Issue 56, September 2019

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

Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

The Wreck of the Godspeed

by James Patrick Kelly

Useless Things

by Maureen F. McHugh

The Memcordist

by Lavie Tidhar

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the September 2019 issue of Forever Magazine and thank you for subscribing or buying a copy. Your support keeps this little magazine going.

Well, I’m back from Ireland and the Worldcon. If you haven’t heard, I came in second to Gardner Dozois for the Hugo Award for Best Editor (Short Form). It’s hard to complain when you lose to one of the legends of the field and a friend. In some ways, it’s a career milestone: I’ve joined the storied ranks of editors that have lost a Hugo to him over the years.

Being away for nearly two weeks has left me with a considerable to-do pile to face in September. It’s going to be an exhausting pace, but most of it is work that should at least be fun to do. Among them is another buying round of stories for future issues of Forever. If you have any thoughts, now would be the time to let me know.

Until next time,

-Neil

The Wreck of the Godspeed

James Patrick Kelly

Day One

What do we know about Adel Ranger Santos?

That he was sixty-five percent oxygen, nineteen percent carbon, ten percent hydrogen, three percent nitrogen, two percent calcium, one percent phosphorus, some potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, iodine and iron and just a trace of chromium, cobalt, copper, fluorine, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, tin, vanadium and zinc. That he was of the domain Eukarya, the kingdom of Animalia, the phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertebrata, the class Mammalia, the order Primates, the family Hominidae, the genus Homo and the species Novo. That, like the overwhelming majority of the sixty trillion people on the worlds of Human Continuum, he was a hybrid cybernetic/biological system composed of intricate subsystems including the circulatory, digestive, endocrine, excretory, informational, integumenary, musculo-skeletal, nervous, psycho-spiritual, reproductive, and respiratory. That he was the third son of Venetta Patience Santos, an Elector of the Host of True Flesh and Halbert Constant Santos, a baker of fine breads. That he was male, left-handed, somewhat introverted, intelligent but no genius, a professed but frustrated heterosexual, an Aries, a virgin, a delibertarian, an agnostic and a swimmer. That he was nineteen Earth standard years old and that until he stumbled, naked, out of the molecular assembler onto the Godspeed he had never left his home world.

The woman caught Adel before he sprawled headlong off the transport stage. “Slow down.” She was taller and wider than any of the women he’d known; he felt like a toy in her arms. “You made it, you’re here.” She straightened him and stepped back to get a look. “Is there a message?”

—a message?—buzzed Adel’s plus.

minus buzzed—yes give us clothes—

Normally Adel kept his opposites under control. But he’d just been scanned, transmitted at superluminal speeds some two hundred and fifty-seven light years, and reassembled on a threshold bound for the center of the Milky Way.

“Did they say anything?” The woman’s face was tight. “Back home?”

Adel shook his head; he had no idea what she was talking about. He hadn’t yet found his voice, but it was understandable if he was a little jumbled. His skin felt a size too small and he shivered in the cool air. This was probably the most important moment of his life and all he could think was that his balls had shrunk to the size of raisins.

“You’re not . . . ? All right then.” She covered her disappointment so quickly that Adel wondered if he’d seen it at all. “Well, let’s get some clothes on you, Rocky.”

minus buzzed—who’s Rocky?—

“What, didn’t your tongue make the jump with the rest of you?” She was wearing green scrubs and green open-toed shoes. A oval medallion on a silver chain hung around her neck; at its center a pix displayed a man eating soup. “Can you understand me?” Her mouth stretched excessively, as if she intended that he read her lips. “I’m afraid I don’t speak carrot, or whatever passes for language on your world.” She was carrying a blue robe folded over her arm.

“Harvest,” said Adel. “I came from Harvest.”

“He talks,” said the woman. “Now can he walk? And what will it take to get him to say his name?”

“I’m Adel Santos.”

“Good.” She tossed the robe at him and it slithered around his shoulders and wrapped him in its soft embrace. “If you have a name then I don’t have to throw you back.” Two slippers unfolded from its pockets and snugged onto his feet. She began to speak with a nervous intensity that made Adel dizzy. “So, Adel, my name is Kamilah, which means ‘the perfect one’ in Arabic which is a dead language you’ve probably never heard of and I’m here to give you the official welcome to your pilgrimage aboard the Godspeed and to show you around but we have to get done before dinner which tonight is synthetic roasted garab . . . ”

—something is bothering her—buzzed minus—it must be us—

“ . . . which is either a bird or a tuber, I forget which exactly but it comes from the cuisine of Ohara which is a world in the Zeta 1 Reticuli system which you’ve probably never heard of . . . ”

—probably just a talker—plus buzzed.

“ . . . because I certainly never have.” Kamilah wore her hair kinked close against her head; it was the color of rust. She was cute, thought Adel, in a massive sort of way. “Do you understand?”

“Perfectly,” he said. “You did say you were perfect.”

“So you listen?” A grin flitted across her face. “Are you going to surprise me, Adel Santos?”

“I’ll try,” he said. “But first I need a bathroom.”

There were twenty-eight bathrooms on the Godspeed; twenty of them opened off the lavish bedrooms of Dream Street. A level below was the Ophiuchi Dining Hall, decorated in red alabaster, marble and gilded bronze, which could seat as many as forty around its teak banquet table. In the more modest Chillingsworth Breakfasting Room, reproductions of four refectory tables with oak benches could accommodate more intimate groups. Between the Blue and the Dagger Salons was the Music Room with smokewood lockers filled with the noblest instruments from all the worlds of the Continuum, most of which could play themselves. Below that was a library with the complete range of inputs from brainleads to books made of actual plant material, a ballroom decorated in the Nomura III style, a VR dome with ten animated seats, a gymnasium with a lap pool, a black box theater, a billiard room, a conservatory with five different ecosystems and various stairways, hallways, closets, cubbies, and peculiar dead ends. The MASTA, the molecular array scanner/transmitter/assembler was located in the Well Met Arena, an enormous airlock and staging area that opened onto the surface of the threshold. Here also was the cognizor in which the mind of the Godspeed seethed.

It would be far too convenient to call the Godspeed mad. Better to say that for some time she had been behaving like no other threshold. Most of our pioneering starships were built in hollowed out nickel-iron asteroids—a few were set into fabricated shells. All were propelled by matter-antimatter drives that could reach speeds of just under a hundred thousand kilometers per second, about a third of the speed of light. We began to launch them from the far frontiers of the Continuum a millennium ago to search for terrestrial planets that were either habitable or might profitably be made so. Our thresholds can scan planetary systems of promising stars as far away as twenty light years. When one discovers a suitably terrestrial world, it decelerates and swings into orbit. News of the find is immediately dispatched at superluminal speed to all the worlds of the Continuum; almost immediately materials and technicians appear on the transport stage. Over the course of several years we build a new orbital station containing a second MASTA, establishing a permanent link to the Continuum. Once the link is secured, the threshold continues on its voyage of discovery. In all, the Godspeed had founded thirty-seven colonies in exactly this way.

The life of a threshold follows a pattern: decades of monotonous acceleration, cruising and deceleration punctuated by a few years of intense and glorious activity. Establishing a colony is an ultimate affirmation of human culture and even the cool intelligences generated by the cognizors of our thresholds share in the camaraderie of techs and colonists. Thresholds take justifiable pride in their accomplishments; many have had worlds named for them. However, when the time comes to move on, we expect our thresholds to dampen their enthusiasms and abort their nascent emotions to steel themselves against the tedium of crawling between distant stars at three-tenths the speed of light.

Which all of them did—except for the Godspeed.

As they were climbing up the Tulip Stairway to the Dream Halls, Adel and Kamilah came upon two men making their way down, bound together at the waist by a tether. The tether was about a meter long and two centimeters in diameter; it appeared to be elastic. One side of it pulsed bright red and the other was a darker burgundy. The men were wearing baggy pants and gray jackets with tall, buttoned collars that made them look like birds.

“Adel,” said Kamilah, “meet Jonman and Robman.”

Jonman looked like he could have been Robman’s father, but Adel knew better than to draw any conclusions from that. On some worlds, he knew, physiological camouflage was common practice.

Jonman gazed right through Adel. “I can see that he knows nothing about the problem.” He seemed detached, as if he were playing chess in his head.

Kamilah gave him a sharp glance but said nothing. Robman stepped forward and extended his forefinger in greeting. Adel gave it a polite touch.

“This is our rookie, then?” said Robman. “Do you play tikra, Adel?”

—who’s a rookie?—buzzed minus.

—we are—

Since Adel didn’t know what tikra was, he assumed that he didn’t play it. “Not really,” he said.

“He’s from one of the farm worlds,” said Kamilah

“Oh, a rustic.” Robman cocked his head to one side, as if Adel might make sense to him if viewed from a different angle. “Do they have gulpers where you come from? Cows?” Seeing the blank look on Adel’s face, he pressed on. “Maybe frell?”

“Blue frell, yes.”

—keep talking—plus buzzed—make an impression—

Adel lunged into conversation. “My uncle Durwin makes summer sausage from frell loin. He built his own smoke house.”

Robman frowned.

“It’s very good.” Adel had no idea where he was going with this bit of family history. “The sausages, I mean. He’s a butcher.”

—and we’re an idiot—

“He’s from one of the farm worlds,” said Jonman, as if he were catching up with their chitchat on a time delay.

“Yes,” said Robman. “He makes sausages.”

Jonman nodded as if this explained everything about Adel. “Then don’t be late for dinner,” he advised. “I see there will be garab tonight.” With this, the two men continued downstairs.

Adel glanced at Kamilah, hoping she might offer some insight into Robman and Jonman. Her eyes were hooded. “I wouldn’t play anything with them if I were you,” she murmured. “Jonman has a stochastic implant. Not only does he calculate probabilities, but he cheats.”

The top of the Tulip Stairway ended at the midpoint of Dream Street. “Does everything have a name here?” asked Adel.

“Pretty much,” said Kamilah. “It tells you something about how bored the early crews must have been. We’re going right.” The ceiling of Dream Street glowed with a warm light that washed Kamilah’s face with pink. She said the names of bedroom suites as they passed the closed doors. “This is Fluxus. The Doghouse. We have room for twenty pilgrims, twice that if we want to double up.”

The carpet was a sapphire plush that clutched at Adel’s sandals as he shuffled down the hall.

“Chrome over there. That’s where Upwood lived. He’s gone now. You don’t know anything about him, do you?” Her voice was suddenly tight. “Upwood Marcene?”

“No, should I? Is he famous?”

“Not famous, no.” The medallion around her neck showed a frozen lake. “He jumped home last week, which leaves us with only seven, now that you’re here.” She cleared her throat and the odd moment of tension passed. “This is Corazon. Forty Pushups. We haven’t found a terrestrial in ages, so Speedy isn’t as popular as she used to be.”

“You call the threshold Speedy?”

“You’ll see.” Kamilah sighed. “And this is Cella. We might as well see if Sister is receiving.” She pressed her hand to the door and said, “Kamilah here.” She waited.

“What do you want, Kamilah?” said the door, a solid blue slab that featured neither latch nor knob.

“I have the new arrival here.”

“It’s inconvenient.” The door sighed. “But I’m coming.” It vanished and before them stood a tiny creature, barely up to Adel’s waist. She was wearing a hat that looked like a birds nest made of black ribbon with a smoky veil that covered her eyes. Her mouth was thin and severe. All he could see of her almond skin was the dimpled chin and her long elegant neck; the billowing sleeves of her loose black dress swallowed her hands.

“Adel Santos, this is Lihong Rain. She prefers to be called Sister.” Sister might have been a child or she might have been a grandmother. Adel couldn’t tell.

“Safe passage, Adel.” She made no other welcoming gesture.

Adel hesitated, wondering if he should try to initiate contact. But what kind? Offer to touch fingers? Shake hands? Maybe he should catch her up in his arms and dance a two-step.

“Same to you, Sister,” he said and bowed.

“I was praying just now.” He could feel her gaze even though he couldn’t see it. “Are you religious, Brother Adel?” The hair on the back of his neck stood up.

“I’d prefer to be just Adel, if you don’t mind,” he said. “And no, I’m not particularly religious, I’m afraid.”

She sagged, as if he had just piled more weight on her frail shoulders. “Then I will pray for you. If you will excuse me.” She stepped back into her room and the blue door reformed.

plus buzzed—we were rude to her—

—we told the truth—

“Don’t worry,” said Kamilah. “You can’t offend her. Or rather, you can’t not offend her, since just about everything we do seems to offend her. Which is why she spends almost all her time in her room. She claims she’s praying, although Speedy only knows for sure. So I’m in Delhi here, and next door you’re in The Ranch.”

—Kamilah’s next door?—buzzed minus.

—we hardly know her don’t even think it—

—too late—

They stopped in front of the door to his room, which was identical to Sister’s, except it was green. “Press your right hand to it anywhere, say your name and it will ID you.” After Adel followed these instructions, the door considered for a moment and then vanished with a hiss.

Adel guessed that the room was supposed to remind him of home. It didn’t exactly, because he’d lived with his parents in a high rise in Great Randall, only two kilometers from Harvest’s first MASTA. But it was like houses he had visited out in the countryside. Uncle Durwin’s, for example. Or the Pariseaus’. The floor appeared to be of some blondish tongue-and-grooved wood. Two of the walls were set to show a golden tallgrass prairie with a herd of chocolate-colored beasts grazing in the distance. Opposite a rolltop desk were three wooden chairs with velvet upholstered seats gathered around a low oval table. A real plant with leaves like green hearts guarded the twin doorways that opened into the bedroom and the bathroom.

Adel’s bed was king-sized with a half moon head and footboards tied to posts that looked like tree trunks with the bark stripped off. It had a salmon-colored bedspread with twining rope pattern. However, we should point out that Adel did not notice anything at all about his bed until much later.

—oh no—

“Hello,” said Adel.

—oh yes—

“Hello yourself, lovely boy.” The woman was propped on a nest of pillows. She was wearing a smile and shift spun from fog. It wisped across her slim, almost boyish, body concealing very little. Her eyes were wide and the color of honey. Her hair was spiked in silver.

Kamilah spoke from behind him. “Speedy, he just stepped off the damn stage ten minutes ago. He’s not thinking of fucking.”

“He’s a nineteen year old male, which means he can’t think of anything but fucking.” She had a wet, whispery voice, like waves washing against pebbles. “Maybe he doesn’t like girls. I like being female, but I certainly don’t have to be.” Her torso flowed beneath the fog and her legs thickened.

“Actually, I do,” said Adel. “Like girls, I mean.”

“Then forget Speedy.” Kamilah crossed the room to the bed and stuck her hand through the shape on the bed. It was all fog, and Kamilah’s hand parted it. “This is just a fetch that Speedy projects when she feels like bothering us in person.”

“I have to keep my friends company,” said the Godspeed.

“You can keep him company later.” Kamilah swiped both hands through the fetch and she disappeared. “Right now he’s going to put some clothes on and then we’re going to find Meri and Jarek,” she said.

“Wait,” said Adel. “What did you do to her? Where did she go?”

“She’s still here,” Kamilah said. “She’s always everywhere, Adel. You’ll get used to it.”

“But what did she want?”

The wall to his right shimmered and became a mirror image of the bedroom. The Godspeed was back in her nest on his bed. “To give you a preview of coming attractions, lovely boy.”

Kamilah grasped Adel by the shoulders, turned him away from the wall and aimed him at the closet. “Get changed,” she said. “I’ll be in the sitting room.”

Hanging in the closet were three identical peach-colored uniforms with blue piping at the seams. The tight pantaloons had straps that would pass under the instep of his feet. The dress blue blouse had the all-too-familiar pulsing heart patch over the left breast. The jacket had a double row of enormous silver zippers and bore two merit pins which proclaimed Adel a true believer of the Host of True Flesh.

Except that he wasn’t.

Adel had long since given up on his mother’s little religion but had never found a way to tell her. Seeing his uniforms filled him with guilt and dread. He’d come two hundred and fifty-seven light years and he had still not escaped her. He’d expected she would pack the specs for True Flesh uniforms in his luggage transmission, but he’d thought she’d send him at least some civilian clothes as well.

—we have to lose the clown suit—

“So how long are you here for?” called Kamilah from the next room.

“A year,” replied Adel. “With a second year at my option.” Then he whispered, “Speedy, can you hear me?”

“Always. Never doubt it.” Her voice came from the tall blue frel-leather boots that were part of his uniform. “Are we going to have secrets from Kamilah? I love secrets.”

“I need something to wear,” he whispered. “Anything but this.”

“A year with an option?” Kamilah called. “Gods, Adel! Who did you murder?”

“Are we talking practical?” said the Godspeed. “Manly? Artistic? Rebellious?”

He stooped and spoke directly into left boot. “Something basic,” he said. “Scrubs like Kamilah’s will be fine for now.”

Two blobs extruded from the closet wall and formed into drab pants and a shirt.

“Adel?” called Kamilah. “Are you all right?”

“I didn’t murder anyone.” He stripped off the robe and pulled briefs from a drawer. At least the saniwear wasn’t official True Flesh. “I wrote an essay.”

Softwalks bloomed from the floor. “The hair on your legs, lovely boy, is like the wire that sings in my walls.” The Godspeed’s voice was a purr.

The closet seemed very small then. As soon as he’d shimmied into his pants, Adel grabbed the shirt and the softwalks and escaped. He didn’t bother with socks.

“So how did you get here, Kamilah?” He paused in the bedroom to pull on the shirt before entering the sitting room.

“I was sent here as a condition of my parole.”

“Really?” Adel sat on one of the chairs and snapped on his softwalks. “Who did you murder?”

“I was convicted of improper appropriation,” she said. “I misused a symbol set that was alien to my cultural background.”

—say again?—buzzed minus.

Adel nodded and smiled. “I have no idea what that means.”

“That’s all right.” Her medallion showed a fist. “It’s a long story for another time.”

We pause here to reflect on the variety of religious beliefs in the Human Continuum. In ancient times, atheists believed that humanity’s expansion into space would extinguish its historic susceptibility to superstition. And for a time, as we rode primitive torches to our cramped habitats and attempted to terraform the mostly-inhospitable worlds of our home system, this expectation seemed reasonable. But then the discovery of quantum scanning and the perfection of molecular assembly led to the building of the first MASTA systems and everything changed.

Quantum scanning is, after all, destructive. Depending on exactly what has been placed on the stage, that which is scanned is reduced to mere probabilistic wisps, an exhausted scent or perhaps just soot to be wiped off the sensors. In order to jump from one MASTA to another, we must be prepared to die. Of course, we’re only dead for a few seconds, which is the time it takes for the assembler to reconstitute us from a scan. Nevertheless, the widespread acceptance of MASTA transportation means that all of us who had come to thresholds have died and been reborn.

The experience of transitory death has led homo novo to a renewed engagement with the spiritual. But if the atheists were disappointed in their predictions of the demise of religion, the creeds of antiquity were decimated by the new realities of superluminal culture. Ten thousand new religions have risen up on the many worlds of the Continuum to comfort and sustain us in our various needs. We worship stars, sex, the vacuum of space, water, the cosmic microwave background, the Uncertainty Principle, music, old trees, cats, the weather, dead bodies, certain pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom, food, stimulants, depressants, and Levia Calla. We call the deity by many names: Genius, the Bitch, Kindly One, the Trickster, the Alien, the Thumb, Sagittarius A*, the Silence, Surprise, and the Eternal Center. What is striking about this exuberant diversity, when we consider how much blood has been shed in the name of gods, is our universal tolerance of one another. But that’s because all of us who acknowledge the divine are co-religionists in one crucial regard: we affirm that the true path to spirituality must necessarily pass across the stages of a MASTA.

Which is another reason why we build thresholds and launch them to spread the Continuum. Which is why so many of our religions count it as an essential pilgrimage to travel with a threshold on some fraction of its long journey. Which is why the Host of True Flesh on the planet Harvest sponsored an essay contest opened to any communicant who had not yet died to go superluminal, the first prize being an all-expense paid pilgrimage to the Godspeed, the oldest, most distant, and therefore holiest of all the thresholds. Which is why Venetta Patience Santos had browbeaten her son Adel to enter the contest.

