Starmind

1 Provincetown, Massachusetts 1 December 2064

Rhea Paixao was considered odd even by other writers. But some things are universal. Like most of her colleagues, Rhea got some of her best writing done in the bathroom.

And this was her favorite bathroom. She stopped in the doorway and examined it before entering. She had known it since earliest childhood, and the passage of time and changing fashions had altered it very little.

True, it now contained a modern toilet and bath; there was such a thing as carrying quaintness too far. But the wall opposite her was simply that, a wall, not programmable in any way: it displayed nothing, could not even become a mirror. An actual silvered-glass mirror hung on the wall, over the sink, its image speckled and distorted by surface impurities. Between mirror and sink, offset to the left, was a widget that had once been used to hold toothbrushes and a plastic cup of germ culture. Farther to the left was an antique cast-iron radiator, unused in decades. The sink itself had mechanical taps, two of them, completely uncalibrated; one had to adjust the flow-rate and temperature by hand with each use. There was a depression behind the rim meant to hold a decomposing lump of phosphate soap. And slung beneath the sink was an antique seldom seen anymore in 2064: a spring-loaded roller intended to hold a roll of toilet paper. (There was no roll there now, of course—but there had been for years after people stopped using the horrid stuff. Nana Fish had insisted on it. Even after she had broken down and accepted modern plumbing, Nana had insisted on keeping a roll of the Stone Age tissue handy, “just in case.” She went back to the days when machinery used to fail all the time.) Every time Rhea saw that roller, she wanted to giggle.

The room was, in fact, almost a microcosm of the town around it. From its earliest days, Provincetown had always conceded as little as possible to the passing of years, changing only with the greatest reluctance and even then pretending not to. That had been the town’s—most of Cape Cod’s—stock in trade for centuries now… and a good living there was in it, too. Even in these days, when “progress” was no longer quite as dirty a word as it had once been, there were still people who would pay handsomely for the illusion of an allegedly simpler time. P-Town, as the natives called it, was tailor-made for the role.

She stepped into the bathroom and let the door close behind her. No terminal in here, no phone, rotten ventilation—it was possible to make the mirror steam up—and nothing in the room accepted voice commands. In here, all three avatars of the house’s AI were blind, deaf, mute and impotent. The wind outside was clearly audible through the walls. Rhea loved this bathroom more than even she suspected. She had plotted out at least three books here, and worked on a thousand poems, songs, articles and stories. At age fifteen, she had renounced Catholicism forever in this very room… sitting on that same oaken toilet seat over there!

Just like that, a perfectly good story idea popped into her head—

She gave it a lidded glance, not wanting to seem too interested, and sauntered to the toilet. It followed her, and her pulse quickened. Studiously ignoring the idea, she urinated, let the commode cleanse and dry her, and went to the sink. Again it was at her shoulder. She used her dental mouthwash, making a rude production of it, and spat noisily into the porcelain sink. The idea did not take offense.

She continued to ignore it, studied herself in the mirror. Still a couple of years to go before her fortieth birthday. Black hair, black eyes that others called “flashing,” coffee-with-cream complexion. Exotic high-cheeked Portuguese features that always reminded Rhea of old 2-D pictures of Nana Fish as a girl, back in the twentieth century, an impression reinforced by the old-fashioned nightgown and robe she wore now. She ran water and splashed some on her face, rubbing especially at her eyes and cheeks and lips as though her makeup could be washed off, a childhood habit so trivial it wasn’t worth unlearning. Colly was asleep, and Rand was not expecting her back in the bedroom any time soon so far as she knew; there was time to dally at least briefly with the idea. She studied it out of the corner of her eye: a short-story idea probably, really no more than a situation—but one she knew she could do something good with.

For Rhea’s kind of writer, plot and theme and even character were always secondary, mere craftsmanship, constructed as needed to flesh out the story. For her, the heart of a story, the first flash that impelled and enabled her to dream up all the rest, was always that special suffering called “antinomy.” “Conflict between two propositions which seem equally urgent and necessary,” as a professor of hers had once defined it. The juncture between a rock and some hard place. The place right out at the very tip of the sharpest point on the horns of a dilemma. Give someone an impossible choice, and then you had a story. Once the Muse revealed to you a deliciously impossible choice, you could begin deciding what sort of person would squirm most revealingly when confronted with it, and from that you could infer your theme, which gave you your plot.

This idea, for instance…

It had been born in that brief flash of recollection she’d had as she first walked into the bathroom, of the long-ago night when fifteen-year-old Rhea had made up her mind in the privacy of this very room that she wasn’t scared, dammit, Catholicism was bullshit, there was no God. As the adult Rhea had remembered that night, and thought of the Catholic Church for the first time in years, she’d been reminded of an artistically beautiful tragedy she knew about and had never exploited dramatically before.

