Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Of Love and Other Monsters

by Vandana Singh

Mutability

by Ray Nayler

The Best We Can

by Carrie Vaughn

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to our December 2020 issue!

As 2020 comes to a close, I just wanted to say thank you for sticking with Forever through all this. I can’t imagine that anyone has had an easy year and, hopefully, there’s been some escape provided by the stories we’ve published. A break would be welcome about now and I’m still looking for mine. Suggestions welcome.

If you celebrate any of the holidays this month, I hope you can enjoy them safely. At the least, we can all cheer on the end of 2020 later this month.

Until next time,

-Neil

Of Love and Other Monsters

Vandana Singh

When I think about him I remember a wave I watched near a beach once, a big, beautiful, smooth wave, perfectly rounded, like molten glass. It came into a narrow channel from the open sea, muscular and purposeful, hardly breaking into surf. I thought it would climb all the way up the end of the channel, wash over me, and carry on, unbroken, till it crossed the entire Deccan peninsula. But it met the sand, rolled over it, little traceries of white disturbing its smooth, translucent aspect. Touched my toes, broke up into little tongues of froth, and dissipated. So I like to think of him—Sankaran, I mean—like a wave that came out of the ocean for a while to fulfill some purpose (whatever that was). Then he was lost to me.

Physicists have a name for that kind of wave. It is very unusual, and it is called a soliton, or solitary wave.

When, as a young man, I met Sankaran for the first time, I thought he was the one I had been searching for all my conscious life. But as the poet Faiz says, there are more sorrows in the world than love. As soon as I had settled into a certain youthful complacency, the world and its attendant sorrows got in the way.

The study of minds, soliton-like or otherwise, is my particular passion. Mindsensing, mind-weaving—these extraordinary abilities set me apart from other people. I like to go into a gaggle of housewives bargaining over turnips or a crowd at a cricket match. I drift about, trying to determine what kind of entity the crowd has the potential to become. I take the embryological possibility of the meta-mind, make a joining here, a parting there; I wave my baton like the conductor of an orchestra and sense a structure, a form, coalesce in the interactions of these knots of persons. The meta-mind I construct has a vague unity of purpose, a jumble of contradictory notions, and even a primitive self-awareness.

Which is why I am so disturbed by solitons. They walk into a meta-mind as though nothing were there, and they walk out, unaffected. They give nothing, nor do they take away.

Such was Sankaran-with-stars-in-his-eyes, Sankaran the astronomer. This is not his story, however—his is just one thread in the tapestry, one voice in the telling. This is my story, and it begins when I was (so I am told) seventeen years old.

The first thing I remember is fire. The next thing: a pair of big, strong hands stroking and kneading me. A woman’s voice, saying, “Come now, be so, be still . . . ” I was lying on a bed of warm ash, with sharp bits digging into my back.

I have no recollection of my life before the conflagration took my memory and identity. What I am now began with fire, with a woman called Janani, on a summer night in the remote outskirts of a small town in eastern India. Some time later, when I came to my senses, the stars were out, and the air smelled of roasted coriander seeds and cow dung, as it does most nights over there. I was lying on a cot in the little yard behind Janani’s shack. Everything, including my lean, dark body, was unfamiliar to me.

My rescuer, Janani—a widow who ran a toddy shop—took me in and helped me face my predicament. The first thing she did after I recovered was to give me a name: Arun, which (like everything in those early days) sounded strange to me. “It means ‘red,’” she told me. “You were born of fire.” In those days I could sense the ghost of my past self very faintly: I saw symbols, words, numbers, shapes, as though scratched in damp clay. “Who am I? What happened to me in the fire?” I asked her. My voice sounded rasping and unfamiliar. The Hindi syllables felt strange on my tongue, but the words were there in my mind, waiting for me.

“I cannot tell you,” she said. “There was a fire in an abandoned building, and I rescued you. You are not a local. That’s all there is to know.”

Without an identity I had nowhere to go, no family. Nobody in the area recognized me. So Janani gave me a home. I slept in the front of her hut, which was the toddy shop. Oh, the strangeness of those days!

It was like learning to live again. She had to show me how to take a twig from the neem tree behind the hut and use it like a toothbrush. I learned how to use a toilet, how to chop onions, how to talk to customers. Janani made a living not just from selling toddy but also by dispensing herbs for ailments from stomachaches to unrequited love, and I had to learn the lore enough to know which bottle to bring out when she asked for it. I had to learn to recognize my own face in the mirror—I would stand before the little mirror on the wall and pull faces until she yelled at me, “Arun, you fool! Did I pull you out of the fire so you could admire your beauty all day?” And she would set me to work washing glasses or chopping herbs. The ghost of my past self stayed in the shadows of my mind, and I found myself thinking less and less of what my old life might have been. At that time all was new, strange, and endlessly fascinating—not least of which was my ability to sense minds.

I was idle by nature and by the nature of my ability, which was distracting to say the least. Janani insisted on educating me; from her I learned my letters and arithmetic, which seemed to come very easily to me. She also got a retired clerk who frequented the tea shack nearby to teach me a little about history, geography, and the rudiments of the English language. I would have liked nothing better than to loiter all day in the marketplace, but Janani’s sharp tongue kept me at my chores and lessons, at least until her back was turned. She was stocky and strong; she moved with the cadence of a large, slow river, sweeping up everything in her path. Her customers, work-worn laborers and ne’er-do-wells, feared her and confided their woes to her. Only once did I see her take a man into the dark room behind the shop where she slept. After several hours he came out, staggering, smiled vaguely at me, handed me a ten-rupee note, and left. He never came back.

My favorite place, where I learned and practiced what I considered to be my art, was the market; here the vendors squatted on the ground before their baskets full of gourds, peppers, eggplants, and onions, shouting, “Rob me! Loot me! Only three rupees a kilo!” I grew to appreciate the sweaty housewives with their glinting eyes, their bright saris hitched up in readiness for battle as they began insulting the produce. Pride, honor, and desire amidst the tottering, shining piles of luscious fruits and vegetables—how could I resist? I sensed the convoluted topography of each mind, its hills, valleys, areas of light and darkness, the whole animal mass trembling and shifting with emotional fluxes. After some practice I was able to draw the minds into a kind of net, to weave the separate threads of jangling thought processes into—not a tapestry, I was never that skilled, but a jumble of knitting wool, such as a kitten might do. There was little awareness among the separate minds that they were, at this point in space and time, tentatively the members of a rather confused metamind—how many cells in your body, but for a specialized few, are aware of themselves as part of a higher consciousness?

I once tried to draw Janani into a meta-mind with a couple of her customers, but she came into the back of her shop and cuffed me. “Don’t you try that on me, you good-for-nothing! Is this how you repay me?” I had already guessed (from the fact that nobody had tried it on me and that my subjects seemed to be so unaware of what I was doing) that this ability of mine was unique, but I didn’t know that Janani knew I had it. Later she explained that she did not possess my ability—indeed, she had come across only one other person who did—but she was a sensitive. She could tell when someone, especially a crude beginner like me, was trying tricks.

“Who’s this other person?” I asked, intrigued.

“You don’t need to know anything about him,” she told me. “Just somebody I met once. He wasn’t a nice man.”

She wouldn’t tell me more. But I realized then that the world was more complex than I’d thought; at least one other person had my peculiar talent, most didn’t, and some could sense my mind reaching out to theirs.

I spent all my spare time wandering about the narrow green lanes of my neighborhood under the gulmohar trees, scuffing up soft, silken dust with my bare toes. In the muddy by-lanes I gambled at marbles with other boys and gawked with them over the calendar of dewy-eyed film stars hanging in the neighborhood tea shack. I learned about sex and desire by watching the pariah dogs in the streets and the way the older boys looked at the unreachable, uniformed schoolgirls passing by with pigtails swinging. My own longings were nebulous. I could look at the tea seller’s daughter—a sloe-eyed vixen with a sharp tongue and a ready vocabulary of swear words—and tell that underneath it all was a mind as fragile as a spider’s web, tense with fear and need. I felt drawn to her, but then there was also the barber, a thin, clean-shaven young fellow, shy and subdued to all appearances. He distracted me every time I passed the place where he had set up shop: a mirror hung on a wall by the street with a chair in front of it, where he sat his customers down and ministered to their heads or beards. His mind was luscious, imaginative, erotic; I could not read his thoughts, but I could sense the nature of them: desire flowed with the rise and fall of his fingers, the shy caress of his hands on the cheek of a customer. Both my mind and body responded to the needs of such men and women around me; sometimes I would get aroused simply walking down the street, feeling the brush of their minds like feathers on my skin. Due to the crowded, public nature of our lives and the narrowness of convention, there was little hope of physical consummation—only the occasional groping in dark alleyways among us boys—but I could reach out with my mind and make a bridge, a connection as tangible to me as a touch. Most did not have the ability to sense this, but once the tea seller’s daughter looked up at me, startled, her eyes as clear and honest as a small child’s, as though she, too, had felt the electricity between our minds. Then her habitual aloofness slipped over her face like a mask, and the moment was gone.

There was a game I liked to play: I would lie on the broad branch of a large neem tree that grew near the tea shop, close my eyes, and try to guess who was passing below me from their mind-signature. If the person was a stranger, the mind-signature told me nothing of their identity, not even if they were male or female—but a well-known person was like the familiar topography of the street you grew up on.

Despite my persistent questions, Janani refused to tell me about the other person she knew who had my ability. “I hope you never meet him,” she would say with a shudder.

Then one night he found me.

I had just finished sweeping out the shop when I sensed something odd, as though a tendril had insinuated itself into my mind; at the same time I became aware that there was someone outside the door, just standing and waiting in the darkness. Janani must have felt it too, because she looked at me in sudden apprehension. I felt the tug of a mind far more sophisticated than my own, pulling me into the labyrinths of its own consciousness like a fisherman drawing in his line. I got up and began walking toward the front of the shop as if in a dream. Janani, who was obviously less affected than I, grabbed me and pushed me out the back door, into the quiet darkness of her vegetable garden. “Arun, you fool, get out of here!” she whispered fiercely against my cheek. I willed myself to put one foot before another. I climbed across the bamboo fence. Every step I took made me stronger and more able to resist.

When I returned, Janani was sitting on the shop floor, rocking to and fro. Her hair was unkempt, her sari crumpled, and she kept saying, “Rama, oh, Rama,” in a soft monotone. A great wave of anger and fear swept over me.

“Who was that? What did he do?”

“That was Rahul Moghe. The only other person I know who has your talent. He is dangerous, and he wants you, God knows for what terrible purpose. You must avoid him. You will know him not by his appearance, which can be deceptive, but by the way he drags at your mind without warning.

“He has threatened me. Now this place is no longer safe for either of us. I must think what to do . . . ”

That was the first and only time Janani took me to her bed, to the comfort of her dark, Himalayan breasts that smelled of cloves and cinnamon. She was like an earthquake and a tidal wave rolled into one. Afterward, I heard her mutter to herself, “Surely it doesn’t matter with him; he’s different . . . ” In the morning she flung me summarily out of her bed and began to pack.

“This is a sign that we must part ways. I have taught you what I can. You will go out into the world and make something of yourself, and keep away from Moghe. I have some money I have been saving for you. Meanwhile I will sell this place and go live with a friend in Rishikesh. Keep in touch with me, because I want to know how you are faring. I have some of your things in a safe place. I will send them to you when I can.”

“What things?”

“Things from before the fire. Don’t worry about it now. You must go to the next town and get a job. I know a place . . . ”

Which is how I found myself living in a tiny room over a tailor’s shop in the neighboring town. It was a tranquil time for me. I helped the tailor with deliveries, and after a while he made me a pair of pants and a shirt so I could look like a respectable young man instead of a drifter with holes in his clothes. Eventually (prompted by a barrage of letters from Janani) I got a job as a clerk at a computer training institute. Here my quick brain and my lessons with Janani and the old clerk paid off; over the next year I improved my English and began to help the system administrator with computer maintenance work. The work was enjoyable and came to me easily.

“Arun, foolish one,” Janani wrote. “You are no longer a street waif with few prospects. Here is your chance to make something of yourself. I’m sending money for classes. Learn computers and get a proper job; every idiot is doing it.” So I registered for a couple of classes and found that I had a knack for programming. Numbers, symbols, instructions, logic—it was as though I had once known this, or something like this, in my old life. Encouraged by the students, who looked upon me as a project of their own, I began to study full-time. Although I had no formal education and was unused to discipline, I made progress with their help. In the hot, dusty little classrooms with the squeaky ceiling fans and traffic sounds from the open windows, I was able to shut out other minds and concentrate. Slowly I began to write, decipher, and debug computer code. In a few months other students were asking me for help. My life changed.

Back in my bare little room I would lie on my sagging bed and listen to the voices from the shop below, the lulling rhythm of the sewing machines, and play at making meta-minds. “Arun,” I would tell myself, “in two years you’ve come a long way.” But my laziness, held at bay by the unaccustomed intellectual stimulation, reasserted itself eventually. Instead of pursuing a full degree I opted for a mere diploma, which greatly disappointed Janani as well as some of my teachers.

But the change in my life, in this short, intense period, had opened me up to the possibilities of the world. I read voraciously in Hindi and English, learning about foreign countries and customs, and the wars and plagues of history. From lurid Hindi science fiction to paperback English romances, there was nothing that was not grist for my mill. I came to realize that sensing other minds through the written word was almost as interesting a skill as my unique, innate ability to sense them directly. Writing—whether English or Hindi or computer code—was the key that opened the doors to other minds, other lands. Like a monk on leave from the monastery, I was agape with wonder. For the first time I realized that there were many ways to be a foreigner; losing one’s memory, being poor, being illiterate, were just some of them.

Meanwhile I continued to get letters and packages from Janani. She was now a seamstress in Rishikesh. She wrote that she was gradually retrieving and returning my things, such as they were, from before the fire. The things made no sense. There were some photographs that she had apparently taken herself: a great, dazzling wall of flame, an enormous log in the foreground, glowing with the heat. Pieces of abstract ceramic sculpture, remains of etchings. Had I been an artist? There was nothing remotely artistic about me now. I looked at my hands, my body, clean and healed by Janani’s ministrations. I did not even have any scars. I looked at the other photos she had sent of teenage boys looking into the camera. One of them was me. The others looked vaguely familiar. Had they been my friends in that unknown life?

But I was too busy with my new life to pay much attention to my erstwhile possessions. Not long after receiving my diploma, I got a job checking software for defects and moved to the great, crowded metropolis of New Delhi. Janani was ecstatic. “A great step up in the world, Arun!” she wrote, exulting. And in many ways it was so. Flush with success—the job was easy for me and not too demanding—and with a new sense of my place in the world, I settled down in my new life. It was during this time that I began to explore my extraordinary mental abilities in a more methodical manner.

One of my early discoveries was that there were minds that were completely closed to me, different from the kind of mental resistance I’d felt with Janani. There were people who would be standing with the crowd outside the cricket stadium, apparently as excited about the impending match as anybody else, but they did not register on my radar. I was greatly troubled by such minds—blanks, I called them. I feared and distrusted them. It seemed that my skill had its limitations. But the solitons were different. I sensed them, all right, but I could not draw them in. Their minds moved through my jumbled meta-mind the way a man walks through a large, empty field on his way home. Quickly, cleanly, with his attention elsewhere. Taking nothing, leaving nothing behind.

The first one I experienced was at a rally at the Red Fort in Delhi. The prime minister was up on the ramparts in a bullet-proof box, speechifying about the latest war. Seventeen thousand people with nothing better to do—college students, farmers with harvests lost in the drought, clerks on their way to important errands, unemployable sons of rich men and other wastrels, street people and pickpockets—had been rounded up by the party men. As the prime minister’s rhetoric became more passionate, I sensed the minds, at first relaxed and disjointed like a bunch of loose rubber bands, becoming like angry bees buzzing in concert. Not very interesting—too simple, but also dangerous. I put my hands over my ears, but I could not shut them out; it was as though I were being blinded and deafened at the same time. Stumbling away through the crowd, I was pushed and cursed as I pressed on. And the realization hit: the meta-mind had formed of its own accord. I had not done it. That is why I couldn’t make it stop. What such a self-generating meta-beast could do, who knew? The crowd surged around me, thrusting and clawing at me. I imagined the monster going out into the streets, maiming and killing, crying for blood. As my own mind dissolved into chaos, something strange and wonderful happened. I sensed a deep and momentary stilling in my mind, as though I had crossed a great, noisy battlefield into a waterfall of peace. Just for one glorious moment. Then the bees hummed in my head again, and it was all I could do to stagger about like a drunk at the fringes of the crowd, looking for that person. Useless, of course. Who walked so cleanly through the mad tangle that was the meta-beast, like a monk striding serenely through the sinful glitter of the world?

I learned later that there are only a few people like Sankaran, and that for very brief periods of time all people are like that. But some sustain that state of mind for most of their waking life. A cobbler mending shoes in front of a cinema hall in Bombay. A mathematician walking, seeing not the world but equations and things. A mother, single-minded about her ailing son. A lover in a dusty old garden, oblivious to roses. Yes, later I understood this state of mind.

Life in the big city was never boring. There was scope for my abilities, and they led me into unexpected adventures. One time, while strolling through the fort city of Old Delhi, I came upon a young girl standing in a doorway. She was a waif, barely in her teens, incongruously dressed in a bright red salwaar kameez that was too big for her. The narrow street was full of people and noise, bicycle bells and the calls of fruit sellers, and the light had the dazzling clarity of high summer. Seeing her in the dark archway of an old building with the sunlight washing her thin face, I felt the anguish of her mind like a blow between the eyes. I sensed a hopelessness so absolute that instinctively I moved toward her. She drew back from me, and a man appeared out of the shabby darkness of what I then realized was a brothel.