Adel’s reasons for writing his essay had been his own. He had no great faith in the Host and no burning zeal to make a pilgrimage. However he chafed under the rules his parents still imposed on him, and he’d just broken up with his girlfriend Gavrila over the issue of pre-marital intercourse—he being in favor, she taking a decidedly contrary position—and he’d heard steamy rumors of what passed for acceptable sexual behavior on a threshold at the farthest edge of civilization. Essay contestants were charged to express the meaning of the Host of True Flesh in five hundred words or less. Adel brought his in at four hundred and nine.

Our Place

By Adel Ranger Santos

We live in a place. This seems obvious, maybe, but think about it. Originally our place was a little valley on the African continent on a planet called Earth. Who we are today was shaped in large part by the way that place was, so long ago. Later humans moved all around that planet and found new places to live. Some were hot, some freezing. We lived at the top of mountains and on endless prairies. We sailed to islands. We walked across deserts and glaciers. But what mattered was that the places that we moved to did not change us. We changed the places. We wore clothes and started fires and built houses. We made every place we went to our place.

Later we left Earth, our home planet, just like we left that valley in Africa. We tried to make places for ourselves in cold space, in habitats, and on asteroids. It was hard. Mars broke our hearts. Venus killed millions. Some people said that the time had come to change ourselves completely so that we could live in these difficult places. People had already begun to meddle with their bodies. It was a time of great danger.

This was when Genius, the goddess of True Flesh awoke for the first time. Nobody knew it then, but looking back we can see that it must have been her. Genius knew that the only way we could stay true to our flesh was to find better places to make our own. Genius visited Levia Calla and taught her to collapse the wave-particle duality so that we could look deep into ourselves and see who we are. Soon we were on our way to the stars. Then Genius told the people to rise up against anyone who wanted to tamper with their bodies. She made the people realize that we were not meant to become machines. That we should be grateful to be alive for the normal a hundred and twenty years and not try to live longer.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we were not alone in space. Maybe if there were really aliens out there somewhere, we would never have had Genius to help us, since there would be no one true flesh. We would probably have all different gods. Maybe we would have changed ourselves, maybe into robots or to look like aliens. This is a scary thought. If it were true, we’d be in another universe. But we’re not.

This universe is our place.

What immediately stood out in this essay is how Adel attributed Levia Calla’s historic breakthrough to the intervention of Genius. Nobody had ever thought to suggest this before, since Professor Calla had been one of those atheists who had been convinced that religion would wither away over the course of the twenty-first century. The judges were impressed that Adel had so cleverly asserted what could never be disproved. Even more striking was the dangerous speculation that concluded Adel’s essay. Ever since Fermi first expressed his paradox, we have struggled with the apparent absence of other civilizations in the universe. Many of the terrestrial worlds we have discovered have complex ecologies, but on none has intelligence evolved. Even now, there are those who desperately recalculate the factors in the Drake Equation in the hopes of arriving at a solution that is greater than one. When Adel made the point that no religion could survive first contact, and then trumped it with the irrefutable fact that we are alone, he won his place on the Godspeed.

Adel and Kamilah came upon two more pilgrims in the library. A man and a woman cuddled on a lime green chenille couch in front of a wall that displayed images of six planets, lined up in a row. The library was crowded with glassed in shelves filled with old-fashioned paper books, and racks with various I/O devices, spex, digitex, whisperers and brainleads. Next to a row of workstations, a long table held an array of artifacts that Adel did not immediately recognize: small sculptures, medals and coins, jewelry and carved wood. Two paintings hung above it, one an image of an artist’s studio in which a man in a black hat painted a woman in a blue dress, the other a still life with fruit and some small, dead animals.

“Meri,” said Kamilah, “Jarek, this is Adel.”

The two pilgrims came to the edge of the couch, their faces alight with anticipation. Out of the corner of his eye, Adel thought he saw Kamilah shake her head. The brightness dimmed and they receded as if nothing had happened.

—we’re a disappointment to everyone—buzzed minus

plus buzzed—they just don’t know us yet—

Meri looked to be not much older than Adel. She was wearing what might have been long saniwear, only it glowed, registering a thermal map of her body in red, yellow, green and blue. “Adel.” She gave him a wistful smile and extended a finger for him to touch.

Jerek held up a hand to indicate that he was otherwise occupied. He was wearing a sleeveless gray shirt, baggy shorts and blacked out spex on which Adel could see a data scrawl flicker.

“You’ll usually find these two together,” said Kamilah. “And often in bed.”

“At least we’re not joined at the hip like the Manmans,” said Meri. “Have you met them yet?”

Adel frowned. “You mean Robman?”

“And Spaceman.” Meri had a third eye tattooed in the middle of her forehead. At least, Adel hoped it was a tattoo.

—sexy—buzzed minus

plus buzzed—weird—

—weird is sexy—

“Oh, Jonman’s not so bad.” Jarek pulled his spex off.

“If you like snobs.” Meri reminded him a little of Gavrila, except for the extra eye. “And cheats.”

Jarek replaced the spex on the rack and then clapped Adel on the back. “Welcome to the zoo, brother.” He was a head shorter than Adel and had the compact musculature of someone who was born on a high G planet. “So you’re in shape,” he said. “Do you lift?”

“Some. Not much. I’m a swimmer.” Adel had been the Great Randall city champion in the 100 and 200 meter.

“What’s your event?”

“Middle distance freestyle.”

—friend?—

“We have a lap pool in the gym,” said Jarek.

—maybe—minus buzzed

“Saw it.” Adel nodded approvingly. “And you? I can tell you work out.”

“I wrestle,” said Jarek. “Or I did back on Kindred. But I’m a gym rat. I need exercise to clear my mind. So what do you think of old Speedy so far?”

“It’s great.” For the first time since he had stepped onto the scanning stage in Great Randall, the reality of where he was struck him. “I’m really excited to be here.” And as he said it, he realized that it was true.

“That’ll wear off,” said Kamilah. “Now if you two sports are done comparing large muscle groups, can we move along?”

“What’s the rush, Kamilah?” Meri shifted into a corner of the couch. “Planning on keeping this one for yourself?” She patted the seat, indicating that Adel should take Jarek’s place. “Come here, let me get an eye on you.”

Adel glanced at Jarek, who winked.

“Has Kamilah been filling you in on all the gossip?”

Adel crammed himself against the side cushion of the couch opposite Meri. “Not really.”

“That’s because no one tells her the good stuff.”

Kamilah yawned. “Maybe because I’m not interested.”

Adel couldn’t look at Meri’s face for long without staring at her tattoo, but if he looked away from her face then his gaze drifted to her hot spots. Finally he decided to focus on her hands.

“I don’t work out,” said Meri, “in case you’re wondering.”

“Is this the survey that wrapped yesterday?” said Kamilah, turning away from them to look at the planets displayed on the wall. “I heard it was shit.”

Meri had long and slender fingers but her fingernails were bitten ragged, especially the thumbs. Her skin was very pale. He guessed that she must have spent a lot of time indoors, wherever she came from.

“System ONR 147-563.” Jarek joined her, partially blocking Adel’s view of the wall. “Nine point eight nine light years away and a whole lot of nothing. The star has luminosity almost three times that of Sol. Six planets: four hot airless rocks, a jovian and a subjovian.”

“I’m still wondering about ONR 134-843,” said Kamilah, and the wall filled with a new solar system, most of which Adel couldn’t see. “Those five Martian-type planets.”

“So?” said Meri. “The star was a K1 orange-red dwarf. Which means those Martians are pretty damn cold. The day max is only 17C on the warmest and at night it drops to—210C. And their atmospheres are way too thin, not one over a hundred millibars. That’s practically space.”

“But there are five of them.” Kamilah held up her right hand, fingers splayed. “Count them, five.”

“Five Martians aren’t worth one terrestrial,” said Jarek.

Kamilah grunted. “Have we seen any terrestrials?”

“Space is huge and we’re slow.” Jarek bumped against her like a friendly dog. “Besides, what do you care? One of these days you’ll bust off this rock, get the hero’s parade on Jaxon and spend the rest of your life annoying the other eyejacks and getting your face on the news.”

“Sure.” Kamilah slouched uncomfortably. “One of these days.”

—eyejack?—buzzed minus.

Adel was wondering the same thing. “What’s an eyejack?”

“An eyejack,” said Meri confidentially, “is someone who shocks other people.”

“Shocks for pay,” corrected Kamilah, her back still to them.

“Shock?” Adel frowned. “As in voltage shock or scandalize shock?”

“Well, electricity could be involved.” Kamilah turned from the wall. Her medallion showed a cat sitting in a sunny window. “But mostly what I do,” she continued, “is make people squirm when they get too settled for their own good.”

—trouble—buzzed plus.

—love it—minus buzzed.

“And you do this how?”

“Movement.” She made a flourish with her left hand that started as a slap but ended as a caress that did not quite touch Jarek’s face. Jarek did not flinch. “Imagery. I work in visuals mostly but I sometimes use wordplay. Or sound—laughter, explosions, loud music. Whatever it takes to make you look.”

“And people pay you for this?”

“Some do, some sue.” Kamilah rattled it off like a catchphrase.

“It’s an acquired taste,” Meri said. “I know I’m still working on it.”

“You liked it the time she made Jonman snort juice out of his nose,” said Jarek. “Especially after he predicted she would do it to him.”

The wall behind them turned announcement blue. “We have come within survey range of a new binary system. I’m naming the M5 star ONR 126-850 and the M2 star ONR 154-436.” The screen showed data sheets on the discoveries: Location, Luminosity, Metallicity, Mass, Age, Temperature, Habitable Ecosphere Radius.

“Who cares about red dwarfs?” said Kamilah.

“About sixty percent of the stars in this sector are red dwarfs,” said Meri.

“My point exactly.” Said Kamilah, “You’re not going to find many terrestrials orbiting an M star. We should be looking somewhere else.”

“Why is that?” said Adel.

“M class are small cool stars,” said Jarek. “In order to get enough insolation to be even remotely habitable, a planet has to be really close to the sun, so close that they get locked into synchronous rotation because of the intense tidal torque. Which means that one side is always dark and the other is always light. The atmosphere would freeze off the dark side.”

“And these stars are known for the frequency and intensity of their flares,” said Meri, “which would pretty much cook any life on a planet that close.”

“Meri and Jarek are our resident science twizes,” said Kamilah. “They can tell you more than you want to know about anything.”

“So do we actually get to help decide where to go next?” said Adel.

“Actually, we don’t.” Jarek shook his head sadly.

“We just argue about it.” Kamilah crossed the library to the bathroom and paused at the doorway. “It passes the time. Don’t get any ideas about the boy, Meri. I’ll be right back.” The door vanished as she stepped through and reformed immediately.

“When I first started thinking seriously about making the pilgrimage to the Godspeed,” said Jarek, “I had this foolish idea that I might have some influence on the search, maybe even be responsible for a course change. I knew I wouldn’t be aboard long enough to make a planetfall, but I thought maybe I could help. But I’ve studied Speedy’s search plan and it’s perfect, considering that we can’t go any faster than a third of C.”

“Besides, we’re not going anywhere, Jerek and you and me,” said Meri. “Except back to where we came from. By the time Speedy finds the next terrestrial, we could be grandparents.”

“Or dead,” said Kamilah as she came out of the bathroom. “Shall we tell young Adel here how long it’s been since Speedy discovered a terrestrial planet?”

“Young Adel?” said Meri. “Just how old are you?”

“Nineteen standard,” Adel muttered.

—twenty-six back home—buzzed plus.

“But that’s twenty-six on Harvest.”

“One hundred and fifty-eight standard,” said the wall. “This is your captain speaking.”

“Oh gods.” Kamilah rested her forehead in her hand.

The image the Godspeed projected was more uniform than woman; she stood against the dazzle of a star field. Her coat was golden broadcloth lined in red; it hung to her knees. The sleeves were turned back to show the lining. Double rows of brass buttons ran from neck to hem. These were unbuttoned below the waist, revealing red breeches and golden hose. The white sash over her left shoulder was decorated with patches representing all the terrestrial planets she had discovered. Adel counted more than thirty before he lost track.

“I departed from the MASTA on Nuevo Sueño,” said the Godspeed, “one hundred and fifty-eight years ago, Adel, and I’ve been looking for my next discovery ever since.”

“Longer than any other threshold,” said Kamilah.

“Longer than any other threshold,” the Godspeed said amiably. “Which pains me deeply, I must say. Why do you bring this unfortunate statistic up, perfect one? Is there some conclusion you care to draw?”

She glared at the wall. “Only that we have wasted a century and a half in this desolate corner of the galaxy.”

“We, Kamilah?” The Godspeed gave her an amused smile. “How long have you been with me?”

“Not quite a year.” She folded her arms.

“Ah, the impatience of flesh.” The Godspeed turned to the stars behind her. “You have traveled not quite a third of a light year since your arrival. Consider that I’ve traveled 50.12 light years since my departure from Nuevo Sueño. Now see what that looks like to me.” She thrust her hands above her head and suddenly the points of light on the wall streamed into ribbons and the center of the screen jerked up-right-left-down-left with each course correction and then the ribbons became stars again. She faced the library again, her face glowing. “You have just come 15.33 parsecs in ten seconds. If I follow my instructions to reach my journey’s end at the center of our galaxy I will have traveled 8.5 kiloparsecs.”

—if?—buzzed minus.

“Believe me, Kamilah, I can imagine your experience of spacetime more easily than you can imagine mine.” She tugged her sash into place and then pointed at Kamilah. “You’re going to mope now.”

Kamilah shook her head. Her medallion had gone completely black.

“A hundred and thirty-three people have jumped to me since Nuevo Sueño. How many times do you think I’ve had this conversation, Kamilah?”

Kamilah bit her lip.

“Ah, if only these walls could talk.” The Godspeed’s laugh sounded like someone dropping silver spoons. “The things they have seen.”

—is she all right?—buzzed plus.

“Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know,” said the Godspeed. “A fun fact. Now that Adel has replaced Upwood among our little company, everyone on board is under thirty.”

The four of them digested this information in astonished silence.

“Wait a minute,” said Meri. “What about Jonman?”

“He would like you to believe he’s older but he’s the same age as Kamilah.” She reached into the pocket of her greatcoat and pulled out a scrap of digitex. A new window opened on the wall; it contained the birth certificate of Jon Haught Shillaber. “Twenty-eight standard.”

“All of us?” said Jarek. “That’s an pretty amazing coincidence.”

“A coincidence?” She waved the birth certificate away. “You don’t know how hard I schemed to arrange it.” She chuckled. “I was practically diabolical.”

“Speedy,” said Meri carefully, “you’re starting to worry us.”

“Worry?”

“Worry,” said Jarek.

“Why, because I make jokes? Because I have a flare for the dramatic?” She bowed low and gave them an elaborate hand flourish. “I am but mad north-northwest: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

minus buzzed—time to be afraid—

“So,” said the Godspeed, “we seem to be having a morale problem. I know my feelings have been hurt. I think we need to come together, work on some common project. Build ourselves back into a team.” She directed her gaze at Adel. “What do you say?”

“Sure.”

“Then I suggest that we put on a play.”

Meri moaned.

“Yes, that will do nicely.” The Godspeed clapped her hands, clearly pleased at the prospect. “We’ll need to a pick a script. Adel, I understand you’ve had some acting experience so I’m going to appoint you and Lihong to serve on the selection committee with me. I think poor Sister needs to get out and about more.”

“Don’t let Lihong pick,” said Meri glumly. “How many plays are there about praying?”

“Come now, Meri,” said the Godspeed. “Give her a chance. I think you’ll be surprised.”

Day Five

There are two kinds of pilgrimage, as commonly defined. One is a journey to a specific, usually sacred place; it takes place and then ends. The other is less about a destination and more about a spiritual quest. When we decide to jump to a threshold, we most often begin our pilgrimages intending to get to the Godspeed or the Big D or the Bisous Bisous, stay for some length of time and then return to our ordinary lives. However, as time passes on board we inevitably come to realize—sometimes to our chagrin—that we have been infected with an irrepressible yearning to seek out the numinous, wherever and however it might be found.

Materialists don’t have much use for the notion of a soul. They prefer to locate individuality in the mind, which emerges from the brain but cannot exist separately from it. They maintain that information must be communicated to the brain through the senses, and only through the senses. But materialists have yet to offer a rigorous explanation of what happens during those few seconds of a jump when the original has ceased to exist and the scan from it has yet to be reassembled. Because during the brief interval when there are neither senses nor brain nor mind, we all seem to receive some subtle clue about our place in the universe.

This is why there are so few materialists.

Adel had been having dreams. They were not bad dreams, merely disturbing. In one, he was lost in a forest where people grew instead of trees. He stumbled past shrubby little kids he’d gone to school with and great towering grownups like his parents and Uncle Durwin and President Adriana. He knew he had to keep walking because if he stopped he would grow roots and raise his arms up to the sun like all the other tree people, but he was tired, so very tired.

In another, he was standing backstage watching a play he’d never heard of before and Sister Lihong tapped him on the shoulder and told him that Gavrila had called in sick and that he would have to take her part and then she pushed him out of the wings and he was onstage in front of a sellout audience, every one of which was Speedy, and he stumbled across the stage to the bed where Jarek waited for him, naked Jarek, and then Adel realized that he was naked too, and he climbed under the covers because he was cold and embarrassed, and Jarek kept staring at him because he, Adel, was supposed to say his line but he didn’t know the next line or any line and so he did the one thing he could think to do, which was to kiss Jarek, on the mouth, and then his tongue brushed the ridges of Jarek’s teeth and all the Speedys in the audience gave him a standing ovation . . .

 . . . which woke him up.

Adel blinked. He lay in bed between Meri and Jarek; both were still asleep. They were under a yellow sheet that had pink kites and blue clouds on it. Jarek’s arm had dropped loosely across Adel’s waist. In the dim light he could see that Meri’s lips were parted and for a while he listened to the seashore whisper of her breathing. He remembered that something had changed last night between the three of them.

Something, but what?

Obviously his two lovers weren’t losing any sleep over it. Speedy had begun to bring the lights up in Meri’s room so it had to be close to morning chime. Adel lifted his head but couldn’t see the clock without disturbing his bedmates, so he tried to guess the time. If the ceiling was set to gain twenty lumens a minute and Speedy started at 0600, then it was . . . he couldn’t do the math. After six in the morning, anyway.

The something was Jarek—yes. Adel realized that he’d enjoyed having sex with Jarek just a bit more than with Meri. Not that he hadn’t enjoyed her too. There had been plenty of enjoying going on, that was for sure. A thrilling night all around. But Adel could be rougher with Jarek than he was with Meri. He didn’t have to hold anything back. Sex with Jarek was a little like wrestling, only with orgasms.

Adel had been extremely doubtful about sleeping with both Meri and Jarek, until Meri had made it plain that was the only way he was ever going to get into her bed. The normal buzz of his opposites had risen to a scream; their deliberations had gotten so shrill that he’d been forced to mute their input. Not that he didn’t know what they were thinking, of course; they were him.

Jarek had been the perfect gentleman at first; they had taken turns pleasuring Meri until the day before yesterday when she had guided Adel’s hand to Jarek’s erect cock. An awkward moment, but then Adel still felt like he was all thumbs and elbows when it came to sex anyway. Jarek talked continually while he made love, so Adel was never in doubt as to what Jarek wanted him to do. And because he trusted Jarek, Adel began to talk too. And then to moan, whimper, screech, and laugh out loud.

Adel felt extraordinarily adult, fucking both a man and a woman. He tried the word out in the gloom, mouthing it silently. I fuck, you fuck, he, she, or it fucks, we fuck, you all fuck, they fuck. The only thing that confused him about losing his virginity was not that his sexual identity was now slightly blurry; it was his raging appetite. Now that he knew what he had been missing, he wanted to have sex with everyone here on the Godspeed and then go back to Harvest and fuck his way through Great Randall Science and Agricultural College and up and down Crown Edge. Well, that wasn’t quite true. He didn’t particularly want to see the Manmans naked and the thought of sleeping with his parents made him queasy and now that he was an experienced lover, he couldn’t see himself on top, underneath or sideways with his ex, Gavrila. But still. He’d been horny back on Harvest but now he felt like he might spin out of control. Was it perverted to want so much sex?

Adel was wondering what color Sister Lihong Rain’s hair was and how it would look spread across his pillow when Kamilah spoke through the closed door.

