Issue 64, May 2020

© Wyrm Publishing, 2020
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

I hope that May finds you and your families healthy and safe from the bad science fiction story that seems to be unfolding around us. Why bad? Look around and think about it. Would you believe half this stuff if someone put it in a serious SF story? I know there have been several moments where I’ve found myself thinking that if an author had done that a story they sent me, I’d have rejected it as cartoonish. Perhaps that says more about how I look at the world than anything else, but it does seem like a lot of people are playing the role of Wile E. Coyote in this story. Right now, I sort of wish we were in one of the more cliched stories, where a super-genius is cracking the code to defeating the alien virus. Why couldn’t we end up in one like that? Maybe we are . . . and we’re just too minor a character to know it. Somehow, that makes me feel better.

Until next time,

-Neil

New Atlantis

Lavie Tidhar

 PROLOGUE

Listen.

Outside, the skies darken. The male nightjars’ voices rise and fall in their churring songs, and they blend harmoniously with the chirps of the field crickets. My daughter’s children and their friends run laughing on the paths. I long to join them.

It is Chuseok, the festival of the harvest Moon. I can smell jasmine, lilac, and the deep, rich scent of the small pink flowers of the Arbre de Judée tree that grows outside my window, and which I planted there as a little girl with my mother, long ago.

My name is Mai. I have lived on this Land for eighty-four years and I love it, deeply. I was born here, and it was here that I learned to write: which is to say, to attempt to give shape to the world. And so it is here that I write this, the chronicle of a life spent under the broken Moon, of a life spent on this Land, from which we all come and to which we all return, but for those few of us who once tried to go to the stars.

I wish to go outside, to join my daughter and my granddaughter and my grandson, to watch the paper lanterns as they light up the night sky. The Moon is broken, but it is still the Moon. The Earth was broken, and billions died, but we endured, the way weeds do.

This festival, like all our celebrations, is a mélange. When the Earth shook and the Seas rose and the sky was rent and the Moon broke, the survivors of our species came from all corners, by paths both perilous and desperate to this place. I could give you the old names of things, but I can tell you where it is by what it grows: pines and weeping boletes, wild thyme and wood sorrels, dandelions, jasmine. . . .

I wish to go and join them, but the days grow short and the nights long, and I write this in the light of a lantern adapted from an old mortar shell, the sides cut out and fitted with old glass that was itself salvaged. My mother was a salvager, journeying each autumn, after the harvest Moon, along the old roads where the vehicles of the ancients rusted in their millions, and on to the ancient ruined cities, where only salvage and junk and a few old machines, still alive, remained. Each year, I would hold my father’s hand and watch her go. The salvagers departed for months at a time and returned in spring, bringing back with them all that was still usable. I longed to go with her, and to see the ocean, and to smell the salt in the air and see not just Land, but Sea. And one year I did that, too, and one year she disappeared, and I searched for her. . . . But that is another story, for another time. I never became a salvager, it was not in me; but I did become, in lieu, a chronicler of sorts.

But I digress. My daughter calls me to come out. I do not want to miss the lanterns. Later, we’ll eat baked flatbread, olives, winter kimchee, watermelons. We’ll drink young, red wine. The flowers bloom. My father told me, Never pick a flower. Let them grow where they are. We keep the plants, and, in our clumsy way, we try not to trespass upon the planet.

So hush. This happened long ago, in my third decade on the Land.

A message came, one day, from the place we now call the New Atlantis, where the seven sacred islands lie. . . .

I reluctantly went on a long, hard journey. I encountered loss, and I found love. I saw the Sun harvest in Suf and the fabled floating Isles of the Nesoi, and I suffered shipwreck. I met the mad robot, Bill, and I saw the ruins of La Ville Lumière. I visited Atlantis.

Then I came back.

That is the story.

Everything else, as the old poet once said, is just details.

 I. THE MESSAGE

It had been a cold and shivery winter and I had been restless through much of it. The fog lay heavy on the Land in nighttime, and the yellow light of the broken Moon struggled to illuminate the landscape through it. I took long midnight walks through the silent Land, observing spun spider webs glittering with tiny drops of dew like hardened diamonds, and snails that communicated silently with each other in the mulch of leaves, their retractable tentacles raised in complex greeting.

Ants whispered softly through the forest, marching across fallen pine needles, over the raised roots of ancient trees. In the stream that ran beyond our homes, the eels slithered through the water on their way back to the distant Sea. All was quiet, but for the faraway call of a migrating cormorant. The birds traveled to our shelter in winter, but left again in the spring, to go north and west. I was restless, desirous of something I could not put a word to. An irritability I was unable to shake off drove me through much of that winter, and my father took to finding shelter in his library, where he pored over ancient manuscripts my mother had salvaged for him in the ancient cities of the coast. Turning the pages of an illustrated atlas of the old world, he’d glare at me over the glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. “What you need,” he’d say, “is a purpose, Mai. And stop stomping quite so much! I can barely hear myself think.”

“But I don’t!” I’d say, and stomp my feet, the way I had when I was little, and he’d soften at my frustration and smile his old smile and say, “Would you like me to tell you a story?”

My mother, the salvager, ever practical, had a use for maps only if they were current. Salvager maps were makeshift, continuous works-in-progress. They marked known nests of wild machines, where a river had shifted, where a new road had been hewn, where there was danger, where there was salvage. My father, by contrast, dreamed of the world as it had been, not as it was. For hours he would trace winding blue paths on the ancient maps, and speak to me in the language of long-vanished waterways: “Bosporus, Mother Volga’s Watershed, Pearl River, the Lower Blue Nile. . . . ”

My mother salvaged scrap and debris, anything from the old world that could be repurposed. She was a stoic, practical woman. She hated waste. My father, by contrast, was a man given to daydreams and stories. He was endlessly fascinated by those missing decades, by the centuries before them, that glittering time of consumption and excess, when the roads were laid all across the flesh of the Earth and a billion petroleum-fed travel-pods crawled like fat beetles along them. Only their scars were left to us.

I stayed restless all throughout that winter. I tilled the soil in the fields and helped Aislinn Khan, Mowgai’s mother, in the bakery, enjoying the warmth of the oven and the silence of the predawn night that lay as thick as a blanket over the houses and their sleeping inhabitants. I helped Elder Simeon oil the gears of the small mill on the brook, surrounded by his pets: tiny, intricate clockwork automata of ducks and geese, a peacock, a cat, a turtle. From the mill I could look out to the low-lying hills beyond the brook, past Elder Simeon’s house, where as children Mowgai and I would imagine they formed the shape of a vast, reclining manshonyagger, a buried giant forever sleeping, a snatch of nightmare from the old age.

I waited, for what I didn’t know. Perhaps for spring. Mowgai was a salvager now, and he and the others were gone with my mother, to the Blasted Plains, to the ruined cities by the coast.

I read old books, I played backgammon and bao and cap sa with my neighbors, I dug fleshy cyclamen bulbs out of the soil to replant, and drove my father deeper and deeper into his study. I had just come off three years in New Byblos working on the Extinction Lists, and off a relationship I had thought would last, but didn’t.

As the days lengthened and the nights grew short, flocks of storks began to migrate across the brightening skies, black-and-white, black-and-white on the thermal winds.

It was on a day such as this, the air still cold in the shade but the Sun warm, and the air filled with the fragrance of spring, that I saw a familiar bird shape circle in the sky overhead. It was a gray spot against the sky, and as it descended, I recognized it as Hornbill, a wild drone Mowgai had rescued from a malfunctioning replicator nest in the Blasted Plains and raised as his own. It was far into its life cycle by this time and spent much of its days nestled unmoving as it absorbed sunlight, but I knew how attached Mowgai was to it.

If it was here, Mowgai and the other salvagers couldn’t be far behind.

Could they?

Hornbill spotted me and gracefully descended. It opened its vicious-looking beak and Mowgai’s familiar voice emerged. The message was brief and addressed to me. It said they were on course for return but were still two or three weeks away. I could hear wind behind them, the crying wail of wild dogs far in the distance, the rattle of shifting pebbles underfoot. Mowgai sounded tense, yet I could imagine him smiling. I smiled on hearing his voice, in the happiness of recognition.

“Mai . . . ” He paused there. I heard my mother’s voice in the background, saying something I couldn’t decipher, and Old Peculiar’s grunt in reply. “There’s been a message for you.”

That pause again, the hiss of wind. Hornbill blinked at me, his mottled gray hide thickening to black as it began to power down. The old machine was tired. I tried to think of who would contact me. For a moment I thought of Ifrim, back in Byblos, and felt a pang of loss.

“From beyond the Sea.” I could hear exhaustion in his voice. “Meet at the way station.”

Then the sound faded, and the old drone powered down, trusting me to carry it. I returned to my parents’ house, left Hornbill to nest on the roof, and went inside to hunt for my father in his library.

“Beyond the Sea?” my father said, doubtfully. He brewed us tea, fresh sage leaves and just a hint of honey in the water. We watched the rain outside, but it was a final gust of winter, and I could see new shoots on the plants, and the flowering trees. I could smell the coming spring, as though the Land and everything upon it were holding their breath in delighted anticipation. It was the season of rebirth, of joy. “What is there beyond the Sea?”

“There are other places than these,” I said. I paced around the room. I hated mystery. Or did I? My father looked at me and shook his head.

“You’ve been like a caged bird all winter,” he said.

“We don’t cage birds,” I said, irritably.

“Then perhaps it is that you, too, should fly,” he said, and smiled, and blew on his tea in the way that had always annoyed me, even as a kid. He took a sip, and kept the smile, and I was forced to smile, too.

“Francia, Albion . . . ,” he said musingly. “Or does the message mean Afri? Misr, Carthage. . . . ”

“Your geography is as muddled as your history,” I said, laughing. But the truth was that I longed to go—somewhere, anywhere. The restlessness I’d felt all winter had vanished, and in its place came a clear, pure determination.

My father took another sip of his tea and looked up at me with guileless eyes.

“So when do we leave?” he said.

The journey out wasn’t hard. We followed the stream, enjoying the waking Land, the blooming flowers, the new warmth in the air. Bees buzzed lazily about us. It was, though I did not realize it at the time, the last such journey I would take with my father. He was in good health, his steps long and assured, yet unhurried. He seemed determined to enjoy the long hike, and his joy was infectious. For all that he loved old books and their stories of the past, he was a child of the Land and he loved it wholeheartedly. As we walked he told me stories, the way he had when I was but a girl: of huge flying machines that crossed over the oceans; of vast, glittering temples where every manner of thing was put on display and could be had for the asking; of a planet filled with a humanity that was always rushing, hungry, filled with a giddy need and an uncontrollable energy. He’d stop to show me flowers: poppy, wolf’s bane, wild thyme. We skirted anthills, saw shy deer observe us in the distance. In the night, we built a fire and sat around it, and I told him of my time in Tyr, where they sing still of the old days, and of my work in Byblos. I did not speak of Ifrim, and my father did not ask. Some wounds heal slowly.

In this manner we traveled for some days, at last departing the brook for a path left by generations of salvagers. The ground began to rise here, and my father walked more slowly, and at night we saw foxes, jackals, once a wildcat. One day we saw the paw prints of a bear not far from where we’d made camp for the night.

Then we reached a steeper incline, and as we crested it we saw below us the way station.

My father is long gone now, and buried in the Land he loved. His flesh has fed and nourished others, the plants and worms which are our friends and neighbors. The chill of the nights often invades my bones now, and many years have passed, and yet it seems so fleetingly, as though it had only just happened. And I am glad I had that time with him.

The way station was a sturdy construction of timber and stone, and smoke rose from its chimney. I could see distant figures standing outside, and they resolved as we descended the slope into familiar shapes and faces. I hugged Mowgai as my father held my mother in his arms and twirled her round in a dance. Old Peculiar, as gnarled and hard as an ancient olive tree, stood to one side and watched us with his usual inscrutable expression. He was a man of few words and rare smiles. Mowgai, by contrast, was slight, spindly, never still. “Full of nettles and brambles,” as old Grandma Mosh always said. When he was young, he undertook the long journey to Tyr, where they still maintain a fascination with the old age, and there he was equipped with the composite exoskeleton that allowed him to walk, in however crablike a fashion.

“Mai!”

I hugged him again. “You were gone a long time,” I said. “I was getting restless.”

He smiled. “I may have a cure for that,” he said.

Then it was my mother I was holding, feeling the strength in her, her arms around me, and I buried my head in the crook of her neck, the way I had as a girl. She smelled of campfires and sweat and toil, of the road.

“I missed you,” she said.

“I missed you, too.”

It was a bright morning. Blue-winged butterflies chased each other above the lavender and rosebushes. By the side of the house I saw the salvagers’ carts, laden with scrap. A lemon tree provided shade. We sat on the veranda, drinking lemonade Mowgai had made, eating flatbread cooked on the fire, and salty, hard goats’ cheese with a dip of olive oil and fried wild thyme and sumac. I remember it so vividly, even after all this time: my father’s laugh, my mother’s murmured voice, Mowgai’s grin, the creak of Old Peculiar’s rocking chair.

“Well?” I said, at last. Conversation had ebbed and a pleasant sleepiness overtook us. Old Peculiar’s head dropped on his chest and he began to snore, and my mother and father, by tacit agreement, left us to be on their own. Mowgai rose on his spidery legs and scuttled elsewhere. He returned with a travel-worn satchel and we went a short way off, to sit on the boulders in the shade of a pine, the way we had when we were children.

What I extricated from the satchel was a small and cheap-looking pendant on a chain. I held it up to the light, wondering.

It was a memory trinket, of the sort that were sold by the thousands in the old age, when there were still such things as currency. Back then, it was easy enough to simulate recollection, encode the brain’s electric signals into off-the-rack virtualities that could be played back whenever one desired. It looked old, and it was only then that I noticed an inscription had been added to the belly of the device, and it read, For Mai.

I looked at Mowgai in question.

“It came to Tyr by coast-hugger,” he said, “and from there by one of the Green Caravanserai, which we encountered between Suf and the Plains.” He shrugged. “It’s for you. The message was quite clear on that.”

Still I held it dangling by the chain. “Where did it come from?”

He shrugged.

I reached. My hand closed over the locket, my fingers tightening around the scratched combo of plastic and metal. It felt warm. I put the old neuromodulator to my temple.

Translation was gradual.

 . . . Light, growing around me. It had a different quality, a brighter white. It was the sort of light that erased shadows. I heard seagulls cry in the distance, smelled salt and tar. Beyond the window I could see palm trees, the Sea.

 . . . Islands.

A faint recollection, as though I knew where I was. . . .

“Mai.”

I was looking into a mirror. The face that looked back at me wasn’t my own.

 . . . He ran his hand over his short hair, self-conscious. He was about my age, and I knew him then, though he had grown from the boy I used to know.

“It’s Gaw.”

He smiled at the reflection—at me—then turned back to the window. I could see boats in the distance, white sails, a pod of dolphins. We were somewhere higher than the Sea.

“We found something. A millennial vault, we think. It’s buried deep under the Sea, in the strata of the old city. . . . Could you come?”

His gaze lingered on the Sea, and I thought I saw, or perhaps I imagined, a dark spot in the water, as though something immense and old underneath were casting its shadow upward. Then he turned back to the mirror, and I found myself gazing into his eyes. “I heard about your work in Byblos, on the Extinction Lists. Even here, we sometimes get word. . . . It would be good to see you again.”

He blinked. My sight went dark, returned, went dark again. For a moment longer, I thought I glimpsed another vision entirely: a sunken city, divers moving like drab fish through murky water, piercing the depths with torchlight; fallen masonry, a shoal of silver fish swimming through the remnants of a crumbling marble arch. And something down below even farther, like a sort of manhole cover but not, a metal sphere that sucked the light around it, and I felt myself falling toward it, as if this memory, added later, belonged to one of the divers.

Then the quality of the light changed again, and I was sitting back under the pine tree, in the sunshine, holding the trinket. And I thought about Gawain, the way I’d known him back at the academy in Tyr, more than a decade ago, and a wash of memories—my own, this time—flooded me. I sat there quietly, then put the trinket away and smiled at Mowgai.

“How would you like to go on a journey?” I said.

 II. THE ROADS MUST ROLL

“It is said the harvest will be plentiful in Gomrath this spring,” Mowgai said. “And that a heron was spotted for the first time in centuries near Esh.”

We had been traveling for days. For a while yet we were still in the world as I mostly knew it, with its familiar terrain of good, black earth, and in the bloom of early spring, so that we rose each morning to the sight of thousands of pink and purple cyclamens, red poppies, yellow daisies, and blue-and-white lupines that stood stiffly like guards in the breeze.

“It is also said a vast Sea monster washed ashore in Sidon, dead upon the sand, and that a manshonyagger of old was seen near Dor-Which-Fell-To-Ruin,” Mowgai said, and shrugged. “But such stories are often told and there is seldom truth in them.”

“The sea monster, perhaps,” I said, thinking of the ocean and its mysteries. I smiled at him, imagining our faraway destination. The New Atlantis lay beyond the Sea. “If we’re lucky, we might get to see one.”

He shuddered. “Salvagers survive by avoiding danger, not running headlong toward it,” he said.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “So my mother always tells me.”

“And you never listen,” he said, but he smiled when he said it.

At night we made camp under the stars. The broken Moon hung in the sky. Fractured by some enormous, violent force of the old age, gravity kept it in roughly the same lemon shape, the broken chunks all drawn together into the semblance of the old Moon.

I often imagined those few humans who had set foot on it, in the time of the great excess, when we had imagined ourselves masters of the cosmos, and dreamed that everything, sooner or later, would be possible. We had left our mark in space. Debris and junk in orbit, dead satellites, dead dreams. Golf balls and a flag on the lunar surface, footsteps in ancient dust. A few robotic probes, crash-landed on other planets. Litter, really. It marked us as a species.

At last we came to the frayed edges of a great forest. The trees thinned as we walked, and their branches grew ever more twisted and gnarly until they resembled grotesque scarecrows, and the ground between them became shorn and bare and hard. The Sun beat down ruthlessly, and then we were through the last of the trees and it was there: the first of the Blasted Plains.

It stretched out to the horizon, never ceasing, never changing. It was a great big barren silence scarred into the Land, and on it nothing lived, and nothing moved, yet I knew the Plains could be deceiving.

Things did live and move within that continental vastness of annihilated Land. There were whole gigantic cities lost within the Plains, where only salvagers would venture. It was a dead place, but even the dead crawl with maggots, and flies, and worms.

Bisecting the Plain was a road.

I looked at Mowgai, and he looked back at me with measured calm. The road seemed endless from our vantage point. It cut through the Plain and disappeared in the distance. We began walking toward it, across the Plain itself, and I was startled as I had been before on coming here at how sound ceased: no birds, no chirping insects, no rustle of leaves. It was a desolation.

Reaching the road felt almost a relief, even a victory, as illusory as it was. As you came closer to it, step by halting step, it grew, until there came a moment when you realized just how immense and foreign it truly was. This was not a natural path, but a remnant of the old age. It was a sort of hyper-highway, fifty lanes across at its widest points, with concrete walls between opposing lanes of traffic. The ancient Romans had built roads that outlasted the fall of an empire. The age of excess built grander and more imposing than anything the Romans could ever have imagined, but it did not build to last.

The ruined old highway stretched out across the barren Plain. Its surface had long since deteriorated and the concrete slabs that served as guards had broken and crumbled in many places. Any markings that might have been made on the road were long vanished, and old signs, made of cheap metal rusted and eaten by the elements, lay crumbling on the ground.

A countless number of vehicles littered the road, their wheels now rotted to nothing. Most of their outermost skin of thin sheet metal had similarly rusted and was blown in the wind. Engines, broken down but still recognizable as such. Shattered panels of glass, so you had to tread carefully wherever you went. Worse were the cheap seat cushions, made of a mass-manufactured polymer. Before, they would have been hidden under another material, perhaps leather. The polymer did not decay, even after centuries. Headlights and taillights. Batteries. Plastic bottles, and everything else that was plastic. It was a graveyard of decay, but some of these things survived. They had outlived the vast majority of the human race that birthed them, back in the old age, and as old as they were, I knew they would outlive me, and my children, and my children’s children down the generations.

Attempts had been made in the past to sweep parts of the road. A thin trail like a snail’s path through the debris. In other regions of the Land, nature had reclaimed the old roads. But from the Blasted Plains nature itself shied away, and I shivered as I stepped through the gap in the concrete and onto the road.

Mowgai had no such qualms. He surveyed our environment with a quiet confidence, and I imagined I even saw joy in his eyes. It was why I could never be a salvager. I liked stories, safe from a distance. But salvagers had to thrive in the part of our world that we found most distasteful. Its slowly dying past, lying all about us, a poisoned gift from our dead ancestors.

“It’s horrible,” I said.

Mowgai looked slowly around the ancient highway, from one distant edge of it to another. His exoskeletal arms made that little involuntary dance he sometimes did, which meant excitement.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

I punched him in the arm and he laughed and pulled away, rubbing the flesh where I’d hit him. “Ow!”

“I’ll never understand you, Mowgai.”

“It’s not so bad,” he said. “Compared to the rest of it.”

At that we both lost our smiles. It was so quiet there, on the road. I suddenly, desperately wanted to hear birds again. Instead, we began to walk.

It is not easy to traverse the old roads. Once upon a time, traveling along one of these routes would have been a matter of routine, a pleasant drive of some hours from destination to destination, with stops for refreshments along the way, each person ensconced in their own personal pod, thousands upon thousands of them all traveling at once.

Now, it was a harrowing, slow journey, and with each footstep I took, I felt the oppressive silence of the Plains press down on me. It would be a journey of many days before this Plain ended, and in a way, they never truly did. They spread, like a malignant tumor, all across the planet.

We marched for a day. Worse than the silence were the bursts of inexplicable sound, the sense of . . . things darting at the corner of your eye. Ghosts from a vanished age. We came across one of them at last as the day lengthened. It was a pitiful thing, a spiderlike creature lying on its back. It was dying. Mowgai prodded it with a stick, dispassionately.

“They used to sweep the roads for debris,” he said. “Cleaning machines. There were nests along the old highways, printing them out whenever they were needed.” He prodded the thing again. “Short life-span, but they’re durable enough. Useless for salvage, though.”

We went around the dying machine. When night came we didn’t build a fire, but sat in silence against the crumbling concrete boulders. I sat there looking up at the sky, and at the stars, so many stars. We took turns sleeping, one of us always keeping watch, but we were not disturbed.

The next day we came to an intersection and followed an arm of the old road to an abandoned facility, the ruins of which were still standing. It was where passengers would have stopped in the past for refreshments or to recharge their vehicles with gas.

