Issue 43, August 2018

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

Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Inclination

a novella by William Shunn

After the Apocalypse

a short story by Maureen McHugh

The Muses of Shuyedan-18

a short story by Indrapramit Das

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the August 2018 issue of Forever Magazine!

I’m off to Worldcon in a couple of weeks for five days of meetings, conversations, panels, dinners, award ceremonies, and parties. I’m up for two awards—a Chesley (Best Art Director) and a Hugo (Best Editor Short Form)—and plan to enjoy the moments of recognition regardless of how the results fall. Awards are fickle beasts and people always find some reason to complain about how so-and-so was robbed or how X only won because of their not-so-subtle publicity campaign on social media. We’re fans. We’re passionate about the work we love, so when it doesn’t get the attention we think it deserves, it can be upsetting. 

This is my sixth time as a finalist for best editor short form and have a streak of five losses. It’s a tough ballot and I have a great deal of respect for each of the amazingly talented people that I’ve lost to. That I can live with. Yes, I’d like to win, but losing to the right person is the next best thing. I’m still at that point in my career that I’m flattered just to be considered among them. Besides, I’ll have plenty of fun things to distract me while I’m there. :)

Until next time . . .

-Neil

Inclination

William Shunn

The Manual tells us that in the beginning the Builder decreed six fundamental Machines. These are his six aspects, and all we do we must do with the Six. We need no other machines.

I believe this with all my heart. I do. And yet sometimes I seem to intuit the existence of a seventh Machine, hovering like a blasphemous ghost just beyond apprehension.

There is something wrong with me, and I don’t know what it is.

Late for my curfew and trembling, I grasp the doorknob that is not a doorknob.

This is the Machinist Quarter—only a tiny sliver of Netherview Station’s Ring B, though I’m one of the few boys I know who has ever been outside it. Fo-grav stays off in the Quarter; our only simulation of gravity is the 0.25 g of natural centripetal acceleration born of the station’s rotation and our two-kilometer distance from the hub. We joke that this is why it’s called the Quarter. It sure isn’t called that after the ratio of its volume to the station’s.

The cabin I share with my father Thomas lies in the Inclined Plane branch, third transverse, twelfth hatch on the left. Standing at the hatch, I straighten my billed cap and smooth my coverall—each emblazoned with a right triangle stitched in dove-gray thread, representing our ward—and gently turn the knob. Recessed lights at deck level cast my diffuse shadow up the bulkheads to either side of me. The knob operates as if it were mounted on a genuine mechanical axle, though of course it isn’t. A dumb mechanical doorknob wouldn’t unlock to my touch alone, or Thomas’s. I hate the doorknob. I hate the deceitfulness of it, the way its homogeneous smart matter mimics the virtuous and differentiated and pure. I hate what it conceals. I hate it for not keeping me out.

With a silent prayer to the Builder, I push the hatch open. It swings inward on soundless, lying hinges. I tread lightly inside, in case Thomas is sleeping, the nonslippers on my feet helping me keep my steps short and low. But as I round the door I see Thomas sitting up on his bunk in his short gray underall, watching me enter. The door closes itself behind me, which no door should do unbidden. The cabin is narrow and unadorned but for a diagram of the Six Fundamental Machines affixed to the rear bulkhead, and a small wooden chest bolted to the deck beneath it. The air reeks of a coppery sourness that matches Thomas’s narrowed glare. The cabin is so tiny I could reach out and stroke his curly, graying hair if I wanted, but that’s an urge that no longer seizes me often. Anyway, the days when I could reliably charm him out of his anger are long past.

“You’re late, son,” he says. He’s squinting at me now, eyes unfocused, the way he does sometimes. He doesn’t even glance at the chronometer on his wrist—a true mechanism, with tiny metal gears and not smart matter inside, a symbol of his status as a merchant trader. “It’s past your curfew.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, turning my back and reaching for the crank that will fold my bunk down from the bulkhead opposite his.

His voice grates out in sharp, tight bursts like the strokes of a rasp on iron: “If you were sorry, you’d have been on time.”

My shoulder blades prickle. I say nothing, cranking down the bunk.

“Jude, you’re fifteen years old,” Thomas says. “Why do you think you still have so many rules? Why?”

I try to shrug, but the effort feels jerky, like the gesture of a marionette. “I was waiting my turn at devotions,” I say, clinging to the false crank. “You know—with Nic and the rest. But the Foremen wouldn’t—they stayed past their time, and we, well . . . ”

Thomas has risen, his voice at the back of my neck, shivering my spine. “I was out looking for you. I spoke to Nicodemus an hour ago. In Plane, not at gymnasium.”

My blood runs chill. That’s two lies I’ve told, and he’s caught me in one already. Nicodemus is my best friend, or used to be, but lately I’ve been avoiding him. We were up late working on our motors in the schola a couple of weeks ago. He was helping me get the timing right on mine and his fingers brushed the back of my hand. It was just an accident. We’ve been friends all our lives, but it was like seeing him for the first time. I wanted to touch his face, though I didn’t let myself. The scary thing was, it didn’t feel wrong, and that scares me all the more.

Of course I can’t explain this to Thomas. Nor can I explain why more and more I can’t force myself to evening devotions on time. The cleansing room where we change and shower is like a chamber of horrors. None of the boys seem bothered by disrobing in front of each other, but it bothers me acutely. Letting them see my body makes me want to tear my skin off.

My bunk is halfway lowered. I want to turn and defend myself against Thomas’s implicit accusation but a bolus of confusion clogs my throat. Words swarm like dust in my brain, eluding my grasp. Why do I have to explain any of this to him? Why doesn’t he just know? And why is it his business?

“Great Builder, Jude,” Thomas says at my back, “if you have to lie to me, how can I trust you at a job?”

My shoulders stiffen, my head half turns.

“That’s right, I’ve lined up a job for you. Do you understand, son? At the hub.”

A sick despair flares in my gut. Outside the Quarter? Could things get any worse?

“I need you up early, and fresh, but you’re out doing Builder knows what when you should be in bed. Did I raise you to be this way, Jude? Did I?”

Tiny flecks of spittle flense the back of my neck. I was at my devotions, I really was, I want to say, but the words won’t come.

“Answer me when I speak!” Thomas says, seizing my arm and spinning me around. My cap with its Inclined Plane insignia flies off my head.

The skinny legs tensed for violence, the slow ripple of his round, protruding belly, the sharpening rage on his gray blade of a face—I’m bigger and taller, but I might as well be five again for all that I can stand up to what’s coming.

He shakes me. “You will honor your father, that your days may be long upon the earth!”

Saline globules tremble at the corners of my eyes, watery jewels sparkling across my sight. The words burst out before I know I’m speaking: “There’s no earth here, only metal.”

My father’s face flushes livid. He spins, hurling me across the cabin—not difficult, since my weight is just twenty kilos. I sprawl across my father’s bunk, all gawky limbs and terror.

I roll over and there he is looming above me, fists raised and shaking. It’s been months since last he struck me, an improbable lucky streak which now seems about to end. But he lowers his arms and leans over me.

“The Wrecker’s in you, boy,” he says, shaking a finger. “You pray hard and shake loose his grip. Pray to be made square and true. Tomorrow more than ever, you need the Builder to be with you.”

And now he’s pulling on his coverall and leaving the cabin to stalk off his anger, the hatch snicking shut behind him like a quiet tap to a finishing nail. Alone, I flow off the bunk to the floor, to my knees, to retrieve my cap and pray.

I’m out of true and I need fixing. Through shuddering tears I pray for the Builder to make me a better son, a stronger laborer, a whole person. I pray for his protection, both physical and spiritual. I pray for reassurance that Thomas doesn’t really mean to send me alone among the Sculpted in the morning.

When I finally crawl into my bunk and wrap the blanket around myself, though, it’s not the Builder with his Machines I picture watching over me in the dark. It’s my departed mother Kaiya, angel wings spread above me in a canopy of white.

The Builder has ignored my prayer, at least the part about the Sculpted.

We rise and dress early, Thomas and I, and exit our cabin. In one hand Thomas carries a gray cloth sack big enough to hold a loaf of bread.

Only the most devoted practitioners are awake at this hour, en route to gymnasium. Rather than follow them, Thomas leads me to the end of the next branch over, to where Saul, foreman of Inclined Plane, lives. The only mark that sets this hatch apart from every other in the row is the small carpenter’s square etched at its very center.

Foreman Saul appears in the hatchway, bleary-eyed, at Thomas’s knock. “Selah, Jude,” he says in greeting, favoring me with a look both compassionate and foreboding. “Brother Thomas, let me speak to you alone a moment. We’ll only be a bit, Jude.”

Thomas follows Saul inside without a glance at me. I stand in the corridor and mentally rehearse the Builder’s Code. I’m still in Lever, less than halfway through the Hexalogue, when the hatch opens again. Saul gestures me in.

The cabin is a little smaller than the one Thomas and I share, and consequently more crowded than ours ever gets. Thomas sits at one end of the only bunk, cloth sack in his lap. He pats the space beside him, and I sit. Saul picks up a thermos from the foldout stovetop that juts from the rear bulkhead and sips carefully at the spout. The air smells faintly of powdered coffee and machine oil.

“Jude,” Saul says, “your father let me know late last night that he’s secured you a position on a stevedore crew at the docks. Unfortunately, as you’re required there promptly this morning and you can now be fined for tardiness, there’s no time to go through the usual series of preparatory lessons before you leave the safety of the Quarter.”

I don’t miss the baleful sideways glance Saul gives Thomas, but Thomas doesn’t seem to react to it. He just sits there with the same twist of bored impatience on his lips.

“Oh, I’ve been out a couple of times before,” I say, if only to cut the palpable tension, which is settling into my neck. “I mean, when I was younger.”

“Yes.” Saul sighs, blinking his pouchy eyes a few times. He is older than my father, taller and softer, but no sadder. I’ve been tempted many times to bring my cares and questions to him, but something has always held me back. “You’re a bright young man, Jude, and I know you’ve walked among the Sculpted before, so at least the sights won’t be new to you. But accompanying your father once or twice on his rounds is hardly the same as working alongside them, alone, for a full shift every day. If there’s no time for the proper instruction first, at the very least a blessing is in order.”

“Okay,” I say, a little of the weight lifting from my shoulders. Even if the Builder isn’t listening to me, surely he’ll listen to the foreman, as pious a man as I know. But at the same time I’m beginning to feel in my gut just how much spiritual danger I’ll be courting. Why is Thomas doing this to me?

“If you’ll sit here?” Saul says. He is setting up a metal folding chair in the middle of the cabin, which means it nearly bumps Thomas’s knees. I scoot over into the chair, doffing my cap and clutching it in my lap, as Saul removes a ceremonial oilcan from a niche in the bulkhead. Thomas joins Saul behind me. The oilcan ka-chunks, the tip of its spout tickling the hair at the crown of my head as it deposits a tiny bead of machine oil. Saul gently taps the droplet down onto my scalp, and he and Thomas lay their hands upon my head.

Other kids get to have their mothers in the cabin with them during blessings like this. I close my eyes and try to imagine Kaiya here, watching from the corner near the hatch. And she could be, right? Surely that’s not a vain hope.

“Great Builder,” Saul says, “in the name of the Wheel, the Wedge, the Lever, the Plane, the Pulley, and the Screw, we bring before you your true and faithful servant Jude, who ventures forth this day to labor amongst the Sculpted for his daily bread. Be with him, Builder, that he might have health in his navel, marrow in his bones, and strength in his sinews—strength that he might work and not be weary, but moreso that the Wrecker with his subtle wiles may find no purchase in his heart, mind, or flesh. We know the Wrecker’s cunning is great, Builder, and that he can make what’s wrong seem right. But your power and love are infinite, and so we commend this young man to your oversight with all faith in your goodness and wisdom. May we ever draw nearer to thee, Great Builder, as the Inclined Plane rises ever to heaven. Amen.”

“Amen,” I say. The hands, which have grown progressively heavier during the blessing, lift from my head. I stand, rolling my head to soothe my neck.

Saul folds the chair and sets it aside—a deft, practiced move in the cramped space—then reaches out to clasp my forearm in the Scaffold Grip. His hand is warm and dry. “What’s today, Thursday? Let’s meet Sundays after temple, Jude, to make some headway on those lessons. Better late than never.”

“When his schedule allows,” Thomas says, conspicuously checking his chronometer. “They call this Oneday outside. Weeks aren’t reckoned the same.”

“Of course. Then any day you can, Jude.” Saul squeezes and releases my forearm. “And remember that the Builder blesses you not just for obedience to his commandments, but for obedience to your parents as well.”

“Jude,” Thomas says. He picks the sack up from the bunk and inclines his head toward the hatch.

“Selah, Foreman,” I say and follow my father out into the corridor. I look back to see, in the moment before the hatch closes behind us, Foreman Saul standing like a forlorn beast in the center of a cage.

Or is that perception just a way to make myself feel better about the sentence to which I’ve been condemned?

Thomas leads me at a brisk pace out to the main corridor, skipping lightly along the deck. “Don’t let him get to you, Jude,” he says over his shoulder. “Saul, Bartholomew, none of the Foremen understand our economic realities.”

I’m not sure whether he means our family’s or the whole Quarter’s. I don’t ask for clarification, not just because I don’t like encouraging him to disparage the Foremen but because we’ve turned into the main corridor and a few more people, from all different wards, are out and about now. The soft gray of their coveralls and visored caps against the brighter gray of the bulkheads make the Quarter look almost like a scene from an ancient monochrome photograph.

We pass the gymnasium entrance, then the intersections with Wedge Branch and Wheel and Axle. We’re alone now, and the Primum Mobile Gate looms ahead, painted with various strident warnings and danger symbols.

“You’ll have to find your own way back this evening, so pay close attention,” Thomas says, pulling the lever that opens the Gate. The massive hatch grinds aside, admitting a bedlam of voices and light and sound. “Now be ready for the weight. And whatever you do, don’t gawk.”

My heart races. I follow Thomas through the Gate and an extra forty kilos drops onto my bones. Thanks to my faithful attention to devotions I don’t fall, but I stagger and I’m sweating in the moist air before we’ve gone far. The public corridors are as crowded and noisy now as they are around the clock, alive with the babel of a thousand languages, and the bulkheads are lost in the riot of greenery that thrives on every available surface. I feel conspicuous in my Machinist garb. People—monsters—fall silent and stare as we pass, and with all their unsettling modifications it’s hard not to stare back. I can’t imagine navigating this profane world without Thomas.

We ride a slidewalk spinward, then crowd into a hubward elevator that at least contains no obvious plant life. But for every normal person, I see one with skin the wrong color or texture, limbs numbering too many or too few, a body with mysterious prosthetics or protuberances, or a head misshapen and gross. A pebbled gray creature that might once have been human brushes against me in the elevator. Dizzy, I press closer to Thomas, the sweat trickling into my eyes. I’m not sure whether his hand on my shoulder is meant to reassure me or restrain me.

At hub level, the bulkheads are again clean and metallic, as they should be. Thomas leads me through a short but bewildering maze of hatches and gangways. With fewer people around now, I breathe more easily. Thomas knocks at an open hatch. I peek inside. It’s an office about a meter and a half in radius, and every surface, 720 spherical degrees around, is jammed with monitors, control panels, and handholds. The thickset woman seated at the center has a second pair of arms where her legs should be.

“I don’t give a spout for your schedule,” she tells someone unseen. “My stevies can do the job fast, but not that fast. All right, fine. You do that.”

She looks at Thomas, and I see she has silver semispheres implanted over her eyes. Three quick swings from handhold to handhold bring her to the door. Fo-grav is still about 0.75. She’s strong.

“This the kid?” she asks.

“That’s him,” Thomas says.

She turns those reflective bugeyes on me, twitching her head up and down, and it’s like I’m being X-rayed. What she sees, I can’t imagine. “Any mods? No, of course not. You goddamn Wheelies, what am I talking about? All right, he doesn’t look too bad. Let’s get him suited up and see how he does. What’s your name, kid?”

My mouth is so dry my tongue crackles. “Jude.”

“Well, now you’re Stevie. For stevedore.”

She barks a laugh like a chugging motor, clinging to holds around the hatch with three hands. Thomas laughs too. His eyes crinkle and his lips peel back, and it’s like seeing ten years drop away from him. He never laughs around me.

In that moment I feel inexpressibly sad. And I hate him.

The woman swings out through the hatch and drops to the deck between Thomas and me. “Follow me,” she says, loping down the gangway on all fours.

Thomas shoves the cloth sack into my hands. “Your lunch,” he says.

I clutch the sack like a lifeline. It’s three times as heavy as it should be, and its heft brings a desperate lump to my throat. On a usual morning, it’s I who makes lunch for Thomas, but I didn’t even think about it today. I’m realizing that the usual mornings are behind me.

“Now you work hard and do what Renny tells you,” Thomas says. “I can’t stress enough how important this money is.”

“Okay.” I turn to trudge after the woman.

“And remember who you are,” Thomas stage-whispers fiercely. “Your body belongs to the Builder, not to them.”

“Selah,” I say.

Thomas sighs. “Selah, son. Now go.”

Renny, fidgeting impatiently, has stopped at a juncture up ahead. I follow, the grief of abandonment thick in my throat.

The Six are more than just machines. High Foreman Titus—our founder, who 120 years ago spoke with the Builder face to face—teaches us that they represent the Builder’s various aspects, and thus the ways in which we must approach him. The Six also name our wards, the clans or tribes of our faith. Though my father and I belong to Inclined Plane Ward, we owe each equal adoration, and it’s the Wedge that concerns me now.

The Manual teaches that the purpose of the Wedge is to both divide asunder and hold in place. From this we learn to divide ourselves from the evils of the world, as the maul divides the log, keeping always to the side of the Builder. Yet we also learn to bridge the gap between, as the keystone—a truncated wedge—holds the arch in place. The lesson for us is to serve the world, and serve as examples, without becoming corrupted by it.

As a people, we excel at dividing ourselves from the world. We don’t do so well at bridging—except perhaps for my father. But between him and me there’s surely a great Wedge, and it’s never clear to me which of us is on which side of it.

Thomas didn’t explain to me exactly what a stevedore is. Turns out it’s someone who loads and unloads cargo. Starships from hundreds of light-years around dock at Netherview Station’s hub, then, depending on size and mass, slide into one of three concentric levels of berths. Many of the ships are laded automatically by robot or waldo; the ones that can’t afford the special treatment (or can afford to waive it) get us.

Renny explains this to me, more colorfully, as I follow her to the locker room. She leaves me alone there to change into my docksuit, a close-fitting layer of red polymer that covers me from the neck down. I try not to think about how much smart matter I must be wearing. I leave my coverall and cap behind like a shed snakeskin in my thumbprint-activated locker. The heaviness I feel has nothing to do with gravity, though physically I’m breathing hard already from the exertion since leaving the Quarter. Carrying my lunch sack, I rejoin my new boss outside the locker room.

Before leading me to the berth where the crew awaits us, Renny rears up on her hind arms and affixes a round green badge to my chest. “Regs,” she says. “Since you’ve got no built-in monitors, this’ll let us keep tabs on you.”

The crew is twelve, male and female both, and I make thirteen. They’re lounging in a small break room off Berth C-46. Renny clambers to the top of a table and waves for quiet. “This is our new trainee,” she says. “His name is Jude Plane. Corgie, he’s your man this shift.”

A groan from a preternaturally thin fellow sprawled out on a couch prompts laughter from the others and a sinking feeling inside me. I’m sweating, much to my embarrassment.

“Okay, you shits, okay. The Needlethreader’s in dock now. Let’s go.”

The crew don helmets and begin to spill out a hatch opposite the one Renny brought me through. They disperse in all directions—left, right, up, down—grabbing implements from a rack outside as they go. They’re all human in shape, mostly normal as far as I can see. They don’t look much older than I am, but you never can tell with the Sculpted. One has bright blue skin above the collar of his suit, an eye-straining contrast with the red polymer. He winks at me as he drops out the hatch. My stomach clenches.