Donny—Mr. Hansen—and Patty. She could no longer recall Patty’s last name. Mr. Hansen had been Rhea’s Sunday School teacher, twenty-three and gorgeous and devout in his faith, and every girl in the class had had a crush on him, but they all knew it was hopeless. Donny Handsome (as they called him, giggling, among themselves) was blatantly and terminally in love with Patty, who was also twenty-three, and just as gorgeous and devout, and just as clearly daffy about him. Together they were so beautiful—their love was so beautiful to see—that the girls in Mr. Hansen’s class actually forgave her for existing.

Then, a single week before they were to be married, Patty had announced that God had called her to be a nun.

Teenage Rhea had been transfixed by Mr. Hansen’s dilemma. He was a good Catholic to the soles of his feet. According to the rules he lived by, he was not even allowed to be sad. Not only could he not argue with Patty, try to change her mind… he was not allowed to want to. It was his spiritual duty to rejoice for his beloved, and the special grace she had been granted. He had, in the metaphorical terms of his church, been jilted for Christ, and was expected to smile as he gave away the bride.

That had been the beginning of the end of Rhea’s faith: seeing Donny Handsome stumble around P-Town like a zombie, smiling aimlessly. She had refused to believe that the universe and butterflies could have been made by so sadistic a God. Now, why hadn’t she ever thought to convert such a splendidly awful antinomy into a story before?

Her craft-mind went to work on the idea now. Just put it down, as it had happened? No, it was always best to change it in the telling, she found: the way it changed told you what was most important to keep. Besides, that made it art and not journalism. Did she need the Catholicism angle, for instance? Or could she change it to some other, equally inflexible faith? With celibate clergy… hmmmm, weren’t a lot of those left anymore these days. Weren’t a lot of Catholics left, for that matter. Maybe it didn’t even need to have religion in it at all. But if not, what else had that same implacable weight?

She tried an old trick. Refine it all down to a single sentence: the sentence that the suffering protagonist screams (even if only inside) at the moment that the point enters the belly. Then throw out everything that doesn’t lead inexorably to that scream. Okay, what was Donny Handsome’s scream?

My beloved, how can you want to go where I cannot follow?

In the instant of that crystallization, Rhea knew what the story was really about… and knew that she could not write it. No matter how she disguised it dramatically. Not yet. And maybe never.

She told the story idea to get lost. Until she knew what its ending was.

She went to the window—missing the sudden chill that used to come from December windows when she was a little girl—and pulled aside the ancient curtain to look out at the night. And was rewarded. In the distance, above the shadowy housetops of P-Town, the silhouette of the Pilgrim Monument showed clearly against the night sky, an eighty-five-meter tower of grey granite—and poised beside it, midway up its length, seeming to be only meters from its crenulated stone windows, was a brilliant crescent moon. The juxtaposition was weirdly beautiful, quintessential Provincetown magic. Rhea became conscious of her breath. It swept her mind clear—of the captive story idea and her ongoing concerns and the day’s cares and her self. She watched without thought for a timeless time, long enough for the moon to climb perceptibly higher up the Monument.

She became aware of herself then, and let the curtain fall closed. She felt a sudden close connection with the child she had once been in this room, in this house, in this town. More than that, deeper than that—a connection with the family that had raised her here, and with their forebears, fishermen and fishermen’s wives, back seven or eight generations to old Frank Henrique Paixao, who had gone over the side of a Portuguese whaler in a two-man dory off Newfoundland one cold day in 1904. He and his partner Louis Tomaz had successfully gotten themselves lost in the fog, miraculously survived to reach Glace Bay in Cape Breton, landed there without formalities or paperwork, and somehow made their way overland across the border and down the coast to Massachusetts, eventually fetching up in P-Town. The cod fishing there was as good as they had heard. After five years or so, both men had sent for their families back in Portugal, and settled down to founding dynasties in the New World—just as the Pilgrim Monument was being raised.

Rhea felt that Frank’s wife Marion must have seen the Monument and moon looking just like this more than once, and could not help listening for the echo of her ancestor’s thoughts. She heard only the sighing of night winds outside.

She sighed in accompaniment, went to the mirror and ran a brush through her hair. She was ready to join Rand in bed. A month he’d been home already, and she was just getting used to having him around again. Every home should have a husband. She shut off the light with a wall switch and left the bathroom, walked down the short hallway to the bedroom. In her mind’s eye she was still seeing the slow dance of Monument and moon in the crisp cold starlight as she opened the bedroom door and stepped into the New Mexico desert at high noon.

