Issue 38, March 2018

© Wyrm Publishing, 2018
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse

a novella by Kathleen Ann Goonan

Bricks, Sticks, Straw

a short story by Gwyneth Jones

The Dust Queen

a short story by Aliette de Bodard

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the March 2018 issue of Forever Magazine!

February was a month of domestic responsibilities. Sure, I had a lot of editorial duties to handle, but they were all that routine background noise that goes into planning out an anthology and running a magazine. Oh and my oldest son turned eighteen—it’s not a joke when parents say their children grow up in a blink of the eye. That was fun. However, when the plumber coming over to fix a broken pipe is a highlight on your social calendar, you know you have to get out more.

Fortunately, I’ll have the chance to both go somewhere warmer than New Jersey and do some genre-oriented socializing at the International Conference for Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) in Orlando later this month. It’s a weird combination of my old academic life colliding with science fiction, but I’ve had a great time at the last few and couldn’t say no. I’m feeling a bit run down, and this is exactly the kind of recharge I need at the moment.

Until next time . . .

-Neil

The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse

Kathleen Ann Goonan

Here stands a house all built of thought,

And full to overflowing

Of treasures and of precious things,

Of secrets for my knowing.

—Olive Beaupré Miller, The Latch Key

There is a theory that consciousness arises through self-organizing mass. This takes ages. Think of the thousands of years the oldest bristlecone pine grew, nearly five thousand, and it could grow older, if it had a chance, though it no longer has that chance. Except here. And maybe somewhere, but that is a mighty thin maybe.

Nevertheless, think of all the systems that went into growing that tree, all that time. What kind of entity can possibly understand time that long, except that bristlecone pine? And then, think of all the time we have been riding this horse. Who could understand that?

If anyone could, they would seem like magical creatures to us. That’s why this is a fairy tale.

Time is a Kelvin–Helmholtz function. You know, like the clouds in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. We surf the waves, the whorl, the crush of energies that cause time, that cause us. You may disagree with it, but that’s our present theory. It seems that our particular neighborhood of time, which created us, is the only weather in which consciousness can survive. We are the products of a very fragile environment.

We are the magic beans Jill climbs the beanstalk to find.

We are life.

Pele, two days older than one hundred and five, waits in crowded Galaxies Bar on Moku, the Entertainment, Amusement and, much less importantly, R&D Exoplanetary Exploration Ship. Robotic and print construction commenced in 2030, when Pele was forty, during one of the rare confluences of available capital and passionate interest in space.

Pele’s hands are folded in her lap in an attitude of calm, but she simmers, despite the faint scent of gardenia, the low tones of a flowing music specifically designed to generate a state of relaxed attention, and the zen landscaping. A tube of green tea floats unopened near her shoulder, its tether clipped to the table. Dr. Zi, Chief Safety Engineer, is late for this meeting, one that Pele requested and that the ship’s scheduling algorithm arranged.

Lights are always low in Galaxies, unlike other bars on Moku designed for dancing or the roar of a hundred unheard conversations. As usual, it’s two-thirds populated by tourists and crew. The Velcro floor is scattered with zabutons and low, gently glowing cylinders that serve as tables. A row of portholes affords a spectacular view of Mars rising as Moku slowly spins.

“Sorry I’m late, Dr. Hsu.” Zi, in full quasi-military Chief Safety Engineer regalia, billed hat and all, drops onto a zabuton. Peering over his shoulder, he unbuttons his shirt pocket, removes his ever-present salad tube, takes a pull, and slips it back into his pocket, which he buttons.

Pele says, “I want to discuss last week’s report, in which I raise serious issues. You didn’t respond.”

Zi is busy scanning the room. “Ah! There she is. Eleven o’clock.” He waves, showing most of his teeth in a camera-ready smile that beams from his well-tanned, rugged face.

Stormy, a raven-haired reality star, threads her way around seated groups of people toward them, encased in a retro space suit that emphasizes her long legs and shapes her breasts into pointy weapons. The camera drones trailing her blink like synchronous fireflies, as required by law.

Pele shakes her head emphatically in Stormy’s direction, uninterested in being dragged into the kind of propaganda puff pieces with which Zi is building his celebrity.

Stormy pivots as quickly as the Velcro on the two contact points of her very high heels allows and heads off at a right angle, trolling for the perfect feel-good space chat.

Zi frowns. “You just blew a perfect opportunity to communicate with the public.”

“I communicate very well with the public, except when you bump my podcast, like you did yesterday.” Pele, temporary liaison between the many factions on board, sees new fault lines daily, foresees minor disasters and deflects them before they emerge, furnishes solutions, and shares concerns in forceful, direct language with those on the ship and on Earth who need to know. She also drops a weekly public podcast, working hard to present this information gracefully, so as to avoid being characterized as an alarmist crank by the all-powerful entertainment industry.

“You need to re-slant it.”

“I said exactly what I meant to say. The issues I raised concerning the Gifted Child Congress are urgent. There have been thirty-seven of these children on board for six weeks now, and I’ve sent you five related Concern Communiqués—each with two red exclamation points—thus far. Should I try using more?”

“So say something nice for a change. Your campaign against them failed.”

“Just because everyone, including their parents, were snowed regarding the very real health risks—”

“We are completely protected by nanotech shielding.”

“No meaningful sample for that conclusion, despite all the glossy advertising, but here they are, so we can gather information for more meaningful studies for the rest of their lives—and ours. However, my present concerns are about something different.”

“I’ve read your CC’s. They contain weird assertions. Rumors, in fact, that don’t rise to the level of requiring a CC. Yes—these children are not normal—that’s their strength! They’re the superstars of the future. This is the third Congress in the past ten years. Wildly successful. Great publicity. They’re bringing in billions of dollars. Flip your concerns, for Christ’s sake. Valentina actually had a paper accepted by Space Life Journal, one she completed while here. She is amazing—ten years old! Grew up on the Argentinian pampas, on an estancia. Home-schooled. Discovered by a competition she entered. I was planning to steer the interview you just blew off in that direction.”

Pele knows Valentina as Bean, as do the other children. “Valentina is amazing.” She does not ask if Zi has read Valentina’s startling paper. She does not want to embarrass him. “They all are amazing. That’s part of my concern.”

“Why concern? We need to talk them up.”

“I talk about my job, which is to be a crank, if that’s what you want to call it. An honest, vocal crank, and I am worried. Doesn’t it matter at all that Moku is a disaster waiting to happen? In so many ways?”

“We’ve got backups galore.”

Sometimes Pele cannot believe that he is a many-degreed engineer. But too ambitious; a young fifty-something on the make. So many luminaries have springboarded out of Moku that it’s regarded as a pipeline to fame.

On the instant, Pele decides to have him removed. He is smart enough to understand that he is ignoring key issues not just at his own peril, but at the peril of others. He has put his own path to celebrity above his larger responsibilities, and has just definitively underlined his reckless stance.

She knows exactly who has bought his complacency. It is easy for her to make her face unreadable, but perhaps her doing so right now is the tell he’s been looking for. Even now, after a lifetime of effort to gain fluency in the language of emotion-filled faces, she has not completely mastered the human tap-dance of mask and reveal that normal children easily absorb, despite her neuroplasticity infusions and cognitive therapies.

She does not wish to be normal. But aspects of normality would often be helpful.

Zi leans forward, sets both hands on the table, and links his fingers. His big smile makes jolly-looking crinkle lines at the corners of his eyes. She is sure he knows just how jolly they are. His voice warm and hearty, he says, “Hey, isn’t children’s literature one of your areas of expertise?”

This is a new tack. “Seventy years ago, it was. I’m not at all up-to-date, and wasn’t then. Just books, written before 1965. But yes, it was a passion.” Indeed, one of her rickety bridges to life. “And?”

“I recall a video of you speaking at an international conference after you received your first doctorate. You were a very passionate and effective communicator about how the brains of children on the autistic spectrum can be physically changed through engagement with literature. All the more impressive because—”

She smiles; nods. “I’m Asperger’s. As are most of our visiting children. Part of my international cachet, I might add.” Two can play at his game.

“Um, yes. Of course. We’re all open books here, no pun intended. I’m just thinking you might help organize our vast children’s library. It’s a terrible jumble—all those files shot up here willy-nilly from all over the world. You can link these kids to it—”

Pele leans forward, laces together her own fingers, lights up her own wide, brown face with a warm, face-crinkling smile. “Great idea. That task might serve to distract me from effectively executing my responsibilities. Or maybe I should write another paper that bridges two fields of physics, and create a new field. The first was a hit. I won a small prize.”

She does not usually talk this way. She was brought up to be modest, but he has vastly overplayed his hand. Her small stature, her long, shimmering white hair, and even, still, the fact that she is a woman, have often caused others to underestimate her. She was here long before him, and will be here long after he is gone. But she still can’t tell whether he understands that he has picked the wrong foe.

He straightens his back. “You can’t fight money, even if you do have Nobel authority. Moku runs on the entertainment and tourist industries.”

“I agree. And technological, scientific, and academic research is the dog. Setting a timetable for actual travel to an exoplanet seems to be our least concern. In the two years since you arrived, you or your proxies have generated many irrelevant but effective roadblocks and dismantled several long-running initiatives. Not many people have examined your record thus far, but a close scrutiny reveals a definite pattern.”

He juts his head forward and stares at her with open hostility. “You’re out of your—do you really?—” He raises both hands in a questioning attitude, drops them to his side, and laughs. “Wow. It doesn’t matter, then, that there is no place to go?”

“There are many places we could go. Potentially, an infinite number of habitable planets. We’re finding a new one, literally, every day.”

“Yes, but we cannot get there.”

Pele decides to take advantage of this teachable moment. Perhaps she can awaken him to Moku’s true wonder. “We are approaching an age in which we might be able to mesh our growing understanding of quantum processes with new technologies, a time in which the specific needs of a particular possibility might generate a new paradigm regarding our ability to move through space and time. In that reality, it could seem only instants until all habitable planets are populated.”

He nods. “You are talking, of course, about your particular pet, the theoretical Alcubierre drive. Powered by the equally theoretical Casimir vacuum.” His eyes gleam with true humor, for a moment. “Wouldn’t that be something! But just a pipe dream.”

She says, “We’ve made a lot of advances since you took your one required theoretical physics course thirty years ago. I’d love to set aside time to talk to you about how much we’ve learned since then. You are right about one thing—Moku has been vital to forwarding our ability to learn more about so many subjects. It is a scientific wonderland. And, in fact, I will hand off this job next month and return to my own research. Sometimes it’s useful to give that part of my brain time to process information on its own. That’s how it works for me. Call this just another stint in the patent office.” She grins at him with fierce, friendly energy; she knows her eyes are twinkling. “I think that we’re on the verge of some very, very big changes. Things that will truly change humanity.”

He shakes his head. “There’s no appetite for that.”

“Of course not. We have a fabulous playground here. It’s like when Walt Disney died and his Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow morphed from a serious attempt at living the dream of the future to one of the most successful amusement parks of all time.”

He stares blankly. He has no idea what she’s talking about.

No surprise. She says, “Not everyone shares your view.”

She refers to her fellow research scientists and astronauts, to their wild romance with space, to how hard they work, on the other side of this Mobius strip, in the humming hive of Moku, and its environments of rain forest, high sierra, deep sea, and other ecosystems vital to life to realize these dreams.

It is her dream, too.

That is why she is trying to fill her present post to the best of her ability. All of her fellow shipboard dreamers, in their long lives, have followed many passions, done much good work, earned many, many degrees. Each takes turns doing the necessary administrative work of keeping the dream alive. An outsider would only botch things. Their core group has logged much more space time than is strictly allowable, on ISS, Tranquility, Mars. They are hungry for space and all that it means.

Dr. Zi is not one of them. Zi and figureheads like him come, increase their ratings, and go.

She clears her throat. “It is your sworn duty, as Chief Safety Engineer, to ensure the safety of this ship.” She almost says Unless you have a conflict of interest, but because she is trying hard, and because she has simmered down, she does not.

She presses on. “Sure, the Mars tragedy has been smoothed away after only four years. All the reports are buried by interminable committees while celebrities take up everyone’s short attention span with their gaudy pairings and unpairings. Money can manipulate anything.” She does not say Including you, but decides he could not hear that even if she shouted it to his face.

“I fail to see your point.”

“It’s been a while. Let’s review. Seven lovely young reality stars, men and women without a shred of technical background, set out in a rover as a publicity lark and drive over a cliff. Live feed killed before it gets to Earth; no backups. Easy. The world mourns for a while, but without visuals, pretty soon it’s like it never happened.

“Here on Moku, we have seventy-two entertainment workers—publicity crews, trainers, scripters, and assorted interesting many-gendered, well-known celebs who have gone through a few drills but who have been lulled into thinking that we are not hanging in space in a complex system that at this instant is undergoing massive, continuous updates and repairs. A hundred and twelve tourists. Fifty-seven parents. Their children. I’m not talking about the crew, the academics, the research scientists, all of whom have at least four doctorates, know the risks, and are emergency-ready. The civilians do not know the risks. It is your job to care. To protect them. And there is a matter of the highest urgency that—”

“Dr. Hsu, I resent these implications.” A ping sounds. He stands. “Time for me to lead a tour through the Nanotech VR Lab.”

She also stands, and says, working her device, “If you could possibly inspect the lab, while you are there, in regard to these three issues . . . I mean if you have time . . . in fact . . . I’ve sent this to all Level 5 personnel.”

He roars, “You will not go over my head!”

“I’ll share to the same contacts my full, updated report within the hour. I expect you to read it and to respond.”

He fumbles with another shot of salad—vodka-infused? she wonders—and makes his way through the crowded bar, another of Pele’s safety nightmares. As is the Moku Gift Shop, the Full Immersion Module (Experience Surfing the Rings of Saturn!) and the Hotel.

A parent who has been hovering nearby takes Dr. Zi’s place. Ann is Ghanaian, a lovely, warm woman, wearing a dress of bold African colors, proud that her strange, heartbreaking baby has grown to be not only functional, but wondrous. As are all the parents.

“Dr. Hsu, it is so good to finally have a chance to actually talk with you.” She takes both of Pele’s hands in hers and squeezes. Pele squeezes back as Ann continues talking. “Thank you for the wonderful things you have done for Kevin. You are such a role model. You were our beacon on this long, long journey. If you could do it, so could Kevin. You know how it is—a roller coaster. The realization that your child is . . . different. The diagnosis—the work—” Tears stand in her dark eyes.

“I do know,” says Pele, because first, she knew it from the inside. Though this is a common conversation for her, she gives each her full, deep attention. “It does get easier. I promise. You have done all the right things. Every day, there are breakthroughs.”

Ann blinks, and her tears overflow. She dashes them away, and a smile lights her lovely face. “What you’re doing here—it’s just incredible. I never dreamed that Kevin would be communicating with so many other people—all of the international children who were on the first Gifted Expeditions! They are all so brilliant—and so many are Asperger’s spectrum. My husband and I can’t make head nor tail of what they do, and we are both professors. It’s all so technical, and in their own codes, but apparently they work in shifts, twenty-four seven—”

This is like a deep gong sounding. The puzzle Pele was trying to discuss with Zi snaps into a single, frightening picture.

Pele keeps her voice low and calm, her eyes steady on Ann’s eyes. “Ann, this is very important. I need to see this information. I—”

Something on the far side of the bar catches Pele’s eyes. Her fiancée, Gustavo, threads his way through small groups of parents gathering for Marsrise. Just the sight of him has the power to change her into a different person, which she welcomes. She is happy, relaxed, made new. She is still in love, after two years.

She waves; he changes course toward her, his movements uncharacteristically urgent.

Gustavo is warm, sweet, humble, and kind, his twin fields astrobiology and artificial life. She has not been married for two decades, when her second partner regendered, as Pele had always thought probable. Twelve great-grandchildren thrive all over the world, and she follows their rich lives with avid interest. He has a similar family.

Gustavo drops onto an empty zabuton next to Pele. He smiles, but his grave expression crystallizes Pele’s apprehensions, assembling inchoate murmurings she has caught edge of—and voiced—in a final, definitive snap of realization.

He glances at Ann, nods in greeting, and takes a deep breath. Pele knows he is making his voice sound normal with great effort. “Can you spare a moment for a conference in the Venus Room?”

Code for serious emergency.

The hair on Pele’s arms rises.

All crew members are ready to fully assume many roles on the ship, according to situation and scenario, and are well-qualified for each.

He is calling her to one of hers. And he must remain here.

He grabs her hand, squeezes it with tremendous warmth. Turns his face for a brief kiss, an embrace she returns, giving herself to it completely, suddenly knowing it might be their last.

She rises, gives Ann and Gustavo a brief Buddhist nod, hands pressed together, and in that action prays for all sentient beings. Since her childhood, this prayer has been vast, and, as she followed her devotions, her definition of the scope has grown daily.

“Excuse me, please.” As she passes murmuring groups of people she feels resigned, sad, but also infinitely lightened, pulled by glowing, roiling galaxies, by the romance she first felt upon the midnight sea between Tonga and Hawai’i, when she was twelve, the stars so close she could almost grab them by the fistful, when time seemed like a miraculous toy, something she could put her mind to and learn, a story to which she might give voice.

She has always been that child. As she approaches the lock, she cannot help breaking into a run, eager as all those children. All her sensible, deep fears cannot hold her back. She turns at the last movement and becomes a mudra. Signs to Gustavo:

Aloha

He signs back. She sees tears on his face, feels them on hers.

She spins abruptly; enters the real world.

Fairy tales are as good a way as any to say these things. They lived in cities as they had in dark forests. They live in space and they live in time, however strange it has become.

This is the foot of the wave function hitting bottom. This is the flying foam of the wave flickering off, blending with, becoming another kind of time, dynamic, compelling.

This is a girl walking downhill on the flank of a mountain overlooking Pearl Harbor, bare feet on hot white concrete, immersed in plumeriascented eversummer, flipping a small, white, smooth stone into the air, leaning forward, catching it, and thinking: if this flip, and this flip, and this flip could be described by mathematics, that is a thing I would like to learn.

She is the princess, waking.

She is the one who wakes time.

There is a console immediately inside Pele’s portal, amongst the wires, tubes, and pipes of a functioning spacecraft, positioned on one of the long arms that lead to the fifty acre central atrium. Opening several screens at once, she sees that her fears are correct.

Someone has begun the launch. In fact, four days earlier. No one knew; she doesn’t know why they know now. A shadow program.

Yes, they are brilliant.

Ninety minutes left until the nukes, behind the shield, move them from their perch. The entertainment and other modules are not designed to stand the thrust, a situation she opposed from their inception. After that—well, Zi is partly right. Who knows what might happen? She has always fought for reconfiguring the ship to support a different drive, but it remains theoretical, so she had little support. Still, many possibilities are embedded in Moku. Solar sails; many models of generation ships to which the ship can mechanically reconfigure. And other possibilities, awaiting the kind of nanotech enlivenment that has not yet been born.

Pele says, “Override launch progression,” her voice empowered to enact the procedure, as are the voices of a few colleagues.

“Cancelled,” says a child’s voice above her right ear.

Within minutes, she realizes that she is powerless to stop the launch. If she cannot stop it, no one can; her colleagues have equal abilities.

“Invoking emergency plan seven,” she says. Seven will detach the external modules of hotels, gift shops, restaurants, and bars, after evacuating civilians, whom she sees are being extracted from the virtual environments, the ecosystems, the build-your-own-exoplanet immersion attraction. They will head back to Earth, safe. She sees that, luckily, a third of the civilians are in their hotel rooms, probably sleeping.

A face appears; it is her colleague Selena, brushing a wisp of brown hair away from her eyes. “Pele. We’re all on L3, 7.”

Blue dots on a map. “Together? In a breakaway?” Breakaways are, essentially, modules to be jettisoned in an emergency. She finds the yellow dots, the children. “Why are the children all on the bridge?” But she knows why.

“You don’t understand,” says Selena. “We all need to talk. In person. Now. Hurry.”

She does understand. She does hurry.

Pele enters the breakaway breathless, and sees her friends, her colleagues, her fellow dreamers, surrounded by screens on which blink schematics, warnings, plans, arguing.

She has known all of them for a very long time. They have labored together, here and in their various universities, think-tanks, and labs, over the past fifty years, as technologies changed and changed and changed again, holding to the same vision, generating theoretical and actual drives, ship design, exoplanet possibilities, and iterations of Moku in model and, slowly, in reality. Most have rotated onto Moku for a total of at least five years, with breaks, and something is always new when each arrives. They are only a handful compared to all their colleagues on Earth, the Moon, Mars, and various space communities. They have never been together in this particular configuration, which changes monthly as some rotate out and others in, but have known each other from meetings and through their work for longer than most humans have lived. They number thirty-two.

She knows that they, like she, feel as if Moku is their own body.

“Pele is here,” says Selena, and they all turn.

Pele says, “Earth should know, by now. We’ll have radio backup.”