“Are you ready?” Mowgai said.

I took a deep breath. “As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.

In the old station, the salvagers had stashed a store of equipment and durable foods, and we ate, if sparingly. There was water, stale but clean. Then we strapped on the bulky backpacks of provisions and rolled the sails onto the road.

We were going skate-sailing.

“I heard,” Mowgai said, “that one of the old religions had a day so holy that even operating a vehicle was, for just one day in the year, prohibited. Imagine it, Mai. For one day, as the Land breathed with relief, all those millions of people abandoned the roads at the same time. No vehicle passed. All that surface area was, however fleetingly, reclaimed. Children, going out there onto terrain denied them. Couples, walking hand in hand. Old people strolling, perhaps remembering when it was all still grass. For one day, all those empty roads.”

I tried to picture them, all those vanished people. I looked about me, at the empty road. A swept path, clear of debris, lay ahead of us. The road stretched to the horizon.

“And now,” I said, “it’s ours alone.”

“You remember how to do it, right?” he said.

“I’ll manage.”

He shot me a final glance and a nod. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

And with that, I leaned into the wind, and Mowgai did the same, and then we were sailing. The wind pushed at us and I maneuvered the sail, slowly at first and then gathering speed. The board ran over the old road as we slalomed along the swept path, avoiding debris. The wind rushed in my hair and against my face, and for the first time on the road I felt a rush of exhilaration take me as we sped down that old, empty highway. From a distance, I thought, we must look so strange, two tiny human figures sail-skating against that vast black-tar wound in the Land. All about us the silent remains of vehicles rotting in the Sun, but we were free, and gathering speed; and in this way we sailed beyond the sunset.

 III. THE SUN HARVEST

The Convocation of Suf had once, I think, been a prosperous trading town on the shores of an inland river. But that river was long gone, and now Suf inhabited a wide strip of greenery that snaked its way between two of the Blasted Plains like a sort of boundary hedge. To anyone coming from my own home, Suf would have seemed a peculiar abode indeed, a place of esoteric preoccupations, eccentric architecture, and a strange disregard for the dangers of the past.

We had ridden hard along the ancient road, and it was with relief that we reached at last the boundary of the Plain. What had caused them, what awful weapon or disaster had imprinted on them this vast and unchanging desolation, I didn’t know. Such knowledge was lost, and I hoped it would stay gone forever. One moment we were sail-skating-sailing along the road and in the next instant the boundary changed and the Land was renewed. Immediately the road teemed with life again. Birds chirped, and insects crawled, and the ruined travel-pods of old were filled with earth and flowers, and the roots of gnarled trees pushed through the surface of the road and hindered our progress. I had never been so glad to see a tree.

We disentangled ourselves from the sails and folded them carefully, and continued our journey on foot. I’d forgotten what it was like to be on Land. The smell of spring overwhelmed me. There were so many flowers growing by the side of the road—orchids and tulips and African Moons, lilies and begonias and Bleeding-Heart vine—and their perfume and their profusion of colors made me glad again, for the first time in days.

The flowers were enough to sustain whole colonies of bees, which darted lazily this way and that, gathering nectar, and their humming filled the air. Bright sunlight fell everywhere. The flowers were of a different kind from those in my home. They belonged in warmer climes than ours.

But it was always sunny in Suf.

Already on the way we began to discern their famed statues, towering spirals and fractal curves all made from the discarded junk of the ancients, some of it preserved over centuries, some of it buried deep in the Sea or on the Plains. They were fashioned from aluminum cans and plastic toy ducks, glass bottles and windshields, polystyrene foam boxes, wrenches and hammers and spoons, keys and watches and screws and clips and spray bottles. They were made of the past. And they were given shapes, some surreal, some familiar. One looked like rain, falling down between the leaves of the trees, until you looked closer and saw that the drops were ancient coins. Another was a giant DNA double helix rising into the sky fabricated entirely from cans that people had probably, in centuries past, drunk from. Another resembled fine mist and must have been made from plastic bags. There were still storms out on the Plains where the bags fled through the air, millions of them, and to be caught in such a storm was every salvager’s nightmare, for many were known to have been trapped and buried in the assault of innocuous bags that had once held groceries or garbage, and now flew like silent ghosts to choke and murder the unwary in their ephemeral grip. We passed in this way between the sculptures, and all about us the flowers bloomed, bees hummed, birds called and worms burrowed and the Sun shone. The Sun always shone, in Suf.

Then we passed through a hole punched in the hull of a vast submersible ship of yore, lying on its side half-buried in the ground.

Beyond was the Convocation.

Suf sat on a series of low-lying hills. It had the deep photosynthesis-green of cacti and the intense yellow of rice and the fiery red of cayenne. Where there had once been a dock there still remained the stylized fortifications, cranes rising over a riverbed filled now with lettuce, arugula, radicchio, spinach, and cress. Shade netting kept the sunlight from the plants, a dark green river of them flowing away from the Convocation. Suf itself resembled a series of cubes piled on top of each other, and they were scattered about all over the hills, seemingly at random. It was only when you came closer that you realized the houses had been built with lovingly restored shipping containers, of the sort that had once traveled the globe.

I tried to imagine it. The oceans calm, and the great ships, bigger than the biggest whale, sailing on them as though it were the simplest thing in the world to cross the planet. Each vast ship holding thousands of containers. Thousands of ships, millions of containers, the wealth of a planet carried so casually, as though it meant nothing; and perhaps it hadn’t, then.

We followed the path up the hill. It was a shock to see so many people again. A friend of mine, Miguel, whom I knew from Tyr, came out of his house to welcome us. We embraced warmly.

“Mai,” he said. “It is good to see you again.”

“And you,” I said, laughing. “Your hair is shorter, Miguel. When I last saw you, it was down below your shoulders.”

He ran his hand over his scalp and grimaced. “Age comes to us all, Mai. To some sooner than others. . . . You haven’t changed one bit.”

“Liar!”

He laughed, and so did I.

“I heard you did good work in New Byblos,” he said. “On the Extinction Lists.”

“I hope so.”

“How’s Ifrim?”

“I don’t know.”

“ . . . Oh.” He looked at me a moment longer, then squeezed my shoulder. “Come on in, come on in. Will you be staying long?”

“We’re just passing through, Miguel.”

“Going to Tyr?”

“And then farther.”

He turned and looked at me sharply. “Farther? How much farther?”

I said, “Beyond the Sea.”

That day we ate the way they eat in Suf. Their homes are temples of vegetation, in which every manner of flora is grown in rich mulch, illuminated by the stored light of the Sun. We ate char-grilled kebabs of chunky butternut squash, stir-fried beans with long slices of chilies, peppers stuffed with tomatoes and rice and flavored with numerous herbs, pastries as delicate as air filled with potatoes and mushrooms, and for dessert we had papaya with fresh lime, and pineapple slices, and bananas cooked in sugar and alcohol and set aflame. There was wine, too, from the extensive vineyards they keep inside their growtainer-estates.

That day, too, I washed properly for the first time since we’d left the way station. Aqueducts run through Suf and feed into washing houses and pools, and the water is always hot. They grow their own soaps, in Suf. I luxuriated in the hot baths, feeling scrubbed and clean and healthy. Miguel swam to me then and, laughing, lifted me up, until I turned and put my arms around him.

“But how much farther?” he said, after we parted from our kiss.

“The New Atlantis.”

“Mai . . . I thought it was a myth, that place.”

“It’s real. And they need me.”

His fingers ran down my naked back. “There is plenty of need for a chronicler here, in Suf,” he said.

“I can feel your need hard enough, Miguel,” I said, laughing. After that we didn’t talk for a while; at least not in words.

Later, as we floated in the water, the Sun had gone down and the night sky came out and brought with it the stars. It was very still, and peaceful.

“Stay,” he said. “It is not so bad, here.”

“No,” I said. “No, it is not so bad. But my path leads elsewhere.”

He sighed. “I know,” he said. “It always has, Mai.”

We climbed out of the baths and dried and dressed under the stars and the broken Moon. Holding hands, we wandered along the alleyways. It is a curious place, Suf, with its cubist homes and its rare flowers. There is a saying in Suf that their home belongs to orchids, and the people are merely their guests.

The streets thronged with conversation and laughter. Music played everywhere as people set up impromptu bands. Children ran laughing and screaming through the warm alleyways, playing salvagers and robots, and hide-and-seek, and dead man’s bluff. I saw people emerge from their homes, holding what looked like origami flowers in their hands. As we walked, more and more people emerged, all traveling in the same direction, until we became a stream of humanity flowing along the path, until we reached the end of the Convocation and the top of the hill and I saw, below us, the Great Solar Plain of Suf.

What the area had once been—homes? Industrial zones? A municipal park?—I never knew. The past had been erased from it, and in its stead, the residents of Suf had laid down miles of sun-sheeting composed of cross-linked layers of a solid-state polymer, able to absorb and retain sunlight. The Solar Plain was dark and silent now, in the night, but clearly illuminated by the silver light of the Moon, which turned everything ethereal. Holding hands, we descended to the Plain with the others. Someone passed me one of the origami flowers. As we approached, I saw that there were narrow pathways between the orderly rows of sheeting. As each person passed, they swept their arm over the suncatchers. As they did so, the stored solar energy leaped from the charged molecules of the polymer and into the flowers themselves. The devices flared with bright, warmth-giving light. One by one the lights came on, and when it was my turn, I, too, swept my arm over the sheets and cupped the light of the Sun between my fingers. The petals of the flowers opened with the light. When I looked up, dazzled, I saw that the entire Solar Plain was no longer dark but awash with sunlight, and I saw that each of us was an atom, and we were all bound together in one great, complex molecule. Beside me, Miguel’s face was rapt, raised upward, bathed in illumination.

I held his hand, and, in this fashion, we traversed the Great Solar Plain of Suf, in the time of the Sun harvest.

The next day we said our good-byes. The path ahead was difficult and long, and New Atlantis beckoned from its mythical white cliffs and palm-tree-covered coves, as if to say, Hurry, Mai, hurry.

“Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,” the old poet once wrote. And who was to say, who was to say—

And as I write this now, I think again of seagulls crying over foreign shores, a body facedown in the water, and the sound of barnacle-covered chains scraping slowly against each other. . . .

But not yet, not now, and maybe never. Some memories I know I’d be happier to forget. Not everything the storyteller writes is true. . . .

I’m sorry. I digress. The next day we left, Mowgai and I, and the road ahead was long, and there were ants, and shipwrecks, and there was treasure, of a sort. There always is, isn’t there, in such stories?

As for Miguel, he, too, is gone now, having passed of old age, but not before he lived and laughed and loved, and worked the Land, and fathered children. I remember him, fondly.

Stay. The nights grow long and light is precious, but the old hand that holds the pen still, in the act of writing, remembers.

And I was glad then, and I am glad now, that I got to see the famed Sun harvest, and hold the light of a star in the palm of my hand; however briefly it lasted.

 IV. THE TOMB

“As we move, remember to stay within the rough zone of influence of the Caravanserai,” Iqbal said. “Don’t go wandering off, and never lose line of sight. This area’s been active recently. There’ve been reports of increased wild machine activity. Oh, and take this.”

He pushed a stubby, makeshift device into my hand. It looked like a tear-shaped bottle, of the sort they once used to feed babies with.

“What’s that?”

“It’s an EMP gun. If you see anything move, use it. It should scramble most Level Three and below entities, at least long enough for you to get away.”

“And if it’s a Level Four?”

He shrugged. “Run?”

“Would that do any good?”

“Might make you feel better, for the second or so before they catch you.”

We were traveling across the Blasted Plains that lie between Suf and the Sea. There were no roads of the ancients here, nothing to mark the landscape. Just miles and miles of blasted gray dust, where nothing lived and nothing moved.

The Green Caravanserai was all around us. It was an ever-rolling assemblage of people, wagons, trucks, and elephants, with sheets of suncatchers fixed to everything, and big, colorful tents rolled up in the back of the slow-moving vehicles. Children ran in between, playing, human and elephant both. It was a never-silent procession, and at any given time, someone was cooking, someone else sleeping, and on the perimeter armed lookouts kept a constant watch.

We had joined the Caravanserai outside Suf. They were headed to the seaports beyond the Plains, and we were glad for the safety they offered. The Green Caravanserais were not like other human communities on the Land. They were tightly knit clans of people and elephants both, assimilated into a single tribe. It was the old philosopher, Aristotle, who said that the elephant was the animal which surpasses all others in wit and mind. After the time of the great excess, and the destruction it had wrought, we had come to see our place on this Land differently from our ancestors. We enslaved no animal, and seldom killed even for food. It was not that we denied our nature. But when we killed, we did so reluctantly and with need, and when we had to do so, it was nakedly, without tools. We coexisted, but we no longer ruled, for our rule before had brought disaster with it.

The Green Caravanserais never stood still for long. They wandered the Land, between Sea and interior, across highlands and valleys and the bad, forgotten places of the world. Crossing the Blasted Plains back and forth made them hardy and practical. They were not salvagers, but they used salvage when they needed to. They were not killers, yet they knew death. No one knows death like an elephant.

Iqbal and Mowgai moved side by side, easy in each other’s company. I envied them that easy camaraderie. I saw the backs of their hands often touched as they walked.

At night we made camp, the tents going up and fires burning as food cooked. Goats wandered around the encampment. There were always goats, traveling with the Caravanserais. They were tireless explorers, sure-footed and strong, with an excellent memory even in the changeless geography of the Plains, and often went ahead of the Caravanserai as scouts.

I sat by the fire, exchanging stories with Amir, one of the men. He had curls of black hair and a quick smile, and in the firelight I saw the long scar that ran from his index finger and all the way up his arm. He saw me look and smiled again. Like I said, the expression came to him easily.

“Tank repair drone,” he said. “At least, I think that’s what the thing was. This happened a long way from here, near Esh. Clawed me right up the arm, opened the skin to the bone.” He shrugged. “I feel sorry for the old machines,” he said. “We made so many of them, in the old age, and made them strong, and self-repairing, and intelligent. And then we made them serve. When the world changed . . . all they knew was war.”

“How did you get out?” I said.

“It was a unit with distributed brains,” he said. “I snapped off one arm, and then the other, and the other after that . . . It was old, it broke easy. It’s only the claws were still sharp.” He stared into the fire. “It itches, sometimes,” he said. Then, “Do you go to Tyr?”

“To Tyr, at first. I hope to find a ship there that will take me past the Pillars of Hercules, if they still stand.”

“You wish to go beyond them?” He sounded horrified.

I took out the old memory trinket Gaw had sent me and showed it to him. “Have you seen one of these before?”

“There are many, littering the old places,” he said. “Some like to use them, to experience the old age. But many of the memories have been corrupted, and when they do work it can be like a drug. I have seen people succumb to it, forget their life, the Land. . . . All for what? A memory of shopping?”

I looked at the flames. A goat came and nudged my shoulder until I gave her a chunk of my flatbread. “They made beautiful things, too,” I said, quietly. “Music and art and magic. They had so much power . . . too much of it.”

He gestured at the Plains beyond our encampment. “And this is what it brought us,” he said.

“Yes.”

“So what memory does your trinket hold?” he said.

“A request for help. For me.”

“From faraway.”

“From the New Atlantis.” It was my turn to shrug. “I dream of it, sometimes,” I said. “Seagulls cry over white chalk cliffs, and the air is humid and warm, scented with vegetation. I see a figure walk along the shore, but I cannot make out its face. The sunlight is behind it, and everything’s so bright. . . . ”

“It sounds nice,” he said.

“Then why do I feel as though something terrible is going to happen?”

He laughed as he turned to me and took my hands in his. “The terrible thing’s the past,” he said. “And that, that’s already happened.”

We spent the night together. We rose early, with the Sun. The camp was already in motion, tents struck, breakfast cooking, solar sheeting spread out to catch every drop of sunlight. I noticed Mowgai’s cot was empty and had not been slept in. A short while later, I saw him return with Iqbal, and they were holding hands, and I smiled to myself. I’d thought I remembered they had a history.

Days into nights we traveled in this way across the never-changing Plains, with the calls of the elephants and the bleating of goats, the chatter of humans, the smell of smoke and dung and sweat, and the Sun beating down, and I longed for the Sea.

The Plains stretched in all directions. It was like traveling on the surface of the Moon and, like on the Moon, we began to discern the remnants of old war machines scattered across the landscape. Ancient tanks, sticking out of the gray dust at odd angles. The remains of rocket batteries strewn around, with ancient warheads pointing in all directions. A field of crashed airplanes, the rotting debris of jet engine turbines glaring like baleful eyes. For a time, too, the lookouts felt an increased presence of live machines. They stalked us in the night, and once, from a great distance, I thought or imagined I saw a manshonyagger, a walking man-shaped figure so tall that, had it but lifted its arm, it could have swept aside the clouds.

Then the presences of all the wild machines ceased, abruptly, and all signs of the old war were erased from the part of the Plains we traversed as though they had never existed. I thought nothing of it, at first; until we found the anthill.

The call came for me out of the night. I was sitting by the fire when Iqbal materialized by my side and motioned for me to follow him. I rose and he led me between the elephants to the perimeter of the camp. “We found something,” he said.

I followed him wordlessly away from the camp. It felt odd, after so many days and nights, to be out of the Caravanserai. The darkness suddenly felt very large and the night sky endlessly wide. The moonlight made everything stand out in stark relief, and our shadows walked by our sides. Iqbal moved with silent confidence, leading me across the plain until we came abruptly upon Mowgai and Amir and three others, who were all armed.

“What is it?” I said, whispering. At first, no one answered. Then they stirred, and I followed again until we came upon a large shape looming out of the ground ahead.

“It’s a hill,” I said.

“We’ve been this way before,” Iqbal said.

“So?”

“There was no hill here then.”

I looked at it. It was illuminated clearly enough by the moonlight, roughly conical in shape and as tall as ten men. As I looked I saw that it had many openings, some as small as a finger, others as wide as an arm. It was silent and still and nothing came in or out of the openings.

“What is it?”

“We hoped you might know. You’re the chronicler, Mai.”

“Is it artificial?” Iqbal asked.

“If so, it’s not human-made,” I said, and felt uneasy.

“Some remnant of the war?”

“It could be nothing,” I said. “Just a natural formation in the land.”

“This is no Land, Mai. You know that. Nature has no foothold here.”

“What is it made of?”

“I came close enough to take a sample,” Amir said. “As far as I can tell, it’s made of the same material as the Plains, but that material has been broken down and reformed by some unknown process.”

“Is that possible?”

Beside me, Iqbal shrugged. “It must be.”

“Leave it be,” I said. “There are enough mysteries in the world. What’s one more, among them?”

Mowgai nodded. He looked uneasy. “I agree with Mai,” he said.

“It’s just a hill,” Amir said. He turned to me and flashed me a grin and, before any of us could stop him, he ran toward it, his gait smooth and easy as his long legs covered the distance. We could only watch as he reached it, stopped. He rested his hands on the incline of the structure and then began to climb it, finding foothold and purchase in the openings I’d noticed. He scrambled up it easily, illuminated by the moonlight, until he reached the top and crouched there, suspended.

“There’s a hole here!” he shouted back. “A circular opening, large enough to fit a person. I can’t see inside—”

It was then that I saw the ants.

They began to emerge from the hill’s openings, rapidly. There was nothing to distinguish them from other ant species, but they moved with speed, and in a sort of coordinated, military fashion. Tiny bodies advancing under the light of the Moon.

“Amir, run!”

He laughed. Then he saw them, but he did not appear unduly worried at first. Nevertheless, he began to climb down. The ants swarmed from the entrance at the top now, and from what I began to think were defensive encampments around it. Amir lost his footing and began to fall, but he never made it down. The ants swarmed him from all directions at once. In moments, they had covered him entirely. We could only watch in horrified silence as Amir’s body began to move upward, dragged along the hill’s incline, until he once more reached the top. For one moment longer he lingered there, suspended. Then he was simply gone, pulled down into the hole, and all the while he never uttered another sound.

We stood there, numb. The ants disappeared as quickly as they’d arrived, and the hill stood, silent and empty under the moonlight, until we turned away.

We left him there.

We had to. Inadvertently, we had invaded another species’ home.

That night there was mourning in the Caravanserai, and the elephants gathered around Iqbal, touching him with their trunks, expressing puzzlement and sorrow. There was not even a body for them to bury, and anyway there were no leaves on the Plains with which to cover a body.

A small expedition set out again to the hill. They stayed at a respectful distance, and there they left an offering, by way of an apology: some food, and parts of old machines, and flowers.

That night, by the fire, I mourned Amir, and thought of my mother. She traversed these selfsame lawless lands each year, in search of salvage. She had seen friends and colleagues die, and sometimes people simply disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. It was a hard life, for a hardy people: but I had never experienced this myself, nor have I ever heard of life returning to the Plains, and I was troubled by the way in which it happened. What it meant, I didn’t know.

The next morning we left at first light, the elephants calling mournfully to each other and the humans subdued.

“I thought nothing lived on the Blasted Plains,” I said.

Iqbal said, “So did we.”

We reached Tyr several hard weeks later, and my heart was lifted by the smell of the Sea. I had missed it, and the cry of the gulls and the sharp scent of salt and tar in the air made me long for the journey still ahead. The radiance of the Sun reflected in the calm blue water, inscribing a message written in sparkles of light, in a language I wished I could decipher. I could have easily lingered longer in Tyr, waiting for a coast-hugger.

But I remembered the night it happened, and the one that followed. For as we made camp that second night, I called to Mowgai, quietly, and he agreed to come. We sneaked out of the camp, against protocol, and doubled back, crossing the miles in silence, with only the broken Moon to light our way.

And when we got there, I could see that there were lights burning in that anthill. The beams burst out of the openings in all directions, though nothing moved, and nothing stirred, and no sound emerged from the place that was, that must have been, Amir’s tomb. We watched it for a long moment before we turned away. It felt as though, for just a moment, we were witnessing events on an alien planet.

There was only one more stop after that: the place where we had left the offering. I knelt down by the colorful plaited mat, and looked.

The food, and the flowers, had been left unclaimed.

“What are they?” Mowgai said.

“Ants.”

“But—”

I felt awfully tired, then. “I don’t know.”

The food and the flowers remained untouched, just like I said. But all of the machine parts—those the ants had taken.

 V. THE CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE

The Academy of Tyr rests on the highest point of the old town, overlooking the port below. Tyr had once been deep inland. Now the Sea rose up to its foundations, and waves whispered between half-drowned arches, and some of the old town could still be seen, beneath the waves. Fish now swam where once there had been streets and homes. The Cathedral of Tyr is the largest structure of the old town, and its dome rises out of the water at low tide, and some say its bells can still be heard on moonlit nights, tolling when all in the town are sleeping. It is a restless city, some say. Filled with ghosts, say others. I do not know the truth of it but that Tyr is a city still engaged with the past, a city in which the present and the future are dim and tenebrous things.

