Issue 52, May 2019

© Wyrm Publishing, 2019
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the May 2019 issue of Forever Magazine and thank you for subscribing or buying a copy. Your support helps make this little venture possible, so I really appreciate it.

With over fifty issues under my belt, I’ve been giving some thought to the future direction of the magazine and how it connects with the other short fiction projects I’m involved with. At the moment, it is a fairly independent venture from the rest, but I’m wondering if there are ways to bring everything a bit closer together, yet still maintain Forever’s unique perspective. Are there aspects of Clarkesworld or my anthologies that you’d like to see better represented here? Are there ways to make them more complementary of one another or should I be pushing in an entirely different direction, whatever that might be?

No, I’m not considering dropping the whole thing, but I do like the projects I work on to evolve and grow. While I’m still enjoying working on this magazine, I do worry that sticking to the same old formula will eventually wear thin for both myself and our readers. It’s my job as editor to make sure that doesn’t happen, so I’m pushing at the edges and thinking about the options. You are more than welcome to chime in and help shape that vision for the future of this publication. Feel free to reach out to me at neil@clarkesworldmagazine.com with your thoughts.

Until next time,

-Neil

Jackie’s Boy

Steven Popkes

PART 1

Michael fell in love with her the moment he saw her.

The Long Bottom Boys had taken over the gate of the Saint Louis Zoo from Nature Phil’s gang. London Bob had killed in single combat, and eaten, Nature Phil. That, pretty much, constituted possession. The Keepers didn’t mind as long as it stayed off the grounds. So the Boys waited outside to harvest anyone who came out or went in. They just had to wait. Somebody was always drawn to the sight of all that meat on the hoof, nothing protecting it from consumption save a hundred feet of empty air and invisible, lethal, automated weaponry. People went in just to look at it and drool.

Michael knew their plans. He’d been watching them furtively for a week, hiding in places no adult could go, leaving no traces they could see. The Boys had caught a woman a few days ago and a man last night. They were still passing the woman around. What was left of the man was turning on the spit over on Grand. He sniffed the air. A rank odor mixed with a smell like maple syrup. Corpse fungus at the fruiting body stage. Somewhere nearby there was a collection of mushrooms that yesterday had been the body of a human being. Michael wondered if it was someone who had spoiled before the Boys had got to them or if it was the last inedible remnants of the man on the spit. By morning there would be little more than a thin mound of soil to show where the meat had been.

This dark spring morning, just when the gates unlocked, one of the guards remained asleep. Michael held his backpack tightly to his chest so he made no sound. The man started in his sleep. For a moment, Michael thought he would have to take up one of the fallen bricks and kill the guard before he woke up. But the guard just turned over and Michael slipped furtively past him. He was just as happy. The only thing that got the Boys more riled than meat was revenge.

He stayed out of sight even past the gate. If the Boys knew he was here, they’d be ready at closing time when the Keepers pushed everyone outside. Michael had never been in the Zoo, but he was hoping a kid could find places to hide that an adult wouldn’t fit. Inside the Zoo was safe; outside the Zoo wasn’t. It was as simple as that.

Now, he was crouching in the bushes outside her paddock in the visitor’s viewing area, hiding from any Keepers, looking for a place to hide.

She came outside, her great rounded ears and heavy circular feet, her wise eyes and long trunk. As she came down to the water, Michael held his breath and made himself as small as an eleven-year-old boy could be. Maybe she wouldn’t see him.

Except for the elephant, Michael saw no one. The barn and paddock of one of the last of the animals was the worst place to hide. He’d be found immediately. Everyone had probably tried this. Even so, when the elephant wandered out of sight down the hill, Michael sprang over the fence and silently ran to the barn, his backpack bouncing and throwing him off balance, expecting bullets to turn him into mush.

Inside, he quickly looked around and saw above the concrete floor a loft filled with bales of hay. He climbed up the ladder and burrowed down. The hay poked through his shirt and pants and tickled his feet through the hole in his shoe. Carefully, through the backpack, he felt for his notebook. It was safe.

“I see you,” came a woman’s voice from below. Michael froze. He held tight to his pack.

Something slapped the hay bale beside him and pulled it down. The ceiling light shone down on him.

It was the elephant.

“You’re not going to hide up there,” she said. Michael leaned over the edge. “Did you talk?”

“Get out of my stall.” She whipped her trunk up and grabbed him by the leg, dragging him off the edge.

“Hold it, Jackie.” A voice from the wall.

Jackie held him over the ground. “You’re slipping, Ralph. I should have found his corpse outside hanging on the fence.” She brought the boy to her eyes and Michael knew she was thinking of smashing him to jelly on the concrete then and there.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

“We all make mistakes.” The wall again.

“Should I toss him out or squish him? This is your job. Not mine.”

“Let him down. Perhaps he’ll be of use.”

The moment stretched out. Michael stared at her. So scared he couldn’t breathe. So excited the elephant was right there, up close and in front of him, he couldn’t look away.

Slowly, reluctantly, she let him down. “Whatever.”

A seven-foot metal construction project—a Zoo Keeper—came into the room from outside. Three metal arms with mounted cameras, each with their own gun barrel, followed both Jackie and Michael.

“Follow me.” This time the voice came from the robot.

Michael stared at Jackie for a moment. She snorted contemptuously and turned to go back outside.

Michael slowly followed the Keeper, watching Jackie leave. “Elephants talk?”

“That one does,” said the Keeper.

“Wow,” he breathed.

“Open your backpack,” the Keeper ordered.

Michael stared into the camera/gun barrel. He guessed it was too late to run. He opened the backpack and emptied it on the floor.

The Keeper separated the contents. “A loaf of bread. Two cans of tuna. A notebook. Several pens.” The lens on the camera staring at him whirred and elongated toward him. “Yours? You read and write?”

“Yes.”

“Take back your things. You may call me Ralph, as she does,” said the Keeper as it led him into an office.

“Why aren’t I dead?”

“I try not to slaughter children if I can help it. I have some limited leeway in interpreting my authority.” The voice paused for a moment. “In the absence of a director, I’m in charge of the Zoo.”

Michael nodded. He stared around the room. He was still in shock at seeing a real, live elephant. The talking seemed kind of extra.

The Keeper remained outside the office and the voice resumed speaking from the ceiling.

“Please sit down.”

Michael sat down. “How come you still have lights? The only places still lit up are the Zoo and the Cathedral.”

“I’m still able to negotiate with Union Electric. Not many places can guarantee fire safety.”

Michael had no clue what the voice was talking about. “It’s warm,” he said tentatively.

“With light comes heat. Now, what is your name?”

“Michael. Michael Ripley.”

“How old are you?”

Michael looked around the room. “Eleven, I think.”

“You’re not sure?”

Michael shook his head. “I’m pretty sure I was six when my parents died. Uncle Ned took me in. I stayed with him for five years. The Long Bottom Boys killed him a few months ago.”

“You have no surviving relatives?” Michael shrugged and didn’t answer. “Where do you live?”

Michael’s attention snapped to the Keeper and he looked around the ceiling warily. “I just hang around the park.”

“You have no place to stay?”

“No.”

“Would you like to stay here?”

Michael looked around the room again. It was warm. There was clearly plenty to eat. None of the gangs were ever allowed inside. But where did they get the food for the animals? How come people weren’t allowed in at night? Maybe he was on the menu here, too.

“I guess,” he said slowly. “Good. You’re hired.”

“What?”

“You will call me Ralph as I told you before. I will call you Michael except under specific circumstances when I will address you as ‘Assistant Director.’ Do you understand?”

Michael stared at the ceiling. “What am I supposed to do?”

Dear Mom,

I found a job. It is helping to take care of an eleefant. Her name is jakee. She is not very much fun but I like her anyway. Maybe she’ll like me better when she gets to Know me. She is an eleefant!!! I don’t think I ever saw an eleefant before. Just in the books you red to me.

I work in the zoo. I bet you never thawt I would ever work in a zoo. Most of the animals are gon. But there is the eleefant and a rino. No snaks.

It is a lot better than sleepng in the dumstrs. And a dumstr does not stop a rifle much. I miss you and DAD. But I don’t miss uncle NeD all that much. I miss the apartment, though.

Love, Mike

He was mucking out her stall when Jackie entered. She stopped and looked down at him.

“What are you doing?”

Michael straightened up. He tried to smile at her. “Working. Ralph hired me.”

“To do that?”

Michael looked around. “I don’t know. This seemed like it needed doing.”

Jackie didn’t speak for a moment. “Let the Keepers do that. Come with me.” He followed her to the door of the stall.

“We’ll start with the first office on the left. You go in there and look for papers. Books. Notes. Memos. Anything with writing on it. You know what writing is?”

“I know what writing is.”

“Good.”

Michael looked up at her. “How did you learn to talk?”

“That’s not your business. Do your job.”

It wasn’t a small job. It seemed that the world of zoos ran on paper. Just pulling the folders out of the first office took three days. Michael’s duties didn’t end with bringing the papers out. The type was small enough he often had to hold it in front of first one of Jackie’s eyes, then the other. It wasn’t easy on Jackie, either. She had to stop regularly because of headaches. When he could, he tried to read them himself to see what Jackie was trying to find. She smacked him with her trunk if she caught him so he took extra time in the offices.

A cold rain descended on the Zoo. Ralph closed the doors and turned up the heat. Jackie was irritable at the best of times. Being inside only made her worse.

A month after Michael had come to the Zoo, when a late spring snow was sticking wetly to the ground outside, Jackie stared out the window resting her eyes from reading. Michael was sitting in front of the heater duct, eyes closed, luxuriating in the hot wind blowing over him. Jackie had been pushing him all morning but now she was fixing her gaze outside to ease her headache.

“So, kid, what’s your story?”

Michael was instantly alert. “What do you mean?”

“Ralph told me you didn’t have anybody outside. I know that much.” Jackie turned her great head to look at him, and then stared outside again. “Where are your folks? Mom and Dad? Uncle and Aunt?”

“Mom and Dad died, like everybody else.” Michael shrugged. There wasn’t much to say about it. “Uncle Ned let me stay with him over near the Cathedral until he got caught by the Long Bottom Boys. I got away. I’ve been scrounging until now.”

“Tough out there, is it?”

“I guess. It wasn’t so bad with Ned. I took care of him. He took care of me.”

Jackie looked at him. “What does that mean?”

“As long as I kept him happy, he gave me a place to live and fed me and protected me from anybody else.” Michael considered Jackie thoughtfully. “I’m not sure what it takes to make an elephant happy.”

“Just do your job,” Jackie snapped at him. “That’ll be enough.”

She didn’t speak for a moment. “Do you know how to get to the river from here?”

“Sure. But I wouldn’t try it. The Boys have everything sewed up around the park. I sure found that out.” He patted the duct and closed his eyes. “You have it nice here. Ralph keeps everybody out. You have food and heat. I sure wouldn’t leave.”

“I bet,” Jackie said dryly. “Okay. Let’s look at the lab books again.”

Over the next week, Ralph often spoke with Jackie. Most of the time Jackie sent Michael outside. Having nothing better to do, Michael took to visiting the other animals.

There weren’t many of them. Most of the exhibits were sealed and empty. The reptile house and the ape refuge were long abandoned. The bears were gone but some of the birds were still in the aviary and Michael stood for an hour in front of a single, lonely rhinoceros.

The rhino room became his favorite refuge. The rhino wasn’t short with him. The rhino didn’t ask him strange questions or snort with contempt when he tried to answer. The rhino didn’t call him an idiot. The rhino didn’t speak.

“Michael?” Ralph’s voice came from the ceiling. “Yes, Ralph.”

“Jackie and I are finished for the moment. You can come back.”

“Yeah.” Michael didn’t speak for a moment. “I do everything she asks.”

“I know.”

“I don’t talk back. I clean up after her. And elephants make a lot of shit. Why does she treat me like it?”

“You’re human. She has no love of humans. She needs you. That makes it worse.”

“What did humans do to her?”

“She’s the last of her herd. Humans brought her ancestors from India. Human scientists raised her and the others in these concrete stalls and gave her the power of speech. Then they let the rest of her herd die.”

“How come?”

“The scientists didn’t have much choice. They were already dead.”

“A plague like what killed my folks?”

“Somewhat. From what you told me, your parents died from one of the neo-influenzas. The scientists died of contagious botulism.”

“Where did all the plagues come from? How many are there?”

“Six hundred and seventy-two was the last count I received. But that was a few years ago and the data feed was getting unreliable toward the end. They came from different places. Some were natural. Some weren’t. Several were home grown by people with an agenda: religious martyrdom, political revenge, economic policy disagreements, broken romances. Some started out natural and were then modified for similar reasons.”

Michael mulled over what he understood. He didn’t have Ralph to himself very often. Likely this chance wouldn’t last long. “If she doesn’t like people so much, why are we spending so much time going through all the lab books? Why doesn’t she just leave?”

“That’s not for me to say.”

Dear Mom,

I thought elephants were nice. Jackie doesn’t like anybody. Not even Ralf. Hes nice to me but Jackie says he has to be that way. He’s a machine like the Keepers. Jackie said Ralf coodnt do what I am doing. It had to be a human beang.

But I still like her even if she doesnt like me. I like to watch her when shes eating. Its neat to watch her use her trunk, like a snake thats also a hand. There are two knobs on the end of her trunk she uses like fingers. Only they are much stronger than fingers. She pinched me yesterday and today its still sore!

I moved my bed to the loft. That way its right over the heater and the hot air comes right up under me. Its like sleeping in warm water.

I miss you and Dad. If you can see us from up there in heavun, try to make Jackie not get mad all the time.

Love, Mike

“Where did you find this?” Jackie pinned him against the wall. She held up a green lab book in her trunk.

Michael tried to push her away but it was like trying to move a mountain. “I’m not sure.”

“Where?”

Michael stopped struggling. “If you don’t like what I’m doing, then do it yourself.”

“That’s your job.”

“Then, back off !”

A moment passed. Jackie eased backwards. She handed him the lab book. “Here’s the date range,” she said pointing to the numbers on the page with her trunk. “See? Month, slash, day, slash, year. Here’s the volume number. This is volume six. I need volume seven for the same date.”

“What’s it going to tell you?”

Jackie raised her trunk and for a moment it looked like she was going to strike him. Michael stared at her.

Slowly, she lowered her trunk. “I’m not sure yet.”

“Say thank you.”

Jackie went completely still. “What did you say?”

“I said, say thank you.” Michael’s fists were clenched.

Jackie seemed to relax. She made a sound like a chuckle. “Get the lab book and I’ll thank you.”

“Fair enough,” he said shortly.

Back in the offices, he stood in the hall and let his breath out slowly. His hands were shaking.

“Good for you, Michael,” Ralph said from overhead. “Yeah. Now I’ve got to find the lab book she wants.”

“In the corner of each room is a camera,” said Ralph. “If you can hold up the papers, I can help.”

An hour later, he walked back into Jackie’s stall and solemnly held out the lab book to her.

“Thank you,” Jackie said in a neutral tone. “Hold it up to my eye.”

“Okay.”

Michael nodded.

Reading the lab book didn’t take long. “That’s enough,” Jackie said.

“What do you want me to do with it?”

“I don’t care. I’m going outside.”

Jackie turned and left the stall. Michael was surprised. It was cold out there and snow still remained on the ground from the night before.

He opened the lab book and went over the pages. There were few words but several figures and dates. It didn’t mean anything to him.

“What’s going on, Ralph?” Michael shivered and looked up at the gray sky. Spring was sure a long time coming. Ralph had told him this was April.

“I’m not sure,” Ralph said. “Maybe she found what she was looking for.”

Michael woke in the middle of the night. Sleepily, he looked over the edge of the loft. A Keeper was helping Jackie put something over her back.

“I don’t think I can do it,” Ralph said.

“Quiet. You’ll wake him. Maybe you can toss it over my neck and tie the ropes underneath.”

Michael sat on the edge of the loft and watched them a moment.

“You’re leaving,” he said after a moment.

“You’re supposed to be asleep.” Jackie tossed her trunk irritably.

Michael didn’t say anything. He climbed down to the apron and walked over to them. The Keeper was trying to pull some kind of harness over her neck and back. “Give me a knee up,” Michael said. “I can help.”

“No human will ever be on my back!” snarled Jackie.

“Suit yourself,” Michael said. “But the only way you’re going to be able to tie that harness is if you can center it on your back first and Ralph can’t do it. I can if I can get on your back.”

The Keeper extended his arm. “Here,” said Ralph.

Michael stood on the camera and the Keeper extended it until Michael could jump to Jackie’s neck. He grabbed the base of her ear and pulled himself up.

“That stings,” she said. “Sorry.”

In a few moments, he had the harness in place. Then he dropped to the floor and pulled it tight.

“Good job, Michael,” said Ralph.

Jackie shook herself and shifted her shoulders and back. “It’s tight. I’m ready.” Michael looked first at the Keeper, then at Jackie. “Are you closing the Zoo?”

“Not immediately,” said Ralph. “The food trucks have been coming in sporadically. I still have contacts with the farm and the warehouse. I’ve spoken with power and water. They say they are well defended but if somebody digs up a cable or blows up the pipes . . . ” Ralph paused a moment. “My worst scenario is a year. My best scenario is five years.”

Michael felt suddenly lost. He looked up at Jackie. “Take me with you.”

“What?” Jackie snorted. “No way.”

“Come on,” Michael pleaded. “Look, to everybody out there, all you are is steak on a stroll. I can get you out of the city. Tell me where you want to go.”

“I—”

“She’s going south,” Ralph said smoothly. “She needs to follow the river south to the I-255 Bridge and then south to Tennessee.”

“Where’s I-255?”

“Oakville.”

Michael thought for a moment. “That’s not going to work. It’ll be dicey enough to get past the Long Bottom Boys around the park. But the Rank Bastards live that way and they have an old armory. Even the Boys are scared of them.”

“What do you suggest?” asked Ralph.

“Don’t ask him.” Jackie stamped her foot. “I can make it on my own.”

Michael stood next to her. He looked at the ground. “I’m a kid. I don’t have a gun. I’m not even very big. I can’t hurt you.”

Jackie looked away.

Michael nodded. “Well, once you’re out of the park you can’t go south. That’s the Green Belt—sharpshooters. They don’t ask questions. You just fall down dead about two miles away. You can’t go north through the Farm Country. They don’t have sharpshooters but they burned everything to the ground for six miles around them so you can’t hide. That means west or east. Gangs in both directions just like the Long Bottom Boys or worse. I’d take the old highway right into town to the bridge and take it across. There’s no boss around the bridge; there’s nothing there anybody wants. The road is high off the ground so you can’t be seen. If you’re quiet and quick, you can get through before anybody knows. Then, I’d stay on the highway all the way down. People stick to the farms to protect them. The highways don’t have anything. There are no gangs below Cahokia or many people either. Prairie Plagues got them. South of Cahokia, I don’t know anything.”

“How do you know all this?” Jackie snarled.

Michael stared at her. “If you don’t know where things are somebody’s going to have you for lunch. Uncle Ned taught me that and I’m still alive, aren’t I?”

Jackie tossed her head and didn’t reply. “Jackie?” asked Ralph. “The idea has merit.”

Jackie didn’t speak for a long time. She stared out the door of the stall. Then she turned her head back to him. “Okay,” she asked reluctantly.

“When do we leave?” Michael turned to the Keeper.

Jackie slapped the back of his head. “Right now. Get aboard.”

Michael rubbed his head. “That hurt,” he said as he climbed up on her back. She rumbled out of the light.

“Good luck!” called Ralph after them.

“Wait!” Michael turned and called back. “What’s going to happen to the rhino?” He couldn’t hear the reply.

They didn’t say anything as Jackie walked slowly down behind the reptile house. Her ears were spread out and listening. The gate swung open at a brush of her trunk. Michael was impressed. A secret entrance.

“Check it out.”

Michael slipped to the ground and peered through the bushes. No Boys. He signaled and she followed him, pushing aside the branches. She knelt down and he climbed back up. They listened. Nothing. She started walking up the hill.

Jackie was quieter than he’d imagined. She walked with only a soft, deep padding sound.

She stopped at the edge of the road. “Where to?” she asked in a low rumble. Michael leaned next to her ear and whispered as quietly as he could. “Don’t talk.”

I’ll tell you where to go. Go to the right down the road. Then, when you go over the bridge, walk down to your left. That’s where the highway is.”

Jackie nodded abruptly and he could tell she wasn’t pleased that he should tell her to be quiet but she didn’t say anything. He figured he’d get an earful if they made it down below the river.

Michael looked around and listened. It was in the middle of the night. He couldn’t smell a fire. Sometimes the Boys built a fire with the contents of one of the old houses. They drank whatever hooch they could find—raiding other gangs if necessary—and fired guns into the air and shouted at the moon until dawn. That would have been ideal. If Michael and Jackie were seen by the party, they would be seen by drunks.

No fire meant one of two things. Either there was no one around here or they were out hunting. A bunch of hungry, desperate, sober Long Bottom Boys was about the worst news Michael could think of. There was no hint of sweetness in the air—no mushroom festooned corpses indicating the site of a battle. That was good. The Long Bottom Boys were big on ceremonial mourning and they killed anyone they found. There weren’t many left in Saint Louis but not so few that the Boys couldn’t find someone to kill and then ritually stand over while the mushrooms returned the corpse to the earth.

Michael sweated every foot of the walk to the highway. But the night remained silent.

The highway here was level with the ground, but after a mile or two it rose to a grand promenade looking down on the ruins of the city. Michael whispered to Jackie that now was the time to run (quietly!) if she could.

Jackie didn’t reply. Instead, she lengthened her stride until he had to grab on to her ears to stay on her neck. He looked down and saw the riotous dark of her legs moving on the pavement.

There was a shot behind them in the direction of the park. Jackie stopped and turned around. They saw a flash and a dull boom. Then, gradually like the sunrise, the glow of an increasing fire.

Oh, Michael thought hollowly as he stared at the tips of the flames showing over the trees. That’s what was going to happen to the rhino.

“Come on,” he urged. “People are going to wake up. We need to get near the river before they start looking away from the park.”

The road curved around the south of downtown and then north to reach the river bridges. They could not see the river below them as they crossed but they heard the hiss and rush of the water, the low grunt of the bridge as it eased itself against the flow, the cracks and booms as floating debris struck the pilings.

Then they were over it and traveling south, the flat farmland on their left, the river bluffs on their right, the road determinedly south toward Cahokia.

Dear Mom,

We reached Cahokia a little before daylite. We could tell we got there by the sign on the highway. I wasnt tired at all. But Jackee was. It must have been hard work walking all that way. Heres something intristing. Eleefants cant run. Jackee told me. They can walk relly fast but they are to big to run.

Jackee still doesnt like me much. She doesnt talk to me unless its to get help figuring out where we are. Mostly she can figur it out. But she needs my hands. I figur one of these days shell leave while I am asleep. So I sav things when I can.

She says we’re going to Tenesee. Howald, Tenesee. There used to be eleefants there. She says she thinks they might be still there. If she doesn’t find them there, she’s going to try to get to Florida. It’s warm all the time down there. There’s lots of food to eat and it’s never winter. That sounds pretty good to me.

I would like to stay with her. She is big and pretty and reel strong. She doesnt talk to me very nice. I dont think she would protek me like Ned did.

I will writ agin tomoro.

love, mike

Michael was surprised that they saw no people in Cahokia. The farmlands he had been thinking of were bounded by weeds but, other than that, looked as if cumargin-invated by invisible hands. They saw no one. The only sounds were the spring birds, the river and the wind. Every few steps they could see a little mound of soil. The mushrooms had all dried up and blown away but these mounds still marked where someone had died.

That first day, when they made camp in a hidden clearing, Michael discovered that Ralph had planned for him to accompany Jackie all along. There was a tent, sleeping bag and all manner of tools: a tiny shovel, a knife, a small bow and arrow, the smallest and most precious fishing set Michael had ever seen. In a flap cunningly designed to be hidden, he found a pistol that fit his hand perfectly. Next to it, separated into stock, barrel, and laser sight, was a high-powered rifle. A second flap had ammunition for both, exploding and impact bullets in clearly marked containers. Michael stared at them. He suddenly realized he could take down an elephant with this weapon. Ralph must have known that. The implied trust shook him.

“What did you find?”

Michael realized she hadn’t seen the guns. The pistol was no threat. He pulled it out and showed it to her.

“Do you know how to use it?”

“Yes.” He replaced the pistol. Next to the weapons were Jackie’s vitamin supplements along with finely labeled medicines and administration devices that only a human being could use.

Jackie snorted when she saw it all laid out.

Michael looked at everything, sorted and arrayed in front of him, for a long time. He wondered how long they’d be able to keep such treasures as this. He realized he might need the rifle.

Occasionally between long stretches of young woods and tall fresh meadows, they saw a few manicured fields that were laid out so ruler straight that the two of them stopped and stared. These, Jackie told him, must be tilled by machines. No human or animal would ever pay such obsessive attention to details. But no machines could be seen, and even these meticulous rows of corn or soybeans were frayed at the edges into weeds and brambles.

Even so, as tempting as a field of new corn was to Jackie, she was unwilling to chance it. Machines were chancy things, she said, with triggers and idiosyncrasies. Even negotiating with Ralph had been difficult when it went against his programming. Better to wait until they found an overgrown field down the road.

Jackie had no trouble finding food. It had been a wet spring and now that the sun had come out, the older and uncultivated fields sprouted volunteer squash and greens.

They fell into a routine. In the evening, they agreed on a likely spot and Michael took the harness off of her and set up camp. Michael was afraid she might step on him while she slept, so Jackie slept off a little ways from Michael’s tent.

At first light, Jackie went off to find her day’s sustenance. Michael made himself breakfast out of the stores Ralph had left him. He tried his hand at fishing in the tributary rivers of the Mississippi and gradually learned enough to catch enough for a good meal. He tried to eat as much as he could in the morning. It was likely they wouldn’t stop until nightfall.

After he had eaten and before Jackie returned, he waited, wondering if she would come back.