Renny hops down from the table and grabs Corgie by the leg before he can say a word to me. “Pay close attention to the kid,” Renny says. “He’s barefoot. He’ll need a fishbowl on top of everything else.”

“You’re joking,” Corgie says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fishbowl.”

“There’s one in the rack today along with everything else.”

My trainer heaves an aggrieved sigh. “All right, Juke,” he says to me. “Follow me and stick close.”

“Jude,” I say.

“Right. Juke.”

Renny reaches for my lunch sack, which I still clutch uncertainly. She stashes it for me as I trail out the hatch after Corgie.

And suddenly I’m not just lighter. I’m weightless, and drifting.

Fo-grav isn’t turned off in the berth; it’s on but dialed down to null, damping even the small inertial effects of rotational velocity and centrifugal force. Corgie gives me a brief lesson in how to maneuver in null-g with a dockwand, a thin, meter-long rod of smart matter that ejects a stream of inert particles from one end or the other on command. Basically you point it, squeeze, and drift off in the opposite direction. It takes me a while to get the hang of it, largely because I’m loath to touch it, but soon enough I’m helping Corgie and the rest carry out the dockwand’s other function, herding big gray crates of who knows what out of the cargo hold in the belly of the starship and through the air to the elevators that will take them wherever they need to go next—sometimes another level of the station, sometimes the hold of another ship in another berth.

I do it all wearing a helmet with a transparent visor that curves down over my face. The helmet draws words and diagrams in the air, overlaying what I see, giving me data like what time of day it is and where the next crate needs to go. By turning my head and focusing somewhere, I can get information about whatever I’m looking at. Sweeping my gaze along the streamlined, almost organic curve of the huge ship, for example, I can access its flight schedules, crew data, cargo manifests, manufacturer’s specifications, and even schematic diagrams that show me more of what it looks like than I can possibly see by just flitting around in the space between its black belly and the berth’s bulkhead. I can zoom in on the other crews working the hatches fore and aft of ours, and I can even find out more about my own crewmates, though I don’t feel right about prying. But it is a good way to learn everyone’s name, which I manage before the start of our first break.

Is this the world my crewmates walk through every waking moment of every day, with intimate information about everything they see just an eyeblink away? We may inhabit the same great wheel in space, but these strangers live in a truly alien world, one I don’t like visiting. Builder knows making motors isn’t my favorite activity, good as I am at it; still, I’d rather be in my applied mechanics class with Nic and Mal than here. I’d even rather be home with Thomas—anywhere but stranded amongst the ignorantly blasphemous, wielding tools that are an offense in the sight of the Builder, being slowly poisoned by the worldview of the Sculpted.

What is Thomas trying to do to me?

Our shift is the longest day of my life. The ghostly ticking clock in the corner of my vision doesn’t help.

At shift’s end we deposit our dockwands, now stubby and depleted, in the rack outside the break room and file off to the showers. I’m happy to drop off my fishbowl as well, though the experience of walking in gravity without a data overlay seems somehow dreamlike and crippling as I readjust to moving about without it—almost as crippling as walking in high-g alone. It surprises me how exhausted I am. I must have used and abused every muscle in my body.

As we reach the locker room, I’m startled that our single-file queue remains intact. The women enter through the same hatch as the men. Bringing up the rear, I tell myself there must surely be a dividing bulkhead or at the very least a screen inside, but of course I was here this morning and know there’s no such thing. I try to keep my eyes averted, but just to reach my locker I must step around a woman named Soon, who already has her suit pushed down to her hips.

The room is too small, and everyone jostles everyone else on the way to the ultrasonic showers. I stand with my burning face to my open locker, wondering if I can get away with standing here and not changing until the room is empty. Soon’s bare torso blazes like a beacon in my mind. A part of me is fascinated and wants to look at it again; another part is horrified at the thought, and at the distant, epochal memories of my mother that stir, memories so ancient they seem apocryphal.

Renny, galumphing through the locker room, slaps the back of my thigh and says, “Next shift’s gotta get in, kid. Hurry it up.”

Somehow I strip off the suit, deposit it in the recycler, and manage the walk to the showers. My skin crawls as I crowd into the white ceramic chamber with the others, though part of this, I’m sure, is the feel of the ultrasonics vibrating sweat and grime loose from my body. Still, I can’t look higher than anyone’s ankles. It’s not just the naked flesh that distresses me. I’m out of my coverall in front of heathen, and that’s a grave offense in the sight of the Builder. My hands hover in front of my crotch.

My hip brushes the thin blue man’s; I nearly jump out of my skin, and I mumble an apology. “Don’t worry about it,” he says with a kind smile. “We’re all friends here.”

“Yeah,” Corgie says. “Just help yourself to a handful of whatever’s closest.”

“Or a thimbleful,” says an apparent neuter named Ice IX, pointing at Corgie’s flaccid penis.

“Careful. You don’t want to wake the monster.”

Mijk, a muscular man with a series of knobby lumps down his back, says, “I do. Someone ran all the lotion out of my dispenser.”

“And apparently he wants it back,” Soon says with a giggle.

Corgie wipes his mouth. “Come and get it,” he says, and his penis flares to enormous size, all ridged and quivering. It is a monster.

I turn away, blushing. But something strange has begun to happen. I don’t feel comfortable exactly, but I do feel somewhat invisible, with less of the compulsion to run and hide than comes in the cleansing room at gymnasium. I’m able to let my eyes roam some, taking in the female bodies as well as the male, plus two or three I find less determinate and the entirely genderless Ice IX. In the Quarter, contact between boys and girls is strictly regulated and chaperoned, even during courtship; a situation like this is as unthinkable as a motor assembling itself from raw ore. I have more answers now than I know what to do with to what minutes ago was only a compelling mystery.

I almost don’t want the shower to end, but when the thought takes form I realize the Wrecker is already getting his claws into me. How much easier a time of it he has here than inside the Quarter! Despair washes over me. How will I ever survive this?

Clean, but with a film of shame clinging to my exposed skin, I trail the group back to the lockers. I’ve pulled on my underall and my coverall and am about to put my cap on when a tall, trouserless man named Twenty plucks it deftly out of my hands.

“What’s this for, some kind of uniform?” he asks, turning the cap this way and that. “You got another job?”

My muscles seem to seize up, and the bottom falls out of my soul. So much for invisibility. Renny is gone; I don’t know where to turn for help. Heat and mortification radiate from the top of my uncovered head as Twenty’s Sculpted hands defile my cap.

“No, you ramscoop,” Corgie says, taking the cap, “he’s a Wheelie. Don’t you know anything?”

And now he’s passing it to someone else, who’s asking why there’s a triangle on it if I’m a Wheelie, and now it goes to someone else, and now it’s flying through the air past my face, and now again the other way. I reach for the cap, but it’s snatched by the knobby-spined Mijk.

“Wheelie, huh?” he says. “Those are like Christers, right? How come you’re named after a traitor, Wheelie?”

“Judas betrayed the Builder,” I say quietly. I want to sound dangerous, but even I can hear the quaver in my voice. “Jude was a different apostle.”

“Jude, Judas, Peter, penis—whatever. Think this’d fit me?”

Mijk’s about to slip the cap onto his head, and I’m about to shout something, maybe do something I’ll regret, when a half-dressed woman named Beneficent Sunrise takes it from him.

“Mijk, it doesn’t stretch. It’s not smart enough to fit your thick skull.”

“Then what good is it?”

Beneficent Sunrise turns the cap over. She studies the inclined plane symbol. “Never seen something made from dumb fabric before. Interesting the way it feels. Almost real.”

Her frank curiosity defuses my anger. Or is it the sight of her full, bobbing breasts? They fill me with an emotion I can’t quite put a name to. Not desire, not quite, but something as sharp in its poignancy. I wonder what they feel like.

The blue man picks my cap cleanly out of her grip. Holding it by the visor only, he puts it in my hand. My fingers clutch it spasmodically.

“Real like your tits, Sunny?” he says to the woman.

“Go deplete your wand,” she says in the general laughter, but she’s smiling with everyone else.

Weak with humiliation and relief, I cover my head and turn to rummage in my empty locker. Around me, my crewmates casually hide their nakedness.

The blue man is called Haun Friedrich 4, but the fishbowl taught me he prefers to go by Derek Specter. He’s in the trial period before a legal name change.

The idea that one may choose one’s own name is as strange to me as everything else about the Sculpted. What would I choose if I were to name myself? Paul? Luke? Timothy? None of them work. I can’t imagine learning to answer to any name but Jude. That’s me. That’s who I am.

I’m standing in the gangway outside the locker room, having lingered there until the arriving crew forced me out. People edge past me in both directions. I’m trying to remember which way I came this morning, fighting a growing sense of panic, when Haun—Derek—touches my shoulder with blue fingers.

“Know where you’re going?” he asks with an easy grin.

“Er . . . rimward,” I say, feeling the blood heat my cheeks.

“Yes, that would almost certainly be correct.” Derek leans against the bulkhead near me, a little too close, arms folded and eyes bright. His skin is the blue of Enoch’s fabled seas, and his irises glow like bits of its sky. “Do you need any help getting there?”

I look down at my gray nonslippers. “I guess I do,” I say, embarrassed at the prospect of this ostentatiously abnormal creature rescuing me twice in the same ten minutes.

Derek gazes at the opposite bulkhead, cupping his chin. “Wheelieville, I presume,” he says. He gives me a sidelong glance, apologetic but not self-conscious. “The Machinist Quarter, I mean.”

“Uh, yeah.”

His eyes narrow. “Let me just find it on the map.”

“What map?” I say. His glance this time is mildly reproving, and I let out an abashed “Oh.”

“We just need to get you to Elevator Seven, Eight, or Nine,” Derek says after a moment. “That’s probably the trickiest part of the route. And I happen to be going the same way, if you don’t mind company.”

My feet are itching to move. I’d rather he just point me in the right direction and let me go my way, but I’m too tired to argue. I shrug my acquiescence.

As we set off down the narrow way, Derek says over his shoulder, “You were good in there today. Not everyone adjusts to null-gee that quickly. I think even Renny was impressed.”

He looks back expectantly, but since I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say to this, I don’t answer.

“Corgie gave you some shit, I know,” Derek says, “but you should have seen him back when he started. Talk about an ostrich. Was this your first time with an overlay?”

“Yes.”

“I remember when I was first getting used to it. It was strange to turn it off and not see labels everywhere I looked. You must be going through the same thing. You probably haven’t ever used Geoff before either.” At my blank look, he grins. “Yeah, we’ll have to teach you how to use Geoff. Then next time you need to get somewhere you won’t have to put up with me running off at the mouth.”

“What’s Geoff?” I ask.

“Info daemon on the public net. You’ve really been sheltered, haven’t you? Geoff’s mostly for travelers and transients—anyone offline, really, so you can use him too. He’ll answer any question you have, if he has the answer and you’re older than ten. And as long as it’s not private or classified.”

Derek keeps looking back at me with an expression like he’s trying to tell me something significant and I’m just not getting it. I feel dumb, and my skin’s been crawling ever since the word “daemon” anyway. “I—thanks, but that doesn’t sound like something I ought to be messing with.”

He gives me one more look, then shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says. “But you do have a right to whatever information you want. You only have to ask.”

We take the next couple of turns in silence, me adrift in an uneasiness I can’t quite put my finger on.

“So what’s a nice Machinist like you doing in a job like this anyway?” Derek asks at last. “I thought you were supposed to stick to your own turf, not venture out amongst the unwashed.”

The corridors are wider now, the crowds thickening, and Derek, walking beside me, speaks too loudly for my comfort. “Commerce with the Sculpted isn’t forbidden,” I say a little defensively, keeping my voice low. “It’s just . . . discouraged, I guess. It’s—there’s a lot of danger, spiritually.”

“I always wanted to be a spiritual hazard,” Derek says. “You probably shouldn’t even be talking to me, should you?”

“Um . . . ” I’m looking around, anywhere but at him. There are unholy forms and faces and sounds and smells everywhere. “Not really, not like this.”

“So why are you? I mean, in the larger sense. Why are you here at all? Why do you have this job?”

I sigh. “I didn’t exactly have a choice,” I say, cursing my inability to hold my tongue. “Thomas, my father, he’s our ward trader, which means he goes out and sells whatever we build or manufacture. That’s so the ward can meet its obligation to the Guild.”

“Which is saving up to get off Netherview Station and continue its fabled trek to Enoch. I’ve read about it.”

I look at him, nonplussed. We know so little about the Sculpted, I somehow can’t get over the fact they know anything about us. “But business isn’t so good,” I continue. “As trader, my father has to pay the rest of the ward first, before he takes his share, but lately there’s not much left over. In fact, I think there may not be anything left over. He’s been trying for months to get me a job outside the Quarter, and believe me, that means things are grim.”

“Of course they are,” Derek says. “Who wants primitive toys made from primitive materials?”

“They’re not toys!” I say, turning on him, thinking of the motor I’ve been building for some weeks now. “It’s serious work! It’s sacred!”

“Hey, hey, I’m sorry.” We’re now at the elevator bay, waiting, and Derek puts his hands up as if to ward off my anger. I see for the first time that his palms and the pads of his fingers are a rich green, fading into blue at the edges. “I didn’t mean it like that. But you have to realize that’s how most people see what you do. If it has no practical use, it must be a toy.”

“It does have a practical use,” I say. “You people are just too stiffnecked to humble yourselves and admit it.”

Derek nods. “Or you might say we’ve put away childish things.”

This reference to the Manual startles me. The elevator opens as I’m groping for a suitable reply, and we crowd in with several other commuters, including a woman who has tentacles where her fingers should be. Derek spends the ride staring straight ahead with the barest of smiles on his lips.

I’m still smarting when the elevator opens on Six. I’m about to say that I think I can find my way from here, but Derek steps out with me into the thick, damp air and dank vegetation.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” he says, “what is the significance of the triangle on your clothing? It’s an inclined plane, right?”

“Um, right,” I say. “That’s the ward I belong to.”

“You’re lucky you’re not in Screw,” he says. “You’d never hear the end of it at work.”

“So, er,” I say, stumbling a little as we step onto the counterspinward slidewalk, “I guess you understand the Inclined Plane is one of the Six Fundamental Machines.”

“I’ve heard that rumor somewhere,” Derek says.

“Well, they’re also symbols. This one represents the obliqueness of our approach to the Master Builder. No matter—”

“You mean God, right?”

“You might call him that,” I say.

“I might. And again, I might not.”

He has a way of continually derailing me and looking pleased about it that I find entirely infuriating. “No matter how shallow the angle,” I say, soldiering on, “the Inclined Plane leads us ever upward, and though it may take eons, eventually we’ll reach the level of the Builder.”

“Sounds suspiciously like the Tower of Babel,” Derek says. “And didn’t God punish the Babylonians for trying to approach him in just that way?”

“Their approach was more direct, and completely literal,” I say, my voice heating up. “We’re not talking about a literal approach. Ours is metaphorical. We approach the Builder by understanding and manipulating his six aspects.”

“I’d have thought he’d have more respect for the direct approach. You know, just wrap an inclined plane around a big pole and climb to heaven.” He waggles his blue eyebrows at me, eyes twinkling. “Maybe what offended him about it was the metaphorical significance of it. Maybe the Babylonians were really saying God could screw himself, and that’s why he gave them all a good tongue-lashing.”

The delight he derives from such extreme statements takes my breath away. “You can’t approach the Builder in anything but a metaphorical way!” I say.

“Then why let yourselves be literally constrained? Why confine yourselves to what you can build from six fairly arbitrary machines?”

“The machines aren’t arbitrary! They’re the six aspects of the Builder.”

“They are arbitrary, and not all of them are even that fundamental. The screw we were just talking about—like I said, it’s just an inclined plane wrapped around an axle. The pulley’s a special case of the wheel and axle, and the wedge is just another way of looking at an inclined plane.”

I wipe fatigue sweat from my forehead. He’s hitting uncomfortably close to blasphemous thoughts I’ve entertained myself, which may explain my vehemence in denouncing them. “Every aspect partakes of the others to some extent,” I say, but I sound more shrill than certain.

“Seems to me that if there really is a god, you could find some far more useful metaphors for the way he operates if you’d just reach deeper than your six machines.”

He exits the slidewalk and I follow, belatedly realizing we’ve arrived near the PM Gate. To my relief and chagrin both, I’ve been so focused on the conversation that I haven’t paid much attention to the nightmarish creatures around me, nor to the riotous greenery. But I notice them all now and feel hemmed in.

“We’re not meant to reach deeper,” I say, hurrying to keep up with Derek’s long gait in the swarming crowd.

“Then you’ll never achieve godhood, now, will you?” Derek says. He pauses near the unadorned hatchway that leads to the Machinist Quarter. “Well, here you are.”

Bathed in sweat, I purse my lips. “Thanks, uh . . . thanks for getting me here.”

“The pleasure was all mine.” He makes as if to move on, but stops. “I meant to tell you before, I thought you handled those jokers in the locker room about as well as you could have. Just don’t let them know they’re getting to you and they’ll leave you alone soon enough. They’re not really mean, just exemplars of what I call the indolent uninformed. Learning new things is such a trivial process they don’t even make the effort.”

“Like the Israelites and the fiery serpents,” I say.

Derek blinks, his eyes losing focus. “Interesting,” he says after a moment or two. “Numbers, chapter twenty-one. If the ones who were bitten only gazed upon Moses’s brass serpent, they would live. All they had to do was look. You know, there’s good sense to be found in that book here and there.”

“The miracle is,” I say, “even a gentile can look and see it.”

Derek laughs long and loud. It makes me feel clever and proud, though why I should care about looking clever to this mockery of a man baffles me. “Touché, Jude,” he says. “See you tomorrow at the orifice.”

He studies some resource invisible to me, and then he’s off, a lean blue figure vanishing into a teeming, grotesque jungle. I’m reminded that he inhabits a world even more strange than this physical one, and that when the two or us look at an object we each see a vastly different thing.

“Selah, Derek,” I say under my breath. I pull the lever and pass through the Gate, wondering what he sees when he looks at me.

The cleanliness, calm, cool, and quiet of the Quarter stand in stark contrast to what I’ve left behind. It’s evening by our clocks; we run here on only one shift. The few Machinists out and about look at me strangely as I pass from outside. It should feel good, this homecoming after an eternal shift away, this shedding of weight, this lightness, this cooling of my sweat, but I find myself keyed up and restless before I’ve even reached the branching to Wheel and Axle. I know Thomas will be waiting for me, wanting to know how the day went, but I can’t confine myself at home just yet. Instead I lower my head and trudge to gymnasium.

The machines are manned mostly by Levers, all older than I, but one station opens up before long. I do my best to complete the ritual properly, pitting every muscle group against the pulleys as I rehearse the Builder’s Code in my mind, but I’m barely into the first canto before my sore muscles are quaking. What’s more, I can’t keep my thoughts focused. My mind keeps reaching back to worry images of naked flesh—sometimes colored naturally, sometimes blue or green.

One by one the Levers are finishing up and heading to the cleansing room, some of them whispering and giving me looks as strange as the ones I got outside from the Sculpted. I rush to try to complete the minimal requirements before the place fills up with Inclined Planes, but in vain. I’m not quite done when Nicodemus and another Plane named Amos arrive. I see them from across the room, over the tops of three ranks of machines. I duck my head but too late. Nic spots me and hurries over.

The station next to mine is empty, abandoned just moments before. Nic, his face cautiously friendly, slides into the seat, leaving Amos to fidget awkwardly in the aisle before us. “Selah, Jude,” Nic says.

“Selah,” I say, mouth dry.

Nic begins some warmup stretches of his arms and back. “You weren’t at schola today,” he says.

I look straight ahead, pumping away with my arms in bellows mode, but Amos is right there staring at me so I focus on my knees instead. “No,” I say.