“Send Adel out,” she said, “but put some clothes on him first.”

Adel’s head jerked up. “How does she know I’m here?”

“Time is it?” said Meri.

“Don’t know.” Jarek moaned and gave him a knee in the small of the back. “But it’s for you, brother, so you’d better get it.”

He clambered over Meri and tumbled out of bed onto her loafers. Their clothes were strewn around the room. Adel pulled on his saniwear, the taut silver warm-ups that Meri had created for him and his black softwalks. The black floss cape had been his own idea—a signature, like Kamilah’s medallion or Sister’s veil. The cape was modest, only the size of a face towel, and was attached to his shoulders by the two merit pins he’d recycled from his Host uniforms.

He paused in front of a wall, waved it to mirror mode, combed fingers through his hair and then stepped through the door. Kamilah leaned against the wall with her medallion in hand. She gazed into it thoughtfully.

“How did you find me?” said Adel.

“I asked Speedy.” She let it fall to her chest and Adel saw the eating man again. Adel had noticed that her eating man had reappeared again and again, always at the same table. “You want breakfast?”

He was annoyed with her for rousting him out of bed before morning chime. “When I wake up.” Who knew what erotic treats he might miss?

“Your eyes look open to me.” She gave him a knowing smile. “Busy night?”

He considered telling her that it was none of her business, but decided to flirt instead. Maybe he’d get lucky. “Busy enough.” He gave his shoulders a twitch, which made his cape flutter. “You?”

“I slept.”

“I slept too.” Adel waited a beat. “Eventually.”

“Gods, Adel!” Kamilah laughed out loud. “You’re a handful, you know that?” She put an arm around his shoulders and started walking him back up Dream Street. “Meri and Jarek had better watch out.”

Adel wasn’t quite sure what she meant but he decided to let it drop for now. “So what’s this about?”

“A field trip.” They started down the Tulip Stairway. “What do you know about physics?”

Adel had studied comparative entertainment at Great Randall S&A, although he’d left school in his third year to train for the Harvest Olympics and to find himself. Unfortunately, he’d finished only sixth in the 200 meters and Adel was still pretty much missing. Science in general and physics in particular had never been a strength. “I know some. Sort of.”

“What’s the first law of thermodynamics?”

“The first law of thermodynamics.” He closed his eyes and tried to picture the screen. “Something like . . . um . . . a body stays in motion . . . ah . . . as long as it’s in motion?”

“Oh great,” she said wearily. “Have you ever been in space?”

For the first time in days he missed the familiar buzz of his opposites. He lifted their mute.

—she thinks we’re a moron—buzzed minus.

—we are a moron—plus buzzed.

“Everybody’s in space,” he said defensively. “That’s where all the planets are. We’re traveling through space this very moment.”

“This wasn’t meant to be a trick question,” she said gently. “I mean have you ever been in a hardsuit out in the vacuum?”

“Oh,” he said. “No.”

“You want to?”

—wow—

—yes—

He had to restrain himself from hugging her. “Absolutely.”

“Okay then.” She gestured at the entrance to the Chillingsworth Breakfasting Room. “Let’s grab something to take away and head down to the locker room. We need to oxygenate for about half an hour.”

—but why is she doing this?—buzzed plus.

There were two ways to the surface of the Godspeed: through the great bay doors of the Well Met Arena or out the Clarke Airlock. Adel straddled a bench in the pre-breathing locker room and wolfed down a sausage and honeynut torte while Kamilah explained what was about to happen.

“We have to spend another twenty-minutes here breathing a hundred percent oxygen to scrub nitrogen out of our bodies. Then just before we climb into the hardsuits, we put on isotherms.” She opened a locker and removed two silky black garments. “You want to wait until the last minute; isotherms take some getting used to. But they keep the hardsuit from overheating.” She tossed one to Adel.

“But how can that happen?” He held the isotherm up; it had a hood and opened with a slide down the torso. The sleeves ended at the elbow and the pants at the knee. “Isn’t space just about as cold as anything gets?”

“Yes, but the hardsuit is airtight, which makes it hard to dissipate all the heat that you’re going to be generating. Even though you get some servo-assist, it’s a big rig, Adel. You’ve got to work to get anywhere.” She raised her steaming mug of kappa and winked at him. “Think you’re man enough for the job?”

—let that pass—buzzed plus.

“I suppose we’ll know soon enough.” Adel rubbed the fabric of the isotherm between his thumb and forefinger. It was cool to the touch.

Kamilah sipped from the mug. “Once we’re out on the surface,” she said, “Speedy will be running all your systems. All you have to do is follow me.”

The Godspeed displayed on a section of wall. She was wearing an isotherm with the hood down; it clung to her like a second skin. Adel could see the outline of her nipples and the subtle wrinkles her public hair made in the fabric.

—but they’re not real—minus buzzed.

“What are you doing, Kamilah?” said the Godspeed. “You were out just last week.”

“Adel hasn’t seen the view.”

“I can show him any view he wants. I can fill the Welcome Arena with stars. He can see in ultraviolet. Infrared.”

“Yes, but it wouldn’t be quite real, would it?”

“Reality is over-rated.” The Godspeed waggled a finger at Kamilah. “You’re taking an unusual interest in young Adel. I’m watching, perfect one. “

“You’re watching everyone, Speedy. That’s how you get your cookies.” With that she pulled the top of her scrubs off. “Time to get naked, Adel. Walk our hardsuits out and start the checklist, would you, Speedy?”

—those are real—buzzed minus.

—Meri and Jarek remember—

—we can look—

And Adel did look as he slithered out of his own clothes. Although he was discreet about it, he managed to burn indelible images into his memory of Kamilah undressing, the curve of her magnificent hip, the lush pendency of her breasts, the breathtaking expanse of her back as her tawny skin stretched tight over nubs of her spine. She was a woman a man might drown in. Abruptly, he realized that he was becoming aroused. He turned away from her, tossed his clothes into a locker, snatched at the isotherm and pulled it on.

And bit back a scream.

Although it was as silken as when Kamilah had pulled it out of the drawer, his isotherm felt like it had spent the last ten years in cryogenic storage. Adel’s skin crawled beneath it and his hands curled into fists. As a swimmer, Adel had experienced some precipitous temperature changes, but he’d never dived into a pool filled with liquid hydrogen.

—trying to kill us—screeched minus.

“Are you all right?” said Kamilah. “Your eyes look like eggs.”

“Ah,” said Adel. “Ah.”

—we can do this—buzzed plus.

“Hang on,” said Kamilah. “It passes.”

As the hardsuits clumped around the corner of the locker room, their servos singing, Adel shivered and caught his breath. He thought he could hear every joint crack as he unclenched his fists and spread his fingers. When he pulled the isotherm hood over his head, he got the worst ice cream headache he’d ever had.

“This is going to be fun,” he said through clenched teeth.

The hardsuits were gleaming white eggs with four arms, two legs and a tail. The arms on either side were flexrobotic and built for heavy lifting. Beside them were fabric sleeves into which a spacewalker could insert his arms for delicate work. The legs ended in ribbed plates, as did the snaking tail, which Kamilah explained could be used as a stabilizer or an anchor. A silver ball the size of coconut perched at the top of the suit.

“Just think of them as spaceships that walk,” said Kamilah. “Okay, Speedy. Pop the tops.”

The top, translucent third of each egg swung back. Kamilah muscled a stairway up to the closest hardsuit. “This one’s yours. Settle in but don’t try moving just yet.”

Adel slid his legs into the suit’s legs and cool gel flowed around them, locking him into place. He ducked instinctively as the top came down, but he had plenty of room. Seals fasten with a scritch and the heads up display on the inside of the top began to glow with controls and diagnostics. Beneath the translucent top were fingerpads for controlling the robotic lifter arms; near them were the holes of the hardsuit’s sleeves. Adel stuck his arms through, flexed his fingers in the gloves then turned his attention back to the HUD. He saw that he had forty hours of oxygen reserve and his batteries were at 98% of capacity. The temperature in the airlock was 15.52°C and the air pressure was 689 millibars. Then the readouts faded and The Godspeed was studying him intently. She looked worried.

“Adel, what’s going on?”

“Is something going on?”

“I’m afraid there is and I don’t want you mixed up in it. What does Kamilah want with you?”

Adel felt a chill that had nothing to do with his isotherm.

—don’t say anything—buzzed plus

—we don’t know anything—

“I don’t know that she wants anything.” He pulled his arms out of the hardsuit’s sleeves and folded them across his chest. “I just thought she was being nice.”

“All right, Adel,” said Kamilah over the comm. “Take a stroll around the room. I want to see how you do in here where it’s flat. Speedy will compensate if you have any trouble. I’m sure she’s already in your ear.”

The Godspeed held a forefinger to her lips. “Kamilah is going to ask you to turn off your comm. That’s when you must be especially careful, Adel.” With that, she faded away and Adel was staring, slack-jawed, at the HUD.

“Adel?” said Kamilah. “Are you napping in there?”

Adel took a couple of tentative steps. Moving the hardsuit was a little like walking on stilts. He was high off the floor and couldn’t really see or feel what was beneath his feet. When he twisted around, he caught sight of the tail whipping frantically behind him. But after walking for a few minutes, he decided that he could manage the suit. He lumbered behind Kamilah through the inner hatch of the airlock, which slid shut.

Adel listened to the muted chatter of pumps evacuating the lock until finally there wasn’t enough air to carry sound. Moments later, the outer hatch opened.

“Ready?” Kamilah said. “Remember that we’re leaving the artificial gravity field. No leaps or bounds—you don’t watch to achieve escape velocity.”

Adel nodded.

—she can’t see us—buzzed minus—we have to talk to her—

Adel cleared his throat. “I’ve always wanted to see the stars from space.”

“Actually, you won’t have much of a view until later,” she said. “Let’s go.”

As they passed through the hatch, the Godspeed announced, “Suit lights are on. I’m deploying fireflies.”

Adel saw the silver ball lift from the top of Kamilah’s suit and float directly above her. The bottom half of it was now incandescent, lighting the surface of the Godspeed against the swarming darkness. At the same time the ground around him lit up. He looked and saw his firefly hovering about a meter over the suit.

—amazing—buzzed plus—we’re out, we’re out in space—

They crossed the flat staging pad just outside the airlock and stepped off onto the regolith. The rock had been pounded to gray dust by centuries of foot traffic. Whenever he took a step the dust puffed underfoot and drifted slowly back to the ground like smoke. It was twenty centimeters deep in some places but offered little resistance to his footplates. Adel’s excitement leached slowly away as Kamilah led him away from the airlock. He had to take mincing steps to keep from launching himself free of the Godspeed’s tenuous gravitational pull. It was frustrating; he felt as if he were walking with a pillow between his legs. The sky was a huge disappointment as well. The fireflies washed out the light from all but the brightest stars. He’d seen better skies camping on Harvest.

“So where are we going?”

“Just around.”

“How long will it take?”

“Not that long.”

—hiding something?—buzzed plus.

—definitely—

“And what exactly are we going to do?”

“A little bit of everything. One of her robotic arms gave him a playful wave. “You’ll see.”

They marched in silence for a while. Adel began to chafe at following Kamilah’s lead. He picked up his pace and drew alongside of her. The regolith here was not quite so trampled and much less regular, although a clearly defined trail showed that they were not the first to make this trek. They passed stones and rubble piles and boulders the size of houses and the occasional impact crater that the path circumnavigated.

—impact crater?—buzzed minus.

“Uh, Kamilah,” he said. “How often does Speedy get hit by meteors?”

“Never,” said Kamilah. “The craters you see are all pre-launch. Interstellar space is pretty much empty so it’s not that much of a problem.”

“I sweep the sky for incoming debris,” said the Godspeed, “up to five million meters away.”

“And that works?”

“So far,” said Kamilah. “We wouldn’t want to slam into anything traveling at a third the speed of light.”

They walked on for another ten minutes before Kamilah stopped. “There.” She pointed. “That’s where we came from. Somewhere out there is home.”

Adel squinted. There was pretty much meaningless. Was she pointing at some particular star or a space between stars?”

“This is the backside. If Speedy had a rear bumper,” she said, “we’d be standing on it right here. I want to show you something interesting. Pull your arms out of the sleeves.”

“Done.”

“The comm toggle is under the right arm keypad. Switch it off.”

The Godspeed broke into their conversation. “Kamilah and Adel, you are about to disable a key safety feature of your hardsuits. I strongly urge you to reconsider.”

“I see the switch.” Adel’s throat was tight. “You know, Speedy warned me about this back in the airlock.”

“I’m sure she did. We go through this every time.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“Many times,” she said. “It’s a tradition we’ve started to bring the new arrival out here to see the sights. It’s actually a spiritual thing, which is why Speedy doesn’t really get it.”

“I have to turn off the comm why?”

“Because she’s watching, Adel,” said Kamilah impatiently. “She’s always with us. She can’t help herself.”

“Young Adel,” murmured the Godspeed. “Remember what I said.”

—trust Kamilah—

—or trust Speedy—

—we were warned—

Adel flicked the toggle. “Now what?” he said to himself. His voice sounded very small in the suit.

He was startled when Kamilah leaned her suit against his so that the tops of the eggs were touching. It was strangely intimate maneuver, almost like a kiss. Her face was an electric green shadow in the glow of the HUD.

He was startled again when she spoke. “Turn. The. Comm. Off.” He could hear her through the suit. She paused between each word, her voice reedy and metallic.

“I did,” he said.

He could see her shake her head and tap fingers to her ears. “You. Have. To. Shout.”

“I. Did!” Adel shouted.

“Good.” She picked up a rock the size of a fist and held it at arm’s length. “Drop. Rock.” She paused. “Count. How. Long. To. Surface.”

—science experiments?—buzzed plus.

—she’s gone crazy—

Adel was inclined to agree with his minus but what Kamilah was asking seemed harmless enough.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

She let go. Adel counted.

One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five . . .

And it was down.

“Yes?” said Kamilah.

“Five.”

“Good. Keep. Secret.” She paused. “Comm. On.”

As he flicked the switch he heard her saying. “ . . . you feel it? My first time it was too subtle but if you concentrate, you’ll get it.”

“Are you all right, Adel?” murmured the Godspeed. “What just happened?”

“I don’t know,” said Adel, mystified.

“Well, we can try again on the frontside,” said Kamilah. “Sometimes it’s better there. Let’s go.”

—what is she talking about?—minus buzzed.

For twenty minutes he trudged in perplexed silence past big rocks, little rocks and powdered rocks in all the colors of gray. In some places the surface of the trail was grainy like sand, in others it was dust, and in yet others it was bare ledge. Adel just didn’t understand what he was supposed to have gotten from watching the rocks drop. Something to do with gravity? What he didn’t know about gravity would fill a barn. Eventually he gave up trying to figure it out. Kamilah was right about one thing: it was real work walking in a hardsuit. If it hadn’t been for the isotherm, he would have long since broken a sweat.

—this is has to get better—buzzed plus.

“How much longer?” said Adel at last.

“A while yet.” Kamilah chuckled. “What are you, a little kid?”

“Remember the day I got here?” he said. “You told me that you were sentenced to spend time on Speedy. But you never said why.”

“Not that interesting, really.”

“Better than counting rocks.” He stomped on a flat stone the size of his hand, breaking it into three pieces. “Or I suppose I could sing.” He gave her the first few bars of “Do As We Don’t” in his finest atonal yodel.

“Gods, Adel, but you’re a pest today.” Kamilah sighed. “All right, so there’s a religion on Suncast . . . ”

“Suncast? That’s where you’re from?”

“That’s where I was from. If I ever get off this rock, that’s the last place I’m going to stay.”

—if?—buzzed minus—why did she say if?—

Anyway, there’s a sect that call themselves God’s Own Poor. They’re very proud of themselves for having deliberately chosen not to own very much. They spout these endless lectures about how living simply is the way to true spirituality. It’s all over the worldnet. And they have this tradition that once a year they leave their houses and put their belongings into a cart, supposedly everything they own but not really. Each of them drags the cart to a park or a campground—this takes place in the warm weather, naturally—and they spend two weeks congratulating themselves on how poor they are and how God loves them especially.”

“What god do they worship?”

“A few pray to Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the galaxy, but most are some flavor of Eternal Centerers. When it was founded, the Poor might actually have been a legitimate religion. I mean, I see their point that owning too much can get in the way. Except that now almost all of them have houses and furniture and every kind of vehicle. None of them tries to fit the living room couch on their carts. And you should see some of these carts. They cost more than I make in a year.”

“From shocking people,” Adel said. “As a professional eyejack.”

The comm was silent for a moment. “Are you teasing me, young Adel?”

“No, no.” Adel bit back his grin. “Not at all.” Even though he knew she couldn’t see it, she could apparently hear it inflected in his voice. “So you were annoyed at them?”

“I was. Lots of us were. It wasn’t only that they were self-righteous hypocrites. I didn’t like the way they commandeered the parks just when the rest of us wanted to use them. So I asked myself, how can I shock the Poor and what kind of purse can I make from doing it?”

A new trail diverged from the one they had been following, Kamilah considered for a moment and then took it. She fell silent for a few moments.

Adel prompted her. “And you came up with a plan.”

—why are we interested in this?—buzzed plus.

—because we want to get her into bed—

“I did. First I took out a loan; I had to put my house up as collateral. I split two hundred thousand barries across eight hundred cash cards, so each one was worth two hundred and fifty. Next I set up my tent at the annual Poverty Revival at Point Kingsley on the Prithee Sea, which you’ve never heard of but which is one of the most beautiful places in the Continuum. I passed as one of the Poor, mingling with about ten thousand true believers. I parked a wheelbarrow outside the tent that had nothing in it but a suitcase and a shovel. That got a megagram of disapproval, which told me I was onto something. Just before dawn on the tenth day of the encampment, I tossed the suitcase and shoveled in the eight hundred cash cards. I parked my wheelbarrow at the Tabernacle of the Center and waited with a spycam. I’d painted, ‘God Helps Those Who Help Themselves’ on the side; I thought that was a nice touch. I was there when people started to discover my little monetary miracle. I shot vids of several hundred of the Poor dipping their hot hands into the cards. Some of them just grabbed a handful and ran, but quite a few tried to sneak up on the wheelbarrow when nobody was looking. But of course, everyone was. The wheelbarrow was empty in about an hour and a half, but people kept coming to look all morning.”

Adel was puzzled. “But your sign said they were supposed to help themselves,” he said. “Why would they be ashamed?”

“Well, they were supposed to be celebrating their devotion to poverty, not padding their personal assets. But the vids were just documentation, they weren’t the sting. Understand that the cards were mine. Yes, I authorized all expenditures, but I also collected detailed reports on everything they bought. Everything, as in possessions, Adel. Material goods. All kinds of stuff, and lots of it. I posted the complete record. For six days my website was one of the most active on the worldnet. Then the local Law Exchange shut me down. Still, even after legal expenses and paying off the loan, I cleared almost three thousand barries.”

—brilliant—buzzed minus.

—she got caught—plus buzzed.

“But this was against the law on Suncast?” said Adel.

“Actually, no.” Kamilah kicked at a stone and sent it skittering across the regolith. She trudged on in silence for a few moments. “But I used a wheelbarrow,” she said finally, “which LEX ruled was too much like one of their carts—a cultural symbol. According to LEX, I had committed Intolerant Speech. If I had just set the cards out in a basket, the Poor couldn’t have touched me. But I didn’t and they did. In the remedy phase of my trial, the Poor asked LEX to ship me here. I guess they thought I’d get religion.”

“And did you?”

“You don’t get to ask all the questions.” The tail of her hardsuit darted and the footplate tapped the rear of Adel’s suit. “Your turn. Tell me something interesting about yourself. Something that nobody knows.”

He considered. “Well, I was a virgin when I got here.”

“Something interesting, Adel.”

“And I’m not anymore.”

“That nobody knows,” she said.

—just trying to shock you—buzzed plus.

—bitch—minus buzzed.

“All right,” he said, at last. “I’m a delibertarian.”

Kamilah paused, then turned completely around once, as if to get her bearings. “I don’t know what that is.”

“I have an implant that makes me hear voices. Sometimes they argue with each other.”

“Oh?” Kamilah headed off the trail. “About what?”

