Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Native Seeds

by Catherine Wells

Lost: Mind

by Will McIntosh

Ninety-Five Percent Safe

by Caroline M. Yoachim

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to our May 2021 issue!

As I write this, I find myself in my third quarantine of the month. No, I haven’t been exposed to COVID. This is all about keeping me from catching it and passing it along to the doctors that will be working on me tomorrow morning. The ever-elusive end of the road for my recent medical issues may be finally at hand, but by now, I’ve learned not to get my hopes up. I’ll know soon enough.

There was some good news last month. I’m delighted to be on the Hugo ballot for Best Editor Short Form for my ninth time. Maybe ninth is the charm? Also thrilled to have two Clarkesworld stories on the ballot in the novelette category: “Monster” by Naomi Kritzer and “Helicopter Story” by Isabel Fall. Always tough when you have two in the same category, but I wish them both the best of luck. (A tie perhaps?) Thanks to everyone that nominated this year!

Until next time,

-Neil

Native Seeds

Catherine Wells

Alfonso woke reluctantly, prodded by a full bladder and an aching hip. He had been dreaming of a mountain where others had survived, a hope long dead—well, dormant, anyway—and it left him uneasy. Did they still live, those Men on the Mountain? And if so, why had they never come back? Perhaps el Jefe had been right to refuse to join them up there. Perhaps the Mother Earth had let them all perish.

He shifted on his bed of poorly tanned furs, trying to find a more comfortable position for his hip before admitting there probably wasn’t one. For a moment he lay debating the virtues of getting up to relieve himself. Spring had returned, but mornings were still chilly in the Valley of the People. He could just pee in a jar and crawl back under his furs—but he hated using jars and other things created in the Before Times, unsure if they offended the Mother Earth. So he ignored his bladder, ignored the pale light seeping through the sticks and bark of his wickiup, and sought the slippery comfort of sleep.

Yet he could not shake off the dream. No doubt the Men on the Mountain had all died off—wasn’t that their plan, not to bring children into a dying world? It had been nearly forty years since they had parted ways, surely the wrath of the Mother Earth had claimed them all. So why did he dream of them now? And why did the thought of them still make him so uneasy?

Ruben Mendoza sighed as he traced the satellite’s descent into the Indian Ocean. “Well, that’s it,” he announced to the room at large. “We’ve lost China.” He noted the time in his log: 07:42, 10 April, 2284.

Sharon McKay came from her workstation to look over his shoulder, pushing her long ash-blond hair behind one ear. She leaned in closer than was necessary, her cheek hovering next to his, and he tensed. “There wasn’t much going on in China anyway,” she said.

Ruben eased away from her slightly. “No, but it leaves another giant hole in our coverage.” When Ruben was a boy, the series of geosynchronous satellites had transmitted data from around the globe, giving the installation on Kitt Peak a complete and complex picture of climate and conditions as the Earth spiraled through violent earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and massive storms. Clouds had interfered with transmissions for months at a time, but whenever there was a break, whenever the radio signals got through, they’d been able to download data and get a comprehensive picture of what was going on. Ruben had been excited to learn from his mother how to access the feeds, how to run the data through the translators and produce stunningly beautiful pictures of the planet’s demise.

But even as he had learned how to run the monitoring equipment, the satellites had begun to fail, like the telescopes that once dominated this facility. Some satellites, such as the one focused on China, sputtered through decaying orbits into oblivion; others simply stopped transmitting. The global grid, once so complete, now looked like Alpine lace.

Sharon straightened and shrugged. “Does it really matter? We can see the trend. Things are settling back to how they were before the Evacuation. And it’s not like we can send the information anywhere.”

She had a point. It had been forty-two years since the last shuttle had lifted off from Earth, ferrying passengers to the transport behemoths headed for other planets. New worlds, some naturally life-sustaining and others terraformed, had gathered in the humanity Earth rejected. But the ability to transmit information to them had failed years ago. Earth’s far-flung children had no idea their mother planet was now healing itself.

Ruben rolled his shoulders, thick with muscle from hoeing in the gardens at the foot of the mountain. “They might come back,” he said. “I mean, there’s no reason they shouldn’t send a spaceship back someday to see how Earth is doing.”

“Trust me,” said Sharon, “they don’t care. Settling two dozen new worlds—Just imagine the power struggles, the competition for resources. I’ll bet you a day’s rations they’ve had at least three good wars by now. Probably more.”

“An easy bet to make, since there’s no way to prove it one way or the other.” Her attitude always grated on him, that air of superiority because she was twenty-seven to his twenty-two. And the way she assumed they would pair up soon. How he wished the other girls of his gen hadn’t all been snapped up, even—

The whoosh of an opening door interrupted his thoughts, and a skirling breeze blew Ruben’s friend Vijay Singh into the room. Tall and lean, Vijay wore a light jacket over his khaki coverall in deference to the early morning chill. “Ruben, you busy?”

Ruben sighed. “Just watching another satellite die.” It was Sharon’s watch—he’d only come in to check on the China satellite.

“Rathna’s going on a livestocking run,” Vijay said. “The White Mountains. We could use some extra muscle.”

It was that, or another day in the gardens. A chance to fly over the healing Earth, a day far from the pressures of survival and—he glanced at Sharon—procreation. He needed only a moment’s thought before he bolted up from his chair. “Can we check out any industrial sites along the way? See if there are electronics worth scavenging?” If they were to keep the rest of the network up and running . . .

Vijay grinned. “You can ask, but you know how my sister gets when she’s hunting for livestock.”

Ruben grinned back. “Like she gets when you want to look for other survivors.”

Alfonso woke again, no longer able to ignore the promptings of his aging flesh. Growing old brought many joys—and a certain smug satisfaction at having survived this long—but it had many drawbacks, as well. When was the last time he had slept all through the night? Suppressing a groan, he struggled to his bony knees, pulled the smelly deer-hide blanket over his shoulders, and crawled out of his wickiup.

Once outside, the morning sunlight lit his soul, and he paused, blinking at its blessed brightness. He remembered too well the years when only a pale, watery light filtered through to the land, years of want and despair. Heart lifting, he levered himself up from his crouch and looked out over the Village of the People, the Survivors and their children, sheltered here at the foot of the cliff whose ancient cave dwelling had saved them. Overcome, he lifted his voice in thanks to the Mother Earth.

Hear, O Mother Earth!

I remember the dark times,

And so I greet the dawn with gladness.

I remember the Rains That Never Stopped,

The killing waters,

And so I laugh with your gentle brook.

You have washed yourself clean

And you give to your children this new day.

I thank you, O Mother.

I thank you, O Mother.

Chest swelling, he turned first east where the sun peeked over a mesa, then west to the trail that led out of the valley, and finally back south, gazing across the gushing creek to the undulating flood plain where the People had planted their squash and beans. Then, pulling the hide more snugly around his shoulders, he trudged toward the latrine trench downstream from the village.

The women of the village had been up early, stirring their cooking fires, and by the time Alfonso returned, the fragrance of stewed rabbit filled the air. They had run out of squash during the cold months, but now flower buds and tender young prickly pear pads filled out their stew pots. Sometimes Alfonso craved the foods of his youth—popcorn and canned peaches and chocolate—but he’d been hungry too many years to be anything but grateful for whatever nourishment the Mother Earth provided. Especially if he didn’t have to cook it himself.

He stopped by the fire of his younger daughter, Squash Blossom, and inhaled pointedly. A round-faced girl of seventeen summers with a toddler slung over one shoulder, she smiled and greeted him. “Good morning, Father. Would you like some food?”

“If you have enough.”

The smile faded from her eyes, if not her lips. “Your generosity sees to that.” Last fall, her young husband had slipped on a rocky slope and broken his neck, and now it was Alfonso who brought her rabbits and other small game to add to the vegetables she gathered or grew. Being widowed was hard enough, but Squash Blossom’s sadness was compounded because she knew she must marry again, and her choices for a new mate were limited.

Alfonso stifled a sigh. Having lost his own wife Ernestina several years ago, he could appreciate her despair. He was near fifty, and though the desire for a woman still plagued him, the thought of taking a giggling, doe-eyed, scatter-brained adolescent into his cramped wickiup to live made him shudder. A more mature woman might be a better companion, but those who had survived the privations of the early years found their wombs dried early. And why disrupt his life and his peace, if not to make children? Love between a man and a woman was a luxury; children were a necessity, if the People were to survive.

Survive. Alfonso lifted his eyes to the cliff wall towering over the village, to the stone houses built into a cave there by ancient hands. That shelter high above the floodwaters, out of the driving rain, was all that had saved them. For eleven miserable days, they had huddled there with no fire and only the meager provisions in their packs. When the storm finally subsided, water still rushed through the valley, and the only escape from their sanctuary/prison was to climb the treacherous slope above the houses to the mesa top. Chico had gone first, always angry, channeling his hatred of their situation into resolve and inching, fingers and toes, up the jagged cliff face. When he reached the top he had thrown back taunts, but also a rope, and Alfonso, Juan, Carlos, Enrique, and Estevan all climbed up to join him in the hunt for food.

Six teenaged boys trying to feed twenty-two empty bellies from a land scoured first by brutal drought, then by savage storm. Alfonso had lain for hours in the prickly sedge beside a rabbit hole until the furry inhabitant poked its head out, and he yanked his snare tight. By then he was so hungry, he could have eaten the rabbit raw; but he put it aside, found another hole, and stretched out to wait again . . .

“We should have gone with them,” Chico complained time and again. “When they came from the Mountain that last time. We should have gone back with them as they asked. It was el Jefe who stopped us, that old man and his lies.”

“They were not lies,” Alfonso always soothed. “He did not try to deceive us. It was what he believed, that we were better off without their help. And we do not know he was wrong. We have seen no more of them.”

A bright flash caught his eye now and drew him from his memories. What was that in the sky to the south? A bird? The birds had come back slowly—raptors first, then doves and pigeons, then others. But this—no, that was no bird sailing through the clear spring sky. That glint was the flash of sunlight on metal or polished fiberplas. Alfonso blinked, hardly able to believe what he saw.

Chico appeared at his elbow. “Look! You see that? You see that? It’s them! They did not die! All this time, we could have been safe with them up on the Mountain!”

Accustomed to his friend’s harangue, Alfonso shook his head. “Was life any easier on that mountain?”

Squash Blossom looked up from feeding her fire. “What mountain?”

“Far away to the south,” Alfonso said. “Many days’ walk.”

“Father!” Alfonso’s son Turtle came toward them, up the path from the river. He was a handsome, well-built man of twenty-odd summers, with straight black hair that brushed his shoulders. Ernestina had made his leather headband, pressing designs into it and staining it red with amaranth seeds. Turtle pointed at the object in the sky. “What is that? It does not move like a bird.”

Throughout the village, people were taking notice now, looking up at the sky, shielding their eyes against the morning glare. Alfonso sighed. “It is a hopper.”

“A what?”

He realized he had used the English word and he tried to remember the Spanish equivalent. When that failed, he gave it a name his son would understand. “A flying machine.”

“A machine that flies? How is that possible?”

Alfonso shrugged and gave his favorite answer. “Magic.” Then he added, “It’s from the Before Times. I saw one once, when I was a boy.”

“And we should have gotten on it,” Chico insisted. “Think how many died! We could have shared their food. We could have had their medicine. My daughter would not have died of pneumonia.”

Alfonso did not bother to answer. He and Chico had had this argument many times. As scarce as food had been here, they might have had less on the Mountain. Perhaps the others there would have resented sharing it with the People. Perhaps by sharing too widely, all would have starved. There was no knowing what might have been; they could only be grateful for what they had.

“Flag it down,” Chico said. “Do something! Make a big smoky fire.”

But Alfonso turned to his wickiup, the unease of his dream heavy as the hide across his shoulders. “If the Mother Earth wishes them to pass us by, they will. If she wishes them to find us . . . ”

Chico followed him, cursing under his breath.

Rathna Singh squinted at the wisp of smoke off to the aircraft’s left, then sighed in exasperation. “Wildfire.”

“No, look at this,” Vijay insisted, pivoting the hopper’s infrared camera to focus on the area in question. “It’s not a line of heat, like a wildfire. It’s several distinct heat signatures. Like campfires.”

Ruben had two sisters himself, so he was accustomed to this kind of squabbling between siblings. Still, he wondered why he let himself get suckered into these excursions. As a biologist, Rathna was dedicated to her mission of animal husbandry, fostering a population of healthy animals as a sustainable food source for her community. As a chemist with a wife and two kids, Vijay was dedicated to voyages of discovery that would raise him out of his everyday life into the fantasy realm of books and games.

“You’re supposed to use the infrared to look for warm-blooded beasts,” Rathna scolded. “And those are spotfires. Sparks blown from the main fire always spawn spotfires.”

Eyes twinkling, Vijay turned to Ruben in the seat behind her. “Hey—maybe it’s survivors from Leonard Pacheco’s band.” Pacheco had led a group of Native Americans who refused to evacuate Earth forty-odd years before. The notion that any had survived had fascinated the two boys growing up, the subject of many hours of imaginative play.

Rathna, several years older, had scoffed at the notion then as she did now. “Too far south.”

“They could have moved. It’s been what—thirty years, Ruben? Thirty-five?”

Ruben would have preferred to be left out of the debate, but Vijay wasn’t giving him the option. “The last anyone saw of them was before the megastorms hit,” he said. “That was . . . five or six years Post-Evac, I think.” No one on the mountain had thought of having children until the storms passed and things started growing again. Ruben’s brother Victor, twenty-nine, had been the first child born on the mountain, and the storms had lasted about six years, so . . . “Yeah, thirty-five years at least, I’m pretty sure. Mark McKay would know, he keeps those records.” Sharon’s brother was the archivist for the mountain installation.

“Just because there’s nothing left of their settlement doesn’t mean they didn’t move somewhere else. Somewhere more conducive to survival.” Vijay tapped the screen. “Those are campfires.”

Rathna scowled. “It’s a wildfire. Look, I’ll show you.” She banked the hopper and headed northwest toward the smoke.

“What is its purpose, this hopper?” Turtle asked. He squatted outside Alfonso’s wickiup, looking up at the sky as he added twigs to his father’s fire.

“Put green wood on it,” Chico coaxed. “Make a lot of smoke.”

Seated in his doorway with his bowl of stew, Alfonso ignored Chico and answered Turtle’s question. “It carries people.”

“Like a horse?” No horses had survived the terrible Food Wars that preceded the Evacuation, but their legend was common lore among the People.

“No, people ride inside,” Alfonso explained. “It is bigger than it looks.” He licked the last of the stew from his fingers and glanced again at the sky. Was it growing nearer, that shiny object?

Turtle’s eyes had gone wide. “People? What people?”

“I think they must be the Men on the Mountain. I thought they had forgotten about us. Or died off.” Alfonso frowned to himself. Had he never told Turtle the story? How the scientists had come one last time, insisting the People should come back to their mountain for safety. How el Jefe had turned them down flat. Only he and Chico had been there with el Jefe, and Alfonso did not like to bring it up. It only made Chico bitterer. “They . . . were not known as respecters of the Mother Earth,” he elaborated.

Turtle threw him a dark look, grunted.

“Then it is no wonder they died.”

“Except they didn’t,” Chico growled. “See? Who else could it be, in a flying machine?”

“Apparently,” Alfonso said, watching the aircraft draw nearer, “the Mother Earth chose to let some live.”

Turtle huffed as he watched the glistening thing come on. “And why have they kept themselves hidden all these years?”

Alfonso did not respond. He knew it was not the Men on the Mountain who had kept themselves hidden. Though they never spoke of it, most of those who remembered the Before Times had wished them dead, those arrogant scientists, wished them punished for their hubris in scorning the Mother Earth and rousing her anger. Wished them afflicted with hunger and loss and humiliation. Wished someone had suffered more than the People.

And maybe they had. Maybe this was some drone, activated after decades by a computer that should have died years before. Maybe it would fly right past them on its unknown, unneeded mission—

Just then the aircraft altered its course and came straight toward them.

Alfonso closed his eyes, felt his heart sink like the weight on a fishing net. It might be different this time. They might have learned, those Men on the Mountain, as the People had learned. They might be humbler now. He opened his eyes again and set aside his empty bowl. “Fetch Carlos,” he told Turtle. “And Celia and—” He wondered who else might remember some English. “Dawn. I think we are about to have visitors.”

Ruben watch the shadow of the hopper glide over the land below them, saw green patches resolve into shrubby trees and cactus as they came in low. Sunlight gleamed off a pale rock face where an old cliff dwelling perched on a shelf, its doors gaping, its courtyards bare. Strange, that this ancient mud habitation should have lasted when the concrete and steel of so many buildings had succumbed to the ravages of nature. But then, this place was built into a sheltering cave, protected from the elements on three sides.

It was, however, decidedly unoccupied. Deflated, Ruben chided himself for having hoped there might really have been survivors there.

Then Rathna tilted the hopper’s wings, and he peered down at the stretch of land sloping from the cliff toward the creek. Brush huts sat scattered among the saltbush and mesquite, each with a tidy campfire. In the spaces between clustered dozens of upturned faces.

“Oh my God,” Rathna breathed. “Vijay, you were right.”

Alfonso watched the hopper dip low over the village, then swoop upward and circle a flat-topped hill just to the east. There it began its vertical descent, bringing back memories of that other hopper so many years ago, landing on higher ground above el Jefe’s town. He and Chico had been boys then, no more than twelve. How proud they had been when el Jefe invited them to go with him to meet the delegation from the Mountain.

“Make them come down to us,” Chico said now as the hopper settled on the hilltop. “Why should we go to them?”

Alfonso twisted his lips in annoyance at this abrupt shift in attitude. “I thought you were eager to see them.”

“I am, but my knees are not.”

Neither were Alfonso’s, but he couldn’t help wondering why el Jefe had chosen to go up to meet that last delegation. He might have remained in his house, made them come to him. What was his reason? Was there something in the town he didn’t want them to see? Had he feared the exchange might get ugly and wanted to keep it away from the heart of their settlement? Or had he simply been anxious to shoo them off ?

Chico snorted. “You are still following that old man’s advice, aren’t you? Wary of los Otros, the Others. What good did it do us? We might have died with him and the rest of our people.”

Alfonso only grinned and turned to the knot of elders gathering around him. “Come, my friends,” he said. “Let us go up and greet our guests.”

The desert vegetation on the hilltop was laced with spring green, and wildflowers clustered around chunks of old asphalt where a road or a parking lot had once been. From the air, Ruben had seen foundations of a building long gone, and Rathna had eased the hopper down cautiously to avoid the rubble and debris. She cut the main engine now, but Ruben noticed she did not fold back the aircraft’s wings, leaving it ready for a quick takeoff. “This was probably a park of some kind,” she said as she unbuckled her harness. “Historic site. Before such things were defunded and fell into ruin.” Long before the Food Wars.

Vijay was already opening the hopper door. “Any structures probably washed away in the megastorms. Looks like the grass and shrubs have been growing here quite a while.” Stunted mesquite trees had sunk their talons amid the chaparral. “Look!” He pointed to half a dozen figures winding their way up the hillside single file. “A welcoming committee!” He grinned back at his companions.

Ruben felt his gut tighten as he watched them come. The leader was an old man, his long hair gray and his face deeply lined. He wore moccasins tied well up his calves, with a pair of fibrous mats skirting his loins and an animal hide draped over his shoulders. Behind him came two other men and three women, though one seemed more a girl. She helped one of the older women up the slope.

“If they’re Leonard Pacheco’s group, they may not be very welcoming,” Rathna warned. “Aunt Sara said they made it very clear they wanted to be left alone.”

Vijay looked at his sister in disbelief. “Are you kidding? They’re living in huts made of brush, and they’re not going to be happy to see someone in a hopper?”

“Let’s just wait,” Ruben said as he watched the emissaries come on. “Let’s just wait and see what they say.”

So they stood by the hopper and waited as the little band climbed the hill.

By the time he reached the top of the mesa, Alfonso was winded. “You have grown soft, old man,” Chico taunted. “Remember when we used to run to the top of this hill just to see who was faster?”

“There is no denying this life has aged us,” Alfonso admitted, glad to stop and wait for the others. “But we do not know if those on the Mountain have aged any better.” The scientists had all been adults when Alfonso was a boy. Could these be the same people he had met? He didn’t remember the men’s names, but the woman—Sara Martin. Dr. Sara Martin. No taller than Alfonso then, but all the men jumped at her command. Blond hair streaming in the wind, blue eyes flashing—

One look now, though, told him his guests were strangers. Three young people stood beside the hopper, dressed in utilitarian coveralls. A small woman with long dark hair was flanked by a tall, slender man and another of stockier build. Both men wore their dark hair cut short.

“These are children,” Chico said. “I will not speak English for them.”

Alfonso suspected that was a blessing, but he did not say so. Instead he led his band forward, trying to remember the appropriate English greeting for strangers. “Hello,” he said. “Good morning.”

The woman and the taller man stood silent, mouths gaping. The other man glanced at the dumbstruck pair as if he expected one of them to lead, then straightened himself and spoke. “Good morning.” Another glance at his companions, and he forged ahead. “We saw your fires.”

