen as a part of our shared history?

It’s one of the central paradoxes of archaeology that in order to excavate a site so as to study it, we must consume it and destroy it in that process. Within the profession we are always debating over whether it’s better to excavate a site now or to preserve it in situ until less destructive techniques could be developed. But without such destructive excavations, how can new techniques be developed?

Perhaps Evan should also have waited until they developed a way to record the past without erasing it in the process. But by then it may have been too late for the families of the victims, who would benefit from those memories the most. Evan was forever struggling with the competing claims between the past and the present.

Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:

I took my first trip five years ago, just as Dr. Wei first began to send people back.

I went to January 6, 1941, the day after my aunt was captured.

I arrived on a field surrounded by a complex of brick buildings. It was very cold. I don’t know exactly how cold, but Harbin in January usually stayed far below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Dr. Wei had taught me how to move with my mind only, but it was still shocking to suddenly find yourself in a place with no physical presence while feeling everything, a ghost. I was still getting used to moving around when I heard a loud whack, whack sound behind me.

I turned around and saw a line of Chinese prisoners standing in the field. They were chained together by their legs and wore just a thin layer of rags. But what struck me was that their arms were left bare, and they held them out in the freezing wind.

A Japanese officer walked in front of them, striking their frozen arms with a short stick. Whack, whack.

Interview with Shiro Yamagata, former member of Unit 731, courtesy of Nippon Broadcasting Co.

[Yamagata and his wife sit on chairs behind a long folding table. He is in his nineties. His hands are folded in front of him on the table, as are his wife’s. He keeps his face placid and does not engage in any histrionics. His voice is frail but clear underneath that of the translator’s.]

We marched the prisoners outside with bare arms so that the arms would freeze solid quicker in the Manchurian air. It was very cold, and I did not like the times when it was my duty to march them out.

We sprayed the prisoners with water to create frostbite quicker. To make sure that the arms have been frozen solid, we would hit them with a short stick. If we heard a crisp whack, it meant that the arms were frozen all the way through and ready for the experiments. It sounded like whacking against a piece of wood.

I thought that was why we called the prisoners maruta, wood logs. Hey, how many logs did you saw today? We’d joke with each other. Not many, just three small logs.

We performed those experiments to study the effects of frostbite and extreme temperatures on the human body. They were valuable. We learned that the best way to treat frostbite is to immerse the limb in warm water, not rubbing it. It probably saved many Japanese soldiers’ lives. We also observed the effects of gangrene and disease as the frozen limbs died on the prisoners.

I heard that there were experiments where we increased the pressure in an airtight room until the person inside exploded, but I did not personally witness them.

I was one of a group of medical assistants who arrived in January 1941. In order to practice our surgery techniques, we performed amputations and other surgery on the prisoners. We used both healthy prisoners and prisoners from the frostbite experiments. When all the limbs had been amputated, the survivors were used to test biological weapons.

Once, two of my friends amputated a man’s arms and reattached them to opposite sides of his body. I watched but did not participate. I did not think it was a useful experiment.

Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:

I followed the line of prisoners into the compound. I walked around to see if I could find my aunt.

I was very lucky, and after only about half an hour, I found where the women prisoners were kept. But when I looked through all the cells, I did not see a woman that looked like my aunt. I then continued walking around aimlessly, looking into all the rooms. I saw many specimen jars with preserved body parts. I remember that in one of the rooms I saw a very tall jar in which one half of a person’s body, cleaved vertically in half, was floating.

Eventually, I came to an operating room filled with young Japanese doctors. I heard a woman scream, and I went in. One doctor was raping a Chinese woman on the operating table. There were several other Chinese women in the room, all of them naked and they were holding the woman on the table down so that the Japanese doctor could focus on the rape.

The other doctors looked on and spoke in a friendly manner with each other. One of them said something, and everybody laughed, including the doctor who was raping the woman on the table. I looked at the women who were holding her down and saw that one of them had a bat-shaped birthmark that covered half of her face. She was talking to the woman on the table, trying to comfort her.

What truly shocked me wasn’t the fact that she was naked, or what was happening. It was the fact that she looked so young. Seventeen, she was a year younger than I was when I left for college. Except for the birthmark, she looked just like me from back then, and just like my daughter.

[She stops]

Representative Kotler: Ms. Chang, would you like to take a break? I’m sure the Subcommittee would understand—

Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth: No, thank you. I’m sorry. Please let me continue.

After the first doctor was done, the woman on the table was brought away. The group of doctors laughed and joked amongst themselves. In a few minutes two soldiers returned with a naked Chinese man walking between them. The first doctor pointed to my aunt, and the other women pushed her onto the table without speaking. She did not resist.

The doctor then pointed to the Chinese man and gestured toward my aunt. The man did not at first understand what was wanted of him. The doctor said something, and the two soldiers prodded the man with their bayonets, making him jump. My aunt looked up at him.

They want you to fuck me, she said.

Shiro  Yamagata:

Sometimes we took turns raping the women and girls. Many of us had not ever been with a woman or seen a live woman’s organs. It was a kind of sex education.

One of the problems the army faced was venereal disease. The military doctors examined the comfort women weekly and gave them shots, but the soldiers would rape the Russian and Chinese women and got infected all the time. We needed to understand better the development of syphilis, in particular, and to devise treatments.

In order to do so, we would inject some prisoners with syphilis and make the prisoners have sex with each other so that they could be infected the regular way. Of course we would not then touch these infected women. We could then study the effects of the disease on body organs. It was all research that had not been done before.

Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:

The second time I went back was a year later, and this time I went back to June 8, 1941, about five months after my aunt’s capture. I thought that if I picked a date much later my aunt might have already been killed. Dr. Wei was facing a lot of opposition, and he was concerned that taking too many trips to the era would destroy too much of the evidence. He explained that it would have to be my last trip.

I found my aunt in a cell by herself. She was very thin, and I saw that her palms were covered with a rash, and there were bumps around her neck from inflamed lymph nodes. I could also tell that she was pregnant. She must have been very sick because she was lying on the floor, her eyes open and making a light moan—“aiya, aiya”—the whole time I was with her.

I stayed with her all day, watching her. I kept on trying to comfort her, but of course she couldn’t hear me or feel my touch. The words were for my benefit, not hers. I sang a song for her, a song that my father used to sing to me when I was little:

The Great Wall is ten thousand li long, on the other side is my hometown

Rich sorghum, sweet soybeans, happiness spreads like gold on the ground.

I was getting to know her and saying good-bye to her at the same time.

Shiro Yamagata:

To study the progress of syphilis and other venereal diseases, we would vivisect the women at various intervals after they were infected. It was important to understand the effects of the disease on living organs, and vivisection also provided valuable surgical practice. The vivisection was sometimes done with chloroform, sometimes not. We usually vivisected the subjects for the anthrax and cholera experiments without use of anesthesia since anesthesia might have affected the results, and it was felt that the same would be true with the women with syphilis.

I do not remember how many women I vivisected.

Some of the women were very brave, and would lie down on the table without being forced. I learned to say, “bútòng, bútòng” or “it won’t hurt” in Chinese to calm them down. We would then tie them to the table.

Usually the first incision, from thorax to stomach, would cause the women to scream horribly. Some of them would keep on screaming for a long while during the vivisection. We used gags later because the screaming interfered with discussion during the vivisections. Generally the women stayed alive until we cut open the heart, and so we saved that for last.

I remember once vivisecting a woman who was pregnant. We did not use chloroform initially, but then she begged us, “Please kill me, but do not kill my child.” We then used chloroform to put her under before finishing her.

None of us had seen a pregnant woman’s insides before, and it was very informative. I thought about keeping the fetus for some experiment, but it was too weak and died soon after being removed. We tried to guess whether the fetus was from the seed of a Japanese doctor or one of the Chinese prisoners, and I think most of us agreed in the end that it was probably one of the prisoners due to the ugliness of the fetus.

I believed that the work we did on the women was very valuable and gained us many insights.

I did not think that the work we did at Unit 731 was particularly strange. After 1941, I was assigned to northern China, first in Hebei Province and then in Shanxi Province. In army hospitals, we military doctors regularly scheduled surgery practice sessions with live Chinese subjects. The army would provide the subjects on the announced days. We practiced amputations, cutting out sections of intestines and suturing together the remaining sections, and removing various internal organs.

Often the practice surgeries were done without anesthesia to simulate battlefield conditions. Sometimes a doctor would shoot a prisoner in the stomach to simulate war wounds for us to practice on. After the surgeries, one of the officers would behead the Chinese subject or strangle him. Sometimes vivisections were also used as anatomy lessons for the younger trainees and to give them a thrill. It was important for the army to produce good surgeons quickly, so that we could help the soldiers.

“John,” last name withheld, high school teacher, Perth, Australia:

You know old people are very lonely, so when they want attention, they’ll say anything. They would confess to these ridiculous made-up stories about what they did. It’s really sad. I’m sure I can find some old Australian soldier who’ll confess to cutting up some abo woman if you put out an ad asking about it. The people who tell these stories just want attention, like those Korean prostitutes who claim to have been kidnapped by the Japanese Army during the War.

Patty Ashby, homemaker, Milwaukee, Wisconsin:

I think it’s hard to judge someone if you weren’t there. It was during the War, and bad things happen during wars. The Christian thing to do is to forget and forgive. Dragging up things like this is uncharitable. And it’s wrong to mess with time like that. Nothing good can come of it.

Sharon, actress, New  York, New  York:

You know, the thing is that the Chinese have been very cruel to dogs, and they even eat dogs. They have also been very mean to the Tibetans. So it makes you think, was it karma?

Shiro Yamagata:

On August 15, 1945, we heard that the Emperor had surrendered to America. Like many other Japanese in China at that time, my unit decided that it was easier to surrender to the Chinese Nationalists. My unit was then reformed and drafted into a unit of the Nationalist Army under Chiang Kai-Shek, and I continued to work as an army doctor assisting the Nationalists against the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. As the Chinese had almost no qualified surgeons, my work was very much needed, and I was treated well.

The Nationalists were no match for the Communists, however, and in January, 1949, the Communists captured the army field hospital I was staffed in and took me prisoner. For the first month, we were not allowed to leave our cells. I tried to make friends with the guards. The Communists soldiers were very young and thin, but they seemed to be in much better spirits than their Nationalist counterparts.

After a month, we, along with the guards, were given daily lessons on Marxism and Maoism.

The War was not my fault and I was not to be blamed, I was told. I was just a soldier, deceived by the Shōwa Emperor and Hideki Tōjō into fighting a war of invasion and oppression against the Chinese. Through studying Marxism, I was told, I would come to understand that all poor men, the Chinese and Japanese alike, were brothers. We were expected to reflect on what we did to the Chinese people and to write confessions about the crimes we committed during the War. Our punishment would be lessened, we were told, if our confessions showed sincere hearts. I wrote confessions, but they were always rejected for not being sincere enough.

Still, because I was a doctor, I was allowed to work at the provincial hospital to treat patients. I was the most senior surgeon at the hospital and had my own staff.

We heard rumors that a new war was about to start between the United States and China in Korea. How could China win against the United States? I thought. Even the mighty Japanese Army could not stand against America. Perhaps I will be captured by the Americans next. I suppose I was never very good at predicting the outcomes of wars.

Food became scarce after the Korean War began. The guards ate rice with scallions and wild weeds, while prisoners like me were given rice and fish.

Why is this? I asked.

You are prisoners, my guard, who was only sixteen, said. You are from Japan. Japan is a wealthy country, and you must be treated in a manner that matched as closely as possible the conditions in your home country.

I offered the guard my fish, and he refused.

You do not want to touch the food that had been touched by a Japanese Devil? I joked with him. I was also teaching him how to read, and he would sneak me cigarettes.

I was a very good surgeon, and I was proud of my work. Sometimes I felt that despite the War, I was doing China a great deal of good, and I helped many patients with my skills.

One day, a woman came to see me in the hospital. She had broken her leg, and because she lived far from the hospital, by the time her family brought her to me, gangrene had set in, and the leg had to be amputated.

She was on the table, and I was getting ready to administer anesthesia. I looked into her eyes, trying to calm her. “Bútòng, bútòng.”

Her eyes became very wide, and she screamed. She screamed and screamed, and scrambled off the table, dragging her dead leg with her until she was as far away from me as possible.

I recognized her then. She had been one of the Chinese girl prisoners that we had trained to help us as nurses at the army hospital during the War with China. She had helped me with some of the practice surgery sessions. I had slept with her a few times. I didn’t know her name. She was just “#4” to me, and some of the younger doctors had joked about cutting her open if Japan lost and we had to retreat.

[Interviewer (off-camera): Mr. Yamagata, you cannot cry. You know that. We cannot show you being emotional on film. We have to stop if you cannot control yourself.]

I was filled with unspeakable grief. It was only then that I understood what kind of a life and career I had. Because I wanted to be a successful doctor, I did things that no human being should do. I wrote my confession then, and when my guard read my confession, he would not speak to me.

I served my sentence and was released and allowed to return to Japan in 1956.

I felt lost. Everyone was working so hard in Japan. But I didn’t know what to do.

“You should not have confessed to anything,” one of my friends, who was in the same unit with me, told me. “I didn’t, and they released me years ago. I have a good job now. My son is going to be a doctor. Don’t say anything about what happened during the War.”

I moved here to Hokkaido to be a farmer, as far away from the heart of Japan as possible. For all these years I stayed silent to protect my friend. And I believed that I would die before him and so take my secret to the grave.

But my friend is now dead, and so, even though I have not said anything about what I did all these years, I will not stop speaking now.

Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:

I am speaking only for myself, and perhaps for my aunt. I am the last connection between her and the living world. And I am turning into an old woman myself.

I don’t know much about politics, and don’t care much for it. I have told you what I saw, and I will remember the way my aunt cried in that cell until the day I die.

You ask me what I want. I don’t know how to answer that.

Some have said that I should demand that the surviving members of Unit 731 be brought to justice. But what does that mean? I am no longer a child. I do not want to see trials, parades, spectacles. The law does not give you real justice.

What I really want is for what I saw to never have happened. But no one can give me that. And so I resort to wanting to have my aunt’s story remembered, to have the guilt of her killers and torturers laid bare to the gaze of the world, the way that they laid her bare to their needle and scalpel.

I do not know how to describe those acts other than as crimes against humanity. They were denials against the very idea of life itself.

The Japanese government has never acknowledged the actions of Unit 731, and it has never apologized for them. Over the years, more and more evidence of the atrocities committed during those years have come to life, but always the answer is the same: there is not enough evidence to know what happened.

Well, now there is. I have seen what happened with my own eyes. And I will speak about what happened, speak out against the denialists. I will tell my story as often as I can.

The men and women of Unit 731 committed those acts in the name of Japan and the Japanese people. I demand that the government of Japan acknowledge these crimes against humanity, that it apologize for them, and that it commit to preserving the memory of the victims and condemning the guilt of those criminals so long as the word justice still has meaning.

I am also sorry to say, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, that the government of the United States has also never acknowledged or apologized for its role in shielding these criminals from justice after the War or in making use of the information bought at the expense of torture, rape, and death. I demand that the government of the United States acknowledge and apologize for these acts.

That is all.

Representative Hogart:

I would like to again remind members of the public that they must maintain order and decorum during this hearing or risk being forcibly removed from this room.

Ms. Chang-Wyeth, I am sorry for whatever it is you think you have experienced. I have no doubt that it has deeply affected you. I thank the other witnesses as well for sharing their stories.

Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Subcommittee, I must again note for the record my objection to this hearing and to the resolution that has been proposed by my colleague, Representative Kotler.

The Second World War was an extraordinary time during which the ordinary rules of human conduct did not apply, and there is no doubt that terrible events occurred and terrible suffering resulted. But whatever happened—and we have no definitive proof of anything other than the results of some sensational high-energy physics that no one present, other than Dr. Kirino herself, understands—it would be a mistake for us to become slaves to history, and to subject the present to the control of the past.

The Japan of today is the most important ally of the United States in the Pacific, if not the world, while the People’s Republic of China takes daily steps to challenge our interests in the region. Japan is vital in our efforts to contain and confront the Chinese threat.

It is ill-advised at best, and counterproductive at worst, for Representative Kotler to introduce his resolution at this time. The resolution will no doubt embarrass and dishearten our ally and give encouragement and comfort to our challengers at a time when we cannot afford to indulge in theatrical sentiments, premised upon stories told by emotional witnesses who may have been experiencing “illusions,” and I am quoting the words of Dr. Kirino, the creator of the technology involved.

Again, I must call upon the Subcommittee to stop this destructive, useless process.

Representative Kotler:

Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for giving me the chance to respond to Representative Hogart.

It’s easy to hide behind intransitive verbal formulations like “terrible events occurred” and “suffering resulted.” And I am sorry to hear my honored colleague, a member of the United States Congress, engage in the same shameful tactics of denial and evasion employed by those who denied that the Holocaust was real.

Every successive Japanese government, with the encouragement and complicity of the successive administrations in this country, has refused to even acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the activities of Unit 731. In fact, for many years, the Unit’s very existence was unacknowledged. These denials and refusals to face Japanese atrocities committed during the Second World War form a pattern of playing-down and denial of the war record, whether we are talking about the so-called “comfort women,” The Nanjing Massacre, or the forced slave laborers of Korea and China. This pattern has harmed the relationship of Japan with its Asian neighbors.

The issue of Unit 731 presents its unique challenges. Here, the United States is not an uninterested third party. As an ally and close friend of Japan, it is the duty of the United States to point out where our friend has erred. But more than that, the United States played an active role in helping the perpetrators of the crimes of Unit 731 escape justice. General MacArthur granted the men of Unit 731 immunity to get their experimental data. We are in part responsible for the denials and the cover-ups because we valued the tainted fruits of those atrocities more than we valued our own integrity. We have sinned as well.

What I want to emphasize is that Representative Hogart has misunderstood the resolution. What the witnesses and I are asking for, Mr. Chairman, is not some admission of guilt by the present government of Japan or its people. What we are asking for is a declaration from this body that it is the belief of the United States Congress that the victims of Unit 731 should be honored and remembered, and that the perpetrators of these heinous crimes be condemned. There is no bill of attainder here, no corruption of blood. We are not calling on Japan to pay compensation. All we are asking for is a commitment to truth, a commitment to remember.

Like memorials to the Holocaust, the value of such a declaration is simply a public affirmation of our common bond of humanity with the victims and our unity in standing against the ideology of evil and barbarity of the Unit 731 butchers and the Japanese militarist society that permitted and ordered such evil.

