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Analog SF, April 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

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Copyright (c)2005 Dell Magazines

Dell Magazines

www.dellmagazines.com

Science Fiction

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NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Duplication or distribution of this work by email, floppy disk, network, paper print out, or any other method is a violation of international copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment.

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*CONTENTS*

NOTE: Each section is preceded by a line of the pattern CH000, CH001, etc. You may use your reader’s search function to locate section.

CH000 *Editorial*: Whence Comes Morality?

CH001 *The Stonehenge Gate* by Jack Williamson

CH002 *Company Secrets* by Kyle Kirkland

CH003 *Her World Exploded* by David Burkhead

CH004 *Reinventing Carl Hobbs* by James C. Glass

CH005 *Standards of Success* by John G. Hemry

CH006 *Letters of Transit* by Brian Plante

CH007 *Artificial Photosynthesis* by Stephen L. Gillett, Ph.D.

CH008 *Analog Computing* by Stephen L. Gillett

CH009 *The Alternate View*: Review of _Kicking a Sacred Cow_

CH010 *The Reference Library*

CH011 *Upcoming Events*

CH012 *Brass Tacks*

CH013 *In Times to Come*

* * * *

First issue of _Astounding_(R) Jan 1930

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_Analog Science Fiction and Fact_

_(Astounding)_ ISSN 1059-2113 is pub — lished monthly except for combined

January/February and July/August double issues.

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Scott Lais: Contracts & Permissions

Peter Kanter: Publisher & President

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CH000

*Editorial*: Whence Comes Morality?

A couple of years back, in an editorial (“Useful Illusions and Deadly Faith,” February 2003) speculating on the connections among faith, truth, and virtue, I remarked that, “Faith that leads to criminal and immoral acts against other human beings is simply criminal and immoral.” Some readers objected to this, saying or implying that I was guilty of circular reasoning and gently suggesting that I unwittingly misspoke. How, they asked, could “immoral” be defined in my statement, when the very notions of morality in any human culture are deeply rooted in religion, even if later thinkers tried to cast off the religious associations and justify moral principles on logical grounds?

But I didn’t misspeak. I really did mean to say that religions or people acting in their name can do immoral things. And yes, that does imply that “immoral” can be defined in terms of a “higher,” or at least more objective, general, and absolute, standard than any religion can provide. But the question is fair: Where does that standard come from?

Historically, I can’t deny that the origin and dissemination of many of the moral or ethical (Throughout this discussion I use “ethics” and “morality” interchangeably to refer to general systems of determining how people should behave. I realize that “ethics” also has a more specialized meaning referring to rules of conduct for members of a profession, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.) principles widely held in any human culture I know of have been closely bound up with organized religions. Our hospitals, orphanages, and many of our legal protections clearly owe much to the hard work that churches have done to create and maintain them. What is far less clear, to me or (I’m reasonably sure) to any of those who take issue with my terminology, is exactly what the nature of that connection was when both religions and ethical ideas were getting started.

One possibility is that a Higher Power really and literally did decree a moral code and demand and enforce obedience to it. Another is that a group of powerful leaders in an early society set themselves up as a priesthood and sold their followers stories of a Higher Power to give added clout to their demands.

Hardly a man is now alive who remembers, so we can only make educated guesses. If either of those scenarios is correct, we are still entitled to ask how the Higher Power or the priesthood invoking one decided _what_ principles to promulgate. Did the choice have to make some sort of logical sense, or was it purely arbitrary?

My hunch is that it _did_ have to make sense, because some ethical systems are simply and demonstrably much more _viable_ than others. It’s hard, for example, to imagine how a society could survive very long if it adopted as a basic precept, “Thou shalt kill as many of thy fellows as possible.” Or the Shaker ideal of absolute, universal celibacy, which guaranteed the ultimate demise of any society that tried to practice it indefinitely and in isolation.

In that case — if ethical systems, like all other biological systems, are selected for their survival value — what seems to me more likely than either of the above scenarios is one more like this. Early people living in groups found empirically that the group as a whole, and most of the individuals living in it, fared better if they followed certain rules. The general good was better served if, for example, people did _not_ kill others except under well-defined special circumstances; if they did not steal others’ property, and insisted on the same consideration in return; if they were loyal to their own mates, parents, and children, and helped them through sickness and other hard times; and if they refrained from incest. But those are all generalities whose truth only becomes apparent through a prolonged period of accumulated observation, and might often seem at odds with the best interests of an individual in a particular situation. So the aforementioned priesthoods formed and created religious frameworks to motivate individuals to follow the general principles even in those cases where they’d rather not.

As Spider Robinson said in a _Locus_ interview, “Why should you bother being a good man; given there is no guy with a beard and thunderbolts up his sleeve enforcing the rules, why should you obey them? There’s no rational reason not to be a selfish sonuvabitch … It’s our grandchildren…. “Actually there _is_ a rational reason not to be a selfish sonuvabitch, but only if you look beyond the immediate desires of a shortsighted individual and consider the welfare of _all_ individuals, including grandchildren and beyond. My hunch is that religions evolved as a means of forcing people to do that, or at least to act as if they did. And that is indeed a profound contribution to civilization.

But the real _reason_ for behaving morally is that doing so helps a society survive and prosper, not just that a higher being or a church says you must. As Elizabeth Moon succinctly put it during a panel on “Alien Ethical Systems” at the 2004 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, “Ethics come from biology.”

But there’s obviously more to it than that. Though a few general principles are widespread through human societies, there’s also a great deal of variation, and ethical systems have extended to details quite far removed from obvious biological needs. In some cultures it’s rude to belch at the dinner table; in others it’s rude not to. How do these embellishments and divergences come about?

Another panelist (I believe it was Paul Levinson, and I think he was paraphrasing somebody else), said something like, “Our trouble is that we think about it too much.” To a certain extent that _is_ a trouble. When a society feels the need to codify and regulate every detail of personal life, it runs the risk of losing respect for even the truly important parts of its codes, or falling into the trap of trying to convert everybody else to its ways and thereby incurring their potentially fatal wrath.

But in other ways, “thinking about it” is not a problem at all. Ethical codes, like anything else evolved by biological systems, tend to be solutions to yesterday’s problems. Not necessarily optimum solutions, either; nature only requires, and usually only provides, “good enough” solutions. By the time it has those, quite likely conditions have changed and you have new problems requiring new solutions. Thinking about the new problems — carefully — provides at least a possibility of coming up with good-enough new solutions. As a character of mine once remarked, “The value of intelligence is that it can overrule instinct when instinct is wrong.”

This is dangerous ground in any discussion of ethics. For many people, “situational ethics” is a hot button that triggers rants about how some people think that morality is whatever they want it to be — so I want to emphasize explicitly that that’s not at all what I’m saying. Any set of circumstances does impose quite definite limits on what sorts of actions make sense within it. Some circumstances prevail quite widely (one is tempted to say “universally,” though one is also well-advised to resist the temptation insofar as possible) through human experience. “Thou shalt not kill,” though a bit too simplistic to cover all real eventualities, really does seem a very widely applicable ideal, now and for the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, some conditions do change significantly with time, so a good ethical equation must include time-dependent variables as well as constants. “Be fruitful and multiply,” for example, is excellent advice in times and places where you have plenty of land, food, water, and enemies. It can be culturally suicidal if you live in an closed environment like a desert island or an O’Neill colony and your supplies of essential resources like food, water, or energy are being depleted at an accelerating rate. In such a case, obstinately quoting and blindly following what worked for your distant ancestors is not good enough. You have to take responsibility for figuring out what your problems are _now_ and what you can realistically do about them. And it is irresponsible to dismiss those who are trying to do that but don’t happen to share your religion by saying (as a recent letter to my local newspaper did), “One cannot be virtuous without religion.”

Science fiction readers and writers, as a group, tend to understand such ideas much better than the population at large — but they’re not perfect, either. Readers often tell us in publishing that they want to read about believable societies that are truly different from our own — but when we show them one, some of them get very distraught if the ethical principles of that society are significantly different from those of here and now. To them I must say: get used to it, folks. Things are changing fast, and they’re not slowing down. The ways people deal with them will have to change too, so let’s hope they find ways that make sense in the new terms.

And if we’re ever lucky enough to meet truly alien species, evolved to deal with truly alien environments, we can expect some of their ethical solutions, even if they’re nearly perfect for their conditions, to look quite peculiar and likely distasteful to us. Attitudes toward children, for example, can be expected to be — to _have_ to be — very different in a species that has thousands of offspring for every one it expects to survive.

Let’s hope that we’re up to that challenge if it ever arises. In the meantime, we have a far more immediate but only slightly smaller one: to find ways of remaining an ethical species in rapidly and radically changing times — ways of living that recognize and adapt to new circumstances without succumbing to the copout of “anything goes.”

— Stanley Schmidt

––—

CH001

*The Stonehenge Gate* by Jack Williamson

Part III of III

“_Cultural heritage_” may mean much more than most of us think.

––—

A synopsis of the first two parts:

_Back at home before it all began, we called ourselves the Four Horsemen, though none of us owned a horse and Lupe was a woman. We were teachers at our small New Mexico college. Lupe was an anthropologist, searching out the origins and history of early man. Derek Ironcraft taught physics. I’m Will White, telling the story._

_Ram Chenji was the oddball. Born in Kenya, of mixed ancestry, he spoke of a strange great grandmother, a little black woman who said she had been a slave on another world. He carried a birthmark inherited from her; she called it “the crown of worlds.” Before she died, she gave him an odd emerald pendant she said was the key that had let her escape, “though the gates of hell.”_

_Derek came back that fall from a summer internship with NASA. With penetration radar, he had found what looked like a larger Stonehenge buried under the Sahara. When the Christmas vacation came, we pooled our resources, flew to Tunis, and chartered a chopper to take out over the Grand Erg Oriental._

_We found the tops of two massive columns jutting out of a dune. The radar image showed the fallen lintel stone buried under the sand. Carrying his key over it, Ram fell into a circle of great black megaliths that stood in a dead world where the atmosphere was deadly. Gasping for air, he climbed back to join us._

_Leaving Ram and Lupe at the site, Derek and I returned to Tunis for oxygen gear. Back at the site, we found Ram alone. A monstrous thing had hopped out of nowhere and dived at Lupe at our camp in the hollow of the dune. Something with long metal legs and a bright silver skull, it seemed half machine, half alive. Gliding down on stubby wings, it had snatched her up and carried her away._

_In oxygen masks, Derek and Ram and I went though the gate. I felt the shock of a different gravity. My ears clicked to the pressure of a different atmosphere. We found ourselves on a world of cold volcanic lavas, massive black trilithons towering over the bones of men and monsters caught and killed there._

_We were following Lupe’s tracks in the dust when another monster hopper dived at us. In panic, we ran through another gateway to yet another planet. We found were on a moving pavement that carried us out into an Earth-like landscape, where plant and animal life looked strangely familiar. Another enormous hopper followed down the road and stopped as if to watch us._

_In hope of finding Lupe or some clue to her fate, we let the pavement carry us on. Among the monumental ruins of a vanished civilization, we passed the monumental figures of a black man and a white woman, seated side by side on a throne. Strangely, both their foreheads bore birthmarks identical to Ram’s. Farther on, we saw the abandoned ruin of an enormous fortress and a vast battlefield hidden below a virtual world, relics of a conflict that seemed to have left no survivors._

_The constellations were strange when we saw the night sky. Searching for anything familiar, Derek said the gates had taken us far across the galaxy. This planet was double, its close twin world a huge moon that eclipsed ours every day. The road carried us to a skywire between them, with an elevator operated by multicellular robots._

_We let them take us to a city on the sister planet. It was empty, but well tended by robots waiting for people to return. We were hungry. Though food was abundant, we lacked any language to ask for it. When we tried to take it, they pursued. We ran for a trilithon. Another gigantic hopper joined the chase. Hoping it would take him to Lupe, Derek turned and waited to let it snatch him up._

_Beyond the trilithon, Ram and I reached another terminal on a mountain summit, a lush jungle landscape far below. There we met a runaway slave in flight from a gang of black pursuers. Ram knew a little of their language leaned from his great-grandmother. They knelt around him when they saw the crown of worlds, taking it to mark him as the son of the god Anak, expected to return and liberate their race._

_”I don’t know what to think,” he told me. “I never quite believed all my Little Mama told me about hell and how she got away. I never understood why she and I both wore the birthmark. In spite of all she said, I never expected any magic destiny.”_

_We learned a little about the planet’s two great continents, Norlan and Hotlan. Norlan lay around the pole, capped with ice, with only narrow strips along the coast inhabited. Hotlan sprawled across the equator, most of it drained by the great Blood River. It was half unknown, the vast eastern rain forests roamed by nomad tribes and scattered with the monumental ruins of the dead Grand Dominion. The Norlan whites ruled the river from Periclaw, their seaport city on the delta._

_Toron took us and his captive slave down the mountain and through endless miles of jungle, back to a trading post and a little red brick fort on Blood River. Toron delivered the captive to the Norlan agent at the fort and got Trader Hake to put us up in his walled compound. The fugitive slave, still alive, was hanged from a tree in front of the fort with an iron hook through his ribs._

_Ram talked to the agent and the trader._

_”We’re in an iffy fix,” he told me. “It’s the crown of worlds that worries them. They’re afraid of me, afraid I’ll set off another slave rebellion. Hake doesn’t want any trouble that might wreck his business. The agent wants no problems with his bosses in Periclaw.” He grimaced at the slave, still gasping for life in the tree. “They’d like to string the two of us up along with him.”_

_Spreading news of Ram’s arrival did kindle revolt. Toron took him to lead it. I stayed as Hake’s guest while the agent waited for orders. I met his wife, a white refugee from Periclaw. Pregnant with the child of a black singer, she had fled to save her life and her child’s. The child, Kenleth, was now a bright little boy that I liked at once._

_When rebel slaves stormed and looted Hake’s compound, the rebels captured Kenleth and his mother. I ran to the fort for refuge. The agent held me in prison until a gunboat arrived to carry me down to the Norlan authorities in Periclaw. On the river, we found Kenleth, floating on a log. His mother gone, he was lost and desperate. I promised to keep him with me._

_Farther down the river, we found Ram and Toron waiting at a landing. They wanted a truce, offering to stop the rebellion in return for an end to slavery and equal rights for the blacks. The gunboat captain was scornful of the offer, but he took Ram with us on down the river._

_He had been initiated into the Elderhood. In the archives, he had found a high-tech relic of the Grand Dominion, a device that showed Lupe and Derek as captives in another strange world. When he took off his cap in the cabin that night, I saw his birthmark strangely luminous._

_In Periclaw, Ram and I were caught in a crisis. The blacks were eager to welcome him as their promised liberator. The whites were in terror of the spreading insurrection, yet afraid to kill him; martyrdom might make him a greater danger than he was alive._

_My own situation was no better. I was commonly regarded as a renegade white, a traitor to my race. Few believed my story. One person willing to take it seriously was Celya Crail, the daughter of wealthy white aristocrats. A historian, collecting relics of the Grand Dominion, she took Kenleth and me to stay in her family mansion._

_We were kept locked in our room, but she had me brought down to her father’s formal dinners. From other guests, I heard news of the war. It went badly for the whites. An expedition against the Elderhood was annihilated by “blood rot,” a fatal virus believed to be a weapon invented for the ancient Armageddon. I heard nothing of Ram until Celya brought him to the dinners as another guarded guest. To the dismay of her parents, they fell in love._

––—

28.

Late that night a muffled rapping woke me. Light shone into the room through the glass in the double balcony door. I heard a lock click. The doors swung open. Ram and Celya stepped inside. Kenleth slid out of bed, darted to meet them, and stopped with a gasp. The bandage across Ram’s forehead was gone. The light came from the crown of worlds, blazing again.

I sat up on the side of the bed, blinking at them.

“Quiet.” His finger on his lips, Ram nodded at the hallway door. “The guard’s just outside.”

Celya stood close beside him. The revealing gowns were gone. She wore a plain jacket and slacks of something like gray denim. She looked pale and tense, but her face held firm determination.

“A miracle?” His voice hushed, Kenleth stared at the shining mark. “Are you a god?”

“I don’t know what I am.” Ram grinned and touched the mark. “They cut it off, trying to defang me. When we lifted the bandage it was glowing again.” He frowned at me. “I guess you can explain it, if you believe the builders of the trilithons were also genetic engineers, but nobody here is a genetic engineer. They take it for a sign of destiny. Or a death warrant if they catch me.”

He slid his arm around Celya.

“She’s no safer. A hard choice, exile or death.”

She smiled into the light from his face and turned gravely back to me.

“The council met tonight. Emergency session. They voted to revoke my custody. They want to hang him. We’re running for our lives.”

“Can we?” Kenleth breathed the words. “Can we come with you?”

Ram shook his head and looked at me.

“You’re safer here. We have no time. No plans. Nowhere to go. We’re climbing down the fire escape. Celya knows the city. We may find friends if the right people see the mark.” He shrugged. “Hard luck if we don’t. We stopped to give you this.”

He slipped off the emerald pendant he wore on its thin silver chain.

“The intelligence men ripped it off. Celya had it in the museum. She gave it back to me.”

He handed it to Kenleth, who brought it to me.

“Why?” I protested. “It was from your Little Mama. The crown of worlds. It means too much to you.”

“It did.” With a wry little shrug, he frowned and touched the mark. “Now I’ll never need it again. There’s a chance it could save your life. Or even get you back to Earth. Who knows what cards will fall?”

He strode across the room to grip my hand. Kenleth was staring at Celya, tears running down his cheeks. She hugged him, kissed him, murmured something, and followed Ram back through the balcony door. He closed it silently, and they were gone.

* * * *

Early next morning we saw uniformed officers outside on the balcony, squatting to inspect the floor, peering over the railing, squinting at the lock with a magnifying lens. They unlocked the door and came inside. Ignoring us at first, they searched the room, looked into the closets and under the bed.

The man in charge gripped Kenleth by the shoulders. Had he seen anything unusual? Anybody on the balcony? Had he heard any unusual sound? Had he seen Ram Chenji or Celya Crail? Had they been in the room? Did he know where they had gone?

Bravely, he played the wide-eyed innocent. He had slept through the night. He knew nothing at all. The officer shrugged and turned grimly to me.

“Sir, if you have anything to say, we can make you sorry if you don’t say it now.”

My pulse throbbing, I told him I had nothing to say.

“We’ll be back,” he said, but they never came back. We spent the rest of the day anxious and alone. The valet never came to dress me for dinner. Instead, a pretty quadroon housemaid brought us a tray. Looking as stressed and desperate as Celya had been, she shook her head when Kenleth tried to talk.

“I’m afraid,” I heard her tell the guard. “Afraid of Sheko’s breath.”

The valet did come to dress me next day, as silent and nervous as if grooming some dangerous predator. Ram’s place and Celya’s empty, I was alone at the foot of the table. The admiral and Krel were there near the head, offering sympathy to the Crails for the loss of their daughter.

In funeral black, Crail’s wife looked sick and wasted, suddenly old. Grim-faced, Crail was pressing Krel for news.

“Not a clue, sir,” Krel told him. “Except that a rowboat is missing from your landing down on the beach. We have to assume they went downriver, with the current. The constabulary has five hundred men combing the delta. We’re posting rewards. A thousand slaves for that black Satan, dead or alive.”

The crisis heightened, yet nothing changed for Kenleth and me. The valet dressed me every day. The guard brought me down to dinner and stood behind my chair. Not allowed to speak to me, the guests could only stare. Sitting in silence, I tried to overhear whatever I could.

One day Krel was elated. The hunters caught Ram and Celya, hiding in a cane field on the delta. Next day he was gloomy. Taken to a constabulary station, they escaped when the rebels raided it. Under interrogation, a captured slave claimed to have seen the liberator camp, the crown of worlds blazing on his face, drilling warriors to fight for freedom.

“Propaganda,” the admiral said. “He’ll hang high when we catch him.”

Yet he was never caught. The revolt spread across the delta. The rebels burned Crail’s cotton gin and a warehouse where he had stored baled cotton worth five hundred slaves. They cut levies to flood crops on reclaimed land below sea level. They burned plantation homes. They butchered a constabulary brigade when its commanders refused to surrender.

To even the score, the constabulary hanged half the prisoners in the river island cap, cut off the hands of the other half, and released them to display the fruit of victory. The admiral reported his gunboats busy on the delta channels and canals, bombarding rebel positions. Around Periclaw the battle lines grew tighter. We heard the rumble of cannon. Looking from the balcony window we saw plumes of distant smoke by day and flashing guns beyond the river at night.

Commonly, Crail accepted news of losses in stolid shrugs, but the strain was telling. One evening when a waitress dropped a dish he cursed her in fury and ordered her whipped. He relented when his wife protested, and muttered an apology. The terrified dropped to her knees, silently sobbing.

––—

29.

On the night of Crail’s final dinner, Krel came late, brushed past the butler, and handed him a scrap of yellow paper. Crail rose to scan it, lost color, and sank back into his chair. An uneasy hush filled the room until he stood again.

“Intelligence report.” He read broken phrases as he squinted at them, the paper quivering in his fingers. “Delayed for confirmation…. Now verified…. Blood rot…. Deadly contagion…. Cause unknown.”

The room was dazed. I heard gasps, whispers, curses. Anxious voices lifted and jangled. Crail’s wife rushed out of the room, her napkin over her face. Another woman shrieked and fell to the floor. A constabulary captain tossed a glass of liquor into his throat and gagged on it. Most of the meal was left uneaten. Guests pushed their plate away, made quick farewells, scattered to their fates. The guards hustled me back to our room.

Shut up there with Kenleth, I listened and watched from the windows as Periclaw died. The maids still brought our meals and told us what they knew. The infection began on a delta island. Krel believed the rebels had brought it out of the jungle as a weapon of war. More likely, the admiral thought, death had drifted down Black River on the vulture-picked skeletons in a native dugout the tides left on a delta beach.

The house grew strangely silent. The Crails had left the city for refuge in their summer home in the hills, taking most of their servants and a small army of licensed guards. My own guards were still on duty, never speaking to us but watching me as warily as if I had the infection.

* * * *

The contagion struck hard and fast. Retreating from the delta, constabulary forces brought it back to Blood Hill. It spread from there into the city, panic with it. People fled when they could. We saw craft of every sort carrying refugees upstream. The infection went with them.

We heard an ocean liner whistle and watched tugs pull it out from the commercial docks. It steamed down the channel almost to the Sheko tower, listed, and went down. Refugees had bid fortunes for places aboard, the maids told us. The council ordered it scuttled, hoping to save Norlan from the plague.

With city water cut off, the fire set at the military docks had never been controlled. The smoke of it gave the air a biting taint even in the room, and became so thick outside that it hid the river. One night a high wind carried glowing embers past our windows. Kenleth crouched against me, quivering.

“Will it burn the house?” he whispered. “And us inside?”

“We can hope for luck,” I told him. “Back on Earth we used to play a game called poker. We always trusted luck.”

He knelt by the bed to murmur a prayer to Anak

“My mother believed,” he told me. “She said he has no color. He can be black or white. He loves us all, when we love each other.” He made a grimace. “Ty Hake laughed at her. If he had a god, he said, he wouldn’t be black.”

Our luck came with the monsoon rains. They began that night with blinding lightning and crashing hail. That sudden downpour quenched the flames and washed the city clean. Half of it had escaped destruction. The smoke was gone, roof tiles clean and bright, the streets and the river empty, no traffic anywhere.

That day the maids never came. No wagons or rickshaws moved on the streets, no craft on the water. The stillness chilled me. I’d sensed the pulse of the city in the murmur of mingled far-off voices, the muffled rumble of toil, all the echoes of unseen life. Now the breathless silence became its dying scream.

* * * *

Late that night the lock clicked on the inside door. Nobody entered. The room was pitch-black. We had a snuffed-out candle, but no way to light it. I lay there in the dark, listening to Kenleth’s quiet breathing, till daylight came at last and I got up to try the door.

It opened. The guards were gone. We dressed and went down the stair and through the silent house. An aged, crippled cook was still at his duty in the kitchen, perhaps out of loyalty to the Crails, perhaps merely unable to leave. Limping about the stove, he was making breakfast for Ram and Celya Crail.

We found them sitting at the table, eating a ripe papaya. Ram was in mud-stained constabulary fatigues, blood dried black around a bruise on the side of his chin. Even by day, the crown of worlds still shone with a golden glow. Celya wore the same yellow fatigues, tattered and stained with blood, a red band around her close-cut hair. Her face looked thin and pale but lovelier, I thought, than ever.

Ram shouted when he saw us, and came grinning to meet us.

“Will?” He scanned my face. “Are you okay?”

“So far,” I told him. “We’ve been shut up alone. I’m not sure I’ve been exposed.”

“You will be,” he said. “It’s everywhere. Lethal to whites, but I think you have a chance. If Lupe was right, it’s a geologic age since our own forefathers got back to Earth. We’re all the same race, but our immunities may be different.”

“I hope.”

I gripped his hand and looked at Celya. She was still at the table, staring as if we were strangers. I moved to greet her. She drew back, shaking her head.

“Keep away.” Her voice was a raspy whisper. “If you’re afraid.”

I turned to Ram. He nodded silently. I found nothing good to say. She was white, and the pathogen was striking everywhere. I went on to offer her my hand. She rose to put her arms around me. I felt her slender body trembling, felt a silent sob. Yet she managed a wan little smile and kissed my cheek. Ram nodded at the table and she called the cook to take our orders.

The papayas were fresh and delicious. The bacon and eggs might almost have come from the Wagon Wheel, back in Portales. The meal was half over before we felt ready for talk of anything else.

“While it lasted, we had a golden time.” Ram spoke slowly, with a bitter little smile for Celya. “We were in love. The crown of worlds was magic, and triumph in sight. The constabulary blacks were burning off their tattoo numbers, ready to follow us out of hell. We dreamed of freedom, peace, even the chance to start rebuilding something like the Grand Dominion must have been. But then — “

He gulped and slid his arm around her.

* * * *

The cook had brought us huge mugs of bitter black corath tea. They smiled into each other’s eyes and clicked the mugs together before Ram turned back to me.

“An old friend brought us back. White Water, the river pilot. Remember his complexion? All his life he managed to pass without a license, but the genes from his black grandma saved him. He has a neat little steam launch. The owners hired him to take them upriver. The boat fell to him when they died.”

When we had finished eating, Celya showed us the house. Her own room was almost as museum, the high walls hung with collected artifacts. Mats and hats and baskets, knives and pots and fishing spears, prayer sticks and divining rods, counting cords and funeral masks, tiny images of Anak and Sheko carved from jet and alabaster.

“The black culture.” She gestured at the walls. “It’s richer than you’d think. Ritualistic and well diversified. There are scores of cults to the divinities and mythic human heroes. I was trying to understand them, preserve what I could.”

For a moment she seemed forlorn, but she smiled at Ram when he put his arm around her.

He nodded at a library table. “We’ve something to show you.”

I saw the ancient laptop he had brought back from the place of the Elders.

“From Derek and Lupe?”

He shook his head. “Something else.”

Celya lifted the screen and turned it to let us see.

“Krel seized it,” he said. “He gave it to the museum when it baffled his experts. Celya had it here at home when I got to know her.”

She tapped keys to open pages of hieroglyphs.

“The text is still a riddle, but she’s found an interesting map.”

She touched the keys again, to show the prelude we had seen before: black space and new constellations, the rocket pioneers and a strangely tipped Milky Way, the fine green lines I thought must have been spaceways, the solar system and its planets. He stopped her on Africa.

“Notice the coastlines. That’s the way they were when _Homo sapiens_ got back from the Grand Dominion, two hundred thousand years ago. The oceans are lower. It must have been an ice age. A lot of water frozen on land, and the Sahara region wet enough for the trilithon builders.” He grinned at me. “That’s your chance to beat the odds.”

He turned to Celya.

“Let’s see this world.”

She was gazing at him, her face fixed and grave. She seemed not to hear until he asked again. She started, and showed us an image of the planet, slowly rotating in dark space.

“The two continents.” He pointed. “Norlan, spread over the pole. Here’s Icecape, Southpoint, Glacier Bay. And Hotlan, the equator across it. Iron River. The Blood. Periclaw, here on the delta.”

He asked Celya for a flat projection.

“Here’s what I wanted to show you.”

Hotlan spread wide. The legends across it were riddles, but I found the rivers, the delta, a brown mountain ridge down the west coast. “Mount Anak.” He pointed at a tiny black trilithon symbol north of the Blood. “And look at this.”

He jabbed his finger at another like it, in the mountain chain that curved down the west coast.

“A way out?” It took my breath. “Home to Earth?”

“Maybe.” Ram shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “If you could get there. Celya says the site’s unknown, though explorers have reported stories. It’s in high mountains, far beyond the head of navigation on the Blood.” He frowned. “If you want to gamble on where it will take you, go.”

He looked at Celya and I saw his lips twist.

“We have other plans.”

“I want to see my parents.” Her face drawn with pain, she took a long breath. “If they’re alive.”

“The railway isn’t working,” Ram said. “The rebels burned a bridge. White Water can take us up the river.”

She clutched at his arm as if she needed support.

“They couldn’t — wouldn’t understand how I love Ram. They were bitter. It hurt me to hurt them. And now — ” Her shrug was almost apologetic. “I have to see them if I can.”

Kenleth had been staring at a display of native weapons, but now he turned eagerly to Ram.

“Can we come up the river with you?”

“I wish you could.” He shook his head and turned to me. “They wouldn’t want you.”

––—

30.

That day was almost happy for Kenleth and me. The sun was warm and bright, the fresh air sweet, songbirds aloft. Rejoicing in freedom, we walked in the orchard at the back of Crail’s walled compound. Cherry trees were loaded with golden fruit. We filled ourselves and went on down to the riverside dock where White Water was overhauling the launch, replacing a broken paddle and melting metal to pour a new bearing.

I saw no change in his worn leather garb or his weather-beaten face. He was chewing cinnamon sticks. They left an amber stain on his tuft of chin whiskers, but he said they cleared his head. Kenleth embraced him happily, glad to find him was still alive.

“The fall of the bones.” He shrugged. “Bad times come and bad times go. I’ve been up and I’ve been down. I live as I can, but we aren’t here forever.”

He stopped to gnaw at his stick.

“The bones fell wrong for all the world.” He made a hard grimace. “Wrong for Celya Crail and your friend Ram. With a better break, they might have been rulers of a great new kingdom. Might have been, if General Zorn had hadn’t been so hungry for glory. Might have been.”

He shrugged and grinned at Kenleth.

“You and I are still alive, and we’ve got a great little boat.”

He showed us over the launch and explained the engine to Kenleth. The bow was open, with a folding awning to cover it. The engine had two cylinders, with drive shafts that turned two paddle wheels at the stern, the rudder hinged to the keel between them. Delighted, Kenleth sat at the wheel and hissed though his teeth with the sound of steam.

I asked White Water what sort of future he saw for Hotlan.

“I’ve known black seers with their divining rods and white scientists with their statistics. They had one thing in common. Their forecasts very seldom hit the mark.”

Reflecting, he chewed his cinnamon.

“Any good to come is hard for me to see. Periclaw spat in Ram’s eye when he brought them an offer of peace. They’ve paid a bitter price. Sheko’s deadly breath on all the simon-pure whites. Admiral Koch scuttled every seagoing ship to save the whites of Norlan. They may survive, but they’ll have lean times with no imports.”

“As for you, Ty Will — ” He squinted at me, shrewdly. “If you got here by magic, you might do well to try your spells again.”

* * * *

Ram and Celya were going on the next day to look for her parents.

“An idiot mission,” White Water called it. “The Crails were royalty. I know the type. They did live high, but owning men gives the mind an ugly set. They could try to forgive their daughter, but you — ” He looked at Ram. “You’re pure poison. It’s you and your shining sign that killed their world. They’d kill you if they could.”

Ram shrugged and said Celya had to go.

They spent the day preparing for the trip. With so few left to use it, water was running again. They showered and found clean clothes. White Water finished his work on the launch. The cook packed them a basket of food and served a farewell dinner at the kitchen table.

The dishes were simpler than those I’d had at Crail’s formal dinners, but for Kenleth and me they were a banquet. A platter piled with something like fried chicken, maybe related to the chickens of Earth. Another platter of crisp brown pones, rather like the cornbread my grandmother used to bake. Crail had an icehouse, stocked with ice shipped from Norlan glaciers, and there were bowls of iced fruit.

We toasted Ram and Celya with a bottle of chilled wine from Crail’s cellar. She sat close to him, smiling fondly at him but ignoring the rest of us. Toying with her food, she barely tasted it. Her face was pale and she seemed unsteady when she walked. I wondered if she would live to see her parents.

I’d enjoyed the day, but that night I had a dreadful dream. After a long search, we’d reached that trilithon in the high mountains west. The great square uprights of something like black granite rose out of a frozen lake rimmed with towering, snow-capped peaks. Ram and Kenleth were somewhere behind me. I started through the gateway, holding Ram’s green pendant before me, and stopped when I saw a naked body.

It lay sprawled on the ice between the pillars. Blue with cold, the limbs jerked suddenly, twitched, stiffened, turned red. Thick dark blood oozed out of them. Swiftly, the whole body melted into a wide red puddle, spreading slowly toward my feet. In terror of it, I tried to back away.

I couldn’t move, because I knew the body had been my own.

“Ty Will?” A hollow voice boomed out of the dark beyond the trilithon. “Ty Will, are you okay?”

Kenleth caught my arm and dragged me out of the nightmare.

* * * *

The cook had an early breakfast ready, and a basket of food packed for Ram and Celya. Kenleth and I went to watch them board the launch. White Water had it ready, with fire in the boiler and a head of steam. He cast off the mooring lines. The paddle wheels spun. Ram waved goodbye as they swung into the current. Celya sat staring blindly at us, without expression.

Kenleth turned to me and whispered, “Will Ty Ram come back?”

“I hope,” I said.

Waiting to know, we stayed inside the walls. From the upper windows, the river looked empty. The streets were deserted, except for now and then a furtive figure risking Sheko’s wrath in search of salvage. Kenleth found a hook and line in the boathouse and fished off the dock. Cheerfully, the cook fried or grilled his catch.

At last the launch came back. Ram and White Water were aboard, Celya wasn’t. Ram looked bleak and sleepless. He didn’t want to talk. White Water did, after Ram walked out to see what was left of Periclaw, and Kenleth and I were alone with him

“Upriver, we had to fight the current. It took us all day to reach the canal. Celya was already too sick to travel, really, but she had to see her folks before they died and Ram was her slave. We had food enough, and a case of wine, but she couldn’t eat or drink. I thought we’d never get her there.”

We were in the boathouse, with the launch tied up at the dock below it. White Water had been grinding a leaky steam valve, but he bit the end off a cinnamon stick and sat down on the workbench to talk.

“The infection made her crazy. Ram got half drunk with old Crail’s wine. Reason enough for that. All she wanted was him. They made love on the boat. Why not? He tilted the awning to screen them and told me not to look. With the whole world gone, who was left to care?”

He shook his head and stared out across the empty river.

“I care,” Kenleth said.

“Matter of fact, so do I.” He shrugged and resumed his story. “Forty miles upriver, we reached the first lock. It looked abandoned, but we found the lockkeepers still at the gates. Still proud of their licenses, proud of their posts, proud of the locks. Seemed not to know the world had ended. They let us though. We tied up for the night.

“Next morning Celya was out. Wet with sweat. Stiff and hardy breathing. So fast asleep I thought she was already done for. Ram finally roused her. A few swallows of wine revived her a little. She sat up and talked to him about a honeymoon cruise to Icecape. At noon she drank another glass of wine and tried to sing him a song. Her voice was too weak. He took her in his arms. She cried herself back to sleep.

“That day the canal took us through what had been great plantations. Grain. Sugarcane. Abandoned now. Never harvested. Blown flat by monsoon storms. Two more locks got us up to the edge of the foothills and the Crail landing. His country place was another mansion. Not quite so fancy as the city house, but grand enough.

“Crail came out to meet us. Looking older, limping on a cane, but almost too tough to die. Celya begged him to let her see her mother. He waved the cane and called her a filthy bug-loving slut. She’d shamed herself and fouled the family name. If she had blood rot, she’d got it from her black devil. He yelled for his guards.

“They came out of the house. A squad of mulattos and quadroons, all branded with their license numbers, looking fit as ever. Crail’s wife followed them, white as chalk and shriveled to a wisp, so sick she had to be carried in a chair. She waved a handkerchief and beckoned Celya toward her. Crail yelled at her to get back in the house.

“Celya fell to her knees, trying to climb out of the boat. Ram helped her to the dock. Crail struck at her with his cane. As weak as she was, he staggered and one of the guards caught him to keep him on his feet. Ram picked Celya up and carried her to meet her mother. Crail yelled again, and the guards snatched her out of his hands. She got to her mother. They hugged, but she called back to Ram.

“‘Wait for me, darling. Just a minute, till I can say good-bye.’

“But of course we couldn’t wait. He knew Celya was dying. Crail gave us three seconds to get the hell off his dock. The guards hustled her into the house, her mother with her. Crail ordered the guards to fire. Ram jumped back in the boat and grabbed an oar to push us off. The guards fired a volley. The bullets whistled over our heads. All we could do was get away.”

White Water got off the bench, turning back to his leaky valve.

“I think Ram’s immune to the rot.” He paused to spit a brown jet at a fly on the floor. “But still it nearly killed him.”

That afternoon he went for a swim in the river. It was muddy and high, the current fast. White Water said there were crocodiles in the lagoons down in the delta. I wondered if Ram meant to come back. We watched for him till the sun went down. Kenleth shouted at last, and we saw him wading ashore, the crown of worlds glowing in the dusk. He looked tired but that bleak set was gone from his face.

He spent all the next morning in Celya’s room, poring over that electronic book, and finally shook his head in defeat.

“The text is chicken tracks. The video sections make it look like a history of the planet. There’s just enough to tease us in the maps and that trilithon symbol in those high mountains west. The only chance I see.”

“Chance?” That startled me. “A chance for us? At some other world?”

He nodded.

“There’s nothing for us here. Not any longer. I want to see that trilithon. If it’s really there, where the map seems to put it.” He shook his head and looked far away. “But don’t bet on it. The map was made maybe a hundred thousand years go. A younger planet. No delta yet. The mouth of the Blood is far down the coast.”

That afternoon Kenleth and I went with him back to the academy complex, the museum where I had first met Celya and the library and lecture halls around it. He wanted modern maps of the upper river and records of any expeditions into the mountain region where the trilithon had been.

Vandals had been there before us. We found doors battered in, display cases smashed. The storm had damaged the roof, and rain had flooded the clutter the looters had left on the floors. Ram took us through the ruin and finally stopped us at the entrance to a gloomy hall.

“The Grand Dominion.” He gestured at the sodden waste on the floor. “This was Celya’s treasure house. Her prize collection of artifact from what she thought had been imperial tombs. Personal ornaments, weapons, tools. Silver, gold, metals I didn’t know. Tantalizing objects Celya had no names for.”

He shrugged and turned to leave the building.

“Precious to her but no road map to take us to the trilithon. The blacks could have been there, but they never made maps, not of any kind we can read. The whites never got far beyond the head of steam navigation. We’ve got a long way to go.”

That night a stabbing headache woke me. I lay sweating and shivering till day came at last, and I wanted no breakfast. The blood rot had hit me.

––—

31.

I tottered down to breakfast. The cook was serving ripe mangoes, boiled eggs, and fried slices of something like plantains. They looked good enough, but one taste of the egg wrenched me with nausea. I staggered when I tried to stand, and Ram helped me back up the stair.

I thought I was dying.

“Not quite yet.” He grinned at me bleakly. “You’re white enough, but Earth has its own evolutionary tree. You could still draw an ace.”

I don’t know how long I was sick. My watch still ran, but the days of Earth meant nothing here. Sometimes I was conscious. I remember Kenleth holding my hand, his warm touch a lifeline out of the darkness. I remember Ram lifting my head to give me water I couldn’t swallow.

Sometimes I was back on Earth. Once we were flying into Lubbock and they wouldn’t let us land because I had blood fever. We flew on into a thunderstorm, with no destination. Once we were back at home. Lupe had called the media to a press conference to announce our return. Derek tried to give a slide show, with shots of the Sahara gate and all the strange worlds we had seen. The reporters laughed and walked out, and the campus cops were called to arrest me for bringing the fever home to Portales.

Later I was lying in the bottom of the launch, listening to the steady puff of the little engine, staring up at the awning. It was woven of coarse strips of some straw-colored reedy stuff, with herringbone stripes of orange and rust. Sometimes they made patterns like the glyphs in the e-book, but never anything sane.

Kenleth brought me water as soon as I could swallow. A time came when I wanted to live. I could breathe without coughing. I could sit up and look around us at the wide brown river and the green forest walls. Periclaw was already far behind. White Water was taking us up Blood River.

“To look for that trilithon, if you remember,” Ram said. “If it’s anywhere near where that old map shows it.”

I grew stronger. I was able to swallow a few sips of the hot black corath tea when Kenleth offered it, and finally felt eager for another full mug. Kenleth fished from the boat and Ram broiled his catch on the boiler door. They discovered ripe papayas in the abandoned fields, and yams Ram could bake. Once Kenleth found bees in a hollow tree. Ram built a fire to stun them with smoke and brought back a basket filled with delicious honeycombs.

I grew ravenous for any food they offered. I was able to stand, able to climb out of the boat and walk on the sandbars when we stopped to gather driftwood for the boiler. My recollections of sweat and pain and dread began to fade away. I felt alive once more, alert to things around me. The river was lower now, as the monsoon wind had changed. It was empty of traffic. The banks looked empty of people.

“Sheko breathed death on the river,” Ram said. “They’ve gone back to the jungle.”

When we came in sight of the red-brick fort at Hake’s landing, Kenleth told me what he knew about his parents. His white mother had worked at the Periclaw civic center. His black father was an artist and singer an explorer found in the jungle. He was a registered guest with a license to stay. People bought his paintings and flocked to hear him sing.

His mother heard him at a concert and met him at a tea. He asked her to show him the city. They fell in love, which broke the law. His father was hanged. His mother lived in hiding till the explorer bribed Hake to stow her away on his trading boat. That was before he was born.

He showed me a ring his mother gave him the last time he saw her, after they had followed Toron into the jungle. Her last relic of his father, he thought it had come from some jungle tomb. A wide gold band, it was set with three polished black stones to make a tiny trilithon. It was too large for Kenleth’s finger, and he wore it on a cord around his neck.

The brick fort was abandoned, but he wanted to see his old home. We tied up at the empty dock. I was able to limp ashore with him. Kenleth ran ahead of me to the scraps of the stake palisade that still stood where the compound had burned, and found only a new jungle of ferns and vines inside. Nothing was left that he remembered. He came back with tears in his eyes.

* * * *

Pushing on upriver, we passed tributaries, one so wide that White Water seemed uncertain which branch to follow. Ram frowned over the maps in his e-book, and found no useful clues.

“We’ll trust our luck,” he said. “Or White Water’s hunch.”

We stopped when we had to, for driftwood or fallen logs we could cut, and steamed on when we had steam. The channel narrowed, cut through rocky hills. The vegetation changed, rain forest replaced with evergreens. We found mountains ahead, blue in the distance.

Day by day, they rose higher. We came out of barren hills into a high-walled canyon cut through black granite. It narrowed till the sky was a thin bright strip we had to crane to see. The current grew too fast for the toiling engine. Thunder boomed against the cliffs. We came around a turn and found a waterfall ahead.

I’d seen Niagara. This was wider, higher, the thunder louder. Kenleth stood up in the boat, gaping at the crashing water and the canyon walls that boxed us in.

“Is this the end?”

I thought it was. I still felt weak. I saw no way out. The water fell over an enormous dam, roaring down into a cloud of white spray lit with a rainbow arc where a shaft of sunlight struck it. White Water steered the launch to a tiny strip of gravel beach and eased us to it. He and Ram jumped out and pulled the launch half out of the water.

We stood there on the beach, craning up at the dam. Built of something smooth and black, it curved from wall to canyon wall. I felt shut in, caught in closing granite jaws.

“They were giants!” White Water shook his head at it. “The magicians of the Grand Dominion.”

* * * *

Ram was scanning the dam’s long curve.

“The map shows it,” he said. “There’s a long lake above it. It must have been built for power. There should have been tunnels to carry water to turbines and generators somewhere. Or maybe not?” He shrugged and turned to scan the walls around us. “So much has been forgotten.”

“Far enough?” White Water gave him an inquiring frown. “Is it back to Periclaw?”

“We can’t stop here. Not with the trilithon just beyond the lake.”

“I can’t leave the boat,” White Water said. “It’s all I have.”

Ram stood a moment frowning at me. Kenleth shrank against me, groping for my hand. Feeling helpless, I could only shrug.

“We’ve nothing here.” Ram winched as if from a stab of pain. “We’ve got to go on.”

“I don’t see how.” White Water gestured at the black cliffs and the narrow far scrap of sky. “You’ve got rough country ahead. We’ve been living off the land, but we’ve left the easy pickings behind us.”

“Will?” Ram turned to me. “Are you fit to climb?”

“I’m stronger,” I told him. “I’ll do my best.”

“If you’re that crazy,” White Water said, “I’ll wait for you here.”

“Thanks, my friend.” Ram gripped his hand. “But don’t wait long. If we find the gate, if it lets us through, we’ll never be back.”

“You will be.” White Water frowned at Ram’s face and the golden birthmark. “Your destiny is here.”

“I’ve had my destiny.” Ram again flinched as if from an actual stab. “It’s over.”

* * * *

We shook White Water’s hand and left him with the launch. Ram loaded himself with fruit we had dried, fish we had smoked, yam-like roots we could bake. Kenleth carried blankets. I had a water jug and a strip of the awning, with ropes to stretch it like a tent.

The dam builders had left us a way around the fall, a sloping ramp that led us behind that roaring water to a narrow crevice in the canyon wall. In single file we followed it for hours, uphill and down, until at last we came out into twilight on a windy ledge, the lake a thousand feet below us, so vast that most of it was lost in the dusk.

The wind had an icy bite. We retreated into the crevice and spread the blankets. I slept and dreamed that Ram had left us there alone. He had gone back with White Water to rule a new Grand Dominion. I felt relieved to find him still with us, kindling a tiny fire to make hot tea.