She always did. She eased herself down the bank and drank, knee deep in the river. Jackie was always impatient to get started and stamped her feet as Michael repacked the harness. Then she made a knee for him and he climbed aboard. Always they went south. Always as quickly as Jackie could. Hohenwald first, since that was where the elephant sanctuary had been. But continuing south after that, if she didn’t find them. South, she told him, was warm in the winter. South had food all year round.

Michael was amenable. He felt pretty safe. He was well fed. He’d learned the trick of riding Jackie and enjoyed watching the river on the right slip smoothly ahead of them and the land on the left buckle and roll up into bluffs and hills.

Spring turned warm and gentle. Michael felt happier than he could remember, up until they reached the spot where the Ohio poured into the Mississippi and the bridge was gone.

They stood on the ramp of Interstate 57 looking down at the wreckage. The near side of where the bridge had been was completely dry. Stained pilings that had clearly been underwater at one point rested comfortably in a grassy field. On the far side, the remains of the bridge had broken off a high bluff as if the whole southern bank of the river had slid downhill. The river narrowed here, to speed up and pour into the slower moving Mississippi. Huge waves burst into the air as the rivers fought one another. They were over a mile away from the battle, but even from here they could hear the roar.

“The earthquake, maybe?” muttered Jackie.

“Earthquake?”

“About eight years ago the New Madrid fault caused a big quake down here. Ralph told me about it. The scientists had expected it to hit St. Louis as well but the effects were to the east so we were spared.” Jackie shook her great head and swayed from one side to another. “How are we going to get across now?”

Michael looked at the old atlas. “There’s a dam upstream near Grand Chain Landing.”

“Look at the bridge!” Jackie trumpeted and pointed with her trunk. “It’s just a sample. Look at the river. The dam is probably gone, too.”

Michael looked upstream. “We’ll find something. We just can’t go south for a little while.”

Jackie just snorted. After a moment, she turned slowly toward the east.

Dear Mom,

So far we still haven’t been able to cross the OHIO river. I think it was even bigger than the Missspi. Even at night, we can hear it rushing by. Every now and than, something floats by. Today I saw six trees, a traler and an old house float by. Jackie says it’s becawse of the flud upstreem.

I can tell sumthing is bothering jackie. She hasnt been as mean lately. Its not just that we arnt moving sowth. It is sumthing more.

Love, Mike

As Jackie predicted, the dam was gone. Perhaps the Ohio, powered by spring rains, had ripped apart the turbines and concrete. The ground trembled as the water poured over the remaining rubble.

“Now what?” Jackie said in a soft rumble.

“Could you swim across?” Michael asked doubtfully. “Can’t elephants swim?”

“Look at the water,” Jackie said shrilly. “No one can swim through that.”

“Then not here. How about where the water doesn’t run so fast?”

Jackie didn’t answer.

Michael stared at the map closely.

“There used to be a ferry in Metropolis. Maybe we could get a boat.”

“A ferry?” Jackie turned her head and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “I weigh in at six tons.”

Michael nodded. “A big ferry, then. Couldn’t hurt to look. It’s just a few miles up the road.”

“A ferry,” Jackie muttered. “A ferry.”

The center of Metropolis clustered around a bend in Highway 45. Jackie and Michael followed the signs down to the docks. The shadow of the broken Interstate 24 Bridge fell across the road and in the distance they could see the disconnected ends of the lesser Highway 45 bridge.

A great half sunken coal barge rested against the dock on the right side. The surface of the water was punctured by the rusting remains of antennas poking up from drowned powerboats on the left. Between them nestled the ferry Encantante incongruously upright and unmangled. A man sat on the deck, whittling. He looked up as they came down the hill.

“Don’t believe I’ve ever seen an elephant down this way before,” he said as he stood up. “What can I do for you?” He was a tall, thin man. Michael couldn’t tell exactly how old he was. His hair was turning gray but his face seemed smooth and unwrinkled. Thirty, thought Michael. Doesn’t people’s hair turn gray when they are thirty? The man was dressed in a red and black plaid jacket against the cool river air.

Michael spoke up before Jackie could respond. He hoped she would remain silent. He was pretty sure talking elephants would be suspicious.

“We need to get across.”

“Do you, now?” He tapped out his pipe against the side of the ferry and refilled it carefully. “My name’s Gerry. Gerry Myers. You are?”

“Michael Ripley. This is Jackie.”

Gerry nodded. “All right then.” He looked at the elephant. “I’ve never put an elephant on my boat. But it can’t weigh much more than four or five of those little cars so it would probably be okay. He won’t jump or move about?”

“Jackie’s a girl.” Michael looked at the water ripping along.

Gerry followed his gaze. “Yeah. ‘She,’ then. She won’t move around? Be a damned shame if she turned over the boat and killed us all.”

“She won’t.”

“Good. Well, then. Since you are the only human being I’ve seen in some months,” Gerry said dryly, “and since I’ve buried everybody else, I’m inclined to think about your proposal.” Gerry looked at him closely. “You’re not sick, are you?”

Michael shrugged. “I feel pretty good.”

“Doesn’t mean much, does it?” Michael shook his head.

Gerry stared out over the river and sighed. “Yeah. The last good citizen of the Metropolis that had lunch with me said he hadn’t felt this good in months. I went looking for him when he didn’t show up for dinner. He was dead sitting in his kitchen with a smile on his face. Only thing I can say is apparently he died so suddenly he forgot to feel bad about it.”

Gerry lit his pipe and puffed at it for a moment. “Speaking of lunch, I’m a bit hungry. Care to eat with me?”

Michael hesitated.

Gerry pointed at the bluff up the hill from them. “On the other side of that is an old soybean field. Lots of good leafy growth for Jackie. Maybe you could turn her loose and eat with me.”

“I don’t know.” Gerry didn’t look like somebody that would kill him and roast Jackie. Uncle Ned had known who to trust—until the day he didn’t, Michael corrected himself. How could you tell? Michael had a sneaking suspicion he would have to pay for the ride one way or another.

“Well, the field’s there. Suit yourself. I’ll be eating lunch in half an hour or so. In that warehouse looking building over there. Come by if you want to.”

Michael nodded. Jackie turned and started up the hill.

The field was as advertised and there were no visible people around to take advantage of them.

“I’ll eat here. You watch,” said Jackie.

“I’d just as soon go on and have lunch with the old man,” Michael said as he unharnessed her. “We still have to cross the river. Seems like we ought to know something about the other side.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“You don’t trust anybody.” Michael rummaged through the packs until he found the pistol. “I got this.”

“You be careful, then,” Jackie said. “I’ll be coming down there if you try to run off.”

“Yeah. I like you, too.” Michael hefted the pistol. It was heavier than it looked. He made sure it was loaded and checked the action.

Jackie watched him. “Where did you learn to handle a gun?”

“Uncle Ned taught me,” Michael said shortly. “I kept guard when he foraged.”

“Then . . . ” Jackie stopped for a moment. “If you had the gun, why didn’t you leave him?”

“It took both of us to stay alive,” Michael released the chamber and made sure the safety was on. He put the gun in his pocket. “He was a lot bigger than I was. He protected me. I helped him. Staying with him made a lot of sense.”

“But he—” Jackie shook her head.

“When the Boys found us he sent me off and took them on by himself.”

Jackie was silent a moment. “So you wanted to leave with me because I’m a lot bigger than you are. I can protect you. Staying with me makes a lot of sense.”

Michael stared at her. “Are you kidding? I’m traveling with six tons of fresh meat. What part of that makes sense to you?”

“Then why did you come with me?”

Michael stood up and didn’t answer. He trotted down the hill toward the landing. Jackie stared after him.

Gerry was cooking in an apartment above the warehouse. The room had a nautical feel to it. Every piece of furniture had been carefully placed. The curtains over the window were a red and white check. The table was an austere gray, with metal legs and a top made of some kind of plastic. The countertops looked similar.

Two plates had been set out. The fork on the left, knife and spoon on the right, napkin folded just so on the plate. Plastic water glasses were set at precisely the same angle for each place setting.

Michael stood in the doorway, not sure what to do. Coming into the room felt like breaking something.

“Come on in,” said Gerry. He was stirring a pot. The contents bubbled and smelled deliciously meaty. “Channel catfish bouillabaisse.” He ladled out two full bowls and handed one to Michael. “Been simmering since this morning. Have a seat.”

They sat across the table and in a few moments, Michael forgot Gerry was even there. He only remembered where he was when the bowl was half empty. Michael looked up.

Gerry was watching him with a smile on his face. “Good to see someone enjoy my cooking. Want some bread? Baked it yesterday.”

Michael broke off a piece. Next to the bread was a small plate with butter. For a long minute, Michael stared, unable to recognize it. Then he remembered and smeared the bread across it.

“Whoa there. Use the knife.”

Michael shrugged, pulled out his small hunting knife and smeared the butter across the bread.

Gerry raised his eyebrows and chuckled. “Fair enough. But next time use the little knife next to the butter.”

Michael sopped up the rest of the soup with the bread and leaned back in his chair, stuffed and happy.

Gerry picked up the bowls and put them in the sink. “Come on down to the porch.” Michael followed him outside and down the stairs to a part of the dock that jutted over the water. Under an awning, he sat down in a lawn chair while Gerry pulled a box out of the river and opened it. He pulled out two bottles. He gave Michael the root beer and kept a regular beer for himself.

Michael sat back in the chair and savored the sharp, creamy flavor.

Gerry said nothing and the two of them watched the river roll by.

“So,” Gerry said at last. “What’s waiting for you on the other side of the river?”

“Hohenwald, Tennessee,” Michael said and sipped his root beer. He could get used to this. “Then, maybe Florida.”

“What’s in Hohenwald?”

“An elephant sanctuary. Elephants don’t like to be alone.”

Gerry nodded. “I thought Florida was underwater.”

“A lot of it is. But Jackie says the upper part of Florida is still there.” Michael stopped.

“I see,” said Gerry. He was silent a moment. “You’re an awful nice boy to be crazy.”

Michael didn’t say anything. If Gerry wanted to think he was crazy that was all right with him.

“You don’t think you’ll find anybody down there, do you?” asked Gerry.

Michael shrugged. “How would I know?”

Gerry nodded. “Everything’s pretty much fallen apart. I think there might be five people left alive here in Metropolis. You’d think we’d hang together. But it didn’t seem to work out that way. There might be a few hundred out in the countryside. Seems like I spent the last five years burying everyone I’ve ever known. I can’t believe it’s much better down south.”

Michael finished his root beer and put it on the deck. “That’s where Jackie has to go. She has to have something she can eat in the winter.”

Michael looked up at the remains of the bridge. He had only really known Saint Louis. It looked like things were messed up everywhere. For the first time he had an inkling what that meant.

“What was it like before?” Michael muttered.

Michael had been talking to himself, but even so, Gerry reacted. His face seemed to take on a rubbery texture. “Everything just came apart. First, the weather went to shit. Then came plagues, one after another. And not just people. Birds. Cattle. Sheep. Wheat. Beans. There was about six years where you couldn’t get a tomato unless you grew it yourself. Even then, it wasn’t much better than fifty-fifty. Oaks. Sequoias. Shrimp. Government would figure out how to make tomatoes grow again and every maple in the county would fall over and rot. They’d get a handle on that and the next thing you know somebody had engineered a virus that lived in milk. Why would anyone ever do that?” He shook his head. “Figured that one out after a couple of million kids. Right after that, the corn began to wither. We got a strain of corn that would grow and a tidal wave comes roaring over the East Coast. Boston, Providence, and New York go under water.”

He stopped and sat up. He pulled out his bandanna and wiped his eyes. “If I believed in God, I’d go out and kill a calf on a rock or something. We sure as hell pissed him off.” Gerry sighed. “Ah, musn’t grumble.” He sipped his beer, composed again.

Michael stared at him. Maybe Gerry did this all the time. “So,” began Michael after a long and awkward silence. “We should cross here?”

“That’s true. I’m pretty much the only game in town. But that’s not my point.” He pointed over the river at the opposite shore. “That’s Kentucky. Or what’s left of it. Things have been falling apart for a long, long time. I was sitting on my boat twenty years ago when the big rush came down the river that took out the two bridges. I could see it coming, a fifteen-foot wall of trash and debris rolling down on top of us. I had just enough time to pull Encantante into the creek downstream behind the oak bluffs when it washed over Metropolis and scoured everything between us and Cairo. Back then we still had people living here, so we were able to clean up and rebuild over a couple of years.” Gerry chuckled. “My little ferry business picked up because nobody was going to rebuild the bridges—we were still in a crisis at that point. It hadn’t become a disaster yet. Not enough people had died.”

“Where did the water come from?”

Gerry shook his head. “Never really figured that out. Was it just the Smithland Dam that let go? Or did one big flood start way up the river and then take out all the dams one by one on the way down? I do know that flood is what took out the two dams downstream from here and when I did go up to look at Smithland, there wasn’t much left of it. I came back. Then, about six years later, I loaded up a boat I had with all the fuel I could find and went up nearly five hundred miles to see what the hell was going on. It’s not like you could trust anything you heard on the radio. I only knew what had happened here. I didn’t turn around until I reached Cincinnati. There wasn’t a bridge or a dam left standing the whole way. This was before the earthquake. Maybe somebody blew them up. It was a big mystery until other things sort of overshadowed it. But you let me wander away from my point again.”

“Hey, it wasn’t my fault.”

“My point is that now the only thing that keeps what’s on the Kentucky shore from coming over onto this shore is that river.”

Michael shook his head. “So? What’s over there that’s not over here?”

Gerry shrugged. “Things. Big lizards, sometimes. Maybe a crocodile or two. Big animals—I haven’t seen any elephants. But I might have seen a tiger.”

“Yeah, right.” Michael snorted. “Pull the other one. A mountain lion, maybe.”

Gerry shrugged again. “When we put dams and bridges across the water, cars and buses weren’t the only things that crossed. Now the dams and bridges are gone and what lives on the other side stays on the other side. It’s not going to be as easy to get over here as it was before.”

“We crossed the bridge in Saint Louis. It was just fine.”

Gerry pulled his pipe out of his pocket along with his pocket knife and began cleaning the bowl. “Maybe things can’t cross up that far north. Maybe the Mississippi keeps things from crossing west just like the Ohio keeps things from crossing north. Maybe I’m just having old man hallucinations. But I know what I saw. There are things that live on that side of the river I don’t see on this side. You cross the river and they’re sure as hell going to see you.”

Michael didn’t look at him. “That’s where she has to go. She just can’t get food up here in the winter.”

“What did you do in Saint Louis?”

“The Zoo kept us alive. But it’s gone now.”

Gerry sighed. “She’s a pretty animal. I guess there’s no animal on earth so noble and beautiful, and just plain big, as an elephant. But it doesn’t belong here. Jackie should be in India.”

“I can’t take her to India.”

“I know that.” Gerry hesitated. “Maybe it’s time to cut her loose.” Michael stared at the decking. He didn’t know what to say.

Gerry pointed across the river. “Tell you what. You and I take her across the river and let her off the boat. Maybe she’ll work her way south. You come back here with me.”

Michael looked at him, trying to see if there was some hint of Uncle Ned in his face. He couldn’t tell. Michael was in no particular hurry to repeat that arrangement. “I don’t know.”

Gerry finished tamping the tobacco in the bowl and lit his pipe. “You know that soybean field I sent you to up on the hill? It’s a pretty field, isn’t it? The soybeans are one of those perennial varieties popular about fifteen years ago. When I was a kid that was a toxic waste site with a lot of mercury and cadmium and toxic solvents. Don’t look at me that way. That was years ago. It’s safe enough for her now. Anyway, you know how they reclaimed it?”

“No.”

“It was pretty neat, actually. They took some engineered corn. Corn pushes its roots deep into the soil—as much as ten feet in some varieties. This corn pulled up the metals and concentrated them into the kernels of the ear. It discolored the kernels. Some were silver, some were bright blue.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Anyway,” continued Gerry. “Because of the metal concentration, the kernels were expected to be sterile. Most of them were. But coons attacked the field and ate some and got sick. So that was one problem they had. Crows pecked at the ears and got sick. That was another. Bits of the ears were dragged by various animals a ways away. Turned out some were fertile after all. They took root and started growing over data lines. The plant couldn’t tell the difference between a heavy metal being cleaned up in a waste site or a similar heavy metal in a computer underground.”

Michael stamped his feet. “What are you talking about?”

Gerry stared hard at him. “I don’t know what’s across the river. I’m saying it could be anything.”

“What? Killer corn?”

Gerry snorted. “Of course not. But if people can rebuild corn and it escapes what else could they have done? Crocodiles to control Asian lung fish? Killer bees to control oak borers? I know what lives around here. I live with it every day. I know things are different across the river.” Gerry calmed himself. “You take your elephant across the river if you want to. But you’ll come back and stay here with me if you’re smart.”

Jackie was waiting for him in the afternoon shade. A vast section of the soybean field had been leveled and she looked well-fed for the first time in several days.

Michael looked around. “Tasty?”

Jackie looked at the field. “Pretty good.” Her belly even seemed a little swollen.

“How much longer until we get to Hohenwald?”

Jackie shook her head. “Couple of weeks, I hope.”

“And Florida?”

“If we go to Florida, I expect we’ll get there midsummer.” Michael thought for a moment. “Do you know the date?”

“It’s the first of May.”

“May day,” said Michael slowly. “That’s six weeks.” Jackie looked at him with one eye. “So?”

“Could you get there faster if you weren’t carrying me?”

“It wouldn’t make any difference. I could only go faster if I didn’t take the time to keep fed. But I can’t afford to starve myself. Not now.”

“How come?”

“Never mind.”

“You’re hiding something.”

“So what? It doesn’t concern you.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” shouted Michael, surprising them both. Jackie stepped back. For a moment she stood, arrested, one leg raised ready in defense, three solidly on the ground.

“Are you going to squash me for shouting at you?” Michael shook his head in disgust. “I was better off with Ned.”

Slowly, Jackie eased her leg down. She turned and silently walked over to the pond in the middle of the soybean field. Michael watched as she pulled up water and splashed it over herself.

Dear Mom,

I don’t think Jackee will ever like me. I guess I was fooling myself. She’s an eleefant. She hates me because I’m a person and people did things to her and other eleefants.

Gerry wants me to stay here with him. He has a good thing here. Metropolis has a power sorse so he can stay warm for a long time. With everybody gone, the left over preserved food will be good for years. There are some wild crops here, too. Ned never had it so good.

Jackee doesn’t need me. Most of the stuff Ralph packed was for me. I could rig a bag for her to carry around her neck for the stuff she has to have. That ought to be enough. And it’s not like I’m holding stuff for her to read anymore. Whatever she found back at the Zoo must have been all she wanted. She hasn’t been interested in anything but going south since.

When I told this to Jackee she didn’t say anything for a while. Then, all she said was, Suit yourself.

So, I guess I’ll be staying in Metropolis.

love, Mike

Gerry waited at the ferry while Michael walked with Jackie back up to the soybean field. Michael decided he didn’t want Gerry to know about her. It felt safer to keep everything quiet. Jackie followed his lead silently.

Michael kept glancing at her as she ate, trying to see if she had any regrets he was staying here. Her elephantine face was inexpressive but her movements were short and abrupt. Could she be angry at him for staying? Or just impatient to be on her way?

When she was done, he slung the makeshift bag around her neck so she could reach it and led her back down to the dock. She stepped gingerly onto the metal floor of the ferry. There was plenty of room and even in the strong current, it only swayed slightly.

Gerry cast off without comment and angled the ferry upstream into the river. Michael felt the powerful motor bite into the current and the entire craft hummed. But he could not hear the motor itself, only the churning of the propeller.

Gerry caught his expression. “Quiet, isn’t she? Electric motor.”

He pulled up the hatch. Michael saw a roundish cube with the shaft coming out connected with thick cables to a cylindrical device.

“That’s the motor,” Gerry said pointing to the cube. “That’s power storage.” He pointed to the cylinder.

“A battery?”

“They called it a fuel coil when I bought the boat. Not sure how it works but it holds about forty hours of power. These days I charge it up from a little turbine I dropped off the dock. Don’t need to use the boat that much. For longer trips I can charge it from a big fuel cell I can carry with me.” He dropped the hatch with a clang and returned to the wheel.

The Encantante passed the main eddy line and entered the center of the river. Gerry stepped up the motor and angled the Encantante more steeply. The ripples and twists in the current caused the boat to shift and slide a little. Not enough to make standing difficult but enough so Michael noticed. It made him grin. Jackie looked around nervously.

Then, they were across the main river and nearing the far side. Gerry eased off the throttle and dropped the Encantante below a bluff jutting out into the water. Again they crossed a strong eddy that made the ferry jump a moment. The water grew calm and Gerry brought Encantante to the dock.

Michael led Jackie off the ferry and stood with her for a moment in the middle of the road. He looked east, judging the vegetation. There was plenty. The forest was thick on the other side of the road and he could see the break in the trees signifying a field. Jackie wouldn’t starve.

Turning away from Gerry so he couldn’t see, Michael pulled the atlas out of his jacket.

“Here. You walk down here to Interstate 24 and take it south. Then take Highway 45 to Benton. Once you get to Benton, hunt around until you find Highway 641. Take that to Interstate 40, east. Then—”

“You’ve been over this. A lot.”

“Well, I wrote it down. There’s a leather holder I made for you. It’s tied to the belt and the directions are in it along with the map book. I drew it all out on the map so you wouldn’t get lost.”

“Thanks,” said Jackie shortly.

Michael nodded and stuffed the atlas into the bag. “You take care of yourself.” Jackie watched him as he walked back to the ferry. Michael felt his eyes sting. He looked back.

Jackie was only a few feet away. Something shook the brush on the far side of the road. Before he fully registered what it was, he was running at it, yelling at Jackie to back away. Gerry tried to grab him but Michael ducked under his hands.

It raised its thick body high on its legs and ran toward Jackie, its mouth open and narrow as a snake’s. Lizard? Crocodile? He ran past and stood, screaming, between them.

The thing stopped, closed its mouth and stepped back only so long for a long tongue to slip out and back. Then it lunged forward and grabbed for Michael. Michael danced back but it grabbed his leg and shook him off his feet, then raised its claws over him.

Michael heard trumpeting. Jackie’s leg came down on its midsection. The creature ruptured and blood and meat spewed across the road. Its jaw opened reflexively and Michael scrambled back. Jackie stamped on it until it was nothing but a flat, smeared ruin. Then she looked at Michael.

Michael smiled at her. She leaned over him and wrapped her trunk around his leg. He looked down and saw the blood and felt nauseous.

“This will hurt,” she said. She wrapped her trunk around his leg and squeezed. For a moment, Michael couldn’t see or breathe.

“Gerry!” Jackie shouted. “Get over here and pick him up!”

Gerry ran over to them and as he lifted Michael by the shoulders, Jackie lifted his leg. The pounding in his leg seemed to drown out everything.

Back in the ferry, Michael looked around. He must have blacked out a moment for they were now deep in the middle of the river. He felt sleepy.

“Don’t you go away on me,” said Jackie, kneeling next to him. “You stay here. Michael—”

Michael wanted to say he was sorry but he was as light as smoke and he drifted away.

PART 2

It was all light and dark for a long time. When things were lighter he slept in a brown haze as if he were swimming in honey. He was warm and safe. Occasionally, he was convulsed with pain. He couldn’t tell where the pain was coming from exactly. Sometimes it seemed to come from his neck. Other times, his leg. Sometimes he was riven by pain that seemed to come from nowhere.

This went on, it seemed, forever. Then, it grew lighter and he opened his eyes.

He was in a room, in a bed, that reminded him of when his parents still lived. The room had a window. As then the bed had been pushed against the wall so he could look out the window. It had sheets and a blanket. He fingered them gently, wondering if he was dreaming. Outside, the sun shone. His leg hurt.

He heard a grunt and Jackie’s head appeared in the window. She pushed it open. “How are you feeling?”

“Sleepy,” Michael said. “My leg hurts.”

“Go back to sleep if you want. I’ll be here.”

Michael nodded and smiled. Her trunk hovered in the air near him. He reached up and pulled it close, a warm and bristly comfort. He could feel the muscles tense a moment, then relax. The weight of it next to him, the grass smell of her breath, the beat of her pulse. Michael closed his eyes. He felt like he was floating in the air.

Gerry was sitting at the foot of the bed reading a book. The sunlight was gone and it looked threatening outside.

“An afternoon June storm,” Gerry said, looking up from his book. “June?” Michael shook his head. “It was May when we got to Metropolis.” Gerry nodded but didn’t say anything.

“Well?”

“Wait until Jackie gets back. She wanted to be here when you woke up. I only got her to go up the hill and eat by promising to call her if you woke up.”

Gerry returned to his book. “Aren’t you going to call her?”

Gerry shook his head. “It’s hard enough to get her to leave you. She needs to eat her fill. Know what you’re going to do?”

“What?”

“Pretend to be asleep so I don’t get in trouble.”

Michael closed his eyes obediently. Then he didn’t need to pretend.

It was the thunder that woke him. He started and his leg began to throb. He could see the bulking shadow of Jackie with her head in the window. Gerry had rigged some kind of awning over the window so at least her head wouldn’t get too wet. Michael didn’t like it. That was his job.

Gerry entered the room with a hissing lantern. He set it on the side table and moved the curtains away.

“There, you see? Let there be light.”

Michael tried to reach his leg but he was too weak. “Can you rub my leg? It really hurts.”

Gerry looked down.

“Michael,” Jackie rumbled gently. “You need to be brave.” Michael didn’t like the sound of it. “Am I going to die?”

“No,” said Jackie somberly. “The dragon bit your leg. We couldn’t save it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It got infected,” said Gerry. “It got so bad we thought it was going to take you with it. So, it had to go.”

“Go?” Michael shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

“Gerry had to cut off your leg,” said Jackie.

“What?” Michael said weakly.

Gerry pulled back the blanket. Michael’s thigh and knee looked bruised and purple. Below that was a fat bandage that ended long before his ankle.