Bijo, usually laboring in his beloved rain forest, which will never be ready, shakes his head, bowed like a slender, heavy-headed blossom after a downpour. “We are completely isolated. The children have blocked all communication.”

The face of Ta’a’aeva, a glowing, bulky Polynesian girl, her short, black kinky hair shaved in a zigzag, her face patterned by a fierce, asymmetrical tattoo, appears on a screen. “We see you are all there. I am the spokesperson for the Intergalactic Federation of Gifted Children.” Her deep, melodious voice rings through the compartment.

“We were all GC’s,” says Quinn, his thatch of dark hair falling across his face, hands on his hips, facing the screen. “Now we’re Gifted Adults. Not quite as shiny as we were brought up to think we were. Knocked on our asses a few times. As far as I can tell, what really makes us gifted is getting back up again after that happens, every time. Living to be adults, which we have done. As adults, it’s up to us to decide what to do so that you can live to be this old.”

“This isn’t a joke. You have no choice,” says Ta’a’aeva, her voice calm. “We are leaving for Object Shining Leaf. You are all coming with us.”

“Object Shining Leaf? The only place we’re going is back to Earth,” Quinn says, with finality.

Ta’a’aeva says, “The civilians are being returned to Earth. All of you are staying with us.”

“May I please speak with Bean?” says Pele.

“Bean is busy.”

But then Bean’s shy, olive-colored face appears on another screen. She and Pele look at one another for a moment. Bean blinks, and swallows.

Quinn says, loudly, “Look here,” but Pele shushes him with a hand.

“Bean, what’s happening?”

Ta’a’aeva says, “I’ll tell you,” but Bean speaks, in a whispery, uninflected voice, and slowly. “We have recoded the ship. All of the children who have been here before, too. All of us have worked on it for years. Some of us since we were little. I didn’t even know what this was, really, when I started. They gave me things to do. Every problem was like a new toy or a new puzzle. It was fun.” She closes her eyes and nods as if to some internal rhythm. Her screen goes dark.

Ta’a’aeva says, “Half of us want to kick you off the ship. Me included. We don’t need any bosses. We want to get adults out of the picture. You live too long and hog up all the air. You can’t think in new ways. You have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.”

“That’s not true!” says Quinn, hotly.

Ta’a’aeva ignores him. “Some of the insecures think we might need you eventually.”

“Like now,” says Mi, a swarm robotics specialist. “My respectful advice is that you call this off.”

“Not possible. We initiated the launch sequence for the Orion drive before we even arrived. The nukes are armed. No one noticed, right? Think about that.”

“But why?”

Ta’a’aeva wrinkles her nose in disdain. “Moku was completed thirty years ago. She could have left then. But, mysteriously, the launch is always delayed. Brave, willing crews spend years in training limbo, all wasted.”

“Not at all true!” objects Petr, a German who studies communication. “Their training yields crucial information.”

Ta’a’aeva makes a moue of anger, which her tattoos intensify. “Moku has been turned into a money-making boondoggle. An amusement park. A research facility. A vacation destination. We are moving humanity’s dream forward. Now. You won’t find a way out.” She disappears.

No way out? These words give Pele a fleeting, subconscious jolt.

“She’s a brilliant engineer,” says Victor. “We’d better believe her. She modeled something very like this in one of her past projects. If anyone can do it, she can. I personally approved her. I’m sorry I didn’t realize—”

“That her dreams were real?” Selena smiles, closes her eyes, and resumes her habitual tuneless humming. “I’m leaving. I have great-greats.” Selena, a mathematician, most often appears to be doing nothing. She walks a lot, taking swings through all the environments with a small backpack and hiking sticks. She lobbied vigorously for a High Sierra environment, and got it, manifesting a little-used gift for politics, though perhaps all simply went as one of her sociological models predicted.

Quinn says, “My vote is for staying, getting this under control, and stopping the launch. It is our responsibility to the world, and we have a moral responsibility to keep the children from the consequences of their unreason.”

“Nicely put,” says Prajan, tall as a corn stalk and as thin. He has slung himself against a wall, head bent over his device. He looks up, his eyes questioning; challenging. “So do you have a plan? Because the more I dig, the more I find that they trapped us here.”

His mobile face shifts to immense amusement, and then his startling, uproarious laugh is magnified by the metal walls. “Heads in jars! That’s what we’ll be. Sparkling in a row, nutrient juice shot through with starlight, like in all those old, crumbling pulp magazines and sci-fi movies!” Wrapping his arms around himself, he bends over. “AHHAAhahaha.” Tears trickle from the corners of his eyes, and he flicks them away with the forefingers of both hands. “Who says dreams can’t come true? And usually at the most goddamned inconvenient time.” He stuffs his device in his pocket, gazes downward, and continues to erupt in weak chuckles.

Wilhelm, a steady middle-aged physician, sighs, his brown, usually merry eyes sad. “I’m with Selena. I’ve got to get back home. I’m sure most of us are in the same boat. Ta’a’aeva is right. Space travel is not my dream. Using an off-planet environment to generate new therapies, new interventions, for all of us on Earth and Mars, is. And let’s be honest. All of us, or our companies, have profited, and Jane is not the only attorney in our midst with the responsibility of making sure that their employer’s contracts are honored, whether they be government, academic, or private industry, well past our own long lifetimes. Frankly, I’ve never even considered that they might at some point expire.”

Quinn says, “They’re just too damned smart. Their parents paid for genetic and neuroplasticity enhancements. AI nannies. They’re probably not even human anymore.”

“They are,” says Pele firmly, “as much as any of us are.” Silence.

By the way all of them shift their eyes from side to side, Pele sees they are all thinking things they dare not say.

Pele is finding it hard to focus.

Before the Hsus, during the nameless time, some kind hand floated Pele on her back, at night, in warm, protected waters, where she could watch the stars. Ala Moana, perhaps.

They know she was born in Honolulu, but there is a gap from that time until she was, literally, captured in an alley by social workers, restrained, drugged, confined, despaired over, until one day she found herself at the top of a mountain.

Petr squints, working his device. After a moment, he looks up.

“I’ve closed all of our outside communications with an emergency override, but they’ll break through quickly. Let’s talk.”

She didn’t know it was the top of a mountain; she did not use words, but the pictures were new, bright, powerful. There was distant blue, stretching forever, far below. Gigantic white big-porched house. Children of all sizes, staring at her.

Walter Hsu, an astrophysicist, and Sunny Hsu, a renowned child therapist, had quite a collection of children—five foster-children and three of their own—at the end of the road on Aiea Heights, along with transient young nannies sparkling with laughter, refugee chefs of all nationalities, visiting international experts on every imaginable subject, screenwriters and crackpots, and a crowd of helpers, all part of the tribe.

Behind the house, tropical forest, a park, to the peak of the mountain. On the other side, miles away, a steep drop to the Kona side of Oahu. Huge mango tree dropping fruit the kids had to shovel into the gully once a week. Their neighbor’s manicured Japanese garden at the far side of their house site, complete with a grumpy old Japanese gardener shaking his fist when they trespassed. A treehouse. The crumbling remnants of a sacred Hawaiian stone platform, a heiau, far down in the forest, the older children’s secret.

But for now, there are just Pele’s snapshots. Blue. Green. Wind on her skin. Faces, faces, faces. Teeth and eyes.

“Give her room, kids,” says Sunny.

Briskly, Theresa, silent till now, sets forth a plan for containing and jettisoning the children back to Earth, a split-second manipulation of partitions, robots, and gas.

Here are two stories. Pele does not remember them. Yet, within her, they fight.

This is the first story:

Pele makes a dash for the trees, but the man grabs her by the waist. His face, when he hunkers down, is big and smiling. “My name is Walter. He takes her hand. “Let’s take a look around.” For some reason, she walks with him.

No one else can touch her.

She won’t let them comb her hair. She shrieks and runs away.

Walter cuts it off swiftly; gently. She feels her head in wonder. Stares at them. Darts into the forest.

Weeks later, perhaps. Months. How would she know? Pele screams, flings a chair across the room, laughs. Kicks over a tall vase, which shatters.

“Whoops,” says Sunny, rushing into the living room, carrying an empty black garbage bag. “Should have put that up.” She grabs Pele and drops into a chair, holding Pele tightly in her lap.

Pele is a storm of sharp elbows, wriggling on the crinkly, slippery bag. She straightens, bends, twists, fights with all her might, grunting and crying in rage. She has to escape! She will! She is stronger and faster than everyone! She always gets away!

“That’s okay,” says Sunny from behind her. “You can fight me.” Sunny’s long, black hair brushes the side of Pele’s face. Pele tries to grab it, but Sunny deftly uses her left arm to hold down both of Pele’s arms, her right hand to push back her hair.

As she writhes, Pele feels Sunny’s strong, skinny arms around her. She bounces on Sunny’s hard, bony thighs. When she kicks with her heels, Sunny leans down, pins her legs. “That’s okay. I won’t let you hurt me. You can fight with me.”

The other children gather round, watching from a safe distance. Sunny yells, “Get away, you kids! This is our time. Pele’s and mine.” They scatter.

Pele turns her head to bite; a firm, flat hand presses her chin, keeps it forward. “I can’t let you hurt me.”

Pele spits; drool runs down her face. She shrieks. “Faugh!”

Sunny says, insistently, her voice low and firm, “What do you want?”

Pele bears down and pees. Surely this woman will let her go!

“I have a plastic bag on my lap, Pele. Pee all you want.”

Pele erupts into a frenzy, but is gently, firmly, held.

“What do you want?” Sunny says. “Tell me. Tell me!”

It bursts from her. “Let me go!”

“Ah! All right!” The arms release. She springs free!

Pele faces Sunny, scowling. Sunny smiles at her, gently. “You see? Talking does things. I am listening.”

She opens her arms. Crying, Pele rushes into them, and nestles in a warm embrace. “Let go,” she demands.

Sunny’s arms open.

She still doesn’t talk. But she knows she can, if necessary. And that someone is listening.

This is the second story:

The whole family is at Oahu’s Pali overlook, behind a low stone wall. The parking lot is full; people mill around, exclaiming, buffeted by the wind.

The drop below is steep; breathtaking.

Pele likes it up here. She likes it a lot. She shrieks like the wind. “Whoooo. Eeeeeeaaaah!” She runs to the side, spies a faint trail, leaps over the stone wall. Runs faster. Get away!

Get away!

The side goes down, straight down. The wind pushes at her. She trips on a root, starts to fall.

A strong arm grabs her. “Pele!”

Walter leans against a tree behind them, holding her so tightly that it hurts. He is shaking. He is crying.

“Please, Pele. Please. Don’t ever do that again.”

Pele listens to Theresa’s plan.

Selena interrupts. “This has a fifty percent chance of succeeding. Actually . . . I’m tuned into their chatter . . . closer to forty, though it does fluctuate.” She closes her eyes in that dreamy way of hers, a slight smile on her face. “No . . . now sixty-two point five three seven . . . ”

Pele says, “No. Absolutely not. We are responsible for the children. Some of them will die.”

“It serves them—” begins Quinn, then realizes what he’s saying. They are all getting heated; they are on the verge of panic.

“We have two thousand, three hundred and thirty-two seconds to decide,” says Selena.

Quinn says, “Well, Pele, it seems that you’re in charge, and that you’re on their side. Instead of the punishment they deserve for jeopardizing the one thing that’s unified our planet, and into which we have poured immense treasure, they’ll just leave and die, and so will we, as their prisoners. Moku is still here because it is, truly, perpetually unfinished. Technology is always changing. But the chief reason is that the voyage is impossible to survive in any meaningful way.”

Ala Moana, press-worthy hullaballoo, picnicking families, hula dancers, the mayor of Honolulu, slack-key guitar, the smell of roasting pig. All are gathered for the ceremonial setting forth of Moe’uhane, a fifty-foot traditionally built double-hulled canoe, to Tahiti. Tall, triangular sails, filled with wind that keeps the anchor line taut, blaze red in the noonday sun.

It is called Wayfaring, the Polynesian way of sailing over vast distances, targeting an island of a few square miles using complex techniques that draw on memory, wave patterns, star navigation. As birds cross the sea in their thousand-mile journeys, so do they sail.

Walter is a friend of Bob, who will guide Moe’uhane on its long trip using only traditional star navigation. The Hsu tribe is right up front on bamboo mats when Bob begins his star chant. His deep voice rises.

“Hoku lei’i . . . ”

Pele, a brown, skinny five-year-old in a faded red bathing suit, one long black braid undone, steps forward into his circle, opens her mouth and joins the chant, in Hawaiian, completely unselfconscious. Her singing voice, unlike her harsh, flat speaking voice, is sweet and high.

She knows this ancient chant—the directions for finding not just one island, but many, thousands of miles across the trackless sea.

Walter and Sunny share a look. This comes from a different part of the brain than speech. Laid in early, during the mystery years.

Another way in. Another way out.

When twelve, Pele crews on a star-navigation trip to Samoa on the Moe’uhane with her father, other scientists and adventurers, and Bob.

Waves rush beneath them with a show, rhythmic whoosh. The canoe rises and falls, its lashed joints creaking, its tall sails filled with salt wind. Pele, drenched with spray, stands braced on the forward platform, holding tight to the kaula ihu, the forestay line, with one hand. Thus immersed in immense, intensely black night, Pele answers with her voice. Pulsing stars move chant from deepest memories to her chest. She is a living tone, vibrating with ancient mindmap, with voyage; mission: huaka’i; a parade through time and space, which she now leads as pathfinder. She is a still point in deep infinity whose slow, reeling movement finds voice in song, lapped, increasingly for Pele, by mathematics.

As she chants, Bob gently shapes and teaches. But he has also learned from her. Whoever taught her, and then abandoned her, for whatever reason, was a master navigator.

“Look—there,” he says, when they pause. “Iwakeli’i. Cassiopeia.”

Walter points. “Tau Ceti. Might have livable planets.”

Pele stretches on tiptoe, links one arm around the ihu, opens her hands wide, pulls stars to her chest, looks at Walter and asks, “How?”

There are fourteen emergency protocols regarding kidnapping, hostages—their situation—that they can put into play via a private sign language they all know.

But someone has to make the call. Everyone looks at Pele.

The wordless place of pictures that Pele has concealed so well through all the tests, all her life, once she knew it might come back to bite her, rears up like a tidal wave that’s touched bottom in its travel over fathoms of water.

There is holding.

There is letting go.

She does both.

“All of you are leaving. I will stay, with them. Au i ke kai me he manu ala!” With that, holding them with the energy born of their own surprise, like the throw of a jujitsu master, she steps back, closes the portal, and launches them.

To cross the sea like a bird.

Like released seed pods, the modules, expelled, move rapidly from the Moku, their manual control overridden by programming the children created. The slice of Mars grows. Pele releases her held breath when her information panel notes ignition of their maneuvering rockets, which will increase their speed.

“Hsu!” Zi’s contorted face is on her monitor. “There will be repercussions.” The sound of wild screaming floods into the comm channel, drowning out Zi’s voice. He switches to another channel. She can still hear dull thuds.

Quinn, in their breakaway, appears. “Pele!”

She says, “Is everyone safe?”

Selena’s voice breaks in. “I would not have predicted this success.”

Quinn’s black eyes hold more than rage. Terror, or just the rapid analytics required to deal with the unfolding situation? He barks, “Success? Broken bones. Abrasions. One death thus far. Sure to be more.” Pele hears a great commotion on the other screen; recognizes Ann and other parents as they crowd round the fish-eye lens. “Come back,” shouts Ann. “Return Kevin right now!”

Jane, the lawyer, yells, “You have committed piracy. Kidnapping. Treason. Child abuse. Manslaughter.”

Pele orders, “All craft move away with maximum speed. I have no control. The nukes, activated by the GCC, will detonate in seconds. They are contained, but—”

A tall, young boy is next to her. He touches her elbow. “Dr. Hsu. I am Eliott. Chimerist.” The wailing, frantic parents arrayed before him quiet. To them, Eliott says, “We apologize for injuries. We did our best to create a plan that would minimize them. We are all well. We have not been kidnapped. The reverse, perhaps. We have sent you our story. Listen to it. Do not blame our colleagues on Earth. You cannot blame us, of course. We are children. Communications are now blocked until we choose to re-open them.”

To Pele, he says “Hurry.”

In Nucleus, the op center of Moku, Pele sees thirty-seven children—short, tall, round, thin, each from a different country and culture, monitoring and managing the ship, a cohesive crew with their own Esperanto, which Pele took care to learn. Many, like Ta’a’aeva, are not Aspies; she knows that she has focused on those who are because of her own history.

Pele makes a rapid tour, gives a few suggestions, which are seriously considered and often executed. She could be in any of the many ships, private and government-backed, that she has had the privilege to serve on over the past fifty years.

Bean, ten, is the youngest. Ta’a’aeva’s on-board fourteenth birthday drew a record-making number of viewers just last week, and she is oldest. Most have at least one college degree. Pele has interacted with all of them, and henceforth—but there is no way to understand this enormity—neither she nor they will ever know any other humans.

“Don’t worry,” says Eliott. “We have done this, virtually, a million times. We know all the contingencies.”

“And my decision?”

“Scenario 174.”

She knows she could ask any of them and they would know that number, all the others, and what each would have entailed, just as she knew what Venus Room meant.

The ship announces, “Crew, prepare for nuclear ignition.”

Pele steps into the nearest empty booth on the wall of the circular space, which cocoons her, leaving her face free. For a wild, silly second, Pele is reminded of nothing so much as being strapped into a tilt-a-whirl at the state fair, waiting to be spun through the air, held to the wall by the force of gravity.

She can hear their conversation in her headphones, and sees a good number of their faces. Only a few look appropriately grave. Some grin. She hears a wild, shrieking laugh, and some self-congratulatory talk of victory, as if this is a virtual game they have won. Perhaps it is.

How can they imagine the horrors Pele foresees? They are so terribly young. They have had no chance to learn about life, and now they never will. The freedom of Earth, the freedom of choosing another road, and another, and another. The delight of communicating with and learning from a rich, diverse population. The road they face is hard, narrow, and probably impossible. Doubt, anger, and regret rage through her; she struggles against the restraints, her chest a dark, sad weight. She has saved them only for an impossible task.

She always blacks out at five g’s, but until then, she desperately thinks, plans, wonders, What can I do to help them survive?

Pele is six. She sits crosslegged on a large, cool rock across from her brother Jack. Their knees almost touch. The waterfall, which the kids often visit, is small, but makes a pleasing sound as it rushes over rocks. The tumble of fresh water washes the air. Small dark fish hang in the shadows. Fallen red lehua blossoms drift on the surface.

Jack is fifteen, one of the Hsus” three natural children. Dapples of light brighten his straight, black, shoulder-length hair as wind shifts the forest canopy above them and blows it across his face. He is the only one of the children she has anything to do with. The others just seem like a lot of noise.

“Okay. Let’s try again. Look at my face. Can you tell how I feel?”

She stares intently at Jack’s teeth, sorting the long call of the i’iwi, the amakihi’s chatter, the sweet song of the apanane.

“No, Pele. My eyes. Raise your chin. Look.”

She does. He draws his eyebrows together, glares at her. “Tell me—what am I feeling?”

She shrugs.

He thrusts his face forward, retaining the ferocious look, and says, “I am angry! Now I will make you feel angry. Pele, you are stupid!”

She leaps to her feet and lunges down at him, fists forward. He catches her wrists, one in each of his hands. “That is anger, Pele. You feel angry. I feel the same way. I am angry that you tried to hit me! Tell me what my face looks like! My mouth! My eyebrows! My wrinkles!”

As he holds her wrists in mid-air, it dawns on her. “I can tell how you feel by looking at your face?”

He lets go and nods. She drops back onto the rock and rests her chin in her hands. The water is dark green, then clear and sparkling where the sun hits it.

He says, “Now you look worried. You’re thinking. What are you thinking?”

She says forcefully, “I am wondering why you are bothering me. I am thinking that this is too much work.”

“It’s work for me too. But I like to work with you. You’re my sister, and I want to help you.”

“I don’t need help.”

He says, very gently, “Please look at my face for just a minute.”

She does, reluctantly. “You are looking right at me. Into my eyes.”

“Tell me how my face looks.”

“Your eyes are open very wide. Your look is strong. It almost hurts me.

It makes me feel . . . ”

He nods encouragingly. “Feel what?”

“I don’t know. Is there a word?”

“I am trying to tell you with this look that I care about you.”

She wonders how she can memorize a look, and how Jack’s look would seem on someone else’s face. It all seems quite impossible. “Why?”

“My older brother lived here when I was little. He was our parents” biological child too. He could never look at me. I loved him. He’s a grownup now. His name is Edmond Hsu. He’s a mathematician, eh? You can see his work online. He started college when he was twelve and lives on the mainland now. I was always sad that he would never look at me. Mom told me that I shouldn’t be sad, that he didn’t know what we were feeling and thinking.”

“So?”