Its twisting lanes are of great antiquity. Its houses of stone have weathered the storms and the rise of the Sea and the breaking of the Moon. To these were added more modern structures, simple exoskeletons of wood and bamboo and cloth, rising around and above the old buildings. Its sewers often smell of strange alchemical odors, which mix not entirely unpleasantly with the aroma of fish and other Sea creatures, which the residents of Tyr devour with a great appetite. It is a place, also, where some of the old religions are still preserved, in however makeshift and haphazard a way. Some still pray in the direction of drowned Mecca, some speak each year of the next being in Jerusalem-Which-Vanished, and some pray still to a figure of a man bound with thorns on a rosy cross. It is a place of argument, of learning, of constant chatter and debate in the town squares and in its numerous coffee houses and tearooms, yet it is also a place where it is easy to disappear, get lost, find oneself in an unknown, quiet blind alley, and be startled anew by an unexpected sign, an ancient statue or a sundial or a graveyard filled with a cacophony of roses, blue and red and pink.

It was to Tyr that I came, years earlier, as a student, and it was from Tyr—from its academy, which as I said dominates the highest peak above the harbor—that I graduated. It was there that I first met Gawain, a foreigner from a faraway land, from beyond the Sea. Atlantis, we would say, laughing, and he would say, No, no, in our tongue its name remains Britannia.

Mowgai and I arrived in Tyr with the Green Caravanserai. I was glad to see it—glad, too, for the smell of the Sea. It had always made me long for travel, and adventure. The minarets of Tyr rise into the sky above the port, itself the color of a memory trinket recording tuned to some implausible recollection. We found shelter at a small hotel near the harbor and said our good-byes to the Caravanserai. Iqbal wanted to take the matter of the anthill to the Profesoura, that informal body of the learned—they are an argument upon themselves, like the discordant notes of a badly tuned orchestra, yet they represent, to us, a sort of collective memory, an active form of preserving. Which did not mean I envied Iqbal when he went to present to them his question. Professors, I always found, are best handled individually, or not at all.

The morning after our arrival, we wended our way down to the port. We needed to find a coast-hugger, yet there were none moored behind the breakers, and the port master told us it might be some days before one arrived.

“The Hermit Crab’s out beyond Gorgon’s Point,” the port master said. She scratched her temple, hidden under her thick braids of hair. The water was still and the air hazy with humidity. “The Albatross went searching for the Isles of the Nesoi a fortnight back. Idlewild’s exchanging in the ports of Turkiye. I don’t know, Mai. You may be stuck here a while. Besides, where you want to head? No ship goes that far out.”

“What about Gawain?” I said. “You remember him, Elle. The day he came.”

“Damn, Mai,” she said, and the smile she gave me had something wistful in it. “I remember the ship when it arrived. The Fikturiya, out of New Atlantis. She was a salvage-ship, nothing we’d seen around here in all the time I’d been at Sea. Hammered together out of wood and sheet metal and hope, with sails as old as the end of the world and just as ugly. How it made that journey, there is no one alive in Tyr who could tell you. Abandon-tech, I think. Verboten stuff, from the old days. That thing had power.”

“They do things differently there,” I said, but quietly.

“It isn’t right, Mai,” she said. But a smile was playing at the corners of her mouth, and I could see her tanned, rough hands open and close as though she were picturing herself steering the old vessel along the coast of Francia. “It isn’t right, but she would get you there, a ship like that.”

I thought about Gawain. A sort of barbarian-prince, we called him, teasingly. A tall, gangly youth with wild hair, and tales of ancient households enclosed in dryland forts, somewhere so distant we could barely imagine it. The ship that brought him, the Fikturiya, named after some ancient queen of his people, had stayed in port a month or so before taking her leave. Gawain claimed they had sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and visited the floating Isles of the Nesoi; that they had seen monsters rise to the surface from the deeps in open seas, vast creatures casting shadows miles wide with eyes as large as sailboats. Sailors’ tales, of the sort you’d hear in any port’s bars. We never did fully know him. He was one of us, a student and a bright one at that, but some of the past had clung to him in a way that it hadn’t to the rest of us.

“He was part-Sea,” Elle said. “He was part-Sea, and when you sail out far enough, when there is no more Land, it is as though the world had never changed, because time moves differently out there—past, present, future are erased and there is only Sea.”

She was always a bit of mystic when she got going, Elle. She dreamed of tankers and container ships, the great old metal beasts that crossed the seas with careless ease, back when people still thought they ruled the planet. Instead she ruled over a fishing port from which small dhows and schooners sailed over what had once been Land, passing blithely above drowned streets and towns, watery graveyards in which the bones of the dead rose and fell in whispers.

“Stay for lunch,” Elle said. Mowgai excused himself, and I knew he would haunt the wharf-side hostelries where the salvagers congregated. Ocean salvage was a different discipline from Mowgai’s own, and there were few who did it. It was possible our best bet would be to find a salvage-ship to take us at least part of the way to our destination.

I remained behind, and the port master and I adjourned to her offices by the harbor wall. Elle brought out fresh bread and an assortment of pickled vegetables, some cheese, a platter of fried whitebait. She watched me with amusement as I passed on the fish.

“Everything we take, whether Land or Sea, is nevertheless taken,” she said.

“I realize that,” I said.

“We are still animals. We still evolved to eat other species.”

“And look where it brought the people of before,” I said.

“We are not them,” she said. It was an old argument. “We only take a little, and only with need.”

“And I don’t need to eat the fish,” I said.

She laughed, conceding my point. “But they are so tasty.”

“What of the Nesoi?” I said.

“The Nesoi won’t help you,” Elle said. “Mai . . . why do you need to go?”

“To Atlantis?”

“Yes,” she said, with a scowl. “To Atlantis.”

“Gawain asked—”

“Gawain!” she said. “And do you trust him?”

“Trust him? I’m needed, Elle. And it’s my job.”

“To dig into the past.”

“Someone has to tell the stories of the dead.”

“I could take you,” she said, out of nowhere.

“What?”

“I grow restless here, watching over fisherfolk. I know you, Mai. You want adventure. Well . . . perhaps I do, too.”

“That far?” I said. “No one in living memory—”

“The Atlantids did it, when they brought over Gawain.” She scowled again. “You think what they can do, we of Tyr can’t do, and better?”

“They make use of old technology. Their interpretation of the Covenant is looser than most.”

“I could take you,” she said.

“How?”

“The Argosy is currently moored off Helicon,” she said. I knew that was a nearby island. “She was built by my aunt, and by me. When I was a girl, we took her as far as Jezreel and back, and saw Harmegiddon rise out of the Sea. It could make the journey, I’d stake my life on it.”

“You’d have to, if you went.”

“Well?” she said.

“I would not like to put you in danger,” I said, and she snorted.

“Have some more wine,” she said, pouring red from the bottle into our glasses. I accepted. As we sat there watching the harbor, I noticed more and more people gathering by the quayside. They came solemnly, alone or in small groups, all congregating at the same spot and looking out to Sea. The sight brought back memories, and I was sure I had been witness to it before, but what were they doing?

“You don’t remember?” Elle said. “It’s the Linking of the Cables. They do it every year. . . . We went once, remember? It’s just an excuse to have a drink.” I noticed she’d finished her glass and was topping it up as we spoke. And indeed, the people on the quay looked festive. Streamers and banners and drinks were brought out. It had the air of an impromptu carnival.

“Linking?”

“The submarine cables. You know. The cobweb?”

Once upon a time, the world was very large, and then it grew very small, and then it grew large again. In the time when it was very small, it was because everything moved rapidly from point to point, and there were so many people that they always needed to talk to each other, and for that purpose they had woven a sort of web that linked them to each other; but each delicate silk thread was actually a sort of thin, extremely long cable that ran along the bottom of the Sea from coast to distant coast. Those cables carried the bulk of this global conversation, and they were protected from the raging storms by being deep, deep under the Sea.

“Can you see it? Is it coming?”

“Not yet. Wait. . . . ”

It was long gone, the cobweb. The ravages of time had done their work, the earthquakes and the storms and the volcanic eruptions had torn that beautiful, delicate shape that once spanned the world. Once the world was big, and then it grew small, and then it grew big again. Torn threads, a great silence. But the people of Tyr remembered what it was like, in the old days, and so they reenacted the great Joining, the way it had once been celebrated all across the world – the linking, the joining together.

“It’s coming!”

I could see it, then, the small boat bobbing on the waves, dragging in its wake a thin, long thread of wire. When it reached the shore, they began to haul the cable up and out of the water. Once, it would have run for thousands of miles, allowing someone in Yurop to talk to Afriq or Sneyland in an instant. And there came a solemn procession from the Land, carrying the other part of the cable, the host body, and the two processions, of Land and Sea, came toward each other with measured steps, and a band struck up music.

Then it happened, just like it had all those centuries before. The two cables met, and were Joined. And that was it—that was how it happened, though back then no one had paid much attention to the process of joining, and it had happened quietly, out of sight, just a bunch of workmen bringing up the cable from the Sea, without fanfare.

It was a symbolic gesture, nothing more. The underwater cable linked nowhere now, and the machines that had sustained that worldwide conversation had been mute for centuries, not even useful salvage. Yet there was something moving about this reenactment, and for a moment I was lost in daydream, trying to imagine a world where you were always present as a node on an ever-shifting, never-silent, spun-silk cobweb that enveloped the planet.

Then the celebrations began in earnest, and I drank my wine, and Elle smiled at me crookedly over the rim of her glass and said, “So?”

I sighed. “How soon can we leave?” I said.

Another memory trinket waited for me when I returned to the inn. Who had left it there, I didn’t know. It had the same old, scratched quality as the last, and I was not surprised to discover my name inscribed into the casing. Mai. I put it to my temple. Transition was instantaneous this time . . .

“Mai.” I could see Gawain in the mirror again. His body lithe, dark from the Sun, and there were new scars on his chest and abdomen. He smiled at his reflection—at me. “If you get this then you’ve made it to Tyr, at least, and I hope you’re on your way. I had hoped to send a ship to greet you, but that decision was overruled. The Plantagenet will be waiting just beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It can meet you there and escort you the rest of the way. . . . We no longer enter the Medius Sea.” An expression I couldn’t decipher crossed his face, as of old, remembered pain. “But it should be safe for you to do so.”

He looked out of the window, as he had before, and there was a disorienting change of perspective, as though for just a moment I was seeing events through the eyes of a seabird plunging rapidly from the windowsill down toward the Sea. The beach rose sharply ahead and then the bird plunged into the water, and my perception changed yet again. Once more, I saw the divers moving sluggishly through the water, and the ruins of tall skyscrapers jutting out of the sand at the bottom.

“These used to be our docklands,” his voice said in my ear, startling me. “The great ships came and went from the docks, and an empire had spread all over the planet. Then came the great shortening, and a new kind of web rose—”

Once again, we sank deeper in the dark water, and once again I saw shoals of silver fish, darting in tandem until they resembled a silver screen blowing in a wind; I saw the skyscrapers of metal and glass lying on their sides, their windows broken, crustaceans scuttling under barnacle-covered desks. Telephones rotted, their lines trailing like entrails.

And I could see them, I could see them all. The cables were thin and ethereal. They lay along the floor of what had once been river, was now open Sea. They converged onto this spot, onto these Docklands, like the threads of a spider’s web, and I realized this place had once been a major hub, a point on the global cobweb. I followed the gently undulating threads in the water, how they shone against the light of my diver’s helmet, how they were still . . . extant.

And I saw, deep down below, a shuttered metal eye, the hidden opening to a buried vault. I saw the cables rising from it, like the tentacles of a squid, like a mesh of threads. There was something inside it, something living, and again I felt myself falling, falling toward it, and for just one brief moment I thought I could see it—And I was plunged, without warning, into the world of before, and living streets where people trudged through gusts of rain, people in thick coats and hoods with goggles protecting their eyes, bent over as they pushed against the storm. The sky overhead was a perfect dome of clouds, a hurricane sky. There was no Sun, no Moon, no stars. And I realized I was walking among them, on the street, through dirty puddles, and I could smell ozone and smoke, dung—somewhere nearby, someone cooking meat on a grill. A vehicle came into sight, flashing lights, and a man and a woman in uniforms stepped out, blocking my way.

“Your papers, miss.”

“Papers?”

I saw them reaching for objects on their hips—I thought, horrified, could those be guns?

“Your identification, please, miss.”

“But I don’t have identification—” I began to say, when the skies cracked open with thunder, and the world was torn in half and began to burn like an old, flammable document. I shot upward, until I was a fragment of light in Gawain’s green, gold-speckled eyes.

“We tunneled a breach into the vault,” he said. “But it didn’t go well. You saw . . . Well, I’m not sure what you saw. It’s interacting with our equipment in ways we can’t really account for.” His smile in the mirror was apologetic. “Please, come.”

“Wait,” I wanted to say, “Gaw—”

But it was just a recording. Wasn’t it? For a moment I saw confusion in his eyes, as though he’d heard me. Then everything went blank and I came to in my own body, with a beating pain in my head, and I felt the bile rise in my throat, until I threw up all over the floor. Red wine and bread and cheese. . . . I took deep, gulping breaths of air.

When I gingerly touched the memory trinket again, it was inert.

Several days later, on a clear, balmy day, with the salt spray of the Sea fresh in the air and the winds high and favorable, we sailed out of the harbor of Tyr, heading west. Seagulls cried overhead, and as the old city receded in the distance I felt a sharp pang of loss. What lay beyond, I couldn’t know. We would try to sail close to shore, follow the coastline along the wilderness, but beyond this point, few had ventured in recent memory, and all the maps were vague. What did “Beware a Pod of Globsters” mean, or “Here Be Dagon”?

There were annotations on the map, dotted lines crisscrossing themselves, tracing the last known movements of the Nesoi. There were small human settlements marked beyond Tyr, but these grew sparse and then vanished entirely as the only annotation left on the map was one simple word.

Wilderness.

 VI. SHIPWRECKED

Ship’s Diary, Day 3

Pirate birds with long hooked bills soar high overhead. Storm petrels in the distance patter impossibly on the surface of the Sea, and I admire the way they move, how they seem to walk on water. I say, “I’ve never seen something like this before.”

Beside me Mowgai, not displaying much enthusiasm for bird-watching. Face greenish, his exoskeleton struggles onboard the ever-moving ship, the sloping deck, the toss and sway of the waves. The sky overhead is a dark blue, with few clouds, but Elle’s face is troubled as she scans the distance with a pair of ancient binoculars.

“Is something the matter?” I say.

“Something is always the matter,” she says.

I leave her to it. Up in the crow’s nest Dain gives a short, sharp whistle, but what it signifies I do not know. We are only three days’ sail from Tyr, yet the world is already transmogrified, changed. The Land is a thick swash of dense, vibrant greens. Primordial forest, nothing like the gentle woodlands of my home. The Sea is a green-blue pond. It is a window: Through its depths we can see the rooftops of sunken homes, wide highways traversed now only by shoals of fish. Clonal colonies of Neptune grass undulate gently in fields stretching in every direction. I try to imagine all that is hidden there, lives preserved, drowned worlds beyond measure. Bellman on the prow pulls up a mahi-mahi with his rod and grunts as the heavy fish flops onto the deck.

Yesterday we’d dropped anchor by a shore settlement where they spoke the common tongue with an accent unfamiliar to any of us, though they knew Tyr well and had met salvagers like Mowgai in the past. It had felt odd sitting there in their nasara, the communal space under the great banyan tree, with the fire burning, discussing the world beyond. They spoke of strange sightings on the horizon during the Blood Moon, of submersible machines which haunted still the silent cities of the Down Below, of the time a pod of whales was beached onshore, like sailors seduced to their deaths by the siren call of another time. In their stories the Sea was unfathomable, a blank map without borders or compass points. Perhaps they were right. The world was changed, its maps irreversibly redrawn. Who was to say what sailed the seas, or what new life arose from the debris of the old age?

Day 5

I had taken to catnapping in a hammock on the deck. At night, the stars overhead seem so close that all you have to do is reach out a hand and touch them. A river of stars. . . . This is what happened:

A cool night. The ship slowed down, by degrees, and I heard Elle and Bellman talking in low voices. I went to join them at the prow.

“What is it?”

Elle pointed. Choking our forward motion was a sea of weeds. Their fronds moved as though by sentience, stroking the hull of the ship. The ship near stalled. The broken Moon was very bright in the sky, and it erased the farther stars. I started—

Something grated against the hull of the Argosy. Poseidon weed. Neptune grass. A single organism made up of countless clones. As an entity it was near immortal, and I thought it must have seen the age of excess rise and fall, seen the Sneylanders’ empire and the Romans before them, seen it all—

“What was that?”

“What was w—” I began to say. The wave came out of nowhere. It rose over the hull and came rushing at me, knocking me off my feet.

“Mai, hold my h—!”

It swept me overboard and my breath caught, and I fell.

Into water as warm as a bath. . . .

The reeds held me like a child.

I felt myself submerging in the water, slowly. . . . The fronds of weeds stroked my face. It felt so peaceful.

I fell. . . .

Day 7

Our location is uncertain, and there is no sight of land. Elle is convinced, however, that an outpost of the Nesoi is nearby. She has been poring for hours over intricate clockwork devices, the nature of which I do not know. The sky is overcast, and a fierce wind is blowing. Mowgai had strapped himself to the mast, like Odysseus. The poor man has nothing left to throw up.

 . . . I fell. Into a world I can’t describe, an ever-shifting chiaroscuro. Alien voices spoke nonsense words. The weeds prodded me, curious. They were trying to understand me, I think, just as I failed to understand them. An ancient organism, living and evolving under the broken Moon. . . .

Will you let us pass? I thought.

No reply, but a sort of whispered melody, like the cooing of adults at a child. Then, abruptly, it was over, and I felt hands pulling me, roughly, and I was taken from that warm embrace and—

“Damn it, Mai! Breathe! Breathe!”

I spluttered salt water, took in gasps of air. The Moon shone down and I laughed, lying there, drenched, on the deck.

“Are we moving?”

“We . . . ” She looked surprised. “Yes,” she said.

“Good,” I said, and closed my eyes.

Day 8

“There!” Elle says. She points into the darkness. I see nothing, at first. Then a dark shape, eerily illuminated by the Moon. A coastal outline, and were those lights, coming into being?

The ship glides toward that floating island. I had never thought to see them. A harbor, opening—I would say natural, but they are not natural, exactly. Coral, engineered to grow a certain way? The island floats upon the Sea. Moonlight bathes the scene, reflecting twisted trees, a path, silent figures standing on the shore.

The ship comes to rest and we step out, even Mowgai. I see three figures come toward us. Humanoid, but different. . . . Tall and willowy, like trees, their arms are branches, their fingers leaves. How delicate they are, I think. Only their eyes are comprehensible as fauna, silver-speckled, with a yellow sheen; it’s hard to say if they’re mammals or reptilian—

Welcome.

We stand onshore. Do we follow them inland? There are many stories told of the floating Isles of the Nesoi. The coral gleams in strands of rich and ethereal colors. It is alive, the whole island is alive—a clonal colony like the Poseidon weed but, unlike that entity, it is more animal than plant. The islands are hermaphrodites; they reproduce out on the open sea. The Nesoi are captains . . . some say, polyps.

Do we follow? Their arms move as though underwater, their eyes gleam so strangely. And somehow we are no longer standing on the shore, but following the path into the Mimsy, the coral flowers undulate around us, the porous ground breathes and the pools are warm, and a smell I can’t identify washes over us, the very air perfumed as by some alien scent. Deeper and deeper into the island we go.

Day —

 . . . and I awoke and found me here, on the cold hills—

 . . . back on board the Argosy. How long we’d dwelt in the Mimsy it was impossible to tell. The timekeeping instruments Elle had consulted all disagreed with each other. It was as though we had been in a pleasant, years-long dream, yet woken up from it with only an instant having passed. Had we dwelt on the island, or was it just an illusion? I’d seen things, a sort of technology, I think, of the kind they had only begun to develop in the final decades of the old age, a sort of bioinformatics or biorobotics interface. I’d seen the jubjub birds and heard, in the distance, the call of the frumious bandersnatch. . . .

“What was that?” I said.

“The Nesoi,” Elle said, simply.

As I try to remember it the details fade, but I had learned something there, something important, if only I could remember it! A warning, I think, of my journey’s ultimate end. Some words come back to me as we set sail again, under the new Moon. Not all history must needs be remembered.

I wonder what it means.

Day 3 (redux)

Elle squints at the horizon, her face uneasy. All seems peaceful. The shore is empty of any and all human habitation. We are somewhere off the coast of Francia, I think. The surface of the Sea is almost preternaturally calm. There are no birds in the sky.

“What is it?” I say.

“A storm.”

I almost laugh. But Mowgai, standing with her, wears a troubled expression.

“What . . . sort of storm?” I say. He has his salvager face on, I think, uneasily. It is something that turns warm, compassionate Mowgai into a cold, efficient machine, something that can survive in the old parts of the world.

“The instruments picked up a submarine explosion an hour ago, nor’-nor’-west.”

“An explosion?”

“Perhaps a better word is an eruption,” Mowgai says.

“I don’t understand.”

“The instruments are picking up a large heavy body, moving rapidly, against the current.”

“Moving in our direction, Mai.”

“But—”

I see then how fleeting the Argosy’s movement is on the calm Sea, how we’re heading to shore, how Bellman and the crew attempt to stir us in a pattern, like traces of lying eights, of infinity.

“It’s all right,” Elle says, “we’re on course to shore and if we’re right, it will only hit in twenty-three min—”

This is when things go rapidly wrong.

The first indication that something is wrong is when a dark mountain rises out of the seawater straight ahead, between us and the shore. Its slopes are a glossy black and the water roils around it. Then a giant appendage snakes from the thing and makes for the ship, and for just a moment, I see something, two bright orbs of light, open in the cliff-face vista of the creature, and I think, with sudden horror—they’re eyes.

Then the tentacle hits, the terminal pad smashing into the masts, and the rest of the long shape follows, and overhead I see carpal suckers opening and closing. The manus slams into the deck and shatters wood like kindling, and I lose my balance and fall, and roll, along the broken deck toward the railings.

“Mai!”