That was how I met Dulari. My rescue of her involved most of my meager savings (her price) and a local women’s group. She was eventually given a job at a clothing shop that employed dozens of emaciated young women to sew name-brand clothes for overseas markets. I went to see her occasionally, but most of the time guilt made me stay away. Although her life was better than before, it was still no life for a fourteen-year-old girl. But I was now a member of the middle class. I had to pretend to a certain decorum. Besides, I lived in a tiny room sublet to me by a large and boisterous Punjabi family. Dulari had no place in my life.

But I could not hide from myself the fact that I could have loved her. She was a child, and it was not appropriate, but I saw past her painfully thin, broken body into her mind. She was like the proverbial lotus that grows in murky water; its roots are soiled, but it climbs upward, bifurcating into petals that open to the sky. Under the scars, a part of her was untouched by the privations and humiliations of her life; there was intelligence, hope, and layers of wonderful complexity and potential that perhaps would never find expression.

My colleague Manek was another matter entirely. He was well educated, had prospects, and was earning a reasonable salary. His mind—I could never look upon a person as simply a corporeal entity—was clean and simple, like an orderly room, and his thoughts and emotions were often quite transparent. One day, I sensed that he was depressed and asked him about it. In his simple, direct way, he told me that he was in love with a young woman he could not marry. There were caste and class issues, and his beloved’s family was keeping guard round the clock so the couple could no longer meet. To make matters worse, his parents were now looking for a suitable girl for him. Naturally I became Manek’s confidant.

That summer my landlord and his family decided to go home to their village in Punjab for the holidays. They padlocked all the doors in the apartment except for my room, the kitchen, and the bathroom and left me to a peace and privacy I had never before enjoyed.

So Manek came to see me at home. One day he was near tears and I put my arms around him to comfort him. After that we became lovers after a fashion. He was not gay, he said, but he wanted me to pretend to be a woman, to be held, caressed, and comforted. In his mind the illusion was so complete that as I lay with him, I could almost feel the swell of my breasts. Meanwhile I touched his mind with my own, furtively, tentatively. I think our occasional mental contact helped him relax, although he could not directly sense the tendrils of my mind. With his face buried against my bare shoulder he would whisper the names of all the women he had loved from afar, ending with Anjana, his beloved.

Later there was Sheela, a quiet mouse of a woman, the older unmarried daughter of a couple who lived in the flat above. Her sisters were married off; she was the plain one, apparently, so there was not much hope that she would find someone. In her lovemaking, as in her mind, she was bold, imaginative, and tender, but everything she said was by touch or glance. During our few assignations she never spoke a word. Once I broke our pact of silence by uttering the word “love.” She sat up on the bed, stared at me, her wide eyes filling with angry tears. “Don’t you dare say that word ever again,” she said fiercely. She leaped upon me and began to pull off my shirt. The dark places in her mind deepened, trembled; caves opened like mouths; rivers of emotion roared in the gorges, the hidden places of her soul. She was fascinating, but she did not want me. Ultimately, fate in the form of a divorced man looking for a wife took her away to some far city and another life.

Sometimes I worried about how different I was from other young men. I looked and dressed like a man, but I did not understand social conventions about what it meant to be a man or a woman. I could go out with other young men to seedy bars and drink beer, but I did not know that the women there were for flirting with, or that I should outshout the other men in a bid to impress. I would sit down with a woman and ask her about her work, or about the embroidery on her blouse. Women colleagues found that when I was the only male present they could talk as easily about “women” things as if they were by themselves; once I took part in a discussion about their periods, even though my role was only that of interested questioner. “God, Arun, you’re too much,” they would say, suddenly remembering I was a man. I watched cooking shows with as much curiosity as cricket and wrestling. My ability to sense minds enabled me to see human beings as entities beyond man-woman categories. I decided, after some months of informal study, that rather than two sexes there were at least thirty-four. Perhaps “sex” or “gender” isn’t right—perhaps a geographical term would be more appropriate—thirty-four climactic zones of the human mind!

But my peculiarities occasionally made me wonder about my future. My colleagues were falling in love, getting engaged, getting married. To me, each job was like a temporary resting place before the next thing, as was each relationship. Would my restlessness be my undoing? Janani dismissed my fears. “You are young,” she wrote in a letter. “Learn about the world, Arun. Embrace it. Love as many people as you can, but don’t let anyone keep you like a bird in a cage.”

By the time I met Sankaran I had learned a lot. Never to go to political rallies, for one thing. Or religious processions, although temples, churches, gurudwaras, and mosques were all right in small doses. I had also learned that contrary to what you might expect, families do not generally make good meta-minds. There is too much pushing and shoving about. They coalesce and come apart. Maybe they maintain a dynamic rather than a static equilibrium, because they are, after all, with each other day in and day out. Perhaps a meta-mind, indefinitely sustained, eventually goes mad.

I also did some experimenting with animals. There was a herd of cows that foraged in the street outside my apartment complex. They stood in the midst of traffic like humped, white islands, peacefully chewing cuds, or waited with bovine patience for people to dump their kitchen refuse at the corner garbage dump. I sensed their minds but did not understand the nature of their thoughts. One night, returning from work, I saw a magnificent bull standing in the middle of the road, on the median. Traffic swept by him on either side. In the luminous dust under the street lamps, he was like a great white ghost. Across the road the cows lay regarding him with indifference. I sensed his mind as clearly as if it had been visible. He was calling to the cows with all he had, a long, soundless low of desire. The cows’ response was, in effect, Not today, pal, we have cud to chew. It was then that I realized that animals could not only sense each other’s minds but also communicate mentally.

I continued my experiments with human minds, learning all kinds of interesting trivia. For instance, odd numbers, especially primes, make more stable meta-beasts; even numbers are less steady, especially if there are only two people involved. Couples are really dangerous, because there is nothing to balance the connection between the minds, no push to counter the pull, if you know what I mean. Which is why, long before I met Sankaran, I had decided never to fall in love.

I met him in America. Janani encouraged me to go there after she heard from a fellow sensitive that Rahul Moghe had been seen in Chandigarh, only a few hours’ drive from Delhi. I felt the old, nameless fear again. I had not thought about Rahul Moghe in years. At that time my company was exporting a team of software people to the United States. Urged by a fury of letters from Janani, I joined the exodus to the land of milk and honey.

In America’s small towns, with their abnormally clean streets so strangely empty of people and animals, in the surreal, neon-bright canyons of vast skyscrapered cities, I found that I could further explore my ability to make meta-minds. Despite the much-touted individualism of Americans, I often encountered large groups of people with similar belief systems and mental processes. In the beginning it was vastly entertaining; I walked down Wall Street, peered in at the Stock Exchange. All those people, thinking themselves competitors and rivals, muttering into cell phones and shouting like deranged children—what a seamless, stable meta-mind they made! Then there was suburban America, yuppie-ville, with the over-large houses and multiple cars and boats, where it was just too easy. Teenagers expressing their individuality in their name-brand clothing and angst-ridden looks were easy, too, but there was a dark undercurrent in that meta-mind that disturbed me, hinting of dams upstream about to burst. I amused myself making meta-minds out of warring groups of political opponents and fundamentalist religious types with opposing loyalties. My own community of Indians, with few exceptions, lived in a time warp, adopting conventions and practices that no longer existed in India. Their constant obsession with their status as high-earning professionals was boring. Far more interesting were splinter groups living on the edge of mainstream culture; I made friends with Wiccans, Mexican immigrants, and an Ethiopian gay couple that ran a restaurant in San Francisco. I lived in California at first, working as little as I could get by with, indulging my special ability to the hilt. Despite all this I felt a deep and increasing loneliness at the back of my mind, a longing not just for my old haunts in India, for old friends and people I had known, but for something beyond that. Already I was making a shape, a place, for Sankaran inside me.

Then something happened that drove me from California. One bright Saturday morning I was swimming about in the shallows near a beach when I felt an undertow. I began to struggle against it; then I realized that it was in my mind. A powerful tug, reeling me in as though I were an exhausted fish. I recognized the summons that would not be denied. Rahul Moghe had found me at last.

I emerged from the water and found myself compelled to walk between sunbathers and colorful beach umbrellas toward a car parked on the road above the beach. I tried to stop, or to ask for help, but I was as helpless as a mannequin. As I came near the road one part of my mind noted that the car was a white sedan with tinted windows. A man in sunglasses sat in the driver’s seat. He leaned forward to open the passenger side door. I remember that a gold ring flashed on his hand.

There was a sudden squeal of brakes, a shuddering crash. A bus, pulling into its stop just behind the car, hadn’t slowed down enough. It rear-ended the parked car, buckling the back and making it rock forward. The pull of Rahul Moghe’s mind ceased abruptly.

I took the chance; I ran to where my beach bag lay, picked it up, crossed the road out of sight of the accident, and sprinted furiously through the parking lot on the other side of the road. My bare feet burned on the concrete, but in a minute or two I was in my car, driving off to safety. A police car came in from the other direction, siren wailing.

About twenty minutes later I felt Rahul Moghe’s mind reach for me again, but his touch was faint, searching, tentative; a few minutes later I couldn’t feel him at all.

Through sheer luck I had gotten away again.

I changed jobs, fled the West Coast, and kept to old, sprawling eastern metropolises like New York and Boston. Nearly a year passed. There was no sign of Rahul Moghe. Janani’s letters also did not mention him except to warn me to be vigilant. She hoped I had seen the last of him.

I knew, however, that he would be back, that he would find me. I sensed this in a way that I did not understand. I would dream of him sometimes, of the long arms of his mind reaching for me, drawing me to him, to the abyss of his soul. He terrified me. But there was a part of me that wanted to know him, perhaps the only other person with my ability.

Then one afternoon, in a café in Boston, where I was attempting to drink what Americans fondly believe to be chai, I met Sankaran.

I was amusing myself constructing a meta-beast from the very uppity literary crowd in one corner and a dysfunctional family of four at the next table when someone coasted through the whole mess of mental cobwebbing like it wasn’t there. Instinctively I looked toward him. He was unmistakably Indian, delicately built, with a thatch of unkempt black hair and an apologetic and neglected mustache. His hands were slender and brown. He sat down with a book and a coffee cup and was soon lost in whatever he was reading.

I went across to him, trying to control my excitement. His being Indian provided an easy excuse to introduce myself.

He was a post-doctoral researcher at one of the universities scattered about this great city. He lived in a hole in Cambridge. While traveling on a bus he had gotten so engrossed in a collection of conference reports that he had gotten off at the wrong stop. Finding himself near a café, he had dropped in for a coffee and a good, long read.

“You mean you don’t know where you are?”

He turned his brown eyes to me and smiled. For a moment he really seemed to be there in the café. “Does any body?” he said, separating the “body” from the “any” with the precision of a surgeon. I thought this a deeply philosophical statement until he explained that he meant that since the Earth and the solar system and the entire galaxy were constantly changing their places in space, one had to be very specific about reference frames. I was utterly charmed.

After I helped Sankaran find his way home, we became friends. He never sought me out, but I began to haunt a coffee shop in Cambridge where he turned up nearly every evening like a homing pigeon, armed with books and papers. When aware of the mundane world, he treated it with a bemused, indiscriminate kindness—being the kind of person who, upon bumping into people, doors, or potted plants, apologizes to them with equal courtesy. Much of the time I watched him over my coffee cup, filled with silent wonder. I could explore his mind, embrace it with my own, but I could not draw it to me, play with it, or manipulate it. He was untouched by my mental explorations. He had no need of me; he posed no threat. He filled the emptiness that had been growing in me.

I discovered in Sankaran some of the things that had drawn me to Dulari—but without the pain. His mind had the delicacy of petals about to unfurl and the innocence and wonder of a child beholding a rainbow for the first time. Instead of the white noise of contradictory emotions, the cacophony of thwarted desire and loneliness that makes up a typical human mind, his mind possessed the deep peacefulness found in high places, in the thin air of Himalayan country above the snow line. He did not torture himself with questions about his purpose in life or what other people thought about him—indeed, the obsession with self was quite absent in him. He was beautiful, a being absorbed at play in a universe far vaster than ordinary humans could imagine.

Looking at him, at his thin, mahogany brown body draped without grace on the sofa while his mind saw wonders I could only guess at, I was filled with the sweetness of desire. I wanted to touch his body as well as his mind. I wanted his touch, even if it were only as brief and innocent as a hand on my arm. In India, where platonic friends of the same sex often hold hands or fling arms around each other in public without censure or misunderstanding, it would have been easy. But social mores were different here, and—more to the point—he remained unaware of my need of him.

I spent as much time as I could with Sankaran. Sometimes I would meet him in the physics department and amuse myself looking at star charts on the computer as he finished a colloquium or worked out his equations. He would join me at the computer when he was done and fill me with astronomical lore as we roamed the galaxy. Here was a red giant, there a supernova, a binary star system, a neutron star, a black hole, an extra-solar planet fifteen times the mass of Jupiter. I learned the lexicon of astronomy as a lover learns the body of his love.

Gradually I got to know a little about Sankaran’s background. He was from a learned Tamilian family. He was very fond of his mother and his elder brother, who remained in the ancestral home in Chennai after his father’s death. I had a mental picture of the faded whitewash on the walls, the banana trees in the courtyard at the back. When he talked about his family, he seemed suddenly to come to earth.

“My mother’s cooking, nothing like it.” Or, “Unna taught me calculus in eighth class.”

“They want for me to get married,” he told me once, shyly. He shook his head. “I do not have time for a wife. But it is also tradition to continue your line. Life is not simple.” He sighed. But for an accident of gender and the cruelty of convention, I would have married him in a minute.

He was also a devotee of Lord Shiva. He kept a small stone Shiva lingam in his room, a shrine in a bookshelf surrounded by books and papers on astrophysics. There was only one picture on the wall—a photograph of the beautiful and graceful Tamilian actress Shobhana. Sankaran confessed shyly to me that he was a fan.

I feigned an interest in cooking so I could spend more time with him in the privacy of his room. As I stirred eggplant curry on the stove, I would look at him as he lay on the bed, flipping through the latest Astrophysical Journal, his eyes dreamy. He would mutter phrases that were meaningless to me, things like “virial theorem” or “off-main-sequence star.” Sometimes I would ask him to explain, and I would perch on the bed next to him, feeling the heat of his body, the passion of his intellect. I would glance up at the stone phallus of Shiva and remember how it felt to pretend to be a woman for my old lover, Manek. In the little studio apartment the air would fill with the smell of roasting spices, cumin and coriander, and the sharp, enticing aroma of ginger. I would lean close to Sankaran, looking with him at incomprehensible pages of equations and star charts, conscious only of his nearness, the soft black hairs on his arms stirring in unison with the rhythm of his breath. I would stretch my mind toward his, enclosing him, burying myself between the flanks of his beautiful, oblivious mind. Sleepy with desire, I would remember that one of the manifestations of Shiva is Ardhanarishwaram: half man, half woman. Shiva is the one who dances the world into being and out of it. One day I said:

“Tell me something, Sankaran. If you could ask the Lord Shiva three questions, what would they be?”

He was silent for a while. Then he said, “I would ask if the dark matter problem is truly a question of missing mass. Then I would ask about the Higgs boson and the accelerating expansion rate. Which may be related to the very failure of the standard model I mentioned at the seminar. You have to consider . . . ”

I would distract him gently back to my question. Each time I asked him the question, he would answer as though he had never been asked this before. One day, after he had read a letter from his mother, he sighed.

“I would like to ask Lord Shiva if there is some way I can avoid getting married without hurting my family.”

And once:

“I would ask Lord Shiva if there is life on the extra-solar planets we have found. If there is life on other worlds at all.”

I found myself falling into Sankaran’s gravitational well as inevitably as a star being swallowed by a black hole.

Janani cautioned me not to focus on Sankaran to the exclusion of other things. “Explore your ability,” she wrote. “Travel a bit. See the world, Arun. Immerse yourself in it. We think all we have are our paltry possessions and the special people in our lives. But the world is greater than that . . . ”

Her advice came too late. I remember wondering about the tone of Janani’s letter—she was not one to wax philosophical as a rule. It occurred to me that she never wrote about her life in Rishikesh, or the woman she worked with—I had never thought to ask about these things. But then I had a new distraction. Sankaran got a phone call from his elder brother in India. The family had found him a bride. He was to go home in a week to tie the knot.

He told me the news with a resigned air. Clearly he saw marriage as a duty to endure with good grace. We sat in silence for a while, my own mind reeling with dismay and resentment. Then Sankaran turned back to his notes and scribbled away at his equations, quite happily lost in his universe of stellar wonders, and I was relieved. The wife would be a nuisance, and I would have to find a way to spend time with Sankaran without her interfering, but she could never truly touch him, never own him. How could one woman compete with a trillion burning suns?

I saw him off at the airport. As I felt the quiet comfort of his mind recede, I staggered out into the warm light of a spring day, a man adrift in a sea of blathering minds, without an island in sight.

The days of his absence are still clear to me: the heat of my apartment, the monotony of the days at work, the stupefying predictability of the minds around me that produced an answering dullness in my own soul.

Then came a letter from Janani that worried and mystified me.

“I am going on a journey to Thailand,” she wrote. “I, who have never been out of India! I am very excited to be traveling on a plane and seeing the world, just as you have done. At my age, too! Still, it is not a pleasure trip. I am on an adventure, Arun, the culmination of a life’s work. I don’t know if I will emerge from it unscathed. Meanwhile I have just sent you a parcel containing the last of your things. When you understand who you are, Arun, I hope you will forgive me . . . ”

There was no way to contact Janani for details. The little shop where she lived and worked as a seamstress did not have a phone. I debated going to India to see her. The thought was tempting. I had not been home in three years. Perhaps later I could go down to Chennai and see Sankaran. I began making inquiries at a travel agent’s.