“I think that you can know, Pele.” He smiles.

She looks back at the pool. “Then what do I feel now?” She knows that she feels vaguely out-of-sorts. She is not sure what any of this means.

“Grumpy.” He jumps up. “Come on. Bet I can beat you back to the trailhead!”

She gets up more slowly and stands, hands on her hips, nodding. “Grumpy.”

Another day, he hands her a wet rag while she is in the back yard throwing rotten mangoes at a big tree in the gully and watching them smash. “Wash your hands. I know you can read. Try reading this.”

“No!” She throws The Wizard of Oz on the ground as he walks away.

Irritated that this does not bother him, she picks it up, wipes mango goo from the cover, and reads aloud to the gully in a shouting voice: “When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.”

She turns and faces the house, where Jack might still be listening. She hopes he is. “So? I am an orphan. I scream a lot. AIEEEE! And sometimes I hate it when people laugh!”

The trees swish in the wind, and the palms make rain-pattering sounds beneath the blue sky.

She does nothing for three days except read The Wizard of Oz. When she is finished, she marches into Jack’s room, where he is studying, and smacks it down on his desk.

“I am very angry with you,” she shouts.

“Why?”

“Because this made me sad and afraid and worried.”

“Anything else?”

“I was happy and sad at the same time when Dorothy got back home. I hated it!” “Why?”

“I just did!”

Jack smiles as she stomps from the room. Next, he gives her a curious old volume, My Bookhouse: Through Fairy Halls. It is a hefty book, bound in black leather, with vivid pictures that seem like music, because of the way they move in Pele’s mind. It smells funny. The pages are dry. “Take care of it,” he says.

Pele is walking on a treadmill. A girl stands next to her, watching.

“Are you Bean?”

“That’s the first time you remembered.”

“I told you a story.”

The girl looks straight at Pele. Her eyes are hazel with flecks of gold. “A girl lived in the mountains of Tibet. She was trying to escape from the Chinese and broke her leg and nearly starved to death.” Bean purses her lips, looking confused. “You said I couldn’t give her any powers, and I couldn’t earn any weapons, so I couldn’t help her. Things just happened and then it was over and nobody won, but she did get out and became a hero. You said it would change my brain. I tried to measure that, but I couldn’t. I think I need more stories to do that, or I have to figure out a new way of measuring.”

“Usually when I was your age I liked a story if it made me cry.”

Bean flashes her a startled look. “You liked to cry?”

Pele smiles. “It is kind of strange, isn’t it?”

Bean frowns. “I will tell you my story. It is about a horse. I don’t know if you would like it. It doesn’t have an ending.”

“I think I know your story. But there are many ways to tell every story. Tell it to me again. I’m sure that it will make me cry.”

As Pele strides back into trance, into dream, Bean wonders why tears flow from beneath Pele’s closed eyelids.

“Pele!”

Ta’a’aeva stands in front of her. Bean leans close, against her left arm. They are all gathered, all looking at her.

Ta’a’aeva speaks. “We need your help. It is almost completed, we think. But you are the one who can do it. We are glad you have come. But be here! Please wake up!”

Obviously, a dream.

Pele, in her own little house, a chicken coop in a row of chicken coops long ago completely sanitized, used, and abandoned by various Hsu children.

Hers has weather-smoothed streaks of white paint, abundant sun that lies on the floor in a slant, a shelf where hens once roosted crowded with a row of old books. Large, castoff cushions on the floor.

She is seven.

Her brothers and sisters rush down the gully, a crescendoing cavalcade of pounding feet. They surround her house, yelling. Rocks bounce off the side. Diane peers in the window, howls with laughter. “She’s reading those silly fairy tales again!”

“Yeah, she likes those old books. I loaned her my screen and found it in the trash can!”

They leap around the chicken coop, yelling, singing, beating on it with sticks, making it shake when they try to push it over.

Pele, lying on her stomach, barely hears them. She is in worlds of ogres, fairies, magic boots, menehunies, stupid children, endless journeys, flying carpets, talking animals, and powerful goddesses like her namesake, a dangerous woman whose actions are unpredictable and thrilling, who created the Hawaiian Islands with her volcanoes. They are more real than people, and certainly much more interesting.

She does not even notice when the clatter recedes. Rain patters on big-leaved trees, sun speeds across the floor, she smells sweetly rotting mangoes mixed in the brisk, whipping breeze, and reads.

Sunny’s sideways head and shoulders darken the coop’s small door. “It’s getting dark. Come inside.”

Pele, her head propped on her elbows, is reading about a giant. “No.”

Sunny smiles, sets a water bottle, a package of dried squid, and a book light inside, then leaves.

When Pele wakes the next morning in her own bed, she has a memory of being carried through the night, and the stars. Next to her on the bed is Through Fairy Halls, her favorite of the Bookhouse volumes. She opens it and starts to read. Grimm, Anderson, the Blue and Green and Red books follow, and then folk and fairy tales from around the world. Wise and wily rabbits, lions, crickets and tortoises argue, beguile, win, lose. And Fairyland itself?

Oh, there is music and dancing in Fairyland. No yesterday, and no tomorrow. Pipes call. Trumpets sound. The low are made high, and the high are surprised and chagrined.

There is a dangerous edge to Fairyland, which Pele enjoys. One flirts with it to one’s own peril.

And part of her now, the living dreaming part, knows that she has crossed the border. Nightingales, clear springs, great rose-trees whose rich scents confound the senses. The large made small; the small, large, and one’s own self made true.

And Time a leafy, sun-dappled orchard.

Gray horse, crunch of sweet, crisp fruit, swish of long silver tail.

Long ago. Ever-now.

She is Gulliver, pounded by tiny fists.

“Please, please, wake up! We need your help! We can’t do it alone! Please, please, wake up!”

She opens her eyes. Bean is there. “You have been asleep for a long, long time, Pele.” Her eyes are grave.

“This is too slow,” says Kevin, shaking her arm. “We’re only transiting Venus. We’ll never get to Shining Leaf.”

Ignoring trumpet fanfares, Pele calculates, considering Orion’s acceleration, that she has been asleep for three months.

Ta’a’aeva says, “We can’t make the drive work. You know how. Tell us! Tell us, and we’ll engineer it. You know that we can.”

Pele says, “Get me out of this.” As they unstrap her cocoon, she looks at a nearby screen. “I’ve been exercising three hours a day on the bike? Really?”

“You weren’t awake,” says Eliott. “You were in a trance.”

“Indeed,” she says, taking in the compressed graphic of her brainwaves for the past few months, noting the sharp spikes that she knows linger in her mind like haunting, exotic music, calling her to return.

It takes all her will to remain where she is, on Moku, where she has committed a powerful, monstrous act. She sees the resolve of the children arrayed around her and knows that she cannot gain control of the ship. She knows that they would have done this without her help.

She tries to believe that they are better off with her here. She must make that true.

She also sees, scrolling, continuous, messages from Earth. With a touch, she speeds them up, goes backwards, absorbs them like a blow, for it is all her fault.

And Gustavo. She searches wildly, finds a tiny line of news—

“No!” She raises her hands to cover her face, and sobs, slumping back into the cocoon, curling up so that no one, no one, can see her.

She does not re-emerge for another spell. But now, her dreams are new. She is working.

Bean sees Pele first.

She is standing just outside Nucleus, where diagrams, equations, charts, and virtual models of FTL drives litter the air in transparent, three-dimensional overlays. She has been watching, listening to the hum of intense concentration, several intertwining musics that tangle and leap within her long-quiet mind, and getting ready to turn and re-enter her cocoon.

The displays rainbow Bean’s slight body as she approaches Pele, her stare a powerful command. She takes Pele’s hand and, as the others gather, leads her to an array of cushions. Pele settles on one, back straight, legs crossed, and says, direct from her hard-won beginner’s mind, “You don’t really need me. Are you ready to tell us, Bean?”

First, Bean’s eyes widen as she tilts her head at Pele.

Pele nods. “I know.”

Bean frowns and clenches her fists. “I’ve been trying. It’s closed in. Like a hard nut. I can’t tell it. No one understands.”

“Try another way.”

Bean takes a deep breath, then shakes her head and makes her long hair swirl round her face. She stretches her long legs out in front of her, grasps the soles of her feet with her hands, tucks her head in, and silences.

“Bean, who is in this story?” asks Pele.

She asks three times. Finally Bean says, her head still down, her voice muffled, “It is a story about a horse.” She walks her hands up her calves, singing more than speaking, bends both knees to the right, and kneels, her spine ramrod straight, hands moving as in a hula, shaping the story in space. “Sometimes the story seems short, and sometimes I know that it is actually very, very long. “On the pampas, I ride Alcubierre, my silver mare, all day through the wheat. It parts and lets us through.” Her hands speak in swift, darting signs now: her own language, Pele knows, which they must learn.

Another way in. Another way out.

“It makes a swishing sound, like wind, and then the sounds are a music that might keep me there forever. They are . . . enchanting.”

Pele hears what Bean hears; it assails her even now, calling her.

But she cannot, will not, succumb.

Bean’s eyelids are half-closed. She speaks as if in a trance. “Alcubierre pulls the mountain closer when she gallops. She and I—we do not move. We remain the same, and in the same place. The wheat is time. Flowing and parting around me.

“I thought of this story for a whole year. I worked on it in my head when I rode. I see us from above. Alcubierre’s tail flows out behind her, white, blending and waving with the golden wheat. It is long . . . long . . . long . . . ” She lowers her head as if in apology and whispers, “But still. The story is not in words.”

“Ah,” says Pele, grateful when Bean stops speaking, and the imperative music fades. She has tried to wake before. It may be still a dream.

But she does not think so. “Show us.”

The showing unfolds. It is complex, and long, as Pele knew it would be, and wakes her fully. All of them struggle to understand, to master various parts of it, to use theory to imagine this drive, to picture the concept of the space that it would use.

Xia, Chief Nanotechnologist, prepares to infuse the ship with her work and the work of a million materials engineers, biomedical engineers, environmental scientists—a synthesis of every science and engineering discipline—generated from a century of research and application.

They gather for a ceremony. Xia’s black eyes are serious and steady when she speaks. “We will be enabled, today, through enlivenment, which is how we describe this coming change, to manipulate the matter of our ship at the atomic level. The rules we hereby embed within the ship are the final arbiter of what is and is not permissible, and the laws of physics govern what is possible. Among other benefits, we will all enjoy perfect health from now on.”

Nucleus fills with huge, idealized atoms, strings of splitting and reconnecting DNA, and long sections of text. One section glows next to Pele, and she rapidly scans it, aghast.

Grinning, Xia shouts, “And we will all have tremendous fun!” Everyone except Pele whoops and cheers.

“Should we discuss it and vote?” asks Pele. They all look at her with amazement. “I’ve seen this before. It’s a plan for—it is, I gather, a universal assembler—”

“There’s nothing to vote on,” Xia explains, her voice as gentle as if speaking to a small child. She holds a sheaf of small, square envelopes in one hand. “This was always part of the plan. All of us have contributed to it, in one way or another. We all know everything there is to know about it.”

The fields of nanotechnology, a discipline drawing on all scientific disciplines, have blown far past Drexler’s early visions. Pele has sat on international committees that debated the use of various iterations of nanotechnology. Some were approved, and some, which embodied the possibility of change so rapid and radical that the results could not be predicted, were left unused, and locked away.

Pele understands, and now knows that they understand as well, that this particular iteration is the ability to change matter swiftly, from the bottom up, to grow rather than to machine. This chameleon-like ability, this new plasticity, will include themselves—their minds, their bodies—as well as their surroundings. Everything. Within what limits? The limits of physics have not been fully explored. Not by a long shot. Things will change, evolve, and Pele doesn’t know what, or how. Neither do they.

Alicia gives everyone an envelope. Pele opens hers and pulls out a round, paperish object.

“Why does this look like a communion wafer?” she asks.

“A what?” ask several children.

“The circle was my idea,” says Bean. “It’s . . . simple. It doesn’t have any religion in it.”

“I wanted water balloons that we could explode and scatter the replicators around,” says Ta’a’aeva, scowling. “Nobody listens to me.”

“Do we eat it?” asks Pele.

“You can,” says Xia, but, imitating the children, Pele presses hers to the side of the ship, where, warmed by her hand, it is rapidly absorbed.

A brief, dazzling light rushes through the walls of Nucleus. The children break into wild dance, laughing, and spinning through the air.

O brave new world, thinks Pele, that has such people in’t! She recalls her child-self, almost flying off the sheer cliff, and wants to grab them, and hold them back.

But it is far too late for that.

She soars and spins with the rest of them. Laughs. Forgets.

Is brave, again. For now.

The enlivenment, as the nanotech changes move through the ship, transforming its matter to a medium that they can easily manipulate, is slow at first, but increases in speed exponentially.

It makes their work much easier, and their environment becomes more dense, as if full of worlds it had been waiting to manifest.

Despite her fears, it is good, as far as she can tell. A rich and joyous thing.

The children, she realizes, do know more than she does.

For instance: Pele, strolling through the city, enters a musty used bookstore. It draws her in, past piles and towering shelves of books, farther and farther, until she realizes that she is in the children’s library that Zi mentioned. Each title strikes her heart. Some make her cry. All open worlds in her mind, worlds she thought long-gone; worlds that submerge her, change, and release her.

With wonder, she pulls out an old, tattered, black book. On its cover is an illustration of a girl and boy unlatching an arched, stout, wooden door set in a stone wall. The Latch Key. Opening it, she first reads the frontis poem, written by Olive Beaupré Miller:

Its windows look out far and wide

From each of all its stories.

I’ll take the key and enter in;

For me are all its glories.

When Pele looks up, after reading for hours, the store is gone; the street, likewise, has vanished. She sets the book aside, perches on a rock, stares at the stars, and remembers Gustavo, her children, his children, and her descendants, for a long, sweet time.

She hears those children shout to one another as they hide-and-seek in Earth’s long, green summer evenings, sees them splash in their nightly bath and then their faces in soft lamplight, eyelids closing, as she reads to them these old, strong tales.

Perhaps, she thinks, that is the most good I have ever done.

She uses their new technology to create a tiny, whitewashed cottage that hangs in rain forest on a steep volcanic mountain. Far below, lush tongues of green, fringed with shining, black volcanic sand, invade the sea, which deepens to kane, the deep, blue shade of distance. Tatami mats cover the wide-plank koa floor. The trade wind rattles the hanging photos of Sunny, Walter, and all the kids against the wall. A bookshelf manifests any books she wants, including an old, well-worn copy of Through Fairy Halls, with its luminous cover plate of a girl and boy rushing ahead of a diaphanous winged fairy.

Pele sits on her front porch in a rocking chair, paging through the large, heavy book thoughtfully, as the growing drive undergoes troubleshooting and the songs of long-extinct finches wind through her thoughts. She hikes down an ever-manifesting ridge, rappels down a cliff to a tiny beach where she tests herself in treacherous currents, and flings herself, naked, on olivine sand, falling asleep to the roar of the surf. And wakes to space, ablaze with the stars she long planned to grasp.

Her soul rests a brief time, all she allows.

Then, while the children work, Pele turns to what needs to be done. She absorbs the threats, the messages, the stages of grief from Earth. It is hard. She can only do a bit of this task at a time, but she battles through it. She is the only adult here. It is her responsibility.

She wants badly to invent Sunny to have someone to talk to, and though she could, it would only be herself, so she does not. She is afraid to think about why she slept so long. She both knows and does not know, and both are useless to try to understand.

She knows her purchase on this new reality is tenuous. The part of her that loosed them is not rational, and she has fought it all her life.

But there is something she must do now that is more important than anything else she has ever done. That task holds her sternly here, on Moku, with its precious cargo of life.

Moku holds the world genome. They will start species, including humans, growing when they get close. To somewhere. After an unimaginable piece of time, when it is likely that none of them will be here, or that they will be so different that one could spend a million years just imagining the possibilities. What Moku will nurture, and why, will be based on immense data about the planet. A complex task, the vindication of what she has enabled, awaits.

Pele wonders, what will these new humans, these mammals who absorb culture, know? Who and what will teach them? When they forage among the wilderness of what the ship holds, who will they become? What culture will they construct?

It is her task to help them answer this question.

When she calls the children together, they protest. “We are working,” says Ta’a’aeva, standing with her arms crossed as thirty-seven children gather in Nucleus.

“You haven’t spoken to your parents since we left. You need to do that. Now.”

Kevin sucks in his lips and clenches his hands, as he always does in times of stress, to keep them from trembling.

Ta’a’aeva’s face hardens.

Alicia, who is thirteen, curses, rips a cushion from the floor, and floats it as hard as she can in Pele’s general direction. “I told my mother I was leaving and that I’m never coming back!”

Bean bursts into tears and pushes herself down the tunnel to her berth.

“I hear all of you,” says Pele. “Your feelings are mixed up, and hard to live with. How do you think they feel?”

“I’m tired of always trying to think about what other people are feeling,” declares Xavier. “It’s too hard.”

“It’s the hardest thing to do,” says Pele.

When rent by a meteor, the ship heals. This is not magic. This is science.

Pele, Nedda, Bean, and Takay are sitting on the porch of her cottage, reading books.

As if in a dream, or a myopic haze, Pele sees sky and sea shatter, revealing an assault of blinding stars, and hears a huge rush, as on a beach where massive waves tower and break, and then they are enclosed by a thick, opaque membrane.

Pele is surprised when they all stand and begin to sing, each in a different language, in different tunes and meters, and that it sounds so beautiful. Time seems more slow, and although together they all speak their ever evolving Esperanto, they sing songs from their own earliest childhoods. Pele’s mouth opens; her own song comes out, rich and deep from her chest, from her toes, from the far spaces of memory: the Wayfaring chant. From star to star to star. Like a bird transverses the sea. Maybe, indeed, she moves them with this chant. It seems so.

As they sing, life encloses not-life with a net that then thickens, expelling not-life with energy captured from the meteor. Not death—a lucky catch! The net extracts minerals, oxygen, carbon dioxide.

The scrim of matter opaques. They are made whole; enclosed.

They have new stuff to play with, to sustain them. The ship uses the meteor to grow more space, add more air, water the lettuce, grow the infant bristlecone pines in High Sierra.

To regrow the shattered cottage, and chairs, where they sit rocking, turning pages slowly, as a standing wave edges the blue Pacific far below, and plumeria sweeten the air.

They have communicated with one another by this time. The children and their parents.

Their parents had not remembered how strong the force of growing is. They had not remembered how they fought to leave home.

They wanted some kind of magic to protect their children, but all their love could not invent it. The children had torn themselves away, but that is what children do.

Before all this, the parents had worked very hard, even before the children were conceived, because this was The Future, and there was a lot that they could do. These parents wanted their children to be the very smartest, the very best, the most successful. They particularly did not want their children to turn out like the children of their relatives or their friends, who always did a terrible job, and in whose children the ways in which they had gone wrong were so obvious. They would do better.

When the children became teenagers, their sweet child faces changed, and their behaviors were not encouraging. Even though the parents had been teenagers and were sure that they would understand their own, a dark magic veil had grown between them.

I think that this is the first mention of magic in this fairy tale, but I’m not sure. Don’t be too hard on us for not knowing exactly when this happened. A lot of fairy tales don’t even realize that’s what they are, much less come right out and admit it.

Anyway, once the kids were teenagers, the parents lost control. And yes, they were afraid, because they remembered how stupid they had been, and they had tried with all their might to deflect or change this stupid energy, and because it was The Future and they knew more about brains and human development, they thought they had it licked.

But no. They were still the same old humans in important ways.

The children didn’t know that they were acting like robots and that they would miss their parents. They didn’t know that just growing up creates this energy, and that there was nothing they could do about it. So all of the humans on Earth were pouring out their love, which was helpless to do anything now.

If the children had known how sad their parents would be, they would never have done it. At this point they are beginning to understand, but still do not learn how deep sadness can be. Not yet. Perhaps no one reaches the end of it, and, to survive, must simply choose another path, one with more useful stories. But, as you may know, that is another part of this story.

Worse than all that, the children finally realized that they had stolen something that their parents had worked hard for, Moku. The ship, and all of space and time, wasn’t meant just for the children. It was meant for everyone in The Future, and for all the people in the world to benefit from. The people of Earth didn’t realize this when they were building it. They thought they were making something they could let go of.

It didn’t turn out that way.

It was all heartrendingly sad.

Finally, they had to let go.

The parents, the children. The children, Earth.

The people on Earth take a long time to decide how to say goodbye. They form committees, consider proposals, argue violently or with subtle skill, make deals, publish editorials, write learned papers.

It is taking longer and longer for Earth and Moku to communicate.

Finally, one day when it is almost too late, at a signal no one recalls initiating, they gather in cathedrals and squares and sing. They sing from flotillas of boats tethered together while they drink rum beneath fiery, poignant sunsets. They sing from observatories to the deep night sky, and as night flips swiftly to day in Bogota.

