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Asimov's Science Fiction

April/May 2007

Vol. 31, Nos. 4 and 5. Whole Nos. 375 and 376

Cover Art courtesy of NASA

NOVELLAS
The River Horses by Allen M. Steele
Dead Money by Lucius Shepard

NOVELETTE
The Rocket into Planetary Space by William Barton

SHORT STORIES
A Small Room in Koboldtown by Michael Swanwick
Wolves of the Spirit by Liz Williams
The Eater of Dreams by Robert Silverberg
Lilyanna by Lisa Goldstein
Distant Replay by Mike Resnick
End Game by Nancy Kress
Always Karen by Joy Fowler
Fifth Day by Jack McDevitt
Green Glass by Gene Wolfe

POETRY
Where the First Backyard Starship Lifted Off by Robert Frazier
Soular by Peter Payack
The Dimensional Rush of Relative Primes by Bruce Boston
Leaving for the Mall by Roger Dutcher
Alternate Astrology by Ruth Berman

DEPARTMENTS
Editorial: In Memories Yet Green by Isaac Asimov, George Scithers, Kathleen Moloney, Shawna McCarthy, Gardner Dozois, and Sheila Williams
Reflections: Thirty Years! by Robert Silverberg
Asimov's Hugo- and Nebula-Award Winners
Letters
On Books: Whither the Hard Stuff? by Norman Spinrad
The SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss

Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 31, Nos. 4 and 5. Whole Nos. 375 and 376, April/May 2007. GST #R123293128. Published monthly except for two combined double issues in April/May and October/November by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One year subscription $43.90 in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $53.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. Address for subscription and all other correspondence about them, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Allow 6 to 8 weeks for change of address. Address for all editorial matters: Asimov's Science Fiction, 475 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10016. Asimov's Science Fiction is the registered trademark of Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. © 2007 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. All rights reserved, printed in the U.S.A. Protection secured under the Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All submissions must include a self-addressed, stamped envelope; the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. POSTMASTER, send change of address to Asimov's Science Fiction, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. In Canada return to Quebecor St. Jean, 800 Blvd. Industrial, St. Jean, Quebec J3B 8G4.

EDITORIAL: IN MEMORIES YET GREEN

REFLECTIONS: THIRTY YEARS! by Robert Silverberg

Asimov's Science Fiction Hugo and Nebula Award Winners

LETTERS

THE RIVER HORSES by Allen M. Steele

WHERE THE FIRST BACKYARD STARSHIP LIFTED OFF by Robert Frazier

A SMALL ROOM IN KOBOLDTOWN by Michael Swanwick

WOLVES OF THE SPIRIT by Liz Williams

THE EATER OF DREAMS by Robert Silverberg

SOULAR Peter Payack

THE ROCKET INTO PLANETARY SPACE by William Barton

LILYANNA by Lisa Goldstein

DISTANT REPLAY by Mike Resnick

THE DIMENSIONAL RUSH OF RELATIVE PRIMES by Bruce Boston

END GAME by Nancy Kress

LEAVING FOR THE MALL by Roger Dutcher

ALWAYS by Karen Joy Fowler

ALTERNATE ASTROLOGY by Ruth Berman

FIFTH DAY by Jack McDevitt

GREEN GLASS by Gene Wolfe

DEAD MONEY by Lucius Shepard

ON BOOKS: WHITHER THE HARD STUFF? by Norman Spinrad

NEXT ISSUE

Isaac Asimov: Editorial Director (1977-1992)
Sheila Williams: Editor
Brian Bieniowski: Associate Editor
Gardner Dozois: Contributing Editor
Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant
Victoria Green: Senior Art Director
Irene Lee: Production Artist
Carole Dixon: Senior Production Manager
Evira Matos: Production Associate
Abigail Browning: Manager Subsidiary Rights and Marketing
Bruce W. Sherbow: Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Sandy Marlowe: Circulation Services
Julia McEvoy: Manager, Advertising Sales

Peter Kanter: Publisher
Christine Begley: Associate Publisher
Susan Kendrioski: Executive Director, Art and Production

Connie Goon: Advertising Sales Coordinator
Phone: (212) 686-7188
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Stories from Asimov's have won 44 Hugos and 25 Nebula Awards, and our editors have received 17 Hugo Awards for Best Editor.

Please do not send us your manuscript until you've gotten a copy of our manuscript guidelines. To obtain this, send us a self-addressed, stamped business-size envelope (what stationery stores call a number 10 envelope), and a note requesting this information. Please write “manuscript guidelines” in the bottom left-hand corner of the outside envelope. The address for this and for all editorial correspondence is Asimov's Science Fiction, 475 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016. While we're always looking for new writers, please, in the interest of time-saving, find out what we're loking for, and how to prepare it, before submitting your story.

This month's editorial is a composite of short pieces. Each of the magazine's previous editors was asked to write about his or her tenure at the magazine, and I've included some recollections of my own. Shawna McCarthy recommended the title. At George Scithers's suggestion, the mix also incorporates Isaac Asimov's first editorial, which details the magazine's beginnings.

Isaac Asimov

In addition to writing or editing over five hundred books, penning around ninety thousand letters, and receiving dozens of awards and honorary doctorates, Isaac Asimov was the magazine's beloved editorial director from 1977 until his death in 1992.

I suppose I ought to start by introducing myself, even though that seems needless. The whole point about putting my name on the magazine rests on the supposition that everyone will recognize it at once, go into ecstatic raptures, and rush forward to buy the magazine. Well, just in case that doesn't happen, I'm Isaac Asimov. I'm a little over thirty years old and I have been selling science fiction stories since 1938. (If the arithmetic seems wrong here, it's because you don't understand higher mathematics.) I have published about forty books of fiction, mostly science fiction, and about 140 books of nonfiction, mostly science. On the other side of the fence, I have a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University and I'm Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine.—But let's not go on with the litany since I am (as is well known) very modest, and since I am the least important person involved with this magazine.

Joel Davis, the publisher, is much more important. His company, Davis Publications, Inc., puts out over thirty magazines, including the enormously successful Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. It also publishes Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. With two such magazines under his belt, visions of empire arose before Joel's eyes, and it seemed to him he ought to have a science fiction magazine as sister to these. To retain symmetry, however, he needed a name in the title and he thought of me at once.

You see, I'm familiar to him because I have, in recent years, sold a score of mystery short stories to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and he would often catch me in suave conversation with Eleanor Sullivan and Constance DiRienzo, the bewitching young women who occupy the EQMM office. I can't say I fell all over myself with joy. The truth is I was worried. I told Joel that no science fiction magazine had ever borne a person's name on it, to my knowledge, and that the writers and readers would surely resent this as an example of overweening arrogance. He said, “Nonsense, Isaac, who could possibly accuse you of arrogance?"

—Well, that's true enough. But then I pointed out that the editors of the various other science fiction magazines were, one and all, personal friends of mine, and I would not wish to compete with them. He said, “You won't be competing with them, Isaac. One more strong magazine in the field will attract additional readers, encourage additional writers. Our own success will help the other magazines in the field as well.” (I consulted others and everyone agreed with Joel.)

Then I told Joel that I had a monthly science column running in one of the other science fiction magazines. It had been running without a break for eighteen years and under no circumstances could I consider giving it up. He said, “You don't have to give it up. Continue it exactly as before.” (And I am doing so, with the blessing of the other magazine's editor.) But then I had the topper. I told him that the fact was I couldn't edit a magazine. I didn't have the ability or the experience or the desire or the time. He said, “Find someone you can trust, with the ability, the experience, the desire, and the time, and he can be the editor. You can be the editorial director, and the man you pick will work under your direction, for I want this to be your magazine, a reflection of your tastes with your kind of science fiction. You should keep an eye on what the editor buys, write the editorials yourself, and work closely with this editor to set policy and to solve problems as they come up."

So we agreed to that; now let me introduce the Editor. He is George H. Scithers, an electrical engineer specializing in radio propagation and rail rapid transit, who is a Lieutenant Colonel (retired) in the United States Army and who does a bit of writing on the side. He has been involved with the world of science fiction for over thirty years. He was the chairman of DisCon 1, the World Science Fiction Convention held in Washington in 1963 (where I got my first Hugo, so you can see what a well-run convention that was), and has been parliamentarian for several other conventions. He has a small publishing firm, Owlswick Press, publishing books of science fiction interest, notably the new revision of L. Sprague de Camp's Science Fiction Handbook. Furthermore, I know him personally, know that his tastes in science fiction are like mine and that he is industrious and reliable.

As Associate Editor, George has managed to get the services of Gardner Dozois, who is himself a contemporary science fiction writer of note.

Now what about the magazine itself ? Life is risky for magazines in these days of television and paperbacks so we are starting as a quarterly. What reader support we'll get is now in the lap of the gods, but if things go as we earnestly hope they do, we will work our way up to monthly as soon as we can. We are concentrating on the shorter lengths, and there will be no serials. Novels have plenty of outlets these days, the shorter lengths relatively few.

With my name on the magazine, it won't surprise you to hear that we will lean toward hard science fiction, and toward the reasonably straightforward in the way of style. However, we won't take ourselves too seriously and not every story has to be a solemn occasion. We will have humorous stories and we will have an occasional unclassifiable story. We will have a book review column that will favor short notices of many books rather than deep essays on a few. We will have non-fiction pieces—that we will try to make as science-fiction-related as possible. We have one that will cover a museum opening, for instance, but it's a space museum; and we're working on one that compares real life computers with those in science fiction stories. But you can see for yourself what we're trying to do if you read this issue and, undoubtedly, we will develop in ways not easily predictable at the start.

Two last points—for heaven's sake, don't send any manuscripts to me, send them to George Scithers. And for heaven's sake, be careful where you allocate credit. If this magazine pleases you, do give the credit to George Scithers and write and tell him so. He's doing the work.

—If, on the other hand, you decide it's a stinker, please send your letters to Joel Davis. The whole thing was his idea.

And remember, those letters that we find to be of general interest will be printed in a letter column along with comments by me; and we will try to spell your name correctly.

George Scithers

George Scithers received two Hugo Awards for editing Asimov's. In addition to founding our magazine, he also edited the venerable Amazing Stories. With Darrell Schweitzer and John Betancourt, he now edits the even more venerable Weird Tales and works full time for Wildside Press.

The early years working on Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine were some of the happiest, yet most challenging, of my life.

I had just retired from thirty years in the U.S. Army and taken a job with the City of Philadelphia's Department of Public Property as the city's electrical engineer on a quarter-billion-dollar project to build a four-track, electrified commuter railroad through the center of that city; dream job for a railroad fan like myself. Then Dr. Asimov called me with even more of a dream job: to be the editor of a professional science fiction magazine as well!

And that came about like this: Joel Davis, president and publisher of Davis Publications, Inc., had long been the publisher of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. A year or so earlier, he had purchased the then-money-losing Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. He and his staff immediately turned it into a successful, money-making magazine. Looking for new fields to enter, Joel asked Isaac to be editor of a similarly titled publication, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

"But no,” Isaac protested; “I'm not an editor, and besides...” and so on at some length. “But who...?” Joel asked, and Isaac suggested me.

Isaac and I had met at various science fiction conventions over the years. We had mutual friends—the late L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, and John D. Clark. We were both members of the Trap Door Spiders, a supper club immortalized by Isaac in his Black Widowers mystery stories. And I had saved him from a lonely train ride when it happened that we took the same train from a mid-west science fiction convention to Boston.

I had written and sold short stories to the professional magazines—one to Fred Pohl at If, one to John W. Campbell at Analog, and another to Ben Bova, also at Analog. While I had no experience as a professional magazine editor, I had been the publisher and editor for just over twenty years of the long-running, Hugo-winning sword-&-sorcery fanzine, Amra. And best of all, my work at the commuter railway project let me take the then-part-time job as the founding editor at IA'sfm, as we abbreviated the magazine's title in those days.

Starting a magazine from scratch would have been impossible without the substantial help from the Davis staff and from Joel himself. The late Fred Dannay, who had been editing EQMM for decades for Joel's father and then for Joel, gave me invaluable advice and support. Eleanor Sullivan, managing editor (and later editor in her own right) of EQMM, helped me set up the magazine's system of handling manuscripts and dealing with George Monette's Twin Company, our typesetter. Connie DiRienzo, contracts manager for all the Davis fiction magazines, helped me write our standard contract, based on EQMM's and that of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—a contract which I have since used with Amazing Stories and now Weird Tales. For the first few issues, Gardner Dozois, who had experience as a first reader for other magazines, served as IA'sfm's associate editor.

Starting from scratch would have been really impossible without the help of the established science-fiction writers and of their organization, the Science Fiction Writers of America. As Jerry Pournelle once put it, I called in a lot of obs (a term from a story by Eric Frank Russell). As it turned out, starting took a few months longer than I had first assumed; after some discussions with Eleanor Sullivan and Fred Dannay, I had to go to Joel and ask for a little more time, which he gave.

In addition to the full-time staff in New York, I accumulated a small group of science fiction fans in Philadelphia—Darrell Schweitzer, who's been working with me ever since; Lee and Diane Weinstein; John Ashmead; and many others. At the same time, IA'sfm built up a group of new writers, notably Somtow Sucharitkil, Sharon Webb, the late John M. Ford, and Barry Long-year.

The magazine was originally conceived as a science fictional version of EQMM: no serials, almost entirely stories of six thousand words or less, and strictly science fiction with no fantasy content. And—because both Isaac and I have a weakness for humor—the magazine had very much of a light touch. We even picked up the Feghoot series of outrageous science fiction puns by Reginald Bretnor, writing as the anagrammatic Grendel Briarton.

As it turned out, Joel was right: there was indeed room for a new science fiction magazine. IA'sfm sold some sixty-five thousand copies of its first issue on the newsstands, and rapidly converted many of them to subscribers, some of whom are still with the magazine. The renewal rate for those initial subscribers was the best the company had ever seen, which reinforced Joel's decision to go from quarterly to bi-monthly publication for our second year, and to full monthly publication the year after. Our first cover was a photograph of Isaac; we soon shifted to science fiction paintings—a few illustrating specific stories, other, being general science fictional scenes. In those early years, Joel let me assign interior artwork and—in consultation with the company's art department—the covers as well.

By the time the magazine went monthly, it became apparent that there weren't enough pure science fiction short stories to keep the pages filled. We (who by then included the always capable Shawna McCarthy as full-time assistant editor in the Davis offices in New York. I had also left my railway planning job to become a full-time editor, commuting to New York once or twice a week) added fantasy and longer works. No serials—though there were works by Fred Pohl and by Jack Williamson that we presented as episodic novels appearing in successive issues rather than serials labeled as such.

Somewhere along the line, Joel asked if we could put together a companion magazine, 8.5 by 11 inches in size rather than the traditional digest format, which appeared as Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine with splendid covers repeated as double-page centerfolds. Shawna and I promptly assembled the new magazine, and we loaded it up with some of the best material we had in inventory. Notable stories included one of John Brunner's “Traveller in Black” tales, and Roger Zelazny's “Unicorn Variations.” Alas—it only lasted four quarterly issues; at the time, there was simply no room for a 8.5-by-11-inch science fiction magazine on the newsstands. It tended to be put with the comics, and the comics readers of the time weren't interested in stories told in words rather than pictures.

Back at IA'sfm, we—editors, writers, and artists—were still having fun. I got some notable covers out of Alex Schomburg and Frank Kelly Freas. We ran one of L. Sprague de Camp's sword-&-planet short novels with a lovely Freas cover. And Schomburg and the IA'sfm gang of writers concocted what I remember as one of the most fun issues of my stay at the magazine.

A few years before, Don Wollheim had worked out the perfect cover for a Romance novel: a brooding manor (castle, watchtower, whatever) against a darkening sky. A female figure, fleeing in the foreground. And—Don's inspired touch—a single light in the manor's window.

Alex Schomburg's version: a very science fictional building grounded-spaceship/whatever in the background. A male figure fleeing in the foreground, and—again—a single light in the structure's window. Then the writers produced a half-dozen stories all built around that cover scene!

Ah—those were the fun times!

Kathleen Moloney

Kathleen Moloney lives and works—as a freelance writer—in New York City. She is married to Dominick Abel, a literary agent.

I was editor-in-chief of IAsfm for only seven months, from July 1982 through the end of that year. Frankly I'm not quite sure how I got the job. I'd had several publishing gigs but no science fiction or fantasy background unless you count reading Animal Farm in junior high. Despite my lack of experience I was hired, by Carole Dolph Gross and Joel Davis.

It took me a while to learn the ropes at IAsfm, and as I did so, I relied heavily on senior editor Shawna McCarthy, especially as a reader. She had superb taste, I thought. I liked just about everything she recommended—stories by John Brunner, Gregory Benford, Connie Willis, Robert F. Young, Sharon Webb, Glen Cook, Madeleine Robins, Richard Bowker, Steve Vance, and dozens of others. Our cover story in November was David Brin's “The Postman.” I really liked that one.

While Shawna dug through the mail, I concentrated my efforts on trying to get Isaac Asimov to write more for us (with some success) and introducing new features. During my tenure we added a Profile (starting with Alvin Toffler, Harry Harrison, William Burroughs, Lewis Thomas, and Stephen Jay Gould), a cartoon we called “Mooney's Module,” and a crossword puzzle, edited by Merl Reagle. In December of 1982, my swan song, we did a terrific special issue devoted to the publication of Isaac Asimov's Foundation's Edge. After that I went off to be an editor at Times Books, and Shawna McCarthy got my job.

Working in the world of science fiction was a strange but excellent adventure, and it remains the only time in my life I went to a convention with a weapons policy.

Happy thirtieth anniversary to IAsfm.

Shawna McCarthy

Shawna McCarthy is a literary agent (The McCarthy Agency—what else?) and the fiction editor of Realms of Fantasy magazine. She has also at one time or another been senior editor at Bantam Spectra Books and Workman Publishing. She edited Asimov's during the Iron Age, and helped discover fire. Shawna was also the first woman to win the modern Best Editor Hugo Award.

I have two words to say regarding my time at Asimov's: Dream Job.

Seriously, I would walk home from the subway at night and think, I am the luckiest person in the world. First of all, I got to work in the genre I loved, doing something I was good at. Second of all (actually, maybe this should be first), I was working with ISAAC ASIMOV!!! Omigod! (Yes, I have teenage children.) Third of all, I got to hang out in interesting places with some of the most interesting people in the universe. My job took me to cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis (wait, what?), and Austin, where I got to stay in nice hotels, eat great meals with huge groups of people, appear on panels, go to parties, and flirt like crazy. For an unmarried twenty-five-year-old woman there was no better sphere to move in than the SF world—the male to female ratio was at least six to one, and they'd all been more or less pre-selected for brains and creativity, if not grooming.

Perhaps this sounds flip, but I'm sincerely trying to get across the joy that I took in working at Asimov's. All parts of it, even down to reading the slush and laying out the issues, gave me great pleasure, and while most middle-aged people will say, when reflecting on their youth, “I didn't know how good I had it,” I must admit that I absolutely did know how good I had it. From the first day I walked into the office as George Scithers’ assistant to the day I left to help found Bantam Spectra, I reveled in my job.

Now might be a good time to point out though, that much as I loved my job, my job did not always love me back. As I mentioned above (albeit in a somewhat different context!), SF had (dare I say has?) always been a bit of a boys’ club; in fact, George and Isaac actually knew one another from a literal boy's club, the Trap Door Spiders. As a woman, and as someone who did not come out of fandom, I think I brought a somewhat different spin to the magazine, one which was not entirely appreciated by the charter subscribers. Not unreasonably, they felt they had signed up for a magazine that reflected Isaac Asimov's sensibilities and style, one that offered straightforward stories with transparent prose, clear-eyed heroes, intriguing scientific puzzles, and awful puns. And while George published quite a few groundbreaking new authors (Connie Willis, anyone?), for the most part, under his editorship the magazine delivered exactly what the readers wanted.

Those halcyon days were not to last, however—I became editor and started publishing things that were, umm, controversial (anyone remember “Her Furry Face"?), things which caused the mailbox to fill with hate mail and caused Isaac no end of tsuris. That brave man was kept quite busy defending my choices, and saying in editorial after editorial that while he personally might not like some of my selections, they were all certainly well written and worthy of publication and that maybe the readership might want to try to keep an open mind. For my part, I hung in there, hoping that the “new” Asimov's would win over charter subscribers and find its new readership, and luckily for me, eventually it did. My happiest day came about a year into my editorship when I opened the Nebula nomination list and found that stories from the magazine dominated the ballot. I felt vindicated and I'm sure Isaac felt relieved!

When, after much soul searching, I decided to try my hand at editing books, I was not about to leave the magazine in the hands of an unkindred spirit, and so I turned to the most kindred spirit I could find, Gardner Dozois. To my delight, he agreed to take over the editorship, and I knew my baby was safe in his and Sheila's capable hands.

I've been trying to sum up what I got from Asimov's, and I'm finding it almost impossible, because in the end, what I got was my life. What I do—hell, who I am—today, from editing Realms of Fantasy, to running my literary agency, to raising my children (yes, I met my husband through my work!) springs directly from my time there. The only thing I can say at this point is: thank you. Thank you, George; thank you, Joel; thank you, Isaac (wherever you are); thank you, Gardner; thank you, Sheila; thank you, readers; thank you, whatever powers might be, for everything.

Gardner Dozois

Gardner Dozois was the editor of Asimov's Science Fiction for almost twenty years, and still edits the annual Year's Best Science Fiction anthology series from St. Martin's Press, now up to its twenty-fourth annual collection. He is the author or editor of more than a hundred books, and has won fifteen Hugo Awards for his editing work and two Nebula Awards for his own short fiction.

Although I had been associate editor for a year or so under George Scithers, we had parted ways years before, and I had no formal connection with Asimov's until the spring of 1985, when then-editor Shawna McCarthy took me aside during that year's Nebula Award Banquet (just after I'd gotten down from the stage for winning a Nebula for my story “Morning Child"), told me that she was stepping down, and asked me if I'd like to be the new editor of the magazine. The idea of returning to the magazine in an editorial capacity again had never occurred to me, and I was at first almost more surprised by the idea of Shawna leaving (like everybody else, I'd assumed that she'd be in the job for years if not decades to come) than by the idea of me taking over. After thinking about it for a few moments, though, I tentatively accepted.

Of course, technically the choice wasn't Shawna's to make, and I had to submit a formal resume in writing and go through a long interview with Joel Davis, then the magazine's publisher, and wait on pins and needles for awhile, before I was formally offered the job. Shawna's support of me as her candidate for the job, though, was the main reason why I got it, and to this day I'm not entirely sure why she wanted me as her replacement, except that I'd had some magazine experience in the past, reading slush for the UPD group of Galaxy, Worlds of If, Worlds of Tomorrow, and Worlds of Fantasy, and working on the first few issues of Asimov's way back at the beginning of the magazine. I'd also done a decent job of editing a “Best of the Year” anthology, and I had been selling stories to her at Asimov's (winning a Nebula for the magazine with my story “The Peacemaker") in the previous couple of years. The fact that Isaac Asimov had agreed with some of the things I'd had to say about SF magazines on a convention panel the year before may have helped, as did, oddly, the fact that there were a number of other candidates for the job, some of whom wanted to produce a very different magazine indeed from the one I ended up producing, the proposed trajectories of which Isaac thoroughly disliked.

Things moved very quickly, and so, almost before I'd had a chance to get used to the idea or fully appreciate the fact that it was actually happening, I found myself installed as the new editor of Asimov's Science Fiction (then called Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine). I didn't expect to last long. Although I had cut my shoulder-length hippy-style hair before the interview, and had a cheap suit I used for occasions such as award banquets, I'd not shaved my beard and I was clearly not a corporate kind of guy, as the odd looks I got from others in the hallways attested. I'd also thought that Joel Davis had been squinting at me with deep suspicion during my interview, and had clearly had to have his arm twisted by Shawna into accepting me. So I thought that I'd last a few months, and then they'd fire me. Curiously, this may have been my greatest advantage. Figuring I'd only be there a few months, I decided that I had nothing to lose by taking as many risks as possible, and worked hard to completely and radically transform the tone of the magazine in as short a time as possible. If I'd known I was going to be there for almost the next twenty years, I might have been more cautious and taken fewer literary risks, and so quite possibly have produced an inferior magazine.

Looking back at my days as editor, I can say that stories that I bought won thirty-four Hugo Awards (some years winning all three of the short fiction categories), fifteen Nebula Awards, and four World Fantasy Awards, that under my reign Asimov's itself won the Locus Award for Year's Best Magazine fourteen times in a row, and that I myself won the Hugo Award for Best Editor fifteen times. Not too bad a track record, I like to think, although now that my career as Asimov's editor is behind me, it'll be up to the critics and historians to evaluate it, and decide what it is I did and what—if anything—it all was really worth.

(I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank everybody I worked with at the magazine over the years, especially Sheila Williams, who worked side by side with me for all of those years, for helping to make the magazine what it was—and is.)

Sheila Williams

Asimov's was founded by Isaac Asimov and Joel Davis, the owner of Davis Publications, a relatively small, family-owned publishing house. Fifteen years later, the magazine was sold to Bertelsmann, a publishing giant that now includes Random House, Doubleday, Bantam, Dell Books, the SF Book Club, Del Rey Books, and many other well-known publishing lines. One of Doubleday's top-selling authors was Isaac Asimov, and the parent company was excited to have his books and his magazine under one roof. With the sale to Bertelsmann, we became part of Dell Magazines, a venerable publishing company that was perhaps best known as the world's first crossword-magazine publisher. The Bertelsmann era, however, proved a short interlude. Four years later, Dell Magazines was sold to Penny Press, a family-run puzzle-magazine publisher. Dell and Penny had been competitors, and their merger into Penny Publications created a major force in the puzzle-magazine field. The purchase of Dell Magazines gave Penny an opportunity to diversify as well, since the sale included Dell Horoscope,Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazines, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and, of course, Asimov's Science Fiction.Asimov's continues to flourish today because of the support we receive from our publisher, Peter Kanter.

Starting professional life as an editorial assistant in a small company was an educational and nurturing experience. It was an opportunity to learn almost everything there was to know about magazine publishing. At first, it felt like I was making every single mistake that could be made once. Luckily, there were a number of supportive and demanding colleagues who saw to it that I learned from those mistakes. I was immediately thrust into the mechanics of creating a magazine. Before the days of desktop publishing, that meant working with repro proofs and blue pencils. Last minute typos were eliminated by the art editor with an Exacto knife. In the days before fax machines, communication with our economical typesetter in Holyoke, Massachusetts, held to a tight schedule. One week was generally the best we could do to turn around corrections, so sudden changes of heart could only be accomplished by cannibalizing old repro. I was constantly in motion, dragging the heavy repro boards down out of the closet and running the hallways that separated the editorial department from the art department. In addition to the art department, I worked directly with the advertising, accounting, circulation, contracts, production, and subsidiary rights departments.

Moving to a large company, located in Times Square, was exciting. At first, the work didn't really change, but we all got corporate credit cards! Departments were more spread out, and there were a lot more meetings and memos. Eventually, our new publisher instituted desktop publishing. It had taken years to convince Davis Publications to give me a correcting typewriter. Now I could load an entire issue onto my computer—although doing so usually made it crash. The typesetter was gone, and I became less dependent on the art department. I could make all the corrections myself. Somehow, this change didn't make my job any easier, but it did make it more sedentary.

The Internet didn't happen for Asimov's until after our second sale. Our website went live in February 1998, and email became a way of life. Almost from the start of my employment, I had been responsible for writing all the biographical notes that accompany each story. Information was mostly collected through the US mail, but I got some of it by telephone. I got to know the authors very well, but I'm afraid my phone bills were correspondingly large. These days author corrections and biographical information usually arrives via email. Corrections can be made up until the day the magazine is released to the printer, and the entire issue sent electronically to the printer. Communication by email is a lot more impersonal than a phone call, but it's faster and cheaper. There's no handwriting to decipher, and no misheard information to garble in the blurbs.

Working for a large publishing outfit was an exciting experience, but adapting to Penny Publications felt a lot like coming home. Not too long ago, I was surprised to realize that I had been working for them longer than I had for Joel Davis. Over the years, many assistants have helped me pull the magazine together. Nowadays, I've handed over much of the magazine's production to the steadfast Brian Bieniowski. Asimov's has always had its talented authors to thank for the quality fiction that shows up in its pages every month. That the magazine shows up in your mailbox and on your newsstand is in many ways thanks not only to Brian and Peter Kanter, but to all the people you see listed on our masthead.

—Additional thanks to Gene Wolfe for thematic inspiration.

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In my first rapturous years as a reader of science fiction magazines, more than half a century ago, I greeted the advent of any new title with immense excitement. What a thrill it was to see an unfamiliar cover looking back at me from the array of magazines at the corner newsstand, and discover that another newcomer had arrived! 1949 brought The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1950 delivered Galaxy and Imagination and Worlds Beyond, among others, 1952 produced If, Space Science Fiction, and half a dozen more, and the never-to-be-matched bumper crop of 1953 included Fantastic Universe, Future Science Fiction, Universe, Science Stories, Vortex, Beyond, Science Fiction Plus, and ever so many more. Most of them lasted just a few issues and all of them are ancient history, now, except for the perdurable Fantasy & Science Fiction. But for me the arrival of each in the candy store is still a well-remembered red-letter day, betokening who knew what fabulous fictional delights.

On the other hand, when the first issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine made its appearance in the early weeks of 1977, I confess that I paid hardly any attention at all.

For one thing, I was no longer the starstruck teenager, gaga over all things science fictional, of the early 1950s. I was in my forties now, a veteran professional writer with decades of published work behind me, and I not only had virtually stopped reading science fiction, I had given up writing it. My life had grown very complicated in the mid-1970s, I felt terribly tired, and I told anyone who was willing to listen that I had retired from writing forever. So I dutifully bought the first issue of Asimov's, because it was still my age-old and unbreakable habit, going back to those rapturous teen days, to buy the first issue of any new SF magazine. But I glanced through it with what could best be termed indifference, and put it on the shelf, and that, I thought, was that. No longer did the coming of a new SF magazine open infinite vistas for me. Since I had given up writing the stuff, and wasn't much interested in reading it, I didn't see how Isaac's new magazine could be of any relevance to my life at all. Little did I know.

I have that first issue before me now, and from its pristine condition I suspect that I never did get around to reading it. In format Issue Number One isn't extraordinarily different from the magazine that's in your hands right now. The page size is about half an inch shorter, and it has 192 pages instead of today's 144, but the typeface was a little larger back then, so the overall word-count of the two magazines is probably about the same. The text runs right across the page from right to left, book-style, rather than being divided into columns according to the usual custom of magazines. Instead of today's simply styled straight-up-and-down cover heading that tells us that the magazine's name is Asimov's Science Fiction, the name of the magazine on that 1977 issue is splashed across half the cover in giant curving yellow letters against a startling red background, and took up even more space because the magazine, in those days, was called Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Just to reinforce the point, the part of the cover that didn't blazon forth the name of the magazine contained a photograph of Isaac, a lovely picture of him in a dark jacket and light-blue necktie, looking formidably intelligent and quite handsome.

The price of that first issue was one dollar. (The price has quadrupled since then, but so has the price of almost everything else.) It was dated “Spring 1977,” because the cautious publisher, Joel Davis, was launching the newcomer as a quarterly. (It was such an immediate success—within a year and a half it was the best-selling magazine in the field—that it shifted to bimonthly publication in 1978, to monthly publication in 1979, and for a giddy time beginning in 1981 published thirteen issues a year before gradually subsiding back to today's ten-times-a-year schedule.)

In my one indifferent glance at the Spring 1977 Asimov's I concluded that it was probably a pretty good magazine, and that if I were interested in writing science fiction at all, I would probably want to write for it. Isaac's presence on the masthead as editorial director guaranteed a certain level of quality, after all. And the actual editor, the man who would be picking the stories, was the knowledgeable and sophisticated George Scithers, whom I knew to be well grounded in science fiction. (His associate editor at the outset was the young writer Gardner Dozois, who had already established himself as a storyteller of distinctive skills.) The first issue contained stories by such accomplished veterans of SF as Arthur C. Clarke, Gordon R. Dickson, and Fred Saberhagen, and a novelette by the brilliant new writer John Varley. (There were actually two Varley stories in the issue, one under a penname, but I didn't find that out until much later. The other one was “Air Raid,” published as by “Herb Boehm,” which has been much anthologized since and made into a film.)

But I wasn't writing science fiction in 1977, and, as I said, had no plans ever to do so again, so the new magazine receded to the back-burner part of my mind. I still maintained a social interest in the field, though. And over the next year or two I began to hear considerable buzz about the new magazine from my writer friends. It was, they said, the most exciting newcomer to emerge in the field in many years. They were all writing for it. George Scithers won the Hugo award in 1978 as Best Professional Editor, and won it again in 1980. Stories published in the magazine were being nominated regularly for both the Hugo and the Nebula, and some of them were winning them.

I ended my “retirement” from writing late in 1978 with a new novel, Lord Valentine's Castle, and began to think about writing a few new short stories, too. When I saw Scithers at the World Science Fiction Convention not long afterward he asked me whether I might care to write one for him, and I said I'd think about it if I ever did start doing them again.

Little did I know!

I did start writing stories again in January of 1980, and a few months later, after another gentle hint from George, I wrote my first for Asimov's, a very short piece called “The Regulars,” with which I made my debut in these pages in the issue of May 11, 1981. (That was how they were dated then.) Soon afterward I followed up Lord Valentine's Castle with a group of stories set on the same planet, Majipoor, and three of them appeared in consecutive Asimov's issues in December of 1981 and January and February of 1982, with others to follow. And so it went for me thereafter at Asimov's as the magazine came to occupy a central position in my short-story-writing life. When Shawna McCarthy became editor later in the 1980s I did the novella “Sailing to Byzantium” for her, the first of my award-winners for Asimov's, and for her successor Gardner Dozois I did a whole raft of stories and novellas, maybe two dozen of them, including two more award-winners ("Gilgamesh in the Outback” (1987), and “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another” (1990). And so on and so on ever since, even unto this very issue. And a year and a half after Isaac's death in 1992 I took on the task of writing this quasi-editorial column, “Reflections,” which has appeared in all but one issue of Asimov's in the past thirteen years. (The one time I missed I was fighting a book deadline, and my wife Karen wrote a column in my place.)

Which amply demonstrates how important Asimov's Science Fiction has been to me across some twenty-seven of its thirty years of existence, and how foolish I feel about having paid so little attention to it in its first three years. How important the magazine has been to its readers over the thirty years of its life has been made amply clear by the astonishing string of Hugo and Nebula awards its stories have gained—I hope Sheila Williams runs the full list somewhere in this issue—and the many honors that have come to its editors as well.

Now, in the capable and experienced hands of Sheila, its current editor, Asimov's enters its fourth decade of publication. Only a few SF magazines have reached that milestone. The list is headed, of course, by our companion magazine Analog, the once and future champion, which goes back to 1930. (But Analog, then called Astounding Stories, went out of business for six months in 1933.) The field's pioneer, Amazing Stories, ran from 1926 to 2005, but it too suffered interruptions of publication along the way, several of them, and seems to be undergoing permanent interruption now. Weird Tales, which published a great deal of SF, had a thirty-year-run from 1923 to 1954, and has been revived several times since, but there have been some very big gaps in its publication history. Only Fantasy & Science Fiction, of all the SF magazines we have had, has managed to continue without ever breaking continuity from its first issue to its current one, a span that now is approaching sixty years. But Asimov's hasn't been doing too badly in that area. It has sailed serenely along for three full decades, now, never missing a beat under three different corporate owners and five editors, and will, I trust, hang in there many decades more. I like to think that I'll be around in this column for at least some of that time. I hope you'll be here too.

Copyright © 2007 Robert Silverberg

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Hugo Award Winners

Novellas:

2000—The Winds of Marble Arch by Connie Willis

1998— ...Where Angels Fear to Tread by Allen Steele

1997—Blood of the Dragon by George R.R. Martin

1996—The Death of Captain Future by Allen M. Steele

1993—Barnacle Bill the Spacer by Lucius Shepard

1992—Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

1991—The Hemingway Hoax by Joe Haldeman

1989—The Last of the Winnebagos by Connie Willis

1988—Eye for Eye by Orson Scott Card

1987—Gilgamesh in the Outback by Robert Silverberg

1986—24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai by Roger Zelazny

1985—Press Entern by John Varley

1983—Hardfought by Greg Bear

1980—Enemy Mine by Barry B. Longyear

Novelettes:

2004—Legions in Time by Michael Swanwick

2001—Millenium Babies by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

2000—1016 to 1 by James Patrick Kelly

1998—We Will Drink a Fish Together ... by Bill Johnson

1997—Bicycle Repairman by Bruce Sterling

1996—Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly

1993—The Nutcracker Coup by Janet Kagan

1991—The Manamouki by Mike Resnick

1990—Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another by Robert Silverberg

1985—Bloodchild by Octavia Butler

1983—Fire Watch by Connie Willis

1982—Unicorn Variations by Roger Zelazny

Short Stories:

2005—Travels with My Cats by Mike Resnick

2002—The Dog Said “Bow-Wow” by Michael Swanwick

2000—Scherzo with Tyrannosaur by Michael Swanwick

1998—The 43 Antarean Dynasties by Mike Resnick

1997—The Soul Selects Her own Society ... by Connie Willis

1995—None so Blind by Joe Haldeman

1994—Death on the Nile by Connie Willis

1993—Even the Queen by Connie Willis

1992—A Walk in the Sun by Geoffrey A. Landis

1991—Bears Discover Fire by Terry Bisson

1990—Boobs by Suzy Mckee Charnas

1988—Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers by Lawrence Watt-Evans

1984—Speech Sounds by Octavia Butler

Nebula Award Winners

Novel:

1991—Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick

Novellas:

2004—The Green Leopard Plague by Walter Jon Williams

1996—Da Vinci Rising by Jack Dann

1991—Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

1990—The Hemingway Hoax by Joe Haldeman

1988—The Last of the Winnebagos by Connie Willis

1987—The Blind Geometer by Kim Stanley Robinson

1986—R&R by Lucius Shepard

1985—Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg

1984—Press Entern by John Varley

1983—Hardfought by Greg Bear

1979—Enemy Mine by Barry B. Longyear

Novelettes:

1992—Danny Goes to Mars by Pamela Sargent

1987—Rachel in Love by Pat Murphy

1986—The Girl Who Fell Into the Sky by Kate Wilhelm

1985—Portraits of His Children by George R.R. Martin

1984—Bloodchild by Octavia Butler

1982—Fire Watch by Connie Willis

Short Stories:

1995—Death and the Librarian by Esther M. Friesner

1992—Even the Queen by Connie Willis

1990—Bears Discover Fire by Terry Bisson

1989—Ripples in the Dirac Sea by Geoffrey A. Landis

1983—The Peacemaker by Gardner Dozois

1982—A Letter from the Clearys by Connie Willis

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Dear Sheila—

I need to confess, when I first sold one of my stories to Asimov's—"The Utility Man,” November 1990—my reaction was euphoria mixed with the cocky sense that “It's about time, dammit.” After all, I'd been sending manuscripts to the correct address for several long years, testing the patience of two previous editors and then Gardner Dozois. But even with that first sale, nothing seemed easy. A lot of my work was sent back to me. Quite a few years had to pass before I could sell to the magazine on a halfway regular basis. And even now, when I send out a new story I have to brace myself for rejections, and if they don't come and I make the sale instead, then I feel that sweet old euphoria all over again.

Robert Reed

Lincoln, NE

Dear Editor,

I was one of several first readers for Asimov's back in the year it was launched. George Scithers, the first editor, had a house in West Philadelphia and I was one of his tenants. Every so often he would visit the publisher's offices in New York and haul back heaps of manuscripts for us to help him review, comment on, and mail back.

It was an exhilarating experience. Not only did we see lots of stories by first-time authors and currently popular authors, but we also saw material ranging from stories from old authors no longer publishing in the field to stories from emerging authors just hitting their stride. It was a real thrill for me to be plowing through a pile of manuscripts in their original envelopes one afternoon and find two John Varley stories, one of them being “Air Raid.” No rejection slip for those!

We first readers had an interesting fringe benefit. Back in those days, when the features and departments of the magazine were still pretty fluid, one idea being considered was to have a story by Dr. Asimov in every issue. This didn't happen, but we all got to have an early look at several Asimov stories before publication even if some of them ended up getting published elsewhere.

So, my memories of early issues of Asimov's not only include all your published stories, but lots of stories you never published as well.

Sanford Meschkow

Wynnewood, PA

Dear Asimov's:

Oh, my gosh! Asimov's can't be celebrating thirty years! Someone has done some kind of time warp. It was only last month that somebody at my writer's workshop told me Isaac Asimov was starting a new magazine that was going to redefine science fiction, only two weeks ago that I sent in “Fire Watch” and was blown away by Octavia Butler's “Blood Child,” only last week that Gardner Dozois told me I was never going to get a cover illustration for one of my stories unless I put some spaceships or dinosaurs in them (advice James Patrick Kelly listened to with fabulous results—"Think Like a Dinosaur"), only yesterday that Sheila Williams was bullying me to write another story for the Christmas issue. (Actually, that was only yesterday. Some things never change.) But when I start thinking of all the terrific stories I've read in Asimov's, from Joe Haldeman's “The Hemingway Hoax” to Nancy Kress's “Beggars in Spain” to Terry Bisson's “Bears Discover Fire,” and of all the wonderful authors who've appeared in its pages—Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ted Chiang, Greg Bear, John Varley, Megan Lindholm, Mike Resnick, Paolo Bacigalupi, and, of course, Isaac—to say nothing of all the Hugo and Nebula and Best Editor Awards Asimov's has racked up, then it seems like it must have been around for at least a couple of hundred years! So, congrats! Thanks for being such a great magazine to work for—for indulging me and letting me write my Christmas stories and romantic comedies and those stories everybody else said weren't really science fiction; thanks for having such great editors and columns and editorials and art and poems—and stories! Most of all, thanks for creating a magazine at once innovative and old-fashioned, fun and literary, and thanks for letting me be a part of it! May you be around for another thirty—no, fifty—no, a thousand years!

Connie Willis

Greeley, CO

Dear Sheila—

Forgive my familiarity, but I feel as if I actually know you, since I've seen your name every month since you first joined this wonderful magazine. I'll never forget when I first discovered Asimov's Science Fiction in 1980. I had just landed a job as clerk at a local bookstore and newsstand. As an employee, there were no sick days or health care benefits. The only benefit was that I could have three books or magazines free every week. This seemed like a goldmine to me! That first week, I discovered an issue of Asimov's, but was horrified to find that in order to have it for free, I would have to tear the cover off of it. Why, the cover was half of the intrigue for me. I paid for the issue rather than defile it. Inside, I discovered a collection of stories that I thought had been gathered just for me, a girl who loved real sciencey science fiction. I already loved the Good Doctor and here he was in my hand, practically speaking to me personally, in his editorials every month. I loved him all the more for them. I've since fallen in love with a raft of authors, some familiar and many new. Ever since that magic moment of discovery, no matter if I could afford it or not, I have subscribed to this dear magazine that has been so much a part of my daily life. Now, as a middle-school English teacher, I even use some the stories and poems to entice my students into the amazing world of science fiction. Thanks for being there for me throughout all of these years.

Margaret Livingstone

Northfield, MA

Hi Sheila,

I write this in the shadow of Thanksgiving, 2006, and so I'd like to take a moment to give thanks for Asimov's. My first sale to 'Mov's in 1983 was “Still Time” a story that was very worried about nuclear war. Thank goodness that's not a problem anymore! Er ... um ... never mind. Well, anyway, my count so far is thirty-five stories, forty-seven “On The Net” columns, thirteen poems, and now, finally, a letter to the editor. Speaking of editors, I want to thank Shawna, Gardner, and Sheila for giving me the chance to write to you so often over the years, dear readers.

I have a lot of wonderful memories of great times with the Asimov's crew, and lots of them center around meals that I shared with them (and the magazine paid for!) Oddly enough, the spread I remember best wasn't the most expensive. After the very first Asimov's Readers’ Awards in 1987, Gardner and Sheila took some of their writers out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant—somewhere in Manhattan, I forget where exactly. I was fortunate to be invited as was my good friend Connie Willis. I remember we talked long into the night; I believe we might have closed the place. But what sticks in my mind is that Gardner ordered fried dump-lings. “What are they?” I asked. “You've never had dumplings before?” asked my incredulous editors. And that's how the hick from New Hampshire had his first dumpling. Mmm—I can still taste the dipping sauce.

I've said this before and I'm saying it again here: Asimov's is where almost all of the work I'm best known for has first appeared. So Happy Birthday, Asimov's and thanks for all the dumplings!

James Patrick Kelly

Nottingham, NH

Illustrious staff:

I would not turn down an invitation to write a letter for the thirtieth anniversary issue of your magazine. I think that is a great occasion and one that should be signified by optimisim. It's being said that science fiction is “dying” (there's no such thing as death); I must have been looking at Asimov's when the evidence was on view, and reading the stories when the contention was being discussed, because I remain unconvinced of the truth of this assertion. I know that Asimov will be leaping for joy in the self-created domain where he now resides as he considers the thirty years of success of his magazine.