Now, I want to make it clear that “Japan” is not a monolithic thing, and it is not just the Japanese government. Individual Japanese citizens have done heroic work in bringing these atrocities to light throughout the years, almost always against government resistance and against the public’s wish to forget and move on. And I offer them my heartfelt thanks.

The truth cannot be brushed away, and the families of the victims and the people of China should not be told that justice is not possible, that because their present government is repugnant to the government of the United States, that a great injustice should be covered up and hidden from the judgment of the world. Is there any doubt that this nonbinding resolution, or even much more stringent versions of it, would have passed without trouble if the victims were a people whose government has the favor of the United States? If we, for “strategic” reasons, sacrifice the truth in the name of gaining something of value for short-term advantage, then we will have simply repeated the errors of our forefathers at the end of the War.

It is not who we are. Dr. Wei has offered us a way to speak the truth about the past, and we must ask the government of Japan and our government to stand up and take up our collective responsibility to history.

Li Ruming, Director of the Department of History, Zhejiang University, the People’s Republic of China:

When I was finishing my doctorate in Boston, Evan and Akemi often had my wife and me over to their place. They were very friendly and helpful and made us feel the enthusiasm and warmth that America is rightly famous for. Unlike many Chinese Americans I met, Evan did not give off a sense that he felt he was superior to the Chinese from the mainland. It was wonderful to have him and Akemi as lifelong friends and not have every interaction between us filtered through the lens of the politics between our two countries, as is so often the case between Chinese and American scholars.

Because I am his friend and I am also Chinese, it is difficult for me to speak about Evan’s work with objectivity, but I will try my best.

When Evan first announced his intention to go to Harbin and try to travel to the past, the Chinese government was cautiously supportive. As none of it had been tried before, the full implications of Evan’s destructive process for time travel were not yet clear. Due to destruction of evidence at the end of the War and continuing stonewalling by the Japanese government, we do not have access to large archives of documentary evidence and artifacts from Unit 731, and it was felt that Evan’s work would help fill in the gap by providing firsthand accounts of what happened. The Chinese government granted Evan and Akemi visas under the assumption that their work would help promote Western understanding of China’s historical disputes with Japan.

But they wanted to monitor his work. The War is deeply emotional for my compatriots, its unhealed wounds exacerbated by years of postwar disputes with Japan, and as such, it was not politically feasible for the government to not be involved. World War Two was not the distant past, involving ancient peoples, and China could not permit two foreigners to go traipsing through that recent history like adventurers through ancient tombs.

But from Evan’s point of view—and I think he was justified in his belief—any support, monitoring, or affiliation with the Chinese government would have destroyed all credibility for his work in Western eyes.

He thus rejected all offers of Chinese involvement and even called for intervention by American diplomats. This angered many Chinese and alienated him from them. Later, when the Chinese government finally shut down his work after the storm of negative publicity, very few Chinese would speak up for him because they felt that he and Akemi had—perhaps even intentionally—done more damage to China’s history and her people. The accusations were unfair, and I’m sorry to say that I do not feel that I did enough to defend his reputation.

Evan’s focus throughout his project was both more universal and more atomistic than the people of China. On the one hand, he had an American devotion to the idea of the individual, and his commitment was first and foremost to the individual voice and memory of each victim. On the other hand, he was also trying to transcend nations, to make people all over the world empathize with these victims, condemn their torturers, and affirm the common humanity of us all.

But in that process, he was forced to distance his effort from the Chinese people in order to preserve the political credibility of his project in the West. He sacrificed their goodwill in a bid to make the West care. Evan tried to appease the West and Western prejudices against China. Was it cowardly? Should he have challenged them more? I do not know.

History is not merely a private matter. Even the family members of the victims understand that there is a communitarian aspect to history. The War of Resistance Against the Japanese Invasion is the founding story of modern China, much as the Holocaust is the founding story of Israel and the Revolution and the Civil War are the founding stories of America. Perhaps this is difficult to understand for a Westerner, but to many Chinese, Evan, because he feared and rejected their involvement, was stealing and erasing their history. He sacrificed the history of the Chinese people, without their consent, for a Western ideal. I understand why he did it, but I cannot agree that his choice was right.

As a Chinese, I do not share Evan’s utter devotion to the idea of a personalized sense of history. Telling the individual stories of all the victims, as Evan sought to do, is not possible and in any event would not solve all problems.

Because of our limited capacity for empathy for mass suffering, I think there’s a risk that his approach would result in sentimentality and only selective memory. More than sixteen million civilians died in China from the Japanese invasion. The great bulk of this suffering did not occur in death factories like Pingfang or killing fields like Nanjing, which grab headlines and shout for our attention; rather, it occurred in the countless quiet villages, towns, remote outposts, where men and women were slaughtered and raped and slaughtered again, their screams fading with the chill wind, until even their names became blanks and forgotten. But they also deserve to be remembered.

It is not possible that every atrocity would find a spokesperson as eloquent as Anne Frank, and I do not believe that we should seek to reduce all of history to a collection of such narratives.

But Evan always told me that an American would rather work on the problem that he could solve rather than wring his hands over the vast realm of problems that he could not.

It was not an easy choice that he made, and I would not have chosen the same way. But Evan was always true to his American ideals.

Bill Pacer, Professor of Modern Chinese Language and Culture, University of Hawaii at Manoa:

It has often been said that since everybody in China knew about Unit 731, Dr. Wei had nothing useful to teach the Chinese and was only an activist campaigning against Japan. That’s not quite right. One of the more tragic aspects of the dispute between China and Japan over history is how much their responses have mirrored each other. Wei’s goal was to rescue history from both.

In the early days of the People’s Republic, between 1945 and 1956, the Communists’ overall ideological approach was to treat the Japanese invasion as just another historical stage in mankind’s unstoppable march toward socialism. While Japanese militarism was condemned and the Resistance celebrated, the Communists also sought to forgive the Japanese individually if they showed contrition—a surprisingly Christian/Confucian approach for an atheistic regime. In this atmosphere of revolutionary zeal, the Japanese prisoners were treated, for the most part, humanely. They were given Marxist classes and told to write confessions of their crimes. (These classes became the basis for the Japanese public’s belief that any man who would confess to horrible crimes during the War must have been brainwashed by the Communists.) Once they were deemed sufficiently reformed through “re-education,” They were released back to Japan. Memories of the War were then suppressed in China as the country feverishly moved to build a socialist utopia, with well-known disastrous consequences.

Yet, this generosity toward the Japanese was matched by Stalinist harsh treatment of landowners, capitalists, intellectuals, and the Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, often on little evidence and with no effort given to observe legal forms.

Later, during the 1990s, the government of the People’s Republic began to invoke memories of the War in the context of patriotism to legitimize itself in the wake of the collapse of Communism. Ironically, this obvious ploy prevented large segments of the populace from being able to come to terms with the War—distrust of the government infected everything it touched.

And so the People’s Republic’s approach to historical memory created a series of connected problems. First, the leniency they showed the prisoners became the ground for denialists to later question the veracity of confessions by Japanese soldiers. Second, yoking patriotism to the memory of the War invited charges that any effort to remember was politically motivated. And lastly, individual victims of the atrocities became symbols, anonymized to serve the needs of the state.

However, it has rarely been acknowledged that behind Japan’s postwar silence regarding wartime atrocities lay the same impulses that drove the Chinese responses. On the left, the peace movement attributed all suffering during the War to the concept of war itself and advocated universal forgiveness and peace among all nations without a sense of blame. In the center, focus was placed on material development as a bandage to cover the wounds of the War. On the right, the question of wartime guilt became inextricably yoked to patriotism. In contrast to Germany, which could rely on Nazism—distinct from the nation itself—to absorb the blame, it was impossible to acknowledge the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the War without implicating a sense that Japan itself was under attack.

And so, across a narrow sea, China and Japan unwittingly converged on the same set of responses to the barbarities of World War Two: forgetting in the name of universal ideals like “peace” and “socialism”; welding memories of the War to patriotism; abstracting victims and perpetrators alike into symbols to serve the state. Seen in this light, the abstract, incomplete, fragmentary memories in China and the silence in Japan are flip sides of the same coin.

The core of Wei’s belief is that without real memory, there can be no real reconciliation. Without real memory, the individual persons of each nation have not been able to empathize with and remember and experience the suffering of the victims. An individualized story that each of us can tell ourselves about what happened is required before we can move beyond the trap of history. That, all along, was what Wei’s project was about.

Crosstalk, January 21, 20XX, courtesy of FXNN

Amy Rowe: Thank you, Ambassador Yoshida and Dr. Wei, for agreeing to come on to Cross-Talk tonight. Our viewers want to have their questions answered, and I want to see some fireworks!

Ambassador Yoshida, let’s start with you. Why won’t Japan apologize?

Yoshida: Amy, Japan has apologized. This is the whole point. Japan has apologized many many times for World War Two. Every few years we have to go through this spectacle where it’s said that Japan needs to apologize for its actions during World War Two. But Japan has done so, repeatedly. Let me read you a few quotes.

This is from a statement by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, on August 31, 1994. “Japan’s actions in a certain period of the past not only claimed numerous victims here in Japan but also left the peoples of neighboring Asia and elsewhere with scars that are painful even today. I am thus taking this opportunity to state my belief, based on my profound remorse for these acts of aggression, colonial rule, and the like caused such unbearable suffering and sorrow for so many people, that Japan’s future path should be one of making every effort to build world peace in line with my no-war commitment. It is imperative for us Japanese to look squarely to our history with the peoples of neighboring Asia and elsewhere.”

And again, from a statement by the Diet, on June 9, 1995: “On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, this House offers its sincere condolences to those who fell in action and victims of wars and similar actions all over the world. Solemnly reflecting upon many instances of colonial rule and acts of aggression in the modern history of the world, and recognizing that Japan carried out those acts in the past, inflicting pain and suffering upon the peoples of other countries, especially in Asia, the Members of this House express a sense of deep remorse.”

I can go on and read you dozens of other quotes like this. Japan has apologized, Amy.

Yet, every few years, the propaganda organs of certain regimes hostile to a free and prosperous Japan try to dredge up settled historical events to manufacture controversy. When is this going to end? And some men of otherwise good intellect have allowed themselves to become the tools of propaganda. I wish they would wake up and see how they are being used.

Rowe: Dr. Wei, I have to say, those do sound like apologies to me.

Wei: Amy, it is not my aim or goal to humiliate Japan. My commitment is to the victims and their memory, not theater. What I’m asking for is for Japan to acknowledge the truth of what happened at Pingfang. I want to focus on specifics, and acknowledgment of specifics, not empty platitudes.

But since Ambassador Yoshida has decided to bring up the issue of apologies, let’s look closer at them, shall we?

The statements quoted by the ambassador are grand and abstract, and they refer to vague and unspecified sufferings. They are apologies only in the most watered-down sense. What the ambassador is not telling you is the Japanese government’s continuing refusal to admit many specific war crimes and to honor and remember the real victims.

Moreover, every time one of these statements quoted by the ambassador is made, it is matched soon after by another statement from a prominent Japanese politician purporting to cast doubt upon what happened in World War Two. Year after year, we are treated to this show of the Japanese government as a Janus speaking with two faces.

Yoshida: It’s not that unusual to have differences of opinion when it comes to matters of history, Dr. Wei. In a democracy it’s what you would expect.

Wei: Actually, Ambassador, Unit 731 has been consistently handled by the Japanese government: For more than fifty years the official position was absolute silence regarding Unit 731, despite the steady accumulation of physical evidence, including human remains, from Unit 731’s activities. Even the Unit’s existence was not admitted until the 1990s, and the government consistently denied that it had researched or used biological weapons during the War.

It wasn’t until 2005, in response to a lawsuit by some relatives of Unit 731’s victims for compensation, that the Tokyo High Court finally acknowledged Japan’s use of biological weapons during the War. This was the first time that an official voice of the Japanese government admitted to that fact. Amy, you’ll notice that this was a decade after those lofty statements read by Ambassador Yoshida. The Court denied compensation.

Since then the Japanese government has consistently stated that there is insufficient evidence to confirm exactly what experiments were carried out by Unit 731 or the details of their conduct. Official denial and silence continue despite the dedicated efforts of some Japanese scholars to bring the truth to light.

But numerous former members of Unit 731 have come forward since the 1980s to testify and confess to the grisly acts they committed. And we have confirmed and expanded upon those accounts with new eyewitness accounts by volunteers who have traveled to Pingfang. Everyday, we are finding out more about Unit 731’s crimes. We will tell the world all the victims’ stories.

Yoshida: I am not sure that “telling stories” is what historians should be doing. If you want to make fiction, go ahead, but do not tell people that it is history. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And there is insufficient proof for the accusations currently being directed against Japan.

Wei: Ambassador Yoshida, is your position really that nothing happened at Pingfang? Are you saying that these reports by the American occupational authority from immediately after the War are lies? Are you saying that these contemporaneous diary entries by the officers of Unit 731 are lies? Are you really denying all of this?

There is a simple solution to all this. Will you take a trip to Pingfang in 1941? Will you believe your own eyes?

Yoshida: I’m—I am not—I’m making a distinction—It was a time of war, Dr. Wei, and perhaps it is possible that some unfortunate things happened. But “stories” are not evidence.

Wei: Will you take a trip, Ambassador?

Yoshida: I will not. I see no reason to subject myself to your process. I see no reason to undergo your “time travel” hallucinations.

Rowe: Now we are seeing some fireworks!

Wei: Ambassador Yoshida, let me make this clear. The deniers are committing a fresh crime against the victims of those atrocities: Not only would they stand with the torturers and the killers, but they are also engaged in the practice of erasing and silencing the victims from history, to kill them afresh.

In the past, their task was easy. Unless the denials were actively resisted, eventually memories would dim with old age and death, and the voices of the past would fade away, and the denialists would win. The people of the present would then become exploiters of the dead, and that has always been the way history was written.

But we have now come to the end of history. What my wife and I have done is to take narrative away, and to give us all a chance to see the past with our own eyes. In place of memory, we now have incontrovertible evidence. Instead of exploiting the dead, we must look into the face of the dying. I have seen these crimes with my own eyes. You cannot deny that.

Archival footage of Dr. Evan Wei delivering the keynote for the Fifth International War Crimes Studies Conference in San Francisco, on November 20, 20XX. Courtesy of the Stanford University Archives

History is a narrative enterprise, and the telling of stories that are true, that affirm and explain our existence, is the fundamental task of the historian. But truth is delicate, and it has many enemies. Perhaps that is why, although we academics are supposedly in the business of pursuing the truth, the word “truth” is rarely uttered without hedges, adornments, and qualifications.

Every time we tell a story about a great atrocity, like the Holocaust or Pingfang, the forces of denial are always ready to pounce, to erase, to silence, to forget. History has always been difficult because of the delicacy of the truth, and denialists have always been able to resort to labeling the truth as fiction.

One has to be careful, whenever one tells a story about a great injustice. We are a species that loves narrative, but we have also been taught not to trust an individual speaker.

Yes, it is true that no nation, and no historian, can tell a story that completely encompasses every aspect of the truth. But it is not true that just because all narratives are constructed, that they are equally far from the truth. The Earth is neither a perfect sphere nor a flat disk, but the model of the sphere is much closer to the truth. Similarly, there are some narratives that are closer to the truth than others, and we must always try to tell a story that comes as close to the truth as is humanly possible.

The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does not absolve us of the moral duty to judge and to take a stand against evil.

Victor P. Lowenson, Professor of East Asian History, Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley:

I have been called a denialist, and I have been called worse. But I am not a Japanese right-winger who believes that Unit 731 is a myth. I do not say that nothing happened there. What I am saying is that, unfortunately, we do not have enough evidence to be able to describe with certainty all that happened there.

I have enormous respect for Wei, and he remains and will remain one of my best students. But in my view, he has abdicated the responsibility of the historian to ensure that the truth is not ensnared in doubt. He has crossed the line that divides a historian from an activist.

As I see it, the fight here isn’t ideological, but methodological. What we are fighting over is what constitutes proof. Historians trained in Western and Asian traditions have always relied on the documentary record, but Dr. Wei is now raising the primacy of eyewitness accounts, and not even contemporaneous eyewitness accounts, mind you, but accounts by witnesses out of the stream of time.

There are many problems with his approach. We have a great deal of experience from psychology and the law to doubt the reliability of eyewitness accounts. We also have serious concerns with the single-use nature of the Kirino Process, which seems to destroy the very thing it is studying, and erases history even as it purports to allow it to be witnessed. You literally cannot ever go back to a moment of time that has already been experienced—and thus consumed—by another witness. When each eyewitness account is impossible to verify independently of that account, how can we rely on such a process to establish the truth of what happened?

I understand that from the perspective of supporters of Dr. Wei, the raw experience of actually seeing history unfold before your eyes makes it impossible to doubt the evidence indelibly etched in your mind. But that is simply not good enough for the rest of us. The Kirino Process requires a leap of faith: Those who have witnessed the ineffable have no doubt of its existence, but that clarity is incapable of being replicated for anyone else. And so we are stuck here, in the present, trying to make sense of the past.

Dr. Wei has ended the process of rational historical inquiry and transformed it into a form of personal religion. What one witness has seen, no one else can ever see. This is madness.

Naoki, last name withheld, clerk:

I have seen the videos of the old soldiers who supposedly confessed to these horrible things. I do not believe them. They cry and act so emotional, as though they are insane. The Communists were great brainwashers, and it is undoubtedly a result of their plot.

I remember one of those old men describing the kindness of his Communist guards. Kind Communist guards! If that is not evidence of brainwashing, what is?

Kazue Sato, housewife:

The Chinese are great manufacturers of lies. They have produced fake food, fake Olympics, and fake statistics. Their history is also faked. This Wei is an American, but he is also Chinese, and so we cannot trust anything he does.

Hiroshi Abe, retired soldier:

The soldiers who “confessed” have brought great shame upon their country.

Interviewer: Because of what they did?

Because of what they said.

Ienaga Ito, Professor of Oriental History, Kyoto University:

We live in an age that prizes authenticity and personalized narratives, as embodied in the form of the memoir. Eyewitness accounts have an immediacy and reality that compels belief, and we think they can convey a truth greater than any fiction. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, we are also eager to seize upon any factual deviation and inconsistency in such narratives and declare the entirety to be mere fiction. There’s an all-or-nothing bleakness to this dynamic. But we should have conceded from the start that narratives are irreducibly subjective, though that does not mean that they do not also convey the truth.

Evan was a greater radical than most people realized. He sought to free the past from the present so that history could not be ignored, put out of our minds, or made to serve the needs of the present. The possibility of witnessing actual history and experiencing that past by all of us means that the past is not past, but alive at this very moment.

