Issue 41, June 2018

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

Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Entanglement

a novella by Vandana Singh

Sails the Morne

a novelette by Chris Willrich

Hotel

a novelette by Suzanne Palmer

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the June 2018 issue of Forever Magazine!

I’ve barely had time to think in the last month. As I mentioned last month, my travel schedule was very heavily in May: family vacation, Nebula Awards, and Balticon. It was a made dash to get this month’s issues of Clarkesworld and Forever done, not to mention the final work on an anthology and behind-the-scenes work on a new Chinese anthology.

And then came the news that Gardner Dozois has passed away. I knew he was in the hospital, but all signs seemed to point to recovery. Stunned doesn’t even begin to describe it. My Clarkesworld editorial this month hits on some of what he meant to me. (Many didn’t know he was the Reprint Editor there for the last five years.)

Aside from the down note the month ended on, I had a great time on my trips. My introvert batteries are completely drained, but it was worth it. Now I’m ready to stay home for the next month and get things off my checklist.

Until next time . . .

-Neil

Entanglement

Vandana Singh

 . . . FLAPPING ITS WINGS . . .

 . . . and flying straight at her. She ducked, averting her eyes. The whole world had come loose: debris flying everywhere; the roar of the wind. Something soft and sharp cannoned into her belly—she looked up to see the monster rising into the clouds, a genie of destruction, yelled—Run! Run! Find lower ground! Lower ground!

She woke up. The boat rocked gently; instrument panels in the small cabin painted thin blue and red lines. Outside, the pale Arctic dawn suffused the sky with orange light. Everything was normal.

“Except I hadn’t been asleep, not really,” she said aloud. Her morning coffee had grown cold. “What kind of dream was that?”

She rubbed the orange bracelet. One of the screens flickered. There was a fragmented image for a microsecond before the screen went blank: a gray sky, a spinning cloud, things falling. She sat up.

Her genie appeared in a corner of the screen.

“Irene, I just connected you to five people around the world,” it said cheerfully. “Carefully selected, an experiment. We don’t want you to get too lonely.”

“Frigg,” she said, “I wish you wouldn’t do things like that.”

There were two messages from Tom. She thought of him in the boat three hundred kilometers away, docked to the experimental iceberg, and hoped he and Mahmoud were getting along. Good, he had only routine stuff to report. She scrolled through messages from the Arctic Science Initiative, the Million Eyes project, and three of her colleagues working off the northern coast of Finland. Nothing from Lucie.

She let out a long, slow breath. Time to get up, make fresh coffee. Through the tiny window of the boat’s kitchenette, the smooth expanse of ocean glittered in the morning light. The brolly floated above it like a conscientious ghost, not two hundred meters away. Its parachute-like top was bright in the low sun, its electronic eyes slowly swiveling as the intelligent unit in the box below drank in information from the world around it. Its community of intelligences roved the water below, making observations and sending them back to the unit, so that it could adjust its behavior accordingly. She felt a tiny thrill of pride. The brolly was her conception, a crazy biogeochemist’s dream, brought to reality by engineers. The first prototype had been made by Tom himself, in his first year of graduate school. Thinking of his red thatch of hair framing a boyish face, she caught herself smiling. He was such a kid! The first time he’d seen a seal colony, he’d almost fallen off the boat in his enthusiasm. You’d think the kid had never even been to a zoo. He was so Californian, it was adorable. Her own upbringing in the frozen reaches of northern Canada meant she was a lot more cold-tolerant than him—he was always overdressed by her standards, buried under layers of thermal insulation and a parka on top of everything. Some of her colleagues had expressed doubts about taking an engineering graduate student to the Arctic, but she’d overruled them. The age of specialization was over; you had to mix disciplinary knowledge and skills if you wanted to deal intelligently with climate change, and who was better qualified to monitor the brollies deployed in the region? Plus Mahmoud would make a great babysitter for him. He was a sweet kid, Tom.

She pulled on her parka and went out on deck to have her coffee the way she liked it, scalding hot. Staring across the water, she thought of home. Baffin Island was not quite directly across the North Pole from her station in the East Siberian Sea, but this was the closest she had come to home in the last fifteen years. She shook her head. Home? What was she thinking? Home was a sunny apartment in a suburb of San Francisco, a few BART stops from the university, where she had spent ten years raising Lucie, now twenty-four, a screenwriter in Hollywood. It had been over a year since she and Lucie had had a real conversation. Her daughter’s chatty e-mails and phone calls had given way to a near silence, a mysterious reserve. In her present solitude that other life, those years of closeness, seemed to have been no more than a dream.

Over the water the brolly moved. There was a disturbance not far from the brolly—an agitation in the water, then a tail. A whale maybe five meters in length swimming close to the surface popped its head out of the water—a beluga! Well, she probably wasn’t far from their migration route. Irene imagined the scene from the whale’s perspective: the brolly like an enormous, airborne jellyfish, the boat, the human-craft, and a familiar sight.

The belugas were interested in the brolly. Irene wondered what they made of it. One worry the researchers had was that brollies and their roving family units would be attacked and eaten by marine creatures. The brolly could collapse itself into a compact unit and sink to the seabed or use solar power to rise a couple of meters above the ocean surface. At the moment it seemed only to be observing the whales as they cavorted around it. Probably someone, somewhere, was looking at the ocean through the brolly’s electronic eyes and commenting on the Internet about a whale pod sighting. Million Eyes on the Arctic was the largest citizen science project in the world. Between the brollies, various observation stations, and satellite images, more than two million people could obtain and track information about sea ice melt, methane leaks, marine animal sightings, and ocean hot spots.

It occurred to Irene that these whales might know the seashore of her childhood, that they might even have come from the north Canadian archipelago. A sudden memory came to her: going out into the ocean north of Baffin Island with her grandfather in his boat. He was teaching her to use traditional tools to fish in an icy inlet. She must have been very small. She recalled the rose-colored Arctic dawn, her grandfather’s weathered face. When they were on their way back with their catch, a pod of belugas had surfaced close enough to rock their boat. They clustered around the boat, popping their heads out of the water, looking at the humans with curious, intelligent eyes. One large female came close to the boat. “Qilalugaq,” her grandfather said gently, as though in greeting. The child Irene—no, she had been Enuusiq then—Enuusiq was entranced. The Inuit, her grandfather told her, wouldn’t exist without the belugas, the caribou, and the seals. He had made sure she knew how to hunt seals and caribou before she was thirteen. Memories surfaced: the swish of the dog sled on the ice in the morning, the waiting at the breathing holes for the seals, the swift kill. The two of them saying words of apology over the carcass, their breath forming clouds in the frigid air.

Her grandfather died during her freshman year of high school. He was the one who had given her her Inuk name, Enuusiq, after his long-dead older brother, so that he would live again in her name. The name held her soul, her atiq. “Enuusiq,” she whispered now, trying it on. How many years since anyone had called her that? She remembered the gathering of the community each time the hunters brought in a big catch, the taste of raw meat with a dash of soy. How long had it been since those days? A visit home fifteen years ago when her father died (her mother had died when she was in college)—after that just a few telephone conversations and Internet chats with her cousin Maggie in Iqaluit.

The belugas moved out of sight. Her coffee was cold again. She was annoyed with herself. She had volunteered to come here partly because she wanted to get away—she loved solitude—but in the midst of it, old memories surfaced; long-dead voices spoke.

The rest of the morning she worked with a fierce concentration, sending data over to her collaborators on the Russian research ship Kolmogorov, holding a conference call with three other scientists, politely declining two conference invitations for keynote speaker. But in the afternoon her restlessness returned. She decided she would dive down to the shallow ocean bed and capture a clip for a video segment she had promised to the Million Eyes project. It was against protocol to go down alone without anyone on the boat to monitor her—but it was only twenty-two meters, and she hadn’t got this far by keeping to protocol.

Some time later she stood on the deck in her dry suit, pulled the cap snugly over her head, checked the suit’s computer, wiggled her shoulders so the oxygen tank rested more comfortably on her back, and dove in.

This was why she was here. This falling through the water was like falling in love, only better. In the cloudy blue depths she dove through marine snow, glimpsing here and there the translucent fans of sea butterflies, a small swarm of krill, the occasional tiny jellyfish. A sea gooseberry with a glasslike two-lobed soft body winged past her face. Some of these creatures were so delicate a touch might kill them—no fisherman’s net could catch them undamaged. You had to be here, in their world, to know they existed. Yet there was trouble in this marine paradise. Deeper and deeper she went, her drysuit’s wrist display clocking time, temperature, pressure, oxygen. The sea was shallow enough at twenty-two meters that she could spend some time at the bottom without worrying about decompression on the way up. It was darker here on the seaweed-encrusted ocean floor; she turned on her lamp and the camera. Swimming along the sea-floor toward the array of instruments, she startled a mottled white crab. It was sitting on top of one of the instrument panels, exploring the device with its claws. Curiosity . . . well, that was something she could relate to. The crab retreated as she swam above it, then returned to its scrutiny. Well, if her work entertained the local wildlife, that was something.

A few meters away she saw the fine lines of the thermoelectric mesh on the seabed. There were fewer creatures in the methane-saturated water. Methane gas was coming up from the holes in the melting permafrost on the seabed—there were even places you could see bubbles. Before her a creature swam into focus: a human-built machine intelligence, one of the brolly’s family unit. Its small, cylindrical body, with its flanges and long snout, looked like a fish on an alien planet. It was injecting a rich goo of nutrients (her very own recipe) for methane-eating bacteria. She was startled by how natural it looked in the deep water. “Eat well, my hearties,” she told her favorite life-forms. Methanotrophs were incredibly efficient at metabolizing methane, using pathways that were only now being elucidated. Most of the processes could not be duplicated in labs. So much was still unknown—hell, they’d found five new species of the bacteria since the project had started. Methanotrophs, like most living beings, didn’t exist in isolation, but in consortia. The complex web of interdependencies determined behavior and chemistry.

“If methane-eating bacteria sop up most of the methane, it will help slow global warming,” she said into the recorder. “It will buy time until humanity cuts its carbon dioxide emissions. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Although it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long, too much methane in the atmosphere might excite a positive feedback loop—more methane, more warming, more thawing of permafrost, more methane . . . a vicious cycle that might tip the world toward catastrophic warming.” Whether that could happen was still a point of argument among scientists, but the methane plumes now known to be coming off the seabed all over the shallow regions of the Arctic were enough to worry anyone whose head wasn’t buried in the sand.

Maybe her bacteria could help save the world. With enough nutrients, they and their communities of cooperative organisms might take care of much of the methane; in the meantime the thermoelectric mesh was an experiment to see whether cooling down the hot spots might slow the outgassing. The energy generated by the mesh was captured in batteries, which had to be replaced when at capacity. The instrument array measured biogeochemical data and sent it back to the brolly.

Her drysuit computer beeped. It was time to return to the surface—or else she would run out of oxygen. She turned off the camera-recorder and swam slowly and carefully toward the light. “Message from Tom,” her genie said. “Not urgent but interesting. Two messages from Million Eyes, one to you, asking about the video, the other a news item. A ballet dancer in Estonia saw an illegal oil and gas exploration vessel messing around the Laptev Sea. There’s a furor. Message from your cousin Maggie in Iqaluit, marked Personal. She’s in San Francisco, wondering where you are.”

Damn. Hadn’t she told Maggie she was going on an expedition? Maggie hardly ever left Canada so the trip to San Francisco must be something special.

“I’m coming up,” she said, just as she felt a numbing pain sear into her left calf. The cold was coming in through a leak, a tear in the suit; her drysuit computer beeped a warning. Her leg cramped horribly. She looked up, willing herself not to panic—the surface seemed impossibly far away, and the cold was filling her body, making her chest contract with pain. She moved her arms as strongly as she could. She must get up to the surface before the cold spread—she had had a brush with hypothermia before. But as she went up with excruciating slowness she knew at once that she was going to die here, and a terror came upon her. Lucie, she said. Lucie, forgive me, I love you, I love you. Her arms were tired, her legs like jelly, and the cold was in her bones, and a part of her wanted simply to surrender to oblivion. Frigg was chirping frantically in her ear—calling for rescue, not that there was anyone in the area who could get to her in time—and then a voice cut in, and her grandmother said, Bless you and be careful up there, I’m praying for you. This was really odd because her grandmother was dead, and the accent was strange. But the voice spoke with such clarity and concern, and there was such an emphasis on be careful—and weren’t there kitchen sounds in the background, a pan banging in the sink, so incongruously ordinary and familiar?—that she was jolted from the darkness of spirit that had descended on her. Her arms seemed to be the only part of her body still under her control, and although they felt like lead, she began to move them again.

Tom’s voice cut in, frantic. “I’m coming, I’m coming as fast as I can, hold on,” and Mahmoud, more calmly, “I’ve contacted the Kolmogorov for their helicopter—and the Coast Guard.” But the helicopter had been sent over to a station in Norway that very afternoon. She saw her death before her with astonishing clarity. Then she felt something lift her bodily—how could Tom get here so soon?—an enormous white shadow loomed, a smile on the bulbous face—a whale. A beluga? She felt the solid body of the whale below her, tried to get a hold of the smooth flesh, but she needn’t have worried, because it was pushing her up with both balance and strength, until she broke the water’s surface near the boat. Hauling herself up the rungs of the ladder proved to be impossible: she was shaking violently, and her legs felt numb. The whale pushed her up until all she had to do was to tumble over the rail onto the deck. She collapsed on the deck, pulled off her mask, sobbing, breathing huge gulps of cold air. Her suit beeped shrilly.

“Get dry NOW,” Frigg said in Mahmoud’s voice, or maybe it was Mahmoud. She half crawled into the cabin, peeled everything off, and huddled under a warm shower until the shivering slowed. A searing pain in both legs told her that blood was circulating again. There was a frayed tear in the drysuit—had it caught on a nail as she was pulling it out of the cupboard? So much for damning protocol, something she never did if a colleague or student was involved. Her left calf still ached, and the tears wouldn’t stop. At last she toweled off and got into warm clothes, with warm gelpacks under her armpits and on her stomach. The medbot checked her vital signs while hot cocoa bubbled.

“Frigg, tell Tom and Mahmoud not to come, my vitals are fine,” she said, but her voice shook. “Tell them to call off the rescue.” Her chest still ached, but as she sipped the cocoa she started to feel more normal. After a while she could stand without feeling she was going to fall over.

She stepped gingerly out on the deck. The sun, already low in the sky, was falling slowly into the ocean like a ripe peach. The first stars sequined the coming Arctic night. The belugas swam around the boat. She finished her cocoa in a few gulps and felt a shadow of strength return to her. A whale popped its head out of the water next to her boat and looked at her with friendly curiosity.

She put her arms between the railing bars and touched the whale’s head. It was smooth as a hard-boiled egg. “Qilalugaq,” she whispered, and tears ran down her cheeks, and her shoulders shook. “Thank you, thank you for saving my life. Did Ittuq send you?” She realized she was speaking Inuktitut, the familiar syllables coming back as though she had never left home. “Ittuq,” she whispered. She had been too young when her grandfather died, too shocked to let herself mourn fully. Now, thirty-nine years later, the tears flowed.

At last she stood, leaning against the rail, spent, and waved to the pod as it departed.

Later that night, when she had eaten her fill of hot chicken soup, she talked to Tom on video. He was touchingly grateful that she was all right and excited about the whale rescue. Irene said, “Don’t go around broadcasting it, will you?” She had no desire to see her foolishness go viral on the Internet. Fortunately Tom had something exciting of his own to share.

“Look!” he said. “This is from this afternoon.” A photo appeared on the side of the screen. There lay the enormous bulk of the artificial iceberg to which his boat was docked. An irregular heap lay atop it.

“Polar bear,” he said, grinning. “Must have been swimming for a while, looking for a rest stop. Poor guy’s sleeping off a late lunch. I tossed him my latest catch of fish.”

“Stay away from him!” Irene said sharply. “Wild animals aren’t cute house pets—remember your briefing!”

“You’re a fine one to talk, Irene.” He grinned again, and then, anticipating her protests, “Yes, yes, I know, don’t worry. If I go aboard the berg with the bear on it, some kid somewhere is going to notice and send me a message. This morning I stepped out without my snow goggles and a twelve-year-old from Uzbekistan messaged my genie. Thanks to Million Eyes you can hardly take a shit in peace . . . er, sorry . . . ”

“It’s not that bad.” She couldn’t help smiling. Good for the kid in Uzbekistan. Tom could be absentminded. The screen image of the fake berg was impossibly white. It was coated with a high-albedo nanostructured radiative paint that sent infrared right back into the atmosphere, while leaving the surface cool to the touch.

“Another interesting thing happened today,” he said, with the kind of casualness that betrayed suppressed excitement. “You know we have eight brollies on big lump?” Big lump was the largest iceberg in a flotilla about fifty kilometers north of Tom’s station. “They’ve been screening meltwater pools on the berg from the sun, refreezing them before they have a chance to melt deeply enough to make cracks. Well, three nomad brollies arrived from Lomonosov Station—just left their posts of their own accord and came over and joined them. Mahmoud just reported.”

“Very interesting,” she said.

It was not surprising that brollies were making their own decisions. It meant that as learning intelligences, intimately connected to their environment and to one another, they had gone on to the next stage of sophistication. Her own brolly continuously monitored the biogeochemical environment, knowing when to feed the methanotroph consortia their extra nutrients, and when to stop. Her original conception of linked artificial intelligences with information feedback loops was based on biomimicry, inspired by natural systems like ecosystems and endocrine systems. Her brolly was used to working as a community of minds, so she imagined that facility could be scaled up. Each brolly could communicate with its own kind and was connected to the climate databases around the world, giving as well as receiving information, and capable of learning from it. She had a sudden vision of a multilevel, complexly interconnected grid, a sentience spanning continents and species, a kind of Gaiaweb come alive.

“How much time before they become smarter than us?” she said, half-jokingly. “This is great news, Tom.”

Afterward she watched the great curtains of the aurora paint the sky. She sat in her cabin, raising her eyes from the data scrolling down her screen. Temperature was dropping in the ocean seabed—the methane fizzler had perceptibly slowed since the project began. It was a minute accomplishment compared to the scale of the problem, but with two million pairs of eyes watching methane maps of the Arctic, maybe they could get funding to learn how to take care of the worst areas that were still manageable. Partly the methane outgassing was a natural part of a thousands-years process, but it was being exacerbated by warming seas. Didn’t science ultimately teach what the world’s indigenous peoples had known so well—that everything is connected? A man gets home from work in New York City and flips a switch, and a little more coal is burned, releasing more warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Or an agribusiness burns a tract of amazon rain forest, and a huge carbon sink is gone, just like that. Or a manufacturer in the United States buys palm oil to put in cookies, and rain forests vanish in Southeast Asia to make way for more plantations. People and their lives were so tightly connected across the world that it would take a million efforts around the globe to make a difference.

She touched the orange wristlet and the screen came on. “Frigg, call Maggie.”

“Irene, Irene?” Maggie had more gray in her hair, but her voice was as loud as before. Demanding. “Where have you been? They told me at your campus you were in the Arctic, and I thought, dammit, she’s come home at last, but I hear you’re somewhere in Siberia?”

“Don’t you keep up?” Irene said, growling, trying not to grin in delight, and failing. She blinked tears from her eyes. “Siberia is where it’s at. I’m in a boat, running an experiment on the seabed. Trying to stop methane outgassing, you know, save the world, all in a day’s work.”

“Great, great, but I hate coming all the way here and finding you gone. I have to tell you, I saw Lucie. Yes, you heard me right. She’s going into documentary filmmaking—expedition to Nepal—”

Nepal!

“Well, I am glad she’s talking to you,” Irene said, after a moment. “Is she . . . is she all right?”

“She’s fine! Irene, she just needs to find her own way—you two have been by yourselves for so long . . . ”

“By ourselves! In the middle of the empty streets of the bay area!”

“You know what I mean. Big cities can be terribly lonely. Why do you think I came back after college? Listen, Irene, nuclear families suck, and single-parent nuclear families suck even more. People need other people than just their parents. My kids have issues with being here in Iqaluit, but at least they are surrounded by uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents—”

“How are your parents? How is everyone?”

“Waiting for you to come home. Come and visit, Irene. It’s been too long. We all thought you were the one who was going to stay because of everything you learned about the old ways from Grandfather.”

“The last time I came, when my father died . . . your mother threw a fish at me and told me to gut it.”

Maggie laughed.

“Which I think you did pretty well. Surprised me. Now you have to come on up, Irene! Or down, I should say. Come talk to my boy. Peter’s part of a collaboration between Inuit high schoolers and scientists. Hunters too. Going out with GPS units, recording information about ice melting and wildlife sightings.”

Irene wanted to say, Maggie, I almost died today, but Qilalugaq gave me the gift of life, and that means I have to change how I live. I need your help. The words wouldn’t come out. She said, instead:

“Maggie, I got to go. Let’s talk tomorrow . . . we have to talk.”

“Irene, are you all right? Irene?”

“Yes . . . no, I can’t talk about it now. Tomorrow? If . . . if you see Lucie again, tell her—give her my love.”

“I’m seeing her Friday for lunch before she leaves. I will, don’t worry. Tomorrow, for sure then. Hang in there, girl!”

She waved good-bye and the screen went blank. The lights of the aurora reflected off the walls and desk in the darkened room. The boat swayed gently—out there, the pale top of the brolly floated. Something splashed out at sea, a smooth back. She remembered the small house in Iqaluit where she’d grown up with her parents and grandfather and two aunts and cousins. The great sky over the ice, sky reflecting ice reflecting sky in an endless loop. Her grandfather had been an immensely practical man, but he had also taught her to pay attention to intangible things, things you couldn’t quantify, like the love you could feel for a person, or the land, or the whale. She had been rescued by a whale, a whale from home. What more of a sign did she need? She had stayed away first because it was inconvenient to go all the way, and then because she had been so busy, doing important work—and later because she was confused and ashamed. How to face them all, knowing that despite her successes she had lost her way, wandered off from her own self? How to return home without Lucie, knowing herself a failure in so many ways? Now she saw that the journey home was part of her redemption, and as the belugas migrated, traveling in great closed loops in the still-frigid waters of the Arctic, visiting and revisiting old ground, so must she. “Enuusiq,” she whispered, practicing. She thought of her daughter’s eager, tender face in childhood as she listened to a story, and the bittersweet delight when Lucie went off to college, so young and beautiful, intelligence and awareness in her eyes, at the threshold of adulthood. She thought of herself as a small child, watching her mother weaving a pattern on the community loom: the sound, the rhythm, the colors, her mother’s hands. The world she loved was woven into being every moment through complex, dynamic webs of interaction: the whales in their pods, the methanotrophs and their consortia, the brollys and their family units, the Million Eyes of eager young people trying to save the world.

“Ittuq,” she said aloud, “I’m coming home.”

 . . . IN THE AMAZON . . .

 . . . There is a city in the middle of the rain forest: Manaus. This year there is a drought. The rains are scant. When they fall, they fall kilometers downwind of the city . . .

In the heat, outside the glitzy hotels and bars, there is the smell of rotting fruit, fish, garbage, flowers, exhaust. Rich and poor walk the streets with their cell phones or briefcases or Gucci handbags or baskets of jenipapo or camu-camu, and among them prowls the artist. He’s looking for a blank wall, the side of a building. Any smooth, empty surface is a canvas to him.

His favorite time is the early morning. In that pale light when the bugio monkeys and the birds begin to call, he is there with black oil chalk and a ladder, drawing furiously in huge arm strokes, then filling in the fine-detail work. He never knows what animal will emerge from the wall—the first stroke tells him nothing, nor the next, or the next, but each stroke limits the possibilities until it is clear what spirit has possessed him, and then it emerges. When it is a jaguar, he, the artist, feels the bark of the tree limb; he flickers through the jungle on silent, padded feet. When a manatee emerges from the blank wall, the artist knows the watery depths of the river, the mysterious underwater geography. When it is a bird, he knows the secret pathways of the high jungle canopy.

Then he is done. He looks around, and there is nobody, and he breathes a sigh of relief. He slips away through the sleeping streets to another self, another life.

Fernanda stared out from the airplane window at the city that was her home. It was a bright splash of whiteness in the green of the Amazon rain forest. Urban heat island indeed, she thought. The city had grown enormously in the last decade, with the boom in natural gas and high-tech manufacturing—returning to it was always a surprise—a populous, economically vigorous human habitation in the middle of the largest forest in the world. Despite the urban forests that made green pools in the white sea of concrete, it lay before her like scar tissue in the body of the jungle. The Rio Negro was languid as an exhausted lover—the water was lower than she could remember since the last drought. She hadn’t forgotten what it had been like, as a child, to stand on the dry bed of the river during the big drought, feeling like the world was about to end. Bright rooftops came up toward her as the plane dipped, and she tried to see if there were any green roofs—hard to tell from this height. Never mind, she would know soon enough, when she joined the new project.

“Been on holiday?” the man next to her said pleasantly.

Fernanda was caught off guard. She had spent three months in the coastal jungle studying the drought, counting dead trees, making measurements of humidity, temperature, and rainfall, and, on one occasion, fighting a forest fire started by an agricultural company to clear the forest. Her left forearm still hurt from a burn. The team had camped in the hot, barren expanse, and after two months she and Claudio had broken up, which is why she was coming back alone. They’d established beyond doubt that barren wasteland was hotter than healthy forest, and that less rain fell here, and that it was similar to an urban heat island. Far from being able to regrow the forest, they had to fight greedy marauders to prevent more of it from being destroyed. Claudio remained behind with the restoration team, and the rest of them had trekked through the deep coolness of the remaining healthy forest until they had got to civilization. She had grown silent as the forest muttered, called, clucked, and roared around her, had felt its rhythms in some buried ancestral part of her, and her pain had quieted to a kind of soft background noise. Now she looked at the man in his business suit and his clean-shaven, earnest face, the shy smile, the hint of a beer belly, and thought how alien her own species seemed whenever she returned from the forest.

“Business,” she said coldly, hoping he wouldn’t inquire any further. The plane began its descent.

The city was the same and not the same. She found out within the next few days that the cheerful family gatherings at Tia Ana’s, which she’d always enjoyed, were a lot more difficult without Claudio, mostly because of the questions and commiserations. Tia Ana had that look in her eye that meant she was already making matchmaking plans. Her mother had tickets for two for a performance of Aida at the Teatro Amazonas, no less, which was something to look forward to. Inevitably she thought about that last fight with Claudio, when he accused her of being more sexual with her saxophone than with him. Not that she’d brought her sax into the rain forest—but she hadn’t been able to take it out of its case as yet.

What was different was that there wasn’t enough rain. When the clouds did gather, there might be a scant shower over the city, but most of the rain would fall about fifty kilometers downwind. Meanwhile the humans sweltered in their concrete and wooden coops—those who had air-conditioning cranked it up—the poor on the city’s east side made do without, some falling victim to heat exhaustion. But for the most part the lives of the middle and upper classes went on much the same apart from the occasional grumbling. It seemed peculiar to Fernanda that even in this self-consciously eco-touristy city, people whom she knew and loved could live such oblivious lives, at such a remove from the great, dire warnings the biosphere was giving them.

The other thing that was different was the artist.

An anonymous graffiti artist had hit the streets of Manaus. Sides of buildings, or walls, were transformed by art so startling that it slowed traffic, stopped conversations. She heard about all this with half an ear and didn’t pay attention until she went running the day before her new project began. White shorts and tank top, her black hair flying loose, along the harborway, through the crowded marketplaces with their bright awnings and clustering tourists, she ran through the world of her species, trying to know it again. She paused at a fruit stand, good-naturedly fending off the flirtations of two handsome youths while she drank deeply of buriti juice. There were ferries as usual on the Rio Negro, and the water was as she remembered it, dark and endless, on its way to its lover’s tryst with the Solimões to form the Amazon, the Amazon she had known and loved all her life.

She turned onto a side street and there was a jaguar, about to leap at her from the windowless side of a building. She stopped and stared. It was abstract, rendered in fluid, economical brushstrokes, but the artist knew which details were essential; whoever it was had captured the spirit of the beast, the fire in its eyes, what Neruda had called its phosphorescent absence. For a moment she stood before it, enthralled, the jungle around her again.

After that she looked for more of the work, asking at street corners and market stalls. The drawings were everywhere—a flight of macaws, a sloth on a tree branch, or an anaconda about to slide off a wall onto the street. Wherever they were, there was a crowd. The three-dimensionality of the drawings was astounding. The ripple of muscle, the fine lines of feathers, the spirit come alive in the eye. She was contemplating a particularly stunning rendering of a sauim-de-coleira that a real monkey would be forgiven for mistaking for its relative, when a car full of university freshmen went by, loudly playing what passed for music among the young (she was getting old and jaded at twenty-seven!). The car stopped with a screech of brakes and the youngsters piled out, silenced, and Fernanda thought in triumph: This is the answer to the oblivious life. Art so incredible that it brings the jungle back into the city, forces people to remember the nations of animals around us.

But the next day, looking at the data from her rooftop lab, she was not encouraged. The city’s pale roofs were glaring back at the sun. What impact did the city’s heat island have on the local climate, compared to the drought-ridden sections of the forest? The drought was mostly due to large-scale effects connected with warming oceans and coastal deforestation, but she was interested in seeing whether smaller-scale effects were also significant, and by that logic, whether small-scale reparations at the right scale and distribution might make some difference. It was still a controversial area of research. She spent days poring over maps on her computer screen, maps generated by massive computer models of climate, local and regional. Could the proposed green-roofing experiment be significant enough to test the models? How to persuade enough people and institutions to install green roofs? Scientists were notoriously bad at public relations. Tia Ana would say they weren’t good at other kinds of relationships either, although that wasn’t strictly true. Her former advisor, Dr. Aguilar, had been happily married to his wife for half a century.

There was a private home in the Cidade Nova area that was already green-roofed according to the design—native plants, chosen for their high rates of evapotranspiration, mimicking the radiative properties of the rain-forest canopies. If they could get enough city officials, celebrities, and so on to see a green roof in action, maybe that would popularize the idea. The home was in a wealthy part of town, and the owner, one Victor Gomes, was connected to the university. She went to see it one hot afternoon.

It was quite wonderful to stand in a rooftop garden with small trees in pots, shrubs in raised beds arranged with a pleasing lack of respect for straight lines, and an exuberance of native creepers that cascaded lushly over the walls. There were fruits and vegetables growing between the shrubs. This was the same model that the restoration team was using in the drought-ridden portions of the Atlantica forest—organically grown native forest species with room for small vegetable gardens and cacao, rubber, and papaya trees, inspired by the cabruca movement: small-scale agriculture that fed families and preserved the rain forest. Fernanda looked over the railing and saw that the foliage covered almost the entire side wall of the house. A misting sprayer was at work, and a concealed array of instruments on poles recorded temperature, humidity, and radiative data. It felt much cooler here. Of course, water would be a problem, with the rationing that was being threatened. Damn the rains, why didn’t they come?

But she was encouraged. On her way back, her smartphone beeped. There was a message from Claudio that the initial plantings had been completed in the experimental tract, in the drought-ridden forest, and that the local villagers were tending to the saplings. The grant would help pay for the care of the trees, and when the trees were older, they would bear fruit and leaves for the people. There were only a few cases worldwide where rain forests had been partially restored—all restoration was partial because you couldn’t replicate the kind of biodiversity that happened over thousands of years—but it was astonishing how things would grow if you looked after them in the initial crucial period. Only local people’s investment in the project would ensure its success.