“Malachi heard you were outside,” Nic says.

“Yeah, at the hub,” Amos says.

“He said you had a job.”

A wary hope fills Nic’s voice, but whether it’s hope that the rumors or true or simply hope that I’ll talk to him, I can’t tell. Either way, I can’t look at him. I can’t look at his golden hair, his glistening shoulders, his wise blue eyes. But I can’t not answer.

“That’s right,” I say gruffly. “I guess you won’t see me much in class anymore.”

“Is it true about the Sculpted?” Amos says. He’s a skinny kid and he practically dances from foot to foot. “They drink blood instead of water?”

“Amos, I see a free machine over there,” Nic says with a jerk of his head.

“But—”

“I’m nearly done here,” I say.

“Better hurry, Amos.”

I can’t see Nic’s face, but I hear the tone of warning in his voice, and I see the answering expression of querulousness on Amos’s face. Amos stalks off, even as I fight down the unwelcome surge of warm emotion in my chest.

I rest for a twelve-count, saying nothing, then embark on another bellows set.

Nic has launched into a set of cherrypickers. “So what’s with you, Jude?” he says between reps.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been avoiding me for a couple of weeks now. What did I do?”

I sigh, clinging to the handgrips and letting my upper body sag. “It’s not you, Nic.”

“Then what is it? Is it about this job?”

What am I supposed to tell him? That I’ve started to worry I like him too much? I can hardly express the thought even to myself.

“It’s not about the stupid job,” I say, though I’m aching to tell him about everything I’ve seen and done today. I cut my set short and stand up, infuriated. “Great Builder, you’re so—so—oh, flashcan it!”

I rush to the cleansing room with all the dignity I can muster, which isn’t much, aware of all the eyes on me. In the quick glimpse I caught of Nic before I fled, there was hurt and concern. He hadn’t yet broken a sweat.

I try to put him out of my head among the straggling Levers in the steam-filled shower. I try to conjure the illusion of camouflage I felt in the showers at the hub, as if I could hide myself amongst my Sculpted crewmates and never be seen. Here I feel anxious and wrong, like I don’t belong. But I certainly don’t belong there.

Scanting my cleansing, I dress quickly and hurry into the main corridor. The crowds here are about as thick as they ever get but seem downright sparse compared to outside. People stride lightly from their duties back to their branches, men and women, boys and girls, as evening stretches toward the dinner hour. I envy them their apparent lack of care.

“Jude, Jude,” hails a gentle voice, and I raise my head. I hadn’t realized my neck had bent as if in stronger gravity.

It’s Sariah, a Pulley my age who’s walking the other way. “Oh, selah,” I say.

She takes my sleeve and draws me to the side of the corridor. “Missed you at schola,” she says, voice low. Not that we have any of the same classes, but the boys and girls do see each other at lunch. Often I’ve wished I could learn the simpler skills the girls ply, like producing rough fabrics on machines the men construct, but the one occasion on which I expressed such a desire to my father is one I’m not likely to forget. I was younger then and hadn’t learned better.

“I wasn’t there,” I say tiredly.

“I know,” she says, a look of eager horror on her face. “You were outside. Helena saw you go this morning. So what was it like?”

My eyes are already straying down the corridor toward escape. How can I explain what it was like today? I’m too confused. “It’s the Wrecker’s workshop out there, truly,” I say, pulling away. “Look, I’m sorry, but I need to get home.”

She lays a cool hand on my arm. She’s very pretty with her enviably long yellow hair, and she’s nearly as tall as I am. “Jude, what’s wrong?” she asks, her face close to mine, eyes filled with concern. “Was it that horrible? You can tell me.”

I want to weep. I have friends, sure, or I did, but what I’ve never had is someone I can confide in, someone I can really trust and open up to. That’s all I want.

“Sariah—”

I feel her eyes searching my face, but I can’t quite meet her gaze. “What is it?” she says.

“I—” Am I really going to say it? She’s always been nice to me, kind. I glance up quickly. “What do you think about Nic?”

“Nicodemus?” A little crease appears between Sariah’s fine eyebrows. “He’s okay, he’s nice. Why?”

I shake my head, my stomach turning inside out. “It’s just—you know, he’s such a great guy . . . ”

I trail off as her eyes get a little wider. “Oh,” she says quietly, almost in wonder.

“I mean, he’s been my best friend for such an incredibly long time,” I say.

She nods slowly, focused on some inner vision. “No, no, I see. I get it.”

“So, you know . . . ”

“Who would have thought?” The ghost of a pensive smile touches the corner of her mouth. She kisses me suddenly on the cheek. “Thank you, Jude. Thank you. I’ll talk to you later.”

With that she trails off down the corridor, yellow hair billowing in the quarter-g, leaving me to wonder desolately what in space just happened.

Thomas is waiting for me at the cabin, reading the Manual. He looks pointedly at his chronometer as the hatch closes behind me. “I expected you sooner,” he says.

“I stopped for devotions on the way back,” I say. “I thought I might be too tired later.”

He nods, accepting this, and I breathe a sigh of relief. “How was it today?” he asks.

I shrug. “Fine, I guess.”

“Did you work hard?”

“I think I did.”

“Crew treat you okay?”

I take off my cap and rub my head. I don’t want to get into it all with Thomas. “They were fine. They didn’t pay me much mind.”

Thomas closes his Manual, a finger marking his place. “You be polite around them, Jude, but keep your thoughts to yourself. That’s the way to stay true among the Sculpted.”

“I will,” I say, though already I feel duplicitous.

Thankfully, that seems to close that subject. The only other thing Thomas seems to want to know before he goes back to his reading is when I expect to be paid—something I haven’t given much of a thought to. I assumed that was something he would have worked out with Renny already.

I prepare our dinner on the foldout stovetop, a stew of ground meat, beans, and vegetables. The activity proves more calming and centering to me than devotions did. But that night as I drift toward sleep, my mind keeps turning back to the women in the locker room, and to the wooden chest bolted to the deck not two feet from my head. Kaiya’s chest.

The Screw is a peculiar machine, partaking directly as it does of aspects of the Axle, the Inclined Plane, and the Wedge, and often requiring application of the Lever to fulfill its purpose. This is fitting, given its function as the aspect that both joins together and elevates, and as a representation of the way in which men and women join together in holy communion with the Builder to ignite the spark of life.

Sacred as it is, I’ve always been a little embarrassed by the Screw, a little wary of it. Maybe if that were my ward I’d have a better understanding of it, a healthier attitude toward it, but I’ve never been quite comfortable with its symbolic freight. Love and apotheosis strike me as less the Screw’s nature than doing violence to whatever surface it encounters.

I find it difficult to credit that I will ever come to completely trust and adore the Screw.

My work schedule is seven days on and three off—one full s-week as reckoned by the Sculpted. My first “weekend” falls on a Thursday through Saturday by the Guild calendar, which means schola every day while I’m supposed to be taking a break. Neither my long stretches without a day of rest nor my falling behind at schola seems to bother Thomas much, but it bothers me. When I dare bring this up, he tells me the Builder is blessing us for our sacrifice—though I don’t see what sacrifice it is that he’s making.

By my second s-week on the job, I’ve begun to feel comfortable and confident in null-g, and competent if not so comfortable with my fishbowl’s graphic overlay. It’s as if I’m looking at a raw and exposed layer of reality that should more properly be covered, or at the very least from which I should avert my eyes—though, just as in the locker room with my crewmates, doing so is practically not an option. I am on friendly terms with most of the crew, even if I can’t quite bring myself to consider any of them friends. We’re too different for that, both in our worldviews and in our expectations of what friendship means. For one thing, they don’t seem to have a problem with the occasional tweaking of one another’s anatomy in the showers. I do, as they have learned.

I have spent most of my lunch hours and several more walks home chatting with Derek. Despite the fact that he’s so obviously unlike me, he has a directness, a curiosity, and a willingness to take my arguments seriously that I can’t help but like, even if I can’t always effectively rebut the points he makes. I consider him a goad to make me apply myself more diligently to my studies. I retain the faith that answers exist to his objections, and if I can’t find them and express them articulately then I’m hardly a worthy ambassador for the Guild.

It’s end of shift on Sevenday of my second s-week on the job when Renny calls us together in the break room. “Got some news, little stevies,” she says, executing a sort of four-handed cartwheel up a chair to perch on her favorite table. The animated chatter anticipating our weekend break quiets down.

“Fourday and Fiveday next week we’ve got a special assignment coming up for anyone who wants in on it. Berth A-11, prospecting ship full of scientific samples. Very delicate, both the ship and the cargo. Berth’s gonna be fully evacuated, so there’s hazard pay, but only those of you rated for vacuum will be eligible. If you don’t want in, that’s fine—we’ll have plenty to do here. But if you want in and you’re not vacuum-rated, it’s not too late to get that way. You can even take shift time to do it without getting docked. I just need to see your certification first thing Threeday if you want in. Understood? All right, that’s it.”

Renny draws me aside as the others file off to the showers. “This is a good opportunity, kid,” she tells me in a low voice. “You’re a good worker, and you sure don’t want to miss out on triple pay.”

She’s right, I don’t. I can imagine how happy Thomas will be to see the extra credits. “How do I get vacuum-rated?” I ask, watching two tiny, distorted me’s in her silvery eyeglobes. “Is there a test I take or something?”

“Not, er, not really,” Renny says. “What it mostly entails is getting your lungs and eyes and ears vacuum-hardened. You’d be wearing a pressure suit in the berth, of course, but if it should fail you could suffocate before we got you out of there and repressurized. Regs don’t let us subject you to that risk.”

My breath catches. “What you’re talking about—that would mean Sculpting, wouldn’t it?”

“Just a small bit, internally.”

The pay would be welcome, but I have to shake my head. “No offense, but I can’t do that. I’m very sorry.”

Renny shrugs, an elaborate motion of her hind shoulders. My reflection dances crazily in her eyes. “What can I say, kid? It’s your choice, and I sure won’t think any worse of you for it. But don’t make the decision now. Think about it over the break. Get the details from Geoff. Talk to your old man, see what he says.”

“Right,” I say. “I already know what he’d tell me.”

“Thomas ain’t a bad guy, for a Wheelie. Talk to him, kid.”

All the way to the showers, cringing, I can hear Thomas telling me the Wrecker’s in me. But I can’t quite shake Renny’s insistence that I bring it up with him.

That evening over our humble dinner I blurt it out before I can reconsider: “Renny says there’s a special job next week. Extra pay, and she’s pushing me to do it.”

Thomas puts down his fork. “And?” he says, glaring at me over the table.

“And . . . I’d need some small modifications. Vacuum-hardening.”

Thomas bows his head. Today’s a Saturday in the Quarter, what would in other circumstances have meant half a day at schola for me and a morning of light community service for him. But neither of us follows a normal schedule now, and we’re each exhausted from the labors of the day. I wait for him to speak, not chewing, heart in my throat.

Not that I don’t know the right answer. I only have to ask myself what the Builder would say. Or my mother, I think, the tip of my nonslipper grazing the wooden chest beneath the foldout table that spans the width between the bunks. The chest contains Kaiya’s clothing, which, despite the reg against storage of unnecessary mass, Thomas has never been able to bring himself to recycle. It’s almost as if he’s waiting for her to come back. I’m not, though. I don’t have many firm memories of Kaiya, and in fact Thomas has told me so often that my mother is with the angels now that that’s how I nearly always picture her: dressed in spotless white with huge feathered wings furled above her, looking down on me from on high. I know what she would think if I broached the topic of transfiguration. I know what she does think, in whatever level of the Builder’s mansion she’s watching me from.

At last Thomas forks a bite of boiled potatoes and carrots into his mouth and peers at me, practically through me, from under lowered brows. “You told her no, right?”

I flinch a little. It takes a moment for me to realize he’s talking about Renny, not Kaiya. “Of course,” I say. My words feel defensive, as if he’s somehow already forced me to lie to him.

“Wrecker take that woman, anyway.” He shovels more food into his mouth and chews silently for a few bites.

When he speaks again his voice and his eyes, unexpectedly, have softened. “Son, I know they teach us at temple never to compromise with the world, to always live as if we’re with the Builder in his mansion, but in practice that’s just impossible. We all make compromises—we have to, or we couldn’t get by. We couldn’t live. The tricky part—no, the hard part is knowing what’s okay to compromise and what isn’t. You have to figure out where that dividing line is—and then stay well back from it. When you try to walk it . . . ”

Thomas folds his hands together and stares down at the table. “Jude, son, I can tell you what happens. You fall. You tell yourself you won’t, but you do.” He clears his throat, lips compressing almost convulsively. “I just want you to be happy. Maybe that’s not what this world is for, but Builder knows it’s what I want for you.”

His eyes rove this way and that, never meeting mine, and he clears his throat again. Once upon a time, this would have been where I edged around the table to give him an awkward hug. Tonight I can’t. My soul cries for him, but I’m not a little kid anymore, and I just can’t.

We finish our meal in silence.

The next day is temple, the first Sunday in three Guild weeks I’ve been off work. Thomas and I sit toward the back of the long, low chapel, which sits near the AD Gate at the opposite end of the Quarter from the PM Gate. The bulkheads are of brushed gray metal, with three of the Six Machines etched on the left wall, three on the right, and the carpenter’s square on the wall behind the pulpit.

Inclined Plane Ward meets third every Sunday, in the late-morning slot. During Foreman Saul’s sermon after the sacrament, I spot Nicodemus several rows ahead and to the right. What caught my eye was his golden head tilting back as he smiled wide at something the person next to him had whispered in his ear. The person next to him has long, shining yellow hair.

The person next to him is Sariah.

I blink hard for the next several minutes. I shift and fidget through the rest of the sermon. The pew is cold and rigid—dumb, unyielding matter—and no matter how I try I can’t get comfortable. I’m supposed to meet the foreman for my private instruction after church, but when the service ends I rush back to the cabin instead, with a vague excuse to Thomas about my stomach.

Two full days of schola still ahead, catching up on subjects where I’m falling further and further behind, before I get to return to work. I don’t know how I’m going to make it.

Wednesday comes at last, Oneday to the rest of the station, and in the break room in the early morning Renny reminds the gathered crew that we have only two days left to sign up and show vacuum certification if we want in on the special gig. She looks my way but I duck my eyes. Funny—I’ve spent the past two days at schola avoiding Nic and looking forward to Oneday, and now that it’s here it looks like I’m going to spend the day avoiding Renny. I’m such a bent nail I can’t stand myself.

Our client today is a Thunder-class starship, Colder Equation, which we lade with supplies bound for the exomorph colony at Van Maanen’s Star. It’s hard work but mostly mindless, and I find my cares evaporating for the first time in days. I feel best at midshift when we break for lunch, but the rest of the day is marred by the clock in the corner of my vision, ticking down the minutes until I return to gravity’s embrace.

At shift’s end, after showers, I ask Derek if he’d like to go somewhere for food. He’s invited me to eat after work several times now, but I’ve worried not just that Thomas would find out but that I wouldn’t be able to find anything appetizing in the public cafeterias. Tonight, though, I’m desperate enough to talk that I think I can overcome my food objections.

Delighted, Derek leads me all the way to a dim cafeteria two levels in from the rim. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but certainly not this gloomy cave with the dark red walls and the low ceiling. Quiet, lilting string music plucked out by unseen hands drifts on the air, which smells gently dank and laden with minerals. Thick pillars and curtains of leafy plant life obscure the view from one end of the place to the other, though here and there I can see tables of two, three, or four, the sometimes asymmetrical faces of the patrons lit from below by flickering orange light. Perhaps it’s the dimness, but I no longer find their deformities as hideous as I did at first.

A woman in a lumpy black cowled robe leads us through the compact maze of foliage to a table against a black-painted bulkhead studded with white pinpricks. It isn’t until we take our seats in form-fitting smart-matter chairs that I realize the bulkhead isn’t a bulkhead at all, but a viewport—a hole punched through fifteen centimeters of metal and plugged with glass or something like it.

“Wheel and Axle,” I murmur, stunned. I can’t take my eyes from the bright, nail-hard stars.

“Netherheim and Freya should come into view before you’re finished,” the cowled woman says. “That’s a sight to behold.” She makes an arcane gesture in the air. “Now, let me call your attention to today’s specials.”

“Perhaps a . . . hardcopy menu would be in order for my friend here?” Derek says, nodding toward me.

“Oh, certainly,” the woman says before receding like smoke into the shadows.

The surface of our table glows a dim, swirling orange, making Derek’s skin look like polished stone and his eyes smolder with fire. “So what do you think?” he asks.

“It’s not what I expected at all. I pictured something more, well, functional from a cafeteria.”

“Cafeteria, eh?” Derek’s eyes sparkle with amusement. “I suppose you could think of it that way.”

The robed woman returns with a catalog of dishes listed on a single sheet of paper, and I’m shocked to discover, as Derek points out, that most of the items have been grown hydroponically. “This must be terribly expensive,” I say, mouth watering. “I can’t afford this, I’m sure of it.”

“Relax,” Derek says. “Everyone gets credit for a meal like this once a month. I’ve got a couple saved up, and you must have at least a dozen just sitting there, unused.”

I cover my surprise and confusion by studying the menu. I have the sense of riding an iceberg in a limitless ocean, borne up by a vast bulk the composition of which I can’t begin to fathom. Choosing more or less at random, I select an opener of fine pasta garnished with grated cheeses and truffle shavings, and a spiced squash tart as a main course. Derek places our orders, a process invisible to me, choosing a fruit assortment and a roulade of vegetables and nuts for himself.

He folds his hands and leans forward. “So, what’s on your mind, Jude?”

“Oh, this and that,” I say, and shrug. “I was thinking today about what it would be like to live out in space.”

Derek shakes his head, grinning. “We do live in space. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

“No, I mean in space, like the exomorphs, just floating there in the middle of nothing.”

“Well, it’s not nothing. There is a structure, a lattice, to grow their colony in.”

“But it’s not much, and it’s open to space.” I didn’t know there were such creatures, such people, until today. I read it on the fishbowl during work. “Can you even imagine the mods you’d need for that?”

“Serious work indeed,” Derek says. “Not to be undertaken lightly.”

“No one on our crew has work that serious. They all look pretty much normal, at least when they’re dressed.”

“The more radical mods are often specialization for particular types of work. We’re unskilled labor, our crew, Jude.”

I nod, having figured this out without really being able to articulate it. I take a deep breath. “Derek, can I ask you something personal?”

He laces his fingers together and rests his joined hands on the table. The green of his palms has crept halfway up his arms in the time since I met him, and his ears are now tinged green as well, though I can’t make the hues out well in this light. His gaze upon me is very open and direct and unsettling, more so because every day I come to know better how little I understand of his world, layered as it is above and beneath and around mine. “I don’t know, can you?” he says.

“I don’t know. I’ll try.” I’ve learned some things about him from the fishbowl at work without really trying—for instance, the distressing fact that he has three biological mothers—but nothing that doesn’t just whet my curiosity. I look down at the glowing table and take a deep breath. “I’m just wondering if there’s some, I don’t know, some practical reason for your mods, something functional. You know, what the blue skin turning green is all about.”

“There’s a time for love, and a time to hate,” Derek says with a rakish smile. “A time for blue, and a time for green.”

I puff out an exasperated breath. “Do you spend all your time looking up things in the Manual you can make fun of?”

He shakes his head. “You do understand, don’t you, Jude,” he says animatedly, “that a book called the Bible existed long before Titus Grant slapped his own generic title on it, and that it’s not exactly an obscure work in the human literary canon?”

“High Foreman Titus didn’t just change the title. Under the Builder’s inspiration, he clarified and corrected—”

Derek extends a finger until it almost touches my lips, waving his other hand preemptively. “Yes, fine. But you understand he didn’t write the Manual from scratch.”

“All right, fine, I understand,” I say. “So what about the color change?”