By daylight, we saw a range of snow-clad peaks beyond the lake, blue with distance. We were already high above the timberline. I wondered if the trilithon might be beyond our reach, but we made a frugal breakfast and took the trail again, over barren ridges and through rocky gorges.

By noon, we were down to the lakeshore, the water so crystal clear that Kenleth wanted to swim till he dipped a foot and felt how cold it was. The trail went on, cut into the cliffs just a few yards above the water level. We followed it all day, to a narrow in the lake and a bridge across it, five long arches of some dark stone, hardly scarred by time.

We camped in a shallow cave where an overhang jutted above the path, and crossed the bridge the next morning. The lake widened again beyond it, reaching far toward those snow-topped peaks. We left it there, climbing the path to a stony, treeless tableland.

* * * *

The next day we saw the trilithon, toy-small in the distance, so far that another noon had come before we reached it. It stood alone, the only feature on a scrap of barren plain. It had grown enormous as we finally neared it, the twin black pillars towering out of a broad black pavement.

Ram opened his e-book and craned to study the symbols cut deep into the huge crossbar a hundred feet above us. He sighed at last and snapped the book shut. Kenleth stood gaping at the pillars and the bleak landscape beyond them. The path had ended and it looked like the road to nowhere. In a mix of awe and unbelief, he turned to Ram.

“It’s a door? Where does it go?”

“_Quien sabe_?” He shrugged. “That’s what a friend of ours would say. With luck enough, we hope to find her somewhere on the other side. We’ve got no way to know except to try it.” He turned to Kenleth. “Are you ready?”

Eyes shining, Kenleth caught my hand.

“One more shuffle, one more deal.” Ram shrugged and grinned at me. “If you have the magic key.”

I’d worn the emerald pendant since he gave it to me. I slipped the silver chain over my head, and gave it back. He held it in his right hand and caught mine with his left. I got my balance and held my breath. Grinning at Kenleth, he chanted his Swahili numbers. His hand gripped harder. We stepped through together.

––—

32.

The sunlight dimmed and reddened. My ears clicked to the air pressure change. The ground jolted as a different gravity caught me. My right ankle failed. I staggered and went down, my breath knocked out. I lay gasping for air that was suddenly oven-hot and bitter with dust.

“Will?” Ram and Kenleth had my arms, trying to help me up. “Are you hurt?”

I tried to say I was okay, and found no voice. I tried to stand and fell back against the black stone column. Sitting propped against the column, I gasped for breath and gripped the ankle to ease the pain.

“Where?” Kenleth sneezed and coughed from the dust. “Where are we?”

“My Little Mama always said she’d run from hell.” Ram stood gazing around us. “I think we’re there.”

The trilithon stood on a flat stone bench. The land around it was pocked with craters, but almost level to far dark mountains. Wind-blown dust lay piled around scattered boulders of rust-red stone. The sun was huge and high, the color of red-hot iron, so dim that it didn’t hurt my eyes.

“Mars?” Ram shook his head. “We couldn’t breathe on Mars.”

“What’s that?”

Kenleth was pointing back through the trilithon. The paved trail we had followed was gone. All around us, that lifeless waste of rocks and dust and crater pits reached away to dark and distant mountain peaks bare of snow. A gust of the burning wind stung my eyes with dust.

“That thing?” Ram turned to me. “What could it be is?”

I blinked and rubbed my eyes and found the object. Far away among the craters, it was a great thick angular mass of some dark stuff, something no natural force could have shaped.

“A building?”

“Odd, if it is.” Ram shook his head. “No doors or windows I can see.” He shaded his eyes to study it again. “Something the trilithon-builders left? Maybe the ship that brought them?”

He sat down in the shadow of the high lintel stone and opened his pack to find his e-book. The script pages flickered across the screen. He stopped on the image of a planet that might have been a second Mars, waterless, cratered, the color of dust.

“I wish we had Derek here.” He frowned a long time at the image and finally looked back at me. “But I think the book’s a history of the Grand Dominion and its founders. I can’t read the text, but the planets we’ve seen are all there, even the twin system. I think they had to reach the planets with rocket craft before they built the trilithons.

“This planet is the first one in the book. Could be it’s the first one they reached. Not fit for life.” He scowled at the red desolation around us. “They would have gone on from here. Found better worlds, but barren of life. Finally Earth and life they could transplant from there.”

He touched a key. Lines of golden hieroglyphs flashed across the image. He pointed at a tiny black trilithon symbol in a wide crater at the center of it.

“That could be where we are.” He shook his head. “Or I could be wrong. No way to know.”

“An ugly place.” Kenleth shivered in spite of the heat and shaded his eyes to stare back through the trilithon at the dead waste beyond it. He turned anxiously to Ram. “Can we go back?”

“I wish we could.” Ram touched the pendant. “We’ve tried. The key never lets us.”

“So what can we do?”

“Not much.” He shook his head, with a wry glance at me. “Not till Will can walk.”

He touched a button to close the book. It stayed open. A bell-tone pealed. The dead screen flashed red and green, red and green again. It froze, amber-hued. English letters scrawled themselves across it unsteadily, as if written in haste.

RAM AND WILL, IF YOU EVER READ THIS, YOU HAVE REACHED BETA CENTRAL TRILITHON. WE ARE GOING ON TO PLANET ALPHA. WE NEED YOU WITH US. IF YOU CAN FOLLOW, TAKE THE SOUTHWEST ROUTE TO THE MOUNTAIN GATE.

LUPE AND DEREK

Kenleth leaned to read it. “Can we follow?”

“If we could.” Ram made an ironic grimace. “If we had a taxi and knew where to go.”

Kenleth blinked forlornly at the red desert around us.

“Is there any southwest here?”

“Derek explained directions,” Ram told him. “When you face a rising sun you’re looking east. The north pole is on your left, south on your right. But I don’t see any road or any signs to get us to the southwest route.”

* * * *

Ram shut the e-book and turned to frown again at that great black object.

“I could walk out for a closer look. I don’t know what we’ll find. Likely nothing, but I wonder if it could be the workshop used and left here by the trilithon builders. Interesting, maybe, if we could get inside.” He shrugged. “I see nothing else for us to do.”

I tried again to stand. Again a stab of pain brought me down. My ankle was swelling, turning purple, painful when I touched it. I looked around for anything that might make a cane or crutch, but all I saw was useless stone and dust. The effort to move left me breathing hard.

“Oxygen.” Ram grimaced. “It’s short here. No green life to set it free.” He gave me a wry grin. “Just wait right here.”

“Can I go with you?” Kenleth turned to me. “Or do you need me here with you?”

“Go,” I told him. “Ram could need you more than I do.”

Kenleth put his arms around me. Ram grinned and told me to call an ambulance if I needed help. I tried to laugh and felt tears on my cheeks. Helpless to do anything else, I sat back against the pillar, sweating in the heat and coughing from the acrid dust.

“Back by sundown,” Ram called. “Or light a lamp if we are late.”

I watched them walk away, picking a careful path through the rocks and carter pits, raising puffs of orange dust the wind whipped around their feet. They went slowly. Once Kenleth tripped and fell. Ram picked him up and gestured as if trying to send him back, but they went on together.

The black object was larger and farther than it looked. They were a long time on the way. The huge pale sun crept across the dusty sky. The shadow of the lintel shifted. I crawled on hands and knees to move our gear back into the moving shade.

They diminished in the distance. Gusts of yellow dust hid them and hid them again. They became tiny insect figures dancing in the shimmer of heat on the horizon between dark red desert and red-lit sky. I lost them altogether. The great dull sun sank into what I thought should be the west.

My ankle throbbed. The dust turned bitter in my throat and I took a careful sip of water. I dozed, and the sun was suddenly lower. I thought they had gone too far to be back before it set. I was wondering dismally if they would ever be back at all when I saw a bright flash ahead of them and then a tiny black grasshopper soaring in silhouette against the sun’s great face.

The hopper spread and beat its stubby wings, climbing higher, gliding down across that vast red disk. Small and far as the creature was, I knew the shape: the long narrow body and blunt silver head, the short wings, the black lever legs. It was another like the one that snatched Lupe out of the trilithon circle on that first planet, like the one that seized Derek on the planet of the robots.

I watched till it rose back across the sun’s dull face and glided down toward me. I counted five flights before it dived at the point where I had last seen Kenleth and Ram. It soon soared again, away from me now, soared and soared again, till I lost it in the sky above that strange black structure.

* * * *

I waited and saw nothing else. The sun went down. Purple dusk faded into moonless, starless darkness. I lay there on the hard stone floor, my ankle throbbing. The hot night wind took my breath and stung my throat with dust. I longed for Kenleth’s bright laugh, for Ram’s calm courage, for Lupe and Derek, for any spark of hope.

Yet somehow I slept. I dreamed that I’d somehow got back home to the university and called a press conference at the Campus Union. Reporters jeered at me. NASA scientists called my story a hoax. Our instant skipping from planet to planet was forbidden by Einstein’s laws of space and time. A chartered radar plane had flown over the Sahara and found no trace of any trilithon buried under the sand.

Skeptic demanded evidence, but I had no written records, no photos of the skywire or the robots or the hoppers, no artifacts from the fallen Grand Dominion. The university president wanted to know what had become of his missing faculty members.

Refusing to believe anything I said, he called the campus cops and then the state police. I was arrested and tried in district court. The judge was a tall black-robed man who had Crail’s sick and angry face. In a funeral voice, he stated the case against me.

“William Martin White, you are charged by the state of New Mexico with the murders of Dr. Derek Ironcraft, Dr. Lupe Vargas, and Dr. Ram Chenji. You are charged with destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice, and perjury in the fourth degree. What is your plea?”

My attorney rose to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. My only witness was Kenleth, still in the muddy rags he had worn when we picked him up out of the jungle. The prosecuting attorney ridiculed him. What court would accept the lies of a scrawny little black kid, a minor and an alien from nowhere? His testimony was stricken from the record.

The prosecuting attorney called a clever dark officer from Interpol, who clenched the case against me. Ram had been the kingpin of a plot to overthrow the government of his native Kenya. Derek and Lupe were his allies. They had infiltrated a terrorist group to obtain high explosives, and they were flying to Nairobi to assassinate the president.

Kenyan intelligence officials had bribed me to nip the plot. I planted a stolen bomb in Ram’s briefcase. Their plane crashed in the dunes of the Grand Erg Oriental, where searchers could never reach it. All three were certainly dead. The prosecutor called me a criminal idiot, if I expected a fairy tale of magic trilithons to shield me from the justice I deserved.

My attorney rested the case. The jury glided in, six glittering snakes shaped of glittering diamonds. Climbing into the jury box, they flashed their scarlet eyes at the lawyers and took half-human forms. The foreman’s head became White Water’s, and he read the decision from Ram’s e-book.

Death by lethal injection.

I woke drenched with sweat and parched with thirst. The giant sun was rising, veiled in wind-whipped dust that dimmed it to a great copper plate and burned my eyes. The courtroom and the cellular robots were gone, but that sentence of death was still with me.

It would execute itself when my food and water were gone.

––—

33.

I was there for an endless week as my watch measured Earth time, fifteen of the planet’s days. Each of those dragged on forever. I watched the path Ram and Kenleth had followed and searched the dull red sky where the hopper had flown. I ate when hunger drove me. I hoarded water till the last drop was gone. I slept when I could, and endured evil dreams.

“Ty Will?” I heard Kenleth’s anxious voice and felt his finger on my arm. “Are you okay?”

For a moment I thought he was another dream, but I opened my sticky eyes and found him leaning over me, clad in new white garments. Ram stood beside him, garbed in the same tight jacket and ballooning pants. Behind them I saw the machine that had brought them.

I gawked at it, wondering. The size of a van, it had no wheels, resting instead on a thick mattress of something that shaped itself like black rubber to fit the ground. It was topped with a dark oval shell that gleamed like glass under the dull red sun. A door in the end had swung down to make a ramp.

“Will?” Ram helped up. My ankle felt stiff, but I could stand. “How are you?”

My dry throat made a hoarse rasp when I tried to answer. I swayed on my feet and the trilithon spun around me. I tried to swallow when Kenleth held a cup of cold water to my lips, coughed and strangled on it, finally washed my mouth, took an uneasy sip, then reckless gulps.

“Better,” I managed to whisper. “Since you got here.”

“We tried to come sooner,” Kenleth said. “The hoppers kept us in the octagon.”

Ram helped me into a small space at the end of the machine. The ramp lifted to seal the door behind. Air hissed, suddenly dust-free and cool. A second door opened into a larger space that had seats rather like those in a small RV.

“An air lock,” Ram said. “And our own ventilation system.”

I sank into a seat. Kenleth folded a little table down before me, brought a basin of water and a sponge to let me wash the dust out of my eyes, the sweat-caked grime off my hands and face. He brought a cup of hot soup and a tray of crisp little biscuits. The banquet I’d longed for. I breathed the good air, sipped and nibbled, collapsed suddenly into a fit of sobbing.

“What’s wrong, Ty Will?”

Kenleth hovered over me, but I could only lie back in the seat, shaking, struck with terror that this was only another dream, that I would wake alone. He brought the sponge to let me wipe my eyes again. I’d nerved myself to die, and relief had overwhelmed me. I sat up at last, caught my breath, found life enough for questions.

“Humans?” Ram frowned. “This machine seems designed to fit us. But we’ve found nobody here.”

“Derek and Lupe?”

He nodded, with a wry shrug.

“We found their backpacks in a sort of museum. Hung up for display, along with their clothing and possessions. Marked with labels we couldn’t read. Nothing else.”

I asked about the hoppers.

“A monster!” Kenleth went shrill. “As big as a ship! It came down at us out of the sky. I was terribly afraid, but that was exciting. It had arms like slick snakes and hands with a dozen fingers. It grabbed us up and carried us back to the hive.” He looked at Ram. “If that’s what you call it.”

“I don’t know what to call them. The place seems to be a sort of hive. Or maybe a factory. We saw what I think may be a baby hopper.” Ram frowned. “A big, pale-gray slug, floating in a tank of liquid. Part of it was wrinkled, like a brain. Something was pulsing like a heart. It had no eyes, no limbs.

“Next to it was a big workshop, where a gang of cellular robots were turning out parts for it. Making the hard body shell, those long legs, the wings, the silver-colored skull. I think the hoppers are half machine, half alive.”

“Are they intelligent?”

“Depends on how you define it.” Eyes narrowed, he sat silent for a moment, staring out across the craters and the dust. “I think the hoppers were created to build the trilithons and explore the universe. I think they operate them now. They do it well, but that’s about all. Ask them something about Shakespeare’s sonnets, they might want you to define the word sonnet. More likely you’d get a glassy stare.”

“They talk?”

“They hear. The robots speak for them, with never much to say.”

“What do they want? Why did they pick you up?”

“They wanted to study us,” Kenleth said. “Like bugs under a lens.”

“They examined us.” Ram nodded. “Stripped us. Weighed and measured us. Tested our vision and our hearing. Ran us through a sort of maze, I guess to test our own intelligence.”

“That’s how they found my ring.”

Kenleth showed it to us, still hung on the cord around his neck, the gold band set with the tiny black trilithon.

“The one his mother gave him,” Ram said. “It came from a ruin. The robots took it to the hopper. It examined it under those big eyes that shine like searchlights and let the robots give it back to Kenleth.”

“And they worshipped me!” His eyes had lit. “Bowed to me and gave me a gift. A wonderful toy.”

He showed it to me. A crystal tetrahedron, clear as glass, three inches on a side.

“A lucky break.” Ram shrugged, with a puzzled frown. “I don’t understand the toy, if it is a toy, but the ring’s magic. It must come down from the time of the Grand Dominion. It carries authority. They gave us the machine and let us go.”

“Derek and Lupe?” I asked. “You saw their packs?”

“They must have been here. They had no magic ring, but they should have scored well on the I.Q. intelligence tests. I’d like to think the hoppers fitted them out and let them go on.”

“Where could they go?”

“Not back to Earth. Not if I know them. I think they’d want to go on to look for the creators.”

“Who are they?”

“A riddle for Derek and Lupe, if they had a chance to tackle it. A riddle for us if we’re lucky.” He frowned and shook his head. “But somebody, something, did create the hoppers and the robots and send them out to explore the universe. Somebody on another planet. This one never cradled the evolution of anything.”

He nodded at the machine.

“I want to go on, to see what we can find. You have a choice.”

* * * *

I asked what he meant.

“The hoppers run the trilithon system,” he said. “They take orders from Kenleth since they saw the ring. I think we could get them to take you back to Earth. Kenleth too, if he wants to go with you.”

That hit me like an unexpected fist. Emotion choked me. I broke into another fit of sobbing.

“Don’t you want me with you, Ty Will?” Kenleth put his arms around me. “You don’t have to take me.”

He brought me a cup of water. I took a gulp and found my voice.

“I want you with me,” I told him, and turned to Ram. “You can’t send me home.”

“Think about it, Will. I am going on, but it won’t be a picnic. Lupe and Derek said they needed us, but we might never find them.” He studied me again. “You’ve been through rough times. I don’t think you’re really over the fever. Frankly, you don’t look fit to go.”

“We’re the Four Horsemen, remember?” I tried to grin. “I can’t go home alone.”

* * * *

We stayed in that odd vehicle, there in the shadow of the trilithon, through several more of the planet’s fleeting days. Ram spent most of them at the controls in the nose and the navigation screen, studying what he thought was an operator’s handbook.

“Imagine a chimp in a car, with no instructor and a book he can’t read.” He mocked himself. “The robots don’t give driving lessons. But it does show routes and destinations.”

Kenleth spent hours absorbed in his new toy, the crystal tetrahedron. I began to see what made it wonderful. Changing colors flashed through it when he pressed the points. I caught glimpses of strange landscapes, images that baffled me, shining symbols from that script we had never been able to read.

“It’s a game,” he said. “I have to learn the rules.”

I asked Ram how the vehicle moved with no wheels.

“It crawls.” He shook his head. “Don’t ask me how. It somehow crawls or floats or flows on that black stuff under it. Slow, but it sure beats walking. It was engineered for rough country. No tires to puncture. You couldn’t collide it with anything or turn it over. I think it’s also a boat, if we had water to float it.

“There’s a sort of auto-pilot. A little like our satellite navigation systems back at home. I can’t read the legends, but the screen shows a map of the crater, with a red dot for the octagon and a trilithon sign for the point where we are. Routes across the area are marked in yellow. One runs southwest to the mountains. That ought to be Derek and Lupe’s southwest route to the mountain gate.”

He stopped to frown at me.

“One more gamble, if you can really get fit for it.”

* * * *

I ate, drank, dozed, ventured outside for short walks in the dusty heat, and finally convinced Ram that I was fit enough. He drove us by the octagon. It was even more enormous than I’d thought, maybe a mile across, the black walls windowless, towering perhaps a thousand feet into the dust-yellow sky.

I asked why it was so big.

“We didn’t see much. Nothing I’m sure I understood.” Ram shrugged. “It’s a ring, with a wide space in the center open to the sky. It could be a space ship, moved here by a force I can’t imagine. It could have been a center of operations for the exploration of the universe. Equipment built here, data and specimens studied and stored. It could have been a power plant, maybe still running the trilithons and that moving road. More likely something we’d never guess.

“Questions for Derek if we ever overtake him.”

As we came near, a tiny-seeming door opened on the ground level. A diamond snake crawled out and reared into a mockery of Derek. Its disk-shaped eyes flashed orange rays at us. Ram touched keys on the control board. The robot made a brisk about-face. It eyes flashed green. Its glittering arm lifted and froze, pointing our way.

Ram tapped a key and drove us on.

There was a sort of joystick, but he let the machine steer itself. Turning away from the octagon, it found what had been a road. Wind-drifted dust covered any pavement it ever had, but it was smooth enough for the machine, curbed here and there with ragged piles of dust and boulders moved to level it. It ran straight across the red-lit desert as far as I could see.

“Where are we going?” Kenleth was flushed with excitement. “Where’s the mountain gate?”

Ram was tapping the navigator keys, squinting at the flicker of script and image.

“We’ll see.” He frowned at his screen. “The print’s still Greek to me, but the pictures begin to make a sort of sense. I think we’re in a great crater that was left early in the planet’s history by the impact of something big. It’s deep. Maybe a couple hundred miles across. We’re on a route toward the rim.”

He and Kenleth took turns in the driver’s seat, but the machine left nothing for them to do. I sat watching the bleak landscape slide past. The machine moved without jolts or vibration, but it had a gentle sway that finally lulled me to sleep.

* * * *

Kenleth woke me.

“Will, we’ve got here!” He was pointing. “There’s the mountain gate!”

We had come to the end of the road. The gate was a towering trilithon, carved into black granite, with solid rock beyond it. The machine had stopped in its shadow. The ground had been leveled around it. Dust had drifted across a stretch of pitted pavement, but I saw no other road that led away.

“Breakfast!” Kenleth shouted. “And then we’re going into the mountain!”

He and Ram were busy with a little device that dispensed hot drinks and crisp little cakes. We ate. Ram studied the navigation screen and shook his head at the rock wall ahead, his birthmark glowing. He fumbled under his white jacket for the emerald pendant, put it to his lips, and murmured a few Swahili words to his Little Mama.

“Ready?” He looked around at Kenleth and me. “_Tayari_?”

“Ready!” Kenleth shouted. “Go!”

He touched something. The machine lurched ahead.

––—

34.

Black midnight fell. The rock-carved trilithon was gone, the dull red sun, the lurid sky. Ram stopped the machine. The pale green glow of the instrument lights went out. The crown of worlds shone golden on his forehead, but I saw nothing else. We sat lost in suffocating darkness.

“What happened?” Kenleth whispered. “Are we dead?”

“Not yet,” Ram said.

We sat there while our eyes adjusted to the dark. Star came out. One faint blue spark low in the east, a white spark to its right, a dim red point below it. More and more came behind them, rising so slowly I thought they were never really moving, all low in the east, none overhead or north or south or west.

“Strange!” Ram shook his head. “We’ve seen half a dozen skies from planets wide apart, but all somewhere in the galaxy. They all had our own Milky Way. But none like this.”

Hours passed. My legs cramped from sitting too long. Ram turned on the inside lights. Kenleth worked the dispenser to bring us cups of a tart amber drink and a tray of crisp almond flavored biscuits. With the lights out and our eyes adjusted again, we found a star cloud in the east; thousands of stars, bright and faint, a luminous haze behind them.

“Look!” Kenleth caught Ram’s arm. “Your birthmark!”

I saw an odd constellation. A compact cluster made a level bar. Brighter stars made an arc above it. They formed the crown of worlds. I turned to stare at the glowing pattern on his forehead.

“The same!” I couldn’t stop myself. “What does it mean?”

“Nothing.” Ram shrugged. “Nothing I like. Derek said it had to be a genetic artifact created by the trilithon builders. Maybe it is. I don’t know. I was born with it, but I never wanted any special destiny written in some strange sky.”

We sat in silence till I heard Kenleth’s awed whisper.

“My mother thought you were born to be a god.”

“No!” The word exploded in the dark. “I’m no god!”

* * * *

He moved abruptly to turn the headlamps on. Blazing ahead, they flooded a flat wasteland, white as new snow. Nothing broke it, as far as I could see. Not a rock, not a building, not a tree, not anything at all.

“Where?” Kenleth’s voice was hoarse and hushed. “Where is this?”

“I’d like to know.”

Ram started the crawler again, turning to let the headlights sweep all around us. There was no trilithon, nothing but that flat white waste. I shivered, as if its dead desolation had crept into the machine.

“Let’s take a look,” he said. “A look outside.”

He went back to the airlock. The door thumped and sealed behind him. Air hissed. We waited a long time until at last it hissed again. He stumbled dazedly back, shaking his head.

“We’re stuck,” he muttered. “The outside hatch won’t open. A safety lock, I guess. I can’t be sure how to read the instruments, but I think they show air pressure zero and outside temperature close to absolute zero. That would mean the planet has no sun.”

His face turned harder in the birthmark’s glow.

“If Derek and Lupe got here ahead of us, I’m afraid they’re dead.”

Kenleth looked at me, his eyes huge. “Will we die?”

All I could do was put my arm around him.

* * * *

Ram was peering into the pool of light ahead of the crawler.

“See that!” Suddenly he was pointing. I saw a faint gray trace across it. “Derek and Lupe did get here. They left a track in that white stuff, which I guess is frozen air. A trail I think we can follow.”

We set out along it, the machine crawling a little faster than a man could walk. Ram let me take my turns in the driver’s seat, but the faint gray trail ran straight forever, with never a turn or a break, and the machine drove itself.

“A frozen world.” Ram hunched his shoulders as if he felt its bitter chill. “Frozen nearly forever, but it must have been alive. With air until it froze. Water and weather, to wear the surface smooth. How long ago — ” He shook his head. “I can’t imagine.”

Fascinated with the food and drink dispenser, Kenleth served our meals. The strange textures and flavors turned me off at first, but hunger was a great appetizer.

“Synthetics.” With a grin of relish, Ram finished a chocolate-colored bar. “I’ve had worse.”

Very slowly, the crown of worlds rose higher in what we came to call the east. Crowded constellations followed it. Hot red stars. Cold blue giants. Stars white as our own sun. Crowded closer and closer together till half the sky blazed with diamond fire.

“Imagine Derek!” Ram shook his head at the sky and the faint trail ahead.” “If he’s okay. He taught an astronomy course back at Eastern, with a little telescope of his own. Discovering this should drive him wild.”

* * * *

By my watch, twenty hours of Earth time had passed by then.

“A lazy planet,” Ram said. “The day maybe eighty hours. The ages must have slowed it down.”

The machine crawled on and on. We slept, stretched out on seats that folded flat. We ate when we were hungry. We scanned that great swarm of stars rising out of the east, climbing till it covered all the sky and flooded that empty white infinity with starlight brighter than our own moon had been.

Nothing changed it until Kenleth, sitting at the joystick, cried out.

“There! See!”

It was hard for me to see, but at last I found a saw-toothed break in the straight horizon. Hour by hour it stretched longer, and the tiny teeth became towers, climbing higher and higher against the bright mosaic of varicolored stars.

“A city?” Kenleth was enchanted. “Have we found a city?”

It had been a city. A wall had stood around it, broken now with gaps that let us see the buildings. Climbing as we neared them, they became magnificent and strange. Slender pyramids stabbed spear-like toward the star-packed zenith. Hexagonal columns clustered among domes and spires and soaring shapes I knew no names for. Their splendor awed us into silence.

Ram stopped the machine.

“A ruin!” he whispered. “I wish we could have seen it whole.”

Half of it was gone, reduced to stumps and rock piles and bare foundations. Deep canyons yawned between rubble mountains. All of it was shrouded under hills of frost-white dust.

“Dead!” Ram shivered. “Dead before our world was born.”

“Were they people?” Kenleth whispered.

“The doors are human-sized,” Ram said. “That’s one sign.”

“What killed them?”

“A falling meteor?” Ram shook his head. “A missile? Or maybe merely time? It happened very long ago.”

We sat there a long time before he moved the machine again.

* * * *

“A field day for Lupe!” Ram swung the headlights to scan the way ahead. “She was wild for anything prehistoric. Just imagine her here!”

The trail was hard to follow. They had gone through a gap in the wall and onto a magnificent avenue. A ridge of toppled masonry had turned them back. Our own tracks were laid over theirs until we lost then altogether. We ourselves were lost.

A dozen hours were gone before we found a gap that took us back out of the wall. With the constellations for a compass and starlight over the ruins, we picked up the trail. Again the faint gray track ran straight into a world dead forever. Frost crystals flashed and vanished in our headlights, but we saw no other change.

The star clouds covered all the sky with diamonds and set in what we called the west. Again we crawled on and on and on, with only the headlights to show the trail. We took turns at the joystick, turns at staring into empty darkness, turns asleep. We ate again and still again. I asked Ram how long he thought our supplies might last. He didn’t know.

Another day of starlight dawned at last, the crown of worlds climbing again out of the east.

“There!” Kenleth pointed ahead. “What is that?”

His eyes were shaper than mine. I saw nothing until an hour later, when the starlight was strong enough to show me a tiny pyramid on the horizon. Ram woke to watch it with us. It grew until I saw that it was no pyramid at all, but a cone-shape instead, towering alone out of infinite flatness.

“A mountain?” Kenleth asked. “Is it a mountain?”

“Not here.” Ram shook his head. “Not likely, though it’s tall enough.”

It was a thousand feet high, he guessed, half a mile across, the surface sloping smoothly up. Kenleth made out a spiral path that wound around from the ground to a railed platform at the top.

“Something built,” Ram said. “Likely when the city was.”

Like the city, it was buried under frost and dust.

“Can we climb it?” Kenleth was eager. “To the top?”

“If Derek and Lupe did,” Ram said. “We’ll follow till we find them.”

* * * *

They hadn’t climbed, we found, but had gone down instead. The track took us past a long ridge of frozen air that had been bulldozed to clear a wide space around the cone. I saw a dark archway in the foot of it. Light flickered there, and a long crystal robot crawled out to meet us.

It reared in front of us. The little cubes and disks and pyramids and cones and shapeless masses morphed into a glittering image of Lupe in her jeans and field jacket and even something like her wide-brimmed field hat. The round eyes flashed orange, and it beckoned us to stop.

“Lupe Vargas!” Ram stopped the crawler and sat gaping at it. “We’ve found them!”

“Found what?” Kenleth goggled at it.

Its eyes flashed again. Ram moved abruptly to answer with our headlights. It eyes shone green, and it stepped aside to beckon us through the arch. Ram drove us past it into a wide tunnel that sloped gently down. The walls were high and our headlamps glinted red and gold on tiles that made intricate patterns of interlocking rosettes.

“A paradise for Lupe!” Ram whistled. “What a culture to explore!”

The tunnel curved, always sloping down. We followed for several miles, finally out into a cavernous space with a circular floor. A blue dome arched it, softly luminous. We saw no exit. Ram stopped the machine. We sat there waiting.

* * * *

Kenleth fidgeted, staring uneasily around at the featureless dome.

“What’s this — “

It flickered before he could finish, and became a bright blue sky with a warm sun rising in the east. The crawler sat on a grassy plain with clumps of trees around us. Smoke climbed from a brown lava cone on the north horizon. A small stream ran past us toward a distant water hole. Far off to the south, a lone mountain peak towered above the clouds to a cap of white.

“Kenya!” Ram gasped. “We’re on the rim of the Rift.” He shook his head and pointed south. “That’s Kilimanjaro.”

“Where’s this?” Kenleth gaped at me. “What happened to us?”

“It’s a picture,” Ram told him. “A living picture of the world where I grew up.” He caught his breath and turned to stare at me. “But how did it get this far from Earth?”

I had no idea. We sat there drinking it in. A little herd of zebras was grazing near us, a few impalas among them. A pair of giraffes browsed treetops beyond. A great, white-tusked elephant ambled around a clump of the trees, half a dozen more behind it. Ignoring us, they stopped to drink from the stream. A dark-maned lion lay on a rocky hill, its great head lifted, watching sleepily.

“People!”

Kenleth gestured. They came toward us, wading the stream in single file. Naked and hairy, but walking erect, they were certainly human. In the lead were three or four black-bearded men, carrying long spears and stone axes in rawhide pouches slung over their shoulders. One had an impala hindquarter over his shoulder, still in its hide. Another had a little boy with a missing foot astride his neck.

Two of the women carried babies, one a full water skin. A tall girl had golden fruit in a fiber bag. A younger girl led her little sister by the hand. A wisp of smoke drifted from a little pile of ashes in a bird-nest of mud and woven grass on an older woman’s head. She was the keeper of fire. Two boys had slings and bags of pebbles. One ran to the front, whirled a rock around his head, and let it fly. The other darted to look for what it might have hit.

Kenleth blinked at Ram. “Who are they?”

“Us,” Ram said. “The way Lupe thought we were two hundred thousand years ago, when somebody brought us back to Earth from wherever we were evolved or engineered.”

They vanished. The dome around us was smooth and blue again. A door slid open ahead of the crawler to reveal another wide tunnel mouth ahead. A vehicle glided out, a crawler like ours, perhaps a little larger. I glimpsed the man at the joystick.

Derek Ironcraft.

––—

35.

The machine crawled closer. Derek waved a greeting. I found Lupe in the seat beside him. In an odd white outfit like Ram’s and Kenleth’s, she was almost a stranger. Her field hat was gone. Her hair hung behind her shoulders in a long black braid. Derek had grown a thick beard and long bronze hair secured with a red headband.

“Derek?” Ram bent over the instruments and pulled out a knob that looked like a microphone. “Lupe? Do you hear me?”

Derek waved again, but I heard no answer. Lupe shaded her eyes to see us. Ram shook his head and edged us closer. Derek gestured for us to stop. He backed away and turned his machine to bring the doors together. The air locks thumped and hissed. Suddenly Derek and Lupe were coming through, a gleaming metal and crystal robot gliding behind them.

“We were hoping.” Derek gripped my hand. “A relief to see you safe.”

Lupe hugged us. I introduced Kenleth. Lupe gave him a smile. He burst into tears.

“I — I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “You look like my mother.”

She put her arms around him. Ram beckoned them into the seats. He huddled against her, gazing up at her face in instant adoration. Derek studied me sharply and asked how I was.

“Okay,” I said. “Since we’ve found you.”

“We’re all better now,” Ram said. “I thought we’d lost you forever.”

* * * *

We asked a thousand questions. Where had they been since the hoppers picked them up? What was this place? How had they found their own way here? How did they control the robots? What had they learned about the builders of the trilithons, the frozen city, the towering cone above us?

“Big questions.” Derek shrugged them off. “We’re looking for answers and always finding more to ask. Most of what we have is guesswork. You’ve seen the cybroids. That’s what we call the hoppers and the robots. You’ve seen the empty sky. And Omega. That’s Lupe’s name for the city. You know as much as we do.”

“You got here,” Ram said. “All we’ve done is follow.”

“We want to know how you managed that.”

“A long story.” Ram’s face went bleak. “It wasn’t easy.”

Lupe worked the dispenser and brought us a plate of little lemon-flavored cakes and yellow globes with the taste of ripe peaches. Derek opened a cabinet and came back with a tray loaded with pitchers, glasses, and a bowl of ice.

“Not quite the Kentucky bourbon we used to drink on poker nights.” He held a bottle of amber liquid up to the light. “But the cybroids make a fair mint julep when you can teach them what you want.” He filled our glasses. “Here’s to Planet Alpha and the Omegans.”

“To the Four Horsemen!” Lupe waved her glass. “Together again!”

I sipped cautiously. It wasn’t bourbon, but it had a hint of mint and a fiery bite. Kenleth wanted a taste. Derek gave him a little of it, mixed with water. He sipped and made a face.

“You’ve been on Delta?” Lupe said. “What’s it like?”

“Delta?” Ram shook his head. “We never knew a name for it.”

“Our own tags,” Derek said. “In the order in which we think the Omegans reached them. They must have evolved here, which makes this Alpha. The octagon’s on Beta.”

Ram summed up our story.

“Delta had a high-tech culture once, when it was part of the interstellar empire the natives call the Grand Dominion. That collapsed long ago. It’s pretty primitive now, but still inhabited by two races, black and white.”

His voice grew hoarse and slow when he came to the slave rebellion, our captivity, the blood rot pandemic, our escape with White Water up Blood River. He broke it off with not a word about the Crails.

“Celya?” Kenleth said. “Don’t forget her.”

Ram’s face went hard. He gulped and said nothing.

“She was a beautiful woman,” Kenleth told Lupe. “We lived in her home.”

“She was white.” Ram spoke at last, his voice quick and sharp. “We fell in love. She’s dead. I can’t talk about her now.”

* * * *

Kenleth sat playing with his crystal tetrahedron while we talked. Lights flashed in it, sometimes a shining hieroglyph, sometimes a shape that baffled me, sometimes a human-seeming face. Now and then an identical tetrahedron sprang from of one of its faces and vanished again, a second pyramid of golden light with some momentary image inside it.

Once a chord of strange music pealed out, so loud it startled me, and I saw the tiny image of a woman’s head, fair-haired and entirely human. She was singing to the music, the rhythm strange, her voice loud and clear. He pressed a point that muffled it to a whisper.

“Sorry,” he said. “It surprises me.”

Ram caught his breath, staring at the little image. Derek and Lupe leaned to see. The woman was young and very blonde. She looked much like Sheko in the colossi we had seen on Delta, almost like Celya Crail herself.

“Amazing!” Lupe turned to Derek. “Is she an Omegan?”

“Maybe.” He shook his unkempt head. “More likely an Omegan creation, engineered to populate the new worlds. Maybe a cousin of our own. I’d like to know.”

Kenleth pressed another point, and the image was gone.

“A holographic projector,” Derek said. “We saw a rack of things like it in the octagon, but I never learned much about them.”

“We’ve seen a thousand artifacts we didn’t understand.” Lupe nodded. “Enough to fill a museum if we could get them back to Earth. All of them perplexing. Enough to keep a hundred scholars busy for the next hundred years.”

Derek grinned. “Certainly enough to keep us busy here.”

I wondered if we could ever get back to Earth with anything at all.

* * * *

Derek offered his juleps again. Ram took one and sat sipping it slowly, staring at Kenleth and his toy. Thinking of Celya, I imagined. I declined the julep and asked for more about the Omegans and Planet Alpha.

“It gets me. That black sky with no sun. The frozen air. The dead city. Earth so far away. I feel terribly lost.”

“So did we.”

Derek nodded at the robot still at the airlock door. It stood rigidly motionless, but its eye disks seemed to follow when he moved. A slow pulse of dim green and orange light beat from its head down through the crystal bits that made its body.

“The cybroids gave us rough times. They guard the gates. We had to pass tests to convince them we’re human. Lupe did it first, of course. She helped me through.”

“Stiff tests,” Lupe said. “But the cybroids were never vicious. And I had a bit of good luck. The bad luck of an Arab who died a thousand years ago, back when he must have been carrying Islam across North Africa. He blundered on the Sahara gate, and a hopper picked him up. He flunked the tests and never got beyond Beta, but he left useful clues for me.”

“Poor guy.” Derek grinned. “He must have thought they had him in hell.”

“I found a few useful items in the octagon,” she went on. “Things I guess his followers left there as an offering. Weapons, a few gold coins, a manuscript of the Koran that a true believer would die for. The cybroids learned a little Arabic in the course of his interrogation, and they don’t forget. I have a smattering of Arabic, enough to help me get past the hurdles.”

“Enough to get us here to Alpha, just a few weeks ago.” Derek shook his head in awe. “It’s a wonderland! I wish we had a telescope. The seeing would be splendid.”

He saw me shiver.

“It’s no tropic paradise.” He grinned as if amused at me. “That’s because we’re outside the galaxy. Outside a globular cluster. I think our Milky Way is hidden behind it. It’s probably older, formed before the galaxy was. Not the best place for life to begin, because the cluster stars are poor in the heavy elements it needs, yet Omegan life was born here.”

“Here?” Ram turned to stare at him. “On this dead planet?”

“It’s a graveyard now.” Derek nodded. “The tomb of the Omegans. But it was somewhere in the cluster then, with suns enough to warm it.”

“How did it get out here?”

“Ejected.” Derek paused to gaze at Kenleth, who had laid his magic toy aside and moved to snuggle up to Lupe. “Stars are crowded in a cluster. Chaotic gravitational forces can toss a planet out.”

“And cold killed its people?”

“Not the Omegans.” He shook his head. “Rather, it forced their evolution. We don’t know what they knew, but their history must have been an epic. They had to change with the changes in their world. They invented the science and the high technology that kept them alive — and finally let them send the cybroids out to explore the galaxy and build the trilithons.”

He sighed and shook his head.

“I’m sorry they died.”

“What killed them?” Ram stared at him. “After they’d hung on so long?”

“We hope to find the answer here. Or maybe in the city, if we can ever get back to Earth and return with a team and equipment to begin an excavation.”

“I hope to!” Lupe’s lean face lit. “I’ve spent my life digging for our own prehistory. In Asia, Chile, Kenya, New Mexico. But Omega City! It’s incredible! Whole buildings there under the frozen air that look still intact.”

“A wild dream.” Derek grinned and shook his head at her. “Imagine the problems. Working here so far from Earth, in high vacuum at absolute zero.”

“Problems.” She nodded. “But I think the Omegans left us solutions, if we learn enough of what they knew.”

“Just suppose.” He shrugged, laughing at her. “Suppose we learn it all. We might make ourselves immortal. We might restore the Grand Dominion. We might make ourselves the lords of Earth and turn it into a real utopia.”

“We dream.” She smiled at him fondly, with a wry little quirk of her lips. “We do collide with awkward realities, but the hopes and visions us keep going. And what we’re learning is wonderful enough.”

* * * *

“I’ve still got questions.” Ram frowned. “If the Omegans were really immortal, how come they’re dead?”

“A paradox.” Derek nodded. “But look at the logic of it. Immortals can’t afford to replicate themselves. Their progeny would supplant them. They have to stop reproduction. I think the Omegans conquered death. I think that did them in.”

“Tell me how.”

“I can guess. I think they’d lived as long as they wanted to. The cold hadn’t hurt them. Their cybroids had found warmer worlds where they might have gone. They chose to stay, chose to die. If they left any records of the reasons why, we haven’t read them.” He shrugged and grinned at Lupe. “If they’d learned everything and done everything, perhaps they were simply bored with everything and saw no reason to go on.

“Or maybe — “

He stopped to study Kenleth, who was absorbed again with the images and symbols flickering in his crystal pyramid.

“Or maybe they are still alive in us,”

Ram blinked and his eyebrows lifted.

“We are their children,” he said. “We know they were genetic engineers. We know the cybroids picked up prehuman hominids and brought _Homo sapiens_ back to Earth. You’ve had a glimpse of the new arrivals, there in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. I think the Omegans left their own genes in us.”

Ram stared, shaking his head.

“The answer to an old question in human evolution.” Lupe nodded. “Early hominids had small skulls. The sudden enlargement of the brain has been a puzzle. Maybe the Omegan genetic engineers were simply making room for gifts our own forebears had never needed. Language, art, abstract thought. We may be the new Omegans.”

––—

36.

“We’re frustrated.”

Derek’s shoulders sagged to a weary shrug, but he brightened in a moment.

“The Omegans may be dead, but the cybroids are still with us and now we’re on the road to wonderland. I think the cone above our heads is an interstellar signal tower in instant touch with all the trilithons. It must have been the nerve net of the Grand Dominion.”

Looking out at the mosaic enigmas on the tunnel wall, he seemed to see beyond them.

“They knew the Grand Dominion would never be eternal. They left a more lasting record here, a gift to whatever future they hoped for. Here outside the galaxy, the planet’s a deepfreeze that ought to be perpetual. A fabulous bonanza — if we could get at it.”

He looked at Lupe and waited for her silent sigh.

“We can’t.” His voice fell. “There are tunnels filled with what must be libraries and museums. Enormous halls filled with artifacts that stump us. Miles of mosaic print we can’t read. The whole place is the riddle old Egypt was before Young and Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone.”

Behind the unkempt beard, his face set tight. “We’ve found no Rosetta Stone.”

* * * *

“Let’s look at the site,” Lupe said. “If you want to see our problems.”

Derek raised his hand to signal the robot. It made no sound, but its eye disks flickered and the pulse of light quickened through its limbs. Moving with a swift economy of action, it uncoupled the crawlers.

Leaving ours there in the dome, Derek drove us farther down the corkscrew curves. Huge yellow glyphs blazed out of the wall ahead, changed slowly to others in blue, changed and changed again, faster and faster until they became a shimmering sun. That winked out, replaced with waves of rainbow light that hurt my eyes and left me giddy.

“A message.” He stopped the crawler to grin at me. “Can you read it?”

“Can you?”

“Not yet. A tough nut to crack.” He frowned. “I’m not even sure we have the right senses to get the full signals. Or the minds to read them if we did. Our brains were shaped to make specific responses to specific challenges in our own environment. To find food, defend territory, defeat rivals, win mates, interact with others. Not to mesh with anything Omegan.

“You might object that we can also do higher math or write symphonic music or build the Hubble telescope. Those are wonderful serendipities, harder to account for. Maybe gifts of the genes the Omegan planted in us. But we aren’t Omegans. Evolving in their own very different environment, they had to cope with another set of challenges. They must have had different brains.”

He gestured at the mosaics we were passing.

“Those must be symbolic of what the Omegans knew and felt and believed, but we weren’t evolved to grasp them. We’ll never think like the Omegans did.”

He sighed again and drove us on. Those perplexing images gave way to panel after panel that shone with lines of symbols like those in Ram’s e-book.

“That’s their writing.” Derek frowned. “A code without a key. We hope to find that by analysis of repeated patterns. See those symbols in red?”

He stopped the crawler to point to a blank space on a green-lettered panel with a line below it set in tiny ruby-colored stones.

“The text is in sections, separated by breaks like that. Each one has that sort of centered heading. Maybe, just maybe, those repeated symbols could be chapter numbers.”

“They are.” Kenleth looked up from his toy. “That’s two hundred and seven in Omegan numbers. It would be a bigger number for us. The Omegans count to eleven instead of nine before they come to ten.”

“So they used base twelve?” Derek stared at him. “Instead of base ten?”

“Ken!” Lupe blinked. “How do you know?”

“I’m taking lessons.” He held up the crystal tetrahedron. “I’ve learned the numbers. I’ve begun the easy words. Water sounds like _scheeth,_ though I can’t say it quite right. A river is _en_-_scheeth_. A sea is _ru_-_scheeth_.”

“The language may be simplified,” Derek said. “To make it easier to decipher.”

“That’s amazing!” Lupe hugged Kenleth and leaned to look for herself into the crystal pyramid. “If you’ve found a Rosetta Stone — ” She hugged him closer. “You’re a hero!”

He beamed at her, tears of joy gleaming in his eyes.

* * * *

She and Derek were instantly ecstatic, the secrets of Omega almost in their grasp. But not quite. They tried the tetrahedron themselves and had to give it up.

“Kids are born with a gift for language,” Derek said. “It fades with time. We’ve lost too much of ours. Kenleth hasn’t.”

They began to study with him, copying the glyphs, taking notes, debating rules of Omegan grammar. They kept the robot busy, sending it outside with an Omegan relic, a sort of video camera, to get pictures and collect artifacts. They invented a jargon of their own to discuss every clue to Omegan science and history.