Rhea was so startled she closed the door by backing into it. The sudden sense of distance, of vast expanse, was as staggering as the sudden brightness. The horizon was unimaginably far away; she saw a distant dark smudge, bleeding purple from beneath onto the ground below, and realized it was a thunderstorm large enough to drench a county. Between her and the horizon were endless miles of painted desert, broken occasionally by foothills and jagged rock outcroppings; close at hand were scrub hills and cacti and a dry wash. Right before her was an oasis, a natural watering hole. Beside it was an old-fashioned wooden bedframe with a curved solid oak headboard and a thick mattress. On the bed reclined one of Rhea’s favorite holostars, dressed only in black silk briefs. He was nearly two meters tall, as dark as her, and glistening with perspiration or oil. He was holding out a canteen toward her, smiling invitingly.

She discovered she was thirsty. Hot in this desert. She stepped forward and accepted the canteen. The hand that offered it was warm. He was real, then. Icy cold water, sweet and pure. He looked even better up close. She handed back the canteen. He moved over to make room. She let the robe fall from her shoulders and drop to the sand. His eyes went up and down her slowly, as she took off the nightgown and dropped that too. She stepped out of her slippers; the sand felt strangely furry. She spun around once, taking in the vast silent desert that receded into infinity in all directions, and leaped into the bed. That started it bouncing, and it did not stop for some time.

She nearly drifted into sleep afterward, the desert sun warm on her back and buttocks and legs. But an inner voice caused her to rouse herself and nudge her celebrity companion. Might as well get it over with. “That was really wonderful, darling,” she said sleepily. “All of it. But really—purple rain?”

His famous features melted and ran, becoming the familiar face of her husband. His hair lightened to red and his complexion to fair. “No, honest—I’ve seen it, outside of Santa Fe. Near the pueblos. Just that color. I’ve wanted to show it to you.” Rand reached out a lazy arm, did something complicated to nothing at all in mid-air, and the desert sun diminished sharply in brightness without leaving the center of the sky. The effect was of a partial eclipse: twilight with the shadows in the wrong places. Power of suggestion made the temperature seem to drop, or perhaps he had dialed that, too; they slid under the covers together.

“I’m glad you did,” she said, snuggling. “It’s lovely.” She looked around at the dusky desert, noting small excellences of detail. An eagle to the east, gliding majestically. Intricate cactus flowers, no two quite alike. Ripples on the surface of the water in the oasis, seeming to be wind-driven. Microfilaments of lightning, convincingly random, flickering in that distant purple rain. “This is the best one yet. Is the music this far along too?”

He shook his head. “Just some ideas, so far. But having the basic visual will help.”

“I’m sure it will. It was a beautiful gift, really. The set and the sex. Thank you.”

He grinned. “You’re welcome. I’m glad you liked it.”

“Very much. So… what’s the catch?”

“Catch?” he asked innocently.

The reason she knew there was a catch was because it was not possible for her husband to conceal something important from her, not while making love. But she could not let him know that, so she made up a logic-chain. “It’s not our anniversary. It’s not my birthday. I don’t keep score, but I don’t think I’ve been unusually nice to you lately. You’re not having an affair; you haven’t had time. It was a wonderful present and I thank you for it, and”—she grinned and poked him in the ribs—“what is it going to cost me?”

He opened his mouth as if to say something, changed his mind, and reached out into the empty air beside the bed again, typing new commands onto his invisible keyboard. The desert went away. So did everything, except the bed and themselves. All at once they were in space, surrounded by blackness and blazing stars, tumbling slowly end over end. High Orbit: the Earth swam into their field of view, huge and blue and frosted with clouds. The illusion was so powerful that Rhea felt herself clutching at the bed to keep from drifting away from it, even though she knew better. All at once the rotating universe burst into song. Rand’s fourth symphony, of course, as familiar to her as her name. He muted the sound with a gesture after a few bars, left the visual running.

It was her heart plummeting; that was what made the illusion of free-fall seem so real. “But—but you’re not going up again for another eight months—”

“Things have changed, love,” he said. “I mean, really changed. Sit down.”

“Sit down? I’m lying down, what the hell do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

She lay back. “Okay, I’m ‘sitting down.’ Go on.”

“My brother called. While I was down at the shore a while ago.”

“Oh? How is Jay? Cancel that, I don’t give a damn how he is: what did he say?”

“Pribhara bombed. Big-time. She hates space, the customers hate her—even the company hates her new work. But most important of all, she says she just can’t adapt. She’s a born perpendicular. So she’s thrown in the towel… a few seconds before they would have yanked it out of her hand.”

Rhea was confused. She knew there was a booby-trap in this somewhere, but couldn’t find one big enough to justify all this buildup yet. “So that’s good news, right? Now there are only three of you competing—”

“It goes beyond that,” he said, looking uncomfortable. He dithered with his invisible controls until their shared rotation in space slowed and stopped. The starry universe stabilized around them.