Only just “thanks” for the most recently received issue of the magazine—Charles Stross, Nancy Kress, and a wonderful picture of Icarus by Michael Whelan on the cover, and James Patrick Kelly keeping computer activity going in a big way in his Net column. Your prediction of the authors you have coming up in 2007 assures you that I will keep reading the magazine, if my recent subscription re-up does not. Thanks again for all the fiction you've been giving us in thirty grand years of publication.

John Thiel

Lafayette, IN

We welcome your letters. They should be sent to Asimov's, 475 Park Avenue South, Floor 11, New York, NY 10016, or e-mailed to asimovs@dellmagazines.com. Space and time make it impossible to print or answer all letters, but please include your mailing address even if you use e-mail. If you don't want your address printed, put it only in the heading of your letter; if you do want it printed, please put your address under your signature. We reserve the right to shorten and copy-edit letters. The email address is for editorial correspondence only—please direct all subscription inquiries to: 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855.

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"I read the first issue of Asimov's when I was a high school senior, and, since even then I was an aspiring science fiction writer, I looked forward to the day that I'd find my own stories in this magazine. Thirty years later, I've had more than three-dozen stories published here, including two Hugo winners and four that have received the annual Readers’ Award. So it's a quite an honor to be back for the thirtieth anniversary issue."—Allen M. Steele

"The River Horses” is a stand-alone Coyote story that takes place after “Home of the Brave” (December 2004)—the story that comprises the last chapter of Coyote Rising (the second volume of the Coyote trilogy), and precedes the events of Coyote Frontier, the third volume. The author's latest novel, Spindrift, which is set in the same universe, is just out from Ace Books.

The shed's wooden doors rumbled as they were pushed apart by a couple of proctors. Early morning sun flooded the barnlike interior, causing Marie to raise a hand to her eyes. About thirty yards away, her brother walked up the dirt path that would lead him back to town. For a moment she thought Carlos would turn to wave goodbye, but he'd turned his back upon her, and there was nothing more to be said between them.

The proctors finished opening the vehicle shed. Neither of them spoke as they turned toward her, but the one on the left tucked a thumb in his gun belt, his hand only a few inches from the butt of his holstered flechette pistol, while his companion nodded toward the skimmer parked behind her. A wayward grasshoarder fluttered into the building; Marie's eyes followed the small bird as it alighted upon the floodlight rack mounted above the glass hemisphere of the hovercraft's cockpit. Then Lars started the twin duct-fan engines; alarmed by the abrupt roar, the grasshoarder flew away.

"Time to go, Ms. Montero.” Manny loaded the last crate of supplies aboard the skimmer; grasping the hatch-bar of the starboard cargo bin and pulling it shut, the savant walked over to her. “We have to leave."

Marie didn't respond. Instead, she glanced back toward where she'd last seen Carlos, only to find that her brother had already disappeared into the tall grass that lay between Sand Creek and Liberty. She'd expected him to watch her leave, at least; finding that he wasn't going to do even this, she felt something cold close around her heart.

"Ms. Montero..."

Something touched her left shoulder; looking around, she saw that Manny had laid one of his clawlike hands upon her. “Get away from me,” she snapped as she tried to swat it away. The four-fingered claw was made of ceramic carbon, though, and was hard as steel. Flesh met unresisting metal, and she winced in pain.

"Sorry.” As always, the savant's face registered no emotion; it was only a silver skull, a death's head shrouded by the raised hood of his black cloak. His remaining eye, the right one, emitted a faint amber hue; the left one was covered by a patch. His hand disappeared within the folds of his robe. “I didn't mean to..."

"Just stay away, all right?” Marie had spent the last several years of her life learning how to hate Manuel Castro; just because he'd volunteered to accompany her and Lars didn't give her any reason to make friends now. Massaging her fingertips, she stepped around him and marched toward the skimmer. Within the cockpit, Lars waited for her, his face impassive as he kept the engines at idle. Marie glanced up at him and he gave her a quiet nod. No point in standing around, and they had no choice; it was time to go.

She was about to mount the ladder to the skimmer's middeck when Chris Levin came up behind her. “Marie..."

She paused, her hands on the ladder's bottom rung. The Chief Proctor held out a satphone, wrapped in a waterproof catskin packet. “In case the com system goes down,” he said, his voice barely audible above the muttering engines. “Don't use it unless..."

He stopped, not needing to finish the rest: Unless you're in so much trouble that you can't get yourselves out of it. Then we might come get you, but only if it's a life or death situation. Otherwise, you're on your own.

She wondered if he was embarrassed by what was happening here. After all, he himself had been made an outcast once, many years ago. Marie took the satphone, hooked it to her belt. She thought to say something, then realized that any words from her would be pointless. Behind Chris, another proctor watched her; his eyes were hidden by a pair of sunglasses, yet his expression was unkind. Not wanting to give anyone the satisfaction of hearing her beg forgiveness, she simply nodded. Chris gave her a tight-lipped smile, then offered his hand. Marie chose to ignore the gesture, though; the last thing she wanted was belated sympathy from her brother's best friend. Turning away from them, she grasped the ladder rungs and climbed up onto the skimmer.

The top hatch was open; she climbed down into it and, ducking her head, clambered through the narrow aft compartment into the cockpit. The skimmer was an Armadillo AC-IIb, a light assault vehicle left behind by the Union Guard after the Revolution; there were four seats within the bubble, two forward for the pilot and co-pilot, two in back for the gunner and engineer. The 30mm chain gun and rocket launchers had been removed, though, and only a few capped wires showed where the weapons-control panel had been dismantled. Seeing this, she wondered whether the skimmer's armament had been taken out before now, or if the magistrates had decided that they didn't want to risk giving her and Lars enough firepower to level most of the colony. She wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer.

"Ready to go?” Lars glanced over his shoulder at her. Marie didn't say anything as she squeezed past him, making her way toward the bucket seat on the right forward side. “Okay, then let's go...."

"You're not forgetting someone, are you?” Castro's leaden footfalls had been lost in the growl of the idling engines; Marie looked around to see the savant's head and shoulders emerge through the hatch leading to the aft compartment. “I'd be insulted if you did."

Lars didn't reply, yet his hands fell from the control yoke and his head fell back on his neck. “I wouldn't be ... never mind.” Then he turned to look at the savant. “Look, we're going to get along fine if you'll just keep your mouth shut."

"My mouth is shut, Mr. Thompson.” Castro's voice emerged from the vocoder grille on the lower part of his face. “I wouldn't have it any other way ... and you?"

Lars slowly let out his breath. He turned back around, but when he grasped the yoke again, Marie noticed that the knuckles of his hands were white. “Keep pushing it,” he murmured. “Just keep pushing it...."

"Let's just go, okay?” Through the curved panes of the canopy, she could see the proctors watching them, their hands never far from their sidearms. Chris had stepped away from the vehicle; she briefly met his eye, and saw that any vestige of their childhood friendship had been lost behind an implacable mask of authority. Suddenly, she was sick of Liberty and everyone who lived here. “C'mon. I just want to get out of this place."

A grim smile crept across Lars’ face. “Your wish is my command.” He reached to the twin throttle bars, gently slid them upward. The engines revved to a higher pitch, and the hovercraft rose upon its inflatable pontoons and began to ease forward ... and then, obeying a sudden, violent impulse, Lars shoved the bars the rest of the way into high gear.

"Hang on!” he yelled, as the skimmer lunged for the shed doors.

The proctors standing at the entrance were caught by surprise. For a moment, they stared at them in shock, then threw themselves out of the way. Marie caught a brief glimpse of the proctor to the right as he tripped over a barrel and fell to the concrete floor. For a moment, she thought Lars would run over him, but the proctor managed to scramble out of the way before the Armadillo swept out of the shed.

"Yeee-haaah!” Lars's rebel yell reverberated within the cockpit, almost drowning out the engines. “Run, you sons of bitches! Run!"

Once the skimmer was clear of the shed, he twisted the yoke hard to the right, aiming for the nearby creek. Pieces of grass and flecks of mud spattered the bottom part of the bubble; Marie clung to her armrests as her body whiplashed back and forth in her seat.

"Gangway!” Lars shouted. “Mad driver! Run for your...!"

"Stop it!” Marie reached forward, grabbed the throttle bars. “Stop it right now!"

She yanked the throttle back in neutral. The back end of the skimmer lifted slightly as it coasted to a halt, less than a half-dozen yards from the creek. Through the tall grass, she caught sight of a canoe drifting near the shore; two teenagers, neither much younger than her or Lars, stared at them in horror, their fishing poles still clutched in their hands. In another second or two, Lars would have mowed them down.

Lars's laughter died, the ugly amusement in his eyes suddenly turning to frustrated anger. “You said you wanted to get out of here,” he said, grabbing her hand and trying to pry it away from the throttles. “I was just doing like you..."

"That's not what I meant!” Wincing against his grasp, she wrapped her fingers more firmly around the bars. “I don't want to leave this way,” she added, speaking more softly now. “I just want to...” I want to come backsome day when no one is afraid of me anymore, or at least when my own brother can look me in the eye. “Just take it easy,” she finished, struggling for words that might get through to him. “Show a little class, y'know what I mean?"

Dull comprehension crept across her boyfriend's face. “Yeah, sure,” he murmured. He released his grip from her hand, and it wasn't until then that she realized how much he'd hurt her. “Just take it easy,” he said, repeating what she'd said as if the idea was his own. “Show a little class...."

"That's it.” Marie let go of the throttles. “Be cool. That'll really bug ‘em."

The outlaw smirk reappeared on Lars's face. He laid his right hand on the throttles again, and for a moment Marie thought he'd jam them forward once more. But instead he eased the bars up just a half-inch, and the skimmer responded by sluggishly moving forward. The teenagers in the canoe had already paddled out of range by the time the Armadillo entered the narrow river; there was a mild splash as the pontoons drove water against the cockpit, rinsing away torn-up grass and mud.

"So,” Lars asked, “which way you want to go?"

"To.... “Marie hesitated. “I don't know.” She pointed downstream, south from where they were now. “That way, at least until I can get our bearings."

"Our bearings?” He glanced at her. “What, you don't know where you are? I mean..."

"Just go that way, okay?"

She pushed herself out of her seat. Castro's skeletal face raised slightly as she brushed against him; for a brief instant, as the multifaceted ruby of his right eye gleamed at her, she caught dozens of tiny reflections of herself, each tinted the color of diluted blood. Yet the savant said nothing as she ducked her head to make her way through the aft-section hatch, and anything else Lars might have said to her was lost in the thrum of the skimmer's engines.

The day was a little older when she climbed out through the topside hatch. Grasping the slender handrails, she stood upon the middeck, feeling the engines vibrating beneath the soles of her boots as she gazed back the way the way they'd just come. The wood-shingled rooftops of Liberty were already lost to her; she caught a last glimpse of the grange hall, the tall mast of its adjacent weather tower rising above the treetops. A minute later, the faux-birch cabins and shops of Shuttlefield went by; the shadow of Swamp Road Bridge fell across her, and Marie looked up to see a little girl, not much older than she herself had been when she'd come to Coyote, waving to her from its railing. Marie lifted her hand to wave back, and the girl beamed at her, delighted to be acknowledged by a woman traveling down Sand Creek, bound for glories that she could only imagine.

Marie stood on the deck until the last vestiges of human civilization disappeared behind her. Then, wiping tears from her eye with the back of her hand, she climbed back down the hatch.

From the journal of Wendy Gunther: Uriel 47, c.y. 06

Today was First Landing Day, our first since the Revolution. I should be happy, but it's hard for me to join the celebration: we sent Marie and Lars into exile today.

That's not the official term, of course. The magistrates are calling it “corrective banishment,” and claim that it's a more benign form of punishment than sentencing them to a year in the stockade. Perhaps this bends Colony Law a bit, but count on Carlos to come up with a new idea; he didn't want to see Marie do hard time, so he used his mayoral influence to convince the maggies that his sister and her boyfriend would benefit from being sent to explore the wilderness. And since Marie and Lars are former members of the Rigil Kent Brigade, no one wanted to put a couple of war vets on the road crew. Better for them to do something that might serve the community more than digging ditches and hauling gravel.

I thought Clark Thompson would object. After all, he's not only a member of the Colonial Council, but Lars is also his nephew. From what I gather, he and his wife Molly raised Lars and his brother Garth as their own children after their parents were killed (never got the full story on that—wonder what happened?). But Clark is as tough as Molly is gentle, and he was furious when he learned that his boy held a man's arms behind his back while Marie slashed his face with a broken bottle, the outcome of a tavern brawl that should have been settled with fists and nothing worse. Like Carlos, Clark figured that statutory reform was preferable to penal time, so he agreed not to stand in the way while the magistrates sent Lars and Marie into exile ... pardon me, “corrective banishment."

They may be right. Marie and Lars aren't hardened criminals, nor are they sociopaths (or at least Marie isn't—I'm not too sure about Lars). Yet the fact remains that both of them came into adulthood fighting a guerilla war against Union forces. In a better world, Marie would have spent her adolescence knitting sweaters and fidgeting in school, while Lars might have done nothing more harmful than pestering the neighbors with homemade stink bombs. But they were deprived of that sort of idyllic fantasy; they grew up with rifles in their hands, learning how to shoot enemy soldiers from a hundred yards away with no more remorse than killing a swamper. Their first date should have been a shy kiss and a furtive grope behind the grange hall, not a quick screw somewhere in occupied territory, with one eye on the woods and their weapons within arm's reach.

So this morning, just before sunrise, Chris had his proctors release them from the stockade. They were marched down to the vehicle shed, where they were given a decommissioned Union Guard skimmer, along with rifles, ammo, wilderness gear, and enough food to last them a month. And then Carlos told them to get lost ... literally. Go out and explore the boonies, and don't come back for six months. If they show up in any of the other colonies—Defiance, New Boston—they'll be arrested and sent back here to serve out the rest of their sentence, plus six months, in the stockade. Until then, they're expected to survey the wilderness and use the skimmer's satphone to make a report every couple of days or so on what they've found.

I have to hand it to my husband: as solutions go, it's not such a bad one. The Union occupation pretty much forestalled further exploration of Coyote, or at least beyond what we found on Midland while we were hiding from the Union. Once the Revolution ended, we had our hands full, dealing with the climatic after-effects of the Mt. Bonestell eruption. So nearly eight-tenths of this world have never been seen except from space; the maps we have, for the most part, are little more than composites of low-orbit photos.

Time to send out the scouts, even if they're conscripts. Carlos spent several months alone on the Great Equatorial River, so he knows it's possible to live off the land. And I know how he changed for the better from that experience. He left Liberty as an irresponsible, reckless boy, and came back as the man I was willing to marry and be the father of my child. Why not have his sister and her boyfriend have the same benefit?

And it isn't as if they're completely on their own. Manny Castro has volunteered to go with them. To be sure, this is a calculated risk. Manny isn't just a savant—he was also the lieutenant governor of Liberty during the Union occupation. Lars even attempted to drown him after he was captured during the Thompson's Ferry massacre. But Manny is trying to find his place in the world, I think, now that the Matriarch is gone and the Union has fled Coyote ... and perhaps Lars should learn what it's like to live with someone whom he once tried to murder.

So it's all very logical, all very sane, all very benign. Everything we've done today is in keeping with the sort of society we aspire to create on this world. And yet ... I'm still not certain whether we've done the right thing. We can justify our actions with our choice of words, yet the fact remains that we've just sent three people into exile.

I've never been much of a religious person. My faith is in the human spirit, not in what most people call God. Nonetheless, if there are angels in the heavens, I pray that they guard and protect those whom we've made outcasts.

They made camp late that afternoon downstream from Liberty, on a brush-covered spit of land formed by the divergence of Levin Creek from Sand Creek. This was boid country; they were near the place where, four Coyote years ago, Jim Levin and Gil Reese had lost their lives in a fateful hunting expedition. Marie knew the story well; Carlos had been on that same trip, back when he was a teenager. She was reluctant to spend the night there, but Lars was nonchalant about the risk they were taking.

"Look, we've got rifles,” he said, “and we've got it.” He pointed to Manny, who'd undertaken the task of unloading their gear from the skimmer, now floating next to the gravel beach where they'd dropped anchor. “Better than perimeter guns ... it can stay awake all night, and shoot anything that moves."

"I can do that, yes.” Manny walked down the lowered gangway, aluminum food containers clasped within each claw. “That is, if I don't put myself in rest mode. Helps to conserve power, you know...."

"Shut up.” Lars lay on the beach where he'd thrown down a thermal blanket, his back propped against the still-folded dome tent. He unwrapped a ration bar, carelessly tossing the wrapper into the cloverweed behind him. “When you get done unloading everything, you can set up the tent. Then you can get started on dinner.” He glanced over at Marie. “What do you want to eat tonight?"

Before Marie could reply, Manny dropped the containers. “Mr. Thompson, I'll tell you this once, and once only. Appearances notwithstanding, I'm not a robot, and I refuse to be treated as such. If you want anything from me..."

"You're our guide, Robby. You volunteered for the job, remember?"

"A guide, not a slave ... and as I was saying, if you want anything from me, then you'll treat me with common human respect. That begins with not calling me ‘it’ or ‘Robby’ or anything other than..."

"I dumped your metal ass in the river once.” Lars stared at him. “Give me a reason to do it again ... please."

Manny gave no answer. Instead, he strode across the beach to where Lars lay, until he was close enough for his shadow to fall across the young man. Lars hastily scrambled backward on his hands and hips, as if afraid that the savant was about to attack him. But Manny merely regarded him for a moment before he slowly turned his back upon Lars and, ever so deliberately, lowered himself to the ground, folding his legs together in lotus position. As Marie watched, the savant rested his hands upon his knees, lowered his head slightly, and became silent.

And there he remained for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, motionless and quiet, even as daylight faded away and darkness came upon the tiny island. Lars kicked at him, swore at him, even pulled out a rifle and threatened to shoot him. Yet Manny refused to budge; the multifaceted corona of his right eye, now dimmed ever so slightly, reflecting the setting sun a dozen different ways as he meditated upon whatever it was that savants thought about when they entered rest mode. By then it'd become obvious that they would receive no cooperation from him; Marie pitched the tent while Lars was still throwing his tantrum, and she finally managed to get him to help her gather driftwood for a campfire. Dinner came late, and was little more than sausage and beans warmed in a skillet above the fire; when they finished eating, Marie coaxed Lars into gathering the plates and utensils and washing them in the shallows. And still Manny remained inert and silent.

Bear was rising to the east, the leading edge of its ring-plane a spearhead against the gathering stars, when Marie lighted a fish-oil lamp and used it to illuminate the map she'd spread out on the ground next. “We've got to figure out where we're going,” she said, kneeling over it. “We can't keep going down Sand Creek...."

"Why not?” Lars pointed to where it flowed into the East Channel. “Look, that's only a day away or so. Once we make the channel, all we have to do is follow it until we reach the big river.” By that he meant the Great Equatorial River, which encircled Coyote like an endless, elongated ocean. “Get there, and we can go anywhere."

"Not the way we're going, we can't.” Marie tapped a finger against the Eastern Divide, the long, high ridge that separated the New Florida inland from the East Channel. “The only way through is the Shapiro Pass. Carlos went through that in a kayak, and it almost killed him."

"But we don't have a kayak. We've got that big mother over there...."

"Even worse.” Marie let out her breath, looked up at him. “I've been through it, too, remember? In a keelboat, back in ‘03 when we evacuated Liberty. That was in mid-winter, when the water was high, and even then we nearly ripped out the bottom of the boat. The rapids ... trust me, this time of year, the rapids are murder. We'll never make it."

"Yeah, yeah, okay.” Lars had learned not to argue with Marie about the terrain of places where she'd already been. He pointed to the Garcia Narrows Bridge, northeast of their present location, where it crossed the East Channel to Midland from the Eastern Divide. “So we cut across country, take the bridge...."

"Can't do that either. That'll take us into Bridgeton and Forest Camp—” she indicated the settlements on the east and west sides of the bridge respectively “—and we were told to stay away from the other colonies."

"C'mon ... you're not taking that seriously, are you?” A smirk came to his face. “I got friends in Bridgeton. Lester, Tiny, Biggs ... I'm sure any of them would put us up for a few days.” He gave her a wink. “Maybe even six months, if we play our cards right...."

"Or they would turn you in as soon as they saw you, and avoid jail time themselves."

Startled by the unexpected sound of Manny's voice, Marie looked up to see the savant gazing at them. Sometime during the last few minutes, he'd risen from his perch at the water's edge and turned to face them, a black specter half-visible by the firelight.

"No one will help you,” Manny went on, as if he'd been part of the conversation all along. “The word is out, or at least it will be by the time you make it to the next town. You're persona non grata. Bad company. Anyone who associates with you risks stockade time. I wouldn't count on..."

"I thought I told you to shut up.” Lars scooped up a handful of gravel, flung it at the savant. It clattered off his metal chest, ineffective as it was impulsive; Manny didn't move, but simply stood there. Lars shook his head and looked down at the ground. “God, I need a drink. Didn't we bring any booze?"

"Did you ever stop to consider that drinking may be the source of all your...?"

"If you want to help,” Marie said, “you can start by not lecturing us.” Picking up the map, she stood up and walked over to him. “We need a place to go. If we can't go south or east, and north takes us back to Liberty..."

"Then it's obvious, isn't it? You should follow Horace Greeley's advice."

"Who the hell is Horace Greeley?” Lars muttered.

"'Go west, young man, go west.'” Taking the map from Marie, Manny studied it for a moment. She was surprised that he could see it without the aid of a flashlight, then remembered that he was gifted with infrared vision; bearlight was sufficient for his electronic eyes, even if one of them was permanently damaged. “If we cross Sand Creek and go west by southwest for about fifty miles, we'll arrive at the confluence of North Creek and Boid Creek. And if we follow Boid Creek upstream for another hundred and twenty miles, we'll reach the West Channel, just past the mouth of the Alabama River. From there..."

"Wait a sec.” Marie held up a finger, then dashed back to the campfire to pull a pocket light from her pack. Bringing it back to where Manny stood, she switched it on and held it over the map so that she could read it as well. “Oh, no ... no, that's no good. That's almost two hundred miles through back country, with the first fifty across dry land."

"The skimmer is designed for all-terrain travel. Deflate the pontoons, and it'll operate just as well in high grass. It'll run a little slower, granted, and we'd do well to avoid heavy brush, but once we reach Boid Creek, we'll make up for lost time."

"Aren't you forgetting something, Robby?” Still not rising from where he sat, Lars snapped a branch in half and fed it into the campfire. “Back country means boid country. Maybe you don't have anything to worry about, but us flesh ‘n blood types..."

"I have no more desire to encounter boids than you do, Mr. Thompson. I doubt they'd distinguish very much between a savant and a baseline human ... and I've asked you not to call me Robby.” He returned his attention to Marie. “The first fifty miles will be the toughest, I grant you that, but, with luck and skillful driving, we can probably travel the distance in only a day or two. Once we reach Boid Creek, we'll be on water again. After we reinflate the pontoons, we should be able to cover...."

A harsh scream broke the quiet of the evening, a high-pitched howl that drifted across the savannah and caused the hair on the back of Marie's neck to stand. She immediately switched off her light, even as Lars looked around for where he'd left his rifle. Only Manny was unperturbed; pulling back the hood of his cloak, he turned his head toward the direction from which the sound had come, as if searching for its source.

"It's not close,” he said. “No less than two miles, at least. But..."

"But what?” Marie peered into the darkness. Once again, she became aware just how vulnerable they were. The narrow creeks on either side of the island offered little protection from what was out there.

"Wait,” Manny said softly. “Just wait.... “Then they heard another boid cry, this time from a slightly different direction, and a little louder than the first. “Ah, so,” he added. “That would be the mate. They work together, frightening their prey into making them run first one way, then another, until they become disoriented. Then..."

"I got the idea.” Yet in all the years she'd spent on Coyote, this was the first time she'd heard of this. Not even Carlos, who had a boid skull on his cabin wall as a hunting trophy, possessed that kind of insight. “So what do we do?"

"Keep the fire going. They associate open flame with brush fires caused by lightning storms, and they tend to avoid those. Otherwise, all we need to do is stay where we are and make as little sound as possible. We don't want to draw their attention.” Folding the map, Manny handed it back to her, then walked over to the fire, where Lars crouched, rifle at hand. “Thank you for allowing me to recharge, Mr. Thompson. If you'll give me your weapon, I'll be happy to stand watch tonight."

Lars gazed at him warily, unwilling to surrender his carbine. “Give it to him,” Marie said quietly. “He knows what he's doing ... I think."

"Believe me,” Manny said, “I do.” Lars hesitated, then stood up and, without another word, relinquished the rifle to the savant. Manny checked the cartridge to make sure that it was fully loaded, then tucked it beneath his right arm, pulling back his robe so that it wouldn't get in the way. “Now go to bed, both of you. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow."

"Yeah. Sure. Whatever.” Standing a little straighter, Lars tried to muster what remained of his earlier bravado. “So what's for breakfast tomorrow, Robby?"

"'I don't use it myself, sir ... it promotes rust.'” Manny's voice became deeper and more mechanistic as he said this. It sounded like another quote, yet Marie couldn't quite put her finger on it. Humiliated, Lars slinked off to the tent, muttering something she didn't quite understand. She watched while he fumbled with the zipper, waited until he went inside, then turned to Manny.

"Thanks, Savant Castro,” she murmured. “I appreciate it."

"Of course, Ms. Montero.” His voice returned to its former inflection. “And, by the way ... my name's Manny."

She nodded, and began to walk away. Then she paused to look back to him. “I'm Marie,” she said, as quietly as she could.

"Good night, Marie. Sleep well."

From the diary of Marie Montero; Uriel 49, c.y. 06

Decided to start a diary today—this is my first entry. Found an old logbook in the bottom of the tool compartment while searching for something to help us clean grass from engine blades. Figure since we're going to be out on our own for a while, might as well keep a record of where we've gone and what we've done. Got to report in every other day, so it'll help me keep track of stuff. Wendy's been keeping a journal for years, seems to help her put everything in perspective (is that the right word?), so maybe if I do the same thing it'll help me, too.

Lars says I'm wasting time doing this, but I've got a lotta time to waste. Just spent last two days making our way across New Florida—seen nothing but grass, grass, and more grass. Trees now and then, but it's pretty much the same thing: miles and miles of grass, tall as my chest. Every ten miles or so we have to stop because the stuff gets caught in the fans and clogs them up, so when the engines start to overheat Lars pulls over and then Manny and I have to get out and yank all that grass out of the cowlings while Lars waits for the engines to cool down. But when we're not doing that, the only thing I have to do is sit there. Lars won't let me drive, and he doesn't like it when I talk to Manny. So it's pretty boring.

Manny's not such a bad guy, once you get to know him. We chit-chat while we clear the engines, and he's told me a bit about himself. Turns out that he was once a poet, back on Earth almost eighty-five years ago. Even wrote a couple of books. But he got some sort of disease that caused his bones to lose calcium and deteriorate, so when he got a chance to download his mind into a quantum comp and become a savant, he took it. Hearing this makes me think he's a little more human than I thought ... but then I remember that he used to be the Matriarch's #2 man, and I try to keep this in mind before I trust him too much.

Spent last night (our second) somewhere in the savannah. Close as we can tell from looking at the map, we're about two-thirds of the way to where North Creek and Boid Creek come together. Lars wanted to push on until we got there, but Manny told him that it wouldn't be smart to travel at night. There's a lot of stuff out here—tree stumps, ball plants, even boid nests—that we could run into even with the floodlights on. Lars finally listened to him and stopped, but the grass was too high for us to make camp without doing a lot of clearing, so instead we stayed aboard, laying out our sleeping bags on the deck and eating cold rations for dinner.

Didn't sleep well. Kept hearing boids all night. Manny stood watch again—nice to have someone who doesn't need to sleep and who can see in the dark—but I woke up once when I heard something moving through the grass pretty close to us. Looked up, saw Manny standing just a couple of feet from Lars and me. Bear was up high, so I could see him really well. He had his carbine raised to his shoulder and was aiming down at something I couldn't make out. He didn't fire, though, but just kept watching, and pretty soon I didn't hear the boid any more. Almost like it caught sight of Manny and decided not to mess with him.

Lars missed the whole thing. Just kept snoring away. Took me a while to shut my eyes again, though. When I woke up this morning, though, Manny didn't tell us what happened. He just gave us some cereal and sliced apples, and stood watch while Lars and I took turns to go off in the high grass to shit and pee. And then we were off again.

Made North Creek about two hours ago. Stopped to reinflate the pontoons, then hit the water and went south down it about five or six miles until we reached the junction of Boid Creek, where we turned W x NW and started heading toward West Channel. Feels good to be on the water again. Making time now that we don't have to stop to clear the fans.

Will use the satphone later to call back home, tell Carlos what we've seen so far. Which ain't much. Stupid idea, sending us out here to explore the world. Ha! Just grass, grass, and more grass.

They were on the fourth day of the trip, little more than ten miles from the West Channel, when Marie was nearly killed.

As Manny promised, the journey became faster once the Armadillo reached Boid Creek and was on the water again. Although they were traveling against the current, it didn't slow the skimmer very much, so long as Lars kept the engines at full throttle and remained in the center of the creek. They camped overnight on a sandbar just east of the confluence of the Alabama River, and the evening had passed uneventfully; once again, Manny stood watch while Lars and Marie slept in the tent.

The following morning, though, they awoke to find the sky overcast with iron-grey clouds. While the others had breakfast, Manny used the skimmer's comsat system to pull up a nowcast report from Liberty. Satellite images showed that a low-pressure front had rolled in from the west during the night, bringing with it a strong chance of storms. Back in the colonies, the change of weather wouldn't have mattered so much, but out here in the open...

"We should go as far as we can today,” Manny said, “but we need to get off the water at the first sign of a thunderstorm."

"C'mon, what's a little rain?” Lars peered at him over the lip of his coffee mug. “You won't melt.” Then he snickered. “Oh, wait, I forgot ... you might draw lightning."

"If I happen to attract lightning, as unlikely as that may be, then you'll be the first to know. I sit behind you, remember?” Lars's smirk lapsed into a dark glower, and Manny went on. “It's not just lightning we have to worry about ... if we get enough rain, we'll also have to be concerned about flash-floods. If that happens, we'd rather be on dry land, don't you think?"

Despite himself, Lars had to admit that the savant had a point. Until the storms actually came, though, there was no reason why they shouldn't keep moving. So they put out their fire, struck camp, loaded their equipment back aboard the skimmer, and continued down the narrow river, with Marie and Lars taking turns on the middeck to watch for signs of bad weather.

Yet, although the air became cooler and a few drops of rain occasionally pattered against the canopy, the storm never arrived. The clouds became thick and heavy, and shortly after midday Marie briefly spotted a blue-white lancet arcing between the sky and the ground. But the lightning strike was somewhere in the grasslands many miles to the south, so far away that, when the thunder finally arrived nearly a minute later, it was only a dull grumble. The front moved past them with little more than a vague threat of violence; by early afternoon, as they passed through the broad delta that marked the mouth of the Alabama River, the clouds were parted here and there to admit angular columns of pale yellow sunlight, ghostly stairways rising into the heavens.

Marie was in no mood to appreciate the sublime beauty of the moment; she had another problem to worry about. She didn't know whether it was anxiety or the diet of processed food—it had been two days since they'd had anything fresh to eat—but, regardless of the reason, she'd come down with a case of diarrhea. Since the beginning of the trip, she'd learned to wait until they made rest stops along the way, but today her bowels refused to cooperate. The antacid tabs she'd found in the medkit didn't help much, and, during the hours while Lars was running the engines hard in an effort to get out from under the storm, she hadn't dared to ask him to pull over so that she could make a quick dash into the tall grass.

Yet her guts had begun to cramp painfully, and unless she wanted to relieve herself over the middeck rail, she had to do something fast. So as soon as they were past the Alabama River, she demanded that Lars make an emergency landing. No, they couldn't wait until they reached the coast; she had to go, right now. Lars groused a bit, but one look at her face told him that she wasn't kidding. With a resigned shrug, he throttled down the engines and turned the Armadillo toward shore.

Marie was off the skimmer before Manny had a chance to lower the ramp. Scrambling down the ladder, she dropped into ankle-deep muck so thick that it threatened to pull her moccasins off her feet. Scowling as she grabbed at waterfruit vines for support, cursing with each bowlegged step she took, she clambered ashore, then scrambled up a muddy riverbank until she reached dry land. Then she plunged in the tall grass, searching for some place where she couldn't be seen from the skimmer.

A dozen yards from the creek, she found a spider-bush thicket high enough to afford her some privacy. Dropping her pants, she squatted behind it; relief was immediate and not a second too soon. Once she was done, she pulled up a handful of cloverweed and used it to clean herself, a trick she'd learned while in the Rigil Kent Brigade. Then she stood up and bent over to pull her pants up from around her ankles.

It was when she raised her head again that she spotted the boid.

The giant avian stood less than twenty yards away, silently watching her from the tall grass within which it was concealed. So perfectly did its tawny feathers match the color of the sourgrass, she might have missed seeing it entirely if something hadn't moved near its feet. Perhaps it was a swamper or a creek cat, but it distracted the boid just enough that it moved its head ever so slightly to watch it go.

She caught a glimpse of its enormous beak, absurdly parrot-like yet large enough to decapitate her with a single bite, and involuntarily sucked in her breath. The sound she made was sufficient to draw the boid's attention; its head swiveled on its thick neck, and once again its black, button-like eyes fastened upon her.

Fighting the urge to run, Marie forced herself to stare straight back at the creature. If it knew that it'd been seen, it wouldn't attack immediately, because boids preferred to stalk their prey and catch them unaware. Yet now that it knew that it had been spotted, the attack would be inevitable. The short, spike-like plumage on the top of the boid's skull lifted—it was an adult male, as if that mattered much just now—and it rocked back and forth upon its legs, almost as if it dared her to make a break for it.

Marie's mind raced, calculating her odds for survival. The distance between her and the boid was greater than the distance between her and the skimmer. Not much, but those few extra yards might make all the difference. If she ran as fast as she could, she might be able to reach the creek before it caught her. But boids were fast; their legs were longer than her own, and they were accustomed to chasing down their prey and leaping upon them while they were...

Damn it! Too much thinking, and not enough action. “Aw, shit,” she muttered, and then she turned and ran.

She might have had a good head-start, were it not for the spider-bush directly behind her. She'd forgotten about that. Swearing, she nearly charged headlong into it, and only barely managed to avoid being tangled within its thorny strands. Yet it cost her precious seconds; even as she dodged around the bush, she heard the boid screech, and knew without looking back that it was coming after her.

Air burned within her lungs as she raced for shore, her arms raised to swat aside the grass. The ground trembled slightly beneath her feet, and she instinctively knew that the boid had leaped over the thicket. Still, she refused to look back. The shore was close, very close; already she could see the skimmer's aerial, protruding against light grey clouds tinted orange-red by the afternoon sun, so heartachingly beautiful, and, in a moment of clarity, she regretted that this might be the last thing her eyes would ever see.

Oh god, oh god, oh god ... oh dear lord, save me, I'll never do anything ... oh god, please, I swear I'll...

A hot wind, stinking of decayed flesh, brushed against the back of her neck. A hard snap just behind her...

From somewhere to her left, the loud poppa-poppa-poppa of an automatic weapon, Looking around, she caught a glimpse of Manny standing in the tall grass only a few yards away, hood thrown back, carbine raised to his shoulders.

"Down!” he yelled.

The gun's muzzle moved in her direction, and she dove headlong for cover. She hit the ground face-first, hard enough to knock the wind from her lungs. Rolling over, Marie saw the boid towering above her. For a second, she thought this was the end, then she heard gunfire again. The boid staggered backward, red blood and grey brains spurting from a hole in its head big enough for her to stick her hand in. Gore spattered across her legs, then the creature toppled over, its taloned feet twitching as if, even in death, it was still trying to catch up with her.

Her mouth dry, her heart feeling as if it was about pound its way through her chest, Marie fell back against the trampled grass. A timeless time went by, then Manny loomed over her, a figure in black with a death's head for a face. He said something—it may have been are you all right? but she couldn't be sure, because his voice sounded scratchy and distant, as if it was a radio transmission from another world—and all she knew for certain was that she was drifting away to a dark, warm place, where there was no fear.

From the diary of Marie Montero: Uriel 52, c.y. 06 (extract)

When I came to, I was back aboard the skimmer. Manny [had] carried me back while Lars pulled anchor and started up the engines, so when I woke up, I found that we were already underway. Manny'd laid me out on deck and pulled the awning over me, and when I woke up, I found that he'd put a wet cloth across my forehead.

Very weird, coming out of it like that. Don't even remember fainting. In fact, that's a first for me—fainting, that is—but Manny says it's not unusual, considering how close I came to buying it. I asked him how close the boid was when he shot it and at first he wouldn't tell me, but when I told him about the snap I heard, he said the snap was the boid trying to bite my head off. That's how close it was.

Manny told me he'd come ashore when he saw that I'd gone off without a rifle. He had a hunch there might be trouble. Glad he had that hunch, or I would've been lunch, ha ha. Not funny, I know ... but right now, laughing is a lot better than crying, and I've done some of that already.

Lars got us downriver a mile or two, then stopped engines and came back to see how I was doing. He was worried, too ... at least I think he was ... but then he went off on me about going ashore unarmed, and that I shouldn't ever take a dump again without packing a gun. Then he told Manny we should've hauled the boid aboard and carved it up for food, because we could've gotten a good meal out of it. I had to laugh at that. Hell, I was downright hysterical. Told him that it would've tasted even better if I'd fattened it up a little bit. That got him pissed off. He went back to the cockpit and started the engines again, and didn't say anything to me after I returned to the bubble.

Lars means well, I know that. And he was right about going ashore without carrying a rifle to protect myself. But, dammit, I was almost killed back there, and he's mad about not getting some fresh meat from the carcass?!

At any rate, we made it to the end of Boid Creek by the end of the day, where we found the entrance to the West Channel. So far as we know, we're the first ones to see the western side of New Florida. From here, it's about five miles across the channel to Great Dakota; we can see river bluffs on the other shore, with deep forests and high mountains that look almost black rising in the distance. Totally different landscape from New Florida—sort of like Midland, except even more rugged. What a relief. I'm so sick of sourgrass, I could puke.

It was too late for us to cross that night, so we made camp on New Florida, on the north side of the mouth of Boid River. For once, Manny made Lars haul everything ashore and set up the tents—he wanted to spend the last hour or two of daylight surveying the area (taking pictures, setting up the theodolite and making measurements, using a plumb-line to estimate the water depth, etc.). Says this place could be a good site for a port town, some time in the future. Guess I can see that, maybe ... but Manny sees things a lot different from us, I think.

I made dinner, but it wasn't very good ... burned the beans and undercooked the chicken (in fact, I couldn't even eat the chicken—reminded me too much of what almost ate me). Lars bitched about having to do all the hard work, but Manny stayed quiet. He spent the time writing up the report to send home—I asked him not to mention what happened today [because] I didn't want Carlos to get worried—and when he was done I read it over and let him transmit it. Then I crawled into the tent and tried to go to sleep.

Lars came in a while later. Pulled off his clothes and made me take off mine. Wanted to have sex. Wasn't in the mood, but I let him, because he insisted. Felt good for about a minute, but I [crossed out]. It seemed to satisfy him, though, because after he was done he rolled over and fell asleep.

Needed to pee, so I moved him aside, crawled out of the tent. Found Manny standing by the fire, looking out over the channel. He wanted to escort me while I went into the bushes, but I told him I'd be OK. No boid cries—everything was calm and quiet. I didn't go far, just to the edge of the water, but I never let him out of my sight. He turned his back, but I could tell from the way he held his gun that he was on alert.

When I was done he said goodnight and told me to have pleasant dreams. Before I went back to bed, I asked him what he was doing, i.e., what did he do all night while Lars and I were sacked out.

He said that he was writing poems.

Writing poems. I like that.

Although Marie, Lars, and Manny thought they were the first to navigate the southwest end of the West Channel, they soon learned they were wrong. Not long after the expedition crossed over from New Florida and began making its way down the east coast of Great Dakota, they unexpectedly came upon another group of explorers.

At Manny's insistence, Lars throttled down the engines and let the current carry them downstream. Although Lars was impatient to reach the Great Equatorial River, Manny wanted to take time to study the channel. When Marie agreed with the savant—after all, there was no reason for them to hurry—the pilot found himself outvoted. So while Lars fumed within the cockpit, Manny and Marie sat side by side on the middeck, legs dangling over the side, as they watched the river go by.

The day was pleasantly warm, with just a touch of autumn to the salt breeze wafting across the channel's dark blue expanse. Swoops circled above the faux-birch whose roots clung precariously to the edge of limestone bluffs rising above the river; now and then, channelmouth jumped from the water near the boat, as if frightened by the aliens who'd suddenly appeared in their midst. In the far distance, they could make out the highlands, enormous mountains so thickly forested with blackwood and rough bark that they looked as if they were made of charcoal, save for the rocky summits that towered above the tree line.

Great Dakota was breathtakingly beautiful, as awesome in its unspoiled majesty as the savannahs of New Florida had been menacing. For the first time since they'd left Liberty, they were able to relax. There was no sourgrass to battle though, no boids to watch out for. After a while, Marie and Manny stopped talking; instead they shared a quietude that was both respectful and intimate. Manny made notes in a datapad, but every so often he switched to the graphic-input function and used the tip of one of his claw-like fingers to render a quick sketch. Peering over his shoulder, Marie was surprised by the delicate lines he traced upon the screen. Manny was not only a poet, but also an artist; it was easy to forget that he was a savant, a soul locked within a mechanical body.

Around midday, Lars stopped the engines. He came up top to drop anchor, then stomped across the middeck to the stern where, without apology, he opened his fly and urinated into the river. Marie had taken off her shirt and now wore only her bra; looking around to catch Lars staring at her breasts, she found herself feeling naked, and quickly pulled her shirt on again before going below to make lunch.

Left alone with Manny, Lars leaned against an engine cowling; he crossed his arms and silently regarded the savant for a long time, idly scratching at his beard but never once saying a word. Manny put away his datapad and stood up to face the channel; he was better at practicing stoicism than Lars, and after a while Lars turned and began plucking small blades of grass from the fans.

Marie came back up with sandwiches and some dried fruit; she and Lars ate in near silence, their only conversation some technical chatter regarding engine maintenance. Lars threw the rest of his sandwich overboard and watched a couple of channelmouth fight over it, then he stomped back across the deck, pulled up the anchor, and went back down the ladder.

Manny and Marie resumed their previous places on the deck. A few minutes later, the engines restarted and the skimmer began moving down the channel. Marie let out her breath, and for just a moment she heard the soft crackle from Manny's mouth grille that, in its own way, signified a sigh.

It was late in the afternoon when they spotted a thin tendril of smoke rising in the distance, from a point farther down the coast. At first Manny thought it was a forest fire caused by the storm that had passed over them the day before, but after a while he and Marie realized that it was too small to be natural in origin. Lars must have thought so, too, for suddenly the engines revved up and both of them had to grab the railing as the skimmer rose higher upon its pontoons and began to cruise down the river.

They were right: the source of the smoke was a campfire, set by people who'd already ventured down the West Channel. As they grew closer, the bluffs gradually disappeared until they came within sight of a broad, flat delta where an inland creek emptied into the channel. A pair of keelboats lay at anchor just offshore, their sails furled. Nearby were several catskin tents, their poles leaning haphazardly as if carelessly planted in the muddy soil. And it was clear that they'd been spotted as well, for several figures stood on the sandy beach, waving their arms above their heads as the skimmer approached them.

"Who do you think they are?” Marie had climbed down the ladder into the cockpit; now she stood behind Lars, gazing at the campsite through the bubble.

"Does it matter?” Lars throttled back the engines as he turned the yoke toward shore. “First people we've seen in almost a week. Probably the only guys we're going to see this side of New Florida.” He grinned. “Time to go over and say howdy."

"We're not supposed to make contact with anyone.” Unnoticed by either of them, Manny had followed Marie belowdecks. “That's the condition of our..."

"Shut up, Robby.” Lars shoved down the throttle bars. The fans growled as the engines reverse-propped; the skimmer's bow rose slightly upon the crest of its own wake. “Ain't a colony, is it? So we can meet ‘em if we want to.” He glanced back at the savant. “And since when did you become boss?"

Marie kept her silence. Already, two men were wading out into the shallows, preparing to grab hold of the skimmer and help tow it ashore. Their beards were long and unkempt, their clothes ragged and patched together. Upon the beach, several more men and women stared at them; although a couple held up their hands in greeting, she saw no welcoming smiles.

"He might be right,” she murmured, feeling a forbidding chill. “Maybe we should..."

