Issue 39, April 2018

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

Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Katabasis

a novella by Robert Reed

Blind Cat Dance

a novelette by Alexander Jablokov

Stochasticity

a novelette by Tobias S. Buckell

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the April 2018 issue of Forever Magazine!

It’s a big book month for me. I have two books coming out within days of one another. First up is Clarkesworld Year Nine: Volume One, the latest—and long overdue—volume in our annual anthologies from Clarkesworld Magazine. As the title indicates, this one features all the original stories from the first six months of our ninth year. It covers the period around our 100th issue and the launch of our Chinese translation project with Storycom. I’m hoping to have volume two out in May and both year ten books before the end of the year. That will leave me with eleven and twelve for 2019.

A day or so later, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Three will be published by Night Shade Books. I’ve really enjoyed working on this series and hope I have the opportunity to continue doing so for a while. The next book is contracted and we’re due to talk about books five and on soon. Hopefully this one has a strong launch. That would certainly help the future of the series.

The other exciting news for April is that I’m once again a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form. This is my sixth time in the running for this one and currently winless. That said, it’s always a thrill to be on the ballot and who knows, maybe sixth time is the charm. A big thank you to everyone that nominated me this year! Quite honored.

Until next time . . .

-Neil

Katabasis

Robert Reed

1

The custom was to bring nothing but your body, no matter how weak or timid that body might be. Robotic help was forbidden, as were exoskeletons and other cybernetic aids. Every nexus had to be shut down; the universe and its distractions were too much of a burden to carry across the wilderness. Brutal work and miserable climates were guaranteed, and the financial costs were as crushing as any physical hardship. Food was purchased locally, every crumb wearing outrageous import fees, while simple tents and minimal bedding cost as much as luxury apartments. But most expensive were the indispensable porters: Every hiker had to hire one strong back from among a hodgepodge of superterran species, relying on that expert help to carry rations and essential equipment as well as the client’s fragile body when he proved too weary or too dead to walk any farther.

Porters were biological, woven from bone and muscle and extravagant colors of blood. Evolved for massive worlds, most of them thundered about on four and six and even eight stout legs. But there were a few bipeds in the ranks, and one of those was a spectacular humanoid who called herself Katabasis.

“Yet you seem small,” said the human male. “How can you charge what you charge, looking this way?”

Katabasis was three times his mass and much, much stronger. But the question was fair. With an expression that humans might mistake for a smile, she said, “The client pays the penalty for being brought out on his back. When you give up, we earn a powerful bonus.”

The human lifted a hand, two fingers tapping the top of his head. He had pale brown skin and thick hair the color of glacial ice, white infused with blue. The fingers tapped and the hand dropped and with genuine pride he said, “I studied the rules. I understand that rule.”

“Good,” she said.

“But these other creatures are giants,” he said. “That Wogfound would have no trouble carrying you. And the One-after-another looks easily stronger.”

“All true,” she agreed. “But by the same logic, they feel no special obligation to look after their clients. Extra money has its charms, and if you shatter, they win. But I am relatively weak—as you wisely noted, thank you—and that’s why I avoid carrying others, even for a few steps. Ask the other porters here; you will learn. Katabasis is notorious for keeping her clients healthy, which not only adds to the value of the trek, but it saves you the ignominy of being brought into City West as a cripple or a carcass.”

The modern brain was nearly impossible to kill, and no client had ever permanently died during these marches through jungle and desert. Yet immortality had its costs, including exceptional memories that played upon weaknesses like pride and dignity. Small humiliations were slow to heal. Giant failures could eat at the soul for thousands of years. Most humans would take her warning to heart. Yet this man was peculiarly different. Staring at the powerful, self-assured alien, he smiled for the first time. “Oh, no,” he said. “You cannot scare me.”

Katabasis had centuries of experience with the species and its countenances, but she had never observed anything so peculiar as that broad, blatant grin and that bald declaration. She watched the ugly tongue curling inside that joyful mouth. The human made no attempt to hide his feelings. He was staring, obviously intrigued by the porter: The shape of her tall triangular face and the muscled contours of the rugged, ageless body, and how the bright golden-brown plumage jutted out of her work clothes. An interspecies fantasy was playing inside his crazy head. This happened on rare occasions, but never on the first day. And never like this.

Without shame, the man adjusted his erection. “My name is Varid, and I want to hire you.”

“No.”

Varid didn’t seem to hear her. He continued to gaze at her with a simpleton’s lust. Then the face flattened, emptiness suddenly welling up in the eyes, and using a tone that was almost but not quite puzzled, he asked, “Why not?”

“You won’t endure the journey,” Katabasis said.

Varid tried to laugh but the sound came out broken, as if he was an alien attempting to make human sounds. Then the other arm lifted, bending to make a big bulge of muscle. “I’m exceptionally fit. I’ve trained for years, preparing for this day. Designer steroids and implanted genes, and I have special bacteria in my gut and my blood, doing nothing but keeping this body in perfect condition.”

“It isn’t the body that concerns me,” she said.

Varid shut his eyes and opened them again. “What are you saying?”

“Your mind is the problem.”

He responded with silence.

“I don’t know you,” Katabasis continued, “but my impression is that you have a fragile will and a foolish nature.”

The human face remained empty, unaffected.

“Hire the One-after-another,” she said, one broad hand picking him off the ground and then setting him aside. “She’s more patient than most porters, and she won’t speak too rudely about you once you give up.”

In the remote past, in some distant parcel of the newborn universe, someone harvested the core of a Jovian world. Godly hands filled the sphere with caverns and oceans, and then they swaddled their creation inside a hull of hyperfiber. Towering rockets rose thousands of kilometers above the stern, and the new starship was fueled and launched. Yet nobody ever came onboard. The machine’s purpose and ultimate destination were forgotten. Billions of years later, humans found the derelict wandering the cold outside the Milky Way, and after considering a thousand poetic names, that lucky species dubbed their prize “the Great Ship” and began a long voyage around the entire galaxy, offering passage to any species or individual that could afford the price of a ticket.

Early in the voyage, a high-gravity species sold asteroids and rare technologies to the humans and with their earnings bought passage for a distant solar system. Once onboard, they built a vast centripetal wheel. The wheel was deep inside the Ship, helping minimize the natural, distracting tug of real gravity. Forty kilometers wide and nearly five hundred kilometers in diameter, their home spun a circle every eight minutes, pressing them snugly against the wheel’s rim.

Eventually the aliens reached their destination, and they sold their home to a speculator with dreams but few resources.

That began a sequence of bankruptcies and auction sales. Each grand plan ended with fresh disappointment. Investors changed and new tenants worked the ground with false optimism, and then everything would fall apart again. In that piecemeal fashion, the habitat’s climate was modified and rectified in places while other regions were left to shatter, creating an ecological stew populated by survivors from a thousand massive worlds. Today the lone sea was shallow and hypersaline, bordered by City East and City West, while at the opposite end of the wheel stood a chain of mashed-down mountains. An artificial sun rode the hub, throwing a patchwork of colors and intensities of light into a maze of valleys, and after thousands of years, for no reason but luck, a splendidly fierce and decidedly unique biosphere had matured.

The current owners occupied City West, and so long as their investment produced capital and public curiosity, they were happy.

Every porter lived in City East. An abrasive, brawling community, it was as diverse as the countryside if not so beautiful. With powerful arms, Katabasis had hollowed out a boulder of quake-coral, making a cavity where she could sleep easily. She liked the City, and she loved to walk its shoreline every day, but she also had debts upon debts, which was why she worked constantly and why the wilderness was as much of a home as any place.

Prospective clients gathered every morning at the official trailheads. Among today’s crop were several species that she preferred to humans. But Varid wasn’t only peculiar, he proved especially stubborn. She tried to whisk him aside, but he insisted that she should be his porter, making noise about proving his worth and giving away wild bonuses for her trust.

At that point, she interrupted. “No, I won’t take you, no.” Her voice was sharp, and everything about the scene was in poor form. But at last the man seemed to understand. One last time, his face emptied. Varid finally walked away, slowly approaching the One-after-another. The small success lasted until two other humans approached—a mated couple, unexceptional to the eye—and Katabasis wondered why her day was cursed.

Then the male human did something rare. Not only had he read Katabasis’ public posting, he also had some understanding of her species. Raising one hand to make introductions, he looked skyward and called to her by name.

She lifted the backs of her hands, which was how one smiled politely to a stranger.

The human was named Perri. A handsome monkey, athletically built and younger in the face than fashionable, he raised his second hand and introduced his wife. Quee Lee took one step and another and then rested. She was a dark elegant creature built from curving tissues and pleasant odors. But there were telltale signs of intense training and medical trickery at work in the muscle beneath those curves, and the creature’s new strength was lashed to reinforced bones that could weather the relentless weight. Making humans ready for this gravity was as much art as engineering. Too much bulk, no matter how powerful, eventually dragged the body to its doom. In most circumstances it was smart to begin small and build the flesh where needed, on the trail and fed by the precious rations. That’s why it was a good sign, these humans being smaller than most, and perhaps they understood at least one vital lesson.

QueeLee raised her arm. “It is an honor to cross paths with you.”

“You have made this trek before,” Katabasis guessed.

“I managed the half-kilometer from the custom office, yes,” she said, her mouth filled with bright teeth.

“But I made the full circuit once,” Perri said. “Three hundred years ago, and my wife has been training since I returned home.”

“I’m trying to make my life exciting,” said Quee Lee.

“I am a boring husband,” he said.

The two laughed loudly, excluding the world with their pleasure.

Katabasis studied how they moved, how they stood, and with experience and unsentimental eyes, she sought the warning signs of failure.

“My husband wants to hire you,” Quee Lee said, “but I won’t survive the journey. My goal is to make the halfway point, into the mountains, and from there someone will have to carry me.”

“What about that Wogfound?” Perri asked. “She looks unbreakable.”

“Except she’ll mock you relentlessly,” Katabasis warned.

“I had one on my first trek,” Perri said. “Wogfounds are masters of insults and name-calling.”

“Well, if I’m riding, then I deserve her abuse,” Quee Lee said. “And if I’m dead for a spell, what could the noise matter?”

Three humans and several other alien hikers came to terms with their porters. Contracts were spun and sealed, monies were dropped into accounts of trust, and by then the day was half finished. The habitat’s original owners had come from a world with an eleven-hour day-night cycle, and the present owners maintained at least that tradition. Food and equipment still had to be collected, which was why the porters and their clients wouldn’t embark until the next dawn.

Perri asked to be responsible for his needs. Alone, Katabasis returned to that comfortable and familiar but ultimately alien home. A pot of boiled fish and twenty kilos of flame-blackened bread were the day’s meal, and then she chewed a stick flavored with mint and iron, walking the salty sand of her favorite beach. The night’s sleep lasted for most of three hours, which was typical, and then she woke when the dreams left her no choice, returning to the present and its stolid comforts full of hard work followed by more hard work, from this moment and until the time’s end.

2

The good porter knew what to leave behind. Extra clothes were burdens to drop in your tracks. Charms and religious symbols needed to be lighter than whispers, or they were unlucky evils. Even the richest flavors had to be carried in tiny doses, and only dead sticks could be collected along the way, soaked and chewed and then discarded with the body’s waste. Water in the wilderness was often tainted and sometimes putrid, if not outright laced with toxins. One rough filtering might leave a thousand awful tastes behind. But immortals lived inside tough, enduring bodies, and what was adventure without suffering? The one great law that couldn’t be cheated was that physical work required energy. Energy always meant food. But many of the habitat’s species were rare, and some had fallen extinct on their home world, which was why every visitor, local and tourist alike, was forbidden from hunting and grazing. That’s why every meal was carried and why each mouthful had to be jammed with nutrition. And the good porter fed herself before the client, because it was imperative that she be the strongest beast on the trail.

Katabasis never brought treats or wet meals. A client might pocket dried fruits or hide away some bloody bit of meat, but if she found these indulgences, she took them for herself. The preferred rations were dense desiccated nuggets. Flavors were coded to color and every tongue had favorites, but basically these were lumps of highly purified fat that would test even an immortal’s adaptable guts.

The trek’s first days always brought gas and embarrassing smells.

Katabasis expected jokes and had a few of her own at the ready, but Perri and his wife seemed untroubled by the rude noises.

The Wogfound was much less discreet. But the couple treated his jabs as just another series of farts, inevitable and natural, barely worth mentioning in a realm full of oddities.

The humans walked the jungle trail in slow, measured steps. Pseudo-gravity was difficult for its crushing pressure, but another complication was at work: The Great Ship had its own tug, and as the habitat’s rim spun upwards, everyone’s apparent weight increased. Then the wheel peaked and fell and down came both the body and weight. A one-gee swing rolled past every eight minutes. Clients had to contend with the shifting rules of walking and falling. Humans always fell, and they eventually broke. The other clients and their porters pushed ahead, but Katabasis’ little group conquered two kilometers on the first day and tried to hold that pace thereafter, passing through stands of pillar trees and a grove of golden willows growing around cores of carbon fiber, and then came another stretch of pillars that looked identical to the first but were born on an entirely different world. After ten days, the forest came to an abrupt end, replaced with a long valley filled with wooden reefs covered with bug-eating anemones and flower-mouths collected from scattered, left-behind worlds.

Varid was somewhere ahead of them, walking with a Tristerman and the largest Yttytt that Katabasis had ever seen. Tracks and the wind claimed that he was matching paces with those stronger aliens. Perhaps the human felt that he had some point to prove. Maybe he was overextending himself, or maybe Katabasis had been wrong about his nature. The truth didn’t matter. She had a client and hers was quite cheerful about his pain, while his wife was proving resilient. Ten days was nothing in a very long journey, but they had a reasonable pace and ample rations, and their camp was pitched before darkness, time left to eat another dense, gut-knotting meal before managing a few hours of sleep and dreams.

The couple slipped into their little tent, and in the careful fashion of weaklings trapped in high gravity, they made love.

The porters listened to the sex, and because he couldn’t help himself, the Wogfound offered insults. “Before I carry that monkey,” he said, “I will wrap her inside her bedding. She is too ugly to touch in any way.”

“She is a beast,” Katabasis said agreeably. “But I don’t think you will ever carry her.”

The challenge was noted. “A wager then, your guess against mine.”

“No.”

“If you have seen the future,” said the Wogfound, “I will pay you what my bonus would have been.”

Again, she said, “No.”

Pulling his legs beneath his long body, the Wogfound prepared for sleep. “How many times have we walked together, Katabasis?”

“I cannot say.”

“Many times perhaps.”

“More than many,” she said.

“Yet I don’t know you at all,” he said.

Looking at the armored shell and the three jewel-like eyes, she said, “You are as stupid as you are ugly.”

The laughter was abrupt and thunderous. Every anemone yanked into its home, and save for the grunting of two monkeys hiding inside their tent, the reef fell silent. Then with a brazen joyful voice, the Wogfound said, “I know what I am. I am beautiful and brilliant.”

“A good thing to know,” Katabasis replied.

Shortly after that, the camp fell asleep.

They caught Varid on the seventeenth day, inside an arid valley blasted by the brilliant blue mirage of a sun. He had spent the night there, his tent and rations packed up but still lying on the hot rock. Varid was stretched out on a skeletal chair. He smiled when the others arrived. He aimed the smile at them and spoke a few quiet words, perhaps to his porter, and the One-after-another gave a deep snort. A furnace would be hotter, but not much. Varid was drenched with sweat, but to prove his strength he lifted one of those very powerful arms, wincing when he held the open hand high.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

Perri was leading. Seventeen days and the previous trek had taught him how to move against the relentless weight. Never lift the leg higher than necessary; keep the back straight and strong. Only motions essential to covering the next half-meter were allowed. He wore minimal clothes and light boots and a body that could live for another million years. But immortality didn’t make animals into machines. He was suffering as he shuffled forward, and his voice was slow when he said, “Thank you for waiting. You’re nothing but kind.”

Katabasis heard sarcasm and pain.

Varid appeared oblivious. Still smiling, he turned and said something else to his porter, and then he broke into an oversized laugh.

With her four back legs, the One-after-another stomped at the ground. They weren’t a verbal species, but those motions signaled frustration.

“I was traveling with several friends,” said Varid, “but I tripped and fell yesterday, rather hard, and the others continued without me.”

They had seen their chance to get free of you, thought Katabasis.

Perri stopped walking, breathing deeply. “A bad fall, was it?”

“Bones poking through skin and some torn tendons.”

Quee Lee caught up with her husband. “Are you having trouble healing?”

“I never have trouble healing.” Varid sat up, the veins in his forehead ready to burst. “No, I decided to let you catch me. I wanted someone to talk to.”

“I am dreary company,” said the One-after-another.

Varid stood carefully, and his chair collapsed into a fist-sized bundle.

Katabasis had served hundreds of humans, and none were like him. She wondered about the effects of drugs and other elixirs ingested for this journey. She wondered if one of the alien “friends” had tripped the man, perhaps intentionally—a common event out on the trails.

“May I walk with you?” Varid asked.

“Absolutely,” Quee Lee said, slowly passing her husband.

The One-after-another stowed the chair and balanced all of the gear on her broad back. Three humans and their porters continued up the desert valley. A long stone wall had been cut through the middle with explosives, and they slipped into the gap and entered the remains of someone’s attempted home—tunnels and oval rooms and bits of debris that might have been precious once or might have been trash. Katabasis never enjoyed walking this ground. Each time, without fail, she thought about lost homes and the ignorant strangers who would feel nothing when they passed through what others had once treasured.

Quee Lee was in the lead. Perceiving a challenge, Varid found his legs and got busy chasing her.

Every tradition told the porters to remain behind, watching the slow, painful, and ultimately useless race.

The parched trail eventually swung back toward the wheel’s center, and after a long climb over a diamondcrete ridge, they dropped into a fresh drainage and different climate. The sun was always directly overhead, but now it turned pale and small. The air filled with mist. The vegetation was several shades of black, every plant held up by multiple trunks, supporting hungry canopies and fluorescing wings wrapped around giant insect bodies.

“Beautiful,” said Quee Lee.

Glancing up, Perri stumbled, the bones in his left leg splintering from the unexpected impact, and he collapsed and hit the ground, shattering his cheek and eye socket against bare stone.

Quee Lee returned to him. There was no reason for worry, but she settled beside him anyway.

Varid was ahead of everyone, smiling at his fortune.

“I could make you feel better,” Quee Lee said.

“In no time,” her husband agreed.

“But others are lurking.”

The two of them laughed.

Then Quee Lee looked at the other human. “Have we met him? He seems just a little familiar.”

They didn’t have access to a nexus. Memory was what counted, and despite the blood plastered across his face and a crooked leg trying to straighten itself, Perri had enough focus to decide, “I don’t remember a man like him. And I think I would.”

“Maybe he isn’t the same person now,” said Quee Lee.

Perri wiped the gore from under his eye. “Maybe something happened to him.”

“Maybe I should ask him,” Quee Lee said.

Perri laughed softly.

“You’re right,” she said. “This is a long walk. There’ll be plenty of boring to fight off before the end.”

A central valley led toward the distant mountains, and the River East was slow leaden water down its middle. For three days the trail pushed close to the water, and just when the routine and climate became familiar, they crossed the river on a massive bridge of granite slabs and granite columns.

Another ridge demanded to be climbed.

Half a kilometer was one day’s work, and they weren’t yet to the top.

They camped again and ate shavings from their supplies, and nobody complained about the taste of the water. The spring at their feet was cool and clear, little crustaceans leaving feces that tasted like something called pepper. Beside them was a grove of tashaleen trees—massive trunks laced with glass, each supporting fat bladders filled with sulfuric acid. Tashaleens periodically flooded the landscape to maintain their monoculture, but none were ripe at present, and they had lovely red colors that pushed deep into the infrared.

Today Varid had broken the little bones inside one foot. They healed fast enough, but the foot needed hard rubbing.

The couple sat opposite him, leaning against one another.

Katabasis was sitting alone, chewing steadily on a dead black stick laced with bright flavors.

After a long silence, Varid cleared his throat. Smiling at his foot, he lifted his hand, and then he turned to smile at his fingers as he said, “Name anyone luckier than us.”

There was optimism in the voice.

And there wasn’t.

“Nobody is luckier,” Quee Lee said.

Perri watched the man. “What luck are you talking about?”

“Buying passage on the Great Ship,” said Varid. “That’s an honor beyond measure.”

How could anyone disagree?

“I feel blessed.”

“Where did you come from?” Perri asked.

“Mellis 4.”

“That’s a colony world,” Quee Lee said. “In the Outskirt District, isn’t it?”

Varid seemed to hear the question, and for a moment he looked ready to formulate an answer. But then his face emptied, and everybody sat waiting. Eventually he stared at Perri, and after another long pause asked, “What’s your background? From where did you come?”

“Nowhere. I was born on the Ship.”

“Are you some captain’s child, or something else?”

“Something else,” said Perri.

Varid nodded slowly, as if he was working through the myriad possibilities. But he didn’t ask for more information. He shifted his focus to Quee Lee, ready to ask the same question.

“I was born on the Earth,” she volunteered.

“I want to visit the Earth,” Varid said. “Once the voyage ends, I plan to walk all across its ancient ground.”

The Great Ship wouldn’t return home for another two hundred thousand years. And that was assuming nothing disastrous happened during the long, long journey.

The married humans glanced at each other.

Varid appeared excited, staring at the ground and the once-injured foot, smiling and breathing faster until he suddenly looked up, hunting for another worthwhile face.

“Katabasis,” he said.

His porter let her plumage flatten, showing disinterest.

“Your name,” he said. “There’s a human word that sounds like Katabasis.”

The others looked at her. Even the other porters were curious.

This had happened several times before, human clients recognizing the word. But to have this odd dim creature bring up the matter like this, without warning . . . well, it was astonishing. Katabasis held her breath, the hearts in her thighs pushing blood into her face, making it more purple than usual.

“What word is ‘Katabasis’?” asked Quee Lee.

“It is very old, and Greek,” Varid said. “I wish I could remember what it meant. Maybe I knew once, but then again . . . ”

His voice faded, yet the face seemed more alive than usual, dark eyes sparkling and the mouth very small, very intense.

Perri looked at his porter. “Is that a coincidence?”

“No,” she admitted.

Quee Lee was interested enough to stand up and shuffle closer. “You took the name when you came here. Didn’t you?”

“It’s a tradition,” Katabasis explained. “Move to another realm, and you embrace some name from those in power.”

Varid’s face changed again, back to its flat, vague, and apparently empty ways. But he lifted the hand that had rubbed the foot that couldn’t be any healthier, and he asked the hand, “How did you find your way to the Great Ship?”

The other porters put their ears and eyes on her.

Then Katabasis surprised herself. With her voice cool and pleasant, she said, “I walked here. And I walked and walked and walked.”

3

She wasn’t Katabasis and wasn’t immortal, and she knew her tiny age and critical place, always going to sleep certain that a great family loved her. She lived inside the world’s stronghold. A wedge-hole decorated with painted pretties was where she slept, and the girl had a collection of flavored sticks to chew on, and every morning one of the household warriors would lick her bare toes, waking her with a hot rough tongue.

“The maiden is expected,” the warrior would say, or words to that effect. “The Five are waiting in the study with books and high expectations.”

The Five were a fierce and wealthy and much respected marriage. Royalty and elected leaders didn’t exist in the world and couldn’t be envisioned by the People. But three women and two husband/brothers sat astride generations of obligations and large favors. The girl wasn’t one of the Five’s children, not by blood or by adoption. But she was a Hopeful, which meant that she was endowed with some talent or compelling strength that had made her worth purchasing from forgotten parents.

“The Five are waiting,” was a ritual statement. Time was too precious to share with even the most promising half-grown citizen. But there were mornings when one of the Five, usually the younger brother/husband, would march past the two hundred Hopefuls, handing out assignments and lofty words about the future before chasing after even more pressing ceremonies.

The typical morning brought small groups divided by skills and led by teachers who loved the subject in hand. Sometimes Hopefuls were gathered in the arena where they played elaborate games full of lessons and fun that kept them busy until the day’s meal and the night’s sleep. Even better were days when a girl was told to read alone and contemplate every word. But reflective lessons brought warriors on the next morning—warriors delivering hard training because it was important to drive the laziness from these young, spoiled souls.

The girl’s gift was mathematics, and in particular, cumbersome formulas with their tangled alliances and deep abstractions. On the best days, a teacher and one warrior would pull aside the mathematicians—eleven Hopefuls, including her closest friends—and they would leave the stronghold, going out into the great, lovely, and nearly perfect world to test their knowledge against what was real.

All that was worth knowing was built upon formulas.

The world was one day’s walk wide, on average, and fifteen days in length, shaped rather like a passion worm dying on hot rock. The world stood upon an old mountain range. Left in their natural state, those eroded peaks would catch only the rare rain, and perhaps a few rock-scions would grow in the valleys. But the People had built forests of broad towers standing above the tired, broken-down tectonics. Each life in the world had its job. Gardeners and their vines dangled out of the windows while J’jjs and clonetakes sang from cages, begging their keepers for feed. The buildings’ interiors were full of wedge-holes and broad hallways, and every floor had its stockers and teachers, weavers and gossips. Especially important were the miners who left every evening, descending to the hot plains to work with their electric machines. They cut fresh stone from the quarries and smelted metals from the best ores available. Other citizens tended the fans that stood high, dancing with the winds to supply power, and those who knew the dew-catchers watered the crops and every mouth. There was majesty and perfection in this labor. Every mouth attached to a working mind sang praises to the world’s rich life.

The towers demanded endless construction, and construction demanded endless calculation.

This girl, the happy young Hopeful, was being groomed to design new walls and reinforce old buttresses. If she couldn’t look forward to the day, at least she was resigned to her duty, and it was a good day whenever a teacher looked at her work, saying without too much difficulty that she was showing that most precious talent: “Promise.”

She never imagined that outside events could interrupt her future.

Who does at such an age?

The best mornings found the budding mathematicians riding in bubbles strung on electrified cables, climbing to the highest rooftops. Where the air was thin and chill was her favorite place. Deep pleasure could be found in those vistas. The girl always stole moments to look past the world. The surrounding plains were rough and ugly, but there was a horizon to seek, though it was often masked by dust and the occasional cloud. She carried a worn-out telescope rescued from the school’s garbage, and if she was very lucky and the lessons went into evening, she had stars to admire and neighboring worlds, and sometimes several moons graced the sky with their trusted round faces.

Each class was accompanied by at least one trained, well-armed warrior. The Hopefuls had real value and might tempt their enemies. Other worlds and other People lived beyond the horizon. Perhaps those same enemies would come here to steal away their talent: It had never happened and never would happen, but there was pleasure in the possibility. Who doesn’t wish to be valuable, to be special?

One day-journey reached into evening and then farther. The teacher had critical points to deliver about bracing towers and the telltale signs of strain on a windmill blade, and she steadfastly refused to leave this high place until every student absorbed her competence.

Thinking no one was watching, the girl drifted away.

But the warrior noticed and climbed after her, finding her chewing a fresh stick of dribbledoe while pushing the little telescope against her eye. The nearest moon was overhead—gray and airless, pocked with volcanoes that sometimes threw up columns of soot that left a soft ring in its orbit. She watched the moon’s limb and stared at patches of stars, and because this was one of those rare perches where every direction was visible, she turned in a slow circle, trying to absorb the precious vista.

The warrior was young and bold. He crept up on the girl, and wanting to startle her, tried to drop the cold gun barrel against her beautiful neck.

“Your feet are sloppy,” she warned, not looking at him. “I have listened to your approach since you left class.”

He paused, embarrassed and laughing.

She chewed and looked toward tomorrow’s dawn, where night was full and the land empty of any feature worthy of a name. “I wish I had a true telescope,” she said. “Like one of the giants perched on top of the stronghold.”

“They are impressive machines,” he agreed.

“Have you even seen them?” she asked doubtfully.

“I saw all of them during my training, of course. They are the ‘long eyes’ for the warrior guild.”

“But have you ever used one?”