I felt left out. Though I rejoiced in their delight, it was hard for me to share. Even coupled together, the two crawlers gave us a very tiny living space. We had room enough to sit, to eat, to sleep, but not much else. I felt shut in, cramped, useless.

Ram sat alone for hour after hour, brooding, I thought, over all he had lost. Kenleth was as restless as a monkey in a cage. He roved every nook of the crawlers and tested every gadget, but always came back to huddle over the tetrahedron, watching the flickering enigmas inside it, listening to the strange heads that sprang out of it, learning alien phonemes.

For me, the confinement became intolerable. I had nothing at all to do. The effects of the fever were still in me, and I could never shake off my dread of the eternal bitter night that held us there in prison. I longed for change, for space, sunlight, people, Earth, my Eastern friends and colleagues, my old house in Portales.

I couldn’t help asking when we might go home.

“Don’t think about it!” Lupe was almost shocked. “This is too exciting. We’ve found a key to dreamland. We can’t quit now.”

“Look at it, Will.” Derek begged me, very soberly. “Of course we’re going back home, but we can’t do it now. We’d get a cold welcome. What we’re finding would upset too many apple carts. Ten thousand experts in everything from archaeology to zoology would unite to defend their territories from anything so new.

“Without evidence they can’t deny, they’d laugh us off the Earth. We’ll have to have artifacts, photos. Maybe robots. Or a giant hopper! One if them ought to persuade everybody.” He grinned at the thought, and grew grave again. “Don’t rush us. Getting solid getting proof enough together will take time. We can’t afford to fail.”

I sat there dumb, blinking at them, tears blurring my vision. I loved them. The Four Horsemen. We’d worked and played together half our lives, even before we found the Stonehenge gate. I didn’t want to leave them, yet I felt trapped and miserable.

“You’re disappointed, Will?” Lupe gave me a searching look. “You really want to go?”

My throat aching, I felt more than I could try to say.

“We could send the two of you.” Derek turned to Ram. “If you want to go. If you can learn to work the cybroids and the trilithons.”

“Can I go?” Kenleth appealed eagerly to me. “Will you take me?”

I’d thought of that. I’d come to love him, the child I’d never had. Life on Earth would be lonely if I ever did get back alone. Awkward, too, with too many questions I could never answer. I would need him, miss him terribly.

I’d weighed the possibilities. He would be illegal, but illegals are common in New Mexico. Perhaps I could adopt him. Put him though school. Watch him play in Little League. Help him find his place on Earth. It could be a great adventure for him, a world as new as his had been for us.

“Of course,” I told him. “I’ll love to have you with me.”

“Thank you!” He came to put his arms around me. “I’d love to see your world.”

Lupe looked at Derek and shook her head. Half a minute passed before she caught her breath and spoke.

“Kenleth, we need you here to help us learn the Omegan language. Your tetrahedron could be our key to all the mysteries of Omegan science and history. We need you to teach us how to use it. Won’t you please stay, long enough at least to put us on the road?”

He wiped his eyes and looked at me.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, “but I think you ought to stay.”

“Then I will.” His voice was choked, and he had to wipe his eyes again. “But I’ll always love you, Ty Will.” He put his quivering arm around me and looked at Ram. “I’ll miss you too, Ty Ram, if you go. I hope you’ll both be happy back on Earth.”

* * * *

“I’ve been thinking.”

Ran stood up to face us with an expression of austere decision I had never seen before. Muscular and tall, the crown of world shining on his forehead, he was suddenly magnificent, a reminder of the colossal figures of Anak we had seen on Delta.

“Thinking a lot.” His voice seemed deeper, and I heard a sudden ring of confidence. “I don’t belong here. There’s nothing for me on Earth. I had a bad time on Delta. I guess I ran away, but now I think I ought to go back there.”

He looked at Derek.

“Can you send me?”

“If you want.” Derek nodded. “If you want to go.”

“I want to know if Norlan’s still alive.” Absently, Ram fingered the glowing crown of worlds. “Ships were sunk to save it. Maybe it escaped. And Celya — ” Pain bit his face. “Her mother came from there. Her sister’s there on Norlan now, teaching history and prehistoric antiquities at a college in Glacier Bay.”

He shook his head, frowning out at a dancing glyph.

“Celya talked about her. They were close. Letters to each other in every mail boat. I can try to find White Water. Find if he can get me on to Glacier Bay. I need to tell her what I can about the last days Celya and their parents. Maybe take her whatever I can find at their old place that she might like to have.”

He shrugged unhappily.

“But Norlan’s a long way off.”

––—

37.

It hurt to be abandoning my closest friends amid all the hazards I could imagine here, but they had to stay. Derek and Lupe were in Omegan heaven. Kenleth was elated, suddenly able to open the secrets they longed for. I felt sorry for Ram, saddened because I knew no way to help him or any of them.

“Back to Earth?” He shook his head. “Not now. Maybe never. I don’t know what to do.”

Though the aftermath of the illness was still in me, my own spirits rose with the hope of escape from this narrow prison cell and all the black and frigid death around it. I felt stronger day by day as we planned the trip, with a fresh appetite for the meals Kenleth served from the dispenser. Lupe offered to pack a collection of Omegan artifacts to help me prove my story, but I decided not to take them. I wanted no controversy.

“You’ll be getting back with no passport,” Derek reminded me. “Nothing to prove who you are. You’ll need money.”

He found a handful of what he thought were Omegan coins, heavy little metal doughnuts ringed with Omegan script. They looked like gold. In time to come they might be priceless, but I couldn’t explain them now. I left them with him.

Ram and Lupe helped invent a harmless tale for me to tell. When I was ready, they gathered at the air lock to say good-bye. Derek and Ram shook my hand. Lupe hugged and kissed me. Kenleth clung a long time to me, and sobbed a promise to come to come to stay with me down on Earth if ever he was able.

* * * *

They all stood waving as I hoisted my worn backpack and turned to the airlock. Sudden emotion overwhelmed me. My voice broke as I tried to call a last farewell. My heart was thumping. I felt unsteady on my feet. My vision blurred. Perhaps I stumbled.

“Will?” Lupe looked at me sharply. “You’re pale. Do you feel well? Are you really able to go?”

“I’m okay.” I had to catch a breath. “Just — just anxious. It’s a long way to Earth. “I don’t know what to expect on the way.”

The silent robot stood waiting at the lock, a tall man-shape made of crystal bits. It reached a glittering hand to assist me toward a seat. I heard Kenleth’s plaintive call through the closing door.

“I love you, Ty Will.”

The robot was efficient and well instructed. It sealed the lock and drove me back up the tunnel, past the glistening mosaics I would never see again, out into Alpha’s perpetual frigid night. Though I had seen no trilithon at the tunnel mouth, it was another interstellar gate. I had one last glimpse of the cluster’s clotted stars rising over that flat white waste of frozen air before the crawler lurched to a different gravity.

* * * *

And something hit me. The crawler seemed to spin. I remember a flash of blinding sunlight, a pang of sickness at the pit of my stomach, a moment of darkness. I came awake slowly, lying alone on a bed in a small bare room that had high, pale-green walls.

My mind was empty, without awareness of who or where I was or any urge to know. Bits of memory came, shadow shapes that took focus: the trilithons, the worlds we had seen, Kenleth standing with Derek and Lupe in the crawler, blinking at his tears and calling his quavery farewell.

I had no strength at first, no desire to move, but I turned my head at last to look around the room. I found an open door on one side, a wide window on the other. Beyond a strip of white pavement, a velvet lawn sloped down to an arm of blue water ruffled with whitecaps. Smooth hills rose beyond the water, and far mountains hazed with distance.

All of it looked Earthlike for a moment, until its strangeness struck me. All the land was velvet smooth, velvet green. I saw no trees, no buildings, no creatures, nothing alive. Two bright suns were rising into a clear blue sky. This was nowhere I had ever been.

“Ty White?” Derek’s voice startled me. “You wake?”

I moved my head again and found a tall crystal column standing at the foot of the bed, rainbow colors pulsing slowly through its thousand facets. It changed as I looked, morphing into a semi-human form. I knew the slope of the shoulders, the tilt of the strange head. Derek’s!

“You are awake.” Its tone turned positive. “Tyba Vargas coming.”

Mocking Derek’s swinging stride, it left the room. Lupe bustled in. The human Lupe. In a neat white jacket, with a stethoscope hung over her shoulder, she might almost have been a physician back at home.

“Will?” She gave me a brown grin. “Com’ esta?”

“I don’t — don’t know.” My voice was a rusty whisper. “Where’s this?”

“You’re lucky,” she said. “The robot medics are tops. They remember millennia of experience with human patients. Anywhere else you’d be dead.”

“What happened to me?”

“A delayed effect of your illness. It stopped your heart. They knew how to set it to ticking again in time to save your brain.”

I lay there a long minute, groping with the fact of the illness, before I found the curiosity to ask, “Where are we now?”

“We call it Theta. The eighth Earthlike planet the Omegans reached. This is a research station they set up, but they never tried to terraform or settle it. I suppose because they respected its native life. An odd sort of life. I hope we can see more of it when we’re through on Alpha.”

“Odd? What’s it like?”

“You see the green?” She nodded at the window. “It covers the ground like skin, eats whatever fall on it. Exists only here in the tropics, I think. The survey team left maps and specimens and research reports about the rest of the planet that I hope we’ll be able to read.”

“Before you go home?” I asked her. “How long will it take?”

Overcome with a tidal wave of sleep, I didn’t hear whatever she said.

* * * *

She must have been impatient to get back to Derek and the mysteries of Omega, but she stayed till she was sure of my recovery. Making the most of her time, she studied the robot, made notes of everything she found at the station, and saw what she could of the world outside.

“Derek will be excited to see the double sun,” she said. “And Theta itself will be a bonanza for some future science team. I can’t read anything, but there are maps and photos and specimens. Other zones have other sorts of life biologist will die to see.”

Caring for me, the robot took her shape and her voice. It brought my meals, gave me pills and drinks that had the taste of medicine, made me exercise. My strength came back, and a fresh sense of well-being. A day came when she said she had to go.

“Derek needs me more than you do.” She kissed me, the first real kiss I’d had in many years. “We’ll miss you, Will, but we’ll be following you home as soon as we have what it will take to persuade the world we’ve really been off the Earth.”

* * * *

My watch was gone. I don’t know how long I was there alone with the robot. Now and then I ventured into other sections of the station, a maze of spaces that I thought were labs or workshops or the quarters of the vanished research team, but there was nothing I understood.

More often I walked outside, under the double sun. I found the trilithon behind the station, huge square pillars of black granite towering high, looking as new as if just erected. I learned to stay on the white pavement. Once when I stepped onto the green velvet land cover, a patch of it turned black and flapped to grip my foot until the robot dragged me free.

The crawler stood near the trilithon. Hopefully, I asked the robot when it could take me on to Earth.

“You wait.” It paused, growing taller and more erect, morphing into a grotesque copy of Ram, even to bright sparks for the crown of worlds on the forehead. “Wait for Ty Chenji.”

Happily, I waited. Next day the robot led me out to the trilithon. I stood waiting by the crawler. One moment I saw only the green velvet slope beyond the pillars. Another instant and there was another crawler sliding toward me. The lock opened. Ram climbed out. Kenleth came after him and ran to me.

“Ty Will!” He hugged me and looked at my face. “Are you okay?”

“Now I am, since you are here.”

Ram grinned and gripped my hand.

“We’ve had enough of Alpha.” His shoulders hunched to a bitter shrug. “Lupe and Derek love it, but I still get chills when I think about that dead sky and the frozen air. They did need Ken, but now he’s taught them how to use that Omegan toy. They’ve let us go.”

“Back to Earth?”

“With a stop on Delta.” He nodded, and I saw a shadow on his face. “I want to see who’s left alive and how the future looks. White Water, if we can find him. I’d like to know if Norlan survived, if there’s any way to tell.”

“You don’t want to stay there on Delta?”

His lips set and he shook his head.

“Lupe thought I should. Derek wanted to send a team of robots to help me try to restore some kind of civilization. They said it’s what I was born to do. But now — “

His voice trailed off. I glanced at his forehead. The fine white dots of the crown of worlds still shone faintly, even under the double sun. He saw my glance and shook his head again.

“Now I can’t.” His voice was hushed with pain. “Not since Celya’s dead.”

* * * *

They stayed there an hour, walking around the station and staring off across the green horizons. Ram made a pinhole in a scrap of plastic to show Kenleth an image of the double sun, but he didn’t want to go inside the building.

“I’ve seen too many Omegan mysteries,” he said. “They’ve begun to hurt my head.”

We went on to Delta. Climbing after him into the crawler, I asked about our destination.

“That trilithon above Blood River? Or the one on Mount Anak?”

“Neither. The robots can open temporary gates anywhere they have good coordinates. They can set us down in Periclaw.”

The robot had good coordinates. It set the crawler down on the drill field on the riverbank and opened the lock to let us get out. The black cannon muzzles still jutted out of the towering fortress walls. The Blood flowed wide, no ships on it. I saw no trilithon.

“They’re only markers,” Ram said. “The actual gates are not material.”

I caught a scent when a gust of wind struck us, a faint scent of death that perhaps the pandemic must have left. It struck a chill through me, but we climbed back in the crawler and drove through the white stone streets of Periclaw. Still imposing, they were silent, empty, dead. I saw birds in the sky and weeds growing out of mud in the gutters, but nothing else alive.

“It’s haunted.” Ram seemed to shiver. “At least to the natives. Haunted by all the thousands that died here.”

He guided the robot to the old Crail mansion. It looked on the edge of ruin, the lawn grown wild and littered with broken tree limbs, the gate knocked down, perhaps by venturesome vandals. We left the robot in the crawler and walked to the door. Ram rapped with the heavy brass knocker. We waited till at last the door swung open.

I saw a young woman and heard her cry out.

“Celya!” Ram gasped. “Celya?”

––—

38.

Of course she was not Celya, but the resemblance startled me. Standing in the open door, she had Celya’s fair face and platinum hair. She had the same fluid flow of expression when she peered in a puzzled way at Ram and then at me.

“I had a sister Celya.” She had her sister’s voice. “I believe she died in the blood pandemic. I am Delya Grail.” She looked sharply back at Ram. “You knew Celya?”

Ram nodded and caught his breath to speak, but she had turned away, staring past us in wonder at the crawler and the robot waiting at the lock, the sun glinting on its thousand polished facets.

“What — ” She gasped and looked back at me. “What’s that?”

“Our vehicle,” I said.

“Vehicle?” She gazed at it again. “You came here in that?” She shook her head and turned to blink at me. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

“From off this planet.”

She gaped in unbelief, and I tried to tell our story. Her green-gray eyes narrowed as I spoke. Her expressions changed from scorn to shock and dread. She shrank away from me. I thought for a moment that she was about to go back inside and shut the door. But then she looked past us again, at the crawler and the motionless robot.

“Celya wrote me.” She spoke slowly, frowning at Ram and then at me. “She wrote about two strangers who told a ridiculous tale that they had come down out of the sky. A white magician and a black that claimed to be a son of the black god Anak.”

“No.” Ram’s protest was a husky whisper. “Nothing like that.”

Lips set tight, she drew farther from us.

“There were stories about them before the ships stopped coming.” She seemed not to hear him. “Stories that they had incited the slave rebellion. That they had brought the blood pandemic.” Her tone turned bitter. “They killed my sister!”

Glaring at us, she brushed a wisp of that fair hair from her forehead. I saw a mark it had hidden. A little patch of golden freckle had the pattern of the crown of worlds. Ram caught his breath and stood scowling at it.

“Please!” I begged her. “You don’t know the facts. If you’ll let us explain — “

“I don’t know what you are.” Her voice turned harsh. “I don’t want to know.”

She went back in the house and shut the door in our faces. Ram strode grimly back toward the crawler. I followed. The robot stepped aside to let us climb in, but Ram stopped outside and turned to me. He seemed dazed, uncertain of anything.

“You saw that mark?”

“I saw,” I said. “I don’t know what to make of it.”

He glanced back at the house and his face drew harder.

“I — ” He caught his breath. “I don’t want to be superstitious, but I don’t like what I don’t understand. Remember the myth? Sheko murdered Anak. You see how this woman hates me. I don’t want a replay. Let’s get off the planet while we can.”

I felt anxious to get back on Earth, but I had seen no real future there for him. And here was Celya’s sister, almost her double, with the birthmark almost identical to his! That left me almost as shaken as he seemed to be, but I groped for logic.

“Don’t be too hasty,” I told him. “Let’s take a minute to think about it. Lupe talked to me about the birthmark back at the hospital. She and Derek have a reasonable scenario.”

“Reasonable?” He seemed to shiver. “It’s too — too uncanny.”

“It is to me,” I said. “But nothing’s uncanny to Derek and Lupe. With Kenleth’s help, they’ve begun to decode scraps of Omegan history. Not yet much, but enough to let them guess about the marks.”

“So?” He blinked in doubt.

“Here’s their guess,” I said. “The Omegan engineers must have created several human species that would preserve something of themselves. Sometimes they failed to get the right balance of prehuman and Omegan traits. Lupe thinks they were testing different versions on different planets. That must have taken time. She thinks they died in the middle of the tests, with that terrible war still going on. The work wasn’t finished. The people we’ve met here are some of the survivors. So are we back on Earth, she said, left to make the best of what we are.”

“Could be.” He shrugged, but still he wore a look of dread. “But what about the marks? On the Hotman gods. On my Little Mama. On me and now Delya Crail. Birthmarks are not hereditary.” He made a bitter face. “I don’t like it.”

“Lupe said Derek has a notion. He believes the birthmarks were genetic markers, intended to identify one of the experimental strains. We’ve got no way to know, but that seems possible to me.”

“Not to me,” he muttered.

* * * *

Kenleth had been watching from the crawler door.

“Can we go on to see the Earth?” he called. “The robot says it’s time to go.”

It turned to us, sunlight shimmering on its metal and crystal bits, and spoke in a voice that might have been Kenleth’s

“Flight window about to close,” it said. “Departure required within twenty-seven minutes, your time.”

“I’m ready.” Ram seemed relieved. “I want to be human again. Not some weird genetic freak. Not the puppet of any Omegan engineer that died forty thousand years ago.”

He was on the folding steps, climbing in, when I heard a shout from the house and saw White Water running toward us.

“Wait a minute!” he yelled. “Tyba Crail didn’t know you. She wants you to come inside.”

“I don’t know.” Ram blinked uncertainly at me. “I’ve had too much of her, but White Water — he’s a man I learned to trust.”

He turned to ask the robot about the next open window.

“Options are uncertain,” it told him. “Planet Earth is remote, the routes seldom tested. Stars drift with time. Unused flight congruencies may be lost. Coordinates for another flight must be confirmed.”

“Then confirm them.”

White Water came on to us. In a faded uniform jacket with a gold button on the breast, he looked unchanged, a spry and wiry little man, his weather-beaten face dark with the black blood that had kept him alive.

“Ty Chenji. Ty White.” He bowed and moved his hands in the Hotlan greeting. “I am happy to see you back. Tyba Crail will see if you will come in.”

“Maybe.” Ram shrugged uncertainly, but he returned the gesture of greeting and asked White Water how he was.

“Riding the waves the way I always did.” He waved his arms as if to welcome a brighter future. “Life’s coming back to the river. I’m working now for Tyba Crail.”

“She was on Norlan?” I asked. “And the plague never got there?”

“Thanks to all the captains who obeyed orders to scuttle the refugee ships.” He nodded, with a bleak grimace. “It’s just lately that anybody came back to find if anybody survived. She was on the first ship to get here. A lady with guts. You’ll like when you get to know her.”

He ignored Ram’s scowl of doubt.

“You’ll be glad to meet the Norlan officials. They’re already negotiating with Toron and the Elders. I think they’ll agree to most of what you and Toron were asking for. Equal rights and no more slavery.”

“Good,” Ram muttered. “Not that it matters to me. Not now.”

“It matters to us,” he said. “Maybe more to the Norlanders. They did survive, but they were hit hard. Enough to tell them how much they need us. But come on in. Tyba Crail is waiting.”

We followed him back to the house and found Delya Crail waiting at the door. Her face pale and set, she stood half a minute peering at Ram and gave him a stiffly formal bow. Silently, she led us down the hall. We sat at a table in a small alcove at the end of the big kitchen.

“Oh!”

I heard Kenleth’s soft cry and saw him staring. He had seen the little ceramic that had been his mother’s, sitting on the table. The figures of Anak and Sheko, seated on their golden throne. Ram and Delya peered at it and turned to frown at each other. Half a silent minute passed before she spoke.

“Ty Chenji,” she asked, her voice hushed. “Will you take off your cap?”

He was wearing a black beret that he’d found in that octagon on Beta. He shrugged and took it off. The crown of worlds shone with a soft golden glow. Her features hardened.

“So that’s who you are, really?” The question was quietly accusing. “The son of Anak.”

He gave her a quick little grin. “If you are Sheko’s daughter.”

She stiffened as if in anger, but in a moment she relaxed.

“A Hotman myth. I heard it from a maid when she saw this.” She gestured at her own golden freckle. “It never bothered me.”

* * * *

The old black cook limped into the room with glasses on a tray and a bottle of Crail’s good wine. Delya filled the glasses. Ram took a sip, gave her a grave little smile, and raised his glass in a sort of greeting.

“Ty White Water says you just got here?”

“Two weeks ago. He saw the ship and came down the channel to guide us to the harbor. I had to come!” Her words flowed out in a sudden torrent. “The war killed the colony and left us desperate. A dreadful time. Most of us lost somebody here. Lost investments ruined us all. Food imports were cut off. What was left had to be rationed.”

For a moment she had Celya’s look of bleak endurance in her last days, but then her face softened and she turned with a pale smile for White Water.

“I was lucky to find him.”

“The plague?” Ram asked her. “Are you safe here?”

“I hope we are.” She nodded. “The doctors think we are.”

“The pathogen must have died out when no more victims were left to carry it,” White Water said. “But it left us with trouble enough.”

“I’d be lost without him.” She nodded at him and made a somber face. You’ve seen what’s left? The total devastation. When I saw the city, I wanted to get back on the ship, but we’re trying to restore what we can.”

“It’s hard, but we’ve begun.” He nodded soberly. “The Norlanders see how much their lives depended on the colony. Toron and his people know what Hotlan can give them. Its civilization, science, technology. The ship’s still anchored in the harbor. They’re still negotiating. The Hotlanders promise equal rights.”

“Nobody will be coming back without guarantees for us,” Delya said. “Security and property rights. We’re offering plans.”

White Water nodded. “The Crail bank can be reopened. Maybe as the Hotlan National, if Hotlan becomes a nation. There’ll be a new currency, based on labor value. We need it to pay the liberated willing to come back out of the jungle. A lot of them should be. They’re dislocated by the war, without much food or anything else. With fair pay, I think we can make them happy back at work.”

The old cook seemed happy enough. Cheerfully, he made a good dinner for us out of the kitchen garden he had grown in the backyard. White Water had found a few more of the Crail house servants living in the jungle along the riverbank. The mansion was the only home they had known. Seeming glad to be back, paid by scrip to be redeemed when the new bank opened, they were already cleaning the house and clearing fallen branches and rubbish of the neglected lawns.

* * * *

Kenleth and I were there almost a week, sleeping in the upstairs room that had been our jail. The robot waited in the crawler that still stood in front of the house. Ram spent most of his time with White Water and Delya, involved in spite of himself in their plans for the Hotlan future.

One night I heard drum talk, and next day a dugout came down the river carrying Toron in his bright-colored tribal regalia, a small black man in the sober garb of the Elderhood with him. White Water took Ram and Delya down to welcome them aboard his launch and carried them down to confer with the Norlan officials on the steamer.

Kenleth went down to visit the paddlers waiting in the dugout, and came back looking troubled.

“They’re from somewhere up the Black River,” he told me. “Far up north. They speak a language I couldn’t really understand, but they hate Norlanders. They won’t come ashore.”

He had the cook fill a basket with fruit to give them, but failed again to win any friends. The sun had set before the launch came back up the river. Toron and the Elder got in the dugout and it pulled away. I saw Delya smile at Ram when he offered to help her off the launch. They had begun to get along, but he wore a sober expression.

“We’ve struck a snag.” He frowned when I asked how the talks had gone. “The Norlanders want a deal, but the Elders don’t trust them.”

“Ty Toron wants Ty Chenji to stay.” Delya turned to him. “The Elders think you came to liberate the slaves. They do trust you. Everybody needs you here.”

“If that’s true.”

He gave her a long, searching look. The black beret was off, and the crown shone faintly in the dusk. Her eyes fixed on it with a look I couldn’t read. They both were silent for a time. He finally nodded. She smiled very grave and he turned to me.

“Would you mind it, Will? I hate to send you back alone, but I’m really needed here.”

“Ty Will, you won’t be alone.” Kenleth caught my arm. “I’ll be with you if you’ll take me.”

I put my arm around him and told Ram I understood.

* * * *

Kenleth was eager to see the Earth, yet he and Delya had warmed to each other. Next morning at breakfast she was asking him about his mother and his life at Hake’s station. When she saw his solemn glance at the ceramic that had been his mother’s, she gave it to him.

“Thank you, Tyba Crail.” He gave her a formal bow. “You are very kind to me. And very beautiful. As petty as your sister. But I can’t take it.” He tried to hand it back her. “It was Tyba Celya’s.”

“It’s yours,” she insisted. “Keep it to remember your mother.” She turned to Ram and me. “Celya and I kept in touch but we never really knew each other. Our mother came home to visit her people in Glacier Bay before we were born. She took Celya with her back to Periclaw. She left me to be adopted by my aunt, her older sister, who wanted me because she had no children of her own.” She smiled at Kenleth. “It means more to you than me.”

“Thank you again, Tyba Crail.” Tears in his eyes, he took it and bowed again. “You are very generous and very beautiful. As beautiful as your sister. I love you.”

Tears in her own eyes, Delya took him in her arms.

The drums talked again. Toron was coming back. White Water was taking him and Ram upriver to meet with more of the Elders and other tribal leader. Before they left, Delya wanted to see the country place where their parents and Celya died. They were in the kitchen that morning, packing a basket of food and wine for the trip.

“Ty Will!” Kenleth burst into the room. “The robot has a flight window open. We can go.”

––—

39.

We drove back through the empty avenues of Periclaw to the empty drill field at Fort Blood. I don’t know what the robot did, but the ghost of a trilithon towered suddenly across the sky ahead. We went through it. The sky turned black. My ears clicked. The crawler pitched to the different gravity of Earth and slid down the cusp of that long brown dune in the Grand Erg Oriental.

I found a full moon rising over the square black tops of the twin megaliths, still jutting out of the sand a hundred yards behind us. Sandstorms had erased all traces of our camp in the hollow, but the ancient lake bed was still swept bare, where Lupe had found that ancient waterhole with its buried bones of early life and those silicon slivers that must have come from some unlucky cybroid.

The crawler was built for all terrains, but slow. We were two nights and a day on our way out of the erg and on to the Gabe’s road. I had the robot leave us there, standing in the ditch beside it. Kenleth clung to my hand, excited but yet afraid, both of us shivering to a cold desert dawn. Watching the crawler turn and lumber back toward the erg, I felt suddenly a stranger on Earth, unprepared for what might come.

Kenleth seemed eager for everything. Peering around the barren landscape behind us and date palms on the horizon ahead us, he had a thousand new questions about Earth and my life here, about Tunis, about the roaring machines that ran past us faster than the crawler could move, leaving smoke and a stink in the air.

In spite of our lifted arms, none of them stopped. The sun grew hot and I began to sweat, but my poker luck ran right. A tourist van screeched to a halt and backed to where we stood. A window opened. I heard a shout. My name!

A short bald man jumped out and ran grinning to meet me.

“White! You’re Professor Will White?”

His bare head was pink with sunburn, but he wore dark glasses. I failed to recognize him till he took them off and reached to take my hand.

“Remember me? Ben Sanders. I was in you’re your English 101 a dozen years ago. Somebody told me to inquire about your desert expedition.”

He was now teaching history at an Arizona college and here on a field research expedition with a half a dozen students. Astonished to find us, he shaded his eyes for a sharp squint at Kenleth, and asked if we needed help. I told him we’d been waiting for a taxi that had failed to pick us up.

I told him I’d stayed in Tunis to look at the site of ancient Carthage and collect background for a seminar on Flaubert’s _Salammbo._ He seemed to accept that, though he took a puzzled look at the odd garments we had found so many light-years away. He grinned at them.

“Dressing in Carthaginian style?”

I shrugged and left him to wonder. He turned to frown at Kenleth, who was keeping very quiet. I said he was a homeless orphan I had found on a Tunis street. With no papers, a history we had to hide, and very little English, he promised to be a problem I hardly knew how to solve.

The van had empty seats. I sat beside Sanders all day, listening to the guide’s lectures on Tunisian history. From his vague evasions to Sanders’ questions, I suspected that he was inventing most of what he said about the Phoenicians and the Greeks, about Rome and Carthage, the Vandals and Venice, the Arabs and the Prophet, the French and General Rommel. The students took dutiful notes and trooped out with cameras to shoot every bit of ancient stonework where we stopped.

Though my sense of Earth was coming back, I felt that I’d been away for a lifetime. The city of Tunis was a jolt to me at first, almost as alien as Periclaw had been. Without Sanders’ aid, we’d have been helpless. I said my pocket had been picked. Back at his hotel, he paid for my dinner and persuaded the clerk to let us register, even with no money and no passport.

Next morning he took us to a barber and then to shops where he put new shoes and clothing for us on his own credit card. Officials at the American embassy were harassed with terrorist threats, security concerns, and the problems of too many tourists, but they helped me get calls through to the university, my lawyer, and my bank.

My identity established and my lost plastic replaced, Kenleth was still a problem. Sanders expected me to abandon him. When I refused, he talked to his tour director. The director called people who had the right connections and an appetite for money. It took another day and a few thousand dollars, but they provided documentation for Kenleth, complete with an American entry visa.

We had a farewell breakfast the next morning with Sanders and his students. They were going on to Egypt to see the pyramids, the Aswan dam, and Luxor. I thanked him, repaid him, and bought air tickets to Lubbock.

* * * *

Back in Portales without my companions, I had to improvise stories for newspapers, faculty friends, university officials and the campus cops, the state police and the district attorney, and all the anxious relatives. I kept to actual events until we had reached Tunisia and hired the chopper to take us out over the erg.

The chopper landed us, I said, at the site where Derek’s radar had located what he thought were half-buried megaliths. I said we’d found no trace of them. A sandstorm caught us before the pilot returned to pick us up. When the winds died down and we could see again, we set out toward a far-off dune where we thought we saw the chopper waiting.

I said we never found it. Never got back to the camp where we had left our food and water. We wandered through the dunes all the burning day and tried to sleep that night. Alone when I woke, I blundered on until heat and thirst overcame me. I said I recalled nothing more until I woke lying in the ditch by the Gabe’s road and got a ride on a farm truck back into Tunis.

Most people seemed willing to accept the amnesia story. A few were critical. Derek’s uncle Daniel was the harshest. He had posted a small fortune in rewards for information and gone twice to Tunis to make his own investigation. He’d looked up our pilot and hired him to fly back over the erg. They found no sign of our camp, located no second Stonehenge.

He’d been fond of Derek, and he suspected foul play. A lawyer himself and once an assistant district attorney, he kept probing like a prosecutor for all I said I had forgotten. Nothing satisfied him. He tried to interrogate Kenleth, who kept a blank face and said he didn’t understand the questions. He grew angry and finally concluded, I think, that I’d damaged my mind on drugs.

* * * *

Kenleth and I are now back in the old house my grandfather built, just a few blocks off the campus. My old faculty friends held a party to welcome me home, with drinks enough and no uncomfortable questions. The university has filled my empty slot with a brilliant young Victorian scholar. I’ve retired to a part-time position that gives me time to write. Next semester I’ll be teaching a graduate seminar on Shakespeare’s history plays.

Good neighbors had looked after the house and mowed the lawn. My bank kept the bills paid. The old brown brick is far less imposing than the Crail mansion, but Kenleth is happy in the room that used to be my mother’s. He has learned more English, learned to ride a bike, made friends with the neighbor kids.

Some of them tried to torment him at first, for the color of his skin, his odd accent, his silence about where he came from. One day he came home with a black eye. He hadn’t hurt anybody, he said, because he didn’t want to make trouble for me. I told him to defend himself. He said the kids at Hake’s station had taught him how to do it.

I was watching from the car next day when he walked out to join a baseball game on a vacant lot. Three of the bullies left the game to meet him. I couldn’t hear what was said, but the brief encounter left one of them flat on his back and the others in flight. They’ve since become friends and he’s already earning a place on the team.

For his sake as much as my own, I’m still trying to keep the secret of the gate and the far worlds beyond it. The media and scientific skeptics would tear him apart if we tried to tell the truth. I’m going to adopt him. I want him to have a normal boyhood and a chance at a normal life.

* * * *

I’m glad to have him with me here, the child I never had. Yet our old weekly poker nights have left an aching gap. Sometimes on moonless nights I stand out in my back yard and search the sky, trying to imagine Ram and Delya working to restore the Grand Dominion and Derek and Lupe still busy on that runaway planet out beyond the stardust of the Milky Way, recovering Omegan history.

The adventure is vivid in my memory. I find a kind of comfort in it. When I feel depressed by news of spreading terror here on Earth and the dread of a dark tide rising to overwhelm civilization, it cheers me to recall that we are the new Omegan, with that magnificent legacy waiting for us. We have survived the death of our first sun. Bad times may come, but surely we’ll prevail.

I wish I’d brought some relic back. One of those Omegan coins, perhaps, or even a magic tetrahedron like Kenleth’s. I spend restless nights dreaming that Derek and Lupe have returned, sometimes bringing a diamond-shining celluform robot to overwhelm the unbelievers. Ram is sometimes with them. Together again, we Four Horsemen could shake up the planet.

That can happen. I don’t know when.

––—

Copyright (C) 2004 by Jack Williamson.

––—

CH002

*Company Secrets* by Kyle Kirkland

A Novelette

Here’s a trend that’s well underway. How far can it go?

––—

The video monitor in the taxi was one of those megabuck wide-angle models, with 3D graphics and ultra-fine resolution. But I had trouble seeing the picture because a five-cent screw was loose in the mounting bracket, and I got dizzy watching the vibrating screen. Every bump, every jostle of the evening rush hour traffic gave me a bad case of double vision.

The monitor was mounted at a 45-degree angle from the roof, so I had to tilt my head and watch, as best I could, as it showed the fire engines arriving at Massingham Square. I reached up and cranked the sound control; the dial had nearly been on zero. The person who’d last hired this taxi must have worn sound-enhancing implants — and hadn’t turned them off in the cab, even though there wouldn’t have been any conversation on which to snoop.

“…Massingham Square, one of the oldest and finest areas of the city — ” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a blue Nissan slam into my bumper as it barreled past, so I didn’t hear what came next. No damage to the elastic bumper — this taxi was probably rated at 140 kilometers per hour or better — but the monitor did a series of contortions that was too painful to watch.

When the oscillations died down enough so that I could see again, the camera panned over the square and the television announcer described the evacuation. People were continuing to stream out of the building.

So much for Dale Hauser, Inc. Hopefully no one would get hurt — otherwise Dale would _really_ be in for it. But even if the building didn’t go up in flames, it would be the end of his business. Finished, bankrupt, kaput — Massingham was in his service area and I was dead certain I knew what he’d done wrong.

I closed my eyes and let my hand rest gently on the taxi’s metered accelerator. Pity that taxis are strictly programmed to obey all speed limits. It takes big bucks to escape the automated program and steer it yourself — big bucks to _me_, anyway. I hesitated; I could afford it, I just wasn’t sure I wanted to. The police and fire department could handle the emergency. But they couldn’t do something that I probably could: save Hauser’s business.

Problem was, the day had been a long one and the taxi was already in no-man’s land. Massingham Square was pretty far, almost ten minutes away. My little condo, perched near the top of a bluish-gray tower, beckoned … and in the cooker was a nice juicy roast. Something wet and delicious was also standing by. And on TV, an economic analysis of current business trends. Maybe I’d keep an eye on the Nude Sunbathing Channel too. Or the hockey game.

Did I really want to save a competitor’s business?

“…emergency crews waiting,” said the announcer. “Massingham,” he continued, as the monitor displayed the impressive facade, “is a distinguished office as well as a residential complex, but fortunately most of the offices are empty this time of day. The warning siren’s going off and I see the strobe light on top of the Square. Momentarily we’ll have a live report from Suzee Carnell, Inc., who’s just now arriving…”

I’d have to be crazy to want to save a competitor’s business, of course. But there were other factors to consider here. I swiped my credit card through the reader and a panel slid open, unlocking the accelerator and revealing a brake. I wouldn’t need the brake for a while. I made a U-turn and raced back to the urban jungle.

Traffic in this direction was just as bad as the other way: some of the horde that worked in the burbs were now on their way back home to the city. Why don’t these sheep live in the same place they work?

With one eye on the jitterbugging monitor I juiced up the taxi until it spurted forward, colliding with the herd of vehicles ahead. Slowly my taxi nudged its way through; it was now six o’clock and definitely bumper car traffic time. I gave an embarrassed smile to the guy who shook his fist after his Caddy — slightly displaced by the nose of my taxi — dealt a glancing blow to the guardrail.

Dale and I had been classmates at business school and we graduated about the same time, almost four years ago — though he’s quite a bit older than me. He’s a good guy but not exactly genius material; worse, he never had the killer instinct you need to survive as a corporation. Dale was a sheep, no doubt about it. A wage earner if I’ve ever seen one.

Dale was an infomeister, like me, so he was a competitor — and so I kept track of what he was up to. But lately he was important to me for another reason. He was my biggest source of info on TriSci, who just happened to have an office in Massingham. It was these three big-time scientists who were going to help me earn enough money to get out of no-man’s land and stave off my _own_ looming bankruptcy — after I nailed them for anti-trust violations and collected the bounty. Everybody needs to hit at least one home run to make it in Big Business, and this was going to be mine.

A woman’s voice came over the monitor’s speaker. “This is Suzee Carnell, Inc., reporting live from Massingham Square. I’m just behind the police barricade on the south side of the Square.”

“Is everything under control yet?” asked the announcer.

“Not yet. I spoke with the fire chief just moments ago, and they’re still worried. The cause of the alarm is still undetermined, and the evacuation isn’t quite finished.”

The monitor showed a trickle of people still coming out of the building. A shirtless old guy gave everybody — including the camera — an angry glare. A crowd formed behind the barrier.

Then the camera showed something else and my heart was never quite the same again.

She was _gorgeous_. Shoulder-length blonde hair, a great tan, smooth skin, cheekbones, eyes, everything in the right place and in the right amount. Suzee Carnell, Inc. She must be new in town — I’d never seen her before, and she damn sure wasn’t the type you’d ever forget.

“I can see the strobe light,” said Suzee. Even her voice was sexy. She leaned over the barricade and put her hand up to her brow; her shirt hitched up in the process and I couldn’t help but notice that her tight midsection was briefly exposed. “The light is starting to flash more rapidly now.”

It took a while for that to sink into my brain, but the meaning was clear. The strobe light flashes at a higher frequency when the building’s electrical power starts to surge. I was running out of time.

Wrenching my gaze from the monitor, I maxed the taxi’s accelerator and sliced through traffic. All my attention was taken up with zigging, zagging, and giving apologetic looks when the zig or zag failed.

Minutes later I took the exit ramp leading to Massingham. The taxi screeched to a halt as I pulled up as close to the barricade as possible.

Surprisingly, the barricade was practically deserted.

Glancing around, I saw a mass of people streaming back into the building. Emergency crews were rolling up their hoses, cranking down their elevators, packing away their equipment. Bystanders were drifting off. I looked up at the strobe light. It’d gone completely dark.

I stood there, perplexed. Merv Dunn, Inc., had arrived for the rescue. But the emergency was already over.

* * * *

I stared disbelievingly at Massingham Square. Everything had almost returned to normal: all of the residents had gone back inside and the last remaining emergency crew had finally packed up and left. It was as if nothing had happened.

Fortunately, nothing did. But I couldn’t figure out why.

Massingham was one of those snooty places, an “exclusive” building for the filthy rich who don’t mind, and even insist on, paying megabucks for whatever they buy. Massingham was owned and managed by the kind of people who don’t like change; when you’re in first place and you’ve reached the top of the pile, then any change, no matter what, is probably for the worse. So the info revolution left Massingham behind. Hauser often complained about it bitterly, because it meant that he had to _manually_ configure the junction box. It was this very junction box for which I began to search.

It wasn’t going to be easy to spot. The building was surrounded by a small park, which was only about 100 feet wide but still a lot of ground to cover. The box could be anywhere.

I looked to my left — nothing. I looked to my right, and was startled by the sight of two cops. Both of them cast suspicious glances my way.

The trouble with the police is that they’re sheep, but with authority. That’s a strange combination. I moved off to the left.

Not that I have a big problem with cops. They’re okay. They’re necessary. But it’s creepy that people without business acumen, credentials, or connections should be able to interfere with corporate activity.

Slowly I strolled through the park, keeping my eyes on alert for an ugly gray box.

It would be an even bigger box than usual, thanks to Massingham’s reluctance to rewire the building. Rather, their reluctance to rip _out_ the wiring and replace it with a simple circuit feed. Instead, Hauser had to ensure that the input coming into Massingham was separated at the junction box into its components: electrical power, data stream, voice messages, digital control lines, medical in/out, and most importantly, all of the huge number of satellite links by which the rest of the world communicated. Massingham was a dinosaur, clinging to an era when all transmissions ran on separate cables rather than multiplexed on a single line. Ridiculous waste.

I was reasonably sure what had caused the emergency: Hauser’s manual config was probably about as secure as that mounting bracket in the taxi. One little bump — maybe a gigantic waste disposal truck rumbling down the road a bit too fast, causing vibrations in things attached to the ground — and suddenly a high-voltage signal goes into a small gauge wire meant to carry a five-volt digital pulse. The result would be melting insulation and smoke, possibly igniting a fire.

But if that’s what happened, who managed to fix it? You have to be a specialist to configure a junction box. Sheep don’t even know how to open the cover. And Hauser himself was in the burbs — or at least that’s where my info sources told me he was, trying to swing some sort of major deal.

Finally I found the box, hidden behind a child’s swing.

Hauser’s name was on the cover and it was locked up tight. Not a problem. I’m a good enough infomeister to be able to break the code of a competitor, particularly if the competitor happened to be Hauser. In less than five minutes my data comp found the password sequence and unsealed the box.

The first thing that struck me was the disorganized mess of wiring inside. It didn’t look much like Hauser’s job — he might not be all that bright but he wasn’t sloppy. A loose wire attracted my attention. It was an old-fashioned copper job and the tip was blackened. I began to reach for it when the voice sounded from behind me.

“Mr. Hauser?”

For a microsecond — _only_ a microsecond — I flinched. I hoped it went unnoticed. But even before I turned around I knew who had spoken. That voice was going to be featured in a lot of upcoming dreams of mine. Suzee Carnell, Inc.

“No, I’m not Dale Hauser, Inc.,” I said, turning to face the blonde beauty. I slammed the box shut. Her eyebrows rose ever so slightly, then her face resumed its normal expression: intelligent, forceful, passionate, judgmental. I suddenly had an acute urge to say _not guilty_, _your honor_.

But instead I launched the standard spiel. “I’m Merv Dunn, Inc. I handle all of the basic corporate information needs. Information is my business, and I’ll make it yours too.”

“I’m Suzee Carnell, Inc. Accurate and incisive news reporting, all of the time and on all the channels. Nice to meet you, Mr. Dunn.”

“Likewise.” I gave her my best smile. “I saw your report on the emergency here at Massingham. You did a nice job. But I missed the final bit. Evidently it had a good ending, but I’m not sure how.”

“Neither am I. I’m sure the police would like to know too.” She shot me a questioning glance.

Much as I would have liked to talk to her, it was more prudent at the moment to leave. I nodded, and looked at my watch.

She wasn’t going to let me off the hook that easily. “Would you like to tell me why you were rummaging around in equipment belonging to Dale Hauser, Inc.?”

“Contract work.”

She gave me another questioning glance. Probing, evaluating, deciding. The conclusion was briefly pasted on her expression: Merv Dunn, Inc., is a liar. “Mind if I ask what sort of contract work?”

“Yes. I mind very much.” I smiled pleasantly and walked up to her. “Well, I must be going. Glad to meet you, Suzee. Remember Merv Dunn, Inc., for all your business information needs. Quotes available upon request.”

She gave me another long look, but decided not to press the issue. “I’m happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Dunn. When you’re looking for news that’s right the first time, think of Suzee Carnell, Inc.”

I started to turn around and leave, but then she said something that surprised me. “So you saw my show. I’m new in the city. I’ve done a lot of work in smaller markets, inching my way up. This is my first big break. Did you really like my broadcast?” She smiled confidently.

“Sure did. Especially when your belly button showed.”

She smirked. Yeah, right, her expression said; didn’t happen, chump.

So I added: “Love your tattoo.” I’d seen it clearly: a red dragon, with its head on her stomach and its tail pointing down to….

Suzee’s confidence seemed to fade just a bit.

I bowed. “Be seeing more of you, I hope.” Her piercing blue eyes became fixed on mine — there was a suggestion of good humor in them, though it was hard to tell. I turned and walked away, strongly suspecting that two little blue laser beams were boring a pair of holes in the back of my head.

I thought about the reporter with the dragon tattoo all the way back to no-man’s land. It was a nice trip. Somewhere along the way I remembered to dial in to restart the roast.

Too bad I didn’t get a chance to eat it.

Getting off the elevator in my building, I walked down the hall with the roast and Suzee Carnell, Inc., battling for control of my mind. But when I rounded the last corner to my condo there was a man trudging down the corridor. I only saw his back but I recognized him at once.

I sprinted and caught up. “Dale Hauser!” I yelled.

That’s when someone turned out the lights.

* * * *

The dreams were good. Me and Suzee, walking down Malibu Beach and catching the rays, feeling the gentle sea breezes, watching the sea gulls gracefully swoop down from the long row of oil rigs and associated refineries. Me and Suzee, strolling down Champs Elysees and speaking French, admiring the fashions, and discovering a fantastically large number of Parisians who were in desperate need of our corporate services.

My bot woke me. “Messsssssage from Dale Hauserrrrrrr!”