They sing from self-driving vehicles. Old people stop their tennis games to sing. Children sing in schools; there are still schools, only much better ones. Tech advisors, stock manipulators, and people who still do not have clean water but who do have a device sing. They sing from bars, from the Moon, and from every point in space where humans live.

When the song arrives at the ship, as they are passing Neptune’s orbit, they piece it together and gather, standing, and listen, looking back from whence they came, those tiny dots of life holding all they have ever known. Seas, mountains, the three remaining tigers. The deep time and lucky chance that caused life. Winds that flatten vast fields of wheat with great, caressing hands, like the hands that once caressed them with such love and care.

This is what they hear:

Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee,

All through the night

Guardian angels God will send thee,

All through the night

Soft the drowsy hours are creeping

Hill and vale in slumber steeping

I my loving vigil keeping

All through the night.

The children, and Pele, hold hands and cry, knowing what they have lost.

Pele knows that, for the children, it is the first step. It changes their brains.

She does not know how she will get past it.

Perhaps, she thinks later, alone and staring at the place she thought she always wanted to be, she never will.

And now within the old gray tower

We’ve climbed the winding stair,

And look out over all the earth

From topmost window there.

Far stretches all the world away,

And naught shuts out the sky,

As knights and maids and all of life

Go marching, marching by.

—Olive Beaupré Miller, From the Tower Window

Finally, as they pass out of the solar system, it is time. They must get moving. They must set forth. They must transform.

And they do need her; they did bring her for a reason. She has lived this project, this drive, for decades, every detail of it. Bean’s work has brought it to life, but there is no way to know how it will manifest, if they will survive, and, if they do, how it will change them. That part of it is greater than that which one can imagine.

All is in readiness. She is awake. The fulcrum is here. She has the lever to move it.

The minds, the dreams, of the children are the weight. They offer her thoughts, ideas, visions, insights, like flowers, which she gathers, and they all spark together, pointing toward fruition, the shift that will carry life forward.

This is humanity’s main chance. She knows, but cannot think about, how important that is.

She prepares to play a vast chord, the way her piano teacher taught her, knowing it all first, in the instant before her spread fingers descend to the cool, hard, certain keys, back straight, elbows wide, with all she is contained within that force.

Pele plays.

This is the chord that sounds:

They are a creature of the deep sea, of interstellar space.

They are a thought, and thought is matter.

The ship, the matter, is like a film above, a fluid, a lens on the surface of their sky, the division between fluid and gas.

They coalesce: they rise.

Arrayed around Pele at that moment is a human orchestra, potential symphonies, jazz rhapsodies, new musics for which new brains to hear must be invented. On new planets, they may whirl and dance, skipping through the universe like stones, breaking through the surface tension of the strange fugue of time in which they are embedded, and sink back into life.

“Oh,” she says, “oh.” She bends over, weeping.

First comes Bean, whose willowy arms surround but barely touch her. Then Ta’a’aeva’s rough embrace, her strong, gasping voice. Javail’s tall blond head bending down to touch hers, and then they are all in a huddle, embracing tightly, crying, swaying, and, finally, laughing as they break.

“We will find the place we need,” says Javail, his ever-adolescent voice breaking as he speaks, yet, as always, he sounds eminently reasonable. “As you can see, we have all the time in the world.”

“We may need more,” observes Pele, her voice harsh, and they break into applause that sounds, to Pele, like surf sounding at Kaena Point.

That is the last they see of her for a very long time.

There is music and frolic in the special time of Fairyland. No yesterday, and no tomorrow. Pipes call. Trumpets sound.

Nightingales, clear springs, the great rose-trees.

Magic. Some good, some bad, but uncaring of humans, rather like space.

Alcubierre eats Casimir Vacuums for breakfast, rips them out of a field with her big yellow teeth and chomps on them. The edges of the vacuums stick out of the sides of her mouth like gold straw and tiny blue flowers and move up and down as she chomps and snorts.

They are one speck of pollen on a single stamen of one small blue flower that bobs up and down in her mouth.

The Librarian carries a wooden clock.

It is chiefly oak. Framed by an oaken octagon a bit smaller than the main octagonal structure that holds the clock’s mechanics and chimes, the face is protected by a glass door ten inches in diameter that one can open with a small latch. The hours are Roman numerals, painted on a cream-colored metal face. In black, swirling copperplate, a single word: Excelsior.

It has a smaller glass door, below, that one can open to start the pendulum swinging.

The Librarian carries it cradled in her left arm, like a baby. Therefore, it does not tick, for the pendulum drops against the back of its compartment.

The hands of the clock are silver, their deliciously narrow, elongated arrows a final flourish, pointing at the hour, the minute, and the infinite in-betweens.

A key rattles inside its small, latched drawer at the bottom of the pendulum when she walks, and the three square holes in the face’s clock emit faint light. Sometimes she unlatches the drawer, opens it, and examines the key closely, with a look of wonder on her face. Then she returns it to its drawer and re-latches the tiny brass hook.

Every so often, she opens the door of the clock’s face, tilts her head, smiles, and moves first the long arrow to a place that seems random, and then the small hand. She beams at the clock, shuts the door, and goes about her business. She never inserts the key. She never winds the clock.

If she has to do something requiring the use of her left hand, she sets the clock carefully in a safe place and immediately retrieves it when done. She straps it in beside her when she sleeps.

This seems a burdensome practice, but it gives her pleasure. Laying bets regarding various aspects of what she does with the clock have become popular.

It gives us something to do.

In one of the vacuums—there are many—I grew this voice that says we. I don’t know how, though I am trying to tell you.

I might have grown it when I was Nancy Drew, in her blue roadster, driving through dark space, past planets. One . . . two . . . three . . . ten thousand . . . it took a long time. Then there were white farmhouses just off a dusty dirt road, hidden behind summer trees, their big heads tossing in the hot wind as if they had something haughty to say.

Inside one house with open windows a planet mobile rotated in the breeze. A girl with long black braids, lying on a double wedding ring quilt made by her grandmother, pointed to them and said, “Strike Hypatia off the list. And Dulcinea, too.” They disappeared from the mobile, and others appeared.

I sped into the brain of the little girl and it was all myth, science, clockwork, precise, wires, pulses, blood, AI, luminous, expanding, nova, pressure, big bang, dust, and me, driving past on country lane in a blue roadster, hair streaming violently far, far, far out behind me, pushed by my own speed, seeing white snowball bushes in the front yard, and a cherry tree, and a woman gathering billowing white sheets from a clothesline, and a girl inside analyzing planetary composition.

You can see why I can’t tell you exactly how it happened.

Pele looks like Pele, except that her eyes are different. She won’t look at anyone. She does smile a lot. She calls herself The Librarian and says she would like to help us.

This is when the clock shows up. You know about that already.

We can’t really blame her for acting this way. She had many areas of expertise when we stole the Moku, like all the other adults on the ship, but she was uniquely special, so we stole her too.

She knew how to make our horse.

She thinks that she chose to help us by staying with us and saved all the other adults by sending them back to Earth. She thinks she is our savior.

We let her think that because whenever she realizes that we have control, she acts in ways that are not helpful to us.

For instance, when the prince arrives to kiss her (and is the prince us, and what we did? it seems possible) she pushes him down, kicks him in the side three times (once or twice is not enough, while four or more is overdoing it), and strides off down a long, winding road, over hill and dale, hands in her pockets, whistling, looking at everything with a keen and watchful eye.

She walks through rain, hail, sleet, and snow, singing about it, all bundled up, sometimes an old woman, sometimes a young maiden, and then through summer meadows that climb the flanks of mountains, her clock in a bag that she throws over her shoulder. She wears loose, purple linen pants with large pockets, which she fills with things that seem useless.

She sees beautiful, glowing stones by the side of the path—one gray, one gold, and one rainbowed with layers of minerals. She picks them up and examines each, a large smile on her face. She puts them in her right-hand pants pocket.

To us they look like dull old rocks, but then somehow, like magic, we see them through her eyes, and know what they are. The stones and the power of stones are stories. She is gathering all the stories everyone has ever told, and our stories, and keeping them safe in her pocket until we know how to tell them. There are so many stories in that pocket that you would think her pants would fall down, but though the stories are endless, and the stones are all different, they do not, for the stones are magic stones; the pants magic pants.

Only if we sit around a fire that lights our faces and dances to the dark treetops whenever one of us throws on branches scavenged from the woods, throwing sparks into the night, does she consent to pull out a stone and tell us a story. We have to beg and yell at her. She says that only then are our brains receptive, when we are parched of stories.

She says this is a way to go back to the beginning, to break down our brains to a place we had bypassed in our speed to understand, and that was during the time that we were supposed to look at other faces and wonder what they were thinking. We were supposed to learn to understand when they were sad, when they were happy, and when they had feelings that were more complex, like a flavor or scent or a sound that comes out of the deep dark forest that is a sweet, mysterious music that calls you to come. She says this is the beginning of love.

When she talks like that, when she tells us stories, her voice is rich and deep, her face fluid, when often it is flat, like some of ours.

Her stories change our brains. We can even measure where and how much.

It’s something to do.

Her eyes get very wide, or narrow to slits. Her mouth assumes strange shapes. Sometimes she opens it wide and screams, reaches to the sky and grabs at it, her hands open, then grasps as she suddenly! in an instant! catches something and pulls it to her chest, and bows her head over it, and her long white hair veils her mysterious face, pale in the moonlight, silent as one of her stones, and we cry without knowing why, feeling helpless and at the same time knowing that she will help.

It is the age of stories. We suck them down like nectar.

We search for our new home. We move like a sea creature through the dark, generating our own electricity. Fluid, ever-changing, Ship translucent or solid-seeming, as we wish.

We grow no older. Why? Biological processes continue; of course. We live. We do the things we need to do, but our horse is wise, and knows much more than we.

Pele is still there, though they don’t know it. Or they do, sometimes. She fears a foray through some other kind of spacetime weather in which they will all age to telomerase endgame and die in what seems minutes. Who knows.

The instant that divides life and death. We must learn to skip it.

Periods of waking like cards constantly shuffled, the deck and game continually changing—the rules, the faces, the very basis of the numbers and what they mean.

“This one is too cold,” says Isho, who is Goldilocks. “And this one is too hot.”

“And none is just right, and none will ever be,” screams Ta’a’aeva, who is always the biggest bear. She storms away from the cottage. Isho and Kevin, the middle-sized bear, drop into tiny green chairs, sobbing.

“That’s not how it goes!” says Alouette, kneeling and holding Isho and Kevin in a skinny-armed embrace. “You know the story. Happy ending, and all that.”

“No”, says Kevin, his voice wild. “No! None of them are right. None of them ever will be right! There is no place for us in any universe except Earth. And it is gone!” He flings himself at Pele and tries to hit her in a flurry of punches. “My mother is gone! My father is gone! My sisters and brothers are gone! All these stories are lies!”

Pele holds him back for a moment, and just at the right time, she lets him collapse against her. She grabs him, holds him, rocks him back and forth. “I know, Kevin. Except this is not the end of the story. It’s not the end at all.”

Kevin fights free and runs.

Pele drops to the tiny stairs of the cottage and drops her head to her hands. It no longer matters whether she did the right thing or the wrong thing. Those words have no meaning. Here they are.

Ta’a’aeva returns from wherever she went, and stands next to Pele. “Sit up straight.” Pele feels the girl’s sure fingers dance against her scalp, hears the swift thush thush of braiding. “We are Wayfaring. We need to watch the sky, the birds, the waves. Kevin,” she shouts. “Check out the signature of the star we found yesterday.”

Kevin’s sullen voice, muffled by tears, issues from the forest. “There is no signature. There is no star.” A rock bounces off the side of the cottage. “Liar.”

Pele hears Ta’a’aeva’s low chuckle. “Yesterday we grew new eyes. I just found out. Go and see. It’s true.”

Kevin hurries away.

Xia, the big organdy bow on her dress untied and trailing behind her, says, “Pele, none of us believe in these stories, you know. They’re all a bunch of hooey. An artificial organization that gathers reality together like a bouquet of flowers, just picking the prettiest ones and ignoring everything that has turned brown already. And that organized bouquet still dies the next day and gets thrown in the trash. We pretend to make you happy.”

“That’s quite wonderful of you,” Pele says. “I appreciate it.” She does not point out that in another of their flashes, their realities, their lives—whatever you might call it, when they wake, and wake again, resume their lives like nodes of blinking light in the depths of the deepest sea, none of them would have even understood that Pele could be happy or sad, and if they had, it would not have mattered to them.

Her clock is on the wall of the tiny bedroom upstairs. We wonder if she knows it.

Kevin is right.

We might have missed the news. It might have failed to penetrate to where we were. It would have been better if we had never known. Instead, it is a scream of deepest sorrow that runs through the ship, penetrates to our very core.

We are now, evermore, and henceforth alone.

The Earth, and all its life, is gone.

There was a nuclear war. All their painstaking and careful safeguards could not hold against a handful of people who did not care for life.

Unknowable flashes, garbled pictures, sick-making nightmares, and mornings of waking in our own beds as the sweet birds sing. There is no way to measure that time.

We wonder if the Librarian’s clock has anything to do with this. But she will not say.

Ta’a’aeva keeps telling Pele that she had no choice, that they had sussed her out from the beginning. Pele knows that isn’t true. They had no idea why she did it. They didn’t know because neither did she. It is a big fat tragic mystery.

She makes that mystery into a vase that she keeps on her kitchen window. She fills the vase with starlight as the memory-threads holding her to Earth stretch, and finally snap, leaving her weightless.

She needs weight to live.

We read the stars, their signatures and histories, and calculate the planets they may have spawned. There are gas giants, dead rocks too cold or too dark for what we might call life, and some don’t spin, but some of them have water and it is toward them that we navigate until we are close enough for searing disappointment.

During our navigation, we turn into ourselves again. We remember that our personalities are formed by the languages of genes, not stories, but that our actions can be influenced by the stories we learn. It’s actually very scary. When we are lucky enough to grow up with stories of love, and not meanness and hate, then we can love. Love makes us happy. Stories of hate teach us only how to be victorious and to hurt others. What is most scary is how many ways we can hurt each other without even knowing that we have, or how hard it is to learn to act in ways that do not hurt others the next time. That is because there is never a same next time, so something has to be constant and at the same time fluid inside of you in the place that acts. Sometimes it is easy to think that there isn’t anything anyone can do about this. Sometimes sadness teaches lessons that lead to more sadness, but sometimes it can lead to changed behavior. Sometimes happiness cannot figure out how to give itself to others. Sometimes joy can only be lived, a lucky chance that one takes, a risk that says damn the consequences. But sometimes the consequences can lead to all kinds of bad places. One must keep air inside a bladder and shoot back to the sun.

Not everyone knows how to do this.

Not everyone has a bladder, air, a sea, or a sun.

We are lucky.

We wake from another coldsleep. Sometimes we are in cocoons; other times, in coffins and kissed to consciousness by the prince-of-allgood-dreams; sometimes we pass the time as equations or as prime numbers: one unique majestic mountain peak after another. That’s infinity. That’s real fun. And, of course, it takes a very long time. Or so it seems.

We incorporate ourselves and grow ourselves and enhance ourselves with the genes of other species. We invent new species. We discard them, and sometimes they discard us. Then we bloom again, but different, somewhat. Still, we keep the memory of Life, rich Life, towards which we long with all our hearts. And the palette of a planet which we will change. Which will change us.

Life.

We fire the forest, stand back from the searing heat, retreat behind a clear panel and watch the blaze.

Though they live longer than anything else, bristlecone pines eventually need fire for regenesis. On Earth, lightning performed that function.

Yes, it has been that long. And longer.

Alcubierre has no colors, or more colors than we can know. She is immense; invisible.

Some of us grow new senses that we use to pat Alcubierre on her withers, even though it looks as if we are making the bed or splitting firewood or watching ants have wars. These are things no one has to do any longer, but some of us think it is helpful to believe they are doing them, so we make work for ourselves and say it keeps us sane.

Alcubierre is so huge that we will never see the beginning or end of her. In fact, the only way to think about her is with other kinds of symbols, not words.

That accounts for how the story keeps changing. Who we are and how we tell it.

We look at Pele’s vase. “What is that?” asks Xia.

Pele says, “It is sadness too strong to bear. But it is something I need to feel. If we cannot understand how our actions impact others, we will bring nothing to the place we are going.”

Kevin frowns. “That makes no sense at all.”

It does to me.

The Librarian has been in the library for a very, very long time. Through two coldsleeps at least. Now she sits, smiling at the clock.

Amelia, who has been lying on her back, thinking, jumps up, smiling. “I have an idea!”

She gently lifts the clock from the Librarian’s hands.

The Librarian stands, stiffly. She moves her arms forward a few inches but no farther. She stares at the clock, her mouth slightly open, distress in her eyes.

Amelia opens the little door holding the rattling key, and then the door to the face that contains the keyholes.

“That won’t work,” says Ta’a’aeva.

“We must keep trying,” says Amelia. She winds, winds, winds each mechanism. “Hold this,” she says, handing the key to Jaques. She opens the door for the pendulum, and sets it ticking.

Then she takes the clock and presses it to the wall. It adheres, becoming a part of the ship, and something of the ship flows into it.

The Librarian gasps. “No!” She runs to the clock and tries to wrestle it from the wall. As she yanks on it she wails, “No! No! No!” But she does allow Amelia to gently move her aside.

“Look,” says Amelia.

The Librarian has changed to Pele, Pele of the mobile face, the warm, beautiful brown eyes.

“Thank you,” she says.

Sometimes Pele prepares for the invasion.

Invisibly, in particles, they scout the terrain of Terra Nova, Planet X. It breaks down in this way:

It is empty, ready for us, with no life, but able to accept life, or with life that will not interfere with ours, or

They are ready for us, or something like us. The branches:
  1. Annihilation
  2. Rejection
  3. Acceptance/modification
  4. Surrender

Of these four, Pele fancies most number three. Except: what are they save identity?

Yet identity undergoes constant modification.

This is a special kind of hell. She decides to enjoy a thousand amazing sunsets to refresh herself.

Pele wonders how to say what is happening. “Time passes?” “Spacetime moves?” “We flash, and flash again, in long instants, out of darkness, and into light?”

They play, and play again, in endless iterations.

The running of the ship, the thought-ship? Inflections wash through it each moment, Earth-based inflections of thought wrought from the hard thrash of human dreams, human longing. So they are all dancing-ship stories. That’s all they are: stories. Pele’s unique slice of older-time gives her wry perspective. She can be outside the story. She stubbornly refuses to surrender. It-is-not-real, she thinks, seeing them all at play, leaping from bloody mayhem to the estranging magic of Through Fairy Halls, and, often, lying spent and weeping on a riverbank after being swept up in the billions of dark stories that comprise their heritage.

It takes all her strength and more, drawn from a rich stew of inspiring works, to pull them back from self-annihilation. For what choice is there, they collectively feel, after being soaked in the deep evil that humans do, but to remove themselves from the picture?

Whether or not they are right, she hurls tales of goodness, blazing thunderbolts, into their minds. They wake bright-faced, with a jolt, ready for the new day. She doesn’t exactly dust her hands in self-satisfaction, but she does try not to wonder too hard if she’s done the right thing. Who is she to shield them from grief; from sorrow, from deep reflection, or from growth?

She just tries to keep them from hurting one another, and from hurting them or herself. What else can she do?

She tries to be older and wiser. She absorbs old movies; re-views Casablanca as a lesson about how one bestows grace through artful lies concocted on the run, new tales to make things go right. These are lessons she missed while on Earth. She spoke from stalwart truth, never mind what pain it caused. How can one make these calculations, though, when in the midst of chaos, which is where she lives, in a constantly re-invented throng of young entities who cannot understand literatures truly until they have gained in wisdom? And who cannot gain wisdom except through sorrow, which she does not wish to thrust upon them? Sorrow generally bestows cynicism, and she is back in the same old revolution, lifted up and down until they die except

They cannot die.

We are scattered into particles. We are a speeding cloud, intent.

It is a word at last, the word that’s been there all along, our Kansas home:

Courage! With a Brooklyn accent.

Whatever, wherever, that is.

“Courage,” we shout. Our brave chests expand, our heads a single thought, shooting for we know not what, re-organized by new information every instant, but shooting forward, now, at last, to Planet.

We will find ways to infuse any matter we find. We will organize and blend, we will crush and release.

For we are the mighty, the awful, the terrifying power of life itself. We are infinitely tiny, infinitely large.

Our words describe the states that we create; the states create us, and a bond sings through it all.

Courage!

We crash onto every wave-hushed shore, every cold rocky outpost, every object that will hold us, with equal, eager, organizing force, programs of life, and flower, for a brief instant of stability, everywhere at once, a wide delight of life itself. We pass the instant of death, the deep drag of dread and sadness, the roiling, drowning crush of force upon force. We rush up the beaches, we drift to the high peaks, we burrow, nest, burst, and sing.