Claudio sounded almost happy. Perhaps healing the forest would heal him too.

The heat wave continued without respite. Fernanda saw people out in the streets staring up at the sky, now, looking at the few clouds that formed above as though beseeching them to rain. The river was sullen and slow. Everyday life seemed off—the glitter of the nightlife was faded too, and the laughter of the people forced. She spent an evening with her cousins Lila and Natalia at the Bar do Armando, where the literati and glitterati seemed equally subdued. The heat seemed to have gotten to the mysterious artist too, since there had been no new work for several days.

Fernanda found herself making the rounds of the graffiti art in the evenings. There were tourist guides who would take visitors to the exhibits. Small businesses sprouted up near these, selling street food and souvenirs. There was outrage when one store painted out the drawing of macaws on its side walls. Each time Fernanda went to see the artwork there would be people standing and staring, and cameras clicking, and groups of friends chattering like monkeys in the jungle. Once she bumped into the man she had sat next to on the plane. He was standing with his briefcase balanced against his legs while he tried to take a picture. She thought of saying hello, apologizing for her coldness on the plane, but he didn’t look her way.

She noticed him on three other occasions at different parts of the city, clicking away at the graffiti with his camera. He was photographing the crowds as much as the graffiti. Just a businessman with a hobby, she told herself. But one day, he dropped his briefcase and papers flew open. There were sheets of accounts, tiny neat numbers in rows, a notepad, a notebook computer, a badly wrapped half-eaten sandwich, and a piece of black chalk. The chalk rolled near where Fernanda was standing. The people near the man were solicitously bending over and picking up his things, but he looked around at the ground wildly. Without thinking Fernanda put her foot over the piece of chalk. She dropped her bag, bent down to retrieve it, and got the chalk in her purse with a fluidity that surprised her. It was hard and oily, not at all like ordinary chalk. There was a loose sheet of paper not far from her that the crowd had missed—she picked it up, hurriedly scribbled an address on it, put her business card and the chalk behind the sheet, and gave the whole thing to the man, looking at him with what she hoped was the innocent gaze of a good citizen. She saw recognition leap into his eyes. Obrigado. He averted his gaze and hurried off.

She spent the rest of the day feeling restless. If only she could reassure him! She wasn’t going to give him away. She’d seen the name of the company where he worked on top of the sheets. Now if only . . .

At home she touched her wristpad, turning on her computer. She scrolled through the news. The tornado in an eastern state of India. Arguments in the United States Senate about the new energy strategy. Floods here, droughts there, the fabric of the biosphere tearing. She thought of the Amazon rain forest, so often called the Earth’s green lung. Even some tourist guides in the city, taking their mostly North American charges into the jungle, used that term. Did anyone know what those words meant? She thought of the predictions of several models, that the great forest, currently a massive carbon dioxide sink, might turn into a source of CO2 if it was stressed enough by drought and tree-cutting. What would happen then? “Hell on Earth,” she said aloud. She wondered how many people looked up into the sky and imagined, as she did, the invisible river of moisture, the Rios Voadores, roaring in over the Amazon from the Atlantic coast. It thrilled her to think of it: flying river, the anaconda of the sky, carrying as much water as the amazon, drawn in and strengthened by the pull of the forest so that it flowed across Brazil, hit the Andes, turned south, bringing rain like a benediction. What had human foolishness done to it that there was drought in the Amazon? The green lung had lung cancer. She remembered Claudio’s face in the lamp-light at camp, speaking passionately about the violated Atlantica forest, the mutilated Mato Grosso, the fact that nearly seven thousand acres of forest were cleared every year.

“What do you think—are we a stupid species, or what?” she asked the lizard on the wall. The lizard gave her an enigmatic look.

She rested her head on her arms, thinking of Claudio, his physical presence, his kindness. The work they had been doing had drawn them together—maybe the relationship had never been more than that. And yet . . . the work was important. To know whether such reparations would make a difference was crucial. She was usually so positive, so determined despite the immensity of the task. Perhaps it was the drought, the lack of rain when it should be raining buckets every day, that was making her feel like this. “What shall I do to bring the rain?” she asked aloud. The wristpad beeped, and then there was a kid’s voice, distorted by electronic translation software. On the computer screen he was sitting in a hospital bed, his dark, thin face earnest. His ears stuck out.

“Sing,” he said. Behind the translation she could hear the kid’s real voice speaking an unfamiliar language. He sounded tired. What had he said? “Sing,” he said again. “Sing for the clouds, for the rain.” He started to sing in an astonishingly musical voice. She could tell he was untrained, even though the musical style was unfamiliar. But it was strangely uplifting, this music that would bring the rain. She wanted his voice to go on and on, even though the translation software was off-key. Then abruptly the screen went dark.

Where had the kid come from? She had signed on to an experimental social network software device at a friend’s urging, but the kid wasn’t in her list of contacts. The connections were really bad most of the time. She hoped he was all right.

The next day the idea of music bringing the rain still haunted her. Of course such things didn’t happen in the real world—as a scientist, she knew better. The vagaries of the climate were still beyond them, and the reparations, the stitches in the green fabric of the jungle, had just begun. The trouble with repairing the forest was that it would never be enough, without a million other things happening too, like the work at the polar ice caps, and social movements, ordinary people pledging to make lifestyle changes, and governments passing laws so that children and grandchildren could have a future. The crucial thing was to get net global carbon dioxide emissions down to zero, and that would take the participation of nearly everyone. The days of the lone ranger were gone; this was the age of the million heroes.

Still, she opened her saxophone case the next day and caressed the cool metal. It drew her, the music she had put away from her. She hadn’t answered her bandmates’ e-mails. Now she had to run to the lab—maybe this evening, she told her saxophone. We’ll have a date, you and I.

But she never got to the lab, because her colleague Maria called her, excited. As a result she went straight to the home in Cidade Nova with the experimental green roof. She went around the house to the side wall, where a crowd had already gathered. People were getting out of cars, and there was even a TV truck. From behind the foliage cascading down the wall of the house peered a jaguar, a gentle jaguar, sleepy even, at peace with the world. Fernanda let out a long breath. The artist had understood her message. The owner of the house, elderly Victor Gomes, was standing with the crowd, his mouth agape.

Within a few hours, the news spread and the crowd swelled until the traffic became a problem. Sensing an opportunity, she talked briefly and urgently to Victor Gomes, and he gave an impromptu tour of the rooftop garden. Suddenly everyone was talking about green roofs. Imagine, if you went ahead and got one (and there was a grant to help you out with costs if you couldn’t afford it), not only did your air-conditioning bills go down, but maybe, just maybe, the artist would come paint the side of your house.

Two days later there was a gala fund-raiser and awareness event at the Hotel Amazonas. Fernanda played with her old band. She put her lips to her saxophone and into each note she poured her yearning for the rain, for a world restored. The music spilled out, clear as light, smooth as flowing water, and she sensed the crowd shift and move with the sound, with her breath. During a break, when she leaned against the side wall of the stage, watching Santiago’s fingers ripple over the piano keyboard, a waiter came up to her and handed her an envelope. Curious, she opened it, and inside was a paper napkin, and an Amazonian butterfly drawn on it, so vivid she half expected it to rise off the napkin. She searched for him in the crowd but there were too many people. Her wristpad beeped. “A butterfly,” she whispered, and she felt the wings of change beating in the light-filled air around her.

“ . . . CAN CAUSE A TORNADO . . . ”

“ . . . but scientists now know more than they did only five years ago. We will now speak to an expert . . . ” Can you please turn off the TV? I can’t bear to see anything more about the storm . . . it was the same program this morning.

I am too sad to tell this story. You’ll have to wait a moment.

I am sad because my grandfather the professor died. He was not really my grandfather, but he treated me like I was his own. I called him Dadaji. He let me sleep on the verandah of his bungalow, on a little cot. I felt safe there. I cleaned and cooked for him, and he would talk to me and tell me about all kinds of things. He taught me how to read and write. From the place where I slept I could look down a low incline to the village, my village.

Are you translating this into English? Does that mean I’ll be famous all over India?

I want to help my village. I want people to know about it, even though it is only a Harijan basti sitting on stony ground. I want to make sure the world knows that we did something good.

Let me tell you about my village. The river is many hours’ walk from us, but the floods are getting worse. Last year during the monsoons the water came into the huts and the fields and drowned everything except what we could carry. The ground where the village sits is very stony, and things don’t grow well. We don’t have fields of our own, not really. We are doms—most of us work in town, or for the big Rajput village—Songaon—two miles away. We do all the dirty work—sweeping and cleaning privies, that sort of thing. Me, I am lucky because the professor employs me and takes care of me and treats me as though I were not a dom. He doesn’t observe caste even though he is a Rajput himself—he says it is already dying out in the towns and cities. He says the government laws protect people like us, but I don’t know about those things because if the Rajputs are angry then they can do what they like to us and nobody can stop them. But the professor, he is a different kind of person—a devata. He even has me cook his food, and pats my head when I do my lessons well—and when there is a festival we share a plate of sweets together.

See this thing I am wearing around my wrist, like a watch? The professor gave it to me. He has been teaching me the computer and this thing makes it come on and we can see and talk to people from around the world. Once I spoke to a man all the way in Chennai—it was very exciting. It was really like magic, because the man didn’t know Bhojpuri or Hindi and the computer translated his words and mine so we could both understand. The translator voices were funny. Mine didn’t sound like me at all.

What I love most is music. In the early morning when the mist lies on the river, the first thing I hear is the birds in the bougainvillea bush. When I bring the tea out on the verandah and we have drunk the first cup, the professor gives me his tanpura to tune. Then he starts to sing Bhairav, which is a morning raga. Listening to him, I feel as though I am climbing up and down mountain ranges of mist and cloud. I feel I could fly. I sing with him, as though my voice is a shadow following his voice. He tells me I have a good ear. It isn’t the same kind of singing as in the movies—it is something deeper that calls to your soul. When I told the professor that, he looked pleased and said that good music makes poets of us. I never thought that just anybody could be a poet.

From his house, I can see all the way to the river far beyond the village. In the last few years we have either had drought or flood. This year seems to be a dry year. Always there is some difficulty we have to deal with. But we have been changing too, ever since the professor came and began to live in his house. He has problems with his sons; they don’t get along, so he lives alone except for me. He and some other people have been working with our basti. The other people are also dalits like us, but they can read and write, and they know how to make the government give them their rights. They have traveled all over the country telling villages like ours that the climate is changing, and we must change too, or we won’t survive. So now we have a village panchayat, and there are three women and two men who speak for all of us. You see, new times are coming, difficult times, when Dharti Mai herself is against us because instead of treating her like a mother, human beings have treated her like a slave. Most of those people who did this are in America and places like that, but they are here too, in the big cities. It is strange because at first we used to think places like that were the best in the world, because of what we saw on TV, but the professor explained that living like that, with no regard for Dharti Mai, comes with costs. Why doesn’t Dharti Mai punish them, then? I asked him that once. Why is she punishing us poor people, who have done nothing to cause the problem? The professor sighed and said that Dharti Mai was punishing everyone. So people ask him all the time, what can we do? This makes the professor happy because he says that earlier most people in our basti just accepted their lot—after all, for thousands of years it has been our lot to suffer. He is pleased because now we want to do something to save ourselves and make the world better. If all those rich, upper-caste people and all the goras have been wrong all this time about how they should live, maybe they’re wrong about us too. Maybe our time has come.

But Bojhu kaku—he’s the one who took me in when my parents died—he says what’s the good in pointing fingers? Even the goras are changing how they live. The question is what can we do to heal Dharti Mai? How can we help each other survive the terrible times that are upon us? So in the village people take turns being lookouts when there is a bad weather forecast, and they help each other more, and they’ve got a teacher to come twice a week to teach them how to read and write. They sent Barki kaki off to the town to be trained by a doctor—she’s the midwife—so that she can help us all be healthier. You should have seen her when she came back, she was so proud—she got to see how they work in the big hospital and she came back with pink soap for everyone. We now have our own hand pump and don’t have to drink river water. All this is because of the professor, and because of people like Bojhu kaku, and Barki kaki—and Dulari Mai, even though most people are scared of her temper. The professor and I are treated like royal guests whenever we go to visit. The professor studies people—anthropology—and even though he is retired, he hasn’t stopped. He goes around all the local villages, tap-tapping with his cane—he’s got a bad leg—and he tells people about the world.

Which is how we know about how the world is getting hotter, and even the goras are burning up in their big cities with all those cars and TVs. But that is not all. You know there is a big coal-mining company that wants to buy all the land around us? The professor gets angry whenever the coal company is mentioned, so angry he can hardly get a word out. It is burning coal and oil that is making the world hotter and Dharti Mai so angry with us. He says the government, instead of finding ways to use other things, is mining more coal and making more coal plants so that the people in the big cities can have electricity and cars and TVs, which warm the world even more. It sounds to me like when Dhakkan kaka gets drunk, he wants to keep on drinking. So maybe the way the rich people of the world live is like a sickness where they can’t make themselves stop. Also most people in my village don’t want to give up their ancestral land for the coal company, small and poor and stony though it might be, even though the government has promised compensation. That tiny piece of earth is all we have. But some of the young men think that the money would be good, and they can go to the big city and make it big. The professor told them that there are already too many people trying to make it in the city, but behind his back they grumble and talk about the good life they could have. It’s mostly people like Jhingur kaka’s older son, who is a malcontent. The Rajput village—Songaon—doesn’t like the coal-mining idea either and the professor persuaded them to let us join a protest delegation in the town, although we had to keep our distance behind them. The professor sat with us and argued against the coal company from the back. You should have seen how furious the Rajputs were! They respect him for his education and his caste, even though he doesn’t keep caste, but his ways upset them. Later, when we were walking back, one of them told him, “If you weren’t an old man, and learned too, I would take my stick to you, for the example you are setting to our children.” I know, because I heard him. It was Ranbir Singh. He is the one with the biggest mustache and the biggest, stoutest sticks, and the biggest temper. His mood changes so quickly, everyone is afraid of him. He even has guns. The professor just said quietly that if Ranbir Singh did that with every Rajput in the country who had broken caste, he would run out of sticks pretty quickly.

The day it all happened, in the morning we were listening to the classical program on the radio because the professor wanted to hear a new bandish that was playing. There were clouds in the sky but no sign of rain. Just then we heard a roaring sound. The radio crackled and the announcer said something about an unusual cloud formation. The sound of the wind became so strong that we couldn’t hear the radio. The sky became dark, even though over the river it was still light. There was a tapping sound over our heads: hail! I was very excited. Hail has fallen only once in my village in my lifetime. I ran down the verandah steps to collect some, and then I saw the storm.

I had never seen anything like it. I saw a whirling monster towering in the fields behind the house, like a top spun out of clouds and wind. The professor looked alarmed. He said he had heard of things like this in other lands, and that it was called a tur-nado. He said we would be all right in a pukka house like his, but then he stared out into the distance toward my village. People were coming out of their homes and getting ready to walk to Songaon or the town for the long day of work.

“Bhola,” he said to me, “I am going to check on the computer what we should do. Get ready to run down to the village and warn people.”

“Dadaji, will you be all right?” he’s an old man, and lame, too. But he pushed me impatiently off, saying of course he would be fine. That’s the last thing he said to me.

I ran down toward the village. The wind was strong, and I saw a crow in the sky struggling to keep its wings under control. It swooped down in a big arc and came right at me, flapping its wings, and hit me in the stomach. I grabbed it and held it to my chest—a full-grown crow. I thought it was dead, but I couldn’t just throw it away. So I held it to my chest and I ran.

The sky darkened and the wind howled in my ears. I looked behind me at the house. The tur-nado was over it. The verandah was so dark I couldn’t see the professor. I saw the lit screen of the computer disappearing as he went into the house. Above us the tur-nado looked like a monster. I have never been so scared. Then my wrist strap beeped. A woman’s voice said out of nowhere, “Find low ground, low ground,” and “Run! Run!” I wanted to see if the professor was all right, but he had told me to warn the village. So I ran.

There is a narrow ravine not far from the village. Old people say that it is a crack that opened in the earth during an earthquake. In the monsoons it fills with water, but right now it is dry, full of thorny bushes and rocks. The goats like it there. That was the only low place I could think of. I began to shout as I got closer, yelling to people to stop gawking and trying to lead them to the ravine. I couldn’t hear my own voice because of the wind, but Dulari mai started to scream at people and gather them and point them to the ravine. Everyone worked quickly; they are afraid of her temper. There was even someone carrying Joti ma, old Gobind-kaka’s mother, on his back, the terrified children were all holding hands, some were carrying the babies. Behind me the tur-nado danced across the fields, ripping up everything in its path. It picked its way across the land. I saw people rushing toward the ravine, some carrying bundles with them. There was a lot of shouting but everyone was moving. I thought: I’m not needed here, I could have stayed with the professor. I thought I should see if I could go around the tur-nado and get to his house. I made my way back across the fields, keeping a careful eye on the storm.

When I was halfway there, I saw the children. It was Ranbir Singh’s younger daughter and son, returning from school on the footpath through the fields. Usually someone takes them from Songaon to the town and back by bicycle, but they were walking home. She is older than me, maybe fourteen, and he is only about five years old. Her father once had Bojhu kaku’s son beaten because he said he—Kankariya bhai—dared to raise his eyes and look at his daughter. Before I was born, there was trouble that nobody talks about and the Rajputs came and burned down some of our huts, and three people died. That’s what I mean when I say they can do anything to us. I hesitated, because if I said anything to the children they didn’t like, their father could have me thrashed and the village burned down.

The children looked scared. The girl was trying to use her mobile but she gave up and put it in her schoolbag, looking upset. They looked at me and looked away, and the older sister said to the boy, “Come,” urgently, and pulled on his arm. He was tired and about to cry.

I thought: Why should I try to help them? But I pointed to the tur-nado raging behind us:

“Sister, that is a bad toofan. The professor told me we have to hide. We are all at the ravine near my basti. I can take you there.”

I took extra care to be polite. I didn’t want her to accuse us later on and get the whole village in trouble. She hesitated. The little boy said:

“Why are you holding a dead crow?”

The girl came to a decision. She said:

“Show me where this place is.”

They followed me. There were leaves and branches flying around, and I saw the thatched roof lift off a hut and vanish. A brick came hurtling through the air and missed us by two spans of my hand. I didn’t dare look back—we were racing over the fields. The little boy stumbled, and the girl picked him up. Panting, she followed me. It would have been faster if I’d carried the child, but she wasn’t going to let a dom boy touch her brother. Then she half stumbled. She said: “Wait!” I almost didn’t hear her but when I looked back she was crying. She thrust her brother at me. Her breath was coming in sobs. He was crying too.

“You want me to carry him? Your father will break my neck!”

She was wailing and shaking her head, and the tur-nado was very close, so I put the child on one hip and handed her the still-warm body of the crow.

“I’m not going to hold that,” she said, scowling.

“Then take your brother back,” I said, losing my temper. “This crow is a vahan of Shani Deva, and we must not disrespect it. Don’t you keep pigeons?”

She wrinkled her nose but took the crow in her dupatta, and we ran the rest of the way until we were at the ravine.

It was dark inside, because the low, thorny bushes growing on the top edges of the ravine blocked the sky. Wind screamed over our heads and we heard the most terrible sounds, as though the world was being torn apart.

And then silence.

We all looked at each other. Bojhu kaku and the others saw that I was holding Ranbir Singh’s son in my arms, and his daughter was standing next to me, holding the body of a crow in her dupatta, her eyes wide with fear.

“Bhola, what have you done?” someone said. Maybe it was Barki kaki. People gasped.

“I couldn’t leave them to die,” I said. The boy wriggled out of my grasp and went to his sister. She handed me the crow and held her brother close. Tears ran down her face.

Bojhu kaku said to the girl, “We will see you home. Come, there is nothing to be scared of.”

So the children were escorted to Songaon by the crowd. If Bojhu kaku went by himself, he might have to bear the brunt of Ranbir Singh’s mood. There was no telling whether he’d be grateful or angry. So Barki kaki said she would go, and then Dulari Mai (and we had to tell her no because she would insult even the gods if she lost her temper, and where would we all be then?). So about fifteen people went.

We climbed out of the ravine. The village was smashed flat. There were pots and pans scattered about the fields, and bricks also. The bargad tree that has stood at the crossing on the way to Songaon for two hundred years was completely uprooted. The pathway was covered with big tree branches. Our homes were gone. You might say, What’s a mud-and-thatch house? It is nothing. But to a poor person it is home. Our hands shape it, our hands weave the bhusa. It is where our hopes live. When you have very little, everything you have becomes more precious. We wept and in the same breath we thanked the gods for sparing our lives.

I didn’t go with them. My duty was to my dadaji now, and I had a terrible fear growing inside me. I went to the house on the hill. Midway the crow stirred in my arms, and I saw that it was only stunned, not dead. I stopped in the field and found a pocket of moisture where some hailstones had fallen, and let a few drops trail from my fingers into its throat. Suddenly it struggled and flapped its wings. I opened my hands and it flew. It was unsteady at first, but it got stronger as it flew, making two big circles over my head before it went off. Then I went up to what was left of the house.

The windows and doors were gone, and I could see the sky through the roof. Two walls were down. I thought: This is a pukka house, how could this have happened? How could brick and mortar come down like this? There was dust in the air. It made me cough. There were pages and pages torn from his books, fallen everywhere like leaves. I saw that his computer had fallen under his desk and was all right. Bricks fell as I walked around. I fell too, and broke my arm, and hurt my leg. That’s why I’m in hospital.

I was the one who found him. He was near the drawing room window, under a pile of bricks.

He was my grandfather, no matter what anyone says about caste and blood. He gave me everything I have—he was like a god to me. I would have given my life for him, but instead he is the one who is gone. He said I would grow up to be a learner and a singer—someone who could change the world. A dom boy like me—nobody has ever told me such things. I’m telling you, he was my dadaji; I don’t care what anyone says.

His sons came for his body. I’m not allowed to be there for the last rites. But I know, and he knows, that I should be there. He used to tell me that if you look at things on the surface, you don’t k now their true nature. You also have to look with your inner eye. He looked at me with his inner eye. He was my dadaji and he’s gone.

That’s his computer on the table. His sons didn’t ask about it.

Nobody has come to see me and I am scared.

What is that you say? Half of Songaon is destroyed? That is a terrible thing. Seven people dead!

I am glad Ranbir Singh’s children gave a good account of us. It is strange for him to be in our debt.

Earlier today there was a TV program about the tur-nado. They interviewed an expert. He said that although a tur-nado is strong, it is also delicate. I think I know what he means. Before it is born, the tur-nado is a confusion of cloud and wind. It takes only a little touch here and there to turn the cloud and wind into a monster that can destroy houses. Even once it is made, you can’t tell where it is going to go, because it is so delicate a thing that maybe one leaf on one tree might persuade it to go this way instead of that. Or one breath from one sleeping farmhand in the field.

When I leave the hospital, I’m going to help rebuild my village. And I’m going to collect all the pages of dadaji’s books that are scattered all over the fields. I imagine I will find the thoughts of a scientist or philosopher, or the speeches of a poet, stuck in a tree’s branches, or blowing in the wind with the dust. I will pick up every page I find and put it together.

I have to find out how I can keep learning. Dadaji was going to teach me so that I could be a learned man like him when I grow up. How is it possible for a tur-nado to be so powerful and so delicate at the same time? How do we tell Dharti Mai we are sorry? How do we stop the mining company that wants to take our land? Please print that in your newspaper—we cannot let them mine and burn more coal, because that is destroying the world. Please tell the big people in the cities like Delhi and in faraway places like America. They won’t care about someone like me, but ask them if they care about their own children. I saw just yesterday that it is not just the poor who will suffer in this new world they are making. Tell them to stop.

I have been seeing crows at the window all afternoon. They land on the sill and caw. The orderly says Shani Deva has shown me grace, because of the crow I saved. Everyone fears Shani Deva because he brings us difficult times. But crows remember, and they tell each other who is a friend, and maybe the crows will help us. It’s their world too.

I’m very tired. In one day I lost my grandfather, hid my people from the tur-nado, saved two Rajput children, and became a friend of crows.

Something strange happened after dinner. I was half asleep. I heard a woman saying very sadly, “What shall I do to bring the rain?” then I saw it wasn’t a dream, because there was this young woman on the computer screen, a foreigner. I thought she must be one of the people who used to talk to the professor. She looked sad and tired. I told her, you have to sing to the clouds. You have to sing the rain down. Between the radio and my dadaji’s lessons I have learned a little of the raga—Malhaar, the rain-calling raga. I sang a line or two for her before the connection broke.

Dadaji told me once that sound is just a tremble in the air. A song is a tremble that goes from the soul into the air, and thus to the eardrums of the world. The tur-nado is a disturbance of the air, but it is like an earthquake. Perhaps it is the song of the troubled Earth, our mother Dharti Mai. One day I will compose a song to soothe her.

 . . . IN TEXAS . . .

 . . . it was the kind of day Dorothy Cartwright’s husband wouldn’t have allowed. Wasn’t it just a year and a half ago—he’d gotten so mad at the heat wave at Christmastime that he’d cranked up the air-conditioning until she had to go find a sweater? But they’d had the traditional Christmas evening fire in the fireplace, and weather be damned. It was nowhere near Christmas day, being March, but it was hotter than it should be, the kind of day when Rob would have had the AC going and the windows closed. Closed houses always made her feel claustrophobic, no matter that her old home had been over four thousand square feet—just the two of them after their son, Matt, grew up and left home. But now Rob was dead of a heart attack more than a year ago, and Dorothy lived in a little two-room apartment in an assisted-living facility. She could open the windows if she felt like it. She did so, and turned on the fans, and checked the cupcakes baking in the oven. There was a cool breeze, no more than a breath. The big magnolia tree in the front lawn made a shade so deep you could be forgiven for thinking evening had come early. She arranged the chairs in the living room for the fifth time and glanced at the clock. Fifteen minutes and they would be here.

As she was taking the cupcakes out, the phone rang. She nearly dropped the tray. Shaking, she set it on the counter and picked up the phone. It was Kevin.

“Gramma! Guess where your favorite grandson’s calling from?”

He was cheerful in the faked way he had when he was upset. Which meant—

“I’m in rehab and this time I’m going to quit for good.”

“Of course, hon,” she said. Who could believe the kid when he’d been in and out of rehab six times in two years? She remembered Rob’s cold fury the last time the boy had been over. Her grandson was adrift, and she was helpless and useless. The other day she’d watched a show on PBS about early humans and how the human race wouldn’t have survived without old people, other people than the parents, to help raise the young and transmit the knowledge of earlier generations. Grandmothers in particular were important. That was all very well, but in this day of books and computers and all, who needed grandmothers? They lived in retirement homes, or in huge, echoing houses, at the periphery of society, distracting themselves, waiting for death. Times had changed. Kevin was beyond anyone’s help. She gripped the edge of the counter with her free hand. An ache shot through her chest. She felt a momentary dizziness.

“I’ll send you some cupcakes,” she said. All she had been able to do for the people she loved was to offer them food, as though the trouble in the world could be taken away by sugar and butter and chocolate. She said good-bye, feeling hopeless.

He had sent her an orange wristlet, rather pretty. It had jewellike white buttons on it that allowed her to communicate with her new notebook computer (a gift from her son) with a touch. She looked at it and thought how nice Kevin was, to get her a present. She touched the button and her notebook computer lit up, and there was an image of a woman in a diving suit suspended in murky blue water, her arms working, and a reedy electronic voice like a cartoon character saying something about cold Arctic waters and repeating a name, Dr. Irene Ariak, Irene Ariak. Surely she had heard the name in some show or other. A scientist working in the Arctic. What a dangerous thing to do, to go up there in the cold and dark. “Bless you and be careful up there, I’m praying for you,” she said. The cartoon voice said, Mrs. Cartwright, thank you! And the screen went blank. Dorothy wondered if she’d heard right. Well, this was a new world, to be sure.

The doorbell rang as she was setting the cupcakes on a plate. Patting her hair, glancing at the small oval mirror over by the little dining table (her lipstick was just right), she went to the door.

There they all were, smiling. Rita, with her defiantly undyed white hair in a braid tied with rainbow-colored ribbons (Rob would have thought them loud), said, “How nice of you to host the meeting, Dorothy!,” and planted herself in the comfortable armchair. The others, Mary-Ann, Gerta, Lawrence, Brad, Eva, and three women she didn’t know, crowded into the small living room. Dorothy handed around cupcakes and poured tea and coffee and felt as awkward as a new wife hosting her first dinner party. She scolded herself: Now, then, you’ve known these people for eight months, and you’ve hosted more parties in your life than you can remember! This was about reinventing herself. Stretching outside her comfort zone, learning new things. Rob would have never allowed these people in their house—there was something not done about their passionate intensity. “Aging hippies,” Rob would have said. He would have told her what was wrong with each of them, and she would never have invited them again. Once she’d had a local mothers’ group over for tea; Rob came home early. He’d been pleasant enough greeting them and had gone upstairs. The women were upset about the firing of the principal at the local elementary school, and one of them had raised her voice emphatically, making her point. Rob had banged the bedroom door so hard upstairs that the reverberation made the windows rattle. She’d never invited those women over again.

She sat down and let the conversation swirl around her, trying to ignore the tightness in her chest. Keeping up the smile was becoming difficult.

“Well,” Rita said, “Our energy-saving campaign has been successful beyond anything we expected. Management has stopped grumbling. We’ve saved them $14,504 in energy bills, annually!”

“New lightbulbs and more insulation, and cranking down the AC so it isn’t freezing in the middle of summer, and one set of solar panels . . . who’da thought it?”

“Our see-oh-two emissions are down by . . . let’s see . . . 18 percent . . . ”

“Multiply individual actions by millions or billions, and you’re looking at real global difference . . . ”

It was one of the new women, a blonde with intense blue eyes. Not from the apartment complex. Dorothy had already forgotten her name. Now the woman was smiling at her a little uncertainly.

“Mrs. Cartwright, we need to recruit people for the protest. The pipeline is coming to us. Janna Helmholtz’s land is being violated—they got a court order to cut a corridor through her woods to bring the oil pipes through, and we’re going to protest. Can we count on you?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Dorothy said, feeling foolish. What had she agreed to?

“ . . . they say fracking for shale oil and gas is going to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but can you believe they base that on completely ignoring the methane emissions from the fracking?”

“Methane is twenty times worse than see-oh-two . . . cooking the planet . . . ”

“My objection to fracking is entirely on another plane—see, less coal burned here means coal prices fall, and it gets exported elsewhere, so coal usage will go up somewhere else if fracking happens here in the United States—idiots don’t understand the meaning of global . . . ”

“Yes, but there’s also the issue, I told him that, I told him just because you work for Texas O&G, try to have an open mind for fuck’s sake—I told him, think about switching to green energy. Fracking for oil and gas just means putting off what we need to do. Like, you know, you need to fucking quit, not go from cocaine to . . . to meth!”

Rob wouldn’t approve of the f-word either. Dorothy told herself to stop thinking about Rob. Rob used the f-word as much as he liked, but he couldn’t stand women swearing. Generally, he said that meant that either they were common, or they needed a good lay. Shut up about Rob, she told herself.

“Well, Mrs. Cartwright?”

She cleared her throat. What had they been talking about?

“I don’t know,” she said. What could she do? Her life behind her . . . she felt a sudden wave of utter misery.

