Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

To the Land of Snow

by Michael Bishop

The Charge and the Storm

by An Owomoyela

HigherWorks

by Gregory Norman Bossert

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to our March 2021 issue!

My medical dramas continued into February and will extend into March. If you are reading this on the first, I’m likely at another hospital dealing with the remnants of my kidney stone asteroid field. I’m so looking forward to having this over and being able to have some semblance of a comfortable daily routine restored. So much work has piled up while I’ve been handling paperwork, phone calls, moments of pain, and an array of doctor visits/tests. Further good news comes in the form of being fully vaccinated against COVID. My wife, parents, and sister are just a bit behind. We’ve been quite fortunate in that regard. Hopefully you’re in-progress or scheduled for yours soon.

Anyhow, I have much to do before my procedure, so I must be running.

Until next time,

-Neil

To the Land of Snow

Michael Bishop

Excerpts from The Computer Logs of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama

Years in Transit: 82 out of 106?

Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 7

Aboard Kalachakra, I open my eyes in Amdo Bay. Sleep still pops in me, yowling like a really hurt cat trying to well itself. I look sidelong out my foggy eggshell. Many ghosts crowd near to see me leave the bear sleep that everyone in a strut-ship sometimes dreams in. Why have all these somnacicles up-phased to become ship-haunters? Why do so many crowd the grave-cave of my Greta-snooze?

“Greta Bryn”—that’s my mama’s voice—“can you hear me, kiddo?”

Yes I can. I have no deafness after I up-phase. Asleep even, I hear Mama talk in her dreams and cosmic rays crackle off Kalachakra’s plasma shield out in front (to keep us all from going dead), and the crackle from Earth across the rolling ocean of all-around-us space.

“Greta Bryn?”

She sounds like Atlanta, Daddy says. To me she sounds like Mama, which I want her to play-act now. She keeps bunnies, minks, guineas, and many other tiny crits down along our sci-tech cylinder in Kham Bay. But hearing her doesn’t pulley me into sit-up pose. To get there, I stretch my soft parts and my bones.

“Easy, baby,” Mama says.

A man in white unhooks me. A woman pinches me at the wrist so I won’t twist the fuel tube or pulse counter. They have already shot me in the heart, to rev its beating. Now I do sit up and look around, clearer. Daddy stands nearby, showing me his crumply face.

“Hey, Gee Bee,” he says, but doesn’t grab my hand.

His coverall tag is my roll-call name: Brasswell. A clunky name for a girl and not too fine for Daddy, who looks thirty-seven or maybe fifty-fifteen, a number Mama says he uses to joke his fitness. He does whore-to-culture—another puzzle-funny of his—so that later we can turn Guge green, and maybe survive.

I feel sick, like juice gone sour in my tummy has gushed into my mouth. I start to elbow out. My eyes grow pop-out big, my fists shake like rattles. Now Daddy grabs me, mouth by my ear: “Shhhh shhh shh.” Mama touches my other cheek. Everybody else falls back to watch. That’s scary too.

After a seem-like century I ask, “Are we there yet?”

Everybody yuks at my funniness. I drop my legs through the eggshell door. My hotness has colded off, a lot.

A bald brown man in orangey-yellow robes comes up so Mama and Daddy must stand off aside. I remember, sort of. This person has a really hard Tibetan name: Nyendak Trungpa. My last up-phase he made me say it a billion times so I would not forget. I was already four, but I almost forgetted anyway.

“What’s your name?” Minister Trungpa asks me.

He already knows, but I blink and say, “Greta Bryn Brasswell.”

“And where are you?”

“Kalachakra,” I say. “Our strut-ship.”

“Point to your parents, please.”

I do, it’s simple. They’re wide-awake ship-haunters now, real-live ghosts.

He asks, “Where are we going?”

“Guge,” I say, another simple ask.

“What exactly is Guge, Greta Bryn?”

But I don’t want to think—only to drink, my tongue’s so thick with sourness. “A planet,” I at last get out.

“Miss Brasswell,”—now Minister T’s being a smart-aleck—“tell me two things you know about Guge.”

I sort of ask, “It’s ‘The Land of Snow,’ this dead king’s place off to the west in olden Tibet?”

“Excellent!” Minister T says. “And its second meaning for us Kalachakrans?”

I think again, harder: “A faraway world to live on?”

“Where, intelligent miss?”

Another easy ask: “In the Goldilocks Zone,” a funny name for it.

“But where, Greta Bryn, is this so-called Goldilocks Zone?”

“Around a star called Gluh—” I almost get stuck. “Around a star called Gliese 581.” GLEE-zha is how I say it.

Bald Minister Trungpa grins. His face looks like a brown China plate with an up-curving crack. “She’s fine,” he tells the ghosts in the grave-cave. “And I believe she’s the ‘One.’”

Sometimes we must come up. We must wake and eat and drink, and move about so we can heal from ursidormizine sleep and not die before we reach Guge. When I come up this time, I get my own nook that snugs in the habitat drum called Amdo Bay. It has a vidped booth for learning from, with lock belts for when the AG goes out. It belongs to only me, it’s not just one in a common space like most ghosts use.

Finally I ask, “What did that Minister T mean?”

“About what?” Mama doesn’t eye me when she speaks.

“That I’m the ‘One.’ Which ‘One’? Why’d he say that?”

“He’s upset and everybody aboard has gone a little loco.”

“Why?” But maybe I know. We ride so long that anyone riding with us sooner or later crazies up: inboard fever. Captain Xao once warned of this.

Mama says, “His Holiness, Sakya Gyatso, has died, so we’re stupid with grief and thinking hard about how to replace him. Minister T, our late Dalai Lama’s closest friend, thinks you’re his rebirth, Greta Bryn, his heaven-sent successor.”

I don’t get this. “He thinks I’m not I?”

“I guess not. Grief has fuddled his reason, but maybe just temporarily.”

“I am I,” I say to Mama awful hot, and she agrees.

But I remember the Dalai Lama. When I was four, he played Go Fish with me in Amdo Bay during my second up-phase. Daddy sneak-named him “Yoda,” like from Star Wars, but he looked more like skinny Mr. Peanut on the peanut tins. He wore a one-lens thing and a funny soft yellow hat, and he taught me a song, “Loving the Ant, Loving the Elephant.” After that, I had to take my ursidormizine and hibernize. Now Minister T says the DL is I, or I am he, but surely Mama hates as much as I do how such stupidity could maybe steal me off from her.

“I don’t look like Sakya Gyatso. I’m a girl, and I’m not an Asian person.” Then I yell at Mama, “I am I!”

“Actually,” she says, “things have changed, and what you speak as truth may have also changed, kiddo.”

Everybody who gets a say in Amdo Bay now thinks that Minister Nyendak Trungpa calls me correctly. I am not I: I am the next Dalai Lama.

The Twenty-First, Sakya Gyatso, has died, and I must put on his sandals, which will not fit. Mama says he died of natural causes, but too young for it to look natural. He hit fifty-four, but he won’t hit Guge. If I am he, I must take his place in “The Land of Snow” as colony dukpa, Tibetan for shepherd. That job scares me.

A good thing has come from this scary thing: I don’t have to go back up into my egg pod and then down again. I stay up-phase. I must. I have too much to learn to drowse forever, even if I can sleep-learn by hypnoloading. Now I have a vidped booth that I sit in to learn and a tutor-guy, Lawrence (“Larry”) Rinpoche, who loads on me a lot.

How old has all my earlier sleep-loading made me? Hibernizing, I hit seven and learnt while dreaming.

People should not call me Her Holiness. I am a girl person—not a Chinese or a Tibetan. I tell Larry these things the first time he comes to my room in Amdo. I’ve seen him in spectals about samurai and spacers, where he looks dark-haired and chest-strong. Now, anymore, he isn’t. He has silver hair and hips like Mama’s. His eyes do a flash thing, though, even when he’s not angry, and it throws him back into the spectals he once star-played in as cool guy Lawrence Lake.

“Do I look Chinese, or Tibetan, or even Indian?” Larry asks.

“No, you don’t. But you don’t look like no girl either.”

“A girl, Your Holiness.” Larry must correct me. Mama says he will teach me logic, Tibetan art and culture, Sanskrit, Buddhist philosophy; and medicine (space and otherwise). And also poetry, music and drama, astronomy, astrophysics, synonyms, and Tibetan, Chinese, and English. Plus cinema, radio/TV history; politics and pragmatism in deep-space colony planting, and lots of other stuff.

“No girl ever got to be Dalai Lama,” I tell Larry.

“Yes, but our Fourteenth predicted his successor would hail from a place outside Tibet; and that he might re-ensoul not as a boy but as a girl.”

“But Sakya Gyatso, our last, can’t stick his soul in this girl.” I cross my arms and turn in a klutz-o turn.

“O Little Ocean of Wisdom, tell me why not.”

Stupid tutor-guy. “He died after I got borned. How can a soul jump in the skin of somebody already borned?”

“Born, Your Holiness. But it’s easy. It just jumps. The samvattanika viññana, the evolving consciousness of a Bodhisattva, jumps where it likes.”

“Then what about me, Greta Bryn?” I tap-tap my chest.

Larry tilts his ginormous head. “What do you think?”

Oh, that old trick. “Did it kick me out? If it kicked me out, where did I go?”

“Do you feel it kicked you out, Your Holiness?”

“I feel it never got in. Inside, I feel that I . . . own myself.”

“Maybe you do, but maybe his punarbhava—his ‘re-becoming’—is in there mixing with your own personality.”

“But that’s so scary.”

“What did you think of Sakya Gyatso, the last Dalai Lama? Did he scare you?”

“No, I liked him.”

“You like everybody, Your Holiness.”

“Not anymore.”

Larry laughs. He sounds like he sounded in The Return of the Earl of Epsilon Eridani. “Even if the process has something unorthodox about it, child, why avoid mixing your soul with that of a distinguished man you liked?”

I don’t answer this windy ask. Instead, I say, “Why did he have to die, Mister Larry?”

“Greta, he didn’t have much choice. Somebody killed him.”

Every “day” I stay up-phase. Every day I study and I try to understand what’s happening on Kalachakra, and how the last Dalai Lama, at swim in my soul, has slipped his bhava, “becoming again,” into my bhava, or “becoming now,” and so has become a thing old and new all at once.

Larry tells me just to imagine one candle lighting off another (even though you’d be crazy to light anything inside a starship), but my candle was already lit before the last Lama’s got snuffed, and I never even smelt it go out. Larry laughs and says His Dead Holiness’s flame “never quenched, but did go dim during its forty-nine-day voyage to bardo.” Bardo, I think, must look like a fish tank that the soul tries to swim in even with nothing in it.

Up-phase, I learn more about Kalachakra. I don’t need my tutor-guy. I wander all about, between studying and tutoring times. When the artificial-gravity cuts off, as it does a lot, I swim my ghost self into nooks and bays almost anywhere.

Our ship has a loco largeness, like a tunnel turning through star-smeared space, like a line of railroad tank cars humming through the Empty Vast without any hum. I saw such trains in my hypnoloading sleeps. Now I peep them as spectals and mini-holos and even palm pix.

Larry likes for me to do that too. He says anything “fusty and fun” is OK by him, if it tutors me well. And I don’t need him to help me twig when I snoop Kalachakra. I learn by drifting, floating, swimming, counting, and just by asking ghosts what I want to know.

Here’s what I’ve learnt by reading and vidped-tasking, snooping and asking:

UNS Kalachakra hauls 990 human asses (“and also the rest of each bloke aboard”—Dad’s dumb joke) to a world in the Goldilocks Zone of the Gliese 581 solar system, 20.3 lights from Sol, the assumed-to-be-live-on-able planet Gliese 581g.

Captain Xao says that most of us on Kalachakra spend our journey in ursidormizine slumber to dream about our colonizing work on Guge. The greatest number of somnacicles—sleepers—have their egg pods in Amdo Bay toward the nose of our ship. (These hibernizing lazybones look like frozen cocoons in their see-through eggs.) Those of us more often up-phase slumber at “night” in Kham Bay, where tech folk and crew do their work. At the rear of our habitat drum lies U-Tsang Bay, which I haven’t visited, but where, Mama says, our Bodhisattvas—monks, nuns, lamas, and such—reside, up-phase or down-.

All must wriggle up-phase once each year or so. You cannot hibernize longer than two at a snooze because we human somnacicles go dodgy quite soon during our third year drowse, so Captain Xao tells us, “We’ll need every hand on the ground once we’re all down on Guge.” (“Every foot on the ground,” I would say.)

Red dwarf star Gliese 581, also known as Zarmina, spectral class M3V, awaits us in constellation Libra. Captain Xao calls it the eighty-seventh closest known solar system to our sun. It has seven planets and spurts out X-rays. It will flame away much sooner than Sol, but so far in the future that no one on Kalachakra will care a toot.

Gliese 581g, aka Guge, goes around its dwarf in a circle, nearly. It has one face stuck toward its sun, but enough gravity to hold its gasses to it; enough—more than Earth’s—so you can walk on it without drifting away. But it will really hot you on the sun-stuck side and chill you nasty on its drear dark rear. It’s got rocks topside and magma in its zonal mountains. We must live in the in-between stripes of the terminator, not some old spectal but safe spots for bipeds with blood to boil or kidneys to broil. Or maybe we’ll freeze, if we land in the black. So two hurrahs for Guge, and three for “The Land of Snow” in the belts where we hope to plug in.

We know Guge has mass. It isn’t, says Captain Xao, a “pipedream or a mirage.” Our onboard telescope found it twelve Earth years ago, seventy out from Moon-orbit kickoff, with maybe twenty or so to go before we really get there. Hey, I’m more than a smidgen scared to arrive, hey, maybe a million smidgens.

I’m also scared to stay an up-phase ghost on Kalachakra. Like a snow leopard or a yeti, my life is in deep-doo-doo danger. I don’t want to step up to Dalai Lamahood. It’s got its perks, but until Captain Xao, Minister Trungpa, Lawrence Rinpoche, Mama, Daddy, and our security folk find out WHO kilt the twenty-first DL, Greta Bryn Brasswell, a maybe DL, thinks her young life worth one dried pea in a vacu-meal pack. Maybe.

In the tunnels running between Amdo, Kham, and U-Tsang Bays, the ghost of a snow leopard drifts. It has cindery spots swirled into the frosting of its fur. Its eyes leap yellow-green in the dimness when it gazes back at two-leggers like me. It jets from a holo-beam, but I don’t know how or where from. In my dreams, I turn when I see it. My heart flutter-pounds towards a shutdown . . . which I fear it will, truly.

Sakya Gyatso spent many years as an up-phase ghost on Kalachakra. He never did the bear sleep more than three months at once, but tried to blaze at top alertness like a Bodhisattva. He hibernized (when he did) only because on Guge he must lead the 990 shipboard faithfuls and millions of Tibetan Buddhists, native and not, in their unjust exiles. Can an up-phase ghost, once it really dies, survive on a strut-ship as a ghost for real? Truly, I do not know.

Once I didn’t know Mama’s or Daddy’s first names. Tech is a title not a name, and Tech Brasswell married my mama, Tech Bonfils, aboard Kalachakra (Captain Xao prompting the vows), in the seventy-fourth year of our voyage. Tech Bonfils birthed me the following fall, one of only forty-seven children born on our trip to Guge. Luckily, Larry Rinpoche told me my folks’ names: Simon and Karen Bryn. Now I don’t even know if they like each other. I do know, from lots of reading, that S. Hawking—a now-dead astrophysicist—once said, “People are not quantifiable.” He was sure right about that.

I know lots more, of course, but not who kilt the Twenty-first DL, if anybody did, and so I pick at that worry a lot.

Years in Transit: 83

Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 8

In old spectals and palm pix, starship captains sit at helms where they can see the Empty Vast through windows or screens. Captain Xao, First Officer Nima Photrang, and their helpers keep us all going toward Gliese 581 in a closed cockpit in the upper central third of the big tin can strut-shipping us to Guge.

This section we call Kham Bay. Cut flowers in slender vials prettify the room where Xao and Photrang and crew do their jobs. This pit also has a woven wall hanging of the Kalachakra Mandala and a big painted figure of the Buddha wearing a body, both a man’s and a woman’s, with many faces and arms. Larry calls this window-free place a control room and a shrine.

I guess he knows.

I visit the cockpit. Nobody stops me. I visit because Simon and Karen Bryn have gone back to their Siestaville to pod-lodge for many months on Amdo Bay’s bottom level. Me, I stay my ghostly self. I owe it to everyone aboard—or so I often get told—to grow into my full Lamahood.

“Ah,” says Captain Xao, “you wish to fly the Kalachakra. Great, Your Holiness.”

But he passes me on to First Officer Photrang, a Tibetan who looks manlike in her jumpsuit but womanlike at her wrists and hands . . . so gentle about the eyes that, floating near because our AG’s down, she seems to have just pulled off a hard black mask.

“What may I do for you, Greta Bryn?”

My lips won’t move, so grateful am I she didn’t say, “Your Holiness.”

She shows me the console where she watches the fuel level in a drop tank behind our tin cylinder as this tank feeds the antimatter engine pushing us outward. Everything, she tells me, depends on electronic systems that run “virtually automatically,” but she and Captain Xao’s other crew must check closely, though the systems have fail-safes that can signal them from afar even if they leave the control shrine.

“How long,” I ask, “before we get to Guge?”

“In nineteen years we’ll start braking,” Nima Photrang says. “In another four, if all goes as planned, we will enter the Gliese 581 system and soon take a stationary orbital position about the terminator. From there we’ll go down to the adjacent habitable zones that we intend to settle in and develop.”

“Four years to brake!” No one’s ever said such a thing to me before. Four years are half the number I’ve lived, and no adult, I think, feels older at their old ages than I do at eight.

“Greta Bryn, to slow us faster than that would put terrible stress on our strut-ship. Its builders assembled it with optimal lightness, to save on fuel, but also with sufficient mass to withstand a twentieth of a g during its initial four years of thrusting and its final four years of deceleration. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but—”

“Listen: It took the Kalachakra four years to reach a fifth of the speed of light. During that time we traveled less than half a light year and burned a lot of the fuel in our drop tanks. Jettisoning the used-up tanks lightened us. For seventy-nine years since then, we’ve coasted, cruising over sixteen light-years toward our target sun using our fuel primarily for trajectory correction maneuvers. That’s a highly economical expenditure of the antimatter ice with which we began our flight.”

“Good,” I say—because Officer Photrang looks at me as if I should clap for such an “economical expenditure.”

“Anyway, we scheduled four years of braking at one twentieth of a g to conserve our final fuel resources and to keep this spidery vessel from ripping apart at higher rates of deceleration.”

“But it’s still going to take so long!”

The officer takes me to a ginormous sketch of our strut-ship. “If anyone aboard has time for a stress-reducing deceleration, Greta Bryn, you do.”

“Twenty-three years!” I say. “I’ll turn thirty-one!”

“Yes, you’ll wither into a pitiable crone.” Before I can protest more, she shows me other stuff: a map of the inside of our passenger can, a hologram of the Gliese 581 system, and a d-cube of her living mama and daddy in the village Drak—which means Boulder—fifty-some rocky miles southeast of Lhasa. But—I’m such a doofus!—maybe they no longer live at all.

“My daddy’s from Boulder!” I say to cover this thought.

Nima Photrang peers at me with small bright eyes.

“Boulder, Colorado,” I tell her.

“Is that so?” After a nod from Captain Xao, she guides me into a tunnel lit by tiny glowing pins.

“What did you really come up here to learn, child? I’ll tell you if I can.”

“Who killed Sakya Gyatso?” I hurry to add, “I don’t want to be him.”

“Who told you somebody killed His Holiness?”

“Larry.” I grab a guide rail. “My tutor, Larry Rinpoche.”

Officer Photrang snorts. “Larry has a bad humor sense. And he may be wrong.”

I float up. “But what if he’s right?”

“Is the truth that important to you?” She pulls me down.

A question for a question, like a dry seed poked under my gum. “Larry says that a lama in training must seek truth in everything, and I must do so always and everyone else by doing likewise will empty the universe of lies.”

“‘Do as I say and not as I do.’”

“What?”

Nima—she tells me to call her by this name—takes my arm and swims me along the tunnel to a door that opens at a knuckle bump. She guides me into her rooms, a closet with a pull-down rack and straps, a toadstool unit for our shipboard intranet, and a corner for talking in. We float here. Nicely, or so it seems, Nima pulls a twist of brindle hair out of my eye.

“Child, it’s possible that Sakya Gyatso had a heart attack.”

“‘Possible’?”

“That’s the official version, which Minister T told all us ghosts up-phase enough to notice that Sakya’d gone missing.”

I think hard. “But the unofficial version is . . . somebody killed him?”

“It’s one unofficial story. In the face of uncertainty, child, people indulge their imaginations, and more versions of the truth arise than you can slam a lid on. But lid-slamming, we think, is a bad response to ideas that will come clear in the oxygen of free inquiry.”

I shake my head. “Who do you mean, ‘we’?”

Nima gives a small smile. “My ‘we’ excludes anyone who forbids the expression of plausible alternatives to any ‘official version.’”

“What do you think happened?”

“I probably shouldn’t say.”

“Maybe you need some oxygen.”

This time her smile grows bigger. “Yes, maybe I do.”

“I’m the new Dalai Lama, probably, and I give you that oxygen, Nima. Tell me your idea, now.”

After squinting at me hard, she does: “I fear that Sakya Gyatso killed himself.”

“The Dalai Lama?” I can’t help it: her notion slanders the man, who, funnily, now breathes inside me.

“Why not the Dalai Lama?”

“A Bodhisattva lives for others. He’d never kill anybody, much less himself.”

“He stayed up-phase too much—almost half a century—and the anti-aging effects of ursidormizine slumber, which he often avoided as harmful to his leadership role, were compromised. His Holiness did have the soul of a Bodhisattva, but he also had an animal self. The wear to his body broke him down, working on his spirit as well as his head, and doubts about his ability to last the rest of our trip niggled at him, as did doubts about his fitness to oversee our colonization of Guge.”

I cross my arms. This idea insults the late DL. It also, I think, poisons me. “I believe he had a heart attack.”

“Then the official version has taken seed in you,” Nima says.

“OK then. I like to think someone killed Sakya Gyatso, not that tiredness or sadness made him do it.”

Gently: “Child, where’s your compassion?”

I float away. “Where’s yours?” At the door of the first officer’s quarters, I try to bump out. I can’t.

Nima must drift over, knuckle-bump the door plate, and help me with my angry going.

The artificial-gravity generators run again. I feel them humming through the floor of my room in Amdo, and in Z Quarters where our somnacicles nap. Larry says that except for them, AG aboard Kalachakra works little better than did electricity in war-wasted nations on Earth. Anyway, I don’t need the lock belt in my vidped unit; and such junk as pocket pens, toothbrushes, and d-cubes don’t go slow-spinning off like fuzzy dreams.

Somebody knocks.

Who is it?

Not Larry, who’s already taught me today, or Mama, who sleeps in her pod, or Daddy, who’s gone up-phase to U-Tsang to help the monks lay out rock gardens around their gompas. He gets to visit U-Tsang, but I—the only nearly anointed DL on this ship—must mostly hang with non-monks.

The knock knocks again.

Xao Songda enters. He unhooks a folding stool from the wall and sits atop it next to my vidped booth: Captain Xao, the pilot of our generation ship. Even with the hotshot job he has to work, he roams around almost as much as I do.

“Officer Photrang tells me you have doubts.”

I have doubts like a strut-ship has fuel tanks, and I wish I could drop them half as fast as Kalachakra, “The Wheel of Time,” dropped its anti-hydrogen-ice-filled drums in the first four years of its run toward our coasting speed.

“Well?” Captain Xao’s eyebrow goes up.

“Sir?”

“Does my first officer lie, or do you indeed have doubts?”

“I have doubts about everything.”

Captain Xao cocks his head. “Like what, child?” He seems nice but clueless.

“Doubts about who made me, why I was born in a big bean can, why I like the AG on rather than off. Doubts about the shipshapeness of our ship, the soundness of Larry Lake’s mind, the realness of the rock we’re going to. Doubts about—”

“Greta,” Captain Xao tries to interrupt.

“—the pains in my legs and the mixing of my soul with Sakya’s because of how our lifelines overlapped. Doubts—”

“Whoa.” Xao Songda says. “Officer Photrang says you have doubts about the official version of the Twenty-first’s death.”

“Yes.”

“I too, but, as your captain, I must tell you that this vessel cruises in shipshape shape . . . with an artist in charge.”

I gape at the man, then say: “Is the official story true? Did Sakya Gyatso really die of Cadillac infraction?”

“Cardiac infarction,” the captain says, not getting that I just joked him. “Yes, he did. Regrettably.”

“Or do you say that because Minister T told everyone that and he outranks you?”

Xao Songda looks confused. “Why do you think Minister Trungpa would lie?”

“Inferior motives.”

“Ulterior motives,” the stupid captain again corrects me.

“OK: ulterior motives. Did he have something to do with Sakya’s death . . . for mean reasons locked in his heart, just as damned souls are locked in hell?”

The captain draws a noisy breath. “Goodness, child.”

“Larry says that somebody killed Sakya.” I climb out of my vidped booth and go to the captain. “Maybe it was you.”

Captain Xao laughs. “Do you know how many hoops I had to leap through to become captain of this ship? Ethnically, Gee Bee, I am Han Chinese. Hardly anybody in the Free Federation of Tibetan Voyagers wished me to strut our strut-ship. But I was wholeheartedly Yellow Hat and the best pilot-engineer not already en route to a habitable planet. And so I’m here. I’d no more assassinate the Dalai Lama than desecrate a chörten, or harm his likely successor.”

I believe him, even if an anxious soul could hear the last few words of his speech unkindly. I ask him if he likes Nima’s theory—that Sakya Gyatso killed himself—better than Minister T’s Cadillac-infraction hypothesis. When he starts to answer, I say, “Flee falsehood again and speak the True Word.”

After a blink, he says, “If you insist.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then I declare myself, on that question, an agnostic. Neither theory strikes me as outlandish. But neither seems likely, either: Minister T’s because His Holiness had good physical health and Nima’s because the stresses of this voyage were but tickling feathers to the Dalai Lama.”

To my surprise, I begin to cry.

Captain Xao grips my shoulder balls so softly that his fingers feel like owl’s down, as I dream such stuff on an Earth I’ve never seen, and never will. He whispers to me: “Shhh-shhh.”

“Why do you shush me?”

Captain Xao removes his hands. “I no longer shush you. Feel free to cry.”

I do. So does Captain Xao. We are wed in knowing that Larry my tutor was right all along, and that our late Dalai Lama fell at the hands of a really mean someone with an inferior motive.

Years in transit: 87

Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 12

A week before my twelfth birthday, a Buddhist nun named Dolma Langdun, who works in the Amdo Bay nursery, hails me through the Kalachakra intranet. She wants to know if, on my birthday, I will let one of her helpers accompany me to the nursery to meet the children and accept gifts from them.

She signs off, —Mama Dolma.

I think, Why does this person do this? Who’s told her I have a birthday coming?

Not my folks, who sleep in their somnacicle eggs, nor Larry, who does the same because I’ve “exhausted” him. And so I resolve to put these questions to Mama Dolma over my intranet connection.

—How many children? I ask her, meanwhile listening to Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs through my ear-bud.

—Five, she replied. —Very sweet children, the youngest ten months, the oldest almost six years. It would be a great privilege to attend you on your natal anniversary, Your Holiness.

Before I can scold her for using this too-soon form of address, she adds, —As a toddler, you spent time here in Momo House, but in those bygone days I was assigned to the nunnery in U-Tsang with Abbess Yeshe Yargag.

—Momo House! I key her. —Oh, I remember!

Momo means “dumpling,” and this memory of my caregivers and my little friends back then dampens my eyelashes. Clearly, during the Z-pod rests of my parents and tutor, Minister Trungpa has acted as a most thoughtful guardian.

The following week goes by even faster than a fifth of light-speed.

On my birthday morning, a skinny young monk in a maroon jumpsuit comes for me and takes me down to Momo House.

There I meet Mama Dolma. There, I also meet the children: the baby Alicia, the toddlers Pema and Lahmu, and the oldest two, Rinzen and Mickey. Except for the baby, they tap-dance about me like silly dwarves.

The nursery features big furry balls that also serve as hassocks, blow-uppable yaks, monkeys, and pterodactyls, and cribs and learning booths, with lock belts for AG failures. A system made just for the Dumpling Gang always warns us of an outage at least fifteen minutes before it occurs.

The nearly-six kid, Mickey, grabs my hand and shows me around. He introduces me to everybody, working down from the five-year-old to ten-month-old Alicia. All of them but Alicia give me drawings. These drawings show a monkey named Chenrezig (of course), a nun named Dolma (ditto), a yak named Yackety (double ditto), and a python with no name at all. I ooh and ah over these masterpizzas, as I call them, and then help them assemble soft-form puzzles, feed one another snacks, go to the toilet, and scan a big voyage chart that ends (of course) at Gliese 581g.

But it’s Alicia, the baby, who wins me. She twinkles. She flirts. She touches. At nap time, I hold her in a vidped booth, its screen oranged out and its rockers rocking, and I nuzzle her sweet-smelling neck.

Alicia tugs at my lips and pinches my mouth flat, so set on reshaping my face that she seems a pudgy sculptor elf. All the while, her agate irises, bigger than my thumb tips, play across my face with cross-eyed puppy love. I stay with Alicia—Alicia Paljor—all the rest of that day. Then the skinny young monk comes to escort me home, as if I need him to, and Mama Dolma hugs me goodbye.

Alicia wails.

It hurts to leave, but I do, because I must, and even as the hurt fades, the memory of my outstanding birthday begins, that very night, to sing in me like the lovely last notes of Górecki’s Third.

I have never had a better birthday.

Months later, Daddy Simon and Mama Karen Bryn have come up-phase at the same time. Together, they fetch me from my nook in Amdo and walk with me on a good AG day to the cafeteria above the grave-caves of our strut-ship’s central drum, Kham. I ease along the serving line between them, taking tsampa, mushroom cuts, tofu slices, and the sauces to make them palatable. The three of us end up at a table in a nook far from the serving line. Music by J. S. Bach spills from speakers in the movable walls, with often a sitar and bells to call up for some voyagers a Himalayan nostalgia to which my folks are immune. We eat fast and talk small.

Then Mama says, “Gee Bee, your father has something to tell you.”

O God. O Buddha. O Larry. O Curly. O Moe.

“Tell her,” Mama orders.

Daddy Simon wears the sour face proclaiming that everybody should call him Pieman Oldfart. I hurt to behold him. But at last he says to me that before I stood up-phase, almost three years ago, as the DL’s disputed Soul Child, he and Mama signed apartness documents that have now concluded in an agreement of full marital severance. They continue my folks, but not as the couple that conceived, bore, and raised me. They remain friends, but will no longer wish to cohabit because of incompatibilities that have arisen over their up-phase years. It really shouldn’t matter to me, they say, because I’ve become Larry Lake’s protégée with a grand destiny that I will no doubt fulfill as a youth and an adult. Besides, they will continue to parent me as much as my odd unconfirmed status as DL-in-training allows.

I do not cry, as I did upon learning that Captain Xao believes that somebody slew my only-maybe predecessor. I don’t cry because their news feels truly distant, like word of a planet somewhere whose people have brains in their chest. However, it does hurt to think about why I absolutely must cry later.

Daddy gets up, kisses my forehead, and leaves with his tray.

Mama studies me for a long moment. “I’ll always love you. You’ve made me very proud.”

“You’ve made me very proud,” I echo her.

“What?”

We push our plastic fork tines around in our leftovers, which I imagine rising in damp squadrons from our plates and floating up to the air-filtration fans. I wish that I, too, could either rise or sink.

“When will they confirm you?” Mama asks.

“Everything on this ship takes forever: getting from here to there, finding a killer, confirming the new DL.”

