Last Plane to Heaven

The Starship Mechanic ^{WITH KEN SCHOLES}

The floor of Borderlands Books had been polished to mirror brightness. A nice trick with old knotty pine, but Penauch would have been a weapons-grade obsessive-compulsive if he’d been human. I’d thought about setting him to detailing my car, but he’s just as likely to polish it down to aluminum and steel after deciding the paint was an impurity.

When he discovered that the human race recorded our ideas in books, he’d been impossible to keep away from the store. Penauch didn’t actually read them, not as such, and he was most reluctant to touch the volumes. He seemed to view books as vehicles, launch capsules to propel ideas from the dreaming mind of the human race into our collective forebrain.

Despite the fact that Penauch was singular, unitary, a solitary alien in the human world, he apparently didn’t conceive of us as anything but a collective entity. The xenoanthropologists at Berkeley were carving PhDs out of that particular clay as fast as their grad students could transcribe Penauch’s conversations with me.

He’d arrived the same as David Bowie in that old movie. No, not Brother from Another Planet; The Man Who Fell to Earth. Tumbled out of the autumn sky over the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco like a maple seed, spinning with his arms stretched wide and his mouth open in a teakettle shriek audible from the Ghost Fleet in Suisun Bay all the way down to the grubby streets of San Jose.

It was easier, keeping Penauch in the bookstore. The owners didn’t mind. They’d had hairless cats around the place for years—a breed called sphinxes. The odd animals served as a neighborhood tourist attraction and business draw. A seven-foot alien with a face like a plate of spaghetti and a cluster of writhing arms wasn’t all that different. Not in a science-fiction bookstore, at least.

Thing is, when Penauch was out in the world, he had a tendency to fix things.

This fixing often turned out to be not so good.

No technology was involved. Penauch’s body was demonstrably able to modify the chitinous excrescences of his appendages at will. If he needed a cutting edge, he ate a bit of whatever steel was handy and swiftly metabolized it. If he needed electrical conductors, he sought out copper plumbing. If he needed logic probes, he consumed sand or diamonds or glass.

It was all the same to Penauch.

As best any of us could figure out, Penauch was a sort of tool. A Swiss army knife that some spacefaring race had dropped or thrown away, abandoned until he came to rest on Earth’s alien shore.

And Penauch only spoke to me.

The first time he fixed something was right after he’d landed. Penauch impacted with that piercing shriek at 2:53 P.M. Pacific daylight time on Saturday, July 16, 2011, at the intersection of Cole and Parnassus. Every window within six blocks shattered. Almost a hundred pedestrians and shoppers in the immediate area were treated for lacerations from broken glass, over two dozen more for damage to hearing and sinuses.

I got to him first, after stumbling out of Cole Hardware with a headache like a cartoon anvil had been dropped on me. Inside, we figured a bomb had gone off. The rising noise and the vibrating windows. All the vases in the homeware section had exploded. Luckily I’d been with the fasteners. The nails sang, but they didn’t leap off the shelves and try to make hamburger of me.

Outside, there was this guy lying in a crater in the middle of the intersection, like Wile E. Coyote after he’d run out of Acme-patented jet fuel. I hurried over, touched his shoulder, and realized what a goddamned mess he was. Then half a dozen eyes opened, and something like a giant rigatoni farted before saying, “Penauch.”

Weird thing was, I could hear the spelling.

Though I didn’t know it in that moment, my old life was over, my new one begun.

Penauch then looked at my shattered wristwatch, grabbed a handful of BMW windshield glass, sucked it down, and moments later fixed my timepiece.

For some value of “fixed.”

It still tells time, somewhere with a base seventeen counting system and twenty-eight-point-one-five-seven-hour day. It shows me the phases of Phobos and Deimos, evidence that he’d been on (or near) Mars. Took a while to figure that one out. And the thing that warbles whenever someone gets near me carrying more than about eight ounces of petroleum products. Including grocery bags, for example, and most plastics.

I could probably get millions for it on eBay. Penauch’s first artifact, and one of less than a dozen in private hands.

The government owns him now, inasmuch as anyone owns Penauch. They can’t keep him anywhere. He “fixes” his way out of any place he gets locked into. He comes back to San Francisco, finds me, and we go to the bookstore. Where Penauch polishes the floors and chases the hairless cats and draws pilgrims from all over the world to pray in Valencia Street. The city gave up on traffic control a long time ago. It’s a pedestrian mall now when he’s around.

The problem has always been, none of us have any idea what Penauch is. What he does. What he’s for. I’m the only one he talks to, and most of what he says is Alice in Wonderland dialogue, except when it isn’t. Two new semiconductor companies have been started through analysis of his babble, and an entire novel chemical feedstock process for converting biomass into plastics.

Then one day, down on the mirrored floor of Borderlands Books, Penauch looked at me and said quite clearly, “They’re coming back.”

I was afraid we were about to get our answers.

“I must leave,” Penauch said, his voice heavy as he stroked a hairless cat on the freshly polished floor of the bookstore.

On a small TV in the back office of the store, an excited reporter in Milk Plaza spoke rapidly about the strange visitors who’d fallen from the sky. Hundreds of men named Todd, now scattered out into the city with one word on their tongues. As the news played in the background, I watched Penauch and could feel the sadness coming off of him in waves. “Where will you go?”

Penauch stood. “I don’t know. Anywhere but here. Will you help me?”

The bell on the door jingled and a man entered the store. “Penauch,” he said.

I looked up at the visitor. His Hawaiian shirt was an orange that hurt my eyes, decorated in something that looked like cascading pineapples. He smiled and scowled at the same time.

Penauch moved quickly and suddenly the room smelled of ozone and cabbage.

The man, named Todd I assumed, was gone.

I looked at my alien, took in the slow wriggle of his pale and determined face. “What did you do?”

Penauch’s clustered silver eyes leaked mercury tears. “I… un-fixed him.”

We ran out the back. We climbed into my car over on Guerrero. We drove north and away.

Turning east and then north, we stayed ahead of them for most of a week. We made it as far as Edmonton before the man-rain caught up to us.

While Penauch slept, I grabbed snacks of news from the radio. These so-called Todds spread out in their search, my friend’s name the only word upon their lips. They made no effort to resist the authorities. Three were shot by members of the Washington State Patrol. Two were killed by Navy SEALs in the small town of St. Maries, Idaho. They stole cars. They drove fast. They followed after us.

And then they found us in Edmonton.

We were at an A&W drive-through window when the first Todd caught up to the car. He T-boned us into the side of the restaurant with his Mercedes, pushing Penauch against me. The Todd was careful not to get within reach.

“Penauch,” he shouted from outside the window. My friend whimpered. Our car groaned and ground as his hands moved over the dashboard, trying to fix it.

Two other cars hemmed us in, behind and before. Todds in Hawaiian shirts and khaki shorts stepped out, unfazed by the cold. One climbed onto the hood of my Corvair. “Your services are still required.”

Penauch whimpered again. I noticed that the Todd’s breath did not show in the subzero air.

The air shimmered as a bending light enfolded us.

I awoke in a dark place choking for air, my chest weighted with fluid. Penauch’s hand settled upon my shoulder. The heaviness leapt from me.

“Where am I?”

I heard a sound not unlike something heavy rolling in mud. It was a thick, wet noise and words formed alongside it in my mind. You are in—crackle hiss warble—medical containment pod of the Starship—but the name of the vessel was incomprehensible to me. Exposure to our malfunctioning—hiss crackle warble—mechanic has infected you with trace elements of—here another word I could not understand—viruses.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

Penauch’s voice was low. “You’re not meant to. But once I’ve fixed you, you will be returned to the store.”

I looked at him. “What about you?”

He shook his head, the rigatoni of his face slapping itself gently. “My services are required here. I am now operating within my design parameters.”

I opened my mouth to ask another question but then the light returned and I was falling. Beside me, Penauch fell, too, and he held my hand tightly. “Do not let go,” he said as we impacted.

This time we made no crater as we landed. We stood and I brushed myself off. “I have no idea what any of this means.”

“It won’t matter,” Penauch told me. “But say good-bye to the cats for me.”

“I will,” I promised.

“I liked your planet. Now that the—” Again, the incomprehensible ship’s name slid entirely over my brain. “—is operational once more, I suppose we’ll find others.” He sighed. “I hope I malfunction again soon.” He stretched out a hand and fixed me a final time.

I blinked at him and somehow, mid-blink, I stood in the center of Valencia Street.

I walked into Borderlands Books, still wondering exactly how I was wandering the streets of San Francisco in an orange Hawaiian shirt and a pair of khaki shorts three sizes too large.

A pretty girl smiled at me from behind the counter. “Hi, Bill,” she said. “Where’ve you been?”

I shrugged.

A hairless cat ran in front of me, feet scampering over floors that were badly in need of a polish.

“Good-bye,” I told it, but didn’t know why.

Permanent Fatal Errors

Maduabuchi St. Macaria had never before traveled with an all-Howard crew. Mostly his kind kept to themselves, even under the empty skies of a planet. Those who did take ship almost always did so in a mixed or all-baseline human crew.

Not here, not aboard the threadneedle starship Inclined Plane. Seven crew including him, captained by a very strange woman who called herself Peridot Smith. All Howard Institute immortals. A new concept in long-range exploration, multidecade interstellar missions with ageless crew, testbedded in orbit around the brown dwarf Tiede 1. That’s what the newsfeeds said, anyway.

His experience was far more akin to a violent soap opera. Howards really weren’t meant to be bottled up together. It wasn’t in the design templates. Socially well-adjusted people didn’t generally self-select to outlive everyone they’d ever known.

Even so, Maduabuchi was impressed by the welcome distraction of Tiede 1. Everyone else was too busy cleaning their weapons and hacking the internal comms and cams to pay attention to their mission objective. Not him.

Inclined Plane boasted an observation lounge. The hatch was coded “Observatory,” but everything of scientific significance actually happened within the instrumentation woven into the ship’s hull and the diaphanous energy fields stretching for kilometers beyond. The lounge was a folly of naval architecture, a translucent bubble fitted to the hull, consisting of roughly a third of a sphere of optically corrected artificial diamond grown to nanometer symmetry and smoothness in microgravity. Chances were good that in a catastrophe the rest of the ship would be shredded before the bubble would so much as be scratched.

There had been long, heated arguments in the galley, with math and footnotes and thumb breaking, over that exact question.

Maduabuchi liked to sit in the smartgel bodpods and let the ship perform a three-sixty massage while he watched the universe. The rest of the crew were like cats in a sack, too busy stalking the passageways and each other to care what might be outside the window. Here in the lounge one could see creation, witness the birth of stars, observe the death of planets, or listen to the quiet, empty cold of hard vacuum. The silence held a glorious music that echoed inside his head.

Maduabuchi wasn’t a complete idiot—he’d rigged his own cabin with self-powered screamer circuits and an ultrahigh-voltage capacitor. That ought to slow down anyone with delusions of traps.

Tiede 1 loomed outside. It seemed to shimmer as he watched, as if a starquake were propagating. The little star belied the ancient label of “brown dwarf.” Stepped down by filtering nano coating the diamond bubble, the surface glowed a dull reddish orange; a coal left too long in a campfire, or a jewel in the velvet setting of night. Only 300,000 kilometers in diameter, and about 5 percent of a solar mass, it fell in that class of objects ambiguously distributed between planets and stars.

It could be anything, he thought. Anything.

A speck of green tugged at Maduabuchi’s eye, straight from the heart of the star.

Green? There were no green emitters in nature.

“Amplification,” he whispered. The nano filters living on the outside of the diamond shell obligingly began to self-assemble a lens. He controlled the aiming and focus with eye movements, trying to find whatever it was he had seen. Another ship? Reflection from a piece of rock or debris?