“What can I do? I’m not trained . . . ”

“Dorothy, you don’t need training for this,” Rita said, in her proselytizing voice. Rita was a You-nitarian, You-niversalist, as Eva had once said in mincing tones—Rita, there’s so much You in UU, where’s the room for God? They’d had quite a spat about it, but they stayed friends. Rob had always said you could only be friends with people who thought like you.

“Honey, there are retired people all over the country like you and me who care about the world we are leaving our grandchildren—”

“—hell, everyone thinks we are old fogies, useless relics, and I say we are a totally untapped resource, a revolution waiting to happen . . . ”

Lawrence (“not Larry”) nodded. “We have experience, and knowledge of human nature—Dorothy, just by being who you are you can make a difference—”

She found herself signing up to recruit five people and be at the meeting place today in three hours. Janna Helmholtz had called to say the earthmovers were going to be on her property ripping up the trees her granddaddy had planted and she needed them to be there. Three hours! (Well, the fracking company doesn’t wait at our convenience, honey; besides imagine if you were in the middle of the workday, you wouldn’t be able to make it. But we have the time and the determination! So be there or be a quadrilateral! This from Eva, retired math teacher at Pine Tree Elementary.)

After they had all left, Dorothy found herself putting the dirty dishes by the sink in a mood of despair. How was she going to go to wing 5 and recruit five people? She couldn’t imagine being able to convince anyone. Talking to people was difficult anyway, especially when they didn’t wear their hearing aids or were taking a nap. She heard Rob’s voice: You’re being a fool, Dottie. We Cartwrights don’t get into other people’s business. Do you really think you can make a difference?

It was hard to remember that she had been second valedictorian at her school, and that she had got into a prestigious college and been on a debating team. After she met Rob—he’d chased and flattered her relentlessly—she had seen the possibility of another life, the kind that she’d only glimpsed through the iron lattice gates of rich acquaintances—a life of going to theater and art museums and raising children to send off to the best schools. Who in the world would love her like Rob? She remembered when they were both young, and he had lost his first job, how much he’d looked up to her, needed her. She began to scrub the baking tray, thinking of Rob’s love for her cooking. He’d always praised her culinary skills to his business friends whenever there was a party. She sighed. He would not have been pleased about her involvement with this cause. But she’d given her word—what had made her agree to talk to five strangers? She wiped her sudsy hands absently on the towel, and her wristlet beeped. “I’m no use to anyone,” she said aloud. “I don’t know what to do.” And she heard a voice from the little computer on the mantelpiece say, with the utmost conviction: “Something good will happen to you today.” Very clear English, but a strange accent. She went and picked up the computer but the screen had gone dark.

She rearranged her hair and put on fresh lipstick and went determinedly down the hall to wing 5. There were several people in the lounge. She told herself second valedictorian and made herself smile and say hello. By the end of an hour she had recruited eight people. Would have been nine, if Molly hadn’t had her annual physical that afternoon. Damn, you’re good, Rita said, when she called and told her, and Dorothy thought, with pleased surprise, Yes.

In an hour they were loading into cars, driving over the long, empty roads soon to be filled with rush-hour traffic, over to Janna’s place. Janna had a big house on a hundred acres, and there was already a crowd in the middle of a field, and at least half a dozen cars, and my goodness, was that a TV truck? There was Janna, with a new perm and her big smile, waving to the newcomers walking over to her. The sun was hot. Along one side of the field ran a dark line of woodlands, presumably the place where the pipeline was going through. Dorothy walked over determinedly, ignoring the odd breathlessness that caught her at moments, gritting her teeth, closing her ears against Rob’s voice. That woman should never wear shorts, her legs are too fat, and that one, dressed like a slut, tells you what she wants. These wannabe hippies are a laugh. Can barely walk and they want to change the world! Well, that bit was true of some of the protesters, old ladies with walkers and even a man in a wheelchair. There was Rita, high-fiving him. Dorothy found herself standing at the edge of the crowd, grateful for her hat. There were the earthmovers roaring up in front of them. A young man at the helm of each, one of them grinning, the other one nervous. The sun glinted off the windshields.

A black woman was making a speech. Eva nudged Dorothy and whispered, “Myra Jackson, professor over at the university.”

“It’s not just about land,” the woman said. “Global warming is real, and we have to do something about it now, not tomorrow. Shale gas only puts off what we really need, which is green energy, and a new alternative-energy-based economy. Germany’s already ahead of us in solar energy. We need a Marshall Plan for the ecological-economic crisis!”

There were cheers.

Now they could hear police sirens getting louder. The protesters began to shout slogans. Dorothy’s heart began to beat thunderously in her ears. What had she gotten herself into?

There was Janna, yelling above the noise. “Y’all pack up your equipment and get outta here, we’re not gonna let you clear my family’s woods! No more fracking!”

There were signs now going up, and cameras flashing, and people yelling “Don’t frack Texas!,” and the big yellow machines kept coming, although slowly. The professor woman jumped off the table—she was too young and fit to be one of the oldies—and someone moved the table away. The cops arrived, waving the protesters to the side so that the machinery could get to the trees. The crowd shifted and surged, without backing away. The man in the wheelchair waved his stick at a policeman and yelled something. Handcuffs clicked, cameras rolled. The giant machines kept inching forward. Dorothy found herself ignored by everyone, even the cops. She felt the cool air of the woods at her back, through her thin cotton dress. She was just in front of one of the machines. She stared at the young man in the driver’s seat. He looked like Kevin. She wondered why his face was set—goodness, the boy was nervous! She thought of him suddenly as a sacrifice, like all the young men in her life, her son gone to the army, returned a silent shadow of his former self, her grandson beset by demons, all that youth and strength turned wrong. She thought of the poor woman out in the bottom of the ocean in the Arctic trying to save the world so that her grandchild, Dorothy’s grandchild, and all, everyone’s grandchild could live in the world. And she thought how cruel the world that makes young men hold the guns against their own temples, the knives at their own throats, so that their own hands poison the Earth and its creatures that the good Lord made—and Rob said in her mind, Dottie, you’re talking like a fool—and something broke inside her.

She was standing with a Tupperware box of cupcakes—stupidly, she waved it in front of the boy like an offering. She walked toward him, her own face set, as though she could save him, as though she, Dorothy Cartwright, B.A., M.R.S., could do anything. The kid’s eyes went wide, and he waved frantically at her, and she turned around and saw the great yellow arm of the other machine swing, and the horrified face of the other man, who saw her only at the last minute—then it hit her shoulder, and the side of her head, and then she was falling, and cupcakes falling everywhere.

She awoke in the hospital. The light was too bright. Someone drew the curtains across the window. She could hear some kind of hubbub outside her door. She slept.

Hours later she woke feeling better. A lantern-jawed doctor who looked like a very tired Clint Eastwood told her she had a mild concussion, and a cracked bone in her shoulder. The man at the bulldozer had turned the thing off just in time; it was the momentum that had gotten her. Otherwise she might be dead. She was really lucky. All the scans were clear, but they were going to keep her overnight for observation. After that, six weeks of rest for her shoulder.

“I can see you’re a wild young rebel, Mrs. Cartwright, but promise me you won’t be up to those shenanigans for a while,” he said, smiling.

She told him, smiling back, surprising herself, “You do your job, I’ll do mine.”

Her son called. Matt was driving over the next day. He sounded more bemused than anything. She thought with satisfaction that she had finally managed to surprise someone.

And then Molly was there, praising her like she had done something heroic.

“Wish I could have been there,” she said wistfully. “Rita and Eva are in jail, and that black professor too, and about ten other people. They’re probably going to charge you as soon as you are well.”

Dorothy couldn’t imagine going to jail—but Molly made it sound like it was the thing to do. Well, it had been some day. She decided not to worry. Over the doctor’s objections she let two journalists interview her and take pictures. Her mother used to call her a chatterbox, a trait that had disappeared with time and Rob, and now she couldn’t stop talking.

“When my husband was still alive,” she said, “he used to tell me how impractical it was to worry about the environment. Practical people run the economy, make sure things work. That attitude, combined with greed, has ruined the Earth to a degree that threatens our grandchildren. I’m only a housewife, but I know that we need good, fresh air to breathe, and trees to grow, and we need the wild things around us. As a grandmother, I can’t think of one single grandparent who wouldn’t want to do the best for their grandchildren. That’s why I believe we need to protect what the good Lord gave us, this blessed Earth, else how can we live? And what’s more practical than that?”

After they had all gone, in the silence of the room, she lay back against the pillows, spent. An incredulity rose in her. What had she done? The whole day she had been putting herself forward, Rob would say. The elation subsided. She hid her face in the pillows.

Then the phone rang. This time it was Kevin.

“Gramma! I saw you on TV! You kicked ass!”

She laughed. It was so very nice of him to call. They talked for half an hour, until the nurse came and frowned at her.

“Gramma, I’m going to get clean this time,” Kevin said. Dorothy took a deep breath.

“Kev, soon as they let me out of here I’m going to come see you. This time you will get clean, love. You’ve got a life to live.”

And so do I, she thought after she hung up.

Lying back in the darkened room, she saw from the digital clock on the side table that it was nearly midnight on March 16. Heavens, no wonder Rob had been haunting her all day—it was his birthday! And she had forgotten. Well, at least she had baked his favorite cupcakes. She thought about how her life had changed in one day, and the work left to be done. It wasn’t going to be easy, and she had no illusions that she was any kind of heroine, or that her few minutes of fame were going to lead to any major changes. But Molly had told her that the phone lines of No Fracking Texas were swamped with calls from other assisted-living facilities and retired people’s associations. It seemed the old ones, the forgotten ones, were coming out of the woodwork. In times gone by, the old were the ones to whom the young turned for advice. Now the old had to bear responsibility for ruining the Earth, but they also, by the same logic, bore the responsibility for setting things right. The press was calling it the Suspender Revolution. The Retirees Spring. Kind of disrespectful, but they’d show them. And she, Dorothy Cartwright, had helped it come about. Viva la revolución, and poor Rob, rest in peace, and Happy Birthday.

THE END

The Story Begins

Or does it end here?

It ends, the young man thinks, as he climbs the last mountain, emerging into the last alpine valley. It ends with his own life winding down as he climbs to the roof of the world. The strength that has allowed him to leave the busy streets of Shanghai and journey to this remote place in the Himalayas is like the sudden flaring of the moth caught in the flame. Lately he’s had a vision of simply lying down in the tall green meadow grass, and falling asleep, and feeling the grass stalks growing through his body, a thousand tiny piercings, until he is nothing but a husk.

He pauses to catch breath against the rocky wall of the cliff. His breath forms clouds of condensation in the cold air. His rucksack feels heavier now. He can’t remember when he last ate. Probably at the village he left in the morning. He takes out a flask of water, drinks, and finds a small bag with trail mix and walks again.

When he emerges from the narrow pass, he finds himself at a vertiginous height. Below him, lost in mist and distance, is a rocky, arid valley through which a silver river winds. On the other side the mountains are gaunt and bare, the white tongues of melting glaciers high on the slopes. But the place he seeks is immediately to his right, where the path leads. The stone facade of the monastery comes into view, a rocky aerie impossible to conceive of—how could anyone build here, halfway up to the sky?—but it is solid, it is there. So he walks on, up the narrow path, to the great flight of steps. The tiers of windows above him are empty, and there is an enormous hole in the roof of the entrance hall, through which he can see a lammergeier circling high in the blue sky. Could it be that the last refuge is destroyed after all? He had dreamed of a great university hidden deep in the Himalayas, a place where people like him could gather to weave the web that would save the dying world. He had dreamed of its destruction too, at the hands of greed and power. Can it have happened already?

Wearily he sinks down on the dusty floor at the top of the steps. In the silence he hears his own breath coming fast, and the faint trickle of water in the distance. He is conscious of being watched.

A man is standing on a fallen column. He is tall, dressed in rough black robes. There is some kind of small animal on his shoulder, brown, with a long, bushy tail—a squirrel, perhaps, or a mongoose?

Yuan bows, clears his throat.

“I dreamed of this place,” he says in English, hoping the monk can understand him. “I came here to try to do something before I die. But it’s too late, I see.”

The monk gestures to him, and Yuan stumbles over broken pieces of stone, follows him around a corner into a small, high courtyard open to sun and sky.

“Sit,” the monk says, indicating a low wooden seat. There is tea in a black kettle, steaming over a small fire. “Tell me about your dream of this place.” There is white stubble on his shaven chin, and deep lines are etched on the brown face. His English is fluent, with an accent that is vaguely familiar. Yuan clears his throat, speaks.

“It was a monastery first, then a university. It was a place for those who sought to understand the world in a new way, and to bring about its resurrection. I saw the humblest people come here to share what they knew, and the learned ones listened. It didn’t have the quietude of the monastery it had once been—at every corner, in every gathering, I heard arguments and disagreements, but true peace is dynamic, not static, and rests on a thousand quarrels.

“It wasn’t a secret, although not many people knew about it. It was rumor and it was real, because at the university where I studied in Shanghai, there was a woman—a scientist from Nigeria—who spoke of this place. She came and taught for five days and nights. After that we were all changed. I got a new idea, and even though I was dying, I made sure it came to light. Then I thought I needed to find her, my teacher, and this place. Here and there I heard rumors that it had been destroyed—because there are people who will try to hasten the end of the world so they can make a profit. And this place stood in their way.

“It was the hope of the world. I heard that there were branches in a few other places. There was an idea about connecting it through small world architecture to webs of information, webs of knowledge and people, to generate new ideas and, through redundancy, ensure their survival. If it hadn’t been destroyed before that hope was made real, its disappearance may not have mattered so much.”

His voice fades, as he slumps to the ground. The monk gathers him up and carries him effortlessly through long corridors into a room of stone, where there is a rough bed. He wakes from his faint to see the wild creature sitting on a wooden stool by the bed, staring at him with dark, round eyes. The monk helps him up so he can sip hot yak butter tea, rich and aromatic. Then Yuan sleeps.

Over five days and nights they talk, the monk and Yuan, sometimes in this room with its narrow windows, sometimes in the high, sunny courtyard.

“This place was destroyed in an avalanche,” the monk tells him, pointing to the mountain behind them, from the high spur on which the monastery perches. “The glacier melted and brought down half the mountain with it. It rained boulders. Many were killed, and the place abandoned. I live here alone, except for the odd scientific team that comes to study the glacier.”

Yuan is silent. So much for the university that would save the world. But how could his dreams be so vivid, if they weren’t true?

When he feels a little better, Yuan goes with the monk to a high terrace from which he has the best view of the glacier. The terrace is broken in places—holes have been torn out of it, and the room below is littered with massive stones. The still-intact portions of the floor make a zigzag safe pathway across the terrace.

The terrace is open to wind and sun, and the immensity of the mountain overwhelms him for a moment. Squinting, he looks up at it and nearly loses his balance. The monk steadies him.

Far above them, what remains of the glacier is a bowl of snow above sheer rocky walls. A great, round boulder bigger than a house stands guard at the edge of the bowl, rimmed with white.

“Don’t worry,” the monk says. “If that falls, it will fall right here and finish off this terrace, and what’s left of the western wing. The part of the monastery where we sleep is not going to be affected—see that ridge?”

Yuan sees a ridge of rock high above and to his right, rising out of the steep incline of the mountain. A fusillade of snow, ice, and boulders falling down the slope would be deflected by it just enough to avoid the eastern edge of the monastery, which is why it is still intact.

Yuan begins to shake. The monk guides him silently across the broken floor, and they return to the room. He sinks onto the bed.

“Why do you remain in this terrible place?” he cries.

The monk brings him tea.

“Thirty-three died in the avalanche,” he says, “my teacher among them. So I stay here. The others left to join another monastery.”

Yuan is thinking how this does not answer his question. He is beginning to wonder about this monk and his excellent English. After a pause the monk says:

“Tell me about yourself. You said you came up with an idea.”

Yuan rummages in his rucksack, which is at the foot of the bed. He draws out a handful of orange wristlets. Each has a tiny screen on it, and some are encrusted with cheap gems.

“I am a student of computer engineering,” he says. “In my university in Shanghai I was working toward some interesting ideas in network communications. Then she came—Dr. Amina Ismail, my teacher—and changed everything I knew about the world.

“Most of us think there is nothing we can do about climate disruption. So we live an elaborate game of denial and pretend—as though nothing was about to happen, even though every day there are more reports of impending disaster, and more species extinctions, and more and more climate refugees. But what I learned from my teacher was that the world is an interconnected web of relationships—between human and human, and human and beast and plant, and all that’s living and nonliving. I used to feel alone in the world after my parents died, even when I was with friends or with my girlfriend, but my teacher said that aloneness is an illusion created by modern urban culture. She said that even knowledge had been carved up and divided into territorial niches with walls separating them, strengthening the illusion, giving rise to overspecialized experts who can’t understand each other. It is time for the walls to come down and for us to learn how to study the complexity of the world in a new way. She had been a computer scientist, but she taught herself biology and sociology so she could understand the great generalities that underlie the different systems of the world.”

“She sounds like a philosopher,” the monk says.

“They used to call scientists natural philosophers once,” Yuan says. “But anyway, I learned from her that whether we know it or not, the world and we are interconnected. As a result, human social systems have chaotic features, rather like weather. You know Lorenz’s metaphor—the butterfly effect?”

“I’ve heard of it,” says the monk.

Yuan pauses.

“She said—Dr. Ismail—that we may not be able to prevent climate change because we’ve not acted in time—but perhaps we can prevent catastrophic climate change, so that in our grandchildren’s future—my teacher has two grandchildren—in that future maybe things will start turning around. Maybe the human species won’t go extinct.

“So one day I was walking through the streets, very upset because my girlfriend and I had just broken up, and I didn’t look where I was going. I got hit by a motor scooter. The man who was driving it yelled at me. I wasn’t seriously hurt—mostly bruises and a few cuts—but he didn’t even stop to ask and went on his way. I dragged myself to the curb. People kept walking around me as though I was nothing but an obstacle. I thought—why should I go on with my life? Then a man came out of a shop. He bent over me, helped me to my feet. In his shop he attended to my cuts, and he gave me hot noodle soup and wouldn’t let me pay. I stayed there until I was well enough to go home.

“That incident turned me away from my dark thoughts. I realized that although friends and family are crucial, sometimes the kindness of a stranger can change our lives.

“So I came up with this device that you wear around your wrist, and it can gauge your emotional level and your mood through your skin. It can also connect you, via your genie, to your computer or mobile device, specifically through software I designed.”

He sighed.

“I designed it at first as a cure for loneliness. I had to invent a theory of loneliness, with measures and quantifiers. I had to invent a theory of empathy. The software enables your genie to search the Internet for people who have similar values of certain parameters . . . and it gauges security and safety as well. When you most need it, based on your emotional profile at the time, the software will link you at random to someone in your circle.”

“Does it work?” said the monk.

“It’s very buggy,” Yuan says. “There are people working on it to make it better. The optimal network architecture isn’t in place yet. My dream is that one day it can help us raise our consciousness beyond family and friend, neighborhood and religion, city and country. Throughout my journey I’ve been giving it away to people. In every town and village.”

He taps the plain orange wristlet on his left arm.

“I’m connected right now to seven other people, seven strangers. The connection is poor, but sometimes I hear their voices or see them on my notebook screen. On the way here I stopped at a grassy meadow criss-crossed by streams, a very beautiful place. The reception must have been good because all at once I saw an old woman on my computer screen. She was standing at a kitchen counter feeling like she had nothing to give to the world. Helpless, useless, because she was old. So I told her—I didn’t know what to tell her because I felt her pain—but finally I told her something clichéd, like a fortune from a fortune cookie. I said, ‘Something good will happen to you today.’ I don’t know if that turned out to be true. I don’t even know who she is, only that she’s from another country and culture and religion, and I felt her pain like it was my own.”

The monk listens very carefully, leaning forward. The little creature has gone to sleep on his lap.

“Perhaps you suffer from an excess of empathy,” he says.

“Is that a bad thing? I suppose it must be, because of how I’ve ended up. As you grow up you are supposed to get stronger and harder, and wiser too. But I seem to be less and less able to bear suffering—especially the suffering of innocents. I saw a photo of a dead child in a trash heap, I don’t know where. The family was part of a wave of refugees, and the locals didn’t want them there. There was violence. But what could these people do? Their homeland had been flooded by the sea. They were poor.

“I once saw a picture of a dead polar bear in the Arctic. It had died of starvation. It was just skin and bone, and quite young. The seals on which it depended for food had left because the ice was gone.

“There are people who don’t care about dead polar bears, or even dead children in trash heaps. They don’t see how our fates are linked. Everything is connected. To know that truth, however, is to suffer. Each time there is the death of innocents, I die a little myself.”

“Is that why you are so sick?” the monk says harshly. “What good will it do you to take upon yourself the misery of the world? Do you fancy yourself a Buddha, or a Jesus?”

Yuan is startled. He shakes his head.

“I’ve no such fancies. I’m not even religious. I’m only trying to learn what my teacher called the true knowledge that teaches us how things are linked. My sickness has nothing to do with all this. The doctors can’t diagnose it—low-grade fever, systemic inflammation, weight loss—all I know is that no treatment has worked. I am dying.”

The monk walks out of the room.

Yuan sits up weakly, finds the cooling yak butter tea by the bedside, and takes a sip. He is bewildered. Why is the monk so upset?

Later the monk returns.

“Since the third day you came here,” he says, “you haven’t had a fever. Once your strength returns, you should go back, down into the world. You have things to do there.”

Yuan is incredulous.

“Even if what you say is true,” he says after a while, with some bitterness, “how can I trust myself? My vision of this place—remember? The university I dreamed of—the hope of the world. My reason to keep going. It was all false.”

“Maybe it was a vision of the future,” the monk says gently. “After all, your teacher was real. If she mentioned this place to you, then that must mean that others are dreaming the same dream. Go back down. Do your work. This malady, I think it is nothing but what everyone down there has. Most of the time they don’t even know it.”

He gestures savagely toward the world below and falls silent.

Yuan has not allowed himself to feel hope for so long that at first he doesn’t recognize the feeling. But it rises within him, an effervescence. He looks at the monk’s averted face, the way the animal on his shoulder nestles down.

“If I am cured, then you have saved my life. You took me in and nursed me back to health. The kindness of strangers. I am twice blessed.”

The monk shakes his head. He goes out of the room to attend to their next meal.

As Yuan’s condition improves, he begins to explore the ruined monastery. There are rooms and rooms in the east wing that are still intact. The meltwater from the avalanche has filled the lower chambers of the west wing. In that dark lake there are splashes of sunlight under the holes in the roof.

“We got all the bodies out,” the monk says.

Then one afternoon, when he is exhausted from exploring and has taken to his bed, Yuan is woken by the monk’s little pet. The animal is scrabbling frantically at Yuan’s shoulder, whimpering. Sitting up, Yuan looks around for the monk, but there is no sign of him. There is a great, deep rumble that appears to come from the Earth itself.

At first Yuan thinks there is an earthquake, because the mountain is shaking. Then he realizes what it is. He rushes out of the room, conscious of the little creature’s scampering feet on the stone floor behind him. He runs up the stone stairway to the broken terrace that lies directly in the glacier’s path.

The monk is standing on the terrace, gazing upward, his black robes billowing behind him. The enormous boulder that was poised at the lip of the glacier has loosened and is thundering down the mountainside, gathering snow and rocks with it.

“What are you doing?” Yuan yells, grabbing the man. “Get away from here—you’ll be killed!”

He grabs the man’s robe near the throat, shakes him. The monk’s eyes are wild. With great difficulty Yuan pulls him across the shaking, broken terrace floor, toward the stairs.

“You die here, I die here too!” he yells.

At last they are half falling down the steps, running down the broken corridors, over to the east wing. When they get to the terrace, there is a sound like an explosion, and the ground shakes. It seems to Yuan that the whole monastery is going to go down, but after what seems like a long, endless moment, the shaking stops. They look around and see that the east wing is still standing. The small creature leaps up the monk’s robe and trembles on his shoulder. The monk caresses it.

There are tears in his eyes, making tracks down the lined face. Yuan sits him down on the low wooden seat. The kettle has fallen over. He brings water from the great stone jar, pours some into the kettle, gets the fire going.

When the first cup of tea has been made and drunk, when the monk has stopped shaking, he starts to speak:

“I’m not a monk. I’m only the caretaker. They took me in when I came in as sick as you, but where the world made you feel like you would die of grief, it made me burn with anger. I was a city man, living what I thought was the only way to live, the good life. Then some things happened and my life unraveled. I lost everything, everyone. I ran away up here so that I wouldn’t hear the voices in my head. I was full of anger and pain. My sickness would have killed me if the monks hadn’t calmed it, slowed me down. Instead thirty-three of them died when the avalanche came—my teacher among them. And I lived.”

“So you were waiting for that last rock to come down,” Yuan says slowly, “so you’d have your death.”

The man starts to say something, but his eyes fill with tears, and he wipes them with the back of his hand. The creature on his shoulder chitters in agitation.

“Your little animal needs you to live,” Yuan says. “He came and called me. That is why you are alive.”

The man is holding the animal against his cheek as the tears flow.

“Life is a gift,” Yuan says. “You gave me mine, I gave you yours. That means we are bound by a mutual debt, the kind you can’t cancel out. Come back with me when I return.”

Several days later, much recovered, Yuan made his way back the way he had come. His companion had decided to stay in the village nearest the monastery. Here, under a sky studded with stars, Yuan heard the man’s story. Yuan left with him an orange wristlet, even though the satellite connection was intermittent here. When they parted, it was with the expectation of meeting again.

“In the future that you dreamed of,” said his friend. “Don’t be too long!”

“I’ll be back before you know it,” Yuan said.

After he had passed through the high mountain desert, Yuan descended into the broad alpine meadow. He lay down in the deep, rich grass and felt his weight, the gentle tug of gravity tethering him to the earth. Around him the streams sang in their watery dialect. Sleep came to him then, and dreams, but they weren’t about death. His wristlet pinged, and he woke up. He must be back in satellite range. He heard, faintly, music, and the sound of a celebration. A woman’s voice spoke to him, a young voice, excited. Two words.

“ . . . A BUTTERFLY . . . ”

Originally published in Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer.

Sails the Morne

Chris Willrich

The morning that Eight Ball’s klaxon blared, heralding the disciples of universal night, her captain had gone fishing.

Gesar Chin—friends called him “Brick”—was a relic even for a long-hauler, and he appeared almost stony astride his fishing pole, like a terra cotta warrior with a patina of grease. His only movement was to chew the betel nuts that for all 24th Century dentistry still left his teeth bloody red. Each chew bobbed him slowly in freefall, like an ebbing pendulum. Just an hour out of hibernation, he still ached. And one thing he’d learned in all his dubious careers was to take the morning slow.

Never mind you hate the Gwai Lo, he told himself. Deep breaths. Remember what Wigness said, just steer the ship. Keep a grip.

So he was eyeing a fat golden pictorial velcroed open among the charts (2,000 Years of Illuminated Manuscripts) and a fat silvery fish drifting beyond the big transparent dome, when the alarm screamed as of murder, and the lighting shifted red. The cod appeared to swim in blood.

“Aiya,” Brick muttered, still chewing his nut, reflexively touching the knife at his belt. “What the hell?” he croaked. But the cod couldn’t answer. He shot it a disgusted look.

Like all Eight Ball’s crew except Kybernetes, the ship’s resident Brain, he wore a two-dimensional rendering of a black sphere from an obscure Earth game. It incorporated a radiation dosimeter and a link to the ship’s network. He tapped it and said, “Captain here. Make it good.”

“Brick,” came the cool voice of the woman he knew only as Dagger Meza, his first mate. “Kyb’s spotted an object in an intersecting solar orbit.”

This time Brick stopped chewing. “Intersecting?”

“Close enough. It’s two hundred eighty thousand klicks away now. We’ll pass within a hundred sixty thousand.” 

Brick swore louder this time. The thing was already closer than Earth was to its moon. “Uncharted iceball?” he said. “Or a ship?”

“The betting pool’s going with ship, sir,” came the glum tones of Kybernetes.

“I want to have a look,” Brick said, “with my own ’eyes.’”

Martian by birth, he had the winsome but weathered look of those Sino-Tibetans who first walked the red world without masks. He also bore the hoarse voice and dark goggles of old spacers whose thyroid got too many Grays and whose eyes got too many gees.

“We figured you would,” Kyb said.

Brick sighed and spat into a self-sealing cup. Then he keyed the ascent. The hatch below snapped shut. Motors whirred; silver shapes darted off, including the one that got away.

The fishing bubble doubled as the astrogation bubble, even if Eight Ball’s specs had it the other way around. Eight Ball’s denizens—four fresh-thawed baseline humans, three revived aliens, and the ever-vigilant Kybernetes—dwelled in a titanium sphere about thirty-five meters across, itself sealed in a shell of carbon-steel-caged cold water, five meters thick. The water had many uses: cosmic ray shielding, heat dissipation, backup propellant. You could even drink it. But it was Brick’s innovation to stock it with Pacific cod, and to rig the bubble atop the inner sphere with a rod and reel, its handle just above the navigation charts.

The bubble rose like an elevator car in some Earthly undersea habitat. A circular panel irised upon the grey wall of the outer shell. Beyond was a special membrane that peeled away as the bubble peered through. Now the fishing rod dangled into space. The Milky Way sparkled beyond the orange lozenge of the lure. Stray water drops froze and scattered to join the stars, or drifted like snow onto the white hull around the bubble.

Eight Ball matched her name. Her outer shell was a black sphere studded with cargo modules, sensors, and heat radiators, but at the bow lay a circle of white paint threaded with a black infinity symbol. A docking port crouched inside the starboard loop; the astrogation bubble peeked from inside the port loop. Smirking dirtsiders supposed the black paint a nod to stealth, sabotaged by the white patch. In fact, both white and black were affectations. A ship’s heat glowed more livid to sensors than candy stripes. Barring odd “terrain” like dense convoys or the close vicinity of the Sun, stealth in space was a myth.

The principle worked both ways however. No one should have gotten the drop on Eight Ball.

Grunting, Brick tapped his goggles and blinked, and the lenses responded. These were not true corrective glasses, but rather flat computer panels of a sort antiquated by direct neural links. The uniform black of the goggles absorbed photons while a computer perched above Brick’s nose tailored displays for his acceleration-damaged eyes. In effect, everything he saw was a simulation. When he glanced at his pictorial, for instance, with its swirling rendition of the Chi Rho page of the Book of Kells, the Greek letters denoting Christ filled with shimmering intricacies like some ecclesiastic fractal set; and he could choose to magnify the image, tease out the miniature animals and fanciful beasts and nearly as fanciful humans tucked within the dizzying Celtic knotwork, or delve deeper, examining the fine veining of the calf-skin parchment so faithfully reproduced, or call up an annotated gloss about the original rich palette of pigments, such as iron gall, orpiment, and lapis lazuli.

He loved such explorations. But now he must look away, from illumination into darkness.

Graphical overlays crisscrossed Brick’s view of the stars. A green dot on a green line marked their destination, Kuiper Belt Object Quaoar, eight hours away and crawling with alien Gwai Lo.

A red line, thicker to indicate nearness, slashed at a slight angle across the green. Upon it pulsed a red dot, Kybernetes’ bogey.

Brick grunted, squinted, rapped, mixing the goggles’ information with Kyb’s data. He resolved a fuzzy, shadowy image. Soon he could guess its true shape, slender and tri-winged.

