2312

Swan and Zasha

Earth’s thirty-seven space elevators all had their cars full all the time, both up and down. There were still many spacecraft landings and ascents, of course, and landings of gliders that then reascended on the elevators; but all in all, the elevators handled by far the bulk of the Earth-space traffic. Going down in the cars were food (a crucial percentage of the total needed), metals, manufactured goods, gases, and people. Going up were people, manufactured goods, the substances common on Earth but rare in space—these were many, including things animal, vegetable, and mineral, but chiefly (by bulk) rare earths, wood, oil, and soil. The totals came to quite a flow of physical mass up and down, all powered by the counterbalanced forces of gravity and the rotation of the Earth, with a bit of solar power to make up the difference.

The anchor rocks at the upper ends of the elevator cables were like giant spaceliners, as very little of their original asteroidal surfaces were left visible; their exteriors were covered with buildings, power units, elevator loading zones and the like. They were in effect giant harbors and hotels and, as such, extremely busy places. Swan passed through the one called Bolivar and settled into one of the hotel cars without even noticing it; to her it had just been a complicated set of doors and locks and corridors, getting her into yet another set of rooms. She was resigned to the long ride down to Quito. It was an irony of their time that the trip down the elevator cable was going to take longer than many interplanetary voyages, but that’s the way it was. Five days stuck in a hotel. She spent the days attending performances of Glass’s Satyagraha and Akhnaten, also dancing hard in a grueling class designed to get people toughened up for one g, which sometimes hit her pretty hard. Looking down through the clear floor, she got familiar again with the great bulge of South America, gaining definition below them: blue oceans to each side; the Andes like a brown spine; the little brown cones of the big volcanoes, bereft of all their snow.

It was almost an ice-free planet now, with only Antarctica and Greenland holding on to much, and Greenland going fast. Sea level was therefore eleven meters higher than it had been before the changes. This inundation of the coastline was one of the main drivers of the human disaster on Earth. They had immensely powerful terraforming techniques off-planet, but here they usually couldn’t be applied. No slamming comets into it, for instance. So they bubbled their ship wakes with surfactants to create a higher albedo, and had tried various levels of sulfur dioxide injected into the stratosphere, imitating volcanoes; but that had once led to disaster, and now they couldn’t agree on how much sunlight to block. Much that people advocated, and many of the smaller projects that were in action already, cut against other proposed or ongoing projects. And there were still powerful nation-states that were also corporate conglomerates, the two overlapping in Keynesian disarray, with the residual but powerful capitalist system ruling much of the planet and containing within it its own residual feudalism, there to fight forever against the serfs, meaning also against the horizontalized economy emerging within the Mondragon. No, Earth was a mess, a sad place. And yet still the center of the story. It had to be dealt with, as Alex had always said, or nothing done in space was real.

In Quito Swan took the train to the airport and got on an airplane flight to New York. The Caribbean’s cobalt and turquoise and jade were brilliantly vivid; even the brown underwater outline of drowned Florida had a jasper sheen. The stunning gloss of Earth itself.

A much steelier ocean crashed whitely into Long Island as they descended over it, bumping and slipping in the air. Then they were landing on a runway somewhere on the mainland north of Manhattan, and at last she was out of the various travel containers, the rooms and vehicles and corridors and hallways, and under the open sky.

Simply to be outdoors in the open air, under the sky, in the wind—this was what she loved most about Earth. Today puffy clouds were massed overhead at about the thousand-foot level. Looked like a marine layer rolling in. She ran out into some kind of paved lot filled with trucks and buses and trolley cars, and jumped around screaming at the sky, then kneeled and kissed the ground, made wolf howls, and, after she had hyperventilated a bit, lay on her back on the pavement. No handstands—she had learned long before that handstands on Earth were really hard. And her rib still hurt.

Through gaps in the cloud layer she could see the light-but-dark blue of the Terran sky, subtle and full. It looked like a blue dome flattened at the center, perhaps a few kilometers above the clouds—she reached up for it—although knowing too that it was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything. The blue itself was complex, narrow in range but infinite within that range. It was an intoxicating sight, and you could breathe it—one was always breathing it, you had to. The wind shoved it into you! Breathe and get drunk, oh my, to be free of all restraint, minimally clothed, lying on the bare surface of a planet, sucking in its atmosphere as if it were an aqua vitae, feeling in your chest how it kept you alive! No Terran she had ever met properly appreciated their air, or saw their sky for what it was. In fact they very seldom looked at it.