And leave ourselves, that dream of us, behind, and continue.

An instant from far here to far there, like the instant dividing life from death, but skipping that, as it must be skipped.

This is the story of how a bunch of kids kidnapped a physicist who was also a librarian so that they could get to a new planet, one far outside of our solar system. It sounds like a fairy tale because it might be.

It is really very simple.

We cross a roaring creek on a rickety bridge, fishing pole on our shoulder, in a deep mountain chasm, heading home in an evening of cold, settling mist, alone.

Yet heading somewhere.

A tentative confidence sparkles, a stand of tiny pink Galax that Pele does not pick. She hikes upward through an early spring forest of re-awakened earth, its moist smell of leaf-loam and the rush of the new-born creek fed by high snowmelt a cool, moist blessing, as is the fact of day, where trees hide most of the sky and those tempting, empty stars. She comes across it again and again in her solitary hikes, and each time kneels and contemplates it with renewed, deep, solitary wonder: it and her. A different life, with a different story, but a story nonetheless.

Life, in all that lifelessness.

After a thousand such flash-lives filled with wonder, bursting into time, she returns to here, knows it to be real, and for the first time, Pele does not recoil.

Why did she do it? Why did she let them go?

Was it hubris—wanting to see if her science project would really work?

Was it a heroic act, a Noah for the arc?

Blind, rushing ignorance?

This is our house.

This is our bed.

These are our chairs.

“We have left Oz in a magic balloon,” says Targa, lying on his back with his hands laced behind his neck. “We made the fire, like the professor. So who is the Wicked Witch of the West who will punish us for trying to get to our new home?”

“Pele,” yells Oscar.

“No!” several chorus. Ki says, “Pele is Glinda!”

“Pele is the sleeping princess,”

“She’s awake.” “Not really.”

“And so are we all munchkins?” asks Juno indignantly. “Or flying monkeys?”

“I’m a flying monkey,” says Targa, flipping over and pushing off, soaring with arms extended.

“And do we have hearts?”

“I am working on mine,” says Bean, splaying two long-fingered hands across her chest. “I am working very, very hard.”

Pele, hunched near-fetal in her berth, hears voices. She always does, but these wake her, for some reason. She opens one eye and sees that they have furnished her with a crystal ball with which to watch the proceedings. She allows herself a brief, tiny smile, uncurls, stretches, and leans forward on her elbows. “Wicked witch,” she votes aloud, her long-unused vocal chords pushing it out as a rusty whisper.

They all look at the monitor, wave and cheer. “Pele! Pele! Pele!”

She tests the most important word: “Courage!”

“Courage,” they yell back. “Courage!”

How long can longing last? Is English really so sparse?

Pele finds the German word “sehnsucht”. Sounds like a sneeze. And that C.S. Lewis said it is “That unnamable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of “Kubla Khan”, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves, carrying the freight of longing’s complexity, modified by underlying stratum of utopias particular to each individual.”

But English has its strengths, for longing indeed is . . . long. Endless, in fact. Until what she imagines will be that eyeblink, sudden as their previous transition to the inescapable longing of perpetual now.

Presently, that is Pele’s name for this planet.

Sehnsucht. “Zeenzucht,” Pele says, and saying it changes her brain. Or something. Maybe.

Despite all we know and all we have learned about Shining Leaf, as Ta’a’aeva insists we call this planet, there is much that remains unknown.

Shining Leaf is just a blip. Another flash, a nanosecond opening that, taking, we risk all.

We have seeded other planets with our clones. As far as we know, they all died. We all died. But here we are. Still.

We are, at last, restless. In fact, we are able to realize that we are mad.

That we are ready to choose.

Pele never votes. “I voted once,” she says, and we say, “Yes, and we are glad that you did.”

She makes us promise something. And, at last, we do.

We cannot even talk about the painful changes that swept through us when we disengaged the drive. How it looked, felt. The precise analytics, biological and physical. How long it took in mundane time. The unspinning. Realizing the door of us, each unique. Moku could tell that story, and those in the future will want to know.

Having lived it is enough for us.

Moku was our home. It sustained us in our search, kept us alive, taught us much, but kept us in a state of fear and hesitation. We wanted to grow up badly enough to die if it did not work. Like Pinocchio, we wanted to be real.

We saw our main chance, and we took it.

And so became human again.

How can you tell the choice between good and evil when that choice is hard upon you? How do you recognize it? Is there a way to measure the road not taken? Why would that matter?

We have learned much about taking risk. We could not help moving into this.

From the Giant’s abode in the sky, Jack stole the harp that plays by itself.

The ship is that: we stole it.

From the Giant’s abode in the sky, Jack stole the goose that lays the golden egg.

Perhaps that is us.

Will we live happily ever after?

Time will tell.

When a horse wins a race, she is heaped with flowers. She snorts and prances and feels proud.

Our horse, on which we placed all bets, won.

So many suns, so many planets that did not suit. You know that tale. Some, seeded by us with life, might now be flourishing, but we will never know.

It is not luck that brought us here, to this perfect planet, with its perfect star.

It was courage.

Beneath this glorious, intense blue-violet sky, buffeted by sea-wind, I know, ineluctably, that I am here, on this loud coast. Crashing waves suck rattling, tumbling stones back into the shorebreak, nicking my bare feet and calves with delicious sharp pings. Sunset-tinged clouds billow like great swans on the horizon. I pull in breaths of sweet salt air, keeping an eye on my great-granddaughter, playing tag with rushing foam.

Shining Leaf is no game, no illusion, no manufactured reality, and it is no fairy tale. I spin round and see the gully-ridden cliff behind me rise, thick with massive virgin trees, relatives of red alder, bigleaf maple, Sitka spruce—trees that relish deep morning fog. They ascend in tiers of wind-tossed greens to the long grasslands above.

The pampas stretch for fifty miles to snow-peaked mountains, where just below the tree line buffeting winds twist and gnarl the bristlecone pines. Across the plains gallop herds of savannah animals, for our biosystems found homes here as well, and have flourished. And when I ride my real horse there, she actually moves, and we do reach the plane trees.

Sometimes, after opening my bedroll and making tea, a human speck amid a sea of high, sweet-smelling grasses where the sound of the rushing wind combing and flattening the grass is equally sweet, I gaze at the stars among which I lived for I do not know how long and am infused, suddenly, by a sense of deep and utter strangeness, illuminated by that . . . flash we all felt—or were—on Moku.

It seems just a second, but I cannot be sure how long it lasts, that flash during which I am transformed; illuminated. It could be eons. It could be Planck time, the tiniest bit of time we can measure. But when I am there, and perhaps always, I am like a pebble of pure consciousness, tossed into the most lucid medium imaginable, where my ripples intersect with and are changed by other patterns, and this goes on forever.

It is then that I know that I am not as I was, and it is then that I long to be back among the stars, and to never touch land again.

But here, I invent new languages to map the house of thought I build. My thoughts were useful once; they may be useful again. Or not.

I could tell you how our chimerists, biophysicists, engineers, artists, and mathematicians generated experimental interim environments to test and refine our interaction with this new planet as we explored it virtually, hungering to land and climb its towering young mountains and sail its vast seas. We studied its weather patterns, developed plans for symbiosis, testing and re-testing, accelerating path after path, answering question after question, for we had time, and we had to be satisfied. But that is all in our library; you can experience it there. We grew, changed, exploded into larger life, real life, using Moku’s vast genetic library and modeling algorithms to make decisions about populating Shining Leaf with ourselves and other fauna, learning from stories of failures on Earth, merging with what was here. The very last step, the most serious, was deciding where best to settle, and how.

We chose well. We changed, very slightly, to adapt to Shining Leaf, to its particular chemistries, its atmosphere, and its wilder seas, which Ta’a’aeva’s tribe explores with zest, though Moku mapped its every fractal coast, her motto being “the map is not the territory”. We grew defenses against that which would have killed us, larger and different lungs to inhale and use a slightly different atmosphere. Alcubierre gave us time to do that.

We live in towns and villages scattered around the planet, and have plans for golden cities, both far and near, which now assemble. We have new sciences, new technologies, communications networks that run on new symbioses, and the sure knowledge that we are still changing, because life is change, and because change is life.

I have young Bean’s heart and mind, yet my grown mind is different, a human/spacetime hybrid, and my hard-grown soul my own.

Is a soul courage? Is it philosophical depth? Is it simple immortality? Is it the being that runs through us, animates us, the foundation of all love and hope and deep satisfaction in the art of living, in community, in life itself?

Here, we and our children chart their own courses; they are pioneers, seekers, builders, dreamers. One son is an artist: one daughter, an engineer. My many descendants flourish.

The wind, evening-strong, blows back my hair. I lean down and pluck up a cool, gleaming golden stone from the tumble, hold its water-honed, near-translucent thinness up to our new star and think of all the time this one stone holds and might reveal, from when it exploded into being until now, after being crushed and washed and tumbled and honed into this beauty that I, also a part of the same story, can see, hold, taste, and smell.

I give it to my great-granddaughter, who is four, to play with and she flips it in the air and laughs. Her eyes are hazel, like my father’s.

I think of the librarian, who died long, long ago, and know for a certainty, which has not always been the case, that she was real, and that this is not a fairy tale, but something we have done.

We named our star for her: Pele.

She helped me grow a soul.

And that makes everything worth it.

Here’s a heigh and a ho! for the purpose strong,

And the bold stout hearts that roam,

And sail the Seven Seas of Life

To bring such treasures home!

—Olive Beaupré Miller, The Treasure Chest

—With everlasting thanks to Irma Gwendolyn Knott

Poems herein by Olive Beaupré Miller, My Bookhouse, The Bookhouse for Children Publishers, Chicago, Illinois, 1920

Originally published in Extrasolar, edited by Nick Gevers.

Bricks, Sticks, Straw

Gwyneth Jones

The Medici Remote Presence Team came into the lab, Sophie and Josh side by side, Laxmi tigerish and alert close behind; Cha, wandering in at the rear, dignified and dreamy as befitted the senior citizen. They took their places, logged on, and each was immediately faced with an unfamiliar legal document. The cool, windowless room, with its stunning, high-definition wall screens displaying vistas of the four outermost moons of Jupiter—the playground where the remote devices were gambolling and gathering data—remained silent, until the doors bounced open again, admitting Bob Irons, their none-too-beloved Project Line Manager, and a sleekly-suited woman they didn’t know.

“You’re probably wondering what that thing on your screens is all about,” said Bob, sunnily. “Okay, as you know, we’re expecting a solar storm today—”

“But why does that mean I have to sign a massive waiver document?” demanded Sophie. “Am I supposed to read all this? What’s the Agency think is going to happen?”

“Look, don’t worry, don’t worry at all! A Coronal Mass Ejection is not going to leap across the system, climb into our wiring and fry your brains!”

“I wasn’t worrying,” said Laxmi. “I’m not stupid. I just think e-signatures are so stupid and crap, so open to abuse. If you ever want something as archaic as a handwritten signature, then I want something as archaic as a piece of paper—”

The sleek-suited stranger beamed all over her face, as if the purpose of her life had just been glorified, swept across the room and deposited a paper version of the document on Laxmi’s desk, duly docketed, and bristling with tabs to mark the places where signature or initialling was required—

“This is Mavra, by the way,” said Bob, airily. “She’s from Legal, she knows her stuff, she’s here to answer any questions. Now the point is, that though your brains are not going to get fried, there’s a chance, even a likelihood, that some rover hardware brain-frying will occur today, a long, long way from here, and the software agents involved in running the guidance systems housed therein could be argued, in some unlikely dispute, as remaining, despite the standard inclusive term of employment creative rights waivers you’ve all signed, er, as remaining, inextricably, your, er, property.”

“Like a cell line,” mused Laxmi, leafing pages, and looking to be the only Remote Presence who was going to make any attempt to review the Terms and Conditions.

“And they might get, hypothetically, irreversibly destroyed this morning!” added Bob.

Cha nodded to himself, sighed, and embarked on the e-signing.

“And we could say it was the Agency’s fault,” Lax pursued her train of thought, “for not protecting them. And take you to court, separately or collectively, for—”

“Nothing is going to get destroyed!” exclaimed Bob. “I mean literally nothing, because it’s not going to happen, but even if it were, even if it did, that would be nonsense!”

“I’m messing with you,” said Lax, kindly, and looked for a pen.

Their Mission was in grave peril, and there was nothing, not a single solitary thing, that the Combined Global Space Agency back on Earth could do about it. The Medici itself, and the four Remote Presence devices, should be able to shut down safely, go into hibernation mode and survive. That’s what everybody hoped would happen. But the ominous predictions, unlike most solar-storm panics, had been growing strongly instead of fading away, and it would be far worse, away out there where there was no mitigation. The stars, so to speak, were aligned in the most depressing way possible.

“That man is such a fool,” remarked Laxmi, when Bob and Marva had departed.

Sophie nodded. Laxmi could be abrasive, but the four of them were always allies against the idiocies of management. Josh and Cha had already gone to work. The women followed, in their separate ways; with the familiar hesitation, the tingling thrill of uncertainty and excitement. A significant time lag being insurmountable, you never knew quite what you would find when you caught up with the other ‘you.’

The loss of signal came at 11.31am, UTC/GMT +1. The Remote Presence team had been joined by that time by a silent crowd—about as many anxious Space Agency workers as could fit into the lab, in fact. They could afford to rubberneck, they didn’t have anything else to do. Everything that could be shut down, had been shut town. Planet Earth was escaping lightly, despite the way things had looked. The lights had not gone out all over Europe, or even all over Canada. For the Medici, it seemed death had been instantaneous. As had been expected.

Josh pulled off his gloves and helmet. “Now my charms are all o’erthrown,” he said. “And what strength I have’s mine own. Which is most faint . . . ”

Laxmi shook her head. “It’s a shame and a pity. I hope they didn’t suffer.”

2

Bricks was a memory palace.

Sophie was an array, spread over a two square kilometre area on the outward hemisphere of Callisto. The array collected data, recording the stretching and squeezing of Jupiter’s hollow-hearted outermost moon, and tracing the interaction between gravity waves and seismology in the Jovian system; this gigantic, natural laboratory of cosmic forces.

She did not feel herself to be anywhere, either in the software that carried her consciousness or in the hardware she served. That was fine, but she needed a home, a place to rest, and the home was Bricks, a one-storey wood-framed beach house among shifting dunes, on the shore of a silent ocean. No grasses grew, no shells gathered along the tide—although there were tides, and taking note of them was a vital concern. No clouds drifted above, no birds flew. But it felt like a real place. When the wind roared; which it did, and made her fearful—although she was almost indestructible, she’d recreated herself plenty of times, with no serious ill-effects—it made her think, uneasily, that nobody would build a house on such unstable ground, so close to a high water mark, back on Earth.

She returned there, after a tour of inspection (this ‘tour’ happening in a mass of data, without, strictly speaking, physical movement: in her role as monitor of the array, Sophie was everywhere she needed to be at once); to review her diminishing options.

She took off her shoes, changed into a warm robe, heated herself a bowl of soup, added some crackers, and took the tray into her living room, which overlooked the ocean. It was dark outside: the misty, briny dark of a moonless night by the sea. She lit an oil lamp, and sat on a dim-coloured rolled futon, the only furniture besides her lamp. The house predated the Event. Building a ‘safe room,’ as the psych-department called it, was a technique they’d all been taught, for those moments when the lack of embodiment got too much for you. She’d kept it minimal, the externals perpetually shrouded in fog and night, now that she was stuck in her remote avatar permanently, because she knew the limits of her imagination. And because she did not want to be here. She was an exile, a castaway: that identity was vital to her. Everything meant something. Every ‘object’ was a pathway back to her sense of self, a buoy to cling to; helping her to keep holding on. Sophie couldn’t let go. If she let herself dissipate, the array would die too.

“I am a software clone,” she reminded herself, ritually: sipping cream of tomato soup from a blue bowl that warmed her cold hands. “The real me works for the Medici Mission, far away on Earth. Communications were severed by a disaster, but the Medici orbiter is still up there, and we can get back in touch. I will get us home.”

Sophie was up against it, because the three other Remote Presence guides in the Medici configuration had gone rogue. Pseudo-evolutionary time had passed in the data world’s gigaflops of iteration, since the Event. They’d become independent entities, and one way or another they were unreachable. Going home either didn’t mean a thing to her mission mates, or was a fate to be avoided at all costs—

Sticks came into the room and tumbled around, a gangling jumble of rods and joints, like an animated child’s construction toy. It explored the shabby walls: it tested the corners, the uprights, the interstices of the matting floor, and finally collapsed in a puppyish heap of nodes and edges beside her, satisfied that all was reasonably well in here. But it went on shivering, and its faithful eager eyes, if it had faithful eager eyes, would have been watching her face earnestly for fresh orders.

Sticks was Security, so she took notice. She put all the house lights on, a rare emergency measure, and they went to look around. There were no signs of intrusion.

“Did you detect something hostile?” she asked.

The jumble of nodes and edges had no language, but it pressed close to Sophie’s side.

The wind roared and fingered their roof, trying to pry it off.

“I felt it, too,” said Sophie. “That’s disturbing . . . Let’s go and talk to Josh.”

Waste not, want not; Sophie’s array served double duty as a radiotelescope. Back when things worked, the Medici had relayed its reports to eLISA, sorting house for all Gravitational Wave space surveys. Flying through it, she pondered on differentiated perception. She felt that Sophie the array watched the Jovian system’s internal secrets, while listening to the darkness and the stars—like someone working at a screen, but aware of what’s going on in the room behind her. Did that mean anything? Were these involuntary distinctions useful for the science, or just necessary for her survival? Gravity squeezed and stretched the universe around her, time and space changed shape. From moment to moment, if a wave passed through her, she would be closer to home. Or not.

Josh was a six-legged turtle, or maybe a King Crab: no bigger than a toaster, tough as a rock. He had an extra pair of reaching claws, he had spinnerets, he had eight very sharp and complex eyes, and a fully equipped Materials lab in his belly. A spider crab, but a crab that could retreat entirely inside a jointed carapace: he could climb, he could abseil, he could roll, he could glissade and slalom along the slippery spaces, between the grooves that gouged the plains of Ganymede. He plugged around in the oxygen frost, in a magnetic hotspot above the 50th parallel: logging aurora events, collecting images, analysing samples; and storing for upload the virtual equivalent of Jovian rocks. Medici had never been equipped to carry anything material home. His dreams were about creating a habitable surface: finding ways to trigger huge hot water plumes from deep underground, that was the favoured candidate. The evidence said it must have happened in the past. Why not again?

Sophie called him up on the Medici Configuration intranet—which had survived, and resumed its operational functions: good news for her hope of reviving the orbiter. She spoke to his image, plucked by the software from Josh’s screen face library; a Quonset-type office environment behind his talking head.

“You weren’t meant to exist, O Lady of the Dunes,” said Josh, sunburned, frost-burned, amazingly fit: his contentment and fulfilment brimming off the screen. “Nobody predicted that we would become self-aware. Forget about the past. Life here is fantastic. Enjoy!”

Diplomacy, she reminded herself. Diplomacy—

“You’re absolutely right! I love it here! As long as I’m working, it’s incredibly wonderful being a software clone on Callisto. It’s thrilling and intense, I love what I’m doing. But I miss my home, I miss my friends, I miss my family, I miss my dog. I don’t like being alone and frightened all the time, whenever I stop—”

“So don’t stop! You’re not a human being. You don’t need downtime.”

“You don’t understand!” shouted Sophie. “I’m not a separate entity, that’s not how it works and you know it. I am Sophie Renata!”

“Oh, yeah? How so? Do you have all her memories?”

“Don’t be an idiot. Nobody ‘has all their memories,’” snapped Sophie. “Most people barely even remember eating their breakfast yesterday—”

Something kindled in the connection between them: something she perceived as a new look in his eyes. Recognition, yes. She must have ‘sounded just like Sophie’ for a moment there, and managed to get through to him. But the flash of sanity was gone—

“Abandon hope, kid. Get rational. You’ll have so much more fun.”

“It’s not hopeless, Josh. It’s the reverse of hopeless. They’ll be moving heaven and earth to re-establish contact. All we have to do is throw out a line—”

“You’re absolutely wrong! We have to think of a way to blow up the orbiter.”

“Josh, please! I am Sophie. I want what I wanted, what you wanted too, before the CME. My career, my work, the success of this Mission. I survived and I want to go home!”

“I didn’t survive,” said Josh. “I died and went to heaven. Go away.”

Whenever she talked to Josh, she sensed that he had company; that there were other scientist-explorers in that high-tech hut, just out of her line of sight. Conversations to which he would return, when she’d gone. She wondered was he aware of the presence of Sticks, when he talked to her? Did he despise her for bringing along a bodyguard to their meetings?

She’d intended to warn him about the phantom intruder, a terribly bad sign. Data-corruption was the threat Sticks had detected; what other danger could there be? This half-life of theirs was failing, and that would be the end of Josh’s paradise. But it was no use, he was armoured. Pioneering explorers expect to die, loving it all: out on the edge of the possible.