"Look, it's just for a little while, okay?” Lars cut the engines, let their momentum carry the skimmer the rest of the way ashore. “'Sides, we gotta make camp soon anyway. Why not with these guys?” He stared at her. “Anything wrong with that?"

"No ... no, I guess not.” Her voice was meek. “It's just that..."

"Yeah, well, hold that thought.” Lars pushed himself out of his seat, then slid between her and Manny, practically shoving them out of the way in his haste to get topside. “Need to drop anchor before this heap drifts away."

Manny watched him as he scampered up the ladder. “Who knows?” he said quietly. “Maybe seeing someone else might do him some good."

Marie could already hear men clambering up the sides of the skimmer. Recalling stories of Caribbean pirates she'd heard when she was very young, it wasn't hard to visualize them with bandanas tied around their heads and daggers clenched within their teeth.

"Stay with me,” she whispered. “Please, whatever you do ... just stay with me."

From the diary of Marie Montero: Uriel 53, c.y. 05 (extract)

Stopping was a mistake. We should've stayed away, just waved and kept going. But Lars insisted, and Manny thought it might be good for him if he saw someone else besides just him and me. But if I could take it back, somehow run back the clock, we would've never set foot on the beach.

I was nervous about these people from the get-go, especially the way a couple of their guys climbed aboard without so much as a how-do. I didn't like the way they looked at me, like I was fresh meat they'd love to skewer. But Manny really put the spook on them ... the last thing they expected to see was a Savant, not to mention one with a rifle in his hands, so they calmed down a bit once we came ashore, and introduced themselves as politely as they could.

Turns out they're a group from New Boston, about three hundred miles N x NE from where we found them. Twenty-seven in all, mostly men, although there's also a few women and a couple of children. They built the boats themselves and set out from Midland to explore the West Channel, mainly to see if they could find a location for a new settlement. They'd been on the river for about three weeks when we happened upon them, and they were just as surprised to see us as we were to see them.

That warned me right then and there that something was wrong. New Boston isn't a major colony, but it's well-off enough that no one ought to want to leave it to go exploring, or at least not in the last month of summer, with autumn just ahead. And these guys seem to have just enough to get by on ... just a few patched-up tents and some hand-me-down equipment that'd seen better days. Even their guns are old Union Guard flechette rifles left over from the war, and they didn't have but a few of those. Like they'd just grabbed whatever they could get their hands on before they shipped out.

But they've got plenty of booze. About six kegs of sourgrass ale, along with a few jugs of bearshine that they said they'd been saving for a special occasion. Soon as Lars heard that, I knew we were staying for the night, whether Manny or I liked it or not.

At least their leader is someone I can trust. Woman by the name of Chris Smith—guess it's short for Christine, although almost everyone calls her Missus Smith. Big lady, with arms that look like they could yank the wings off a boid. Real no-nonsense attitude. When one of the guys started to get a little frisky with me, she stepped in and stared him down. He backed off right quick, and after that the others decided to look but not touch. At least for a while.

They got a bonfire started shortly after sunset, and a couple of guys fried some redfish they caught this morning. For a while, it wasn't so bad: just a bunch of people, chowing down around the campfire and swapping stories about what we've seen and done since we left home. Lars didn't tell anyone exactly why we'd left Liberty, and none of them told us exactly why they'd left New Boston, but after a while I got the feeling that the reasons were pretty much the same. These people were too ornery for the place where they'd come from, and someone had told them to hit the road and not come back.

Well, good enough. But then a few of the men got into serious drinking, and that was when I noticed that the rest, including all the women and children, began making themselves scarce. The only woman who stayed behind was Missus Smith. She parked herself on a log next to me, and I noticed that her right hand never strayed far from the big hunting knife she kept in a scabbard on her belt.

Manny was there, too. Although no one liked having him around—all through dinner, he had to put up with stuff like “Hey, where'd you get the pet robot?” and “Maybe we can break him down for spare parts"—he never left my side, and stood behind me while we ate. He said nothing, and after a while people pretty much forgot he was there.

So it was Manny and Missus Smith who saved me from getting gang- raped, because I have no doubt that's what would've happened if they hadn't been there. I was tired, and about ready to head for our tent, when Lars happened to remark that we hadn't brought any liquor of our own, and would anyone consider making a trade for a jug of bearshine.

Someone suggested that they'd swap a jug for one of our carbines, but Lars shook his head and told him that we only had two and we needed both of them. Another guy said that he'd settle for our satphone, and for a moment I thought Lars would actually do that, so I said that we needed it, too, no thanks. And then someone else—a skinny guy named James—said that he'd trade up for a night with me.

Lars looked at him. Then he looked at me. Then he looked at the jug James was holding out. And then he just shrugged and said, “Sure, why not?"

At first I thought he was joking. I mean, there was a smile on his face when he said this. But then James said, “All right, it's a deal” and then he stood up and started toward me. “Let's go, honey-doll. We got a big night ahead of us."

That's when I knew he wasn't kidding. He meant to drag me off to his tent and ... well, you can guess the rest. And not only that, but since his pals stood up as well, it was pretty clear that James wouldn't mind having company. Lars did nothing to stop them, though. James handed him the jug, and Lars pulled out the cork and treated himself to a big swig of corn liquor. Didn't even look at me.

Chris stood up and pulled out her knife. “No deal,” she said. “Everyone just stay put and no one gets hurt.” But they didn't back down. After all, she was outnumbered at least six to one. No matter how tough she might be, there's no way she could take them all at once.

Then there was a shot behind us, and I knew without looking that Manny had fired his gun in the air. Everyone jumped except for Lars, who just stayed where he was, cool as can be, while Manny lowered the gun and pointed it straight at James.

No one said a word, but James and his posse backed off. They went back to where they'd been sitting, and for a couple of minutes no one said anything. Then someone remarked that Bear had come up and didn't it look pretty tonight, and pretty soon everyone was back to talking about the weather and fishing and what-else, as if nothing had happened.

Chris didn't sit down, though, and she didn't put her knife away. She nudged me with her elbow and cocked her head toward the skimmer. That was all the advice I needed. I stood up and, with Manny beside me, walked back to where we'd beached the skimmer. I didn't breathe easy until I'd climbed back aboard, and didn't feel safe until I went belowdecks.

I'm sleeping in the skimmer tonight, with the hatch shut and Manny standing watch topside, as he'd done while we were still on New Florida. It's not boids he's on the lookout for, though, but James and his buddies. Lars hasn't returned and I hope he doesn't. Looking through the cockpit at the bonfire, I can hear him: laughing, singing, getting drunk. Not a care in the world.

Sure know how to pick ‘em, don't I?

Lars seemed to remember nothing of what had happened the night before. When Marie saw him again the following morning, his clothes were grimy from having slept on the beach next to the bonfire. His breath reeked of alcohol, and he claimed to have no recollection of attempting to trade her for a jug of bearshine. So far as he was concerned, all he'd done was have a little party with some newfound friends. But Marie couldn't help but notice that he was unable to look her in the eye, or that he avoided having anything to do with Manny.

She wanted to leave at once, as did Manny. While Lars stumbled off toward the latrine, the other two of them packed up their gear. Much to her surprise, nothing appeared to be missing; the fact that they'd left most of their equipment aboard the skimmer probably had something to do with this. The half-dozen men who'd stayed up all night were still sleeping off their hangovers; those who were awake studiously avoided Marie and Manny while they disassembled the tent and rolled up the sleeping bags, yet just as they were about to carry everything to the skimmer, Chris Smith came over to them.

"Just wanted to say I'm sorry about what happened last night.” Like Lars, she had trouble looking at Marie, and instead gazed at the smoldering remains of the bonfire. “What James said and did was...” Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head. “Look, it's no way to treat a guest, let's put it that way."

"No, it wasn't.” Marie was tempted to turn her back on Missus Smith until she saw how embarrassed the woman was. “Appreciate you standing up for me,” she added, her tone softening. “Would've been worse if you hadn't."

"Yeah, well...” Straightening her broad shoulders, she turned to look at the nearby tents. “My fault. James and his boys seem to think they run the show here. They tried this once before with some of the other women. I put it down then, thought it wouldn't happen again. If I'd known it would, I would've warned you.” She hesitated. “Besides, I thought your man would've ... I mean, that he would have defended you, not..."

"You're no more surprised than I am.” Marie turned to look in the direction Lars had gone. Through the brush that marked the edge of the campsite, she saw him standing at the edge of the latrine pit, his back turned to them as he relieved his bladder. As she watched, he abruptly collapsed to his hands and knees; even from that distance, she could hear gagging sounds as everything in his stomach forced its way up through his throat. No longer did he resemble the guerrilla fighter with whom she'd fallen in love. Instead he was a pathetic drunk. All of a sudden, she realized how much she had come to despise him.

"If I could leave him behind,” she murmured, “I'd do so in a heartbeat."

Chris quietly regarded her a moment. “Got a minute?” she asked at last. “Or are you in a hurry to get out of here?” Marie looked back at her, and Missus Smith nodded toward the water's edge. “Take a walk with me, sister. I got a proposition for you."

Marie glanced at Manny. The savant nodded, then reached forward to take the folded tent from her. As Manny carried their equipment to the skimmer, Chris led Marie down the beach, away from the campsite.

"You probably figured out by now that we're not your usual settlers,” Chris said once they were out of earshot of anyone else. “Fact is, most of us are here ‘cause we got fed up with New Boston. It's become an iron town ever since they found the Gillis lode, and these people aren't the kind who want to spend their lives down in some mine with pick-axes in their hands. So we gathered up what little we could and sailed off down the channel, looking for some place to start our own colony."

"Makes sense. We've had people like that leave Liberty since the war was over."

"I know. I was in Forest Camp during the occupation, working on the bridge project. So's most everyone else here. When Rigil Kent blew up the bridge, we headed north and started New Boston. So we're used to cutting timber, not digging holes. But...” She shrugged. “Well, lately I've begun to wonder just how serious some of these guys really are."

"I don't understand."

Missus Smith stopped and turned toward the beach. “Take a look around, tell me what you see.” Without waiting for Marie to respond, she pointed inland. “I'll tell you what I see. Plenty of dry land past the beach, with a freshwater river leading down from the mountains. No boids to worry about ... they're all on the other side of the channel. And up there in the hills, all the wood you could possibly want. Good, solid timber, too ... not just blackwood and faux-birch like on New Florida, but rough bark and mountain briar as well. With some work, this place could become a major settlement."

In her mind's eye, Marie perceived the place as Chris imagined it: not as a broken-down fishing camp, but as a thriving frontier colony. And she had a point. Most of Liberty, and much of Midland on the other side of the Eastern Channel, had already been deforested during the Union effort to build the Garcia Narrows Bridge. Although this place was farther away from Liberty than Forest Camp, she'd already glimpsed the vast, untouched wilderness of Great Dakota. There was potential here, no doubt about it.

"Have you talked about this with anyone else?” she asked.

Missus Smith let out her breath as a dry snort. “Sure I have. We've been here nearly two weeks, y'know. And a few of us see it as I do. But James and his bunch...” She absently kicked a clump of beach grass in frustration. “Should've never let them get into the booze. Hell, if I'd known they'd turn into a bunch of drunks, I'd never have let ‘em bring it in the first place. Now all they want to do is drink and fish, and half the time they're too messed up to fish. Like this is some sort of vacation."

She looked at Marie. “Last night was the final straw,” she went on, more quietly now. “I've had it with ‘em. No more parties, no more trying to gang-bang anyone with tits. So I'm cutting ‘em loose."

Marie stared at her. “You can do that?"

"Sure, I can.” A grim smile. “Second day out from New Boston, when we made camp on the north shore of New Florida, James and I had a little disagreement about who was in charge. So we had an election, winner take all. I won. And believe me, I can make it stick. Maybe you didn't see it last night, but there's a lot of people among us who are just as sick and tired of him and his pals as I am.” Missus Smith patted the knife on her hip for effect. “If I tell em to go, then they'll go."

"Sure, but ... where'd they go?"

"I don't care.” She pointed to the two keelboats anchored near the skimmer. “They can take either one of the boats ... both are in good condition. Load up their tents and take the booze with ‘em, and head any which way they choose. North, east, west, south ... wherever they can get the news. So long as they're not hanging around here, causing trouble."

She paused. “If you want to get rid of your man,” she said, very quietly, “here's your chance. I saw what he tried to do last night. He would've pimped your ass for a jug of bearshine. Whatever caused you to light out for the country with him is none of my business, but..."

"I know.” Marie looked back at camp. Lars was nowhere to be seen, yet she felt his presence nonetheless, and it gave her a chill. Sometime in the last week, the tough-minded yet easy-going guy whom she'd met during the Revolution had disappeared. Perhaps he'd never been there in the first place; all she'd seen was what she had wanted to see. Yet the fact remained that, from the moment they'd left Liberty, all he'd given her was heartache and misery. Two days ago, he'd shown no remorse when she'd been attacked by a boid. And last night...

"Can Manny stay?” she asked abruptly.

"The savant?” Chris thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “I'm not crazy about those kind, but if you really insist...."

"I mean it. If I stay, he stays, too.” She hesitated. “Look, he saved my life. Twice now, in fact."

"Yeah, yeah, all right.” Missus Smith smiled. “He's handy with a gun, I'll give him that much.” Then her smile faded, and her expression became more serious. “So, are you with us? Or do you want to take your chances with Lars? Tell me now, because I need to know where you stand."

Marie took a deep breath. “I'm with you."

"Good.” Missus Smith clapped her on the shoulder. “Glad to have you with us. Now let's go and read ‘em the riot act."

Lars didn't take Marie seriously at first. Even when she climbed aboard the skimmer to throw his belongings on the beach, he seemed to think she was simply having a fit; he stood nearby with his arms crossed, a knowing smirk on his face. It was not until Missus Smith told him to pick up his gear and carry it to the closer of the two keelboats that he realized this wasn't a joke. He was being expelled, along with the New Boston colonists who'd been at last night's drinking party.

His disbelief quickly turned to anger, as did everyone else's being forced to leave. Yet Missus Smith had the upper hand; she'd already spread the word to all those in camp who were tired of being bullied by James and his cronies, and they'd decided the time had come to stand up for themselves. They'd shown up with guns, machetes, tree branches, anything that could be used as a weapon. Seeing that he and his pals were outnumbered, James tried to bargain with her, making promises that they'd behave from now on, but Missus Smith remained firm. James's group would be given one of the boats and a fair share of the supplies, including a couple of flechette rifles and a satphone in case of an emergency. They could take the rest of the ale and bearshine, too. Yet there was no question that they were being sent their own way, or that Lars was going with them.

Lars became ugly. Red-faced, stamping at the ground like a petulant child, he heaped foul words upon Marie, calling her things that, until now, she'd never imagined that he could think about her. Perhaps it was only the heat of the moment, but it was then that she realized for the first time that he'd never really loved her; she'd been little more than a toy he'd found, useful for sex and little else. Truth be told, she'd felt much the same way about him, too; the events of the past several days, though, had shown her that Lars was only a mannish boy who thought of no one but himself.

Nonetheless, his last words to her stung the most. “You can't get along without me,” he said as he bent down to pick up his sleeping bag. “You know it, too."

"Yes, I can.” She fought to keep her expression stolid, yet tears welled in the corners of her eyes. “I don't need you."

"Yeah, you do. You'd be dead by now if it wasn't for me.” He looked past her toward Manny. The savant stood a few yards away, carbine in his hands. “Who you gonna depend on now, that thing? Hell, it ain't nothing more'n a two-legged can opener."

"He saved my life. And he didn't try to trade me for a jug of booze. More than I can say for you."

"No?” Lars slung the pack over his shoulder, tucked the bag under his arm. “Let's see him keep you warm at night, then.” An ill-humored grin split his face. “Hell, I'd pay good money to see that. Might be as much fun as watching you and James..."

She stepped forward and slapped him across the face. The blow was harder than she meant it to be; that, or he simply didn't see it coming. Either way, he staggered back, almost tripping over his own feet as the sleeping bag fell from his arms. His eyes were wide with astonishment, his cheek reddened where she'd struck him, and, although his mouth opened, for a moment he was speechless.

Behind him, a couple of men from James's group snickered. Someone muttered something that Marie didn't catch, but Lars apparently did. The swollen corner of his upper lip curled, and Lars started toward her, dark fury in his eyes.

"That's enough,” Missus Smith said. Hearing a low click to her left, Marie looked around. Missus Smith had raised her rifle and was pointing it straight at Lars. “Any closer, and so help me I'll put an end to you."

"Chris...."

"Hush.” Missus Smith didn't look away from Lars. “No more words. You're done here. Pick up your stuff and get on the boat. Now."

Lars said nothing. He leaned over to retrieve his sleeping bag, now laying unrolled upon the sand like a dead worm. For a moment, Marie thought he'd mutter a last curse or threat, but Lars surprised her by remaining silent. Instead, he quietly slung the bag over his shoulder, turned away from them and marched down the beach to the keelboat.

James was waiting for him. The two men spoke for a few seconds, then James swatted him on the shoulder and let Lars climb aboard. Two other men shoved the boat backward into the surf, then were hauled over the side by their companions. The morning tide pulled the craft out into the channel, and the people on shore watched as the seven outcasts hoisted sails and tacked into the wind. Within minutes, they were gone, sailing southwest toward the Great Equatorial River.

"Good riddance,” Missus Smith said quietly. “With any luck, we've seen the last of ‘em."

Marie raised a hand to wipe away the tears sliding down her face. For the first time since they'd met, she was free of Lars. And yet, despite all reason not to do so, she knew they'd meet again.

From the journals of Wendy Gunther: Uriel 54, c.y. 06

We heard from Marie today—not a mission report, but a real-time call via satphone. I was on duty at the hospital, but Carlos was home when she called. He spoke with her, and told me about it once I got home. By then he'd calmed down a little, but the conversation clearly upset him.

In short: Marie has left Lars. Or rather, she's made him leave her. She told Carlos that Lars had become abusive since they left Liberty, to the point that he'd almost allowed her to get killed a few days ago—a run-in with a boid that, for some reason, she hadn't mentioned in her last report. It seems that matters came to a head two nights ago after they crossed the West Channel, when they met up with a group from New Boston who'd made camp on Great Dakota. Apparently some of these people were rather ... well, unpleasant, to put it mildly ... but they had plenty of liquor, and Lars went on a binge with them.

Carlos says that his sister wasn't very specific about what occurred next, but apparently something occurred that gave her reason to become afraid of what Lars might do if he remained with her. And that was enough for her, and for the rest of the people in the camp; the next morning, their leader told the troublemakers to get lost, and to take Lars with them. Whatever Lars did, it must have been pretty bad, because Carlos said Marie broke down while she was talking to him.

So Lars is gone, and Marie and Manny have elected to stay for a while on Great Dakota, helping the rest of the group establish a new settlement. Although Carlos is relieved that Marie hasn't been hurt and that she's no longer with Lars—so am I; neither of us ever liked him very much—he's also angry that she's broken the conditions of her parole, i.e., that she and Lars were to explore as much of Coyote as they could during the next six months, and to avoid contact with any other colonists. On the other hand, realistically speaking, there's not much we can do to stop her, short of sending a couple of blueshirts out in a gyro to pick her up and bring her home. And what good would that accomplish?

We've discussed the situation with the magistrates, and come to agree that, at least for the time being, we just should wait and see what happens. If Marie and Manny have located a prime location for a new colony—and from what she's told Carlos, Great Dakota could become a major timber resource—then it's probably best that they explore it with others. After all, they're the first people to cross the West Channel; the other side is wilderness no one else has seen before. So it makes no sense for them to go at this alone when they've found other people who share the same objectives.

As for Lars ... well, that was a tough call. One of the rules we'd set out was that they were to stay together, with Manny as their guide. Marie broke that rule when she allowed the New Boston group to expel him. We've talked this over with Clark Thompson. As much as he loves his nephew, he and Molly are aware of Lars’ problems—especially his drinking—and he knows how much trouble he can cause. On the other hand, he's upset that Marie allowed him to be cut loose. He thinks Manny had something to do with this, even though Carlos told him that this was apparently Marie's decision, and he seems to believe that Lars should have been allowed to stay. But again, he knows there's not much he can do about it, so all he can do is hope that Lars will reappear sooner or later, and that by then Marie will have forgiven him for whatever he did.

Carlos is worried sick about his little sister. Maybe she's not so little anymore, but nonetheless he remembers when they were kids and he always had to look out for her. He's felt responsible for her ever since their folks were killed a few days after we arrived on Coyote and the two of them became orphans. (I had the same problem, of course, but since I didn't know my father very well, the situation was different for me.) When I got home, I found him gathering his outback gear. He planned to enlist a gyro pilot to fly him out west so he could track down Marie. I talked him out of it, but he's still pacing the floor.

So now Marie is on her own, or at least without Lars. Well, maybe that's the way it was meant to be. But there's one thing that still puzzles me. In her reports, she seldom mentions Manny. Wonder why that is?

With the camp's population reduced by one-fourth, the first days without those seven men were the hardest. Although several weeks remained before the autumn equinox, it was clear that Coyote's long summer was drawing to a close; the days were beginning to get cooler, the nights a little longer. If the twenty-two remaining men, women, and children—who now included Marie and Manny—wished to settle Great Dakota, they would have to prepare for the hard, cold months that lay ahead. Cabins needed to be built, along with outhouses, storage sheds, and greenhouses; autumn crops had to be planted, firewood cut and stockpiled: those and a dozen other tasks that James and his crew, who'd been among the hardiest of the original group, had ignored in favor of drinking and sport fishing.

Now that they were gone, though, there was nothing left to distract the others from the serious business of homesteading. Two nights after Lars left, Missus Smith called to order a town meeting, held after dinner around the community fire pit. After it was decided that the settlement would incorporate itself as Riverport, pending approval of the Colonial Council, an election was held for the town mayor. To no one's surprise, Missus Smith ran unopposed.

When Chris presented a motion formally inviting Marie and Manny to become town members, Marie was stunned to find the vote was unanimous in their favor. Perhaps she'd been an outcast in Liberty, but in Riverport she was a fellow citizen. Nor did anyone make an issue of the fact that Manuel Castro was a savant, even though almost everyone was aware that he'd once been the lieutenant governor of the New Florida colonies during the Union occupation. All the same, Marie was struck by the irony that Riverport's mayor shared her first name with Liberty's Chief Proctor: one had welcomed her with open arms, while the other had thrown her in the county jail.

"You two aren't the only ones with a past,” Chris said to her after the meeting was over. “Everyone here's running from something.” Then she smiled and patted her on the shoulder. “Look, you've got a clean slate. Whatever you or Manny did is over and done. So forget about it, okay? Time to start fresh."

And so she did. Over the course of the next several weeks, Marie joined the effort to transform Riverport from a squalid collection of tents into something that resembled a frontier settlement. It was hard work, relentless and seldom pleasant. Once the camp was relocated from the beach to higher ground beside the nearby river, an adjacent stand of faux-birch was designated as timber for the construction of permanent structures. Her first task of the day usually involved helping the men cut down trees and strip them of branches. They lashed ropes around the trunks and dragged them to where cabins would be built. After lunch, she'd help the women and children clear a nearby meadow for the crops that would eventually be planted. And if there was any time left in the day, she collected firewood, washed clothes, cleaned fish, did some of the cooking, and whatever else needed to be done.

Although Manny wasn't strong enough to offer much assistance in the more grueling chores—despite appearances, his mechanical body wasn't meant for hard labor—he proved to be an able architect and civil engineer, designing not only cabins, but viaducts and sewage systems. He performed water-table measurements that accurately predicted the locations for artesian wells, and once he learned less physically demanding crafts such as carpentry and fishing, he turned out to be adept at them as well. Logs shaved and trimmed beneath his tireless hands had precise fittings; the trotlines he rigged every morning produced enough channelmouth, redfish, and brownhead to feed everyone by day's end.

For the first couple of weeks, Marie and Manny saw little of each other. She shared a tent with another woman whose former companion had been among those who'd been expelled, while Manny stayed aboard the skimmer. Although it had been beached, he made sure that its engines remained in proper operating condition. Their work schedules seldom coincided; when she was with the timber crew, he was helping build cabins, and when she was planting seed for corn, wheat, and radishes, he cut bait for the trotlines. Yet as time went on and they became accustomed to their duties, the two found opportunities to talk.

As before, when they'd been on the river, Marie found herself amazed by his insights. Even with only one functional eye, little escaped Manny's notice. He was intrigued by the seasonal migration of sea-swoops toward their breeding grounds in the distant Meridian Archipelago; day by day, he counted their numbers, taking note of how many birds were in each flock that passed overhead, and how that indicated the coming of autumn. He also followed gradual changes in the night sky, the way bright stars like Arcturus and Canopus seemed to rise a little earlier every evening. One afternoon they all witnessed a solar eclipse, when Bear passed between Coyote and 47 Ursae Majoris; it happened often enough that Marie had long-since become accustomed to such events, but Manny pointed something out to her that she'd never really noticed before. The winds rose from the east at the beginning of the eclipse, abruptly died off during totality, then rose again from the west during the end. Just one more thing she'd taken for granted, yet which fascinated him.

Indeed, Manny was everything that Lars hadn't been. He was always gentle, never raising his voice to her, and although he was gifted with vastly superior intelligence, not once did he ever condescend to her. She found solace in his presence, and found herself longing for his company when he wasn't around. In time she forgot almost entirely about Lars, except to occasionally wonder what he'd do once his pals ran out of booze, and whether that meant he'd reappear to make her life miserable again.

Lars's departure had one unforeseen side effect. Although Missus Smith used the skimmer's satphone to transmit a formal petition to the Colonial Council for ratification of Riverport as a colony, the motion failed in the executive committee by a vote of 4-3. When Marie asked why this happened, Carlos told her that the dissenting vote had come from Clark Thompson. Lars's uncle was still angry about his nephew's expulsion. In his capacity as an influential committee member, he didn't want to do anything that might result in vital materials being shipped to the fledgling settlement. So until Lars reappeared, if ever, Riverport was nothing more than a squatter camp unrecognized by the Coyote Federation. Petty politics, really, but the only alternative was to make contact with James's group and beg them to return. Chris was firmly opposed to that idea, and so was Marie.

Yet even that was little more than a nuisance. Once the crops were planted, Marie found more opportunities to spend time with Manny. By then he was beginning to survey the nearby forests. In her desire to find reasons for the Council to recognize Riverport, Missus Smith wanted to make a case for Riverport becoming a major source of timber for all the colonies, and she'd put Manny in charge of scouting out the nearby woodlands. Marie and Manny would follow the river upstream into the foothills, then hike upward through dense forests of rough bark and swoop's nest briar until they reached a granite bluff upon a steep ridge overlooking town. This lonely spot on Thunder Ridge became a favorite place for them to rest—although Manny didn't really need to do so, he never forgot that she wasn't a savant—and compare notes on what they'd found.

The fifth day of Adnachiel was surprisingly warm, at least for the first week of autumn. Behind them rose the rocky summits of the Black Mountains, forbidding in their stark majesty. A few miles to the east lay the broad expanse of the West Channel, bright sunlight sparkling upon its cool blue waters. Manny sat cross-legged upon the bluff, sketching the view upon his pad. Marie lay on her side, quietly observing the delicate way his forefinger traced the river upon the pad's opaque plate.

A notion occurred to her, and she reached forward to tap his arm. “Hey, do you ever draw people?"

His head swiveled toward her. He'd pulled back his robe's cowl, so she saw his face clearly. Although it remained expressionless, there was something in the way that he tilted his head that caused her to imagine a wry grin. “On occasion,” he replied. “No one has ever posed for me, though, so I have to do it when they're not looking."

"I'll pose.” She smiled. “I'd love to have a picture of me."

The metallic buzz from his mouth grill that she'd come to recognize as laughter. “Certainly. It'd be my honor.” He shifted around so that he faced her, propping his pad on one raised knee. “How would you like to...?"

"I'll show you.” Grasping the bottom of her shirt, she pulled it over her head in one swift motion. She reached behind her back and unsnapped her bra. Tossing it aside, she shook out her hair, then stretched out upon the granite, feeling its cool, gritty texture against her skin.

"Like this,” she said, her voice soft and low.

Manny stared at her, his right hand poised above the pad. He said nothing for a few moments, then he lowered his head. “Please put your shirt back on."

"It's all right.” Marie gave him a shy smile. “No one can see me but you.” She paused. “I don't want anyone but you to see me."

Manny put the pad aside, and said nothing for a few seconds. “Whatever it is you want from me,” he said at last, “I can't give it to you."

"You already have. You're my friend...."

"Then be my friend, and...” He stopped, slowly raising his head. “Marie, have you ever wondered why I became a savant? Why I chose to have my mind scanned, downloaded into this?"

Raising his right claw, he tapped it against his chest, where his quantum comp lay. A dull, metallic clank, like a fork rattling against an empty skillet. “Because I was ill. In fact, I was ill all my life. The only part of me that was healthy was my brain. The rest ... I spent my life in a wheelchair, with a respirator tube running up my nose and a nurse pushing me around."

"Manny..."

"Just listen, please.” The afternoon sun reflected off the ruby orb of his left eye, turning it into a jewel. “I never walked on my own. I never ran, or played games with other children, or did anything that I couldn't do with my hands. Or at least my right hand ... the left never worked very well.” He paused. “And, no, I've never been with a woman, if that's what you're thinking."

Suddenly, the day felt cold, as if summer had abruptly come to an end. “I'm sorry,” she said, sitting and reaching for her shirt. “I didn't mean to..."

"No, of course you didn't.” He shook his head. “I know all about cruelty, and that wasn't your intent.” Again, the short buzz. “Misplaced flirtation, perhaps, but not cruelty. But seeing you this way ... well, the gesture is appreciated, but it's also one of those things I've tried not to think about."

Marie slowly nodded. Neglecting her bra, she hastily pulled the shirt over her head. “Please forgive me. I just...” She sighed, looked away. “Hell, I don't know what I was thinking."

"I know. Just an impulse.” Then he hesitated, a little longer this time. “One thing, though ... something I noticed when you were ... shall we say, disrobed?"

She laughed at the diplomatic way he chose his words. “You mean when I was half-naked and trying to play sex kitten?"

"If you wish.” Another pause. “It wasn't until you took off your shirt that I was certain of something I've observed before. Your breasts have become larger."

Marie stared at him. As busy as she'd been over the past several weeks, she hadn't been paying close attention to herself. Now that he mentioned it, though, she realized that her brassieres had become a bit uncomfortable lately. And although she'd eaten as well as anyone in camp could, given the fact that they were living on a diet of fish, waterfruit, rice, and beans, there were mornings when she'd been unable to keep anything in her stomach.

"Oh, god,” she murmured. “Don't tell me what I think you're telling me."

"I'm not telling you anything. Only let me ask a personal question.” He hesitated. “When was the last time you had your period?"

From the diary of Marie Montero: Adnachiel 5, c.y. 06

I'm pregnant.

Yeah, I'm sure. Found a test stick in the med kit. Peed on it, watched it turn red. You know the saying: stick turns green, a virgin you've been, stick turns red, you've been naughty in bed. Ha-ha. Not so funny now.

Looking back, I think I've known for a while, but was trying not to admit it to myself. All the signs were there: morning sickness, cold sweats, craving for fish and sweets, tits getting bigger and more sensitive. And, of course, that period I missed a couple of weeks ago. But it took Manny to make me see what I didn't want to see.

Don't know how I could've been so stupid. We brought pills, of course—they were in the med kit, too—but for some reason I forgot to take them. Maybe it was because I wasn't having sex with Lars. But that night when he forced himself on me ... well, that must have done the trick. So now I'm knocked up, and...

[Passage deleted]

Don't know how to feel about this. Angry at Lars for getting me in this position (or any other position, ha-ha—sorry, another bad joke) but also at myself for being so careless. But also scared. Last thing I need right now is worrying about having a baby.

Manny and I talked it over tonight, aboard the skimmer where we wouldn't be overheard. He let me have a good cry and once I got it out of my system he gave me a cloth to dry my tears. Then we discussed what I should do.

He figures that I'm about four or five weeks pregnant. Means I'll be due in about two and a half months Coyote-time. So I should expect to have the baby by the end of the year, sometime between Hanael 45 and New Year's Day.

Abortion is out of the question. Even if I wanted to do that ... and I don't, ‘cuz it's against my principles ... there's no one here to perform the proce dure. Not safely, at least, and I refuse to let anyone get near me who doesn't know what they're doing. And even tho’ the med kit has pregnancy strips and contraceptive pills, for some dumb reason there's no whoops-silly-me pills.

Leaves me with two choices. Stay here in Riverport, and have the baby in a town that's going to have a rough time getting through winter as is without having one more mouth to feed, or pack up and head back to Liberty where there's a half-decent clinic and a sister-in-law who's used to delivering babies.

Might think the choice is obvious, but it's not. For one thing, I'm still in exile. If I go back, I'd have to fill out my sentence. That means the baby gets born in jail, with Mama going off to the road crew every morning. Even if the maggies cut me some slack, I'll still go back to being the bad apple no one wants around, not even my own brother. Just some stupid girl who got preggers and had to crawl home with a baby in her belly, looking for mercy and hoping that someone would take her in. If I'm lucky, someone will take pity on me and give me a job washing dishes or something.

But here, I'm a respected member of the community. No one cares about what I once was or what I once did ‘cuz just about everyone else here has something in their past, too. Sometimes it seems like we're just getting by, but today we finished putting a roof on another cabin. Even if it leaks, it's a place someone can live, not just some crappy tent. That means something ... and dammit, I like having a life that means something!

I want my child to grow up the same way.

Manny says I don't have to rush into this. The pregnancy is still early, so I've got some time to decide what to do. We're not telling Chris or anyone else what's going on until I figure things out. Hope she'll forgive me, but I'm not ready to pop the news just yet.

I'm scared. Goddamn, but I'm scared. Least I don't have Lars around, though. Sure, he's the other half of this problem, but I remember what he did to me and I don't want him being the father of my child.

Where is he, anyway?

They heard from Lars two days later.

The satphone transmission might have been missed if Manny hadn't been aboard the skimmer, using its side-looking radar to verify the topographical estimates of the maps he and Marie had made. Considering that it was one of those rare occasions when he switched on the instrument panel for anything besides a quick system check-up, it was pure luck that Lars’ satphone call was intercepted. Yet as soon as Manny heard a familiar voice coming through the transceiver—"Mayday, mayday, is anyone there?"—he reached over to pick up the hand mike.

Marie was helping raise a cabin's roof beam when one of the kids raced into town from the beach, breathlessly telling her that Mr. Castro needed to see her right away. She might have waited until the beam was safely hoisted into place if the child hadn't added that Manny had just heard from Lars, and that it was an emergency. Someone quickly stepped in to take her place at the pulley-rope, and she jogged across Riverport to the beach, following the boy whom Manny had sent to find her.

Lars was still on the line when she climbed down the skimmer's top hatch. Manny was sitting in the pilot's seat; as she entered the cockpit, she observed that he'd patched himself directly into the com panel via a cable that he'd extended from his chest. “Here she is,” Manny said, then he picked up the mike and extended it to her. “Lars. Says he's in trouble."

Marie hesitated, then took the mike from him. “Hello, Lars,” she said, realizing even as she spoke how aloof she sounded. “How are you?"

"Marie ... oh, man, it's good to hear you.” Although the satellite downlink should have been perfect, the signal was scratchy, fuzzed with static. “I've got trouble. You gotta help me out."

Her lip curled. What's the matter? she was tempted to say. Run out of bearshine and getting the shakes? Yet when she glanced at Manny, he slowly nodded, confirming the gravity of the situation. “I'm listening ... go on. Where are you?"

"On the big river,” he said, meaning the Great Equatorial River. “About eighty miles southwest of you. An island a few miles west of the channel, just off the coast.” His words came as a rush, and she was surprised to hear an undertone of panic in his voice. “I'm not kidding. You gotta get down here ... we need you, real bad."

"You've got a boat.” Despite herself, she was still skeptical.

"Sank. Shoals punched a hole in the hull while we were trying to make it to shore. We're lucky to get here before..."

A sudden rush of sound, as if something was moving past the satphone. In the background, a voice, unintelligible but nonetheless frightened. She caught only a few words—” ... back, get back, they might ... "—then Lars came back again.

"We've lost almost everyone.” Now his voice was low, as if he was whispering into the satphone's mouthpiece. “Just me, James, and Coop ... and Coop's in bad shape. We've got only one gun, and that's not going to help much. Marie, swear to God, you gotta get us out of this."

"Out of what?” Puzzled, she leaned closer to the com panel. “You're not making any sense. What's..."

Once again, in the background she hear a flurry of noise, as if the satphone was held in the hand of someone who was running. A couple of swift, violent pop-pop-pop sounds that she immediately recognized as the semi-auto gunfire. Then Lars’ voice returned "Please, Marie ... for the luvva God, come get us! I'm sorry about everything! Just come and..."

A sudden snap, like a dry twig breaking. Then silence.

"I have a fix on the location.” Manny disconnected the cable from the com panel and let it spool back into a panel within his chest. “Latitude three-point-one degrees north, twenty-three minutes, longitude seventy-seven-point-nine degrees west, nine minutes.” He pointed to the comp screen above the yoke. “Here."

Marie peered at the screen. Displayed upon it was an orbital map of Coyote. As Manny indicated, the signal from Lars’ satphone originated from the eastern tip of a large island off the southern coast of Great Dakota, just miles west of where the West Channel emptied into the Great Equatorial River.

She sighed. Less than a hundred miles away. Apparently Lars and his buddies hadn't wandered so far as she and the others had hoped. Maybe they thought they'd just go away for a while, get in some drinking time and do a little fishing, then come home and sweet-talk their way back into good graces with everyone they'd left behind. She could almost imagine him now. Oh, babe, I was just foolin’ with you. You know how much I love you. C'mon, now, sweetie, just let me in....

But that was in the past. She'd heard not only the gunshots, but also the terror in his voice. Somewhere just north of the equator, Lars had run into something that he couldn't handle. Marie tossed the mike on the dashboard, let out her breath.

"Better warm up the engines,” she murmured. “I think we're going on a rescue mission."

They didn't go alone. When Marie went back into town to gather the things they'd need, she took a minute to find Chris and tell her what was going on. As it turned out, Missus Smith already knew something was up; the boy who'd fetched Marie had gone on to tell her as well, so when Marie located her in her cabin, she was putting her pack together.

"If there's trouble, you're going to need someone to ride shotgun.” Chris didn't smile as she took down her rifle from the hooks above the door. Marie started to object, but she held up a hand. “James is a worthless drunk, and Cooper's a lowlife, but they're still my people. And you and Manny can't do this by yourselves."

Marie didn't argue. If the situation was as dire as Lars had led her to believe, she knew they'd need all the help they could get. So the two of them grabbed a medkit and some food from the mess tent, then they hurried back to the beach. News traveled fast in Riverport; a small crowd had already gathered near the skimmer, wanting to know what was going on. Chris told them what little she and Marie knew, then gave the town's remaining satphone to another woman and told her to monitor the emergency frequency. If anything were to happen to them, Missus Smith said, she was to call to Liberty and request—no, demand—assistance from the Colonial Militia.

She and Marie climbed aboard the skimmer. Manny revved the engines, then put the fans in reverse and slowly backed out into the water. As the skimmer pulled away from shore, Missus Smith went below to join Manny in the cockpit; Marie lingered on the aft deck, though, and watched while Riverport receded from view. Once again, she was leaving home ... and she found herself surprised to realize how much she'd come to regard this small, underpopulated settlement as home. Only last month, she'd thought it was a mistake to stop here. Now she was afraid she'd never see it again.

It took the rest of the day for them to travel down the coast. They'd left shortly before noon, and although the current was with them, the distance from Riverport to the delta where the West Channel emptied into the Great Equatorial River was considerable. Manny stayed close to shore as they cruised past the lowland marshes south of Riverport, vast tracts of sourgrass and spider-bush, the southeast range of the Black Mountains rising beyond them. The humid air lay still, sullen in the warmth of the afternoon sun; skeeters purred around the aft deck, and from the shore they could hear the cries of nesting birds.

This was a part of the world none of them had ever seen before. It wasn't long, though, before the view became monotonous. Shortly after lunch, while Missus Smith took a siesta, Marie relieved Manny at the controls. Lars had been reluctant to let her drive the skimmer, so it was a pleasure to take the yoke, feel the smooth vibration of the fans beneath her hands. Despite the urgency of the mission, she throttled down a quarter-bar, just to savor the sensation of water passing swiftly beneath the bottom of the hull.

"Not in a rush, are you?” Manny said after a few minutes. “You can go faster, you know."

Marie glanced at him. “Just enjoying the ride, that's all."

"No apologies necessary.” Manny turned his head to glance back at Missus Smith. She lay upon an unrolled sleeping bag in the aft compartment, eyes closed and hands folded together on her chest. “Day's getting short, and it looks rather tight for two people back there. Unless you want to sleep up top...."

Marie didn't reply, but instead throttled up the engines once more, returning the skimmer to cruise speed. Through the canopy, she could make out a low ridge gradually falling toward the southeastern tip of Great Dakota. Just past that point lay the Great Equatorial River; somewhere beyond that, the island where Lars and his companions were shipwrecked.

"I don't get it,” she murmured, keeping her voice low so Chris could sleep. “Lars has been gone ... what, five, six weeks? And he gets stranded so close to us?” She shook her head. “What's he been doing all this time?"

"No idea.” Manny hesitated. “What I'm more concerned about is what you're going to tell him when you see him again."

Marie didn't say anything. She hadn't given the subject much thought, believing that Lars was out of her life for good, or at least until after the baby was born. Indeed, no one in Riverport knew that she was pregnant, save for Manny. She hoped that, by the time her condition became obvious, the town would be self-sufficient enough that she could take maternity leave and return to Liberty long enough for Wendy to deliver the baby in the colonial hospital. Then she'd be able to go back to Great Dakota with her newborn child and a clear conscience that she'd done the right thing.

"As little as possible,” she said after a moment. Then she gave him a sidelong frown. “And neither will you."

"My lips are sealed.” A pause. “Literally."

Marie grinned at the self-effacing joke. “You'd make a great father, you know that?” A new thought occurred to her. “Think you'd like the job?"

Now it was Manny's turn to become silent. He didn't respond for a minute or two; when Marie looked at him again, he was staring straight ahead, as if studying the channel. Once again, she found herself wishing that his face was capable of displaying emotion, so that she'd have an idea of what thoughts were passing through his mind.

"Stay close to shore,” he said at last. “Get out into deep water, and you might have trouble with the current."

A couple of hours later, they left the West Channel and entered the Great Equatorial River.

It was almost twilight, the sun's reddish-orange light illuminating the enormous granite escarpment that marked the southeastern tip of Great Dakota. Like the prow of some mammoth, petrified vessel, the sharp-edged cliffs towered nearly three hundred feet above the jagged shoals below. Manny had taken the yoke back by then; carefully steering clear of the surf that crashed against the shoals, he slowed down so that they could take in the majesty of the giant rock. Missus Smith had awoken from her nap, and she and Marie stood on the aft deck, watching as the skimmer slowly cruised beneath its shadow.

Just past the delta was the Great Equatorial River, so broad that its far side lay beyond the horizon. To the east, on the opposite shore, they could make out the thin, dark line that marked the west coast of New Florida. It wasn't until Manny turned the skimmer to the west and they began traveling up the south coast of Great Dakota that they spotted the smoke. Back-lit by the setting sun, it curled upward as a slender tendril from a dark form that seemed to float upon the water.

The island ... and someone there had lit a signal fire.

Wary of the fading light, Manny pushed the engines up to full throttle and switched on the spotlights. Salt spray drenched the aft deck, chasing the two women below; from the cockpit, they watched the island gradually grow larger. Now they could see that it was a narrow stretch of land, about five miles long but less than a mile across, and heavily forested. The smoke rose from the closer end of the island, but they still couldn't see the fire. The island was a couple of miles away when the satphone crackled, and once again they heard Lars’ voice.

"Hey. Marie! Is that you, babe?"

Marie picked up the handset. “Roger that. We see your smoke, and we're coming in."

Through the speaker, the ragged cheers of men shouting with relief. “Oh, babe, I love you! Can't believe you got here so soon! Really made that sucker fly, didn'cha?"

Marie glanced at Manny. “Don't let him know,” he said quietly. “It'll just upset him."

Missus Smith snickered. Marie shook her head, then keyed the mike again. “Yeah, sure ... look, the sun's going down, so you're going to have to help us find you. If you've got a light, turn it on and shine it out toward the water so that we can see where you are."

A long pause, then Lars’ voice returned, more calm this time. “Can't do that. River horses might see the light, follow it back to us. We're taking a chance as is, just keeping a fire going."

"River horses?” Marie stared at the satphone in puzzlement. “What are you...?"

"Just take my word for it, okay? Kill your lights ... we can see you now ... and put someone on deck to look for the fire. That's where we are."

Marie shook her head, glanced at Manny. “What the hell is he...?"

"Never mind. I'll go.” Rising from her seat, Chris picked up her carbine. “Just get us in close, and I'll yell as soon as I spot the beach."

"Chris, wait..."