He smiled and said, “Only the largest telescope. I looked through it once, just to see what could be seen.”

She smiled with her free hand. “What did you see?”

“The nearest worlds,” he said, pointing his weapon at the mountains riding the western horizon. “Skies were clear, clearer than tonight, and I saw amazing details.”

“I don’t care about those worlds,” she said. “Did you look at the sky?”

“No.”

She studied him.

“We don’t have enemies in the sky,” he said.

Every mountain range was a world standing alone, and the plains and scalding oceans between the ranges would kill any person who lingered too long.

The young warrior said nothing, wondering what to make of his complicated, shifting feelings for this child.

She turned to the redness where the sun had just vanished. “I’ve seen lights in that sky.”

“Flyers,” he said.

“I know what they are.”

“Then why didn’t you call them that?”

“I wish we had flyers,” she said.

“We could build them, if we needed them.”

“I suppose.”

“We are as smart as the other nations,” he said with authority.

The girl found a faint dark bulge where a young volcano pushed high into the wet heights of the sky.

“Our world is little,” she said.

“Our world is great,” he said.

“Nonetheless, we are small and poor. And the hills beneath us are nearly exhausted.”

The warrior pretended not to be bothered by this topic.

She lowered the telescope, reading his face and his feet. “You really don’t know very much, do you?”

“I know quite a lot.”

She said nothing.

“Our fans catch the winds,” he said. “And we have other machines that can snatch words out of the wind.”

“Those are radios. Yes, our teachers talk about them.”

He stood as tall as possible. “I’ve listened to the radios. Have you?”

“What did you hear?” she asked.

“Have you listened to them?”

“No.”

“I have heard voices,” he said.

“Did you understand the voices?”

“No.”

With a gesture, she proved that she wasn’t impressed.

“But I have a good friend,” he insisted. “My friend’s duty is to translate the other languages, making sense of our enemies’ words.”

“Are these words interesting?”

“Maybe.”

“What does ‘maybe’ mean?”

Suddenly the warrior wished the topic would vanish. But he was also young and willing to risk everything to impress this odd, odd girl. So against his best instincts, he said, “There is a secret. Only the Five and their children and a few chosen People are allowed to know this secret.”

“And you too,” she said.

He smiled.

She said, “Tell me.”

“Aliens,” he said, pointing at that last glimmer of ruddy light. “At this moment, aliens are walking on that world.”

Each world stood on its own mountains, and each was isolated by the dry wastelands. Every mature world had its own People. Ten thousand species of People were scattered across the face of Existence. Existence was the planet, and the planet had lived forever, and the word “alien” was normally used for the strangest, most remote species of People.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“I am sorry,” he said. “‘Alien’ is a weak word for what I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know a new word.” The warrior looked up at the churning moon and cold stars, and using a nervous, inexpert mouth, he tried to say the word.

“What is that?” she asked. “What does ‘human’ mean?”

4

Clients had to praise scenery. After spending and suffering too much, it was their duty to collapse on some little knoll, singing about the lovely colors and intoxicating odors and the magical properties of an ordinary breeze. Species and the lay of the land refused to stay the same. “Walking across twenty worlds wouldn’t be this interesting,” clients would sing. But how many of them had walked across even one world during their wealthy long lives? That was a good question never asked, certainly not by the stolid porters following behind, saying nothing while dreaming about grateful tips.

The rare client had careful eyes. Perri paid attention, but the skill was sharpest in the morning and faded with exhaustion. Quee Lee was less interested in scenery, but she was vigilant about her footing, measuring every step and each hesitation, ignoring the usual vistas until she was sure that she couldn’t fall. That made her the client who found animal tracks and odd rocks and bits of litter left by thousands of parties exactly like theirs, and unlike many, she asked big questions of the porters and then tried to paint the answers on the insides of her cavernous mind.

Varid existed at the other end of the spectrum: He was nearly blind. Wide scenes and telling details were ignored as he marched forward. What he did notice—what was bright and exceptionally real to the man—were the various ailments rolling inside him. Katabasis saw flashes of misery in the face. Sometimes a foot broke, or a rib; more often it was chronic fatigue. But even when he was rested and whole, his surroundings passed with little notice. The man filled that tiny chair in the morning, doing nothing and plainly thinking nothing, eyes open and pointing in some random direction, observing nothing as the rest of the camp made ready for the day’s next kilometer or two.

“He is the oddest monkey,” the Wogfound remarked. “Have you ever known a creature like him?”

“I never have, no,” Katabasis said with certainty.

“And do you know how he sleeps?”

Recalling Varid’s peculiar, unwelcome interest in her, she said, “I know nothing of the kind.”

“I know quite a lot,” said the Wogfound. “Look inside his shelter. During the night, early or late, the moment doesn’t matter. The creature lies on his back, holding a light before his face.”

“Which light?”

“His camp torch turned up high, or a blank reading net draped over his face, and I once saw him with a captured blazebee between his fingers.”

“Did you ask what he was doing?”

“I demanded to know. But he didn’t reply.”

“And did he wonder what you were doing, poking into his business?”

“From what I see, I doubt that creature is capable of wonder.”

Katabasis absorbed the words, unsure what to believe.

But the Wogfound had a ready explanation. “The body is human enough, but that mind is alien. Perhaps Sorry-gones have made a nest inside the head.”

“Not Sorry-gones, no,” she said. Varid was bizarre, but he was still human in her gaze. She wanted him to be human, maybe even needed that, but she didn’t want to dwell on reasons, much less the state of her mind.

“Watch him sleep,” her colleague advised.

“You may snoop for both us,” she said. “With my blessing.”

Days later, a torrential rain struck the valley where they were walking. Fat drops of water and ice battered exposed heads, and the ground that wasn’t flooded was left too slippery for any human foot.

Varid remained inside his tent for the rest of the day.

Just once, Katabasis looked in at him. The man had cut a small hole in the fabric and water fell through, hammering the blank gaze and the mouth that was moving as if talking, but not talking to her and maybe not to himself either. He made no noise. The lips were busy and then they stopped, and after a long moment Varid turned his head, not quite looking at her when he found the breath to say, “I like rain. I always have liked rain. I think.”

The storm passed in the night, replaced by cooler, drier air.

Perri took the lead in the morning and held it until he stumbled, shattering his knee and pelvis. Quee Lee passed him. “I’d stay and keep you company, darling. My darling. But I can smell the mountains now.”

“Push on,” he said amiably.

“I already have,” replied Quee Lee, her head down, focusing on the next meter of wicked pebbles and greasy soil.

Katabasis unfastened her tumpline and various straps, lowering her pack onto a boulder where it would wait without complaint. Settling beside the injured man, she said, “Let me carry you over the next rise.”

“And earn your bonus,” Perri said.

They laughed together.

Varid was approaching as the giant wheel spun upwards, making him heavier. Leaden feet needed to rest before taking any next step, and the man kept his head down, but more out of exhaustion than to pay strict attention. Meanwhile the ground kept trying to drop him. He wasn’t clumsy in any normal sense; when he slipped or staggered his feet often found the grace to save him. And then as he passed by, the wheel began to fall again, and inspired by that slight lessening of weight, Varid grew bold. Straightening his back, he managed longer strides, conquering the next low rise before his left leg leaped out in front of him, the monkey knee wrenched in a decidedly unnatural direction.

The moaning was urgent and familiar.

Katabasis and her client remained where they were. Eventually the moans softened, and turning to Katabasis, Perri said, “I finally remembered the story.”

“Which story?”

“Wait.”

The One-after-another was stomping past them with a furious air. Perri waited for her to leave, and then rubbing his healing leg, he said, “Our brains work so well. Living bioceramics woven around the original neural network, with horizon-sinks latching tight to every idea and event and whispered word. In theory, we shouldn’t forget anything for the next ten million years. Isn’t that what you hear when you get the upgrade?”

The human leg grew scorching hot as the healing quickened. There was beauty in the infrared glow. “Were you upgraded?” Katabasis asked.

“No, I was born exactly this way,” Perri admitted. “Humans usually are. But some little instinct tells me you were born elsewhere and maybe you heard the sales pitch one or two times.”

“We are talking about Varid,” she said.

“We were,” Perri agreed.

They sat for a moment, neither speaking.

“Varid,” said Perri. “I finally managed to remember the man. He didn’t have quite the same face and his hair was black then. I met him at a very splendid party. And I know what are you asking: ‘Why was this rough fellow at a splendid party?’ Because his wife moves in some very high orbits, and Varid used to belong to the highest reaches of the high. That’s why.”

“Varid was a captain?” Katabasis asked doubtfully.

“Oh, no. There are even loftier souls than those dreary uniforms.” Perri laughed. “I’m thinking about a civilian family—mother and father and several grown children accompanied by assorted mates and mistresses and thinking toys. One family, and they owned corporations and key patents and the entire Mellissolar system. They even had one of the fastest streakships in human hands. Varid happened to be one of those children, and his clan was among the Ship’s first paying passengers, human or otherwise. They purchased the largest quarters in the Ship’s most exclusive district, and seeing no reason to leave that paradise, they rarely took the trouble.”

Perri winced and smiled and looked at Katabasis. “Perhaps your people are never smug, self-involved, or dismissive. Since my only experience with your species is you, I can’t say. But that rich human family was all those things, and Varid—the original Varid—was pried from the same complacent mold. I keep massaging my head. There probably are other incidents. But I’ve remembered the one party and that single occasion when we crossed paths. We held drinks and faced each other and spoke at length about his grand wealth and the happiness that went with that wealth, and when I found my chance, I left. I didn’t see the man again until that day at the trailhead. Thousands of years had passed, and I never felt the urge to seek him out, and I’d wager anyone’s wealth that Varid didn’t hunger for my company. But of course that’s one of the sterling benefits of the Great Ship—you can avoid the souls you don’t like at all, unless it happens to be yours.”

From the hilltop, Varid groaned mightily.

“That is the man you met,” Katabasis said skeptically.

“No.” Perri showed his teeth. “Or yes.”

She waited.

“Seven hundred years ago, I found myself trapped inside another smug party. Some honorable charity was involved. Quee Lee promised her time and money, and certain lady friends insisted that she bring her wild wandering husband along. Rich ladies have always loved wild wandering husbands, just so long as we weren’t their problem. The party lasted ten days, which is about average, and there were ten thousand dull conversations to endure, and I drank more than was proper. But I told a few stories after my wanderings, and nobody seemed too offended. Which was when I discovered that I was, despite my own smugness, enjoying myself.

“On the tenth day, I happened across a group of strange faces. These people were too important to arrive until the end, and they clearly knew one another. The topic was homes and circumstances. It seemed that everybody had moved recently, judging by the sense of adventure when they described the giant apartments that they still had barely explored. And then according to some rule or tradition peculiar to them, they started to tell stories about the Fire.

“‘Which fire,’ I asked, meaning no harm.

“One lady turned to me and very calmly said, ‘The Whisper Fire,’ before turning back to her friends.”

He paused, watching Katabasis.

She said nothing.

“The Whisper Fire was eleven hundred years before that evening.” Perri studied his porter’s face while giving his knee a stern rubbing. “Eighteen hundred years ago, and maybe you don’t remember. Maybe you weren’t onboard yet. But the Fire was a fusion nightmare. It was very big, very dangerous. Of course our brains are tough, tough, tough. But nuclear temperatures eat away baryonic material. Even hyperfiber will eventually collapse back into plasma. The Fire was extinguished within the day, but mistakes and confusion led to many disasters, and some very important enclaves were obliterated before they could be evacuated.”

Katabasis nodded, saying nothing.

“Do you see my confusion? More than a millennium had passed, yet those jittery rich people were still dealing with the disaster. Which for some reason struck me as fun, and I remained at the edge of the group for a very long time, listening to old stories mixed with occasional bites of fresh news.”

He paused, and she said, “Varid.”

“They didn’t use his name. They used his family name, and just when I was beginning to feel a vague familiarity, someone mentioned that all of the family but one had perished: Parents and siblings, servants and spouses, plus the grandchildren born inside the Great Ship. All of them were inside their enclave. The enclave was consumed totally. There was only one survivor, except survival didn’t come in the usual sense of things.”

Katabasis didn’t want to hear anything more about Varid. Her pack was waiting to be carried, and she wondered if she would look cowardly or rude, sliding inside those heavy straps and walking over the hill.

She resisted the impulse.

Perri’s voice softened, saddened. “A team of salvage experts and ship engineers had finally cut into the deepest ruins. A thousand years had passed, and inside the amorphous glass and bottled poisons they found a piece of brain that hadn’t quite died. I was fascinated. How could you not help but be? I wanted to know how most of a mind can be vaporized but a sliver is spared. What odd chaos of fluid mechanics allows that kind of half-blessing? I asked questions. They ignored my questions. Finally the man’s name was mentioned, and the woman in the know spoke about a long convalescence that had only just begun and made no sense to any of them. ‘The boy was legally and literally dead,’ said this very pretty, very civilized lady. Discussing a many-thousand-year-old entity, she said, ‘What is left of the boy is residue, it is trash. Why build a body for the emptiness that remains?’”

On the hilltop, the One-after-another was stomping her encouragement to her miserable client.

“‘Besides,’ the lady said, ‘the boy’s portion of the estate was always tiny. He was the least-favorite child with the least-liked offspring. Any holdings back home have been inherited by cousins and odd twigs on the family spruce, and which leaves him close to destitute before he takes even one step from the hospital.’”

Katabasis looked up the trail.

Perri slowly rolled over and set both hands against the ground. Every limb pushed as he stood on his rebuilt leg, testing bone and the pain while that lovely heat faded.

“You’re certain that this is the same man,” Katabasis said.

“I’m certain of nothing. I don’t have a nexus and so how can I check?” He lifted the foot and dropped it, barely holding his balance. “Of course I’ve considered asking the source. My sense is that he would tell me, if he could. But even if every detail is wrong . . . even if this is a different, unrelated Varid . . . I think at its heart, our story remains true.

“Our friend is a shell.”

A series of owners had strived to make the mountains spectacular, each investing capital into endless sandwiches of cultured granite and diamondcrete and hyperfiber bracing and hyperfiber scrap, creating a range of increasingly treacherous hills that rose up to scenic summits and starved air.

Several hundred days of steady toil brought them to the foothills and the source of the River East. The party camped in a forest of happen-trees—vast gray plates tipped on end and halfway buried in the ruddy ground—and the humans rested, gathering energy for the push to the highest ridge. The next day was slow and taxing, but they conquered a hundred meters more than planned. Two travelers passed them in the end, both riding their porters. One was poet-bird, and with an important singsong voice he said, “Swallow your pride and ride, brothers and sister. Regret is sweeter pain than a hundred splintered bones.”

In their group, nobody rode. The day after was very slow and became slower when Quee Lee took a hard spill, shattering her face and her back. But she refused the Wogfound’s attempts to call her broken and carry her for the rest of the way, and when Perri offered his hand, she laughed and said, “You genuinely don’t know me, do you?”

The day after that proved steady and very productive. No one fell. Not even a small bone was shattered. One of Katabasis’ favorite campsites proved empty and as inviting as always—a glade of rainbow-colored foliage that never looked the same twice. She set down her pack and helped her client pitch his tent, and the Wogfound came over to complain about many matters, many failures, while waiting for the One-after-another to finish her duties.

Quee Lee lay in the open glade, on her back, legs flat. She was sobbing. She was laughing. Tears made the day-old face shine in sun that was as unnatural as it was brilliant—a fierce white glare that encompassed equal portions of the visible spectrum, feeding plants from at least a hundred worlds.

Finished with her chores, Katabasis rested where the ground was dampest, happily doing nothing while her trousers and plumage grew soggy.

Her colleagues marched past. “If we had made that wager,” said the One-after-another, “you would win tomorrow.”

“Or I would lose tomorrow,” said Katabasis.

Jeweled eyes studied the prostrate human. “As you say, she is a beast.”

“Am I the beast?” asked Quee Lee.

“You are,” Katabasis said. “You are going to climb these mountains.”

“I am a great beast, yes,” she said, smiling a little more.

Perri was beneath the little tent, preparing their aerogel bed.

Varid emerged from his shelter and on the third attempt managed to stand, walking slowly across the bright glade. Varid wanted to stare at Quee Lee. This was a recent habit, and no one acted offended or intrigued by the attention. But Katabasis was curious how this evening’s conversation would play out. She didn’t join her colleagues. Instead she studied the diminished human and the lovely beast who kept weeping from pleasure, and she was doing nothing else when a thick layer of scrap rock shifted on the slope behind her. An instant later several million tons of black granite swept across the glade, crushing and burying everything within ten steps of where Katabasis was sitting.

Two porters were gone.

Three survivors called for their companions, searching until well after dark, but nothing answered the pleas, and except for a few binnerlings dancing across the rubble, nothing moved.

Varid didn’t join the search. Walking to where Quee Lee had been, he laid down, filling the imprint of her body and shutting his eyes and opening them again, and out from the blackness he said a few true words.

“Somebody else will dig them up.”

Then, with a well-earned expertise, he added, “It’s amazing what you can survive, and with only a little luck.”

5

Her cadre of Hopefuls were about to graduate. Childhood was finished and her original wedge-chamber was too small for comfort. But the warrior always came past in the morning, licking toes and feet and the lower legs that stuck out into the hallway. It was the same warrior who several years ago told her about humans. The secret had seemed wondrous, overwhelming. Creatures from a distant sun had come to their planet, to Existence, and at least one of them was now walking the face of a neighboring world. But knowledge that grand couldn’t remain special for long. Teachers and every Hopeful and eventually even the old servants in the latrine began discussing the odd beasts that fell from the sky. Some claimed the Five were using radio winds to chat with the humans. These newcomers were few and wouldn’t stay long—gravity was crushing for their weak constitutions—but every story agreed on this: Creatures from nameless places were making pledges of peace and cultural trade as well as long speeches about their glorious, magical nature.

Soon the People inside the stronghold and throughout the world understood that great events were flowing.

And they understood nothing.

One morning the young woman was dreaming, and then she felt the touch and wetness of the tongue. But the warrior wasn’t licking between her toes. She was awake and in the next groggy moment felt the six fingers of a hand tugging at her leg while an excited, angry, and almost incomprehensible voice—her closest friend among the mathematicians—said something about hurrying to the arena. “Come now,” he said. “The Five are meeting with everybody, and everybody is late.”

The girl dressed as she walked. A big, naturally strong creature, she broke into a smooth foot-skimming run in the hallways, convinced that she was in trouble for being tardy but then discovering that no, she was among the first of the invited guests.

The Five appeared together only on ceremonial days. But this was a special occasion, and this was the new Five—the oldest wife had died recently, replaced by a smart young husband with a thousand valuable favors owed to him. The new husband sat as he should, off to the side, his mouth closed. Today’s oldest wife spoke for the group, and for a long while she said nothing except to urge the People to come forward and push close, and once there was no more space under the dome, she demanded that everyone remain silent and attentive.

Thousands of People breathed in sips, making no sound.

“There is a new word in our world,” said the wife. Then with an unnatural growl to the voice, she said, “Human.”

The excitement was felt, but no one spoke or moved.

“Humans are why we have called each other together,” the wife continued. “Star-creatures have crossed a tremendous desert to sit close to our realm. But they are not part of our world, and they have no plans to visit our world, and it is time to admit why: Because we are poor. They ignore the People because we have ordinary resources and unspectacular knowledge. And compared to those sitting on younger mountains, we are few. So they are not here and never will be here, and only the raving fool bolsters herself with bold, impossible talk.”

Honesty was rougher than any tongue. The full-grown Hopeful kept silent and tried to remain still, but she felt herself turning slowly, scanning the tight-packed faces until she found the gathered warriors.

They were made of stronger stone than her. Her warrior never let his gaze wander, and he didn’t flinch as the speech continued.

“We are poor and few,” said the wife, “and even worse, our long prospects are miserable. Our old world is crumbling beneath us. A new world might suddenly burst out of the nearby plains, affording us fresh homes. But mountains are fickle gods, and this is why my family and all of the People have spent generations making ready for a longer exodus. Out on the horizon, perhaps somewhere past dawn, stands a row of young mountains too remote to be settled or too weak to resist our arrival. This has always been our destination, our salvation—a plan aimed at a heartbeat some thousand years in the future.

“But now we have a second destination: The humans. They are powerful beasts wielding tools that scare even our strongest neighbors. To move from star to star and manage that trick so easily—it astonishes our little minds. But humans are creatures of honor and heroism. Appreciating favors and good deeds, their main emissary has made an offer to all worlds and all species of People. Give the humans a worthy gift, and they will grant us passage to a starship. The starship is larger than our entire planet. Give them greater gifts, and they will grant the People infinite life. Then their Great Ship will carry us to some new planet where empty beautiful worlds stand above deserts that aren’t as ugly oras hot as ours.

“The Five have decided to embark on this bold migration. Today we are offering each of you the opportunity to walk with us across the emptiness. We will travel in the same ways our ancestors strode to these mountains when they were new—by wheel and by foot, one night at a time. And once we reach our benefactors, we shall give them a gift, a great gift—a wondrous, perfect gift worthy of passage on this giant vessel of theirs.”

The speaker paused. From the adjacent hallway came an electric wagon bearing a stout steel box, locked and secured with steel straps.

“An object waits inside,” explained the wife. “My ancestors dug this treasure out of the throat of the volcano that built the land beneath us, and it has belonged to my family since . . . our grandest, loveliest treasure, worth a million favors from creatures such as these human beasts.”

6

There was no reason for grief. The weight of twenty mountains meant nothing to the modern mind. Two porters were temporarily misplaced, bodiless but safe, bathed in partial comas that let them feel angry about their miserable luck and the loss of income but eternally confident that the landlords or colleagues would eventually come after them with a shovel.

The landslide was no grave, and besides, Katabasis’ colleagues were never true friends.

Why then was she sorrowful?

Humans thought of grief as being something that lived inside them, toxic and massive and often crippling. But Katabasis was not human. Sitting on the damp ground, a bright cloud hung about her face and shoulders. Her companions couldn’t see the sharp blue light pouring into her body and brain. They didn’t realize that anguish brought strength and absolute focus, which was the hallmark of her species: Horrible, withering losses could strike the species, yet the survivors’ instinctive response was to grow lighter and even braver, pushing toward some goal that had never seemed more precious.

“Maybe we should turn around and walk back to City East,” Quee Lee said.

“Back is nearly as far as forward,” said Perri.

“I won’t go back,” Varid said.

“Well, food won’t be a problem now,” Perri said. “We have supplies for six, including two giants.”

“And one good back to carry the wealth,” his wife said.

“I’m going on,” said Varid. He was holding a rigid golden leaf against the torchlight, watching it dry and then smolder and finally burn.

“We might hire new porters, if we push ahead,” Perri said.

“A strong porter carrying a dead client,” his wife agreed. “And we would pay bonuses for the extra work, of course.”

“One pissed-off Wogfound,” Perri said. “That’s all we need.”

The porter recognized the smartest strategy. But Katabasis was larger than her job, and she was older than her job, and she wanted to hold their present course, not involving anyone outside her family.

Whose family?

She caught herself, shaken by her thoughts.

Suddenly the reasons for grief stood in the open. She had a family once, a great embracing family, but they were lost on a distant trail. The porters trapped underground weren’t dead, but they served as triggers for these immortal aches, and these three fragile aliens—the unlikely lords of the galaxy—suddenly meant more to her than anyone else alive.

Katabasis made small sorrowful gestures, fighting to find her voice.

Varid dropped the burning leaf. With a big voice, he said, “Do what you wish, people. But I don’t need a porter.”

Quee Lee opened her mouth and closed it again, waiting.

“I’ll carry my own rations and sleep in the open and don’t worry about me.”

Perri touched his wife’s knee, and she met his stare. With nothing but faces, the ancient couple settled into prolonged conversation. Two rational minds were deciding how to argue with the damaged man. Watching their eyes and mouths, Katabasis remained silent, waiting for the reasonable tone and the most responsible plan. All at once Quee Lee brightened. She smiled and managed to laugh, slowly lifting herself to her knees and hands and then to her feet, shuffling over to Varid, her voice high and light when she said, “My porter is lost, and I don’t know where to turn.”

Varid looked up through the weak smoke.

Quee Lee dropped a hand on his shoulder. “What I want to do, if you’ll let me . . . I want to hire you as my new porter.”

All the days spent together, and Varid had never shown surprise. Until now he had been a flat, simple creature. But his eyes jumped open. He tried to breathe and failed, and then with a nervous tone asked, “Why me?”

“You’re the strongest back available,” she said simply.

Katabasis looked at Perri. Was this a genuine offer?

Perri replied with the appropriate hand gesture, slicing the air to say, “This is reasonable to me.”

“I don’t know,” said Varid.

Quee Lee said, “Please.”

Then the man smiled, and it wasn’t just a grin that had been practiced during rehabilitation. Varid smiled with his face and entire body, leaning into the hand’s touch, an effusive voice rolling across the glade and the avalanche, saying, “Of course I will. I will be your porter, yes.”

Two days after the disaster, they reached the first summit. Thousands of boots and bare feet had stood on the highest ground, killing all but the flattest and the toughest. Lichen from various worlds painted the stone, and a pair of ragdogs followed closely, ignoring Katabasis to beg for treats from the humans. The four walked slowly from view to view. On each peak, Perri and Quee Lee would discuss the scenery and animals and the rich smells on the breeze and how much farther they might cover before one of them broke another hip. Then some detail or single word would trigger memories in both of them, and suddenly they were talking about events and places buried deep in their shared past, and they laughed and often kissed, and Katabasis was weary of the game.

Varid paid no attention the show. He was playing the role of porter, and Quee Lee was nothing but his client. For two mornings he had made a show of loading and balancing his tiny pack before claiming that he was ready to carry more. A portion of his rations and a tiny piece of hers were inside the pack, plus his aerogel bed and a few other lightweight essentials. There was extra room, but Katabasis always had the ready excuse not to add grams to a body that would break several times on the best days. She had to be cautious. In the history of this world, there had never been a slower, more fragile porter. Nor could Katabasis remember any colleague who took his work half as seriously.

Tents were a brutal kilogram best left in one of the official trash heaps. Bodies and beds spent the night on the final summit, and when snow fell they gathered inside the same rocky bowl, waking early beneath half a meter of dry fluff. Several valleys radiated down from the final summit. Katabasis selected the most forgiving slope, but that didn’t stop accidents and breaks and extra food ingested to make up for lost heat and chronic repairs. Then the sun changed, growing dim and tiny, and they entered a forest of velvety foliage, the scarce light concentrated by banks of living mirrors.

Three careful days were usually required to cross this region.

Katabasis estimated that five days would be necessary, but the sixth arrived with another two days standing in their way. She hated marching in the dark and never mentioned her feelings. They walked through the gloom, and sometimes one of the humans stumbled, and it was Varid as much as it was the other two. But on the sixth day, while crossing a thin, cold slice of snowmelt, Katabasis allowed her pack to shift out of position, and for the first time in twenty treks, she fell hard enough to shatter a leg.

Quee Lee and Perri returned with regrets and polite offers of help.

“Walk on,” was Katabasis’ advice. “I’ll heal in one moment and catch up in two.”

But the other porter refused to leave. With grave eyes and a taunting grin, Varid sat on a flat stone, obviously enjoying the circumstances.

“Don’t smile,” she warned.

He heard the words or her sharp tone, and the smile abandoned the face, leaving him as empty as always.

Such a puzzle, the creature was. Wanting any noise for distraction, she said, “Katabasis.” Then she asked, “How did you recognize my name?”

Varid did not react.

“Do you remember your lecture about Greeks?” she asked.

He stared at her hot leg and then at his own hands, nodding slightly. With a quiet voice, he admitted, “I wasn’t sure where the word came from. I used to study history, and languages fascinated me, and I must have learned it there.”

She watched her leg’s fire, saying nothing.

“I have had some recent difficulties,” Varid admitted. “My health, my situation, has not been good. My mind is far from what it used to be.”

“I know this.”