He leans back in his chair. “Right, that. It’s not really anything practical. There’s nothing I can point to and say my skin color accomplishes. In fact, it’s mostly a random aesthetic process. I’m never sure what color’s coming up next.”

“Then why did you do it? I mean, what’s the purpose?”

“It keeps me interested,” Derek says, and his smile cracks momentarily. “I see me and not-me in the mirror at the same time, and there’s always the mystery of what’s coming next. It’s as good a reason to stick around as any.” He leans forward again, and to my ears his heartiness now sounds forced. “What makes you curious, friend?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

“You’re thinking about the job, aren’t you? The vacuum job this Fourday.”

I look out the viewport at the stars, but the view seems to tilt and wheel beneath me, spinning my sense of balance away. “Maybe,” I admit.

“You know,” Derek says with a trace of his vigorous smile, “if you do it, a lot of folks on the crew are going to be disappointed. People are starting to get protective of you, and you may make them feel like they’ve corrupted you.”

“It’s not their decision,” I say.

“Agreed.”

A different woman brings us our opening course. A thick tail moving in counterpoint to the balanced trays in her hands protrudes from beneath her black robe. Attention to the food spares Derek and me from the burden of conversation. I’m not sure I enjoy all the lush, strange flavors on my plate, but I know I’ve never tasted anything so vivid. I swallow every last crumb.

Derek seems uncharacteristically fidgety between courses, but it’s not until our main courses have arrived and I’m halfway through my tart—excellent—that he says, “Jude, can I ask you something?”

“Um, sure,” I say between bites.

He swallows. “What is it that happened to your mother?”

The bite I’ve just taken feels too big going down my throat. “How do you know about my mother?”

“I’m sorry, I’m not trying to pry.” He wipes his mouth with a cloth serviette that actually shows slight stains of use. “It’s hard sometimes to look at you and not make the easy jumps back through your genealogy.”

“My mother died when I was small, four or five,” I say, setting down my fork and holding my gaze steady with great effort. “I’m not clear exactly how. My father doesn’t like to talk about it, and I don’t like to press him.”

Derek opens his mouth, looking confused, and for a moment I have the strangest feeling he’s going to tell me how it happened. I feel the sting beginning behind my eyes at the thought that he might know more about it than I do.

But what he says is: “Do you think about her much?”

I nod. “All the time.”

He looks so stricken at this that I feel I could be looking at a reflection of my own expression in a blue-tinted mirror—or, so I believe for a giddy, wildly hopeful moment, at my mother. The illusion shatters as Derek rises suddenly in his chair, takes my face in both his green hands, and leans in to kiss me on the mouth. He stares at me a second or two, an eternity, and sits back down.

Breathless, I turn to the window. Netherheim has swung into view, a giant ball of spun sugar swirled with red and yellow stripes, a fruit as sweet and bursting and sick-making as my heart inside me. I sit very still, not looking at him. My pulse is racing about a hundred klicks a second.

“I don’t know if I can finish this,” I say and push the rest of my tart away.

“Jude, I’m sorry,” Derek says, his eyes very steady and direct.

“Why did you do that?” I ask. Asking a question is better than yelling or crying or hitting the table.

Derek spreads his green palms. They look black with blood in the cafeteria’s hellish light. “I forgot for a minute what a kiss signifies to your people. Let myself forget, to be honest. To us—the groups I identify with, at least—it can be a greeting between friends, a show of camaraderie or comfort, even the equivalent of a slap. It doesn’t have to have a sexual connotation.”

“But why did you do it?”

Derek sighs. “Jude, you just seemed so sad. I couldn’t stand it. Lonely and sad.” He shakes his head. “You reminded me of me when I was your age. Sometimes I wish someone had just done that for me.”

Do I believe him? I’m not sure. I look out the viewport. Netherheim is just beginning to slide out of view. A cauldron of emotion, like the multicolored atmosphere of the planet below, seethes inside me. I want to storm out of the room. I want to turn a somersault in the air. I want to shake Derek by the shoulders until his head flops like a scrap doll’s.

I think about Nicodemus, wondering what I ever saw in him.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Can you help me find an elevator to Level Six?”

“Of course, Jude.”

The compassion and concern in Derek’s voice are unbearable. So is the heartbreak.

At home, safe from the sea of wild bodies and leering faces that populate the station, I fall to my knees. I should pray to the Builder for forgiveness, for putting myself in such a compromised position, but instead I thumb the combination on the wooden chest in the middle of the deck. Thomas is still out, and with luck will be for at least another hour. He doesn’t know that I long ago surfed the combination over his shoulder. The lid swings back on stiff, creaky, decidedly low-tech hinges, revealing the layered treasures within.

Reverently, I lift out the first folded garment, hearing in my mind a surreal ghost of Kaiya’s voice telling Thomas to keep this, she’ll have no use for it where she’s going. I unfold and smooth out the soft gray dress with the Inclined Plane on the bosom—then, hands trembling, pull it over my head and slip my arms through the sleeves, as I’ve done maybe half a dozen times before in my life.

The fabric is tight across my shoulders and under my arms—much tighter than it was the time before. There’s no hope of closing the buttons at the back. This may be the last time I can manage to fit into it at all.

Sobs rise up inside me as I yearn for angel wings to bear me away.

The sensation of walking spinward inside a great turning wheel like Netherview Station is a little like walking up an endless inclined plane. Because your feet are borne forward by the rotation a tiny bit faster than your head, you might feel if you’re attentive enough as if you’re leaning slightly backward, or walking up the slightest of slopes.

By the same token, a counterspinward stroll might feel a bit like a walk downhill. But compare your slight forward angle to a tangent of the circle your feet are touching and you’ll see that the attitude of your body is more like that of a person walking uphill. Thus, walk either direction inside the rim of a rolling wheel and you partake of one aspect or another of ascending an incline.

I haven’t found much scriptural support for my position, and the members of Wheel and Axle in particular would call it blasphemy, but at some crossroads it strikes me that any path you follow can lead you upward, and closer to the Builder.

I sleep badly, unaccustomed to the richness of the food in my belly. Upon rising I prepare Thomas what seems a meager and bland breakfast, all the while fearing that he will somehow sense that the chest and its contents have been disturbed. But he eats with all his attention on his Manual, and he barely bats an eye when I tell him I may end up working overtime today.

I arrive early at the hub, in time to catch Renny in her spherical office well before the start of our Twoday shift. “I want to learn more about this vacuum-hardening procedure,” I tell her without preamble. “Uh, how can I do that?”

Renny vaults out of her chair like a charged particle expelled from an atom. “If you weren’t crippled you could ask from anywhere,” she says, clinging to the frame of the hatch and shoving her ugly face into mine. “As it is, you’ll have to use a Geoffroom. There’s one not far from here.”

She leads me on a brisk walk. “You know,” I say as I hurry to keep up with her, “my father’s pretty upset with you.”

Renny looks over her shoulder and grins. “What, for telling you about the job? Oh, I heard from him. Nothing he could do about it, though. It’s regs and Thomas knows it. Like he has room to complain, the way he called in so many favors to get a barefooter like you onto the team in the first place. But he’s your father and he’s just following the script, same as me.”

She stops before a row of three hatches, each emblazoned with the old-fashioned schematic symbol for an activated light fixture. I’ve passed hatches like these at many times since starting my job, but never known what they were.

Renny rears up on her hind arms and pats the gleaming surface of the first hatch. “Now here’s the next part of my script,” she says. “This is a Geoffroom, where Geoff can tell you anything you care to ask about. He’ll answer all your questions and then some. The light bulb is glowing, which means the room’s unoccupied and you can walk right in. Take all the time you need, but if you’re going to be here longer than the first hour of shift, have the big lug message me so I know.”

She touches a panel in the center of the hatch, and it opens with a slight hiss.

“Keep your eyes and ears open, kid,” she says, and I step inside.

“Don’t be afraid. I won’t bite.”

The voice is a warm tenor and originates from no location I can see in this small, very white room. The ceiling is high enough to let me stand comfortably; my outstretched arms would nearly span the room in both dimensions. A body-enfolding chair like you might find at the medic’s rests at the center of the deck. Panicked, I turn—to find the hatch has sealed noiselessly behind me. I can barely see its outline.

“Have a seat, Jude,” the voice says. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

The air is warm, but my skin prickles cold and hard. “Where are you?” I say. “How do you know my name?”

“I’ve known you since you were born, Jude. I’m glad we’re finally getting a chance to talk. This happens so rarely with members of your Guild. But we’ll talk more comfortably if you sit. Please.”

Blasphemy! my mind cries. False gods! But I ease myself down into the chair, letting the cushions take hold of me. I feel the chair adjust to my size, and carefully I lay my head back in the niche that fits it.

A man appears before me. A pot-bellied man with flowing white hair and a bushy white mustache, dressed in a billowy white coverall. A man carrying a wooden carpenter’s square. “Selah,” he says.

I start in alarm, but the man makes calming motions as he bends over me. “The Builder,” I gasp.

He shakes his head. “If you see me in the likeness of the Builder, it’s only because that’s your strongest conception of a figure of benevolent wisdom. Not to aggrandize myself at all.” He looks down at the carpenter’s square in his hand. “This probably doesn’t help matters.” He tosses the square over his shoulder, and it vanishes.

“Who are you?” I say, struggling to sit up.

The man crackles and flashes transparent. “This’ll be less disorienting if you stay down in the chair,” he says. “For both of us.”

Suspiciously I lie back, and the image solidifies. In fact, I can feel the man as he presses a comforting hand to my chest and pushes me down.

“I’m Geoff,” he says. “No last name, but I can give you a version number if you’re really interested.”

He smells faintly of sweat, smoke, and some kind of musky perfume. “I don’t know what you mean,” I say.

“I know,” he says with a smirk. He pulls up a chair from nowhere, seats himself near my knees, and crosses his legs. “But you came here because you wanted to ask me something. So go ahead. Ask me anything you like. Ask me as much as you like. That’s what I’m here for.”

“What are you?” I ask.

“A very sophisticated information retrieval system. Once upon a time, you might have called me a search engine, but I’m much more than that. I’m something of a diagnostician as well, and a physician, and a surgeon, and a teacher and a tutor. A diplomat, a translator, an ombudsman. A legal advisor, and an advocate too. And I play a mean hand of gin.”

“Where did you get the name Geoff?” I’m thinking of Derek and his name change. “What does it mean?”

Geoff strokes his mustache. “Nothing, really. I just liked the sound of it. It seemed to me to suit me somehow. Where did you get your name?”

I blink. “From the Manual.”

“Be glad you didn’t end up Nebuchadnezzar.”

Maybe this is where Derek learned to be so cheeky. “How is it I can see you? It has something to do with the chair, doesn’t it?”

“It has plenty to do with the chair, and with its ability to create a microwave interface with your visual cortex. I can give you a more detailed technical specification if you like, but I imagine you have more pressing questions you’d like to ask.”

I’m delighted in spite of myself, and I raise my head out of the cradle several times in succession just to watch Geoff flicker in and out of existence.

“Careful,” he says, rising from his illusory chair. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

He’s right. My head has started pounding and the room whirls. My stomach feels none too steadfast in its grip on breakfast. I lie back and Geoff strokes my forehead. His cool fingers fail to disturb the swelling droplets of perspiration. I take deep breaths, digging my fingers into the padding of the armrests.

“Tell me about this vacuum-hardening process my boss keeps telling me about,” I say, eyes squeezed shut. “How does it work?”

“There’s not a lot to it,” Geoff says in a reassuring tone. “What it does is construct around your lungs a sort of a cellular retaining wall that gets deployed on any catastrophic drop in air pressure. It actually seals shut your lungs and can temporarily prevent the gases in your bloodstream from expanding and killing you. This retaining wall is also capable of breaking oxygen atoms loose from the carbon dioxide your blood returns to your lungs, so you can effectively keep rebreathing the same old air. That’s only temporary too, of course. It’s like any filter—eventually it’s going to get choked with carbon and fail. But you can last an hour that way, anyway. More than enough time for help to get to you. In most circumstances.”

It sounds so reasonable when Geoff says it. I’m looking at him again now, and he has returned to his seat. “Is the procedure expensive?” I ask, praying the answer will be yes.

“Not at all,” Geoff says. “And if you can demonstrate a need for it in the course of your job, the station covers it anyway. You do qualify, by the way.”

“Are there side effects?”

“You might feel a little short of breath after the procedure, a little dizzy and weak, but your lungs will adjust within a day or so. That’s all, really.”

I take a deep breath. “And the procedure itself—it sounds complicated. How long does it take?”

“Oh, about twenty minutes,” Geoff says, tilting his head to one side.

“Twenty minutes! That’s all?”

“You’d have the entire shift off, though, for recovery and observation. With pay.”

“But—but how is that possible?” I’m groping for words. “I mean, it’s Sculpting, right? You can’t just snap your fingers and it’s done.”

“That would be true, Jude . . . if we were starting from scratch. We’re not.”

Now I can’t breathe, and my insides seem to freeze. “What do you—what do you mean?”

Geoff stands up and clasps his hands behind his back. “You are what you call Sculpted, Jude, as is every other member of the Machinist Guild on Netherview Station. You’ve been that way since before birth, the nanodocs passed on to you via your mother’s bloodstream. Your nanodocs don’t do anything more than maintain reasonably good health and let me keep tabs on you. But the potential is there for more. Much more.”

“But—but why?” Tears gather in the corners of my eyes. “How can you do this to us? It’s—it’s monstrous!”

Geoff looks pained. “Jude, please understand what a fragile environment this station is. We have two million permanent residents and millions more who pass through every month. We can’t have people running loose who aren’t monitored in some way.”

“But it’s wrong. It’s my body!”

“Jude, if I weren’t helping out, your body would have broken the first time you left the Quarter. Your devotions keep your muscles strong, but the low gravity weakens your bones. You’ve had supplements in your food all your life to counteract the effects.”

I roll my head from side to side. “Lies.”

“I’m not lying, Jude.”

“Not now, but all along! Everything we know, my people, it’s all lies.”

“I told you the first opportunity I had. Jude, you have the right to get this information at the age of ten, when you become a provisional citizen of Netherview Station—that’s about thirteen and a third by your Guild calendar. Unfortunately, the Guild can keep that knowledge from you until age fifteen—twenty to you. You still have the right to ask and get answers, like you’re doing now, but what good does that do most of you when you don’t know you can ask?”

I’m shaking my head. “I don’t believe you. That would mean—that would mean everyone knows. All the adults—my father. Everyone knows.”

“Actually, no.” Geoff purses his lips sadly and lays a hand on my arm. “Just because they know they have the right to ask doesn’t mean they’ll actually do it. By the time they reach twenty, most of them don’t want to know.”

“I don’t want to know!” I say, wrenching my arm through Geoff’s hand to paw the water from my eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Jude . . . ”

“No! You’re the Wrecker! I don’t want to hear it.”

Geoff sighs. “As far as I’m aware, I am not the Wrecker. In fact, I’m not certain I’m capable of telling a lie. I try my very best to do good, really.”

Uncomfortably aware of how childish I’m being, I cross my arms and turn my head away from the preening phantom before me. I lie that way for some time, mind churning. When I look at Geoff again he’s watching me expectantly. I feel hollow inside.

“Geoff,” I say, my voice small, “can you fix my brain?”

Geoff leans forward, looking concerned. “What’s wrong with your brain, Jude?”

“I—I mean—”

“Yes?”

“I think I’m out of true.” I’m almost whispering. “Bent.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know.”

“Pretend I don’t.”

I lick my lips. “I think I like boys.” The admission leaves me feeling curiously flat, detached. “Can you fix me?”

Geoff tugs at his white mustache. “Jude, there are various therapy regimens I can initiate, but I don’t ‘fix’ things like sexual inclination. Not that I’d call you homosexual at all in the sense you’d think of it. The truth, I believe, is rather more interesting and complicated than that.”

My heart leaps. “What’s the truth?”

“Your Guild likes to treat sexuality and gender as binary values, either this or that, one right, one wrong, no other possibilities. But the ones you call Sculpted understand these characteristics more as a spectrum of possible values, fluid and multidimensional. There’s no either-or, nor even necessarily a permanent identification with any given point on the grid.” Geoff spreads his hands in an eerily Builderlike gesture. “Now, this is a preliminary diagnosis only, but you would appear to me to suffer from a multivalent somatocognitive dysphoria.”

“A what?” I ask, vague trepidation gnawing at my stomach.

“To put it more bluntly, your body is male, but the personality inside may be closer to the female end of the continuum. Not all the way there, of course, but more so than not.”

I shake my head despite the nausea I feel. “No, no. That’s ridiculous.”

“You would have learned very early to hide the symptoms—the wants and behaviors your people wouldn’t find acceptable in a little boy. But that, plus overcompensation in areas of archaically male pursuit, still wouldn’t make them go away.”

“You’re crazy.” The notion is offensive, repulsive. “The Builder doesn’t make mistakes like that.”

“In a perfect world, maybe not,” Geoff says. “But this world’s anything but perfect, and we all have to come to our own accommodations with that fact. Now, I can recommend and even direct a course of therapeutic counseling, just as a starting point, and of course participation would be entirely up to—”

“No!” I shout. “Stop it!”

“Jude, let’s at least talk about this for a—”

“You lying, false machine, shut up! I can’t think.”

Geoff folds his hands in his lap as I turn my eyes to the white ceiling, chewing the inside of my cheek. I’m furious, and terrified for my soul, to realize how easily I’ve been taken in by the lies of this Wrecker-spawned abomination. The right thing to do—the right degree of compromise—has never been more clear.

“I’m going to do it,” I say, the steel in my voice a wall holding back utter dissolution.

“I’m sorry—do what?” Geoff asks.

“The vacuum-hardening. I’m going to do it.”

“Are you sure?” He sounds dubious.

“Absolutely. But so you don’t get any ideas, I’m doing it for the Guild, not for myself.”

“I’m not certain what you mean by that.”

“The more hazard pay I get,” I say, “the more quickly my people can get off this godforsaken station.”

“Your pay is yours. It doesn’t have to go to your Guild.”

“I don’t care.”

“It won’t make any difference,” Geoff says. “The Guild’s debts are considerable.”

“I don’t care.”

“Jude, I don’t want you doing this under any false illusions. The Guild owes so much money they can’t even pay the interest on it. It’s practically a losing proposition to keep housing them.”

“Then why don’t you just let them leave?” I demand, enraged.

Geoff shakes his head. “I’ll tell you if you really want to know—that’s my function. But you won’t like it.”

“I don’t like it already! Just tell me.”

“As you wish. I have to be concerned about the well-being of the station as a whole, and having you here serves a purpose other than economic. The existence of a permanent underprivileged social class reinforces in the minds of the rest of the population the benefits of full participation in this pseudo-socialist post-scarcity paradise of ours. Superiority breeds contentment, of a sort.”

“So you’re telling me my people live in poverty to provide an example of how undesirable poverty is?”

“I told you you weren’t going to like it.”

My anger has shrunk to a cold, clear gem in my heart. “As if it took a supercomputer to figure that out. And I told you I’d made up my mind already.”

“Well!” he says, raising his eyebrows. He looks as if he’s about to offer more argument, but evidently decides otherwise. “So you give your consent for the vacuum-hardening procedure?”

I give a curt nod. “Yes.”

“So be it,” Geoff says quietly. He almost sounds chastened. “I’ll let your boss know you’ll be occupied today, and we’ll get started right away.”

I arrange myself stiffly in the chair, arms at my sides, as if waiting for the lid of my coffin to close.

“You’re all right from here?” Derek asks.

We’re standing at the PM Gate, the smells and tumult and humidity around us as heavy as ever. His arm around my shoulder helps offset the crushing gravity. I nod a little woozily and say, “It’ll be easier inside. Quarter gee.”