But Providence had other plans.

A few days before I was to pay for my ticket, I woke up in the throes of a nightmare. I sat up in bed in the half-light of dawn, looking around at the familiar chaos of my room, wiping my sweaty hands on the bedclothes. The monster that had been there in my dream was still present, however. I sensed it—a meta-mind of great power. It seemed to be some distance away, a fact that puzzled me. Even the selfgenerated meta-mind I had encountered at the rally in Delhi had had a fairly short range. I remembered how it had buzzed and hummed in my ears, driving me close to madness. This was something like that, but quieter. It was engaged in some kind of play, like a child absorbed in a toy. Only this play felt dangerous.

I could have walked away from it, but I felt a deep curiosity mingled with fear. Where was this meta-mind? What was taking up its attention so completely? How had such a powerful thing come into being?

I dressed hurriedly, flung myself into the car, and began to drive toward it.

When I was halfway to Boston (having driven about ten miles) I realized it was much farther than I had thought. What could make its presence felt from so far away?

My apprehension mounted the closer I got to it. As I drove between the tall buildings of the city, with the sunlight flashing on tiers of windowpanes, reflecting in my eyes, I realized that the meta-mind was different from any I had encountered. The one at the Red Fort had been a hasty and temporary thing, powerful only because it was made up of seventeen thousand minds. This thing had fewer components and was more focused, like a laser beam.

I came to a stop before an old brick office building. Sirens wailed; as I leaped out of my car, police vehicles and ambulances drove up, disgorging men in uniform. A crowd had collected in front of the building, looking skyward with a mixture of apprehension and ghoulish anticipation. I squinted against the glare of the sun and saw a man standing on a window ledge some seven stories above the street. He teetered, looked behind him, and jumped.

He seemed to fall in slow motion, his arms flung up as though in surrender. About halfway down, his mind, which had been locked in a trancelike state, woke up to screaming terror. Too quickly, a red flower blossomed on the sidewalk, and a splinter of bone buried itself in a watching woman’s arm. People screamed, moving back, stumbling over each other. Blood spattered their clothes. TV cameras zoomed in as policemen began to shout orders.

Then the next one fell. A woman, her skirts billowing up. She broke like a cracked egg on the sidewalk.

In the screaming and confusion I darted into an entrance I’d noticed further along the sidewalk.

I took an elevator to the seventh floor. The meta-mind was still quivering with satisfaction. It was composed of not more than twenty minds, twisted and knotted together, not randomly but with the intricacy, order, and beauty of an integrated circuit or a Persian carpet. It was beautiful and deadly, and I sensed its hunger as it felt around for its next victim.

I entered a corridor with plush blue carpeting and chrome and glass décor. The place was cold and smelled of fear. People stood silently in little knots, with wide, frightened eyes. A troop of policemen were trying to force open one of the double doors in the hallway. A large woman in a red business suit was flailing her arms and crying hysterically, “Another one! There must be another one!”

I stood very still, concentrating, stilling my own fears. My mind felt like it was being run over by a convoy of trucks. I thought of Sankaran, took a deep breath, and concentrated on undoing the meta-mind. I slipped into the meta-mind the way a snake enters a marsh, without a ripple, and started to unravel it, thread by thread, mind by mind. The exquisite patterns and symmetries were the work of a master. As I took it apart I regretted having to destroy something so beautifully constructed.

It came loose as though it had been turned off with a switch. I took a breath of relief, and found that my knees were shaking. I trembled all over, and little rivers of sweat dribbled down my face. Untangling it had taken more out of me than I had realized.

I leaned against the wall for support, fighting panic. Meanwhile the hysterical woman had stopped shouting and was looking around her in bewilderment. Tears started running down her face. The double doors that the police had been trying to force opened suddenly, and a man looked out. He seemed dazed. The policemen pushed him aside and ran into the room. Inside, people were getting up from a table, passing hands over their eyes, shaking their heads, as though they were coming out of a trance. Sunlight streamed through an open window; the glass lay smashed on the floor, like diamonds. One of the men at the table looked at the window, the policemen. “What happened?” he asked.

I walked with difficulty to the elevator; every few steps I had to stop to lean against the wall. People around me were shouting, crying, and rushing about, and nobody took any notice of me. As I stumbled into the elevator I realized that only one person could have constructed a meta-mind so powerful.

Now I recognized the familiar swift current of his mind drawing me toward him. I staggered out of the lobby and round the corner of the building to a blue station wagon. I saw the tinted windows, the flash of the gold ring as the door opened. I got into the passenger seat almost thankfully, collapsing in a heap.

Rahul Moghe took off his sunglasses, looked at me, and smiled. I had an impression of largeness, although physically he was not more than average in height and build. Seeing him in his entirety, body and mind, was like looking at a vast ship with the prow head-on. His eyes burned like forest fires in his dark face—his arms reached toward me, pulling me into the seat. I heard the click of the seat belt.

Much later, when I came to, the first thing I saw was his face, leaning over me. We were in a dingy hotel room. I remember the hardness of the bed on which I lay, the sunlight making a pool of brightness on the green carpet. I closed my eyes, but he was still there in my mind.

The feelers of his mind held me close, with an intimacy that terrified me. He spoke.

“You are a coward, Arun. You run from the only person who is like you. Why?”

The fingers of his mind opened every door, every barrier in my mind. He entered my memories, my secret places, the unknown depths of my consciousness. He gathered me to him, and hot pincers of pain gripped my head.

“What you saw just now is only the beginning of what we can do together. You don’t know who you are, or how long I have needed you. Together we will build meta-minds that will make this last one look like a child. Come, I will train you, tell you how to use your power. But first let me tell you who you are. At last . . . ”

His mind relaxed its hold on mine as he began to caress me. I was so tired; I had struggled for so long. Now I could rest. I had never known what it was like to reach across the void between one person and another and find a hand held out to grasp your own . . .

I hit him with all the strength I had. I got him squarely on his throat; he rolled off the bed and fell gasping and gurgling to the ground. My mind pushed his away as I leaped off the bed. He lay on the ground, clutching his throat, rolling from side to side.

As my hands fumbled with the doorknob, a searing pain tore through my head. He was sitting on the floor, rubbing his neck, concentrating. Against my will, I turned around and walked back to him and sat helplessly on the bed. The pain receded. He sat beside me, his arms pushing me down until his face was leaning over mine.

“You don’t know who you are, Arun. That bitch Janani took your memories away from you. Did you know that? She took away what you were. If I could resurrect you, I would. But all I can do now is share with you . . . ”

My vision blanked. I dropped into darkness, into a silence in which my own screams kept echoing. Terrifying images came crowding out of the dark—demonlike visages and shapes that kept morphing from one monstrosity to another. I fell with them toward a pale circle of light that opened up below me like the mouth of a well. Then I lost consciousness.

When I came to, Rahul Moghe was holding me up against his shoulder, trying to spoon something into my mouth. I gagged as chicken soup went down my throat, then licked my cracked lips and tried to struggle out of his grasp. The room spun.

“Take it easy,” he said. A dim lamp lit the room; I saw that night had already fallen. I felt weak and spent.

“It was too much for you, too fast,” he told me, spooning more soup into my mouth. “I see that I have to work against a great deal of conditioning. So much damage has been done . . . ”

He let me sleep after that, but throughout my incarceration I never truly regained consciousness. I experienced brief periods of wakeful clarity, but for the most part I was in a confused, dreamlike state during which I could not distinguish between reality and the nightmares that plagued me. Held in Rahul Moghe’s fierce grip, his face against mine, I thought I heard voices of people I had known. Once it seemed a woman lay by me, painfully thin; she nestled sensuously against my shoulder and spoke in Dulari’s voice. Another time I felt Sankaran prop me up to a sitting position. I thought I was being rescued at last, but he was holding a star chart in his hands, pointing at it, saying something insistently. Old friends—the boys I had played with in my teenage years, Manek—walked through my consciousness like ghosts. Always Rahul Moghe was there in my mind, muttering in my ear in Hindi, English, and languages I could not understand. “You belong to me,” he would say. “You and I are one of a kind . . . both alien, both lost, both pretending to belong . . . ” And again: “Alone, our powers are nothing. Together we can do things . . . ” Sometimes his words would echo in my head like muffled drumbeats: “power to change . . . to change . . . to change . . . ” or “she burned you . . . burned you . . . ” He would alternately entreat and reprimand me. “You think you belong, Arun,” I remember him muttering against my ear. “But you live in a dangerous place outside the boundaries humans create around themselves. Man-woman. Mind-body . . . If your so-called friends could see you as you are, they would hate and revile you. I am the only friend you have, my love. We owe our allegiance to a different star . . . ”

I saw myself falling again toward a pale sun, surrounded by demonlike wraiths that stretched long fingers toward me. “This is who you are,” Rahul Moghe whispered. His hands raked my bare chest. As I bit back a cry of pain, I perceived it—his mind, opening before me like sunrise on a new world. I saw the power, the beauty, the ruthlessness of him—the mountain ranges, the sheer cliffs, vast Escher-like vistas. He was letting me into his soul.

And I turned to him, reaching out exploring arms toward this stupendous geography. As we lay entwined, he changed beside me—his skin paled, then darkened; his hair changed colors like a kaleidoscope. Arms and breasts and thighs moved against my skin—I had a glimpse of a great, hungry creature, all orifices and phalluses—and as I joined with him, I could no longer tell body from mind. Then, just as our bizarre mating reached its climax, he tore into me, tasting and feeding, ripping and slicing.

When eons later I opened my eyes, I was weak but able to think. Rahul Moghe lay beside me, asleep, one arm flung over my chest. Afternoon light filtered through the green plastic curtains. My mind felt as though it had been shredded and trampled on. To my horror I saw that the covers over my chest were stained with blood. Warily I groped about in my mind for him, but he was gone. Slowly and carefully I put myself back together, like an injured animal licking its wounds.

Just then I saw the door open halfway. An olive-skinned woman stood there, holding a pile of clean sheets, her mouth open. She backed out and shut the door behind her. Had I dreamed her? And if not, why had I not felt her mind? Why had Rahul Moghe not stirred, not known she was there? It came to me that she was a blank, one of those whose minds were inaccessible to me. And to him, also, I realized.

I must have fallen into exhausted slumber, because when I woke again the room was dark and the phone was ringing. Moghe stirred beside me, cursed, and turned on the lamp. He grabbed the phone and spoke into it for a few minutes in Hindi. His mind was quivering with excitement.

“Another of our kind has been found,” he told me. “You are too weak to travel with me. I must leave you for a few days. Do not think of betraying me. A man in the hotel who is my servant will look after you.”

When I found my voice it was barely a whisper.

“Where . . . ?”

“Bangkok,” he said.

I fell asleep again and woke some time later to find a strange dark-haired older man in the room, dressed in the hotel livery of white and green. His mind was like a cowering animal. “This is Odylio,” Moghe said. “He will feed you and check on you. Perhaps without me you will recover faster.” He leaned toward me, and for a moment I saw the mouths of the demons that plagued my sleep. “Wait for me, Arun,” he whispered, and then he was gone.

That night Odylio fed me soup. He did not try to talk to me. I was too weak to play any tricks with his mind; besides which, I suspected that whatever Rahul Moghe had done to this man could not be reversed by my poor skill. In Moghe’s absence my mind slowly cleared; I began to think of escape, although it seemed impossible. Perhaps the soup had some drug in it—I was still unnaturally weak. I lay helpless, sensing the minds of people passing by outside the door, but I could not even cry out.

Then, next morning after breakfast, the olive-skinned cleaning woman opened the door. She was holding a pile of towels. She gave me a nervous look and began to back out. I raised my hand weakly from the bed. “Help me!” I croaked.

She came slowly into the room, her eyes wide. She looked at me and said something I could not understand. She set the towels down, picked up the phone, and began speaking breathlessly in what I realized must be Portuguese.

I had avoided and feared blanks all my life; the irony of being rescued by one was not lost on me. I was taken to hospital by the police; lying there with the IV in my arm, I closed my eyes to stop the tears of relief and gratitude and to remember the face of my deliverer.

The police did not believe my story. Although I did not think there was much point in telling them the truth—mere forces of law and order could hardly contain a person such as Rahul Moghe—I was too weak to invent something more plausible. The hotel receptionist had said very clearly that the person who had checked in and taken the key of Room 323 was a young white woman called Marie Grenier from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nobody knew anything about an Indian man.

I never found out what, if anything, the Brazilian maid told the police, or whether they had believed her.

That night, I sat up in my hospital bed and detached the IV from my arm. I found my clothes folded neatly at the foot of the bed, and changed into them with some difficulty. There were bandages on my chest that hurt every time I moved. I dragged myself from corridor to corridor under garish fluorescent lights, choking on the antiseptic smell, until I came upon a side exit.

The cool night air revived my senses. With the last of my strength I found the nearest subway station, took a train journey that I can no longer remember, and went home to my apartment. I didn’t have any of my things with me—I had to find the manager, who was not amused at being woken at four in the morning. I fell onto my bed and slept until noon.

When I woke, my mind was mercifully my own. I was bruised and injured physically and mentally from my ordeal—I thought longingly of Sankaran’s healing presence—but at the same time I dared to hope that I would recover.

I resigned from my job, telling my colleagues I had found work in Florida. I withdrew my savings from my bank and rented a room in a ramshackle apartment complex in Cambridge. I requested an unlisted phone number, obtained a post office box under a different name, and immediately wrote Janani to let her know how to reach me.

If it had not been for Sankaran, I would have fled to the ends of the earth. I don’t think Moghe understood that. I believe that my subterfuge paid off because he expected me to leave Boston, to run before him as I had done before. I would no longer run.

Within a few weeks, I found a job working with a medical company as a lowly computer technician. It paid enough to keep me alive, and to maintain my car. Now assured of a livelihood and a roof over my head, I could no longer avoid thinking about my ordeal with Rahul Moghe and what it implied about my past. Janani’s last parcel, which came a few days after my new job started, confirmed that I had not dreamed up the events in that hotel room.

The parcel contained the usual junk that Janani had sent me over the years, bits of broken metal and shards of ceramic, some with drawings and etchings on them. There was also a letter.

I read it. I looked at the contents of the parcel that I had piled on the bed. I read the letter again. I remembered Rahul Moghe whispering impossible things into my ear.

“Alien, alien, alien,” he had said. “You and I owe our allegiance to a different star.”

I looked at the strange objects on the bed. Whether I wanted them to or not, they began to make sense. The ceramic pieces, burnt black on one side, red on the other. The strange etchings, the pointillist ones in particular, one of them showing me a pattern I had seen before, not only on Sankaran’s computer but also in my fevered dreams: the constellation Sapt-Rishi as seen from Earth. Then the pictures Janani had taken, of the boys so like me—they were all me, I realized, at various stages of formation.

I could no longer avoid the truth of my origin. I sat on my bed, watching night fall, shadows moving out from the corners of the room to fill it with darkness. Headlight beams swept across the curtained window, and through the thin walls I could hear my neighbors having an argument about laundry.

I laughed hysterically. After a while I started to cough, so I got up, turned on the light, and got a drink of water. Looking out of the grimy window at the busy street in front of my apartment complex, I had an impulse to cry.

Instead I went to the local pub and drank myself stupid. I told the bartender I was an alien. He gave me a sad look from beneath long, dark eyelashes and went on polishing glasses. “You won’t believe how many people tell me that,” he said. This set me off laughing again, until I was weeping large tears onto the bar. I don’t remember how I got home. I slept like a dead person until late the next afternoon.

When I woke I had a headache the size of Antarctica; I staggered into the shower with my clothes on. Under the cold water some of my reason returned. I stripped, looking down at my all-too-human body. I thought about the notion that Janani was as much my murderer as my progenitor. She had burned me, Moghe had said. I understood now that I was stuck with this body, this gender, because of that. Unlike him, I could no longer change form; nor could I tell friend from foe. “Damn them all, Moghe and Janani and all,” I told myself.

I spent two days in this insane state, staring at the things on my bed, rereading Janani’s letter. Rahul Moghe appeared in my dreams, and sometimes I would wake terrified, feeling as though I was still his prisoner, that my escape had only been a trick of the mind. Then, slowly, sanity would return.

On the third day, a colleague, Rick, called from work to ask why I had not come in. I stammered something about being sick. Rick commiserated and asked when I could come in. They were having a problem with the computer system.

So the world pulled me back. I spent the next few days working out and fixing the glitch. Having to focus helped me a great deal. When two other technicians took me out for pizza after it was all done, I saw myself in the mirrors that ran along two walls of the restaurant. There I was, a skinny Indian guy with stubble on my chin and pizza sauce at the corners of my mouth, grinning and guzzling like everyone else. Rick’s people had immigrated here three generations ago from Holland. Aichiro was a second-generation Japanese immigrant. So what if I’d come from a farther shore than anyone else? This was Boston, one of the great melting pots of the world, where nearly everyone was a stranger. My two colleagues were both married, and I, too, had someone I loved, someone to wait for. The revelation about my true identity seemed, all of a sudden, irrelevant.

As soon as I could take leave from my job, I booked a flight to India. It was too late to attend Sankaran’s wedding. Much as I wanted to see him, I felt this wasn’t the right time. As for Janani, I had no idea what I would say to her, but she owed me some answers. I also had to admit to a growing worry about her silence. Why had she not written to me? What had happened to her in Thailand? Surely it could not be a coincidence that she and Moghe had been headed to the same place?