"Don't worry about it. I got my best friend to protect me.” Missus Smith patted the stock of her rifle, then ducked her head and left the cockpit.

Early evening had settled upon the river, with the first stars beginning to appear in the darkening sky, when they caught sight of a flickering glow upon the island's eastern tip, close to the waterline. Chris called down from the aft deck and Manny throttled back the engines, then swung around so that the skimmer approached the point from an oblique angle. Through the bubble, they could see the leading edge of Bear's rings appearing above the eastern horizon, casting a silver luminescence upon the black water.

A couple of sudden bumps against the bottom of the hull as the skimmer hit unseen driftwood. “Wish we could switch on the spotlights,” Marie murmured. “Can't see where we're going."

Manny turned off the interior lights. The cockpit was plunged into darkness save for the sallow glow of the instrument panel. “There,” he said. “I can see now."

As if to demonstrate, he twisted the yoke hard to port. A moment later, there was a gentle bump against the starboard pontoon as the skimmer grazed a floating log. Once again, Marie remembered that Manny possessed infrared vision; now that Bear was rising, he was able to use its light as human eyes could not. An uncomfortable reminder that Manny was a savant. His soul might be human, but his body was not.

"You're almost there!” Once more, Lars’ voice crackled through the transceiver. “C'mon in! We'll meet you at the water!"

The fire was very close now, less than a few dozen yards away. Marie started to reach for the mike when Chris yelled down through the top hatch. “There's something in the water! I saw it move!"

"Hold on!” Marie rose from her seat and started to head for the hatch. “I'm coming up!"

"Stay put.” Manny remained calm. “We're almost there. Thirty feet more, and they'll be able to..."

A gunshot from the aft deck, followed by two more. Marie bolted from the cockpit and scrambled up the ladder.

In the wan light cast from the open hatch, she saw Missus Smith standing at the starboard rail, rifle raised to her shoulder and pointed toward the water just beyond the skimmer. Left eye fixed upon the infrared sight, she tracked something Marie couldn't see, then cursed and raised the barrel.

"Dammit! It's gone under!” She glanced at Marie. “You see that?” Without waiting for an answer, she lunged for the far end of the deck, pointed the gun down over the side. “Whatever it is, it's goddamn big!"

"What did you see?” Marie peered into the darkness. With night closing in, there was little that her eyes could make out. “What did it look like?"

"I dunno.” Missus Smith searched the water, her rifle's muzzle sweeping back and forth. “All I saw was this giant head. Sort of like a horse, but..."

"Hey! Over here!"

Lars's voice, from the port side. Looking around, Marie caught a brief glimpse of two figures caught in silhouette against the signal fire. Then they disappeared; a few seconds later, the sound of men splashing through shallow water, as if meaning to swim out toward the approaching skimmer.

"Stay back!” Marie rushed to the port rail as Manny coaxed the skimmer closer to shore. “There's something out...!"

Another gunshot from behind her, and Marie turned just in time to see a massive head rise above the starboard side.

Almost equine in shape, yet larger than any horse's head she'd ever seen, it swayed back and forth upon a thick, amphibian neck. Narrow eyes deep within a bony skull reflected the dim glow of the firelight; she had an impression of jagged teeth inside a cavernous mouth, and shrank back in horror.

The river horse loomed above Missus Smith, and for a moment it seemed as if it was studying her. She squeezed off another shot, but her aim was wild. The creature recoiled, but only for an instant. Then its head pounced forward, and its jaws clamped down upon Chris's shoulder.

Crying out in agony, she dropped her weapon. The rifle clattered to the deck, and Marie hurled herself toward it. Chris was battering her fists against the creature's skull as she snatched up the rifle.

"Shoot it!” Chris screamed. “Shoot ... !"

Yet before Marie could get a clear shot, the creature yanked Chris from the deck. The toe of her left boot caught against the railing, and for a half-second Marie thought that might save her. Then the boot was ripped from her foot and her body was dragged overboard, down into the black water.

Marie ran to the railing, fired aimlessly into the water, but there was nothing to be done now; the river horse had disappeared, taking her friend with it.

She sagged against the railing, still staring at the place where Chris Smith had vanished. She was barely aware that Lars had scrambled up the ladder, with James just behind him, or that Manny had shoved the throttles all the way forward. The fans roared as the skimmer hurtled away from the island. Cold water, tasting of salt and death, cascaded upon her.

She stared back at the island that she'd barely visited, knowing even then that she'd never be the same again.

From the diary of Marie Montero: Adnachiel 9, c.y. 06

We rescued Lars and James from Smith Island—that's what Manny has decided to call it, in honor of Chris—but they were the only two survivors. The other five men in their group were killed by river horses: the first four in the initial attack, with Cooper surviving long enough to reach the island only to die before we could reach them. Considering everything that happened, they're lucky to be alive.

Lars wasn't pleased to see Manny again. Almost as soon as he came aboard, in fact, he told Manny to hand over the skimmer's controls. But Manny refused and I backed him up, and after that Lars hunkered down in the back with James. He didn't put up much of a fight, really. He and James were cold, wet and hungry, and I think he was more scared than he wanted to admit.

Took most of the night to get back home. Didn't reach Riverport until a few hours before sunrise. Found some food in the back (they'd lost everything when the boat capsized ... lucky that Lars had the satphone in his pocket) and once they ate, Lars told us what happened. Don't know how much is true and how much isn't, but here goes:

After they got thrown out, the seven of them sailed a few miles downstream, then made camp in the swamps. At first they thought they'd just wait until “the heat blew over” (as Lars puts it), then come back and try to talk their way back into our good graces. After a while, though, they decided that they were better off without us anyway—little did they know the feeling was mutual.

They knew they couldn't rough it on their own for very long, so they talked over what they should do next. Lars told them about his good friends in Bridgeton who he was sure would take him in—I remember when he tried to use that line on me—and he managed to persuade the others that everything would be wine and roses if they could only get there.

So they sailed down the West Channel to the Big River, then turned east and moved along the southern coast of New Florida, and finally turned north and went up the East Channel till they reached Bridgeton. Took them nearly three weeks to make the trip, so they must not have been in much of a hurry. James said something about “doing a lot of fishing,” so I figure they were drinking all the way. Miracle they made it in the first place.

But they didn't stay long in Bridgeton before they had to move on again. Lars is a little vague about that part of the story. He says he found Tiny, Lester, and Biggs, but none of them had room for the group in their houses and they couldn't find jobs anywhere. I find that story hard to believe. More likely someone in town recognized Lars and knew that he'd been exiled from the colonies, and that taking him in would result in criminal prosecution. The way he carries on about how his pals “betrayed” him makes me wonder if his old buddies decided to play it safe and turn him in. Or maybe Lars and the others just wore out their welcome, drinking and causing trouble, until everyone in town finally got fed up with them and the blueshirts showed them the way to the docks.

In any case, they left Bridgeton in a hurry. Now they had a choice—either keep going north and try for New Boston (fat chance! they would've gotten the same reception there, more than likely!) or go back the way they'd come and try to beg forgiveness from Missus Smith.

That's when Lars turned on his charm. For the next few minutes, I got an earful about how much he loved me, how he couldn't live without me, etc. while James is sitting beside him with this shit-eating grin on his face, staring down the front of my shirt. I heard him out, then told him to go on with the story.

So, anyway, they sailed back down the East Channel until they reached the big river, then turned west and started toward Great Dakota. But they'd just reached the delta and were about to turn north up the West Channel when they changed their minds and and instead decided to go downriver a little further.

Again, I'm not sure what to believe. Lars says that some of the others wanted to get in a little more fishing, while James says they wanted to give us a little more time to think about how much they missed us. I think the truth is somewhere in-between—i.e., they got cold feet about having to beg their way back into camp. Besides, the weather was still warm and they still had plenty of booze (no doubt they picked up more bearshine in Bridgeton). In any case, they opted to sail downriver a little ways—to have one more party before they came home to face the music, I think—to an island they'd spotted before.

That's when the river horses found them.

There's a lot about Coyote we still don't know, even after being here nearly nineteen Earth-years. Not all of it is the same; we're still finding new animals, plants, etc. And considering how long the Great Equatorial River is, we've barely explored 1/10 of it. So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that there's more to it than catwhales, weirdlings, and redfish. There are creatures that have never met humans before, and don't care if we've got boats and guns.

In any case, the boat was coming close to the island when the creatures attacked. Lars says that Cooper gave them the name “river horses” because they look like sea horses back on Earth, only bigger (yeah—a lot bigger). Manny believes the similarity may only come from what they saw above water; he thinks they may be something like crocodiles back on Earth, only warm-blooded and much larger. That's something I don't know, though, so I have to take his word for it.

In any case, a pack of them attacked the boat just as the men approached the island. Two or maybe three of them came in all at once, from both sides, just after one of the guys jumped overboard to swim ashore with a rope to tie off. He died first, before the rest of the group knew what hit him, and while the others were still running back and forth on deck, the other two river horse went for the boat.

It's hard to tell to what happened after that, except that everyone panicked. The flechette guns they had were useless, in any case. Three more men were killed and the boat capsized before Lars, James, and Cooper managed to swim ashore. And even then Coop barely got away—a river horse caught him in its mouth, but he kicked it in some way that made it let him go (I wish Chris had learned that trick), then Lars grabbed him and hauled him ashore. By then their friends were gone and their boat was sunk.

Like I said, they were lucky on two scores: Lars was carrying the satphone in his shirt pocket and James had a waterproof lighter in his pants. So after they carried Cooper the rest of the way onto dry land, they started a fire on the beach. But that seemed to attract the river horses, so they doused it, and didn't start another one until after Lars used the satphone to call for help and they were sure we were on the way. They tried to keep Coop alive, but they didn't have a medkit and he'd lost too much blood. By the time we got to them, he'd been dead three hours.

Don't know what to make of all this. Lars is back. He's asleep in my bed in the cabin I built without his help. When he gets up, maybe I'll talk to him. Or maybe I won't. But he's not welcome, that's for damn sure.

River horses. What a name. Kind of think it describes me. Something that just keeps pulling and pulling, with no end in sight.

Marie kept her distance from Lars. As soon as she could, she evicted him from her cabin, telling him that, despite what happened on Smith Island, she wasn't taking him back. No one else in town wanted him either, so he and James moved into a tool shed, the only shelter available to them in Riverport.

The two men found jobs with the timber crew, and for a little while it seemed as if Marie would be able to keep Lars out of her life. They saw each other infrequently, usually at dinner time when they stood in the chow line together, and her friends made sure that she never had to sit next to him. It hardly mattered, though, because Lars seldom spoke to her; indeed, his only companion was James, and together they occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder. Although they'd returned to the settlement, they were far from being accepted back into the community. Everyone knew what had occurred on Smith Island, and they held Lars and James responsible for Missus Smith's death.

Yet it wasn't long before the situation changed.

With Chris gone, there was a vacuum that had to be filled. Although Marie didn't want the job, she soon found the others turning to her for leadership. She and Missus Smith had been close, and people were looking for someone who could fill her role. So it came to pass that, when the next town meeting rolled around and a special election was held, Marie discovered she was the sole nominee for mayor. Although she accepted the job with reluctance, she promised to continue the work her predecessor had begun, the transformation of Riverport into a self-sufficient community.

By then, that which only Manny had known had become obvious: she was pregnant, with her child due by the end of the year. Now that she was mayor, Marie knew leaving Riverport even for a short while was out of the question. Yet she also realized that her condition gave the settlement a bargaining chip it hadn't possessed before. So one evening, with Manny's assistance, she composed a formal letter to the Colonial Council, which was transmitted via satphone to Liberty the following morning.

The response came quickly, and not the way she'd expected. Marie was working on the farm when she heard a familiar sound. Turning to raise a hand against the afternoon sun, she watched as a gyro soared across the West Channel, making a lazy arch above the settlement as the pilot searched for a place to land. Marie put down her rake, picked up her straw hat from where she'd placed it on a tree stump, and walked back into town to greet the visitors.

She wasn't surprised to find that the delegation from Liberty included Carlos. For a few seconds after he climbed out of the gyro, brother and sister regarded one another with mutual discomfort, neither of them quite knowing what to say or do. Then Carlos grinned and stretched out his hands, and Marie walked over to give him a hug, to the warm applause of the settlers who'd come out to the beach.

This wasn't the only reunion. Also aboard the gyro was Clark Thompson. He waited patiently beside the aircraft until his nephew shuffled forward from the back of the crowd. Lars was a broken man; thin and hollow-eyed, his shoulders slumped, he'd lost the arrogance that he had carried when he'd left New Florida. The two men regarded each other for a moment, then Clark solemnly extended his hand, and Lars took it with shame-faced reticence.

The townspeople quit work early that afternoon, and a special dinner was prepared for their honored guests. While the cooks labored in the mess tent, Marie escorted Carlos and Clark, along with the two other members of the Council, on a quick tour of Riverport. Although she was embarrassed by what little she had to show them—a half-dozen log cabins, along with a couple of sheds and a half-built greenhouse—the council representatives were impressed by the progress made in only a month by less than thirty people. It was clear, though, that the settlement would need assistance if it was going to survive the long winter ahead, and Marie knew without asking that this support would not come without a price.

Her suspicions were confirmed shortly after dinner, when Carlos came over to her. “Let's take a walk, shall we?” he said quietly. “There are some things we need to discuss, just the two of us."

The crimson rays of the setting sun peered from behind purple clouds as they strolled together along the beach, Marie's hand clasped within the crook of Carlos's arm. “You've done well,” he said as they walked along the water's edge, watching the tide lap at the mottled sands. “Better than I thought ... than we thought ... you would."

"Thank you.” To the east, Bear's ring-plane was beginning to glide into view above the horizon. “I can't take credit for this, though. These people have worked awful hard to..."

"I don't mean the colony. I mean you.” He pulled her a little closer. “Hard to believe you're the same girl ... the same woman, I mean ... who was getting in bar fights just a month ago. You've changed a lot since then. I'm proud of you."

"Well..."

"Hear me out, please. This is important.” He paused, as if to choose his words. “I've spoken with the magistrates. They're willing to let you return ... on probation, at least, so long as you behave yourself ... but my guess is that you won't come back."

"Nope.” Marie grinned and shook her head. “Wouldn't look good for a mayor to skip town just because she's pregnant.” Her smile faded. “Besides, people might think I'm nothing but trouble. Can't have that, can we?” Embarrassed, Carlos looked away. He started to release her arm, but she pulled him close again. “Forget it. You did what you had to do. If you didn't, I'd be digging ditches now."

"Yeah, well ... like I said, you did better than most people expected.” He glanced back at the settlement. “As for Lars ... that's a whole ‘nother issue."

"Not an issue at all.” Marie gazed out at the channel. “He's got his life now, and I've got mine. So far as I'm concerned, he can go back any time he wants. We'll get along just fine without him."

"Well ... no.” Carlos shook his head. “The amnesty the maggies have offered you doesn't extend to him. They know everything he did ... or at least what you've told us, along with how he tried to hide out in Bridgeton ... and they don't consider him to be—” he searched for the correct phrase “—'sufficiently rehabilitated,’ if I remember it correctly. So he's stuck here, whether he likes it or not."

"All right.” Marie gave an offhand shrug. “Fine. Whatever makes them happy, I can live with it."

"It's a little more complicated than that.” Carlos let go of her arm, tucked his hands in his pockets. “Problem is, you're carrying his child. And Uncle Clark is an old-fashioned sort of guy who seems to think that, no matter what else, his nephew has a right to be a father."

"Like hell, he does.” Feeling a surge of anger, Marie stopped and turned toward him. “Lars knocked me up one night when I was too tired to resist. He..."

"Did he rape you?” Carlos looked her straight in the eye. “Tell the truth."

She hesitated. “Well, no, but..."

"Then there's nothing I can do ... and please, don't ask me to lie on your behalf.” He held up a hand before she could object. “Clark Thompson hasn't given up on his boy, any more than I gave up on you. He wants the best for him, and that includes the prospect of him settling down and raising a family."

"Oh, for the love of..."

"Just listen, please.” Carlos let out his breath. “There's more to this than just you two. Clark has a strong voice on the Council, and it's become even stronger since word came that you and Lars discovered a new source of timber...."

"It wasn't him and me, dammit.” She felt her face becoming warm. “It was Chris Smith's idea. She..."

"Maybe, but she's not around anymore, is she? And the way Clark has put this to the council, this is your settlement. Yours and Lars's.” Again, he raised a hand before she could protest. “He's willing to allocate everything you need ... tools, generators, boats, whatever ... to turn this place into a viable colony as soon as possible. A blank check...."

"But his signature has to be on it.” Marie stared at him. “Right?"

"Right.” Carlos bent down to pick up a piece of driftwood. “But that's just council business. I've also learned that he's already taken steps toward setting up a private company to corner the market on the Great Dakota timber industry. The Thompson Wood Company, with him and Molly in control..."

"Oh, great. That's excellent.” Marie shook her head in disgust. “Coyote's first major corporation. What's next, a stockholder meeting?"

"Probably.” Carlos hurled the stick out into the water. “What do you want? Social collectivism all over again? Maybe Manny Castro would like that, but..."

"Leave Manny out of this.” She absently ran her fingers through her hair. “Look, let me get this straight. Clark is willing to provide support for Riverport..."

"Which is what you want."

"...but he's not going to persuade the Council to give us the stuff we need to do that unless his family has a lock on the timber industry."

"That's correct, yes."

"And for him to do that, he wants...” Marie's voice trailed off as she put everything together. “Oh, god ... Carlos, you can't be saying..."

"You know what I'm saying.” Carlos looked down at the ground, suddenly reluctant to meet her eyes. “Uncle Clark wants what's best for his favorite nephew. A wife, a child, a job..."

"I don't love him!” In frustration, she turned away from him. “He's not the one I want! I...!"

She stopped before she said something she knew she'd regret. Her legs buckled beneath her, and she fell on bended knees to the beach. “Is there someone else?” Carlos asked, kneeling down beside her. “Who is it? Tell me, please...."

Marie raised her head, looked away. For just a moment, beyond the nearest dune, she caught a glimpse of a figure cloaked in shadows, a single red eye reflecting the light of the setting sun. Then the figure disappeared, a twilight ghost swallowed by the coming night.

"No,” she whispered. “There's no one else."

From the diary of Marie Montero: Barbiel 15, c.y. 06

The first keelboat from Liberty arrived today: fifteen people in all, including Clark and Molly Thompson and Lars's brother Garth. And that's just one boat: two more are on the way, sailing out from Bridgeton and making their way around New Florida until they reach Great Dakota. We've made sure that they know to avoid Smith Island. That place belongs to the river horses, and we should all stay away from there.

By the time everyone gets here, Riverport's population will have doubled—no, tripled—in size. Only a couple of months ago, this explosion would've been unimaginable. Maybe even impossible: there was no way we could have supported seventy-two people. But apparently there's quite a few folks in New Florida and Midland who want to take a shot at starting a new colony, especially if there's a chance they'll make a good living working for the Thompson Wood Company.

Now that the Council has formally recognized us, we're getting everything we need: food, livestock, clothing, hardware, building materials, comps, even a couple of electrical generators. I was told that several panes of uncut plate glass are also being shipped out to us, which means we'll be able to finish work on the greenhouse. Such a small thing, really, and yet so necessary. Once the greenhouse is up, we'll be able to feed ourselves through winter.

Lars is happier now that he has his family with him. Our relationship has been pretty much touch and go since he moved in with me. Even though I've told him that he's going back to the tool shed if he starts drinking again, there's been a couple of nights when he's come home with ale on his breath. Decided to look past that as much as I can. He's been nicer to me lately. and he seems to be honestly looking forward to raising a child. We've already decided on names: Hawk if it's a boy, Rain if it's a girl.

Clark insists that we get married, and I think that's pretty much inevitable. I'm still not sure whether I can love Lars, but the baby is coming soon, and he or she is going to need a daddy. Besides, the Thompson Wood Company is going to be a family-owned business. If I want an interest in it, getting hitched to Lars is part of the deal. Carlos and Wendy still don't trust him very much, but they're willing to go along with the plan. It may not be the happiest of marriages, but ... well, we'll see.

Clark and I have talked things over lately, and we've agreed that he's probably better cut out to be mayor than I am. After all, he's had experience with this sort of thing before, and with a baby on the way, the last thing I need to worry about is running a town. We haven't gone public with this yet, but once all the newcomers arrive and get settled in, I'm going to resign and put my support behind him in the special election. Maybe not the most democratic way of doing things, but at least it'll help make sure that Riverport has a strong leader during its first year.

So all is well, or at least as well as it can be. Except for one thing...

Manuel Castro had his own cabin, a one-room shack on the far side of town. A handful of New Boston settlers helped him build it, but since then he'd lived alone, becoming increasingly reclusive as new people began to arrive in Riverport. The cabin had no windows, and no furniture save a table, a chair, and a cabinet for his few belongings. The one room was lit by a fish-oil lamp suspended from its rafters, and it wasn't until someone noticed that they didn't see its glow seeping beneath the doorframe one evening that anyone realized the savant had disappeared.

Learning this news the following morning, Marie hurried to his cabin, only to discover it had been stripped bare. Manny hadn't left a note, yet when she questioned several townspeople, she discovered that he'd recently bartered his meager possessions—his chair here, his desk there—in exchange for hand tools and a backpack. The sort of things one might need in order to homestead in the wilderness. That was when she knew where he'd gone.

She didn't tell Lars or anyone else where she was going when she left town by herself. By then it was late autumn; the wind had long since ripped the leaves from the trees, and the first hard freeze had solidified the ground. She bundled herself warmly in the oversized wool serape a couple of friends had woven for her, and filled a waterskin from the town well. Along the way, she found a broken tree limb to use as a staff to help support her weight. In her second trimester, it felt as if she were carrying a heavy sack in her midriff; she made sure that she rested frequently, and drank water whenever she was thirsty.

The path leading into the foothills was just as she'd remembered it, when she and Manny had hiked up Thunder Ridge in the first days of autumn. The season had become colder since then, the sky the color of iron, yet by midday she'd reached the bluff where she and Manny had rested on an afternoon more warm and fair than this. It was here that she found him.

It was almost as if he'd never left this place at all. He sat on a boulder, pad propped upon his knee, using a claw-like finger to etch a picture on its screen. His cowl was pulled up around his face, though, so his blind eye didn't see her coming until her staff made a scraping noise on the bare rock. Then he looked up, and stared at her for a long time.

"Marie,” he said at last. “You shouldn't have come."

"You shouldn't have left.” She clung to the branch with both hands, trying to catch her breath. “Damn it, Manny. Why did you...?"

"Hush.” Putting down his pad, he rose to his feet and walked over to her. “You're pregnant, remember? This can't be good for..."

"I'm fine. Exercise is good for the baby.” Yet she let him take her by the shoulders, ease her to a seat on the ground. “Where do you think you're going? Why didn't you...?"

"So many questions.” The soft rasp from his chest that signified a chuckle. “You know, you've changed quite a bit since we first met. Back then..."

"Shut up and talk to me."

"Which do you want first? Shut up, or...?"

"Never mind.” She glared at him. “Why...?"

"Because I don't belong down there.” His single eye peered at her. “I went with you and Lars because I didn't want to be the resident freak in Liberty. Now Lars is back, and I don't want to be the resident freak in Riverport either."

"Lars is..."

"I know what Lars is, just as I know that I can't compete with him.” He shook his head. “I need to find my own place in the world, even if it means living alone. So I left. Simple solution to a simple problem.” All this came in the same monotone he'd assumed when he'd first met her. “Any more questions? Catch your breath, and..."

"One more, then I'll go home.” She stared at him. “Do you love me?"

"Of course, I love you.” His reply was immediate, without reservation. “You should know that by now, just as you know it'll never work out..."

"Dammit, Manny...!"

"Please ... just listen.” Standing up, he pointed toward the nearby hills. “I'm building a cabin up there. Just for myself, with no one else around. But if you ever need me, that's where I'll be."

She tried hard not to cry, but the tears came anyway. Manny didn't say anything for a moment, then he reached down and, taking her by the shoulders, gently raised her to her feet. “You'll do fine. You've got a family again, and you're no longer an outcast. Everything you've ever wanted is yours for the taking. All you need to do is be strong ... and you've shown that you have more courage than you thought you had."

She started to reply, but found she could think of nothing to say, so instead she put her arms around Manny and laid her head against his chest. She heard no heartbeat within his metallic body, but when he wrapped his arms around her shoulders, the embrace was tender and undeniably human.

They stood that way for a long time until he finally pushed her away. Looking up at him, she was surprised to see a few white flakes upon his cowl; unnoticed by either of them, snow had begun to fall.

"Storm's coming in,” she murmured. “I better get back."

"Yes, you should.” Manny reached down, picked up her walking stick. “Go quickly, before it gets too rough."

Marie nodded as she took the stick from him. There was nothing more to be said, so she turned and started toward the downhill trail. At the edge of the tree line, though, she paused to look back. The snow was falling more swiftly now, making a soft hiss as the wind carried it through the trees.

For a moment, she caught a last glimpse of a black-robed figure walking across the bluff, heading for the dense woodlands. And then he was gone, leaving her to a follow a path that was hers and hers alone.

Copyright © 2007 Allen M. Steele

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Velocity Street ran next to the immense parking lot

of an IGA store and beyond that along a stretch

where half the meter poles were decapitated

stood rows of abandoned welfare tenements

a Pentecostal church and a blackened brick hotel

that kept a commons room with faded velvet

wallpaper and Space Cowboy still on the juke

we're talking inner suburbia gone to weeds

streetlights with no more wattage than a bug lamp

yet this was a place that Midwestern kids escaped to

far from potluck socials and the putting by of preserves

far removed from the slow burn of their futures

under the transmission cowling of a combine tractor

they found work at the NASA labs shared apartments

married saved for veneered furniture took a loan

for a second station wage with a trailer hitch

popped out a few kids read up on warp engine science

and talked and talked on weekends about leaving

the Heartland for a place where the universe

whispered its mysteries in a primary hue—Robert Frazier

Copyright © 2007 Robert Frazier

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"I was an unpublished gonnabe writer back in 1977 when the first issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine appeared. Since it came out during a convention that Asimov attended, I joined the little throng that materialized about him in the hallway to get his autograph on the cover. Because I was nobody in particular and rather acutely aware of it, I was last in line. So it was just we two when the convention's guest of honor, a writer who had rocketed up out of nowhere, but whose name I won't mention, passed by, surrounded by sycophants and well wishers. ‘Look at that,’ Asimov said quietly, handing me back my magazine. ‘A year ago, everybody was saying, “Who is So-and-So?” And ten years from now, they're all going to be saying, “Who is Isaac Asimov?” ‘” ‘Oh, bullshit!’ I said reflexively. But Asimov didn't hear me. He was staring off into the future at his oncoming oblivion. “I realized then that if I tiptoed away immediately, I could always claim to be the man who said ‘Bullshit!’ to Isaac Asimov and left him speechless. So I did. “It's been thirty years and in this one respect I proved a better prophet than the master. He isn't forgotten—far from it. Not only are his books still in print, but every month the magazine that bears his name comes out and is read everywhere. I have yet to hear anybody pick it up and ask, ‘Who is Isaac Asimov?’”—Michael Swanwick

The author has just finished writing his latest book, The Dragons of Babel—excerpts from which have been published in Asimov's as “The Word That Sings the Scythe” (October/November 2004), “An Episode of Stardust” (January 2006), “Lord Weary's Empire” (December 2006), and now “A Small Room in Koboldtown.” Michael tells us, “One chapter from the end, my wife Marianne was convinced that it was all going to end miserably, as so many of my stories do. Imagine her surprise when she discovered that it all comes out happily. No, really. An honest-to-gosh happy ending. Honest. I mean it."

That winter, Will le Fey held down a job working for a haint politician named Salem Toussaint. Chiefly, his function was to run errands while looking conspicuously solid. He fetched tax forms for the alderman's constituents, delivered stacks of documents to trollish functionaries, fixed L&I violations, presented boxes of candied john-the-conqueror root to retiring secretaries, absent-mindedly dropped slim envelopes containing twenty-dollar bills on desks. When somebody important died, he brought a white goat to the back door of the Fane of Darkness to be sacrificed to the Nameless Ones. When somebody else's son was drafted or went to prison, he hammered a nail in the nkisi nkonde that Toussaint kept in the office to ensure his safe return. He canvassed voters in haint neighborhoods like Ginny Gall, Beluthahatchie, and Diddy-Wah-Diddy, where the bars were smoky, the music was good, and it was dangerous to smile at the whores. He negotiated the labyrinthine bureaucracies of City Hall. Not everything he did was strictly legal, but none of it was actually criminal. Salem Toussaint didn't trust him enough for that.

One evening, Will was stuffing envelopes with Ghostface while Jimi Begood went over a list of ward-heelers with the alderman, checking those who could be trusted to turn out the troops in the upcoming election and crossing out those who had a history of pocketing the walking-around money and standing idle on election day or, worse, steering the vote the wrong way because they were double-dipping from the opposition. The door between Toussaint's office and the anteroom was open a crack and Will could eavesdrop on their conversation.

"Grandfather Domovoy was turned to stone last August,” Jimi Begood said, “so we're going to have to find somebody new to bring out the Slovaks. There's a vila named—"

Ghostface snapped a rubber band around a bundle of envelopes and lofted them into the mail cart on the far side of the room. “Three points!” he said. Then, “You want to know what burns my ass?"

"No,” Will said.

"What burns my ass is how you and me are doing the exact same job, but you're headed straight for the top while I'm going to be stuck here licking envelopes forever. And you know why? Because you're solid."

"That's just racist bullshit,” Will said. “Toussaint is never going to promote me any higher than I am now. Haints like seeing a fey truckle to the Big Guy, but they'd never accept me as one of his advisors. You know that as well as I do."

"Yeah, but you're not going to be here forever, are you? In a couple of years, you'll be holding down an office in the Mayoralty. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if you made it all the way to the Palace of Leaves."

"Either you're just busting my chops, or else you're a fool. Because if you meant it, you'd be a fool to be ragging on me about it. If Toussaint were in your position, he'd make sure I was his friend, and wherever I wound up he'd have an ally. You could learn from his example."

Ghostface lowered his voice to a near-whisper. “Toussaint is old school. I've got nothing to learn from a glad-handing, pompous, shucking-and-jiving—"

The office door slammed open. They both looked up.

Salem Toussaint stood in the doorway, eyes rolled up in his head so far that only the whites showed. He held up a hand and in a hollow voice said, “One of my constituents is in trouble."

The alderman was spooky in that way. He had trodden the streets of Babel for so many decades that its molecules had insinuated themselves into his body through a million feather-light touches on its bricks and railings, its bars and brothel doors, its accountants’ offices and parking garages, and his own molecules had in turn been absorbed by the city, so that there was no longer any absolute distinction between the two. He could read Babel's moods and thoughts and sometimes—as now—it spoke to him directly.

Toussaint grabbed his homburg and threw his greatcoat over his arm. “Jimi, stay here and arrange for a lawyer. We can finish that list later. Ghostface, Will—you boys come with me."

The alderman plunged through the door. Ghostface followed.

Will hurried after them, opening the door and closing it behind him, then running to make up for lost time.

Ghostface doubled as Toussaint's chauffeur. In the limo, he said, “Where to, Boss?"

"Koboldtown. A haint's been arrested for murder and we got to get him off."

"You think he was framed?” Will asked.

"What the fuck difference does it make? He's a voter."

Koboldtown was a transitional neighborhood with all the attendant tensions. There were lots of haints on the streets, but the apartment building the police cars were clustered about had sprigs of fennel over the doorway to keep them out. Salem Toussaint's limousine pulled up just in time for them to see a defiant haint being hauled away in rowan-wood handcuffs. The beads at the ends of his duppy-braids clicked angrily as he swung his head around. “I ain't done nothin'!” he shouted. “This is all bullshit, you fuckers! I'mna come back an’ kill you all!” His eyes glowed hellishly and an eerie blue nimbus surrounded his head; clear indicators that he'd been shooting up crystal goon. Will was surprised the haint was even able to stand.

The limo came to a stop and Will hopped out to open Salem Toussaint's door. Toussaint climbed ponderously out and stopped the guards with an imperious gesture. Then he spoke briefly with their captive. “Go quietly, son. I'll see you get a good lawyer, the best money can buy.” Will flipped open his cell, punched a number, and began speaking into it in an earnest murmur. It was all theater—he'd dialed the weather and Jimi Begood had doubtless already engaged a defender—but, combined with Toussaint's presence, it calmed the haint down. He listened carefully as the alderman concluded, “Just don't get yourself killed, that's the important thing. Understand?"

The haint nodded.

In the lobby, two officers were talking with the doorman. All three stiffened at the sight of haints walking in the door, relaxed when they saw Will restoring the twigs of fennel, and smiled with relief as they recognized Toussaint. It all happened in a flicker, but Will saw it. And if he noticed, how could his companions not? Nevertheless, the alderman glided in, shaking hands and passing out cigars that the police acknowledged gratefully and stowed away in the inside pockets of their coats. “What's the crime?” he asked.

"Murder,” said one of the cops.

Toussaint whistled once, low and long, as if he hadn't already known. “Which floor?"

"Second."

They waited for the elevator, though the stairs were handy and it would have been faster to walk. Salem Toussaint would no more have climbed those stairs than he would have driven his own car. He made sure you understood what a big mahoff he was before he slapped you on the back and gave your nice horse a sugar cube. As the doors opened, Toussaint turned to Ghostface and remarked, “You're looking mighty grim. Something the matter?"

Ghostface shook his head stiffly. He stared, unblinking, straight ahead of himself all the way to their destination.

There were two detectives in the frigid apartment, both Tylwyth Teg, golden-skinned and leaf-eared, in trench coats that looked like they had been sent out to be professionally rumpled. They turned, annoyed, when the cop standing guard at the door let the three of them in, then looked resigned as they recognized the alderman.

"Shulpae! Xisuthros!” Toussaint slapped backs and shook hands as if he were working the room at a campaign fundraiser. “You're looking good, the both of you."

"Welcome to our humble crime scene, Salem,” Detective Xisuthros said. He swept a hand to take in the room: One window, half open, with cold winter air still flowing in through it. Its sill and the wall beneath, black with blood. The burglar bars looked intact. A single dresser, a bed, a chair that had been smashed to flinders. A dribble of blood that led from the window to a tiny bathroom with the door thrown wide. “I should have known you'd show up."

A boggart sprawled lifeless on the bathroom floor. Its chest had been ripped open. There was a gaping hole where the heart should have been.

"Who's the stiff ?” Toussaint asked.

"Name's Bobby Buggane. Just another lowlife."

"I see you hauled off an innocent haint."

"Now, Salem, don't be like that. It's an open and shut case. The door was locked and bolted from the inside. Burglar bars on the window and a sprig of fennel over it. The only one who could have gotten in was the spook. He works as a janitor here. We found him sleeping it off on a cot in the basement."

"Haint.” Salem Toussaint's eyes were hard. “Please."

After the briefest of pauses, the detective said, “Haint."

"Give me the story."

"About an hour ago, there was a fight. Bodies slamming against the wall, furniture smashing. Everybody on the hall complained. By the time the concierge got here, it was all over. She called us. We broke in."

"Why didn't the concierge have a key?"

"She did. Buggane put in a deadbolt. You can imagine what the old bat had to say about that."

"Why wasn't there a haint-ward on the door?"

"Didn't need one. Doorman in the lobby. Only one haint in the building."

Will squinted at the wall above the door. “There's a kind of pale patch up there, like there used to be a ward and somebody took it down."

Detective Shulpae, the quiet one, turned to stare at him. “So?"

"So what kind of guy installs a deadbolt but takes down the ward? That doesn't make sense."

"The kind who likes to invite his haint buddy over for a shooting party every now and then.” Detective Xisuthros pointed toward the dresser with his chin. A set of used works lay atop it. “The concierge says they were so thick that some of the neighbors thought they were fags.” He turned back to Toussaint. “Alderman, if you want to question our work here, fine, go ahead. I'm just saying. There's not a lot of hope for the boy."

"Will's right!” Ghostface said. He went to the window. “And another thing. Look at all the blood on the sill. This is where it happened. So how the hell did he get all the way into the bathroom? Somebody ripped his heart out, so he decided to wash his hands?"

Now both detectives were staring at him, hard. “You don't know much about boggarts,” Xisuthros said. “They're tough. They can live for five minutes with their heads ripped off. A heart's nothing. And, yeah, that's exactly what he did—washed his hands. Old habits go last. One of the first things we did was turn off the water. Otherwise, I thought the concierge was going to have a seizure."

Ghostface looked around wildly. “What happened to the heart? Why isn't it here? I suppose you think the haint ate it, huh? I suppose you think we're all cannibals."

In a disgusted tone, Detective Xisuthros said, “Get Sherlock Holmes Junior the fuck out of here."

Salem Toussaint took Ghostface by the elbow, led him to the door. “Why don't you wait outside?"

Ghostface turned grey. But he stamped angrily out of the room and down the hall. Will followed. He didn't have to be told that this was part of his job.

Outside, Ghostface went straight to the alley below Buggane's window. There were no chalk marks or crime scene tape, so the police obviously hadn't found any evidence there. Nor was there a heart lying on the pavement. A dog or a night-gaunt could have run off with it, of course. But there was no blood either, except for a stain under the window and maybe a stray drop or two that couldn't be seen in the dark.

"So what happened to the heart?” Ghostface paced back and forth, unable to keep still. “It didn't just fly away."

"I don't know,” Will said.

"You be Buggane.” Ghostface slapped a hand against the brick wall. “Here's the window. You stand here looking out it. Now. I come up behind you. How do I rip your heart out in a way that leaves all that blood on the windowsill? From behind you, I can't get at your heart. If you turn around to face me, the blood doesn't splash on the sill. Now, those ignorant peckerwood detectives probably think I could shove my hands through Buggane's back and push his heart out. But it doesn't work like that. Two things can't occupy the same space at the same time. If I make my hands solid while I'm inside your chest, I'm going to fuck them up seriously. So I didn't come at you from behind."

"Okay."

"But if you turn around so I can come at you from the front, the blood's not going to spray over the sill, is it? So I've got to be between you and the window. I don't know if you noticed, but Ice didn't have any blood on him. None. Zip. Nada. Maybe you think I could rip somebody's heart out and then make myself insubstantial fast enough that the blood would spray through me. I don't think so. But even if I could, the blood's going to spatter all over the floor too. Which it didn't. So you tell me—how could I rip your heart out and leave the blood all over the sill like that?"

"You couldn't."

"Thank you. Thank you. That's right. I couldn't."

"So?” Will said.

"So there's something fishy going on, that's all. Something suspicious. Something wrong."

"Like what?"

"I don't know.” Abruptly, Ghostface's hands fell to his sides. Just like that, all the life went out of him. He slumped despondently. “I just don't know."

"Ghostface,” Will said, “why does all this matter? You called this guy Ice. What's he to you?"

The haint's face was as pale as ash, as stiff as bone. In a stricken voice, he said, “He's my brother."

They went to a diner across the street and ordered coffee. Ghostface stared down into his cup without drinking. “Ice always was a hard case. He liked the streets too much, he liked the drugs, he liked the thug life. That's why he never made anything of himself.” He picked up a spoon, looked at it, set it down. “I dunno. Maybe he did it. Maybe he did."

"You know he didn't. You proved he couldn't have."

"Yeah, but that's not going to convince a judge, now is it?"

Will had to admit it would not. “You guys keep in touch?"

"Not really. I saw him a few months ago. He was all hopped up and talking trash about how he'd finally made a big score. He was going to be smoking hundred-dollar cigars and bedding thousand-dollar whores. Maybe he stole something. I told him to get the hell out, I didn't want to know anything about his criminal activities. My own brother. The last time I saw him, I told him to go to hell."

They were silent for a bit. “Nobody said anything about finding anything valuable,” Will observed.

"Sometimes the cops will pocket that kind of stuff."

"That's true.” Will dipped a finger in his coffee and drew the Sigil of Inspiration on the linoleum counter. Nothing came to him. He sighed. “What would the Big Guy do in this situation?"

"Him?” Ghostface said bitterly. “Probably hand out cigars."

"Hey.” Will sat up straight. “That's not a half bad idea. It's pretty cold out there.” He counted cops through the window. Then he called the waitress over. “Give me four large coffees, cream and sugar on the side."

Leaving Ghostface hunched over the counter, Will carried the cardboard tray out to where the police stood stamping their feet to keep warm. They accepted the gift with small nods. All four had dark skin, short horns, and the kind of attitude that came from knowing they'd never, ever make detective. The oldest of the lot said, “Working for the spook, are you?"

"Oh, Salem's okay."

The cop grinned on one side of his oak-brown face. “You're what the micks would call his Hound of Hoolan. You know what that is?"

"No, sir."

"It means that if he says he wants to drive, you bend over and bark."

The cops all laughed. Then three of them wandered away, leaving only the rookie. Will took out a pack of Marlboros, offered one, took one for himself, then lit both. They smoked them down to the end without saying much. Will flicked his butt away. The rookie pinched the coal off of his and ate it.

Finally Will said, “This Buggane guy—you know him?"

"Everybody knew him. A real bad character. In jail as often as not. His girlfriend's cute, though. Used to come to the station to bail him out. Skinny little thing, no tits to speak of. The big lugs always like ‘em petite, you ever noticed?"

"Some of the neighbors thought he was queer."

"They sure wouldn't of said that to his face. Buggane was a bruiser. Used to fight some, under the name of Dullahan the Deathless."

"No kidding,” Will said. “His gym anywhere around here?"

"Down the street and over a couple of blocks. Place called the Sucker Punch. You can't miss it."

Ghostface was still in the diner, so Will left a note on the dash of the limo. A few minutes later, he was at the Sucker Punch A.C. If there was one thing Will had learned working for Toussaint, it was how to walk through any front door in the world and act as if he had a perfect right to be there. He went in.

The gym was dark and smelled serious. Punching bags hung from the gloom. Somebody grunted in a slow and regular fashion, like a mechanical pig, from the free-weight area. There was a single regulation ring in the center of the room. A trollweight bounced up and down on his toes, shadow-boxing.

"Go home, little boy,” an ogre in a pug hat said. “There ain't nothing here for you."

"Oh, it's not about that, sir,” Will said quickly. By that meaning whatever the ogre thought it meant. The alderman had schooled him never to meet aggression head-on.

"No? You don't wanna build yourself up, get the girl, and beat the crap out of whoever's pushing you around?” The ogre squeezed Will's biceps. “You could use it. Only not here. This is a serious club for serious fighters only."

"No, sir, I'm with Alderman Toussaint.” By the ogre's expression, Will could see that he recognized the name and was not impressed. “I was hoping you could tell me something about Bobby Buggane."

"The bum. What's he done now?"

"He was murdered."

"Well, I ain't surprised. Buggane was no damn good. Coulda worked his way up to the middle of the card, but he wasn't willing to put in the effort. Always jerking off somewhere with his spook buddy when he shoulda been working out."

"Somebody said they got into doing crimes together.” It was a shot in the dark, but Will figured the odds were good

"Yeah, well, like I said, I wouldn't be surprised. There's a lot of crap a gorilla like Buggane can pull off if he's got a haint accomplice. You go into a jewelry store and pinch the ward when the guy ain't lookin’ and replace it with a sprig of plastic fennel. Looks just like the real thing. Then that night the spook slips in and shuts off the alarm. If you're like Buggane, and can rip a safe door off its hinges, you can walk off with a bundle. Somebody pulled something like that at a warehouse down in the Village about six months ago. Got away with a fortune in slabs of raw jade. I remember it because Buggane quit the gym right after that, and I always wondered."

"Raw jade's got to be hard to sell, though,” Will said. “I mean, in bulk."

"Not if you got connections. Even if you don't, something big like that could be moved through your regular fence, provided you waited until things had cooled down some. Not that I'd know personally. But you hear things."

"Huh,” Will said. “This girlfriend of his—you remember her name?"

"Naw. Daiera, Damia, something like that. Maybe Danae. Only reason I recollect at all is that I asked Buggane once was she a pixie or a russalka or what and he said she was a diener. Deianira the Diener, that was it. That's a new one on me. I thought I knew all the ethnics, but I ain't never heard of a diener before. Listen, kid, I really have got work to do."

"I'll be out of your way, then,” Will said. “Thanks for your help.” He took one last look around the gym. “I guess Buggane should have stayed in the ring."

"Oh, he wasn't a ring boxer,” the ogre said. “He was a pit boxer."

"What's the difference?"

"Pit boxing's strictly death-match. Two fighters climb down, only one climbs out. Buggane had a three-and-two record when he quit."

"How the fuck,” Will said, “can somebody have a three-and-two record when he's fighting to the death?"

The ogre grinned. Then he explained.

Less than an hour later, Will, Salem Toussaint, and Ghostface stood waiting in the shadows outside the city morgue. “Okay,” Ghostface said. “I thought I knew all the racial types from Litvak night-hags to Thai shit demons, but you say this girl is a what?"

