Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Audubon in Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

Weather Girl

by E. J. Swift

Travelling into Nothing

by An Owomoyela

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

June feels early this year. It’s not like I’ve been particularly busy, but time has just zipped by. The high point of the month was attending a few online conventions. I think the most of impressive of the lot was a free one called Flights of Foundry, which was run by a group called The Dream Foundry. They hosted a significant amount of panels over the weekend and should be making them available on YouTube at some point. Given the volume, it’s more than likely, you’ll find something there to be interested. SFWA also ran a much smaller, fee-based Nebula Conference. I had planned to be at the actual conference, so I went to its digital replacement instead and had some good conversations in their virtual consuite instead. It was also nice to watch the first virtual Nebula Awards ceremony and get to see A.T. Greenblatt win for Clarkesworld story, “Give the Family my Love.” last night.

Other than that and trying to chase a groundhog out from under our garage, things have been quiet. I hope that you are all keeping well and I look forward to seeing you at some virtual event in the near future or a real one further down the line.

Until next time,

-Neil

Audubon in Atlantis

Harry Turtledove

Delicate as if walking on eggs, the riverboat Augustus Caesar eased in alongside the quay at New Orleans. Colored roustabouts, bare to the waist, caught lines from the boat and made her fast. The steam whistle blew several long, happy blasts, telling the world the sternwheeler had arrived. Then black smoke stopped belching from the stacks as the crew shut down the engines.

The deck stopped quivering beneath John Audubon’s feet. He breathed a silent sigh of relief; for all the time he’d spent aboard boats and ships, he was not a good sailor, and knew he never would be. Any motion, no matter how slight, could make his stomach betray him. He sighed—a long sea voyage still lay ahead of him.

Edward Harris came up and stood alongside him. “Well, my friend, we’re on our way,” he said.

“It’s true—we are. And we shall do that which has not been done, while it may yet be done.” As Audubon always did, he gathered enthusiasm when he thought about the goal and not the means by which he had to accomplish it. His English was fluent, but heavily flavored by the French that was his birth-speech. He was a good-sized man—about five feet ten—with shoulder-length gray hair combed straight back from his forehead and with bushy gray side whiskers that framed a long, strong-nosed face. Even without an accent, he would have spoken more mushily than he liked; he was nearer sixty than fifty, and had only a few teeth left. “Before long, Ed, either the great honkers will be gone from this world or I will.”

He waited impatiently till the gangplank thudded into place, then hurried off the Augustus Caesar onto dry land, or something as close to dry land as New Orleans offered.

Men and women of every color, wearing everything from rags to frock coats and great hoop skirts, thronged the muddy, puddled street. Chatter, jokes, and curses crackled in Spanish, French and English, and in every possible mixture and corruption of those tongues. Audubon heard far more English than he had when he first came to New Orleans half a lifetime earlier. It was a French town then, with the Spanish dons hanging on where and as they could. Times changed, though. He knew that too well.

Not far from the Cabildo stood the brick building that housed the Bartlett Line. Edward Harris following in his wake, Audubon went inside. A clerk nodded to them. “Good day, gentlemen,” he said in English. A generation earlier, the greeting would surely have come in French. “How may I be of service to you today?”

“I wish to purchase passage to Atlantis for the two of us,” Audubon replied.

“Certainly, sir.” The clerk didn’t bat an eye. “The Maid of Orleans sails for New Marseille and Avalon on the west coast in . . . let me see . . . five days. If you would rather wait another week, you can book places on the Sea Queen for the east. She puts in at St. Augustine, St. Denis, and Hanover, then continues on to London.”

“We can reach the interior as easily from either coast,” Harris said.

“Just so.” Audubon nodded. “We would have to wait longer to leave for the east, the journey would be longer, and I would not care to set out from Hanover in any case. I have too many friends in the capital. With the kindest intentions in the world, they would sweep us up in their social whirl, and we should be weeks getting free of it. The Maid of Orleans it shall be.”

“You won’t be sorry, sir. She’s a fine ship.” The clerk spoke with professional enthusiasm. He took out a book of ticket forms and inked his pen. “In whose names shall I make these out?”

“I am John James Audubon,” Audubon replied. “With me travels my friend and colleague, Mr. Edward Harris.”

“Audubon?” The clerk started to write, then looked up, his face aglow. “The Audubon? The artist? The naturalist?”

Audubon exchanged a secret smile with Edward Harris. Being recognized never failed to gratify him: he loved himself well enough to crave reminding that others loved him, too. When he swung back toward the clerk, he tried to make the smile modest. “I have the honor to be he, yes.”

The clerk thrust out his hand. As Audubon shook it, the young man said, “I cannot tell you how pleased I am to make your acquaintance, sir. Mr. Hiram Bartlett, the chairman of the shipping line, is a subscriber to your Birds and Viviparous Ouadrupeds of Northern Terranova and Atlantis—the double elephant folio edition. He sometimes brings in one volume or another for the edification of his staff. I admire your art and your text in almost equal measure, and that is the truth.”

“You do me too much credit,” Audubon said, in lieu of strutting and preening like a courting passenger pigeon. He was also glad to learn how prosperous Bartlett was. No one but a rich man could afford the volumes of the double elephant folio. They were big enough to show almost every bird and most beasts at life size, even if he had twisted poses and bent necks almost unnaturally here and there to fit creatures onto the pages’ Procrustean bed.

“Are you traveling to Atlantis to continue your researches?” the clerk asked eagerly.

“If fate is kind, yes,” Audubon replied. “Some of the creatures I hope to see are less readily found than they were in years gone by, while I”—he sighed—“I fear I am less well able to find them than I was in years gone by. Yet a man can do only what it is given to him to do, and I intend to try.”

“If they’re there, John, you’ll find them,” Harris said.

“God grant it be so,” Audubon said. “What is the fare aboard the Maid of Orleans ?”

“A first-class cabin for two, sir, is a hundred twenty livres,” the clerk said. “A second-class cabin is eighty livres, while one in steerage is a mere thirty-five livres. But I fear I cannot recommend steerage for gentlemen of your quality. It lacks the comforts to which you will have become accustomed.”

“I’ve lived rough. Once I get to Atlantis, I expect I shall live rough again,” Audubon said. “But, unlike some gentlemen of the Protestant persuasion”—he fondly nudged Edward Harris—“I don’t make the mistake of believing comfort is sinful. Let us travel first class.”

“I don’t believe comfort is sinful, and you know it,” Harris said. “We want to get you where you’re going and keep you as healthy and happy as we can while we’re doing it. First class, by all means.”

“First class it shall be, then.” The clerk wrote up the tickets.

Audubon boarded the Maid of Orleans with a curious blend of anticipation and dread. The sidewheeler was as modern a steamship as any, but she was still a ship, one that would soon put to sea. Even going up the gangplank, his stomach gave a premonitory lurch.

He laughed and tried to make light of it, both to Harris and to himself. “When I think how many times I’ve put to sea in a sailing ship, at the mercy of wind and wave, I know how foolish I am to fret about a voyage like this,” he said.

“You said it to the clerk last week: you can only do what you can do.” Harris was blessed with both a calm stomach and a calm disposition. If opposites attracted, he and Audubon made a natural pair.

The purser strode up to them. Brass buttons gleamed on his blue wool coat; sweat gleamed on his face. “You gentlemen are traveling together?” he said. “If you would be kind enough to show me your tickets . . . ?”

“But of course,” Audubon said. He and Harris produced them.

“I thank you.” The purser checked them against a list he carried in one of his jacket’s many pockets. “Mr. Audubon and Mr. Harris, is it? Very good. We have you in Cabin 12, the main deck on the starboard side. That’s on the right as you look forward, if you haven’t gone to sea before.”

“I’m afraid I have,” Audubon said. The purser took off his cap and scratched his balding crown, but Audubon meant it exactly as he’d phrased it. He nodded to Harris and to the free Negro pushing a wheeled cart that held their baggage. “Let’s see what we’ve got, then.”

They had a cabin with two beds, a chest of drawers, and a basin and pitcher on top of it: about what they would have had in an inn of reasonable quality, though smaller. In an inn, though, I’m not likely to drown, Audubon thought. He didn’t suppose he was likely to drown on the Maid of Orleans, but if the seas got rough he would wish he were dead.

He gave the Negro half a livre, for the luggage, once unloaded from the cart, filled the cabin almost to the bursting point. Neither Audubon nor Harris was a dandy; they had no extraordinary amount of clothes. But Audubon’s watercolors and paper filled up a couple of trunks, and the jars and the raw spirits they would use to preserve specimens took up a couple of more. And each of them had a shotgun for gathering specimens and a newfangled revolver for self-protection.

“Leave enough room so you’ll be able to get out and come to the galley when you’re hungry,” the purser said helpfully.

“Thank you so much.” Audubon hoped his sarcasm would freeze the man, but the purser, quite unfrozen, tipped his cap and left the cabin. Audubon muttered in pungent French.

“Never mind, John,” Harris said. “We’re here, and we’ll weigh anchor soon. After that, no worries till we get to Avalon.”

No worries for you. But Audubon kept that to himself. Harris couldn’t help having a tranquil stomach, any more than the artist could help having a nervous one. Audubon only wished his were calm.

He also wished the Maid of Orleans sailed at the appointed hour, or even on the appointed day. Thursday, the 6th day of April, 1843, at half past 10 in the morning, the clerk had written on each ticket in a fine round hand. Audubon and Harris were aboard in good time. But half past ten came and went without departure. All of Thursday came and went. Passengers kept right on boarding. Stevedores kept on carrying sacks of sugar and rice into the ship’s hold. Only the stuffed quail and artichokes and asparagus and the really excellent champagne in the first-class galley went some little way toward reconciling Audubon to being stuck on the steamship an extra day.

Finally, on Friday afternoon, the Maid of Orleans’ engine rumbled to life. Its engine had a deeper, stronger note than the one that had propelled the Augustus Caesar down the Big Muddy. The deck thrummed under Audubon’s shoes.

Officers bawled commands as smoke belched from the steamship’s stacks. Sailors took in the lines that secured the ship to the quay. Others, grunting with effort, manned the capstan. One link at a time, they brought up the heavy chain and anchor that had held the sidewheeler in place.

Watching them, Harris said, “One of these days, steam will power the capstan as well as the paddlewheels.”

“You could be right,” Audubon replied. “The sailors must hope you are.”

“Steam is the coming thing. You mark my words,” Harris said. “Steamships, railroads, factories—who knows what else?”

“So long as they don’t make a steam-powered painter, I’ll do well enough,” Audubon said.

“A steam-powered painter? You come up with the maddest notions, John.” Edward Harris laughed. Slowly, though, the mirth faded from his face. “With a mechanical pantograph, your notion might almost come true.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that so much,” Audubon told him. “I was thinking of this new trick of light-writing people have started using the last few years. If it gave pictures in color, not shades of gray, and if you could make—no, they say take—a light-writing picture fast enough to capture motion . . . well, if you could, painters would fall on thin times, I fear.”

“Those are hefty ifs. It won’t happen soon, if it ever does,” Harris said.

“Oh, yes. I know.” Audubon nodded. “I doubt I’ll have to carry a hod in my fading years. My son will likely make a living as a painter, too. But you were talking about days to come. May I not think of them as well?”

The steamship’s whistle screamed twice, warning that she was about to move away from the quay. Her paddle wheels spun slowly in reverse, backing her out into the Big Muddy. Then one wheel stopped while the other continued to revolve. Along with the rudder, that swung the Maid of Orleans’ bow downstream. Another blast from the whistle—a triumphant one—and more smoke pouring from her stacks, she started down the great river toward the Bay of Mexico. Though she hadn’t yet reached the sea, Audubon’s stomach flinched.

The Big Muddy’s delta stretched far out into the Bay of Mexico. As soon as the Maid of Orleans left the river and got out into the bay, her motion changed. Her pitch and roll were nothing to speak of, not to the crew and not to most of the passengers. But they were enough to send Audubon and a few other unfortunates running for the rail. After a couple of minutes that seemed like forever, he wearily straightened, mouth foul and burning, eyes streaming with tears. He was rid of what ailed him, at least for the moment.

A steward with a tray of glasses nodded deferentially. “Some punch, sir, to help take the taste away?”

“Merci. Mon Dieu, merci beaucoup,” Audubon said, tormented out of English.

“Pas de quoi,” the steward replied. Any man on a ship sailing from New Orleans and touching in the southern parts of Atlantis had to speak some French.

Audubon sipped and let rum and sweetened lemon juice clean his mouth. When he swallowed, he feared he would have another spasm, but the punch stayed down. Reassuring warmth spread from his middle. Two more gulps emptied the glass. “God bless you!” he said.

“My pleasure, sir. We see some every time out.” The steward offered restoratives to Audubon’s fellow sufferers. They fell on him with glad cries. He even got a kiss from a nice-looking young woman—but only after she’d taken a good swig from her glass of punch.

Feeling human in a mournful way, Audubon walked up toward the bow. The breeze of the ship’s passage helped him forget about his unhappy innards . . . for now. Gulls screeched overhead. A common tern dove into the sea, and came up with a fish in its beak. It didn’t get to enjoy the meal. A herring gull flapped after it and made it spit out the fish before it could swallow. The gull got the dainty; the robbed tern flew off to try its luck somewhere else.

On the southern horizon lay the island of Nueva Galicia, about forty miles southeast of the delta. Only a little steam rose above Mount Isabella, near the center of the island. Audubon had been a young man the last time the volcano erupted. He remembered ash raining down on New Orleans.

He looked east toward Mount Pensacola at the mouth of the bay. Pensacola had blown its stack more recently—only about ten years earlier, in fact. For now, though, no ominous plume of black rose in that direction. Audubon nodded to himself. He wouldn’t have to worry about making the passage east during an eruption. When Mount Pensacola burst into flame, rivers of molten rock ran steaming into the sea, pushing the Terranovan coastline a little farther south and east. Ships couldn’t come too close to observe the awe-inspiring spectacle, for the volcano threw stones to a distance coast artillery only dreamt of. Most splashed into the Bay of Mexico, of course, but who would ever forget the Black Prince, holed and sunk by a flying boulder the size of a cow back in ’93?

The Maid of Orleans steamed sedately eastward. The waves weren’t too bad; Audubon found that repeated doses of rum punch worked something not far from a miracle when it came to settling his stomach. If it did twinge now and again, the rum kept him from caring. And the lemon juice, he told himself, held scurvy at bay.

Mount Pensacola was smoking when the sidewheeler passed it near sunset. But the cloud of steam rising from the conical peak, like that above Mount Isabella, was thin and pale, not broad and black and threatening.

Edward Harris came up alongside Audubon by the port rail. “A pretty view,” Harris remarked.

“It is indeed,” Audubon said.

“I’m surprised not to find you sketching,” Harris told him. “Sunset tinging the cloud above the mountain with pink against the deepening blue . . . What could be more picturesque?”

“Nothing, probably.” Audubon laughed in some embarrassment. “But I’ve drunk enough of that splendid rum punch to make my right hand forget its cunning.”

“I don’t suppose I can blame you, not when mal de mer torments you so,” Harris said. “I hope the sea will be calmer the next time you come this way.”

“So do I—if there is a next time,” Audubon said. “I am not young, Edward, and I grow no younger. I’m bound for Atlantis to do things and see things while I still may. The land changes year by year, and so do I. Neither of us will be again what we were.”

Harris—calm, steady, dependable Harris—smiled and set a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You’ve drunk yourself sad, that’s what you’ve done. There’s more to you than to many a man half your age.”

“Good of you to say so, though we both know it’s not so, not any more. As for the rum . . . ” Audubon shook his head. “I knew this might be my last voyage when I got on the Augustus Caesar in St. Louis. Growing up is a time of firsts, of beginnings.”

“Oh, yes.” Harris’ smile grew broader. Audubon had a good idea which first he was remembering.

But the painter wasn’t finished. “Growing up is a time for firsts, yes,” he repeated. “Growing old . . . Growing old is a time for endings, for lasts. And I do fear this will be my last long voyage.”

“Well, make the most of it if it is,” Harris said. “Shall we repair to the galley? Turtle soup tonight, with a saddle of mutton to follow.” He smacked his lips.

Harris certainly made the most of the supper. Despite his ballasting of rum, Audubon didn’t. A few spoonfuls of soup, a halfhearted attack on the mutton and the roast potatoes accompanying it, and he felt full to the danger point. “We might as well have traveled second class, or even steerage,” he said sadly. “The difference in cost lies mostly in the victuals, and I’ll never get my money’s worth at a table that rolls.”

“I’ll just have to do it for both of us, then.” Harris poured brandy-spiked gravy over a second helping of mutton. His campaign with fork and knife was serious and methodical, and soon reduced the mutton to nothing. He looked around hopefully. “I wonder what the sweet course is.”

It was a cake baked in the shape of the Maid of Orleans and stuffed with nuts, candied fruit, and almond paste. Harris indulged immoderately. Audubon watched with a strange smile, half jealous, half wistful.

He went to bed not long after supper. The first day of a sea voyage always told on him, more than ever as he got older. The mattress was as comfortable as the one in the inn back in New Orleans. It might have been softer than the one he slept on at home. But it was unfamiliar, and so he tossed and turned for a while, trying to find the most comfortable position. Even as he tossed, he laughed at himself. Before long, he’d sleep wrapped in a blanket on bare ground in Atlantis. Would he twist and turn there, too? He nodded. Of course he would. Nodding still, he dozed off.

He hadn’t been asleep long before Harris came in. His friend was humming “Pretty Black Eyes,” a song popular in New Orleans as they set out. Audubon didn’t think the other man even knew he was doing it. Harris got into his night-shirt, pissed in the chamber pot under his bed, blew out the oil lamp Audubon had left burning, and lay down. He was snoring in short order. Harris always denied that he snored—and why not? He never heard himself.

Audubon laughed once more. He tossed and twisted and yawned. Pretty soon, he was snoring again himself.

When he went out on deck the next morning, the Maid of Orleans might have been the only thing God ever made besides the sea. Terranova had vanished behind her; Atlantis still lay a thousand miles ahead. The steamship had entered the Hesperian Gulf, the wide arm of the North Atlantic that separated the enormous island and its smaller attendants from the continent to the west.

Audubon looked south and east. He’d been born on Santo Tomás, one of those lesser isles. He was brought to France three years later, and so escaped the convulsions that wracked the island when its colored slaves rose up against their masters in a war where neither side asked for quarter or gave it. Blacks ruled Santo Tomás to this day. Not many whites were left on the island. Audubon had only a few faded childhood memories of his first home. He’d never cared to go back, even if he could have without taking his life in his hands.

Edward Harris strolled out on deck. “Good morning,” he said. “I hope you slept well?”

“Well enough, thanks,” Audubon answered. I would have done better without “Pretty Black Eyes,” but such is life “Yourself?”

“Not bad, not bad.” Harris eyed him. “You look . . . less greenish than you did yesterday. The bracing salt air, I suppose?”

“It could be. Or maybe I’m getting used to the motion.” As soon as Audubon said that, as soon as he thought about his stomach, he gulped. He pointed an accusing finger at his friend. “There—you see? Just asking was enough to jinx me.”

“Well, come have some breakfast, then. Nothing like a good mess of ham and eggs or something like that to get you ready for . . . Are you all right?”

“No,” Audubon gasped, leaning out over the rail.

He breakfasted lightly, on toasted ship’s biscuit and coffee and rum punch. He didn’t usually start the day with strong spirits, but he didn’t usually start the day with a bout of seasickness, either. A good thing, too, or I’d have died years ago, he thought. I hope I would anyhow.

Beside him in the galley, Harris worked his way through fried eggs and ham and sausage and bacon and maize-meal mush. Blotting his lips with a snowy linen napkin, he said, “That was monstrous fine.” He patted his pot belly.

“So glad you enjoyed it,” Audubon said tonelessly.

Once or twice over the next three days, the Maid of Orleans came close enough to another ship to make out her sails or the smoke rising from her stack. A pod of whales came up to blow nearby before sounding again. Most of the time, though, the sidewheeler might have been alone on the ocean.

Audubon was on deck again the third afternoon, when the sea—suddenly, as those things went—changed from greenish gray to a deeper, richer blue. He looked around for Harris, and spotted him not far away, drinking rum punch and chatting with a personable young woman whose curls were the color of fire.

“Edward!” Audubon said. “We’ve entered the Bay Stream!”

“Have we?” The news didn’t seem to have the effect on Harris that Audubon wanted. His friend turned back to the redheaded woman—who also held a glass of punch—and said, “John is wild for nature in every way you can imagine.” Spoken in a different tone of voice, it would have been a compliment. Maybe it still was. Audubon hoped he only imagined Harris’ faintly condescending note.

“Is he?” The woman didn’t seem much interested in Audubon one way or the other. “What about you, Eddie?”