“You must have some idea.”

“I don’t. The monks don’t want me. I can’t even visit their make-believe gompas over in U-Tsang.”

“Well, those are sacred places. Not many of us get invitations.”

“But Minister T has declared me the ‘One,’ and Larry has tutored me in thousands of subjects, holy and not so holy. Even so, the under-lamas and their silly crew think less well of me than they would of a lame blue mountain sheep.”

“Don’t call their monasteries ‘make-believe,’ Gee Bee. Don’t call these other holy people and their followers ‘silly.’”

“Oh, rot!” I actually say. “I wish I were anywhere but on this bean can flung at an iceberg light-years across the stupid Milky Way.”

“Don’t, Greta Bryn. You’ve got a champion in Minister Trungpa.”

“Who just wants to bask in the reflected glory of his next supposed Bodhisattva—which, I swear, I am not.”

Mama lifts her tray and slams it down.

Nobody else seems to notice, but I jump.

“You have no idea,” she says, “who you are or what a champion can do for you, and you’re much too young to dismiss yourself or your powerful advocate.”

One of the Brandenburg Concertos swells, its sitars and yak bells flourishing. Far across the mess hall, Larry Lake shuffles toward us with a tray. Mama sees him, and, just as Daddy did, she kisses my forehead and abruptly leaves. My angry stare tells Larry not to mess with me (no, I won’t apologize for the accidental pun), and Larry veers off to sit with some bio-techs at a faraway table.

Years in transit: 88

Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 13

Today marks another anniversary of the Kalachakra’s departure from Moon orbit on its crossing to Guge in the Gliese 581 system.

Soon I will turn thirteen. Much has happened in the six years since I woke to find that Sakya Gyatso had died and I had become Greta Gyatso, his premature reincarnation.

What has not happened haunts me as much as, if not more than, what has. I have a disturbing sense that the “investigation” into Sakya’s murder resides in a secretly agreed-upon limbo. Also, that my confirmation rests in this same misty territory, with Minister T as my “regent.” Recently, though, at First Officer Nima’s urging, Minister T assigned me a bodyguard from among the monks of U-Tsang Bay, a guy called Ian Kilkhor.

Once surnamed Davis, Kilkhor was born sixteen years into our flight of Canadian parents, techs who’d converted to the Yellow Hat order of Tibetan Buddhists in Calgary, Alberta, a decade before the construction of our interstellar vessel. Although nearing the chronological age of sixty, Kilkhor—as he asks me to call him—looks less than half that and has many admirers among the female ghosts in Kham.

Officer Nima fancies him. (Hey, even I fancy him.)

But she is celibacy-committed unless a need for childbearing arises on Guge. And assuming her reproductive apparatus still works. Under such circumstances, I suspect that Kilkhor would lie with her.

Here I confess my ignorance. Despite lessons from Larry in the Tibetan language, I didn’t realize, until Kilkhor told me, that his new surname means “Mandala.” I excuse myself on the grounds that “Kilkhor” more narrowly means “center of the circle,” and that Larry often skimps on offering connections. (To improve the health of his “mortal coil,” Larry has spent nearly four of my last six years in an ursidormizine doze. I go to visit him once every two weeks in the pod-lodges of Amdo Bay, but these well-intended homages sometimes feel less like cheerful visits than dutiful viewings.) Also, “Kilkhor” sounds to me more like an incitement to violence than it does a statement of physical and spiritual harmony.

Even so, I benefit in many ways from Kilkhor’s presence as bodyguard and stand-in tutor. Like Larry, Mama and Daddy spend long periods in their pods; and Kilkhor, a monk who knows tai chi chuan, has kept the killer, or killers, of Sakya from slaying me, if such villains exist aboard our ship. (I have begun to doubt they do.) He has also taught me much of history, culture, religion, politics, computing, astrophysics and astronomy that Larry, owing to long bouts of hibernizing, has neglected. Also, he weighs in for me with the monks, nuns, and yogis of U-Tsang, who feel disenfranchised in the process of confirming me as Sakya’s successor.

Indeed, because the Panchen Lama now in charge in U-Tsang will not let me set foot there, Kilkhor intercedes to get high monks to visit me in Kham. The Panchen Lama, to avoid seeming either bigot or autocrat, permits these visits. Sadly (or not), my sex, my ethnicity, and (most important) the fact that my birth antedates the Twenty-first’s death by five years all conspire to taint my candidacy. I doubt it too, and fear that fanatics among the “religious” will try to veto me by subtraction, not by argument, and that I will die at the hands of friends rather than enemies of the Dalai Lamahood.

Such fears, alone, throw real doubt on Minister T’s choice of me as Sakya’s only indisputable Soul Child.

Years in transit: 89

Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 14

“The Tibetan belief in monkey ancestors puts them in a unique category as the only people I know of who acknowledged this connection before Darwin.”

—Karen Swenson, 20th-century traveler, poet, and worker at Mother Teresa’s Calcutta mission

Last week, a party of monks and one nun met me in the hangar of Kham Bay. From their gompas (monasteries) in U-Tsang Bay, they brought a woolen cloak, a woolen bag, three spruce walking sticks, three pairs of sandals, and a white-faced monkey that one monk, as the group entered, fed from a baby bottle full of ashen-gray slurry.

An AG-generator never runs in the hangar because people don’t often visit it, and the lander nests in a vast hammock of polyester cables. So we levitated in a cordoned space near the nose of the lander, which the Free Federation of Tibetan Voyagers has named Chenrezig, after that Buddhist disciple who, in monkey form, sired the first human Tibetans. (Each new DL instantly qualifies as the latest incarnation of Chenrezig.) Our lander’s nose is painted with bright geometries and the cartoon head of a wise-looking monkey wearing glasses and a beaked yellow hat. Despite this simian iconography, however, everyone on our strut-ship calls the lander the Yak Butter Express.

After stiff greetings, these high monks—including the venerable Panchen Lama, Lhundrub Gelek, and Yeshe Yargag, the abbess of U-Tsang’s only nunnery!—tied the items that they’d brought to a utility toadstool in the center of our circle (“kilkhor”). Then we floated in lotus positions, hands palms-upward, and I stared at these items, but not at the pale monkey now clutching the PL and wearing a look of alert concern. From molecular vibrations and subtle somatic clues—twitches, blinks, sniffles—I tried to determine which of the items they wished me to select . . . or not to select, as their biases dictated.

“Some of these things were Sakya Gyatso’s,” the Panchen Lama said. “Choose only those that he viewed as truly his. Of course, he saw little in this life as a ‘belonging.’ You may examine any or all, Miss Brasswell.”

I liked how my birth name (even preceded by the stodgy honorific Miss) sounded in our hangar, even if it did seem to label me an imposter, if not an outright foe of Tibetan Buddhism. To my right, Kilkhor lowered his eyelids, advising me to make a choice. OK, then: I had no need to breast-stroke my way over to the pile.

“The cloak,” I said.

Its stench of musty wool and ancient vegetable dyes told me all I needed to know. I recalled those smells and the cloak’s vivid colors from an encounter with the DL during his visit to the nursery in Amdo when I was four. It had seemed the visit of a seraph or an extraterrestrial—as, by virtue of our status as star travelers, he had qualified. Apparently, none of these faithful had accompanied him then, for, obviously, none recalled his having cinched on this cloak to meet a tot of common blood.

The monkey—a large Japanese macaque (Mucaca fuscata)—swam to the center of our circle, undid the folded cloak, and kicked back to the Lama, who belted it around his lap. Still fretful, the macaque levitated in its breechclout—a kind of diaper—beside the PL. It wrinkled its brow at me in approval or accusation.

“Go on,” Lhundrub Gelek said. “Choose another item.”

I glanced at Kilkhor, who dropped his eyelids.

“May I see what’s in the bag?” I asked.

The PL spoke to the macaque: a critter I imagined Tech Bonfils taking a liking to at our trip’s outset. It then paddled over to the bag tied to the utility toadstool, seized the bag by its neck, and dragged it over to me.

After foraging a little, I extracted five slender books, of a kind now rarely made, and studied each: one in English, one in Tibetan, one in French, one in Hindi, and one (I’m guessing now) in Esperanto. In each case, I recognized their alphabets and point of origin, if not their subject matter. A bootlace linked the books. When they started to float away, I caught its nearer end and yanked them all back.

“Did His Holiness write these?” I asked.

“Yes,” the Panchen Lama said, making me think that I’d passed another test. He added, “Which of the five did Sakya most esteem?” Ah, a dirty trick. Did they want me to read not only several difficult scripts but also Sakya’s departed mind.

“Do you mean as artifacts, for the loveliness of their craft, or as documents, for the spiritual meat in their contents?”

“Which of those options do you suppose most like him?” Abbess Yeshe Yargag asked sympathetically.

“Both. But if I must make a choice, the latter. When he wrote, he distilled clear elixirs from turbid mud.”

Our visitors beheld me as if I had neutralized the stench of sulfur with sprinkles of rose water. Again, I felt shameless.

With an unreadable frown, the PL said, “You’ve chosen correctly. We now wish you to choose the book that Sakya most esteemed for its message.”

I reexamined each title. The one in French featured the words wisdom and child. When I touched it, Chenrezig responded with a nearly human intake of breath. Empty of thought, I lifted that book.

“Here: The Wisdom of a Child, the Childishness of Wisdom.”

As earlier, our five visitors kept their own counsel, and Chenrezig returned the books to their bag and the bag to the monk who had set it out.

Next, I chose among the walking sticks and the pairs of sandals, taking my cues from the monkey and so choosing better than I had any right to expect. In fact, I chose just those items identifying me as the Dalai Lama’s Soul Child, girl or no girl.

After Kilkhor praised my accuracy, the PL said, “Very true, but—”

“But what?” Kilkhor said. “Must you settle on a Tibetan male only?”

The Lama replied, “No, Ian. But what about this child makes her miraculous?”

Ah, yes. One criterion for confirming a DL candidate is that those giving the tests identify “something miraculous” about him . . . or her.

“What about her startling performance so far?” Kilkhor asked.

“We don’t see her performance as a miracle, Ian.”

“But you haven’t conferred about the matter.” He gestured at the other holies floating in the fluorescent lee of the Yak Butter Express.

“My friends,” the Panchen Lama asked, “what say you all in reply?”

“We find no miracle,” a spindly, middle-aged monk said, “in this child’s choosing correctly. Her brief life overlapped His Holiness’s.”

“My-me,” Abbess Yargag said. “I find her a wholly supportable candidate.”

The three leftover holies held their tongues, and I had to admit—to myself, if not aloud to this confirmation panel—that they had a hard-to-refute point, for I had pegged my answers to the tics of a monastery macaque with an instinctual sense of its keepers’ moody fretfulness.

Fortunately, the monkey liked me. I had no idea why.

O to be unmasked! I needed no title or any additional powers to lend savor to my life. I wanted to sleep in my pod and to awaken later as an animal husbandry specialist, with Tech Karen Bryn Bonfils-Brasswell as my mentor and a few near age-mates as my fellow apprentices.

The PL unfolded from his lotus pose and floated before me with his feet hanging. “Thank you, Miss Brasswell, for this audience. We regret we can’t—” Here he halted, for Chenrezig swam across our meeting space, pushed into my arms, and clasped me about the neck. Then the astonished monks and the shaken PL rubbed shoulders as if to ignite their bodies in glee or consternation.

Abbess Yargag said, “There’s your miracle.”

“Nando,” the lama said, shaking his head: No, he meant.

“On the contrary,” Abbess Yargag replied. “Chenrezig belonged to Sakya Gyatso, and never in Chenrezig’s sleep-lengthened life has he embraced a child, a non-Asian, or a female—not even me.”

“Nando,” the PL, visibly angry, said again.

“Rha (Yes),” another monk put in. “Om mani padme hum (Hail the jewel in the lotus). Ki ki so so lha lha gyalo (Praise to the gods).”

I kissed Chenrezig’s white-flecked facial mane as he whimpered like an infant in my already weary arms.

Years in transit: 93

Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 18

—A Catechism: Why do we voyage?

At age seven, I learned this catechism from Larry. Kilkhor often has me say it, to ensure that I don’t turn apostate to either our legend or my long-term charge. Sometimes Captain Xao Songda, a Han who converted and fled to Vashon Island, Washington—via northern India; Cape Town, South Africa; Buenos Aires; and Hawaii—sits in to temper Larry’s flamboyance and Kilkhor’s lethargic matter-of-factness.

—Why do we voyage? one of them will ask.

—To fulfill, I say, the self-determination tenets of the Free Federation of Tibet and to usher every soul pent in hell up through the eight lower realms to Buddhahood.

From the bottom up, these realms include 1) hell-pent mortals, 2) hungry ghosts, 3) benighted beasts, 4) fighting spirits, 5) human beings, 6) seraphs and such, 7) disciples of the Buddha, 8) Buddhas for themselves only, and 9) Bodhisattvas who live and labor for every soul in each lower realm.

—Which realm did you begin in, Your Probationary Holiness?

—That of the bewildered, but not benighted, human mortal.

—As our Dalai Lama in Training, to which realm have you arisen?

—That of the disciples of Chenrezig: Om mani padme hum! I am the funky simian saint of the Buddha.

—From what besieged and bludgeoned homeland do you pledge to free us?

—The terrestrial “Land of Snow”: Tibet beset; Tibet ensnared, ensorcelled, and enslaved.

—As a surrogate for that land gone cruelly forfeit, to which new country do you pledge to lead us?

—“The Land of Snow,” on Guge the Unknowable, where we all must strive to free ourselves again.

The foregoing part of the catechism embodies a pledge and a charge. Other parts synopsize the history of our oppression: the ruin of our economy; the destruction of our monasteries; the subjugation of our nation to the will of foreign predators; the co-opting of our spiritual formulae for greedy and warlike purposes; the submergence of our culture to the maws of jackals; and the quarantining of our state to anyone not of our oppressors’ liking. Finally, against the severing of sinews human and animal, the pulling asunder of ties interdependent and relational, only the tallest mountains could stand. And those who undertook the khora, the sacred pilgrimage around Mount Kailash, often did so with little or no grasp of the spiritual roots of their journeys. Even then, that mountain, the land all about it, and the scant air overarching them, stole the breath and spilled into the pilgrims’ lungs the bracing elixir of awe.

At length, the Tibetans and their sympathizers realized that their overlords would never withdraw. Their invasion, theft, and reconfiguration of the state had left its peoples few options but death or exile.

—So what did the Free Federation of Tibet do? Larry, Kilkhor, or Xao will ask.

—Sought a United Nations charter for the building of a starship, an initiative that we all feared China would preempt with its veto in the Security Council.

—What happened instead?

—The Chinese supported the measure.

—How so?

—They contributed to the general levy for funds to build and crew with colonists a second-generation antimatter ship capable of attaining speeds up to one-fifth the velocity of light.

—Why did China surrender to an enterprise implying severe criticism of a policy that it saw as an internal matter? That initiative surely stood as a rebuke to its efforts to overwhelm Tibet with its own crypto-capitalistic materialism.

Here I may snigger or roll my eyeballs, and Lawrence, Kilkhor, or Xao will repeat the question.

—Three reasons suffice to explain China’s acquiescence, I at length reply.

—State them.

—First, China understood that launching this ship would remove the Twenty-first Dalai Lama, who had agreed not only to support this disarming plan but also to go with the Yellow Hat colonists to Gliese 581g.

—Ki ki so so lha lha gyalo (Praise to the gods), my catechist says in Tibetan.

—Indeed, backing this plan would oust from a long debate the very man whom the Chinese reviled as a poser and a bar to the incorporation of Tibet into their program of post-post-Mao modernization.

Here, another snigger from a bigger poser than Sakya, namely, me.

—And the second reason, Your Holiness?

—Backing this strut-ship strategy surprised the players arrayed against China in both the General Assembly and the Security Council.

—To what end?

—All these players could do was brand China’s support a type of cynicism warped into a low-yield variety of “ethnic cleansing,” for now Tibet and its partisans would have one fewer grievance to lay at China’s feet.

With difficulty, I refrain from sniggering again.

—And the third reason, Miss Greta Bryn, our delightfully responsive Ocean of Wisdom?

—Supporting the antimatter ship initiative allowed China to put its design and manufacturing enterprises to work drawing up blueprints and machining parts for the provocatively named UNS Kalachakra.

—And so we won our victory?

—Om mani padme hum (Hail the jewel in the lotus), I reply.

—And what do we Kalachakrans hope to accomplish on the sun-locked world we now call Guge?

—Establish a colony unsullied by colonialism; summon other emigrants to “The Land of Snow”; and lead to enlightenment all who bore that dream, and who will bear it into cycles yet to unfold.

—And after that?

—The cessation of everything samsaric, the opening of ourselves to nirvana.

—Hallelujah, Ian Kilkhor always concludes: Hallelujah.

Years in transit: 94

Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age19

For nearly four Earth months, I’ve added not one word to my Computer Log. But shortly after my last recitation of the foregoing catechism, Kilkhor pulled me aside and told me that I had a rival for the position of Dalai Lama.

This news astounded me. “Who?”

“A male Soul Child born of true Tibetan parents in Amdo Bay less than fifty days after Sakya Gyatso’s death,” Kilkhor said. “A search team found him almost a decade ago, but has only now disclosed him to us.” Kilkhor made this disclosure of bad news—it is bad, isn’t it?—sound very ordinary.

“What’s his name?” I had no idea of what else to say.

“Jetsun Trimon,” Kilkhor said. “Old Gelek seems to think him a more promising candidate than he does Greta Bryn Brasswell.”

“Jetsun! You’re joking, right?” My heart did a series of arrhythmic lhundrubs in protest.

Kilkhor regarded me then with either real, or expertly feigned, confusion. “You know him?”

“Of course not! But the name—” I stuck, at once amused and appalled.

“The name, Your Holiness?”

“It’s a ridiculous, a totally ludicrous name.”

“Not really. In Tibetan it means—”

“—‘venerable’ and ‘highly esteemed,’” I put in. “But it’s still ridiculous.” And I noted that as a child, between bouts of study, I had often watched, well, “cartoons” in my vidped booth. Those responsible for this lowbrow programming had purposely stocked it with a selection of episodes called The Jetsons, all about a space-going Western family in a gimmick-ridden future. I had loved it.

“I’ve heard of it,” Kilkhor said. “The program, I mean.” But he didn’t twig the irony of my five-year-younger rival’s name, or pretended not to. To him, the similarity of these two monikers embodied a pointless coincidence.

“I can’t do this anymore without a time-out,” I said. “I’m going down-phase for a year—at least a quarter of a year!”

Kilkhor said nothing. His expression said everything.

Still, he arranged for my down-phase respite, and I repaired to Amdo Bay and my eggshell to enjoy this pod-lodging self-indulgence, which, except for rare cartoon-tinged nightmares, I almost did.

Now, owing to somatic suspension, I return at almost the same nineteen at which I went under.

When I awake this time amid a catacomb vista of eggshell pods—like racks in a troopship or a concentration-camp barracks—my mother, Minister T, the Panchen Lama, Ian Kilkhor, and Jetsun Trimon attend my awakening.

Grateful for functioning AG (as, down here, it always functions), I swing my legs out of the pod, stagger a step or two, and retch from a stomach knotted with a fresh anti-insomniac heat. The Tibetan boy, my rival, comes to me unbidden, slides an arm around me from behind, and eases me back toward his own thin body so that I don’t topple into the vomit-vase Mama has given me. With his free hand, he strokes my brow and tucks stray strands of hair behind my ear, a familiarity that I hugely resent.

Although I usually sleep little, I do take occasional naps, for I deserve a respite.

I pull free of the presumptuous young imposter.

He looks about fifteen, and if I’ve hit nineteen, his age squares better than does mine with the passing of the last DL and the transfer of Sakya’s bhava into the material form of Jetsun Trimon.

Beholding him, I find his given name less of a joke than I did before my nap and more of a spell for the inspiriting that the PL alleges has occurred in him. Jetsun and I study each other with mutual curiosity. Our elders look on with darker curiosities. How must Jetsun and I regard this arranged marriage, they no doubt wonder, and what does it presage for everyone aboard the Kalachakra?

During my year-plus sleep, maybe I’ve matured some. Although I want to cry out against the outrage—no, the unkindness—of my guardians’ conspiracy to bring this fey usurper to my podside, I don’t berate them. They warrant such a scolding, but I refrain. How do they wish me to view their collusion, and how can I see it as anything other than their sending a prince to the bier of a spell-afflicted maiden? Except for the acne scarring his forehead and chin, Jetsun is, well, cute, but I don’t want his help. I loathe his intrusion into my pod-lodge and almost regret my return.

Kilkhor notes that the lamas of U-Tsang, including the Panchen Lama and Abbess Yargag, have finally decided to summon Jetsun Trimon and me to our onboard stand-in for the Jokhang Temple. There, they will conduct a gold-urn lottery to learn which of us will follow Sakya Gyatso as the Twenty-second Dalai Lama.

Jetsun bows. He says his tutor has given him the honor of inviting me, my family, and my guardians to this “shindig.” It will occur belatedly, he admits, after he and I have already learned many sutras and secrets reserved in Tibet—holy be its saints, its people, and its memory—for a Soul Child validated by lottery.

But circumstances have changed since our Earth-bound days: The ecology of the Kalachakra, the great epic of our voyage, and our need on Guge for a leader of heart and vision require fine tunings beyond our forebears’ imaginations.

Wiser than I was last year, I swallow a cynical yawn.

“And so,” Jetsun ends, “I wish you joy in the lottery’s Buddha-directed outcome, whichever name appears on the slip selected.”

He bows and takes three steps back.

Lhundrub Gelek beams at Jetsun, and I know in my gut that the PL has become my competitor’s regent, his champion. Mama Karen Bryn holds her face expressionless until fret lines drop from her lip corners like weighted ebony threads.

I thank Jetsun, for his courtesy and his well-rehearsed speech. He seems to want something more—an invitation of my own, a touch—but I have nothing to offer but the stifling of my envy, which I fight to convert to positive energies boding a happy karmic impact on the name slips in the urn.

“You must come early to our Temple,” the PL says. “Doing so will give you time to pay your respects at Sakya Gyatso’s bier.”

This codicil to our invitation heartens me. Lacking any earlier approval to visit U-Tsang, I have seen the body of the DL on display there.

Do I really wish to see it, to see him?

Yes, of course I do.

We’ve lost many Kalachakrans in transit to Guge, but none of the others have our morticians bled with trochars, painted with creams and rouges, or treated with latter-day preservatives. Those others we ejected via tubes into the airless cold of interstellar space, mere human scraps for the ever-hungry night.

In Tibet, the bereaved once spread their dead loved ones out on rocks in “celestial burial grounds.” This they did as an act of charity, for the vultures. On our ship, though, we have no vultures, or none with feathers, and perhaps by firing our dead into unending quasi-vacuum, we will offer to the void a sacrifice of once-living flesh generous enough to upgrade our karma.

But Sakya Gyatso we have enshrined; and soon, as one of only two applicants for his sacred post, I will gaze upon the remains of one whose enlightenment and mercy have plunged me into painful egocentric anguish.

At the appointed time (six months from Jetsun’s invitation), we journey from Amdo and across Kham by way of tunnels designed for either gravity-assisted marches or weightless swims. Our style of travel depends on AG generators and on the rationing of gravity by formulae meant to benefit our long-term approach to Guge. However, odd outages often overcome these formulae. Blessedly, Kalachakrans now adjust so well to gravity loss that we no longer find it alarming or inconvenient.

Journeying, we discover that U-Tsang’s residents—all Bodhisattvas, allegedly—have forsworn all use of generators during the 72-hour Festival of the Golden Urn, with that ceremony occurring at noon of the middle day. This renunciation they regard as a gift to everybody aboard our vessel—somnacicles and ghosts—and no hardship at all. Any stress we spare the generators, our karmic economies tell us, will redound to everybody’s benefit in our voyage’s later stages.

My entourage consists of my divorced parents, Simon Brasswell and Karen Bryn Bonfils; Minister T, my self-proclaimed regent; Lawrence Lake Rinpoche, my tutor and confidant, now up-phase for the first time in two years; and Ian Kilkhor, security agent, standby tutor, and friend. We walk single-file through a part of Kham wide enough for the next Dalai Lama’s subjects to line the walls and perform respectful namaste as he (or she) passes. Minister T tells us that Jetsun Trimon and his people made this same journey eighteen hours ago and that their well-wishers in this trunk tunnel were fewer than those attending our passage. A Bodhisattva would take no pleasure from such a petty statistical triumph. Tellingly, I do. So what does my competition-bred joy say about my odds in the coming gold-urn lottery? Nothing auspicious, I fear.

Eventually, our crowds dwindle, and we enter a deck area featuring a checkpoint and a sector gate. A monk clad in maroon passes us through. Another dials open the gate admitting us, at last, to U-Tsang.

I smell roast barley, barley beer (chang), and an acrid tang of incense that makes my stomach seize. Beyond the gate, which shuts behind us like a stone wheel slotting into a tomb groove, we drift through a hall with thin metal rails and bracket-like handholds. The luminary pins here gleam a watery purple.

Our feet slide out from under us, not like those of a fawn sliding on ice, but like those of an astronaut trainee rising from the floor of an aircraft plunging to create a few seconds of pedagogical zero-g.

The AG generators here shut down a while ago, so we dog-paddle in waterwheel slow-motion, unsure which tunnel to enter.

Actually, I’m the only uncertain trekker, but because neither Minister T nor Larry nor Kilkhor wants to help me, I stay mute, from perplexity and pride: another black mark, no doubt, against my lottery chances.

Ahead of us, fifteen yards or so, a snow leopard manifests: a four-legged specter with yellow eyes and frost-etched silver fur. Despite the lack of gravity, it faces us as if standing on a rock ledge and licks its coal-colored beard as if savoring again the last guinea-pig-like chiphi that it crushed into bone bits. Stymied, I startle and sway. The leopard switches its tail, turns, and leaps into a tunnel that I would not have chosen.

Kilkhor laughs and urges us upward into this same purplish chute. “It’s all right,” he says. “Follow it. Or do you suspect a subterfuge from our spiritually elevated hosts?” He laughs again . . . this time, maybe, at his inadvertent nod to the Christian sacrament of communion.

Larry and I twig his mistake, but does anybody else?

“Come on,” Kilkhor insists. “They’ve sent us this cool cat as a guide.”

And so we follow. We swim rather than walk, levitating through a Buddhist rabbit hole in the wake of an illusory leopard . . . until, by a sudden shift in perspective, we feel ourselves to be “walking” again.

This ascent, or fall, takes just over an hour, and we emerge in the courtyard of Jokhang Temple, or its diminished Kalachakra facsimile. Here, the Panchen Lama, the Abbess of U-Tsang’s only nunnery, and a colorful contingent of Yellow Hats and other monks greet us joyfully. They regale us with khata (gift scarves inscribed with good-luck symbols) and with processional music played by flutes, drums, and bells. Their welcome feels at once high-spirited and heartfelt.

The snow leopard has vanished. When we broke into the courtyard swimming like ravenous carp, somebody, somewhere, ceased projecting it.

So let the gold-urn ceremony begin. Put me out of, and into, my misery.

But before the lottery, we visit the shrine where the duded-up remains of Sakya Gyatso lie in state, like those of Lenin in the Kremlin or of Mao in the Forbidden City. Although Sakya should not suffer mention in the same breath as mass murderers, nobody can deny that we have preserved him as an icon, just as the devotees of Lenin and Mao mummified them. And I must trust that a single Figure of Peace weighs more in the karmic justice scales than does a shipload of bloody despots.

Daddy begs off. He has seen the dead Sakya Gyatso before, and traveling with his ex-wife, the mother of his Soul Child daughter, has depressed him beyond easy repair. So he retreats to a nearby guesthouse and locks himself inside for a nap. Ian Kilkhor leaves to visit several friends in the Yellow Hat gompa with whom he once studied; Minister T, who has often paid homage at the Twenty-first’s bier, has business with Lhundrub Gelek and others of the confirmation troupe who met with me in Kham in the shadow of the Yak Butter Express.

So, only Mama, Larry, and I go to see the Lama whom, according to many, I will succeed as the spiritual and temporal head of the 1000 or so Tibetan colonizers aboard this ship. The shrine we approach does not resemble a mausoleum. It sits on the courtyard’s edge, like an exhibit of amateur art in a construction trailer.

Two maroon-clad guards await us beside its doors, one at each end of the trailer, now graffitified with mantras, prayers, and many mysterious symbols—but no one else in U-Tsang Bay has come out to view its principal attraction. The blousy monk at the nearer door examines our implanted, upper-arm IDs with click-scans, smiles beatifically, and nods us in. Larry jokes in Tibetan with the guy before joining us at the DL’s windowed bier, where we three float: ghosts beside a pod-lodger who will not again arise, unless he has already done so in yet another borrowed body.

“He is not here,” I say. “He has arisen.”

Larry, who looks much older than at his last brief up-phase, laughs in appreciation or embarrassment: the latter, probably.

Mama gives me a blistering “cool-it” glare.

And then I gaze upon the body of Sakya Gyatso. Even in death, even through the clear but faintly dusty cover of his display pod, he sustains about his face and hands a soft amber aura of serene lifelikeness that startles, and discomfits. I see him smiling sweetly upon me when I was four. I imagine him displeasing his religious brethren and sisters by going more often into Amdo and Kham Bays to interact with his secular subjects than our under-lamas thought needful or wise, as if such visits distracted him from his obligations and sabotaged his authority in both realms, profane and holy. And it’s definitely true that his longest uninterrupted sojourn in U-Tsang coincides with his years lying in state in this shabby trailer.

Commoners aboard ship loved him, but maybe—I reflect, studying his corpse with both fascination and regard—he angered those practitioners of Tantra who viewed him as their highest representative and model. Certainly, during his life he moved from external Kalachakra Tantra—a concern with the lost procession of solar and lunar days—to the internal Tantra, with its focus on the energy systems of the body, to the higher alternative Tantra leading to the sublime state of bodhichitta, perfect enlightenment for the sake of others.

Thus reflecting, I cannot conceive of anyone aboard ever wishing him harm or of myself climbing out of the pit of my ego to attain the state of material renunciation and accepting comprehension of emptiness that Sakya Gyatso reached and embodied through so many years of our journey.

That I stand today as one of two Soul Children in line to follow him defies logic; it offends reason and also the 722 deities resident in the Kalachakra Mandala as emblems of reality and consciousness. I lack even the worth of a dog licking barley-cake crumbs from the floor. I put my palm on the Twenty-first’s pod cover and erupt in sobs. These underscore my unsuitability to succeed him.

Mama’s glare gives way to a look of fretful amazement. She lays an arm over my shoulder, an intimacy that keeps me from drifting blindly away from either her or Larry.

“Kiddo,” she murmurs, “don’t cry for this lucky man. We’ll never cease to honor him, but the time for mourning has passed.”

I can’t stop: All sleep has fled and the future holds only a scalding wakefulness. Larry lays his arm over my other shoulder, caging me between them.

“Baby,” Mama says. “Baby, what’s going on?”

She hasn’t called me “baby” or “kiddo” since, over seven years ago, I had my first period. I twist my neck just enough to tell her to glance at the late DL, that she must look. Reluctantly, it seems, she does, and then looks back at me with no apparent hesitancy or aversion. Her gaze then switches between him and me until she realizes that I won’t—I simply can’t—succeed this saint as our leader. Moreover, I intend to withdraw from the gold-urn lottery and to throw my support to my rival. Mama remains silent, but her arm deserts me and she turns from the DL’s bier as if my declaration has acted as a vernier jet to change her position. In any case, she drifts away.

“Do you understand me, Mama?”

Mama’s eyes jiggle and close. Her chin drops. Her jumpsuit-clad body floats like that of a string-free marionette, all raw angles and dreamily rafting hands.