As the end of the procedure drew near, Geoff roused me to suggest I might want a friend to walk me home. I said Derek’s name before I really thought it through, but even after the fact, wondering if that had been a good idea, it didn’t seem to me I really had a better option. Geoff contacted him, and Derek was there waiting outside the Geoffroom as soon as the hatch opened.

Now he takes his arm from around me and watches with concern as I take a wobbly step on my own. “Is this . . . you know . . . are you going to be in trouble?”

“How will anyone know?” I say. “There’s nothing visible that’s changed.”

Derek looks like he’s about to say something, then extends his hand instead. Green is now his predominant hue; even his irises have changed color. “Well, Jude, just in case . . . you’ve got a place to bunk down if you need it. No strings, just a place to stow your gear.”

I nod, my throat thickening. I try to say thank you, but I can’t. I duck my eyes, pull the lever, and pass through the gate.

I might be imagining it, but as the gate closes behind me I almost think I hear Derek saying, “Selah, Jude.”

Inside, it’s late and the corridors are empty. This is good because even in the lower grav I’m having trouble walking a straight line. Geoff told me this is nothing to worry about, that I’ll feel fine again by morning, but drawing the wrong kind of attention on the way home through the Quarter would be something to worry about.

The cabin is dark when I slip inside, and Thomas lies motionless in his bunk. I strip off my coverall as quietly and cautiously as possible, crank down my bunk, and slip beneath the blanket. I lie on my back, unable to relax or even close my eyes. I spent most of the day in essentially this position. Like Geoff promised, the process took only twenty minutes—though, having felt nothing, I have only his word for that—but for the rest of my shift and beyond I lay fitfully dozing as I recuperated. I suspect Geoff would have liked to keep me longer than he did, but my father would have been livid if didn’t come home all night.

My heart pounds as I suddenly become aware that Thomas is sitting up. I try to fake deep, easy breathing as Thomas stands and pads across the narrow cabin. Even talking to him right now is too exhausting a thought to contemplate.

“Son,” he says, almost a question, his voice subdued.

I crack an eye. His face is a gray smear in the darkness, gazing down on me like the cinders of a burnt-out sun.

“Son . . . Jude . . . ” He sighs, breath hitching like an unbalanced motor. “I’ve been thinking a lot. Praying hard. I think it was wrong to send you to work. You can quit if you like. We’ll get by. We’ll manage.”

I’m not sure he knows I’m awake, sees my eyes wide and dilated in the dark. It’s like he’s talking to himself. But when he reaches down to stroke my hair, his face draws nearer and his brows knit.

“Son?” he says, his voice quavering. “Son, what have they . . . what have you . . . ?”

His hand snaps back like the magnetic arm of a relay switch. But I have only an instant to steel myself before he shakes off the stun and whips back, seizing me by my throat and one thigh and hauling me off the bunk.

“What in the Wheel have you done?” he cries, stumbling back as I watch the indistinct room tumble crazily around me. He loses his grip on my thigh, and my knees bounce off the deck even as my windpipe grinds against his other hand. I smash sideways against the bottom of the hatch, torn loose now from both his hands, and watch in the terrible clarity of low gravity as his leg swings back in an arc that will ultimately reverse and connect with my ribs.

I’ve never felt revulsion before at his correctional touch, only the sort of accepting resignation born of an intimate belief in the justice of it. But now, sprawled on the deck, my skin crawls with a sense of wrongness and violation.

Spasming, I curl myself around his leg at the moment of contact, I grab tight with both arms, I twist violently toward the hatch. Arms wheeling, Thomas hits the bulkhead face first.

The lights brighten at his startled cry, and in the sudden glare I scuttle desperately to the cabin’s far corner. Thomas’s face leaves a lurid red smear on the door as he slides to the deck. Dizzy, I push myself to my feet, lungs heaving, alternately holding back sobs and retches.

Thomas huddles on the floor with his arms over his head. “Oh, Builder,” he half coughs, half wails. “What did you do?”

There’s only one way he could have detected my mods. “You see it,” I say, nodding like a drunk. “You’re Sculpted too, you hypocrite.”

He rolls over onto one side. “I couldn’t do my job otherwise,” he says, wiping blood from his mouth. “The job I have to do for you and our people. You have no idea what I’ve sacrificed.”

“If I have no idea,” I shout, “it’s because you never told me! You sent me out there to face the same choices, but you never told me what you chose!”

He sits up, wiping his face and examining the blood on his hand. “I told you what was right, Jude. That’s my job.”

“You think I can’t figure that out for myself?”

“Obviously not. Just like your mother.” He’s breathing hard, wincing. “She couldn’t make the distinction either—what one person sacrifices out of necessity, and what that spares the rest of his family. She tore us apart because of it. She left this family in shambles.” He pushes himself to his feet. “And I suppose you want to join her now, Wrecker take you both.”

He totters the few steps toward me. I try to rise, intending to meet his assault on my feet, however it comes.

When he lays hands on me, though, it’s to take my elbow and help me rise. “Be my guest,” he says, gesturing to the hatch. “The door’s there.”

“The door?” I repeat, confused. “But . . . I thought . . . ”

“Thought what? Thought—” Understanding dawns on his face like it hasn’t yet on mine. “Oh, Jude.”

“What?”

“You know so much else. I thought you must have found that out too.”

I feel a tremble in my chest. “Found out what?”

“About your mother. That she’s . . . ”

Time seems to freeze. Something terrible roars somewhere far, far away, someplace only I can hear it.

“Son?” Something in my expression causes Thomas to release my elbow and take a step back. “Son,” he says, hands up, “she was dead to us, dead in every way that mattered. She wasn’t the same woman anymore. That woman died.”

I fling myself at him, fists pummeling his chest like I’m a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.

“I was only trying to protect you, Jude! She’s a monster now! She’s Wreckerspawn!”

“Liar!” I cry, spittle flying from my mouth, tears blinding my eyes. “You liar!”

Now he’s crying too, behind his upthrust arms, but it can’t be from my pathetic beating. I shove him away in disgust. He staggers and sits down hard on his bunk. Not pausing to think, I snatch my clothing from the netted basket beside my bunk and cross to the hatch.

“And now you’re leaving me, too,” Thomas says bitterly. “You’re her son in every way.”

“Good,” I say, turning the knob. “That’s what I’d rather be anyway.”

I have one last glimpse of him—hunched on his bunk in the harsh light like a wild animal, clawing at his wet, puffy eyes—and the hatch snicks shut behind me.

Standing over me, Kaiya looks the same as she does in my half-waking imaginings—tall, porcelain-skinned with cascades of black hair, slightly larger than life, and no older than I remember. And those wings. Those glorious, glowing, white wings, stretching up into the inky night to touch at a point as far above her head as her head is above her feet. Each feather is as long and wide as one of my forearms. I could see her clasping me to her white-robed breast and soaring high out of the galactic plane with wings like that. She is an angel.

“Jude, first let me tell you how sorry I am,” she says, leaning in so close I can count every one of her eyelashes. “I must have made a dozen recordings like this for you, at least, every time I move or make some other change, but sorry is the one thing that’s always constant. That and how much I love you.”

She’s not here, of course, but I can almost smell the dry perfume of her hair, the oily tang of her wings. I’m in a Geoffroom, the first one I could find, dressed and tipped back in the big chair and submerged in illusion. I can hardly believe this is happening, that this revelation has been so close to hand for so long, dormant and unguessed-at. All I had to do was ask the right question—or rather, to learn there were questions to ask at all. The magic incantation which had summoned this genie forth from the bottle was, quite simply, “Where is my mother?”

“I’m not authorized to answer that directly,” Geoff told me. “But I do have a message for you.”

“I wanted to bring you with me. Really I did, Jude. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could. But because of the Guild’s legal arrangements with the Station, that was impossible, and after the change I’d made I certainly couldn’t stay. All I could do was hope that you reached a point—and preferably long before you reached your Guild majority—where you were able to start asking questions.

“Since you’re seeing this, apparently you have.

“As I speak, you’re now ten years old—thirteen by Guild reckoning. You’re old enough to get this message if you ask, but not old enough that I can contact you directly. I don’t know anything about you, what kind of young man you’ve turned into since the last time I saw you. Are you still as sweet as you were as a child, and as serious? What do you believe? What do you hope for? What do you dream? How have you changed? One thing’s for certain—you must have changed some to be seeing this now. You must have made some hard choices, and you must have many more still to come.

“I’m still changing, too, Jude. I’m heading into the final phases of my exomorphological transform. When you see this, I’ll probably already be homesteading in the New Bountiful Colony at Van Maanen’s Star. It’s a long way from here, terribly far. But that doesn’t mean I won’t drop it all to see you again. It won’t be quick or simple, but if you want to start arranging it, just tell Geoff yes at the end of this recording, or any time afterward. A message will be dispatched to me immediately, though it may take a while to reach me.

“If you don’t want to see me”—she shrugs, and her mighty wings tremble—“well, you can just say nothing. I’ll never know, and I can go on assuming you’ve never seen this.”

Is there really any question? Is there any doubt? “Yes, Mom,” I say, feeling my face crumple. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”

“I’m so proud of you, Jude,” she says. “You chose enlightenment over ignorance, and that’s a terribly hard choice to make. I love you and I always will, no matter what. I can’t wait for you to see what I’ve become, and I especially can’t wait to see what you’ve become.”

The Manual tells us that in the beginning the Builder decreed six fundamental machines. These are his six aspects, and all we do we must do with the Six. We need no other machines.

I believe this with all my heart. But not even my sincerest belief, I fear, is sufficient to make it true. Not when the shape of the Builder’s seventh great Machine, transcending the other six, is coming clear.

The Seventh Machine is me.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April-May 2006.

After the Apocalypse

Maureen McHugh

Jane puts out the sleeping bags in the backyard of the empty house by the tool shed. She has a lock and hasp and an old hand drill that they can use to lock the tool shed from the inside but it’s too hot to sleep in there and there haven’t been many people on the road. Better to sleep outside. Franny has been talking a mile a minute. Usually by the end of the day she is tired from walking—they both are—and quiet. But this afternoon she’s gotten on the subject of her friend Samantha. She’s musing if Samantha has left town like they did. “They’re probably still there because they had a really nice house in, like, a low-crime area and Samantha’s father has a really good job. When you have money like that maybe you can totally afford a security system or something. Their house has five bedrooms and the basement isn’t a basement, it’s a living room because the house is kind of on a little hill and although the front of the basement is underground, you can walk right out the back.”

Jane says, “That sounds nice.”

“You could see a horse farm behind them. People around them were rich, but not like on TV rich exactly.”

Jane puts her hand on her hips and looks down the line of backyards.

“Do you think there’s anything in there?” Franny asks, meaning the house, a 60’s suburban ranch. Franny is thirteen and empty houses frighten her. But she doesn’t like to be left alone either. What she wants is for Jane to say that they can eat one of the tuna pouches.

“Come on, Franny. We’re gonna run out of tuna long before we get to Canada.”

“I know,” Franny says sullenly.

“You can stay here.”

“No, I’ll go with you.”

God, sometimes Jane would do anything to get five minutes away from Franny. She loves her daughter, really, but Jesus. “Come on, then,” Jane says.

There is an old square concrete patio and a sliding glass door. The door is dirty. Jane cups her hand to shade her eyes and looks inside. It’s dark and hard to see. No power, of course. Hasn’t been power in any of the places they’ve passed through in more than two months. Air conditioning. And a bed with a mattress and box springs. What Jane wouldn’t give for air conditioning and a bed. Clean sheets.

The neighborhood seems like a good one. Unless they find a big group to camp with, Jane gets them off the freeway at the end of the day. There was fighting in the neighborhood and at the end of the street, several houses are burned out. Then there are lots of houses with windows smashed out. But the fighting petered out. Some of the houses are still lived in. This house had all its windows intact but the garage door was standing open and the garage was empty except for dead leaves. Electronic garage door. The owners pulled out and left and did bother to close the door behind them. Seemed to Jane that the overgrown backyard with its tool shed would be a good place to sleep.

Jane can see her silhouette in the dirty glass and her hair is a snarled, curly, tangled rat’s nest. She runs her fingers through it and they snag. She’ll look for a scarf or something inside. She grabs the handle and yanks up, hard, trying to get the old slider off track. It takes a couple of tries but she’s had a lot of practice in the last few months.

Inside the house is trashed. The kitchen has been turned upside-down, and silverware, utensils, drawers, broken plates, flour and stuff are everywhere. She picks her way across, a can opener skittering under her foot in a clatter.

Franny gives a little startled shriek.

“Fuck!” Jane says. “Don’t do that!” The canned food is long gone.

“I’m sorry,” Franny says. “It scared me!”

“We’re gonna starve to death if we don’t keep scavenging,” Jane says.

“I know!” Franny says.

“Do you know how fucking far it is to Canada?”

“I can’t help it if it startled me!”

Maybe if she were a better cook she’d be able to scrape up the flour and make something but it’s all mixed in with dirt and stuff and every time she’s tried to cook something over an open fire it’s either been raw or black, or most often, both—blackened on the outside and raw on the inside.

Jane checks all the cupboards anyway. Sometimes people keep food in different places. Once they found one of those decorating icing tubes and wrote words on each other’s hands and licked them off.

Franny screams, not a startled shriek but a real scream.

Jane whirls around and there’s a guy in the family room with a tire iron.

“What are you doing here?” he yells.

Jane grabs a can opener from the floor, one of those heavy jobbers, and wings it straight at his head. He’s too slow to get out of the way and it nails him in the forehead. Jane has winged a lot of things at boyfriends over the years. It’s a skill. She throws a couple of more things from the floor, anything she can find, while the guy is yelling “Fuck! Fuck!” And trying to ward off the barrage.

Then she and Franny are out the back door and running.

Fucking squatter! She hates squatters! If it’s the homeowner, they tend to make the place more like a fortress and you can tell not to try to go in. Squatters try to keep a low profile. Franny is in front of her, running like a rabbit, and they are out the gate and headed up the suburban street. Franny knows the drill and at the next corner she turns, but by then it’s clear that no one’s following them.

“Okay,” Jane pants. “Okay, stop, stop.”

Franny stops. She’s a skinny adolescent now—she used to be chubby but she’s lean and tan with all their walking. She’s wearing a pair of falling-apart pink sneakers and a tank top with oil smudges from when they had to climb over a truck tipped sideways on an overpass. She’s still flat chested. Her eyes are big in her face. Jane puts her hands on her knees and draws a shuddering breath.

“We’re okay,” she says. It is gathering dusk in this Missouri town. In awhile, streetlights will come on, unless someone has systematically shot them out. Solar power still works. “We’ll wait a bit and then go back and get our stuff when it’s dark.”

“No!” Franny bursts into sobs. “We can’t!”

Jane is at her wit’s end. Rattled from the squatter. Tired of being the strong one. “We’ve got to! You want to lose everything we’ve got? You want to die? Goddamn it, Franny! I can’t take this anymore!”

“That guy’s there!” Franny sobs out. “We can’t go back! We can’t!”

“Your cell phone is there,” Jane says. A mean dig. The cell phone doesn’t work, of course. Even if they still somehow had service, if service actually exists, they haven’t been anywhere with electricty to charge it in weeks. But Franny still carries it in the hope that she can get a charge and call her friends. Seventh graders are apparently surgically attached to their phones. Not that she acts even like a seventh grader anymore. The longer they are on the road, the younger Franny acts.

This isn’t the first time that they’ve run into a squatter. Squatters are cowards. The guy doesn’t have a gun and he’s not going to go out after dark. Franny has no spine, takes after her asshole of a father. Jane ran away from home and got all the way to Pasadena, California when she was a year older than Franny. When she was fourteen, she was a decade older than Franny. Lived on the street for six weeks, begging spare change on the same route that the Rose Parade took. It had been scary but it had been a blast, as well. Taught her to stand on her own two feet, which Franny wasn’t going to be able to do when she was twenty. Thirty, at this rate.

“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” Jane said, merciless. “You want to go looking in these houses for something to eat?” Jane points around them. The houses all have their front doors broken into, open like little mouths.

Franny shakes her head.

“Stop crying. I’m going to go check some of them out. You wait here.”

“Mom! Don’t leave me!” Franny wails.

Jane is still shaken from the squatter. But they need food. And they need their stuff. There is $700 sewn inside the lining of Jane’s sleeping bag. And someone has to keep them alive. It’s obviously going to be her.

Things didn’t exactly all go at once. First there were rolling brown outs and lots of people unemployed. Jane had been making a living working at a place that sold furniture. She started as a salesperson but she was good at helping people on what colors to buy, what things went together, what fabrics to pick for custom pieces. Eventually they made her a service associate; a person who was kind of like an interior decorator, sort of. She had an eye. She’d grown up in a nice suburb and had seen nice things. She knew what people wanted. Her boss kept telling her a little less eye make-up would be a good idea, but people liked what she suggested and recommended her to their friends even if her boss didn’t like her eye make-up.

She was thinking of starting a decorating business, although she was worried that she didn’t know about some of the stuff decorators did. On TV they were always tearing down walls and re-doing fireplaces. So she put it off. Then there was the big Disney World attack where a kazillion people died because of a dirty bomb, and then the economy really tanked. She knew that business was dead and she was going to get laid off but before that happened, someone torched the furniture place where she was working. Her boyfriend at the time was a cop so he still had a job, even though half the city was unemployed. She and Franny were all right compared to a lot of people. She didn’t like not having her own money but she wasn’t exactly having to call her mother in Pennsylvania and eat crow and offer to come home.

So she sat on the balcony of their condo and smoked and looked through her old decorating magazines and Franny watched television in the room behind her. People started showing up on the sidewalks. They had trash bags full of stuff. Sometimes they were alone, sometimes there would be whole families. Sometimes they’d have cars and they’d sleep in them, but gas was getting to almost $10 a gallon, when the gas stations could get it. Pete, the boyfriend, told her that the cops didn’t even patrol much anymore because of the gas problem. More and more of the people on the sidewalk looked to be walking.

“Where are they coming from?” Franny asked.

“Down south. Houston, El Paso, anywhere within a hundred miles of the border,” Pete said. “Border’s gone to shit. Mexico doesn’t have food, but the drug cartels have lots of guns and they’re coming across to take what they can get. They say it’s like a war zone down there.”

“Why don’t the police take care of them?” Franny asked.

“Well, Francisca,” Pete said—he was good with Franny, Jane had to give him that—“sometimes there are just too many of them for the police down there. And they’ve got kinds of guns that the police aren’t allowed to have.”

“What about you?” Franny asked.

“It’s different up here,” Pete said. “That’s why we’ve got refugees here. Because it’s safe here.”

“They’re not refugees,” Jane said. Refugees were, like, people in Africa. These were just regular people. Guys in T-shirts with the names of rock bands on them. Women sitting in the front seat of a Taurus station wagon, doing their hair in the rearview mirror. Kids asleep in the back seat or running up and down the street shrieking and playing. Just people.

“Well what do you want to call them?” Pete asked.

Then the power started going out, more and more often. Pete’s shifts got longer although he didn’t always get paid.

There were gunshots in the street and Pete told Jane not to sit out on the balcony. He boarded up the French doors and it was as if they were living in a cave. The refugees started thinning out. Jane rarely saw them leaving, but each day there were fewer and fewer of them on the sidewalk. Pete said they were headed north.

Then the fires started on the east side of town. The power went out and stayed out. Pete didn’t come home until the next day, and he slept a couple of hours and then went back out to work. The air tasted of smoke—not the pleasant clean smell of wood smoke, but a garbagy smoke. Franny complained that it made her sick to her stomach.

After Pete didn’t come home for four days, it was pretty clear to Jane that he wasn’t coming back. Jane put Franny in the car, packed everything she could think of that might be useful. They got about 120 miles away, far enough that the burning city was no longer visible, although the sunset was a vivid and blistering red. Then they ran out of gas and there was no more to be had.

There were rumors that there was a UN camp for homeless outside of Toronto. So they were walking to Detroit.