He smiled again, this time with a shy human embarrassment.

Katabasis liked that smile best.

“I do remember the word,” he said. “But there isn’t any simple meaning to ‘Katabasis,’ is there?”

“There isn’t,” she agreed.

“But you chose the name for a reason.”

“No one leaves names to chance.”

“It must have suited you,” he said.

She nodded, ready to explain.

But Varid lifted an arm first. “Give me one chance to guess.”

“Try,” she said.

And he closed his eyes, quietly saying, “Katabasis is the journey from a high place, down and down into the bowels of Hell.”

She stared at him.

Then Varid opened his eyes and looked at her, his broken laugh ringing in the dark air. “Two rarities in the same day,” he said. “You fall down, and I impress you.

“What could be more miraculous?”

7

The girl always woke early, long before the sun set. Bad dreams woke her, and good ones too. The heat woke her. Breathing the thick, toxic, and very dusty air hurt her lungs, and she would roll to her side and cough hard and ache all the worse, unable to fall back to sleep. Sometimes her lover woke her with his coughing and his dreams, and then they would lie in the hot shadow beneath the mirrored tent, talking about critical matters—water rations and food stocks and the distance to be covered tonight and the little hints of terrain visible in the fiery glare of the plains. It was important to plan your night’s walk and then grab an early start. The People were moving in a wide line, shoulder to shoulder as they pushed across the wilderness, and it was best to get ahead of the dust kicked up by all of those feet and wheels. And if there was time after their planning, or if one of them was especially sad, the other would mention the humans and their Great Ship. These were the goals, and everyone needed goals. Not like they needed water, no, but the Great Ship was everything that water and food couldn’t supply. It didn’t represent hope; it was the only hope. Its hallways and giant wedge-rooms offered rest to the weary, and the body and mind would be rejuvenated and then enlarged—relentless long life and profound brains ready to be filled with experience and joy that would endure for thousands and millions of years.

The warrior was smitten with the idea of instant healing. Eleven days after abandoning the world, he brushed against a barkershang, driving three poisoned needles into his thigh. The wounds had been cleaned and cleaned, and he was good about changing his dressings, but even though the doctors claimed that he was improving, the holes were no smaller and the swollen flesh was a bright sick green.

From the moment she woke until they fell asleep with their legs wrapped together, the girl would remind herself that her lover was strong enough even without the help of aliens. He might limp on occasion, and maybe he suffered little fevers, but there were sicker citizens and a few dead. Besides, they were marching toward another world and different people, and warriors were at a premium. The Five had ample stocks of better drugs, and when the time came—should it come—they would release the antibiotics and the charms held back for emergencies.

The warrior wished for the immortal body, but the girl wanted the gifts of the mind. Perfect, boundless memory struck her as a blessing—provided that she could control the onslaught from the past. But why build such a brain and not give yourself the power to close off certain days and the very bad years? She imagined that she had a choice, and that was mostly true. But only while she was awake. A thousand years later, she would dream it all over again, and it wouldn’t be just the worst night, but every hot sorry march through the darkness and every sleepless oven-racked day.

The worst night began with the sun still up. She woke and the warrior slept, and she worked like a demon not to cough. But the coughing was always worse when she finally succumbed—a roaring hack blowing out the dust and thick air. The warrior was jarred awake. She apologized, but he said that he was rested. She asked about his leg, and he lifted the leg and rubbed it before announcing that the swelling and pain were both in the ground under them.

They talked about water and food.

With quiet, conspiratorial voices, they described the wedge-room they would share on the Great Ship and what kinds of aliens they might meet on their way to the toilet.

It was still day, but the sun was dropping. The earliest shadows were talking to one another, claiming that first willingness to merge and matter. The People were moving under their bright tents. The girl drank what was allowed and the warrior took his share, and with the sun fading into the red dust, they climbed into the greater heat, packing and loading the two-wheeled cart that she would pull and push through the night. That was her duty. His duty involved marching ahead, scouting for enemies and the best routes, although there were good reasons to come back and give help, and maybe she would need help in the night’s heart.

The sun vanished against the low shape of the distant world, leaving nothing behind but its heat and a furnace wind.

He and she embraced and again embraced, and like every other dusk, she wondered if they would never touch again. These were not omens. Tiny mistakes and large lapses in judgment could kill, and even the smartest, most careful soul was never safe.

The old world stood behind them, mostly abandoned. Only the sick and infirm, the elderly and cowardly had remained inside the empty buildings. The Five were leading the rest across the wasteland, and true to their nature, they were models of sacrifice and generosity. Electrified vehicles were charged by daylight, and the Five had ownership over many or most of the machines, but they rarely rode. Walking among the common citizens was their duty, and maybe the old wife was carried now and again, but who could blame her? Her guards and her children were well within their rights to catch her as she stumbled, and if a chair and poles were assembled on the spot, why not? She was the leader among the Five. She was owed enormous favors and deserved this small consideration, just as any other person was entitled to help and care when they weakened and dropped—provided that they had built up the favors to deserve the honor.

That night—the worst night ever—saw the girl pushing her cart up a long slope of pale, star-washed rock. Knots of angry weed threatened—weeds as alien as anything found on remote planets. Dust was everywhere. So many feet pounding the same ground made for clouds of smothering grime, and not even three cloths across the mouth would keep out the urge to choke.

Climbing uphill, she suddenly found herself walking beside the Five’s new husband. He was pushing nothing, but she managed to drift ahead. Their eyes met for a moment. He offered an amused gesture. Then he lost his footing on a weed and fell hard, causing the girl to stop her cart and offer the free hand.

He said, “You are a strong woman, and thank you.”

She was strong, and now she felt important too. A favor had been given to one of the Five. It was a smallish favor, and maybe it would be forgotten before it could be redeemed. But perfect memories were coming, and ten thousand years from tonight, this ageless man would recall the instant and her strength, and he would pay back the debt. It was a thought worth savoring. This was a moment to share inside the tent, the sun rising again and the food for the day going inside them. The warrior would laugh, feeling proud of his big strong lover, and then they would plunge into sleep, a few more steps achieved on the endless trek.

Happiness proved brief. Reaching the hill’s crest, she found a dozen People sitting on the dry hot ground, breathing painfully or not breathing at all. One and then two more reached for her, and someone called a name. But it wasn’t her name. They were guessing, hoping for lucky coincidences. She didn’t know any of the faces or hands. It was normal for citizens to collapse after the hard climb, but what alarmed her was their youth and the fit bodies with the plumage still vigorous. Obviously they had worked too hard, too fast. That was the impression that helped her walk past, and that was the smug attitude that made her push harder through the night.

Twice again, long slopes needed to be climbed.

Centuries later, she would dream about the dying people on top and on the way up to the top, and because it was a dream and a lie, their voices would call to her. This time everybody knew her name, and she owed each of them multiple favors, yet she shoved the cart past them and couldn’t even do them the simple courtesy of averting her eyes. In her dreams she stared at their suffering and hopelessness, and sometimes she even boasted about her invincible luck.

This long trek had started well enough, but that’s how a trap works. If bad weather or unusual heat had struck the People, most would have turned around immediately, leaving the Five and their precious gift to march into oblivion. But the weather and a thousand other factors had remained relatively kind. Until that night, it was possible to believe that most of the People would survive. It was possible to walk through the heat and bad air, letting the anguish strengthen every stride. But hundreds of People were collapsing now, sometimes on the easiest ground, and the girl remembered that after the next line of little hills came a long basin covered with salt and metallic dusts and temperatures strong enough to cook meat and a girl’s will.

She pushed her cart into a boulder-littered valley where water hadn’t traveled in ages. Even the machines were dying now. The electric cart with the precious steel box was broken, and the oldest of the Five was sitting in a chair supplied by one well-wisher, sucking on what looked like a ball of ice supplied by another. Mechanics were listing the reasons why the vehicle would never roll again. The old woman said she didn’t care about the machine. What mattered was its cargo, and nobody should forget that. And with her authority in hand, children and associates hurried off to find new transport, including the son who stopped a big bus crossing the dead stream.

The bus was opened and emptied. Mechanics began cutting out the seats and removing the roof, making room for the treasure. The passengers had lost this night’s promised break. A slender little mathematician didn’t seem too displeased, helping with the work when he saw the big girl pushing the cart past. He called the proper name. He didn’t ask for help. He probably only wanted a gesture of friendship, a sharing of confidence. But the girl decided not to risk the possibility. There was plenty of ground between them. It was easy not to hear her friend in the rattle of machinery, and it was even easier to sprint ahead without quite fleeing, out of the valley and across the last high ground before the salt and real misery began.

This was an awful night, and it still wasn’t finished. That girl, the future Katabasis, began to see warriors marching back toward the rest of the People. She saw her lover in one body after another. There he was, no there, and there too. The search was frustrating, and then it was terrifying, and somewhere in the midst of her desperate hunt she realized that he was dead and lost forever.

But the man wasn’t dead. In fact, he wasn’t any weaker or sicker than he was at dusk. Out from the swirling dust he emerged, and they made camp and finally ate their daily allotment, and then as the sun broke over the bright tent, they tried to settle.

The habit was for the warrior to engulf her legs with his legs.

But that dawn was different. He did nothing, and she complained about his distance.

So he tried twice and then twice again, but he was uncomfortable. Finally pulling away, he coughed weakly before admitting that the soreness was worse, maybe more than a little worse, and he was sorry but tomorrow he would feel better and everything would be right again.

She reached behind, touching the injured leg.

The swollen flesh was hiding inside the trousers, obvious and alarming if not yet lethal. Suddenly the future was clear. The warrior was too strong to die quickly. He would serve his duty tomorrow night and for several nights, and then his duty and the uniform would be stripped from him as he failed. Like the girl, he would be allowed to carry what he could and help push the cart, and one of the cart’s wheels would eventually shatter and they would have to leave it behind. Each night’s misery would be stoically endured; there was no doubting his capacity to suffer. But a final moment was approaching. The warrior would stumble one last time. Some People managed to be kind in the end, dying quietly, without complaints. He was the sort of man to make that kind of honorable promise. But as the girl lay beside him in their bed—as the sun rose and he growled fitfully in his sleep—she arrived at the awful knowledge that the love of her life would break every promise in the end. He would use her name and invoke every favor, and she would walk past him and then pause, returning in order to reach past his desperate hands, stripping away the last of his rations and two tastes of salty, hot, precious water.

8

The humans fell and broke and healed again and got up again. Two of them stopped pretending to be cheerful about these circumstances, aiming instead for weary politeness. The third human rolled in agony and wept with a child’s self-absorption, and in the end his results were no worse, no better. Every injury could be healed, but there were costs. Heat and the rapid weaving of tissue and bone required high levels of fuel, and they were already limited in the food they carried. If the humans avoided stumbling, they would eventually reach the final kilometer with a last meal in their guts. But the descending trails were never easy, and the food shares had to be cut again. Missing calories forced injured bodies to cheat with the healing. Mass was lost, fat burned, and organs minimized before precious muscle was stolen. The humans shrank. Proportions changed, saving what was necessary to walk while stripping away what didn’t matter today. But even the most careful manipulations caused strength to fade and bones weaken, and the shriveled, half-starved bodies defended themselves with extreme caution, measuring each step twice before making the attempt.

And still they fell. The two-kilometer hikes from the early days were impossible. Half a kilometer was an exceptional accomplishment. But that meant that each mouthful was buying even less distance than before, and their shares had to be sliced down again, and City West might well be standing at the end of the universe for all the chance they had of reaching its broad, clean streets.

“Care for yourself,” Katabasis told the other porter, pressing an extra brick of food into a grimy cold hand. “You’re the woman’s best chance, but not if you turn into a stick lost beside the trail.”

Varid looked at the gift. The brick was shiny gray, flavored like dribbledoe and laced with chemical bonds waiting for any excuse to explode. Then he looked at her, setting the brick on one of his bare knees. “You’re losing weight too.”

“Not like the rest of you,” she said.

He nodded.

“Eat,” she insisted.

Saliva came out with the words. “I am a porter.”

“You are.”

“A porter,” he repeated. Then he brightened and picked up the feast with both hands, asking, “How did I get so lucky?”

Without question, the habitat’s second half was lovelier than the first. Forests were older, more complex. Landlords hadn’t reworked the ground as often or as ineptly. And the weather was a little less awful than before. But even the strongest clients were usually worn down by now: They couldn’t appreciate the artful winding of streams. Rare blossoms and brilliant worms could barely rouse them out of the tedium. Typically Katabasis looked forward to a glade of unique trees—each one lovely, each representing one species that couldn’t be found anywhere else inside a thousand-light-year radius—and she usually made a point of camping inside the glade, lingering for two nights and a full day. But they entered in mid-morning, the weather kind but cloudy, and fearing rain and more delays, she marched her humans through the gorgeous woods, barely looking to her side as she held the slow, withering pace.

Other clients and other porters began to catch them. They could hear them closing, often for a full day, and then some happy voice would beg for a wider trail, please. Those first clients were always riding strong porters. Nobody recognized Varid, and the anonymity suited him. But a few rich travelers, human and otherwise, knew the married couple, and they would shout out greetings and teasings before offering some obligatory words about admiring their courage.

But starvation kept eating at the faces and the bodies, and eventually the best friends stopped recognizing them.

Perri was a frail body shrunk down to a child’s proportions while his face remained pretty in a rail-slender fashion. Except on the hottest days, he was cold, and the hair had dropped off his scalp and face, but the eyes seemed only to have grown larger from the experience, gazing at nothing but the ground that looked flat and looked level but might at any moment tip him over, breaking him in the same dreary, frustrating ways.

Quee Lee was even less recognizable. She was hairless, genderless. Breasts and hips had vanished, the black hair was scattered all the way back to the mountains, and with a tired, dry, amazed voice she would admit that she hadn’t even attempted relations with her husband in fifty or sixty or a hundred nights. She counted those nights. She laughed weakly and dabbed at the crumbs of her day’s rations, and then she would collapse into Perri’s little arms, whispering a few words when she found the energy.

“Thank you so much for inviting me along,” she told her husband.

With a slight laugh, he said, “You’re welcome,” and then dabbed up a few more crumbs. The source of these little feasts was uncertain, but he always attempted to put his finger into Quee Lee’s mouth, and she would suck hard and cry and then pull the finger out again, urging his closer ear to her mouth, ready to whisper whatever was next.

Walking clients began to catch them. Even weak and inept hikers passed by, as if the humans were trees standing in a glade. Various eyes stared at the couple, probably assuming they were alien, not human. And then they noticed the human porter with his little pack that hadn’t carried anything in a very long while. What was that man’s story? Sometimes they struck up a conversation, with the strangers or with each other, and it became the day’s high point to watch their emotions when a woman’s voice emerged from the tiniest, weakest of the apparitions.

Quee Lee had digested most of her face. Her mouth was a sliver without more than a few tired teeth, and the cheekbones had collapsed into a skull that was perforated like an aerogel sponge. But her voice remained, and a shred of humor, and the first time that she begged for food was meant as a joke.

One brick of high-density fat helped save the trek.

She promised that she was joking. She and Perri were sharing the unexpected feast at camp, and she was honestly remorseful for pleading as she had. What kind of person had she become? The next three groups didn’t hear begging, and they didn’t leave gifts. But the hunger returned, and Quee Lee used her voice and bizarre appearance to find sympathy with everybody who passed them by. Most strangers didn’t want to part with their wealth, but a few were more amenable. Ten days of humiliation and charm produced enough nourishment to put them twenty or thirty days farther down the endless trail, giving them enough leeway to consider their situation very carefully.

In the night, inside a warm bramble-filled valley, Quee Lee and Perri lay together beneath the aerogel bedding. Katabasis could hear pieces of their conversation. Certain words and the long silences pointed at a grim topic, and the porter listened and ached and in the next moment corrected herself. Nobody was doomed. No souls were bound for the Final World where all the species of People shared the breath of life. These two creatures were simply discussing matters of time and energy and the pragmatic limits of desire, and after a while they fell into sleep, and preparing her own bed, Katabasis felt peculiarly honored for being allowed this chance to study their lives.

One blue light shone in the darkness.

A little stiffly, the porter rose again, walking to the man lying in his bed. Varid was holding the torch to his eyes. What once was deeply peculiar had become ordinary. The man couldn’t sleep in the usual sense. Holding brightness against his eyes seemed to relax him or busy him or do something else worthwhile. Katabasis had never asked why he did this. She didn’t intend to ask now. But looking down at Varid, she enjoyed the same epiphanies that had struck her again and again over these last days:

This was not a human being.

And whatever Varid was, he was unique—a species with a population of precisely one.

She knelt beside him, watching the light and the open eyes.

After a long while, he noticed. Taking a long breath, he set the torch aside, and when he felt ready he said, “It helps me remember, the light does.”

“Remember what?”

He was too tired to sit up. The first attempt proved it, but he tried again, glad for her help when it came, and then he regretted the choice and slowly fell back into the aerogel. After more breathing, he said, “I suffered this medical situation. I was caught inside a very large fire.”

“The Whisper Fire,” she said.

“Have I told you this before?”

“No.”

A slow nod. “I don’t remember very much. Not the day or being scared, or anything like that. But I do remember the last thing that I saw: This impossibly bright light. They say . . . the doctors explained this to me . . . they claimed that I took shelter inside a hyperfiber blister, and the inferno ate through the walls, and as soon as the last layer was pierced, this thread of plasmas found me. But my eyes didn’t die immediately, and my brain survived afterwards. Something about the shape of that little space not only saved my mind, but it allowed my eyes to watch this most amazing light.”

She said nothing.

“Then I was dead and blind,” he said. “I was lost and mostly unconscious. But if you’re buried for a thousand years, thoughts happen. You remember what you can, but I couldn’t remember much. So much had been turned to fire.” He paused, smiling weakly. “But you probably realized that on our first day together, didn’t you?”

“The light,” she said.

“It helps my head work better. Brilliance somehow makes it easier for me to practice what I learned today and fifty thousand years ago.”

She said, “Good then.”

“This is crazy, yes. But when I was dead, the fire that killed me . . . nearly killed me, and murdered my family . . . that fire was my largest best memory. It seemed so lovely and wonderful. I don’t think I could have remained sane for even a hundred years, if it wasn’t for me thinking about that searing magical light.”

Watching him, Katabasis weighed questions.

Varid answered an unasked question. “I don’t need sleep anymore. It’s a consequence of my injuries, and it’s because this is how far I was fixed before the fixing stopped.”

“Why did the fixing stop?” she asked.

Varid picked up the torch again, holding it against his right eye. He didn’t act interested in the question, and maybe he didn’t notice it. Katabasis still didn’t know what the man could learn or how well ideas would play inside his head. But he wasn’t the insane idiot that she had imagined. He was a mystery, relentlessly frustrating but compelling, and instead of working to avoid this creature, she wanted to share the solitude forced on both of them by bad and wonderful forces.

“Could I become a porter?” he asked abruptly.

“What?”

The torch and hand pulled away from his face. The dark center of the eye was a pinprick point. He wasn’t as starved as the others, his bluish-white hair still alive, though thin and not growing any longer, and his face was very much like the face that she first met. She had passed her colleague enough rations to keep up his strength, and she had quit bristling whenever she thought of Varid that way: Her colleague.

“I don’t know if you could be a porter,” she said.

He remained silent.

“You’re tiny and you’re weak,” she said.

“Like you,” he said. “But you manage to make your living.”

She laughed with her hands, her face. She laughed as close to the human sound of laughter as she could manage.

“I stopped the fixing where it is,” Varid said.

“Did you?”

He nodded.

“Was it a question of money?” she asked.

“No, I have money. A sliver from the original estate, they tell me. But it’s still more than most passengers enjoy.”

She watched his face.

“No, the doctors let me choose,” he said. “They gave me permission to decide how much new bioceramic I wanted grown, and how giant my mind would be. They thought they were going to get rich doing the work. But I surprised them. I told them thank you, but no, and to leave me alone.”

She watched his empty hand, fingers spread out on his hungry belly.

“A thousand years spent underground, and almost everything from before was gone,” he said. “I didn’t think about my dead family, and I didn’t forget and think about them being alive either. I had memories of the past and disjointed facts learned, but there wasn’t one story pulling the mess together. I was dead. My mind was gone, only pieces left, and those pieces slowly assembled themselves into something that was familiar to me . . . that became me . . . and I don’t know how to explain this.”

“Don’t,” she advised.

But Varid showed a stubborn face. “I don’t have much humor left. But maybe I didn’t have any to begin with. I don’t feel much empathy for others, and I know I forget most of what I learn. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop learning or making myself better or doing whatever good thing it is that I’m supposed to do. And I do like to attempt whatever is difficult. Which isn’t the way I used to be, they tell me. Certain strangers who knew me before. They don’t like me, they like to say, but I don’t see how they liked the man who died. I’ve studied him. For years and years after getting out into the world again . . . I know I’m rambling, I do this if I’m not careful . . . but I do appreciate, very much, getting lost in passions that he couldn’t even imagine. Like this adventure. He would never, ever have envisioned walking through wilderness accompanied by a beautiful alien creature.”

Katabasis sat motionless, watching all of the man.

“You can sleep,” Varid said. “Sleep now, and it will help you tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” she said.

She stood and said, “I will.”

Three days later, Perri found the right place and proper circumstances. He called Quee Lee to his side and they spoke to each other with just those big eyes. Standing beneath a ripe tashaleen tree, they looked vulnerable and worried. But when Varid walked into the tree’s shadow, they calmly warned him to back away.

Little seams were opening in the swollen bladder. The stink of sulfuric acid began to pervade the calm forest air, but it might take another day or two for the flesh to burst wide, scouring the nearby ground.

Varid slowly backed away, studying the scene. Comprehension took longer for him, but he accepted the obvious quickly, and approaching Katabasis, he said, “We have all of the rations.”

She was carrying every bit of food, including the treats given out of pity.

Quee Lee called to Varid, saying, “You’ll have to carry me from here on. So of course you’ll earn your bonus.”

Perri slowly bent over, grabbing a small rock.

Katabasis was thinking about acid and its effects on flesh and how the flow would roll when the bladder burst.

Perri tried to throw the pebble at the bladder, but it weighed tons and tons.

“I won’t break the tree for you,” Katabasis warned.

“I have a suggestion,” Varid said. Then to the couple waiting in that dark, fume-laced shade, he said, “Lie down inside your bed.”

With a reasonable, perfectly calm voice, he said, “The aerogel won’t dissolve, but it will let the acid seep through. Your brains will stay where they are, which is good. We won’t have to chase either of you downstream.”

9

At dawn, eighty-nine People crawled beneath the tattered shelters. There were no rations to eat, nothing to drink. They lay quietly, in pain, listening to the world bake and blister, and sometimes they slept but mostly they watched their own vague thoughts form and shift before being lost. When the sun finally dropped behind the new world, eighty-three People found enough reason to stand again, stowing the shelters in the final three carts and grabbing hold of the wagon that carried the rusted steel box, slowly pushing away from the dead.

The new world began with towering black cliffs. Through telescopes, rivers could be seen plunging over the side of the volcano, wasted water turning to mists and serpentine clouds that were consumed before drifting halfway to the desert. Those cliffs were the goal, the dream, but the walk would take another four or five or perhaps six nights, and worse, there was no obvious path leading up the imposing and very smooth face of rock.

The Five had become the Three. The ice-sucking woman refused to die, along with her two youngest husbands. The woman always rode on the back end of the wagon. Every night she made optimistic noises about imminent rescue and the abiding decency of the human animal. She insisted that she knew the animal well. She and the god-like emissary had spoken many times by radio. They were allies, collaborators, sometimes friends. But the final radio died out on the salt, and she didn’t have her friend to speak to anymore. She was making noise, half-mad and often feverish, and her noise had an erosive effect on the last shreds of hope.

Her husbands didn’t bother lying. Working beside the strongest bodies, they pushed wheels up long slopes and used their scant weight to keep the wagon and their wife from rolling wild downhill. Sometimes one or the other would climb ahead, scouting the ground for the least-awful route. Just short of the night’s center, the older man went up to the ridge crest and then came back again. He was running. He fell suddenly. He got up and fell and got up laughing with his arms, and with more disbelief than joy, he announced, “We reached the world early. Over this hill is a mine.”

The next long reach of desert had been stripped away. Deep gouges were cut into the pale rock, roads and paths leading down to giant electric machines working in the depths of the deepest hole. The machines took no interest in them. Any miners were equally oblivious. Eighty-two People looked down on the mayhem, and one of them sat for a moment and died and the others backed away from the mine’s edge, aiming for the nearest road.

The first miner had a strange oval face and a fancy mask over his mouth and eyes. He stared at the filthy parade of bodies, and with a string of peculiar words, he spoke into a tiny radio, presumably asking a question or soliciting advice.

Peculiar words came out of the radio, and he responded by clambering into a burly electric cart and riding away.

After that, they didn’t see one miner.

But someone had left rations and fresh water stacked together in some form of way station. The People fell on what they assumed were gifts, drinking enough and eating more than enough, and another one of their ranks died from the indulgence.

The station had a roof full of tubes that leaked cold air, and several sets of rails ended here but led off toward the world. The rails stood empty until a heavy railcar arrived and parked. The husbands conferred and then gave orders. The car was long enough for all of the People to ride in comfort, with room remaining for a battered wagon and its precious cargo. Once loaded, the railcar began rolling back from where it had come, bearing the People across the last bits of wasteland, diving into a long tunnel as the sun burst into view. And even at that moment, the girl sitting on the aluminum floor of the car was unable to believe that she would survive one day longer.

Their old world was nearly nothing. It had been a low ridge, dry and thinly populated, while this world was a hundred times larger, tall enough for permanent ice and wet everywhere, its belly full of hot rock and deep springs powering geothermal plants which made the entire realm hum with electrical activity. Perhaps a million generations separated the People from these citizens. They looked that different, that alien. Every face was grossly round, and the plumage wasn’t just wrong in its color but longer and gaudily colored, and these new People smelled different and sounded odd, talking about the railcar that was sliding past their homes and businesses. Their day had just begun. The old People, their lost cousins, deserved notice and some idle chatter. The girl stared at the bright buildings passing by and the endless metal and how every window was filled with light, the faces behind glass staring at her for a moment or two, curious but not curious, ready for any excuse to pull back to their own busy lives.

If the girl and her People had arrived here in full force, they would have meant nothing. They were too scarce, too primitive, and much too stupid to generate anything more than polite disinterest.

That was the morning’s first awful lesson.

The long railcar was driven by a machine’s mind, turns taken and turns avoided until they arrived at a fresh volcanic crater, barren land encircling a turquoise lake. On the black rock stood a different kind of building, round like a half-ball and woven from slick gray material that didn’t look like any steel.

“This is the emissary’s quarters,” the old woman announced happily. “It is also a spaceship, fueled and ready to carry us to the Great Ship.”

At dusk, the girl didn’t believe anything the old woman claimed. But suddenly she was an expert again, and every statement only enhanced her boundless value.

The car stopped before a walkway made from gemstone bricks.

Out from the building—from the spaceship—came a creature with six jointed legs. Except it wasn’t a creature, it was a machine, and the human rode on a high chair inside the machine’s body. His face was grim, stern. But the girl didn’t know it then. He was as angry as a diplomat trained in the art of agreements and sweet words could ever be. But she only saw the narrow black face and the frail body shorn of its plumage and the odd little hands that didn’t like rising off the rests in his chair. He was undoubtedly alien. The new People would look ordinary next to him, if only they were standing here. But it was the human alone, and the last of the girl’s People, and he introduced himself with his name and his title and once again, his name.

A box inside the walking machine made the best translations possible.

The diplomat was named Rococo, which was nothing but odd noise in her ears and she forgot it immediately.

“You have arrived,” the emissary said wearily.

Everyone looked at the old woman, but suddenly and for no apparent reason she forgot how to speak.

The youngest husband broke the silence. “We have a gift for you. For your species. We brought it from our home, at great cost.”

“I don’t want it,” Rococo said.