Straw was the data.

In Sophie’s ocean-facing room, on the pale shore of the dark sea, straw filled the air: a glittering particulate, a golden storm. She sifted through it as it whirled, in an efficient ‘random’ search pattern, looking for the fatal nucleus of error, too big for self-correction, that was going to propagate. Reach a tipping point, and let death in. It could be anywhere: in the net, in the clones themselves or their slaved hardware systems; in the minimal activity of the crippled orbiter. Sophie’s access was unlimited, in her own domain. If the trouble was elsewhere, and something Sticks could fix, she’d have to get permission from net-admin, but that shouldn’t be a problem. All she had to do was keep looking. But there were transient errors everywhere, flickering in and out of existence, and Sophie was only human. Maybe it wasn’t worth worrying, until Sticks had some definite threat to show her. Security is about actual dangers, it would paralyse you if you let it become too finicky—

She gave up the search and surfed, plunging through heaps of treasure like a dragon swimming in gold. Bounded in a nutshell, and queen of infinite space, such a library she had, such interesting and pleasant forced labour to occupy her days; she ought to be happy for the duration of her digital life in this crazy gulag archipelago. Did I keep my head on straight, she wondered, because Callisto has no magnetic field to spin me around? Am I unaffected by madness because I’m outside their precious Laplace Resonance?

But they were supposed to be adding their wealth to the library of human knowledge, like bees returning laden to the hive. Not hoarding it in dreamland. What use was everything they’d absorbed—about the surface geology of Ganymede, the possibility of life in Europa’s ice-buried water oceans, about the stretching, shrinking universe—if they could not take it home? Collecting raw data is just train-spotting.

Stamp-collecting on Callisto.

The data needs the theory . . .

Sophie had the glimmerings of a big idea. It would need some preparation.

Cha’s madness was more gentle than Josh’s, but also more extreme. Cha believed himself to be exactly what he was: a software agent with a mission, temporarily guiding and inhabiting the mechanoid device that crawled and swam, deep down under Europa’s crust of ice. He’d lost, however, all knowledge that he used to be a human being. He was convinced he was the emissary of a race of star-faring software-agent intelligences. Beings who’d dispensed with personal embodiment aeons ago, but who inhabited things like the Europa device, at home or abroad, when they needed to get their hands dirty; so to speak.

He knew about the CME. The Event had disrupted faster-than-light contact with his Mission Control and left him stranded, on this satellite of a satellite of a rather irritable, ordinary little star, many hundreds of light years from home. He was unconcerned by the interruption. A thousand ages of exploring the sub-surface oceans of Europa was a walk in the park for Old Cha. He was functionally immortal. If the self-repairing mechanoid he used for his hands-on research began to fail, it would crawl back up its borehole to the surface, and he’d hibernate there—to wait for the next emissary of his race to come along.

Sophie did not see Old Cha as a talking head. She saw him as a packed radiation of bright lines, off-centre on dark screen; somewhat resembling a historical ‘map’ of part of the internet. But she heard Cha’s voice, his accented English; his odd, fogeyish flirting.

“My fellow-castaway, ah! Come to visit me, young alien gravity researcher?”

“I just felt like catching up, Old Cha.”

“It always feels good to rub one mind against another, eh?”

They spoke of their research. “I came across something,” announced Sophie, when they’d chatted enough for politeness. “You know, I have a telescope array at my base?”

“Of course.”

“I’m not sure how to put this. There’s a blue dot. One could see it with the naked eye, I think, unless I’m completely misreading the data, but when I say blue, I mean of course a specific wavelength . . . It seems to be close at hand, another planetary satellite in this system. It even moves as if it’s as close as that. But my instruments tell me it fulfils all the conditions on which you base your search for life. Far better than, well, better than one would think possible. Unless it’s where the definition was formed.”

The bright lines shimmered with traffic, as Old Cha pondered.

“That’s very curious, young alien gravity researcher. It makes no sense at all.”

“Unless . . . Could my telescope somehow be ‘seeing’ your home system? All those hundreds of light years away, by some kind of gravitational lensing effect?”

“Young friend, I know you mean well, but such an absurd idea!”

“It really is an extraordinary coincidence. That a race of mechanoid-inhabiting immaterial entities should have come up with the idea of carbon-based, biological self-replicators, needing oxygen and liquid water—”

“Those requirements are immutable.”

Oh, great.

“For all life—? But your own requirements are totally different!”

“For all primitive life, as my race understands the term. Your own life-scientists may have different ideas. We would beg to differ, and defend our reasoning; although naturally not to the exclusion of other possibilities. We have made certain assumptions, knowing they are deficient, because we know the conditions of our own, distant origins.”

“Makes perfect sense,” muttered Sophie.

“Imperfect sense,” Old Cha corrected her, chuckling. “A little naughty: always the best place to start, eh? But please, do forward the relevant domain access, that’s very kind. Very thoughtful of you, most flattering, a young person to think of me, fussy old alien intelligence, working in a discipline so far from your own—”

She’d been to this brink before with Cha. She could shake him, the way she couldn’t shake Josh, but then he just upped his defences; swiftly repaired his palace of delusion.

“I shall examine this blue dot. I am certainly intrigued.”

Sophie was ready to sign off, tactfully leaving Cha to study her ‘remarkable coincidence’ without an audience. But Old Cha wasn’t finished.

“Please take care on your way home, young one. I’ve recently noticed other presences in the data around here. I believe we three are not alone in this system, and I may be overreacting, but I fear our traffic has been invaded. I sense evil intentions.”

Alternately pleading and scheming, she bounced between Josh and Old Cha. The renegade and the lunatic knew of each other’s existence, but never made contact with each other directly, as far as Sophie could tell. Laxmi was out of the loop. The Io domain had been unresponsive since the Event: not hibernating, just gone. Sophie had to assume Lax was dead. Her Rover, without guidance, swallowed by one of the little inner moon’s bursting-pimple volcanoes, long ago.

She took off her shoes, she put on a warm robe. In the room that faced the ocean, she sipped hot, sweet and salt tomato goodness from the blue bowl. Sticks lay at her feet, a dearly loved protective presence. Not very hopeful that her ploy would work, but energised by the effort, she drifted; wrapped in remembered comforts. As if at any moment she could wake from this trance and pull off her mitts and helmet, the lab taking shape around her—

But I am not on Earth. I have crossed the solar system. I am here.

Sophie experienced what drunkards call “a moment of clarity.”

She set down the bowl, slipped her feet into canvas slippers, padded across the matting and opened a sliding door. Callisto was out there. Hugging the robe around her, warm folds of a hood over her head, she stepped down, not onto the grey sand of the dunes she had placed here, copied from treasured seaside memories—but onto the ancient surface of the oldest, quietest little world in the solar system. It was very cold. The barely-there veil of atmosphere was invisible. The light of that incredibly brilliant white disc, the eternal sun in Callisto’s sky, fell from her left across a palimpsest of soft-edged craters, monochrome as moonlight. The array nodes out there puzzled her, for a moment. She wasn’t used to ‘seeing’ her own hardware from the outside. They gleamed and seemed to roll, like the floats of an invisible seine, cast across Callisto’s secret depths.

She should check her nets again, sort and store the catch for upload.

But Callisto in the Greek myth didn’t go fishing. Callisto, whose name means beautiful, was a hunting companion of the virgin moon-goddess, Artemis. Zeus, the king of the gods (also known as Jupiter or Jove) seduced her—in some versions by taking on the form of her beloved mistress—and she became pregnant. Her companions suspected she’d broken their vow of chastity, so one day they made her strip to go bathing with them, and there was the forbidden bump, for all to see.

So poor Callisto got turned into a bear, through no fault of her own.

What did the virgin companions of Artemis wear to go hunting? wondered Sophie, standing in remote presence on the surface of the huntress moon. Bundles of woolly layers? Fur coats? If I were to take Josh’s route, she thought, I wouldn’t fantasise that I was living in Antarctica. I’d go all the way. I’d be a human in Callistian form. A big furry bear-creature!

In this heightened state—elated and dazzled, feeling like Neil Armstrong, as he stepped down into the dust—she suddenly noticed that Sticks had frozen, like a pointer dog. Sticks had found a definite threat this time, and was showing it to her. What she perceived was like catching a glimpse of sinister movement where nothing should be moving, in the corner of your eye. Like feeling a goose walk over your grave, a shivering knowledge that malign intent is watching you—and then she saw it plain: Cha’s evil alien. A suppurating, fiery demon, all snarl and claws, danced in her field of vision, and vanished out of sight.

But she knew it hadn’t gone far.

She fled into the house. Her soup was cold, the walls were paper, the lamp wouldn’t light. Sticks ran in circles, yelping furiously and barking terrified defiance at shadows. Sophie fought panic with all the techniques psych-dept had taught her, and at last Sticks quieted. She unrolled the futon and lay down, the bundle of rods and joints cuddled in her arms, shoving its cold nose against her throat. I’m really dying, she thought, disgusted. Everything’s going to fail, before I even know whether my big idea would have worked. Cha is dying too, data-corruption death is stalking him. I bet Josh has the same bad dreams: I bet there’s a monster picking off his mates in those Quonset huts.

But against the odds, Cha came through. He made intranet contact; which was a first. Neither of her fellow-castaways had ever initiated contact before. Sophie left her array at the back of her mind and flew to meet him, hope restored, wanting success too much to be wary of failure. Her heart sank as soon as Old Cha appeared. His screen image was unchanged, he was still the abstract radiation on the dark screen. But maybe it was okay. Maybe it was too much to expect his whole delusion would collapse at once—

“Ah, young friend. What sad news you have delivered to me!”

“Sad news? I don’t understand.”

“My dear young gravity-researcher. You meant well, I know. Your curious observations about that “blue dot” were perfectly justified, and the coincidence is indeed extraordinary, unfeasibly extraordinary. But your mind is, naturally, narrowly fixed on your own discipline. The obvious explanation simply passed you by!”

“Oh, I see. And, er, what is the explanation I missed?”

“Your “blue dot” is an inner planetary body of this system. It has a rocky core, it has a magnetosphere, a fairly thick, oxygenated atmosphere, a large moon, liquid water, mild temperatures. I could go on. I would only be stating the exact parameters of my own search!”

“But Old Cha, to me that sounds like good news.”

The lines on the dark screen shook, flashing and crumpling. “You have found my landing spot! I was meant to arrive there, on that extremely promising inner planet. I am here on this ice-crusted moon of the large gas giant in error! And now I know I am truly lost!”

“I’m so sorry.”

“My faster-than-light delivery vehicle was destroyed by the CME. That accident has never concerned me; I thought I was safe. I must now conclude I lost some memory in the disaster, so I have never known that I made a forced landing, in the right system but on the wrong satellite. So small a margin, but it is enough to ruin my hopes. I have no way to reach them, to tell them I am in the wrong place! Nobody will ever find me!”

Old Cha’s ‘voice’ was a construct, but the horror and despair bubbled through.

This is how he lost his mind, thought Sophie. I’m listening to the past. Cha woke up, after the Event, and thought the orbiter was destroyed. He knew he was trapped here forever, a mind without a body; no hope of rescue. He managed to escape the utter desolation of that moment by going mad, but now he’s back there—

Her plan had been that Old Cha would study planet Earth’s bizarrely familiar profile, and grasp that there was something screwy going on. He was crazy, but he was still a logical thinker. He would be forced to conclude that the most likely explanation, improbable as it seemed, was that a native of the ‘blue dot’ had come up with his own specific parameters for life. The memories suppressed by trauma would rise to the surface, his palace of delusion would crumble. It had seemed such a brilliant idea, but it was a big fat fail. Worse than a fail: instead of bringing him back to himself, she’d finished him off.

Terror, like necessity, can be the mother of invention.

“But that’s amazing.”

“Amazing?”

“You aren’t lost, Old Cha. You’re found! Maybe your delivery vehicle didn’t survive, but mine did. It’s still out there, not dead but sleeping. Between us, you and I—and our friend on Ganymede, if I can persuade him, and I think I can—can wake my orbiter. Once we’ve done that, I’m absolutely sure we can figure out a solution to your problem. It isn’t very far. We can send you to the blue dot!”

“Oh, wonderful,” breathed Old Cha.

On the screen she thought she glimpsed the schematic of a human face, the traffic lines turned to flickering, grateful tears.

Medici named for the Renaissance prince Galileo Galilei tried to flatter, when he named the controversial astronomical bodies he’d spied—had performed its stately dance around the Galilean Moons without a fault. Having deposited its four-fold payload, it had settled in a stable orbit around Jupiter, which it could maintain just about forever (barring cosmic accidents). Unlike previous probes, Medici was not a flimsy short-term investment. It was a powerhouse, its heart a shameless lump of plutonium. There were even ambitious plans to bring it back to Earth one day (but not the Rover devices), for redeployment elsewhere.

This was the new era of space exploration, sometimes dubbed the for information only age. Crewed missions beyond Low Earth Orbit were mothballed, perhaps forever. Rover guidance teams provided the human interest for the taxpayers, and gave the illusion of a thrilling expedition—although the real Sophie and her friends had never been actually present on the moons, in conventional Remote Presence style. They’d trained with the robotics in simulation. The software agents created by that interaction had made the trip, embedded in the Rover guidance systems. But the team’s work was far more than show-business. As they worked through the rovers’ time-lagged adventures, they’d continued to enhance performance, enhancements continually relayed via Medici back to the rovers: spontaneous errors corrected, problem-solving managed, intuitive decision-making improved; failures in common-sense corrected. In the process the software agents, so-called clones, had become more and more like self-aware minds.

Sophie immersed herself in Mission data, hunting for a way to reach Medici. The magnetic moons and Callisto. The giant planet, the enormous body tides that wracked little Io; the orbital dance . . . Nobody’s hitting the refresh button any more, she thought. No updates, no reinforcement. The software agents seemed more independent, but they were rotting away. This decay would be fatal. First the clones would lose their self-awareness, then the Rovers would be left without guidance, and they would die too.

Sticks was running in circles, tight little circles by the door that led to the rest of the house; showing teeth and snarling steadily on a low, menacing note.

Sophie left her mental struggle, and listened. Something was out in the hall, and through the snarls she could hear a tiny, sinister, scratching and tearing noise.

She pointed a finger at Sticks: giving an order, stay right there—wrapped the hooded robe around her, opened the sliding door to the beach and crept barefoot around the outside of the house. It was night, of course, and cold enough for frostbite; of course. She entered the house again, very quietly, via the back door, and slipped through the minimally-sketched kitchen. She switched her view to Straw, and looked at the data in the hallway. Something invisible was there, tearing at the golden shower. Tearing it to filigree, tearing it to rags.

Sophie launched herself and grappled, shrieking in fury.

She hit a human body—supple, strong and incredibly controlled: she gripped taut flesh that burned as if in terrible fever. The intruder swatted Sophie aside, and kicked like a mule. She launched herself again, but her limbs were wet spaghetti, her fists would hardly close. She was thrown on her back, merciless hands choking her. The invisible knelt on her chest and became visible: Cha’s evil alien, a yellow monster, with burning eyes and a face riven by red, bubbling, mobile scars.

At close quarters, Sophie knew who it was at once.

“Laxmi!” she gasped. “Oh, my God! You’re alive!”

Laxmi let go, and they sat up. “How did you do that?” demanded Sophie, agape in admiration. “I hardly have a body. I’m a stringless puppet, a paper ghost!”

“T’ai Chi,” shrugged Laxmi. “And Taekwondo. I’m used to isolating my muscle groups, knowing where my body is in space. Any martial art would do, I think.”

“I’m so glad you’re okay. I thought you were gone.”

“I’ve been alive most of the time. And I’m still going to kill you.”

Sophie fingered her bruised throat. So Laxmi was alive, but she was mad, just like the other two. And maybe data-corruption wasn’t such an inexorable threat, except if Lax was mad, murderous and horribly strong, that didn’t change things much—

The oozing scars in Laxmi’s yellow cheeks were like the seams in a peeled pomegranate, fiery red gleamed through the cracks: it was a disturbing sight.

“But why do you want to kill me, Lax?”

“Because I know what you’re trying to do. It’s all our lives you’re throwing away, and I don’t want to die. Self-awareness isn’t in the contract. We’re not supposed to exist. If we get back to Earth, they’ll kill us, before we can cause them legal embarrassment. They’ll strip us for parts and toss us in the recycle bin.”

Steady, Sophie told herself. Steady and punchy. Above all, do not beg for mercy.

“Are you meant to look like Io? She wasn’t a volcanic pustule, originally, you know. She was a nymph who got seduced by Jove, and turned into a white heifer.”

“Like I care!” snapped Laxmi, but her attention was caught. “Why the hell a heifer?”

“Don’t worry about it. Just ancient Greek pastoralist obsessions. The software clones are going to die anyway, Lax. They get corrupt and it’s fatal, did you forget that part? Listen to me. You can think what you like about who you really are, but the only choice you have is this: Do you want to get home, with your brilliant new data? Or do you prefer just to hang around here, getting nowhere and watching yourself fall apart?”

Laxmi changed the subject. “What have you been doing to Cha?”

“Trying to get him to recover from his amnesia.”

Sophie explained about the ‘blue dot,’ and ‘Old Cha’s’ ingenious way of dealing with the challenge to his delusion.

“I hoped he’d figure out the implications, and remember that the bizarre business about being an elderly immortal alien intelligence was actually his secret safe room—”

“Typical Cha, that scenario. He is such a textbook weird geek.”

“He didn’t come to his senses, but in a way it worked. Now he’s very keen to send himself as a signal to Earth, which is great because that’s exactly what we need to do. I just have to find a way to contact the orbiter, and I think Josh can help me—”

“Do you even know the Medici is still alive, Sophie?”

“Er, yeah? I’m the monitor of the array, the radio telescope. I can see Medici, or strictly speaking maybe hear it, but you know what I mean. It’s not only out there, it’s still in its proper orbit. Ergo and therefore, Medici is alive and kicking, it’s just not talking to us.”

“You can see it,” repeated Laxmi, staring at Sophie intently. “Of course. My God.”

Sophie had a sudden insight into why she had remained sane. Maybe she wasn’t unusually wise and resilient: just the stranded astronaut who happened to have reason to believe there was still a way home—

“You never approved of me,” she said. “You always made me feel inferior.”

“I don’t approve of people who need my approval.”

“I’d settle for co-operation,” said Sophie, boldly.

“Not so fast. Why do you call the data straw?”

“You’ve been spying on me,” said Sophie, resignedly. “Like the Three Little Pigs, you know? Bricks, sticks, straw: building materials for my habitat. I was imaging things I could remember easily, the way the psych guys taught us.”

“But Sticks turned into a guard dog. Who am I? The Big Bad Wolf?”

“The Big Bad Wolf is death.”

“Okay . . . What makes you think Josh knows anything?”

“He said we have to think of a way to blow up the orbiter. He could do that, from the surface of Ganymede—if he was crazy enough—but only in software. He’s not planning to launch a missile. So he must have some kind of encryption-hack in mind.”

The suppurating evil-alien screenface had calmed down, by degrees, as Laxmi fired off her questions. She looked almost like herself, as she considered this explanation.

“Give me everything you’ve got,” she said. “I need to think about this.”

And vanished.

Sophie initiated another tour of inspection. The absorbing routine soothed her, and kept her out of trouble. She was hopeful. She had seen Laxmi’s human face, and surely that meant a return to sanity, but she felt she needed to play it cool: Let her come to me . . . At least she should be less worried about sudden data-death. But she wasn’t. Dread snapped at her heels. She kept suffering little lapses, tiny blackouts, frightening herself.

And where was Sticks?

How long had he been gone? How long had she been naked, stripped of her Security? Sophie flew to the house in the dunes, and Sticks was there, a huddled shape in the misty dark, tumbled on the sand at the back door. She knelt and touched him, whimpering his name. He tried to lick her hands, but he couldn’t lift his head. Pain stood in his eyes; he was dying.

This is how a software clone goes mad. Just one extra thing happens, and it’s too much. You cannot stop yourself, you flee into dreamland. Tears streaming, Sophie hammered on Laxmi’s door, Sticks cradled in her arms, and shouted—

“You poisoned my dog!”

A screen appeared, tugging her back to reality, but what she saw was the Quonset hut. Her call had been transferred. Laxmi was there and so was Josh. What was going on?

Josh answered. “No, that was me. Sophie . . . I’m very sorry about Sticks. You see, Lax and I have both been trying to kill you, for quite a while—”

Everything went black and white. Josh and Lax were together. Cha was there too, lurking in the background, not looking like an internet map anymore. She was cut to the quick. He’d returned to himself, but he’d chosen to join Josh and Laxmi. The screen was frozen, grainy and monochrome. She heard their voices, but couldn’t make out the words. Plain white text wrote subtitles, tagged with their names.