“You cut off my leg.” Michael couldn’t believe the stump was his. “This is a joke. I can still feel my foot.”

Gerry replaced the blanket. “After a while, your mind will accept there’s no foot there. Then you won’t feel it anymore.” The shape of the blanket now clearly showed what was missing. “At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

Michael stared at the blanket for a long time. Outside, the thunder receded and while the lightning played in the clouds, there was little sound but for the rain and the wind.

“You said dragon,” Michael said, looking up from his leg. He couldn’t stand to stare at it anymore.

“Komodo dragon lizard,” Gerry said. “Jackie figured out what it was as soon as she saw it.”

Jackie looked up at the sky. She looked inside the window. “I expect there were several zoos and other facilities in Florida that collapsed just like the zoo in Saint Louis. Maybe that rhino is still alive. For the summer, at least. According to Gerry, these lizards have survived for a while. I’m not sure how a tropical species can make it through a temperate winter. Perhaps they move south when the temperature drops. Or perhaps they find a place they can sleep through the cold. I suppose it’s possible there were enough of them that some were resistant to the cold. The ones less resistant died out and the remaining population bred. Evolution in action. Or maybe they were modified.”

Michael stared at her. Jackie was talking to him. Really talking to him. She had never done that before.

Gerry interrupted gently. “How are you feeling, Michael?”

Michael started. He’d forgotten Gerry was there. “My foot hurts.” He looked down at the blanket, oddly misshapen without his foot under it. Tears welled up. “What am I going to do?”

“Rest, for the moment,” said Jackie. “Then figure it out.”

Michael healed with all the combustive vitality of any well-fed young boy. By early July, the stitches were out and the skin over the stump was new and tender. He either hobbled about with a crutch that Gerry had made him or Jackie carried him.

But as the days wore on he started finding Jackie high on the broken end of the Interstate 24 Bridge carefully watching the other side.

“What’s over there?” Michael asked as he sat down and dangled his leg over the hundred foot drop.

“You shouldn’t sit so close to the edge,” Jackie said quietly.

“If this bridge will hold you, it’s going to hold me.”

Jackie reached over and picked him up with her trunk. “Edges crumble.” She put him down and he leaned against the wall. “Okay. What’s over there?”

“I’ve been watching the dragons.” She pointed with her trunk. “They come to the road once around sunrise and once around sunset. In the morning, when they’re warm enough, they leave the road and move to the forest at the edge of the clearing. At night, they slink away under the trees to sleep somewhere. A cave, maybe, or some other kind of den. If they’re hungry, they stay near the clearing until they’ve made a kill. Animals avoid the road so it’s not profitable to hunt there. That’s why they hug the edges of the clearings. There.” She pointed again across the river. “And there. See the carcass? It was a deer they took yesterday morning.”

Michael saw one leg sticking up from the ground in the clearing. Two long motionless shadows were lying near it.

“So the road is safe in the middle of the day.”

“Safer, anyway. This section of road has only two lanes. The wider roads might be better or worse. I can’t tell from here. Gerry was right about one thing. They’re not crossing the river.”

Michael saw something moving. A large spotted cat. He pointed it out to Jackie. “A leopard, maybe?” she said. “Look how it’s avoiding where the dragons are.”

“Look way in the distance in that clearing. Deer?”

“I don’t know. They don’t look like deer. Gazelles? Antelopes? Something the leopards and Komodos can eat, I suppose.”

“Where did they come from?”

“Zoos in Florida? Laboratories in Atlanta? I don’t know.” She paused a long time. “Over there things are going to be different.”

Michael leaned back against the ridge of her back. He rubbed the stump of his leg. It was still tender and it itched constantly. Sometimes, if he wasn’t thinking about it, he tried to scratch his toes.

“The summer is getting on,” Michael said. “We should get started.”

“Yeah, right,” Jackie snorted. “You want to lose both legs? You’re staying here with Gerry. I’ll go on down alone.”

“You need me!”

“I’ll cope. You were right. You belong here.”

“That was before.”

“Before what?”

Michael hesitated. “When I didn’t think you liked me.”

Jackie turned her head and looked at him. “What makes you think I like you now?”

“You stayed with me. Gerry said.”

“I felt guilty for getting you into this.”

Michael felt as if he were struck. Ned had never treated him this way. “Why? Why hate me? Why be so mean to me?” Michael felt like she was hiding something. How do you get someone to tell you what they don’t want to? “Why did you leave the Zoo?” he asked suddenly.

“I didn’t like humans. And I had to leave.”

Michael picked up on the “didn’t” immediately but kept it to himself. “Ralph said he had a couple of years yet. It didn’t have to be right then.”

“I had to leave.”

“Why? Why then? Why—when we could be back there enjoying good food and not staring over the river at dragons.”

Jackie shook her head.

Sudden rage shook Michael. “Damn it! I saved you. You owe me.”

Jackie sighed. “This is hard for me. Did you know there were four of us? Tantor, Jill, Old Bill, and me. We all learned to speak quickly enough but we hid it from the Keepers as long as we could. We had no love of them. Why should we? Even if we hadn’t had the wit to speak, we would have known this was not the place we should be.

“You saw the zoo. There were cameras everywhere. Where there are cameras, there can be no secrets. So we were found out. They taught us to read. They taught us anything they could get their monkey hands on. We talked it over among ourselves. Why not learn what they had to offer? What could it hurt? Learn the enemy, said Old Bill. But keep them distant.”

Jackie fell silent for a moment. “Every animal is wired its own way. Herd animals and pack animals are similar in one respect. They define themselves by membership in the group. Once you include a new member in the group, you’re bound to them. Wolves, cattle, and elephants are the same. We didn’t want that. We didn’t want to include humans in our tight little community. So we held back. We acted confused and slow. We did everything we could to make ourselves look stupid. Smart enough to work with, but our true nature held secret.

“Then the humans started dying. One after another. In groups. By themselves. Until we were by ourselves. Only Ralph was left to care for us.

“We were ecstatic. All we had to do was figure out how to escape Ralph and survive. We knew we had to go south. Georgia. Florida. Alabama. Where there was no snow in the winter and we could eat.

“Then Jill died. A bit of wire or glass left in the hay, maybe. No veterinarians left, right? We never really knew, but she died bloated and screaming. That left Old Bill and Tantor. I don’t know how it happened, but I woke up a few weeks later and they were fighting. It’s a terrible thing to see two five-ton animals slamming into one another. They had come into musth at the same time. I don’t know why. I think I came into heat watching them. Biology triumphant.”

Jackie snorted. “If they had been dumb beasts, one of them would have figured out they were losing and broken it off. Instead, Old Bill killed Tantor. He came over and mounted me.”

“But the battle hurt him, too. Inside, somehow. A concussion? Internal hemorrhaging? I’ll never know. He just wasted away. Then he was dead and I was alone and pregnant. You appeared on the scene a week after that.”

Michael stared at her. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m telling you why I had to leave. I didn’t have a couple of years. The gestation period of an elephant is twenty-two months. No more. No less. I’m five months pregnant. I have to find a place that’s safe, that’s warm, where I can raise my child.”

“Oh,” Michael said. “But why the hurry? That’s a couple of years.”

“Not really. I don’t know what’s at Hohenwald. What if there are no elephants left? Then it’s only me. A few months to find a place and get through the first winter—how will I know I’ve found a good spot until I’ve been through the winter? Then a few months to move to a new spot if I have to. Then a solid year of eating. That’s not much time. Not much time at all.”

Michael looked across the river. “Guess the dragons are a problem for a little guy.”

“You think?” she chuckled.

“I didn’t mean me,” Michael said reasonably. “You’re going to need me.” He looked up at her and she looked away. “And you know it, too. Is it so terrible to need a human when you’re so alone?” Michael looked over the edge of the bridge and spat. He could see it nearly all the way down. “Look at it this way. We used you when everybody was alive. Now’s your chance to use us—or at least me.”

“I don’t want to use anybody.”

“Then take me along because you like me. Take me along because you can use my monkey hands. Take me along because I don’t weigh much and won’t be a burden to carry. Only take me along!”

Jackie didn’t say anything for a moment. “You’re crippled.”

“Compared to you, everyone is crippled.”

“Michael, you’re missing one leg.”

“So?”

Jackie snorted. “You can’t keep up.”

“I couldn’t keep up before.”

“You’re being difficult.”

“Where did you ever get the idea I’d make leaving me behind easy for you?”

“You’re missing a leg!” Jackie trumpeted in frustration. “I can’t take you with me.”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” Jackie shook her head. “You’re missing a leg.”

“You said that.” Michael stared her straight in the eye. “Like I said: So?”

“Michael,” she said helplessly.

“You owe me an answer. And don’t give me the ‘not keeping up’ crap. You owe me better than that.”

Jackie stared back at him. “Okay,” she said slowly. “The truth is I don’t want to have to take care of you.”

“More crap.”

“Not at all. I don’t know what’s going to happen when I meet other elephants. I can’t have any more dependants than my own baby.”

“Let’s add some more truths here.” Michael felt like he was going to cry. He wiped his eyes angrily. “So I can’t walk without a crutch. I’m riding you anyway. Besides, when my stump heals, we can make an artificial leg. You read that yourself. Even Gerry said he could do it. We might even find one that will fit me. Just because there wasn’t anything in the Metropolis Hospital doesn’t say anything about other hospitals. So it’s not my leg. It’s not like I haven’t been useful. You wouldn’t have gotten out of Saint Louis without me. It’s been me, with my human hands, who’s been able to keep the stuff together. I’m the one who can use a gun. I’m the one that saved your life. The truth is you need me. Your baby needs me. So let me come along.”

“I’ll have to look out for you.”

“We’ll have to look out for each other. You didn’t see the dragon. I did.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want anybody to die around me. Not again.” She shuddered.

For a moment, Michael could read her as clearly as if she were a human being standing right in front of him: her face dark and sad, her eyes haunted. He reached up and took her trunk and draped it around his shoulder. He stroked it gently. “You’re going to need all the help you can get. You’ve got a baby coming. You don’t even know if the elephants are still there or if you can find them. You’re going to need my hands and my eyes. Better take them with you.”

“Why do you want to go with me so much?”

Michael laughed. “Are you kidding? Live on the back of an elephant? What kid wouldn’t trade his teeth to be in my place?”

“That can’t be the only reason.”

“Oh, there are a million reasons for us to be together. I can’t think of all of them for you.” Michael hugged her trunk. He looked up at her. “I’m going to be an uncle!”

This time, Gerry kept the Encantante a hundred yards from shore while Michael and Jackie watched for signs of the dragons.

Michael scanned the forest with the binoculars Gerry had given him. “I don’t see any.”

“We saw the kill in the clearing this morning. They should be there,” Jackie said. “And they might have decided to stay in the shade today,” Gerry commented dryly.

“Why miss a chance at a mountain of meat?”

“Quiet,” said Michael. “Let’s not do this all over again.”

Gerry opened his mouth, and then shut it. “Suit yourself. I’ll say this for the last time. This is a mistake and you’ll remember I said it.”

“If things work out, we might come up in a year or two. You can meet Jackie’s new baby.”

Gerry didn’t answer but emptied his pipe over the side.

“It’s now or never.” Michael patted Jackie’s leg. “Help me up.”

“I think Gerry’s right.”

“Not going to go through it again right this minute. Make a leg.”

Jackie bent down on one knee and Michael clambered up. “Okay, then.” He pulled out the rifle.

Jackie eyed it warily. “I didn’t know you had that.”

“Everybody has secrets. Let’s roll.”

Gerry brought the Encantante slowly to the pier. His own rifle was standing in the corner a foot away from him but he didn’t look at it. Instead, he kept his hand over the throttle and the reverse switch.

Jackie stepped slowly onto the pier and looked around. Michael held the gun ready. “Okay, then.”

Jackie began lumbering up the road.

Michael heard Gerry call after them: “Good luck!” Then the propeller revved up and the ferry pulled away from the pier.

They were on their own.

Michael looked around and watched carefully. The one that got his leg was dead but Michael wouldn’t have minded giving him some company.

PART 3

Once the dragons had warmed themselves on the pavement, they moved to the shadows, waiting for whatever wandered close by. Michael didn’t know if it was Jackie’s size or the fact they stayed in the center of the road as far from the edge as possible, but the few dragons they saw only watched as they walked by. The Encantante containing two humans and an elephant must have confused them. Perhaps Michael had been the real target all along, or perhaps the dragon hadn’t seen all of Jackie, just her leg, and attacked what it thought was a single animal. They would likely never know.

The infection that had nearly killed Michael showed the threat of the dragons was probably greater than Jackie being a target for every hungry man with a gun. Staying to the middle of the roads meant they traveled in the open. Jackie could be seen for a long distance. This made both of them nervous. Michael kept anticipating the feeling of Jackie sagging underneath him, the victim of a hungry sniper, followed by the inevitable sound of rifle fire.

They saw no one.

“Where is everybody?” Michael asked. Even in Saint Louis there had been some people—to be avoided, of course. But they had always been there.

“I don’t know.” Jackie watched the low farms. “This is different from what I had imagined.”

The land rose. The forest grew thicker, lush and filled with tall oaks and maples. The road disappeared into rubble within a dark and gloomy forest floor nearly bare of vegetation. The remains of the road was a break of light between the trees.

“Keep watch,” Jackie said after a while. “It’ll be cold under the trees. The dragons will be sunning themselves wherever there’s a warm spot.”

But the forest grew thicker and even quieter. They saw no dragons.

“No people and no dragons.” Michael leaned forward to look down on Jackie’s face. “Any ideas?”

Jackie shook her great head. “It’s too cool for them here under the trees. Maybe the dragons migrate north in the spring when the canopy is thinner. Then return south.”

“Lizards migrating?”

“Who knows? It’s a new world down here. I was modified. Maybe they were, too. Or maybe this just isn’t dragon country.”

“You were modified for a reason, I guess. Maybe they were, too.”

Jackie was silent for a moment. “Why do you think I had to be modified for a reason?”

“Nobody would choose a five-ton experiment unless they had a reason.” Michael cuffed the top of her head. “Especially one as foul tempered as you are.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Jackie was silent for perhaps a dozen steps. “It was in the last notebooks you found.”

“I figured.”

“How so?”

“I bring you every notebook in the place. None of them satisfy you. Then, you find what you’re after. The next day you leave. At first, I thought it might be something about Hohenwald. Something important you needed to know before you could leave. But the place is clearly on the map. And I couldn’t see what would be in notebooks about you that would have anything to do with Hohenwald. Whatever you were looking for had to be about you. After a while I figured out it had to be something about you that only the people that created you would know. That’s why you were searching the notebooks. And it had to be something Ralph either didn’t know or couldn’t tell you. Ralph would know all there was to know about how they had made you. But there’s no particular reason I could think of that they would tell him why.”

“It could have been genetic maps of the Hohenwald males.”

“What’s a genetic map?”

“Something you wouldn’t know about.” Jackie grabbed the leaves off a low hanging maple and pulled them down. The branch tapped Michael on the head.

“Ouch. What was that for?”

“For thinking you know everything about me.”

“I know I don’t know everything about you. For one thing, I don’t know what was in those notebooks.”

“The purpose of the project. My purpose.”

Michael cried out with delight. “I was right,” he crowed. “You were right.”

“What was it?”

“They were going to reseed elephants back into Africa and Asia. But the elephants were going to have to be as smart as humans to keep from being steak on the hoof.”

“That’s weird,” Michael said. “Why couldn’t somebody just go and watch out for them.” Then it hit him. “Oh.”

“‘Oh,’ is right,” Jackie said gently.

“They knew they were dying. They must have known everybody was dying. There wouldn’t be anybody to take care of you.” Michael shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why go through all the trouble and die before they can make good on it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t find any personal diaries or notes. I just found the original mission statement and long range plan.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I think they made a mistake and died too quickly. Since we didn’t trust them, they didn’t really know how well they had succeeded. They kept trying to adapt, trying to figure out how smart we really were and how they were going to adapt their plan to our limitations. They were caught sick trying to do right by us.”

Michael didn’t say anything for a long time. “Do you think they figured it out before they all died?”

Jackie sighed, a deep rumbling breath. “God, I hope not.”

Dear Mom,

My spelling is better since I let Jackie read the letters. She had been doing it sometimes but hadn’t said anything.

I didn’t tell you about Gerry. But he and Jackie took care of me when I was sick. Gerry is a Real Good Guy, so if you get a chance, look out for him.

Jackie’s job was to look out for the elephants. So, now when we get to Hohenwald, she gets to do her job. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. My job so far has been to be her hands. But most of what I do has to do with traveling. When she gets there, she won’t be traveling anymore.

She said all of the elephants at Hohenwald were females. But the information she had was over ten years old. Ralph hadn’t been able to contact Hohenwald for a long time. Maybe they weren’t fire protected.

The land is different now, wilder. Jackie says it looks like the old forests from hundreds of years ago. But it’s much too recent. She thinks somebody must have made it. So we’re careful.

I miss you every day. You and Dad both, though I don’t remember him so well. Jackie thinks I’m strange to write to you, being dead and all. I don’t think it’s strange at all. (So there, Jackie!)

If I talked to you out loud, people would just think I was crazy. This way, it’s just between me and you and I get a chance to collect my thoughts. I think I remember you better, too, if I do this. Ned had some good ideas mixed with the bad.

Jackie makes sure I brush my teeth every night. She had me look for a toothbrush in Ralph’s packs. Sure enough, there was one.

We’re coming into Hohenwald soon. So, I’ll tell you about it after that.

Love, Michael

They had been several days on old Highway 641 when Michael saw Interstate 40 through a break in the trees.

This part of the road had seen better days. The roads in Tennessee were better cared for than the ones in Illinois or Kentucky. It was one of the best ways to determine when they crossed state or county borders: the roads or the farms were cared for differently. In Kentucky, the roads were broken in places and worn away in others and they had to keep a sharp eye for dragons.

Once they crossed into Tennessee the roads looked as if they were cared for by someone with a mania for cleanliness and sharp borders. It reminded Michael of the mysterious farms up in Illinois. The dark forest seemed to be the province of Kentucky. The forest here seemed more normal: a mix of young trees and shrubs. Once or twice they saw the remains of a garden. There had been people around recently, if they weren’t around right now. Still, they saw no one living. Just the occasional mound of mushrooms.

Jackie stopped dead in the middle of the roadway.

Michael almost fell off. He caught on to one of her ears and pulled himself back up to her neck. He looked around nervously to see what made her stop.

“What is it?” he whispered. “I hear something.”

“Dragons?”

“No.”

Jackie spread her legs and leaned forward. She let her trunk down to rest on the ground.

“Is something wrong?” asked Michael. “Shut up.”

Michael leaned back and pulled out the map. It looked like they turned east here. Hohenwald was only seventy or eighty miles away.

Jackie straightened up. “So?”

“Nothing.”

“Right.”

Jackie shook her head in irritation.

A few miles further on, Interstate 40 was more visible. They walked up the eastern ramp to the road proper. Michael felt better. The visibility from an interstate was much greater than from the little, forest enclosed roads. While they hadn’t seen a dragon for a while, Michael didn’t want to take any chances.

Jackie stopped on the interstate again and assumed the strange leaning posture. “What is it?”

Jackie didn’t answer. She just shook her head at him.

Michael climbed down to look around. He hopped over to the edge of the interstate, leaned against the guard rail. It was considerably more open to the south. Michael thought he could see a fairly large turtle of some sort, perhaps thirty pounds, walking along the edge of the forest. It looked like dragon country.

“We’re going the wrong way,” Jackie said suddenly.

Michael pulled out the map and studied again. “No. This is the way to Hohenwald.”

“Where are we?”

Michael studied the map. “McIllwain. At least, that’s the closest thing that looks like a town. That way—” he pointed east “—lays the Tennessee River. We go over it, if the bridge is still there. About thirty miles further on we turn south again to Hohenwald.”

Jackie shifted nervously. “They’re not there.”

“The Hohenwald elephants?”

Jackie turned west. She leaned out again and laid her trunk on the ground. “Not that way, either.”

“Nothing to the north of us, is there?”

Jackie turned east again, dropped her trunk to the ground. For a long time, she was motionless. Finally, she shook herself. “It’s the river that’s messing me up. I think they’re south.”

Michael sat on the guard rail. “Dragons might be down that way. Also, people.”

“Maybe. I don’t think they’re far.”

Michael sighed. He stood, leaning against the wall. Jackie made a leg for him and he climbed up. “The river is going north to south. Maybe we can keep going south on 69 and you can keep listening.”

“How far is the river? Is there a road that follows it?”

Michael ran his finger along the blue line. “The river is angling toward us. It comes pretty close starting around Akins Chapel. We’ll only be a few miles away from it when we get to Jeanette. Maybe ten miles.”

“Let’s go.”

At Jeannette, they found Brodie’s Landing Road. This brought them down to the river.

The Tennessee River was not the crushing roar of the Ohio or the Mississippi. It was broad and flat with a steady slow southern flow. On the other side, washing in the still water was a herd of elephants.

Jackie froze, staring at them. The air was still. The elephants across the river stared back. Michael didn’t move. He wondered if the elephants could see him. Just how well did elephants see, anyway?

The moment stretched out long enough that Michael wanted to change his position. He began to itch.

Suddenly, one elephant in the water snorted and clambered up the bank. It trumpeted once and then walked up the bank. The other elephants followed her.

Jackie shook herself once they were out of sight. She walked into the water but the current, though slow, seemed to shift her slightly. She stopped and backed up. “Where can I get across?”

“We can go back north and across Interstate 40. Or, we can go south and cross Highway 412.”

“Which is closer?”

“Both are about the same.” Jackie thought for a long time.

“South,” she said at last. “We go south.”

They crossed the river at Perryville. The bridge seemed intact, though, of course, they couldn’t be sure. It cracked like a gunshot when they were in the middle and for a moment, Michael couldn’t breathe. But the bridge gave them no more trouble and they were on the east side of the Tennessee River.

“We’re quite a ways from Hohenwald,” Michael said as they lumbered down the road.

“Did you think they would stay there? Their Keepers must be dead, too.” Jackie sounded almost happy.

“Do you think Ralph is dead?”

She shook her head irritably. “I’m not concerned about the fate of one robot.”

That’s not your purpose, he thought. It made him nervous.

Along the eastern side of the river, they found a flat, worn trail, well marked with elephant scat. Jackie turned over each pile, broke it open and smelled it.

“Is that necessary?”

“I want to know who they are.” She pointed to one worn pile. “African elephant. Female. Smells like she’s the dominant one.” She pointed behind. “There are three Indian females. One is still a little immature. She’s unrelated to the other two. None of them are pregnant.”

“What are you?”

“Indian. What? You didn’t know?”

“It’s not like you told me.”

She snorted.

“Any boy elephants?”

“There were no males in Hohenwald.”

“Why not?”

“Males need more space. They don’t herd like females.”

Michael thought for a moment. “Better hope your baby is a boy.” Jackie didn’t answer.

They came to the point across the river where they had seen the herd, a long, hard packed sandbar held together with tough grass and cottonwoods. The scat here was plentiful. The elephants liked this place and returned to it often.

Michael leaned over her head. “Which way?”

“I’m not sure.”

Michael slid to the ground. Jackie handed him his crutch. He moved around one side of the clearing while Jackie searched the other. The elephant markings were so numerous it was hard to figure out where they had gone.

“Over here,” she called softly. Michael hobbled over.

Jackie pointed to a large pile. “Male Indian. No more than a week ago.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Maybe.”

She cried out suddenly. “Get down!” And swept him to the ground. A dart stuck in Jackie’s trunk where he had been standing. Michael scrambled up to pull it out.

“Samsa!” cried a girl’s voice from the brush. She ran out toward Jackie.

Michael tried to intercept her but was knocked to the ground again, this time by an older man. He held a knife to Michael’s throat.

Jackie eased herself down to her knees. Then lay down on the ground. “Jackie!” Michael cried out.

She looked blindly at the sound of his voice. Then it seemed as if her eyes were looking elsewhere. She closed them slowly.

“You’ve killed her,” he said, not believing it.

“It was an accident, cripple,” whispered the woman in a stricken voice. “I was aiming at you.”

PART 4

The girl pulled the dart out of Jackie’s trunk. “Will she die, Samsa?” the girl asked the man holding the knife to Michael’s throat.

“I don’t know,” Samsa said. He pulled cord from a pouch belted around his waist and bound Michael’s wrists.

“What? Do you think I’m going to run away?” Michael pushed his stump at him. “Cripple, remember?”

Samsa ignored him. He knelt next to Jackie. “She’s breathing. That’s a good sign. Maybe the dosage is too small.”

“Dosage of what?” Michael stared at them. “What did you do to her?”

“Missed you,” said Samsa, evenly. “Let’s see the dart, Pinto.”

Pinto gently brushed Jackie’s eyes closed, picked up the dart and brought it to Samsa.

Samsa examined it carefully, deliberately avoiding the point. “Full dose, all right. Get the med kit in my tent back at camp.”

“Got it.” With that, the girl was gone, running up the trail away from the river. Samsa examined Jackie minutely. He placed a hand on her chest to measure her breathing. After that, he held his hand under her trunk and stood silently.

“What are you doing?” Michael asked quietly.

“Shut up.”

After a moment, Samsa released the trunk. “Pulse is good. Breathing is a little weak.”

“That was a poison dart.”

“You’re a smart one.”

“Why shoot me?”

“Let’s see. You’re riding the biggest piece of meat for twenty miles around—except for the dozen or so other pieces of meat just as big. You’re not important, boy. She is. Too important to provide you a year’s supply of steaks.”

“You think I was going to eat her?”

“That would be a little ambitious. I think you were going to trade her. Maybe to the Angels in Memphis or the Rubber Girls in Chattanooga. They would have taken her and then served you up as a garnish—which would have been fine by me but we’d still be out an elephant.”

“Jackie’s not one of your elephants.”

“I know that. Since you’re accidentally alive you can tell me where you stole her.”

“I didn’t steal Jackie. I don’t think anybody could do that. If she could talk, she’d tell you herself.”