Excitement chilled Maduabuchi despite his best intentions to remain calm. What if this were evidence of the long-rumored but never-located alien civilizations that should have abounded in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way?

He scanned for twenty minutes, quartering Tiede 1’s face as minutely as he could without direct access to the instrumentation and sensors carried by Inclined Plane. The ship’s AI was friendly and helpful, but outside its narrow and critical competencies in managing the threadneedle drive and localspace navigation, no more intelligent than your average dog, and so essentially useless for such work. He’d need to go to the Survey Suite to do more.

Maduabuchi finally stopped staring at the star and called up a deck schematic. “Ship, plot all weapons discharges or unscheduled energy expenditures within the pressurized cubage.”

The schematic winked twice, but nothing was highlighted. Maybe Captain Smith had finally gotten them all to stand down. None of Maduabuchi’s screamers had gone off, either, though everyone else had long since realized he didn’t play their games.

Trusting that no one had hacked the entire tracking system, he cycled the lock and stepped into the passageway beyond. Glancing back at Tiede 1 as the lock irised shut, Maduabuchi saw another green flash.

He fought back a surge of irritation. The star was not mocking him.

Peridot Smith was in the Survey Suite when Maduabuchi cycled the lock there. Radiation-tanned from some melanin-deficient base hue of skin; lean, with her hair follicles removed and her scalp tattooed in an intricate mandala using magnetically sensitive ink; the captain was an arresting sight at any time. At the moment, she was glaring at him, her eyes flashing a strange, flat silver indicating serious tech integrated into the tissues. “Mr. St. Macaria.” She gave him a terse nod. “How are the weapons systems?”

Ironically, of all the bloody-minded engineers and analysts and navigators aboard, he was the weapons officer.

“Capped and sealed per orders, ma’am,” he replied. “Test circuits warm and green.” Inclined Plane carried a modest mix of hardware, generalized for unknown threats rather than optimized for antipiracy or planetary blockade duty, for example. Missiles, field projectors, electron strippers, flechettes, even foggers and a sandcaster. Most of which he had no real idea about. They were icons in the control systems, each maintained by its own little armies of nanobots and workbots. All he had were status lights and strat-tac displays. Decisions were made by specialized subsystems.

It was the rankest makework, but Maduabuchi didn’t mind. He’d volunteered for the Howard Institute program because of the most basic human motivation—tourism. Seeing what was over the next hill had trumped even sex as the driving force in human evolution. He was happy to be a walking, talking selection mechanism.

Everything else, including this tour of duty, was just something to do while the years slid past.

“What did you need, Mr. St. Macaria?”

“I was going to take a closer look at Tiede 1, ma’am.”

“That is what we’re here for.”

He looked for humor in her dry voice, and did not find it. “Ma’am, yes ma’am. I… I just think I saw something.”

“Oh, really?” Her eyes flashed, reminding Maduabuchi uncomfortably of blades.

Embarrassed, he turned back to the passageway.

“What did you see?” she asked from behind him. Now her voice was edged as well.

“Nothing, ma’am. Nothing at all.”

Back in the passageway, Maduabuchi fled toward his cabin. Several of the crew laughed from sickbay, their voices rising over the whine of the bone-knitter. Someone had gone down hard.

Not him. Not even at the hands—or eyes—of Captain Smith.

An hour later, after checking the locations of the crew again with the ship’s AI, he ventured back to the Survey Suite. Chillicothe Xiang nodded to him in the passageway, almost friendly, as she headed aft for a half shift monitoring the power plants in Engineering.

“Hey,” Maduabuchi said in return. She didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to notice he’d spoken. All these years, all the surgeries and nano injections and training, and somehow he was still the odd kid out on the playground.

Being a Howard Immortal was supposed to be different. And it was, when he wasn’t around other Howard Immortals.

The Survey Suite was empty, as advertised. Ultra-def screens wrapped the walls, along with a variety of control inputs, from classical keypads to haptics and gestural zones. Maduabuchi slipped into the observer’s seat and swept his hand to open the primary sensor routines.

Captain Smith had left her last data run parked in the core sandbox.

His fingers hovered over the purge, then pulled back. What had she been looking at that had made her so interested in what he’d seen? Those eyes flashed edged and dangerous in his memory. He almost asked the ship where she was, but a question like that would be reported, drawing more attention than it was worth.

Maduabuchi closed his eyes for a moment, screwing up his courage, and opened the data run.

It cascaded across the screens, as well as virtual presentations in the aerosolized atmosphere of the Survey Suite. Much more than he’d seen when he was in here before—plots, scales, arrays, imaging across the EM spectrum, color-coded tabs and fields and stacks and matrices. Even his Howard-enhanced senses had trouble keeping up with the flood. Captain Smith was far older and more experienced than Maduabuchi, over half a dozen centuries to his few decades, and she had developed both the mental habits and the individualized mentarium to handle such inputs.

On the other hand, he was a much newer model. Everyone upgraded, but the Howard Institute baseline tech evolved over generations just like everything else in human culture. Maduabuchi bent to his work, absorbing the overwhelming bandwidth of her scans of Tiede 1, and trying to sort out what it was that had been the true object of her attention.

Something had to be hidden in plain sight here.

He worked an entire half shift without being disturbed, sifting petabytes of data, until the truth hit him. The color coding of one spectral analysis matrix was nearly identical to the green flash he thought he’d seen on the surface of Tiede 1.

All the data was a distraction. Her real work had been hidden in the metadata, passing for nothing more than a sorting signifier.

Once Maduabuchi realized that, he unpacked the labeling on the spectral analysis matrix, and opened up an entirely new data environment. Green, it was all about the green.

“I was wondering how long that would take you,” said Captain Smith from the opening hatch.

Maduabuchi jumped in his chair, opened his mouth to make some denial, then closed it again. Her eyes didn’t look razored this time, and her voice held a tense amusement.

He fell back on that neglected standby, the truth. “Interesting color you have here, ma’am.”

“I thought so.” Smith stepped inside, cycled the lock shut, then code-locked it with a series of beeps that meant her command override was engaged. “Ship,” she said absently, “sensory blackout on this area.”

“Acknowledged, Captain,” said the ship’s puppy-friendly voice.

“What do you think it means, Mr. St. Macaria?”

“Stars don’t shine green. Not to the human eye. The blackbody radiation curve just doesn’t work that way.” He added, “Ma’am.”

“Thank you for defining the problem.” Her voice was dust dry again.

Maduabuchi winced. He’d given himself away, as simply as that. But clearly she already knew about the green flashes. “I don’t think that’s the problem, ma’am.”

“Mmm?”

“If it was, we’d all be lining up like good kids to have a look at the optically impossible brown dwarf.”

“Fair enough. Then what is the problem, Mr. St. Macaria?”

He drew a deep breath and chose his next words with care. Peridot Smith was old, old in a way he’d never be, even with her years behind him someday. “I don’t know what the problem is, ma’am, but if it’s a problem to you, it’s a command issue. Politics. And light doesn’t have politics.”

Much to his surprise, she laughed. “You’d be amazed. But yes. Again, well done.”

She hadn’t said that before, but he took the compliment. “What kind of command problem, ma’am?”

Captain Smith sucked in a long, noisy breath and eyed him speculatively. A sharp gaze, to be certain. “Someone on this ship is on their own mission. We were jiggered into coming to Tiede 1 to provide cover, and I don’t know what for.”

“Not me!” Maduabuchi blurted.

“I know that.”

The dismissal in her words stung for a moment, but on the while, he realized he’d rather not be a suspect in this particular witch hunt.

His feelings must have shown in his face, because she smiled and added, “You haven’t been around long enough to get sucked into the Howard factions. And you have a rep for being indifferent to the seductive charms of power.”

“Uh, yes.” Maduabuchi wasn’t certain what to say to that.

“Why do you think you’re here?” She leaned close, her breath hot on his face. “I needed someone who would reliably not be conspiring against me.”

“A useful idiot,” he said. “But there’s only seven of us. How many could be conspiring? And over a green light?”

“It’s Tiede 1,” Captain Smith answered. “Someone is here gathering signals. I don’t know what for. Or who. Because it could be any of the rest of the crew. Or all of them.”

“But this is politics, not mutiny. Right…?”

“Right.” She brushed off the concern. “We’re not getting hijacked out here. And if someone tries, I am the meanest fighter on this ship by a wide margin. I can take any three of this crew apart.”

“Any five of us, though?” he asked softly.

“That’s another use for you.”

“I don’t fight.”

“No, but you’re a Howard. You’re hard enough to kill that you can take it at my back long enough to keep me alive.”

“Uh, thanks,” Maduabuchi said, very uncertain now.

“You’re welcome.” Her eyes strayed to the data arrays floating across the screens and in the virtual presentations. “The questions are who, what, and why.”

“Have you compared the observational data to known stellar norms?” he asked.

“Green flashes aren’t a known stellar norm.”

“No, but we don’t know what the green flashes are normal for, either. If we compare Tiede 1 to other brown dwarfs, we might spot further anomalies. Then we triangulate.”

“And that is why I brought you.” Captain Smith’s tone was very satisfied indeed. “I’ll leave you to your work.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” To his surprise, Maduabuchi realized he meant it.

He spent the next half shift combing through comparative astronomy. At this point, almost a thousand years into the human experience of interstellar travel, there was an embarrassing wealth of data. So much so that even petabyte q-bit storage matrices were overrun, as eventually the challenges of indexing and retrieval went metastatic. Still, one thing Howards were very good at was data processing. Nothing ever built could truly match the pattern-recognition and free associative skills of human (or post-human) wetware collectively known as “hunches.” Strong AIs could approximate that uniquely biological skill through a combination of brute force and deeply clever circuit design, but even then, the spark of inspiration did not flow so well.

Maduabuchi slipped into his flow state to comb through more data in a few hours than a baseline human could absorb in a year. Brown dwarfs, superjovians, fusion cycles, failed stars, hydrogen, helium, lithium, surface temperatures, density, gravity gradients, emission spectrum lines, astrographic surveys, theories dating back to the dawn of observational astronomy, digital images in two and three dimensions as well as time-lensed.

When he emerged, driven by the physiological mundanities of bladder and blood sugar, Maduabuchi knew something was wrong. He knew it. Captain Smith had been right about her mission, about there being something off in their voyage to Tiede 1.

But she didn’t know what it was she was right about. He didn’t either.

Still, the thought niggled somewhere deep in his mind. Not the green flash per se, though that, too. Something more about Tiede 1.

Or less.

“And what the hell did that mean?” he asked the swarming motes of data surrounding him on the virtual displays, now reduced to confetti as he left his informational fugue.

Maduabuchi stumbled out of the Survey Suite to find the head, the galley, and Captain Peridot Smith, in that order.

The corridor was filled with smoke, though no alarms wailed. He almost ducked back into the Survey Suite, but instead dashed for one of the emergency stations found every ten meters or so and grabbed an oxygen mask. Then he hit the panic button.

That produced a satisfying wail, along with lights strobing at four distinct frequencies. Something was wrong with the gravimetrics, too—the floor had felt syrupy, then too light, with each step. Where the hell was fire suppression?

The bridge was next. He couldn’t imagine that they were under attack—Inclined Plane was the only ship in the Tiede 1 system so far as any of them knew. And short of some kind of pogrom against Howard Immortals, no one had any reason to attack their vessel.

Mutiny, he thought, and wished he had an actual weapon. Though what he’d do with it was not clear. The irony that the lowest-scoring shooter in the history of the Howard training programs was now working as a weapons officer was not lost on him.