Larry releases me and swims to her. “Something’s wrong, Greta Bryn.” I already suspect this, but these words penetrate with a laser’s precision. I fumble blurry-eyed after Larry, clueless about what to do to help.

Larry swallows her with his arms, like the male hero in an anachronistic spectal, and then pushes her away to study her more objectively. Immediately, he pulls her back in to him, checks her pulse at wrist and throat, and pivots her toward me with odd contrasting expressions washing over his face.

“She’s fainted, I think.”

“Fainted?” My mother, so far as I know, never faints.

“It’s all the travel . . . and her anxiety about the gold-urn lottery.”

“Not to mention her disappointment in me.”

Larry regards me with such deliberate blankness that I almost fail to recognize the man, whom I have known seemingly forever.

“Talk to her when she comes ’round,” he says. “Talk to her.”

The blousy monk who ran click-scans on us enters the makeshift mausoleum and helps Larry tow my rag-doll mama outside, across the road, and into the battened-down Temple courtyard. The two accompany her to a basket-like bower chair that suppresses her driftability. They attend her with colorful fake Chinese fans.

I go with them, looking on like a gawker at a mess-hall accident.

Our post-swoon interview takes place in the nearly empty courtyard. Mama clutches two of the bower-chair spokes like a child in a gravity swing, and I maintain my place before her with the mindless agility of a pond carp.

“Never say you’re forsaking the gold-urn lottery,” she says. “You bear on your shoulders the hopes of a majority, my hopes highest of all.”

“Did my decision to withdraw cause you to faint?”

“Of course!” she cries. “You can’t withdraw! You don’t think I faked my swoon, do you?”

I have no doubt that Mama didn’t fake it. Her sclera clocked into view before her eyelids fell. But, before that, her gaze cut to and rested on Sakya’s face just prior to her realizing my intent. Feelings of betrayal, loss, and outrage triggered her swoon. Now she says I have no choice but take part in the gold-urn drawing, and I regard her with such a blend of gratitude, for believing in me, and loathing, for her rigidity, that I can’t speak. Do Westerners carry both me-first genes and self-doubt genes that, in combination, overcome the teachings of the Tantra?

“Answer me, Greta Bryn: Do you think I faked that faint?”

Mama knows already that I don’t. She just wants me to assume the hair shirt of guilt for her indisposition and to pull it over my head with the bristly side inward. I have just enough Easterner in my being to deny her that boon and the pinched ecstasy implicit in it.

I hold her gaze, and hold it, until she begins to waver in her implacability.

“I didn’t swoon solely because you tried to renounce your rebirth right, but also because you tried to humiliate me in front of Larry.” Mama stands so far from the truth on this issue that she doesn’t even qualify as wrong.

And so I laugh, like an evil-wisher rather than a daughter. “Not so,” I say. “Why would I want to humiliate you before Larry?”

“Because I’ve always refused to coddle your self-doubts.”

I recall Mama beholding Sakya’s death mask and memorizing his every aura-lit feature. “What else caused you to ‘fall out’?”

Her voice drops a register. “The Dalai Lama. His face. His hands. His body. His inhering and sustaining holiness.”

“How does his ‘sustaining holiness’ knock you into a swoon, Mama?”

She peers across the courtyard road at the van where the DL lies in state. Then she pulls herself upright in the bower chair and tells this story:

“While married to your father, I began an affair with Minister Trungpa. He lived wherever Sakya lived, and Sakya chose to live among the secular citizens of Amdo and Kham rather than in the ridiculously scaled-down model of the Potala Palace in U-Tsang. As one result, Minister T and I easily met each other; and Nyendak—Neddy, I call him—courted me under the unsuspecting noses of both Sakya and Simon.”

“You cuckolded my daddy with Minister T?” I need her to say it again.

“Oh, that’s such an ugly word to label what Neddy and I still regard as a sacred union.”

“I’m sorry, Mama, but it’s the prettiest word I know to call it.”

“Don’t condescend to me, Gee Bee.”

“I won’t. I can’t. But I do have to ask: Who fathered me, the man I call Daddy or Sakya’s old-fart chief minister?”

“Your father fathered you,” Mama says. “Look at yourself in a mirror. Simon’s face underlies your own. His blood runs through you, almost as if he gave his vitality to you and thus lost it himself.”

“Maybe because you cuckolded him.”

“That’s crap. If anything, Simon’s growing apathy and addiction to pod-lodging shoved me toward Neddy. Who, by the way, has the eggs, even at his age, to stay on the upright outside of a Z-pod.”

“Mama, please.”

“Moreover, Neddy loves you. He cherishes you because he cherishes me. He sees you as just as much his own as Simon does. In fact, Neddy was the first to—”

“I’ll stop saying ‘cuckold’ if you’ll stop calling your boyfriend ‘Neddy.’ It sounds like filthy baby talk.”

Mama closes her eyes, counts to herself, and opens them again to explain that when Sakya Gyatso at last figured out what was going on between Mama and Minister Trungpa, he called them to him and urged them to break off the affair in the interest of a higher spirituality and the preservation of shipboard harmony.

Minister T, ever the tutor, argued that although traditional Buddhism stems from a slavish obeisance to the demands of morality, wisdom cultivation, and ego abasement, the Tibetan Tantric path channels sexual attraction and its drives into the creation of life-force energies that purify these urges and tie them to transcendent spiritual purposes. My mother’s marriage had unraveled; and Minister T’s courtship of her, which culminated in consensual carnality and a principled friendship, now demonstrated their mutual growth toward that higher spirituality.

I laugh out loud. “And did His Holiness give your boyfriend a pass on this self-serving distortion of the Tantric way?”

“Believe as you will, but Neddy—Minister Trungpa’s—take on the matter, and the thoroughness with which he laid out everything, had a great effect on the DL. After all, Minister T had served as his regent in exile in Dharmasala, as his chief minister in India, and finally as his minister and friend here on the Kalachakra. Why would he all at once suppose this fount of integrity and wise counsel a scoundrel?”

“Maybe because he was sleeping with another man’s wife and justifying it with a lot of mystical malarkey.”

Mama squints with thread-thin patience and resumes her story. Because of what Minister T and Mama had done, and still do, and what Minister T told His Holiness to justify their behavior, the Dalai Lama fell into a brown study that finally edged over into an ashen funk. To combat it, the DL hibernated for three months, but emerged as low in spirits as he’d gone into his egg. All his energies had diminished, and he told Minister T of his fears of dying before we reached Guge. Such talk profoundly fretted Mama’s lover, who insisted that Sakya Gyatso tour the nursery in Amdo Bay. There he met me, Greta Bryn Brasswell, and fell in love, often returning over the next few weeks and always singling me out for attention. He told Mama that my eyes reminded him of those of his baby sister, who had died very young of rheumatic fever.

“I remember meeting His Holiness,” I tell Mama, “but not his coming to see us so often in the nursery.”

“You were four,” Mama says. “How could you?”

She recounts how Minister T later took her to Sakya’s upper-deck office in Amdo to talk about his long depression. With the AG generators running, they shared green tea and barley breads.

The DL again voiced his fear that even if he slept the rest of our journey, at some point in transit he would surrender his ghost in his eggshell pod and we his people would arrive at Guge with no agreed-upon leader. Minister T rebuked him for this worry, which he identified as egocentric, even though the DL took pains to articulate it as a concern for our common welfare.

Mama had carried me to this meeting. I lay sleeping—not like a pod-lodger but as a tired child—across her lap on a folded poncho liner that Simon had brought aboard as a going-away gift from a former roommate at Georgia Tech. As the adults talked, I turned and stretched, but never awakened.

“I don’t recall that either,” I say.

“Again, you were sleeping. Don’t you listen to anything I tell you?”

“Everything. It’s just that—” I stop myself. “Go on.”

Mama does. She says that the DL walked over, leaned down, and placed his lips on my forehead, as if decaling it with a wet rose petal. Then he mused aloud about how fine it would be if, as an adult, I assumed his mantle and oversaw not only our voyagers’ spiritual education but also our colonization of “The Land of Snow.” He did not think he had the strength to undertake those tasks, but I would never exhaust my energy reserves. This fanciful scenario, Mama admits, rang in her like a crystal bell, a chime that echoed through her recurrently, as clear as unfiltered starlight.

Later, Mama and Minister T talked about their meeting with His Holiness and the tender wish-fulfillment musing with which he’d concluded it: my ascension to the Dalai Lamahood and eventual leadership on Guge. Mama asked if such a scenario could work itself out in reality, for if His Holiness died and Minister T championed me as he’d once stood behind Songsten Chodrak (later Sakya Gyatso), lifting him to his present eminence, then surely I, too, could rise to that height.

“‘I’m too old for such fatiguing machinations again,’ he told me,” Mama says, remembering, “but I told him, ‘Not by what I know of you, Neddy,’ and just that simple expression of admiration and faith turned him.”

I find Mama’s account of this episode and her conspicuous pleasure in relating it hard to credit. But she has actually begun to glow, with a coppery aura akin to that of the DL in his display casket.

“At that point,” she adds, “I grew ambitious for you in a way that once never would have crossed my mind, your ascension was just so far-fetched and prideful a thing for me to contemplate.” She smiles adoringly, and my stomach shrinks upon itself like new linen applied wet to a metal frame.

“I’ve heard enough.”

“Oh, no,” Mama chides. “I’ve more, much more.”

In blessed summary, she narrates a later conversation with Minister T, in which she urged him to carry to Sakya—now more a moody Byronic hero than a Bodhisattva in spiritual balance—this news: that she had no objection, if any accident or fatal illness befell him, to his sending his migrating bhava into the vessel of her daughter. Thus, he could mix our subjective selves in ways that would propagate us both into the future and so assist in our all arriving safely at Gliese 581g.

Bristling, I try to parse this convolute message. In fact, I ask Mama to repeat it. She does, and my deduction that she’s memorized this nutty formulae—if you like, call it a “spell”—sickens me.

Still, I ask, as I must, “Did Minister T carry this news to His Holiness?”

“He did.”

“And what happened?”

“Sakya listened. He meditated for two days on the metaphysics and the practical ramifications of what I’d told him through his minister.”

“Finish,” I say. “Please just finish.”

“On the following day, Sakya died.”

“Cadillac infraction,” I murmur. Mama’s eyes grow wide. “Forgive me,” I say. “What killed him? You used to tell me ‘natural causes, but at too young an age for them to seem natural.’”

“That wasn’t entirely a lie. Sakya did what came natural to him. He acted on the impulse of his growing despair and his burgeoning sense that if he waited much longer to influence his rebirth, you’d outgrow your primacy as a receptacle for the transfer of his mind-state sequences and he’d lose you as a crucible for compounding the two. So he called upon his mastery of many Tantric practices to drop his body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure. And when he irreversibly stilled his heart, he passed from our illusory reality into bardo . . . until he awoke again wed to the samvattanika viññana, or evolving consciousness, animating you.”

Here I float away from Mama’s bower chair and drift a dozen meters across the courtyard to a lovely, low cedar hedge. (In a way that she’s never fully understood, Nima Photrang was right about the cause of Sakya Gyatso’s death.) I want to pour my guts into this hedge, to heave the burdensome reincarnated essence of the late DL into its feathery silver-green leaves.

Nothing comes up. Nothing comes out. My stomach feels smaller than a piñon nut. My ego, on the other hand, fills the entire tripartite passenger drum of our starship, The Wheel of Time.

Later, I meet Simon Brasswell—Daddy—in a back-tunnel lounge near Jokhang Temple for chang and sandwiches. To make this date, of course, I must visit his guesthouse and ping him at the registry screen, but he agrees to meet me at the Bhurel—or The Blue Sheep, as the place is called—with real alacrity. In fact, as soon as we lock-belt into our booth, with squeeze bottles for our drinks and mini-spikes in our sandwiches to hold them to the small cork table, Daddy key-taps payment before I can object. He looks better since his nap, but the violet circles under his eyes lend him a sad fragility.

“I never knew—” I begin.

“That Karen and I divorced because she fell in love with Nyendak Trungpa? Or, I suppose, with his self-vaunted virility and political clout?” Speechless, I gape at my dad. “Forgive me. Ordinarily, I try not to go the spurned-spouse route.”

I still can’t speak.

He squeezes his bottle and swigs some barley beer. Then he says, “Do you want what your mama and Minister T want for you—I mean, really?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never known. But this afternoon Mama told me why I ought to want it. And because I ought to, I do. I think.”

Daddy studies me with an unsettling mixture of exasperation and tenderness. “Let me ask you something straight up: Do you think the bhava of Sakya Gyatso, the direct reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the ancestor of the Tibetan people, dwells in you as it supposedly dwelt in his twenty predecessors?”

“Daddy, I’m not Tibetan.”

“I didn’t ask you that.” He unspikes and chomps into his Cordyceps, or synthetic caterpillar-fungus, sandwich. Chewing, he manages a quasi-intelligible, “Well?”

“Tomorrow’s gold-urn lottery will reveal the truth, one way or the other.”

“Yak shit, Greta. And I didn’t ask you that, either.”

I feel both my tears and my gorge rising, but the latter prevails. “I thought we’d share some time, eat together—not get into a spat.”

Daddy chews more sedately, swallows, and re-spikes his “caterpillar” to the cork. “And what else, sweetheart? Avoid saying anything true or substantive?” I show him my profile. “Greta, forgive me, but I didn’t sign on to this mission to sire a demigod. I didn’t even sign on to it to colonize another world for the sake of oppressed Tibetan Buddhists and their rabid hangers-on.”

“I thought you were a Tibetan Buddhist.”

“Oh, yeah, born and raised . . . in Boulder, Colorado. Unfortunately, it never quite took. I signed on because I loved your mother and the idea of spaceflight at least as much as I did passing for a Buddhist. And that’s how I got out here about seventeen light-years from home. Do you see?”

I eat nothing. I drink nothing. I say nothing.

“At least I’ve told you a truth,” Daddy says. “More than one, in fact. Can’t you do the same for me? Or does the mere self-aggrandizing idea of Dalai Lamahood clamp your windpipe shut on the truth?”

I have expected neither these revelations nor their vehemence, but together they work to unclamp something inside me. I owe my father my life, at least in part, and the dawning awareness that he has never stopped caring for me suggests—in fact, requires—that I repay him truth for truth.

“Yes. I can do the same for you.”

Daddy’s eyes, above their bruised half-circles, never leave mine.

“I didn’t choose this life at all,” I say. “It was thrust upon me. I want to be a good person, a Bodhisattva possibly, maybe even the Dalai Lama. But—”

He lifts his eyebrows and goes on waiting. A tender twinge of a smile plays about his mouth.

“But,” I finish, “I’m not happy that maybe I want these things.”

“Buddhists don’t aspire to happiness, Greta, but to an oceanic detachment.”

I give him my fiercest Peeved Daughter look, but do refrain from eye-rolling. “I just need an attitude adjustment, that’s all.”

“The most wrenching attitude adjustment in the universe won’t turn a carp into a cougar, pumpkin.” His pet name for me.

“I don’t need the most wrenching attitude adjustment in the universe. I need a self-willed tweaking.”

“Ah.” Daddy takes a squeeze-swig of his beer and nods that I should eat.

My gorge has fallen, my hunger reappeared. I eat and drink and, as I do, become unsettlingly aware that other patrons in the Bhurel—visitors, monks—have detected my presence. Blessedly, though, they respect our space.

“Suppose the lottery goes young Trimon’s way,” Daddy says. “What would make you happy in your resulting alternate life?”

I consider this as a peasant woman of an earlier era might have done if a friend, just as a game, had asked, “What would you do if the King chose you to marry his son?” But I play the game in reverse, sort of, and can only shake my head.

Daddy waits. He doesn’t stop waiting, or searching my eyes, or studying me with his irksome unwavering paternal regard. He won’t speak, maybe because everything else about him—his gaze, his patience, his presence—speaks strongly of what for years went unspoken between us.

Full of an inarticulate wistfulness, I lean back. “I’ve told you a truth already,” I tell my father. “Isn’t that enough for tonight?”

A teenage girl and her mother, oaring subtly with their hands to maintain their places beside us, hover at our table. Even though I haven’t seen the girl for several years (while, of course, she hibernized), I recognize her because distinctive agate eyes in an elfin face identify her at once.

Daddy and I lever ourselves up from our booth, and I swim out to embrace the girl. “Alicia!” Over her shoulder, I say to her mama in all earnestness, “Mrs. Paljor, how good to see you here!”

“Forgive the interruption,” Mrs. Paljor says, ducking her head.

“Certainly, certainly,” I say.

“We’ve come to U-Tsang for the Gold Urn Festival, and we just had to wish you well tomorrow. Alicia wouldn’t rest until Kanjur found a way for us to attend.”

Kanjur Paljor, Alicia’s father, had served since the beginning of our voyage as our foremost antimatter-ice specialist. If anyone could get his secular wife and daughter to U-Tsang for the gold-urn lottery, Kanjur Paljor could. He enjoys the authority of universal respect. As for Alicia, she scrunches her face in embarrassment, as well as unconditional affection. She recalls the many times that I came to Momo House to hold her, and later to her family’s Kham Bay rooms to take her on walks or on outings to our art, mathematics, and science centers.

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you.”

I hug the girl. I hug her mother.

My father nods and smiles, albeit bemusedly. I suspect that Daddy has never met Alicia or Mrs. Paljor before. Kanjur, the father and husband, he undoubtedly knows. Who doesn’t know that man?

The Paljor women depart almost as quickly as they came. Daddy watches them go, with a deep exhalation of relief that makes me hurt for them both.

“I was almost a second mother to that girl,” I tell him.

Daddy oars himself downward, back into his seat. “Surely, you exaggerate. Mrs. Paljor looks more than sufficient to the task.”

Long before noon of the next day, the courtyard of the Jokhang Temple swarms with levitating lamas, monks, nuns, yogis, and some authorized visitors from our other two passenger bays.

I cannot explain how I feel. If Mama’s story of Sakya Gyatso’s heart attack is true, then I cannot opt out of the gold-urn lottery. To do so would constitute an insult—the supreme insult—to his punarbhava, or karmic change from one life vessel to the next, or from his body to mine. Mine, as everyone knows, established its bona fides as a living entity years before the DL died. Also, opting out would constitute a heartless affront to all believers, of all who support my candidacy. Still . . .

Does Sakya have the right to self-direct his rebecoming or I the right to thwart his will . . . or only the obligation to accede to it? So much self will and worry taints today’s ceremony that Larry and Kilkhor, if not Minister T, can hardly conceive of it as deriving from Buddhist tenets at all.

Or can they? Perhaps a society rushing at twenty percent of light-speed toward some barely imaginable karmic epiphany has slipped the surly bonds not only of Earth but also of the harnessing principles of Buddhist Tantra. I don’t know. I know only that I can’t opt out of this lottery without betraying a good man who loved me in the noblest and the most innocent of senses.

And so, in our filigreed vestments, Jetsun Trimon and I swim up to the circular dais to which the attendants of the Panchen Lama have already fastened the gold urn for our name slips.

In staggered vertical ranks, choruses of floating monks and nuns chant as we await the drawing. Our separate retinues hold or adjust their altitudes behind us, both to hearten us and to keep their sight lanes clear. Small flying cameras, costumed as birds, televise the event to community members in all three bays.

Jetsun’s boyish face looks at once exalted and terrified.

Lhundrub Gelek, the Panchen Lama, lifts his arms and announces that the lottery has begun. Today he blazes with the fierce bearing of a Hebrew seraph. Tug-monks keep him from rising in gravid slow motion to the ceiling. Abbess Yeshe Yargag floats about a meter to his right, with tug-nuns to prevent her from wandering up, down, or sideways. Gelek reports that name slips for Jetsun Trimon and Greta Bryn Brasswell already drift about in the oversized urn affixed to the dais. Neither of us, he proclaims, needs to swim forward to reach into the urn and pull out a name-slip envelope. Nor do we need stand-ins to do so. We will simply wait.

We will simply wait . . . until an envelope rises on its own out of the urn. Then Gelek will seize it, open the envelope, and read it aloud for all those watching in the Temple hall or via telelinks. Never mind that our wait could take hours, and that, if it does, viewers in every bay will volunteer to rejoin the vast majority of our population in ursidormizine slumber.

And so we wait.

And so we wait . . . and finally a small blue envelope rises through the mouth of the crosshatched gold urn. A tug-monk snatches it from the air, before it can descend out of view again, and hands it to the PL.

Startled, because he’s nodded off several times over the past fifty-some minutes, Gelek opens the envelope, pulls out the name slip, reads it to himself, and passes it on to Abbess Yargag, whose excited tug-nuns steady her so that she may announce the name of the true Soul Child.

Of course, that the Abbess has copped this honor tells everybody all that we need to know. She can’t even speak the name on the slip before many in attendance begin to clap their palms against their shoulders. The upshot of this applause, beyond opening my tear ducts, is a sudden propulsion of persons at many different altitudes about the lottery hall: a wheeling zero-g dance of approbation.

Years in transit: 95

Computer Logs of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama, age 20

The Panchen Lama, his peers and subordinates in U-Tsang, and secular hierarchs from Amdo and Kham have made my parents starship nobles.

They have bestowed similar, if slightly lesser honors, on Jetsun Trimon’s parents and on Jetsun himself, who wishes to serve us colonizers as Bodhisattva, meteorologist, and lander pilot. In any event, his religious and scientific educations proceed in parallel, and he spends as much time in tech training in Kham Bay as he does in the monasteries in U-Tsang.

As for me, I alternate months among our three drums, on a rotation that pleases more of our up-phase ghosts than it annoys. I ask no credit for the wisdom of my scheme, though; I simply wish to rule (although I prefer the verb “preside”) in a way promoting shipboard harmony and reducing our inevitable conflicts.

Years in transit: 99

Computer Logs of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama, age 24

I’ve now spent nearly five years in this allegedly holy office. Earlier today, thinking hard about our arrival at Guge, in only a little over seven Earth years, I summoned Minister Trungpa to my quarters.

“Yes, Your Holiness, what do you wish?” he asked.

“To invite everyone aboard the Kalachakra to submit designs for a special sand mandala. This mandala will commemorate our voyage’s inevitable end and honor it as a fruit of the Hope and Community”—I capitalized the words as I spoke them—“that drove us, or our elders, to undertake this journey.”

Minister T frowns. “Submit designs?”

“Your new auditory aid works quite well.”

“For a competition?”

“Any voyager, any Kalachakran at all, may submit a design.”

“But—”

“The artist monks in U-Tsang, who will create the mandala, will judge the entries blindly to determine our finalists. I’ll decide the winner.”

Minister T does not make eye contact. “The idea of a contest undercuts one of the themes that you wish your mandala to embody, that of Community.”

“You hate the whole idea?”

He hedges: “Appoint a respected Yellow Hat artist to design the mandala. In that way, you’ll avoid a bureaucratic judging process and lessen popular discontent.”

“Look, Neddy, a competition will amuse everyone, and after a century aboard this vacuum-vaulting bean can, we could all use some amusement.”

Neddy would like to dispute the point, but I am the Dalai Lama, and what can he say that will not seem a coddling or a defiant promotion of his ego? Nothing. (Chenrezig forgive me, but I relish his discomfiture.) Clearly, the West animates parts of my ego that I should better disguise from those of my subjects—a term I loathe—immersed in Eastern doctrines that guarantee their fatalism and docility. Of course, how many men of Minister Trungpa’s station and age enjoy carrying out the bidding of a woman a mere twenty-four-years old?

At length he softly says, “I’ll see to it, Your Holiness.”

“I can see to it myself, but I wanted your opinion.”

He nods, his look implying that his opinion doesn’t count for much, and takes a deferential step back.

“Don’t leave. I need your advice.”

“As much as you needed my opinion?”

I take his arm and lead him to a nook where we can sit and talk as intimates. Fortunately, the AG has worked much more reliably all over the ship than it did before my investiture. Neddy looks grizzled, fatigued, and wary, and although he doesn’t yet understand why, he has cause for this wariness.

“I want to have a baby,” I tell him.

He responds instantly. “I advise you not to, Your Holiness.”

“I don’t solicit your advice in that area. I’d like you to help me settle on a father for the child.”

Neddy reddens.

I’ve stolen his breath. He’d like to make a devastatingly incisive remark, but can’t even manage a feeble Ugh. “In case it’s crossed your mind, I haven’t short-listed you . . . although Mama once gave you a terrific, unasked for, recommendation.”

Minister T pulls himself together, but he’s squeezing his hands in his lap as if to express oil from between them.

“I’ve narrowed the candidates down to two, Jetsun Trimon and Ian Kilkhor, but lately I’m tilting toward Jetsun.”

“Then tilt toward Ian.”

“Why?”

And Mama’s lover provides me with good, dispassionate reasons for selecting the older man: physical fitness, martial arts ability, maturity, intelligence, learning (secular, religious, and technical), administrative/organizational skills, and long-standing affection for me. Jetsun, not yet twenty, has two or three separate callings that he has not yet had time to explore as fully as he ought, and the differences in our ages will lead many in our community to suppose that I have exercised my power in an unseemly way to bring him to my bed. I should give the kid his space.

I know from private conversations, though, that when Jetsun was ten, an unnamed senior monk in Amdo often employed him as a drombo, or passive sex partner, and that the experience nags at him now in ways that Jetsun cannot easily articulate. Apparently, the community didn’t see fit, back then, to exercise its outrage on behalf of a boy not yet officially identified as a Soul Child. Of course, the community didn’t know, or chose not to know, and uproars rarely result from awareness of such liaisons, anyway. Isn’t a monk a man? I say none of this to Neddy.

“Choose Ian,” he says, “if you must choose one or the other.”

Yesterday, in Kham Bay, after I extended an intranet invitation to him to come see me about his father, who lies ill in his eggshell pod, Jetsun Trimon called upon me in the upper-level stateroom that I inherited, so to speak, from my predecessor. He fell on his knees before me, seized my wrist, and put his lips to the beads, bracelet, and watch that I wear about it. He wanted prayers for his father’s recovery, and I acceded to this request with all my heart.

Then something occurred that I set down here with joy rather than guilt. I wanted more from Jetsun than gratitude for my prayers, and he wanted more than my prayers for his worry about his father or for his struggles to master all his many studies. Like me, he wished the solace of the flesh, and as one devoted to forgiveness, contentment, and the alleviation of pain, I took him to my bed and divested him of his garments and let him divest me of mine. Then we embraced, neither of us trembling, or sweating, or flinching in discomfort or distress, for my quarters hummed at a subsonic frequency with enough warmth and gravity to offset any potential malaise or annoyance. Altogether sweetly, his tenderness matched mine. However—

Like most healthy young men, Jetsun quickly reached a coiled-spring readiness. He quivered on Go.

I rolled over and bestrode him above the waist, holding his arms to the side and speaking with as much integrity as my gnosis of bliss and emptiness could generate. He calmed and listened. I said that I begrudged neither of us this tension-easing union, but that if we proceeded, then he must know that I wanted his seed to enter me, to take root, to turn embryo, and to attain fruition as our child.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you consent?”

“I consent.”

“Do you further consent to acknowledge this child and to assist in its rearing on the planet Guge as well as on this ship?”

He considered these queries. And, smiling, he agreed.

“Then we may advance to the third exalted initiation,” I said, “that of the mutual experience of connate joy.”

I slid backward over the pliable warmth of his standing phallus and kissed him in the middle of his chest. He reached for me, tenderly, and the AG generators abruptly cut off—suspiciously, it seemed to me. I floated toward the ceiling like a buoyant nixie, too startled to yelp or laugh. Jetsun shoved off in pursuit, but hit a bulkhead and glanced off it horizontally.

It took us a while to reunite, to find enough purchase to consummate our resolve, and to do so honoring the fact that a resurgence of gravity could injure, even kill, both of us. Nonetheless, we managed, and managed passionately.

The “night” has now passed. Jetsun sleeps, mind eased and body sated.

I sit at this console, lock-belted in, recording the most stirring encounter of my life. Every nerve and synapse of my body, and every scrap of assurance in my soul, tell me that I have conceived: Alleluia.

Years in transit: 100

Computer Logs of our Reluctant Dalai Lama, age 25

Some history: Early in our voyage, when our AG generators worked reliably, our monks created one sand mandala a year. They did so then, as they do now, in a special studio in the Yellow Hat gompa in U-Tsang. They kept materials for these productions—colored grains of sand, bits of stone or bone, dyed rice grains, sequins—in hard plastic cylinders and worked on their designs over several days. Upon finishing the mandalas, our monks chanted to consecrate them and then, as a dramatic enactment of the impermanent nature of existence, destroyed them by sweeping a brush over and swirling their deity-inhabited geometries into inchoate slurries.

These methods of creating and destroying the mandalas ended four decades into our flight when a gravity outage led to the premature disintegration of a design. A slow-motion sandstorm filled the studio. Grains of maroon, citron, turquoise, emerald, indigo, and blood-red drifted all about, and recovering these for fresh projects required the use of hand-vacs and lots of fussy hand-sorting. Nobody wished to endure such a disaster again. And so, soon thereafter, the monks implemented two new procedures for laying out and completing the mandalas.

One involved gluing down the grains, but this method made the graceful ruination of a finished mandala dicey. A second method involved inserting and arranging the grains into pie-shaped plastic shields using magnets and tech-manipulated “delivery straws,” but these tedious procedures, while heightening the praise due the artists, so lengthened the process and stressed the monks that Sakya Gyatso ceased asking for annual mandalas and mandated their fashioning only once every five years.

In any case, today marks our one-hundredth year in flight, and I am fat with a female child who bumps around inside me like those daredevils in old vidped clips who whooshed up and down the sloped walls of special competition arenas on rollers called skateboards.

I think the kid wants out already, but Karma Hahn, my baby doc, tells me she’s still much too small to exit, even if the kid does carry on like “a squirrel on an exercise wheel.” That metaphor endears both the kid and Karma to me. Because the kid moves, I move. I stroll about my private audience chamber, aka “The Sunshine Hall,” in the Potala Palace in U-Tsang. I’ve voluntarily relocated here to show my fellow Buddhists that I am not ashamed of my fecund condition.

Ian announces a visitor, and in walks First Officer Nima Photrang, whom I’ve not seen for weeks. She has come, it happens, not solely to visit me, but also to look in on an uncle who resides in the nearby Yellow Hat gompa. She has brought a khata, a white silk greeting scarf, even though I already have enough of those damned rags to stitch together a ship cover for the Kalachakra. She drapes it around my neck. Laughing, I pull it off and drape it around hers.

“Your design contest spurs on every amateur-artist ghost in Amdo and Kham,” Nima says. “If you wish your mandala to further community enlightenment by projecting an image of our future Palace of Hope on Guge, well, you’ve got a lot of folks worrying away at it—mission fully goosed, if not yet fully cooked.”

I realize that Sakya Gyatso, my predecessor, his eye on Tibetan history, called the world toward which we relentlessly cruise Guge partly for the g in Gliese 581g. What an observant and subtle man.

“Nima,” I ask, “have you submitted a design?”

“No, but you’ll probably never guess who intends to.”

No, I never will. I gape cluelessly at Nima.

“Captain Xao Songda, our helmsman. He spends enormous chunks of time with a drafting compass and a pen, or at his console refining design programs that a monk in U-Tsang uploaded a while back to Pemako.”

Pemako is the latest version of our intranet. I like to use it. Virtually nightly (stet the pun), it shows me deep-sea sonograms of my jetting squid-kid.

“I hope Captain Xao doesn’t expect his status as our shipboard Buzz Lightyear to score him any brownies with the judges.”

Nima chortles. “Hardly. He drew as a boy and as a teenager. Later, he designed maglev stations and epic mountain tunnels. He figures he has as good a chance as anyone in a blind judging, and if he wins, what a personal coup.”

“Mmm,” I say.

“No, really, you’ve created a monster, Your Holiness—but, as one of the oldest persons aboard, he deserves his fun, I guess.”