Eddie? Audubon had trouble believing his ears. No one had ever called Harris such a thing in his hearing before. And Harris . . . smiled. “Well, Beth, I’ll tell you—I am, too. But some parts of nature interest me more than others.” He set his free hand on her arm. She smiled, too.

He was a widower. He could chase if that suited his fancy, not that Beth seemed to need much chasing. Audubon admired a pretty lady as much as anyone—more than most, for with his painter’s eye he saw more than most—but was a thoroughly married man, and didn’t slide from admiration to pursuit. He hoped Lucy was well.

Finding Harris temporarily distracted, Audubon went back to the rail himself. By then, the Maid of Orleans had left the cooler waters by the east coast of Terranova behind and fully entered the warm current coming up from the Bay of Mexico. Even the bits of seaweed floating in the ocean looked different now. Audubon’s main zoological interests did center on birds and viviparous quadrupeds. All the same, he wished he would have thought to net up some of the floating algae in the cool water and then some of these so he could properly compare them.

He turned around to say as much to Harris, only to discover that his friend and Beth were no longer on deck. Had Harris gone off to pursue his own zoological interests? Well, more power to him if he had. Audubon looked back into the ocean, and was rewarded with the sight of a young sea turtle, not much bigger than the palm of his hand, delicately nibbling a strand of the new seaweed. Next to the rewards Harris might be finding, it didn’t seem like much, but it was definitely better than nothing.

Like the Sun, Atlantis, for Audubon, rose in the east. That blur on the horizon—for a little while, you could wonder if it was a distant cloudbank, but only for a little while. Before long, it took on the unmistakable solidity of land. To the Breton and Galician fishermen who’d found it first, almost four hundred years before, it would have sent the setting sun to bed early.

“Next port of call is New Marseille, sir,” the purser said, tipping his cap to Audubon as he went by.

“Yes, of course,” the artist replied, “but I’m bound for Avalon.”

“Even so, sir, you’ll have to clear customs at the first port of call in Atlantis,” the other man reminded him. “The States are fussy about these things. If you don’t have a New Marseille customs stamp on your passport, they won’t let you off the ship in Avalon.”

“It’s a nuisance, to open all my trunks for the sake of a stamp,” Audubon said. The purser shrugged the shrug of a man with right, or at least regulations, on his side. And he told the truth: the United States of Atlantis were fussy about who visited them. Do as we do, they might have said, or stay away.

Not that coming ashore at New Marseille was a hardship. On the contrary. Warmed by the Bay Stream, the city basked in an almost unending May. Farther north, in Avalon, it seemed to be April most of the time. And then the Bay Stream curled north and east around the top of Atlantis and delivered the rest of its warmth to the north of France, to the British Isles, and to Scandinavia. The east coast of Atlantis, where the winds swept across several hundred miles of mountains and lowlands before they finally arrived, was an altogether darker, harsher place.

But Audubon was in New Marseille, and if it wasn’t veritably May, it was the middle of April, which came close enough. A glance as he and Harris carted their cases to the customs shed sufficed to tell him he’d left Terranova behind. Oh, the magnolias that shaded some nearby streets weren’t much different from the ones he could have found near New Orleans. But the gink-goes on other thoroughfares . . . only one other variety of ginkgo grew anyplace else in the world: in China. And the profusion of squat cycads with tufts of leaves sprouting from the tops of squat trunks also had few counterparts anywhere in the temperate zone.

The customs official, by contrast, seemed much like customs officials in every other kingdom and republic Audubon had ever visited. He frowned as he examined their declaration, and frowned even more as he opened up their baggage to confirm it. “You have a considerable quantity of spirits here,” he said. “A dutiable quantity, in fact.”

“They aren’t intended for drinking or for resale, sir,” Audubon said, “but for the preservation of scientific specimens.”

“John Audubon’s name and artistry are known throughout the civilized world,” Edward Harris said.

“I’ve heard of the gentleman myself. I admire his work, what I’ve seen of it,” the official replied. “But the law does not consider intent. It considers quantity. You will not tell me these strong spirits cannot be drunk?”

“No,” Audubon admitted reluctantly.

“Well, then,” the customs man said. “You owe the fisc of Atlantis . . . let me see . . . ” He checked a table thumbtacked to the wall behind him. “You owe twenty-two eagles and, ah, fourteen cents.”

Fuming, Audubon paid. The customs official gave him a receipt, which he didn’t want, and the requisite stamp in his passport, which he did. As he and Harris trundled their chattels back to the Maid of Orleans, a small bird flew past them. “Look, John!” Harris said. “Wasn’t that a gray-throated green?”

Not even the sight of the Atlantean warbler could cheer Audubon. “Well, what if it was?” he said, still mourning the money he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to spend.

His friend knew what ailed him. “When we get to Avalon, paint a portrait or two,” Harris suggested. “You’ll make it up, and more besides.”

Audubon shook his head. “I don’t want to do that, dammit.” When thwarted, he could act petulant as a child. “I grudge the time I’d have to spend. Every moment counts. I have not so many days left myself, and the upland honkers . . . Well, who can say if they have any left at all?”

“They’ll be there.” As usual, Harris radiated confidence.

“Will they?” Audubon, by contrast, careened from optimism to the slough of despond on no known schedule. At the moment, not least because of the customs man, he was mired in gloom. “When fishermen first found this land, a dozen species of honkers filled it: filled it as buffalo fill the plains of Terranova. Now . . . now a few may be left in the wildest parts of Atlantis. Or, even as we speak, the last ones may be dying—may already have died!—under an eagle’s claws or the jaws of a pack of wild dogs or to some rude trapper’s shotgun.”

“The buffalo are starting to go, too,” Harris remarked.

That only agitated Audubon more. “I must hurry! Hurry, do you hear me?”

“Well, you can’t go anywhere till the Maid of Orleans sails,” Harris said reasonably.

“One day soon, a railroad will run from New Marseille to Avalon,” Audubon said. Atlantis was building railroads almost as fast as England: faster than France, faster than any of the new Terranovan republics. But soon was not yet, and he did have to wait for the steamship to head north.

Passengers left the Maid of Orleans. Beth got off, which made Harris glum. Others came aboard. Longshoremen carried crates and boxes and barrels and bags ashore. Others brought fresh cargo onto the ship. Passengers and longshoremen alike moved too slowly to suit Audubon. Again, he could only fume and pace the mercifully motionless deck. At last, late the next afternoon, the Maid of Orleans steamed towards Avalon.

She stayed close to shore on the two-and-a-half-day journey. It was one of the most beautiful routes anywhere in the world. Titanic redwoods and sequoias grew almost down to the shore. They rose so tall and straight, they might almost have been the columns of a colossal outdoor cathedral.

But that cathedral could have been dedicated to puzzlement and confusion. The only trees like the enormous evergreens of Atlantis were those on the Pacific coast of Terranova, far, far away. Why did they thrive here, survive there, and exist nowhere else? Audubon had no more answer than any other naturalist, though he dearly wished for one. That would crown a career! He feared it was a crown he was unlikely to wear.

The Maid of Orleans passed a small fishing town called Newquay without stopping. Having identified the place on his map, Audubon was pleased when the purser confirmed he’d done it right. “If anything happens to the navigator, sir, I’m sure we’d be in good hands with you,” the man said, and winked to show he didn’t aim to be taken too seriously.

Audubon gave him a dutiful smile and went back to eyeing the map. Atlantis’ west coast and the east coast of North Terranova a thousand miles away put him in mind of two pieces of a world-sized jigsaw puzzle: their outlines almost fit together. The same was true for the bulge of Brazil in South Terranova and the indentation in West Africa’s coastline on the other side of the Atlantic. And the shape of Atlantis’ eastern coast corresponded to that of western Europe in a more general way.

What did that mean? Audubon knew he was far from the first to wonder. How could anyone who looked at a map help but wonder? Had Atlantis and Terranova been joined once upon a time? Had Africa and Brazil? How could they have been, with so much sea between? He saw no way it could be possible. Neither did anyone else. But when you looked at the map . . .

“Coincidence,” Harris said when he mentioned it at supper.

“Maybe so.” Audubon cut meat from a goose drumstick. His stomach was behaving better these days—and the seas stayed mild. “But if it is a coincidence, don’t you think it’s a large one?”

“World’s a large place.” Harris paused to take a sip of wine. “It has room in it for a large coincidence or three, don’t you think?”

“Maybe so,” Audubon said again, “but when you look at the maps, it seems as if those matches ought to spring from reason, not happenstance.”

“Tell me how the ocean got in between them, then.” Harris aimed a finger at him like a pistol barrel. “And if you say it was Noah’s flood, I’ll pick up that bottle of fine Bordeaux and clout you over the head with it.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything of the sort,” Audubon replied. “Noah’s flood may have washed over these lands, but I can’t see how it could have washed them apart while still leaving their coastlines so much like each other.”

“So it must be coincidence, then.”

“I don’t believe it must be anything, mon vieux,” Audubon said. “I believe we don’t know what it is—or, I admit, if it’s anything at all. Maybe they will one day, but not now. For now, it’s a puzzlement. We need puzzlements, don’t you think?”

“For now, John, I need the gravy,” Harris said. “Would you kindly pass it to me? Goes mighty well with the goose.”

It did, too. Audubon poured some over the moist, dark meat on his plate before handing his friend the gravy boat. Harris wanted to ignore puzzlements when he could. Not Audubon. They reminded him not only of how much he—and everyone else—didn’t know yet, but also of how much he—in particular—might still find out.

As much as I have time for, he thought, and took another bite of goose.

Avalon rose on six hills. The city fathers kept scouting for a seventh so they could compare their town to Rome, but there wasn’t another bump to be found for miles around. The west-facing Bay of Avalon gave the city that bore its name perhaps the finest harbor in Atlantis. A century and a half before, the bay was a pirates’ roost. The buccaneers swept out to plunder the Hesperian Gulf for most of a lifetime, till a British and Dutch fleet drove them back to their nest and then smoked them out of it.

City streets still remembered the swashbuckling past: Goldbeard Way, Valjean Avenue, Cutpurse Charlie Lane. But two Atlantean steam frigates patrolled the harbor. Fishing boats, bigger merchantmen—some steamers, other sailing ships—and liners like the Maid of Orleans moved in and out. The pirates might be remembered, but they were gone.

May it not be so with the honkers. Audubon thought as the Maid of Orleans tied up at a pier. Please, God, let it not be so. He crossed himself. He didn’t know if the prayer would help, but it couldn’t hurt, so he sent it up for whatever it might be worth.

Harris pointed to a man coming up the pier. “Isn’t that Gordon Coates?”

“It certainly is.” Audubon waved to the man who published his work in Atlantis. Coates, a short, round fellow with side whiskers even bushier than Audubon’s, waved back. His suit was of shiny silk; a stovepipe hat sat at a jaunty angle on his head. Audubon cupped his hands in front of his mouth. “How are you, Gordon?”

“Oh, tolerable. Maybe a bit better than tolerable,” Coates replied. “So you’re haring off into the wilderness again, are you?” He was a city man to the tips of his manicured fingers. The only time he went out to the countryside was to take in a horse race. He knew his ponies, too. When he bet, he won . . . more often than not, anyhow.

He had a couple of servants waiting with carts to take charge of the travelers’ baggage. He and Audubon and Harris clasped hands and clapped one another on the back when the gangplank went down and passengers could disembark. “Where are you putting us up?” asked Harris, who always thought about things like where he would be put up. Thanks to his thoughts about such things, Audubon had stayed in some places more comfortable than those where he might have if he made his own arrangements.

“How does the Hesperian Queen sound?” Coates answered.

“Like a pirate’s kept woman,” Audubon answered, and the publisher sent up gales of laughter. Audubon went on, “Is it near a livery stable or a horse market? I’ll want to get my animals as soon as I can.” Harris let out a sigh. Audubon pretended not to hear it.

“Not too far, not too far,” Coates said. Then he pointed up into the sky. “Look—an eagle! There’s an omen for you, if you like.”

The large, white-headed bird sailed off toward the south. Audubon knew it was likely bound for the city dump, to scavenge there. White-headed eagles had thrived since men came to Atlantis. Seeing this one secretly disappointed Audubon. He wished it were a red-crested eagle, the Atlantean national bird. But the mighty raptors—by all accounts, the largest in the world—had fallen into a steep decline along with the honkers, which were their principal prey.

“Well,” he said, “the Hesperian Queen.”

The last time he was in Avalon, the hotel had had another name and another owner. It had come up in the world since. So had Avalon, which was visibly bigger and visibly richer than it had been ten years—or was it twelve now?—before.

Harris noticed, too. Harris generally noticed things like that. “You do well for yourselves here,” he told Gordon Coates over beefsteaks at supper.

“Not too bad, not too bad,” the publisher said. “I’m about to put out a book by a chap who thinks he’s written the great Atlantean novel, and he lives right here in town. I hope he’s right. You never can tell.”

“You don’t believe it, though,” Audubon said.

“Well, no,” Coates admitted. “Everybody always thinks he’s written the great Atlantean novel—unless he comes from Terranova or England. Sometimes even then. Mr. Hawthorne has a better chance than some—a better chance than most, I daresay—but not that much better.”

“What’s it called?” Harris asked.

“The Crimson Brand,” Coates said. “Not a bad title, if I say so myself—and I do, because it’s mine. He wanted to name it The Shores of a Different Sea.” He yawned, as if to say authors were hopeless with titles. Then, pointing at Audubon, he did say it: “I’d have called your books something else, too, if they weren’t also coming out in England and Terranova. Birds and Critters, maybe. Who remembers what a quadruped is, let alone a viviparous one?”

“They’ve done well enough with the name I gave them,” Audubon said.

“Well enough, sure, but they might’ve done better. I could’ve made you big.” Coates was a man with an eye for the main chance. Making Audubon big—he lingered lovingly over the word—would have made him money.

“I know why folks here don’t know quadrupeds from a hole in the ground,” Harris said. “Atlantis hardly had any before it got discovered. No snakes in Ireland, no . . . critters”—he grinned—“here, not then.”

“No viviparous quadrupeds.” Audubon had drunk enough wine to make him most precise—but not too much to keep him from pronouncing viviparous. “A very great plenty of lizards and turtles and frogs and toads and salamanders—and snakes, of course, though snakes lack four legs of quadrupedality.” He was proud of himself for that.

“Sure enough, snakes haven’t got a leg to stand on.” Harris guffawed.

“Well, we have critters enough now, by God,” Coates said. “Everything from mice on up to elk. Some of ’em we wanted, some we got anyway. Try and keep rats and mice from coming aboard ship. Yeah, go ahead and try. Good luck—you’ll need it.”

“How many indigenous Atlantean creatures are no more because of them?” Audubon said.

“Beats me,” Coates answered. “Little too late to worry about it now, anyway, don’t you think?”

“I hope not,” Audubon said. “I hope it’s not too late for them. I hope it’s not too late for me.” He took another sip of wine. “And I know the viviparous creature responsible for the greatest number of those sad demises here.”

“Rats?” Coates asked.

“Weasels, I bet,” Harris said.

Audubon shook his head at each of them in turn. He pointed an index finger at his own chest. “Man,” he said.

He rode out of Avalon three days later. Part of the time he spent buying horses and tackle for them; that, he didn’t begrudge. The rest he spent with Gordon Coates, meeting with subscribers and potential subscribers for his books; that, he did. He was a better businessman than most of his fellow artists, and normally wouldn’t have resented keeping customers happy and trolling for new ones. If nobody bought your art, you had a devil of a time making more of it. As a younger man, he’d worked at several other trades, hated them all, and done well at none. He knew how lucky he was to make a living doing what he loved, and how much work went into what others called luck.

To his relief, he did escape without painting portraits. Even before he set out from New Orleans, he’d felt time’s hot breath at his heels. He felt himself aging, getting weaker, getting feebler. In another few years, maybe even in another year or two, he would lack the strength and stamina for a journey into the wilds of central Atlantis. And even if he had it, he might not find any honkers left to paint.

I may not find any now, he thought. That ate at him like vitriol. He kept seeing a hunter or a lumberjack with a shotgun . . .

Setting out from Avalon, Audubon might almost have traveled through the French or English countryside. Oh, the farms here were larger than they were in Europe, with more meadow between them. This was newly settled land; it hadn’t been cultivated for centuries, sometimes for millennia. But the crops—wheat, barley, maize, potatoes—were either European or were Terranovan imports long familiar in the Old World. The fruit trees came from Europe; the nuts, again, from Europe and Terranova. Only a few stands of redwoods and Atlantean pines declared that the Hesperian Gulf lay just a few miles to the west.

It was the same with the animals. Dogs yapped outside of farmhouses Chickens scratched. Cats prowled, hoping for either mice—also immigrants—or unwary chicks. Ducks and geese—ordinary domestic geese—paddled in ponds. Pigs rooted and wallowed. In the fields, cattle and sheep and horses grazed.

Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed the ferns that sprouted here and there or the birds on the ground, in the trees, and on the wing. Some of those birds, like ravens, ranged all over the world. Others, such as the white-headed eagle Audubon had seen in Avalon, were common in both Atlantis and Terranova (on Atlantis’ eastern coast, the white-tailed eagle sometimes visited from its more usual haunts in Europe and Iceland). Still others—no one knew how many—were unique to the great island.

No one but a specialist knew or cared how Atlantean gray-faced swifts differed from the chimney swifts of Terranova or little swifts from Europe. Many Atlantean thrushes were plainly the same sorts of birds as their equivalents to the west and to the east. They belonged to different species, but their plumages and habits were similar to those of the rest. The same held true for island warblers, which flitted through the trees after insects like their counterparts on the far side of the Hesperian Gulf. Yes, there were many similarities. But . . .

“I wonder how soon we’ll start seeing oil thrushes,” Audubon said.

“Not this close to Avalon,” Harris said. “Not with so many dogs and cats and pigs running around.”

“I suppose not,” Audubon said. “They’re trusting things, and they haven’t much chance of getting away.”

Laughing, Harris mimed flapping his fingertips. Oil thrushes’ wings were bigger than that, but not by much—they couldn’t fly. The birds themselves were bigger than chickens. They used their long, pointed beaks to probe the ground for worms at depths ordinary thrushes, flying thrushes, couldn’t hope to reach. When the hunting was good, they laid up fat against a rainy day.

But they were all but helpless against men and the beasts men had brought to Atlantis. It wasn’t just that they were good eating, or that their fat, rendered down made a fine lamp oil. The real trouble was, they didn’t seem to know enough to run away when a dog or a fox came after them. They weren’t used to being hunted by animals that lived on the ground; the only viviparous quadrupeds on Atlantis before men arrived were bats.

“Even the bats here are peculiar,” Audubon muttered.

“Well, so they are, but why do you say so?” Harris asked.

Audubon explained his train of thought. “Where else in the world do you have bats that spend more of their time scurrying around on the ground than flying?” he went on.

He thought that was a rhetorical question, but Harris said, “Aren’t there also some in New Zealand?”

“Are there?” Audubon said in surprise. His friend nodded. The painter scratched at his side whiskers. “Well, well. Both lands far from any others, out in the middle of the sea . . . ”

“New Zealand had its own honkers, too, or something like them,” Harris said. “What the devil were they called?”

“Moas,” Audubon said. “I do remember that. Didn’t I show you the marvelous illustrations of their remains Professor Owen did recently? The draftsmanship is astonishing. Astonishing!” The way he kissed his bunched fingertips proved him a Frenchman at heart.

Edward Harris gave him a sly smile. “Surely you could do better?”

“I doubt it,” Audubon said. “Each man to his own bent. Making a specimen look as if it were alive on the canvas—that I can do. My talent lies there, and I’ve spent almost forty years now learning the tricks and turns that go with it. Showing every detail of dead bone—I’m not in the least ashamed to yield the palm to the good professor there.”

“If only you were a little less modest, you’d be perfect,” Harris said.

“It could be,” Audubon said complacently, and they rode on.

The slow, deep drumming came from thirty feet up a dying pine. Harris pointed. “There he is, John! D’you see him?”

“I’m not likely to miss him, not when he’s the size of a raven,” Audubon answered. Intent on grubs under the bark, the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker went on drumming. It was a male, which meant its crest was also scarlet. A female’s crest would have been black, with a forward curl the male’s lacked. That also held true for its close relatives on the Terranovan mainland, the ivory-bill and the imperial woodpecker of Mexico.

Audubon dismounted, loaded his shotgun, and approached the bird. He could get closer to the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker than he could have to one of its Terranovan cousins. Like the oil thrush, like so many other Atlantean birds, the woodpecker had trouble understanding that something walking along on the ground could endanger it. Ivory-bills and imperial woodpeckers were less naive.

The woodpecker raised its head and called. The sound was high and shrill, like a false note on a clarinet. Audubon paused with the gun on his shoulder, waiting to see if another bird would answer. When none did, he squeezed the trigger. The shotgun boomed, belching fireworks-smelling smoke.