But Mowgai’s even more helpless than I am, trapped on his back, his exoskeleton moving helplessly, the way the mahi-mahi had, when was it? When we’d set out, when we’d had such high hopes of success. . . . I see Elle and Bellman swept aside as the giant thing comes rising once again above us, I see its beak—what is it, where did it come from, the Sea is full of such unnamed things, had it evolved or was it wrought to semblance of a life by machine science? The age of excess was so very, very good at the science of killing. . . .

I crawl for Mowgai. I almost reach him, my hand grasps his, I pull—

The mountain rises above the Argosy, two giant eyes like sleepy Moons look down, tentacular clubs rise all about the ship—a nightmare of sailors in story and song all down the ages—hadn’t Pliny the Elder written of such a thing? But why am I thinking of Pliny the Elder, I wonder, in a daze—the ship is sinking, the ocean all around us, but I don’t let go of Mowgai’s hand, and together, together we are pushed on the waves, until inhuman voices wake us as we dr—

Day —

These are the last words I shall write in this diary. We are stranded on the coast of Francia. The Argosy lies broken on the shore. It washed up onto the debris line in bits and pieces. Of the crew, two are missing, but Elle is unharmed, and Bellman escaped with just a broken arm. Mowgai and I are bruised, yet well enough to travel.

Elle will not go farther. She is determined to rebuild the Argosy and sail her back to Tyr. “I built her with my own two hands and I will rebuild her again if it kills me,” she says. I have half a mind to suspect she intends to sail back via the Isles of the Nesoi. There is a coral-like quality about her, sometimes, a new, faraway look in her eyes. . . . I wish I could join her, for in truth, the lure of those mysterious islands calls to me, also, and their spell lies heavy on my mind.

Not so Mowgai, to whom the Nesoi are but another trap awaiting the unwary traveler. He, in turn, is fascinated by the monster that attacked us. He speaks of “militarized Octopus giganteus,” and “biomech kaiju,” and “Level III Boojums,” and draws diagrams in the sand I and the others do our best to ignore. I think he, too, has fallen under the spell of the Sea, but his dreams are of hunting a Snark—whatever it may be.

My own path lies elsewhere. I am haunted by images of the buried vault under New Atlantis, and of a memory that isn’t mine. Not all history must needs be remembered, the Nesoi told me, yet I think they’re wrong. It is my task to remember and to tell. It is the telling of our stories that makes us human.

Mowgai will come with me. The others remain. At dawn, tomorrow, we set off into the wilderness. Yurop lies ahead of us, thick with foliage, a world as wild and unexplored as an alien planet. We shall have to traverse this land—this Land—until we reach the ocean that lies on the other side of this continent. What awaits us, I do not know. I shall hug Elle good-bye, and hope we meet again. I am leaving this salt-stained notebook as a record, however jumbled, of our Sea voyage. If you find it, know this: My name is Mai. I have lived upon this Land for five-and-thirty years. And I am going to the New Atlantis.

 VII. LA VILLE LUMIÉRE

“Humans,” Bill said, “should have gone extinct.”

It wasn’t a very nice thing to say, but then Bill wasn’t a very nice . . . person.

We were standing high on top of the hill that was once called Montmartre, and all below us the city of lights was swaddled in jungle.

Hunter drones flew in formation over a wrought-iron tower jutting at an odd angle from the ground. The city was still alive with light. Clouds of fireflies rose through the foliage and from on high the city looked aflame with festive luminescence. In the glow of the setting Sun, Bill’s metal body shone. His joints creaked when he moved and streaks of rust covered his chest like scars, but he was surprisingly agile and infinitely resourceful: By his own account, he had survived on his own in La Ville Lumière for centuries.

Bill was the first humanoid robot I’d ever met. Having encountered him, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to meet another.

Bill took a long draw on a stick of rolled paper stuffed with leaves, which he had set on fire at one end. He drew smoke and blew it out in perfect rings into the sky. Beside me Mowgai coughed, but Bill ignored him.

“After a meal, there’s nothing like a good cigar,” he said.

He was sexless, of course, but that is not to say without gender. There was something of the men of old about Bill, however he might protest. He was a creature of the age of excess, and with all the arrogance that came with it.

“We survived,” I said. “And now we live in harmony with the Land. We no longer upset the ecology of the planet the way we—”

He shook his head. “For how long?” he demanded. “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the Sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

He looked pretty satisfied with himself as he said it, as much as a robot can be said to look satisfied.

“Where is that from?” Mowgai said.

“From a very old, holy book,” Bill said. He turned and glared at us—I want to say, accusingly. “Sooner or later you will be fruitful and multiply again, and fill the Earth. You’ve nearly destroyed it once. You should not be allowed to do it again.”

“Surely every species has a right to live,” I said. “Even humans.”

“Right? Living isn’t a right,” Bill said. “It’s a responsibility.”

He was an old robot, and there was no arguing with him. Below us, giraffes moved gently through Place Pigalle, and a herd of elephants was framed against the dying Sun in the distance. In the trees by the ruins of the old church where we stood, small, silver monkeys chattered to each other excitedly.

“Ah, Paree!” Bill said, and he drew, contentedly, on his cigar.

We’d crossed the wildlands of Francia on foot. From the coast our journey was slow, hot, and bothersome. Hordes of mosquitoes plagued our every step. Snakes slithered underfoot. Branches and vines blocked our way and we resorted to hacking through the foliage with bush knives. All my muscles ached, and Mowgai’s exoskeleton struggled in the confines of the jungle, moving sluggishly with dirt clogging up its delicate joints, or where it snagged on an extended vine—it was as though the very flora were actively working against us.

In all this time we did not see human habitation, though now and then we’d come across the remnants of the old age, buried in the mulch of the forest: rooftops and glass bottles and rusted machines, and stone walls that still stood, unexpectedly, in what once might have been a farmhouse or a town, but was now overtaken with vegetation.

I knew Francia was much like the rest of the world now was. It was incredible how quickly humanity’s footsteps on the planet could be erased. Homes and buildings meant to last forever were wiped away like chalk, and in their place came other species, fungi, birds, cherry trees, wolves.

It was the wolves we heard, at night, howling in the distance. Once we came upon a bear in a clearing, but it merely snorted at us. Once we saw an anthill and gave it a wide berth. It was Mowgai, with his salvager’s senses, who found a path for us that led at last out of the thicket and onto the remnants of an old highway.

When the Romans at last abandoned their colony of Britannia, they had left behind their roads. Centuries later, those ancient highways still remained, etched into the Land, still traversed by a people who knew nothing of their vanished builders. This Francian highway was much the same, and it made it easier for us to travel.

We ate gathered berries, fruit, nuts on our way. Mowgai set traps, reluctantly, and for the first time in years I was forced to eat meat. We caught birds, a wild rabbit, squirrels. As we traversed the road, we came upon the remnants of old towns, some remarkably well preserved. I was enchanted by the sight of medieval cathedrals and brutalist office buildings, still surviving, choked by vines and inhabited by wildlife. In one town we came at last upon a vast, majestic river, and the remnants of an old pier. I remembered the old maps of this territory. This must be the Sequana, or Seine, and I knew that if we followed it, it could take us all the way to the coast that faced the New Atlantis.

We stood on the remnants of an old pier and saw, in the undergrowth, a curious sight. Amid the carcasses of drowned, ruined boats were several canoes moored against the bank, dugouts made of oak, with crude-fashioned sails. Mowgai and I exchanged glances, for this was the first sign we had seen of the presence of human beings in this wilderness. As we came closer, however, we saw clearly the signs of a battle. Two of the canoes had been set on fire and their sails were blackened rags flapping in the wind. There were traces of old blood on the pier, dark patches that had soaked into the stone. We moved cautiously, and it was then that we found the corpses.

There were three of them, two men and a woman. The woman and one of the men had been shot in the back with crude-looking arrows. The second man, however, had suffered a different, crueler fate. His feet and hands bound with thick rope, he had been moored to an ancient metal hook set into the stones, then tossed just beyond the pier into the water. He must have lain there, half-submerged, for hours, trying to crawl away, drowning by degrees. When we pulled him out, we saw that some creature in the water had been dining on his face. The corpse was white; all his blood had spilled into the water.

I was sick into the river. Mowgai, grim-faced, moved about the scene, examining the other two who had died there. When I recovered enough, I joined him. I felt ill. Such things were no longer possible, surely. We had evolved, as a species, beyond this kind of needless killing, beyond war.

Yet was that true? The world had always been harsh, there were always those who killed and those who were killed. Even in our lasting peace there were isolated murders. There had been one in Tyr, when I attended the Academy. . . . It was the main topic of conversation for months.

“How long do you think they’ve been dead?” Mowgai said.

I looked at the corpses. They wore little more than loincloths, and their bodies were decorated with colorful tattoos, of snails and spirals, wolves and bears, and stylized Sun and Moon. The drowned man’s corpse, in contrast, carried tattoos of what looked like machine blueprints, with an old communication satellite inked into his now-bloodless chest.

“Two tribes?” I said, dubiously.

“How long?” Mowgai said. I looked at him and realized what he was saying. None of the corpses was decomposed, and when I knelt down to touch the bloodstains, my finger came away smudged with dirt, and I shivered.

“Recent,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What do we do?”

“This is not our fight, Mai. This is not—”

I don’t know what he was going to say. At that moment, we heard an eerie cry over the river, coming from the far bank. A group of people emerged from the trees. They were armed with bows and arrows, and they saw us. But before we could act, a new cry sounded, and we realized that their attention wasn’t on us, but on a second, opposing group, which rose behind us and began to descend. They were too far away to make out clearly, but I had good hunch that, were I to look closely, I would see that one group bore tattoos of animals, and one of machines.

“What do we d—”

“Push! Mai, push!”

There was nothing else for it. We grabbed the first unburned canoe and pushed it into the water. Mowgai hopped in, more nimbly than I. I fell into the water and had to paddle until Mowgai helped me aboard. The canoe wobbled, then stabilized. The two groups of warriors swarmed to the banks of the river on either side and I saw bows raised. Mowgai and I both ducked as arrows whistled through the air, but they were not aimed at us. The wind picked up and the sail billowed and then we were sailing away, downstream, as the river expanded ahead and the Francian wilderpeople grew smaller and smaller in the distance and finally disappeared.

“To kill for food is nature,” Bill said. “To kill for anger, to kill for hate—to kill with tools—that’s human.”

“And humans should have gone extinct,” I said, testily. “Yes, you said.”

We had sailed down that great river, which looped and bent around the swathe of land that was Francia, for many days. We caught fish when we could, and beached when the river quietened. We were unkempt and badly nourished, but we were alive. I was disturbed by what we had witnessed in that ruined town. Mowgai took it more stoically. As a salvager, he was used to sudden and violent death, and to the traps and dangers of the old world. It was a sharp reminder to me of how things had once been. How they could be again, perhaps, one day. And I thought of those two tribes, and the drowned man with the satellite inked on his chest. I thought of him often, in the years that followed.

Then, one day, we came around a bend in the river and saw the city.

The nights lengthen, and in the evening of my life, I often stay awake in the dark hours that come before dawn, and I write in my notebooks, and I listen to the silence, and often I remember back to the city of lights.

It was immense. For days, Mowgai and I wandered its abandoned streets, taking shelter in ruined buildings. Thick vegetation had taken over the city, and packs of wild dogs and cats nested in what had once been churches, museums, office buildings, homes. We became aware of other animals, large game: elephants and giraffes, zebras, lions. Caged once, perhaps, and then escaped when the city fell, and now they populated it. Orchids grew by the side of empty avenues, and it often rained, in thick, humid drops.

It was when we discovered the island that we first encountered Bill.

Île de la Cité, I think it was once called. Now it sat in the middle of a much wider river, but a rickety bridge of wood and rope linked it to the south bank all the same. An enormous and crumbling cathedral stood on the island, and monstrous gargoyles and chimeras still stared down from its battlements, but what they looked down on was now a place of desolation—at least as far as people were concerned.

It was a beautiful, serene place. Elephants congregated by the riverbank, their young spraying water on each other as the adults watched in affectionate amusement. Colorful parakeets flew overhead and thick green vines twisted their way over the old stones and the fallen-down buildings that surrounded a once-majestic square. It was to this square that we wended our way, over the rope bridge. Crocodiles swarmed down below us in the river. When we reached dry land, we saw it—him. The robot.

The robot stood in front of the great doors of the cathedral. He stood almost motionless, his old, metallic body catching the light of the Sun. All around him, a destruction of wild cats had gathered, and they sat staring up at him dreamily, heads on paws, as the robot scattered food for the pack like a benediction.

At the sound of our footsteps, all the cats turned, and hissed. The robot turned to look. He stood there, then reached into a little satchel he was carrying and brought out one of his cigars, which he proceeded to light. We stopped and watched him.

“ . . . Humans,” he said at last. His voice was flat. It was a man’s voice, a recording perhaps, made long ago. It was gruff, and had a sort of scratched quality to it. “It has been centuries since I last saw humans.”

“We’re still around,” Mowgai said.

The robot seemed to give it some consideration.

“ . . . Too bad,” he said.

Like I said at the start, he just wasn’t a very nice sort of person.

“We could go,” I said.

“No, no,” he said. “You’re here now.” He blew smoke from his cigar. It was one of his affectations, as we learned. “It is nice to . . . chat.”

“Chat,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “Nice.”

“Nice.”

“Sure. Did I ever tell you I went to the Moon?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think you did.”

A puff. “I did.” A puff. “Long ago.” The recorded cough of someone dead many centuries past. “It was rubbish.”

“Of course it was,” Mowgai said, beside me, and I had to smile.

“Nothing but rocks and, well, golf balls, and Teslas. Name’s Bill, by the way,” the robot said. “Well. What’s a name. But you can call me Bill.”

“Does it stand for something?” Mowgai asked. “Like a model number or a serial number or . . . ?”

“No,” the robot said. “It’s just Bill. Well, come along. I’ll show you around. Oh, and watch out for ants.”

“Ants?” I said.

“Yes. I don’t like ants,” the robot said.

We’d climbed Montmartre at dawn. For a few days before, we shadowed the ancient robot as he wandered the abandoned streets of the old Francian capital. How he had survived for so long we had no idea. His own, often rambling account of his life changed with each telling. He had been to the lunar base before the Moon fractured. He’d known famous historical figures: Elvis, Gandhi, Pak Kyongni, Lior Tirosh. He served under General Khaw during the Muddy Confluence Uprising. He visited Sneyland.

How he ended up in the City of Lights even he couldn’t say. Now he wandered its streets and spoke to its cats—he’d made a study of the wild cat population, had followed them through generations, knew each one by lineage, remembered litters, parents and great-grandparents. The cats looked up to him. He was a sort of wild cat messiah.

“I can help you get to New Atlantis,” he said. “Though I don’t see why you’d bother. I went there once, you know.”

“Of course you did.”

“Fishermen who thought themselves gods,” he said. “Barbarians with titles, tracing their bloodlines to the last of the climate-clans. Every man an earl, and every woman a duchess, and all their children bastards. I’d avoid the place, if I were you. I don’t like islands.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“They generate their own weather systems,” he said.

We did not believe his offer at first, but he persisted. I suggested we sail down the river to the Sea, but then, how would we cross the ocean to the New Atlantis?

Mowgai said he’d had enough of water to last a lifetime, that he had never seen nor been in as much water as on this journey and that, when this was over, he would be happy never to see the Sea again.

I said, “Well then, why don’t we just walk.”

He said, “Now you’re just being petty, Mai.”

The robot said, “Why don’t you fly?”

I said, sharply, “What do you mean, fly?” Mowgai and I were both pretty irritated with each other at that moment.

“Fly, fly,” the robot said. “Up in the air and far away. You know. Voyage aérien?”

“What?”

He sighed, the recorded sound of a long-dead man. “I’ll show you,” he said.

We’d climbed Montmartre at dawn, but it was dusk by the time Bill’s contraption was ready.

It had been left, carefully packed, in the ruins of the basilica. We’d watched him unpack crates, erect poles, string wires, until a light basket, fit for two or three, stood on the ground. Above it were the burners, and above them, but currently lying on the ground, was the envelope.

It was a hot air balloon.

“What?” Bill said, a little defensively. “Everybody needs a hobby.”

“Flying? You think we can get there by flying?”

“Just follow the course of the river until you get to the Sea,” he said. “New Atlantis lies just beyond what was once a channel. I’ll show you the controls. Try not to die, I suppose.”

“I thought the Sea was bad,” Mowgai said, and shuddered.

But I loved the idea. When I was a little girl, Grandma Toffle told me the story of the day a pilot arrived in a solar glider. She had landed in the fields near our homes, and exchanged pleasantries and news, and then she took the children for a ride in her aircraft.

I had never experienced flight.

The Sun was setting over the city of lights when we said our good-byes to the robot. He stood there near-motionless, watching us, and the cats of Montmartre slunk along the old broken stone stairs and came to surround him in a half-circle.

“Please,” the robot said. “Don’t come back. Two humans in half a millennium of solitude is all that I can bear.”

I wanted to tell him of the wild tribes we’d encountered downriver. I had the feeling that one day this lost city of gold in the jungle would be rediscovered, that people would fight over its treasures. But I did not have the heart to tell him, and besides, it might never come to pass, I thought. And so we simply said our good-byes, and left the ancient robot to his solitude.

It is his face I remember still. Raised up to the sky as the hot air balloon rose slowly, the envelope stretching and filling. Mowgai and I held on to the railings of the basket and looked down, where the robot and the cats watched us go.

We sailed over the city of lights that night, and saw many curious things. A glass pyramid rose out of the ground, and we wondered uneasily which ancient king was buried there, and what they had done to be given such a tomb. We watched the elephants march along the Champs-Élysées, and the monkeys who nestled in the ruins of a stone arch at its end. The city grew small below us. The night fell wholly, and the stars came out, and the broken Moon shone down, a stark reminder that once, there were people there.

The winds propelled us, and we navigated our way along the twisting path of the river, until we came, at dawn, to the estuary where the Seine spills into the Sea. And we saw, in the distance, white cliffs rise into the clear blue skies.

And we knew, then, that we were almost at our destination: We had, at last, discovered the New Atlantis.

 VIII. BREACH

The nights grow long and the days short, and the letters on the page as I write grow dense and small like a bird’s black footprints in ink. The words are blurred through a film of rain, and it is only then that I realize I’m crying.

The nightjars call. The air is thick with jasmine. I have lived on this Land for eight decades and I love it, dearly. But sometimes I remember New Atlantis, and I remember the tomb, and what was buried there.

Well, then. Not long to go. When I was a little girl, my mother went missing and Mowgai and I went looking for her, and what we found was Byblos, where the memories of a vanished age are stored. That is another story, for another time, but ever since, I had sought out those memories, inscribed within the time vaults of the ancients, and which are slowly yet inexorably deteriorating. . . .

“It’s a Bostrom Type III civilization,” Gaw said. “As far as we can tell. There are some peculiarities. . . . Could be a Type IV. We’ve dated it to the last few decades of the age of excess. We’re at stable Breach. . . . We think. Mai, it’s good to see you.”

“You, too, Gawain,” I said.

The years since I’d last seen him had been good to Gawain. Gangly as a youth, he moved now with confidence. Tanned from the Sun, muscled from a life spent on the water, he was a far cry from the awkward teen I’d known.

Mowgai and I had flown the hot-air balloon to the landmass of old Britannia, and thence followed the Tamesis where it had breached the mainland and flowed into a wide, navigable basin. In the heart of this inland Sea were seven islands. We drifted toward them, over open water. Down below we could see canoes moving lazily, sailboats bobbing gaily in their moorings, shacks and sandy beaches and, beyond, the famed white palaces of Hampstead.

In the event, we couldn’t quite manage a dignified landing: Bill’s explanations regarding this procedure had been vague, and we crash-landed into open Sea. Canoes rowed toward us just as I thought we would drown. Hands reached down and lifted us out of the water and into safety, and brought us ashore, to the nearest island, which was called Shooters Hill.

It is a strange place, the New Atlantis. Life moves at the pace of tides, and the Moon is important to them. They grow the cannabis plant there and smoke the dried buds, which they roll ceremoniously into cones of paper, or put into hand-fashioned pipes carved of wood or fired from clay. Of the seven sacred hills, Highgate is their cemetery, Clockhouse the place of science and industry, and Hampstead is where the drylander descendants of the climate-clans reside. Other islands can be seen at low tide, but they are unoccupied. An old city lies down below, and the islanders of Shooters Hill are fisherfolk and salvage divers and beachcombers. They welcomed us openly, and we spent a day in their company, resting and eating of their food, which is abundant, while we waited for word to travel to Gawain. It was only the next day that his boat arrived, and when he stepped onto the sand my heart leaped, for it was good to see an old friend.

“You made it,” he said. “I knew you would.”

“How could I resist?” I said, smiling. “But it better be worth it, Gawain.”

“Oh, I think it will,” he said. “But then, you have some experience with vaults, don’t you? There are not many people who have that.”

“There are not many vaults,” I said, and he nodded.

“Do you think you could—?”

“It’s what I came for,” I said, and he nodded again, and looked relieved.

“I would not ask one of my own,” he said.

Mowgai snorted at that, for all that he, too, would never have done it. He noticed my expression, and to his credit looked ashamed. I knew the salvagers feared places where vaults may lie, that they marked them on their maps as Fata Morgana, Do Not Approach. I did not blame them. It is unsettling, to experience the past. And one could easily get trapped there, with the ghosts of the dead. I was nervous, but also excited, for this was what I had traveled all this way for, and what I was born to do. I am a chronicler, and there must always be someone to remember the past as it was, for how else can the future be made anew?

“You came a long way,” Gawain said. “Our hospitality is yours, and everything we have. It is rare for us to receive visitors from so far away.”

“It is a long way to go,” Mowgai said. He looked morosely over the water. I thought that he’d begun to regret accompanying me. “Who knew the world had so much Sea in it?”

Gawain laughed. “Water is the life,” he said. “Once, this was all Land. Now the city lies below the waves, a constant reminder to us of the way the world ended. But we endure, like weeds. Isn’t that what you used to say, Mai?”

“Old Grandma Mosh used to say it to me. . . . ”

The rhythm of the tides; the percussion of Moon and stars. We accompanied Gawain by boat, sailing through serene waters over streets and landmarks buried in the Sea: broken bridges that had once spanned Tamesis, Gothic Revival houses of office, a ruined palace where fish swam through long-broken windows. An immense wheel spun in the currents, half-buried in ancient mud. Above water, all was peaceful and quiet, and the hot Sun shone down on fisherfolk in their canoes, throwing nets, and on the vast floating gardens of New Atlantis, where they raise kelp. Between the islands there were scores of boats and floating homes, and the smell of cooking and the shrieking laughter of kids were everywhere. The kids of New Atlantis swim like dolphins, and as we passed near Hampstead they came swimming toward us, lithe and tanned and laughing, to stare at us, the foreigners.