She collected herself and walked over to the dock. A big grumbling water ferry took on her and many others, and after negotiating a crowded canal, they were out in the Hudson River and going down to Manhattan. The ferry moved into a dock on Washington Heights, but Swan stayed on it as it plied its way down the Hudson side to midtown. A few parts of Manhattan’s ground still stood above the water, but most of it was drowned, the old streets now canals, the city an elongated Venice, a skyscraper Venice, a super Venice—which was a very beautiful thing to be. Indeed it was an oft-expressed cliché that the city had been improved by the flood. The long stretch of skyscrapers looked like the spine of a dragon. The foreshortening effect as they got closer made the buildings look shorter than they really were, but their verticality was unmistakable and striking. A forest of dolmens!

Swan got off the ferry at the Thirtieth Street Pier and walked on the broad catwalk between buildings to the High Line extension, where people filled the long plazas stretching north and south. Manhattan on foot: workers pushing narrow handcarts on crowded skyways, connecting island neighborhoods suspended between skyscrapers at differing heights. The rooftops were garnished with greenery, but the city was mostly a thing of steel and concrete and glass—and water. Boats burbled about on the water below the catwalks, in the streets that were now crowded canals. All the aerial plazas and catwalks were jammed with people. As crowded as ever, people said. Swan dodged between the bodies of the crowd, working the border between the two directions of traffic, glorying in all the faces. They were just as heterogeneous as any spacer crowd, but the people were very much closer to an average size—rather short at that—with many fewer smalls and talls. Asian faces, African, European—everyone but Native Americans, as she always thought in Manhattan. Talk about invasive biology!

A building she passed had pumped out its old floor and now operated down there in a kind of big bathtub of air. She had heard that submarine and intertidal real estate was booming. Some spoke of pumping out the subway system, which still worked wherever it had run aboveground. Below her the slop of water threw up a big ambient sound. Human voices, and water splashing, and the cries of gulls back on the docks, and the rush of wind through the canyons of buildings; these were the sounds of the city. The water below was completely chopped up with intersecting wakes. Behind her, down the avenue to the west, mirrorflakes of broken sunlight bounced on the big river. This was the thing she loved—she was outdoors, truly in the open. Standing on the side of a planet. In the greatest city of all.

She hopped down some stairs and got on a vaparetto going down Eighth Avenue. The ferry was a long low-slung thing, with seats for about fifty people and room for another hundred to stand. It stopped every few blocks. She hung over the rail and gazed up and down the canal: a river canyon, with buildings for canyon walls. Very Futurismo in appearance. She got off at Twenty-Sixth Street where it was bridged by a long esplanade, extending east all the way to the East River. Lots of the east-west streets had overhead platforms like this, and the crowded canals under them were shaded almost all day long. When the sunlight slanted through slots, it laid a bronze glaze on things, and the blue water turned pewter. The New Yorkers did not seem to notice this effect, but on the other hand, there were twenty million people living here despite the flood, and Swan thought that beauty was not completely irrelevant to the phenomenon, even if people chose to keep mum about it. Tough guys, it made her laugh. Swan was not a tough guy, and not a New Yorker, and this place was astonishing and she knew the locals knew it. Talk about landscape art! “ ‘The geography of the world is unified only by human logic and optics,’ ” she chanted, “ ‘by the light and color of artifice, by decorative arrangement, by ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful!’ ” You could sing Lowenthal’s entire oratio on the catwalks of Manhattan, and no one would care.

She moved into the sun whenever she could. That was the direct radiation of Sol, slamming into her naked skin. It was amazing to stand in the light of the sun without dying of it. This was the only place in the solar system where that could happen; the bioshell surrounding a star was as thin as a soap bubble. Thickening the life bubble—maybe that was the human project. That they had pulled the bubble out around Mars was a remarkable thing. If they pulled it inward to Venus, even more so. This, however, would always be the sweet spot. No wonder the mystics of this old world, stunned by all life’s changes. Metamorphosis suited Earth, and never stopped. The great flood had become a fortunate fall, had brought on an exfoliation into a higher state. The world had been watered. Flowers popping out of the leafy branch. She was back.