“They probably have electric stoves,” Chico muttered in Alfonso’s ear. “They think we are barbarians because we use fire.”

Alfonso hushed him with a gentle elbow. “I am Alfonso,” he continued, the English coming back to him now.

“Tell them what they call you,” Chico mocked softly. “Tell them you are He With Faith. They’ll be impressed.”

“I am Ruben.” Ruben waved a hand at his companions. “This is Rathna and her brother Vijay. We were out looking for livestock. Animals. Are you—are you part of Leonard Pacheco’s group?”

Alfonso nodded. “He was our jefe. Our chief.”

The woman Rathna came to life then, sucked in her breath and spoke in a rush. Alfonso caught the words “four thousand” and “people” and “all that’s left?”

“Please, slow down.” He gestured with both hands to stem her flow of words. “It’s a long time since I speak English. Yes, we”—He gestured toward the village—“are all the People. We are the Survivors. Plus our children, and their children.”

Celia spoke to Alfonso in Spanish. “They can’t be from the Mountain. Those people were all older. Unless they had children after all, which they swore they wouldn’t do.”

Before he could respond, Ruben spoke again. “Habla Español aqui?”

Alfonso’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “You speak Spanish?”

“Un poquito.” Ruben grinned. “It’s the language my parents used when they didn’t want us kids to know what they were saying. I picked up a few words.”

Chico folded his arms and glared at Alfonso. “So they lived well enough on the Mountain to have children. And we could have been with them.”

Alfonso repressed a sigh. “Our language is mostly Spanish,” he told the visitors, “with some Apache and Navajo and O’odam and Yavapai—” He groped for the right word, then pantomimed stirring.

“Mixed in,” Ruben guessed.

“And we have our own words, words that belong only to the People.” That had been his idea, to give things new names, for the new world they lived in.

Chico snickered. “You never imagined you’d have to explain those words to anyone else, did you?”

Now Celia addressed the strangers in English. “Why do you come?”

“We saw your fires,” Rathna said, her speech slower now but not exaggerated. “We didn’t know anyone else survived. We’re from Kitt Peak.”

Alfonso grunted. “I thought so. But we are surprised.” He cocked his head. “We thought you chose to die with no children.”

“That was the intent.” Rathna stepped forward, taking over now. “There was so much ash in the air for years, and the constant storms, and nothing would grow, even in our hydroponic gardens. We nearly died.”

“Us, too.” The Time of Storms and Fury. The Year that Summer Never Came.

“But then things got better, and it seemed good to keep the mission going, so—Now there are, what, Vijay? A hundred and fifty of us?”

“Closer to two,” Vijay said.

Alfonso drew a deep breath as he considered that. Such a number could easily overwhelm the People. “We are less,” he said carefully. Then he smiled and pointed to Celia’s daughter Cholla Bud, whose belly bulged slightly beneath her skirt. “But we keep growing.”

Ruben’s gaze had drifted to the collection of wickiups along the creek where adults conferred while children jostled each other and played an improvised game with sticks. “May we see your village?” he asked.

Alfonso hesitated. “Go on,” Chico prodded. “Are you still afraid? Look, they are not dangerous. No guns, no stunners. Don’t be rude. Invite them to eat with us.”

Alfonso straightened his shoulders, inclined his head. “We welcome you. Come and sit at my fire.”

Ruben counted the brush shelters in the village as they picked their way down the slope. Seventeen.

“You know what I’m thinking,” Rathna said softly.

Alfonso and another man were ahead of them, the others trailing behind. Vijay cocked an eyebrow. “That they’re hunting your precious mule deer?” he teased.

She scowled at him. “I doubt they’re equipped to hunt deer. No, I’m thinking . . . bloodlines.”

Vijay snorted. “You’re a biologist—you’re always thinking bloodlines. Tell me how these people are going to improve the bloodlines on any of your livestock. I don’t see any domesticated animals, do you?”

But Ruben knew what she meant. “She’s not worried about our livestock. She’s worried about these people, right? Seventeen huts by my count, a family in each—they don’t have enough numbers to prevent genetic drift.”

Rathna scowled at him. “They don’t have enough? We don’t have enough. But twenty, thirty more adults . . . ”

Ruben’s eyes widened as the implication hit him. Their biologists had insisted it was manageable, as long as some couples changed partners occasionally. Some people objected to this, worried about social damage caused by swapping. But if they brought these new people to the mountain . . . if he had a choice other than Sharon McKay . . .

“You have no food on your fire,” Celia pointed out when they reached Alfonso’s wickiup.

Alfonso shrugged sheepishly.

“Come to my fire,” she commanded. “I have four fine sons—there is always food in my cookpot.” Then she led the way toward the far side of the village.

“You should put that old woman in her place,” Chico said as they followed.

“She is not much older than we are,” Alfonso reminded him. “And she commands as much respect. If she wants to have us at her fire, she is entitled.” He thanked Celia pointedly for making the offer.

Their visitors gawked at the trappings of the camp as they walked on. Alfonso knew how barbaric it must seem to them: huts of brush and mud, rough clothing of woven yucca fibers, poorly tanned hides. “They look on us with disdain,” Chico said.

But Ruben paused to inspect the bindings on a drying frame, the pieces of meat draped on it. “I think it’s amazing,” Ruben said, “what you’ve done with nothing. Or almost nothing.”

Alfonso lifted his chin. “All we have, we have from the hand of the Mother Earth.”

Chico snorted softly. “And their plastics, their refined metals and ceramics and glass, are they not also from the Mother Earth?”

Alfonso was glad the visitors did not understand Chico’s Spanish.

“Is that deer hide?” Ruben asked, pointing to the skin on Alfonso’s shoulders. “How do you hunt deer?”

“I chased this one into a pit.” Alfonso held up the portion of hide with a hole gouged through it, where the deer had fallen on a sharpened stake. As he did, he noticing the cracks and scaly patches. Ernestina had done her best to tan it, but . . . “We were children when our elders were washed away. Worse—we were teenagers. We failed to learn many of the skills they would teach us. Making snares and traps, yes. Food was—” He groped for a word. “Obsession. Never enough food. But tanning hides? Spinning thread?” He shook his head. “We were busy with other things.”

“You have no cloth,” Rathna noted.

“We have no cotton. Or sheep.”

Ruben’s brow puckered. “Can’t you find cloth in one of the old cities? Not everything was washed away in the floods. We get lots of our—”

But Alfonso waved him off. “We prefer to make our own things. We live from the bounty of the Mother Earth.”

“And sometimes go hungry,” Chico reminded him. “And cold.”

They had arrived at Celia’s wickiup. “Come, eat,” she said, dishing stew into wooden bowls and handing them to the visitors. The tantalizing aroma tickled Alfonso’s nostrils, and he had to remind himself he had already eaten at Squash Blossom’s fire.

As if called by the thought, his daughter appeared at his elbow with her child in one arm and a stack of yucca mats in the other. “Perhaps our guests will sit while they eat,” she suggested, indicating a nearby ramada.

Alfonso nodded and translated her words into English for the visitors. “My daughter has brought mats so you can sit,” he told the visitors.

Ruben turned to her. “Gracias.”

Alfonso noted how the young man’s eyes followed Squash Blossom as she spread the mats on the cleared ground. She glanced shyly at the stranger, then retreated to where two of her friends waited with their babies. “Thank you, Squash Blossom,” Alfonso said, taking a seat and indicating the others should join him.

Ruben dropped with enviable ease into a cross-legged position, his eyes never leaving the girl. She and her friends giggled behind their hands and sent sidelong glances at him and Vijay.

Rathna took the bowl of stew Celia offered and tasted it. “Mm, it’s good,” she said, licking gravy from her fingers. “Nice and spicy. You must grow chiles.”

“It would be better with garlic,” Chico complained. “And cumin. I’ll bet they have those on the Mountain.”

“Yes, we grow chiles,” Alfonso said. “And squash and beans, and we harvest from the desert around us. But we could find no corn to plant, or cotton seeds, either.”

“Ask them, ’Fonso.” Chico urged. “Ask them if they have those spices. And then ask them to take us back with them. Potatoes, ’Fonso. Flour tortillas. Tomatoes and onions and—”

“You have done very well anyway,” Rathna said. “Amazingly well. I’m sure I couldn’t do as well, if I were plunked down in the middle of the desert like this.”

“What happened to your elders, exactly?” Vijay asked. “You say they were washed away, but—all of them? And how is it you escaped?”

Alfonso drew a deep breath, but it did nothing to ease the ache in his chest. “We were not in town when the flood came,” he said, “and so we—” His voice failed.

“You survived,” Rathna said quietly. “You survived.”

Alfonso tried to ignore the burning look Celia sent his way.

Ruben’s gaze slid back to the three young women seated across the way. They wore knee-length skirts of hemp-like fibers, woven and fringed, with hides draped over their shoulders. What lay beneath the hides, he could not tell. How old were they? Old enough to have a child apiece. Their cheeks were round and smooth, their hair a glossy black, and the eyes that darted his way were bright and mischievous.

This was certainly not what he and Vijay had imagined as kids, pretending to be the heroic explorers who found Leonard Pacheco and his lost band. In their fantasies, they rescued people held in thrall by a superstitious dictator, half-starved and forced to do his bidding. But these people—these people looked content. If their clothes were shabby, they didn’t seem to notice, and they looked as well fed as anyone on the mountain. And all of this—food, shelter, an entire culture from what he could see—preserved or created by a bunch of teenagers. He wondered, if someone had plunked him and other second-gens down in the desert with only their wits, would they have survived?

And the idea of bringing these people back to the mountain—What would the administration do, install them in their own village at the base? Find them housing with everyone else? Talk about culture shock. But Rathna was right, both populations could use the genetic diversity. Genetic—He looked at the young women again, and a part of him stirred that had nothing to do with science.

Alfonso’s daughter probably had a husband. They all probably had husbands—they had kids, didn’t they? How would they feel about mating with strangers, with people outside their group?

Then Squash Blossom’s eyes met his, and a jolt of electricity shot through Ruben. That look, that smile—she was flirting with him. Wasn’t she? Ruben was no psychologist, but he was pretty sure she was flirting with him. Maybe they didn’t have marriage as such—they couldn’t really afford to, as small a group as they were. Scientifically speaking. Maybe they had open relationships, and . . .

Vijay’s elbow caught him in the ribs. “You’re drooling.”

Ruben flushed. “Oh, yeah?” He kept his voice low. “Your eyes aren’t exactly staying in their sockets.”

Vijay sniggered. “I won’t tell your girlfriend if you don’t tell my wife.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend!”

“Yeah? You enjoy celibacy?”

Ruben glanced around to be sure no one was listening to their side conversation, but Rathna was asking about the wildlife in the region, what kinds they’d seen, where they hunted. “Just ’cause I’m not married,” he whispered, “doesn’t mean I have to be celibate.”

“Big talk.” But Vijay turned his attention back to the exchange on deer and javelina, ducks and foxes.

“That’s what brought us here,” Rathna was saying, “we were headed for the White Mountains to look for livestock. Mountain sheep, preferably, or deer, but we’ll take anything, really. Not rabbits, we have plenty of those, but waterfowl, or even a bear. We’ve got one pair of black bears, but we could use more.”

“We have seen no sheep,” Alfonso told her. He didn’t think any had lived in this area even before the Food Wars, certainly not after. “But we have only gone upriver, to the west, so I don’t know what you will find in those mountains.”

“Hey, did you ever see a Celux nobilis?” Vijay asked. “Big quadruped with a single horn? I know they were imported from off-world during the Food Wars—”

“And were all butchered for meat,” Rathna scoffed. “Honestly, Vijay, you go from one fantastic notion to anoth—” She stopped short and took in the faces around her. “Well. Um . . . ” She clambered to her feet. “Maybe our discussion of livestock should wait for another time. Right now, I think we better go home and let people know you’re here. They are going to be so excited to learn you’ve survived. We’ll radio the news as soon as we’re within range. I’m sure our leaders will want to come right back to meet with you.”

Alfonso’s gut tightened. “Your leaders?”

“We have an administrator,” she explained “and department heads. I’m sure they’ll be back.”

He swallowed. “Sara Martin?”

“Aunt Sara? Oh, no, she gave up administration years ago. She teaches now.”

Dr. Sara Martin, a teacher. Alfonso tried to picture it. She had made quite an impression on him, all those years ago. Fair-skinned, fair-haired—he imagined she had been beautiful behind that breathing mask she wore. To twelve-year-old Alfonso, the men with her looked like monsters in their masks, but she—she was a katsina, an otherworldly being. A being of great power.

“You don’t understand!” Her voice had been tinny through the mask. “This ash will stay in the air for months. Maybe years. It’s not just the monster storms it will trigger—it’s going to affect the sunlight. Plants will die. Animals will starve. And so will you!”

But el Jefe had stood with his bare face to the driving rain, gray hair whipping back from his headband, as calm and resolute as she was passionate and determined. “And you think your technology will save us, up there on your mountain? Did it ever occur to you that technology is what made the Earth nearly uninhabitable in the first place? That your addiction to machines and computers and excess was unsustainable?”

Dr. Martin had drawn herself up as though to command the storm. “You have to come with us now. The roads are already gone, and when I get back, I’m grounding all aircraft for the duration. It’s now or never.”

“And why can you not accept,” el Jefe had asked, “that we choose never?”

She’d taken two steps forward, her face only inches from his. “I want to talk to your people directly.”

El Jefe had laughed. “Do you imagine they will give you a different answer? I have presented your kind offer to them, Dr. Martin. It is their answer I bring.”

“It is yours!”

“The Council of Elders discussed it at length. All viewpoints were considered. In the end, it was unanimous. We will trust in the Mother Earth. We are her children; her wrath will pass.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then we will perish in our homes, rather than on your mountain. Leave us, Dr. Martin. Your conscience is clear.”

For a moment Alfonso had imagined she would rise up and smite him, but she only balled her fists and shouted, “You don’t understand!”

“I understand you have made a decision, and it infuriates you that we will not do as you command.”

Dr. Martin had drawn back as though struck. No warmth colored el Jefe’s smile and he said, “As your people say, ‘You are not the boss of me.’”

Then el Jefe had turned and he, Chico, and Alfonso had walked away from her, although Alfonso could not resist a glance back. Sara Martin had been marching toward the waiting hopper, her entourage trailing after her. Had she lost face with the Men on the Mountain because she could not bring the People back?

And the Administrator Rathna spoke of now—would that person also try to command the People?

Alfonso was brought back to the present by Vijay, who had stood to join Rathna. “Hey, maybe you want to come with us, Alfonso.”

The remnants of last night’s dream stirred in Alfonso’s consciousness, and a chill slid down through his chest and into his gut. Go to the Mountain . . .

Rathna was enthusiastic. “Sure! Good idea. You can come along in our hopper—”

Alfonso quickly held up a hand, shaking his head. “I will not go in your hopper.”

Chico, who had been silent for some time, sprang to life. “What do you mean, you won’t go? Of course, you’ll go! We’ll both go! We’ll both go, and we won’t have to come back.”

“The People—my people—need time,” Alfonso demurred. “To . . . process, is that right? We have long thought you dead like our elders, and ourselves alone in the world. Our council will need to discuss, to . . . consider.”

“We have a council?” Chico demanded.

“What is there to consider? They have food, medicine, soft beds—”

“I understand,” Rathna said. She turned to Ruben, who still sat on a mat. “Ruben?”

Ruben looked up. His mind had clearly been somewhere else, and Alfonso was fairly sure he knew where. “Um—sure. Time. To discuss.”

A thought struck Alfonso. The man was young, strong . . . “Maybe you would like to stay with us for a day or two,” he suggested. “You can go back with your leaders, when they return to talk with us.”

Ruben blinked, then turned to his friends, who looked equally startled. “Uh—I’m flattered. Thank you. But—uh—” He straightened his shoulders. “Not this time, okay? I’d like to stay in your village, see how your people live, but—I’m just not prepared right now.”

Alfonso smiled. “Next time,” he agreed, then added, “Bring your toothbrush.” Ruben laughed, startled. “And maybe, if you can spare them, some seeds.”

“Seeds?”

“Corn. Cotton.”

“Potatoes,” Chico suggested. “Wheat.”

“Things that will grow here in our climate,” Alfonso qualified.

“Sure,” Ruben said. “I’m sure I can bring you some seeds.”

“You are thinking of another kind of seed, aren’t you?” Chico accused when the hopper had lifted off and they trudged back to the village. “You would give away your daughter to one of them?”

“I give away nothing,” Alfonso said. “But if he comes here . . . I simply make it possible for her to have another choice.”

“And if he doesn’t stay?”

Alfonso shrugged. “I will make it all right for her to choose one man now, and another later.”

“You will make it all right,” Chico scoffed.

“Like you made it all right for me to take my half-sister Elena to wife.”

Alfonso sighed. “There were only so many combinations, Chico, and the others had all chosen. You know that. It was either Elena, or wait till one of the children matured. And you didn’t want to wait, so I—” He stopped short, went back to the script he had used a dozen times. “So I talked to the Mother Earth, and She said it would be all right for you to marry your half-sister.”

Chico snorted. “These conversations you have with the Mother Earth.”

“Your babies were fine, weren’t they? And now Mother Earth is telling me this Ruben, he can give Squash Blossom fine babies. Babies with new blood. We need that, Chico.”

“If we go back to their Mountain, there will be plenty of new blood.”

“True.” Alfonso stopped and looked at the dirt paths wending between sturdy shelters of sticks and mud. “But will we still hear the Mother Earth up there?”

News of the survivors had spread rapidly, and several people waited at the landing pad as the hopper touched down. At the front of the pack stood Sharon McKay, and Ruben’s stomach clenched. What in the world was she doing here? This had nothing to do with her.

Vijay popped his safety harness and fairly lunged for the hatch, but Ruben stalled deliberately, fiddling with his safety harness, checking the gear stowed behind his seat while Rathna folded the wings and started her post-flight checklist. Sharon, however, was nothing if not assertive. As soon as Vijay cleared the hatch, she thrust her head in. “Hey, Rathna. Hey, Ruben.” She smirked at him, and he tensed reflexively. Did she think that was a smile? That she was flirting? “I hear you made quite a discovery out there.”

“It was Vijay’s discovery,” Ruben demurred, waving a hand at his friend who was locking the hopper in its clamps, a precaution against wind gusts that eddied over and around the mountain. “I need to give him a hand.” He pushed past Sharon and tried to escape.

She only followed him. “So this is part of Pacheco’s band you found? How many are left?”

Ruben shrugged. “I didn’t count.”

“There were four thousand in the beginning, though I think there were a lot less by the time Sara Martin tried to rescue them.”

“We’re guessing about fifty,” Vijay chimed in. Other onlookers were moving in now, listening, and Vijay raised his voice to include them. “And you should see them: living in mud huts, walking around half-naked—”

“They’re wickiups, not mud huts!” Ruben snapped. “I’d like to see you build one.”

Vijay straightened, stung. “Oh, excuse me, I’m not up on Native American architecture.”

“They’ve managed incredibly well,” Ruben temporized, “considering their whole settlement was washed away in the floods. They’ve built shelters, kept themselves fed and clothed—”

“If you call that stuff they wore clothing. More like placemats and mangy old—”

“Vijay!” Rathna called, exiting the hopper at last. “Let’s go. Feingold’s waiting.” She led the way past the curious watchers, past the Commons building and toward Administration.

Sharon stayed at Ruben’s side, long-legged enough to keep up with him. “They must have been glad to see you,” she said. “Did you get a hero’s welcome?”

Ruben nearly stumbled as he realized the survivors hadn’t actually seemed very excited. Polite, yes, but—wary was the word that came to mind. To say that, though, with so many people listening in . . .

Rathna saved him. “Sharon, let’s wait with the questions. We really should talk to Dr. Feingold first.”

Sharon’s mouth tightened. “Why? Is it some big secret?” She waved a hand at the knot of people still trailing them. “Hate to tell you, but everyone knows.”

“Protocol,” Rathna said. “We’ll catch up with you later.”

Ruben could have hugged her.

Celia looked Alfonso up and down like a horned owl deciding if a rattlesnake was worth the trouble to carry off for dinner. “So. You think they will come back?”

“Oh, yes.” Alfonso sat before his wickiup, dragging an antler point across a piece of stone to sharpen it. He did not like having to use bones and antlers for cutting and carving—they were not nearly as effective as the metal knife he once possessed. But Chico had teased him about using tools from the Before Times, and in a fit of pique, Alfonso had thrown the knife into a ravine. “We are like a scab that itches,” he told Celia. “They cannot leave us alone.”

“And is that good or bad, do you think?”

“It’s good,” Chico insisted. “Of course it’s good. We need them.”

“I think it can be good,” Alfonso temporized. They could help him identify flint, maybe tell him how it ought to be knapped to make a sharp edge.

Celia’s face did not change. “They will try to control us.”

Alfonso gave a short laugh. “They tried to control us before, remember?”

Not a smile from Celia. But in a voice so low he barely heard her, she said, “Maybe we should have gone with them.”

Maybe. Would they still be alive, his uncles, his cousins, if they had all gone to the Mountain to shelter with the scientists? “We cannot change that,” he said. “We can only deal with the present.”