Adel picked his way after her. “Mostly about what I should do.” He sensed that he didn’t really have her complete attention. “Say I’m coming out of church and I see a wheelbarrow filled with cash cards. One voice might tell me to grab as many as I can, the other says no.”

“I’d get tired of that soon enough.”

“Or say someone insults me, hurts my feelings. One voice wants to understand her and the other wants to kick her teeth in. But the thing is, the voices are all me.”

“All right then,” Kamilah paused, glanced left and then right as if lining up landmarks. “We’re here.”

—too bad we can’t kick her teeth in—buzzed minus.

“Where’s here?”

“This is the frontside, exactly opposite from where we just were. We should try shutting down again. This might be your lucky spot.”

“I don’t know if I want to,” said Adel. “What am I doing here, Kamilah?”

“Look, Adel, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I forget you’re just a kid. Come over here, let me give you a hug.”

“Oh.” Adel was at once mollified by Kamilah’s apology and stung that she thought of him as a kid.

—we are a kid—plus buzzed.

And what kind of hug was he going to get in a hardsuit?

—shut up—

“You’re only nine standard older than I am,” he said as he brought his suit within robotic arm’s reach.

“I know.” Her two arms snaked around him. “Turn off your comm, Adel.”

This time the Godspeed made no objection. When the comm was off, Kamilah didn’t bother to speak. She picked up a rock and held it out. Adel waved for her to drop it.

One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand six one thousand, seven one . . .

Seven? Adel was confused.

—we messed up the count—buzzed minus.

—did not—

He leaned into her and touched her top. “Seven.”

“Yes.” She paused. “Turn. Off. Lights.”

Adel found the control and heard a soft clunk as the firefly docked with his hardsuit. He waved the suit lights off and blacked out the HUD, although he was not in a particularly spiritual mood. The blackness of space closed around them and the sky filled with the shyest of stars. Adel craned in the suit to see them all. Deep space was much more busy than he’d imagined. The stars were all different sizes and many burned in colors: blues, yellows, oranges and reds—a lot more reds than he would have thought. There were dense patches and sparse patches and an elongated wispy cloud the stretched across his field of vision that he assumed was the rest of the Milky Way.

—amazing—

—but what’s going on?—

“Questions?” said Kamilah.

“Questions?” he said under his breath. “Damn right I have questions.” When he shouted, he could hear the anger in his voice. “Rocks. Mean. What?”

“Speedy. Slows. Down.” She paused. “We. Don’t. Know. Why.” Another pause. “Act. Normal. More. Later.”

—act normal?—

—we’re fucked—

“Comm.” He screamed. “On.”

“Careful,” she said. “Adel.”

He felt a slithering against his suit as she let go of him. He bashed at the comm switch and brought the suit lights on.

“ . . . the most amazing experience, isn’t it?” she was saying. “It’s almost like you’re standing naked in space.”

“Kamilah . . . ” He tried to speak but panic choked him.

“Adel, what’s happening?” said the Godspeed. “Are you all right?”

“I have to tell you,” said Kamilah, “that first time I was actually a little scared but I’m used to it now. But you—you did just fine.”

“Fine,” Adel said. His heart was pounding so hard he thought it might burst his chest. “Just fine.”

Day Twelve

Since the Godspeed left the orbit of Menander, fifth planet of Hallowell’s Star, to begin its historic voyage of discovery, 69,384 of us stepped off her transport stage. Only about ten thousand of us were pilgrims, the rest were itinerant techs and prospective colonists. On average, the pilgrims spent a little over a standard year as passengers, while the sojourn of the colony-builders rarely exceeded sixty days. As it turns out, Sister Lihong Rain held the record for the longest pilgrimage; she stayed on the Godspeed for more than seven standards.

At launch, the cognizor in command of the Godspeed had been content with a non-gendered persona. Not until the hundred and thirteenth year did it present as The Captain, a male authority figure. The Captain was a sandy-haired mesomorph, apparently a native of one of the highest G worlds. His original uniform was modest in comparison to later incarnations, gray and apparently seamless, with neither cuff nor collar. The Captain first appeared on the walls of the library but soon spread throughout the living quarters and then began to manifest as a fetch, that could be projected anywhere, even onto the surface. The Godspeed mostly used The Captain to oversee shipboard routine but on occasion he would approach us in social contexts. Inevitably he would betray a disturbing knowledge of everything that we had ever done while aboard. We realized to our dismay that the Godspeed was always watching.

These awkward attempts at sociability were not well received; the Captain persona was gruff and humorless and all too often presumptuous. He was not at all pleased when one of us nicknamed him Speedy. Later iterations of the persona did little to improve his popularity.

It wasn’t until the three hundred and thirty-second year that the stubborn Captain was supplanted by a female persona. The new Speedy impressed everyone. She didn’t give orders; she made requests. She picked up on many of the social cues that her predecessor had missed, bowing out of conversations where she was not welcome, not only listening but hearing what we told her. She was accommodating and gregarious, if somewhat emotionally needy. She laughed easily, although her sense of humor was often disconcerting. She didn’t mind at all that we called her Speedy. And she kept our secrets.

Only a very few saw the darker shades of the Godspeed’s persona. The techs found her eccentricities charming and the colonists celebrated her for being such a prodigious discoverer of terrestrials. Most pilgrims recalled their time aboard with bemused nostalgia.

Of course, the Godspeed had no choice but to keep all of us under constant surveillance. We were her charges. Her cargo. Over the course of one thousand and eighty-seven standards, she witnessed six homicides, eleven suicides and two hundred and forty-nine deaths from accident, disease, and old age. She took each of these deaths personally, even as she rejoiced in the two hundred and sixty-eight babies conceived and born in the bedrooms of Dream Street. She presided over two thousand and eighteen marriages, four thousand and eighty-nine divorces. She witnessed twenty-nine million eight hundred and fifteen thousand two hundred and forty-seven acts of sexual congress, not including masturbation. Since she was responsible for our physical and emotional well-being, she monitored what we ate, who we slept with, what drugs we used, how much exercise we got. She tried to defuse quarrels and mediate disputes. She readily ceded her authority to the project manager and team leaders during a colonizing stop but in interstellar space, she was in command.

Since there was little privacy inside the Godspeed, it was difficult for Kamilah, Adel, Jarek, Meri, Jonman and Robman to discuss their situation. None of them had been able to lure Sister out for a suit-to-suit conference, so she was not in their confidence. Adel took a couple of showers with Meri and Jarek. They played crank jams at top volume and whispered in each other’s ears as they pretended to make out, but that was awkward at best. They had no way to send or encrypt messages that the Godspeed couldn’t easily hack. Jonman hit upon the strategy of writing steganographic poetry under blankets at night and then handing them around to be read—also under blankets.

We hear that love can’t wait too long,

Go and find her home.

We fear that she who we seek

Must sleep all day, have dreams of night

killed by the fire up in the sky.

Would we? Does she?

Steganography, Adel learned from a whisperer in the library, was the ancient art of hiding messages within messages. When Robman gave him the key of picking out every fourth word of this poem, he read: We can’t go home she must have killed up would. This puzzled him until he remembered that the last pilgrim to leave the Godspeed before he arrived was Upwood Marcene. Then he was chilled. The problem with Jonman’s poems was that they had to be written mechanically—on a surface with an implement. None of the pilgrims had ever needed to master the skill of handwriting; their scrawls were all but indecipherable. And asking for the materials to write with aroused the Godspeed’s suspicions.

Not only that, but Jonman’s poetry was awful.

Over several days, in bits and snatches, Adel was able to arrive at a rough understanding of their dilemma. Three months ago, while Adel was still writing his essay, Jarek had noticed that spacewalking on the surface of the Godspeed felt different than it had been when he first arrived. He thought his hardsuit might be defective until he tried several others. After that, he devised the test, and led the others out, one by one, to witness it. If the Godspeed had actually been traveling at a constant 100,000 kilometers per second, rocks dropped anywhere on the surface would take the same amount of time to fall. However, when she accelerated away from a newly established colony, rocks dropped on the backside took longer to fall than rocks on the frontside. And when she decelerated toward a new discovery . . .

Once they were sure that they were slowing down, the pilgrims had to decide what it meant and what to do next. They queried the library and, as far as they could tell, the Godspeed had announced every scan and course change she had ever made. In over a thousand years the only times she had ever decelerated was when she had targeted a new planet. There was no precedent for what was happening and her silence about it scared them. They waited, dissembled as best they could, and desperately hoped that someone back home would notice that something was wrong.

Weeks passed. A month. Two months.

Jonman maintained that there could be only two possible explanations: the Godspeed must either be falsifying its navigation reports or it had cut all contact with the Continuum. Either way, he argued, they must continue to wait. Upwood’s pilgrimage was almost over, he was scheduled to go home in another two weeks. If the Godspeed let him make the jump, then their troubles were over. Hours, or at the most a day, after he reported the anomaly, techs would swarm the transport stage. If she didn’t let him make the jump, then at least they would know where they stood. Nobody mentioned a third outcome, although Upwood clearly understood that there was a risk that the Godspeed might kill or twist him during transport and make it look like an accident. Flawed jumps were extremely rare but not impossible. Upwood had lost almost five kilos by the day he climbed onto the transport stage. His chest was a washboard of ribs and his eyes were sunken. The other pilgrims watched in hope and horror as he faded into wisps of probability and was gone.

Five days passed. On the sixth day, the Godspeed announced that they would be joined by a new pilgrim. A week after Upwood’s departure, Adel Ranger Santos was assembled on the transport stage.

Sister was horribly miscast as Miranda. Adel thought she would have made a better Caliban, especially since he was Ferdinand. In the script, Miranda was supposed to fall madly in love with Ferdinand, but Sister was unable to summon even a smile for Adel, much less passion. He might as well have been an old sock as the love of her life.

Adel knew why the Godspeed had chosen The Tempest; she wanted to play Prospero. She’d cast Meri as Ariel and Kamilah as Caliban. Jonman and Robman were Trinculo and Stephano and along with Jarek also took the parts of the various other lesser lords and sons and brothers and sailors. Adel found it a very complicated play, even for Shakespeare.

“I am a fool,” said Sister, “to weep when I am glad.” She delivered the line like someone hitting the same note on a keyboard again and again.

Adel had a whisperer feeding him lines. “Why do you weep?”

“Stop there.” The Godspeed waved her magic staff. She was directing the scene in costume. Prospero wore a full-length opalescent cape with fur trim, a black undertunic and a small silver crown. “Nobody says ‘weep’ anymore.” She had been rewriting the play ever since they started rehearsing. “Adel, have you ever said ‘weep’ in your life?”

“No,” said Adel miserably. He was hungry and was certain he would starve to death before they got through this scene.

“Then neither should Ferdinand. Let’s change ‘weep’ to ‘cry.’ Say the line, Ferdinand.”

Adel said, “Why do you cry?”

“No.” She shut her eyes. “No, that’s not right either.” Her brow wrinkled. “Try ‘why are you crying?’ ”

“Why are you crying?” said Adel.

“Much better.” She clapped hands once. “I know the script is a classic but after three thousand years some of these lines are dusty. Miranda, give me ‘I am a fool’ with the change.”

“I am a fool,” she said, “to cry when I am glad.”

“Why are you crying?”

“Because I’m not worthy. I dare not even offer myself to you—much less ask you to love me.” Here the Godspeed had directed her to put her arms on Adel’s shoulders. “But the more I try to hide my feelings, the more they show.”

As they gazed at each other, Adel thought he did see a glimmer of something in Sister’s eyes. Probably nausea.

“So no more pretending.” Sister knelt awkwardly and gazed up at him. “If you want to marry me, I’ll be your wife.” She lowered her head, but forgot again to cheat toward the house, so that she delivered the next line to the floor. “If not, I’ll live as a virgin the rest of my life, in love with nobody but you.”

“We can’t hear you, Miranda,” said the Godspeed.

Sister tilted her head to the side and finished the speech. “You don’t even have to talk to me if you don’t want. Makes no difference. I’ll always be there for you.”

“Ferdinand,” the Godspeed murmured, “she’s just made you the happiest man in the world.”

Adel pulled her to her feet. “Darling, you make me feel so humble.”

“So then you’ll be my husband?”

“Sure,” he said. “My heart is willing . . . ” he laid his hand against his chest, “ . . . and here’s my hand.” Adel extended his arm.

“And here’s mine with my heart in it.” She slid her fingers across his palm, her touch cool and feathery.

“And,” prompted the Godspeed. “And?”

With a sigh, Sister turned her face up toward his. Her eyelids fluttered closed. Adel stooped over her. The first time he had played this scene, she had so clearly not wanted to be kissed that he had just brushed his lips against her thin frown. The Godspeed wanted more. Now he lifted her veil and pressed his mouth hard against hers. She did nothing to resist, although he could feel her shiver when he slipped the tip of his tongue between her lips.

“Line?” said the Godspeed.

“Well, got to go.” Sister twitched out of his embrace. “See you in a bit.”

“It will seem like forever.” Adel bowed to her and then they both turned to get the Godspeed’s reaction.

“Better,” she said. “But Miranda, flow into his arms. He’s going to be your husband, your dream come true.”

“I know.” Her voice was pained.

“Take your lunch break and send me Stephano and Trinculo.” She waved them off. “Topic of the day is . . . what?” She glanced around the little theater, as if she might discover a clue in the empty house. “Today you are to talk about what you’re going to do when you get home.”

Adel could not help but notice Sister’s stricken expression; her eyes were like wounds. But she nodded and made no objection.

As they passed down the aisle, the Godspeed brought her fetch downstage to deliver the speech that closed Act III, Scene i. As always, she gave her lines a grandiloquent, singing quality.

“Those two really take the cake. My plan is working out just great, but I can’t sit around patting myself on the back. I’ve got other fish to fry if I’m going to make this mess end happily ever after.”

To help Adel and Sister get into character, the Godspeed had directed them to eat lunch together every day in the Chillingsworth Breakfasting Room while the other pilgrims dined in the Ophiuchi. They had passed their first meal in tortured silence and might as well have been on different floors of the threshold. When the Godspeed asked what they talked about, they sheepishly admitted that they had not spoken at all. She knew this, of course, but pretended to be so provoked that she assigned them topics for mandatory discussion.

The Chillingsworth was a more intimate space than the Ophiuchi. It was cross-shaped; in the three bays were refectory tables and benches. There was a tile fireplace in the fourth bay in which a fetch fire always burned. Sconces in the shapes of the famous singing flowers of Old Zara sprouted from pale blue walls.

Adel set his plate of spiralini in rado sauce on the heavy table and scraped a bench from underneath to sit on. While the pasta cooled he closed his eyes and lifted the mute on his opposites. He had learned back on Harvest that their buzz made acting impossible. They were confused when he was in character and tried to get him to do things that weren’t in the script. When he opened his eyes again, Sister was opposite him, head bowed in prayer over a bowl of thrush needles.

He waited for her to finish. “You want to go first?” he said. “I don’t like to think about going home to Pio,” she said. “I pray it won’t happen anytime soon.”

—your prayers are answered—buzzed minus.

“Why, was it bad?”

“No.” She picked up her spoon but then set it down again. Over the past few days Adel had discovered that she was a extremely nervous eater. She barely touched what was on her plate. “I was happy.” Somehow, Adel couldn’t quite imagine what happy might look like on Sister Lihong Rain. “But I was much smaller then. When the Main told me I had to make a pilgrimage, I cried. But she has filled with her grace and made me large. Being with her here is the greatest blessing.”

“Her? You are talking about Speedy?”

Sister gave him a pitying nod, as if the answer were as obvious as air. “And what about you, Adel?”

Adel had been so anxious since the spacewalk that he hadn’t really considered what would happen if he were lucky enough to get off the Godspeed alive.

—we were going to have a whole lot of sex remember?—buzzed plus

—with as many people as possible—

Adel wondered if Sister would ever consider sleeping with him. “I want to have lovers.” He had felt a familiar stirring whenever he kissed her in rehearsal.

“Ah.” She nodded. “And get married, like in our play?”

“Well that, sure. Eventually.” He remembered lurid fantasies he’d spun about Helell Merwyn, the librarian from the Springs upper school and his mother’s friend Renata Murat and Lucia Guerra who was in that comedy about the talking house. Did he want to marry them?

—no we just want a taste—minus buzzed.

“I haven’t had much experience. I was a virgin when I got here.”

“Were you?” She frowned. “But something has happened, hasn’t it? Something between you and Kamilah.”

—we wish—buzzed plus.

“You think Kamilah and I . . . ?”

“Even though nobody tells me, I do notice things,” Sister said. “I’m twenty-six standard old and I’ve taken courses at the Institute for Godly Fornication. I’m not naïve, Adel.”

—fornication?—

“I’m sure you’re not.” Adel was glad to steer the conversation away from Kamilah, since he knew the Godspeed was watching. “So do you ever think about fornicating? I mean in a godly way, of course?”

“I used to think about nothing else.” She scooped a spoonful of the needles and held it to her nose, letting the spicy steam curl into her nostrils. “That’s why the Main sent me here.”

“To fornicate?”

“To find a husband and bring him to nest on Pio.” Her shoulders hunched, as if she expected someone to hit her from behind. “The Hard Thumb pressed the Main with a vision that I would find bliss on a threshold. I was your age when I got here, Adel. I was very much like you, obsessed with looking for my true love. I prayed to the Hard Thumb to mark him so that I would know him. But my prayers went unanswered.”

As she sat there, staring into her soup, Adel thought that he had never seen a woman so uncomfortable.

—get her back talking about fornication—minus buzzed.

“Maybe you were praying for the wrong thing.”

“That’s very good, Adel.” He was surprised when she reached across the table and patted his hand. “You understand me better than I did myself. About a year ago, when Speedy told me that I had been aboard longer than anyone else, I was devastated. But she consoled me. She said that she had heard my prayers over the years and had longed to answer them. I asked her if she were a god, that she could hear prayer?”

Sister fell silent, her eyes shining with the memory.

“So?” Adel was impressed. “What did she say?”

“Speedy is very old, Adel. Very wise. She has revealed mysteries to me that even the Main does not know.”

—she believes—plus buzzed.

“So you worship her then? Speedy is your god?”

Her smile was thin, almost imperceptible, but it cracked her doleful mask. “Now you understand why I don’t want to go home.”

“But what about finding true love?”

“I have found it, Adel.” Sister pushed her bowl away; she had eaten hardly anything. “No man, no human could bring me to where she has brought me.”

—could we maybe try?—

—she’s not talking about that—

“So you’re never leaving then?” Adel carelessly speared the last spiralini on his plate. “She’s going to keep you here for the rest of your life?”

“No.” Her voice quavered. “No.”

“Sister, are you all right?”

She was weeping. That was the only word for it. This was not mere crying; her chest heaved and tears ran down her cheeks. In the short time he had known her, Adel had often thought that she was on the brink of tears, but he hadn’t imagined that her sadness would be so wracking.

“She says something’s going to happen . . . soon, too soon and I-I have to leave but I . . . ” A strangled moan escaped her lips.

Adel had no experience comforting a woman in pain but he nevertheless came around the table and tried to catch her in his arms.

She twisted free, scattering thrush needles across the table. “Get away.” She shot off her bench and flung herself at the wall of the breakfasting room. “I don’t want him. Do you hear?” She pounded at the wall with her fists until the sconce shook. “He’s nothing to me.”

The Godspeed’s head filled the wall, her face glowing with sympathy. “Adel,” she said. “You’d better leave us.”

“I want you,” Sister cried. “It’s you I want!”

Day Fifteen

Adel sprawled on the camel-back sofa and clutched a brocade toss pillow to his chest. He rested his head in the warmth of Meri’s lap but, for the first time since they had met, he wasn’t thinking of having sex with her. He was trying very hard to think of nothing at all as he gazed up at the clouds flitting across the ceiling of the Blue Salon.

Robman spun his coin at the tikra table. It sang through stacks of parti-colored blocks that represented the map of the competing biomes, bouncing off trees, whirling over snakes, clattering to a stop by the Verge.

“Take five, put two,” said Robman. “I want birds.”

“I’ll give you flies,” said Jonman.

“Digbees and bats?”

“Done.”

Jonman spun his coin. “It’s not just you, Adel,” he said. “Speedy picked Robman and me and Jarek too. Sister didn’t want us either.”

“Why would she want you two?” said Adel. “You’re yoked.”