The old woman roused herself. With a quiet, tense voice, she said, “Take the box to him now. Take it.”

“It is alien,” said the older husband. “We found this artifact in the throat of a dead volcano.”

“Very valuable,” the other husband shouted.

Rococo stared at the gray box. “Leave it there,” he ordered.

But the People were not listening or refused to understand. Terrific costs had been paid so that they could drag the box off the wagon and over the railcar’s railing, metal screeching against metal as the alien wonder was dropped on the gemstones beside the mechanical feet.

Staring at the old woman, the emissary said, “I told you. What did I tell you? I was exceptionally clear about what I could and couldn’t do for you.”

From a special pouch came the key. But the woman was too nervous, and she didn’t care who opened the treasure.

The girl found the key in her hand.

“We can’t take just anybody onboard the Ship,” the human insisted. Then with a thought, he caused a mechanical arm to unfold and reach down, grabbing the girl by her wrist.

She dropped the key.

“I have made agreements,” said the human. “Following galactic law, we have binding arrangements with the most advanced species on this world. My species has purchased the right to begin terraforming your nearest moon, and in thanks for this blessing, we will give carry a small, small, small population of local People to a world that they will be able to colonize.

“This is binding and legal and I told you all of that before,” he said. “I was honest. When did I mislead you? I told you not to bother with this pathetic migration, and you came anyway. I talked to you a hundred times in the night, warning you to turn around and head home again before it was too late. If I wasn’t stationed here alone, I would have sent subordinates to the basin just to explain things to your flock. Which I should have done myself, and I see that now. I regret it all, yes.”

The youngest husband grabbed the key, and with a blur of motion unfastened the lock and threw the lid over the side.

“Look,” he shouted. “Look.”

Rococo released the girl and grudgingly peered inside.

The girl fell to her knees, rubbing at the aching wrist. She wanted to look inside and didn’t. Then the human beast told everyone, “This is a piece of hyperfiber, a shard of someone’s hull. Hyperfiber is the most durable, persistent, and unremarkable kind of trash in this portion of the galaxy, which means that it is worth nothing.”

The girl shook from nerves, exhaustion, and anguish.

Then the old woman stepped between the mechanical legs and under the arm, and with a passionate, practiced voice she said, “Of course it isn’t enough. You told me, and I believed you, yes. But I have learned about your species, your nature. You know sympathy and empathy, and just like us, you understand how great deeds demand to be recognized. We are the last of our species. We have spent everything and sacrificed almost everything to place a few of us on your ground.”

Rococo took a deep breath, and then gasped.

She moved her hands as a beggar would. “Take a few of us with you, please. We can select, or you can choose. I am prepared for either eventuality. But here we stand, surrounded by People who care nothing for us, and we have pushed ourselves to the brink of extinction, and if you don’t give us this one little charity, our kind will vanish from the universe forever.”

Rococo lifted one of his hands, and he lowered it again.

He did not know what to say next.

The old woman turned and said, “Marvel at what we have accomplished, my People. We must celebrate this wonderful fine day.”

Katabasis stood. What happened next wasn’t planned, but it wasn’t an accident either. She intended to throw her fist but she wanted only to make the old woman stop talking, and the woman should have been bruised and startled. But she stumbled oddly and fell sideways into the box, and the rusted red corner of steel struck at the worst point on her head, and she died.

The two husbands and then the others attacked the girl.

With every mechanical arm and half of the legs, the emissary dragged the murderer away from the People. Then he threw curses and threats of much worse, hauling his prisoner back inside the ship where he intended to wait for some inspiration that would give him a route out of this miserable trap.

10

Clients walked past them and rode past them, some for the second and third time. It seemed that the story of the landslide and long subsequent march had gained a brief measure of fame. Everyone who met them on the trail, including their porters, asked when they would arrive at City West. Would it be today or tomorrow or maybe the day after? Katabasis promised they would finish tomorrow, probably late in the day, and then the other porter, the human, would name the clearing where they planned to camp tonight, begging the others to please leave it empty because they needed quiet even more than they needed food.

Save for two acid-polished jackets of bioceramic matter, their packs were nearly empty. They had one torch but no food and no bedding, and they drank their water straight from the river, and even the excess grams of fabric had been cut away from the packs and clothes, left behind in the jungle along with at least half of their body mass. They were battered gaunt skeletons taking tiny strides. They were crazy souls and heroes, and strangers were so impressed by what they knew of the story that they would turn short of the trail’s end and come back around again, just to see them once more with their own mesmerized eyes.

Several clients mentioned that groups were gathering. Well-wishers would be waiting tomorrow at the edge of City West, and there might even be a small ceremony complete with treats suitable for brave, tenacious creatures like them.

By day’s end, they were close enough to the City to hear individual voices mixed in with the normal urban sounds. Varid smelled food on the wind, his belly aching even worse. But as promised, they made their night’s camp. Several tents had been left behind, each wearing notes and good wishes, and the two porters selected the largest tent and set the torch inside, turned up to full brightness, and when night arrived and the City changed its pitch, moving into nocturnal affairs, they climbed into the open and shouldered the cut-apart packs, carrying their clients down the dark, well-walked trail.

Neither porter fell in that last stretch.

The next six hundred meters took half of the night, but suddenly the jungle ended and the sky opened up, revealing a welcoming banner written in the human language. Apparently no one was certain about Katabasis’ native language. But someone had managed to spell her name in the original Greek, which made her feel just a little sorry for slipping past this way. Then they slowly, slowly crept their way to the first street, and she waved for a cap-car, telling it that they were carrying two people needing to be given some rather extensive medical help.

Three kilometers were covered in two minutes. Autodocs were waiting at the entranceway, along with one of the habitat’s landlords whose duty was to make certain that no paying customers had died.

“I left two porters under the mountain,” Katabasis said.

“We know everything,” he said testily. “As soon as arrangements can be made, we will start to dig.”

Varid stared at the man and then turned to his colleague.

She put a finger in his mouth, which she had learned was a very good way to keep the man from talking.

The landlord belonged to that second species of People. He was a young man when the human emissary arrived, walking in the bug-carriage down the avenues of his home world. Now he was grown but would never grow old—a giant well-fed beast sporting purple and blue plumage. He and his kind had purchased the habitat for almost nothing. They had excellent minds for business and a natural flair for selling their wares, and the strange slow-motion nightmare that had just been lived by these two pathetic creatures was very good for business. The habitat was an investment to help pay for extras needed when they finally reached the colony world. That was the only reason why he didn’t shout his disapproval. It was enough to offer a few gestures that were very similar to those used by Katabasis’ species, leaving no doubt about his state of mind and how small his regard was for this hero and her monkey friend.

Perri and Quee Lee were left in the care of autodocs.

Katabasis removed her finger from the little wet mouth. Back inside the cap-car, she asked for the nearest dock, and they rode in silence. Then they slowly climbed out, and using a calm, reasoned tone, Varid mentioned that he would like something enormous to eat.

The salty little sea was home to one odd fish, tough as could be and worth any price. Katabasis suggested that for a dinner, and her companion bought ten kilos, both smoked and raw, and then they boarded the first ferry they could find, starting across the flat dark water.

They ate, and after a time Varid turned to her. “He looked like you.”

“But we aren’t the same,” she said.

He nodded, and waited.

“We’re like two species of monkeys,” she said.

He stopped nodding. His face went blank in that way that she envied, as if he had the power to wash away his past and any urgent thoughts of the moment, existing in a quiet realm that she could only wish to know.

Then with no warning, Varid asked, “How did you come here?”

She considered. She leaned a long ways forward, and after one deep breath told the ferry to stop in the middle, please, and drift with the current and wait.

She killed the old woman once again, except not in her dreams but with words and a small sorry thrust of the fist.

Varid chewed at the raw fish, saying nothing.

“The human carried me inside his ship,” she said, “and for two days he fed me and fed the People outside, and he spoke to them and to me and finally decided on a course of action and inaction. What I had endured was beyond any human experience, and he could not believe what we had accomplished. The local species—those standing thick on this world and the nearby volcanoes—were durable, yes, but not nearly as resilient as us. Against every instinct, he decided that we had proved our worth, and with that in mind, he would personally return the People to their former home. The buildings were still standing. With repairs, enough fans and dew-catchers could feed a small rebirth. And later, when human terraformers arrived in force, the People would supply most of the labor and all of the tenacity to making the inhospitable moon into a wondrous garden.”

Varid swallowed and looked across the water. “I have an idea.”

“I’m not finished,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “But don’t let me forget to tell you my idea, please.”

“I will remind you.”

She ate and he ate, and then he said, “You are here.”

“If Rococo had left me with my People, I would have been killed. But my crime occurred on the diplomat’s ground, which was nearly the same as being on the Earth or inside the Great Ship. His laws ruled. He had the only authority. And according his laws, I needed to be tried in a fair court, which could only be found once he returned here.”

“He saved you,” Varid said.

“In a fashion, yes,” she said. “I was frozen inside the shuttle’s hold and defrosted on arrival and tried three years later and convicted of some lesser brutality. My sentence was short. Someone, probably Rococo himself, paid to have my body and mind rebuilt. But nobody has told me who holds this favor, which is the largest favor of all. Then as I was released from prison, the captains presented me with a bill for passage onboard the Great Ship—which will take fifty thousand years to make good, working as a porter, and that really is another gift, when you consider that you have forever to march across.”

Her companion said nothing. He had stopped eating, and the face had shifted into another lost expression.

“You had an idea,” she said.

“I did,” he agreed.

They waited.

Just when she thought that he had forgotten the subject, Varid pushed his face close and said, “There are little passengers onboard the Ship. They are machines and intelligent parasites and such. And I have empty space inside my head. Has there ever been a porter willing to be filled with other souls, carrying his clients from the first step?”

“No,” she said. “There never has been, no.”

The sun was slowly coming to life overhead. She told the ferry to continue and turned back to Varid. “This is a worthy idea,” she told him. “This is definitely a notion to twist in the light, to see how it plays.”

Once again, at last, Katabasis walked her beach.

She couldn’t sleep. Her body felt too tired to ever rest again. She moved weakly and breathed too much, and the familiar faces of her neighbors weren’t quite certain who she was. Yet she felt stronger in every way but strength, strolling past her usual turning point and then coming back even slower. Her little house of quake-coral looked like a wonder from a distance. Two legs were sticking out of the door, and smiling with her hands and arms, she came up quietly and knelt down and looked inside.

Varid was on his back, his eyes closed.

She sat back and waited. Was he truly that exhausted? Was this his first real sleep in centuries? Then she leaned forward and looked again, watching the eyes bouncing under the barely closed lids.

Once more, she sat back.

But she couldn’t resist. There finally came the moment when she put her shrunken weight on her arms and dipped her head, brushing his salty ankles with the full rough surface of her tongue.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2012.

Blind Cat Dance

Alexander Jablokov

ENCOUNTER #1

CAFE KULFI

The cougar stalks into the cafe, its skin loose, looking relaxed, even a bit bored. Its padded feet are silent on the terrazzo. Conversation at the tables drops for a moment, but then, when the cat doesn’t immediately kill anything, gets noisy again.

Berenika sits near the back, on a banquette, with her friends from before, Mria and Paolo. Mria is small and nervous, with spiky frosted hair. Paolo is tall, with big ears and Adam’s apple.

“You don’t mean you, like, just left.” Mria can’t believe it. “Walked out on Mark.”

“You can’t just walk out of that place, can you?” Paolo says. “That’s miles of desert. You could die. You must have gotten a ride. Who gave you a ride?”

“Oh, sure,” Mria says. “That’s what we need to know. Her means of transportation.”

Paolo looks hurt. “I was just saying she could have called me to come get her. I would have done it. Right, Berenika? Far, but I would have done it for you.”

Berenika is solemn. “Thank you, Paolo.”

“But who—”

“Oh!” Mria turns her head sharply toward Berenika, hoping her hair will exclude Paolo from the conversation. “But what did Mark do? What did he say?”

“Not much, really,” Berenika says. “By that point, I think he realized there wasn’t anything he could do.”

“You must know your husband better than that,” Mria says. “There’s always something he can do. Has he called you? Hired people to kidnap you? Planted himself in your yard and let birds nest in his hair?”

“No.” Berenika clearly doesn’t want to talk about it. “Nothing like that.”

“We were all going to Easter Island.” Paolo is mournful. “To that new jungle. I was already packed.”

“Ah,” Mria says. “Procrastination pays off again. I hadn’t even found my suitcase yet.”

“That’s actually not funny.” Paolo blinks slowly. “I was looking forward to it.”

“Oh, so was I.” Mria waggles her cup over her shoulder at me without looking, an annoying habit. “So was I. I need a break. Easter Island. Giant heads, buried under vines. And you, Berenika. It was your idea in the first place. You wanted some special tour to see how they brought everything back. More than back. I don’t think the jungle was as dense before people came there.”

Berenika isn’t paying much attention to the discussion about the ecological restoration of Easter Island, which, with variations, they’ve already had several times. She’s watching the cougar. No one else is, because it doesn’t really seem to be doing anything.

It’s a male cougar, Puma concolor, medium-sized for its species at 130 pounds, six feet long. It is utterly still, not even the tip of its long, luxurious tail moving. Its fur is red-brown, paler under its muzzle and on its belly. That color matches that of the local population of deer. There are no deer in the cafe. Its hazel eyes are dilated in the dimness. It can’t see color, but can detect the smallest movement.

It has sensed the shadow of something. It is on full alert. And well it should be. It’s out of its territorial range, and on the edge of the range of another male. A bigger male.

It doesn’t really know that yet. Right now, it’s just checking things out.

I refill Mria’s cup, but she just sighs at the delay, not noticing me.

“Weren’t you looking forward to it?” Mria’s voice gets penetrating. “Berenika!”

“What?” Berenika looks at her friends. “Sure. Of course I was.”

“That would have been a great place for you to learn about . . . restoration methods, whatever it was.” Paolo sighs. “I bought this nice linen jacket. . . . ”

“Return it.” Mria turns to cut him out again. “You’re not seriously still interested in working, like, with animals, Berenika. Are you?”

“I am.” Berenika smiles, just for a split second, a flash of light. “I’m sure they wouldn’t let me start with animals, but that’s still what I want.”

“Oh! That’s ridiculous. Just leave them alone, why don’t you? Let them be themselves. Natural, like they’re supposed to be.”

They all look at the cougar, which is again on the move.

It doesn’t see anything at the tables it moves past. It believes the cafe to be empty, in fact sees the space as a clearing in a larger forest.

“Okay,” Mria says. “Maybe that’s not so natural. I didn’t even really notice when these things started wandering around. Where does the thing take a crap? Not in here, I hope.” She picks up her feet so her pumps don’t touch the floor.

“It’s trained to go in a certain spot, where it gets recycled,” Berenika says. “You might not have noticed it, but there’s a place under the bushes in front of the candle store. And it looked like there was another cougar that usually used it.”

And then she sniffs.

“The service here sucks,” Mria says. “But the place seems clean enough.” She keeps her feet up, though, just in case.

“You checked in the cat toilet?” Paolo says. “And you could tell who’d used it?”

But now Berenika is up. She stalks around, tall and loose, a bit of a cat herself. The combs in her thick, black hair glint in the dimness. The cougar jerks its head, and she freezes. It looks past her. Somewhere, inside, it is deeply frustrated, knowing it’s missing something but having no way of figuring out what it is.

She kneels and sniffs a corner by the counter. Mark had led me to expect someone a bit more . . . romantic. Not interested in the yucky details of how we actually get these animals to survive among us. She hitches her skirt up a bit to free up her movements and sniffs again. She’s dressed beautifully, with several layers of translucent fabric of contrasting patterns.

People in the cafe are now watching her, not the cougar.

Paolo shreds his napkin in embarrassment, then closes his eyes.

It wouldn’t be natural for me not to react.

“Have you lost something, miss?”

She stands up next to me. “We’re in another cougar’s territory here. Where is it now?”

I’m startled. Did she actually examine the feces in the waste recycler in the plaza? “I’ve seen one, I guess. Another cat, right? But I don’t know. I could ask . . . ”

“That’s all right.” She heads back to her table, having dismissed me as useless.

That’s the point. That’s why I’m wearing this stupid padded white jacket, like a fencer, or something. I’m supposed to be taking care of things in the background.

I still wish she’d have really looked at me.

“Their urine has been modified to smell kind of like turpentine.” Berenika slides neatly back into her seat. “To us. To each other, it still smells jagged and aggressive.”

“That’s charming,” Paolo says.

“It’s a lot of work to get it just right,” Berenika says. “Real skill.” If only she knew. “But we’re definitely on an established territory. I bet that other cougar is out past all those little stands in the plaza. There must be good hunting for small game in the shrubs.”

She’s absolutely right. That other cougar, larger and stronger than this one, isn’t part of the story yet, but there is the potential for drama. Fights over territory and access to sex always sell.

“If you like stuff like that, Mark could have set you up better than anyone,” Mria says. “I think he has connections with the guys who run this stuff. You could have your own, I don’t know, ecosystem, whatever.”

“It’s a messy hobby,” Paolo says. “Not like you, Berenika. I didn’t even think Mark should have gotten those blind fish in your basement. What a lot of work! Is that what got you interested?”

“I didn’t want Mark to set me up with anything.”

Her friends can tell they’ve annoyed Berenika. That’s something they don’t want to do.

Mria shifts in her seat. “Let me get this. My turn, really.”

“Good point,” Paolo says.

The cougar slides behind the counter, being a bit perverse now, as they will be. It angles its body up and puts its forepaws up on the counter, knocking some demitasses to the floor. Its claws are a good inch and a half long. It yawns in flehmen, seeking scent information, and, incidentally, shows its canines, white against its black gumline.

Well, it gets what information it can, but cannot overcome the blockages that allow it to survive in the environment it now lives in. It has no idea it’s in a place that serves good Turkish coffee, black as night, sweet as love, hot as hell, a place that makes you wear a ridiculous jacket to serve it. It can’t smell anything human. It can’t see us or hear us. As far as it is concerned, we no longer exist.

It reaches its head forward . . . and pushes its nose against the hot side of the espresso machine.

It makes a tiny yelp, like a kitten, then jumps back, crouches down and hisses.

Everyone in the cafe laughs. Despite the fact that they are invisible to it, that there is no possible threat, they are still afraid of it, and welcome such evidence of its impotence.

Berenika, I notice, doesn’t laugh.

ENCOUNTER #2

NO FAUX PHO

A red-tailed hawk soars overhead in an updraft from the parking lot. It’s been up there a while without success. The deer mice in the high grass between the parking places haven’t been active.

The noodle shop is stuck to the side of the old mall like a piece of gum. The tables are on balconies hanging down, with steep stairs that make it easy to spill pho on a customer. Not that anyone worries about the comfort of the waitstaff.

Mria and Berenika have chosen the lowest table, just above where a small herd of elk browse beneath oaks and maples with leaves just touched with russet and purple by approaching fall. An elk cow lowers her head, grabs a bit of grass, looks around. She can’t see us, or the mall, or the cars that make their way over hardened paths through the lot’s ridges and swales to find spots outside the wildlife zones. She also can’t see the cougar, who sits, seemingly not paying attention to her, in some underbrush a few feet away.

That’s two completely different ways of not seeing. I’m sure there are others.

“You know,” Mria says. “I was just remembering how you and Mark got together.”

“It was fated,” Berenika says. “The stars were aligned and it all happened exactly as was ordained.”

“What?”

Berenika laughs. “Oh, come on, Mria. We met at that party. Chance. You had just left. I was helping Margaret clean up.”

“Duty pays off again.”

“He always said he was ‘putting in an appearance’,” Berenika says. “I thought that was pompous, then learned how much of that he actually does.”

“He put in an appearance on Easter Island,” Mria says. “Don’t tell Paolo. He’ll never get over it. Poor Paolo. He kind of got to thinking that he was the one Mark really liked. That they had some kind of relationship.”

“Mark does like Paolo. He said so.”

“Oh! Mark. Like you can believe what he says.”

“You look good,” Berenika says. “Is that a new thing with your hair?”

“Just growing it out a little.” Mria pats her blond curls with a satisfied air. “I’ve got somebody good. I’ll give you her name.”

“Sure. Maybe.”

Berenika’s black hair is thicker and shorter than it was a few months ago, and the clips in it look almost permanent. And she wears an outdoor jacket with a couple of bird shit stains on it that never quite came out.

A second hawk sits on a bough of an oak, just as unsuccessful as the one circling above the parking lot, but not working as hard.

“Really, Berenika. Are you still doing the animal thing?”

Berenika smiles. “I should have done it years ago. Even at a low level, I love it. I have to start at the bottom, of course. Physiology classes, ecology, working support in a clinic. It’s physically hard. I never expected how hard. I fall dead asleep in my bed every night.”

“That desert house of Mark’s had the best beds,” Mria says. “I never dreamed there.”

“Try cleaning up after a sick moose all day. You won’t dream then.”

“No thanks. I prefer a really expensive mattress.”

“Maybe you should have married Mark,” Berenika says.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t stay to help do the dishes. That’ll show me. But he never wanted anyone but you. Why is that?”

“I’m the wrong person to explain. I have no idea.” Berenika watches the cougar. It stalks forward, belly to the ground, astonishingly fluid for something that must have bones in it somewhere.

Mria follows Berenika’s gaze, but I can tell she doesn’t see the cougar either.

“This banh mhi is too dry,” Mria says. “Now, that’s not really a complaint, but you really like that moistness, if you know what I’m saying . . . ”

I replace her banh mhi.

“How is your food, Berenika?” Mria says.

Berenika hasn’t eaten anything. “Fine, I guess.”

“Yeah. Kind of, meh, right? I don’t like the way this one soaks the bread, kind of makes it fall apart. . . . ”

She’s not watching as the cougar charges, but Berenika is.

Three or four bounds, and it is on the elk.

But something gives the cow warning: a rustle in the leaves, a finch that switches branches a few seconds before the cat makes its decision, something, but it is already moving when the cougar tries to drop it.

Claws scratch its flank, but it is bounding off across the parking lot, dodging between the cars it sees as trees, and is gone. Cougars aim, not at the weak or the sick, but at the inattentive. When they’ve judged attention wrong, they can find themselves struggling with something fully as strong as they are.

There is no way the cougar can pursue the fleeing elk. Like all cats, its speed is available only in short bursts. Its heart is small for its body mass. Just that effort alone has sucked up all its stored oxygen. It stands on the spot where the elk had been, breathing deeply, replenishing its stores. At moments like this, it is completely vulnerable.

“What happened?” Mria cranes around.

“Nothing,” Berenika says. “Nothing happened.”

“He can’t have let you go so easily,” Mria says. “That’s just not the Mark I know.”

“Maybe the Mark you know isn’t the Mark I know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“All right.” Mria manages a smile. “So you’re liking what you’re doing?”

“More than anything I’ve ever done. I feel . . . I don’t know. It’s like I was always meant to be out there. Not away from people, exactly. But closer to the foundation of things.”

I hate it when people talked like that. We’re never more human than when we’re manipulating the natural world.

I don’t know why she’s annoying me so much all of a sudden. She’s just doing her best, studying, taking her tests like the teacher’s pet I’m sure she’s always been. I was a problem student. It’s only luck, and Mark’s help, that lets me do what I’m so good at.

Mark wants her to feel herself submerged in the totality of nature. But I’m the one creating that totality, setting up each stage on her progress.

There’s no way she’ll ever know I’m back here.

A raccoon emerges on the restaurant balcony. How it got here is my secret.

Of all the wild creatures, it is perhaps the raccoon that misses human beings most. The others didn’t even notice when humans figured out how to edit themselves out of animal perceptions and return the world to the wild.

Going back to work has been hard on the raccoons. Their mood seems permanently bad.

This one has had it, at least for today. It clambers up onto the table, scattering silverware, and, with grim determination, closes its eyes and goes to sleep. As far as it is concerned, this is a place of concealment, invisible to anyone, and, in fact, nothing out in those woods has a chance of seeing it. A buzzard sweeps close overhead, its eyes questing, but sees nothing but dead leaves and a recovered cougar, now loping off, ready for another go at an elk.

“Is it snoring?” Mria says. “Tell me raccoons don’t snore.”

ENCOUNTER #3

GREENSLOPE

The forested slope is really the roof of an indoor gym and mall. Just above the restaurant, the hill crests, and, out of sight, descends in a succession of apartments. At the slope’s base is an open park, its snow trampled by mule deer looking for browse. A small herd of deer stands in a tight group there now, yanking a last bit of grass root out with their teeth.

The big houses on the valley’s other side, beyond the concealed highway, are ugly enough that I wish I had the suppressed perceptions of a wild animal.

I also wish I couldn’t see the Wild West duster they make me wear here. It’s embroidered with lassos and horses.

The spruces and firs overhead hold huge clumps of snow in their needles. A chickadee hangs upside down from a cone and yanks determinedly at a seed. Various other squeaky-voiced small birds jump around the branches, distinguishable as kinglets, nuthatches, and others to those who care to tell them apart. Each has a different diet, and thus different ways of perceiving the world. No one appreciates how hard it is to manage a mixed group like that. Certainly not Paolo, who hasn’t stopped talking since he and Berenika sat down.

But Berenika is looking at the birds. She always looks carefully at animals, as if she actually sees them as meaning something in themselves. She raises a hand, and crooks a finger to summon a waiter. Me.

A kinglet flutters down and perches on it. It’s unexpected, and her green-brown eyes widen. The kinglet, a tiny greenish bird with an orange crown, walks back and forth on her finger. It actually thinks her finger is a twig, and is looking for signs of hibernating insects beneath the bark. Before anything unfortunate happens, it shoots off again.

Berenika watches after it. She has a gift of meaningful stillness. Snow glitters in her dark hair. She is a nature goddess only temporarily among the worlds of men.

The sun is shining but the air is bony and cold. Most animals are in hiding, and those that appear are lean, their intentions focused down to survival. Winter rakes through with sharp teeth, giving the survivors a bigger space to grown in the summer. The pain of survival is most obvious at this season, and the restaurant does a good business when it’s cold.

Giant bluish cubes of ice, fifty feet on a side, thrust out of the trees. Snow clings to flaws in their surfaces. It always seems that you should be able to look all the way through them, but vision disappears into the deep blue interior. These grab the winter’s cold and send it back through heat exchangers in the summer to cool the buildings below, as they melt and cascade down the rocks, disappearing by the time fall brushes the leaves from the trees.

A puff of breeze, and light snow races across the tables. Berenika and Paolo wear folded clothes like elaborate tents, with velvet over their hair. Warm air puffs from their sleeves when they lean forward, melting the snow into droplets. Paolo has his set so high he’s sweating. He’s picked this place to please Berenika. He prefers things to be a little more comfortable.

“So, Berenika,” he says. “How have you been doing?”

Right now, Berenika is doing what she is supposed to be doing. She is looking for the cougar. Her brief hesitation before answering the question creases Paolo’s wide face. He’s laid some kind of plan, but is having trouble putting it into operation.

“Oh, Paolo! Sorry. I’m doing good. I can’t believe I waited so long to do what I wanted to. It’s hard work. But I wouldn’t want to do anything else.”

“But you haven’t heard from. . . . ”

“No. Nothing from Mark. I kind of wish everyone—”

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. Mria was wondering, and you know how she is. She’d be all over me if I didn’t ask. I’m glad you could find the time to come out here with me. I thought maybe you would like it.”

“I do, Paolo, I do. I’ve always heard of it.”

“It seemed like your kind of place.”

Both of them are uncomfortable. Neither expected to ever be in this situation.

“I’ve been doing well too,” Paolo says.

“Really? What have you been up to?”

“You know, the usual. But well, you know.” Paolo starts again. “Do you have any, like, wider plans? For your life outside of nature?”

“Not really. I’ve been pretty focused.”

Paolo sighs. A gust at the same moment makes it seem that his inability to move her has shaken the snow from the trees.

“Does he still live in the desert?” Paolo asks.

Berenika has sensed movement in the trees along the meadow’s edge. “What?”