Franny says, “You can’t leave me! You can’t leave me!”

“Do you want to go scavenge with me?” Jane says.

Franny sobs so hard she seems to be hyperventilating. She grabs her mother’s arms, unable to do anything but hold on to her. Jane peels her off, but Franny keeps grabbing, clutching, sobbing. It’s making Jane crazy. Franny’s fear is contagious and if she lets it get in her she’ll be too afraid to do anything. She can feel it deep inside her, that thing that has always threatened her, to give in, to stop doing and pushing and scheming, to become like her useless, useless father puttering around the house vacantly, bottles hidden in the garage, the basement, everywhere.

“GET OFF ME!” she screams at Franny, but Franny is sobbing and clutching.

She slaps Franny. Franny throws up, precious little, water and crackers from breakfast. Then she sits down in the grass, just useless.

Jane marches off into the first house.

She’s lucky. The garage is closed up and there are three cans of soup on a shelf. One of them is cream of mushroom, but luckily, Franny liked cream of mushroom when she found it before. There are also cans of tomato paste, which she ignores, and some dried pasta, but mice have gotten into it.

When she gets outside some strange guy is standing on the sidewalk, talking to Franny, who’s still sitting on the grass.

For a moment she doesn’t know what to do, clutching the cans of soup against her chest. Some part of her wants to go back into the house, go through the dark living room with its mauve carpeting, its shabby blue sofa, photos of school kids and a cross stitch flower bouquet framed on the wall, back through the little dining room with its border of country geese, unchanged since the eighties. Out the back door and over the fence, an easy moment to abandon the biggest mistake of her life. She’d aborted the first pregnancy, brought home from Pasadena in shame. She’d dug her heels in on the second, it’s-my-body-fuck-you.

Franny laughes. A little nervous and hiccoughy from crying, but not really afraid.

“Hey,” Jane yelled. “Get away from my daughter!”

She strides across the yard, all motherhood and righteous fury. A skinny dark-haired guy holds up his hands, palms out, no harm, ma’am.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Franny says.

The guy is smiling. “We’re just talking,” he says. He’s wearing a red plaid flannel shirt and T-shirt and shorts. He’s scraggly, but who isn’t.

“Who the hell are you,” she says.

“My name’s Nate. I’m just heading north. Was looking for a place to camp.”

“He was just hanging with me until you got back,” Franny says.

Nate takes them to his camp—also behind a house. He gets a little fire going, enough to heat the soup. He talks about Alabama, which was where he’s coming from, although he doesn’t have a Southern accent. He makes some excuse about being an army brat. Jane tries to size him up. He tells some story about when two guys stumbled on his camp north of Huntsville, when he was first on the road. About how it scared the shit out of him but about how he’d bluffed them about a buddy of his who was hunting for their dinner but would have heard the racket they made and could be drawing a bead on them right now from the trees, and about how something moved in the trees, some animal, rustling in the leaf litter and they got spooked. He was looking at her, trying to impress her, but being polite, which was good with Franny listening. Franny was taken with him, hanging on his every word, flirting a little the way she did. In a year or two, Franny was going to be guy crazy, Jane knew.

“They didn’t know anything about the woods, just two guys up from Biloxi or something, kind of guys who, you know, manage a copy store or a fast food joint or something thinking that now that civilization is falling apart they can be like the hero in one of their video games.” He laughs. “I didn’t know what was in the woods, neither. I admit I was kind of scared it was someone who was going to shoot all of us although it was probably just a sparrow or a squirrel or something. I’m saying stuff over my shoulder to my ‘buddy’ like, Don’t shoot them or nothing. Just let them go back the way they came.”

She’s sure he’s bullshitting. But she likes that he makes it funny instead of pretending he’s some sort of Rambo. He doesn’t offer any of his own food, she notices. But he does offer to go with them to get their stuff. Fair trade, she thinks.

He’s not bad looking in a kind of skinny way. She likes them skinny. She’s tired of doing it all herself.

The streetlights come on, at least some of them. Nate goes with them when they go back to get their sleeping bags and stuff. He’s got a board with a bunch of nails sticking out of one end. He calls it his mace.

They are quiet but they don’t try to hide. It’s hard to find the stuff in the dark, but luckily, Jane hadn’t really unpacked. She and Franny, who is breathing hard, get their sleeping bags and packs. It’s hard to see. The backyard is a dark tangle of shadows. She assumes it’s as hard to see them from inside the house—maybe harder.

Nothing happens. She hears nothing from the house, sees nothing, although it seems as if they are all unreasonably loud gathering things up. They leave through the side gate, coming nervously to the front of the house, Nate carrying his mace and ready to strike, she and Franny with their arms full of sleeping bags. They go down the cracked driveway and out into the middle of the street, a few gutted cars still parked on either side. Then they are around the corner and it feels safe. They are all grinning and happy and soon putting the sleeping bags in Nate’s little backyard camp made domestic, no civilized, by the charred ash of the little fire.

In the morning, she leaves Nate’s bedroll and gets back to sleep next to Franny before Franny wakes up.

They are walking on the freeway the next day, the three of them. They are together now although they haven’t discussed it, and Jane is relieved. People are just that much less likely to mess with a man. Overhead, three jets pass going south, visible only by their contrails. At least there are jets. American jets, she hopes.

They stop for a moment while Nate goes around a bridge abutment to pee.

“Mom,” Franny says. “Do you think that someone has wrecked Pete’s place?”

“I don’t know,” Jane says.

“What do you think happened to Pete?”

Jane is caught off guard. They left without ever explicitly discussing Pete and Jane just thought that Franny, like her, assumed Pete was dead.

“I mean,” Franny continues, “if they didn’t have gas, maybe he got stuck somewhere. Or he might have gotten hurt and ended up in the hospital. Even if the hospital wasn’t taking regular people, like, they’d take cops. Because they think of cops as one of their own.” Franny is in her adult to adult mode, explaining the world to her mother. “They stick together. Cops and firemen and nurses.”

Jane isn’t sure she knows what Franny is talking about. Normally she’d tell Franny as much. But this isn’t a conversation she knows how to have. Nate comes around the abutment, adjusting himself a bit, and it is understood that the subject is closed.

“Okay,” he says. “How far to Wallyworld?” Franny giggles.

Water is their biggest problem. It’s hard to find, and when they do find it, either from a pond, or very rarely, from a place where it hasn’t all been looted, it’s heavy. Thank God Nate is pretty good at making a fire. He has six disposable lighters that he got from a gas station, and when they find a pond, they boil it. Somewhere Jane thinks she heard that they should boil it for eighteen minutes. Basically they just boil the heck out of it. Pond water tastes terrible, but they are always thirsty. Franny whines. Jane is afraid that Nate will get tired of it and leave, but apparently as long as she crawls over to his bed roll every night, he’s not going to.

Jane waits until she can tell Franny is asleep. It’s a difficult wait. They are usually so tired it is all she can do to keep from nodding off. But she is afraid to lose Nate.

At first she liked that at night he never made a move on her. She always initiates. It made things easier all around. But now he does this thing where she crawls over and he’s pretending to be asleep. Or is asleep, the bastard, because he doesn’t have to stay awake. She puts her hand on his chest, and then down his pants, getting him hard and ready. She unzips his shorts and still he doesn’t do anything. She grinds on him for awhile, and only then does he pull his shorts and underwear down and let her ride him until he comes. Then she climbs off him. Sometimes he might say, ‘Thanks, Babe.’ Mostly he says nothing and she crawls back next to Franny feeling as if she just paid the rent. She has never given anyone sex for money. She keeps telling herself that this night she won’t do it. See what he does. Hell, if he leaves them, he leaves them. But then she lays there, waiting for Franny to go to sleep.

Sometimes she knows Franny is awake when she crawls back. Franny never says anything and unless the moon is up, it is usually too dark to see if her eyes are open. It is just one more weird thing, no weirder than walking up the highway, or getting off the highway in some small town and bartering with some old guy to take what is probably useless U.S. currency for well water. No weirder than no school. No weirder than no baths, no clothes, no nothing.

Jane decides she’s not going to do it the next night. But she knows she will lie there, anxious, and probably crawl over to Nate.

They are walking, one morning, while the sky is still blue and darkening near the horizon. By midday the sky will be white and the heat will be flattening. Franny asks Nate, “Have you ever been in love?”

“God, Franny,” Jane says.

Nate laughs. “Maybe. Have you?”

Franny looks irritable. “I’m in eighth grade,” she says. “And I’m not one of those girls with boobs, so I’m thinking, no.”

Jane wants her to shut up, but Nate says, “What kind of guy would you fall in love with?”

Franny looks a little sideways at him and then looks straight ahead. She has the most perfect skin, even after all this time in the sun. Skin like that is wasted on kids. Her look says, ‘Someone like you, stupid.’ “I don’t know,” Franny says. “Someone who knows how to do things. You know, when you need them.”

“What kind of things?” Nate asks. He’s really interested. Well, fuck, there’s not a lot interesting on a freeway except other people walking and abandoned cars. They are passing a Sienna with a flat tire and all its doors open.

Franny gestures towards it. “Like fix a car. And I’d like him to be cute, too.” Matter of fact. Serious as a church.

Nate laughs. “Competent and cute.”

“Yeah,” Franny says. “Competent and cute.”

“Maybe you should be the one who knows how to fix a car,” Jane says.

“But I don’t,” Franny points out reasonably. “I mean maybe, someday, I could learn. But right now, I don’t.”

“Maybe you’ll meet someone in Canada,” Nate says. “Canadian guys are supposed to be able to do things like fix a car or fish or hunt moose.”

“Canadian guys are different than American guys?” Franny asks.

“Yeah,” Nate says. “You know, all flannel shirts and Canadian beer and stuff.”

“You wear a flannel shirt.”

“I’d really like a Canadian beer about now,” Nate says. “But I’m not Canadian.”

Off the road to the right is a gas station/convenience store. They almost always check them. There’s not much likelihood of finding anything in the place because the wire fence that borders the highway has been trampled here so people can get over it which suggests that the place has long been looted. But you never know what someone might have left behind. Nate lopes off across the high grass.

“Mom,” Franny says, “carry my backpack, okay?” She shrugs it off and runs. Amazing that she has the energy to run. Jane picks up Franny’s backpack, irritated, and follows. Nate and Franny disappear into the darkness inside.

She follows them in. “Franny, I’m not hauling your pack anymore.”

There are some guys already in the place and there is something about them, hard and well fed, that signals they are different. Or maybe it is just the instincts of a prey animal in the presence of predators.

“So what’s in that pack?” one of them asks. He’s sitting on the counter at the cash register window, smoking a cigarette. She hasn’t had a cigarette in weeks. Her whole body simultaneously leans towards the cigarette and yet magnifies everything in the room. A room full of men, all of them staring.

She just keeps acting like nothing is wrong because she doesn’t know what else to do. “Dirty blankets, mostly,” she says. “I have to carry most of the crap.”

One of the men is wearing a grimy hoodie. Hispanic yard workers do that sometimes. It must help in the sun. These men are all Anglos and there are fewer of them than she first thought. Five. Two of them are sitting on their floor, their backs against an empty dead ice cream cooler, their legs stretched out in front of them. Everyone on the road is dirty but they are dirty and hard. Physical. A couple of them grin, feral flickers passed between them like glances. There is understanding in the room, shared purpose. She has the sense that she cannot let on that she senses anything, because the only thing holding them off is the pretense that everything is normal. “Not that we really need blankets in this weather,” she says. “I would kill for a functioning Holiday Inn.”

“Hah,” the one by the cash register says. A bark. Amused.

Nate is carefully still. He is searching, eyes going from man to man. Franny looks as if she is about to cry.

It is only a matter of time. They will be on her. Should she play up to the man at the cash register? If she tries to flirt, will it release the rising tension in the room, allow them to spring on all of them? Will they kill Nate? What will they do to Franny? Or can she use her sex as currency. Go willingly. She does not feel as if they care if she goes willingly or not. They know there is nothing to stop them.

“There’s no beer here, is there,” she says. She can hear her voice failing.

“Nope,” says the man sitting at the cash register.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

It’s the wrong thing to say. He slides off the counter. Most of the men are smiling.

Nate says, “Stav?”

One of the guys on the floor looks up. His eyes narrow.

Nate says, “Hey Stav.”

“Hi,” the guy says cautiously.

“You remember me,” Nate says. “Nick. From the Blue Moon Inn.”

Nothing. Stav’s face is blank. But another guy, the one in the hoodie, says, “Speedy Nick!”

Stav grins. “Speedy Nick! Fuck! Your hair’s not blond anymore!”

Nate says, “Yeah, well, you know, upkeep is tough on the road.” He jerks a thumb at Janey. “This is my sister, Janey. My niece, Franny. I’m taking ’em up to Toronto. There’s supposed to be a place up there.”

“I heard about that,” the guy in the hoodie says. “Some kind of camp.”

“Ben, right?” Nate says.

“Yeah,” the guy says.

The guy who was sitting on the counter is standing now, cigarette still smoldering. He wants it, doesn’t want everybody to get all friendly. But the moment is shifting away from him.

“We found some distilled water,” Stav says. “Tastes like shit but you can have it if you want.”

Janey doesn’t ask him why he told her his name was Nate. For all she knows, ‘Nate’ is his name and ‘Nick’ is the lie.

They walk each day. Each night she goes to his bedroll. She owes him. Part of her wonders is maybe he’s gay? Maybe he has to lie there and fantasize she’s a guy or something. She doesn’t know.

They are passing water. They have some so there is no reason to stop. There’s an egret standing in the water, white as anything she has seen since this started, immaculately clean. Oblivious to their passing. Oblivious to the passing of everything. This is all good for the egrets. Jane hasn’t had a drink since they started for Canada. She can’t think of a time since she was sixteen or so that she went so long without one. She wants to get dressed up and go out someplace and have a good time and not think about anything because the bad thing about not having a drink is that she thinks all the time and fuck, there’s nothing in her life right now she really wants to think about. Especially not Canada, which she is deeply but silently certain is only a rumor. Not the country, she doesn’t think it doesn’t exist, but the camp. It is a mirage. A shimmer on the horizon. Something to go towards but which isn’t really there.

Or maybe they’re the rumors. The three of them. Rumors of things gone wrong.

At a rest stop in the middle of nowhere they come across an encampment. A huge number of people, camped under tarps, pieces of plastic and tatters and astonishingly, a convoy of military trucks and jeeps include a couple of fuel trucks and a couple of water trucks. The two groups are clearly separate. The military men have control of all the asphalt and one end of the picnic area. They stand around or lounge at picnic tables. They look so equipped, from hats to combat boots. They look so clean. So much like the world Jane has put mostly out of her mind. They awake in her the longing that she has put down. The longing to be clean. To have walls. Electric lights. Plumbing. To have order.

The rest look like refugees, the word she denied on the sidewalks outside the condo. Dirty people in T-shirts with bundles and plastic grocery bags and even a couple of suitcases. She has seen people like this as they walked. Walked past them sitting by the side of the road. Sat by the side of the road as others walked past them. But to see them all together like this . . . this is what it will be like in Canada? A camp full of people with bags of wretched clothes waiting for someone to give them something to eat?

She rejects it. Rejects it all so viscerally that she stops and for a moment can’t walk to the people in the rest stop. She doesn’t know if she would have walked past, or if she would have turned around or if she would have struck off across the country. It doesn’t matter what she would have done because Nate and Franny walk right on up the exit ramp. Franny’s tank top is bright insistent pink under its filth and her shorts have a tear in them and her legs are brown and skinny and she could be a child on a news channel after a hurricane or an earthquake, clad in the loud synthetic colors so at odds with the dirt or ash that coats her. Plastic and synthetics are the indestructibles left to the survivors.

Jane is ashamed. She wants to explain that she’s not like this. She wants to say, she’s an American. By which she means she belongs to the military side although she has never been interested in the military, never particularly liked soldiers.

If she could call her parents in Pennsylvania. Get a phone from one of the soldiers. Surrender. You were right, Mom. I should have straightened up and flown right. I should have worried more about school. I should have done it your way. I’m sorry. Can we come home?

Would her parents still be there? Do the phones work just north of Philadelphia? It has not until this moment occurred to her that it is all gone.

She sticks her fist in her mouth to keep from crying out, sick with understanding. It is all gone. She has thought herself all brave and realistic, getting Franny to Canada, but somehow she didn’t until this moment realize that it all might be gone. That there might be nowhere for her where the electricity is still on and there are still carpets on the hardwood floors and someone still cares about damask.

Nate has finally noticed that she isn’t with them and he looks back, frowning at her. What’s wrong? his expression says. She limps after them, defeated.

Nate walks up to a group of people camped around and under a stone picnic table. “Are they giving out water?” he asks, meaning the military.

“Yeah,” says a guy in a Cowboys football jersey. “If you go ask they’ll give you water.”

“Food?”

“They say tonight.”

All the shade is taken. Nate takes their water bottles—a couple of two liters and a plastic gallon milk jug. “You guys wait and I’ll get us some water,” he says.

Jane doesn’t like being near these people so she walks back to a wire fence at the back of the rest area and sits down. She puts her arms on her knees and puts her head down. She is looking at the grass.

“Mom?” Franny says.

Jane doesn’t answer.

“Mom? Are you okay?” After a moment more. “Are you crying?”

“I’m just tired,” June says to the grass.

Franny doesn’t say anything after that.

Nate comes back with all the bottles filled. Jane hears him coming and hears Franny say, “Oh wow. I’m so thirsty.”

Nate nudges her arm with a bottle. “Hey Babe. Have some.”

She takes a two litre from him and drinks some. It’s got a flat, faintly metal/chemical taste. She gets a big drink and feels a little better. “I’ll be back,” she says. She walks to the shelter where the bathrooms are.

“You don’t want to go in there,” a black man says to her. The whites of his eyes are yellow.

She ignores him and pushes in the door. Inside, the smell is excruciating, and the sinks are all stopped and full of trash. There is some light from windows up near the ceiling. She looks at herself in the dim mirror. She pours a little water into her hand and scrubs at her face. There is a little bit of paper towel left on a roll and she peels it off and cleans her face and her hands, using every bit of the scrap of paper towel. She wets her hair and combs her fingers through it, working the tangles for a long time until it is still curly but not the rat’s nest it was. She is so careful with the water. Even so, she uses every bit of it on her face and arms and hair. She would kill for a little lipstick. For a comb. Anything. At least she has water.

She is cute. The sun hasn’t been too hard on her. She practices smiling.

When she comes out of the bathroom the air is so sweet. The sunlight is blinding.

She walks over to the soldiers and smiles. “Can I get some more water, please?”

There are three of them at the water truck. One of them is a blond-haired boy with a brickred complexion. “You sure can,” he says, smiling back at her.

She stands, one foot thrust out in front of her like a ballerina, back a little arched. “You’re sweet,” she says. “Where are you from?”

“We’re all stationed at Fort Hood,” he says. “Down in Texas. But we’ve been up north for a couple of months.”

“How are things up north?” she asks.

“Crazy,” he says. “But not as crazy as they are in Texas, I guess.”

She has no plan. She is just moving with the moment. Drawn like a moth.

He gets her water. All three of them are smiling at her.

“How long are you here?” she asks. “Are you like a way station or something?”

One of the others, a skinny chicano, laughs. “Oh no. We’re here tonight and then headed west.”

“I used to live in California,” she says. “In Pasadena. Where the Rose Parade is. I used to walk down that street where the cameras are every day.”

The blond glances around. “Look, we aren’t supposed to be talking too much right now. But later on, when it gets dark, you should come back over here and talk to us some more.”

“Mom!” Franny says when she gets back to the fence, “You’re all cleaned up!”

“Nice, Babe,” Nate says. He’s frowning a little.

“Can I get cleaned up?” Franny asks.