"A diener. It's not a type, it's a job. A diener is a morgue attendant who's responsible for moving and cleaning the body. She also assists the coroner in the autopsy. I made a few calls and Deianira's on night duty this week. Though I'm guessing she might take off a little early tonight."

"Why's that?"

"This is where Bobby Buggane's body wound up."

"I think, boy,” Toussaint said firmly, “you'd best tell us the whole story."

"All right,” Will said. “Here's how I put it together. Buggane and Ice steal a truckload of jewelry-grade jade together and agree to wait six months before trying to fence it. Buggane keeps possession—I'm guessing it's stashed with his girlfriend, but that's not really important—and everyone has half a year to reflect on how much bigger Buggane's share will be if he stiffs Ice. Maybe Ice starts worrying about it out loud. So Buggane goes down to the basement to talk it over with his good buddy. They have a couple of drinks, maybe they smoke a little crack. Then he breaks out the crystal goon. By this time, your brother's lost whatever good judgment he had in the first place, and says sure."

Ghostface nodded glumly.

"Ice shoots up first, then Buggane. Only he shoots up pure water. That's easy to pull—what druggie's going to suspect another druggie of shortchanging himself ? Then, when Ice nods off, Buggane goes back to his room, takes down the ward, and flushes it down the toilet. That way, when he's found dead, suspicion's naturally going to fall on the only individual in the building able to walk through a locked door. One who he's made certain will be easy to find when the police come calling."

"So who kills Buggane?"

"It's a set-up job. Buggane opens the window halfway and checks to make sure his girlfriend is waiting in the alley. Everything's ready. Now he stages a fight. He screams, roars, pounds the wall, smashes a chair. Then, when the neighbors are all yelling at him to shut up, he goes to the window, takes a deep breath, and rips open his rib cage with his bare hands."

"Can he do that?"

"Boggarts are strong, remember. Plus, if you checked out the syringe on his dresser, I wouldn't be surprised to find traces not of goon but of morphine. Either way, with or without painkiller, he tears out his own heart. Then he drops it out the window. Deianira catches it in a basket or a sheet, so there's no blood on the ground. Nothing that will direct the investigators’ attention outside.

"She leaves with his heart.

"Now Buggane's still got a couple of minutes before he collapses. He's smart enough not to close the window—there'd be blood on the outside part of the sill and that would draw attention outward again. But his hands are slick with blood and he doesn't want the detectives to realize he did the deed himself, so he goes to the bathroom sink and washes them. By this time, the concierge is hammering on the door.

"He dies. Everything is going exactly according to plan."

"Hell of a plan,” Toussaint murmured.

"Yeah. You know the middle part. The cops come, they see, they believe. If it wasn't for Ghostface kicking up a fuss, we'd never have found all this other stuff."

"Me? I didn't do anything."

"Well, it looked hinky to me, but I wasn't going to meddle in police business until I learned it mattered to you."

"You left out the best part,” Toussaint said. “How Buggane manages to turn killing himself to his own advantage."

"Yeah, that had me baffled too. But when a boxer picks up a nickname like ‘the Deathless,’ you have to wonder why. Then the ogre at the gym told me that Buggane had a three-two record pit boxing. That's to the death, you know. It turns out Buggane's got a glass heart. Big lump of crystal the size of your fist. No matter how badly he's injured, the heart can repair him. Even if he's clinically dead."

"So his girlfriend waits for his body to show up and sticks the heart back in?” Ghostface said. “No, that's just crazy. That wouldn't really work, would it?"

"Shhh,” Will said. “I think we're about to find out. Look."

A little door opened in the side of the morgue. Two figures came out. The smaller one was helping the larger to stand.

For the first time all evening, Toussaint smiled. Gold teeth gleamed. Then he put a police whistle to his mouth.

After Buggane and his girlfriend had been arrested, Ghostface gave Will a short, fierce hug and then ran off to arrange his brother's release. Will and the alderman strolled back to the limousine, parked two blocks away. As they walked, Will worried how he was going to explain to his boss that he couldn't chauffeur because he didn't have a license.

"You done good, boy,” Salem Toussaint said. “I'm proud of you."

Something in his voice, or perhaps the amused way he glanced down at Will out of the corner of his eye, said more than mere words could have.

"You knew,” Will said. “You knew all the time."

Toussaint chuckled. “Perhaps I did. But I had the advantage of knowing what the city knows. It was still mighty clever of you to figure it out all on your own."

"But why should I have had to? Why didn't you just tell the detectives what you knew?"

"Let me answer that question with one of my own: Why did you tell Ghostface he was the one who uncovered the crime?"

They'd reached the limo now. It flickered its lights, glad to see them. But they didn't climb in just yet. “Because I've got to live with the guy. I don't want him thinking I think I'm superior to him."

"Exactly so! The police liked hearing the story from a solid boy better than they would from me. I'm not quite a buffoon in their eyes, but I'm something close to it. My power has to be respected, and my office too. It would make folks nervous if they had to take me seriously as well."

"Alderman, I..."

"Hush up, boy. I know everything you're about to say.” The alderman opened a door for Will. “Climb in the back. I'll drive."

Copyright © 2007 Michael Swanwick

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"When I sent my first story to Asimov's, I thought it didn't have a hope. I literally could not believe the acceptance letter; it was rather like slipping into a parallel universe. Things haven't changed much. Great going to all of you and happy thirtieth!"—Liz Williams

Liz Williams is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in Glastonbury, England, where she is co-director of a witchcraft supply shop. In the US, her novels and story collections have been published by Bantam Spectra and Nightshade Books. Liz appears regularly in Realms of Fantasy, Asimov's, and other magazines. In her latest tale, she takes an icy look at some haunting songs and some ominous...

I am the keeper of the Baille Atha light now that my mother is dead, a princess in an ice-colored tower. My kingdom is the last hummock of land before the wastes of the Western Ocean, the final island before Darkland, and the enemy, and the start of storms.

Generations of women, generations of lighthouse keepers. It's all kept in a book, a real one, bound with leather and iron as well as being stored in the computer database of the light. The book isn't necessary, of course, and neither is it necessary for a living person to tend a lighthouse—they'd even stopped it on old Earth, long before we left for the stars, but something about Muspell, something about the sea and the mist and the ice, the way that ships vanish between midnight and morning, the way that you hear a sudden voice on the open ocean, seems to have convinced my ancestors that you need a living soul in a lighthouse, a small stand against the dark.

And there's a lot of darkness, on Muspell.

My mother hated the winters here, the short bleak days followed by the quick fall of the sun, and she loved the long light summers, with the Northern Fire playing greengold above the horizon and the sky flowering with the summer stars. But I am the opposite, liking the stormy nights and the crash of dark, restless in summer with the gleaming length of days.

Shoredwellers always ask if you become lonely, out on the ice. They don't realize that you are never alone: the weather is always with you, and the sea, and these are the great presences beyond the smaller spirits, of birds and sealstock and the selk. And others, too: once I went out onto the field at the end of winter to see an old woman standing at the very end of the crags, above the sea. She raised a hand and waved to someone, but when I reached her, she was no longer there.

You would have thought that I'd have dreamed of a man, coming across the sea to claim me, a young girl's dreams, but I was content with what I had. There seemed enough time for that; I would wait, I told myself, until I became lonely, but somehow I never did.

Then, one day, a man did come.

This is the way things are done. My own father was an island-man from Haut-terre, blown off course by the equinoctial gales, his little boat crashing onto the rocks beneath the lighthouse. My mother nursed him back to health; they fell in love, she fell pregnant.

He left anyway, when the next provisions drop came. They winched him up onto the copter and that, my mother said, was the last she saw of him. She cried, but not for long. There was too much to do. He did not come back.

She stayed, and brought me up, here at the Baille Atha light. We were not confined to the lighthouse itself. We would skate out across the green expanse to where the birds are, so thick along the ice cliffs that the air is one great shriek. And beyond the birds are the selk, and in winter, the selk sing.

Until the arrival of the man, I heard them only once, when I was a child and my mother had taken me out onto the icefield.

"Mother?” I said, when we had skated almost as far as the edge of the cliffs, our high-proof slickskins barely keeping out the cold. “Where are we going?"

And she said, “Why, we're going to the end of the world."

Beyond the cliff, the sea was like metal. As we reached the top and looked out over miles of silver water, the seabirds came up in a cloud and settled back down again. Their shrieking ended. The icefield was suddenly very quiet.

"Why have they stopped?” I asked. I looked up at my mother's face behind the translucent film of her slickskin; it was rapt and distant, her grey eyes fixed on the far horizon.

"Why?” I asked again, but she ignored me.

I didn't know what it was when I first heard it. It was thin and high, as cold as the wind. It drifted out across the icefield and we stood still in its path, frozen in the wake of sudden song.

"Mama?” but I never knew whether I had spoken the word aloud or whether the song had conjured it, was speaking to me out of the air. But my mother reached out and took my hand and drew me forward, to the very lip of the ice.

The sea churned, hundreds of feet below. I felt dizzy if I looked down, so I stared ahead instead, out to the bright line between sea and sky, and let the song go on.

My mother nudged me. “There. Can you see them?"

I looked down, wished I hadn't, but she was holding tightly onto my arm and then I realized that the song itself would not let me fall.

The selk lay on the rocks below. They are nothing like the sirens of old Earth: there is little that is womanly or fair about them, although they were interbred with human genes. Like seals, but larger and more tapered, with front paws that are almost hands and with which they are able to manipulate basic tools. But they had no real need of tools, not with that song. It crept into my head and it spoke to me of the northern seas, the deep green, the dive and the rush. Listening to that song, I knew what it was like to be something other than myself.

I don't know why they stopped. Perhaps they glimpsed us far above and took us for predators. But abruptly, their song ended and they slid over the edge of the rocks and into the water, one, two, three. A ripple marked the point of their dive and we did not see them again. The weather was changing, a storm driving down out of the north, and we skated fast before it, arriving back at the lighthouse just as the first flakes of snow hit. We locked the doors behind us and looked out at white sea, white sky.

"There,” I said. “That place, the cliffs. Is it really where the world ends?"

"No,” my mother replied. “Beyond the sea is Darkland, the home of our enemies, where the vitki come from."

"The vitki,” I said. I'd heard the word before; my mother had used it to frighten me, when I was younger: don't go out on the ice alone, the vitki will come, they will take you away and change you into something terrible.

"Who are the vitki?” I asked now, and my mother answered, “They are the wolves of the spirit."

But that night, I dreamed of the selk, and of songs.

When I was nineteen, my mother died, of an infection in the lungs that might have been cured if she had lived on the shore. But the winter storms had come again and we were too far from a medical center. She went downhill fast, so quickly that I could not believe it, and I do not think I believed until several days after I had sent her body, in its burial pod, down into the green depths of the sea. I used to see her all the same, standing by the light, a younger woman than I had ever known, and nothing about this ever struck me as strange.

I ordered supplies, and a replacement pod, and carried on. That spring, I went out onto the ice again, finding a freedom in not having to ask permission of anyone, and visited the selk, but I did not hear them sing, neither that year, nor any year that followed. I dreamed of it, all the same.

When the man appeared, I did not know at first whether he was real. I was used to ghosts, by then. I took up the binoculars and watched him trudge over the ice: an ordinary fisherman's slickskin, a half-moon of face under the hood. He was dragging something behind him, something grey.

I went down to the intercom. Moments later, his voice came through.

"Is anyone there?"

"I'm the lighthouse keeper. My name is Siri Clathe. Do you have ID?"

The scan glowed blue and data showed on the screen: Edri Lailoken, out of Harkness, the registry numbers of a fishing rigger.

"You'll do,” I said to Edri Lailoken through the intercom, and opened the door.

He wasn't so much older than I was, perhaps ten years or so, in his early thirties. When he pulled back the hood I saw blue eyes, dark hair, a face that was all harsh, sharp angles. But he had a winning smile.

"I've got a problem,” he told me. “Got blown down out of Uist last night; my rigger's a wreck. Spring gales, you see. Come up faster than the eye can blink."

"Where is it?"

He gestured towards the northwest of the icefield. “Up there, at the base of the cliff."

"You were lucky,” I said.

He grimaced. “You won't say that when you see the rigger."

He dumped a small pack on the floor and moved to open it, and it was then that I saw what he'd been dragging across the ice.

Dapple and pale, like a shadow made flesh. I felt as though he'd brought in the flayed skin of a man.

He saw me looking. “I know.” His voice was very quiet. “I found it. Someone's been hunting."

"I'll have to report this.” I felt sick. “The spring equinox was a fortnight ago—you know they're sentient, now?"

"Of course. But Siri, there are plenty of folk even in the Reach who think the selk are nothing more than animals. Even when they plead for mercy under a hunter's club."

"Why did they leave the skin?” I forced myself to look at it.

"Maybe they're just after the meat—but I think it's more likely to be this.” He tugged the skin over and I saw the black bands around it. “See? It's a young one. The pelt-merchants don't like the banding, it's not fashionable."

"So they just dumped it."

I could see the disgust in his eyes. It had struck me, of course, that he'd been the one to kill the selk, but that expression convinced me otherwise. “You need to get someone out here, Siri."

"I don't know if they'll come for only one selk.” The culls were another matter; I'd seen those on the newsfeeds, the ice running red, the pups begging for their lives.

"It won't be just one. It's so far out here, I suppose they thought they'd be undisturbed. Would you have gone out there, in this weather?"

I shook my head. “I'll put that report through,” I said, and did so.

Communications this far out are often subject to delay. It was evening before I got a reply, telling me that the report had been filed and a response would be with me in the next couple of days.

"When is the next provision copter through?” Lailoken asked.

"Another week."

"I'm afraid in that case, you'll just have to put up with me, Siri."

He said it with a smile. A lot can happen in a week, the thought came to me.

On the following morning, we went out to look at Lailoken's rigger.

"I'm taking this.” I showed him the harpoon gun, the only weapon I had. “Just in case the hunters are still around."

He gave a grave nod. “Good idea. I don't have anything with me—I had a small weapon, but it's still in the rigger; I couldn't get at it."

When I saw his craft, I knew why. Looking down from the top of the cliff, the prow of the rigger had been stoved in and it was sinking. The back half was already submerged.

"You were really lucky to have made it up the cliff,” I said. “There's no way we're going to be able to drag that up."

Lailoken cursed. “It'll be gone by the time we can get a rescue copter out here and anyway, I'd have to pay. Oh well. It's insured, at least."

"Will you get the full amount back?"

He snorted. “I pay a high enough premium."

When we got back to the lighthouse Lailoken, with an air of resignation, asked if I had a spare fishing rod. I watched him walk across the ice, a graceful prowl, and chop a hole in the ice with a borrowed prong.

A fish supper, in pleasant company. Maybe I'd been lonelier than I'd thought.

I had a number of tasks to do around the light: basic maintenance. I went down into the base area to fetch some equipment; the skin of the selk was still there, folded as neatly as I could manage it, and so was Lailoken's pack. We'd made up a bed for him on the couch.

As I crossed the room, I heard a whisper.

Iskir. Iskir.

It was surprisingly loud and it startled me. I looked around, but nothing was there. My head rang with it. Iskir.

"Who's there?” I said aloud.

The whisper came again and it was coming from the pack. I was an idiot, I told myself. Lailoken must have a radio in there. Not much use, however, if the battery went flat. I didn't like rummaging about in his bag, but I opened it a little way anyway.

There was no radio. A handful of clothing, a spare slickskin, a long, flat parcel in a waterproof wrapping, that whispered, Iskir, Iskir.

I flicked the parcel open and snatched my hand back. There was blood on it, from a thin, shallow cut. I put my hand to my mouth and, carefully, drew the wrapping aside. Inside, was a long black knife: black blade, black shaft. It looked almost of a piece, the metal and bone blending into one another so seamlessly that I had to look hard for a join. My mouth flooded with the taste of iron.

I had a small weapon, but it's still in the rigger.

The door hummed and I hastily shoved the bag shut. Lailoken stood in the entrance with a brace of limmerel, his face wind-reddened and smiling.

"They're shoaling. You could almost pull them out of the water."

"Oh, well done.” My voice sounded almost normal, I found to my surprise. I kept my injured hand out of sight, behind my back. “That's dinner settled, then."

Perhaps this was what marriage was like, all cheer and plans for supper, with the hiss of secrets underneath. I got through the next few hours with difficulty, and excused myself shortly after dinner. I told Lailoken I'd cut myself on a weathered sheet of metal. He seemed hardly to hear me.

My mother might have lived alone, apart from me, but that didn't mean that she didn't communicate. She had friends all over the Reach: on the message boards and the genealogy lists. One of them was a sea marshal named Kari Shoar. I sent her a message, then went to bed and tried to sleep.

I could still hear it, in my restless dreams. Iskir, Iskir.

Around three AM, I found myself wide awake. The message-in section of the console was blinking. I went to look at what Shoar had written.

I've not met Edri Lailoken myself. Some of the older guys here know him, though he hasn't been out with the boats for years, since his accident. They say he's a miserable old bugger, keeps himself to himself. What's he doing all the way out at the Baille Atha light?

I hadn't voiced my suspicions yet, but I did so then. I did not feel able to handle this on my own. I needed help and I asked Shoar to send a sea marshal out, or come herself. Why would you take on someone else's identity, unless you had something to hide? And besides, identity theft in the Reach is not an easy matter. Not easy, or cheap.

I did not sleep for the remainder of that night. There was no further reply from Shoar; her part of the Reach was several hours ahead of Baille Atha, and she had probably gone on shift. I watched the moon drift down over the ocean, sliding into its own silver track, and still the whispering went on.

Towards dawn, there was a flicker of green in the corner of my eye. Message-in, I thought, and ran to the console. But it was on another array to the communications console—a small emerald light, telling me that the main door of the lighthouse had been opened.

I should have waited. I should have locked myself into the lighthouse, a princess in my tower, and made sure that the override switches were on lock. Because I knew what Lailoken was, now, and where that black blade had come from: a land of dark glass cliffs, of echoing forests, of experiments and spells.

Should have waited, but did not. I thought of that sad piled pelt in the base of the lighthouse, of the selk singing at the ocean's edge, and I could not stay. I picked up the harpoon gun on my way out; he had not taken it with him. I suppose he did not need to. I also checked his bag. The knife was gone.

In the cold glow just before the dawn, the spires and pinnacles of ice gleamed green with their own faint phosphorescence. Lailoken had left no tracks in the snow, and that nearly made me turn back to the reassuring column of the lighthouse. But I went on, following the whisper of the knife in my mind, and at last I came to that same cliff, that my mother had called the edge of the world.

Lailoken was nowhere to be seen. Cautiously, I made my way to the lip of the cliff and looked over. The ice field extended some distance out from the shore, a thin spring sheet, and he was already halfway across it. Ahead, shadowy shapes marked the rocks. The selk were there. I raised the harpoon and measured a shot but he was out of range. I could see how he'd made his way down the cliff, the handholds. It was still dark enough that he might not see me even if he looked back, or so I prayed. I shouldered the gun and went after him.

When I was almost at the bottom of the cliff, and Lailoken's figure was approaching the rocks on which the selk lay, something changed. The world around me became colder and seemed to darken, but at the same time, I could see more clearly. I caught a glimpse of Lailoken's face, as if I was kneeling before him. It was white and rapt against the pre-dawn sky and I knew that I was seeing through the knife itself, through Iskir. My blood hammered and pounded in my head and I came close to falling. I snatched at a handhold of ice, half caught it, and slid the rest of the way, luckily only a few feet, to the base of the cliff.

Down here, the rocks were slippery, like wet glass. I did not know how Lailoken had made such quick progress and my fear of him grew. I saw his face again and he was speaking, whispering to the knife as someone might whisper to a lover. Something pushed against the world; I had the sense of force—and then the song began.

This time, it was not wordless. The selk, sentient now, was singing in its own tongue of Shelta. I did not understand it, but I could grasp repeats, refrains—and Iskir did understand, I somehow knew, and was spinning the song out of the selk like a long skein of blood.

Lailoken gave a single shout, a cry of triumph. He raised Iskir, brought it down through the air. I had a dizzying rush, cleaving the air with the knife, as it cut the song. Lailoken's other hand held a bag; the song fell into it. From across the icefield, there was a heavy, echoing splash as the selk rolled and fell. And I dragged the harpoon from my shoulder, aimed and fired.

The world slowed down. Lailoken turned as the bolt glided towards him and I saw his face, clearly at last. He looked nothing like the blue-eyed, black-haired young man from whom I'd sat across a table, eating limmerel. I don't know what he looked like, except that I wouldn't have described it as human. The bolt crept on and Lailoken smiled and stepped unhurriedly out of the way.

"Iskir!” I cried. “Iskir!” My voice sounded thick in my mouth. Lailoken's smile widened, but out on the rocks, something stirred. A selk was singing.

It wasn't the plaintive, desolate song of a few minutes before. Lailoken's spell had been broken just long enough, the knife's concentration shifting. This was a war song.

My hands hammered at my ears. I dropped to my knees. Time came back in a rush and the harpoon bolt sailed past Lailoken and struck a spire of ice, which shattered. But the ice was shattering, too, thin splintering cracks stemming out from where Lailoken, suddenly, was flailing for balance.

It happened quickly after that: the ice breaking, Iskir flying from Lailoken's hand like a black arrow, the vitki going down, down, into the killing sea. The selk's song stopped as abruptly as it had begun. I was crouching, my forehead nearly touching the ice. A few yards from me, where the ice was unbroken, Iskir skittered to a halt and lay waiting.

After a moment, I became aware that the pounding sound in my head wasn't my own blood, after all, but the rotor blades of a sea marshal's copter, landing above me on the cliff. Slowly, I got to my feet. I stepped out onto the ice, picked up Iskir, and put it in a fold of my slickskin. It felt slippery, as if coated with blood. Then I climbed back up the cliff to where Marshal Shoar was waiting.

An hour later, she and I went back up to the northwest quadrant of the icefield. It was not long past dawn, with a strong morning wind blowing offshore. Together, Shoar and I looked over the cliff to where the wrecked rigger lay. It was not wrecked now. It hovered slightly above the surface of the water, quite safe, with the flicker of a dying holo-form shuddering over it. In the moments where the holo-form was failing, I saw that it was nothing like a fishing rigger, but a thin craft. I'd never seen anything similar before, but Shoar nodded when she saw it.

"Vitki,” was all that she said.

"He wanted me to file the report about the skin,” I said. “He was prepared for someone to come."

"Arrogance,” she said. But she did not sound sure. Then she added, “Perhaps he wanted a copter."

Her team took the rigger back with them to Uist, proof of enemy incursions into the Reach. The Baille Atha lighthouse was put on the nearest marshal's sea patrol and now a wing comes over perhaps every three days or so, undergoing routine checks. But Lailoken still walks the ice, head down in its vitki hood, stumbling along as if looking for something. I can see the ice spires through his body; I have seen no need to alert the sea patrol to his presence.

I keep Iskir in a metal box, up in the light near the storms and the sky. Sometimes, I take the knife out and look at it; it seems to grow harder, more solid, year by year. I have not told the sea patrol about Iskir, either. For if another wolf of the spirit should come, searching for a knife that can cut a song from the air, I think I would like to see just how far Iskir can pare, spiraling flesh and blood and bone away, all the way down to the cold hollow of an enemy soul.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Williams

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"This is the shortest, by a good many thousands of words, of the two dozen or so stories I've had in Asimov's over the years. But that doesn't mean it's insignificant, at least not to me, because writing it qualified me for a place in this very special issue. It's an honor to be here, no matter what the length of the story."—Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg's new story collection, To Be Continued, was published by Subterranean Press late last year. It's the first volume in what is intended as a nine-volume set of Bob's collected (not complete!) science fiction stories. This first volume covers stories written between 1953 and 1958. Obviously, it will take a while before we see the volume that includes this latest tale by our resident Grand Master.

The Queen-Goddess feels another dream coming to her tonight, and she knows it will be a dark one. So I am summoned to her, masked in the mask of my profession, and I crouch by her pallet, awaiting the night. The Queen-Goddess sleeps, lying asprawl like a child's discarded doll. At the foot of the bed lurks the Vizier in his horned mask: our chaperone. No man, not even the royal Eater of Dreams, may enter the Queen-Goddess’ bedchamber unescorted.

Her spirit flutters and trembles. Her eyes move quickly beneath their lids. She is reaching the dream-world now. Her dreams are always true visions. Therefore she suffers when a dark one comes, for such dreams acquaint her with pain and grief, and we suffer when she suffers, since all things flow to us through the spirit of the Queen-Goddess. What she will bring us after such a dream is pain and grief. We cannot abide pain or grief; and so I must take her dark dreams from her as swiftly as I can.

Last night she dreamed—she could not communicate it well to me—of ashes and ruin, of ugliness and shame, of strife and sadness. From her vague description, I knew that she has been ranging through ancient times again. She often makes contact with some epoch of the distant pre-Imperial past, that era of apocalyptic nightmare out of which our own shining civilization emerged. Last night's dream, for which, alas, I was not summoned in time, has cast its shadow over today's flow of beneficial energy. If another like it comes tonight, I will be here to guard her majesty against it.

And, yes, yes, the dream is coming, and it is the same.

Surely her majesty has slipped once more into the black abyss of time past. I say the words that unlock the portals of her spirit, link my mind with hers, and see a fearful strangeness. The stars, of which she gives me just the most fleeting of glimpses before her gaze turns away from them, seem to have an unfamiliar look: the constellations I so quickly see do not appear to be the constellations we know today. They must be those of some long-ago epoch. The stars in their courses travel great distances over time.

And what I behold under these strange skies is bleakness and horror. We are in a hideous city. It is an era I have never seen in her dreams before, an awful one. The buildings are brutal towers, looming inexorably. On myriad interlacing roadways, vehicles move like swarming beetles. I see an ashen sky; I see stunted trees with blackened leaves; I see hordes of people with faces twisted in anguish. The air itself has a poisonous-looking pall. It is the past, yes; it is one of those dark predecessor civilizations, ridden with pain and error, out of which we have emerged into sunlight and joy. What can this terrible ancient era be, if not the dreadful world of eight, ten, twelve thousand years ago, that grim time so proud of the frenzied, furious industriousness that its builders mistook for wealth, from which the benevolence of her majesty's dynasty has emancipated us all forever?

"Majesty,” I say softly. “Give me this dream."

I utter the words of transfer and the dream enters me in all its fury. For a moment I recoil; but I am skilled in my art, and quickly I engulf the images, neutralize them, dissipate them, and then it is over and I am rising, trembling, drenched in sweat, fighting nausea. It will take me a while to recover. But I am used to that. Her majesty's face is tranquil. She sleeps like a happy child. The Vizier comes to me and we embrace, mask against mask. “Well done,” he says. “But I fear this is not the last of them."

The day that follows is a happy one. Strength and joy flow from her majesty from dawn to dusk. It is a day of golden sunlight, of cloudless skies, of unfolding blossoms and rising fragrance. The great lawns sweeping down to the river have never looked greener; the river's pure flow is a celestial blue. We are a blessed people. We will not make the mistakes of yesteryear. Our civilization will endure eternally.

But at midnight the Vizier summons me again.

"Another,” he says. “The third night. This one will be the worst."

Smiling, I tell him, “Whatever it is, I am ready."

Indeed I am. For sixty years now I have guarded her majesty against the terrors of the night, and we have moved together from triumph to triumph. In the privacy of my soul I flatter myself with the thought that I am essential to the realm—that, without my diligence and skill, the Queen-Goddess would be ridden nightly by horror and torment and all the world would be the worse for that.

I don my mask. The Vizier dons his. The Queen, ever youthful, ever beautiful, is asleep. Signs of tension are visible on her brow. The dream is coming. I say the words. The link is formed.

It comes now, the dream.

Her wandering mind has entered that same ancient era, but this night there are significant differences. The brutal towers now are shattered: charred stumps are everywhere. Those interlacing roads are twisted and broken. Vehicles lie piled in rusting heaps along their margins. The air is black and oily. The citizens—there are just a few in the ruined streets—have a dazed, stunned look. Some dreadful thing has happened. The dreaming mind of the Queen-Goddess must have found the very end of the former era, the disastrous climactic time of the Great Collapse, when all assumptions were overthrown and the corrosive prosperity of the day tumbled overnight into that dreary poverty out of which, after so many centuries, our Imperial government created the serene, lovely epoch in which we live today.

It is a much more powerful vision than last night's, and I know that afterward I will reverberate with it for hours, but so be it. I will take it from her and all will be well. “Majesty,” I say, as ever. “Give me—"

But then her head shifts, and she murmurs in her sleep, and the perspective changes and she shows me the sky, not the brief glimpse of last night but a long, slow, clear view, and everything is wrong. The moon, our familiar pockmarked moon, is a chipped and broken thing, and the stars whose patterns I have studied so well are not the stars of some vanished yesterday nor the stars of today but stars strung across the sky in some utterly unknown configuration. And in that moment all my strength leaves me, for I know this dream to be too huge to swallow. It is the future, not the past, through which the Queen-Goddess walks tonight, and what it shows is that the cycle of destruction will come round again, that our green and golden era that we thought to be invulnerable will not last eternally after all, that we too will be swept away as all earlier civilizations of Earth have been swept away. I can protect her against the past, but there is no way I can stave off the onrushing future, and I fling my mask aside and crouch and weep while the Vizier, maskless and stunned as well, comes hurrying to my side.

Copyright © 2007 Robert Silverberg

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A new radar detector

that has recently been invented

can not only detect rainbows

-

as was its original intention

-

but also has the unexpected

yet astonishing power

of seeing people's souls.

-

While meteorologists

and weather enthusiasts

are all aglow about this new

innovation,

-

blithely code-named “Soular,"

-

civic and church

authorities are looking

leerily about this new invention.

-

Church Officials,

are distressed about meteorologists

meddling in matters

previously the domain

of people of the cloth,

-

not to mention it being

somewhat unethical to have

lay-people voyeuristically

gawking into a person's soul.

-

The Surgeon General

has now also become involved

and recommended against

government approval.

Her rationale:

The soul has never before

been considered

a bodily part

and is therefore beyond

their scope of investigation.

-

In addition,

The Civil Liberties Union

has intervened

and has asked for a court injunction

to put a stop

to the test trials of this new mechanism.

-

Under the Fourth Amendment

of the Constitution

this is considered

an invasion of personal privacy.

The Constitution holds it

illegal to search

a person's house,

and the body being a “temple"

makes it illegal

to peer into a person's

most vital essence.

—Peter Payack

Copyright © Peter Payack

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"Magazines are the soul of science fiction, and the place where it first began. Hundreds of novels are published every year, but only a few magazines exist at any one time, and only a few of those last for any length of time. Asimov's is one of those that have lasted, becoming the literary heart of science fiction in the eighties, nineties, and beyond. Happy birthday, Asimov's! I'm grateful to have been a part of it all."—William Barton

Over the past thirty-five years, William Barton has written numerous science fiction stories, including the award-winning novel Acts of Conscience (Warner Aspect, 1997) and several stories for Asimov's, most recently, “Down to the Earth Below” October/ November 2006). Regarding “The Rocket into Planetary Space,” he says, “I am, as the clever comedian once said, The Luckiest Boy in the World! I was seven years old when Sputnik 1 orbited the Earth, and only ten when Yuri Gagarin flew. I was fourteen when Mariner IV sent back those first magical photos of Mars, eighteen when Apollo 8 orbited the Moon and still eighteen when Eagle set down on the Sea of Tranquility. I was twenty-five when Viking 1 landed on Mars and twenty-seven when the two Voyagers left for the stars. When I was thirty, I stood just three miles from the launch pad and watched STS-1 Columbia climb heavenward on a column of fiery smoke. What followed was Challenger exploding when I was thirty-five, then the Endless Space Station of my forties, then my own Columbia falling to pieces over Texas when I was fifty-two, and I began to feel cheated. Cheated out of the universe Asimov, Heinlein, and all the others promised me when I was that little boy, breathless in front of the TV news. This story is about why I changed my mind, and why I feel so very lucky to have lived here and now, after all."

This is the way things turned out for Burke the Jerk. If things can turn out this way for someone like me, there's hope for us all. And I always did believe an elephant can fly...

On September 7, 2016, just three weeks before my sixty-sixth birthday, when I should've been retired and tucked safely away in a Geezer Storage Facility somewhere down on the Grand Strand of South Carolina, or living under a bridge somewhere if things had gone that badly, maybe even safely dead, I was strapped into a canvas bucket seat in front of the systems engineer's console in the forward cupola of the node we'd mounted to the front of Excelsior, our shiny new SpaceHab Apex 400 cargo module, watching the fat, flat Pacific roll by, five hundred klicks straight down.

Excelsior. I remember how everyone razzed me about that when I proposed it. My wife Sarah'd said, Isn't that wood shavings or something? True. But in Latin, it means Higher.

The world's a fairly featureless place from low equatorial orbit, which passes over Brazil and Congo and not much else. Most everything cool looking is in the northern hemisphere, or down around the south pole. Sure, the Andes are spectacular enough, and you can see Kilimanjaro sticks up part way, but what the hell. I thought they should've put the Bigelow Exodus orbital hotel in polar orbit, give folks something to look at, once they got tired of the novelty of a zero-gee honeymoon, but equatorial's the best place to toss inflatables from the Rocketplane Kistler K-1 site at Woomera, easy to reach by Dragon from SpaceX's Falcon-9 pads on Kwajalein. Maybe when they get the second one built, and the launch site outside Vegas in a few years?

My pal Willy Gillooly was at the pilot's console, neatly bundled up in one of the used launch and entry suits we'd picked up cheap from Roskosmos, one hand on the rotational controller, watching his console clock count backward toward zero. He had the helmet open and thrown back onto the nape of his neck, and I always thought Willy looked like some old Dick Tracy character, um ... Flattop? That's one. Skinniest guy I ever met, face as bony as Michael Rennie playing Klaatu. Nice as hell, though. And smart. Way smarter than me.

From the bulkhead speaker, Minnie, voice squeakier than usual, said, “CNN is starting its satellite feed. Turn on your TV.” Willy claims his wife got that name because her parents thought she looked like Minnie Pearl when she was a baby, but what newborn ever looks like anything but a space alien? You know damn well it was something to do with the Voice of the Mouse.

Minnie was going to ride out the burn in Smaug's reentry module, sort of as a safety measure, and I suppose Sarah should've done the same with Fafnir, but she wanted to sit at her astrogator's console with us, and here she was. Our two SpaceX Dragons were hard-docked to the two y-axis ports on the node, and, theoretically at least, anything that might tear them loose would most likely kill us all. Still, you never know.

I hit the power button on the TV, and the CNN anchor's sharp voice proclaimed, “This is Chelsea Clanton, bringing you a Live Scoop, direct from the Bigelow Exodus, high above the Pacific Ocean!"

On the screen, what you could see was the broad curve of the Earth, mainly blue, with a complex swirl of white clouds, Hawaii visible as a hazy bit of crud up by the northern limb. In the foreground was a little tiny thing looked like some kind of toy.

Willy said, “Jeez, we're only ten klicks away! Don't these guys know about telephoto lenses?"

All you could really see was the United Launch Alliance Delta V second stage, which we'd had launched out of Kourou without a payload, meaning most of the fuel for the six RL-10B engines had made it to orbit too. We'd sent up the Apex 400, both Dragons, and the three Xcor Prometheus methane/LOX propulsion modules on three separate Falcon 9S9 launches.

Turned out to be a lot harder than we expected, getting it all bolted together.

On TV, Ms. Clanton was yammering, “You're looking at Excelsior, the world's first manned interplanetary expedition, developed and assembled in secret by a privately funded consortium of space scientists,” I heard Willy, conservative as Goldwater's Ghost, snort as she went on, “Bound today for a secret destination, somewhere beyond the Moon!"

Behind me, I heard Sarah sing, “Some-where, beyond the Moooon...!"

It'd been hard to come up with the six hundred thirty million dollars for this, and when we first thought of it ten years ago, it seemed like a ridiculous idea. Still, the Gates Foundation gives away that much and more every month, year in, year out, and one month in ‘09 we convinced them to give us a bit of a boost.

Minnie said, “The CNN producer says you need to start the audio feed, Alan."

I hit that button too.

Sarah giggled and Willy snorted, then they both sobered up.

Willy said, “Go for interplanetary injection. Thirty seconds."

I started paying attention to my console. Willy's main job is to hold the stick and make sure the Delta V guidance package is doing what Sarah says it needs to do. Me? Well. I wrote Excelsior's flight software, and I left myself in the loop.

Willy said, “Ten seconds,” and damn if his voice didn't sound tight.

"Ten, Willy. Astro?"

Sarah said, “Go."

"Rescue?"

Minnie said, “Go."

Willy said, “Five."

I was tempted to call “Guide-o,” and then answer myself, in an attack of the nervous sillies, but I said, “Valves open at tank-head idle."

"Zero."

I thumbed the switch. “Ignition."

There was a slight tremor, igniters firing slightly out of synch. Willy said, “I show 2 percent thrust."

I stole a look at the TV, ignoring Clanton's color commentary. There was white light guttering around the RL-10B expansion bells. “Looks like a good burn.” Not the way you usually start up rocket engines, but we figured better safe than sorry.

Willy said, “Energize pumps. And watch the strain gauges.” If we lost the Dragons and lived, we'd probably still get home someday, but I suppose he didn't want to lose Minnie.

There was a steady vibration now, and I felt my butt press down lightly on the canvas. “Pump idle, all six. Ten percent thrust."

I heard Willy blow out a long breath. “Okay. Go with throttle-up."

I'd gotten myself an old airliner throttle, though the computer and my software could handle all this, but, you know, I wanted to feel it. Feel it under my own hand. When I slid the bouquet of levers forward along the slot, I suddenly got heavier, then heavier still.

And when I looked out the cupola dome, the Earth's curved horizon was, ever so slowly, starting to drop, with a beautiful yellow crescent Moon rising out of the haze over Peru.

By the end of the work day, a few hours later, the Earth, shrunk to the apparent size of a basketball, had become a slim crescent due to our exit trajectory, and I floated in front of Fafnir's hatch window, picking out city lights with my binoculars. You would not believe how much light comes from Japan, not to mention the enormous coastal cities of China. All those people crammed into that little bit of space, then the black expanse of Siberia and Central Asia beyond.

It reminded me a little bit of making a night flight back from California to the east coast when I was a kid. You'd fly out of the solid light-flood of L.A., then it would be black, black, black all the way to the Mississippi, small towns along the river, then more black until you crossed the Appalachians, where the woods were lit up by dots of light, like a mirror held up to the midnight sky.

Behind me, Sarah said, “Can you still see the Delta stage?” I could hear the soft whisper of her getting undressed, getting ready for her first sponge-bath of the expedition.

I turned the binoculars toward where I thought it should be, then scanned along its trajectory, back and forth. It was just a little yellow thing, a bright rectangle far out in the black. “Barely."

She said, “Twenty klicks maybe? Tumbling?"

"I don't think so."

ULA had agreed to monitor the stage and direct it to an impact on the Lunar farside to keep it from becoming a future navigation hazard out in deep space. There's a Saturn S-IVB stage out there already that gets reported as a new asteroid every few years.

I took the binoculars down and looked out across the dark Excelsior assemblage, glad Willy and Minnie had turned out the cupola lights, but not gone into Smaug yet. If you looked close, you could see their shadows inside the little dome, close together, over by the pilot station.

We'd started rotisserie mode to keep skin heating more or less even, and just now, the sun was somewhere behind the Apex 400 body, leaving us in shadow. Just enough shadow to see a starry night sky, enough shadow to see the Milky Way go all the way round and, crossing it, a faint silver haze of gegenschein.

I whispered, “Damn...” All the millions of words I've churned out in my life and now, seeing this, I couldn't come up with a damn thing.

Sarah drifted up behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder to steady herself, then docking her head next to mine. “Wow!” she said. “Zodiacal light?"

I nodded, still speechless.

Softly, she said, “Alan, if you'd told me, when you sat down ten years ago to write that idiotic story ... well. I'd've sent for the nice young men in their clean white coats."

I'd gotten the idea after looking at the websites of the six NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation System COTS contenders, had a good time writing it, and forgotten all about it while the usual year went by between sale and publication. A year, a couple of weeks, and then the phone rang.

I'd known Willy Gillooly for maybe twelve years by then, both of us busy with our lives and careers, acquaintances, maybe friends, because we both found time to write the occasional technostory, because both of us were good enough to get published. After telling me how much he liked the tale, he'd said, “I ran the numbers. Looks like you did the arithmetic right for a change."

I'd managed a dry, “Thanks.” That was our usual litany. My shaky math, his shaky people.

Then he'd said, “How much you think it'd cost to really do it?"

"I dunno. A billion?"

Willy ran a research lab many orders of magnitude bigger than my little software design bureau, but nowhere near that big. “Too bad,” he'd said. And that was that until, some months later, I found myself looking at the rules for submitting a proposal to the Gates Foundation. I'd called him back, then called the PayPal guy and let him know what I was thinking. Turned out he'd liked the story too.

The sun came around the Apex hull, lighting up the foreground, and Sarah said, “Hey, look! Willy and Minnie are necking!"

They were, floating under the cupola dome, faces pressed together, arms and legs wrapped around, holding them tightly together. “Still got their clothes on, anyway."

Sarah snickered, “If it was us ... well, Willy's too shy for that."

"Who's he think's watching? God?"

"Us, dummy."

True. We'd had a damn good time on our orbital Second Honeymoon, and I suppose Willy and Minnie did too. Having a good time now, by the looks of it.

Sarah said, “Did you know Minnie's got a brother named Max?"

I turned away from the view and gave her a look. “Have they killed their parents yet?"

She laughed.

Two days later, we flew behind the Moon. I remember, when I was a kid, fresh out of high school, just shy of fifty years ago, listening to one of the Apollo 8 astronauts describe what it was like arriving in Lunar orbit. Because of when and where they were going, the limitations inherent in launching to the Moon from Florida, they'd arrived over the farside in darkness, the only sign of where they were a big black Something blotting out half the sky.

Our trajectory took us over a daylit farside, the four of us sitting in Excelsior's dome, looking out at a torn, hilly landscape, gray and brown dirt brilliantly floodlit yellow by the sun, gaping like hayseeds, bug-eyed in the big city. Though I'd been studying Lunar maps for years, anticipating this moment, I couldn't spot a God-damned thing.

I said, “Man. It's a good thing we don't need to find a landing site down there."

Willy said, “Yep. It'd be up to Sarah."

Who, sitting at her astrogation console, said, “Hey! I see the Soyuz!"

She put it on our screens, but it wasn't much to see, a tiny green freckle arcing over the moonscape, higher than we were, in a free-return trajectory. If you looked close, you could spot the solar panels, like wings on a blackfly.

Minnie said, “Can you get any closer?"

"That's the best I can do in the spotting scope."

Willy said, “Can you imagine being dumb enough to shell out all those bucks for that little ride?"

I shrugged. “Well, they've found four guys wanted to do it in the last three years.” It was the ultimate space joyride to date. The Russians would send two tourists along with a pilot up to ISS for a weeklong stay, then dock the Soyuz to a propulsion module and fling them around the Moon. For a hundred million dollars a seat.

Willy said, “Maybe now we've proved the Interplanetary Dragon works, SpaceX will give it a try. You could do it with a 9S9 for half the money, with twice the seats."

Minnie said, “I think they'll wait to see how things turn out with the Moon Race."

I said, “And tSpace."

Sarah said, “And us."

"Yeah."

I guess there's a Moon Race, though not much of one in public. The Russians have only got their little tourist enterprise, claiming they were putting most of their effort and money into a long-range joint Mars program with ESA. Meanwhile, NASA's Orion capsule hadn't flown ‘til 2014 after all, its ISS duties captured by SpaceX and RpK. All to the good, I guess, since now they were saying they'd be in Lunar orbit by late 2017, and would land the following year, two years ahead of dawdling Bush's original schedule.

Of course, the Chinese claimed they were going to put a little manned lab in Lunar orbit early next year, and would land as soon as may be after that. Does that make it a race?

I imagine the governments know what the Transform Space Consortium, tSpace, is up to in the Australian desert, not far from the K-1 launch site, where US regulators chased them. I just don't imagine they think it'll work.

I'd visited tSpace once during the workup for Excelsior and been intrigued by their planetary lander design, but had been just as skeptical of the notion you could do it without a big cargo launcher. Just the idea of staging tankers along the whole route, refueling on the way to the Moon, again in Lunar orbit before landing, then again afterward ... not to mention flying back from the Moon in a spaceship with no aerobraking capability.

You know that old story too: either you incinerate in the Earth's atmosphere, or you fly on by and die some time later, out in the cold and dark.

The tSpace guy giving us the tour had looked me in the eye, and said, “If you don't break the Outer Space Treaty, we will.” Made me think about the little Standard ARM flag we'd had made up. That'll be fun.

There was a little beep-beep from the console, and Sarah said, “Coming up on phasing burn. Five minutes."

We were using the Moon mainly to twist our orbital inclination relative to the Sun, so one little burn and, UB(2009)/21 here we come ... Damn, I thought. I must be getting used to this....