Samsa snorted. “I expect she’d have a lot to tell me, too.” Michael fell silent.

“Where did you get her?”

“Jackie and I came from Saint Louis. We were trying to find the elephants at Hohenwald. She wanted her own herd.”

“Well, you found them. We’ll take it from here.”

“She’s—”

Samsa pointed the dart at him. “There’s enough left in this for a little slip of a thing like you. Even if it didn’t kill you, it’ll paralyze you until morning. The Komodos would find you long before that.”

Michael stared at the point of the dart. The tip had a drop of oil on it. He couldn’t look away.

“Don’t,” Jackie said in a long exhalation.

Samsa looked over at the elephant. He looked back at Michael. “She didn’t just talk, did she?”

“Is she going to be all right?”

Samsa looked back at her. “I think so. The curare didn’t kill her so it will wear off in a while. Pinto is bringing back the antidote.”

“Then pretty soon you’ll find out for yourself.”

Pinto returned with a professional looking bag. She gave it to Samsa and went to sit next to Jackie. She huddled next to her head. Michael hoped she had sense enough to move away when Jackie got up.

Michael tried to figure out the two of them. Samsa was an older man. What little hair he had left was streaked with gray and matched his beard. He was tall and thin as if strung together with wires. Pinto wasn’t much more than Michael’s own age. Through her loose shirt Michael could see a suggestion of young breasts, but her legs and arms still looked childish. Michael wondered if Pinto had bartered protection the same way he had with Uncle Ned. They didn’t look related.

Samsa pulled out two glass ampoules, one with a powder and the other a liquid, a syringe, and a wicked needle. He filled the syringe with the liquid and injected it into the ampoule with the powder and swirled it around to mix it. He caught Michael watching him.

“We don’t have much call to use this so it’s still in the original packaging.” Samsa grinned at him. “We brew the poison ourselves.”

“From what?”

“Poison arrow frogs down in the bayou. We go down there once or twice a year to catch what we need.”

“I didn’t know there were such animals.”

“Pretty little things. Red. Blue. All sorts of colors. Skin carries a poison that will lay you out to dry if you mess with them. They didn’t use to live down there but somebody’s menagerie broke open—or was deliberately released—and some small group managed to survive the cooler winters. It’s a nice weapon against humans—quiet. Quick. If you keep your wits about you, you can take down half a dozen people before they realize what’s happening.”

He finished shaking the ampoule and filled the syringe with the resulting mixture. “Out of the way, Pinto,” Samsa said. He swabbed a section of Jackie’s hide and slipped the needle in. Then he withdrew the needle, broke it, and put the syringe and broken needle in a jar from the bag.

“She’s still not going to be moving for a couple of hours but now her breathing won’t be affected.” He looked up at the hot sun. “We’ll have to keep her cool.” He looked at Michael. “Take your shirt off and wet it in the river. Keep it wet and on the elephant’s head.”

“Her name is Jackie.”

“Jackie, then.”

“Better untie me.”

“You’ll do fine with your hands tied together. Hop to it. Pinto? Help him but keep out of reach. Use your own shirt, too. I’ll go get a couple of buckets.”

Pinto kept a wary eye on Michael but he ignored her. The sun was hot even on his sweating body. He didn’t want to imagine what Jackie felt like.

“Keep her ears wet, too,” Pinto told him. “Elephants keep cool through their ears.” Michael grunted and bathed Jackie’s ears.

“Did she knock you down?” Pinto asked as they passed one another on the way to the river.

“She saved my life,” Michael said simply.

“Right.”

Michael shrugged.

Samsa returned with two buckets and a rifle. “I thought you liked poison,” Michael said.

“I do. But it’s hard to penetrate the hide of a crocodile with a dart.”

“There are crocodiles in this river?”

“Not usually this far north but sometimes. The Komodos usually stay away, too. But not always. I’ll keep watch, just in case.”

Michael stopped and looked at Samsa. “You were a Keeper at Hohenwald.”

“Director,” Samsa corrected.

“So you let the elephants go when everybody died?” Samsa cocked his head. “Eleven years ago.”

“All the other elephants in Saint Louis died. Jackie and the Keeper decided she should look for the elephants down here.”

“Did they, now?”

“Jackie’s going to have a baby. Is the poison going to hurt it?”

Samsa sighed and looked over to her still form. “I should have picked that up right away.” He turned back to Michael. “I hope not but there’s no way to know. If she doesn’t miscarry, it’s a fair bet the baby will be all right.” Samsa gestured to Michael. When Michael came close enough, Samsa untied his hands.

“I’m starting to believe you’re not a poacher.” He held up the gun. “But I still have the rifle.”

Michael nodded and went back to filling buckets.

In the early afternoon, Jackie started twitching. An hour later, she was trying to get up. Samsa stood next to her, speaking soothingly. “Don’t get up yet, girl.” He gestured Michael and Pinto off the sand bank.

Jackie seemed to calm down and remained still. But it wasn’t long until she heaved herself up, swaying and looking confused.

“It’s okay, girl,” Samsa said soothingly.

Jackie swung her trunk and knocked the rifle to the ground, then swung back, caught Samsa’s leg and turned him over on his back. In a moment, she had a foot on his chest.

“You tried to kill my boy,” she hissed. Samsa tried to speak but couldn’t.

Pinto ran to Jackie and tried to pull up her foot. Jackie ignored her. “Are you all right, Michael?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you want me to do with him?”

“Let him go,” Michael said. “He’s the director at Hohenwald.”

Jackie slowly raised her foot. She carefully walked down the sandbar into the water and eased into it.

Pinto held Samsa’s hand. She was crying. Michael squatted down next to him. “She can talk,” Samsa coughed out.

“I know,” Michael said.

Dear Mom,

We found the other elephants. But the people that own them found us. Almost killed us, too. Me, anyway.

Samsa and Pinto were out tracking the herd. There is one big herd of six adult females and no calves. There are two other groups. One has three females and one calf. The other has four females and two calves.

Male elephants don’t hang around except when they’re in muss. Or muth. Or something. There are four males in the area.

All of them are Indian elephants except one: Tika. Tika is an african elephant. She’s huge. She was the big elephant we saw at the stream. Samsa says it’s possible for african and indian elephants to mate but she won’t have any of the males. She’s real strickt with her group. Maybe that’s why they don’t have calves.

Samsa let the elephants free when it looked like everybody was going to die, him included. But he didn’t. Now there are fifteen people who help Samsa watch the elephants. They don’t eat meat. They protect the elephants from people. Maybe they want to be elephants themselves.

They have their own little village near here. Samsa seems to run things from what I’ve seen. They want Jackie to come to the village. Jackie’s not interedsted. She wants to join the herd. I think she’s suspicious of them. They won’t let me stay in the village. Maybe they still think I’m a poacher.

Love, Michael

“You need both legs to follow the elephants,” said Samsa reasonably. “I can get around pretty good with my crutch. Let me do something.”

“You can’t run. Sometimes the elephants charge and if you can’t get up a tree quick enough, there won’t be quite enough of you left to bury. We’ve lost people that way.” Samsa and Pinto left before Michael could protest further.

Jackie was resting near the camp. She watched them from a distance. Michael had no doubt she could hear every word.

Michael hobbled over to her. He sat down next to her. She reached up and pulled down the branch of a birch tree and began methodically pulling the leaves off and eating them.

“They won’t let me come with them,” Michael said. “So I heard.”

The fog had come up the trail from the river and everything was swathed in mist. Michael felt cold and half blind. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired. Laying in the sun for half a day takes a lot out of you.”

“Do you think there really are crocodiles in the river?”

“Do you think they’re lying?”

Michael looked back to the fog. “I guess not. Do you know which band you’re going after?”

Jackie didn’t answer for a moment. “Tika’s band, I think.”

“Won’t she be the hardest?”

“Probably.”

“Then why her?”

Jackie was quiet a moment. “Silly reasons. It’s surprising she even has a band with Indians in it. When you’re desperate for company you’ll take anything, I suppose.”

Michael didn’t speak immediately. His chest hurt and his throat felt thick. He stared up the trail where Samsa and Pinto had gone. Was that how he felt about them? Desperate? Was that how Jackie felt about him?

He went to their gear and opened up the hidden flap. He put together the rifle and took the exploding shells.

“What are you going to do?” Jackie stared at him. “Follow them.”

It was awkward to carry the rifle while he was still forced to use the crutch. He thought maybe he’d try to get down to one of the old cities and look for a leg. Or build one. He had a vague memory of a story about someone with a peg leg. That would be enough for him.

The trail was clear and Samsa and Pinto had left footprints so they weren’t hard to follow. He’d catch up to them or he wouldn’t. Either way he was doing something.

He could tell the trail was coming close to the river by the way the trees began to thin. Michael listened and he could hear splashing—probably the elephants. He found a tall tree, leaned the crutch against the trunk and slung the rifle over his back and started to climb.

From near the top, he had a commanding view of the river, the elephants, and Samsa and Pinto watching the elephants. He could also see the sunken logs slowly drifting toward the splashing of the elephants. He unslung the rifle and aimed it at one of the logs. The telescopic sight showed the crocodile clearly. He turned on the laser and saw the bright red spot appear on the animal’s back. Then he watched.

Samsa and Pinto were watching the elephants. Samsa had a rifle but it was slung. He was talking, or maybe arguing, with Pinto. One of the crocodiles stopped, watching the bank. Then it submerged.

Let’s see, thought Michael. Think like a croc—or a dragon. Go for the little target, not the big one. Where would I attack from if I were a crocodile?

The water erupted near Pinto.

Right there. For a moment, the crocodile was frozen in midleap, the red spot clearly showing on his neck. Michael squeezed off three shots. He saw the water and blood spurt where they hit.

Then time caught and the crocodile started to close his jaws on Pinto when the explosive rounds triggered.

There was no flash or sound but the crocodile fell to the ground, dragging Pinto down with him. Samsa pulled Pinto out of the animal’s limp mouth. They scrambled back up the bank, blood showing on Pinto’s legs. But the croc was unmoving.

The elephants roared out of the water and ran into the forest. Michael stayed there for some time but the river was empty save for the remaining crocs staying safely off shore.

He climbed down and made his way back to camp. Samsa was treating Pinto’s wounds.

Michael put the rifle down and sat next to it. “I have some use,” he said.

Samsa was sitting across from him when Michael awoke. “I want the rifle.”

Michael sat up. “I’d like to live in the village and use it to help you. But what I’d really like is to have my leg back. But that’s the way it is.”

Samsa shook his head. “We don’t know you. I can’t have any weapon around that can kill an elephant in the hands of someone I don’t know.”

“You mean like the darts?”

“That’s different.” Samsa watched him a moment. “We could dart you and take it.” Michael pulled out the pistol and held it loosely. He didn’t point it at Samsa but he didn’t deliberately point it away. “You could pry it from my cold dead hands, I suppose.”

“I know where that expression comes from. Do you?”

“Does it matter?” Michael was quiet for a moment. “I think it should be enough that Jackie trusts me.”

“I don’t think so. Jackie hasn’t seen enough humans to know who to trust.”

“Do tell,” said Jackie from behind Samsa.

Michael looked up at Jackie. “You tell me what you want done with the rifle.”

“Keep it,” said Jackie shortly. “Likely you’re a better shot with it than he is. Certainly, you’re more trustworthy.”

“I am the caretaker of the elephants,” Samsa said in a controlled voice.

“That’s not your job,” said Jackie. “It’s mine.”

They didn’t tell Samsa or Pinto or anyone else they were leaving. The village was up the hill and out of sight behind a bend in the trail. Michael certainly wasn’t going out of his way to say goodbye. Even so, Michael could feel watchful eyes on him as they turned from the trail that led up the hill to the elephant scat covered trail that followed the bottomland.

“Tell me,” Jackie said conversationally that afternoon. “Do you think Samsaville is on the map?”

Michael laughed for a long time.

The quality of their travel changed. Before, Michael had felt essentially alone in the forest. Other elephants were an abstraction. Other humans were absent. The very idea of a village was absurd.

But now Samsaville—the name stuck—loomed in his mind. He thought Jackie might think similarly about the elephants.

Dear Mom,

Jackie and I have left the other people and went to look for the elephants on our own. I’m not sure what’s going to happen now. Maybe Jackie would be better without a one legged crippled kid.

I miss you and Dad. I miss Gerry. I even miss Uncle Ned. I miss my leg. It hurts at night.

Jackie’s worried about joining the elephants. She doesn’t say so but I can tell. Maybe Samsa will follow us. Maybe he’ll dart me or worse. Maybe Tika won’t let us join. Maybe something bad will happen.

Whatever happens, I love you.

Michael

They found Tika two days later. It was midmorning. The herd was grazing on the edge of a clearing. Worn buildings marked the clearing as having once been a farm. Michael looked at the ancient stubble of corn shocks and rusting machinery. This farm had never seen a robot. It had been abandoned long ago.

Tika had already turned to face them before Jackie and Michael left the forest. She must have heard them coming, thought Michael. Or smelled them.

Jackie stopped well short of them and started grazing on the opposite side of the clearing. After an hour or so, Tika returned to grazing with the other females. But her attention never wavered from Jackie.

Afternoon came and the herd disappeared into the forest. Michael slid down to the ground and made himself a lunch out of dried fruit and crocodile jerky.

“Samsa is watching us,” Jackie muttered and she stood near Michael. “Up on the ridge. I can smell him.”

Michael nodded. “Is he going to shoot me?”

“I can’t smell a gun but that doesn’t mean much.”

“Anybody else?”

Jackie shook her head. “Not as far as I can tell.”

“Nothing to be done, then.”

Michael chewed the crocodile jerky. Not bad. Sort of like chicken. “I wonder why the dragons don’t come across the bridges. Do you think there’s something here they don’t like?”

“Maybe the elephants kill them. I know I would.”

“You did.”

“True.” Jackie thought for a moment. “It’s a mistake to think this ecology is complete. Humans left it very recently. It could be the Komodos just haven’t reached this far yet. The Komodos have to migrate north from the coast every spring and return every fall. It’s going to take time for them to penetrate new areas. Any place they go can only be as far as they can return to in time to avoid the winter.”

“They could learn to winter up here.”

“Unlikely.”

“They’re unlikely, right? Who knows what they can do?”

Jackie was silent for a moment. “That’s not something I want to think about.”

Michael shivered. “Me, neither.”

The next week followed the same ritual. The elephants came to the abandoned farm and grazed, moving over to new areas as they stripped the old of leaves. By the week’s end, Jackie and Tika had circled the entire clearing. Still standing opposite one another, Jackie was now where they had first sighted Tika and Tika was grazing where Jackie had first entered the clearing.

“Today we have to follow them,” said Michael. He spat out the last of the meat. He was tired of crocodile jerky.

“It’s too soon.”

“Look around you.” Michael pointed at the trees. “There’s nothing left. They’re not going to come back here just to say hello.”

Tika chivvied her herd back to the clearing’s entrance. Jackie followed at a respectful distance. Tika kept turning to check on them.

“This might work out,” Jackie whispered.

They followed the band for hours. The smell of Samsa and the other humans faded. The trail became wilder and more curved until they couldn’t see the band for minutes at a time. Then they turned a corner in the trail and Tika was facing them.

Jackie stopped dead still. Michael had been leaning forward, resting his head on Jackie’s head and watching. He froze, not wanting to draw attention to himself.

Tika approached cautiously, trunk half raised and sniffing the air. Jackie raised her trunk slightly. When the two of them were close enough, they sniffed each other with their trunks. Tika seemed to relax.

Michael watched. It came to him that Tika wanted Jackie in her band—maybe because she was pregnant. Maybe because there were dangers enough out here for everybody to share.

Tika suddenly whipped her trunk over Jackie’s head and caught Michael squarely in the side, sweeping him off Jackie’s neck and down on the ground in front of Tika.

Michael fell the ten feet in a moment of frozen astonishment and landed hard on his back, knocking the wind out of him. Desperately, he tried to force himself to breathe, cough, anything. But his lungs stubbornly refused to fill.

Tika raised her leg over him.

Michael saw the details of her foot, the broken toenail, the puckered scar. Jackie screamed “No!” and stepped over him, shoving Tika away.

Tika stumbled back and then shoved back.

Jackie stood foursquare over him, her head and trunk down.

Michael’s breath caught and he sat up, watched twenty tons of animals shoving above him.

“Move,” Jackie cried.

Michael scrambled away. A tree! Where’s a tree? He saw an oak and hopped over to it, clawed his way up the trunk and into the branches high enough to escape Tika.

Jackie fell back in front of the tree, facing Tika. Tika trumpeted at her.

It was as if she shouted in English: You we want. But not with him. Jackie trumpeted back. Not without him.

“Jackie,” he shouted. “Go with them. I’ll be okay.” Tika fell back, staring at the two of them.

“No,” Jackie said. “Both of us or not at all.” Michael found himself crying.

PART 5

Dear Mom,

It’s been a while since I wrote but I’ve been busy. Little Bill is just as stubborn as his mother. Jackie says he outgrew the cute phase when he was two. Now she thinks it’s just unpleasant. But I like him. He reminds me of his mother.

I think Tika’s finally accepted me. It took long enough. She’s allowed me to stay all this time by just ignoring me. But a few weeks ago before we left Panacea one of her toenails got infected and needed to be lanced and cleaned. It was pretty clear it had to be done before we started north. Jackie stood next to me to make sure I didn’t get hurt. But Tika brought over her foot and didn’t twitch when I cleaned out the wound. It must have hurt. It looks lots better now.

That was just after I shot two Komodos that had decided to make a meal out of Tika’s leg. The Komodos aren’t much problem in the winter. They’re all asleep somewhere. But between the time they wake up in the spring and the time they start north, they’re pretty hungry and mean. I can’t say for sure what made Tika change her mind. But she seemed pretty happy that Jackie and I were walking next to her when we went North this year.

Things are still changing. The Komodos are tough but they seem to have a hard time with the brush lions. We’re not sure. Where we find brush lions, there aren’t any Komodos and where we find Komodos there aren’t any brush lions. We don’t know exactly what’s going on.

And the fire ants keep spreading north.

Good news this spring. Both Tanya and Wilma are pregnant. The bull that visited around Christmas must have done his job. More young ones for Little Bill to play with.

We’re not far from Samsaville. It’ll be nice to see Pinto and Samsa. I’m trying to persuade Jackie we should go far enough north to see Gerry. But she doesn’t like going through dragon country.

All for now,

Love, Michael

Michael finished signing his name and closed the notebook. It was almost filled. This would be book number seven. He hefted it in his hands. He wondered if he was a little off in his head to be writing his dead mother all these years. He was sixteen now. Michael shrugged. He still liked doing it. Maybe Jackie would have an opinion on it.

He put down his pack and watched the river flow by. Mostly he just enjoyed the play of sunlight and color on the water. It was a careful observation, too. Keeping track of floating logs nearby that might leap out at him. The crocodiles had become more numerous in the last couple of years. Michael didn’t know what they were eating but so far none had tasted elephant on his watch.

Little Bill came down to the edge of the bank. Little? Michael smiled to himself. Bill’s head was two feet taller than he was.

“Jackie’s-Boy! Jackie’s-Boy!” he piped, a tiny voice for such a large body. Michael wondered when, and if, the elephant’s voice would ever break into the deep timbre of an adult. Michael’s had. Well, mostly. Sometimes it still cracked.

“Just Michael,” he said. “Like I always say. Just Michael.”

“Jackie’s-Boy is what Tika calls you.”

Michael chuckled, wondering, not for the first time, how an elephant spoke without being able to speak. The world was filled with mysteries. “Does she now?”

“Are you ready to go?” piped Bill. “Tika sent me to get you. She wants you and Jackie to go first.”

Michael reached down and pulled up his artificial leg and fastened it on. “Really? Tika wants us to lead?”

“Sure. At least as far as Cobraville.”

“Ah. She wants us to cross the fire ants first, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“Will wonders never cease?”

Little Bill didn’t answer. Instead, he made a leg. Michael shouldered the rifle and climbed up over his neck. He looked around. The blue bowl of the sky above him, the warm sun, his gray family patiently waiting for him half a mile away. He felt like singing.

Lovingly, he patted the top of Little Bill’s head.

“Well, then. Musn’t grumble,” he said with a grin. “Let’s go.”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April/May 2010

Entangled

Ian R. MacLeod

When she awakes, it seems as if she’s not alone. Many arms are around her, and she’s filled with a roaring chorus of voices. Consciousness follows in a series of ragged flickers, and the voices fade, and soon she inhabits her own thoughts, and knows that she is Martha Chauhan, and nothing has changed. But the air, the light, the sounds which reach this morning to her room fifteen floors up in Bladwin Towers, all feel different today . . .

Lumbering from bed, she clears a space in the frost, peers blearily down, and sees from the blaze of white that it’s snowed heavily in the night, and that many of the entangled are already up and about. Kids, but adults as well. Either throwing snowballs, or dragging handmade toboggans, or building snowmen, or helping clear the pathways between the tower blocks. The small shadows of their movements seem impossibly balletic.

Still climbing from the fuzz of night, she counts and dry-swallows the usual immune suppressants from her palm. The water isn’t entirely cold, the hob puts out just enough heat to turn her coffee lukewarm, and she’s grateful she doesn’t have to use the commune toilets. In so many ways, she’s privileged. Fumbling with yesterday’s clothes, she swipes the mirror for glimpses of a woman in late middle age with something odd about the left side of her skull, then picks up her carpetbag and heads down the pell-mell stairs with other commune residents in their flung coats, sideways bobble hats and unmatched gloves.

Shouts and snowballs criss-cross the air as she crunches to her readapted Mini, another great privilege, which has already been cleared of snow. She clambers in. Shivers and hugs herself as she waits for the fuel cell to warm. Finally, she drives off. Along with the 1960s tower blocks, there are houses and maisonettes in other parts of this estate that were once occupied by individual families. Now, they have all been reshaped and knocked through, joined by plastic-weld polysheets, raggedly angled sheds and tunnels of tarpaulin, with the gardens and other open spaces used for communal planting and grazing. Everything’s white this morning, but all the roads have been cleared, and braziers already blaze in the local market where the communes come to barter. Strangers smile to each other as they pass. Acquaintances hug. Co-workers sing gusty songs as they shovel the paths. Lovers walk hand in hand. Even the snowmen are grinning.

This isn’t how I imagined my life would be.

I grew up in this same city, not far from these streets. Dad was of Indian birth, and came here to the England with my brother in his arms and me clinging to the strap of his suitcase and our mother dead from a terrorist dirty bomb back in Calcutta. He changed my name from Madhur to Martha, and Daman’s to Damien, and honed his cultural knowledge to go with his excellent English, and had all the certificates and bio-tags to prove he was a doctor, and was determined to make his mark. Money is important, and so is security, and status is something to be cherished—that was what Martha Chauhan learned at her father’s knee. That, and all the stories he told me as he sat by my bed. Tenali Ramakrishna and the gift of the three dolls who all seemed the same, but only one of which knew how to feel. Artful imps who danced about the flames in a hidden heart of a forest to the secret of their own name. But maybe I was too cosseted, for I could never get the point. The world was clearly collapsing. You could see that merely by switching screens from the kiddie channels he tried to sit Damien and me in front of in our secure house in our gated and protected estate. A wave of my chubby hand, and the Technicolor balloon things dissolved and you were looking down at people clinging to trees as the helicopters flew on, or bomb blast wreckage surrounded by wailing women, and then Damien started crying, and that was that.

St James’ schoolhouse is like something from Dickensian old times, even without today’s gingerbread icing of snow. A great, paternally white oak looms across the trampled playground. Martha heads inside past the tiny rows of dripping coats into a room filled with rampaging four year olds. The walls hang with askew potato prints and cheery balloon-style faces. There’s a sandpit and a ballpool and something else that hovers in mid-air that fizzes and buzzes as the kids dive.

Tommy the teacher lies somewhere at the bottom of largest piles of waving limbs, and it’s some time before he or anyone else notices Martha’s presence. When they do, it’s as if she’s left the doors open and is a cold draft the kids feel on their necks. Once the unease is there, it spreads impossibly fast. Tommy, who’s lying on his back like a tickled dog, is almost the last to pick up the change of mood.

He clambers to his feet in a holed jumper and half the contents of the sandpit bulging his pockets. The kids cluster around him, exchanging looks, half-words, mumbles, grunts, nudges, gestures and silences. Tommy does as well until he remembers how rude that is.

“It’s okay, it’s okay . . . ! We have a visitor, and I want everyone to simply talk when Martha’s with us. Right?” Kids give metronomic nods as Martha’s introduced as the nice lady who’s going to be seeing them individually over the next few hours. Then a hand goes up, then another. “So why . . . ” asks a small voice, before different one takes over until the question finishes in chorus. “ . . . isn’t she . . . HERE . . . ?”

Followed by a rustle of giggles. After all, Martha obviously is here. But, in another, deeper, sense she’s clearly not. Martha understands their curiosity. After all, she can remember how she used to stare at fat people and paraplegics when she was young until her father told her it was impolite. She can’t help but smile as hands sneak out to touch the snow-melting tips of her boots, just to check she’s not some weird kind of ghost.

“I am here,” she says. “But the thing is, not everyone has the same gift that all of you have. I can see you, and I can hear you as well. But there was an accident—perhaps you can see where it was . . . ” She turns so they can admire the odd shape of her skull. “I lost . . . ” She pauses. “ . . . part of my mind. Truth is, I’m very lucky to be here at all. What my disability means is that I’m not entangled. Not part of the gestalt. I can’t share and feel as you do. But I’m as real as all of you are. Look, this is my hand . . . ” She holds it out. Slowly, slowly, tentatively, little fingers encircle her own like new shoots enclosing old roots. Then, and at the same instant, and as if by some hidden decision, they withdraw. As they settle back, the face of one of the boys blurs and tries to reshape itself into Damien’s.

Dad always was an industrious man. Not only had he managed to qualify as a doctor back in India, but he’d studied what was then called biomechanical science. He also had a practical business eye. He’d worked out that the most secure jobs in medicine at a time of collapsing insurance and failing state healthcare were to be found in the developing technologies of neural enhancement.