I did not know how much I had missed being in India until I was in Delhi, taking in great lungfuls of warm air that smelled of car exhaust, roasting corncobs, and 11 million people. From the Inter State Bus Terminus I took a night bus to Rishikesh, traveling with a group of elderly pilgrims who took pity on me and shared their dinner of parathas and pickled mangoes. As dawn came I woke from uneasy slumber to find myself breathing in the scent of the Himalayas.

It took the auto-rickshaw man only about ten minutes to locate the address I gave him. He piloted his little vehicle through narrow, twisting streets, past amiable gatherings of cows, goats, and people to a small row of shops. Their shutters were still down, and the shopkeepers were bustling about in front of their shops, putting up the cots they had slept in. At last I came to the place Janani had lived in for the past ten years.

I searched for her with my mind, but she was not there. A handsome, middle-aged woman in a blue cotton sari was raising the shutters. She was chewing on a neem twig. Every few seconds she would rub her teeth with the twig and spit in a corner in front of the shop. (I remembered, with a pang, Janani teaching me how to brush my teeth in just this manner.) Behind the woman I could see two large, old-fashioned sewing machines and a number of finished clothes on racks. An array of grimy bottles stood on a shelf—Janani’s herbal concoctions. I smelled the familiar aroma of tulsi. Heeng. Dried amla.

I put my palms together. “Namaste,” I said. “My name is Arun. I am looking for Janani-behn. Are you Rinu Devi?”

Her eyes widened; the neem twig fell from her mouth. Her mind was quivering, tense. I found her reaction puzzling.

“Janani is not here,” she said with outward composure. “She has moved to foreign lands.”

“I know she went to Thailand,” I said, coming into the shop. I was aware of a curious urchin or two hanging about, listening. The woman’s mind was bristling with fear and dislike.

“I am just a friend,” Rinu Devi said, sounding placating. She gave me a wary look. “Janani’s helped me run my shop these past few years. Then recently she met someone and got married and went to Thailand.”

She was lying. I looked outside. It was still early, and only a slow car or sleepy bullock cart went by. The urchins had gone back to their business for the moment.

“Look, Rinu-ji,” I said. “I could be nice and spend the next two days trying to persuade you to tell me the truth. Or I could mess with your mind. Janani must have told you what kind of monster I am.”

She gave me a look of loathing.

“If you must know, Janani went to a place near Bangkok, I don’t remember the name, because she heard that one of your kind had landed there. Someone new. She went to organize a burning. It’s been nearly a month and she has not been back. How can I say what happened to her?”

“Did she leave any message, any note?”

“No. She wasn’t one to confide in me about these things. She told me just this: that she might not return. She expected danger.” Rinu Devi’s mind was calmer now. She was feeling more confident. Yet under the façade I sensed strong emotion.

“That’s all she told you? Why didn’t she confide in you?”

“She knew I don’t like her involvement in the network. I’ve never understood why she wouldn’t just want to kill the aliens instead of . . . of changing them. We . . . we had disagreements.”

I took a deep breath.

“What network?”

She raised her eyebrows in mock astonishment.

“Oh, she didn’t tell you? There are other people like her who can sense the aliens. Whenever they hear of an unusual event—like reports of strange lights in the sky—they go to that place. If they find one of your kind, they burn them to take away their power. What’s left is like an empty gourd.”

“Where is this network? Where are the other people like me?”

She curled her lip. Her mind trembled with spite.

“Mostly in mental hospitals,” she said. “Or wandering the streets, begging, I don’t know. Janani didn’t go far enough with you—she said you called out to her, as your old self died. She pulled you out of the fire too early.”

I sensed it then: my ghost self. It stood at the edge of my consciousness, a limb raised, as though to beckon. But I am dead, I thought. I am dead.

Into the silence between us came the sounds of shutters being opened, a cot being dragged across the ground. Mingled with the smell of Janani’s herbs was the pungent scent of pine. Away and below us the great Ganga rushed frothing toward the plains.

When I spoke, my voice was barely a whisper.

“But why . . . why do they do this to us?”

I already knew the answer. In her last letter Janani had said that they had to burn me to save me, to make me human. Rahul Moghe had escaped this ordeal by fire, she wrote, and look how dangerous he was. But apart from him, she had said nothing about others like me or about a network. Perhaps my species was indeed hostile to humankind. And yet . . . what if that was not the case with every individual? What if some of us were different? What right did Janani and her network have to deny us the chance to be who we were?

“You really don’t know much, do you?” said Rinu. Her tone had lost some of its bite. “You are alien—enemy. You want to subdue us, enslave us!”

“But—,” I began.

She waved an impatient hand. “I can’t answer your questions. I don’t know who these network people are. I just wanted her to leave the whole thing, to have a life with me . . . ”

Her eyes filled with tears. I sensed her mind turning over, like a cat turns on its back, exposing the belly. Here she was, vulnerable, all pretense lost. Her hatred of me was not gone but contained, as water is by a dam.

“Did you love her?” I asked.

She wiped her eyes with the free end of her sari.

“How could I not? We were friends as girls.” She hesitated, looked at me with defiance, chewing the end of her neem twig with strong white teeth. “We began like sisters, but then we fell in love. She left me to work for the network. When she came back here after years, I thought . . . I thought . . . ”

“You thought she had come back to you, but she was still working for the network.”

She nodded. Eyes that had once been beautiful peered out from a nest of premature wrinkles. Lines of discontent surrounded the well-shaped lips. Her hair was tied in a bun, the free end of the sari draped over her head. Her sari was blue, not white, but I knew I was looking into the face of a mourner.

“So she said nothing about this network,” I said at last. “You didn’t see her meet anyone . . . ”

“I don’t know anything about those people,” she said. “Janani knew I would be upset if she talked about them. Always, letters came for her, and phone calls at the booth in the next lane. I don’t know anything.”

She made space for me on a mat on the floor. Through the one shutter she had opened, pale light came in. She went to the front and yelled to a boy to bring tea.

The tea came in chipped glasses, milky and strong with the scent of cardamom. I sipped and listened to Rinu talk about her life with Janani. She kept rubbing tears away from the corners of her eyes.

“Why are you so certain she is dead?” I asked her. Without a word she got up, went behind a curtain at the back of the shop, and returned with an envelope that she handed to me. When I opened it I found a piece of newsprint torn from an English-language daily based out of Bangkok. With it was a note in a crude hand that said simply: “Sorry. She was one of our best.” It was signed “A.R.”

“The man at the tea shop read it to me,” she said, pointing to the newspaper fragment. “I don’t read English—not enough.”

The news brief said only that there had been an explosion in an abandoned warehouse in a locality on the outskirts of Bangkok. Three people had been killed, two of them women. One of them was believed to have been a tourist from India, one Janani Devi. The heat from the explosion had been so great that nothing recognizable had been left of the bodies. Witnesses had seen the three people entering the warehouse just before the explosion.

I stared at the dirty little piece of paper, numb with grief and anger. This only confirmed what I had feared all along—that Janani was dead. I would never be able to confront her now, never have answers to my questions. Never receive letters from her, full of scolding and advice . . .

Rinu leaned forward, patted me on the shoulder. She wiped her face with the end of her sari. I thought of Rahul Moghe in the hotel room, the phone call, and his face filled with hunger and anticipation as he said, “Bangkok.”

Who had called him? Who had told him about the next landing? Had he known Janani would be there?

For that matter, how had he known—twice—where to find me?

“You betrayed her, didn’t you?” My words came out brokenly.

Her shapely lower lip trembled. Perhaps she thought I could read her mind. But the pieces were slowly coming together.

“You were the one who told Rahul Moghe I had gone to America. Someone must have been telling him. How else would he find me in San Francisco and Boston? You couldn’t read the English return addresses on my letters to Janani, but perhaps you could read enough to make out the city I was in. Tell me, did you phone him from somewhere, or did you write?”

She flinched, then gathered herself together and stood up. I stood up also, trembling with rage. She spat at my feet.

“Yes, yes, I betrayed her. I told Rahul Moghe that she was going to Bangkok, that they had found one of his kind. I knew he would find her and confront her, perhaps kill her. So what! She betrayed our love a hundred times. I always came second for her. Even to you—you!”

Tears slid down her face, and a wave of jealous hatred rose in her mind.

“You! A thing, a creature from another world—she loved you better than me! Serve her right! But I never knew what it would be like without her. I thought I could just go back to the time ten years ago before she returned. I had become free of wanting her, you see . . . ”

My mind lashed out at hers like the talons of a predatory bird. I had never been able to do this before. Suddenly, I knew I could hurt her. I drew back. I looked at her, now sobbing at my feet. A face peered around the shutters.

“Anything wrong, Rinu-behn?”

It was the barber’s wife from next door; she glared suspiciously at me.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s just some bad news I brought. Death in the family. Look after her—I must be on my way.”

I left that miserable creature sobbing in the arms of her neighbor and went away, feeling a hundred curious eyes on me.

In my little hotel room I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling for what seemed like days. The sun rose and set in the two small windows that faced each other, and each time dark fell I saw the stars of Sapt-Rishi burning in a velvet sky.

Sapt-Rishi . . . Sankaran showing me star charts on his computer.

I roused myself, made a phone call to Sankaran’s home in Chennai. It would be good to see him, I thought. But he wasn’t there. I talked to his mother, who spoke with enthusiasm about the wedding. She told me that Sankaran and his bride had gone to Ootacamund for their honeymoon.

I thought of Sankaran in the blue Nilgiri hills, the stars spreading in the sky above him like a great, sequined quilt. Would he lecture his wife on celestial objects? Would she listen to him as I had? A great wave of envy and loneliness swept over me.

I spent the remaining week of my leave wandering around the hill towns near Rishikesh. I bathed in the holy waters of the Ganga with the other pilgrims. I went to a lonely shrine of Lord Shiva’s, high in the mountains. Moved by a strange impulse, I set before the stone lingam a small offering of marigolds. In the little hill towns I walked the crowded streets restlessly, enjoying, despite my grief and loneliness, the anonymity that I had nowhere else in the world.

When I returned to Boston, I was in the lowest of spirits. I had lost everything, including my illusions about myself. Sankaran was my last resort. I needed the healing touch of his mind, the restful pleasure of his company. Meanwhile I wondered uneasily about Rahul Moghe. He seemed to have vanished from my life, but I could never rid myself entirely of his presence. It was as though he had left a splinter lodged in me, a ghost of a voice that called to me with a longing that could not be denied, an endless summons of desire that reminded me of the bull I had seen once on a street in New Delhi.

Sankaran’s itinerary was posted on my fridge. As the day of his return approached, I became more and more nervous. What if his wife was a tyrant? What if she restricted his movements so that we could no longer meet? How could I make a claim on him that would be at least equal to that of his wife?

How does a man who is not a man or a woman, not a human or an alien—how does such a being confess his love to another man?

Then it came to me: I would tell him my story.

Not all at once, but with hints and intimations at first.

I shook all over at the thought. With Janani gone, there was nobody in the world excepting Rinu and the network who knew what I was. What better evidence of love and trust could I give Sankaran?

On an impulse I went to the local bookstore and bought the most lavish card I could find. In it I wrote:

Dear Sankaran,

Lord Shiva has given me an answer to one of the questions you asked him.

There is life on other worlds. Let’s talk about this.

Your Friend,

Arun.

I put the card in an envelope and pushed it under the door of his apartment. Breathlessly I waited for his return, for the time when I could once more sink my mind into the cool streambed of his being. On the day that he was to arrive I decided to surprise him by meeting him and his wife at the airport.

Because there was a traffic pileup on the highway, I was late getting to the airport. When I rushed into the baggage claim area, most of the passengers from his flight had left. I looked around for him for a while. Finally I realized that he must have already gone home.

I drove like a madman to his apartment. When I arrived, I found Sankaran and his wife relaxing over coffee. Sankaran welcomed me and introduced me to his wife.

She was all aglitter in a blue silk sari and gold jewelry. Her eyes were like black beetles. She smiled coldly and disapprovingly at me. With a shock I realized that I could not sense her mind at all. She was a blank.

As for Sankaran, I sensed that the clarity and beauty of his mind was already being undermined by the confusion and contradictions that characterize the ordinary person. There were only hints of damage now, but the clean, clear transparency of his soul that had sustained me was breaking up into bubbles, little patches of opacity. He was dissipating before my eyes.

What had she done to him?

She was holding the card I had put under the door. She wrinkled her nose as though she had picked it up out of the trash and handed it to him.

“What’s this?”

He glanced at it without (apparently) noting my untidy scrawl. He shrugged his shoulders, put the card on the desk, and smiled fondly at his wife, following her movements with his eyes as she poured me a cup of coffee. He was already only peripherally aware of me.

My heart clenched in my chest. I drank my coffee in a few gulps, burning my tongue, made my excuses as quickly as I could, and left them to their domestic bliss.

The next time I saw Sankaran, I didn’t see him. I was in the café, and he walked in with his wife, and I didn’t even feel the quiet, clean wave of his mind wash over and refresh my soul.

I remembered then what physicists say about solitons—eventually they all dissipate.

It is hard for me to recall with composure the days after these events. I lived in a surreal, depressive daze in which night and day blurred into one another. My mind dwelled constantly on death and loss.

When my company folded and I lost my job, I left Boston and began to travel. My depression gave way to the restlessness that had always been a part of me. I moved from port to port, taking up jobs in short spells, staying only as long as the wanderlust let me. I felt as though I was being shadowed—whether it was by my ghost self or Rahul Moghe I could not tell. A footfall on a quiet street in the outskirts of Atlanta. My hotel door in Milan creaking open, then shut, while I lay half-asleep on the bed. A whisper in a darkened street in Ankara, saying my name. Through this troubled time I continued to experiment with mind-weaving, but without the enthusiasm of my earlier days. I was only too aware that whatever pleasure it gave me was temporary—and that it underlined the fact that I was not human.

Eventually I washed up on Indian shores. It was a relief to be back; I took comfort in the small but immutable fact that I looked like everybody else. I knew the sense of belonging was illusory, but it eased my mind a little.

I took up a job as a lecturer at a college in South Delhi. Something about the slow circumlocutions of the ceiling fans, the languor of heat-stupefied students, the cool rush of air-conditioned air in the computer rooms, took me back to my own days as a young student, when I had not a care in the world and Janani was still part of my life. I used my skills with mind-weaving, crude as they were, to settle disputes, to help students understand each other. This should have given me some satisfaction, but at the end of the day when I went up to my two-room flat only the familiar despair awaited me. At times I wanted to end my life, but the same inertia that kept me from living also kept me from dying by my own hand.

Then I met Binodini.

Her mind was muscular, strong, beautiful. Its fluxes and transformations were smooth, controlled, like a dancer executing a familiar turn. Although she could not sense my mind exploring hers, I had difficulty manipulating its topography to make a meta-mind with another. There was a discipline about her that, while quite different from the high-Himalayan feel of a soliton’s mind, had a similar, if muted, effect on me—a subtle quieting, a calming. In appearance she was a middle-aged woman with graying hair that she did up carelessly in a bun; her face was calm, her large, sympathetic eyes observant.

She taught sociology. I had seen her at faculty meetings and liked the shape of her mind; one day, when I was nursing a cup of tea alone at a stained wooden table in the café, she asked if she could join me. It turned out she was a divorced single woman without children. She did research on groups that believed in supernatural phenomena including UFO sightings.

“Do you believe in aliens?” I asked her, hoping I sounded jocular.

She smiled. “There are things I’ve come across in my research that I can’t explain. So I keep an open mind.” She looked at me over her cup of chai. “Something tells me that your question wasn’t a casual one. Is there an experience you’ve had that you can’t explain either?”

I wasn’t ready to tell her, but it occurred to me with an immense sense of relief that perhaps I had found a confidante.

Life wasn’t easy for her. She was not interested in a relationship and had to keep fending off men who couldn’t understand that. There was a controlled fierceness about her, a courage and curiosity that kept her going. She kept a little vegetable garden behind her apartment, where she grew red radishes and brinjal, and simla mirch. I still recall the color and roundness of freshly uprooted radishes in the blue ceramic bowl on her kitchen table, the crunch of her strong white teeth as she bit into one. She did an hour of yoga every morning.

“I’d be dead without yoga,” she told me. “Disciplines the mind.”

She gave me a shrewd look.

“It’s also good if you’re in mourning.”

It was then that I told her. That morning—classes had been canceled due to some unrest in the city—we’d walked off campus together, and she had invited me into her home.

She listened well. I don’t think she necessarily believed me the first time, but she didn’t disbelieve me either. To my own ears my story sounded ludicrous, but her sympathy was real, without condescension.

Later I showed her my things, the broken ceramic bits that were presumably the remains of my ship; the photos; Janani’s letters. She looked at everything with a scholar’s interested gaze, mingled with childlike wonder. When she looked at me her eyes were bright; she hugged me.

“Take me to your leader,” I said, to stop my own tears. And we laughed helplessly.

After that we spent a lot of time together. We went to movie theaters and watched bad science fiction films. We sat in the café and talked. I sensed that she was holding off on becoming intimate with me, which at first upset me. But I knew that although our friendship had brought a lightness into my heart, the despair was still there. I was still haunted by what had happened to me, and she knew it.

“You know you have to find him, don’t you?” she told me after we emerged from a showing of Antariksh ki Yatra.

The crowd was spilling out of the exit doors; my feet crunched on popcorn. A teenager was shouting into her cell phone; somewhere I smelled henna. A man looked at me from the doorway and smiled, apparently mistaking me for someone else. His face changed when I stared at him.