With a startled squawk, the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker tumbled out of the pine. It thrashed on the ground for a couple of minutes, then lay still. “Nice shot,” Harris said.

“Merci,” Audubon answered absently.

He picked up the woodpecker. It was still warm in his hands, and still crawling with mites and bird lice. No one who didn’t handle wild birds freshly dead thought of such things. He brushed his palm against his trouser leg to get rid of some of the vagrants. They didn’t usually trouble people, who weren’t to their taste, but every once in a while . . .

A new thought struck him. He stared at the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker. “I wonder if the parasites on Atlantean birds are as different as the birds themselves, or if they share them with the birds of Terranova.”

“I don’t know,” Harris said. “Do you want to pop some into spirits and see?”

After a moment, Audubon shook his head. “No, better to let someone who truly cares about such things take care of it. I’m after honkers, by God, not lice!”

“Nice specimen you took there, though,” his friend said. “Scarlet-cheeks are getting scarce, too.”

“Not so much forest for them to hunt in as there once was,” Audubon said with a sigh. “Not so much of anything in Atlantis as there once was—except men and farms and sheeps.” He knew that was wrong as soon as it came out of his mouth, but let it go. “If we don’t show what it was, soon it will be no more, and then it will be too late to show. Too late already for too much of it.” Too late for me? he wondered. Please, let it not be so!

“You going to sketch now?” Harris asked.

“If you don’t mind. Birds are much easier to pose before they start to stiffen.”

“Go ahead, go ahead.” Harris slid down from his horse. “I’ll smoke a pipe or two and wander around a bit with my shotgun. Maybe I’ll bag something else you can paint, or maybe I’ll shoot supper instead. Maybe both—who knows? If I remember right, these Atlantean ducks and geese eat as well as any other kind, except canvasbacks.” He was convinced canvasback ducks, properly roasted and served with loaf sugar, were the finest fowl in the world. Audubon wasn’t so sure he was wrong.

As Harris ambled away, Audubon set the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker on the grass and walked over to one of the pack horses. He knew which sack held his artistic supplies: his posing board and his wires, his charcoal sticks and precious paper.

He remembered how, as a boy, he’d despaired of ever portraying birds in realistic poses. A bird in the hand was all very well, but a dead bird looked like nothing but a dead bird. It drooped, it sagged, it cried its lifelessness to the eye.

When he studied painting with David in France, he sometimes did figure drawings from a mannequin. His cheeks heated when he recalled the articulated bird model he’d tried to make from wood and cork and wire. After endless effort, he produced something that might have done duty for a spavined dodo. His friends laughed at it. How could he get angry at them when he wanted to laugh at it, too? He ended up kicking the horrible thing to pieces.

If he hadn’t thought of wires . . . He didn’t know what he would have done then. Wires let him position his birds as if they were still alive. The first kingfisher he’d posed—he knew he was on to something even before he finished. As he set up the posing board now, a shadow of that old excitement glided through him again. Even the bird’s eyes had seemed to take on life again once he posed it the way he wanted.

As he worked with wires now to position the woodpecker as it had clung to the tree trunk, he wished he could summon more than a shadow of the old thrill. But he’d done the same sort of thing too many times. Routine fought against art. He wasn’t discovering a miracle now. He was . . . working.

Well, if you’re working, work the best you can, he told himself. And practice did pay. His hands knew almost without conscious thought how best to set the wires, to pose the bird. When his hands thought he was finished, he eyed the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker. Then he moved a wire to adjust its tail’s position. It used those long, stiff feathers to brace itself against the bark, almost as if it had hind legs back there.

He began to sketch. He remembered the agonies of effort that went into his first tries, and how bad they were despite those agonies. He knew others who’d tried to paint, and who gave up when their earlier pieces failed to match what they wanted, what they expected. Some of them, from what he’d seen, had a real gift. But having it and honing it . . . Ah, what a difference! Not many were stubborn enough to keep doing the thing they wanted to do even when they couldn’t do it very well. Audubon didn’t know how many times he’d almost given up in despair. But when stubbornness met talent, great things could happen.

The charcoal seemed to have a life of its own as it moved across the page. Audubon nodded to himself. His line remained as strong and fluid as ever. He didn’t have the tremors and shakes that marked so many men’s descent into age—not yet. Yet how far away from them was he? Every time the Sun rose, he came one day closer. He sketched fast, racing against his own decay.

Harris’ shotgun bellowed. Audubon’s hand did jump then. Whose wouldn’t, at the unexpected report? But that jerky line was easily rubbed out. He went on, quick and confident, and had the sketch very much the way he wanted it by the time Harris came back carrying a large dead bird by the feet.

“A turkey?” Audubon exclaimed.

His friend nodded, face wreathed in smiles. “Good eating tonight!”

“Well, yes,” Audubon said. “But who would have thought the birds could spread so fast? They were introduced in the south . . . it can’t be more than thirty years ago, can it? And now you shoot one here.”

“They give better sport than oil thrushes and the like,” Harris said. “At least they have the sense to get away if they see trouble coming. The sense God gave a goose, you might say—except He didn’t give it to all the geese here, either.”

“No,” Audubon said. Some of Atlantis’ geese flew to other lands as well, and were properly wary. Some stayed on the great island the whole year round. Those birds weren’t. Some of them flew poorly. Some couldn’t fly at all, having wings as small and useless as those of the oil thrush.

Honkers looked uncommonly like outsized geese with even more outsized legs. Some species even had black necks and white chin patches reminiscent of Canada geese. That frankly puzzled Audubon: it was as if God were repeating Himself in the Creation, but why? Honkers’ feet had vestigial webs, too, while their bills, though laterally compressed, otherwise resembled the broad, flat beaks of ordinary geese.

Audubon had seen the specimens preserved in the museum in Hanover: skeletons, a few hides, enormous greenish eggs. The most recent hide was dated 1803. He wished he hadn’t remembered that. If this was a wild goose chase, a wild honker chase . . . then it was, that was all. He was doing all he could. He only wished he could have done it sooner. He’d tried. He’d failed. He only hoped some possibility of success remained.

Harris cleaned the turkey and got a fire going. Audubon finished the sketch. “That’s a good one,” Harris said, glancing over at it.

“Not bad,” Audubon allowed—he bad caught the pose he wanted. He gutted the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker so he could preserve it. Not surprisingly, the bird’s stomach was full of beetle larvae. The very name of its genus, Campephilus, meant grub-loving. He made a note in his diary and put the bird in strong spirits.

“Better than that,” Harris said. He cut up the turkey and skewered drumsticks on twigs.

“Well, maybe,” Audubon said as he took one of the skewers from his friend and started roasting the leg. He wasn’t shy of praise—no, indeed. All the same, he went on, “I didn’t come here for scarlet-cheeked woodpeckers. I came for honkers, by God.”

“You take what you get.” Harris turned his twig so the drumstick cooked evenly. “You take what you get, and you hope what you get is what you came for.”

“Well, maybe,” Audubon said again. He looked east, toward the still poorly explored heart of Atlantis. “But the harder you work, the likelier you are to get what you want. I hope I can still work hard enough. And”—he looked east once more—“I hope what I want is still there to get.”

He and Harris stayed on the main highway for most of a week. The broad, welltrodden path let them travel faster than they could have on narrower, more winding roads. But when Audubon saw the Green Ridge Mountains rising over the eastern horizon, the temptation to leave the main road got too strong to resist.

“We don’t want to go into the mountains anywhere near the highway,” he declared. “We know no honkers live close to it, or people would have seen them, n’est-ce pas?”

“Stands to reason,” Harris said loyally. He paused before adding, “I wouldn’t mind another couple of days of halfway decent inns, though.”

“When we come back with what we seek, the Hesperian Queen will be none too good,” Audubon said. “But we go through adversity to seek our goal.”

Harris sighed. “We sure do.”

On the main highway, fruit trees and oaks and chestnuts and elms and maples thrived. They were all imports from Europe or from Terranova. Audubon and Harris hadn’t gone far from the highway before Atlantean flora reasserted itself: ginkgoes and magnolias, cycads and pines, with ferns growing in profusion as an understory. Birdsongs, some familiar, others strange, doubled and redoubled as the travelers moved into less settled country. Atlantean birds seemed more comfortable with the trees they’d lived in for generations uncounted than with the brash newcomers men brought in.

Not all the newcomers clung to the road. Buttercups and poppies splashed the improbably green landscape with color. Atlantean bees buzzed around the flowers that had to be unfamiliar to them . . . or maybe those were European honeybees, carried to the new land in the midst of the sea to serve the plants men needed, wanted, or simply liked. Curious, Audubon stopped and waited by some poppies for a closer look at the insects. They were, without a doubt, honeybees. He noted the fact in his diary. It left him oddly disappointed but not surprised.

“In another hundred years,” he said, climbing back onto his horse, “how much of the old Atlantis will be left? Any?”

“In another hundred years,” Harries replied, “it won’t matter to either of us, except from beyond the Pearly Gates.”

“No, I suppose not.” Audubon wondered if he had ten years left, or even five, let alone a hundred. “But it should matter to those who are young here. They throw away marvels without thinking of what they’re doing. Wouldn’t you like to see dodos preserved alive?” He tried not to recall his unfortunate bird model.

“Alive? Why, I can go to Hanover and hear them speechifying,” Harris said. Audubon snorted. His friend waved a placating hand. “Let it go, John. Let it go. I take your point.”

“I’m so glad,” Audubon said with sardonic relish. “Perhaps the authorities here—your speechifying dodos—could set up parks to preserve some of what they have.” He frowned. “Though how parks could keep out foxes and weasels and rats and windblown seeds, I confess I don’t know. Still, it would make a start.”

They slept on the grass that night. The throaty hoots of an Atlantean ground owl woke Audubon somewhere near midnight. He loaded his shotgun by the faint, bloody light of the campfire’s embers, in case the bird came close enough for him to spot it. Ground owls were hen-sized, more or less. They could fly, but not well. They hunted frogs and lizards and the outsized katydids that scurried through the undergrowth here. Nothing hunted them—or rather, nothing had hunted them till foxes and wild dogs and men came to Atlantis. Like so many creatures here, they couldn’t seem to imagine they might become prey. Abundant once, they were scarce these days.

This one’s call got farther and farther away. Audubon thought about imitating it to lure the ground owl into range of his charge. In the end, he forbore. Blasting away in the middle of the night might frighten Harris into an apoplexy. And besides—Audubon yawned—he was still sleepy himself. He set down the shotgun, rolled himself in his blanket once more, and soon started snoring again.

When Audubon woke the next morning, he saw a mouse-sized katydid’s head and a couple of greenish brown legs only a yard or so from his bedroll. He swore softly: the ground owl had come by, but without hooting, so he never knew. If he’d stayed up . . . If I’d stayed up, I would be useless today, he thought. He needed regular doses of sleep much more than he had twenty years earlier.

“I wouldn’t have minded if you fired on an owl,” Harris said as he built up the fire and got coffee going. “We’re here for that kind of business.”

“Good of you to say so,” Audubon replied. “It could be that I will have other chances.”

“And it could be that you won’t. You were the one who said the old Atlantis was going under. Grab with both hands while it’s here.”

“With the honkers, I intend to,” Audubon said. “If they’re there to be grabbed, grab them I shall. The ground owl . . . Well, who knows if it would have come when I hooted?”

“I bet it would. I never knew a soul who could call birds better than you.” Harris took a couple of squares of hardtack out of an oilcloth valise and handed one to Audubon. The artist waited till he had his tin cup of coffee before breakfasting. He broke his hardtack into chunks and dunked each one before eating it. The crackers were baked to a fare-thee-well so they would keep for a long time, which left them chewier than his remaining teeth could easily cope with.

As he and his friend got ready to ride on, he looked again at the remains of the giant katydid. “I really ought to get some specimens of those,” he remarked.

“Why, in heaven’s name?” Harris said. “They aren’t birds, and they aren’t viviparous quadrupeds, either. They aren’t quadrupeds at all.”

“No,” Audubon said slowly, “but doesn’t it seem to you that here they fill the role mice play in most of the world?”

“Next time I see me a six-legged chirping mouse with feelers”—Harris wiggled his forefingers above his eyes—“you can lock me up and lose the key, on account of I’ll have soused my brains with the demon rum.”

“Or with whiskey, or gin, or whatever else you can get your hands on,” Audubon said. Harris grinned and nodded. As Audubon saddled his horse, he couldn’t stop thinking about Atlantean katydids and mice. Something had to scurry through the leaves and eat whatever it could find there, and so many other creatures ate mice . . . or, here, the insects instead. He nodded to himself. That was worth a note in the diary whenever they stopped again.

They rode into a hamlet a little before noon. It boasted a saloon, a church, and a few houses. BIDEFORD HOUSE OF UNIVERSAL DEVOTION, the church declared. Strange Protestant sects flourished in Atlantis, not least because none was strong enough to dominate—and neither was his own Catholic Church.

But the saloon, in its own way, was also a house of universal devotion. Bideford couldn’t have held more than fifty people, but at least a dozen men sat in there, drinking and eating and talking. A silence fell when Audubon and Harris walked in. The locals stared at them. “Strangers,” somebody said; he couldn’t have sounded much more surprised had he announced a pair of kangaroos.

Not surprisingly, the man behind the bar recovered fastest. “What’ll it be, gents?” he asked.

Harris was seldom at a loss when it came to his personal comforts. “Ham sandwich and a mug of beer, if you please.”

“That sounds good,” Audubon said. “The same for me, if you’d be so kind.”

“Half an eagle for both of you together,” the proprietor said. Some of the regulars grinned. Even without those tell-tale smiles, Audubon would have known he was being gouged. But he paid without complaint. He could afford it, and he’d be asking questions later on, and priming the pump with more silver. He wanted the locals to see he could be openhanded.

The beer was . . . beer. The sandwiches, by contrast, were prodigies: great slabs of tender, flavorful ham on fresh-baked bread, enlivened by spicy mustard and pickles all but jumping with dill and garlic and something else, something earthy—an Atlantean spice?

Audubon hadn’t come close to finishing his—he had to chew slowly—when the man behind the bar said, “Don’t see too many strangers here.” Several locals—big, stocky, bearded fellows in homespun—nodded. So did Audubon, politely. The tapman went on, “Mind if I ask what you’re doing passing through?”

“I am John James Audubon,” Audubon said, and waited to see if anyone knew his name. Most places, he would have had no doubt. In Bideford . . . well, who could say?

“The painter fella,” one of the regulars said.

“That’s right.” Audubon smiled, more relieved than he wanted to show. “The painter fella.” He repeated the words even though they grated. If the locals understood he was a prominent person, they were less likely to rob him and Harris for the fun of it. He introduced his friend.

“Well, what are you doing here in Bideford?” the proprietor asked again.

“Passing through, as you said,” Audubon replied. “I’m hoping to paint honkers.” This country was almost isolated enough to give him hope of finding some here—not quite, but almost.

“Honkers?” Two or three men said it as the same time. A heartbeat later, they all laughed. One said, “Ain’t seen any of them big fowl round these parts since Hector was a pup.”

“That’s right,” someone else said. Solemn nods filled the saloon.

“It’s a shame, too,” another man said. “My granddad used to say they was easy to kill, and right good eatin’. Lots of meat on ’em, too.” That had to be why no honkers lived near Bideford these days, but the local seemed ignorant of cause and effect.

“If you know of any place where they might dwell, I’d be pleased to pay for the information.” Audubon tapped a pouch on his belt. Coins clinked sweetly. “You’d help my work, and you’d advance the cause of science.”

“Half now,” the practical Harris added, “and half on the way back if we find what we’re looking for. Maybe a bonus, too, if the tip’s good enough.”

A nice ploy, Audubon thought. I have to remember that one. The locals put their heads together. One of the older men, his beard streaked with gray, spoke up: “Well, I don’t know anything for sure, mind, but I was out hunting a few years back and ran into this fellow from Thetford.” He knew where Thetford was, but Audubon didn’t. A few questions established that it lay to the northeast. The Bideford man continued, “We got to gabbing, and he said he saw some a few years before that, off the other side of his town. Can’t swear he wasn’t lyin’, mind, but he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.”

Harris looked a question towards Audubon. The artist nodded. Harris gave the Bideford man a silver eagle. “Let me have your name, sir,” Harris said. “If the tip proves good, and if we don’t pass this way again on our return journey, we will make good on the rest of the reward.”

“Much obliged, sir,” the man said. “I’m Lehonti Kent.” He carefully spelled it out for Harris, who wrote it down in one of his notebooks.

“What can you tell me about the House of Universal Devotion?” Audubon asked.

That got him more than he’d bargained for. Suddenly everyone, even the most standoffish locals, wanted to talk at once. He gathered that the church preached the innate divinity of every human being and the possibility of transcending mere mankind—as long as you followed the preachings of the man the locals called the Reverend, with a very audible capital R. Universal Devotion to the Reverend, he thought. It all seemed to him the rankest, blackest heresy, but the men of Bideford swore by it.

“Plenty of Devotees”—another obvious capital letter—“in Thetford and other places like that,” Lehonti Kent said. He plainly had only the vaguest idea of places more than a couple of days’ travel from his home village.

“Isn’t that interesting?” Audubon said: one of the few phrases polite almost anywhere.

Because the Bidefordites wanted to preach to them, he and Harris couldn’t get away from the saloon for a couple of hours. “Well, well,” Harris said as they rode away. “Wasn’t that interesting?” He freighted the word with enough sarcasm to sink a ship twice the size of the Maid of Orleans.

Audubon’s head was still spinning. The Reverend seemed to have invented a whole new prehistory for Atlantis and Terranova, one that had little to do with anything Audubon thought he’d learned. He wondered if he’d be able to keep it straight enough to get it down in his diary. The Devotees seemed nearly as superstitious to him as the wild red Terranovan tribes—and they should have known better, while the savages were honestly ignorant. Even so, he said, “If Lehonti—what a name!—Kent gave us a true lead, I don’t mind the time we spent . . . too much.”

Thetford proved a bigger village than Bideford. It also boasted a House of Universal Devotion, though it had a Methodist church as well. A crudely painted sign in front of the House said, THE REVEREND PREACHES SUNDAY!! Two exclamation points would have warned Audubon away even if he’d never passed through Bideford.

He did ask after honkers in Thetford. No one with whom he talked claimed to have seen one, but a couple of men did say some people from the town had seen them once upon a time. Harris doled out more silver, but it spurred neither memory nor imagination.

“Well, we would have come this way anyhow,” Audubon said as they went on riding northeast. The Green Ridge Mountains climbed higher in the sky now, dominating the eastern horizon. Peering ahead with a spyglass, Audubon saw countless dark valleys half hidden by the pines and cycads that gave the mountains their name. Anything could live there . . . couldn’t it? He had to believe it could. “We have a little more hope now,” he added, as much to himself as to Harris.

“Hope is good,” his friend said. “Honkers would be better.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth before the ferns and cycads by the side of the road quivered . . . and a stag bounded across. Audubon started to raise his shotgun, but stopped with the motion not even well begun. For one thing, the beast was gone. For another, the gun was charged with bird-shot, which would only have stung it.

“Sic transit gloria honkeris.” Harris said.

“Honkeris?” But Audubon held up a hand before Harris could speak. “Yes, honker would be a third-declension noun, wouldn’t it?”

Little by little, the country rose toward the mountains. Cycads thinned out in the woods; more varieties of pines and spruces and redwoods took their places. The ferns in the undergrowth seemed different, too. As settlements thinned out, so did splashes of color from exotic flowers. The very air seemed different: mistier, moister, full of curious, spicy scents the nose would not meet anywhere else in the world. It felt as if the smells of another time were wafting past the travelers.

“And so they are,” Audubon said when that thought crossed his mind. “This is the air of Atlantis as it was, Atlantis before those fishermen saw its coast loom up out of the sea.”

“Well, almost,” Harris said. That he and Audubon and their horses were here proved his point. In case it didn’t, he pointed to the track down which they rode. The ground was damp—muddy in spots—for it had rained the day before. A fox’s pads showed plainly.

“How many birds has that beast eaten?” Audubon said. “How many grounddwellers’ nests has it robbed?” Many Atlantean birds nested on the ground, far more than in either Europe or Terranova. But for a few snakes and large lizards, there were no terrestrial predators—or hadn’t been, before men brought them in. Audubon made another note in his diary. Till now, he hadn’t thought about the effect the presence or absence of predators might have on birds’ nesting habits.

Even here, in the sparsely settled heart of Atlantis, a great deal had been lost. But much still remained. Birdsongs filled the air, especially just after sunrise when Audubon and Harris started out each day. Atlantis had several species of crossbills and grosbeaks: birds with bills that seemed made for getting seeds out of cones and disposing of them afterwards. As with so many birds on the island, they were closely related to Terranovan forms, but not identical to them.