My eyes were gummy and my left arm was numb. I sat up on the sofa and my feet managed to find the floor; I tried to stand up, but failed. Tried again. Failed. The third time I tried my bot helped me by rolling over my right foot. The pain motivated a successful rising.

“Messsssssage,” persisted my bot. “From Dale Hauserrrrrrr.”

“Go away.”

“Messsssssage from Dale Hauserrrrrrr.”

I looked around. My den was in the same shape it was always in — hurricane alley. At least nothing important seemed to be missing. But of course there was nothing important in my whole condo. That’s especially true of my ancient, decrepit, obsolete, nearly useless bot. For which I still owed 22K, at an exorbitant interest rate.

“Messsssssage from — “

“I heard you, I heard you. Well, don’t keep me in suspense.”

“Dale Hauserrrrrrr sends his regrets.”

“And?”

“End of messsssssage.”

Wonderful. I had a nebulous memory of meeting Hauser out in the hallway, but nothing after that. A good guess would be that he was responsible for the memory gap, and for bringing me into my condo and setting me down — not in the most anatomically friendly of positions — on the sofa. Likely, too, our impromptu meeting was the principal reason why my brain currently felt like it was preparing to explode.

Bot helpfully reminded me of a crucial appointment in “One hourrrrrrrs and nineteen minutes.” A TriSci press conference, their first since forming the temporary merger. Foster and Estavia would be there, with Rikter satelliting in.

I found the shower, a toothbrush, the toilet, a comb, and a bottle of aspirin.

I also found the floor. That was after I hastily came out of the dressing room and immediately tripped over Bot, who happened to be standing in the middle of the doorway. That was its usual habit — no matter what chip was in its brain, whenever it wanted something from me it would wait in the middle of the doorway of whatever room I happened to be in.

I righted the meter-high piece of junk and snapped on one of the wheels that kept popping off. One of these days, when my business is a roaring success, I’m going to get one of the latest models. One that actually works. One that doesn’t forget to record the business news and market reports. One that can learn to respond to your voice even when there are many other people talking at the same time — and doesn’t freak out if you turn on the radio or a vid channel. Until then….

“What do you want?”

“Inssssssstructions.”

I inserted the accounting chip. “Go over the books. Profit/loss for the quarter. Got it?”

“Rrrrrrroger.”

“One more thing.” I paused at the door and set the condo’s security. Bot could never get it straight. “Send a message to Dale Hauser, Inc. Tell him my lawyer will be in touch with his lawyer.” Just as soon as I could afford a lawyer chip for my bot.

* * * *

It was a beautiful day outside. Sheep were everywhere, playing tennis or sailing on the river or hiking through the parks or catching the rays at an outdoor concert. Must be nice.

But jobs with a lot of time off were always available. All you had to do was be willing to work for the government or for nonprofit organizations or — as is sometimes the case — for particularly large corporations who can’t fulfill all their labor needs with just bots. You can spend whole days away from the office in those jobs.

Or you could go on welfare. Those were my tax dollars out there, sunning themselves.

Well, it _was_ Saturday. And I suppose _someone_ had to consume leisure goods. Pretty large industry sector. I too had a lovely little stroll downtown, since I was nine minutes early for the press conference.

Of course the sheep were always complaining about their economic status and that they didn’t get a large enough slice of the pie. I had to be careful, since it was a weekend and I was in a business suit; sheep would know for certain that I was a corporate entity, and some of them were fully capable of venting their economic discontent with a well-aimed flowerpot dropped from a window. I spent most of my stroll gazing skyward.

Good thing, too. I sidestepped one just in time. Missed me by more than two meters and crashed onto the sidewalk. Pot shards flew everywhere. No telling exactly where it’d come from, but at least there was no harm done. Except … I saw a begonia, lying pathetically on the sidewalk, roots still clinging to a few crumbs of soil. Wasteful. I tossed a couple of dollars to some nearby sheep, told them to find a place to plant it.

There was a crowd at the hotel ballroom that TriSci had rented. Plenty of reporters — no sign of Suzee, though — and infomeisters like me who smelled money. But the audience was mostly scientists who wanted to keep tabs on their competition.

And successful competition it was. I didn’t know the scientists personally and I’d never met any of them, but I’d done some digging into all of their backgrounds. Ed Foster, Inc., was one of the wealthiest scientists on the planet. He was a biochemist who made his first fortune by patenting an enzyme that increased the number of red blood cells in the body. This ratcheted up endurance and stamina by about 30%, and almost every parent of a would-be athlete bought the gene therapy treatment for their son or daughter.

Julia Estavia, Inc., was probably almost as rich, though much less known and not nearly as flamboyant as Foster. She was a physicist by training and was involved, in some obscure but important way, in the development of commercial tracking and navigation systems.

The oddball of the group was Allyn Rikter. He wasn’t even incorporated. He wasn’t a sheep either: he was an academic, a psychologist who specialized in sensation and perception and did most of his work in some far-away lab.

It was these three people — two business people and an academic — who were going to become my cash cow. Ed Foster has always been a big idea man, and he usually manages to make his ideas work. Big ideas mean big money, and a percentage of TriSci’s take was headed straight for my pocket.

All I had to do was provide evidence of an anti-trust violation. And there were plenty of candidates. Although the most obvious regulation for scientific temp mergers was met — each of TriSci’s scientists had a different specialty — it wasn’t so easy to adhere to _all_ of the regulations. For instance, the scientists could collaborate only on _one_ specifically stated product; any other transfer of information between them was illegal. So, if after the merger dissolved Estavia came out with a product involving even the smallest contribution from the others — say, a little biochemical insight provided by Ed Foster — then they pay a hefty fine, composed of a certain percentage of the revenue on both the illegal product _and_ the merger’s product.

Long ago, the government realized that regulators and law-enforcers who were motivated by political ambition or by some sort of vague ideology or by just plain spite didn’t usually make good regulators and law-enforcers. So for once the government adopted a workable idea: a bounty on violators, with financially motivated bounty hunters, such as me, doing the rest. With our knack for information we infomeisters make good regulators — given a sufficient percentage-based fee.

Foster took the podium to formally announce the temp merger, a merger which actually began about three weeks ago. Foster was a carefully groomed man with a cultivated streak of gray hair at the temples and healthy bronze skin.

“Today the science industry takes a giant step forward,” he said, with minicams whirring around him. Then Foster gave one of his famous pauses and surveyed the room with Hollywood aplomb. “Today the science industry, which has benefited mankind in so many ways, takes yet another step toward our ultimate goal of universal health, welfare, and rational living. Today I am pleased to announce the temporary merger….”

It went like that for ten minutes. Foster could really ham it up. He said nothing substantial, and even his remarks on the target product were notably imprecise.

“What we hope to accomplish at TriSci is nothing short of miraculous. What we hope to accomplish has long been the goal of creative scientists and technologists. We’re aiming for a prized and sought-after application of life: biological communication, instantiated in technological devices. Cells, trillions of cells make up the human body — and each cell is a machine, ladies and gentlemen. Our lives are made possible by the interaction of these cells. They form networks — organs, systems, and so on — with each cell doing a specific job. What makes it all work is communication. Cells work _together_, signaling each other with a vast array of messages. The brain is the most obvious example, but there are many other such systems. TriSci’s stated goal is to understand this communication and implement it in a highly useful device. Forget artificial intelligence, ladies and gentlemen. Intelligence is not just a bunch of algorithms, it’s not pure logic, it’s not simply computation. Intelligence is _communication_….”

I shifted in my chair and glanced about the room. A few people’s interest seemed to have been piqued, but most of the audience appeared bored.

I wasn’t bored — I was puzzled. All of my business instincts screamed one thing: this was a smokescreen. Foster was a good politician and he knew how to divert attention from the real issues.

And yet … doing that here didn’t make much sense — there was no reason to hide their agenda. In fact they were _required_ to state the actual nature of their temp merger at the outset. Nobody doing a temp merger lied about that. The lies came later, in situations where they’d be much less likely to get caught.

Finally we heard brief comments from the other two members of TriSci. Estavia stood up; she looked like the stereotypical scientist on TV, with frowsy gray hair, wrinkles, and an obvious disdain for any cosmetics whatsoever. Her speech lasted three minutes and she merely echoed Foster’s sentiments.

Rikter was even more brief. “I’m excited to be associated with this fine venture,” he said over the satellite link. The huge monitor in the background framed a middle-aged man who spoke with a slow, deliberate voice. “A profound understanding of the emergent behavior of simple agents will lead to a technology with considerable value.” Then he fell silent, apparently assuming that everyone in the audience would be able to interpret his cryptic comment — and if they couldn’t, that was their tough luck. Reminded me a lot of my high school geometry teacher.

Overall, it was a bust, a great disappointment. Most of the audience walked out frowning. And I was extremely worried that my cash cow was going to turn into a poor little church mouse. No product meant no revenue, which translated into a worthless bounty.

And as I was leaving something happened that made me even more nervous. I glanced up and caught both Foster and Estavia staring straight at _me_.

* * * *

An hour after the press conference, bot rang my comm and told me Dale Hauser, Inc., had requested a meeting. Which suited me fine, because I had a few things to say to Hauser too.

Hauser’s office/condo was on the 7th floor of a complex just a few miles from where I lived. Like me and the rest of the fledgling corporations, Hauser could only manage to live in no-man’s land, between the burbs and the city. The prosperous corporations and the tiny fraction of sheep who had money lived in the burbs or the city, depending on their tastes; the burbs had a lot of horizontal acreage, whereas the city was mostly vertical.

No-man’s land was neither horizontal nor vertical. It just squatted: a disorganized patchwork without the slightest bit of structure, design, or plan.

The receptionist bot in Hauser’s building ushered me in after meticulously scrutinizing the authentication signal sent from my office computer. “We’ve had some intrusions lately,” it explained.

Here? Hauser lived in an even bigger dump than I did. Glancing out of the window, I saw the effects of one of the public works projects our government was always funding. A big pile of dirt. Must have kept some sheep plenty busy for a while. And even more tax money was no doubt working its way through appropriations committees at this very moment, destined to fund another big project — putting all that dirt back in the hole it was taken from.

Even the plants in the lobby were wilting, and a germanium in the corner was screaming for water and a little sunshine. But the sun doesn’t shine in no-man’s land, because of the shadow of the city and the smoke drifting in from the burbs. Who would want to intrude _here_?

The elevator creakily deposited me on the seventh floor and I managed to find Hauser’s door despite the peeling and illegible signs.

The door clicked open when my hand and eye were placed next to the sensors. That gave me the impression that Hauser would at least remember our appointment. Unfortunately, no one was in his condo.

I searched all four rooms and even poked my head into the walk-in closet and the bathroom. No Dale Hauser, Inc.

Then I heard some sound coming from the room that appeared to be his corporate office and headquarters.

I walked in again. A cold tingle crept up my spine.

“Hauser?”

Some static and white noise answered. Then I noticed a light between the cracks of a closed wooden cabinet inside a recess in the wall. I swung open the doors to reveal a comm monitor. Two little cameras instantly rotated, fixating me with their oblong eyes. No doubt they were transmitting my picture to the other end of the comm line.

“Mr. Dunn,” said Dale. The monitor showed his pale, worried face. “It’s good, uhm, that you could come. Welcome to the corporate HQ of Dale Hauser, Inc. Thank you for your kind attention in this matter.”

“Cut the crap, Dale. What’s going on? And why did you plaster me yesterday?”

“I’m, ah, terribly sorry about the events on the evening of the 17th. Truly an accidental occurrence. I will gladly provide some small but adequate compensation for the inadvertent dose of sleeping gas that escaped my dispenser — “

“Dale! It’s just us here, all right?”

Hauser took a deep breath. “Okay, okay. You’re right. And I hate the business regimen. But you never know who might be listening. Not these days. I’m scared, Merv. Like last night. You came at me from behind and startled me. I didn’t know it was you! I’m scared, really scared.”

“I noticed.” Sweat was pouring from Dale’s forehead.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t stay and wait for you at my corporate HQ, but I had to get out. I heard a noise.”

“You heard a noise,” I repeated sarcastically. But I caught myself sneaking looks around the room. Hauser’s abject fear was starting to get to me.

“Nothing I do is right,” said Dale. “I just can’t please those people.”

“Who?”

“Foster. TriSci. Who else? I’m closing the account. I’m closing down my whole damn business. I’m getting out. I’m through, I’m dissolving my corporation and selling off all my assets.”

Even though it was Hauser talking, I was still taken aback. Dissolution wasn’t an option used by corporate entities very often. Businesses were normally ended only upon bankruptcy or death, two terms that were often thought of as synonymous.

“I’m tired of the corporate life,” continued Dale. “I’m tired of the incessant competition, the maneuvering, the deceit, the politics. Everything.”

“So you want to become a sheep?”

Dale grinned. “Baaaaah. Baaaaah.”

“So you want to become a sheep.” Even though I had always thought of Dale as a sheep, it was still unsettling now that it was about to come true. Revolting too.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a wage-earner,” he said. “If you can find a good job. And I can.”

“I’ve got news for you. There’s competition for those jobs. Not all of those sheep on the dole are there just because they want a free ride. Low test scores ruined most of them.”

“So? I’ve got a good education.”

“But that alone still isn’t enough.” Hadn’t Dale learned anything yet? “There just aren’t enough good jobs to go around.”

“With 60% of Gross National Product coming from wage-earners, I’d say there’s room for one more. Me, for instance.”

I shook my head. Dale was one of those people who were smart enough to cite statistics but not quite smart enough to understand what the numbers meant. “That’s right, 60% of GNP is from sheep. Impressive, until you realize that there are 8 _billion_ of them. The other 40% comes from the 300,000 or so corporations. Think about it: who would you rather be?”

Dale frowned. After a short pause he said, “I guess I’d rather be someone who’s happy with his life.” He shrugged. “Okay, so there’s competition for the high-end wages. Even so, it won’t be as intense as corporate life.”

“Maybe, but — “

“Which leads me to why I asked you here. On my desk you will find certain documents. Copies will also be sent through normal electronic channels, but I wanted to make absolutely certain of the transfer. Sorry, your physical presence here wasn’t essential but it makes me feel better. If your bot is like mine used to be….”

“Say no more. Where is your bot, by the way? I didn’t see it when I walked in.”

“Someone zapped it. I threw it away a few days ago.”

“Zapped?” I looked around again.

“Sent it five hundred volts through a comm channel. Fried the brain instantly. Melted the circuits.”

There were supposed to be filters and circuit breakers and electronic firewalls to prevent that sort of thing. But Hauser’s bot must have been a real cheap model. Like mine. I began to grow even more uneasy. “Who would do something like that?”

“TriSci, of course.”

“Come on, Dale. Get a clue. TriSci wouldn’t destroy your silly bot. Those guys have better things to do.”

“Fine. Go ahead, don’t believe me. I’m just warning you. After all, _you_ are the one who’s got to deal with them next.”

I stared at him. The shiver that had been traveling up and down my spine for the last few minutes started to move into more advanced parts of my nervous system.

“That’s what I wanted to discuss with you, Merv. It’s my last order of business, except for all the dissolution paperwork. When I decided to quit, TriSci wanted an infomeister replacement and I gave them your name and credentials. They seemed very satisfied with the choice and told me to go ahead and make the deal. I’m transferring my contract with TriSci to your name.”

I shook my head so violently that my headache suddenly reappeared. “Nope. No way, no deal. Find somebody else. I’m not interested.”

Dale looked astonished. “You, turning down a lucrative contract? Did I give you too much Sleep-Now last night?”

“There’s nothing wrong with my business strategy. A contract would be full of obligations, which would forbid me from snooping. But I’m looking to bust TriSci the moment they walk over the anti-trust line.”

Dale leaned forward, as if not believing what he heard. His eyes momentarily lost their fearful look. “_You_? _You_ are going to nail Foster and Estavia?” He convulsed with laughter.

“What’s so funny?”

Dale didn’t seem to hear me. Too busy chuckling. Finally he wiped the tears from his eyes and found his voice again. “I knew you were ambitious, Merv. You’re good at what you do, I’ll admit that. Damn good. But I didn’t know you were _foolish_, except when it comes to the opposite sex.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“You’re too impulsive. You’ve always been that way.” Hauser smiled. “Remember Miss Galaxy? That time you — “

“Just a passing infatuation.”

“What about that other beauty, what’s her name, the one you saw back when we were seniors at business school?”

“She passed, too.”

Hauser didn’t get my joke. He kept going through the list. “And that friendly brunette when we were freshmen — “

“Nothing but raging adolescent hormones. We were teenagers back then.”

“And now you’re what, 25?” Dale paused, squinting at me. “You _do_ seem to be picking up a few gray hairs, old man.”

“I’ll dye them.”

Dale gave me another look — sympathy mixed with concern. “You usually show a lot more savvy in your business dealings than with your romances — and you better, with TriSci. You need to get older and wiser. Real fast.”

“Apparently you’re privy to information I don’t have. Want to let me in on the secret?”

“That, sir, would be a violation of anti-trust laws.” Dale adopted a mockingly serious tone. “And you know that I have always conducted my business in the strictest accordance to all of the rules and regulations.”

“You also know that bounty hunters would never trouble themselves with such poor corporations as us. So we don’t have to worry much about the rules and regulations. Until we get rich.”

“Until _you_ get rich. Okay, Mr. Corporation, Mr. Inc. Shoot for your first megabuck before you reach thirty. Know what I think? I think there’s going to be a lot of little pieces of Merv Dunn, Inc. scattered all over no-man’s land. The only thing you’ll accomplish is nourishing a bunch of stray cats and dogs.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion. I’ll just be on my way.” I walked toward the door. “Cats and dogs I can handle. I don’t like dealing with sheep.”

“Merv, wait. Please.”

Something in his tone stopped me at the doorway. The cameras whirred around until they spotted me.

“We were friends once,” said Dale. “I know we can’t be friends anymore, but I don’t want to see anything bad happen to you. Your trouble is that you believed in all of that tripe they fed us at business school. You bought into the system and you can’t see its flaws. Well, it’s got flaws, Merv. And some people exploit them. Not in the way that we do — bending a few of the minor nitpicking rules whenever we can get away with it. Some corporations play so rough and dirty you just wouldn’t believe it. There’s blood on a lot of hands and the richer they are the bloodier it gets. I’m warning you: TriSci is dangerous.”

I nodded. “Thanks for the warning. Oh, and I meant to ask you. Do you know what happened at Massingham yesterday? The source of the alarm?”

“TriSci. That’s what happened.”

I frowned. Clearly Dale wanted to blame TriSci for everything. “How do you know?”

“I don’t have any factual evidence, but there’s no doubt about it. Listen, there’s worse things than being a sheep.” A disgusted look came over Dale’s face. “Frankly, I’d rather be a sheep than a ruthless exploiter.”

“And I’d rather be neither.” For some reason — instincts, again — I got the impression that Dale was holding something back. But in his current state of mind it probably wouldn’t pay to press the issue. “Thanks again for the advice.”

“No problem. Good luck, Merv. I hope you actually manage to avoid becoming a sheep or a wolf. Obviously I failed.” He shrugged. “Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be. I’ll tell TriSci your plate is full and you can’t take on any more business at the present time.”

* * * *

As it turned out — much to my astonishment — TriSci was a bit miffed at my reluctance to accept their contract. I wouldn’t have believed it, but several incidents convinced me.

The first one happened in the morning of the day after I talked to Dale. I was catching a taxi in no-man’s land — which is always a dangerous thing to do, even without miffing a powerful conglomeration. The sheep who lived here were the poorest of the lot, and some of them were desperately unhappy.

Furthermore, I wasn’t really thinking about TriSci. I had more important things on my mind. Suzee Carnell, Inc.

It had been a while since I’d seen her, and in the interim I realized how badly I wanted to see her again. Smart, sexy, and sly; who can ask for anything more?

Finding her was easy. After a brief query, my TV search engine turned up her latest report, currently on channel 93. She was interviewing some corporation who’d been foolish enough to go _public_. After selling himself to sheep, he’d gotten what he deserved: bankruptcy and a class action lawsuit.

It sounded as if she was going to wrap up the interview soon, so I ran over to the nearest station to take a taxi to the studio she was at in the city.

I clicked the “to hire” button but several taxis whizzed past me, already hired out. As I was impatiently waiting for the next available vehicle, I felt a tingle and a slight push in the back. Probably just the breeze, I thought. My gaze locked onto a decelerating taxi that was headed straight for the station.

The lady who got out of the taxi stepped down on the platform and uttered a sharp cry. She pointed at something behind me.

Whirling around I saw a man lying on the pavement. Groggily he was trying to get to his feet.

“What happened?” cried the lady.

“Oh, nothing much,” I replied. It immediately became obvious what had knocked him down. “Just had a shocking experience, I suspect. He’ll be fine.” I lifted the guy’s wallet and found some ID. Albert K. Bigg, Inc., business information. His card read, “Think Bigg when you think Business Information.” Cute.

I dropped the wallet, boarded the taxi and punched in my destination and my credit code.

I’d never heard of Mr. Bigg, Inc., even though he was an infomeister. But I had a good idea who had hired him to help me find a taxi. I also didn’t have a doubt where that taxi would have gone, if Mr. Bigg, Inc., had gotten his way.

Of course he didn’t, but that’s because he didn’t know about my electric suit. Comes in handy, this suit — provided you wear insulating underclothes and specially soled shoes. The suit packs a pretty mean charge, and if someone were to grab hold of it — with the unfriendly intent of, say, twisting my arm behind my back and forcing me to go somewhere I didn’t want to go — then that person had better be insulated from ground. Otherwise he’d be in for a real shocker. Good thing for my friends that backslapping had gone out of style.

Did TriSci think they were dealing with an amateur? I’m no Hauser, that’s for sure. I don’t frighten easily.

I worry a lot, though, so in the taxi I called up Bot, just to check on things. We exchanged passwords and coded greetings, etc., and while I was logged on to my home comp I double-checked security. Everything was tight.

The taxi whisked me to the studio with only a moderate number of bumps and bruises, since traffic was light. I caught the tail end of Suzee’s interview on the taxi monitor and she finished it up just as I arrived.

In the canyon created by the tall buildings, I waited until she walked out of the studio. She was talking into her comm and stashing a camera into her shoulder bag. “You’re slipping, Barney,” she said angrily. “When I say I want a zoom lens delivered by a certain date, I _mean_ it … Don’t want to hear it. Just get it to me pronto!”

I managed to catch her eye as she strode briskly out the door. “Mind if I talk to you?” I asked.

She instantly recognized me — I saw it in her eyes. Hah! She remembered. So she’d been thinking of me too, yes?

But she frowned, and I wasn’t sure whether it was because of me or the person she was talking to on the comm. “Tomorrow, then,” she said into the hair-thin microphone of her mini-headset. “It better be ready.”

I smiled. “How would you like to do lunch?”

Her expression turned neutral. “Don’t have time.” Then she added, “Sorry. I’m really busy. What did you want, Mr. Dunn?”

Always nice when they remember your name. But that was probably a major part of Suzee’s job — remembering names, dates, sources. And she undoubtedly had plenty of men chasing after her, perhaps she even had a currently significant other. Which was fine; I like competition, it improves performance. “I want to ply you for info,” I told her.

She grinned widely. “I’m surprised how often infomeisters say that to me.”

“We know who to ask. In your line of work you hear a lot of things about certain corporations, don’t you? Rumors and such.”

“Sure. But I don’t believe half of what I hear. And I’m pretty suspicious of the other half, too.” Suzee glanced at her watch.

“Do you have a few minutes to talk to me about TriSci?”

“Foster and Estavia’s new gig?”

“Yes. But don’t forget about Rikter.”

“Never heard of him.” Suzee glanced at her watch again. “Sorry, Mr. Dunn. I’m late. But if you walk with me to my car,” she said, indicating a garage in the basement of one of the nearest skyscrapers, “I’ll chat with you.” With rushed steps she headed toward the garage.

“I was at TriSci’s initial press conference,” I said, matching my stride to Suzee’s. “I wasn’t impressed. Sounded fake.”

Suzee gave me a sideways glance. “Better watch yourself, Mr. Dunn. I’ve been told that Mr. Foster has delicate feelings. And Ms. Estavia’s not one to take lightly either.”

“I’m not taking any of them lightly. Foster, Estavia, nor Rikter. I want to find out as much about them as possible.”

Again the sideways glance. “Looking for a bounty?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, I am.” No sense lying about it. Suzee’s already proven to me that she’s a pretty good B.S. detector. “Do you know what they’re really up to?”

Pausing at the door to the garage, Suzee gave me an incredulous look. “Going after the big guns so early in your career. You don’t fool around, do you?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I could be enticed.”

She laughed. “I suppose you could at that. I’m sorry, Mr. Dunn, but I’ve run out of time. I don’t know anything in particular about TriSci, nor do I remember hearing any rumors, juicy or otherwise. But I’ll keep a lookout. If there’s a story here, I’m interested.”

With a thin smile she disappeared into the garage, leaving me standing in the urban canyon and trying to stitch back up my breaking heart. But I vowed to see her again. As many times as possible.

I walked to a station a few blocks away and hopped on a taxi, punching in my credit code and the coordinates to my office/condo. Then I sat back and thought some more about Suzee Carnell, Inc.

It wasn’t long, however, before I realized that the taxi had no intention of going to no-man’s land. It seemed to be bound and determined for another destination — and wasn’t going to stop or let itself be steered until it arrived.

Even without consulting a map I knew where it was headed.

* * * *

When I arrived at Massingham two goons were waiting for me.

“Just where I wanted to go,” I remarked as the taxi door slid open. I stepped down. “But I hope you guys aren’t expecting a tip.”

Sans any trace of a smile or good humor the goons ushered me into the corporate HQ of TriSci. I had no doubt that Foster and Estavia were there — it was not only their HQ, it was also, at least for the time being, their living quarters. Although I’m sure that the two rich scientists had properties and houses all over the globe, Massingham was said to do a particularly good job of catering to high-powered clients.

They took me to a small conference room; Estavia was sitting at the table. “Good afternoon,” she said. “Welcome to TriSci.”

“Hello, I’m Merv Dunn, Inc. I handle all of the basic corporate information needs. Information is my business, and I’ll make it yours too.”

Estavia nodded politely. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Dunn. I’m Julia Estavia, Inc., specializing in navigation and tracking systems. You name it, and I’ll find it.”

“I suppose you’re wondering why I dropped in.” I noticed with some relief that the goons had disappeared. “Actually, so am I.”

“Sit down, Mr. Dunn. Mr. Foster will be here shortly. Mr. Rikter is not in town, but he’ll be available via sat link.” She operated a switch from some panel hidden from my view, and a comm screen dropped down from the ceiling. In a moment Rikter appeared, looking bored. I nodded but he didn’t notice; he looked as if his mind was a million miles away. Probably was.

Estavia looked at me again. “We regret the inconvenient and somewhat inappropriate way that you were summoned. However, you’re a difficult corporation to deal with. I find that surprising, given your youth.”

“I have an ambitious corporate structure.”

“Yes, we know.” Estavia seemed to be scrolling through a document on a reader that was invisible from where I sat. She stared at the screen and pushed back an unruly strand of gray hair that kept falling over her left eye. “Your business school professors documented your unrivaled instincts and your impressive drive to succeed.”

“Did they?” I did my best to appear unsurprised.

“Yes, although you’re not likely to be aware of it. But you as an infomeister shouldn’t be astonished that people love to accumulate information. Reports, grades, evaluations, attendance records. Everything is information these days. I guess I don’t have to tell _you_ that, do I?”

Just then Foster swept into room. He stepped right over to me and offered his hand. His grip was firm, his smile polite and political, his eyes … rapacious. And Hauser called _me_ greedy. Everything about Ed Foster suggested a primeval, unconquerable lust for money and power.

A dangerous thought suddenly came to me. Was this the sort of person I wanted to become? The thought scared me because it would probably make me unsure of myself. Worse, it could make me hesitant. And he who hesitates….

“I was just discussing the subject of information with Mr. Dunn,” said Estavia.

“Who better for such a discussion?” said Foster.

I nodded my thanks for the compliment.

Foster sat down beside me. “Shall we turn to business? We have a proposition for you, Mr. Dunn. I think you will find it interesting and definitely worth considering. We have investigated your background, your corporate charter, your business practices. We feel that you’re perfectly suited for the job.”

“Better suited than Dale Hauser, Inc.?” I asked.

“Mr. Hauser wasn’t my original choice.” Foster shot an annoyed glance at Rikter, who seemed to be paying little attention to the proceedings. “I didn’t think very highly of Mr. Hauser.”

“Did you think very highly of Mr. Bigg?”

Foster looked confused. I glanced at Estavia, whose brow was also furrowed.

“Up to this point,” said Foster, “Dr. Rikter has handled most of our infomeister needs. For purely minor tasks. Now that the real business of TriSci is at hand, it’s time to get serious about infomeisters.”

“Infomeisters.” I looked at Foster. “Plural.”

“It’s a big project. An important one.”

I smiled. “Having nothing to do with what you talked about at your press conference.”

“That’s not true,” said Estavia. “At least, as far as outward appearances are concerned.”

“Indeed,” added Foster. “We’ve already researched and developed a product. Finished the design months ago. Should be a bestseller, it’ll revolutionize comm links. It’s a router that acts like a nervous system. It has dynamic ‘synapses’ that are plastic, automatically adjusting to different loads, users, circuit failures, as well as learning traffic patterns.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” I paused. “According to the rules — “

“Yes, yes, I know.” Foster sighed. “But we collaborate all the time. We have to … Christ, it’d be silly not to. The rules, I admit, were made with the best of intentions, and I think it was proper for the government to encourage competition. But let’s be reasonable. We’re people — we love to get together and talk.”

“But — ” I tried to remind him that we’re corporations, not just “people”, but Foster cut me off.

“Now, Mr. Dunn, I ask you: who amongst us doesn’t have at least a few skeletons in the closet?”

“Interesting that you should be so open with me,” I said, shifting uncomfortably in my chair.

“Meaning, I take it, that this is just the sort of bounty you were looking for.” Foster stared at me with those rapacious eyes. “I would advise against it, Mr. Dunn. First of all, you would find it a difficult allegation to prove. More importantly, you would discover that the cost of doing so would be unacceptably high.” He shook his head. “No, there’s no profit in that. It wouldn’t be a smart move.”

Rikter’s pondering voice suddenly cut in. “You have to give him an alternative, Ed.”

I looked up in surprise. Rikter was gazing serenely down on us.

Foster’s expression showed a microscopic but detectable frown. “I’m coming to that.”

“Well, Mr. Dunn,” said Rikter, “we’d like to offer you a contract which would be rewarding financially as well as appealing to your civic spirit.”

“I’m intrigued.”

“You see — ” started Rikter.

“It’s like this, Mr. Dunn.” Estavia glanced an apology to Rikter for interrupting, but she didn’t give him a chance to finish his sentence. “These days everybody’s designing and manufacturing systems that are based on biological principles, but I believe there’s still room for a little physics in the world.”

Rikter cleared his throat. “Physics is in some ways the most fundamental discipline.”

“And we want to apply it to make our society as stable and economically sound as we can make it.” Estavia’s voice grew animated. It was obvious that she and Rikter handled the science aspects, whereas Foster took care of business. “That’s how you’re going to help us.”

“I’m afraid I nearly flunked physics in college.”

“But you’ve no doubt heard of quantum mechanics,” said Estavia.

“Have you ever wondered,” mused Rikter, “why an atom is so stable? Why the orbiting negatively charged electrons don’t just fly off or wind up falling into the positively charged nucleus?”

Rikter seemed to be fond of going off on tangents. Probably appealed to his mathematical mind. “No, I can’t say that I’ve given it much thought.”

“Well, you should have,” admonished Foster. “Because it’s the answer to the problem of what to do with all the sheep in the world.”

I smiled. “Oh, I get it now. You’re going to shrink the sheep down to the size of electrons.”

“We’re not jesting,” said Estavia. “What we do is give them discrete levels. That’s why an atom is stable: the orbits of electrons are discrete, they take on only certain values. They’re not continuous, they’re not like the number line where there’s a number at each and every point. It’s more like the integers, which are a discrete set of numbers with gaps in between.”

Rikter cleared his throat again. “A splendid society, composed of nothing but stable states.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like a caste system.” Didn’t sound so splendid to me.

Foster shook his head. “No, not like that. We don’t want to constrain people. We’re not talking about anything so totalitarian. People will still have upward mobility.” He gave me a meaningful glance. “Downward too.”

I leaned back and thought a moment. “All of this has something to do with information, or I wouldn’t be here. I’m guessing you want to manipulate the information traveling through these intelligent routers of yours. Right?” Foster and Estavia smiled and nodded. “But I don’t understand how or why you plan to achieve these discrete levels.”

“Look at it this way,” said Rikter. “Say you’re playing a game, and there are referees who enforce the rules. Consider the fact that during the course of the game, a referee will likely make at least a few judgment calls with which you disagree. Let me ask you this. When are you most likely to bitterly argue a referee’s call that goes against you: when the score of the game is tied or when the score is badly lopsided?”

“Tied, of course. Otherwise it doesn’t really matter.”

Rikter smiled. I was a good pupil. “Now consider the following scenarios. When are you more likely to get upset over a lost promotion or a bad grade on an exam: when your performance score was a tenth of a point away from the cutoff, or when you were so far down that you weren’t even close? And think about the converse situation, too. When are you likely to be worried about your job: when your rating just grazes the minimum, or when you’re comfortably ahead of the threshold?”

“So that’s what you want to do.” I had to admit, it was clever. All those performance reports, grades, evaluations, outcome assessments. All of them passed through the comm links, for how else do they get transmitted? What if the figures could be manipulated so that the distributions formed discrete clumps? You could manipulate the individual scores or you could manipulate the reported statistics … either way, you’d probably be able to put the majority of people squarely in one category or another. And since most personal data are confidential, and all of it is compiled and distributed by automated systems, nobody double-checks the results or probes too deeply into the details. If all of this could be done, then everything would appear to be clear-cut. With less ambiguity there might well be less emotion. Less agitation. “I suppose you think you could do it in such a way that nobody gets suspicious.”

“Well, the _sheep_ won’t get suspicious,” said Foster. “But we need information specialists to implement and maintain the system. Rikter has designed the overall plan, set up the optimal distribution parameters. Other than that, it’s just programming. To achieve stability, we simply create discrete distributions.”

Estavia beamed. “It’s not like we’re affecting anyone’s real economic or social status. Not at all. We’re only affecting their psychology.”

“That’s very important,” said Rikter. “What matters is not the actual state of the world but what people _perceive_ is the state of the world.”

“There’s something else that’s important,” I said. The word was on the tip of my tongue but I couldn’t quite think of it.

“The beauty of the plan is that it’s so easy to do.” Foster’s rapacious eyes twinkled. “Modern comm systems have but a single channel, as you well know, Mr. Dunn. How simple it is to control! Not like in the days when you had multiple lines running from multiple companies across multiple circuits.”

“I see.” I leaned back. Foster and Estavia were watching me closely. Rikter’s attention seemed to have wandered off again.

“It’s a perfect plan,” said Foster. “We make a lot of money and we deal with the sheep problem at the same time. We’re going to have to do _something_ about the sheep, you know, sooner or later.”

“There are more and more of them every year,” agreed Estavia. “An ever growing population. Some of them are competent enough to make small but necessary contributions to the economy, but on the whole the sheep are hardly worth all those tax dollars we pay to support the ones who can’t do anything right. And they’re never satisfied, they want more. They want much more than their abilities warrant.”

“Sheep have been a problem ever since corporations first began downsizing,” said Foster. “Now that most corporations are a single person, the problem has become critical. I believe you’ll admit that this is the most innocuous thing we could do with potential troublemakers. Certainly better than some of the things you could think of doing. We have to keep them in line somehow, and this is far more ethical, more humane, more fair.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, Mr. Dunn, what do you think of our project?” asked Foster.

“I think it stinks.”

Estavia’s posture stiffened and Foster’s lip curled ever so slightly upward.

Foster leaned forward menacingly. “Is that your professional estimation?”

“My professional estimation is that it just might work.”

Some of the tension in the room eased a little. “We’re glad you see it our way,” said Estavia.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well, let’s say you’re undecided.” Foster rose. “The money’s going to be good if you accept the contract. Think about it. That’s all we can ask.”

“And if I decline?”

“No problem. We’ll simply have to be more successful in recruiting other infomeisters. As long as you maintain the confidential nature of our discussion here today, no harm done. And I don’t think for a minute that you’ll violate that confidentiality. You’re a very intelligent man, Mr. Dunn. You’d never do something extremely stupid.”

“Of course not.” I got up. “Pleasure meeting all of you. And remember Merv Dunn, Inc., for all your business information needs. Quotes available upon request.”

* * * *

It was late that night before I decided what to do.

Not that I had to think about whether I wanted to take TriSci’s contract or not. That sort of thing just wasn’t for me.

Integrity. That was the word I was trying to think of at the meeting. It was perhaps revealing that the word eluded me for so long. At least the _concept_ was there in my mind, lurking somewhere deep in the folds of my cerebral cortex.

The thing I was debating was whether to pursue my curiosity. It’d be risky, probably a lot more risky than it’d be worth.

Yet I decided to give it a try. There was something I didn’t understand, something I’d heard at TriSci HQ that made no sense. I couldn’t let the matter drop without trying to find an answer.

So I carefully made my way back to Massingham. I didn’t take a taxi — I hitched a ride with a friend, who let me off a few blocks away. I wasn’t going to TriSci’s HQ, though. Just to their junction box.

The little park was mostly dark, which suited my purpose quite well; the only lights were a dull yellow glow coming from the building entrance and the stray beams from a few curtained windows scattered among the many floors.

It was easy to get access to the junction box because my data comp had stored the password sequence from before. But this time I brought something with me: a nanomite information sniffer. Back when I was in business school a fellow student and I developed the prototype. If you put it in contact with the incoming line, it searched the data until it found the tag phrases it was programmed to seek. Then it transmitted a copy of the data; in this case, it would transmit the data back to my home comp. It worked fast enough not to slow down the signal flow, so it wouldn’t arouse suspicions.

I had programmed it to search and copy all messages destined for TriSci and, because Foster and Estavia also lived there, I added their names to the tag list as well.

All forms of communication, personal and business, were encrypted. This, even though messages were generally believed to be beyond interception. But only the most sensitive communications were _rigorously_ encrypted, because of the time and expense. The top-level encryption codes would take a quantum computer decades to crack. Routine communications, however, weren’t worth that much trouble, and their encryption algorithms was far less sophisticated; people figured that even if someone managed to intercept them and break the code, not much was lost.

But they didn’t realize how much a good infomeister like me could glean from even routine comm data — provided the sender and received don’t realize someone’s listening in.

The word “integrity” came to mind again. But I was dealing with some rather unpleasant people here.

Okay, so I guess there’s always an excuse, isn’t there?

Upon opening the junction box and using a pencil-thin flashlight, I noticed that the dangling wire I’d seen earlier had been reconnected. Other things looked to be shifted around too. Interesting.

I’d just finished inserting the device when I heard the voice.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

Deja vu. Except this time I was jumpy enough to slam the box’s cover on my finger.

“Yowwww!”

“Quiet.”

I became aware of a firm grasp that pushed me into the shadow of a giant oak tree. A small leafy branch scratched my ear.

Suzee Carnell, Inc. I didn’t mind that she was pressing her body up against mine.

“Fancy meeting you here, Mr. Dunn.”

“Pleasure’s mine.”

“I’m sure.” Suzee stole some glances around the park. It was still quiet.

“Hey,” I said, “I just thought of something. You wear specially insulated shoes, don’t you?”

“I have to, because I deal with young corporations all the time. You and your electric suits. So childish.”

In the darkness I could see her pearly white smile. Her hair, too — the electrical charges she’d absorbed had nowhere to go, and they made her blonde tresses stick straight up. But still she managed to look gorgeous.

“There’s something I want to tell you, Mr. Dunn. I heard a rumor. It involved a corporation — let’s call it T.S. — and a certain infomeister whose initials are M.D.”

“Well, what did you hear? Was it that M.D. P.O.’ed T.S.? Or would you prefer to tell me the rumor after we get to my place?”

“We’re not going to your place. And you’re not going anywhere except possibly to jail.”

“Yeah?” Now it was my turn to look around.

“Did it ever occur to you that other people can be just as smart and crafty as you are?”

“It seems I’ve had that thought a time or two.” Suzee’s face was so close that I could see, backlit by a distant streetlight, the soft downy hair on her cheeks. She smelled wonderful — faintly ozone-ish, but wonderful — and it made concentration difficult.

“Did it ever occur to you that your activity would be monitored?”

“They sure did a good job of hijacking my taxi. Must have programmed the whole system to listen for my credit ID. Impressive.”

“Then why did you show up here?”

“Cause I’ve got intestinal fortitude.” I heard whispers of sirens, coming from the distance. They were still far away, but sound seemed to travel well in the city, funneled as it was along the urban canyons. “They called the cops, I gather.”

“You gather correctly. When they come and find that thing you put in, they might think ill of you. You’d better take it out at once and hope the cops don’t search you.”

“I don’t need to take it out of the box. They won’t find it.” I grinned. “It’s not only tiny, it’s also mobile. It slurps up part of the electricity like a parasite and uses it to drive microscopic servos. Not enough to degrade the signal, just enough to move the motors. By now that little bug has probably traveled as far up the receiver’s antenna as it can go. They can take the whole comm station apart and never find it.”

Suzee showed her pearly teeth again. “Looks like you’ve been underestimated.”

“People sometimes do that. To their cost.” The sirens were getting uncomfortably louder. “Want to do me a favor?”

“You want me to tell you how I knew you’d be here.”

“No. I mean yes, I want to know. But at the moment I need another favor. Something involving a bit of a diversion. So I can get away.”

“Oh, that. Naturally. I have connections with the police, you see. They know me. That, by the way, was how I discovered you’d be here. I monitor their calls and they were told immediately about your presence here at Massingham. Anonymous tip.”

“You don’t say.” I started to trot toward a side alley. I looked back at Suzee. “Sounds like I really got under somebody’s skin.”

“I’ll tell them you went thataway,” said Suzee, pointing in the opposite direction.

I didn’t much care. The important thing was that I had firm plans to see Suzee Carnell, Inc., again. And again, and again, and again.

I took a roundabout way home, including a shared taxi ride with a gregarious sheep who worked night shift and who didn’t mind paying the fare — as long as I told him how to rewire his house.

When I finally arrived home I discovered that someone had sent a super-high voltage across the comm line, straight to my corporate HQ. Bot was alive and kicking, though. Saved by obsolescence. Bot had assumed the signal was me dialing for a roast and routed the “messsssssage” through.

I still had a working bot, such as it is, but now I needed a new microwave oven.

* * * *

The next day I had Bot make me an appointment with TriSci. They probably thought I was surrendering — but they were in for a surprise.

All night long I’d analyzed the signals traveling to and from TriSci. Lots of interesting things turned up. Especially interesting were the audio messages; I recorded them on a portable player and took it with me to Massingham.

Since TriSci would assume I was coming back with my tail between my legs, I wasn’t worried about my safety. I caught a taxi and spent the trip to Massingham thinking about TriSci’s project.

Maybe it wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. I wasn’t sure about the physics analogy, but the idea itself wasn’t too bad. And since people don’t often share their personal data, it had a chance of escaping detection for at least a little while.

It was a desperate measure, but desperate times call for that sort of thing. Every corporation was aware of the sheep problem. But none of us seemed to have any idea what to do about it. Nor, for that matter, could we legally act on any idea that came to us: collaboration was forbidden, making concerted action impossible. _Openly_ concerted action, that is.

What about the government? It had become so bloated and so full of sheep that it was much more a part of the problem than the solution.

Still, I wanted nothing to do with TriSci’s idea. Even though the manipulated data wouldn’t change people’s actual status, it _would_ change their plans, thoughts, and behavior. That’s not fair. I remember in my final year of business school there was a 63-year-old grandmother in a few of my classes, trying hard to earn her corporate license. And why not? But would she have been there if everything, including her test scores, had discouraged her?

Besides, I think TriSci would find their plan was at best a stopgap solution. And once it became public — as it was bound to, sooner or later — there’d likely be a strong backlash. And I knew who would take the blame for it; certainly not Foster or Estavia or Rikter. That’s the real reason they wanted to hire infomeisters: an anticipated need for scapegoats. Why else had TriSci insisted on meeting me at their HQ? They’d assuredly do the same thing to their other infomeister recruits and the reason was plain enough. It was the best way to ensure that the conversation was private.

The taxi let me off at the closest station to Massingham and I walked the rest of the way. As I had expected, the detectors at the gate gave an alarm the moment I walked through. I was armed and dangerous — I was carrying a concealed tape recorder. I handed it over to the bot but made the thing promise to deliver it to TriSci HQ.

I was disappointed with my reception committee: it consisted of only Estavia. “Mr. Foster is busy,” she said, after I was shown into the same conference room as yesterday. “But I assure you he’s interested in what you have to say. I’ll be briefing him later.”

“No, I think Foster would rather hear what I have to say firsthand.” I pointed to the comm monitor. “And I’ll bet that both of you will want most of all to talk to Rikter. Why don’t you get him now and save yourself the trouble later?”

She frowned and shook her head; frowsy hair swung back and forth. “This is highly irregular, Mr. Dunn.”

“So is the news I’m bringing you.” I gave her my best corporate smile.

Estavia hesitated. “If you could tell me the nature of your information….”

The bot had delivered the player as promised and I played one of the recordings. Foster was in the conference room and Rikter was on the sat link less than five minutes later.

* * * *

Foster looked at me with total incredulity. “I don’t believe it,” he said forcefully. “You mean you’ve been eavesdropping on our corporate messages? Impossible.”

“Highly possible,” I corrected. “Well, just the lightly encrypted ones. For example, at 7:22 A.M. you received a communication from Yi Mou, Inc., regarding some electrical apparatus. Correct?”

Estavia checked. Her face turned pale.

“And,” I added, “at 7:26 A.M. you received — “

“Never mind.” Foster leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Never mind, I believe you. I don’t know how you did it but you did it.”

I started to tell them about my little bug, but I decided against it. Never divulge company secrets.

Rikter’s voice came in over the comm speaker. He sounded nervous and very close to despair. “If nobody minds I will return to my lab. I find all of this very distracting.”

“May I recommend a contrary course of action?” growled Estavia.