“Huh,” he said. “Very Flash. Gordon, that is.”

“Captain?” Dagger’s miniature face popped up in one corner of Brick’s display—or rather lack of face, since she always left her quarters shrouded in dark robe and cowl.

“Looks so out of place it’s crazy, I mean. Might as well be a sailing ship.”

Dagger’s image nodded. “We thought it might be an atmosphere-launched missile, but out here, that makes no sense.”

Brick scratched his nose beneath his goggles. “Probably a yacht,” he decided with surprise. It was hard to surprise him these days.

But it must be so. Any interplanetary vessel so sleek must be a toy of Rollers, plutocratic youth cruising the inner system before becoming Loaded, discarding flesh for electronic immortality. Even SolGov would bow to the economic wisdom of using different craft for atmospheres than for deep space.

“Who the hell is this?” Brick snarled, his thoughts now burning to his cargo. “How did he sneak up on us?”

“Working on the who-the-hell-he-is, sir,” Kyb said, her tone sparking with anger. At Brick? More likely at the Roller. There was no pop-up image of Kyb’s face, because she no longer had one. Brain-hood was a cheaper brand of immortality than Loading, and many of the elite sponsored the cybering of Brains in return for indentured servitude. That was Kybernetes’ story, until Brick had bought her freedom. But there remained the worry her Roller employer had left hidden overrides behind.

Maybe Kyb worried too.

“They can’t have chased us from the inner system,” Kyb was saying. “It can be done, but we’d have seen it.” Brick nodded. If life support was a candle, ship’s drive was a bonfire. Kyb continued, “So I would guess it was manufactured out this way. I’m searching our onboard registry. As for how sensors missed it, there’s almost no heat signature. I only spotted it because I got into a paranoid mood, and checked for star occultations.”

“Let’s hear it for moods,” Brick said. “Huh, no heat. A robot yacht?” Its appearance might be a ruse.

“Maybe, yes. But even for a robot it’s cold. If it wasn’t coming so close, I’d wonder if it was a derelict.”

Mercury “Merc” Jones, the flashily-named engineer with the unassuming title Loadmaster, popped up in another corner of Brick’s display. “Been thinking about that,” said Merc, a thirtyish-looking black man leathered by years of solar exposure at Mercury’s Quicksilver Scrapyards. He bore a toothmark scar on his temple from the _Eight-Ball_ crew’s notorious barfight on Titan, where Merc accidentally switched his raw-egg drink with an Ixion’s bark juice. Though younger, the peripatetic Loadmaster had stripped and jury-rigged more ships than Brick had ever seen. “Could be running in some kind of dormant mode, you know . . . like how old space probes carried little batteries, enough to run a few instruments, not enough to easily spot. Some late 21st Century models could run damn cold. Sneaky.”

“Assuming the ship is not built with alien stealth,” Dagger said.

“Huh.” In her own way, Dagger mistrusted Gwai Lo as much as Brick did. One of the Lagrange space colonists, her home habitat had been an economic basket case since the Contact Crash, and while unlike Brick she wasn’t alive then, L5 still suffered.

(He’d never forget her fighting off that Ixion in the Titan barfight, wielding her tequila bottle with all the passion and precision of some drunken yet dragon-slaying Joan of Arc. Even now it generated thoughts unbecoming of a captain.)

He respected her worries. The Ixions in particular had boycotted Quaoar’s All-System Exposition in disdain for the smelly tree-beasts who nominally owned the system in question. Brick could imagine the ravenous, slimy, two-meter wasp-snakes vaporizing Eight Ball for emphasis. Still, the ships of the Kuiper Belt’s great colonial Powers, and even lesser lights like the Erisians, were as distinctive as works of art. Why would aliens go slumming on a human yacht?

“Okay,” Brick said. “For now we assume they’re human pirates. Or at least human-built pirates.” He sighed. “We’d better inform Ambassador Yee.”

“We going to launch her at them?” Merc said.

“She’s SolGov,” Brick said, “and we’ve got an obligation to keep her informed. Anyway, we opted for a laser cannon, not a missile bay. Put her on.”

“Pirates?” Chodon Yee sputtered presently. Like Brick, the Special Ambassador for Inter-species Conferences was Martian-Tibetan-Chinese, but the resemblance ended there. An icy beauty, she seemed eternally young, with a talent for gathering attention like Jupiter gathered moons. If he hadn’t seen her in the flesh before hibernation, Brick would have thought the sleek image in the pop-up display some virtual avatar. She just didn’t quite seem real.

“Robot pirates,” Dagger said.

“Ahr, buzz, ahr, matey,” Brick said. There was silence for a moment, before everyone ignored him. His crew could tell when he was talking as the captain, and when he was talking as the Old Coot. Yee probably thought he sounded no more stupid than usual.

“I trust you have an explanation for this?” she said.

“Piracy in deep space is difficult,” Kyb said, “because the detection ranges are so long. But this ship may have a workaround. Imagine a controlling AI . . . or Loaded personality . . . aboard a minimally-powered ship. Give it drones to recover swag. We’re highly visible even coasting, because of the heat from life support. Our robot pirate doesn’t have that problem. And so now they’re here, well within weapon range.”

“I don’t want a lecture on pirate tactics,” Yee said. “I want to know how you ignored this possibility. I have never been comfortable with SolGov’s use of private haulers. This only vindicates my concerns.”

Brick chomped a fresh betel nut. He could almost hear Merc sharpening his knife. He said quickly, “This is somewhat unprecedented, excellency.” He remembered SolGov representative Wigness assuring him the threat from piracy was nil. He wished he could bring Wigness here now. “What little space piracy goes on, goes on closer to the Sun—”

“You shame your ancestors with excuses. No doubt you bring great negative karma upon this ship. You are certain it’s hostile? Have you tried hailing?”

“Madam.” Brick drummed his fingers upon the image from the Book of Kells. “It’s a ship close enough to spit on. That can’t be an accident, and I’m not taking chances. Our only advantage right now is that it might not know we know.”

Kyb tried to rescue him. “We do have another advantage, Captain. No life support means low heat profile, but only if they’re powered down . . . they’ll have to go through a power-up before threatening us with more than bad thoughts.”

Yee said, “Then there may be time for Quaoar to help us. We should alert Ambassador Wintergrue.”

Merc laughed. “Quaoar never answers maydays, excellency.” The Loadmaster wasn’t bothering to keep the scorn out of his voice. Merc disliked officialdom, piety, and dirtsiders, and Yee wrapped all three up in one glossy package. Brick gathered Merc had spent years tangled with some well-heeled, Mars-based cult, the Moddies maybe, or a human branch of the Night Readers, and this had a lot to do with his love for the outer system. “For that matter,” Merc went on, “they’re so fussy about approaches they’ll blast anything that assumes a collision course, even by accident. Fun people.”

“Even with Wintergrue on board?” Yee scoffed.

“Let’s ask,” Brick said.

“Even with me on board,” the retiring Quaoran Ambassador confirmed a minute later, its translator affecting an easy, mellow tone. “It is simply that we don’t fool around with high relative velocities. At spacecraft speeds, accidental collisions are hard to distinguish from deliberate attacks. So we don’t. Too bad for me.”

Brick bit hard on a betel nut, looking at the Quaoaran’s grotesque image in his display, so at odds with its urbane artificial voice.

A Quaoaran—the name was a convenience, for its true home was light-years away—was like a ten legged tarantula, stuck to the bottom of a meter-wide balloon composed of layers of spider-silk and crisscrossed with tiny, scampering young (plus robot versions of same) the whole works spray-painted white. Quaoran language was ideographic, formed of red threads dropped onto the white by those mind-linked (some sources said enslaved) younglings. So strange squiggles coiled around Wintergrue’s gasbag like bloody calligraphy, the Quaoran analog to his speech.

“Now, despite the fact that Quaoar will be no help,” Wintergrue continued, “I am curious why these pirates would choose to intercept when we’re relatively close. They could have caught you in hibernation.”

Brick frowned at the image. One of the child-spiders up top was looking quite big, almost as large as the parent.

“Maybe they’ve got a buyer at Quaoar,” Merc was saying, “you know?”

Dagger added, “And when piracy does happen, sometimes the raiders want an awakened target that will jettison cargo.”

“Excellency,” Brick put in, “pardon me for prying. But are you in danger of tipping?”

The amount of red writing on the Quaoaran gasbag tripled, but Wintergrue’s mild voice said simply, “All my young are leashed, Captain Chin. My eldest will be cut loose at Quaoar soon, before any psychotic takeover can take place. Thank you for your concern.”

Brick wanted to trust Wintergrue; horrific appearance aside, it was tolerable company, for a Gwai Lo. But Quaorans whose mind-linked young rebelled could become irrational. Sometimes the rebel could even masquerade as the parent . . .

“You’re wasting time, Captain,” Yee said. “What are you going to do about this pirate? How are you going to ensure the safety of the holy relic?”

“Holy relic?” Merc said.

“What my first mate suggested,” Brick said quickly. “Drop and run.”

“You’d jettison the cryptbox?” Yee exclaimed.

“No,” Brick snapped. “I’m talking about the outboard cargo. Kona coffee for the Quaoarans. Redwood bark for the Ixions. That sort of thing.”

“Cryptbox?” Kyb said.

Thanks, Yee, Brick thought. But I guess our pirates already know. The box was the likely target. Even as voracious as the Ixions, say, were for Earth plant matter (gluttonous omnivores though they were, the very scent of Earth meat could set them vomiting—he’d lost a good shirt to green splatter at that Titan bar), tree bark hardly justified piracy. But at least Eight Ball could shed mass.

To Kyb he said, “Later,” before tapping his badge for a shipwide announcement. “This is the captain. We’ve detected a probable hostile. All passengers to the storm cellar. All passengers to the storm cellar.” He killed the announcement. “Wait for it . . . ”

The Orcan Ambassador to Quaoar (reassigned from Earth) cut in. Brick had run out of corners to stow the pop-up images, so it appeared beside Yee’s. By contrast to her chilly composed gaze, it was giving him the finger.

The Ambassador, whose name translated as Oddsgod, traveled in an aquarium about the size of Wintergrue’s gasbag, covered with extendable manipulator-claws. It made Brick think of one of H.G. Wells’ Martian war machines, with a fishbowl on top. The fishbowl’s interior frothed with smoky-looking water. Sometimes tendrils emerged into view, brushing the crystalline wall. The Orcan itself, Brick knew, dangled from an icepack mounted to the aquarium roof. It resembled an inverted blue willow tree with thousands of diminutive worms for branches, little eyeballs near the tips. Those blue tendrils were quite dextrous, so much that Oddsgod was able to make human-readable doodles just by shoving them against the crystal wall. Oddsgod’s latest masterpiece looked like a human hand with its middle finger jutting up.

“Screw that! You’re not hiding any secrets in the muck, human. You either, Wintergrue!” Oddsgod’s tendrils sketched a question mark beside a Quaoran interrogation-chop. “Say, are you about to tip?”

“I see rudeness is not confined to humanity,” Wintergrue observed.

Brick said, “I called you out of courtesy, excellency.” He sketched out the situation. “Expect a burn soon.”

“So begins the fabled All-System Exposition,” Oddsgod gloated, tentacles forming the outline of a fish floating upside down, X for an eye.

“I know you gain great prestige from any embarrassment to Quaoar,” Wintergrue said. “No need to drain a dead husk.”

“Oh, don’t worry. Time’s current will bring our own Worlds’ Fair along soon. I wager we’ll learn from your mistakes.”

“Start by learning some quiet, excellency,” Brick said. “Kyb, punch it soon as the yacht lights. No matter where the rest of us are.”

“I don’t have much propellant reserve,” Kyb said, “if we’re still going to decelerate for Quaoar rendezvous.” 

“Forget rendezvous. Shoot us past Quaoar in an Oberth maneuver, close enough to wave, and get as much speed as you can. Just make it clear we won’t hit. We’ll have to hope they’ll reel us in eventually, since one of their people is on board.”

“They might do that,” Wintergrue said. “They are polite.”

“Oh, your words wound me,” Oddsgod said, tendrils doing a passable rendition of the face in Munch’s The Scream.

“Enough,” Brick said. “We give diplomats passage as a courtesy to your governments—”

“A courtesy unnecessary if not for the ban on civilized tech in your deeper system,” Oddsgod shot back. “Mass-driver launch tubes! Antimatter gas core engines! Ten-year transits! Hibernation! Even the Erisians could do better.”

Yeah, Brick grunted to himself, squinting at Oddsgod’s mobile aquarium, you Orcans love your contraptions, don’t you. Come to think of it, you’re awfully fond of robotics . . .

“Captain,” Merc muttered, interrupting his thought,“where is the Erisian?”

Brick frowned. The babbling octopus-vulture-thing should have popped up by now. His excellency the babbling octopus-vulture-thing. “None of you have seen him?”

Humans and aliens communicated their one point of unanimity.

“Damn it,” Brick said. “Kyb?”

“Can’t find him,” Kyb admitted. “We’re not exactly a fortress here, Captain. And Erisians do have a reputation for sneakiness.”

“Enough. Ladies and gentlemen and indefinites, prepare for a burn.” Brick cut off contact with the diplomats. “Merc, get the VIPs to the storm cellar. Dagger, grab a scanner and find that Erisian.” He hesitated. “Grab a pistol, too.”

“You think he’s in league with the pirates?” Dagger said, her tone sharp. Brick sensed a lecture coming. “Get a grip, Brick. Erisians are annoying, but they’re honest to a fault. That’s part of why they’re annoying.”

Dagger was always telling him to get a grip. Good general advice on a spaceship, of course . . . but she meant much more.

I mistrust the aliens’ power and position, Brick, she’d said before. If I could ever find a way to get our whole system back, I’d probably kill for it. But you—I think ‘foreign devil’ isn’t just an expression for you. I think you literally believe they’re monsters.

Brick snapped, “Just get ’em all into the cellar and in the rescue balls. That way if they make a fuss all they’ll do is play pool.”

“That game sounds weirder every time you talk about it, Captain,” Merc said. “Loadmaster out.”

There was a pause, then: “Dagger out.”

Brick said, “Kyb . . . keep paranoid.”

“You don’t have to ask. It’s dark out here.”

“Captain out.”

Silence and stars again. Brick frowned anew at the mystery yacht. Might it really be just a Loaded eccentric, out where he didn’t belong? Give me a clue, Brick thought.

For an instant there flickered in his goggles’ display an odd message, sandwiched between the distance and velocity estimates.

Beware the Eagle.

It was there and gone, like a quote on the Cislunar Stock Exchange.

The lack of tags made the message seem tight-beamed to the goggles, not pulled from Eight Ball’s network.

“Give me another clue,” he said hopefully. Nothing happened.

Grunting, Brick tapped his goggles and blinked. Data flickered as he tried to determine who’d sent the message. He found no trail.

Was somebody on board sending a private warning? Or . . . he frowned out at the darkness. It was unlikely, but not impossible, the message actually came from the yacht.

Brick cursed and keyed a virus purge. The world dissolved into fuzz. He pulled up the goggles. The blurry view from his gee-damaged eyes was not a huge improvement, but at least he could get around . . . and any viruses recently implanted would be caught. He raised Kyb again.

“A shipwide purge?” she repeated. “I haven’t detected any signals . . . ”

“Guess it’s my turn to be paranoid,” Brick said. “Run it. And Kyb . . . ”

“Captain?”

“Check the registry for yachts named Eagle. Captain out.”

Brick stared a moment longer at the stars, those uncatchable bright fish, thinking of old books and ships and storms. He ran a finger along a chart book’s spine, recalling a ballad of the 13th Century, and a knight commanded to sail in bad weather.

Murmuring aloud, Brick repeated Sir Patrick Spens’ words to his crew: “Mak hast, mak haste, my mirry men all / Our guid schip sails the morne . . . ”

And he answered himself as had Spens’ crew: “O say na sae, my master deir, / For I feir a deadlie storme.”

Wet sea or dark, Brick could empathize. There was a hint in the ballad that the knight had earned enemies, and Brick could relate to that too. Out of need, but more out of anger at the Gwai Lo and the humans who kissed their tendrils/manipulators/feet, Brick once had stolen and smuggled, old books being his specialty. He had concerns about his passengers, but truth to tell, any observer who knew his past would suspect Brick first of all. If pirates were coming, that was surely his karma. Perhaps he should accept it with the solemn grace of a Sir Patrick Spens, sailing to a fifty-fathom grave.

He spat into his cup again and withdrew from the stars. He’d better check his treasure.

Back in the ship’s guts, with fish poking about the bubble, Brick slipped through the hatch below and pulled himself by handholds through the cluttered chart room. From there he nosed through the hatch into the axial ladder. Face-first, he descended.

The ladder was a twenty-five-meter crawl from bow to engine room. The trip was like a caving expedition through tangles of ducting and cables and pipes. Brick’s face felt the tug of air vents, the vibration of motors, the tickle of air freshener strips.

Brick wasn’t going all the way, just a deck down.

Everything looked as expected when he reached his office: neat and ordered, the wall displays flickering with the virus purge.

As expected—except for the alien crouched upon the steel-mesh desk.

The Erisian Ambassador to Earth (currently non-resident) stared with carrion-eater eyes, and one hand on his blade, Brick stared back. His goggles should be fine now; he swallowed and with his free hand pulled them down. His vision clarified, and he beheld a thing out of nightmares.

The alien had its tentacles around the cryptbox like a tomb robber getting better acquainted with King Tut. Only in this case, the robber resembled some mutated Egyptian bird-god (vulture-headed, fish-gilled, bat-winged, and tentacled like an octopus shy two limbs, the whole package wrapped in corpse-grey skin); and the sarcophagus was instead a black slab proportioned like a briefcase. Red death’s-heads flickered across its surface. The cryptbox was magnetically clamped to the desk, and the ambassador did not seem to be trying so much to remove it, as caress it. That was disturbing enough.

It was even worse that the Erisian didn’t so much as glance at the box. Instead it focused on the human as though the antics of its own writhing tentacles were beneath its concern.

“Stop staring at me,” Brick said, “and attack or something.”

“I pray your forgiveness,” the alien kawed politely. “I’m waiting for your death.”

“Beg pardon?”

“How to explain . . . My people evolved to spy carrion littering land, or drifting listless on the sea. When you hold still, my inner scavenger snaps awake.”

Brick shivered. “You’re not exactly calming me down.”

“I am not here to kill you, Captain Chin.”

“Huh. So what are you doing, Ambassador? Excuse me: thief.”

“I am not here to steal. I came to speak to you, then heard the shipwide alarm. Fearing the worst, I investigated your office. I crave the safety of the artifact, as do you.”

As the Erisian spoke, the viewer behind it resumed its normal schematic of the solar system, with the words No Virus Detected covering the eight inner planets of SolGov and the myriad alien-settled iceworlds of the Kuiper Belt.

“Artifact?” Brick said, with a twinge more confidence. “That’s just my MacGuffin.”

“’MacGuffin?’”

“It’s a human term for old movies. This particular one is called Psycho. A classic. Ever see it?” Brick smiled evilly and drew the knife. He twisted a knob and a little display in the hilt switched from Q to E.

The Erisian closed double membranes over its multifaceted eyes, opened them again. “I know what truly occupies the box, Captain Chin. I know also that a menace occupies your vessel.”

“No shit, Sherlock. You break into my office, Ambassador Vul-ah-er . . . ” As a dozen times before, Brick’s tongue tripped on his passenger’s name.

“I am Vulchuglurian Rogatnigok [SCREE] Gowlakach, of Eris and the Darkensea Aerie.”

“Ambassador Vulch. You break into my office, and you’re talking about threats? It’s all clear now. A robot pirate ship wouldn’t be half as effective without an inside man.”

“Fool,” Vulch squawked. “Pirates are not your chief concern. Grave danger lurks on board your vessel . . . ”

“I’m with you there.”

“ . . . a disciple of universal night, a pawn of the Devourers, an emissary of cosmic heat death. You cannot conceive your peril—!”

As the Erisian spoke, a fit engulfed it. The tentacles released the cryptbox and whipped the air as though in ecstasy or terror. The motion revealed the Erisian’s marsupial-like pouch, previously concealed by the ropy limbs. Brick saw various artificial objects protruding from the lip. He saw a tentacle drift toward one. He acted.

Brick yanked himself into the room at an angle, thumbing two buttons on his hypoknife as he came astride the Erisian’s open beak.

The blade shot from his hand on a jet of compressed air, giving Brick a slight impulse backward, as he’d intended, into his bookshelf.

Meanwhile the blade sank into the Erisian’s left shoulder.

Brick plowed into his collection, somewhere between Great Martian Pulps #5: A Princess of Virginia and A Child’s Christmas on Europa. With his free hand he ripped a book from its velcro. As the Erisian, tentacles quivering, looked up, it received Volume One of the Encyclopedia Luna (A to Antimatter) square in the snout.

The Erisian cartwheeled. Ambassador Vulch was resilient, and quickly braced itself against the bulkhead. But the hypoknife still sprouted from its shoulder, and its movements slowed.

The ampoule he’d loaded was prepped for Erisians. Kyb wasn’t the only paranoid one.

“Fool!” croaked Vulch, wings aquiver. “So bigoted are you . . . you ignore the evil behind human faces.”

Adrenalin screaming in his veins, the words foamed out of Brick like water from a burst canal. “We didn’t ask you to come to our system, Gwai Lo! To crash our economy, make my family broke—”

He caught his breath, mastered himself. “What do you mean? Evil behind human faces?”

“Beware,” Vulch croaked, “the Evangelist . . . ” Then the membranes fluttered over its multifaceted eyes. From time to time they flickered open and closed again.

“Perfect,” Brick called to the unseen, unseeing heavens, and swore oaths against foreign devils of all species.

When his fight-haze cleared, Brick gingerly recovered the encyclopedia volume, then yanked the groaning Erisian to the office hammock. A few old fisherman’s knots and the intruder was secured. Purple drops of Erisian blood drifted like spilled wine. Brick left the hypoknife in place. If he had to stow the alien here, he might as well leave it sedated; the blade would dose Vulch at intervals. Vulch muttered something about “Logovores” and “star death” and “devouring.” Probably random nonsense.

Brick yanked the cryptbox loose from the table’s magnetic mesh. Since the box wasn’t screaming, he knew the lock was intact.

Now, just as the Great Powers could swat aside his vessel, they could sidestep mere quantum encryption. But the best Erisian tech, Brick knew, was only a step ahead of humanity’s.

And yet. He had to check.

Though Brick wanted to yank the box open, instead he located a serene haven in his psyche’s stormy sea, the image of his family’s old redoubt on Mars. In his mind’s eye he walked the island estate and found a bottle glinting in the sand. The message inside was a series of numbers which Brick (back turned to the Erisian’s fluttering eyes) traced upon the box’s metal.

This sequence, fed by an implant in Brick’s brain, matched a sequence in the lock. Implant and lock were linked by quantum entanglement, acting as one physical system, despite their separation. Spooky action at a distance, as Einstein long ago put it. Brick should relax. Old Albert had his back.

He opened the box.

Eight Ball’s portion of the Book of Kells was gone.

The worst of it, Brick thought as he regarded the empty box, was that he’d leapt to haul this treasure. Other captains back at Lagrange Four muttered SolGov had gotten giddy about this Exposition . . . that even under-armed freighters ran bloated with swag. But Brick, book-loving Brick, had been too dazzled. He still had connections from his smuggling days, and from the days he’d turned informant. They’d come through for him.

You just steer the ship, SolPol Officer Wigness—now Programme Specialist for Museums and Cultural Objects Wigness—had soothed. The cryptbox will do the rest. Top-end security, maximum shock absorption, nuclear bunker plating. Trinity College wouldn’t let its treasure off-planet otherwise.

Brick slammed the box onto the desk and confronted Vulch. The alien hissed something about “rising glory” and its eyes fluttered shut.

Brick mastered his anger, searched the Erisian. Inside the marsupial-like pouch he discovered a traveler’s medkit and toolkit and . . .

Wonders.

There was a purple scroll covered with Ixion taste-glyphs like green puzzle pieces . . .

A pale Quaoaran memory ribbon threaded with red wormtrail writing . . .

A blue Orcan stem-husk spattered with tiny black words of autobiography . . .

And a yellowed 2076 paperback of Common Sense.

“Night Reader,” Brick murmured. “You’re a goddamned Night Reader.”

It was a little like discovering a house burglar was a Vatican scholar, or a Buddhist monk.

The Erisian said nothing more. Its wings trembled as it slept.

Beware the Eagle, huh? Vulch was the only winged being on board . . . But a Night Reader—

Shaking his head, Brick sealed the office and descended the axial ladder. He passed the V-shaped upper split of the laser cannon and paralleled the grimy chrome pillar of the cannon’s main trunk, down to the spin ring. The laser was Eight Ball’s sole armament. Its main function was deterrence, not so very unlike the little plaques outside proclaiming IF YOU CAN READ THIS I HAVE WEAPONS LOCKED.

But sometimes people ignored warnings.

“Beware the Evangelist,” he muttered aloud.

“Beware what, Brick?” A glint of polished metal shone from the darkness ahead.

Brick’s eyes focused on a cloak pin, blue and gleaming like an icy stiletto. The rest of the speaker was nondescript as a medieval monk. A dark, hooded cloak shrouded her, secured with a toolbelt instead of a rope. Inside the hood brown eyes blinked on a brown face, beneath coils of black hair. A thin-cut smile curled beneath. Teeth flashed.

“’Lo, Dagger,” Brick said.

Dagger Meza hailed from the original L5 colony—known commonly as the “Elf Hive.” The “Elfs” now endured such choking population density they shrouded themselves for anonymity, camouflage ranging from masks to holograms. Even Dagger clung to the mores, to the extent of going cowled.

Perversely, it was Dagger’s modesty that occasionally fanned the spark of lust hidden in her captain. Brick kept it snuffed, of course.

“I said, ’Beware Greeks bearing gifts,’” Brick added, maybe too gruffly. “Or Norwegians. Shouldn’t have taken this job.”

Brick elaborated, leaving out only the “bewares.”

“So,” Dagger said, “we’ve lost the Book of Kells.”

“One fourth of it,” Brick snapped. The 9th Century vellum manuscript comprised four volumes, more or less corresponding to the Christian gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had each boarded a different ship. Eight Ball’s charge was John, the most fragmentary of the four. (Brick recalled the other three vessels, weeks behind, were more advanced and better armed.)

“I see,” Dagger shot back. “Ireland will only lynch one fourth of the crew, then. I wonder who that will be?”

“That’s why you’re my first mate,” Brick said. “All that respect. The book’s got to still be on board, or they wouldn’t bother with the yacht. I think we can rule out Ambassador Vulch . . . ”

“Vulchuglurian Rogatnigok [SCREE] Gowlakach,” Dagger corrected.

“I think we can rule the Erisian out,” Brick said. “I know that’s hard to buy . . . ”

“Let me shock you by agreeing,” she said. “I’ve encountered Night Readers. They are insane, sure . . . but they want only to protect the astral essences of literature from monsters from Beyond. Or something. All harmless mystic crap. Honorable fanatics. Like you.”

“Beg pardon.”

She smiled. “Seriously, Brick. Think of the mass we cart around in the form of books. You’re a bit obsessed.”

“Doesn’t make me a cultist.”

“No. You’re a romantic. We could be shooting at that bogey, you know. We’re powered up, they’re not.”

“We don’t have proof—”

“My point.”

“Gunning down innocents, even Loaded innocents, that’s Gwai Lo work. Buddha notwithstanding, we’re not much better. But we’re trying, damn it.”

“Brick . . . ”

“I know, I know, get a grip. It doesn’t matter. You still got a scanner on you?”

“Of course,” she said, patting her cloak. Medieval-looking or not, it had plenty of pockets.

“Then let’s help Merc with our other passengers.”

“You believe one of them is our thief?”

“Someone beat a cryptbox. That’s got to take Great Power technology. No Ixions around, so that means Oddsgod or Wintergrue.”

Dagger nodded. “It did seem strange that we got so many diplomats on this run. If one of them is carrying illicit tech . . . ”

“They’ll be in big trouble.” The Gwai Lo weren’t allowed to bring their more advanced tech inside Neptune’s orbit. Diplomatic privilege had prevented scans or searches back at Lagrange, but if someone had boarded Eight Ball with a super-device, that would have repercussions in galactic law. Of course, discovery might encourage their government to do away with the witnesses. Eight Ball wasn’t inside Neptune’s orbit now. “Let’s just hope to God that’s not really a Great Power ship out there.”

“God may be displeased that you lost the holy gospel.”

“You’re an atheist, Dagger.”

“Just an observation.”

As they descended the tangential ladder into the spin ring, they could hear the passengers arguing with Merc.

The spin ring boasted a sixteen-meter-diameter interior, with a corridor circumscribing it and a series of cabins branching off, four for passengers, three for crew. What might have been Kyb’s cabin housed the medical pod. If necessary, Kyb’s brainshell could be shunted from the flight deck to the pod. For the others, the ring offered simulated lunar gravity, a boon to health and morale.

Given the snarling up ahead, however, it would take a lot more than spin-grav to restore morale to Eight Ball.

Brick jogged up the sloped floor. Despite his haste he tapped the handholds amid the multicolored piping on the right. Keep a grip . . . because if Kyb punched a burn, the spin ring would automatically stop. Acceleration would transform the right hand wall into the “ceiling,” and the smooth left hand wall into the “deck.”

Thus, by the time Brick arrived, arguments had devolved into threats.

A glowering Merc, wearing a heavy toolpack as though geared for a hiking expedition to a scrapyard, gripped the piping on the wall. The Loadmaster, a health fanatic, made Brick feel fat and feeble just looking at him, but sometimes that was a reassurance. Now, for instance. Merc’s free hand brandished a hypoknife, pointing at the the three remaining Ambassadors.

The graceful, cold-eyed Chodon Yee with her black gown swirling with red dragons still didn’t quite seem real. Adding to the surrealness was the ambulatory fishbowl of Oddsgod (tendrils sketching the symbol of a null set) and the drifting spider-nest gasbag of Wintergrue, whose overgrown child crouched atop the balloon, looking even bigger than before.

“Can’t convince ’em,” Merc said, “can’t stab ’em. You know?” The scars from an Ixion’s fangs looked shiny around his right eyebrow.

“Captain, be reasonable,” Wintergrue said. “We are grown beings, not fresh-cut juveniles.”

Oddsgod said, “I might feel more cooperative if your grease-monkey hadn’t drawn a knife on us.”

“Loadmaster,” Merc said. “His Loadmaster drew a knife on you.”

“I promise you,” Yee announced, “none of you will work in space again.”

Brick fetched a betel nut, bit down. For all his worries about Oddsgod and Wintergrue, Yee had uttered fighting words. He strove for a diplomatic tone, and got within maybe an Astronomical Unit of one.

“Excellencies. We face potential combat. Safety demands you visit the storm cellar.”

“A little late for safety,” Yee said, “after you let pirates down our throats.”

“Well, if I read the group’s mood,” Oddsgod said, “you’d better let us sift our own waters, Chin.”

“Have you already seized our colleague,” Wintergrue asked, “Vulchuglurian Rogatnigok [SCREE] Gowlakach?”

“He’s . . . secure,” Brick said, then muttered, “Am I the only one who can’t pronounce that?”

“Nope,” Merc said. “I call him Squiggly.”