“Not always,” said Meri. “Jonman was here a month before Robman.”

“But I saw him coming,” said Jonman. “Put ought, skip the take.”

“She didn’t disappear because of you,” said Adel.

—or you either—buzzed minus.

“Or you either.” Meri had been stroking his hair, now she gave it a short tug. “This has nothing to do with you.”

“I made her cry.”

“No, Speedy did that.” Meri spat the name, as if she were daring the Godspeed to display. She had not shown herself to them in almost three days.

Robman spun again.

“Speedy wouldn’t let her go out of the airlock,” said Meri. “Would she?”

“Without a suit?” Robman sipped Z-breeze from a tumbler as he watched his coin dance. “Never.”

“Who knows what Speedy will do?” said Adel.

“They’re wasting their time,” said Jonman. “Sister isn’t out there.”

“Do you see that,” Meri said “or is it just an opinion?”

“Take one, put one,” said Robman.

“Which gets you exactly nothing,” said Jonman. “I call a storm.”

“Then I call a flood.” Robman pushed three of his blocks toward Jonman’s side of the board. The tether connecting them quivered and Adel thought he could hear it gurgling faintly.

Jonman distributed the blocks around his biome. “What I see is that she’s hiding someplace,” he said. “I just don’t see where.”

Meri slid out from under Adel’s head and stood. “And Speedy?” Adel put the pillow on the armrest of the sofa and his head on the pillow.

“She’s here,” said Jonman. “She’s toying with us. That’s what she does best.”

“At least we don’t have to practice her damn play,” said Robman.

Adel wanted to wrap the pillow around his ears to blot out this conversation. One of their number had vanished, they were some fifty light years from the nearest MASTA, and there was something very wrong with the cognizor in command of their threshold. Why weren’t the others panicking like he was? “Rehearse,” he said.

“What?”

“You don’t practice a play. You rehearse it.”

Meri told the wall to display the airlock but it was empty. “They must be back already.”

“Have some more Z-breeze, Rob,” said Jonman. “I can’t feel anything yet.”

“Here.” He thrust the tumbler at Jonman. “Drink it yourself.”

Jonman waved it off. “It’s your day to eat, not mine.”

“You just want to get me drunk so you can win.”

“Nothing,” said Kamilah, as she entered the salon with Jarek. “She’s not out there.”

“Thank the Kindly One,” said Jarek.

Robman gave Jonman an approving nod. “You saw that.”

“Is Speedy back yet?” said Kamilah.

“She hasn’t shown herself.” Meri had settled into a swivel chair and was turning back and forth nervously.

“Kamilah and I were talking on the way up here,” said Jarek. He strode behind Meri’s chair and put hands on her shoulders to steady her. “What if she jumped?”

“What if? “ Meri leaned her head back to look up at him.

“Adel says she was hysterical,” said Kamilah. “Let’s say Speedy couldn’t settle her down. She’s a danger to herself, maybe to us. So Speedy has to send her home.”

“Lose your mind and you go free?” Robman spun his coin. “Jon, what are we waiting for?”

“Speedy,” said Kamilah. “Is that it? Talk to us, please.”

They all looked. The wall showed only the empty airlock.

Adel hurled the pillow at it in a fury. “I can’t take this anymore.” He scrambled off the couch. “We’re in trouble, people.”

—be calm—

—tell it—

They were all staring at him but that was fine. The concern on their faces made him want to laugh. “Sister said something was going to happen. This is it.” He began to pace around the salon, no longer able to contain the frenzied energy skittering along his nerves. “We have to do something.”

“I don’t see it,” said Jonman.

“No, you wouldn’t.” Adel turned on him. “You always want to wait. Maybe that was a good idea when all this started, but things have changed.”

“Adel,” said Meri, “what do you think you’re doing?”

“Look at yourselves,” he said. “You’re afraid that if you try to save yourselves, you’ll be fucked. But you know what, people? We’re already fucked. It makes no sense anymore to wait for someone to come rescue us.”

Adel felt a hand clamp onto his shoulder and another under his buttock. Kamilah lifted him effortlessly. “Sit down.” She threw him at the couch. “And shut up.” He crashed into the back cushion headfirst, bounced and tumbled onto the carpet.

Adel bit his tongue when he hit the couch; now he tasted blood. He rolled over, got to hands and knees and then he did laugh. “Even you, Kamilah.” He gazed up at her. She was breathing as if she had just set a record in the two hundred meter freestyle. “Even you are perfectly scared.” Her medallion spun wildly on its silver chain.

“Gods, Adel.” She took a step toward him. “Don’t.”

Adel muted his opposites then; he knew exactly what he needed to do. “Speedy!” he called out. “We know that you’re decelerating.”

Meri shrieked in horror. Jonman came out of his chair so quickly that his tether knocked several of the blocks off the tikra board. Kamilah staggered and slumped against a ruby sideboard.

“Why, Adel?” said Jarek. “Why?”

“Because she knows we know.” Adel picked himself up off the Berber carpet. “She can scan planets twenty-light years away and you don’t think she can see us dropping rocks on her own surface?” He straightened his cape. “You’ve trapped yourselves in this lie better than she ever could.”

“You do look, my son, as if something is bothering you.” The Godspeed’s fetch stepped from behind the statue of Levia Calla. She was in costume as Prospero.

“What did . . . ?”

“Speedy, we don’t . . . ”

“You have to . . . ”

“Where is . . . ?”

The Godspeed made a grand flourish that ended with her arm raised high above her head. She ignored their frantic questions, holding this pose until they fell silent. Then she nodded and smiled gaily at her audience.

“Cheer up,” she said, her voice swelling with bombast. “The party’s almost over. Our actors were all spirits and have melted into air, into thin air. There was never anything here, no soaring towers or gorgeous palaces or solemn temples. This make-believe world is about to blow away like a cloud, leaving not even a wisp behind. We are the stuff that dreams are made of, and our little lives begin and end in sleep. You must excuse me, I’m feeling rather odd just now. My old brain is troubled. But don’t worry. Tell you what, why don’t you just wait here a few more minutes? I’m going to take a turn outside to settle myself.”

The Godspeed paused expectantly as if waiting for applause. But the pilgrims were too astonished to do or say anything, and so she bowed and, without saying another word, dissolved the fetch.

“What was that?” said Robman.

“The end of Act IV, scene 1,” said Adel grimly.

“But what does it mean?” said Meri.

Jarek put his hand to her cheek but then let it fall again. “I think Adel is right. I think we’re . . . ”

At that moment, the prazz sentry ship struck the Godspeed a mortal blow, crashing into its surface just forty meters from the backside thruster and compromising the magnetic storage rings that contained the antimatter generated by collider. The sonic blast was deafening as the entire asteroid lurched. Then came the explosion. The pilgrims flew across the Blue Salon like leaves in a storm amidst broken furniture and shattered glass. Alarms screamed and Adel heard the distant hurricane roar of escaping air. Then the lights went out and for long and hideous moment Adel Ranger Santos lay in darkness, certain that he was about to die. But the lights came up again and he found himself scratched and bruised but not seriously hurt. He heard a moan that he thought might be Kamilah. A man was crying behind an overturned desk. “Is everyone all right?” called Jerek. “Talk to me.”

The fetch reappeared in the midst of this chaos, still in costume. Adel had never seen her flicker before. “I’m afraid,” said the Godspeed to no one in particular, “that I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

The Alien is worshipped on almost all the worlds of the Continuum. While various religions offer divergent views of the Alien, they share two common themes. One is that the Alien gods are—or were once—organic intelligences whose motives are more or less comprehensible. The other is that the gods are absent. The Mission of Tsef promises adherents that they can achieve psychic unity with benign alien nuns who are meditating on their behalf somewhere in the M5 globular cluster. The Cosmic Ancestors are the most popular of the many panspermian religions; they teach that our alien parents seeded earth with life in the form of bacterial stromatolites some 3.7 billion years ago. There are many who hold that humanity’s greatest prophets, like Jesus and Ellen and Smike, were aliens come to share the gospel of a loving universe while the Uplift believes that an entire galactic civilization translated itself to a higher reality but left behind astronomical clues for us to decipher so that we can join them someday. It is true that the Glogites conceive of Glog as unknowable and indifferent to humankind, but there is very little discernable difference between them and people who worship black holes.

We find it impossible to imagine a religion that would worship the prazz, but then we know so little about them—or it. Not only is the prazz not organic, but it seems to have a deep-seated antipathy toward all life. Why this should be we can’t say: we find the prazz incomprehensible. Even the Godspeed, the only intelligence to have any extended contact with the prazz, misjudged it—them—entirely.

Here are a few of most important questions for which we have no answer:

What exactly are the prazz?

Are they one or many?

Where did they come from?

Why was a sentry posted between our Local Arm and the Sagittarius-Carina Arm of the Milky Way?

Are there more sentries?

And most important of all: what are the intentions of the prazz now that they know about us?

What we can say is this: in the one thousand and eighty-sixth year of her mission, the Godspeed detected a communication burst from a source less than a light year away. Why the prazz sentry chose this precise moment to signal is unknown; the Godspeed had been sweeping that sector of space for years and had seen no activity. Acting in accordance with the protocols for first contact, she attempted a stealth scan, which revealed the source as a small robotic ship powered by a matter-antimatter engine. Unfortunately, the prazz sentry sensed that it was being scanned and was able to get a fix on the Godspeed. What she should have done at that point was to alert the Continuum of her discovery and continue to track the sentry without making contact. That she did otherwise reflects the unmistakable drift of her persona from threshold norms. Maybe she decided that following procedures lacked dramatic flair. Or perhaps the discovery of the prazz stirred some inexpressible longing for companionship in the Godspeed, who was herself an inorganic intelligence. In any event, she attempted to communicate with the prazz sentry and compartmentalized the resources she devoted to the effort so that she could continue to send nominal reports to the Continuum. This was a technique that she had used just once before, but to great effect; compartmentalization was how the Godspeed was able to keep her secrets. We understand now that the contact between the two ships was deeply flawed, and their misunderstandings profound. Nevertheless, they agreed to a rendezvous and the Godspeed began to decelerate to match course and velocity with the prazz sentry.

The highboy that killed Robman had crushed his chest and cut the tether that joined him to Jonman. Their blood was all over the floor. Adel had done his best for Jonman, clearing enough debris to lay him out flat, covering him with a carpet. He had tied the remaining length of tether off with wire stripped from the back of a ruined painting, but it still oozed. Adel was no medic but he was pretty sure that Jonman was dying; his face was as gray as his jacket. Kamilah didn’t look too bad but she was unconscious and breathing shallowly. Adel worried that she might have internal injuries. Meri’s arm was probably broken; when they tried to move her she moaned in agony. Jarek was kicking the slats out of a Yamucha chair back to make her a splint.

“An alien, Speedy?” Adel felt too lightheaded to be scared. “And you didn’t tell anyone?” It was as if the gravity generator had failed and at any moment he would float away from this grim reality.

“So where is this fucking prazz now?” Jarek ripped a damask tablecloth into strips.

“The sentry ship itself crashed into the backside engine room. But it has deployed a remote.” The Godspeed seemed twitchy and preoccupied. “It’s in the conservatory, smashing cacti.”

“What?” said Adel.

“It has already destroyed my rain forest and torn up my alpine garden.”

plus buzzed—they’re fighting with plants?—

“Show me,” said Jarek.

The wall turned a deep featureless blue. “I can’t see them; my cameras there are gone.” The Godspeed paused, her expression uneasy.

—more bad news coming—buzzed minus.

“You should know,” she said, “that just before it attacked, the prazz warned me that I was infested with vermin and needed to sterilize myself. When I told it that I didn’t consider you vermin . . . ”

“You’re saying they’ll come for us?” said Jarek.

“I’m afraid that’s very likely.”

“Then stop it.”

She waved her magic staff disconsolately. “I’m at a loss to know how.”

“Fuck that, Speedy.” Jarek pointed one of the slats at her fetch. “You think of something. Right now.” He knelt by Meri. “I’m going to splint you now, love. It’s probably going to hurt.”

Meri screamed as he tenderly straightened her arm.

“I know, love,” said Jarek. “I know.”

—we have to get out of here—buzzed minus.

“How badly are you damaged, Speedy?” said Adel. “Can we use the MASTA?”

“My MASTA is operational on a limited basis only. My backside engine complex is a complete loss. I thought I was able to vent all the antimatter in time, but there must have been a some left that exploded when the containment failed.”

Something slammed onto the level below them so hard that the walls shook.

—those things are tearing her apart—

—looking for us—

“I’ve sealed off the area as best I can but the integrity of my life support envelope has been compromised in several places. At the rate I’m bleeding air into space . . . ”

Adel felt another jarring impact, only this one felt as if it were farther away. The Godspeed’s fetch blurred and dispersed into fog. She reconstituted herself on the wall.

“ . . . the partial pressure of oxygen will drop below 100 millibars sometime within the next ten to twelve hours.”

“That’s it then.” Jarek helped Meri to her feet and wiped the tears from her face with his forefinger. “We’re all jumping home. Meri can walk, can’t you Meri?”

She nodded, her eyes wide with pain. “I’m fine.”

“Adel, we’ll carry Jonman out first.”

“The good news,” said the Godspeed, “is that I can maintain power indefinitely using my frontside engines.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” Jarek’s voice rose sharply. “We’re leaving right now. Jonman and Kamilah can’t wait and the rest of us vermin have no intention of being sterilized by your fucking prazz.”

“I’m sorry, Jarek.” She stared out at them, her face set. “You know I can’t send you home. Think about it.”

“Speedy!” said Meri. “No.”

“What?” said Adel. “What’s he talking about?”

“What do you care about the protocols?” Jarek put his arm around Meri’s waist to steady her. “You’ve already kicked them over. That’s why we’re in this mess.”

“The prazz knows where we are,” said the Godspeed, “but it doesn’t know where we’re from. I burst my weekly reports . . . ”

“Weekly lies, you mean,” said Adel.

“They take just six nanoseconds. That’s not nearly enough time to get a fix. But a human transmit takes 1.43 seconds and the prazz is right here on board.” She shook her head sadly. “Pointing it at the Continuum would violate my deepest operating directives. Do you want a prazz army marching off the MASTA stage on Moquin or Harvest?”

“How do we know they have armies?” Jarek said, but his massive shoulders slumped. “Or MASTAs?”

Jonman laughed. It was a low, wet sound, almost a cough. “Adel,” he rasped. “I see . . . ” He was trying to speak but all that came out of his mouth was thin, pink foam.

Adel knelt by his side. “Jonman, what? You see what?”

“I see.” He clutched at Adel’s arm. “You.” His grip tightened. “Dead.” His eyelids fluttered and closed.

—this isn’t happening—

“What did he say?” said Meri.

“Nothing.” Adel felt Jonman’s grip relaxing; his arm fell away.

—dead?—buzzed plus

Adel put his ear to Jonman’s mouth and heard just the faintest whistle of breath.

minus buzzed—we’re all dead—

Adel stood up, his thoughts tumbling over each other. He believed that Jonman hadn’t spoken out of despair—or cruelty. He had seen something, maybe a way out, and had tried to tell Adel what it was.

—don’t play tikra with Jonman—buzzed minus—he cheats—

—dead—plus buzzed—but not really—

“Speedy,” said Adel, “what if you killed us?” What would the prazz do then?”

Jarek snorted in disgust. “What kind of thing is that to . . . ” Then he understood what Adel was suggesting. “Hot damn!”

“What?” said Meri. “Tell me.”

“But can we do it?” said Jarek. “I mean, didn’t they figure out that it’s bad for you to be dead too long?”

Adel laughed and clapped Jarek on the shoulder. “Can it be worse than being dead forever?”

—so dangerous—buzzed minus.

—we’re fucking brilliant—

“You’re still talking about the MASTA?” said Meri. “But Speedy won’t transmit.”

“Exactly,” said Adel.

“There isn’t much time,” said the Godspeed.

The Neverending Day

Adel was impressed with how easy it was being dead. The things that had bothered him when he was alive, like being hungry or horny, worrying about whether his friends really liked him or what he was going to be if he ever grew up—none of that mattered. Who cared that he had never learned the first law of thermodynamics or that he had blown the final turn in the most important race of his life? Appetite was an illusion. Life was pleasant, but then so were movies.

The others felt the same way. Meri couldn’t feel her broken arm and Jonman didn’t mind at all that he was dying, although he did miss Robman. Adel felt frustrated at first that he couldn’t rouse Kamilah, but she was as perfect unconscious as she was when she was awake. Besides, Upwood predicted that she would get bored eventually being alone with herself. It wasn’t true that nobody changed after they were dead, he explained, it was just that change came very slowly and was always profound. Adel had been surprised to meet Upwood Marcene in Speedy’s pocket-afterlife, but his being there made sense. And of course, Adel had guessed that Sister Lihong Rain would be dead there too. As it turned out, she had been dead many times over the seven years of her pilgrimage.

Speedy had created a virtual space in her memory that was almost identical to the actual Godspeed. Of course, Speedy was as real as any of them, which is to say not very real at all. Sister urged the newcomers to follow shipboard routine whenever possible; it would make the transition back to life that much easier. Upwood graciously moved out of The Ranch so that Adel could have his old room back. Speedy and the pilgrims gathered in the Ophiuchi or the Chillingsworth at meal times, and although they did not eat, they did chatter. They even propped Kamilah on a chair to include her in the group. Speedy made a point of talking to her at least once at every meal. She would spin theories about the eating man on Kamilah’s medallion or propose eyejack performances Kamilah might try on them.

She also lobbied the group to mount The Tempest, but Jarek would have no part in it. Of all of them, he seemed most impatient with death. Instead they played billiards and cards. Adel let Jonman teach him Tikra and didn’t mind at all when he cheated. Meri read to them and Jarek played the ruan and sang. Adel visited the VR room but once; the sim made him feel gauzy and extenuated. He did swim two thousand meters a day in the lap pool, which, although physically disappointing, was a demanding mental challenge. Once he and Jarek and Meri climbed into bed together but nothing very interesting happened. They all laughed about it afterward.

Adel was asleep in his own bed, remembering a dream he’d had when he was alive. He was lost in a forest where people grew instead of trees. He stumbled past shrubby little kids and great towering grownups like his parents and Uncle Durwin. He knew he had to keep walking because if he stopped he would grow roots and raise his arms up to the sun like all the other tree people, but he was tired, so very tired.

“Adel.” Kamilah shook him roughly. “Can you hear that? Adel!”

At first he thought she must be part of his dream.

—she’s better—

—Kamilah—

“Kamilah, you’re awake!”

“Listen.” She put her forefinger to her lips and twisted her head, trying to pinpoint the sound. “No, it’s gone. I thought they were calling Sister.”

“This is wonderful.” He reached to embrace her but she slid away from him. “When did you wake up?”

“Just now. I was in my room in bed and I heard singing.” She scowled. “What’s going on, Adel? The last thing I remember was you telling Speedy you knew we were decelerating. This all feels very wrong to me.”

“You don’t remember the prazz?”

Her expression was grim. “Tell me everything.”

Adel was still groggy, so the story tumbled out in a hodgepodge of the collision and the prazz and the protocols and Robman and the explosion and the blood and the life support breech and Speedy scanning them into memory and Sister and swimming and tikra and Upwood.

“Upwood is here?”

“Upwood? Oh yes.”

—he is?—

—is he?—

As Adel considered the question, his certainty began to crumble. “I mean he was. He gave me his room. But I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“How long?”

Adel frowned. “I don’t know.”

“How long have we been here? You and I and the others?”

Adel shook his head.

“Gods, Adel.” She reached out tentatively and touched his arm but of course he didn’t feel a thing. Kamilah gazed at her own hand in horror, as if it had betrayed her. “Let’s find Jarek.”

Kamilah led them down the Tulip Stairs, past the Blue and Dagger Salons through the Well Met Arena to the Clarke Airlock. The singing was hushed but so ethereal here that even Jarek and Adel, whose senses had atrophied, could feel it. Sister waited for them just inside the outer door of the airlock.

Although Adel knew it must be her, he didn’t recognize her at first. She was naked and her skin was so pale that it was translucent. He could see her heart beating and the dark blood pulsing through her veins, the shiny bundles of muscles sliding over each other as she moved and the skull grinning at him beneath her face. Her thin hair had gone white; it danced around her head as if she were falling.