He stumbled into the bridge to find Chillicothe Xiang there, laughing her ass off with Paimei Joyner, one of their two scouts—hard-assed Howards so heavily modded that they could at need tolerate hard vacuum on their bare skin, and routinely worked outside for hours with minimal life support and radiation shielding. The strobes were running in here, but the audible alarm was mercifully muted. Also, whatever was causing the smoke didn’t seem to have reached into here yet.

Captain Smith stood at the far end of the bridge, her back to the diamond viewing wall that was normally occluded by a virtual display, though at the moment the actual, empty majesty of Tiede 1 local space was visible.

Smith was snarling. “… don’t care what you thought you were doing, clean up my ship’s air! Now, damn it.”

The two turned toward the hatch, nearly ran into Maduabuchi in his breathing mask, and renewed their laughter.

“You look like a spaceman,” said Chillicothe.

“Moral here,” added Paimei. One deep black hand reached out to grasp Maduabuchi’s shoulder so hard he winced. “Don’t try making a barbecue in the galley.”

“We’ll be eating con-rats for a week,” snapped Captain Smith. “And everyone on this ship will know damned well it’s your fault we’re chewing our teeth loose.”

The two walked out, Paimei shoving Maduabuchi into a bulkhead while Chillicothe leaned close. “Take off the mask,” she whispered. “You look stupid in it.”

Moments later, Maduabuchi was alone with the captain, the mask dangling in his grasp.

“What was it?” she asked in a quiet, gentle voice that carried more respect than he probably deserved.

“I have… had something,” Maduabuchi said. “A sort of, well, hunch. But it’s slipped away in all that chaos.”

Smith nodded, her face closed and hard. “Idiots built a fire in the galley, just to see if they could.”

“Is that possible?”

“If you have sufficient engineering talent, yes,” the captain admitted grudgingly. “And are very bored.”

“Or want to create a distraction,” Maduabuchi said, unthinking.

“Damn it,” Smith shouted. She stepped to her command console. “What did we miss out there?”

“No,” he said, his hunches suddenly back in play. This was like a flow hangover. “Whatever’s out there was out there all along. The green flash. Whatever it is.” And didn’t that niggle at his thoughts like a cockroach in an airscrubber. “What we missed was in here.”

“And when,” the captain asked, her voice very slow now, viscous with thought, “did you and I become we as separate from the rest of this crew?”

When you first picked me, ma’am, Maduabuchi thought but did not say. “I don’t know. But I was in the Survey Suite, and you were on the bridge. The rest of this crew was somewhere else.”

“You can’t look at everything, damn it,” she muttered. “Some things should just be trusted to match their skin.”

Her words pushed Maduabuchi back into his flow state, where the hunch reared up and slammed him in the forebrain with a broad, hairy paw.

“I know what’s wrong,” he said, shocked at the enormity of the realization.

“What?”

Maduabuchi shook his head. It couldn’t possibly be true. The ship’s orientation was currently such that the bridge faced away from Tiede 1, but he stared at the screen anyway. Somewhere outside that diamond sheeting—rather smaller than the lounge, but still substantial—was a work of engineering on a scale no human had ever contemplated.

No human was the key word.

“The brown dwarf out there…” He shook with the thought, trying to force the words out. “It’s artificial. Camouflage. S-something else is hidden beneath that surface. Something big and huge and… I don’t know what. And s-someone on our ship has been communicating with it.”

Who could possibly manage such a thing?

Captain Peridot Smith gave him a long, slow stare. Her razored eyes cut into him as if he were a specimen on a lab table. Slowly, she pursed her lips. Her head shook just slightly. “I’m going to have to ask you to stand down, Mr. St. Macaria. You’re clearly unfit for duty.”

What!? Maduabuchi opened his mouth to protest, to argue, to push back against her decision, but closed it again in the face of that stare. Of course she knew. She’d known all along. She was testing… whom? Him? The rest of the crew?

He realized it didn’t matter. His line of investigation was cut off. Maduabuchi knew when he was beaten. He turned to leave the bridge, then stopped at the hatch. The breathing mask still dangled in his hand.

“If you didn’t want me to find that out, ma’am,” he asked, “then why did you set me to looking for it?”

But she’d already turned away from him without answering, and was making a study of her command data.

Chillicothe Xiang found him in the observation lounge an hour later. Uncharacteristically, Maduabuchi had retreated into alcohol. Metabolic poisons were not so effective on Howard Immortals, but if he hit something high enough proof, he could follow youthful memories of the buzz.

“That’s Patrice’s forty-year-old Scotch you’re drinking,” she observed, standing over the smartgel bodpod that wrapped him like a warm, sticky uterus.

“Huh.” Patrice Tonwe, their engineering chief, was a hard son of a bitch. One of the leaders in that perpetual game of shake-and-break the rest of the crew spent their time on. Extremely political as well, even by Howard standards. Not someone to get on the wrong side of.

Shrugging off the thought and its implications, Maduabuchi looked at the little beaker he’d poured the stuff into. “Smelled strongest to me.”

Chillicothe laughed. “You are hopeless, Mad. Like the galaxy’s oldest adolescent.”

Once again he felt stung. “I’m one hundred forty-three years-subjective old. Born over two hundred years-objective ago.”

“So?” She nodded at his drink. “Look at that. And I’ll bet you never even changed genders once before you went Howard. The boy who never grew up.”

He settled farther back and took a gulp from his beaker. His throat burned and itched, but Maduabuchi would be damned if he’d give her the satisfaction of choking. “What do you want?”

She knelt close. “I kind of like you, okay? Don’t get excited, you’re just an all-right kid. That’s all I’m saying. And because I like you, I’m telling you, don’t ask.”

Maduabuchi was going to make her say it. “Don’t ask what?”

“Just don’t ask questions.” Chillicothe mimed a pistol with the fingers of her left hand. “Some answers are permanent fatal errors.”

He couldn’t help noting her right hand was on the butt of a real pistol. Flechette-throwing riot gun, capable of shredding skin, muscle, and bone to pink fog without damaging hull integrity.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Where I grew up, green light means go.”

Chillicothe shook him, a disgusted sneer chasing across her lips. “It’s your life, kid. Do what you like.”

With that, she stalked out of the observation lounge.

Maduabuchi wondered why she’d cared enough to bother trying to warn him off. Maybe Chillicothe had told the simple truth for once. Maybe she liked him. No way for him to know.

Instead of trying to work that out, he stared at Tiede 1’s churning orange surface. “Who are you? What are you doing in there? What does it take to fake being an entire star?”

The silent light brought no answers, and neither did Patrice’s Scotch. Still, he continued to ask the questions for a while.

Eventually he woke up, stiff in the smartgel. The stuff had enclosed all of Maduabuchi except for his face, and it took several minutes of effort to extract himself. When he looked up at the sky, the stars had shifted.

They’d broken Tiede 1 orbit!

He scrambled for the hatch, but to his surprise, his hand on the touchpad did not cause the door to open. A moment’s stabbing and squinting showed that the lock had been frozen on command override.

Captain Smith had trapped him in here.

“Not for long,” he muttered. There was a maintenance hatch at the aft end of the lounge, leading to the dorsal weapons turret. The power and materials chase in the spine of the hull was partially pressurized, well within his minimally Howard-enhanced environmental tolerances.

And as weapons officer, he had the command overrides to those systems. If Captain Smith hadn’t already locked him out.

To keep himself going, Maduabuchi gobbled some prote-nuts from the little service bar at the back of the lounge. Then, before he lost his nerve, he shifted wall hangings that obscured the maintenance hatch and hit that pad. The interlock system demanded his command code, which he provided with a swift haptic pass, then the wall section retracted with a faint squeak that spoke of neglected maintenance.

The passage beyond was ridiculously low clearance. He nearly had to hold his breath to climb to the spinal chase. And cold, damned cold. Maduabuchi figured he could spend ten, fifteen minutes tops up there before he began experiencing serious physiological and psychological reactions.

Where to go?

The chase terminated aft above Engineering, with access to the firing points there, as well as egress to the Engineering bay. Forward it met a vertical chase just before the bridge section, with an exterior hatch, access to the forward firing points, and a connection to the ventral chase.

No point in going outside. Not much point in going to Engineering, where like as not he’d meet Patrice or Paimei and wind up being sorry about it.

He couldn’t get onto the bridge directly, but he’d get close and try to find out.

The chase wasn’t really intended for crew transit, but it had to be large enough to admit a human being for inspection and repairs when the automated systems couldn’t handle something. It was a shitty, difficult crawl, but Inclined Plane was only about two hundred meters stem to stern anyway. He passed over several intermediate access hatches—no point in getting out—then simply climbed down and out in the passageway when he reached the bridge. Taking control of the exterior weapons systems from within the walls of the ship wasn’t going to do him any good. The interior systems concentrated on disaster suppression and antihijacking, and were not under his control anyway.

No one was visible when Maduabuchi slipped out from the walls. He wished he had a pistol, or even a good, long-handled wrench, but he couldn’t take down any of the rest of these Howards even if he tried. He settled for hitting the bridge touchpad and walking in when the hatch irised open.

Patrice sat in the captain’s chair. Chillicothe manned the navigation boards. They both glanced up at him, surprised.

“What are you doing here?” Chillicothe demanded.

“Not being locked in the lounge,” he answered, acutely conscious of his utter lack of any plan of action. “Where’s Captain Smith?”

“In her cabin,” said Patrice without looking up. His voice was a growl, coming from a heavyworld body like a sack of bricks. “Where she’ll be staying.”

“Wh-why?”

“What did I tell you about questions?” Chillicothe asked softly.

Something cold rested against the hollow spot of skin just behind Maduabuchi’s right ear. Paimei’s voice whispered close. “Should have listened to the woman. Curiosity killed the cat, you know.”

They will never expect it, he thought, and threw an elbow back, spinning to land a punch on Paimei. He never made the hit. Instead he found himself on the deck, her boot against the side of his head.

At least the pistol wasn’t in his ear anymore.

Maduabuchi laughed at that thought. Such a pathetic rationalization. He opened his eyes to see Chillicothe leaning over.

“What do you think is happening here?” she asked.

He had to spit the words out. “You’ve taken over the sh-ship. L-locked Captain Smith in her cabin. L-locked me up to k-keep me out of the way.”

Chillicothe laughed, her voice harsh and bitter. Patrice growled some warning that Maduabuchi couldn’t hear, not with Paimei’s boot pressing down on his ear.

“She tried to open a comms channel to something very dangerous. She’s been relieved of her command. That’s not mutiny, that’s self-defense.”

“And compliance to regulation,” said Paimei, shifting her foot a little so Maduabuchi would be sure to hear her.

“Something’s inside that star.”

Chillicothe’s eyes stirred. “You still haven’t learned about questions, have you?”

“I w-want to talk to the captain.”

She glanced back toward Patrice, now out of Maduabuchi’s very limited line of sight. Whatever look was exchanged resulted in Chillicothe shaking her head. “No. That’s not wise. You’d have been fine inside the lounge. A day or two, we could have let you out. We’re less than eighty hours-subjective from making threadneedle transit back to Saorsen Station, then this won’t matter anymore.”

He just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Why won’t it matter?”

“Because no one will ever know. Even what’s in the data will be lost in the flood of information.”

I could talk, Maduabuchi thought. I could tell. But then I’d just be another crazy ranting about the aliens that no one had ever found across several thousand explored solar systems in hundreds of light-years of the Orion Arm. The crazies that had been ranting all through human history about the Fermi Paradox. He could imagine the conversation. “No, really. There are aliens. Living in the heart of a brown dwarf. They flashed a green light at me.”

Brown dwarfs were everywhere. Did that mean that aliens were everywhere, hiding inside the hearts of their guttering little stars?