I remember him taking Damien and me along with him one day to the private hospital where he did much of his work. It was probably down to some failure in the child-minding arrangements that all single parents have to make, although Damien must have been about five by then and I was nearly twelve, so perhaps he really had wanted to show us what he did.

“Here we are . . . ””

The rake of a handbrake in his old-fashioned car that smelled of leather and Damien’s tendency to get travelsick. We’d already passed through several security systems and sets of high walls, and were now outside this big old castle of a building that looked like something out of Harry Potter or Tolkien—all turrets and pointy windows. Then doors swished, and suddenly everything turned busy and modern, with people leaning down with dangling their unlikely smiles and security passes toward us to ask who we were—at least, until Damien began to cry. Then we were inside a bright room, and this creature was laid at its centre surrounded by wires and humming boxes and great semi-circular slabs of metal.

Damien sat over in a far corner, pacified by some game. But apparently it was important that I stand close and listen to what he had to say. You see, Martha, this patient—her name’s Claire, by the way—is suffering from a condition that is slowly destroying her mind. Can you imagine what that must be like? To forget the names of your best friends and the faces of your family? To get confused by simple tasks and slowly lose any sense of who you really are? A terrible, terrible thing. But we now have a procedure that helps combat that process. What we do, you see . . . he’d called up a display which floated between us like a diseased jellyfish . . . is to insert these incredibly clever seeds which are like little crystals into her skull that we then stimulate with those big magnets can see around her head so they slowly take over the damaged bits of her mind . . .

The jellyfish quivered.

Dad doubtless went on in this way for some time, probably covering all sorts of fascinating moral and philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness, and how this withered relic would come to use all this new stuff in her head in much the same way that someone who’s lost their hand might use a re-grown one. But not quite. Nothing in medicine is ever perfect, you see, Martha, and bits of people’s brains can’t be persuaded to regenerate in way that other parts of their body can, and rejection—that means, Martha, when the body doesn’t recognise something as part of itself—is still a problem, and a great deal of practise and continued medication is going to be needed if Claire’s to make the most of this gift of half a new mind. Meanwhile, I was staring at the creased and scrawny flesh that emerged from all that steel and plastic like the neck of a tortoise, and thinking, why is something so old and horrid still even alive?

Martha’s given her usual “room” at the school—actually little more than a cupboard—and says no to an offer of coffee. Then she opens up her carpetbag and puts the field cap with its dangle of controls and capillaries on the radiator to warm. The entanglement virus is generally contracted naturally soon after birth, but it’s the job of her, and many others like her, to deal with any problems which may arise during the short fever which follows. She often looks in again on toddlers, but it’s at this age, when the children have joined the gestalt as individual personalities, that’s the next major watch-out. Then, if it all goes as well as it almost always does, there are some final checks to be made during the hormone surge of adolescence. In some cultures and other parts of the globe, she’d be thought of as a shaman, priest, imam or witch doctor. But the world had changed, and the differences really aren’t that great.

“This is where I . . . Should be?”

Martha looks up, slightly surprised by the way this kid has simply stepped in to this tiny room. Most hang around outside and wait to be invited, or rub and scratch at the door like kittens, seeing as, even though her disability has been explained to them, they still find it difficult to believe that she’s actually inside. “Yes. That’s perfect. You’re . . . ” She glances at Tommy’s execrably written list. “Shara, right? Shara of Widney Commune. Am I getting your name right, by the way? Shara? Such a pretty name, but I don’t think I’ve heard it much before. Or is it Shar-ra?”

“I think it’s just Shara,” she says as she settles on the old gym mat. She has bright blue eyes. Curly, almost reddish, hair. “Some people say it different but it doesn’t matter. The other mums and most of the dads sometimes just call me Sha. I think Shara was just a name they made up for me when I was born.”

Shara of the Widney Commune really is an extraordinarily composed creature. Pretty with it, with those dazzling eyes and the fall around her cheeks of that curly hair, which Martha longs to touch, just to see if it really is as soft and springy as it looks. If ever there was a subject for whom her attentions might seem irrelevant, it’s Shara. And yet . . . There’s something about this girl . . . Martha blinks, swallows, kicks her mind back into focus and reminds herself that she’s taken her usual handful of immune suppressants, just as Shara’s features threaten to dissolve.

“Are you alright?”

“Oh . . . ? Absolutely, Shara. Now, I want you to put this on.”

Shara takes the field cap and puts it on in the right way without the usual prompting, even tightening the chinstrap against the pressure of those lovely curls. She lies down.

“I want you to close your eyes.”

Unquestioningly, she does so.

“Can you see anything?”

She shakes her head.

“How about now?” Martha lifts the ends of the capillaries and touches the controls.

“It’s all kind of fizzy.”

“And now?”

“Like lines . . . ”

“And now?”

This time, Shara doesn’t respond. Her fingers are quivering. Her cheeks have paled. The rhythm of her breathing has slowed. Sometimes, although Martha tries to insist that they use the toilet beforehand, the kids wet themselves. But not Shara. The girl’s in a fugue state now, lost deep inside the gestalt. Always a slight risk at this point that they won’t come back, and Martha’s trained in CPR and has adrenalin and antipsychotic shots primed and ready in her carpetbag just in case they need to be quickly woken up or knocked out, but the rigidity fades just as soon as she cuts the signal back. Shara stretches. Blinks. Sits up. Smiles.

“How was that?” Martha helps unclip the field cap and feels the spring of those lovely curls.

Shara thinks. “It was lovely. Thank you Martha,” she says. Then she kisses her cheek.

It wasn’t all famine, tribal wars, economic collapse back in the day. Life mostly went on as it always did, and I suppose Dad did his best to try to keep us going as some kind of family as well. I remember a summer West Country beach—it wasn’t all floods and landslips, either—that he must have driven us down to from the Midlands in that creaky old car between regular stops at the roadside for Damien to vomit. There we were, Dad and me, sat on an old rug amid our sandwiches and samosas whilst dogs flung themselves after Frisbees and Damien and some other lads attempted to play cricket. Kites stuck like hatpins into a pale sky and a roaring in my ears that could be the sea, but often comes when I chase too hard after memories.

Dad was chattering on as he often did. Trying hard not to be a bore, or talk down to me, but not really succeeding . . . You see, Martha, the work I do on the mind, the brain, the whole strange business of human consciousness, is just the very beginning. The crystals I persuade to grow inside peoples’ skulls are almost as primitive as wooden legs. Real, living neurons use quantum effects—it isn’t just electricity and chemistry. The mind, the entirety of the things we call thought and memory and consciousness, is really the sum of a shimmer of uncertainties. It mirrors the universe, and perhaps even calls it into existence. But even that’s not the most wonderful thing about us, Martha. You see, we all think we’re alone, don’t we? You imagine you’re somewhere inside your skull and I’m somewhere inside mine, that we’re like separate islands? But we’re not looking at it from enough dimensions. It’s like us sitting on this beach, and looking out over those waves toward the horizon, and seeing a scatter of islands. No, no, I’m not saying there are real islands out there, Martha because there obviously aren’t. But just stay with me for a moment my dear and try to imagine. We’d think of those islands as alone and separate, wouldn’t we? But they’re not. Not if you look at the world sideways. Beneath the sea, under the waves, all the islands are joined. It’s just that we can’t properly see it, or feel it. Not yet, anyway . . .

The day moved on, and Dad stood at the driftwood wicket like any good Englishman, or Indian, and soon got bowled out. Then he fielded, and dropped an easy catch from Damien as I crunched through the last of the sandy samosas. Then the wind blew colder, and the kites and the Frisbees and the dogs fled the beach, and the last thing I can remember is my lost Dad holding hands with lost brother Damien as he wandered with his trousers rolled at the edge of the roaring sea.

Martha drives out toward the edge of the motorway system which still encircles this old city. The big trucks are out in force now; great, ponderous leviathans that grumble along the rubbled concrete out of a greyness that threatens more snow. Dwarfed by their wheels, she parks her Mini at a transport stop, and stomps up to the glass and plastic counter. It’s a regular old-fashioned greasy spoon. The windows are steamed, and baked beans are still on the menu, and the coffee here is moderately strong. Always a difficult dance, getting through a busy space when people’s backs are turned, but she clatters her tray to give warning, and they soon share the sense of her oddity and decide not to stare. Mindblind coming through.

She likes it here. The people who do this travelling kind of work far from their communes are still surprisingly solitary by nature. A few are sharing tables and chatting in low voices or quietly touching, but most sit on their own and appear to be occupied with little but their own thoughts. In places like this it’s possible to soak up a companionship of loneliness that she can imagine she shares. Sometimes, one of them comes over to talk. Sometimes, but more rarely, and after all the usual over-polite questions, the conversation moves on, and the some of old signs of sexual availability, which to them must seem arcane as smoke signals, waft into view.

There are some rooms at the back of this place which anyone who needs them is free to use. Piled mattresses and cushions. Showers for afterwards—or during. Sex with Martha Chauhan must be something lonely and oddly exotic, and perhaps a little filthy, as far as the entangled are concerned. A weird kind of masturbation with someone else in the room. There’s an odd emptiness in their eyes as they and the gestalt study her when, and if, she comes. But Martha’s getting older. Mindblind or not, they probably find her repulsive, and whatever urgency she once felt to be with someone in that way has gone.

She pushes aside her plate and swirl the dregs of her coffee. Blinks away the fizzing arrival of her father’s reproachful smile. After all, what has she done wrong? But the empty truth is there’s nothing she needs to do this afternoon. She could go back to her room in Baldwin Towers and try to sleep. She could go tobogganing, although being with other people having fun is one of the loneliest things of all. This day, the whole of whatever is left of her life, looms blank as these steamy, snow-whitened windows. She could give up. She could stop taking her tablets. Instead, though, she rummages in her carpetbag and studies the list she was given this morning, and sees that name again, Shara of the Widney Commune, and remembers the face of that striking little girl.

I first bumped into Karl Yann during one of my many afternoons of disgruntled teenage wandering. Dad, of course, was full of You must be carefuls and Do watch outs. Well, fuck that for a start, I thought as I tried without success to slam the second of the heavy sets of gates which guarded our estate. Looking back through the shockwire-topped fence at the big, neat houses with their postage stamp lawns, panic rooms and preposterous names, it was easy to think of prisons. Then, reaching into my coat pocket, hooking the transmitter buds around my ears and turning on my seashell, my head filled with beats, smells, swirls and other sensations, and it was easy not to think of anything at all. Hunching off along the glass and dogshit pavements past the boarded-up shops, dead lampposts and abandoned cars, there was a knack that I’d mastered to keeping my device set so I remained aware enough to avoid walking into things. Until, that was, I found my way blocked by a large, laughing presence that was already reaching into my pocket and taking out, and then turning off, my precious seashell.

The city was supposedly full of piratical presences, at least according to my father, but this guy actually looked like a pirate. That, or, with his bushy red beard, twinkling blue eyes, wildly curly hair, be-ribboned coat and pixie boots, like some counter-cultural Father Christmas.

“Give that back!”

He grinned, still cupping my seashell in a big, paint-grained palm. “This is a pretty cool device, you know. Basically, it’s mimicking your brainwaves so it can mess around with your thoughts . . . ”

My father had said something similar, but this man’s tone was admiring rather than concerned. At least, he seemed a man to me; I figured out later that Karl was barely into his twenties.

“I said—”

“Here. Don’t want to get yourself tangled . . . ” Almost impossibly gently, he was reaching to unpick the buds from around my ears, and already I was hooked. He was asking me questions. He seemed interested in my head-down city wanderings, and where I was from, and what I’d been playing on my seashell, and what I thought about things, and even in my Indian background, although I did have to make most of that up.

“This is the place. Don’t snag yourself . . . ”

Now, he was holding the wire of the fence that surrounded one of those half-finished developments that the dying economy had never finished. Maybe shops or offices or housing, but basically just a shrouded, rusty-scaffolded concrete frame. A few floors up, though, and in this place he called “the waystation” became a different world. In many ways, it was a glimpse of what was to come.

People stirred and said hi. The waystation’s inner walls were painted, or hung with random bits of stuff, or fizzed with projections that drifted to and fro in the city haze. Old vehicles, bits of construction material, expensive drapes, blankets and rugs that looked more as if they had come from gated estate communities such as my own, had all been cleverly re-used to shape an exotic maze. Everything here had been transformed and recycled, and it was plain to me already that Karl was an artist of some talent, and at heart of whatever was going on.

The Widney Commune is based around a grand old house, with icicled gates leaning before a winding drive. Some long-dead Midlands industrialist’s idea of fine living. Shara and the other commune youngsters will still be down at the schoolhouse, and most of the adults will be out. This place could almost be deserted, Martha tells herself as she edges her Mini up the drive and clambers out. The main door lies up a half-circle of uncleared steps, with an old bellpull beside. Something tinkles deep within the house when she gives it an experimental tug.

Even with all the indignities which have been inflicted on it—the warty vents and pipings, the tumbling add-ons—this is still a fine old sort of a place to live. Especially when you compare it to Baldwin Towers. No fifteen floors to ascend. Nor any concrete stalactites, or rusting pipes, or a useless flat roof. The entangled might claim that they can see the wrongness of things, and feel disappointment and envy. But they clearly don’t.

Martha starts when snow scatters her shoulders.

“Hello there,” she shouts up with all her usual yes-I-really-am-here cheeriness. “Just trying to see if there’s anyone at home.”

“Oh . . . ” A pause as the head at the window above registers that she’s not some odd garden statue. “ . . .  I’m sorry. The front door’s been stuck for years. If you can come around to the side . . . ”

This pathway’s been cleared, as even a mindblind moron should have noticed, leading to a side entrance which opens into what was once, and still mostly is, a very great hall.

The space goes all the way up and there are galleries around it and a wide set of stairs. Live ivy grows up over the beams and there’s a hutch in the corner where fat-eared rabbits lollop, and it’s plain that the woman who’s sashaying over to greet Martha is the source of at least half of Shara’s good looks.

“I’m Freya . . . ” After a small hesitation, she holds out a hand. It’s crusty with flour, as are her bare arms. Her shoulders are bare, too, and so are her feet. Which, like the tip of her nose, are also dusted white. She’s wearing holed dungarees that show off a great deal of her lithe, slim figure. Dirty blonde hair done up in a kind of knot. “ . . . you’re . . . ?” Confused by the difficulties of introduction with someone of Martha’s disability, she hesitates with a pout.

“Martha Chauhan.” Martha lets her hand, which by now is floury as well, slip from Freya’s. “I’m guessing you’re Shara’s birth mother?”

“That’s right.” Freya squints hard. “You were testing Shara? Today? At school?”

Martha nods. “Not that there’s any cause for concern.”

“That’s good.” She smiles. Hugs herself.

“But I, ah . . . ” Martha looks around again, wondering if this is how social workers once felt. “Sometimes just like to call in on a few communes. Just to . . . Well . . . ”

“Of course,” Freya nods. “I understand.”

Somehow, she does, even if Martha doesn’t. The entangled live in a sea of trust.

“Most people are out, either working or enjoying the day. But I’ve just finished baking . . . so what can I show you?”

The entangled are relentlessly proud of their communes. They’ll argue and josh about who breeds the fluffiest sheep, puts on the cheeriest festival or grows the best crop of beets. As always, there’s the deep, sweet, monkeyhouse reek of massed and rarely washed humanity, but it’s mingled here with different odours of yeast, and the herbs that seem to be hanging everywhere to dry, and yet more of those rabbits. Each commune has its own specialities which it uses to exchange for things it doesn’t make, and this one turns out to be rabbits which are raised to make warm blankets and coats from their skins, as well as for their meat. This commune’s bread is something they’re particularly proud of, as well. Down in the hot kitchen, Freya tears some with her hands, takes a bite, then offers Martha the rest, dewy with spit. She doesn’t have to lie when she says she isn’t hungry.

Many of the rooms look like the scenes of some perpetual sleepover. The entangled mostly sleep like puppies, curling up wherever they fancy, although Freya’s slightly more coy about one or two other spaces, which reek of sex. Another smell, sourer this time, comes from some leaking chairs and sofas set around a big fire where the old ones cluster, basking like lizards, tremulous hands joined and rheumy eyes gazing into the tumbled memories at a past forever gone.

“And this is where Shara sleeps with the rest of the under-tens . . . ”

Another charming, fetid mess, although this one’s scattered with toys. There’s a spinning top. There are rugs and papier mache stars. There’s a one-eyed, one-armed teddy bear. A few story books and piles of paper, as well, along with newer, stranger devices that make no sense to Martha at all.

“Shara’s your only birth child?”

Freya nods. She looks at least as proud of that as she is of most things, even if parenting is shared in a loose kind of way that involves the whole commune and no one gets too possessive. Knowing exactly who the father is can be difficult. In this era of trust, mothers are surprisingly coy about who they’ve fucked. Women often wander out to visit other communes—driven either by biological imperative or the simple curiosities of lust—and births are often followed by versions of the he’s got Uncle Eric’s nose conversations that must have gone on throughout human history.

Freya’s showing drawings and scraps of writing that Shara’s done, then lifting up pretty bits of clothing she’s resewn herself for all the kids to use and share.

“No new babies at the moment,” she adds. “Although we’re planning, of course . . . Soon as the commune has the resources. And Shara’s been such a joy to us all . . . That I’m rather hoping . . . ” As she puts the things back, her hands move unconsciously to her breasts.

“And Shara’s father? Somehow, I’m guessing he’s a fair bit older than you are . . . ?”

“Oh? That’s right.” Freya smiles, not remotely insulted or surprised. “Karl’s hoping, as well. We all are. Would you like to see the studio where he works?”

Martha blinks, swallows, nods. A falling feeling as she follows Freya down a long corridor then through a doorway into what’s clearly an artist’s studio. Rich smells of oil and varnish. Linseed oil squeezed out over a press. Pigments from the hedgerow, or wherever it is that pigments come from. Half-finished canvases lean against the walls. The room is a kind of atrium, lit from windows on all sides and high up. The colours and the shadows roar out to her even on a day as wintry as this.

“He’s probably out helping in one of the greenhouses,” Freya says. “That or sketching. He tends to paint in short, intense bursts.”

The canvases are part abstract and part Turner seascape. They’re undeniably accomplished, and recognisably Karl Yann’s, although to Martha’s mind they’ve lost their old edge. The entangled are good at making pretty and practical things, but proper art seems to be beyond them. Still, as Martha stares at the largest blur of colour, which looms over her like a tsunami in a paint factory, it’s hard not to be drawn.

Freya chuckles, standing so close that Martha can smell the grease in her hair. “I know. They’re lovely, and they barter really well . . . But Karl doesn’t like to have them up on display in our commune. Says all he’d ever see is where he went wrong.”

I never did get my seashell back, but I got Karl Yann instead. He had a bragging mix of certainty and vulnerability which I found appealing after my father’s endless on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other attempts at balance. Karl was clever and he knew what he thought. Karl was an accomplished artist. Karl cared. He’d read stuff and done things and been to places and had opinions about everything, but he also wanted to know what my views were, and actually seemed to listen to me when I said them. Or at least, he had a roguishly charming way of cocking his head. Maybe it was a little late in the day for this whole hippy/beatnik/bohemian revolutionary shtick, but these things come new to every generation—or at least they used to—and they felt new to me. Karl used real paint when he could, or whatever else came to hand—he found the virtuals fascinating but frustrating—but what he really wanted to create was a changed world. No use accepting things as they are, Martha. No use taking about what needs to be done. At least, not unless you’re prepared to act to make the necessary sacrifices to help bring about the coming wave of change. The forests dying. Whole continents starving. The climate buggered. The economy fucked. So, are you with us, Martha, or not?

They called them performance acts, and Karl and the other inhabitants of the waystation were convinced they were contributing towards bringing about a better world. And so, now, was I. People had to be shaken out of their complacency—especially the selfish, cosseted rich, with all their possessions, all their things—and what was the harm in having some fun while we’re doing so? Right? Okay? Yes?

We used my credit pass to gain access to one of those exclusive, guarded, gated, palm tree-filled, rich-people-only, air-conditioned pleasure domes they still called shopping malls to which my father had occasionally taken me and Damien as a birthday treat, and pulled on balaclavas and yelled like heathens and flung pigshit-filled condoms at the over-privileged shoppers and their shit-filled shops, and got out laughing and high-fiving in the ensuing mayhem. We climbed fences and sneaked through gardens and around underlit pools to hang paintings upside down and spraypaint walls and mess with people’s heads. Then, often as not, and young as Martha Chauhan still was, she went home to her gated estate.

The Mini seems to know the way from the Widney Commune, but time and entanglement haven’t been kind to this part of the city. Martha’s boots press through new white drifts to snag on the rusted shockwire and fallen sensor pylons that once supposedly protected this little enclosure. The houses, haggard with smoke, blink their shattered eyes and shrug their collapsing shoulders as if in denial. Is this really the right place? Even the right street? Martha struggles to make sense of the layout of her lost life as she stands at what was surely the heart of their neat cul-de-sac where an uprooted tree now scrawls its branches until she’s suddenly looking straight at her old home and everything’s so clear its as if her eyeballs have burned through into ancient photographic negatives. The roof of the old house still intact, even if Dad’s old car has long gone from the driveway, and she almost reaches for her key when she steps up to the front door. But the thing is blocked solid by age and perhaps even the fancy triple-locking that once protected it. You can’t be too careful Martha . . . She looks around with a start. The other houses with their blackened Halloween eyes stare back at her. She shivers. Steps back. Takes stock. Then she walks around to the side past an upturned bin and finds that half the wall is missing, and pushes through, and everything clicks, and she’s standing in their old kitchen.

Over there . . . Over here . . .

She’s an archaeologist. She’s a diver in the deepest of all possible seas. She scoops snow, dead leaves and rubble from the hollow of the sink. She straightens a thing of rust that might once have been the spice rack. Many of the tiles with their squiggle pattern of green and white that she never consciously noticed before are still hanging. And all the while, the thinning light of this distant winter pours down and in. So many days here. So many arguments over breakfast. She can see her father clearly now, quietly spooning fruit and yoghurt on his museli with the flowerpots lined on the windowledge behind him and the screen of some medical paper laid on the table and his cuffs rolled back to show his raw-looking wrists and his tie not yet done up. Damien is there as well, chomping as ever through some sugary, chocolaty stuff that he’ll waste half of.

“I had a visit from some police contractors yesterday,” he’s telling her as he unfolds a linen handkerchief and dabs delicately at his mouth. “Apparently, they’re looking for witnesses to an incident that happened at the Hall Green Mall. You may have heard about it—some kind of silly stunt? Of course, I told them the truth. I simply said you were out.”

Now, as he refolds his handkerchief, his turns his guileless brown eyes up towards her, and the question he’s really asking is so padded with all his usual oblique politeness that it’s easily ignored. Anyway, time is moving on—Martha can feel it roaring through her bones in a winter gale—and now she’s back home from her first term at the old, elite university town that her father, ever the supportive parent, has agreed to finance her to study at. Politics and Philosophy, too, and not a mention of the practical, career-based subjects she’s sure he’d have much preferred her to take. Even as he spoons yoghurt over his museli, she can feel him not carefully mentioning this. But he seems newly hunched and his hand trembles as he spoons his yoghurt. And here’s a much larger, gruffer-sounding version of Damien, as well, and sprouting some odd kind of haircut, even if he is still half-eating an bowl of sugary slop. All so very strange: the way people start changing the instant you look away from them. But that isn’t at the heart of it. What lies at the core of Martha’s unease is, of all things, a dog that isn’t really a dog.

“Of course he’s a dog, Martha,” my father’s saying as his suddenly liver-spotted hands stroke the creature’s impossibly high haunches and it wags its tale and gazes at me with one eye of brown and the other of whirring silver. “Garm’s fun. We take him for walks, don’t we Damien? The only difference is that he’s even more clever and trustworthy, and helps bring us a little bit of extra safety and security in these difficult times. Some worrying things have occurred locally, Martha, and I don’t just mean mere destruction in unoccupied homes. So we do what we can, don’t we Garm? Matter of fact, Martha, the enhancement technology that allows him to interact with the house security systems is essentially the same as I use to help my patients . . . ”

But this is all too much, it always was, and Martha’s off out through the same stupid security gates and on along the same cold, dreary streets with more than enough stuff roaring around in her head to make up for her missing seashell that Karl never did give back to her even though all property is, basically, theft. That’s dumb sloganeering and there are many new ideas Martha wants to share with him. But even the waystation seems changed. Sydney’s been arrested, and Sophie got her arm burned on some stray shockwire, and different faces peer out at me through the fug. Who is this person? Martha Chauhan could ask them the same. Then up the final level, squeezing past a doorway into some windy higher floor which already looks like the aftermath of a battle in an art gallery, with ripped concrete walls, flailing reinforcing bars and blasted ceilings all coated in huge swathes of colour. Clearly Karl’s experimenting with new techniques, and it’s all rather strange and beautiful-ugly. Forget regurgitated abstract expressionism. This is what Bosch would have painted if he’d lived in the bombed-out twenty-first-century city. But hadn’t they agreed that that art for art’s sake was essentially nothing but Nero fiddling while Rome burned?

“So,” he gestures, emerging from the dazzling rubble with the winter sun behind him like some rock star of old. “What do you think?”

“It’s . . . incredible . . . ” So much she wants to tell him, now that she properly understands the history and context of their performance acts and sees them as part of a thread that goes back through syncretic individualism, anarcho-syndicalism and autonomism. But Karl is already scuttling off and returns holding something inside a paint-covered rag that she momentarily assumes as he unwraps it is some new artistic toy he’s been playing with—a programmable paint pallet or digital brush. But, hey, it’s a handgun.