“I can’t believe you only asked them for seeds,” Chico grumbled. “You should have asked for flour, for sugar, a good pair of jeans. Or better yet, you should have gone with them, as they offered. Then you could have asked for all kinds of things.”

“What do you think?” Alfonso asked Celia. “Should we go to their mountain, see what they have to offer?”

She thought about it for a moment, then lifted her chin. “No, you were right. They should come to us. We will hear what they have to say. Our ‘council.’”

Alfonso grinned sheepishly. “It sounded good. There used to be one, you know, a Council of Elders. So you and I, the other Survivors—we can be the council.”

“Too many. Three is enough.”

Alfonso considered the possibilities. Carlos, or Dawn—no, they should have someone younger, someone who did not remember the Before Times. “Five,” he countered.

Celia nodded ascent. “Pick the others. Come to my wickiup.”

“Your wickiup?” Chico objected. “Why not Alfonso’s?”

“No one’s wickiup.” Alfonso glanced up at the sunbaked structures high on the cliff above them. “Up there. We will make the Men on the Mountain come to us there. It will be a solemn place for solemn discussions.”

Celia craned her neck up at the dwellings that had been their sanctuary from the pounding rains. “You’re going to make me climb up there?”

“You are hoping I will not make the climb,” Chico accused.

“Plenty of room for everyone,” Alfonso said. “And—” He remembered standing on the mesa top, just he and Chico and el Jefe facing Sara Martin and four men—four armed men. That was why, he realized. Because the men carried weapons, and el Jefe would not allow weapons in the settlement. So when the Men on the Mountain returned—Yes, the Village of the Ancients was a better place to meet with them. “We are more likely to speak carefully,” he said, “when it is harder to walk away.”

“This is incredible,” Dr. Feingold said, looking down at her e-slate and the notes she had made. The administrator was an angular woman with short gray hair and a prominent bump on her nose. “And did they say how they survived when the flood washed everyone else away?”

They sat at a large rectangular table in a sunny room of the administration building, twelve of them. Ruben glanced around him, wondered if someday he would be part of administration and meet here to make decisions for the mountain enclave. The thought made him uncomfortable. It wasn’t a responsibility he sought.

“We didn’t ask a lot of questions,” Rathna told Feingold. “We thought it was better if you did that.” Silence stretched around the table, so she added, “We told them you’d be back to talk to them. We didn’t feel we ought to make any promises or anything.” She threw Ruben a look.

Ruben was about to object that he hadn’t made any promises when he remembered saying he’d come back and stay for a while. And that he’d try to get them some seeds. But he hadn’t promised, he’d just said he’d like to. That he’d try.

Dr. Feingold looked around the conference table at her department heads. “What do you think? Should we go out there?”

Ruben’s jaw sagged. Should they go out there? Why wouldn’t they go out there?

“I think we need to talk to them, at least,” Seth Nguyen said. “See what kind of state they’re in.” Nguyen was Feingold’s aide, a second-gen with short dark hair and startling blue eyes.

Esther Johnson cleared her throat. She was in charge of maintenance and facilities. “I can look into what it would take to get them back here. None of our wheeled vehicles would make it, not with all the roads out between here and there, so it would have to be landcrawlers or hoppers—”

“No way in hell.”

Everyone turned to stare at Stefan Hadley, Director of Operations.

The thin-faced man leveled cool gray eyes at Dr. Feingold. “We’re not bringing those people back here.”

Dr. Feingold clasped her hands on the table in front of her. “That decision hasn’t been made yet. We’re just looking into our capabilities so we don’t make promises we can’t—”

“Fifty people, with no education and no technology skills? They’ll sink us!”

Ruben was aghast. Beside him, he felt Rathna straighten in her chair. A glance beyond her told him Vijay, too, was stunned.

Feingold, however, said, “That’s certainly something to take into consideration.”

“But we need them,” Rathna blurted. “From a genetic standpoint.”

Feingold inclined her head. “Also something to consider.”

“Genetics!” Hadley was indignant. “What good will genetics do us if we all starve to death?”

Now Feingold pursed her lips as though holding back a retort. “I think you’ll find, Stefan, that with the new farm-bots we’ve recovered—”

“We are one crop failure from extinction, and you know it.”

“That’s not true!” Rathna interrupted. “We’re building our livestock pool and—”

“Are you part of administration?” Hadley demanded, his tone sharp enough to amputate limbs.

“Thank you, Rathna,” Feingold intervened. “You’ve done a marvelous job filling our pens with new breeding stock—”

“Which also has to be fed,” Hadley pointed out. “We don’t have the resources to take on another fifty people. Especially people with no skills.”

Ruben couldn’t keep quiet. “They’ve managed to feed themselves for thirty-odd years.”

“So let them keep doing that. Out there, where they won’t be tempted to dip into our livestock pens.”

“Enough,” Feingold said firmly. “As I said, the matter bears further consideration before we make any decisions. Rathna, thank you for your report. Esther, please look into transportation options, and housing, too. Fred, I know you’ve run projections on our increased food production with the recovered farmbots, but I want numbers on what adding fifty people to the equation would do. Stefan, Seth, Alicia—please stay behind, we have other matters to discuss.”

Recognizing the dismissal, Rathna and Vijay rose obediently from their chairs along with the others. Ruben, though, found his muscles reluctant to move. Vijay prodded him. “Come on.”

Slowly Ruben levered himself to his feet, willing himself to leave with his friends. He made it halfway to the door, then stopped and turned back to Dr. Feingold “They could camp at the base of the mountain,” he said. “All they’re asking for is some seeds. Corn and cotton.”

Dr. Feingold smiled at him. “Thank you, Ruben,” she said. “We’ll consider that.”

Outside the Administration building, Vijay nearly exploded. “Can you believe that? They want to leave those people out there!”

Rathna shook her head as they rounded the corner back toward the Commons. “They’re not going to leave them out there. That’s just Hadley, blowing off steam. You know how he is, he hates everything.”

“And he’s going to scare the rest of them to death. You heard Dr. Feingold—she wants numbers on what adding fifty people will do to our supplies. Like they couldn’t contribute. Like leaving them out there to die is an option—”

“They haven’t died yet,” Ruben pointed out.

“Relax,” Rathna told them. “Feingold gets it. She’s just playing administrator, letting everyone have their say, getting all the raw data. It’s called consensus building. And I have to say, she’s pretty good at it.”

On the patio outside the Commons, Sharon stood up from the picnic table where she had obviously been waiting for them. Ruben stopped short, his gut tightening at the sight of her. “I’ll see you guys later, I’ve got some stuff to do.”

“Stuff?” Vijay echoed.

“Yeah.” Ruben veered off toward the archives. “I want to brush up on my Spanish. And maybe talk to Fred about getting some seeds.”

Turtle stretched out a hand to help his father up off the ladder. Alfonso took it gladly, and a moment later, he stood in the entrance plaza of the Village of the Ancients. Pleased that he was only a little winded, he paused to look around the multilevel cliff dwelling. He hadn’t been up here in years, preferring to let younger knees carry heavy baskets to and from the storage rooms. The houses looked well-kept, although he noted a few spots where fresh mud was needed to patch the adobe before the summer rains arrived. And of course, the view was spectacular.

“I thought we’d use this one,” Turtle said, gesturing toward a large house where a wisp of smoke curled through the open doorway, escaping toward the high arch of the cave sheltering the dwellings.

Alfonso turned to his son. “Turtle, do you remember when we still lived up here on the cliff?”

Turtle shook his head. He had been only a toddler when Ernestina, heavy with their second child, had complained about having to go up and down the ladder so many times a day. She wanted a house near the creek, where water was easy get and the latrine pit was closer. “Unless you want to empty the night soil bucket,” she had growled at Alfonso.

So he and Chico had undertaken to construct shelters on the strip of land below the cliff. They couldn’t manage a hogan, such as the Navajo had built, but after a few tries they came up with a reasonable facsimile of an Apache wickiup. Other families had followed suit, and soon the entire group was living by the creek, using the old cliff dwellings only for storage or temporary shelter.

“Big enough for many people, as you said, and dry inside. I lit a fire to chase out the lizards.” He grinned. “Carlos stayed anyway.”

Alfonso chuckled. “Are the others here already?”

“Except Celia. You know how she likes to make an entrance.”

It was true, but Alfonso wasn’t sure he should admit that to his son. “She just doesn’t want me looking up her skirt as she climbs the ladder,” he said.

Turtle’s eyes widened, unsure if his father was joking. Alfonso ignored him and studied the designated council chamber. It was a good choice. “We should mark it, to show it is a special place. Paint a symbol of some kind over the door. I will think about it.” Crouching to step inside, he remembered how easily, how carelessly, he had ducked in and out of these doorways as a young man. This had been one of the first chambers they inhabited after climbing down from the plateau above. The roof had been intact, unlike some of the rooms on higher levels, and it was large enough for them to sleep in a heap, sharing body warmth. Once the rain had stopped and they’d collected some wood—and gotten it dried out enough to burn—Chico had started a fire with his lighter. That was Chico—no food or blanket or spare clothes in his pack, but he always had a lighter for his bong.

Alfonso glanced at his old friend through the hazy smoke of the Council Chamber fire now. Chico’s eyes twinkled, as though he had read Alfonso’s thoughts. That lighter had kept them a lot warmer than any single blanket could have. And the ancient builders had known their craft—now, as then, the smoke drew easily out through the open doorway as if up a chimney.

“All right, old man, I’m here,” Celia said as she pushed through the opening, puffing from the exertion. Her eyes travelled the circle of those in attendance. “Why is Turtle here?”

“I wanted someone who does not remember the Before Times,” Alfonso said. “There are more of them than us, and we need to know their thoughts, too.”

Celia humphed and eased herself onto a bench built along one wall. “Well, then. What do we do about these Men on the Mountain?”

But Alfonso held up a hand. “Let us call on the Mother Earth first, to keep our minds focused on that which matters most.”

Celia nodded her assent, then lifted her arms.

“Hear us, O Mother.

We come to you in this house of earth,

This womb wherein you bore us.

Here were we made,

Here did we grow and become the People.

Now we have gone out into your world,

But we do not forget.

We do not forget how you sheltered us,

Sent creatures into our snares,

Placed food within our reach.

Guide us now, Mother Earth, as we meet in council

To find the path that keeps us in harmony with you.”

It was well said, Alfonso had to admit. He could not have done better. If he had learned one thing over the years, it was how dependent they were on the whims of Mother Earth, and how dangerous it was to forget that.

“Now,” Celia said, dropping her arms. “What shall we do about these Men on the Mountain?”

Silence greeted her question. Around the room, the others shifted, looked at one another. Finally Turtle spoke. “Why do we need to do anything?”

“They can change our lives,” Carlos said.

“They will change our lives.”

“They will want us to go back with them,” Celia said.

Again the silence hung like smoke in the room.

“I don’t understand,” Turtle said. “Why do they want us to go with them?”

“They think we are better off with them,” Alfonso explained. “They have machines. Medicines.”

“They want us to be like them,” Carlos added.

“Why can’t we have their machines here?” Turtle asked.

A brief silence greeted the question. Then Celia lifted her chin. “We are not sure their machines are pleasing to the Mother Earth.”

“Their machines are not what killed the Earth,” Chico muttered. “It was their ignorance and their arrogance.”

“Machines can make us proud,” Alfonso added. “They tempt us to think we live by our own cleverness and not the kindness of the Mother Earth.”

Celia sighed. “But their medicines,” she said softly. Her younger sister had been the first casualty among the original survivors, a loss that still hung like a stone from her soul. Alfonso remembered it, too, how the child had burned with fever as they huddled in the damp chamber, how they had passed her among them, holding her close, trying to keep her warm—or using her heat to keep themselves warm . . .

“Do they still have those medicines?” Carlos asked. “Medicines expire, you know. Do they have a way to make more? Aspirin, maybe. But antibiotics? Insulin? Things like that?”

Alfonso shrugged. “We do not know what they have. We do not know what they want. I think we must wait till they come and talk to them. Only when we know their minds we can decide what to do.”

“Seeds?” Fred Chenoweth lifted his eyebrows in surprise. They were impressive eyebrows, long white hairs poking stiffly in a variety of directions. They matched his thatch of unruly white hair, a stark contrast to his deeply tanned face.

“For the survivors,” Ruben explained. “I know you’re busy, getting that data for Dr. Feingold, but—They invited me to come back, and I promised I’d ask about seeds. I can get vegetable seeds from my mom, she always saves them, but they specifically asked about corn and cotton.”

Fred nodded. They were in his office, a closet-sized space in a tower that had once housed a stellar telescope. “Yes, those would grow well in that climate, with enough water. Be careful about the vegetables, though, they won’t all.” Fred was a botanist and head of the Agriculture Department. “Too bad all the seed banks on this continent were raided during the Food Wars or we could look for native seeds that—But it’s kind of a moot point, isn’t it? If we bring them here to the mountain.”

Ruben shifted his weight from one foot to the other, always feeling like a school kid in Fred’s presence. Fred wasn’t just one of the original team, he was the oldest man still living, somewhere in excess of eighty. “I thought—it sounded like Dr. Feingold wasn’t sure,” he said. “About bringing them here.”

“We have to,” Fred said bluntly. “Rathna is right: We need their genetic input.”

Ruben tried to imagine Sharon McKay taking one of the survivors—one of the People, isn’t that what Alfonso called them?—as a husband. Ha! She wouldn’t even consider one of the widowers on the mountain because they were too old or too ugly or too—whatever. Sharon, marry an uneducated, half-naked—Not likely. “Well—maybe they need our genetic input,” he countered.

“Indeed they do,” Fred agreed. “We need to have both populations together so they can intermingle, spread their DNA throughout the community. It is necessary to our survival.”

“And theirs.”

Fred shook his head. “There is no ours and theirs, us and them. We are all human beings, Homo sapiens. If our species is to survive on this planet, we must stop thinking of ‘us and them.’”

“So you think we can support their added numbers up here?”

“We have to. It may be like supporting children at first, but I’m sure we can train them to do useful things here. We’ll raise the little ones like our own, teach them math, science, mechanics, and they can help with the mission. The older ones will have a harder time, but as I said—there are other ways to contribute to our community.”

Like hoeing the gardens and cleaning out the animal pens. The scut work we do in turns, would they do for the rest of their lives? Ruben drew a breath. “I’m sure you’re right. But in case it takes a while to make all those arrangements—It’s spring. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to give them some seeds to plant? Let them have a harvest to bring with them?”

Fred’s face lit. “What an excellent idea! If we gave them seeds now—” He poked a gnarled finger at his display, pushing data around. “Yes, corn and cotton. Are you going back with Dr. Feingold? You could take them along.”

“That’s up to Dr. Feingold,” Ruben said. “But maybe you could put in a word for me?”

“Celia likes to boss people around,” Chico grumbled.

Alfonso sat on a rock at the edge of the field where younger men and women hoed weeds from around the spreading squash plants. “She is entitled,” he said, savoring the warmth of the sun on his face. “After all, she is usually right.”

“That does not make her less arrogant.”

Alfonso smiled. “No, it makes her more. But after so many years, we should be used to that.”

“What if those Men on the Mountain never come back?” Chico pestered, his favorite theme in the three days since the hopper had arrived. “We will have missed our chance, and all because you were afraid to go back with them. You could at least have gone to see. And slept in a real bed.”

“I was not afraid,” Alfonso insisted, though he wondered privately if Chico was right. “I have simply learned that it is better not to make big decisions in haste.” He watched as a dozen strong backs bent to the fieldwork, backs that had never known the comfort of a mattress. They did not seem any worse for it.

“Are you just going to sit here? Why don’t you help them?” Chico demanded, waving an arm at the laborers.

“I am helping.” Alfonso picked up a small stone and hurled it at a rabbit nosing at the young plants. It scampered off. “And I’ve cut these yucca leaves to strip for their fibers, so Squash Blossom can make me new sandals.” He looked down at the green blades, knowing he should start pounding them with a stone to separate the tough fibers, but in no hurry to do so. Especially if he could get Squash Blossom to do it for him. “That’s enough work for one morning. For an old man like me.” He closed his eyes and tilted his head back to catch the sun again.

A moment later, a cry rose from the field, and his eyes snapped open. A hand pointed skyward. Alfonso followed it and saw the telltale glint of a hopper’s reflective skin.

“They’re back!” Chico’s voice rose in excitement. “Now’s your chance, ’Fonso. Tell them you want to see their mountain, see how they live.”

Alfonso’s heart had lifted at the sight of the hopper, but he kept himself in check. “We’ll see,” he said. Then, “I hope Ruben is with them.”

Chico smirked. “You only want him to come so you can push your daughter on him.”

“I like him,” Alfonso defended. “And I think Squash Blossom would like him.”

“And do you expect him to marry her and live here in our village to raise children?”

“No, I only expect him to sire children. But if he wants to stay . . . ” Alfonso shrugged.

“What if he wants to take her away with him?”

That was a dilemma. “I think she would be too frightened.” At least, he hoped she would. “The children must stay with the People.”

“Unless we move to the Mountain. That could solve all our problems!”

“Or create many more.” Alfonso sighed. “Come. We’d better go meet them.”

This time a single villager climbed the hill to meet the emissaries from Kitt Peak. Ruben recognized the young man, who also recognized him and addressed him in the formal tones of a rehearsed speech. “Hello, Ruben. I am Turtle, son of Alfonso.” Turtle gestured toward the village below, where Alfonso and several others waited. “Come with me.” Then, “Please,” he added, as if he had just remembered that part.

“Alfonso is their leader,” Ruben told Dr. Feingold as the small party followed Turtle along a winding path down the hill. “At least, he speaks for them. I guess they have a council.” He adjusted his pack, the one with the seeds Fred Chenoweth had given him.

Feingold nodded, picking her way carefully along the rough trail. Behind them came Seth Nguyen, Esther Johnson, and Rathna. Stefan Hadley had wanted to come, too, but Feingold had declined his request, much to Ruben’s relief. “And you say they mostly speak Spanish?” she asked. “I didn’t realize Leonard Pacheco’s group was Spanish-speaking. I talked to Sara Martin about her encounter with them, and she never mentioned it.”

“They were probably bilingual, like my parents,” Ruben said. “They spoke English with us—at least, a few of the older ones did.” He motioned toward a cluster of people waiting at the foot of the hill. “But among themselves, it’s a mix of Spanish and some Native American languages. I don’t think any of the younger ones speak English.”

“Ruben!” Alfonso waved as they approached. “My friend Ruben!”

Grinning, Ruben waved back. “I brought seeds.”

“Good!” Alfonso surveyed Feingold and her entourage as they drew up before him. “Please introduce me to your friends.”

When introductions had been made, Alfonso indicated the bank of adobe houses clinging to the cliff wall above them. “Please, come to our council chamber. The others are waiting. My daughter Squash Blossom will bring food.”

Ruben’s heart lifted like a butterfly at the prospect of entering the ancient cliff dwellings. Montezuma’s Castle, it had been called—he’d located it on an old map in the Archives. And that’s what it felt like they were doing: mounting the walls of a castle for a glimpse of a rich and storied past. But he noticed not everyone shared his excitement. As Turtle scrambled up the wooden ladder, Esther Johnson drew back slightly, her face pale. Dr. Feingold examined the rope bindings that held the rungs in place, but Ruben couldn’t tell if she was intimidated or simply curious about their construction. At any rate, she grasped the ladder gamely and climbed carefully to the top. Seth Nguyen followed quickly.

Ruben reached around Esther Johnson to take a firm grip on an upright. “I’ll hold the ladder for you,” he offered, and she threw him a grateful look before placing a cautious foot on the first rung. Two steps up she hesitated, and Rathna stepped up behind her, a hand to either side. As they went up together, Rathna murmuring soft encouragement, Ruben wondered how in the world they would get the woman down again.

When they had cleared the ladder, Alfonso turned to Ruben. “Maybe you could wait here and help Squash Blossom carry the food up,” he suggested. He nodded toward his daughter, who came up the path with a basket in each arm.

Her long black hair was pulled to one side, caught loosely by a leather thong into which she had tucked a sprig of purple wildflowers. Similar blooms adorned her skirt, laced into the fringe. A band woven of the same hemplike fibers wrapped around her back and crossed her breasts to tie behind her neck, accented by a necklace of tiny white flowers. Nothing disguised the smooth working of her muscles beneath flawless amber skin.

“Buenos dias,” Ruben greeted as she approached. Behind him, he heard Alfonso grunt as he started up the ladder.

The girl lowered her eyes shyly. “Buenos dias.”

Ruben had brought an audio translator with him, but it was still in his pack. “Puedo ayudarle,” he ventured, hoping two nights of sleep learning and a day of speaking Spanish with his mother had gifted him with enough of the language to offer his help.

Squash Blossom smiled in a way that made him wonder if he’d screwed up the conjugation, or an idiom. But, “Gracias,” she said, handing him one of the baskets.

“De nada.” He gulped as she brushed past him and started up the ladder. Lord, look at those legs. Mesmerized, he watched her ascend until, halfway up, she paused and looked down at him.

“¿Tú vienes?”

“Sí,” he managed, placing one foot on the bottom rung. “I’m coming.” And he followed her cautiously up the ladder, trying his best not to glance up.