Outside under the neem trees it was dark, quiet. The earth smelled damp from yesterday’s rain. Tonight the stars were partly obscured by city haze and light pollution. As was my habit, I looked for the star that was my native sun, but the constellation Sapt-Rishi was lost in the haze.

“Whom do I have to find?” I said, although I knew whom she meant.

“Rahul Moghe.”

His name, unspoken for so long, sent an electric shock through me. My ghost self arose in my mind as though it had been waiting for those very syllables. I felt a great wave of fear and longing.

Over the next few days Binodini argued with me, and ultimately I gave in. She was simply repeating to me what my own mind had been trying to tell me: that if I were to have any peace in this life I would have to confront Rahul Moghe, to find the answers to the questions that had plagued me half my life. And then I would have to make a decision.

“All right,” I said at last. From pursued I would become the pursuer. But how would I find him?

“You’ll find him,” Binodini said confidently.

One day I confessed to her my greatest fear. What if I joined forces with Rahul Moghe and turned against humanity as he had done? “He would kill you without a thought,” I told her. “Do you want me to become like that?”

“Listen, Arun, whatever decision you make, you will still be you. Alien or human—those are just words, labels. You are what you are.”

So I went looking. Because I didn’t know where to find Rahul Moghe, I followed the trails of disasters, riots, unexplained violent events. But all these turned out to be the work of human beings alone. Wherever he was, Rahul Moghe was not trying to attract my attention.

One evening I was in a train returning from one of these trips. The Shatabdi Express was tearing through the night across the Gangetic plain. I was in a secondclass, air-conditioned compartment; my fellow travelers were asleep, but I was wide awake, leaning against the window, watching my reflection in the glass. The impenetrable night outside made the compartment seem like a cocoon, a world unto itself. Yet as the train swayed and sang in rhythm, it seemed to be singing his name.

Rahul Moghe, wherever you are, let me find you, I said in my mind, with all the fervor of my despair.

I didn’t know I had also spoken aloud. The man in front of me, huddled in a blanket, stirred; black eyes snapped open. His mind woke suddenly, but he closed his eyes and feigned sleep. There was a suitcase under his bunk, embossed in gold letters: Amit Rajagopal.

It wasn’t him. I would have known Rahul Moghe anywhere from his mind’s signature. This man’s mind seemed vaguely familiar, but perhaps it was just that he reminded me of someone at the college. I didn’t pay much attention to him because something in my own mind woke up when I made my plea.

How can I describe it?

It’s like falling asleep with the radio on very low. The sound does not disturb your sleep or your dreams, except perhaps to give them a certain haunted quality, but when you wake up it is there. So I heard his voice in my mind as it woke, calling to me very faintly across a vast distance.

“I’m coming!” I said, and in that moment there was no fear in my heart.

He would not wait but would meet me halfway. I don’t know what means he employed to travel from wherever he was, but early that morning I stepped off the train at a tiny station where this train normally did not stop. He must have arranged it by tinkering with the engine driver’s mind. The thought made me shudder. I knew this was the place.

The brick station platform was edged with lush bougainvillea bushes with red flowers. Apart from the blanket-wrapped people asleep on the platform in the early morning stillness and a small band of crows raiding the garbage, there was nobody. In the field by the station, men, young and old, squatted at their ablutions, their water pots agleam in the early sun. They watched the train go by and did their business without embarrassment. I walked through the nearly empty station house, where I smelled tea brewing. Lata Mangeshkar was singing a bhajan on the radio. I came out into the narrow lanes of a small town.

He was in a ramshackle hotel room not far from the station. Our minds met as I climbed the stairs. I didn’t have to knock; he opened the door and let me in. He was in the same form as when I’d seen him last: a wiry Indian man who seemed larger than he was. The room was dingy, with a dressing table and a tarnished mirror in an ornate brass frame. A single, sagging bed was covered with a blue, patterned sheet, and paan stains showed through the whitewashed walls. A calendar with a buxom movie star hung on the wall by the window. I could see the street below, already crowded with bicycles, and a few cars lurching behind them, honking. The air was full of the sounds of bicycle bells.

Rahul Moghe did not touch me but bade me sit on the only chair in the room.

How can I describe that meeting? Here was the being I had feared and loathed for so many years of my life, who had killed innocent people, had done to death the one human being who had loved me and cared for me: Janani. And yet . . . he was my own kind. Between our minds there were no barriers. With him I could begin to learn the lexicon of my lost language.

I touched his mind tentatively; I could have lost myself exploring its dizzying contours. But when the whole mass shifted and loomed over me like a great blue whale turning, I withdrew in panic.

“I forgot,” he said, and his voice startled me in the room. “Last time. You weren’t used to how we communicate. I should have given you more time.”

The questions and challenges I had for him dried on my tongue. It took me some time to speak. All the while his eyes looked hungrily at me. Leopard’s eyes, burning in that gold-brown face.

“I want to know . . . I need to know more about what I . . . what we are,” I said. “Why we are here. Why you’ve done what you’ve done.”

“Let me touch you,” he said. “Not mind-to-mind, if that frightens you still, but I can’t explain things very well by speech alone. I must have contact.”

I put my hand on his arm. He shivered, and it seemed to me that his arm would change, that he would change form any moment, but he didn’t.

“You don’t know how long I searched for you,” he said. “I went all over the world . . . Then it came to me that I would have to wait for you to come home to me. All these years I have been waiting.”

I don’t know what I had expected of this meeting, but the almost anticlimactic quietness of it was something I had not anticipated.

“Let me tell you about our people,” he said. “According to the lore, when our species was still young, yet old enough to go out among the stars, we colonized several worlds, this one among them. Then our own world fell into an age of darkness and ignorance. Instead of letting each other meld and fuse and thereby achieve greater harmony, we put up barriers. We fought. We lost ourselves and our history. You must understand that a species such as ours does not record data on stone—we have no need of it. When we die, we simply rejoin the formless substrate that holds all our memories. New ones are born from that substrate with bits and pieces of the old knowledge. When we meld with another, we recover it for all of ourselves.

“When I was young we had recovered some fragments, enough to know how to build ships again to navigate the seas of the sky. But there had been no contact between us and the colonized worlds for eons. Our history would not be complete until the colonizers came home and mingled with us. So some of us set out. I landed on this planet and began my search for our kind.”

I could feel his mind straining to speak its own language, to tell me mind-to-mind what those first years had been like. The escape from the first burning. The destruction of the spaceship. The endless wanderings from continent to continent to find the colonizers. And then, a stupendous discovery.

“The first wave of colonizers had taken over the native species as we have done on our own and other worlds,” he said. “It is a form of perspective-borrowing, where you get to see from the point of view of the animal what the universe looks like to it. But the colonizers had gone a step further. They had, in fact, joined with the mindshapes of the natives—turned native, in a manner of speaking, so that they no longer remembered who they were.

“Have you ever wondered why you found it so easy to get into the minds of the animals here? The humans, more than any other species? It is because at some level the colonizers still remember their old language. Why do you think the average human is such a messy mix of contradictory emotions? Why do you think they feel alienated, not only from each other but from their own selves?”

He fell silent.

“But why do you destroy the humans, then,” I asked, “if part of them is like us?”

The mountain ranges of his mind quivered, loomed large over me.

“Why? Why? You can ask that?”

He clutched my hand and pulled me to the bed. His hand burned as though with fever. He put his face close to mine. His eyes were empty sockets in which danced a universe of stars.

After a while he could speak again.

“When I made my discovery I realized I had to free our people, the first colonizers, from their bondage to this species. I could not go home; my spaceship had been destroyed. If another of our kind came to this planet we could return on their ship, or we could put our minds together and send forth a beacon into space, a message calling for help.

“But that woman—that viper—destroyed the few who came. So I realized that there was another way.

“If I could do the right kind of mind-weave between human minds, I could project a message into space, a weak one, but enough that it could be picked up. But for that I need your help. I have not succeeded because I need another to hold the structure. It will be the largest structure ever built, at least a hundred thousand human minds . . . ”

It was like making waves on a string, I realized. You need a person at each end.

“I think,” he resumed, “that this great melding of minds will free the original colonizers from their current state. They will realize who they really are. They will leave with us when the ship comes. Even if they cannot take corporeal form, we can find some way to take them with us. To go home . . . ”

His mindscape convulsed when he said the word “home.” All these decades he had experienced the utter loneliness of the foreigner whose language nobody knows.

“I haven’t melded with a mind for years,” he said. “They left enough of you that I could at least get a taste of what it used to be like. You know, among our species, when we mate, nothing is hidden. We know each other as truly as it is possible to know another being. And then, when we have tired of the world and need rest, we sink into formlessness, to rise again as another consciousness.

“How inadequate this language is! Come, now, let me show you in the way that you will truly understand. I cannot tell you what it is like . . . to actually be there.”

We leaned toward each other. I could not help it. I suppose I had made the decision already that I would remain with him, two of a kind, marooned on this world. Perhaps I had hopes of ultimately being able to stop him from wreaking havoc on humankind. I don’t know. All I wanted at that moment was to know again what it meant to meet mind-to-mind with my own species.

How can I explain that need? I was trapped in this male, human, unchanging body; only with my mind meeting his could I have the freedom to transcend these boundaries. To taste all the thirty-four states and more, to soar above the barriers that humans make between each other, and between humankind and all else. To know another being in a way that surpasses ordinary intimacy. My human fears dissipated; my ghost self appeared in my mind, beckoning.

Our attention was on each other, so it startled us both when there was a thunderous knocking at the door and shouting outside. We had already drawn together; the top of his pale yellow shirt was unbuttoned and I could smell, incongruously, cologne on his skin. In that moment as we sprang apart, I saw what hung from his neck on a black thread.

It was a human finger. It looked fresh; somehow the nail gleamed pinkly, which seemed unnatural, because it must have hung on his neck these many years, a trophy. It had once graced Janani’s hand. I was sure of that.

“Fire!” shouted the man at the door. He left us and ran to the next door, shouting. Downstairs we could hear more yells, confusion. I smelled smoke.

Rahul Moghe stared fiercely at me.

“Have you led those vipers to me? Is this a betrayal, after all?”

“No!” I said. “Let’s get out quickly. I don’t know, it may just be an ordinary fire.”

But even as I said it I knew that it wasn’t so. I had been followed. That man on the train . . . his initials, A.R. Like the signature on the note that Rinu had showed me, those years ago in the Himalayas.

They must have been keeping track of me for a long time.

The lower part of the building was in flames. Men were leading cattle out from one of the rooms, which had apparently been used as a barn. Bits of straw floated in the smoke. A crowd of passersby had already collected; some were hauling buckets of water.

Rahul Moghe and I pushed through the crowds. The streets were full of people, bicycles, cattle, and noise. Like him, I wanted to find a quiet place where we could be together. The knowledge of what the string around his neck held throbbed in my consciousness.

We found an empty field behind a house that was being constructed. At this time house and field were both deserted. Great piles of red brick lay in rectangular stacks around us. There was some kind of storage shed in the field, with a massive padlock on its wooden door. We stopped in front of it and looked at each other. His mind quivered with hunger. I nodded.

He put his finger into the padlock keyhole, thinning it into the right shape, and the lock clicked open. We went into the darkness of the hut, which was lit only by a narrow slit of a window. Inside were dusty bags of cement. I sensed a rat mind as the creature slithered away between the bags.

What I had seen, what I hadn’t told him, was that a man had slipped behind us as we left the crowds outside the hotel. One man, maybe two. The interesting thing was that they were both blanks. I could not sense their minds, nor could Rahul Moghe.

That finger. That is what stopped me from warning him.

I thought to myself: I will pull him out of the fire before they completely destroy his mind. He will be like me, then, a creature with whom I can meld my own mind, but who will no longer be able to destroy humankind. After all, this world isn’t so bad; I don’t even remember the other one. We’ll be marooned together . . .

He must have sensed some change in my mindscape; I think it was only his need of me that stopped him from probing too deeply. Perhaps he thought only that I was afraid.

“I will be careful with you,” he told me, as he reached toward me. I felt myself go under as the great waves of his loneliness and longing washed over me. Then there I was, sailing with him as though on the waves of a vast sea. He was beginning to change shape, very slowly out of consideration for me.

I opened my mouth to speak, to warn him after all, maybe, but he closed it with his own. Limbs emerged from his trunk, embracing my own body, fitting against me like no human ever could, making allowance for the rigidity of my form. How trapped I felt then, in my human, unchangeable body!

Outside, there was a muffled explosion; I saw that the thatched roof over our heads was on fire. The walls of the hut were mud and straw. People—the blanks; I don’t know how many there were—were battering the walls down. A flaring torch fell through the slit window.

And still, for a moment, he held me, our minds and bodies locked in the closest embrace I have ever experienced. Then it came to him that we were trapped.

“Help me!” I cried. Part of the roof had fallen in—fortunately not the part directly above our heads—and I could see sky through the smoke. I pulled him to this spot. We opened a bag of cement and threw it on the flames, but still they smoldered around us. Brands of burning wood were being thrown through the gap in the roof. We were choking, coughing. I thought to myself, This is how I will die, with him.

“Change form!” I cried. “Change into a bird—fly away! They are not interested in me. Go!”

“It is too late,” he said hoarsely. “Besides, I will not leave you.” We were both kneeling on the dirt floor, gasping for breath. He put his arms around me, and again I felt the great, terrible magnificence of his mind surround my own. In my arms he changed form, swiftly, dizzily: he was a horned ape, a squat, treelike monster, a giant, ameboid, tentacled beast. I felt that great mindscape shudder as though a quake was ripping through it; I saw the glory of structure and form coming apart. His face and body changed; in my arms he was human again, but he felt different, rigid, unchangeable. I wanted to pull him out of the fire before his old self died, as Janani had done for me. I called Janani’s name through my charred throat, but all around me was a wall of fire.

I saw her then, Janani, her face incongruously suspended in the fire as though she were part of it, her dark brown hands reaching out for me through the ochre flames. The left hand was missing an index finger.

When I came to, I was lying on the floor in a room. Afternoon light poured in. There was a man lying next to me, his breath warm against my neck. My arms hurt; now I saw that they were clasped tightly around the man.

A face hung over me; the person was gently trying to disengage my hands. As he did so, the man I had been holding rolled over onto his back, apparently unconscious.

It was Rahul Moghe in his permanent form. Only he looked exactly like me.

“He imprinted on you,” a voice said. I saw that there were other people in the room; the one who was speaking now was my train companion, A.R. He wasn’t a blank, but the others were.

“Janani,” I croaked. My throat felt burnt. There were tender spots all over my body. “Where’s Janani?”

A.R. frowned. “Janani has been dead for years,” he said. “That fellow—Rahul Moghe—killed her. I thought you knew.”

“But,” I began, then gave up.

Someone said “Hush; be still.” The man was a doctor; he was leaning over me, applying some kind of ointment. Soothing my burns.

“You suffered smoke inhalation and some pretty bad burns,” he said. “But you’ll be all right. We dare not take you to a hospital lest questions be asked.”

I turned my head, not without pain, to indicate Rahul Moghe. Seeing his face was a shock all over again. I could have been looking into a mirror.

“What about him?”

“He’s going to be fine,” the doctor said. “He’s harmless now.”

He was harmless all right. That great mindscape was gone, and in its place . . . a shadow. Nothing left but a ghost. After all this, I had not saved him; I had not pulled him out in time.

He stirred, opened his eyes. They were as vacant as an idiot child’s. A thin line of drool trickled down from one corner of his lips.

“Rahul?” I said, and began to weep.

Later they told me that there must always be a human holding the alien in their grasp when the fire is lit, so that the alien would take up the form of that person. In my own burning the person had been a young friend of Janani’s, part of the network. He had later been killed by Rahul Moghe.

“How did you know where I was?” I asked my captors. I think it was the second day of my recovery. I lay on a bed, my body covered with bandages. Rahul Moghe drooped in a chair in a corner, looking at nothing.

“We’ve been . . . keeping track of you,” said the man called A.R.

A terrible thought occurred to me.

“Not Binodini?”

“Not Binodini,” he said, but I could not tell whether he was, with gentle mockery, simply repeating my words, or whether he meant that she had nothing to do with this. Was it a coincidence that she had been the one to persuade me to look for Rahul Moghe? She had connections to groups that kept track of UFO sightings. If she was part of the network, she would know that the only way they would find him would be through me.

I don’t know that I’ll ever know.

Rahul Moghe is at a special home for the retarded. I go to see him nearly every month. When he sees me, something like recognition comes into his eyes. Sometimes he laughs; sometimes he sets up a terrible keening, like a child in pain. He can speak a few words of Hindi, use the bathroom, brush his teeth, but he cannot read. He likes it when I tell him stories, though. I tell him about other worlds and their wonders, and sometimes it almost seems to me that he is remembering.

I still don’t know if Janani is alive. A.R. swore to me that she died at Rahul Moghe’s hands all those years ago, but my memory of her face in the fire, her hands with that missing finger, is so vivid that I have trouble believing she is gone. She may think it best to stay out of my life, knowing what she’s done, what I’ve been through. If we meet someday I have no idea what I’ll say to her.

I’ve often thought about what Rahul Moghe told me that fateful morning in the hotel room: that people of our own kind came to live in and become part of human minds. I’ve read about that curious organelle, the mitochondrion that inhabits cells. It was once an independent entity, a kind of bacterium, but at some point in human evolutionary history it ceased to become an invader and instead became an essential part of something larger. If you could offer a mitochondrion its freedom, would it take it?