Snow blows in. Martha’s breath plumes. It’s growing dark. The old family house creaks, groans, tinkles as she shuffles into the hall and brushes away ice and dirt from the security control panel beneath the stairs. But everything here is dead—her own memory of the night when she lost half her mind and more than half her family included. Just doubts and what-ifs. Things Karl had said, questions he’d asked, about her Dad being a doctor, which surely meant access to drugs and money, and about the kind of security systems employed in their gated estate, and ways to circumvent them. That, and the strange, dark, falling gleam of that handgun, and how those performance acts of old had never been that harmless. Not just ghastly artwork hung up the wrong way but taps left running, freezers turned off, pretty things smashed. Precious books, data, family photos, destroyed or laughingly defaced beyond all hope of recovery. Pigshit in the beds. Coy carp flopped gasping on Persian rugs. Treasured bits of people’s lives gleefully ruined. In a way, she supposes, what Karl did to her here in her own home was a kind of comeuppance.

With numb fingers, she picks out the thumbnail data card that once held the house records and shoves it into her coat pocket, although she doubts if there’s anything that would now read it, the world having moved on so very far. The rotten stairs twitch and groan as she climbs them. The door to poor, dead, Damien’s room is still closed, a shrine, just as it was and always should be, but the fall of the side wall has done for most of Dad’s room, and she’s standing almost in empty air as she looks in.

Amazing that this whole place hasn’t been ransacked and recycled, although she’s sure it soon will be. Her own room especially, the floor of which now sags with the rusty weight of the great, semi-circular slabs of polarised metal and all the rest of the once high-tech medical equipment which encircles her bed.

My father pitted all his money and energies toward healing his injured daughter in the aftermath of the terrible night of Damien’s death. All I can recall of this is a slow rising of pain and confusion. Instructions to do this or that minor task—the blink of an eye, the lifting of a finger—which seemed to involve my using someone else’s body. My thoughts, as well, seemed strange and clumsy to me as the crystal neurons strove to blend with the damaged remains of my brain and I dipped in and out of rejection fever. In many ways, they didn’t seem like my thoughts at all. I wasn’t me any longer.

Sitting watching bad things happen on a screen with my baby brother crying. Or being on a beach somewhere with crashing waves and the dogs, the Frisbees, the cricket. These were things I could understand and believe in. But the uncooperative limbs and wayward thoughts of this changed, alien self belonged to someone else. A roaring disconnect lay between the person I’d been and the person I now was, and the only way I could remain something like sane was to think of this new creature as “Martha Chauhan.”

“I’m so grateful you’re still here and alive,” a tired, grey-haired man Martha knew to be her father was saying as he spoon-fed her. “Is there much . . . ” The offered spoon trembled in age-mottled fingers. “ . . . you can remember of how all this happened?”

Martha made the slow effort to shake her head, then to open her mouth and swallow.

“There was a break-in, you see, here at our house. I don’t know how the person got in, nor why the systems didn’t go off, or why poor Garm wasn’t alerted. But he wasn’t. Neither was I—I’m too old, too deaf—and I think it was your brother Damien who must have heard something, perhaps the glass of the back door being broken, and got you to go downstairs with him. And then I believe the intruder must have panicked. After all, it can’t be easy, to be standing alone in the dark of someone else’s kitchen. A gun going off—that was what woke me, and by the time I got downstairs the intruder had fled and poor Damien was past any kind of help, although at least I know he didn’t suffer. And poor Garm, of course, proved to be no use at all, and I had him reformatted and sold. But then, you never did like him much, did you? I thought you were lost to me as well for a while, Martha, what with the damage that bullet had inflicted to your head. But you’re here and alive and so am I and for that I’m incredibly, impossibly grateful . . . We’ve spilled a bit there, though, haven’t we? Hold on, I’ll get a cloth . . . ”

Eventually, Martha learned how to sit up unaided, and to spoon, chew and swallow her own food. It was a slow process. Through several sleepless years, as her father grew withered and exhausted from wiping her arse and changing the sheets and tending the machines, she learned how to walk and talk and returned to some kind of living. He never left her. He never let go. He never relented. He was a sunken smile and tired eyes. He was the stooped back that lifted her and hands which were always willing to hold. He never spared the time or energy for any feelings of rage, or such abstract concepts as retribution, although he surely knew who was responsible for the destruction of his family, and had sufficient evidence to prove it, even in days when justice was about as reliable as the power grid and the police were privatised crooks. Karl Yann slunk off toward the sunrise of this bright new world, whilst Martha Chanhan’s father’s heart gave out from grief and exhaustion, and she was left empty, damaged and alone.

She rams the old car into gear and thumbs on the headlights. The tyres slide. The black-edged, glittering night pours past her. She can hear laughter over the roaring in her ears as she parks and kills the Mini’s engine at the far edge of some trees outside the Widney Commune. She rummages deep in her carpetbag, picks off the fluff and dry-swallows the few immune suppressants she can find loose in the lining. Not enough, but it will have to do. Then she takes out a primed antipsychotic syringe and shoves it into her coat pocket.

Her feet are dead and the house’s fire-rimmed shadow leaps over a field of untrampled snow as she crunches toward it. There’s no one about apart from pigs sleeping in their pens until she turns a corner and hits a blaze of bonfire. Then there’s life everywhere, and dancing to the accompaniment of discordant shouts and bursts of clapping.

Amazing, how well this useless brain of hers still works. How it can devise and dismiss plans without her even realising she’s thought of them. The paintings inside the house, for example. She could walk in and slash, burn or deface them. But that wouldn’t hurt Karl Yann. At least, not enough. He’d just pronounce it a fresh phase. Even burning this whole commune to the ground wouldn’t be sufficient. What about that child, then, Shara—who Martha can see twirling at the shimmering edge of the flames? Or the lovely Freya? He’d feel their loss, now, wouldn’t he? But Martha’s mind slides from such schemes, not so much because she finds them abhorrent but because they lack the brutal simplicity she craves. It has to be him, she tells herself as she stands ignored at the edge of the light searching the shining, happy faces. Has to be Karl Yann. Draw him away to some quiet spot—he might recognise her, but the entangled are impossibly trusting—then knock him senseless with the contents of this syringe. Drag him to the Mini, drive him to some as-yet undefined place . . . In this world where no one steals and no one hurts and everything is shared, all these things will be ridiculously easy.

The straps of the field cap can be easily adjusted. Its settings are incredibly flexible. You could kill someone, fry their brains, if you really wanted. That, or turn them into a gibbering vegetable. Appealing though these options are, though, to Martha’s mind they lack the simplicity of true retribution. So why not destroy just enough of his thalamus to break the quantum shimmer of entanglement? Then, he’d be alone, just as she is. He’d be lost, and he’d know what it really is to suffer. The final performance act in a world made perfect.

But where is he?

“Hey, hey—look who it is! Its Martha!”

A familiar male voice, but it’s Tommy the teacher who comes up to embrace her. Perhaps this is his commune. Perhaps he’s out on the look for new friends to dance, laugh or fuck with. The entangled are like bonobo monkeys. Smell like them, as well. Others are turning now that Tommy’s noticed her, mouths wide with surprise and sympathy. Poor, dear Martha. Sweet, old Martha. Standing there at the cold edge of the dark, when all of us are so very warm and happy. You don’t need to be entangled to know what they’re feeling.

She’s swept up. She’s carried forward. She lets go of the syringe in time just as her hands are hauled from their pockets. The entangled don’t do booze, or other drugs—most them of them frown at Martha’s liking for coffee—but the stuff that steams in the cracked mug that’s forced into her fingers is so sweet and hot it must be laced with something. Then there’s the rabbit: tender, honey-savoury—a treat in itself, meat being something that’s reserved for special occasions. They’re so happy to see her here at the Widney Commune it’s as if they’ve long been waiting for her, and their joy spills out in hugs, giggles and touches. The kids flicker like elves. The old ones grin toothlessly.

Come on, Martha! Now, they’re clapping to some offbeat she can’t quite follow. A circle forms, and she’s at the heart of it where’s the snow’s been cleared and the fire roars. Come on, Martha! Come on, Martha! They think they’re not taunting her. Think they’re not drunk. But they’re drunk on this hour. Drunk on the future. Drunk on everything.

Martha does an ungracious bow. Stumbles a few Rumplestiltskin steps. She’s the ghost of every lost Christmas. She’s the spirit of the plague from that story by Poe. And everything, her head most likely, or possibly her body, or this entire world, is spinning. Poor Martha. Dear Martha. They stroke lumpen shape of her skull like it’s an old stone found on a beach. And this isn’t even her commune. Isn’t her world.

“Hey, Martha . . . ” Now, Freya and Shara emerge from the glowing smoke.” So great that you’ve come back to see us again!”

“Oh, yes . . . ” Shara agrees. “We all love you here, Martha. We really do.”

“Where’s Karl?” Martha yells over a roaring that must be mostly in her head.

“He’s . . . ” One starts.

“ . . . out.” The other finishes.

“Right,” Martha says. “You don’t have any idea where, do you? I mean . . . You see . . . ”

She trails off as these two elfin creatures, one small and one fully grown and both entirely beautiful, gaze at her with firelight in their eyes.

“Oh, somewhere,” Freya says with a faraway smile. “Your birthfather likes to wander, doesn’t he, Sha?”

For Martha’s benefit, Shara gives an emphatic nod.

“Oh? Right. Good . . . You see, I think I used to know him . . . Long ago.”

“Oh, but you did!” Freya delightedly confirms. “I said you’d come to see us, and Karl instantly knew who you were, didn’t he, Sha? Said you went back a very long way.”

“And then . . . He went out again?”

“Of course. I mean . . . ” Freya shrugs her shoulders. Gazes off, as if nothing could be more welcoming, into the freezing dark. “Why not?”

After her father died—a feat he managed with the same quiet fortitude with which he’d done most things throughout his life—Martha Chauhan found herself living in a place with Harry Potterish turrets and pointed windows that could have been the one she and Damien had visited when they were kids. A kind of commune, if you like. But not.

Still a youngish woman by many standards, but she fitted in well with these wizened and damaged creatures who cost so much money and technology and wasted effort to keep alive. She learned how to talk to them, and show an interest. She got better at walking. She learned how to play mahjong. And outside, beyond the newly heightened shockwire and the sullen guards, the world was falling apart. The tap water was brown with sewerage. The winters were awful. The summers were shot.

But wait. The big screens they sat in front of all day were showing something else. There was a virus—a new mutation of a type of encephalitis that attacked a part of the brain known as the thalamus. The fever it triggered was worrying, but very few people died from it, and those who survived were changed in ways they found hard to explain—at least to those who hadn’t yet become whatever they now were. Some said the virus wasn’t just some random mutation, but it was down to terrorists, or space aliens, or the government. Or that it was triggering something had long been there, buried deep inside everyone’s skulls, and that this was a new kind of humanity, a different kind of knowing, which was triggered by a form of quantum entanglement which joined mind to mind, soul to soul.

Others simply insisted that it was the Rapture. Or the end of the world.

Of course, there were riots and pogroms. There was looting. There were several wars. Politicians looked for personal advancement. Priests and mullahs pleaded for calm, or raged for vengeance. People walked the streets wearing facemasks, or climbed into their panic rooms, or headed for hilltops and deserted islands with years’ supplies of food and weapons. A time of immense confusion, and all Martha Chauhan knew as things collapsed was that the few staff who were still working at Hogwarts laughed as they saw to the catheters or mopped the floors. Soon, many of the wizened and damaged ones were laughing as well.

The day the shockwire fell—her own personal Berlin Wall—Martha Chauhan stumbled out into a changed world. It was all almost as she’d long expected. There were the bodies and the twisted lampposts and the ransacked buildings and the burnt-out cars. But people were busy working in loose, purposeful gangs, and clearing things up. Stranger still, they were singing as they did so, or laughing like loons, or simply staring at each other and the world as if they’d never seen it before.

On she stumbled. And was picked up, cradled, fed, welcomed. Then, as the fever passed by her and nothing changed, she was pitied as well. Eventually, she got to meet people who could explain why she could never become entangled, but she already knew. There was nothing that could be done to replace the dumb nano-circuitry that took up vital parts of her skull without destroying this construct known as Martha Chauhan as well. Still, the commune at Baldwin Towers were as happy to have her. She was even given a specialist kind of work, along with some privileges, to reflect her odd status and disability, a bit like the blind piano tuners of old. And so it went, and so it still is to this dark winter’s night, and now Martha Chanhan’s back in her Mini, driving lost and alone through a fathomless, glittering world.

She’s stopped. The little car’s engine is quiet, and the cold’s incredibly intense. She fumbles in her carpetbag with dead fingers, but whatever immune suppressants she has left—carefully made somewhere far from here at great but unmentioned expense—must all be back at Baldwin Towers, and the roaring in her head deepens as she breaks the door’s seal of ice and tumbles outside.

Another day is greying as she looks up at the waystation. Superficially, nothing much has changed. It’s still an abandoned ruin, although the snow and these extra years of neglect have given it a kind of grace. Even the dead shockwire Karl once held up for her remains, and shivers like a live thing, scattering rust and ice down her neck as she crawls beneath.

All the old faces seem to peer out at her as clambers on and in through concrete shadows and icicle drips. Who is this person? She could ask same of them. Not that she ever belonged here. Or anywhere. Creaks and slides as she climbs ladders and crawls stairways until she claws back her breath and finds she’s standing surprisingly high, overlooking a greened and snowy landscape that seems more forest than city in the sun’s gaining blaze. For all she knows, the entangled will soon be swinging tree to tree. But that isn’t how it will end. They’re biding their time for now, still clearing things up as this damaged world heals, and the icecaps, the forests, the jungles, the savannahs, return. But the gestalt will spread. Soon, it will expand in a great wave to join with the other intelligences which knit this universe. Martha Chauhan hears someone laughing, and realises it’s herself. For a dizzy moment there, standing at this precipice at the future’s edge, she almost understood what it all means.

The whole sky is brightening, and she’s starting to realise just how beautiful this high part of the old waystation has become. Blasted rubble and concrete and a sense of abandonment, certainly, but everything covered in the glimmer of frost and snow and old paint and new growth. Colours pool in the icemelt. Then, something bigger moves, and she sees that it’s a ragged old man, a kind of grey-bearded wizard, half Scrooge and half Father Christmas, who seems part of this grotto in his paint-strewn clothes.

“It’s me, Martha,” Karl Yann says in a croaked approximation of his old voice as his reflections ripple about him. “I just wish I could share how you feel.”

“But you can’t can you? You’re here and I’m not.” Martha Chauhan shakes her head. Feels her thoughts rattle. That isn’t what she meant at all. “You think you know everything, don’t you? All the secrets of the fucking universe. But you don’t know what it is to hurt.”

He winces. Looks almost afraid. But there’s the same distant pity in his old eyes that Martha’s seen a million times. Even here. Even from him. She tries to imagine herself dragging the syringe from her pocket. Running forward screaming and stabbing. Instead, her vision blurs with tears.

“Oh, Martha, Martha . . . Here, look . . . ” Now he’s coming toward her in a frost of breath, and holding something out. “This used to be yours. It is yours. You should have it back . . . ”

She sniffs and looks despite herself. Sees her long-lost seashell, of all things, nestling in his craggy hand. She gabs it greedily and hugs it to herself and away from him. “I suppose you’ve got that other thing here as well—another bloody souvenir?”

He almost looks puzzled. “What thing?”

“The gun, you bastard! The thing you killed my bother with—and did this to me!” She slaps the slope of her skull so hard it rings.

But he just stands there. Then, slowly, he blinks. “I think I see.”

“See what?” The entangled are useless at arguing—she’s tried it often enough.

“You think, Martha, you believe, that I broke into your house and did that terrible thing? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Of course I am.” But why is the roaring getting louder in her head?

“I’m sorry, Martha,” he says, looking at her more pityingly than ever. “I really am so very, very sorry.”

“You can’t just . . . Leave . . . ”

But he is. He’s turning, shuffling away from her across this rainbow space with nothing but a slow backward glance. Dissolving into the frost and the shadows, climbing down and out from this lost place of memories toward his life and his commune and a sense of infinite belonging, before Martha Chauhan even knows what else to know or say or feel.

Full day now, and Martha Chanhan’s sitting high at the concrete edge of the waystation.

It’s freezing up here, despite the snowmelt. But she doesn’t seem to be shivering any longer, nor does she feel especially cold. She sniffs, swipes her dripping nose, then studies the back of an old woman’s hand which seems to have come away coated in blood. That roaring in her ears which is much far loud and close to be any kind of sound. Although there’s no pain, it isn’t hard for her to imagine, with what brains she has left, of the wet dissolution of the inside of her skull as the immune suppressants fade from her blood. If she doesn’t turn up back at Baldwin Towers soon, she supposes help will probably come. But the entangled can be astonishingly callous. After all, they let their old and frail die from curable diseases. They kill their treasured pets for clothing and food.

She inspects her old seashell. A small glow rises through the red smears when she touches its controls. Something here that isn’t dead, and she hooks the buds around her ears and feels a faint, nostalgic fizz. But the stuff she liked back in the day would surely be awful, old and lost as she now is. A different person, really. In fact, that’s the whole point . . .

She feels past the syringe in her coat pocket, finds the data card she took from the house security system and sniffs back more blood as she numbly shoves it in. It’s still a surprise, though, to find options and menus hanging against the clear morning sky. Files as well, when you’d have thought Dad would have deleted them. But then, he never liked destroying things—even stuff he never planned to use. And perhaps, the thought trickles down through her leaking brain, he left this for her. After all, and despite his many evasions and protestations, he always had a strong regard for the truth.

She waves a once-practised hand through ancient images until she reaches the very last date. The end of everything. The very last night.

And there it is.

There it always was.

She’s looking into the bright dark of their old kitchen through the nightsight eyes of that stupid not-dog. Fast-forward until a window shatters in a hard spray and the door opens and something moves in, and the not-dog stirs, wags its tail, recognises . . . Not Karl Yann, but much more a familiar shape and scent.

Martha rips the buds from her ears, but she still can’t escape the past. She’s back at this waystation, but she’s young again, and the colours are brilliant, and she’s here with Karl Yann, full of Politics and Philosophy and righteous anger at the state of the world. And he’s got this handgun that he’s merely using as a prop for all his agitprop posturings, when she has a much clearer, simpler, cleverer idea. The final performance act, right? The easiest, most obvious, one of all . . . Come on, Karl, don’t say you haven’t thought of it . . . And fuck you if you’re not interested. If you’re not prepared, I’ll just do the damn thing myself . . .

Martha flouncing out from the waystation. Into the darkness. Hunching alone through the glass and rubble streets. The gun a weight of potentiality in her pocket and the whole world asleep. She feels like she’s in the mainstream of the long history of resistance. She’s Ulrike Meinhof. She’s Gavrilo Princip. She’s Harry Potter fighting Voldemort. A pure, simple, righteous deed to show everyone—and her Dad especially—that there are no barriers that will keep the truth of what’s really happening away from these prim, grim estates. Not this shockwire. Nor these gates. Not anything. Least of all the glass of their kitchen door which breaks in a satisfying clatter as she feels in for the old-fashioned handle and turns. Not that this isn’t a prank as well. Not that there isn’t still fun to be had. After all, that fucking thing of a dog isn’t really living anyway, it’s nothing but dumb property, so what harm is being done if she shoots it properly dead? Nothing at all, right? She’s doing nothing but good. She’s shoving it to the system. She’s giving it to the man. The darkness seethes as she enters, and she feels as always feels, standing right here in her own kitchen, which is like an intruder in her own life.

That roaring again. Now stronger than ever, even though the seashell’s buds are off and its batteries have gone. After all, how is she to tell one shape from another in this sudden dark? How could she know when she can barely see anything that the thing that comes stumbling threateningly out at her is Damien and not that zombie dog? It’s all happened already, and too quickly, and the moment is long gone. A squeezed trigger and the world shudders and she’s screaming and the dog’s howling and all the backup lights have flared and Damien’s sprawled in a lake of blood and the gun’s a deathly weight in her hand—although Martha Chauhan doubts if she could ever understand how she felt as she turned it around so that its black snout was pointing at her own head and she squeezed the trigger again.

Her father’s with her now. Even without looking, and just as when she lay in her bedroom surrounded by pain and humming equipment, she knows he’s here. After all, and despite her many attempts to reject him, he never really went away. And, as always, he’s telling her tales—filling the roaring air with endless ideas, suppositions, stories . . . Talking at least as much about once-upon-a-times and should-have-beens as about how things really are. Using what life and energy he has left to bring back his daughter. And if he could have found a way of sheltering her from what really happened that terrible night, if he could have invented a story that gave her a reason to carry on living, Martha knows he would have done so.

She sniffs, tastes bitter salt, and feels a deep roaring. It’s getting impossibly late. Already, the sun seems to be setting, and the beach is growing cold, and the cricket match has finished, and that last gritty samosa she’s just eaten was foul, and all the dogs and the kite flyers have gone home. But there’s Dad, walking trousers-rolled and hand-in-hand with Damien as the tide floods in. Martha waves cheerily, and they wave back. She thinks she might just join them, down there at the edge of everything where all islands meet.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2013

An Ocean is a Snowflake, Four Billion Miles Away

John Barnes

Thorby had kept up his resistance training, but he’d been on Boreas for most of a year so he’d worried about agravitic muscular dystrophy. You could never quite trust a gym centrifuge, or the record-keeping software, or most of all your own laziness. You might set things too low, lie to the records, anything to not be quite so sore and stiff for just a couple days, or to have a few days of no aches, and before you knew it you hadn’t actually worked out in a month, and you’d be falling down weak at your next port. He’d missed recording the first calcium bombardment of Venus from ground level for that very reason, not working out while he’d been in the orbital station for three months before.

People always said you could make it back by working out in the high gravity on the ships between the worlds, but the ships boosted at a gee and a half until they started braking at four gee, so you spent all your time lying down or doing gentle stretches at best, and most trips weren’t long enough anyway. And besides this had been less of a voyage and more of a hop; Boreas was very close to Mars now.

The comfortable grip of his feet on the train station platform, confirming that he was truly ready for Mars’s real gravity, was as acute a pleasure as the clean thinness of bioprocessed air lightly stained with smells of coffee, frying meat, lubricant, and fresh plastic, as much as the pink late-afternoon light flooding the train station, as much as the restless waves and murmurs of crowd noise.

He could have laughed out loud at how good it felt to be in his skin, standing on the platform at Olympus Station, a throng of eager hikers, sailplaners, and mountaineers all around him, the whole scene turned warm and sentimental by the pink light pouring in through the immense dome that arched above them.

It had been a decade since he’d been on Mars, a planet like the rest of the solar system: a place he always came back to, because he never went home.

“Thorby!” Léoa emerged from the crowd, saw him, and waved; he walked toward her slowly, still relishing the feel of having good ground legs.

“So do I look like me?” she asked. “Did you know that back in the protomedia days, when they had recording tech but things hadn’t fused yet, that it was a cliché that people always looked better than their pictures?”

“I’ve mined protomedia for images and sounds too. My theory about that is that you couldn’t get laid by telling the picture that it was the better-looking one.”

“You’re an evil cynic. Pbbbt.” Even sticking her tongue out, she was beautiful.

So was he. All documentarians had to be, the market insisted.

“I never used pixel edit on myself,” she said. He wasn’t sure if she sounded proud or they were just having a professional discussion. “So screen-me does look unusually like real-me. I’ll do a docu about the way people react to that, someday. Want to get a drink, maybe a meal? It’s hours till our train.” Without waiting for him to say anything, she turned and walked away.

Hurrying to catch up beside her, he called, “Baggins, follow,” over his shoulder. His porter robot trailed after them, carrying Thorby’s stack of packed boxes. Everything physical he owned still fit into a cube with sides shorter than his height. “Did you have a good trip in?” he asked her.

“For me it’s always a great one. I’ve been here for six Martian seasons, three Earth years, and I’ll never be one of the ones that shutters the window to concentrate on work. I came in from Airy Zero City via the APK&T.”

“Uh, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Mars, is that a railroad?”

“Oh, it’s a railroad—the grandest on the planet. The Airy Zero City–Polar Cap–Korolev-and-Tharsis. The one that tourists take if they only have one day on Mars. Also the one we’ll be taking up to Crater Korolev for jump-off. Among many other things it runs around the edge of the northern ice cap. Strange to think it won’t be long before it stops running. They’re just going to leave it for the divers, you know, and maybe as a spread path for some of the seabed fauna. More to be lost.”

“If we’re going to start bickering,” Thorby said, smiling, “shouldn’t we be recording it? Or will that draw too much attention?”

“Not on Mars. It’s a tourist planet—pretending celebs aren’t there is de rigueur. And you don’t look much like your teenaged pictures anymore.”

“They were mostly in a spacesuit where you couldn’t see my face anyway,” he pointed out. “And I don’t use my face in my docus. I was thinking mainly about you.”

“Pbbbt. I never was much of a celeb. There won’t be fifty people in all these hundreds who have ever seen any of my work. So the short answer is, if anything, it might be some worthwhile free publicity to do the interview while we walk through here. I’ll bring out my stalkers.” She whistled, a soft high-pitched phweet!—toooeee . . . wheep.

A hatch opened on the porter humming along at her heels. A metal head on a single stalk popped up. The stalker hopped out and raced ahead of them to get a front view. Four more stalkers leaped out like toy mouse heads roller-skating on pogo sticks, zipping and bounding to form a rough, open semicircle around Thorby and Léoa, pointing their recording cameras back at the two people, and using their forward sensing to zigzag swiftly and silently around everything else.

“I intend to look sincere and charming,” Léoa said. “Do your best to look philosophical and profound.”

“I’ll try. It might come out bewildered and constipated.”

She was nice enough to laugh, which was nicer than he was expecting. They descended the wide steps onto the broad terrace, far down the low, northwest side of the dome, and took a table near the dome surface, looking northwestward from Mount Olympus across the flat, ancient lava lake and into the broken, volcanic badlands called sulci beyond it. “Our ancestors would have found a lot of what we do utterly mad,” Léoa said, “so I suppose it’s comforting that we can find one thing they did explicable.”

“You’re trying to get me to say something for the documentary.”

“You’re spoiling the spontaneity. Of course I notice you do that all the time in your own documentaries.”