She took a deep breath. “Tell me.”

“The competition is over,” he said. “I won.”

“What?” she cried in dismay. “You won?”

It was only that: a misplaced emphasis. Had she said, “You won?” there might not have been a quarrel at all. That night, at least.

Rand had been one of four competitors for a plum position: Co-Artistic Director and Resident Shaper/Composer at the legendary Shimizu Hotel, the first hotel in High Earth Orbit and still by far the grandest. The creator and first holder of that position had held it with great distinction for fifty years—then a year ago, both he and his heir apparent had been killed in the same freak blowout while vacationing off Luna. Replacing an artist of Willem Ngani’s stature overnight had been a daunting task: the management of the hotel had narrowed the field to four candidates, and then found itself unable to reach a final decision. It had elected instead to postpone the question for a three-year trial period. The first year of that period was nearly over: each of the four candidates in turn had gone to space for a three-month residency at the Shimizu. Rand had drawn the third shift, and had only returned from his own highly successful season a month earlier; the fourth and final composer, Chandra Pribhara, was supposed to be just now entering the second month of her own first residency.

But Pribhara had turned out to be a “perpendicular”—one of those rare unfortunates who simply cannot adapt to space, who cannot make the mental readjustment that allows a human being to retain her sanity in a sustained zero-gravity environment. She had abruptly canceled her contract after only a single month in free-fall, accepting the huge penalties and creative disgrace, and returned to Earth early.

This left the Shimizu’s management with a quick decision to make. A hotel must have entertainment. The show must go on. The Resident Choreographer—Rand’s half-brother Jay Sasaki—needed a Shaper to collaborate with. Someone had to replace Pribhara, fast. They might have simply advanced the rotation schedule, summoned Wolfgar Mazurski back to orbit two months earlier than he was expecting, and continued from there on a three-shift rotation while they pondered their final decision. But Mazurski had other commitments, and so did Choy Mu Sandra, the other contender.

Which left Rhea’s husband.

But Rand was only just back from orbit. Returning to space for another three-month shift this soon would raise his total free-fall time to six months in one calendar year: very likely enough time for his body to begin adapting—completely and permanently—to zero gravity. It would take fourteen months for the transition to be finished… but deleterious metabolic changes often began much sooner. If they asked him to replace Pribhara now, the competition was over: they would have to give him the permanent position to forestall a costly lawsuit.

The Shimizu management had little choice. And Rand’s first season had been the most well-received of the four so far. So they had sent word, through his half brother, Jay. The job was his if he wanted it—along with a scandalous salary, outrageous perks, immense cachet and luxury accommodations in-house for himself and his wife and daughter. For life—which was how long they would need them.

Rhea hated the very thought of moving.

And if she were going to move, space was the very last place she’d pick. The only one-way ticket there was. Fourteen months or more in space, and you had to stay there forever. You couldn’t even hope to go back home again someday…

Worse, Rand knew all this. Or at least, he should have known. A decade ago, he had solemnly promised Rhea—as a condition of marriage—that he would never ask her to move away from her beloved P-Town, from her home and family and roots.

When he had first mentioned the possibility of this job, she had been shocked and hurt. But she had not reminded him of his promise… partly because she loved her husband and knew how badly he wanted the job, and mostly because she knew in her heart that there was no way Rand would ever actually be offered it. That had been clear to her from the start. For one thing, his blood relationship with Jay would work against him—allowing disgruntled losers to cry nepotism. For another, he was the most talented of the four—traditionally a handicap. To nail it down, he was by far the least political—traditionally the kiss of death.

Ironically, it was that which had clinched the deal. Mazurski and Choy each had a powerful and influential clique of friends, skilled at vicious infighting: they canceled each other out. Rand was the only choice everybody could (barely) live with. And so it was the very same aspect of her husband’s character which had in fact won him the job that caused Rhea to say to him now so injudiciously, “You won?”

The ensuing quarrel was so satisfactory a diversion that it was a full hour before they got around to the actual argument they had been avoiding for over a year now.

“God dammit, Rhea, just tell me: what’s so awful about space?”

“What’s so fucking good about it?”

“Are you kidding? Sterile environment, pure air, pure water, perfect weather all day every day, no crime, no dirt, longer lifespan—and weightlessness! You don’t know, honey, you haven’t been there long enough to get a feeling for it; everything is so easy and convenient and restful in space. Nothing is too heavy to lift, nobody’s a weakling, your back never hurts. And the freedom! Freedom from the boredom and tyranny of up and down, freedom to live in three dimensions for a change! To use all of a room instead of just the bottom half—to see things from different angles all the time—to let go of something and not be afraid gravity’s going to smash it against the wall by your feet. Put that all together, throw in a better class of neighbors and the best view God ever made, and it doesn’t sound half bad to me.”