By the time another twenty-four hours had passed, Earth was a tiny blue marble in the sky, yellow-gray Moon a similar size off to one side. When I'd mentioned to Willy how the Moon seemed to be getting smaller faster, he'd given me a little smirk: It's closer, dummy. Think!

Oh, right.

So the sun was bright and the sky was black, and there wasn't much more to see. The brighter stars were managing to poke through the sun's glare, but most were lost in nothingness, here and there the steady, bright fireflies of the big planets and close planets. Venus over there, Jupiter there, wan Saturn that way ... I looked for Mars but couldn't find it. Maybe...

Sarah was at the comm console, tracking the high-gain antenna this way and that, trying to find the CNN satellite again, muttering something about the published ephemerides, so I sat down at the astrogation station, pulled up the scope image, and started slewing along the ecliptic. There. Venus looked like a brilliant crescent moon, blinding against an intensely black backdrop.

Funny you can't see ... well, no, I guess not. No Earthlight to make the nightside visible on the edge of vision. No moon. No nothing.

Sarah said, “Hey. We're on!” When I looked, Willy and Minnie were floating behind her chair, each holding on with one hand.

On the TV, there was another dark sky, indistinct, T-shaped thingy centered on the screen, while a woman's vibrant voice said, “This is a view of Excelsior emerging from behind the Moon, taken from telescopes at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The spaceship and its four-person crew are now on their way to near-earth asteroid UB(2009)/21, the first human beings to leave Earth's orbit for a destination beyond the Moon. This is Chelsea Clanton, reporting live from Houston!"

Willy said, “Houston?"

Sarah said, “I think she's at SpaceHab."

"But that's just our Apex 400 engineering telemetry!"

A shrug. “We didn't exactly set up a Mission Control."

The TV switched to CNN anchor Barney Frank in Atlanta, who said, “Meanwhile, in other news...” His sweaty jowls were replaced by the hazy ruins of Damascus.

I slewed on from Venus, sticking to the ecliptic, unable to remember what planet was next. Suddenly, Saturn was a pale pastel disk, rings steeply tilted down, like the brim of a rakishly worn hat. Imagine going there. Maybe, if I live long e...

Christ. I never thought I'd live long enough, or get lucky enough, to be here! Count your damned blessings and be glad, Burke the Jerk...

Still. As always. Hoping against hope.

A little more than a year after we secured that Gates Grant, Willy and I were still trying to get our designs resolved, figure out what the best way to do It would be, disagreeing every step of the way. One day, we took a Wild Blue flight to the new AndrewsSpace facility in the Nevada desert. I remember it was hot as hell that day, desert wind reeking like gunpowder, but it was nice and cool, cool and dim in the unexpectedly big hangar the pretty Chinese woman was showing us.

Willy thought I was nuts of course, wasting our time like this. I mean, Andrews had been one of the COTS losers, though they'd fielded the biggest of the CEV proposals back in 2006, a ten-man Apollo-style capsule. Still, they had a lot of government contracts and were the primary subcontractor on the K-1. They had something. Something to show us.

When Willy saw what it was, he tripped over his own feet, staggering, almost falling down.

I managed a little more savoir faire, stopping dead in my tracks, gasping, saying, “Well ... Fuck!"

The Chinese girl burst out in a full-throated laugh, startling in such a skinny little thing.

The object lying on its side in the big, cool hangar was another matter entirely. I'd call it every goofy SF dork's wet dream of a magic starship. Big as an airliner, maybe fifty meters, nose to tail, eight huge triangular metal vanes starting amidships and tapering toward the tail, ring of windows just behind the conical nose.

I said, “Where are you going with this? Tau Ceti?"

That got another big laugh.

"This is the Mini-Mag Orion, isn't it?"

She said, “That's right. We don't call it that anymore, though. Not since NASA took the name Orion for the CEV."

The original Orion had been a pulsed-fusion spaceship, sort of an interplanetary battleship, designed in the late 1950s. It would've worked, though the idea of riding full-sized H-bombs into the sky seemed ... lunatic, at best. This one, I knew, proposed to use a z-axis magnetic pinch engine design. But ... really building it?

"So what do you call it now?"

"The Project 8K11 Full-Scale Mockup."

"Mockup."

"It'll be about five years before we build the battleship prototype."

A battleship prototype is a working version of a design, built with no regard to weight requirements. Too heavy to fly, but you could run all the systems and see them work.

Willy said, “How much?"

Another big laugh. “You boys must have some real money!"

I said, “Our annual budget is..."

Willy snapped, “Alan!"

Oh, right. To some people, a hundred million a year is big bucks. Not to this girl, though.

She smiled. “We think we're ten, maybe twelve years from space trials. When we sell them...? At least three billion USD twenty-ten. Adjusted for inflation, of course."

"Of course. Can we see inside?"

The control room in the nose was pretty good. Spacious and bright, with three seats in front of instrument panels, the other seven flat racks on the rear bulkhead, for passengers. I said, “It looks like your old CEV design."

"It is. Still has the heat shield, too."

Willy said, “This thing can't land on a planet. Why..."

She said, “Just in case. It has minimal RCS, fuel cells and life support sufficient for one month. Call it an escape capsule."

I said, “Or a lifeboat."

"That too."

The cylindrical compartment behind the command module looked pretty much like the bottom deck of Skylab, with a head and galley, storage compartments, and a bunch of “zero-gee staterooms,” really not much more than closets. Two hatches led one level further aft, one to an airlock, the other to what she called “accessible life support."

"You going to launch manned?"

She nodded. “It's sized to take the place of an Ares V earth-departure stage. We plan to launch in a high arc from Canaveral, and use the fusion drive to make orbit.” You could see the faraway gleam in her eyes then, a fanatic pursuing a fantastic dream. “With a full fuel load, she can make a round trip anywhere in the inner solar system except Mercury. We can get to Mars, Venus. The low-inclination asteroids. Even Callisto, though not the other Galileans."

Willy whispered, “Callisto...” looking right at me.

"Too much radiation anyway,” she said.

Later, outside in the roasting gunpowder night, she said, “So where do you boys think you're headed?"

Maybe she meant just tonight, and Willy said, “Vegas..."

But I pointed at a yellow diamond high in the night sky. “You see Jupiter?"

Willy hissed, “Alan ..."

I ignored him, and slid my finger forward to a point sixty degrees along the ecliptic. “Right about there, I think."

Her dropped jaw had a satisfyingly comical look. After a minute, face quite serious, she said, “If you can come up with enough dough, we might be able to cut you a deal on an early flight model."

I said, “By 2020, maybe?"

"Probably a couple of years after that, I'm afraid."

"Okay. We'll be in touch."

Sitting in the cool comfort of our Hybrid Grand Cherokee, Willy said, “Why'd you tell her?"

I shrugged. “No one's going to race us to the Fore-Trojans. You know that. And we've got easier fish to catch first."

He nodded. “We'll sure as hell have to catch those fish, if we want to scrape up that kind of cash!"

"Yeah. Meanwhile, we've got a flight to catch.” I tapped the dashboard clock. “Our meeting with Musk and his team is in ten hours."

In the here and now, as Earth and Moon shrank slowly away, I finally managed to find Mars, a mottled red ball in the scope. You couldn't see much real terrain, just the ice caps and the four dark blotches of Olympus Mons and Tharsis ridge, but it did look like it had canals.

So many illusions. So little time.

Maybe I will stand there one time before I die.

Who knows?

A month later, I sat watching my instruments, as Willy burped Excelsior's methane/LOX engine, matching orbits with UB(2009)/21. Though you could hear the pop of the RCS thrusters, the main engine was too smooth and too far away, the only sign of anything unusual happening the little surges of acceleration on my butt.

From the astrogation console, Sarah called out. “That's it! Ten klicks."

When I looked up, having finished my checklist, Willy was yawing us around toward the asteroid. The sky was full of stars, of course, and for a moment I was disoriented. Okay. There's the perpetual noonday sun over there, same size as seen from Earth and the Moon, not blinding only because of the photoreactive glass forming the base of the dome's UV-opaque quartz outer layer. “Mmmmmphhhh..."

Sarah, familiar with all my little grunts, said, “Look just over Smaug's high-gain antenna."

Earth was tiny and blue from eight million miles out, but still a visible disk, Moon a gray-brown speck off to one side. Suddenly, the sky was familiar, Orion's belt jumping out at me, then the Pleiades, Aldebaran, and the Hyades ... There. That fat, pale-orange spark is Jupiter, and...

I glanced at my own instruments, then tipped my head back so I could look straight up through the dome. “Hmh. I expected to see it."

Willy said, “I did too. I guess, from almost five miles out, a rock smaller than a football stadium..."

Minnie released her harness and floated up toward the inner surface of the dome. “It's big enough to see, big as your thumbnail, anyway. I guess the albedo is too low."

Sarah said, “Hiding in the dark between the stars."

I felt a sudden, hard pulse of atavistic thrill at her words. Look! Look where you are!

I'd felt it a few times before, always unexpected, though you'd think by now I'd know the moments when it would come. Once when I sat in those sunny offices in Santa Barbara, California, sitting across the table from the famous PayPal guy, signing my name below Willy's on a contract said we agreed to buy three Falcon 9S9 rockets, complete with launch services, from Space Exploration Technologies, along with two complete manned-version Dragon space capsules, customized to our specs.

Again four years later, as the four of us lay on our backs along with one other “honeymooning couple,” as I felt the hard, complex jolt as those nine Merlin engines lit, and the ground outside the porthole started to drop, taking us on our “practice flight” to the Bigelow Exodus.

A third time on the day we took delivery of Excelsior from SpaceHab, standing in a hangar just before they boxed it up for shipment to Kwajalein. I'd stood there, looking in through the dome at those four seats and instrument panels, and suddenly realized what I was going to do, where I was going to go.

In the spotter scope image, UB(2009)/21 was just off the center crosshatch, wanly lit up by the sun, not quite a potato-shaped lump. No, here was a fat charcoal-gray belly, with a smaller lobe on one end, making something that looked like a dirty snowman wearing a funeral shawl. A crippled snowman, perhaps?

I said, “Snow-hunchback,” not quite realizing I'd spoken.

Minnie giggled and said, “That's a pretty image! Too bad there's already an asteroid named Victor Hugo..."

I said, “Is there one named Quasimodo?"

She kicked off from the dome and came to float behind me, holding onto the back of my seat. Then, in a dreaming sort of voice, she said, “All sorts of clues to the formation of this thing. Five, maybe six distinct terrains. Craters all over the smaller binary, but near the contact point, you see they fade away..."

This was her pulse of joy, different from mine perhaps, but still the moment of a lifetime. I suddenly realized Minnie Gillooly was about to become only the second geologist to stand on the surface of another world, after Harrison Schmitt on the Moon, forty-four long years ago. What the hell took so long?

Damn fools in high places, of course.

Willy said, “I guess it's time to prepare for landing. Guys?"

Sarah said, “We can still decide to bring Excelsior in close."

I shook my head. “Probably a good idea to stick with our plan, and leave Excelsior out here where nothing can happen to it.” It'd be a cramped ride home in Smaug and Fafnir, if we lost our mother ship.

Willy said, “Okay. Let's get to it."

Another little thrill went up my spine.

No more than an hour later, and I sat strapped in Fafnir's pilot seat, looking out through the left forward docking window at Excelsior's dimly lit cupola dome. Sarah had the MacDonald-Detweiler MiniCanadarm unshipped from its mount on the little SpaceHab airlock/adaptor, and had reached forward to grapple its standard end effector to the fixture on Excelsior.

It's become the usual way spacecraft link up now. No more gentle forward movement, “parking in the garage,” and gentle shudder of soft dock. Just fly within range of an RMS, or use your own, and swing on in to a Standard Berthing Mechanism.

Beyond Excelsior, I could see the windows of Smaug lit up yellow, could see the vague shapes and shadows of Willy and Minnie, doing their tasks, same as us. In my earphones, Willy's voice, slightly crackly with interplanetary static, said, “Ready, gang?"

My mouth went dry, and I could feel my heart start to stutter. “All set."

"Let's do it."

I took a deep breath and looked at Sarah, a few feet away in the flight engineer's seat.

She smiled, and said, “Okay, Alan. Just like in the simulator."

"I prefer to think of it as just like in a story, sweetling."

More smile, then she looked down at her instruments, one hand in the RMS glove. “Say when."

I remember the day I sat down to write that story. I'd never been much of a writer, but I'd kept it up over a long, long time, thirty-some-odd years producing a couple of dozen stories, a handful of novels, most of them published, in magazines, by New York publishers. Just a hobby, something fun to do when I wasn't making money, first as a marine machinery mechanic, then, when I got too old to be comfortable working outdoors on the coast of Maine, in the winter, at night, sitting in an office writing computer software.

I remember I sat down in my old green secretarial chair, in front of the aging HP 4550Z I set aside for writing, opened up a new file in WordStar 7.0a for DOS, the antiquated word processor I used only for stories. Wiggled my fingers above the keyboard to make the juices flow, then tappy-tap-tap, the words began forming on the screen.

The people in the story weren't afraid, didn't feel their hearts speed up like crazy, lived in the future, had seen it all, were used to it all, ho-hum.

Then I thought, What if it was me? Really me? What if I had the money to buy a space capsule from one of the New Space Entrepreneurs I was reading about, and go on my own real space adventure? How would I feel then?

So I wrote the story that way.

I was a hell of a lot more nervous now than the me in the story had been. But I said, “When."

Sarah punched commands into her console, fingers chattering rapidly across the keyboard, and I felt a series of light jolts as the berthing latches let go, then a quiver as we came loose from Excelsior. “Berthing mechanism released,” she said.

Then she put her arm in the glove, pushed the arm with one long smooth motion, then quickly opened her fingers. Out the window, I could see Excelsior suddenly swing away, then recede as the RMS end effector let go of the grapple fixture. And Sarah said, “Grapple released."

I watched Excelsior drift away as she swung the arm back in and clipped it to its rack on the adaptor. Beyond the mothership, I could see Smaug receding in the opposite direction, growing smaller, then smaller still. Little lights twinkled around the hull, and she stopped, hanging in space.

Okay, Burke the Jerk. Get busy. I nudged the hand controller, RCS jets popping and muttering through the hull, and Excelsior stopped going away too.

In my earphones, Willy's voice crackled, “Okay. I guess if it wanders off while we're gone, we've got plenty of fuel to go looking."

I took my eyes off the window, and looked down at the three flat panels of my IFR display, looking at radar, visual camera, and FLIR, columns of data down the left-hand edge of each screen, just the way I liked. Radar was all soft static, but for the bright beads of Excelsior and Smaug in the foreground. Visual showed nothing. But in FLIR, UB(2009)/21 was a bright sparkle, waiting against the dark sky.

I whispered, “Tally-ho..."

Willy said, “Time to go, boys and girls."

I wiped the sweat from my palms on the front of my coverall, then took hold of the rotational controller on the right, throttle on the left, twist, then gentle push...

Fafnir swung around her y-axis, there was a gentle thud-hiss as the main engine lit, and we were on our way.

At a relative velocity of only one meter per second, it took us almost three hours to cross the ten kilometer gap between Excelsior and the asteroid. Always the nap girl, Sarah tucked her hands into her safety harness, and was soon asleep, gentle buzz of a girlish snore soft and serene.

Lucky, I thought.

But I wouldn't, or couldn't.

I sat in my seat, hands on the armrests, staring out at a fantastically starry night, watching UB(2009)/21 materialize out of the mist. Every once in a while, I'd glance to port, where I could see the windows and running lights of Smaug twinkling fifty meters away.

I bet Willy's heart isn't pounding.

Willy has a hard edge to him, volatile as me, yes, but somehow far away, self contained. Probably why we'd been able to stay friends all these years, when so many other people were mad at us both, over what seemed like nothing.

Burke the Jerk I'd been as a kid, jackass now to all those people I'd beaten in business deals, contracts I'd won when theirs were lost. Jealous? Or just me?

You could see our little asteroid now, lit up dim gray by the sun, a deformed peanut hanging against the black, slowly growing bigger, beginning to occlude stars now. I wondered again if Quasimodo was already taken. What the hell does that name mean? I'd taken Latin in school when I was a kid, much of it long forgotten, gone along with the French and Japanese I'd learned later. I remembered quasi meant “as if” and modo was used the way we use only, merely, just ... So what the hell did Hugo mean? “Just as if ?” Just as if what?

Probably, somewhere, there are learned articles about it, but I was never a learned man.

The asteroid was looking big now, subtending quite a bit of sky anyway, and when Sarah's console beeped, she woke up all at once, like magic, like she'd never been asleep at all, blue eyes out the window, voice whispering, “Wow...!"

Growing large in the deep distance, it wasn't so odd looking after all. From this perspective, coming in perpendicular to its axis of rotation, sun more or less behind us...

Over my earphones, Minnie's voice, high, squeaky and full of tension, said, “Here comes the B segment of the contact binary. Looks like..."

And there it was, peering over the limb, a new bulge, quite a bit darker than what was in the foreground, changing perspectives as we approached, asteroid elongating into something not quite like an egg shape, defying common sense somehow. Details without number seemed to proliferate across the surface in a maze of shifting shadow, while Minnie chattered about bright ray systems and a carbon regolith.

Willy suddenly burst out, “Hey, that's really something, huh?” Excited now, voice thick with some unknown emotion, showing he wasn't quite the cartoon character I sometimes imagined.

Minnie said, “I've got a fix on the density. Figuring it as if it were rough spheres of one-eighty and one-thirty meters, it comes in at around 1.03 grams per cubic centimeter. Pretty light."

From her place beside me, Sarah, whose world was mainly abstract numbers, said, “That's a good sign, isn't it?"

Not wanting Willy or Minnie to jump on me with a flood of corrective detail, I whispered, “If it's almost half carbon compounds, I guess so..."

From the story. Straight from the goddam story!

In my earphones, Willy said, “I heard that!"

And, “Close enough,” came from Minnie.

Close enough. I don't know if either one of them ever really believed in my story, which had been set in the Fore Trojan asteroids, but this ... This!

Real.

I had to readjust my idea of the thing's size continually. I'd thought of it as small, just a little bitty hill in space, but it was damned big, seen from close up, irregularities and empty outer space background screwing up my sense of scale. UB(2009)/21 continued to grow, filling the window with hundreds, then thousands of distinct features, cratered like the surface of the Moon. The true nature of the contact binary was apparent now, the slightly smaller secondary body come well out of eclipse, recreating that twisted snowman shape, Quasimodo the Snow Hunchback.

Minnie said, “I see at least five distinct terrains here..."

The asteroid was turning to “ground” now, seeming to slant away because we were going to pass just to one side of the large, grayish component.

Sarah said, “Time on target."

I put my hands back on my controls, yawing Fafnir around to point the main engine toward our travel vector. I said, “Ready, Willy?"

He said, “Ready and ... three, two, one..."

I pulsed the main engine and suddenly we were hanging over a brief little world of dark gray stone. Motionless ... no, not quite. I could see the ground moving off to one side.

"Willy, I..."

Sarah said, “Radial velocity there, not us."

Right. I forgot. E pur si muove as far as the eye can see.

Willy said, “Are we seeing gravitational acceleration?"

"I almost can't tell. Right on the edge of the Doppler radar's sensitivity, I guess."

I said, “Good enough, anyway."

Willy said, “Hey, remember when people used to say, ‘Good enough for government work?’”

"Yup. Probably why government work done by private contractors always sucked."

Sarah said, “Guys? Not now."

Right. Dumb. “So. Where should we land?” Since there was no way to get a telescopic view of something so small and far away, we'd never had any planning maps for UB(2009)/21. Now...

Minnie said, “It's so strange. The albedo ranges are similar to some of the asteroids that've been investigated in main-belt Piazzi bodies. Aside from the steep upturn in the reflectance spectra above point-seven micrometers, it might as well be some old carbonaceous chondrite."

"We'll just have to go down and see,” said Willy. “How about we pick a point near the intermediate zone on A? We can take a look at those grooves. Maybe they're the remains of that internal activity Alan had in his story!"

I felt an odd creepy feeling come and go. Willy believed in my story that much?

Sarah surprised me by saying, “More likely just a manifestation of broken rock from the collision that made this thing."

I said, “What the hell. We have to start someplace."

It took us about an hour to get down, accelerating into a slow arc along the gray lobe, stopping over what was technically the south pole, as defined by rotational direction, then accelerating toward the ground while Sarah unshipped the MiniCanadarm and pulled the radio-controlled dexterous manipulator system from its mount on the airlock hull.

We'd talked about mounting landing legs on the Dragons, but it was expensive, and pretty much pointless, given the almost nonexistent gravity we were facing here. Christ, we won't even be able to walk on the surface! We'll need the compressed air maneuvering units we bought just to keep from drifting away.

Like the cosmonauts in my novel Fellow Traveler, Willy'd said when I brought it up a few years ago.

Yep. Like that.

Down we went, Smaug and Fafnir side by side, MiniCanadarms, each with a big hand now, splayed out in front, slowly, slowly, ever so slowly ... I tried to hold my breath while the ground reached up and grew more or less flat in front of us, but I kept running out of air, exhaling, inhaling again noisily.

Just before contact, Willy snickered and said, “Jeez, Alan! Don't have a heart attack on me!"

The hand and arm flexed, cushioning our impact, which I could hardly feel at all, no more than a faint surge against my harness. I took a look at the accelerometers and popped a couple of RCS jets very gently, while Sarah grabbed with the dexterous manipulator, digging into regolith. Maybe there was a bit of a bob, a tiny little sway, then...

Sarah said, “That's it. Fafnir has landed."

I heard Minnie say, “Smaug, too!"

I said, “Where away?"

"About fifty meters to your ... ummm ... west?"

"Fifty meters? That's pretty close. Uh ... oh, wait. That puts you over the local horizon, doesn't it?"

Willy said, “You know, I keep forgetting how little this place is!” I could swear he sounded dazed. There was a rustling in the earphones, then he said, “I'm up at the hatch window. I can see your main engine and a bit of propulsion module sticking up."

I said, “Okay, I guess it's time to...” I choked suddenly, unable to speak.

Sarah said, “Time to suit up and go outside."

Willy yelled something that sounded like, “Yee-hah!"

I'd like to say I stepped out of the airlock hatch ten minutes later, stepped out and planted my spacesuit boots firmly in the charcoal dust, first man on Quasimodo, but what I really did was float out and hang suspended. I guess if I'd waited long enough, I'd've drifted on down, but what I did was puff the compressed air jets on my backpack, once to get started down, and again to keep from bouncing off.

Then I just stood there, silent, trying not to move a muscle, not wanting to fly away into the sky on the strength of a twitch. We'd talked about Neal-Armstrongish first words and decided against them. First on the Moon is a big damn deal. First on a little bitty rock, lost in the void between the worlds ... I dunno. Anyway, we'd decided against it.

Time for words later, when and if we decided we really would do the flag ceremony, planting the corporate banner of Standard ARM in the black dirt of UB(2009)/21 and staking our first mining claim.

We'd landed near the rotational pole, technically on the A lobe, so the immediate vicinity seemed level, a golden-black plain, featureless except for a random spray of little craters. In one direction, there was a nearly normal-looking moonscape, in the other, a strange, stretched-out depression, constricted in the middle, almost like a valley, but it kept going downhill, all the way to the horizon.

There's something funny about...

I had a sudden vivid memory of a long-gone day, back in 1985, not long after I quit the shipyard and was just getting started on my new career as a computer programmer. I'd gone to visit my high school friend Matt, who lived in a decaying old mansion his wife had inherited, sitting beside a lake outside a place called Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, somewhere near Wilkes-Barre.

We'd gone for a walk that day, talking about old times, about his new wife, about the pretty blonde I'd recently lost to another man, about the books and stories and magazine articles I was writing, about his similar aspirations, so far unrealized, when suddenly I'd come to a stop, sniffling against my allergies, looking around.

He'd given me a strange glance, then looked around too. Damn! he'd said, You can't see anything but the hillside and sky! Like we're on a little bitty world, somewhere out in space.

This was like that now. It didn't really feel like the horizon was too close, or was right at our feet, the way it was portrayed in pre-Space Age science fiction stories. No, the ground just went out in a normal sort of way, and then ended against sky, like there was some kind of cliff.

I tried to take a step forward, tipped to one side, and drifted off the ground. When I righted myself with the backpack, the ground had shifted under me, and the “cliff edge” had moved on, exposing new level ground. It really was the horizon. And it really was close.

Sarah, floating outside the ship now, drifting toward me, looked disconcerted behind her faceplate. “Hmm. Strange,” was all she said.

The four of us made rendezvous between the ships, in the confusing terrain where A and B overlapped into each other. It reminded me a little bit of the mess on Enceladus, black overlaying dark gray, rather than white, but you could see the gray was the real “bedrock” here.

Once we'd gotten away from the immediate area of the spacecraft, going further into the tarry black surface associated with B, Minnie and Willy moved closer together, and began hooking up cables. Although it was originally intended to be carried in the field by one hopefully young and fit geologist, with the instrument package on his back, display package on his chest, holding the five-foot sensor boom in his hands, the GE GeoStrider wasn't really suited to our spacesuits, or zero gee.

Since our Russian-made suits had life support backpacks, with used ISS maneuvering units clipped behind them, we'd split it up three ways. Willy had the instruments on his chest, Minnie the displays, I'd operate the boom, and Sarah would ride herd on the cables.

"Okay,” said Willy. “Snakes it is."

I said, “Snakes'd be trying to get away. These bastards seem to like us!"

Sarah said, “Are you sure nobody else can hear us over the radio?"

I thought of reminding her we were recording everything, both voice and through our little helmet cams, but kept my mouth shut. “Any place in particular you want me to start?"

Minnie said, “Here is good.” I lowered the boom and started to flip the head, but Minnie said, “Don't bother with the brush or rat yet,” so I lowered the sensor face to the ground and thumbed the switch.

Minnie said, “Um."

There was a bit of silence, then Willy said, “So? Anything?"

"Weellll ... It's what we expected. This surface is composed of kerogen-like organics. Processed CHON grains, maybe. A little methane and ammonia mixed in by meteoritic gardening, processed by larger impacts and solar flux..."

I said, “This stuff comes off B, right? And B is some kind of processed cometary nucleus. A lot of the stuff that gets knocked off B has to wind up on A if it isn't sent off into space. Maybe we should move up toward the top of the head?"

Willy said, “Tomorrow or the day after? We've got plenty of time. Min?"

She said, “Sure. Let's focus on the interface zone for now."

We moved off downslope in a bunch, following her lead. Oddly, though my eyes were telling me we were going down, some subtler clue, maybe from the tiny bit of gravity tickling my vestibular organs, seemed to say I was ascending a very shallow hill. A strange hill at that. My eyes kept wanting to see the valley as a bulbous black mountain, hanging over me like a mushroom cloud.

Just one little shift of perspective, and we're flies climbing a vertical wall. Hmh. Scary? No. Flies can fly and so can we.

After about twenty minutes, taking readings here and there, sometimes using the brush and rat heads on the sampler, we stopped at the terminus of a long groove, looking down into a bare and shallow depression, half filled with shadow, dark and darker. The groove dwindled quickly in the distance, climbing up onto the gray hump of B.

Willy said, “Looks like a textbook graben, buried and softened by deep regolith."

Minnie whispered something to herself, then said, “No signs of layering or endogenic activity. Probably just big cracks, I'm afraid."

I said, “Crush two hard-boiled eggs together at their blunt ends and this is what you might get. Hard to say what it means for the interior.” And ever since we'd seen the reflectance spectra for UB(2009)/21, years ago now, the interior is what we'd talked about. And why the M in Standard ARM stood for Mining.

"Why,” asked Sarah, “do the cracks line up with both bodies?"

After a second, Minnie, voice thin and dreamlike said, “You know, that's a damn good question...."

The next day, we went out with the collapsible drill rig we'd brought. It'd begun life as a quarter-scale prototype of the rig being made for Project Constellation, and the company that made it had been quite reluctant to sell it to us, having been instructed to sell it for scrap by NASA. When we found out they were planning to sell the first full-scale test rig to tSpace, which planned to file claim to pieces of the Moon, we talked them into selling the prototype to us as a species of hush money. Willy and I were both good with machinery, so it didn't take much customizing to make it do what we wanted.

In between putting the damned thing together and working over all the samples and sensor data we had, we even had time for our scheduled interview with CNN. I thought it was supposed to be taped, given there was a round trip signal delay of more than a minute, but Ms. Clanton said they were going out live.

Gives them more time for color commentary, I guess. Anyway, she told us our little trip was causing quite a flap down there, with the Japanese media calling us “space pirates,” French and Russian diplomats raising treaty issues in the UN General Assembly, and the U.S. government ominously silent.

Didn't seem much interested in what we thought of the asteroid though. Just, show the tape of the EVA between blips of commentary, views of us floating in Excelsior's cupola. I heard later, the approach film we shot of UB(2009)/21 got shown over and over again on every news show in the world, and I even managed to slip in a reference to Quasimodo.

When we popped the hatch on Fafnir, struggling with all our junk, it was nighttime, Quasimodo's surface a blending of gray and black shadows, low hummocky rises here and there, details hardly visible. Overhead, the stars were like tiny needles of light.

I said, “Smauggies?"

Minnie's voice was a bit staticky, punched through the asteroid's surface layer. “Loud and clear."

"Starting westward along the bary-equator now, toward your anticipated position."

"Roger. See you there."

I still felt a little funny, using old-timey radio jargon. Roger. Over and out. Ten-four ... A coordinated puff of compressed air and we began drifting away from the ship, surface just beneath our toes, moving slowly over a world of silvery dusk, and Sarah said, “You know, despite what I know it is, it really seems like we're on a mountaintop here."

Sudden change of perspective. Right. World curving away in all directions, stars outlining the horizon. We'll walk to the edge and suddenly the black plains will spread out below, maybe the twinkling of city lights on the horizon, far far away ... Instead, on the edge of our little world, came first the milky ghost of the solar corona, then sunrise, preceded by a few tongues of blinding prominence flame.

The landscape expanded all around us, the two worlds, A and B, growing together, shadows shortening, as the neck valley of the our crippled snowman came out of eclipse.

We made rendezvous with Willy and Minnie a little farther on than we expected. They were “standing” on a bit of underhang, just on the edge of the neck of striated rubble that formed the last bit of the bridge onto A, festooned with as much hardware as we had, floating together, looking down at something.

I heard Willy say, “So what the hell is this?"

Beyond them, amid the jumble of small craters and humps, there was a sudden change of color, a sinuous ridge of rusty brown material, like a snake under the regolith, spattered here and there with patches of black obviously blasted from nearby craters.

Minnie whispered, “Um. That's odd."

"No kidding."

I said, “So what is it?"

Minnie said, “Don't know.” She started working on the fasteners holding her parts of the core sampler to her harness, the rest of us following suit because she was pretty much calling the shots when it came to this stuff. “It almost looks like something that's bubbled out of the interior."

"On a body this small?"

In a small voice, she said, “You wouldn't think so...” I could see her head moving behind the helmet's faceplate, as if looking around. “But the orientation of those linear features..."

It took almost two hours to set up the little drill rig, while the sun and stars went round and round. The biggest problem was driving the pitons to hold it down. We had an inertialess hammer, but it didn't work at all well, twirling out of my grip when I triggered it, banging out to the end of its lanyard.

Willy and Sarah finally held me down with continuous firing of their backpacks, Minnie steadying the rig while I swung our high-tech gizmo like something from a hardware store.

Finally, we were ready, and I got behind Minie, holding her more or less steady, one hand on her life-support system mounting rack, the other on my maneuvering unit controller. In theory, I would be able to feel her shifting movements and puff my jets appropriately, keeping her more or less where she needed to be.

I said, “Okay?"

"That's fine, uh ... one moment..."

I could feel the core drill's vibration, propagating through Minnie's suit and into mine, while I wiggled the little thumb controller, trying to compensate. I said, “Minnie, are you..."

"!?” She made an odd, wordless grunt.

Shove.

I felt myself going over backward, feet swinging up to the sky as Minnie's LSS rack popped out of my hand, pulling away as if propelled by a runaway thruster.

Me: Dark ground whizzing by. Black sky. Dark ground, a little further away. Black sky...

"Jesus Christ!” Willy's voice was almost a scream.

I heard Minnie shout, “I can't see! Where the hell am I?"

I watched the ground go by, then started toggling the controller this way and that, working against the spin, until I stabilized, facing away from the sample site, able to judge and kill what little bit of lateral movement I'd picked up.

My heart was thundering like mad, lungs pumping, but ... good, good. Didn't panic. Very good. I caught my breath, and looked around.

Minnie was up in the sky, maybe twenty meters off the surface, turning about her center of gravity, a spinning starfish, growing smaller as I watched. Her suit was somehow disfigured, almost as if misshapen, some kind of black splash on it, blending some of her edges against the sky, as if bites had been taken out by some space monster.

And ... ?

A column of bubbling liquid, jetting, curling around itself, climbing off the surface of B, carrying the remains of our little drill rig with it.

For just a moment, I couldn't really make myself see it for what it was. No. Nothing like that. Not here. I must be misunderstanding what I see. Familiar expectations, as if this were a world of air and...

Minnie's voice said, “Where am I...?"

Sarah said, “You're about sixty meters up. Can you...?"

"I can't see anything. There's something all over my faceplate."

From not far away, I saw Willy rising off the surface, jetting in her direction. He said, “I'm coming after you. Hang on. Relax.” You could hear something like pride in his voice then. Proud of you, Minnie. Proud of myself.

We're not really heroes of the Space Age, bold astronauts with that fabled Right Stuff. Just a bunch of geezers with ... damn. The right stuff after all.

Sarah said, “Should we..."

I said, “We need to stay here. If he can't catch up to her, or they can't get back, we'll need to go after them in Fafnir."

"They're pretty far off, already. I guess the rendezvous radar..."

I turned and looked back toward the brown column. It'd pinched off at its base and goo was slowly curling toward the surface, curling over the area we'd been sampling. The rest of it kept on climbing, hard to see against the dark sky, an independent body rising from the surface, losing its shape as it rose, af if some surface tension were...

Well. A liquid body. Here?

As I watched, it passed low over A's limb and receded toward the stars. Going. Going. Gone.

It took us quite a while to make it back to Excelsior. Willy managed to retrieve Minnie, catching up to her, stopping her spin like an old EVA pro, though he was no Ox van Hoften for size, getting them both on their way back to the surface on a direct trajectory for Smaug's landing site.

Once it was clear they were going to make it back, I'd said, “Okay. We'll head for Fafnir.” I moved over to the fresh curl of brown solid on the surface, looking at odd, lumpy shapes glistening in the sun, like fresh roofing tar in a bucket. “Want me to try for another sample before we go back? Maybe we can hack off..."

Willy laughed, right on the edge of a hysterical giggle. “I think we have enough. Wait'll you see Minnie's suit!"

All the way back to the mother ship, Willy complained about the stink in Smaug. Though they sealed it in the airlock as soon as they could, the “sample” was outgassing, making their eyes burn and noses run. Sniffling away, and despite Willy's loud objections, Minnie'd run the geo-sensor against it and taken some readings before slamming the hatch.

Then we heard her voice, squeaky with amazement: “Hydrocarbon contaminants! Maybe we can become CHON miners after all..."

Willy, voice dry and amused now that he'd calmed down, now that the ship's filters were cleaning out the CM's air, said, “Well, there's our damn article, Alan. Hell, we oughta clear a couple of thousand bucks on that, easy!"

He'd ridden me about the unlikelihood of our little adventure paying off, whenever our funding sources couldn't hear.

Minnie said, “Huh. Mostly constructs of methane and ethane. And, uh ... some kind of propylated compound."

Sarah said, “How dangerous is this? The suit's still outgassing in your airlock, so how're you going to get back aboard...?"

I said, “They can cycle the airlock once, then rush through, grabbing a sample on the way. The faceplate will come off easiest."

A couple of hours later, we met them in the docking segment below Excelsior's cupola, floating above the closed hatch that led down to the habitat we'd built in the Apex 400's cargo bay.

Sarah, said, “Wow! That really stinks! I hate to open up the hab and..."

Willy held up the suit faceplate he'd detached. “Outgassing's about over. We need to get this down to the lab ASAP."

As I cranked the hatch's lock lever, I thought about the familiarity of the odd, ethery smell in the air. Not such a bad smell, though one most people wouldn't like. I'd always been partial to certain chemical smells, and this one ... I said, “Y'know, it kind of smells like an oxygenated synthetics plant."

Minnie gave me an odd look, then we were inside, Minnie going head down in the instruments, while Willy put the sample in a vice, slipped his toes in foot restrains and broke it up, faceplate and all.

Only one spare of everything, I thought. We'll need to be more careful...

Sarah got out the camera equipment, while I settled myself in front of the infosys console, popping the old Logitech MiniView KVM switch we'd pulled out of my office, looking at various screens. I said, “Okay, guys. Everything's up and running."

Long silence. Then Minnie said, “Well..."

Watching the raw data scroll by, I thought, Good thing one of us knows about this stuff. Willy was trained as an aerospace engineer, Sarah as a mathematician, and I was trained as nothing, just an old mechanic smart enough to think his way into the depths of software design.

Minnie said, “These are some very nice aliphatic hydrocarbons we've got here."

Willy said, “What the ... look over there. Six-carbon ring, some double bonds, with nitrogen crap all over it...."

I felt old, old knowledge surface out of nowhere, things I'd forgotten I ever knew. My dad had been a geologist too, in the long ago and far away, and I'd taken quite a few organic chemistry courses before flunking out of my first attempt at college, back at the tail end of the 1960s. Out of the blue, I said, “When it has the CH3 and the two extra hydrogen radicals, it's called toluene."

Willy's head jerked out of the binocular eyepieces, looking at me, astounded. “And the nitrogen?"

Minnie's giggle tinkled. “You need a refresher course in organics, don't you? Think about what you'd call a cyclohydrocarbon compound with three NO2 radicals sticking out of it like that!"

Must be nice, knowing stuff like that. I started typing notes for the article, alongside the data flow. You never know.

Willy seemed to stutter. “Uh ... I guess these layered sheets of hex ring must be fragments of ... graphite?"

I choked suddenly, making them both look. “Not necessarily. You could crack it out as isomers of n-hexane and -heptane. I guess..."

Their mouths popped open in two little O's, making me laugh.

Willy looked away, then, softly, said, “What a scientist you would've made if you'd been able to get a real education."

I laughed again, nothing sensible to say in response. “Explains the smell, don't it?"

He said, “I guess so.” He looked back at the data flow, and said, “Hard to imagine this stuff just forming out here."

I said, “Maybe little green zombies from the Phantom Planet left it for us?"

His turn to laugh.

Sarah said, “What the hell are you talking about?"

Before I could answer, Minnie said, “Quasimodo is surfaced with CHON material, meaning B must've had its final processing out in the Kuiper belt, maybe even the Oort. Assume B is largely CHON, descended from your classic ‘dirty snowball.’ From its density, we know A has to be a stony-iron, formed close in."

Willy said, “Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. In a lot of old stories, I remember the authors assumed we'd be eating CHON someday."

Minnie said, “Ghaak!"

I said, “What do you call a mess of aliphatic hydrocarbon sludge?” and waited.

Moment of silence, then I saw Sarah's eyes light up. “I know. Petroleum."

Willy looked at her, suddenly respectful. “Well, yeah. And maybe a pool of it stuck between the two components of near-earth asteroid UB(2009)/21."

Sarah said, “A pool."

Minnie said, “I told you asking about the striated ridge linear orientation was a damned good question."

Willy said, “How does it happen on Earth? Dead ferns are made of the same stuff as CHON, that's why those old writers thought we'd be eating it one day. Then all you need is time, temperature, and pressure."

I said, “Pretty cold out in the Oort."

Minnie said, “Not to mention the Oort cloud. But A and B are two distinct entities with wildly different histories. Just because they went splat and stuck together way back when doesn't mean they haven't been in slightly different orbits, grinding away against each other for however long it's been, converting orbital kinetic energy into thermal energy..."

It was left to Sarah to say, “And CHON particles into oil."

A day or so later, I sat strapped in my flight engineer's seat, head tipped back, looking out through the cupola dome. From this perspective, Quasimodo seemed to have tumbled head first toward the Sun, light shining on its bald pate, and also on that bit of neck where we'd been, fresh little scar just barely visible next to the old, two rusty little flecks of tar, like scabs on a vampire's bite.

I imagined the glob of asphalt sailing slowly away, in its own orbit now, and thought, There must be other ones out there as well, little spurts of paving material drifting around the Sun. Well. This is the only one with geological sampling tools stuck in it.

After a little argument, we'd decided it was safe to move Excelsior in close to the asteroid, not really in orbit, more sort of co-orbital around the Sun. We don't have a drill-rig anymore, so it's not that likely to squirt oil or tar or whatever all over our main ride home.

For safety's sake, we'd gone down in one ship only, leaving the other one aloft for an added safety margin, knowing if anything went wrong on the surface, we could probably get back up on EVA jetpacks alone.

Buck Rogers? Well, no. Buck rode a coal mine into the future and wound up fighting the Chinamen from Outer Space. Still, you know what I mean.

We'd taken more samples, brought down the little Standard ARM pennon with its cute comet logo, read our statement about how we were claiming ownership of UB(2009)/21, Outer Space Treaty or no Outer Space Treaty. We did our best to take high definition photos with Willy's expensive digital camera, and had a hard time with the foursome shots, because it didn't occur to anyone the tripod wouldn't work so well in the near absence of gravity.

Back aboard ship, we'd chirped into the comsat system to get CNN's attention, gotten them to set up the secure link we'd arranged, then given another one of those long, halting interviews to Ms. Clanton. When we sent in the recordings, there was a short break while she watched, then her next transmission began, “There'll be hell to pay over this, you know."

But she was grinning all the same.

Hell to pay is money in the bank to a TV journalist.

About an hour after the interview was broadcast, CNN called again, reestablishing the secure link, and let us know they'd been asked to provide us with wireless broadband through their satellite, so we could get to our email accounts, among other things.

I'm sure they expected they'd be able to read the data flow, and they got what they expected. I let Willy and Sarah handle the government and media howling. I'd already figured what might happen, so I'd set up an Internet-based VPN interface with the hardware in the network at my business office.

Not some commercial crap, either.

I do this for a living, and I doubt the Homeland Security hackers would even know there were extra packets going out over CNN's bandwidth. Maybe some geeks in Redmond would be able to get in, but only if it occurred to them to look.

There were tens of thousands of messages waiting in the public mailboxes of Alan Burke Enterprises, everybody under the sun wanting everything from a piece of the action to our hides nailed to the barn door. Sometimes both. But in the special accounts I'd set up, there were only six, and only one of those really mattered.

I said, “Guys? ExxonMobil is offering ten billion USD for the rights to UB(2009)/21. They also want our prospecting data, so they can decide which other NEAs are worth looking at."

Sarah whistled. “I wouldn't have thought..."

Willy said, “Anybody else?"

"Not even in the ballpark."

"Huh. That's going to make it hard to negotiate the price up some. I mean a bidding war..."

Minnie said, “Oil is everything to our civilization."

I said, “And our technology is geared to use it. Everything from rocket fuel to plastics feedstock. Until fusion power reactors running off helium-3 stop being a pipe dream, this stuff's going to be worth its weight in ... oh, hell. Worth so much if there hadn't been any here, they'd've had to ship it up by rocket."

Willy said, “So what'll we say?"

I said, “Yes, obviously, but meanwhile...” the keyboard rattled as I typed.

Willy said, “Hey! We need to talk..."

I said, “Oh, I'm not emailing ExxonMobil yet. This is just a note to AndrewsSpace, putting down a deposit on one of those ships."

That stopped them cold. After a minute, eyes very far away, he said, “I wonder if I'll be in good enough shape for this, when the time comes..."

I laughed. “Willy, I'm ten years older right now than you'll be in 2022! And if you think you're going without me, guess again."

Outside, Quasimodo tumbled in the sun, shining gray and black, and it was maybe another thirty seconds before where I was and what I'd just said grabbed my soul and flung it out to the stars. m

Author's Note:

First of all, a word of appreciation for Michael Capobianco, who did substantial research on a much earlier version of this story, and for Kevin J. Anderson, who sent me a most amusing critique of that original tale. Thanks, guys! And Kevin, you'll notice I took your advice about not naming the two spaceships Hesperornis and Rhamphorynchus...

Second?

EVERYTHING IN THIS STORY IS TRUE.

Not true in the sense that's it's already been done, but in the even more important sense that if you have a great big steaming wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket, there are real companies that already have every product and gizmo in the story not just in the form of imaginative viewgraphs, but in the design stage and beyond, many of them already under construction. There's no single item in the story that costs more than a few tens of millions of dollars, and if you've got the bucks, you can buy the Buck Rogers.

In fact, the entire scenario played out in the story can be had for under a billion dollars. Admittedly, that's a lot of money for a business hacker like me, who missed out on the dotcom gravy train because he was writing science fiction stories instead of paying attention, but there are plenty of people who've got that much laying around, and more.

As to where...