Audubon shot a male green grosbeak in full breeding plumage. Lying in his hand, the bird, with its apple-green back, warm cinnamon belly, and yellow eye streak, seemed gaudy as a seventeenth-century French courtier. But on the branch of a redwood, against the green foliage and rusty-brown bark, it hadn’t been easy to spot. If it weren’t singing so insistently, chances were he would have ridden right past it.

At dusk, Harris shot an oil thrush. That wasn’t for research, though Audubon did save the skin. The long-billed flightless thrush had more than enough meat for both of them. The flavor put Audubon in mind of snipe or woodcock: not surprising, perhaps, when all three were so fond of earthworms.

Gnawing on a thighbone, Harris said, “I wonder how long these birds will last.”

“Longer than honkers, anyhow, because they’re less conspicuous,” Audubon said, and his friend nodded. He went on, “But you have reason—they’re in danger. They’re one more kind that nests on the ground, and how can they escape foxes and dogs that hunt by scent?”

Somewhere off in the distance, far beyond the light of the campfire, a fox yelped and yowled. Harris nodded. “There’s a noise that wasn’t heard here before the English brought them.”

“If it weren’t foxes, it would be dogs,” Audubon said sadly, and Harris’ head bobbed up and down once more. Atlantis was vulnerable to man and his creatures, and that was the long and short of it. “A pity. A great pity,” Audubon murmured. Harris nodded yet again.

The screech ripped across the morning air. Audubon’s horse snorted and tried to rear. He calmed it with hands and voice and educated thighs. “Good God!” Harris said. “What was that?”

Before answering, Audubon listened to the sudden and absolute silence all around. A moment before, the birds were singing their hearts out. As a lion’s roar was said to bring stillness to the African plains, so this screech froze the forests of Atlantis.

It rang out again, wild and harsh and fierce. Excitement tingled through Audubon. “I know what it is!” Despite the urgency in his voice, it hardly rose above a whisper. His gaze swung to the shotgun. Have to charge it with stronger shot, he thought.

“What?” Harris also whispered, hoarsely. As after a lion’s roar, talking out loud seemed dangerous.

“A red-crested eagle, by all the saints!” Audubon said. “A rara avis itself, and also, with luck, a sign honkers aren’t far away.” Maybe the Atlantean national bird was reduced to hunting sheep or deer, but Audubon hadn’t seen any close by. If the eagle still sought the prey it had always chosen before the coming of man . . . Oh, if it did!

Harris didn’t just look at his shotgun. He reached for it and methodically began to load. After a moment, so did Audubon. Red-crested eagles didn’t fear men. They were used to swooping down on tall creatures that walked on two legs. People could die—people had died—under their great, tearing claws, long as a big man’s thumb. Nor were their fierce beaks to be despised—anything but.

“Where did the cry come from?” Audubon asked after loading both barrels.

“That way.” Harris pointed north. “Not far, either.”

“No, not far at all,” Audubon agreed. “We have to find it. We have to, Edward!” He plunged into the undergrowth, moving quiet as he could. Harris hurried after him. They both carried their shotguns at high port, ready to fire and ready to try to fend off the eagle if it struck before they could.

Call again. Audubon willed the thought toward the red-crested eagle with all his strength. Call again. Show us where you are.

And the eagle did. The smaller birds had begun to sing again. Silence came down on them like a heavy boot. Audubon grew acutely aware of how loud his own footfalls were. He tried to stride more lightly, with what success he had trouble judging. Tracking the cry, he swung to the west just a little.

“There!” Harris breathed behind him. His friend pointed and froze, for all the world like a well-bred, well-trained hunting dog.

Audubon’s eyes darted this way and that. He did not see . . . He did not see . . . And then he did. “Oh,” he whispered: more a soft sound of wonder than a word.

The eagle perched near the top of a ginkgo tree. It was a big female, close to four feet long from the end of its low, long bill to the tip of the tail. The crest was up, showing the bird was alert and in good spirits. It was the coppery red of a redheaded man’s hair or a red-tailed hawk’s tail, not the glowing crimson of a hummingbird’s gorget. The eagle’s back was dark brown, its belly a tawny buff.

Slowly, carefully, Audubon and Harris drew closer. For all their caution, the bird saw them. It mantled on its perch, spreading its wings and screeching again. The span was relatively small for the eagle’s size—not much more than seven feet—but the wings were very broad. Red-crested eagles flapped more than they soared, unlike their white-headed and golden cousins. Naturalists disagreed about which were their closer kin.

“Watch out,” Harris whispered. “It’s going to fly.”

And it did, not three heartbeats after the words left his mouth. Audubon and Harris both swung up their guns and fired at essentially the same instant. The eagle cried out once more, this time a startled squall of pain and fear. It fell out of the sky and hit the ground with a thump.

“Got it!” Harris exulted.

“Yes.” Joy and sorrow warred in Audubon. That magnificent creature—a shame it had to perish for the sake of art and science. How many were left to carry on the race? One fewer, whatever the answer was.

This one wasn’t dead yet. It thrashed in the ferns, screaming in fury because it couldn’t fly. Its legs were long and strong—could it run? Audubon trotted towards it. It mustn’t get away, he thought. Now that he and Harris had shot it, it had to become a specimen and a subject for his art. If it didn’t, they would have knocked it down for nothing, and he couldn’t bear the idea.

The red-crested eagle wasn’t running. When he came close enough, he saw that a shotgun ball from one of the two charges had broken its left leg. The bird screeched and snapped at him; he had to jump back in a hurry to keep that fearsome beak from carving a chunk out of his calf. Hate and rage blazed in those great golden eyes.

Along with the shotgun, Harris also carried his revolver. He drew it now, and aimed it at the bird. “I’ll finish it,” he said. “Put it out of its misery.” He thumbed back the hammer.

“In the breast, if you please,” Audubon said. “I don’t want to spoil the head.”

“At your service, John. If the poor creature will only hold still for a few seconds . . . ”

After more frantic thrashing and another long-neck lunge at the men who’d reduced it from lord of the air to wounded victim, the eagle paused to pant and to gather its waning strength. Harris fired. A pistol ball would have blown a songbird to pieces, but the eagle was big enough to absorb the bullet. It let out a final bubbling scream before slumping over, dead.

“That is one splendid creature,” Harris said solemnly. “No wonder the Atlanteans put it on their flag and on their money.”

“No wonder at all,” Audubon said. He waited a few minutes, lest the eagle, like a serpent, have one more bite in it. Even then, he nudged the bird with a stick before picking it up. That beak, and the talons on the unwounded leg, commanded respect. He grunted in surprise as he straightened with the still-warm body in his arms. “How much would you say this bird weighs, Edward?”

“Let me see.” Harris held out his arms. Audubon put the red-crested eagle in them. Harris grunted, too. He hefted the eagle, his lips pursed thoughtfully. “Dog my cats if it doesn’t go thirty pounds, easy. You wouldn’t think such a big bird’d be able to get off the ground, would you?”

“We saw it. Many have seen it,” Audubon said. He took the eagle back from Harris and gauged its weight again himself. “Thirty pounds? Yes, that seems about right. I would have guessed something around there, too. Neither the golden nor the white-headed eagle goes much above twelve pounds, and even the largest African eagle will not greatly surpass twenty.”

“Those birds don’t hunt honkers,” Harris said. His usual blunt good sense got to the nub of the problem in a handful of words. “The red-crested, now, it needs all the muscles it can get.”

“No doubt you’re right,” Audubon said. “The biggest honkers, down in the eastern lowlands, would stand a foot, two feet, taller than a man and weigh . . . What do you suppose they would weigh?”

“Three or four times as much as a man, maybe more,” Harris said. “You look at those skeletons, you see right away they were lardbutted birds.”

Audubon wouldn’t have put it that way, but he couldn’t say his companion was wrong. “Can you imagine the red-crested eagle diving down to strike a great honker?” he said, excitement at the thought making his voice rise. “It would have been like Jove’s lightning from the sky, nothing less.”

“Can you imagine trying to hold them off with pikes and matchlocks and bows, the way the first settlers did?” Harris said. “Better those fellows than me, by God! It’s a wonder there were any second settlers after that.”

“No doubt that’s so,” Audubon said, but he was only half listening. He looked down at the red-crested eagle, already trying to decide how to pose it for what would, for all sorts of reasons, undoubtedly prove the last volume of Birds and Viviparous Quadrupeds of Northern Terranova and Atlantis. He wanted to show it in a posture that displayed its power and majesty, but the bird was simply too large even for the double elephant folios of his life’s work.

What can’t be cured . . . , he thought, and carried the bird back to the patiently waiting horses. Yes, it surely weighed every ounce of thirty pounds; sweat streamed down his face by the time he got to them. The horses rolled their eyes. One of them let out a soft snort at the smell of blood.

“There, there, my pets, my lovelies,” he crooned, and gave each beast a bit of loaf sugar. That calmed them nicely; horses were as susceptible to bribery as people—and much less likely to go back on any bargain they made.

He got to work with the posing board—which, though he’d brought the largest one he had, was almost too small for the purpose—and his wires. Watching him, Harris asked, “How will you pose a honker if we find one?”

“When we find one.” Audubon would not admit the possibility of failure to his friend or to himself. “How? I’ll do the best I can, of course, and I trust I will enjoy your excellent assistance?”

“I’ll do whatever you want me to. You know that,” Harris said. “Would I be out here in the middle of nowhere if I wouldn’t?”

“No, certainly not.” Again, though, Audubon gave the reply only half his attention. He knew what he wanted to do now. He shaped the red-crested eagle with wings pulled back and up to brake its flight, talons splayed wide, and beak agape as if it were about to descend on a great honker’s back.

He found a stick of charcoal and began to sketch. No sooner had the charcoal touched the paper than he knew this would be a good one, even a great one. Sometimes the hand would refuse to realize what the eye saw, what the brain thought, what the heart desired. Audubon always did the best he could, as he’d told Harris. Some days, that best was better than others. Today . . . today was one of those. He felt almost as if he stood outside himself, watching himself perform, watching something perform through him.

When the drawing was done, he went on holding the charcoal stick, as if he didn’t want to let it go. And he didn’t. But he had nothing left to add. He’d done what he could do, and . . .

“That’s some of your best work in a long time, John—much better than the woodpecker, and that was mighty good,” Harris said. “I didn’t want to talk while you were at it, for fear I’d break the spell. But that one, when you paint it, will live forever. It will be less than life-sized on the page, then?”

“Yes. It will have to be,” Audubon said. When he spoke, it also felt like breaking the spell. But he made himself nod and respond as a man would in normal circumstances; you couldn’t stay on that exalted plane forever. Even touching it now and again seemed a special gift from God. More words came: “This is right. If it’s small, then it’s small, that’s all. Those who see will understand.”

“When they see the bird like that, they will.” Harris seemed unable to tear his eyes away form the sketch.

And Audubon descended to mundane reality, drawing ginkgoes and pines and ferns for the background of the painting yet to come. The work there was solid, professional draftsmanship; it seemed a million miles away from the inspiration that had fired him only minutes before.

Once he finished all the sketches he needed, he skinned the eagle and dissected it. When he opened the bird’s stomach, he found gobbets of half-digested, unusually dark flesh. It had a strong odor that put him in mind of . . . “Edward!” he said. “What does this smell like to you?”

Harris stooped beside him and sniffed. He needed only a few seconds to find an answer, one very much in character.

“Steak-and-kidney pie, by God!”

And not only was the answer in character. It was also right, as Audubon recognized at once. “It does!” he exclaimed, though the homely dish wasn’t one of his favorites. “And these bits of flesh have the look of kidney, too. And that means . . . ”

“What?” Harris asked.

“From everything I’ve read, honker kidneys and the fat above them were—are—the red-crested eagle’s favorite food!” Audubon answered. “If this bird has a belly full of chunks of kidney, then somewhere not far away, somewhere not far away at all, there must be—there must be, I say—honkers on which it fed.”

“Unless it killed a deer or some such,” Harris said. In that moment, Audubon almost hated his friend—not because Harris was wrong, but because he might not be. And dropping a brute fact on Audubon’s glittering tower of speculation seemed one of the cruelest things any man could do.

“Well,” Audubon said, and then, bucking up, “Well,” again. He gathered himself, gathered his stubbornness. “We just have to find out, don’t we?”

Two days later, two days deeper into the western foothills of the Green Ridge Mountains, Audubon’s sense of smell again came to his aid. This time, he had no trouble identifying the odor a breeze sent his way. “Phew!” he said, wrinkling his nose. “Something’s dead.”

“Sure is,” Harris agreed. “Something big, too, by the stink.”

“Something big . . . ” Audubon nodded, trying without much luck to control the electric jolt that coursed through him at those words. “Yes!”

Harris raised an eyebrow. “Yes, indeed. And so?”

“There aren’t many big creatures in Atlantis,” Audubon said. “It could be a dead man, though I hope not. It could be a dead deer or horse or cow, perhaps. Or it could be . . . Edward, it could be . . . ”

“A dead honker?” Harris spoke the word when Audubon couldn’t make himself bring it past the barrier of his teeth, past the barrier of his hopes, and out into the open air where it might wither and perish.

“Yes!” he said again, even more explosively than before.

“Well, then, we’d better rein in, hadn’t we, and see if we can find out?” Harris let out a creaky chuckle. “Never thought I’d turn bloodhound in my old age. Only goes to show you can’t tell, doesn’t it?”

He and Audubon tied their horses to a pine sapling by the side of the track. Audubon didn’t worry about anyone coming along and stealing the animals; he just didn’t want them wandering off. As far as he knew, he and his friend were the only people for miles around. This region was settled thinly, if at all. The two men plunged into the woods, both of them carrying shotguns.

A bloodhound would have run straight to the mass of corruption. Audubon and Harris had no such luck. Tracking by sight or by ear, Audubon would easily have been able to find his quarry. Trying to track by scent, he discovered at once that he was no bloodhound, and neither was Harris. They cast back and forth, trying to decide whether the stench was stronger here or there, in this direction or that: a slow, nasty, frustrating business.

And then, from the edge of a meadow, Harris called, “John! Come quick! I’ve found it!”

“Mon Dieu!” Audubon crashed toward him, his heart thumping and thudding in his chest. “Is it, Edward?” he asked. “Is it a—”

“See for yourself.” Harris pointed out to the curved lump of meat that lay in the middle of the grass and weeds.

“Mon Dieu,” Audubon said again, softly this time, and crossed himself. “It is a dead honker. It is. And where there are dead ones, there must be live ones as well.”

“Stands to reason,” Harris said, “unless this one here is the very last of its kind.”

“Bite your tongue, you horrible man. Fate wouldn’t be so cruel to me.” Audubon hoped—prayed—he was right. He walked out to the huge dead bird.

If any large scavengers had been at the corpse, Harris—or Audubon’s noisy passage through the woods—had scared them off. Clouds of flies still buzzed above it, though, while ants and beetles took their share of the odorous bounty. Audubon stood upwind, which helped some, but only so much.

This wasn’t one of the truly enormous honkers that had wandered the eastern plains before men found Atlantis. It was an upland species, and probably hadn’t been as tall as Audubon or weighed much more than twice as much as he did. A great wound in the center of its back—now boiling with maggots—told how it died. That was surely a blow from a red-crested eagle: perhaps the one Audubon and Harris shot, perhaps another.

“Can you draw from this one?” Harris asked.

Regretfully, Audubon shook his head. “I fear not. It’s too far gone.” His sensitive stomach heaved. Even with the ground firm under his feet, the stench nauseated him.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Harris said. “Shall we take specimens—bones and feathers and such—so we have something to bring back in case we don’t run into any live honkers?”

Messing about with the dead, reeking bird was the last thing Audubon wanted to do. “We will find live ones,” he said. Harris didn’t answer. He just stolidly stood there and let Audubon listen to himself and know he couldn’t be certain he was right. The artist glared at him. “But I suppose we should preserve what specimens we can, in the interest of science.”

Pulling feathers from the honker wasn’t too bad. The black ones on its neck and the white patch under the chin testified to its affinity to Canada geese. The feathers on the body, though, were long and shaggy, more hairlike than similar to the plumage of birds gifted with flight.

Getting the meat from the bones and then cleaning them . . . Audubon’s poor stomach couldn’t stand the strain. He lost his breakfast on the green meadow grass and then dry-heaved helplessly for a while. A little rill ran through the meadow not far away. Perhaps the honker was going out to drink there when the eagle struck.

Audubon rinsed his mouth with cold, clear water from the rill . . . upstream from where Harris washed rotting flesh from the honker’s right femur. The thighbone was larger and stouter than his own. Gathering himself, Audubon went back to the corpse to free the bird’s pelvis. He brought it back to the rill to clean it. How long would his hands reek of decay? How long would his clothes? Would he ever be able to wear this outfit again? He doubted it. As he worked, he tried not to look at what he was doing.

His hands, then, told him of something odd: a hole in the bone on the left side of the pelvis that wasn’t matched on the right. That did make him look. Sure enough, the hole was there, and a shallow groove leading to it. “See what I have here,” he said to Harris.

His friend examined it, then asked, “What do you make of that?”

“Don’t you think it comes from the claw of the red-crested eagle?” Audubon said. “You saw the talons on the bird. One could pierce the flesh above the bone, and then the bone itself. This is plainly a very recent wound: notice how rough the bone is all around the edge. It had no chance to heal.”

After considering, Harris nodded. “I’d say you’re right. I’d say you have to be right. You might almost have seen the eagle flying at the honker.”

“I wish I would have!” Audubon held up the still-stinking pelvis. “I’ll have to draw this. It holds too much information to be easily described in words.”

“Let Mr. Owen look to his laurels, then,” Harris said.

“I’ll do the best I can, that’s all,” Audubon said. The detailed scientific illustration would have to be pen and ink, not charcoal or watercolor. It would also have to be unrelentingly precise. He couldn’t pose the pelvis, except to show the perforation to best advantage, and he couldn’t alter and adjust to make things more dramatic. His particular gift lay in portraying motion and emotion; he would have to eschew them both here. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “An artist should be versatile, eh?”

“I know you can do it.” Harris showed more confidence in him than he had in himself.

The smell of rotting honker came closer to spooking the horses than the eagle’s blood had a couple of days before. The pack horse that carried Audubon’s artistic supplies didn’t want to let him anywhere near it. It didn’t even want sugar from his stinking hand. He counted himself lucky to take what he needed without getting kicked.

He set the honker hipbone in the sun, then started sketching with a pencil. He tried and rubbed out, tried and rubbed out. Sweat ran down his face, though the day was fine and mild. This was ever so much harder—for him, anyway—than painting would have been. It seemed like forever before what he set down on paper bore any resemblance to the specimen that was its model.

When he was finally satisfied, he held up the sketch to show it to Harris, only to discover his friend had gone off somewhere and he’d never noticed. Painting took far less concentration. It left room for artistry. This . . . this was a craft, and one in which he knew himself to be imperfectly skilled.

He’d just inked his pen for the first time when Harris’ shotgun boomed. Would that be supper or another specimen? I’ll find out, Audubon thought, and set about turning his shades of gray into black and white. He had to turn the pelvis to compensate for the way shadows had shifted with the moving sun while he worked.

Harris fired again. Audubon heard the blast, but didn’t consciously register it. His hand never twitched. A fine line here, shading there to show a hollow, the exact look of the gouge the eagle’s claw had dug before piercing the pelvis where the bone thinned . . .

“We’ve got supper,” Harris said. Audubon nodded to show he heard. Harris went on, “And here’s something for you to work on when you’re done there.”

That made Audubon look up. Along with a plump oil thrush, Harris carried a small, grayish, pale-bellied bird with a black cap. “An Atlantean tit!” Audubon said. The bird was closely allied to the tits of England and Europe and to Terranovan chickadees. Naturalists disagreed about which group held its nearest kin. At the moment, though, he was just glad he would be able to sketch and paint; to feel; to let imprecision be a virtue, not a sin. “Yes, that will be a change—and a relief.”

“How’s the drawing coming?” Harris asked. Audubon showed him. Harris looked from the paper to the pelvis and back again. After a moment, he silently lifted his broad-brimmed felt hat from his head, a salute Audubon cherished more than most wordier ones.

“Bones are all very well,” the artist said, “but I want the chance to draw honkers from life!”

Audubon began to despair of getting what he wanted. He began to believe Harris’ gibe was right, and he’d come along just in time to find the last honker in the world moldering in the meadow. Could fate be so cruel?

Whenever he started to fret, Harris would say, “Well, we’ve got something, anyway. We didn’t know for sure we’d get anything at all when we set out.” Every word of that was true, and it always made Audubon feel worse, not better.

He spent several days haunting the meadow where his friend found the dead honker, hoping it was part of a flock or a gaggle or whatever the English word for a group of honkers was. No others showed up, though. He found no fresh tracks in the mud by the rill. At last, sorrowfully, he decided the dead bird must have been alone.