“It sounds horrible to me! The same weather, every day? The first thing you said: ‘a sterile environment,’ that’s exactly what it sounds like. Living in a little sterile tin can surrounded by cold vacuum, breathing canned air and peeing into a vacuum cleaner. What about Colly? Where’s an eight-year-old going to find playmates in space? Think about never again going out for a walk, never getting rained on or snowed on or going to watch the sun rise—”

“—the sun rises fourteen times a day at the Shimizu—”

“—it’s not the same and you know it—”

“—no, it’s not the same, it’s better—”

“—bullshit—”

“—how the hell would you know? You were up there for three whole days! I’m telling you, I’ve been there for three months and it’s better—”

“—maybe it is, but it’s different, God dammit—”

He flinched at her vehemence. After a few seconds of silence, he slapped at his control panel, and set the universe spinning around them again. “What’s so bad about different?”

She reached irritably past him and felt for the keyboard, found it and quit the holo program abruptly. Blink: they were in their quaint comfortable moonlit bedroom in their magnificent old home in picturesque P-Town. “What’s so bad about what we have?” she cried, gesturing around her at hardwood floor and lace curtains and quilted comforter and scrimshaw and Frank Paixao’s barometer and fading photographs of Nana Fish and Nana Spaghetti on the walls.

He looked round, at the familiar trappings of their marriage, of their shared life. When he spoke, his voice was softer. “It’s good. You know I love it here too. But it’s not all there is.”

“It is for me!” she said. Oh my beloved, how can you want to go where I cannot follow?

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and played his hole card. “It isn’t for me.”

She clutched his shoulder and played her own. “You promised, Rand! Back when you first asked me to marry you, you promised…”

There was nothing he could say to that, because it was true. She had him dead to rights. The argument was effectively over, now. She had won…

…and cost her beloved husband the professional and personal opportunity of a lifetime, the crowning achievement of his career…

He nodded, and rolled over on his right side, back to her. “When you’re right, you’re right,” he said very quietly, and mimed preparing to sleep. But his shoulder blades were eloquent.

She savored her triumph for as long as she could stand it, staring at the ceiling. Then, keeping her voice as neutral as possible, she said, “Anyway… how would we deal with Colly’s education?”

His shoulder blades shut up in midsentence.

“Well—” he said finally, and rolled over to face her.

2

Rand Porter had been waiting for that question, of course. Their eight-year-old would get a better education if he took the job; Rhea had known that when she asked the question. On his new salary, they could afford to enroll Colly in any school on or off Earth, with full bandwidth and as much individual attention as she wanted. Hell, they could afford to have teachers physically brought up to her if they wanted, in corporation shuttles. And Rhea could have Unlimited Net Access herself too.

And all these things, he added, would be merely perks—over and above a salary so immense that they could easily have afforded to pay for them. Full Medical would be another such perk. Rhea’s literary reputation could only benefit from all the publicity that would accrue. Rand stressed all these points, without ever quite saying aloud a point that mattered to him almost as much as the honor or the creative challenge or the prestige or the money per se.

If he took this job, he would be earning more money than Rhea, and would be more famous than her. For the first time in their relationship.

He couldn’t mention that aloud. They had agreed back at the start that they would never mention it; that was how little it meant to them; therefore he couldn’t bring it up now.

“Worse comes to worst, why couldn’t we compromise?” he suggested desperately. “Have one of those commuter marriages? I’d take the job, and you could come up for three months out of every six. Lots of people do that, when only one half of the team wants to be a spacer.”

“Sure,” she said. “That worked out just great for your brother, didn’t it?” Jay had maintained such a relationship with a dancer in one of his two rotating companies for over five years—then about six months ago, Ethan had sent him a Dear-Jay/resignation fax from Fire Island. The scabs were just beginning to turn into scar tissue.

“We’re more committed than Jay and Ethan were,” Rand protested. But privately he was not sure that was true—and the stats on groundhog/spacer marriages were discouraging.

When they were exhausted enough, they agreed to sleep on it.

At five in the morning he slipped from the bed without waking her and went down the hall to his Pit. Strains of melody were chasing each other in his head, but when he booted up his synth, he could not isolate any of the strands in his headphones. Sounded aloud, they were an inseparable jangle of discord—like his feelings.

So he went to the kitchen, and found he was not hungry. He went to the bathroom and discovered he didn’t have to pee. He put the headphones back on and learned that he didn’t want to hear anything in his collection. He went up to Colly’s room and found that she didn’t need to be covered. As he bent to kiss her, he startled himself by dropping a tear on the pillow next to her strawberry blonde hair. He went quickly back downstairs to the living room and wept, as silently as he could. When he was done, he dried his eyes and blew his nose.