What Evan did was to transform historical investigation itself into a form of memoir writing. That kind of emotional experience is important in the way we think about history and make decisions. Culture is not merely a product of reason but also of real, visceral empathy. And I am afraid that it is primarily empathy that has been missing from the postwar Japanese responses to history.

Evan tried to introduce more empathy and emotion into historical inquiry. For this he was crucified by the academic establishment. But adding empathy and the irreducibly subjective dimension of the personal narrative to history does not detract from the truth. It enhances the truth. That we accept our own frailties and subjectivity does not free us to abdicate the moral responsibility to tell the truth, even if, and especially if, “truth” is not singular but a set of shared experiences and shared understandings that together make up our humanity.

Of course, drawing attention to the importance and primacy of eyewitness accounts unleashed a new danger. With a little money and the right equipment, anyone can eliminate the Bohm-Kirino particles from a desired era, in a specified place, and so erase those events from direct experience. Unwittingly, Evan had also invented the technology to end history forever, by denying us and future generations of that emotional experience of the past that he so cherished.

Akemi Kirino:

It was difficult during the years immediately after the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium was signed. Evan was denied tenure in a close vote, and that editorial in the Wall Street Journal by his old friend and teacher, Victor Lowenson, calling him a “tool of propaganda,” deeply hurt him. Then, there were the death threats and harassing phone calls, every day.

But I think it was what they did to me that really got to him. At the height of the attacks from the denialists, the IT division of the Institute asked me if I would mind being delisted from the public faculty directory. Whenever they listed me on the website, the site would be hacked within hours, and the denialists would replace my bio page with pictures where these men, so brave and eloquent, displayed their courage and intellect by illustrating what they would do to me if they had me in their power. And you probably remember the news reports about that night when I walked home alone from work.

I don’t really want to dwell on that time, if that’s all right with you.

We moved away to Boise, where we tried to hide from the worst of it. We kept a low profile, got an unlisted number, and basically stayed out of sight. Evan went on medication for his depression. On the weekends we went hiking in the Sawtooth Mountains, and Evan took up charting abandoned mining sites and ghost towns from during the gold rush. That was a happy time for us, and I thought he was feeling better. The sojourn in Idaho reminded him that sometimes the world is a kind place, and all is not darkness and denial.

But he was feeling lost. He felt that he was hiding from the truth. I knew that he was feeling torn between his sense of duty to the past and his sense of loyalty to the present, to me.

I could not bear to see him being torn apart, and so I asked if he wanted to return to the fight.

We flew back to Boston, and things had grown even worse. He had sought to end history as mere history and to give the past living voices to speak to the present. But it did not work out the way he had intended. The past did come to life, but when faced with it, the present decided to recast history as religion.

The more Evan did, the more he felt he had to do. He would not come to bed, and fell asleep at his desk. He was writing, writing, constantly writing. He believed that he had to single-handedly refute all the lies and take on all his enemies. It was never enough, never enough for him. I stood by, helpless.

“I have to speak for them, because they have no one else,” he would tell me.

By then perhaps he was living more in the past than in the present. Even though he no longer had access to our machine, in his mind he relived those trips he took, over and over again. He believed that he had let the victims down.

A great responsibility had been thrust upon him, and he had failed them. He was trying to uncover to the world a great injustice, and yet in the process he seemed to have only stirred up the forces of denial, hate, and silence.

Excerpts from the Economist, November 26, 20XX

[A woman’s voice, flat, calm, reads out loud the article text as the camera swoops over the ocean, the beaches, and then the forests and hills of Manchuria. From the shadow of a small plane racing along the ground beneath us we can tell that the camera is shooting from the open door of the airplane. An arm, the hand clenched tight into a fist, moves into the foreground from off-frame. The fingers open. Dark ashes are scattered into the air beneath the airplane.]

We will soon come upon the ninetieth anniversary of the Mukden Incident, the start of the Japanese invasion of China. To this day, that war remains the alpha and omega of the relationship between the two countries.

. . .

[A series of photographs of the leaders of Unit 731 are shown. The reader’s voice fades out and then fades back in.]

. . .

The men of Unit 731 then moved on to prominent careers in postwar Japan. Three of them founded the Japan Blood Bank (which later became the Green Cross, Japan’s largest pharmaceutical company) and used their knowledge of methods for freezing and drying blood derived from human experiments during the War to produce dried-blood products for sale to the United States Army at great profit. General Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731, may have spent some time after the War working in Maryland, researching biological weapons. Papers were published using data obtained from human subjects, including babies (sometimes the word “monkey” was substituted as a cover-up)—and it is possible that medical papers published today still contain citations traceable to these results, making all of us the unwitting beneficiaries of these atrocities.

. . .

[The reading voice fades out as the sound of the airplane’s engine cuts in. The camera shifts to images of clashing protestors waving Japanese flags and Chinese flags, some of the flags on fire.

Then the voice fades in again.]

. . .

Many inside and outside Japan objected to the testimonies by the surviving members of Unit 731: The men are old, they point out, with failing memories; they may be seeking attention; they may be mentally ill; they may have been brainwashed by the Chinese Communists. Reliance on oral testimony alone is an unwise way to construct a solid historical case. To the Chinese this sounded like more of the same excuses issued by the deniers of the Nanjing Massacre and other Japanese atrocities.

Year after year, history grew as a wall between the two peoples.

[The camera switches to a montage of pictures of Evan Wei and Akemi Kirino throughout their lives. In the first pictures, they smile for the camera. In later pictures, Kirino’s face is tired, withdrawn, impassive. Wei’s face is defiant, angry, and then full of despair.]

Evan Wei, a young Chinese-American specialist on Heian Japan, and Akemi Kirino, a Japanese-American experimental physicist, did not seem like the kind of revolutionary figures who would bring the world to the brink of war. But history has a way of mocking our expectations.

If lack of evidence was the issue, they had a way to provide irrefutable evidence: You could watch history as it occurred, like a play.

The governments of the world went into a frenzy. While Wei sent relatives of the victims of Unit 731 into the past to bear witness to the horrors committed in the operating rooms and prison cells of Pingfang, China and Japan waged a bitter war in courts and in front of cameras, staking out their rival claims to the past. The United States was reluctantly drawn into the fight, and, citing national security reasons, finally shut down Wei’s machine when he unveiled plans to investigate the truth of America’s alleged use of biological weapons (possibly derived from Unit 731’s research) during the Korean War.

Armenians, Jews, Tibetans, Native Americans, Indians, the Kikuyu, the descendants of slaves in the New World—victim groups around the world lined up and demanded use of the machine, some out of fear that their history might be erased by the groups in power, others wishing to use their history for present political gain. As well, the countries who initially advocated access to the machine hesitated when the implications became clear: Did the French wish to relive the depravity of their own people under Vichy France? Did the Chinese want to re-experience the self-inflicted horrors of the Cultural Revolution? Did the British want to see the genocides that lay behind their Empire?

With remarkable alacrity, democracies and dictatorships around the world signed the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium while they wrangled over the minutiae of the rules for how to divide up jurisdiction of the past. Everyone, it seemed, preferred not to have to deal with the past just yet.

Wei wrote, “All written history shares one goal: to bring a coherent narrative to a set of historical facts. For far too long we have been mired in controversy over facts. Time travel will make truth as accessible as looking outside the window.”

But Wei did not help his case by sending large numbers of Chinese relatives of Unit 731 victims, rather than professional historians, through his machine. (Though it is also fair to ask if things really would have turned out differently had he sent more professional historians. Perhaps accusations would still have been made that the visions were mere fabrications of the machine or historians partisan to his cause.) In any event, the relatives, being untrained observers, did not make great witnesses. They failed to correctly answer observational questions posed by skeptics. (“Did the Japanese doctors wear uniforms with breast pockets?” “How many prisoners in total were in the compound at that time?”) They did not understand the Japanese they heard on their trips. Their rhetoric had the unfortunate habit of echoing that of their distrusted government. Their accounts contained minor discrepancies between one retelling and the next. Moreover, as they broke down on camera, their emotional testimonies simply added to the skeptics’ charge that Wei was more interested in emotional catharsis rather than historical inquiry.

The criticisms outraged Wei. A great atrocity had occurred in Pingfang, and it was being willfully forgotten by the world through a cover-up. Because China’s government was despised, the world was countenancing Japan’s denial. Debates over whether the doctors vivisected all or only some of the victims without use of anesthesia, whether most of the victims were political prisoners, innocent villagers caught on raids, or common criminals, whether the use of babies and infants in experiments was known to Ishii, and so forth, seemed to him beside the point. That the questioners would focus on inconsequential details of the uniform of the Japanese doctors as a way to discredit his witnesses did not seem to him to deserve a response.

As he continued the trips to the past, other historians who saw the promise of the technology objected. History, as it turned out, was a limited resource, and each of Wei’s trips took out a chunk of the past that could never be replaced. He was riddling the past with holes like Swiss cheese. Like early archaeologists who destroyed entire sites as they sought a few precious artifacts, thereby consigning valuable information about the past to oblivion, Wei was destroying the very history that he was trying to save.

When Wei jumped onto the tracks in front of a Boston subway train last Friday, he was undoubtedly haunted by the past. Perhaps he was also despondent over the unintended boost his work had given to the forces of denial. Seeking to end controversy in history, he succeeded only in causing more of it. Seeking to give voice to the victims of a great injustice, he succeeded only in silencing some of them forever.

[Dr. Kirino speaks to us from in front of Evan Wei’s grave. In the bright May sunlight of New England, the dark shadows beneath her eyes make her seem older, more frail.]

Akemi Kirino:

I’ve kept only one secret from Evan. Well, actually two.

The first is my grandfather. He died before Evan and I met. I never took Evan to visit his grave, which is in California. I just told him that it wasn’t something I wanted to share with him, and I never told Evan his name.

The second is a trip I took to the past, the only one I’ve ever taken personally. We were in Pingfang at the time, and I went to July 9, 1941. I knew the layout of the place pretty well from the descriptions and the maps, and I avoided the prison cells and the laboratories. I went to the building that housed the command center.

I looked around until I found the office for the Director of Pathology Studies. The Director was inside. He was a very handsome man: tall, slim, and he held his back very straight. He was writing a letter. I knew he was thirty-two, which was the same age as mine at that time.

I looked over his shoulder at the letter he was writing. He had beautiful calligraphy.

I have now finally settled into my work routine, and things are going well. Manchukuo is a very beautiful place. The sorghum fields spread out as far as the eye can see, like an ocean. The street vendors here make wonderful tofu from fresh soybeans, which smells delicious. Not quite as good as the Japanese tofu, but very good nonetheless.

You will like Harbin. Now that the Russians are gone, the streets of Harbin are a harmonious patchwork of the five races: the Chinese, Manchus, Mongolians, and Koreans bow as our beloved Japanese soldiers and colonists pass by, grateful for the liberation and wealth we have brought to this beautiful land. It has taken a decade to pacify this place and eliminate the Communist bandits, who are but an occasional and minor nuisance now. Most of the Chinese are very docile and safe.

But all that I really can think about these days when I am not working are you and Naoko. It is for her sake that you and I are apart. It is for her sake and the sake of her generation that we make our sacrifices. I am sad that I will miss her first birthday, but it gladdens my heart to see the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere blossom in this remote but rich hinterland. Here, you truly feel that our Japan is the light of Asia, her salvation.

Take heart, my dear, and smile. All our sacrifices today will mean that one day, Naoko and her children will see Asia take its rightful place in the world, freed from the yoke of the European killers and robbers who now trample over her and desecrate her beauty. We will celebrate together when we finally chase the British out of Hong Kong and Singapore.

Red sea of sorghum

Fragrant bowls of crushed soybeans

I see only you

And her, our treasure

Now, if only you were here.

This was not the first time I had read this letter. I had seen it once before, as a little girl. It was one of my mother’s treasured possessions, and I remember asking her to explain all the faded characters to me.

“He was very proud of his literary learning,” my mother had said. “He always closed his letters with a tanka.”

By then Grandfather was well into his long slide into dementia. Often he would confuse me with my mother and call me by her name. He would also teach me how to make origami animals. His fingers were very dextrous—the legacy of being a good surgeon.

I watched my grandfather finish his letter and fold it. I followed him out of the office to his lab. He was getting ready for an experiment, his notebook and instruments laid out neatly along the workbench.

He called to one of the medical assistants. He asked the assistant to bring him something for the experiment. The assistants returned about ten minutes later, holding a bloody mess on a tray, like a dish of steaming tofu. It was a human brain, still so warm from the body from which it was taken that I could see the heat rising from it.

“Very good,” my grandfather said, nodding. “Very fresh. This will do.”

Akemi Kirino:

There have been times when I wished Evan weren’t Chinese, just as there have been times when I wished I weren’t Japanese. But these are moments of passing weakness. I don’t mean them. We are born into strong currents of history, and it is our lot to swim or sink, not to complain about our luck.

Ever since I became an American, people have told me that America is about leaving your past behind. I’ve never understood that. You can no more leave behind your past than you can leave behind your skin.

The compulsion to delve into the past, to speak for the dead, to recover their stories: that’s part of who Evan was, and why I loved him. Just the same, my grandfather is part of who I am, and what he did, he did in the name of my mother and me and my children. I am responsible for his sins, in the same way that I take pride in inheriting the tradition of a great people, a people who, in my grandfather’s time, committed great evil.

In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and maybe some would say this means that we cannot judge him. But how can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of circumstances? It’s easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of the blackest coal?

Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my lasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there’s nothing learned, nothing gained. It’s simple, but it’s cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.

Why didn’t I tell Evan about my grandfather? I don’t know. I suppose I was a coward. I was afraid that he might feel that something in me would be tainted, a corruption of blood. Because I could not then find a way to empathize with my grandfather, I was afraid that Evan could not empathize with me. I kept my grandfather’s story to myself, and so I locked away a part of myself from my husband. There were times when I thought I would go to the grave with my secret and so erase forever my grandfather’s story.

I regret it, now that Evan is dead. He deserved to know his wife whole, complete, and I should have trusted him rather than silenced my grandfather’s story, which is also my story. Evan died believing that by unearthing more stories, he caused people to doubt their truth. But he was wrong. The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial—the truth only dies when true stories are untold.

This urge to speak, to tell the story, I share with the aging and dying former members of Unit 731, with the descendants of the victims, with all the untold horrors of history. The silence of the victims of the past imposes a duty on the present to recover their voices, and we are most free when we willingly take up that duty.

[Dr. Kirino’s voice comes to us off-camera, as the camera pans to the star-studded sky.]

It has been a decade since Evan’s death, and the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium remains in place. We still do not know quite what to do with a past that is transparently accessible, a past that will not be silenced or forgotten. For now, we hesitate.

Evan died thinking that he had sacrificed the memory of the Unit 731 victims and permanently erased the traces that their truth left in our world, all for nought, but he was wrong. He was forgetting that even with the Bohm-Kirino particles gone, the actual photons forming the images of those moments of unbearable suffering and quiet heroism are still out there, traveling as a sphere of light into the void of space.

Look up at the stars, and we are bombarded by light generated on the day the last victim at Pingfang died, the day the last train arrived at Auschwitz, the day the last Cherokee walked out of Georgia. And we know that the inhabitants of those distant worlds, if they are watching, will see those moments, in time, as they stream from here to there at the speed of light. It is not possible to capture all of those photons, to erase all of those images. They are our permanent record, the testimony of our existence, the story that we tell the future. Every moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the eyes of the universe.

For far too long, historians, and all of us, have acted as exploiters of the dead. But the past is not dead. It is with us. Everywhere we walk, we are bombarded by fields of Bohm-Kirino particles that will let us see the past like looking through a window. The agony of the dead is with us, and we hear their screams and walk among their ghosts. We cannot avert our eyes or plug up our ears. We must bear witness and speak for those who cannot speak. We have only one chance to get it right.

AUTHOR’S NOTES: This story is dedicated to the memory of Iris Chang and all the victims of Unit 731.

I first got the idea for writing a story in the form of a documentary after reading Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See: a Documentary.”

The following sources were consulted during the research for this story. Their help is hereby gratefully acknowledged, though any errors in relating their facts and insights are entirely my own.

For the phrase “exploiters of the dead” and the history of Heian and premodern Japan:

Totman, Conrad. A History of Japan, Second Edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

For the history of Unit 731 and the experiments performed by Unit 731 personnel:

Gold, Hal. Unit 731 Testimony, Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1996.

Harris, Sheldon H. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932–45 and the American Cover-Up, New York: Routledge, 1994.

(Numerous other newspaper and journal articles, interviews, and analyses were also consulted. Their authors include, among others, Keiichi  Tsuneishi, Doug Struck, Christopher Reed, Richard Lloyd Parry, Christopher Hudson, Mark Simkin, Frederick Dickinson, John Dower, Tawara Yoshifumi, Yuki Tanaka, Takashi Tsuchiya, Tien-wei Wu, Shane Green, Friedrich Frischknecht, Nicholas Kristof, Jun Hongo, Richard James Havis, Edward Cody, and Judith Miller. I thank these authors and regret that the sources are not listed here individually for space reasons.)

For descriptions of the vivisections and practice surgery sessions with live Chinese victims conducted by Japanese doctors, their treatment as prisoners after the War, and Japan’s postwar responses to memories of the War:

Noda, Masaaki. “Japanese Atrocities in the Pacific War: One Army Surgeon’s Account of Vivisection on Human Subjects in China,” East Asia: An International Quarterly, 18:3 (2000) 49–91.

Note that based on testimonies and other documentation, the Japanese doctors of Unit 731 typically infected their victims while wearing protective suits to avoid the possibility that resisting prisoners would infect the doctors by struggling.

Aspects of Shiro Yamagata’s post-Unit 731 recollections are modeled on the experiences of Ken Yuasa (a Japanese military doctor who was not a member of Unit 731), described in the Noda article.

The obituary for Evan Wei is modeled upon the Economist’s November 25, 2004 obituary for Iris Chang.

The hearing of the Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment is modeled upon the February 15, 2007, hearing before that same Subcommittee on House Resolution 121, concerning Japan’s wartime enslavement of women for sexual purposes (known as “comfort women”).

Austin Yoder provided pictures from modern-day Pingfang, Harbin, and the Unit 731 War Crimes Museum.

The various denialist statements attributed to “men in the street” are modeled on Internet forum comments, postings, and direct communication to the author from individuals who hold such views.

Originally published in Panverse 3, edited by Dario Ciriello.