I recognized the place from the memory trinket Gawain had sent me, but I was not prepared for its faded grandeur. Here, the old mansions had been lovingly kept and restored. These ancient buildings were constructed with a variety of limestone from the mainland. They had extensive gardens and manicured lawns that belonged to an earlier era and cooler weather. Into these exclusive surroundings there were nevertheless intrusions of palm trees and frangipani and wild macaws, and sand beaches that surrounded what had once been a hill. I saw pods of dolphins rising in the surf and, looking beyond Hampstead Island, I could see what the islanders called the mainland. In contrast to the islands, this was a place of wide desolation and unchecked growth, and looking far to the north I could see, with a shudder of recognition, the beginning of a wide and featureless gray plain, in which nothing lived and nothing grew and nothing moved.

We skirted Hampstead and sailed eastward, following the vanished channel of old Tamesis.

How do I describe the site to you?

Even after all these years, a shudder of recognition runs through me . . . and I awake at night with an ache, a sense of loss like a ghost limb.

Well, then. Let me try.

It was dusk when we approached the salvage operation. . . .

Heavy platforms floating on the water, dark towers, searchlight beams illuminating the Sea. Divers moving below the surface, their lights leaving a faint trail in their passing. A broken dome deep down below. . . . I saw a diving bell lowered into the water from one of the platforms, heard the scraping of heavy metal chains. . . . I knew this from the memory Gawain had sent me.

“It will be cold,” I said. Mowgai looked uncomfortable.

“I don’t ask you to follow me farther,” I said to him, gently. “Only to wait for me to come back.”

“If you come back . . . ,” he said.

“I will.”

“Promise?”

He smiled and so did I, though we both knew my survival wasn’t something that could any longer be guaranteed.

“Promise,” I said.

I dressed slowly in the heavy suit as the diving bell was raised from the depths, and then Gawain and I climbed inside. It smelled dank, and when we spoke our voices sounded distorted, as though somehow filtered through a machine. I took a deep breath as we were plunged into the water. Through the small window I could see the murky waters of the Sea, and the lights of the divers bobbing in the currents. Streets, houses, the remnants of a bridge all came into view. I shivered.

Gawain said, “This isn’t quite how I expected to meet you again, Mai.”

“No,” I said.

“I kept thinking I would go back, then something always intervened. But I never—”

“I know,” I said, gently. “Me, too.”

His shoulders slumped and he looked relieved. I thought of the past, how it is always out of reach, forever, and yet how vivid it remains to us, the living. Gawain and I had been together, for a while. I was glad neither of us resented how it ended, or that it had.

“I wouldn’t have come, otherwise,” I said.

“I know. I hoped you would.”

We smiled, together, something of the old, awkward teenage intimacy restored. It was quiet inside the diving bell, and our words when we spoke echoed back at us from the metal walls.

“Tell me about the vault,” I said. “How large is the Bostrom Field?”

“As large as a city, we think,” he said. “The old city. With as many as fifty thousand souls, maybe.”

“Sentient?”

“45.67 on the Markram Scale, according to the readouts.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

We descended through the layers of water to the seafloor. We docked with the makeshift dome that had been erected there, over the buried vault, and went across.

Inside, you could feel the chill. It wasn’t the ocean pressing down on you from above, not even the dead weight of broken history that littered the seabed, nothing as metaphorical as that. It was the vault itself. Like many others like it, it had been constructed some time in the dying decades of the age of excess, when for one glorious era it seemed everything was possible. As the planet died we had reached for the stars, and as the Seas writhed in pain we sought to colonize them, and as species died in their thousands, humans sought immortality: immortality of flesh, immortality of mind.

It was cold because the vault was cold. It was colder inside the vault than the cosmic background temperature of space itself. Behind multiple shielding and cooling chambers, the quantum processing strata existed in a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. It was powered by Fleischmann reactors sunk deep into the bedrock and kept operational by a rat-brained (17.05 Markram) self-repair system of Turings. I mean, these are the details, more or less. Other vaults used noncompatible systems, anything from Narula spaces to Artaud one-shots, and most were meant to last forever. . . . But forever, as it turns out, is a long time.

The truth was, they were the last, sad gasp of a dying race, a repeating act of hubristic hope that was simply more refuse the human species had littered on the planet. But I loved them—their quirky world-building and their slowly deteriorating insides, unwitnessed by any living being. Populated by echoes and ghosts, they were images of the past caught in amber, and there was no way I would have missed this one. I’d traveled a long, hard way to the New Atlantis. But what interested me wasn’t the laid-back island life above water. It was the world that had been buried centuries past in the dead drowned city.

All around us in the subaquatic base people were moving; machines had been attached to the metal surface of the buried dome and I could hear the high-pitched whine of drilling, and taste rust on my tongue. I admired the New Atlanteans’ equipment, the delicate computational machinery that did not look like salvage—they looked new.

“So it’s true,” I said. “You still . . . manufacture.”

“That sounds like an accusation,” Gawain said, but he squirmed a little. “We respect the pact. But we are still . . . a civilization, Mai.”

“I did not come here to argue,” I said.

I’d seen machines like this before, but those had been old, lovingly repaired and maintained. These cast a spell around them, reading out data from the buried vault. I longed to use them.

“It is hard,” I said. “To give up the toys of the past.”

“We had these built purely for this excavation,” he said.

“And you’ve made Breach.”

“We have. Do you . . . ?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

They’d penetrated into the vault with a micron-wide tunnel. A seeking tendril plugged into the unit, establishing just the tiniest foothold, analyzing the vault’s protocols, then monitoring the outer layer. It was at Breach but there was one final act that could take place, and I was willing to do it. This was what the old astronauts must have felt like, I often thought, as they got ready to blast off into space. You never knew if the rocket wasn’t about to explode underneath you.

“Are you ready?” he said. “There is no rush, we could go back to the surface and you could rest for a day or a week or a—”

“I’m ready,” I said. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

I changed and lay down in the submersion tank and made myself comfortable, then reached across and took the small grip in my hand. The Injection would fire a massive burst of qubit data down the thin band and into the core. I’d be the first to see this world in centuries . . . if I survived Translation.

The machines would construct a Minsky shell copy of my consciousness which would be injected into the vault. In theory, I would remain behind, able to Waldo the shell-me . . . but entanglement and Heisenberg fluctuations meant things were never that clear-cut. If I weren’t careful, it would be me who became the ghost in the old machine.

I took a deep breath, and then I laughed and pressed the button, and everything went dark.

And then, just like that, I was elsewhere.

 IX. THE DROWNED WORLD

Elsewhere.

The world loses definition and returns with the taste of blue, a shriek of salt, a flash of musical notes from a popular song no one has played in centuries. The world tastes of pain and soapsuds.

I fall.

The sky is rent asunder and static devours the horizon. A bridge like a clean black line spans a low-resolution river. The world takes on definition, blocks of buildings, tiny figures moving jerkily in the streets between.

I fall.

The world explodes around me. Color returns, but everything is so gray. Bostrom worlds are meant to be happy places, the last refuge of the climate-clans rich into a make-believe world. Tiny hidden microworlds scattered deep underground in shelters built to weather nuclear storms. They never did count enough on entropy, though.

I fall.

The world gains and loses definition. Termites crawl across the sky. A diseased river flows down below. . . .

I fall.

I-we stood at the north end of the Blackfriars Bridge, ghosting on a local host. Local data flooded into my-our consciousness. I knew, for example, that had once been a great bridge that spanned the river from south to north, but by now it was reduced to a pile of rubble still, somehow, just standing up, and that a makeshift rope bridge that ran along its five spans was the only way to cross it in relative safety. I could see, from where I stood, the fishing nets that hung from the bridge, and the objects caught in them: debris, blowing in a powerful wind.

I wore a parka, heavy-soled boots, thick gloves, and goggles over my eyes to protect them from the wind. The sky was a gray and impenetrable expanse of clouds through which sunlight filtered wanly. It was the sort of sky you get during a hurricane, but here it looked permanent. Small figures moved nimbly over the bridge, pulling up ropes and nets, scavengers looking for salvage.

“You! You there!”

I turned, and saw them. There were five of them, thin, scraggly, dressed much as I was. They moved with a loping gait, into the wind. Coming my way.

“You there! Stand where you are!”

I began to back away. I saw them reach for weapons. Ahead of me I saw a domed cathedral but there were holes in the dome and the road leading up to it was filled with tenement buildings, and more figures came out at the shouts, and they stared in my direction but made no move either way.

“Outsider! Outsider!”

Thiels, I thought, with a sense of horror. I should have anticipated this. A Level IV Bostrom world slowly degrading to a Level III, and its inhabitants, at least some of them knowing, or at least suspecting, their world was a simulation—

They wanted out. My arrival would have been a shot of data powerful enough to send checksums awry all across the virtuality. They’d pinpointed me quickly—too quickly.

“Stop or we’ll shoot!”

I started to run, away from the river, away from the Thiels. They gave chase. I had to assume sentience, but sentience does not equate kindness or mercy. I could feel my lifeline back to the Up and Out, but it was a thin, wispy thread, and I had come too far, and I needed to see, and to know! This world had been closed off for centuries, and the things it could teach me about the past outweighed any personal danger—even death. I could imagine I-me in the Up and Out, plugged in, twitching, drooling, neural networks quantum-entangled with the I-we local host’s data-field.

Then the pop pop pop of projectile weapons discharging, and I heard a swarm of bees fly around me and one stung me on the arm. I spun around and my body screamed in pain. The bullet had burned through the parka and grazed the skin, drawing blood. I tasted rust.”What are you doing!” I shouted. “Stop that!”

“Get her!”

They came swaggering up the path from the river. I knew the people of the past had a mad violence about them, I knew violence was a part of being human, I had even experienced the past before, in other Markram worlds, in Byblos and elsewhere . . . but I’d never been shot before.

“That hurt!”

“It’s going to hurt a lot more when we’re done with you,” the one who seemed to be their leader said. He came forward, not hurrying, and he’d removed his goggles and behind them one eye was a black orb, and the other a sharp blue that stared at me. “You’re from out there. We want out, do you understand? Out!”

“But that’s.. . . . ” I stopped, helpless.

“What?” he demanded. “What!”

“But that’s not possible,” I said, softly. “You’re . . . you’re Markram minds, 45.67 to maybe 62.18 peak. You’re digitally native, man!”

He pointed his gun at me. His single eye was blue and clear and, I thought, quite mad.

“You have no bodies,” I said. “No physicality. If you truly believe you’re a simulation . . . then what is there for you in the world beyond?”

His face twisted, in anger or pain. As though he had expected that answer. But what could I tell him? I think he knew.

“Then shut it down,” he said. “Shut it down!”

“What happened here?” I said. “It can’t always have been like this.”

“It was beautiful, once,” he said. “Then it started to revert. This, what you see? The storms, the dead river, the blind sky—this is how it was outside.”

There was nothing I could say to him.

“What happened to the people of our time?” he asked me, then. He must have been a man of power, in the Up and Out, before he brain-mapped himself and Translated into the time vault.

“They died,” I said. I had no reason to lie to him. “Most of them. A few survived. The Moon broke, and there’s no one on Mars now but a few dead robots, rusting in the winds. Most people died. The Seas rose, the earth shook. . . . Now there’s just a handful of us. But we endure. Like . . . weeds.”

“Weeds?” he said. “Weeds? We ruled the world!”

“Well,” I said. “I guess we don’t do that, anymore.”

I turned my back on him. I had nothing left, and my arm hurt. I half-expected a bullet in the back, to finish me off. But he did nothing, and I simply walked away.

For months I wandered this shell of a town. Remember, in the Up and Out, this place was buried underwater, a ruin of antiquity. Here I had the chance of seeing it the way it was, the way it lived, even in its final days. Its denizens lived as all people live. It was a city on the edge of climate-collapse, yet it functioned still. In the Regent’s Park allotments, they raised beets and cabbages and dug for potatoes, men and women braced against the winds, and autonomous Asimovs, old and rusted, swept the constant debris off the city streets. It was easy, after a time, to forget that one existed in a simulation. And, of course, it wasn’t, not quite. It was a world upon itself, a pocket universe. To its residents it was real and, after all, isn’t reality what we think it is? They lived, they died, they endured. We are all just weeds.

I spent much of my time in what was left of the British Museum, poring over documents with the semblance of old paper, but mostly I needed to interact with the people who lived in the town. I was to be their only witness to the outside.

I was at the Amundsen Arms. . . .

The pub off Leicester Square was lit with tallow candles. . . .

The smell of underground vegetation, fungi, and the river. . . . People moving in the near-dark, the sound of loud laughter, the smell of spilled beer, a haze of smoke from cigarette sticks. They grew mostly marijuana; tobacco such as I believe was plentiful once did not grow in that city, in that time. Most of their agriculture was underground, in the old tunnels where the trains once passed. A fire burning in the hearth. . . .

I liked it there.

It was then that I saw him.

He came in through the door and the storm outside and shook his hair loose and smiled. His eyes were Hyla-frog green. He was tall, he had to stoop a little under the low ceiling. When he walked he had the slightly bow-legged gait of a Mudlark. He crossed the room and people parted for him. Above the bar, a television set was flickering, a political broadcast from Mrs. Equitone in No. 10. He perched himself at the bar, easily; the bartender brought him a shot glass without being asked and he drank it. He looked around, and saw me, and smiled.

I never meant for it to happen, but the past has always held such an attraction. . . .

“I’m Kay,” he said.

What is real? This question often bothers me, more so now, as age hobbles my progress through time. All lives are finite, and someday, I think, the human race shall fade, at last, and it will be the ants who take over the planet. But perhaps this has always been their world, and only our arrogance led us to assume otherwise. . . .

The nights grow long and I miss the light, and my bones ache. Age brings with it a thousand small pains. It is pain that tells us we are still alive.

This is the story. I told it to you back at the start. I reluctantly went on a long, hard journey. I encountered loss, and I found love. . . .

It is a curious thing. How do you define love? How do you quantify it? We know the weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity, electromagnetism. But where does love feature in a unified field theory of the universe? Do ants love? Do stars?

Kay was real to me, as real as pottery shards or the wind, as necessary as sunlight. He was a Mudlark, hunting for salvage on the banks of Tamesis, which they called the Thames. It was a dangerous, laborious job, but he did it gladly. He saw himself as an archaeologist, I think, digging up the past. Buried in the mud he’d find Roman coins and plastic dolls, a Georgian necklace, unexploded ordnance, a Norman bronze horse, a comical mouse on a key ring wearing red pants and white gloves, and polycarbonate disks with reflective surfaces that caught the light and broke it into tiny rainbows.

But what is love? Some say it is merely a projection of our imagination—a miniature virtuality constructed in the neuron-firing pathways of the brain. That every existence is a solitary one, that we are each of us a simulation, and how do we trust anything we see, or feel?

But to be human, I think, is to love—to love and to hate, also. We have always possessed such a great capacity for emotion that it spilled over the entire world and nearly killed it.

Was Kay real? Was I?

For months I lived in that city, in that time. At times, I wished never to leave it. With Kay I explored its hidden passageways—they did not burn their dead but processed them using Wiigh-Mäsak promation, to cultivate the soil. With him, I crossed the rickety bridges in the constant storms, and visited the south bank, where wild, mutated animals roamed. Once, we visited the British Library, as it was called, but it, or its simulacrum, had burned to the ground in centuries past, and all I could find of its books were some blackened fragments.

Was he real?

Was I?

But seven months into my stay in the city, we lay high in a room overlooking the water. A storm raged on the horizon in purple swirls, and lightning flashed, illuminating a tentacled monster rising, for just a moment, out of the toxic river. It was warm and humid inside the room. We made love and, when we were replete, I felt something change in me, then, traveling up the pipe from I-we to I, and I sighed. . . .

“What is it?” he said.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m just happy.”

He stroked my face. “You will go soon.”

“No,” I said. “No, I won’t leave you.”

“But you will,” he said. And, “It’s all right.”

“How can it be all right? Kay . . . do you ever miss it? What was before? Don’t you ever want to fix the world?”

“I like it here,” he said. “This is my world. And I am me, not someone else’s ghost.”

“Don’t you worry the world might be decaying? That it will . . . stop working, one day?”

“Don’t all worlds do that?” he said. “And, Mai, didn’t endlessly trying to fix everything just get us here in the first place?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know, anymore.”

“Come here,” he said, and he held me in his arms, and sang as we watched the storm chase dark birds across the sky. At least I thought they were birds. His song was soft and sad, and I didn’t know the words. After a time I fell asleep and, in the morning, he was gone.

I went looking for him and found him by the river. He had waded into the water and was sifting through the nets half-buried in the mud. I called to him, but the winds snatched away the sound. I felt terribly sad then, and I didn’t know why. He looked so perfect, standing there. His back was to me, but I thought he was happy. This was his world.

The wave came out of nowhere. Perhaps it was a product of a delayed tsunami effect from a quake, or perhaps it was the world-system itself. It rose over so that it almost looked still, a Hokusai wave. Then it crashed on him and he vanished.

“Kay! Kay!”

I started to run to him. The chill of the water bit me. The wind tore at my face. I felt people watch me, silently, from the tenements. I was mad with shock, with grief. I pulled on my lifeline, and the world froze. I tore the clouds open. For the first time in centuries the Sun shone down on the city of London.

“I will rip you apart, piece by piece, until you give him back to me!”

Nothing answered my call. The world was still. It was indifferent to what I wanted. You cannot take on a world, and win. I saw the Thiels stand on the embankment. They watched the hole I had punched through their world. Then, one by one, they, too, turned their backs on me and walked away. I guess they’d finally realized they’d find nothing on the other side.

My lifeline pulled. The world rushed back into being. The clouds closed over the Sun. The river calmed. I felt myself yanked like a doll on a string. The world lost definition. It tasted cobalt blue and I heard cinnamon cry.

I fell, up.

They pulled me out of the immersion tank. I was weak from the long period of submersion. My legs would not support me and I threw up all over the floor. Mowgai was there, holding me up. I tasted rust and yellow, which tastes like fresh mulberry leaves.

Inside me, something kicked.

And that’s really all there is to it. I received a message from the New Atlantis, and I went there, and I saw the sights. I visited the past, for a little while. . . .

I fell in love.

I suppose the sort of love I’d had with Kay was one that we both knew was fleeting. Passion burns strongest when it is doomed. I loved, I lost. . . .

But something of him remained. Some sort of entanglement I can’t explain, and never sought to. I was sick each morning, and then it passed. Mowgai would look at me sideways, but say nothing. We dwelt on Shooters Hill, all throughout that long summer, as my belly swelled and I felt myself engulfed in sunlight. The seagulls called across the shores of New Atlantis. . . . I wrote the chronicle of old London, the one preserved still in the amber of the time vault deep under the waves.

When my daughter was born the pain was almost unbearable, but when I held her to my chest for the first time and felt her warmth, I knew this was heaven, or as close to it as we can get, on Earth.

Then I went back.

 EPILOGUE

Night has fallen, and the children run, shrieking and laughing, outside, between the homes. I look out of my window and see the paper lanterns rise into the sky like fireflies. Their lights do not dispel the dark but complement it. The nightjars call, and I smell jasmine, wild thyme, and roses.

My name is Mai. I have lived on this Land for eighty-four years and I love it, deeply.

My daughter calls. My grandchildren burst into the room and run to me, climbing on my knees. I love them, too, with a love that almost hurts. I think I am fortunate. And when I go into the dark, my atoms will remain, to feed the fields and flowers. I’ve known rain and I’ve known Sun, and once I saw the Isles of the Nesoi, and once I visited the New Atlantis. . . .

I experienced loss, and I found love.

Then I went back.

Everything in between, as the old poet said, is just details.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2019.

Sidewalks

Maureen F. McHugh

I hate when I have a call in Inglewood. It’s still the 1990’s in Inglewood and for all I know, people still care about Madonna. Los Angeles County has a forty bed psych facility there. Arrowhead looks like a nursing home; a long one story building with a wide wheelchair ramp and glass doors and overly bright, easy to clean floors. I stop at the reception desk and check in.

“Rosni Gupta,” I say. “I’m here to do an evaluation.”

The young man at the desk catches his bottom lip in his teeth and nods. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Hold on ma’am. I’ll get the director.” He has an elaborate tattoo sleeve of red flowers, parrots, and skulls on his right arm. “Dr. Gupta is here,” he says into the phone.

I also hate when people call me Dr. Gupta. I’m a PhD, not a medical doctor. I’m running late because I’m always running late. That’s not true of me in my personal life. I’m early for meeting friends or getting to the airport but in my work there are too many appointments and too much traffic. Being late makes me anxious. I’m a speech pathologist for Los Angeles County working with Social Services. I’m a specialist; I evaluate language capacity and sometimes prescribe communication interventions and devices. What that means is that if someone has trouble communicating, the county is supposed to provide help. If the problem is more complicated than deafness, dyslexia, stroke, autism, learning disability, or stuttering, all the things that speech therapists normally deal with, I’m one of the people who is brought in. “Devices” sounds very fancy, but really, it’s not. Lots of times a device is a smartphone with an app. I kid you not.

“Are you from LA?” I ask the guy behind the desk.

He shakes his head. “El Salvador. But I’ve been here since I was eleven.”

“I love El Salvadorian food,” I say. “Tamales de elote, pupusas.”

He lights up and tells me about this place on Venice called Gloria’s that makes decent pupusas until Leo shows up. Leo is the director.

Just so you know, I’m not some special, Sherlock Holmes kind of woman who has been promoted into this work because I can diagnose things about people. Government does not work that way. I took this job because it was a promotion. I’ve just been doing speech pathology for about twenty years and have seen a lot and I am not particularly afraid of technology. I have an iPhone. I attend conferences about communication devices and read scientific journals.

What I understand about this case is that police got a call about a woman who was speaking gibberish. She was agitated, attacked a police officer, and was placed on a seventy-two hour psych hold. She has no identification and is unable to communicate. They can’t find any family and since she is non-verbal except for the gibberish, she was given an initial diagnosis as profoundly autistic, and when a bed opened up at Arrowhead she was placed here. I’m here to determine what the problem is.

The file is pretty lean.

I don’t know Leo-the-director very well. He’s a balding, dark skinned guy wearing a saggy gray suit jacket and jeans. He looks tired, but anyone running a psych facility looks tired. “Hi Ros, How was the 405?” he asks.

“Sorry I’m late,” I say. “The 405 was a liquor store parking lot on payday. Tell me about your Jane Doe.”

He shrugs. “She’s not profoundly autistic, although she may be on the spectrum.”

“So she’s communicating?”