“The name isn’t so hard,” Dagger said.

“That’s just ‘cause you’re the smartest person on board,” Brick sighed. “Speaking of which, did you get that last task done?”

“I did,” she said, patting a pocket.

Brick nodded. Then he spat red juice. Hell with diplomacy. “All right. You don’t want protection, that’s your lookout. Address further complaints to the vacuum. You will now enter your quarters. Which will be locked.”

“Absurd!”

“Screw that!”

“This is hardly—”

Suddenly Dagger pulled a dark, glinting laser pistol from her cloak. “You heard him.”

“You’re finished, Captain Chin!” Yee said, as she and her colleagues stalked into their cabins. “You’ll be begging for oxygen at Lagrange—” The hatches clanged.

Brick removed his badge, tapped an instruction, and slammed it against each of the three hatch controls. Red lights proclaimed a priority lockup.

“Dagger, well?” he said, donning the badge like a sheriff at movie’s end. “Oddsgod or Wintergrue?”

“Brick . . . ” Dagger said slowly, studying her scanner. “It’s Yee.”

Brick found himself another betel nut. “Beg pardon?”

“If I read this right, Yee is an android with an alien coiled in her abdomen. She . . . it . . . is loaded with enough alien tech to cause a galactic incident. Ambassador Yee is an Ixion, Brick.”

Brick stared at her so long, he did a passable imitation of a Erisian.

Then the burn began.

Brick admired Kybernetes’ respect for orders. He’d told her not to worry about the crew, and indeed she had not.

Eight Ball sprang ahead, building toward three gees. The spin ring spun down simultaneously. A jarring acceleration spinward met a punishing shove toward the left wall. Brick’s right hand wrenched in its handhold. He yelped with pain, and heard his shipmates doing likewise.

There were small mercies: at least he hadn’t been thrown against his first mate.

He let go, slumping to what was now the “deck.” Best to ride a burn on your back. Brick’s eyes trembled and teared.

Kybernetes’ voice sounded in their badges. “You guessed right, the bogey powered up. We’re running like hell. How are you?”

“Taking it lying down,” Brick said.

“Had worse, you know . . . ” Merc said, voice clearer via badge than through the air, what with the throbbing in Brick’s ears.

“Think . . . broke finger . . . ” crackled Dagger’s voice.

“Sorry,” Kyb said. “I’m getting a headache, for what it’s worth.”

“I weep for you,” Dagger said.

“Captain,” Kyb said, “I’d like to vent some water from the shell. Less mass, and snow might fuzz our profile.”

“Do it,” Brick said. More cosmic ray shielding gone. Well, he’d never expected to have children.

“Bogey’s too distant to effectively tag with exhaust,” Kyb was saying. “Not that I want him close. Uh oh, change that from bogey to hostile. They’re firing. Looks like missiles. Might have to get creative.”

“You have my . . . ” Brick began, then stopped.

He noticed, one, then another, then a third of the passenger hatches popping open.

“ . . . Full confidence,” he rasped, as he saw three shapes approaching.

“Are you all right?” Kybernetes said. “You sound a little funny—”

“Everything on this deck is fine,” Brick said, as the two—no, three—aliens drifted or crawled or stepped out of their cabins. Wintergrue wasn’t obviously discomfited, although it and its juveniles moved more sluggishly, relying on the little spider-bots to scamper to the deck and tow the gasbag with silver threads. Oddsgod’s mobile aquarium strained visibly under three gees but managed to amble around. Meanwhile “Chodon Yee” seemed oblivious to the acceleration. There was even a little spring to her steps. “Believe you me,” Brick added, “no one has evaluated a deck as carefully as I am now. Just focus on running. Captain out.”

“Thank you for freeing us,” Wintergrue said to Yee.

“What’s your game, Yee?” Oddsgod added.

“I am a surprise guest,” said Yee, in a tone appropriate for afternoon tea. “An Ixion in savage’s clothing.”

Wintergrue sighed, or rather its transmitter did. “I confess I suspected you were not human,” Wintergrue said. “But lacking proper technology, I could not be sure.”

“Same here” said Oddsgod. The tendrils sketched a fanged, wormlike shape. “I have to admit I’m surprised you’ve turned out to be an Ixion, Yee. All you air-breathing warm-worlders are noxious of course, but the Ixions stink the worst. So, what, did you eat the original?”

“On Earth, only the plant matter is palatable,” said the Ixion. “No, not long before _Eight-Ball’s_ current flight, the original Yee had an unscheduled mishap . . . Don’t look at me thus, ice-dweller. I know the emotional cues of seven species, and no, I am not a murderer, merely an opportunist. While I’ve enjoyed playing the role of ‘Yee,’ it is chance that brings me to this peculiar feast.”

“Given the Ixion hostility to our Exhibition,” Wintergrue said, “I find that difficult to believe.”

“Yeah,” Oddsgod said.

Yee smiled. “You Orcans are hardly enthusiastic about the Exhibition yourselves.”

“At least we’re in the game.” Oddsgod whipped tendrils to make a caricature of Yee, and then of an Ixion bursting out of her like an exclamation point with teeth. “And our kind would never hide as one of the scruffy tree-beasts.”

“Hey!” Brick snarled. “Are we invisible?”

Wintergrue projected a laugh. The red writing upon its gasbag got jittery. It wobbled a bit. “He has a point. Colleagues, whatever our agendas, let us discuss them privately—in the control room. After all, the fate of this flying deathtrap might merit our attention.”

Yee said, “My current form is proof even against low yield nuclear weapons. I fear nothing.”

Oddsgod scoffed, rippling its aquarium’s water. “Come on! The last thing we need is a skinsuit competition! I second the motion.”

“Very well,” said Yee. “I am feeling an unseemly urge to step on lesser life forms . . . ”

As if reaching some Great Power quorum had dissolved all niceties toward the natives, the trio strolled, scampered, and bobbed toward the access ladder. “Wait!” Brick croaked. “Where’s the book, Yee?”

“Whatever you refer to, Chin,” the Ixion said, disappearing around the bend, “I know nothing of it.”

Brick snarled and crawled after the aliens, right hand throbbing, then slumped to the deck. His ribs ached. He tapped his badge. “Kyb . . . company . . . ”

“Don’t I know it,” she answered. “Missiles almost here. Hold on, firing the lasers.” The illumination flickered and Brick felt a new vibration in the deck. “Got one. But the second’s still coming . . . hang on for a bigger burn.”

Brick gave up and heaved himself onto his back. That act saved him from serious injury as Kyb further stacked on the gees.

Blackout—

Flanked by pagodas, embraced by plum trees, the manor crowned a little island in the Hellas Sea. The island was artificial, a coral matrix cradling the wreck of a colonial lander. A Chin had served aboard. His wealthy descendants considered the site sacred. They’d set the manor’s foundation by hand.

Gesar Chin’s nickname was no slap. His family venerated their history, and for a time they’d been, like all early Martians, bricklayers.

It had been too long since he’d fished here. He relished the lap of the water under the pier, the rainbow flashes of the local trout, the lifelike pages of the holo-book above his rod. Multiyear hauls and hibernation had snatched him from life’s flow; yet his kin understood that but for Brick the estate would have been auctioned in the hard times, two centuries ago. They called him Gungun, an honored elder, and spoke not of smuggling. Still, he was nearly a stranger. He felt most at home on the pier.

He was almost glad to see the flash of the SolGov shuttle.

Programme Specialist Wigness was an Earther, a tall blonde Norwegian, and proud of his resulting bulk. He put stolid emphasis into the thunk of false-leather boots as he approached. Brick remembered Wigness’ hands around an ex-partner’s throat.

“Have you thought about it?” Wigness began without preamble.

“It’s too hot,” Brick said, slipping into old jargon. “Someone will make a play.”

“Even human tech could spot a pirate from months away,” Wigness said. “Don’t worry, Brick. I’m not sending you to your doom. There are no storms out in the Kuiper’s cold waste.”

“It’s too hot.”

Suddenly Brick’s holo-display of Mr. Midshipman Hornblower filled with static snow. It shifted, growing huge. There was now one vast vellum page, brown-gold, with illuminations like some angelic family album. Four portraits burned within a dizzying frame of Celtic knotwork. There was a winged man in the upper left, and three winged beasts: a lion, a calf, and an eagle.

“Folio twenty-seven verso,” Wigness said. “Behold the symbols of the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Consider the intricacy of line and pigment. Feel the lust of the bibliomaniac.”

“Enough,” Brick said.

“Very well,” Wigness said, and the display flickered through still more pages of the Book of Kells.

There were lines of dark, rounded text with capitals erupting into color like peacocks or fruit trees; a portrait of John the Evangelist, as regal as any king’s portrait but brandishing a book not a blade; and the Chi Rho page’s vortex of color, drawing Brick’s goggled eyes surely as the mandalas of his own tradition. The intricacy of the illuminations spoke of such dedication the monks might as well have bled onto the page.

“Enough!” said Brick, mouth dry. His hand blocked the vision as though warding the Sun.

Most Martians sought Buddhist detachment, but they coveted paper books. A historical quirk, perhaps, arising from a culture of epistles sent to Earth, Sino-Tibetan respect for learning, the expense of computer manufacture on Mars, the relative ease of growing plants in CO2-rich domes . . . or just plain nostalgia. Brick felt the lure, and had profited by it too.

“All our species’ triumphs,” Wigness said, as though cracking the covers of Brick’s mind, “all our despair . . . none of it means a damn without memory. And nothing speaks to memory like the written word.”

Brick wet his lips. “You so sure I’ve reformed?”

Wigness chuckled.

Fish leapt in the Hellas Sea, forgotten.

—Awakening.

“Okay,” Merc said from somewhere far away as Mars, “maybe I haven’t had worse.”

“Brick,” Dagger’s voice jabbed. “Wake up.”

Brick’s eyes and chest ached. He’d pissed himself, too. He opened his eyes, and saw not an evangelist icon but that of a dagger. His first mate’s face clarified, but memory nagged. What had he dreamed? It blurred, like a fish underwater. But his crew needed him.

The three shipmates floated in the shadowed spin ring. Glowpups in alcoves offered a green, spectral light. Dark betel nuts floated in a cloud around Brick. The burn was over, so there was no weight from acceleration, and the ring hadn’t resumed rotation.

Brick tapped his goggles. The ship’s network was silent. At least he could summon night vision: a grey-white scene etched with a blue framework from ship’s specs.

“I remember a godawful clang,” Merc said. His toolbag drifted, discarded during the burn, a decision that probably saved his spine.

“A dud missile?” Dagger said. Her robe billowed around her.

“Seems too gentle,” Brick said, “and I’m not feeling that lucky.”

“Electromagnetic pulse?” Merc wondered.

Brick checked his badge’s dosimeter; radiation count was normal. “Don’t think so. Kyb?”

“Couldn’t raise her,” Merc said.

Brick tried, with no result. “If she’s hurt . . . ”

He grabbed a betel nut, threw it, winced at the pain in his injured right hand. He needed accuracy, though, so he did it again. Momentum pushed him to the “ceiling.” Dagger and Merc followed, using air-jets from their hypoknives.

“I’ll check Medical,” Brick said. “You two search the aliens’ cabins.”

“What are we looking for?” Merc asked.

“I’ll explain,” Dagger said.

Brick monkeyed to Medical. Inside, the backup power was active. White surfaces gleamed, including a sphere with flickering lights labeled PILOT KYBERNETES.

Brick tapped his goggles and established a tight beam.

“You in there?”

Here, Brick . . . scrolled the textual response. What’s happening . . .

“Power’s out. You’re in Medical.”

Hackbot . . . second missile had a hackbot . . . I managed to burn it off . . . took some hull with it . . . but it decoupled me from ship controls. I think it ordered me sedated . . . I’m on enforced medical leave. She added a green smiley face, squinting and sticking out its tongue.

“I hate emoticons. And hackbots. Okay, I’m getting you detoxed. We’re going to Control and getting you back online.”

Thanks . . . Captain, have to warn you, we’re no match for them . . .no Eagle out here, but the profile fits a Full Fathom Five, built at Quaoar’s human enclave by a mysterious client . . . dozens of missiles aboard . . . we may be finished but I’ll go down fighting, after all you’ve done . . .

Then another message, there and gone:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

“Those are the pearls that were his eyes . . . ” Brick murmured.

Captain?

“Nothing, Kyb. Being senile.” His mystery signaler was still there. Either it was someone on board, or a deeply embedded virus.

“And you’re being maudlin,” Brick continued. “It’s the drugs. Hang on.” He cut the connection, and worked the medical console. He muttered, “Okay, fortune cookie guy, you have something to say, say it.” There was no response.

For I feir a deadlie storme, Brick thought, and returned to the others. They were poking through Wintergrue and Oddsgod’s cabins, having given up on Yee’s. Brick relayed Kyb’s words. “She’s alive,” he said. “But we need her live.”

“There’s nothing here,” Dagger said. “On to control.”

“Where the aliens are?” Merc asked.

“They’re not one big happy family,” Brick mused. “They must suspect each other, just like we suspect them. We’ve got room for talk, or trickery . . . ”

“Or caveman grunts and sharp rocks,” Merc said.

“That too. But first I want to see the Erisian. He talked a lot of nonsense before I knocked him out, but he also warned me about ‘evil behind human faces.’ I think I should have heard him out.”

“Brick,” Dagger murmured. “I’m proud of you.”

“Watch it,” Brick said.

“What else did he say?” Merc asked.

“Well, I wanted to ask you about that, Merc. Don’t want to pry, but I know you got involved in a cult yourself, once. Was it the Night Readers?”

Merc frowned, ire evident even in night vision. “You think I’m involved, Captain, is that it?”

Brick couldn’t help glancing at the toolpack Merc had recovered. Then, despite himself, his eyes shifted toward Dagger’s cloak. Plenty of hiding room in either place. He was grateful the goggles concealed his gaze.

“We’ve all got pasts,” Brick said. “You two shouldn’t have to squint between the lines to know I was a smuggler, once. Kells is just the kind of thing I’d have moved. In my dreams, anyway. Kyb, she used to be a Loaded bastard’s slave, maybe the one who’s out there now. Dagger, you grew up in a nasty place, thanks in part to our Gwai Lo pals. Maybe you wouldn’t mind wrecking their Exhibition.”

“I trust you have a point, Captain,” Dagger said.

“The point is, if I can’t trust my crew I’m screwed, surely as if Eight Ball drops into a black hole. We’re a messed-up species and sometimes all we’ve got is each other. I’m making you trust a smuggler, so damned if I won’t trust you. I don’t suspect you, Merc. I just hope you know something that might give me an angle. Ambassador Vulch is a Night Reader. What’s he doing here?”

Merc nodded. “Okay. Captain. Well, I wasn’t one of them. That’s mostly an alien thing. But we did run into Night Readers, back when I ran with the Moddies.”

“The Moddies?” Dagger asked. “Rogue gene-modifiers?”

Merc chuckled. “Nothing so simple. I mean the Church of Christ the Moderator.”

Dagger nodded. “Ah, them. They believe reality is a simulation, correct? Jesus was some sort of high-level system administrator?”

“Close enough,” Merc said. “The universe is code, Word made flesh, you know. I didn’t get all that deep, though. There was a girl involved . . . anyway, we talked to a bunch of Night Readers once, because we had a common enemy. Evangelists of Entropy.”

“Huh,” Brick said. “Would these Evangelists have anything to do with ’Logovores?’”

“Logovores! Sure. Haven’t heard that word in a while. Tall tales told by aliens. Dead gods of space, you know, waiting for the day when they’ll wake up and eat everyone. Crazy stuff. They can send dreams to their servants, the Evangelists of Entropy, who go steal mojo for them.”

“What kind of mojo?” Dagger asked.

“They like to scrag important texts. Kind of like a sacrifice. They burn them, shred them, or literally eat them. They used a computer virus to hunt down copies of the Leet News . . . Oh.”

Brick let out a breath. “Yeah. I think that’s it. The pirates are Evangelists of Entropy.”

“It might explain why they’ve been fairly easy on us,” Dagger said.

“Right,” Brick said. “They don’t want just any cargo, and they don’t want us vaporized. They want the book. And it went missing already, so someone on board is working with them.”

“It’s still got to be Yee,” Dagger said. “It took super-tech to crack a cryptbox, and her android body is the most advanced thing on board.”

“Not so sure,” Merc said. “If it was someone with an alien government, I’d go along with that. But if it’s this cult? Who knows what tricks they have? Or what allies?”

“You believe all that?” Dagger rejoined. “About the dead gods of space?”

“The Night Readers believed it.”

“Enough,” Brick said. “Now we’re just spinning in the dark. I have to talk to Vulch. From here on we stick together. Don’t want anyone’s ghost haunting my ship.”

“You’re an atheist, Captain,” Dagger said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“I have point,” Dagger said. “The two of you are lightweights in a fight. Remember that bar on Titan?”

“I remember.” Merc smirked, rubbing the old scar. “I’ve got your back, friends. You know? Way back . . . ”

“I need to draft a memo about respect,” Brick said.

Banter got them moving, and reaching the axial ladder was easier with the ring stopped. Darkness was a bigger hurdle, but Brick had his goggles, and Dagger had grown up in freefall. Merc could navigate the ship drunk and blindfolded; Brick had known that since the last refit party. They could handle this.

As they ascended, something shadowy shot from above and to the left, and scuttled up the axis to the bow. It wriggled toward the airlock.

“The Erisian—” Dagger said.

“Move,” Brick said.

They “climbed,” or in other words, “plunged.” Beside the open hatch to Brick’s office, dark blobs of goo pelted them: alien blood? It stained Brick’s goggles. He squinted around the blots, refusing to take the impromptu Rorschach test.

Up top, Dagger punched controls, yanked the hatch leading to the airlock’s alcove. The airlock shared a deck with Astrogation. It could access the ship’s exterior on a track parallel with the fishing bubble’s. The airlock proper was sealed. 

Behind the airlock portal, Vulch’s multifaceted eyes stared back at them.

Brick tried the hatch. The safety was engaged. He would need the ship’s network to override.

“Vulch! We know you’re a Night Reader. Let’s talk.”

As Brick spoke, Merc pried off a panel and fiddled with the innards.

Vulch’s beak moved. Brick put an ear to the glass.

“You will be silent now,” croaked Vulch’s voice, “and listen. Your foe is an Evangelist of Entropy, who dreams of the cosmic Dark Age when all bright stars die. Then, in a universe of dim red suns, most of the galaxies gone forever beyond the dark horizon, the cosmos will cool. New forces of nature will spontaneously break from the ones we know now, even as the forces of today separated after the primal heat of the Dawn. Powers you would call supernatural will emerge. In that epoch belief, love, and memory will have physical power—as will fear, hate, and despair. Then will the Logovores awaken from dark comets, to raven and devour.”

Vulch was a little hypnotic when he got going. Brick blinked. “Wait. Back up. The book—”

“Silence! When the Logovores rise, they will slay the rejected and devour the favored.”

“There an Option C?”

“No. Devouring is a metaphor for absorption into the Logovores’ life process. The Logovores abhor the notion of other sentient life. They claim to be the first, and seek to be the last. A fluke of the Dawn created them, a freakish pocket of the universe’s inflation spawning a cloud of heavy elements in a manner distinct from later synthesis by stars. This was irrelevant to the cosmos’ overall scheme, but it birthed one lonely gas giant and its attendant moons. On one such moon, tidal forces sparked heat, and there, in an icy ocean below a starless vault, emerged the Logovores. They divined many secrets of the universe, and deduced the coming of the stars and other life. Enraged, they laid their plans and hid, awaiting the Dark Age yet to come. Intimations of that future and its changed forces ripple backward through time, touching their servants the Evangelists of Entropy. The Evangelists strive to weaken the other species, and strengthen their masters, by destroying the vessels of memory.”

None of it means a damn without memory . . . Brick thought. Who’d said that?

“They have eaten much treasure,” Vulch continued. “I have known a world with deserts threaded by writings of glass, vast words towering like shining hills, laid down by those who brought life to that place. Evangelists of a crystalline species devoured the Testament of Life like fire along a fuse. I have seen a world of hiveminds where entire caste-nests comprise living texts. Evangelists of a gasbag species spread mad pheromones among the Nest of Nine Million Memories, scattered its constituents to the winds. I have beheld a distant star graced with sunspot poems. Evangelists of a plasma species—”

“Enough,” Brick said. “I get it. A religious nutcase—no offense—stole the book. They probably want to take it aboard the pirate ship for a nice little ritual with pipe organ and explosives. But who—?”

“No, Captain. They do not yet have the book—”

“Aha,” Merc said. The hatch popped.

Brick experienced a confused moment of peering through the crack, catching a blur of movement . . .

And Vulch did something, thrust its tentacles . . .

An invisible object whacked Brick in the face. Something flat, solid, but oddly spongy. He tumbled.

He really should have let Dagger take point.

The far hatch opened. Water surged in.

As if to add insult to injury, a message flashed across his goggles:

Nothing of him that does fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Suffer this, Brick thought, borrowing a gesture from Oddsgod as the water shoved him back. This time he did sprawl into Dagger.

They fell sputtering into the axial shaft, grabbing handholds as sparks hissed in the alcove and the interior hatch clanged. Merc had managed to close it.

“Bad timing, Merc—but good work! Now . . . Merc?”

“Damn it,” Dagger said, launching up.

Merc was convulsing. Electrocution. The Loadmaster’s eyes danced upward in their sockets, and Dagger cradled him; he resembled a plague victim in a mendicant’s arms.

“His heart—” she began.

“Get him to Medical.” They had no medkit, and CPR was nearly impossible in freefall.

“You need me.”

“I’ll manage. Think I know who’s behind this. Go!”

She was already moving. Her laser pistol drifted behind.

“Take it!” she called back. “Luck!”

She plunged like a high-diver.

Luck to you, sharp lady.

Then, “Now you’ve pissed off an old Martian fisherman,” he told the universe, and grabbed the gun.

Before he got moving, he pushed up his goggles. Things went from grey/sharp to colored/blurred. He envisioned lurid monsters of space as if inscribed by medieval monks, scuttling and oozing through his vision’s shadowy margins. He dismissed them, cupping a water blob and splashing it against the alien stains on the goggles, which proved to be a yellow-flecked green.

Clean enough. He set off for Control.

But on impulse, he revisited his office along the way. There he found the hypoknife drifting end-over-end through the air. He caught it, and frowned at the stains upon the blade.

Pushing his goggles back again, he blinked.

In natural vision Brick discerned two kinds of alien fluid marking the steel.

One was purple, Vulch’s blood.

The other was that same green, yellow-speckled goo that stained his goggles in the shaft.

He studied this weird palette splattered across his knife. He sheathed the blade and pushed down his goggles.

God might be displeased, they read, before the message vanished.

“He can take a number,” Brick said, and moved on.

Control resembled a small operating room with tables for three patients. The tables were really acceleration couches, and what dirtsiders might take for surgical gear was rather a set of control panels mounted on mobile arms.

The representatives of the Great Powers clung to those couches, idly exploring the controls. Yee offered Brick a cold smile. Oddsgod’s tendrils contrived a grotesque human grin. Wintergrue drifted, some of its young upon the couch, anchoring the gasbag with silk-strands. The parent-entity was oriented to stare at the viewer “overhead.”

The viewer bore a split image. On the right loomed Quaoar, dark, icy, crater-pocked, yet glinting with scattered lights. On the left, a tri-winged vessel sliced a starfield.

“Friends of yours?” Brick jabbed the pistol at the viewer.

Yee shrugged. Oddsgod’s tendrils made a cartoon of a human raising hands in a “got me” gesture. Wintergrue said, “We might have asked the same.”

Brick reached the control panel beside the Quaoran, mastering his shiver at approaching what appeared a mammoth nest of spiders. He clung to the panel like a raft. Little ten-limbed creatures watched him interrogate it. He ordered Kyb back on duty; but that would take time. Meanwhile he could access secondary functions, like hatches and communications.

Okay. He was here. Now he had to plunge into the deep water, and act on all his hunches.

“Wigness,” he sent to Full Fathom Five. “I don’t want the job.”

“Brick!” came the voice of the Programme Specialist for Museums and Cultural Objects. “How did you guess?”

“‘Beware the Eagle.’ That message has been bugging me. Then I remembered. To the scribes who made Kells, each gospel author had his symbol. The eagle was John’s, and we’re carrying his book. ‘Beware’ meant I shouldn’t have taken this job in the first place. You were taunting me. Right?”

“My little joke,” Wigness said. “The messages in your goggles are inspired, of all things, by ancient junk mail. The virus plays on words you’ll find suggestive, muddying the waters, making you jump at shadows. I wanted you distracted. But that first warning was mine. I figured you’d miss the point, and think the ‘eagle’ was my ship. Or even the Erisian, given your prejudices. Good show. You’re not as thick as I thought.”

Brick glowered. “How the hell did you get out here?”

“Why, I made it out here the fastest way of all—beamed at the speed of light.”

“You got Loaded,” Brick said.

“Absolutely. My masters can make a man wealthy, Brick. I’ll be doing even better after I deliver up the cryptbox.”

“Like you delivered me.”

“You weren’t listening very well, back at Mars, or else you brushed off my hints. So be it, I thought. My shuttle was loaded with electronic infiltration gear. While you were distracted with that holo-image, I left surprises in your goggles, too deep for you to purge. I took Eight Ball’s technical specs in trade. I know your ship, Brick. You’re outmatched. Unless you want her blown to Quicksilver Scrapyards, hold course while I match velocities, and hand over that box.”

“And betray my trust.”

“Well, if it weren’t for your history, you could probably explain. As it is . . . you could always disappear into the Kuiper Belt. I could even help. I know people, and people who aren’t people.”

Brick cocked an eye at the aliens. “Speaking of people who aren’t people . . . Who’s your accomplice on my ship? The Quaoaran? The Orcan? The Ixion?”

“What Ixion?” Wigness’ voice gave nothing away.

“Long story.”

“You are stalling, Brick. Just give me the box.”

“Hey, let a dumb fisherman think it over a little. For old times’ sake.”

“You’ve got just a few minutes, Brick. Fathom out.”

Yee the Ixion said, “You have a difficult-to-digest problem.”

“In other words,” Oddsgod the Orcan added, “you’re screwed.”

“This is a quandary,” Wintergrue the Quaoran said. “I sympathize. Do you preserve your ship by surrendering the treasure?”

“Your people wanted it for your Exposition, Wintergrue,” Brick answered. “What do you say?”

Younglings skittered; red writing curled upon the gasbag like blood upon snow. “You see us as exploiters, don’t you, Captain Chin? Yet we’d hoped this Exposition would improve the pride of your people, your works displayed alongside those of the Kuiper Belt’s colonists.”

“Then bail us out.”

“We honor your independence, Captain. If we did not, your system would be overrun. Your battle is your own.”

Brick took a deep breath. Rage would make him stupid. In his mind’s eye he transported himself back to Mars, to fish again upon the family pier.

He had to be patient, like a fisherman. There was a chance yet he might pull his fish from the water.

Water . . . He imagined dark seas on an icy world, and the still colder thoughts of ancient dwellers there. He thought of the menagerie of little creatures in the art of the Book of Kells, all bound together within illuminated knotwork, as though huddling together against the dark. If Vulch was right, all the Gwai Lo and the humans too were like that, in the eyes of the Logovores. Tiny, fragile. All on the same page. Awaiting a sea-change, as Shakespeare might have said, into something rich and strange.

So bigoted are you . . .

 . . . sometimes all we’ve got is each other . . .

“I will condescend to offer advice,” Yee said. “You could discard the cryptbox into the water shell, like a sucked seedpod. Flush the water to space. This will give you some separation from Wigness’ prize.”

Oddsgod’s tendrils formed a pair of dice. “An interesting gamble!”

“We would regret its loss,” Wintergrue said, “but this tactic might save you.”

Brick tapped a control.

“That’s interesting,” Wintergrue said. “Why are you opening an interior airlock?”

“You’re adopting my suggestion, Chin?” Yee said. “That is surprisingly astute.”

“If premature,” Wintergrue said. “You hasn’t shifted that airlock to the outer hull, Captain. Water will spill into the interior. Perhaps you’ve ’tipped?’”

Brick set up a shipwide conference, pumped it to loudspeakers. “Dagger. How’s Merc?”

“Stable.” Dagger said, relief burnishing her voice. “Got his heart going. When he wakes he’ll feel like Eight Ball rolled over him, but he’ll live.”

Brick let go a long breath. Something was going right. “Thank you. Now, I’ve got to ask for more, first mate. You’re probably covered in that green goo that was floating around my office and in the shaft. You’ve got a lab there. You’re probably smarter than anyone else aboard. Quick analysis?”

“Of course . . . ” she said, the question in her voice unstated.

“I’m happy your grease monkey will live,” said Oddsgod, “but what’s this ’goo?’”

“Loadmaster,” Brick said. “My Loadmaster will live. And let’s review a few things. My old pal out there is awfully insistent I surrender the cryptbox. Not the book, mind. The box. Like he’s begging me to put one over on him . . . ”

The klaxon rang.

Brick stared at the screen, which had automatically formed a triptych. Between the smooth orb of Quaoar and the sharp wedges of Full Fathom Five there glided a thing like an immense crystalline icicle, glinting with greens-blues-purples, tapering toward an auroral engine plume.

Brick’s heart hammered. That New Lhasa-sized monster could make Eight Ball disappear with one cold look.

“An Orcan warship?” Wintergrue said. “Here? You’d actually risk a conflict with Quaoar?”

“Hey, life’s a gamble,” Oddsgod said, tendrils sketching a cartoonish hand of cards.

Brick consulted his panel. “They’re not signaling.”

“Not that you can detect,” Yee said.

Brick stared at Oddsgod, weird anenome-thing from an icy moon of a distant sun, so like the world of the Logovores . . .

Deep breaths, Brick. Keep a grip.

“I’ve got it,” said Dagger. “The green material is stomach residue from an Ixion. Looks like it was eating some kind of processed beef with a peculiar garnish . . . ”

“Define peculiar.”

“Well, there’s iron gall, orpiment, lapis lazuli . . . ”

“Thank you.” Brick scowled at Yee, raised the laser pistol.

“You have an Orcan warship out there, and you’re worried about me?” Yee scoffed. “Was my breakfast that offensive?”

“You tell me. But first, go back to what you just said. You encouraged me to put the box into the water shell, so I could flush the book to Wigness. Maybe you knew who really had the book, and where he was. Vulch . . . you back in?”

There was a caw of assent.

“Come to Control. It will be all right.”

Brick shut the airlocks. He held a finger over the red switch that would flush the water shell.

“Acceleration has damaged more than your eyes, Captain Chin,” said Yee. “Whatever you’re accusing me of, my skinsuit protects me from laser shots, projectiles . . . ”

Brick saw Vulch’s shadowy form filling the open hatch. He nodded to the Night Reader.

Vulch slid something from his pouch, something shimmering and transparent, something that had, earlier, whacked him in the face . . . something his vision couldn’t really process.

Or rather, not his vision, but the computer-generated images in his virus-compromised goggles.

Beware Erisians bearing gifts, goaded Wigness’ viral program. But now Brick knew to ignore it. “How about that famous Ixion indigestion.” He caught the control panel between his knees and opened his left arm.

Vulch guessed his gambit and tossed the invisible thing. Brick caught it, felt its weight like a wide, flat slab. He thrust it toward Yee.

“Remember this?”

Yee vomited.