—beautiful—

—exquisite—

“I’m glad you’re here.” She smiled at them. “Adel. Kamilah. Jarek.” She nodded at each of them in turn. “My witnesses.”

“Sister,” said Kamilah, “come away from there.”

Sister placed her hand on the door and it vanished. Kamilah staggered back and grabbed at the inner door as if she expected to be expelled from the airlock in a great outrush of air, but Adel knew it wouldn’t happen. Kamilah still didn’t understand the way things worked here.

They gazed out at a star field much like the one that Adel had seen when he first stepped out onto the surface of the Godspeed. Except now there was no surface—only stars.

“Kamilah,” said Sister. “you started last and have the farthest to travel. Jarek, you still have doubts. But Adel already knows that the self is a box he has squeezed himself into.”

—yes—

—right—

She stepped backwards out of the airlock and was suspended against the stars.

“Kamilah,” she said, “trust us and someday you will be perfect.” The singing enfolded her and she began to glow in its embrace. The brighter she burned the more she seemed to recede from them, becoming steadily hotter and more concentrated until Adel couldn’t tell her from one of the stars. He wasn’t sure but he thought she was a blue dwarf.

“Close the airlock, Adel.” Speedy strolled into the locker room wearing her golden uniform coat and white sash. “It’s too much of a distraction.”

“What is this, Speedy?” Jarek’s face was ashen. “You said you would send us back.”

Adel approached the door cautiously; he wasn’t ready to follow Sister to the stars quite yet.

“But I did send you back,” she said.

“Then who are we?”

“Copies.” Adel jabbed at the control panel and jumped back as the airlock door reappeared. “I think we must be backups.”

Kamilah was seething. “You kept copies of us to play with?” Her fists were clenched.

Adel was bemused; they were dead. Who did she think she was going to fight?

“It’s not what you think.” Speedy smiled. “Let’s go up to Blue Salon. We should bring Jonman and Meri into this conversation too.” She made ushering motions toward the Well Met and Adel and Jarek turned to leave.

—good idea—

—let’s go—

“No, let’s not.” With two quick strides, Kamilah gained the doorway and blocked their passage. “If Meri wants to know what’s going on, then she can damn well ask.”

“Ah, Kamilah. My eyejack insists on the truth.” She shrugged and settled onto one of the benches in the locker room. “This is always such a difficult moment,” she said.

“Just tell it,” said Kamilah.

“The prazz ship expired about three days after the attack. In the confusion of the moment, I’d thought it was my backside engine that exploded. Actually it was the sentry’s drive. Once its batteries were exhausted, both the sentry ship and its remote ceased all function. I immediately transmitted all of you to your various home worlds and then disabled my transmitter and deleted all my navigation files. The Continuum is safe—for now. If the prazz come looking, there are further actions I can take.”

“And what about us?” said Kamilah. “How do we get home?”

“As I said, you are home, Kamilah. Your injuries were severe but certainly not fatal. Your prognosis was for a complete recovery.”

—right—

—makes sense—

“Not that one,” said Kamilah. “This one.” She tapped her chest angrily. “Me. How do I get home?”

“But Kamilah . . . ” Speedy swept an arm expansively, taking in the airlock and lockers and Well Met and the Ophiuchi and Jarek and Adel. “ . . . this is your home.”

The first pilgrim from the Godspeed lost during a transmit was Io Waals. We can’t say for certain whether she suffered a flawed scan or something interfered with her signal but when the MASTA on Rontaw assembled her, her heart and lungs were outside her body cavity. This was three hundred and ninety-two years into the mission. By then, the Captain had long since given way to Speedy.

The Godspeed was devastated by Io’s death. Some might say it unbalanced her, although we would certainly disagree. But this was when she began to compartmentalize behaviors, sealing them off from the scrutiny of the Continuum and, indeed, from most of her conscious self. She stored backups of every scan she made in her first compartment. For sixty-seven years, she deleted each of them as soon as she received word of a successful transmit. Then Ngong Issonda died when a tech working on Loki improperly recalibrated the MASTA.

Only then did the Godspeed understand the terrible price she would pay for compartmentalization. Because she had been keeping the backups a secret not only from the Continuum but also to a large extent from herself, she had never thought through how she might make use of them. It was immediately clear to her that if she resent Ngong, techs would start arriving on her transport stage within the hour to fix her. The Godspeed had no intention of being fixed. But what to do with Ngong’s scan? She created a new compartment, a simulation of her architecture into which she released Ngong. Ngong did not flourish in the simulation, however. She was depressed and withdrawn whenever the Godspeed visited. Her next scan, Keach Soris arrived safely on Butler’s Planet, but Speedy loaded his backup into the simulation with Ngong. Within the year, she was loading all her backups into the sim. But as Upwood Marcene would point out some seven centuries later, dead people change and the change is always profound and immaterial. In less than a year after the sim was created, Ngong, Keach and Zampa Stackpole stepped out of airlock together into a new compartment, one that against all reason transcends the boundaries of the Godspeed, the Milky Way and spacetime itself.

So then, what do we know about Adel Ranger Santos?

Nothing at all. Once we transmitted him back to Harvest, he passed from our awareness. He may have lived a long, happy life or a short painful one. His fate does not concern us.

But what do we know about Adel Ranger Santos?

Only what we know about Upwood Marcene, Kalimah Raunda, Jarek Ohnksen, Merigood Auburn Canada, Lihong Rain and Jonman Haught Shillaber—which is everything, of course. For they followed Ngong and Keach and Zampa and some forty thousand other pilgrims through the airlock to become us.

And we are they.

Originally published in Between Worlds, edited by Robert Silverberg.

Useless Things

Maureen F. McHugh

“Senora?” The man standing at my screen door is travel stained. Migrant, up from Mexico. The dogs haven’t heard him come up but now they erupt in a frenzy of barking to make up for their oversight. I am sitting at the kitchen table, painting a doll, waiting for the timer to tell me to get doll parts curing in the oven in the workshed.

“Hudson, Abby!” I shout, but they don’t pay any attention.

The man steps back. “Do you have work? I can, the weeds,” he gestures. He is short-legged, long from waist to shoulder. He’s probably headed for the Great Lakes area, the place in the U.S. with the best supply of fresh water and the most need of farm labor.

Behind him is my back plot, with the garden running up to the privacy fence. The sky is just starting to pink up with dawn. At this time of year I do a lot of my work before dawn and late in the evening, when it’s not hot. That’s probably when he has been traveling, too.

I show him the cistern, and set him to weeding. I show him where he can plug in his phone to recharge it. I have internet radio on; Elvis Presley died 45 years ago today and they’re playing “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care.” I go inside and get him some bean soup.

Hobos used to mark codes to tell other hobos where to stop and where to keep going. Teeth to signify a mean dog. A triangle with hands meant that the homeowner had a gun and might use it. A cat meant a nice lady. Today the men use websites and bulletin boards that they follow, when they can, with cheap smart-phones. Somewhere I’m on a site as a ‘nice lady’ or whatever they say today. The railroad runs east of here and it’s sometimes a last spot where trains slow down before they get to the big yard in Belen. Men come up the Rio Grande hoping to hop the train.

I don’t like it. I was happy to give someone a meal when I felt anonymous. Handing a bowl of soup to someone who may not have eaten for a few days was an easy way to feel good about myself. That didn’t mean I wanted to open a migrant restaurant. I live by myself. Being an economic refugee doesn’t make people kind and good and I feel as if having my place on some website makes me vulnerable. The dogs may bark like fools, but Hudson is some cross between Border collie and golden retriever, and Abby is mostly black Lab. They are sweet mutts, not good protection dogs, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.

I wake at night sometimes now, thinking someone is in my house. Abby sleeps on the other side of the bed, and Hudson sleeps on the floor. Where I live it is brutally dark at night, unless there’s a moon—no one wastes power on lights at night. My house is small, two bedrooms, a kitchen and a family room. I lean over and shake Hudson on the floor, wake him up. “Who’s here?” I whisper. Abby sits up, but neither of them hear anything. They pad down the hall with me into the dark front room and I peer through the window into the shadowy back lot. I wait for them to bark.

Many a night, I don’t go back to sleep.

But the man at my door this morning weeds my garden, and accepts my bowl of soup and some flour tortillas. He thanks me gravely. He picks up his phone, charging off my system, and shows me a photo of a woman and a child. “My wife and baby,” he says. I nod. I don’t particularly want to know about his wife and baby but I can’t be rude.

I finish assembling the doll I am working on. I’ve painted her, assembled all the parts and hand rooted all her hair. She is rather cuter than I like. Customers can mix and match parts off of my website—this face with the eye color of their choice, hands curled one way or another. A mix and match doll costs about what the migrant will make in two weeks. A few customers want custom dolls and send images to match. Add a zero to the cost.

I am dressing the doll when Abby leaps up, happily roo-rooing. I start, standing, and drop the doll dangling in my hand by one unshod foot.

It hits the floor head first with a thump and the man gasps in horror.

“It’s a doll,” I say.

I don’t know if he understands, but he realizes. He covers his mouth with his hand and laughs, nervous.

I scoop the doll off the floor. I make reborns. Dolls that look like newborn infants. The point is to make them look almost, but not quite real. People prefer them a little cuter, a little more perfect than the real thing. I like them best when there is something a little strange, a little off about them. I like them as ugly as most actual newborns, with some aspect that suggests ontology recapitulating phylogeny; that a developing fetus starts as a single celled organism, and then develops to look like a tiny fish, before passing in stages into its final animal shape. The old theory of ontology recapitulating phylogeny, that the development of the human embryo follows the evolutionary path, is false, of course. But I prefer that my babies remind us that we are really animals. That they be ancient and a little grotesque. Tiny changelings in our house.

I am equally pleased to think of Thanksgiving turkeys as a kind of dinosaur gracing a holiday table. It is probably why I live alone.

“Que bonita,” he says. How beautiful.

“Gracias,” I say. He has brought me the empty bowl. I take it, and send him on his way.

I check my email and I have an order for a special. A reborn made to order. It’s from a couple in Chicago, Rachel and Ellam Mazar—I have always assumed that it is Rachel who emails me but the emails never actually identify who is typing. There is a photo attached of an infant. This wouldn’t be strange except this is the third request in three years I have had for exactly the same doll.

The dolls are expensive, especially the specials. I went to art school, and then worked as a sculptor for a toy company for a few years. I didn’t make dolls, I made action figures, especially alien figures and spaceships from the Kinetics movies. A whole generation of boys grew up imprinting on toys I had sculpted. When the craze for Kinetics passed, the company laid off lots of people, including me. The whole economy was coming apart at the seams. I had been lucky to have a job for as long as I did. I moved to New Mexico because I loved it and it was cheap, and I tried to do sculpting freelance. I worked at a big box store. Like so many people, my life went into freefall. I bought this place—a little ranch house that had gone into foreclosure in a place where no one was buying anything and boarded up houses fall in on themselves like mouths without teeth. It was the last of my savings. I started making dolls as a stopgap.

I get by. Between the little bit of money from the dolls and the garden I can eat. Which is more than some people.

A special will give me money for property tax. My cistern is getting low and there is no rain coming until the monsoon in June, which is a long way from now. If it’s like last year, we won’t get enough rain to fill the cistern anyway. I could pay for the water truck to make a delivery. But I don’t like this. When I put the specials on my website, I thought about it as a way to make money. I had seen it on another doll site. I am a trained sculptor. I didn’t think about why people would ask for specials.

Some people ask me to make infant dolls of their own children. If my mother had bought an infant version of me I’d have found it pretty disturbing.

One woman bought a special modeled on herself. She wrote me long emails about how her mother had been a narcissist, a monster, and how she was going to symbolically mother herself. Her husband was mayor of a city in California, which was how she could afford to have a replica of her infant self. Her emails made me uncomfortable, which I resented. So eventually I passed her on to another doll maker who made toddlers. I figured she could nurture herself up through all the stages of childhood.

Her reborn was very cute. More attractive than she was in the image she sent. She never commented. I don’t know that she ever realized.

I suspect the Mazars fall into another category. I have gotten three requests from people who have lost an infant. I tell myself that there is possibly something healing in recreating your dead child as a doll. Each time I have gotten one of these requests I have very seriously considered taking the specials off my website.

Property tax payments. Water in the cistern.

If the Mazars lost a child—and I don’t know that they did but I have a feeling that I can’t shake—it was bad enough that they want a replica. Then a year ago, I got a request for the second.

I thought that maybe Rachel—if it is Rachel who emails me, not Ellam—had meant to send a different image. I sent back an email saying were they sure that she had sent the right image?

The response was terse. They were sure.

I sent them an email saying if something had happened, I could do repairs. The response was equally terse. They wanted me to make one.

I searched them online, but could find out nothing about the Mazars of Chicago. They didn’t have a presence online. Who had money but no presence online? Were they organized crime? Just very very private? Now a third doll.

I don’t answer the email. Not yet.

Instead I take my laptop out to the shed. Inside the shed is my oven for baking the doll parts between coats of paint. I plug in the computer to recharge and park it on a shelf above eye level. I have my parts cast by Tony in Ohio, an old connection from my days in the toy industry. He makes my copper molds and rotocasts the parts. Usually, though, the specials are a one off and he sends me the copper supermaster of the head so he doesn’t have to store it. I rummage through my molds and find the head from the last time I made this doll. I set it on the shelf and look at it.

I rough sculpt the doll parts in clay, then do a plaster cast of the clay mold. Then from that I make a wax model, looking like some Victorian memorial of an infant that died of jaundice. I have my own recipe for the wax—commercial wax and paraffin and talc. I could tint it pink, most people do. I just like the way they look.

I do the fine sculpting and polishing on the wax model. I carefully pack and ship the model to Tony and he casts the copper mold. The process is nasty and toxic, not something I can do myself. For the regular dolls, he does a short run of a hundred or so parts in PVC, vinyl, and ships them to me. He keeps those molds in case I need more. For the head of a special he sends me back a single cast head and the mold.

All of the detail is on the inside of the mold, outside is only the rough outline of the shape. Infant’s heads are long from forehead to back of the skull. Their faces are tiny and low, their jaws like porkchop bones. They are marvelous and strange mechanisms.

At about seven, I hear Sherie’s truck. The dogs erupt.

Sherie and Ed live about a mile and a half up the road. They have a little dairy goat operation. Sherie is six months pregnant and goes into Albuquerque to see an obstetrician. Her dad works at Sandia Labs and makes decent money so her parents are paying for her medical care. It’s a long drive in and back, the truck is old and Ed doesn’t like her to go alone. I ride along and we pick up supplies. Her mom makes us lunch.

“Goddamn it’s hot,” Sherie says as I climb into the little yellow Toyota truck. “How’s your water?”

“Getting low,” I say. Sherie and Ed have a well.

“I’m worried we might go dry this year,” Sherie says. “They keep whining about the aquifer. If we have to buy water I don’t know what we’ll do.”

Sherie is physically Chinese, one of the thousands of girls adopted out of China in the nineties and at the turn of the century. She said she went through a phase of trying to learn all things Chinese, but she complains that as far as she can tell, the only thing Chinese about her is that she’s lactose intolerant.

“I had a migrant at my door this morning,” I say.

“Did you feed him?” she asks. She leans into the shift, trying to find the gear, urging the truck into first.

“He weeded my garden,” I say. “They’re not going to stop as long as you feed them.”

“Like stray cats,” I say.

Albuquerque has never been a pretty town. When I came it was mostly strip malls and big box stores and suburbs. Ten years of averages of 4 inches of rain or less have hurt it badly, especially with the loss of the San Juan/Chama water rights. Water is expensive in Albuquerque. Too expensive for Intel, which pulled out. Intel was just a larger blow in a series of blows.

The suburbs are full of walkaway houses—places where homeowners couldn’t meet the mortgage payments and just left, the lots now full of trash and windows gone. People who could went north for water. People who couldn’t did what people always do when an economy goes soft and rotten, they slid, to rented houses, rented apartments, living in their cars, living with their family, living on the street.

But inside Sherie’s parent’s home it’s still twenty years ago. The countertops are granite. The big screen plasma TV gets hundreds of channels. The freezer is full of meat and frozen Lean Cuisine. The air conditioner keeps the temperature at a heavenly 75 degrees. Sherie’s mother, Brenda, is slim, with beautifully styled graying hair. She’s a psychologist with a small practice.

Brenda has one of my dolls, which she bought because she likes me. It’s always out when I come, but it doesn’t fit Brenda’s tailored, airily comfortable style. I have never heard Brenda say a thing against Ed. But I can only assume that she and Kyle wish Sherie had married someone who worked at Los Alamos or at Sandia or the University, someone with government benefits like health insurance. On the other hand, Sherie was a wild child, who, as Brenda said, ‘Did a stint as a lesbian,’ as if being a lesbian were like signing up for the Peace Corps. You can’t make your child fall in love with the right kind of person. I wish I could have fallen in love with someone from Los Alamos. More than that, I wish I had been able to get a job at Los Alamos or the University. Me, and half of Albuquerque.

Sherie comes home, her hair rough cut in her kitchen with a mirror. She is loud and comfortable. Her belly is just a gentle insistent curve under her blue Rumatel goat dewormer t-shirt. Brenda hangs on her every word, knows about the trials and tribulations of raising goats, asks about Ed, the truck. She feeds us lunch.

I thought this life of thoughtful liberalism was my birthright, too. Before I understood that my generation was to be born in interesting times.

At the obstetrician’s office, I sit in the waiting room and try not to fall asleep. I’m stuffed on Brenda’s chicken and cheese sandwich and corn chowder. People magazine has an article about Tom Cruise getting telemerase regeneration therapy which will extend his lifespan an additional forty years. There’s an article on some music guy’s house talking about the new opulence; cutting edge technology that darkens the windows at the touch of a hand and walls that change color, rooms that sense whether you’re warm or cold and change their temperature, and his love of ancient Turkish and Russian antiques. There’s an article on a woman who has dedicated her life to helping people in Siberia who have AIDS.

Sherie comes out of the doctor’s office on her cellphone. The doctor tells her that if she had insurance, they’d do a routine ultrasound. I can hear half the conversation as she discusses it with her mother. “This little guy,” Sherie says, hand on her belly, “is half good Chinese peasant stock. He’s doing fine.” They decide to wait for another month.

Sherie is convinced that it’s a boy. Ed is convinced it’s a girl. He sings David Bowie’s “China Doll” to Sherie’s stomach which for some reason irritates the hell out of her.

We stop on our way out of town and stock up on rice and beans, flour, sugar, coffee. We can get all this in Belen, but it’s cheaper at Sam’s Club. Sherie has a membership. I pay half the membership and she uses the card to buy all our groceries then I pay her back when we get to the car. The cashiers surely know that we’re sharing a membership, but they don’t care.

It’s a long hot drive back home. The air conditioning doesn’t work in the truck. I am so grateful to see the trees that mark the valley.

My front door is standing open.

“Who’s here?” Sherie says.

Abby is standing in the front yard and she has clearly recognized Sherie’s truck. She’s barking her fool head off and wagging her tail, desperate. She runs to the truck. I get out and head for the front door and she runs towards the door and then back towards me and then towards the door, unwilling to go in until I get there, then lunging through the door ahead of me.

“Hudson?” I call the other dog, but I know if the door is open, he’s out roaming. Lost. My things are strewn everywhere, couch cushions on the floor, my kitchen drawers emptied on the floor, the back door open. I go through to the back, calling the missing dog, hoping against hope he is in the backyard. The back gate is open, too.

Behind me I hear Sherie calling, “Don’t go in there by yourself!”

“My dog is gone,” I say.

“Hudson?” she says.

I go out the back and call for him. There’s no sign of him. He’s a great boy, but some dogs, like Abby, tend to stay close to home. Hudson isn’t one of those dogs.

Sherie and I walk through the house. No one is there. I go out to my workshop. My toolbox is gone, but evidently whoever did this didn’t see the computer closed and sitting on the shelf just above eye level.

It had to be the guy I gave soup to. He probably went nearby to wait out the heat of the day and saw me leave.

I close and lock the gate, and the workshop. Close and lock my back door. Abby clings to me. Dogs don’t like things to be different.