Alfonso did not quite know what to make of Dr. Feingold. If Sara Martin had been a wildcat, regal and proud and snarling, this one was—what? A fox? A coyote? Clever enough to smile and wait patiently, he suspected. She tasted their food politely and made small talk with each of the council members. Then, with the invocation over and the time for serious discussion at hand, she led with, “We are curious how you survived.” Curious? Or resentful? After all, Sara Martin had predicted they would all die without her help.

And they nearly had.

So Alfonso smiled and took his time, explaining about the flower buds and the mesquite beans, the wild squash and the tender young cactus pads, the snares and the nets and the cache of pinto beans that had provided sustenance for the People. Celia recounted their attempts at curing hides, the more successful weaving of fibers from yucca leaves. They avoided the topic of how twenty-two children happened to be out in the forest when a flood swept away their homes.

“And my friend Ruben,” Alfonso said, gesturing to the young man, “he brings us seeds, no? So now we will have cotton?”

“Cotton, yes,” Ruben said. “And some vegetables, including corn.”

“Yes, corn!” Chico crowed, and for a moment, Alfonso was afraid his friend would jump up and do a parody of a war dance in the council chamber. Thankfully, he did not.

“If you plant right away,” Dr. Feingold said, “you should be able to have a harvest before we’re ready to—well, while we continue to discuss what’s best for your people, and ours.”

Ah, there it was. She expected to have a say in the future of the People. She expected to make a decision about them.

Oblivious to his caution, Chico leaned over and whispered in his ear. “Tell her to give us fields on the Mountain.”

“And now we have told you how we survived,” Celia said, “tell us, please, how you survived on the Mountain.”

Dr. Feingold blinked—she had not expected to be quizzed, Alfonso guessed. “Why—we have fields, too, at the base of the mountain,” she said, “and some livestock we’ve captured and bred. Rathna here can tell you all about that sometime. But you can see we still have the technology you’ve lost, so we can—”

“The technology we gave up,” Celia said firmly. “We chose to stay behind when everyone else took their technology and left. We chose to believe in the Mother Earth, to seek harmony with her and to trust her wrath would pass. And that faith has been justified. We live by her bounty when we walk in her ways.”

Dr. Feingold exchanged a look with Seth Nguyen, the slight, dark-haired man at her side. “Yes. Well. Certainly the volcanic eruptions, the droughts, the storms, all that seems to have passed. For now. And with our animal husbandry program, we hope to stabilize the wildlife populations so they can recover—”

Celia brushed this aside with an imperious wave, and Alfonso cringed. “Tell us of your medicines.”

Leave it to Celia to dispense with all courtesy and formality and cut straight to the point. “We are wondering,” Alfonso added quickly, “if you can still make medicines. Antibiotics and vaccines and such.” He was also wondering if it wasn’t better to just let Dr. Feingold talk and try to hear what lay behind her words.

Dr. Feingold hesitated. “We have some,” she hedged. “It’s a priority for our chemists, to search the literature for formulae to recreate useful drugs. Many diseases have disappeared because the people and insects who carried them have died out, but we’ve located a pharmaceutical plant and are currently assessing the state of its equipment and—”

“So you have no antibiotics,” Celia interrupted.

“Not at the moment. Antiseptics, but not antibiotics.”

“No anti-venoms for spider and snake bites.”

“Not anymore. But we have two trained physicians who can set broken bones and do some surgery, plus several med techs. We have ether for anesthesia, that’s not hard to make.”

Celia’s eyes met Alfonso’s over the fire. Clearly, she was not impressed. But the Men on the Mountain were more than their technology, and he wished he knew them better. He hoped Ruben would stay with them for a while. He might get a better sense of them from watching Ruben.

“We can send one of our physicians out to you,” Dr. Feingold offered. “Check your people over.”

“We have no sick people right now,” Alfonso said, uneasy at the thought of medical examinations. What if they only uncovered problems no one could do anything about? “But thank you for your offer. This has been a most interesting conversation. Now, maybe we should step outside—you can see our fields from up here, and our village. You can see for yourselves how the Mother Earth has blessed us.”

The fields did not look like much at this time of year—pale dirt and occasional shrubs with sprinkles of green where vines spread their tentative fingers in the sun. But to Ruben, who had done his share of tending fields, it looked as if they would produce enough to supply such a small band of people. The irrigation system was interesting, with its levered baskets to dip water from the stream into neatly gouged furrows. For a people with no electronics, no solar generators, no postsecondary education, they had done, Ruben thought, remarkably well. As they had discovered on the mountain, necessity was indeed the mother of invention.

When the fields and features of the village had been duly noted, and everyone had ooh-ed and ahh-ed at the impressive panorama, Dr. Feingold suggested it was time for them to return to the mountain. Ruben quickly offered to go down the ladder first and hold it steady for the others. As he had hoped, Dr. Feingold was next to descend.

“So what do you think?” he asked as she stepped off the last rung.

She gave a weary sigh. “I’m not sure they need us,” she said frankly. “They certainly don’t think they do.”

“They have done pretty well for themselves,” he agreed. “But I was wondering—Alfonso invited me to stay with them for a few days, and if it’s all right with you . . . I could maybe get a better sense of their situation.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “You want to stay here?”

“Just for a few days.”

Rathna was on her way down now, coaxing Esther Johnson one rung above her with every step. “Well . . . ” Dr. Feingold glanced up at them. “We do need further discussion, I think, on what to do here, so a few more days . . . It might be helpful, if you’re willing.” She dropped her voice. “I know it makes sense to bring them to Kitt Peak, but I’m just not sure about integrating them into our society. I can see problems there.”

Ruben bobbed his head, not really paying attention. Let administration wrestle with the problems. He’d stuffed a few necessary items into his pack along with the seeds, hoping Dr. Feingold would agree to let him stay. And she had! His heart felt light, tapping out a happy dance inside his chest.

Rathna and Esther were down now, with Seth close behind them. Turtle stood at the top, arms folded across his chest, shaking his head as if in disbelief at their qualms. Then he stepped onto the ladder facing forward, his back to the cliff, and scuttled nimbly down.

Ruben’s jaw sagged. I’ve got to learn to do that.

Alfonso spent a long moment gazing at the stars overhead, then looked around at the faces encircling the bonfire. Most of them were staring, not at him, but at Ruben seated to his right. Ruben seemed unaware of their scrutiny, his eyes fixed on Squash Blossom, who sat on his other side with her son on her lap. Ruben carried a translator and was entertaining mother and son by making it speak for them.

The fire was a ceremonial one, lit at times of celebration like harvest or a successful hunt, though Alfonso welcomed its heat this chilly spring night. He wasn’t sure why he’d called for it to be lighted—to introduce Ruben? Or because today’s meeting had ended equably when he had expected . . . something else. He had expected Sara Martin, and Dr. Feingold was . . . different. At least on the surface.

He turned to Turtle at his left. “What did you think of Dr. Feingold?”

Turtle shrugged. “She talked without saying much.”

“She told us they have painkillers,” Chico interjected. “And doctors who can set bones and do appendectomies.”

“She was respectful, at least,” Alfonso said. “It might not be so bad . . . ”

“What might not?” Turtle asked.

“Going back with them!” Chico cried. “Moving to the Mountain, having access to all the technology they’ve saved. Shooting deer with a rifle instead of chasing them into a pit. Letting machines plow and plant and harvest our crops.”

“I only wish I knew their thoughts,” Alfonso continued. “How they see us. If they will respect our devotion to the Mother Earth.”

“We can respect the Mother Earth from the controls of a harvester!” Chico snapped.

Alfonso shook his head. “We have learned much since we lost our elders. But we have forgotten much more. I do not want to lose what we have found—but when I think of all that has slipped away from us . . . ”

“Solar power,” Chico suggested. “Pellet fuel. An oven with a temperature control.”

“The skills of our ancestors?” Turtle asked.

It was a phrase Alfonso had used often, and he was not surprised Turtle quoted it. “Our ancestors lived in harmony with the Mother Earth.”

“But not always with each other,” Chico reminded him. “We had wars before the Europeans showed up. And don’t forget the Food Wars.”

Neither Chico nor Alfonso had been born yet when people were killing one another for a can of tuna or a stray cat, though they had heard all about it. And as hungry as the People had been in the early years Post-Evac, they had never turned on each other. But how would the Men on the Mountain feel about sharing what they had with the People? Dr. Feingold had been quick to offer their technology, but what did she expect in return? Did she even know? Bitter experience had taught the People there was no gain without loss. What did they stand to lose?

Alfonso shook his head and levered himself to his feet. Enough pondering of deep subjects. The fire, which he had whimsically named Elvira, crackled and blazed, shooting sparks into the night sky—it was a time for dancing and storytelling. But first, he must take care of some business. “Children of the Mother Earth!” he cried. “I have something to say.”

The murmur of voices died, and heads swiveled in his direction. Ruben took the translator from Squash Blossom and placed an earpiece in his ear.

“We have a guest among us,” Alfonso began, wondering if the younger people even knew the word guest. “My friend Ruben brought us seeds, and we will treat him with honor and respect. We will feed him at our fires and allow him to sleep in our wickiups. He comes to learn more of the People and our ways.” Heads nodded in the firelight. “We will show him how we walk in harmony with the Mother Earth.” More nodding. “And while he is here . . . ” Alfonso took a deep breath. “If he so chooses, he may take one of our maidens as a companion.”

On the ground beside him, Ruben sat up straight, and his mouth flew open.

“If the maiden agrees,” Alfonso added hastily. “And if she does not already have a husband. And now—” He smiled benignly. “Let us sing of the fire, the Elvira. Carlos, you start us.”

Ruben’s face burned, and not from the heat of the bonfire. Ignoring the hand-clapping and singing around him, he asked Alfonso through gritted teeth, “Did you just say what I think you said?”

“Your machine does not tell you?” the old man asked innocently. “I have told the People you may choose a woman for your bed.”

The crafty old devil! What was he up to? Had he set up his daughter for this? Asking Ruben to help her carry the food, beckoning her to sit with him at the fire? “Why?”

“So we have no misunderstandings.”

“No, I mean—”

Alfonso laid a hand on Ruben’s arm. “You brought us several kinds of seeds, and we are grateful. But we need one more. You understand, yes? About genetics?” Ruben nodded dumbly, and the old man snickered. “You are surprised I know about genetics? I went to school, you know. While there were still enough of us to hold classes, before the big die-off. After that, learning became . . . ad hoc.”

It unnerved Ruben to hear his host speak of science, to use Latin. Primitives don’t talk like that in vids, he thought. But despite appearances, Alfonso was the product of a technologically savvy generation, even if they had turned their backs on that technology. Or so they claimed. “Was that when you lost your village?” he asked. “The big die-off?”

Around them, people had risen to dance, stomping their feet in rhythm with the music, responding to a primal throbbing. Squash Blossom stood holding her son’s hands and encouraging him to bob his knees and tap his bare feet on the ground. Ruben felt the tug in his own gut but ignored it, focusing on Alfonso.

The old man shook his head. “No. The big die-off—I don’t know what caused that. Hunger. Sickness. Stupidity. Despair.” For a moment, he seemed to drift away, back to that earlier time. Then he sighed and shook his head again. “But this is not a time for such tales. This is a time to dance. Help me up and I will show you how.”

Ruben obliged by rising and offering his hand, hauling Alfonso to his feet. But he wondered, Is it my imagination, or is the old man hiding something about those last days?

Alfonso squinted in the bright sunlight. “I have heard the story,” he said as he dropped three dried kernels into the parched earth, “of when Europeans first came to this continent and the native peoples taught them how to grow corn. They put a fish into each hill with the seeds, to fertilize the plants.” He sighed and straightened up, trying to ease the ache in his lower back. “We do not have fish to spare. We put nets in the stream, but the big ones we eat and the little ones we let go to grow bigger.”

Ruben was digging the next hole with a sturdy stick. Whatever else the Men on the Mountain might be, they were obviously no strangers to hard work. Ruben had been puzzled by the digging stick—no doubt they used metal shovels on the Mountain, or maybe digging machines, but when Alfonso demonstrated, Ruben quickly took up the work without objection.

He had slept in Alfonso’s wickiup last night, and Alfonso thought he looked tense, a little tight around the eyes and mouth. He wished the young man had gone to Squash Blossom’s wickiup, they would all have slept better. But maybe Ruben felt shy about it. Maybe he had a wife on the Mountain and didn’t want to be unfaithful—Alfonso had never thought to ask.

“We burn our stubble fields and plow the ash under,” Ruben said now. “That helps enrich the soil.”

Alfonso lifted his eyebrows. “Ash. I had not thought of that. We could bring the ash from our cook fires and till it into the fields.” He grinned at the young man. “I think you can teach us many things while you are here. Do you know how to make a good bow?”

“Sorry.” Ruben shrugged. “But I can look it up when I get back to the mountain.”

“On the net?”

Ruben waved this off. “We lost the net decades ago. Even before the satellites started going down. But we have a pretty extensive archives, stuff that was downloaded before all the connections were lost.” He set the stick aside and began removing loosened dirt with a shovel made from the shoulder blade of deer lashed to a stout pole. “We have disrupter rifles, too.”

Alfonso felt a sudden chill. “No. No rifles, or pistols, either. We gave them up long ago, in el Jefe’s time.”

“It’s a lot easier to kill something with an disrupter than a bow and arrow.”

Alfonso nodded. “Exactly.”

Ruben started another hole. “So let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re okay with spindles and looms and the weaving of cotton cloth, but you don’t want anything to do with sewing machines, or even scissors, which are a simple mechanical device.”

Alfonso dropped three seeds into the next hole. “Our ancestors could spin and weave in the days when we still walked in harmony with the Mother Earth. She does not mind these things. But scissors—” He frowned, thinking. “I don’t know about scissors.” Ernestina had used a pair of scissors, back when they were still making garments from cloth they’d scavenged. It hadn’t hurt her any. Scissors were metal, though, and metal must be forged . . . “We need things we can make with our own hands. Things we can teach our children to make, and they teach their children. These things cannot be lost.”

Ruben paused again to wipe sweat from his brow. “You lost a lot, didn’t you, when your village was washed away?”

“Yes, we did. But our greatest loss was the wisdom of our elders.”

“And didn’t your elders use sewing machines and scissors and things like that?”

A heaviness settled in Alfonso’s chest. “Yes, they did,” he said sadly. “And where are they now?”

“You left him there?” Stephan Hadley demanded. They had gathered in the conference room to hear the delegation’s report on their encounter with the survivors. “Good God, woman, what were you thinking?”

Naomi Feingold had been exhausted when she returned from her visit to the newly discovered survivors, so she had postponed this meeting until she’d slept. She’d also wanted time to ponder the questions raised in her discussion with Alfonso and his council. She hadn’t come to any insightful conclusions overnight, but she did feel better able to cope with her operations chief. “I was thinking,” she said, “we don’t know enough about these people. That includes you, Stefan.”

“I know they rejected our help thirty years ago, I was there. You should have seen the stone-faced bastards. We warned them about the disasters ahead—the eruptions, the storms—offered them shelter with us, and they scoffed at us. Called us liars. Said we ‘desecrated the Mother Earth.’ They ordered us not to come back, and there was a clear threat implied if we did.”

Seth Nguyen, at Feingold’s elbow, murmured, “That’s not exactly the way Sara Martin tells it.”

“They hate us, Naomi,” Hadley insisted. “And you left that boy out there with them?”

“Regardless of what happened in the past,” Feingold said patiently, “these were very courteous and hospitable people. I assure you young Mendoza is in no danger.”

“Well, when you find his bloody corpse—or don’t find him at all—don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“So noted.” Given the looks Mendoza and that village girl were giving each other, she doubted murder was on their minds.

But if she brought the primitives back here to the mountain, how long would it be before Hadley or someone like him made violence a self-fulfilling prophecy?

By sundown, Ruben could not remember when he had been so tired. He was accustomed to manual labor, but never more than a few hours at a time. Alfonso had not set a hard pace, and they’d taken frequent breaks, but Ruben had been ravenous by the time Squash Blossom brought lunch to them. Alfonso had gone back to the village after that, but others were still working in the fields, including Turtle, so Ruben had felt compelled to work beside them until they shouldered their tools and headed for the creek to wash and cool off.

Now he sat with Alfonso outside the old man’s wickiup, trying not to wolf down the contents of the bowl Squash Blossom handed him. His host ate slowly, and Ruben wondered if that was to savor the food or because he was missing several teeth. “How old are you, Alfonso?”

Alfonso paused to consider. “I’m not sure. My wife used to keep track of such things.” He turned to his daughter. “¿Qué edad tengo?”

She shrugged. “¿Cincuenta?”

Alfonso shook his head. “I don’t think so. How long has it been since Sara Martin came?”

Now it was Ruben’s turn to shrug. “Thirty-five years, maybe?”

“Then I am not fifty,” Alfonso said. “Maybe forty-seven, forty-eight.”

It stunned Ruben—he’d have guessed nearer seventy. Life had not been kind to Alfonso. Turning to Squash Blossom, he asked, “Cuantos años tienes?”

She bobbed her head shyly. “Dies y siete.”

Seventeen? And with a baby. Ruben pointed at the toddler with a questioning look.

“Dos.”

If she’d been fifteen when her son was born, then she’d been married—or mated—at—

“Children are the hope of the People,” Alfonso said. “We do not delay their coming.”

And I shouldn’t delay, Ruben thought. Sharon isn’t getting any younger. The problem was, she wasn’t getting any less irritating. Or bossy. And giving in to the inevitable wouldn’t dampen her smug superiority. Squash Blossom would never be like that. Well . . . she wouldn’t start out like that, anyway.

But he would have only a few days with Squash Blossom, if he chose to—well, choose. Unless, of course, they moved her village to his mountain. Then a marriage was possible. If they relocated the whole village—Ruben tried to envision himself sleeping in a wickiup at night and going up to work with the satellite feeds during the day. The juxtaposition was jarring. But to bring Squash Blossom into one of the little apartments on the mountain, or even to build a house as his parents had done . . .

Alfonso’s noisy yawn brought Ruben back to the present. “My old bones are tired. I am going to bed. Goodnight, Ruben.” With that, Alfonso crawled into his wickiup and pulled the hide door down behind him.

When Ruben turned back, Squash Blossom had pushed aside half her woven top and was nursing her son. He tried not to notice the exposed flesh. She smiled at him and said some something he did not understand, something about her father. He switched on his translator and asked her to repeat it. “My father likes you,” the machine said.

Ruben nodded. “I like him, too.”

“He is a wise man.”

“Yes.”

“But a lonely one.”

“Is he?”

She nodded. “My mother died three winters ago, and he has been very lonely since.”

“Oh.” The child appeared to be dozing off in his mother’s arms.

“Sometimes he talks to her. I hear him, when he doesn’t know I am listening.”

Ruben smiled. “He must have loved her very much.”

She beamed back at him, her round face reflecting the light of the dying cook fire. “He says both he and Uncle Chico were in love with her, but she chose him.” She adjusted the child in her arms. “It is good to be chosen.”

Ruben swallowed, unsure where this was leading. In the fading light, he couldn’t see the expression on her downturned face, but he thought she might be blushing. When she spoke again, her voice was so soft the translator didn’t pick it up. She cleared her throat and spoke more clearly. “And will you choose one of our maidens?”

Now Ruben was sure she was blushing. He drew a deep breath, swallowed, and tried to wet his lips with a suddenly dry tongue. Heart beating like a hummingbird’s wings, he asked, “May I choose you?”

Alfonso wished the Men on the Mountain had not returned quite so soon. Only five days had passed, and there was no knowing if Squash Blossom was pregnant yet, despite the sounds emanating nightly from her wickiup indicating Ruben’s dedicated efforts. Another week would improve the chances greatly, and besides, it made Squash Blossom smile. It was good to see her smile again.

But here was the hopper, lowering itself to the mesa top like a man squatting carefully in a patch of prickly weeds. Putting aside the stone he was using to pound the yucca leaves into fiber, he glanced across the creek to where Turtle had been showing Ruben how to work the irrigation system. Both young men were on their way back now, splashing across the shallow creek, their eyes on the hopper. “It is good they get on so well,” Alfonso said. “They learn from each other.”

Beside him, Chico snorted. “Yes, I am sure on the Mountain Ruben will be glad to know how to water crops using baskets on levers.”

“His Spanish is better,” Alfonso defended. “That is something he has learned.”

Squash Blossom, who had been with her sister, came scurrying back toward her wickiup, anxiously watching Turtle and Ruben come up the path from the creek. No smile lit her face now.

“Father!” Turtle called. “Should I go meet them?”

“No, I sent She Is Pretty already.” He waved a hand toward a tall, thin woman who was nearing the top of the hill.

Turtle came to a halt several paces from his father. “I should light the council fire, then.”

“I asked Carlos to be Firekeeper. He will not want you to do his work for him.”

“I must admit, that is a good idea you had,” Chico said, “making Firekeeper an honorary position. My lighter is long dead, and if the fires in the village ever went out, you’d have to rub two sticks together to start another one.” He grinned. “I’ll bet you’d miss your technology then!”

Squash Blossom had reached them now, and she touched Ruben’s arm as she gazed up into his face. “You will go away now?”