“Does Mark still live in that desert place? I liked those parties he had out there.”

Berenika manages to tear her attention from the signs of the cougar’s presence. She leans forward and puts her hand over Paolo’s. Both are gloved, so it’s not as intimate as it might be.

“Give him a call if you want, Paolo. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.”

“Really?”

“Really. He always said. . . . ” She’s moved too fast, and now has to come up with something Mark always said. “He said you were good company. And he liked it when you mixed the drinks.”

“Yeah, well. I always liked him too. I mean, I understand why it had to end and all, but. . . . ”

Unlike the elk, the mule deer don’t get a reprieve. One is momentarily distracted, trying to yank a particularly sweet grass tuft. There’s a puff of snow as the cougar leaps, and then the lead buck is down. It kicks its legs once, but the cougar’s teeth sink in and crush its windpipe. That may be unnecessary. It looks like its head’s impact with the frozen ground has been enough to take it out.

The cougar breathes hard for a few moments, then lowers its head and starts to feed.

It looks easy. Without a knowledge of what is going on, it all looks easy. The deer weighs as much as the cougar, and carries a multipointed rack that can stab a lung or a gut. Even a small injury can be fatal, if it impairs the ability to hunt. The cougar has to average over a dozen pounds of meat a day to survive a winter. Any interruption in the flow of calories and protein is death. The cougar has been watching for the past two hours, patiently waiting for the exact moment that carried the highest odds.

A waiter has to stand just attentively, but gets relatively less for the effort. And he has to wear a stupid outfit.

The cougar raises its head. Something about the open space of the meadow is bothering it. The mule deer think they have moved off to another high valley, as they do when a predator appears, but there is actually no room for that here. They will circle the dining area and reemerge exactly where they were before. Pika move in their long runs under the snow-covered grass, and, a hundred yards away, a porcupine grunts along a freshly fallen log, tearing bark away to get at the still-fresh living layer beneath. Everything else is silent.

What else does the cougar sense?

It sinks teeth into the carcass, and, with a couple of powerful bounds, hauls it straight up the cliff.

It drops it near the table, right next to Berenika, then resumes its meal. Steam rises from the entrails of the dead elk.

Unlike the others, Berenika does not watch it. Instead, she scans everyone else in the restaurant, a gaze she usually devotes only to the animals. No one is feeding with quite the gusto of the cougar. Berenika has snow in her eyelashes. Sometimes the cougar has that same look. It is a solitary, as private as possible, used to sliding past perception without affecting it. Knowing it is in full view all the time would leave it with the feline equivalent of despair. It could not live that way.

“Is he here?” Paolo hunches forward miserably.

“Who?” Berenika says.

“Mark! He’s got to be here. Somewhere.”

She looks almost frightened. “Why do you say that?”

“Because he can’t just let you go. I can’t stand it that he let you go.”

The cougar curves around a couple of times, then lays down on the mule deer carcass and goes to sleep. There’s plenty of meat left on it, and its own body heat is the only way it’s going to keep it from freezing solid overnight. The deer’s head gazes blankly at us, its bloody tongue hanging out of its mouth.

ENCOUNTER #4

PLAZA ECONTORO

The plaza outside the Cafe Kulfi is a piece of marsh most of the way to becoming a meadow, with a thick patch of oaks at the edge. The squirrels and birds in the branches sense deeper forest behind them, not a brick wall. There’s still some open water, so there are muskrats, never the most popular animal to watch, but an important part of the system. They serve as food for the mink pair that nest under the cheese shop.

It’s a nice spring day, and quite a few people are out.

My hot dog cart’s umbrella conceals a rainforest canopy microenvironment. Bromeliads and orchids dangle from its ribs. Mist drifts down over the relish tray.

Berenika walks slowly through the plaza. She’s graceful, every part of her long body involved, and her feet seem to barely touch the ground. She’s cut her thick hair even shorter and now wears it unclipped. Her jacket ends at her waist. Her trousers are made of some flowy material.

She’s hunting for something. She doesn’t peer around, but it’s clear from the way she looks off into some invisible distance that she’s letting all of her senses open all the way, so that even the slightest hint will make itself known. I thought she was waiting for Paolo or Mria before going up into the Cafe Kulfi, where I worked on her world for the first time, but neither have shown and it’s starting to look like she’s on her own today.

Despite my mini rainforest, she doesn’t pay any attention to my stand. She’s been in training for months, so surely she recognizes the virtuoso technique involved. It’s a clear signal, directly to her. She’s not usually so obtuse.

The riot of rainforest life under my umbrella is hard to put together and even harder to maintain, right above a great selection of bratwurst and all-beef hotdogs. You could spend an hour looking at moths get nectar from orchids, ants crawling up stems, counting the tree frogs. I’m doing good business, good enough that I can’t pay as much attention to her as I want. It’s a point of pride that I get the orders right.

Even though it’s right in their face, everyone misses the three-toed sloth at first. It hangs amid the leaves, its fur green with algae, its yellow claws hooked around an umbrella rib, and chews on the same leaf it’s been working on for the past half an hour.

Berenika kneels and peers into the animal waste recycler just past a set of stairs. But it’s clean. She can’t tell how recently the cougar who owns this territory has been here.

She turns, and for a moment, I think she’s going to walk over and get a hot dog. I do have to wear this ridiculous purple and orange jacket that clashes with the orchids. I’ve sweated through the pits. Still, I want her to.

Finally, our cougar slinks into the plaza. It glances toward the Cafe Kulfi. It still remembers the unexpected nose burn and won’t go up there unless it has a good reason.

It has other things to worry about. It is well into the other male’s range, and this time is completely aware of it. Its ears flick back and forth. A cougar has thirty separate muscles in its ear and it’s using every one to swivel them, trying to extract all the information the environment has to offer.

Each step forward is a serious consideration. Since it’s here, it believes that it is here to challenge the other cougar. Like anything above a certain level of consciousness, it believes it acts because of decisions it has made. And, like anything above a certain level of consciousness, it is wrong.

As soon as it appears, Berenika is aware of it. She doesn’t turn toward it, but I can see the way her back stretches out, fine shoulder blades against the fabric of her jacket. She stands very still: irrelevant, since the cougar can’t see her. It’s almost a courtesy. Her hands float without weight.

I didn’t understand her before, and now I’m kind of sorry about that raccoon. She’s not just fooling around. She’s as serious about life as I am. She could be the rare Trainer that could be seen, and still do her job.

The cougar whose territory we’re in comes out of the Cafe Kulfi and stands at the top of the stairs. It is significantly larger and stronger than our cougar, full-sized at 170 pounds, eight feet long. Everyone in the plaza falls silent and watches as it swishes its tail impatiently. Since this is its territory, it is the local favorite. They wait to see what it will do to the interloper.

Somewhere around here, Mark appears and comes back into her life. That’s the story. And the cougar, no longer needed, goes. Sure, there’s always a chance it will defeat its larger and stronger opponent. Nothing is certain.

But the smart money’s on the muscle.

The territory owner crouches down to charge. It is ready. Our cougar is going to find out that it is no longer the center of attention.

Berenika strolls toward the cafe, not giving any sign that she sees the other cougar. I should be watching the cougars, but, instead, I watch her. She looks like she’s just window-shopping, but I know she’s not seeing anything in the vitrines. Her consciousness is focused forward.

She steps right into the other cougar’s path. It is ready to leap . . . and suddenly its opponent has vanished. All it can really sense is the absence that is Berenika, because it can’t detect a human being. A shadow has dropped over its world, and it is confounded.

Suddenly coming to itself, realizing the perilous situation it is in, our cougar turns and bounds out of the plaza.

There is a stir among everyone else in the plaza. They resume whatever they were doing. But they feel vaguely cheated, unfulfilled. A crucial plot point was muffed.

That’s because they’re paying attention to the wrong story.

“Excuse me.”

Berenika came up silently, as I watched the cougar vanish. She catches me off guard.

Our eyes meet through the mist that comes from my umbrella. As a gesture, the sloth even turns its head, jaws still working on its leaf, to look at her.

She realizes the complexity of what I have achieved here. And, seeing that, she’s scoped out who is responsible for the events around her. She has an instinctive feel for the behavior of living creatures. Seeing the effects, she’s tracked down the cause: me.

“I’d like two hot dogs, please.”

Two? She really doesn’t need to get one for me. It’s my stand, after all. “Um, sure. That’s what I’m here for.”

“One with mustard and relish.”

“Okay.”

“And one with lots of hot peppers, sauerkraut, and epizote, if you have any.”

It’s not something I’d usually know about an employer, but Mark had me make him his favorite dog when we were setting this scene up, the day before. Peppers, sauerkraut, and—

“No epizote.” I still have some, but he’s not getting it. “Out today.”

“Well.” She sighs. “We can’t always get what we want, can we?”

“No,” I say. “I guess not.”

I watch her, graceful and slim, as she crosses the plaza and heads right for the copse of trees where Mark stands, seemingly invisible from the world, waiting to emerge into the midst of a battle to the death between cougars for a single territory.

LAST ENCOUNTER

ANHINGA

The water just beyond the table is still and black. The cypress trees in the hammock stretch above, forming a thick canopy, screening the bright sun. The air is hot, heavy, motionless. Spanish moss, vines, flowers dangle down, dripping water. The only detectable motion is that of an occasional insect flying slowly, almost walking on the thick air. Tiny beams with motion detectors pick them out and highlight their lacy wings against the dimness, subtly enough that the patrons take it for granted that they can see things here, despite having evolved on the sunny, dry veldt.

There’s no reason why nature shouldn’t always look her best.

Paolo, Mria, Berenika, and Mark have fallen silent as they wait for their food. Mark is never chatty, and Paolo and Mria have been trying to fill in the spaces, showing, by their eagerness to entertain, their gratitude that things are back the way they should be, but they’ve run out of things to talk about.

Mark paid their way out here. That’s their notion of the way things should be.

Berenika hasn’t been talking much. Is she already regretting her decision to get back with him?

“Look, there’s one.” Paolo points as an alligator slides by, careful not to thrust his finger over the railing.

No one else looks.

“What’s wrong?” Mark finally says. “I knew this was a mistake. Too wet, right? We should get back to the house. The desert. That’s best.”

“No,” Berenika says. “That’s not it. This is extremely impressive. I might like to work here, actually.”

Our wetland, lush with water coming from the north, is sandwiched between an office building, all pink stucco and plate glass, and a housing development. Carefully generated mist makes the office building look like a mistake of vision, and the houses hide behind a vine-covered wall. Water is pumped into this patch of jungle, runs through, and then gets recovered on the other side of the restaurant.

Water once sheeted down from the lakes to the north, covered the sawgrass prairies less than an inch deep, all the way down to the south. Development and overuse of water had threatened these environments.

Not much of the sawgrass prairie was left, but the wetland is something people want to see. Water flows have been reestablished, exactly to the necessary degree. Nothing that lives here, in the deep waters or any of the other environments around, senses that it all came via subtle paths completely different than the original ones.

But there’s still a lot of work to do. Berenika could make a real contribution.

“But something’s bothering you about it.”

“Yeah: Paolo,” Mria says. “Stop pointing out that stupid alligator every time it swims by. We see it.”

Paolo’s mouth droops.

“No,” Berenika says “It’s the cat.”

Our cougar rests on a bough above the black water, barely awake.

“Wrong species of panther?” Paolo flicks through the restaurant’s environmental information., eager to make good. “The Florida one’s extinct, this one is pretty close, they say. . . . ”

“Not the species. The environment. The place. Cougars live in the slash pine woods. In decent-sized limestone uplands. They need some dry land. Not down in the water here. They don’t fish.”

“Maybe they eat birds.” Paolo, on a roll, is pleased to spot the anhinga, the restaurant’s signature bird, as it pops out of the water, a dead fish speared on its beak. He starts to point, thinks better of it, and changes his gesture to a wave at the waiter.

He’s just going to have to wait. I’m no longer on duty.

The anhinga climbs out on a cypress knee and spends a moment getting the fish off its beak. It’s dark, with a long white neck. It swallows the fish, then spreads its wings. Unlike most water birds, anhingas have no oils on their feathers. This permits them to dive deeply, but means they have to dry their wings before attempting flight.

This catches the cougar’s attention. There’s really no way it can get that anhinga, but, still, it’s kind of an interesting intellectual problem, with the tricky approach, the bird’s speed, and all. For a sated cat, thinking about ways to catch unpromising prey is like doing crossword puzzles.

“You’re right.” Mark frowns. “It shouldn’t be here.”

Neither should I. My job is done. I should be back to my regular work. There’s some oak stands to redo in Illinois, and ponds for migratory birds. Those things are hard. The birds have to maintain their ability to navigate thousands of miles, yet not realize they are landing amid observation platforms whenever they come down.

Aside from some species of parrot, birds are never easy to train.

Berenika has slipped away, probably to the bathroom. I didn’t notice her go.

In her absence, Mark is checking and sending messages. He’s probably finding out where I am, what I’m up to, figuring out that someone who owed me a favor let me set up here in the Everglades, checking water pH and drainage.

Mark isn’t the only one with deep resources.

A couple of heavy drops fall on the raft, and it tilts, just slightly, with added weight.

“Do you really think no one can see you?” Berenika says, almost in my ear.

I jerk, but don’t knock anything over, and look up. She stands over me, water sheeting down her body, her hair gleaming black.

“How much was real?” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.” She moves around the raft, barefoot and silent, and examines the equipment. “Is this what a nature god is? A little man squatting in the underbrush with some display screens?”

“I’ve never claimed divine status—”

She’s in my face. She’s disturbing close up, eyes too big, cheekbones too high, skin too velvet. She’s meant to be observed from a safe distance.

“How much, Mr. . . . you do have a name, don’t you? Mark must allow you a name.”

“Tyrell Fredrickson.”

“Come on.” She glances back at the restaurant. Mria is complaining that there is too much saffron in the flan. There isn’t supposed to be any saffron in the flan. No one has missed Berenika yet. “You’ve been on me, you and your kitty. What did Mark hire you to do?”

“Just to keep you safe. What appears to be the natural world is more dangerous than you—”

She knocks me down and pins me to the raft. The cougar stands up on its bough and looks over at us, exactly as if it can see us both.

I enjoy feeling her weight on me.

“It wasn’t all my doing, was it?” she says. “Everything around me. You have the power to control it. Tell me!”

So I do. It’s not that I think she’s going to kill me, though she’s mad enough to try. It’s because she sees that which she would like least to see. My assignment was to make her feel like . . . Mark said, “like a nature goddess.”

It had been a dream ever since she was a little girl, to have the natural world perceive and respond to her. She’d always had pets, found wounded birds and animals and nursed them back to health, had the ability to sit still for hours and let things come to her. She was perfect for the career I had.

Mark’s analysis had shown him that she had left because she felt like she didn’t have equal standing with him. She didn’t have a valid role. So he decided to give her one.

That’s my job, really. To make things seem like they just happen. Of course, if you left the natural world to “just happen,” most of it would be dead and decaying in a couple of seasons. Too much of it is gone for the rest of it to live on its own.

“That’s pretty much what I thought,” she says, and sits back on her heels.

I look at her. I never expected her to go back with Mark, no matter what power she felt. I expected . . . I don’t know what I expected. None of it makes sense. Mark wanted her to come back to him, so he made her feel more powerful, more in control. And now she questions the one illusion that makes her feel best about herself.

“I’m going away,” I say. “I’m taking a rough job. A weed patch in an old city. No one really likes those mundane restoration jobs. It takes forever, and even when you’re done, it doesn’t look like much.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“In case . . . if you wonder where I am. What I’m doing.”

She shakes her head, smiles at me. “You really don’t understand anything, do you?”

“Look—no matter what, you’re good at this. Better, probably, than I am. You can—”

“I know what I can do. But what can you do? Are you just going to hide in the leaves and fake it all up for people?”

“It’s what I do. I’m a Trainer.”

“So am I, now. You think Mark wanted to give me the illusion of power over nature to get me to come back to him. But it’s not an illusion, is it? I’m not some kind of nature goddess. That’s just dumb. But I do have power over nature. And I love it all. Every bit of it. Do you love it, Tyrell?”

“I do.” The answer comes before I think about it.

This time she really looks at me. I’m pale, a little soft, but I think I have some shape to me. A good jaw, and people say my eyes are thoughtful.

Well, my mother said it. She was otherwise pretty honest. She never told me I was strikingly handsome or anything.

“You might still make something of yourself, Tyrell. Then we’ll see.” Her dive into the water is totally silent.

Berenika. I write these reports for Mark, but he never reads them. Maybe someday you will.

HOW I BECAME A TRAINER

TYRELL FREDRICKSON

You don’t really want the whole story, but perhaps this part will help you make sense of it.

Before I became a Trainer, I worked on a farm, at Sty #14, on the thirtieth floor. Sometimes, when my work was done, I’d go out to the plant areas to watch the sun set. The circulating breeze kept condensation off the glass and made the leaves whisper behind me. From that height I didn’t really see people, just buildings copper to the horizon. After a few minutes, something would start beeping. I wasn’t really supposed to be in that area. My job was the pork.

I’d go back to the dark. The glow strip across the vat room’s arched ceiling was about as bright as a full moon. After all, the pork tubes—pigs, if you insist—couldn’t see.

The sterilizing lights came on once a day. Then it was my job to put on goggles and turn the tubes in their vats of liquid, making sure the UV hit all their surfaces. The fluid was full of antibiotics and all that, but there were fungi, there were molds . . . anywhere there was that much cell shedding and organic material something would find a way to live.

The main problem was the skin. The bones were vestigial, floating free from each other like an exploded skeletal diagram, but the things still had skin. They floated in the blue-green support fluid, but they were so huge that there were always folds, or points of pressure against the tank sides, where infection could collect. My job was detecting these areas and taking care of them.

It might seem that you should just get rid of the skin and just have meat, but that would cause more problems than it solved. Skin is a sophisticated interface, keeping in the things that should be in, and keeping almost all of the universe out. Creating some new interface would have been more trouble than it was worth. It might not have seemed that way, but they’d changed only those things that needed changing. For example, collagen had been added, to make the skin easier to remove, when that time came.

The back of pork still looked like a pig. The spine had separated like the boosters of a rocket heading for space, but I could still see a trace of the original shoat, with its bristly hair. If I left them in some other orientation, they would slowly turn to have their backs up.

No one ever visited me there. The meat side of the farm just wasn’t that popular. There was an occasional maintenance team, in to adjust the recirculators that turned pork waste into usable fertilizer for the plants on the south side. Otherwise, I was alone with my pigs.

Once a month was slaughtering time.

I’d pull each tube out of the liquid in a support harness. The sterilizing fluid would cascade off its sides. I’d dry the skin, first with a roller and then with an infrared light, and then I would open it up. There was supposed to be a seam, kind of a biological zipper, along where the edge of the belly had once been, but it often got jammed up with squamous cells and other undifferentiated growth.

So I would have to cut it open. I had a vibratory cutter that I would run along the pig’s side. Then, being extremely careful, I would roll up the hide. As I mentioned, there was additional collagen that added some tension, so that the skin curled up to expose the meat.

Most of each pig was smooth flesh, suitable for processed food. Without connective tissue or grain, this was easy to work with. I’d run the cutter along the pig’s length, and then cut off slabs. There was always a little blood seepage, but not much. The cutter was smart, and the blood supply was spaced rationally. Large vessels would be avoided, and tucked in, to dangle like electrical conduit. I’d hit them with vascularization hormones later, stimulate arborization, and link them up with the new flesh that bubbled up around them.

Then I would supervise the movement of the chops to the cooler, in the blank north side of the building. They’d rumble down one of the conveyors and disappear to the next step in the process of making food. The area was forgotten, with hexagonal ice crystals growing on the housings of seldom-used support pumps, and fluid spills that eventually turned into sheets of brown-red ice. My least favorite part of the job was defrosting and cleaning that.

Things did go wrong. Cancers could spread through the flesh when cell reproduction was disrupted. This could happen surprisingly fast. Sometimes an entire tube would have to be terminated and discarded. I had no idea where that flesh went.

Once I heard a rattle as the cutter went by. When I looked at the resulting slab, I found a pig’s lower jaw, complete with teeth, all perfectly formed. They looked tiny against that huge bulk, even though they would have been able to support the feeding of a creature that weighed several hundred pounds. I cleaned them off and kept them. There is nothing more diagnostic of a mammal than the elaborate pattern on the surface of the teeth. Someone with more experience than I could have identified what breed of Sus domestica had led to this gargantuan meat factory.

I got into my routine. I don’t think I was even fully conscious, following out my rounds in the semidarkness, with only the backs of pigs for company.

But that jaw should have made me more attentive. Something had gone wrong with the gene expression in that tube. All the developmental genes were still there, after all, just suppressed. It was only after the cutters hesitated a bit on that same pig that I finally hauled it up out of the fluid to investigate more thoroughly.

It had grown a leg, complete with trotter. It looked ridiculous, down there all by itself, supporting nothing, contacting nothing, but it had the full complement of bones and muscles.

I poked it and it jerked away.

So it had some basic innervation as well. I was going to have to do something about this.

Sometimes a consumer gets a hankering for a real differentiated piece of meat, something with connective tissue, muscle strands, bone: a ham, a rib, a chop. These tubes had not been designed to produce those. Even in those that had been, what looked like ancestral cuts of meat were sculpted creations, not actual muscles attached to limbs.

The hoof looked tiny and precise. Something about it appealed to me. I decided to keep it for a while. I had the idea that I was liberating some essential nature hidden in the huge tube of meat. I reprogrammed the slab cutters to avoid it. That dropped my overall productivity a bit, but still well within the quotas I had for this sty.

Sentimentality has no place in farming. I really should have known that.

Next harvest, that leg threw the slab cutter off so much it pulled back, forcing me to slice meat manually. I wasn’t used to the auxiliary blade, and the flesh shuddered so much when I lowered myself to it that I almost sliced through a finger.

Maintaining a sentimental piece of real pig quickly proved to be tiresome. And a health and safety inspection would show poor practice. My real career was elsewhere, but losing points here could really set me back.

At the next skin maintenance time, I rotated that tube so that the leg stuck out toward me. I pulled myself up to it. The leg’s joint was right at the skin surface. That was good. There would be no telltale stump left afterward, and the cutters would be able to do their job. I got right up to the thing, pushing my head against its side, and slid the auxiliary blade into the leg.

It kicked me. I lost my grip and almost fell into the tank myself. I did drop the saw, and lost it somewhere in those translucent depths. The leg flailed several more times, then was still. But it was pulled back against the tube’s bulk, as if ready to attack again.

A shudder went through the entire thing, sending waves splashing back and forth against the tank sides. Blood seeped from the cut and dripped down.

Muscle and bone were one thing, but the thing had nerves, and had recruited a blood supply.

What had given the command to kick me? The nerves led somewhere.

Maybe I was mad at it, but I had given up on careful surgery. I had to get this thing fixed and back on the production line. I recovered my blade from the tank bottom and slashed deeply, checking for any variations in the meat’s otherwise smooth structure.

I found and removed a couple of ribs and a big fold of tissue that I later figured out was a bladder, one that had never managed to grow in on itself to hold fluid. A bit of ureter led off from it, but it had never regrown a kidney, so the tube just ended.

Beneath that, along the spine, I found a lump. This was the creature’s real secret.

It had never grown a dura mater, much less cranial bones, and most of the brain had never grown either, but here was a bit of the pig’s brain, barely protected by a flexible arachnoid and pia mater, material like stiff rubber.

The original pig had a fair amount of cortex. It was an intelligent animal.

This tube of meat was not an intelligent animal. But even then I knew enough of the structure of the mammalian nervous system to have some idea of what had regrown. It was a bit of the motor cortex: what had allowed the thing to kick me. And much of the sensory cortex: what had allowed it to feel me probing it.

There was no comfort I could give. Nothing I could do to help. It couldn’t see, it couldn’t hear, it couldn’t taste. But it could feel pain.

It was just a mistake. Just a malfunction in gene expression, the generation of nerve cells with no consumption value. I thought about how long it had been shuddering under the slices of the cutter. The innervation had gone much farther than I would have thought possible. It sensed everything that was going on, everything that happened to it.

It was silent in that huge room. I sat there, kind of stroking the part of the skin that was left. I had no idea if it could feel that too.

A damage report was called for, so that others could be on the lookout for a similar malfunction.

But I didn’t tell anyone. I excised the brain, the nerves, the other organs.

Then I sautéed those no-longer-functional pain centers in butter. The ultimate discourtesy to a food animal is to kill it but not to eat it.

I think I overcooked them. They were a bit crumbly. But I choked them down.

Okay, this isn’t why I became a Trainer. But it’s why I’ve never quit. We’ve picked something up, and now there’s no way for us to ever put it down again. Now that you bear some of the weight, Berenika, maybe you understand.

NON-ENCOUNTER

MARK AND BERENIKA’S DESERT RESIDENCE

I go through every room of the house, as if someone will be hiding in one of them.

But there’s nowhere to hide. The furniture is gone, and the rooms, floored with native stone, seem to have been vacuumed by forensics teams and retain not a trace of their previous occupants.

The high living room windows show the distant dry ridge, tilting like a sinking ship.

I hear a thunk from the underground garage, then voices. A man and a woman.

I was sure Berenika would leave him again. It just didn’t make sense that she would stay. But instead she was taking advantage of his power. I thought they were far away, restoring some part of the dead ocean, not here to find me scuttling across their floor like a hermit crab that had misplaced its shell, pale and shrivel-assed.

“Who are you?”

It’s Paolo. He stands tall and skinny in the doorway’s exact center, as if demonstrating how unnecessarily wide it is.

“I—”

“Oh, you know him.” The short, blond Mria pushes past him, carrying a bag that seems symbolic of “groceries”: leafy celery and a baguette stick out of the top. “The Trainer. Mark’s guy.”

“Mark’s guy.” Paolo’s eyes are pale blue. I had not noticed how clear and perceptive they were. I hadn’t really been watching him, and he certainly had never looked at me before. “What is he doing here, then?”

“I don’t know.” Mria is already in the kitchen. “Maybe he’s training gophers. Why don’t you ask him?”

“I’m here to put some things away,” I say. This is even almost true. At least it is now.

“Hey, us too,” Paolo says. “We can start a club. ‘People who clean up after Mark and Berenika.’”

“Don’t be bitter, Paolo.” Mria is opening and closing cabinets. “Didn’t they say they’d leave a saucepan in . . . oh, there it is. She just asked us for a favor, since we were going to be in the neighborhood.”

There was no neighborhood. Mark had, impressively, put his house where there really was nothing, an expanse of dry ridges and valleys in the Great Basin. The most visible life in the region was a herd of pronghorns that tended to keep well south, where there was more water. The only plant visible is an occasional sullen creosote bush. Those black sticks suck all the moisture from the dirt around them, leaving a circle so dry that no seed would ever germinate there. Their kingdoms are tiny and parched, but they are supreme within them.

“You hid your car,” Paolo says.

“Habit.”

“So what were you going to do here?”

“Maybe he’s moving here.” Mria pokes her head in from the kitchen. Behind her, I hear something frying. “You want some lunch, Mr. Animal Trainer? We’re going to have to pack out what we don’t eat.”

I’d never pegged Mria as a cook. But, then, I hadn’t paid that much attention to her either. I’d been watching Berenika.

“Sure,” I say. “I didn’t bring anything to contribute.”

“Didn’t figure that you would.” She vanishes back into the kitchen.

“Berenika’s going to be a Trainer too,” Paolo says. “She’s going to find out what really makes things tick.”

“It’s a long, hard road,” I say. “Much less fun than it looks.”

“She knows all about that,” Paolo says. “You probably explained some of it to her.”

“I tried.”

“You’re not going to ask, are you.” Mria hands me linen-wrapped silverware and has me set the table. “Berenika’s gone back to Mark, and both of them are off on some atoll trying to restore fish stocks, train tuna to protect themselves, whatever, and you’re going to pretend you don’t even care.”

“I don’t have the right to care,” I finally manage.