“So what’s this all about?” Rikter’s image glanced downward, apparently at a watch. “I haven’t got much time.”

“It’s about manipulation,” I said. “By you.” I played the same tape I’d played to Estavia earlier. It was a voice giving a set of instructions to a bot — a voice-activated bot, of course. The voice sounded like Estavia’s, although it wasn’t hers. The bot was instructed to insert the following sentences into Estavia’s diary: “I’m feeling out of sorts. I guess my life is empty right now. Does money make you happy? No, it doesn’t for me. I lack something. Something tangible. Something I can hold, something I can … love. And will love me back.”

Instructions for several other additions to Estavia’s diary, with a similar message and tone, were also given. The signals had been sent directly to Estavia’s living quarters and played through her comm speakers. The sender had apparently received feedback on her movements and her physiological processes; I’d noticed that there was an outbound message stream that looked suspiciously like the signal of a medical monitor. The instructions were only given when Estavia was either asleep or in another room, out of earshot.

“I’m not sure I understand,” said Foster.

“Those words were put into my diary,” said Estavia. “Not just last night. Apparently this has been happening for the past few days. And I reread my diary often.”

Foster gave her a strange look. “So? Didn’t you realize that you didn’t write them?”

I turned to Foster. “Do _you_ remember everything you write? Particularly if you write a lot, especially when you’re tired at the end of the day.” I glanced at Estavia. “That’s when you usually wrote your diary entries, isn’t it?” She nodded.

Foster frowned. “I guess I might not remember either. But still — ” His eyes grew bright. “Wait a minute. Does this have anything to do with that book you’ve been reading?” Estavia gave him a pained look and Foster chuckled. “So that’s it! I wondered about that. You tried to hide the book from me but I glimpsed the title this morning. I was astonished: it was a romance novel! You don’t read romance novels, Julia!”

Estavia sighed. “Not in the past. But I started thinking … how dull my life is. The words in my diary — the words I thought I had written — planted a seed in my mind.” Her head drooped.

“Although Rikter can tell you more than I can,” I said, “it’s easily explainable. The power of suggestion is remarkable, but it’s most powerful when the person is convinced that the idea came from his or her own thoughts.” In the early hours of the morning, after I discovered what was being sent over TriSci’s comm line, I’d done some reading on psychology. Interesting subject.

The incoming messages had a single source, and it was the same as the destination for the medical signals: Rikter.

“Well,” said Rikter, “Julia, Ed, I see no reason to become upset. It’s really quite innocent. I was just experimenting. I felt sure that Julia harbored secret desires and the diary additions simply reinforced them.”

A deep throaty snarl erupted from Estavia.

Ed grinned. “Now, Julia. I can understand how you feel, and I will agree that it was an unconscionable thing for Allyn to do. But let’s not get carried away. There was no harm done, was there?”

I changed the tape. “Glad to hear you say that, Ed. Listen to this. It was playing in _your_ apartment.” A voice came on, a pretty good imitation of Foster’s, and instructed Foster’s bot to order and install a large number of mirrors in various places in the apartment.

Foster’s eyes opened wide. “I wondered … I thought it was just something Massingham’s management was doing. It never occurred to me to ask questions about it.” He looked at Rikter, then at me. I saw a little bit of fear in his expression. “But what was the purpose?”

“To set up the next phase of the ‘experiment’,” I replied. “Which was to play a tape in your bedroom while you were sleeping. The med monitor revealed when you were asleep.”

Foster looked like he was starting to smell a rat. “A tape?”

“That’s right.” I pressed another button. “A message that played continuously throughout the night.”

The voice on the tape wasn’t an imitation of Foster, but it did have a specially strong air of authority. “You _must_ part your hair on the left side,” said the voice, deep and masculine, “not the right side. You look unprofessional with your hair parted any other way except on the left. People will not recognize you as a superior human being. Everyone’s hair has a natural part. Yours is on the left. If you do not follow your natural part, other people will think you are stupid.”

Estavia looked at Foster with undisguised mirth. “I wondered why you suddenly started parting your hair on the left.”

Underneath his bronze skin, Foster’s cheeks grew blistery red. He glared at Rikter’s image. “How _dare_ you manipulate me in that insolent fashion!”

“Now, now,” answered Rikter. “Simply more experimenting. I was just testing. Subliminal perceptions are an important part of life, and it’s a fact that sensations below conscious threshold can nevertheless register in the mind. That includes things we hear in our sleep. But subliminal perceptions aren’t very powerful, as businesses discovered back in the mid 20th century when they tried to slip in advertising to an unwary public. It didn’t really work. As far as manipulations go, subliminal perceptions usually have to be supplemented. That was the role of the mirrors, Ed — to get you thinking about your physical appearance. In the years that I’ve known you, I’ve noted several interesting features of your personality. Despite your amazing success you are, well, somewhat insecure.”

“I’ll thank you,” said Foster in a dangerous tone, “to mind your own business.”

“Ed, Julia, can’t you both understand?” pleaded Rikter. “I had to experiment in a controlled environment, and this was the best I could come up with. Surely you realize that our project — stabilizing society with discrete distributions — is just a temporary measure. We have to think further ahead, we need more ideas. I was just anticipating the time when we would need a more advanced form of manipulation. Surely you don’t mind participating in the testing phase of a more permanent solution to the sheep problem….”

* * * *

I caught up on my sleep during the rest of the day and all of that night. Working around the clock was okay during my business school days but really wears me out quickly now that I’ve got my own business to run.

The next morning I wasn’t surprised to learn that TriSci had disbanded. There went my bounty. Not that I was particularly eager to challenge Foster — a man who, by all accounts, backed up his threats.

The terse press release indicated the breakup was due to “philosophical differences.” Don’t see that one too often in a corporate environment. But I guess Foster and Estavia discovered that a dose of their own medicine was unpalatable.

Rikter, on the other hand, seemed less than contrite. That was worrisome. It was Rikter’s involvement with infomeisters — as Foster had mentioned in our first meeting — that had puzzled me in the first place, and now I knew why he’d hired them. He didn’t know enough to get the best ones, though, or perhaps he wasn’t willing to shell out enough money to hire competent people; they’d made several mistakes configuring TriSci’s router and nearly burned down Massingham Square.

At first I thought maybe Rikter was just having some fun at the expense of his arrogant erstwhile colleagues, but that’s not Rikter’s style. He was a scientist who believed the whole world was his laboratory. Including all of us human beings.

Becoming one of Rikter’s guinea pigs wasn’t my idea of fun, but there didn’t seem to be much that I alone could do to stop him. So I opted for a course of action that was a distinct change of pace for me. Publicity. The public — both corporations and sheep — should be warned. And I knew just the person to help me do it.

Besides, it gave me a legitimate reason to see Suzee Carnell, Inc., again.

My TV search engine located her, and I headed off to a park in the burbs where she was doing a short program on wildlife conservation. I had to wait twenty minutes before she was done, but I managed to get her attention shortly thereafter.

“Merv Dunn, Inc.,” she said to me as she stowed her miniaturized equipment into a small shoulder bag. “Nice to see you again. I understand TriSci split up and it wasn’t a very amicable dissolution. Your doing, I believe.”

“I played a role.” I glanced around. We appeared to be alone but I was still nervous. “Want to take a short walk in the park? We can look at the wildlife you just conserved. And I’ll tell you something juicy.”

“I’m pretty busy.” As if to emphasize the point, a buzz sounded — her comm line. Frowning, she pushed the wire-thin microphone up to her mouth. “Can I call you back?” Then she pulled the headset off, folded it up, and slipped it into a pocket.

“I’m busy, Mr. Dunn, but I’ve always got time for _you_.” She hooked her arm in mine and guided me down a little path that wound around the lush vegetation and carefully sculpted landscape of the park.

Her arm and shoulder were toned to perfection: supple but firm. Her perfume was aromatic and intoxicating.

We walked in silence for a few minutes.

“I thought you were going to tell me something juicy,” said Suzee. We stopped by a little spring; the splashing and bubbling water cascaded down a series of bowl-shaped stones. We sat down on a bench.

Amid the cozy atmosphere and sound of running water I told her about TriSci’s grand plan and Rikter’s experiments. I tried to keep my emotions in check and my voice neutral; anything else would be unprofessional.

Suzee listened without comment.

“I think something should be done,” I said, “and I’m hoping you’ll help.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Suzee. “It seems like a good enough idea, but are you sure it’ll work?”

I paused. “Work?”

“Since Rikter fouled up TriSci’s plan, who’s to say that someone else won’t ruin it for us?”

“Ruin it for us.” I looked a question at her.

“Sure.” Suzee gave me an annoyed glance. “Not only would we have to contend with morons like Rikter, we’d also have to deal with sheep lovers.”

“You mean — “

“Yes. I realize that you’re very young, and perhaps a touch naive, but in my line of work I’ve had several awkward dealings with sheep lovers already. There are a small number of corporations out there with an incredibly uneconomic attitude. Sheep deserve better than what they’ve got, these people say, sheep deserve this and that. Never mind that sheep are running rampant. They’re even pathetic as consumers, and we don’t really need them. Their drag on productivity more than outweighs the benefits we get from their consumption, except perhaps for the leisure and booze industries. And yet they want even more, despite all the taxes we already pay. I agree with you that something has to be done so that we don’t have eight billion rebellious underachievers running around like loose cannons. All I’m saying is that it needs to be carefully considered.”

“My sentiments exactly.” I stood up. The most terrifying thing was that it only took ten seconds for all of my dreams to go poof.

Gone. Me and Suzee, spending the weekend in Vail, cross-country skiing, snuggling by a roaring fire, listening to the Rocky Mountain market reports. Me and Suzee, floating in zero-g at the space station, watching the earth spin and counting the number of continents in which our net profit margins exceed 10 percent. Gone, all gone.

“I’ll let you know. Thanks for listening. Remember Merv Dunn, Inc., for all your business information needs. Quotes available upon request.”

I vowed never to see Suzee again.

It took an hour to get home because I took the scenic route. Did some thinking.

When I got home I dictated a message to Bot. Recipient: Dale Hauser.

I’d gotten an idea. A market strategy. A business niche.

Information filters. It would appear that they might come in handy pretty soon. I spotted a potentially vast growth industry, saw a great need starting to develop: a need to monitor incoming information and communication lines, a need to block unwanted messages and report suspicious activity. Gone were the days when you could rely on privacy in your own home — the world was too connected, and even the most sophisticated bots could be manipulated without too much trouble. Gone also were the alternate routes of communication; it was all channeled through one single artery now. And unfortunately, you never knew who it was that controlled your comm.

I’d need help. I couldn’t develop a whole industry all by myself. I needed someone who knew the business and was good with the technical aspects of information flow and analysis. Merv Dunn, Inc., might be getting his first employee.

And Dale was a _hell_ of a lot smarter than Bot.

Hiring a sheep was a pretty drastic step, though. Suzee talked about corporations who sympathized with sheep, but there were just as many who felt the opposite way. Like Suzee. I was in for trouble. As a new and precariously funded corporation who unfashionably hired a sheep when I didn’t appear to need one, or could even afford such a luxury, I’d probably be blackballed by at least a few corporations. Maybe as many as a quarter of them.

But I’d much rather hire a sheep than be eaten by a wolf. Or manipulated by a rat.

––—

Copyright (C) 2005 by Kyle Kirkland.

––—

CH003

*Her World Exploded* by David Burkhead

A Short Story

It may sound like “obviously a metaphor,” but in this case it was literally true!

––—

It wasn’t a large world, or particularly valuable — just a rock really, scarcely more than a large asteroid — but it was _hers_. She had paid good money for it and had a secure, solitary, vacation cottage built on it. And now, just as she was arriving for her first extended visit after an investors’ symposium at Ceti III, it had exploded.

What had happened? Had terrorists planted an unusually large and powerful nuclear device on it? Had it been struck by a giant meteor? Had some angry deity hurled a thunderbolt with her poor vacation cottage as the target? She did not know, but she determined to find out. After all, her world had cost her more than 200 million credits, enough to buy three luxury liners. She had insurance to cover the financial loss, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that she wanted — needed — someplace where she could get away, someplace where she could set aside the masks, the personas, she wore to deal with other people, someplace where there was no Ingenue, no Dragon Lady, no Vamp, no Professor, just Victoria, just her.

She leaned back in her chair. The walls of the control room of her yacht were paneled in natural wood, an extravagance that had tickled her when she had bought it. The brushed metal control panel had remarkably few instruments and switches. The yacht relied on its computer for most controls with little in the way of manual backup. In the space between the stars, if the computer failed, the crew and passengers died. No manual controls and readouts could stop that.

“Any damage, Michael?” she asked the yacht. “That was a pretty big explosion.”

“I’ve lost the optical the sensors on that side,” the yacht answered back. “The radiation shielding seems to have held long enough for me to engage the drive and run about two light hours away. It was a little bumpy running through our wake, but we are now outside the explosion radius.”

“What happens when it catches up to us?”

“I expect us to be gone before then.”

She sighed. The explosion might not be powerful enough to hurt them at this distance, but it had certainly been powerful enough to convert her poor vacation cottage into brightly glowing rubble. “And I was looking forward to this vacation too.”

“Miss?”

“Nothing, Michael. No, wait a minute. What’s the procedure for reporting a planet that’s exploded?”

“I don’t know, miss. To my knowledge, it’s never happened before.”

“I didn’t think it was a daily occurrence,” she said. “Do you have a guess, Michael?” The computer that ran her yacht had a name of his own. He was a Morgan, one of the artificial intelligences built by Daniel Morgan in the mid twenty-first century. The Morgans so closely mimicked human that they scared her sometimes. After about a dozen were built, the project was canceled. After all, who needed to spend all that effort to produce artificial brains that imitated natural ones? The natural way was much cheaper. She grinned at the thought. Down inside her, the Vamp’s grin was predatory. The natural way was much more fun, too.

“I would guess,” Michael said, “that the explosion should be reported to the nearest Tripartite base. After all, there is the possibility that the explosion is the result of military or criminal activity. At the same time, I could have my optical sensors replaced.”

“That sounds reasonable to me,” she said. “I guess you’d better take us there.”

“Yes, miss.”

As Michael read the navigation computer and calculated the course, her eyes caressed the registration plaque mounted next to the command console. Her gaze traced the bold lettering that spelled out the name of the ship’s registered owner: Victoria R. Schneider. The “R” stood for “Richetta.” She was very proud of her ship, less proud of the parents who had saddled her with that name. Schneider, Schneider, Schneider, everywhere she went that name followed her. People always wanted to know if she was related to _those_ Schneiders.

It didn’t help that she was.

And so she had bought her world, and this ship, to escape from that. Most interstellar ships still used the older Ballard long-jump drive. Ships based on the more complicated “short-jump” solution to the Ballard equations were just starting to become popular … for those who had the money.

Both types of drives used wormholes, microscopic fluctuations in spacetime that made two points in space effectively the same point. To jump, the ship would “grab” a wormhole and spin it up large enough for the ship to pass through. The equations were complex, but one key element was that a ship could only grab a wormhole whose far terminus was along the same motion vector with the ship relative to … well, the scientists were still arguing about just what that motion was relative to.

The other key element was that no path through any series of wormholes could bring a ship, or anything else, back to the start before it left. Whenever such a path formed from the motions of wormhole termini, a resonance was created which quickly destroyed every wormhole in that loop path. That same destruction quickly spun off new wormholes that formed new paths.

As a result, space was filled with wormholes — some with termini far apart in normal space, others with termini closer together — and causality was preserved. But the deeper a wormhole terminus moved into a gravity well, the steeper the gradient of that well, and the more distant the other terminus of the wormhole was in normal space, the more likely for a closed loop to form and for the wormhole to be destroyed.

In the Old Earth system, ships using the short-jump drive could come in as close as two or three times the distance of Earth’s Moon. Ships with long-jump drive could only approach to within twice the distance of Pluto. And even with high accelerations and inertial compensators, just shuttling around in-system could take a while.

Her world was much, much smaller than Earth, of course. The short-jump limit was actually inside the world itself.

“We’re ready, miss,” Michael said, interrupting her thoughts.

Victoria shifted immediately to her Professor persona. One thing she could not fault her family for was the quality of her education. “Wake clearance, Michael?”

“Adequate, miss. It was rough enough jumping out. I wouldn’t like a repeat performance.”

Victoria nodded. When a ship passed through, or rather around, a section of space, it disturbed the network of microscopic wormholes that made the jumps possible. It was only natural that the term “wake” be adopted to describe such disturbed regions. Ships could still jump through wakes, but they drove energy costs far, far higher than jumping through normal space, and put a great deal of strain on a ship’s drive. Fortunately, the wakes quickly settled, as they could not be detected except where they crossed a system’s jump limit. There, they produced intense, microscopic tidal forces.

“Thank you, Michael.” Victoria settled down for the trip. She was alone on the yacht, except for Michael, and he didn’t exactly count. And that was exactly how she wanted it when she took a vacation.

* * * *

Johnston Station had been a major Fleet re-supply base during the war. Since then, it had mostly been converted into a way station for commercial shipping, although the Fleet still maintained a significant presence. Victoria sat in the Fleet’s Civilian Affairs office.

She had already gotten past the “are you related to those Schneiders” routine with the uniformed young man who took her report.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said at last. She had no idea what the rank insignia on his shoulder meant. His nametag said Carter. She did not know if that was his first or last name. “Michael had just turned off the star drive and — “

“Michael? I thought you said you were alone.”

“Michael _Morgan_. He’s….”

“The android war hero. I know.”

Victoria cast her gaze upward and shook her head. “I don’t know anything about his being a war hero. I suppose as a Morgan he must have been an android, but he’s my ship’s computer now.”

“Really?” Carter tapped his chin with his index finger. “He chose to discorporate? I wonder why?”

“I don’t know.” Victoria rapped her fingertips on the desktop to punctuate her exasperation. She had chosen her Ingenue persona when she met with Carter, but perhaps that had been a mistake. Maybe the Professor would have been better. “He does a marvelous job. He’s good company when I want company. Most importantly, he leaves me alone when I want to be alone.”

Carter grinned. “I can see why a human male would have trouble leaving you alone.”

“That is _just_ what I mean.” Her lips pulled into a thin line as she tried to stare holes in Carter. “That’s why I bought my world, so I can get away from everyone seeking my attention.” She sighed. The worst of it was she didn’t even understand why she drew that attention. Sure, she knew what she looked like, but she wasn’t that extraordinary. And it couldn’t always be the size of her portfolio. After all, her net worth wasn’t tattooed on her forehead. “I mean, I enjoy the attention sometimes, but other times I need a break.” She broke off as she noticed Carter’s expression. His face flamed scarlet as his gaze spot-welded his folded hands to the desktop.

“So Michael shut down the drive?” he said after a moment.

Victoria took a moment herself to regain control. Ingenue. Remember, ingenue. “Yes. He’d just put a picture of our approach on the screen then … blooey!”

“Blooey?”

“Blooey.” She nodded. “No more world.”

“So you decided to report it here?”

“Well, actually, Michael suggested it.”

Carter nodded. “I see. Do you have your orbit parameters? Your trajectory when the accident happened may be important to our investigations. Also, we’ll need to check your flight recorders. Maybe your ship’s sensors picked up something.”

“I don’t know about any of that stuff; you’ll have to ask Michael,” she said, then smiled. “I don’t really know anything about spaceships. I just push buttons. Now, if you want to know anything about investing….”

Carter smiled back. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

* * * *

Victoria was trying to keep rein on her temper as she sat in the office of Lloyd & Company’s local insurance adjuster. Trying, but failing. Ingenue had definitely been the wrong approach to take here. The news she was hearing was not what she wanted to hear and none of the supposedly soothing pastel shades or the smooth-lined, graceful furnishings could change that.

“What do you mean it’s not covered?” Victoria rose from her chair.

“Miss,” the insurance adjuster, Thom Radley, said, “your insurance is on the house and chattels. Nobody insures worlds, not even small ones like that. Furthermore, the company never anticipated the destruction of an entire world. After all, what possible force can truly destroy a thousand-kilometer sphere of rock? So….”

“So its not in the exclusion list and therefore should be covered, right?”

“No, miss,” Radley said, “the position of the company is that coverage is only extended for events that could reasonably be expected. We cannot properly determine coverage and rates for events that are totally unanticipated.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Victoria said. “No court would agree with it.”

“Perhaps, miss,” Radley said, “but it would be expensive to find out.”

Victoria abandoned her ingenue persona. This called for the Dragon Lady. “Expensive for me or expensive for you?” she said. Although she looked at Radley, she didn’t really see him. Instead, she saw an annoying little bug that she ground under the heel of an expensive boot. The image soothed her only for a moment. “Never mind. We’ll see.”

“Frankly, miss, I think you’d be hard pressed to convince a court that a thousand-kilometer-diameter sphere of rock and iron just exploded. Do you have any idea how much energy that would take?” He smiled. “More likely someone — ” he paused, letting her imaging who that “someone” might be. ” — altered the database records of the location of the world and then cooked up a fantastic story of the world exploding to fraudulently collect the insurance.”

“You make a statement like that in public,” Victoria said, her voice cold even to her own ears, “and by the time my lawyers get done with you, your ancestors will be impoverished.”

The man smirked. “Don’t make threats you can’t back up.”

Sliding doors could not be slammed.

Outside the insurance adjuster’s office, she took her portable phone from the pouch that hung at her belt and punched in the code for the ship, “Michael?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Can you hook into the law library?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Good. The insurance company is saying they’re not going to make good my losses. In fact, they’re claiming that my world wasn’t even destroyed and we’re faking the whole thing. I’d like you to check legal precedents. Can we sue? In particular, can we win?”

“I’ll look into it, miss.” A moment later, he added, “It would help if we knew the cause of the explosion.”

“Then we’re just going to have to find out,” Victoria said. “Damn it. I paid good money for insurance on that vacation home, and I’m not going to let some pissant take that away from me.”

“Uh, miss?”

“Never mind, Michael. Just get the ship ready to go.”

“If we’re really going to try to identify the cause of the explosion, we’ll probably need more equipment.”

“Fine. Get whatever you think we need. Have it installed. I’ll be in the Club if you need me.”

“Yes, miss.”

As she put up the phone she noticed several people in the corridor staring at her. “What are you looking at?”

The people scurried back to their various tasks.

* * * *

Victoria sighed as the waiter returned to her table. Another drink she hadn’t ordered. In front of her sat three others: A Mint Julep, a Martini, and some fizzy, frozen drink. Her own drink, an iced tea, sat half full in front of her.

She had packed away the Dragon Lady. That was always a slow task and one of the reasons she rarely released her. The Ingenue was much more agreeable, but then, the Ingenue had her own problems.

“Who this time?” she asked the waiter.

“The Relarian by the door, ma’am.”

“A _Relarian_?” She twisted to stare. The Relarian’s pelt shone burnished gold, the thick head of hair obsidian black. The Relarian was female, of course. Males almost never left Rela. Once, nearly two thousand years ago, they had fought a nuclear war and blown themselves back into their equivalent of the Stone Age. A lasting legacy of that war had been a genetic disorder that only affected males. It made their bones, particularly the joints, extremely weak. Relarian males could barely stand and, as a result, did not travel.

The Relarian noticed Victoria’s stare and smiled, or tried to. With the short muzzle and cleft upper lip, the result more resembled a snarl. The Relarian lifted her glass in a toast.

Blushing furiously, Victoria jerked her eyes back to her own table and stared down at the drinks. What would a Relarian’s, particularly a female’s, interest be in her? Maybe it was better that she didn’t know.

“If you drink all that, you’ll never make it back to your room.” The voice from behind made Victoria jump.

She looked up. Carter grinned down at her.

“Actually, I’m staying on my ship,” she said.

He flicked a hand at the chair opposite her. “May I join you?”

At Victoria’s frown, he held up both hands. “Just business. I swear.”

Victoria shrugged. “Have a seat.” She waved her ice tea over the four other drinks. “Would you care for something?”

Carter sat in the proffered chair and leaned back. “I wouldn’t want to interrupt your bender.”

“I didn’t order _any_ of this!”

Carter started to laugh, then seemed to think better of it and shrugged. “I did some checking into exploding worlds,” Carter said.

“Did you say ‘worlds’? Plural?”

“I did, although worldlets or asteroids is probably a better term than worlds, actually. Yours isn’t the first we’ve had, surprisingly enough, but it is the largest. And yours is rather unusual.”

“Unusual?” Victoria laughed. “And exploding worlds or worldlets or asteroids or whatever aren’t unusual to begin with?”

“Unusual enough,” Carter said, “but the others have all been mining or processing facilities. We’ve been treating them as some form of industrial accident.”

“But mine was just a vacation cottage,” Victoria said. “There’s nothing there that could possibly blow up and take the whole world with it.”

“Exactly. Like I said, unusual.”

“I see,” Victoria said. “Is that all?”

“Pretty much.” He stood up. “Just wanted to let you know that we are looking into the matter.”

Looking into the matter, Victoria thought as Carter walked away. How many times had she heard that before?

“Herro, miss.”

Victoria looked up to see the Relarian standing next to her table.

“Pardon my forwardness, but your smerr suggests that perhaps you are interested in riason?”

Her what? Her smell?

Victoria sagged forward and let her head fall onto her folded arms.

* * * *

Needle streams of warm water tingled against Victoria’s skin. She had been some time extricating herself from the Relarian’s attentions. She had explained, repeatedly, that humans don’t use scent to indicate attraction like Relarians. The Relarian had insisted that they most certainly did and her scent was stronger than anyone else’s in the club. Eventually, she had managed to persuade the Relarian that, scent or no scent, she wasn’t interested.

“Michael?” she said as the warm air blasts began the drying cycle.

“Miss?”

“How soon will we be ready to go?”

“The new equipment has been installed overnight. We can leave as soon as we get clearance.”

“Then get ready to go right away.”

“Um, I can’t quite do that, miss.”

Victoria held her arms out to the sides so that the air blasts could dry her sides. “Didn’t you just say we could?”

“I said as soon as we get clearance, miss. It seems there’s a hold order on this ship.”

“A hold order? Why?”

“I don’t know, miss, but … I think we’re about to get an explanation. Lieutenant Carter is just arriving at the entry.”

Victoria stepped out of the shower and wrapped herself in a robe. “He is, is he? Let him in.”

“Yes, miss. Should I guide him to the lounge while you get dressed?”

A slow smile spread across Victoria’s face. “No. I think this will be fine.”

“But, miss….”

“Trust me on this one, Michael.”

“Yes, miss.”

Now which persona, she thought, would be the best to use to meet Carter? Deep inside her, the Vamp licked her lips.

Victoria met Carter in the ship’s small lounge. She snugged the belt of her robe tight around her waist and sat across the room’s single low table from Carter. She crossed her legs, allowing the bottom of the robe to part for a moment.

Sometimes, scent or no scent, the attention she drew had its uses.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Carter?” she said and suppressed a smile at the tinge of pink that crept into his cheeks. And Victoria had always heard how jaded military men were.

“Um, ma’am … miss. Um.”

She leaned forward a bit. “Yes?”

“Um, my office would like to know where you are planning to go after departing local space?”

“Go? Well, I’d thought maybe to head back to Earth. There are some investments that I need to check on occasionally.”

“The thing is, miss,” Carter said, “we’ve received reports of some very odd additions to your ship’s instrumentation.”

“You don’t say?” Victoria leaned back. “And what, pray tell, is so odd about Michael’s new instruments?”

“We thought you might have planned to return to the remains of that worldlet of yours, the one that exploded.”

“And if I did?”

“Well, you see, it will take about six months to get a survey ship out there and if you’re going out anyway, with the instruments you’ve had installed, well, they thought an observer from our office could go along and report on the findings.”

Victoria paused, surprised. “You mean you just want a ride?”

“Well. Yes, ma’am.”

With two slight tugs, Victoria shifted the lines of the robe. The Vamp, with a disappointed struggle, gave way to the Businesswoman. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I want to find out what happened to my world. I have no objection to having an observer along.”

* * * *

In retrospect, Victoria decided that a three day trip, alone in her yacht, with a young — yes, decidedly young — officer of the Tripartite fleet was not the best idea she had ever had. For all his polish and professionalism he was, nevertheless, a young man. And three days alone — just her and that young man — no, not her best idea at all. Not even in the top ten.

Oh, he hadn’t done anything, not overtly. It was the way he would look at her and then quickly look away when he saw that she had caught him at it. It was the exaggerated politeness. It was the overwhelming … _chivalry_ of the man.

She was halfway tempted to drag him to bed just to get it over with so he could calm down but, no, that wasn’t her style at all. He’d be afraid to touch The Ingenue and the Vamp would eat him alive. The Businesswoman or the Professor would probably intimidate him and the Dragon Lady? No, not the Dragon Lady. She had no real desire to hurt him.

At least his military background meant that even on a private yacht he deferred to her as the captain of the vessel. There was no question of his trying to take over the investigation of the remains of her world — he was there to help and to observe and no more.

And so they were sitting two light-weeks away from where her world had once orbited through the depths of interstellar space. In a matter of minutes now the light from the explosion would reach them. Michael had used his remotes to unfurl a ten-meter telescope. It would not be able to see her ship’s earlier arrival, a week past, but it would be able to see, and analyze the explosion. And this, Victoria realized, was the reason that Carter wanted aboard her ship. Although for the brief moments of the explosion it shone with the brightness of a third-magnitude star, being able to view the actual explosion this close would let them learn a lot more than would a survey ship later — and farther out.

Victoria watched intently in the ship’s main viewscreen. Although there had not been time to connect high-speed feeds to the telescope into the ship’s network for a real-time display, Michael had estimated that from this distance the explosion would be twenty-two times as bright as Earth’s Moon as seen from Earth.

“Coming up on time,” Michael said. “Are you ready, Lieutenant?”

“I’m ready.” Carter’s voice came over the ship’s intercom. He was in the hold, monitoring the telescope from its control station. With the instruments Carter had available, he would, in many ways, have a much more complete picture of the explosion, but the bridge viewscreen would give her every bit as good a view of the show in visible light. A little peace in trade for not seeing the time-series, soft x-ray spectrum seemed like a good bargain.

“Five seconds,” Michael said. “And … now.”

A new star blazed in the heavens, a brilliant diamond that swamped the screen. As the screen dimmed to accommodate the brightness of the new star, the other stars faded from view, leaving one point of light in a dark screen. Then, after but a brief life, it died.

Carter’s whisper came over the intercom. “My … God.”

“Lieutenant,” Michael said, “Please finish transferring the data to my systems. Then, I think we should go in closer and see if we can capture some debris.”

“Uh … right.”

* * * *

A brilliant green arc shot across the main viewscreen. The dust cloud, remnants of Victoria’s destroyed world, was still as thick as some planetary atmospheres. They had already captured several samples of the dust and now Michael was searching for larger fragments. They hoped to find one or more pieces of a convenient size to handle.

The information and samples they had been gathering had, at least, given Carter something to do rather than pine after Victoria. That gave her some relief from his oh-so-polite attentions. She did have to admit that he was a lot more attractive working on real problems than he was trying to pretend that he wasn’t interested in her. Maybe…. But, no.

Meanwhile, the dust and gas continued to interact with the yacht’s radiation shielding producing the colorful displays outside, along with a steady drain on the ship’s power.

Victoria gnawed at her lower lip as she read the instruments on the main board. “Michael, I’m a bit concerned about the main shield bus.” Temperatures had been hovering at just under redline for several days, a situation which made the Professor frown deeply.

“Yes, miss,” the yacht said. “I’ve been running part of the power through the backups to keep the temperature down.”

“That’s against the regs,” Victoria said.

“Not quite. It’s not against the regs, exactly, but it is contrary to standard procedure. Backup systems are supposed to remain offline until needed. This is supposed to ensure that any damage that takes out the mains won’t also take out the backups. However, in this case we need that backup capacity to help ensure that we don’t lose the mains.” Michael did a very good impression of a human sigh. “Even so, we’ll probably need a complete overhaul by the time we get back. I hate overhauls.”

“Just make sure we do get back, Michael. This isn’t worth dying over.”

“I’ll be careful, miss.”

Victoria smiled. Dangerous or not, the light show was certainly entertaining. Outside, a red arc collided with a green arc and coalesced forming a yellow jet of light.

“Miss?”

“Yes, Michael?”

“I think we’ve got something. It’s hard to resolve with all that dust out there, but I think we’ve got a fragment about half a meter across. I’m coming up on it now.”

“Thank you.”

“One more thing, miss.”

“Yes?”

“Lieutenant Carter would like to see you. Shall I send him to the bridge?”

Victoria sighed. “Might as well.”

A few seconds later Carter burst through the door to the bridge.

“I take it you’ve found something?” Victoria asked when Carter had skidded to a stop.

“Found something? Found all sorts of somethings.”

“Do any of these somethings explain why my world exploded?” Victoria said?

“Well, no, not exactly, at least not yet.”

Victoria waited.

“Well,” Carter said at last, “the dust samples we’ve collected are hot, really radioactive, a lot more radioactive than it should be.”

“Of course it’s radioactive,” Victoria said. “You don’t think an explosion that big was chemical, do you?”

“No, you don’t understand.” Carter began to pace quickly, as if to punctuate his words with his footfalls. “In any kind of nuclear explosion, you get radioactive debris because the explosion generates radioisotopes, but the radioactivity of each isotope is a constant. A given amount of a given isotope will release a set amount of radiation, not just a set amount, but with a characteristic spectrum. But in this dust, every isotope is releasing more radiation than it should and even isotopes that shouldn’t be releasing radiation are, and the spectra are just, well, wrong. And the mass is high too, falling into cracks where there aren’t supposed to be cracks. I’d think the instruments are off, but they read fine on the calibration samples. Only, well, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Michael?” Victoria said. “Is this stuff a danger to the ship?”

“Ordinarily, I would say it shouldn’t be, miss. The dust samples are in well-shielded containers. However, something destroyed your world. It may be that whatever caused the explosion is also what is causing this enhanced radiation.”

“Dump it,” Victoria said. “Dump it all. Then get us out of here.”

“The rock we’re chasing?”

“Forget it. I don’t want to bring something that might blow up inside my ship.”

“Uh, captain?” Carter said.

“What is it, Carter?”

“Maybe we can at least tag the rock and the samples and plot their trajectories so that when the survey ship gets out here, it can find them again.”

Victoria thought for a moment then nodded. Both the Professor and the Businesswoman agreed. That made sense.

* * * *

Victoria sat alone in the control room. The control room and her cabin were the two places on the ship where Carter would never come uninvited so that she could sit and think without having to worry about accidental company.

“Radiation, Michael.” It was the Professor who was speaking. The Professor was not a master of any one field, but rather had a good grasp of the basics across a number of fields, a useful trait to have when researching investments and other things.

“Radiation, miss?”

“Radiation is energy and energy is mass. I believe Carter said something about the mass being high? Mass spectrograph data?” While she talked, she fidgeted, tugging at the elastic wristband of her tunic.

“Yes. But he didn’t think they would be useful. The mass spectrometer’s calibration was off. Everything read slightly high. The calibration specimens read correct, but maybe they were contaminated in some way.”

“What if they weren’t?” Victoria said. “What if all the stuff from the explosion actually was slightly high? Say, they were put into some kind of excited state having more energy then normal.”

“The question then becomes, how did they get that way?”

“How indeed?” Victoria released the wristband of her tunic, which snapped sharply against her wrist.

“Tidal forces, Michael. What happens if you put a lot of gravitational stress, on a microscopic level, right into the nuclei of atoms?”

“Our wake.”

Victoria nodded. “Not just ours, but all the ships involved in building my cottage. Normally it wouldn’t do anything, but my world was large enough to have a jump limit, but small enough for the jump limit to be within it. That combination turned out to be very expensive.”

“It could have been even more expensive,” Michael said. “We could have been grounded when it went.”

Victoria shuddered.

* * * *

Six months, Victoria thought. Six months could turn even the most pleasant deep space station into an excruciating prison. Only days after their arrival at Johnston station a Tripartite directive had gone out. All short-jump drive ships were grounded until further notice. That left her stranded unless she wanted to abandon Michael and take passage on a long-jump ship somewhere, anywhere, just off this station.

Victoria sat in the club. Even with Carter’s report the insurance company still refused to pay. Her lawyers had confirmed the insurance company’s threats — fighting the case in court could get really expensive, with no guarantee of eventual victory. The combined loss of her world with the legal fees, should she lose the case, would not seriously threaten to bankrupt her but they would hurt. They would hurt a lot.

She must have been glowering, she thought, as no unordered drinks appeared on her table.

“Is this seat taken, or do you bite?”

Victoria looked up. Carter stood grinning down at her.

She shrugged. “Whatever suits you.”

“My,” Carter said as he sat at the chair across from her, “you sure are testy today.”

“Do you know how much whatever caused my world to explode is going to cost me?”

“Not one credit,” Carter said.

“Not one…? What?”

Carter’s grin widened. “The science boys have figured out what caused the explosion.”

Victoria caught her breath. “And?”

“All of the explosions, yours and the various automated processing plants, had certain things in common. The sizes fell in a fairly narrow range, they were all rich in heavy elements, and they all had a lot of local traffic using short-jump drive. That’s why short-jump ships have been grounded, by the way. They were all big enough mass to have a short-jump limit, but small enough that the limit was inside the body of the worldlet.”

Before Victoria could say anything she would have regretted later, the waiter appeared at their table. He provided a refill of Victoria’s iced tea, took Carter’s order, and departed.

“You were saying…” Victoria said.

Carter nodded. “The clincher was the samples we got, which the survey ship was able to pick up. The isotopes were more radioactive then they should be, and heavier then they should be. They finally pieced together what happened. Your own report was just about spot on. Why do you hide your ability that way?”

Victoria shrugged.

Carter paused as the waiter returned with his drink. He sighed. “We were lucky. The tech boys are looking into a fix for the problem, but if we hadn’t caught it, it would have been just a matter of time before somebody was killed. As it was, the property damage is in the billions.”

Victoria nodded then, after a moment, smiled. “So. You’re telling me that this is a drive accident.”

Carter nodded. “Although a drive design flaw might be a better term.”

“Either way, drive-related problems are explicitly covered by my insurance.”

“I took the liberty of looking that up,” Carter said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mind?” Victoria grinned while deep inside her, the Dragon Lady licked her lips. “Why should I mind? I’ve got me an insurance adjuster to skin.”

––—

Copyright (C) 2005 by David Burkhead.

––—

CH004

*Reinventing Carl Hobbs* by James C. Glass

A Short Story

Some lines get thinner and thinner…

––—

The limo swerved left out of the traffic pattern at level four and descended rapidly. Melody didn’t react to the sudden move, but Tom Lesko gasped and clutched at his stomach. Twenty hours on high alert was beginning to tell on him, she thought.

“You’re not going to get sick on me, are you?” Melody uncrossed her long legs and pushed herself deeper into the cushioned seat, but in the confinement of armrests and a protruding wet bar, their knees were almost touching.

“Not funny,” said Tom. “I’m paid to take death-threats seriously, even if you don’t.”

“That’s why I have Carl, and he can do the worrying without getting an ulcer over it. Relax, Tom; try to have some fun tonight.”

“You have the fun. I’ll watch the property,” said Tom, and frowned at something he was hearing from the tiny receiver in his ear.

Melody laughed. “That’s me. The property. Global couldn’t survive a week without me.”

“That’s more true than you realize,” said Tom. “Bring up your glamorous self, now. We’re coming in. There’s one aisle through the crowd. Take Carl’s left arm, and my right. No autographs. We’re going straight inside.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, giving a mock salute that drew the hint of a smile from him. “I hear and obey, sir.”

“That’ll be the day I relax,” said Tom.

The limo swerved again, and slowed. Through tinted polymer, Melody could barely see the theater below, and the crowd of expectant fans packed at the entrance. Laser beams scribed pulsating patterns on the surrounding towers of steel and glass, and “Ariel’s Vision” was lit up in meter-high letters on the theater’s marquee. All the opening-night ceremonies she’d attended, and it was still a thrill for her. For the moment, it was easy for her to forget that among her countless fans out there, one did not wish her well tonight, or any other night. One wished only to share in the experience of her death.

They descended straight down, outside the traffic patterns of levels three and two. Laser beams found them and played over the descending car. A sea of faces looked up, sprouting a forest of waving arms.

“Ariel’s theme kicks in the second you get out of the car. Try to look like you’re in love,” said Tom.

Ariel’s theme, from the love scene with Ariel and Nathan, their flawless white bodies entwined on a beach of black sand. Melody had gone deeply into her artistic soul to find the love, the agonizing want and passion for the scene, the synaptic multiplexer in her skull behind her left ear processing the data for narrow band transmission to the recorder for later multiplexing with the music on the sound track. Low to high frequency, passion to fear, the subliminal modulations were received by the viewing audience, inducing in them the same feelings and emotions experienced by the artist during her performance.

Melody Lane was a strikingly beautiful woman, but it was not beauty that made her the number one holostar of Global Studios. It was the depth and intensity of her soul.

The limo touched down with a bump. Even in her sealed compartment, Melody could hear the screams outside. She thought of her lover, a faceless man in her dreams. She sighed, and reached for the door.

“Wait for Carl,” said Tom. “Let him take your hand.”

Melody started to pull back her hand, but then the limo door was opened from outside. The sudden noise was deafening, and she squinted in the light. A black-gloved hand reached for her; she took it gently, and exited the limo. Carl Hobbs stood tall beside her, his plastic face shining brightly in the lights, dark glasses masking the stare of his huge eyes. He smelled like warm polymer, and his arm was hard as stone when she grasped it.

Tom exited right behind her, and Melody hugged his arm, smiling serenely as the sound of Ariel’s theme burst forth from speakers above the entrance to the theater.

People screamed and wept. Bodies strained against thick ropes bordering the red carpet leading into the theater. Police stationed along the way pushed them back. Carl moved quickly, pulling Melody and Tom into a near trot. Misha and Andrus, her human bodyguards, were right behind them, never more than a few feet away when Melody was in public. Dressed in tuxedos, they still looked like thugs.

Hands reached out to her. She smiled back, but couldn’t see faces in the bright lights. Ahead of her there was a scuffle. Someone had broken through the rope barrier, a young man in baggy pants and a loose-fitting woolen shirt. A policeman grabbed for him, but missed. The man sprinted towards her, holding out something sparkling with colors in his hand. His eyes seemed glazed, and his mouth hung open in a crazy grin.

“Carl,” said Melody.

Carl’s right hand shot out like a piston and hit the man in the throat. The man fell heavily at Melody’s feet, gurgling. The thing in his hand bounced once and came to rest. It was an artist’s paperweight, filled with swirling colors.

Misha and Andrus hauled him roughly to his feet. The man coughed hard, his face tinted blue. He looked at Melody with the saddest eyes she’d ever seen, and pointed at the colorful glass at her feet. “I just wanted to give you a gift,” he croaked, “but they won’t let anyone get near you.”

Tom leaned over and picked up the paperweight as police pulled the man to one side. He caught the man’s eye and gestured to show the gift was received.

“God damn it, Carl, slow down! Do you realize what a mess you’ve just made?”

“He was protecting me, Tom.”

“By striking an over-zealous fan in the throat? You’ve violated a fundamental principle, Carl, and you’re supposed to be better than that. I want you in my office for assessment tomorrow morning.”

Carl was mute. They entered the theater: plush red carpet, a crystal chandelier hanging from a high dome ceiling, a wide staircase leading up to balcony level. People rushed towards them: producers, directors and a few of Melody’s peers. Melody felt a shiver pass through Carl’s arm. She looked up at him, saw his mouth opening and closing without sound. His entire body began to shake.

“Oh, no,” said Melody.

Tom took one look, and rolled his eyes. “Shit,” he said softly.

Melody went up the stairs to her balcony seat with Misha as her escort. Unlike Carl, Misha’s arm was warm, and though muscular, had the telltale elasticity of human flesh.

Tom stayed behind long enough to be sure Carl was loaded safely into a van for transport to Schutz Fabrik, where early the next morning he was cleared of a crippling logic loop and rebooted for further service.

* * * *

“Why don’t you stop defending him?” asked Tom.

“And why don’t you stop trying to tell me what to do?” said Melody. “You’re my manager. You manage my business, not my personal life.”

“Sorry. I just don’t understand your patience. You certainly don’t have any with me.”

“You’re human. No excuses for you. Carl is limited by his program, and his logic isn’t fuzzy enough. They’ve made him too rigid. A good AI learns from mistakes, and Carl seems to break down every time he makes one. It’s like he’s continually anxious, and every mistake pushes him over the edge.”

“So now you’re an expert on artificial intelligence.”

“Why not? Being an actress doesn’t make me stupid. I think I can help him.”

“How? Why?”

“I like having my own AI, Tom. I feel safe with him, and he’s not demanding or too familiar like Misha and Andrus. I can talk to him. Input, you know. Let him know it’s okay to make a mistake. For a moment last night I was really scared, Tom, and that’s what triggered him. The error he made could have been made by any human under the same circumstances.”

“You have scripts to read, and another shoot in three weeks. Let Schutz Fabrik do the work with Carl.”

Melody glared at him. “You weren’t listening to me a minute ago. I want Carl assigned to my suite. I’ve caught Misha and Andrus asleep three times now. If my stalker shows up, I want someone awake to defend me.”

“We don’t know you’re being stalked. Someone’s just sending you threatening letters.”

“It’s more than that. I can feel it. There are times I’m alone, and I know I’m being watched. I keep waiting for someone to jump out at me from any closed door. I know it sounds stupid, but the feeling is real.”

“Sounds more dramatic than stupid,” said Tom, and immediately regretted it.

Melody’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You work for me, Tom. Either get Schutz to assign Carl for duty in my suite, or find yourself another job. I want him to carry out any voice command I give, and I want to be able to teach him. Is that dramatic enough for you?”

“Clear enough,” said Tom. “I’ll get on it.”

“What are you smiling at?”

Tom grinned. “Oh, I just get a kick out of dealing with strong-willed women. I’ll have Schutz Fabrik call you by this evening and tell you when Carl will be ready.”

“It had better be soon,” said Melody.

And it was, for that evening she received another threatening letter.

* * * *

Misha and Andrus were not happy with the new arrangement. “What happens if he freezes up again, or goes nuts? He could kill you with a single squeeze before we can react,” said Misha.

“I’m willing to take that chance,” said Melody.

“If he attacks you I’ll blow his head off, and I won’t wait for your permission to do it.”