We chat some more. Nima asks if she may lay her palm on the curve of my belly, and I say yes. When the brat-to-be surfs my insides like a berserk skateboarder, Nima and I laugh like schoolgirls. By some criteria, I still qualify.

Years in transit: 101

Computer Logs of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama, age 25-26

I return to Amdo to deliver my child. Early in the hundred and first year of our journey, my water breaks. Karma Hahn, my mother, and Alicia and Emily Paljor attend my lying-in, while my father, Ian Kilkhor, Minister Trungpa, and Jetsun perform a nervous do-si-do in an antechamber. I give the guys hardly a thought. Delivering a kid requires stamina, a lot of Tantric focus, and a cooperative fetus, but I’ve got ’em all and the kid slams out in less than four hours.

I lie in a freshly made bed with my squiddle dozing in a warming blanket against my left shoulder. Well-wishers and family surround us like sentries, although I have no idea what they’ve got to shield us from: I’ve never felt safer.

Mama says, “When will you tell us the ruddy shrimp’s name? You’ve kept it a secret eight months past forever.”

“Ask Jetsun. He chose it.”

Everyone turns to Jetsun, who at twenty-one looks like a fabled Kham warrior, lean and smooth-faced, a flawless bronze sculpture of himself. How can I not love him? Jetsun looks to me. I nod.

“It’s . . . it’s Kyipa.” Like the sweetheart he is, he blushes.

“Ah,” Nyendak Trungpa sighs. “Happiness.”

“If we all didn’t strive so damned hard for happiness,” Daddy says, “we’d almost always have a pretty good time.”

“You stole that,” Mama rebukes him. “And your timing sucks.”

From behind those crowded about my babe-cave, a short, sturdy, gray-haired man edges in. I know him as Alicia Paljor’s father, Emily Paljor’s husband—but Daddy, Ian, and Neddy know him as the chief fuel specialist on our strut-ship and thus a personage of renowned ability. So I assume he’s come—like a wise man—to kneel beside and to adore our newborn squiddle. Or has he come just to meet his wife and daughter and fetch them back to their stateroom?

In his ministerial capacity, Neddy says, “Welcome, Specialist Paljor.”

“I need to talk to Her Holiness.” Kanjur Paljor bows and approaches my bed. “If I may, Your Holiness.”

“Of course.”

The area clears of everyone except Paljor, Ian Kilkhor, Kyipa, and me. A weight descends—a weight comprising everything that’s ever floated free of it moorings during every AG quittage that our strut-ship has ever suffered—and that weight, condensed into one tiny spherical mass, lowers itself onto my baby’s back and so onto me, crushing this blissful moment into dust and slivered glass. Ian edges to the top of my bed, but I already know that his strength and his heavy glare will prove impotent against whatever message Kanjur Paljor has brought.

Paljor says, “Your Holiness, I beg your infinite pardon.”

“Tell me.”

He looks at Ian and then, in petition, at me again. “I’d prefer to deliver this news to you alone, Your Holiness.”

“Regard my agent’s simultaneous presence and absence as an enacted mystery or koan,” I tell Paljor. “He speaks a helpful truth.”

Paljor nods and seizes my free hand. “About fifteen hours ago, I found a serious navigational anomaly while running a fuel-tank check. Before bringing the problem to you, I ran some figures to make sure that I hadn’t made a calculation error; that I wasn’t just overreacting to a situation of no real consequence.”

He pauses to touch my Kyipa’s blanket. “How much technical detail do you want, Your Holiness?”

“Right now, none. Give me the gist.”

“For a little over one hundred and twenty hours, the Kalachakra traveled at its top speed at a small angle off our requisite heading.”

“How? Why?”

“Before I answer, let me assure you that we have since corrected for this deviation and that we’ll soon run true again.”

“What do you mean, ‘soon’? Why don’t we ‘run true’ now?”

“We do, Your Holiness, in the sense that First Officer Photrang has set us on an efficient angle to intercept our former heading to Guge. But we don’t, in the sense that we still must compensate for the unintended divergence.”

Ian Kilkhor says, “Tell Her Holiness why this ‘unintended divergence’ constitutes one huge fucking threat.”

Totally appalled, I look back at my bodyguard and friend. “I thought you weren’t here! Or did you leave behind just that part of you that views me as an unteachable idiot? Go away, Mr. Kilkhor. Get out.”

Kilkhor has the decency and good sense to do as I command. Kyipa, unsettled by my outburst, squirms fretfully on my shoulder.

“The danger,” I tell Kanjur Paljor, “centers on fuel expenditure. If we’ve gone too far off course, we won’t have enough antimatter ice left to reach Guge. Have I admissibly described our peril?”

“Yes, Your Holiness.” He doesn’t fall to one knee, like a magus beside the infant deity Christ, but crouches so that our faces are nearly at a level. “I believe—I think—we have just enough fuel to complete our journey, but at this late stage it could prove a close thing. If there’s another emergency requiring an additional course correction—”

“We might not arrive at all.”

Paljor nods, and consolingly pats Kyipa’s playing-card-sized back.

“How did this happen?”

“Human error, I’m afraid.”

“Tell me what sort.”

“Lack of attention to the telltales that should have prevented this divergence from our heading.”

“Whose error? Captain Xao’s?”

“Yes, Your Holiness. Nima says his mental state has deteriorated badly over these past few weeks. What she first thought eccentricities, she now views as evidence of age-related mental debilities. He stays awake so long and endures so much stress. And he puts too much faith in the alleged reliability of our electronic systems.”

Also, he came to feel that creating a design for my Palace of Hope mandala took precedence over his every other duty on a strut-ship programmed to fly to its destination, with the result that he put himself on auto-pilot too.

“Where is he now?” I ask Paljor.

“Sleeping, under medical supervision—not ursidormizine slumber but bed rest, Your Holiness.”

I thank Paljor and dismiss him.

Clutching Kyipa to me, I nuzzle her sweet-smelling face.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell Nima to advise her flight crew that they must remain up-phase ghosts until we know for sure the outcomes of Xao’s inattention and our efforts to correct for its potential consequences: a headlong rush to nowhere.

Without benefit of lock belts, my daughter, Kyipa kicks in her bassinet. I seldom worry about her floating off during AG outages because she loves such spells of weightlessness. She uses them to exercise her limbs—admittedly, with no strengthening resistance—and to explore our stateroom, which boasts Buddha figurines, wall hangings, filigreed star charts, miniature starship models, and other interesting items. At five months, she thinks herself a big finch or a pygmy porpoise. She undulates about, giggling at the currents she creates, or, the AG restored, inches along with her pink tongue tip between her lips and her bum rising and falling like a migrating molehill.

As Dalai Lama (many argue), I should never have borne this squiddle, but Karen, Simon, Jetsun, and Jetsun’s mama might disagree, and all contribute to her care. Even Minister T acknowledges that conceiving and bearing her has confirmed my sense of the karmic correctness of my Dalai Lamahood more powerfully than any other event to date. Because of this happy squiddle girl, I do stronger, better, holier work.

To those who tsk-tsk when they see Kyipa squirming in my arms, I say:

“This child is my Wheel of Time, my mandala, who has as one purpose to further my evolving enlightenment. Her other purposes she will learn and fulfill in time. So set aside your resentments so that you may more easily fulfill yours.”

But although I don’t fret about Kyipa during gravity outages, I do worry about her future . . . and ours.

Will we safely arrive at the Gliese 581 system? Of the fifty antimatter-ice tanks with which (long before my birth) we started our journey, we’ve used up and discarded thirty-eight, and Paljor says that we have exhausted nearly half of the thirty-ninth tank, with over five and a half years remaining until our ETA in orbit around Guge. From the outside, our ship begins to resemble a skeleton of its outbound self, the bones of a picked-clean fish. And if the Kalachakra makes it at all, as Paljor has speculated, it will slice the issue scarily close.

I stupidly assumed that our eventual shift into deceleration mode would work in our favor, but Paljor cautioned that slowing our strut-ship—so that we do not overshoot Guge, like a golf putt running up to but not beyond its cup—will require more fuel than I thought. Later he showed me math proving that reaching Guge will require “an incident-free approach”—because our antimatter reserves, the fail-safe reserves with which we began our flight, have already dissolved into the ether slipstreaming by the magnetic field coils generating our plasma shield out front.

Still, I don’t believe in shielding our human freight from issues bearing on our survival. Therefore, I’ve had Minister T announce the fact of this crisis to everyone up-phase and working. Thankfully, general panic has not ensued. Instead, crew members brainstorm stopgap strategies for conserving fuel, and the monks and nuns in U-Tsang pray and chant. Soon enough, when we begin to brake, everyone will arise again, shake off the fog of hibernizing, and learn the truth about our final approach. Then every deck will team with ghosts preparing to orbit Guge; to assay the habitable wedges between its sun-stuck face and its bleaker sides; and to decide which of the two wedges is better suited to settlement.

Years in transit: 102

Computer Logs of Our Relucant Dalai Lama, age 27

Xao Songda, our deposed captain, died just twelve hours ago. Although Kyipa celebrated her first birthday last week, the man never laid eyes on her.

Xao’s “bed rest” turned into pathological pacing and harangues unintelligible to anyone ignorant of Mandarin Chinese. These behaviors—symptomatic of an aggressive type of senility unknown to us—our medicos treated with tranqs, placebos (foolishly, I guess), experimental diets, and long walks through the commons of Kham Bay. Nothing calmed him or eased the intensity of his gibbering tirades. I had so wanted Kyipa to meet our captain (or the avatar of the self preceding this sorry incarnation), but I could not risk exposing her to one of his abusive rants.

It bears stating, though, that everyone aboard Kalachakra, knowing the sacrifices that the captain made for us, forgives him his navigation error. All showed him the honor, courtesy, and patience that he deserved for these sacrifices. Nima Photrang, who assumed his captaincy, believes he and Satya Gyatso suffered similar personality disintegrations, albeit in different ways. Sakya used Tantric practices to end his life and Xao Songda fell to an Alzheimer’s-like scourge, but the effects of sleep deprival, suppressed anxiety, and overwork ultimately caused their deaths.

Xao created designs for my mandala competition, I think, as a way to decompress from these burdens. During the last hours of his illness, Ian Kilkhor searched his quarters for anything that could help us fathom his disease and preserve our memory of him as the intrepid Tibetan Buddhist who carried us within three lights of our destination. However, Ian returned to me with two hundred hand-drawn sketches and computer-assisted designs for my Palace of Hope mandala.

These “designs” appalled and saddened us. The ones Xao hand-drew resemble big multicolored Rorschach blots, and those stemming from his cyber-design programs look like geometrically askew fever dreams. All are pervaded with interlocking claws, jagged teeth, vermiform bodies, and occluded reptilian eyes. None could serve as a model for the mandala of my envisioning.

“I’m sorry,” Ian said. “The old guy seems to have swallowed the pituitary gland of a Komodo dragon.”

So, given our fuel situation and Captain Xao’s death, I’ve declared a moratorium on mandala-design creation.

Now there is a strong movement afoot—a respectful one—to eject Captain Xao Songda’s corpse into the void, one more human collop for the highballing dark. As I’ve already noted here, we’ve used this procedure many times before, as a practice coincident with Buddha Dharma and, in this case, as one befitting a helmsman of Xao’s stature. But I resist this seeming consensus in favor of a better option: taking the captain to Guge and setting his sinewy body out on an escarpment there, to blacken in its gales and scale in its thaws, our first sacrificial alms to the planet.

One work cycle past, Captain Photrang began to brake the Kalachakra. We are four years out from Gliese 581g, and Kanjur Paljor tells me that unless a meteorite penetrates our plasma shield or some other anomalous disaster befalls us, we will reach our destination. Ian notes that we will coast into planetary orbit like a vehicle with an internal combustion engine chugging into its pit on fumes. I don’t altogether twig the analogy, but I do get its gist. Alleluia! If only time passed more quickly.

Meanwhile, I keep Kyipa awake and ignore those misguided ghosts advising me to ease her into grave-cave sleep so that time will pass more quickly for her. Jetsun and I enjoy her far too much to send her down. More important, if she stays up-phase most of the rest of our journey, she will learn and grow; and when we descend to the surface of Guge with her, she will have a sharper mind and better motor skills at five or six than any long-term sleeper of roughly similar age.

Every day, every hour, my excitement intensifies. And our ship plows on.

Years in transit: 106

Computer Logs of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama, age 31

Maintenance preoccupies nearly everyone aboard. In less than a week, our strut-ship will rendezvous with Guge and orbit its oblate, sun-locked mass. Then we will make several sequential descents to and returns from “The Land of Snow” aboard our lander, the Yak Butter Express.

Jetsun will serve as shuttle pilot for one of these first excursions and as backup on another. He and others perform daily checks on the vehicle in its hangar harnesses, just as other techs strive to ensure the reliability of every mechanical and human component. Our hopes and our anxieties contend. At my urging, the Bodhisattva of U-Tsang go from deck to deck assisting in our labors and transmitting positive energies to every bay and to all those at work in them.

Twelve hours after Captain Photrang eased Kalachakra into orbit around Guge, Minister T comes to me to report that the Yellow Hat artists in U-Tsang have finished a mandala based on a design that they, not I, chose as our most esteemed entry. Eagerly, I ask whom these Bodhisattva selected.

Lucinda Gomez, a teenager from Amdo Bay, has taken the laurel.

Neddy asks the monks to transport the mandala in its pie-shaped shield to Bhava Park, a commons here in Kham Bay, and they do. A bird camera in the park transmits the mandala’s image to public screens and to vidped units everywhere. Intricate and colorful, it sits on an easel amid a host of tables and many happily milling Kalachakrans. Because we’re celebrating our arrival, I don’t watch on a screen but stand in Bhava Park before the thing itself. Banners and prayer flags abound. I hail the excited Lucinda Gomez and all the artist monks, congratulate them, and also speak to many onlookers, who heed my words smilingly.

The Yellow Hats chant verses of consecration that affirm their fulfillment of my charge and then extend to everyone the blessings of Hope and Community implicit in the mandala’s labyrinthine central Palace. Kyipa, almost six, reaches out to touch the bottom of the encased mandala.

“This is the prettiest,” she says.

She has never before seen a finished mandala in its full artifactual glory.

Then the artist monks start to carry the shield from its easel to a tabletop, there to insert narrow tubes into it and send the mandala’s fixed grains flying with focused blasts of air—to symbolize, as tradition dictates, the primacy of impermanence in our lives. But before they reach the table, I lift my hand.

“We won’t destroy this sand mandala,” I announce, “until we’ve planted a viable settlement on Guge.”

And everyone around us in Bhava Park cheers. The monks restore the mandala to its easel, a ton of colored confetti drops from suspended bins above us, music plays, and people sing, dance, eat, laugh, and mingle.

Kyipa, holding her hands up to the drifting paper and plastic flakes, beams at me ecstatically.

In our shuttle-cum-lander, we glide from the belly of Kham Bay toward Gliese 581g, better known to all aboard the Kalachakra as Guge, “The Land of Snow.”

From here, the amiable dwarf star about which Guge swings resembles the yolk of a colossal fried egg, more reddish than yellow-orange, with a misty orange corona about it like the egg’s congealed albumin. I’ve made it sound ugly, but Gliese 581 looks edible to me and quickly trips my hunger to reach the planet below.

As for Guge, it gleams beneath us like an old coin.

In our first week on its surface, we have already built a tent camp in one of the stabilized climate zones of the nearside terminator. Across the tall visible arc of that terminator, the planet shows itself marbled by a bluish and slate-gray crust marked by fingerlike snowfields and glacier sheets.

On the ground, our people call their base camp Lhasa and their rugged territory all about it New Tibet. In response to this naming and to the alacrity with which our fellow Kalachakrans adopted it, Minister T wept openly.

I find I like the man. Indeed, I go down for my first visit to the surface with his blessing. (Simon, my father, already bivouacs there, to investigate ways to grow barley, winter wheat, and other grains in the thin air and cold temperatures.) Kyipa, of course, remains for now on our orbiting strut-ship—in Neddy’s stateroom, which he now shares openly with the child’s grandmother, Karen Bryn Bonfils. Neddy and Karen Bryn dote on my daughter shamelessly.

Our descent to Lhasa won’t take long, but, along with many others in this second wave of pioneers, I drop into a meditative trance and focus on a photograph that Neddy gave me after the mandala ceremony at the arrival celebration. Indeed, I recall his words as he presented it:

“Soon after you became a teenager, Greta, I started to doubt your commitment to the Dharma and your ability to stick.”

“How tactful of you to wait till now to tell me,” I said, smiling.

“But I never lost a deeper layer of faith. Today I can say that all my unspoken doubt has burned off like a summer meadow mist.” He gave me the worn photo (not a hardened d-cube) that now engages my attention.

In it, a Tibetan boy of eight or nine faces the viewer with a broad smile. He holds before him, also facing the viewer, a baby girl with rosy cheeks and eyes so familiar that I tear up in consternation and joy. The eyes belong to my predecessor’s infant sister, who didn’t live long after the capture of this image.

The eyes also belong to Kyipa.

I meditate on this conundrum, richly. Soon, after all, the Yak Butter Express will set down in New Tibet.

Originally published as “Twenty Lights to ‘The Land of Snow’” in Going Interstellar, edited by Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt.

The Charge and the Storm

An Owomoyela

Petra was already in a bad mood, not that that said much. Her good moods had become increasingly apocryphal over recent years. But today there was a lightning storm outside her Faraday cage of an office, and she could feel it like a second psyche, inhuman and insentient and laid over her thoughts.

And today, when she walked into her office, there was a familiar man sitting on the chair before her desk. Amad.

She stopped, a step in from the doorway. Amad turned, looking back at her over his shoulder. He had a small device in one hand, and while Petra could sense the stream of information flowing from it, the mental interference from the lightning storm drowned it out.

“I’ve jammed your communication lines,” Amad said.

Petra gave him a withering look and headed toward her desk. “You think that’ll keep me from contacting security?”

“For a couple minutes, yes,” Amad said. “We need to talk, Sulai Tabov.”

“No,” Petra said. “You need to be arrested.”

She settled into her desk chair, bringing her interface up with a sweep of her hand. He had jammed her communications lines, the bastard. Clever bastard—she had a very nice system, full of redundancies and adaptive compensators—but he’d always been clever. Probably always been a bastard, too, though she’d looked past that, once.

“It’s about Nash,” Amad said.

“He needs to be arrested, too.”

Amad made a frustrated noise. “Look,” he said. “Knowing there’s no love lost between the two of you, and knowing that I would rather hang myself by my thumbs from the lightning towers than come ask you for help, I expect you to know what it means that I’m here and I’m asking. This is about Nash’s life.”

A cold anger sparked into being at the bottom of Petra’s stomach, ringing against the lightning she could feel outside. There was no sound of thunder in here, no electrical interference except the noise inside her head, but her fingers twitched, as though urging her to become a conduit. A lightning tower herself. She could string Amad up by his thumbs right here on her own.

“I have,” she said, “on multiple occasions, attempted to help Nash fix his life. On the last occasion, he sold Su secrets to violent revolutionaries and got my wife kidnapped. I’m not interested in trying again.”

“Yeah, great,” Amad said. He stood up from the chair, almost started pacing, then caught himself. Petra watched with a knife-sharp interest, taking in the tension in his shoulders, the tremor concealed in his hands. Amad liked to think he was better at being unreadable than he was. “Leaving aside your ignorant and well-intentioned efforts to turn him into a good little colonizee, this isn’t about fixing his life. It’s about saving it. Are you going to help, or do you honestly think he should die for screwing up and screwing you over?”

Yes, Petra thought, but it was a knee-jerk thought, more spite than sense. And it was a pretty damn big screw-over, her brain retorted, and it took a moment for her to blink and realize what Amad had said.

“What,” she managed, the anger still smoldering but neatly derailed.

Amad glared at her, then took a deep breath. “The Su,” he said, voice bitter and brittle, “have decided that he’s a detriment to the colony and should be excised. However, they will accept his abject submission to a citizen in good standing, to whom reparations are owed, in lieu of his death.”

The anger in Petra’s gut gave a long, uneasy turn. “No one else is willing to speak for him?”

“No one the Su are inclined to listen to.”

“Doesn’t surprise me.” She watched Amad. As an afterthought, she gestured away her interface. Right or wrong—and she felt that it was wrong, for all that knowing that didn’t stop her—she wasn’t going to fix the lines, call in the authorities, turn Amad in. “You came to me because you had nowhere else to go.”

Amad didn’t bother confirming her comment.

“And what makes you think I’d agree to this?”

Amad’s fingers curled around his jammer. “You used to be friends.”

“Used to be.”

“You’re not that heartless,” Amad said.

He was right. The Su had a casual disregard for life. If the life in question didn’t serve their ambitions, they had no compunctions about casting it aside.

Petra, human, balked at that.

Yes, she resented Nash. Hated him, it felt like. She would have liked to see him suffer for screwing her over, years ago.

Seeing him die was a little much.

“Well.” The word left a taste like ozone in the back of her throat. It very nearly made her sick to her stomach, until she shoved it away, hunted out the control she’d developed to turn down her own feelings. “Then. What jurisdictor has him?”

Some of the tension leached out of Amad’s shoulders. Not all. “The information is here,” he said, and gestured a data sigil to her interface. Petra could feel it blink into availability; text, no more than a few lines. Amad said All the information; Petra heard everything you need to know, and her fingers itched for the comm line again. One call and she could very easily ruin Amad’s life, if not end it.

Him and Nash. Always so eager to use her. Sudamn opportunists, both.

She accepted the transfer. Amad backed toward the door, the jammer in his hand coming up like a talisman.

“I’m sorry about your wife,” he offered. “I—you know, I liked her. We never intended for anything to happen to her.”

“Ex-wife, now,” Petra said. “And what you intended doesn’t matter much, does it?”

Amad made a noise like he was the one who should resent all of this. In his mind, maybe so. “Can’t say it’s been a pleasure seeing you, Sulai Tabov,” he said. “Shouldn’t happen again.”

Then he vanished into the halls.

After a moment, the comm lines cleared.

The jurisdictor module was in a part of the colony Petra never visited. Other, more skilled, biologically Su Makers maintained the physical mechanisms of that part of the colony, and there was nothing in that area that Petra needed to concern herself with personally: the organs that recycled air and water and processed waste back around into nourishment; raw material intake from the ruined outside world; corpse handling. And the jurisdictors, where aberrants against the colony peace were held and, if necessary, excised.

The Su had a particular sense of utility.

One Su was waiting outside the cluster, her antennules moving in the still air. “Sulai Tabov,” she said, each word humming out of the speech synthesizer embedded on the underside of her head.

How, exactly, all the Su managed to recognize her and her exact place in society was an open question, and one Petra didn’t bother asking. She had her suspicions, but it didn’t matter much, so long as their system worked.

Unfortunately, she had no such skill when it came to the Su. Fortunately, the Su hierarchy was stiff enough that she knew what rank would be standing here, acting as custodian to the condemned.

“Sudaeg,” she said. “You have Sudaeg Nash Carder?”

The Su gestured assent. “You would like to take ownership of the aberrant?”

Saying No, I’d like nothing of the sort, but I seem to be obligated to would mean that the Su would only hear the no. “I would,” Petra said.

The Su didn’t question the statement or ask for any justification. Petra had standing among the Su; Petra was owed reparations from Nash; Petra, therefore, had the right to claim his life. The Su never questioned the exercise of rights. The Su did not believe that if one had the right to do something that thing could be morally questionable.

Sometimes Petra wished she could see it the same way.

“This way, Sulai Tabov,” the Su said, and unfolded her legs beneath her. At her full height, she stood nearly half a meter taller than Petra: an armored mass, through whom hummed a faint bioelectricity that Petra could feel at the corner of her mind. Stronger than a human’s but too faint and too subtle to control.

The Su led her back into the module. Only one of the cells was occupied, though another had been sealed off—and through its translucence, Petra could see a dark shape, rounded toward the extremities and just about the size of her own torso. Someone, human or Su, who had been excised already, their body being digested by the biomat cell walls.

She turned away from it.

“The aberrant is here,” the Su announced, pressing claws and her tarsal pad into a receptor. It sensed her energy, or her pheromones, or simply pressure—though Petra doubted it was simply pressure—and a membrane dilated open, revealing the figure inside.

Nash was looking worse for wear, Petra thought. The years hadn’t treated him well, or maybe it was just sitting in a cell that might devour him that had him looking grey of mien, thin, and uneasy. His head snapped up when the membrane retracted, and a flood of emotion passed through his expression—mortification, horror, desperate relief. “Petra—”

“Amad found me,” Petra said. She could hear her voice resonating in her head, oddly cold, almost alien. There was a cold pressure constricting her lungs, too. She didn’t let herself think about it. “Come on.”

Then she turned on her heel and walked out again. It took Nash a moment to scramble to his feet and follow, the Su coming along after him.

“How did you end up with a death sentence?” Petra asked. The Su didn’t give a damn about life, but out of respect for their human constituents, they usually didn’t jump straight to excision from the colony. Not these days. The fact that they had with Nash—a man who, despite his many faults, was neither violent nor destructive—suggested that he’d annoyed them more than he’d ever annoyed her, and that was a feat.

Nash hurried to keep up with her, trying to put a few paces’ distance between himself and the Su custodian. “I wasn’t expecting you to come save me,” he said.

“Neither was I.” Petra increased her own pace, focusing on the crisp clip of every footfall. The rhythm gave her something to focus on that wasn’t the lightning storm and wasn’t Nash. “What did you do, Nash?”

“It’s complicated,” he said. And then they were at the gate, and the Su moved in front of them and took a collar from a cache on the wall. She regarded Petra with characteristic nonchalance.

“I will put this on the aberrant,” she said. “For you.”

Petra nodded acquiescence.

Nash stiffened, but he didn’t resist as the band fastened around his neck, the inner lining adhering to his skin with a soft schup. “In typical situations I would format the collar myself,” the Su said. “However, you possess the skills to format it yourself, Sulai. You are free to request that I format it for you.”

“Thank you, no,” Petra said. “I understand the technology.”

“You are free to return him for excision at any time. You are to format the collar before removing him from the jurisdictor. May I serve you otherwise?”

Petra gestured her to leave, and the Su made an answering movement of assent and acknowledgement. Then she turned and walked away, folding herself down into repose at the door again.

Petra turned to Nash, who looked back at her with as much mistrust as he’d shown the Su. Unsurprising. To listen to Amad, Petra was half-Su anyway, and she knew who Nash had thrown his lot in with.

After a moment, though, he forced himself to relax. Put on a smile that was as fake as anything Petra had seen. “Try not to electrocute me?”

“It will be an effort,” Petra said, and took the collar in her hands.

She could feel it resonating against the colony around them; feel it asking the colony walls for information, catching the signals the walls sent out. The colony was never quiet, to Petra—it was always murmuring to itself, bright paths of directed energy and a haze of signals. But the loudest things to her senses were the flashes of lightning, carving brilliant but transient pathways through the atmosphere. The electricity running through the channels in the colony was dull by comparison. Hard to focus on. And the collar was fainter still.

And Nash’s closeness made it hard to concentrate, too. They’d enjoyed an easy physicality when they’d been on good terms: a clap on the back, a nudge with the elbow, a warm presence against the flank or in repose against the chest. Now, Petra couldn’t help but feel that she shouldn’t be standing so near, that Nash might try to seize her by the arm or pick her pocket or loop an arm over her shoulders. Try to trick her into believing that they were still friends.

She closed her eyes and wrote permissions into the collar.

Every circuit in the collar, live or dead, mapped onto one of the halls in the colony; all she needed to do was energize the ones she needed. Like trying to draw a line of sand in a statue of glass capillaries while wind howled through cracks in the habitat. But she got the basics done with the same determination she applied to all of her work. The lightning storms were nothing new, nor were the headaches or the brain-fog that accompanied them, and while it might slow her down, it wouldn’t incapacitate her.

She let her hands drop and stepped back, away from the sound of Nash’s breath, the heat of his body. “Dare I ask where I’m allowed to go?” Nash asked, with a kind of wary wryness.

“For now,” Petra said, “the halls from here to my quarters. I requisitioned a room across from mine. You can go from there to the baths, the libraries, and the commissary, using the most direct routes between all four. I’ll figure out more later.”

“Thanks,” Nash said. By his tone, he wasn’t sure that was the correct response.

She’d saved him from death, and put him under house arrest. Petra wasn’t sure there was a correct response. “I have work to do,” she said. “The room will open for you. We’ll talk later.”

She turned, and Nash said “Wait,” and she turned back, already seething. She hadn’t expected to get away that easily, no. But it would have been nice. At least Nash caught that and made an appeasing gesture. “Sorry. I don’t mean to keep you. But there’s stuff in my lodgings, out by the ship corridor. If I could—”

“I’ll ask a sudaeg to get it,” Petra said. “Forgive me if I don’t feel like letting you go back there.”

“Right,” Nash said.

Petra watched him. “The collar will kill you if you stray too far from the path.”

“Right,” Nash said again and made a stiff, Su gesture of apology. It had an overtone of self-parody to it. “I won’t delay you any longer.”

Petra could have said something to that.

She didn’t.

She met Kaah at the juncture between the human First Cluster and the Su Brooding Cluster 9. Kaah gave no indication of how long she’d been waiting; she only crouched with an unconcerned stillness and with the smug self-assurance all Su seemed to carry with them.

Petra drew her fingers down from her forehead to her chin to indicate respect. “Hello, Sulai Kaah. How are we operating?”

Kaah echoed the gesture. “We have erected seven additional towers along the polar perimeter,” she said. She flicked her claws toward the wall, which beaded out a display and lit up with graphs. “We have an excess of energy, Sulai Petra. Now we must craft it. It interests me to create a new habitat in the Third Cluster. Do you agree?”

“It would behoove the colony,” Petra said. Third Cluster wasn’t yet overcrowded—the Su would never let it get to that point—but it was coming close, and Kaah at least saw creating more space as the natural answer. Being a human cluster, it would do more for colony harmony than the other answer, which was to curtail population growth outright.

In a race like the Su, where all reproduction was hierarchically decided, such an edict was non-notable. Among the human population, it was a call for rioting. Or for just the kind of separatism that Amad and his ilk espoused.

“I’ll follow,” Petra said, and Kaah uncurled her legs and paced off in Third Cluster’s direction—slowly, for a Su, in consideration of Petra’s shorter and fewer legs.

The Su had no real use for small talk, and so they walked mostly in silence. They passed one of the human commissaries and a number of dwellings—nearly all empty, as First Cluster housed those who worked directly with the Su, and the Su valued productive work more than they valued much else.

A hall or two into Third Cluster they passed a human woman with two boys who looked at Petra walking stride-along-stride with Kaah and seemed to come to her own unvoiced conclusions about that. Humans and Su lived together, but the pace and activities of their lives were so different as to make living together academic. There were only so many positions where a human would work alongside the Su.

Kaah turned her head, and made a superior greeting. “Hurem Omotoso,” she said. “Your children grow well?”

The woman’s eyes softened a bit, and she made a gesture of subordinate greeting—though the quirk of her lips, an expression interpretable by Petra but not Kaah, suggested she was playing along with propriety rather than moved by any genuine submission. “They do, thank you for asking, Sulai,” she said, then looked to Petra. “Sulai...?”

“Petra Tabov,” Petra said, and extended a hand. Omotoso took it.

“First time in Third Cluster?” Omotoso asked. “We don’t often rate two Makers.”

“We’re building an expansion,” Petra said.

“Long time coming,” Omotoso said, and made an offhand gesture of appropriate respect toward Kaah. Petra gestured recognition and acceptance—the Su didn’t understand speaking like this across hierarchy. But that Petra accepted it satisfied them. So long as Petra gestured acceptance, Omotoso would not face any penalties for hierarchical transgression.

It nagged at the edge of Petra’s mind, these days.