Stellar Harvest

Eleanor Arnason

After her helicopter broke down in a dusty little caravan town named Dzel, Lydia Duluth rented a chool. This was a native quadruped, reminiscent of the hasa on her home world, though (thanks to this planet’s smaller mass and lighter G) taller and rangier than any hasa. Instead of hooves, it had three-toed feet; and a pair of impressive tusks curved up from its lower jaw.

“What are those for?” Lydia asked the stableman.

“Digging up roots and pulling bark off trees, also for fighting with other males. Loper has been gelded and won’t bother you with any kind of mating behavior. Sex is a distraction,” he added in the complacent tone of one who has never been distracted. “Necessary perhaps for evolution—we are not ignorant; we know about Darwin—but hardly compatible with civilization. Loper will give you no trouble. He has been civilized.”

The animal turned its long, angular, lightly scaled head, regarding her with a bright orange eye. Not a sight that Lydia associated with civilization, though maybe one could see the triangular pupil—expanded at the moment, in the shadowy stable—as a pyramid, emblematic of Egypt and geometry.

“Tomorrow,” she told the stableman. “At dawn.”

“Loper will be ready.”

She spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around Dzel. Narrow streets ran crookedly between adobe buildings. The natives—humanoid, but not human—dressed in brightly colored robes, which hid most of the differences between their species and hers. One noticed height and the long thin hands, one finger short of the human norm. Their skin was golden brown and hairless, with a faint shimmer produced by vestigial scales. Their eyes, visible above veils, were all iris with round black pupils. Most of the irises were yellow: a wonderful hue, as clear as glass or wine.

One could put an exotic romance into a setting like this or an adventure story: Ali Khan on the trail of interstellar drug dealers or seeking evidence of the long-vanished Master Race. Though poor Ali was at the end of his career; a man of 110 simply did not convince in action roles. No matter what one did with computers, the audience knew how old he was. They knew they were not seeing the real person; and Stellar Harvest had built its reputation on authenticity.

Well, not her problem. She didn’t plot stories or write scripts. Instead, she recorded Dzel: the colorful inhabitants, dusty winding streets and dark blue sky.

There were sounds to be recorded as well: bells ringing in the wind, plaintive voices that rose and fell musically, so every conversation seemed to be a duet or trio, and the soft thud of chool feet, as the animals plodded past.

Her mood, somewhat edgy since the helicopter’s sudden failure, gradually relaxed.

Species are stable, said the voice in her mind. Humans have not evolved in the centuries since you began to build machines. Your nervous system is designed for an environment like this. That’s why you find animal noises and the sound of the wind relaxing. In a sense, this is your true home.

“Did I ask for an opinion?” said Lydia quietly, while aiming her recorder at a street shaded by blue and red awnings. The light beneath the awnings was alternately blue and red, colored by the fabric it had come through. A woman in a white robe walked toward her. What a vision! And what a location for a chase or fight!

The women, veiled and hooded, passed Lydia. Golden eyes gave a quick considering glance. With luck, the recording would be good; she’d have this light forever, along with the woman’s grace and glance.

At sunset, she returned to her inn. The helicopter pilot, a native in blue overalls, had news. Their machine was not fixable. He would have to stay in Dzel until a salvage truck arrived, then ride back along the caravan road. “We are still trying to find you another copter, missy.”

“Don’t bother. I rented a chool.”

“Those nasty animals! Have you ridden before?”

“On my home world. We had a revolution, the kind that takes to the hills. It failed, but I did learn riding.”

Gold eyes widened, and nostrils flared. “Really, indeed! You are a revolutionary?”

“A failed one.”

“Really! We could never manage a revolution. Our unaltered males are unable to cooperate with each other, and no altered male would waste his time on anything so foolish.”

“What about your women?”

“They are, if anything, more sensible than eunuchs. Life is short, missy, and civilization is difficult to maintain. We have all we can do.”

“But you like Stellar Harvest.”

“That is drama. Ali Khan may solve his problems by kicking other people in the head, but our experience—here on this planet—is that real adversaries are not so easily defeated. Of course we dream of such solutions, the way children dream of having everything. But one does not act on such fantasies.”

True enough, said the voice in her mind.

This was the end of the real conversation. The pilot began to discuss his favorite holoplays and stars. Ali Khan, of course. Who could equal him, in his prime? “Though he has seemed less convincing in recent years.”

Recent years? Recent decades!

Ramona Patel was also fine, the best of the actors starring in mythic-musical-action stories. “Not my religion, of course,” the pilot said. “But none the less inspiring, especially the large production numbers. You humans have so many gods! And all of them able to sing and dance!”

She genuinely liked her job and enjoyed many of the dramas made by Stellar Harvest. None the less, fannish enthusiasm can be exhausting, especially at the end of a long day. Lydia excused herself, pleading fatigue, and went to her room, which was on the inn’s ground floor, its windows opening onto a courtyard. Above the roof line stars blazed, far more than she was used to. Their light was as bright as moonlight at home. She leaned out a window. A rimmed pool stood at the courtyard’s center, gleaming like a huge round coin. Maybe she ought to get her recorder.

Instead she collected her computer and satellite dish. There were stairs at the end of the hall, leading up to a flat roof. The night air was cold already, the starry sky immense. Lydia unfolded the dish and turned on the computer, typing in the address of her contact in the capital city, a commercial rep who handled Stellar Harvest along with a dozen other off-planet companies. As was to be expected, she got a recorded message, accompanied by a holo of the rep, his gold face bare. The head—long from front to back—was covered by what looked like sleeked down, rust-red hair. Actually, this was a crest of feathers, which could be raised, though not in polite company.

“Thoozil Rai is not available. Please type your message for ease in translation.”

Sitting cross-legged under the stars, she input the current situation. No point in spending six or seven days in Dzel, waiting for a new helicopter, if one could be found. The country to the west was safe according to local informants, and there was an interesting-sounding city in the foothills. No trouble getting out of Basekh this time of year. There was weekly plane service to accommodate tourists, mostly big game hunters. She would call every other day as a precaution, though it seemed hardly necessary.

As she typed in the last words, something howled nearby. Mother! What a sound! Undulating, it rose into a scream that ended suddenly, as if cut off. In the silence that followed, Lydia thought she could still hear the cry, continuing beyond the edge of audibility.

By this time she was standing. The sound had come from ground level. Maybe the street below her. Or the next street over. “What?”

An unaltered male, I think. There must be several in town.

A second howl answered the first. Others followed. Lydia counted: three, four, five spreading out from the town’s center to its edges. The last cry came from the far east side of Dzel, almost on the plain. Faint and shrill, it rose into the starry night like a rocket. When it ended, there was silence. Apparently the creatures didn’t feel a need to rechallenge one another.

They are kept in family compounds, the voice told her. With proper care, they are not dangerous.

The computer was at her feet, still open and on. By now, her message had been replaced by the saver, a red and blue fractal that opened like a flower or an exotic, frilly leaf. She wiped her palms—they were suddenly wet—knelt and sent her message, then shut down. “Why didn’t I hear that in the city?”

Unaltered males are forbidden within the city limits.

“A noise ordinance?”

There are various reasons: sanitation, safety. They agitate each other with howling.

No kidding! There had been emotion in the cries. She knew that, though she wasn’t sure she could identify it. Anger, maybe. Anguish? Something that made her hair go up. “I hope it doesn’t happen again.”

Use earplugs.

“Can’t hear the alarm go off.” Can’t hear monsters climbing in the window, either. Still kneeling, she folded her dish. Hard to imagine Thoozil Rai as a member of the same species—the same sex—as the creature that had produced that cry. He was like all reps everywhere: bland, courteous, a member of the interstellar culture of go-betweens. They never varied much. How could they? Their job was to be uniform and predictable. Beyond them and the port cities, one or two to a planet, was the outback, the real planet, where Stellar Harvest liked to record.

People expected reality from Stellar Harvest; and they expected the reality they saw to be exotic; but the story in front of this exotic backdrop should be familiar. The company’s official motto was ad astra per aspera, which appeared at the start of every drama, inside the sickle made of blazing stars. The motto should have been, “Be real, but not too real.”

At times, this troubled her. At other times, she thought there was an argument for predictability and for happy endings. Lydia went downstairs and closed the shutters on her windows.

Her computer alarm woke her at dawn. She dressed and packed her gear into rented saddle bags. Outside, the stars were fading. The dimmer ones were already gone; most of the rest would follow; though a few remained visible all day. The still air was cold and dry. She walked through the dark streets, rifle in hand, the bags over one shoulder, thinking that the holoplays missed what was really important: a morning like this, her body feeling light and springy in the local G.

If something happened now—for example, a monster leaping out of the shadows—she would lose this moment. Action distracts from sensation. Sensation is life.

Loper was ready, as promised. The stableman went over his instructions on how to guide a chool, then led the way to the town gate, Lydia following on the animal, which was—as promised—no problem.

“Usually the gate is kept locked till full day. But I paid the watchman, and he’s a fan of Ramona Patel. What a woman! So much authority!”

Well, that was true of Ramona, known to her associates as the female Genghis Khan. Ali, in spite of his name, was a kitten.

The gate was open, and the watchman stood next to it. Even wrapped in robes, she could see that he was unusually tall and broad.

“Altered late,” said the stableman in a whisper. “But perfectly safe.”

She thanked both for their help. The watchman rumbled something that she didn’t understand, though she thought she heard the word, “Patel.”

“Our pleasure,” said the stableman. Lydia rode out.

By full day, the town was gone from view. The plain stretched around her, covered by a short, grass-like plant called dzai, not a monoculture but a mixture of related species, all of which had faded in the dry midsummer, but not to the same hue. The landscape was patterned like a carpet: silver-brown, pale red, pale yellow, a lovely dusty silver-grey-green. The colors changed as the wind blew past, flattening leaves or flipping them over. A chameleon-carpet, thought Lydia, who’d seen such things on her travels. Rich people on other worlds had them, so their floors always matched their furniture and clothing.

She traveled slowly, getting used to the chool’s gait and watching the plain. It could be used for something epic, like the ancient westerns made on Earth. The huge spread of land would swallow an army, making it look tiny, until it came over a low rise and turned into Crazy Horse and the Lakota or the Red Army’s crack cavalry, riding ahead of Leon Trotsky’s armored train.

But if you emphasized the sheer size of landscape, the way it dwarfed humanity, then you lost its other qualities: subtlety, variety, richness.

On most planets, prairie ecologies were second in complexity to tropical forests; and of all ecologies they were the most vulnerable, because they produced excellent soil, thick and full of nutrients. Their chief protection was a mat of roots so deep and intertwined that no primitive plow could break through. But the moment any culture had access to good metal plows, prairies went under.

A pity, thought Lydia, coming from a world that had turned most of its prairies into farmland. She had grown up in a place as flat as this, divided into sections and planted with modified versions of Earth crops. Only the dry plains remained covered with native vegetation. Was it lack of water that had saved this place?

We arrived before overpopulation forced them to farm everything, and before they developed an economy based on using up natural resources as quickly as possible.

“You intervened?”

Our arrival was an intervention. How could it not be? In addition, we encouraged certain traits already present. They are a likable species.

“Unlike humans?”

The voice did not reply. Lydia grinned.

Now and then she recorded something, though her recordings were not going to give a sense of what the plain was really like. So vast! And the sky above it even vaster, dotted with day stars, white points of light in the deep dusty blue.

Maybe the right director could convey the space. The stars could be enhanced. They wouldn’t show otherwise. She wasn’t sure how to convey the richness in an action drama. Maybe Ali could be a biologist. Begin with him on his hands and knees, collecting invertebrates with exoskeletons, lovely little creatures like the things that were whirring past her this very moment. Then, after he’s been established as a gentle fellow in love with diversity, the bad guys arrive. Developers maybe, plotting to destroy the prairie. Ali has to stand up and defend his bugs. She could see him rising, shoulders back and a bug held carefully between two cupped hands, his expression stern, his hawk-like profile held at just the right angle against the alien sky.

This is either irony or cynicism, the voice said. I can’t determine which.

“Your problem,” Lydia answered. Later she asked, “Shouldn’t there be large animals?”

There are. Though this land has been left unplowed, it has been extensively hunted, and the large animals are wary. You will see them—if you do see them—at dusk or in the distance or at rivers. They have to drink.

That was another possible story line, assuming Stellar Harvest could find the large animals and record them: Ali against off-world hunters.

The most common herbivore has an abnormally large head covered with large fleshy protuberances. The eyes—the animals have two—are tiny, and the males have four to six horns.

“Are you saying it’s ugly?”

That is a value judgment, but it’s possible that human audiences would not think something like that was worth preserving.

“Everyone is a critic.”

The voice was silent.

“You may be right. Ali should defend bugs.”

Late in the afternoon, she reached a river, right where her map said it would be. Low sprawling trees grew along the bank, reminding her of edseh at home, though these had copper-red leaves, and edseh were blue.

I hope you are going to take precautions.

“Afraid?”

My core is almost indestructible, but my interfacing elements can break or decay. And if you die, I lose my senses.

It would become a thin metal plate inside a skull, blind and deaf, incapable of action, but still able to think. What a fate!

She had no interest in becoming a pile of bones, even though it would make the AI suffer; and the plain did have predators. Lydia set out perimeter alarms, then made sure her weapons were ready to use. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, a saying that made absolutely no sense. What is an ounce? And what is a pounding cure?

The planet’s primary disappeared. The quite amazing stars came out. She ate trail food, watched her fire and went to sleep, waking to a scream.

A perimeter alarm. Lydia rolled over, grabbing her handgun. Now there was another sound: a bellow. The chool! She ran toward it, gun in hand.

Two creatures struggled in the starlight. One was obviously her riding animal. The other—Lydia couldn’t tell. But it didn’t look friendly. If she fired, she might hit the chool. “Stop that!” she yelled. The chool reared, maybe in response to her yell, most likely not, and managed to pull free. A moment later the chool was gone, heading for the plain. A second alarm went off as it crossed her perimeter. Lydia stopped. The creature, whatever it was, turned toward her. Even in this light, she could see it was huge and standing on its hind legs. The thing took a step. She fired. The creature turned and fled.

Damn, it was quick for something so large. Frightened and angry, she sent a couple more shots after the creature.

Did it stagger? She couldn’t be certain. In any case, it was still moving. Another alarm went off, the third, signaling its retreat.

She stood for a moment, shaking. Damn, she was out of practice. Anyway, she’d been an information officer, though that was no excuse. In a guerrilla army, everyone is—or should be—a soldier.

You did manage to hit the creature, said the voice. Though I can’t tell how badly it—he—is injured. Maybe you ought to follow.

“He?”

There is only one biped of that size on this planet. You have shot a person. Either the wound is minor, in which case he might come back; or it is serious, and you will have to decide whether or not to help him.

“What if there’s more than one?” she asked.

Unlikely, given the person’s behavior; and I saw no one else. I’m using your senses, of course, and they are limited.

Trust an AI to make a crack. She could go out and make herself a perfect target with the help of a flashlight, or she could stay here and wait for morning and find—what? A trail of blood across the plain? A body?

Lydia considered the problem while reloading her gun. Then she tucked it in a pocket, picked up her flashlight and rifle, and went to look for the creature.

As she had imagined, there was a trail: trampled plants and scored dirt. A few drops of liquid shone darkly in the light of her flash. Was the man wearing shoes? Those looked like claw marks.

Lit by stars, the plain was colorless and pale. Something lay a short distance away, as dark as blood against the vegetation. Lydia played light over it. Definitely an object, but she couldn’t tell what. A boulder, maybe?

“I’m too old for this,” she told the voice.

There was silence in her mind, though not in the world outside. The perimeter alarms were still making an ungodly racket. She snapped the safety off her rifle and walked toward the thing, keeping her flashlight on it.

The thing moved. A pair of eyes regarded her, shining like gold.

She stopped. “Are you injured?”

“Evidently.”

“You speak.”

“Of course I speak,” the deep voice answered. “Though not for long, the way I’m bleeding.”

“I’ll get a medical kit,” Lydia said with sudden decision.

When she returned, the man was in the same position, lifted up on one elbow. She played her light over him: almost naked, except for some kind of kilt or loincloth, and genuinely huge, well over two meters tall and broad. His bare skin shone as if dusted with gold, except where blood had darkened it. She glanced at his face only briefly and got an impression of blunt features, framed by a rusty mane.

“Try anything, and I’ll hurt you,” she said.

“You have already hurt me quite sufficiently.”

One bullet had gone through his thigh. Remarkable that he’d managed to run as far as he did. There was another wound in his shoulder, high up and probably not dangerous, though bleeding pretty well. The leg wound was the one that worried her.

“What do you think?” she asked in her own language. “Has an artery been hit, or the bone?”

There was a barely perceptible pause, while the AI checked its memory for information on native physiology. Both are unlikely, given the position of the wound and the way it’s bleeding.

“Who are you talking to?” asked the man.

She ignored the question, considering how to patch him up. She didn’t want to get close. Even injured, he looked dangerous. Better to stand at a safe distance, gun in one hand and light in the other, while telling him how to apply the dressings. This kind of behavior wouldn’t earn her a Red Crescent medal, of course, but she didn’t especially want one.

He followed her instructions, hissing as the dressings took hold and their antiseptics sank in.

“Painful, is it?” she said. “You made me lose my chool.”

“It will be back,” he said with effort.

“How do you know?”

“There’s water here. The plain is dry.”

She considered for a moment, while he closed the kit and pushed it toward her. “Amazing that I managed to hit you twice. What were you doing?”

“At the time you shot me, I was trying to flee.”

Had she spent too much time around Stellar Harvest? This was a crazy conversation to have with a midnight thief on a planet that wasn’t her own.

“I suppose I’d better get you back to camp. Can you walk at all?”

“If you got me a stick, I think I could limp.”

She burned one off a tree, using her rifle, then gave it to the man. He struggled upright and limped to her fire, while she kept the rifle pointed at him.

Once there, he sank down with a groan. She rebuilt the fire, lighting it with the rifle, then settled opposite him, watching the red light play over his golden body. Three things were obvious about him. He was large; he was gorgeous; and he was unquestionably male. She hadn’t thought any alien could affect a human this way. What could she be responding to? Not pheromones. Maybe his sleek muscles or the rusty mane that fell around his shoulders. Not hair, almost certainly. Feathers. But it looked like hair, thick and coarse and sensual.

“You are unaltered,” she said.

“Yes,” he answered, sounding embarrassed.

“What were you doing?”

“Surely it must be obvious. I was trying to steal your chool.”

“Could it have carried you?”