The Mercury House was down by the Museum of Modern Art. Many of the museum’s paintings were now on Mercury, only copies left behind, and in an unusual gesture, a room here was devoted to Mercurial art. The Group of Nine was prominently displayed, of course. It was a little too much sun and rock for Swan. And she always found it odd to see canvas used as the medium, a bit like looking at scrimshaw or other antique exotica. When you had the world and your body as canvases, why deal in squares of wallpaper? It was peculiar, but as a result perhaps interesting as well. Alex and Mqaret had held a reception for the Nine once, and Swan had met many of them and enjoyed talking to them.

Up on the roof patio of the Mercury House building, maybe thirty stories above the water, she found a number of Mercurials gathered at the bar. Most of them wore exoskeletons or body bras, which, whether hidden by clothing or not, were evident to Swan by the way the people wearing them stood, resting comfortably slightly off true, as if in water. The ones without were more or less heroically erect, holding off the weight of the Earth with a strained look. Swan felt a little that way herself. No matter what you did, one g imposed itself on your attention for a while.

Their New York office was headed by an ancient Terran named Milan, who had a sweet smile for everyone. “Swan, darling, so good of you to come.”

“Oh my pleasure, I love New York.”

“Well, bless your ignorance, child. I’m glad you like it. And I’m glad you’re here. Come meet some of my new people.”

So Swan met some of the local team and endured their condolences about Alex, and gave them a brief inaccurate account of her trip to Jupiter. They had ideas about the Mondragon above and beyonds that they shared with her.

When they were done, Swan said to Milan, “Is Zasha still around?”

“Zasha will never leave this town,” Milan said. “You must know that. Haven’t you been to Z’s latest scheme? It’s on one of the Hudson piers.”

So Swan took the ferry back up Eighth Avenue, got off, and climbed stairs until she reached a catwalk she could take west.

With all the old piers eleven meters underwater, a new set had had to be built. Some were old ones salvaged and stilted; others had been built anew, sometimes using the drowned ones as foundations. Smaller floating docks filled gaps and were attached to piers or nearby buildings at what used to be their fourth floors. Some of these docks were mobile and became like barges as they moved around. It was a tricky shoreline.

Some of the submerged docks now held aquaculture pens, and Swan’s old partner Zasha apparently now ran a pharm on one of these piers, growing various piscean drugs and bioceramics while also doing things for the Mercury House—and for Alex.

Swan had called ahead, and Zasha appeared at the fence that cut a floating dock off from the big plaza complex west of Gansevoort Street, at the south end of the High Line. After a brief hug, Z led her to the end of the dock and then out on the Hudson River in a boat, a smooth little hummer that soon had them midriver.

Everything on the water moved at a watery pace, including the water itself. The Hudson River here was wide; the entire city of Terminator would have fit in New York Harbor. Bridges were visible all over the place, including one on the distant southern horizon. There was so much water Swan could hardly believe it; even the open sea did not seem to have so much; and yet it was not even a very big river, compared to the really big ones. Earth!

Zasha was observing the scene with a contented expression. Banks of windows at the tops of the highest skyscrapers blazed with reflected sunlight, and all the buildings glowed. Skyscraper island: it was the classic Manhattan look, unlikely and superb.

“How are things with you?” Swan asked.

“I like this river,” Zasha said, as if it were a reply. “I motor up to the top of the island, or even to the Palisades, and then just float on down. Throw a line over. Hook the most amazing stuff sometimes.”

“And at Mercury House?”

Zasha frowned. “Spacers are getting blamed for a lot these days. The people down here are resentful. The more we help, the more resentful they get. However, their capital funds keep on investing in us.”

“As always,” Swan said.

“Yes, well, perpetual growth. But nothing lasts forever. The solar system is just as finite as Earth.”

“Do you think it’s filling up? Hitting carrying capacity?”

“More like investment return peak. But people may be feeling pinched by it. Anyway, they’re acting like they’re pinched.”