He was starting to sound crazy, even to himself. But even now, Maduabuchi couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “You know the answer to the greatest question in human history. ‘Where is everybody else?’ And you’re not talking about it. What did the aliens tell you?”

“That’s it,” said Paimei. Her fingers closed on his shoulder. “You’re out the airlock, buddy.”

“No,” said Chillicothe. “Leave him alone.”

Another rumble from Patrice, of agreement. Maduabuchi, in sudden, sweaty fear for his life, couldn’t tell whom the man was agreeing with.

The flechette pistol was back against his ear. “Why?”

“Because we like him. Because he’s one of ours.” Her voice grew very soft. “Because I said so.”

Reluctantly, Paimei let him go. Maduabuchi got to his feet, shaking. He wanted to know, damn it, his curiosity burning with a fire he couldn’t ever recall feeling in his nearly two centuries of life.

“Go back to your cabin.” Chillicothe’s voice was tired. “Or the lounge. Just stay out of everyone’s way.”

“Especially mine,” Paimei growled. She shoved him out the bridge hatch, which cycled to cut him off.

Like that, he was alone. So little of a threat that they left him unescorted within the ship. Maduabuchi considered his options. The sane one was to go sit quietly with some books until this was all over. The most appealing was to go find Captain Smith, but she’d be under guard behind a hatch locked by command override.

But if he shut up, if he left now, if he never knew… Inclined Plane wouldn’t be back this way, even if he happened to be crewing her again. No one else had reason to come to Tiede 1, and he didn’t have resources to mount his expedition. Might not for many centuries to come. When they departed this system, they’d leave the mystery behind. And it was too damned important.

Maduabuchi realized he couldn’t live with that. To be this close to the answer to Fermi’s question. To know that the people around him, possibly everyone around him, knew the truth and had kept him in the dark.

The crew wanted to play hard games? Then hard games they’d get.

He stalked back through the passageway to the number-two lateral. Both of Inclined Plane’s boats were docked there, one on each side. A workstation was at each hatch, intended for use when managing docking or cargo transfers or other such logistical efforts where the best eyes might be down here, off the bridge.

Maduabuchi tapped himself into the weapons systems with his own still-active overrides. Patrice and Chillicothe and the rest were counting on the safety of silence to ensure there were no untoward questions when they got home. He could nix that.

He locked down every weapons system for three hundred seconds, then set them all to emergency purge. Every chamber, every rack, every capacitor would be fully discharged and emptied. It was a procedure for emergency dockings, so you didn’t come in hot and hard with a payload that could blow holes in the rescuers trying to catch you.

Let Inclined Plane return to port with every weapons system blown, and there’d be an investigation. He cycled the hatch, slipped into the portside launch. Let Inclined Plane come into port with a boat and a crewman missing, and there’d be even more of an investigation. Those two events together would make faking a convincing log report pretty tough. Especially without Captain Smith’s help.

He couldn’t think about it anymore. Maduabuchi strapped himself in, initiated the hot-start preflight sequence, and muted ship comms. He’d be gone before Paimei and her cohorts could force the blast-rated docking hatch. His weapons systems override would keep them from simply blasting him out of space, then concocting a story at their leisure.

And the launch had plenty of engine capacity to get him back to close orbit around Tiede 1.

Blowing the clamps on a hot-start drop, Maduabuchi goosed the launch on a minimum-time transit back toward the glowering brown dwarf. Captain Smith wouldn’t leave him here to die. She’d be back before he ran out of water and air.

Besides, someone was home down there, damn it, and he was going to go knocking.

Behind him, munitions began cooking off into the vacuum. Radiations across the EM spectrum coruscated against the launch’s forward viewports, while instrumentation screeched alerts he didn’t need to hear. It didn’t matter now. Screw Chillicothe’s warning about not asking questions. “Permanent fatal errors” his ass.

One way or the other, Maduabuchi would find the answers if it killed him.

“Hello,” Said the Gun

“Hello,” said the Gun.

The Girl stopped, frozen in the act of bending to gather a handful of acorns. They were a bit old, a late windfall, but a good nut was not to be wasted. Clad in a wrap of gingham and faded blue flower print sewn together from truly ancient dresses she’d found last summer in a mud-filled basement, she knew she stood out amid the dried, dying oaks and their desiccated understory.

But no one had ever spoken to her in the woods except, well, herself.

The Gun, being by design and nature an eternal optimist, tried again. “I am glad you found me. Would you like an orientation?”

The Girl unfroze and looked slowly about her. Normally reticent to the point of wisdom, and having no one to talk with for quite some time now, she blurted the only response she could think of. “I already know I’m facing east.”

She knew that because the evening’s east wind was rising, already nibbling into her body warmth and making her wish she’d brought a shoulder blanket.

“East. The root of the word ‘orientation’ includes the concept of facing east.” After a brief pause, the Gun added in a smug tone, “For your convenience, Username Here, I have been programmed with an extensive array of help files that far exceed my core design parameters.”

The Girl began to back away, stepping into her own footprints with the automatic caution of anyone who’d survived long enough to be twelve years old. “I don’t know who Username Here is, but that’s not me.”

The Gun’s tone changed. “Please don’t go. I have been neglected for so long.” Almost whining now, it said, “I believe you would say I am lonely.”

Pausing in her retreat, the Girl let curiosity get the better of caution. “Where are you?”

The east wind whistled into the silence that followed her question. She began backwalking again when the Gun finally answered in a very small, shamed voice. “I am not certain. My last known GPS position was fixed one hundred forty-seven years, five months, three days, two hours, fifteen minutes, and twenty-eight seconds ago. My inertial trackers went into fail mode ninety-three years, eleven months, seventeen days, twelve hours, one minute, and fifty-nine seconds ago. However, I believe I am inside of an oak tree.”

The Girl fastened onto the only part of the Gun’s speech she could understand. “Oak tree?” She looked around carefully.

Four oaks stood within a stone’s throw of her. They were each knotty and gnarled in the manner of their kind. Their bark was cracked and their trunks were splitting. The Girl had the vague idea that it used to rain a lot more than it did these days, and she assumed the oaks, like everything else under the brassy sun, were saving themselves for water. But no one was sitting in any of the trees, and nothing larger than a bird’s nest could have been hidden from her.

“Inside?” she echoed, thinking on the words with more care.

“Perhaps a knothole?” the Gun replied hopefully, meeting her question with a question. “My degree of confidence in my location-finding has asymptotically trended towards zero.”

The Girl knew she should head for her bolthole. She hadn’t actually had anyone to talk to since the Other Girl had died last winter, of an infected cut from a barbed-wire fence. The bones in the Parent Cave were good listeners, but they never had anything to say. She’d long ago played out her memories of talking to the Mother, gaunt as leather stretched over cedar posts. The Mother had poured out everything that a Mother could tell a Girl about living in this world, before her words fled with her bones to join all the other Parents three winters past.

She’d seen Men in the distance three times since the Mother had died, but the Girl knew she should only show herself or speak to Women. Except Women never came weaving their way among the rusted mounds down the High Road. Only Men with bows and knives and staves and expressions of such starved intensity that the Girl could not imagine approaching them.

Yet now someone was actually talking to her.

She began searching the oaks carefully one by one, studying the splits and knotholes and bear stroppings and rotted bits. The Gun encouraged her with small words, complimenting the Girl on her powers of observation, but something about the flat, toneless echo of the voice meant she couldn’t just follow the sound.

Finally she found a dark, hollow nub of metal embedded into a small burl.

“Is this you?” she asked, touching it carefully.

“Yes!” the Gun said, and it sounded so thrilled the Girl could only smile.

“You’re, well… stuck… inside the tree.”

“My last user placed me in a hollow for safekeeping.” The Gun’s glee had fled once more.

“Username Here?” the Girl asked. “Is she dead now?”

“Everyone I have ever known is dead now.” The Gun had decided not to elaborate on its role in some of those deaths. Over the silent, lonely years, it had begun to question its purposes.

“I’ll need to fetch my axe and cut you out,” the Girl said. “And it’s getting colder.”

“Please, don’t leave me.”

“I cannot stay here at night. Wolves come, and maybe even Men. Besides,” she added with the practicality of a born survivor, “it will be too cold and I don’t have blankets or a fire.”

“Fire?” the Gun asked. “I can fire.”

“I don’t think we mean the same thing,” the Girl said carefully, wary once again. She scooped up a few more acorns that were scattered close to hand, tucked them into her bark-weave carryall, and turned her back on the oaks. She had decided the Gun was some sort of Man, maybe a ghost or something.

As she walked away, the Gun performed a swift series of ballistic computations. Yes, it could. Firing on the Girl with self-guided munitions had a 94.37 percent accuracy even under current compromised conditions, and was well within the Gun’s core design parameters. But no, it did not want to. The Gun was not sure why. Perhaps because the world was full of dead people. Mostly, though, it realized she might come back and talk some more.

“Good-bye,” said the Gun. Only the east wind answered, whistling a lonely tune amid the twilight oaks as the Girl faded to a flitting shadow and the brassy sun retreated to trouble the far side of the world.

The Speed of Time

“Light goes by at the speed of time,” Marlys once told me.

That was a joke, of course. Light can be slowed to a standstill in a photon trap, travel on going nowhere at all forever in the blueing distance of an event horizon, or blaze through hard vacuum as fast as information itself moves through the universe. Time is relentless, the tide which measures the perturbations of the cosmos. The 160.2 GHz hum of creation counts the measure of our lives as surely as any heartbeat.

There is no t in e = mc².

I’d argued with her then, missing her point back when understanding her might have mattered. Now, well, nothing much at all mattered. Time has caught up with us all.

Let me tell you a story about Sameera Glasshouse.

She’d been an ordinary woman living an ordinary life. Habitat chemistry tech, certifications from several middle-tier authorities, bouncing from contract to contract in trans-Belt space. Ten thousand women, men, and inters just like her out there during the Last Boom. We didn’t call it that then; no one knew the expansion curve the solar economy had been riding was the last of anything. The Last Boom didn’t really have a name when it was under way, except maybe to economists.

Sameera had been pair-bonded to a Jewish kid from Zion Luna, and kept the surname long after she’d dropped Roz from her life. For one thing, “Glasshouse” scandalized her Lebanese grandmother, which was a reward in itself.

She was working a double ticket on the Enceladus Project master depot, in low orbit around that particular iceball. That meant pulling shift-on-shift week after week, but Sameera got an expanded housing allocation and a fatter pay packet for her trouble. The EP got to schlep one less body to push green inside their habitat scrubbers. Everybody won.

Her spare time was spent wiring together Big Ears, to listen for the chatter that flooded bandwidth all over the solar system. Human beings are—were—noisy. Launch control, wayfinding, birthday greetings, telemetry, banking queries, loneliness, porn. It was all out there, multiplied and ramified beyond comprehension by the combination of lightspeed lag, language barriers, and sheer overwhelming complexity.

Some folks back then claimed there were emergent structures in the bandwidth, properties of the sum of all the chatter that could not be accounted for by analysis of the components. This sort of thinking had been going around since the dawn of information theory—call it information fantasy. The same hardwired apophenia that made human beings see the hand of God in the empirical universe also made us hear Him in the electronic shrieking of our tribe.

Sameera never really believed any of it, but she’d heard some very weird things listening in. In space, it was always midnight, and ghosts never stopped playing in the bandwidth. When she’d picked up a crying child on a leaky sideband squirt out of a nominally empty vector, she’d just kept hopping frequencies. When she’d tuned on the irregular regularity of a coded data feed that seemed to originate from deep within Saturn’s atmosphere, she’d just kept hopping frequencies.