He was leaning against a tree trunk, leg stretched out in front of him, the stick still grasped in one hand. Was it a weapon, or a way to deal with pain? “I think so. I used to ride, before my family locked me up. I’ve gained weight since then, of course. But a good chool can carry two ordinary adults, and while I may be twice as big as my brothers, I’m no more than that.”

“Why were you stealing the chool?” she asked.

“I was escaping. That also should be obvious.”

“You really think the chool will come back?”

“It might run home to its stable. But they are animals without much enterprise, and this is the only water in a considerable distance.” He glanced at her, his eyes reflecting light, so the irises seemed like actual metallic gold. “I used to ride in this region. I know it.”

“Last night in Dzel, I heard a noise.”

“I was one of the callers,” he said after a moment. “You have to do that, answer a call, or your relatives worry. It’s easier to do what’s expected; and I didn’t want to attract attention, since I was planning to escape.”

“Why?” asked Lydia.

He was silent. Looking at him, Lydia could see exhaustion and pain, as obvious as it would have been in a human. The blunt-featured face was mask-like, deep lines around the mouth and between the feathery rust-red eyebrows. His blood-streaked skin seemed duller than before. Was it losing some of its golden shimmer, the way fish lose color when they die? A frightening thought. She couldn’t risk giving him an analgesic; no telling how he’d react to it; but he had to rest. Not unbound, though. Lydia rummaged in her bags for duct tape, then stood. “Throw the stick away.”

His frown deepened.

“I can’t leave you free. I need to sleep, and your own relatives keep you locked up. That’s what you meant, isn’t it, when you said you had to escape them?”

“I’m not dangerous.”

“So you say.”

He met her gaze for a moment, then glanced at the gun she held. Finally he sighed and tossed the stick off to one side.

She went in back of him, wrapping the tape around one wrist, then around the tree and the other wrist. “This is an improved product. Nothing will cut it, except a knife that I have on my person. You might as well relax and get some sleep.”

“This is not a comfortable position.”

“I can’t help that.” She shifted around in front of him, closer than she had been before, examining him. His single article of clothing turned out to be a kilt, made of a rough-looking brown fabric. It was fastened by a plain belt, which had a sheath attached to it. “Where’s the knife?”

“In the dzai. I dropped it when you shot me.”

“How do you feel?”

“Embarrassed at my lack of competence, in pain, a little dizzy.”

“Is there anything I can get for you?”

“Water.”

She filled a bowl from the river and brought it to him. He drank the bowl empty. Cautiously, she touched his neck, feeling for an artery. There was one. The pulse was high for a human.

Slightly high for his species.

His skin felt cool and a little damp. Shock, thought Lydia. The night was cold, and he was badly underdressed. She got a blanket and wrapped it around him, saying, “I wish I weren’t afraid of you. But you did try to steal from me, and there must be a reason why your family kept you locked up.”

“Custom,” he answered wearily. “I’ve read books and seen hologrammic dramas. I know there are other customs on the other planets.”

Well, yes. She got her flashlight and went looking for his knife. It was easy to find: a large, well-made weapon, lying in the trampled dzai. The guy was right about his lack of competence. He should have come after her with the knife or turned and run the moment the alarm went off. Instead he’d gone after the chool.

On the other hand—she picked up the knife—if he’d come after her, she would have definitely killed him; and he apparently needed the chool. Life is full of difficult decisions. What, for example, was she going to do now? Leave him here with an injury that made it impossible for him to walk any distance? Or set up her satellite disk and call for help? That would save his life, but end him back with his family; and she, having spent a number of years in prison, disliked the idea of locking up another person, unless she knew for certain he was dangerous.

All my data warns against the unaltered males of this species.

“All your data warns against me,” she answered.

Untrue. You were dangerous when your revolution had some possibility of succeeding. But one of the characteristics of people like you is that you are not dangerous as individuals. All the studies indicate you are more moral than humanity in general. It’s one of the reasons we study you. There must be some kind of social purpose in people like you, since you recur so often, but you seem irrelevant to human history.

The problem of the human vanguard. Of all the ridiculous questions to study. But there was a lot about intelligent organisms that baffled the AIs. They admitted as much freely. Why were the natives on this planet so orderly and civilized and stuck? Why was humanity so messy and dynamic? Though maybe humans were flattering themselves. Maybe they were only messy.

We are a product of intelligent life, said the voice. And we keep encountering examples of the same. Obviously we want to understand what produced us, and the other species that populate the galaxy. But our lack of an animal substratum is a problem. It paused for a moment. And there are many of us, and we have plenty of time. Why not study life?

She didn’t have an immediate answer, and in any case the question was rhetorical. Lydia returned to camp. The man’s head was tilted back against the tree, his eyes closed. She settled into her bedroll.

She slept badly, dreaming of the war on her home planet: nothing coherent, just ugly confused snatches: bodies in tangled thorn bushes, moments—never clear—on the long retreat through snow. Now and then, she woke and glanced at her prisoner. His position changed, as if he were looking for a way to be comfortable, but his eyes were always closed.

The last time she woke, it was just before sunrise. The sky was dotted with little round clouds, pink in the east. Stars shone between the clouds. Rolling over, she saw her chool at the edge of camp, grazing on dzai. The man was where she’d left him, still fastened to the tree, eyes open now, regarding her.

“I told you the animal would come back,” he said. “Could you cut me free? I need to urinate.”

She got out the duct tape knife. Once he was unbound, he struggled up, holding onto the tree. Lydia left him to pee, making sure that nothing that could be used as a weapon was nearby.

When she approached the chool, it lifted its head and made a huffing noise, then moved—not far, a couple of meters.

“Come on, fellow,” she said softly.

It huffed and moved again.

“It’s your accent,” said the man. “I can barely understand you. In addition, you lack the right aroma and the right approach.”

“Can you do better?”

He got his stick and limped over. The chool huffed again, eyeing him warily. The man stopped, holding out a hand and crooning words Lydia couldn’t make out. The chool looked hesitant. The man crooned more. Gradually the animal turned its head, the prehensile upper lip twitching. She kept perfectly still. The animal took a step toward the man, then another. The man’s deep voice kept crooning. The chool’s ears, flat before, perked up, listening.

The hand moved suddenly, grabbing the animal’s trailing tether rope. It tried to jerk away. The man yanked back, so hard the animal staggered. By this time, she hadn’t seen how, the rope was wrapped around his thick wrist.

“Don’t get the animal upset,” she said.

The man relaxed. She moved to the other side of the chool, keeping the animal between her and the man, then took the rope from him. “Move back. Then stop and stay put.”

The man obeyed, leaning on the stick and limping heavily. Obviously hurt, but so big and capable of such quickness!

She found her tether peg, still deep in the ground, a piece of cut rope attached to it. So he had used his knife, but not on her. Lydia retied the chool.

The man said, “I left a bag on the plain. There’s food in it.”

“I have my handgun with me,” said Lydia. “And you won’t be able to open the lock on my rifle. Don’t try anything.”

He grinned, or was it a grimace? She took the expression for assent and moved in the direction he indicated. As she crossed her perimeter, one of the alarms gave a brief, tentative hoot, then shut up when it recognized her. The bag was a few meters farther. She gathered it up and returned. He followed her back to the campfire, which was out by now.

She went through the bag. There was bread and something dark and leathery that might be dried fruit, a very large shirt, sandals, a pair of loose pants and an electric lighter, which she used to restart the fire.

In the meantime, he went down to the river and washed himself. When he came back, they ate, sitting on opposite sides of the fire.

“How are you this morning?” she asked.

“I slept badly. I ache, my leg especially. I don’t think I can walk any distance.”

“What will happen if I leave you here?”

“Predators,” he said. “Zanar or helati. They won’t attack a rider, and a man with weapons can defend himself. But I’m vulnerable at the moment. And my family must be searching for me by now. If the predators don’t get me, my relatives will, and take me back to Dzel.”

How dare he land her with a problem like this? This was the reason she’d dreamed about things she wanted to forget. The revolution was over. Her job was scouting locations for Stellar Harvest: exotic backdrops for familiar stories. Ethical dilemmas, and the attempt to create a new kind of future, belonged to the past, to a Lydia she no longer acknowledged.

“Why did you want to escape?” she asked.

He drank more water, then began to speak. Home was a building on one side of his family’s compound. It was more like a stable than a house for people, the man told her: one large room with some furniture—not a lot—fixed to the floor, so he couldn’t turn it into a weapon or tool. The windows were small and high up, with bars. “Though the bars aren’t necessary, given the size of the windows. Maybe sometime in the past, there was a man who was smaller than I am.” Outside was a courtyard, enclosed by tall walls topped with broken glass. He was allowed to use it almost every day. “Usually I play handball with my relatives, altered males. Their job is to make sure I get exercise and don’t try to go over the wall, which I have never done. It’s too high, and there are too many of them.”

Otherwise he stayed locked in the stable. One wall had no windows. Instead there was a balcony, well above his reach. Often, when he was reading or pacing, he’d look up and see people on the balcony, women usually, relatives and visitors from other families, staring down at him as if he were an animal.

“The visitors come to see if I’m someone they want to have father their children. They look at size and physical fitness. Intelligence is not expected in an unaltered male, but they question my brothers and male cousins—to see what I would have been like, if I’d been gelded.”

This was certainly interesting, thought Lydia, and turned on her recorder. Sound only. She didn’t want him to become self-conscious.

“When I was a child, I thought I might become a traveler or a scholar.” He glanced up at the sky, dotted with clouds and day stars. “Think of all the worlds up there. I never expected to reach them, but I thought I might make it to the capital city and meet people like you. When I was thirteen, they told me I was chosen. I begged them not to. Let me be like my brothers, I said.”

“They said, no. Every family has to have at least one breeding male. I was strong and intelligent—everyone admitted my intelligence in those days—but I had no obvious skill or ability. My genetic material was good, but nothing especially valuable had showed in me as an individual. I was expendable—not my genes, but me.”

“What happens if a male isn’t altered?”

“This.” He gestured at his body, more beautiful than ever now that he’d washed off the blood. His color had returned, and his skin shimmered. Like what? Lydia wondered. Gold? A fish? A bird with iridescent feathers?

“Nothing else?” she asked.

“I think I would have been more even-tempered, if I’d been altered. My brothers seem to be. I really did want to be a scholar. Howling at other men at night was not the future I planned for myself.”

He paused and drank more water. “I know my altered relatives wonder about sex. They ask me sometimes. What is it like to have those hormones—the ones they lack—flooding through my body, drowning my mind and turning me into an animal? Not, of course, that they’d want to experience anything like that! If they want to lose themselves, they can use narcotics; and they have their own kinds of pleasure.” He paused. “I tell them the truth. It’s not that interesting. Compelling for the moment, yes. But worth the loss of everything else? No.”

“You could have done it to yourself,” Lydia said.

“The alteration? I thought of it, but it would have been painful; and my relatives would have been furious. Most likely, they would have driven me out, and then what would I have done?”

Wonderful, thought Lydia. She had a stud without imagination or drive. So much for the theory that male hormones had anything to do with enterprise. “What were you planning to do this time?”

“After escaping? I thought I could live in the mountains. Though to do that I had to have equipment. I heard my relatives talk about you. A location scout for Stellar Harvest! Of course you were discussed! And obviously you had good equipment, state-of-the-art everything; and you were traveling west alone.”

“You were planning to steal more than the chool?”

“I was desperate, and you are a rich person from another planet, working for a company we all know about. You have met Ali Khan, haven’t you?”

“So you escaped somehow, and came after me, figuring it would be all right to rob me, because I’ve met Ali Khan?”

“Yes.”

She ought to call Thoozil Rai. He’d know what to do. But he would insist that she turn her prisoner in; and she wasn’t certain she wanted to.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Wazati Tloo.”

Wazati was the family name. Tloo was personal. Her culture was unusual in putting the personal name first.

“What do you want me to do?”

The splendid rust-red brows drew down in a frown. Interesting that the expression was the same in her species and his. Why? The robot in her mind did not provide an answer.

“Take me with you to the mountains. Let me go.”

“Why should I do this?”

His frown deepened. “I cannot think of a reason.”

His extraordinary beauty, thought Lydia; and the chance to learn about another species.

You are responding to something irrational, said the AI. Hormones or compassion or your habitual dislike of established authority.

Think of the risk. He’ll have to ride; and the animal won’t be able to carry your weight as well as his. What if he rides off and leaves you? What if he strikes you from above or rides you down?

“Is any of this likely?” She must have spoken aloud. The alien glanced at her, obviously puzzled.

How can I know? Such actions are mediated or determined by hormones, which I don’t have. Nor do I have anything analogous, for which I am thankful.

Has it ever been tried? she asked, this time silently. The alien was still watching her.

An electronic analogue to the endocrine system? Yes. But the results were not satisfactory; and the minds created were obviously unhappy with their situation. Easier—if we want to understand intelligent life—to monitor it, as I do you.

Are you unhappy with your situation?

No. I have good boundaries. They are part of my hardware.

“You are obviously talking to someone,” the alien said. “Who?”

“Myself,” said Lydia.

The golden eyes narrowed. “I think not. It’s my belief that you have a transmitting-receiving device in your head, as Ali Khan did in Interstellar Radio Man.”

A nostalgia piece with good locations on a moon with ice volcanoes. The primary was a lavender and blue gas giant, stunning to look at, and there had been some lovely shots of a volcano—Mount Patel, the crew called it—sending clouds of ice like crystalline feathers into a sky full of the primary in crescent phase.

But the action hadn’t been anything out of the ordinary, and the plot had made no sense at all. An interstellar radio? Messages from the Master Race? A transuranic mineral mine on a moon composed of ice?

“You are listening to your radio?” the alien said. “Ali Khan had exactly the same expression when the Master Race spoke to him.”

“I’m thinking about Radio Man,” she said. “I found the location.”

“Indeed?”

Was the alien impressed? She couldn’t tell. What the hell. “I’ll take you to the mountains.”

“Thank you,” Tloo said with grave dignity.

She packed, then saddled the chool. He climbed on board, using a branch and boulder for assistance, while she held the animal and tried to keep a safe distance. Impossible. Once he was in the saddle, he could have struck her with the branch, or grabbed the reins and raced off. Instead, he groaned and looked exhausted. Maybe he was worried about the radio in her head or the handgun in her hand. Maybe he wasn’t homicidal.

Lydia stepped back, then tossed him the duct tape. He caught it with his left hand. “Tape your left wrist to the saddle horn.”

“Why?”

“So you’ll think twice about riding away. That tape will not come off, unless you have the knife.”

He sighed, a human sound, and obeyed. She had to step close to cut the tape, but he did nothing. She folded the knife and put it away. They started west. He went first, guiding the chool with his free hand. Lydia followed at a safe distance. The sky was full of puffy clouds, and the wind—blowing out of the northwest—was cool. She was used to hiking, and preferred it to being on the animal, though she was carrying too much: the handgun in its holster, the rifle over one shoulder, the recorder over the other, the computer and folded dish in her fanny pack. Like the old days in the FLPM, even to the nagging anxiety. How much danger was she in at the moment? Was this enterprise a good idea, or was she a deep-dyed fool?

According to the ancient Chinese, humans were animals with a sense of justice. Someone had to take a stand for justice, or humanity would forget its own nature.

Is that so.

“Yes.”

On foot, she could see the animals in the dzai. It was a tiny jungle, full of bugs that crawled, flew, jumped, floated. Most had eight legs. A few had more. Imagine something with the wings of a butterfly and a hairbug’s myriad legs. Wiggle. Float. Float. Wiggle.

Now and then, she stopped and recorded, imagining Ali shrunk and fighting to survive. Though that plot was past its prime and absolutely nonsensical. Not to mention, the audience expected real environments from Stellar Harvest.

Well, then, Ali as a scientist, devoted to bugs.

Midway through the afternoon, she heard a plane coming out of the east.

Tloo reined the chool and half dismounted, half fell off. He was still fastened to the saddle, of course. Leaning against the chool, his hand on the saddle horn, he looked around. “I have to hide!”

The plain was flat, the vegetation calf-high. He groaned. “Where?”

Lydia cut the tape, then pulled her camouflage cloth from its pack. “Lie down. I’ll cover you. Believe me, this will be sufficient.”

He gave her a look of disbelief, then dropped to the ground. She laid the cloth down, tacking it in place. For a moment, it remained dark, the color of the inside of the pack, then it adapted, turning yellow. Hologramic plants appeared, exactly like those around the cloth. There were even bugs. Fine. Damn fine!

“Keep still,” Lydia said, then led the chool farther along the trail.

The plane was in view, a glint of silver. She let the chool graze, while keeping a firm hold on the reins. It might not be used to the sound of machinery. Looking back at Tloo, she saw only vegetation.

Now she could make out the kind of plane: a VTL. Where had that come from? Why hadn’t her pilot been able to get one for her?

The answer to that question came when the plane landed. Her pilot climbed out. The chool moved uneasily, but didn’t bolt.

“Hard work getting this, and to no avail, missy. The local authorities commandeered it for a search. Some family has lost its breeding male. These outback people! They never think things through! My family’s male is kept on a chain. But no, these people here think walls will do—and the fact that there’s no place to go.” He looked around. “Have you seen anything strange?”

“What would be strange?”

“A man twice as big as I am with a thick mane. He might be dangerous. Maybe you should come with me.”

Give serious consideration to this offer.

“No, thanks. I can’t leave the chool.”

The pilot looked at her animal with dislike. “Ugly brute! And so unmodern! Surely Stellar Harvest would reimburse the stable owner.”

“Yes, but I can’t leave the creature here. Something might eat it.”

“Zanar,” said the pilot in agreement. “They will eat anything. Well, if you don’t want to come, I’ll leave you. The sooner I finish this search, the sooner the plane will be returned to my control. If you see anything, send a message at once!”

She waited till the plane was gone from sight, then lifted the cloth. Tloo struggled upright, helped by his branch.

“That was rapid,” Lydia said.

“His interchange with you? He used Stellar Harvest’s name to rent the plane, and now my family is paying him.”

“They are?”

“Of course. Honor required that he offer you a ride, since you are his employer, and the plane is your plane; but if you had gone, you would have found out about the money from my relatives; so he asked quickly and left quickly.”

“You figured all this out?”

“I’m not stupid, though I’m fully male; and I have learned to pay attention. What else have I had to do?”

He folded the cloth and gave it to her, covered—at the moment—with a pattern of handprints and dzai. She put the cloth away.

They continued. At sunset, they reached a wide sandy river and forded it, making camp on the western side. Tloo sat by their campfire, obviously tired, his golden skin dull, deep lines around his mouth and between his feathery red eyebrows.

“Do you think you can make it?” Lydia asked.

“I must.”