“The forks go on the other side,” Mria says briskly. “You don’t need some kind of standing to care.”

“Oh, come on.” Paolo slouches above us, unsure of what to do. “He just failed. He wanted to set things up a certain way, train Berenika to move to him, and he didn’t do it.”

I try to do it slowly, but I think they hear me let my breath out.

“Don’t you guys need to protect those fish?” Mria says. “Go ahead. I’ll lay everything else out.”

“The fish,” Paolo says on the way down the stairs to the lower levels. “Did you put them here?”

“My first project for Mark,” I say. “They’re an almost-vanished subspecies—agriculture had dropped the water table and their caves were going dry. They seem to be breeding pretty well here. I hope the new owner takes care of them.”

“It’s in the deed. You have to. If you don’t want to, buy somewhere else.”

Many people think that the way we fool nature now shows our power. But it equally enslaves us to perpetual care.

Or some of us, anyway.

In the cool darkness we could hear the water swirling beneath our feet and in the walls. A still pool filled the floor’s center. We stand on its edge, looking down and seeing the passages receding in all directions into the earth.

The pool has a blue glow now that we’re here. The fish can’t see it, but it lets us see them.

“Did you . . . make this?” Paolo’s eyes are large in the dimness.

“I worked it out. There were objections. There’s no geology anywhere near here that could remotely have water-filled caverns like this, but Mark offered to finance it, and it really was the best option. You can’t have everything perfect.”

Blind fish have eyes. Or, rather, they develop eyes normally, up to a point. The genes that guide the development of the eyes is still there, still active. An eyecup develops, a lens. Then, another gene, busily beefing up the front of the head, increasing the sense of smell, the barbels, the whole chemical/physical sense structure that the fish needs to survive in the absolute darkness of limestone caverns a thousand feet underground, finally gets its bulldozers and concrete mixers into the area—and builds right over the eye. It sinks under that new flesh, and vanishes.

I wave my hand over the water. This was once Berenika’s great pleasure, Mark had told me. The one thing about the house that had entranced her. I want to see what she saw.

And they come. The fish swim out of their underground grottos and out into the dim blue glow of that room. Their skin is pure white, patterned with blue, like tattoos. Their drooping barbels let them sense what is around them. They swirl up, never touching each other, sensing the pressure of the others, searching for their microscopic food.

I hold my finger over the water, but don’t touch it. It’s best for them if they never know anyone else is here. It’s too late, anyway. Even if they knew I was here, that I had determined their destinies, they wouldn’t care.

“Come on,” I say to Paolo.

The controls make everything automatic, but it still seems that we need to be there to supervise. I carefully check the sandy floor for any obstructions and find. . . .

Paolo stands next to me and looks down.

“Was that your cat?” he says.

“Not at all,” I say. “Just a companion. We worked together for a while. And then—”

“And now it works for Mark too?”

The footprint is clear. I’m tempted to say too clear, as if it was rolled there for police identification. But over here, it looks like the cougar slept. A cave might seem a good place of concealment for it.

No way of telling how long ago it had been here.

“Will they . . . will they be okay under there?” Paolo says.

“The system is sealed and recirculating,” I tell him. “Left for long enough, sure. This cave won’t survive the fall of civilization or anything. But long before they have any trouble, someone will be here to clean it up, keep them fed and alive.”

The cover looks like heavy stone, though I know it’s just a foamed metal alloy with a thin cover of fused rock dust. It slides across the pool, across the cougar footprint, across the vague traces we ourselves have left down there, and the blue glow vanishes. The house’s life is concealed until someone returns to reveal it again.

The cougar never knew I was there, so it can’t miss me, but it must be able to detect a difference in its life now that I have left it.

“Come on up.” Mria calls from upstairs. “Lunch is ready.”

“What are you going to do now?” Paolo says.

“I have another project.”

“Mark must have paid you a bundle. It must be something pretty wild.”

“Not so wild,” I say. “Just something that needs to get done.”

POTENTIAL ENCOUNTER

URBAN STUDY AREA #7

Sometimes a chunk of decorative plaster crashes down from the coffered ceiling high overhead. This usually happens a couple of days after a heavy rain. The water percolates through the various remaining layers of the railway station roof. You’d think there wouldn’t be an acanthus swag or gilded rosette left up there, but the builders had not stinted on unseen decoration.

Sometimes it happens for no reason at all, like this morning. I jerk awake, hearing just the echoes of a distant crash.

Usually I get up and search, trying to figure out which piece it was that had just been added to the rubble on the waiting room floor. I don’t know what the point of that is, but I do feel good when I see fresh edges, as if I’m finally getting a grip on how things work around here.

I don’t feel like doing that today. I just wiggle myself deeper into my bag and watch the pale light of morning grow in the high windows. The pigeons that have left a crust over the glass shift complain on their perches high above.

I’ve been here a few months now, and still find it ridiculous. Had absolutely everyone left this city and headed for better places? It had once been huge. I can walk the old streets for days, clamber carefully across rusting bridges, jump across the pits of collapsed sewers. None of it was set up to interact with nature. It comes from a purely human world, now obsolete.

Most of it collapsed and was swept into sinuous ridges, twenty or thirty feet high. Forests slowly spread across them. There’s a small modern city up the river a bit, but it has its own environment and I never take any animals there.

So now I live among weeds: spiky leaved plants, muck-loving carp, fast-growing trees, pigeons. I hunt among the herds of stunted deer that browse the grass between fallen branches of locusts and silver maples. Sometimes a pack of canids makes its quarrelsome way through the area. A cross between domestic dogs and coyotes, they are unromantic, unphotogenic, and unclean. No Trainer has ever worked to get them to set their carrion-smelling paws on a city street. No passerby has ever been struck at dawn by their wild beauty. When I hear them yelping at night I stuff my head into my pillow.

A crow calls outside, so it really is time to get up. All of the animals can see me, but only that crow seems to care. It has a kind of reptilian affection for me, based on the small prey I scare up on my hunts, and I sometimes find it staring fixedly at me, head sidewise, considering me with an expressionless yellow-rimmed eye. I work at not attributing human emotions to it, but always fail. Maybe I wasn’t meant for my line of work after all.

At least I haven’t given it a name. That’s the most obvious way we pretend animals are more ours than they actually are. I figure it respects me, but is puzzled by me. Our lives are pretty similar just now, so we get along. The bird can predict in general what I am going to do next, but not specifically, and that is the basis of a decent relationship.

There is no natural world. If the term ever had meaning, it hasn’t for years. Jeremiads about how the natural world will unite and turn against humans are a childish fantasy. Nature has no motivations, no desires, no ultimate goal.

Except what we choose to give it. I finally roll out of my bag, wash my face in the basin I always fill before going to sleep, and go outside. It’s overcast, and cold. My breath puffs. I like feeling the weather against me. Having little defense against it, I have to react to it the same way everything else alive has to. I listen to the air, sniff it to see how scents are carrying today, listen to any sounds it brings. I’m here and visible. I can be evaded, I can be resisted, I can be killed. I pay full attention.

Outside, something on the ground catches my eye. I kneel to get a better look. I reach out my hand, but pull it back before my fingertips can disturb anything.

It’s a partial print: a big heel pad, and two toe marks. No claw indentations, and it looks pretty good-sized. Cat. It looks like a large cat.

I bend over the imprint and push my face almost to the ground, looking and smelling, using every channel of information I can. I smell cat too.

Could be a lynx. I’ve seen some other, ambiguous traces. A lynx would be okay.

I don’t think it’s a lynx. A few days ago I found a piece of scat. Like the print, it was big, bigger than your usual coydog turd. And it had a bit of hair in it, as from self-grooming with a rough tongue. I managed to persuade myself that it was just the right shade of reddish brown.

I stand up, ready for my day. If there really is a cougar out here somewhere, I won’t see it. In an even contest, I don’t have a chance. But I’ll keep looking.

Anyone could find me here, if they wanted. Berenika has to know where I am. She could come here and observe me in my natural habitat. If she wanted.

It’s ridiculous. A feral housecat could make it here in this shrunken weed patch, for as long as it evaded the coydogs, but chances were lower for a lynx, and a cougar was impossible. A cougar needed more than ten square miles of territory to support itself, probably significantly more in this impoverished ecology, and there was nothing like that here, not yet. A single kill and the deer would flee elsewhere. These are not trained to forget, circle around, and return. Again, not yet.

So there’s work to be done. The various patches of woods can be knitted together in the minds of the beasts that are here. That’s what we do. We take the far-flung archipelagos of environment and reassemble them into continents in the minds of the animals. We give them a way to live in the world we have made.

So I live, work, and hope.

I imagine Berenika, somewhere in an abandoned room in the city, in a brick row house standing alone amid the trees, like a single book on an empty shelf. Since I’m imagining it, I imagine detail. She’s in an old bedroom where someone changed wallpaper every year. The warmth and moisture she’s brought into the room have loosened its glue, and the soft paper peels off in layers, showing different colors. When she awakes before dawn, it’s to the whisper of falling florals and beribboned hunting horns.

I don’t actually believe she’s there. She’s got more important things to pay attention to.

Mark is the kind of guy who thinks that making his wife stronger is the way to keep her. That makes him hard to compete with. But I’ve worked with him, and know he can be tiresome. A jerk, really. And, pathetic huddled voyeur or not, I know what I’m doing. That can be attractive. There is some room for hope.

Meanwhile, I have work to do.

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

Stochasticity

Tobias S. Buckell

The day before the city rioted was a day, for me, like any other. The day before Maggie pulled me deep into the shit.

I was up late that night, bouncing at ZaZa’s, just barely covering my bus pass for the month. Same shit, different day.

I had this funny feeling that I’d be moving on soon, which I did every couple years, as a shrimp of a man stared up at me and asked, “What are you looking at?” And I thought, there had to be somewhere more interesting to be than Detroit.

I’d gotten into a rut here.

The shrimp pushed at me. Spoiling for a fight.

I’ve found that the trick to bouncing, just as much as standing around and looking perpetually annoyed, was negotiation. Not negotiation as in the I’m-going-to-give-you-something-for-something-you-agree-to-do-for-me kind, but the sort of negotiation where you agree not to stave in some drunk bastard’s skull in exchange for his leaving the club.

And although that doesn’t sound like negotiation, with a drunk, it really is. Because it takes a lot of circuitous explanation, leading, and alternate phrasing to make them realize they’re in for a load of shit.

“Stop. Breaking. The pool cues.” I used a calm, patient tone. It was, after all, a calm and reasonable request. Even if it wasn’t a request, really.

“What are you going to do about it?”

Even with all the negotiation, however, you also end up negotiating how much shit they might be in.

It was a Monday night. Usually a slow night. No jumping DJ using their antique original iPods lacquered in sparkling silver to run the floor. No girl’s night. No happy hour. No nothing.

Just the regulars, quietly slinking their way towards an easier form of despair, hunched over the hump of the stained wood surface at the bar. Huddled against each other, backs turned to the expanse of the empty, unlit dance floor.

Just the core regulars, and this belligerent asshole who was up in my face.

“What are you going to do about it?” he repeated.

He must have thought he wasn’t three inches shorter than me. Or that he wasn’t fifty pounds lighter. This little one had something to prove.

Screw it. I grabbed the yappy guy’s hand before he even realized it and twisted him around in front of me. He struggled a bit, so I half-nelsoned him quick, then marched him right past the bar. Several customers turned to watch, beers raised in a mocking half salute, as I gently shoved the shrimp out the doors.

He tried to turn around and come back in, so I sucker-punched him.

As he sagged to the dirty concrete I grabbed his collar and threw him against the brick facade of the club, the ZaZa’s neon sign blinking and fitzing in front of us. Both of us looked eerie orange, then green.

“Come back in, I break something,” I said, and left him there with one more good shove.

He got it. Negotiations finished.

Back inside the gloom the new bartender, Maggie, looked up from setting a beer mug down in front of an old man with a long, white beard. “Want me to call the Eddies?” She was probably too young to be pulling bar duty. But she was good at listening to wasted customers. She was also pretty enough to pull in the extra tips she needed, and surprisingly tough. The electrified deterrent clothes she wore were remarkably effective too. I’d seen patrons writhing on the floor after a butt pinch. Now they kept clear of her like cows from an electric fence.

“Nah.” I leaned against the bar on my elbows. “If he’s got an issue with me now, imagine what he’ll be like when he wakes up with a bill after spending a night in the drunk tank. Last thing he needs is a lien on his house or something stupid. Call a cab. And where the hell is Lawrence?”

“Still running late.” Maggie tapped the phone in her ear. I noticed she had a bit of a bruise under her right eye, covered with makeup. I wondered what from. Asshole boyfriend? Did she like her men wild and dangerous? It was certainly none of my business . . .

She cocked her head. “Want me to call him again?”

“Forget it.” I’d have to sleep in the storage room until morning. The last bus would be leaving downtown Detroit any second. “I’ll hit the cot tonight.” Besides, it’d save me some money.

Whoever the pipsqueak drunk was, he was lucky. He was a downtowner and could get home in a cab without spending a good portion of his day’s wages. He could afford to get drunk.

“That’s three times this week. Go take a nap when Lawrence gets here, I’ll drop you off.”

“Maggie . . . ”

“Reg, I insist.”

No one called me Reg. Except her. I’m Reginald. Reginald Stratton. But she could get away with Reg.

It was the cheerfulness, I guessed.

Maggie let her car drive us there with a cheerful abandon, setting the vehicle’s profile to aggressive and letting it weave in and out of traffic as it whined its way on. From the somewhat revised downtown, then on past the decaying warehouses and skyscrapers of the heydays, and from there into the sudden change of the nice suburbs. The ones within a short, very short, driving distance.

I didn’t live there, though: I lived in the decay of the Wilds.

The further out you got, the longer it took to drive, the more gas it cost out where battery cars like Maggie’s and bikes couldn’t easily get to, the rougher it got. And that’s where I lived.

It began with the abandoned tract houses. Many just slumped over, windows shattered, roofs failed or riddled with pigeons and shit. I grew up somewhere like this, a dead end an hour and a half away from any major urban center.

A safe place, a protected space, to raise your little ones.

Or so we thought back then.

All the while burning our way via car to and from work.

Back then.

Now those artificial greens and wooden houses were abandoned, for the most part, given away for the land to reclaim as its own.

At the very edge of the Wilds I had Maggie pull over into the driveway. I pulled out a hundred, but she shook her head. “Let’s take a look.”

She followed me in. I wasn’t sure what this was about, but then, Maggie was the only one who got to call me Reg.

“Welcome to Casa Stratton.” I waved my hand at the three acres of vegetable gardens and the large greenhouse I’d built out of windows reclaimed from houses further into the Wilds.

“It’s a fucking mansion,” Maggie declared.

“House belonged to some formerly rich family, once upon a time. All the stone and brickwork stopped it from getting burned up for steam engines or winter heating.”

“And you own it?”

I shook my head. “Course not.” No one owned them. That would have meant paying taxes. These were abandoned, but couldn’t be purchased because no one would claim them, as that would result in having to owe back taxes, with interest, for decades. All these buildings floated in limbo, just like the outer skyscrapers: the Slumps. Perfectly good real estate, abandoned and not truly owned by anyone, and thus unable to be renovated.

I knew a lot of people who’d give their right nut to live in the close-by skyscrapers. Instead they were guarded by private security, or even on contract by Edgewater. Those owners kept them from being reclaimed, but you couldn’t trace who those owners were. They were waiting for the good times to come back.

Who wouldn’t kill to live closer to the urban hub? Let the mega-corp farms deliver food into where you all were easily gathered? No more gardening for myself, no more hour-long commutes and most of my month’s take going into transportation costs.

“Looks nice, though,” Maggie said. “You got an extra room, I’ll move in. But don’t get excited, this is simple business.”

“Leaving him?”

Maggie looked confused, then touched the bruise under her eye and laughed. “You think it’s a guy? No, it was a lot of guys. Eddies.”

“What’d you do to piss the Eddies off?”

“Hiding out up in a penthouse in the Slumps. They found me.”

“Ah. So you want to couch surf me?”

“In exchange for half the cost of your bus pass, my car’s cheap to run.” She charged up the car at work, some sort of agreement with the owners. “Plus, buses are getting less and less regular. Could all quit soon enough.”

Halving my transportation costs. Sounded harmless enough.

I agreed and showed her a spare room. There were seven. No real trouble, other than having a pretty roommate who was entirely uninterested in me.

Welcome to poverty homesteading, I thought. But it beat getting flushed out of the city by Edgewater. I’d made the same mistake Maggie had when I first arrived downtown, seeing an empty skyscraper as an opportunity.

Fortunately I’d had enough on me to pay the Edgewater holding fee and get loose.

Every once in a while, I wondered what happened to the homeless the Eddies rounded up who couldn’t pay.

Later in the night, once Maggie was fast asleep, I padded out into the backyard and off into the Wilds. Survival training-wise: flitting my way through forest and suburban ruins.

My bolthole was about two miles from my house, next to an old oak tree. Buried near a massive root, I had my whole stake in a lockbox.

Sure, currency could devalue, but that hit everyone equally. With cash in hand and hidden, no hacker, frauder, lawyer, Edgewater flunky, or government, could get at my savings.

Good luck finding this out in the Wilds.

Maggie, on the way in the next morning, talked about the various cities she’d bartended her way through. Living out of the back of her car, charging up and moving on. She’d seen the East Coast, she told me. Now she was moving on through the Midwest, although she wasn’t sure how the car would do in open spaces. She was thinking about saving up for an ox. Or maybe a donkey. To pull it when power ran out, or when she couldn’t get gas to fill the generator in the back of the car.

“Driving by day, sleeping under the stars, seeing something new every day. I don’t want to ever give it up,” she said.

I lay slumped against the passenger window in my usual morning stupor, watching the dirty sidewalks slip past. Lotta trash was building up. Every other week pickups.

But there was something new. Something I should have noticed on the bus rides in, but was too busy balancing in the aisle to see out the window and notice. The bouncy roads kept you busy hanging on if you didn’t get a seat.

People milled around the sidewalks.

I would have said they were homeless, but they didn’t look like garden variety homeless. They were all clean-shaven, well-clothed. A variety of hairstyles: punk to stiff to end-overs. A lot of them wore gray suits, others a loose poncho.

They all sat along the street, watching traffic and life pass by. Some waved as we passed them. One of them sat next to a large plastic cube that was folding itself up, deflating from where it was hooked to the side of the street. Some sort of mobile tent.

Most of them bunched up near the disused skyscrapers of the outer ring. As we hit downtown they thinned out. But we passed one last pair, sitting on folding chairs, fruit drinks in hand with little umbrellas perched off to the side.

“Listen,” Maggie said. “You still hurting for cash?”

“Yeah.” Two men in blue pinstripes leaned against a corner, talking into earpieces. I’d done a tour. These guys were doing recon. I’d have bet the day’s tips on it.

What the hell was going on out in the Slumps? I needed to pay more attention to the news, because whatever it was, the Eddies would be on to it soon. If there was going to be any trouble anywhere downtown I wanted to know about it before it reached me.

“I wasn’t just trying to sleep out there last night for no reason. There’s a guy, paid me a week’s worth to try and shelter in the Slumps for a night,” Maggie said. “I’d run out, couldn’t afford the hotel I was in anymore.”

“Creepy?”

“Turk work. Anonymous. Some piece of software’s my second boss. I found the job on a list. Looking for people in Detroit to do stuff around the city. Random shit. Day One, I delivered a package lying out on a counter in a hotel to a bike courier ten blocks away. Then a couple days later I had to walk up to the top of some old carpark and toss some paperballs over the side. Weird stuff. Random. Paid well. Last night it was good pay to see how long I could stay in a Slump building. Some other guy, a lawyer, turking out himself probably, came and bailed me out from the Eddies. As promised, if I got caught.”

“Job listing still up?” I asked.

“Nah. But whoever’s running this is offering me a bonus to refer people verbally.” Maggie handed me a piece of paper with an email address of random numbers on it. One time encryption, no doubt.

“A week’s worth?” Pay like this, and with the money Maggie was saving me, I might be able to think about a place in the city. I could ditch the house in the Wilds after Maggie inevitably moved on.

“Week,” she confirmed.

“That’s worth a bruised eye,” I said.

“Damn straight.”

Plus, it sounded harmless enough.

I don’t know why it’s called turking. Taking a complicated task and putting it up online, divvying up the parts of a task between multiple people and paying for the results, that had been going on a long time.

Say you needed someone to find a certain face in a crowd, if you were an Edgewater investigator. You could upload the photo of the perp you were hunting, and then upload pictures of crowds you suspected the person was in.

Then you put the task up online and paid whoever turned in a result. Saved you time, someone else did the idiot work, and you got to focus on higher level stuff.

But it went further than that. Suppose you had a package in Los Angeles that needed to get to New York. When I was a kid you’d go to a centralized post office, pay for stamps, and it would be taken on a special van at a certain time of day along a series of routes to an airplane, across the country with a bunch of other packages to a distribution center, and then onto more vans, to finally end up in New York. And most of all that was run by that one company.

Today you turked the package out. Left it at a street corner with a price embedded on the package’s tag. Someone going in the right direction would snag it and get the credit or partial credit for taking it as close to the goal as they could get it.

But other things were also turked out. Insidious things. And you’d never know. All you were being asked to do was walk a package a couple miles from one place to another. What was in the package? None of your business. And if you opened it, the tag could snag a picture of you or pass on the information you used to agree to grab the package with to the owner.

No sense doing that.

So there was also no sense in wondering what I was complicit in when I pinged the email on the piece of paper Maggie’d given me, and got back a set of simple instructions.

I was to stand on the corner not too far from an Edgewater depot, and when they left their compound, text a certain number.

Simple enough.

And with good pay. I’d make what I made in three or four night’s bouncing to do this.

Someone really wanted to know what Edgewater’s comings and goings were.

Not really harmless anymore. But still potentially lucrative.

I left work early for my street turk assignment, walking my way over to the location. I stood in the hot night, wind kicking faded pieces of litter past me. Dirt kicked up, grit stinging my eyes, and the nighttime rush of the city flowed by. I had staked out a spot on the street near an alley where part of a brick wall collapsed in. No one could walk up behind me, and I had the shadows to lurk in.

Trails of brake lights burned on the back of my retinas as cars whined past. Some even thundered past. Uncollected trash out on a sidewalk smelled rich, making the thermos of coffee I had clipped to my belt seem unappetizing.

The Edgewater compound broke into a flurry of activity as a large armored van full of men in riot gear rolled on out, a siren burping out a staccato series of wails and screeches.

I texted.

Over the next eight hours I texted three more times as the streets fell into their late night rhythm of random cars, distant sirens, and the occasional cat fight that broke out near any given garbage can.

Simple enough.

When dawn broke over the skyline I had an hour left. I was that much closer to leaving the Wilds. And it was then I heard the click of a safety catch being released in the alley behind me.

Impossible, but there it was.

I had the lid cup of the thermos filled with coffee. I slowly raised both hands, the thermos cup lid hanging off my pinkie.

The Eddies must have spotted me.

“On the ground,” spat the voice behind me. I followed the order.

Once I kissed the sidewalk he zip-tied my hands behind me. I heard an engine gun up loudly as a vehicle whipped around the street corner. I was wrenched up to standing and tossed into the back of the armored personnel carrier that I had watched roar out of their compound all night.

In the dim light inside they shoved me up against a metal bench. Five men in full urban combat garb stared at me. With gray fatigues and night vision goggles, they were also fully kitted out to climb buildings, blow out doors, and rush in with a shoot-first-ask-questions-later sort of look to them.

“Good morning,” said the nearest Eddie. “What have we here?”

“He was staking us out,” said the one who’d snuck up on me.

After Sudan I’d been offered a job as an Eddie in Cleveland.

By then, I’d put in enough time kicking down doors and trying to figure out if the gray-green blob inside my night vision goggles was going to shoot me or run screaming.

“You staking us out, you little concrete bunny?” The nearest Eddie, a pale-looking thin dude with a sour smell, leaned in. “You related to those fuckers that’ve been setting off little bombs and running for it, just to get us to run around all night? You getting off on wasting our time?”

Nothing I said would be helpful, but if I remained quiet, that was a problem too. They had me here in the armored carrier because they could rough me up some before getting back to the compound. They were having a long night, and now they had a target.

Straight truth was the easiest course. No running around. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I said. “But maybe. I got paid a good bit. Street turking. Just to stand there and text a number if you guys ran out in a hurry. I’m the bouncer at ZaZa’s, usually, but I’m out in the Wilds. They offered me good money to stand here. Bus fares are tight: you know the drill.”

The nearby Eddie still looked keyed up to cause me some pain, but the Eddie standing in silhouette at the entrance to the carrier nodded. “Makes sense. Turk out the stake out, just like the guy last night. We’ll bust you, they’ll have a turked out lawyer ready and waiting. They have other turks watching this scene, if last night was any indication.”

“Fuckers,” the sour-smelling Eddie said.

“Take this joker to a cell and wait for bail, charge the max for loitering,” the Eddie outside said. He sounded in charge and on top. “Might as well see some good green for our trouble.”

“Shit.” Sour-smelling Eddie spat something nasty and brown at my feet. “Sure about that?”

“Dee and me will take patrol, see if we can flush out the other turks.” This Eddie looked young, and tired. He rubbed his face. Maybe he’d commanded a squad overseas, enough savvy to get noticed and promoted to running things when he got back.

Now he probably sensed something was in the air, something that didn’t bode well for the Eddies.

Outside Eddie shut the doors and slapped them, and the carrier lurched into gear. Sour-smelling Eddie smiled at me.

I didn’t like him.

Some people enjoyed their jobs way too much.

This punk was probably some kid from the Midwest, one of those who seemed to think that everyone non-white was to blame for everything that was wrong with the country since any of the various crises had hit. He took some relish in policing the city, putting certain people in their place.

Probably had a no-immigration bumper sticker on his electric pickup cart. Even though it was mostly Canada and the Europeans trying to keep us contained in our own borders these days.

He volunteered to steer me to my cell, and followed me in.

I turned to face him. “Can I help . . . ”

He hit me hard in the stomach, but I’d already tensed and let my torso move with the blow.

Still hurt. All this bus riding and gardening didn’t exactly keep me in peak shape. I needed to remember to work a bit harder on that.

I was a bouncer, after all.

Back a few steps, and I was ready for the next, but someone smacked the windows with the palm of their hand. “Hey! Gary. Knock that shit out.”

The Community Management Officer of the station stood outside. CMO S. Whatten, the patch on his chest indicated. Unlike all the other head-shaved urban commandos I’d run into tonight, Whatten had a business cut going. Middle-management kind of look. A suit.

But you could see in his posture he was command through and through. Probably served in the same fields as me. Been given a pat on the back, a gas bonus, and taken private work on his return.

S. Whatten shook his head. “Gary, you lose your cut.”

“What?” Gary looked genuinely shocked. “I helped pull this one in.”

“He’s got a lawyer outside. If you kept going they wouldn’t be paying us permanent bail, idiot, they’d be getting a force-and-violence payout from us.” Whatten shoved Gary back. “Keep it up, Gary, keep it up and I’ll happily toss your ass out of the dorm and let you walk to work every day. See how long you last on your own two feet.” A known Edgewater walking out and around. He’d get knifed in the back before long unless he was very quick on his toes. Gary didn’t strike me as quick on his toes.

Gary swallowed, and with a glance back at me, left the room.

But this wasn’t over. CMO S. Whatten stood in the middle of the door, looking me over. “You don’t have any property to post a lien against. Got a lawyer outside. Got no money our computer can find. But no record.”

They couldn’t find my money because I took it out and buried it deep in the Wilds, in the backyards woods. “You going to knock me around and tell me to keep more pocket change on me so that next time you won’t feel like you wasted your effort?”

“No,” Whatten sighed. “Not going to waste the effort. Not going to drill through a thick grunt’s skull like yours.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, plus, I don’t take orders anymore.”