“I do. Spontaneity is overrated when you’re covering big explosions and collisions. They only happen once, so you have to get them right, and that means looking in the right place at the right time, and that means a ton of prep.”

“All right, well, have you had enough time to prepare to talk about something the ancestors would consider insane? What do you think about putting a train station on top of the highest mountain in the solar system?”

“Where else would you put it? People who want to climb the mountain still can, and then they can take the train home. People who just want the view just take the train both ways. And once it starts to snow seriously around here, the skiing is going to be amazing. So of course there’s a train station here. They put it here to attract trains, the way Earth people put out bird-feeders to attract birds.”

She nodded solemnly and he realized she was doing a reaction shot on him, showing her sincerity and trust. He looked away, out through the dome.

“You’re getting lost in the sky,” Léoa said.

“I like the pink skies here.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that there will probably only be a thousand or so more of those?”

“Not any more than it bothers me that I’ve missed billions of them before I was born.”

“What about the people who will never see it?”

“They’ll get to surf the new ocean, and stretch out on the beaches that all the dust washing out of the sulci and down the canyons will form. They’ll love that, in their moments. In my moment, I’m relishing a late-afternoon pink sky.”

The stalker in the center was spinning back and forth, pointing its camera at each of them in turn; so now it was a Ping-Pong match. They did more verbal sparring and genned more quotes and reactions, ensuring they’d both have plenty to work with when the coproject went to edit. After a while they ordered dinner, and she stopped fishing for him to confess to imperialism or vandalism or whatever she was going to call it.

She told her Stalker Number Three to silhouette him against the darkening sky and the landscape far below. The little robot leaped up, extended its pencil-thin support to a bit more than two meters, and silently crept around to shoot slightly down on Thorby and get the horizon into the picture.

When Boreas rose in the northwest, covering much of the sky, they both said, “More profounder versions of what we already said,” as Léoa put it, while the stalkers recorded them with their back to the dome wall. Léoa had her stalkers stand tall, extending till they were about three meters high, to catch the brilliant white light that the huge comet cast into the sulci below; Thorby positioned his low, to silhouette them against the comet head itself. The huge station mezzanine around them, in the brilliant bluish white light, looked like some harsh early photograph with artificial lighting.

Over coffee and dessert, they watched the fast-rising comet swim through the northern constellations like a vast snake coiling around Cepheus and the Bears before diving over the northeast horizon, making a vivid arc different from that of anything else in the heavens. Finally it was late and they went to their rooms at the station hotel for the night. Thorby managed not to say anything about liking to see stuff smashed up, and she avoided saying she really preferred bare, dead rock and sand to forests and meadows, so the first day was a tie.

They got off at Korolev Station, on the south side of the crater, pulled on Mars suits, loaded the porters, and walked out past the stupa that was another of the most-photographed places in the solar system.

Crater Korolev was as far north on Mars as Novaya Zemlya on Earth, nearly circular, about seventy kilometers across, with sharply reared crater walls all around. It was a natural snow trap, gathering both water ice and dry ice in mixtures and layers.

In a midmorning of Martian spring, the crater floor far below them had its own weather, gas geysers spraying snow, explosive sublimations that sent ground blizzards shooting out radially from suddenly exposed snowfields, and an occasional booming flash-and-crack between the whorls of fog that slithered just above the snow, almost a kilometer below the observation point behind the stupa. Monks in orange Mars suits, on their way to and from the long staircases that zigzagged from the stupa down to another stupa on the crater floor, passed between their stalkers, even less interested in the stalkers than the stalkers were in them.

“This place makes a lot of lists of scenic wonders,” Léoa said. She knelt at the meter-high shrine that interrupted the rails of the observation platform, palms together in the ancient prayer gesture. The stalkers closed in on her.

He did the same, to avoid her stalkers’ recording him being disrespectful.

When Thorby and Léoa stood, and looked again across the stormy snowfields of Korolev Crater, the stalkers leaped up on the railing like an abstract sculpture of birds on a wire, balancing easily with their gyros. Thorby and Léoa deopaqued their helmets completely and turned on collar lights. “It doesn’t bother you,” she asked, “that these snowfields were here before the first human wandered across the African plain?”

“No,” he said. “After all, the protons and electrons in the snow were probably in existence shortly after the big bang. Everything is made of bits of something older. Everything that begins means something ends. I like to take pictures of the moment when that happens. A day will come when we walk by Lake Korolev and admire the slow waves rolling across its deep blue surface, and then another day will come when this stupa stands on one of the islands that ring Korolev Atoll, and very much within our lifetime, unless we are unlucky, this will be an interesting structure at the bottom of the Boreal Ocean. I hope to see them all; life is potential and possibility.”

“That was very preachy,” she said, “and you kind of intoned. Do you want to try it again?”

“Not really. Intoning feels right when I’m serious. I like things that will happen once, then never again. That’s what my problem is with the animators that make their perfect simulations; they never take a chance on not getting what they’re after. Be sure to use that. Let’s get some animators good and angry.”

“They don’t get angry,” she said sadly. “Nothing’s real to them.”

He shrugged. “Reality is just a marketing trophy anyway. Twenty thousand years from now, if people want to walk around on a dry, thin-aired, cold Mars, they’ll be able to do it, and it will look so much like this that even a trained areologist won’t see the difference. Or if they want to watch the disassembly of Boreas a hundred times, and have every time be as subtly different as two different Tuesdays, they’ll be able to. Your recording of what was, and my recording of how it changed, will just be two more versions, the ones with that odd word ‘real’ attached.”

“Attached validly. If reality doesn’t matter, why do animators try to fake their way into having their work labeled ‘real’ all the time? It’s the only thing they do that makes me really angry.”

“Me too.” He could think of nothing else to add. “Catch the gliderail?”

In the half-hour zip around to the north side viewing station, they sat on the top, outside deck. Their stalkers shot them with the crater in the background. It was noon now, and the early spring sun was still low in the sky to the south.

On firm ground, in a Mars suit with robot porters to do all the carrying, a human being can cover about a hundred kilometers in a day without difficulty. Since the country they were crossing was ancient sea bottom (that was the point of everything, really), it would be flat and hard for the next couple of hundred kilometers before the Sand Sea. They could have just taken a hop-rocket to some point in the vast plain, claimed to have walked there, recorded their conversation, and then hopped another hundred kilometers or so to the edge of the Sand Sea, but they were the two most prominent documentarians of the realist movement.

Visually it was monotonous. They had planned to use the long walk to spar for quotes, but there was little to say to each other. Léoa documented places that were about to be destroyed in the Great Blooming; Thorby recorded the BEREs, Big Energy Release Events, the vast crashes and explosions that marked humanity’s project of turning the solar system into a park and zoo. They were realist-purists, using only what a camera or a mike could record from the real world. Unable to do anything except disagree or agree completely, they tried arguing about whether a terraformed planet can have wilderness, since the life on it was brought there and the world shaped for it, and about whether it was masculine to like to see things smashed and feminine to like to see things protected, and they agreed that animation had no place in docu, all in the first hour.

For a while she fished for him to tell stories about his brief moment of fame, as the teenager who rode his bicycle around a comet, but he didn’t feel like telling that story during that hike, though he did promise to tell it eventually. It wasn’t that he minded, it was only that the good-parts version came down to no more than four or five sentences for anyone else, and to inchoate, averbal images for Thorby.

By noon the first day, there was nothing to do but walk and look for something worth recording, or an argument worth having. They walked two more days.

The Sand Sea was no more conversational, but it was beautiful: an erg that stretched to the horizon, dune after dune in interlocking serpentines stretching for hundreds of kilometers in all directions. From orbit the regularity of the pattern of dune crests was remarkable, but from the dune crests, where they skied, it was busy and confusing like a choppy sea. Down between the dunes it was just piles of sand reaching to the sky on all sides.

They hadn’t spoken in hours. Léoa didn’t even ask him if he felt sad that all this would be converted to a mudflat and then drowned under three kilometers of water. He couldn’t work up the energy to needle her about protecting a pile of dust the size of France, so that future generations could also visit a pile of dust the size of France.

They went slowly for the last day, as Léoa got visuals of the Sand Sea. She had built her reputation on doomed landscapes; this would be the biggest to date.

Thorby was sitting on top of one of the immense dunes, watching the sunset and talking his notes to one of his stalkers, planning the shooting of the Boreas-pass above the North Pole. He felt a low vibration, and his suit exmike, which had only supplied a soft whisper for days, reverberated with deep bass notes, something between a tuba and a bell, or a choir of mountains.

The dune under him heaved like an ocean wave waking from a long sleep, and he tumbled over, rolling and sliding in a bewildering blur of dust and sky, halfway down the western, windward face before sliding to a halt. The slipping dust piled around him, starting to pin him to the ground.

He pushed up to his feet, and stepping high, climbed back up the dune. It was more than a minute, while the pure tones of the bass notes in his exmike became a continuous thunder of tympani, before he struggled back to the top. The sun was less than a fingerwidth above the short horizon, and the light would disappear in minutes, the smaller solar disk and short horizon of Mars reducing twilight to an instant.

The thunder was still loud, so he clicked up the volume on his radio. “Are you all right?”

“Far as I can tell. It buried me to my waist but I got out.” He picked out Léoa, climbing the leeward slope far below. “Booming sands,” she said. “One of the last times they’ll ever do it. The resonance trips off more distant dunes, one dune triggering another by the sounds, till all the dunes with those frequencies have avalanched and added to the din. There’s a scientist I met who sowed microphones all over the polar sea and he could show you maps of how the booming would spread from dune to dune, all over the Sand Sea in a couple of hours. And all that will be silent forever.”

“Silent as the Boreal Ocean is now,” he said, mindful that their recording mikes were still on and so was the sparring match. All round them, stalkers were finding their way back to the surface, usually stalk first so that they rose like slim reeds from the ground until they suddenly flipped over, spun to clear the dust from their scoopshaped audio pickups, and resumed hopping through the sand like mouse heads on pogo sticks, normal as ever. “There was a time to hear the sands, and there will be a time to hear the waves. And in between there’s going to be some of the grandest smashing you ever saw.”

She must not have had a good reply, or perhaps she just didn’t want to reply to his intoning again, because she got back to her setup, and he got back to his.

The Mars suits shed the fine dust constantly, so that Léoa seemed to smolder and then to trail long streaks as the wind shifted during the few seconds of twilight. They finished under the stalkers’ work lights, and lay down to wait on the soft lee of the dune, safe now because it had just avalanched.

“Thorby,” she said, “this is not turning into anything that will make either of us famous.”

He hunched his shoulders, shaping the fine sand under him. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s not.”

“You’ve already been famous.”

“It’s one of those things you can’t experience while it’s happening,” he said, “like seeing yourself across a crowded room. Not all that it’s cracked up to be. I like making docus and I like selling them, so that kind of ‘where is he now’ fame doesn’t hurt, and it’s far enough in the past so I mostly get left alone.” He watched Phobos, far south in the sky; from these far northern latitudes you never saw it full, always as a lumpy sort of half-moon.

“If a model or a musician had taken a tumble in booming sands it would sell systemwide, but if we got stranded out here and you killed and ate me to survive, it would barely show up. Docus are what, half a percent of the market? There’s not even a market in pirating them.” Léoa sighed. “I was just thinking that the mainstream celeb channels haven’t even mentioned that the two leading documentarians of the realistpurist movement are here to record the biggest event of the next few hundred years of the Great Blooming, the re-creation of the Boreal Ocean. Not even to mention that we’ve always feuded and we purportedly hate each other. Not even to do one of those ‘Will they reconcile and have sex?’ stories they like so much. Not even to mention that one of us is the teenager who took the longest bicycle ride in history. Yet two years ago they covered the fad for learning to hand-read, and a couple guys in the retro movement that produced written books—can you believe it, written books, just code, that stuff people used to hand-read—and they covered a blacksmith last year, but docus are so dead, they didn’t bother with us.”

“We’re not dead enough. Gone but not long enough or completely enough to be a novelty.” He tried to decide whether he could actually see Phobos crawling along eastward, down by the equator, and decided he could. “Maybe we should have the blacksmith build us chariots, and race each other, and do a documentary about that.”

“Maybe.” The scratchy sound in her radio puzzled him till he saw her rolling over; she was looking for a comfortable position on the dune, and he was hearing her Mars suit pushing dust away.

“Hey,” he said. “Since you’ve been trying to get me to miss something, I just noticed something I will miss. Phobos. I like the way it looks from this far north.”

“Well, I’m glad something can touch your heart. I’d have thought you were excited about getting to see it fall.”

“It won’t be much of a show. Phobos’ll be busted to gravel from all the impacts as it comes down through the rings, so it won’t really be a BERE, just a monthlong high point in the spectacular meteor shower that will go on for fifteen Mars-years or so. I wasn’t even going to bother to shoot it. But what it is right now—I never realized it’s always a half-moon up here in the far north, because it’s so close to the equator and so low in orbit, and besides, it’s fun just to watch it, because it’s so low it orbits really fast, and I’m thinking I can see it move.”

“I think I can too.” She commanded her stalkers to set up and record the view of Phobos, and then to get the two of them with Phobos behind them as they sat on a dune. “Those shots will be beautiful; so sad though that stories about Great Blooming projects are about as popular as public comment requests by the Global Desalination Authority.”

He shrugged, hoping it would show up on the stalker’s cameras. “Post-scarcity economy, very long life spans, all that. Everything to do and nothing matters. Story of everyone’s life. Have you thought about doing anything other than docus?”

“I try not to. I want to get the Great Blooming recorded, even if I call it the Great Vandalism or Bio-Stuff Imperialism. Somebody has to stand up for rocks, ice, and vacuum.”

“Rocks make okay friends. They’re dependable and loyal.”

“I wish somebody wanted to watch us talking to each other,” Léoa said. “About all this. About Mars and about the Blooming and all that stuff. I almost wouldn’t care what we had to say, or how things came out, if somebody would just find us interesting enough to listen. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah.” Thorby didn’t really feel that way himself but he often didn’t know what he felt at all, so he might as well agree.

They began final checkout just a few minutes before Boreas’s first aerobraking pass. The stalkers were self-maintaining, and they were already in place, but it felt wrong to just assume everything would work.

“This will be one of your last views of your home,” Léoa said. “How do you feel about that?”

He turned toward her, flipped the opaquing on his helmet to zero, and turned up the collar lights, so that his face would be as visible as possible, since this was an answer he knew he needed to get right. Already the northern horizon was glowing with Boreas dawn. “Boreas is where I grew up, as much as I ever did, but that doesn’t make it home,” he said. “First of all when I lived there you couldn’t walk on most of it, anyway, and they weren’t going to let a little boy put on a suit and go play outside. When I went back four weeks ago, all that melting and vaporizing that went on while Boreas worked its way down to the lower system had erased even the little bit of landscape I did know; I couldn’t even find Cookie Crumb Hill on radar and thermal imaging, and anyway if I’d found it, it’s so dark down there now, with all the fog and grit flying around, that I doubt I could have gotten pictures that penetrated more than twenty meters into the mess. The Boreas I knew when I was a kid, way out beyond Neptune, is more than a decade gone; it’s nothing like it was. Nothing at all.”

He was crabbier in his tone than he had meant to be, irritated by her question because he’d blown half his share of the budget to buy passage to Boreas so that he could come back with the seven scientists who were the last evacuated from the iceball’s surface, and what he’d gotten had been some lackluster interviews that he could as easily have done a year before or a year after. Furthermore, since the station had not had windows, he could have done them somewhere more pleasant. He had also acquired some pictures of the fog-and-grit mix that now shrouded what was left of the old surface. (Most of the old surface, of course, now was fog and grit.)

As Boreas came in over the North Pole, it would swing low enough for atmospheric drag, which, combined with the gravitational drag from coming in an “inverse slingshot” trajectory, should put it into a very eccentric, long orbit around Mars. Doing this with a big natural ball of mixed water ice, carbon dioxide, and frozen methane, with a silica-grit center, was so uncertain a process that the major goals for the project began with “1. avoid impact by Boreas, 2. avoid escape by Boreas.”

But if all went well, nudgers and roasters would then be installed on Mars’s new huge artificial moon, with the objective of parking it in a nearly circular retrograde orbit below Phobos, well inside Mars’s Roche limit, so that over a few years, Boreas would break up and form a complex of rings. The billions of bits of it, dragged and shredded by the planet’s rotation, would then gradually spiral in across twenty years, creating a spectacular continual meteor shower in the plane of the ring, a carbon dioxide-methane atmosphere at about a bar of pressure, and, as water vapor snowed down, then melted, then rained and ran to the lower parts of the planet, a new ocean in the bed of the dry-for-a-billion-years Boreal Ocean.

The comet’s pass would light the sky for many hours, but its actual brush with the atmosphere would last less than three minutes. Thorby and Léoa intended to be directly underneath it when that happened.

“Did you leave anything on Boreas, a memento to be vaporized onto Mars?” she asked.

He started to say, “No.”

She picked up her walking stick and knocked off the head of one of his stalkers.

Startled speechless for an instant, he didn’t speak or move till she whacked the second one so hard that its head flew in pieces into the sand.

“What are you—”

“Destroying your stalkers.” Her voice was perfectly calm and pleasant as she whacked another stalker hard enough to break its stem in half, then drove the tip of her stick down on its head. “You won’t have a record of this. And mine will only be recording your face and appearance. You’ve lost.”

He thought, Lost what? for an instant, and then he wanted to rush to see if Number Four Stalker, which had been with him for twenty-five years, was all right because it was crushed and he couldn’t help thinking of it as “hurt,” and then he wanted to scream, Why?

The landscape became brighter than day, brighter than Earth lightning, not at all like the Boreas dawn they had been expecting. A great light flashed out of the north, and a breath later a white, glowing pillar pushed up into the sky. They froze, staring, for some indefinite time; his surviving stalkers, and all of hers, rotated to face the light, like clockwork sunflowers.

Thorby heard his voice saying, “We’ll need to run, south, now, as fast as we can, I don’t think we’ll make it.”

“Must have been a big fragment far out from the main body,” Léoa said. “How far away do you think—”

“Maybe up close to the pole if we’re lucky. Come on,” he said, “whistle everything into the porters. Skis on. Run.”

Two of his stalkers had not been destroyed, and they leaped into his porter at his emergency call. “Skis and poles,” he told the porter, and it ejected them; he stepped onto the skis, free-heelers designed for covering ground and moving on the slick dust, and hoped his few hours’ practice at a comfortable pace in the last day would be enough to let him go fast now.

“Baggins, follow, absolute.” Now his porter would try to stay within two meters of his transponder, catching up when it fell behind, until it ran out of power or was destroyed. If he lost it, he might have to walk hungry for a while, but the northern stations were only a couple of days to reach. His Mars suit batteries were good for a week or more; the suit extracted water and air; he just had to hope he wouldn’t need the first aid kit, but it was too heavy to strap onto the suit.

The great blue-white welding-arc pillar had cooled to orange-white, and the main body of Boreas, rising right on schedule, stood behind it as a reflector. The light at Thorby’s back was brighter than noonday equatorial sun on Earth, much brighter than any sun Mars had ever seen, and the blazing face of Boreas, a quarter of the sky, spread the light with eerie evenness, as if the whole world were under too-bright fluorescent light.

He hurled himself along the windward side of the south-tending dune crest, using the skating technique he’d learned on Earth snow and practiced on frozen methane beds on Triton; his pushing ski flew out behind him, turning behind the lead ski to give extra push, then reach as far in front of him as possible, kicking and reaching as far as he could. On the slick, small, round, particle sand of the ridge top, in the low gravity, he might have been averaging as much as twenty kilometers per hour.

But the blast front from the impact was coming at them at the local speed of sound, 755 kilometers per hour, and though that was only two-thirds as fast as Mach 1 in warm, thick, breathable air, it was more than fast enough to overtake them in a half hour or less. At best the impact might have been four hundred kilometers away, but it was almost surely closer.

He glanced back. Léoa skied swiftly after him, perhaps even gaining ground. The light of the blazing pillar was dimmer, turning orange, and his long shadow, racing in front of him, was mostly cast by the dirt-filtered light of the Boreas dawn. He wasn’t sure whether Boreas would stay in the sky till the sun came up, but by then it would all be decided anyway.

“Thorby.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve had it look for shelter, read me some directions, and project a sim so I’m sure, and there’s a spot that’s probably safe close to here. This dune crest will fork in about a kilometer. Take the left fork, two more kilometers, and we’ll be behind a crater wall from the blast.”

“Good thinking, thanks.” He pushed harder, clicking his tongue control for an oxy boost. His Mars suit increased the pressure and switched to pure oxygen; his pace was far above sustainable, but either he made this next three kilometers or he didn’t.

Léoa had destroyed his recording setup. He’d known she deplored his entire career of recording BEREs—Big Energy Release Events—at least as much as she disliked the whole idea of the Great Blooming, but he’d had no idea she would actually hash the joint project just to stop him from doing it. So his judgment about people was even worse than he’d thought it was. They had been colleagues and (he’d thought) friendly rivals for decades, and he hadn’t seen it coming.

He kept pushing hard, remembering that he was pouring so much oxygen into his bloodstream that he had to keep his muscles working hard or hyperventilate. His skis flew around him, reached out to the front, whipped back, turned, lifted, flew out around him, and he concentrated on picking his path in the shifting light and staying comfortably level and in control; in the low Martian gravity, with the close horizon that didn’t reveal parallax motion very well to eyes evolved for Earth, it was far too easy to start to bounce; your hips and knees could easily eat a third of your energy in useless vertical motion.

The leeward side of a dune crest is the one that avalanches, so he stayed to the right, windward side, but he couldn’t afford to miss the saddle-and-fork when it came, so he had to keep his head above the crest. He heard only the hiss of his breath and the squeal of his skis on the sand; the boiling column from the impact, now a dull angry red, and the quarter-of-the-sky circle of the comet now almost directly overhead, were eerie in their silence. He kept his gaze level and straight out to the horizon, let his legs and gut swing him forward, kept the swinging as vertical as he could, turning only the ski, never the hip, hoping this was right and he was remembering how to do it, unable to know if he was moving fast enough through the apparently endless erg.

He had just found the fork and made the left turn, glancing back to check on Léoa. She seemed to be struggling and falling a little behind, so he slowed, wondering if it would be all right to tell her she was bouncing and burning unnecessary energy.

The whole top five meters of the dune crest under her slid down to the leeward in one vast avalanche. For one instant he thought, but how can that be, I just skied it myself and I’m heavier. The ground fell away beneath him in shattering thunder as the whole dune slumped leeward.

Of course, how did I miss that? In the Martian atmosphere, a cold thin scatter of heavy CO₂ molecules, sound is much slower than it is in anything human beings can breathe; anyone learns that after the first few times a hiking buddy’s radio has exmike sound in the background, and it seems to be forever before your own exmike picks it up. But the basalts of the old Martian seafloor are solid, dense, cold, and rigid to a great depth; seismic waves are faster than they are elsewhere.

He thought that as he flipped over once, as if he were working up the voice-over for his last docu. Definitely for his last docu.

In the low gravity, it was a long way to the bottom of the dune. Sand poured and rumbled all around him, and his exmike choked back the terrible din of thousands of dunes, as the booming erg was all shaken at once by the S waves running through the rock below it, setting up countless resonances, triggering more avalanches and more resonances, until nearly the whole potential energy of the Sand Sea released at once.

Maybe just to annoy Léoa, he intoned a voice-over, deliberately his corniest ever, as he tumbled down the slope and wondered how the sand would kill him. “It is as if the vast erg knows what Boreas is, that this great light in the sky is the angel of death for the Sand Sea, which shouts its blind, black, stony defiance to the indifferent glaring ice overhead.”

He rolled again, cutting off his intoning with an oof! and released his skis. Rolling again, he plowed deep into the speeding current of sand. Something hard hit the back of his helmet. He tumbled faster and faster, then flopped and slid on his belly headfirst.

In darkness, he heard only the grinding of fine sand against his exmike.

The damp in Thorby’s undersuit and his muzzy head told him he’d just done the most embarrassing thing of his life, fainted from fear. Now it felt like his worst hangover; he took a sip of water. Bruised all over, but no acute pain anywhere; slipped out of his urine tube, that seemed to be all that was wrong. If Baggins caught up with him, Thorby would like to get into the shelter, readjust things in the undersuit, sponge off a bit, but he didn’t absolutely have to.

His clock didn’t seem to be working—it didn’t keep its own time, just reported overhead signal—but the wetness in his undersuit meant he couldn’t have been out more than fifteen minutes or so. He’d be dry in another few minutes as the Mars suit system found the moisture and recycled it.

He was lying on his face, head slightly downward. He tried to push up and discovered he couldn’t move his arms, though he could wriggle his fingers a bit, and after doing that for a while, he began to turn his wrists, scooping more sand away, getting leverage to push up more. An eternity later he was moving his forearms, and then his shoulders, half shaking the sand off, half swimming to the top. At last he got some leverage and movement in his hips and thighs, and heaved himself up to the surface, sitting upright in the silvery light of the darkened sky.

There was a pittering noise he couldn’t quite place, until he realized it was sand and grit falling like light sleet around him. The blast wave that had carried it must have passed over while Thorby was unconscious; the tops of the dunes had an odd curl to them, and he realized that the top few meters had been rotated ninety degrees from their usual west-windward, east-leeward, to north-windward, southleeward, and all the dunes were much lower and broader. Probably being down in the bowl had saved his life; maybe it had saved Léoa too.

He clicked over to direct voice. “Léoa?”

No answer, and her voice channel hadn’t sent an acknowledge, so she wasn’t anywhere in radio range, or she was buried too deep for him to reach her.

He tried the distress channel and got a message saying that if he was above thirty degrees north latitude and wasn’t bleeding to death within ten kilometers of a hospital, he was on his own. Navigation channel was out as well, but if he had to he could just walk with the Bears and Cassiopeia to his back while they got the navigation system back on, and still get himself to somewhere much safer and closer to other people, though getting out of the dunes might take a week without his skis.