Now when I explore the mindscape of a human, I wonder which part is my species and which was originally human. I wonder if the ancestral memories of my species are buried somewhere in the minds of humans. Perhaps they can access these memories only in their wildest dreams. After all, in dreams you can change form; you can walk among otherworldly wonders. The other thing that occurs to me is that while humans (unlike other animals) cannot normally communicate mind-to-mind, that ability might still be latent. So, for instance, some people can tell that they are being watched, or that there is someone besides them in an apparently empty room. Perhaps these are vestigial remains of the original ability to sense and meld with other minds.

After I recovered physically, I went back to my college in Delhi, although my heart wasn’t in it. I needed to earn a living so that I could make sure Rahul Moghe was well taken care of. As for Binodini, I have not yet asked her if she betrayed me. I can sense the contours of her mind, but I cannot tell whether she would lie to me or not—her mind is disciplined enough that she might successfully conceal an untruth. Besides, if I don’t ask her, I can still persuade myself, sometimes, that she is innocent.

When I returned she immediately understood that I had been through an ordeal; my still-healing body was proof enough. But she knew also that my mind and heart were broken, and she did not press me with questions. I told her only that I had met Rahul Moghe and that he was no longer a danger to humanity. Perhaps she supposed that I had made my choice and that it had been a difficult one. Perhaps she guessed that the possibility of her betrayal might always stand between us. But we no longer met as often as we used to.

I saw my old friend Sankaran again, some time after my return. He came to Delhi University to deliver a lecture. He was now a well-known cosmologist at an institute in Chennai, but he recognized me at once and greeted me affectionately. His wife seemed a lot more relaxed; she chatted pleasantly with me and introduced their seven-year-old daughter, a shy child with a mind as clear and still as lake water with the most interesting undercurrents. All three of them seemed happy, and despite the pain old memories brought me, I was happy for them.

He was no longer a soliton, of course. But that old curiosity, that childlike openness to the marvels of the universe, remained, as did his complete lack of pretension. He still apologized to potted plants when he bumped into them. My eyes filled with tears when I saw this; I blinked them rapidly away and laughed with him.

Perhaps the shadow of my old love was still there. We parted with promises of keeping in touch.

One evening Binodini came to my little flat. I was just seeing off some students I had been tutoring; they gave me good-natured “aha” glances when she came up the stairs. She had been worrying about my depression, she said. There was a movie in the local theater, a particularly silly science fiction movie we had not yet seen, and would I go with her to see it? I did not want to go, but I let myself be persuaded. In the hot and stuffy theater I sat stiffly in my seat as the drama revealed itself; it was all about aliens on Earth trying to pretend to be human and failing hilariously. Another time it would have sent me into hysterical fits of laughter, but this time I simply felt the sadness come upon me like a wave. Binodini seemed to sense that the movie was not the right one; she pressed my hand as if in apology, and when I stood up to go out, bumping against people’s knees and apologizing, she followed.

It was a clear night. The neighborhood next to the theater was suffering a power failure, common in the summer months, so the stars stood out more brightly than they normally did. I looked up at the speck that was my native sun, unfathomably far away.

Binodini took my hand.

I thought of human beings, how they could be, simultaneously, friend and betrayer. Murderer, mother, lover. I, too, had loved and betrayed my own kind.

“You’re not alone,” Binodini said. “At least, not any more than anyone else.”

In that place where we paused, the neon lights of the theater and the sounds of traffic and people were both muted. Under the neem trees the night was thick, so that the candles in the windows of the darkened houses appeared like flickering stars. I could, with a little imagination, see us as adrift in the ocean of space. Home was just a short flight away.

As we gazed up, a meteor seared a path through the black velvet sky and disappeared. A meteor, or a ship.

“Wish a wish, Arun!” Binodini said. Her voice was full of tears.

Her hand was warm in mine. She disengaged it gently, and we walked home together through the star-filled night.

Originally published in Of Love and Other Monsters, Aqueduct Press (Conversation Pieces #18), 2007.

Mutability

Ray Nayler

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;

How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,

Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon

Night closes round, and they are lost forever:

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

It was an almost perfect café. It was in a red brick building built sometime in the early twentieth century: a mass of art deco, faux-Moorish and Russian influences, punctuated with stained glass and onion domes. You entered through an Arabian Nights archway into an anteroom of cracked hexagonal tiles and robin’s-egg plaster. Here, you could take off your coat and hang it on one of the brass hooks along the right-hand wall. Turn left through another arch—this one crawling with chipped plaster grapevines—you were in the main room. This room had a domed ceiling like a mosque or a Turkish bath house, blue Byzantine tiles on the floor, and layers of crumbling posters on the walls interspersed with framed pictures and notes signed by customers. The age-spotted mirrors and dusty bottles of an ancient, hand-carved bar dominated one side of the room.

The bar was where the owner was always to be found, rubbing his shaved head, staring at a game of chess. He always played against one of three different opponents. Opponent One was a gaunt man in a dirty collared shirt who chewed, repulsively, on a piece of string hanging from the corner of his mouth. Opponent Two was a heavy, slope-shouldered man. He kept his coat on and played quickly and impatiently. Opponent Three was a girl, thirteen or so, with a nose she was trying to grow into and blonde hair that looked like it had been rubbed in ashes. One so rarely saw children these days. Very serious, she always came in with a book—a real book. Where was she getting them?

It was unclear who won any of the long, silent games. Once they were over, Opponent One or Opponent Two would get up and leave, with no hint of triumph or desolation. Opponent Three would stay and read her book for hours, accepting the occasional cocoa on the counter nearby while the owner busied himself with other things. His child? Who knew? The owner never spoke to the café’s customers, with the exception of these three.

The rest of the room was filled with tables, chairs, and light. The tables were an assortment of round café tables, square or rectangular tables from restaurants or offices long since gone, high tile-topped wrought-iron tables of the kind you might find in a garden or on a balcony somewhere, big scarred oaken slabs that might have come from a warehouse or factory. The chairs were also a mix: some straight-backed, some cane, some wicker, some just plain stools. All were defective in their unique way, and all demanded different techniques for getting comfortable. The chairs and tables were never to be found in quite the same configuration when Sebastian came in in the mornings. The light was never in the same configuration either: it fell piebald through the stained glass panels at the top of the windows in a moody shift along the tiles and tables and chairs, dependent on cloud and season.

And so the café had the feeling, at once, of agelessness—its ancient building, its collection of rescued furniture like a museum of other places, its continual game of chess in the corner—and of change: the patterns of color-stained light and the restless puzzle of tables and chairs. All this, and the coffee, sandwiches, and macaroons were excellent. All this, and the service was good.

But what made it nearly perfect was Sebastian’s place in the corner, against the wall furthest from the entrance, by the windows. Here there was an enormous, worn, purple-velvet armchair and a massive oak table. There was enough room on that ancient table to spread his work out; the terminal and the notebooks he liked to use when he wanted the mechanical action of writing by hand, the cup of coffee brought steaming to the table by one of the students from the nearby universities who worked here (they were like the light and the chairs and tables, moving always elsewhere). The waiters never came around to ask if he wanted anything else, but they were always near the bar, scanning the customers for a motion that meant something was needed, that meant it was time for the check.

He had found the café at a terrible time in his life. He felt, in a way, as though the café had saved him. The long days of work, or of just watching the light slide across the floor, or just watching other customers—in hushed conversation, or bent over their terminals, or just staring off at nothing—made him feel a quiet part of something. He was welcome here. He was known, but left alone. He could work here in a way he could never work at home. At home, when he tried to attack a particularly difficult problem in the work, something would distract him. Hours later he would find himself staring blankly into his terminal, reading about god knows what insignificant detail of research on something completely unrelated to what he had been looking for. Here, surrounded by pleasant, human-scale distractions, he found his focus.

Sebastian had noticed her long before she approached him. More exactly, he had noticed her notice him. He’d looked up and caught her staring at him. Later he would examine the moment: rain outside that the wind occasionally drove against the windows, streaking through the dust in alluvial fans toward the bottom of the glass. A special feeling of refuge in the café that day. The smell that the rain brought in along with new customers seeking shelter—one of whom was this tall, dark-haired woman in a gray dress and moss-green scarf. It was a hard, autumn rain that said winter was coming, a rain that drove the loosening gold leaves from their branches to the ground. He had not seen her before, and he caught her looking at him—really looking at him, in a way at once rude and mystifying. She looked away when he looked up, but he was aware of her glancing at him while he worked. The rain hammered the streets and the buildings outside and the place filled up with more dripping refugees. When he came home that evening, the maple in the courtyard, which that morning had been wrapped in red and yellow, was a winter skeleton.

The next day she was there early. She stayed most of the day, with a terminal for company. Also the day after. On the fourth day she stopped him in the anteroom. Outside, the evening street was shadow-colored. Above the buildings, the flushed undersides of clouds were dark blue and salmon. He was lifting his ancient shooting jacket from a hook. She came in, reached for a threadbare peacoat. Then she stopped, resting her hand on the collar of her coat, and turned to him.

“I have a strange request.”

He had the jacket on and was shifting it to fall correctly over his shoulders. There was a little whirring blade of cold air in the anteroom, and it nipped at his wrists and climbed up his pant leg. The world, hesitating between fall and winter, all brown, dry leaves and flights of migrating birds headed south. “How strange is it?”

She had small crows’ feet around her eyes, a vertical worry-line between her high, dark eyebrows. Longish hands, unpainted fingernails cut short. She could have been a musician, or many other things.

“I live near here. I wonder if you would come to my apartment so I can show you something.”

What did he read in her face? Impossible to say. There should be a class offered in reading the expressions of others. Perhaps there already was: he would ask his terminal. “All right. Now, you mean?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.” She began, quite clumsily, to put on her coat, dropping the mossy scarf and grey gloves on the floor in the process. He picked them up for her, handed them back. She carefully avoided touching him when he did so. The impossibilities of reading other people. Were some people able to do so? He thought yes, certainly better than he. They went out into the cold street.

Her apartment was on the next block—but because the apartment buildings (most of them in this section of town very ancient) were enormously long, it was a ten-minute walk. The days were shortening, and the chill filled him with positive melancholy: winter was hot drinks and flushed cheeks and good books. Leaves scuttled across the pavement. Overhead, the dark spiderweb of the Nanocarbon Elevated Metro (NEM) striped black through the indigo air, a train dopplering past. For some reason, they did not speak much. She was tense. She seemed to be working herself up to something. She did tell him her name: Sophia.

Her apartment was on the third floor of an unobtrusively upgraded old building. The lack of draftiness inside was probably due to insulating nanofiber injections into the walls. The modern voice/ret scanner near the entrance to her stairwell posed as an antiquated domofon. The dismal authenticity of the concrete stairwell had been maintained. The apartment was high-ceilinged but small, just one rectangular room furnished with a matroshka furniture cluster, which she converted with a touch to its table and chairs format. A kitchenette near the windows overlooked the street. Refrigerator unit, old-fashioned teakettle, instantheat, a cabinet from which she drew two mugs and a teapot. While she was making the tea he politely scanned the room. Besides the matroshka unit, a bookshelf along one wall held a selection of music theory books, two terminals not of the latest make, a violin, and a shelf of carefully collected, vintage psychoanalytical works—not first editions, but well-known translations. On the opposite wall, a painting hung in which several female forms dissolved in a grey-and-red-streaked fog. Difficult to place its period: eccentric and not of any particular school, artist likely an unknown, but fantastically talented: the piece moved him. He looked away from it.

Sophia set the two mugs and the teapot on the table. The apartment was full, now, of the scent of the steeping tea, black with some sort of berry in it. The window near the electric kettle was obscured by steam: the other windows mirrored the room and Sebastian and Sophia standing in the room. He sat down on the backless cube of a chair. She poured him tea. He looked up to find her deep in thought, staring hard into his face. She caught herself and looked away.

“You must think I’m very strange,” she said.

Sebastian stared into his tea. Miniature leaves floated, unfolding in the heat of the water. “Who isn’t, these days?”

She was holding an envelope in her left hand. She placed the envelope on the table.

“First of all,” she said, “please take a look at this.”

Sebastian opened the unsealed envelope and drew out a photograph. It was a color photograph, very old. Its tones were shifting toward orange and red as it aged. The edges were yellowed, although it had been printed on supposedly archival paper. It had been badly bent a number of times, and creased once diagonally, then re-straightened. The two people in the photograph were wearing laughably out-of-fashion winter coats: coats that would have been normal now only in some sort of historical drama. They were grinning into the camera. The man was wearing a wool watch cap, the woman a beret. Behind them there were some very neat, tiny houses almost entirely obscured by snow. Judging by the architecture of the houses, the picture was taken somewhere in northern Europe. A very pale light. Very far north. The couple looked truly happy: their arms around one another, their heads leaned in to one another, the crown of the woman’s head against the man’s jaw.

It was a photograph of Sebastian and Sophia. Their hair was significantly different (his was just terrible, unflattering. What could he have been thinking? Hers looked nice). Their clothes of course were different, but there was no doubt at all that it was the two of them. He looked for a long time at the photo, turned it over and looked at its back. Nothing there but the digital printing from the machine—a series of numbers, some kind of internal code from wherever it had been printed, barely legible now. No date, but he could guess by the clothes that it was . . .

“The first thing you think. The first thing that comes to mind.”

He looked up. She was leaning in a bit toward him, both of her hands wrapped around her mug of tea.

“Well . . . it’s us. I mean . . . it appears to be a picture of you and me. But I don’t . . . ”

“No, you wouldn’t remember it, Sebastian.” She said his name strangely, like a person afraid to pronounce a word incorrectly that they had only read in books. “I don’t remember it. I don’t remember anything of it. It’s . . . ” She stood up suddenly and went to the window. “It’s well beyond my memory horizon. I’ve researched the picture. Looked up the fashion of the clothes. Not . . . obsessively. Just—because I’ve always had it with me. I found it in my things, I think . . . I can’t remember exactly. But this picture . . . which I’ve carried with me as long as I can remember . . . I think it’s about four hundred or so years old. That’s just a guess. It could be three hundred ninety and their—our—clothes are out of style, but it’s probably closer to four hundred. I need to walk. Do you want to go for a walk? I can’t be in here with you.”

They walked along the river embankment. There was no ice yet on the river, but a serpent of freezing air coiled down its length, winding winter into the city. They crossed the river via an escalator and an enclosed pedestrian footbridge. Below, the black mirror of river reflected the city up at them. There were, of course, no stars.

“I don’t know how long ago I found it. I have a vague recollection of pulling it out from the pages of a book. The book is battered”—she was walking with her eyes shut—“and it has a white cover. With only text on it. Like handwritten text. And green stripes? I remember green stripes. The book is gone now—I can’t recall what I did with it, but it’s been gone a long time. I’ve tried as hard as I could to remember the title of the book, and I can’t.”

She stopped walking and turned to him suddenly. “Tell me your oldest memory.”

“Clear or muddled?”

“The oldest one you are sure is not a dream, but an actual memory.”

“Okay . . . ” In the distance, down a turn of the river, the sections of a residential skyscraper slowly rotated, changing which of its balconies had a view of the river below. “I’m standing on the deck of a ship. It’s massive—almost the size of a city, and its deck is covered with stacked containers. You know the ones. Apartment containers, with catwalks and gantries between them. I’ve examined the feelings around this memory: I’m at the end, maybe, of a long period of being sad. I look at my hands. I’m holding pieces of something in them. But I can’t see what it is, closely. Whatever it is, it’s mostly white and orange. I can’t identify it for the life of me—I’ve spent hours trying. I open my hands, and the stuff drifts out of them, is caught by the wind, and then falls down along the huge side of the ship and out of sight. And I remember feeling disappointed: I had wanted the drama of seeing it hit the water, but I could not see it. It just—went away under this enormous bulk. Gone.

“The next clear memory is months afterward, and after that they get clearer and clearer, of course. That one must have been very strong to have lasted for so long. I sort of keep retelling it to myself. To see if I can remember it. Forever . . . ”

“It must have been one of those round-the-world container-home trips,” she said. “I remember the ads: ‘Travel around the world for five years, all in the comfort of your own home.’ The whole idea was a bit unwieldy, a lot of diesel fumes and seedy ports, but people signed up who had the time and the money. They were popular for a long time. Until one of those liners went down in the Atlantic, remember?”

“Fifty years ago.”

“Sixty, I think.”

“It could easily be. I keep so little track, these days.” They were on the down escalator, across the river now. Outside, cobblestones and cold. The entire center of the city had been restored to the way it was hundreds and hundreds of years before anyone could possibly remember—even the professional mnemosynes. He liked that about it: it was why he lived here: and also why, he imagined, Sophia lived here. Their gloved hands bumped against one another as Sophia changed direction, leading them up a narrow side street. There were bicycle stations everywhere, of course: no cars allowed within two hundred fifty blocks of here. His own bicycle was at a station not so far away. They were within walking distance of his place. He blew through the fabric of his gloves. Time to switch from the fall to the winter pair. He felt a sense of dread opening in him, and he wanted to be away from Sophia and home among his SAE texts, pushing himself through another hour of studying, closed off in that little, specific world. She put a hand on his shoulder as she turned, stopping him, blocking the sidewalk in front of him.

“I’m not a superstitious person, you know.” A gust came off the river and hissed evilly through the dry-leafed trees. They both laughed. “No matter how hard the world tries to make me one. I don’t think I believe in fate or anything else. But I want to say a few things. Can I?”

He blinked. “Why wouldn’t you be able to?”

“Right. What I want to say is: my oldest memory is of finding that picture. And they say—all the books say—that the memories that survive for the longest are the ones that are somehow important. Some even say, the ones that carry some sort of a key inside them to something else. I don’t know if it’s true—but it makes sense that you remember the more important things for longer. That’s one.” She counted it on her glove.