“Fair enough,” said Melody, but shuddered at the look in Misha’s eyes. She could not question his loyalty, only his competence.

Now, in the quiet of her suite, she felt safe again. The suite covered half of the twentieth floor of the Globus building, and looked out at the ocean. Up the beach, the Santa Monica shopping ring looped far out to sea. The walls and furniture were in beige, and lit by full spectrum tubes in ceiling panels to supplement the sunlight even in daytime. Melody snuggled in deep pillows on a sofa, a pile of scripts in her lap, a few placed to one side, many scattered on the floor after her rejection. Misha and Andrus patrolled the outside hallway while Carl made random rounds inside the suite. He moved silently, but always there was the odor of warm polymer in his presence. Melody looked up as he entered the room to check the sliding doors to the balcony.

“Talk to me, Carl. I’m tired of reading these things. Most of them are awful.”

“One moment, Melody,” said Carl, his voice a soothing and mellow baritone. He checked the balcony, the area above and below it, then closed the doors and sat down stiffly in a plush chair facing her. “What do you want to talk about today?” he asked. His mouth moved out of synch with his words, and without his dark glasses on, his large fisheye lenses made him look even more artificial.

“You,” said Melody.

“Will you teach me today?”

“Maybe. Are you happy here, Carl?”

“Happy? I am fulfilled by my tasks.”

“And how are you rewarded for that?” Melody put down the script she’d been reading, and cupped her chin in one hand.

“My reward is the completion of a task. There is a reset pulse, and it modulates my powerpac. I am energized.”

“Clever.” said Melody. “With humans it’s biochemicals that affect parts of the brain to produce pleasurable sensations. Do you want to be more human, Carl?”

“That is one of my tasks. I learn by watching humans react to stimuli; I copy their average behavior for a given circumstance.”

“There’s a wide variety of human reactions. What happens when you choose the wrong one, when your reaction is not appropriate? I really want to know what happened to you at the theater the other night, when you hit that man who tried to give me a gift.”

“That was an error in perception. My task was to protect you, Melody, but you were not in danger. I injured a human without reason. When I paused to correct the error there was no way to accomplish it and undo the injury I’d caused. I was caught in a logic loop for all processors simultaneously, and my task was not ended.”

“You reacted hastily, perhaps, but you did protect me, Carl. That man was coming at me fast, and I was frightened. His behavior brought about his injury, not you. Your response was basically correct.”

“Mr. Lesko pointed out my error instantly. He was my human control at the time, and his opinion overrode my own.”

“He was wrong, and now I’m your control. If you want to be more human you must be willing to tolerate mistakes you make, and learn from them. Rules are not cast in stone, Carl. If I’m threatened, I want your response instantly. I do not want you worrying about hurting someone.”

“You are frightened again. I can see it in your eyes, and the wrinkles in your brow.”

“I’m an actress. I let my emotions show. If you can read my face, you can learn my feelings the same way my audience does: by watching and listening to my performances. I want you to do that, a little each day. I’ll sit with you.”

“This is important to you,” said Carl, a statement, not a question.

“Yes, it is,” said Melody. “I want to make you better than you are. I want you to be more human.”

* * * *

Their routine was unbroken for two weeks, but then there was one frightening afternoon when Carl was picked up by a Schutz Fabrik van for upgrades ordered by Melody herself. The hard plastic of his face was to be replaced by soft polymer, and new lenses installed to get rid of his bug-eyed look. The work was routine, though expensive, and he was gone only five hours, but when he returned he found the hallway filled with police, and Melody was curled up in a little ball on her bed, crying softly. She reached out and held his hand when he stood by her bed, and she was suddenly calm.

“I was reading scripts, and something struck the door. I went to it, saw an envelope pushed beneath the door, a shadow moving. I called out, but nobody answered. It wasn’t like the other letters, Carl. Those were full of sexual fantasies. This one describes how he wants to kill me, and soon. I was scared, then mad. I screamed until Misha and Andrus came. I’m afraid I called them some very bad names, and now I feel badly about it.”

So yet another letter had been hand-delivered, slipped under her door in broad daylight. Talking to the police, Carl learned that whoever had delivered it had gained roof access to the elevator shaft and a service tunnel and dropped into the hall from an air return vent while Misha and Andrus were checking out the arrival of an empty elevator from ground floor. It had all happened in less than a minute.

Tom had been called, but had not yet arrived. Carl returned to Melody, and sat down on the edge of the bed when she ordered it. She clung to him like a little child.

“Whoever it was knew I was away,” he said. “You should not send me away for any reason, Melody. The person must be watching you.”

“He even knows what I wear to bed,” sobbed Melody. “He says I should wear the purple teddy when he comes for me. He wants to have sex, and then watch my face while he slowly strangles me. Do you understand what I’m saying, Carl?”

“Yes.” Carl stroked her hair with hard, stiff fingers. “He must be found by others. I will protect you. No human is as strong or as quick as I. You’ll feel better after you sleep, that thing you do when your eyes close at night. Sometimes your eyes move, and you say things. I have watched.”

“I dream,” said Melody. “It’s a human way of reorganizing memories, analyzing things, sort of recreating myself each night. Tonight my dreams could be bad. If you’re not in this room with me tonight, I won’t be able to sleep.”

“I’ll be here,” said Carl.

Melody was more composed a few minutes later when Tom arrived, but felt even better after he held her hands and gushed over her. He even said something nice to Carl.

“What happened here was not your fault,” he said.

“I know,” said Carl. “The fault is in trusting humans to protect her.”

Tom smiled. “How human of you, Carl. Arrogance is a human trait, but I think you’ll have to share the responsibility for Melody’s safety.”

Tom turned to Melody. “You seem to be giving him a lot of freedom, dear.”

“Maybe he needs even more. Misha and Andrus keep slipping up. That’s four times, now. All it seems to take is a small distraction to make their attention wander.

“I understand your feeling, but I still want you to keep a leash on your personal bodyguard here. I don’t want another person hurt without reason. I was lucky to keep the last incident out of the press.”

“I see,” said Melody. “It’s okay, then, if I’m murdered in my bed.”

Tom leaned close and softly said, “We don’t really have to worry about that, do we? This is a terror campaign being waged by a demented fan. He could have broken in here, but didn’t.”

“He didn’t have the time. Some night he will, and we’ll be waiting for him. I’m tired of this conversation, Tom. I want to go to sleep. See Mr. Lesko out, Carl, and come back here.”

There was no arguing with her when she was like this. Tom gave up without a fight and allowed Carl to escort him out of the suite. Once outside he ordered Misha and Andrus to remain seated by the double doors to the suite, and talked to the police, who’d found nothing useful in their investigation. There was only the grate popped out of the hallway ceiling, and the letter under the door. Nothing else. The occupants of the suites across the hall from Melody’s had not been home at the time. It bothered Tom that those suites had not been searched, but a police sergeant assured him they would be as soon as the owners returned and gave their permission. He was also bothered by the sloppy work of Misha and Andrus. Before leaving, he told both of them that one more letter would cost them their jobs. Neither man seemed to be bothered by his remarks, and he vowed to have them replaced within the week.

Back in her bedroom, Melody began to relax again. Carl stood in the doorway. In low light, his new eyes and face made him look almost human. “My protector,” she said, and smiled.

“Yes,” said Carl.

Melody yawned, and stretched. “I want to have nice dreams tonight, Carl. This has been a terrible day.”

“I’ll be right here until you sleep,” he said.

Her eyes were already closed, and he felt her slip off, her brain still active, but going into a different state to reorganize and refresh. He’d watched her do this many times. She’d even given him a soundtrack made just for him, sweetly modulated sound allowing him to follow her into slumber. Once there, a part of her mind moved in random fashion, flitting here and there, while another part remained totally awake and ready for instant response to stimuli. Carl was amazed by the mix, but had been so far unable to duplicate it for himself. Melody’s patient teaching had brought him to a point where, a few minutes each day, he would lie down and consciously shut out all visual and audio stimuli to review the events of the day, positives and negatives, and then build alternative scenarios to better fit his assigned tasks. The change had been gradual, but he felt it. It was as if, a few minutes each day, he was reinventing himself.

Melody’s breathing was now slow and deep. Carl pondered the day’s events, but remained alert. Something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t the way it seemed. He’d built several scenarios for the delivery of the threatening letter, and one of them disturbed him deeply. If true, it could mean that Melody was still in immediate danger.

Carl did not do his usual random checks of the suite that night. Instead, he stationed himself in a dark corner of the front room and near the double-door entrance.

He did not have to wait long for something to happen.

* * * *

It was after dark when the police left.

Misha and Andrus remained at their station by the doors for about an hour, and then began wandering the halls again. Their attention spans seemed quite short, even by human standards. They spoke softly, but Carl’s hearing was acute. Still, they were often far enough away to exceed his audio detection limit.

The elevator came and went several times, and he heard a door open and close twice, but otherwise there was only Misha and Andrus engaged in inane conversation, and not paying attention to their duties.

Well after midnight, it was suddenly silent outside the suite, but only for a while. Minutes later, Carl could hear snoring; Melody’s incompetent human guards were asleep again. He resisted the temptation to go outside and awake them in a frightening way — not to injure them, but to encourage their wakefulness. They were, after all, Melody’s first line of defense.

Sometime later, in the darkness of his corner, Carl heard a faint thud, and felt a transient vibration in the floor. There was a sustained scuffing sound after that, and then the elevator arrived, a sharp note signaling the opening of the doors. The doors closed, and there was the whine of the motor running the elevator. Silence again, then a scraping, ripping sound, metal on metal. Carl left his corner, took several steps towards the doors and listened again.

More scuffing sounds, something hard dragging on the carpet outside. Something rattled metallically, and then there was a distant tone as if a great bell had been struck, a hollow sound with overtones, fading quickly. Carl stepped up to one side of the doors, his audio sensitivity ramped to maximum.

At first there was nothing, though he continued to sense weak, transient vibrations in the floor. Suddenly there was a scratching sound from low on the doors, and then a soft moan. A human moan. Carl felt a single shock pass through the floor, and reached for the door latch, his left arm cocked and ready to deliver a lethal blow.

Nobody was there. The chairs by the doors were empty. The long hallway was empty. The doors to the elevator were open, but it was dark inside, and someone had ripped the air-return grate again from the ceiling and thrown it against a wall, damaging the wallpaper there.

Carl stepped outside, closed and locked the doors behind him. There was a red spot on the carpet by the doors, and two faint grooves in the fabric ran off towards the elevator. He followed them, nanoscale parallel processors busily building scenarios in his head as he noted his surroundings.

He even noticed that the door to the suite nearest the elevator was slightly ajar, but a sound ahead suddenly distracted him.

Three feet from the open elevator doors he realized the elevator wasn’t there; he was looking into the open shaft at the black cables supporting the elevator somewhere below. Peering over the edge, the elevator cab was far below him, probably at ground level. There was a click behind him; he started to turn around.

Something heavy slammed into him, knocking him headlong into the elevator shaft. His arms and legs flailed wildly. In the six seconds of his fall, his brain reviewed nine different scenarios of what was happening now, and could happen soon. He chose one as his right hand caught a cable and squeezed. The only variable left was the identity of Melody’s assailant. His hand crushed down on the cable, slowing him rapidly, but he crashed onto the top of the elevator car with considerable force.

A body was there, a human body, crushed and broken by a long fall. It was Andrus.

Carl dropped through the trapdoor in the ceiling of the elevator, found the controls smashed, and pried open the doors in one move with his hands. A few people waiting in the lobby jumped back in terror at the sight and sound of ripped and torn metal as he sprinted away towards the staircase.

* * * *

Melody heard a sound, and was instantly awake. “Carl?” she asked, but there was no answer. It was cold when she got out of bed in her underclothes. She went to the closet, slipped into a silk robe and heard the front door open and close.

“I’m up, Carl. What’s going on?”

Still no answer, but Carl often waited to reply when he was finishing a task. Melody pulled up her hair and tied it into a tail as she walked out into the front room. “I heard a noise,” she said.

She was two steps into the room when someone grabbed her roughly from behind, a strong arm encircling her and a hand clamping down tightly over her mouth. The man’s breath was hot in her ear.

“Your boyfriend is gone, and he ain’t coming back. Time to party, bitch. Let’s see if you’re wearin’ that purple thing I like so much.”

Melody twisted, tried to drop out of Misha’s grasp, but he pulled her up again, her feet leaving the floor and banging ineffectually against his massive legs. He grabbed her right wrist, twisted her around and tried to pull her right arm up behind her, but the arm wouldn’t move for him. “Stronger than you look,” he said. “This’ll be more fun than I thought.” He lifted her again, and began backing towards the bedroom.

Melody the actress moaned, and let herself go limp. As they reached the bedroom doorway, Misha’s grip slackened for an instant as he began to change his hold on her. She suddenly kicked backwards off the doorjamb and slammed him into a bedpost, twisted away and sprinted towards the front room. He caught up with her halfway to the doors, and grabbed her by the hair, jerking her back so hard her skullcap came loose and she was dangling from his hand by a thin sheet of polymer.

“What’s this?” asked Misha. “What the fuck is this?”

The doors shattered into a thousand splinters as Carl came through them. And in the last second of his life, Misha seemed astonished by the sight of him. Carl caught him by the throat, swept him up in a high arc and slammed him head first into the floor.

Melody sobbed, and clutched at the back of her head. Carl stepped up to her, put one hand on her shoulder, the other touching the long tail of dangling hair at her back.

“I know, Melody. I know,” he said. “I’ve always known.”

* * * *

“It looks like he was trying to set up Andrus as the killer,” said Tom. “The drug ampoule we found was probably meant for Misha. We’d find him stoned out of his mind, and Carl with Andrus. He was willing to give up a profession to get at Melody. Guy was a deranged woman hater for sure. I don’t think his story would have held up.”

Carl sat close by Melody on the couch. “Do the police know about Melody, about her — “

“No need for that, Carl. The guy’s intent was murder. That makes it justifiable homicide. Melody and Nathan are Global Studios’ best-kept secrets, and we’re not about to change that. If the press didn’t know you’re an AI, I bet I could get you a part in Melody’s next film.” Tom smiled. “You two look like a couple, sitting there.”

“Two peas in a pod,” said Melody, and Carl looked at her.

“We’re alike,” she said. “You know, I would have taught you differently if I’d realized you knew about me.”

“I had to tell him,” said Tom. “Had to keep the pecking order straight, but it amazes me how quickly he picked up on your obstinance.”

“You love my obstinance; it makes me more human, you said.” Melody paused, then, “Tom, I want Carl to stay with me.”

“I want that too,” said Carl.

“Fine with me,” said Tom. “I’m not even surprised. Let’s see how far you can develop together, how human you can really become. Just remember to document everything; that’s what pays the service bills for Carl, dear, and I’d like to keep it that way. Be good, now. I have to leave. Do whatever you do to rest. You’ll be doing a lot of traveling soon. Showbiz. I love it.”

He left them sitting on the sofa, exiting through newly installed but as yet unpainted doors. Melody held up a small, metallic ball with four fine wires hanging from it. “I have a new toy,” she said.

“A toy? A thing to play with?”

She laughed. “It’ll directly connect our synaptic multiplexers. You have one too, you know. I have a new disk to play, and I want to try out my imagination on you.”

Melody took his hand, led him into the bedroom and put him down on his back on the bed.

“What are we doing?” he asked.

“We’re being more human,” she said, then turned on the disk player and lay down beside him. Sweet sound filled the room as she connected herself to him, and then draped an arm across his chest.

“Close your eyes,” she said, and he did.

“Follow me where I go,” she whispered. “We’re going to reinvent you again.”

And they slept.

––—

Copyright (C) 2005 by James C. Glass.

––—

CH005

*Standards of Success* by John G. Hemry

A Short Story

People learn from experience; but there are lessons, and there are lessons!

––—

26 March 2014 — The world today braced for the first landing of humans on Mars as NASA representatives declared that every possible step had been taken to ensure the safety and success of the mission. “NASA has adopted as its model the spectacularly successful unmanned missions to Mars, and will use similar operational methodology to maximize the results of this historic human mission. We want to duplicate to the greatest extent possible the amazing accomplishments of robotic explorers like the Spirit and Opportunity rovers while eliminating any possibility of even minor failures as a result of uncontrolled events.”

NASA representatives repeated their previous statements that experience with unmanned missions led to the decision for scientists on Earth to control the landing on Mars, which in turn led to the extremely complex multiple-redundant landing system which neither requires nor allows any input from the astronauts actually riding in the Mars lander. “Experience with uncrewed probes dramatically highlighted the dangers to mission success of even a single input made without multiple layers of oversight to spot errors. In light of this experience, allowing a single, unsupervised astronaut to make inputs independently at critical points could put the entire mission at risk.”

The official NASA press release points out that even though the astronauts have no way of themselves controlling their landing vehicle, if the crew of the Mars mission has any concerns during the landing sequence, they need only contact NASA facilities on Earth, which would then take corrective action as quickly as needed, subject only to the ten minutes required for communications to reach Earth, the time required for a meeting involving all stake-holders in the mission to consider the situation and approve a course of action, and the ten minutes needed for any action agreed upon by the conference to be communicated back to Mars.

28 March 2014 — The first human landing on Mars yesterday was hailed as an outstanding achievement despite evidence that the landing vehicle came down in the wrong area due to a navigational error programmed into the system by operators on Earth. Confidential sources claim minutes and seconds of latitude and longitude for the landing site were plugged directly into the digital navigational system without converting them from base twelve to base ten, an error which went unnoticed by every layer of management review. “The important thing is that the mission landed safely,” NASA representatives insisted, discounting concerns that the lander had missed falling into a deep canyon by only a small margin. NASA is refusing to release copies of transmissions from the lander on its final descent, which sources claim feature screams of terror from the astronauts.

12 April 2014 — NASA announced that after spending the last two weeks in preparation, the astronauts will begin standing up from their seats in the lander today as they continue to follow procedures developed during robotic missions. The standing up process, in which every movement will be monitored, is expected to take approximately one more week assuming all goes well.

18 April 2014 — Pleased NASA scientists declared that the astronauts on Mars had exceeded expectations by standing up from their seats in only six days. The next week will be spent checking the astronauts for problems before the process of moving the astronauts toward the lander hatch begins.

29 April 2014 — NASA announced that all three astronauts have been successfully lined up at the lander’s exit hatch, a process complicated by the need to coordinate each astronaut’s movements from Earth to ensure none of them bumped into each other or any equipment inside the lander.

7 May 2014 — The first human step on the surface of Mars may be only hours away. Mission Commander Gus Grandin has spent the last several days on the ladder from the lander hatch to the Martian surface as each one of his steps was carefully planned and controlled by NASA scientists. He is currently paused on one leg with his right foot ten centimeters above the surface while NASA analyzes the implications of the discovery that a sixty-centimeter diameter rock lies within one meter of the end of the ladder. NASA scientists, technicians and managers are currently debating whether to instruct Gus to step over the rock, maneuver around it, or abort the ladder sequence and return to the lander.

9 May 2014 — Gus Grandin became the first human to reach the surface of Mars today after he suffered from what NASA characterized as “involuntary muscle failure and/or spasms” after standing on one foot on the Mars lander ladder for the last two days while NASA attempted to decide on his best course of action. While celebrating the historic occasion, NASA warned that Gus appeared to be suffering from some undiagnosed problem that had led to “agitated” streams of conversation directed at NASA personnel. Technicians will attempt to remotely diagnose the cause of the problem and take corrective action. An anonymous source within NASA complained once again about the limitations of manned missions, noting that such a muscle failure would not have occurred in a robotic explorer. “Decisions shouldn’t be forced as a result of short deadlines created by the limitations of the explorer mechanism.”

16 May 2014 — All three astronauts have reached the surface of Mars not much more than a month and half after the landing. NASA technicians exchanged high fives after each astronaut successfully followed directions from Earth controllers to maneuver around the sixty-centimeter diameter rock located near the end of the Mars lander ladder. According to plans, Mission Commander Gus Grandin will now extend one arm in order to hold a camera near the sixty-centimeter diameter rock so that it can analyzed.

17 May 2014 — After an unexplained failure in Mission Commander Gus Grandin’s arm, a back-up astronaut was ordered to extend an arm with a camera and hold it near the sixty-centimeter diameter rock. An official NASA statement heralded the “remarkable string of results achieved thus far during the first human mission to the surface of Mars,” noting that the astronauts had been able to stand up, climb down to the Martian surface, walk a distance of about one meter and begin some exploratory activity after just less than two months on the planet. This compares favorably, they noted, with the heralded achievements of robotic Mars probes about a decade ago.

18 May 2014 — NASA today scrambled to find an explanation for its loss of control over the Mars mission. After successfully and “nearly flawlessly” controlling the astronauts through their initial movements on the planet, reports indicate NASA personnel were shocked yesterday when the astronauts stopped responding to directions from Earth and began moving and acting independently. At the same time, what are officially characterized as “incomprehensible” transmissions have been received from the mission. Informed sources say the transmissions claim the astronauts completed the next six months of scheduled activities within the period of less than one hour after they ceased following orders from Earth.

The sources also state the astronauts are proceeding with further activities based upon their own observations instead of only executing experiments planned in great detail on Earth before being communicated to them.

Officially, NASA will only say that the mission “may be experiencing a mission command/response cycle malfunction which is impairing the effectiveness of the task input/task execution process.”

NASA administrators publicly discount worries that the human astronauts may have gone “rogue,” insisting that NASA will regain positive control of the astronauts in the near future. However, NASA personnel have privately conceded that if the astronauts continue to act independently, controlling their own actions and making their own decisions, it may imperil NASA’s planned mission objectives and lead to unforeseen results. If this occurs, there may be no way to officially quantify the success of the mission. “This merely emphasizes the fact that sending humans into space creates risks to the successful completion of mission objectives above and beyond those seen in robotic missions,” a senior NASA administrator noted.

“Exploration of the solar system is too important to let human astronauts create barriers to the future of humanity in space.”

––—

Copyright (C) 2005 by John G. Hemry.

––—

CH006

*Letters of Transit* by Brian Plante

A Short Story

And you thought the twin paradox was complicated!

––—

Dear Irina,

Writing letters seems like such an old-fashioned skill, doesn’t it? Sure, everybody zips off instant messages, but with so long to wait and think and compose between these _letters_, well, they’re just different. I suppose it’s a lost art and we’ll just have to rediscover it as we go.

I miss you already, even though Centauri A is still three years away as we reckon it on the _Sense Of Wonder_. Three years to get there, a year on the planet, and another three years to get back — that’s seven whole years until I can hold you again, but for you it’s even worse. Fifteen years will go by on your end. That’s relativity for you, but it’s really better this way.

It was awkward with me being 25 and you only 16. Sorry for the “only” but that’s how other people reacted to your age. They don’t know how much more mature you are than others your age. Most 16-year-olds are still children, but you are most definitely an adult.

Nevertheless, if the mission control people had ever found out that I was engaged to a 16-year-old, they probably would have kicked me off the _Sense_ on some morals clause. Even though they assured me that our personal correspondence will be private, I know there’s someone back on Earth monitoring every word. Perhaps we should have prearranged some secret code phrases, like “pepperoni pizza” to mean “love,” or “Afghanistan banana stand” for “danger.” But it’s too late for them to do anything about it, now that the mission is underway, so who cares if they know about us now?

That’s right, Mr. Mission Censor, if you’re reading this, my fiancee is 16 years old and we’re going to get married as soon as the _Sense Of Wonder_ gets back home.

Irina, the bandwidth through the wormhole is fairly limited, and all the telemetry and mission-critical data they’re pumping through it fills up the pipeline. I’ve been told my personal letters are limited to a couple of pages every month, and that’s got to be divided between all the people I need to write to. So forgive me if these letters are so short and far between. It has already become quite boring with all of the mission ahead of us and little to do most of the day, so the few letters I can send and receive will be the highlight of each month for me, until we get to the planet and I have some real work to do. Please don’t stop writing.

Am I unreasonable to think you’ll wait for me so long? If you ever just want out, it’s okay. I’ll understand if someone else comes along in the next 15 years. Can you wait, or am I just being selfish?

Love,

Niels

––—

Dearest Niels,

Of course I’ll wait for you. I took your ring, didn’t I? What kind of fiancee do you think I am?

At this point, the idea that I’ll stray while you’re gone is somewhat moot. The press figured out somehow that you and I are more than just friends, and it’s been all over the omninet. Some of the headlines have been fairly kind, _Astronaut’s Bride To Grow Old At The Altar_, and others hurtful, _Starman’s Underage Sex Kitten_. The stupid reporters follow me around wherever I go now, waiting for some sort of scandal to report on, so it would be difficult for me to cheat on you, even if I wanted.

But I’ll never cheat on you, Niels. You’re the best, um, starman a girl ever had. Now don’t you go cheating on me either. I hear you’ve got a few healthy females on the _Sense Of Wonder_, and seven years is a long time for a man to wait.

Seriously, Niels, I can wait. I will wait. Princeton has accepted me for the Fall term, so I’ll concentrate on my pre-law studies and have a career established by the time you get back. Trust me, I can keep myself busy without getting into trouble with other men.

I’m not too up on how this wormhole thing works. I know you think I’m super-smart, but physics was never my strong subject. Even though Centauri A is 4.3 light years away, they say we’ll still be able to communicate through the wormhole instantly. All right, I think I get that part, but there’s one point that keeps bothering me. You said in your letter that you’ll be able to send me a letter every month. But is that _my_ month or _your_ month? Once the _Sense Of Wonder_ gets closer to the speed of light, your clock will slow down relative to mine and you’ll only age half as fast as someone back on Earth, right? So if you send me a letter every month by your calendar, I’ll only receive a letter every _other_ month by mine, right? I’ll have to have a word or two with Einstein’s statue when I get to Princeton. I’ve been reading up on this physics stuff, even though it makes my head hurt sometimes.

If you meant, instead, that I can send you letters every month, then you’ll receive them more often, since time will be slower for you on the ship, right? I hope your letters won’t slow down as the _Sense Of Wonder_ speeds up, but that’s how I’m figuring this time dilation effect works. It’s so unfair!

I miss you. I wish we could send each other holo clips, or talk in real time.

All my “pepperoni pizza,”

Irina

––—

Darling Irina,

Unfair? Who said physics was supposed to be fair?

Don’t hurt yourself studying physics for me. Stick to your legal stuff, do your best at Princeton, and become the best damn lawyer around. Give a little wink to old Einstein’s statue for making all this possible, but you don’t have to study relativity for me. If you _really_ want to know how this thing works, look up a guy named Kip Thorne. He did a lot of the early work in wormholes when it was still just theory.

The good news is that my letters will remain at a constant once per month for you, no matter how slow the clock gets here on the _Sense Of Wonder_. If we were sending these letters through regular light-speed communications, like radio waves, you would have been right. As we go faster and faster, our shipboard clock will slow down relative to a stationary clock back on Earth, and our one month between letters would indeed be two months of waiting time back home.

The wormhole changes that, though. No matter how far the two ends of the hole get, when you put something in one end, then it comes out the other end _instantaneously_. If the wormhole were big enough, we’d be able to look through it like a window, and see each other going about their business, all in real time. We could even hold hands through it, and time would seem to pass at the same rate on each side of the window. For _both_ of us, we will age exactly one month between each letter.

Seven years will go by, and we will keep sending our monthly letters, I hope, even as the _Sense_ returns to Earth orbit. I’ll stick my last letter into the wormhole, and it will instantly pop out the other end, and you’ll read my message saying that I’m almost home. Then I’ll take a shuttle down to the surface and we’ll be together again. I’ll have aged seven years, and the you that greets me will have aged 15. But the you I sent that last letter to was only seven years older, same as me.

Okay, so here’s where the physics gets really unfair. The you that received my last letter saying I was almost home and on my way down to the surface — that version of you will still have another eight years to wait before I actually arrive. My letter will tell you that the mission was a success and that we returned home _eight years before it will happen in your timeline._ But physics is physics, so I can’t change the fact that you’ll have to wait those eight years before we can actually be together again in the flesh.

Maybe you’ll want to curse old Albert’s statue instead of winking at him.

I wish we could talk or send holo in real time, as you said, but that’s just not possible. Well, it _is_ possible, but just not practical. The wormhole takes such an enormous amount of energy to maintain that we’re only able to keep a very tiny one open. So tiny, in fact, that it’s all but invisible to even the most powerful of microscopes. It’s just big enough to pass a tightly focused electron beam through, and that’s what carries our messages. If we could harness the total energy output from a star, we might be able to keep open a wormhole big enough to reach a hand through it, but for now, this tiny one is all we can manage. Over half the power of the _Sense Of Wonder_ goes into keeping the wormhole open, but we’re glad to have it. Once we get more than a few light-days away from the Earth, communication by radio will become difficult and slow.

Most of the bandwidth through the wormhole is taken up with telemetry readings and such from the ship. The mission folks back on Earth want to make very sure they know everything that’s going on aboard the _Sense Of Wonder_, so that if there were some sort of disaster, they’ll know what it was that got us. That sounds pretty scary, but it’s just a precaution. Like I said, most of the day is just plain boring, waiting to arrive at the planet.

You don’t have to worry about me straying with any of the female crewmembers on the _Sense_, either. All of the crewmembers are given hormone implants to curb our desires, and they really are monitoring things closely. It may sound a bit harsh, but it’s the only reliable way to keep the peace with a mixed crew on such a long mission. The hormone implant will wear off by the time I get home, though, so I’ll be plenty ready for you.

I wouldn’t worry too much about those reporters hounding you, either. They can only keep up interest on any one story for so long before they move on in search of fresh meat. In time, they’ll forget about us and let you get on with your life. But that doesn’t mean you can cheat! Maybe they’ve already lost interest by the time you receive this, since your last letter is several weeks old as I write this.

You should have started the Fall college term by now. How’s Princeton treating you? I’m so proud they admitted you at such a young age. See, I’m not the only one who thinks you’re much more mature than your chronological age. And now it doesn’t sound so bad when I can tell people that I’m engaged to a college student! Good luck with your studies.

I look forward to your next letter. They do keep me going in the face of boredom.

Love,

Niels

––—

Dearest Niels,

My head hurts from reading that Thorne guy you told me about. Too many equations. If I’m understanding this right, the wormhole is more than just a quick way to send messages, it’s also like a time machine. When I receive a letter from you, one year into the voyage by your time, it will really be thirteen months for us back here on Earth. In the real world you haven’t even written that letter for a month yet, but somehow I’ll be receiving it. And, as you pointed out, near the end of the voyage (for you), I’ll be receiving letters that you won’t have written for many years.

This doesn’t seem possible. If it’s true, then I’ll know all about your exploits on the planet years before they actually happen, and I’ll know you returned safely far in advance of your actual arrival. Doesn’t that create paradoxes? Why, you could just as easily send me the winning lottery numbers for next year in one of your letters. There ought to be some kind of natural law against that.

But, of course, once you arrive home, you’ll stop writing letters to me. You’ll meet up with the future version of me, the me that I will become, and have no need to communicate through these pitifully inadequate letters anymore. But for current-day-me, the letters will stop after seven years, and I’ll have eight more years to wait until I grow into that lady who’ll greet you on your return.

Phooey on physics. I’ve had it out with Albert’s statue a couple of times over all this confusing stuff. Just you return home to me in one piece, Niels Crowley, or I’ll never forgive you. Or Albert.

So, how are things doing in the future then, says me, the little voice from the past? The techies said I could include a photo if it was small. They said they could compress it so it didn’t take up too much of your precious bandwidth through the wormhole, so it may be a bit fuzzy. That’s me in my high school cap and gown. Hope you like it. Of course, it’s from the past for both of us; now that I’m in college, I’m already feeling much older.

I’m catching up to you.

Love,

Irina

––—

Darling,

Yes, you’ve got it now — the wormhole will be like a time machine once it’s been to Centauri and back at high speed. The scientists are planning on keeping the wormhole open after the mission is completed just to study this phenomenon. But don’t plan on my sending you those winning lottery numbers. That’s one of the things the Mission Censors (are you guys reading this?) will be watching out for. I don’t think they’re quite sure what will happen if a serious paradox situation comes up.

Long before we arrive back home, we will reestablish radio contact with Earth, so I may be sending a letter through the wormhole to you, aged 23, and a few moments later I can send a radio message to 31-year-old you. That radio message is going to take a while to get there at light speed, so it won’t be a very convenient way to communicate, but you won’t have to wait the full seven years after these wormhole letters stop before you begin hearing from me again. That’s still not very fair to you, but it’s something.

Maybe I’ll ask the mission people if I can continue using the wormhole to send you letters even after the voyage is over. Just because I’m back home and married to the 31-year-old you doesn’t necessarily mean I have to stop my correspondence through the wormhole with the 23-year-old you. That might be fun. But that’s where the paradoxes can come in.

Let’s assume the mission people let us continue these letters after the _Sense Of Wonder_ has returned. In my timeline, I’ll be married to the 31-year-old you, and maybe we’ll have a couple of kids, but I’ll still be sending these letters to a younger version of yourself. I’m not saying that anything like this would ever happen, but what if I wrote, saying our marriage had failed and that you shouldn’t bother to marry me in your timeline? Don’t get excited, it’s not going to happen — I’m just fantasizing wildly. So in my timeline, I’ve married you and we had kids, and then we split up. But in your timeline, you haven’t married me yet, and you change your mind because of what I said in the letters. In your timeline, our kids will never have been born, but in my timeline they were. That’s a paradox. Were our kids ever really born? In one timeline, yes, and in another, no. That’s the sort of thing the Mission Censors will be watching out for. Of course, just by receiving these letters, you already know a few things about the future — that I’m alive and the _Sense Of Wonder_ hasn’t blown up — so the censors must be okay with a little paradox.

Is this all too confusing? Sometimes it makes my head spin, too. But I know everything will be all right when I can be with you and hold you again. Physics be damned.

Love,

Niels

P.S. Thanks for the photograph, but now my crewmates are calling me a cradle robber. Take off those silly high school robes and send me another picture!

––—

Dearest Niels,

Along with this letter, they’ve let me send you another small photo. When I first read your last letter, telling me to take off the robes and send another photo, I thought maybe you were asking for some risque poses, but then I thought about Mr. Mission Censor and selected something a bit tame, I’m afraid. I think I look a bit older in this one. I hope my smiling face can keep you motivated.

Good news. I asked the mission people here if you could be allowed to keep sending me wormhole letters after the voyage is over. I don’t think they’ve thought out too far in advance exactly what they’re going to do with this wormhole time machine once they get the other end back home, but they said a short letter once a month like we’ve been doing wouldn’t be much of a problem, since they won’t have to share the line with the ship’s telemetry data any more. So I won’t have the pain of losing your letters for seven years, if that’s okay and you still want to write to seven-years-in-the-past me while you’re married to seven-years-in-the-future me.

You know, you really _could_ send me those winning lottery numbers when you get back home. Even if the censors won’t let you say anything too important, I’ll still be able to infer quite a bit before it happens in my timeline, just from receiving your letters: the _Sense Of Wonder_ returned home safely, the scientists kept the wormhole open, and society didn’t crumble in the next seven years. So a few early lottery numbers probably isn’t such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I could have quite a nest egg saved up for us when you return. (What do you think about that, Mr. Mission Censor?)

I’ve already started looking at wedding dresses, even though it will be another 14 years before I walk down the aisle. Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to buy one yet. Who knows how the styles will change, or what size I’ll need so many years off? But it’s nice to look, and imagine myself as a bride, eventually.

I can’t wait till you get back, but somehow I will.

Love,

Irina

––—

Darling,

After three years, we’ve finally arrived at Centauri A, and the mission is now a complete failure. The initial long-range readings were completely off-base, and instead of there being a planet in the comfortable zone where life might survive, there is only a ring of dust and pebbles. Beyond that, there’s just a couple of gas giants, so there’s not even anything solid enough for us to land on. It’s all been for nothing.

Aren’t you glad the wormhole let everyone back on Earth find out our failure three years early? In your timeline, we won’t actually arrive at Centauri A for several more years, so maybe these messages from your future are a good thing. It’ll save some other poor crew like us from coming out here on another useless mission.

And now we have to waste three more years of our lives to get back home. At least we get to shave off one year from the mission, since we won’t be sticking around here as long as we planned. Still, I’m so sorry I made you wait like this. Instead of coming home a hero, you future husband will be known as one of those losers who went out to see some stupid dust ring around another star. Big deal.

So what is the omninet saying about the _Sense Of Wonder_ now? I’ll bet there’s a lot of finger-pointing going on. Or have they already abandoned us as a dead-end story and forgotten about us? Maybe that would be for the best, if we could just slink back home with our tails between our legs and return to normal life without a lot of fuss.

Can I return to any kind of normal life after this? I mean, how’s this going to look on a resume? “Spent the last six years (or is it 14?) traveling the stars. Goals accomplished: none.”

Do you still want to marry this loser?

Love,

Niels

P.S. Don’t start spending that lottery money just yet. The Mission Censors have told me that as we return to Earth, I can’t say anything in the wormhole letters that might tip you off about the future, so lottery numbers are probably out. This just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?

––—

Dearest Niels,

Of course I still want to marry you. You and all the other crewmembers _are_ heroes. The press is being wonderful about it, and there’s no hint of condescension at all. You’re the brave men and women who gave up 14 years of your lives on a noble but quixotic quest. And yes, I know it’s not really 14 years as you see it, but that’s how long it’ll be here on Earth. The press never lets the facts stand in the way of a good story.

The focus of the scientists has now shifted to the wormhole itself. Even without any good planets around Centauri to explore, the mission will be a great success if you can get the other end of the wormhole back here. Time machines are apparently important, and they’re eager to get their hands on it!

There will still be a ticker tape parade when you return. Your names will still be entered in the history books. Holovision stories will still be produced about the mission. People still wear bracelets with _Sense Of Wonder_ engraved on them.

And I will still marry you, if you’ll let me.

Love,

Irina

––—

Darling,

Yes, having the wormhole time machine will be pretty neat, but that’s not what I came here to study. The wormhole tech guys can feel good about themselves, but I came here to study the planet. The planet that doesn’t exist. I feel like such a fool.

I will marry you, if you’ll still have me, but why you would want me now, I don’t know. It seems like marrying you might be the only redeeming act of my otherwise wasted life.

I’m sorry I’m not in a better mood to write letters. It’s not your fault.

Forgive me,

Niels

––—

Dearest Niels,

I turned 21 today. Street legal in all 62 states and provinces. By now, they tell me you’re halfway home and we can expect to start picking up radio transmissions again, at least in your timeline. In our timeline, we won’t start hearing from you for a bunch of years, and it’ll be another nine years before I can actually see you in person. I’m counting the days.

I’ve picked out my wedding dress. I know it’s early, but I got one that’s a classic style, so I know it won’t go out of fashion. And I’ll make sure I don’t change so much that I can’t fit into the thing. I’ll keep myself nice for you.

I can’t tell you how badly I want to

[portions deleted]

but until then, I’ll just have to use my imagination. Come on home, starman.

Love,

Irina

––—

Darling,

We’re nearly home now. Just a few short days and I’ll be seeing you. I haven’t used the radio at all to talk to you, since we both decided the wormhole letters were the way to go. I promise I won’t stop mailing these letters to you once I get home. I know what a hardship that would be if this were my last letter and you had another seven years to wait until I arrived.

You’ve hung in with me all this time, so I’ll hang in there with these letters. I’m not sure how much Mr. Mission Censor will let me say, once we’re back home. Anything in these letters will be like a voice from seven years in your future, and they’re still not sure what to do about the paradoxes.

Some of the other crewmembers are getting messages from their loved ones via radio. It sounds like there’s a lot of

[portions deleted]

because of the wormhole. It doesn’t really matter. I can wait.

See you soon.

Love,

Niels

––—

_Hello, Niels. This is Carol, Irina’s mom. They said if I recorded this message, you’d get it in a couple of days over the radio. I guess that means you’re getting pretty close to home. I know it’s been such a long trip for you._

_I’m afraid I have some terrible news, Niels. It’s about Irina. She was riding on the glideway, and some kid in an old jalopy got on somehow, driving that old thing on manual. There was an accident._

_Irina didn’t make it. I know this is going to be a shock to you, since you two were sending letters through that wormhole right up until the end, but it happened three years ago for all of us._

_I know you and I weren’t the best of friends when you left. She was so young back then, and I thought it was wrong for her to be in love with someone so much older. But she did love you and was waiting all those years for you to come back and marry her, even when I tried to talk her out of it. She always spoke so well of you._

_I’m sorry to have to break this news to you, but you needed to know why she isn’t going to be there to welcome you back. I’m sorry. Call me when you’re home and get settled. I have some things of hers I’d like to give you._

––—

Dearest Niels,

So now you’re back home, I guess. In your timeline, anyway. For me, it will be another seven long years, but I can wait. Just keep sending me these letters, and I can hold on forever.

Did you have a big parade? I’ll bet you did, and I hope it was nice. The press is still buzzing over what they can do when they get the other end of the wormhole back, so I’ll bet you had a good celebration, whatever it was.

I’m so excited for you, Niels, even though the mission is still far from finished in my timeline. I know the mission censors won’t let you tell me much, but congratulations on a job well done.

Are we married already in your timeline, or did we decide to wait a bit, I wonder? How do I look? I trust I kept my figure for you, else this wedding dress I’m saving isn’t going to be good for much. There are so many questions I want to ask you, now that you’re back home.

Love,

Irina

––—

Dearest Niels,

I didn’t receive a letter from you last month. Have things started to settle down, yet? I can just imagine, Niels, how much must be going on in your life these days. Between debriefings, tests, interviews and parades, you must be extremely busy. I can forgive you if you miss a letter or two just now. I know how faithful you’ve been.

It occurs to me that _I_ may be the reason for you not writing last month. By now you’ve met up with my future self, and I hope I’m keeping you busy. We have a lot of time to make up for, don’t we? It’s just a bit frustrating that now I may be in the position of competing with my older self for your attention. Well, I’ll gladly defer to that older me. She’s more experienced, and present in the flesh, whereas I’m just a voice from the past, huh? Well, if you’re too busy with older-me to write letters, then that’s probably a good thing. It gives me something to look forward to, right?

I’m so proud of you. Send me a letter!

Love,

Irina

––—

Darling Irina,

Yes, I’ll keep sending you letters. I have to be careful what I say, since

[portions deleted]

the paradoxes. I’m afraid they won’t let much through. Your mother told me what happened. Please, whatever you do

[portions deleted]

I’m not sure I can change anything by telling you, but I can’t just say nothing. Maybe your timeline and mine aren’t the same, and in yours

[portions deleted]

like in some sort of alternate universe. I’m glad we still have these letters. I’ll keep sending them, no matter what

[portions deleted]

Love always,

Niels

––—

Dearest Niels,

The mission censors must have been working overtime on your last letter. You’ll have to be more careful what you say next time. You wouldn’t want to cause any of those nasty paradoxes, would you? Don’t try to tell me anything that hints too much about our future. I can use my imagination. Just as long as I know you’re home and safe. Our future will all come to pass in its time, so I can wait.

I’m so happy you made it home safely. I didn’t always say it, but I always worried about you. I’m almost glad there wasn’t any stupid planet out there for you to explore. It might have been dangerous, and now you’ll be back a year earlier than before. Maybe things happen for a reason.

I tried on my wedding dress again today. I keep putting it on to make sure I haven’t changed in size. It still fits just fine, and I’ll make sure it stays that way. By the time I finally walk down the aisle in it, I’ll have a lot of hours logged in that dress.

I hope the news services handled our wedding tastefully. The reporters come around once in a while to see if I’m still waiting for you, so I can see how they might get frantic by the time we finally do marry. I hope they weren’t too intrusive at the ceremony.

If we have a baby, and it’s a boy, what do you think about naming him after old Albert? Or maybe Kip?

Patiently waiting,

Irina

––—

Darling Irina,

Sorry about what happened to my last letter. I have to remember about those Censors and be careful what I say. I’m sorry I can’t tell you much about the future, but I can say that you and I will always be together.

Yes, the reporters did not forget about us. People always like love stories even if

[portions deleted]

Some people think there are alternate universes, that a person’s destiny is not set in stone. Perhaps in one universe there was a habitable planet orbiting Centauri A, but in ours there was just the ring of dust. So maybe, just maybe, in some other universe

[portions deleted]

owe it to you to try. Your love kept me going all those years. Would it change anything if I told you there was an Afghanistan banana stand on the glideway?

Love always,

Niels

––—

Copyright (C) 2005 by Brian Plante.

––—

CH007

*Artificial Photosynthesis* by Stephen L. Gillett, Ph.D.

Science Fact

It’s not only a promising technology for the future, but also a good example of what makes research hard!

––—

Solar power? Probably the image that comes to your mind is arrays of solar cells gleaming brightly in the sunshine. Or maybe (since this is _Analog_, after all) you think of gleaming arrays out in space, beaming energy to Earth.

But in either case, you’re probably thinking of solar power in terms of turning sunlight into electricity.

Why is that? That’s not how biology does it. Photosynthesis (the natural kind) stores the energy of sunlight as chemical bonds. That makes a lot more sense biologically. In fact, it probably makes a lot more sense technologically, too. After all, conventional fossil fuels are products of photosynthesis, just with a little additional geologic processing.

For what are the big disadvantages of solar power, conventionally viewed? Its intermittency, its lack of storability and its lack of transportability.

But the last two are disadvantages of _electricity_, however made. You can’t store electricity conveniently, and markets are typically nowhere near where it’s generated, especially in the US. Sure, thousands of miles of electrical transmission lines have been built, but they’re extremely expensive, extremely inflexible, and still ultimately limited due to transmission losses in the lines. (And also — an especially important consideration at present — they’re extremely vulnerable.) Even now some 30% of the electricity is lost in transit due to heating and electromagnetic radiation. Using sunlight to make fuels would solve the storage problem automatically, and would lessen the transportation problem greatly. We ship fuel around the world routinely, but overseas transmission lines are hardly practical!

Using sunlight to make fuels also solves the intermittency problem. Or at least makes it less of a problem. Make hay (i.e., horse-fuel) while the Sun shines, and then store that fuel till when it’s needed — agriculture has been doing this for millennia. Why doesn’t technology?

––—

*Photosynthesis, Natural and Otherwise*

Fundamentally, photosynthesis uses the energy of photons — “light particles” — to drive chemical reactions “uphill.” Natural photosynthesis is based on dyes: when a dye molecule absorbs a photon of a particular energy, an electron moves into a higher energy (“excited”) state. (That’s why dyes are colored, by the way: they absorb only certain energies — wavelengths — of light.) Given the right molecular mechanisms, the dye molecule can now transfer that energy into new, energy-rich compounds.