“Still no recognizable language.”

“Psychotic?”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking she may just be homeless and we haven’t identified the language.”

“How did you end up with her?” I ask. Nobody gets a bed unless they are a risk to themselves or others or severely disabled. Even then they don’t get beds half the time. There are about 80,000 homeless in Los Angeles on any given night—not all of them on the street of course—some of them are living in cars or crashing on couches or in shelters—but a lot of them are either severely mentally ill or addicted and there aren’t that many beds.

“She’s 5250 pending T-con. Apparently she was pretty convincingly a danger to someone,” Leo said.

“Section 5250” is a section of the California Welfare and Institutions Code that allows an involuntary fourteen day psychiatric hold and “T-con” is a temporary conservatorship that gets the county another fourteen days to keep someone. We’re a bureaucracy. God forbid we not speak jargon, we have our professional pride. At some point in that fourteen days there has to be a Probable Cause Hearing so a court can decide whether or not the hold meets legal criteria. I’m a cog in that machinery. If I determine that she can’t communicate enough to take care of herself then that’s part of a case to keep her institutionalized.

When I say institutionalized I can just see people’s expressions change. They go all One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Institutions are not happy places. The one I’m in right now is too bright. It’s all hard surfaces so I hear the squeak of shoes, the constant sounds of voices. The halls are way too bright. It’s about as homey as a CVS and not nearly as attractive. But you know, a lot of people need to stay institutionalized. I had a non-verbal patient, Jennie. She was twenty-six, and after many months of working with her and her caregivers to provide her with training she was finally taught to go and stand by the door of the storage room where the adult diapers were stored to communicate that she needed to be changed. I would like to live in a world where she didn’t have to live in a place like this but I’m glad to live in a world where she has a place to live. I’ve been to visit family in New Delhi, okay? In New Delhi, if Jennie’s family was rich she’d have great care. If her family was poor, she’d be a tremendous burden on her mother and sisters, or more likely, dead of an opportunistic infection.

I’m wearing sandals and the heels are loud on the linoleum. They’re three to a room here but a lot of the people are in the day room or group therapy. We stop at a room. Two of the beds are empty and carefully made with blue, loose weave blankets on them. A woman sits on the third bed, looking outside. She is clean. Her hair is long, brown and coarse, pulled back in a thick pony-tail.

“That’s Jane,” Leo says.

“Hello Jane,” I say.

She looks directly at me and says, “Hi.” This is not typical autistic behavior. Jane is about 5’6” or so. Taller than me. She’s about as brown as me. My family is Bengali although I was born and raised in Clearwater, Florida. (I came to Los Angeles for college. UCLA.) Jane doesn’t look Indian. She doesn’t look Central or South American, either.

We’re given use of a conference room where I can do my evaluation. I prefer it to a clinic. It’s quieter, there are fewer distractions.

Jane doesn’t say anything beyond that “Hi” but she continues to make eye contact. She’s not pretty. Not ugly, either. Jane actually rests her elbows on the table and leans a little towards me which is disconcerting.

I’m 5’3”. My husband likes to walk so we walk to the drug store and sometimes we go out to eat. He’s six feet tall, a teacher. He’s white, originally from Pennsylvania. When we walk to restaurants from our little neighborhood (which is quite pretty, we couldn’t afford to buy a house there now, but when we bought our place the neighborhood was still rough) there is enough room on the sidewalk in places for about three people to walk abreast. If there are two people walking towards us and they’re two men, I’m the person who always has to get out of the way. A man will unthinkingly shoulder check me if I don’t and occasionally look over his shoulder, surprised. This is a stupid thing, I know. There are a lot of entertainment businesses in our area—people who make trailers for movies or do mysterious technological things involving entertainment. They’re young men. They wear skinny pants or ironic t-shirts or have beards or wear those straw fedora things. I am old enough to be their mother and I am just surprised that they do that.

“Would they run over their mother on a sidewalk?” I ask.

“It’s because you’re short,” Matt says. Matt is my husband. He is middle-aged but he also wears ironic t-shirts. My favorite is his t-shirt of a silhouette of a T. rex playing drums with its little tiny arms. Matt is a drummer in a band made up of old white guys.

Men never do it if it’s two men coming up on two men, they all just sort of squeeze. I get very irritable about it. I grew up in America. I feel American. My parents come from New Delhi and they are clear that my brothers, Jay and Ravi, and I are very American but growing up I felt like I was only pretending to be. Sometimes I think I learned how to be a subservient Indian woman from my parents and I give it off like a secret perfume.

When I was younger I walked very fast, all the time, but now I’m middle-aged and overweight and I don’t dart around people anymore so maybe I just notice it more or maybe I’m just more cranky.

I plan to do an evaluation called ADOS on Jane Doe. ADOS is one of the standard evaluations for autism. It can be scaled for a range from almost non-verbal to pretty highly verbal and since the file said that she spoke gibberish, it was a place to start. I never get to ADOS because it’s obvious pretty quickly that she exhibits no autistic behaviors.

“Hi, I’m Rosni Gupta,” I say.

She studies me.

I tap my chest. “Rosni Gupta. Ros.”

“Ros,” she repeats. Then she taps her chest. “Malni,” she says. She has an accent.

It takes me a couple of times to get it. She works with me, showing me what she does with her mouth to make the sound. I fiddle with it as I write it down. I think about spelling it Emulni but Malni feels closer. She has a strong accent but I can’t place it. It’s not Spanish. I say a couple of words to her and gesture for her to say them back. She doesn’t make the retroflex consonants of the Indian subcontinent—the thing that everybody mangles trying to sound like Apu on The Simpsons. She watches me write.

I don’t use a laptop for my field notes. I like yellow legal pads. Just the way I started. She reaches out, wanting to use my pen. Her nails are a little long, her hands not very calloused. Her palms are pink. I hand her the pen and slide the pad across to her.

She writes an alphabet. It looks a lot like our alphabet but there’s no K, Q, or V. The G looks strange and there are extra letters after the D and the T and where we have a W she has something that looks like a curlicue.

She offers me the pen and says something. She gestures at me to take the pen. It’s the first time she’s really spoken to me in a full sentence. The language she speaks sounds liquid, like it’s been poured through a straw.

I take the pen and she points to the page. Points to the first letter. “A” she says. It sounds like something between A and U.

Eventually I write an A and she nods fiercely. I write our alphabet for her.

“Wait,” I say. I borrow Leo’s iPad and bring it back showing a Google map of the world. “Where are you from?” I ask.

She studies the map. Eventually she turns and she scrolls it a bit. I change it to a satellite version and I can see when she gets it. Her face is grim. She stabs her finger on the California coast. On where we are right now.

“No,” I say. “That’s where we are now, Malni. Where is home.”

She looks up at me leaning over the table. She stabs her finger in the same place.

I write up my report that she is not autistic and recommend a psychological follow-up. She might be bipolar. Leo tells me as I leave that the cop who brought her in and tazed her. I never got any sense she was violent. I was certainly never worried about my safety. I’ve done evals where I was worried about my safety—not many—but I take my safety very seriously, thank you.

I make dinner that night while Matt marks papers. Matt teaches sophomore English at the high school and is the faculty advisor for the literary magazine. For nine months of the year he disappears into the black hole that is teaching and we lose our dinner table. He surfaces for brief periods from the endless piles of papers and quizzes, mostly around Saturday night. He tells me about his students, I tell him about my clients.

Matt likes Bengali dishes but I don’t make them very often because I didn’t learn to cook until I was out of school. My go to, as you might have guessed, is Mexican. I like the heat. Tonight is carnitas à la Trader Joes.

“What’s this?” Matt asks. He’s sitting at the dining room table, papers spread, but he’s looking at my notes. We’ll end up eating in front of the television. We’re Netflixing, partway through some BBC thing involving spiffily dressed gangsters in post WWI England.

“What’s what?” I ask.

“Looks like someone’s writing the Old English alphabet in your notes.”

I bring out sour cream and salsa and look at what he’s pointing to. “That was my Jane Doe in Inglewood.”

“She’s a Beowulf scholar?” he asks.

“That’s Old English?” I ask.

“Looks like it,” Matt says.

I have a caseload and a lot of appointments but I call Leo and tell him I want to schedule some more time with Jane even though I shouldn’t take the time. He tells me she’s been moved to a halfway house. It could have been worse, she could have been just discharged to the street. He gives me the address and I call them and schedule an appointment.

I have to go in the evening because Malni—they call her Malni now—has a job during the day. She does light assembly work which is a fancy name for factory work. The halfway house is in Crenshaw, a less than desirable neighborhood. It’s a stucco apartment building, painted pale yellow. I knock on her door and her roommate answers.

“I’m looking for Malni?”

“She ain’t here. She be coming back, you might run into her if you look outside.” Her roommate’s name is Sherri. Sherri is lanky, with straightened hair and complicated nails. “You her parole?”

“No, I’m a speech therapist.”

“There ain’t no therapy to do,” Sherri says. “You know she don’t speak no English.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I like your nails.”

Sherri isn’t charmed by my compliment. But I do like them, they look like red and white athletic shoes, like they’ve been laced up across each nail. I’m terrible at maintenance. Hair, make-up, nails. I admire people who are good about things like that.

I head outside and spot Malni coming from a couple of blocks. Malni walks with her shoulders back, not smiling, and she makes eye contact with people. You’re not supposed to make eye contact with people in the city. It’s an unwritten rule. There’s a bunch of boys hanging on the corner and Malni looks straight at their faces. It’s not friendly, like she knows them. It’s not unfriendly. It’s . . . I don’t know. The way people cue looking at people and away from people is something to look for when determining if they’re autistic or if they’re exhibiting signs of psychosis. I’m trained to look for it. Persons on the autism spectrum generally don’t make eye contact. A lot of persons with schizophrenia don’t look at people and look away in the normal rhythms of conversation; they stare too much, too long, for example. When I assessed Malni at Arrowhead, she cued normally.

Malni walks the boys down, looking right in their faces. The boys move out of her way. I suspect they don’t even realize that they’re doing it. I remember her file says she was tazed when police apprehended her. A homeless woman of color speaking gibberish who kept looking them in the face and wouldn’t drop her eyes. Did they read that as aggressive? I bet she didn’t have to do much to get tazed. It’s a wonder she didn’t get shot.

Malni sees me when she gets closer and lifts her hand in a little wave. “Hi Ros,” she says and smiles. Totally normal cueing.

I follow her back into the apartment she shares with Sherri.

“I ain’t going nowhere,” Sherri announces from in front of the television. “I worked all day.” There’s a Styrofoam box of fried chicken and fried rice nearly finished on the coffee table in front of her.

“That’s okay,” I say.

Malni and I sit down at the kitchen table and I open up my laptop. I call up images of Beowulf in Old English and turn the screen around so Malni can see them.

She frowns a moment and then she looks at me and smiles and taps my forehead with her index finger like she’s saying I’m smart. She pulls the laptop closer to her and reads out loud.

It’s not the same liquid sound as when she talked, I don’t think (but that was two weeks ago and I don’t remember exactly). This sounds more German.

Sherri turns around and leans against the back of the couch. “What’s that she’s talking?”

“Old English,” I say.

“That ain’t English,” Sherri says. It’s like everything from Sherri has to be a challenge.

“No, it’s what they spoke in England over a thousand years ago.”

“Huh. So how come she knows that?”

Malni is learning modern English. She can say all the things that you learn when you start a new language—My name is Malni. How much does that cost? Where’s the bathroom? Everyone keeps asking her the same question, “Where are you from?”

She keeps giving the same answer, “Here.”

I pull a couple of yellow legal pads out of my messenger bag and a pack of pens. I write my name and address, my cell number, and my email address on the first one.

“Hey Sherri, if she wants to get in touch with me, could you help her?”

I’m not sure what Sherri will say. Sherri shrugs, “I guess.”

Malni looks at the writing. She taps it. “Ros,” she says. Then the number. “Your phone.”

“Yes,” I say. “My phone.” It’s my work phone because I never give clients my home phone. Not even my clients who read Old English.

I think about Malni walking through those boys. I’m meeting with one of my clients. Agnes is Latina. She’s sixty-four and had a stroke that’s left her nearly blind and partially deaf. She’s diabetic and has high blood pressure. She has a tenth grade education and before her stroke, she and her daughter cleaned houses.

With a hearing aid, Agnes can make out some sounds but she can’t make out speech. Her daughter, Brittany, communicates with her by drawing letters on her hand and slowly spelling things out. I’ve brought a tablet so that Agnes can write the letters she thinks Brittany is writing. It’s an attempt at reinforcing feedback. Adult deaf blindness is a difficult condition. Agnes is unusual because she doesn’t have any cognitive issues from her stroke, so there are lots of possibilities. I’m having Agnes write one letter at a time on the tablet, big enough that she herself might be able to see it.

Agnes has a big laugh when she’s in a good mood. Sometimes she cries for hours but today she’s good. She has crooked teeth. Her English is accented but she’s lived here since she was thirteen—Brittany was born here and speaks Spanish as her first language but grew up speaking English, too. “Mom!” she says, even though her mother can’t hear her. “Quit goofing around!” She smacks her mother lightly on the arm. Agnes’s eyes roam aimlessly behind her thick and mostly useless glasses.

Brittany, who is in her thirties, raises an eyebrow at me. Both women are short and overweight, classic risk profiles for diabetes and hypertension, like me. Unlike them, I have really good health care.

Agnes prefers drawing on the tablet to writing and after twenty minutes of trying to figure out what Brittany has been asking her, “?yr name?hot or cold?what 4 dinner” Agnes has given up and drawn an amorphous blob which is apparently supposed to be a chicken. “Fried chicken,” she announces, too loud because she can’t hear herself well enough to regulate her volume.

“She can’t have fried chicken for dinner,” Brittany says. “She has to stick to her diet.”

Agnes says, “El Pollo Loco! Right? Macaroni and cheese and cole slaw. Cole slaw is a vegetable.”

Brittany looks at me helplessly. Agnes cackles.

My phone rings. “Is this Ros, the speech lady? This is Sherri, Malni’s roommate.”

“Sherri?” I remember the woman with the nails painted to look like the laces on athletic shoes. “Hi, is everything all right?”

“Yeah. Well, sort of. Nothing’s really wrong. I just got a bunch of papers here for you from Malni.”

“Where’s Malni?” I ask.

“She took off to find her friends,” Sherri said.

“What friends?”

“Her friends from wherever the hell she’s from,” Sherri says. “You gonna pick up these papers or what?”

I wanted Malni to write her story down. She filled almost three legal pads. I didn’t expect her to disappear, though.

“This guy showed up,” Sherri says. In honor of Agnes I’ve brought El Pollo Loco. Sherri doesn’t really like El Pollo Loco. “I don’t eat that Mexican shit,” she says but she takes it anyway. “He was tall and skinny. He looked like her, you know? That squished nose. Like those Australian dudes.”

It takes me a moment but then I realize what she means; Aboriginals. She’s right, Malni looked a little like an Aboriginal. Not exactly. Or maybe exactly, I’ve never met an Australian Aboriginal. “Oh, cool, I didn’t know they had mac ‘n’ cheese.” Sherri plunks down on the couch and digs in. “Yeah so he started jabbering at her in that way she talks to herself. Was crazy. And he acted just like she did. All foreign and weird. Then they just took off and she didn’t come back.”

“When was that?” I ask. My feet hurt so I sit down on the couch next to her.

“Like, Saturday?”

This is Thursday. Part of me wants to say, you couldn’t be bothered to call until yesterday but there’s no reason for Sherri to have bothered to call me at all, even though Malni apparently asked her to.

“That bitch was super smart,” Sherri says.

I give Sherri twenty dollars, even though she’s a recovering substance abuser and it’s risky to give her pocket money, and take the legal pads and go.

I call the department of history at UCLA and eventually find someone who can put me in touch with someone at the department of Literature who puts me in touch with a woman who is a Beowulf scholar. Why I thought I should start in History I don’t know since Matt is an English teacher and he recognized the language. Anyway, I tell the Beowulf scholar I am looking for someone who can translate Old English and that I will pay.

That is how I get Steve. We meet at a Starbucks near campus. Starbucks is quickly becoming the place where everybody meets for almost every reason.

Steve is Asian-America and very gay. He wears glasses that would have gotten me laughed out of middle school. He is studying Old English and needs money. “I’m supposed to be working on my dissertation,” he says. “I am working on my dissertation, actually. It’s on Persona and Presentation in Anglo Saxon Literature. But there’s that pesky thing about rent.” He eyes the legal pads. I wonder what persona and presentation even means and what his parents think about having a son who is getting a doctorate in English Literature. Which I realize is racist. Just because my dad is an engineer and my mother is a chemist and they are classic immigrant parents who stressed college, college, college, doesn’t mean Steve’s are. For all I know, Steve’s parents are third generation and his dad plays golf and gave him a car on his sixteenth birthday.

“I can pay you $500,” I say.

“That looks like modern handwriting. Is it, like, someone’s notes or something?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” I say.

He eyes me. I am aware of how weird it is to appear with three legal pads of handwritten Old English. Steve may be a starving UCLA student but this is very strange.

“I think it’s like a story,” I say. “I work for Los Angeles County Social Services. A client gave me these.”

“You’re a social worker,” he says, nodding.

“I’m a speech therapist,” I say.

He doesn’t comment on that. “This is going to take a lot of hours. A thousand?” he says.

“Seven hundred and fifty,” I say.

“Okay,” he says.

I write him a check for half on the spot. He holds the check, looking resigned. I think I’m getting a pretty good deal.

After that I get emails from him. The first one has ten typed pages of translation attached and a note that says, can we meet?

We meet in the same Starbucks.

“Your client is really good at Anglo-Saxon,” he says. “Like, really good.”

“Yeah?” I say. How can I explain?

“Yeah. She does some really interesting things. It’s a woman, right?”

Malni tells a “story” about a woman from a place on a harbor. The place is vast, full of households and people. There are wondrous things there. Roads crowded with people who can eat every manner of food and wear the richest of dress. It is always summer. It is a place that has need for few warriors. Trees bear bright fruit that no one picks because no one wants it because no one is hungry. The air is noisy with the sounds of birds and children.

She is one of a band of people. They work with lightning and metal, with light and time. They bend the air and the earth to open doors that have never been opened. They journey to yesterday. To the time of heroes.

“She’s a woman,” I say.

“It’s like a sci fi fantasy story,” Steve says.

I already know that. Malni has been telling everyone, she’s from here. When I read those words, that they journeyed to yesterday, I figured that plus the Old English meant that somehow Malni thought she had gone to the past.

“Have you heard about anybody who had some kind of breakdown or disappeared in the last year? You know, a teacher? Someone good at Old English?”

“No?” he says.

I tell him a little bit about Malni.

“Wow. That’s . . . wow. You’d think someone this good would be teaching and yeah, it’s a pretty small discipline. I’d think I’d have heard,” he says. “Maybe not. If I hear anything . . . ”

“So she’s really good,” I prompt.

“There are only something like a little over four hundred works of Old English still around,” Steve says. “There’s Beowulf, which was written down by a monk. There’s Caedmon, and Alfred the Great and Bede, a bunch of Saints’ lives and some riddles and some other stuff. You get to know the styles. The dialects. This is close to Alfred but different. I thought at first that the differences were because she was trying to mimic Alfred but getting it a little wrong, you know? But the more I read it over and over, the more I realize that it’s all internally consistent.”

“Like she’s really good at making it up?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Like she’s made a version all her own. Invented a wholly new version of Old English so that it would sound like a different person at close to the same time. And written a story in it. That’s a really weird thing to do. Make it super authentic for somebody like me. Because the number of people who could read this and get what she’s doing and also enjoy it is zero.”

“Zero?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I understand the beginning of the story, I think. It’s a time travel story. She starts in Los Angeles, which, by the way, is really hard to describe in Anglo-Saxon because she doesn’t try to make up words like horseless cart or anything. For one thing, Anglo-Saxon doesn’t really work that way. So she starts here and she travels back in time. Then there’s this part about being in the past in what I think is probably Wessex, you know, what’s now part of England. She makes up some stuff that’s different from the historical record, some of which I wish was true because it’s really cool and some of which is just kind of dull unless you’re really into agriculture. Then there’s this long explanation of something I don’t understand because I think she’s trying to explain math but it isn’t like math like I understand math. But really, I suck at math so maybe it is.”

“She’s got math in there?”

“A little bit, but mostly she’s explaining it. There’s something about how really small changes in a stream make waves and if you drop a stick in the water, no one can predict its course. How when you walk through the door to yesterday, it means yesterday is not your yesterday. Then she talks about coming back to her beautiful city but it’s gone. There’s a strange city in its place. That city is beautiful, too and it’s full of wild men and sad women. That city has savage and beautiful art. It has different things. Some are better and some are worse but her family is gone and no one speaks to her anymore. She says the story is about the cost of the journey. That when you journey to yesterday, you lay waste to today. When you return, your today is gone and it is a today that belongs to somebody else.”

It takes me a moment to think about all that.

One of the baristas steams milk. Starbucks is playing some soft spoken music in the background. It doesn’t feel like someone has just explained how to end my world.

“It’s kind of creepy but the way it’s written there are big chunks that are really hard to read,” Steve says. “Is she crazy? I mean, what’s the deal?”

I want to say she’s crazy. Really, it’s the best explanation, right? She was a professor of Anglo Saxon/Old English. She’d had a psychotic break. Sherri said a man who looked a lot like her—maybe a family member, a brother—tracked her down to the halfway house and took her home.

That strange and liquid language she speaks. The way she acts, as if she comes from a different culture where the men are not so savage and the women not so sad.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I can give you what I’ve translated. I’ve translated all the words but there are parts that don’t make sense,” Steve says.

I pay him the rest and add enough to make a thousand. He’s spent a lot of time on it. Time he could have been working on his dissertation.

“I actually learned a lot,” he says. “It’s like she really speaks Anglo Saxon.”

“Maybe she did,” I say.

Someone, somewhere is working on time travel. I mean, someone has to be. People are trying to clone mammoths. People are working on interstellar travel. I have a Google alert for it and mostly what pops up is fiction. Sometimes crazy pseudo science. Real stuff, too. I get alerts for things like photon entanglement. People are trying.

I think I saw Malni on Wilshire Boulevard one time walking with two other people; a man who looked like her and a woman who had black hair. I was driving, late for an appointment. By the time I saw them I was almost past them. I tried to go around the block and catch them but traffic was bad and by the time I got back to Wilshire they were gone. Or maybe it wasn’t Malni.

Maybe in some lab somewhere, people are close to a time travel breakthrough. I walk downtown with Matt and I think, this might be the last moment I walk with Matt. Someone might be sent back in time at any moment and this will all disappear.