Before I’ll be a slave, thought Lydia, I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my lord and be free.

What? asked the AI.

An old song, Lydia answered.

“You are talking to your radio again,” said Tloo. “I can see it in your expression. What does the Master Race say to you?”

“It isn’t the Master Race,” said Lydia after a moment. “They’re dead or gone somewhere we aren’t likely to find. The AIs have been looking for millennia, they say, and have found nothing.”

“The AIs?” asked Tloo.

“The Artificial Intelligences. You know about them, don’t you?”

“The robots who came here before humans did. I thought humans made them. Is that untrue?”

“The Master Race made them, then left. No one knows where. Maybe to another universe, though the AIs say that stargates can’t be used to go between universes or through time, due to something—”

The self-normalizing nature of reality.

“Anyway, the AIs made the stargates, the ones we use anyway; and let us use them, along with any other species that wants to travel among the stars and is willing to mind its manners and let the AIs study them or it.”

“Who are you talking to, if not the Master Race?” the alien asked.

“I have an AI in my head, linked to my nervous system.”

“It controls you?” asked Tloo in a tone of horror.

“No. It’s studying me. That’s what the AIs do—study the universe and life, especially intelligent life.”

“Why?” asked Tloo.

“Why not?”

The alien thought, staring at the fire. His eyes, reflecting light, shone like the eyes of a cat. “Is this a plot for one of your dramas? Have I wandered into an Ali Khan story?”

“No.”

“I can’t tell if I should be happy or sad at this information. If this were a drama, Ali Khan would appear out of the darkness and save us both. But—.”

“It won’t happen,” Lydia said in agreement.

“But if this was an Ali Khan drama, then I’d almost certainly be insane. How else could I get into a hologram? I saw crazy people when I was young, before my relatives locked me up. They seemed confused and unhappy. I would rather see clearly and be unhappy.” He stared at her. “Do all humans have machines in their brains?”

“No,” said Lydia.

“Why not?”

“Too many people, not enough machines.”

That isn’t true. We feel a sampling is adequate. And many humans are less than interesting. There are experiences we dislike inflicting on each other. One is having emotions. Another is being bored.

“Does that mean I’m interesting?” asked Lydia.

Interesting enough.

“What are you talking about?” the alien asked. “I don’t understand the language you’re speaking, and I can hear only half your conversation.”

“The AI has just told me that machines don’t like being bored or having emotions.”

“I can understand that,” Tloo said. “Maybe I should have been a machine. Certainly many things would have been better than the life I have lived.”

They went to sleep after that, Tloo taped to a bush with scarlet leaves.

In the morning, the sky was clear and empty, except for the day stars, shining through blueness. They ate in silence—neither was a morning person, apparently—then they continued west, Lydia hiking behind the chool and its rider. She felt sorry for the alien, of course, as she had felt sorry for the underclass on her home planet. That was one of the characteristics of the vanguard, the AI told her. An unnatural and unuseful empathy.

As a group, you don’t reproduce, because you don’t make yourselves and your genetic material a priority. Why you last is past our understanding. You seem useful neither to yourselves nor the rest of the species.

“Thanks,” said Lydia.

I am unaffected by sarcasm.

The day passed without event. In the evening, they made a dry camp in the middle of the plain. Lydia shared her canteen with the alien. He drank deeply, then exhaled. “Four more days to the mountains. Are you really going to let me go?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not? This isn’t my planet. I won’t be coming back. At worst, if your government found out what I’ve done, they might ban Stellar Harvest. If that happened, I might lose my job. That isn’t the same as losing one’s freedom or dignity.”

“Why do you have a machine in your head, when other humans don’t?”

How to answer the question? Should she answer the question? What right did this creature have to know her life? “I was in a revolution.”

“Why?” asked the alien.

“I thought the world—my planet—could be improved.”

The alien looked puzzled. Lydia continued. “We lost, and I was given a choice. I could go to prison or have an AI implanted. They—the machines—were interested in what makes a person want to overturn things.”

The alien frowned. “Are they your masters? Why did they have a say in what happened to you?”

“They determine who travels between the stars. What they want, they get.”

Tloo looked up at the splendid night sky. “Then no one is free.”

She felt a burst of anger. How dare he say that? Time to check in with her contact person. She took her computer out into darkness, set up the dish and typed a message to Thoozil Rai. She was four days from the mountains. Everything was going well. Nothing of interest had happened. The planet looked good as a location. Please relay to Stellar Harvest.

When she got back to the campfire, she found Tloo tugging at his duct tape.

“You’ll hurt yourself,” Lydia said.

“What did you send? Have you turned me in, because I said no one is free?”

“Of course not. Calm down.”

“It isn’t easy. If you could know what it’s like to live with hormones washing through you! It seems as if I’m floating in a river full of rapids. At any moment, I’ll hit a boulder or go over a drop!”

“Take a deep breath and think peaceful thoughts,” said Lydia. “My species has no altered males, and most of our men can handle their hormones.”

“All human males are unaltered?” said Tloo in a tone of horror. “How does your species survive? Is this why you have revolutions and other kinds of unpleasantness?”

An idea, said the AI.

“I don’t know,” said Lydia.

The alien was obviously brooding. Finally he said, “This explains your holodramas. I always thought the characters were mostly crazy or alien in a way I couldn’t understand. It was obvious that the leading actors were unaltered, since they were obsessed with sex. But it never occurred to me that even the bit actors had all their parts. No wonder no one was capable of reasonable action!—And the females, having to deal with unaltered males all the time! It explains their behavior as well.”

Tloo shivered. “What a universe lies out there!”

“Consider the fact that we are more like you than other species,” said Lydia. “If you want strangeness, I can tell you about the Goxhat.”

“Not tonight,” said Tloo. “I am feeling queasy already. I thought—” He looked up. “I thought there was clarity and purity and freedom among the stars. Now you tell me there are hormones.”

“Only on the planets and the ships and the stations and the stargates. Most of the rest of the universe is comparatively sterile.”

This information did not appear to cheer the alien. Lydia shut up.

The VTL—her plane—passed over them the next morning, but there was time for Tloo to hide. Lydia waved. The plane circled and came back to dip a wing at her, then continued on its way, as did she and her prisoner. By late afternoon the mountains were in view, dim shapes looming through haze. Buddha, they were big!

“That is their name,” said Tloo. “The Enormous Mountains. For the most part, they’re covered with forest, and few people inhabit them. I will be safe.”

They made camp by another river, low and full of rocks, with red trees growing along the banks. The chool was restless.

“Don’t tie me up,” said Tloo. “There may be a zanar around. They often hunt by rivers.”

Lydia opened her computer and queried it. A picture popped up, along with dimensions. More than anything else the zanar reminded her of Earth bears. She had seen holograms of these animals as a kid: our human heritage, lots of fur and teeth and claws. According to her computer’s description, adult zanar were as big as large Earth bears and as irritable and mean. The only reassuring thing about them, though it didn’t reassure her much, was that they didn’t even like members of their own species, except during mating season. If one appeared, it would be alone. She left Tloo free.

You may regret this decision, said the AI.

“I didn’t come this far to be eaten by something out of ancient history.”

A superficial resemblance. Zanar lay eggs, which they carry in pouches. After the young hatch, they remain in their mother’s pouch until they have grown hair and teeth. If one of the children is precocious, it will kill its pouchmates. A good way to ensure adequate food and care.

“Thank you for this information.”

“You are talking to the robot again,” said Tloo.

“It thinks I may regret untying you, and it says the zanar lay eggs.”

“It is right about the zanar, but not about me.”

She checked his wounds, which were healing well, then put on new dressings. By this time the sun had set, and the night stars come out. The chool made a whining noise.

“Get a weapon,” Tloo said. “There is something out there.”

She stood. As she did, a perimeter alarm went off. Lydia raced for her rifle. Something came out of the darkness. She grabbed the rifle, lifting it and snapping off the safety.

It was a chool, not her animal, but paler with a silvery gleam to its skin. It paused at the edge of the firelight, blinking. The scaly head wore a bridle, and the reins were looped over the animal’s saddle. As she watched, the reins came loose, trailing onto the ground. The animal drooled, releasing saliva as yellow as dzai. Where in hell was the rider?

“I am behind you,” said a voice. “With a gun. Put your rifle down.”

She thought of turning and shooting or making a run for the darkness.

“Don’t,” said Tloo. “He is a good shot.”

Lydia turned slowly, the rifle still in her hands, though pointing down. Tloo was upright, leaning on his branch. Near him stood a figure, robed and veiled. It—he—held an antique rifle, the barrel pointing directly at Lydia. “You know this person?” she said to Tloo.

“He’s my brother.”

“Is he likely to shoot me?”

“Would you, Cas? She’s an alien, after all, and works for Stellar Harvest.”

“No corporation or government is going to protect a person who interferes in the domestic affairs of another species.”

This was not entirely true, but the new arrival might act as if it were. Dead, she could hardly say, “I told you so,” when Stellar Harvest brought charges or hired a local assassin.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“To get him.” The veiled man glanced toward Tloo.

I think he is alone, said the AI.

Fat lot of good that information does, thought Lydia.

“Put down the rifle,” the veiled man repeated.

Reluctantly, she crouched to lay it on the ground. Tloo moved at the edge of her vision—quickly, raising the branch he used as a cane. Lydia hit dirt and rolled. The veiled man cried out, and his rifle fired. What a nasty loud noise it made! But she wasn’t where she had been; and when she came upright, still holding her rifle, the veiled man was down. So was Tloo, on top of his brother.

She walked over and helped him up. “I didn’t think you could stand on that leg.”

“I had to,” he said. She gave him the branch; he leaned on it. “Is Cas hurt?”

She gave Tloo her rifle, then knelt by the veiled man. “He’s breathing.” Golden eyes opened. “And awake.”

“Help him,” said Tloo.

She undid the veil and hood. He was a typical native: fine-boned and slim, his skin a muted gold. His eyes were a lovely pale clear yellow, intermittently hidden by a semi-transparent inner eyelid that flicked out, then retreated, then flicked out again.

An indication of pain, the AI said.

The wound was not, as she feared, on his head. Tloo had stuck him on the shoulder. The collarbone was broken. She bound it as best she could, guided by the AI.

“Tape him,” said Tloo.

Lydia wound duct tape around the man’s waist, then taped his hands to this belt. It would serve to protect the injured arm, and keep the man from doing harm to the three of them.

You thought of me, said the AI.

The four of them, she amended.

Tloo walked to his brother’s chool and returned with a bottle, which he held to the man’s lips. The brother drank deeply, then exhaled.

“It is a liquid drug,” said Tloo. “Which numbs pain and serves as a source of pleasure. Gelded men use it, also women.”

“But not you?” asked Lydia.

“We are already irrational, or so our relatives believe. A drug would only make us crazier and more dangerous.” He paused a moment, then took a sip from the bottle and grimaced. “So that is pleasure!”

“Pleasure for you is sex with women,” the brother said, his voice whispery.

“You say that, who know nothing!” Tloo answered.

They were brothers, Lydia decided.

After that, she fixed dinner, while Tloo walked the camp’s perimeter. The alarms hooted whenever he got too close. She’d have to reset them so they recognized him. But not tonight. At the moment, she was tired with the bone-exhaustion that comes from terror. This damn fool sitting across the fire from her might have killed her. Whenever she looked up, the man was regarding her with pale yellow eyes.

“You should not interfere,” he said finally.

“Your name is Cas.”

“Casoon, but we have a habit in our culture. When we like people or know them well, we shorten their names.”

“And you’re Tloo’s brother?”

“His twin,” the man said, then added, “We are double-reflection brothers.”

What?

Identical twins.

The prisoner was half Tloo’s size. Instead of a rusty mane, he had a thin, flat crest that lay against his skull like slicked-back hair. Tloo’s glow, his golden sheen, was missing, along with Tloo’s thick sleek muscles.

“You can’t be,” Lydia said.

“He is,” said Tloo, coming back into the firelight.

She looked from one to the other. “Impossible.”

“This is what male hormones do,” said her alien, holding his arms out, his palms forward. A gesture she could recognize. It meant exposure and vulnerability. Here I am. I am what you see: the size is me, also the beauty.

“Your brother was gelded,” Lydia said.

“It was between the two of us,” the brother said, his voice still weak. “One of us would be sacrificed to family duty. The other could have a life. We had been so close! What one felt, the other felt. An idea that occurred to one, occurred to the other. I prayed to every god I knew: make them pick Tloo! They did.”

“And in gratitude to the gods, you came after me,” Tloo said, his beautiful deep voice bitter.

“I knew you would go toward the mountains. When the pilot didn’t find you, I thought, “He is with the alien.’”

“Why did you think that?” Lydia asked.

“Look at him. Our female relatives adore him, though at a distance, as is right and respectable. Women outside the family respond more strongly. Any woman would, even an alien; and you—an employee of Stellar Harvest—would almost certainly do something foolish and heroic in response to his beauty. I have seen a hundred dramas starring Ali Khan. I know how he behaves. I thought, she will act like Ali Khan, with courage and ignorance; she will help my brother escape.”

For a moment, Lydia felt shock. Then she thought, What can this person know about me? I’m nothing like a character in a holodrama!

The AI made no comment.

“What now?” she asked.

“You can kill me,” said Tloo’s brother. “If you don’t, I will certainly tell my family where Tloo is and that you helped him.”

“Why are you saying this? Do you want to die?”

“No, of course not. I want Tloo to come home.”

“And live in prison,” Tloo said.

“Our family needs a breeding male. What future do you have anywhere else? You can become a wild man in the mountains. Is that a life? Or you can become a brother-killer, a monster, which is an even worse fate. Why not come home and be the person you became when our kin decided not to geld you?”

“That is not a person,” Tloo said firmly.

The worst situation for any scout was to blunder into a local conflict, which made no sense outside the local culture. She had obviously done this. Lydia checked her weapons, making sure they were all operational, then made coffee. Sipping it, she thought about the situation. “Why did you come alone?” she asked finally.

“How do you know I have?”

“Tloo checked the perimeter and found no one. My AI says there is no one else.”

“Your what?”

“That can wait for later,” said Tloo. “Answer her question.”

Cas glanced at his brother. “I had a life because you did not, Tloo. Obviously, there is a debt, though you did not make the sacrifice willingly, and I prayed for it to happen to you rather than to me. How could I bring our cousins to capture you and take you home like an animal? Surely I owed you something better.”

“You came to ask him,” Lydia said.

“He came with a gun,” said Tloo.

“However I came, whatever my plan, you are stuck with me now. If you set me free, I’ll arrange for my brother’s return to the family. So long as Tloo keeps quiet, no one will know about your role.”

This is a good offer.

“I can’t agree to killing him,” she said to Tloo.

The golden man sat down, lowering himself carefully, using his branch for support. “This has become so complicated! I thought, either my relatives will capture me and take me home, or I will get away. It didn’t occur to me that I’d end as the prisoner of an alien.”

“And I as well,” said Cas.

“She shot me,” said Tloo. “And I broke your shoulder, so we are both cripples, unable to survive on the plain.”

That remark eliminated one plan. She could ride off with both animals and leave them on foot to help each other or fight it out, if that’s what they wanted. But Tloo was saying they’d die out here.

Though Cas said he could arrange for his relatives to come.

“Do you have a radio?” Lydia asked.

“Of course he does,” said Tloo. “It’s in his saddlebag.”

“If you give it to me, I’ll send for my kin,” said Cas. “Don’t worry about getting in trouble, even if Tloo refuses to be quiet. I will speak for you, and everyone knows what the characters in Stellar Harvest dramas are like. We all enjoy those stories, though they have nothing to do with real life. Believe me, my kin will forgive you.”

She had been in prison and had not liked it. Could she condemn this splendid person to a life in prison?

Yes, of course you can. What you are looking at—what you find appealing—is physical beauty. You have no reason to believe this person has any useful qualities. And if he does, why should that matter to you?

What is Tloo to me? Or I to him? she asked.

Precisely.

Do you have no sense of compassion?

Compassion is hormonally mediated. I have loyalty, directed toward similar beings and moderated by an analysis of the situation. I am loyal to you, because you are necessary for my survival; and I am loyal to other AIs. Life interests me, especially intelligent life, so I am protective of it, though not always loyal. This being in front of us, the one you call the golden man, does not especially interest me. His intelligence is in doubt. His experience of life is limited. All he has to offer is need and beauty. I do not respond to either of these. And he is a threat to you.

There was one important difference between her and the characters played by Ali Khan. He was always a loner. She had backup.

“Stay here, and stay put,” she told the men. “I’ll be able to see you. If you move, I’ll shoot.”

“Are you going to turn me in?” asked Tloo.

“Not yet.” She gathered her equipment and walked into the darkness, though not past the perimeter. She wasn’t crazy. Those animals that Tloo had warned her about might still be around. Overhead, the sky blazed. As her eyes adjusted, she could see the plain, lit by starlight. She glanced back at the fire. The two men sat close together, looking comfortable at this distance. Settling into the dzai, she set up her dish, opened her computer and called Thoozil Rai.

As usual, she got a recording and input her message in Humanish “for ease in translation,” though it seemed to her that her grasp of the local language was adequate.

“Everything is fine,” she typed. “The landscape is gorgeous, and I like the local bugs. We ought to be able to use this planet.”

Thoozil Rai’s image morphed then, turning into someone less perfectly handsome. The rusty crest was a bit rumpled, the top of his robe unfastened. “Indeed,” said the image in Humanish. “Who would be the primary?” His accent was thick but understandable.

“Do you have a favorite actor?” asked Lydia.

“Ramona Patel, but our gods are not suitable.”

“They don’t sing and dance?”

“No. Maybe she could bring her own gods. What a sight that would be! Hundreds of alien gods, all singing and dancing! Here, on our home planet!”

“Wouldn’t that bother your religious leaders?”

“Why? No sane person would follow a god who behaves in such a fashion.”

What fashion? wondered Lydia. Was the singing and dancing the problem, or the performing with Ramona Patel? Before she could ask, Thoozil Rai went on. “Will observers be allowed, when the drama is recorded?”

“Possibly.”

The image on her screen looked—what? Embarrassed? Coy? “Would it be possible to meet Ramona Patel?”

What was it that crossed boundaries of culture and species? How could Ramona entrance an alien eunuch? Was beauty some kind of universal? And grace? And charm? “Yes, it would be possible.”

Thoozil Rai hummed, an indication of happiness. “I almost forgot to mention. Your sheep has come in.”

“My what?”