“I want to come back,” he said in Spanish. “This season. But things I necessary do—” He babbled on, his syntax terrible, but Alfonso made out that Ruben had things to take care of on the Mountain before he could return. Alfonso wondered what they were.

“So there is nothing for me to do,” Turtle said, clearly disappointed.

“Keep an old man company,” Alfonso suggested, patting the ground beside him.

Turtle glanced at Ruben, who was crawling into Squash Blossom’s wickiup, presumably to gather his things. With a shrug he dropped to the ground beside his father. “So what will you tell the Men on the Mountain, now that they are here?”

“I don’t know yet,” Alfonso admitted.

Chico snorted. “Waiting for the Mother Earth to speak to you?” His tone dripped sarcasm.

Alfonso touched the ground beside him, feeling the dirt warmed by the sun’s caress. The sheltering cliff, the life-giving creek, the nourishing crops—was he the only one who heard something in that? Or maybe the only one who listened? “Turtle—What do you think I should say?”

Turtled heaved a sigh. “The Mother Earth has given us this place,” he said, sweeping an arm to encompass their surroundings. “It is a good place, and I think we must stay here.”

Alfonso wondered if that was fear talking, or ignorance, or if Turtle had heard it, too. In the sighing of the breeze, and the croaking of the toads, that voiceless voice . . .

“These young people have no idea what is up on that mountain,” Chico scoffed. “What miracles await. My son has never seen a working vehicle. My daughter has never heard recorded music. Neither of them knows what a guitar is, for God’s sake, let alone how to play one!”

Play a guitar! Alfonso twisted his mouth as though he’d bitten into a sour fruit. The People did not need to know how to play guitars, they needed to know how to knap flint and bake ceramics and—

“You don’t agree?” Turtle asked.

Their visitors were winding their way down the hill now, only three of them today. He hoped the woman afraid of ladders had stayed behind. Alfonso exhaled deeply and struggled to his feet. “We should go greet our guests.”

Carlos had made only a token fire in the council chamber, for its cool interior was a welcome respite from the afternoon sun. Alfonso looked around the room as they waited for Celia to make her entrance. Dr. Feingold had returned along with Seth Nguyen, but a man called Joe had replaced Rathna as pilot. Was that a good sign, or a bad one?

“I have to confess, I am amazed this structure is still standing,” Dr. Feingold said, looking around at the smooth mud walls. “Was it like this when you found it?”

“Some walls were crumbling,” Alfonso told her, “and most of the roofs needed repair. But it was a gift from the Mother Earth that sheltered us for several years.”

“So you actually lived up here?” Ruben asked. “After the flood?”

“Not right away. We spent several weeks searching for our elders and—” He shook his head. “I forgot the word. Poking through ruins looking for things we could use. Food. Blankets.”

“Umbrellas,” Chico offered.

Alfonso ignored the jest. “We sheltered where we could, but the flood waters kept rising and we had to find higher ground. The wind blew so hard it pulled trees out of the ground, and the rain never stopped.” He looked at Dr. Feingold. “You remember those days.”

She nodded, her mouth grim. Alfonso wondered what lessons those hard days had taught them on the Mountain. To be less arrogant, maybe?

“We had small children with us,” he continued, “some only three, four years old, and we had to find a safe place for them. For us all.” Nightmares had plagued Alfonso for years afterward, desperate dreams of howling wind and slashing rain, and the urgency of finding someplace warm and dry and quiet, please, Mother Earth, just some quiet, all I want is a place of peace . . .

The room darkened as Celia pushed through the doorway, temporarily blocking the light. “Oof,” she said. “Early to be so warm.”

Alfonso sucked in a breath, hauled back from memories of cold and wet and fear.

Celia plunked herself down on a bench. “What have I missed?”

“Nothing,” Alfonso said.

Dr. Feingold smiled brightly. “Alfonso was just telling us how you found this place to shelter in after . . . after the flood.”

“Did he tell you how he climbed down a rope from up there to reach it?” Celia asked, pointing upward.

“No! From the top?” Dr. Feingold turned expectantly to Alfonso.

He waved this off. “I trusted the Mother Earth, that is all. The hard part was getting everyone else down here. Especially the young ones.”

“There’s something I still don’t understand,” Ruben said. “How is it that only a handful of children and teenagers escaped the flood that washed everyone else away?”

Suddenly Alfonso felt as though all the air had been sucked from the room. He glanced across at Celia, who quickly dropped her eyes, then Carlos, who lowered his forehead to his hand and studied his knees. They didn’t have to tell. They had never told their children, why should they tell these strangers? He looked at his son, listening intently to Ruben’s translator through an earpiece.

Turning back to Dr. Feingold, he said, “I think you should know.” He drew in a breath past the knot forming in his chest. “I think you must know if you are to understand who we are. What makes us the People.” To Turtle he said, “This does not go beyond the council chamber walls.”

Turtle looked surprised, but he tapped his fist over his heart and said, “On my life.”

Alfonso nodded. “We had—we had gone out—” His voice failed.

“We had gone up the mountain to smoke marijuana,” Celia said, looking only at the flickering fire. “Some of us”—Mercifully, she did not name Alfonso and Chico—“had planted it in the forest there, and we sneaked out of the village to smoke. The children—we were babysitting. There was a big meeting, all the adults were there, and we were supposed to be home with the children. But we took them with us so we could party.”

Alfonso knew they should be thankful they had escaped, thankful they had taken the children along. But the reason—If only it had been a food crop they were after, wild raspberries or edible mushrooms, but no. They had gone to smoke pot and get high, and the little ones were a nuisance, an encumbrance, so they brought them along.

“It started to rain,” Celia went on. “It was always raining, but this was—this was different. Hard rain, harder than we’d ever seen.” She sighed. “And we were stoned. And the children were asleep, so we stayed up there in the forest. We had a shelter of tree boughs where the marijuana had been drying, and we stayed, hoping it would let up. And then—” She halted, overcome.

“We heard the roar,” Alfonso said. “In the night. I suppose a dam broke somewhere. In the morning, we crawled out to go home, knowing how angry our parents would be, how worried, but—” He stopped, breathed, finished. “Home was gone.” Tears leaked from his eyes, found the deep grooves in his face. “The whole valley was under water. We searched for others, for anyone who might have made it out . . . ” He shook his head.

“We traveled downstream, searching.” Celia wiped at her nose. “We never even found their bones.” She lifted a hand to the dwellings around them. “But we found this. A gift from the Mother Earth.”

“You found it,” Chico said to Alfonso. “We thought you were insane, tossing that rope off the edge of a cliff, insisting a Village of the Ancients was down here. That you remembered seeing it. Was it really faith, ’Fonso? What would you have done if you’d climbed down and found nothing?”

I would have let go of the rope and let it be your problem.

For a long time the room was silent. Finally Dr. Feingold stirred. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “It must have been terrifying for you.”

Alfonso brushed moisture from his weathered face. “Later—months later, a season later, when the rains let up and the flood was no more, Chico and Carlos and I went back to where our town had been. And there was nothing. No buildings, nothing. All washed away.” He drew breath deep into his constricted chest. “The Mother Earth makes strange choices. To take el Jefe and save a bunch of . . . ” He left the sentence unfinished.

Silence expanded, pressed on the walls, and finally began to ebb. Dr. Feingold drew an audible breath, let it go. “Well, I think you should be proud. What you have done here is amazing, the way you’ve adapted, survived. And now that we have found you—”

Alfonso raised a hand to stop her. “No.”

Dr. Feingold blinked. “No what?”

Chico stiffened. “Yes—no what? What are you doing?”

“No, we will not go to your mountain,” he said, and Chico growled in exasperation. “I know your intentions are good, Dr. Feingold, and you think it is in our best interests. And I know you have many things on the Mountain that we don’t, things that are important to you—but they are not important to us. What is important to us is that we remain the People.”

“Who said we would stop being the People?” Chico demanded at the same time Dr. Feingold said, “Alfonso, I’m sure that—”

“Just because we will not come to your mountain, though, does not mean we refuse your help,” he hastened. “In fact, we need your help. You have books there, yes?”

“Yes, of course. Files and files of them. Some paper ones, too—we’ve been collecting a few in our travels. We’d be glad to loan you any of them. There are portable readers—”

But Alfonso shook his head. Ernestina had tried for a while to teach their children to read, but they’d found no paper books not damaged beyond use. With only road signs and posters for material, reading seemed pointless to the youngsters. Turtle had given up first, and he doubted his daughters remembered any of it now. “We don’t need books, we need teachers,” he said. “People to teach us some things we have forgotten. How to make willow-bark tea for pain. How to make a compound bow. How to find and knap flint.”

Chico was outraged. “A chance to spend our old age in comfort, and you want to know how to shape stone into arrowheads?”

Again Dr. Feingold looked at Seth Nguyen, and something passed between them. Then she turned back to Alfonso. “Of course. If that’s what you want. We’ll be happy to send you teachers.”

Relief flooded Alfonso, washing away the sense of unease he’d had since dreaming of the Men on the Mountain and their return.

“I’ll go,” Ruben said quickly. “I mean—I’ll need to transfer some of my duties on the mountain, and there are—there are some other things I need to see about, but . . . I can look up those things for you in the archives and come back to share them.” He lifted his hands. “Not sure I’ll be any good at knapping flint, but I can bone up on the theory, anyway, and we can work on it together. Turtle and I.”

“What is flint?” Turtle asked.

“You will learn,” Alfonso said, almost dizzy with the decision he had made. “We must all learn.”

Once again Ruben waited at the foot of the ladder till Dr. Feingold had backed down. “So, are you okay with all this?” he asked anxiously. “Leaving them here, sending teachers?”

She huffed out a short breath. “Frankly, I’m relieved. Things—didn’t go well back on the mountain. We held a town meeting to discuss it and a lot of people—” She shook her head. “I was shocked. A lot of people were dead set against it. They’re afraid. Afraid it would take a toll on us, on our way of life. Fred and I tried to talk them around, showed them the numbers and how it wouldn’t be a hardship, but they weren’t interested.” She glanced up at Seth Nguyen, halfway down the ladder now. “It’s hard to make people see numbers when their hearts are on fire.”

Ruben shrugged. “I’m kind of relieved, too. I mean—I’d love having them closer, but—I think what they’ve created here is worth preserving. Developing.”

Feingold scowled. “Personally, I think they’re making a mistake. But it’s their choice, we have no right to dictate to them, and it certainly solves my problem.” She sighed as Seth joined them. “I’m glad they want teachers, at least. I’m glad they’re eager to learn, to grow.”

“And I’m glad you want to be the first teacher,” Seth said to Ruben. “Man, I wouldn’t want to live like this.”

Ruben thought of Sharon McKay and the talk they needed to have. How, if they got married, he might be gone a lot. And just what he’d be doing. She wasn’t going to like it. “Life anywhere has its drawbacks,” he said. Then he glanced down the path toward Squash Blossom’s wickiup, where she played a handpatting game with her son. “But it also has its up side.”

Most of the council climbed to the top of the mesa to see their guests off. They said their farewells, shaking hands in a gesture Alfonso had nearly forgotten. Why shake hands with people you saw every day? “Ruben,” he said as he clasped the young man’s hand. “Come back soon.”

Chico hovered at his elbow, still seething, still muttering in Spanish. “You know, just because the whole village isn’t going doesn’t mean you and I can’t. Come on! Let’s go with them!”

“I promise not to take too long,” Ruben said.

Dr. Feingold’s grip was firm, and Alfonso thought again how different she was from Sara Martin. “You are a very persuasive negotiator, Alfonso,” she said. “And a wise leader, I think.” Cocking her head to one side, she asked, “You aren’t by any chance related to Leonard Pacheco, are you?”

“By blood? No.” Alfonso smiled. “But he was my friend Chico’s grandfather, and we were always together, so after my mom died, he adopted me.”

“Oh?” Her eyes brightened. “I’d love to ask Chico about his grandfather.”

Alfonso sighed. “Chico died many years ago. Rattlesnake bite. I still miss him.”

“And I would still be here,” Chico hissed in his ear, “if we’d been on the Mountain, where they might still have had anti-venom.”

“Come again!” Alfonso called as the Men on the Mountain climbed into their hopper. “See how your seeds are growing.” Then the machine roared to life, filling the world with noise and dust as it lifted off. Behind him, the council members coughed and started back down the hill.

“What kind of fool are you?” Chico demanded. “You could have asked for anything. A plasfoam bed. Wool blankets. A house on the Mountain with electricity and glass windows, heating for the cold winter nights. We could have lived our last days in comfort.”

Alfonso paused on the brink of the mesa and surveyed the village below, its familiar wickiups, the sheltering cliff, the life-giving creek. “This is my comfort,” he said. “Living from the bounty of the Mother Earth, and by her grace.”

Waiting at the head of the path, Turtle looked sideways at his father. “Who are you talking to?”

“Myself,” Alfonso said. “Only myself.”

Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November-December 2017.

Lost: Mind

Will McIntosh

I.

I held Mimi’s hand as a nurse wearing a sari pushed the IV needle through the loose, spotted skin at the crook of her elbow.

“I’m scared. I want to go home.”

The nurse patted Mimi’s hand. She didn’t understand the words, but Mimi’s tone told her everything.

“If you want to call it off, we can.” I wanted to tell her this was the only way—that if we went home now there’d be nothing to look forward to but a long, slow descent into hell. But I couldn’t. Considering what they were about to do, it had to be her decision. I clasped her hand. “But you have to be sure. A year from now it’ll be too late.”

Mimi squeezed her eyes shut; tears rolled out of the corners. “Tell me what to do. Is this the right thing? I don’t know anymore. I’m just so scared.”

“I know you are. Anyone would be.” Suddenly I was doubting this whole plan myself. When they wheeled her into surgery, it would be the last time I’d ever see her. I’d get to talk to her again, and she’d be in a place where Alzheimer’s could never reach her, but I would never see her again. That was sinking in as I sat there squeezing her hand.

The body has to go, because they’re not copies.

We’re not duplicating her brain, Dr. Prakash had said. We’re extracting Miriam’s essence—the parts that make Miriam who she is—and installing it into a new, generic brain of sorts.

It’s still you. That’s the point—it’s still you.

“I just don’t want to lose you,” I said.

Mimi broke into sobs. We’d cried so much in the past seven months; more than in the fifty years before that combined. We’d been blessed, truly blessed, and I didn’t want it to end. Maybe that’s greedy. Maybe I should have been grateful for a good life with Mimi, and accepted that the last few years of it were going to be hell.

“Okay.” Mimi nodded bravely. “I want to do this.”

I kissed her on the cheek, trying to hide my own doubts.

I caught a final glimpse of her bare foot jutting out from under the sheet as they wheeled her down the white hallway. Then she disappeared around the corner.

As I sat in the waiting room I tried to get used to the idea that Mimi’s body was gone now. I would never exchange a glance with her again, never feel her weight on the other side of the bed.

It wasn’t about sex. That’s less of a big deal at our age. No matter how many articles they publish in AARP Magazine about great senior sex, the urge just isn’t there the way it was when we were twenty. Back then we had great sex, I’m happy to say.

I checked my watch. I had at least sixteen hours before Mimi would be ready to go home. The plan was for me to get some sleep, but now that this was actually happening I wasn’t sure I could sleep.

So I sat, and I dreamed about the past. You do that a lot when you get old. More than I would have guessed, when I was younger.

Neither of us remember the first time we met. It was probably in church youth group, when Mimi was thirteen and I was sixteen, but it’s hard to say, because we grew up in the same Upper Manhattan neighborhood and lived three blocks from each other our entire young lives.

We both remember when we became boyfriend and girlfriend, though. We were hanging around in front of Dunkin Donuts, down on Diechman Street, which was the main drag in our neighborhood, and Bobby Barnett turned and asked Mimi if she wanted to go to the movies with him. And out of the blue, I blurted out that Mimi was my girlfriend. She looked at me, startled, but she didn’t disagree.

So I took her to the movie. It was Indiana Jones, by the way. Mimi insists it was Arthur, but we saw that later.

II.

The driver didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Hindi, or Tamil, or any of the other dozen languages people around here spoke, so we stood leaning against the back of the van, our arms folded, and watched the service door in silence.

This felt sleazier than I’d imagined. We were waiting outside a beat-up green door, waving away flies, the smell of trash wafting from a dumpster not ten feet away. It reminded me of my days as a private at Fort Drum. I’d spent a decent amount of time standing around latrines swatting flies back in those days.

Behind us traffic rumbled by on a busy street, people walking everywhere. Across the street was a store covered with signs and advertisements, half a dozen bikes and motorcycles parked on the sidewalk outside.

The green door swung open. A thin guy in white appeared carrying a big wooden crate. Another older guy followed behind him carrying an identical crate. The strength went out of my legs; I had to lean heavily on the van. My Mimi. That was my Mimi.

The driver motioned for me to move away from the van so he could open the back. The other men loaded the crates into the van, side by side.

The older man took the lids off both crates, and pulled out one of the chess pieces. The white queen. It was beautifully carved, much more ornate and colorful than I’d pictured, about eight inches tall.

“Thirty-two. Sixteen in each crate.” He touched each of the crates in turn. “Good?”

Dr. Prakash had taken great pleasure in explaining the logic behind using chess pieces. If you tried to take thirty-two vases or cameras through customs on a tourist visa, it raised suspicion. A chess set is supposed to have thirty-two pieces. You needed something unique, fragile, and valuable enough to justify special handling, so you commissioned a hand-carved and painted chess set and hid the neural material inside, in cylinders that kept them at sub-zero temperature to preserve them. Brilliant. The scanners in the US could detect a whole human mind if you tried to smuggle it through, but not a mind split into thirty-two segments.

The man put a hand on my shoulder. “Good journey to you, Sir.”

I thanked him. I had no idea the journey I was facing.

III.

When the plane touched down at JFK, I literally jogged to the baggage claim area to present my claim check in the special handling office. The young woman behind the desk took the receipt and disappeared into the back. She returned a moment later with a beat up red suitcase.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Your package.” She compared my claim check to the suitcase and nodded.

“No, no, no. It’s two crates. A chess set.”

As my heart pounded, the woman showed me that the tag on the suitcase matched my claim check, number for number. “You said two crates? There’s only one number on this. It can’t be for two items.

“I must have been given the wrong ticket. There are two crates back there.” I described them, how big they were, what was in them. She went into the back and returned four or five long minutes later, shaking her head. “They’re not there.”

I felt like a grenade had just exploded in my chest.

“Sir?” The woman must have come around the desk; her hands were on my shoulders, easing me into a chair. “I need some help here, please,” she shouted out the door.

I shouldn’t have let her out of my sight. I should have insisted the driver and the porter I’d hired outside the airport come with me to the bathroom. When the porter said he’d take care of everything, that I should sit and rest and he’d meet me in the waiting area, I was so grateful to have someone who spoke English and could navigate the chaos, the foreign language, the foreign customs and procedures. I figured Mimi was safer in his hands than mine. Dr. Prakash had walked me through all of the paperwork ahead of time. It was all set.

Five minutes after I came out of the bathroom the porter pressed receipts and a claim check into my hand. I tipped him forty dollars, the driver a hundred, and choked up as I thanked them. I hope they felt like shit taking that money, I really do.

I’m a retired Colonel in the United States Army. I spent my life learning discipline and attention to detail. And then I screwed up the most important detail in the most important mission of my life.

IV.

When I spotted Denise Sculary rushing through the electric doors into the baggage claim area, I broke down. I am not a crier. As far as I can remember I hadn’t cried since I was nine, but I broke down. The airport employees must have thought I was a lunatic, crying over a lost chess set.

Neither Denise nor I are huggers, but she wrapped her arms around me and said, “We’ll figure it out, Colonel. Don’t panic. We’ll figure it out.”

Denise spoke to the supervisor on duty in Special Handling, gave him one of her cards. Once upon a time Denise was a military attorney who worked for the division I supervised. For the past six years we’d been friends who meet for lunch and bullshit about politics and the New York Yankees.

“Shouldn’t I report the crates as stolen?” I asked as we drove home.

“How long will the canisters keep Mimi’s material viable?” Denise asked.

“Oh, God. I don’t know.” It hadn’t occurred to me that the canisters might eventually stop cooling. I called Dr. Prakash and told her what had happened. She was beyond sympathetic—she was distraught, as if Mimi was a relative of hers instead of a patient. I asked her about the canisters.

“They’re powered by standard aluminum graphite batteries. I’ll double-check, but I’m sure they last three months or more.”

“Three months,” I reported to Denise when I disconnected.

“Then absolutely not. Do not report those crates stolen.” Denise delivered the advice in her lawyer tone, which was a decibel lower, with a much slower cadence, than her personal speaking voice.

“Why?”

“If you tell the FBI what’s really in them, you’ll be prosecuted for breaking the Artificial Persons Immigration Act, and Mimi will be confiscated and incinerated. If you claim they’re just valuable artworks and they’re recovered, they’ll be held as evidence in a felony theft case for a year or more.”

“Then what do I do?”

Denise patted my arm. “We have to find her, and buy her back.”

V.