What did he need?

That was easy. He needed someone to tell him he wasn’t a selfish bastard.

He had promised her. Worse, he had thought about it first. He had not specifically envisioned this situation, no—but he had made his promise without reservations. No matter what, love—

But this offer was beyond any dreams he’d had a decade ago. How could he have known? The carrot was irresistible…

Or was it? What was so irresistible? The money would be great—but while they had been middle-class for their whole marriage, they had never been poor, never missed a meal. There were other jobs. Indeed, this was about the only job he could possibly take that would require them to move from P-Town, that he couldn’t basically phone in. It was certainly the only job that would have required permanent exile. What was so great about the damn job?

Two things. It was the most prestigious job in his field, one of the most prestigious there was. And it would make him the principal breadwinner in his family, for the first time.

Not very proud reasons to break a solemn promise to your wife…

No, dammit, there was more to it than that. The job was the richest creative opportunity he had ever had. His three-month stint just past had been the hardest work he’d ever done… and had drawn some of his very best music and shaping out of him. Collaborating with his half-brother Jay had been exhilarating; although Jay was thirteen years older than Rand’s thirty-five, their minds had meshed.

I see: your wife will be a little sadder, but your chops will improve…

It wasn’t just that. Part of what had made his work better in the Shimizu had been the heart-stopping grandeur of space itself, the bliss of zero gee. Space was as magical as Provincetown, in a different way; maybe more so—surely Rhea would see and respond to that, just as he had.

You hope…

Anyway, what was so great about P-Town? Okay, it was beautiful; sure, it was timeless; granted, it was magical. This chair he was rocking in, for instance: beautiful and timeless and magical. But it made noises like rifle fire, and leaned ever so slightly out of true, and wasn’t especially comfortable without the pillows that always slipped out of adjustment. So what if it had belonged to Rhea’s great-grandmother? So what if it had been the chair in which the infant Rhea had been breast-fed… and Colly too?

The answer was all around him—hanging from every wall, perched on nearly every flat surface. Pictures of eight generations of Paixaos, as far back as imaging technology allowed, ranging from faded black and white daguerrotypes of Cap’n Frank and Marion to paused holoblocks of Rhea, Colly and himself. Hundreds of Paixaos and their kin, in dozens of settings… and every single image had Provincetown somewhere in the background. Beautiful. Timeless. Magical…

On the mantle, amid the more recent Paixaos, was a holo of Rand’s parents, Agnes and Tom, taken just before their divorce. The background was Newark, New Jersey.

There was no point to this: he already knew he wanted the job badly enough to take it; whether he should want it that badly or not seemed irrelevant. Nonetheless he flogged himself, as his penance, endlessly replaying the argument until it became a loop that annihilated time.

I want to be great. Is that so terrible?

Just as he felt that his brain might explode, thirty-five kilos of eight-year-old reality landed on his lap like a tonne of bricks, shouting, “Boo!” and his heart nearly exploded instead. Daylight and his daughter had crept up on him.

“I scared you, Daddy!” she reported with glee. “I did, didn’t I?”

For an instant he was tempted to use Colly as a new club to beat himself—how can you ask a child to go pioneering?—but he shifted gears instead, grabbed her in his arms and stood up. “That you did, baby,” he said, clutching her close. “That you did.”

“Did you catch it, Daddy?”

“Huh?”

“Whatever made you stay up all night. Did you get it?”

“Oh. Uh… not yet, sweetheart. I got a look at it, but it got away.”

“Don’t matter about it,” she advised him. “You’ll get it next time.”

Her optimism—and the boundless, unquestioning faith that underlay it—floored him. I can’t be a bastard, he thought. I’d never have fooled her. He hugged her even closer, making her squeal. “That I will,” he agreed. “Right now, let’s you and me get us some grub.”

“I cook,” she said quickly. Her faith in him had practical limits. That was why he could trust it.

“Deal,” he agreed.

And she did cook a better breakfast than he could have—albeit somewhat more messily. Rhea came in while she was doing it, and stood in the doorway in her bathrobe watching and trying not to smile. Colly refused to let either of them help, or even coach. By the time they were all sitting down eating together, it seemed to have been decided that today was a happy day. Rhea’s eyes were unguarded when they met his. The Issue was still there between them, but it was on hold for the moment.

After the meal, it was Rhea who said, “Colly, sit back down. You can be a little late for playgroup today. Your father and I need to talk about something with you.”

“Aw, Mom—do you have to? Sarah’s gonna bring her cat in today, and she swears it has thumbs!”