Go to www.spacex.com and you'll see that Elon Musk and his employees at Space Exploration Technologies, Inc. have been awarded $278 million by NASA for the purposes of building the Dragon commercial manned spacecraft. That would be Fafnir and Smaug in the story. In just a couple years, I'm sure he'll be glad to sell you one, and launch it into space atop a Falcon 9 rocket. And yes, Elon Musk is indeed the PayPal guy, who was paying attention when I was not.

Go to www.rocketplanekistler.com and you'll find everything you want to know about the Kistler K-1 reusable two-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle. Kistler tried and failed to build the K-1 cargo rocket in the 1990s, and finally went bankrupt. For a while, it seemed like the end of the trail, until the remains were bought by Rocketplane Limited, and resurrected to a new life. Now RpK, as it's called for short, has a $207 million contract from NASA to get their rocket up and flying.

And that's just the two winners of the government-sponsored COTS competition for a Commercial Orbital Transportation System. There were losing competitors as well, and some of them intend to proceed, one way or another.

Go to www.spacehab.com and you'll see that the company that makes the SpaceHab payload-bay cargo module for the Space Shuttle had a proposal to build a big cargo module called the Apex 400, which would fly interchangeably atop any of the world's big launchers. It would be a useful thing to have, and I hope they still build it. In the story, it's called Excelsior, and I suspect if you showed up with money and an order, they'd consider building one for you. They already know how.

Go to www.bigelowaerospace.com and there you'll find a wealthy hotelier determined to set up an orbital hotel. Pipe dream? Not at all. The Genesis-1 test module is in orbit right now, and it worked so well the Genesis program will end with Genesis-2, which will have flown long before you read this. Next up, Sundancer, which will act as a prototype for the orbital hotel, and as a target for America's Space Prize, $50 million to anyone who can demonstrate the ability to get up there repeatedly, without taking any government money to do the job. In the story, I called the orbital honeymoon hotel Exodus. I think it's a damn fine name, and I hope Robert Bigelow will consider it, when the time comes.

Need a methane/liquid oxygen main engine for your interplanetary spacecraft, even though NASA has decided it's too iffy for the Orion moonship? Go to www.xcor.com and there you'll see a company that's got smaller engines designed, built and tested. A larger methane/LOX engine is merely a matter of demand. If not, you still might find the Rocket Racing League entertaining.

This is just scratching the surface, of course. the tSpace consortium at www.transformspace.com didn't win either the COTS competition or the CEV competition, but their designs are sound and innovative. The CXV air-launched manned spacecraft may well make it into orbit, and will certainly be cheaper to fly than anything except the Kistler K-1. And if it does? Well, their CEV design will make an ideal all-purpose planetary lander, not just for the Moon, but for Mars and beyond. We'll need it someday, one way or another.

Finally, go to www.andrews-space.com and take a good look. Especially take a look at the Mini-Mag Orion design. It's a practical, buildable fusion-drive interplanetary spacecraft waiting in the wings. It would take a pile of money and determination to bring something like that to fruition, but no more money than is already earmarked by Congress to fund the nation's long-delayed return to the Moon, and a whole lot less than has already been spent on the International Space Station. With it, you could get anywhere in the inner solar system, and a little beyond. If I had one, I'd stick a tSpace CEV on the nose, fly on out to Callisto, and make a landing.

I've written a number of stories about futures we lost due to stupidity, for example “Harvest Moon” (Asimov's, September 2005). And once upon a time, Michael Capobianco and I wrote a book called Fellow Traveler (Bantam Books, July 1991) about a splendidly possible future that crashed and burned away to nothing at all in the weeks and months following the book's publication. Politics and short-sightedness took those futures away before they could happen. This story is about the next such future, looming up before us with the promise of a bright new tomorrow.

Maybe this time, the dream will come true. Either way, we'll soon know. Keep your fingers crossed. And if you happen to have a few hundred million dollars you don't need right away, I've got some cool ideas....

Copyright © 2007 William Barton

[Back to Table of Contents]

"Asimov's bought my first story, ‘Ever After’ (December 1984). I'd already published two novels by then, and I was beginning to think I was going to be one of those authors who could only write novels. Since then, of course, I've given you almost all of my short stories. Best wishes on your thirtieth birthday."—Lisa Goldstein

Lisa Goldstein has published eleven novels, the most recent being The Alchemist's Door from Tor Books. She has spent the last four years as Isabel Glass, and has written two books under this name; the latest is The Divided Crown. Her novel The Red Magician won the American Book Award for Best Paperback. Her novels and short stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. She has worked as a proofreader, library aide, bookseller, and reviewer, and she lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their cute dog Spark. Her website, which includes pictures of Spark, is www.brazenhussies.net/goldstein.

Sometimes after the library closes I walk through the dim rooms, savoring the quiet. I put books back in order, and straighten the displays, and take down the outdated fliers on the community bulletin board. Then I put on my coat, turn out the last light, and go home.

Today the disorder the patrons had left was worse than usual, books scattered on tables and counters and across the floor. The days when libraries were havens of silence, the only sounds a muffled cough and a scratch of a pen on paper, are long gone, I'm afraid. People talk and laugh as if they're at a ball game, or answer their cell phones, or call out to one another when they see a book they recognize. Around three-thirty the after-schoolers come in, looking for something to do until their parents get off work and pick them up. Mostly they gossip, or sit at the computers and play games; occasionally one of them will read something, but it's usually a comic book.

I picked up the books and stacked them into piles. It's a small library I work in, in a small town down the peninsula from San Francisco, just two rooms for adult fiction and nonfiction and two for the juvenile sections. The clean-up took only a few minutes. Then I put the books into the bin to be checked in the next day, in case a patron had checked them out and forgotten them.

A piece of paper fluttered out from one of them and fell to the floor. I picked it up and turned it over. It was a photograph, black and white, a picture of a woman. She looked like a movie star, with the sort of beauty they used to have when they all looked like kings and queens, distant and regal. Perhaps she really had been a star, but if so I didn't recognize her.

I studied her a while longer. Her hair was light brown, and her wide-set eyes could have been the same color, though the black and white of the photograph made it hard to tell; they could just as easily have been gray. Her mouth was that bow shape that had been popular generations ago; it looked dark in the photograph, and I thought she might have been wearing red lipstick.

None of this explains why I thought her beautiful, though. It was something impossible to define, a matter of the curve of a cheekbone, the straight line of a forehead. A few millimeters one way or the other and she would have looked different, entirely ordinary.

The actress she reminded me of most was Greta Garbo. I went over to the movie section (791.43) and took down a book on her, but I saw I'd been wrong; they were not very much alike. But both seemed luminous somehow, as if a light shone from inside them.

I learned from the book that Garbo had not said “I want to be alone,” the quote everyone attributes to her, but “I want to be left alone,” which makes more sense. Librarians, I sometimes think, know a great deal of useless trivia about a great variety of subjects.

I wished I had thought to check which book the photograph had come from, but there were too many in the bin now to make a guess. I puttered around some more, then went to my cubbyhole of an office, just behind the circulation area, and put the photo in a desk drawer. I straightened the plastic sign that said “Harris Kent, Librarian” and checked the empty rooms again—there was no one waiting for me at home, after all—and caught a later bus home.

We were busy as usual the next day. I stayed in my office, doing paperwork and ordering books, coming out when the library aides needed help. I saw the Crossword Puzzle Guy, there in the mid-morning as always—he Xeroxes the puzzle from the New York Times, fills it in in ink, and leaves it behind him on the front table. After he left, a high school student came in, obviously truant. He'd been here a few times before, and had even asked me for help finding information about anoles, which turned out to be a kind of lizard. I'd shown him how to use the encyclopedia (what do they teach them in schools these days?), and later he graduated to the Internet. If he kept skipping school I'd have to talk to him or his parents or guardian, but for now I left him alone; he was probably learning more here than in his classroom.

Every so often I opened my drawer and took out the photograph. Looking at it made me feel as if I were turning on a light in a dark room, as if something were being made clear, illuminated.

I've always liked photographs, the way they're the same each time you look at them, predictable, even comforting. So much else goes by so quickly, changes even before you've had a chance to notice it.

Once when I studied the photograph I saw something new: the woman looked a bit like someone I'd dated in college. Nina had had the same breathtaking beauty, and she, too, had seemed set apart by it, a visitor from some other, better, realm. I'd never understood why she'd gone out with me. I wear glasses, my hair is the dull color of meatloaf, and I'm tall and skinny—though at least, I used to think, Nina and I were the same height.

Usually the thought of her brought back a confusion of feelings, love and loss and regret, but this time the mysterious woman crowded out everything else. Who was she? Where had she come from? What had happened to her?

I went to lunch, came back. The mob of kids came in after school, talking noisily. Some of them towed bookbags on wheels; you have to wonder about the amount of homework they get. Fortunately the children's librarian deals with them; only rarely does she call me for help.

The time slid toward closing. The patrons headed toward the doors, and I turned off some of the lights. A woman dashed in; she knew what she wanted, she said, it would just take a minute. I knew this type of patron of old, and sure enough she was still standing in front of the fiction shelves when we closed. I sent the aides and the children's librarian home and talked to her a bit about the bestseller list; then it turned out that she didn't have a library card and I had to process one for her.

It was ten minutes after closing when I finally shut down the computer and made my rounds through the empty rooms. My footsteps echoed back to me, muffled by the rows of books; when I accidentally dropped a pen the sound lingered for a while, suspended in the silence. This was the way libraries used to sound, I thought, like nothing else in the world.

I picked up books from when they had been left (or thrown—one of them lay open on its back, looking disturbingly helpless, like a dead body). As I carried them to the bin a scrap of paper fell out and drifted to the floor.

I grabbed it on its way down. It was a ticket stub, an old one, pre-printed instead of spat out from a computer. It had been torn in half; the part I held read “Para” and, on the next line, “Thea."

That sparked a vague memory. I put the books down and went to the local history section (979.46). I found it in the third book I checked: a brief history of the Paramount theater in Oakland. The place had been a movie palace from 1931 to 1970, though it had had to shut down once during the Depression. I studied the angular gold and green lights of the main entrance, the statues of golden women marching toward a great gold fountain, and as I did so a strange notion took hold of me: that the woman in the photograph had held this ticket, had gone to this performance.

It was crazy, delusional. And yet the idea wouldn't leave me. I saw her striding through the front door in a short jacket and a long slim skirt, a mannish hat with a feather on her head, looking up at her companion from under the brim. At the intermission she took out a cigarette and went to the women's lounge (amazingly, according to the book, women were not allowed to smoke in public then) and discussed the movie with the other smokers. If my guess was right and she was an actress, perhaps she would have known something about the stars. The other women might even have recognized her, might have listened intently as she gossiped about the leading man.

I re-shelved the history and went back to the pile of books I'd collected earlier. This time I'd seen the one the ticket had come from, and I checked the title; it was The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up. The books themselves weren't relevant, then, just the messages they contained.

I put the ticket in my drawer, together with the photograph, and left. When I got home I made dinner and then settled down with a book I'd checked out. The quiet at the end of the day was welcome, but even as I read I was aware that it wasn't the same as the hushed silence of the library. It didn't have the weight of history behind it, the great edifice built of kings and explorers, poets and philosophers, books about carpentry and cat care and trains and when to plant dahlias, all the knowledge and wisdom of the world.

The next day crept by slowly. I was eager to be left alone (like Garbo) and see if the books would yield up something new. I kept seeing vague glimmers out of the corner of my eye, a blur of white like the sway of a skirt or the turning of a page, but when I looked there would be nothing there. Finally everyone left; I shut the door behind them and turned the sign to Closed.

"Are you doing anything tonight?” someone said behind me.

I jumped. It was only the children's librarian, Amy, coming out of the back. I muttered something about a dinner meeting, and she shrugged and left.

I was actually trembling as I walked through the library, picking up books and rifling through their pages, turning them upside down and shaking them to dislodge any stray pieces of paper. My heart pounded so loudly I could hear it in the silence. I made myself go slower, straightening each pile of books carefully and setting them gently in the bin.

Amy and I had gone out for a drink once. Afterward she had invited me to her house. I had felt awkward, filled with trepidation; I hadn't known what she wanted, hadn't known what I wanted for that matter. It was one of those moments where a life could change in an instant, some decision made that could never be taken back.

I needn't have worried. She lived with her three children, two dogs, and a parrot, who shouted “Abandon all hope!” when we walked through the door. Her ex-husband, I soon discovered, lived over the garage and had been taking care of the kids, only two of which were his. One of the dogs was recovering from some complex surgery and wore that collar that looks like a giant Elizabethan ruff. He had fixed ideas about how big he was, ideas that did not include the collar, and kept bumping into things. Perhaps it was only in memory that he bumped into me more than anything else.

The ex-husband made his living from entering contests, and Amy's walls were stacked with computer games and lifetime supplies of hair product; he had run out of space to store them all. As we sat on her couch, trying to talk over children's demands and the parrot's squawking, a postal truck pulled up, setting off a round of barking from the dogs, and disgorged more boxes.

I noticed for the first time that evening that she was quite pretty—though perhaps cute might be a better word, with her frizzy blond hair, snub nose, and freckles. And I had never realized how short she was; she barely came up to my shoulders.

She turned out to be an interesting woman, too, more thoughtful than I would have expected from her surroundings. “Sometimes I feel like I'm walking down a long hallway, and doors are closing all around me,” she said. “There are so many things I wanted to do, things I thought I'd get around to when I was older. Like go to exotic places and write books about them, and learn how to sail, and speak Spanish, and make pottery ... And have kids, of course, but it's the kids that are keeping me from all the rest of it. You can't do everything, I guess is what I'm saying. Do you know what I mean?"

I didn't, not really. She had her hands full, more than full; she seemed to be doing enough for several people already.

"Well, but you're still young, younger than I am,” I said. “There's still time for all that.” But she looked at me as if my answer had disappointed her.

I never went back. I'm not sure why, really. All the time I was with her I kept thinking about Nina, the way she used to stride forward on those long legs, the way she always seemed to know where she was going, even when she was lost. And Amy's life looked too confusing, there were too many things to take in at once.

I finished making the rounds of the library. There had been no messages from the books, not a scrap of paper to be found. I cursed myself for an idiot. I had built up something out of nothing, a ludicrous fantasy. I felt a mad urge to take every book off the shelf and shake them until they gave up their secrets. Instead I took a last look at the photograph and headed for the door.

I caught the glimmer of white again, but this time it did not go away when I looked directly at it. It was a pearl someone had dropped. As I bent to pick it up I remembered the photograph, the pearl earrings the woman wore.

I'd memorized the photograph by this time, of course, but I went back to my office to look at it one more time. The earrings shone white as a shell, nacreous and pale.

No, it was ridiculous. Someone had dropped the damn thing; that was all. Despite my protests, though, I put the pearl in my drawer along with the photograph and the ticket stub.

The next evening, as I went through my usual routine, I swung between hope and something very like despair. I told myself not to expect much, either a maddeningly vague clue or nothing at all. What I found was a piece of paper partly covered in writing. I read a few lines, then had to sit at a table to stop my heart from pounding.

"Dear Selwyn—” it said.

"It's not like you to be so horrible. What I said was a joke, of course. I don't give a fig for your work, and I'm sure Edith doesn't either. And what you told us was hardly damning—unless, as you said, your boss should come to hear about it. And there's no reason he should, not if you're as careful as you say you are.

"I'll be at the Pearl on Tuesday night, as always. I hope I'll see you there. I never have as much fun without you—none of the others have your spirit and generosity.

"Lilyanna"

I thought a hundred things all at once. That now I knew her name. That her handwriting was bold and a bit old-fashioned, with more flourishes than someone would use today, especially in her headlong dashes. That she had written on creamy linen paper; she could afford luxuries, perhaps, or she cared about how she looked.

Most of all I wondered what it meant. What terrible thing did Selwyn do at work? Who was Edith, and who were the others? It was one of those frustrating stories that don't make sense if you come in in the middle, and it was dreadful to think that I might never know the answers.

There was a date at the top; I hadn't seen it in my rush to read the letter. October 12, 1938. I tried to remember the date today, and realized with growing amazement that it was also October the 12th.

All my doubts disappeared. I was meant to find this letter, and to find it now. In fact—and suddenly the notion seemed as clear to me as if it was written on the piece of paper I held—I could find her, Lilyanna, meet her at the Pearl on Tuesday. The only problem, of course, was that I had no idea where the place could be.

I went to the circulation desk, too much in a hurry even to go to my office, and turned on the computer. I searched for “Pearl” together with various cities around the Bay Area and got nothing but gibberish. There were, I was surprised to see, a few hits for “Lilyanna,” but the people mentioned were all too old or too young or in another country. So much for my thought that she might be a movie star.

A man tapped at the glass on the door; he'd seen me and thought the library was still open, despite the Closed sign and the dim lights. I ignored him. He knocked harder, and I waved him off impatiently. Finally he dumped his books in the outside bin and strode off, no doubt writing an irate letter to the library board in his head.

I turned back to the computer. It was Friday now; I had a few days yet to track her down. I clicked on another link for Lilyanna and found an office-worker's diary. But she was far too young, and Lilyanna would never work in an office.

Suddenly I realized just how old she had to be. If she was twenty in 1938, say, she would be nearly ninety today. Probably she was dead.

But of course I wasn't thinking of her as old. In my mind she was still the woman in the photograph, luminous, mysterious. What did that mean? Was she haunting me, haunting the library?

I got off the computer, stood up and stretched, and went through the library shutting off the lights. As I headed toward the front door I saw the swirl of white again, and I turned quickly. It took on shape, moving slowly in the shadows. The unfurling of a skirt, the turn of a pale leg...

The library seemed colder now, the shadows in the distant corners blacker. I stood still, my skin clammy. No, I was imagining the chill, the darkness—why would she want to frighten me? I groped for a light switch and turned it on, and she frayed into nothingness and disappeared.

I was trembling now. I went into my office and grabbed the photograph, the ticket, and the pearl. Then I left, locking the door firmly behind me.

Outside the moon shone from behind the clouds, but otherwise the street was dark. I walked quickly toward the bus stop, toward light and people. I got home very late; only then, when I looked at my bedside clock, did I realize that I'd been on the computer for hours.

In the morning the fear from last night seemed unreal. Lilyanna needed me; she had sought me out for some task she had left unfinished in life. She was remote in the picture, yes, and as regal as an effigy on a tomb, but she would never harm me.

What had prompted me to turn on the light again, to make her vanish like that? I could have seen her whole, talked to her, found out what she wanted at last.

I dressed and went to my computer. It sometimes seems odd to me that someone who distrusts change as much as I do should take to the Internet, but in fact I like it a great deal. It's like a library in many ways, a library built out of an infinity of knowledge. A library of the air.

As the morning waned, though, I began to think the whole thing was impossible. How could I guess what the word “pearl” meant to Lilyanna and her friends? In desperation I left the main thoroughfares of the search engines and headed down dirt roads and dim alleyways, sites tended by obsessives interested in movies or jewelry or the thirties.

I broke for lunch. Sun came through the kitchen window, and I began to wonder about my own obsessiveness. What was Lilyanna to me, after all? Why was I wasting all this time on someone I had never met? I sat in my kitchen, in the warmth and light, eating a chicken sandwich I'd made out of leftovers, and my mind strayed to other things: Nina, of course, and work I'd left unfinished at the library, and the book I was reading. Then the tattered clouds returned, shrouding the sun, and I went back to Lilyanna and the Pearl.

On Sunday I visited a few of the places I'd seen on the Internet, restaurants and bars and businesses with the word “pearl” in their names. I had no car, which had never seemed like a hardship before; I enjoyed taking the bus to work. But I soon found out that many of the routes were slower than my usual bus, and that the Bay Area Rapid Transit line didn't run anywhere near where I wanted to go. I planned to go to Oakland first, because of the connection with the Paramount, but as time passed I realized that just the places in Oakland would take the whole day.

The first three sites I tried had not even existed in the thirties. I continued on, growing discouraged as I saw business after business dating from the eighties or nineties.

It was near midnight when I finally quit and headed for home. The streets were cold and silent; I heard nothing but my own footsteps. Every so often a car drove by, its lights glowing out of the darkness and then passing on. My bus stop was dark as well, the street lamp next to it burned out.

A pale shape came toward me out of the shadows. I jumped back, but it was only a man in a white T-shirt, strange clothing for such a cold night. He was saying something, but I was filled with such a mixture of terror and excitement I could barely hear him. “What?” I said.

"Very few buses this late on Sunday,” he said. He seemed unconcerned, and as I came closer and could smell him I realized that he had been drinking for a while. “Take a half hour for the next one."

It proved to be over an hour. I felt nervous standing near someone so unpredictable, but he did not make any more sudden moves. The town I lived in was so small, and I was usually indoors so early, that I had forgotten how to deal with people like him, had lost whatever edge I'd once had.

It was after midnight when I finally got home and went to bed. I could not sleep, though; when I closed my eyes I saw wisps of white gathering in the darkness, and I would come awake, my heart pounding.

On Mondays the people who work in the library always ask each other how their weekends were. I don't know why they continue to ask me, since my days off are horribly dull; I usually spend them gardening or reading or listening to music. Today they joked about how tired I looked, what a wild weekend I must have had. Amy said nothing, but I saw her eyes on me a few times, as if she wanted to ask me a question. To be honest, I wouldn't have known how to answer her; anything I said would have sounded crazy. Would have been crazy, for all I knew.

I worked on the circulation desk that day, giving each returned book a surreptitious shake before putting it away, trying not to scowl at the patrons when they asked for information or directions. But there was nothing in any of the books, not even the scraps of torn paper people use for bookmarks. I kept glancing at my watch, willing the time to pass; I was almost certain that I would find the next clue only after everyone had gone home.

Finally the library closed, and I locked the door and made my usual rounds. For a long time I found nothing, and I grew more and more discouraged as I went on. Then one of the books surrendered a piece of paper: a napkin with an address printed at the bottom. In the blank space someone had drawn a row of beads, curving upward like a smile. A pearl necklace.

The place was in Oakland; I'd been right about that, at least. There was no zip code, of course; they hadn't existed in 1938. I hurried to the computer and looked up the address, then linked to a site that showed me which bus to take.

Something glimmered near the history shelves, as pale as snow. I turned, and in that moment I saw her plain, a woman made of pearl and paper, coalescing out of the darkness. A cold wind came up, bringing the smell of old books.

I could feel her need, her desire to be avenged. I took a step toward her, trying to ignore the thrill of terror that ran through my veins. She vanished slowly, like mist.

Thoughts of her intruded as I tried to sleep that night. What had Selwyn done? Perhaps he had joined the Communist Party, like a lot of people in the thirties. Or maybe he had embezzled money; it was the Depression, after all, and he needed to pay for all those theater tickets and drinks at the Pearl. Hadn't Lilyanna said she liked his generosity?

I had a dark thought then. Had she blackmailed him? You could certainly read the note that way, as Lilyanna asking for money. “Unless your boss should come to hear about it,” she'd said. And “if you're as careful as you say you are."

I got up and studied the photo again. No, I couldn't believe it—no one who looked like that could stoop to blackmail.

I set out all I had of Lilyanna: the photo, the pearl, the note, the napkin. For the first time I noticed a stain at the corner of the napkin, a small spot of red. Was it blood? No, of course not. It was much more likely to be food, or lipstick.

But I couldn't stop thinking about the two of them, what they had done. Had Selwyn grown tired of her demands for money and finally killed her? Or had she killed him? Either would explain her urgency, and the fear I sometimes felt in her presence. Her story was darker than I had supposed.

When I got to work the next day I put the photograph on my desk before I did anything else. I couldn't stop staring at it, drawn over and over again to that pale face, those imperious eyes.

The sun came out in the afternoon, that strange California weather that refuses to relinquish summer, even in October. It relaxed me for a moment, and when Amy knocked at my office I looked up, glad of the distraction. I was not so relaxed, though, to forget the picture, and I eased it under a magazine as she stepped inside.

"Are you busy?” she asked.

"No, no,” I said. “What is it?"

"A kid just asked me for The Lying Bitch and HerWardrobe,” she said.

I laughed. “What did you say?"

"Well, I took him to the C.S. Lewis section, but that wasn't the book he wanted. I think he was expecting something else."

We talked for a while about the odd requests we had gotten (The Four Horsemen of the Acropolis, Color MePurple), and I asked her how the dog was, and we discussed library business. When she left I realized with a start that an hour had passed, and that I had barely thought of Lilyanna. How could I have forgotten her? I felt horrified, guilty. I felt like a knight who had been sent out on a quest by his lady-love and who had strayed from the path, diverted by pleasures of the flesh or good company.

But my fear was growing, fear of what I might find, and of Lilyanna, too. I was out of my depth, had stumbled into a quarrel not my own. What if she had murdered someone, what then?

I started to shiver. But I was sweating too; my palms were damp with it. What had I gotten myself into? Who was Lilyanna to come into my life like this? She had snared me with a photograph, beguiled me with trinkets—with the dead past, things that never changed. She had seen how steadfast I would be, that I would never change. Amy's doors had never closed for me; they had never been opened.

I welcomed the anger; it drove out the terror I felt. Perhaps I wouldn't go to the Pearl that night. Why should I be the one to revenge her? I had my own life to live, after all.

One of the aides came through, shouting that the library would close in fifteen minutes. The hell with it, I thought. I stood, my heart pounding, and went to the children's section. My fear rose again and I pushed it away, tried to ignore it.

I waited until Amy finished helping a kid with her homework; then I said, “Would you like to go to dinner with me tonight?"

She looked surprised, and a bit wary. “All right,” she said.

The room grew colder. The children fell silent for once, as if they felt it too. A blur of white moved in the corner and took on shape.

Amy was saying something, and I forced myself to pay attention. “Oh, wait. Don's going to be late tonight—I have to feed the kids."

"I could meet you when you're done. How about seven?"

"That would be good."

Lilyanna turned toward me, her face filled with sorrow. She faded slowly and disappeared.

"Seven, then,” I said, and went back to the circulation area.

The aides folded up the newspapers, straightened the chairs, and went home. The last patron left; then Amy came out from the children's area, and I held the door open for her, smiling.

What would I do until seven? I locked the door and walked through the empty rooms, shutting off lights as I went. I could feel Lilyanna's absence throughout the library. I picked up a pile of books, brought them back to the bin.

I felt as if I had been living in a lurid nightmare the past few days, and that I had finally woken up. Lilyanna had seduced me with beauty and mystery, but in the end I had chosen life over death. I would never find out who Selwyn was, what had happened between him and Lilyanna, and I knew I would always wonder about it, but at the moment it seemed a small loss.

I turned out the last light and headed toward the door. A shape flew at me out of the darkness, white as a shroud, its mouth red as blood. I ran for the door, but it was locked. I fumbled for my keys.

Copyright © 2007 Lisa Goldstein

[Back to Table of Contents]

"Congrats to Asimov's on its thirtieth birthday. It's been a pleasure to be associated with the magazine as a reader, and an honor to be associated with it as a writer. Here's to another thirty years!"—Mike Resnick

According to Locus, Mike Resnick has won more awards for short science fiction than any other writer, living or dead. His last Asimov's story, “Down Memory Lane” (April/May 2005), was a Hugo nominee and recently won Spain's Ignotus Award. His latest novel, from Pyr, is Starship: Pirate.

The first time I saw her she was jogging in the park. I was sitting on a bench, reading the paper like I do every morning. I didn't pay much attention to her, except to note the resemblance.

The next time was in the supermarket. I'd stopped by to replenish my supply of instants—coffee, creamer, sweetener—and this time I got a better look at her. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. At seventy-six, it wouldn't be the first time that had happened.

Two nights later I was in Vincenzo's Ristorante, which has been my favorite Italian joint for maybe forty years—and there she was again. Not only that, but this time she was wearing my favorite blue dress. Oh, the skirt was a little shorter, and there was something different about the sleeves, but it was the dress, all right.

It didn't make any sense. She hadn't looked like this in more than four decades. She'd been dead for seven years, and if she was going to come back from the grave, why the hell hadn't she come directly to me? After all, we'd spent close to half a century together.

I walked by her, ostensibly on my way to the men's room, and the smell hit me while I was still five feet away from her. It was the same perfume she'd worn every day of our lives together.

But she was sixty-eight when she'd died, and now she looked exactly the way she looked the very first time I saw her. I tried to smile at her as I passed her table. She looked right through me.

I got to the men's room, rinsed my face off, and took a look in the mirror, just to make sure I was still seventy-six years old and hadn't dreamed the last half century. It was me, all right: not much hair on the top, in need of a trim on the sides, one eye half-shut from the mini-stroke I denied having except in increasingly rare moments of honesty, a tiny scab on my chin where I'd cut myself shaving. (I can't stand those new-fangled electric razors, though since they've been around as long as I have, I guess they're not really so new-fangled after all.)

It wasn't much of a face on good days, and now it had just seen a woman who was the spitting image of Deirdre.

When I came out she was still there, sitting alone, picking at her dessert.

"Excuse me,” I said, walking up to her table. “Do you mind if I join you for a moment?"

She looked at me as if I was half-crazy. Then she looked around, making sure that the place was crowded in case she had to call for help, decided I looked harmless enough, and finally she nodded tersely.

"Thank you,” I said. “I just want to say that you look exactly like someone I used to know, even down to the dress and the perfume."

She kept staring at me, but didn't answer.

"I should introduce myself,” I said, extending my hand. “My name is Walter Silverman."

"What do you want?” she asked, ignoring my hand.

"The truth?” I said. “I just wanted a closer look at you. You remind me so much of this other person.” She looked dubious. “It's not a pick-up line,” I continued. “Hell, I'm old enough to be your grandfather, and the staff will tell you I've been coming here for forty years and haven't molested any customers yet. I'm just taken by the resemblance to someone I cared for very much."

Her face softened. “I'm sorry if I was rude,” she said, and I was struck by how much the voice sounded like her voice. “My name is Deirdre."

It was my turn to stare.

"Are you all right?” she asked.

"I'm fine,” I said. “But the woman you look like was also named Deirdre."

Another stare.

"Let me show you,” I said, pulling out my wallet. I took my Deirdre's photo out and handed it to her.

"It's uncanny,” she said, studying the picture. “We even sort of wear our hair the same way. When was this taken?"

"Forty-seven years ago."

"Is she dead?"

I nodded.

"Your wife?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry,” she said. “She was a beautiful woman.” Then, “I hope that doesn't sound conceited, since we look so much alike."

"Not at all. She was beautiful. And like I say, she even used the same perfume."

"That's very weird,” she said. “Now I understand why you wanted to talk to me."

"It was like ... like I'd suddenly stumbled back half a century in time,” I said. “You're even wearing Deedee's favorite color."

"What did you say?"

"That you're wearing her—"

"No. I meant what you just called her."

"Deedee?” I asked. “That was my pet name for her."

"My friends call me Deedee,” she said. “Isn't that odd?"

"May I call you that?” I said. “If we ever meet again, I mean?"

"Sure,” she said with a shrug. “Tell me about yourself, Walter. Are you retired?"

"For the past dozen years,” I said.

"Got any kids or grandkids?"

"No."

"If you don't work and you don't have family, what do you do with your time?” she asked.

"I read, I watch DVDs, I take walks, I Google a zillion things of interest on the computer.” I paused awkwardly. “I hope it doesn't sound crazy, but mostly I just pass the time until I can be with Deedee again."

"How long were you married?"

"Forty-five years,” I answered. “That photo was taken a couple of years before we were married. We had long engagements back then."

"Did she work?” asked Deirdre. “I know a lot of women didn't when you were young."

"She illustrated children's books,” I said. “She even won a couple of awards."

Suddenly Deirdre frowned. “All right, Walter—how long have you been studying me?"

"Studying you?” I repeated, puzzled. “I saw you jogging a couple of days ago, and I watched you while I was eating...."

"Do you really expect me to believe that?"

"Why wouldn't you?” I asked.

"Because I'm an illustrator for children's magazines."

That was too many coincidences. “Say that again?"

"I illustrate children's magazines."

"What's your last name?” I asked.

"Why?” she replied suspiciously.

"Just tell me,” I said, almost harshly.

"Aronson."

"Thank God!"

"What are you talking about?"

"My Deedee's maiden name was Kaplan,” I said. “For a minute there I thought I was going crazy. If your name was Kaplan I'd have been sure of it."

"I'm sorry I lost my temper,” said Deirdre. “This has been just a little ... well ... weird."

"I didn't mean to upset you,” I said. “It was just, I don't know, like seeing my Deedee all over again, young and beautiful the way I remember her."

"Is that the way you always think of her?” she asked curiously. “The way she looked forty-five years ago?"

I pulled out another photo, taken the year before Deedee died. She was about forty pounds heavier, and her hair was white, and there were wrinkles around her eyes. I stared at it for a minute, then handed it to Deirdre.

"This is her, too,” I said. “I'd look at her, and I'd see past the pounds and the years. I think every woman is beautiful, each in her own way, and my Deedee was the most beautiful of all."

"It's a shame you're not fifty years younger,” she said. “I could go for someone who feels that way."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing.

"What did your wife die of ?” she asked at last.

"She was walking across the street, and some kid who was high on drugs came racing around the corner doing seventy miles an hour. She never knew what hit her.” I paused, remembering that awful day. “The kid got six months’ probation and lost his license. I lost Deedee."

"Did you see it happen?"

"No, I was still inside the store, paying for the groceries. I heard it, though. Sounded like a clap of thunder."

"That's terrible."

"At least she didn't feel any pain,” I said. “I suppose there are worse ways to go. Slower ways, anyway. Most of my friends are busy discovering them."

Now it was her turn to be at a loss for an answer. Finally she looked at her watch. “I have to go, Walter,” she said. “It's been ... interesting."

"Perhaps we could meet again?” I suggested hopefully.

She gave me a look that said all her worst fears were true after all.

"I'm not asking for a date,” I continued hastily. “I'm an old man. I'd just like to talk to you again. It'd be like being with Deedee again for a few minutes.” I paused, half-expecting her to tell me that it was sick, but she didn't say anything. “Look, I eat here all the time. What if you came back a week from today, and we just talked during dinner? My treat. I promise not to follow you home, and I'm too arthritic to play footsie under the table."

She couldn't repress a smile at my last remark. “All right, Walter,” she said. “I'll be your ghost from six to seven."

I was as nervous as a schoolboy a week later when six o'clock rolled around. I'd even worn a jacket and tie for the first time in months. (I'd also cut myself in three places while shaving, but I hoped she wouldn't notice.)

Six o'clock came and went, and so did six ten. She finally entered the place at a quarter after, in a blouse and slacks I could have sworn belonged to Deedee.

"I'm sorry I'm late,” she said, sitting down opposite me. “I was reading and lost track of the time."

"Let me guess,” I said. “Jane Austen?"

"How did you know?” she asked, surprised.

"She was Deedee's favorite."

"I didn't say she was my favorite,” said Deirdre.

"But she is, isn't she?” I persisted.

There was an uncomfortable pause.

"Yes,” she said at last.

We ordered our dinner—of course she had the eggplant parmesan; it was what Deedee always had—and then she pulled a couple of magazines out of her bag, one full-sized, one a digest, and showed me some illustrations she had done.

"Very good,” I said. “Especially this one of the little blonde girl and the horse. It reminds me—"

"Of something your wife did?"

I nodded. “A long time ago. I haven't thought of it for years. I always liked it, but she felt she'd done many better ones."

"I've done better, too,” said Deirdre. “But these were handy."

We spoke a little more before the meal came. I tried to keep it general, because I could see all these parallels with Deedee were making her uncomfortable. Vincenzo had his walls covered by photos of famous Italians; she knew Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Joe DiMaggio, but I spent a few minutes explaining what Carmine Basilio and Eddie Arcaro and some of the others had done to deserve such enshrinement.

"You know,” I said as the salads arrived, “Deedee had a beautiful leatherbound set of Jane Austen's works. I never read them, and they're just sitting there gathering dust. I'd be happy to give them to you next week."

"Oh, I couldn't,” she said. “They must be worth a small fortune."

"A very small one,” I said. “Besides, when I die, they'll just wind up in the garbage, or maybe at Goodwill."

"Don't talk about dying like that,” she said.

"Like what?"

"So matter-of-factly."

"The closer you get to it, the more a matter of fact it becomes,” I said. “Don't worry,” I added lightly. “I promise not to die before dinner's over. Now, about those Austen books..."

I could see her struggling with herself. “You're sure?” she said at last.

"I'm sure. You can have a matched set of the Brontës too, if you like."

"Thank you, but I don't really like them."

It figured. I don't think Deedee had ever cracked any of them open.

"All right,” I said. “Just the Austen. I'll bring them next week."

Suddenly she frowned. “I don't think I can make it next week, Walter,” she said. “My fiancé's been away on business, and I'm pretty sure that's the day he comes home."

"Your fiancé?” I repeated. “You haven't mentioned him before."

"We've only spoken twice,” she replied. “I wasn't hiding the fact."

"Well, good for you,” I said. “You must know by now that I'm a believer in marriage."

"I guess I am, too,” she said.

"You guess?"

"Oh, I believe in marriage. I just don't know if I believe in marriage with Ron."

"Then why are you engaged to him?"

She shrugged. “I'm thirty-one. It was time. And he's nice enough."

"But?” I asked. “There's a ‘but’ in there somewhere."

"But I don't know if I want to spend the rest of my life with him.” She paused, puzzled. “Now why did I tell you that?"

"I don't know,” I replied. “Why do you think you did?"

"I don't know either,” she said. “I just have this feeling that I can confide in you."

"I appreciate that,” I said. “As for spending the rest of your life with your young man—hell, the way everyone gets married and divorced these days, maybe you won't have to."

"You sure know how to cheer a girl up, Walter,” she said wryly.

"I apologize. Your private life is none of my business. I meant no offense."

"Fine.” Then: “What shall we talk about?"

I thought about Deedee. Sooner or later we talked about everything under the sun, but her greatest passion was the theatre. “Whose work do you like better—Tom Stoppard's or Edward Albee's?"

Her face lit up, and I could tell she was going to spend the next ten minutes telling me exactly who she preferred, and why.

Somehow I wasn't surprised.

We skipped the following week, but met every week thereafter for the next three months. Ron even came along once, probably to make sure I was as old and unattractive as she'd described me. He must have satisfied himself on those counts, because he never came back. He seemed a nice enough young man, and he was clearly in love with her.

I ran into her twice at my local Borders and once at Barnes & Noble, and both times I bought her coffee. I knew I was falling in love with her—hell, I'd been in love with her from the first instant I saw her. But that's where it got confusing, because I knew I wasn't really in love with her; I was in love with the younger version of Deedee that she represented.

Ron had to leave town on another business trip, and while he was gone she took me to the theatre to see a revival of Stoppard's Jumpers and I took her to the racetrack to watch a minor stakes race for fillies. The play was nice enough, a little obscure but well-acted; I don't think she liked the color and excitement of the track any more than Deedee had.

I kept wondering if she could somehow be Deedee reincarnated, but I knew deep in my gut that it wasn't possible: if she was Deedee—my Deedee—she'd have been put here for me, and this one was marrying a young man named Ron. Besides, she had a past, she had photos of herself as a little girl, friends who had known her for years, and Deedee had only been dead for seven years. And while I didn't understand what was happening, I knew there couldn't have been two of her co-existing at the same time. (No, I never asked myself why; I just knew it couldn't be.)

Sometimes, as a bit of an experiment, I'd order a wine, or mention a play or book or movie that I knew Deedee hadn't liked, and invariably Deirdre would wrinkle her nose and express her lack of enthusiasm for the very same thing.

It was uncanny. And in a way it was frightening, because I couldn't understand why it was happening. This wasn't my Deedee. Mine had lived her life with me, and that life was over. I was a seventy-six-year-old man with half a dozen ailments who was just beating time on his way to the grave. I was never going to impose myself on Deirdre, and she was never going to look upon me as anything but an eccentric acquaintance ... so why had I met her?

From time to time I'd had this romantic fancy that when two people loved each other and suited each other the way Deedee and I did, they'd keep coming back over and over again. Once they'd be Adam and Eve, once they'd be Lancelot and Guinevere, once they'd be Bogart and Bacall. But they'd be together. They wouldn't be an old man and a young woman who could never connect. I had half a century's worth of experiences we could never share, I was sure the thought of my touching her would make her skin crawl, and I was long past the point where I could do anything but touch her. So whether she was my Deedee reborn, or just a Deedee, why were the two of us here at this time and in this place?

I didn't know.

But a few days later I learned that I'd better find out pretty damned quick. Something finally showed up in all the tests I'd been taking at the hospital. They put me on half a dozen new medications, gave me some powerful pain pills for when I needed them, and told me not to make any long-term plans.

Hell, I wasn't even that unhappy about it. At least I'd be with my Deedee again—the real Deedee, not the charming substitute.

The next night was our regular dinner date. I'd decided not to tell her the news; there was no sense distressing her.

It turned out that she was distressed enough as it was. Ron had given her an ultimatum: set a date or break it off. (Things had changed a lot since my day. Most of my contemporaries would have killed to have a gorgeous girlfriend who had no problem sleeping with them but got nervous at the thought of marriage.)

"So what are you going to do?” I asked sympathetically.

"I don't know,” she replied. “I'm fond of him, I really am. But I just ... I don't know."

"Let him go,” I said.

She stared at me questioningly.

"If you're not certain after all this time,” I said, “kiss him off."

She sighed deeply. “He's everything I should want in a husband, Walter. He's thoughtful and considerate, we share a lot of interests, and he's got a fine future as an architect.” She smiled ruefully. “I even like his mother."

"But?” I prompted her.

"But I don't think I love him.” She stared into my eyes. “I always thought I'd know right away. At least that's the myth I was brought up on as a little girl, and it was reinforced by all the romance novels I read and the movies I saw. How was it for you and your Deedee? Did you ever have any doubts?"

"Never a one,” I said. “Not from the first moment to the last."

"I'm thirty-one, Walter,” she said unhappily. “If I haven't met the right guy yet, what are the odds he's going to show up before I'm forty, or sixty? What if I want to have a baby? Do I have it with a man I don't love, or with a guy I love who's living six states away before it's even born?” She sighed unhappily. “I have two good friends who married the men of their dreams. They're both divorced. My closest friend married a nice guy she wasn't sure she loved. She's been happily married for ten years, and keeps telling me I'm crazy if I let Ron get away.” She stared across the table at me, a tortured expression on her face. “I'd give everything I have to be as sure of a man—any man—as you were of your Deedee."

And that was when I knew why I'd met her, and why the medics had given me a few more months atop Planet Earth before I spent the rest of eternity beneath it.

We finished the meal, and for the first time ever, I walked her home. She lived in one of those high-rise apartment buildings, kind of a miniature city in itself. It wasn't fancy enough to have a doorman, but she assured me the security system was state of the art. She kissed me on the cheek while a couple of neighbors who were coming out looked at her as if she were crazy. I waited until she was safely in the elevator, then left and returned home.

When I woke up the next morning I decided it was time to get busy. At least I was going to be in familiar locations where I felt comfortable. I got dressed and went out to the track, spent a few hours in the grandstand near the furlong pole where I always got the best view of the races, and didn't lay a single bet, just hung around. Then, after dinner, I started making the rounds of all my favorite bookstores. I spent the next two afternoons at the zoo and the natural history museum, where I'd spent so many happy afternoons with Deedee, and the one after that at the ballpark in the left field bleachers. I had to take a couple of pain pills along the way, but I didn't let it slow me down. I continued my circuit of bookstores and coffee shops in the evenings.

On the sixth night I decided I was getting tired of Italian food—hell, I was getting tired, period—and I went to the Olympus, another restaurant I've been frequenting for years. It doesn't look like much, no Greek statues, not even any belly dancers or bouzouki players, but it serves the best pastitso and dolmades in town.

And that's where I saw him.

His face didn't jump right out at me the way Deirdre's did, but then I hadn't really looked at it in a long time. He was alone. I waited until he got up to go to the men's room, and then followed him in.

"Nice night,” I said, when we were washing our hands.

"If you say so,” he answered unenthusiastically.

"The air is clear, the moon is out, there's a lovely breeze, and the possibilities are endless,” I said. “What could be better?"

"Look, fella,” he said irritably, “I just broke up with my girl and I'm in no mood for talk, okay?"

"I need to ask you a couple of questions, Wally."

"How'd you know my name?” he demanded.

I shrugged. “You look like a Wally."

He cast a quick look at the door. “What the hell's going on? You try anything funny, and I'll—"

"Not to worry,” I said. “I'm just a used-up old man trying to do one last good deed on the way to the grave.” I pulled an ancient photo out of my wallet and held it up. “Look at all familiar?"

He frowned. “I don't remember posing for that. Did you take it?"

"A friend did. Who's your favorite actor?"

"Humphrey Bogart. Why?” Of course. Bogie had been my favorite since I was a kid.

"Just curious. Last question: what do you think of Agatha Christie?"

"Why?"

"I'm curious."

He stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. “I can't stand her. Murders take place in back alleys, not vicarages.” It figured. I'd always hated mystery novels where the murder was committed primarily to provide the detective with a corpse.