My neck was aching from looking at the computer screen for so long. Fifteen years ago I had a spinal fusion procedure on the discs in my neck. I’d also grown soft after seven years of retirement, much of it spent in my recliner watching ball games and old movies.

Things had cruised along so smoothly for so long that I’d just about forgotten what it felt like to hurt. I lost friends, but the core—my family—had been intact and more or less healthy for fifty-five years. I was stunned by how much it hurt to hurt. I’d forgotten what heartache, what real pain, was like.

For the life of me I don’t understand how the driver and the porter, who as far as I know didn’t know each other, had agreed to and executed a crime so quickly. Maybe they set it up ahead of time. I’m sure they thought they were stealing chess pieces; they couldn’t have known Mimi was inside.

The driver had disappeared, and no one knew who the porter was. He’d told me his name was Ruplu, but in a city of eight million, that wasn’t much help, even if it was his real name.

Without the thieves, we were forced to hunt for the chess pieces themselves. Seva Vasa, the artist who’d carved them, was prominent in India, and each of the thirty-two pieces was signed and dated, so we had that going for us in trying to retrieve them.

A dozen or more people were helping me. My son Alvy had taken a leave of absence from his job. Denise was working day and night. Hank Bowie had retired from the NYC police force, but he had a friend on the force who was quietly monitoring crime databases.

If I hadn’t spent all of our savings, just about wiped out the 401K, and put a reverse-mortgage on the house to pay for Mimi’s consciousness transfer (as they call it), I could have paid some tech whiz to help me. The friend I really needed—Frank Carty—had died seven years ago. Frank was a computer whiz back when it was all hard drives and RAM, and he’d kept right up with it when the conversion to neurotech happened. But Frank was gone, so I tried to learn everything I needed to learn to be my own Frank.

I’m not a modern guy. I try not to fall too far behind the times, but I have no interest in plugging into the latest neuro-tech gadget, and I’m baffled by people who stand in line for hours just to be the first to get this or that new plug-in. And not just eighteen year-olds—people my age—sixty-five, seventy year-olds stand in these lines that wrap around the block, their knees and hips aching. It’s insanity. But when it stops being about keeping up, when you’re motivated by survival, you learn in a hurry.

My phone rang, sending a jolt of adrenaline through me. I answered halfway through the first ring.

“I think we may have something, Colonel.” It was Denise. “I hired an Indian man in the US to troll websites in Hindi, and he found some of the pieces listed in an auction.”

I jumped to my feet. “I have to get to India. When is the auction?”

“In three days. Only it’s not in India—it’s in Helsinki.”

“I don’t care if it’s on Mars.” Something she’d said suddenly registered. “Some of the pieces?”

“Seven. Maybe we can trace back from there and find the rest.”

They’d split up the set? I steadied myself on the kitchen table, feeling like I was going to be sick. How could they split it up? It was a set. It was my wife.

VI.

“I’m coming, Mimi,” I said under my breath as I climbed the steps of the escalator, too impatient to wait for it to carry me to the preview room. I’d said it aloud fifty times while my son drove me to the airport, thought it through the whole endless flight to Finland.

The preview room wasn’t as opulent as the lobby and hallways of Hagelstam Art Auction. A pudgy guy in a dark suit stood at an empty table, his hands behind his back. I wanted to grab him by the throat, even though none of this was his fault.

Instead, I checked the catalog I’d been clutching in my sweaty hand. “Items 451 through 458.”

He nodded. “I’ll be right back.”

My heart was beating slow and hard. The auction house probably wasn’t even aware the pieces were stolen (How could they be?), but they’d still been stolen from me, and it made me furious.

I probably should have been focusing my rage on the real villain—the US government, with their anti-artificial persons laws—but I had more than enough rage to spread around. All of this was happening because it was illegal to take advantage of life-saving technology in the country I’d served and protected for forty-two years. Why was it illegal? That depends on who you asked. The Catholic Church said consciousness relocation was an abomination, that it trapped your soul, kept it from floating off to heaven the way it’s supposed to. The official government line was the procedure hadn’t been dragged through all the hoops to show it’s safe yet.

Safe? The way having your brain slowly deteriorate until you’re a vegetable lying in a hospital bed crapping your pants is safe? That kind of safe, you mean? Give me a break.

A lot of terminally ill people in the United States are undergoing the procedure if they can afford it. I hear people say they’d never do it, not in a million years. Usually their lip is curled when they say it. But I’ll tell you, the thought of dying, or someone you love dying, will change your mind in a hurry.

Pudgy man returned with seven chess pieces on a bronze tray. I hadn’t really looked at the one piece I’d been shown at the trunk of that God damned thief’s truck. They were heavy, made of polished marble according to the catalog, and they were beautiful. Breathtaking. I’m not an art aficionado, but even I could see these were incredible.

The white queen was an Indian queen dressed in long, flowing robes. It looked as if the robes were being blown in a breeze, along with the queen’s hair. What was truly remarkable, though, was how clear and lifelike her expression was. She looked pissed, determined.

All of the pieces had lifelike faces. The black bishop looked like he’d just heard a dirty joke. The black rook looked like he was having trouble staying on his horse.

I turned the white queen over. There was no seam, no sign of patching to the base, nothing to make someone suspect there was anything inside.

But there was. A part of my wife’s mind was inside.

“Thank you.” I picked up my paddle and headed for my seat.

When item 451 came out, I raised my paddle before the auctioneer even asked for an opening bid, and I held it there after the hammer came down at seven hundred dollars, so I wouldn’t have to raise it again for item 452. I held that paddle in the air until item 458 hammered for nine-fifty, then turned and strode off to get twenty-two percent of my wife back.

VII.

I sat with the white queen in my lap, a hammer and chisel

on the kitchen table in front of me. Dr. Prakash had assured me there was no way I could damage the canister inside. That wasn’t what I was afraid of, though; that wasn’t what had my hands shaking.

The sooner the neural material is married to the synthetic

brain, the better. That’s what Dr. Prakash had said. Even if I didn’t have it all. Get it in there.

Only Dr. Prakash wasn’t sure what would happen. What does twenty-two percent of a person act like? Would Mimi remember me? Would it be hell for her, psychological torture? Dr. Prakash didn’t know, and I didn’t want to find out. But I had to; the more of Mimi that was thawed and nourished, the better her chances of being herself when I recovered the rest of the pieces. And every moment I spent sitting with the queen in my lap was time I wasn’t hunting down the other pieces. Denise was engaging Hagelstam Art Auction, calmly threatening to rain hell down on them if they didn’t provide us with the seller’s contact information. Denise was a wrecking ball when she needed to be. I was fortunate to have her on my side.

I set the white queen on the table and picked up the hammer and chisel. It took a few good blows before a chunk of the queen’s torso cracked off and fell to the Linoleum floor, exposing the smooth silver of the canister. I lopped the queen’s head off at the shoulders, then her legs, before chipping away enough marble that the canister popped free.

The black bishop was next.

When Dr. Prakash first told me I’d take the chess pieces

home and install Mimi’s mind into a synthetic brain, I pictured sticking my hands into a vat with a brain floating in it, but of course that’s not what she had in mind. I’m grateful the people who came up with neurotech decided to house it inside plastic and make it look like hard tech from the outside. The thought of strips of synthetic brain tissue behind glass everywhere you go, blood vessels snaking up the walls . . .that would be disgusting beyond words.

The brain was inside a hard outer case about the size of a bowling ball that had a camera, speaker, connections for feeding and powering the climate control. Once I had the canisters I was supposed to set them one at a time into a compartment in a shoebox-sized custom-made piece of equipment that the guy who delivered the setup had attached to the brain box. I’m sure it wasn’t called a brain box, but that’s how I thought of it.

I set the first canister in the compartment and closed the door. A blue light went on, and stayed on while the equipment made a whirring sound, like a miniature vacuum cleaner.

The light turned yellow and the door opened. I fed the next canister in as quickly as possible. It would take a couple of minutes for the brain to link up the new neurons, but somehow it seemed like the more of Mimi that was in there at once, the better.

“What—”

I jumped to my feet and rushed to the box. I’d been dozing. I studied the speaker, wondering if I’d dreamed the sound.

I cleared my throat. “Mimi? Are you there?”

“I don’t want to do this. I’m scared.”

“I’m here. Don’t be scared, I’m right here.” I leaned in toward the camera. “Can you see me?”

She didn’t answer.

“Mimi?”

I went into the cabinet over the stove and pulled down one of the bottles of Jack Daniels Joe Collorafi gives me each year for Christmas. I don’t drink much, but I don’t have the heart to tell Joe that, so the bottles pile up. I poured myself a double-shot and downed it in two swallows, willing the booze to take the edge off what I was feeling.

She was scared. That was all she’d said. Was she lost in there? I pictured her stumbling through dark tunnels, lost and terrified.

“Is there a substitute for this? It’s torn. I’m scared.”

“Mimi? Zipper?” Sometimes I called her zipper, because she zips around, always moving, keeping busy.

“Always chocolate. Of course.”

I leaned closer to her. “What? I don’t understand.” Of course I didn’t. Most of her was missing.

“Somebody help me. I’m scared.”

I pressed my forehead against the camera. “I’m here. I’m here.” My stomach was roiling, my head pounding. I couldn’t stand this. Was she suffering? Was she aware of what was happening?

I returned to my computer. The only way out was forward. I had to find the other twenty-five pieces.

VIII.

I passed a mural someone had painted on the wall, of Jesus, Buddha, and what I assumed were Hindu Gods dressed in colorful outfits wearing crowns and necklaces.

Mimi and I had travelled pretty extensively, but we’d never been to India before the procedure. We’d been to China, on a cruise down the Yangtze River. Europe, Costa Rica, Cuba. We’d been hoping to do more after her procedure, although we’d have to limit it to within the United States because of the laws against Mimi’s transformation.

I found the address I was looking for, and stopped in front of a nondescript apartment. Steps led to a narrow sheltered landing, hanging plants swinging, potting soil and a rake leaning against one wall.

The door rippled as I knocked, as if there was water flowing down it. I was jet-lagged beyond belief. In my brain it was three a.m., yet the sun was out and I was wandering back streets in Madras, India.

The man who answered the door wearing shorts and sandals was fiftyish, with thick, curly hair. He raised salt and pepper eyebrows. “Yes?”

“Mr. Chakrabarti? Colonel Walter Murphy.” I stuck out my hand. I’d learned long ago that people tended to give kneejerk respect when I mentioned my military rank, and right now I needed this man’s respect and compliance. Mr. Chakrabarti shook, his eyebrows still raised in an unspoken question: Who the hell are you?

This being my third foray to retrieve a chess piece, I had developed a flow chart strategy.

“I want to talk to you about the chess piece. You posted a photo of it on Pinterest.”

“My wife did, yes.” He shifted his weight, folded his arms across his chest.

“I have a special interest in these pieces.” I pulled a stack of photos from my shirt pocket and showed them to him, flipping through the images of the pieces I’d recovered as I spoke. “I have a sentimental attachment to this set. I’d like to buy your piece.”

Mr. Chakrabarti frowned. “I’m not interested in selling.”

“Can I ask how much you paid?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, but that’s not your concern.”

I spread my hands. “I’m only asking because I want to offer you triple what you paid.”

The offer seemed to antagonize Mr. Chakrabarti rather than interest him. “Where did you come from? Do you live in Madras?”

“I just arrived from the United States.”

“You came all this way to offer to buy my Vasa sculpture?” He seemed somewhere between surprised and horrified by the idea. When I nodded, he asked, “Why didn’t you just phone? I could have saved you a trip and told you I’m not interested.”

So much for offering to buy the piece. That led to tactic B on my flow chart: tell the truth.

“This is too important to me to rely on a phone call.” I raised my hand as he tried to interrupt. “Please. Let me finish. The truth of the matter is, I came to India to try to save my wife from dying of Alzheimer’s disease. We paid a neurosurgeon to perform consciousness transfer. We tried to smuggle her back to the US hidden in chess pieces, so customs couldn’t detect her, only someone stole the chess pieces.”

Mr. Charkrabarti went to close his door. “You’ve lost your mind.”

I lunged, shoved my foot in to wedge the door open. “I’m willing to pay more than a fair price, but I’m telling you right now, that chess piece was stolen from me and I’m going to get it back, or die trying.” This was the first time I’d been forced to move to C on the flow chart. C was threaten and intimidate.

Mr. Chakrabarti studied my loafer, frowning, then held up a finger. “I will make you a deal. If you agree to get your foot out of my door and wait here, I will bring the piece. If you can show me the hidden compartment where your wife is hiding, you can have the piece for nothing.”

“Agreed.” I took my foot out of the door, smoothed my wrinkled dress shirt, and waited. The piece was as good as mine.

IX.

I had developed a ritual when I added a new piece (or in this case, three new pieces) to Mimi. First, I went to the refrigerator and updated my running tally of what percentage of Mimi was now present, crossing out the old percentage and writing the new one below it. We were jumping all the way from twenty-eight percent to thirty-seven point five this time. Then I poured myself a double Jack Daniels and put on Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell, which was still Mimi’s favorite album.

Whatever music you loved at sixteen would always and forever be the music you love most. Someone had told me that, and it was true for Mimi, although she’d been more like thirteen when she discovered Bat Out of Hell.

I installed the new pieces.

While I waited to see what the additions would do, I drank my Jack.

It isn’t immortality. Even neural traces eventually wear out. Over time the person’s harvested neural material fades, and nothing is left but an empty synthetic brain. Mimi didn’t want to be immortal, though; we just wanted to have more time. She had it in her will that the feeding tube to the synthetic brain was to be disconnected when I died, but I was hoping to talk her out of that. Why not stick around and keep our kids company for a few decades?

Bat Out of Hell ended, and I put on Mimi’s favorite TV show, a thirty year-old show no one remembers called Persons of Interest. We had every episode in remastered full-surround, where sometimes you had to turn in your chair to watch the characters walk around just outside the edges of your living room. I may not be a modern guy for the most part, but I’m old, and old people watch a lot of TV, so we had the latest.

I was in a pretty good mood, considering, as I watched the show, which I’d pretended to love for the past twenty-five years because it was Mimi’s favorite show. Privately I was only so-so on it.

“Reese,” Mimi said.

I stood. “What’s that, Mimi?”

“Reese.”

Reese? I didn’t understand. Most of the things she said I didn’t understand. They were like echoes, snatches from some conversation that happened once upon a time.

Out beyond the living room wall, the guy with the glasses and the limp said, “Where are you, Mr. Reese?”

Laughing and crying at the same time, I rushed over to Mimi on her table. “That’s right. Reese! His name is Reese. That’s so good, Mimi.” It was the first time she’d reacted to something. She’d never answered a question I asked, or seemed to recognize a song I played. Of course, it could have been a coincidence.

I turned up the volume on Persons of Interest and waited.

“Finch, are you there?” Mr. Reese, the CIA hero guy, said as he ran down Fifth Avenue.

“Finch, are you there?” Mimi repeated. So she could definitely hear it.

“Mimi, do you recognize me?” I waved in front of her camera. I didn’t know if she could see me, but now I knew she could hear me. “It’s me. It’s Walt.”

No reply.

“Well, you need to move fast,” Reese was saying on Persons of Interest.

“Move fast,” Mimi echoed. And then she screamed. It was a computer voice, part Mimi and part not, and so loud it made the speaker crackle with static. I wanted to comfort her. I would have done anything to hold her hand. Anything.

“Some of you got separated,” I said, talking slowly, carefully. “I’m going to get it, though. I’m going to help you, Zipper. I promise, I’ll get you fixed up.”

X.

“Merry Christmas,” Mimi said when we finished singing Jingle Bells, probably the only song the whole family, including the grandkids, knew.

“Merry Christmas, Mom,” Alvy said as excited exclamations rang out.

“Dad?” Mimi said.

“No, Mom. It’s Alvy.”

Carrie’s little girl Bev dropped to her hands and knees and looked under the table holding Mimi. “Where is Grandma?”

“She’s in the box,” Carrie said. “I told you.”

“No she isn’t,” Bev shouted. “She can’t fit in there.”

Everyone laughed except Carrie, who covered her mouth and turned pinkish. I put my arm around her. “It’s okay,” I whispered in her ear. “She doesn’t understand what anyone is saying.”

“Sometimes she does, a little.”

I shrugged. Once in a while it seemed like Mimi was picking up pieces of what people said to her, but rarely. I gave Carrie a little squeeze and wandered into the family room, where the tree lights flashed and flickered, and the smell of pine was like a knife through my heart.

Everywhere I turned, every decoration, sparked a memory. Christmas memories washed over me like boiling water. The year I tried to reorganize all the bulbs so each section of the tree was a uniform color. The year Alvy knocked the tree over. Even memories of the year everyone in the family had the stomach virus seemed so precious, so wonderful and magical and painful to think about.

I set my hand on the massive package that had arrived three days earlier, from Dr. Prakash. She’d called to tell me to watch for it, warning me that it was just a Christmas gift meant to cheer me, nothing helpful to Mimi. I opened the card that was attached.

It wasn’t from Dr. Prakash, it was from Seva Vasa, the sculptor.

You said it was a shame to break them, but stone can be replaced. I pray you are successful in your quest to find the irreplaceable.

—Seva

I opened the package, knowing what was inside. A complete chess set. I pulled the white queen free and set it on the mantle over the fireplace. When I had the time and energy I’d unpack the rest and line them up with the queen.

“How you doing?” Alvy was standing in the doorway, the colored lights on the tree reflecting in his glasses.

I pointed at the queen on the mantle. “The sculptor sent me a complete set. I talked with her early on to see if she could help us recover pieces, and I complimented her work. I said it was such a shame to have to break them.”

Alvy went to the crate, took out a rook. “What a lovely gift.”

“Isn’t it? She never even met Mimi and she spent, what, probably weeks carving these?”

“How is the search going?”

I shrugged. “All the leads have dried up. We’ve got want ads all over the Internet, we’ve sent word to every big art gallery and auction house in the world.” In the living room, Mimi said something, then everyone talked at once, excited by whatever Mimi had managed to verbalize. “We’ve got three weeks before the batteries start running down. How are we going to find twelve more?”

Alvy knelt by the tree, swung the lever on the train transformer. The black Lionel engine clattered around the track. “We find as many as we can. It doesn’t have to be all twelve.”

“Do you hear her in there?” I pointed into the living room. “She’s more confused than if she did have Alzheimer’s. We can’t let her stay like that. It’s torture.”

Alvy dropped to one knee before pushing himself to his feet, in deference to his bad back. “So is Alzheimer’s, Dad. You did your best for her. Sometimes that’s all we can do.”

“I left her with a couple of strangers to go take a piss. That’s not my best. That’s my worst.”

“If you’d gone to get a drink at the bar, then you should feel like crap. You had to go to the bathroom.” He laughed dryly. “The bathroom. Everyone understands what it’s like to have to go to the bathroom. Mom would understand. Hell, she had to go every twenty minutes. Remember Disney World?”

I smiled. “Yes, I do.”

“They had to stop the Small World ride halfway through and let her off.”

“I remember.”

“She had a bladder the size of a gumball.”

I burst out laughing, then struggled mightily to keep it from turning into crying.

XI.

I set the canister down on Mimi’s table as Bat Out of Hell played. This single lousy piece didn’t seem like a reason to celebrate, but I took a sip of my Jack Daniels anyway. Two days. Nine pieces still missing. Where were they? They had to be out there somewhere. I’d shelled out seventeen thousand dollars, borrowed from Denise and various friends I hadn’t already hit up for cash, to hire a woman who was supposed to be a high-tech cyber-detective extraordinaire. She’d run an image-recognition search that combed through every single one of the billions of photos on the Internet, looking for shapes that matched the missing pieces anywhere in the photos, even on a shelf way in the background. She’d found two that way.

I updated the tally. Seventy-two percent. Twenty-eight percent of Mimi was still MIA.

“Here’s a little more, Mimi. We’re getting closer.”

The door closed, the machine made its vacuum cleaner sound.

“Merry Christmas.” Mimi had been saying that a lot in the weeks since Christmas.

It was hard to tell exactly what was missing just by talking to her. I could ask Dr. Prakash to figure out how much of what was missing was frontal lobe, how much emotion-related material versus memory versus intellect versus whatever, but what good would it do? I knew she wasn’t right. It was as if we’d jumped ahead five years in her Alzheimer’s progression. I could have appreciated the irony of that better if it wasn’t so painful.

“Walt?”

I turned. “Mimi?”

“What. What. What’s wrong with me?”

I got up close to the camera. “Some of the neural extractions were lost. I’ve been trying to find them.”

“Walt?”

“Yes. I’m here, Mimi.” I put my hand on the box, centered my face in the view screen. “Can you see me?”

“I have the worst nightmares. I don’t want to sleep any more. Am I dreaming?”

“No, Mimi. You’re not dreaming.” We’d hit some sort of tipping point. Mimi knew who she was. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. “Part of you is missing. We’re trying to find it.”

“This is miserable. I can’t . . .I keep. Walt?”

“It’s me, Mimi.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“I know. I know it is.”

The phone rang. It was Denise. “I didn’t find another.” She always said that first thing, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up. “But one of our women in the field found someone who owned the white bishop and then sold it. He refused to give her the buyer’s name. Do you want me to contact him?”