Zasha’s boat drifted in the ebb tide until it passed the Battery, and the view to the Brooklyn shore opened up. The skyscrapers at the foot of Manhattan looked like a cluster of giant swimmers, gathered knee-deep to charge into cold water. Between buildings the water sheeted like glass, and the canals were filled with little boats; the harbor bay too, although not as densely. At any given moment hundreds of watercraft were visible. They could see up both rivers, the Hudson and the East, and between those ran the smaller, straighter rivers of the streets, all under a cloudy sky. A Canaletto vision. Cloud reflections whitened the bay’s watery sheen. It was so beautiful that Swan felt like she had been cast into a dream, and she reeled a little with the boat’s rocking.

“Feeling the g?” Zasha asked.

“I am kind of.”

“Want to spend the night at my place? I’m getting kind of hungry.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Zasha piloted the boat west across the river to a channel on the Jersey side that led west. It was hard to tell if it was a canal or a creek. Inland the waterway opened up to the north, and Zasha turned up that way and docked at a wooden pier sticking into what looked like a shallow lake. Whole neighborhoods sloped right down into water. The east side of North America had always been a drowned coastline, but now more than ever.

A walk up a rise under a violent sunset sky, which was tastelessly mashing orange and pink together. At times like these it was the eastern sky that really put on a show, subtler but more glorious. But no one looked that way.

Zasha’s place was a tiny squat next to a line of trees, as handmade and run-down as any favela or shantytown Swan had ever seen.

“What is this place?”

“Part of the Meadowlands.”

“And you’re free to make your own home here?”

“As if! Actually my rent is stupendous, but Mercury House gives me a little supplement to keep me out here away from them.”

“Hard to believe.”

“Anyway, it’s fine. I like my commute.”

Swan sat gratefully in a beat-up armchair and watched her old partner putter about in the gloom. It had been a long time since they had banged around the solar system, building terraria and raising Zephyr; it had even been a long time since Zephyr had died. And they had never gotten along very well, separating soon after Zephyr went off. Still, Swan recognized the way Zasha hovered over the stove, waiting for the teapot to boil, harboring a secretive knowing look she also recognized.

She said, “So did you work with Alex?”

“Well, sure,” Zasha replied, glancing at her briefly. “She was my boss. So you know how that goes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she loved you and took care of you, and you did exactly what she wanted you to.”

Swan had to laugh. “Well, yes.” She thought it over, ignoring the pain. “Somehow she conformed herself to what you needed. Helped you to get what you needed.”

“Uh-huh. I know what you mean.”

“But listen—now she’s gone, and she left me a message. Basically she used me as a courier to Wang, on Io, and also dumped something into Pauline. It was all in case something happened to her, she said.”

“What do you mean?”

Swan described the visitation from Alex’s ghost—the envelopes—her trip out to Jupiter, and the interloper on Io.

Zasha said, “I heard about that. I didn’t know you were there,” frowning at the teapot, face blue in the stove top glow.

“What were you and Alex working on?” Swan asked. “And why didn’t she tell me about it in this message she left? She—it’s like I was just a courier for her, and Pauline some kind of safe-deposit box.”

Zasha didn’t reply.

“Come on, tell me,” Swan said. “You can tell me. I can take it from you. I’m used to you telling me how bad I am.”

Zasha expelled a breath, poured two cups of tea. Steam in gloom, catching light from somewhere. Z handed her one, then sat down on a kitchen chair across from her. Swan warmed her hands on her cup.

“There’s stuff I can’t talk about—”

“Oh come on!”

“—and stuff I can. She got me involved in a group that is hunting down some odd qubes. That’s been interesting. But it was something she wanted kept confidential, along with some other things she had going. So, maybe she thought that you aren’t very good at keeping things confidential.”

“Why would she think that?”

But even Zasha knew of three or four examples of Swan’s being indiscreet, and Swan herself knew of several more.

“Those were accidents,” Swan finally added. “And not very big accidents either.”

Zasha sipped the tea cautiously. “Well, but maybe they seemed to be becoming more frequent. You are not the same person you used to be, you have to admit. You’ve stuffed your brain with augmentations—”

“I have not!”

“Well, four or five. I didn’t like it right from the beginning. When you grow the religious part of the temporal lobe, you can turn into a very different person, not to mention risking epilepsy. And that was only the start. Now you’ve got the animal stuff in there, you’ve got Pauline in there, recording everything you see—it is not insignificant. It can do damage. You end up being some kind of post-human thing. Or at least a different person.”