Green ooze bubbled up between the buttons of her gown. Brick’s eyes widened as pressure parted the fabric and he beheld her android body’s navel, saw that it doubled as a tooth-encrusted mouth.

The body itself stood impassively, still smiling, as the true mouth heaved green blobs.

Brick fired into the maw. His right hand ached, but he kept the beam focused.

The android body darkened at that spot, absorbing what energy it could. But a vile stench rose from within. Finally, Brick had to let go the trigger, stretch his fingers.

Vulch flapped his way between Yee and Brick. The two other aliens, watching with spider-eyes and tendrils, stared at their immobile colleague/rival.

“Time’s up, Brick,” Wigness called on the radio.

Still smiling, Ms. Yee said flatly, “They’ve killed me, Wigness. It’s all revealed. Destroy us.”

“Pilot reporting,” Kyb’s voice chimed. “Did I miss anything?”

“Two gee burn!” Brick bellowed. “Collision course with Quaoar!”

“Collision? But—”

“Do it!”

Brick clung to the panel as Eight Ball rolled. Their new course further raised their relative velocity with Full Fathom Five. He watched the tactical display until the moment was right, then flushed the water shell.

Suddenly Yee sprang toward him, knocking Vulch aside. She slapped his injured right hand. He screamed and dropped both the gun and the other thing.

Then Dagger was there, stabbing into Yee’s midsection with a hypoknife. The two slammed the bulkhead hard. Thanks to acceleration, so did Brick.

Wigness’ voice snarled, “My missiles were destroyed! It wasn’t his laser—and there are no mines on Eight Ball’s specs! What the hell are those things?”

“Flash-frozen Pacific cod,” Brick gasped. Don’t mess with an old Martian fisherman.

Yee abandoned the crumpled form of Dagger, springing at Brick. But now two more aliens interposed themselves, Oddsgod grappling Yee with its aquarium’s manipulators, Wintergrue’s young and their robot analogs coiling silk around the three and leaping off to anchor the combatants to the bulkheads. Though the Orcan and Quaoran looked frail compared to Yee, Yee stopped struggling.

Oddsgod said, “Fun was fun. It was amusing to roil the waters. My government doesn’t trust cults, you see, Night Readers and Evangelists included. We knew agents of both were going to be aboard Eight Ball. I was instructed to tag along and watch, but not intervene unless things got too crazy. I’d guess this qualifies. You’ve strayed into dangerous waters ‘Ambassador Yee.’ Dead or merely blooded, today the current brings you to Orcus.”

“Fool!” Yee cried. “One day, even you children of the iceworlds will be devoured—”

Oddsgod’s tendrils again sketched a hand, giving the finger to Yee and the room at large. The Orcan vanished in a flash of light, Yee disappearing with it.

Wintergrue remained, anchored by silken lines to a dozen nooks and crannies of the control room. Brick swallowed.

“The Orcan warship’s gone,” Kyb said.

“Tell me,” Brick said, “were any of the passengers just a diplomat?”

“I was,” Wintergrue said, “though I’m about to retire, one way or the other. So I will say, in my most diplomatic manner, that you’re on a collision course with my people’s colony, and you’re all about to die.”

“Now, now . . . ” Brick said, struggling to his knees. “I know you’ve got a draconian reputation to maintain. The thing is, we’ve got an artifact on board Eight Ball that your people specifically asked to see. We’re just, uh, delivering it more efficiently.”

Brick smiled a friendly red grin, and wondered if it was the last thing he’d ever do. There were worse ways to go . . .

“Captain,” Wintergrue said, “it seems to me you could have fired on Fathom before it became a fully-powered threat. Why didn’t you?”

“Gunning down innocents is Gwai . . . It seemed right to give them the benefit of the doubt. Excellency.”

Wintergrue said, “Interesting.”

Suddenly, the acceleration dropped to a light tug. Like a man expecting a full suitcase and lifting an empty one, Brick lost his balance.

The viewer showed a ceiling of ice and flashing lights and metal. Creaks and groans reverberated through the hull.

“Captain,” came Kyb’s wondering voice. “We’re at a dead stop. Inside a hangar. On Quaoar.”

“Aiya,” Brick whispered.

“It seems fitting,” Wintergrue said, “to give you the benefit of the doubt as well. Your ship’s been impounded for recklessness, Captain Chin. That this act rescues you from Fathom is incidental.” Wintergrue reeled in its anchoring younglings, in the process picking up some spin. This gave the impression of someone dancing free of a vexing job.

Wintergrue said, “It really is time I cut loose my eldest, before it truly rebels. Soon my people will arrive to secure your incarceration.”

“You’ve never incarcerated anyone before . . . ” Brick reconsidered the wisdom of complaining about not dying, and shut up.

“We’re creative. As are you. It seems every so often your species deals with the horns of a dilemma by leaping the bull, so to speak. It will be fascinating to see if humanity can avoid being gored.”

Wintergrue too vanished, less flashily than Oddsgod, there and gone. Like a junk message.

“Bull to that,” Brick said, and then, “Dagger . . . ”

Vulch already crouched over her. Brick had to contain his urge to shove the carrion-eater aside. The Erisian had already removed Dagger’s cloak, and though the grey tunic beneath was hardly revealing, Brick winced a little for the loss of her privacy. Then he winced at the nasty cut on her chest, and the twisted arm.

The other arm clutched something invisible, still rippling in Brick’s goggles’ display like heated air.

“I have given her something for the pain,” Vulch said. “I will help you reach your medical pod.”

“Thanks.”

“Wait . . . ” Dagger groaned, focused on Brick. “You old lech, Brick, always knew you wanted to look at me . . . ”

“Come on, first mate.” He spat. “I’m the soul of goddamn propriety—”

“Shut up. Fair is fair.”

She reached up with her good hand, letting drop her burden with a thud. She pushed his goggles up above his eyes.

Through the blur he saw his first mate . . . and beside her, Eight Ball’s portion of the Book of Kells. Its cover was a modern transparent pane, and through it he could see the dazzle of the four evangelist symbols preceding the gospel of John, the man, the lion, the calf, and the eagle all staring up at him, perhaps a bit reproachfully. He could also see the dampness across the top of the manuscript, and the big bite taken from one corner.

“Now we’re even,” Dagger said. “You have nice eyes, even if they’re nearly gone. But how did you see . . . ”

“Come on. As you were, Kyb.”

“This isn’t good for my paranoia, Captain,” he heard Kyb saying. “I’ve been impounded . . . ”

Vulch trailing, Brick carried Dagger fireman style down the shaft. He could navigate Eight Ball almost as well as Merc could. Damn it. He’d almost lost the Loadmaster, almost lost them all . . .

Dagger said, “No, tell me, how were you sure it was Yee.”

“Dumb luck.”

“Honestly.”

“Okay. She was a cultist, not with the Ixion government. Seems that even violating the tech ban, she didn’t have the tools to break a cryptbox. She recruited Wigness, or the cult did. He hacked my goggles, causing mischief . . . including selectively removing the book from my goggles’ display. Muddying the waters. He hoped I’d find the cryptbox ’empty,’ and leave it open. Or else go along with the letter of his demand for the box. Heh, like I’m that clever . . . But if that didn’t work, Yee was more than ready to get rough with me.” Brick smiled his red smile. “But Vulch tripped things up.”

“Yes,” the Erisian croaked. “After your noble captain stabbed and drugged me, he opened the box and, believing it empty, slammed it down. The impulse pushed the book out—but he did not see it. I, slipping into oblivion, tried to report the rising glory of the relic behind him. This was insufficient to alert my heroic assailant.”

“Less editorializing,” Brick muttered.

“Keep a grip, Brick,” Dagger said. “Go on, Ambassador . . . ”

They reached the spin ring.

“Later,” Vulch said, “I regained consciousness and found the Ixion devouring the book. No doubt it is the fate of Erisians to witness dire violence. No doubt also, the Evangelist of Entropy could not resist sampling her prize before delivering it to her masters. But as I watched, she convulsed, and vomited. I surprised her then, grabbing the only weapon to hand, the knife in my shoulder. I lost the knife in the melee, but fled with the book.”

“I see,” Dagger murmured. “Yee must have crossed over to Control . . . while we were busy at the airlock . . . ”

“Later on I found the knife,” Brick said. “There were two kinds of stain. At first I assumed the green stuff was yours, Vulch. But remember Titan, Dagger? Ixions love Earth cellulose but our animal tissue makes them violently ill. You see, those Celtic monks didn’t use plant fiber for manuscripts. Today vellum is just a word for any fancy paper—but it originally meant paper made from calf skin.”

He checked to see if Dagger appreciated his book lore and his cunning, but found her asleep. “Good night,” he whispered, stowing her within the pod. Medical devices hissed over her. He regarded Dagger beside the slumbering Merc as he might study a rare tome behind museum glass. It could be a hard thing, sometimes, this detachment—appreciating without possessing. He’d already spent a long lifetime working on it. He’d keep trying.

Vulch lurked outside, clutching the mangled Gospel of John.

“Captain. I am sorry for the harm to your ship and crew.”

Brick took a deep breath. “My fault too,” he said at last. “But why couldn’t you have spilled it all when you boarded?”

“Would you have believed a Guai Lo? You have a reputation.”

Brick glared. But Vulch deserved honesty. “No. Probably I wouldn’t have. Maybe that’s to my shame. Maybe it’s best I rot in the caverns of Quaoar.”

Brick had slowed, and now Vulch was staring as if at a fresh carcass. But the alien’s words were no pronouncement of death. “You, Captain, are a lover of books. Thus you have gazed time and again into the depths of other minds, other times and places. I know it is within your power to look beyond the peculiarities of flesh.”

He didn’t share the alien’s mysticism. Hell, he didn’t put any stock in human mysticism. And yet.

In John’s gospel, Brick knew, there was talk of the Word made flesh. It wasn’t his holy text . . . but maybe he could take a bite from it, so to speak. Maybe he and Vulch, and Dagger and Merc and Kyb, were all just words made flesh, somewhere down deep. The universe yet in its morning, babbling to itself, trying hard to figure itself out before the night closed in.

He reached out and claimed the book. Then, with it nestled between arm and chest, he took a tentacle as well, improvising a handshake. Something rich and strange, he thought, sails the morne. Brick’s flesh crawled as suckers fastened, as though he suffered a sea-change, feared a deadly storm.

But he kept his grip.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March/April 2017.

Hotel

Suzanne Palmer

The man came across the red sands alone and on foot, the storm whipping at his back. He flailed his way through the dome lock with his one free hand, then stumbled through the inner seal and wide, wooden double doors to collapse to his knees on the old, worn carpeting. Still cradling a small case in his other hand, he unlocked the faceplate of his suit and took whooping, desperate breaths even as his eyes found the unimpressed gaze, neither welcoming nor otherwise, of the man who sat with his chin in his hands looking down at him from the ancient and dusty desk. “By all the gods, old and new, loved and feared, named and unnamed, and fierce Ares highest among them all,” the man on the floor said, “please, tell me you have a vacancy.”

The old man at the desk pushed his antique spectacles up his nose. “Do you have a reservation?”

“You take reservations?” the newcomer exclaimed.

The desk clerk sniffed. “No,” he said, that one word suggesting blame for that fact could be laid at the feet of the newcomer as easily as anywhere else. He flipped open a wide paper book, and after some consideration, looked again at the new arrival. “I may have a room available,” he said at last. “There is the matter of payment, and expected length of stay.”

The newcomer unclipped his helmet, took it off, and laid it carefully on the carpet. Laboriously he unbuckled his pack and set it beside the helmet, then held out the small case. Flipping the latches as he got to his feet, he opened it for the old man. On the couches behind them, the young girl with shockingly pink hair who had been trying desperately to act as if she was paying no attention craned her neck, but could not see inside.

The old man behind the desk raised one eyebrow. “How long do you plan on staying?”

“Four days,” the newcomer said, closing the case again and setting it down on the desk. “Perhaps only three, perhaps five, but no more nor less than that.”

“There are rules.”

“So I have been led to understand,” the man said. His suit began to make small snapping sounds as it adjusted to the change in temperature.

“No weapons. No exceptions. No modern tech beyond the lobby. If you have medical implants or other assistive devices, you must disclose them and potentially submit to having them examined. If you disturb the other guests unnecessarily you will be ejected, with or without prior warning depending on the offense, with no reimbursement for any remaining time. By that same token, the hotel is not responsible for any damages to your person, your dignity, or any possessions not in our direct safe-keeping inflicted by other guests, especially if you work for the government.”

“Which government?”

“Any government.”

“Agreed.”

“Hotel staff exist for my convenience, not yours.”

“Agreed.”

“And no parties.”

The man raised his two arms, empty hands outstretched to either side, as if to emphasize that he had come alone. “Also agreed.”

The clerk picked up the case, and it disappeared behind the desk. He pushed the old register forward and handed the man a pen. “Sign in,” he said.

The man picked up the pen, tapped the paper with it, stared at it in puzzlement. “Click the button on the top to activate the ink,” the clerk said, “then use it like a stylus.” The man did that, and with an unpracticed hand managed to scrawl out a name across the register. He had barely lifted the pen back up off the page when the clerk slid the book out from under it. He turned it around, harrumphed, then plucked the pen out of the man’s hand. “Mr. Smith. Welcome to the Rosley,” he said, “the most expensive run-down-to-shit hotel in human space.”

“You’re Mr. Rosley?”

“I’m Eddard,” he said, and pointed at the man’s pack. “If you’ll hand over your tech and any other items you’d like to place in the hotel’s safe, I’ll see that your bottles are recharged by the end of your stay. Compliments of the hotel.”

The guest opened his pack, took out a small hand-held device. “My electronic assistant . . . ?”

The clerk rapped the desk and the man set it down with a sigh, then removed more items from his pack. “A satellite compass and an interactive novel,” he said. “And a legal pad.”

“You can keep that,” Eddard said, taking the others. “What else?”

“Only my pack itself, of course. Sir.”

“Your exosuit as well, if it’s smart. You can drop that off once you’re settled and changed,” the clerk said, picking up the items and stowing them in a padded box. Then he reached up behind him and pulled down some object hung there on a piece of red string and tossed it down on the desk. It was a brass oval ring with an extended limb terminating in wide, flat teeth. “Twenty-two B. Nice view of Arsai Mons to the northwest.”

Smith picked up the object, turning it over in his hand. “What is it?”

The old man sighed. “Your room key, Mr. Smith. Sofi, can you show him how to work it?”

The girl on the couch perked up, and with a grin vaulted over the back of the sage-green sofa. She walked towards the desk, straightening out a pink mini-skirt that matched her hair perfectly. “Twenny-two Bee,” she said. “Easy, right up the vader. You family with Smith in Thirty-one Aye?”

“Uh, no.”

“Oh. Or Smith in Thirty Aye?”

“No.”

The girl wiped her brow. “Sure not, ‘cause you don’t look like a Haxallian.”

“There’s a Haxallian named Smith here?”

The old man chuckled. “We seem to get a lot of guests named Smith, Mr. Smith. Even occasionally alien ones.”

“Vader’s this way,” the girl said, pointing. “You know about vaders?”

“Elevators?” The man guessed. “Of course.”

“Smokeydokey,” she said. She pressed a button set into the gold-brocade patterned wall, and a door slid open on a dusty and ill-lit carriage. The man stepped in after the girl and faced front as the door closed again, then flattened himself against the back wall when the elevator gave a lurch and began to move upward.

“It’s not magnet-lift,” he said.

“Naw,” she said. “S’got a big string out of the top for pulling it up and down.”

“How old are you?”

She shrugged. “Dunno. Hey here, second floor!” The elevator gave another lurch and came to a stop, and the man left it with a little more haste than necessary. “Twenny-two Bee, over here.”

The girl led him around the corner to a door with the number in brass in the center, no palm-plate beside it. She pointed at the handle and a small hole in the center of it. “You put the key in there. Turn one way, clicky, door locked. Turn the other way, clicky, door unlocked.”

He frowned. “But if someone else has a key . . . ”

“All diff’rent.”

“Yes, but, what if they took mine?”

“Then your stuff gets to be in their room.” She shrugged again. “So don’t let anyone take yer key.”

“It doesn’t seem like a very secure system.”

“S’why we has a safe.”

He stuck the key in, wiggled it around clumsily until it clicked, then pushed the door open. The room was fairly small, accented with reds and golds to match the landscape outside. He walked across the carpeting and looked out the room’s small window at the dome in the distance, the promised view beyond it obscured by the same dust storm that had chased him here.

Something moved on the grounds below and he jumped. Three large animals ambled slowly across the sand, pale brown with black and white faces and long, sharp horns. “What the hell are those?”

The girl was still lurking in the doorway. “Oryx,” she said. “From Earth.”

“What are they doing on Mars?”

“Some guest. Couldn’t pay so he took off without ‘em. At first Roz thought maybe he’d come and buy ‘em back, but been years now.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Not as long as them,” she said.

“I can’t place your accent. You’re not from Mars.”

“Here now, tho’.”

“You’re not one for specifics, are you? Thanks, I think I’m okay now.”

“Smokey,” she said, and left.

He spent five minutes or so fumbling with the key before he found the small latch on the door that allowed him to lock it from the inside, and after flipping it he laid down on the bed, his arms wrapped around his near-empty pack, and watched with amazement the slow wanderings of the magnificently improbable animals outside.

The girl returned to the lobby and couch, flinging herself sideways over the back to land prone on the cushions, then fished blindly on the carpeting below with one hand until she found and retrieved her book from where she’d dropped it.

The old man at the desk sighed, having long since given up complaining about her abuse of the furniture. “So, what do you think?”

She didn’t look up. “Trouble.”

“Trouble?” A young woman walked into the lobby. She was wearing an apron emblazoned with the stylized hotel logo and carrying a small mountain of biscuits on a plate, which she set down on the desk. Her hair bore faint remnants of the same pink so boldly declaring itself on the girl’s head.

“New guest. Another ‘Smith’,” the old man said. “Makes three.”

“Is that a record?”

“Five once, ten years or so back. There was a fire.” He took a biscuit from the plate, stuck in between his teeth, then rapidly shoveled the rest into a fold in his shirt.

“Hey!” Sofi shouted. “Verah, he took—”

The woman reached into her apron pocket and set another handful of biscuits on the couch arm. Then she pointed towards the front window, and a more distinct dust-plume growing more discrete by the moments. “More on their way,” she said. “That can’t be the supply buggy, could it?”

Eddard came out from behind the desk, acquiring a brass-knobbed cane on his way around it, and stood, slightly stooped, beside the blonde woman. “Damned dust,” he said, then after a minute. “That is the buggy.”

“But it’s due today,” Verah said. “It’s not late. It’s never not late.”

“Hmmmph. Can’t be coincidence. Got to be trouble.”

“Said so,” Sofi said from the couch.

Rickard was the sort of man whose facial expression was fixed into a permanent angry scowl, so much so that it was the subject of heated discussion among the longer-term residents as to whether it was an indicator of gross shortcomings in personality or in genetics. He had been driving the supply run to the Rosley for eight years now and would without fail show up days—or weeks—late, curse at and otherwise thoroughly abuse whatever staff or residents he happened to lay eyes on, and invariably threaten that, iron-clad agreement or not, this delivery-which-amounted-to-nothing-more-than-theft-from-the-good-and-hardworking-people-of-Ares-Two would be the last and they’d all starve (or suffocate or freeze) and he’d only return when he could burn the wreck of a place down and spit on all their corpses.

No one ever really paid him much attention. Secretly, they were all somewhat fond of him, and suspected he of them as well. Now, though, beneath his scowl lurked something deeply and uncomfortably anxious. He had not come alone, and if he didn’t seem inclined to stand anywhere near the old man or Verah, or Hroknek Jarir from Seventeen Aye (who had come down yet again to complain about the scents of mating from the room beside his own) neither did he seem particularly keen on standing with the two men who had escorted him in the door.

“Rickard,” the old man said.

The driver nodded slightly. If acknowledgement, if apology, if neither, it still seemed a concession.

It was one of the other men who spoke first—a tall, solidly-built man in a quietly nondescript suit that screamed government. “I’m Agent Chernin,” he said, as if that explained everything. “We need to search the premises, and we’ll start by having a look at your guest list.”

“No.”

Chernin blinked. “Excuse me?”

“No.” The old man repeated. “Sorry.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Also, no. Some first-gen bunghole someone managed to stuff into a suit and sent out to hassle folks, at a guess.”

A faint but unmistakable Sofi-chuckle floated down from the mezzanine. Verah glanced up quickly but couldn’t see where the girl had got herself to. For his part, Hroknek Jarir was rubbing his arms together and emitting a low-pitched hum of displeasure.

Chernin undid a pocket and pulled out identification and a badge. He thrust it out, almost slapping the old man in the nose with it. “Mars Colonial Authority. Does this help you?”

“Well, now I know who to complain to once you’ve ceased stinking up my lobby,” the old man said, sitting back on the stool behind the desk. “This hotel and its grounds are neutral territory. You have no authority here.”

“We bring you air, water, fuel, and food,” Chernin says. “You want that to end, Mr. Wise-ass? Because all I have to do is snap my fingers, and then where would a miserable little parasite like you be?”

“Sitting right here with my copy of the Agreement at hand and our lawyer on the sat line. It’s been tried before.”

“This is a law enforcement action,” Chernin said, emphasizing each word. “I’ve tried being reasonable—”
“Sir, let me try reasoning my way,” the other newcomer said. He stepped forward and stuck an energy pistol in Eddard’s face. Beside Verah, Hroknek Jarir’s hum had become louder, lower, and now was accompanied by a hissing sound as the Ponkian drew in air. Anyone watching—which wasn’t too many people, at the moment—would see that the alien was swelling up, growing larger. “The guest list, now,” the man with the gun said.

“Arning . . . ” Chernin said.

“We can’t afford to lose this, Chernin. We do it my way.”

“I’d put down the gun, if I were you,” Verah said.

The man glanced at her, pistol still steady in the old man’s face. “And what do you think you can do about it?”

“I’m saying, if you’ve got any brains at all you’ll put that thing away.”

“You think you’ve got some sort of immunity here?” he shouted, swinging the pistol around. “You think you—”

At that point the expanding Hroknek Jarir had reached comical proportions, the barely-discernible vestiges of his distorted head now pressed against the lobby ceiling. When the gun swung towards Verah, who was standing directly beside him, he let out an ear-piercing shriek. Then, with an enormous pop, the entire lobby was lost in a cloud of viciously foul-smelling, sea-green gas.

A shot went off, the flash an indistinct blur in the haze, and was followed by a loud crack and the distinct sound of the pistol hitting the floor. A chorus of coughing and retching came from within the cloud. From somewhere down the halls an indignant voice called out. “Hey, what fucking idiot just scared the Ponkian?”

By the time the miasma had begun to clear—no small feat, even with the hotel’s overdriven air-handling systems—the old man had retrieved the pistol from the floor, hefting his cane with pride and hoping he’d left a mark on the man’s hand when he’d hit.

Someone had closed the fire doors between the lobby and the rest of the hotel to try to contain the gas. Hroknek Jarir had collapsed onto one of the sofas, wiping at his brow. “Dear-oh,” he said. “Such a mmmm headache that will leave, always mmmm.”

Rickard had been fast-thinking enough to snap his faceplate shut and was standing as unobtrusively as he could manage behind a potted palm. Arning knelt, gasping for breath, tears streaming down his face and onto hands splayed out on the carpet below. Verah stood behind him holding a broom, clearly prepared to do something non-janitorial with it if the moment required.

“What . . . the . . . hell?” Chernin said at last, on all fours not far from his comrade.

“Our guest, Estimable Jarir, is a Ponkian,” Eddard explained. “Kind of like a cross between a pufferfish and a giant skunk, and very prone to emotional upset. And I think we can all agree that guns are very upsetting, can’t we?”

Chernin rolled over and lay on his back on the floor, groaning. Arning started to rise to his feet, saw Verah’s grip on the broom handle shift, and stayed put. “We’ve got a convoy of armored personnel buggies out there with an entire team,” he said. “You can’t hold us hostage forever.”

“Hostage? Idiot. You can leave anytime.” Eddard waved at the front door. “Please, go right now.”

“I can’t believe they sent you damned clowns to do this,” Rickard finally spoke up. He met Eddard’s eyes. “Old man, we’d like to rent a room. One night.”

“Rickard, what the hell?” Arning said. “You don’t have—”

“Shut the hell up. A room, old man.”

“There is the matter of payment.” Eddard said, warily.

Arning made to speak again, but Rickard turned and pointed at him with a single fierce finger and made his angry face, and the man shut his mouth. Then Rickard unzipped the front of his suit, slipped a hand in, and took out a rectangular object, holding it out to Eddard by thumb and forefinger as if fearing contamination.

The man’s eyes lit up and he took it, turned it gingerly edge-on, and read the faded gold print there. He opened it, turned a page, and for the briefest of moments pure joy creased his lips. Then, perhaps realizing he was giving away too much, he frowned and snapped the book shut. “This will cover it, even for you,” he said. “There are rules.”

Rickard looked at the other two, then scowled and began unsealing his suit. From a pocket he produced a small but mean-looking pistol which he laid on the front desk. It was followed by a small handful of gadgets, then after some contortions the suit itself. He turned to look at the two men who had come with him, only to see them staring, unmoving, at him. “Hurry it the fuck up, assholes,” he said, and pounded his finger on the empty desk next to his own stuff.

“I am not surrendering my weapon to these outlaws,” Chernin said.

“Fine. Then give it back to your shit-for-brains partner here and send him back to your rent-an-army so he can tell them to sit quietly out there and wait like good little soldiers,” he said, pointing at Arning. “Lose goddamned cannon makes me want to kick him in the face. You want what you came here for, you do it my way now, got it?”

“Rickard, what’s your plan here?” Chernin asked.

“You can’t storm the place, so do the next best thing—check in. You’ve got your eyes, haven’t you? You want to know if what you’re looking for is here, what more do you need?”

With obvious reluctance Chernin drew his own weapon out and held it grip-first to his partner. “Arning, take this and go wait with the others at the perimeter.”

“You can’t be serious—”

“I am. Rickard’s right. You know what’s at stake.”

“But . . . ” Arning scrambled to his feet and away from Sofi before taking the pistol. “My energy pack needs time to recharge before I can go back out there. The suit heater—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Rickard said. He rummaged through his pack, then tossed a small rectangular block to the man. “Take it and get the hell out of here.”

Arning unclipped his own supply and clicked the new one into place. “A spare? That’s convenient.”

“That’s prepared. This is Mars, not camping in your mommy’s backyard with a flashlight and a teddy bear. Now, do you think you can make it back to the others without someone coming along to hold your hand?”

“Screw you, Rickard, you low-life, loser Martian scum. Do you have any idea how much I hate you?”

“No, but you can tell me all about it someday when I’ve sliced you open and I’m eating your own liver in front of you, just to show you how much I care.”

Before Arning could leap at Rickard, Chernin was between them, hands out to block the confrontation. Arning turned, slammed his suit faceplate shut, and left the hotel with a swagger that struck more than one person there as unearned. “Good mmmm-ridding of him,” the Ponkian muttered from where he was slouched on the couch, slowly deflating.

The old man slid a key across the desk, and Chernin picked it up. “Thirty-five A. Southeast facing Solis Planum. Nice view of back the way you came,” he said. “You can’t miss it; it’s right next to the ice machine.”

Chernin claimed an overstuffed armchair as his own and sat there with a hotel newspad in his hands, fidgeting, scowling, and occasionally dozing, but not, as far as anyone could tell, actually reading. When Smith Three found his way back down to the lobby a few hours later to ask about dinner, Chernin started awake, dropping the newspad on the floor.

The pink-haired girl was sitting perched on the desk, the old man Eddard nowhere to be seen. “Dinner soon,” she told Smith Three. “‘Pends on what supplies came in. Gov’ment agent over there rode in with the buggy and might know.”

Smith Three turned sharply to stare at Chernin. They locked eyes with each other for a long minute. “I’ll take dinner in my room, if that’s okay,” he said, turning back to Sofi.

The girl nodded. “Smokey. I’ll tell Verah.”

The man glanced back at Chernin, then hastily left the lobby. Chernin stood up and pretended to stretch, and then started to head after Smith.

“No rassing guests,” the girl said, just as Eddard appeared through the same doorway, blocking Chernin’s path.

Defeated, Chernin glared back at the girl. “Why the hell did you tell him I was an agent?”

“‘Cause y’are,” she said. “Be stupid if I said you was a rocket-tech or someit, since we don’t got rockets.”

“How long’s he been here?”

The girl answered: “While.”

“And I don’t suppose you can tell me what his name is?”

She smiled. “Smith!”

“You know, sometimes people use the name Smith to hide their real identity, because they’re criminals and agitators hiding from the law,” Chernin said.

“Oh, true? Shouldah interduced you as genius gov’ment agent.”

Chernin’s hand strayed towards where his pistol would have been, fingers twitching.

“Maybe now’s a good time for you to go back to your own room until dinner is ready,” Eddard said.

“He can’t. Rickard locked him out,” the girl said. “Said he paid for the room, he was gonna have hisself a bath and a nap.”

“Then you, Sofi, can go to the kitchen and give Verah a hand, like you’re supposed to,” the old man said, and gently but firmly shoved her off the desk.

Once she was gone, Chernin sank back into the chair. “Quite a mouth on that girl. Get her in trouble some day.”

“Has before and will again,” the old man agreed. His eyes narrowed. “Not from you, though, and not here.”

“You sound awfully sure of that.”

“That’s because I am,” the old man said. He reached under the counter and pulled out the book Rickard had paid him with, running his fingers over the worn cover before gingerly lifting it to reveal the first page. “Now shut up. I’m reading.”

The Rosley’s dining room was small, with a handful of round tables covered with old but clean tablecloths, an eclectic collection of mismatched chairs unevenly spaced around them. A large window looked northeast towards the distant crinkling of the red-orange ground that was the far edge of Noctis Labyrinthus. The boundary of the dome shield was a pencil-thin line crossing the ground, like a shadow cast by a wire, everything outside it made just perceptibly darker. Inside it a solitary antelope wandered past.

Sofi put small trays of rolls on each of the tables, then picked one up—still warm—and took a bite as she watched the animal out the window. She liked the view better in the morning, when a faint mist from sublimating frost ghosted across the distant canyons.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Someone spoke, and she turned around to find that Smith One—a short, reedy man who moved like a dancer—had entered and was filling a clean mug from the nearby stack at the coffee urn. “Can’t get used to that yellow sky. It seems weird, where I come from.”

She shrugged, taking another bite of her roll. “Grew up on a space station,” she said. “Whole planets is weird.”

Verah came in with the rolling cart and handed Sofi a stack of still-warm plates. The girl set them on the tables then returned for silverware. A man and a woman, both wearing matching bright red ‘I biked Olympus Mons’ t-shirts, strolled in holding hands, their eyes looking only at each other. They took two seats at the back of a table in one corner of the room and drew the seats to touching before sitting down.

Smith One turned from the window, glanced briefly at the couple, then took a seat on the other side of the room. Verah and Sofi were setting down covered dishes on the tables as the Haxallian, Smith Two, made its way into the dining hall. Two of its five fluorescent purple legs had been tucked, somewhat ridiculously, into the arms of a white Rosley Hotel bathrobe, the remainder of which dragged on the floor behind it. It eyed the couple in the corner much as Smith One had, except through many more eyes, then moved to join the solitary man.