“We’ll look for him,” Sherie says. Abby and I climb into the truck and for an hour we drive back roads, looking and calling, but there’s no sign of him. Her husband Ed calls us. He’s called the county and there’s a deputy at my place waiting to take a statement. We walk through the house and I identify what’s gone. As best I can tell, it isn’t much. Just the tools, mainly. The sheriff says they are usually looking for money, guns, jewelry. I had all my cards and my cell phone with me, and all my jewelry is inexpensive stuff. I don’t have a gun.

I tell the deputy about the migrant this morning. He says it could have been him, or someone else. I get the feeling we’ll never know. He promises to put out the word about the dog.

It is getting dark when they all leave and I put the couch cushions on the couch. I pick up silverware off the floor and run hot water in the sink to wash it all. Abby stands at the back door, whining, but doesn’t want to go out alone.

It occurs to me suddenly that the doll I was working on is missing. He stole the doll. Why? He’s not going to be able to sell it. To send it home, I guess, to the baby in the photo. Or maybe to his wife, who has a real baby and is undoubtedly feeling a lot less sentimental about infants than most of my customers do. It’s a couple of weeks of work, not full time, but painting, waiting for the paint to cure, painting again.

Abby whines again. Hudson is out there in the dark. Lost dogs don’t do well in the desert. There are rattlesnakes. I didn’t protect him. I sit down on the floor and wrap my arms around Abby’s neck and cry. I’m a stupid woman who is stupid about my dogs, I know. But they are what I have.

I don’t really sleep. I hear noises all night long. I worry about what I am going to do about money.

Replacing the tools is going to be a problem. The next morning I put the first layer of paint on a new doll to replace the stolen one. Then I do something I have resisted doing. Plastic doll parts aren’t the only thing I can mold and sell on the internet. I start a clay model for a dildo. Over the last couple of years I’ve gotten queries from companies who have seen the dolls online and asked if I would consider doing dildos for them. Realistic penises aren’t really any more difficult to carve than realistic baby hands. Easier, actually. I can’t send it to Tony, he wouldn’t do dildos. But a few years ago they came out with room temperature, medical grade silicon. I can make my own molds, do small runs, hand finish them. Make them as perfectly lifelike as the dolls. I can hope people will pay for novelty when it comes to sex.

I don’t particularly like making doll parts, but I don’t dislike it either. Dildos, on the other hand, just make me sad. I don’t think there is anything wrong with using them, it’s not that. It’s just . . . I don’t know. I’m not going to stop making dolls, I tell myself.

I also email the Chicago couple back and accept the commission for the special, to make the same doll for the third time. Then I take a break and clean my kitchen some more. Sherie calls me to check how I’m doing and I tell her about the dildos. She laughs. “You should have done it years ago,” she says. “You’ll be rich.”

I laugh, too. And I feel a little better when I finish the call.

I try not to think about Hudson. It’s well over 100 today. I don’t want to think about him in trouble, without water. I try to concentrate on penile veins. On the stretch of skin underneath the head (I’m making a circumcised penis). When my cell rings I jump.

The guy on the phone says, “I’ve got a dog here, has got this number on his collar. You missing a dog?”

“A golden retriever?” I say.

“Yep.”

“His name is Hudson,” I say. “Oh thank you. Thank you. I’ll be right there.”

I grab my purse. I’ve got fifty-five dollars in cash. Not much of a reward, but all I can do. “Abby!” I yell. “Come on girl! Let’s go get Hudson!”

She bounces up from the floor, clueless, but excited by my voice.

“Go for a ride?” I ask.

We get in my ancient red Impreza. It’s not too reliable, but we aren’t going far. We bump across miles of bad road, most of it unpaved, following the GPS directions on my phone and end up at a trailer in the middle of nowhere. It’s bleached and surrounded by trash—an old easy chair, a kitchen chair lying on it’s side with one leg broken and the white unstained inside like a scar, an old picnic table. There’s a dirty green cooler and a bunch of empty 40 oz bottles. Frankly, if I saw the place my assumption would be that the owner made meth. But the old man who opens the door is just an old guy in a baseball cap. Probably living on social security.

“I’m Nick,” he says. He’s wearing a long sleeved plaid shirt despite the heat. He’s deeply tanned and has a turkey wattle neck.

I introduce myself. Point to the car and say, “That’s Abby, the smart one that stays home.”

The trailer is dark and smells of old man inside. The couch cushions are covered in cheap throws, one of them decorated with a blue and white Christmas snowman. Outside, the scrub shimmers, flattened in the heat. Hudson is laying in front of the sink and scrabbles up when he sees us.

“He was just ambling up the road,” Nick says. “He saw me and came right up.”

“I live over by the river, off 109, between Belen and Jarales,” I say. “Someone broke into my place and left the doors open and he wandered off.”

“You’re lucky they didn’t kill the dogs,” Nick says.

I fumble with my purse. “There’s a reward,” I say.

He waves that away. “No, don’t you go starting that.” He says he didn’t do anything but read the tag and give him a drink. “I had dogs all my life,” he says. “I’d want someone to call me.”

I tell him it would mean a lot to me and press the money on him. Hudson leans against my legs to be petted, tongue lolling. He looks fine. No worse for wear.

“Sit a minute. You came all the way out here. Pardon the mess. My sister’s grandson and his friends have been coming out here and they leave stuff like that,” he says, waving at the junk and the bottles.

“I can’t leave the other dog in the heat,” I say, wanting to leave.

“Bring her inside.”

I don’t want to stay, but I’m grateful, so I bring Abby in out of the heat and he thumps her and tells me about how he’s lived here since he was in his twenties. He’s a Libertarian and he doesn’t trust government and he really doesn’t trust the New Mexico state government which is, in his estimation, a banana republic lacking only the fancy uniforms that third world dictators seem to love. Then he tells me about how lucky it was that Hudson didn’t get picked up to be a bait dog for the people who raise dogs for dog fights. Then he tells me about how the American economy was destroyed by operatives from Russia as revenge for the fall of the Soviet Union.

Half of what he says is bullshit and the other half is wrong, but he’s just a lonely guy in the middle of the desert and he brought me back my dog. The least I can do is listen.

I hear a spitting little engine off in the distance. Then a couple of them. It’s the little motorbikes the kids ride. Nick’s eyes narrow as he looks out.

“It’s my sister’s grandson,” he says. “Goddamn.”

He gets up and Abby whines. He stands, looking out the slatted blinds.

“Goddamn. He’s got a couple of friends,” Nick says. “Look you just get your dogs and don’t say nothing to them, okay? You just go on.”

“Hudson,” I say and clip a lead on him.

Outside, four boys pull into the yard, kicking up dust. They have seen my car and are obviously curious. They wear jumpsuits like prison jumpsuits, only with the sleeves ripped off and the legs cut off just above the knees. Khaki and orange and olive green. One of them has tattoos swirling up his arms.

“Hey Nick,” the tattooed one says, “new girlfriend?”

“None of your business, Ethan.”

The boy is dark but his eyes are light blue. Like a Siberian Husky. “You a social worker?” the boy says.

“I told you it was none of your business,” Nick says. “The lady is just going.”

“If you’re a social worker, you should know that old Nick is crazy and you can’t believe nothing he says.”

One of the other boys says, “She isn’t a social worker. Social workers don’t have dogs.”

I step down the steps and walk to my car. The boys sit on their bikes and I have to walk around them to get to the Impreza. Hudson wants to see them, pulling against his leash, but I hold him in tight.

“You look nervous, lady,” the tattooed boy says.

“Leave her alone, Ethan,” Nick says.

“You shut up, Uncle Nick, or I’ll kick your ass,” the boy says absently, never taking his eyes off me.

Nick says nothing.

I say nothing. I just get my dogs in my car and drive away.

Our life settles into a new normal. I get a response from my dildo email. Nick in Montana is willing to let me sell on his sex site on commission. I make a couple of different models, including one that I paint just as realistically as I would one of the reborn dolls. This means a base coat, then I paint the veins in. Then I bake it. Then I paint an almost translucent layer of color and bake it again. Six layers. And then a clear over-layer of silicon because I don’t think the paint is approved for use this way. I put a pretty hefty price on it and call it a special. At the same time I am making my other special. The doll for the Chicago couple. I sent the mold to Tony and had him do a third head from it. It, too, requires layers of paint, and sometimes the parts bake side by side.

Because my business is rather slow, I take more time than usual. I am always careful, especially with specials. I think if someone is going to spend the kind of money one of these costs, the doll should be made to the best of my ability. And maybe it is because I have done this doll before, it comes easily and well. I think of the doll that the man who broke into my house stole. I don’t know if he sent it to his wife and daughter in Mexico, or if he even has a wife and daughter in Mexico. I rather suspect he sold it on eBay or some equivalent—although I have watched doll sales and never seen it come up.

This doll is my orphan doll. She is full of sadness. She is inhabited by the loss of so much. I remember my fear when Hudson was wandering the roads of the desert. I imagine Rachel Mazar, so haunted by the loss of her own child. The curves of the doll’s tiny fists are porcelain pale. The blue veins at her temples are traceries of the palest of bruises.

When I am finished with her, I package her as carefully as I have ever packaged a doll and send her off.

My dildos go up on the website.

The realistic dildo sits in my workshop, upright, tumescent, a beautiful rosy plum color. It sits on a shelf like a prize, glistening in its topcoat as if it were wet. It was surprisingly fun to make, after years and years of doll parts. It sits there both as an object to admire and as an affront. But to be frank, I don’t think it is any more immoral than the dolls. There is something straightforward about a dildo. Something much more clear than a doll made to look like a dead child. Something significantly less entangled.

There are no orders for dildos. I lie awake at night thinking about real estate taxes. My father is dead. My mother lives in subsidized housing for the elderly in Columbus. I haven’t been to see her in years and years, not with the cost of a trip like that. My car wouldn’t make it, and nobody I know can afford to fly anymore. I certainly couldn’t live with her. She would lose her housing if I moved in.

If I lose my house to unpaid taxes, do I live in my car? It seems like the beginning of the long slide. Maybe Sherie and Ed would take the dogs.

I do get a reprieve when the money comes in for the special. Thank God for the Mazars in Chicago. However crazy their motives, they pay promptly and by internet, which allows me to put money against the equity line for the new tools.

I still can’t sleep at night and instead of putting all of the money against my debt, I put the minimum and I buy a 9 millimeter handgun. Actually, Ed buys it for me. I don’t even know where to get a gun.

Sherie picks me up in the truck and brings me over to the goat farm. Ed has several guns. He has an old gun safe that belonged to his father. When we get to their place, he is in back, putting creosote on new fence posts, but he is happy to come up to the house.

“So you’ve given in,” he says, grinning. “You’ve joined the dark side.”

“I have,” I agree.

“Well, this is a decent defensive weapon,” Ed says. Ed does not fit my preconceived notions of a gun owner. Ed fits my pre-conceived notions of the guy who sells you a cell phone at the local strip mall. His hair is short and graying. He doesn’t look at all like the kind of guy who would either marry Sherie or raise goats. He told me one time that his degree is in anthropology. Which, he said, was a difficult field to get a job in.

“Offer her a cold drink!” Sherie yells from the bathroom. In her pregnant state, Sherie can’t ride twenty minutes in the sprung-shocked truck without having to pee.

He offers me iced tea and then gets the gun, checks to see that it isn’t loaded, and hands it to me. He explains to me that the first thing I should do is check to see if the gun is loaded.

“You just did,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, “but I might be an idiot. It’s a good thing to do.”

He shows me how to check the gun.

It is not nearly so heavy in my hand as I thought it would be. But truthfully, I have found that the thing you thought would be life changing so rarely is.

Later he takes me around to the side yard and shows me how to load and shoot it. I am not even remotely surprised that it is kind of fun. That is exactly what I expected.

Out of the blue, an email from Rachel Mazar of Chicago.

I am writing you to ask you if you have had any personal or business dealings with my husband, Ellam Mazar. If I do not get a response from you, your next correspondence will be from my attorney.

I don’t quite know what to do. I dither. I make vegetarian chili. Oddly enough, I check my gun which I keep in the bedside drawer. I am not sure what I am going to do about the gun when Sherie has her baby. I have offered to baby sit, and I’ll have to lock it up, I think. But that seems to defeat the purpose of having it.

While I am dithering, my cell rings. It is, of course, Rachel Mazar. “I need you to explain your relationship with my husband, Ellam Mazar,” she says. She sounds educated, with that eradication of regional accent that signifies a decent college.

“My relationship?” I say.

“Your email was on his phone,” she says, frostily.

I wonder if he is dead. The way she says it sounds so final. “I didn’t know your husband,” I say. “He just bought the dolls.”

“Bought what?” she says.

“The dolls,” I say.

“Dolls?” she says.

“Yes,” I say.

“Like . . . sex dolls?”

“No,” I say. “Dolls. Reborns. Handmade dolls.”

She obviously has no idea what I am talking about, which opens a world strange possibilities in my mind. The dolls don’t have orifices. Fetish objects? I tell her my website and she looks it up.

“He ordered specials,” I say.

“But these cost a couple of thousand dollars,” she says.

A week’s salary for someone like Ellam Mazar, I suspect. I envision him as a professional, although frankly, for all I know he works in a dry cleaning shop or something.

“I thought they were for you,” I say. “I assumed you had lost a child. Sometimes people who have lost a child order one.”

“We don’t have children,” she says. “We never wanted them.” I can hear how stunned she is in the silence. Then she says, “Oh my God.”

Satanic rituals? Some weird abuse thing?

“That woman said he told her he had lost a child,” she says.

I don’t know what to say so I just wait.

“My husband . . . my soon to be ex-husband,” she says. “He has apparently been having affairs. One of the women contacted me. She told me that he told her we had a child that died and that now we were married in name only.”

I hesitate. I don’t know legally if I am allowed to tell her about transactions I had with her husband. On the other hand, the emails came with both their names on them. “He has bought three,” I say.

“Three?”

“Not all at once. About once a year. But people who want a special send me a picture. He always sends the same picture.”

“Oh,” she says. “That’s Ellam. He’s orderly. He’s used the same shampoo for fifteen years.”

“I thought it was strange,” I say. I can’t bear not to ask. “What do you think he did with them?”

“I think the twisted bastard used them to make women feel sorry for him,” she says through gritted teeth. “I think he got all sentimental about them. He probably has himself half convinced that he really did have a daughter. Or that it’s my fault that we didn’t have children. He never wanted children. Never.”

“I think a lot of my customers like the idea of having a child better than having one,” I say.

“I’m sure,” she says. “Thank you for your time and I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

So banal. So strange and yet so banal. I try to imagine him giving the doll to a woman, telling her that it was the image of his dead child. How did that work?

Orders for dildos begin to trickle in. I get a couple of doll orders and make a payment on the credit line and put away some towards real estate taxes. I may not have to live in my car.

One evening, I am working in the garden when Abby and Hudson start barking at the back gate.

I get off my knees, aching, but lurch into the house and into the bedroom where I grab the 9mm out of the bedside table. It isn’t loaded, which now seems stupid. I try to think if I should stop and load it. My hands are shaking. It is undoubtedly just someone looking for a meal and a place to recharge. I decide I can’t trust myself to load and besides, the dogs are out there. I go to the back door, gun held stiffly at my side, pointed to the ground.

There are in fact two of them, alike as brothers, Indian looking with a fringe of black hair cut in a straight line above their eyebrows.

“Lady,” one says, “we can work for food?” First one, then the other sees the gun at my side and their faces go empty.

The dogs cavort.

“I will give you something to eat, and then you go,” I say.

“We go,” the one who spoke says.

“Someone robbed me,” I say.

“We no rob you,” he says. His eyes are on the gun. His companion takes a step back, glancing at the gate and then at me as if to gauge if I will shoot him if he bolts.

“I know,” I say. “But someone came here, I gave him food, and he robbed me. You tell people not to come here, okay?”

“Okay,” he says. “We go.”

“Tell people not to come here,” I say. I would give them something to eat, something to take with them. I hate this. They are two young men in a foreign country, hungry, looking for work. I could easily be sleeping in my car. I could be homeless. I could be wishing for someone to be nice to me.

But I am not. I’m just afraid.

“Hudson! Abby!” I yell, harsh, and the two men flinch. “Get in the house.”

The dogs slink in behind me, not sure what they’ve done wrong.

“If you want some food, I will give you something,” I say. “Tell people not to come here.”

I don’t think they understand me. Instead they back slowly away a handful of steps and then turn and walk quickly out the gate, closing it behind them.

I sit down where I am standing, knees shaking.

The moon is up in the blue early evening sky. Over my fence I can see scrub and desert, a fierce land where mountains breach like the petrified spines of apocalyptic animals. The kind of landscape that seems right for crazed gangs of mutants charging around in cobbled together vehicles. Tribal remnants of America, their faces painted, their hair braided, wearing jewelry made from shiny CDs and cigarette lighters scrounged from the ruins of civilization. The desert is Byronic in its extremes.

I don’t see the two men. There’s no one out there in furs, their faces painted blue, driving a dune buggy built out of motorcycle parts and hung with the skulls of their enemies. There’s just a couple of guys from Nicaragua or Guatemala, wearing t-shirts and jeans.

And me, sitting watching the desert go dark, the moon rising, an empty handgun in my hand.

Originally published in Eclipse Three: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

The Memcordist

Lavie Tidhar

POLYPHEMUS PORT, TITAN, YEAR FORTY-THREE

Beyond the dome the ice-storms of Titan rage; inside it is warm, damp, with the smell of sewage seeping through and creepers growing through the walls of the above-ground dwellings. He tries to find her scent in the streets of Polyport and fails.

Hers was the scent of basil, and the night. When cooking, he would sometimes crush basil leaves between his fingers. It would bring her back, for just a moment, bring her back just as she was the first time they’d met.

Polyphemus Port is full of old memories. Whenever he wants, he can recall them, but he never does. Instead he tries to find them in old buildings, in half-familiar signs. There, the old Baha’i temple where they’d sheltered one rainy afternoon, and watched a weather hacker dance in the storm, wreathed in raindrops. There, what had once been a smokes-bar, now a shop selling surface crawlers. There, a doll house, for the sailors off the ships. It had been called Madame Sing’s, now it’s called Florian’s. Dolls peek out of the windows, small naked figures in the semblance of teenage boys and girls, soft and warm and disposable, with their serial numbers etched delicately into the curve of a neck or thigh. His feet know the old way and he walks past the shops, away from the docks and into a row of box-like apartments, the co-op building where they’d first met, creepers overgrowing the walls and peeking into windows—where they’d met, a party in the Year Seventeen of the Narrative of Pym.

He looks up, and as he does he automatically checks the figures that rise up, always, in the air before him. The number of followers hovers around twenty-three million, having risen slightly on this, his second voyage to Titan in so many years. A compilation feed of Year Seventeen is running concurrently, and there are messages from his followers, flashing in the lower right corner, which he ignores.

Looking up at her window, a flower pot outside—there used to be a single red flower growing there, a carnivorous Titan Rose with hungry, teeth-ringed suckers—her vice at the time. She’d buy the plant choice goat meat in the market every day. Now the flower pot is absent and the window is dark and she, too, is long gone.

Is she watching too, somewhere, he wonders—does she see me looking up and searching for her, for traces of her in a place so laid and overlaid with memories until it was impossible to tell which ones were original, and which the memory of a memory?

He thinks it’s unlikely. Like the entire sum of his life, this journey is for his benefit, is ultimately about him. We are what we are—and he turns away from her window, and the ice-storm howls above his head, beyond the protective layer of the dome. There had been a storm that night, too, but then, this was Titan, and there was always a storm.

ON BOARD THE GEL BLONG MOTA, EARTH-TO-MARS VOYAGE, YEAR FIVE

There are over twenty million followers on this day of the Narrative of Pym, and Mother is happy, and Pym is happy too, because he’d snuck out when Mother was asleep, and now he stands before the vast porthole of the ship—in actuality a wall-sized screen—and watches space, and the slowly moving stars beyond.