“Oh come on, Z. I’m the same as I always was. And everything you do can damage you! You can’t let that stop you. Every thing I’ve done to myself I consider part of being a human being. I mean, who wouldn’t do it if they could? I would be ashamed not to! It isn’t being post human, it’s being fully human. It would be stupid not to do the good things when you can, it would be antihuman.”

“Well,” Zasha said, “you did those things and you immediately stopped designing terraria.”

“I was done! We were past the design phase anyway; they were just going to build more of the same. And a lot of what we did was stupid anyway. We shouldn’t have been making Ascensions at that point, we needed to get the traditional biomes past the extinction. We still need that! I don’t know what we were thinking, frankly.”

Zasha was surprised at this. “I like the Ascensions. They help genetic dispersion.”

“Too much so. Anyway that’s not the point. The point is I wanted to try different things, and I did.”

“You became an artist.”

“I was always an artist. I just changed media. And hardly even that. Just a focusing in. It was what I wanted. Come on, Zasha. I’m just living a human life. You refuse these opportunities, that doesn’t make you more human, it just makes you regressive. I don’t go anywhere near as far as some people. I don’t have a third eye and I don’t break my ribs when I have an orgasm. I just…”

“Just what?”

“I don’t know. Try things that sound good.”

“And have they all worked out for you?”

Swan sat there in the gloom, somewhere in New Jersey. Outside was the open air of Earth. “No.” Long pause. “In fact I’ve done worse things than what you know about, if you want to know the truth.”

Zasha stared at her. “I’m not sure I do.”

“Ha-ha. And Alex knew about it too, now that I think of it, because I told Mqaret about it.”

“He wouldn’t automatically tell her.”

“I didn’t ask him not to.”

“Well,” Zasha said. “So maybe she knew. Something worse than animal brains? Something worse than a qube in your skull? Never mind, I don’t want to know. But maybe Alex did, and maybe she had stuff that she…”

“That she didn’t trust me with.”

“That she needed to keep to herself. And here you are, kind of a mess.”

“I am not a mess!” Though her rib did hurt, squeezed by her indignation. And she was full of grief for Alex—and now a little angry at her too.

“Seems like you’re saying you are messed up,” Z observed. “You’ve had five or six or seven brain tweaks over the years, a qube in your head—in fact, whatever was fashionable at the time.”

“Yeah yeah.”

“Well think about it!”

Swan put her teacup on the table. “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”

“Good. Don’t get lost. I’ll cook up something while you’re out, say about forty-five minutes.”

Swan left the hut.

Outside the door she took her slippers off and stuffed them into her pocket, dug her toes into the dirt and wriggled them around. Leaned over from the waist like a dancer and dug her fingers in, put hands to face and breathed. Dirt, the ultimate ambrosia. Tasted like muddy mushrooms.

It was after sunset. There was an asphalt road running next to a marsh, green and yellow, the wind bouncing the reeds out there. She walked on the dirt by the side of the road and looked at the marsh and the sky. On the other side of the road some old buildings were nestled under a stand of trees. Rows of old apartment blocks beyond. Croak of frog. She sat on the edge of the marsh and saw the black dots half in and half out of the water under her. A chorus of frogs, croaking. She listened for a while, watching the marsh in the wind, and heard suddenly that they were performing a call-and-response. If one frog said “ribbit,” then all the others would repeat it for a while, up and down the road for as far as she could hear, until in a momentary pause one croaked “robot,” and they would all repeat that for a while. Then it changed to “limit,” and off the others went, as if speaking to her like some Greek chorus, transmogrified to frogs. So many limits! So many robots. The lump nearest her contributed only once in a while, puffing under his chin briefly, then croaking. Otherwise it was perfectly still, except for a little shift of the eyeballs she could see in the dusk, a liquid blink, always alert. “Romper!” it croaked in a pause, and Swan exclaimed, “Good for you!” and said it with them for a while.

October on the northern hemisphere of Earth, so glossy and full. All her body-planet interfaces humming. Suddenly life in space seemed a stark nightmare, an exile to the vacuum, everyone locked in sensory-deprivation tanks, separate, virtual, augmented. Here the real was real.

“Robber!”