The alien extracted a small, rounded box from a ventral cavity and placed it on the table. Whistling at it, moments later the box produced a credible human voice. “Do you mind if I join you?” it said.

Smith One waved for the alien to take a chair, and after some contortions to get its legs realigned to fit, it did. The Haxallian’s head swiveled around and it eyeballed the couple, then rolled back. “All of that intrusive noise and smell,” it complained through the translator, “and still no eggs. How much longer until she can kill and eat him?”

“Unfortunately, humans don’t work that way,” Smith One said.

The Haxallian eyed the couple again. “A pity,” it said.

Rickard came in, looked at the couple, looked at the table with Smith One and the Haxallian, and picked the empty table in between. He was just starting to butter a roll when Chernin entered, looking haggard and as if he’d slept on a floor all night. He stopped halfway into the room and stared. Smith One, just serving himself some pasta, froze as well.

“You!” Chernin shouted.

“You!” Smith One shouted back, and in one smooth motion sent the pasta fork sailing across the room.

Chernin dodged as it flew over his shoulder and stuck into the wall behind him. His hand slapped at his side where his gun should have been. Swearing, he turned and picked up the coffee urn and hoisted it up above his head, ready to throw, when the urn was plucked with sudden force out his hands from behind.

He stumbled backwards with it and found himself face to face with Verah, the urn now in her arms. She glanced at the fork stuck in the wall, then over at the table where Smith One stood, every knife but one from the table now held in his left hand, the lone exception poised in his right for throwing.

“Mr. Chernin,” she said. “You got an explanation?”

“He’s a Sfazili government operative,” Chernin said.

“And you’re an Earth one,” she reminded.

“He has no jurisdiction here!”

“Neither,” she said, her voice severe, “do you. The Rosley is neutral ground. It’s in the Agreement.”

“But—”

“No ‘buts’. You know the rule about bothering the guests. Both of you.”

“I was not bothered,” the Haxallian said.

“ . . . What?” The groom asked from the corner.

Verah let out an exasperated sigh and set the coffee urn back on its small stand. “And either of you? Do you want to lodge a complaint about the other?”

Smith One and Chernin locked eyes. “No, Ma’am,” Chernin said, and Smith One nodded. “Me either, Ma’am.”

“Fine,” she said. “Then sit down and eat your dinner, and if I catch either of you throwing stuff again, you’re gonna get nothing but beets and peanut butter every single meal for as long as you stay.”

Rickard stifled a laugh, and she turned on him. “And you, Mr. Rickard—your lopsided supply deliveries is why I have an excess of beets and peanut butter to threaten them with in the first place. Think about that as you enjoy your dinner.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, the smirk never leaving his face.

“Mmmmmmpardon me,” the Ponkian said, from the doorway.

“Ah, good! Estimable Jarir,” Verah said, brightening, taking one of his arms and leading him over to the table. “If you do not mind, please sit beside Mr. Smith, here.” Obligingly, the Ponkian slid out the chair beside Smith One and collapsed onto it. Verah turned, gesturing imperiously at Chernin with a crooked finger. “You,” she said. “Sit on the other side of Estimable Jarir.”

“I—”

“SIT!” She roared.

Chernin did so.

“There. Enjoy your dinners, and please mind your manners around our Ponkian guest, here.”

Verah returned to the kitchen where Sofi was just loading up a tray with dinners for those guests who had chosen to stay in their rooms. The girl was finally putting on a little weight, had even grown a few inches since they’d come to the Rosley, never intending to remain for more than a few days.

“Do you like it here?” she asked.

“What?” Sofi seemed startled by the question. “S’good. Nice and quiet, most’a the time, and I like Eddard. And Roz, when he’s awake. And the books.”

“It could be getting dangerous.”

“Dang’rous everywhere. More safe here than lots of places,” Sofi said. She looked down at the tray, continued loading it. “And it feels like home. ‘Sides, there’s oryxes here. I like them.”

Verah folded a napkin into a fan, set it on the tray. “Then we’ll stay a little longer,” she said. “Homes are good things to have, when you can. And family’s what you make.”

Sofi smiled wide. “Sisters’a the heart,” she said, and picked up the tray and left the kitchen.

She dropped off three meals at guests’ doors, thinking about Verah and coming to Mars and wondering what the book that Rickard gave Eddard was and making up a poem about oryxes in her head. It didn’t rhyme, but Verah said they didn’t always have to rhyme, so she thought it was probably okay.

Smith Three, the last delivery, let her in on the second knock. She carried the tray in on one hand, picking up the antique folding stand with other. Kicking it open with one foot as Verah had taught her, she set the tray down and stepped back. “Dinner’s pasta,” she said, pointing, “and soup and salad, and tea. Hope it suits.”

Smith Three picked up the pasta lid and peering underneath. “It looks great, thank you,” he said. “Can I ask a question?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “Don’t know much answers, though.”

He turned, pointed towards the window. “Why are they all standing right outside my window?”

“Is they?” Sofi walked over and peered down, and sure enough a half-dozen long, black and white antelope faces peered back up. “Must like you, I guess.”

He laughed. “Or there’s something to eat down there.”

“Probably. They’s modded for Mars, to eat terrorformed lichen. Also Verah says they’s emphatic. Know who they like.”

“Empathic?” He guessed, sounding dubious.

“Yeh, someit like. When you’re done with dinner, put the tray out your door and somebody will get it.”

“Okay, thanks,” he said.

She closed his door behind herself, and went back to the elevators. When the doors opened, inside it Smith One was sitting on top of a very red-faced Chernin with his hands around his neck, and Chernin was whacking Smith One in the head as hard as he could with one of his shoes.

She coughed, and they froze. “Killin’ a guest is kinda like ‘rassing,” she said. “Also, you’re using up all the space in the vader.”

Smith One loosened his grip, but didn’t remove his hands from Chernin’s neck. “We’re just goofing,” he said.

“Go back to the dining room, or to your own rooms,” she said, and made her best angry-Verah frown. “Whatever you two is fighting over, neither of you going to get it if you’re both dead or thrown out.” She laughed. “And if you’re dead we throw you out anyway! Har!” She stood there, holding the tray in front of her like a shield—or a weapon—until the two men released each other, stood up, and walked stiffly away in opposite directions. Then she stood there a little longer to make sure they didn’t come back.

Sunset crept towards the Rosley as the vast shadow of Arsai Mons slowly reached out across the red sands to take hold of them. Verah sat looking out the window at the row of squat, square vehicles sitting, waiting, just along the invisible line where the hotel’s sovereign space ended and Mars began. Earth-owned Mars, she thought. That’s a fight we’re in the middle of, whether we want to be or not. Just as the light began to fail, she saw a last glint in the low hills beyond. “Interesting,” she said out loud, in much the same way she’d say ‘interesting’ upon discovering bugs in the fruit.

“What is?” a voice said quietly at her shoulder, and she jumped.

An ancient, rail-thin, barefoot man with unkempt wild white hair and beard stood there in gray pajamas, a ratty plaid bathrobe hanging loose from his bone-thin shoulders.

“Full police convoy just at the limit, out at the checkpoint on the main road in,” she said. “Someone else out there, just out of line of sight from the convoy. We had an agent come in with Rickard, not sure what they’re looking for.”

“Well, I came looking for tea,” the man said, not concerned. “I’m cold.”

“You’re always cold, Mr. Rosley,” Verah said. She got up from her perch at the window, the last of the dying day at her back. “It’s what comes from freezing yourself for weeks and months at a time. Sit. I’ll bring you some tea and a sandwich.”

“Just tea, please.”

“Tea and a sandwich,” she said.

He waved his hand in the air, not looking at her, not bothering to argue. “I’ll be in the bar,” he said.

“Of course you will,” Verah said. She expected no less.

Eddard was, by the standards of what passed for local talent, quite good at the piano. Once he’d managed to get himself comfortably seated on the small bench, he’d put his fingers on the keys, close his eyes, and some time later—seconds, minutes, it varied—he’d start to play.

The Ponkian had taken up a small table across from the Haxallian and they were playing some unfathomable up-spin game involving small metal disks and pyramids and complex folded vellum shapes passed back and forth. The couple celebrating their bimarriage had taken up the lounge’s small couch doing things that could have very easily—and more politely, the Ponkian had pointed out loudly—been done in their room instead.

The very old man wandered in, went behind the bar, unlocked the cabinet, and poured himself a drink. He caught Eddard’s gaze, and the younger of them nodded.

“Uncle,” Eddard said, and continued playing. The very old man sat and listened, one gaunt hand curled around his glass.

Verah came in a few minutes later and set a teapot and cup and a small plate with a sandwich on it in front of him. “Here you go, Mr. Rosley,” she said. She turned to go, then realized she’d forgotten the sugar packets in her apron pocket and turned back towards him. She felt something brush past her before she felt the sharp sting.

Putting her hand down to her side, it came away with blood. Her eyes alit on the knife on the floor against the far wall, and then met Eddard’s. “Hell. Knife,” she said.

Eddard was half-up from the piano bench and Verah was turning, trying to think her way through the trajectory of the knife back to its source. The groom from the newlywed couple was standing now, the perpetual stupid-happy grin he’d worn for the better part of a week’s stay now replaced with such a cold and determined stare that it was as if he had an entirely new face. Another knife was poised in his hand as his bride, similarly transformed, lifted a small tube to her lips and blew. Across the room the Ponkian made a startled sound, turned an alarmingly mottled shade of yellow, and crumpled to the floor.

The groom had just begun his second throw when a chair flying across the room collided with the side of his head. He went down. “Fucker!” Rickard yelled from the doorway, already reaching for another chair.

“Get him out of here!” Verah shouted to Eddard, pointing sharply at the ancient man standing there with his sandwich and tea, surprise and confusion on his face. She moved to stand between him and their attackers.

Eddard wrapped an arm around Rosley and tugged him towards the door. The bride dropped her blowpipe to the floor as she leapt up onto the table and drew a pair of knives from inside her dress. She raised one of the knives, then had to throw herself sideways off the table to dodge the next chair to come sailing across the room. She rolled, came back to her feet with blade at the ready just as the two old men disappeared through the door.

“No!” she shouted, and threw her blade at Rickard, embedding it in the underside of the chair he’d lifted to block. She kicked her partner sharply and he groaned and tried to roll over, still entangled in the chair that had felled him. “Get up, idiot!”

Chernin walked through the doorway and stopped, staring at Rickard. “Get down, stupid!” Rickard shouted.

Chernin took cover behind the supply driver, staring at Verah crouched down behind the bar and the Ponkian stretched out on the floor. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded.

The bride took advantage of the momentary distraction to roll and throw a table over on its side, cover for both herself and her partner. Peering around it, she gestured with the point of her blade towards where Verah was crouched. “There’s no way she can get out of here without me getting her first. If you want her alive, put down the chair.”

“She’s outnumbered,” Verah shouted, hefting a half-full bottle of gin. “And I’ve got ammunition of my own.”

“Yeah, but do you have your little pink-haired friend?” The bride-assassin snarled. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re lying.”

“Am I?” The bride reached into a pocket with her free hand and threw a small hank of pink hair on the floor. “We just want the old man,” she continued. “No one else here needs to get hurt, and you can get the kid back safe and sound.”

“This is nothing to do with me,” the Haxallian’s translator box calmly declared. Everyone ignored it.

“You won’t find him,” Verah said. “It’s a big hotel, and no one knows it better than those two. Even I couldn’t find them, if they didn’t want me to.”

“Better hope you’re wrong.”

“Maybe I can help here,” Chernin said, stepping out from behind Rickard. The look Rickard shot him could have blackened and peeled the wallpaper around him.

“And who the hell are you?” the bride asked.

Chernin raised one hand, and with the other reached slowly around to his pocket. “I’m getting my identification out,” he said. “I’m a senior agent with Mars Colonial Authority.”

“The law? And you’re going to help us?” She kicked her partner again. He groaned.

“If I were to witness the commission of a crime on Martian soil, I would be obligated to bring the full weight of law to bear on you, but as people keep kindly pointing out to me, I have no jurisdiction here. So, to be blunt, I really don’t give a rat’s ass what you do to any of these people,” Chernin said. “I came to this godforsaken rogue pocket of hell because there’s something here I need to find, and that duty is the only one that matters to me. You need to search the hotel, I need to search the hotel. We could help each other.”

“You’re a pus-sucking turd of an Earther whore, Chernin,” Rickard said.

Chernin pointed to Rickard. “Count him among the people I don’t care what happens to,” he said.

The bride’s partner finally managed to get to his feet beside her, still swaying, an angry red welt on his cheek below a swollen eye and a knife held too tight in his shaking hand. “What . . . ?” he asked.

“I’ll catch you up later,” she told him, not taking her eyes off the room. “You, Mr. Potty-mouth,” she said, pointing at Rickard. “Put the chair down or else.”

Reluctantly, Rickard set the chair back down on the floor. One hand still gripped the back, poised to pick it up again and hurl it at a moment’s opportunity. “You,” she said, turning to Chernin. “You and my partner here are going to tie everyone in this room up.”

“With what?”

She nodded her chin towards the windows. “Curtain sashes.”

“Can’t you just dart them?” The groom asked.

“Used up my last human-prepped dart on the girl, and my last blank keeping that toxic gasbag from going off,” she said, pointing to the sleeping Ponkian. “So no, we tie them up. You—cook,” she said, pointing at Verah. “You’re going to open the hotel safe for me.”

Verah shrugged. “I don’t have the combination. Only Roz and Eddard do. I’m a cook.”

“I’m really starting to hate this job,” she said. “Fine. Agent man, after these fine folks are secured, you and I are going to go through every inch of this hotel—together, so I can keep an eye on you—while my partner here keeps these people on their best behavior. That work for you?”

“That works for me,” Chernin said.

“This really has nothing to do with me,” the Haxallian said again, and was just as soundly ignored as before.

Rickard, Verah, the Haxallian, and the still-drugged Ponkian were tied up and left locked up in the lounge with warnings to stay quiet and not make trouble if they wanted to live. The groom had to emphasize ‘quiet’ several times, and ‘live’ more than once, before Rickard finally ran out of opinions on the subject. “I’m going to be right outside that door,” the groom said, running one hand across his swollen cheek, “and I’d love an excuse.”

A few minutes later Chernin and the bride dragged in Smith One, unconscious and bleeding from a scalp wound. They tied him up to Rickard.

“Do you think you’ll get away with this?” Verah asked.

“Yes,” Chernin said. “We’ve informed the other guests that there’s a police action in progress and they should stay in their rooms, and just like good citizens they’re doing as they were told. Maybe you could learn from them.” He slammed the door on his way out, and they all heard the lock click.

They were left alone again. The Ponkian was snoring now.

“I apologize,” the Haxallian said, “but I am finding this no longer entertaining, and I have some pressing business to conclude.” It stretched its purple tentacle arms out across the floor, thinning and growing longer, until its entire body had grown so elongated that the sashes used to tie it simply fell away. “And now I take my leave of you.”

It picked up its translation box and put it in its mouth and swallowed, where it remained eerily visible just below the surface of its translucent exoderm. With all its arms free, it stretched up to the ceiling, spreading its purple tentacles out in a star formation across the surface like a viscous liquid, then lifted itself up from the floor and began to ooze across the ceiling. In moments it reached the air return and dropped the vent cover down onto the carpeting with a dull thump. The Haxallian disappeared into the narrow duct.

“Wow.” Rickard said, craning his head up to watch the acrobatics. “I didn’t know they could do that.”

“Me either,” Verah said, “but it solves the mystery of how it’s been able to steal so many damned hotel bathrobes out of a locked closet.”

“Too bad it couldn’t have cut us free before it went. I have some business of my own to conclude with that bastard Chernin.”

Verah sighed. “Hotel!” she called out.

A smooth, artificial voice answered from everywhere and nowhere. “Yes, Miss Verah?”

Rickard stared at her. “You have a fucking simulated intelligence in this dump? How come I’ve never known this?”

“You never asked,” Verah said. “It’s a Class E SI, runs all the support and mech systems along with a few other limited functions. It’s decades out of date, but it’s embedded throughout the entire hotel, which at the moment is pretty useful. Hotel, where is Sofi?”

“Miss Sofi is in the tool closet in the buggy garage.”

“Is she okay?”

“She is breathing but is not responsive to queries.”

“Thanks, Hotel,” Verah said. “Where is Mr. Brown?”

“Guest Mr. Brown is in the lobby, near the reception desk.”

“Mr. Brown?”

“Our fake groom,” Verah said. “We’re going to have some trouble getting out of this room without him seeing or hearing us. Where are the other guests?”

“Guest Mrs. Brown is in the second floor corridor, outside room Twenty-Four B. Guest Mr. Chernin is in the second floor corridor, outside room Twenty-Four A. Guest Mr. Rickard is in the Lounge. Guest Smith One is in the Lounge. Guest Smith Two is in the ventilation system. Guest Smith Three is exiting room Twenty-Two B via his window. Guest Est. Jarir is in the Lounge. Guest Mr. Tanden is in the gym. Guest—”

“That’s enough, thank you, Hotel,” Verah said. “Please tell me when Mr. Smith Two exits the ventilation system, and where Mr. Smith Three goes assuming he manages to get out of his room without breaking his neck. Is Mr. Rosley in lockdown?”

“Yes.”

“Is Eddard with him?”

“Yes.”

She turned to Rickard. “Are you going to cause me any trouble?” she asked.

“Certainly,” he said, “but you’re not on the top of my list today.”

“Okay, so where’s the knife?”

“What?”

Verah rolled her eyes. “I don’t for a second believe you handed over all your weapons at the front desk just like that. Since we haven’t detected any tech on you, and you seem to have a particular contempt for your gun-wielding friends—”

“No friends of mine.”

“—Whatever. I’m guessing you’ve got a knife, and since you haven’t already cut your way free, it’s somewhere you can’t reach it. Maybe I can.”

“Left boot,” he said. “What did you do before you ended up here? Security work? Mugger?”

“Actually, I ran a hot dog stand on a space station.”

“Must have been one tough station.”

“Not as bad as where we went from there,” she said. “Now slide over so I can try to reach the knife.”

“Miss Verah, Guest Smith Two has exited the ventilation system,” the hotel said.

“He’s back in his room?”

“He is in room Thirty A.”

“That’s interesting,” Verah said. She let herself fall onto her side with her back to Rickard, and ran her hands down his leg until she found the familiar shape of a knife handle. “I’ve got it,” she said. “Now what?”

“Can you drop it—carefully!—between my knees?”

“I can try,” she said.

“What’s interesting? About the Haxallian.”

“He’s in the Ponkian’s room,” Verah said. She managed to get the knife onto Rickard’s legs, then rolled away.

Rickard bent his legs up and pulled the blade free with his teeth. “I’h goim to hab to fwee you firf,” he said. “Cub hea, an ven dome fubbin moob if you wan to keeb yoh ahms.”

“You cut me and you’ll learn the true meaning of misery,” she answered, and held out her bound hands.

The most recent of the Mr. Smiths carefully let himself over the edge of the small balcony outside his room, his bag with its diminished contents slung diagonally across his back. He had to admit that he had been equal parts pleased and dismayed to discover the window actually opened; if the dome blew, it was a good bet they were all dead anyway, but it still seemed like a worthy precaution to seal them.

Of course, if they had, he’d still be in his room.

Hanging down from the balcony railing, he regretted that he couldn’t just drop his bag down ahead of him and so be able to roll when he hit the ground himself, but there was nothing for it. He steeled himself and let go, dropping down to the red sand and falling into a crouch. On Earth, with its oppressive gravity, he’d likely have broken something. Another reason to love the Red World, he thought.

Something nudged him from behind, nearly knocking him over. He went down on one knee and whirled around, hands raised to defend himself, and found himself staring into large, sad brown eyes set into a long rorschach face. This close, and in the half-light of dusk, the thin black horns looked more menacing than elegant. He moved himself a half-step backwards before slowly rising to his feet.

Another oryx bumped him from the side, and he looked around and realized he was surrounded.

“What?” he said.

The lead oryx head-butted him again, gently, pushing him, and in that manner he was methodically, relentlessly, herded away from the hotel wall.

Eddard picked up a blanket, shook reddish dust from it, then wrapped it around the old man’s shoulders. “Is that better?” he asked.

“Still cold. Can we go back for my tea? I forgot my tea.”

“Not yet. Hotel says Verah and Rickard are still in the lounge but no longer restrained, so we just have to wait for them to clean up and give us the all-clear,” Eddard said, sitting down wearily on the small padded bench. The room was tiny, enclosed, impenetrable by anything short of nearly nuclear force. They were safe, as boring as that might be. “It could be a while.”

“Better not take too long,” Rosley said. “I’m meeting someone.”

Eddard laughed. “Roz, you spend ninety percent of your time frozen in that old life-pod capsule you scavenged after the war, and what’s left you spend sitting in the lounge drinking gin or sitting in the library drinking tea. You barely meet the people here who work for you, much less anyone else.”

“I like Verah. She seems a responsible sort.”

“Yeah. She is.”

“She makes good sandwiches.”

“Yes, she does.”

“And Sofi—good kid. Smart. Pays attention. More to her than meets the eye.”

“Well.” Eddard considered. “She’s a good kid, anyway.”

“Do you think she’ll stay?”

“Sofi?”

“Verah. Both of them.”

“For a while, I guess. You’re not getting any younger, uncle, even without people trying to kill you. Once you’re gone . . . well, you know what’s going to happen here then. Better if none of us stick around for that.”

Rosley only grunted, pulling the blanket tighter around his thin shoulders. “Hotel,” he called out. “Tell Verah to get a move on. And if they’re still in the lounge, tell her there’s an old box down under the back of the bar.”

“Yes, Mr. Rosley,” the hotel answered.

The two sat there in glum silence for many long minutes. At last, Rosley took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, as if to breathe out his own impatience. “Nephew,” he said, and elbowed Eddard, who had started to doze off.

Eddard started awake, looking around them in some alarm. “What is it?” he asked.

“You know any good jokes?”

Eddard put his face in his hands, then ran them up and over his thinning hair. “Yeah,” he said at last. “There once was this crazy hotel on Mars . . . ”

“You find anything?”

“I think so,” Verah said. She put the box up on the bar, brushing her hand across the lid. “From the amount of dust on this, I bet it’s been sitting here untouched since the Rosley was built, seventy years ago.”

Rickard was kneeling next to the unconscious Smith One checking his pulse, but got up and came over to look. “That’s an old Mars Service box,” he said.

She lifted the lid off carefully, folded back a brittle sheet of red tissue paper, and pulled out an old, folded uniform and a small box. Rickard took the box, opened it, and whistled. “Medals,” he said. “A Martian Medal of Honor, not to mention a Red Heart and a Spear of Ares. Where the hell did this come from?”

“It’s Roz’s,” Verah said. She pulled a cap out of the box and set it atop the uniform, then drew out a gun. “He was in the war, barely more than a kid at the time. Sole survivor of the Battle of Ares Vallis.”

“He was that guy?!” Rickard exclaimed. “Damn! He single-handedly saved Ares One.”

“That’s how he ended up here. They asked him what he wanted as a reward and he said a place of his own. They took him literally. I think it amused the colonials at that time to give him his own tiny kingdom, back when the whole planet was pretty much a lawless frontier anyway. It wasn’t until Earth stepped in and imposed order with the Mars Colonial Authority that anyone had a problem with it, but there was no legal way to undo the Agreement. This place is the only spot on Mars that’s free. At least until Roz dies, anyway. You can bet that’s why those two are here trying to kill him.”

“But he’s a hero.”

“You’re only a hero as long as people remember or care what you did, and memory is short. Roz has no heirs, so when he dies the hotel and grounds revert back to MCA control and then all hell breaks loose.”

“What about Eddard? They’re related, right?”

“Eddard doesn’t want it. He doesn’t like the idea of having a target on his back, and he’s not that much younger than Roz. Also, early Mars colonial culture was matrilineal, before Earth came back in and set up the Authority with a whole lot of Redemption politicos on the board, and Roz takes that seriously. As do a lot of Free-Marsies, who see this place as almost hallowed ground. It’s a symbol to them, as is Roz himself.”

“If they kill the old man, it provokes a war with the Free-Marsies that Earth pretty much can’t lose. I get it now.”

“Yeah. Roz is dying anyway,” Verah said. “I don’t know why they can’t just leave him in peace until his time is up. He’d have died years ago if it wasn’t for the cryo, but that’s taking its toll too.”

“The MCA isn’t known for patience.”

“Now that’s certainly true. You know anything about guns?”

“You don’t?”

“Not really. Sofi’s a much better shot.”

Rickard held out his hand. “Give it here,” he said. Taking it, he turned it over and raised his eyebrows. With what almost could have been mistaken for reverence, he powered it on.

“Miss Verah, I detect active tech in the lounge in your immediate vicinity,” the Hotel said.

“It’s okay, Hotel. We’ve got it.”

“Thank you, Miss Verah.”

“It’s still got a trace charge,” Rickard said, flicking the safety back on and tucking it carefully into his waistband. “Not much of one, but maybe enough to knock someone down for a minute or two, if it doesn’t explode in our faces.”

“Better than nothing,” Verah said. She stood there looking around the room, then walked over and started up at the ceiling vent the Haxallian had abruptly exited through. “Help me move this table?”

“What for?”

“I have a plan.”

“I’m not climbing out through the fucking ducts.”

“I’m not expecting you to. Your ass’d get stuck anyway,” she said. “So shut up and help.”

Mr. Brown was standing in the hotel lobby to one side of the large front window, looking at the lights of the police convoy just outside the perimeter of the Rosley grounds and dome, and feeling less than pleased with the situation. While certainly the action he and his partner had contracted to undertake was to the direct benefit, probably pleasure, and possibly pay of those waiting at the line, neither were they the sort to let gratitude get in the way of stringing the assassins up quite publicly, if they caught them. Mrs. Brown wasn’t dumb enough to actually trust the agent, but he wasn’t convinced the agent still wouldn’t get the better of her.

I took my shot too soon, he told himself for the hundredth time. Once the old man had been identified, he should have waited for a better chance. He hadn’t believed he could miss. He never missed. He hated this place. He hated Mars. Stupid poor gravity must have thrown him off.

A loud clang came from the locked lounge behind him. It was about time somebody died, even if it wasn’t anyone he was getting paid for. He ran to the door and unlocked it, kicking it open. No one was hiding behind the door, amateur trick number one. One of the tables had been pushed to the center of the room, a chair standing in the center of it atop the heavy tablecloth, and a metal grill of some sort lay on the floor. He looked up and spotted the open duct.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” he grumbled. Carefully he got up on the table and stood up on the chair, knife at the ready, and peered up into the ceiling.

All of a sudden he was moving, falling, the chair slipping out from under him as the entire table tipped over sideways. Too late, he realized they were hiding under the table. “I hate you!” he shouted as he went down.

He hit the floor hard, trying to roll with it, the chair tangling in his legs. Then that horrible supply driver was standing right above him, a large glass bottle raised up high.

“Check out time,” the driver said, and then everything went black.

“Now what?” Smith Three stood in the center of the floor of the buggy garage. He was talking half to himself, half to the array of antelope faces crowded across the doorway like an inscrutable wall of expectation. It occurred to him that he could easily take a buggy and get out; he would regret the loss of his suit, but not so sorely as the loss of his freedom.

What would truly rankle would be having gone as far as he had to leave with his job unfinished, thanks to one rogue Colonial Agent. I don’t even know he’s looking for me, he thought. Should it matter if he is?

There was a muffled bang and what sounded like shouting coming from further inside the garage. He picked up a mallet from a workbench and followed the sounds to a locked door in the back.

There was another bang, followed by a distinct swear.

“Hang on,” he called through the door. Two good swings with the mallet knocked the handle straight off the door. It lazily swung open.

The pink-haired girl was against the back wall of the tool closet, a pipe wrench raised at the ready. He set the mallet down on the floor and held up both hands, backing away. “It’s just me,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Too right,” she said, climbing out of the closet. “That nitchy cudder stucked me with a dart and I woke up in here.”

“Who? The agent?”

“Naw, the bride woman.”

“Huh,” Smith Three said. “Why?”

“Dunno,” Sofi said. “Didn’t like the room service? Me and my wrench are gonna go ask her about it some.”

“There’s something going on in the hotel,” he said. “It might be safer to stay here.”

“Probably. I can come let you know when it’s safe again.”

“No, I meant you . . . Never mind.” He sighed. “We may not be able to get out of here anyway, because the oryx—” He turned as he spoke, and then stared at the open garage door, at nothing but the fading light on distant, empty hills. “—are gone. They were all right there, the whole lot of them.”

“Sure they was,” Sofi said. “You coming?”

He looked down at his bag, slung across his chest, and debated stowing it somewhere here in the garage, then decided if something happened to him the contents wouldn’t matter anyway. “I’m coming,” he said. It would be harder to make his way back to the hotel alone now that darkness had set in.

Verah and Rickard stood over the unconscious man. Rickard had turned the table entirely upside-down and tied the man, spread-eagled, to all four legs. “If only there were such a thing as Martian Fire Ants,” Rickard said. “Because you know they’d be the best fucking fire ants in the entire universe.”

“Yeah, well, if we didn’t have other things we need to be doing right now, I’d show you how to make a hot pepper paste to put fire-anything-you-can-think-of to shame,” Verah said.

Rickard smiled.

He pointed at Smith One and the Ponkian, both still unconscious. “So what do we do with them?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “Leave them here? We’re a real hotel, after all; they could just be innocent guests.”

“No one is innocent.”

“I suppose not,” she said. “Chernin and this one don’t get along at all.” She nudged Smith One gently with her foot, and the man curled up in his sleep.

“I hate him less already,” Rickard said.

“Chernin said he was a Sfazili agent.”

“Probably here for the same thing as us, then. Rumor is, some stolen data is going to be handed over here, data from the research the Bomo’ri are doing on the artificial creation of hyperspace jump points. Priceless. Chernin’s informant was a Sfazili. That’s all I know, and I wouldn’t even know that much if that chump-monkey Arning wasn’t the biggest lip-flapper on Mars.”

“I don’t think that has anything to do with the Browns, though,” Verah said. “Hotel, where are Mrs. Brown and Mr. Chernin?”

“Mrs. Brown and Mr. Chernin are in the corridor outside room thirty-four A.”

“Where is Smith Two? Is it still in Est. Jarir’s room?”

“No. Mr. Smith Two has entered the ducts again and is exiting into its own room.”

“Did it take anything from Est. Jarir’s room?”

“Yes. A sweater.”

Verah laughed, wearily. “I’m sure it will complement his collection of stolen bathrobes quite nicely,” she said. “Are any other guests in unexpected places or changed positions since last we spoke? Exempting those now in this room.”

“Yes. Smith Three is returning to the hotel from the buggy garage.”

“The buggy garage . . . Hotel, is Sofi still okay?”

“Sofi appears to be okay.”

She let out breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “So what now?” she asked Rickard.

He put one foot on top of Mr. Brown’s chest. “Two against two. Time to go make some violence.”

“Don’t forget, we’ve got the Hotel on our side.”

“Yeah? What can the Hotel do?”

Verah smiled.

Another damned empty room, Chernin thought. The woman had kicked the door in, taken a quick peek under the bed, behind the curtains, in the bathroom and closet, then declared the room clean and moved on. The problem was, the woman didn’t want him out of her sight—nor, honestly, he her; that trust was equally balanced at a bare minimum—and she was impatient for him to keep up, especially since he was unwilling to tell her what he was looking for.