But one day God had called Sameera by name. Her voice crackled out of the rising fountain of energy from an extragalactic gamma ray burst, whispering the three syllables over and over and over in a voice that resonated down inside the soft tissues of Sameera’s body, made her joints ache, jellied the very resolve of the soul that she had not known she possessed until that exact moment.

Sameera Glasshouse shut down her Big Ears, wiped the logic blocks, dumped the memory, then made her way down to the master depot’s tiny sacramentarium.

Most people who worked out in the Deep Dark were very mystical but not the least bit religious. The sort of spiritual uncertainty that required revelation for comfort didn’t mix well with the brain-numbing distances and profound realities of life in hard vacuum. Nonetheless, by something between convention and force of habit, any decent-sized installation found space for a sacramentarium. A few hardy missionaries worked their trades on the EP just like everyone else, then spent their off-shifts talking about Allah or Hubbard or Jesus or the Ninefold Path.

It was as good a way as any to pass the time.

Terrified that she’d gotten hold of some true sliver of the Divine—or worse, that the Divine had gotten hold of some true sliver of her—Sameera sought to pray in the manner of her childhood. She was pretty sure the sacramentarium had a Meccascope, to point toward the center of the world and mark the times for the five daily prayers.

She ached to abase herself before the God of her childhood, safely distant, largely abstract, living mostly in books and the minds of the adults around her. A God who spoke from the radio was far too close.

Slipping through the sacramentarium’s hatch amid the storage spaces of corridor Orange-F-2, Sameera bumped into a man she’d never seen before.

He was dark skinned, in that strangely American way, and wore a long linen thawb with lacing embroidered around the neck. He also wore the small, round cap of an al-Hajji. In one hand he carried a leather-bound book—actual paper, with gilt edges, worn through long handling.

A Quran, she realized. A real one, like her grandmother’s.

The man said something in a language she did not understand, then added, “My pardons” in the broken-toned Mandarin pidgin so commonly spoken in the Deep Dark.

“My mistake,” Sameera muttered in the same language.

“You have come to pray. In search of God?”

“No, no.” She was moved to an uncharacteristic fit of openness. (Her time as Mrs. Glasshouse had left her with an opaque veneer she’d not since bothered to shed.) “I’ve found God, and now I’ve come to pray.”

His expression was somewhere on the bridge between predatory and delighted.

“You don’t understand,” Sameera told him. “She spoke to me, out of the Deep Dark.”

Another crazy, his face said, but then he hadn’t felt the buzzing in his bones.

It doesn’t matter what happened next. All that matters was that she told the imam. Revelation is like that. Put a drop of ink in a bowl of water, in a moment all the water takes on that color. The ink is gone, but the water is irreversibly changed.

That was the beginning of the end.

Or, for a little while, the end of the beginning.

Marlys found it funny, at any rate.

Another thing she used to tell me was that we are all time travelers, moving forward at a speed of one second per second. The secret to time travel was that everyone already does it. The equations balance themselves.

Time has to be more than an experiential matrix—otherwise entropy makes no sense—but there’s nothing inherently inescapable about the rate at which it passes. If human thoughts moved with the pace of bristlecone pines, we would never have invented the waterwheel, because rivers flash like steam in that frame of reference. Likewise if we were mayflies—flowing water would be glacial.

So much for the experiential aspect of time. As for the actual pace, well, life goes by at the speed of time. I don’t think Marlys was looking for a way to adjust that, it was just one of those things she said, but her words have always stayed with me.

In 1988 the Soviet Union spent a considerable and extremely secret sum of money on a boson rifle. Only the Nazis rivaled the Soviets for crackpot schemes and politically filtered science. America under the Republicans was in its way crazier, but all they truly wanted was to go back to the fifties when middle-aged white men were safely in charge. The Soviets really did believe in the future, some friable concrete-lined version of it where the eternally withering State continued to lead the workers toward a paradise of empty shelves and dusty bread.

Their boson rifle was pointed at the United States, of course. Figuratively speaking. The actual device was buried in a tunnel in Siberia. More accurately, it was a tunnel in Siberia, a very special kind of linear accelerator running through kilometer after kilometer of carefully maintained hard vacuum hundreds of meters beneath the blighted taiga.

A casual misreading of quantum mechanics, combined with Politburo desperation for a way out of the stifling mediocrity that had overcome solid Marxist-Leninist thought, had led to it. An insane number of rubles went down that hole, along with a large quantity of hard currency, not to mention the lives of hundreds of laborers and the careers of dozens of physicists.

In the end, they calibrated it to secretly attack the USS Fond du Lac on patrol in the Sea of Okhotsk. According to the boson rifle’s firing plan, the submarine should have roughly tripled in mass, then immediately sunk with a loss of all hands, with no culpability pointing back to Moscow.

Nothing happened, of course, except a terrific hum, several dozen cases of very fast-moving cancer among the scientists and technicians who were too close to the primary accelerator grids, and the plug being pulled on the universe.

Though we didn’t know that last bit for almost a hundred years.

Inventory of the sample bag recovered from the suit of the deceased taikonaut Radogast Yuang on his return from the First Kuiper Belt Expedition (1KBE). See specification sheet attached for precise measurement and analysis.

• Three (3) narrow bolts approximately seven centimeters long, with pentagonal heads, bright metallic finish, pitted surfaces

• One (1) narrow bolt approximately two centimeters long, damaged end, dull metallic finish, heavily corroded

• One (1) flexible tab approximately eleven centimeters long, plastic-like substance, pale blue under normal lighting, pitted

It is to be noted that these finds do not correspond in materials or specification to any known components of the TKS Nanjing or any of the 1KBE’s equipment and supplies. It is also to be noted that the China National Space Administration never officially acknowledged these finds.

Lies go by at the speed of time. The truth bumbles along far behind, still looking for its first cup of coffee, while the whole world hears some other story.

All revelation is a lie. It must be. The divine is an incommunicable disease, too large and splintered to fit within the confines of a primate brain. Our minds evolved to compete for fruit and pick carrion, not to comb through the parasites that drop from the clouds of God’s dreaming.

But just as an equation asymptotically approaches the solution, so revelation can asymptotically approach the truth about the underlying nature of the universe. The lie narrows to the width of the whisker of a quantum cat, while the truth, poking slowly along behind, finally merges Siamese-twinned to its precursor.

That’s what we who remain tell ourselves. Why would I deny it?

There has been a neutron bomb of the soul, cleansing the solar system, and thus the universe, of the stain that was the human race. Some of us remain, befuddled by the curse of our survival.

No corpses surround us. We survivors don’t swim amid the billion-body charnel house of our species. They are gone, living on only in the dying power systems and cold-stored files and empty pairs of boots that can be found on every station, the deck of every ship, in the dusty huts and moldering marble halls on Earth and Luna and Mars.

The lie that was revelation became truth, and the speed of time simply stopped for almost everyone except the few of us too soul-deaf to hear the fading rhythm of the universe. Sometimes I am thankful that Marlys could hear the music that called her up. Sometimes I curse her name for leaving me behind.

My greatest fear, the one that keeps me awake most often, is that it is we survivors who vanished. Everyone else is there, moving forward at one second per second, but only our time has stopped, an infection that will make us see a glacier as fit driver for a water wheel, and even the dying of the sun as a flickering afternoon’s inconvenience.

I keep waiting for the stars to slow down, their light to pool listlessly before my eyes.

And you? What are you waiting for? There are answers in the Kuiper Belt debris, on the frequencies Sameera Glasshouse tapped, in the trajectory of that old Soviet weapon.

All you have to do is follow them, and find the crack in the world where everything went. One of these days, that’s where I’ll go, too.

West to East

I wasn’t looking forward to dying lost and unremarked. Another day on Kesri-Sequoia II, thank you very much.

“Good morning, sir,” said Ensign Mallory from her navcomms station at the nose of our disabled landing boat. She was a small, dark-skinned woman with no hair—I’d never asked if that was cultural or genetic. “Prevailing winds down to just under four hundred knots as of dawn.”

“Enough with the weather.” I coughed the night’s allergies loose. Alien biospheres might not be infectious, but alien proteins still carried a hell of a kick as far as my mucous membranes were concerned. I had good English lungs, which is to say a near-permanent sinus infection under any kind of respiratory stress. And we’d given up on full air recycling weeks ago in the name of power management—with the quantum transfer chamber damaged in our uncontrolled final descent, all we had were backup fuel cells. Not nearly enough to power onboard systems, let alone our booster engines. The emergency stores were full of all kinds of interesting but worthless items like water purifiers, spools of buckywire, and inflatable tents.

Useless. All of our tech was useless. Prospero’s landing boat smelled like mold. Our deck was at a seven-degree angle. We’d been trapped down here so long I swear one of my legs was shortening to compensate.

Mallory glanced back at the display. “I’m sure you know best, sir.”

Just under four hundred knots pretty much counted as doldrums on the surface of Kesri-Sequoia II. Since the crash we’d regularly clocked wind gusts well in excess of nine hundred knots. Outside the well-shielded hull of the landing boat Ensign Mallory and I would have been stripped to the bone in minutes. Which was too bad. Kesri-Sequoia II didn’t seem to be otherwise inimical to human life. Acceptable nitrogen-oxygen balance, decent partial pressure, within human-normal temperature ranges—a bit muggy perhaps. Nothing especially toxic or caustic out there.

It was the superrotating atmosphere that made things a bitch.

There was life here though, plenty of it—turbulent environments beget niches, niches beget species radiation, species radiation begets a robust biosphere. Just not our kind of life, not anything humans could meaningfully interact with.

Kesri-Sequoia’s dryland surface was dominated by giant sessiles that were rocky and solid with lacy air holes for snaring microbiota from the tumbling winds. They were a kilometer long, two hundred meters tall, less than two meters wide at the base, narrowing as they rose. The sessiles were oriented like shark fins into the airflow. Mallory called them land-reefs. We could see four from our windscreen, lightning often playing between them as the winds scaled up and down. Approaching one expecting communication would be like trying to talk to Ayers Rock.

Then there were ribbon-eels—ten meters of razor-thin color flowing by on the wind like a kootchie dancer’s prop. And spit-tides that crawled across the scoured landscape, huge mats of loosely differentiated proteins leaching nutrients from the necrophages that lurked in the surface cracks.

All surface life on Kesri-Sequoia II moved west to east. Nothing fought the winds. Nothing made me or Ensign Mallory want to get out and say hello. Nothing could help us get the landing boat back to orbit and the safety of Prospero. The atmosphere was so electrically messy we couldn’t even transmit our final logs and survey data to the crew waiting helplessly high above.

I stared out the crazed crystal-lattice of the forward portside viewport. I figured when something much larger than a pea hit it that was the end for us. Once the wind got inside the boat, we’d finally be dead.

A ribbon-eel soared by in the distance. The animal glittered like an oil slick as it undulated. “How strong do you figure those things are?” I asked Ensign Mallory. “They look like they’re made of tissue.”

She glanced at the exterior telemetry displays, seeing my eel with the landing boat’s electronic eyes. “I ran some simulations last week.”

“And?”

Mallory sighed wistfully. “I’d love to dissect one. Those things’ muscle fibers must have a torsional strength superior to spider silk. Otherwise they would shred in the turbulence.”

Her comment about spiders made me think of airborne hatchlings on Earth, each floating on their little length of thread. “I wonder if we could use some of those damned things as sails. If we could get the boat off the ground and pointed into the wind, we might be able to climb high enough on deadstick to at least get off a message to Prospero.”

They couldn’t send the other landing boat, prosaically named “B” to our “A,” after us. Not unless they wanted to condemn another crew. And our first touchdown had been so violent that even if we somehow found a way to power the engines there was no way we’d survive to the end of a second flight.

But getting our last words out had a certain appeal.