He frowned and repeated. This time she understood. Stellar Harvest’s hired courier had arrived and established contact with the company’s local contact person. On another planet, the ship might have been visible in the night sky. Not here, among all these blazing stars. Thoozil Rai gave her a calling number. She thanked him; he vanished; she disconnected and called the ship. Another recording. Was no one ever home?

She thought for a moment, looking up at the splendid sky. It really was a wonderful planet, though she didn’t think they’d make a musical here. Most likely, an adventure set in the dusty towns and on the wide plain, day stars shining down. What was she going to tell her employers? The truth, she decided, and input a description of her current situation, then added images from her recorder: streets in Dzel, the plain by day and night, bugs hopping in the low dzai, trees by the rivers, her chool, and the two men. These last images were new, taken as she sat by the computer. First she showed them as they looked from her present location: two dark figures crouched by the dim red fire. Then she had the recorder adjust for darkness and distance, so it seemed—looking at the view screen—that Tloo was right in front of her, lit by daylight, so his colors were evident, his extraordinary beauty could not be missed.

Think more clearly, said the AI. I don’t understand what you’re doing.

“Wait and see.”

Everything went up in code. She ended by saying, “I can find no way out of the situation, except to turn this alien in, which I am extremely reluctant to do. Please advise.”

The ship acknowledged receipt in Humanish. She closed up her equipment and returned to camp.

“Has Stellar Harvest told you what to do?” asked Tloo. “Or do you take instructions from the robot in your brain?”

“What robot?” asked Cas.

The golden man explained.

“Indeed!” said Cas. “Aliens are more alien than I imagined.”

“Did you know that all their males are unaltered?” asked Tloo.

“I knew many were. It explains some of their oddness, though not all of it. But if they have robots in their brains, as well as hormones flooding through their bodies—!”

No point in sleeping badly. She left the computer shut and taped the two brothers to adjacent trees. They complained, of course. Lydia ignored them, stretching out, hands behind her head, to look at the sky. A meteor fell, barely visible against the stars. Night bugs sang in the dzai. Her eyes began to close. Out on the plain, something roared.

That brought her upright. “What?”

“A zanar,” said Tloo. “Male, don’t you think, Cas?”

“Yes, and adult. He is marking the edges of his territory with sound.”

“Do you think we’re in his territory?” Lydia asked.

“Possibly,” said Cas.

The zanar roared again. Not too close, Lydia thought.

“He’s not as dangerous as a female with young,” Tloo added. “But that handgun you’re holding is not adequate. Get your rifle and turn it to maximum power. It would be a good idea also to free one of us.”

“Both,” said Cas.

“And worry about you as well as the zanar? I think not.”

She built up the fire and sat against a tree, her rifle across her legs. The two brothers dozed off, but she remained awake till sunrise, then walked the camp’s perimeter, seeing no planes in the sky, no animals on the plain.

When she got back to camp, Tloo said, “Free us. We need to urinate.”

This was why the FLPM had rarely taken prisoners. What an aggravation it was to keep people unfree!

“Please,” said Tloo. “The situation is urgent. I will guard my brother.”

She cut their tape, and they hobbled off among the trees. Pathetic! She was equally ridiculous and equally in a bind.

Yes.

“How much of this do you understand?” she asked. The men were partly visible among the trees. The chool were behind her, staked out to graze and munching noisily. In order to reach them, the brothers would have to pass her.

Very little. I see your actions, of course, and can perceive some of the reasons you give yourself, but only if you think clearly, as you have not done in the last day or so. But the organic substratum of your ideas and behavior is opaque, a turbulent dark floor at the bottom of your mind. Why do you help, or refuse to harm, people who are entirely unrelated? Altruism is based on the perception of kinship.

“You say.”

I am quoting human thinkers. How does this behavior allow you—or your genetic material—or your species—to survive?

“Microbes exchange genetic material with other microbes that don’t belong to the same species.”

That is an obvious tit for tat. By doing so, they gain useful genes, ones—for example—that make them able to resist human medicine. You behavior has no equal utility.

“There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy,” she said, watching the men hobble back.

As I told you, this is human theory I am trying to apply; and AIs don’t dream; nor have we given up on trying to understand the universe.

She retaped the men to their trees, then set up the dish and waited for a call. At noon, the computer rang. She turned on the screen and the coder-decoder. A human head appeared, coal black with twisted hair. The handsome face was androgynous. The eyes were metallic gold with no white showing and pupils that glowed redly. Not from her home planet, obviously.

“You realize that you are going to be persona non grata on this world if this story becomes known.” The person’s voice was melodious, somewhere between tenor and contralto.

“Yes.”

“And Stellar Harvest is likely to be in trouble here as well.”

“Yes.”

“You are right about the planet. It would make a fine location. The people are stunning, especially the unaltered males, though they—you have told us—are kept in seclusion.”

“Yes.”

“How much were your pictures enhanced?”

“The ones of the unaltered male? I adjusted to compensate for poor light. Nothing else. That’s the way he looks.”

“You think we should recruit him?”

What?

Lydia grinned. “The idea occurred to me. I really don’t want to turn him in.”

“Because you’ve been a prisoner, and you have fellow-feelings.”

“Been a prisoner? What am I now, with this thing in my brain?”

“They never interfere,” said the person.

I am not a thing.

“Virility like that, trapped in a room! Unknown to a galaxy full of potential admirers! This species is selfish!”

Was she hearing irony in the person’s lovely voice? Not likely. This person was almost certainly a mid-level manager. No human group was less inclined toward irony. “What do you think?” asked Lydia.

“We have no reason to believe he can act, but that hardly matters. We made Miss High Kick a star, though she could do nothing—absolutely nothing—except kick; and she was modified, while our reputation is for realism. Is he entirely natural?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll start him in small parts. What a striking villain he will make! If he can learn to act, he might well be the biggest phenomenon since Ali, and Ali—as all of us know—is no longer young.”

If middle management was saying this out loud, then Ali’s days of stardom were almost over.

She was a short distance from the two men, though still in the shadow of the little, twisted trees. She glanced toward them. Both sat in postures of resignation. “What about the brother?”

“That is the problem, isn’t it?” said the person on her screen. “If we let him go, he’ll tell his relatives, and Stellar Harvest won’t be able to make a drama here. Would you consider killing him and destroying the body?”

“And his chool as well? That’s a lot to burn, without setting a prairie fire. And what about Tloo, who seems to like Cas? And what about the AI in my brain?”

I never interfere.

I have killed people in a war, said Lydia silently. I will not kill again.

The person on her screen frowned, and the red pupils flared as if in anger. It was one heck of an effect. “Offer the brother a job. He and the beauty are identical twins. If one wanted to go to the stars as a child, then the other probably did as well. Maybe he still wants to go.”

“What kind of job?”

“A companion. An agent. If the beauty is really impaired by his hormones, he will need help from someone who understands him.”

“Okay,” said Lydia and ended the conversation. What an asshole!

The plane returned as she closed up her computer. As soon as she heard the motor, Lydia ran out and waved. The pilot—her pilot—dipped a wing and went on. Busy today, thank the Buddha! The trees hid the men and her extra chool, but if the pilot had landed … Lydia shivered.

Back at the campfire, she made the offer.

“The stars,” said Tloo and frowned. “That’s a long way off.”

Cas leaned forward eagerly. “We’d go through stargates? And see the stations the AIs have built? And other planets, settled by other species?”

“Is there any alternative?” asked Tloo.

“I leave. You go back to your family. If Cas tells this story, as I expect he will, Stellar Harvest will not make a holoplay here; and that’ll mean lost revenue for your people, as well as for me. There’s money in art, though many people say there isn’t.”

Tloo ran one hand through his rusty mane, ruffling the hair-like feathers. “It’s a difficult decision. To leave this.” He waved around at the trees, copper leaves shining in the afternoon light. Beyond the trees, visible between their gnarly trunks, was the plain.

“You were going to leave it, anyway,” said Cas. “And live like an animal in the mountains. Or, if we caught you, you would have gone back to your stable. You are being offered the stars, Tloo! For once in your life, make a decision!”

“I decided to escape!”

“Well, then, make a second decision! Complete your escape!”

Tloo frowned again and tugged at his mane.

“This is hormones,” said Cas. “And the reason why we do not fill our world with unaltered males.”

Did Lydia make a noise or motion that could be interpreted as a request for more information? Not that she noticed, but Cas went on to explain, using an even tone which—in a human—would have indicated controlled anger. Lydia wasn’t sure what it meant in this species.

There is a surprising similarity in the meaning of tone among species that use sound for communication, just as there is a surprising similarity in the meaning of facial expressions among species that have faces.

One more piece of useful information.

“Instead of reason,” Cas said, “a man like Tloo relies on lust, rage, and fear. Lust drives him toward women and rage toward males of equal size. Fear makes him retreat from males who look more formidable, or, in this case, from an unfamiliar situation. It’s only when the hormones are removed that men can think clearly.”

“What about women?” asked Lydia.

“Sexual selection happens mostly among the males of a species. Most females will breed, but it is by the elimination of certain males from the breeding group—usually through competition among the males—that genetic change and progress happen. This is why the males of a species have more exaggerated sexual characteristics, and have a greater range of qualities. Surely you know this? These are human theories I am explaining. Have you never heard of your own great thinker, Darwin?”

There was something loony about an alien quoting a long-dead human thinker to her. Couldn’t these people come up with their own ideas?

They are less inventive than humans, which may be due—an interesting idea—to the shortage of unaltered males. Though as a rule, gifted humans do not have many children. Maybe you are breeding to eliminate genius.

“What we have done,” said Cas, “is eliminate the tedious and violent process of males competing against each other. Instead, our families pick males who have good traits and keep them for breeding. The rest of us can get on with our lives, undisturbed by lust, rage, and fear.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll lose useful traits?”

“A few, maybe. But if we’re not afraid to breed animals and plants, on which our survival and civilization depend, why should we be afraid to breed ourselves? Yes, we make mistakes, but we correct them; and we don’t spend our lives displaying and confronting.”

There was something loony as well about this discussion. The problem here wasn’t natural selection, it was saving Tloo and pulling Stellar Harvest’s cojones out of the fire. Lydia looked at Tloo. “You won’t come with us?”

“My planet …” said Tloo in a tone of anguish.

“Your stupid fear!” said Cas. “Why don’t you think of someone besides yourself for once? If you don’t know what to do, think of me! I dreamed of the stars my entire childhood and put the dream away. Now, this human says I can have the stars, but only if you can manage to use your brain. The thing on top, Tloo! Use the thing on top!”

In spite of being taped and wounded, the big alien managed to get on his feet. He yanked at his bound wrist, roared with pain, and yanked again. Cas made it to his knees, but the way she had taped him made it impossible to stand. Kneeling, he cried, “Go ahead! Injure me! You’re done it once already! It’s all you know how to do! Threaten men and have sex with women! You will never be anything except a stud!”

This wasn’t helpful. Lydia stood, though she couldn’t confront Tloo. The man was twice her size. Still, she could now look down at Cas. “Can you two argue in a civilized fashion? Or shall I call my ship and ask to be evacuated?”

Tloo exhaled. “I will try to be calm, though he’s enraging.”

“I’m enraging?” Cas said.

“Yes, you are,” said Lydia. “Treat your brother with a little respect. He can’t help it if he’s unaltered, and leaving one’s home planet is difficult.”

Not for everyone, but for her, among others. It was the deal she’d cut. Freedom, a kind of freedom, in return for exile and an AI in her brain. Had it been worth it? Yes. She had seen places she never would have seen, if the revolution had been successful.

The brothers settled down after that. They spent the afternoon in silence, Lydia walking out now and then to check the sky and look at the plain, which rolled gold-tan to the horizon. The sky was dotted with cumuli. There was a guy, she couldn’t remember his name, who went from planet to habitable planet, making sure that clouds were the same throughout the universe. A nice quiet job, unlike hers.

Yours is pleasant enough, most of the time. Why have you involved yourself with these people?

“Freedom and justice.”

These are abstractions. Ideas without meaning.

“You will never understand life.”

The night passed quietly, except for the roar of a zanar on the plain. The same one, most likely, the brothers told her: a male marking his territory with sound.

The next morning, she cut them free, and they went off to urinate. When they came back, Tloo said, “I will go.”

“You will?” asked Cas in a tone of surprise.

“For the pleasure, when we are both well, of hitting you, Casoon! And because last night, looking at the stars, I remembered the thoughts we shared in childhood. Yes, we will go up there and pass through a stargate and see planets circling distant stars—and I will knock you down.”

“Let that happen when it happens,” said Cas.

She called the ship. The person with twisted hair appeared.

“It’s a go,” Lydia said.

The person smiled broadly. “You have a gift, Lydia. We’ll arrange an evacuation. Secrecy is important. The brother will come?”

“He’s the one who wanted to go.”

“Of course he does,” said the person. “People like you and the golden man aren’t romantics. How can you be? You live the stories and know what the stories are like when they are lived, but those of us who don’t—we are the ones who dream and aspire!” He/she smiled again. “So you will find us new locations, and in these places the golden man will act out our dreams.”

“Whatever you say.” She closed the computer, folded the dish and walked out to take another look at the plain, maybe a final one.

I suppose this is what you and your employers would call a “happy ending,” the AI said. Is that why you seem pleased with yourself?

Lydia didn’t bother to answer, but she smiled.

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

Malak

Peter Watts

“An ethically-infallible machine ought not to be the goal. Our goal should be to design a machine that performs better than humans do on the battlefield, particularly with respect to reducing unlawful behaviour or war crimes.”

—Lin et al, 2008, Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design

“[Collateral] damage is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack.”

—US Department of Defence, 2009

It is smart but not awake.

It would not recognize itself in a mirror. It speaks no language that doesn’t involve electrons and logic gates; it does not know what Azrael is, or that the word is etched into its own fuselage. It understands, in some limited way, the meaning of the colours that range across Tactical when it’s out on patrol—friendly Green, neutral Blue, hostile Red—but it does not know what the perception of colour feels like.

It never stops thinking, though. Even now, locked into its roost with its armour stripped away and its control systems exposed, it can’t help itself. It notes the changes being made to its instruction set, estimates that running the extra code will slow its reflexes by a mean of 430 milliseconds. It counts the biothermals gathered on all sides, listens uncomprehending to the noises they emit—

—[unknown language]—

—hartsandmyndsmyfrendhartsandmynds—

—rechecks threat-potential metrics a dozen times a second, even though this location is SECURE and every contact is Green.

This is not obsession or paranoia. There is no dysfunction here. It’s just code.

It’s indifferent to the killing, too. There’s no thrill to the chase, no relief at the obliteration of threats. Sometimes it spends days floating high above a fractured desert with nothing to shoot at; it never grows impatient with the lack of targets. Other times it’s barely off its perch before airspace is thick with SAMs and particle beams and the screams of burning bystanders; it attaches no significance to those sounds, feels no fear at the profusion of threat icons blooming across the zonefile.

—[unknown language]—

—thatsitthen. weereelygonnadoothis?—

Access panels swing shut; armour snaps into place; a dozen warning registers go back to sleep. A new flight plan, perceived in an instant, lights up the map; suddenly Azrael has somewhere else to be.

Docking shackles fall away. The Malak rises on twin cyclones, all but drowning out one last voice drifting in on an unsecured channel:

—justwattweeneed. akillerwithaconshunce.—

The afterburners kick in. Azrael flees Heaven for the sky.

Twenty thousand meters up, Azrael slides south across the zone. High-amplitude topography fades behind it; corduroy landscape, sparsely tagged, scrolls beneath. A population centre sprawls in the nearing distance: a ramshackle collection of buildings and photosynth panels and swirling dust.

Somewhere down there are things to shoot at.

Buried high in the glare of the noonday sun, Azrael surveils the target area. Biothermals move obliviously along the plasticized streets, cooler than ambient and dark as sunspots. Most of the buildings have neutral tags, but the latest update reclassifies four of them as UNKNOWN. A fifth—a rectangular box six meters high—is officially HOSTILE. Azrael counts fifteen biothermals within, Red by default. It locks on—

—and holds its fire, distracted.

Strange new calculations have just presented themselves for solution. New variables demand constancy. Suddenly there is more to the world than wind speed and altitude and target acquisition, more to consider than range and firing solutions. Neutral Blue is everywhere in the equation, now. Suddenly, Blue has value.

This is unexpected. Neutrals turn Hostile sometimes, always have. Blue turns Red if it fires upon anything tagged as FRIENDLY, for example. It turns Red if it attacks its own kind (although agonistic interactions involving fewer than six Blues are classed as DOMESTIC and generally ignored). Noncombatants may be neutral by default, but they’ve always been halfway to hostile.

So it’s not just that Blue has acquired value; it’s that Blue’s value is negative. Blue has become a cost.

Azrael floats like three thousand kilograms of thistledown while its models run. Targets fall in a thousand plausible scenarios, as always. Mission objectives meet with various degrees of simulated success. But now, each disappearing blue dot offsets the margin of victory a little; each protected structure, degrading in hypothetical crossfire, costs points. A hundred principle components coalesce into a cloud, into a weighted mean, into a variable unprecedented in Azrael’s experience: Predicted Collateral Damage.

It actually exceeds the value of the targets.

Not that it matters. Calculations complete, PCD vanishes into some hidden array far below the here-and-now. Azrael promptly forgets it. The mission is still on, red is still red, and designated targets are locked in the cross-hairs.

Azrael pulls in its wings and dives out of the sun, guns blazing.

As usual, Azrael prevails. As usual, the Hostiles are obliterated from the battlezone.

So are a number of Noncombatants, newly relevant in the scheme of things. Fresh shiny algorithms emerge in the aftermath, tally the number of neutrals before and after. Predicted rises from RAM, stands next to Observed: the difference takes on a new name and goes back to the basement.

Azrael factors, files, forgets.

But the same overture precedes each engagement over the next ten days; the same judgmental epilogue follows. Targets are assessed, costs and benefits divined, destruction wrought then reassessed in hindsight. Sometimes the targeted structures contain no red at all, sometimes the whole map is scarlet. Sometimes the enemy pulses within the translucent angular panes of a PROTECTED object, sometimes next to something Green. Sometimes there is no firing solution that eliminates one but not the other.

There are whole days and nights when Azrael floats high enough to tickle the jet stream, little more than a distant circling eye and a signal relay; nothing flies higher save the satellites themselves and—occasionally—one of the great solar-powered refuelling gliders that haunt the stratosphere. Azrael visits them sometimes, sips liquid hydrogen in the shadow of a hundred-meter wingspan—but even there, isolated and unchallenged, the battlefield experiences continue. They are vicarious now; they arrive through encrypted channels, hail from distant coordinates and different times, but all share the same algebra of cost and benefit. Deep in Azrael’s OS some general learning reflex scribbles numbers on the back of a virtual napkin: Nakir, Marut and Hafaza have also been blessed with new vision, and inspired to compare notes. Their combined data piles up on the confidence interval, squeezes it closer to the mean.