Not that he actually knew what he was looking for, either; the data could be in any form, could be gone by now, maybe never existed. He just had to hope he’d know it when he saw it. He was down on his knees, checking out the underside of the vacant room’s desk, when the woman called from across the hall. “Agent-man! This one was occupied, and our guest has gone out the window.”

He got up, sending hateful thoughts to his knees as he did so, and went across the hall. The bed was made, the room empty of any belongings. “Looks vacant to me,” he said.

“Door was locked from the inside,” she said. “Towels are still damp.”

Chernin walked over to the window and looked out. “That’s a long drop,” he said.

“In one-third gravity? Not impossible for someone in good physical shape,” she said.

“In the morning we’ll be able to follow the footprints.”

“This place doesn’t have until morning.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, one way or another I’m going to get my target. I prefer a small, precise hit, but if I have to resort to gross overkill with lots of collateral damage, so be it.”

“You have a bomb.” He didn’t need to ask.

She ignored him. “My objective’s not here, and at his age he certainly didn’t go out the window. Let’s move on.”

“Hold on, it takes me—”

“Might I suggest, Agent,” she said, a growl in her voice, “that given the time constraints, you put your effort into helping me? Because if I find my guy, you can have this place to yourself for as long as you want, but as soon as I decide I’m sick of hide and seek, you are out of time.”

“Hotel, lock down all rooms. Now.”

The door slammed shut with such force that both Chernin and the woman jumped, each reaching for non-existent guns. “What the hell?” Chernin said. He grabbed the door handle and turned, but the door wouldn’t budge.

“Useless . . . get out of the way,” the woman said. He stepped aside as she rammed the door with her shoulder in the same move that had successfully opened more than two dozen doors before. This time the door failed to yield, eliciting a surprised wuf from the woman. Chernin went down on one knee, examining the edge of the strike plate on the door frame. “Magnetic lock,” he said.

“That’s not very early-Mars-period,” she said, rubbing her shoulder. “I want a refund. Or instead . . . ” She reached down into the top of her gown and pulled out a small chip barely larger than her fingernail, and snapped it in two.

Verah and Rickard had just locked the lounge up from the outside and were heading to the stairs when the Hotel spoke up again. “Miss Verah, I have just detected a microsecond 46.2GHz transmission from Guest Smith Three’s room,” it said.

“Shit, that’s a detonator frequency,” Rickard said. “One of those two jonesless, boot-sucking fartmongers just armed some sort of explosive device.”

“How can you tell they only armed it?”

“Because I’m still talking to you instead of admiring my own handsome, crispy corpse.”

“Well, crap,” Verah said. “Now what?”

“We talk to them,” Rickard said, “and we hope they’re just as disinterested in being blown up as we are. Maybe they’ll negotiate.”

“Somehow I don’t expect they’ll have terms we’ll like, but maybe it’ll stall them. I’ll talk to them while you go look for the bomb,” Verah said.

“You sure? Don’t let them be rude to you.”

“I can handle rude,” she said. Turning, she ran up the stairs and down the corridor of the second floor guest wing, slowing as she came close to Twenty-Two B. She thought she could hear arguing inside, but she couldn’t make it out. Steeling herself, she raised one hand and knocked smartly on the door.

“And who is that?” came the bride’s voice.

“The cook, ma’am,” Verah said. “I’ve come to talk.”

“Unlock the door and bring me the old man, and me and my partner will walk out of here and never look back.”

“I’m afraid I can’t give you Roz. I have some credit—”

There was a laugh. “I don’t care about credits, girl. I care about my reputation, and that rides on me seeing that old man properly set for the grave. No one else needs to be hurt.”

“She’s got a bomb,” Chernin’s voice came through the door, followed by what sounded distinctly like a slap.

“I hate people who spoil surprises,” the woman said. “But now that he has, you’ve got forty-one minutes to bring me the old man or he dies anyway, and so does everyone else.”

“So will you.”

“Yeah, well, I hate everyone here just enough to consider it worthwhile.”

“I have your partner. We could trade—we give him back, and you leave and take your bomb with you.”

Laughter. “You can keep him, the useless bungler. Now go get the old man—I can see you standing there through the peephole, you know.”

“I’m going,” Verah said, walking away and thinking furiously.

“No offense, but I’d rather not be found dead with you,” Chernin said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t like you either,” Mrs. Brown said. “If it helps, I have no intention of dying in this rat-trap.” She ran a hand along the hem of her dress, then grabbed with both hands and ripped at the seam, pulling out a small metal disk about the size of a Martian dollar.

“Is that . . . ” Chernin started to say.

“EMP mine. Limited radius. Got a pacemaker?”

“No.”

“Too bad,” she said, and slapped the disk on the doorframe above the strike plate. “Three, two, one—”

There was a muffled buzz and simultaneously the door clicked open and the lights went out, leaving them in pitch blackness. “Zero,” she finished. “I’m getting out of here. If I were you, Agent-man, I’d stay out of my way.”

The lights in the stairwell flickered, and the floor above her dropped into darkness. Verah swore, nearly tripping on the last step and hitting the landing hard. “Hotel?” she called out.

“Miss Verah. I have lost approximately eighty percent of the hotel from my sensors, along with numerous control systems.”

“Some sort of micro-EMP device,” Rickard said, coming around the corner. “Your guests are free again. We don’t have a lot of time, even if your lady wasn’t lying to us.”

“Why would she lie?”

“I would, if it was me. I’d tell you that you had more time than you did, because it would likely screw any last-minute plans you were making to move against me.”

“Well, let’s hope she’s not that clever,” Verah said. “I think I know where the bomb is.”

“Oh?” Rickard’s eyebrows went up, and she felt a brief flush of satisfaction that she’d surprised him.

“They remote-activated the bomb, right? But Hotel didn’t sense any other tech in the hotel activating. If the bomb was here and shielded—which assumes they’ve got some ultra-portable shielding tech we don’t know about—then they could have just as easily brought weapons in here, and then they wouldn’t have had to resort to throwing old-fashioned knives at us. So they can’t have that kind of shielding.”

“Ah! But if the bomb’s not in the hotel . . . ”

She looked at him, and he looked at her. “Buggy garage,” they both said simultaneously.

“I’ve got to warn Eddard and Roz and the remaining guests,” she said. “Some of them have suits; it’ll buy them a few hours, anyhow.”

“Go. I’ll go see if I can get Sofi out, and do something with the bomb.”

Verah hesitated, then nodded. “Thanks, Rickard,” she said, and turned and ran. He turned the other way and did the same.

Sofi and Smith Three were half way across the sand when ahead of them most of the hotel flickered and went dark. Smith Three put out a hand and lightly touched Sofi’s shoulder. “We don’t have any idea what’s happening in there,” he said, keeping his voice low.

Sofi shrugged, the gesture lost to the night. “Been worse places,” she said. “An’ it’s a whole lot easier to find out what’s happening by lookin’ than by sitting out here.”

“True,” he said, “although, do you see, off past my shoulder? Lights in the distance. That’s a police convoy. They must have come with your agent. They’re starting to move—the lights going out must have pushed them into action. They’ll be coming here, either to check on their man or finish his job. Let’s hope they don’t have one of their typical trigger-happy idiots in charge.”

“Agent was looking for someit. You?”

“I hope not,” he said. “But it’s always possible.”

“Yer a Free-Marsie.”

“Yes.”

“You never been here afore?”

“No. They needed someone who wasn’t known in this area.”

“Why?”

“I can’t answer that,” he said. “Can you get us inside?”

“Just gotta find the door. How’s yer night eyes?”

“I can’t even see you.”

Sofi took his hand. “Then come on. I can see a bit.”

Mrs. Brown left the room. She expected the agent to be right on her heels and had decided to just snap his neck and be done with him; he hadn’t been much use so far, and it was increasingly unlikely with each passing second that that would change. But the agent didn’t immediately follow, and by the time she was around the corridor bend it didn’t matter.

It was a short jog down the hall to the honeymoon suite; she’d carefully paced the hall enough to move through it blind. Breaking into the room, she grabbed her bag from the luggage stand, threw it open, and pulled out her surface suit. Another sat nestled below it, and she spared a moment’s thought for Mr. Brown. Then she shrugged off the thought, stepped out of her sundress, and pulled the suit up and on.

A fast snap of her fingers and a glowlight appeared on one of the suit gloves. Raising her hand palm-out so she could see without blinding herself, she pulled close her cosmetics kit, a bag of tacky Ares Five souvenirs, and Mr. Brown’s shaving kit. Laying out select items on the bed, she quickly assembled them into a pressure rifle.

She checked it again, then extinguished the hand light. Now all she needed to do was get out of the hotel, find concealment near the dome entrance, and make sure no one else left before the bomb took care of the job once and for all.

Chernin waited until he was sure the woman had gone, then slipped off his shoes and crept carefully out into the hall, listening furiously. He flinched at the sudden sound of a door being busted open. His left hand, seeking the wall, found a slick, cold surface instead. Belatedly he realized it was the dead hulk of an old-fashioned PhobosCola machine, another victim of the EMP mine.

There was room in the alcove beside it and he slipped into it, trying to make out what it was the woman was doing. Only at the very end, with the methodical clicks and snaps, did he recognize the sounds. The knowledge pushed him further back into the gap. He’d expected her to attempt to kill him right after the mine, but just because she hadn’t didn’t mean she’d overlook the opportunity twice.

She walked right past him without seeing him, but what little he could make out of her was a black form, no yellow polka-dot sundress in sight.

He waited until he heard her go down the stairs, then went back the direction she’d come until he found the open door. A few hints of early starlight through the window led him to the open suitcase on the bed, and, like a gift, a second surface suit inside it. He grabbed it like he was grabbing onto a life raft. What little he remembered of Mr. Brown suggested that it was going to be a tight fit, but if he could get it on, he would.

Verah ran back towards the lounge. “Hotel!” she called out as she ran. “Alert Eddard and Roz that we’ve got a potential for a dome-breech. They need to stay put until they get the all-clear or rescue shows up.”

“I will, Miss Verah.”

“If . . . ” She started, then tried again. “If something happens to me, tell Eddard and Roz I said thanks. This was a good place for Sofi and me, first peace we’ve had in years, and no regrets. Got it?”

“Yes, Miss Verah.”

“Okay. Thanks, Hotel. Please inform any guests you can still reach that they should suit up if they can, just in case.”

Verah turned into the lounge. The Estimable Hroknek Jarir was sitting up now, still pale and yellow. Mr. Brown was still tied to the upside-down table; either he was still unconscious or pretending to be, but she checked his bonds anyway. If he suffered whatever fate his faux bride had planned for the rest of them, that was just fine to her.

Smith One was not moving, the stillness somehow awfully complete. She knelt beside him, checking first his pulse, then rolled him over to attempt chest compressions. She winced and let him fall back where he was.

Casting her eyes around, she spotted what she didn’t think she was looking for. Snagging a dishrag off the edge of the bar, she crawled under a table and carefully retrieved the bloodied object. Wrapping it up carefully, she tucked it into her apron.

Verah turned to the Ponkian. “Did you see what happened?”

“I just woke mmmm up,” Hroknek Jarir said.

Great, Verah thought. “Estimable Jarir, do you have a surface suit in your room?”

“No,” he said. “Such things are difficult for my people. Because of our mmm defense mechanism, binding clothing can damage us. Why mmmm do you ask?”

“The people who attacked us may breach the dome.”

“Dear-oh!” The Ponkian sat up straighter, grew slightly rounder. “I have a mmm breather apparatus. We are mmm resilient quite well to exposure events as long as we have sufficient carbon dioxide, yes.”

“I suggest you go get it, then. The power is out in that part of the hotel—do you have a light?”

“We mmmm also see quite well in the dark.”

“If you see anyone else, please warn them,” she said. “I have to go.”

The Ponkian had braced himself with one of the flung-about chairs and was attempting to get to his feet. “And him mmmm?” he asked, pointing weakly at Smith One.

“Lucky man, doesn’t need oxygen any more,” she said on her way out.

Sofi stopped dead in her tracks and pulled Smith Three down. “I see someit moving,” she whispered. “Get low.”

They lay flat on the sand, Smith Three unable to make out anything. “It’s Rickard,” the girl said at last. “Somebody behind him too, can’t make ‘em out, all in black, like light don’t even wanna touch ‘em.”

“A stealth suit,” Smith Three said. “It’s got to be that woman who attacked you and was searching the hotel.”

“Yeah, well, fancy suit do you no good if you don’t know how to move on Mars,” she said. “Running like she’s got a wedge up. You stay here, ok?”

He shook his head. “It’d be better if I—”

“You got a wrench?”

“What? No.”

“Well, I do. So stay here.”

Just like that, she slithered away from him and was gone. He cursed under his breath, unable to make out exactly where she’d gone, and thinking of his night goggles sitting with his own suit back in the hotel safe doing no one any good at all. Then he closed his eyes and slowed his breathing and did his best to listen.

Rickard was moving fairly quickly towards the buggy garage, the only source of light in the area, unaware that he’d picked up a second shadow. Sofi stayed low until both had passed her, then slipped in behind the follower. Raising the wrench, memories of being darted and stuffed in the tool closet fresh in her mind, she brought it down hard on the woman’s head.

“Aeeeeh,” the woman said, in a distinctly non-woman voice, and went down on his/her hands and knees in the sand. Sofi grabbed the suit mask and pulled, not caring that she could feel a good handful of hair through the material. It came off, revealing a reddened face, eyes tightly shut in pain.

“Agent Chernin,” Sofi said, surprised. “Sorry, thought you was that nitchy Mrs. Brown.”

“Careful! He’s working with her!” Smith Three called, working his way across the sand towards them.

Rickard was still running for the buggy garage, as if nothing had happened. Somewhere not far away there was a click, and all three of Chernin, Sofi, and Smith Three threw themselves flat as the first shot went off. The report from the second almost seemed to come after the splinter of wood and a shout of surprise. Verah was a silhouette against the bright square of the open hotel doorway, already ducking back, but slow.

“Verah, get down!” Sofi shouted, not caring if it gave her own position away.

“I can’t see her at all,” Smith Three hissed. “She must have a suit on too.” He was moving on his hands and elbows towards Sofi and the still-prone Chernin. “If so, she could be anywhere, and she can see clear as day. She must figure we’re pinned down and is saving her shot for more credible threats. Agent, you’re wearing a suit, too—can you see her?”

Chernin didn’t answer.

Smith Three poked the man, and he didn’t move. “Bright Ares Below,” he said, putting his hand on Chernin’s back.

“Is he dead?”

“Not yet, I don’t think,” Smith Three said. “Although I guess we know who was a credible threat after all.”

Another shot rang out, and they saw Rickard stumble, then pick himself back up and continue to run, hunched over and a little crookedly, still heading for the garage in the distance. “He isn’t going to make it,” Smith Three said.

“Must be someit awful important,” Sofi said. She stood up. Smith Three made a grab for her, but missed. “Hey, stupid woman!” Sofi shouted, and began running toward a small rise where she thought the woman must be, the wrench held high. “I’m free, and now it’s my turn to take some thumping on you!”

Verah broke from the doorway. “Sofi, get down!”

“I’ve got enough power to take out all of you!” The woman called out. “You’re just making it easy for—” Her voice broke off suddenly, and there was a moment of silence except for the dull sounds of feet on sand, before she started screaming, a low, choking wail that built rapidly to an agonizing crescendo.

Sofi found Mrs. Brown on her knees in the sand behind the rise, two long black shapes protruding from her abdomen. Then they moved, shifting, withdrawing, and the woman pitched forward, making a strange keening, moaning sound. Behind her, the ghost of a long white face flashed in the night as it backed away, with only a single huff for commentary.

The pink-haired girl stood there as the woman rolled over onto her back, her hands splayed across her black suit, staring up at the Martian sky. “Well now,” Sofi said, “don’t hardly seem fair to hit you now.”

“What . . . the fuck . . . ?” the woman said.

Sofi kicked the rifle away, then sat down cross-legged beside her. “It’s an oryx,” she said. “They’re emphatic.”

Verah reached them, saw the woman was down, and hardly stopped. “I’m going after Rickard,” she said. “There’s a bomb in the buggy garage.”

“Ah,” Sofi said, as Verah disappeared towards the bright square in the distance. “That explains him not saying thanks.” Meeting Mrs. Brown’s eyes, she gave her a good, vicious poke with the wrench, and the woman let out a string of curses. “Shows you to play with bombs. Not nice at all.”

Rickard swore, one hand against his side where the woman had grazed him—at least, he was telling himself it was a graze, and if it wasn’t, well, fuck it—as he reached the doorway of the buggy garage at long last. No more shots came out of the dark, and he’d heard the scream, and hoped that meant the shooter was down. No time to look, he told himself. He’d kept a steady count in his head—his watch hadn’t survived the EMP blast—and figured, if they were lucky, they had maybe ten minutes left.

The garage held his own supply buggy, a microbug with Titan plates, and a larger buggy with no rear windows and ‘Just Married’ scrawled across the back of it. It was locked.

He kicked it a few times, but his side hampered him getting his full weight behind it. Instead he picked up a mallet that had been conveniently left in the middle of the floor and beat at the door. Whatever it was made of, it was certainly not the usual cheap-ass Earth crap that made up the vast majority of buggy sales on-planet; it wouldn’t even dent.

Footsteps behind him, and he turned. Verah ran in, out of breath. “I can’t get the fucking thing open,” he said.

“I can run back and see if she’s got the keycard on her,” Verah said.

“No time,” Rickard said. He pulled open the door to the cab of his supply buggy and threw the trailer release lever, not caring that he hadn’t put down its wheels yet.

There was a horrendous screech as the trailer was ejected from the back of the buggy and slid on its connecting lock across the polycrete floor.

“What are you doing?” Verah asked.

“Getting rid of the bomb,” Rickard said. He pulled himself up into the cab and backed it around, slamming hard into the newlywed wagon just as he threw the trailer magnet back on. There was a slap of metal on metal that stung the air as the two locked together hard and fast.

“I’m coming with you,” Verah said.

“Hell no, you’re not,” Rickard said. He reached down from the open door of the cab and handed her Roz’s ancient service pistol. “Take this.”

“I told you, I’m no good with guns.”

“Just point it at whoever the fuck you need to, and try not to mention that you don’t know how to use it,” he said. “Now get your skinny Mars-trash ass out of my way or I’ll run you over.”

Reluctantly, Verah stepped back. “Thanks, Rickard,” she said.

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “I’m leaving you with an entire trailer full of artichokes and banana paste. Now let’s see how wide awake the people outside are!”

He drove into the garage’s envelope, waited impatiently for the seals to change, then drove out into the open air of Mars. He could see Chernin’s police convoy making top speed towards the hotel, and behind them, nearly hidden by the dunes, the faint light of what must have been the Browns’ ride out.

He shifted the buggy up to top speed, jolting and crashing over the dunes, and aimed straight for the lights. Bad luck for Arning and friends that they were directly in the path between him and the other vehicle; at least he probably wouldn’t live to hear Arning shoot his mouth off about it, if he made it that far.

Verah watched, just the other side of the transparent envelope seal, as Rickard’s buggy with the bomb-laden car in tow headed straight for Chernin’s convoy. They flashed their lights and blared their horns at him, but he never changed course, and at last they all swerved away, scattering, as he barreled through. She could see the tiny dot of light of the other vehicle as it suddenly broke cover and tried to get out of Rickard’s path. She couldn’t see more than that, until the sudden fireball filled her vision and she flinched as if struck by the furious heat and sound of it, even from this far away.

When the smoke cleared, she couldn’t see anything at all.

Turning away from the envelope, she walked back out through the garage, towards the hotel, numb.

Sofi and Smith Three were together trying to drag Chernin back inside. The woman lay where she was, and Verah left her; she wasn’t breathing any more.

Sofi looked up at her. “We safe?” she asked.

Verah nodded. “As much as ever. Chernin still alive?”

“Seems to be.”

“Then let’s get him inside, and start figuring out where we are. I expect the Authority will be here shortly.”

Arning, of course, brought his men in with weapons drawn. She let them bundle Chernin off for medical attention only after Arning agreed to receive and sign a formal complaint for the man’s behavior. “We’ll be getting you a tally of damages,” she said. She figured he was just as responsible for any harm the woman had done while they were briefly partnered.

“You do that, girl,” Arning sneered. “Now back off. My men have a job to do here.”

“The Agreement—” she started.

He put his pistol against her forehead. The round ‘o’ of it was cool against her skin, reminding her of Rickard’s heat, and she did not move. “No,” she said.

“I’d back down, Agent, if I were you,” Smith Three said from where he’d been quietly standing off to the side, leaning against the wall beside the elevators.

Arning let out a long, loud breath. “What this time?” he said. “I don’t see your gassy alien chum around, so who’s going to stop me?”

“I will, for starters,” another voice spoke up from the lobby entrance. Mr. Rosley stood there, leaning on a cane, his other arm looped through Eddard’s. “How is it supposed to go? Oh yes! Get off my lawn, assholes.”

“Mr. Rosley?” Smith Three spoke up.

The old man turned, stared at him. “And you are?”

“I’m the legal representative you asked be sent,” Smith Three said. He reached into his bag as a half-dozen guns swung his way, and pulled out the legal pad. He held it out, and Eddard took it.

“What is this?” Eddard said.

Roz snatched it from his grasp. “Took your damned time,” he said, turned it on, skimmed it with squinting eyes, then put his palm against the screen. It flashed once, and then the bar along the top turned green.

“What is that?” Arning demanded.

“A will,” Roz said. “I just legally declared an heir.”

“That man has no valid license to operate on Mars,” Arning said. “Any document of his you signed has no legal bearing.”

Smith Three took out his ID chip and passed it to one of Arning’s men. “You are correct that I have no license under the Mars Colonial Authority, but by the agreement, the Authority has no standing here. On Mr. Rosley’s behalf, and that of a free Mars, I have petitioned the Multiworlds Consortium for recognition of this territory as an independent and permanent political entity.”

“Someone would have to have spons—”

“If you check,” Smith Three said, “you will find that the governing body of Zanzjan T agreed to sponsor our petition; they have more than a passing familiarity the strong-arm tactics of Earth and their colonial authorities. The petition was granted, and this hotel and its grounds are now officially Free Mars. They’ve also granted us protectorate status, and temporarily appointed me official liaison between them and us.” He turned to Roz. “For only as long as you wish to retain me,” he added. “We were somewhat limited for candidates.”

“So now can I tell them to go?”

“Unless they want to start a shooting war against all thirty-seven worlds of the Consortium, I believe you can.”

Rosley grinned, showing perfect white teeth. “Shoo,” he said, waving his hand at Arning.

“And how much longer is your nephew there going to live?” Arning said. “You’ve only bought yourself a very short reprieve, at best. And your Marsie friends aren’t going to be too happy with you, breaking their inheritance-through-the-women code.”

“Very true,” Rosley said. “If Eddard was my heir.”

Everyone stared at him, except for Smith Three, who was also smiling now. Roz lifted his cane and pointed. “I chose her,” he said, and shook the end of his cane so no one could be mistaken who he was pointing at.

“Me?” Verah said.

“Yeah, you. I like you,” Roz said.

“You have to accept,” Smith Three said. He held out the pad.

“I can’t—” she started.

“And let them win?” Smith Three asked. “After all this?”

“Said you was trouble, right from the start,” Sofi said. She reached out, took Verah’s hand, and placed it on the pad.

“It has to be voluntary,” Smith Three. “Verah?”

The woman looked at Sofi, then at Roz and Eddard. “Oh, hurry up, woman,” Roz said. “I’m not getting any younger here.”

“You said yourself, you make your family,” Sofi said. “First me, now all of us.”

“I . . . Okay,” Verah said, and pressed down. The legal pad registered and turned green.

“Well, that’s done and transmitted,” Smith Three said. “It’s official.”

“Great!” Roz said. “You lot, get the hell out of our hotel.”

Arning kept his gun up, wavering just slightly, as if deciding the cost/benefit of shooting everyone right there. “Sir, you can’t,” one of his men said.

With a growl, Arning turned his weapon towards Verah. “I’m going to solve this right—” he started to say. Verah pulled Roz’s old service pistol out of her apron and pointed it at Arning. There was a blue flash, and Verah jumped and dropped the gun even as Arning crumpled to the floor.

Eddard picked up the gun, then checked on Arning. “Just knocked out,” he said. “I suggest you get him out of here before he wakes up.”

“This isn’t over,” one of Arning’s men said as they gathered up their leader and backed out.

“Buh-bye,” Sofi said, and gave a little wave.

The little group stood watching out the window as the soldiers departed, until someone began hammering on the bell on the desk. They turned around and Rickard was there, looking tired and ragged and more than a little burnt around the edges. “Can’t a man get some fucking service in this dump?” he asked.

“Well, don’t you look like shit,” Verah said, grinning from ear to ear. “Not dead, though.”

“Spare suit in my buggy. You know how hard it is to put on a suit while driving? Yeah. Bailed out about thirty seconds before the damned thing blew and had to walk all the hell the way back here because nobody could get off their ass and come get me. I need coffee. Right. Now.”

Verah smiled. “I think we could manage that.”

Morning came in full, the sun rising above Noctis Labyrinthus to shine down upon the Rosley, quiet now, its small herd of oryx near the far east edge of the dome grazing for lichen.

Verah had managed to get a simple breakfast of toast, jam, and coffee together, and everyone had settled into the dining room to eat when they heard banging and swearing coming through the walls from the lounge next door. “Oh, crap!” Verah swore. “I forgot about Mr. Brown and the dead agent! I should have given them to Arning’s men. What are we supposed to do with them?”

“Not my problem any more,” Roz said. “I’m going back to my freezer.” He picked up a slice of toast and crammed it most of the way into his mouth, and left the room.

“If I may suggest,” Smith Three said, “now that you’re an officially recognized entity, you have the legal authority to detain and charge Mr. Brown on your own.”

“And what? Sentence him to life locked in the pantry?”

“Free Mars may only physically be this one tiny place, but

it lives and breathes in pockets all over this world. We have people who can handle it.”

“Can you take the Ponkian too?” Verah asked.

“Can I what?”

“He’s the one who killed the Sfazili agent. He stabbed him with a bottle-opener.” She pulled the napkin out of her apron and unwrapped it on the table. “The assassins both had knives, Brown was tied down, and no one else was near enough to do it.”

“But why?”

“He’s one of the data thieves Chernin was looking for. The seller, I believe. I think he woke up and saw an opportunity and took it.”

Everyone stared at her. “That game was all bargain talk,” Sofi chimed in. “Seen traders use it afore.”

“I don’t understand,” Smith Three said. “But okay. I’ll contact the nearest Martian stronghold and get them to send some people over, once Arning is well out of the way. The checkpoint could be trouble, but . . . well, they can always come in on foot like I did.”

There was a clatter, and everyone turned to see the Haxallian standing in the doorway turn and run. Tentacle-arms wrapped in another bathrobe, it tripped and fell flat on its face. “And there’s our buyer,” Verah said.

“You have no proof,” it said through its translation box. “Search me. You will not find any data.”

“I’m sure we won’t,” Verah said. “Which is why we’re going to let you leave this hotel on your own. But first, I’d like back that sweater you stole from Estimable Jarir’s room. We’ll hold it for him, safe and sound, until this thing with the agent is resolved.”

The Haxallian struggled out of the bathrobe, but Rickard walked over and put a heavy boot down on one of its tentacles. “I’ll go get it,” Sofi said, and skipped out of the room.

Smith Three stood up and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I guess I should get going now,” he said, “before everything gets complicated again. I have the feeling this place is prone to that, and I still have more documents to file on your behalfs.”

“I don’t even know your real name,” Verah said.

He shrugged. “It’s Smith. For real.”

Smith shook Eddard’s hand, and Verah’s, and nodded to Rickard. Stepping over the Haxallian, he paused. “Oh, yes,” he said. “One last thing.”

He reached into his bag and pulled out a small, square box, and handed it to Verah. “A present from Zanzjan T,” he said. “A small upgrade for your hotel computer.”

“Thanks,” Verah said, looking down at the box, peering under the lid at the small ball nestled within. She had no idea what it was. “After that EMP thing, we need all the help we can get. I do wish we had something to give in return.”

Sofi reappeared, a hideously multicolored sweater in her arms, and Verah brightened. “Actually, forget I just said that,” she said. “I’d like you to take the sweater back to Zanzjan T for me, with our thanks.”

Smith was perplexed. “The governing body of Zanzjan T is a giant intelligent computer. And, uh, having met it, I don’t think it has much need of a sweater.”

“The sweater’s the data,” Sofi said.

“What?” Smith asked, as the Haxallian let out a squeak.

Verah took the sweater from Sofi, and then handed it to Smith. “Ponkians have to wear expandable clothing, otherwise when they blow up they can suffocate themselves. He told me so himself. And when the assassins took over the hotel, the first thing Smith Two here did was make for the Ponkian’s room and steal this sweater. Even with his weird clothing fixation, it seems like an odd priority,” she said. “Until you realize the data’s been written right into tiny fibers—it is the fibers. And cable-stitched, no less. See how they’re iridescent, in the right light?”

“That data . . . ”

“Was stolen from the Bomo’ri. If it stays here, we’ll never see the end of trouble from it. Zanzjan T is near the Bounds, so maybe they have a way of getting it back to them. Seems like the right thing.”

Eddard chuckled. “Roz did good picking you,” he said. He stretched, hands against the small of his back, and gave the room one last lookover. “Well, I’m off for a nap. That damned lockdown room is about as comfortable as rocks, and Roz was telling me jokes all night. Sixty-year-old dirty jokes.” He shuddered, and left.

Rickard looked down on the Haxallian. “Since I’m stuck here waiting around until I can get a ride out again, you want someone to help you evict it?”

“Sure.”

“With or without its stuff?”

“With. Although, if you could, please see that he doesn’t take more than one bathrobe,” Verah said.

“If you show me that fire pepper thing after.”

“Deal.”

Rickard dragged the Haxallian away as Smith packed up the last of his things and left. Verah looked at Sofi, and Sofi looked at Verah.

“Well,” Verah said at last. “What a complete mess.”

“Yeah,” Sofi said. She leaned back against the couch and rolled herself over the top to land in a heap on the cushions, and fished her unfinished novel out from underneath. “Home sweet home. So what’s for lunch?”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2013.

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

Vandana Singh

Vandana Singh was born and raised in India and currently inhabits the Boston area, where she is a physics professor at a small and lively state university. Several of her science fiction short stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best volumes, and shortlisted for awards. For the wider context in which “Shikasta” was written, see the original anthology at csi.asu.edu/books/vvev/. For her essay on the multiple inspirations and challenges of writing this story, see her blog at vandanasingh.wordpress.com. Her second short story collection, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, is out Feb 2018 from Small Beer Press.

Chris Willrich

Chris Willrich (Mountain View, CA) is a science fiction and fantasy writer best known for his sword-and-sorcery tales of Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone. Until recently he was a children’s librarian for the Santa Clara County Library System, in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared in Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Gate, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Flashing Swords, The Mythic Circle, and Strange Horizons.

Suzanne Palmer

Suzanne Palmer is a writer, artist, and linux system administrator who lives in western Massachusetts. She has won both the Asimov&rsquos and AnLab/Analog Reader Awards for her short fiction. Her first novel is forthcoming from DAW in 2019.

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 six-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology is The Final Frontier, which was be published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.