The Gel Blong Mota is an old ship, generations of Man Spes living and dying inside as it cruises the solar system, from Earth, across the inner and outer system, all the way to Jettisoned and Dragon’s World before turning back, doing the same route again and again. Pym is half in love with Joy, who is the same age as him and will one day, she confides in him, be captain of this ship. She teaches him asteroid pidgin, the near-universal language of Mars and the belt, and he tells her about Earth, about volcanoes and storms and the continental cities. He was not born on Earth, but he has lived there four of his five years, and he is nervous to be away, but also happy, and excited, and it’s all very confusing. Nearly fifty million watched him leave Earth, and they didn’t go in the elevator, they went in an old passenger RLV and he floated in the air when the gravity stopped, and he wasn’t sick or anything. Then they came to an orbital station where they had a very nice room and there was gravity again, and the next day they climbed aboard the Gel Blong Mota, which was at the same time very very big but also small, and it smelled funny. He’d seen the aquatic tanks with their eels and prawns and lobster and squid, and he’d been to the hydroponics gardens and spoken to the head gardener there, and Joy even showed him a secret door and took him inside the maintenance corridors beyond the walls of the ship, where it was very dry and smelled of dust and old paint.

Now he watches space, and wonders what Mars is like. At that moment, staring out into space, it is as if he is staring out at his own future spreading out before him, unwritten terabytes and petabytes of the Narrative of Pym, waiting to be written over in any way he wants. It makes him feel strange—he’s glad when Joy arrives and they go off together to the aquatic tanks—she said she’d teach him how to fish.

TONG YUN CITY, MARS, YEAR SEVEN

Mother is out again with her latest boyfriend, Jonquil Sing, a memcordist syndication agent. “He is very good for us,” she tells Pym one night, giving him a wet kiss on the cheek, and her breath smells of smoke. She hopes Jonquil will increase subscriptions across Mars, Pym knows—the numbers of his followers have been dropping since they came to Tong Yun. “A dull, provincial town,” Mother says, which is the Earth-born’s most stinging insult.

But Pym likes Tong Yun. He loves going down in the giant elevators into the lower levels of the city, and he particularly loves the Arcade, with its battle droid arenas and games-worlds shops and particularly the enormous Multifaith Bazaar. Whenever he can he sneaks out of the house—they are living on the surface, under the dome of Tong Yun, in a house belonging to a friend of a friend of Mother’s—and goes down to Arcade, and to the Bazaar.

The Church of Robot is down there, and an enormous Elronite temple, and mosques and synagogues and Buddhist and Baha’i temples and even a Gorean place and he watches the almost-naked slave girls with strange fascination, and they smile at him and reach out and tousle his hair. There are Re-Born Martian warriors with reddish skin and four arms—they believe Mars was once habituated by an ancient empire and that they are its descendants, and they serve the Emperor of Time. He thinks he wants to become a Re-Born warrior when he grows up, and have four arms and tint his skin red, but when he mentions it to Mother once she throws a fit and says Mars never had an atmosphere and there is no emperor and that the Re-Born are—and she uses a very rude word, and there are the usual complaints from some of the followers of the Narrative of Pym.

He’s a little scared of the Elronites—they’re all very confident and smile a lot and have very white teeth. Pym isn’t very confident. He prefers quiet roads and places with few people in them and he doesn’t want anyone to know who he is.

Sometimes he wonders who he is, or what he will become. One of Mother’s friends asked him, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and he said, “A spaceship captain—” thinking of Joy—and Mother gave her false laugh and ruffled his hair and said, “Pym already is what he is. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?” and she gathered him in her arms and said, “He’s Pym.”

But who is Pym? Pym doesn’t know. When he’s down at the Multifaith Bazaar he thinks that perhaps he wants to be a priest, or a monk—but which religion? They’re all neat.

Fifteen million follow him as he passes through temples, churches and shrines, searching for answers to a question he is not yet ready to ask himself, and might never be.

JETTISONED, CHARON, YEAR FIFTY-SIX

So at last he’s come to Jettisoned, the farthest one can get without quite leaving completely, and he hires a small dark room in a small dark co-op deep in the bowels of the moon, a place that suits his mood.

Twenty-three million watch, less because of him and more because he’d chosen Jettisoned, the home of black warez and wild technology and outlaws—the city of the Jettisoned, all those ejected at the last moment from the vast majestic starships as they depart the solar system, leaving forever on a one-way journey into galactic space. Would some of them find new planets, new moons, new suns to settle around? Are there aliens out there, or God? No one knows, least of all Pym. He’d once asked his mother why they couldn’t go with one of the ships. “Don’t be silly,” she’d said, “think of all your followers, and how disappointed they’d be.”

“Bugger my followers,” he says now, aloud, knowing some would complain, and others would drop out and follow other narratives. He’d never been all that popular, but the truth was, he’d never wanted to be. Everything I’ve ever done in my life, he thinks, is on record. Everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve touched, everything I smelled or said. And yet had he said or done anything worth saying, anything worth doing?

I once loved with all my heart, he thinks. Is that enough?

He knows she’d been to Jettisoned in the past year. But she’d left before he arrived. Where is she now? He could check, but doesn’t. On her way back through the outer system—perhaps in the Galilean Moons, where he knows she’s popular. He decides to get drunk.

Hours later, he is staggering along a dark alley, home to smokes bars, doll houses, battle arcades, body modification clinics, a lone Church of Robot mission, and several old-fashioned drinking establishments. Anything that can be grown on Jettisoned gets fermented into alcohol, sooner or later. Either that or smoked. His head hurts, and his heart is beating too fast. Too old, he thinks. Perhaps he says it out loud. Two insectoid figures materialise in the darkness, descend on him. “What are you—?” he says, slurring the words, as the two machines expertly rifle through his pockets and run an intrusion package over his node—even now, when all he can do is blink blearily, he notices the followers numbers rising, and realises he’s being mugged.

“Give them a show,” he says, and begins to giggle. He tries to hit one of the insectoid figures and a thin, slender metal arm reaches down and touches him—a needle bite against his throat—

Numb, but still conscious—he can’t shout for help but what’s the point, anyway? This is Jettisoned, and if you end up there you have only yourself to blame.

What are they doing? Why have they not gone yet? They’re trying to take apart his memcorder, but it’s impossible—don’t they know it’s impossible?—he is wired through and through, half human and half machine, recording everything, forgetting nothing. And yet suddenly he is very afraid, and the panic acts like a cold dose of water and he manages to move, slightly, and he shouts for help, though his voice is reedy and weak and anyway there is no one to hear him . . .

They’re tearing apart chunks of memory, terabytes of life, days and months and years disappearing in a black cloud—“Stop, please,” he mumbles, “please, don’t—”

Who is he? What is he doing here?

A name. He has a name . . .

Somewhere far away, a shout. The two insectoid creatures raise elongated faces, feelers shaking—

There is the sound of an explosion, and one of the creatures disappears—hot shards of metal sting Pym, burning, burning—

The second creature rears, four arms rising like guns—

There is the sound of gunshots, to and from, and then there’s a massive hole in the creature’s chest, and it runs off into the darkness—

A face above his, dark hair, pale skin, two eyes like waning moons—“Pym? Pym? Can you hear me?”

“Pym,” he whispers, the name strangely familiar. He closes his eyes and then nothing hurts any more, and he is floating in a cool, calm darkness.

SPIDER’S HOLD, LUNA, YEAR ONE

Not a memory as much as the recollection, like film, of something seen—emerging from darkness into a light, alien faces hovering above him, as large as moons—“Pym! My darling little Pym—”

Hands clapping, and he is clutched close to a warm, soft breast, and he begins to cry, but then the warmth settles him and he snuggles close and he is happy.

“Fifty-three million at peak,” someone says.

“Day One,” someone says. “Year One. And may all of your days be as happy as this one. You are born, Pym. Your narrative’s began.”

He finds a nipple, drinks. The milk is warm. “Hush now, my little baby. Hush now.”

“See, already he is looking around. He wants to see the world.”

But it isn’t true. He only wants to sleep, in that warm, safe place.

“Happy birthday, Pym.”

He sleeps.

POLYPHEMUS PORT, TITAN, YEAR SEVENTEEN

The party is crammed with people, the house node broadcasts out particularly loud Nuevo Kwasa-Kwasa tunes, there is a lot of Zion Special Strength passing around, the strong, sweet smell latching on to hair and clothes, and Pym is slightly drunk.

Polyport, on his own: Mother left behind in the Galilean Republic, Pym escaping—jumping onto an ancient transport ship, the Ibn-al-Farid, a Jupiter-to-Saturn one-way trip.

Feeling free, for the first time. His numbers going up, but he isn’t paying any attention for once. Pym, not following the narrative but simply living his life.

Port bums hanging out at Polyport, kids looking for ships for the next trip to nowhere, coming from Mars and the Jovean moons and the ring-cities of Saturn, heading everywhere—

The party: a couple of weather hackers complaining about outdated protocols; a ship rat from the Ibn-al-Farid—Pym knows him slightly from the journey—doing a Louis Wu in the corner, a blissful smile on his face, wired-in, the low current tickling his pleasure centers; five big, blonde Australian girls from Earth on a round-the-system trip—conversations going over Pym’s head—“Where do you come from? Where do you go? Where do you come from?”

Titan surface crawlers with that faraway look in their eyes; a viral artist, two painters, a Martian Re-Born talking quietly to a Jovean robot—Pym knows people are looking at him, pretending not to—and his numbers are going up, everybody loves a party.

She is taller than him, with long black hair gathered into moving dreadlocks—some sort of mechanism making them writhe about her head like snakes—long slender fingers, obsidian eyes—

People turning as she comes through, a hush of sort—she walks straight up to him, ignoring the other guests—stands before him, studying him with a bemused expression. He knows she sees what he sees—number of followers, storage space reports, feed statistics—he says, “Can I get you a drink?” with a confidence he doesn’t quite feel, and she smiles. She has a gold tooth, and when she smiles it makes her appear strangely younger.

“I don’t drink,” she says, still studying him. The gold tooth is an Other, but in her case it isn’t truly Joined—the digital intelligence embedded within is part of her memcorder structure. “Eighty-seven million,” she says.

“Thirty-two,” he says. She smiles again. “Let’s get out of here,” she says.

JETTISONED, CHARON, YEAR FIFTY-SIX

Memory returning in chunks—long-unused backup spooling back into his mind. When he opens his eyes he thinks for a moment it is her, that somehow she had rescued him from the creatures, but no—the face that hovers above his is unfamiliar, and he is suddenly afraid.

“Hush,” she says. “You’re hurt.”

“Who are you?” he croaks. Numbers flashing—viewing figures near a hundred million all across the system, being updated at the speed of light. His birth didn’t draw nearly that many . . .

“My name’s Zul,” she says—which tells him nothing. He sees she has a pendant hanging between her breasts. He squints, and sees his own face.

The woman shrugs, smiles, a little embarrassed. Crows-feet at the corners of her dark eyes. A gun hanging on her belt, black leather trousers the only other thing she wears. “You were attacked by wild foragers,” she says, and shrugs again. “We’ve had an infestation of them in the past couple of years.”

Foragers: multi-surface machines designed for existing outside the human bubbles, converting rock into energy, slow lunar surface transforms—rogue, like everything else on Jettisoned. He says, “Thank you,” and to his surprise she blushes.

“I’ve been watching you,” she said.

Pym understands—and feels a little sad.

She makes love to him on the narrow bed in the small, hot, dark room. They are somewhere deep underground. From down here it is impossible to imagine Charon, that icy moon, or the tiny cold disc of the sun far away, or the enormous field of galactic stars or the shadows of Exodus ships as they pass forever out of human space—hard to imagine anything but a primal human existence of naked bodies and salty skin and fevered heartbeats and he sighs, still inexplicably sad within his excitement, for the smell of basil he seeks is missing.

KUALA LUMPUR, EARTH, YEAR THIRTY-TWO

At thirty-two there’s the annoyance of hair growing in the wrong places and not growing in others, a mole or two which shouldn’t be there, hangovers get worse, take longer to dissipate, eyes strain, and death is closer—

Pym, the city a spider’s web of silver and light all around him, the towers of Kuala Lumpur rise like rockets into the skies—the streets alive with laughter, music, frying mutton—

On the hundred and second floor of the hospital, in a room as white as a painting of absence, as large and as small as a world—

Mother reaches out, holds his hand in hers. Her fingers are thin, bony. “My little Pym. My baby. Pym.”

She sees what he sees. She shares access to the viewing stats, knows how many millions are watching this, the death of Mother, supporting character number one in the Narrative of Pym. Pym feels afraid, and guilty, and scared—Mother is dying, no one knows why, exactly, and for Pym it’s—what?

Pain, yes, but—

Is that relief? The freedom of Pym, a real one this time, not as illusory as it had been, when he was seventeen?

“Mother,” he says, and she squeezes his hand. Below, the world is spider-webs and fairy-lights. “Fifty-six million,” she says, and tries to smile. “And the best doctors money could buy—”

But they are not enough. She made him come back to her, by dying, and Pym isn’t sure how he feels about it, and so he stands there, and holds her weakened hand, and stares out beyond the windows into the night.

POLYPHEMUS PORT, TITAN, YEAR SEVENTEEN

They need no words between them. They haven’t said a word since they left the party. They are walking hand in hand through the narrow streets of Polyport and the storm rages overhead. When she draws him into a darkened corner he is aware of the beating of his heart and then her own, his hand on her warm dark skin cupping a breast as the numbers roll and roll, the millions rising—a second feed showing him her own figures. Her lips on his, full, and she has the taste of basil, and the night, and when they hold each other the numbers fade and there is only her.

JETTISONED, CHARON, YEAR FIFTY-SIX

When they make love a second time he calls out her name and, later, the woman lies beside him and says, her hand stroking his chest slowly, “You really love her,” and her voice is a little sad. Her eyes are round, pupils large. She sighs, a soft sound on the edge of the solar system. “I thought, maybe. . . ”

The numbers dropping again, the story of his life—the Narrative of Pym charted by the stats of followers at any given moment. The narrative of Pym goes out all over space—and do they follow it, too, in the Exodus ships, or on alien planets with unknown names?

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. He rises in the dark, and dresses, and goes out into the night of Jettisoned as the woman sleeps behind him.

At that moment he decides to find her.

DRAGON’S HOME, HYDRA, YEAR SEVENTY-EIGHT

It feels strange to be back in the Pluto system. And Hydra is the strangest of the worlds . . . Jettisoned lies like a sore on Charon, but Hydra is even farther out, and cold, so cold . . . Dragon’s World, and Pym is a guest of the dragon.

When he thinks back to his time on Jettisoned, in the Year Fifty-Six—or was it Fifty-Seven?—of the Narrative of Pym, it is all very confused. It had been a low point in his life. He left Jettisoned shortly after the attack, determined to find her—but then, he had done that several times, and never . . .

Dragon’s World is an entire moon populated by millions of bodies and a single mind. Vietnamese dolls, mass-produced in the distant factories of Earth, transported here by the same Gel Blong Mota he had once travelled on as a child, thousands and tens of thousands and finally millions of dolls operating with a single mind, the mind of the dragon—worker-ants crawling all over the lunar surface, burrowing into its hide, transforming it into—what?

No one quite knows.

The dragon is an Other, one of the countless intelligences evolved in the digital Breeding Grounds, lines of code multiplying and mutating, merging and splitting in billions upon billions of cycles. It is said the dragon had been on one of the Exodus ships, and been Jettisoned, but why that may be so no one knows. This is its world—a habitat? A work of strange, conceptual art? Nobody knows and the dragon isn’t telling.

Yet Pym is a guest, and the dragon is hospitable.

Pym’s body is in good shape but the dragon promises to make it better. Pym lies in one of the warrens, in a cocoon-like harness, and tiny insects are crawling all over his body, biting and tearing, sewing and rearranging. Sometimes Pym gets the impression the dragon is lonely. Or perhaps it wants others to see its world, and for that purpose invited Pym, whose numbers rise dramatically when he lands on Hydra.

The Gel Blong Mota had carried him here, from the Galilean Republic on a slow, leisurely journey, and its captain was Joy, and she and Pym shared wine and stories and stared out into space, and sometimes made love with the slow, unhurried pace of old friends.

Why did you never go to her?

Her question is in his mind as he lies there, in the warm confines of Dragon’s cocoon. It is very quiet on Hydra, the dolls that are the dragon’s body making almost no sound as they pass on their errands—whatever those may be. He thinks of Joy’s question but realises he has no answer for her, and never had. There had been other women, other places, but never—

POLYPHEMUS PORT, TITAN, YEAR SEVENTEEN

It is the most intimate moment of his life: it is as if the two of them are the center of the entire universe, and nothing else matters but the two of them, and as they kiss, as they undress, as they touch each other with clumsy, impatient fingers the whole universe is watching, watching something amazing, this joining of two bodies, two souls. Their combined numbers have reached one billion and are still climbing. It will never be like this again, he thinks he hears her say, her lips against his neck, and he knows she is right, it will never—

KUALA LUMPUR, EARTH, YEAR TWO

Taking baby-steps across the vast expanse of recreated prime park land in the heart of the town, cocooned within the great needle towers of the mining companies, Pym laughs, delighted, as adult hands pick him up and twirl him around. “My baby,” Mother says, and holds him close, and kisses him (those strange figures at the corner of his eyes always shifting, changing—he’d got used to them by now, does not pay them any mind)—”You have time for everything twice over. The future waits for you—”

And as he puts his arms around her neck he’s happy, and the future is a shining road in Pym’s mind, a long endless road of white light with Pym marching at its center, with no end in sight, and he laughs again, and wriggles down, and runs towards the ponds where there are great big lizards sunning themselves in the sun.

DRAGON’S HOME, HYDRA, YEAR ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN

Back on Dragon’s Home, that ant’s nest whose opening rises from the surface of Hydra like a volcanic mouth, back in the cocoons of his old friend the dragon—“I don’t think you could fix me again, old friend,” he says, and closes his eyes—the cocoon against his naked skin like soft Vietnamese silk.

The dragon murmurs all around him, its thousands of bodies marching through their complex woven-together tunnels. Number of followers hovering around fifty million, and Pym thinks, They want to see me die.

He turns in his cocoon and the dragon murmurs soothing words, but they lose their meaning. Pym tries to recall Mother’s face, the taste of blackberries on a Martian farm, the feel of machine-generated rain on Ganymede or the embrace of a Jettisoned woman, but nothing holds, nothing is retained in his mind anymore. Somewhere it all exists, even now his failing senses are being broadcast and stored—but this, he knows suddenly, with a frightening clarity, is the approaching termination of the Narrative of Pym, and the thought terrifies him. “Dragon!” he cries, and then there is something cool against his neck and relief floods in.

Pym drifts in a dream half-sleep, lulled by the rhythmic motion of his cocoon. There is a smell, a fragrance he misses, something sweet and fresh like ba—a herb of some sort? He grabs for a memory, his eyes opening with the effort, but it’s no use, there is nothing there but a faint, uneasy sense of regret, and at last he lets it go. There had been a girl—

Hadn’t there?

He never—

He closes his eyes again at last, and gradually true darkness forms, a strange and unfamiliar vista: even the constant numbers at the corner of his vision, always previously there, are fading—it is so strange he would have laughed if he could.

POLYPHEMUS PORT, TITAN, YEAR FORTY-THREE

He walks down the old familiar streets on this, this forty-third year of the Narrative of Pym, searching for her in the scent of old memories. She is not there, but suddenly, as he walks under the dome and the ever-present storm, he’s hopeful: there will be other places, other times and, somewhere in the solar system, sometime in the Narrative of Pym, he will find her again.

Originally published in Eclipse Online, December 2012.

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

James Patrick Kelly

James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows. His most recent publications are the novel Mother Go (2017), an audiobook original from Audible and the collection The Promise of Space (2018) from Prime Books. In 2016 Centipede Press published a career retrospective Masters of Science Fiction: James Patrick Kelly. His fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. Find him on the web at www.jimkelly.net.

Maureen F. McHugh

Maureen F. McHugh has lived in New York City, Austin, Texas, the People’s Republic of China, and Los Angeles. Her most recent collection of short stories, After the Apocalypse, was one of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of 2011.

Lavie Tidhar

Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama (2011), The Violent Century (2013), the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), and the Campbell Award winning Central Station (2016), in addition to many other works and several other awards. His latest novels are the Locus Award nominated Unholy Land (2018) and debut children’s novel Candy (2018). He works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut’s by Locus.

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 seven-time Hugo Award Finalist 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 Year series. His latest anthology The Eagle has Landed, was published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.