“What if it was the last one?” he said. “To miss it by a few days . . . Why couldn’t we have shot the eagle sooner? Then the honker would still be alive!”

He waited for Harris to be grateful again for what they had. But Harris surprised him, saying, “No use worrying about it. We don’t know that eagle got that honker, anyhow.”

“Well, no,” Audubon admitted upon reflection. “Maybe it was some other villainous eagle instead.” He got most affronted when Harris laughed at him.

Even though he was forced to admit to himself that honkers weren’t going to visit the meadow, he was loath to leave it. He knew at least one live bird had frequented it up until mere days before. About what other spot in all Atlantis—in all the world—could he say the same?

He kept looking back over his shoulder long after he and Harris rode away. “Don’t worry,” said Harris, the optimist born. “Bound to be better land ahead.”

“How do you know that?” Audubon demanded.

Harris surprised him by having an answer: “Because as best I can tell, nobody’s ever come this way before. We’re on a track now, not a road. I haven’t seen any hoofprints besides the ones our horses are leaving for a couple of hours now.”

Audubon blinked. He looked around—really looked around. “Nom d’un nom!” he murmured. “So it would seem.” Pines and cycads and ginkgoes crowded close together on either side of the track. The air was fragrant with scents whose like he would find nowhere else. “This might almost be the antediluvian age, or another world altogether. What do you suppose made our trail?”

“Anywhere else, I’d say deer. That may be so here, too, but I haven’t seen any sign of them—no tracks, no droppings,” Harris said. “Oil thrushes? Some of the other big flightless birds they have here? Maybe even honkers—who knows?”

That was enough to make Audubon dismount and minutely examine the surface of the trail in the hope of finding honker tracks. With their size and with the vestigial webbing between their toes, they were unmistakable. He found none. He did see oil-thrush footprints, as Harris had suggested: they reminded him of those of the European blackbird or Terranovan robin, except for being three or four times as large. And he saw a fox’s pads, which stood out against the spiky background of bird tracks. Imported creatures penetrated even here, to the wild heart of Atlantis.

But of course, he thought. Harris and I are here, aren’t we? And we’re no less fond of an oil-thrush supper than foxes are.

A splash of vivid green on the side of a redwood sapling caught his eye as he rode past. At first, he thought it was some strange Atlantean fungus clinging to the trunk. Then, ever so slowly, it moved. “A cucumber slug!” Harris exclaimed.

The slug was almost the size of a cucumber, though Audubon would have fought shy of eating anything of that iridescent hue. Though it was neither bird nor viviparous quadruped, he stopped and sketched it. It was a curiosity, and one little known to naturalists—few of them penetrated to the cool, humid uplands where it lived. Eyestalks waving, it glided along the trunk, leaving behind a thumb-wide trail of slime.

“Maybe we’ll come across some of those snails that are almost as big as your fist, too,” Harris said.

“A shame to do it now, when we have no garlic butter.” Audubon might draw the line at a cucumber slug, but he was fond of escargots. Harris, a Terranovan born and bred, made a horrible face. Audubon only laughed.

They rode on. The tracks they followed were never made by man. They twisted this way and that and doubled back on themselves again and again. Whenever Audubon came out into the open, he scanned the stretch of grass ahead with eager hope. How he longed to see honkers grazing there, or pulling leaves from tender young trees! How disappointed he was, again and again!

“Maybe that was the last honker in this part of Atlantis,” he mourned as he and Harris made camp one night. “Maybe it was the last honker in all of Atlantis.”

“Maybe it was,” his friend replied. Audubon, toasting an oil-thrush drumstick over the flames, glared at him. The least Harris could do was sympathize. But then he continued, “We’ve come too far and we’ve done too much to give up so soon, haven’t we?”

“Yes,” Audubon said. “Oh, yes.”

As the scents were different in this mostly pristine Atlantean wilderness, so too were the sounds. Enormous frogs boomed out their calls an octave lower than even Terranovan bullfrogs, let alone the smaller frogs of Europe. When Audubon remarked on them, Harris said, “I suppose you’re sorry about the garlic butter there, too.”

“Why, yes, now that you mention it,” the painter said placidly. His friend screwed up his face again.

The big green katydids that might almost have been mice were noisier than rodents would have been, though some of their squeaks sounded eerily mouse-like. But most of their chirps and trills showed them to be insects after all. Their calls made up the background noise, more notable when it suddenly ceased than when it went on.

Audubon heard birdsongs he’d never imagined. Surely some of those singers were as yet nondescript, new to science. If he could shoot one, sketch it and paint it, bring back a type specimen . . . He did shoot several warblers and finches, but all, so far as he knew, from species already recognized.

Then he heard the scream of a red-crested eagle somewhere far off to the north. He reined in and pointed in that direction. “We go there,” he declared, in tones that brooked no argument.

Harris argued anyhow: “It’s miles away, John. We can’t hope to find just where it is, and by the time we get there it’ll be somewhere else anyhow.”

“We go north,” Audubon said, as if his friend hadn’t spoken. “The eagle may fly away, but if honkers are nearby they won’t. They can’t.”

“If.” Edward Harris packed a world of doubt into one small word.

“You said it yourself: we’ve come too far and done too much to give up hope.” If that wasn’t precisely what Harris had said, Audubon preferred not to be reminded of it. Harris had the sense to recognize as much.

Going north proved no easier than going in any other cardinal direction. Audubon swore in English; French, and occasionally Spanish when game tracks swerved and led him astray. The red-crested eagle had fallen silent after that one series of screeches, so it told him nothing about how much farther he needed to come. Maybe it’s killed again. Maybe it’s feasting, he thought. Even a freshly dead honker might do.

He and Harris came to a stream like a young river. Those Goliath frogs croaked from the rocks. “Can we ford it?” Audubon asked.

“We’d better look for a shallow stretch,” the ever-sensible Harris said.

They found one half a mile to the west, and forded the stream without getting the horses’ bellies wet. He unfolded a map of northern Atlantis. “Which stream do you suppose this is?” he said. “It should be big enough to show up here.”

Harris put on reading glasses to peer at the map. “If it was ever surveyed at all,” he said, and pointed. “It might be a tributary of the Spey. That’s about where we are.”

“I would have guessed it flows into the Liffey myself.” Audubon pointed, too.

“Next one farther north? Well, maybe,” Harris said. “The way we’ve been wandering lately, we could be damn near anywhere. Shall we go on?” Without waiting for an answer, he urged his horse forward. Audubon got his mount moving, too.

Not long after the murmur of the stream and the frogs’ formidable calls—what Aristophanes would have done with them!—faded in the distance, Audubon heard what he first thought were geese flying by. He’d ridden out onto a grassy stretch a little while before. He looked north to see if he could spot the birds, but had no luck.

Harris was peering in the same direction, his face puzzled. “Geese—but not quite geese,” he said. “Sounds like trumpet music played on a slide trombone.”

“It does!” For a moment, Audubon simply smiled at the comparison. Then, sudden wild surmise in his eye, he stared at his friend. “Edward, you don’t suppose—?”

“I don’t know,” Harris said, “but we’d better find out. If they aren’t honkers, they could be nondescript geese, which wouldn’t be bad, either. Audubon’s geese, you could call them.”

“I could,” said Audubon, who’d never had less interest in discovering a new species. “I could, yes, but . . . I’m going to load my gun with buckshot.” He started doing just that.

“Good plan.” So did Harris.

Keep calling. Please keep calling, Audubon thought, again and again, as they rode through the forest toward the sound. The birds—whatever they were—did keep up the noise, now quietly, now rising to an angry peak as if a couple of males were quarreling over a female, as males were likely to do in spring.

When Audubon thought they’d come close enough, he slid down off his horse, saying, “We’d best go forward on foot now.” He carried not only his gun but also charcoal sticks and paper, in case . . . Harris also dismounted. Audubon believed he would have brained him with the shotgun had he argued.

After perhaps ten minutes, Harris pointed ahead. “Look. We’re coming to an open space.” Audubon nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He too saw the bright sunshine that told of a break in the trees. The bird calls were very loud now, very near. “Would you call that honking?” Harris asked. Audubon only shrugged and slid forward.

He peered out from in back of a cycad at the meadow beyond . . . at the meadow, and at the honkers grazing on it. Then they blurred: tears of joy ran down his face.

“Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Who hast preserved me alive to see such things,” he whispered, staring and staring.

Harris stood behind a small spruce a few feet away. “Isn’t that something. Isn’t that something?” he said, his words more prosaic than his friend’s, but his tone hardly less reverent.

Eight honkers grazed there, pulling up grass with their bills: two males, Audubon judged, and half a dozen smaller females. The birds had a more forward-leaning posture than did the mounted skeletons in the Hanover museum. That meant they weren’t so tall. The males probably could stretch their heads up higher than a man, but it wouldn’t be easy or comfortable for them.

And then they both moved toward the same female, and did stretch their necks up and up and up, and honked as loudly as ever they could, and flapped their tiny, useless wings to make themselves seem big and fierce. And, while they squabbled, the female walked away.

Audubon started sketching. He didn’t know how many of the sketches he would work up into paintings and how many would become woodcuts or lithographs. He didn’t care, either. He was sketching honkers from life, and if that wasn’t heaven it was the next best thing.

“Which species are they, do you suppose?” Harris asked.

Once, at least a dozen varieties of honker had roamed Atlantis’ plains and uplands. The largest couple of species, the so-called great honkers, birds of the easily accessible eastern lowlands, went extinct first. Audubon had studied the remains in Hanover and elsewhere to be ready for this day. Now it was here, and he still found himself unsure. “I . . . believe they’re what’s called the agile honker,” he said slowly. “Those are the specimens they most resemble.”

“If you say they’re agile honkers, why then, they are,” Harris said. “Anyone who thinks otherwise will have to change his mind, because you’ve got the creatures.”

“I want to be right.” But Audubon couldn’t deny his friend had a point. “A shame to have to take a specimen, but . . . ”

“It’ll feed us for a while, too.” The prospect didn’t bother Harris. “They are supposed to be good eating.”

“True enough.” When Audubon had all the sketches he wanted of grazing honkers and of bad-tempered males displaying, he stepped out from behind the cycad. The birds stared at him in mild surprise. Then they walked away. He was something strange, but they didn’t think he was particularly dangerous. Atlantean creatures had no innate fear of man. The lack cost them dearly.

He walked after them, and they withdrew again. Harris came out, too, which likely didn’t help. Audubon held up a hand. “Stay there, Edward. I’ll lure them back.”

Setting down his shotgun, he lay on his back in the sweet-smelling grass, raised his hips, and pumped his legs in the air, first one, then the other, again and again, faster and faster. He’d made pronghorn antelope on the Terranovan prairie curious enough to approach with that trick. What worked with the wary antelope should work for agile honkers as well. “Are they coming?” he asked.

“They sure are.” Harris chuckled. “You look like a damn fool—you know that?”

“So what?” Audubon went on pumping. Yes, he could hear the honkers drawing near, hear their calls and then hear their big, four-toed feet tramping through the grass.

When he stood up again, he found the bigger male only a few feet away. The honker squalled at him; it didn’t care for anything on two legs that was taller than it. “Going to shoot that one?” Harris asked.

“Yes. Be ready if my charge doesn’t bring it down,” Audubon said. Point-blank buckshot should do the job. Sometimes, though, wild creatures were amazingly tenacious of life.

Audubon raised the shotgun. No, the agile honker had no idea what it was. This hardly seemed sporting, but his art and science both required it. He pulled the trigger. The gun kicked against his shoulder. The male let out a last surprised honk and toppled. The rest of the birds ran off—faster than a man, probably as fast as a horse, gabbling as they went.

Harris came up beside Audubon. “He’s down. He won’t get up again, either.”

“No.” Audubon wasn’t proud of what he’d done. “And the other male can have all the females now.”

“He ought to thank you, eh?” Harris leered and poked Audubon in the ribs.

“He’d best enjoy them while he can.” Audubon stayed somber. “Sooner or later-probably sooner—someone else will come along and shoot him, too, and his lady friends with him.”

By then, the rest of the honkers had gone perhaps a hundred yards. When no more unexpected thunder boomed, they settled down and started grazing again. A few minutes later, a hawk soared by overhead—not a red-crested eagle, but an ordinary hawk far too small to harm them. Still, its shadow panicked them more thoroughly than the shotgun blast had. They sprinted for the cover of the trees, honking louder than they did when Audubon fired.

“Would you please bring my wires, Edward?” the artist asked. “No posing board with a bird this size, but I can truss him up into lifelike postures.”

“I’ll be back directly,” Harris said. He took longer than he promised, but only because instead of carrying things himself he led up the pack horses. That gave Audubon not only the wires but also his watercolors and the strong spirits for preserving bits of the agile honker. If he and Harris did what he’d told the customs man they wouldn’t do and drank some of the spirits instead of using them all as preservatives . . . Well, how else could they celebrate?

Audubon soon got to work. “This may be the last painting I ever do,” he said. “If it is, I want to give my best.”

“Don’t be foolish. You’re good for another twenty years, easy,” Harris said.

“I hope you’re right.” Audubon left it there. No matter what he hoped, he didn’t believe it, however much he wished he did. He went on, “And this may be the last view of these honkers science ever gets. I owe it to them to give my best, too.”

He wired the dead male’s neck and wings into the pose it took when challenging its rival. He had the sketches he’d made from life to help him do that. His heart pounded as he and Harris manhandled the honker. Ten years earlier, or even five, it wouldn’t have seemed so hard. No, he didn’t think he had twenty more left, or anything close to that.

Live for the moment then, he told himself. It’s all there is. His eye still saw; his hand still obeyed. If the rest of him was wearing out like a steamboat that had gone up and down the Big Muddy too many times . . . then it was. When people remembered him, it would be for what his eye saw and his hand did. The rest? The rest mattered only to him.

And when people remembered agile honkers from now on, that too would be for what his eye saw and what his hand did. Even more than he had with the red-crested eagle, he felt responsibility’s weight heavy on his shoulders.

The other honkers came out from the trees and began grazing again. Some of them drew close to where he worked. Their calls when they saw him by the male’s body seemed to his ear curious and plaintive. They knew their fellow was dead, but they couldn’t understand why Audubon stood near the corpse. Unlike a hawk’s shadow, he was no danger they recognized.

The Sun was setting when he looked up from his work. “I think it may do,” he said. “The background will wait for later.”

Harris examined the honker on the paper, the honker vibrant with the life Audubon had stolen from its model. He set a hand on the painter’s shoulder. “Congratulations. This one will last forever.”

“Which is more than I will. Which is more than the birds will.” Audubon looked down at the dead honker, agile no more. “Now for the anatomical specimens, and now for the dark meat. Poor thing, it will be all flyblown by this time tomorrow.”

“But your painting will keep it alive,” Harris said.

“My painting will keep its memory alive. It’s not the same.” Audubon thought again about how his heart had beat too hard, beat too fast. It was quieter now, but another twenty years? Not likely. “No, it’s not the same.” He sighed. “But it’s all we have. A great pity, but it is.” He drew his skinning knife. “And now for the rest of the job . . . ”

Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2005.

Weather Girl

E. J. Swift

Sometimes when she closed her eyes at night she saw spirals, wheeling slowly against the backs of her eyelids, each one its own perfect fractal. She had never told anyone about this phenomenon. It seemed fantastical—hardly worth mentioning, never mind bothering a professional about. But lately, in the moments of not-quite-consciousness before the alarm roused her, she had found that the spirals were still there. As though all through the night they had been present, waiting.

“Morning, Maxwell.”

The security guard glanced up, glanced away.

“Morning, sir.”

As Lia passed through the lobby she clocked other agency employees also averting their eyes. It was a standard reaction, and she was used to it. They called her the weather girl. She couldn’t remember how she had found that out, but the moniker, and her reputation, had evidently stuck.

She took the elevator to the basement and found her team assembled in the incident room. They were already busy with an array of models, and Lia sensed the anticipation amidst murmured exchanges. Something new had come up. She shrugged off her coat and accepted a cup of coffee that had just been brewed.

“All right, what have we got?”

“Early indications, sir.”

A marker on the map indicated the area of tropical disturbance. Lia scanned the nearby coastlines, geopolitical factors slotting into place as she mentally noted each city or port.

“No one else has got this?”

“We’re pretty sure it’s just us.”

“How far are you with the modelling?”

“Bringing it up now.”

She watched as the projected pathways emerged one by one on the map. Her team had outlined a number of potential hit points, the result of complicated equations of global and local weather systems. Each pathway would produce a different ripple effect of infrastructural damage, loss of life, refugee outflow and resultant pressure on the home government and neighbouring countries.

“I’ll be in my office. Send the files across.”

The unit’s strategy was ostensibly simple. A typhoon could not be contained. What could be contained was information about its approach. Data could be masked, or it could be leaked. The decision to mask was dependent upon the relationship with the destination sites, and that was where Lia came in. Was it more beneficial to national security for the typhoon to hit with maximum warning, or with minimal? Would the resulting devastation be advantageous, or damaging? Then there was the unpredictability factor. The complexities of typhoon tracking, and their sometimes unexpected detours. It always came down to a gamble.

Lia reviewed her team’s reports. Usually she found it easy to settle her mind, but today for some reason she felt restless. The facts, Lia, she reminded herself. Just the pertinent facts. At the time of her appointment, she’d had psychological profiling and counselling to ensure she wasn’t a psychopath, that she would not make decisions borne out of bloodlust. They’d felt that was important. She’d felt it was ironic.

So: vulnerability indices.

Population density.

National debt to the governments in question.

And crucially, the latest metrics in the materials war. They were behind, and it was a problem.

Her watch vibrated. She’d forgotten to turn it off, which was unlike her. Distracted, she tapped it against the desk and waited as a photograph unfolded. From Nicolas, naturally. There was no caption, he never explained the provenance of his photojournalism. The image was of a street market stall, fruit and vegetables stacked in bright pyramids, a pair of hands reaching to bag the produce. No filter.

Even after three years, the impulse to reply was acute. You’re cooking tonight then? would be her default, or if she wanted to wind him up, Nice lens flare would do the trick. But instinctively she knew he didn’t want her to respond, he wanted her to bear witness. How long had he been travelling now—two years? He had given no warning of the abrupt severance of his city life. Not to Lia, unsurprisingly, but not to any of his friends either. One day he was an investment banker in a global financial centre, the next Lia was receiving images of weatherbeaten temples, drowning island archipelagos or dust-drenched cities. Each new photograph brought another tug of loss.

“Archive it, Hendricks.”

Her virtual assistant responded instantly. “Image archived.”

Lia had never told Nicolas the details of what she did for a living. He had never told her if he’d guessed.

It was not something she had dwelled upon in the past, but increasingly it returned to her, this question. How much he knew. She used to imagine conversations between them where she was forced to justify her work. He would question the ethics of it—because it was Nicolas, and because that was to expected from anyone of even average intelligence and empathy. He would drag up international treaties, conventions of human rights. She would respond with the imperative for security in a world whose boundaries were increasingly porous. She would talk about future-proofing. A safe nation for their children (theoretical, now), and their children’s theoretical children. About necessity. About the war, invisible to most but inescapable for all, a war of electrical impulses and petabytes of data and hackers duelling in the cloud. They could not afford to fall behind. They could not afford to be magnanimous. In these imagined conversations she talked Nicolas around to her way of thinking, but there was an element of doubt in his eyes which she could never quite erase.

Removing the watch, she stuffed it into her pocket. Back to the task in hand. Pathways. Possible outcomes. It was crunch time. On this occasion, as on every other, she did not hesitate to make a decision. She dictated her analysis and recommendations to Hendricks, and Hendricks set up an encrypted link to the CIC for sign off.

The initial hacks ran successfully but in the end it was a false alarm, the disturbance absorbed harmlessly into the warm breezes of the region. Her team returned to surveillance. The data from the stillborn storm was despatched to a second unit, who would feed the analysis into their fledging weather control database. The research unit was the latest fad of certain politicians, but thus far it had achieved little other than dumping large quantities of dirt from one side of the dust bowl to the other.

The reality was that Lia’s particular fiefdom was much the same as any other in the military. Days of quietude, sometimes boredom, interspersed with abrupt action and the adrenaline of an unfolding crisis. But not today.

Which meant she could confirm her date for the evening.

It was dusk when they got into the city. By then Nicolas had been on the bus for eighteen hours and the windows were thick with grime from the road. He was dozing, if you could call it that, a series of tumbles into sleep to be pulled back by a violent lurch of the bus as it navigated another hairpin turn. The driving had scared the shit out of him at first. Now he let his head drop, numb to the shock of it. Doze for five minutes. Jerk awake. Doze. He woke to find the elderly woman in the adjacent seat shaking his arm, pointing at the window, repeating a few insistent words in a language he didn’t understand because his translator was offline, but the woman’s meaning was clear. The city. They were arriving.