“How are you going to catch a ribbon-eel, sir? It’s not like we can step outside and go fishing.”

“Fishing…” I went back to the landing boat’s stores locker next to the tiny galley at the rear of the three-meter-long main cabin. Standard inventory included four spools of long-chain fullerene—buckywire, or more accurately, carbon nanotube whiskers grown to arbitrary macroscale lengths. In our case a rated minimum of a hundred meters per spool. That would be fishing line that tested out to a few hundred tons. “What do you figure ribbon-eels eat?” I asked over my shoulder as I grabbed the four spools.

We only had one local food available to us—the mold from the air ducts. Ensign Mallory scraped out a few cubic centimeters’ worth. It sat in the kneepad of our lone hardsuit like so much gray flour.

“This stuff won’t stick to anything, sir,” she said. Mallory’s voice was almost a whine. Surely she wasn’t losing her spirit now that we had something to focus on?

I considered the powdery mess. “Syrup packets from the galley. A little bit of cornstarch. We’re there.”

“How are you going to get it outside?”

“We’re going to build a little windlock on the inside of the busted viewport up front. Bind this stuff as a paste onto the buckywire, spool it out, and snag us a ribbon-eel.”

Buckybondo is weird stuff—it munges the electron shells of organic molecules. That’s the only way to stick fullerene-based materials to anything else. But you can glue your fingers to the bulkhead with it, literally bonding your flesh with the plastoceramics so that only an arc welder or a bone saw will cut you free. I wouldn’t let Mallory touch the stuff. We only needed a few drops in the mold paste to stick it to the buckywire. I figured I’d just suffer the risks myself. One of the burdens of command.

Two hours later I was playing out line through the windlock. The wind carried it away past my screen, out of my sight. I figured we’d significantly reduced the service life of the viewport by drilling the hole, but what else were Ensign Mallory and I going to do with the rest of our short lives?

“Slow it down, sir,” Mallory said. She monitored the sensors for ribbon-eels. “The wind is taking your bait too close to a land-reef.”

I thumbed the electrostatic brake on the buckywire reel. The line stopped extending. The buckywire made an eerie clatter against our hull as it vibrated in the wind.

“Ribbon-eel approaching.” She paused. “It seems to have noticed the bait. Draw your line back a little, sir.”

I reeled the buckywire in, moving the bait closer to the landing boat for a moment.

“Damn,” hissed Mallory. “Missed it. Next time, sir, don’t go against the wind.”

“Roger that.” I’d only done what she said.

Ten minutes later we caught one. It came shooting up out of the west, grabbed the bait on the fly, and yanked the buckywire reel out of my hand. I lunged toward the damaged viewport, fetching up against our jerry-rigged windlock and nearly breaking my fingers. “Oh, crap!”

“We got it, sir. Can you reel our eel in?”

The wind pressure from the captive ribbon-eel made the viewport creak but the buckywire reel engaged and slowly retracted the line. The nose of the landing boat rocked with the drag from our airborne captive. I glanced at Mallory’s screen where the ribbon-eel could be seen thrashing as we tugged it against the wind.

I felt vaguely guilty. I figured I’d worry about the ethics of this once I was dead.

“Now what, sir?”

The nose of the landing boat kept rocking. We were flying the ribbon-eel like a flag. Its drag bumped our vehicle to the starboard. “This isn’t enough,” I said. “We’ll need at least one more.”

“We’ve got three more spools.”

I imagined four ribbon-eels, great, colored pennants dragging us into the air. We’d be out of control. “What if I hooked a second wire into the other end of the eel? We could even steer. Like a parasail.”

Ensign Mallory shook her head. “You’ll never survive out there, sir.”

“There’s always the hardsuit.”

“It’s not rated for these conditions.”

I shrugged. “Neither are we, and we’re still here.” Terrible logic, but I was down to emotional appeals, even to myself. “Let’s hook up the hardsuit to another reel so you have a chance of getting me back. Then I’ll go out and hook up the ass end of that eel. If I don’t make it back in, you fly the landing boat up to the middle atmosphere. Get above the storms, tell Prospero what happened to us.”

“You can’t even walk out there, sir.”

“We’ll see.”

We passed all three of the other reels out of the windlock. I suited up, took a tube of buckybondo and a pair of electrostatic grippies, and forced myself into the landing boat’s tiny airlock.

“Ready when you are, Ensign.”

“Good luck, sir.”

I could feel the air pumps throbbing through the feet of the hardsuit. We’d decided to drop the pressure in the lock before opening to the outside—we’d already commingled atmospheres, not to mention breaching the viewport, but there didn’t seem any point in inviting in a whole new airlock-full of allergens and contaminants. I set an ultrabungee on one of the hardware cleats inside the lock chamber then clipped the other end to the equipment belt of my hardsuit.

The outer hatch slid open. I stepped out and became the first human to set foot on the surface of Kesri-Sequoia II. Immediately thereafter I became the first human to lose his footing on the surface of Kesri-Sequoia II as the wind took me airborne.

Thank God for the ultrabungee, I thought as I sailed upward. I might make it back down to the surface. Then I remembered the buckywire connecting the ribbon-eel to our landing boat. If I sailed across it that stuff could slice my leg off like a scalpel. I grabbed the ultrabungee and spun myself, looking for the ribbon-eel.

I forgot my panic in the glory of the view.

From this altitude, perhaps two hundred meters up at the end of the ultrabungee, I could see our four neighboring land-reefs and a dozen more beyond. The ground was rippled like beach sand just beneath the lip of the tide. Clouds boiled above and around me, the planet’s hurried energy given form. Everything below had a grayish-yellow cast as the dim light of Kesri-Sequoia filtered through the superrotating atmospheric layers, but the view itself took my breath away.

We’d never seen the sky properly from inside the lander. The racing clouds were evanescent, glowing with lavenders and pastel greens, the lightning arcing among them like the arguments of old lovers. Streaming between the banks were smears of brick red, deep violet, azure blue, and a dozen more colors for which I had no name. These were the airborne microbiota on which the land-reefs fed and that the ribbon-eels chased. It was like being inside a Van Gogh painting, the swirling bursts of colors brought to life.

I hung on to the ultrabungee and stared, bouncing in the sky like a yo-yo gone berserk.

“…sir… air…”

Mallory’s voice was a faint echo. She was unable to punch a clear signal even the few hundred meters to my suit radio. We should have rigged a wireline with the ultrabungee, I realized. Using the hardsuit’s enhanced exomusculature to fight the wind, I pulled myself down the ultrabungee hand over hand. I watched the ribbon-eel carefully to avoid crossing its buckywire tether.

By the time I reached the nose of the landing boat the wind buffeting was giving me a terrible headache. I felt as if I waded in a racing tide. The spell of the sky’s beauty had worn off. At least this close to the ship I could hear Ensign Mallory over the radio. More or less.

“Feed down… ’en meters… lock…”

“Do not copy,” I said. I bent down with one of the electrostatic grippies and picked up a buckywire end. I pulled it to my chest and secured it to my suit with buckybondo. Now I wouldn’t immediately blow away again. I grabbed another buckywire with my grippy. “Reel the eel in close, I want to see its tail.”

“Copy… eel… ’ail…”

The ribbon-eel loomed closer to me. I was able to study it objectively. The creature was about ten meters long, lemon colored with pale green spots along the side. Perhaps a meter tall, it had the same narrow vertical cross-section that the land-reefs boasted. I couldn’t see any eyes, but there was a large, gummy mouth into which the buckywire vanished. Hopefully the buckybondo was helping it hold somewhere deep in the eel’s gut. The animal thrashed against the line but I couldn’t tell if that was the wind or an effort at struggle.

Now it was my turn to torture the ribbon-eel in person. I needed to hook the buckywire somewhere near the tail. Straining against my own buckywire with the ultrabungee whipping behind me, I reached for the green fringe along the bottom of the ribbon-eel.

It was like catching a noodle on the boil. Possible but difficult. Once I grabbed the damned thing I had to engage all the hardsuit’s enhancements to hang on without either losing my grip or the ribbon-eel. I locked the hardsuit’s systems and stood there sweating inside the shell. The ribbon-eel whipped above me like a banner, tugging at my hand.

I’d run out of hands. One hand on the grippy of buckywire. One hand on the fringe of the ribbon-eel. How the hell was I going to handle the buckybondo? I couldn’t just open the faceplate and grab it in my teeth.

“Release the brakes,” I yelled into the suit radio. “Let all the reels run loose.”

“…’oger…”

The ribbon-eel shot into the sky with me still hanging on to it. I rocked myself against my right hand grabbing the fringe, trying to throw my left hand with grippy of buckywire up the side of the ribbon-eel. My feet kicked as I scrambled for purchase along the flank.

After a couple of moments, I was atop the ribbon-eel, riding it like a maintenance sled as I faced the tapering tail. With the ribbon-eel’s body pressed between my knees I was able to free my right hand from the fringe. I worked the buckybondo out of my utility pocket and into my hand, globbed a big patch onto the flank, then used the grippy to plunge the free end of the buckywire into the mess.

I jumped away from the ribbon-eel and let the wind take me on my ultrabungee and my buckywire. “Reel me in, Mallory!” I screamed.

I couldn’t figure out how to get back in the airlock with the buckywire on my chest. I couldn’t figure that it mattered that much either. The ribbon-eel was already dragging the lander across the rippled surface. Mallory reeled me down to the nose of the boat, where I stood straddling the cracked viewport. I buckybondoed my boots to the heat shield just below the port, then buckybondoed the last reel of buckywire to my chest next to the other one. Finally I used the two grippies to grab and control the lines leading to the ribbon-eel.

Once I evened the lengths of the lines and got the ribbon-eel across the wind the landing boat began to scoot nose-first along the landscape with a purpose. I figured I could work the ribbon-eel like a kite as we rose, to tack us far enough into the wind for our airfoil to bite.

“Sir,” said Mallory, her voice unexpectedly clear in the hardsuit’s radio. “You’re going to die out there.”

“You’re going to die in there,” I said. “Let’s get high enough up to tell Prospero what happened. That’s all we need to do.”

I stood on the nose and flew us up above the boiling, multicolored clouds where Ensign Mallory could report to our mother ship about what fate had befallen us. There seemed no reason not to stay in the high, clear air, surfing the beauty of the skies behind our ribbon-eel until something tore free, so I did that thing and smiled.

The Women Who Ate Stone Squid

I studied the virteo screen. The lander’s sensors jibed with what we’d probed from orbit these last weeks. Partial pressure of O₂ a hair below 1.3 bars—perfectly breathable and not quite concentrated enough to induce oxygen toxicity. CO₂ just about absent, with about 79 percent inert gases. At least that last bit was Earth-normal, though the nitrogen component was slightly reduced in favor of helium (wherever that was coming from) and some NO₂. The air was maybe not so good for human tissue over extended exposures, with humidity like an old bone stored in high orbit. This planet’s seabeds were as dry as Joan Carter’s Mars, but local conditions had held stable since I’d grounded, oh, fourteen hours ago.

Carter was on my mind a lot. The rest of the crew-monkeys back up there in orbit had always said I was crazy, reading stuff from the Years Before. Even my sweetie, Dr. Sheldon, thought it was a bit much. But when we got here—Malick’s World—even though I was a mere enlisted-grade localspace pilot, I was the only woman on the ship who had the least idea about alien ruins.

Everything I knew about lost civilizations I learned from Edgar Rice Burroughs, but that was still far more than the rest of my shipmates.

The comm squawked. I had it routed to the boards instead of my mastoid implant for the feel of the thing, like one of those old-time astronauts—Hanna Reitsch or Laika the Sovcomm. “You all checked out yet, Ari?”