“Yes, honey, it’s important.”

“Four of ’em! Oh, okay, go ahead.” She sat back and adjusted her nervous system to fidget mode.

Rhea handed the ball to him. “Rand?”

He cleared his throat. “Colly… have you ever thought about… living somewhere else?”

“You mean I’m going to grandma’s house again? How long this time?”

“No, honey, that’s not what I meant. I mean… all three of us moving away from here, to a new home.”

“And not coming back?”

“That’s right. Not ever.”

The notion did not seem to shock Colly. “Where?” she asked practically.

“Well, remember that time we went to visit Uncle Jay?”

She got excited. “Go to space, you mean? And stay there? In that cool hotel? Oh, wow!”

“You really liked it that much?” Rhea asked, surprised.

“Da! Si! Ja! Oui!” Colly said. “I’m not little in space!”

Both parents were startled into laughter.

“It’s true,” she insisted. “I can reach everything there, and look grown-ups in the eye, and I’m as strong as anybody and not clumsy like everybody else. Besides, it’s fun! When do we go?”

Even Rand was taken aback by support this enthusiastic. “But baby… you know if we stay in free-fall for long, we have to stay forever?”

“Sure.”

“Well… won’t you miss your friends?”

She thought about it. “I could still call them up, right? We could holo-play. And they could come visit me realies, sometimes. And I’d make lots of new friends. I’m good at that.”

Rand squelched a grin. “Well… yes, you are. But won’t you miss… this house, and P-Town… and everything?”

“And the beach?” Rhea prompted. “And the ocean?”

Colly looked around her. “I guess. But if I do, you can just make it for me, Daddy. Anyway, you can’t play six-wall here. I tried.”

He didn’t have to look at his wife to know that she was looking faintly stricken. Her only potential ally had defected. He wanted to put an arm around her, but was not sure whether that would make it worse.

Colly had gone from fidget to bounce mode. “Can I go tell everybody now, Daddy? How soon are we going, Mommy? I gotta go get dressed! Oooh, Kelly’s gonna be so jealous—”

“Hold your horses, young lady. Nothing’s been decided yet. Your mother and I are still discussing the idea—”

Colly wasn’t listening. Her eyes had gone wide. “Wait a minute—this means you got the job, didn’t you, Daddy? You get to work with Uncle Jay now! They picked you! Oh, I knew they would! I told you they would!”

Rhea winced.

“We are going, we are! Can I go tell Kelly now? And Sigrid? And Bobby?”

The choices were let her go or strap her down. “Maybe you better get dressed first,” Rhea said.

Colly looked down at her rumpled pajamas, and giggled. “Oh, okay, if you insist,” she said, and ran for the stairs. She was naked before she reached the top.

Rand and Rhea looked at each other. Each waited for the other to speak, with voice or expression.

“We have to laugh,” he said finally.

“Oh yeah? Why?”

“Because if we strangle each other, who’s going to take Colly to playgroup?”

And so they laughed.

“Come on, somebody,” Colly called from upstairs. “Get dressed! I’m almost ready already!”

They laughed harder, and then got up together and sprinted up the stairs, shouting, “Yes, ma’am! Right away, Your Highness!”

“I still don’t see why you have to live there,” Rhea said thirty minutes later. They had dropped Colly off at playgroup in the West End, and now were sitting in the car at the edge of the sea at Herring Cove, half watching a group of eight or ten Trancers in sleek thermal clothing dancing on the shore, spinning and jumping in the December breeze, falling and recovering but always springing back up at once. They made Rand think, as always, of birds trying to batter their way through an invisible ceiling. Provincetown had been a magnet for Trancers since the strange fad had begun and spread around the planet with the speed of a catchphrase. P-Town had always been a Mecca for all kinds of odd behavior.

“It’s stupid,” Rhea went on. “It’s just stupid elitist thinking. There’s no sensible reason why you can’t phone it in, like any other job. They only have the best holo gear in human space.”

“That’s what the Shimizu is all about,” Rand said patiently. “That’s what they’re buying. The most conspicuous consumption there is. Nothing canned, nothing piped-in—”

“I know, I know—the celebrity artists are all on-site for the customers to press flesh with, and half the robot-work is done by human beings, just to prove they can afford to waste money. Snob logic.”

“You can’t make art for a place without going there,” he said. “Holo isn’t enough. I can’t explain why, but it isn’t. I always go to the site if there is one, at least at first. You know all this.”

“So you’ve been there for three months! Isn’t that enough?”

It was a fair question. He tried to find the words to answer it. All he could come up with was, “Space is different.”

“Different how?”

“Look: you were there.”

“For three days.”

“Long enough to get a taste. Now, tell me: can you remember what it was like?”