He couldn’t see a thing, or rather, what he saw was light through a haze: electricity muted. The haze grew stronger as the bus slowed in gathering traffic, crossing the bridge to the island. He stretched his arms above his head. There was no part of his body that did not ache. When they pulled into the depot the bus shut down with a wheeze and everyone began to stand, grab their bags and talk at speed. He groaned, in solidarity with the woman beside him. He could not imagine enduring the same journey at her age. For now, it was all part of this new stage in his life. Catharsis. No, that was the wrong word. Catharsis implied trauma, something he was running from, and whilst there had been challenging times no event in his former life could be considered traumatic enough to run away from. If he were forced to describe his odyssey he might say he was running towards something.

He joined the shuffling queue of passengers desperate to get off the bus, and gave the elderly woman a hand with her luggage, though the woman protested: she did not need help. It was probably true. She looked tougher than Nicolas. From outside he could see the thickness of the dust on the windows. He could have stood a spoon in it.

Still: a city. Back to the connected world! He downloaded a map and went to find his hotel, which was somewhere downtown. There was no question of taking another tranche of public transport, so he started to walk, breathing in the warm cocktail of dust and pollution and yes, a lick of salt because he was back by the sea at last.

Despite its precarious location, the city remained highly populated, and he took his time, ambling and people watching. Halfway to the hotel he came across a street market. The vibrancy of fruit and vegetables in the late afternoon sun drew him like a moth. He felt like he’d spent months under a veil of dust. He got his camera out. Most people used their watches but Nicolas liked the proper kit. He framed the shot carefully; enough light to enhance, but not to dazzle. He examined the resulting image: not bad, but too much lens flare. Two more attempts and he had the shot he wanted.

He synched his camera to his watch and sent the file, where it joined the litany of images he had sent his ex-wife from parts of the globe she had never visited. Lia never replied to these images, but the app told him she had viewed them, so he kept sending. Temples and shrines. Monuments and palaces. Market stalls and vendors and people in suits and people in camps. Flowers and trash heaps, sometimes together. Women and men, children and animals. He never photographed himself.

The photographs had been their only contact for almost three years. Always he was tempted to write something, even just a caption, a throwaway line. No words seemed adequate, or all words seemed false. He had tried so hard to be unaccountable. To become insignificant. Still he wondered if you had to be counted by someone, however remote, however estranged. If that was the truth of things.

The hawker held up a star fruit, offered Nicolas a winning smile. His earbud murmured a translation.

“Best in the city, ask anyone you like!”

Language changed but the marketplace was the same the world around. Bustling and haggling and thriving, a great shout of life. He snapped another photo, camera focus on the yellow mangos in the foreground with the blurred smiling face of the hawker behind. He didn’t send this one. Not everything should be given.

Lia found her date, Don, sitting at the bar. He was early. She was pleased to discover he was as his profile had suggested: lean, intelligent face, expensively dressed and carrying himself with the easy grace of a confident man. Lia liked him at once.

She slid into the adjacent seat.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting.”

“Not at all. You’re exactly on time. Here, I’ve taken the liberty to order you a drink.’

There were two glasses of tequila on the counter, as yet untouched. He evidently knew his way around the menu.

They talked the usual preamble, out of politeness rather than necessity. She felt the flicker of attraction between them, and it was easy to imagine taking him home tonight, but that had been the last few dates and she was ready for something different. He had a way of watching her that made her think he was waiting for the main event. Sure enough, after a time he sat back and regarded her, eyes inquisitive.

“You don’t mention your occupation in your profile.”

“Ah. That question.”

“Is it something godawful?”

“I guess that depends on how you define the military.”

“You’re in the military?” Slight rise of inflection, a relaxed curiosity.

“It gets worse,” she said. “A classified section of it.”

“Really?”

“Really. I can’t tell you what I do.”

“Or you’d have to kill me, etcetera.” He took a sip of tequila. “Is that why your VA has a surname rather than a first name? Army culture?”

“Why, what’s yours called?”

“Gina.”

“I never gave it much thought, to be honest.”

“So how long in the military?”

“Almost fifteen years.”

“Uh-huh.” He nodded, processing this. “You’re divorced, aren’t you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“You can always tell.” He smiled. “It’s not a problem.”

She returned the smile, raised her empty glass.

“Good. Same again?”

At home she paused in the doorway, taking in the layout of the apartment—unmistakably that of someone single, even in the gloom—the blink of the city through the glass. She lay on the couch fully clothed except for her ridiculous shoes. Her body buzzing with a euphoria which was partially but not entirely induced by the tequila. She didn’t often drink on a week night. A self-imposed rule; she had never had a problem with control. She suspected that had been a deal-breaker with Nicolas although he had not said so explicitly. In fact he had said very little, at the end. Don was irrefutably present, in a way that Nicolas was not. There had always been an—etherealness was too strong a word, a lightness about Nicolas. Or perhaps she was being unfair. Perhaps that was retrospective analysis, a response to his current meanderings. When they met it was a surprise to find he worked in the cutthroat environment of banking. He’d impressed her. And he’d worked so hard to get where he was. The background check had saddened her in a way she didn’t expect, then she put it away and pretended she’d never seen it.

Admit it, she thought. You still miss him, dreadfully.

Pointless, maudlin reflection at the end of a good night. She put Nicolas from her mind. Focus on Don. Focus on the present. Hendricks scanned her biometrics and instructed her to drink plenty of water before retiring. In bed she fell asleep at once, a spiral dancing behind her eyelids.

Nicolas spent the morning exploring. Like so many coastal cities, this place had been abandoned by government funding. The banks and the glitterati had long-since decamped to the mainland, and the city was left to fester where it squatted in the face of the rising seas. In buildings along the waterfront, the lowest floors had been abandoned altogether and were swamped at high tide. People hung on. People were harder to move than institutions. They had affiliations. Call it loyalty, call it stubbornness, catastrophe came and they remained. Like the huge shopping malls he wandered through, once the province of designer retailers, now occupied by cheap stores and squatters. There was an atmosphere about the city, somewhere between careless and carefree; a place that no longer had anything to prove.

That suited Nicolas fine.

He’d lived two lives: stasis and motion, accounted and unaccounted. His first had been about money, his second, he hadn’t figured out yet. When he left the bank he had sold everything. House, car, valuables. He undertook the first tour in a matter of months. Speed had been important then: he needed to feel he was accelerating away from the past. Now he was on his second tour, and it was about slowness, eking the maximum out of time. Nothing would pass him by. He was propertyless, but he had means. He could keep going for a hundred years.

How many villages, towns, cities had he passed through now? He’d lost count. In the four decades he had been alive the world had become increasingly strange and people strange to one another. He had visited cities half-submerged and cities under siege from plagues of frogs or snakes or insects and cities in closed habitats that had once been designed for other planets hostile to life. Rich cities and poor cities. There were always winners, though the winners were even fewer this century than the last.

Of course, he thought, he couldn’t do this forever. And then, why not? And then he wasn’t sure.

On the other side of the mall, he refilled his water bottle and watched a sweeper bot making its patient way along the gutter. That was his father’s job when he was growing up. When the bots took the job they took something else from him too, something that was harder to replace than income. Ever since he was small he remembered his father telling him: you can do anything you want. You’re smart. Smarter than me. You can do anything. After the bots his father still said those things, but the mantra was harder to believe. He was ill at the end. Nicolas looked after him and afterwards he did not allow himself time to mourn, because the only way to honour his father was to prove the mantra right. He worked back-to-back jobs to put himself through the education he’d missed, and then he went into the highest paying profession he could think of because security was an imperative. On his ascent he met his ex-wife, a woman who at first glance seemed so self-assured he was surprised to sense the uncertainty in her smile, as though she hadn’t expected to be singled out. To be noticed. By then he had almost forgotten the feel of poverty and she must have assumed he had always known a privileged life. He might have felt bad keeping things from Lia if she didn’t have secrets too.

Sometimes she cried out in her sleep, a sharp fearful sound that woke him every time. He would open his eyes, blink in a moment of disorientation. His unease dissipating as he adjusted to the absence of light and made out the shape of his wife under the sheets, her breathing settling as she fell back into deeper sleep. It’s okay, he’d murmur. I’m here. You’re okay. When he asked her about her dreams she said she didn’t dream, she never had. He believed her. That is, he believed she did not remember. But there was something, an intimation of darkness, in that cry.

This more than anything else told him that what she did every day must be something terrible.

In the early days they joked about the classified thing. He asked questions, playfully, but with a keen eye to see how she would react. Was it drone strikes? What about interrogation? Do you torture people, darling? He had never asked it so bluntly, but he had come close, and she would always smile and say: you know I can’t tell you anything. As if it really were a joke. Only once she said, There are things . . . Then she shook her head. No. And he would stand at the counter chopping onions and wondering if his wife could be a state-sanctioned inflictor of pain. He looked for marks on her skin but there was nothing to suggest anything other than life behind a desk.

What someone did for a living wasn’t everything. But it was a lot. And if you were ignorant of the specifics, essentially you were admitting you were married to two people, one you knew intimately, the other not at all. Which was fine as long as you could accept it.

At some point Nicolas decided they wouldn’t have children. He thought he would probably be able to withstand finding out who she really was but their theoretical children might not. He didn’t tell Lia his decision, just quietly booked the procedure in case her birth control failed. Anyway, they had a comfortable life and who needed kids to justify their existence?

That was how his life went, in a whirl of shares and assets and friends over for dinner and holidays in destination locations. On the days he got home after Lia, she massaged his shoulders and ran him baths which they ended up sharing – she liked to look after people, to make them feel good – and in the night sometimes she cried out but did not remember. Until one day he knew he couldn’t put anything more between himself and the not-knowing and he told her he wanted a divorce.

He’d hurt her, he knew that. And it had broken his heart.

“Morning, Maxwell.”

The security guard glanced up, glanced away.

“Morning, sir.”

They held the elevator for her.

She was thinking about her conversation with Don. Fifteen years a soldier. Stated so bluntly, her career sounded like the institution it was. It might have been different. A doctorate in mathematics had been beckoning. The agency got their offer in first, and with it came the chance to serve her country. She did her time in intelligence. Quickly proved herself a valuable analyst. She learned things she wished she hadn’t, knowledge she would keep at all costs from the people she loved. Things she could never, ever have told Nicolas, a good person who believed in the goodness of others. He didn’t need to know what it took to preserve that kind of innocence.

One day she was approached by one of the black-ops brigade. It was shortly after she met Nicolas, at a time when she’d begun to doubt she’d ever meet anyone. Doubt whether she deserved to meet anyone. They had a question. Would she be interested in something more developmental?

Ten years later, here she was.

The meteorologists had picked up a new disturbance. They had the reports ready in the incident room. She scanned the briefing with her coffee, the first sip on the verge of scalding. She checked the status of any military operations in the area, open or covert. This was an ideal scenario, out of the way from major shipping and air lanes.

The storm—if it became a storm—was worth masking, but as usual she made herself stand for a minute, facing the map, before making the request for sign off. In this way, the decision became part of her. She hated those agents who tried to shirk responsibility: if you couldn’t own your actions, you shouldn’t be in this line of work.

The green light came through within minutes. She gathered her team.

“Okay everyone, we’ve got the all clear. Phase one, make this clean.”

Over to the hackers. Psychologically, this was the worst part of the operation. Mathematics she understood, but cyber warfare was an ever-evolving science, impenetrable to those on the outside. She could only observe as the hackers got to work. Inevitably, they were dubbed the borgs of the unit. There was always a particular quiet at the start of the hack as the borgs sunk into a trance-like state. Their main target was foreign satellites, scrambling any enemy detection of the weather system, feeding them with false information, but after that local communications became paramount. The shipping forecast could blow their cover, or a lone fishing vessel caught in the path of advancing winds. The borgs worked frenziedly. They had a tail to cover their tracks, although sometimes they would lay down breadcrumb trails to some rogue faction or nation state, tantalizing ghosts to muddy the political waters when the shit hit the fan.

After a while someone said, “We’ve got them.”

“Good. Keep monitoring.”

The atmosphere relaxed slightly, although this was only the beginning. For the next forty-eight hours, the hackers would work in shifts as the foreign satellites fought back and the meteorologists tracked the storm across the ocean, laying down a black hole of communications along its pathway. There came a point when masking was no longer possible, but by then the damage would have been done and vital preparation time lost. That was when phase two kicked in: bombarding the region with a sea of fake news to create mass hysteria.

This was the weather race, or as the liberals liked to dub it, the storm wars. They had been behind at first—still were on the materials front. Too many deniers littering politics, a belief that experts were disposable. But soon enough denial had become an impossibility.

Humanity had waged war on the planet. After centuries of pouring toxins down its throat, a carbon neutral economy had come too late. Now the planet was fighting back. The contents of its armory were truly awe-inspiring. Earth, having spent the previous ten thousand years as a rather dull haven, had morphed into a malevolent chameleon. You could not help but admire the force of the planet’s fury, even as you quaked in your wind-and-rainproofed bunker. And just when you thought the planet had exhausted its repertoire for destruction, some new horror would emerge. The meteorologists had invented new scales of measurement; superstorm was an obsolete term.

In the Anthropocene world, survival had replaced progress, and survival was dependent upon infrastructural resilience. Buildings, power grids, servers, the integrity of the cloud. Scientists, running tests on the resistance and flexibility of the supersteels and nanoskins, were the new soldiers. Get the science. If necessary steal the science or even the scientists. Get the patents and monetize the fuck out of it. That was how you climbed to the top of the new world order in the Anthropocene.

Her country was far from immune, both from the planet, and from the hackers on the other side. Five years ago, a counter attack had left the east coast mercilessly under-prepared. You could argue that everything since then had been about revenge, but that would be an emotional argument. The entire farce was akin to entering a boxing ring. Whatever the outcome, you knew you would come out damaged, but ultimately the winner was the one left standing.

That’s pragmatism, Nicolas, she told him silently. The only way to guarantee there’s any future at all. But Nicolas didn’t answer, just regarded her quietly and the doubt was there as it always was.

Hours passed. Her team kept their vigil. The borgs switched shifts. A strange feeling, watching the birth of a typhoon on screen. As the satellite images refreshed, wisps of white began to merge and densify. A foreshadow of the shape to come, outstretched arms gathering ever greater swathes of cloud as the storm moved across the ocean, anchored by the bold dot of its eye. A shape replicated endlessly in nature from seashells to flower heads to distant galaxies. The beauty of its fractal pattern was irrefutable. Odd to think that such artistry could wreck so much wanton destruction, but wasn’t that the eternal lesson of nature?

One of her team beckoned her over.

“Look, sir. I think we’ve got a tandem.”

“So we have.”

They watched, mesmerised. A second typhoon was emerging in the wake of the first. Less of a rarity than it used to be with so much energy bouncing around the atmosphere.

An alert from Hendricks announced she had mail. The first was Don, asking if she wanted to join him for dinner that evening. She shot a message back: In the middle of something. Give me a couple of days? The response was prompt: This an international woman of mystery thing? She replied: Something like that.

The other was from Nicolas. She glanced at the photograph, was about to tell Hendricks to archive it, then paused.

“Hendricks, can you run a location check on that?”

“Processing now.”

“Thanks.”

No doubt she was being over-cautious, but it was worth the check.

The wind was kicking up. Somewhere around here was a noodle café he remembered from his first tour. A few streets later he found it, and ducked inside for shelter and something to eat. He ordered a spicy broth and when it arrived leaned over the bowl appreciatively. The door banged open with the wind. The proprietor went outside and returned, frowning. She said a few words to the clientele at large, who nodded and sucked at their noodles.

Storm, murmured the translator through his earbud. A storm on the way.

By the time he finished lunch the wind was consistently strong. He debated heading back to the hotel but no weather warnings had been issued, and he wanted to visit the harbour. He took the tram north and from there walked down to the front.

His heart rejoiced to see water again. The harbour was still magnificent, even if it had lost the glamour of decades past. He could see the rows of towers on the waterfront that had once borne the names of economic giants, before survivalist technologies surpassed those of the consumer in the market place. Nicolas had invested his clients’ money in weather-proofing: engineering solutions designed to keep out the water, the wind, and the dust. His clients had done well. Weather-proofing was an expensive business, and few of the places he had visited on his first tour could afford such measures. Skirting the harbour was the shanty town that must have sprung up when the money went. Hundreds of makeshift abodes, perched on stilts, on floating platforms, and in the damp lee of the sea walls.

He watched the ferries making their way across to the mainland. The harbour waters were being stirred up by the winds and the wave crests were very white; the ferries ploughed onwards. He raised his camera. The smallness of the boats against the magnitude of water, that was what he wanted. Just a fringe of the mainland in the top ribbon of the image. He could feel the force of the wind against his forearm, the camera strap flapping beneath. Perhaps it was time to head back.

Hendricks had a location match. Lia glanced at her watch. She read what was there, read it again. A second passed where she seemed to have no thoughts at all, was lost and everything lost to her. Her world reduced to that tiny piece of text. It must be wrong. It couldn’t be right. She blinked. The text remained, clear as day. She took a step towards her office.

“What’s your percentage on that, Hendricks?”

“Ninety-eight per cent certain.”

She shut the door with more force than necessary. On the other side she leaned heavily against it, her mind cycling frantically.

Her team had one crucial rule, and that was that once a cloak had been laid down it was laid down for everyone. Nothing went beyond the incident room. It was Lia’s rule, enshrined in military protocol.

Shakily, she raised her watch.

You idiot, Nicolas. You fucking—

A knock at the door.

“Sir?”

“Give me a minute—”

“Sir, we’ve got a potential problem, I need an authorisation code from you—”

“I’ll be right there,” she said sharply.

He retreated. She stood, feeling the onset of something close to panic. A deluge of data across her brain. Only the pertinent facts, Lia. The facts.

“Hendricks, I need you to contact Nicolas.”

She instructed her assistant to wrap the message in every possible encryption. This was against all protocol.

The hotel dining room was busier than on the previous evening. A steady stream of rain had begun an hour or so earlier, and other guests had also returned to escape the inclement weather. Nicolas listened to the chatter of his fellow diners through his earbud. The translators had improved immensely over the past five years, although in a busy space with multiple conversations, it was a challenge to piece together the disparate shards of dialogue.

Back in his 10th floor room he turned on the news to see if there was any information about the weather. No alerts. He stretched out on the bed to review the day’s photography, and sent the one of the harbour to Lia. It was a tease of a picture, hinting at the mainland shoreline without revealing it. He planned to read for a while but the softness of the bed made him sleepy. Just before he drifted off he heard his watch vibrate, and leaned over to switch it off without looking at the message.

He woke in the dark to a howl, convinced that he was back in the old apartment, that a dream had caused Lia to cry out. It’s okay, he murmured. I’m here. The howl did not stop. He remembered that he was alone and in a hotel room on the other side of the world and then he realized that the sound was not anything human but the wind.

“Lights,” he muttered.

The room warmed slowly from black to brown to amber, but stopped short of its maximum brightness. The rain-streaked window reflected his prone figure on the bed, the sky black beyond the glass. A dim muddle of light through the rain. He checked the time on the wall display and was taken aback to discover that it was nine in the morning. He got up and dressed—after an initial trickle there was no water from the taps, even if he’d wanted to wait around for a shower—and was lacing his shoes when something slammed into the glass with shocking force.

He felt his heart accelerate to a sprint. He stared at the window. A crack ran from sill to ceiling, hairline threads sprouting on either side as he watched. Some part of his brain said it’s going to go you have to move and he grabbed his bag and seized the door handle. It wouldn’t turn. Panic rising, he could hear the groan of the glass you need the card an awful creaking it’s going to go the pass where was the pass—he saw it on the table by the kettle, slapped it against the door and watched the light turn green. He threw himself into the corridor. He was five steps along the carpeted hallway when he heard the crash and knew the window had blown.

He thought of glass splinters exploding through the room, imagined himself still asleep in the bed. Nausea flooded him and he slumped against the wall, his breathing shallow. Up and down the floor doors were opening, perhaps awakened by the sound. Hands rubbing at eyes, confused voices, quick exchanges across the corridor. He continued towards the stairwell—don’t take the lift, even if it’s working—trying to banish the image of those lethal shards.

Downstairs was chaos. A number of guests must have vacated their rooms first thing this morning, and were now gathered in the lobby with their luggage, unable to leave and barraging the night manager with questions. Others like Nicolas were emerging dazedly into the dining room, still in their nightwear. A man was bleeding, a member of staff bandaging his head wound inexpertly. Other staff were putting up storm shutters. Too late, he thought. The wind and rain were a relentless shrill outside.

There was no hot food—even if the kitchen staff had been able to get in, he supposed there was no power—but a porter was laying out a cold buffet. A couple of families encouraged their children to get some breakfast, and gradually the rest of the diners filed up to the tables. Nicolas took some juice and wished there were coffee. Behind the buffet another member of staff started arguing with the porter, apparently over the food. People exchanged glances, and began to eat more quickly.