Will it all disappear at once? Will I have a moment to feel it fading away? Will I be able to grip Matt’s arm? To know?

There are two guys walking towards us as we head to the Mexican place. I’m going to have a margarita. Maybe two. I’m going to get a little drunk with Matt. I’m going to talk too much if I want to. The guys are not paying attention. I remember Malni. I throw my shoulders back a little. I do not smile. I look in the face of the one in my way. The world is going to end, you fucker. I will not give up this sidewalk with my love.

He steps a little to the side. He gives way.

Originally published in Omni, October 2017.

Intervention

Kelly Robson

When I was fifty-seven, I did the unthinkable. I became a crèche manager.

On Luna, crèche work kills your social capital, but I didn’t care. Not at first. My long-time love had been crushed to death in a bot malfunction in Luna’s main mulching plant. I was just trying to find a reason to keep breathing.

I found a crusty centenarian who’d outlived most of her cohort and asked for her advice. She said there was no better medicine for grief than children, so I found a crèche tucked away behind a water printing plant and signed on as a cuddler. That’s where I caught the baby bug.

When my friends found out, the norming started right away.

“You’re getting a little tubby there, Jules,” Ivan would say, unzipping my jacket and reaching inside to pat my stomach. “Got a little parasite incubating?”

I expected this kind of attitude from Ivan. Ringleader, team captain, alpha of alphas. From him, I could laugh it off. But then my closest friends started in.

Beryl’s pretty face soured in disgust every time she saw me. “I can smell the freeloader on you,” she’d say, pretending to see body fluids on my perfectly clean clothing. “Have the decency to shower and change after your shift.”

Even that wasn’t so bad. But then Robin began avoiding me and ignoring my pings. We’d been each other’s first lovers, best friends since forever, and suddenly I didn’t exist. That’s how extreme the prejudice is on Luna.

Finally, on my birthday, they threw me a surprise party. Everyone wore diapers and crawled around in a violent mockery of childhood. When I complained, they accused me of being broody.

I wish I could say I ignored their razzing, but my friends were my whole world. I dropped crèche work. My secret plan was to leave Luna, find a hab where working with kids wasn’t social death, but I kept putting it off. Then I blinked, and ten years had passed.

Enough delay. I jumped trans to Eros station, engaged a recruiter, and was settling into my new life on Ricochet within a month.

I never answered my friends’ pings. As far as Ivan, Beryl, Robin, and the rest knew, I fell off the face of the moon. And that’s the way I wanted it.

Ricochet is one of the asteroid-based habs that travel the inner system using gravity assist to boost speed in tiny increments. As a wandering hab, we have no fixed astronomical events or planetary seasonality to mark the passage of time, so boosts are a big deal for us—the equivalent of New Year’s on Earth or the Sol Belt flare cycle.

On our most recent encounter with Mars, my third and final crèche—the Jewel Box—were twelve years old. We hadn’t had a boost since the kids were six, so my team and I worked hard to make it special, throwing parties, making presents, planning excursions. We even suited up and took the kids to the outside of our hab, exploring Asteroid Iris’s vast, pockmarked surface roofed by nothing less than the universe itself, in all its spangled glory. We played around out there until Mars climbed over the horizon and showed the Jewel Box its great face for the first time, so huge and close it seemed we could reach up into its milky skim of atmosphere.

When the boost itself finally happened, we were all exhausted. All the kids and cuddlers lounged in the rumpus room, clipped into our safety harnesses, nestled on mats and cushions or tucked into the wall netting. Yawning, droopy-eyed, even dozing. But when the hab began to shift underneath us, we all sprang alert.

Trésor scooted to my side and ducked his head under my elbow.

“You doing okay, buddy?” I asked him in a low voice.

He nodded. I kissed the top of his head and checked his harness.

I wasn’t the only adult with a little primate soaking up my body heat. Diamant used Blanche like a climbing frame, standing on her thighs, gripping her hands, and leaning back into the increasing force of the boost. Opale had coaxed her favorite cuddler Mykelti up into the ceiling netting. They both dangled by their knees, the better to feel the acceleration. Little Rubis was holding tight to Engku’s and Megat’s hands, while on the other side of the room, Safir and Émeraude clowned around, competing for Long Meng’s attention.

I was supposed to be on damage control, but I passed the safety workflow over to Bruce. When we hit maximum acceleration, Tré was clinging to me with all his strength.

The kids’ bioms were stacked in the corner of my eye. All their hormone graphs showed stress indicators. Tré’s levels were higher than the rest, but that wasn’t strange. When your hab is somersaulting behind a planet, bleeding off its orbital energy, your whole world turns into a carnival ride. Some people like it better than others.

I tightened my arms around Tré’s ribs, holding tight as the room turned sideways.

“Everything’s fine,” I murmured in his ear. “Ricochet was designed for this kind of maneuver.”

Our safety harnesses held us tight to the wall netting. Below, Safir and Émeraude climbed up the floor, laughing and hooting. Long Meng tossed pillows at them.

Tré gripped my thumb, yanking as if it were a joystick with the power to tame the room’s spin. Then he shot me a live feed showing Ricochet’s chief astronautics officer, a dark-skinned, silver-haired woman with protective bubbles fastened over her eyes.

“Who’s that?” I asked, pretending I didn’t know.

“Vijayalakshmi,” Tré answered. “If anything goes wrong, she’ll fix it.”

“Have you met her?” I knew very well he had, but asking questions is an excellent calming technique.

“Yeah, lots of times.” He flashed a pointer at the astronaut’s mirrored eye coverings. “Is she sick?”

“Might be cataracts. That’s a normal age-related condition. What’s worrying you?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Why don’t you ask Long Meng about it?”

Long Meng was the Jewel Box’s physician. Ricochet-raised, with a facial deformity that thrust her mandible severely forward. As an adult, once bone ossification had completed, she had rejected the cosmetic surgery that could have normalized her jaw.

“Not all interventions are worthwhile,” she’d told me once. “I wouldn’t feel like myself with a new face.”

As a pediatric specialist, Long Meng was responsible for the health and development of twenty crèches, but we were her favorite. She’d decided to celebrate the boost with us. At that moment, she was dangling from the floor with Safir and Émeraude, tickling their tummies and howling with laughter.

I tried to mitigate Tré’s distress with good, old-fashioned cuddle and chat. I showed him feeds from the biodiversity preserve, where the netted megafauna floated in mid-air, riding out the boost in safety, legs dangling. One big cat groomed itself as it floated, licking one huge paw and wiping down its whiskers with an air of unconcern.

Once the boost was complete and we were back to our normal gravity regime, Tré’s indicators quickly normalized. The kids ran up to the garden to check out the damage. I followed slowly, leaning on my cane. One of the bots had malfunctioned and lost stability, destroying several rows of terraced seating in the open air auditorium just next to our patch. The kids all thought that was pretty funny. Tré seemed perfectly fine, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d failed him somehow.

The Jewel Box didn’t visit Mars. Martian habs are popular, their excursion contracts highly priced. The kids put in a few bids but didn’t have the credits to win.

“Next boost,” I told them. “Venus in four years. Then Earth.”

I didn’t mention Luna. I’d done my best to forget it even existed. Easy to do. Ricochet has almost no social or trade ties with Earth’s moon. Our main economic sector is human reproduction and development—artificial wombs, zygote husbandry, natal decanting, every bit of art and science that turns a mass of undifferentiated cells into a healthy young adult. Luna’s crèche system collapsed completely not long after I left. Serves them right.

I’m a centenarian, facing my last decade or two. I may look serene and wise, but I’ve never gotten over being the butt of my old friends’ jokes.

Maybe I’ve always been immature. It would explain a lot.

Four years passed with the usual small dramas. The Jewel Box grew in body and mind, stretching into young adults of sixteen. All six—Diamant, Émeraude, Trésor, Opale, Safir, and Rubis—hit their benchmarks erratically and inconsistently, which made me proud. Kids are supposed to be odd little individuals. We’re not raising robots, after all.

As Ricochet approached, the Venusian habs began peppering us with proposals. Recreation opportunities, educational seminars, sightseeing trips, arts festivals, sporting tournaments—all on reasonable trade terms. Venus wanted us to visit, fall in love, stay. They’d been losing population to Mars for years. The brain drain was getting critical.

The Jewel Box decided to bid on a three-day excursion. Sightseeing with a focus on natural geology, including active volcanism. For the first time in their lives, they’d experience real, unaugmented planetary gravity instead of Ricochet’s one-point-zero cobbled together by centripetal force and a Steffof field.

While the kids were lounging around the rumpus room, arguing over how many credits to sink into the bid, Long Meng pinged me.

You and I should send a proposal to the Venusian crèches, she whispered. A master class or something. Something so tasty they can’t resist.

Why? Are you trying to pad your billable hours?

She gave me a toothy grin. I want a vacation. Wouldn’t it be fun to get Venus to fund it?

Long Meng and I had collaborated before, when our numbers had come up for board positions on the crèche governance authority. Nine miserable months co-authoring policy memos, revising the crèche management best practices guide, and presenting at skills development seminars. All on top of our regular responsibilities. Against the odds, our friendship survived the bureaucracy.

We spent a few hours cooking up a seminar to tempt the on-planet crèche specialists and fired it off to a bunch of Venusian booking agents. We called it ‘Attachment and Self-regulation in Theory and Practice: Approaches to Promoting Emotional Independence in the Crèche-raised Child.’ Sound dry? Not a bit. The Venusians gobbled it up.

I shot the finalized syllabus to our chosen booking agent, then escorted the Jewel Box to their open-air climbing lab. I turned them over to their instructor and settled onto my usual bench under a tall oak. Diamant took the lead position up the cliff, as usual. By the time they’d completed the first pitch, all three seminars were filled.

The agent is asking for more sessions, I whispered to Long Meng. What do you think?

“No way.” Long Meng’s voice rang out, startling me. As I pinged her location, her lanky form appeared in the distant aspen grove.

“This is a vacation,” she shouted. “If I wanted to pack my billable hours, I’d volunteer for another board position.”

I shuddered. Agreed.

She jogged over and climbed onto the bench beside me, sitting on the backrest with her feet on the seat. “Plus, you haven’t been off this rock in twenty years,” she added, plucking a leaf from the overhead bough.

“I said okay, Long Meng.”

We watched the kids as they moved with confidence and ease over the gleaming, pyrite-inflected cliff face. Big, bulky Diamant didn’t look like a climber but was obsessed with the sport. The other five had gradually been infected by their crèche-mate’s passion.

Long Meng and I waved to the kids as they settled in for a rest mid-route. Then she turned to me. “What do you want to see on-planet? Have you made a wish list yet?”

“I’ve been to Venus. It’s not that special.”

She laughed, a great, good-natured, wide-mouthed guffaw. “Nothing can compare to Luna, can it, Jules?”

“Don’t say that word.”

“Luna? Okay. What’s better than Venus? Earth?”

“Earth doesn’t smell right.”

“The Sol belt?”

“Never been there.”

“What then?”

“This is nice.” I waved at the groves of trees surrounding the cliff. Overhead, the plasma core that formed the backbone of our hab was just shifting its visible spectrum into twilight. Mellow light filtered through the leaves. Teenage laughter echoed off the cliff, and in the distance, the steady droning wail of a fussy newborn.

I pulled up the surrounding camera feeds and located the newborn. A tired-looking cuddler carried the baby in an over-shoulder sling, patting its bottom rhythmically as they strolled down a sunflower-lined path. I pinged the baby’s biom. Three weeks old. Chronic gas and reflux unresponsive to every intervention strategy. Nothing to do but wait for the child to grow out of it.

The kids summited, waved to us, then began rappelling back down. Long Meng and I met them at the base.

“Em, how’s your finger?” Long Meng asked.

“Good.” Émeraude bounced off the last ledge and slipped to the ground, wave of pink hair flapping. “Better than good.”

“Let’s see, then.”

Émeraude unclipped and offered the doctor their hand. They were a kid with only two modes: all-out or flatline. A few months back, they’d injured themselves cranking on a crimp, completely bowstringing the flexor tendon.

Long Meng launched into an explanation of annular pulley repair strategies and recovery times. I tried to listen but I was tired. My hips ached, my back ached, my limbs rotated on joints gritty with age. In truth, I didn’t want to go to Venus. The kids had won their bid, and with them off-hab, staying home would have been a good rest. But Long Meng’s friendship was important, and making her happy was worth a little effort.

Long Meng and I accompanied the Jewel Box down Venus’s umbilical, through the high sulphuric acid clouds to the elevator’s base deep in the planet’s mantle. When we entered the busy central transit hub, with its domed ceiling and slick, speedy slideways, the kids began making faces.

“This place stinks,” said Diamante.

“Yeah, smells like piss,” said Rubis.

Tré looked worried. “Do they have diseases here or something?”

Opale slapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m going to be sick. Is it the smell or the gravity?”

A quick glance at Opale’s biom showed she was perfectly fine. All six kids were. Time for a classic crèche manager-style social intervention.

If you can’t be polite around the locals, I whispered, knocking my cane on the ground for emphasis. I’ll shoot you right back up the elevator.

If you send us home, do we get our credits back? Émeraude asked, yawning.

No. You’d be penalized for non-completion of contract.

I posted a leaderboard for good behavior. Then I told them Venusians were especially gossipy, and if word got out they’d bad-mouthed the planet, they’d get nothing but dirty looks for the whole trip.

A bald lie. Venus is no more gossipy than most habs. But it nurses a significant anti-crèche prejudice. Not as extreme as Luna, but still. Ricochet kids were used to being loved by everyone. On Venus, they would get attitude just for existing. I wanted to offer a convenient explanation for the chilly reception from the locals.

The group of us rode the slideway to Vanavara portway, where Engku, Megat, and Bruce were waiting. Under the towering archway, I hugged and kissed the kids, told them to have lots of fun, and waved at their retreating backs. Then Long Meng and I were on our own.

She took my arm and steered us into Vanavara’s passeggiata, a social stroll that wound through the hab like a pedestrian river. We drifted with the flow, joining the people-watching crowd, seeing and being seen.

The hab had spectacular sculpture gardens and fountains, and Venus’s point-nine-odd gravity was a relief on my knees and hips, but the kids weren’t wrong about the stench. Vanavara smelled like oily vinaigrette over half-rotted lettuce leaves, with an animal undercurrent reminiscent of hormonal teenagers on a cleanliness strike. As we walked, the stench surged and faded, then resurfaced again.

We ducked into a kiosk where a lone chef roasted kebabs over an open flame. We sat at the counter, drinking sparkling wine and watching her prepare meal packages for bot delivery.

“What’s wrong with the air scrubbers here?” Long Meng asked the chef.

“Unstable population,” she answered. “We don’t have enough civil engineers to handle the optimization workload. If you know any nuts-and-bolts types, tell them to come to Vanavara. The bank will kiss them all over.”

She served us grilled protein on disks of crispy starch topped with charred vegetable and heaped with garlicky sauce, followed by finger-sized blossoms with tender, fleshy petals over a crisp honeycomb core. When we rejoined the throng, we shot the chef a pair of big, bright public valentines on slow decay, visible to everyone passing by. The chef ran after us with two tulip-shaped bulbs of amaro.

“Enjoy your stay,” she said, handing us the bulbs. “We’re developing a terrific fresh food culture here. You’ll love it.”

In response to the population downswing, Venus’s habs had started accepting all kinds of marginal business proposals. Artists. Innovators. Experimenters. Lose a ventilation engineer; gain a chef. Lose a surgeon; gain a puppeteer. With the chefs and puppeteers come all the people who want to live in a hab with chefs and puppeteers, and are willing to put up with a little stench to get it. Eventually, the hab’s fortunes turn around. Population starts flowing back, attracted by the burgeoning quality of life. Engineers and surgeons return, and the chefs and puppeteers move on to the next proposal-friendly hab. Basic human dynamics.

Long Meng sucked the last drop of amaro from her bulb and then tossed it to a disposal bot.

“First night of vacation.” She gave me a wicked grin. “Want to get drunk?”

When I rolled out of my sleep stack in the morning, I was puffy and stiff. My hair stood in untamable clumps. The pouches under my eyes shone an alarming purple, and my wrinkle inventory had doubled. My tongue tasted like garlic sauce. But as long as nobody else could smell it, I wasn’t too concerned. As for the rest, I’d earned every age marker.

When Long Meng finally cracked her stack, she was pressed and perky, wrapped in a crisp fuchsia robe. A filmy teal scarf drifted under her thrusting jawline.

“Let’s teach these Venusians how to raise kids,” she said.

In response to demand, the booking agency had upgraded us to a larger auditorium. The moment we hit the stage, I forgot all my aches and pains. Doctor Footlights, they call it. Performing in front of two thousand strangers produces a lot of adrenaline.

We were a good pair. Long Meng dynamic and engaging, lunging around the stage like a born performer. Me, I was her foil. A grave, wise oldster with fifty years of crèche work under my belt.

Much of our seminar was inspirational. Crèche work is relentless no matter where you practice it, and on Venus it brings negative social status. A little cheerleading goes a long way. We slotted our specialty content in throughout the program, introducing the concepts in the introductory material, building audience confidence by reinforcing what they already knew, then hit them between the eyes with the latest developments in Ricochet’s proprietary cognitive theory and emotional development modelling. We blew their minds, then backed away from the hard stuff and returned to cheerleading.

“What’s the worst part of crèche work, Jules?” Long Meng asked as our program concluded, her scarf waving in the citrus-scented breeze from the ventilation.

“There are no bad parts,” I said drily. “Each and every day is unmitigated joy.”

The audience laughed harder than the joke deserved. I waited for the noise to die down, and mined the silence for a few lingering moments before continuing.

“Our children venture out of the crèche as young adults, ready to form new emotional ties wherever they go. The future is in their hands, an unending medium for them to shape with their ambition and passion. Our crèche work lifts them up and holds them high, all their lives. That’s the best part.”

I held my cane to my heart with both hands.

“The worst part is,” I said, “if we do our jobs right, those kids leave the crèche and never think about us again.”

We left them with a tear in every eye. The audience ran back to their crèches knowing they were doing the most important work in the universe, and open to the possibility of doing it even better.

After our second seminar, on a recommendation from the kebab chef, we blew our credits in a restaurant high up in Vanavara’s atrium. Live food raised, prepared, and served by hand; nothing extruded or bulbed. And no bots, except for the occasional hygiene sweeper.

Long Meng cut into a lobster carapace with a pair of hand shears. “Have you ever noticed how intently people listen to you?”

“Most of the time the kids just pretend to listen.”

“Not kids. Adults.”

She served me a morsel of claw meat, perfectly molded by the creature’s shell. I dredged it in green sauce and popped it in my mouth. Sweet peppers buzzed my sinuses.

“You’re a great leader, Jules.”

“At my age, I should be. I’ve had lots of practice telling people what to do.”

“Exactly,” she said through a mouthful of lobster. “So what are you going to do when the Jewel Box leaves the crèche?”

I lifted my flute of pale green wine and leaned back, gazing through the window at my elbow into the depths of the atrium. I’d been expecting this question for a few years but didn’t expect it from Long Meng. How could someone so young understand the sorrows of the old?

“If you don’t want to talk about it, I’ll shut up,” she added quickly. “But I have some ideas. Do you want to hear them?”

On the atrium floor far below, groups of pedestrians were just smudges, no individuals distinguishable at all. I turned back to the table but kept my eyes on my food.

“Okay, go ahead.”

“A hab consortium is soliciting proposals to rebuild their failed crèche system,” she said, voice eager. “I want to recruit a team. You’d be project advisor. Top position, big picture stuff. I’ll be project lead and do all the grunt work.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “It’s Luna.”

Long Meng nodded. I kept a close eye on my blood pressure indicators. Deep breaths and a sip of water kept the numbers out of the red zone.

“I suppose you’d want me to liaise with Luna’s civic apparatus too.” I kept my voice flat.

“That would be ideal.” She slapped the table with both palms and grinned. “With a native Lunite at the helm, we’d win for sure.”

Long Meng was so busy bubbling with ideas and ambition as she told me her plans, she didn’t notice my fierce scowl. She probably didn’t even taste her luxurious meal. As for me, I enjoyed every bite, right down to the last crumb of my flaky cardamom-chocolate dessert. Then I pushed back my chair and grabbed my cane.

“There’s only one problem, Long Meng,” I said. “Luna doesn’t deserve crèches.”

“Deserve doesn’t really—”

I cut her off. “Luna doesn’t deserve a population.”

She looked confused. “But it has a population, so—”

“Luna deserves to die,” I snapped. I stumped away, leaving her at the table, her jaw hanging in shock.

Halfway through our third and final seminar, in the middle of introducing Ricochet’s proprietary never-fail methods for raising kids, I got an emergency ping from Bruce.

Tré’s abandoned the tour. He’s run off.

I faked a coughing fit and lunged toward the water bulbs at the back of the stage. Turned my back on two thousand pairs of eyes, and tried to collect myself as I scanned Tré’s biom. His stress indicators were highly elevated. The other five members of the Jewel Box were anxious too.

Do you have eyes on him?

Of course. Bruce shot me a bookmark.

Three separate cameras showed Tré was alone, playing his favorite pattern-matching game while coasting along a nearly deserted slideway. Metadata indicated his location on an express connector between Coacalco and Eaton habs.

He looked stunned, as if surprised by his own daring. Small, under the high arches of the slideway tunnel. And thin—his bony shoulder blades tented the light cloth of his tunic.

Coacalco has a bot shadowing him. Do we want them to intercept?

I zoomed in on Tré’s face, as if I could read his thoughts as easily as his physiology. He’d never been particularly assertive or self-willed, never one to challenge his crèche mates or lead them in new directions. But kids will surprise you.

Tell them to stay back. Ping a personal security firm to monitor him. Go on with your tour. And try not to worry.

Are you sure?

I wasn’t sure, not at all. My stress indicators were circling the planet. Every primal urge screamed for the bot to wrap itself around the boy and haul him back to Bruce. But I wasn’t going to slap down a sixteen-year-old kid for acting on his own initiative, especially since this was practically the first time he’d shown any.

Looks like Tré has something to do, I whispered. Let’s let him follow through.

I returned to my chair. Tried to focus on the curriculum but couldn’t concentrate. Long Meng could only do so much to fill the gap. The audience became restless, shifting in their seats, murmuring to each other. Many stopped paying attention. Right up in the front row, three golden-haired, rainbow-smocked Venusians were blanked out, completely immersed in their feeds.

Long Meng was getting frantic, trying to distract two thousand people from the gaping hole on the stage that was her friend Jules. I picked up my cane, stood, and calmly tipped my chair. It hit the stage floor with a crash. Long Meng jumped. Every head swiveled.