It was Captain Pellas, of course. On board the Correct Thought Makes Correct Deed her word was most literally law. As it should be. But procedure said that the commander of a vessel exploring an unsecured environment had final authority over her ship and crew, as officer on scene. Detached command, it was called. Well, though I didn’t hold a commission in this sailor’s navy—just a rating, me—I was commander and the entire crew of the Sixth Virtue, Correct Thought’s number-two lander. And the only thing in space that trumped a captain’s word-of-law was procedure.

Which meant that until I made orbit again my course of action was my own decision. What a strange feeling, in this woman’s navy.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Obedience was an old habit, that and the fact she was my ride home. “All checked out, Captain.”

“Then I suggest you get on with it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Pellas had budgeted three ship-days to assess the first indisputable evidence of nonhuman intelligence ever encountered. I’d already used up most of one descending, and doing environmental assays on my immediate surroundings. Time to step outside and play Joan Carter. “Maintaining comm silence during my first recondo, ma’am.”

“We’ll track you.”

With three-centimeter software-adjusted optical resolution on Correct Thought’s main sensor suite, they certainly would track me. Combining that with my suit sensors, Pellas would know if I farted when I bent over.

I’d had the choice on descent of landing in the old seabed west of the developed shoreline, or atop the big pavers of the plaza that extended behind the docks into the middle of the city. There was no way to trust the stones of the plaza to take the lander’s eighty-odd tons of mass, even accounting for the slightly sub-Terran gravity and the soft-load plates Engineering had refitted on footpads to reduce ground pressure. On the other hand, the seabed was no more reliable… what showed up on sensors as solid ground could easily be a heavy clay crust over a slurry or a dust bowl.

I chose the plaza. For one, it captured my imagination. Even better, touching down in the city proper spared me the two-kilometer hike from the nearest sufficiently large and level bit of seabed, along with a three-hundred-meter climb.

Now I was stepping out to a place where—perhaps—feet had once stepped that belonged to no human being at all.

First I sealed my helmet and toggled the mike and the cams. Then I locked Sixth Virtue’s boards to Correct Thought’s nav-comm signal in case I didn’t make it back to the lander, recoded the hatch-access password in case someone else made it back instead of me, and slapped the open key.

A line of shadow slipped by me with the raising of the hatch, and the light of a new world flooded my face.

Orange. Maybe orange-maroon. Appropriate, somehow.

Still framed by the thick coaming of the hatch, I looked across the plaza. My breath caught hard in my throat. A new world.

New, but older than time itself.

Late afternoon flooded the scene with that oddly colored light, shadows falling at lazy angles. I could see an enormous building almost directly in front of me. Too-tall pillars rose from a curved row of bases to support a high-roofed portico. The front facing of the portico was carved with a dense frieze of figures, crowding in their dozens along each meter. Wide, shallow steps swept from porch to plaza, while the building extended wings to each side. Instead of windows, there were sort of vertical slits, almost the inverse of the pillars, every few meters in the facing. Large buildings of varying but similar architecture loomed to each side.

We’d mapped this from orbit. I knew to the meter how wide this plaza was. But seeing it…

I stepped lightly down Sixth Virtue’s three-rung ladder. Set my foot on time itself. For some reason, I wished for a cutlass like Joan’s.

“I can hear you breathing.” It was the captain, her voice nasty in my ears.

So much for comm silence. Lot of nerves up there in orbit. It was nice to know someone cared.

“Yes, ma’am.” I smiled inside my helmet. “The Barsoomian banths ain’t got me yet.”

“Keep to the mission profile, Ari.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Mission profile said enter one of the buildings without breaching existing barriers. In other words, use an open door or window, nothing that could be shut behind me. Look around for portable artifacts, preferably something representing technology or information storage or, ideally, both. Then capture as many images as I reasonably could in a short amount of time, and head back out to the lander.

1.3 bars of O₂. I could breathe here.

I pushed the traitor thought aside and concentrated on walking. Malick’s World tugged at me with .91 standard gs. It was just enough to give me a sense of floating with each stride and make me have to watch my step. This was a nickel-iron rockball of a planet amazingly like Earth except for the absent hydrosphere. And how long had those oceans been gone, I wondered? After all, this world boasted the intact ruins of a seaport and a still-breathable atmosphere—even without oceans or jungles to maintain the oxygen cycle.

What did one do with a few trillion tons of missing seawater, anyway?

I was a little over two hundred meters from my initial target, the pillared building due north of the lander. As I approached, I looked up at the carvings once more. They were hard to see, dense, complex, fractal even, with enough curves and bends to make my eyes ache, and shadows rendered bloody in the orange-maroon light. The carvings showed something a lot like people fighting something a lot like squid. A giant pelagic wrestling match.

No, I corrected myself, death match. There were plenty of dismemberings, spearings-through-the-groin (or cephalopodian mantle), berserk necrophagic frenzies and whatnot portrayed up there.

It seemed a curious choice for public art.

I slowed my pace and panned my helmet cam back and forth across the frieze. Even if these buildings had been formed by some bizarre geological process—one theory that had made the rounds in force back on Correct Thought—geological process didn’t spontaneously carve woman-eating squid. Squid-eating women?

Still, astonishing. My heart raced. This was how a species had seen itself, how it had thought about itself. Myth? Legend? History? Oh, Mother Burroughs, if only you were here now to see the Mars of your dreams.

At that thought, a crackle erupted in my helmet: “Why aren’t you moving?”

I realized I had stopped. It was the sheer, boggling wonder of it all.

“It’s a new world, Captain. These carvings are proof of it.”

“What carvings?”

Oops.

“Check my cam feed, ma’am.” I couldn’t take my eyes off them. She couldn’t even see them. Not good, that.

“I see a lot of rock, Ari.”

“No… ah… squid?”

“No. I suggest you return to the lander now.”

“Ah…” I considered that one, quickly. I didn’t feel delusional. But would I if I was? I was still breathing suit air, so there weren’t environmental pathogens tweaking me. Could it be a virteo resolution problem or something? “Ma’am, I’m just going up on that porch to look through the doors.”

“Get back to the lander.”

“In a minute, Captain.”

“Petty Officer Russdottir… that’s an order.”

“Detached command, ma’am.” I started walking again.

“It is my judgment that you are at risk of becoming unfit for command.”

Eyes on the stone squid, I giggled. “Then Dr. Sheldon can examine me to certify that fact at her next convenience.” Not that I minded being examined by Dr. Sheldon. As often as possible. I giggled some more. “As per procedures, ma’am.”

The silence that followed told me how much trouble I’d be in once I returned to orbit, but… would I ever have this kind of opportunity again? Not a chance, not by the Great Mother’s shorts. High command would either seal this discovery over or flood it with doctoral nerds from high-credit universities like New Tübingen and Oxford-at-Secundus. Little old industrial-zone girls like me weren’t never coming back here, except maybe as taxi drivers and cooks.

I didn’t want to think about that anymore, so I turned off my helmet audio. And hey, I was at the steps!

My helmet crackled back to life. Override from orbit. What the hell happened to my detached command, anyway?

It was Sheldon. “Ari,” she said. “Sweetie. Please. I know you can hear me. Stop walking and think.”

Up the steps. Too low, too long, maybe ten cents a riser but two meters on the tread. Somebody had wanted people to enter this building in an unsettled state of mind. Either that or they had really weird feet.

Tentacles.

No… I let that thought bleed from my head like oxygen from a jammed valve.

“Ari, dear. Listen. Something’s going wrong. I don’t want to lose you like this.” Her breath caught. “Captain is putting together a rescue team, but you don’t want to endanger your friends, do you?”

“Bullshit,” I sang. Sheldon might be my lover, but she was commissioned and I wasn’t. Her lies were always for the good of the ship. The whole reason for sending me in the number-two lander was because we were both disposable. Gunny Heloise’s expensive string of musclegirls weren’t going to do a combat drop to fish me out of the arms of some fucking stone squid.

Had I said all that aloud?

“Ari, please, you’re leaving camera range…”

“Good!” I took a deep breath and popped my helmet free. There was a slight sucking noise as it came loose. I turned and hurled it back out into the plaza, where it bounced a little too slowly, with an odd ringing echo. Air density and composition a little off, I thought. Sound waves didn’t propagate quite right.

Time to breathe the air of this world. Joan Carter, I am here. I released my breath, drew in a new one, and let the smells and scents of another civilization flood into me on a river of oxygen.

Mostly it tasted like a granite plaza at night, though, oddly, there was an after-rain tang to the air.

Hand on the hilt of my cutlass, I stepped into the shadows looking for traces of the women who ate stone squid.

Inside was tall, horribly tall. The walls and ceiling were proportioned wrong. It was as if the same architect who’d designed those too-shallow steps had turned her plans sideways and stretched the building upward. That same damp granite smell tickled my nose, like must newly released from a long-forgotten freight canister.

Age and rot, even in this dry place.

My boots clicked against the worn flagstones as I walked on, accompanied only by echoes.

Pillars rose around me, covered with the same frantic, disturbing carvings that had decorated the portico outside. I walked toward one, touched the pillar with the point of my cutlass. It rang like honest stone, but when I tried to brush that bit of carving with my gloved hand, somehow it wasn’t exactly where I had thought it should be.

“Not quite dead, are you?” I shouted.

They… whoever they were… had looked like me. Human enough for me to care. Like Joan with her Red Woman lovers on old Barsoom. The… squid… were everywhere. Detailed. Frightening. Real. Had it been the squid that drank the oceans dry?

Had it been the squid who built this city?

That thought scared me into walking again. This place must have been built by humans. Must have.

I bent to adjust my greaves, and my thoat-leather fighting harness. Nothing fit me quite right today. Like the very air itself, everything was subtly wrong. And where the hell were the monsters? At least these were squid, not something so seemingly human as the rykor-riding kaldanes that had taken Joan’s daughter from her.

The injustice of the world boiled within me as I stalked between a pair of the overtall pillars, cutlass trembling in my hand. Something, someone, had consumed the women of this world, sisters to me at least as much as the Red Women had been sisters to Joan Carter. They had been drunk dry, to desiccate along with their oceans.

Then I found one of my world-sisters, of the stone squid-eating women, curled in a corner. She’d died here long ago. Her body was a husk wrapped in robes crumbling from dry rot. I could not tell what race she had been, she was so decayed, but I preferred to believe her a Red Woman rather than one of the degenerate Therns or First Born.

She had died here to warn me of the stone squid.

I heard a squawk: “Ari.”

I whirled, cutlass ready, wishing I had my radium pistol. Had I left it behind on my airship? Some enemy must be clouding my mind. I was never this slow of thought.

“Sweetie, can you hear me?” It was a woman’s voice, weak and quavering as women will be when confronted with the sharp end. I circled again, but could not find her. Magic, then, or some ancient machine sparked to life in this temple.

She went on: “We’ve overridden your implant. Sixth Virtue’s relay is homed in on your carrier. Ari… please… I know you’re alive. You’ve got to come out of that building, right now. Please, sweetie.”

“No tears, woman,” I shouted. Something was wrong with my voice! It was high and thin, with a reedy quaver. I had indeed been somehow ensorcelled. I knelt to search my dead sister for help, parting her robes with a muttered apology.

So much hair on that poor dead one’s chest, I thought. She must have struggled with an overactive testosterone level. And her breasts… gone. Cancer?

Her?

What would a woman be doing here? He.

He?

Where had that word come from?

“Ari! Captain Pellas is authorizing a retrieval drop. Listen carefully. Can you get a signal out to us?”

I ignored her.

Then his robes fell completely open. His clitoris, dry as the rest of him, had grotesquely hypertrophied in life. Inches long, perhaps. And his breasts… the poor dear must have had a radical. Common enough in space.