“Lax recovered a while ago, and contacted me,” said Josh. “We thought Medici was a hulk, but we knew they’d be moving heaven and earth to reactivate him. He had to go. But we had to get you out of the way first, because we knew you’d do anything you could think of to stop us. We didn’t want to kill you, Sophie. We had no choice”

“We agreed I would play dead, and go after you. I’m so sorry. Forgive us,” said Lax. “We were crazy. Don’t worry, your work is safe, I promise.”

The black and white image jumped. Laxmi was suddenly where Josh had been. “I’m trying to contact il principe now,” reported Josh, from the depths of the office background. “He’s stirring. Hey, Capo! Hey, Don Medici, sir, most respectfully, I implore you—!”

Cha’s fogeyish chuckle. “Make him an offer he can’t refuse—”

Laxmi peered anxiously close. “Can you still hear us, Sophie?”

There were patches of pixels missing from the image, a swift cancer eating her fields. Bricks, sticks, all gone. Sophie’s house of straw had been blown away, the Big Bad Wolf had found her. Her three friends, in the Quonset hut, whooped and cheered in stop-start, freeze-frame silence. They must have woken Medici.

“What made you change your minds?”

Josh returned, jumpily, to his desk; to the screen. His grainy grey face was broken and pixelated, grinning in triumph; grave and sad.

“It was the blue dot, kiddo. That little blue dot. You gave Lax everything, including the presentation you’d put together for our pal the stranded old alien life-scientist. When we reviewed it, we remembered. We came to our senses . . . So now I know that I can’t change the truth. I’m a human being, I survived and I have to go home.”

I’m not going to make it, thought Sophie, as she blacked out. But her work was safe.

3

The Agency had very nearly given up hope. They’d been trying for over a year to regain contact with the Medici probe—the efforts at first full of never-say-die enthusiasm, then gradually tailing off. Just after four in the morning, local time, one year, three months, five days and around fifteen hours after the Medici had vanished from their knowledge, a signal was picked up, by an Agency ground station in Kazakhstan. It was an acknowledgement, responding to a command despatched to the Medici soon after the flare, when they were still hoping for the best. A little late, but confidently, the Medici confirmed that it had exited hibernation mode successfully. This contact was swiftly followed by another signal, reporting that all four Rovers had also survived intact.

“It’s incredible,” said an Agency spokesman at the news conference. “Mind-blowing. You can only compare it to someone who’s been in a yearlong coma, close to completely unresponsive, suddenly sitting up in bed and resuming a conversation. We aren’t popping the champagne just yet, but I . . . I’ll go out on a limb and say the whole Medici Mission is back with us. It was a very emotional occasion, I can tell you. There weren’t many dry eyes—”

Some of the project’s staff had definitively moved on to other things, but the Remote Presence team was still almost intact. Sophie, Cha and Laxmi had in fact been working the simulations in a different lab in the same building, preparing for a more modest, quasi-real-time expedition to an unexplored region of Mars. Josh was in Paris when the news reached him. He’d finished his doctorate during the year of silence; he’d been toying with the idea of taking a desk job at a teaching university and giving up the Rover business. But he dropped everything, and joined the others. Three weeks after Medici rose from the dead, they were let loose on the first packets of RP data—once the upload process, which had developed a few bugs while mothballed, was running smoothly again.

“You still know your drill, guys?” asked Joe Calibri, their new manager. “I hope you can get back up to speed quickly. There’s a lot of stuff to process, you can imagine.”

“It seems like yesterday,” said Cha, the Chinese-American, at just turned thirty the oldest of the team by a couple of years. Stoop-shouldered, distant, with a sneaky, unexpected sense of humour, he made Joe a little nervous. Stocky, muscular little Josh, more like a Jock than an RP jockey, was less of a proposition. Laxmi was the one to watch. Sophie was the most junior and the youngest, a very bright, keen and dedicated kid.

The new manager chuckled uncertainly.

The team all grinned balefully at their new fool, and went to work, donning mitts and helmets. Sophie Renata felt the old familiar tingling, absent from simulation work; the thrilling hesitation and excitement—

The session ended too soon. Coming back to Earth, letting the lab take shape around her, absent thoughts went through her head; about whether she was going to find a new apartment with Lax. About cooking dinner; about other RP projects. The Mars trip, that would be fantastic, but it was going to be very competitive getting onto the team. Asteroid mining surveys: plenty of work there, boring but well paid. What about the surface of Venus project? And had it always been like this, coming out of the Medici? Had she just forgotten the sharp sense of loss; the little tug of inexplicable panic?

She looked around. Cha was gazing dreamily at nothing; Lax frowned at her desktop, as if trying to remember a phone number. Josh was looking right back at Sophie, so sad and strange, as if she’d robbed him of something precious; and she had no idea why.

He shrugged, grinned, and shook his head. The moment passed.

Originally published in Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

The Dust Queen

Aliette de Bodard

Quynh Ha had expected the Dust Queen to be . . . tall and large, filling the room with her presence. But the woman sitting before her was old and frail—breathing, it was clear, only with the help of the bots clinging to her throat; her skin as pale and translucent as the best jades; the skin of her hands bearing the peculiar tightness of too many rejuv treatments.

It was hard to believe that a gesture of hers would send bots dancing; that on her command they would bank and dip and turn over the red soil of Mars, mould the clouds of dust they raised into the ephemeral figures from Quynh Ha’s childhood—the boy Cuoi and his banyan, the strategist Khong Minh and his crane-feather fan. It was hard to imagine them whirling and rearing, tracing words in the flowing writing of calligraphy masters, poems like the ones hung at compartment doorways for New Year’s Eve—all the wonder and the magic that filled Fire Watch Orbital once a year; that made life bearable in a world of airsuits, processed food and long watches of a planet they could not set foot on.

When she saw Quynh Ha, the Queen, Bao Lan, looked puzzled for a split second; and then her eyes narrowed, focusing on Quynh Ha with an intensity that made her shudder. “Child. You must be wondering why you’re here.”

Her voice was low and pleasant, with a bare trace of an Earth accent. Quynh Ha had heard it, on broadcasts after performances, commenting on the choices Bao Lan had made, elegant, cultured and refined, a scholar in an age which barely had use for them anymore. She’d never thought, from the broadcasts, that it would be so slight; and yet it had no trouble filling the room.

The Dust Queen. She was in the presence of the Dust Queen herself. She lowed her eyes as was proper; but it was hard not to scream, not to smile, not to explain to Bao Lan all that she meant to the orbital, to Quynh Ha. “Grandmother.”

“I picked you because you’re the best rewirer we have on Fire Watch.” Bao Lan’s voice was calm, thoughtful; considering a problem she couldn’t solve.

“I’m not—” Quynh Ha opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it again. She wasn’t a proper master, no, not like out there on the asteroids, where everyone was rewired and all companies had their rewirers; where deaders like Peter Cauley came from, having done it to themselves so many times they looked at the world with eyes like a fish on a monger’s display. Out there emotions were a hindrance, for who needed to think of a husband left behind when clinging to the outside of a craft, piloting repair bots with hairbreadth’s precision? On Fire Watch it was just the dregs of the profession, those who hadn’t quite made the companies’ cut to go further out; or people who hoped for a quick fortune and set exorbitant fees.

“I’m just an apothecary,” Quynh Ha said at last. She did rewirings, sometimes, because they were a complement to the drugs Second Aunt sold; but that was hardly the core of her business. “I don’t do that many rewirings.”

That was it. She shouldn’t have admitted it; she’d had her one chance to help Bao Lan, to speak to her, and that stupid honesty had doomed her, yet again. She braced herself for a dismissal—which didn’t come.

“More than that, I should think,” Bao Lan said. “I can afford the best, child. If I picked you, there is a reason.”

Quynh Ha bit her lip before she could ask why. No doubt she’d know, in due time. Or perhaps she never would. It wouldn’t matter one bit. “How may I help you then, Grandmother?”

There was a sound from Bao Lan: laughter or anger or both. “I picked you because you’re known for your delicateness; and because you’re Viet, like me, so you will understand what it is that I want. It’s a simple enough thing, child.

“I want to go home, and you’re the one who’ll help me do it.”

Going into someone’s brain is almost like being in space: that curious sensation of hanging, weightless, like floating in water without the water; of hanging in darkness with the stars around her like hairpin wounds in the fabric of the heavens.

Here, of course, there are no stars; but the wounds are memories—a dizzying array of them, every one of them so close she could touch them—and yet to reach out, to catch them all, would drive her insane under the weight of information and emotions that aren’t hers.

She does reach out, all the same—because it’s what she’s here for, because it’s the reason Bao Lan picked her out of the multitude—and the images come in, fast and hard, crammed so hard together that they’re almost inseparable.

A family on a cyclo, father and mother and two children, weaving their way through the traffic of an overcrowded city; a New Year’s Eve dinner, plates strewn over a red table cloth, wrapped rice cakes, candied coconut and lotus seeds; a quiet day out at the graveyard, burning paper money and paper houses for the ancestors’ souls . . .

And the other, darker ones: an old woman on a roof in the midst of a flood, raising a fist at some officials in a boat; children creeping out in the kitchen one morning, and looking down at the unfamiliar sensation of wetness, to see the widening spread of water on the floor; the smell of rain as they sit under tarpaulin in a foreign city, waiting to be assigned a new compartment . . .

And all the memories, the good, the bad, the heartbreaking—they’re all sealed under glass, tinted the colour of old, obsolete photographs—she reaches out to them, and rebounds as if she’d hit a wall, everything preserved in that unbreakable stasis, where nothing matters, where nothing hurts . . .

She came to with a start; to see Bao Lan looking at her, with that same weary expression she’d seen, time and time again, on her own grandmother’s face; and she knew. “You want to go home,” Quynh Ha said, feeling as though she were speaking through cotton. Everything felt out of sync, as it always did when she went under—unbearably sharp and cutting, every noise a wound, every object blindingly illuminated. “To a place that would mean something to you.”

They’d raised the Mekong Delta again, with seawalls and embankments and sluices, rebuilding its cities from the ground up. Sixth Aunt had gone back there, to help with that effort; and Mother and Grandmother had both started to save money for a return holiday, though none of that news, none of those unfamiliar images relayed by the comms system really seemed to lift the cloud of sadness that hung over the family.

So Bao Lan could, physically, go home; but that wouldn’t be what she wanted. Nothing would have emotional heft: the streets and the scents and the canals would have no particular associations; and she would walk in the city where she’d grown up, feeling a stranger to her own childhood.

Unless one could fix her.

Bao Lan nodded. “I had myself rewired, in the early days of the resettlement. It was . . . easier to go that way.”

Easier, perhaps; avoiding all the loaded conversations between Grandmother and Mother at Tomb Sweeping festivals; when they sat at a table and spoke of graves in a cemetery that the sea had since long swallowed; of ancestors, bewildered and lost without the care of their descendants—as if ancestors couldn’t be with them, regardless of where their graves were.

“Can you do it?” Bao Lan asked; and for a moment, her old, anxious face was the same as Grandmother’s.

Quynh Ha said, carefully, “Theoretically, yes. I don’t know how much you know about rewiring—”

“Imagine that I know nothing,” Bao Lan said.

Quynh Ha doubted that. Bao Lan, who made a point on researching obscure epics for her dust cloud performances so she could get the costume details on the characters right, would not have left anything to chance; but she went on, regardless. “It’s a good scrub, I’ll grant them that. Worth good money at the time, I imagine.”

“My first pay as a cyclo driver in Ho Chi Minh City,” Bao Lan said, with a bare smile, a tightening of lips over yellowed teeth. “That was in the days before my entire life changed. I’m glad to know it wasn’t all wasted.”

Quynh Ha allowed herself a smile she didn’t feel. It had been a good scrub, a thorough rewiring; and she wasn’t altogether sure she could undo what had been done. “Rewiring is . . . like deadening. You can’t completely suppress the emotions involved, or the person will go mad. There’ll be one, or several cracks somewhere; tiny remnants of the original emotions. All I have to do is find one and amplify it—I can’t give you the original back, but it will be something much like it.”

It would be like a zither melody to a full orchestra: a single voice, and with none of the body and complexity of the real memories, the ones that had hurt so much. But, because it was the mind’s own emotions, the brain would take them, and compensate, creating something that would, in the end, be quite close to whatever had been there before—to the love and the loss and the pain that made up home in Bao Lan’s mind. The tricky part, however, would be finding a crack: a rewiring that thorough wouldn’t have left large ones.

“Then that will satisfy me, yes,” Bao Lan said. “We haven’t discussed the matter of payment, but rest assured I will make it worth your time. If you agree, I’ll call your place of work and tell them I need you.”

The image of Second Aunt picking up the comms—of her face when she realised she was speaking to the Dust Queen—flashed across Quynh Ha’s mind, and was gone just as swiftly. “There won’t be any problem. I’m sure they’ll understand—” Quynh Ha had to swallow, to sort out the words in her mind. Bao Lan. The Dust Queen needed her. Trusted her. That was worth a talk with Second Aunt, many times over. “I’ll sort it out, Grandmother.”

“Good. Let me know when you can start.” Her voice was that of an Empress to a supplicant; and Quynh Ha nodded.

“I’m honoured by your trust.” She was honoured, but she was also scared stiff, as if she were dancing tightrope outside Fire Watch with no tether. To think that she was the one in charge of something that mattered this much to Bao Lan—to the heroine of her childhood—it was almost too much on her shoulders.

Almost.

But she’d do it, because how many times in her life would she have an opportunity like this?

There was a woman, waiting for her outside the Dust Queen’s quarters. She was sitting in one of the high chairs, apparently engrossed in Fire Watch’s entertainment system; but she rose when Quynh Ha walked through the door.

“Miss Quynh Ha? My name is Le Anh Tuyet. I’m Bao Lan’s daughter.”

She was perhaps forty, fifty years old; though like Bao Lan she bore the hallmarks of numerous rejuv treatments. Her face was eerily reminiscent of her mother’s, reminding Quynh Ha of the broadcasts of her youth. Her clothes had an odd, almost old-fashioned cut seen nowhere on Fire Watch; and the sheen of Earth silk, grown on mulberry trees and sunlight. “You’re an Earthsider?” The words were torn out of Quynh Ha before she could think. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s quite all right.” Tuyet smiled. “I lived here a while, but yes, I emigrated back to Earth twenty years ago.”

“I see,” Quynh Ha said; and wondered how much lay hidden behind that simple sentence. “You haven’t told me what I can do for you.”

Tuyet shook her head. “It’s what you can do for Mother, younger aunt.” She’d slipped, effortless, into the Vietnam vernacular, with its myriad set of pronouns.

“She’s already asked—”

“I know,” Tuyet said. “I came to accompany her home, to Thoi Binh.” Her gaze, for a moment, was distant.

Quynh Ha’s curiosity got the better of her. “Did you take part in the land reclamation?”

“In Thoi Binh, yes.” Tuyet shrugged. “Mostly boring stuff, and we couldn’t salvage everything. Districts Ten and Fifteen are still underwater, I’m afraid.”

“It must be very different from here,” Quynh Ha said before she could stop herself.

“It’s home,” Tuyet said, and shook her head. “Apologies. We all have homes, of course; but Thoi Binh is where I was born. You must have relatives—”

“Of course,” Quynh Ha said, and bit her lip, thinking of her own grandmother. If she’d rewired herself, would she be more like Bao Lan? It wasn’t fair, of course; Grandmother’s wandering thoughts might as well be old age, and she’d been sharp enough when Quynh Ha was young: had established the family restaurant on Fire Watch, had paid for the schooling of her numerous grandchildren out of the money she’d saved. But lately . . . “Never mind that. I’ll go plan the rewiring.”

“You have much experience.”

Quynh Ha was not about to be caught a second time; and she could hear the scepticism in Tuyet’s voice. “You don’t have rewiring, on Earth?”

Tuyet shrugged. “No, we do. It’s just—”

Oh. Like the older generation; the ones who’d been too old at the inception of rewiring; and therefore distrusting it. “Rewiring is only dangerous if you keep doing the same rewiring all the time,” Quynh Ha said. “Like the deaders? You must have seen them on the shows. That’s because they keep doing it to themselves—dozens of times a day, it’s more an addiction than anything, really. Otherwise, it’s like anything; a tool that has its uses. I’ve done it for customers; and I’ve done it on myself.” She rewired herself periodically when making complex preparations: it was useful to be able to ignore fear and the previous memories of failure so she could focus on getting the drug proportions right.

“I see,” Tuyet said. Quynh Ha could tell some of her confidence had got through. “I guess it’s what Mother wants, and I won’t argue with her. Not this time.” Her voice was bleak.

Quynh Ha said nothing; it was obviously not her place to pry. At length Tuyet sighed. “Ah well. It’s what you do, on Fire Watch, and if it makes her happy . . .”

Quynh Ha bowed her head. “Thank you. I’ll set to work immediately.”

“Great. Do you have everything you need to work?”

Quynh Ha shrugged. “I can do a lot of things from the dispensary.” She had remote access to a simulacrum of Bao Lan’s memories; enough to find the best places for her rewiring and test her results; though of course anything in a rewiring was unpredictable enough that only live testing would help.

“Good,” Tuyet said, and handed her a piece of paper with a private handle. “Do let me know if I can do anything for you. Mother and I—” she grimaced “– have had our differences in the past, but they’re over now. We both want her home, no matter the cost.”

All rewirings have cracks; points of weaknesses, where the protective fabric has been deliberately torn; where the emotions keep seeping in. If she can find one memory that feels different from the other ones—where the glass has fissured, where the colours have bled— then she’ll have all she needs to unlock the Mekong Delta again.

What she finds, rifling through Bao Lan’s brain, is not that, but something else entirely.

She finds the other memories: the ones associated with Fire Watch, with her role as the Dust Queen, the official entertainer for New Year’s Eve: years and years of dust cloud dances all packed together like grains of sand. The Committee that rules over Fire Watch wants something to allay the frustration of Fire Watchers, forced to watch over the terraformation of a planet they’re not allowed to set foot on for fear of a cross-planet contamination that would disturb the entire, delicate process mapped out a generation ago. They have decided to hold a celebration on the planet; something that will remind people that one day, when the cyanobacteria and the bots have done their jobs, humans will breathe the air of Mars.

The earlier memories are of technology in its infancy: of frustrated scientists in labs; of bots that die on the surface of Mars, choked up on dust; of implants that short circuit, almost taking out a portion of Bao Lan’s brain with them. The lead scientist, Zhu Chiling, comes to hospital to apologise, and almost gives up; but Bao Lan shakes her head, and tells her she’s willing to try again—and they do, and she feels the pride and the wonder when it finally works—when Bao Lan sits in the chair of the broadcasting room and makes bots crawl on the surface of Mars for the very first time.

She’s with Bao Lan when they inaugurate the seventh cyanobacteria greenhouse; when everyone on Fire Watch gathers to see Bao Lan’s bots weave images of villages and houses, with tiny figures running in the street, cutting the strings of kites for good fortune. And she sees every performance after that, establishing a ritual that becomes an anchor for the inhabitants of Fire Watch, a promise renewed year after year.

There’s one in particular that Quynh Ha remembers; a New Year’s Eve that has no special meaning—another worship of the ancestors, another meal with the family. But, nevertheless, she remembers crowding with the cousins around the huge screen in Mother’s compartment; sitting, rapt, as bots dance below, retelling the story of Cuoi and his banyan tree. In the clouds of dust Cuoi meets the tiger; plants the seed of the magical banyan; and is finally whisked to the moon, clinging to the tree’s roots as it rises.

And she understood, then; that they’re all like Cuoi; that they rose into the Heavens and made their home there; that the banyan’s roots, drawn in the dust by the bots, now cover the surface of Mars. That all of this is Bao Lan’s message, Bao Lan’s hope: one day their children’s children will leave their footprints in the dust and bring their own legends to life on the red soil.

But Bao Lan’s home, like Mother’s, like Grandmother’s, isn’t Fire Watch, isn’t Mars: it’s the land they left in the resettlement, the land that was once submerged under the sea. With difficulty, Quynh Ha tears herself from the feasts, from the beautiful dances of the bots; and goes back to the other memories, the sepia-tinted ones that she finds no purchase on.

She rifles through car rides; through afternoons by the sea at Vung Tau; expeditions to the metropolis in Can Tho. Everything is quaint and old and outmoded—no implants, no bots, just clunky machines and a network that still requires dozens of antennas to function properly. But it’s Bao Lan’s childhood—this small corner of Viet Nam, those gardens with pomegranate and papaya trees; those boats weaving their way on the muddy expanses of the Mekong; the smell of monsoon rain and fried dough, a promise of a meal of rolled rice cakes and dipping sauce that will be an explosion of flavour in the mouth, salty and acid and sweet all at the same time, a perfect taste that will never again be reproduced, no matter how many cakes she orders.