“No. I’ll go myself. Give me the information.” I was happy to have something constructive to do, and I figured the guy, whoever he was, was more likely to give the information to me than to my lawyer.

“You want to go on a trip, Mimi?” I called up the instructions for linking Mimi’s eyes and ears to my phone. Until now I hadn’t seen the point, but now I thought giving her distractions might be a good idea. Plus, I didn’t want to leave her.

XII.

I studied the page in my note pad where I’d scrawled her name. Winnette Winfield.

As I understand it, she has several.

How many was several? Was it three? Six? Nine? He hadn’t known; all he’d known was the woman he’d sold his white bishop to had several others.

It hadn’t been hard to find information on Winnette Winfield. Apparently there was only one Winnette Winfield on the planet. She lived in the good old USA—Gaithersburg, Maryland. Her husband was an exec with Goldman Sachs, which probably meant they had plenty of cash.

She worked for the FBI.

My gut had clenched when I saw that. My typical plan B—telling the truth—was off the table. I couldn’t tell an FBI agent I’d committed a felony. Plan C was also off the table, since an FBI agent was unlikely to be intimidated by a seventy year-old retiree. I’d have to bowl her over with an outrageous offer, then figure out how to raise the cash.

“Wait a minute. Where are my hands? I can’t find my hands,” Mimi said in my ear.

“You’re not in your body, Zipper. We had to transfer you when you got Alzheimer’s. Remember?” She kept forgetting. Everything would be fine, and suddenly she’d blank out and panic.

“I never have to go to the bathroom again,” she said.

I burst out laughing. “Never again. And no more doctors’ visits, except to keep me company.” We’d listed all of these things in the plus column when we laid out the pluses and minuses on a dry-erase board, back when we were deciding whether to take the plunge.

“I miss my hands. I have an itch.”

“You don’t have an itch. No more itches, either.”

“What day is it?”

“Tuesday.” Her mind, minus twenty-eight percent, tended to jump around.

“Tuesday.” She said it as if this was hugely important, profound knowledge. “Where are we going?”

“We’re trying to find the rest of you.” I took the exit for Gaithersburg. “This didn’t go as planned, but it’s still better. The other way, I was going to lose a little more of you each day. This way, it’s the opposite.”

“You always were the optimist,” Mimi shot back. It was the sort of quip Mimi made all the time when her mind was whole. Hearing it made me miss her. I sped up.

I played it cool. When Winnette Winfield answered the door, I told her I was collecting Vasa chess pieces as well. I said I’d gotten her name from the collector she’d bought the Vasa from, and decided to pay her a visit.

“To be honest, I wish you’d called first instead of showing up on my doorstep.” She was tall and slightly overweight, a big moon face, frowning at the moment. She had the gruff, no bullshit tone I associate with law enforcement. I don’t know if people with that tone tend to gravitate to careers in law enforcement, or if they pick up the tone while on the job.

“I apologize. You’re right, that was inconsiderate of me. I just get very excited when it comes to these pieces. Can I ask how many do you have?” I tried to make the question sound casual, but it came out breathless.

“At this point I own nine.”

I clutched the door frame to steady myself. So much for seeming cool and casual.

“Are you all right?”

“Nine. You know what, Ms. Winfield? Between us we own the complete set.”

That clearly surprised her. “You own twenty-three pieces?”

“Let’s put it this way: you have two white pawns, three black pawns, the white bishop, white knight, black knight, black queen.”

Winnette nodded. “I guess you do own the rest.”

“Is there any chance I can see them?” I licked my dry lips.

She checked the time. “I’ve got an appointment. I have to leave in a few minutes.”

“I understand. I won’t take up much of your time.”

Reluctantly, Winnette led me inside, to a room right off the front hall that was set up like a museum, with glass cases floor to ceiling along the walls, a wide glass-covered display case in the center, sculptures on pedestals scattered around the room. I spotted Mimi’s chess pieces and strode over to them.

Nine. There they were. I pretended to admire the work as I licked my lips and considered how to handle this.

“You have an impressive collection.” I looked around, hands behind my back. “You know, it would give me such pleasure to have that complete set.” I tried to look as if a thought had just occurred to me. “Would you be willing to sell them to me for three thousand apiece?”

Winnette drew back her head in surprise. “No. I’m not interested in selling anything. I’m a collector, not a dealer.”

“No, I understand. It’s just . . .don’t you think the pieces belong together? I don’t know why the set was broken up to begin with—”

“No. I don’t.”

I took a deep breath. I could feel the panic rising. “What if I offered you a hundred thousand dollars for all nine?”

Winnette laughed. “I’d say either you were out of your mind, or you were working some sort of scam.”

“I promise you, it’s an honest offer.” I pulled out my wallet, showed her my military ID. “I can provide references, and pay with a cashier’s check—”

She held up a hand. “Enough. They’re not for sale. Now please.” She gestured toward the door. “I’m late for my appointment.”

I took one last look at the pieces, and headed for the door with Winnette at my heels. I was so close. So close. Scenarios ran through my head as she opened the door to let me out: take them by force; pretend to have a heart attack and steal them when she ran for her treatment kit. If she hadn’t been an FBI agent, probably armed and well-versed in criminal behavior, I might have tried.

XIII

I sat in my library, numb, contemplating burglary. I would have done it if I thought I could, even though Winnette Winfield would immediately know who’d done it and I’d spend three years in prison. But she and her husband lived in a big, expensive house with a valuable art collection. There was no doubt they had a high-end security system, with facial-recognition surveillance, basement-to-roof invisible breach-detection, the whole nine yards. I’d be in handcuffs before I set foot in the house.

“Walt? It’s all right. I’m not afraid to die,” Mimi said.

“Nobody’s dying. Don’t talk about dying.”

“I wasn’t going to say it until we knew for sure. I don’t want to be like this. I want to say goodbye to my mom and pop, and then I want to die.”

I squeezed my eyes closed. Mimi’s mom and pop had died twenty years ago. I wanted to tell Mimi I didn’t want to lose her, I didn’t want to be alone in this house thinking about how my wife had died because I left her with strangers to take a piss. I’d shoot myself first—I’d release Mimi and then I’d follow right after her.

“I don’t want to know when it’s going to happen,” Mimi said. “Okay? Let’s say goodbye now.”

“I don’t want to say goodbye.” I bit off the rest of what was going to be a whiny, self-pitying speech about not wanting to live without her. “Are you sure?”

“I don’t remember being in my twenties, or my forties. I don’t understand those TV shows. I remember understanding them, but I can’t any more. I’m dumb. And confused. And my dreams. I have the most terrible dreams.”

“Okay,” I whispered.

“I don’t want to be like this.”

“Okay.”

My phone rang. It was Denise. I’d called her and Alvy on the way home, to tell them what had happened.

“I called and offered her double,” Denise said. “I was going to cover the other half if she accepted. It just made her angry. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you for doing that.”

“I did find out something else about her. Her father died of Alzheimer’s three years ago.”

I wasn’t sure why that was relevant. Then it began to sink in. Winnette Winfield could relate.

“I wasn’t sure if I should tell you that.”

“You’re thinking she might help us if we told her the truth.”

“No, I’m not thinking that at all. I think if you told her, she would arrest you, and if she did I wouldn’t be able to get you off. The feds don’t screw around with this, Walt. They won’t go easy on you because you’re an old guy trying to help his wife. You’ll do five to eight. I’m telling you because you have the right to know.”

“Well, I appreciate that.” As I said goodbye to Denise, I checked the time on the antique table clock Mimi had inherited from her mother. Nine fifteen. In a day, give or take, the batteries would start to fail.

I’d spoken to Ms. Winnette Winfield long enough that I could picture her handcuffing me and reading me my rights. What I couldn’t picture was her breaking down when she heard my story, taking those chess pieces off the shelf and pressing them into my hands.

“Who was that?” Mimi asked through the intercom.

“It was Denise.”

“How is she?” Mimi probably didn’t remember any of the conversation she’d just overheard. Otherwise she would have asked what I’d meant about telling Winnette the truth.

“She’s fine. She’s great.”

I stared up at the set Seva Vasa had sent me, my gaze lingering on the white bishop, the white knight, the black knight, the black queen.

I stood. “Wait a minute.”

“What?” Mimi asked.

I had nearly identical pieces made by the same artist. I could offer to trade.

Only, why would I have offered her two hundred grand if I already had identical pieces? And why would I want to trade my pieces for identical pieces?

An idea came to me, like fireworks going off in my brain. I could switch the pieces without her knowing.

Holy shit. That might work, if I could somehow arrange to be alone in her museum room. I had no idea how I could manage that, but I had to think of a way, and soon.

I went to pack some things. “We’re going for a ride, Mimi.”

“I’ve got nothing else planned. Where?”

“Back to see the woman who has the chess pieces we need. Her father died of Alzheimer’s.”

I dumped a can of nuts, some candy bars, and Cheerios into a grocery bag to snack on in the car.

“Let me talk to her.”

I froze. That would not have occurred to me in a million years.

My wife wants to speak to you. Alone. That might work. I’d probably go to jail, because Winnette would alert the authorities once Mimi told her the truth, but I was willing to trade the rest of Mimi’s mind for time in prison.

Unless Winnette arrested me on the spot.

As I rushed around the house dumping clothes in a bag I called Denise, who told me Winnette was unlikely to arrest me in her own house while off-duty. More likely she’d alert the authorities and let them handle it. Fair enough.

XIV.

Twenty years ago there was a huge storm that knocked the power out all along the East coast for two weeks. A month before we’d bought half a cow directly from a farm in upstate New York, and had all of that beef stashed in a freezer in the garage. Needless to say, all two hundred-odd pounds of it went bad when the power went out. That created another problem: what did we do with two hundred pounds of rotting beef? The trash people wouldn’t take it, and we didn’t want to put it in our car and risk getting a smell in there that would never come out. I came up with the idea of burying it in the woods behind our house.

We decided to do it at night, because the woods are community property. What we didn’t realize as we dragged the rotting meat into the woods in a tarp was that one of our neighbors could see the spot where we were digging from her bedroom, and she was convinced we were burying a body.

Imagine you’re in the woods burying rotting beef at midnight, and suddenly there’s a flashlight in your face.

Mimi and I shouted in unison. My first instinct was to throw my hands in the air, Mimi’s was to swing the shovel she was holding at the intruder.

When he ducked out of the way, pulled a gun and identified himself as a police officer, Mimi chewed him out for scaring us to death. Still holding the gun, the officer told us to step away from the tarp. He pulled it back, exposing the meat.

For a second his eyes got huge, and I could see he thought he was looking at the dismembered body of one of our neighbors. Then he started to laugh.

You don’t know how you’re going to react in a crisis until it happens. Not that a police officer with a flashlight is a crisis, but when he startled us I threw my hands in the air, and Mimi swung a shovel.

We arrived in Gaithersburg at four a.m., but I waited until eight before knocking on Winnette Winfield’s door.

The best way I can describe her expression upon seeing me is disappointment. “Unbelievable. Am I going to have to take out a restraining order?”

“I’m so sorry to bother you. I promise you, this is the last time you’ll ever see me. My wife wants to speak you.”

Winnette blinked slowly, like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “And where exactly is your wife?”

I pointed at the army rucksack lying on the stoop beside me. To keep Winnette from thinking this was a scene from Psycho and I had my dismembered wife in the rucksack, I quickly opened the neck of the rucksack and gently took out Mimi’s brain box.

“What the hell is going on?” Winnette growled. “Tell me that isn’t what I think it is.”

“Is that her?” Mimi’s voice came from the box.

“That’s her,” I said. “Ms. Winfield, I’d like you to meet my wife.”

Winnette stared at me, dumbfounded. “You do realize I’m an FBI agent.”

“I’m aware of that. All I ask is that you give my wife five minutes of your time. She wants to speak to you alone. Then you can take whatever steps you think are necessary.”

Winnette hesitated for a moment, then, huffing, swung the door open. “This is just priceless.”

I followed her to her office, set Mimi down in a chair. “I’ll be outside.”

As soon as I pulled the door closed, I ran for the rucksack and carried it into Winnette’s museum room. I’d stuffed the chess pieces into the two pockets on the outside. I pulled them out and set them on the floor, then I went to the display case.

It was locked.

They didn’t look like they locked—they were all-glass in front, with sliding doors. I found the locks on the lip jutting below each shelf.

Moving around the room, I swept my hand over the molding on both sides of the door. Nothing. Where would she keep the key?

On her key ring.

Praying no one else was home, I hurried into the kitchen, cast around, spotted Winnette’s purse on the counter. I rooted around inside, frantically checked the inner zippered compartments. While I was doing this I spotted a ring of keys with an FBI fob on the counter, right beside the purse.

“Mom?” A girl’s voice. Footsteps in the hallway. I went the other way, through a doorway, into the dining room. I hid against the inner wall beside the door.

“Mom?”

I waited, heart thumping, while Winnette’s daughter poured herself a bowl of cereal. When, finally, no sounds came from the kitchen, I peered around the doorway. She was nowhere in sight.

I put the keys in my pocket and walked briskly but casually out of the kitchen.

Her daughter, who was in the living room draped in a stuffed chair, looked up as I passed.

I paused in the doorway. “My wife is speaking to your mother. I was just using your rest room.”

“Oh. Okay.”

I returned to the museum room. There was a small, simple key on the ring. I tried it on the section where the chess pieces were displayed. It slid home and turned easily.

Ten seconds later I had the pieces stashed in my rucksack, the replacements in the display case. I locked it and hurried back into the hall.

Of course, now I had to return Winnette’s keys to the kitchen.

The study door clattered open. I stuffed the keys into my pocket just as Winnette appeared. She got right up in my face. “I will not be party to a felony.”

“You have no right to have part of my brain in your house,” Mimi shouted from the study. “Give it back to me.”

“How dare you put me in this position?” Winnette stabbed a finger at my chest. “You did this to your wife, not me. Now you want me to be accessory to a crime, to risk my career, and if I don’t, I’m a heartless bitch who wouldn’t help an Alzheimer’s victim.”

“I tried everything else first. I offered you ten times what the pieces were worth. I even contemplated burglary. I’m desperate.” I’d been desperate. Now I just wanted to get out of there.

“Please,” Mimi called. “You have no idea. This is hell. Please.”

I retrieved Mimi from the study.

“Please. Please. Help me,” Mimi cried.

Winnette clapped her hands over her ears. “Get out. Get out of my house.” Her daughter was in the hall, wide-eyed.

I grabbed the rucksack and headed for the door as Mimi went on pleading. I glanced at Winnette one last time before closing the door behind me. She was crying, her hand over her mouth. I was glad to see it. She had a conscience, at least. She would probably still turn me in, but she was taking no pleasure in this.

I set Mimi in the passenger seat, shoved the rucksack in the back.

“How could anyone be so cruel?” Mimi said.

“I got them,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

“What do you mean, you got them? How did you get them?”

Then I remembered Winnette’s keys. Going back inside was out of the question. I hopped out of the car, went to the big SUV sitting in the driveway, and dropped the keys on the floor on the driver’s side. Hopefully Winnette would assume she’d dropped them there.

I was just getting back in my own car when the front door banged open. Winnette stormed out, her arms filled with chess pieces.

I had the window halfway rolled down when she reached my door. She flung the chess pieces onto my lap.

“Don’t you ever come back here.”

“Thank you so—“

“Don’t.” She stabbed a finger in the direction of my nose. “Just drive away before I change my mind.”

I did as she asked.

“Oh my God. You did get them. How did you know she would bring them out?” Mimi asked as I drove away, my palms damp on the wheel.

“I didn’t.” I hadn’t wanted to tell Mimi my plan ahead of time, in case it didn’t work. Now, as I drove, I explained what I’d done.

A couple of miles from Winnette Winfield’s house, I pulled into a shopping center and parked in the far corner of the lot. After calling up Bat Out of Hell on the stereo I retrieved the hammer and chisel I’d had the forethought to stash under the seat, and went to work freeing the last nine pieces of Mimi as I sang along to Heaven Can Wait.

“Who is this, Bruce Springsteen?” Mimi asked.

“Meat Loaf. You know all the words by heart.” I held up one of the canisters where she could see it. “They’re in here somewhere.” I laughed, my hands shaking, as I hooked up the little machine and installed the canisters one by one.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2016.

Ninety-Five Percent Safe

Caroline M. Yoachim

Nicole went to visit her best friend, Grant, the day before his family left for Opilio. She was jealous that he’d be part of the second wave—the first wave had already done the hardest work of establishing the colonies, but the floating cities would be nearly empty, an abundance of unclaimed living space. She’d heard rumors that families had so much space that each person had their very own room—a place that was theirs even if they went out.

“I got you something,” Nicole said. She held out a small cube with a mini-mint plant inside. The 4-inch cube provided everything the tiny mint plant needed to survive a trip through space. For how small it was, the plant had been astonishingly expensive. Nicole had traded all her recreation credits for the last three months to get Livvy to give it to her.

He shook his head. “You keep it.”

Nicole frowned. “You don’t like it?”

“It’s amazing, but I don’t have anything for you. Keep it, and bring it to me someday in Opilio.”

Grant had it in his head that this was a temporary goodbye, but there was no way Nicole’s mom would ever let her ride the worm—five percent of the pods that went into the wormhole never came back out. No one knew why. “We aren’t coming to Opilio, Grant. Take the plant?”

“The colony is a better place, a better life. Think about it—floating cities in an orange sky. Jellyfish the size of a space station. Here, I’ll pass you the commercial.” Grant put his hand over hers, and when she authorized the transmission he copied the data to her storage implant. “You’ll be sixteen in a couple years, but if you get tired of waiting, you can go as a default.”

“And then what, I can come live with you?” Nicole tried to think of something else to say, but thinking about Grant leaving made her want to cry, and talking about Earth stuff seemed pointless now. She hated goodbyes. She shouldn’t even have come over today.

“Let’s get this over with. Bye, Grant. Don’t be wormfood.” She tried to make her voice sound light and completely failed. She hugged him and then bolted out of his family’s homespace before she burst into tears, barely hearing him call out goodbye behind her. She felt like hurling the mint plant at the wall, but she knew she’d regret it later, so she tucked it into her purse.

The walk home took her past the base of the default elevator, a thin column of metal stretching up to the cavernous metal ceiling of the city. Baine was gray on gray on gray, an underground city of steel towers where the tallest buildings doubled as supports to keep the roof from falling in. Above the roof was the topside station, constantly bombarded by the raging snowstorms of nuclear winter.

Even the clothes the city provided were gray, although these could at least be programmed to look more colorful if you had the credits to buy overlays. Nicole’s jumpsuit was crimson with a scatter of black flowers to accent her waistline. It was prettier than the navy blue student uniform, but Grant hadn’t said a thing about the outfit. She wondered if he’d noticed, then reminded herself that he was leaving.

“You lost, sweetheart?”

Nicole flinched away from the voice, a man dressed in a default gray jumpsuit. She shook her head and kept walking. Mom had warned her a bunch of times to keep clear of the default elevator, but it was the fastest route to Grant’s building. The area was always crowded. Hundreds of people in default gray lined up each morning to ride the pods up to the surface and then onward to the colonies.

A few miles away there was an elevator for people who could afford to pay. That was where Grant’s family would go. That elevator had scheduled departures and nicer pods, but the wormhole ate everyone indiscriminately, so his odds of getting to Opilio were the same as the defaults waiting here.

Nicole paused at the entry to her building to reprogram her clothes to basic navy before going in, but before she could manage the change Mom came up behind her.

“Nicole Morgana Blackensmith, please tell me you did not go walking around in that outfit.”

When they got inside, Mom programmed their homespace into a single room with an old-style wood table in the center. Nicole suspected that Mom called this particular configuration “family meeting,” but Nicole called it “Mom is cranky.”

Mom sat across from Nicole. Dad sat at the far end of the table with three-year-old Tommy on his lap. Tommy was fiddling around with a game cube that was programmed way too advanced for him, a racing game with colorful cars on curvy looping tracks. He twisted the cube around, then shook it. When the cars skidded off the tracks and crashed, he laughed.

“Your father and I want to talk to you about . . . well, about a lot of things. The clothes that you uploaded, and that commercial that Grant gave you—”

“Hey,” Nicole protested, “I put that on my private storage drive!”

“We can monitor everything you upload until you turn sixteen, young lady, and I’m concerned about this ad. It makes the colonies look like some glorious vacation destination,” Mom said, “and I don’t want you to have such an unrealistic idea of what things are like out there.”

Nicole projected the ad into the empty air above the table. If Mom was going to get into her private storage, what was the point of keeping it private? The commercial started with a hazy orange cloud, and then a pair of translucent jellyfish-creatures drifted across the sky. Aureliads. Tommy poked his hand into the projection, trying to touch a low-dangling tentacle.

The image shifted to show an aureliad next to one of Opilio’s floating colonies, domed cities the same size as the massive jellyfish that shared the sky. “Come celebrate the wonders of a better life on Opilio,” the recorded voice on the commercial said, “see the aureliads—”

Mom shut down the projection.

“Aureliad!” Tommy yelled, pointing at the spot where the projection had been. “Aureeeeeeliad!”

“No tantrums, please,” Mom said calmly. “You and Nicole go play.”