“Fair enough.” But Whatten still hadn’t moved. “You don’t know what the hell you were doing out there . . . ”

“You know how it works,” I said. This was leading to something else, though.

“I’ve seen enough turked out armies in my time,” Whatten said. “I look young, but I paid out hard. I’ve seen the ghosts merging in on you, kids with fireworks, others with guns, others with cameras waiting for you to make the inevitable mistake.”

Whatten said ghosts. And he looked haunted, his wide eyes flicked back to memories of battles past in other lands.

The warlords would hand out cellphones like candy to the kids. Promise them gas or food to carry out errands. And individually, not much was going on.

But as a whole, a vast and complicated and decentralized attack, they could bring armies down to their knees before anyone knew what had happened.

I could see Whatten opening fire on some starving teenager with a toy gun, while the cameras relayed the horrible results live to some hungry, waiting news service. Then after the cameras shut off, the kids with the real guns, who looked just like the others, moved in to attack.

“You know something big is moving,” Whatten said. “People staking us out, street turkers all over the place, setting up things. Waiting. Out there. You know what the revised articles of engagement are, Reginald?”

“Yeah, I know them.” It’s why I wouldn’t ever become a damned Eddie. Or any domestic boot-stomping yahoo.

All you did for a turked army was to put a brick down by the side of a road. And maybe all it took was a few hundred other bricks placed to create a roadblock. Individually, you could claim you were just making a buck.

But that still made you an enemy combatant. Which meant you were no longer a citizen.

You didn’t belong to another country, either.

There were no rules about what they could do to you then. You simply didn’t exist as far as the rule of law was concerned.

“At some point,” Whatten told me. “Us Eddies’ll get attacked here. And we don’t stay Eddies when it turns into a war. When the Nationals get mobilized, we’re a subdivision of the army. Then people like Gary, and the real commandos, they’ll come in shooting, kicking in your teeth, and really showing you some pain.”

I shrugged. “You know of another way I can cover my transportation? Some place to stay here in town?”

Whatten crossed his arms over his chest. “So for that you’re dumb enough to work for some turker you don’t even know? The people you’re turking for don’t even have reputation points. You have no idea what the big scheme is? I’ve seen you around, down at ZaZa’s. You’re no tool.”

“Heirarchy of needs, CMO. Give the indigenous infrastructure, they don’t have to depend on desperate moves.” That was a barb that dug deep. Whatten had commanded. No doubt he’d heard that phrase often enough. He’d have taught it, too.

Get dropped into some third world situation where they had nothing. No matter the reason, you soon found out that whoever hated your ass could drum up eager waves of hungry soldiers throwing themselves against you.

There was always some rhetoric. But when you dug deep, it always came down to the simple fact that the ready-to-die simply had nothing to lose. They’d sign up and trust the math. If enough of them attacked, maybe they’d live. Maybe they’d get something out of it. Save their family, get something to eat, live, whatever.

Now give them something to lose, then those waves thinned out.

Infrastructure. Running water. Food. Medical assistance. Homes. Roads and travel. The most devastating tools of war.

But in a world where even the first world nations struggled to provide transportation, water, and safety, well, domestic shitstorms started to look like foreign ones. What you never thought you’d see anywhere but abroad, that came home with you.

Whether the starving and displaced were in Africa, or sitting around a dike that had burst somewhere on a coast here, the pressures were the same. Particularly once the domestic dike had been broken over and over again, where citizens realized that it wasn’t just a one-off, weather had changed, and the government didn’t have much to help them with.

That’s when your thin line of civilization faded.

Welcome home, Whatten, and by the way you never left the front line, I thought to myself.

He got it. He stepped aside to let me walk past and down the corridor. At the other end a gray-suited man with a briefcase waited for me.

My mysterious lawyer, and fellow turker.

I was pushing up a good defense for Whatten. The truth was . . . I was getting nervous.

I didn’t know what the hell I was getting myself into. And maybe it was time to get myself out.

The lawyer asked me to keep my mouth shut until well clear of the compound: sign this, initial here, don’t worry about that. Quick, assured, and efficient. I was buzzed through the thick bomb-proof doors in no time.

He had a bike outside, an old and well-traveled carbon fiber Schwinn with a GPS in the handle and a heavy saddle on the back. He wheeled it alongside me. “Your fine has been covered. Your night’s work is done,” he said. “Thank you.”

I’d checked my account on my phone, but didn’t see the rest of my night’s pay. I mentioned it.

The lawyer looked over at me and sighed. “It’s in the fine print. The cost of springing you is far more than your payoff, so you get nothing as a result of getting arrested by this Edgewater franchise. You’re getting a good deal, trust me.”

I never took too well to getting pissed on and being told to like it. “I’m not a fine print kind of man.”

Had they paid me after a successful mission, where the Eddies wouldn’t have had anything to take from me, I would have been up for the night.

Now all I had to show for the night’s efforts was the down payment on this little affair and some very sore ribs.

“But the contract remains what it is, Mr. Stratton. Can’t wriggle out of these things, you know.”

I licked my lips. “I’m pretty good at not getting noticed. How’d they spot me to round me up?”

The lawyer mounted his bike. “I don’t know Mr. Stratton. Like you, I was just called in to take care of this. I’m just a turker, making some side money.” He picked up speed, pulling away from me. “You know how it works. I don’t know who you are, or what you were doing. None of my business. I was just here to pay your fine and get you on your way.”

He left me there on the quiet rundown streets. I flipped through my phone’s address book and emailed the turker’s address I’d gotten the job through, but it bounced back.

Annoyed, I started a quick jog after the lawyer, sucking air shallowly thanks to the bruised ribs. The money was a magnet, dangling just out of reach.

Turker or not, someone was going to pay me the other damn half of what I was owed.

Three miles later second thoughts occurred as I clutched my ribs, struggling to keep up with the lawyer’s leisurely pace.

In the early morning dawn peeking over sullied and coal-stained brick I realized more and more people were filling the streets I was huffing my way through.

Again, an odd and silent community of well-off homeless stood near their collapsible mobile structures. I smelled eggs and sausage sizzling: both my mouth watered and my stomach twisted at the smell of food, not a good sign after all the jogging.

The great old Ambassador Bridge loomed over the buildings, the gaping bombed ruins of the roadway overhead thrumming in the wind. Thank you Canadian Air Force for that one . . .

I turned a corner, and into a scene that, for a moment, didn’t make any sense. The parking lots and gardens of this area were overrun with massive tents, large RV-type vehicles with masts, lean-looking roadboats, and tens of thousands of people.

Some sort of instant Midwest Burning Man festival, it seemed.

The lawyer disappeared into the center of the mass of people, and three very burly bikers stepped forward. Dark shades already on in the morning sun, their leather jackets festooned with tiny tags and symbols.

“Where’s your ID?” the first asked, long beard whipping about as a dust devil passed by, fluttering tent flaps and flags on poles all around. Roadboat rigging twanged a chorus.

“I must have left it somewhere,” I said, calmly walking toward them, trying to eyeball where the lawyer’d disappeared.

“Nice try. You can’t.” The nearest biker bodychecked me away. “Fucking footprinter.”

My ribs flared pain hard enough to make me suck air in through my teeth.

“Listen.” I held my hands up. That made it hurt more. “I’m not trying to cause any trouble. But I need to talk to someone . . . ”

“You got trouble understanding?” The biker’s tone was familiar. The sort of negotiating tone used to indicate he’d agree not to stave in my skull if I agreed to leave the camp.

I backed away.

“Get out, footprinter . . . Get out now.”

I turned around, wincing. Back to the bar, then. Only this time I called for a cab.

But things didn’t exactly get any better there. Lawrence sat on a chair inside the door, but a big closed sign he’d hand-lettered had been hung on the door.

“What the hell’s going on?” I asked.

“Maggie went home. No bartender, no bar.”

I blinked. She had no reason to be home . . . it made no sense. What could she be up to? My stomach twisted. I still had a bus pass. I ran like hell in time to make the morning bus out to the Wilds.

Maggie’s car wasn’t at the house when I got there.

And the lockbox, two miles out in the depth of the Wilds, wasn’t there either.

I sat next to the empty dirt hole, my back against the root, and flung an acorn out into the bush. Cute little Maggie, the bartender too wispy to be in a brutal downtown.

She was a nomad, stringing her way through the brutal and lawless Wilds of the continent. Maggie was probably tougher than me.

Certainly smarter.

My savings had just been wiped out, and she probably had enough to make the next leg of her journey.

It rained most of the way back. A dirty, whipping Detroit grimy sort of rain. I watched the remains of it congeal on the outside of the bus’s windows as I was jerked back and forth between the quiet mass of commuters making their way in.

I recognized one of the guys several seats ahead of me. One of the squatters in the Wilds who’d given me advice on my garden. He had dog tags hanging off a necklace, something a lot of the reclamation groups off in the Wilds had. Little kudos for each other, signs that told each other where they stood in their own subworlds.

They would be happy to welcome me into their little tribe, I had no doubt. I could teach self defense in one of their crèches. Sleep on recycled packing foam beds. Help out in their gardens.

But I’d done the farmer boy routine. I’d joined the army to leave that. Not my talent, I’d found. I’d found my talent the day seven nomads descended on the farm I was working at.

I blinked at the dirty rain. Hadn’t thought about that in too many years. The crack of a gun, the screams of the wounded.

All too easy. Shooting people, that was. Easier than deer, mostly. But it left you odd, somehow. A little less human each time, but with the knowledge that you could do it if it came to it.

I thought about standing in front of the bar. Thought about all the work put into the brick house. Thought about each bill taken home, buried near the tree.

Maggie pulled one over on me, and I didn’t hate her for it. Not a bit. I hated myself for falling into a routine, a sense of complacency and tired resignation. A miasma of life that had made it so easy for her to do this to me.

Things didn’t come to people who waited. Who picked over the trash and hoped to find treasure. It came to those who grasped.

But then I wondered if that was the same attitude that had led the world to burning up its resources and leaving the dregs for us.

Lot of maybes and buzzing going around and around in the back of my head. I quashed it all. I’d made a decision. I wanted my damn money.

After that, I’d figure out what I was going to do next.

I walked to the Edgewater compound and pounded on the gates until a dubious S. Whatten ambled out to regard me through the chicken-wired bars.

“What the hell do you want, Stratton?”

“The lawyer, who was he?”

Whatten’s pitying look dripped scorn. “Come on, Stratton. We don’t know the laywer’s name. And don’t play like you’ve never encountered one and don’t know the routine.”

I did know the routine. Since the Lawyer Protection Act lawyers used public encryption keys, not names, to protect their identities. Too many of them found hanging from lamp posts by their necks. “His key, give me his key.” It could have been someone turked to represent the lawyer in real time, with an earpiece directing him what to say and when, or an apprentice lawyer turked out, or maybe the real lawyer.

Hard to tell these days. Risky profession.

“Expired. Stratton, what’re you doing?”

“They owe me money. I want paid. I’ve seen him out by the bridge, hiding among some homeless camp. Who paid for my fine, maybe you know that?” They had to have something.

Whatten moved closer to the chicken wire. He didn’t touch it. Electrified. “You really want the lawyer that bad?”

I folded my arms and nodded.

“Okay,” Whatten said. “We want him too. We want to know what the hell is going on. You get in there, you find him out, or anything out, we’ll straight up pay you for the info.”

They were that fucking desperate for any tidbit. Hiding here in their sandbagged fort. I felt a shiver move up my back.

“I just want them to pay me up. Anything I find out, I’ll pass on.”

Whatten bobbed his head a bit, considering whether to trust me. That little cloud of desperation hung over him.

He buckled. “I’ll give you a car rental chit, straight cash bonus.” He named a price.

Good price.

These kids were scared.

I took it. “What do you know?”

“Your fine, it was paid by Spaceship Detroit, a nonprofit.”

Sounded odd. “Who they hell are they?”

Whatten didn’t know.

“What do they do?”

Whatten, again, didn’t know.

But it was something. I turned my back on him.

Spaceship Detroit. They’d pay up. Or give me another job. I’d get roughed up for big money.

But mainly, I could sense it out there. Something moving through the city. Something big. And I wanted to rip a piece of it off for myself.

S. Whatten knew it was out there too. He wanted to figure out what it was.

Bad enough to pay me to do it.

Things were perking up a bit.

The electric car the Eddies rented for me was fully charged, plugged into a public meter. It was a raked back egg-shaped affair of carbon fiber and plastic windshield on three wheels. I swiped the chit Whatten gave me by the window and the car unlocked itself and the doors swung up into the air.

I settled in, running my fingers over the wheel, adjusting the seat just so.

Luxurious.

My father used to take us out for special family trips in his car, when the farm had mulched up enough biodiesel in the yardpits.

Just like then, when the doors shut, it was just you inside. Like when you walked into your own house. The outside world seemed just that, outside. A barrier between you and everyone else.

It was like one of those animes where the hero puts on invincible, giant, techno-armor.

There was an appeal to this. I always found the electrics more fun than the combustion ones as well. Instant torque all the way down through to the wheels in an electric, no hesitation.

I cruised around Detroit, slipping past the downtown section. It was a fortress, new and shiny buildings with their backs to the Slumps. The hardy core of a new Detroit, where people could live in walking distance to jobs and necessities. Where the city touched the river, and boats with massive parasails for mobility delivered their cargo along the docks.

I drove out into the Slumps, paralleling the river, aiming for the bridge, with a stop near a park where a team of kids were playing baseball.

One of the little-leaguers of some reclamation crèche was happy to sell me a bat for cash before the coach and chaperones chased me off.

The expedition continued to the edge of the bridge, where I found an alley looking out at the main street across. Most of the homeless appeared to have left the sidewalks for the strange city, just evident in the distance under the ruins of the bridge. Things were pretty quiet, just the occasional person wandering down the road on whatever errand they were on.

I fished around inside my pockets and found a pair of painkillers, which I dry swallowed.

Then it was the long wait.

Hunting was never for the patient.

Or the hungry. Eventually, after several hours of seeing homeless wander by who weren’t the lawyer, I ventured out to look for somewhere to eat.

The alleyway my car was in sounded busy.

I paused after turning the corner.

The car had been cut to shit with axes, door panels slashed clean off, windows yanked free, and all of this left quickly as I’d arrived.

Everyone had fled.

I got in the car, the door creaking sadly as it swung up. I shut the door, looking nervously around, and tapped the accelerator to get the hell out.

As the car lurched forward the three dozen well-dressed people of all ethnicities came out from their hiding places and started running down the alleyway behind me. They wore suits, or cargo pants with the ponchos. Ten of them carried sharp-looking axes, while the others had large bags. A couple of them had a sled dragging behind them.

This didn’t look good.

The car was in bad shape. It coughed to a gentle stop as some part fell off from underneath onto the road.

A silent and expectant mob surrounded me as I got out of the car, the bat gripped in both hands.

I would need to grab an ax as quickly as possible after the first couple swings, I reckoned.

But the crowd moved back from me.

“We don’t want any trouble,” one of the axe-wielders said. “We just want your car.”

“Storing carbon producing energy in a battery still doesn’t change the impact of the original source of the energy!” someone shouted from the back of the crowd. “Damn footprinter.”

It was the second time I’d been called that.

“Shut up, Mary,” the axe-wielder said. “Sir, just step away from the car.”

“If you can’t see how to take care of your footprint, we’ll do it for you,” the woman shouted.

“Mary. Shut. Up.” The axe-wielder turned back. “You are not helping matters.”

I still stood there, bat in hand, keeping everyone at bay. “What do you want out of me?” I asked.

“Just your car,” the man said, exasperated.

“What the hell is going on?” I really wanted to know. I felt like I’d fallen down a hole into some alternate Detroit.

“We’re turning this area of Detroit into a car-free zone. We’re lead front scavengers, looking to recycle any cars in our occupied territory into useful machines and products. We have a reprap to repurpose the materials. That’s our job.”

I didn’t know what a reprap was. But even though things were hard on cars these days, you couldn’t talk about turning Detroit into a car-free zone with a straight face.

These guys were nomadic extremist nuts of some sort.

“But what’ll you do with the parts?” I asked. “What’s the point?”

The guy grinned. “Oh, we’ll put them to good use.”

A pair of the crowd advanced on the back end of my car and smacked their axes into it.

“Hey!” I yelled, pointing my bat at them.

But the moment was past. They’d written me off as a threat and began tearing into the car with gusto.

So I grabbed the guy nearby with the axe and twisted it free. His friends hardly even noticed, too caught up in their fervor for car destruction.

I dragged the man, wrapping his cloth poncho around his neck and arms in a knot he struggled against, down to a set of steps away from the destruction.

“What . . . the hell?” he gasped.

Dramatic, yes. And yet, it got the attention I wanted. Now I had an axe. And a bat.

I held the axe up and looked at it. “What’s your name?” I asked casually.

“Charles.”

“Charles. Pleased to meet you. I’m Reginald.” I loosened his poncho.

“That fascist bullshit doesn’t fly, dragging me off like that,” Charles spat.

Just like these other homeless, he was well-washed, well-shaved, with short-cropped hair.

I squatted in front of him. “Charles. I could care less. You chopped up the car I was renting. I have to think that violates my rental agreement. So you know who’s going to get flack for that? Me. That puts me in a bad mood. And I’m the guy with the bat.”

“And I’m the guy with some ten thousand other guys sitting just down the block,” Charles said.

Fair enough.

I set the bat and axe down. “Okay.” I pulled a chocolate bar out of my pocket and unwrapped it. “Just explain to me what’s going on.” I waved my hand out at the camp, and the people on the side of the street.

Charles still sulked on the stairs.

I tried again. “You’re all nomads, right, passing through Detroit?” Like Maggie, but in large tribes. Like locusts.

“Yeah, nomads. Low footprint nomads. We don’t stress out the environment. Take what we need into recycling. Recycle what we have. We’re here, but we’re not part of the city, not part of the resources being sucked.”

“So what are you doing with my car?”

“You ever ride a bike?” Charles asked me.

“Yeah. When I was a kid.”

“It’s a perfect technology. Ten to fifteen miles an hour for the energy required for a human to walk. And humans are good at walking,” Charles said. “Evolutionarily, we’re designed to just walk and walk and walk all day long. Eat some calories and watch us go. But look at this shithole.”

He waved his hands around the street. “Not a bike-friendly city?” I hazarded.

“Fuck no! We’re in the second century of having this perfect technology, but we kept focusing on something far less efficient. The streets aren’t bike-friendly, the Wilds aren’t friendly, Detroit and a lot of these other Midwest cities are throwing money at electric cars and power plants that run on coal, thinking that if they can just swap things out life can run right back on the course it did.

“Meanwhile, people run in gyms or just get fat because they keep using the lazy technology. At ten miles an hour, man, you can live within 15 miles of your workplace and still get in.”

He had more, a complete rant, but I held up a hand. “My car, though.”

Charles looked back at me. “People don’t make voluntary changes, they just float downstream. Even when there’s a freaking waterfall at the end.”

“So you’re going to make people swim upstream?”

“No.” Charles laughed. “We’re going to blow the river up. The car makers, their ghosts are still playing with the city. We’re going to make it a carless city. Whether they like it or not.”

I picked up the bat. Edgewater was dealing with ecoterrorists.

The last thing I wanted to do was get between the Eddies and these guys. Things got ugly, when you were dealing with people who’d already thought the world was ended, thanks to people like the Eddies.

No amount of lost love between authorities and eco-anarchists.

But I still wanted paid. And their little tent city under the bridge hid the lawyer.

I cradled my bat in my arms and left Charles on the steps. Around me people were dragging the remains of my rental off down the street in what seemed like thirty different directions for scrap. Or recycling. Or to whatever a reprap was.

I promised myself that I’d be out of the city before the crazy shit started happening.

But as I came out of the old, soot-stained brick buildings and looked out at the empty pavement and weeds in front of me, I wondered if I’d made an empty promise.

The entire tent city had disappeared.

A single, distant figure stood alone in the urban emptiness, as if just waiting for me.

I recognized the lawyer. Even at this distance.

The lawyer waited for me by his bike, both hands holding his briefcase in front of his waist.

“Mr. Stratton, you are a very persistent man.”

I swung my bat up over my back, letting it hang loose, gripped by my right hand. I wasn’t giving him a hand to shake. “Where’d they all go?”

“Staying in one place invites complacency, and authoritarian response. Takes time to muster the resources to evict a group of our size.”

“But there were thousands of people here, with tents, and avenues between the tents,” I protested. “They can’t just evaporate in a morning when my back’s turned.”

“And yet they did.”

I stood in the concrete emptiness, forced to concede his point. “A well-ordered army, then.”

The lawyer smiled. “Now, Mr. Stratton, you’re getting to the meat of it. Are you intrigued?”

“I want the rest of the money.”

“I know. You willing to follow this all the way, then?”

I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. But I nodded assent. “I want paid.”

The lawyer leaned in with a tiny black wand, which he waved over my body. Around my collar it beeped, and the lawyer flicked a switch.

A tiny mote on my collar smoldered, then puffed smoke.

“Now that the Eddies can’t follow you, I have a request,” the lawyer said. He produced a dark blue hood.

I stared at the cloth. “You want me to wear that? You think the Eddies can’t just patch into a satellite and find where your mob took off to?”

The lawyer sighed. “Granted. But where in the camp you are will be secret.”

“Yeah, okay.” Here we go. I pulled the hood on. “But I’m keeping the bat,” I said, my voice muffled.

“Whatever you want, Mr. Stratton.” The lawyer sounded bored. He pushed me forward. “There’s a sidecar on my bike, please get in it.”

Why hadn’t he had me sit first before putting the hood on? To mess with my head? “So are you a part of all this, or are you just a turking lawyer?”

I could feel him climbing onto his bike. We jerked into motion. “I’m a part of the project.”

“To destroy the auto-oriented world of Detroit?”

“Among other things, Mr. Stratton. The world cannot continue on its current path.” The lawyer was huffing as he pedaled, getting us up to a quick clip. “We have returned almost to the time of city-states, like the Greeks. Each of these cities has a different past, and set of traditions and patterns set into its habits. Some of these habits have a fundamental impact, however, on citizens elsewhere. If you dump some form of pollution into the air from a smokestack somewhere, and people are affected hundreds of miles away, shouldn’t they have some sort of say? It used to be there were country-wide principals and guidance, but in this day and age, it’s city to city.

“Now, some of us don’t have allegiances to any one city. Particularly those of us old enough to remember nationalism. You know what I’m talking about Stratton, you fought for country, once, not city.”

“Didn’t do much for me,” I muttered. But I remember the days when bunting hung from porches and second floor windows.

“We have no allegiance to country, city, or company. We’re neo-tribalists at best, but even then, not forming around any constitution or hierarchal structure. We’re per-project affiliations, with reputation economics as our bond. Some of us stick from one project to another, others are committed to the larger plan of trying to create substantial memetic change to our urban environments.”

“Like getting rid of cars.”

“That’s a sub-project, one that many have coalesced around. Some of the more enthusiastic, like those who recycled your car. Yes. But the energy use and issues of transportation are realistically a small segment of the greater issue of creating a city, or environment, that is carbon neutral and thus, sustainable. We’re talking about the long term survival of the human species, Mr. Stratton, not just whether you recycle plastic and go to work in the approved transportational manner.”

“I’ve been hearing doom and gloom for a long time,” I grunted. “The end of the world’s always just around the fucking corner.”

“And you think it won’t come?” The lawyer zigged through streets. Some alleys, too, I could tell by the echoes of our voices. “You think civilizations haven’t collapsed? Someone, or something else will come along. They’ll name some streets after us, maybe create a museum. We still find ancient cities by satellite, after the jungle or desert has long since over run them. Why’d they die off? Overuse of the soil, or whatever, or just plain bad planning when it came to picking neighbors. But the point is, their world ended. You can nuke a patch of ground, and the radiation will kill everything. Years later, nature comes back. Generations later, some parts of it are livable. Still doesn’t mean setting a nuclear bomb off in the middle of your living room’s a good idea.”

“Sounds like a lot of drama.”

“We’re sitting on an edge, Mr. Stratton. You’ve seen it all change in your life. The young around us, they’ve only known the slipping and scrabbling, watching energy prices spiral out of control. They’re content to root around in their parents’ and grandparents’ trash to look for whatever they can recover. But you know better. You can feel it, that your life straddled the point where we hit the apex, and then started sliding. Remember when we used to make things.”

I remembered the long factory lines, the smokestacks belching. The rows of gleaming products, sitting perched over enticing price tags, all packaged in sexy gleaming plastics. They made so much you just tossed it all when you were done, because they’d make more.

We descended down a ramp of some sort, and the world grew dark on the outside of my hood. The lawyer slowly came to a stop, and reached over to remove my hood.

“Don’t ask where you are,” he said. “I’m a delivery man, of sorts. Now that I’m here, I can’t leave, but you may have to, and you can’t know where this is. Most of the people in here don’t know where it is. Keeps it safe.”

I clambered out into the barely lit dimness of an industrial warehouse, the windows all blacked out. As my eyes adjusted I realized it was entirely empty.

Until the doors swung open. People wearing large datagoggles over their eyes walked in. I could see that none of them could see where they were, or what was in front of them. But they marched in, like robots, following invisible lines of information.

More came in, carrying chairs, some with desks, that they sat at predetermined points. They swarmed around each other like ants, following some larger pattern of commands.

Maybe hundreds of them had already swarmed in through the room, and most had gone.

Large industrial worklights lit up the inside of the warehouse, and an entire command center’s worth of monitors had been strapped to a large metal trunk at the center, which had been quickly bolted onto the concrete floor.

Thick fiber optic cables ran all over the warehouse, terminating in a large trunk of bound cables that ran to a dish pointed out of one of the windows that had been pulled open.

The entire process had taken five very surreal minutes.

The crowds all evaporated, leaving ten individuals behind. One of them sat in a complex wheelchair that folded around him and held him up at eye level. It whirred and balanced, and trailed cables behind it.

Inside the wheelchair, the gray-skinned man moved closer to me. Sunken eye sockets, lids stitched closed, and plastic-looking cheekbones. One missing arm, with what was left plugged into a socket on the chair. No legs; they were hidden in the depths of the chair.

One ear was missing as well, replaced with a metallic ovoid sitting over that with three blue lights steadily on.

“Mr. Stratton, I’m afraid we’ve been recruiting you,” the man in front of me said. The wheelchair raised a bit higher so his face was level with mine. A small pair of cameras on his shoulder adjusted their focus with a faint whirr.

“Someone tipped off the Eddies that I was watching them. And someone didn’t pay the other half of what I was expecting.” For some reason, I’d been allowed to keep the bat. But bashing on a man with no legs, one arm, and no eyes was not going to be part of today’s equation.

“Guilty as charged. Mr. Stratton, we’re looking for a leader, someone who knows the area, and someone who has a good sense of the Edgewater contractors here. There are a number of candidates, but you’re a service man with a record, and a good idea of what we’ll be facing.”

“Listen . . . ” I wasn’t sure how to ask after his name, so I floundered for a second.

“My tag is Mock Turtle, the community moderator for this project.” Mock Turtle. A little bit of this, and a little bit of that. An amusing name for a man who was as much machine. He saw my amusement through his camera and nodded. “Yes. I do find some humor in my situation. The alternative was despair.”

“Okay, Mr. Turtle. The lawyer pitched me hard on your cause.” I looked around the warehouse. “I’m not interested. If people want to bike and walk the town, that’s their thing. I’m not getting involved in some riot.”

The wheelchair backed away. “We’re not, as such, asking you to volunteer. We’re willing to pay for your services. And settle up on what you think we still owe you.”

Now we were talking. “I’m listening.”

“An apartment in downtown Detroit. Maybe even continuing work as security for it.”

“A lease? How long, and how much?”

The ruin of a man in front of me chuckled. “You’re not paying close enough attention, Mr. Stratton. See, at first, we weren’t sure who we’d pick, or hire, to run the street side of this project. But then, you showed up, turking for us. It was a sign. Who better to run this than someone like you, down on your luck and needing the help? When you started snooping around, well, we had to bring you in. We’re offering you an apartment. A whole apartment.”