Nicolas checked his watch. No signal, which meant his translator was out of action. He had one message though, which must have been delivered earlier. The message was short. Leave the island as soon as you get this and get as far inland as you can.

It was from an unknown sender, but there was only one person it would have come from. Well, the city was under siege, he couldn’t go anywhere. He supposed Lia had seen reports on the news. Although the message had been delivered hours earlier. He chose not to pursue that line of thought, switched off his watch and walked through the ground floor of the hotel, wanting answers but not understanding a word of the panicked discussions, until he located another tourist. The woman was attempting to charge her watch, but evidently without success. He coughed.

“Excuse me? Do you know anything about what’s going on? My translator’s down.”

The woman straightened. “Yep, mine too. A right mess isn’t it? From what I can gather the grid’s down so the hotel’s running off a back-up generator. Seems they’ve cut any extraneous power sources.”

“I’m guessing we’ve lost the water supply too. My taps weren’t working.”

“No one seems to have seen this one coming.”

He looked towards the storm-shuttered windows. “There must be somewhere we can get to.”

“Honey, have you seen outside? Windspeed’s already clocking three hundred kay and this is just the edge of it. There won’t be any transport off the island now.”

There were more people in the city than there should have been, the woman explained. That was the first problem. An evacuation process that should have taken place over forty-eight hours had been crammed into two. She showed Nicolas some video on her watch taken before the signal went down. Waves twenty metres high imploding against the first line of buildings. Tidal surges torrenting through the streets, flooding the lower levels of the city.

“We’re not much higher up here. It might flood,” said the woman matter-of-factly.

Nicolas replayed the footage. He thought of the shanty towns he had seen around the harbour. How many people had remained in those stilt houses, those floating shacks, when the storm hit?

“Hundreds of people are going to die,” he said.

“It’ll be thousands,” said the woman. That same matter-of-fact tone. Nicolas stared at her. The woman sighed. “I’m an aid worker, I usually operate further south than here. After a while you stop hearing the numbers. It doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

“No,” said Nicolas. “Of course not.”

“They’re calling it Myanna,” said the woman.

“What?”

“The typhoon.”

“Oh.”

On the other side of the room a young woman was sobbing.

“Her friend went out last night,” said the aid worker. “She hasn’t come back.”

The satellite images refreshed, and refreshed again. Lia watched as the spiral revolved in its inexorable formations, moving steadily west. The second spiral on its tail, the two engaged in some ancient deadly dance. She watched as the typhoon smashed into the coastline. As the hackers lifted their blackout, news footage began to leak through, helicopters flying at the edges of the weather system, video clips that had been uploaded before the city went dark. There was a clip from a car caught on the bridge in the attempted evacuation, a wall of water bearing down upon its occupants, screams from those inside. Nothing more had been heard after the upload.

She watched as the hackers tied off loose ends, erased their trails, sighed and stretched their aching bodies, no doubt thinking of their warm beds after a long shift. She watched as the meteorologists talked excitedly about reports of windspeeds surpassing the known record.

Her message to Nicolas had been delivered, but he hadn’t replied. She instructed Hendricks to send another. The second one failed. She asked Hendricks to check for new messages every few minutes, although she knew her assistant would alert her the moment anything came through. Her messages became increasingly frantic: Did you get out? Tell me you got out.

It would be two days before the eye passed over, and then the other side of the eyewall would let rip. In her head she ran through evacuation scenarios, each one more outlandish than the next. Even if it were possible to locate him, she knew better than anyone that none of them would work.

When the lobby flooded everyone moved up a floor. Not all of the food and water supplies had been moved upstairs in time, and everything was rationed. By the second day his throat was continually parched, his stomach rumbling. Guests and staff slept where they could. The children were offered the beds but their parents preferred to keep them away from the windows, even with the storm shutters up. From the corridors you could hear the wind moving through the upper floors in a continual wail. He began to lose track of time. Dozed at intervals. Woke to find someone shaking his arm, and thought himself back on the bus, arriving in the city.

“Hey, hey wake up!”

It was the aid worker.

“We’re going foraging,” she said. “Want to come? We could use the help.”

“Has it stopped?”

“No, but we’re in the eye. So the wind’s dropped.”

It was eleven at night. The woman had organized a small party. They were going to make their way across the street to the row of hotels opposite. The water on the ground floor was waist deep and cold. They waded across the lobby and one by one pushed through the revolving doors.

The water rose a few inches as he stepped into the street. The wind had dropped, the air was preternaturally still. Nicolas looked up and saw stars. It seemed inconceivable. A pretend sky. The aid worker ran a torch over the water, indicating the buildings opposite, and instructed them to form a chain.

“And watch out for debris!”

Nicolas quickly realized the water was occupied. Pieces of furniture, the expelled contents of shops and households, were all floating about. The lead person yelled and stopped. Nicolas saw a darker mass looming ahead, and a car floated past. He couldn’t see if there was anyone inside. They kept going. It wasn’t far but seemed endless. Nicolas was last in the chain. With his free hand he pushed away at anything moving towards him. Halfway across he touched the roughness of fabric and then cold wet skin and he couldn’t suppress a shout.

The body drifted slowly away. A yell from the other end of the chain; they’d reached the opposite side of the street. The other hotel was not much better equipped than theirs, but the manager in charge allowed them to take some bottled water supplies which they could float back across the street. They moved on to the next building. Nicolas’s hands were numb from immersion. Once the torch flickered over the hump of limbs and then a face was illuminated, stark beneath the orange light. The torch moved away quickly. It was easier not to know. They could feel the wind starting to rise again and the aid worker declared it time to return. In the thin starlight Nicolas noticed the building adjacent to their hotel had also lost its windows, and appeared to be listing.

Back in the hotel he removed his soaking trousers, shoes and socks and accepted the offer of a towel. Sat in the corridor in the towel and his damp boxers. He noticed people around him were starting to sniff and cough. The invading sea was chilling the city. He turned on his watch, hoping for a signal before the other side of the eyewall hit, but there was nothing. He read again the message: Leave the island as soon as you get this. He did the maths, slowly because he was hungry and dehydrated and exhausted from the wading through water. It had been sent ten hours before the official warning. Hours before the disaster of the attempted evacuation. The meaning was stark.

He wondered if he had always known. If something in his subconscious had linked the days she worked overnight to certain cataclysmic events around the world. But if this was a revelation it didn’t feel as revelation ought. There was no enlightenment. Just a kind of shutting down.

Of course, she might not have been involved directly. She might have had a tip off. He wanted desperately to believe that, to believe her the woman he’d been introduced to all those years ago, with the beautiful uncertain smile. But he knew in his heart that wasn’t true.

It was too big to grasp at, he supposed. And he was weary, and couldn’t escape the idea that whatever he had been running towards, this was it. He thought of the aid worker’s statement that thousands would die, and wondered whether torture would have been easier to bear.

He looked up and found one of the children staring at him.

“You can be anything you want to be,” he murmured. The child looked at him like he was a lunatic. Who but a lunatic would say such a thing? Besides, they had no language in common. Only this place, this end.

The wind had returned. He thought of Lia crying out in the night. The flutter of her breath warm against his face when he leaned over to check whether she had woken, to gently stroke her face. It’s okay. He curled into a ball and put his hands over his ears.

After, there was a list of the dead. The number of foreign nationals grew longer but he was not on it. She instructed Hendricks to run facial recognition software over footage of the devastation, checking bodies alive and not. There were no matches. She allowed herself to entertain the possibility that he had got out in time, asked a friend to run an identity check on transactions in the city for the twenty-four hours before the typhoon hit. The list was small but confirmed Nicolas’s location. There was a tram ticket. Lunch at a local café.

She remembered her first successful hack. The jubilation in the room when they realized they’d done it, they’d successfully hidden a cyclone. She’d found it hard to suppress the feeling that the cyclone was working for them; had to remind herself they were not wielding a manmade weapon. But it was nonetheless a weapon of mass destruction and thousands of people would die for lack of warning. Still they were jubilant.

Afterwards she had gone home and Nicolas had sensed her adrenaline, asked if there was something to celebrate. She shook her head. Bit of a breakthrough, that’s all. They ordered takeaway and started watching a film, paused it halfway through when she turned to kiss him. She fell asleep against him in the second half.

Even now there was a chance he would be found. Hundreds of people had been washed out to sea and others trapped underground or under collapsed buildings. It was still possible he was alive. But as the weeks passed so did the possibility.

Operation Myanna, as it would be known in the classified files, counted as a success. The damage would run into the trillions, and surveys reported public moral at an all time low. No one would be thinking of the materials war.

She saw spirals every night now. Her dreams brought her visions of figures trapped inside them, stretched and melted into the cyclonic coils. All of them were Nicolas although none of them had his face, instead they were faceless, the faceless millions. She did not remember the dreams, but always she woke to find that her face was wet, and the spirals were waiting for her.

Originally published in Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Travelling into Nothing

An Owomoyela

She was offered the comfort of a drug-induced apathy. She refused.

The cell where she waited to die was, in true Erhat fashion, humane. Really, it was no worse than the room she had rented when she’d first arrived on the station, except for the hard lock on the door. She still had the same music at her fingertips, the same narrative media, the same computerized games of skill or strategy or wit or pure abnegation. All she lacked was freedom.

And a future.

Fuck.

She’d taken to pacing. Four steps wide, seven deep, over and over again until the door chimed—ahead of schedule—and her body seized up in panic, her breath vanished, and her hands fisted of their own accord.

But the voice which came through was . . . curiously non-final. “Kiu Alee. Do you consent to receive a visitor?”

She hesitated a moment, staring at the door. As her heartrate slowed, she said, “Yes”—more from morbid curiosity than anything else. After a moment, she added, “I didn’t know I was allowed visitors.”

The door slid open.

The man on the other side, flanked by a guard whose presence seemed almost cursory, was much taller than anyone in the local Erhat population—much taller than her, as well. Over two meters, at an estimate; he looked taller, with the long black robes that fell in a line down his body. His limbs were long and thin, like articulator arms on a dock, and his movements were fluid, but still hesitant. He had to duck his head to come in, and when he did, he stood there like an abstract statue, head tilted, eyes unfocused, ear turned her way.

Blind. Kiu blinked, moving slightly; true to her suspicion, his head turned to keep his ear angled toward her. Why someone would choose—with the number of augments and prosthetics available—to remain deprived of such a primary sense—

Of course, though, the same could be said about her, and everyone like her. She had no augments to increase her awareness of electromagnetic fields; no augments to expand her visual spectrum. That was her choice. It was every bit as much a choice as this man’s probably was.

And the network of filaments laced through her brain like capillaries didn’t even tie into the social web of the station, the system, the entire Erhat cultural organization. That had made her suspect here, long before she’d murdered someone.

“Kiu Alee,” he said. His accent was strange, all rounded vowels and soft consonants, with an undertone of resignation. “I am Tarsul. You are a long way from home. Do you really intend to die here? I can give you a chance to live.”

Kiu jerked back. “Me?” she said. “Why? For what?”

“Because you have an artificial neural framework,” he said, and her surprise fell again. Of course—her augmented brain, her implanted-in-vitro augmentation, the neural scaffolding too integrated and expansive for any post-maturation implant to match. That made her special. This man arrived because she had a technology he needed; beyond that, he probably didn’t give a whit about her.

And yet, she still wanted to live. What was a little indignity: if her life was only worth anything because of her brain, it was still better than it being worth nothing, without it.

“I’ve spoken with the authorities,” Tarsul said. “They’ve agreed to release you if you never return to their territories.” And why not—no further resource cost to house her, to destroy her body, to update the judicial records any further. And the Erhat government cared very little for any problems faced by those outside its borders. “This suits me, as if you agreed to come with me, you could not return, in any case.”

Kiu had already agreed in her mind by the time that he finished talking. Still, for appearances sake, she hardened her voice, and repeated, “And for what?”

“I need you to pilot a ship,” he said.

The ship, as it turned out, wasn’t so much a ship. More of an engine rig.

More of an engine rig, burrowed into the side of a wandering planetoid, with access corridors and neural interfaces spidering across the surface.

Tarsul had said very little—in her cell, escorting her through the Erhat station’s corridors, bringing her onto a transport which didn’t look like it belonged in any of the territories she was familiar with. Though the transport, at least, had felt as though it wasn’t completely alien; when they docked at the rig, the transport fit into the docking moors like a foot fitting into a glove, and they descended into smooth black halls, ambient light which seemed to glow from the air itself, a gravity which tugged more lightly than the Erhat station and more strongly than a planetoid of this kind should have merited, and a persistent low hum which modulated and changed in a kind of cadence, almost like distant voices. Kiu regarded it all with mistrust.

Tarsul closed the transport up behind them, fingers fluttering over the airlock console, which murmured back a long sequence of slow melodious notes. At length they petered out, and Tarsul laid his hand flat on the console. It didn’t respond in any way.

“The transport has been disabled,” he said. “Its engines and communications are no longer functional. I can explain where we’re going, if you’d like to know.”

Kiu raised an eyebrow, aware that he wouldn’t be able to see it. He might hear the skepticism in her voice, though. “All right. Tell me.”

He turned back to her, as though he’d expected her not to care—to be so grateful to get out of an execution that she’d sashay off anywhere at all, without a question or a second thought. Too bad; she had plenty of second thoughts. The fact that she had no options didn’t stop her from having second thoughts.

Well, there had been the one option: to die. But she wasn’t so principled that she thought that was an option at all.

“My home,” Tarsul said, “is in the black. Interstellar space. It was built by refugees of the Three Systems’ War.”

Kiu frowned, and searched her memory for the war he named. She had the vague impression of learning about it at some point—some incidental bit of history, consumed more for idle interest than relevance. “Is that ancient history?”

Tarsul hmmed, deep in his throat. It didn’t sound like he was disagreeing, though. “We have a long history,” he said. “A long, very isolated, history. My arcology”—the word he used sounded ancient—“was designed to be impossible to track. Impossible to find. Utterly self-sufficient in every degree. It almost was.”

Kiu had never heard of any permanent settlement outside a star system. Settlements in interplanetary space were uncommon; some of the larger stations might have held their own stellar orbits, like the Agisa Station Network where she’d grown up, but if anyone had asked her prior to this, she’d have said there was nothing of consequence drifting in the interstellar medium. Some ships in transit, maybe some ancient lost exploration vessels, or probes, or unfortunate failures of experimental engines. Not a—an arcology, some kind of station she’d never heard of.

“Why?” she asked. Tarsul looked surprised; maybe he was expecting her to care more about what had gone wrong. She didn’t. “Refugees, yeah, I get it. But you had the materials to build a new station? And you didn’t just . . . go to another system?”

“A cultural complaint,” Tarsul said. “Believe me, if interrogating our history were to do any good . . . ”

He let out a long, long breath, and apparently decided not to explain.

“The arcology was meant to be a closed system,” he said. “No resource loss.”

Kiu snorted.

Tarsul inclined his head. “It almost was.”

“So . . . this.” Kiu spread her hand out toward the consoles and the interface bay, indicating by implication the planetoid they were connected to. Tarsul’s head shifted—tracking the sound of rustling sleeves, maybe. “We’re delivering raw materials?”

Tarsul made a soft, affirmative noise. “Though it took me less time to locate this planetoid than to locate a pilot.”

“I’ve never seen this kind of ship before.” Kiu looked again at the composite walls, at the console. “Who made it?”

“A state secret. One which has not been shared with me.” Kiu’s eyes narrowed; Tarsul’s tone cooled. Still, Kiu could recognize some of herself in that tone: a faint undernote of resentment, more well-hidden than she’d ever managed.

Or maybe that was just her imagination, painting commonalities where none were to be found.

“How am I supposed to fly it? I’m not licensed to fly—”

Anything. She had the basic safety certifications for automatic craft in Erhat and Agisa, but that mostly consisted of knowing how to set a distress beacon and fire the maneuvering thrusters if a collision was detected. And she’d never used any of those skills.

“Are you planning on teaching me?”

“The accelerator flies itself,” Tarsul said. “It only needs to be reminded of where to go. As for that, you’ll have a better idea of how to do so than I will.” He brought his hand up, gestured to his own head. “It’s not . . . precisely the same technology as the neural frameworks I’m familiar with. But they seem compatible enough. This is the third time someone has made this journey. Neither of the previous attempts encountered any difficulty.”

Encouraging.

“We can begin, if you’d like,” he said. “After bringing this planetoid out of this system and setting its trajectory, there will be very little to do. The accelerator is well-provisioned, and there’s stasis if you’d prefer it. Perhaps an hour of your effort, and in return, I and my people will make sure you’re accommodated for, in perpetuity.”

Desperation made odd promises, Kiu thought. Lucky for her. “All right,” she said. “Show me what I need to do.”

The pilot’s interface was a little alcove, tucked away down a winding corridor studded, irregularly, with doors. No door separated the interface, though; Kiu had to wonder what design sensibilities this place had been made to accommodate.

The alcove was moulded into a kind of recumbent chair, with a webbing of wire connectors and something that looked like a scanner module near the headrest. The module lit up when Kiu approached, and Kiu could feel it ghosting over her augments. She cast a glance at Tarsul, but Tarsul gave no indication that he felt anything, or knew that anything was going on.

“So, no . . . ”

Ceremony? Nothing I need to know? Evidently not. Kiu breathed in, and lowered herself into the chair.

She’d used neural interfaces before. This was a different model, but . . . compatible enough, Tarsul had said. She leaned her head back, reached a hand up to take hold of the interface wires, and felt them coiling, responsive, toward the ports on her scalp. A moment of cool intrusion, warming into connection—and then, abruptly, Kiu wasn’t herself any more.

She was—

Much older, hands on the smooth black composite, not for any interface, just to feel the substance of the accelerator. A cold, clear purpose underlaid with urgent anger. Turning her head, a jangle of strange senses moving within her, seeing Tarsul standing beside her, expression sad. Seeing—

Someplace different. Long corridors, not as winding as the accelerator’s. No windows; what few windows graced the arcology’s walls faced the sweep of the Milky Way’s arms edge-on, not the much sparser starfields orthogonal. The space filled with voices. Footsteps. The scent of green growing things. The sound of—

Someplace different. The accelerator, but not a part she’d ever seen. Argumentative tones, not in a language Kiu had ever learned. Her voice—not her own—responding in kind. Kiu—

Kiu snapped her head back.

The accelerator—

—flooded her.

Remembered.

And through it all, existing in clear pinpoint precision, knowledge without history or context, a location—nothing more than the endpoint of vectors and accelerations, no fixed point because it had no fixed referent, or possibly the one fixed point in a universe where everything else, including the engine, was moving in the ordered cacophonic chaos of orbital motion, stellar drift, universal expansion.

As soon as that hit her, she was rolled over into a flood of need—not desire, not yearning, but a compulsion as inexorable as every indrawn breath, as unconsidered as a heartbeat. That was where she needed to go. Somewhere in that was home. Home for this engine rig which had burrowed into the side of a planetoid; home for Tarsul, for some pilot who had come before. Kiu reached, and the whole of space seemed to shudder around her. The accelerator snapped into motion.

And then Kiu came dislocated, like a joint wrenched out of socket, and shoved herself away from the interface. She flew in the low gravity; hit both knees and her forehead and palms on the cold composite of the hall, and then twisted, snarling, her entire sense of self ricocheting against the walls of her skull.

Tarsul was there. His hands hot on her arms, and she twisted in the microgravity, lashing out.

“Calm,” he urged her.

She snarled. Tried to shake him off.

Everything felt wrong in the low gravity. Kiu had lived her entire life in the real gravity of a planet, or the centrifugal gravity of a station—out here, she felt dislodged, disconnected, like her entire life had become illusory when she had become weightless. That only made her angrier.

They have gravity on the arcology, some fragment of memory—not her own—reminded her. Minded her? Could it be a reminder, happening for the first time? Not centrifugal. Experimental?

Like the planetary accelerator she’d just plugged into? Like—

Tarsul’s gloved hands, curling against her sleeves, colder and more rigid than they should have been. A soporific calm beginning to infiltrate her consciousness.

She kicked out, and Tarsul let her go. He floated back toward the opposite wall, head canted.

He wasn’t wearing gloves.

“What,” she pronounced, “the fuck?”

“You’re more equipped to answer that question,” he said. “Did something go wrong?”

Kiu spluttered. She dragged the back of her hand across her mouth, glaring murder at Tarsul. Her hands itched for violence. Worthless drifting piece of debris—dragged me out here to make a fool of me—

“Who were those people? Where was that—those weren’t my memories!”

Tarsul considered that. Then he said, “Ah.”

“Ah?”

“The accelerator gleans memories from each of its pilots,” he said. “I believe it was also intended as some form of . . . archival device, perhaps? As an ancillary function. I was told it was quite pleasant. Reassuring, in a way.”

Kiu spat. “Reassuring?”

“Especially for a history as contentious as ours.”