“Two is—we look really happy in that picture, in a way that I know I haven’t felt for as long as I can remember. Which is a long time. And I’m not saying that I haven’t been happy . . . but not like that picture. Nothing like that. Those people . . . we . . . were happy.

“Three is—I’ve kept the picture, but I haven’t been looking for you. Maybe keeping an eye out, half-consciously, but how would I ever find this person in a photo I couldn’t remember taking? Hire a detective? So I just kept it. I was maybe hoping. But not . . . looking. And the picture was taken a long way from here and a long time ago. And the fact that I went into that café—because it was raining, only because it was raining—and saw you there—not looking for you—makes me feel—although I’m pretty terrified of you—that this seems right.”

Standing still was pushing the cold all the way up his thighs. It would be time to switch to long underwear again, as well. “It does. It seems right.”

She started backing up the street. “Okay. Go home, it’s cold. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He just stood there for a while, after the shadows under the furthest trees had drowned her shape. She was not walking toward her apartment, but farther away from it—he wondered how much farther. He turned left and went down the embankment, turning details over in his mind and trying to remember things. Did he remember her? Now that he had seen the picture, it seemed as if he did, but he knew the way these false memories could be constructed by the mind: you would remember a moment, but in the memory, you would be looking into your own face, or looking down at yourself from above—which meant it couldn’t possibly be real. And they said that every time you remembered something, you subtly changed the memory to suit the present moment. He had no independent recollection of her. A hoax? There were memory con artists, some of them incredibly skilled; whole volumes had been written on them.

But he felt sure that Sophia was exactly who she seemed to be. It was a stubborn, ignorant sureness, but it was all he had. He walked a long way down the cold, concrete embankment, very much aware of his fragile, warm form along the riverbank.

At five in the morning he clambered clumsily out of bed in the dark. He was sweating. He must have been dreaming, but the dream was gone, only the impulse remained. He searched desperately in the dark, not even thinking to turn on the light. It was here, somewhere. . . .

Today it was Opponent Three, the little girl. Sebastian was earlier than usual: after waking up at five, he had not been able to sleep. Finally, at seven or so—much earlier than he usually got up, these days—he forced himself into the shower tube, then flung on the old shooting jacket, took his bag, and went out for breakfast to a little Greek place on the corner. For some reason he did not want to go to the café yet. The book on SAE theory was a blur; he kept reading broken bits of sentences, backtracking over whole pages, closing the book and staring out into the quiet, early street. Finally he just got up, leaving the breakfast half finished, and went to the café to wait. It was not a morning café; not the kind of place that people came to for a quick cup of coffee before work, but more the kind of place people just—came to. There was just a smattering of customers reading their terminals, and the owner at the far corner of the bar, playing chess with the serious little girl. At first, Sebastian would be quiet. He would let Sophia talk first—get whatever it was out of her system. Then he would show her. And then what? He couldn’t know. For the first time in a very long time, he was frightened of making a mistake, and he realized that there was something in him, some capacity, like a forgotten function, like an unused piece of programming.

Outside, it started to rain. Not a normal autumn rain, or an early winter rain—but a rain of surprising force. Wind came hammering down the street and awnings flapped, then hail rattled and smacked against the windows. The little girl looked up from the chess game with a look on her face of joy and wonder at the horrible weather—Sebastian’s reaction too, normally. But now the storm threw him into a panic as the rain mixed with sleet, then snow, then freezing rain, and shellacked the windows with distorting ice. Everyone looked around. Customers ordered second cups of coffee. Nobody was worried yet, but nobody was going anywhere. In books in the old days he knew that this was about the time that the power would go out, candles would be brought around, and they would begin to tell stories to one another, or some such thing. The beginning of a one-act play. Of course, the last time there had been a power outage in the city was well beyond anyone’s memory horizon. Still, a few people did look up at one another, acknowledging for the first time that other humans were also in this room. A banner across his terminal announced a temporary reduction of NEM service. The city was in the midst of a major ice storm.

Within two hours, much of the storm had passed, without real damage done to anything. The streets were mechanically cleared thirty minutes after that, and the city returned to its normal, subdued level of activity—but Sophia did not come. Sebastian went home in the dark, up streets forested with icicles. It occurred to him that poems, like eucalyptus trees, poisoned the ground beneath them. Eventually, there would be no soil left where anything new could grow. Eventually, there would be no writing about human feeling left to be done at all—only reading.

There was an Opponent Four. This was something new. Sebastian had come in very early. He dropped into his usual place and ordered a macaroon and a Japanese coffee. How long had the place been a café? Longer, possibly, than he had been alive, which was a very long time. He had moved so long from one obsession to another. Now he thought that, underneath all that concentration—all the papers for peer-reviewed journals, all the attention to syntax and SAE peculiarities and dialectical variations—all the careful research, decades of it—was something else. Some sort of breadcrumb trail he hadn’t even been aware of following, leading off into the darkness. In the meantime he had been analyzing, in excruciating detail, the symbolism in the presentation of the contents of a medicine cabinet, the details of a young man shaving in the mid-twentieth century, the typology of Manhattan apartments, haiku in SAE translation, Western appropriations and reinterpretations of Buddhist thought, twentieth century traditions of suicide . . . Simply to justify his existence, he had thought, when he no longer had to work for money because some version of himself that he could not remember had done all the work for him. Only now did he realize what it was he had really been doing.

A bicycle went past, a manual type, as mandated by city ordinance, making a pleasant, nostalgic clatter over the cobbled street. Opponent Four was a woman in a nurse’s uniform, but without her hat on, and in regular walking shoes. Just off a night shift? She was standing, bent over the board. A sky-blue wool coat was thrown over a barstool next to her, as if she had just swept in off the street and didn’t intend to stay long. “ . . . and . . . mate,” she said, clapping her hands together.

“You’re good,” said the owner.

“Well,” said Opponent Four, “I’ve been playing for as long as I can remember.”

The owner rubbed his shaved head. “So have I. A lot of good it’s done me.”

The nurse put her jacket on and turned. Seeing Sebastian in his usual place in the corner, she walked over.

“You’re Sebastian.”

“Yes,” he said, swallowing macaroon. “Yes. Do I know you?”

“Sophia asked me to stop in here and tell you she’s in the hospital. Central District Hospital #2, just up the street. She slipped on the ice yesterday, broke her elbow very badly. Surgery’s tomorrow. Glad I caught you in time.” She turned and walked out.

Sophia looked like she was being eaten, right arm first, by a white, ovoid machine. The machine was suspended over the bed at the end of a multi-jointed armature. A slight green glow spilled from it and across the side of Sophia’s face.

“Latest of the latest,” Sophia said. “Same technology they use in limb regrowth—it’s supposed to shorten healing time by about ninety-five percent—I should have full mobility in four days. You brought flowers, which is incredibly antique of you. This thing feels weird.”

He sat on the chair next to the bed. “You have surgery tomorrow?”

She frowned. “No, just more of this. Is that what they told you?”

“The nurse told me.”

“That woman has a very strange sense of humor.”

“What does it feel like?”

“It feels like . . . ants crawling up and down the bones of my arm and massing at my elbow. Crawling through the marrow of my bones. But it doesn’t hurt—it tickles. Very strange. Very unpleasant, without being painful. I’d rather not experience it again. This is all very dramatic—ice storms and broken limbs and messengers.”

“And strange requests in anterooms, and photographs.”

She smiled. “My hair is greasy, and I’ve done nothing with my life for about the last hundred years except diddle around on the violin and pretend to write a book on Freud. I can’t even be bothered to learn German. So . . . embarrassing.”

“Possibly of more use than what I have been up to.”

“Which is?”

“An obsession. I’ve built a minor career around it. In fact, I might be, because of it, the world’s foremost expert on Specific American Englishes of the Period 1950–1964, especially those related to the works of one author.”

“Okay, that rivals my idiotic Freud project. Why?”

“I came across a translation of a book. Maybe it was sixty years ago now. I wasn’t living here at the time, but out East at a cataloguing dig. One of the abandoned cities. Another archaeologist loaned me this old book he had—this was just at the time when the fad for paper books was coming back around. I read it, and read it again, and again. I felt drawn to it. And I couldn’t really understand it: the sentences seemed tangled. The book seemed to be about nothing at all, or about something that I couldn’t possibly grasp. But these little glowing pieces that I did understand—fascinated me. I was sure that it was the translation getting in the way. So I decided I would learn to read it in the original.”

“Why?”

“I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I thought at the time that it was because I desperately needed something to do. This thing was as good as any other thing. But it’s what I’ve done now for decades. I’ve studied this very particular, dead version of English. It isn’t really that different from the kind they speak nowadays—maybe half the words are the same, maybe more. The grammar has changed, of course. Mostly, the challenge lies in understanding the world they lived in, which is so different from ours. Their world is so shadowed by inevitabilities, especially the inevitability of death, which covers everything. And of course everything moves so urgently. Everything is so compressed. Yet they waste time with a terrible determination, as well. I knew at least a little modern English, so that was a start. After a few years, I began to forget exactly why I had started the project. I’d become fascinated with all of the little details along the way. Complex, endless little problems. And I started to publish in the field, after a while. Then it became about that—about the academic side of it. The very fine distinctions.

“Several years ago, I was digging around in one of the little antique shops here in the city center, and I came across a paperback copy of the book. The same one that had gotten me started. In decent condition—and you know how rare they are these days, though they were very common at the time. It wasn’t a first edition or anything, but it was of the period, in the original language, and it was in decent shape. I honestly thought I would never find one. Before that, I had always worked from my terminal on electronic texts.

“I was so happy—I remember being happier than I had been about anything in—well, in a very long time. I walked down to the park and I read it—in the original—cover to cover. It was dark when I finished. I remember that I sat there, for it seemed like hours afterwards, trying to hold on to this—mode—that I had slipped into. A particular shape of the world, a tone to things. Like when someone says ‘it struck a chord’ in me. That must be the rough, dead metaphor for this feeling—but it’s nothing like the thing itself.”

He looked at Sophia. She was staring back at him. The machine on her arm bleeped. She turned her head and scowled at it. “Oh, shut up, machine. What do you know?” She turned back to Sebastian. “Keep talking, you.”

“It had taken me fifty-three years to get to that point, where I could read it like that—understand every word, know their world almost as if I had lived in it. I felt like it had all been worth it. And I felt as if I had been following some kind of trail into the dark. I had been following that trail for so long that I had forgotten what I was doing. I had begun to think that I was just walking aimlessly. And then I had come across something that I was looking for. It didn’t feel like the end, the final thing. But it was like . . . a waypoint.

“Then that night, after we talked . . . I didn’t realize it right away . . . ”

He reached into his bag and withdrew a paperback book. It was crumpled, curved of spine, and fragile-looking, packaged carefully in a sleeve of clear plastic. There was, unusually, no illustration on the white paper of the cover—only the book’s title and the author’s name, printed to look as if they had been hand-written with a fountain pen, and a pair of green stripes bisecting the cover, about three-quarters of the way down its white surface.

He put it in her good hand. “This,” he said. “I didn’t realize this. It’s the thing that I’ve been studying for all these years. You see? The trail that led off into the dark. The SAE English, the haiku, the contents of a medicine cabinet . . . they all lead here, to a silly little book that shouldn’t have had any meaning for me at all.”

She held the little book in her hand, moving her hand slightly up and down, as if testing the weight of the thing. She turned it over. The back cover was the same as the front cover, except for a bar code near the bottom—the sort of thing not seen on a book for three hundred years, at least. The lower corner of the back cover was torn.

“I feel like I’ve seen it before.”

“You have,” he said. “It’s the book you took our picture from. You described it to me. In your apartment. A white cover. Only text on it. Handwritten text. And green stripes. It’s the book you put on a shelf once in a little bookstore, meaning to forget it.”

She set the book down on the bed sheet. Then picked it up again. Then put it down, adjusted it a bit. “Yes. This is it.” She shook her head, closed her eyes for a second. Opened them again. “This is it.”

It was an almost perfect café. It was in a red brick building that turned burgundy in the rain, when the rain streamed down its onion domes and its stained glass. Through the archway of chipped grapevines, under the dome of the main room, stood the old, mirrored bar with its bottles gathering dust and the silvered mirrors growing darker every year.

The bar was where the owner was always to be found, rubbing his shaved head, staring at a game of chess. He always played against one of three different opponents. Opponent One was a nurse who stopped by in her uniform around lunchtime. She played quickly, and when she won—as she nearly always did—she clapped her hands together, said “Ha!” and walked out. Opponent Two was a woman with a nose she had never quite grown into and blonde hair like ashes. She would finish the game and, win or lose, sink her pointed face into a book, sipping her coffee in silence. Opponent Three was Sebastian. He played slowly and carefully, with a sort of desperate concentration. After three decades he still had not won a game.

The rest of the room was a shifting dance of tables, chairs, and light. The chairs and tables were never in quite the same configuration when Sebastian came in. He suspected that, after the café closed, the owner moved them around, just for the sake of moving them. The light was never the same either: it fell through the stained glass in a moody shift, dependent on cloud and season.

But what made it nearly perfect was the place in the corner, against the wall furthest from the entrance, by the windows. Here there was an enormous, purple-velvet armchair, a battered wicker high-backed chair, and a massive oak table. When he lost, as he always did, Sebastian would cross the room, shaking his head, and settle into the armchair. Sophia would look up at him from her terminal and sigh.

“One day, you’ll give up.”

“One day, I’ll win.”

And so the café had the feeling, at once, of agelessness—its ancient building, its collection of rescued furniture, its continual game of chess in the corner—and of change: the patterns of color-stained light and the dance of tables and chairs. All this, and the macaroons were excellent. All this, and the service was good.

Originally published in Asimov’s, June 2015.

The Best We Can

Carrie Vaughn

In the end, the discovery of evidence of extraterrestrial life, and not just life, but intelligence, got hopelessly mucked up because no one wanted to take responsibility for confirming the findings, and no one could decide who ultimately had the authority—the obligation—to do so. We submitted the paper, but peer review held it up for a year. News leaked—NASA announced one of their press conferences, but the press conference ended up being an announcement about a future announcement, which never actually happened and the reporters made a joke of it. Another case of Antarctic meteorites or cold fusion. We went around with our mouths shut waiting for an official announcement while ulcers devoured our guts.

So I wrote a press release. I had Marsh at JPL’s comet group and Salvayan at Columbia vet it for me and released it under the auspices of the JPL Near Earth Objects Program. We could at least start talking about it instead of arguing about whether we were ready to start talking about it. I didn’t know what would happen next. I did it in the spirit of scientific outreach, naturally. The release included that now-famous blurry photo that started the whole thing.

I had an original print of that photo, of UO-1—Unidentified Object One, because it technically wasn’t flying and I was being optimistic that this would be the first of more than one—framed and hanging on the wall over my desk, a stark focal point in my chronically cluttered office. Out of the thousands of asteroids we tracked and photographed, this one caught my eye, because it was symmetrical and had a higher than normal albedo. It flashed, even, like a mirror. Asteroids aren’t symmetrical and aren’t very reflective. But if it wasn’t an asteroid . . .

We turned as many telescopes on it as we could. Tried to get time on Hubble and failed, because it sounded ridiculous—why waste time looking at something inside the orbit of Jupiter? We did get Arecibo on it. We got pictures from multiple sources, studied them for weeks until we couldn’t argue with them any longer. No one wanted to say it because it was crazy, just thinking it would get you sacked, and I got so frustrated with the whole group sitting there in the conference room after hours on a Friday afternoon, staring at each other with wide eyes and dropped jaws and no one saying anything, that I said it: It’s not natural, and it’s not ours.

UO-1 was approximately 250 meters long, with a fan shape at one end, blurred at the other, as if covered with projections too fine to show up at that resolution. The rest was perfectly straight, a thin stalk holding together blossom and roots, the lines rigid and artificial. The fan shape might be a ram scoop—Angie came up with that idea, and the conjecture stuck, no matter how much I reminded people that we couldn’t decide anything about what it was or what it meant. Not until we knew more.

We—the scientific community, astronomers, philosophers, writers, all of humanity—had spent a lot of time thinking about what would happen if we found definitive proof that intelligent life existed elsewhere in the universe. All the scenarios involved these other intelligences talking to us. Reaching out to us. Sending a message we would have to decipher—would be eager to decipher. Hell, we sure wouldn’t be able to talk to them, not stuck on our own collection of rocks like we were. Whether people thought we’d be overrun with sadistic tripods or be invited to join a greater benevolent galactic society, that was always the assumption—we’d know they were there because they’d talk to us.

When that didn’t happen, it was like no one knew what to do next. No one had thought about what would happen if we just found a . . . a thing . . . that happened to be drifting a few million miles out from the moon. It didn’t talk. Not so much as a blinking light. The radiation we detected from it was reflected—whatever propulsion had driven it through space had long since stopped, and inertia carried it now. No one knew how to respond to it. The news that was supposed to change the course of human history . . . didn’t.

We wouldn’t know any more about it until we looked at it up close, until we brought it here, brought it home. And that was where it all fell apart.

I presented the initial findings at the International Astronomical Union annual meeting. My department gathered the data, but we couldn’t do anything about implementation—no one group could implement anything. But of course, the first argument was about whom the thing belonged to. I nearly resigned.

Everyone wanted a piece of it, including various governments and the United Nations, and we had to humor that debate because nothing could get done without funding. The greatest discovery in all of human history and funding held it hostage. Several corporations, including the producers of a popular energy drink, threatened to mount their own expeditions in order to establish naming and publicity rights, until the U.S. Departments of Energy, Transportation, and Defense issued joint restrictions on privately-funded extra-orbital spaceflight, which caused its own massive furor.