“The bathroom smells really bad,” Jane says. “I don’t think you want to go in there.” But she digs her other T-shirt out of her backpack and wets it and washes Franny’s face. The girl is never going to be pretty but now that she’s not chubby, she’s got a cute thing going on. She’s got the sense to work it, or will learn it. “You’re a girl that the boys are going to look at,” Jane says to her.

Franny smiles, delighted.

“Don’t you think?” Jane says to Nate. “She’s got that thing, that sparkle, doesn’t she.”

“She sure does,” Nate says.

They nap in the grass until the sun starts to go down, and then the soldiers line everyone up and hand out MREs. Nate gets Beef Ravioli and Jane gets Sloppy Joe. Franny gets Lemon Pepper Tuna and looks ready to cry but Jane offers to trade with her. The meals are positive cornucopias—a side dish, a little packet of candy, peanut butter and crackers, fruit punch powder. Everybody has different things and Jane makes everybody give everyone else a taste.

Nate keeps looking at her oddly. “You’re in a great mood.”

“It’s like a party,” she says.

Jane and Franny are really pleased by the moist towelette. Franny carefully saves her plastic fork, knife and spoon. “Was your tuna okay?” she asks. She is feeling guilty now that the food is gone.

“It was good,” Jane says. “And all the other stuff made it really special. And I got the best dessert.”

The night comes down. Before they got on the road, Jane didn’t know how dark night was. Without electric lights it is cripplingly dark. But the soldiers have lights.

Jane says, “I’m going to go see if I can find out about the camp.”

“I’ll go with you,” Nate says.

“No,” Jane says. “They’ll talk to a girl more than they’ll talk to a guy. You keep Franny company.”

She scouts around the edge of the light until she sees the blond soldier. He says, “There you are!”

“Here I am!” she says.

They are standing around a truck where they’ll sleep this night, shooting the shit. The blond soldier boosts her into the truck, into the darkness. “So you aren’t so conspicuous,” he says, grinning.

Two of the men standing and talking aren’t wearing uniforms. It takes her awhile to figure out that they’re civilian contractors. They aren’t soldiers. They are technicians, nothing like the soldiers. They are softer, easier in their polo shirts and khaki pants. The soldiers are too sure in their uniforms but the contractors, they’re used to getting the leftovers. They’re grateful. They have a truck of their own, a white pick-up truck that travels with the convoy. They do something with satellite tracking, but Jane doesn’t really care what they do.

It takes a lot of careful maneuvering but one of them finally whispers to her, “We’ve got some beer in our truck.”

The blond soldier looks hurt by her defection.

She stays out of sight in the morning, crouched among the equipment in the back of the pick-up truck. The soldiers hand out MREs. Ted, one of the contractors, smuggles her one.

She thinks of Franny. Nate will keep an eye on her. Jane was only a year older than Franny when she lit out for California the first time. For a second she pictures Franny’s face as the convoy pulls out.

Then she doesn’t think of Franny.

She is in motion. She doesn’t know where she is going. You go where it takes you.

Originally published in After the Apocalypse: Stories, Small Beer Press (2011).

The Muses of Shuyedan-18

Indrapramit Das

Shuyedan emerged from its progenitor calling to the stars in agony. Its cries rolled across the plain, a bass hum in our suits. We called it Shuyedan the moment it began to depart its progenitor. Mi, standing next to me, said the word, her eyes visible even behind the glare of sunset on her faceplate. In colbyat, Shuyedan means youngest. We didn’t know their language, if they have one. Its lowing was as alien to us as the way it separated from its progenitor. It wasn’t birth, it was a battle, full of lust and fury and what we might call blood, misting the air and falling upon us in a drizzle that glimmered on our faceplates as we watched. Strings of dark tissue stretched between the aliens like a cat’s cradle, scythes of cartilage emerging to snap them away. Steaming in the red light, Shuyedan pulled away and lay across the loamy ground, ultraviolet reflections storming across its fresh skin like lightning. A giant twisting to articulate itself, groaning to life. Its progenitor gasped flickering blood and shuddered away, its part done.

It was larger even than Shuyedan, a tower unfolding to cast its shadow across Mi and I. I heard Mi’s breath catch in the mouthpiece, a crackle that lingered in my chest.

It’s hard to describe these creatures without language that grew on this world. There are words in Colbyat that do no translate well; aynagal, which can mean thoughtpalace, or vitanbiyet, which can mean lifecastle. Piyentour, the very earthly sounding term dreamweaver. In Colbyat, they share the gender-neutral pronoun used for humans, which makes them sound less like objects to be surveyed and more like sentient life forms. These are beings of poetry, despite their vast solidity, eclipsing the largest of Earth’s animals.

But at that point, Shuyedan, youngest we have seen here, was a blank slate. Its progenitor receded into the horizon groaning, a swaying exoskeletal rook, its skin statuesque with the stories of its life, incomprehensible to us. In that, they were like walking Rorschach blots. We called that one Urdhema, imperial, because we had seen it war and defeat two others. Its mindcarvings, all crumbling creches and curling crenellations, snagged the setting glare of the dwarf sun. It was a walking monument, a castle, a defender of its own space. What we might call its child was now a rival nation.

This was the first time Mi had seen a lifecastle create another. They were all unique, and incredibly solitary. The only time they touched each other was in battle and birth.

“Fuck me, that’s beautiful,” I said to Mi, because it was, and because seeing it anew with her eyes made it as strange as the first time I’d seen a separation. Her channel was open, the reverb of my own voice in her helmet a soothing echo.

“So are you,” she said. So banal, yet striking in her timing. Shuyedan stood up, obsidian giant rippling. Urdhema was rapid despite its size, already getting small on the horizon. It was limping from its painful act of creation, but anxious to get away from the result. Its pennants unfurled behind it, fluttering on the breeze, membranes absorbing blue starshine growing stronger as the sun lowered.

“Stop,” I told Mi. “How can you talk about me when that just happened? Look. Just look at that. Shuyedan.”

“I know. I’m looking. It makes me feel like the luckiest person in the galaxy. To have you, here, now, and have Shuyedan witness us. We’re. We’re blessed, Tani,” Mi said.

Shuyedan’s windows flickered open, steam curling out of them lit yellow by bioluminescence. It beheld—us. We switched on our own headlamps, which burned through the progressing evening in straight lines.

“There are five hundred thousand human beings across the universe, observing other life forms or worlds as strange as this one. Or more, fuck knows. Don’t be so absurdly romantic,” I said, exhilarated by Mi’s happiness even as I reacted against it.

Behind the veil of reflections on her faceplate, her lips parted. “Do you have to swear so much?” A smile behind her words. “Shit,” she said, and stumbled back as Shuyedan’s entire body shook and it sounded again, louder than before. Our external mics squealed.

And just like that, Shuyedan’s skin churned. It witnessed us. First sight; ankhalyan. High above us, part of it transformed, and in the light of its smouldering windows, we saw two wet shapes of bulbous, space-suited human beings rise out of its dark epidermis. Its first carving. It might well be drowned out later by further accretions, but it was the first.

Mi laughed. The volume was too high, turning it into a hiss in my earpiece. Music, yet, to my ears.

That night, the arch of the galaxy a viridian river above us, we had sex in our camp tent with the nanoweave tuned transparent. It was always a thrill to be naked in that blister of breathable air, our bodies cool and damp as we pushed against each other in the sub-Earth grav. But Shuyedan’s bulk looming nearby only strengthened our intimacy. Outside, an atmosphere that would kill us in ten minutes at the most. Inside, we were safe, tethered to ourselves. It felt like a miracle to be so unclad, so bare, our nipples and navels and pubic hair and genitals exposed for all this distant world to see, for this alien to observe and interpret. We were alive, unnaturally so. Homeworld an invisibility in the sky.

On the horizon the closest thing we have to Earth; the lights of Teysanzi Protectorate embedded in the hills.

We left the field lamps on beside us so our bodies glowed fierce blue on that dark plain. Shuyedan watched, its sounding a vibration across the tent. A lifecastle blooming. I felt in that moment like I was living myth; a stunning and meaningless myth in the cool churn of that recycled bubble of human atmosphere, saturated with our floating DNA. I swear I was so giddy I could have hurt Mi then, her mouth on mine, her tongue between my teeth. God, she worshipped me, her long black hair unwrapped, no longer bound in the helmet of a surface suit. Rivers silking across my torso, clinging to the damp on my breasts, which she kissed with such ridiculous passion. Mi would insist on their perfection with such sincerity it sometimes irritated me. Right then, I didn’t care, as she ran her hands over them, fingers wet with spit. Her shoulder blades lit by a flaming galaxy as they writhed under her skin, written with pores and the small flecks of moles and freckles.

Shuyedan carved our sex into its skin, its windows spewing heat into the night.

At crimson dawn, the ground woke us with its rumbling, Shuyedan churning up soil with its scything belly and venting it from cracks in its shifting carapace. It was eating. There were kilunpa in it already, populating its shifting skin and swarming it, gathering ikan from its steaming windows. Months later, when the ikan ripened into something more pungent and powerful, the kilunpa would carry fragments from other lifecastles and fertilize Shuyedan’s skin, so it too would create anew, do battle to separate a new wandering fortress to populate the world. The kilunpa’s crystalline wings batted sun into our eyes. Mi and I unwrapped ourselves from the tangled blankets, sticky with sleep.

“I can’t believe it stayed near us all night,” I said, squinting against sunrise.

“We made something of an impression,” said Mi, voice soft to suit the early hour. “Those carvings are exceptionally detailed.”

We could see the sinuous new spine of human forms entangled along Shuyedan’s side. Etched into shadowy relief by the light of sunrise. Its mindcarvings reminded me of the erotic sculptures that adorn the sandstone walls of the Konark Sun Temple on Earth. I had visited Konark once, barely out of my teens, with a boyfriend who seems so distant now I can remember nothing of his appearance except for the dimples on his earlobes where he sometimes wore silly studs. In the damp coastal fog of Orissa winter I’d watched stone men and women fuck in their alcoves while swallows shat on their shoulders, and I’d felt the hands of those long-dead sculptors and sun-devotees on my back, pushing against the membrane of time and history, even as men of that present-day Earth leered at me as if I were stripping just because my hair was down and my tank top comfortable.

“Which one’s you?” Mi asked me. She put on her underwear, squinting through the transparent tent at Shuyedan lit by sunrise. I looked at the way her hair clung to the side of her face, strands following the temporary scars of pillow marks.

“You can’t tell. It’s just woman, and woman,” I said. The tent buzzed with vibrations from Shuyedan’s feeding.

“You speak to me like a child,” Mi said, kicking into the legs of her surface suit. “If you had to choose, which one?”

I breathed in deep, wanting only to shut her out. “I don’t know. Going by its mindcarvings, to Shuyedan we’re one thought. And we’re seeing that thought.”

“That’s a lovely notion. Maybe you’re more romantic than you know,” Mi said under her breath.

“Well, I don’t see us as one thought. Shuyedan does. That’s fascinating to me, not romantic.”

She stared at me, then. In her sullen amazement I found her painfully attractive, and I was sorry to have hurt her. She zipped up her suit. “Wow. Forgive me for indulging in a little hyperbole.”

A laugh disappeared in me. “Come on,” I said, reaching over. I ran my fingernails over her cheek, freeing the clinging hairs from her face. The creases on her cheek fading. “I don’t understand you sometimes. Can you not see where we are?”

“Yeah. I don’t understand myself either,” she said, probing her front teeth with her tongue. “Maybe we shouldn’t have let Shuyedan witness us,” she said, after a pause.

“What’s this now?”

“We’re on it, for god’s sake. We’re on its skin, being, being intimate. If another surveyor sees it, they’ll know that two women are having sex out here.”

I frowned. “All the more reason for the witnessing. If I don’t want to bear a child for the settlement, that’s my right. Most exoprots hashed this shit out ages ago. Where the hell are we, Earth?”

Mi shook her head, turning away. “You always talk about Earth like it’s one country. You shouldn’t. It’s homeworld. All exoprot culture came from there,” she said, warm in the flushed light of morning. I rolled my eyes, making sure she didn’t see it. As if I hadn’t grown up on Earth, same as her. She continued to look out at Shuyedan, bending down to press her palm against the floor of the tent, feeling the vibrations of the creature’s feeding.

“We allowed a lifecastle to see human sex,” she said. “No one’s done that. Right?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t seen any signs before.”

“And we just did, just like that. That’s history. Isn’t it?”

I started to say something, anything to knock down that statement. But I didn’t, or couldn’t.

I touched her teeth with the tip of my thumb, and kissed her. She kept her mouth closed against it. I wiped her lips.

“Let’s go take a closer look,” I said.

Teysanzi means new life, or beyond-life. Not quite afterlife, because of the connotations with death. I was thirty when I arrived at the Protectorate, and forty-two when I met Mi, new like I was but younger and still nan tizan, “blue-eyed” with memories of Earth. But she was quicker than me to adjust, more confident. Nothing would get her down. Not even the sunless tiled skies and tunnels of Teysanzi, sub-city, metrocolony, Earth-Protectorate. I took her to the food court district, with its cheap neon and sunlamps battered with imported moths, its greenhouse stalls warm and rich with the smell of plants and vegetables and flowers snarling their way along the tables. She had taken it all in with a smile. The hot lights reflecting on her nose, which looked so like a button mushroom (I would tell her so weeks later, much to her false chagrin). I helped her with the chopsticks, her muscles still loose and hands shaking from jumping through spacetime while waking in and out of cryo-phase. From that moment watching her suck noodles into her mouth I knew I couldn’t resist the inexorable tug of affection I had avoided for so long. I knew from the way she stared at me, blissful in trust, that she saw me, strong and grown into the scrubbed air and strange gravity of a new world, as somehow powerful. I fed on her awe in vampiric resignation. Quietly let her recite what she’d learned of this world back on Earth, as if to imprint her new reality with those predefined definitions, watched her explain to herself how Teysanzi cuisine was so spicy because the sub-city’s processed atmosphere and low-g made for chronic swollen sinuses and dulled taste. She licked that same spice off her lips and left it on scrunched napkins by her tray. Mi talked in Colbyat often, to practice, though I think she was actually better at the formal language than I was. Still, I taught her Colbyat slang and swear words she didn’t know, as one will do, told her how it and other star-tongues gestated in the confined cultures of starships, q-tunneling waystations, eventually exoprots.

A week after her arrival, we took the buggy out to the hinterlands to start her apprenticeship. Starlight in the puddled loam sinking under our boots, she asked me, “Do you agree with the sanctions against non-het couples here?” The formality of her constant questions, as if she were continually interviewing me, still delighted me at the time.

“No,” I’d said. “Why?”

“Well. What if our Krasnikov tunnel collapses and we’re cut off from the rest of the protectorate net, from Earth. That’s what the Teysanzi’s afraid of, right?”

I laughed. “Teysanzi’s population isn’t even three thousand. I think if the Krasnikov collapses and we’re stuck out here a hundred light years from the nearest tunnel gate or settled planet, being het and having babies isn’t going to save our asses. Being resourceful will. Or more realistically, nothing will.”

“Yeah?” her voice loud against her helmet mic. A smile behind glass, and butterflies in my stomach. “And how’re we going to be resourceful? Build a mega-generation ship to haul our descendants to the next gas station? Or should I say gas giant,” Mi asked, touching my arm lightly with her gloved hand. Her giddy inflection made me light-headed. There was a tremendous energy to her out here, much more than in the sub-city. So confident, for someone on their first trip out to the hinterlands, suited up. Maybe it was adrenalin.

“Woman of ideas over here,” I said. “First, terrible pun. Second, genship endurance is still a het dependent plan. Maybe we can hack cryo-phase, just sleep for thousands of years on your ship, become space vampires. The breeders can keep breeding.”

“Mmm-hm. It’s not my ship. You’re the resourceful one. I’d just give up, wum,” she said.

“Right. Anyway, this het-normative obsession isn’t going to last. It’s just us cycling through civ states, spinning the wheels, going back in time before we go forward. No matter how much we expand, even if we build new cities, there’s an upper limit to how fast we can expand our population without breathable atmo. Until we can augment our bodies to breathe it. Population booming is just a short-term panic response to the thought of our Krasnikov closing.”

Mi thought about this for a little while, stepping over a tar-black puddle carefully. “Maybe it’ll be good if the tunnel collapses. Maybe an actual apocalypse would turn Teysanzi into a utopia because we wouldn’t worry about anything. I mean, ultimately, who cares, right? There’s plenty of other humans out there on other worlds, and we’re all gonna die whether or not there’s another generation to keep the lights on here. If the Krasnikov goes, we could actually live like no one else ever has, if we know it’s the end. We’d all just make love, be friends, raise the kids here to become new decadents, make art for rescue ships to find centuries later. We’d sip champagne in the ruins of dead lifecastles till there was just one of us left.”

“God. A punner and a poet,” I said.

Mi laughed, much louder than my response deserved.

“So. Are you planning on having a child to bolster our chances against extinction?” I asked, casual as I could be. Probably not at all casual. When we’d toured the school-commune district, she’d been a natural with the children there, completely at ease (very unlike me).

“No,” she said.

I nodded. A few paces ahead of us, a sankipyo looped out of a puddle in a glistening flash and wormed across the ground, frilled legs twirling behind it like wind ornaments. Mi squealed in delight.

“Oh, Tani. Is that,” she whispered. I realized one of the hills in the distance was shifting, moving. I nodded, though I don’t know if she could tell through the helmet. Her first sighting of vitanbiyet. I had other things on my mind. The lifecastle didn’t come anywhere near us, but it was good enough for her, for a first trip. We watched it for about ten minutes, its windows opening and closing, glittering sharp in the distance. Their luminescence made the vitanbiyet look uncannily like a building on the horizon. An old castle on Earth, maybe, swaying in an earthquake, its windows aglow with candlelight and electricity, chandeliers tilting, tinkling.

When we got back to the buggy and sealed all doors, I helped her out of her helmet. The faceplate misted as I freed her face from beneath it. Her eyes were wide, forehead sweaty under the dim blue cabin lights. There’s no excitement like seeing alien life for the first time. She helped me out of my helmet too. I think her hands were shaking. She took a long time undoing the clasps. She was laughing, just laughing. No words.

The moment the helmet was off, I kissed her. The metal rims of our suit collars clashed loudly, but she grabbed the back of my head with her hands and helped me forward, pulling my mouth to hers.

Five weeks later, Mi witnessed her first separation of a new lifecastle. We tagged it, and named it Vitanbiyet Shuyedan.

I felt flushed out there, in my helmet. Oddly clumsy and unprepared.

“You ready for this?” I asked Mi. “We can just follow protocol, use the marker gun if you don’t feel up to doing this.” What we were about to do wasn’t recommended, but I knew that surveyors did it all the time with new apprentices as a bonding ritual. More like asserting to their apprentices that they were badasses.

“I’m ready,” she said, voice flat.

She knew by my tone it had been a challenge, even if I barely realized it myself.

Shuyedan was a hundred feet away, settled in repose, kilunpa settled all over its carapace, their wings like fluttering leaves, making the vitanbiyet look like a giant tree in the breeze. Its windows would flicker sometimes under their bodies like lanterns strung from boughs. In two months, its pennants would grow out, unfurl to signal the ripening of its ikan.

“What’ll they do to us if they find us manipulating the lifecastles? We’re just supposed to tag them, aren’t we?” Mi asked, finally.

“We didn’t manipulate shit. They see what they see. Us having sex just happened to be what this one saw. Nothing wrong with that. Hit it.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. Throw it as far as you can.”

Mi turned, took the silver orb of the sounding beacon from her belt and thumbed it on. The red light on it flickered. She hurled it like a grenade. Her grunt small, bringing a smile to my face. I saw breath on her faceplate. The beacon landed not too far from Shuyedan. We saw the light turn green.

“Let’s go,” I said. Mi followed. We strode toward Shuyedan, our bootprints deep in the dark mud. The sun had risen now above the mountain crests and the blinking transmission towers of Teysanzi. It was full daylight, but here some stars are visible at high noon.