The calm quiet voice meant Mom was furious. Nicole took Tommy to the other end of the room. Mom pulled up a sound barrier, but if Nicole didn’t get any privacy she didn’t see why Mom and Dad should either. It only took her a couple minutes to hack through.

“Rozzy, don’t do this,” Dad said. “She’s upset that her friend is leaving, and if you go down hard about the ad she downloaded it’s only going to make the colonies look that much more appealing. She’ll go for sure the minute she turns sixteen.”

“Don’t you Rozzy me. You think I’m being unreasonable because I don’t want her facing a five percent chance of turning into wormfood?”

Tommy pulled on Nicole’s arm. “Aureliads?”

“Is it really such a terrible idea?” Dad asked. “We could all go, leave this overpopulated cave behind and live in the clouds. You’re only looking at the cost, but what about the reward? There’s more space on Opilio. You could have that garden you’ve always wanted.”

“A garden?” Mom asked. “I can’t believe you’re falling for all this propaganda, too. They send criminals and defaults through that wormhole, and do you know why? Because either they end up on the colonies or they disappear into a collapsed worm. No more problem. And you want that for our family?”

Nicole was surprised at the turn the argument was taking. Her parents were big on presenting a united front. Nicole had known that Mom was against Opilio, but she hadn’t realized that Dad was interested in going.

Too bad Mom was more stubborn than Dad. They’d stay trapped in Baine, and even with both her parents working overtime they’d all live in one tiny room that they had to reprogram any time they wanted to eat or sleep or have “family meetings.”

“Aureliads, PLEASE?” Tommy asked.

“Not right now, Tommy,” Nicole answered. Projecting the commercial again would make Mom even angrier and remind her to clear it off Nicole’s private storage, which hopefully she’d forget to do.

Tired of being ignored and denied, Tommy threw a screaming, kicking, flailing tantrum. Nicole pinged against the sound barrier until Mom and Dad came over to calm him down.

Saturday morning, Nicole sat in bed with the mini-mint cube in her lap, staring at a wall-projected list of pod departures and arrivals. Grant’s pod had departed forty-seven minutes ago. Wormhole travel was instantaneous, but it took time to get the pods up the elevator, launched into the wormhole, and unloaded on the other station. News of a pod’s safe arrival then had to be brought back to Earth on a returning pod.

The lists updated every five or ten minutes as pods arrived back at the topside stations all around the world. Earth’s remaining cities shared the updates brought back by each pod. G114 was lost, G115-G122 made it through, G123 was lost. Another couple dozen pods went through. G149, the pod that Grant’s family was on, made it.

Grant sent her a message a few pods later, “Not tasty enough to be wormfood, ended up as wormshit instead.”

Nicole laughed harder than the old joke merited; she’d been more worried than she realized. The sound woke Tommy, and Nicole cursed herself for being too lazy to set up a sound barrier around his bed. Mom and Dad were working the weekend, again, leaving her to watch Tommy all day.

She sent a message back to Grant, “Too bad you weren’t worm barf, then we could hang out today.”

She watched cartoons with Tommy while she waited for an answer, but nothing came. Someone pinged the door. Nicole read the ID—space allocation services. Damn. She opened a small window in the top of the door.

“You’ve been reassigned to a new homespace, follow me please. We will ship your personal items separately.” A young woman wearing the lime green uniform of city officials stood outside the door.

“My parents are both at work,” Nicole said.

“You’ve been reassigned. I will wait while you contact your guardian for permission to come with me.”

Nicole called Mom, who double-checked what was going on and told Nicole she’d have to go. It was their fourth reassignment in six months, and every time their room was smaller. At least this time they stayed in the same building. Nicole held Tommy’s hand as they followed the woman down a long corridor and then three floors up on the elevator. A box arrived a few minutes later with the family’s personals—Dad’s ancient paper copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a few old game cubes, a stack of ancient datachips, and a yellowed paper packet of broccoli seeds. Seeds that would never sprout, because Mom wasn’t brave enough to take the risk.

Tommy started wailing that he didn’t like the new homespace. Desperate to get him to shut up, Nicole showed him the Opilio commercial while she studied their new room. She paced the length of the walls, and sure enough, it was smaller than the old one. This had to stop. Mom might not see that life on Opilio was better for the family, but Dad thought so. If she and Tommy went first, her parents would have no choice but to follow, and the whole family would be better off.

Nicole reprogrammed her clothing templates to the default.

Tommy stared.

“Big trouble,” he told her.

“Come here, I’ll do yours.”

“I do it.” He reprogrammed his outfit. Nicole hadn’t realized the little squirt could dress himself.

The default elevator wasn’t quite close enough for Tommy to walk, so Nicole took him on the blue-line moving walkway. The breeze from the moving belt wasn’t enough to sweep away the odors of sweat and perfume. They passed a lot of buildings, mostly academic offices and classrooms by day, residential space at night.

When they got off the walkway, Tommy pointed at the metal elevator tube, extending up all the way to the top of the city. “Up?”

“Yeah, it’s an elevator, like we have in our building,” Nicole explained. “We’re going up.”

Hundreds of defaults stood in a line that spiraled out from the base of the elevator and filled the surrounding courtyard. They huddled together in clumps, periodically trudging forward as the line moved. They didn’t look happy to be leaving Earth, but surely their lives on Opilio would be better than the default gray nothing they had here.

Nicole made her way to the back of the line, dragging Tommy along behind her. A pod filled up and made a low rumbling noise as it accelerated up the elevator tube toward the surface.

The woman in front of them had a grandmotherly look about her, with hair exactly the color of her default-gray jumpsuit. She leaned heavily on her walker as the line moved forward. When they stopped, the woman looked back at Nicole. “Aren’t you a little young?”

“No.” Nicole turned away, embarrassed that the old woman had caught her staring.

“I’m three,” Tommy said.

“That’s a good age to be,” the woman told him. Then, to Nicole, “No need to get snippy, I wasn’t passing judgment.”

Nicole smiled in a way that she hoped was polite without inviting further conversation.

“I’m Sorna, and,” she waved to a boy standing in front of her in line, “this is my grandson, Christopher. Fine boy. About your age, maybe. Fifteen, are you?”

“Fourteen,” Nicole admitted. Did defaults have to be of age to ride the elevator? The uniformed officials that were milling around didn’t seem to be checking anybody’s ID. They were busy directing the movement of the line and keeping the peace.

Christopher had his back turned and muffs over his ears. Not muffs, Nicole realized, but headphones. He wasn’t wired with implants. Probably most defaults weren’t—it was expensive. Sorna was staring at her.

“I’m Nicole. This is Tommy.” First names wouldn’t be enough for Sorna to figure out they weren’t supposed to be there. “You said your grandson is fifteen? He looks older.”

“Sixteen. When you get to be my age, there’s not much difference between sixteen and fourteen. I got grandkids from three to twenty-two. Lots of family here in line. That’s Christopher’s dad there at the front end of the family, never could abide that man.” Sorna waved toward a surly-looking man about thirty people ahead of them. “Since my daughter Eavie died, he’s done nothing but drink and piss—excuse my language—and now he’s got little choice but to go to the colonies.”

“There’s so many of you,” Nicole said.

Tommy nodded. He liked to play as though he were part of grown-up conversations, even when he didn’t understand what people were saying.

“A bigger family means more mouths to feed, more rent to pay, and more medical bills,” Sorna snapped.

“Sorry.” Nicole hadn’t meant to make her angry.

“No, you didn’t mean anything by it,” Sorna said. “I failed them. I always worked a couple jobs, sometimes three, but it was never enough. We’re a sickly lot, too much medical debt to ever hope to pay it off. It’d almost be a blessing if the worm takes us.”

They stood quietly for a while, long stretches of waiting punctuated by occasional bursts of movement. Nicole fished a couple protein bricks out of her purse and gave one to Tommy while she munched on the other one. It was time for his nap, and after a while he started nodding off every time the line stopped.

“What happens if you don’t all end up in the same pod?” Nicole asked.

“We’ll go separate,” Sorna said. “We tried to count up, but people come and go from the line . . . ”

Mom would’ve insisted that the whole family go together. The thought made Nicole pause. Mom would be madder than a topside snowstorm when she found out what Nicole was doing. Why couldn’t she see that living in the clouds was better than being buried under the surface? Ninety-five percent safe was good odds and the reward would be worth the risk.

Nicole stared at the gray metal ‘sky’ of Blaine. The upper dome was dotted with yellow lights that illuminated the city for daytime. There weren’t any windows to the surface; there was nothing to see up there but snow. She thought about the ad Grant had given her. What a wonderful thing it would be, to live in a floating city with huge viewing windows onto a beautiful sky.

The line moved forward.

Most of Sorna’s family got into a pod, but it filled up. The doors closed and the pod accelerated up the elevator shaft. Another identical pod rose up from below. Plain metal spheres dotted with small windows. No point to anything fancy since eventually all the pods would be eaten by the worm.

The pod doors opened and the line moved forward. The wheels of Sorna’s walker scraped on the metal floor inside. Nicole followed her. Christopher was in their pod too. He made no sign of knowing or caring that his father had gone in the other pod.

Following the instructions that blared over speakers inside the pod, everyone strapped themselves into seats mounted in a big circle along the curved walls. Sorna pushed a button on her walker, and it folded up small enough for her to slide it into the bin under her seat. Nicole sat down next to Sorna and strapped Tommy into the seat on her other side. Tommy was only half awake as they got into the pod, and as soon as he was belted in his head drooped over to rest against Nicole’s arm. He drooled a big blob of spit onto the sleeve of her jumpsuit.

At first, all Nicole could see through the tiny windows was the inside of the elevator tube rushing by. When the pod reached the surface, the elevator tube opened up into a set of vertical tracks. There was a brief glimpse of snow and a howl of angry wind, and then they were above the clouds.

Tiny points of light appeared against the darkness. Stars. Nicole called up some skymaps and saved them to the not-so-private local storage on her implant, alongside Grant’s commercial. She’d seen skymaps before, but she hadn’t realized the stars would be so small.

“Shouldn’t we have stopped by now for the topside station?” Nicole asked, peering at Sorna through the dim light inside the pod. Her arm was falling asleep from the weight of Tommy’s head.

“Oh, child, you got on not knowing? They don’t let us off until we’re through the worm. Last thing they need is a bunch of defaults clogging up the station.”

“Oh.” Nicole tried to stay calm. She thought she’d have a last chance to bail out—to cut things off if she’d had enough adventure. Grant had told her how it worked with the private pods, and she hadn’t known the default elevator was any different.

Nicole hadn’t even sent a message to her parents to tell them where she and Tommy had gone. She’d planned to do that from the station. She started composing something, then realized her connection to Baine was gone.

The interior light went out.

“That’s normal,” Sorna whispered.

“Quit talking to the stow, Gran,” Christopher said. “She got herself into this, and worse, she brought some unsuspecting toddler with her. She’s just some rich kid playing default for a free vacation. When we get to Opilio, she’ll message her family and they’ll send money to ship her precious ass home in a private pod.”

“I will not,” Nicole snapped. Her parents had enough money for a private pod to Opilio, but they weren’t so well off that they could afford the price of a trip back to Earth. Oh wormshit, what had she done? She and Tommy couldn’t go back now, even if they wanted to.

Sorna patted her on the shoulder. “Christopher, be nice. Scared is scared.”

“It makes me mad, that’s all. Serve her right if the worm eats her on the trip home.”

“Christopher,” Sorna said. “Go back to your music, and leave the poor girl alone.”

“She should’ve left us alone,” he said.

The walls vibrated, and the force of the launch pressed Nicole down against her chair. Through the tiny windows, she could see Earth’s horizon stretched out in a fingernail crescent of white and blue.

Their pod detached from the shuttle. “Is that supposed to happen?”

Sorna nodded. “Watch Polaris.”

“Why?” Nicole found the point of light that was labeled as the North Star in her skymaps.

“That’s where they anchored the mouth of the worm.”

The star moved.

It jumped to the left of where it had been. No . . .it split. There were six other stars, in a circle around the spot where Polaris had been.

“Lensing,” Nicole whispered. She’d learned about it in school, the way the gravity of the wormhole bent light around it to create a ring of stars. Back then she’d thought the ring of stars was pretty. Now they were the teeth of the open-mouthed worm about to eat her.

Everything she and Grant had joked about was real. Would she be wormfood or wormshit? The walls of the pod clanged and rattled. Nicole clutched her purse in her lap. She could feel the corners of her mint-plant cube pressing through the thin fabric. Around her, people joined hands with their neighbors, praying. Sorna reached out and Nicole took her hand. She put her other hand over Tommy’s, holding his tiny fingers as he slept.

The pod passed into the center of the circle of stars.

Discontinuity.

Nicole stared out the window. Something had happened, an odd sort of blink, but not with her eyes. The view was much the same, except she couldn’t make out the worm teeth stars, and her skymaps didn’t recognize the constellations.

A cheer went up among the other travelers.

“Smile, dearie, we made it,” Sorna said.

Nicole searched the sky for the bright colors of the Crab Nebula, but all she saw was stars in an ordinary black sky. “Are we in the wrong place? Shouldn’t it be more colorful?”

“Arrivals go through the space station, rich girl. Those orange skies you saw in all the ads are only once you get to the planet,” Christopher sneered.

“But aren’t we in the Crab Nebula?”

“Not as pretty up close as it is from far away.” Christopher glared at her. “Which is true for a lot of things.”

The pod docked with the Crab Nebula’s worm station, and the doors opened onto a narrow metal hallway. A pair of station officers came into the pod to make sure everyone got off. Grant was right, everyone was welcome in the colonies, but travel back to Earth was strictly regulated. Earth was overpopulated, and they didn’t want colonists coming back home.

This would be their home now. Hers and Tommy’s, and her parents when they came. There was no doubt in Nicole’s mind that they would come. The only question was how many years she’d be grounded once they arrived.

The gravity on the transfer station was wrong, too low, but one of the station officers handed her a set of magnets for her shoes, and a smaller pair for Tommy. Tommy wasn’t all the way awake yet, so he didn’t complain when she put his on for him.

“Please follow me to the immigration area. There are screens with recent arrival information, if you have need to know.”

The group moved in a herd, packed together, following the officer. They passed a window, and Nicole caught her first glimpse of Opilio, angry red with swirling storms. Tommy pulled on her hand. He wanted her to lift him up so he could see better, but the crowd pushed them past the portal. He grabbed at Nicole’s arms and dragged his feet and whined until she picked him up and carried him, which actually wasn’t too bad in the lighter gravity.

“Miss Blackensmith?”

Nicole turned, then realized that she hadn’t told anyone in the pod her last name. A young woman in a dark blue uniform approached her. The uniform was too big, and it bunched up in odd places.

“Miss Blackensmith,” the woman repeated. The voice didn’t sound female, maybe the officer was male. “We will go to a private waiting area. Your parents—”

“I’m fine staying with the group,” Nicole interrupted. “No need for special treatment.”

“Me too,” Tommy added, finally starting to perk up. “Special treatment.”

Nicole walked with the rest of the group, carrying Tommy piggyback. The officer followed her. The hallway opened into an open chamber. A few people gathered near a large window with sweeping views of the planet below, but everyone else went to the arrival screens. The data on the screens was much the same as the feed that Nicole had watched on her implants back on Earth, listing the status of all the latest pods. Nicole tried to establish a connection, but her access codes from Baine didn’t work here on the station.

Nicole saw Sorna and Christopher studying the arrival screens. The old woman leaned against her walker with one arm and hugged her grandson with the other. The other pod, the one with the rest of their family, hadn’t made it.

It was one thing to know that not every pod went through, but Nicole had seen those people. She tried to call up their faces in her memory, but she only remembered one, Christopher’s father. The boy who had been stoic and surly the entire trip was sobbing. She wanted to say something, but she didn’t know what to say. He probably wouldn’t have wanted to hear it from her anyway, even if she could come up with the words.

“Miss Blackensmith, you must come with me now.”

Nicole spent the night with Tommy in one of the station’s private waiting rooms. Her parents had needed time to settle their affairs on Earth, and Mom sent firm instructions that they were not to leave their room. Nicole wanted to explore the station, but given the amount of trouble she was already in, she stayed put.

“I’m bored,” Tommy said.

Nicole didn’t answer. Tommy had declared his boredom once every two minutes for the last half hour. Nicole gave him a game cube from her purse, but he wasn’t interested unless Nicole played too, and she wasn’t in the mood to entertain. Mom and Dad were on their way, which was exactly what she’d wanted, but after seeing that the other pod—the pod full of people she’d seen with her own eyes—hadn’t made it, she couldn’t help but worry.

The waiting room windows were pointed away from the planet, and Nicole could see the region of sky where pods appeared. The tail of the worm, the white hole. The place where the worm would shit out her parents.

Farther in the distance was the mouth of the Earthbound worm. A pod, probably empty since so few people actually travelled back to Earth, disappeared into the black hole.

A few seconds later, a different pod exploded into existence, re-entering the universe in a bright flash of fire. The pod decelerated as it approached the station. The first few times it had been interesting to watch, but a couple hundred pods had come and they were still waiting.

“Can we go home now?” Tommy asked.

Nicole shook her head. She pulled the mini-mint cube out from her purse. It looked much the same as it had on Earth, unaffected by the lower gravity of the station. Somewhere in the red and orange clouds below the station, Grant was getting settled into his new home. Would he want the plant now that she was here? She couldn’t believe it was only the day before yesterday that they’d been arguing over the plant back on Earth.

The door to the waiting room opened.

“Daddy!” Nicole and Tommy cried out in unison. She let Tommy down, and he wobbled over to Dad and glommed onto his leg.

“Where’s Mom?” Nicole asked, peering into the hallway behind Dad. “I know she’s probably really mad, but—”

“Rosaline isn’t here?”

Nicole shook her head.

“She said it would be better. With the statistics. We had to come separately. I told her to take the first pod. I should have gone first.”

“Mommy?” Tommy asked, hesitant. He started to cry, agitated by Dad’s lack of composure. Nicole couldn’t process what was happening. They were here to start their better life, with gorgeous sky views of orange clouds and aureliads. Mom would come around to the idea eventually.

“No, Tommy, Mommy can’t be here.”

Mom had tried to come. She was against the whole thing from the start, but she’d still tried to come, once she knew that Nicole and Tommy were here.

“This a bad place,” Tommy said. “I want to go home.”

“Shut up, Tommy.”

“Nicole—”

“Shut up!” Nicole was frantic, angry. This wasn’t how it was supposed to work. Mom was supposed to yell at them, to tell her what a stupid reckless thing she’d done. She couldn’t be dead. Mom would never get on a pod and risk becoming wormfood. She was on Earth, she had to be, fretting and worrying like always.

Nicole could almost convince herself, until she looked at Dad’s face. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I wish you’d been more patient, is all. If you’d given me a little more time I might have convinced her, and we could have all come together.” He picked up Tommy, who was calling for Mom as if he could magically summon her by repeating her name.

They took the shuttle to one of the floating cities. Dawn Treader. Mom would have enjoyed the ride, in spite of herself. The orange sky was cut with shifting bands of blood-red aurora, streaks of color where the radiation from the Crab Nebula was blocked by the atmosphere of Opilio.

They descended into the swirling storms, and the shuttle bounced and shook. Underneath the more turbulent layers were the floating cities, hazy in the distance. The shuttle pilot pointed to something, off to the right.

“Aureliad,” Tommy whispered.

It was rusty orange like the sky, and as big as the floating cities. The aureliad drifted in the currents of the sky, tentacles trailing behind it for miles. It swept the sky for planktos, tangling its prey in its tentacles like the jellyfish from which it got its name.

Nicole clutched her tiny mint plant, safe inside its cube. She was supposed to give the mint to Grant, but if she could find a place to do it, she would use the tiny plant to start a garden for Mom.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2015.

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

Catherine Wells

Catherine Wells is the author of numerous novels and short stories of speculative fiction, including the AnLab Award-winning Best Novella of 2015, “Builders of Leaf Houses.” For more about her work, visit catherine-wells.com.

Will McIntosh

Will McIntosh is a Hugo award winner and finalist for the Nebula and twelve other awards. His most recent novel is The Future Will Be BS-Free (Delacorte Press). Defenders (Orbit Books) was optioned by Warner Brothers for a feature film, while Love Minus Eighty was named the best science fiction book of 2013 by the American Library Association. Will has published around fifty short stories in Asimov’s (where he won Reader’s Awards in 2010 and 2013), Lightspeed, Science Fiction: Best of the Year, and elsewhere. Will lives in Williamsburg, Virginia with his wife Alison and twins Hannah and Miles. He left his position as a psychology professor in Southeast Georgia to write full time, and also taught large 300-student sections of Intro Psychology at the College of William and Mary for a time. Will is represented by Seth Fishman at The Gernert Company. Follow him on Twitter @WillMcIntoshSF.

Caroline M. Yoachim

Hugo and three-time Nebula Award finalist Caroline M. Yoachim is the author of dozens of short stories, appearing in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, among other places. Her work has been reprinted in multiple year’s best anthologies and translated into Chinese, Spanish, Polish and Czech. Yoachim’s debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories, came out in 2016.

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.