Meanwhile, we and the various other groups working on the project tracked UO-1 as it appeared to establish an elliptical solar orbit that would take it out to the orbit of Saturn and back on a twenty-year cycle. We waited. We developed plans, which were presented and rejected. We took better and better pictures, which revealed enough detail to see struts holding up what did indeed appear to be the surface of a ram scoop. It did not, everyone slowly began to agree, appear to be inhabited. The data on it never fluctuated. No signals emanated from it. It was metal, it was solid, it was inert. We published papers and appeared on cable documentaries. We gritted our teeth while websites went up claiming that the thing was a weapon, and a survivalist movement developed in response. Since it was indistinguishable from all the existing survivalist movements, no one really noticed.

And we waited.

The thing is, you discover the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and you still have to go home, wash up, get a good night’s sleep, and come up with something to eat for breakfast in the morning. Life goes on, life keeps going on, and it’s not that people forget or stop being interested. It’s that they realize they still have to change the oil in the car and take the dog for a walk. You feel like the whole world ought to be different, but it only shifts. Your worldview expands to take in this new information.

I go to work every day and look at that picture, my picture, this satellite or spacecraft, this message in a bottle. Some days I’m furious that I can’t get my hands on it. Some days I weep at the wonder of it. Most days I look at it, sigh, and write another round of emails and make phone calls to find out what’s going to happen to it. To make something happen.

“How goes the war?” Marsh leans into my office like he does every afternoon, mostly to try to cheer me up. He’s been here as long as I have; our work overlaps, and we’ve become friends. I go to his kids’ birthday parties. The brown skin around his eyes crinkles with his smile. I’m not able to work up a smile to match.

“The Chinese say they’re sending a probe with a robotic arm and a booster to grab it and pull it back to Earth. They say whoever gets there first has right of salvage. It’s a terrible idea. Even if they did manage to get it back without breaking it, they’d never let anyone else look at it.”

“Oh, I think they would—under their terms.” He doesn’t get too worked up about it because nobody’s managed to do anything yet, why would they now? He would say I take all of this too personally, and he’d be right.

“The IAU is sending a delegation to try to talk the Chinese government into joining the coalition. They might have a chance of it if they actually had a plan of their own. Look, if you want me to talk your ear off, come in and sit, have some coffee. Otherwise, leave now. That’s your warning.”

“I’ll take the coffee,” he says, claiming the chair I pulled away from the wall for him before turning to my little desktop coffee maker. His expression softens, his sympathy becoming genuine rather than habitual. “You backing any particular plan yet?”

I sigh. “Gravity tractor looks like our best option. Change the object’s trajectory, steer it into a more convenient orbit without actually touching it. Too bad the technology is almost completely untested. We can test it first, of course. Which will take years. And there’s an argument against it. Emissions from a gravity tractor’s propulsion may damage the object. It’s the root of the whole problem: we don’t know enough about the thing to know how much stress it can take. The cowboys want to send a crewed mission—they say the only way to be sure is to get eyeballs on the thing. But that triples the cost of any mission. Anything we do will take years of planning and implementation anyway, so no one can be bothered to get off their asses. Same old, same old.”

Two and half years. It’s been two and a half years since we took that picture. My life has swung into a very tight orbit around this one thing.

“Patience, Jane,” Marsh says in a tone that almost sets me off. He’s only trying to help.

Truth is, I’ve been waiting for his visit. I pull out a sheet of handwritten calculations from under a manila folder. “I do have another idea, but I wanted to talk to you about it before I propose anything.” His brow goes up, he leans in with interest.

He’ll see it faster than I can explain it, so I speak carefully. “We can use Angelus.” When he doesn’t answer, yes or no, I start to worry and talk to cover it up. “It launches in six months, plenty of time to reprogram the trajectory, send it on a flyby past UO-1, get more data on it than we’ll ever get sitting here on Earth—”

His smile has vanished. “Jane. I’ve been waiting for Angelus for five years. The timing is critical. My comet won’t be this close for another two hundred years.”

“But Angelus is the only mission launching in the next year with the right kind of optics and maneuverability to get a good look at UO-1, and yes, I know the timing on the comet is once-in-a-lifetime and I know it’s important. But this—this is once in a civilization. The sooner we can look at it, answer some of our questions . . . well. The sooner the better.”

“The better you’ll be. I’m supposed to wait, but you can’t?”

“Please, Marsh. I’ll feel a lot better about it if you’ll agree with me.”

“Thank you for the coffee, Jane,” he says, setting aside the mug as he stands.

I close my eyes and beseech the ceiling. This isn’t how I want this to go. “Marsh, I’m not trying to sabotage your work, I’m just looking at available resources—”

“And I’m not ultimately the one who makes decisions about what happens to Angelus. I’m just the one depending on all the data. You can make your proposal, but don’t ask me to sign off on it.”

He starts to leave and I say, “Marsh. I can’t take it anymore. I spend every day holding my breath, waiting for someone to do something truly stupid. Some days I can’t stand it that I can’t get my hands on it.”

He sits back down, like a good friend should. A good friend would not, however, steal a colleague’s exploratory probe away from him. But this is important.

“You know what I think? The best bet is to let one of these corporate foundations mount an expedition. They won’t want to screw up because of the bad publicity, and they’ll bring you on board for credibility so you’ll have some say in how they proceed. You’ll be their modern-day Howard Carter.”

I can see it now: I’d be the face of the expedition, all I’d have to do is stand there and look pretty. Or at least studious. Explain gravity and trajectories for the popular audience. Speculate on the composition of alien alloys. Watch whatever we find out there get paraded around the globe to shill corn chips. Wouldn’t even feel like I was selling my soul, would it?

I must look green, or ill, or murderous, because Marsh goes soothing. “Just think about it, before you go and do something crazy.”

I’ve kept a dedicated SETI@home computer running since I was sixteen. Marsh doesn’t know that about me. I don’t believe in extraterrestrial UFO’s because I know in great, intimate detail the difficulties of sending objects across the vast distances of space. Hell, just a few hundred miles into orbit isn’t a picnic. We’ve managed it, of course—we are officially extra-solar system beings, now, with our little probes and plaques pushing ever outward. Will they find anything? Will anything find them?

Essentially, there are two positions on the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and whether we might ever make contact, and they both come down to the odds. The first says that we’re here, humanity is intelligent, flinging out broadcasts and training dozens of telescopes outward hoping for the least little sign, and the universe is so immeasurably vast that given the odds, the billions of stars and galaxies and planets out there, we can’t possibly be the only intelligent species doing these things. The second position says that the odds of life coming into being on any given planet, of that life persisting long enough to evolve, then to evolve intelligence, and then being interested in the same things we are—the odds of all those things falling into place are so immeasurably slim, we may very well be the only ones here.

Is the universe half full or half empty? All we could ever do to solve the riddle was wait. So I waited and was rewarded for my optimism.

In unguarded moments I’m certain this was meant to happen, I was meant to discover UO-1. Me and no one else. Because I understand how important it is. Because I’m the one sitting here every day sending emails and making phone calls. I ID’d the image, I made the call, I had the guts to go public, I deserve a say in what happens next.

I submit the paperwork proposing that the Angelus probe be repurposed to perform a flyby and survey of UO-1. Marsh will forgive me. I wait. Again.

I’ve kept track, and I’ve done a hundred fifty TV interviews in the last two years. Most of them are snippets for pop-documentaries, little chunks of information delivered to the lowest common denominator audience. I explain over and over again, in different settings, sometimes in my office, sometimes in a vague but picturesque location, sometimes at Griffith Observatory, because for some reason nothing says “space” like Griffith Observatory. I hold up a little plastic model of UO-1 (they’re selling the kits at hobby stores—we don’t see any of the money from that) to demonstrate the way it’s traveling through space, how orbital mechanics work, and how we might use a gravity tractor to bring it home. Sometimes, the segments are specifically for schools, and I like those best because I can give free rein to my enthusiasm. I tell the kids, “This is going to take more than one lifetime to figure out. If we find a way to go to Alpha Centauri, it’s going to take lifetimes. You’ll have to finish the work I’ve started. Please grow up and finish it.”

I call everyone I can think of who might have some kind of influence over Angelus. I explain that a picture of a metal object taken from a few million miles away doesn’t tell us anything about the people who made it. Not even if they have thumbs or tentacles. Most of them tell me that the best plan they can think of is to build bigger telescopes.

“It’s not the size,” I mutter. “It’s how you use it.”

NASA thinks they will be making the decision because they’ve got the resources, the scientists, the experience, the hardware. Congress says this is too important to let NASA make decisions unilaterally. A half dozen private U.S. firms would try something if the various cabinet departments weren’t busy making anything they could try illegal by fiat. There are already three court cases. At least one of them is arguing that a rocket launch is protected as freedom of speech. The IAU brought a complaint to the United Nations that the U.S. government shouldn’t be allowed to dictate a course of action. The General Assembly nominated a “representative in absentia” for the species that launched UO-1—some Finnish philosopher I’d never heard of. It should have been me.

After a decade of international conferences I have colleagues all over the world. I call them all. Most are sympathetic. A South African cosmologist I know tells me I’m grandstanding, then laughs like it’s a joke, but not really. They all tell me to be patient. Just wait.

Life goes on. My other research, the asteroid research I was doing, has piled up, and I get polite but firm hints that I really ought to work on that if I want to keep my job. I go to conferences, I publish, I do another dozen interviews, holding up the plastic model of the object that I’ll likely never get close to. The ache in my heart feels just like it did when Peter left me. That was three years ago, and I can still feel it. The ache that says: I can’t possibly start over, can I?

The ache faded when I found UO-1.

“JPL rejected your proposal to repurpose Angelus. Thank God.” Marsh leans on my doorway like usual. He’s grinning like he won a prize.

I got the news via email. The bastards can’t even be bothered to call. I’d called them back, thinking there must have been a mistake. The pitying tone in their voices didn’t sound like kindness anymore. It was definitely condescension. I cried. I’ve been crying all afternoon, as the pile of wadded-up tissues on my desk attests. My eyes are still puffy. Marsh can see I’ve been crying; he knows what it looks like when I cry. He was there three years ago. I take a breath to keep from starting up again and stare at him like he’s punched me.

“How can you say that? Do you know what they’re talking about now? They’re talking about just leaving it! They’re saying the orbit is stable, we’ll always know where it is and we can go after it when we have a better handle on the technology. But what if something happens to it? What if an asteroid hits it, or it crashes into Jupiter, or—”

“Jane, it’s been traveling for how many hundreds of billions of miles—why would something happen to it now?”

“I don’t know! It shouldn’t even be there at all! And they won’t even listen to me!”

He sounds tired. “Why should they?”

“Because it’s mine!”

His normally comforting smile is sad, pitying, smug, and amused, all at once. “It’s not yours, not any more than gravity belonged to Newton.”

I want to scream. Because maybe this isn’t the most important thing to happen to humanity. That’s probably, oh, the invention of the wheel, or language. Maybe this is just the most important thing to happen to me.

I grab another tissue. Look at the picture of UO-1. It’s beautiful. It tells me that the universe, as vast as we already know it is, is bigger than we think.

Marsh sits in the second chair without waiting for an invitation. “What do you think it is, Jane? Be honest. No job, no credibility, no speaking gig for Discovery on the line. What do you think when you look at it?” He nods at the picture.

There are some cable shows that will win you credibility for appearing on them. There are some that will destroy any credibility you ever had. I have been standing right on that line, answering the question of “What is it?” as vaguely as possible. We need to know more, no way to speculate, et cetera. But I know. I know what it is.

“I think it’s Voyager. Not the Voyager. Their Voyager. The probe they sent out to explore, and it just kept going.”

He doesn’t laugh. “You think we’ll find a plaque on it? A message? A recording?”

“It’s what I want to find.” I smile wistfully. “But what are the odds?”

“Gershwin,” he says. I blink, but he doesn’t seem offended by my confusion. He leans back in the chair, comfortable in his thick middle-aged body, genial, someone who clearly believes all is well with the world, at least at the moment. “We’ve had fourteen billion years of particles colliding, stars exploding, nebulae compressing, planets forming, all of it cycling over and over again, and then just the right amino acids converged, life forms, and a couple of billion years of evolution later—we get Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dancing by a fountain to Gershwin and it’s beautiful. For no particular evolution-driven reason, it’s beautiful. I think: what are the odds? That they’re dancing, that it’s on film, and that I’m here watching and thinking it’s gorgeous. If the whole universe exists just to make this one moment happen, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

“So if I think sometimes that maybe I was meant to find UO-1, because maybe there’s a message there and that I’m the only one who can read it—then maybe that’s not crazy?” Like thinking that the universe sent me UO-1 at a time in my life when I desperately needed something to focus on, to be meaningful . . .

“Oh no, it’s definitely crazy. But it’s understandable.” This time his smile is kind.

“Marsh—this really is the most important thing to happen to humanity ever, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But we still need to study and map near-Earth asteroids, right?”

I don’t tell Marsh that I’ve never seen An American in Paris. I’ve never watched Gene Kelly in anything. But Marsh obviously thinks it’s important, so I watch the movie. I decide he’s right. That dance at the fountain, it’s a moment suspended in time. Like an alien spacecraft that shouldn’t be there but is.

Two things happen next.

At the next IAU meeting an archaeologist presents a lecture on UO-1, which I think is very presumptuous, but I go, because I go to everything having to do with UO-1. She talks about preservation and uses terms like “in situ,” and how modern archaeological practice often involves excavating artifacts, examining them—and then putting them back in the ground. She argues that we don’t know what years of space travel have done to the metal and structures of UO-1. We don’t know how our methods of studying it will impact it. She showed pictures of Mayan friezes that were excavated and left exposed to the elements versus ones that remained buried for their own protection, so that later scientists with better equipment and techniques will be able to return to them someday. The exposed ones have dissolved, decayed past recognition. She gives me an image: I reach out and finally put my hand on UO-1, and its metallic skin, weakened by a billion micrometeoroid impacts gathered over millennia, disintegrates under my touch.

I think of that and start to sweat. So yes, caution. I know this.

The second thing that happens: I turn my back on UO-1.

Not really, but it’s a striking image. I write another proposal, a different proposal, and submit it to one of the corporate foundations because Marsh may be right. If nothing else, it’ll get attention. I don’t mind a little grandstanding.

We already have teams tracking a best-guess trajectory to determine where UO-1 came from. It might have been cruising through space at nonrelativistic speed for dozens of years, or centuries, or millions of centuries, but based on the orbit it established here, we can estimate how it entered the solar system and the trajectory it traveled before then. We can trace backward.

My plan: to send a craft in that direction. It will do a minimal amount of science along the way, sending back radiation readings, but most of the energy and hardware is going into propulsion. It will be fast and it will have purpose, carrying an updated variation of Sagan’s Voyager plaques and recordings, digital and analog.

It’s a very simple message, in the end: Hey, we found your device. Want one of ours?

In all likelihood, the civilization that built UO-1 is extinct. The odds simply aren’t good for a species surviving—and caring—for long enough to send a message and receive a reply. But our sample size for drawing that conclusion about the average lifespan of an entire species on a particular world is exactly one, which isn’t a sample size at all. We weren’t supposed to ever find an alien ship in our backyard, either.

I tear up when the rocket launches, and that makes for good TV. As Marsh predicted, the documentary producers decide to make me the human face of the project, and I figure I’ll do what I have to, as best as I can. I develop a collection of quotes for the dozens of interviews that follow—I’m up to two-hundred thirty-five. I talk about taking the long view and transcending the everyday concerns that bog us down. About how we are children reaching across the sandbox with whatever we have to offer, to whoever shows up. About teaching our children to think as big as they possibly can, and that miracles sometimes really do happen. They happen often, because all of this, Gershwin’s music, the great curry I had for dinner last night, the way we hang pictures on our walls of things we love, are miracles that never should have happened.

It’s a hope, a need, a shout, a shot in the dark. It’s the best we can do. For now.

Originally published in Tor.com, July 17, 2013.

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

Vandana Singh

Vandana Singh was born and raised in India and currently inhabits the Boston area, where she is a physics professor at a small and lively state university. Several of her science fiction short stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best volumes, and shortlisted for awards. Her second short story collection, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, was published in 2018 from Small Beer Press in the US and Zubaan in India, and was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick award.

Ray Nayler

Ray Nayler has lived and worked in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans for nearly two decades. He is a Foreign Service Officer, and previously worked in international educational development, as well as serving in the Peace Corps in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. A Russian speaker, he has also learned Turkmen, Tajiki, Albanian, and Azerbaijani Turkish—as well as Vietnamese for a two-year stint as the Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer at the U.S. Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. Ray began publishing science fiction in 2015 with the short story “Mutability,” which appeared in the pages of Asimov’s. Since then, his stories have also seen print in Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Nightmare, as well as in several “Best of the Year” anthologies. His story “Winter Timeshare” from the January/February 2017 issue of Asimov’s was collected by the late Gardner Dozois in The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction.

In addition to his work in Science Fiction, Ray has published in many genres. He is the author of a detective novel, American Graveyards, published by TTA Press, and his short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen, Crimewave, Hardboiled, Cemetery Dance, Deathrealm, and the Berkeley Fiction Review, among many other journals. He is also a widely published poet, with work in the Atlanta Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Weave, Juked, Able Muse, Sentence, and more.

Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn’s work includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Bannerless, the New York Times Bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, and over twenty novels and upwards of one hundred short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. Her most recent work includes a Kitty spin-off collection, The Immortal Conquistador, and a pair of novellas about Robin Hood’s children, The Ghosts of Sherwood and The Heirs of Locksley. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop.

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, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His most recent anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 5, was published by Night Shade Books in October. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.