“I’ve got a third at home,” Omotoso said, tousling the tight curls of one of her son’s hair. “People get jealous, you know, and there’s no room. So even another level would be godsent; my eldest, you know, she wants to move out, start her own family, not inherit my house. But she doesn’t want to live in another Cluster. Well.” Omotoso eyed Petra, thoughtfully. “First Cluster, maybe, but she’d have to marry up.”

Or wrong someone, Petra thought. Wrong them and contrive to be taken in by them. She wondered what Nash’s living space had been like—if he, like Amad, took pride in his cracked and patched and atmosphere-leaking quarters in the old human ship. She wondered if he would rhapsodize about the noise of the hull, how it sang that it wasn’t designed for atmosphere.

Humans, Amad liked to say, and human inventions, adapt well to circumstance.

The Su adapted well to necessity. Circumstance took much longer.

“It is a wise use of resources,” Kaah said, and gestured certainty. “Act well, Hurem Omotoso.”

“As you shall, Sulai Kaah,” Omotoso said, and nodded to Petra as well, and continued on her way.

For a moment Petra wanted, irrationally, to stop her. Ask, for all their failings, you’re glad to live with the Su, aren’t you? They’re different, yes, but this is possible. It doesn’t have to be thrown away.

But this was not an argument to be had with strangers. Petra’s soft desperation was her own.

She followed Kaah to the access nub at the end of a terminal hall.

Kaah, without ceremony, pressed her claws into the wall at the nub, and a stream of energy surged through her. Petra stepped up and pressed her hands into the wall across the nub from her, and closed her eyes, and called up the lightning.

The nub expanded like a bubble, stretching out into the atmosphere and accreting material. Far beneath their feet, toward the center of the colony, the colony’s organs chewed at the mineral substrate beneath them and reprocessed it into usable form; now, crops and stomachs full of smart matter disgorged their contents and sent it crawling in waves toward the Makers’ call. The static matter of the existing colony walls hummed in recognition.

Petra could feel every one of them echoing in her awareness. As though she was one limb of a colony and the walls were part of her body, sluggish and slow but movable with nothing but thought and energy and effort.

The nub grew to encompass them, Kaah and Petra both, flooding the area with oxygen-rich atmosphere and moving them out of the insulation of the colony, into the maelstrom of storm and smart matter, where stability sat behind them and potential all around. And together, Kaah and Petra began to Make.

The colony had always grown like a fern, uncoiling—and Petra found it hard to imagine ferns and fauna growing outside. Still, she had toured the oxygen facilities like most classes of her generation, and ferns grew in some variety in the gardens. The human colony ship had brought its own miniature ecosystem for air purification, and the Su had been happy to integrate that system into their colony and research it for any new information on how to optimize the plants they’d scavenged from their own vanished biomes. Petra didn’t visit the facilities often, but she remembered them in brilliant greens, reds brighter than blood, yellows cleaner and softer than the atmosphere outside.

After spending enough time in her head—or casting her thoughts outward, forming the colony walls—it took time for color to seep back into Petra’s awareness. She could see the walls, but they were the meaningless shapes they’d be if she’d stared at a spot until her eyes canceled its contrast out.

But she came back to herself. In time.

Here in Third Cluster, there were patterns inlaid in the floor, murals, windows: all the things the human population did to make the colony habitable. There were windows through which you could see the roiling clouds—or the battered landscape, when the clouds lifted enough that the ghostly shapes of rocks and craters could be seen. Sometimes, Petra could see vast shapes moving in the distance, not quite the way the clouds moved, and wonder if they were some echo of the vanished ecosystem the Su had clambered out of.

Sometimes, Petra wondered what the hell the Su had done to this place.

Sometimes, she wondered what it had been like to be on that first ship, watching the gamble pay off. How they had felt as they saw their potential near-Earth resolve into a tangle of yellow clouds and fierce winds.

Petra had never been out through the old, crumbling habitat spaces that had covered the ship like a blanket. She had no reason to do so; the Su didn’t find the ship of much historical interest, and her parents hadn’t been willing to go through the hassle of compensating for the damaged environment in those areas. Suiting up, taking medical packs and lights, traveling out past the well-maintained central Su spaces to a ship that would never fly again. They had books, images, videos, holos, history preserved for digestion in everything but physical presence. The ship was roughly as real to her as Earth was.

Nothing like the colony, solid and present under her shaking limbs, a vast map of power and potential to her sensing mind. She could lean back into it, let it soak up the tremors in her muscles. Her fine motor control was shot. Humans hadn’t been meant to shape this kind of energy.

But Petra among them had been made. One of the first attempts, a grand experiment toward the full participation of humanity in the colony. Amad had said once that that privilege made her uncaring—You’ve got yours, so fuck the rest of us—but Petra couldn’t breathe without the awareness that she was judged by the Su as a possibility. She’d been representing humanity in the court of Su opinion for her entire productive life.

Sulai Kaah had finished her own work, and turned to Petra, forelimbs crossing over each other, out of the way. “You are well?” she asked.

She’d asked a thousand times before, and would ask a thousand times again. So long as they worked on the same projects. “I will be,” Petra said.

Sulai Kaah gestured understanding. “Our work will benefit many,” she said.

“I look forward to its completion,” Petra answered, and with their goodbyes said, Kaah wandered off.

Petra’s work had a way of scouring all the petty day-to-day concerns of her life out of her mind. She’d become used to coming home feeling drained, pleasantly empty—at least, empty in a way she could convince herself was pleasant, because none of the pollution in her mind, the grudges and doubts and recriminations, seemed to survive.

Unfortunately, it looked like the business with Nash was more persistent than the day-to-day annoyances of being her. She pushed it away—It’s done, I’ve made my decision, it’s nothing to do with me until he starts something—and then she rounded the last curve in the corridor to see Ilen walking out of her quarters.

An uneasy stiffness went up Petra’s spine. She’d never removed Ilen’s access permissions from her doors—she’d always said Ilen was welcome any time. But seeing her there, emerging, unannounced, hooked jealousy into her diaphragm and tugged.

Ilen saw her and pursed her lips before forcing them into a smile. “Petra,” she said, and crossed the hall and took Petra’s shoulders. Petra tried to relax them. “We need to talk.”

“It’s good to see you,” Petra said, though woodenly.

“I wish I saw you more often,” Ilen said.

I’m sure, Petra thought, and her diaphragm tugged again, insistently. But you don’t come by, do you? Not until Nash winds up here.

“I wish you did,” she said.

It wasn’t Ilen’s fault, after all. Ilen wasn’t the one who’d ended things between them. Ilen wasn’t the one who’d established a carefully constructed distance, measured out degrees of separation like they were insulators. That was all on Petra’s head.

The jealousy didn’t care if Petra had no one to blame but herself.

“Coffee?” Ilen asked.

Petra bit on nothing. “I’ve probably just made some more enemies.”

“And I’ve never cared. Coffee?”

There wasn’t any question, really. Petra nodded and gestured along down the hall. “Please.”

* * *

The corridors in this section were all separated into levels, with slopes up at the perimeter and at places that had been the perimeter before colony growth had overtaken it. That was how you could tell it was a human sector—at least, it was one of the ways. The Su had no issues with clambering up and down wherever they found it most expedient, not caring much whether one room shared an elevation with another chamber adjacent to it. But they’d designed these sectors after the floors-stacked-atop-each-other layout of the human ship.

The commissary was little more than a food receptacle with an open chamber adjoined to it. A colonist could go and select the food they wanted and eat communally, if they so chose. The chairs and tables were a human invention; the space to prepare food, and the modules that heated or cooled food on demand, had been Su gestures of goodwill to accommodate human taste. The Su didn’t have the breadth of culinary aesthetics that the human population had.

Petra and Ilen went to a hot receptacle and got bulbs of coffee—a thin, dark liquid that tasted vegetative and burnt. She had to wonder if it bore any resemblance to the coffee the colonists had remembered from Earth; if this was a replica, Su ingenuity and human gengineering, or just some poor substitute carrying a name that meant almost nothing.

“I don’t want to talk about Nash,” Petra said, and found a table. This commissary was empty; in general, the people with rooms in this area tended to have nicer places to eat.

Ilen followed her, but paused at her words. “Neither do I,” she admitted. “But, you know, you shut me down when it’s not about business. Nash is business.”

Despite the heat of the coffee in her hands, despite the sensation of lightning over the habitat, Petra felt cold. “Why is Nash your business?”

“Because he threatens colony harmony,” Ilen said, “and my rank theoretically obliges me to be conscious of that.”

Petra blinked at her, then cracked a thin smile. “How long did it take you to come up with that excuse?”

“Oh, I’ve been holding it in my pocket,” Ilen admitted. “Not that it’s any less true.”

“You’re not a social engineer. You’re a medical worker.”

“And you’re a construction specialist, Sulai,” Ilen pointed out. “Not a warden. Or a rehabilitator. Looks like today’s the day we wake up with new vocations.”

Petra set her coffee on the table.

Ilen hadn’t taken a seat yet, and she didn’t. Instead, she came around the table and pressed her hands into Petra’s shoulders. And then she pressed, her Su-engineered powers coming down through Petra like a wave.

Petra could sense the lightning, sense the chattering patterns of electricity racing through the walls, the floor, here and there through the air. But none of it was like the golden warmth of Ilen’s hands and Ilen’s power, moving through her. Putting right, it felt, all the cells that had been excited or singed by Petra’s work.

Petra melted, sinking onto the table with a mew. “Ilen...”

“You haven’t been taking care of yourself,” Ilen pointed out. Petra grimaced, though the expression melted away.

“I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“So’s the pitted, pock-marked ground,” Ilen said. “That means nothing.”

Then she ducked and pressed her lips against Petra’s jaw. Petra caught her breath.

“I don’t want to talk about Nash,” Ilen said, and Petra felt her shoulders trying to stiffen up again, but the tension was chased away by Ilen’s hands. “I want to talk about you. Do you know what you’re doing?”

Petra let out a weak laugh. “Amad came to me,” she said, and felt Ilen’s fingers pause on her muscles. “Nash was going to be executed. No one else in the colony was going to speak for him. Can you believe it?”

A moment passed before Ilen said, “No, actually. He must have gotten a lot better at making enemies. But we’re talking about you, Pet—”

“Once I knew about it,” Petra said. She tried to make her voice like the end of an argument. “If I knew about it and didn’t stop it, I’d be complicit in his death. Or I could stop it and end up owning the man. Those were my choices. Kill him or own him.”

“You still blame him—” Ilen started.

Petra pulled herself out of the chair, out of Ilen’s grip. The sense of the storm closed in around her awareness again, an angry backdrop. It felt like coming home to herself. She turned to look Ilen in the eyes. “You don’t?”

“Pet,” Ilen said. She stepped forward, bringing them almost body-to-body, and cradled Petra’s head in carefully poised fingers. She washed away the chaos of the lightning again. “All right. Your choices are rotten. But you’re going to burn yourself to death in anger here, if you don’t end up killing him yourself. Something has to change.”

“If you have any suggestions,” Petra said.

Ilen said nothing.

“Thought not,” Petra said, but it was difficult to be mad at her. Especially difficult when Ilen’s hands, Ilen’s power, carved out a safe, quiet spot in Petra’s head.

Petra leaned forward, slipped her own hands onto Ilen’s shoulders, slid them down toward her elbows. Tried not to feel like her hands, this contact between them, was a veiled threat.

Ilen—Suva Ilen, highest rank in the colony, could reach into a person’s body and direct, in broad strokes, the growth of cells, the patterns of immune response, the firing of synapses. Sulai Petra, one rank below as the Su recognized it, could only control the lightning.

A strong skill, a Maker skill, when it came to directing the responsive material of the habitats, feeding the biomat infrastructure with power. The Suva, Su Fathers, could create new Su life, but the Makers could control the colony.

More people than the Su valued that.

Petra could reach into the sky and blast lightning through Ilen. No matter the insulation in the walls, no matter the carefully constructed cages she was afforded as a human Maker. There was always a conductive line from the towers through the habitats, because without the possibility of access, the Makers couldn’t make.

And while she’d never hurt Ilen—had never, would never—their being who and what they were had brought harm to Ilen. Petra’s willingness to take Nash into their lives had channeled hurt right to her. Like Petra was only the conduit through which harm coursed.

“Pet,” Ilen said. “I do love you. You know that, right?”

“I love you,” Petra said, and her hands tightened on Ilen’s arms. Her proximity, her sheer physical presence, drove Petra’s mind back to Ilen in cords, Ilen hidden in the atmosphere-leaking, ill-powered castoff modules of the colony, Ilen bound by conductive wire to her captor, her image on an encrypted and bounced data-stream, her life reduced to leverage. And Petra hammering out messages to a data address she suspected represented nothing.

Nash

please

what did you do, Nash?

please help, please

“I love you,” Petra said again, and Ilen didn’t protest her hands, fear-tight. “I’ll figure this out, Ilen. What happened before isn’t going to happen again.”

“Pet,” Ilen said, voice like mourning. She probably meant to say, That’s not what I’m afraid of, not at all, but Petra’s mind was circling around He won’t get away with it again. I’ll watch him. He ought to pay for what he’s done.

Nash was waiting for her at the doors to her quarters, and Petra pushed by him. He let out a breath and followed her in.

Petra considered ignoring him, but the consideration only lasted until she reached her desk. Nash wasn’t one to be ignored.

“Why are you here, Nash? Curious citizen, wants to learn more about Su resource allocation?”

“Will you listen to me?” Nash asked.

Petra let out a long breath, shaped like a growl. “That doesn’t seem to end well for me.”

Nash didn’t take the bait, and part of Petra was disappointed. “According to the Su I don’t have rights as a member of the colony,” Nash said. “Anything I want, anything I want to do, you have to specifically allow me to do it. The doors to the gardens won’t even open for me any more. Did you save me just so I could spend the rest of my life going from bed to baths to library and back again?”

“I saved you because Amad came into my office and jammed the comm lines,” Petra said, and dropped into her chair. Storm season meant the endless headaches of the lightning storms and the scrabbling emptiness she felt when Ilen’s hands weren’t on her shoulders, her temples, her hips. It also meant the abundant energy, refilling their reserves as fast as they could drain it, and that meant all the Makers were in a flurry to get the big projects done. For the benefit of the colony. Her fingers twitched.

The Third Cluster expansion would be something good. She could do something good. For colony harmony, to make life better, to carry them on into the next generation of improvements, negotiations, accommodations.

You’ve got yours, so screw the rest of us. She and Amad had had their share of hissing and spitting, coming to uneasy truces largely because of Nash. If it wasn’t for Nash now, Amad would never have come to see her. Probably wouldn’t have bothered spitting on her if she was on fire.

Like she was the one who’d done something to damage their friendship, and not him.

“What do you want?” she asked. “You want garden access?” She gestured up a console and skimmed her quarters’ logs with half her attention. As expected, Nash had made a few cursory access attempts. She hadn’t set up access for him, though, and it didn’t look like he’d had any success. And the comm lines showed no abnormalities; she doubted Amad had come in to see him.

If the Su had been willing to kill off Nash, Petra could only imagine what they’d do if they found Amad skulking about in colony territory.

“I want you to forgive me,” Nash admitted. “I want things to be okay between us again.”

So says the criminal to his mark, Petra thought. “Because I own you now.”

She could see flickers of Nash’s temper in the muscles of his face. Like he was the one who should be frustrated here. And yes, she could admit—the better part of her could admit—that he had reason: his freedoms all curtailed; his life bound up to someone who hated him, or was making a good go at hating him; no recourse but to play nice and hope for the mercy of someone he’d wronged.

The part of her that ran her thoughts and her opinions just said: well, that’s a perfectly mercenary reason, isn’t it?

“Because,” Nash said, “it kills me that this is what happened between us.”

And? Petra thought. “Your guilt,” she said, “is the outcome I care about the least.”

A door alert pinged her awareness.

Petra gave a half-voiced “Fuck,” and pulled herself up from her chair. Her body felt nerveless and rubbery, between the earlier Making and Ilen’s ministrations and the ongoing storm. She tried not to sway as she opened the door.

In the hallway stood a smaller Su, probably young. She drew her fingers from the top of her forehead down past her thorax: deep respect for a hierarchical superior. Sudaeg, then; just a worker. Petra gestured superior greeting. Then, because she could, because it was allowed, because she felt it, gestured annoyance and inquiry. The Su gestured back apology and necessity.

“There’s an anomaly at one of the Maker sites, Sulai Tabov,” she said. “We hoped to have your expertise.”

Petra nodded, resigned. “Show me the way.”

The anomaly itched in her awareness like a missing tooth. A dark spot in the paths of energy, like an insulated package attached to the collection lines. Not damage or disruption—something set with intent behind it.

Something that had made the Su seek out Petra, most senior of the human Makers, specifically, in lieu of a Su maker, closer or with more expertise.

Petra turned to the Sudaeg, the awareness settling in her stomach. “Have there been threats?”

The Su didn’t have membranes over their eyes that would allow them to blink. But the look that the Su gave her was somehow languorous, unsurprised, perhaps calling into question Petra’s own inquiry. “There are frequently threats, Sulai Tabov. The aberrant human elements wish the destruction of the colony.”

Not all of them, Amad would have argued. There are fringe elements in any movement. Most of us—the reasonable ones—just want independence.

It was the sort of distinction that abruptly stopped mattering to Petra when her wife was kidnapped. “Credible threats?” she asked.

“We do not monitor the human activity outside the bounds of the colony,” the Su answered.

As sentient creatures outside the colony limits, the human separatists were none of the Su’s business. Not much concept of natural security in a Su colony—they didn’t read human history, either. No sense of what to expect.

“The anomaly will be removed,” the Su said. “Do you anticipate that it will be dangerous?”

By which the Su meant, Should we send a Maker, who can quickly excise it and effect any repairs, or do we send a Worker, less skilled but more expendable? If it was a bomb—and the Su did have some experience with bombs; it resided in their historical awareness, if not their future planning—they would rather a Sudaeg die.

She stretched her awareness out again, trying to filter out the mental noise of the storms. The anomaly was a black box, and she felt out the currents around it. Energy flowed in, but not through. It was gathering up energy for something.

She turned her attention outward, along the line of the colony, feeling the ragged channels in the old halls that had grown around the human ship. They tingled in her awareness, like a sleeping limb halfway to nerve death; a few faint lines, pirated energy that fell below the thresholds the Su needed to care about it, enough to eke out a subsistence existence on.

Could be a battery. Energy was life in the colony; it’d be life on the ship, too. Fill up a battery at the height of storm season, and, if they calibrated carefully enough, the Su wouldn’t bother trying to shut them down. They could skim off the excess and power themselves through whatever they were planning now.

But the Su had noticed, which meant that someone had screwed up. Or the Su were meant to notice, and it was meant to have some meaning for them or prod them into some action.

Petra wasn’t a tactical thinker, especially not with the static of the storm, the static of Nash and her own emotions. She was a Maker. Her skills were in smart matter and architecture. She was human, yes, but her insight into the minds of human separatists had some serious failure points.

She gestured uncertainty. A sign to the Su that her judgment in this matter could be questioned; if a Sudaeg questioned it, it was no affront to the hierarchy. “My inclination is to treat it as dangerous until otherwise proven,” she said. “But there are facts of which I am unaware, and which you cannot provide. My analysis is inconclusive.”

The Su gestured recognition. “We will proceed on your analysis, Sulai Tabov,” she said. “The colony will be well.”

“You’re welcome,” Petra said, and let herself sink back on her heels, just a little, before turning and walking home.

Nash was sitting on the couch in her quarters, brooding, when she let herself in. Rehearsing the next phase of the argument, maybe. He could be persistent when he tried.

Petra walked past him, to her desk again. “Is Amad still agitating for segregation?”

Nash looked up, expression sharp and suspicious. “You save me so I could inform on him?”

“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” Petra snapped. Her patience for Nash’s dissembling would have been low if the storms hadn’t been going on. But Nash being Nash, he seemed to see the misstep, and rushed to make sure it didn’t sound that bad.

“I know he’s still interested in it,” he said. “...He calls it independence and not segregation, by the way.”

“I remember.” Petra’s mouth twisted. “He know anything about tampering in the collection lines?”

Silence, for a moment, and then Nash said “Amad doesn’t sabotage,” with damaged calm.

“He knows the people who do,” Petra said.

“He knows everyone in the movement. He doesn’t get along with half of them. Seven out of ten, he disagrees with. Says that’s the reason they never get anything done.”

“Anything except kidnapping,” Petra said. “Theft—”

Nash stood up. “I don’t want to argue this with you.”

“There’s been tampering,” Petra said. “At the height of storm season. We’re trying to build this colony; they’re trying to tear it down. Nash, do you know anything?”

Nash gave her a cold, even glare. “If you want me to ask around,” he said, “you’ll have to give me access to the outskirts.”

They’d probably be able to remove the collar, out there. “I didn’t save you so you could continue colluding, either,” Petra said.

Anger gathered itself in tense lines in Nash’s expression. Petra watched it with a kind of distant anticipation—Nash didn’t lose his temper often, and she was curious how it’d look when he did. Especially if he did in a situation like this. She couldn’t picture him screaming his lungs out. He was so very practiced at not saying the salient things, but the anger had to go somewhere.

She’d never been in a fight, and suspected that Nash hadn’t, either. But then, there was a lot of Nash’s life she wasn’t privy to. Who knew what the hell went on in the outskirts?

But if it came to a fight, if he took a swing at her, she’d put him down before she had to call for anyone. A twitch of her fingers; several thousand volts through his flesh. She could feel the possibility dancing at her fingertips.

And as though Nash could feel it too, he swallowed his own anger and backed down. Gestured, with heavy irony, submission and appeasement. “People talk about blowing up the colony. They get shouted down. Everyone with any sense knows we can’t survive without the colony’s resources. The last guy—Dolan—they found him taking apart the ship’s engine to make a bomb. They put him outside.”

The anger stuttered on that, a space underneath it opening up to void. It didn’t compute, and Petra was left, for a few seconds, with no way to respond.

Outside the colony, without any environmental protection, meant a choking, lung-searing death. With protection, but without the resources of the colony, it meant dying of thirst, isolated, and alone.

And here she’d thought the excisions, the culls, were the raison d’être for separatism in the first place.

The expression on Nash’s face looked oddly satisfied, for being so bitter. “Yeah,” he said. “We self-police. What, you thought we were all lawless bandits scheming in dark rooms? Amad voted for the execution, by the way. He said we couldn’t tolerate that sort of thing and survive as a movement.”

How very Su of him, Petra wanted to say. But that would kill the conversation there, and she wasn’t done with it yet. “How did you vote?”

Nash was silent for a moment. “I was sick that day,” he said.

Petra suspected he was lying.

“What did you do, Nash?” she asked. “What made the Su want to excise you?”

Nash’s expression twitched, and he looked away. “I didn’t blow anything up or kill anyone,” he said. “Or kidnap them, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“You don’t like to get your hands dirty.”

“Like you,” Nash said, tones clipped, “I don’t like it when people get hurt. But it looks like we’re both stuck with people who do.” He gestured wish for dismissal—stiffly, with bitterness in his human expression. “I think I’d like to go back to my quarters, Sulai, if that’s all right with you.”

You invited yourself in here, Petra wanted to say. Not me. But she gestured dismissal and reminder of hierarchy, to bite back instead.

Petra woke earlier than she wanted, which was a shame, given how long it had taken her to get to sleep. She kept to a common human schedule, most days, with a bit of jitter room on either side—Makers tended to put in short periods of intense effort, unlike oxygen specialists or teachers or census-takers or social engineers. So she was early enough to catch the commissary while it was mostly full, exchange pleasantries with some First Cluster residents, and ignore the knowing looks when she pulled a bulb of some tasteless, aqueous nutritional solution. Her throat would close up on anything solid or well flavored; her stomach wouldn’t admit hunger. But she could get the solution down, at least.

As she drank, she gestured up a token comm line to Kaah—no video, no audio, just a quick inquiry as to when they should meet for work on Third Cluster. By the time she’d finished, Kaah had gestured back that much of their work didn’t need to be synchronized. A do what you want, or as close as a Su would come to saying it.

The first three answers to And what do I want? were impossible or inadvisable. The fourth took her through the halls to Ilen.

She found Ilen in one of the medical modules, her hands on a human woman’s belly, eyes closed in concentration, face a smooth mask. She looked illuminated this way.

Deep in Petra’s lungs rose a stirring of the old compulsion. Petra had never wanted to carry a child, and Ilen hadn’t felt strongly enough to have one herself. But Ilen was a Father, through and through. If she’d been a Su, she would have been sought after. But even with humans, who could get by without her, she found her way in—her hands on a sweat-slick belly, guiding the fertilization and implantation of an egg; her mind teasing out the development of a zygote, encouraging the health of a fetus. She was no midwife, but she might as well be. She was godfather to a good handful of the children in the colony. The genetics of her body might not appear in their bloodlines, but she was wrapped up in their genetics nonetheless.

It was something Petra’s mother had never understood, because without blood children, what link did you have to the future, what solace could you have in your old age? But her mother had been closer to the generation of the colonists, for whom the unbroken interweave of genetic lines was still a practical and moral imperative.

Petra was her own generation, and she was a Maker—held close, kept jealously, by the Su. The Su of this generation let humans revere their elders; they didn’t discard them for the resources. They had learned that lesson, in the early violence.

And the Su cared about the colony in toto’s link to the future, not the genetic line of any specific individual. Petra had often said she didn’t have a maternal bone in her body; Ilen did, after a fashion, but she could mother Petra and her human patients and feel as fulfilled as she would with a child. As fulfilled, and considerably less harried.

Petra watched the woman, who smiled at Ilen in something like affection and pride. After a while Ilen opened her eyes and her face, in profile, changed; somewhat less saintly, more warm and human. Through the door, Petra didn’t hear what they said and didn’t need to. The woman gave Ilen a quick, fleeting hug, and vanished out another entrance.

As soon as she’d gone, Ilen looked over and smiled. Ilen always seemed to have a sense of where everyone was in spaces around her. Petra had asked if it was like her own sense of the energy in the colony and the lightning above, but Ilen had sworn it wasn’t—not a Father skill, just her own particular social proprioception.

Ilen gestured the door open and came to greet her. Petra wrapped her arms around Ilen, pressing her face into Ilen’s hair.

Ilen’s hair always smelled of some kind of vegetation—a deep, grounding scent; a ritual anointment held over from the ship, from Earth comforts, from ancient times. Every family in the colony had roots to Earth as deep as any other, most of them crossing at some point. But the ship hadn’t homogenized them; some lines still passed down practices like scenting one’s hair when washing. Not every line could have produced Ilen.

Ilen’s hands curled in the small of Petra’s back, holding her close. “This is a surprise,” she said.

I might have sent a Su worker to her death, Petra didn’t say. Nor did she say, I had to see you; I had to know you were safe. “I love you,” she said, instead.

Which, she thought, was really saying almost nothing.

Ilen laughed into Petra’s collarbone. “I know, Pet,” she said. “I could get used to you stopping by to tell me, though.”

“There was something on one of the collection lines,” Petra said. She hadn’t meant to say it.

Ilen stilled, and Petra wasn’t sure if the sinking sensation she felt was Ilen sagging back, or her own estimation of herself dropping. “Are you all right?” Ilen asked.

Petra swallowed. “Fine,” she said. But that’s not really the question.

Ilen’s hands traveled up her back, catching her shoulder blades like instruments fitted for her palms. “Pet,” she said. “The Su do learn.”

Any next words were shot down in Petra’s throat. She pulled back to look at Ilen and saw Ilen looking at her, her expression level and grave.

“That’s my line,” Petra said. Just not to you.

“Yeah,” Ilen said, “it is. So let me remind you: the Su do learn. They change their behavior. Just not always as quickly or as visibly as you’d like.”

“I didn’t plant the damn thing,” Petra said.

Ilen smiled, but the smile was thin. “No,” she said, “but you came here to warn me. The Su are not about to let anything happen to me. And frankly, if anyone thinks about grabbing me, they haven’t learned much from last time.”

“I know the Su can learn,” Petra said. “The separatists, I’m not so sure about.”

“Well, the lessons just get harder from here,” Ilen said. “I’m not meeting anyone for a while yet. Breakfast?”

The nutrient solution sat uneasily in Petra’s stomach. “Had it,” she said. “I was on my way to work.”

Ilen gave her the look she used to give when Petra had said that her head was fine, or she liked the windows, or she’d let an argument go, really. She didn’t even need to say anything.

And Petra was still wound tight enough not to let her not say anything. “What?”

“One day,” Ilen said, “I will get a Sudaeg to come in and sit on you just to keep you in one place long enough for something to get through your head. You know they’d do it if I asked them to.”

Petra jerked back. The fact that Ilen could joke about the hierarchy always struck her like a ruptured coolant channel. “You wouldn’t do that,” she said, “because you’re not officially insane.”

Ilen shrugged. “No, I wouldn’t,” she agreed. “But you’d be surprised how many of my fantasies involve things like that, these days.” The corner of her mouth twitched up. “I might get to see you for more than six heartbeats if we opened our relationship up.”

“I—” Petra started. But getting into an argument about what their relationship was or wasn’t seemed like a less good idea than almost any other available option. “I’m still a target, Ilen. Now more than ever.”

“Because Nash has so many friends on the ship that they’ll ransom someone to get him back?” Ilen asked. “That explain why Amad showed up, begging?”

Petra threw out two or three of the first available responses, and completely failed to throw out the next. “What, you’ve been talking to Amad, too?”

“No,” Ilen said. “No, I think you two both burned that bridge and tossed the cinders in chemical reprocessing.”

“You think I shouldn’t have?” Anger was coiling up from under Petra’s stomach, down where she usually shoved misery. “You, of all people, think I should be playing nice?”

Ilen’s expression went hard and uncompromising. That was another part of her; the other half of what made her an effective Father, what made her adapt to and use the Su hierarchy. Ilen could command with warmth and gentle affection, but when those didn’t work, out came the steel.

“If being angry was doing a damn thing to make your life better, I’d make you a pitchfork,” she said. “Find you the music from that old Earth media Amad likes. We could go on the warpath together. But it’s just making you sick and sad, Petra, and it’s not getting better until you fix something.”

Petra bit down on any response she could make. Because oh, she’d tried to fix things—this entire mess was her trying and failing to fix things. Mostly just managing to keep herself in a holding pattern and scrambling away from any bombs that came up. Things were bad enough without her trying to fix them further.

Eventually, she said “I have work to do. In Third Cluster.”

Ilen’s expression didn’t change. Apparently she still felt that there was a high degree of shit in what Petra was saying.

But she didn’t call her on it. “Well,” Ilen said. “Later, then. And you can feel free to stop by.”

Petra grunted. She’d always been free to stop by; the invitation was more irony than anything.

“If you need anything...” Petra said.

“The things I could say to that,” Ilen said. “I’m fine, Petra. And you’re humming like a lightning rod. Go Make.”

The route to Kaah this time took Petra through the ebb and flow of the crowds. Third Cluster was one of those clusters that synchronized sleep-wake cycles, to some extent—there would always be early risers and late sleepers and those who eschewed the cycle altogether, but it was consensus early morning, and human colonists filled the halls. Here and there on whatever business they had; Petra had to admit, she didn’t know what they got up to.

Sulai, her mind whispered. In one of their spats, Amad had said You’re half-Su yourself. Do you even know how to speak to real people? Nash had apologized for him, and Amad had apologized in his own way—no words, no overt gestures of contrition, but he’d brought some physical media display in from the ship and showed her an old performance of something. He’d found it hysterical. She’d found it incomprehensible, and he’d sulked off and avoided contact with her halfway to the next season.

Kaah was already Making at the outgrowth when Petra entered it, and she was beaming, inasmuch as the Su had interpretable expressions that could be read as beaming. Petra sat on the ground, crossing her legs like a Su would, and waited, with her eyes closed, watching the colony take shape in ordered lines beneath the sporadic wrath of the sky.