“Robber robber robber robber…”

The moment itself, robbed from them as it happened. Here she was, passing through a space. Flit of the now. Dusk in a marsh in a transient universe, so strange, so mysterious. Why should anything be like this? The wind was cool, the clouds had a little twilight left in them. Looked like rain. The leaves of the thorny vine on the ground were as red as maple leaves. The marsh was like a person out there breathing. Crows flew over cawing, headed into the town and its heat islands. Swan knew a little of the crow language; they would say to each other, “Caw, caw, caw,” as now, just chatting, and then one would shout a word out so clearly that it had become an English word—“Hawk!”—and they would scatter. Of course the word crow also came from their language. In Sanskrit they had it as kaaga. Imported words from another language.

There were some people, standing by the buildings next to the trees. They were small somehow. Weighted down. Could this be so close to the great city? Was it indeed part of the city, part of what made it work, not just the wetlands but the legions of poor marginal people, living in the half-drowned ruins? The weight of the planet began to drag her down. Those people over there were like figures out of Brueghel, people from the sixteenth century, bowed down with time. Maybe these were the people living a real life, and what she did in space nothing more than the dilettantism of a gaga aristos. Maybe what she really needed to do was to live here and build things, maybe houses, little but functional, a different kind of goldsworthy. Under the sky, in the full light of the sun—the utter luxury of the real. The only real world. Earth, heaven and hell both—natural heaven, human hell. How could they have done such a thing, how could they have not tried harder?

Maybe they had. Maybe the trying included the flight to space, as some kind of desperate hope. Cast from Earth as if in a seed pod, out to where one was sure to freeze and rot and turn back into soil. This dirt by the side of the road. She lay on it, avoiding the thorny vine; squirmed around as if to burrow into it. A spacer fucking the dirt—they must see that all the time, not be impressed anymore. Those poor lost people, they must think. Because there was nothing like this in space, not really—not the wind and the big sky over her, almost night now, with moisture that was not yet cloud—Oh how could they have left! Space was a vacuum, a nothingness. They had inhabited it only by deploying little rooms, little bubbles; the city and the stars, sure, but it wasn’t enough! There needed to be a world in between! This was what city people forgot. And indeed off in space they had better forget, or they would go mad. Here one could remember and yet not go mad—not exactly.

But how sad it was. Grubby, tawdry, beaten down. Pitiful. Sad to distraction, to a stabbing despair. That they had let it come to this. That she had done what she had done to herself. Even Zasha thought she had gone too far, and Z was a very tolerant person. Would have stayed with her, maybe, if she hadn’t gone off. And now she was no longer the person Zasha had parented a child with, she could feel that, even though she didn’t know exactly what had changed. Unless it was the Enceladan bugs in her… In any case a strange person. A person for whom the only place that made her truly happy also made her deeply sad. How was she to reconcile this, what did it mean?

She sat up. Sat there on the dirt, feeling it lumpy under her.

She saw a motion from the corner of her eye and tried to leap to her feet, misjudged the g and crashed back down. She peered into the gloom:

A face. Two faces: mother and daughter. Here it was such a clear thing; it looked like parthenogenesis. Moonlight just now breaking over the skyglow of the city.

The younger stepped toward Swan. Said something in a language Swan didn’t recognize.

“What is it?” Swan said. “Don’t you speak English?”

The woman shook her head, said something more. She looked around her, called quietly behind her.

Two more figures appeared next to her, taller than her and broader. Two young men. They leaned over and muttered to the daughter.

“You have antibiotics?” one of them said. “My coz is sick.”

“No,” Swan said, “I don’t carry those on me.” Although possibly her belt had something, she wasn’t even sure.

They took a step closer. “Who are you?” one said. “What are you?”

“I’m visiting friends,” Swan said. “I can call them.”

The young men approached her, shaking their heads. “You’re a spacer,” the first speaker said, and the other added, “What you doing here?”

“I have to go,” Swan said, and started for the road—but the two of them grabbed her by the arms. Their grips were so strong that she didn’t even try to jerk free. “Hey!” she said sharply.

The first speaker called out toward the dark behind the two women: “Kiran! Kiran!”

Soon another figure appeared out of the dark—another young man, the tallest yet, but willowy. The two holding Swan had grips that felt to her like something they had done before.