She started to answer, then stopped. “No,” she said finally. “I can remember what I told people about it. I can remember what I wrote about it. But no, you’re right. I can’t remember what it was like. Not really. I have a lingering feeling about it—”

“If you had to write a poem about it, right now, could you? Or a story set there?”

Her shoulders slumped. “I’d have to go back. For longer than a few days. And either write it there, or right after I got back down.”

“That’s why Ngani bullied the Board into putting in writing a provision that his successors would have to live in-house. And that’s why Jay bullied them into honoring the agreement when Ngani died.”

This was all old ground. They had had this conversation over a year ago, when he had first become a candidate for the position. He saw her momentarily as a trapped animal, doubling back on its tracks in search of a way out overlooked earlier, and felt a pang of guilt.

She gestured at the ocean and half a world of clouds, at the crazy Trancers moving in harmony—then turned and gestured in the other direction, at P-Town. “And all of this, we’re supposed to give up, forever, so that Willem Ngani’s artistic vision isn’t violated?”

The question was so unfair that he returned fire with some irritation. “Only if we want me to have the job.”

She left the car and walked a short way along the beach, past the gyrating dancers. By the time she returned, he had cooled down and she looked chilly despite her thermally smart clothing. The Trancers too had finally run out of manic energy, and were dispersing, looking blissed-out.

“How about this?” Rand said, as the car heater switched on to normalize the temperature in the vehicle. “We give it a couple of months. I’ll complete Pribhara’s season. Then if you absolutely hate it, I’ll quit.”

“You couldn’t break your contract!”

“Hell, Pribhara did. I’ll reserve the right. If they want me bad enough, they’ll negotiate. It’s perfectly reasonable—considering they’re wrecking my whole schedule on no notice at all. By rights they ought to be paying me a whopping bonus. If they don’t like it, let ’em give Mazursky and Choy socks full of dung, and let them fight it out.”

She thought about it. “Huh. Two more months wouldn’t be long enough to change you into a spacer. And it’s long enough for me to form an opinion…”

“I promise if you want to come back, there won’t be an argument.”

The device didn’t fool either of them; he could see that in her eyes. But it brought the situation a little closer to tolerable. It would buy some time.

“How soon would we have to leave?”

“I’ll call Jay.”

3 Yawara Queensland, Australia 2 December 2064

At about that moment, not too far from the opposite point on the planet’s surface, an old—no, ancient—woman switched off her ancient compact disc player, brushed the headphones out of her hair with a palsied hand, and decided it was time for sleep. Or at least for bed. Slowly and carefully she got up from her rocking chair, then used it to steady herself while she removed the denim shorts which were her only clothing. She walked with halting steps through the darkness to her bed, but when she reached it, she dropped easily and comfortably into a squat beside it. Reaching beneath it, she drew out her chamber pot and removed the lid. When she maneuvered it beneath her, its weight and a small sloshing sound reminded her that she had forgotten to empty it that morning. As she was about to put it to its accustomed use, she suddenly stopped, clamping her sphincter and flaring her nostrils. Her head turned from side to side, twice. Then she looked down between her legs, bent her head lower and sniffed. She took the chamber pot from beneath her and brought it to her nose and sniffed again.

She knew, then, but nonetheless she reached up and got matches from the bed table. In the sudden flaring light, her eyes confirmed what her nose had told her. Her chamber pot contained wine.

It delighted her. It had been a long time since anything had surprised her. This was a good one. She thought about it, savoring the puzzle. No one had approached her home closer than a hundred yards all day. She had not left it for a moment. She had not emptied the utensil after using it that morning, she was sure of that. She might be old—no, ancient—but her memory was still sharp as the long edge of a war boomerang. There was no logical explanation… so she went inside herself, to her special place.

And at once, contradictory things happened on her face. Her eyes brightened, and bitter tears spurted from them, and years—no, decades—melted from her visage, and her mouth smiled while her brows knotted in a fierce frown. She glanced across the room at her CD player, and ran a hand across her head to confirm that she had taken its headphones off. “Badunjari…?” she whispered, and cocked her head as if listening.

Whatever she heard caused her to smile even wider and weep even harder—but the frown relaxed. She sat back on her heels and began to rock slowly from side to side. After a time, she lifted the chamber pot to her lips and drank from it. The wine was excellent, delicious and immediately powerful. She took a deeper draught.

“Really?” she said in Yirlandji. “What is?”

If there was an answer, no microphone could have recorded it.

Her tears ceased; the smile remained, and became the mischievous grin of a little girl. “Okay,” she agreed, and drank again. “I will wait and see.”

She had not been this happy in forty-four years. Magic, real Dreamtime magic, was loose in the world again…