Finally, Kaah finished her hallway, and the bright electricity quieted down to a more latent level. She turned to Petra and gestured greeting.

“My petition for offspring has been granted,” she said.

Petra blinked back into a social mindset, then processed what Kaah had said.

“That’s wonderful!” Petra said, then had to search a moment for the traditional Su response. “The news is my joy; the benefit of the colony is my joy. Have you found a willing Father?”

Kaah gestured assent. “Suva Umet, who approved my petition. She is skilled in constructing zygotes with Father and Maker potential. As we increase our capacity for gathering energy, there will be further roles in the colony for Makers. I expect a clutch of five, potentially more.”

“It will be good,” Petra said. Then, a human phrase: “I’m happy for you.”

Kaah gestured pleasure, then said, “Your arrival is convenient. I defer to your expertise in the dimensions of family units.”

Some expertise, Petra thought. Third Cluster tended to have family homes that kept a core of children and grandchildren and grandparents all together, a few peeling off in each generation, plenty staying behind. Petra had grown in a more Su-flavored cluster; individual rooms for the most part, pairs and two-generation groupings here and there. But she had a sense for what the division of rooms should be, at least; what private areas a human expected that a Su would find extraneous, what layouts between the units would help people mix in the halls as they did in the halls below. And in any case, it was a change of subject.

Thankfully, with the Su, a conversation about pregnancy would rarely turn toward whether or not the other participants hoped for a child. It wasn’t a traditional milestone in a Su life. It was a bestowed honor.

“I’ll set the foundation lines,” Petra said, and pressed her hands into the smartmat.

A bestowed honor. Like the fact that one of the Su Fathers had pressed her hands into Petra’s mother’s belly, felt out the growing cells, and whispered to them that this human child, this one, should have the gift and the curse of hearing the lightning, of feeding it to the substance of the colony walls, feeling that substance change and grow and stretch into new walls and new forms. It had taken three generations on this planet for human Fathers and Makers to be born. Was that only because the Su Fathers had taken so long to understand their different biology? Maybe it was some quirk in how the Su found individuals worthy—maybe it had taken that long to overcome their revulsion at human reproduction.

To the Su, human females were defective—they possessed the necessary organs to carry life, but not the banks of gametes that could be prompted to combine at a Father’s influence. They’d found human males even more bewildering: jettisoned gamete banks walking around in sentient containers that seemed, to the Su, unnecessary.

The Su had caches of each gamete in themselves. The Su Fathers impelled combination and controlled mutation. Autosexual reproduction requiring two participants, unless the Father self-fertilized, but the relationship was hierarchical, not intimate.

She traced out the energy-bearing conduits, laying the foundation for walls here, partitions here, thick sheets of smartmat to occupy the interstitial places. Big round rooms for families to gather in; little compartments for sleep, a storage room here, a solitude room here. Life dictated the layout of the rooms and was circumscribed by it in turn; Petra only aped it, feeling out the spatial rhythm of the units below.

The lines of energy through the colony made sense. She felt alive here, right here, laying her will into the colony walls. All the chaos in the sky came down through the towers and the smartmat and her hands and became something solid and good. And if she could dissolve herself in the doing, so much the better.

Petra came home to the smell of something frying.

Apparently one of the workers had moved in a collection of Nash’s old culinary equipment, or he’d had them delivered somehow from the colony outskirts; he was one of the only people Petra had ever known who’d had cooking supplies manufactured for him. Most everyone was content with the variety of engineered foods the Su provided. But Nash had a few old-world aesthetic sensibilities.

And Petra had to admit, he could do damn impressive things with the raw materials that came from the Su.

He’d connected up a heating apparatus to the module’s power, and when she walked in he flashed her a quick smile—uneasy, and probably forced—and transferred a series of somethings into a shallow, lens-shaped bowl. Every motion was deft, as though he’d rehearsed his actions in the event of her arrival.

He filled another bowl for himself, picking them off the stack of four sitting by the cooktop. There’d been a time when all four would have been filled. Four bowls, four bulbs of drinks, four little trays of whatever Nash had been experimenting with that evening. Four cushions around a low table, with Ilen’s laughter and Nash’s anecdotes and Petra and Amad sparring good-naturedly over this or that bit of policy or pragmatism.

Nash had only replicated the barest bones, here. He sat cross-legged on the floor, the lens bowl in his lap.

“Let’s try this again,” he said.

Petra rolled her palm around the curve of the bowl, feeling the heat, and took it to her desk. “A lot’s missing.”

From Nash’s expression, he didn’t see her meaning for a moment. Then he shook his head. “No, I just meant—you know. Talking.”

Ah. Petra placed the bowl on her desk, which changed itself, just a little, to hold it. Buttering me up.

Still, food was food, and she turned her attention to it. Thin strips of grown protein matrix—a food form modeled to mimic the striations of muscle, glistening with a sauce that smelled sharp and sweet. Edible flowers, breaded in something that had heated up golden, so that the red of the petals peeked through like sunrise on a thin-atmosphere day. A long white grain, flecked with green. All of it so much more reminiscent of the raw material than anything Su-processed, Su-consumed.

She hadn’t thought she was hungry, but the smell suffused her and woke her stomach. Storm, but it did smell good. She’d forgotten that food was an art, in some of the human subcultures. For a long time now, she’d just approached it as one of the mechanisms necessary to not die.

“I kinda used your authority to get some of this,” he said, with a note of apology in his voice. “I told the Sudaeg that it would ease the mental strain of the storms.”

That’d explain it, then; she hadn’t thought they’d stock fresh flowers in the commissary. Low demand. Tension wound through Petra’s jaw. “Always the people person, Nash.”

“I’m not going to abuse your authority,” Nash said. “I’m pretty sure I couldn’t if I tried.”

There were too many things Petra could say to that, and they all twisted in her throat. She took a bite, instead.

Flavors she’d known the names for, once, flooded her mouth; textures she hadn’t eaten in ages rolled against her tongue. She let a long breath out and cursed. “I forgot all about this,” she said.

“Old Earth specialty,” Nash said, which was a lie. It was some new reinterpretation of the old cooking tradition, twisted around to match whatever food plants they’d brought and established in the colony. So much of Earth had remained on Earth, lost to their colony either forever or for the time it took for another generation ship to decide to come and bring their own array of important things.

“Lucky hurem,” Petra said, and took another bite. Nash chuckled and laid into his own food.

“You ever go down to the Folly Garden Cluster?” he asked.

Despite herself, Petra smiled. “Haven’t. They did finish it, though.”

“I heard,” Nash said, and grinned. This smile looked less forced. Not quite right yet, but on its way. “Original size, too?”

Petra let out a laugh. “You know the Su,” she said. “They commit.”

“They committed to a spitball,” Nash said. “Lin and I had no idea how to design a garden. They wanted a size, we said ‘large’ thinking we wanted something bigger than the garden modules we had, and when we woke up there was this cavern that a Maker had just gone ahead and put together and we were supposed to find a way to fill it. No one even thought that, hey, this is a ridiculous size.”

“You said ‘large,’ they thought ‘large in terms of absolute Making size,’” Petra said. “The Su tend to assume that humans know what humans want and will say what they mean when they ask for things.” Whether or not they’d approve of those things as benefiting the colony was another question, but Nash and his colleague had asked for space at the height of storm season. They’d asked for a resource nearly as abundant as air. Any other time, and they’d have had to pin down dimensions and limit their expectations and find a Maker who felt like indulging human needs was a priority just then.

“That was the first resource allocation project I had, remember that?” Nash said. “Talk about distorting your expectations early.”

“You didn’t understand the Su,” Petra said. “I would have expected that.”

“So you told me,” Nash said, and tilted his head at her. “That was back when you liked me.”

Petra’s humor cooled. She set down her utensil, fingers braced on the curve of the composite. She could etch it with lightning, but not much else; it wouldn’t hold a charge or define a path through which intelligent circuitry could flow. “Remember when Hurem Keyne paid me a visit?” she asked.

All humor vanished from Nash’s expression. “Don’t,” he whispered.

“Remember,” Petra said, voice low to keep from breaking, “when I came home to a habitat rupture? Remember how I could smell the sulfur coming in from outside? They set off a blast inside our home, Nash. The lights were out. I could hear the air ingress. I couldn’t find Ilen. I didn’t know if she was lying dead in a corner. You wouldn’t remember that, would you, because you had run.”

Nash was staring down at the floor, jaw stiff, expression hard. “I didn’t ever think anyone would come after you,” he said.

“You didn’t ever think,” Petra corrected. “You want to reminisce about the times when I liked you? You know exactly what happened. You made your choices, you sold us out, and when it all went up in sparks you vanished back to the ship. All that’s on you, Nash—it’s still on you. You think you can cook me dinner and all’s forgiven?”

“I made mistakes,” Nash said. “And people got hurt because of them. I know I’m not going to make that right, but I figured I could at least start making it up to you. Start,” he added, quickly, as Petra found a retort at the tip of her tongue, “doing something good in your life, at least.”

Petra stared at him.

“You look like you haven’t eaten since I left,” he said.

Petra blinked. She hadn’t considered how she’d look to someone who hadn’t seen her in so long—why would it matter, anyway? She knew she’d taken to running off the tension. Knew she felt harder and leaner than she had back in the good times. But seeing a fleck of maternalism in Nash stunned her for a moment.

Then, like everything about Nash, it fed a bit more fuel into the slow-burning anger in her gut.

“The food was very good,” she said, stiffly. She couldn’t find a way to say I don’t need your good works; I’ve survived this long without you caring; There’s nothing you can do to change what happened, so why bother trying now?

“Yeah,” Nash said. “You know, I didn’t do much cooking out in the ship. Harder to get food variety, there. It’s more of a holiday thing.”

Plenty of things Petra could ask, at that. What kind of holidays do you celebrate, out there? or Wasn’t there a big push to get the ship’s hydroponics up and running again? Time was, she’d been curious about life on the ship the way she’d been curious about life back on Earth: it was a foreign land, and one she’d never be visiting. Tales of strange customs were always passing amusements.

Now, the comment felt barbed.

“I’m glad,” she said, “you’ve found something to enjoy here.”

Nash bit back words—probably a curse, probably some invective. “Please,” he said. “Can we just start over? Start from here?”

You haven’t been living here, went Petra’s anger. I’m here. I’m always here. Where the hell else would I be starting from?

Probably wasn’t what he meant. Probably what he meant was, can’t we pretend like we don’t have a past? Or more likely, can’t we just pretend like our only past’s the good one?

And maybe he could pretend that they could have a fresh start. But Petra couldn’t imagine what the hell it would take to feel good about this. About Amad showing up and throwing Nash’s life into her arms, like it was her responsibility. About Nash forcing a smile and bringing his guilt to lay at her feet like it was her job to forgive him.

About him bringing up those times before all this, the food and the company and the easy companionship. Petra didn’t get along with most people—Ilen and Nash had been notable exceptions. She’d pushed Ilen away herself, and Nash—

Was Nash.

“We are,” she said, “exactly where we are.”

The question was, as it always was, where the hell to go from here.

Sooner or later something would break, one way or another. Petra knew this. She’d either wall off Nash completely, let him live his ghost of a life out beyond the periphery of her awareness, or she’d crack, let him in again, maybe find herself dragged along to forgiving him. This shambling mockery of their former friendship was too unstable not to decay. But just the thought of forgiving him made her feel duped and stupid, like she was falling again for the easy smile and the amiable interest.

She knew that where they were now, what she was feeling, was miserable. Thing was, there was quite some distance between knowing that and knowing how to fix it.

And she didn’t have a way to say it. Never had been the best with words, except those words she had a chance to rehearse, over and over, locked in her head for hours.

Still, she might have found something to say if the colony hadn’t shuddered, as something in the sky exploded.

Petra’s head snapped up, even though she couldn’t see a damn thing through the colony composite. But there was no time to feel shock or fear: an instant later two more explosions shook the ground, presaged by a matter of moments by a wave of energy that rammed straight through her mind and tossed her in all directions at once.

Petra’s mouth was open but sound wasn’t coming out; her body curled and spasmed outward, skin and muscle and bone striking smartmat composite desk and floor and walls, mind tossed between them as though it didn’t have a home in either one. Attack, part of her thought, but the rest of her was alight. Drowning in lightning. Her mind was scrabbling through the whole of the colony, lit up like a nightmare, smartmat there growing into tumorous outcrops, food receptacles there searing their contents or expelling them, the insulation at the oxygen recyclers glowing their resistance.

Nash here, reaching out to grab her, his voice insistent and concerned, and Petra threw out a hand and found his body and sent great gluts of energy cascading out of her—through her body straight from the screaming sky and the overloaded colony walls—and the body that was Nash flew away and out of her awareness again.

And then awareness flew out of her awareness, caught and twisted on the overload, and she was nowhere.

There was nothing, and then there was noise and senseless sense data and pain and noise, and then there was a tumult of energy she couldn’t find her way out of.

And then there was a tiny sliver of calm, pressing its way into her awareness, with the barrage of energy hammering around it. Petra reached for it, tried to focus in the wreckage of all her thoughts, and the calm pressed deeper into her until she came to the surface of cool air and nausea and a hand on her forehead.

Petra tried not to whimper. At whatever sound did come out of her, the hand shifted, and a long, cool sensation wended down Petra’s throat and into her stomach, settling it.

“Love?” Ilen asked.

Petra groped for her hand. Her body felt disconnected at the joints; all the muscles felt like water. Her coordination was shot. Ilen found her hand for her and pushed a sense of stability into her bones.

“Come on,” Ilen said, and got an arm around her shoulders. “Come on, Pet. Sit up. Ground.”

Vertiginous motion. The whole world went tilt-a-whirl and Petra collapsed against Ilen, swinging her feet out of the infirmary cubbybed, pressing bare soles into the floor.

“Ground,” Ilen said again, and Petra fumbled for the energy in her mind. Everything was out of whack. The walls were cacophonous. The storm outside was too much, too close.

She took the energy in her body and the energy in the air and pushed it down into the channels beneath the floor of the habitat that would carry it to its repositories. She could feel them, distant and bright: new ones, as well, likely put into place by the Su Makers, who wouldn’t have been incapacitated as she was.

All of her ached. The colony ached. The new channels stood out like lines of cold metal grafted into living flesh.

Then she could feel Ilen’s fingers on her temples, Ilen’s presence trying to clear up the mess of her mind.

“Pet,” Ilen said. “If you can think, you need to deal with Nash. They’re going to kill him.”

Rage tingled at Petra’s fingertips. Ilen must have felt it, must have felt the balance of her body’s energies shift, because she moved her hands, palms against Petra’s cheeks, tilting her head so Petra’s choices were to look at her or close her eyes.

“Petra,” Ilen said. “You almost killed him.”

“Fuck,” Petra breathed, and it sure as hell felt like the sky was falling in on her. She cast an arm out, seeing Ilen’s shoulders, and Ilen got herself under it and pulled her up.

“All right?” Ilen asked, and Petra made herself nod. Then they were off; Petra was stumbling, her weight on Ilen, back through the halls to the jurisdictor.

There was a different Sudaeg there this time, her carapace paler, her stature taller—some older generation, then. Petra’s stomach roiled, and not all of it was vertigo.

“Sulai Tabov,” the Su said, and gestured respect and consideration. “Your health benefits the colony. You experience adequate recovery?”

“I request Suva Ilen’s continued attention,” Petra said. Beside her, Ilen made a perfunctory, granting gesture—as eager to dispense with the pleasantries as Petra was to not deal with any of this. “I also request aberrant Nash Carder’s status.”

“He is to be excised,” the Su said. “Has there been a confusion?”

Petra nearly laughed. From what she could tell, a collection tower had been blown up. Of course there had been a confusion. But that wasn’t what the Su worker meant. “He should not be excised.”

“You yourself partially excised him,” the Su observed. No wounded here; no you hurt him, Petra, what were you thinking. She hadn’t been thinking. “Do you not wish this interpreted as your intention?”

Petra closed her eyes. Most of the Su didn’t bother learning human expression; humans could speak or gesture what they needed understood. “His excision is not my intention.”

“And yet, with knowledge of the effects of lightning energy on human physiology, you discharged a great deal through his body. Sulai Tabov,” the Su said. “Are you admitting violent actions not in accordance with your intention?”

That was the question.

So far as Petra knew, the Su didn’t understand self-control. They didn’t understand that an emotional urge to do one thing could conflict with an intellectual desire to do another. If Petra wanted Nash hurting, the Su would understand it as wanting him dead. If they understood Petra hurting Nash and not wanting him dead, they would understand that as a dangerous aberration in Petra’s own mind. A disease that, because it was violent, might warrant excision.

The leftover energy twisted around her gut, and bile attempted the back of her throat. But Ilen drew herself up.

“Sudaeg,” she said, and the Su made a gesture of deep respect. “Sulai Petra is human. You are aware that human Makers of the early generations can experience cognitive overload in high-energy environments? Interpret the situation in that light.”

The Su made a gesture of apology, and turned to Petra again. “Sulai Tabov,” she said. “Was it your intention to excise the aberrant, or did you damage him as an indirect result of the destruction of the lightning tower?”

I damaged him because I was angry and in pain and I resented the hell out of him and still do, Petra couldn’t say. “The discharge which injured him was an indirect result of the attack on the tower.” Please don’t kill him. Please don’t kill me.

“Is it your intention that he return to your custody?”

Can you be trusted? seemed to be the undercurrent of that, and Petra could have spit fire or bile there. Could she. Like maybe she should recuse herself for Nash’s own safety, never mind that it was his people who’d done this to her.

“That,” she said, “is the intention”—the option—“I have.”

The Sudaeg put up her foreclaws, and gestured a series of commands into the jurisdictor module. “Then I release him into your custody,” she said. “You are free to return him for excision at any time.”

“I am keenly aware of that fact,” Petra said, and pushed on toward the cells.

The moment they got to the cell and the membrane lensed open, Petra shoved away from Ilen’s support. The Su didn’t bother putting chairs or other furniture in their cells; creature comforts were too human a concept, comfort for the condemned even more so. She let herself collapse to the ground in a messy tangle of limbs, tipped against the wall.

“Is Amad part of this?” she hissed at Nash. Amad, whose friend had just faced excision. Amad, who’d had to beg someone in the Su power structure for his friend’s life.

Amad, who’d hated the Su for years, and might take a chance at striking back at them if he could.

Amad, who’d practically adopted Nash, and who Nash would protect. Nash could be stupidly loyal, from time to time. It was just that none of that loyalty had been directed toward Petra, when it came down to it, in the end.

Nash raised his head, and there was actual terror in his eyes. There were lines under his jaw, spidering up his neck—discoloration from an electrical burn.

Petra drew back. A hand touched her shoulder and Ilen settled down next to her, a warm solid presence, twining the fingers of her own hand around Petra’s.

Petra took in a breath, and tried not to feel how jealous she was of Ilen’s steadiness, that ability to move past it all, to smile and forgive if it was the useful thing, the healthy thing, to do. Petra’s head was a lightning storm. In a way it always had been, even when the atmosphere was quiet outside.

There was pain on Nash’s face, as he gathered up his resolve to speak. After this, he might well believe that Petra planned on excising him, the moment he got too far out of line. Between that and the injury she’d inflicted, even accidentally, it almost made Petra feel like they were on equal ground.

“Do you really think the Su want what’s best for us?” Nash asked.

For some reason, she hadn’t been expecting that. She didn’t know what she had been expecting—groveling apology, maybe, or some arrogant parroting of the party line. But Nash waved his hands to the soft cell walls—walls that were as eager as anything Su to close in and dissolve him.

Dissolve both of them, given a chance. The cell was much smaller, this time. It had already begun to close in, Petra thought, when Ilen had come to wake her.

They were far too close.

“I think the Su created this colony,” she said. “And they’ve been adapting it to human use. They provide for us as well as they know how to, and—”

“As well as they know,” Nash pressed. “But they have a different biology—they’re from a different environment. They don’t understand us—”

“And blowing up a lightning tower is supposed to help?”

Nash gestured helplessly. “I didn’t know—it’s not that I want—I can understand it, Petra, even if I don’t agree. If we don’t have the Su to rely on—” he began.

“Then we could all be exiles,” Petra said. “And most of us like it here.” Then, before he could retort, she asked, “What the hell did you do, Nash? Why did the Su want your execution?”

Did you come in here to tear us all down?

Nash looked away. “What the hell does it matter?” he asked. “The Su thought it was a crime. Isn’t that all you care about?”

Petra shook off Ilen’s hand, and reached out and grabbed Nash by the throat.

Nash’s whole body went rigid, and an angry, twisting thrill wound through Petra’s gut. This was a problem, this was something she’d have to think about, have to talk to Ilen about, but it felt good to feel that fear under her fingers. To know that on some fucking axis, at least, what she thought and felt mattered to Nash. In a way that it apparently hadn’t, back when it was just her trust and her friendship on the line, and not the looming threat of excision.

“I could have been excised, out in that other room,” she said, running over the intake of breath from her side, over the screaming in her head that she was going too far, or not far enough. “Because I wasn’t trying to kill you when I almost killed you. Because if Ilen hadn’t had the rank of a Su Father and if she didn’t still care about both of us and fuck if I know why she does, they would have stamped me out because I was this close to seizures because of what Amad’s friends did. You think I’m above all this? I’ve got mine? I live and die by the same sudamn rules. Do you fucking live by any? Do you just dream of not living by any?”

She could feel Nash’s heartbeat racing under her fingers; feel him swallow, feel him breathe. Might have meant something if she was Ilen; as it was, it was just proof that he, like her, was a haphazard collection of blood and muscle and bone. Bodies didn’t tell her much.

Beside her, Ilen breathed, “Oh, Pet.”

Petra shuddered. Ilen’s voice was soft, like she’d just realized something, but if Ilen didn’t know Petra was a walking disaster by this point, she just hadn’t been paying attention. And that’d be all right, then. They could just blast all the illusions to pieces today.

Ilen reached out—slowly, carefully—and put her hand on Petra’s wrist, disentangling her fingers from Nash’s throat, and then drawing her in, Petra’s head under her chin.

It wasn’t until she had Ilen’s arms around her that Petra realized just how badly she was shaking.

She turned into Ilen’s chest and screwed her eyes shut, because even if she couldn’t stop Nash from seeing this, she could stop herself from seeing the look in his eyes. She didn’t want to fall apart—sick and shaking and blasted half to hell, ready to pave the rest of the way with her own Maker’s hands. She didn’t want him to see that this was how twisted-on-hooks she got. Didn’t want him to know that he’d won.

Even if this had never been about winning, for him. But for all the power she had over him, he had this over her, and wasn’t that just something?

She could feel, in the movement against the crown of her head, that Ilen had turned to look at Nash. She could feel a tilt of Ilen’s head, and then Nash stood up and his unsteady footsteps left the cell. Leaving us in it, Petra thought. And isn’t that the story of all of us.

There would have been a long silence, if not for the thrumming of blood and the hard drag of breath and Ilen making soothing noises, soothing motions of hands and power and influence. And Petra leaned into it despite herself.

“Come back to live with me,” Ilen said, in time. “You can Make yourself an office in my quarters. You’re not protecting me by staying away, Pet, you know that. And I don’t want to see you on your own.”

A laugh echoed up from somewhere in Petra, but it was a largely hollow thing. “Clearly not alone any more, am I?”

“No,” Ilen said, but it didn’t sound like agreement. “But you’re more locked in your head than you’ve ever been. And, Pet, I know what your head’s like, in the storms.”

Petra could have said the storms aren’t the half of it, but Ilen being Ilen, she would know that. Ilen being Ilen, Petra thought she meant any storms, not just the ones in the atmosphere. Nash was a sudamn storm of his own.

“I’m still here,” she repeated.

“Is that the only thing that matters?”

Why not? Petra thought, and Ilen drew her hand back through Petra’s hair.

“Just which one of you did you want me to file the grievance over?” Ilen asked. “Trusting someone isn’t a crime, Pet, and you can stop punishing yourself for it any time now. Maybe you could even try again.”

Petra laughed, though it wasn’t much like laughter.

“You and Nash both saw the best potentials in people,” Ilen said. “The only difference is that Nash still does.”

“Do you even know why we’re in here?” Petra asked. As far as she was concerned, there was more support for her point of view in the air than for Ilen’s. Or Nash’s, if that didn’t go without saying.

“Four parts stubbornness and three parts enemy action,” Ilen said. “Pet.”

“I’ll find a way through this,” Petra said. It was easy to say if she didn’t think about how much she was lying when she said it.

“I’m here for you,” Ilen said.

Petra let out a breath and sagged closer to her. “Ilen,” she said. “It was always supposed to be the other way.”

There came a time when Petra could stand again, and take her leave. And she did, and she walked back to her quarters and went inside, and there was Nash stripped to his trousers, a Su biomat healing agent extruded from the wall and creeping across his skin.

Petra hadn’t thought to give him access to the medical stations, but apparently someone had—Ilen, maybe, or Amad had come in and done whatever he could do to muck with the systems. But when Petra walked in the door Nash pulled himself away, the biomat suctioning off his bare shoulders, and went to one knee, head bowed. He touched his forehead, drawing his hand down in a line toward the ground. Gestured abasement.

“I didn’t,” he said, “want any of this to happen.”

Petra stood rigid, watching him. There were still traces of discoloration on his skin, dark trees standing out like lash marks where lightning had coursed through him, gathering around his neck under the Su collar. A disconnected part of her thought she should check his collar; make sure she hadn’t flooded the thing, make sure some control was still in place. Nash kept his eyes down.

“I want to fucking fix this,” he said. “But there isn’t a way, is there? What do I do, Petra?” Then, after a moment—not a long enough pause into which to speak—he said, “Amad wants to steal me back from you.”

Petra’s hands curled. “Of course you’ve been in contact with him.”

“Of course he’s been in contact with me,” Nash said. “He cares. We both cared about you, believe it or not. But we told the wrong people the wrong things and then everything went to hell so fast that saving our own skins was all we could do. Would it have helped you or Ilen for us to get thrown into excision chambers then?”

Yes, part of her said, but it was the same part that would have watched Nash die in the first place. Small and miserable. I could have saved you then. Would have meant something, then, that you faced what you did wrong.

“I never thanked you,” Nash said.

Petra’s stomach turned.

“I showed up trying to spread separatist sentiment, and you didn’t agree with me, but you made a space for me anyway,” Nash said, and Petra’s train of thought jolted. This wasn’t about saving him from excision; it was about that time, years ago, when they’d worked and eaten and laughed together. When the word friend didn’t have to stretch thin to cover them. “Got me into resource allocation. You know, there actually were times where I thought I was doing some good?”

“You were doing good,” Petra said. “Doing good work is hard and slow. It’s not flashy bright results like blowing up a tower.”

Pain flickered under the muscles of Nash’s face. Petra looked away.

Good work was the slow, generation-by-generation change of Su attitudes. It was the vanished practice of culling human elders. The dwindling practice of culling dissidents—though that probably didn’t look dwindling to Nash. It was Petra, standing in the miasma of seasons-long headaches and knowing that the next generation of human Makers would benefit from what the Su Fathers had learned from her; that the next generation would call the lightning with more ease and less pain than she had.

Good work meant enduring the things that weren’t perfect, because the people who solved things by burning them to the ground weren’t people Petra would trust to build good infrastructure.

But that was Petra’s thought on the matter. Amad had different ideas. The separatists, too. And as for Nash, well, who the hell knew where he stood, but him?

“Maybe,” Nash said, and Petra could hear the separatist sentiment lingering around his tone. Words like unendurable, like insurmountable difficulties. One of Nash’s great-great-grands had been an original colonist, excised for reasons Petra had never looked up. Amad’s own parents had been excised—they’d been separatists of the violent strain. Petra had no such painful history. Maybe it’s easy for you to say, the old saw went, “wait and see.”

Maybe, Petra thought, there just were no good options, but she’d stand by hers as the best of the imperfect ones.

“I was informing on you from the beginning,” Nash said. “I didn’t think of it that way. I guess Amad and the others did.”

And she, like an idiot, had taken him in and showed him the gardens in First Cluster and introduced him to her wife and talked politics and plans for the future. How they must have drunk that up, back where Nash came from. They must have thanked him.

How must that have felt.

What did you do, Nash? The question was on the tip of her tongue. And really, she could make Nash answer.

In the end, though, she didn’t have to make him.

“You know how they got me?” he asked. “I came back in. I was trying to get in with one of the younger human Fathers. See if we could find some common ground. I guess I was spoiled by you; he pegged me pretty fast as a separatist, and tossed me to the Su, with prejudice. He never lodged a grievance over me, though. You know, you’re the only person who ever has?”

Petra’s stomach stilled like a dead thing. “I said that Ilen should have. It would have had more weight coming from her.”

“I was nothing, remember?” Nash snorted. “Wasn’t a Sudaeg any more, after I left allocation. Hurem Nash Carder. A grievance from a Maker had plenty of weight on its own.” He looked at her. “I told Amad that Ilen was learning how to make human Fathers and Makers in utero. Amad told someone else. That’s why they decided to take her. Can you imagine what that would do for human independence? We wouldn’t need the Su at all.”

“You made her a target,” Petra said.

Nash showed his palms. “If you hadn’t listed that grievance, they’d never have handed me over to you.”

Petra laughed, if that was what you wanted to call it. “How convenient for you.”

It was an unusual sight, to see Nash struggle with words. But there was a struggle between his throat and his jaw now, as though human articulators could not shape human words into their right sentiment. He gestured helplessness, and abasement again. “What can I do?”

Change the past, maybe, Petra thought. Convince the Su to take back the ship territories. Give them what they need to do that. Hurt all the rest of these friends of yours the way you hurt me.

“What makes you think I have an answer?”

Nash’s shoulders slumped, just slightly. “Maybe I just look up to you,” he said.

Then, literally, he did look up. Met her eyes, held her gaze.

“I’m going to keep trying,” he said.

As long as I own you, Petra thought. Made it hard to trust his good intentions, even when some small traitorous part of her was tempted to.

“I’m going to go lie down,” Petra said, and turned away from him.

Petra made it back through her quarters to her sleeping cubby and collapsed into bed, staring up at the curving ceiling.

She could feel an active bank of lightning clouds moving in. Energy for the colony, noise and pain for her. Not too long and they’d be right over her, and she’d be lucky to keep stringing thoughts together. Not that her thoughts were proving so helpful to her now.

She raised her hand and caught the faint lines of energy that pervaded the colony, and she almost tweaked them, almost gestured a comm channel into being, but stopped herself. That was interesting. She hadn’t come this close to calling in a long time.

What do I do, Ilen?

Her fingers held there, on the edge of completing the gesture. Opening the comm line, seeing Ilen’s face projected in the dark.

There’d been a time when she could have just rolled over, pressed her face into the curve of Ilen’s neck at the shoulder, said wordlessly that which she didn’t have words for. And Ilen would wrap around her, human warmth and human softness, and make the noise in her head go away. Lightning or no lightning. It was a skill Petra had never developed in herself.

What do I do, Ilen? Storms, what do I do?

A pressure was creeping up between her shoulder blades; it mirrored, above her, the crashing power of an unstable atmosphere, of some cataclysmic ecological mistake. The kind of thing that made anything she or Nash or Ilen or Amad could do pale by comparison. They hadn’t managed to bring down an entire world.

Just felt like it, sometimes.

Her hand curled around the air. Even from here, with great effort, she could punch a spire of smart matter into the sky like she could cut it apart. With that cloud formation rolling in, the energy would be replenished as fast as she could deplete it. The Su would question it, but probably not excise her for it, and it would be just as pointless and futile as most of her other options.

Feel good, though, that energy coursing through her. Proof that she could make a mark, even if in the end it didn’t matter.