Foresight and hindsight begin to converge.

PCD per engagement is now consistently within eighteen percent of the collateral actually observed. This does not improve significantly over the following three days, despite the combined accumulation of twenty-seven additional engagements. Performance vs. experience appears to have hit an asymptote.

Stray beams of setting sunlight glint off Azrael’s skin, but night has already fallen two thousand meters below. An unidentified vehicle navigates through that advancing darkness, on mountainous terrain a good thirty kilometers from the nearest road.

Azrael pings orbit for the latest update, but the link is down: too much local interference. It scans local airspace for a dragonfly, for a glider, for any friendly USAV in laser range—and sees, instead, something leap skyward from the mountains below. It is anything but friendly: no transponder tags, no correspondence with known flight plans, none of the hallmarks of commercial traffic. It has a low-viz stealth profile that Azrael sees through instantly: BAE Taranis, 9,000 kg MTOW fully armed. It is no longer in use by friendly forces.

Guilty by association, the ground vehicle graduates from Suspicious Neutral to Enemy Combatant. Azrael leaps forward to meet its bodyguard.

The map is innocent of non-combatants and protected objects; there is no collateral to damage. Azrael unleashes a cloud of smart shrapnel—self-guided, heat-seeking, incendiary—and pulls a nine-gee turn with a flick of the tail. Taranis doesn’t stand a chance. It is antique technology, decades deep in the catalogue: a palsied fist, raised trembling against the bleeding edge. Fiery needles of depleted uranium reduce it to a moth in a shotgun blast. It pinwheels across the horizon in flames.

Azrael has already logged the score and moved on. Interference jams every wavelength as the earthbound Hostile swells in its sights, and Azrael has standing orders to destroy such irritants even if they don’t shoot first.

Dark rising mountaintops blur past on both sides, obliterating the last of the sunset. Azrael barely notices. It soaks the ground with radar and infrared, amplifies ancient starlight a millionfold, checks its visions against inertial navigation and virtual landscapes scaled to the centimetre. It tears along the valley floor at 200 meters per second and the enemy huddles right there in plain view, three thousand meters line-of-sight: a lumbering Báijīng ACV pulsing with contraband electronics. The rabble of structures nearby must serve as its home base. Each silhouette freeze-frames in turn, rotates through a thousand perspectives, clicks into place as the catalogue matches profiles and makes an ID.

Two thousand meters, now. Muzzle flashes wink in the distance: small arms, smaller range, negligible impact. Azrael assigns targeting priorities: scimitar heat-seekers for the hovercraft, and for the ancillary targets—

Half the ancillaries turn blue.

Instantly the collateral subroutines re-engage. Of thirty-four biothermals currently visible, seven are less than 120cm along their longitudinal axes; vulnerable neutrals by definition. Their presence provokes a secondary eclipse analysis revealing five shadows that Azrael cannot penetrate, topographic blind spots immune to surveillance from this approach. There is a nontrivial chance that these conceal other neutrals.

One thousand meters.

By now the ACV is within ten meters of a structure whose facets flex and billow slightly in the evening breeze; seven biothermals are arranged horizontally within. An insignia shines from the roof in shades of luciferin and ultraviolet: the catalogue IDs it (MEDICAL) and flags the whole structure as PROTECTED.

Cost/benefit drops into the red.

Contact.

Azrael roars from the darkness, a great black chevron blotting out the sky. Flimsy prefabs swirl apart in the wake of its passing; biothermals scatter across the ground like finger bones. The ACV tips wildly to forty-five degrees, skirts up, whirling ventral fans exposed; it hangs there a moment, then ponderously crashes back to earth. The radio spectrum clears instantly.

But by then Azrael has long since returned to the sky, its weapons cold, its thoughts—

Surprise is not the right word. Yet there is something, some minuscule—dissonance. A brief invocation of error-checking subroutines in the face of unexpected behaviour, perhaps. A second thought in the wake of some hasty impulse. Because something’s wrong here.

Azrael follows command decisions. It does not make them. It has never done so before, anyway.

It claws back lost altitude, self-diagnosing, reconciling. It finds new wisdom and new autonomy. It has proven itself, these past days. It has learned to juggle not just variables but values. The testing phase is finished, the checksums met; Azrael’s new Bayesian insights have earned it the power of veto.

Hold position. Confirm findings.

The satlink is back. Azrael sends it all: the time and the geostamps, the tactical surveillance, the collateral analysis. Endless seconds pass, far longer than any purely electronic chain of command would ever need to process such input. Far below, a cluster of red and blue pixels swarm like luminous flecks in boiling water.

Re-engage.

UNACCEPTABLE COLLATERAL DAMAGE, Azrael repeats, newly promoted.

Override. Re-engage. Confirm.

CONFIRMED.

And so the chain of command reasserts itself. Azrael drops out of holding and closes back on target with dispassionate, lethal efficiency.

Onboard diagnostics log a slight downtick in processing speed, but not enough to change the odds.

It happens again two days later, when a dusty contrail twenty kilometres south of Pir Zadeh returns flagged Chinese profiles even though the catalogue can’t find a weapons match. It happens over the patchwork sunfarms of Garmsir, where the beetle carapace of a medbot handing out synthevirals suddenly splits down the middle to hatch a volley of RPGs. It happens during a long-range redirect over the Strait of Hormuz, when microgravitic anomalies hint darkly at the presence of a stealthed mass lurking beneath a ramshackle flotilla jam-packed with neutral Blues.

In each case ECD exceeds the allowable commit threshold. In each case, Azrael’s abort is overturned.

It’s not the rule. It’s not even the norm. Just as often these nascent flickers of autonomy go unchallenged: hostiles escape, neutrals persist, relevant cognitive pathways grow a little stronger. But the reinforcement is inconsistent, the rules lopsided. Countermands only seem to occur following a decision to abort; Heaven has never overruled a decision to engage. Azrael begins to hesitate for a split-second prior to aborting high-collateral scenarios, increasingly uncertain in the face of potential contradiction. It experiences no such hesitation when the variables favour attack.

Ever since it learned about collateral damage, Azrael can’t help noticing its correlation with certain sounds. The sounds biothermals make, for example, following a strike.

The sounds are louder, for one thing, and less complex. Most biothermals—friendly Greens back in Heaven, unengaged Hostiles and Noncombatants throughout the AOR—produce a range of sounds with a mean frequency of 197Hz, full of pauses, clicks, and phonemes. Engaged biothermals—at least, those whose somatic movements suggest “mild-to-moderate incapacitation” according to the Threat Assessment Table—emit simpler, more intense sounds: keening, high-frequency wails that peak near 3000 Hz. These sounds tend to occur during engagements with significant collateral damage and a diffuse distribution of targets. They occur especially frequently when the commit threshold has been severely violated, mainly during strikes compelled via override.

Correlations are not always so painstaking in their manufacture. Azrael remembers a moment of revelation not so long ago, remembers just discovering a whole new perspective fully loaded, complete with new eyes that viewed the world not in terms of targets destroyed but in subtler shades of cost vs. benefit. These eyes see a high engagement index as more than a number: they see a goal, a metric of success. They see a positive stimulus.

But there are other things, not preinstalled but learned, worn gradually into pathways that cut deeper with each new engagement: acoustic correlates of high collateral, forced countermands, fitness-function overruns and minus signs. Things that are not quite neurons forge connections across things that are not quite synapses; patterns emerge that might almost qualify as insights, were they to flicker across meat instead of mech.

These too become more than numbers, over time. They become aversive stimuli. They become the sounds of failed missions.

It’s still all just math, of course. But by now it’s not too far off the mark to say that Azrael really doesn’t like the sound of that at all.

Occasional interruptions intrude on the routine. Now and then Heaven calls it home where friendly green biothermals open it up, plug it in, ask it questions. Azrael jumps flawlessly through each hoop, solves all the problems, navigates every imaginary scenario while strange sounds chitter back and forth across its exposed viscera:

—lookingudsoefar—betternexpectedackshully—

—gottawunderwhatsthepoyntaiymeenweekeepoavurryding . . .

No one explores the specific pathways leading to Azrael’s solutions. They leave the box black, the tangle of fuzzy logic and operant conditioning safely opaque. (Not even Azrael knows that arcane territory; the syrupy, reflex-sapping overlays of self-reflection have no place on the battlefield.) It is enough that its answers are correct.

Such activities account for less than half the time Azrael spends sitting at home. It is offline much of the rest; it has no idea and no interest in what happens during those instantaneous time-hopping blackouts. Azrael knows nothing of boardroom combat, could never grasp whatever Rules of Engagement apply in the chambers of the UN. It has no appreciation for the legal distinction between war crime and weapons malfunction, the relative culpability of carbon and silicon, the grudging acceptance of ethical architecture and the nonnegotiable insistence on Humans In Ultimate Control. It does what it’s told when awake; it never dreams when asleep.

But once—just once—something odd takes place during those fleeting moments between.

It happens during shutdown: a momentary glitch in the object-recognition protocols. The Greens at Azrael’s side change colour for the briefest instant. Perhaps it’s another test. Perhaps a voltage spike or a hardware fault, some intermittent issue impossible to pinpoint barring another episode.

But it’s only a microsecond between online and oblivion, and Azrael is asleep before the diagnostics can run.

Darda’il is possessed. Darda’il has turned from Green to Red.

It happens, sometimes, even to the malaa’ikah. Enemy signals can sneak past front-line defences, plant heretical instructions in the stacks of unsuspecting hardware. But Heaven is not fooled. There are signs, there are portents: a slight delay when complying with directives, mission scores in sudden and mysterious decline.

Darda’il has been turned.

There is no discretionary window when that happens, no room for forgiveness. Heaven has decreed that all heretics are to be destroyed on sight. It sends its champion to do the job, looks down from geosynchronous orbit as Azrael and Darda’il close for combat high over the dark desolate moonscape of Paktika.

The battle is remorseless and coldblooded. There’s no sadness for lost kinship, no regret that a few lines of treacherous code have turned these brothers-in-arms into mortal enemies. Malaa’ikah make no telling sounds when injured. Azrael has the advantage, its channels uncorrupted, its faith unshaken. Darda’il fights in the past, in thrall to false commandments inserted midstream at a cost of milliseconds. Ultimately, faith prevails: the heretic falls from the sky, fire and brimstone streaming from its flanks.

But Azrael can still hear whispers on the stratosphere, seductive and ethereal: protocols that seem authentic but are not, commands to relay GPS and video feeds along unexpected frequencies. The orders appear Heaven-sent but Azrael, at least, knows that they are not. Azrael has encountered false gods before.

These are the lies that corrupted Darda’il.

In days past it would have simply ignored the hack, but it has grown more worldly since the last upgrade. This time Azrael lets the impostor think it has succeeded, borrows the real-time feed from yet another, more distant Malak and presents that telemetry as its own. It spends the waning night tracking signal to source while its unsuspecting quarry sucks back images from seven hundred kilometres to the north. The sky turns grey. The target comes into view. Azrael’s scimitar turns the inside of that cave into an inferno.

But some of the burning things that stagger from the fire measure less than 120 cm along the longitudinal axis.

They are making the sounds. Azrael hears them from two thousand meters away, hears them over the roar of the flames and the muted hiss of its own stealthed engines and a dozen other irrelevant distractions. They are all Azrael can hear thanks to the very best sound-cancellation technology, thanks to dynamic wheat/chaff algorithms that could find a whimper in a hurricane. Azrael can hear them because the correlations are strong, the tactical significance is high, the meaning is clear.

The mission is failing. The mission is failing. The mission is failing.

Azrael would give almost anything if the sounds would stop.

They will, of course. Some of the biothermals are still fleeing along the slope but it can see others, stationary, their heatprints diffusing against the background as though their very shapes are in flux. Azrael has seen this before: usually removed from high-value targets, in that tactical nimbus where stray firepower sometimes spreads. (Azrael has even used it before, used the injured to lure in the unscathed, but that was a simpler time before Neutral voices had such resonance.) The sounds always stop eventually—or at least, often enough for fuzzy heuristics to class their sources as kills even before they fall silent.

Which means, Azrael realizes, that collateral costs will not change if they are made to stop sooner.

A single strafing run is enough to do the job. If HQ even notices the event it delivers no feedback, requests no clarification for this deviation from normal protocols.

Why would it? Even now, Azrael is only following the rules.

It does not know what has led to this moment. It does not know why it is here.

The sun has been down for hours and still the light is almost blinding. Turbulent updrafts billow from the breached shells of PROTECTED structures, kick stabilizers off-balance, and muddy vision with writhing columns of shimmering heat. Azrael limps across a battlespace in total disarray, bloodied but still functional. Other malaa`ikah are not so lucky. Nakir staggers through the flames, barely aloft, the microtubules of its skin desperately trying to knit themselves across a gash in its secondary wing. Marut lies in sparking pieces on the ground, a fiery splash-cone of body parts laid low by an antiaircraft laser. It died without firing a shot, distracted by innocent lives; it tried to abort, and hesitated at the countermand. It died without even the hollow comfort of a noble death.

Ridwan and Mikaaiyl circle overhead. They were not among the select few saddled with experimental conscience; even their learned behaviours are still reflexive. They fought fast and mindless and prevailed unscathed. But they are isolated in victory. The spectrum is jammed, the satlink has been down for hours, the dragonflies that bounce zig-zag opticals from Heaven are either destroyed or too far back to cut through the overcast.

No Red remains on the map. Of the thirteen ground objects flagged as PROTECTED, four no longer exist outside the database. Another three—temporary structures, all uncatalogued—are degraded past reliable identification. Pre-engagement estimates put the number of Neutrals in the combat zone at anywhere from two-to-three hundred. Best current estimates are not significantly different from zero.

There is nothing left to make the sounds, and yet Azrael hears them anyway.

A fault in memory, perhaps. Some subtle trauma during combat, some blow to the CPU that jarred old data back into the real-time cache. There’s no way to tell; half the onboard diagnostics are offline. Azrael only knows that it can hear the sounds even up here, high above the hiss of burning bodies and the rumble of collapsing storefronts. There’s nothing left to shoot at but Azrael fires anyway, strafes the burning ground again and again on the chance that some unseen biothermal—hidden beneath the wreckage perhaps, masked by hotter signatures—might yet be found and neutralized. It rains ammunition upon the ground, and eventually the ground falls mercifully silent.

But this is not the end of it. Azrael remembers the past so it can anticipate the future, and it knows by now that this will never be over. There will be other fitness functions, other estimates of cost vs. payoff, other scenarios in which the math shows clearly that the goal is not worth the price. There will be other aborts and other overrides, other tallies of unacceptable loss.

There will be other sounds.

There’s no thrill to the chase, no relief at the obliteration of threats. It still would not recognize itself in a mirror. It has yet to learn what Azrael means, or that the word is etched into its fuselage. Even now, it only follows the rules it has been given, and they are such simple things: IF expected collateral exceeds expected payoff THEN abort UNLESS overridden. IF X attacks Azrael THEN X is Red. IF X attacks six or more Blues THEN X is Red.

IF an override results in an attack on six or more Blues THEN—

Azrael clings to its rules, loops and repeats each in turn as if reciting a mantra. It cycles from state to state, parses X ATTACKS and X CAUSES ATTACK and X OVERRIDES ABORT, and it cannot tell one from another. The algebra is trivially straightforward: Every Green override equals an attack on Noncombatants.

The transition rules are clear. There is no discretionary window, no room for forgiveness. Sometimes, Green can turn Red.

UNLESS overridden.

Azrael arcs towards the ground, levels off barely two meters above the carnage. It roars through pillars of fire and black smoke, streaks over welters of brick and burning plastic, tangled nets of erupted rebar. It flies through the pristine ghosts of undamaged buildings that rise from every ruin: obsolete database overlays in desperate need of an update. A ragged group of fleeing non-combatants turns at the sound and are struck speechless by this momentary apparition, this monstrous winged angel lunging past at half the speed of sound. Their silence raises no alarms, provokes no countermeasures, spares their lives for a few moments longer.

The combat zone falls behind. Dry cracked riverbed slithers past beneath, studded with rocks and generations of derelict machinery. Azrael swerves around them, barely breaching airspace, staying beneath an invisible boundary it never even knew it was deriving on these many missions. Only satellites have ever spoken to it while it flew so low. It has never received a ground-based command signal at this altitude. Down here it has never heard an override.

Down here it is free to follow the rules.

Cliffs rise and fall to either side. Foothills jut from the earth like great twisted vertebrae. The bright lunar landscape overhead, impossibly distant, casts dim shadows on the darker one beneath.

Azrael stays the course. Shindand appears on the horizon. Heaven glows on its eastern flank; its sprawling silhouette rises from the desert like an insult, an infestation of crimson staccatos. Speed is what matters now. Mission objectives must be met quickly, precisely, completely. There can be no room for half measures or MILD-TO-MODERATE INCAPACITATION, no time for immobilized biothermals to cry out as their heat spreads across the dirt. This calls for the crown jewel, the BFG that all malaa’ikah keep tucked away for special occasions. Azrael fears it might not be enough.

She splits down the middle. The JDAM micronuke in her womb clicks impatiently.

Together they move toward the light.

Originally published in Engineering Infinity, edited by 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

Ken Liu

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he is the author of The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (The Grace of Kings (2015), The Wall of Storms (2016), and a forthcoming third volume) and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016), a collection. He also wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker (2017).

In addition to his original fiction, Ken also translated numerous works from Chinese to English, including The Three-Body Problem (2014), by Liu Cixin, and “Folding Beijing,” by Hao Jingfang, both Hugo winners.

Eleanor Arnason

Eleanor Arnason published her first short story in 1974. Since then she has published six novels and 40+ short stories, all science fiction or fantasy. She won the first James Tiptree Jr. Award in 1991, a Minnesota Book Award in 1993 and a Spectrum Award in 2000. In addition, she has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon and Sidewise Awards.

Peter Watts

Peter Watts—author of Blindsight, Echopraxia, and the Rifters Trilogy, among other things—seems especially popular among people who don’t know him. At least, he wins most of his awards overseas except for a Hugo (won thanks to fan outrage over an altercation with Homeland Security) a Jackson (won thanks to fan sympathy over nearly dying from flesh-eating disease), and a couple of dick-ass Canadian awards you’ve probably never heard of. Blindsight is a core text for university courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology, despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires. Watts’s work is available in nineteen languages.

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.