When the crest had avalanched under Léoa she’d been at least one hundred and fifty meters behind him, and he wasn’t sure she’d gone down into this bowl. He tried her on direct voice again, and still had nothing, so he tried phone and was informed that overhead satellite service was temporarily suspended. He guessed that the impact had thrown enough junk around to take down some of the high-ellipse polar satellites that supplied communication and navigation.

If he knew he was alone, the thing to do would be to start walking south, but he couldn’t leave Léoa here if there was any chance of finding her. The first aid kit in Baggins had directional gear for checking her transponder, but Baggins was probably buried or crushed, and even if the porter was still rolling it might be a while before it found its way to him.

He would wait a few hours for Baggins anyway; the porter not only had the food, but could also track the tags on his skis and poles, and had a power shovel. A lot better to begin with a shelter, food, and skis than to get one or two kilometers farther and a lot more tired. And he did owe Léoa a search.

The best thing he could think of to do—which was probably useless—was to climb to the top of the slope he’d rolled down. The predawn west wind was rising, and the sand swirled around his boots; it was hard going all the way up, and it was dawn before he reached the top. The small bloody red sun rising far to the southeast, barely penetrating the dense dust clouds, gave little light. He clicked his visor for magnification and light amplification, and turned around slowly, making himself look at each slope and into each bowl he could see into, since with the wind already erasing his boot prints, he knew that once he walked any distance he’d have little chance of finding even the bowl into which he’d fallen.

There was something small and dark moving and slipping down the side of the next bowl north; he took a few steps, and used the distance gauge. It estimated the object to be about a meter across and two kilometers away.

He moved toward it slowly until he realized it was Léoa’s porter, headed roughly for the bottom of the bowl, so it must be getting signal from her transponder. He descended to meet it and found it patiently digging with its small scoop and plow, rocking back and forth on its outsize dune wheels to get more leverage.

Thorby helped as much as he could—which wasn’t much—with his hands. He didn’t know whether the porter would try to dig her out if the med transponder showed she was dead, and, of course, it would ignore him, so he didn’t have any way to ask it about anything. The suits usually ran with a couple of hours of stored air as a buffer, and made fresh air continually, but if she’d switched to pure direct oxygen as he had, there might not have been much in her tank, and if the intake was buried and filled with sand, she could suffocate.

Presently he felt a hard object; an instant later the porter reached forward with a claw, took a grip, and pulled one of Léoa’s skis from the sand, putting it into its storage compartment, before rolling forward. Thorby stared at it for a long moment, and started to laugh as he followed the porter up the hill, to where he plucked out a pole. Presumably it would get around to Léoa, sooner or later; nobody had thought to make lifesaving a priority for a baggage cart.

The roiling sky was the color of an old bruise and his temperature gauge showed that it was cold enough for CO₂ snow to fall. He followed Léoa’s porter and tried the phone again. This time he got her voicemail, and left a message telling her what was going on, just in case she was wandering around on a hill nearby and out of line of sight from the satellite.

Five minutes later his phone rang. “Thorby?”

“Yeah, Léoa, are you okay?”

“No. Buried to my mid-chest, I think I have a broken back and something’s really wrong with my leg, and I can see your porter from where I am but I can’t get its attention.” Her voice was tense with pain. “Can’t tell you where I am, either. And you wouldn’t believe what your porter just did.”

“It dug up one of my skis. That’s what yours is doing over here. All right, to be able to see it you must be in the same bowl I landed in, one to the south, I’m on my way. I’m climbing without skis, so I’m afraid this is going to be slow.”

After a while as he climbed, the wind picked up. “Léoa?” he called, on the phone again because radio still wasn’t connecting them.

“I’m here. Your porter found your other ski. Do you think it will be okay for me to have some water? I’ve been afraid to drink.”

“I think that’s okay, but first aid class was a while ago. I was calling because I was afraid sand might be piling up on you.”

“Well, it is. I’m trying to clear it with my arms but it’s not easy, and I can’t sit up.”

“I don’t think you should try to sit up.”

They talked while he climbed; it was less lonely. “Your porter is digging about three hundred meters behind me,” he told her. “It must be finding your other ski.”

“Can’t be, if it’s already found one, because the other one is bent under me.”

“Well, it’s getting your pole then. If your ski is jammed under you, it sounds like it hurts.”

“Oh yeah, the release must have jammed and it twisted my leg around pretty badly, and walloped me in the spine. So the porter must be finding my pole. Or maybe I dropped a ration pack or something. They’ve got so much spare processing power, why didn’t anyone tell them people first, then gear?”

“Because there probably aren’t a hundred million people, out of sixteen billion, that ever go off pavement, or to any planet they weren’t born on,” he said. “The porters are doing what they’d do in a train station—making sure our stuff is all together and not stolen, then catching up with us.”

“Yours just found a pole and it’s heading up the hill, so I guess it’s on its way to you now.”

He topped the rise a few minutes later, just as Baggins rolled up to him and waited obediently for orders. “Skis and poles,” he said to his loyal idiot friend, and the machine laid them out for him.

He couldn’t see Léoa, still, but there was so much sand blowing around on the surface that this might not mean anything. He tried direct voice. “Léoa, wave or something if you can.”

An arm flopped upward from a stream of red dust halfway down the slope before him, and he glided down to her carefully, swinging far out around her to approach from below, making sure he didn’t bump her or push sand onto her. He had to wait for Baggins to bring all the gear along, and tell it to approach carefully, but while the porter picked its way down the slope, he put the first aid and rescue gear manuals into his audio channel, asked it to script the right things to do, and listened until he could recite it back. This was one of those times that reminded him he’d always wanted to learn to hand-read.

Meanwhile he kept brushing sand off Léoa; she was crying quietly now, because it still hurt, and she had been afraid she would be buried alive, and now that he was there to keep her intakes clear, she was safe.

Late that afternoon, he had completed digging her out, tying her to the various supports, putting the drugs into her liquid intakes, and equipping Baggins to carry her. She was lying flat on a cross-shaped support as if she’d been crucified. Voice-commanding Baggins, he slowly raised her, got the porter under her, and balanced her on top. With Baggins’s outrigger wheels extended as far as they would go, she would be stable on slopes less than ten degrees from the horizontal, and at speeds below three kilometers per hour. Thorby figured that hauling her would be something to do for a couple of days until rescue craft were available for less urgent cases.

Com channels were coming back up gradually, and the navigation channel was open again, but there was still little news, except a brief announcement that the impact had not been an early breakup of the comet, but apparently been caused by an undetected stony satellite of Boreas, about a half kilometer across. Splashback from the impact, as Thorby had guessed, had destroyed most of the satellites passing over the pole in the hours following. The dust storm it had kicked up had been impressive but brief and localized, so that only a half dozen stations and towns in the far north had taken severe damage, and tourist trade was expected to increase as people flocked to see the new crater blasted through the polar ice and into the Martian soil before the Boreal Ocean drowned it.

Authorities were confirming that the pass over the South Pole in seventeen days, to be followed with an equatorial air brake nine days after that, was still on schedule. Thorby figured he’d be able to cover those, easily, so Léoa’s little political action would mean very little.

He wanted to ask her about that but he didn’t quite see how to do it.

Shortly after Baggins began to carry the cruciform Léoa in a slow spiral up the inside of the bowl, gaining just a couple of meters on each circuit, her porter appeared over the top of the dune. It had apparently found the last ski pole, or whatever it was digging for, and now followed her transponder like a faithful dog, behind Baggins, around and around the sandy bowl.

Léoa insisted that he get visual recordings of that silly parade, but he quietly killed the audio on it, because all that was really audible was her hysterical laughter. He attributed that to the painkillers.

About dawn he sat up, drank more water and swallowed some food, and skied easily to the top of the dune crest, where Baggins had just managed to carry Léoa after toiling in that slow spiral around the bowl all night. The monitor said she was fast asleep, and Thorby thought that was the best possible thing. Through most of the morning and into the afternoon, he skied along the newly reorganized dune crests, working a little ahead of Baggins and then sitting down to wait for it to catch up, listening to the slow spitting of sand against his suit, and watching the low red dust clouds gather and darken, with only his thoughts for company.

When Léoa finally awoke, she said, “I’m hungry.” It startled Thorby; he was about sixty meters ahead, using his two remaining stalkers to shoot the dunes through the red dust that was still settling.

“Be right there,” he said, and skied back, the stalkers hopping after him. Her mouth, throat, and digestive system were basically okay, according to the medical sensors, though they wanted her to eat mostly clear broth till she could be looked at properly in a hospital. This time she chose chicken broth, and he hooked it up so she could sip it. All the diagnostics from the rescue frame said she was more or less normal, and as far as he could tell the broken leg and spine were the major damage.

After a while she said, “If I call out my stalkers, will you tell the story about the bicycle ride around the comet, and all those things about becoming famous?”

“Sure,” he said, “if it will make the time pass better for you. But I warn you it’s very dull.”

So he sketched out the basics, in his best “I am being interviewed” voice, as the red dusty sky grew darker. When he was fourteen he had been sent to live with his grandmother because his mother had a promising career going as an actress and his being visibly a teenager would have spoiled her image as a sex object for teenage boys. His grandmother had been part of the earliest team for the first Great Bloom projects, so he had found himself dispatched to Boreas with her, forty-five AU from the sun—so far out that the sun was just a bright star. He had been bored and unhappy, spending most of his time playing games in VR and bored even there because he was so far from the rest of the solar system that radio signals from anywhere else, even Triton Station, took most of a day for a round trip.

“So on the day of the first fire-off—”

“Fire-off? You mean the atom bomb?”

“Well, sort of atom bomb. Laser initiated fusion explosive, but nobody wanted to call a bomb LIFE. Yeah, the thing that started Boreas falling down into the lower solar system.” He skied back to look at her life-support indicators; they were all green so as far as he knew, she was fine. “On that day, Grandma insisted that I suit up, which I didn’t want to do, and go outside with her, which I really didn’t want to do, to sit and watch the sky—the gadget was going to be blowing off over the horizon. They put it in an ellipsoidal super-reflecting balloon, at one focus, and then put the other focus of the ellipsoidal at the focus of a great big parabolic parasol—”

“None of this means a thing to me.”

“They had these really thin plastic reflectors to organize it into a beam about a kilometer across, so all that light, X rays, heat, everything pretty much hit one square kilometer and blew off a lot of ice and snow in one direction.”

“That’s better. So, you got to see one big explosion and you liked it so much you decided to see them for the rest of your life?”

“My helmet’s opaqued, did you want a reaction shot to that?”

“I’ll make one up,” she said. “Or use stock. I’m not that purist anymore. Anyway, I’ve heard you mention it two or three times, so what was Cookie Crumb Hill?”

“Home. It was where the base was. Basically a pile of sand cemented together with water ice, it was the boat for the base.”

“The boat?”

“It floated on what was around it, and if anything had gone wrong it would have ejected as a whole, so we thought of it as a boat. But we called it Cookie Crumb Hill because it was a pile of meter or bigger ice clods. The stuff in the core was mostly silica, so the robots spun that into glass fibers, stirred that into melted water, and added enough vacuum beads to make it float on the frost, because otherwise anything we built would have been under twenty-five kilometers of frost.”

A virgin Kuiper Belt Object begins as a bit of dust accumulating frost. It accretes water, ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, all the abundant things in the universe, a molecule at a time. Every so often it adds more dust, and as it grows bigger and bigger, the dust sinks through the loose vacuum frost to the center. At Kuiper Belt velocities, hardly anything ever hits hard enough to cause vaporization, and anyway it’s too cold for anything to stay vapor for long. So over billions of years, the frost at the center packs slowly around the dust, and all of it sinks and compacts into a kind of sandy glacier. Frost on top of that sandy glacier packs in to form “fizzy glacier”—water ice mixed with methane and carbon dioxide ice. And always the surface at a few kelvins, where the slight mass and the low gravity are not enough to compact the crystalline structures, grows as thick frost; at the bottom of twenty-five kilometers of frost, on a world as small and light as Boreas, the total pressure was less than the air pressure of Mars. Time alone made Boreas large and its center hard.

“So before people got there,” Léoa said, “you could say it was one big snowflake. Fractally elaborated fine structures of ice crystals, organized around a dust center—just that it was more than seven hundred kilometers across.”

“Small dust center, big compacted ice center,” he said. “More like a snowball with a lot of frost on it. But I guess you’re right, in a sense. So we called it Cookie Crumb Hill because with the fiber and beads in them, the ice boulders looked sort of like cookie crumbs, and we built it up in a big flat pyramid with sort of a keel underneath to keep it from turning over, so it was also a boat on a fluffy snowball, or if you would rather call it that, a snowflake.

“Anyway, I was a complete jerk as a teenage boy.”

“I had twin teenage boys a couple decades ago,” Léoa said, “and I might have the reversal and have more babies, but only if I can drown them or mail them away at age twelve.”

Thorby skied alongside Baggins to check her indicators; she was farther into the green range, probably feeling better, and that was good.

“Well,” he said, “I was unusually unpleasant even for a teenager, at least until the bicycle ride. Though being bad wasn’t why Mom got rid of me; more like the opposite, actually.” It came out more bitter than he had expected it to; he sometimes thought the only time he’d really been emotionally alive was between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, because everything after seemed so gray by comparison. “Anyway, I sat up there with Gran, and then there was a great light in the sky over the horizon, and about ten minutes of there being an atmosphere—I felt wind on my suit and for just a moment there was a sky instead of stars—and then, poof-click, all this new spiky frost forming everywhere. That was when the idea started, that it would be wonderful to be outside for a long period of time, especially if I could control what I did and how I spent my time.

“So for physics class, I figured out the gadget, and had the fabricators make it. That kilometer across loop of spinning superconductor that was basically a big flywheel I could spin up to orbital velocity by doing shifts pedaling the treadmill, so over about a month I got in shape. Bicycle that I could ride around the inside of the loop as a maglev, picking up speed and momentum for the loop. That was trivial stuff, any lab could build that now, and our local robots didn’t have much to do once the base was done. So I built my loop and my bicycle, or rather the robots did, and pedaled the loop for a few hours a day. In a frictionless very low g environment, the momentum adds up, and eventually that loop was moving at close to six hundred kilometers per hour, more than orbital velocity. With controllable superconduction on my bike tires, I could gradually increase the coupling, so I didn’t get yanked off the bike when I first got on, and just ride my relative speed up high enough before getting off the loop and into orbit.

“Then I just needed the right timing, enough air, food, and water, and a way to come down when I got bored. The timing was done by a computer, so that I pulled out of the loop right at the top, while I was riding parallel to the ground, and I just had a one-time program to do that, it took over and steered when it needed to, since my launch window was about three meters long and at that speed, that went by in about a sixtieth of a second. A recycling suit took care of the air and water. The food was in the big container I was towing. And the container, when it was empty, could be given a hard shove, and dragged through the frost below, as an anchor to get down to about a hundred kilometers per hour, when I’d inflate the immense balloon tires around the superconducting rims, and skim along the frost back to Cookie Crumb Hill.

“I just put the camera on the handlebars, facing backward, so that I’d have a record when I turned the project in for a grade, and then since I had to take a documentation class the next term, I used the footage. I had no idea people would get all excited about the image of me on that bicycle, food hamper towing behind me, with all that Boreas in the background.”

“You looked like you were riding over it like a witch on a broomstick,” she reminded him, “because the producer that bought it made it consistent that your head was upright in the picture, and the way a body in a gravitational field positions itself, the bike ended up toward Boreas.”

“‘It matters not what happened or how it was shot, the editor will decide what it was,’” he quoted, and skied forward a bit to stretch his tired legs and enjoy some exercise in the little daylight there was. Probably it would be another day or two before there was a rescue.

When he came back, and found her still rolling along on the rescue frame (which, to his eyes, kept looking more and more like a cross) on top of Baggins, she was still awake and wanted some more soup, so he set that up for her. “This probably is a good sign for your quick recovery,” he pointed out. “The rescue people say they’ll pick us up sometime tomorrow, so we could just camp here, but if we cover another fifteen kilometers tonight and tomorrow morning, we can officially say we got out of the Sand Sea all by ourselves. Which is more comfortable for you, stationary or rolling?”

“With my eyes closed I can’t tell the difference; your porter is pretty good at carrying a delicate object. I can’t get out of the suit anyway, so you’re the one who setting up a shelter might make a difference to. So let’s keep moving till you want to do that, and then move again in the morning when you’re ready.”

“That’ll work.” It was almost dark now, and though he could steer and avoid hazards all right by light amps and infrared, and find his way by the same navigation system that Baggins used, it was a sort of scary way to proceed and he didn’t like the idea of risking something going wrong with Léoa. “I guess I’ll make camp here.”

The shelter took a few minutes to inflate, and then Baggins carried her inside and set her on cargo supports, so he could at least remove her helmet and let her breathe air that came from the shelter’s generator, and eat a little bit of food she could chew, mostly just pastelike stuff from tubes that the medical advisor said she could have. When he had made her comfortable, and eaten a sitting-up meal himself, he stretched out on a pad himself, naked but feeling much better after a sponge bath. He told the shelter to make it dark, and didn’t worry about setting an alarm time.

“Thorby?”

“Need something?”

“Just an answer to the last part of the question. So how did orbiting Boreas for a month, living on suit food and watching the frost form on the surface as a lot of the evaporated stuff snowed back in—I mean, basically, it was a novelty act, you were just orbiting a snowball on a bicycle—how did that launch everything for you?”

“My big secret is it didn’t,” he said, not sure whether telling her could change anything. “For most of the ride I played VR games on my visor and caught up on sleep and writing to pen pals. I shot less than five hours of camera work across that whole month. Sure, orbiting a kilometer up from a KBO’s surface is interesting for a few minutes at a time. The frost spires and the big lacy ground patterns can be kind of pretty, but you know, a teenage boy doesn’t appreciate much that his glands don’t react to. I finally decided that I could stand company again, tossed the food container downward on the stretch-winch, slowed down to about a forty kilometers per hour across a few hundred kilometers of frost—the rooster tail from that was actually the best visual of the trip, I thought, with a line down from my bicycle to the surface, and then snow spraying everywhere from the end of the line—came in, got a shower, put it together, and forgot about it till it made me famous. At which point it also made it famous that Mom had a teenage son, which was badly blowing the ingénue image, so she filed repudiation papers with Image Control, and I’ve never seen or heard from her since. The biggest thing I learned, I’m afraid, was that I like having a lot of time to myself, and people bug me.”

“What about big explosions?”

“I like them, I always did. And I liked watching frost re-form after moving Boreas around, and I just like to see stuff change. I know you’re looking for something deeper, but you know, that’s about it. Things end, new things form, new things end, newer things form. I just like to be there.”

She didn’t ask again, and he heard her breathing grow slower and deeper. He thought about the visuals he had, and about a couple things he wanted to make sure to do when Boreas did its South Pole pass, and was asleep almost at once in the perfect dark and silence of the Martian wilderness.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll tell you as much as I can, since you are going to ask.” He was sitting beside her reconstructor tank in the hospital. “That’s why you came back, right, to ask why I would do such a thing?”

“I don’t really know if that is why I came here,” he said. “I wanted to see how you were, I had some days before I go down to the South Pole, and since I put some effort into having you be alive, I guess I just wanted to see the results. I’m not planning to work with you again, so I don’t really have to know why you wrecked my stalkers just before some key shots, only that you might, to avoid you.”

“I suppose after what I did there’s no question of your ever liking me.”

“I’m a loner, I don’t like people much anyway.”

“Some people might guess that’s why you like BEREs. The people who used to love the place the way it was are gone, and the people who are going to love the place it will be aren’t there yet. For just that instant it’s just you and the universe, eh?”

She must be recording this. It was the sort of thing you asked an interviewee, and her audience in particular would just gobble this down. Perhaps he should spoil it, and pay her back for having spoiled the first Boreas pass for him?

Except she hadn’t spoiled it. He’d be getting plenty of shots of the later passes and anyway good old Stalker Two had gotten most of what he wanted, including the fiery column from the surprise impact. And even if she hadn’t done that, they’d have missed most of it through having to grab the stalkers and flee for their lives.

So it mattered, but not a lot; he just didn’t want her around when he was shooting anything important. As for rescuing Léoa, well, what else could a guy do? That didn’t create a bond for him and he couldn’t imagine why it might for her. It was just something he did because it was something people did at a time like that.

“You’re looking like you’ve never had that thought before,” Léoa said.

He thought, What thought? and said, “I guess, yeah.”

“You see? We’re not so different from each other. You like to see the moment when something beautiful changes into something new. And you don’t care that things get all smashed when that happens. In fact you enjoy the smash, the beautiful death of something natural and beautiful, and the birth of a beautiful human achievement.”

He thought, What? and was afraid he would have to say something.

But by now she was rolling. “Thorby, that was what I wanted to capture. Thorby, Lonely Thorby, Thorby the Last Mountain Man, finds out he can be betrayed by people he thought were his friends. The change of your expression as it happened. The way your body recoiled. The whole—my idea is, I’m going to overlay all that and interact it, touchlinked back and forth everywhere, with the changes on Mars, show Mars becoming a new living world artificially, and show Thorby engaging and rejoining the human race, artificially, in a dialogue. Show you becoming someone who can hate and maybe even eventually love. Someone who can see that the rest of us are here. The way Mars can learn to respond to life on its surface, in a way that it hasn’t in the three centuries we’ve been there.”

At least he knew about this. People had been trying to change Thorby his whole life. He’d never been any good at being changed. “So you wanted to get the moment when I changed, for your docu?” It was a stupid question, she’d told him, but interviewers have to ask stupid questions now and then, if they want to get decent quotes, and habits die harder than passions.

“That’s it, that’s it exactly. Exactly. I’m giving up on the whole purist-realist movement. You can have it to yourself. It not only isn’t making me famous, it’s not even keeping you famous. I’ve got an idea for a different kind of docu altogether, one where the human change in celebs and the Blooming change in the solar system echo and describe each other in sort of a dialogue. If you’re interested, and I bet you’re not, I’ve recorded sort of a manifesto of the new movement. I’ve put it out already. I told them what I did to you and why and showed your face, which wasn’t as expressive as it could be, by the way. Too bad you never want to do another take. And even though in the manifesto I explain it will be at least twenty years before my next docu, instead of the usual five or six, because I want to get at least that much of the Mars changes into it, the manifesto is still getting the most attention I’ve ever gotten. I’ve got a bigger audience than ever, even pulling in some of my backlist. I’m going to have an impact.”

It all made sense of a sort, as much as people stuff ever did, so Thorby said, “Well, if that’s what you want most, I’m glad you’re finally having an impact. I hope it’s the impact you want.” To him it seemed to come out stiff and formal and unbelievable.

But she smiled very warmly and said, “Thorby, that’s so beautiful I’d never dream of asking for a second take.”

“You’re welcome.” He brushed her forehead with his hand, and added, “Happy impacts.”

Because she looked like she was trying to think of a perfect reply, he left. He needed to get new gear purchased and checked out, then catch a hop-rocket; Boreas pass over the South Pole was just three days away.

He wondered why he was smiling.

Right on Mars’s Arctic Circle, just at 66 N, at winter solstice, the sun at noon should just bounce over the southern horizon, and Thorby had an idea that that might look especially impressive with the big new ring arcing so high across the sky. But to his annoyance, here he was, waiting for that momentary noon-dawn, and the new, thick Martian clouds had socked in every point around the Arctic Circle. Above the clouds, he knew, the new rings were vivid with light, a great arc sweeping halfway up the sky; but down here, nothing, and even the constant meteor shower under the rings was invisible, or showed only as flashes in the clouds indistinguishable from distant lightning.

He waited but it never cleared, and the time for the midwinter sun passed, so he turned on the ground lights on his hop-rocket to pack up.

Thorby blinked for a moment. It was snowing, big, thick, heavy, slow flakes, tumbling down gently everywhere, not many just yet, but some everywhere he looked. It was so fine, and so perfect, that he shot it for twenty minutes, using three stalkers to record the snowfall in big slow pans, and two just to record the lacy flakes as they landed on dark soil and lay exposed for just an instant to his view before the stalkers’ lights melted them, working at maximum magnification to catch each unique one, wondering if it was even possible for a Martian snowflake shape to fall elsewhere.

He stayed there shooting till the wind rose and the snowfall thickened enough so that he had to worry about getting the hop-rocket off the ground. He was laughing as Baggins swallowed up the stalkers and rumbled up the ramp, and he looked around one more time before climbing the ramp and turning off his ground lights. He indulged in a small spiteful pleasure: he knew that his normally expressionless face was cracking wide-open with pure joy, and Léoa and her cameras were in some city or on some ship somewhere, farther from him than anyone had ever been.

Originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe, August 2007

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

Steven Popkes

Most of Steven Popkes’ written work makes his characters’ lives unpleasant. He would like to be able to write heartwarming stories of human fortitude and the value of love and family but doesn’t have the knack.

Instead, he writes about miserable people with miserable lives who have a brief moment when they raise their heads and look around. Fortunately for him, some people share his misanthropic taste and he has been collected in several annual “Best of’s”—most recently in the Best American Mystery Stories, released in fall of 2017. He is a regular at the Boskone and Arisia Science Fiction conventions.

He is an aerospace engineer by day. He lives near Boston, is a private pilot and has a brown belt in Judo.

Ian R. MacLeod

Ian R. MacLeod is the acclaimed writer of challenging and innovative speculative and fantastic fiction. His novel, Wake Up and Dream, won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, while his previous works have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and have been translated into many languages. His short story, “Snodgrass,” was developed for television in the United Kingdom as part of the Sky Arts series Playhouse Presents. MacLeod grew up in the West Midlands region of England, studied law, and spent time working and dreaming in the civil service before moving on to teaching and house-husbandry. He lives with his wife in the riverside town of Bewdley.

John Barnes

John Barnes is the award-winning author of many science fiction novels, including Orbital Resonance, A Million Open Doors, and The Sky So Big and Black. With Buzz Aldrin, he wrote Encounter with Tiber and The Return.

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

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.