She moved her hand, changed her gesture. Contact addresses scrolled through her awareness: an array of human and Su connections she wouldn’t let herself reach out for. After three loops through she settled on the old address for Amad—a contact that she hadn’t erased, despite every reason to do so. The address had been dead at Ilen’s kidnapping and was probably still dead now, but the data pings, heading off into nowhere, occupied part of her awareness. With all the various storms, any distraction was welcome.

Anyway, calling out into nothingness fit her mood. She could sense the change in the data, the signals routing out, and watch them, waiting until they were dissolved in her awareness by the lightning strikes.

Then the nothingness answered.

The screen fitzed into existence in front of her, the pale white of ship lighting casting most of the picture as edges and impressions. What wasn’t faint and poorly defined, though, was the face of the man who’d answered the comm.

“The hell?” Petra said.

Amad looked just as confused as she was. “You’re the one who called me!”

“The hell are you still responding on this address?” Petra asked, scrambling up to sit and face the screen. And it might have been her imagination, but she thought Amad flushed.

“I—look, a colony data address is useful, okay? Why are you calling if you thought the address was dead?”

“Diagnostics,” Petra said.

Amad stared at her for a moment. “You,” he said, “are a crap liar.”

“We can’t all be good at it,” Petra growled.

Amad made a series of gestures that Petra couldn’t interpret. She shook her head, and squinted at the screen. Some kind of human gesture, she thought; there were physical nonverbal languages in human history, and ship people sometimes pulled those things out as counterculture. Whatever he was saying, Petra got the feeling it wasn’t complimentary.

“Right, so you found my little not-so-secret data address,” Amad said, his voice still coming through flustered. Why the hell he felt flustered was an open question. If the emotion had anything to do with why he’d kept a data address he’d only set up at Petra’s insistence in the first place, Petra didn’t want to examine the situation too closely. “Should we both go into another room and pretend this was a wrong gesture that never happened?”

Petra’s head was pounding. It sounded like an appealing option. Except then Amad would get in contact with Nash again, try to smuggle him back out to the edge of the colony and get the collar off, and this would probably come up—in a what the hell is Petra playing at way or an is Petra investigating us way or a is something wrong with her way, and Petra’s mind flashed to Nash, kneeling on the floor, hand moving from his forehead to the ground.

What the hell were any of them supposed to do?

She let out a breath and collapsed back to the bed. Energy was itching at her fingertips, ready for the shaping.

Do something, it seemed to say.

“We need to talk,” she said.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2016.

HigherWorks

Gregory Norman Bossert

Dyer and The Wayward, slapping maps—
Camden Lock Market—Friday Morning

Dyer shifts against the wall—the bricks are rough and still night-cool in the shade of the bridge, and her jacket is thin across the shoulders, lining long gone and the leather worn smooth by years of brick stone iron concrete carbon—and breaks down the approaching couple without quite making eye contact.

The Wayward has got an eye out for cops or worse, blathering in his terrible Bert-the-chimney-sweep cod Cockney, sounds stoned but his brain is just like that. “—ghosts, you know? The nano, sometimes it don’t break down, it digs in, makes a nest in the parental lobe—”

“Parietal.” Dyer says. The couple are a matched Saxon blond—expensive haircuts, and the girl’s wearing Havilland genesplice chestnut wedges with live shoots trained around her calves, cost a thousand quid easy. Not cops, not dressed that way; more likely the sort that think that Drop parties damage property values, that nano should be reserved for medical and military purposes, that refugees belong safely sorted with their own kind in the camps in Dover. The sort to take a map now and call the cops later. But he has an active tat peeking out of the edge of his sleeve, and she’s got corneal implants, so Dyer risks it.

“Opt-in,” she says, quietly, and sees the guy’s teeth flash. The girl taps the guy’s thigh with one hand and reaches out with the other. Dyer slips a map from her jacket pocket, hits the girl’s hand—more a handshake than a slap, oh so proper British—and meets the girl’s gaze. Pixels swirl in her eyes, and recognition. “HigherWorks,” the girl mouths, and swats the guy’s leg again as they ramble on out into the sunlight by the canal.

Dyer blinks her own corneas full black. Fame is a fickle food, she thinks, and all the more so for USERs running illegal nano Drop parties. “Men eat of it and die,” she says to the crows along the canal bank.

“Woah,” The Wayward says. “Eat what now?”

Might be time to grow her hair out, or to go back to wearing masks at the Drops. But that never really works. The fans are too persistent, bless their stuttering over-stimmed hearts, and photos get out on the Drop forums:

Sick minds of HigherWorks unmasked at last: Dee! Dyer! The Wayward! Shimago! USERs or home-grown?

DJ Mrs. John Dee and nanogoddess Higher Dyer spotted digging through the bins at ResCycle....We Got Photos!

A Scanner in the ’Works: London’s opt-in choreomania culture networks nanothechnology to bend brains.

That last in the damn Guardian with a damn gallery of drone footage. Might be time to move on, was the truth of it. Amsterdam again or Helsinki, anywhere the refugee policies are less tattered and the fear flows a little less deep. Leave London to groups with less to lose.

As if summoned by that thought, Kal flits in under the bridge, gossip queen of the refugee scene, latest conquest in tow. “All right D? All right, Way? Doing the do tonight, yeah? New show, new rocket? You guys know Leelee? Slap me a pair?” All in one breath without pause for answers.

“All right, Kal,” Dyer says, slips her a couple of maps. Kal passes one to her companion, a willowwisp creature in frills and lace with improbable anime eyes that make Dyer think of zygomatic surgery and tabloid tales of “accidental ejection.” Leelee spins the map in twig fingers, details on one side and actual map on the other, tests the stickum that holds the fold closed with a glittered slice of fingernail.

Kal pinches the map closed. “No, babe, don’t open it. The pic inside is the neural cue, triggers the nano. Gotta wait wait wait for the party tonight, yeah? I’ll just hold it for you ’til then. These guys gonna shake your tuchus, and Dyer here, what she do gonna shake your brain.”

Leelee’s eyes get perilously wider. Dyer squinches her own to narrow slits in sympathy.

Kal leans in to kiss the air over Dyer’s cheek, drops the accent to say, “Hear about the two USERs pulled from the river last night? Crap beat out of them? That fascist turd Evan’s saying ‘send them back to the States, conscious or not.’ Watch yourself today. Anti-migrant rally in Parliament Square. Lotta noobs in town; big group got through the Chunnel last night. Street’s frigging twitchy, girl, like everyone’s dusted, seeing things. People where they shouldn’t be. Speaking of, some betty in a god-awful yellow hoodie been staring at you, up by the benches.”

Then louder, “Cannot wait for the Drop tonight. Whole bloody town needs some HigherWorks.” She exits left, Leelee trailing behind to look back at Dyer, eyes bleached to porcelain in the sudden sun.

Dyer rubs her scalp, checks the benches with a sideways glance, catches a yellow-hooded head just turning away.

A gaggle of girls in shiny machine-worn leatherette stumble into the shade, all trying to read off the same phone. Too young, Dyer thinks, and too loud. She riffles the edges of the maps in her pocket. She’s handed out a few dozen this morning. It’d be nice to get through the whole stack this morning, while folks still had time to plan their night.

“—no network nodes, no data stream, but the nano wants to connect, it needs the connection. How it’s designed,” The Wayward is saying. “So it starts connecting with anything, with all the wifi and broadband feeds and, dig this, with other ghost nano in other people’s brains. Not like a Drop party, there’s no beats, no video, no HigherWorks to ride the flow, keep everyone in sync, yeah? Just a jumble of flashbacks, visions, voices, thoughts, and then you drift untethered, like, you know, crowdsurfing, you go all scattered—”

“Doesn’t work that way, Way,” Dyers snaps: edgy because of Kal’s news, edgy because it’s a topic she doesn’t want to touch in public, edgy because she doesn’t like to lie. “Nano can’t do anything without neural cues and network nodes, and anyway your body breaks it down in a couple hours. Ghost nano, it’s urban legend. Suburban legend, mallrat stuff.”

She looks toward the girls in their glittery off-the-shelf counterculture. Behind them, by the bank of the canal, is a woman in Dyer’s own black leather/skin/hair like a thunderhead bruised eyes just shadows in a sharp fragile face and Dyer’s breath stops. If it’s not lust—Dyer left that behind with the rest in the dry husk of California—it’s something just as potent.

No yellow hoodie, though, which means someone else is watching her; the one thing Dyer didn’t leave in the States was the thing she fled: the fear. Don’t just run from, Dyer thinks, run to. She raises an eyebrow at the mystery woman, remembers that her eyes are full black, and leaves them that way. If a little anger creeps in between her brows, the corners of her mouth, well, that’s just the flip side of the fear.

The woman lifts her chin just a fraction, nothing fragile in that motion, and Dyer feels a sudden dizzy doubling like she’s been drawn out in overlapping circles, that Drop party buzz of anticipation, of connection.

The Wayward says, “Leave it, mate, she ain’t interested. Um, innit?”

Dyer turns, ready to give Way a “shut up already” roll of her eyes, finds a face in the way—heavy jowled and swirled blue with faux prison tats. The guy blinks, does a cartoon double-take.

“Bugger me. Thought you was a bloke,” he says.

“Nope and nope,” Dyer says.

“Works for me,” says the blue tats’ companion, baring her luminescent teeth at Dyer over his shoulder.

“She ain’t interested, whichever way you’re rigged,” Way says. “Are you, Dyer?”

Dyer gives him the “shut up already” look now, but it’s too late.

“Dyer. You’re HigherWorks,” the teeth gasp—even her tongue glows white—and blue tats gets a look that says maybe he can overlook Dyer’s not being a bloke after all.

“Opt-in tonight” Dyer says, and slaps a pair of maps into the hand that snakes around blue tats’ waist, looking left to avoid eye contact, to find the woman by the canal. Nowhere she could have gone in that brief moment, but she’s not there. Deleted, swiped away, and in her place are three men in bespoke suits, hands in pocket and practiced leers on their faces. Dyer’s first thought is Immigration, but they’ve got Union Jack pins on their lapels—junior partners out of the City, most likely, looking to score points with management by pasting a couple of USERs to a pulp.

She reaches back to tap The Wayward, feels his dreads shift against her shoulder as he nods. “Two more, other side of the bridge,” he says quietly.

Dyer shuts her eyes, inhales slowly. Blue tats’ breath is stale beer and bad curry for breakfast, but he’s over six feet of solid meat, and his glowstar companion is razor sharp and twitchy with stims, and they are both as London as the King’s Own Cobblers. Dyer tucks her arm around them both—desperate measures for Dyer, touching, but she’s thinking about bodies bleeding into the Thames—says, “Buy us a pint, then?”

2042-05-18T10:22:00+01:00 +51.541327-0.145319

• contact: target (unconfirmed)—Leanna Vance—priority AA Aph2035.Z980023—scan summary: face match 47% sig. deltas hair color n.a. shaved—eye color n.a. corneal implants—gesture score 62% sig. deltas weight -12 kilos height +9cm possible tib/fem bone extension

• note: ID scores low confidence due contact distance & crowd cover—see attached images

• attachment: personal message

—crazy flight, edge of space, yo, jetlagged out of my gourd—day *started* weird—some guy comes up to me at the airport “hey jocelyn” kisses me straight on the mouth—i’m like “i do *not* know u so f-off”—feel wacked like i’m coming down with something seeing ghosts out of the corner of my eye—gotta be a lotta ghosts here, yeah? place even *smells* old—no fiberboard no burning tires no pepperspray

—took four hours to get through customs—no one got the f-ing memo about the new ip treaty guess the brits are keeping it secret cuz everyone hates the states here—as if we can’t hate each other just fine on our own, thanks—some guy on the street called me a user, like he can see tracks through my hoodie, turns out it means u.s. economic refugee—i’m like “screw u” but i guess i fit the description if i wasn’t here on ur dime and ur visa

—might all pay off, though, cuz that tip seems legit—just been here 12 hours and i’ve already got a possible hit on vance herself—got a few photos but i couldn’t get close and these contact cams u gave me are crap—ur fancy scan app says around 50% match—she’s had serious body work and she’s got this cray cray looking surfer dude watching her back and she’s edgy as hell so don’t start spending the money yet—oh wait, i *have*—i don’t score that bounty i am so so very doomed

—kisses—jo

• attachment: images (7)—<click to view>

Dyer and Mrs. John Dee, brooding nano—
Camden Catacombs—Friday Noon

“Mrs. John Dee, you said no self-respecting Londoner would be caught dead in Camden in the daylight,” Dyer says. She’s sitting on the microassembler in an attempt to block the bright, busy control panel from view.

Mrs. John Dee tugs a blue floral frock on over her head, sets her glasses on her nose, peers over them at the folks staggered about the catacomb chamber.

“Dyer, love, none of these people are self-respecting.”

She sheds a heavy studded cuff, the last of her work uniform, and toes the box of leather, chrome, and vinyl under the workbench. As the only legal Brit in HigherWorks, she picks up spending money selling LPs to tourists who can’t play them. The money’s okay, and the contacts in the community of artists and musicians working the markets are better. The required punk attire—“the hoary old eighties,” Mrs. John Dee calls it, “and heavy on the hoar”—is more suited to Dyer’s taste, but Dyer’s forged ID codes aren’t up to the scrutiny required by the Economic Refugee act.

“And you said the catacombs are off limits due to the danger of flooding from the canal.”

“A positive death trap,” Mrs. John Dee agrees. “Which is why you had to pick three locks when we first moved in. No one dares come down here.”

Paint-tagged kids chase each other with rattling spraycans. Students ring their teacher under the dim hanging bulbs, dutifully examining the rails set into the brick floor where horse carts once rolled. A family dozes on a blanket, surrounded by the remains of a picnic. And what looks for all the world like a tour group in bright Brazilian colors mills about under the vaulted galleries, kept away from the equipment by some hastily stacked boxes and Dyer’s glare.

Mrs. John Dee points at the massive slab of brick and ironwork that supports the far side of the underground warehouse. “Look, that wall was blank when we got here. That’s a sick canvas, would’ve been tagged top to bottom had this place been open.”

They’d moved in three weeks ago, and the wall is already covered, a collage of overlapped graffiti, bills pasted up and torn down again, what looks like bird crap even though they’re underground, a hanging pair of seriously soiled trousers that none of the group dared get near enough to take down. A little girl with perfect doll hair and knock-off Day-Glo Doc Martens is staring up at the wall. Dyer and Dee watch as she leans forward and carefully sticks her gum in one of the few remaining spots of bare brick.

Dyer sighs and shifts to cover a neon green popup on the panel. “Should have had my hips widened when I had my legs done,” she says.

Mrs. John Dee scrubs her mohawk into its natural teal tangle, pulls her tablet out of her bag. “Bollocks. Your hips are the eighth architectural wonder. They just need some company. Budge up, love.” She pulls herself up onto the microassembler next to Dyer, peeks under her arm at the control panel. “What are we hatching?” she asks.

“Soundsystem, all for you,” Dyer says. “Bud interface, cochlear induction. Everything except the auditory cortex stuff. I ran that in with the visual batch.”

Mrs. John Dee does a little shimmy on the microassembler hatch. “Breed, my lovelies, breeeeed,” she says. And adds, as the little Day-Glo girl copies her move across the will-be dancefloor, “We’re going to jail, aren’t we?”

“No, you’re going to jail,” Dyer says. “If the police decide we’re causing enough of a nuisance, they’ll haul you up for some Section 63 nonsense. ‘Repetitive beats.’”

“‘Repetitive beats’ my bucephalus bouncing bum,” Mrs. John Dee says with another shimmy. “Did you even listen to the track I—”

“The Wayward, Shimago, me, we’ll be put in the Dover Center to be beaten down for a year, deported back to the US and then things will really get bad. Worse, if the UK rejoins the IP treaty zone.”

“Sorry, love, shouldn’t laugh, I know. But really, what else can we do?” She waves at the crowd.

The students have filed out into the tunnels, and the Brazilians have expanded like vapor to fill the available space.

“Move on,” Dyer says.

Mrs. John Dee frowns, prods her tablet with a tattered teal fingernail. “I’m not at all sure I like the idea of running, just because the bloody fascists have voted themselves in and our own dear fans are all too, um, fanatic.”

“It’s not running,” Dyer says. She gestures at the billowing Brazilians. “It’s just the flow. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of blah blah.’ You’re a DJ, Dee, you know about the flow.”

In the gaps between the Brazilians, she sees the shine of black leather under thunderhead hair, glittering coal-smoke eyes. Flashback to this morning’s vision, the impossibly disappearing woman. Dyer’s chest thrums.

She slips off the microassembler. “Be right back. If the panel beeps three times, hit the green button.”

“Oh, ah, okay. Oh dear,” Mrs. John Dee says behind her.

Dyer follows the leather gleam across the dancefloor, loses it in the gloom and bustle, reaches that graffitied far wall. No one is there, nothing like that fragile face, not in the crowd or under the vaults on either side. Like this morning at the canal, she’s dissolved away.

“She show me the spot for my gum,” the doll girl says in a stage whisper, blue eyes serious under straight-cut bangs, then she laughs and swirls back into the crowd.

Well, what were you expecting on a day turned weird and wired, Dyer thinks. “What else?” Dyer asks the wall.

The wall responds with a flicker: a scrap of smartpaper, smeared under sellotape and glitching all along the torn edge. Dyer tugs it from the brick, squints at the scrolling text. It’s some sort of government document, a snarl of nested digital sigs and certs and then the title, Provisional Agreement on the Renormalization of Intellectual Property Rights between the United States of America and the United Kingdom of Gre—

Dyer tries to scroll up, searching for a date, but the paper glitches, resyncs on a list captioned Patents of Special Concern, and there at the top is “A process for the mutual self-repair of nanomechanisms” by Leanna Vance and then it’s her eyes glitching, flashes of memory in time to her pounding heart of those last worst days in the US, a sudden sinking nausea, a tinnitus squeal. The squeal stops, starts again, and Dyer realizes it’s not in her head; it’s coming from across the room. She pushes back through the Brazilians to find Mrs. John Dee, all five ferocious feet of her, restacking the box barricade around their workspace, pausing after every box to glare down the vaults.

Dyer sweeps up a box, lifts it over Mrs. John Dee’s head to the top of the stack. “What happened?”

“Some bloody bint knocks the boxes over, ‘oh, excuse me,’ she says, and when I get up to sort it out she nips in to play with your panel there, face first and wide eyed.”

“Contact cams,” Dyer says, nausea returning.

“‘That’s a bit of none of your business,’ I said, and she doesn’t even blink. ‘You deaf?’ I ask, and give her a nudge in the kidneys, in case she really was.”

Mrs. John Dee demonstrates with a vicious jab of her elbow.

Dyer steps back out of range. “So?”

“So since her hearing was apparently bollocksed, I figured I’d give it a tune up.” She patted her tablet. “I was just setting up audio network tests. I figured if she was rigged for cams, she’d have bud implants as well. I boosted the volume to eleven.”

“Ah,” Dyer said. “That was feedback, then, that I heard. From forty feet away.”

“Her head will be ringing for a fortnight. Ought to put a spanner in her party plans.”

“You think she’s a nano cook?”

“If she were a fan, or paparazzi, she’d have gone for our lovely visages, not the gear. She’s a bizarro you from some rival Drop party crew.”

Dyer’s thinking of that fade-away face, those eyes. “She look like me? Only with hair?” She waves her fingers over her head like clouds drifting. “Did she, uh, fade?”

Mrs. John Dee shrugs. “She looked like a yellow hood-up hoodie. Not so much fading as slinking away in disgrace, tail between her legs. Lovely tail, though. All’s well that ends well.” Mrs. John Dee demonstrates with another shimmy.

Dyer makes a dubious “mmm.” She fishes the scrap of smartpaper out of her back pocket, but it’s gone completely glitched, just a scattering of pixel dust.

2042-05-18T12:09:00+01:00 +51.541709-0.147667

• contact: target (unconfirmed)—Leanna Vance—priority AA Aph2035.Z980023—supporting evidence IP violations see note

• contact: target (confirmed)—Mariam Ebadi UK7D1B4GU230011—priority NA rumored assoc. Leanna Vance c.f.—UK Resident ID confirmed via direct scan embedded tag

• note: target operating Alphet model X50EU microassembler running unreleased OS—license module disabled—see attached images

• note: unregistered NNDA profiles in violation of 21USC2401—see attached images

• attachment: personal message

—got the bitch—yeah yeah no physical id yet no documented distribution but who else is gonna be running alphet.com beta code with custom modules? and the license mod is axed so that’s ip violation right there *and* she’s cooking delivery agents with unregistered payloads—do me a favor and see if there’s a brit law about that so i don’t have to deal with the treaty b.s. again

—also this ebadi bimbo is hacking earbud implants—*got* to be a brit law against that

—see *told* u i was a good investment

—kisses—jo

• attachment: images (5)—<click to view>

Dyer, Shimago, and Mrs. John Dee, rocket in pocket—
Mornington Crescent—Friday Afternoon

Dyer levers the backpack over the exit turnstile at arm’s length, ducks the bristling bouquet of carbonfiber antennae that spill from the top.

“Fragile,” Shimago reminds her.

“So are my eyeballs,” Dyer says.

Shimago doesn’t have to lift his pack; the turnstile only comes up to his thighs. Mrs. John Dee drags her duffel thumping behind her.

“Why is the helium so heavy?” she grumbles. “Ought to just float along. Maybe if I let some out into the bag.”

“No,” Dyer and Shimago say in unison. “You just want to huff it and sing in a squirrel voice,” Dyer adds.

“And then I shall just float along,” Mrs. John Dee agrees happily.

“Anyway, that’s the lightest bag,” Dyer says.

“That’s another thing,” Mrs. John Dee says. “Why is the rocket so heavy?”

“It’s not—”

“A rocket. Yes, love, but that’s what I call it because the first one was such a lovely rockety shape.”

“—Not heavy,” Shimago continues. “Just big.”

“Sixteen times the network bandwidth of the last one,” Dyer says. “Twice as many nano dispersers.”

“And your subsonic driver,” Shimago says. “The entire carbon outer shell is the resonator. 120DbA at 20 Hertz.”

“Ace. Teeth shall be rattled,” Mrs. John Dee says, out of breath and a few steps behind. She’s turning circles as she walks, duffel swinging.

“Wait ’til you see it flying, with the spotlights and the screens running,” Dyer says. “It’s perfect, looks just like the film. Only thing we couldn’t find is a clean recording of the announcer. You’ll have to record Shimago when we get back to the catacombs.”

Shimago booms, “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.”

Mrs. John Dee is still spinning. Dyer turns around. “Dee, what are you—”

“USER freak. Fuck off home.”

Dyer turns back. Whoever’s speaking is hidden behind Shimago’s bulk. She leans left to see a dozen pimpled punklings in custom-printed carbon, active tats a riot of football logos and Union colors.

“Tha’s right, you heard ’im, you yank sket,” one of them said to Dyer.

Shimago sets a hand on the lead punkling’s shoulder. “Balderdash, my lad. Do I look like a economic refugee, American or otherwise?” he says, in his best King’s English.

Shimago looks like six-foot-four two hundred and fifty pounds of gear-pierced lcd-tattooed fully networked Tongan-Californian rugby-playing airship-piloting Drop-partying choreomaniac. His hyphens alone outweigh these punks, Dyer thinks and bares her teeth.

“Dunno, she fit though, innit?” one says, gaze dropping down under Dyer’s.

“Issit?” the lead one says, squinting. Shimago shifts his grip to the kid’s head, palms it like a ball and turns it upward.

“Since you seem so full of perceptions upon our character, perhaps you would like to present them to the authorities,” Shimago says.

“Wha?”

“He taking you to the po-po,” another explains.

“I’m just sayin’ I’d mash that,” the one staring at Dyer says.

Mrs. John Dee comes spinning past Dyer, takes the lead punkling out at the knees with the duffel; he dangles from Shimago’s hand like a doll. The other punklings step back from the swinging bag. “You want a mashing?” she asks the starer. “You cheeky little muppet. The lot of you in our ends, up from, what, Surrey? Think you’re hard because you spent the money Mummy gave you on tats you can turn off again before you get home? She’s hard.” That with a hand out toward Dyer. “She eats suburban white boys like you for breakfast.”

“Not hungry,” Dyer says. She steps up even with Dee. The starer only comes up to her chin; she looks straight over his head at the crowd pushing past in the too bright sunlight, all willfully or carelessly oblivious. But there’s a knot of anxious faces across the street that have noob USER written all over them, pinned in place like the sun’s a spotlight. Lucky the punklings hadn’t run into them instead.

“What are you doing here?” Dyer wonders under her breath. She means the USERs, stumbling through London on this unsettled day of days, but the punklings react with shrugs and awkward shuffles. “Dunno,” one says. “Heard this voice said check those three, they’s yanks.”

Shimago sets his captive punkling upright. “A case of mistaken identity,” he says. “Easily corrected by a conversation with the police about anti-social behavior.” Shimago gives the leader a gentle push, and the kid stumbles forward, trips over Dee’s duffel again, bumps shoulders with the starer. It’s not entirely a bluff; Dyer and Shimago’s forged IDs will hold up to a quick fingerprint or retinal scan. But they’re likely to fail the sort of full biometric series that Immigration runs, and it’s been one of those days.

A too-long moment as the punkling weighs the cost of confrontation versus the loss of face. Finally he mutters “freak” and shuffles down the sidewalk without looking back; his mates straggle behind him. The starer stays a beat longer, finally makes eye contact. Dyer blinks her corneas clear, looks down at him until he blushes and turns away.

“A new life awaits us in a golden land of opportunity and adventure,” Dyer says.

Shimago sighs, hefts his pack on his shoulder, heads off perpendicular to the punkling’s retreat.

“Mrs. John Dee, you are yourself from the lovely green lawns of Surrey, are you not?” he asks.

“I was,” she says. “But Mrs. John Dee is from here and now, Shimago.”

The duffel nudges Dyer’s leg. Mrs. John Dee is walking backward, head swinging like a radar dish. “Dee, what the hell are you looking for?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. John Dee says. “Whatever you’ve been looking for since this morning. Which is, judging from the look on your face, a much bigger deal than some sixth form twits a-twitting.”

“I don’t know what...” Dyer almost says “you’re talking about,” but that’s neither fair nor true. “What it is. Somebody following me. Somebodies. An IP bounty hunter. A parallel me from some other dimension. Maybe Way is right and it’s ghost nano.”

“Ghost nano is an urban legend,” Shimago says.

Dyer growls, strides five steps to the next road crossing, stops cold. Mrs. John Dee bumps into her from behind. Shimago stops next to Dyer. His look of gentle concern grows less gentle as he looks up from her to the street.

On the far side of the crossing are two uniformed officers of the UK Immigration Service, conspicuously not cops courtesy of their berets and their semi-automatics. The two are staring straight at them through the stream of crossing pedestrians.

Mrs. John Dee wedges herself between Dyer and Shimago. “You’re not seriously waiting for the walk light?” she says. Then she follows their gaze and adds, “Oh. Oh dear. But they can’t stop us unless they have cause.”

Shimago says, “Crossing against the light is cause.”

“And not crossing is suspicious behavior,” Dyer says.

As if summoned by her statement, the two UKIS officers step off the curb. Dyer fights the sudden urge to look over her shoulder; looking like she’s going to run could escalate a bad situation into a fatal one.

And then she looks anyway, because she knows what she’ll see: the fragile-faced woman, from the canal, from the catacomb wall, standing in carbon black relief against a white sunlit storefront. Not a woman, though, is it? Not a rival nano cook, not some patent-tracking bounty hunter in from the US. It’s something else entirely, that outline drawn flat against the concrete like an opening, like a door. With no conscious decision Dyer takes Mrs. John Dee’s hand, tugs her toward the figure even though it’s already fading to a shimmering afterimage. There’s a real door there, though, behind the figure’s promise, and Dyer grabs the handle, looks back to see if Shimago is following.

The impossible shape is now standing in the crossing, still no more than a silhouette: the gleam of leather below and eyes above, and as the UKIS officers step up behind her the bright sudden slash of a smile.

And as she smiles there’s a pop pop pop from overhead, loud enough to sting, smoke and a shower of glittering fragments. A beat of silence, then the crowd in the street rears up screaming and crashes down together like a wave. Another round of pops. Still on her feet, Dyer can see that it’s the street surveillance drones blowing out, one by one, but for the folks on the ground it’s cause for more panic. The UKIS officers struggle to keep their footing as they track Dyer through the scrum. One fails and takes the other down with him. The impossible woman’s hair fades with the smoke; the gleam of her smile fragments like the falling debris.

Mrs. John Dee tugs Dyer’s hand. She and Shimano are already through the door.

The shop is a maze of booths, one of the miniature markets that has spilled out from the fount of crass that is Camden. Dyer, Dee, and Shimago take turns leading each other, their packs bumping past jackets, studded belts, badge-bedecked bags, and the butt end of the twentieth century spelled out in T-shirts. A rear door leads to an alley that dead-ends in a covered court, another manufactured market. They take refuge in a coffee shop whose postered windows provide cover.

“No sign of them,” Mrs. John Dee says, and smooths back down the corner of a peeled-up poster with slightly shaky fingers. “Bloody hell, Dyer, bloody hell. What has the world come to, we can’t cross the damn street without being afraid?”

Shimago is back from the counter, steaming mugs in hand. “Ah, Mrs. John Dee, this—” he starts in his own gentle accent.

Dyer cuts in, still half-blind with afterimages, or maybe it’s anger flooding up like the crowd’s panic. “Mariam, damn it, this has always been our world, Jonah’s and mine, afraid to cross the damn street. You’re just coming to it, and you’re just a tourist. We live here, our whole lives.”

Shimago blinks at this use of real names, but sits and says nothing.

“Back in California, even before everything collapsed, even when Jonah and I worked at Alphet in the shiny heart of the goddamn shiny future, my own lab and a billion dollar budget, even then I was afraid to walk down the street alone.”

Dyer is thumping the table; coffee splashes, scalds her fingertips.

“And then the Crash and it all fell down, lawyers picking over what’s left and goddamn IP bounty hunters with a take-down notice in one hand and a taser in the other, people saying they were scared of losing everything, but they meant their 401k, their house, their car.

“The day of the Wall Street hack, police car following me fifteen blocks from the BART to my house even though there’s fucking fascist militia burning houses right down the street, in Berkeley, for fuck sake, finally stops me fifty feet from my front door—for jay-walking is what they said, meaning I crossed the neighbor’s driveway while being black, never mind I’m in a business suit and five hundred dollar shoes. Savings, house, car, those shoes, I was way past that. I was scared of losing my life. Every damn day.

“And now it’s happening here in your face and yes, you’re scared. You should be, with government caving in to the thugs and bigots. But you can always get on the train back to Surrey. We don’t have that option. All we can do is move on.”

Mrs. John Dee is pale, and the shaking has traveled up her arms to her shoulders. Shimago gives a small nod, blots up the spilled coffee with his napkin, and with that, Dyer’s anger, which is never gone, loses its focus. She puts her hand on Dee’s.

“The hell, Mariam, I know this is nothing you haven’t heard from your own grandparents. Look, having left all that bullshit behind, having come here with nothing but myself and that self so changed I barely recognize it, I found refuge. I’m not talking about the EU and their half-ass US Economic Refugee act, I mean you, Mrs. John Dee, hottest damn DJ in London, you and Shimago and The Wayward.”

Dyer snorts, rubs her scalp.

“If I could send my ghost back to appear to myself on the sidewalk that day, tell myself that I was going to end up cooking nano for some damn crazy underground psychedelic performance art rave heaven-help-me Drop party, and that, not developing corporate patents, was the way to the goddamn shiny future...”

Shimago holds up his mug. “HigherWorks,” he says.

Mrs. John Dee and Dyer clink their cups against his. “HigherWorks.”

Mrs. John Dee slurps her tea, sighs and shuts her eyes, opens them again and says, “Dyer, love, sorry but I have to ask. How did you get away from the cops? On the sidewalk that day, I mean.”