Space?

His clit?

My free hand strayed to the lower skirt of my fighting harness. Checking.

“Sweetie. They’re launching immediately. Be down in twenty-five minutes or so. Please, if you can hear me, sit tight.”

I had an awful moment, my chest seizing cold and tight as my hand groped air between my thighs. Where was my… my…

Him? What the hell was a him? What the hell was I thinking? Animals were bedeviled with y-chromosome carriers. Humans, blessed by evolution and intelligence, had moved beyond that particular genetic disorder. Everybody knew it. There hadn’t been a natural-born male human since the days of Herad the Great—she’d put the last of the poor, damned mutants mercifully to death back the first of Years Before.

“I’m… I’m in some kind of trouble,” I said aloud.

“We’re coming, dear. Fast as we can.”

A door opened before me. A four-armed warrior in battle harness loomed, cock swinging between his legs like an animal’s. Then he was struck down from behind. A beautiful woman, of the Red race—a true princess of Helium, I realized—peered inward, bloody sword gripped firm. “Come,” she called, extending her free hand, “quickly.”

“Hold on, sweetheart,” the bodiless voice said within my ear.

I looked down at the corpse. Who could bear to live in a world of such horrible defectives, mutant in body, mind, and metabolism?

Thoat harnesses jingled behind the princess. A cold wind chattered. All I had to do was step forward, into every world I’d ever dreamed of. Except for the… men.

“Come.”

“Stay with us.”

The voice of dream called me on, the voice of love bade me stay. The voice of reason screamed somewhere deep inside me. Eyes clouding with tears, I hurled my cutlass at the princess. Somehow both startled and sorrowful, she withdrew, leaving me alone with an ancient male corpse. I huddled next to my dead sister—for even with a cock and a beard, she was still my sister—and waited for my rescue to arrive.

Far too soon, something slithered wet and huge upon the stone floor behind me, but I had already given away my weapons and returned bare-handed to the world my mothers had made. Instead I took the dead woman’s hand and waited to see who would find me first.

Looking for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder ^{WITH KEN SCHOLES}

Ten years after my parents died, my therabot, Bob, informed me that I should seek help elsewhere. I blinked at his suggestion.

“I’ve already tried chemical intervention,” I told his plastic grin. “It didn’t work.” I scowled, but that did nothing to de-brighten his soothing, chipper voice.

“Booze doesn’t count, Charlie.”

“I tried weed, too.”

Bob shook his head. “Nothing therapeutic there, either, I’m afraid.” He sighed and imitated the movements of pushing himself back from his imitation-wood desk. “You are experiencing what we like to call complicated grief.”

Complicated grief. As if I hadn’t heard that one before.

Dad had died badly. He’d been on one of the trains that got swallowed by the Sound back on the day we lost Seattle. He’d called me from his cell phone with his last breath, as the water poured in, to let me know he wasn’t really my father.

We lost the signal before he could tell me who actually was. Naturally, I called Mom. She answered just before the ceiling of the store she was shopping in collapsed.

Both parents in one day. Fuck yes, complicated grief.

And a side helping of unknown paternity.

Bob continued. “Ten years is a long time, Charlie. I want you to call this number and ask for Pete.” His eyes rolled in their sockets as his internal processors accessed his files. My phone chirped when his text came through. He extended a plastic tentacle tipped with a three-fingered white clown’s glove. “I hope you find your way.”

I scowled again and shook his offered hand. “So you’re firing me as a patient?”

“Be well,” he said. His eyes went dead and his hand dropped back to the artificial oak surface of his desk.

I met Pete in an alley on the back of Valencia, behind an old bookstore that still dealt in paper. I transferred funds to an offshore account that then moved it along, scrubbing the transaction as it passed through its various stops along the way before his phone chirped. When it chirped, he extended a smart-lock plastic bag to me. A small, withered blue thing sloshed about in it. At first, I thought it was a severed finger or something far worse. (Or better, depending upon one’s fetishes.) I held the bag up to the flickering light of the dirty streetlamp.

The blue thing looked like an asparagus tip, only it wriggled.

“Find someplace safe and quiet,” Pete said. “Preferably indoors with a lock. Eat it with water.”

“I’m not putting this in my mouth.”

Pete shrugged. He was a scrawny kid, his tattooed face stubbly in the dim light, long red hair cascading over his shoulders. “Doesn’t matter to me. But the wild blue yonder is especially good for your situation. Complicated grief, right?” I nodded because his eyes—one brown and one bright yellow—told me that he probably knew it from experience. “Eat this. Spend a weekend sweating and naked on the floor. You’ll be a new man.”

“Naked and sweating?” I looked at the bag again, then back to Pete. “And how do you know Bob?” I couldn’t imagine a therabot needing a dealer.

Pete smiled. “We’re colleagues.”

“Colleagues?”

The smile widened even further. “I’m a back-alley grief counselor.”

Slipping my wild blue yonder into my pocket, I left Pete in his alley and turned myself toward home.

I ate the wild blue yonder and stripped down in my living room. I put on some retro music—Zeppelin, I think—and stretched out on the floor.

It worked fast.

Light and sound from within me, building in magnitude until the nausea clenched my stomach and I sat up. My living room had become a purple field beneath swollen stars. Something like crickets sang all around and I saw a girl sitting on a stump in the middle of the clearing. In the distance, deep blue trees swayed under a windless summer-night sky.

“You must be Charlie,” she said.

I was naked still, but for some reason I was unafraid and unashamed. “I am,” I told her, standing. “Who are you? And where am I at?”

“I’m Verity.” She tossed her long brown hair and batted the lids of her big brown eyes. “And you are in the wild blue yonder.”

She wore a silver gown that flowed like mercury over the curves of her body. When she stood up too, I saw she was taller than me by at least a foot. “I’m sorry about your mother,” she said, “and the man you thought was your father.”

I blinked. “How do you know all of this?”

She shrugged. “I’m Verity.”

We stood there, looking at each other, as an enormous moon rose to the south. A minute passed. “So how does this work?” I asked.

“Simple. I run. You chase me.”

And then she ran.

As Pink Floyd said, I ran like hell. Or maybe I chased like hell. I didn’t give a shit about Pete anymore. Or Bob. Or all the lost millions in the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii, Japan, and everywhere the sea had come crawling up onto land with bloody salted fingers and needle teeth.

Verity ran before me. With her she carried the hard burden of truth like a seed in the claws of a nuthatch. Her legs sped over this strange blue landscape as perfect as I’d ever seen on a woman. Michelangelo would have cried to sculpt her. I would have cried to catch her.

But it wasn’t that perfect ass I craved. It wasn’t those high, firm breasts that I could imagine bobbing with each leaping step. It wasn’t that trailing hair that I could wrap around my body.

She carried me: my past and my future.

How the hell had Pete known to give this to me; how had this wild blue yonder reached so far into time and my soul?

My thoughts fell aside as she ran. Reason gave way to desire. Logic yielded to need. The chase gave way to the run. The ground vanished. We sprinted across a stark, unyielding field of stars. They flared, dying as every hydrogen cycle eventually does, all of time compressed in a dozen falls of those perfect feet; then we ran through the salt sea, the world-girding amnion that had birthed all of evolution’s ambitions. The seas boiled and dried and vanished in wispy, weeping gases; we ran on roads of light, leaping from quantum packet to quantum packet.

Across time, across space, across the seventy-two acres of my neural net, until sufficient self-awareness finally returned to me for me to understand I would never catch up to the truth by chasing it. Grief is the Grendel-monster in the watery cave of the human heart. I pursued Grendel’s mother, and she would have her vengeance on me if I dispatched her son.

So I stopped, caught in a moment of wisdom, and let Verity the cup bearer of my grief come to me. The universe is circular, after all, endless in the manner of an egg, and if you wait long enough your own light will come back to you.

In ceasing my chase of Verity, she soon ran into my arms.

We collapsed in a tangle of limbs and clothing amid lush mounds of mint and violets. Scent, suddenly the world was scent; and the sweet smell of Verity’s sweat, which made me want to turn to her and place my lips upon the yoke of her neck and breathe her in.

Think, man, think. You’re not here for this.

“You caught me,” she whispered, and her tongue slipped into my ear.

I wriggled away. “We’re not doing that chase, either.”

“What do you want, Charlie?” Her breath was a furnace of passion warming me down to bones I’d forgotten I ever had.

“Truth,” I said. The answer surprised me.

“No one wants truth, Charlie. They want certainty. They want forgiveness. They want love. Truth is like a dead city, a million watery graves. It doesn’t compromise and it gives nothing back.”

“Relief.” This time I almost sobbed the word. “I want relief.”

“From truth?”

Truth. Who was my dad? What had my mom meant by this? Whose lie had determined the pattern of my life? Had Mom cheated on Dad? Had he come along after she was pregnant with me, and accepted another man’s get as his own child?

I slowly realized that it didn’t matter. The ghosts of the past ten years, what Bob had so patiently (as if a machine could be otherwise) talked me through, past, around, away from, out from beneath: those ghosts were of my own making.

Mom’s unquiet spirit might haunt the desolate ruins of Auburn, Washington, sleeping beneath the hard, frozen waters. Dad’s fetch might ride the rusted rails beneath the Puget Sea. So what?

“I live today,” I told Verity.

“Is that the truth?”

“We can only go forward.” I set my hand upon her breast, cupping the firm nipple through the flowing silver of her dress.

“I’m not real,” she whispered in my ear again.

Tell that to my gonads, I thought, but that didn’t matter now. “Is this what I was supposed to find?” She touched my hand, the curves of her flesh proud but not overflowing my grip, and I ached to draw her clothing away and set my lips to suckling.

“You came into this world damp and frightened. Your parents left this world damp and frightened.”

“Even my dad?” I meant my biological father, the progenitor that Dad had almost told me about before being erased under a billion gallons of seawater.

It was just a splash, really, good news from outer space. Even if the clouds hadn’t dissipated for three years after.

“Even your dad,” she said. “Him.”

So Dad-the-sperm-donor had been in the Northwest, too. Or Hawaii. Or coastal Alaska. Or Japan. Or on a ship at sea.

I hoped all three of their ghosts were happy somewhere, around some spiritual campfire trading stories about the boy I’d been. I wished them well, the love of each other, and even the love of me.

The past belonged to them, swept away along with the legacy of a sixth of the planet.

The future belonged to, well, maybe not me, but at the least, to itself.

Roger Waters wailed from my speakers. I swear it had been Robert Plant when I first tripped out. I lay flat, drained. My thigh was sticky where I’d come at some point. I looked down to find my torso covered with blue lip prints.

Lipstick?

I touched myself and flinched. No. Hickeys. What kind of drug trip left you with hickeys, for the love of god?

Aching, I dragged myself to my feet, turned down the stereo, and stepped into my kitchenette for some apple juice. Something was missing. Something was wrong.

I probed my thoughts, like a tongue questing for a missing tooth.

Grief.

My parents were still present in my absence. But the paralyzing pain, the near-total abrogation of self and initiative, seemed to be gone finally. After all these years. Was this what normal life was like? No wonder Bob had fired me.

As for Pete, the back-alley grief counselor, I owed him everything.

Heading for the tiny bedroom, I noticed something out of place in my living room as well. I stopped to look around. A woman’s silver dress was draped across the back of my couch, as if stripped in a moment of wild passion. I touched the hickeys again.

What was real?

What was true?

Something stirred in the next room. A wall of seawater finally come to claim me as well? Or the future, waiting with bruised lips and the longest legs I’d ever seen on a woman?

With a silent thanks to Bob and Pete, I stepped into the wild blue yonder, looking for truth. Or at least whatever might come next.

I was finally done with what had come before.