The new young man was startled at the sight of Swan and said something sharp to the two holding her, in a language she didn’t recognize. A quick urgent conversation passed between them; this Kiran was not pleased.

Finally he looked at Swan. “They want to keep you for money. Give me a second here.”

More urgent talk in their tongue. Kiran appeared to be making them nervous or defensive; then he approached and took Swan by the upper arm, squeezing once as if to send a message, and gestured the others away with a flick of his head. He was telling them what to do. The other two finally nodded, and the one who had spoken first said to her, “Back soon.” Then the first two slipped away into the night.

Swan looked Kiran in the eye, and he grimaced and let go of her arm. “Those are my cousins,” he said. “They had a bad idea.”

“A stupid idea,” Swan said. “They could have just asked me for help. So what did you tell them?”

“That I would keep you here while they got their mother’s car. So now I think you should get out of here.”

“Come walk me back,” Swan said. “I want you along, in case they come back.”

His eyebrows shot up his forehead, and he regarded her closely. After a while he said, “All right.”

They walked quickly on the road. “Will you get in trouble for this?” Swan asked at one point.

“Yes,” he said gloomily.

“What will they do?”

“They’ll try to beat on me. And tell the old guys.”

Her arms were still burning where they had been gripped, and her cheeks were hot. She regarded the gloomy youth walking next to her. He looked good. And he had without a moment’s hesitation removed her from a bad situation. She recalled how sharp his voice had been when he’d spoken to his cousins. “Do you want to leave?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want to go into space?”

After a pause he said, “Can you do that?”

“Yes,” she said.

They stopped outside Zasha’s, and Swan looked him over. She liked the look of him. He looked at her with an expression curious, wondering—eager. She felt a shiver run down her.

“My friend who lives here is a diplomat for Mercury. So… come in if you want. We can get you up there if you want,” she said, looking skyward briefly.

He hesitated. “You won’t… get me in trouble?”

“I will get you in trouble. Trouble in space.”

She started toward Zasha’s, and after a moment, he followed her. She opened the door. “Zasha?” she said.

“Just a sec,” Zasha called out of the kitchen.

The boy was staring at her, clearly wondering if she was on the level.

Swan said, “They called you Kiran?”

“Yes, Kiran.”

“What language were you speaking?”

“Telugu. South India.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We live here now.”

So he was already an exile. And there were all kinds of immigrant residency requirements on Earth; possibly he was not in compliance.

Zasha appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, washcloth in hand. “Uh-oh. Who’s this?”

“This is Kiran. His friends were kidnapping me, and he helped me to escape. In return I told him I would get him off Earth.”

“But no!”

“But yes. So… here we are. And I need to keep my word.”

Zasha looked at Swan skeptically. “What is this, Stockholm syndrome already?” Z glanced at the youth, whose gaze was fixed on Swan. “Or Lima syndrome?”

“What are those?” Kiran said without shifting his gaze.

Zasha made a little grimace. “Stockholm syndrome is where hostages become sympathetic to their captors and advocate for them. Lima syndrome is where the kidnappers become fond of their victims and let them go.”

“Isn’t there a Ransom of Red Chief syndrome?” Swan said sharply. “Come on, Z. I told you, he rescued me. What syndrome is that? I want to repay a favor, and I need your help. Quit trying to take over the situation like you always do.”

Zasha turned away with an annoyed look; thought it over; shrugged. “We can get him off if you really want it. I’ll have to do it through a friend who helps me with this kind of thing. He’s at the Trinidad-Tobago elevator, it’s a hawala. We have a kind of pass-through agreement, although after this I’ll owe him. Meaning you’ll owe me.”

“I always owe you. How will we get to Trinidad?”

“Diplomatic pouch.”

“What?”

“Private jet. We’ll have to get a worm box too.”

“A what?”

“We have a system. It’s always supposed to be a box of soil or worms, and there’s an understanding that it doesn’t get inspected.”

“Worms?” Kiran said.

“That’s right,” Zasha told him with a grim little smile. “I’m going to get you off-planet, because of Ms. Stockholm here, but given the circumstances, we have to do it off the record. That takes using the systems we have. So you might have to go up in a big box of worms, all right? Are you going to be okay with that?”

“No problem,” said Kiran.