The kilunpa burst from Shuyedan’s back in a flurry of wings, swarming into the sky. I remembered swallows again, and ducks, on Earth. We saw Shuyedan’s mindcarvings unveiled once more, our replicated forms drying into something less smooth than the previous night. It rose, roused by the silent frequency of the beacon, its legs unfolding. I heard the huff of my breath within the helmet, the huff of Mi’s breath in the mics. The barbed black fronds of sikri-grass whipped at our legs as we ran. When we were in Shuyedan’s shadow, I stopped. Two stories high it groaned and swayed, folding its legs again as it looked over the beacon. Its carapace tumbled serpentine shapes that solidified around the naked women on its back, but nothing recognizable formed. I aimed the grappling gun, lining the sights up right below the spine of human shapes. I pulled the trigger. The gun jerked in my arms, and I felt the satisfying second tug of the hook snagging in the carapace.

Mi was at my side quick, and I approved. She fired her own grappling gun. Her shot hit two feet below mine. Good enough. “Nice shot,” I allowed. I couldn’t see her face. We clambered up the vitanbiyet like insects, first up one of the limbs, and then on to the carapace. Its windows flicked open and close by our boots, which trailed sticky threads of unripe ikan. The glow of its windows lit our surface-suits yellow in shuttering intervals. I kept a tight grip on the gun as I clambered up, reeling the chord back in and looking back every five seconds to make sure that Mi was alright. She was using her legs more than her arms, breathing heavy into her mic. But she was doing fine.

“Good girl,” I whispered.

Our entire bodies hummed as Shuyedan sounded and stood up straight, the beacon no longer of interest. It could see us with its windows, but didn’t care now that we were on it. It was the approach that might have made it defensive, but now we were indistinguishable from kilunpa in its vision. Unless we hurt it or drew its attention too much. So far, no human has died from climbing on vitanbiyet, but we’ve seen the immense violence they’re capable of when fighting each other.

We used its swaying gait to land our steps rhythmically against its side.

Under our ikan-smeared soles, the carapace-stone of the lifecastle was almost glassy smooth because it was so fresh. The new presence of kilunpa colonizing it had prompted new carvings along the skin like ornate tracery, arching across the windows in a way the human brain will remind of our own architectures from across history. The skin would become more granular as it aged. Our footsteps along its steep side left flickers of ultraviolet that faded, like phosphenes on its dark surface. Stray kilunpa thumped against our suits, too light for us to feel them. Mi did gasp when one bounced off her faceplate before retreating into a blinking window to lap at the ikan. When I finally reached the mindcarvings of Mi and me, I switched on my headlamp. My arms ached, and sweat collected in itchy trickles under the fabric lining inside the helmet.

I swept the light over the carvings.

The figures were simple but striking, almost life-sized but voluptuous in their exaggerations of human contours. Konark. The two humanoids started off with the round heads and thick limbs of suited and helmeted surveyors, simplistic shapes, then melded together in a melted abstraction that might have been a representation of our camp tent, or mountains. Then they emerged again to form a chain of entwined bodies, distinctly naked and in the various embraces of sex, sometimes melding into the stratum underneath them. From surveyors to humans, object to animal. Mi and Tani. I could see the grooves where buttocks met, the curve of hips, even the small bumps of nipples on breasts and the dimpled patterns of faces; eyes and noses and lips.

“I’m. Obviously. The taller one,” I said between deep breaths.

My headlamp’s light reflected off the placid faces of our alien likenesses and their ecstasy, glossing off Mi’s faceplate. She took a pen-sized marker dart from her belt and stabbed it into the carapace. Characters glowed in my helmet feed as info panels blossomed in my field of vision. In a low-detail map overlay, a new red dot appeared. Shuyedan-18 was tagged.

“How many lovers have you brought here to be witnessed by lifecastles? Is that one of your old tricks?” asked Mi in the tent, serious under her teasing tone. I took a sip of black tea from my thermos, the taste of leaves grown under Teysanzi sunlamps having long overtaken my memories of what tea had tasted like on Earth.

“You’re the first,” I told her.

“I don’t mean the sex. I mean just being witnessed.”

“You’re the first,” I repeated.

“You’re lying.”

“I was always a loner, Mi. You’ve no idea.”

“You’re saying you always came out to the hinterlands alone?” she asked

“Yes. I specifically asked. Hence, loner.”

“Oh come on.”

“Hope to die. I was co-habiting on Earth, you know. With a gentle, kind darling of a woman. I left her to come here. She didn’t want to go to space. Very idea terrified her. So I chose. It hurt like a bitch. Never again. I do actually come out here to survey the hinterlands, tag and observe the lifecastles, all that, not just carve our initials on them like schoolchildren in a playground.”

“Never again. Huh,” Mi breathed.

“Well. Except you. Until you,” I smiled.

Mi placed her hand on my cheek. “Why did you leave the love of your life, leave Earth?” she asked.

“Because I don’t just think of love. Because I read and watched movies and fantasized about space travel since I was little. Because, I think, the universe is my god, and I want to explore its insides. Because there are aliens here that grow statues on their backs, and I can try and understand them.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t mean to sound snappy.”

“You didn’t. You sound, well. You don’t like to be called romantic. But there’s something to being alone, isn’t there.”

“Why did you leave Earth?”

“Not because I’m a loner, that’s for sure,” she said.

I breathed in and out, not saying anything. She continued.

“In fact, I’ve never been lonelier than on the journey here, slipping through the Krasnikov in that ship. I regretted leaving my parents and family behind, hated myself. I felt like the universe was crushing us in that ship. That we were so, so tiny. But once we got here,” she paused, touched her eyelids. “I’ve never felt less alone, even with just two thousand five hundred humans in Teysanzi. To see people making their lives on another world, an entirely new planet? To see the vitanbiyet, the flora and fauna here. This was what I’d studied and trained for, left homeworld for. You called me nan tizan, but I was tei tizan, red-eyed with this world. The universe, this world—it makes me want to puke, it makes me so happy.”

I laughed at this, placing one hand on the hillock of her hip. “You make me want to puke, with your rampant happiness.”

She smiled, then, but it was so obviously sad that it made me queasy. She clicked her tongue behind her teeth.

“What? It was a joke,” I said, gentle.

“Nothing,” she said, and pushed her mouth against my cheek. I got goose bumps. She turned and pulled the blanket over her shoulder.

I think of what I said to Mi, about trying to understand the lifecastles. I still don’t. We still don’t. And why should we? We don’t even understand our fellow Earthlings, really. All those animals we drove extinct, all the ones we saved from extinction, all the ones that barely know we exist. All the human cultures we’ve destroyed, all the new ones growing right now on Earth and other worlds, all the old ones we’ve clung on to. It’s not like we’re all a big ball of understanding, one big happy Earth family.

We can’t even hope to fully understand the human beings we choose to pair up and mate with, to share our intimacies and animal lives with.

So all in all, that we’re here and haven’t yet killed any of the vitanbiyet, or been killed by them, while we peer at each other on this remote world under its small but lively sun—that’s a start. We survey them. Tag them with the markers, name them, count them, observe them, watch the glowing dots of their markers move across our survey maps. Record their mindcarvings, especially when they form human shapes. Compare notes among surveyors about what we see on their skins, from minarets to gargoyles to forested slopes from Earth, though they’re never any of those things. To date, we’ve counted sixty-six lifecastles in the explored hinterlands beyond Teysanzi, of which forty-two are alive now. Eighteen were named Shuyedan by different surveyors, because they were witnessed emerging from their progenitors, and were at the time the youngest recorded.

Only one Shuyedan had naked women across its back in a spine of bodies conjoined; evidence of a tiny, meaningless, insignificant emotion from a planet so far away its inhabitants had to tunnel through spacetime to land on the world. A heart carved into a tree trunk on a bright summer day, air thick with the humid light of a white star instead of a red one.

Whenever I watched lifecastles make new carvings, it made me a little sick to think of us etched into Shuyedan like that, as it went about its solitary life, under the silent companionship of its many-winged kilunpa.

Shuyedan-18 became a celebrity at the research centre in Teysanzi once other surveyors spotted its unique mindcarvings. Some called it the ‘Dirty Old Man’ as a joke, which bizarrely cut me to the quick, so much so that I had to quietly slip away to the washroom or brew a new thermos of tea whenever someone mentioned it. I always noticed Mi blushing fiercely but laughing with everyone else when someone brought up that stupid nickname, and it never failed to make me angry. She probably talked to our colleagues more than I had in ten years.

There were enough same-gendered surveyor teams out there that the identity of Shuyedan’s muses remained a mystery. Whether or not Shuyedan’s muses had done something wrong was a point of debate.

“You don’t really believe this is real, do you,” Mi asked me, in my apartment in Teysanzi, sheets still damp from our bodies. The grav-lights hovered over our bed, quiet, guttering stars in the gloom. I kicked one to the ceiling, where it stayed. “You seem tired when we have sex. Not invested,” she added.

“Shatin-ba, Mi, what do you want me to say?”

“I don’t really know. What can you say to a blue-eyed child? nan tizan, tei tizan. All the same to you.”

I got up, head brushing the low ceiling.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was unfair.”

“Mi, I can’t just keep reassuring you every step of the way. There aren’t a lot of people in this city. Being with a woman, not to mention my apprentice, is a professional risk for me.”

“And it’s not a risk for me? Am I popping out babies with some virile mate to strengthen the colonial populace while, while you suffer in silence?” she asked.

“No, that’s. Not what I meant. Of course it’s a risk for you. But I’m sharing that with you. Doesn’t that tell you enough? I took us to be witnessed by vitanbiyet.”

She didn’t say anything, instead sitting up and pulling her hair back into her strand-entangled scrunchie.

“What?” I asked, a new sweat rising on my forehead.

“You’ve made me feel strange about that ever since you did it. Like we violated Shuyedan by allowing it to see us have sex. We didn’t carve ourselves on it, you know. It did that.”

“That’s ridiculous. I,” I swallowed. “I cherish that moment, Michiko. You have no idea how much. You really don’t.”

She looked at me and shook her head, letting her hands go limp in her lap.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m deporting. Taking the Krasnikov to Jaltara-Lafneik Protectorate.”

“What?”

“Ter nai lan, Tani.”

“Don’t. I am calm. Where’s Jaltara-Lafneik.”

“Watery Super-Earth, GB-277.”

“You’re leaving. You’re leaving the world because you think I’m not. What. Serious enough about you?”

Mi pulled back her hair again, reworking the scrunchie. Pulled the hair taut against her scalp, severe and shining. I sank back into the bed. Her eyes were wet, though it was hard to tell in the dimness of the grav-lights and the stars beyond the skylight.

“No,” she said. “Don’t think that. I just, I want to see the galaxy. Like you say you do. But you don’t. You stay here, and you don’t seem to like it at all. Honestly I think you want to be back on Earth. You’ve lived here ten years and don’t talk to anyone if you can help it. That’s not me. I want to survey on other worlds. I want to survey other life forms.”

“A week ago you were telling me you wanted to spend the rest of your life here, with me. That you loved it here.”

“In ten years you haven’t found a way to be happy here. I can’t carry that for you. This is too small a place for me to share that burden. You’re my closest friend here.”

I thought of Mi being friendly with our colleagues and fellow settlers in the research centre, laughing and joking with the carers in the school commune.

“Who’d you have to fuck to get reassigned to another planet?” I asked.

Mi looked at me, wiping under her eyes, and nodded. She got up off the bed. “I should have left without telling you.”

“No,” I said. “No, no. Don’t go. I’m sorry I said that. You have to understand how. What a surprise this is,” I said, the words spilling over each other in my mouth.

She breathed out, weary, on guard. “I promised Jaltara-Lafneik a child. I’m young, healthy, fertile. Valuable on any exoprot, even one with a good position on the Krasnikov net. They have breathable atmo, no hurdles to growth.”

“You told me you didn’t want a baby.”

Mi leaned against the wall and touched one of the grav-lights in the air, pushed it away. “I wanted you to like me, Tani.”

“You lied?”

She shook her head, looking so young, yet so tired. “I don’t want to be a mother. It’s a bargaining chip to get off-world.” Tired of me.

“So you’re selling your body to some random person on this other world? Mi, please listen to yourself. Don’t do this.”

“Shit, Tani, it’s not really about me at all, is it? It’s about who owns little naive Mi’s body, and that person not being you in your own mind. No more side pillow for you to hug every time you feel old and crabby,” she sprang off the wall, bumping her head on the ceiling. Muscle memory seized my arms and I instinctively tried to get up and touch her, kiss her head. She raised her hands and backed away as if I were pointing a gun at her. I stopped myself. She sat on the bed again, crossed her arms tight against her chest.

“Don’t you worry on my behalf, they have sperm banks. I didn’t sign up to be a mate, it’s not a damn dictatorship. You don’t get assigned husbands. They use the commune system, just like here. The kid’ll be raised by the community. I’m going there because I have skills they want.”

I forced myself to speak calmly, gathering my thoughts instead of spitting them out. “What if you can’t settle properly? You’ve got no lifeline, you’re bartering away your right to relocate again, unless you get rich there. You can never go back to Earth unless you really become successful there. Think, Mi. Just think about that. You’re young, and so bright, but being old and crabby does give me some perspective, at the very least.”

“I’m glad you have so much faith in me,” she said with a small nod.

“That’s not what I meant—”

“Just stop,” she said, and silenced me. She finally looked me in the eye again. “You’re not old. That’s terrible, that I said that. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Nothing wrong with being old. So I am crabby, then?” I asked, trying and failing to smile. She managed one, for a second. I felt my heartbeat deafen me with hope.

“All right. I know you think I’ve been distant. I’ll show you, I’ll be better. What if I came with you? We can start new, all new,” I said.

Her face crumpled in sudden frustration as she let out a soft sound, a small moan that caught in my own chest. “Please. Please don’t do this,” she said.

“Why.”

“You’re a loner, Tani. You always were.”

I shook my head, and before I knew it my head was in her lap, my cheek on her thigh as I wept into her. I shivered as she stroked my head, as if I were a baby.

I watched from the hinterlands, my buggy revving under me, as the lifter scratched a glowing line into the atmosphere before becoming just another star in the magenta sky. Mi didn’t say good-bye after our final conversation. I didn’t blame her, though I hated her for it.

I look at the ruins of Shuyedan. Youngest, fallen now. The arches of its ribs towering over the damp earth, some collapsed to bring the ceiling of its carapace down to the black sikri grass. Its skin pennants tough even after death, dried into wrinkled hide in the cool afternoons. They ripple lazily in the wet breeze, winter rain dampening the ruins slick. Shuyedan-18 died quite young, just three years old when its progenitor Urdhema declared war on it. It never got to become a progenitor itself, but then again, spawning new members of their race seems incidental to them. Perhaps it’s not tragedy at all. Just history.

My own womb remains empty, though some of my fellow Teysanzians continue to drop hints that I should fill it soon, as a collapse-fearing, dutiful citizen. My cyba augments still keep my chances of bearing a child up, but even they’ll wind down with my body. I wonder if I’d be so ostracized on Earth, or Jaltara-Lafneik, for doing as I please with my insides and outsides.

My boots crunch in the crumbled obsidian of Shuyedan’s stone. I pick up pebbles of its skin and toss them, sending stray kilunpa glittering into the air. I’m in unexplored territory, the farthest I’ve been from Teysanzi. Shuyedan-18’s tag failed during its battle with Urdhema, so it took a while to find the remains. Across the collapsed ceilings of the lifecastle’s skin—mindcarvings of nude human bodies, multiple sexes, apart and together. Accretions from three years of observance, and evidence that others had come here to be witnessed by Shuyedan-18, unclothed in their tents, having sex, het and non-het. A new ritual. A new tradition between human and extraterrestrial. Looking at these newer carvings makes something click in me, like a clock starting, counting away from and towards something at the same time.

Then, I find the spine of the first human shapes to grace Shuyedan’s back, now grainy with age, more beautiful because of it. I’ll always recognize them. Frozen in their dance, their small moment of intimacy, ecstasy. Their faces have worn away to pits and nubs, some of their limbs stumps. But still recognizable. Still intact. Shuyedan never erased us from its skin, never forgot its first glimpse of humanity unclad.

“Teysanzi-central,” I say into my helmet. “Shuyedan-18 ruins located. Something to see. Recording now. Recommend cordon, salvage for preservation and study. Will proceed to scraping ikan residue. Observing the famous erotic mindcarvings, the original ones—two human women in coitus, replicated over and over, as if passing in time. The muses.” I listen to myself breathe inside the helmet. No one at the terminal. Slackers. I go on talking. All transmissions are recorded.

“Advise further experiments—nudist tent colonies out in the hinterlands. Rampant hedonism for the benefit of the lifecastles,” I pause, thinking about this.

“Hear me out, actually. Shuyedan-18 is the first one to actively observe us, to remember human form long enough to keep its mindcarvings of us preserved in such detail. I think it’s because it saw us naked, without surface suits, interacting together. It recognised something in us, something alive. Vulnerable. Maybe visual body language is a way for us to communicate with the vitanbiyet. Especially newly separated ones. Dirty Old Man’s gone, rest its soul, along with, I hope, its wretched nickname. But there are other lifecastles. I think, central, that this is the beginning of a long friendship,” I smile into the mic.

My fellow muse, gone.

“Additional. Reporting witnessing, approximately three point five years prior, to Shuyedan-18, ankhalyan. That’s me in the carvings, one of the original muses. You heard right.” I switch off the comm system, feeling light-headed. Maybe now they’ll send me back to Earth, where overpopulation can take good old-fashioned non-hets like me.

Earth. Perhaps I was always nan tizan, and just never admitted it.

I look up at the empty spot between the stars where the Krasnikov Gate graces the sky, invisible to the naked eye. I wonder what it would look like collapsing.

I know they can’t do anything to me. I’m a citizen. Block me from progressing up the career ladder, becoming a supervisor, going into active city governance? Sure. But we’re endangered, us Teysanzians. They need me. I’m staying, till the end of this world if it comes. I’ll outlive every last human bastard in Teysanzi so I can sip champagne alone under the ruins of my sweet Shuyedan-18.

I bend down to look at the spine of Mis and Tanis fucking and decaying in the dim red sunlight. One of them has her head thrown back, black neck open to the drifting rain, mouth open. It is clearly Mi, though only to me. Under her, the other woman with her eyes closed, mouth a placid line. Me. I run my fingers across Mi’s face, and my gloved fingertips come away black.

“Vitanbiyet Shuyedan had a dream of love,” I say to her, and let the rain run down my hand.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2015.

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

William Shunn

Since 1993, William Shunn’s three dozen short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, Science Fiction Age, Realms of Fantasy, Electric Velocipede, Storyteller, Salon, and elsewhere. His novella “Inclination“ was a Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Award nominee in 2007. His misadventures as a missionary—and felon—in Canada in the late ’80s form the basis for his memoir, The Accidental Terrorist (Sinister Regard, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Association for Mormon Letters Award. He currently lives in New York City, where he edits the online literary journal The Piltdown Review.

Maureen McHugh

Maureen McHugh is a writer with four novels and more than two dozen short stories published. The best known is probably her novel China Mountain Zhang. A collection of her short stories, called Mothers and Other Monsters, was published by Small Beer Press in July 2005.

Indrapramit Das

Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is an Indian author from Kolkata, West Bengal. His debut novel The Devourers (Del Rey / Penguin India) was the winner of the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ SF/F/Horror, and shortlisted for the 2015 Crawford Award. His short fiction has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, and has appeared in several publications and anthologies including Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He is an Octavia E. Butler scholar and a grateful graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and received his M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He has worn many hats, including editor, dog hotel night shift attendant, TV background performer, minor film critic, occasional illustrator, environmental news writer, pretend-patient for med school students, and video game tester.

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, The Final Frontier, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology is Not One of Us, which will be published in November by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

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