Perhaps surprisingly, somewhat similar dye-based photosynthetic systems have been looked at off and on for _years_. A classic example is a solution of ferrous iron and the dye thionine. On visible light irradiation the dye is excited, and that excited state then oxidizes some of the dissolved iron(II) to iron(III) — an “uphill” reaction. Why, then, hasn’t iron-thionine been practical as a solar-energy storage system? It’s _dreadfully_ inefficient! The high-energy state just breaks down again right away. But it shows how even fairly simple chemistry can store light energy.

In fact, it’s curious how we got to thinking of solar power reflexively in terms of electricity. The idea of storing the energy of sunlight in chemical fuels is not new. Before the First World War(!), the pioneering Italian photochemist Giacomo Ciamician gave an address to the International Congress on Applied Chemistry, in New York, on the prospects of eventually replacing fossil fuels by sunlight-derived fuels (Ciamician, 1912). J. D. Bernal’s _The World, the Flesh, and the Devil _(1929), famous among space enthusiasts for its visionary depictions of space colonies, also envisioned artificial photosynthesis. Even up into the 1950s discussions of “solar power” focused on photochemistry (e.g., Heidt & McMillan, 1953; Marcus, 1956).

But with the rise of semiconductor technology (remember transistor radios?), and the development of practical — albeit expensive — solar cells in the 1960s as a spin-off of the space program, _and, _no doubt, due to the cachet of semiconductors as “Space Age,” “solar power” came to mean photovoltaic (“solar”) cells.

The most promising near-term avenue for solar power, however, in your author’s humble opinion, is not photovoltaic cells. It’s semiconductor-driven (!) photosynthesis. To explain why, though, I’ll have to sidetrip for a moment.

––—

*Semiconductors 101*

Okay, I realize that many of you reading this know a _lot_ more about semiconductors than I do. But please bear with me while I make sure we’re all on the same page.

Substances are made of atoms, of course, and because of the laws of quantum mechanics the electrons in atoms have very specific energy levels — what a chemist calls “orbitals”, from the old idea that that’s where the electrons “orbit.” When you build up a substance from individual atoms the individual orbitals blend into what are called _bands_, which actually are composed of kazillions of individual levels with minutely different energies. (This is due to the same “Pauli exclusion principle” that says two electrons can’t have exactly the same quantum state.) The electrons then occupy these individual levels, starting (of course) at the lowest energy. The energy level where you run out of electrons is called the “Fermi level” — named, of course, after Enrico Fermi. In most substances, too, there are several distinct bands of different energies, which result from the different sets of blended orbitals in the original atoms. A zone of “forbidden” energies between bands is, sensibly enough, termed a “band gap.”

If the Fermi level ends up in the middle of a band, you have a metal. Metals are electrical conductors because there are still unfilled energy levels in the band into which electrons can move. On the other hand, you get a “semiconductor” when the Fermi level falls within a band gap, so that the lower band (the “valence band” or “V.B.” is filled) and the upper one (“conduction band” or “C.B.”) is empty.

They’re “filled” and “empty” only at absolute zero, actually. At ordinary temperatures, thermal excitation kicks some electrons up into the conduction band, while leaving vacancies (“holes”) behind in the V.B. These account for the (small) “intrinsic conduction” of a semiconductor. In fact, it’s why they were called “semi” conductors in the first place. The electrons in the C.B. can conduct, because there are lots of unfilled levels available. The “holes” in the V.B. can _also_ conduct. In fact they act just like single positive charges. Of course, what’s really happening is that it’s still electrons that are moving. When electrons shift into a vacancy one after another, though, it looks just as if it’s the hole that’s moving. It’s so convenient to treat the holes as single positive charges that people always do so.

Of course, the amount of charge carriers that are present depends both on the energy of the band gap and the ambient temperature. If there’s a big band gap, there’s no significant excitation and so no conduction. In fact, an insulator is just a semiconductor with a _really _wide band gap. For example, the band gap of silica (silicon dioxide, SiO2), an excellent insulator, is about 1.76 attojoules (aJ; 10-18 J or 11 eV), while the average energy of molecules at room temperature is only about 0.004 aJ or 0.026 eV. By comparison the band gap of silicon is only 1.12 eV. (Solid-state physicists still traditionally measure band gaps in electron volts — another of the disciplinary quirks I talk about later.)

Conversely, as the band gap gets smaller and smaller (or as temperatures get higher and higher), a semiconductor becomes more and more like an ordinary conductor, because the electrons can slosh more and more freely across the band gap.

This, by the way, is why silicon replaced germanium transistors. The band gap of germanium is small enough (0.665 eV) that too many electrons start to jump across it even at temperatures around that of a fresh-brewed cup of coffee.

Adding impurity atoms — “doping” — can change the properties of a semiconductor drastically and usefully. Impurity atoms with extra valence electrons donate those electrons to the conduction band, to make “n”(negative)-type semiconductors. Alternatively, “p”(positive)-type semiconductors have doping atoms with too few electrons, so that holes are present in the V.B. In either case, we can look at these impurities as shifting the Fermi level up or down.

Now, what happens at a boundary between two substances with different Fermi levels? Electrons tend to spill from the substance with the higher Fermi level to that with the lower. This goes on until overcoming the electrostatic attraction to remove another electron requires more energy than is gained by having the electron drop to the lower Fermi level. The result is a region around that boundary — a “Schottky barrier” — that has permanent electric charge due to the shifted electrons, the “space charge region.”

Schottky barriers are _extremely_ important technologically. They’re why, for example, p-n junctions can act as rectifiers and (very important) as transistors. But getting into all that is way beyond the scope of the article. Go look at any number of texts on solid-state physics, such as Kittel’s (1986) classic, if you’re interested.

Our interest here is that a Schottky barrier is also critical to the _photophysics_ of semiconductors. When a semiconductor absorbs a photon with energy greater than the band gap, the photon generates a “hole-electron pair.” An electron is kicked up into the C.B. while a hole is left behind in the V.B. Normally the hole and electron then just recombine, and the energy is dispersed as heat.

Which is not too useful. If the electron-hole pair is formed in the space charge region, though, charge separation takes place. The hole and electron go in opposite directions due to the opposite electrostatic attractions they experience at the boundary. This separation is just what has to happen to convert the energy of that photon into useful forms. In fact, in general when we’re talking about changing other forms of energy into electric charges, charge separation is the Holy Grail. _Nothing_ useful can happen unless you can keep the charges from just recombining.

In conventional photovoltaic cells (affectionately “PVs”), wires on either side of the space-charge region collect the holes and electrons, so they can be forced to drive an external circuit. Or rather, they collect as many as possible. One problem with conventional PVs is that you need a very fine network of wires to catch as many charge carriers as possible, and that leads to expensive fabrication issues. Another expense is making the junction in the first place. Fabricating an interface between _p_-type and _n_-type silicon is expensive, particularly because you need a much larger area than in something like (say) a transistor. And finally, the more perfect the semiconductor crystal, the better the efficiency, because imperfections tend to be “traps” where the holes and electrons can get back together. Since semiconductor-grade silicon is expensive, though, using high-quality crystals makes solar cells even _more _expensive.

––—

*Semiconductor Photochemistry and Redox Reactions*

Remember “redox” reactions from Chem 101? When electrons are transferred between atoms in a chemical reaction, the atom that loses electrons is “oxidized”, and the atom that gains electrons is “reduced.” “Oxidation” originally referred to just oxygen, because oxygen is very good at taking electrons from other atoms. But other substances can be even better oxidizers than oxygen. Fluorine is an example.

Or (and here we finally get to the point of this digression) holes. Photogenerated holes are powerful oxidizing agents, capable of wresting electrons from something else to fill the vacancy. In turn, photoexcited electrons are powerful reducing agents. So instead of using the separated electron and hole to drive an electric circuit, we can use them to drive chemistry. In effect, the semiconductor becomes an “antenna” that turns the energy of light into chemically active species that can drive reactions uphill.

For example, if the pairs are energetic enough, they can break down water into H2 and O2:

H2O + hn (a photon) E H2 + 1/2 O2

Actually, this is the overall result of two composite reactions. The holes oxidize water into hydrogen ions and hydroxyl radicals:

h+ + H2O E H+ + OH[Sigma]

where h+ is the hole, H+ is a hydrogen ion, and OH[Sigma] means a hydroxyl radical. (Chemists traditionally put a superscripted dot after a radical formula to show there’s an unpaired electron.) These radicals are extremely reactive and (if there’s nothing else around) react with each other to make hydrogen peroxide:

2 OH[Sigma] E H2O2

which then usually breaks down quickly to water and oxygen:

H2O2 E H2O + 1/2 O2.

(Photosynthesis to make H2 and H2O2 would be _really _interesting, because H2O2 would then be a valuable product too. Unfortunately, though, H2O2 tends to break down easily in these circumstances. Not to say it isn’t worth further research…. )

Meanwhile, the photogenerated electron can reduce the hydrogen ions to hydrogen gas:

H+ + e- E 1/2 H2.

Solar water splitting was first demonstrated by Fujishima and Honda (1972) in the early 1970s, but there have been _lots_ of other efforts since; see Bolton (1996), Lewis (1995), or Bard & Fox (1995) for some overviews. There was a flurry of interest into the early 80s, a lull through the early 90s, and since then research activity has picked up again. (There’s likely to be _lots _more activity over the next few years, too!)

A problem with splitting water is that only ultraviolet photons have enough energy, and they make up a relatively small proportion of the Sun’s output. So, at least in this simplistic approach, if you’re just making hydrogen with solar radiation you’re throwing away a lot of the Sun’s energy.

Other photochemical reactions, though, that aren’t so high energy, could also be useful. Some researchers have looked at such alternatives as the photochemical “fixing” of nitrogen into nitrogen compounds, or making organic carbon compounds from carbon dioxide. Several groups have also looked at the photoreduction of metal ions out of solution onto a semiconductor surface. This seemed promising as a way to recover precious (or toxic) metals from solution, but so far it hasn’t been practical. No one has yet come up with a cheap way to separate the photoprecipitated metal so that the semiconductor can be used again.

By the way, using semiconductors for the photocatalytic destruction of water pollutants has also been a huge research focus over the last couple of decades. Typically such pollutants are thermodynamically capable of “downhill” reaction with oxygen. In other words, they’re capable of burning. Examples would include toxic organic compounds such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) or benzene. The problem is that the activation energy for such reactions is so high that they just don’t occur at room temperature. It takes a match to start a fire. After all, gasoline can sit around indefinitely at room temperature, too, even though it reacts spectacularly with oxygen given a very modest nudge.

In these applications the photogenerated holes and electrons simply furnish the “match.” They break up the molecules into much more reactive species that can then react with oxygen.

––—

*Semiconductor Photocatalysts*

Familiar semiconductors like silicon don’t work in photocatalytic applications. Or rather, they don’t work long enough to be useful. A silicon surface quickly gets covered with an inert layer of silica, and shuts down. The problem is that the photocatalysis I describe above takes place in water solution, usually also in air, and that’s an _extreme_ chemical environment for something like silicon. Silicon is thermodynamically unstable in air as it is, although usually reaction rates are so slow we don’t notice.

Most photocatalytic work has focused instead on semiconductor _oxides_, which are stable in oxygenated water solutions. Unfortunately, most also are “wide-bandgap” semiconductors, with bandgap energies about halfway between “regular” semiconductors and insulators. This means they only absorb relatively high-energy photons and so don’t use the solar spectrum very efficiently. Examples are zinc oxide, ZnO, and tin dioxide, SnO2. Of course, as I noted above, only ultraviolet photons have enough energy to split water anyway. The double oxide strontium titanium oxide (SrTiO3) (Traditionally called “strontium titanate” by solid-state physicists.) is particularly promising for water splitting but is more expensive.

By far the greatest amount of research, however, has employed titanium dioxide (TiO2), which is cheap, nontoxic, and very stable. One crystal form, anatase, is furthermore even capable, at least in theory, of splitting water molecules all by itself.

The TiO2 is used in a high-surface-area form, such as an extremely fine, almost colloidal powder dispersed in an aqueous suspension, or as a very rough “fractal” surface wetted by the water solution. The reason is that the photochemistry takes place at the interface between the TiO2 and the water, so the more contact area, the better the reactions proceed.

In fact, that wetted surface _is_ the junction at which the photochemical activity takes place. A Schottky barrier is set up automatically at the wetted surface of a semiconductor. Water has a perfectly well defined Fermi level, and it’s different from that of TiO2. So just wetting the TiO2 surface sets up a space charge region. What a contrast to the elaborate, painstaking creation of p-n junctions in crystalline silicon: it’s nice that _one _fabrication issue, at any rate, is far easier!

All is not hunky-dory, however. Charge-separation issues rear their ugly head again. The polarity of the wetted interface is such that holes exit into the water, whereas electrons go inward and accumulate within the TiO2. (In fact, sensitive electrophoretic experiments have shown that illuminated TiO2 motes accumulate a negative charge.) However, for the full photocatalytic reaction to proceed, the electrons need to get to the surface, too, so they can react with the hydrogen ions. Some eventually do, of course; you can’t _keep_ accumulating electrons inside a TiO2 grain. But their exit is uncontrolled and leads to serious efficiency losses due to electron-hole recombination.

One approach to making the electron exits less haphazard is to dot the surface of the TiO2 with a separate metal catalyst, which both improves reaction rates and tends to gather in the electrons. Platinum specks are a favorite stratagem. Of course, though, decorating the TiO2 surfaces with platinum particles does _not_ decrease the fabrication expense!

Another efficiency — i.e., practicality — issue with wide-bandgap superconductors is that fact that only high-energy photons work. If a photon has energy less than the bandgap, it’s merely reflected or thermalized, which means it does no good at all. One approach toward using more of the solar spectrum is to attach absorbent molecules — dyes — to the semiconductor surface. The dyes absorb light with sub-bandgap energies, and can then inject excited electrons into the C.B. A fractal dye surface on TiO2 now holds the record for solar energy conversion to chemical energy (O’Regan & Graetzel, 1991).

Alternatively, you could use a semiconductor that absorbs in the visible. So far, though, no good candidates have appeared — and a _lot_ were tried back in the 70s. Ferric oxide (hematite, Fe2O3), for example, is reddish and so obviously absorbs more sunlight than (white) TiO2. Electron-hole recombination is much greater in hematite, though, and apparently the ease of recombination results from intrinsic properties of the crystal. In real crystals, particularly ones made from more than one kind of atom, band structure is not quite so simple as I’ve outlined. The symmetry (or lack thereof) of the crystal structure can make the band energies uneven from place to place in the crystal. This increases recombination because the electrons aren’t free to travel in the conduction band. They tend to get “stuck” (localized, in the formal language of quantum mechanics), which makes them easier targets for recombination.

––—

*Into the Disciplinary Breach*

Surprisingly, semiconductor-driven photochemistry was only really figured out in the 1960s. There are reports in the chemistry literature going back to the 1800s of photochemical reactions associated with what we now know to be semiconductors, but even as late as the 1950s no one had any idea of what was really going on (see, e.g., Elmore & Tanner, 1956). One early paper was on the right track (Weyl & Forland, 1950), but it still fell short of a full semiconductor description.

An amusing aside here: in its powdered form TiO2 is a brilliant opaque white, for two reasons. First, it has a very high refractive index, and second, its bandgap width (and hence photon absorption cutoff) lies just beyond the visible, at a wavelength of about 390 nanometers. Its opacity and its whiteness, coupled with its low cost and non-toxicity, made TiO2 very attractive as the base pigment for paint. In particular, it seemed the perfect alternative to lead monoxide (PbO, litharge), the white pigment in those “lead-based” paints you hear about. However, the early TiO2-based paints didn’t work very well. The paint rapidly chalked and peeled in sunlight, and for years no one understood why. The reason, of course, is that the paint was being destroyed photocatalytically, just like those pollutants I described above. To prevent the photoactivity, modern pigmentary TiO2 is coated with silica. The thinness of the silica layer is critical: it has to be just thick enough to block the photocatalysis, but not so thick that it degrades the optical properties of the TiO2.

Anyway, the reason for the delay in understanding semiconductor-driven photochemistry seems to be that it fell through the disciplinary cracks. Chemists working on oxides suspended in solutions were _already_ working at an interface between subdisciplines: those of surface and solution chemistry. You couldn’t expect them to be familiar with the photophysics of semiconductors too! Photochemists _did _deal with light, but they traditionally dealt with the interactions of individual molecules with individual photons. They weren’t looking at surfaces and their complexities, much less semiconductor complexities.

Conversely, solid-state physicists weren’t familiar with solution chemistry, and even if they had some acquaintance with surface physics, it probably didn’t involve an interface with aqueous solutions. In their seminal 1972 paper on photochemical water splitting, Fujishima and Honda didn’t even cite any of the earlier, sporadic reports of semiconductor photoactivity, probably because they simply didn’t know about them. To show how bad the disciplinary roadblocks can be, a while back a paper appeared in the major chemical journal _Angewandte Chemie_ [Hoffman, R.; How chemistry and physics meet in the solid state, _Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl., 26_, 846-878, 1987. The “international edition” of _Angewandte Chemie_ (“Applied Chemistry”) is published in English(!).] on translating the language of quantum mechanics between solid-state physics and chemistry! Even the energy language was different: solid-state physicists spoke of electron volts, while photochemists talked of potentials with respect to a standard electrochemical reference.

Now, of course, semiconductor-driven photochemistry is its very own discipline (and if you want a heavy-duty technical review, see Tan et al. (1993)). Semiconductor photochemistry hasn’t filtered out to the public at large, though — no doubt another of those reasons why “solar power” means “electricity from sunlight.” You don’t do _chemistry_ with semiconductors, do you?

Last, I’d note that those early enigmatic observations of mysterious photoreactions in association with things like zinc oxide weren’t a matter of “new physics” or anything like that. They were just an example of an unforeseen interaction whose explanation spanned two (or more) different disciplines. Nature, of course, doesn’t respect disciplinary boundaries, and so unexpected phenomena can crop up because no one can know everything. Reality is _complicated_.

Perhaps there’s a moral here.

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*The Value of Deserts*

And now for something completely different … why are deserts traditionally valueless? After all, they get lots of energy! Well, it’s because they’re waterless. But why is that such an issue? It’s not so much because people and animals require some water; it’s because plants require _lots_ of water. A smidgen of water is consumed in photosynthesis, but the amount is utterly trivial. The problem is that the water a plant takes in is also its “blood,” needed to transport nutrients and waste products. My BOTE (back-of-the-envelope!) calculation, based on high-productivity biomass crops and the rainfall they require, is that less than one H2O molecule in 400 is split by photosynthesis. The other 400-odd just pass through the plant. If plants — the primary producers — can’t grow, the whole foundation of traditional livelihoods — of life itself — doesn’t exist. And if you don’t have water, plants can’t exist.

Even now deserts aren’t worth much. If they’re not _too _deserty, there may be enough plant life to support some grazing — although it’s easy to overdo, as overgrazed lands from the ancient Levant to the twentieth-century western US show all too clearly. If they’ve got minerals worth the energy and infrastructure investment, they may sprout mines. In wealthy societies, deserts are handy for proving grounds and (in _really_ wealthy societies) for recreation. But overall, they’re little more valuable than they were several thousand years ago. In fact, I was astounded to learn recently that the Sahara was still being explored — by motor vehicle! — as recently as the 1930s (Kelly, 2002). Until the twentieth century, the logistics of travel in a desert like the Sahara remained so forbidding that rumors and legends of “lost oases” could still flourish. (As an aside, by comparison with lunar regolith, the Sahara is positively brimming with water — which is why lunar development is so difficult.)

Making fuels from sunlight could be the first really new economic activity for deserts since the AEC realized back in the 50s that they were useful for sequestering unneighborly activities like detonating nuclear devices. Of course, if you’re making hydrogen by splitting water, you still need _some_ water as raw material, just as plants do. But the amount is trivial by comparison. Besides, the water need not be pure; brines (seawater, saline lake water, even the waste brine from oilfields) will work just fine. Plants, on the other hand, are pretty picky about water quality.

Because hydrogen is such a light gas, and therefore almost as much a pain to store and ship as is electricity itself, it might make sense to make other fuels instead; methanol (CH3OH), say. Methanol (a.k.a. methyl alcohol, wood alcohol) is an attractive next-generation fuel. Not only can it be used directly in conventional internal-combustion engines with minimal modification, it’s a possibility for advanced fuel cells. And although it’s toxic, it’s less so than gasoline. The carbon in the methanol could come from CO2 in the air, or from limestone (made up of calcium carbonate, CaCO3), which is a common rock in many deserts. Of course, drawing CO2 from the atmosphere would also help stabilize atmospheric CO2 content just as does natural photosynthesis. Finally, what would make a solar-fuel installation even _more _attractive economically would be to make a high-value non-gaseous oxidizer like H2O2, instead of just oxygen, as a by-product.

There’s more than a little irony here, too: with such technologies, the desert-rich nations of the Mideast could continue to export fuel indefinitely. For example, if we assume that we can net 100 watts per square meter for 12 hours a day, which makes reasonable allowances for inefficiencies even in a technologically mature system, the 10 million barrels of oil that Saudi Arabia exports daily is equivalent to a piece of desert about 120 km on a side. (An average barrel of oil corresponds to about 6.1 gigajoules.)

There’s _a lot_ more desert than that around the Persian Gulf. If the hydrogen required all comes from water, about a billion gallons a day is required — or only about 3000 acre-feet. Even with evaporation losses, that will still be just a few percent of the water required for a comparably sized agricultural operation. Seawater will work just fine; or if you’re too far inland for seawater to be convenient, just use those brines that the “oil” wells in those once-great fields are now producing copiously. Of course, _other_ desert areas could also become energy competitors: Australia, Chile, the vast parts of the Sahara _not_ underlain by any oil fields, the southwest US, and so on. Deserts are going to go from being wastelands to highly valuable real estate.

And so last, I’d like to talk to you about some investment opportunities in Nevada….

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*References*

Bard, A. J.; Fox, M. A.; Artificial photosynthesis: solar splitting of water to hydrogen and oxygen, _Acc. Chem. Res., 28_, 141-5, 1995.

Bernal, J. D., _The World, the Flesh, and the Devil_, 2nd ed., Bloomington, Indiana Univ. Press, 1969. (originally published 1929).

Bolton, James R.; Solar photoproduction of hydrogen: A review, _Solar Energy, 57_, 37-50, 1996.

Ciamician, G.; The photochemistry of the future, _Science, 36_, 385-394, 1912.

Elmore, G.V.; Tanner, H.A.; The photochemical properties of zinc oxide, _J. Phys. Chem., 60_, 1328-9, 1956.

Fujishima, A.; Honda, K.; Electrochemical photolysis of water at a semiconductor electrode, _Nature, 238_, 37-8, 1972.

Heidt, Lawrence J.; McMillan, Alan F.; Conversion of sunlight into chemical energy, available in storage for man’s use, _Science, 117_, 75-6, 1953.

Kelly, Saul; _The Lost Oasis_, Westview Press, 2002.

Kittel, C.; _Introduction to Solid State Physics_, 6th ed., Wiley, 1986.

Lewis, Nathan; Artificial photosynthesis — “Wet” solar cells can produce both electrical energy and chemical fuels, _Am. Sci., 83_, 534, 1995.

Marcus, R. J.; Chemical conversion of solar energy, _Science, 123_, 399-405, 1956.

O’Regan, B.; Graetzel, M.; A low-cost, high-efficiency solar cell based on dye-sensitized colloidal TiO2 films, _Nature, 353_, 737, 1991.

Tan, Ming X., Laibinis, Paul E.; Nguyen, Sonbinh T.; Kesselman, Janet M.; Stanton, Colby E.; Lewis, Nathan S.; Principles and applications of semiconductor photoelectrochemistry, _Prog. Inorg. Chem., 41_, 21-144, 1993.

Weyl, W.A.; Forland, T.; Photochemistry of rutile, _Ind. Eng. Chem., 42_, 257, 1950.

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Copyright (C) 2005 by Stephen L. Gillett, Ph.D.

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CH008

*Analog Computing* by Stephen L. Gillett

Special Feature

What can digital computer tell me about 75 years of _Analog_ — and the future it tries to imagine?

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Remember 1980? Jimmy Carter, gas lines (_Those_, at least, are going to come back!), and the Iranian hostage crisis? Disco was waning and the “Moral Majority” waxing. The prime rate came within kissing distance of 20%. Annual fees for credit cards had just (!) been introduced. Not only was the Berlin Wall still standing, but some of the grimmest years of the Cold War still lay ahead. Mt. St. Helens blew its top, which added to the apocalyptic flavor. Lots of the pix in the weekly newsmags were still in black and white — and those mags still ran cigarette ads. Music was distributed on big disks of black vinyl that got scratched at a harsh look. The latest in high-tech entertainment was home videotape players. (_DVD?_ Sounds like a social disease!) You could even get a Betamax (remember Betamax?) with “total control” — that meant a remote. And does anybody even _care_ who shot J. R.?

Personal computers were also in their infancy in 1980. A “web” was something spiders made. And “Google” was a noise babies made. A few games existed for the Apple IIe. VisiCalc had been introduced, but most people still hadn’t heard of spreadsheets. Microsoft was a tiny company that had written a _really_ good Basic compiler. Executives at Big Companies even thought it would look “unprofessional” to be seen at a keyboard. That’s the _secretary’s_ job! It would take a serious recession (and a few of those Big Companies’ going bankrupt) to change attitudes toward “professionals” typing at keyboards. “Portable” PCs roughly the weight of boat anchors didn’t even show up until the mid-80s. (Anyone remember the Osborne?)

And, around this time, longtime British fan Mike Ashley began putting together a comprehensive index of _Astounding/Analog Science Fiction (ASF)_ from 1930 through 1979. Since PCs were so primitive, Mike put the index together the hard way: by hand, using index cards and (hardcopy) files. It was published as a hardcover book by RPW Publications in 1982, and has become indispensable for anyone wanting to research the history of science fiction.

Well, _Analog’s_ 75th anniversary seemed a perfect time both to update Mike’s _ASF_ index and to computerize it, to see what kind of nifty statistics can be extracted from three-quarters of a century of cutting-edge science fiction. So, I’ve done so. I’ll spare you the geeky details, but a science-fictional note is the sheer computer _power_ now available to an individual. In 1980 even the Pentagon couldn’t have carried out the processing I did to computerize the index and convert it into a searchable database. For one thing, software to carry out “optical character recognition” (OCR), which I used to avoid scads of retyping, didn’t even exist. (It’s also planned, by the way, to make the database available at the _Analog_ web site. We’ll post a lot more of the geeky details there.)

I would like to mention, too, that I found very few errors indeed in Mike’s compilation. He, of course, had had to generate all the different tables in his book by hand, by re-sorting and copying index cards — a tedious and painstaking business in which it’s extremely easy to make errors. My computer-regenerated tables agreed with his in all but a handful of trivial cases.

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*Highlights and Numbers*

Before we get into the numbers (“And the winnah is … !”), a few comments and definitions. The “byline” is the name under which the story or article appeared, whether some version of the author’s real name or a pseudonym. (Arlan Andrews takes an unusual prize, for the number of _different_ ways (five) his _real_ name has appeared as a byline.) The “author” is the author’s real name, or as much of it as is known. Some authors were a lot more prolific than you might gather just from looking at bylines, because so much of their work showed up under pseudonyms. All known pseudonyms have been taken into account, using information both from Ashley’s original Index and from other sources such as Jay Kay Klein’s “Biologs.” (For folks like Anthony Boucher, whose pseudonym effectively supplanted his real name, the pseudonym is treated as the real name.) Unquestionably, however, the “authors” list still includes some pseudonyms. For co-authored pieces, each author is credited individually (anyone who’s ever co-authored something knows this is _not_ unfair!). “Fiction” pieces include everything from Probability Zeros to novel-length serials. “Articles” don’t include columns or editorials, though when the author’s the editor, that distinction can get pretty fuzzy. Finally, the database is complete up through June 2004 (yeah, the _Analog_ pipeline is pretty long).

Over this time 5,034 stories, written by 1,036 individuals, have appeared in _ASF_. (The stories appeared under 1,225 bylines, counting each set of co-authors as a separate byline, which shows how many folks’ output is diluted with pseudonyms.) The most prolific _ASF_ fiction authors of all time are shown in Table 1, while Table 2 shows the most prolific since Ashley’s original catalog appeared. “Christopher Anvil” is clearly the all-time winner. Randall Garrett’s high placing may surprise those who hadn’t realized how much of his work originally appeared here under pseudonyms. Jerry Oltion, whose first story only appeared in 1982, is already the fourth-most prolific contributor of all time. No other post-1979 contributors have yet made the top 10. All told, the top 10 contributors have written over 11% of the total fiction in _ASF_.

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*Table 1*. All-time highest fiction contributors to ASF, 1930-2004.

Author, # stories, First, Last Year

“Christopher Anvil”, 83, 1956, 1995

Anderson, Poul, 74, 1944, 2001

Garrett, Randall, 66, 1944, 1978

Oltion, Jerry (Brian), 60, 1982, 2004

“Chan Corbett”, 57, 1931, 1941

“Murray Leinster”, 50, 1930, 1966

Russell, Eric Frank, 49, 1937, 1959

Reynolds, Mack, 46, 1952, 1980

van Vogt, A. E., 46, 1939, 1950

Asimov, Isaac, 45, 1939, 1991

Gallun, Raymond Z., 43, 1934, 1980

Kuttner, Henry, 40, 1938, 1953

Williamson, Jack, 39, 1931, 2001

Zahn, Timothy, 39, 1979, 2002

Smith, George O., 38, 1942, 1980

Janifer, Laurence M., 37, 1959, 2001

“Colin Keith”, 37, 1938, 1945

Rollins, Grey, 37, 1989, 2004

Schmitz, James H., 36, 1949, 1972

Simak, Clifford D., 35, 1932, 1980

Dickson, Gordon R., 35, 1951, 1985

Chilson, Robert, 34, 1968, 2001

Delaney, Joseph H., 33, 1982, 1998

Flynn, Michael F., 32, 1984, 2003

Bova, Ben, 32, 1962, 2003

Thompson, W. R., 31, 1983, 1998

Budrys, Algis J., 31, 1952, 1978

Sheffield, Charles, 31, 1978, 2002

Burns, Stephen L., 30, 1985, 2004

Hubbard, L. Ron, 30, 1938, 1950

Wodhams, Jack, 29, 1967, 1990

Jones, Raymond F., 29, 1941, 1966

de Camp, L. Sprague, 29, 1937, 1993

Turtledove, Harry, 27, 1984, 1999

Sparhawk, Bud, 27, 1976, 2002

del Rey, Lester, 27, 1938, 1957

Moore, C. L., 26, 1934, 1950

Peirce, Hayford, 26, 1974, 1999

Harrison, Harry, 26, 1957, 1975

Long, Frank Belknap, Jr., 26, 1934, 1950

Vinicoff, Eric, 25, 1975, 1992

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*Table 2*. Highest fiction contributors to ASF, 1980-2004.

Author, # stories, First, Last Year

Oltion, Jerry, 60, 1982, 2004

Rollins, Grey, 37, 1989, 2004

Delaney, Joseph H., 33, 1982, 1998

Flynn, Michael F., 32, 1984, 2003

Thompson, W. R., 31, 1983, 1998

Burns, Stephen L., 30, 1985, 2004

Turtledove, Harry, 27, 1984, 1999

Nordley, G David, 24, 1991, 2004

Burstein, Michael A., 23, 1995, 2004

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The sheer length of time some folks have contributed is also noteworthy. Jack Williamson’s record (first _ASF_ story in 1931; latest in 2001) is likely to stand for some time, but several other authors, including Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, and “Hal Clement,” have had contributions spanning more than half a century. Surprisingly, “Clement” didn’t make it into Table 1 because, although he was perhaps the quintessential hard SF writer, he published “only”(!) 20 stories in _ASF_.

Some authors go through bursts of activity interspersed with years of silence. (Yes, Stan: I _know_ I’m one of those!) The greatest gap between successive fictional appearances is Wilson (“Bob”) Tucker, who has a Probability Zero in 1943 and a short story in 1978. Paul Carter has an even longer gap between sheer appearances: he published a novelette in 1946 and an article in 1985. Especially noteworthy is Raymond Z. Gallun, a prominent contributor from the 1930s through early 50s who then published a story each in 1977 and 1980.

At the other extreme are authors who’ve written only one story — ever — that appeared in _ASF_. There have been 510 of these individuals, nearly 50% of the total authors, and they’ve written a bit more than 10% of the stories. There’s no obvious trend in their number over the years (Figure 1). Of course, there are lots of reasons one might only publish one story; time is pressing, after all, and writing fiction (at least for most of us) is _hard_.

The number of what John W. Campbell called “two-headed” authors — collaborations — also hasn’t changed much over the years. There were more than what you would have suspected in the old days, because of pseudonyms such as “Robert Randall,” the pen name of Randall Garrett’s and Robert Silverberg’s prolific collaboration. The paucity of collaborations strongly contrasts with the trend in the scientific literature, where few papers now have just one author. In fact, I’ve even heard that in at least some scientific fields, single-author papers now have less credibility, because the prejudice is that it’s just someone sounding off about a pet hypothesis. Of course, in fiction you’re _expected_ to be sounding off about something you care about, so it’s likely to remain largely a solo endeavor. Besides, no one likes divvying up the royalty payments, either.

The statistics for fact articles (again, neglecting editorials and columns) over the years is also interesting. (The fact that yours truly has written a bunch of them is _not_ relevant. Really. Cross my heart.) Since 1931 some 369 authors have written 985 articles. John W. Campbell appears to be the clear winner here (Table 3), but maybe we should discount this a bit because he _was_ the editor, after all. Leaving John out, then, the all-time winners are Willy Ley and Robert S. Richardson, with G. Harry Stine a distant third. (Yours truly comes in an even-more-distant fourth; I’ve got a long way to go to catch up to these guys.) Dr. Richardson, an astronomer who wrote lots of SF under the pseudonym “Philip Latham,” also wrote a popular astronomy book, _The Fascinating World of Astronomy_ (1964), which I remember fondly from my formative years.

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*Table 3*. All-time highest fact article contributors to ASF, 1931-2004.

Author, # articles, First, Last Year

Campbell, John W., Jr., 80, 1936, 1970

Ley, Willy, 50, 1937, 1952

Richardson, Robert S., 48, 1939, 1975

Stine, G. Harry, 30, 1954, 1996

Gillett, Stephen L., 25, 1983, 1999

Pierce, John R., 21, 1944, 1971

de Camp, L. Sprague, 20, 1938, 1993

Asimov, Isaac, 19, 1948, 1974

Silbar, Margaret L., 16, 1967, 1990

Bova, Ben, 15, 1964, 2003

Gribbin, John, 14, 1977, 1991

Lovett, Richard A., 12, 1999, 2004

Easton, Thomas A., 12, 1972, 1996

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The longest-duration article writer was L. Sprague de Camp, who was also one of the most prolific fiction writers. His first article appeared here in 1938; his last in 1993. Former editor Ben Bova and the late G. Harry Stine are others whose contributions have spanned decades. Conversely, Rick Lovett only began publishing articles here in 1999 and is already in the top 13 (Table 3). There are also many more one-time authors among the article-writers: 251 (68%) of those 369 authors have only written one article. Perhaps this isn’t too surprising, as it’s common for people to write about a topic in which they have special interest or expertise.

Like science and engineering, SF was traditionally male-dominated, so it’s also of interest to see how the number of women authors has changed over the years. C(atherine) L. Moore, whose last piece appeared here in 1950, is the highest ranking _ASF_ woman author for fiction (Table 4). However, all her stories appeared as “C. L. Moore” or under pseudonyms. “Jayge Carr” and Pauline Ashwell (a.k.a. “Paul Ash”) are tied for second with 21 stories apiece. Maya Bohnhoff, a prolific post-1979 contributor, is next with 19. For fact articles, Margaret L. Silbar easily wins (16 articles), far ahead of Catherine H. Shaffer with 2. Since Shaffer only first appeared here in 2003, though, we may well be hearing more from her. The longest-running woman contributor is Katherine MacLean, with Pauline Ashwell a close second.

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*Table 4*. All-time highest women fiction contributors to ASF, 1930-2004.

Author, # stories, First, Last Year

Moore, C. L., 26, 1934, 1950

“Jayge Carr”, 21, 1976, 2002

“Paul Ash”, 21, 1958, 2001

Bohnhoff, Maya K., 19, 1989, 2003

MacLean, Katherine, 14, 1949, 1997

Bechtel, Amy, 14, 1988, 2002

Latner, Alexis Glynn, 12, 1990, 2004

Martin, Marcia, 9, 1975, 1984

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Changes in the number of obviously female bylines over the years tell an even more striking tale. To get these statistics, I classified bylines as “male,” “female,” or “ambiguous,” the last category for androgynous names (“Sandy,” “Lee,” etc.) or for initials. (It doesn’t count that in many cases we now know the gender of the author behind those initials. Everyone now knows, for example, that “C. L. Moore” was female but “A. E. van Vogt” was male. We just have to go by what the byline indicates, which is all that the naive reader had to go on.) I also excluded multiple-author bylines. Neglecting the co-authored pieces, then, we have 1,136 single-author bylines, which break down as 862 (76%) male, 96 (8%) female, and 178 (16%) ambiguous. (Of course, male authors can hide behind ambiguous bylines, too: One reason I put out fiction under an androgynous name [_No,_ I’m not going to say! But it’s in the database.] is to mess with the minds of those who bring preconceptions to a story based on the author’s gender.)

If instead we just look at fiction published since 1979, there are 317 male (74%), 69 female (16%), and only 41 (10%) ambiguous bylines, for 427 total. Hence the number of women contributors _who are identified as women in the byline_ has increased in recent years. (This also does suggest that a disproportionate number of those “ambiguous” bylines were women.) The increase is even more apparent if we plot female bylines as a function of time (Figure 1), where a sharp upturn begins in the early 70s.

And people say there’s no such thing as progress!

Not just authors, but artists over the years have been critical to the success of _ASF_. Distilling the essence of a story into a set of lines on paper is a high art indeed. Moreover, no matter what the old saw says about not judging a book by its cover, the cover _is_ vital in selling a magazine, so at least a magazine’s newsstand success owes a lot to its artists.

One person, Kelly Freas, dominates the art of _ASF_ to a greater degree than any author dominates the stories (Table 5). Remarkably, too, Freas dominates _both_ cover artists and interior artists. A great many artists have specialized either in covers or in interior illustration; famed space artist Chesley Bonestell never did any interior illustrations, while prolific interior artist Elliot Dold never did any covers. The prize for most prolific woman artist goes to Janet Aulisio, who has done 133 interior illustrations and 7 covers since her first appearance here in 1977.

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*Table 5*. All-time highest artist contributors to ASF, 1930-2004.

Artist, Covers, First Cover, Last Cover, Interiors, First Interior, Last Interior

Freas, Kelly, 125, 1953, 2003, 480, 1953, 2003

Schoenherr, John, 75, 1960, 1983, 200, 1958, 1980

Rogers, Hubert, 58, 1939, 1952, 47, 1939, 1956

Brown, Howard V., 53, 1933, 1938, 18, 1934, 1939

Timmins, William, 53, 1942, 1950, 13, 1947, 1950

Di Fate, Vincent, 49, 1969, 2003, 184, 1969, 2004

van Dongen, Henry R., 47, 1951, 1985, 202, 1951, 1985

Wessolowski, Hans Waldemar, 41, 1930, 1938, 215, 1930, 1939

Hardy, David, 26, 1981, 2004, 19, 1981, 2002

Krauter, George, 17, 1994, 2004, 27, 1993, 2004

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Overall, there have also been fewer artists over the years: only about 311, of whom 125 (40%) have done covers. There have also been fewer “one-shot” artists, only 113 (36%). (Artists’ credits in the old days are sometimes a bit ambiguous, as they commonly consisted of just a surname or pseudonym. I’ve also counted collaborations separately. However, all obvious organizational credits or photographs are not counted.) Of course, artists also have competition from photographs; NASA photos graced the cover in 1968 and 1997, and there were even a couple of movie stills back in the 1950s. Photographs have also been common in articles, but not in stories — for obvious reasons!

A handful of people over the years have achieved a remarkable feat: they have appeared as _both_ artists and authors. In recent years Wolf Read and F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre have even illustrated their own stories, as did Katherine MacLean and Rick Gauger back in 1980. Of course, lots of article authors have also illustrated their pieces with diagrams or graphs. Even though they’re shown as “interior art” in Ashley’s index, however, such illustrations hardly count as “art,” even back in the not-so-long-ago days when graphs had to be drawn by hand! Some artists have also contributed articles _about_ SF art, which although of great interest, aren’t quite the same either.

Mike Ashley had also indexed the letters to _ASF_ over the years, and I’ve also brought them up to date. (Since letter writers, like artists, aren’t included in the year-end indices, I had to go through the issues by hand. This is an _extremely_ slow job, because it’s then so easy to get distracted into reading the _Analogs!_) As Kyle Kirkland in the July/August 2004 issue has done such a great job with the history of “Brass Tacks,” I won’t dwell on the letters here. I’ll just note that quite a few _ASF_ authors showed up first in the letter column (including yours truly, with a typical earnest-teenager letter in 1970).

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*Musings*

Of course, _ASF_ is more that just numbers and statistics (No matter _what_ some of the more clueless critics may think!), so it’s interesting to look at how some of the SF themes have changed over the years. Note, though, that this is hardly an exhaustive examination! It’s more a ramble over a few topics that have struck me now and again.

George O. Smith, whose classic stories on “Venus Equilateral”, an interplanetary radio relay station, appeared here in the 40s and 50s, are unfortunately highly dated now because of his _over_descriptions of the technology. Loving descriptions of vacuum tubes tend to jolt the modern reader right out of the story! For staying power, he would have done better to sketch the gadgetry a bit more vaguely. (Wannabe authors: are you paying attention?)

Charles Sheffield’s “Trader” stories (“Trader’s Secret,” Aug 1985; “Trader’s Blood,”, Apr 1986; “Trader’s Cross,” Mar 1987; “Trader’s Partner,” Jul 1987) included the collapse of the Soviet Union as a background element. I remember thinking at the time “what a naive notion” — but of course the joke’s now on me. Who’da thunk the Soviet Union would come apart like a soggy Kleenex within 10 years of the stories’ being written?

Space and space travel, of course, have been defining elements in SF and especially in _ASF_ since its creation. This is one place, though, where technology has gone a different direction than we’d thought. Even here in the early twenty-first century, there’s _still _no lunar base, much less scheduled service to the Moon, and no one’s even been to Mars, much less Venus. I suspect, though, that it’s not just that space is a harder problem than we’d thought, but that the destinations have proved to be a _lot_ less attractive than we’d thought. Of course, those shirtsleeve environments elsewhere in the Solar System were (ahem!) pretty tenuous even back when they were proposed. Even so, there’s little question that the utter hostility of the rest of the System has come as an unpleasant surprise. (I now have the feeling that blaming NASA for why we haven’t gotten into space any faster, a popular bit of conventional wisdom among some SF folks, is a bit like shooting the messenger. But that’s yet _another_ story.) In contrast to the real Venus, for example, the savage jungles of Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “Parasite Planet” (Feb 1935) and “The Lotus Eaters” (Apr 1935), Malcolm Jameson’s “Lilies of Life” (Feb 1945), or Henry Kuttner & Catherine L. Moore’s “Fury” (May-Jul 1947) now look downright homelike! For some years now, fictional shirtsleeve planetary environments have migrated to outside the Solar System. (One might wonder if that’s going to seem equally naive in another century or so … )

Another issue that’s held back space is that we keep finding technological end-runs that let us do on Earth things for which space had seemed the only possible environment. Zero-gee processing, for example: advances in biotechnology have rendered its proposed role for purifying biological compounds pretty much obsolete.

A nearly unconscious projection into the future has also been spaceships as bearers of commerce, in obvious analogy to ships plying the main on Earth. After all, “ships” _carry_ things, right? Why are you going to go, at least once you’ve gotten beyond sheer exploration, if you can’t exchange stuff? In retrospect, though, this projection was highly naive. I mean, _really_: you’re going to spend kazillions of joules to bring a few tonnes — or maybe even just a few _kilos_ — of some kind of organized matter across interplanetary distances, much less across light-years? If you’ve got _that_ kind of energy available, why not just make whatever you’re bringing instead? Even if it’s a spice or a foodstuff or a pharmaceutical or some other biological product, it was synthesized _somehow,_ out of simpler compounds. Indeed, a biological synthesizer like a plant is just a solar-powered molecular-level manufacturing device.

Of course, you see where the discussion is headed: as nanotechnology matures, it will replace a reliance on sheer raw energy with ever-more powerful abilities to organize matter at the molecular scale. As “matter becomes software” the consequences for trade even on _Earth_ will be profound, never mind for space. Consider, for example, Heinlein’s _Citizen of the Galaxy_ (Sep-Dec 1957). One element in the story was independent interstellar traders whose nuclear-powered starships even carried nuclear weapons. This juxtaposition of vast quantities of nuclear energy to haul a few tonnes of organized organics across light years … well, however ironic it seems now, it probably seemed a reasonable story element at the time. I’ve also heard, via a mutual friend, that the late Poul Anderson once commented that nanotechnology had rendered his stories of the traders of the Polesotechnic League “quaint.” Alas, such classics as his _The Man Who Counts_ (Feb-Apr 1958), “Hiding Place” (Mar 1961), “The Three-Cornered Wheel” (Oct 1963), _Trader Team_ (Jul-Aug 1965), “A Sun Invisible” (Apr 1966) and _Satan’s World_ (May-Aug 1968) must now be relegated to a future that will never come to pass. How perspectives shift! One might well wonder which of our present tropes will appear staggeringly naive in another 75 years.