Kiu didn’t know enough to unpack that. Didn’t know Tarsul enough to interpret it. Still, she could have sworn he looked amused.

And that—

That was too much. The rage closed over her like a fist, like plunging into the water by a sulfur geyser, noxious and hot and filling her lungs. She lunged.

Tarsul’s amusement vanished in an instant. And, fast—too fast, with the kind of rapid-twitch motion that spoke to muscular augments, reflex enhancements, he sidestepped her attack, and put his hand out to catch the back of her neck. In another second he had her forehead against a wall, one of her wrists caught and pressed against the small of her back.

“It’s adaptive to fight when one’s life is at risk,” he said. “You are not under threat. Despite what you may feel. This, particularly, is maladaptive action.”

Humiliation coiled at the pit of her gut. Tarsul was treating her like a child, or like some kind of a toy—pick her up from the cell because she was convenient, right, bring her here and plug her into the engine like she was a spare part, lecture her like she was some idiot. “Let me go,” she warned.

To her surprise, he did. “I like you,” he said. Then, an incredulous noise from Kiu: “My policy is to like all people until I have a reason to dislike them. Because I asked you to join me, I have a duty to . . . situate you. I’d ask you, as a kindness, not to make this job more difficult.”

Kiu spluttered.

“Of course, I knew I took a risk when I found you.” Tarsul turned his back to her, which only made the rage spike higher. “But people with artificial neural networks as advanced as yours tend not to be the kind of people who would leave their homes forever, with very little explanation. You were the culmination of seven years of searching.” He turned his ear back toward her. “I’m curious how you came to be where you were.”

Yeah; most of the people with her kind of augments weren’t sad-sack drifters, weren’t murderous detriments to society. She got that; she was special. “I don’t want to talk about my past,” she growled.

“Of course not. But our pasts influence our futures.” Tarsul rolled one shoulder. “I also have a duty to the arcology. Bringing this planetoid to them ensures their resource security for another thousand years, perhaps. But you, Kiu Alee—”

He turned his whole body back to her, head canted, as though he could pin her with his listening the way someone else might pin her with a gaze.

“I also want to know that I ensure their security by bringing them you.”

Kiu avoided Tarsul as much as she could, given the confines of the ship. It wasn’t as difficult as she’d feared; the accelerator sprawled, replete with odd closets and rooms which had been mostly, but not entirely, cleared of detritus. Kiu made a room for herself out of the provisions that Tarsul had, apparently, bought on Erhat: a sleeping cocoon, listening materials on a tablet, a selection of meals, all with their own containment and heating units, so she didn’t have to run the risk of encountering him whenever she wanted food.

She’d refused suspended animation. After the interface, she didn’t relish the thought of going back down into her brain, even if she wouldn’t be conscious to experience it.

Still, after a while—without anything that served to delineate the time, either to a trade standard or a local schedule—she started wondering just how long she could manage. The accelerator’s black walls were depressing and disorienting, like she was both adrift in starless space and confined in a space where the walls were too close. She could reach out and just barely not touch the walls of the room.

So eventually, she started wandering.

It was strange, how easily her body adapted to moving through the gravity of this place. As though her body was also accessing memories that weren’t hers.

And eventually, she encountered Tarsul.

He was at rest, reclining on a little bench which may not have been a bench, in design. His hands were folded on his chest. He wasn’t moving, but he was breathing deep and even; his eyes were open, so he wasn’t sleeping. Kiu paused in the doorway to the little room.

“What are you doing?”

Tarsul tilted his head. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been home,” he said. “It’s strange to realize I’m finally returning.”

Kiu grunted. She let herself in, a few more handspans. Still kept a good distance between herself and Tarsul. “How long?”

Tarsul was silent.

Kiu narrowed her eyes at him, but she kept silent as well. Even so, Tarsul exhaled, sounding like he was disappointed in her. “I’m not sure, exactly.”

“How many times have you made this trip?” Kiu asked.

At that, Tarsul actually looked surprised. He turned so that his whole body was facing her, head canted to one side.

“Me?” he asked. “The last time we sought resources from a star system was over a hundred twenty standard generations ago. How old do you think I am?”

“I remembered you,” Kiu said. “You were there, in the accelerator’s memory.”

Tarsul’s eyebrows knit together. “Two explanations,” he said. “One: your own memories contaminated the accelerator’s stored memory at the same time its contaminated yours. Pieces of your own experience became blended with what you remembered. None of the memories are faithful representations of anyone’s experience. Two: coincidence. Someone on an historical resource-gathering expedition looked like me. Nothing more.”

That would make more sense, she supposed.

Because what was the other explanation? He was over a hundred twenty standard generations old?—whatever that even meant, coming from his colony. Unlikely; the best genetic treatments couldn’t extend life that far. He was cloned, or gengineered? Plausible, but why? She’d met plenty of heavily-gengineered humans, and they were without fail more impressive than Tarsul seemed to be. And if over a hundred generations had passed since that memory, they probably would have improved their gengineering, too. Why reuse the same models?

“You came out here. From your arcology.”

Tarsul nodded, absently.

“How did you—” Not go insane? “Keep busy on the way out?”

“Meditation, mostly,” Tarsul said.

“Really?”

Tarsul spread his hands. “I regarded it as a pilgrimage. I was chosen because I was . . . temperamentally suited to such a long journey. Unfortunately, that was a consideration I didn’t have the luxury to make, for you.”

Kiu made a disparaging noise.

“Maybe you’d prefer to sleep,” Tarsul said. “We can still put you into suspension. I’m told that it’s a dreamless sleep.”

The same way that memory was supposed to be reassuring? Kiu thought. “No. Thank you. I’ll figure something out.”

“Of course,” Tarsul said. “Let me know if I can offer any diversion.”

“I’m not much into meditation,” Kiu said.

Tarsul laughed, briefly. “I’d think not. Even so.”

“Right.”

Kiu lingered for a moment longer, then took herself away down the hall.

And occupied herself for some short span before folding, and admitting that stasis might be a more comfortable way of traveling by far.

Tarsul was right about this, at least—the sleep was dreamless.

She had no conception of the passage of time when consciousness infiltrated her mind again, arriving in a fog of sleepy confusion. She came to not quite knowing where she was; shivering very badly. Entirely psychosomatic, she’d been told, but she didn’t believe it.

Tarsul was at the console beside her stasis bay, an inscrutable series of tones informing him of something. Kiu’s arm ached, faintly, where an IV had gone in. “We’re there?” she asked—but the apprehension of entering a new world, a strange station and culture, didn’t have a chance to develop.

“We’re off-course,” Tarsul said. Maybe it was her imagination, but he sounded tired. “Something must have gone wrong with the calculations.”

Kiu pushed herself out of the bay, and caught herself against the wall. It felt strangely warm against her palm. “I thought you said the accelerator handled all the actual calculations.”

“With some form of input, some guidance, from the pilot,” Tarsul said. “I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies. But it has never failed, before.”

And with that, a new apprehension rose in Kiu’s chest. “What’s that mean?” Don’t ask me to, don’t ask me to—

“It means we’re traveling into nothingness,” Tarsul said. “Unless you can correct the course. The accelerator can correct itself, I’m led to believe, even at these speeds.”

The apprehension roiled into full-blown fear. “You want me to plug back into that thing.”

“Unless the thought of drifting forever appeals to you.” Tarsul turned his ear toward the hall. “Though ‘forever’, in our case, is bounded by the finite amount of supplies we have on board.”

Slow deaths, then. Set against the immediate threat of all those voices, all those images, blooming up in Kiu’s mind. Her heart sped.

As though he could hear that, Tarsul turned back toward her. “It can wait. A few hours will hardly make a difference.”

Except that it would be a few hours more of sitting and dreading. Kiu grit her teeth. “No. I’ll go now.” Go under threat, but then this entire voyage had been under threat. That was nothing new.

She went back to the interface. Plugged herself in. Tensed her shoulders, tensed her hands, and all sensation of shoulders and hands and body dissolved.

Into—

A little planetoid was nothing. She stood at the helm of a planet, now—no atmosphere to shear off, but thrust turned it oblate. Their progress was slower. Not, however, slow. They could put together most of a system this way—

Or simply flee. Another time, another planetoid, another pilot, staring down at his gloved hands. Memories already coursing through his brain, which Kiu felt at one remove. The whole black body of the accelerator representing a theft as well as an escape. Looking up, to meet the eyes of an engineer who had no idea how to work any but its most basic functions, an entire body of knowledge left behind. Saying—

The tall man again, the one who looked like Tarsul, saying, No, it’s futile. In the long run, the arcology will die. Of isolation. Of indolence. Of attrition. Saying, the prudent choice is to return to a star, and all the resources it offers. Not to continue out here, in the black.

Saying, I’ll do my best for you, but I won’t do anything beyond that.

Kiu didn’t even remember the snap of the course correction; the driving need to go home. She snapped back into herself like a line under tension, shaking, with her hands in fists. And Tarsul, standing there, head cocked, as though he couldhear the rage pouring off her. As though he’d neglected one of the traditional senses for some fleet of senses she had no knowledge of.

I won’t do anything. So very like Tarsul, that.

She could have killed him, there.

Could have. That was a proven fact—and she’d thought, for the most part, that killers were people unlike her; people who didn’t know what direction rationality lay in when it was pointed out to them, people whose brains were fried by some accident of genetics or chemical interest or brainwash mis-socialization. Not people like her, who got angry, yeah, but knew where the line was. And yet.

And yet.

There in no particular Erhat corridor, with no particular history of confrontation, in a bad half-second on a bad day in a bad string of days, some Erhat boy no older than her had looked at her and his face had twisted, the universal human expression of disgust, and he’d sent some social impulse off with an ostentatious tilt of his head. Something that had caused his networked friend down the hall to turn, and look at Kiu, and laugh, and Kiu, who’d been through too many homes already and knew, knew that she was still a piece of foreign debris in this one but would have liked to go a day without being reminded of the fact—had taught a lesson with a small stylus, just tapered enough to enter through human muscle and skin, given enough force.

Nothing said I belong; I’m valuable, I’m worthwhile than a staggering act of antisocial tantrum, huh. Even she knew that had been stupid.

It had stopped his friend from laughing, though. At the time, she hadn’t seen past that—not one second, not one thought, not one millimeter.

Tarsul, now, had his eyes unfocused—they were always unfocused—but it seemed as though he was looking far afield. All the way out to his arcology, full of people whose skin was no thicker than that young man in the corridor. They could solve the problem of resource collection in the interstellar nothingness, but maybe they couldn’t solve the problem of her.

“Kiu,” Tarsul said. His tone made resentment march up her spine.

What are you going to do? she could have asked. I’m the only one who can pilot this ship. I’m the only way your stupid arcology will have the material to keep breathing, keep eating, keep the lights on. You need me.

To the exact extent that he needed this expedition to return successfully. And just what extent was that?

Was he the person in the accelerator’s archived memory?

He let out a long breath, here and now. “Maybe you should sleep again.”

“I don’t want to sleep.” She didn’t want to stay awake, either. She wanted to crawl out of her skin. Get in a fight. Hurt someone.

Tarsul sighed again, and said, “I see.”

“What are you going to do with me?” Kiu demanded. She realized, as she said it, how her breath sounded—ragged, rough, like she was looking for a fight. She was looking for a fight. She knew where she stood, when her fists hit flesh. “I’m bringing you home.” I’m doing my best.

I won’t do anything beyond that.

“I’ve yet to decide,” Tarsul said. Like nothing, like this was easy.

Kiu jerked up from the interface chair.

Tarsul stepped back, and then turned, and walked away.

Kiu ran the halls, as best she could. Tried to burn off the anger. It worked as badly as it ever had.

Between footfalls, between corners, she tried to think of options.

They were frustratingly few. She didn’t know how to fix the accelerator so it would listen to her; she didn’t know how to fix herself. So, maybe Tarsul would decide he was better off with her dead. She could strike first—she thought she’d be good at that—but if she killed Tarsul, what would she do? Show up at his arcology without him and expect them to let her in? They sounded like class-A xenophobes; Kiu didn’t find the idea likely.

What else? Pilot the planetoid somewhere else? The accelerator alone would sell to just about any shipyard or research consortium for more than Kiu would need, but it seemed to have a mind of its own. Kiu had no idea how Tarsul had gotten it out to the Erhat system in the first place; maybe it was easier without a planetoid attached, but she couldn’t even get it to go where it wanted to go. So that was out.

Which left . . . not much. Starve to death slowly as the provisions ran out.

She punched a wall. It didn’t help.

In time, as though it had a gravity all its own, she went back to the interface.

She stood staring at it for a good, long time. The source of all her problems, this thing—or, at least, that was a tempting excuse. Much better than all her problems coming from her, or from genetics, or from ontogenic accident. If it caused her problems, maybe it could damn well fix them.

Of course, she couldn’t just hit it until it agreed.

It and its memory, of people and things and places that all seemed to have so much more import than her haphazard little flight, her haphazard little life. All those people, coming into her brain and washing over her, more real to her than she was.

Then it struck her.

If this thing was meant to archive, then fine, it could archive her. Maybe she wasn’t fit to live. But she’d still be remembered by someone. Something.

The thought appealed to her. Before she made a conscious choice, her body was already moving back to the seat.

Bad idea. Yes, well, probably, but she wasn’t much use at having good ones. She growled to herself as she fit the connectors back against her scalp, but she’d decided; she was committed.

She activated the interface, and memory became the air around her.

Or—maybe not memory. Maybe just—

A sense of place, so strong as to be overwhelming. The corridors of the accelerator, but more present and real than they had been as she stood in them. These flooded her awareness, denying distraction, constructing themselves in her mind.

And in her mind, the man who looked like Tarsul materialized as though she’d simply forgotten that he’d been standing there.

But Kiu knew where she was. She didn’t dissolve into it. Instead, she steeled herself, and spoke, with something that wasn’t her voice:

“Who are you?”

Kiu Alee, the apparition said. It didn’t sound like Tarsul; not entirely. Or maybe she just didn’t know him well enough to catch this tone. What an absolutely useless question.

She had no sense of her body, here. She couldn’t lash out. She couldn’t feel her chest tighten, her breath draw in, her jaw and hands clench. It was freeing, in a way. It was also a little like death.

“Okay, then.” She couldn’t take a deep breath. Couldn’t relax her muscles. And yet, she could still feel anger, like a sensation in a phantom limb. “Here’s one: why can’t I fly this thing right?”

Much more useful. Unfortunately, much more complicated. The not-Tarsul turned eyes on her: blank, flat, and still piercing. You are not entirely similar to pilots in the past.

No lip to curl. No teeth to grit, as she considered say saying, No, I’m one of those accidents that happen from time to time. What a waste of resources; what a waste of implants. If the Agisa medics could have pulled the filaments out of her brain and left them salvageable in any meaningful way, they probably would have.

Instead, she found herself here.

But it is an opportunity to learn, the apparition said. I appreciate the chance to analyze your augments. And to analyze you. Of the two, you are more interesting.

Slow realization crept through her. “You’re not a memory,” she said. “Are you?”

You aren’t accessing the archived memories, not-Tarsul responded. I understand the interface controls are erratic on your side, as well. Still, you chose how this interface was calibrated.

“You’re the engine,” Kiu said. “You’re the ship.”

An acceptable explanation.

And that—all the questions she could ask, like who made you or where did you come from, vanished under the tide of annoyance. “You know where you’re going,” Kiu said. “Clearly, you have some kind of intelligence. Why can’t you just fly yourself home?”

Calculations, it said, but Kiu thought there was a coyness to the answer. A slight tinge of lie. Organic processors handle some calculations better.

“If you needed organic processing, your builders could have grown a neural web on a substrate.”

Before she could finish the thought, she was answered—Well, just so. And once a human is connected, why not keep a piece for analysis?

Kiu jerked.

And then she dove, back down toward her body, coming back to the surface of her consciousness with her hands on the connectors. But then the quick-trigger affront died back, just enough to let her close her eyes again, search for the connection.

“You’re copying my neuron structure? Culling it? Replicating it?” Even in Agisa, that wouldn’t have been possible. But moving a planetoid wouldn’t be possible, either. Nor would moving anything but information at this ridiculous speed.

Not as you suspect it, the accelerator responded. Your neuron structure, even with its augments, is not deterministic as to your experiential reality. I expand myself. But if you connected looking for immortality, pilot, all you’ll receive is approximation. Still, this is valuable to me. Whether or not it is valuable to you hardly matters.

She could have laughed. “Story of my life, isn’t it?”

Well, it said. Keep coming back. So far as the story of your life goes, it will matter here more than anywhere.

That didn’t sound like something Kiu was meant to understand. She moved past it. “If you study my augments, will you course correct? Is that what you need?”

No, the accelerator said. That, I’d do for my own interest.

“Wonderful. Great.” This thing’s intelligence was entirely unhelpful. “Can you just tell me why you won’t go home?”

Kiu Alee, the accelerator said. Why won’t you let me?

Kiu worked her body as hard as she could, after disconnecting. Made circuits of the halls, pushed and pulled against fixed points, did stretches and fast motions until she was gasping air. It bled off some of the boiling energy, if not all of it.

She came to Tarsul in the console room, a far-flung little space full of screens which he disregarded. She was almost too exhausted for rage, mostly just too cynical for anything. Tarsul tilted his head to acknowledge her entry.

“We are still not on course,” he said. He sounded resigned. “I admit, I’m surprised. I don’t know of any pilot who . . . experienced this much difficulty.”

“I’m special,” Kiu said, voice heavy. “My brain doesn’t work right. Ace choice in pilots, though.”

Tarsul turned to better regard her. His face, in that three-quarters turn, looked drawn and pensive. Kiu could almost hear the retort on his tongue: I had no choice.

Yeah, well. Seemed to be a common complaint, here.

Kiu glared at him for a while, and then softened, despite herself. Raw deal for him; surrounded by all this wonder, and he had a murderer with a broken brain on one side, a starving arcology so hidebound they needed a planet brought to them on the other. And hour after hour, he just kept doing what was in front of him to do.

Kiu felt a stabbing moment of powerlessness, of the attendant rage. She fought it back down.

“I can try again,” she said. “One more course correction, right? No harm in trying.”

“No harm,” Tarsul agreed. Kiu wondered if, behind that easy agreement, he was already writing her off.

“Yeah,” she said, and went back down the hall. After a moment, Tarsul followed her.

Maybe she’d go into the connection and not come out. Maybe she’d let Tarsul sedate her and let the accelerator mine her brain and learn her augments and maybe she would learn the command that would set their course correctly. Maybe that was the option left to her.

What had Tarsul said? It’s adaptive to fight when one’s life is at risk. Well, throwing a punch wouldn’t save her, so maybe she should stop trying to throw the first punch. Maybe she should find something to pre-empt the violence that waited on the other side of every heartbeat. Maybe this was it.

“I think I can do this,” she lied.

“I’m heartened,” Tarsul said.

Maybe it was Kiu’s imagination, but he sounded like he had as little faith in her as she did.

No matter.

She went back to the interface. Lowered herself into the chair.

Tarsul tilted his head at her. “You seem different,” he said. His voice was curious. Maybe a shade wary.

I don’t know if I’ve given up on life or had a breakthrough, Kiu didn’t say. Maybe a breakdown. She grunted, vaguely, in reply.

“Are you well?” Tarsul asked.

“Fine. I’m always fine.”

She reached for the interface wires, and pulled them down toward her head.

Tarsul was hesitating, as though he had something he wasn’t sure he should say. Kiu paused with her hands on the wires, and raised an eyebrow she knew he couldn’t see.

Whatever internal line of thought had occupied Tarsul wended its way to a close. “I wish you luck,” he said.

“Huh,” Kiu responded.

Then she attached the connectors, breathed out, and opened up, and surrendered herself to going home.

Originally published in Bridging Infinity, 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

Harry Turtledove

Harry Turtledove is an escaped Byzantine historian. He writes alternate history, other science fiction, fantasy (often historically based), and. when people let him get away with it, historical fiction. He is perhaps best known for ﻿The Guns of the South; more recent books include Joe Steele, The House of Daniel, Through Darkes Europe﻿, and a contemporary supernatural thriller, ﻿Alpha and Omega.﻿

He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Broadway maven and fellow writer Laura Frankos. They have three daughters, two granddaughters, and three over-privileged cats. Anyone looking for his annoying opinions about writing and a great many other things can find him on Twitter @HNTurtledove.

E. J. Swift

E. J. Swift is the author of the Osiris Project trilogy, a speculative fiction series set in a world radically altered by climate change. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Sunday Times EFG short story award and the British Science Fiction Award for short fiction, and has appeared in a variety of publications from Solaris, Salt Publishing, NewCon Press and Jurassic London. Her latest novel is Paris Adrift, a tale of bartenders and time travel in the City of Light.

An Owomoyela

An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net, and can be funded at patreon.com/an_owomoyela.

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 last July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.