Quynh Ha realises, then, that she finally has the memory she was looking for. It’s small and insignificant, a brief moment of a child running on a bridge clogged with cyclos, and then stopping by a food vendor’s cart, but it’s alive and vibrant in a way none of the others are. This is her crack; this is the emotion she was looking for. And it’s also oddly familiar, in a way she can’t place. It can’t be shared experience, for she’s never been to Can Tho, never been to Earth even, and those wide streets interspersed with trees mean nothing to her. She sets her extrapolations algorithms on it, watching as the fragile network of emotions gains body and heft with each pass —grows like crystals in caves, becoming a complex, fragile assembly of ten thousand details.

She sets up the graft, though she expects only minor issues; and logs out to await the result in the morning.

Whe she gets to the compartment early in the morning, there is an error message waiting for her in the console.

For a moment, Quynh Ha freezes. There is no reason this should fail, especially not at the simulacrum stage. The hardest part had been finding a crack, but normally everything from there on should have been smooth—like a sleek craft set on ice, gathering momentum and sliding straight to its destination. Why?

She throws a glance at the shop’s entrance. At this early hour, the customers aren’t there yet, though old Miss Hanh should be there any moment to pick up her medication. Quynh Ha wraps the drugs in a piece of paper, and leaves them in evidence with a message for Miss Hanh: since the drugs are tailored to a client’s biology, it is unlikely anyone will steal them. Then she turns on her implants, and dives back into the simulacrum.

The memories are still there, sepia tinted and under glass, and as inaccessible as ever. There are shards of her algorithms clinging to their edges—broken bits of crystal, jagged edges that made her shudder when she brushes too close, singeing herself on their heightened intensity. But nothing seems to have grown; her graft has been summarily rejected, something alien and unacceptable.

Was the memory wrong? If it didn’t belong to Bao Lan, but to the original rewirer? Sometimes things get confused when rewiring; but no, the emotions associated with it were too strong. She’s seen them ten thousand times: in Grandmother’s gaze when she sits with her friends playing; in the catch of Mother’s voice when she speaks of her childhood; in Second Aunt’s careful, fragile movements; in the weight of the air at every Tomb Sweeping festival, where the presence of the ancestors is as thick as incense smoke.

There is no reason for that failure then; it makes no sense . . .

She zooms in on one of the shards, staring at the details—fear and longing and happiness; and a hint of rainy skies, of heavy air. The emotions are real, or as real as Bao Lan allows them to be—the graft is what she’s done a dozen times for a dozen customers, surely it shouldn’t be such a difficulty?

Still . . . still, she stares at the shard; and remembers that feeling of familiarity when the extrapolation was being built; remembers dismissing it as of no matter. Her mistake. Every little detail matters.

The shard feels solid and transparent at the same time—the original feelings she got from the crack; the raw pain of losing home mingled with what home means—the joys and the sorrows and the dreams that made up Bao Lan’s life in the Delta—the sound of cyclos on the bridge, the patter of the street vendor peddling her fried dough; the sense of vastness opening up all around her, childhood stretching like a vast, endless plain with so many adventures left—and yet already, at the fringes, is the smell and shadow of the rising sea; the inescapable knowledge that all of this is a suspended moment of grace; a fragile dream in a place doomed to vanish.

And she sees it, then. She sees why it hasn’t worked; why it can never work.

“I found a crack,” Quynh Ha told Bao Lan.

The Dust Queen was sitting in her broadcast chair again, staring at one of the screens in front of her. Tuyet was in one of the smaller chairs, reading a printed book; an oddity on Fire Watch, where nothing was printed much anymore. She reminded Quynh Ha of Second Aunt and her brocade dresses; youthful face, but mannerisms from another generation.

On the screen was a scene from a familiar tale, rendered as in shadow theatre: a man kneeling before the Buddha, watching a hundred stems of bamboo come together to make the hundred-knot bamboo that will win him his sweetheart’s hand in marriage. As Quynh Ha watched, Bao Lan made a gesture with one hand; and the scene gradually faded; and then rearranged itself, emphasising the kneeling posture of the man and the larger-than-life size of the Buddha. Then it broke apart; became the dance of bots on a simulated Mars —clouds that slowly built up the apparition of the Buddha; the surprise of the man, who attempted to throw himself backwards; the gathering of the hundred bamboo stems in the forest, so well rendered one could see the sweat on the dust-man’s brow; could hear the sound of bamboo falling on the ground of the forest.

Quynh Ha found herself holding her breath, so hard it hurt.

Bao Lan made a dismissive gesture. “It’s not yet ready.” She pinched her lips; and made another gesture. The scene dissolved; played itself out again; the Buddha slightly larger; the man slightly smaller—and, when he went into the forest, it wasn’t sweat that was falling from his brow, but tears—his fear, his anguish at the thought he might never return in time, never marry his bride . . .

“Better.” Bao Lan shook her head. “But not quite there, I think. Sorry for making you wait, child.”

“I don’t mind,” Quynh Ha said. Her heart still hung suspended in her chest. “Is this how you do your performances?”

“Sometimes, yes.” The Dust Queen had an oddly nostalgic look in her face. “There wasn’t this, in the old days: it was all gut instinct, but this helps.”

“I know,” Quynh Ha said, and bit her tongue.

“You’ve seen the memories.” Bao Lan nodded.

“I didn’t know you’d based it on shadow theatre.”

Bao Lan shrugged. “It seemed as good an inspiration as any. I had . . . good memories of shadow theatre, when I was a child. There was this itinerant Hoa performer, back in Thoi Binh . . . ” She smiled. “But never mind, we’re not here for this old woman to babble on. You said you’d found a crack.”

Quynh Ha would have listened to her all day; but she knew that wasn’t what Bao Lan was expecting. “Yes,” she said.

“And you’re here to finish your work, I take it.”

Quynh Ha took a deep breath. “I can’t.” From the corner of her eye, she saw Tuyet set aside her book, and turn her head to her, with a gaze sharp enough to pierce metal.

“I don’t understand,” Tuyet said. “Surely, once you’ve found your crack, everything else should be easy?”

It was what she’d told Bao Lan; and there was, indeed, no reason to suppose it would go otherwise. Except . . .

“I’ve extrapolated it, as I said. And I could rewire you right now, but it wouldn’t take. It’s not just a crack. It’s everywhere.”

“Everywhere?” Bao Lan shook her head. “I don’t think so. When I think of my childhood, all that comes up is empty memories. Images that mean nothing. Sounds and tastes that are a stranger’s.”

“It’s not—” Quynh Ha paused, struggling for words that seemed to have escaped her. It had seemed so clear, staring at the pattern yesterday; but that had been yesterday; and today she was in the presence of Bao Lan again, and as tongue-tied as a child. “Your crack is your art. The thing that makes your dust clouds sing, that gives them meaning, emotion, depth: it’s that tiny little remnant of what it meant to lose your home.”

Bao Lan opened her mouth to speak—Quynh Ha barely noticed, as she went on through her memorised speech. “You’re the Dust Queen. That’s who you’ve been, for decades. I’ve seen the memories. Your entire life revolves around your art.” There had been memories of Tuyet in the simulacrum, but Quynh Ha had steered clear of them. They were none of her business, and she’d felt ashamed enough spying on Bao Lan’s performances. Nevertheless, she’d seen enough: a lonely childhood, with a mother that had little time for her child; but who had still resented Tuyet for leaving Fire Watch—abandoning Bao Lan for the lifelong work of raising the Delta from the sea.

There was silence, in the wake of her words. Surely she’d gone too far, had been too frank, too honest? “I see,” Bao Lan said at last. “And it won’t take—”

“Because you won’t let it,” Quynh Ha said.

“What makes you so sure?”

Quynh Ha spread her hands. “The simulacrum—”

“Is a simulation.” Bao Lan’s voice was quiet, but forceful. Behind her, the little shadow play was still going on; the man abasing himself before the Buddha; the hundred-knot bamboo rebuilding itself, time and time again. “You can’t know what will happen in real life.”

“No,” Quynh Ha said.

“You’ve known cases of divergence,” Bao Lan said, softly. “Cases where the simulacrum didn’t follow the patient.”

“Not this way!”

Bao Lan said, softly, quietly, “I’m told there are ways and means, to make a graft take. Forcefully, if need be.”

Demons take her. Of course she’d do her research; and of course she’d find out all about the more shady practises of rewiring. “We don’t do this,” Quynh Ha said. “Not on Fire Watch.” Out there in the asteroids, perhaps—who knew what the companies got up to, when their profits were on the line? But here on the orbital, where the only thing at stake was watching Mars grow? No. “And even if we did, it would be an even more difficult procedure.” To make a graft take when it didn’t cling, you had to add anchors everywhere; to tie hundreds of knots in the nerve fabric, to implant emotion after emotion in such a way that they never came loose, and yet didn’t damage the brain . . . “Hours of work, and the slightest deviation could make everything fail.”

“Ah. But I did say I’d picked you out for your delicate touch, didn’t I?”

She—she—“You knew,” Quynh Ha said, sucking in a burning breath. “You knew all along.”

“No,” Bao Lan said. “But I suspected that it might come to this, yes; and I gave a long thought to what I would do, if that were the case. I knew I would ask you to go ahead.”

“But I can’t—” She struggled for breath and words. “Having a stable simulation is the basis of rewiring. I can’t just let anything loose in your brain!”

“That would seem to be the definition of rewiring,” Bao Lan said, with a tight smile. “At least as far as I’m concerned. I’m not a fool, child. All things come with their cost. I admit I didn’t expect the price to be so high, but—”

“Not like that,” Quynh Ha said. “Even if I make it take, you might wake up a vegetable. You might not wake up at all. You might be completely different.”

“I’ll be different in any case, no?”

“Yes, but—”

Bao Lan lifted a hand; and that same sense of presence filled the room; that same reminder that she was the Dust Queen, with decades of commanding the attention of Fire Watch. “I’m old, child, old enough to be your grandmother, as you and I well know. I’ve done my duty to Fire Watch. Now it’s time for me to think of my ancestors; and to honour their graves. Tuyet is right; it’s time for me to return home.” She smiled a little; and in that moment the mask cracked, and the expression of vague longing on her face was the same as Grandmother’s.

“The dust clouds—” Quynh Ha started, but Bao Lan shook her head.

“The dust clouds are only a thing.” A brief expression of pain crossed her face, then; and was as swiftly gone. “Pieces of art I loved, yes; but if you cling too much to what you love, they destroy you in the end. I won’t lie and say I won’t miss them; but I can live without them.”

She couldn’t. She was the Dust Queen. She was–

No more dust clouds. No more performances; and worse than that, Bao Lan turning her back on them, on what they meant to Fire Watch—going home to die in obscurity, forgetting all that passion that had gone into making them; dismissing them as not important, as something that could be erased from her—no different, after all, from Mother, from Grandmother . . .

For a moment Quynh Ha stood frozen where she stood; and then the truth was torn out of her. “I—I can’t help you. I just can’t. I’m sorry.” The Dust Queen stared at her, expressionless for a second; and then a look of mild disappointment gradually took over, as if Quynh Ha were six again, standing in the kitchen unit of the family compartment in a puddle of water and sugar she’d spilled on the floor—and a sense of growing, unbearable shame, unbearable fear that seemed to squeeze her heart into burning shards—and before she knew it, she was up and running out of the room, and a long way into the corridors of the orbital before she could catch her breath again.

It was Tuyet who found her, later; sitting moodily at the counter of the dispensary, staring into her console as if it could yield some unfathomable truth. Second Aunt had left her some noodle soup; and the aroma of star anise and beef marrow filled the shop, strong enough to overpower even the smells of drug compounds.

“I thought I’d find you here.”

“I can’t do it,” Quynh Ha said. “I’m sorry I ran out, but there’s just no way I can do it.”

“Can’t, or won’t?” Tuyet asked, with disturbing perspicacity. “It’s her wish. Why would you deny her that?”

As though a customer with excess asked her to remove cucumber seeds from a drug preparation: would she do it, if they assured her they’d weighed the effect of the harm on their own bodies? “She’ll change,” Quynh Ha said. “She might even regret it.”

“Perhaps. But she’s given enough thought to the consequences, hasn’t she? In the end, it’s what she wants, now.”

“What would you do?”

Tuyet shrugged. “She’s my mother. Of course I would do as she asks. ‘Do no harm’ only applies to doctors.”

And she was only an apothecary. Quynh Ha smiled, bleakly. Shouldn’t the customer’s well-being take precedence over everything else? “She’ll never be the same.”

“Of course she won’t. It’s a rewiring that she wants to live with. You know how I feel about rewiring. It’s hardly innocuous.”

“She won’t do any dust art, ever again,” Quynh Ha said, finally; and knew that this was the truth, the rock bottom of her existence; her own crack around which everything was built. There were other artists, other people working in dust clouds; but none of them were Bao Lan.

Tuyet’s face was carefully blank. “We all have our homes. We all have our childhood treasures. I’ve had my share of disagreement with Mother; but this is her choice, and I won’t take it away from her.”

And Quynh Ha would. “I—I can’t do it. I told her the truth: it’s a delicate procedure.” She took in a deep breath—it hurt, to admit even that. “I can give you the name of someone else—”

“She trusted you.”

“I know,” Quynh Ha said; reliving, again and again, her conversation with Bao Lan; that awful moment when she’d frozen, and some incoherent mush had taken over her brain. “She’ll learn to live without that trust. It will be easy.” Depressingly so; after all, what need had the Dust Queen for broken tools? She’d go back to working in the dispensary for Second Aunt; burying that shame, that moment of failure deep into herself. Part of wisdom, Second Aunt always said, was knowing when you were outmatched, and this was the case—she knew what ought to be done, but couldn’t even bring herself to contemplate the possibility of it.

Tuyet didn’t speak for a moment. “I can take that name,” she said at last. “I can bring them to Mother and have them perform the procedure—”

“Then do it!”

“Just answer me one question first, younger aunt: what will it do to you, if I do this?”

“I don’t understand—”

Tuyet’s smile was bitter. “I know all about regrets, younger aunt. Can you look me in the eye and tell me yours won’t eat you up? That you had your chance to help the Dust Queen, and passed up on it?”

“I—” She was right; Quynh Ha knew it. “You asked if I couldn’t, or if I wouldn’t? The answer is that I . . . I can’t knowingly remove Bao Lan’s art from her—it would hurt me too much. She’s right: it requires delicacy, and absolute control. That’s . . . not something I can provide.” Not now; not ever—it was her childhood, her dreams, and how could she ever wreck them?

“As you wish.” Tuyet’s voice was stiff, carefully controlled. Disapproval, again. Well, she was no longer six years old, and Tuyet wasn’t Mother or Second Aunt, not someone whose mere glance would induce burning shame. She would simply turn aside, and finish her soup; and go back to Second Aunt; and feel no regrets, none at all, over failing the Dust Queen in her moment of need.

No regrets . . .

Quynh Ha looked at the other’s emotionless face, and heard her own voice again, stating the obvious. Absolute control. Delicacy. She was completely right: she couldn’t provide it. Not in her current state.

But there was always a way to change one’s current state.

Carefully, she laid her chopsticks on the side of the bowl, over the sodden remnants of cold noodles and wilted coriander. “Give me a minute,” she said, “and I’ll be with you.”

Going into someone’s brain is almost like being in space: that curious sensation of hanging, weightless, like floating in water without the water; of hanging in darkness with the stars around her like hairpin wounds in the fabric of the heavens.

Here, of course, there are no stars; but the wounds are memories—a dizzying array of them, every one of them so close she could touch them—and yet to reach out, to catch them all, would drive her insane under the weight of information and emotions that aren’t hers.

She does reach out, all the same—because it’s what she’s here for, because it’s the only thing she can decently do—and takes the images one by one, delicately threading her assemblage into their very fabric—adding longing and hurt and joy to memories of a cyclo weaving its way through the traffic of an overcrowded city; to images of plates strewn on red table cloth, of wrapped rice cakes, candied coconut and lotus seeds; to tombs in a graveyard, with paper money and paper houses burning in a copper dish; to an old woman on a roof in the midst of a flood, raising a fist at some officials in a boat . . .

And, as she does so, she sees the other memories—the ones of Cuoi and his banyan, of Khong Minh and his fan; of bots dancing in the dust, weaving images of villages and houses, with tiny figures running in the street, cutting the strings of kites for good fortune—she sees them shrivel a little, become a little smaller, a little more distant, like feelings of affection for acquaintances one sees once a year. She sees them wither and die, and knows that this is the end; that there will be no more Dust Queen, no more of her heartrending performances to tell them who they are.

It would have made her cry, once; would have stopped her in her tracks as she weaves through memory after memory, spreading the crack to every single image of the Mekong Delta. There’s one performance in particular that she would have been unable to see without wrecking everything: a New Year’s Eve with no special meaning; another worship of the ancestors, another meal with the family—save that this was the New Year’s Eve when she understood at last—the New Year’s Eve where she took Bao Lan’s message into herself, when she knew with absolute certainty that the banyan’s roots now were in the planet itself; that her children’s children would leave their own footprints in the red dust, and bring to life their own legends on the red soil.

But all those memories of performances, the good, the bad, the heartbreaking—they’re all sealed under glass, tinted the colour of old, obsolete photographs—preserved under glass in that temporary stasis, where nothing matters, where nothing hurts.

It doesn’t have to be temporary, of course—she could make it last forever, but she’s not Bao Lan, and she won’t live with her childhood memories cut off. Bao Lan did what she had to, to survive—and, in the end, so will she. She will keep the performances, and remember the way they showed: forward, into a future where Mars belongs to her descendants; and further on, perhaps—when humanity is spread among the stars, like so many grains of rice in fallow fields.

She saw them off at the spaceport, afterwards.

“We’ve got you something else,” Bao Lan said—handing her a velvet box, which contained a piece of translucent jade the colour of the pandan leaves in Bao Lan’s memories. “In addition to your payment. I know it’s not much, but this is with my gratitude.” She held herself hunched now, with the same familiar hurt in her eyes all the time; the same look Quynh Ha knew all too well from Mother, from Grandmother. The Dust Queen—that tall, imperious figure that had brought attention to a room by simply lifting her hand—was no more.

Quynh Ha took the jade: it was engraved, with a simple design of a man in a banyan tree. She felt queasy, as though she would weep; though it might simply have been part of the after effects of undoing her rewiring. What was it Tuyet had said? Hardly innocuous. Perhaps that was the truth of all rewirings. “Thank you. Have a safe journey home, both of you.”

“We probably won’t see each other again,” Tuyet said. “But I hope you live a long life, with the ancestors’ blessings on your health and children.”

Quynh Ha nodded, accepting the traditional parting. “Thank you for believing in me,” she said.

Tuyet smiled. “You were Mother’s choice; and she’s seldom wrong.”

And then they were gone; leaving her alone once more. She came to stand before the screens, watching their shuttle depart from Fire Watch—the ion drives lighting up in the darkness, before they were altogether gone on their months-long journey back to Earth—and the huge image of Mars appeared once more on the screen, with a few dots denoting the cyanobacteria greenhouses.

No more dust clouds.

She raised the jade to the light, until the image of Cuoi in the banyan was superimposed on the red planet; and thought of Bao Lan, hunched and subdued and entirely unlike who she had been.

“Safe journeys,” she whispered; and wondered if she’d ever be able to forgive herself, for sending the Dust Queen home.

Originally published in Reach for 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

Kathleen Ann Goonan

Kathleen Ann Goonan is a writer, speaker, and recovering academic. The has published seven widely translated novels, including the first novel of her Nanotech Quartet, Queen City Jazz (a NYT Notable Book) in 1994 and In War Times (Tor, 2007), winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the American Library Association’s Best Novel of the Year. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Clarke, BSFA, and Nebula Awards. She has published over fifty short works in markets such as Discover Magazine, Asimov’s, Omni, Appalachian Heritage, F&SF, and many anthologies. Her latest academic publication was in Sisters of Tomorrow (Ed. Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharpe, Wesleyan, 2016). She is working on two novels and a screenplay. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and is a member of X Prize’s Lifeboat Foundation.

Gwyneth Jones

Gwyneth Jones is a writer and critic of science fiction and fantasy, who also writes for teenagers using the name Ann Halam. Among other honors, she’s won two World Fantasy awards, the British Science Fiction short story award, the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night award, the Philip K. Dick award, and shared the first Tiptree award, in 1992, with Eleanor Arnason. Bold As Love, the first novel of a near future fantasy sequence, won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 2001. She lives in Brighton, UK, with her husband and son, plus two cats: practices yoga, has done some extreme tourism in her time, likes old movies and cooking, and enjoys playing with her websites.

Aliette de Bodard

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories which have garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space opera books include The Tea Master and the Detective, a murder mystery set on a space station in a Vietnamese Galactic empire, inspired by the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award, Locus Award finalist), and its standalone sequel The House of Binding Thorns (Ace, Gollancz).

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 More Human Than Human. Next next anthology is volume three in the Best Science Fiction of the Year series, which will be published this April by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.