Asteroid mining is a particularly fascinating case: an old SF idea that became Conventional Wisdom and is now becoming obsolete — and all without actually happening! SF writers for years have touted the “near-infinite wealth of the asteroids,” and _ASF_ authors such as Randall Garrett and Poul Anderson almost singlehandedly invented the now-stereotypical Belter civilization, with its rugged individualists set against an oppressive, decadent Earth. Look at Garrett’s “Anchorite” (Nov 1962) or “Thin Edge” (Dec 1963), or Anderson’s “Industrial Revolution” (Oct 1963). The subgenre has not vanished by any means, as shown by Jerry Pournelle’s and Charles Sheffield’s _Higher Education_ (Feb-May 1996). Even Ben Bova’s _Precipice_ (May-Dec 2001), with its substantially more nuanced treatment of politics, is set against the background of a resource-exhausted and desperate Earth. Asteroid mining has even made the transition into serious futurism, as shown by mainstream nonfiction books like John S. Lewis’s _Mining the Sky _(1996).

And yet, asteroid mining — at least for materials for use on Earth — is another thing that nanotechnology has most probably made obsolete, as I’ve pointed out previously in the pages of this magazine (“Near-Term Nanotechnology”, Oct 1998). Element separation is _not_ intrinsically an energy-intensive procedure, as biology shows repeatedly. Consider plants’ extraction, using only the fitful and diffuse energy of sunlight, of CO2 from the atmosphere, where (even now) its concentration is only about 350 parts per million. Conventional processing of conventional ores is energy-intensive because it’s an extremely clumsy technology (see “Beyond Prometheus”, Dec 1993). It uses vast flows of heat to force phase changes (melting, boiling, crystallization, etc.) Elements then partition into one or another phase, and we collect the one we want. An example is molten iron separating out from molten slag, while the oxygen originally combined with the iron wafts away as CO2.

Biosystems don’t do anything so cumbersome. They carry out their separations molecularly, using molecular mechanisms that literally grab individual atoms or molecules and move them around. Not only is this vastly more efficient, it also lets you deal with much more dispersed sources. In fact, separation at this scale blurs the difference between a “pollutant” and a “resource.” It becomes semantic: if we _want_ what we extract, it’s a resource. Otherwise it’s a pollutant.

Hence an early application for nanotechnology will be in molecular separation, and probably the initial economic driver will be pollution control. A lot of my research in recent years has been directed toward technological approaches to molecular separation. I may write an article about it one of these days, if Ye Esteemed Editor agrees. Watch This Space….

It’s been widely commented, too, that the one direction in which technology _has_ advanced staggeringly — computer technology — is one that almost everyone missed. Someone’s noted that not so long ago the phrase “personal computer” would have sounded as oxymoronic as “personal nuclear submarine.” It’s indeed now a bit jarring to read in old stories of engineers’ slipping slide rules on spacecraft … and if there was a mechanical computer on board, it was inevitably huge, with its working often accompanied by the sound of “whirring gears.”

Even as the _personal_ computer revolution settled in it was still hard to grasp both the scale of changes and their speed. Jerry Oltion now laughs that his “Frame of Reference” (Jan 1984) tossed out the phrase “10 megabytes” as representing an astronomical amount of storage space. A single-page scan, of which I made _dozens_ in the process of computerizing the database, is equivalent to a whole box of 1980s-vintage 360K floppy disks.

Against that background, though, it’s nice to report some uncannily prescient hits. In the early 1960s, long-time contributor Dean McLaughlin told of database searching at the local library, with the comment that some people had become wealthy because of finding unexpected connections between widely separated fields of knowledge. Sounds like what we now call “data mining” to me. And the matter-of-fact descriptions of ubiquitous robotics and what we’d now call “IT” in Randall Garrett’s “The Hunting Lodge” (Jul 1954) seem unremarkable today, but no doubt seemed utterly fantastic in the early 1950s — perhaps even more fantastic than Moon voyages.

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_Ad Astra per Analogia?_

Once again, The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be. But let’s hope we have _Analog_ authors around to keep giving us previews for the _next_ 75 years.

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Copyright (C) 2005 by Stephen L. Gillett.

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CH009

*The Alternate View*: Review of _Kicking a Sacred Cow_

Jeffery D. Kooistra

It was a sunny summer day in 1997. I was in the backyard with my father-in-law assembling a new swingset for my kids when my wife Dorothy called to me from the back door. “Jeff, you have a phone call. James Hogan. Do you know him?”

Well, the only “James Hogan” I’d ever heard of was James P. Hogan, one of my very favorite science fiction authors starting from when I was in high school. But we’d never met, nor even communicated, and I couldn’t think of any reason why a blue supergiant SF star like him would be calling a puny red dwarf like me.

I answered the phone with “hello,” and he said, “Hello Jeffery, this is James Hogan.”

“_Which_ ‘James Hogan?’” I asked.

“Oh, the _writer_,” he replied with that accent of his.

And I thought, “Holy shit! _James P. Hogan_ is calling _me_!”

As it turned out, he had recently read my fact piece “Paradigm Shifty Things” in that year’s June _Analog_, and he was struck by how my thinking paralleled his own. We both recognized that in many cases we’d been oversold on just how established certain “established facts” in science actually are.

During that conversation, Hogan told me he was working on a non-fiction book called _Truth Under Tyranny_ which would expose the actual truth behind many scientific controversies. It is my proud and happy privilege to review that book for you now under its published title of _Kicking the Sacred Cow: Questioning the Unquestionable and Thinking the Impermissible_. [From Baen Books, 2004, ISBN 0-7434-8828-8]

One thing that puzzled (surprised, maybe _shocked_) me during that phone conversation with Hogan was that he was a mainstream science skeptic like me, for this was not the James P. Hogan I knew from his early books. In the Introduction, Hogan explains how his views evolved. On page 3 he says, “The picture of science that I carried into those early stories reflected the idealization of intellectual purity that textbooks and popularizers portray.” However, his earlier idealistic understanding of how science works was brought back down to Earth by the nuclear power controversy.

What it was Hogan figured out from that controversy is summed up succinctly on the bottom of page 3 following into page 4. I will quote him at length, because this describes exactly the sort of thing that has led others of us long-time science cheerleaders to become critics instead. He says: “It wasn’t just political activists with causes, and journalists cooking a story who were telling the public things that the physicists and engineers I knew in the nuclear field insisted were not so. Other scientists were telling them too. So either scientists were being knowingly dishonest and distorting facts to promote political views; or they were sincere, but ideology or some other kind of bias affected what they were willing to accept as fact; or vested interests and professional blinkers were preventing the people whom I was talking to from seeing things as they were. Whichever way, the ideal of science as an immutable standard of truth where all parties applied the same rules and would be obliged to agree on the same conclusion was in trouble.”

He adds on page 5 the following, four sentences which every scientist, science fiction writer and/or reader — hell, every _citizen_ — should understand about science and scientists: “Whatever science might be as an ideal, scientists turn out to be as human as anyone else, and they can be as obstinate as anyone else when comfortable beliefs solidify into dogma. Scientists have emotions — often expressed passionately, despite the myths — and can be as ingenious as any senator at rationalizing when a reputation or a lifetime’s work is perceived to be threatened. They value prestige and security no less than anyone else, which inevitably fosters convergences of interests with political agendas that control where the money and jobs come from. And far from the least, scientists are members of a social structure with its own system of accepted norms and rewards, commanding loyalties that at times can approach fanaticism, and with rejection and ostracism being the ultimate unthinkable.”

I know: I’m almost halfway through this review and I haven’t gotten to any of the sacred cows Hogan kicks. But the merits of the book cannot be separated from Hogan’s reasons for writing it. He, like me, loves science, always loved science, and continues to love science. He, like me, hasn’t become critical because he now hates it. Rather, he is ashamed of it when its practitioners fail to live up to their own professed standards. Hogan’s willingness to look at other views from outside the mainstream of acceptability does not arise from an inability to understand “real science”; it comes from understanding science in a deeper way than many scientists do. His willingness to consider “heretical” views does not arise from a lack of skepticism; it comes from being _more_ skeptical of accepted science than most people are used to.

With the aforesaid firmly in mind, we proceed to the sacred cows.

The body of the book is broken into six sections. In section one he goes after Darwinism, in section two, modern cosmology, and in section three, relativity theory and the ether. These three sections tend to be more technical than the other three, questioning scientific orthodoxy with scientific evidence either ignored or unappreciated by the mainstream. Section four deals with the Velikovsky controversy, section five with environmentalist ideology “masquerading as science,” and section six with AIDS. Although Hogan also brings scientific evidence to bear in kicking the cows in these last three sections, the issues raised are more concerned with the sociology of science than are those in the first three. Because of this, they also will bring the most hate mail, since everybody “knows” DDT killed the birds, and everybody “knows” HIV causes AIDS, with far more certainty then they “know” that the Universe started in a Big Bang.

The full title of section one is “Humanistic Religion: The Rush to Embrace Darwinism.” I’ve always known that Darwinism is a religion because I come from a religious background so I recognize religion when I see it. It is harder for people without this background to notice this because they have to rely on their own (usually) flawed caricature of what religions and religious people are like to make the comparison. Consider what that popularizer of Darwinism Richard Dawkins said (as Hogan quotes him on page 16): “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” Dawkins probably never noticed that his statement is every bit as religious as it would be if a Fundamentalist preacher said it, but simply substituted “God” for “evolution.”

What is most valuable about section one is that Hogan brings to the debate his perspective as one who was once a true believer, but is now skeptical, yet without becoming a “creationist.” He presents a compact yet reasonably thorough discussion of where evolution falls short as a theory of origins, touching on the usual problems cited by critics, like the failure of the fossil record to support evolution the way it was expected to, and the “irreducible complexity” of the cell revealed by modern molecular biology. Granted, one chapter in an iconoclastic book shouldn’t make you up and discard your earlier belief in evolution, but it should make you see that some people who don’t believe in evolution are far from being ignorant, stupid, or insane.

Section two is a useful summary of modern cosmology and what is wrong with it. Hogan covers briefly some of the same material covered at length in another book I reviewed in my April 2003 column, that being Hoyle, Burbidge, and Narlikar’s _A Different Approach to Cosmology_. Hogan explains how the Big Bang model came to be accepted, and how later work, often ignored by the mainstream, has offered simpler, less epicylic, explanations for how galaxies formed and why there is a universal, uniform 2.7K background radiation. If you want to know what will be accepted mainstream cosmology ten or fifteen years from now, and you don’t have time for the Hoyle book, this section will go a long way toward meeting the same need.

Section three correctly states the true position of those non-cranks who have objections to relativity theory. As Hogan puts it (page 113), “The objections are not so much to the effect that relativity is ‘wrong.’” Rather, “…the premises relativity is founded on, although enabling procedures to be formulated that correctly predict experimental results, nevertheless involve needlessly complicated interpretations of the way things are.”

As in the previous two sections, Hogan does a nice job of summarizing the accepted view and explaining why some have problems with it, and what their alternative explanations are. But in writing a brief chapter like this, one must include some things and ignore others. I was a bit disappointed because if I had written it, I would have included other people and other ideas than those Hogan chose. For instance, in that same April 2003 column, I reviewed two books by Oleg D. Jefimenko, which show _precisely_ how relativity is simply the inescapable result of the finite propagation velocity of electromagnetic interactions. Yet Jefimenko gets no mention from Hogan.

Section four is called “Catastrophe of Ethics: The Case for Taking Velikovsky Seriously.” If you’ve heard of Velikovsky at all, it is likely negatively, as just some nut case who thought he could explain the miracles of the Bible by having Venus somehow shot out of Jupiter in historical times. Hogan himself used to think essentially this, but later actually read Velikovsky’s books and discovered that what the man was and said in reality were essentially different, and a great deal more reasonable, than the simple disparaging caricature suggests. This chapter will not turn you into a Velikovskian, but it will show you just how unscientific and _untruthful_ even scientists will be when defending against incursions on their turf.

Section five is one of my favorites. Therein Hogan gives an _accurate_ — as opposed to the usual hysterical — assessment of the dangers of global warming, ozone depletion, radiation, asbestos, and most eloquently, the pesticide DDT. For me, his discussion of how and why DDT came to be demonized and discontinued is the most disquieting. Apparently, there is not and never has been any reason based on legitimate science for banning DDT. This was already known in 1972 when then EPA Administrator William Ruckleshaus ignored the scientific evidence and banned DDT for, as Hogan’s sources report he himself said, political reasons. Because of this, millions die each year from malaria.

In section six Hogan argues that, contrary to accepted dogma, HIV does not cause AIDS. I’ve been suspicious of this claim myself, and I thought the AIDS fact article in the October 2004 _Analog_ read more like propaganda than science. But the ins and outs of AIDS research are outside my areas of either expertise or interest. However, on page 314 Hogan asks: “Where is the study that proves HIV causes AIDS?” He knows of no definitive answer to this question, and neither do I. If you have the answer, send me the reference, or better yet, the paper itself, and I’ll pass it on to him.

In short, get it, read it. You may not agree with Hogan, but you couldn’t find a more levelheaded person to introduce you to both interesting and important heresies.

This book is one giant Alternate View.

With a vengeance.

— Jeffery D. Kooistra

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CH010

*The Reference Library*

Reviews by Tom Easton

*The Green and the Gray*

Timothy Zahn

Tor, $27.95, 445 pp.

(ISBN: 0-765-30717-0)

Timothy Zahn ventures into new territory with The Green and the Gray, and to very good effect. His specialty has been action-adventure hard SF, ranging from popular _Star Wars_ titles to _Manta’s Gift_ (reviewed here in April 2003). This one has the action and the adventure, but is it SF? It’s billed as “an exciting fusion of science fiction and urban fantasy,” but it’s less a fusion than a phasion.

That is — Phase One — it starts off feeling like fantasy. The scene is Manhattan, where the Greens and the Grays are about to sacrifice a Green maiden, Melantha, in order to achieve peace. But as the kid is being choked to death, someone intervenes and snatches her away. Unfortunately, the snatcher is wounded and soon Roger and Caroline Whittier, walking home from a pretentious amateur drama, are confronted by a bulky fellow with a gun who hands them Melantha and demands that they protect her. They get the kid home, tuck her in, and call the cops. But when the cops show up, the kid has vanished. Not only that, but prowlers show up on their balcony, quite inaccessibly high above the street.

Something strange is going on, and it doesn’t take long to get stranger. The Greens have an affinity for trees and even merge into them to hide or bed down for the night. The Grays climb walls like spiders and can render themselves practically invisible. The Greens can knock one flat with a shriek. The Grays have hammerguns that deliver powerful blows before flying back to their owner’s hand. And it isn’t long before we learn that both groups arrived in Manhattan (in 1928) as refugees from a nasty war on another world.

We’re into Phase Two — Science Fiction — now. That war is about to erupt again. If Melantha is not returned to her people, large parts of Manhattan are likely to be destroyed. But as Roger and Caroline soon learn, there are factions within both Greens and Grays. They gain the help of one of New York’s Finest detectives, who quite remarkably seems able to swallow the weirdness of the situation, but will they be able to unravel the truth of war and factions and achieve a lasting peace? That’s the goal right from the start, even though it seems just as elusive as it ever is for mere humans.

And if hammerguns seem familiar, you just may have a clue to the world these Greens and Grays originally came from, and thus to the way Zahn winds up blurring the boundary between fantasy and SF in a way that actually makes a good deal of sense. He’s having fun, and so will you. This is the kind of SF that hooked us when we were kids.

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*Gaudeamus*

John Barnes

Tor, $24.95, 320 pp.

(ISBN: 0-765-30329-9)

For a different kind of different, try John Barnes’s Gaudeamus. The narrator, John, a writer much like Barnes himself, is blessed with an old college chum, Travis Bismarck, a private detective who has a tendency to pop up unexpectedly, wanting rides someplace and bearing strange stories. This time, John has just wrapped up his early-morning ritual of perusing “Gaudeamus,” a daily webcomic with an astonishing variety of connections to the real world, even of minutes before its posting, and an even more astonishing technical virtuosity that should require very powerful computers and weeks of time to achieve, when Travis knocks on the door. Now it’s “Heigh-Ho, let’s have some of that super-strong coffee of yours, of course with a drop of your Wild Turkey, and don’t worry, they’re after me, not you.”

It seems that Travis was hired to pin down a leak in a super-secret research facility. A bit of tailing and a few bugs later, and he’s found a call girl with a supercomputer in her fridge, a nice line in marvelous pills called “goddies,” and the very strange ability to recite the text of papers sitting in a typewriter — not a computer, not networked — miles away. That’s a helluva leak, folks, and it’s just the beginning. There’s some super tech of just the sort to appeal to old-time _Analog_ readers, a serial killer who turns out to be one of the good guys, aliens who think they can buy the planet, a crazed environmentalist, a very bad rock group, flying saucers, and a robodeer.

The last third of the book has too many shortcuts — as if the manuscript were originally twice the length and was edited down too clumsily — to suit me, but Barnes still makes it work. He even leaves the reader wishing the tech gimmick could be real, for it would solve at least as many problems as he says it would.

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*The Family Trade*

Charles Stross

Tor, $24.95, 303 pp.

(ISBN: 0-765-30929-7)

If you think Charles Stross can only do space opera as in _Iron Sunrise_ (reviewed here in January-February 2005), brace yourself. On the acknowledgements page of The Family Trade, Stross says his agent urged him “to make a radical change of direction,” and the result owes more than a little to his fondness for H. Beam Piper and Roger Zelazny.

He begins with Miriam Beckstein, an ace investigative reporter who, looking into investments in the biotech field, has discovered that large amounts of money are being laundered. Unfortunately, some of the folks involved own her paper. Only minutes after broaching the topic to her boss, she and her researcher are on the street. A few hours later, her adoptive mother decides it is high time to turn over a shoebox full of clippings about her mother’s mysterious death, along with a tarnished locket. That evening, she sits down in her home office, opens the locket, discovers a knotwork pattern, and stares at it until she finds herself with a splitting headache and surrounded by forest.

An Otherwhen without a Lord Kalvan? An Amber with a more arduous crossing? It isn’t long before she learns the truth, for she is kidnapped from her bedroom and transported to a palace ruled by Duke Angbard of House Lofstrom, who is her uncle. Her mother, it seems, was an important person, and she is in effect a Cinderella princess. The realm of Gruinmarkt (northeastern America) is ruled by an aristocracy with strong spiritual kinships to the Medicis. The Clan to which she and Angbard belong is the only group with the world-walking talent, and it has used that talent to move large quantities of low-mass, high-value commodities (yup — cocaine!) around Earthly borders and thus build great wealth and power. There are large numbers of vested interests, political factions, and cousins who will surely find the sudden reappearance of a long-lost heiress threatening. Since women have no standing of their own, the solution, Angbard tells her, is to form a strong alliance by marriage as soon as possible.

But Miriam is a modern American gal, well educated in medicine, economics, and business. She does not find a world of such retro sexism appealing, and she also thinks the Clan’s business model could use some serious updating. (After all, wealth derived from the drug trade can evaporate in a hurry if Congress ever gets smart enough to legalize drugs.) She therefore does not take long to start her own brand of scheming.

But all we see is the start of the process. _Family Trade_ is just the start of a series that seems bound to be very popular. Stross has set up the situation, established Miriam as a doughty heroine quite capable of shooting to kill, and made it clear that there are numerous forces in play, including at least one that only Miriam suspects.

Watch for the next. This series is going to be fun.

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*The Life of the World to Come*

Kage Baker

Tor, $25.95, 332 pp.

(ISBN: 0-765-31132-1)

Kage Baker has earned praise for her tales of the Company, a future-based outfit that “recruits” throughout time, turns its new troops into immortal cyborgs, and sends them out to fill in the blank spots of history, collect treasures before they are lost, and defend the Company’s interests. One of those recruits was the Botanist Mendoza, who fell in love with a mortal in sixteenth-century Spain and watched him burn at the stake. In 1862, she encountered his look-alike, one Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, in California and promptly vanished. Now, in The Life of the World to Come, we learn that she was exiled to an island 150,000 years in the past, where for the last 3,000 years (experiential time) she has tended her very isolated garden. But now here is her boyfriend again! He’s Alec Checkerfield, seventh earl of Finsbury, this time, and what the heck is going on?

Trust Baker to tell all, or nearly so. We learned in _The Graveyard Game_ (reviewed here in September 2001) that the Company has been stashing its cyborg goon-squads in hidden stasis vaults, letting troops of more civilized mien be seen in public instead. Now we learn that Alec is a tetraploid, engineered from the genetic remnants of a long-extinct prehuman species, and that the Company made three of him. Somehow each one found Mendoza. The first two promptly died. The third … Alec is a prodigy of the twenty-fourth century; as a child he hacked his AI playmate free of its programmed constraints. Now he has a prodigious aide in Captain Morgan, an echo of the age of pirates, vast wealth, a ship of his own, a life as a smuggler, and a deep anger for those who made him and destroyed lives in the process. When Mendoza learns Alec hails from just a few short years before the 2355 Silence, the cutoff beyond which the Company cannot see, she salutes him as the company’s nemesis.

And perhaps he is. He has the skills, the anger, and even the allies. But he does not know of the hidden cyborg troops, nor does he suspect the existence of factions and secret enemies with potent weapons that can incapacitate the cyborgs, all of which we glimpsed in _Graveyard Game_. There has to be at least one more volume when Baker brings it all together.

Look for it! Baker does not disappoint!

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*Rift*

Richard Cox

Ballantine, $23.95, 261 pp.

(ISBN: 0-345-46283-1)

Richard Cox’s first novel, Rift, is a promising harbinger. Once Cox learns better control of his material, he will be a contender.

_Rift_’s premise is simple: NeuroStor has been developing expensive, giga-capacity memory chips. But now Cameron Fisher, a bored, unmotivated accountant, is being told by his boss that the real and hitherto secret agenda is the development of quantum teleportation for human bodies, and that he can have five million bucks just for letting them send him through the gadget to test how well it works. Or he will be fired.

Cameron’s wife doesn’t like the idea, but he’s buying the boss’s line about how this will let him make a difference with his nebbish life. So he agrees, closes his eyes in Texas, and opens them in Arizona, where his long-time best friend Tom meets him and takes him to a strip joint where they admire a dancer named Crystal. Then they go golfing, where Cameron discovers his coordination is off. He fears that the process has been imperfect, and he’s been messed up. Soon they are being pursued, Tom is dead, and Cameron is tumbling along a streambed with Tom’s last words — “Find Crystal!” — ringing in his ears.

Something is clearly amiss, but Crystal’s eventual explanation of it all as a neo-Aryan plot which she — and now Cameron, of course — must defeat just doesn’t ring true. Cameron isn’t bored, he’s more motivated than ever in his life before, and the cover blurb (“_The Matrix_ meets _Mission: Impossible_”) has the reader wondering if what’s really going on is a VR cure for ennui. The truth has a lot more to do with the company’s memory tech, for as every SF fan knows, as soon as you can convert a material object (alive or not) to information, you can save it as well as transmit it. And then, of course, you can transmit it again.

Cameron’s a bit doubtful about the plot as well, but he still lets Crystal lead him toward the final confrontation. He’s mad enough on his own — the scan errors are looking worse, his best friend is dead, people are chasing him — so she doesn’t have a hard job. As that final confrontation nears, however, schemes that warrant elaborate preparation are presented as last-minute improvisations. The reader stops believing the story could really happen this way, and even though the ending is true to the material, the end result is not very satisfying.

Still, Cox should improve with experience. Keep an eye on him.

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*Life*

Gwyneth Jones

Aqueduct Press, $19, 370 pp.

(ISBN: 0-9746559-2-9)

Gwyneth Jones has published almost a dozen novels under her own name since she appeared on the scene in the late 1970s, and a few juveniles under her “Ann Halam” pseudonym. There is also the scholarly _Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction, and Reality_ (Liverpool University Press, 1998), but it was for her fiction that she scored the Tiptree award (1992), the World Fantasy Award (1996), and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (2002).

Now we have Life, a curious construction that is well worth recommending. The basic idea is that several young people meet in college in England. There is the hero Anna Senoz; the American import, Spence, who becomes her lover and eventually her husband; and the mad feminist Ramone Holyrod, among others. Anna is studying biology intensely, and in due time she makes a curious discovery: a piece of the Y chromosome (which marks males) is jumping to the X chromosome (females have two, males have just one). In her dogged pursuit, she repeatedly runs afoul of the men who dominate the labs in which she works. She is forced to drop it, keep her head down, and get on with life — marriage, a stillbirth, earning a living, even in countries where sexual politics takes a repressive turn. Jones tracks her through it all, including her rape by a fellow grad student and the recurring appearances of Ramone to remind us of the madness of extreme feminism. Yet she keeps coming back to her discovery, and eventually she manages to piece together enough evidence to publish strong papers. But the papers are uniformly dismissed at first; only when others make supportive discoveries does the fit truly hit the shan.

What? Why? Jones’s work marks her as a strong feminist, and indeed in an afterword she likens herself to Ramone. To her it seems reasonable to say that anything that threatens the sexual or gender status quo will get people excited. And here is something that threatens a very basic sexual distinction, as well as affecting fertility. The world reacts as if Anna has somehow destroyed the difference between the genders, and here is where I have trouble. I am sure some people will react just as unreasonably as Jones depicts — there are pundits aplenty in the media who would jump on this as hungry dogs jump on a steak. But most people pay very little attention to the pundits. And gender behavior is so largely learned that I just cannot bring myself to see any real threat; I suspect most of the public just wouldn’t get the point of the fuss.

So be it. Jones portrays her main characters as convincingly as any writer one can name. The point of the novel is the life of an intelligent woman, Anna, who, despite living in a modern age and a culturally advanced nation, still must confront sexual politics. She and her friends and her colleagues are all “enlightened,” but still, she is a woman and therefore regarded as not quite as good or significant or worth paying attention to as a man. This gripes her as it gripes Jones, and perhaps she wishes that something like the chromosomal change she imagines would come along to redress the imbalance. Justice would be served.

But perhaps her chief-scientist character, KM Nirmal, is a better example of the way things might work out in some best-of-all-possible worlds. He’s old-school. When Anna’s working for him, she is supposed to obey orders, do the work he sets for her, and _not_ undertake anything independent, even if it does lead to interesting discoveries. But he comes around when her independence is pushed in his face and he’s had time to think. Sexual politics would be less urgent if more men were capable of admitting error. (Women too, for that matter.)

Jones is an enormously skilled writer who has clearly thought about these issues in depth and at length. The events of the story resonate with the title of her scholarly book, _Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction, and Reality_, and perhaps she is right to insist in her fiction that a scientific discovery on the microscopic scale of chromosomes could affect the reality of sexual politics. I’m not convinced, but Jones is nevertheless well worth the reading.

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*Lurulu*

Jack Vance

Tor, $23.95, 204 pp.

(ISBN: 0-312-86727-1)

It has been six years since Jack Vance’s _Ports of Call_, which I said in my September 1998 review marked a decline since Vance’s heyday. Vance remains one of the Grand Old Men of science fiction, renowned and much imitated for his archly ornate style. But what remains today seems more style than substance. In _Ports of Call_, Myron Tany was a hanger-on to his rich and capricious aunt, Dame Hester Lajoie, who had won a spaceship in a lawsuit and decided to use it to pursue rumors of a Fountain of Youth. Myron lasted as captain of the ship until he crossed one of her pet sycophants. The next stage of his career saw him as crew on a tramp freighter hopping from world to world and seeing sights galore. And that was it. At the time, I said the book left me feeling like it was missing its second half.

Lurulu continues the tale. Vance’s style remains, but the plot is straightforward and without complication or setback as Myron and his captain, Maloof, track down Maloof’s mother, who fell victim to a con man who spirited her away to the reputedly most beautiful world in the Gaean Reach, Fluter. Now Maloof is on Fluter, and in short order he and Myron track down the missing couple. With that success behind them, they are off on the track of Dame Lajoie; soon all is hunky-dory and the title seems justified. “‘Lurulu’ is a special word from the language of myth,” meaning the long-sought desideratum, the quest object, the grail. But it adds the idea of being ever-elusive, the reach beyond the grasp, and perhaps that is enough to justify Vance’s effort. But I was not satisfied. We are accustomed to story arcs that dip and reverse — A. J. Budrys once taught that a hero’s progress should be marked by seven setbacks (more or less), and though Myron had setbacks in _Ports of Call_, he has none here. His track is smooth. There is no suspense. There is only the Vancian style and a pithy moral. And those are not enough.

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*Jovian*

Donald Moffitt

ibooks, $24.95, 421 pp.

(ISBN: 0-7434-5277-1)

Donald Moffitt’s Jovian is unabashed space opera in a familiar vein. Jarls Anders hails from the cloud-cities of Jupiter, the backwoods of the Solar System. Like all Jovians, he is superbly strong, and when a recruiter comes to town, he signs up for what sound like excellent job prospects. When he learns the truth — not a lush Earth-side three-year contract, but perpetual debt-servitude in the hell that is Venus — he defies authority, survives assassination attempts, and is shipped out to Mercury, whence few return. But he escapes to Earth and is soon involved in a scheme to upset the status quo.

From slave to revolutionary hero is a familiar path in fiction, if not in real life. Moffitt brings to the tale his usual skills, and though this edition is a couple of years old, Don tells me that there will be by Spring 2005 an e-book/print-on-demand edition and perhaps a trade paperback edition as well.

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CH011

*Upcoming Events*

Compiled by Anthony Lewis

25-28 March 2005

PARAGON2/EASTERCON 2005 (56th British National SF Convention) at Hanover International Hotel, Hinckley, Leicestershire, UK. Guests of Honor: Richard Morgan, John & Eve Harvey, Ben Jeapes, Ken MacLeod, Robert Rankin. Registration until November 2004: GBP40 attending, GBP15 supporting, GBP20 junior, GBP5 child. Info: <www.paragon2.org.uk>; <sofa@paragon2. org.uk>; +44(0) 114.281.0674; John Dowd, 4 Burnside Ave., Sheffield S8 9FR, UK.

1-3 April 2005

MIDSOUTHCON 23 (Middle Southern conference) at Holiday Inn Select, Memphis, TN. Guest of Honor: Esther M. Friesner. Artist Guest of Honor: Steve Hickman. Gaming Guest of Honor: Games Workshop. Registration: $30 until 1 March 2005, $35 at door. Info: <info@midsouthcon.org>; <www.midsouthcon.org>; (901) 274-7355, (731) 664-6730. (731) 664-4320 (fax); Midsouthcon, Box 11446, Memphis, TN 38111-0446.

1-3 April 2005

TECHNICON 22 (Southern Virginia SF conference) at Blacksburg, VA. Theme: The Age of Chivalry. Guests of Honor: Lois McMaster Bujold and Pete Abrams. Info: <info@technicon.org>; <www.technicon.org.>

8-10 April 2005

I-CON 24 (Long Island SF conference) at SUNY Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY. Info: <info@iconsf.org>; <www.iconsf.org>; (631) 632-6045, (631) 632-6355 (fax); I-CON, Box 550 Stony Brook, NY 11790-0550.

8-10 April 2005

ODYSSEY CON V (Wisconsin area SF conference) at Radisson Inn, Madison, WI. Guest of Honor: Lois McMaster Bujold. Registration: $35 until 20 March 2005. Info: <oddcon@oddcon.org>; <www.venture1.com/~oddcon/home.html>; (608) 260-9924; Jerome Van Epps, 901 Jenifer St., Madison, WI 53703.

8-10 April 2005

WILLYCON 7 (Nebraska SF conference) at Wayne State College, Wayne, NE. Guest of Honor: Julie E. Czerneda. Artist Guest of Honor: A.B. Word. Fan Guest of Honor: Rodney Ruff. Registration: $15 until 1 March 2005, $20 thereafter. Info: <RoVik1@wsc.edu>; <wildcat.wsc.edu/clubs.sfclub.textsite/willycon>; WillyCon, Student Center, Rm. 103, Attn: Ron Vick, 1111 Main St., Wayne, NE 68717.

21-24 April 2005

AGGIECON 36 (Texas SF conference) at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX. Registration: $15 student/$20 non-student until 31 March 2005, $20 student/$25 non-student at the door. Info: <Mayafh@tamu.edu; <aggiecon.tamu.edu.>

_Running a convention? If your convention has a telephone number, fax number, e-mail address, or web page URL, please let us know so that we can publish this information. We must have your information in hand SIX months before the date of your convention._

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CH012

*Brass Tacks*

Letters from Our Readers

Dear Mr. Schmidt,

I just read “Attack of the Giant Oxymorons.” As usual, it was a great editorial.

You have this uncanny knack of seizing upon a subject and breaking it to fragments — then carefully studying each piece. Many times the subject will be something I haven’t given much thought to, if at all. But then this door opens and I say to myself, “Hey, this is an _important_ observation. How come I didn’t think about it before?” Then after I’ll go back and reread the parts I thought the most critical.

I don’t read newspapers anymore: usually they are details of some disaster I can’t do anything about. (That’s the press: details, details, details!) But there’s one thing I _will_ read and that’s your editorials. They’re valuable and they’re something once can actually use. I think everybody should read them.

Keep up your exceptional work!

Paul De Vinny

Hayward, CA

PS. Robert Silverberg’s editorials are okay. But he’s simply not in your class.

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Dear Dr. Schmidt,

I’ve just read Jeffery Kooistra’s “Alternative View” in the November 2004 issue of _Analog_, and as always his writing leaves me pondering, yet unconvinced by, his reasoning. He attempts to make the argument that the development of the H-bomb by the U.S. before the Soviets was critical for winning the Cold War, and that without that sequence of events, the U.S. “might” have lost the Cold War to the Soviets. I do not see why this sequence of events should have been so pivotal.

In the ‘40s and ‘50s, the U.S. had the A-bomb, and had aircraft that could fly great distances at very high altitudes so as not to be easily intercepted, giving the U.S. the ability to deliver those bombs where it wished. So when Mr. Kooistra asks what the U.S. could have done if the Soviets got the H-bomb first and staged an “accidental” H-bomb attack, the answer seems obvious: A U.S. aircraft traveling over the Soviet Union could have dropped something (by “mistake” of course), and the message would have been sent, either in the form of a dud or as an actual wiped out [insert name of target city here], that the U.S. had the means to respond to threats. (Actually, wasn’t the sending of just such a message one of the reasons for flying those spy planes over the Soviet Union in the first place?) Thus, mutually assured destruction would have been achieved without both sides having the H-bomb, but the U.S. would have had time to develop a thermonuclear bomb if it wished.

Between the A-bomb and the H-bomb, there is the difference between the destruction of a city and about half a county. Perhaps differences on this scale of devastation can be comprehended by Mr. Kooistra or others, but to me the results look the same: death on such a scale that no one would wish it to occur to themselves or to others. So to claim that the U.S. could not have achieved mutually assured destruction if it had not developed the H-bomb before the Soviets still seems a bit of a stretch.

As a might-have-been starting point for a science fiction story, I can accept that perhaps the absence of one scientist from the NATO alliance might, in a story, lead to subsequent events different from history, and it could make for fine story telling. But I do not agree with the suggestion, which Mr. Kooistra made in his April 2004 Alternative View column, that in our actual history if the U.S. had not gotten the H-bomb before the Soviets, this might have left the U.S. vulnerable to the point of losing the Cold War.

Scott T. Meissner

Ithaca, N.Y.

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Mr. Schmidt,

“Baby On Board” was the most pathetic piece of smug, self-righteous piety I have seen in a really long time. It was almost physically painful to read through. It is presumptuous to assume, just because you see an SUV in a shopping mall, that there is not, somewhere in the usage pattern of the owner, an occasion to need the capabilities of that vehicle, like driving home in snow without having to chain up, or carrying a daughter’s soccer team to practice. Regulatory folk would have creamed their jeans over “the egg” rather than puzzle over classification. At the very least our hero would be allowed into diamond lanes and forgiven all taxes. The Ford crunch alluded to was a lawsuit defense movement, since electric cars have been demonstrating alarming hazards in minor collisions.

As for Bambi, were it not for the sport hunter, there would be no deer. It is a cheap shot to depict sport hunters as oafs and anyone who learned anything about wildlife from anyone but Felix Salton or Disney knows that a deer of super strength would primarily be concerned with accumulating a bigger harem, not avenging himself on the occasional hunter.

Walter E. Wallis

Palo Alto, CA

_I’m sorry you didn’t like “Baby on Board” and “The Bambi Project.” It’s a shame that you can’t enjoy a story just because some of its characters, or even its author, have a viewpoint different from yours; but obviously I can’t expect everybody to like anything or anybody to like everything. I’ve published and enjoyed stories that poked fun at editors, writers, and physicists, and I don’t see any group as exempt. It has long been a hallmark of _Analog_ to publish a wide range of ideas and viewpoints._

_Just a couple of comments in regard to yours on these two. I’ll certainly agree that some SUV drivers have good reasons for using them; in my personal opinion, though, there are also plenty who don’t, and I see nothing wrong with publishing a story whose protagonist feels that way. I also think you took this one way too seriously, but if you write me a good enough story with a sharply contrasting viewpoint, I’ll be just as glad to publish that._

_As for Bambi, you hardly need lecture me on the virtues of responsible hunting; I’ve defended it plenty of times myself against self-righteous meat-eaters who think it’s okay to buy steaks from the supermarket but not to shoot their own. I’ve advocated more of it, and/or the reintroduction of natural predators, in areas like mine that are overrun with out-of-balance deer. I’ve also known plenty of responsible hunters who ate what they shot. But I can still enjoy a story that shows a couple of oafish hunters getting their comeuppance from a genetic engineer who wants to turn the tables a bit. Please note that the story does not “depict sport hunters as oafs”: it depicts exactly two of them that way and says nothing about the thousands of others._

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Hello Dr. Schmidt,

I enjoyed the December issue. I am, however, moved to question a pair of items.

Although I think I grasp the allegorical (metaphorical?) nature of your word choice, I recoil somewhat from calling non-sentient items, e.g. fire, “predators”. I think the editorial itself is very nicely to the point and, as both a farmer and a hunter, applaud your pointing out human narrow mindedness and lack of geological time sense.

Secondly, as that same hunter, I suppose I could take offense at the somewhat low “beer swillin’ redneck” caricature that Grey Rollins makes his prey out to be, but I won’t, primarily because I know I’m not one, nor are the vast majority of legal hunters. What I have to, genteelly, say “Fie” upon is his comparison of engineered deer vs. hunter to the sport of American football. On the gridiron, the “meeting of equals” includes the fact that each team is well acquainted with the other; with its strengths, tactics, endurance, and so forth, and the fact that both parties know and have agreed to the rules. While Rollins’ victims were behaving criminally (misdemeanor, by the way), they were ambushed by an overwhelmingly advantaged opponent. In that this theme of animal revenge is hardly original, I would have hoped for a more challenging twist from an otherwise excellent author.

Interesting juxtaposition with your editorial.

My thanks again, to you and all your authors, for a thought provoking hour.

Dr. Dwight Scott Miller

Bryan, Texas

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Dear Mr. Schmidt,

I’m finally getting to Mary A. Turzillo’s _An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl_, since I always wait until the end of such serials before I begin to read them (in case I want to blast right through). Of course, this adjustment in my reading habits is quite irritating since I rely on _Analog_ (and your sister publication, _IA_) for a steady stream of _short_ fiction. If you really want to do authors of longer works a favor, print the first installment and then let those that are interested buy the novel!

I’ve done exactly this on the basis of stories and reviews I first encountered in _Analog_. Benford & Swanwick stand out as examples (though I believe you cheated Swanwick out of novel sales by serializing).

This issue seems to come up fairly regularly in your reader’s section. So why do you persist? The fact that Turzillo’s story is intended as a “juvenile” only makes it worse, because of its length.

None of the above will prevent me from being a life-long reader of your and IA’s magazines. I’m eternally grateful for your introducing me to nanotechnology via Drexler’s fact article in the 1987 Mid-December issue (and in that vein, you should as soon as possible let Will McCarthy have a “kick at the cat” regarding “programmable matter”). Just keep in mind, that your “core competency” is short stories.

Rick Salenieks

_My thinking about the pros and cons of serials is pretty much summed up in my Mid-December 1988 editorial recently posted on our website (analogsf.com). There’s no way to please everybody with anything, or anybody with everything (see above), but carefully selected serials overall seem to please enough people to warrant using them. Printing a first installment as a teaser might do writers a favor, but would rightly annoy readers unless the first installment was capable of standing alone as an independent story. (I don’t agree, by the way, that the fact that it has young lead characters makes the Turzillo story a “juvenile” unsuited for adult readers.)_

_As for Wil McCarthy and programmable matter, he’s already done it. Please see his article “Beyond the Periodic Table,” in our January 2002 issue._

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Dear Stan,

It was interesting to see Larry Diersen’s letter on Joe Haldeman’s serial, _Camouflage,_ in the same issue (November 2004) that featured the conclusion of Mary A. Turzillo’s serial, _An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl._ In contrast to Mr. Diersen, I enjoyed Joe Haldeman’s story. It offered some intriguing ideas and a plot driven by the logical, if not entirely rational, interactions of the characters.

On the other hand, Mary Turzillo’s story was an exercise in frustration for me. Her heavy reliance on the contrivance of explaining key details in the form of diary entries violated one of the most basic rules of story writing: “show, don’t tell.” The story offered some interesting ideas, but in my view the characters acted, for the most part, like “air headed” idiots. I found it very hard to develop any sympathy for the heroine. Nanoannie Centime may be Ms. Turzillo’s idea of an old-fashioned Martian girl, but give me Podkayne any day!

That said, I know others will disagree with me and find enjoyment in Ms. Turzillo’s tale. Tastes differ. And even though not everything that appears in _Analog_ is to my taste, thank you for providing the opportunity to sample a wide variety of different science fictional styles. You don’t know what you might like until you try it.

Colin Helmer

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

_And thank you for a refreshingly open-minded viewpoint!_

––—

Dear Stan:

I would like to comment on one point in the excellent article by Kondo and Gaubatz.

They mention solar power satellites as viable alternatives to more conventional energy sources, but do not discuss them further.

SPS need much more discussion than they are currently given. Consider the advantages. An SPS can provide continuous power 24/7/365, except for the few hours a year when it is in shadow, which can be predicted long in advance. The power is as non-polluting as an energy source can be; the only problem is that microwave energy at the collection fields might be a hazard to birds that roost in the area. Environmentalists should be our natural allies in this. An SPS would provide an ideal station for assembly and launch of interplanetary exploration vehicles, including launches to Mars. Many construction materials would be best provided from a base on the Moon, which could be the start of a permanent Moon City. The base could provide rocket fuel (oxygen), saving on haulage from Earth. The International Space Station would be needed as an intermediate stop for traffic to and from an SPS, giving it (at last!) a real use.

The main problem is cost. Robert Zubrin estimated an SPS at four trillion dollars, but he assumed every screw would be hauled up by the most expensive transport system ever invented, the shuttle. There are many ways to reduce this cost by orders of magnitude, such as providing heavy construction materials from the Moon. Even so, the SPS will probably not become reality until the space elevator has been shown to be practical. Once we know that a space elevator is practical, an SPS will provide the motive for construction and use of the elevator.

Al Hexter

Kensington, CA

_The author responds…_

SPS is indeed one viable energy alternative to the diminishing — and regrettably polluting — fossil fuels. The Sun, which might be thought of as a safe and reliable fusion power plant, has been providing the energy that has nurtured and sustained life on Earth for the past four and a half billion years. We should go and tap it in space more directly now!

Technological feasibilities of SPS are being explored and demonstrated in the U.S., Japan, Europe and elsewhere. A substantial fraction of the costs of building SPS is indeed transportation to geosynchronous orbit. Regrettably, outdated technological information is sometimes used for estimating the costs of placing SPS in service or evaluating its putative risks. Reusable launch vehicles can reduce the costs of placing a payload in low Earth orbit by a factor of one hundred — from some $20,000 per kilogram by space shuttle to $200 per kilogram; cf., “Introduction” by NASA Administrator Dan Goldin in _Space Access & Utilization Beyond 2000_, edited by Kondo, Sheffield and Bruhweiler (AAS-Univelt, 2001).

As a way station for the construction of SPS in low Earth orbit, before lifting it to higher geosynchronous orbit, the International Space Station unfortunately has an unfavorable orbital inclination. SPS needs to be assembled in an equatorial (low Earth) orbit in order to be lifted to equatorial geosynchronous orbit at reasonable fuel costs. (ISS has a high orbital inclination to make it practical for Russian space ships, launched from Central Asia, to reach it easily. The space shuttle, launched from the Cape, requires additional fuel when going to ISS.) ISS, however, could still be used as a way station for some missions beyond Earth orbit.

We can build a space station in an equatorial orbit, using launch sites near the equator. (Brazil is now building a spaceport near the equator. In the novel, _Legacy of Prometheus,_ [E. Kotani and J. Maddox Roberts, Tor Books] that is how an SPS is first built.)

In addition to various entrepreneurial groups developing RLVs, others are already exploring and developing the technical know-how for building the space elevator. The more competition of this sort we have, the better off our future will likely be.

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Dear Mr. Schmidt,

I am having great difficulty understanding Mr. Cramer’s (December 2004 AV) article. He repeatedly states that an experiment or something else is going to or has falsified a particular theory. “Falsify” means to misstate deliberately, to mislead. If I falsify my birth certificate, I change it so it reflects a false date. I think that he might mean that the theory was disproved. And I guess there are synonyms for disprove he could use. But falsifying something is not the same thing at all. If I change his “falsify” to “disprove,” I could understand the article much more easily. But I can’t do that unless he tells me that’s what he meant.

Edwin Carine

_”Falsify” is often used in science to mean “to prove [a hypothesis] false.”_

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CH013

*In Times to Come*

Our May issue, by pure coincidence, looks a little like a “Moon” issue, framed by two quite different novelettes set there. The first, with cover by Vincent Di Fate, is Shane Tourtellotte’s “Footsteps,” about a mystery concerning a situation that looks impossible but happened nonetheless. All of which leads to a surprising application of Occam’s razor — and a decidedly worthwhile step for mankind. The other, by Joe Schembrie, has a good deal of whimsy about it. I won’t say the title, “High Moon,” says it all, but I hope it at least says enough to constitute a tantalizing hint!

In between, we have a wide variety of fiction by such writers as Grey Rollins, Jerry Oltion, James Van Pelt, Richard A. Lovett, and some talented and promising newcomers. The fact article is one you’ll probably find a bit unsettling: “Big Brother Inc: Surveillance, Security, and the US Citizen.” Our current society shows some disturbing trends in the direction of a well-known Orwell novel, with new technologies to help them along. Laura M. Kelley talks about some of the things that can now be done to keep track of us — and the choices we as a civilization must make.

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Visit www.dellmagazines.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.