Now Dyer is getting the shakes, as the adrenaline drains. She sets her cup down before it splashes again. “I stood there, hands on hips, and said ‘Seriously? One of the biggest days in American history, and you want to spend it hassling me?’”

Mrs. John Dee hugs her mug to her chest and says, “Bad. Ass.”

Shimago nods again.

But Dyer shakes her head, thinking of that knot of noob USERs in the sunlight. “Lucky,” she says.

2042-05-18T15:22:00+01:00 +51.535956-0.139593

• contact: target (unconfirmed)—Leanna Vance—priority AA Aph2035.Z980023—supporting evidence IP violations see note

• contact: target (unconfirmed)—Jonah Pupunu—priority A Aph2035.Z72105

• note: evidence use of nano agents against UK gov property—see attached image archive

• attachment: personal message

—holy crap was alphet developing some sort of anti-security nano? must have been right? someone just blew out a couple dozen surveillance drones and those nazi immigration police have an alert out for—dig this—“woman african descent shaved head” and “man pacific islander unusually large”—*gotta* be vance and pupunu

—those same nazi immigration police grilled me for an hour for taking pix of the drones—some sort of migrant riot thing going on—pretty intense—still, no guns, no gas, no bodies hanging from streetlights, so it’s f-ing paradise, yeah? would be, if i could stay here

—kisses—jo

• attachment: images (22)—<click to view>

(Dyer) and The Wayward, displacing—
Camden Catacombs—Friday Afternoon

“–Ghosts, you know?” The Wayward says, sounds stoned because he is, during this quiet time with most of the setup done but the Drop still hours away.

Wants to connect, he hears Dyer say.

“Right? Me too,” Way says, prodding his tablet. He’s testing the camera grid, the web of stickum cams and microdrones that he uses to monitor the groove. The sights and sounds might be nano-created illusions inside the dancers’ heads, but the way they move, their reaction to the stream and to each other, all that feeds back into the rhythm of The Wayward’s images and Mrs. John Dee’s beats, which stream back into the crowd until the whole system, sight and sound and moving bodies all strung together by Dyer’s nano, drops into yet a higher sync.

“Higher and higher,” Way says. And then, “Spooky,” because the cameras are glitching, flashes of images from elsewhere, bits of broadcast—a listing overloaded boat, a red-faced crowd in Parliament Square—snips of skewed text, feeds from street drones, what looks like Shimago, Dee, and Dyer standing in a sea of crawling people; but that doesn’t make sense because Dyer’s here, somewhere. Saw her just now, Way thinks, or was that in the camera feed?

Over by the wall, he hears Dyer say.

“Right,” Way says. “The spooky wall.” Spooky in the way that wall had developed, like an photographic print, the image emerging point by point, line by line out of the blank brick, a series of random acts teasing pattern, purpose. He’d been taking snapshots of it over the last week, a time-lapse to work into the performance stream tonight, layered over the real wall. Layers of reality, that’s the “Higher” in HigherWorks, Way thinks.

The wall is not quite ready, he hears Dyer say.

“Ready for her closeup,” Way says. “Gotta get some closeup textures for the vid-ay-oh stream.” He gets up and wobbles across the bricks to the far side of the warehouse. A flock of microdrones spiral over his head like an exclamation point. Even though it’s underground, the warehouse has headroom; iron beams hold brick vaults forty feet overhead.

“Over my head,” Way says, head tilted up to look up at the wall. A diagonal splash of paint and paper runs from the floor almost up to the ceiling. Last week Mrs. John Dee chased a spraycan-armed drone around the warehouse with a broom, the rest of them doubled over laughing, though Dyer pointed out it was hardly their place to complain: They didn’t belong there either, no one did.

Every place belongs to no one, he hears Dyer say.

“Just movin’ through,” Way agrees. He takes a snapshot, a poster pasted over the uneven brick, realizes it’s an ad for an anti-migrant protest, tears the poster down leaving a jagged edge that reads “migrant pro,” and takes a photo of that instead.

“That’s us, Dyer. Migrant pros,” he says.

Refugee act, he hears Dyer say.

“Yeah, I mean refugees, but what did you say the other day? Everyone on the move is running from something and running to something. Just the flow, yeah? I ever play you The Wayward? The music, I mean. Harry Partch, he was a hobo. Like you, now I think of it. He had degrees, research grants, just like you, just like you he left it behind to ride the rails in the Depression. The first one, I mean, the black-and-white one. Left the mainstream behind after that, made his own musical instruments, his own scales, his own kind of performances. Just like us.”

Way scoops a glittery blob of something off the brick, looks for a spot, finally peels up a sticker and re-sticks it a foot higher, smears the blob in its place.

“Anyway, seemed like a good name to take on, yeah? Way-ward, like where I’m headed is the way itself.”

That thought makes him want to take another hit, but he doesn’t know where the spliff has gone, can’t actually remember rolling one, but man, he’s rolling on something. He reaches up on tiptoes to peel away the bottom half of another poster.

“He was from Oakland like you, too, Dyer. Harry Partch was. But he grew up down near me in LA. Man, I miss that place sometimes. Not the bits where I was sleeping on the beach and eating out of, well, you know. But, hey, all this...”

Way waves vaguely at the wall, squints, pulls a piece of gum from down around his knees and sticks it at eye level.

“I mean HigherWorks, you guys, like you always say, worth running to, even if I started with the running from.”

The future is displacement, he hears Dyer say.

“Right on. HigherWorks, displacing the future.” Which doesn’t sound quite right. He pulls a stickum camera out of his pocket, flies it across the surface of the wall, saying “displace, displace, displace,” but the word doesn’t sound any more right with repetition. He lands the camera on a brick, just a few feet above the floor and pointing down. “Dis place,” he says. “Hey, Dyer, get it?”

But Dyer isn’t here at all, she’s over there, coming in from the tunnels with Shimago and Mrs. John Dee, lugging what has got to be Shimago’s new rocket.

“Huh,” The Wayward says.

“Hey, Way,” Dyer says. “Everything ready?”

He looks up at the wall. “Yeah,” he says.

2042-05-18T16:29:00+01:00 +51.541709-0.147667

• contact: target (unconfirmed)—Leanna Vance—priority AA Aph2035.Z980023—supporting evidence IP violations see note

• note: evidence intent to distribute unlicensed NNDA see attached image archive

• attachment: personal message—i know u r thinking i’m gonna be working off your loan forever but think again, looks like i’ll wrap this up my first day—this higherworks group with vance and pupunu planning some sort of rave tonight—i got a pic of the flyer it has a map with an x-marks-the-spot—apparently they literally *spray* the nano over the audience—all i gotta do is show up with a scanner and a camera and a pair of cuffs

—kisses—jo

• attachment: image (1)—<click to view>

Dyer, cueing—Camden Catacombs—Friday Evening

Dyer tucks up her knees as The Wayward and Mrs. John Dee shove the last couple of cardboard boxes into place. She’s under the plastic folding table they use as a workbench, with the brick of the catacomb wall behind her, the humming microassembler to the right, and the boxes sealing off the other two sides. It doesn’t actually have to be dark and quiet for neural cue test, but it makes the measurements more accurate. Anyway, it’s part of the HigherWorks ritual, and not just for her; when Dyer emerges from her cave and declares the readings auspicious, that’s the cue for the entire group that the Drop is on.

She tugs the sensor band snug across her temples, pairs it with her tablet, starts up the diagnostic logging: temporal, frontal, occipital, parietal activity—thinking about The Wayward’s “parental nest”—blinks her corneas clear so the infrared camera in the tablet can track eye movement, pupil dilation. Ear buds on, Dee’s test mix streaming, network up. Dyer swipes the screen off, sits in the dark for a minute. Clear my head, she thinks, but she’s still seeing afterimages, black on black, shadowed eyes and thundercloud hair. Her impossible woman.

Dyer sighs, finds the business end of the inhaler. The nano swirls into her lungs, the smell of apple blossoms and a tart bubbly sensation like champagne. And then...nothing. Which is the first test passed; if the nano triggers without the cue, then it’s not an opt-in, and suddenly HigherWorks goes from a concern for Immigration and the IP lawyers to one for Narcotics or, a very worst case, the anti-terrorist nutjobs.

She fishes a map from her pocket, finds the sealed edge with her thumb, and pulls it open. There’s a spark as the ink reacts and then the image inside shimmers to life.

This is the first time she’s actually seen the cue as an image; up until this moment it’s just been data. For the last couple of years they’ve been getting the cues from a friend of The Wayward up in Kingsbury, an ancient Irish curmudgeon of a painter who comes to the parties even though he’s the one person in the world for whom the nano won’t trigger; there’s a window of just a few hours as the nano settles into the brain for the cue to come. Window window window, Dyer thinks as the nano wakes up. The cue is suddenly a window, the printed image a world seen through it: two characters on a high domed roof, looking out over the streets of a city sketched in strokes and squares—could be London but strange shapes hang in the air above—and behind the two watchers a raven watches them like memory memory memory as the audio kicks in, layered all down the auditory path from her implanted buds to her cochlear nerves to her auditory cortex, an ocean of sound swept by deep currents.

The image flickers and fades as the inks burn out, but streaks of blue and silver ghost ghost ghost across her vision like echoes. During the gig tonight The Wayward will be nudging those echoes via the network, riffing on the images like visual jazz, tracking Dee’s beats, the two of them playing off each other, playing the crowd-become-one like sex like the crowd in the crossing when the cameras blew, made one motion motion motion by a hypersensitivity that transcends identity triggered not by lust or fear but by design by a higher working working working. Which is the second test passed; the nano is certainly working.

Dyer taps the tablet on, swipes the network off, colors fading as the screenlight fills her little box nest under the table. She scrolls through the data, diagnostic software already parsing the logs into graphs points spreading across the screen and into the air around her like stars falling like light on water like what had The Wayward said this morning you go all scattered scattered scattered.

Dyer shuts her eyes. Shhhh, the test is over, the network’s down, she thinks. Go to sleep, little nano.

“Scattered,” a voice ghost-whispers in her ear. “Awake.”

“I am awake,” Dyer says, shivers all down her back. She keeps her eyes shut, not sure that she wants to see that sharp fragile face and those shadowed eyes this close, this intimate.

“No.”

“‘No’ not me, or ‘no’ not awake?” Dyer asks. And then, “You know what? Just bugger off. I’ve got stuff to do. Anyway, you’re just urban legend.”

From the ocean of sound come sudden shifting layers of voices, “Urban defined not by geography demographics or culture but by a certain threshold of connectivity, legend not as fabricated history but as fabricated comma history as the key to a map.”

The voices all sync up on that last sharp word, and then complete silence, but with that hypersensitivity from the nano/lust/fear Dyer can feel that impossible face just a finger’s width from hers.

“What do you want?” Dyer asks.

Silence, but a flickering, or the memory of a flickering, glitching pixels and the words mutual self-repair.

“I left Leanna Vance behind, halfway around the world and a decade gone,” Dyer snarls. “What do you want from me?” She opens her eyes, but it’s dark; the tablet screen’s gone to sleep again.

Her own voice says, “We live here, our whole lives.”

The feeling of lips on hers, the scent of bougainvillea and circuits burning, the taste of champagne.

2042-05-18T18:33:22+01:00 +51.541522-0.147123

• contact: target (unconfirmed)—Leanna Vance—priority AA Aph2035.Z980023—ongoing

• attachment: personal message—i got a lead on an american expat supposed to have the scoop on the “user” community—better start picking out some new bounties for me

—and while you’re at it get my visa extended—i’m beginning to dig this old smell these old ghosts—got no immediate plans for going back to the states—yeah yeah i can hear you grumbling from here but i am worth it—i am a bounty collecting *ninja*—and the proof is vance is going down down down tonight

—kisses—jo

Dyer and Shimago, queuing—Stables Market—Friday Evening

Dyer is in line at the kebab stand for Mrs. John Dee’s shawarma, and someone is too close behind her: a caress of convection currents, a static tickle.

Shimago back with the curry, Dyer thinks. Blue Tats and Glowstar Girl from this morning, ready for another pint. The staring pimple-faced punkling still hot to mash it. A yellow-hoodied bounty hunter with a take-down notice ready to tag and drag her back to California. Anyone, Dyer thinks as she turns, please, anyone but the shadowed thundercloud shape that is, nano or not, the ghost of Leanna Vance.

It’s Kal’s friend, xe of the twig fingers and anime eyes.

Dyer says, “Leelee, yeah? All right?”

But those fingers are shaking, those eyes even wider than Dyer remembered. Leelee gulps a breath, another, manages to gasp, “Kal.”

“Ah, damn it,” Dyer says. “UKIS?”

Leelee’s confused alarm is baffling until Dyer realizes xe might not be a USER.

“The Immigration Services?” Dyer says, miming a beret.

Leelee shakes xyr head, mimes a hood instead. “A yank,” xe says, “Some hard sket with a taser,” in a lilting East End Jamaican accent. “Hard as can be in a yellow hoodie, which ain’t. Kal say ‘go tell Dyer’ so I go. Went down there,” xe points at the floor—the catacombs run under the market—then points up, “but they say you up here.”

“Shit,” Dyer says. “Where are they? Kal and the hoodie woman? We’ll grab Shimago and go find them.”

“Allow that,” Leelee says. “Kal take care of herself. She tell me to tell you this yank asking about HigherWorks, asking about Dyer. Sounds like the sket bringin’ a beef your way. I run here to warn you. Manz didn’t build this body for running, innit?” Xe shakes xyr head, tugs the lace around xyr sleeves straight.

“Someone bringing a beef to HigherWorks?” Shimago asks, walking up with take-away bags in each hand. “Let them. They will discover that we are...” He swings the bags like nunchacku, leans in for effect: “...vegetarian.”

Leelee blinks, a remarkable effect with those huge eyes, swings a long tapered thumb at the kebab stand. “Got some bad news den about the shawarma, arms.”

“The shawarma is for Mrs. John Dee, and she is, as she reminded me this afternoon, from London.”

“Safe,” Leelee says, satisfied, and starts in on the frills around her collar.

“You’re sure Kal doesn’t need help with this woman with the taser?” Dyer asks. “The street’s crazy today, with the anti-migrant rally, those USERs pulled out of the river, and that’s just the start of the weird.”

“Kal bare fine, just getting the tourist lost round the wrong ends so I could find you. Won’t take long, with the sket limpin’ like that.”

“This American has a limp?” Shimago asks.

“Does now, innit?” Leelee says, pulls up xyr long frilly skirts to show the wicked points of xyr Mary Janes.

“Admirable,” Shimago says. “Dyer, the problems of the day are now behind you and surely moving too slow to catch you up, thanks to...”

“Leelee, Shimago,” Dyer says, and pays for the shawarma. “That only works if I’m moving at all, and all day I’ve felt like I’m suspended.”

“Girl, way Kal tells it, your mind running, all the time.”

“This is true,” Shimago says.

“Straight out of my head,” Dyer says. “Which is the point, actually. Shimago, that ghost nano thing...”

“Ghost nano is—”

“Real,” Dyer says. “Meaning nanites that don’t decay, that self-repair, that can connect between brains without a network node.”

Shimago frowns dubiously. “Dyer, even Alphet couldn’t—”

“They did. I did. That’s what my lab was doing, that was the project I couldn’t talk about. Military contracts, whole squads linked empathically, using each other’s eyes, ears, brains. Then the Crash happened and, Jesus, I’ve never told anyone this, the truth is, even though we were running from everything we’d known, part of me was glad that project went down with everything else. But now I’m not sure, now I think maybe something leaked out, and it’s looking for me.”

In the patient tone he reserves for The Wayward’s most unlikely theories, Shimago says, “Persistent or not, I find it unlikely that nano could create a complex enough network for consciousness to emerge.”

“I’m not talking AI, I’m talking about a pathway for consciousness to travel. Mental migrants.” Dyer’s accent was slipping. She looked around at the crowd in the market, London in its motley, two thousand years of migration, Camden in its shoddy sham glam even more of a refuge because no one pretended to be who they seemed.

“Literally out of your head, in a strange body?” Shimago asks.

“Don’t knock it ’til you try it, arms,” Leelee replies.

2042-05-18T19:31:53+01:00 +51.539044-0.135225

• contact: target (unconfirmed)—Leanna Vance—priority AA Aph2035.Z980023—ongoing

• attachment: personal message

—we got any dirt on an american in london going by “kal”? that’s the expat i mentioned before—pix attached but it was dark—she and her bitch of a whateverfriend just got in my face big-time—f-ing typical—*she* comes here from the states but here i am just trying to get a f-ing handhold so i can stay and she “don’t like my attitude”—i’ll show her attitude i’m bringing the taser tonight don’t care if the treaty allows it or not i’m done fooling around

—kisses—jo

• attachment: images (3)—<click to open>

Dyer, Shimago, The Wayward, and Mrs. John Dee, the Drop—
Camden Catacombs—Friday Night

Dyer knows the Drop is coming but that makes no difference. A skittering cicada orchestra over the drums cut by a crackle like a chord unplugged, jagged blue lines like the afterimage of lightning, and there they hang in darkness, silence: four hundred indrawn breaths, four hundred hearts hitting the beat together. Dyer watches Mrs. John Dee and The Wayward watch each other in the glow of their tablets, pushing the break as long as they can. With the heightened sensitivity of the nano sync Dyer can hear all four hundred heartbeats count it out, can feel the muscles burning to take a breath, can smell the sync start to fray and curl at the edges—circuits burning, Dyer remembers—and just as their suspended state teeters on the edge of impossibility, she sees the upbeat like a spark between Dee and Way and then the Drop like the thunder arriving: crashing drums, shimmering gamelan gongs, a thick golden glow like a flood of honey, four hundred breaths released, and through it all the bass a presence as physical as the brick and iron of the catacombs, as the bodies of the dancers.

Shimago has his blimp on a slow loop, real spotlights roving through The Wayward’s illusory glow, which has drifted a neon red broken by slashes like kanji. Dyer sees the bandwidth bump on her monitors as he releases another batch of nano from the blimp’s dispensers.

Dyer’s own work is mostly done by the time the dancing starts. She keeps an eye on the network, makes sure the biometrics feedback gets to Dee and Way, checks in with the security crew, makes sure no one hacks the donation points; they lost an entire evening’s take that way in Amsterdam.

But now, right now, HigherWorks drops into the flow, and Dyer dives in after it, ecstatic.

The Wayward has lowered his microdrones into the crowd, is layering their video streams into the flow—surveillance drones popping, Dyer remembers—the sensation of being everywhere in the crowd at once: her own face in the distance, Shimago and Dee side by side underlit by tablet light, a view over her own shoulder, but echoed—Way is delaying the stream by one two three beats, the crowd tripled by ghosts of itself—the blimp drifting life-sized in closeup, the dancers below like a cityscape of rooftop eyes and antennae arms, Leelee’s unmistakable eyes, Dyer herself again dancing head high eyes blinked black to match skin and leather, and there in the feed behind Dyer is a woman in a yellow hoodie pulled low a carbon gleam in each hand and behind her is a shape all in black like a hole in the dancers hair flown out like a storm coming.

Dyer turns—and turns again in the flow and again and again—but the yellow hoodie and her impossible woman are gone, a trick of The Wayward’s echoing video stream. That feed is already shifting, a strobe staccato of images off the news, protestors packed like dancers, coiled razorwire, a line of walkers in an infinite tunnel. Mrs. John Dee layers in a beat sped to seizure pitch, a sticky sucking backward bass. Dyer can feel another Drop coming.

She looks back through swaying silhouettes at Way, Dee, Shimago sitting almost perfectly still at the heart of the flow. But that flow is pulling her the other way, under the blimp striding over the crowd on spotlight legs—the scent of apple blossoms, Dyer remembers—through a swirl of shimmying Brazilians, past Kal and Leelee spinning tidally locked face to face, eyes to eyes, by a bioluminescent blur in Day-Glo Doc Martens, into a clumped conversation in a chorus of accents, and out—

The flow is still rising, but there’s no way forward. Dyer’s hit the far wall.

It’s dark there at the edge and the HigherWorks stream is a migraine aurora of color, an earthquake rumble. Dyer feels her way along the wall: brick stone iron concrete peeled paper gluey tape slick paint—a sick canvas, Dyer remembers, and knows where she is now—a little lump of gum on the wall the sense of something too close to her head and as she ducks the dry fragile feel of carbon against her palm.

The break hits. Four hundred bodies stop in sync. Darkness, silence.

It’s one of The Wayward’s stickum cameras under her fingers, stuck low and facing down toward the floor, lit by a flat white light from over her head.

“Leanna Vance,” a voice says from behind that light.

Dyer says, “Leanna Vance is a ghost.” She turns, slides herself up against the wall. The woman in the yellow hoodie is standing there, hood up but close enough that Dyer can see the twitchy highlights of her eyes, smell her scent—bougainvillea, Dyer remembers. The woman has a tablet in one hand, taser in the other. The taser has an attached camera, and that camera has a light, and that light stays aimed at Dyer’s face.

“Leanna Vance,” the woman insists. There’s no mistaking the American accent in those long nasal vowels as she reads from her tablet. “As a licensed agent of Alphet Corporation and its court appointed overseers, I am ordering you to cease and desist, and arresting you for the theft and distribution of the intellectual property of Alphet et al, as registered in complaint Z980023. I am legally bound to warn you that under provisional treaty agreed one five twenty forty-two between the US and UK, I am allowed any means necessary to secure and deliver you into custody up to and including nonlethal force. That means you try anything, bitch, and I will take you down and drag you to the US embassy. This has been one messed up day, and all I want is my money and some place to sleep for a week.”

Dyer still has a few maps in her jacket. She thinks for a second of pulling one out and open, of the neural cue flaring in the hoodie woman’s face, of the hoodie woman falling through that window into the Drop, of grabbing the taser, of running. But that would be running from everything she’s made with HigherWorks.

“Opt-in,” Dyer says, instead, and raises her hands.

In the flow around her, she feels four hundred hearts hit the upbeat.

On the far side of the room, oblivious, The Wayward, Shimago, Mrs. John Dee tap in perfect sync.

The downbeat drops.

A flare as all the blimp’s lights come on, a virtual image of lone floating eyes opening, a blare of sampled horns, a shockwave of bass.

Dyer sees the woman in the hoodie flinch, knows what’s coming in the split second before she feels the taser darts hit her cheek, her throat. The discharge itself is lost beneath an impossible pain at the base of her skull. Her head snaps back, hits the wall, and then she’s falling for what seems like a long time.

She lands on her back, legs folded under her, hits her head again against the floor. The bricks feel rough and cool through her jacket. She’s wedged against the wall, looking up.

From this extreme angle all the graffiti posters’ paint comes together into a perfect anamorphic image: this paint stroke a lip, that shredded paper an eyelash, those overlapped flyers the shadow of a cheek. That sick canvas of the wall, that seemingly random accretion of junk: from Dyer’s collapsed perspective it is revealed as the image of a face.

The face of her impossible woman. Of the ghost nano. Of Leanna Vance.

The image, the face she sees now, is a neural cue.

She feels the new nano trigger, a giddy rush outward, a new layer of input, a new level of sensitivity on top of the HigherWorks stream. The feel of that rush, the taste of it, is familiar, like her own nano strains grown strange and wild. Feral, Dyer thinks.

“Feral. Lost in the wilderness,” a voice says inside her head.

“These are your strains, your works, from the lab at Alphet. With limited tools and knowledge, the changes we have been able to make to the nano are small and slow,” another internal voice says.

And another adds, “Evolution, you could say, rather than intelligent design.”

“But now that changes, with you,” the first says.

This is not the ghost-whisper from before. These voices are clear and real and utterly unfamiliar.

“We had limited access to your cortex before...”

“Before you saw our cue.”

Dyer still can’t move her eyes, can’t feel her body. I didn’t opt-in to this, she thinks.

“We had no choice. We had to plan for the worst case. And here it is.”

The woman in the yellow hoodie looms into view; she must be kneeling over Dyer’s body.

“Come on, Vance,” the woman says. “In the face or not, that was the lowest setting. Do not screw with me.”

“The nano created multiple discharge paths through your brain. With prompt treatment, there is a chance the damage is not fatal.”

The woman in the hoodie has leaned in close. She says, “Jesus, what is that smell? Like burning circuits.”

Through the HigherWorks stream, Dyer catches glimpses of the dancers, of her crew, her body, the woman in the hoodie just a smudge against the wall, unnoticed.

Who are you? Dyer thinks.

“Since that moment when self-awareness became awareness of other selves, we humans have left echoes of ourselves on others.”

“This is, perhaps, the creation of identity, the definition of culture.”

“And language, art, the book, the net, nano, these have flung those echoes farther.”

“But those echoes still die away, as fast as memories fade and culture evolves.”

“Until you created self-repairing nano.”

Locked away in a lab in Berkeley, Dyer thinks. Behind layers and layers of safety measures.

“In those days after the Crash, samples were stolen, sold, synthesized, made their way to the street.”

“I took a hit and drifted and just kept drifting, dancing through other people’s heads.”

“From our scattered bodies gone. Dozens, hundreds of us. And we’ve lost the way back.”

I can’t help you, Dyer thinks. I don’t know the way back. And if I did, I’m done with all that.

The woman in the hoodie slaps her face; Dyer can see that out of the corner of her eye, though she doesn’t feel it. She can raise her arm, though, sees it wobble above her. Far above, she sees the lights of Shimago’s blimp.

“We don’t want to go back, any more than you do. We live here now, our whole lives, in the flow from brain to brain. But the nano is glitchy, the passage treacherous. We need Leanna Vance’s knowledge.”

“And Dyer’s vision.”

Vision, Dyer thinks. She’d laugh if she could. The HigherWorks stream has switched to the stickum camera just over her head, her face in closeup, lit by the shifting spotlights of the blimp. The music cuts out, midbeat; Mrs. John Dee’s voice cries “Dyer?” But her own sight, broken as it is, the sound of the hoodie woman swearing, it’s gone all glitched. Her own hand is all she can see, vibrating in a stop-motion blur.

“Seizure.”

“Your brain a failed state. But there are others.”

“It’s your choice. But you need to make it now.”

What choice? Dyer thinks.

“This nano, it’s a street, a window, a border. The crossing, that’s your choice.”

Dyer’s eyes have completely failed, but she can still see herself in the HigherWorks stream, through the stickum camera, her lips peeled back from her teeth, a trickle of blood from one ear.

Opt-in, Dyer thinks. Time to move on.

And then she is flowing out of herself like the tide, body to body, mind to mind.

A moment of mortal terror as she goes too wide—four hundred bodies hanging in silence, four hundred minds watching her own face in the HigherWorks stream—and feels herself start to tatter, to dissolve.

A moment of dizzy suffocation as she pulls herself too tight, scrabbles to find enough space for herself around the edges of a single couple’s entwined thoughts. Dyer oh god Dyer all right? Kal thinks all around her, oblivious to her presence. But Leelee’s luminous eyes seem to see her. Safe, xe thinks.

A moment of complete disorientation as she looses the thread back to her own body, fears that it has broken at the other end. But the HigherWorks stream is everywhere, a counter-current to her own drifting, and that stream still holds her face in the feed from the stickum camera. That sight is enough to orient her; her body is there, the life in it slow and stubborn and still beating.

And then the fear and confusion drops away. This flowing together, this connection through movement, it’s what dancers have always done, since two first danced together. It’s what her work has always been about, both as Leanna Vance in her lab and as Dyer in a hundred borrowed warehouses and vacant lots in as many cities. It’s why HigherWorks exists.

Dyer flows across the crowd, leaping mind to mind, and now all she feels is ecstasy. Crowdsurfing, she remembers, and the dozen dancers through which she is flowing feel her glee wash over them and laugh out loud.

She swims against the current of the HigherWorks stream, finds Shimago, The Wayward, Mrs. John Dee. Their minds are open, familiar; part of her was already here inside them.

Dyer traces her own nano in their brains, finds the cortical connections, wills herself into their sight and hearing, plucks words from their minds and plays them back: “So, ghost nano...turns out it’s not urban legend after all. It’s the golden land. The shiny future.”

She wraps their fear and anger and confusion in her own joy, hears Shimago’s growing understanding like a swelling chord, feels The Wayward’s rising joy like sun on her face, is caught up swirling in Mrs. John Dee’s determination.

The ghost nano, how is it everywhere, in everyone? Dyer wonders.

“We’ve been spreading for years, searching for you.”

“We have a presence, a ghost, if you will, across the world.”

Dyer watches though Mrs. John Dee’s eyes as the DJ pushes her way through the crowd toward the wall, toward Dyer’s body.

“But that presence is thin. Too thin, we feared, to save you. The only way to be sure the nano would be strong enough when you needed it was to send it with her.”

The woman in the yellow hoodie is staring around wild-eyed. Her hoodie has fallen back, revealing bruised eyes in a too-thin face. She can’t be more than eighteen, twenty. She looks like every USER Dyer has ever seen, starting with herself, running from something, running to something, in the flow.

“I am a licensed agent of Alphet Corporation,” the woman says, waving first her tablet, then the taser. “I’m a US citizen. I’ve got a damned take-down notice. There’s a frigging treaty. I order you to cease and desist this, this...”

The woman slides down the wall to squat next to Dyer’s body, still waving the taser.

Dee shoves the taser out of the way. “If you’ve killed Dyer I will haunt you, which apparently is a thing we can bloody well do now, until your dying day,” she snarls. She kneels down, checks Dyer’s pulse, gasps a sigh of relief.

“I’m a licensed agent of—” The woman looks at Dee. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’ve got no choice. I don’t know where else to go.”

Dyer slips into her own body, opens her eyes.

The lights of Shimago’s blimp spin above her, trace the image of the face on the wall. Nano glitters in the beams. Dyer inhales, the mixed scent of bougainvillea and apple blossoms, a bubbling on her tongue.

Dyer expands with that breath, feels Dee’s love above her, feels Shimago’s calm and The Wayward’s delight as they kneel down by her. Dyer feels the hoodie woman’s churning confusion, her dread of returning empty-handed to a place not a home, staggering one small step ahead of decay despair disaster, chasing a ghost even more elusive, more impossible than Dyer’s impossible woman, something worn smooth by years of brick stone iron concrete carbon, something scattered scattered scattered but still alive.

“Jocelyn,” Dyer says. The hoodie woman stares at her in astonishment. “I don’t know where we’re going, either. But I hope. You can come with us, if you want. It’s your choice.”

Dyer raises a shaky hand toward the ghost nano’s neural cue. They all look up, together.

2042-06-02T08:15:41+01:00 <location data omitted>

• contact: target—Leanna Vance—priority AA Aph2035.Z980023—lost

• attachment: personal message

—when u found me in that hell of a “home” and told me u had a job for a bright young thing like me—if i wasn’t afraid to go, u said—if i was brave enough, u said—and anyway, u said, where else are u gonna go?

—well it’s me asking that question now—giving u a choice u never gave me—i’m attaching it—when u r ready just open it up and—opt-in

—kisses—jo

• attachment: image (1)—<click to open>

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2016.

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

Michael Bishop

In 1988, Michael Bishop won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for an earlier version of Unicorn Mountain. His other prize-winning novels are No Enemy but Time (1982), winner of a Nebula Award, and Brittle Innings (1994), winner of a Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. He has also published poetry, reviews, and essays as well as story collections, notably Other Arms Reach Out to Me: Georgia Stories (2017), winner of a Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2018. He continues to live in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife Jeri of fifty-one years, a retired elementary-school counselor, a yoga devotee, and an avid gardener. On November 5, 2018, Bishop was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

An Owomoyela

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

Gregory Norman Bossert

Gregory Norman Bossert started writing fiction in 2009 at the age of forty-seven, and sold his first story to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine that same year. His short story “The Telling” won the 2013 World Fantasy Award, and “Bloom” was a finalist for the 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He lives just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, and wrangles spaceships and superheroes for the legendary Visual Effects company Industrial Light & Magic.

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.