I stared. Like I said, there were some that would give their left nut for downtown space.

I included myself in that list.

“So you’re going to riot to turn this into a car-free city. And you need my help.” Too good to be true, it all was. And if there was one thing I learned in life, it was a little suspicion. “No way a downtown apartment’s worth it for my help. You’ve already got an army, well-trained, you showed it off when you set all this up in here a few minutes ago.”

The Mock Turtle spread his one arm. I recognized what those scars came from: a landmine. Boston, or DC, I wondered. “You’re right. It’s not just the cars. That’s a diversion. An important issue, yes. But we’re involved in some urban renewal as well.”

Which is where the apartment offer came from. They’d paid Maggie to try and overnight, I remembered. I could put a few things together. “You going to try to occupy the Slumps, are you?” All these nomads, they were going to settle in, try and reclaim some of these buildings.

I could have laughed.

“Not really, Mr. Stratton. It’s . . . more complicated than that. We make no guarantees, but I will put a good faith payment up in escrow right . . . now. Consider it a down payment on the apartment. We need a dedicated team of protestors to keep the Edgewater contractors busy, but the protest cannot get to the size that the military is called in. You have to both keep the protest in line, and keep it out of the Edgewater’s reach. It’ll be a delicate balance. If it works, and if our project works in the meantime, you’ll have an apartment of your own.

“If the project fails, you’re one of several people offered large cash payouts for your services on the ground, rather than volunteering your time. You will still get an equivalent pay. We are fair people, we depend on our word and reputations.”

Down the rabbit hole, off to meet the Mock Turtle, and now to engage in even more silliness.

But these mad hatters were certainly offering cold cash. I checked my phone, and the bank confirmed an escrow offer.

“The Edgewater guys, no deadly violence, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m your guy.”

Mock Turtle smiled. “Welcome aboard, Colonel Stratton.”

I cringed. “That’s why you came to me?”

“Of course. Welcome to Starship Detroit.”

“You have a silly name,” I said.

“You might not think so when we’re done,” said the strange man in the wheelchair.

I was in the heart of the sleeping dragon I’d sensed curled up in the darkness, the thing that S. Whatten feared.

I was deep into the crazy shit.

CMO S. Whatten, in his permanently wrinkle-free working suit, looked surprised. “Didn’t think you’d show back up.”

“Didn’t think I’d be back.” I handed him a receipt. “I refunded your payment. There’ll be a claim on the car. It was wrecked.”

Whatten took a sip of coffee, and looked down the street at the pair of men who’d biked me over to the compound. “Stratton. Colonel. I’m considering calling in reinforcements, or at least talking to the Edgewater board. I’m guessing that there are thousands of these people lurking around the city.”

“I think you’re overestimating,” I replied. He wasn’t, he was way, way underestimating.

“We tried to get satellite pictures of their camp from the other night, but someone has blocked it. A clever trick. I don’t know the size of my enemy, or their nature. And now they have a known counter turk-army specialist. You spent years taking down networked insurgencies, Stratton. Overseas. Now, if I didn’t know better, you seem to be working for one.”

I leaned forward, until my face was just an inch from the chicken wire and bars. “They are eco-freaks, Whatten. They applied for a protest license.”

“No one gets that anymore.” The right to assemble and protest had long since been finessed into oblivion. Didn’t stop them from happening, just meant you had no right to do it.

“I know. So they’re going to go ahead with it anyway.”

“And we’ll have to stop it. I’ll need reinforcements. Tell me why I shouldn’t bump this up?”

“A gentlemen’s agreement,” I said. “I promise that the protest will not exceed a number. How many can the local Eddies and their compounds handle?”

Whatten chuckled. “I tell you that and you deploy a larger number and I’m up the creek.” He sipped from his mug.

“Whatten, I shit you not, I’m trying to do you a favor. These are people who’re going to do this one way or another, but they’re scared of you. Remember fighting for country, the way things used to be? That’s what they’re after. The right to express dissatisfaction without getting a skull cracked. They hired me to keep it civil, keep things from getting crazy, because I have that expertise. Now, I could hire toughs to keep a barrier going between us, could get snipers up on the roofs, could make for some real ugly back and forths, but I just want to make an easy buck. We keep it small, balanced, and you get to round up some easy fines. They get to make their point. I get to make some serious cash from these hippies. One grunt to another, Whatten, let’s make this easy.”

I watched the gears turn. “You really think this’ll go down that easy?”

“Do you want the board staring down too close into your operation? You want them calling in military? National coverage of the event? Serious battle?”

Whatten looked off in the distance. “Some of my men are a bit jumpy by now.”

“Control them. Offer them bonuses for a calm day of rounding up these guys. Tell them chaos is not welcome. Tell them anything you want, but tell me what your threshold is for kicking the protest upstairs.”

“I see more than three hundred people I’m calling in reinforcements,” Whatten said.

“I’ll keep it to half that.”

“Half that?” Whatten looked incredulous. “It’s not going to be a protest, it’ll be a lunch date with a bad ending.”

“Half. Thank you, Whatten.”

“Call me Samuel. If it goes the way you say, I’ll even shake your hand when it’s all done. But Stratton . . . fellow grunt or not, we’re going to round people up. And if it gets big, it’s going to hit the fan. It isn’t just my men who’re jumpy. I’m getting it too. I’ll call the second it looks odd.”

“I know.” I handed Samuel Whatten my phone number. “We’ll keep in touch. Keep the lines open. The air clear. Just in case.”

I walked back down the street, blinking in the morning sun. Charlie, the bike enthusiast, waited for me.

“So?”

“The Eddies can handle a hundred protestors.”

“Damn it.” Charlie hit his bike handles in frustration. “There is no way we can shut Detroit down with a hundred protestors.”

I smiled. “We have an hour to do it, and then we have to keep doing it for twenty four hours. Come on Charlie, don’t you believe in the vision enough to trust me?”

He just stared at me.

I laughed. “We’ll need far more than a hundred people. We’ll need thousands and thousands.”

“But we’re trying to avoid getting the military to come out after us,” Charlie said.

“No more than a hundred can gather and protest. But the rest of the city is still a tool, Charlie. They still have eyes.”

Charlie was frustrated that the citizens of the city wouldn’t work to change their paradigms.

But they would.

You just had to turk them out in just the right way.

Detroit. Late morning. The first dry run I chose was near Grand Circus Park, a big intersection near a rundown, gothic-looking church. A set of roads ran semicircle around a portion of the intersection as well.

I sat, cross-legged, on top of a large stone block, in front of which was a statue of a sitting man.

It looked like Charlie’s wet dream. One hundred bikes converged from four different directions. Mock Turtle had given me a list of thousands of possibles, and I’d chosen the fittest, with the fastest bikes.

Speed would be an essential part of this equation.

A small smile quirked the side of my mouth, seeing the four sets of twenty-five bikers stream in at full tilt, pedaling away. They all braked to a sudden stop at the center of the intersection.

Now the chaos came. Cars with green lights braked, confused at the sudden clutter as the bikes made a barricade around the square of the intersection.

Waiting in electric utility vans was my support crew. I picked up my phone and selected the mailing list. “Roll out,” I typed.

Fifty men leapt out from the backs of the vans. My heavies. Anyone with a self defense or military background. They lugged plastic cones, and began placing them around the edge of the bicycle barricade.

I slipped on a pair of shades and let them talk to my phone. I needed more screen real estate. Because now, things would get tricky.

The more practical drivers, realizing something was afoot, and not wanting to get caught up in the middle of some riot or demonstration, began to try and start turning their cars around.

Finally, the signs went up declaring the area a car-free zone.

I could see Charlie standing with a bullhorn. Behold the rhetoric. Burn the gas-using relics of a failed era. Embrace the pedal-powered and walkable future.

All around the city I’d deployed bikes, messengers, and paid turks to call in the location of the Eddies. Small flags started popping up in my vision, on a map of Detroit via my heads up display glasses. Scrambling Eddies.

“Security out, ten to stay,” I sent. And the heavies melted back into the vans, which pealed off, a handful remaining off to the sides.

The Eddies were ripping up Washington Boulevard toward us. When they crossed Michigan Avenue I tapped in the scatter signal.

Just as abruptly as they’d appeared the protestors scrambled onto their bikes and took off in every direction, leaving only the stalled and snarled traffic, the cones, and the signs.

I hopped off the public art and strolled down into the park, near the empty fountain, then turned back to watch as the Eddies waded into the mess we’d created.

Angry drivers, confused Eddies not sure if it wasn’t the drivers somehow involved.

Some of them were. Paid to have trouble turning around, that was.

There was some small part of me inside chuckling. Being on the other side, there was a sort of beauty to this creative destruction. I’d always suspected there was.

Twenty Edgewater contractors, in full company uniform, were a bit frustrated.

I called a randomly selected heavy. “Atwater and Bates. Start forming it up.” It was close to the tunnel to Canada, enough to really freak the Eddies out.

The fleeing bicyclists would find warehouses, shops, and eateries to duck into. Beta group was activated and ready to go.

An electric waited for me at the far end of the park. And hopefully Charlie and his pals would leave this one alone long enough for me to get through the day.

After swinging around the effects of jammed traffic I headed for a view of the next mess.

I found a spot a block away from the intersection and parked the car. Lit up my heads-up display glasses. The Eddies were chasing bicyclists. They’d captured a few, given the ten SOS flags I saw.

Time to send in the lawyers for them.

“Atwater and Bates: go,” I ordered via my phone. The bicycles kicked into gear, and my heavies moved onto the scene to stand ready with cones and signs once more.

Since the turn of the century mobile networked insurgencies had been upsetting the balance of force in urban environments for First World militaries.

Infrastructure, Stratton. Infrastructure.

As laws ate away at the rights to demonstrate, free-form riots had begun to grow, imitating the guerilla tactics abroad. Standing still for a protest didn’t make any sense. Not when rioters would get classified as non-state terrorist entities when rounded up.

The trick was to control your membership. No violence. Which was hard to do when real insurgents waited in the wings to join protests as a cover for whatever they had in mind.

And when the Edgewater types paid turks to bring violence to a protest so that they could shut it down and levy massive fines for pure profit, one had to be quick on their feet.

Damn quick.

Even as my protestors set up, I saw Eddie flags popping up on my HUD map. They were reforming, dropping their chases, and coming my way.

Samuel Whatten was smart. Eyes on the ground reported a detachment of fifteen Eddies regrouping at Grand Circus Park.

“Security out,” I ordered. And then as the Eddies approached I ordered half the protestors to evaporate ahead of the brunt.

The remaining fifty scattered tire-piercing jax with blue-tooth signals, giving up information about the negative effects of personal transportation as practiced by the city currently.

I was sure the drivers would be thrilled with that.

But the message delivered was this: today, any cars in the area defined by the river and Interstates 375, 75, and the Lodge Freeway, would be harassed. Charlie shouted it. Agents delivered messages to blogs, podcast hosts, old media outlets, and placed battery powered projectors on overpasses all around this section of Detroit we’d staked out for the protest.

Here be no cars welcome.

Of course, we couldn’t shut down every street leading in. But if we caused enough trouble, and spread the word, enough people would get the idea and stay away because they didn’t want to get caught up in an Edgewater roundup and riot.

The effect would be the same.

And I had a few specific goals up my sleeve.

I ordered protestors to pedal out. We had a few more noncritical intersections to demonstrate at.

A few hackers under our pay tapping into Eddie radio chatter reported that the order was going out for all the compounds around Detroit to contribute extra contractors. All Detroit Eddies were getting yanked out of bed no matter their shift. Riot gear was being passed out.

Things were getting warm.

I yanked Charlie off the streets and had him chauffeur me around in my electric car. Things were getting complex enough I couldn’t drive and coordinate at the same time.

Enough people had heard his talking points and been briefed. They were handed loudspeakers and told to carry on the crusade.

Plus, making pedal-powered Charlie drive me around appealed to me on a deep level.

“Spaceship Detroit,” I asked him. “What do you know?”

“It’s the higher level project,” he said, from the front seat. He was doing his best to follow my orders, but not chat too much. Driving me around really had irked him.

It cheered me up.

“Urban renewal.” I knew I was running a big diversion, and I wondered if true-believers like Charlie knew they were just turking out.

It was like one of those games-with-a-purpose you could play online.

You thought you were taking over the world in a digital simulation, but instead you were helping develop an algorithm for bottle-packing computers based on your reactions to certain variables.

I had to admit, I was enjoying myself a hell of a lot more than I was working as a bouncer just a few nights ago.

“It’s noon,” Charlie said.

“I know.”

“So . . . ”

“Give it a few minutes,” I said. We passed by a series of office buildings. I could see faces in windows looking out. Word of a potential riot had gotten out. People were checking the streets before leaving for lunch.

We continued driving. As I drew more and more people into downtown, I wondered what would be happening in the Slumps.

Spaceship Detroit, huh?

I just hoped it wouldn’t be a massive piece of multiplayer performance art, or something stupid. Maybe some of the rhetoric had stuck on me. It would, if people flung it at you long enough.

I would love a walking city, like those European ones, where they’d eased into post-auto societies due to their medieval city layouts and historically high gas prices. I’d visited them, on my way to the trouble spots.

A city where I didn’t have to scrounge out in the Wilds, where the Slumps were utilized, and where it felt like there was action, and hope. I liked the sound of that.

“They’re coming out now,” Charlie said.

He was right. The lunch crowds were starting to form.

“Okay. Lunchtime madness,” I ordered via my phone.

Groups of twenty-five, in five different packs, descended outside popular restaurants, blocking off the roads to them with demonstrations. Again, jax, signs, and cones to muddy everything up.

Charlie’s acolytes preached their slogans, and people did their best to get away from the traffic snarls. The Eddies, now out in patrols in full force, and having gotten a sense for the rough area we’d staked out, descended quickly. They’d spread out in a rough net, and were using their own information to quickly rally to a point.

Turks with live cams gave me feeds of each demonstration, as well as streamed them live to anyone who really cared. Already some people in the city were honking horns whenever they saw a pack of bicyclists going by. Drivers, sympathetic to the cause.

Funny.

In the middle of protest number three, my heavies dragged out a bicyclist from the middle of the group. Discreet, quick, they tossed him into the back of a van, and my phone rang.

“He didn’t have an ID,” they reported. Each official protestor had a small RFID tag that responded to a challenge/response query that the support team could broadcast via their phones.

“Try and work out who he’s getting paid by,” I said.

“He doesn’t know. Just turking it,” was the response.

“The Eddies are thinking quick. Take him out into the Slumps and dump him off.”

Lunch had been successful. Late and annoyed business people, traffic tied up in all five locations. And we still were keeping just ahead of the increasingly frustrated Eddies.

A few of the protestors captured since the first demonstration had been shoved around a bit. But it was still civil.

“Lunch is over. Afternoon delight begins.” I smiled.

For the next four hours they just kept shifting the fun around the city, frustrating the traffic and Eddies. Eating into rush hour traffic as everyone left just added to it. Drivers jumped at every little glitter on the road, imagining tire-piercing jax waiting for them.

Outraged bicyclists not associated with the riots were getting arrested throughout the city as they tried to get to buses or home. The temporary protests appeared, vanished, appeared, vanished, constantly moving about.

At this point some of them were riding in the vans, getting dropped off in locations faster than they could bike to. And to be honest, there were closer to five hundred bicyclists working for me, hidden all throughout downtown.

Even though the Eddies now had extras coming in from the Slumps and the Wilds, I was prepared to keep this up all through the night, when Mock Turtle called.

“We have a problem,” he said softly.

Outside, the sun was dipping over the skyline, the buildings throwing their long shadows down the streets.

“What kind of problem?”

“Edgewater is advancing on the project. They’re liable to misinterpret what’s going on.”

“Well, what is going on?”

“Come and see.”

And the directions to one of the skyscrapers in the Slumps popped up on my phone.

As we drove deep into the Slumps I realized why Edgewater might get nervous. As night fell thousands of people were crawling out of nooks and crannies.

Even as we drove, the streets were filling with people.

People were working on portable machine shops, or turning out parts via automated stamping machines. Others ran up and down the street with carts and toward the center of all the activity.

Spaceship Detroit. The skyscraper loomed over this section of the Slumps, where the buildings made perhaps fifteen stories at best.

Massive solar panels had already been mounted to the upper deck and outside the windows, jutting from the building like leaves from a demented, scrap metal tree. Charlie swore and stopped the car, and I got out.

Dump trucks of soil lined the block, the air hazy with dust as they dumped dirt onto conveyor belts leading into the building, where vacuum hoses and other contraptions moved the dirt elsewhere.

And everywhere, a swarm of humanity working furiously.

Mock Turtle wove his way through the sidewalk, people blinded with their visors and tasks magically moving aside at the last second, a sea of humanity parting for him in his wheelchair.

“Welcome to the single most coordinated sudden attack of urban renewal ever witnessed,” he proclaimed. “Two hundred thousand souls, dedicated to turning this building into a sustainable structure.”

My knees were weak. “The Eddies are going to call in the military.”

“Since dawn we’ve been quietly working on the infrastructure of the building inside, doing as much prep as we could. Parts have been manufactured off-site for months now. We’ve all been rehearsing on 3-D models in massive multiplayer online simulations for a year, since we identified the target. It’s going to take eight more hours to get the soil in, and then finish the interior modifications once that’s in place for the full occupation.”

“But what is it?” Why did they need soil?

“People have been taking over unused buildings and repurposing them in decayed areas for as long as we’ve had cities. But what is the point in taking over structures like this, if we don’t have any new paradigms to offer?” Mock Turtle led me back toward the building. Inside the giant lobby people were working on a series of ponds. Sprinklers over my head went through a testing cycle, briefly dropping mist into the air.

My host continued. “It began in an online game that let people design homes. Many used it as a place to test how to make more efficient homes, or redesign existing homes in niches in cities. Eventually the designers realized we had the economy of a small country. And so they wondered how they could face some of these problems of how to be responsible dwellers. Out of that grew a community plan to create an embassy to the world.”

We took a glass elevator up through the building’s levels: I was seeing apple and orange trees, and rows of furrowed soil. I recognized all this. Farms. They were building farms. Like the skyscraper farms in New York. No need to worry about seasons. Much more efficient acreage. You could reuse the water as it filtered down via gravity.

“We used a squatter at first. That triggered a response from the Edgewater contractors here to evict that person. They have a contract to protect this building. Our hackers were able to then follow the report that Edgewater delivered about the incident back through several shell companies to the actual owner of this building.”

We’d passed twenty rows of farms and gardens, and now it turned into apartments and corridors.

“That information was made public, prompting liens and back-tax collection actions against the owners which forced them into bankruptcy. Now we’re claiming ownership, and offering to pay taxes and be good stewards. Under a subsidiary company based out of Turkey.”

“Turkey?” I said. “Why Turkey?”

“We have allies at the top in America. Allies who want us to succeed, who played the simulations, who know what we planned. And from a simple financial point of view, if we own the building, we’ll pay our taxes, raise the value of the building, and maybe even offer a plan to revitalize the Slumps. Since we put in a claim via a Turkish company to build an embassy, ostensibly for Turkey, we are technically on Turkish soil. They have a rule that says if you can build a building in a night where the owner doesn’t notice it to try and stop it, then you can stay there.

“So we will be allowed to have this land if we can finish this project in one night. But the previous owners, under a reconstituted company, are counter-filing having the building taken away, and are trying to stop us by getting the Eddies over here, because we have no building permits and we’re taking up the streets. It’s all legal fictions and weirdness, but we need to stop the Eddies from coming over here.”

He’d taken me to the top of the building, where a carefully landscaped set of gardens sat. With a waterfall trickling away already. I understood. Spaceship Detroit. A whole building that could sustain itself in all manners. This wasn’t recycling our forefather’s leftovers, or scrabbling about for what we could get today, this was its own direction. And it could be made right on the foundation of the existing.

“So how bad do you want that apartment? I could take you to see it, it’s just under our feet. Recycled oak floors, two bedrooms . . . ” I held up my hand to quiet him. We looked out over the twinkling skyline.

I’d had a feeling it would come to something like this. Riding the back of the tiger meant getting bashed up. It never came without consequences.

“I need three hundred very dedicated people,” I said. “Not the cyclists. People ready to get hurt. Because the Eddies are not going to go easy.”

“You can have thousands,” Mock Turtle said.

I shook my head. “Anymore than a few hundred is going to get the military involved. They’ll be able to meddle with the project, easily enough. We want just the Eddies to stay involved and away from here.”

“What are you going to do?”

I pointed off in the distance. “By the park, the Detroit Opera House. We take and hold it all night. It pushes over from nuisance into hostile, but with only three hundred of us, and them thinking it’s today’s protestors, they won’t escalate this into a major emergency. But get your lawyers ready.”

Mock Turtle reached out with his good hand. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” I looked out over the city with a sinking feeling in my stomach.

Was it just about the apartment now? Or had I gotten sick of skulking about in the Wilds by myself?

Or had a strong taste of the Mock Turtle’s Kool-Aid gotten to me?

A little bit of all of the above, I figured.

We rushed the security guards quickly enough, and I set teams to boarding up the doors. Jax were scattered on the streets. Protest signs wavered on the walls outside, thanks to projectors dropped all over the street.

Charlie had stuck with me, and he looked at the team. “Not a lot of us here.”

“Enough are,” I said. “We have to hold out until we get the all clear from the project or until we’re all rounded up.”

The Opera House was a recognizable building, a part of the history of the city. The Eddies would not ignore this.

Sure enough, my phone finally buzzed. CMO S. Whatten. “Stratton? I’m getting reports you’re at the Opera House?”

“We’re barring ourselves in for the night.”

I could see on my heads-up glasses that the Eddies were starting to stream this way.

“You sure about this?” Whatten asked. “We were just about to get a temporary city ban on bikes and end the whole protest. You want to take it up to this?”

“It’s too late, Samuel,” I looked around at the project volunteers. “We’re here for the night.”

The first Eddies were pulling up at the perimeter of our jax field.

But then, so were hundreds of people on bikes, and cars, and on foot, coming to see the latest star singer, sports player, or whoever they idolized.

Thanks to personal interest profiles, and thousands of turkers working to invite them down to the Detroit Opera House for a special showing of . . . whatever it was their interests indicated they would come down to see for a free showing.

These people weren’t working for anyone, or getting paid. They wouldn’t be classified as part of the protest.

But they were indirectly working for us.

The Eddies formed up, clearing away the jax. Their riot teams rolled up and out with battering rams to come in after us.

“Frustrated fans, execute,” I ordered.

Outside, whisper campaigns started. The Eddies were here to take away the impromptu concerts being planned. They were here to ruin the fun.

Now this was incitement.

The project’s lawyers were going to have to earn their money when I got bailed out later tonight.

My streaming video didn’t show who threw the first bottle. But when it broke on the pavement, the Eddies moved their focus from the Opera House to the massive crowd outside.

Charlie, sitting next to me in one of the balcony seats, swore. He was looking at the streams on a small pad in his hands.

Outside erupted.

It was clear enough these weren’t anti-car protestors. The Eddies had a two front war on their hands now. It bought us until just past midnight, as the Eddies had their backs to us to deal with the frustrated and unruly crowds trying to get in.

“You don’t have room in your cells for us,” I told Whatten when he called me again. “Why bother now?”

“We’ll make do,” he hissed. He sounded tired. The friendliness I’d found in him earlier had been wrung out.

“We have no weapons. We’re just trying to make a point.”

“You’ve well made it all day. We’re going to make a point as well.”

By one in the morning they had the whole outside of the Opera House surrounded, and they’d started smashing in one of the doors.

“Get up here,” I ordered, moving to the location. We pushed our way forward with planks, doing our best to keep it reinforced.

They fired tear gas in, noxious smoke roiling through at us. We had masks for it and kept on pushing back at the splintered planks we’d nailed up, our shoes slipping on broken glass.

“Eddies’re in the back,” Charlie reported. And we split our forces.

But there were more Eddies. As each new breach appeared we split to deal with it.

At two in the morning I ordered the bulk of the project volunteers to fall back to the next floor. The volunteers at the doors faced the Eddies, who punched through and started dragging them away.

I left half of the remaining volunteers to hold upper floors, leaning against doors, or just forming human chains.

The rest of us, a hundred now, took to the roof. Barricading anything we found on the way up there, we had fewer doors to defend.

“They only can land a handful at a time by helicopter,” I told a nervous Charlie. “And unlike the military during a riot, they’re not going to shoot us, because that won’t turn them a profit, will it?”

The hundred of us on the roof saw dawn break, helicopters hovering around the edges of the building, Eddies camped outside with fellow project members zip-tied to each other and sitting outside in one long line.

When they got through, the Eddies kicked and beat us down. Making their point.

But by then, we really didn’t care, did we?

Mock Turtle himself came to spring us. “Are you ready to see your apartment?” he asked.

But I found that I didn’t want it.

“What’s the next project?” I asked.

It was late in the morning, a year later.

I packed up my home, folding my tent back down. The skinnable walls faded, their pictures and vistas disappearing as I shut the tent off.

I packed the trailer behind my bike, and as I locked it down, the rest of the city around me started to wake up. The smell of fresh coffee wafted over the neighborhood lines as slow wakers got stumbling.

Fresh bread, airshipped in from a vertical farm in Columbus, or so everyone said, also filled the air. But I was in a hurry, and had decided to skip breakfast.

Everything folded up and away, with a quick double check to make sure the chalked-off area of my lot for the night was clean, and I was off.

Friends from the last months of slow pedaling across the great American West waved at me as I cranked along through the streets of a tent city that had gone up overnight. Five thousand in this particular tribe.

I passed security along the edge and they let me through. Then it was out along the back roads and trails with my electric-assist trike, with the aerodynamic trailer behind me with all my belongings bumping along.

I had found, over the last year, that I didn’t need much. I’d gotten rid of a lot of things as I’d moved my way West.

This last leg was easy, coming down out of the mountains. I passed a handful of other bicycles and small cars, a few gas-powered.

And there it was: Los Angeles.

I had two reasons for LA. For one, it was our next project. We had a new code name, didn’t want the local Eddies to sniff us out ahead of time. We were trickling into LA a little bit at a time. Project Ceres had an ambitious hundred building goal, enough to completely feed the entire city, thus putting the project in the financial situation of becoming a major agribusiness and funding the formal creating of vertical farms anywhere it wanted. A different aim than the spaceship concept, but one I could still get behind.

We’d been perfecting our methods all throughout the center of the country, gaining recruits, resources, and abilities.

The second reason was Maggie.

She was out here in the city. With the Mock Turtle’s resources, I’d found her.

I wanted to thank her.

It sounded ridiculous, but sometimes it took losing something important to you for you to shake yourself out of your old habits and seek out something new. Something different.

Sometimes, something better.

Originally published in Metatropolis, edited by John Scalzi.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Robert Reed

Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual Year’s Best anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella A Billion Eves. His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (Prime Books, 2014).

Alexander Jablokov

With only a handful of stories, mostly for Asimov’s, and a few well-received novels, Alexander Jablokov established himself as one of the most highly-regarded new writers of the ’90s. His first novel, Carve The Sky, was released in 1991, and was followed by other successful novels such as A Deeper Sea, Nimbus, River of Dust, and Deepdrive, as well as a collection of his short-fiction, The Breath of Suspension. Jablokov fell silent through the decade of the Oughts, but in the last couple of years has been returning to print, releasing Brain Thief in 2010, his first novel in over ten years, and popping up in the magazines again with elegant, cooly pyrotechnic stories.

Tobias S. Buckell

Called “Violent, poetic and compulsively readable” by Maclean’s, science fiction author Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling writer born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, and the islands he lived on influence much of his work.

His Xenowealth series begins with Crystal Rain. Along with other stand-alone novels and his over fifty stories, his works have been translated into eighteen different languages. He has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. His latest novel is Hurricane Fever, a follow up to the successful Arctic Rising that NPR says will “give you the shivers.”

He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs.

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 month by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.