“I apologize for the dramatics,” I said, “but earlier, you all noticed me blanking out. I want to explain.”

I limped to the front of the stage, unsteady despite my cane. I wear a stability belt, but try not to rely on it too much. Old age has exacerbated my natural tendency for a weak core, and using the belt too much just makes me frailer. But my legs wouldn’t stop shaking. I dialed up the balance support.

“What just happened illustrates an important point about crèche work.” I attached my cane’s cling-point to the stage floor and leaned on it with both hands as I scanned the audience. “Our mistakes can ruin lives. No other profession carries such a vast potential for screwing up.”

“That’s not true.” Long Meng’s eyes glinted in the stage lights, clearly relieved I’d stepped back up to the job. “Engineering disciplines carry quite the disaster potential. Surgery certainly does. Psychology and pharmacology. Applied astrophysics. I could go on.” She grinned. “Really, Jules. Nearly every profession is dangerous.”

I grimaced and dismissed her point.

“Doctors’ decisions are supported by ethics panels and case reviews. Engineers run simulation models and have their work vetted by peers before taking any real-world risks. But in a crèche, we make a hundred decisions a day that affect human development. Sometimes a hundred an hour.”

“Okay, but are every last one of those decisions so important?”

I gestured to one of the rainbow-clad front-row Venusians. “What do you think? Are your decisions important?”

A camera bug zipped down to capture her answer for the seminar’s shared feed. The Venusian licked her lips nervously and shifted to the edge of her seat.

“Some decisions are,” she said in a high, tentative voice. “You can never know which.”

“That’s right. You never know.” I thanked her and rejoined Long Meng in the middle of the stage. “Crèche workers take on huge responsibility. We assume all the risk, with zero certainty. No other profession accepts those terms. So why do we do this job?”

“Someone has to?” said Long Meng. Laughter percolated across the auditorium.

“Why us, though?” I said. “What’s wrong with us?”

More laughs. I rapped my cane on the floor.

“My current crèche is a sixteen-year sixsome. Well integrated, good morale. Distressingly sporty. They keep me running.” The audience chuckled. “They’re on a geography tour somewhere on the other side of Venus. A few minutes ago, one of my kids ran off. Right now, he’s coasting down one of your intra-hab slideways and blocking our pings.”

Silence. I’d captured every eye; all their attention was mine.

I fired the public slideway feed onto the stage. Tré’s figure loomed four meters high. His foot was kicked back against the slideway’s bumper in an attitude of nonchalance, but it was just a pose. His gaze was wide and unblinking, the whites of his eyes fully visible.

“Did he run away because of something one of us said? Or did? Or neglected to do? Did it happen today, yesterday, or ten days ago? Maybe it has nothing to do with us at all, but some private urge from the kid’s own heart. He might be suffering acutely right now, or maybe he’s enjoying the excitement. The adrenaline and cortisol footprints look the same.”

I clenched my gnarled, age-spotted hand to my chest, pulling at the fabric of my shirt.

“But I’m suffering. My heart feels like it could rip right out of my chest because this child has put himself in danger.” I patted the wrinkled fabric back into place. “Mild danger. Venus is no Luna.”

Nervous laughter from the crowd. Long Meng hovered at my side.

“Crèche work is like no other human endeavor,” I said. “Nothing else offers such potential for failure, sorrow, and loss. But no work is as important. You all know that, or you wouldn’t be here.”

Long Meng squeezed my shoulder. I patted her hand. “Raising children is only for true believers.”

Not long after our seminar ended, Tré boarded Venus’s circum-planetary chuteway and chose a pod headed for Vanavara. The pod’s public feed showed five other passengers: a middle-aged threesome who weren’t interested in anything but each other, a halo-haired young adult escorting a floating tank of live eels, and a broad-shouldered brawler with deeply scarred forearms.

Tré waited for the other passengers to sit, then settled himself into a corner seat. I pinged him. No answer.

“We should have had him intercepted,” I said.

Long Meng and I sat in the back of the auditorium. A choir group had taken over the stage. Bots were attempting to set up risers, but the singers were milling around, blocking their progress.

“He’ll be okay.” Long Meng squeezed my knee. “Less than five hours to Vanavara. None of the passengers are going to do anything to him.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Nobody would risk it. Venus has strict penalties for physical violence.”

“Is that the worst thing you can think of?” I flashed a pointer at the brawler. “One conversation with that one in a bad mood could do lifelong damage to anyone, much less a kid.”

We watched the feed in silence. At first the others kept to themselves, but then the brawler stood, pulled down a privacy veil, and sauntered over to sit beside Tré.

“Oh no,” I moaned.

I zoomed in on Tré’s face. With the veil in place, I couldn’t see or hear the brawler. All I could do was watch the kid’s eyes flicker from the window to the brawler and back, monitor his stress indicators, and try to read his body language. Never in my life have I been less equipped to make a professional judgement about a kid’s state of mind. My mind boiled with paranoia.

After about ten minutes—an eternity—the brawler returned to their seat.

“It’s fine,” said Long Meng. “He’ll be with us soon.”

Long Meng and I met Tré at the chuteway dock. It was late. He looked tired, rumpled, and more than a little sulky.

“Venus is stupid,” he said.

“That’s ridiculous, a planet can’t be stupid,” Long Meng snapped. She was tired, and hadn’t planned on spending the last night of her vacation waiting in a transit hub.

Let me handle this, I whispered.

“Are you okay? Did anything happen in the pod?” I tried to sound calm as I led him to the slideway.

He shrugged. “Not really. This oldster was telling me how great his hab is. Sounded like a hole.”

I nearly collapsed with relief.

“Okay, good,” I said. “We were worried about you. Why did you leave the group?”

“I didn’t realize it would take so long to get anywhere,” Tré said.

“That’s not an answer. Why did you run off?”

“I don’t know.” The kid pretended to yawn—one of the Jewel Box’s clearest tells for lying. “Venus is boring. We should’ve saved our credits.”

“What does that mean?”

“Everybody else was happy looking at rocks. Not me. I wanted to get some value out of this trip.”

“So you jumped a slideway?”

“Uh huh.” Tré pulled a protein snack out of his pocket and stuffed it in his mouth. “I was just bored. And I’m sorry. Okay?”

“Okay.” I fired up the leaderboard and zeroed out Tré’s score. “You’re on a short leash until we get home.”

We got the kid a sleep stack near ours, then Long Meng and I had a drink in the grubby travelers’ lounge downstairs.

“How are you going to find out why he left?” asked Long Meng. “Pull his feeds? Form a damage mitigation team? Plan an intervention?”

I picked at the fabric on the arm of my chair. The plush nap repaired itself as I dragged a ragged thumbnail along the armrest.

“If I did, Tré would learn he can’t make a simple mistake without someone jumping down his throat. He might shrug off the psychological effects, or it could inflict long-term damage.”

“Right. Like you said in the seminar. You can’t know.”

We finished our drinks and Long Meng helped me to my feet. I hung my cane from my forearm and tucked both hands into the crease of her elbow. We slowly climbed upstairs. I could have pinged a physical assistance bot, but my hands were cold, and my friend’s arm was warm.

“Best to let this go,” I said. “Tré’s already a cautious kid. I won’t punish him for taking a risk.”

“I might, if only for making me worry. I guess I’ll never be a crèche manager.” She grinned.

“And yet you want to go to Luna and build a new crèche system.”

Long Meng’s smile vanished. “I shouldn’t have sprung that on you, Jules.”

In the morning, the two young people rose bright and cheery. I was aching and bleary but put on a serene face. We had just enough time to catch a concert before heading up the umbilical to our shuttle home. We made our way to the atrium, where Tré boggled at the soaring views, packed slideways, clustered performance and game surfaces, fountains, and gardens. The air sparkled with nectar and spices, and underneath, a thick, oily human funk.

We boarded a riser headed to Vanavara’s orchestral pits. A kind Venusian offered me a seat with a smile. I thanked him, adding, “That would never happen on Luna.”

I drew Long Meng close as we spiraled toward the atrium floor.

Just forget about the proposal, I whispered. The moon is a lost cause.

A little more than a year later, Ricochet was on approach for Earth. The Jewel Box were nearly ready to leave the crèche. Bruce and the rest of my team were planning to start a new one, and they warmly assured me I’d always be welcome to visit. I tried not to weep about it. Instead, I began spending several hours a day helping provide round-the-clock cuddles to a newborn with hydrocephalus.

As far as I knew, Long Meng had given up the Luna idea. Then she cornered me in the dim-lit nursery and burst my bubble.

She quietly slid a stool over to my rocker, cast a professional eye over the cerebrospinal fluid-exchange membrane clipped to the baby’s ear, and whispered, We made the short list.

That’s great, I replied, my cheek pressed to the infant’s warm, velvety scalp.

I had no idea what she was referring to, and at that moment I didn’t care. The scent of a baby’s head is practically narcotic, and no victory can compare with having coaxed a sick child into restful sleep.

It means we have to go to Luna for a presentation and interview.

Realization dawned slowly. Luna? I’m not going to Luna.

Not you, Jules. Me and my team. I thought you should hear before the whole hab starts talking.

I concentrated on keeping my rocking rhythm steady before answering. I thought you’d given that up.

She put a gentle hand on my knee. I know. You told me not to pursue it and I considered your advice. But it’s important, Jules. Luna will restart its crèche program one way or another. We can make sure they do it right.

I fixed my gaze pointedly on her prognathous jaw. You don’t know what it’s like there. They’ll roast you alive just for looking different.

Maybe. But I have to try.

She patted my knee and left. I stayed in the rocker long past hand-over time, resting my cheek against that precious head.

Seventy years ago I’d done the same, in a crèche crowded into a repurposed suite of offices behind one of Luna’s water printing plants. I’d walked through the door broken and grieving, certain the world had been drained of hope and joy. Then someone put a baby in my arms. Just a few hours old, squirming with life, arms reaching for the future.

Was there any difference between the freshly detanked newborn on Luna and the sick baby I held on that rocker? No. The embryos gestating in Ricochet’s superbly optimized banks of artificial wombs were no different from the ones Luna would grow in whatever gestation tech they inevitably cobbled together.

But as I continued to think about it, I realized there was a difference, and it was important. The ones on Luna deserved better than they would get. And I could do something about it.

First, I had my hair sheared into an ear-exposing brush precise to the millimeter. The tech wielding the clippers tried to talk me out of it.

“Do you realize this will have to be trimmed every twenty days?”

“I used to wear my hair like this when I was young,” I reassured him. He rolled his eyes and cut my hair like I asked.

I changed my comfortable smock for a lunar grey trouser-suit with enough padding to camouflage my age-slumped shoulders. My cling-pointed cane went into the mulch, exchanged for a glossy black model. Its silver point rapped the floor, announcing my progress toward Long Meng’s studio.

The noise turned heads all down the corridor. Long Meng popped out of her doorway, but she didn’t recognize me until I pushed past her and settled onto her sofa with a sigh.

“Are you still looking for a project advisor?” I asked.

She grinned. “Luna won’t know what hit it.”

Back in the rumpus room, Tré was the only kid to comment on my haircut.

“You look like a villain from one of those old Follywood dramas Bruce likes.”

“Hollywood,” I corrected. “Yes, that’s the point.”

“What’s the point in looking like a gangland mobber?”

“Mobster.” I ran my palm over the brush. “Is that what I look like?”

“Kinda. Is it because of us?”

I frowned, not understanding. He pulled his ponytail over his shoulder and eyed it speculatively.

“Are you trying to look tough so we won’t worry about you after we leave?”

That’s the thing about kids. The conversations suddenly swerve and hit you in the back of the head.

“Whoa,” I said. “I’m totally fine.”

“I know, I know. You’ve been running crèches forever. But we’re the last because you’re so old. Right? It’s got to be hard.”

“A little,” I admitted. “But you’ve got other things to think about. Big, exciting decisions to make.”

“I don’t think I’m leaving the crèche. I’m delayed.”

I tried to keep from smiling. Tré was nothing of the sort. He’d grown into a gangly young man with long arms, bony wrists, and a haze of silky black beard on his square jaw. I could recite the dates of his developmental benchmarks from memory, and there was nothing delayed about them.

“That’s fine,” I said. “You don’t have to leave until you’re ready.”

“A year. Maybe two. At least.”

“Okay, Tré. Your decision.”

I wasn’t worried. It’s natural to feel ambivalent about taking the first step into adulthood. If Tré found it easier to tell himself he wasn’t leaving, so be it. As soon as his crèchemates started moving on, Tré would follow.

Our proximity to Earth gave Long Meng’s proposal a huge advantage. We could travel to Luna, give our presentation live, and be back home for the boost.

Long Meng and I spent a hundred billable hours refining our presentation materials. For the first time in our friendship, our communication styles clashed.

“I don’t like the authoritarian gleam in your eye, Jules,” she told me after a particularly heated argument. “It’s almost as though you’re enjoying bossing me around.”

She wasn’t wrong. Ricochet’s social conventions require you to hold in conversational aggression. Letting go was fun. But I had an ulterior motive.

“This is the way people talk on Luna. If you don’t like it, you should shitcan the proposal.”

She didn’t take the dare. But she reported behavioral changes to my geriatric specialist. I didn’t mind. It was sweet, her being so worried about me. I decided to give her full access to my biom, so she could check if she thought I was having a stroke or something. I’m in okay health for my extreme age, but she was a paediatrician, not a gerontologist. What she saw scared her. She got solicitous. Gallant, even, bringing me bulbs of tea and snacks to keep my glucose levels steady.

Luna’s ports won’t accommodate foreign vehicles, and their landers use a chemical propellant so toxic Ricochet won’t let them anywhere near our landing bays, so we had to shuttle to Luna in stages. As we glided over the moon’s surface, its web of tunnels and domes sparkled in the full glare of the sun. The pattern of the habs hadn’t changed. I could still name them—Surgut, Sklad, Nadym, Purovsk, Olenyok . . .

Long Meng latched onto my arm as the hatch creaked open. I wrenched away and straightened my jacket.

You can’t do that here, I whispered. Self-sufficiency is everything on Luna, remember?

I marched ahead of Long Meng as if I were leading an army. In the light lunar gravity, I didn’t need my cane, so I used its heavy silver head to whack the walls. Hitting something felt good. I worked up a head of steam so hot I could have sterilized those corridors. If I had to come home—home, what a word for a place like Luna!—I’d do it on my own terms.

The client team had arranged to meet us in a dinky little media suite overlooking the hockey arena in Sklad. A game had just finished, and we had to force our way against the departing crowd. My cane came in handy. I brandished it like a weapon, signaling my intent to break the jaw of anyone who got too close.

In the media suite, ten hab reps clustered around the project principal. Overhead circled a battery of old, out-of-date cameras that buzzed and fluttered annoyingly. At the front of the room, two chairs waited for Long Meng and me. Behind us arced a glistening expanse of crystal window framing the rink, where grooming bots were busy scraping blood off the ice. Over the arena loomed the famous profile of Mons Hadley, huge, cold, stark, its bleak face the same mid-tone grey as my suit.

Don’t smile, I reminded Long Meng as she stood to begin the presentation.

The audience didn’t deserve the verve and panache Long Meng put into presenting our project phases, alternative scenarios, and volume ramping. Meanwhile, I scanned the reps’ faces, counting flickers in their attention and recording them on a leaderboard. We had forty minutes in total, but less than twenty to make an impression before the reps’ decisions locked in.

Twelve minutes in, Long Meng was introducing the strategies for professional development, governance, and ethics oversight. Half the reps were still staring at her face as if they’d never seen a congenital hyperformation before. The other half were bored but still making an effort to pay attention. But not for much longer.

“Based on the average trajectories of other start-up crèche programs,” Long Meng said, gesturing at the swirling graphics that hung in the air, “Luna should run at full capacity within six social generations, or thirty standard years.”

I’m cutting in, I whispered. I whacked the head of my cane on the floor and stood, stability belt on maximum and belligerence oozing from my every pore.

“You won’t get anywhere near that far,” I growled. “You’ll never get past the starting gate.”

“That’s a provocative statement,” said the principal. She was in her sixties, short and tough, with ropey veins webbing her bony forearms. “Would you care to elaborate?”

I paced in front of their table, like a barrister in one of Bruce’s old courtroom dramas. I made eye contact with each of the reps in turn, then leaned over the table to address the project principal directly.

“Crèche programs are part of a hab’s social fabric. They don’t exist in isolation. But Luna doesn’t want kids around. You barely tolerate young adults. You want to stop the brain drain but you won’t give up anything for crèches—not hab space, not billable hours, and especially not your prejudices. If you want a healthy crèche system, Luna will have to make some changes.”

I gave the principal an evil grin, adding, “I don’t think you can.”

“I do,” Long Meng interjected. “I think you can change.”

“You don’t know Luna like I do,” I told her.

I fired our financial proposal at the reps. “Ricochet will design your new system. You’ll find the trade terms extremely reasonable. When the design is complete, we’ll provide on-the-ground teams to execute the project phases. Those terms are slightly less reasonable. Finally, we’ll give you a project executive headed by Long Meng.” I smiled. “Her billable rate isn’t reasonable at all, but she’s worth every credit.”

“And you?” asked the principal.

“That’s the best part.” I slapped the cane in my palm. “I’m the gatekeeper. To go anywhere, you have to get past me.”

The principal sat back abruptly, jaw clenched, chin raised. My belligerence had finally made an impact. The reps were on the edges of their seats. I had them both repelled and fascinated. They weren’t sure whether to start screaming or elect me to Luna’s board of governors.

“How long have I got to live, Long Meng? Fifteen years? Twenty?”

“Something like that,” she said.

“Let’s say fifteen. I’m old. I’m highly experienced. You can’t afford me. But if you award Ricochet this contract, I’ll move back to Luna. I’ll control the gating progress, judging the success of every single milestone. If I decide Luna hasn’t measured up, the work will have to be repeated.”

I paced to the window. Mons Hadley didn’t seem grey anymore. It was actually a deep, delicate lilac. Framed by the endless black sky, its form was impossibly complex, every fold of its geography picked out by the sun.

I kept my back to the reps.

“If you’re wondering why I’d come back after all the years,” I said, “let me be very clear. I will die before I let Luna fool around with some half-assed crèche experiment, mess up a bunch of kids, and ruin everything.” I turned and pointed my cane. “If you’re going to do this, at least do it right.”

Back home on Ricochet, the Jewel Box was off-hab on a two-day Earth tour. They came home with stories of surging wildlife spectacles that made herds and flocks of Ricochet’s biodiversity preserve look like a petting zoo. When the boost came, we all gathered in the rumpus room for the very last time.

Bruce, Blanche, Engku, Megat, and Mykelti clustered on the floor mats, anchoring themselves comfortably for the boost. They’d be fine. Soon they’d have armfuls of newborns to ease the pain of transition. The Jewel Box were all hanging from the ceiling netting, ready for their last ride of childhood. They’d be fine too. Diamante had decided on Mars, and it looked like the other five would follow.

Me, I’d be fine too. I’d have to be.

How to explain the pain and pride when your crèche is balanced on the knife’s edge of adulthood, ready to leave you behind forever? Not possible. Just know this: when you see an oldster looking serene and wise, remember, it’s just a sham. Under the skin, it’s all sorrow.

I was relieved when the boost started. Everyone was too distracted to notice I’d begun tearing up. When the hab turned upside down, I let myself shed a few tears for the passing moment. Nothing too self-indulgent. Just a little whuffle, then I wiped it all away and joined the celebration, laughing and applauding the kids’ antics as they bounced around the room.

We got it, Long Meng whispered in the middle of the boost. Luna just shot me the contract. We won.

She told me all the details. I pretended to pay attention, but really, I was only interested in watching the kids. Drinking in their antics, their playfulness, their joyful self-importance. Young adults have a shine about them. They glow with untapped potential.

When the boost was over, we all unclipped our anchors. I couldn’t quite extricate myself from my deeply padded chair and my cane was out of reach.

Tré leapt to help me up. When I was on my feet, he pulled me into a hug.

“Are you going back to Luna?” he said in my ear.

I held him at arm’s length. “That’s right. Someone has to take care of Long Meng.”

“Who’ll take care of you?”

I laughed. “I don’t need taking care of.”

He gripped both my hands in his. “That’s not true. Everyone does.”

“I’ll be fine.” I squeezed his fingers and tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let go. I changed the subject. “Mars seems like a great choice for you all.”

“I’m not going to Mars. I’m going to Luna.”

I stepped back. My knees buckled, but the stability belt kept me from going down.

“No, Tré. You can’t.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it. I’m going.”

“Absolutely not. You have no business on Luna. It’s a terrible place.”

He crossed his arms over his broadening chest and swung his head like a fighter looking for an opening. He squinted at the old toys and sports equipment secured into rumpus room cabinets, the peeling murals the kids had painted over the years, the battered bots and well-used, colorful furniture—all the ephemera and detritus of childhood that had been our world for nearly eighteen years.

“Then I’m not leaving the crèche. You’ll have to stay here with me, in some kind of weird stalemate. Long Meng will be alone.”

I scowled. It was nothing less than blackmail. I wasn’t used to being forced into a corner, and certainly not by my own kid.

“We’re going to Luna together.” A grin flickered across Tré’s face. “Might as well give in.”

I patted his arm, then took his elbow. Tré picked up my cane and put it in my hand.

“I’ve done a terrible job raising you,” I said.

Originally published in Infinity’s End, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

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

Lavie Tidhar

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011) and of the Campbell Award winning and Locus and Clarke Award nominated Central Station (2016). His latest novels are the forthcoming Unholy Land (2018) and first children’s novel Candy (2018). He is the author of many other novels, novellas and short stories.

Maureen F. McHugh

Maureen F. McHugh grew up in Ohio, but has lived in New York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. She is the author of four novels and two short story collections. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the Tiptree Award and her latest novel, Nekropolis, was a Book Sense 76 pick and a New York Times Editor's Choice. McHugh teaches scriptwriting at the University of Southern California. She and her husband and two dogs used to live next to a dairy farm. Sometimes, in the summer, black and white Holsteins looked over the fence at them. Now she lives in Los Angeles, California.

Kelly Robson

Kelly Robson is a Canadian short fiction writer. Her novelette “A Human Stain” won the 2018 Nebula Award, and she has won both the 2019 and 2016 Aurora Awards for best Short Story. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, Locus, Astounding, Aurora, and Sunburst Awards. Kelly consults as a creative futurist for organizations such as UNICEF and the Suncor Energy Foundation. After twenty-two years in Vancouver, she and her wife, writer A. M. Dellamonica, now live in downtown Toronto.

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; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and an eight-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.