"Good answer, Wally."

"What are you smiling about?” he asked suspiciously.

"I'm happy."

"I'm glad one of us is."

"Tell you what,” I said. “Maybe I can cheer you up, too. You know a restaurant called Vincenzo's—a little Italian place about three blocks east of here?"

"Yeah, I stop in there every now and then. Why?"

"I want you to be my guest for dinner tomorrow night."

"Still why?"

"I'm an old man with nothing to spend my money on,” I said. “Why don't you humor me?"

He considered it, then shrugged. “What the hell. I don't have anyone to eat with anyway."

"Temporarily,” I replied.

"What are you talking about?"

"Just show up,” I said. Then, as I walked to the door, I turned back to him and smiled. “Have I got a girl for you!"

Copyright © 2007 Mike Resnick

[Back to Table of Contents]

When Theda slipped into

a life of leisure

on eleven planets,

she had no idea of

the alien opportunities

she would endure.

-

At the end of her

journey lay the instant

known as Earth.

Teeming as it was,

she remained human

among others as such.

-

She missed the sure

exaltations that stellar

realms had to offer,

the swift acceleration

and dimensional rush

of relative primes.

-

Most of all the slender

tripeds of Nine-Four-Three,

intimate in their bravura.

-

Someday she would teach

her children's children

about the wages of space,

how in traveling from

one world to another

you are transubstantiated.

-

In that telling she would

conjugate the rules

of her digression

and the subsequent

definition of a self

she could not deny.

-

Illuminating her past and

its brash indiscretions,

she would prove without

the sun of a doubt

that the stars are fire.

—Bruce Boston

Copyright © 2007 Bruce Boston

[Back to Table of Contents]

"I'm an Asimov's veteran. My second published story appeared in the January/February 1978 issue, and the bulk of my short work has appeared in Asimov's ever since, including one Hugo- and two Nebula-Award winning stories. I've published with five editors and countless format changes, and I'm still thrilled to be here."—Nancy Kress

Focusing on a single gambit can lead to an unsettling...

Allen Dodson was sitting in seventh-grade math class, staring at the back of Peggy Corcoran's head, when he had the insight that changed the world. First his own world and then, eventually, like dominos toppling in predestined rhythm, everybody else's, until nothing could ever be the same again. Although we didn't, of course, know that back then.

The source of the insight was Peggy Corcoran. Allen had sat behind her since third grade (Anderson, Blake, Corcoran, Dodson, DuQuesne ... ) and never thought her remarkable. Nor was she. It was 1982 and Peggy wore a David Bowie T-shirt and straggly brown braids. But now, staring at the back of her mousy hair, Allen suddenly realized that Peggy's head must be a sloppy mess of skittering thoughts and contradictory feelings and half-buried longings—just as his was. Nobody was what they seemed to be!

The realization actually made his stomach roil. In books and movies, characters had one thought at a time: “Elementary, my dear Watson.” “An offer he couldn't refuse.” “Beam me up, Scotty!” But Allen's own mind, when he tried to watch it, was different. Ten more minutes of class I'm hungry gotta pee the answer is x+6 you moron what would it be like to kiss Linda Wilson M*A*S*H on tonight really gotta pee locker stuck today Linda eight more minutes do the first sixteen problems baseball after school—

No. Not even close. He would have to include his mind watching those thoughts and then his thoughts about the watching thoughts and then—

And Peggy Corcoran was doing all that, too.

And Linda Wilson.

And Jeff Gallagher.

And Mr. Henderson, standing at the front of math class.

And everyone in the world, all with thoughts zooming through their heads fast as electricity, thoughts bumping into each other and fighting each other and blotting each other out, a mess inside every mind on the whole Earth, nothing sensible or orderly or predictable.... Why, right this minute Mr. Henderson could be thinking terrible things even as he assigned the first sixteen problems on page 145, terrible things about Allen even or Mr. Henderson could be thinking about his lunch or hating teaching or planning a murder.... You could never know. No one was settled or simple, nothing could be counted on....

Allen had to be carried, screaming, from math class.

I didn't learn any of this until decades later, of course. Allen and I weren't friends, even though we sat across the aisle from each other (Edwards, Farr, Fitzgerald, Gallagher ... ). And after the screaming fit, I thought he was just as weird as everyone else did. I never taunted Allen like some of the boys, or laughed at him like the girls, and a part of me was actually interested in the strange things he sometimes said in class, always looking as if he had no idea how peculiar he sounded. But I wasn't strong enough to go against the herd and make friends with such a loser.

The summer before Allen went off to Harvard, we did become—if not friends—then chess companions. “You play rotten, Jeff,” Allen said to me with his characteristic, oblivious candor, “but nobody else plays at all.” So two or three times a week we sat on his parents’ screened porch and battled it out on the chessboard. I never won. Time after time I slammed out of the house in frustration and shame, vowing not to return. After all, unlike wimpy Allen, I had better things to do with my time: girls, cars, James Bond movies. But I always went back.

Allen's parents were, I thought even back then, a little frightened by their son's intensity. Mild, hard-working people fond of golf, they pretty much left Allen alone from his fifteenth birthday on. As we moved rooks and knights around the chessboard in the gathering darkness of the porch, Allen's mother would timidly offer a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of cookies. She treated both of us with an uneasy respect that, in turn, made me uneasy. That wasn't how parents were supposed to behave.

Harvard was a close thing for Allen, despite his astronomical SATs. His grades were spotty because he only did the work in courses he was interested in, and his medical history was even spottier: bouts of depression when he didn't attend school, two brief hospitalizations in a psychiatric ward. Allen would get absorbed by something—chess, quantum physics, Buddhism—to the point where he couldn't stop, until all at once his interest vanished as if it had never existed. Harvard had, I thought in my eighteen-year-old wisdom, every reason to be wary. But Allen was a National Merit scholar, and when he won the Westinghouse science competition for his work on cranial structures in voles, Harvard took him.

The night before he left, we had our last chess match. Allen opened with the conservative Italian game, which told me he was slightly distracted. Twelve moves in, he suddenly said, “Jeff, what if you could tidy up your thoughts, the way you tidy up your room every night?"

"Do what?” My mother “tidied up” my room, and what kind of weirdo used words like that, anyway?

He ignored me. “It's sort of like static, isn't it? All those stray thoughts in a mind, interfering with a clear broadcast. Yeah, that's the right analogy. Without the static, we could all think clearer. Cleaner. We could see farther before the signal gets lost in uncontrolled noise."

In the gloom of the porch, I could barely see his pale, broad-cheeked face. But I had a sudden insight, rare for me that summer. “Allen—is that what happened to you that time in seventh grade? Too much ... static?"

"Yeah.” He didn't seem embarrassed, unlike anybody normal. It was as if embarrassment was too insignificant for this subject. “That was the first time I saw it. For a long time I thought if I could learn to meditate—you know, like Buddhist monks—I could get rid of the static. But meditation doesn't go far enough. The static is still there, you're just not paying attention to it anymore. But it's still there.” He moved his bishop.

"What exactly happened in the seventh grade?” I found myself intensely curious, which I covered by staring at the board and making a move.

He told me, still unembarrassed, in exhaustive detail. Then he added, “It should be possible to adjust brain chemicals to eliminate the static. To unclutter the mind. It should!"

"Well,” I said, dropping from insight to my more usual sarcasm, “maybe you'll do it at Harvard, if you don't get sidetracked by some weird shit like ballet or model railroads."

"Checkmate,” Allen said.

I lost track of him after that summer, except for the lengthy Bakersville High School Alumni Notes faithfully mailed out every single year by Linda Wilson, who must have had some obsessive/compulsiveness of her own. Allen went on to Harvard Medical School. After graduation he was hired by a prestigious pharmaceutical company and published a lot of scientific articles about topics I couldn't pronounce. He married, divorced, married again, divorced again. Peggy Corcoran, who married my cousin Joe and who knew Allen's second wife, told me at my father's funeral that both ex-wives said the same thing about Allen: He was never emotionally present.

I saw him for myself at our twenty-fifth reunion. He looked surprisingly the same: thin, broad-faced, pale. He stood alone in a corner, looking so pathetic that I dragged Karen over to him. “Hey, Allen. Jeff Gallagher."

"I know."

"This is my wife, Karen."

He smiled at her but said nothing. Karen, both outgoing and compassionate, started a flow of small talk, but Allen shut her off in mid-sentence. “Jeff, you still play chess?"

"Neither Karen nor I play now,” I said pointedly.

"Oh. There's someone I want you to see, Jeff. Can you come to the lab tomorrow?"

The “lab” was sixty miles away, in the city, and I had to work the next day. But something about the situation had captured my wife's eclectic and sharply intelligent interest. She said, “What is it, Allen, if you don't mind my asking?"

"I don't mind. It's a chess player. I think she might change the world."

"You mean the big important chess world?” I said. Near Allen, all my teenage sarcasm had returned.

"No. The whole world. Please come, Jeff."

"What time?” Karen said.

"Karen—I have a job."

"Your hours are flexible,” she said, which was true. I was a real estate agent, working from home. She smiled at me with all her wicked sparkle. “I'm sure it will be fascinating."

Lucy Hartwick, twenty-five years old, was tall, slender, and very pretty. I saw Karen, who unfortunately inclined to jealousy, glance at me. But I wasn't attracted to Lucy. There was something cold about her beauty. She barely glanced up at us from a computer in Allen's lab, and her gaze was indifferent. The screen displayed a chess game.

"Lucy's rating, as measured by computer games anyway, is 2670,” Allen said.

"So?” Yes, 2670 was extremely high; only twenty or so players in the world held ratings above 2700. But I was still in sarcastic mode, even as I castigated myself for childishness.

Allen said, “Six months ago her rating was 1400."

"So six months ago, she first learned to play, right?” We were talking about Lucy, bent motionless above the chessboard, as if she weren't even present.

"No, she had played twice a week for five years."

That kind of ratings jump for someone with mediocre talent who hadn't studied chess several hours a day for years—it just didn't happen. Karen said, “Good for you, Lucy!” Lucy glanced up blankly, then returned to her board.

I said, “And so just how is this supposed to change the world?"

"Come see this,” Allen said. Without looking back, he strode toward the door.

I was getting tired of his games, but Karen followed him, so I followed her. Eccentricity has always intrigued Karen, perhaps because she's so balanced, so sane, herself. It was one reason I fell in love with her.

Allen held out a mass of graphs, charts, and medical scans as if he expected me to read them. “See, Jeff, these are all Lucy, taken when she's playing chess. The caudate nucleus, which aids the mind in switching gears from one thought to another, shows low activity. So does the thalamus, which processes sensory input. And here, in the—"

"I'm a realtor, Allen,” I said, more harshly than I intended. “What does all this garbage mean?"

Allen looked at me and said simply, “She's done it. Lucy has. She's learned to eliminate the static."

"What static?” I said, even though I remembered perfectly our conversation of twenty-five years ago.

"You mean,” said Karen, always a quick study, “that Lucy can concentrate on one thing at a time without getting distracted?"

"I just said so, didn't I?” Allen said. “Lucy Hartwick has control of her own mind. When she plays chess, that's all she's doing. As a result, she's now equal to the top echelons of the chess world."

"But she hasn't actually played any of those top players, has she?” I argued. “This is just your estimate based on her play against some computer."

"Same thing,” Allen said.

"It is not!"

Karen peered in surprise at my outrage. “Jeff—"

Allen said, “Yes, Jeff, listen to Carol. Don't—"

"'Karen'!"

"—you understand? Lucy's somehow achieved total concentration. That lets her just ... just soar ahead in her understanding of the thing she chooses to focus on. Don't you realize what this could mean for medical research? For ... for any field at all? We could solve global warming and cancer and toxic waste and ... and everything!"

As far as I knew, Allen had never been interested in global warming, and a sarcastic reply rose to my lips. But either Allen's face or Karen's hand on my arm stopped me. She said gently, “That could be wonderful, Allen."

"It will be!” he said with all the fervor of his seventh-grade fit. “It will be!"

"What was that all about?” Karen said in the car on our way home.

"Oh, that was just Allen being—"

"Not Allen. You."

"Me?” I said, but even I knew my innocence didn't ring true.

"I've never seen you like that. You positively sneered at him, and for what might actually be an enormous breakthrough in brain chemistry."

"It's just a theory, Karen! Ninety percent of theories collapse as soon as anyone runs controlled experiments."

"But you, Jeff ... you want this one to collapse."

I twisted in the driver's seat to look at her face. Karen stared straight ahead, her pretty lips set as concrete. My first instinct was to bluster ... but not with Karen.

"I don't know,” I said quietly. “Allen has always brought out the worst in me, for some reason. Maybe ... maybe I'm jealous."

A long pause, while I concentrated as hard as I could on the road ahead. Yellow divider, do not pass, thirty-five MPH, pothole ahead...

Then Karen's hand rested lightly on my shoulder, and the world was all right again.

After that I kept in sporadic touch with Allen. Two or three times I phoned and we talked for fifteen minutes. Or, rather, Allen talked and I listened, struggling with irritability. He never asked about me or Karen. He talked exclusively about his research into various aspects of Lucy Hartwick: her spinal and cranial fluid, her neural firing patterns, her blood and tissue cultures. He spoke of her as if she were no more than a collection of biological puzzles he was determined to solve, and I couldn't imagine what their day-to-day interactions were like. For some reason I didn't understand, I didn't tell Karen about these conversations.

That was the first year. The following June, things changed. Allen's reports—because that's what they were, reports and not conversations—became non-stop complaints.

"The FDA is taking forever to pass my IND application. Forever!"

I figured out that “IND” meant “initial new drug,” and that it must be a green light for his Lucy research.

"And Lucy has become impossible. She's hardly ever available when I need her, trotting off to chess tournaments around the world. As if chess mattered as much as my work on her!"

I remembered the long-ago summer when chess mattered to Allen himself more than anything else in the world.

"I'm just frustrated by the selfishness and the bureaucracy and the politics."

"Yes,” I said.

"And doesn't Lucy understand how important this could be? The incredible potential for improving the world?"

"Evidently not,” I said, with mean satisfaction that I disliked myself for. To compensate I said, “Allen, why don't you take a break and come out here for dinner some night. Doesn't a break help with scientific thinking? Lead sometimes to real insights?"

I could feel, even over the phone line, that he'd been on the point of refusal, but my last two sentences stopped him. After a moment he said, “Oh, all right, if you want me to,” so ungraciously that it seemed he was granting me an inconvenient favor. Right then, I knew that the dinner was going to be a disaster.

And it was, but not as much as it would have been without Karen. She didn't take offense when Allen refused to tour her beloved garden. She said nothing when he tasted things and put them down on the tablecloth, dropped bits of food as he chewed, slobbered on the rim of his glass. She listened patiently to Allen's two-hour monologue, nodding and making encouraging little noises. Toward the end her eyes did glaze a bit, but she never lost her poise and wouldn't let me lose mine, either.

"It's a disgrace,” Allen ranted, “the FDA is hobbling all productive research with excessive caution for—do you know what would happen if Jenner had needed FDA approval for his vaccines? We'd all still have smallpox, that's what! If Louis Pasteur—"

"Why don't you play chess with Jeff ?” Karen said when the meal finally finished. “While I clear away here."

I exhaled in relief. Chess was played in silence. Moreover, Karen would be stuck with cleaning up after Allen's appalling table manners.

"I'm not interested in chess anymore,” Allen said. “Anyway, I have to get back to the lab. Not that Lucy kept her appointment for tests on ... she's wasting my time in Turkistan or someplace. Bye. Thanks for dinner."

"Don't invite him again, Jeff,” Lucy said to me after Allen left. “Please."

"I won't. You were great, sweetheart."

Later, in bed, I did that thing she likes and I don't, by way of saying thank you. Halfway through, however, Karen pushed me away. “I only like it when you're really here,” she said. “Tonight you're just not focusing on us at all."

After she went to sleep, I crept out of bed and turned on the computer in my study. The heavy fragrance of Karen's roses drifted through the window screen. Lucy Hartwick was in Turkmenistan, playing in the Chess Olympiad in Ashgabat. Various websites told of her rocketing rise to the top of the chess world. Articles about her all mentioned that she never socialized with her own or any other team, preferred to eat all her meals alone in her hotel room, and never smiled. I studied the accompanying pictures, trying to see what had happened to Lucy's beauty.

She was still slender and long-legged. The lovely features were still there, although obscured by her habitual pose while studying a chessboard: hunched over from the neck like a turtle, with two fingers in her slightly open mouth. I had seen that pose somewhere before, but I couldn't remember where. It wasn't appealing, but the loss of Lucy's good looks came from something else. Even for a chess player, the concentration on her face was formidable. It wiped out any hint of any other emotion whatsoever. Good poker players do that, too, but not in quite that way. Lucy looked not quite human.

Or maybe I just thought that because of my complicated feelings about Allen.

At two A.M. I sneaked back into bed, glad that Karen hadn't woken while I was gone.

"She's gone!” Allen cried over the phone, a year later. “She's just gone!"

"Who?” I said, although, of course, I knew. “Allen, I can't talk now, I have a client coming into the office two minutes from now."

"You have to come down here!"

"Why?” I had ducked all of Allen's calls ever since that awful dinner, changing my home phone to an unlisted number and letting my secretary turn him away at work. I'd only answered now because I was expecting a call from Karen about the time for our next marriage counseling session. Things weren't as good as they used to be. Not really bad, just clouds blocking what had been a steady marital sunshine. I wanted to dispel those clouds before they turned into major thunderstorms.

"You have to come,” Allen repeated, and he started to sob.

Embarrassed, I held the phone away from my ear. Grown men didn't cry like that, not to other men. All at once I realized why Allen wanted me to come to the lab: because he had no other human contact at all.

"Please, Jeff,” Allen whispered, and I snapped, “Okay!"

"Mr. Gallagher, your clients are here,” Brittany said at the doorway, and I tried to compose a smile and a good lie.

And after all that, Lucy Hartwick wasn't even gone. She sat in Allen's lab, hunched over a chessboard with two fingers in her mouth, just as I had seen her a year ago on the Web.

"What the hell—Allen, you said—"

Unpredictable as ever, he had calmed down since calling me. Now he handed me a sheaf of print-outs and medical photos. I flashed back suddenly to the first time I'd come to this lab, when Allen had also thrust on me documents I couldn't read. He just didn't learn.

"Her white matter has shrunk another 75 percent since I saw her last,” Allen said, as though that were supposed to convey something to me.

"You said Lucy was gone!"

"She is."

"She's sitting right there!"

Allen looked at me. I had the impression that the simple act required enormous effort on his part, like a man trying to drag himself free of a concrete block to which he was chained. He said, “I was always jealous of you, you know."

It staggered me. My mouth opened but Allen had already moved back to the concrete block. “Just look at these brain scans, 75 percent less white matter in six months! And these neurotransmitter levels, they—"

"Allen,” I said. Sudden cold had seized my heart. “Stop.” But he babbled on about the caudate nucleus and antibodies attacking the basal ganglia and bi-directional rerouting.

I walked over to Lucy and lifted her chessboard off the table.

Immediately she rose and continued playing variations on the board in my arms. I took several steps backward; she followed me, still playing. I hurled the board into the hall, slammed the door, and stood with my back to it. I was six-one and 190 pounds; Lucy wasn't even half that. In fact, she appeared to have lost weight, so that her slimness had turned gaunt.

She didn't try to fight me. Instead she returned to her table, sat down, and stuck two fingers in her mouth.

"She's playing in her head, isn't she,” I said to Allen.

"Yes."

"What does ‘white matter’ do?"

"It contains axons that connect neurons in the cerebral cortex to neurons in other parts of the brain, thereby facilitating intercranial communication.” Allen sounded like a textbook.

"You mean, it lets some parts of the brain talk to other parts?"

"Well, that's only a crude analogy, but—"

"It lets different thoughts from different parts of the brain reach each other,” I said, still staring at Lucy. “It makes you aware of more than one thought at a time."

Static.

Allen began a long technical explanation, but I wasn't listening. I remembered now where I'd seen that pose of Lucy's, head pushed forward and two fingers in her mouth, drooling. It had been in an artist's rendering of Queen Elizabeth I in her final days, immobile and unreachable, her mind already gone in advance of her dying body.

"Lucy's gone,” Allen had said. He knew.

"Allen, what baseball team did Babe Ruth play for?"

He babbled on about neurotransmitters.

"What was Bobby Fischer's favorite opening move?” Silently I begged him, Say e4, damn it.

He talked about the brain waves of concentrated meditation.

"Did you know that a tsunami will hit Manhattan tomorrow?"

He urged overhaul of FDA clinical-trial design.

I said, as quietly as I could manage, “You have it, too, don't you. You injected yourself with whatever concoction the FDA wouldn't approve, or you took it as a pill, or something. You wanted Lucy's static-free state, like some fucking dryer sheet, and so you gave this to yourself from her. And now neither one of you can switch focus at all.” The call to me had been Allen's last, desperate foray out of his perfect concentration on this project. No—that hadn't been the last.

I took him firmly by the shoulders. “Allen, what did you mean when you said ‘I was always jealous of you'?"

He blathered on about MRI results.

"Allen—please tell me what you meant!"

But he couldn't. And now I would never know.

I called the front desk of the research building. I called 911. Then I called Karen, needing to hear her voice, needing to connect with her. But she didn't answer her cell, and the office said she'd left her desk to go home early.

Both Allen and Lucy were hospitalized briefly, then released. I never heard the diagnosis, although I suspect it involved an “inability to perceive and relate to social interactions” or some such psychobabble. Doesn't play well with others. Runs with scissors. Lucy and Allen demonstrated they could physically care for themselves by doing it, so the hospital let them go. Business professionals, I hear, mind their money for them, order their physical lives. Allen has just published another brilliant paper, and Lucy Hartwick is the first female World Chess Champion.

Karen said, “They're happy, in their own way. If their single-minded focus on their passions makes them oblivious to anything else—well, so what. Maybe that's the price for genius."

"Maybe,” I said, glad that she was talking to me at all. There hadn't been much conversation lately. Karen had refused any more marriage counseling and had turned silent, escaping me by working in the garden. Our roses are the envy of the neighborhood. We have Tuscan Sun, Ruffled Cloud, Mister Lincoln, Crown Princess, Golden Zest. English roses, hybrid teas, floribunda, groundcover roses, climbers, shrubs. They glow scarlet, pink, antique apricot, deep gold, delicate coral. Their combined scent nauseates me.

I remember the exact moment that happened. We were in the garden, Karen kneeling beside a flower bed, a wide hat shading her face from the sun so that I couldn't see her eyes.

"Karen,” I said, trying to mask my desperation, “Do you still love me?"

"Hand me that trowel, will you, Jeff ?"

"Karen! Please! Can we talk about what's happening to us?"

"The Tahitian Sunsets are going to be glorious this year."

I stared at her, at the beads of sweat on her upper lip, the graceful arc of her neck, her happy smile.

Karen clearing away Allen's dinner dishes, picking up his sloppily dropped food. Lucy with two fingers in her mouth, studying her chessboard and then touching the pieces.

No. Not possible.

Karen reached for the trowel herself, as if she'd forgotten I was there.

Lucy Hartwick lost her championship to a Russian named Dmitri Chertov. A geneticist at Stanford made a breakthrough in cancer research so important that it grabbed all headlines for nearly a week. By a coincidence that amused the media, his young daughter won the Scripps Spelling Bee. I looked up the geneticist on the Internet; a year ago he'd attended a scientific conference with Allen. A woman in Oregon, some New Age type, developed the ability to completely control her brain waves through profound meditation. Her husband is a chess grandmaster.

I walk a lot now, when I'm not cleaning or cooking or shopping. Karen quit her job; she barely leaves the garden even to sleep. I kept my job, although I take fewer clients. As I walk, I think about the ones I do have, mulling over various houses they might like. I watch the August trees begin to tinge with early yellow, ponder overheard snatches of conversation, talk to dogs. My walks get longer and longer, and I notice that I've started to time my speed, to become interested in running shoes, to investigate transcontinental walking routes.

But I try not to think about walking too much. I observe children at frenetic play during the last of their summer vacation, recall movies I once liked, wonder at the intricacies of quantum physics, anticipate what I'll cook for lunch. Sometimes I sing. I recite the few snatches of poetry I learned as a child, relive great football games, chat with old ladies on their porches, add up how many calories I had for breakfast. Sometimes I even mentally rehearse basic chess openings: the Vienna Game or the Petroff Defense. I let whatever thoughts come that will, accepting them all.

Listening to the static, because I don't know how much longer I've got.

Copyright © 2007 Nancy Kress

[Back to Table of Contents]

"Can I borrow the ship, Daddy?"

The “smart key” arches

In perfect trajectory

Into her waiting hand

And in his mind

He sees her

Blasting off, huge fins

And red flames

Of exhaust...

She laughs

At his old fashioned

Rockets with

Primitive fuels...

Her old man is so funny;

And catching the key,

She's ready to go,

Already gone

Leaving no trail behind

For him to watch

Or follow.

—Roger Dutcher

Copyright © 2007 Roger Dutcher

[Back to Table of Contents]

"I've followed Asimov's through three outstanding editors, and wish the magazine well for the next thirty years."—Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of four novels and two short story collections. Her first novel, Sarah Canary, won the Commonwealth Award for best first novel by a Californian, Sister Noon was a Pen/Faulkner finalist, and The Jane Austen Book Club, a New York Times bestseller. She won the World Fantasy award for her collection Black Glass and the Nebula for her short story “What I Didn't See.” From 1985 to 1997, we published nine of her perceptive short stories. While it's taken ten years to get her tenth, we hope it won't be so long before we see another one.

How I Got Here:

I was seventeen years old when I heard the good news from Wilt Loomis who had it straight from Brother Porter himself. Wilt was so excited he was ready to drive to the city of Always that very night. Back then I just wanted to be anywhere Wilt was. So we packed up.

Always had two openings and these were going for five thousand apiece, but Wilt had already talked to Brother Porter who said, seeing as it was Wilt, who was good with cars, he'd take twenty-five hundred down and give us another three years to come up with the other twenty-five, and let that money cover us both. You average that five thousand, Wilt told me, over the infinite length of your life and it worked out to almost nothing a year. Not exactly nothing, but as close to nothing as you could get without getting to nothing. It was too good a deal to pass up. They were practically paying us.

My stepfather was drinking again and it looked less and less like I was going to graduate high school. Mother was just as glad to have me out of the house and harm's way. She did give me some advice. You can always tell a cult from a religion, she said, because a cult is just a set of rules that lets certain men get laid.

And then she told me not to get pregnant, which I could have taken as a shot across the bow, her new way of saying her life would have been so much better without me, but I chose not to. Already I was taking the long view.

The city of Always was a lively place then—this was back in 1938—part commune and part roadside attraction, set down in the Santa Cruz mountains with the redwoods all around. It used to rain all winter and be damp all summer, too. Slug weather for those big yellow slugs you never saw anywhere but Santa Cruz. Out in the woods it smelled like bay leaves.

The old Santa Cruz Highway snaked through and the two blocks right on the road were the part open to the public. People would stop there for a soda—Brother Porter used to brag that he'd invented Hawaiian Punch, though the recipe had been stolen by some gang in Fresno who took the credit for it—and to look us over, whisper about us on their way to the beach. We offered penny peep shows for the adults, because Brother Porter said you ought to know what sin was before you abjured it, and a row of wooden Santa Claus statues for the kids. In our heyday we had fourteen gas pumps to take care of all the gawkers.

Brother Porter founded Always in the early twenties, and most of the other residents were already old when I arrived. That made sense, I guess, that they'd be the ones to feel the urgency, but I didn't expect it and I wasn't pleased. Wilt was twenty-five when we first went to Always. Of course, that too seemed old to me then.

The bed I got had just been vacated by a thirty-two-year-old woman named Maddie Beckinger. Maddie was real pretty. She'd just filed a suit against Brother Porter alleging that he'd promised to star her in a movie called The Perfect Woman, and when it opened she was supposed to fly to Rome in a replica of TheSpirit of St. Louis, only this plane would be called The Spirit of Love. She said in her suit that she'd always been more interested in being a movie star than in living forever. Who, she asked, was more immortal than Marlene Dietrich? Brother Porter hated it when we got dragged into the courts, but, as I was to learn, it did keep happening. Lawyers are forever, Brother Porter used to say.

He'd gotten as far as building a sound stage for the movie, which he hoped he might be able to rent out from time to time, and Smitty LeRoy and the Watsonville Wranglers recorded there, but mainly we used it as a dormitory.

Maddie's case went on for two whole years. During this time she came by occasionally to pick up her mail and tell us all she'd never seen such a collection of suckers as we were. Then one day we heard she'd been picked up in Nevada for passing bad checks, which turned out not to be her first offense. So off she went to the San Quentin instead of to Rome. It seemed like a parable to me, but Brother Porter wasn't the sort who resorted to parables.

Lots of the residents had come in twos like Wilt and me, like animals to the ark, only to learn that there was a men's dormitory and a women's, with Brother Porter living up the hill in his own big house, all by himself and closer to the women's dorm than to the men's. Brother Porter told us right after we got there (though not a second before) that even the married couples weren't to sleep together.

There you go, Mother, was my first thought. Not a cult. Only later it was clarified to me that I would be having sex with Brother Porter and so, not a religion, after all.

Frankie Frye and Eleanor Pillser were the ones who told me. I'd been there just about a week and, then, one morning, while we were straightening up our cots and brushing our teeth and what not, they just came right out with it. At dinner the night before there'd been a card by my plate, the queen of hearts, which was Brother Porter's signal, only I didn't know that so I didn't go.

Frankie Frye, yes, that Frankie Frye, I'll get to all that, had the cot on one side of me and Eleanor the cot on the other. The dormitory was as dim in the morning as at night on account of also being a sound stage and having no windows. There was just one light dangling from the ceiling, with a chain that didn't reach down far enough so about a foot of string had been added to it. “The thing the men don't get,” Frankie said to me, snapping her pillowcase smooth, “The thing the men mustn't get,” Eleanor added on, “is that sleeping with Brother Porter is no hardship,” said Frankie.

Frankie was thirty-five then and the postmistress. Eleanor was in her early forties and had come to Always with her husband Rog. I can't tell you how old Brother Porter was, because he always said he wouldn't give an irrelevant number the power of being spoken out loud. He was a fine-looking man though. A man in his prime.

Wilt and I had done nothing but dry runs so far and he'd brought me to Always and paid my way into eternity with certain expectations. He was a fine-looking man, too, and I won't say I wasn't disappointed, just that I took the news better than he did. “I can't lie to you,” he told me in those few days after he learned he wouldn't be having sex, but before he learned that I would be. “This is not the way I pictured it. I sort of thought with all that extra time, I'd get to be with more people, not less."

And when he did hear about me and Brother Porter, he pointed out that the rest of the world only had to be faithful until death did them part. “I don't care how good he is,” Wilt said. “You won't want to be with him and no one else forever.” Which I suspected he would turn out to be right about and he was. But in those early days, Brother Porter could make my pulse dance like a snake in a basket. In those early days, Brother Porter never failed to bring the goods.

We had a lot of tourists back then, especially in the summer. They would sidle up to us in their beach gear, ten cent barbecue in one hand and skepticism in the other, to ask how we could really be sure Brother Porter had made us immortal. At first I tried to explain that it took two things to be immortal: it took Brother Porter and it took faith in Brother Porter. If I started asking the question, then I was already missing one of the two things it took.

But this in no way ended the matter. You think about hearing the same question a couple hundred times, and then add to that the knowledge that you'll be hearing it forever, because the way some people see it, you could be two hundred and five and then suddenly die when you're two hundred and six. The world is full of people who couldn't be convinced of cold in a snowstorm.

I was made the Always zookeeper. We had a petting zoo, three goats, one llama, a parrot named Parody, a dog named Chowder, and a monkey named Monkeyshines, but Monkeyshines bit and couldn't be let loose among the tourists no matter how much simple pleasure it would have given me to do so.

We immortals didn't leave Always much. We didn't have to; we grew our own food, had our own laundry, tailor, barber (though the lousy haircuts figured prominently in Maddie's suit), and someone to fix our shoes. At first, Brother Porter discouraged field trips, and then later we just found we had less and less in common with people who were going to die. When I complained about how old everyone else at Always was, Wilt pointed out that I was actually closer in age to some seventy-year-old who, like me, was going to live forever, than to some eighteen-year-old with only fifty or so years left. Wilt was as good with numbers as he was with cars and he was as right about that as everything else. Though some might go and others with five thousand to slap down might arrive, we were a tight community then, and I felt as comfortable in Always as I'd felt anywhere.

The Starkes were the first I ever saw leave. They were a married couple in their mid-forties. (Evelyn Barton and Harry Capps were in their forties, too. Rog and Eleanor, as I've said. Frankie a bit younger. The rest, and there were about thirty of us all told, were too old to guess at, in my opinion.)

The Starkes had managed our radio station, KFQU (which looks nasty, but was really just sequential) until the FRC shut us down, claiming we deviated from our frequency. No one outside Always wanted to hear Brother Porter sermonizing, because no one outside Always thought life was long enough.

The Starkes quit on eternity when Brother Porter took their silver Packard and crashed it on the fishhook turn just outside Los Gatos. Bill Starkes loved that Packard and, even though Brother Porter walked away with hardly a scratch, something about the accident made Bill lose his faith. For someone with all the time in the world, he told us while he waited for his wife to fetch her things, Brother Porter surely does drive fast. (In his defense, Brother Porter did tell the police he wasn't speeding and he stuck to that. He was just in the wrong lane, he said, for the direction in which he was driving.) (He later said that the Starkes hadn't quit over the crash, after all. They'd been planted as fifth columnists in Always and left because we were all such patriots, they saw there was no point to it. Or else they were about to be exposed. I forget which.)

The next to go were Joseph Fitton and Cleveland March. The men just woke up one morning to find Joe and Cleveland's cots stripped bare and Cleveland's cactus missing from the windowsill, without a word said, but Wilt told me they'd been caught doing something they didn't think was sex, but Brother Porter did.

I couldn't see leaving myself.The thing I'd already learned was that when you remove death from your life, you change everything that's left. Take the petting zoo. Parrots are pretty long-lived compared to dogs and goats, but even they die. I'd been there less than two years when Chowder, our little foxhound, had to be put down because his kidneys failed. He wasn't the first dog I'd ever lost; he was just the first I'd lost since I wasn't dying myself. I saw my life stretching forward, all counted out in dead dogs, and I saw I couldn't manage that.

I saw that my pets from now on would have to be turtles or trees or nothing. Turtles and trees don't engage the way dogs do, but you can only have your heart broken so many times until it just won't mend again. I sat with Chowder and pulled him into my lap as he died and I was crying so hard for all the Chowder-less years ahead that I understood then and there that immortality was going to bring a certain coldness, a remoteness into my life. I hadn't expected that, but I didn't see a way out of it.

Here's another thing that changes: your investment strategies. As Wilt would say, we were all about T-bills now. Wilt said that often. I got real tired of Wilt saying that.

How It Went On:

Time passed and I felt pretty good about my situation. No one at Always died, and this was a powerful persuasion given how very old some of them were. Not that I needed persuading. I wasn't the youngest woman anymore, that was Kitty Strauss, and I didn't get the queen of hearts so often, but that was okay with me. Only the parrot was left from the petting zoo, so you couldn't really call it a zoo now, and I didn't see as much of the tourists and that was okay with me, too.

Three years in, Wilt had decided he'd gone for immortality prematurely. It had occurred to him that the older residents lived their full lives first, and only arrived in Always when they were tired of the flesh. Not that he wanted to wait as long as some. Winnifred spent every meal detailing the sufferings her arthritis caused her, as if we women weren't already listening to her toss and turn and hack and snore all night long.

Also, he hadn't managed to scrape up the second twenty-five hundred dollars we owed and it wasn't likely he would, since Brother Porter collected all our paychecks as a matter of course.

So Wilt told me that he wouldn't ante up again for eternity until he'd slept with at least twenty-five women, but no sooner did he move into San Jose than he was on his way to the Pacific Theater as a mechanic on the USS Aquarius. For awhile I got postcards from the Gilberts, Marshalls, Marianas, and Carolines. It would have been a real good time for Wilt to be immortal, but if he was thinking that too, he never said it.

In fact, the postcards didn't say much of anything. Maybe this was navy policy or maybe Wilt remembered that Brother Porter vetted all our mail first. Whichever, Brother Porter handed Wilt's postcards to me without comment, but he read Mother's letters aloud in the dining hall after dinner, especially if someone was in the hospital and not expected to recover or was cheating on her husband or her ration card. I listened just like everyone else, only mildly interested, as if these weren't mostly people I'd once known.

Brother Porter said Mother's letters were almost as good as the Captain Midnight radio show, which I guess meant that up in the big house, he had a radio and listened to it. Lots of Mother's friends were being neglected by their children. You might say this was a theme. No one ever needed a secret decoder ring to figure Mother out.

It didn't seem to me that the war lasted all that long, though Wilt felt otherwise. When he got back, I'd meet him from time to time in San Jose and we'd have a drink. The city of Always was dry, except for once when a bunch of reporters in the Fill Your Hole club rented out our dining space, invited us to join them, and spiked the punch so as to get a story from it. It ended in a lot of singing and Winnifred Allington fell off Brother Porter's porch, and Jeb Porter, Brother Porter's teenage son, punched out Harry Capps as a refutation of positive thinking, but the reporters had left by then so they missed it all.

Anyway Brother Porter never explicitly made abstention a condition and I never asked him about it in case he would. I still got my age checked whenever we went to a bar, so that was good. It renewed my faith every time it happened. Not that my faith needed renewing.

Now that Wilt was dying again, our interests had diverged. He was caught up in politics, local corruptions, national scandals. He read the newspapers. He belonged to the auto mechanics’ union and he told me he didn't care that the war had ended so much as I might think. The dead were still dead and he'd seen way too many of them. He said that war served the purposes of corporations and politicians so exactly that there would always be another one, and then another, until the day some president or prime minister figured out how to declare a war that lasted forever. He said he hoped he'd die before that day came. I wonder sometimes if that worked out for him.

Once while he was still at Always, Wilt took me to the ocean so that we could stand on the edge and imagine eternity. Now when Wilt talked politics, I'd fill my ears with the sound of the ocean instead. Corporate puppet masters and congressional witch-hunts and union payola—they all drowned together in the pounding of the sea.

Still I went out with Wilt every time he asked. Mostly this was gratitude because he'd bought me eternity. Love had gone the way of the petting zoo for me. Sex was a good thing and there were plenty of times I couldn't sleep for wanting it. But even if sleeping with Wilt wouldn't have cost my life, I wouldn't have. There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak, I read once in high school in a book about Thoreau, who died more than a hundred years ago and left that shrub oak a grieving widow.

When I first came to Always, there were six Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries in the women's dormitory that used to belong to Maddie. I read them all several times. But I wasn't reading anymore and certainly not murder mysteries. I'd even stopped liking music. I'd always supposed that art was about beauty and that beauty was forever. Now I saw that that music was all about time. You take a photograph and it's all about that moment and how that moment will never come again. You go into a library and every book on the shelves is all about death, even the ones pretending to be about birth or rebirth or resurrection or reincarnation.

Only the natural world is rendered eternal. Always was surrounded by the Santa Cruz Mountains, which meant tree trunks across streams, ghostly bear prints deep inside the forest, wild berries, tumbles of rocks, mosses, earthquakes and storms. Out behind the post office was a glade where Brother Porter gave his sermons, had sex, and renewed our lifespans. It was one of those rings of redwoods made when the primary tree in the center dies. Brother Porter had us brick a wall in a half circle behind the trees so it would be more churchlike and the trees grew straight as candles; you could follow along their trunks all the way to the stars. The first time Brother Porter took me there and I lay smelling the loam and the bay (and also Brother Porter) and looking up, I thought to myself that no matter how long I lived, this place would always be beautiful to me.

I talked less and less. At first, my brain tried to make up the loss, dredging up random flashes from my past—advertising slogans, old songs, glimpses of shoes I'd worn, my mother's jewelry, the taste of an ant I'd once eaten. A dream I'd had in which I was surrounded by food that was bigger than me, bread slices the size of mattresses, which seems like it should have been a good dream, but it wasn't. Memories fast and scattershot. It pleased me to think my last experience of mortality would be a toothpaste commercial. Good-bye to all that.

Then I smoothed out and days would go by when it seemed I hardly thought at all. Tree time.

So it wasn't just Wilt, I was finding it harder to relate to people in general, and, no, this is not a complaint. I never minded having so little in common with those outside Always and their revved-up, streaming-by lives.

While inside Always, I already knew what everyone was going to say.

1) Winnifred was going to complain about her arthritis.

2) John was going to tell us that we were in for a cold winter. He'd make it sound like he was just reading the signs, like he had all this lore, the fuzzy caterpillars coming early or being especially fuzzy or some such thing. He was going to remind us that he hadn't always lived in California so he knew what a cold winter really was. He was going to say that Californians didn't know cold weather from their asses.

3) Frankie was going to say that it wasn't her job to tape our mail shut for us and she wasn't doing it anymore, we needed to bring it already taped.

4) Anna was going to complain that her children wouldn't talk to her just because she'd spent their inheritance on immortality. That their refusal to be happy for her was evidence that they'd never loved her.

5) Harry was going to tell us to let a smile be our umbrella.

6) Brother Porter was going to wonder why the arcade wasn't bringing in more money. He was going to add that he wasn't accusing any of us of pocketing, but that it did make you wonder how all those tourists could stop and spend so little money.

7) Kitty was going to tell us how many boys in the arcade had come onto her that day. Her personal best was seventeen. She would make this sound like a problem.

8) Harry would tell us to use those lemons and make lemonade.

9) Vincent was going to say that he thought his watch was fast and make everyone else still wearing a watch tell him what time they had. The fact that the times would vary minutely never ceased to interest him and was good for at least another hour of conversation.

10) Frankie was going to say that no one ever listened to her.

It was a kind of conversation that required nothing in response. On and on it rolled, like the ocean.

Wilt always made me laugh and that never changed either, only it took me so much longer to get the joke. Sometimes I'd be back at Always before I noticed how witty he'd been.

What Happened Next:

Here's the part you already know. One day one spring—one day when the Canada geese were passing overhead yet again, and we were out at the arcades, taking money from tourists, and I was thrilling for the umpteenth time to the sight of the migration, the chevron, the honking, the sense of a wild, wild spirit in the air—Brother Porter took Kitty out to the cathedral ring and he died there.

At first Kitty thought she'd killed him by making the sex so exciting, though anyone else would have been tipped off by the frothing and the screaming. The police came and they shermanned their way through Always. Eventually they found a plastic bag of rat poison stuffed inside one of the unused post office boxes and a half drunk cup of Hawaiian Punch on the mail scale that tested positive for it.

Inside Always, we all got why it wasn't murder. Frankie Frye reminded us that she had no way of suspecting it would kill him. She was so worked up and righteous, she made the rest of us feel we hadn't ever had the same faith in Brother Porter she'd had or we would have poisoned him ourselves years ago.

But no one outside of Always could see this. Frankie's lawyers refused to plead it out that way; they went with insanity and made all the inner workings of Always part of their case. They dredged up the old string of arsons as if they were relevant, as if they hadn't stopped entirely the day Brother Porter finally threw his son out on his ear. Jeb was a witness for the prosecution and a more angelic face you never saw. In retrospect, it was a great mistake to have given immortality to a fourteen-year-old boy. When he had it, he was a jerk, and I could plainly see that not having it had only made him an older jerk.

Frankie's own lawyers made such a point of her obesity that they reduced her to tears. It was a shameful performance and showed how little they understood us. If Frankie ever wished to lose weight, she had all the time in the world to do so. There was nothing relevant or even interesting in her weight.

The difficult issue for the defense was whether Frankie was insane all by herself or along with all the rest of us. Sometimes they seemed to be arguing the one and sometimes the other, so when they chose not to call me to the stand I didn't know if this was because I'd make us all look more crazy or less so. Kitty testified nicely. She charmed them all and the press dubbed her the Queen of Hearts at her own suggestion.

Wilt was able to sell his three years among the immortals to a magazine and recoup every cent of that twenty-five hundred he put up for me. There wasn't much I was happy about right then, but I was happy about that. I didn't even blame him for the way I came off in the article. I expect coquettish was the least I deserved. I'd long ago stopped noticing how I was behaving at any given moment.

I would have thought the trial would be just Mother's cup of tea, even without me on the witness stand, so I was surprised not to hear from her. It made me stop and think back, try to remember when her last letter had come. Could have been five years, could have been ten. Could have been twenty, could have been two. I figured she must be dead, which was bound to happen sooner or later, though I did think she was young to go, but that might only have been because I'd lost track of how old she was. I never heard from her again so I think I had it right. I wonder if it was the cigarettes. She always said that smoking killed germs.

Not one of the immortals left Always during the trial. Partly we were in shock and huddled up as a result. Partly there was so much to be done, so much money to be made.

The arcade crawled with tourists and reporters, too. Looking for a story, but also, as always, trying to make one. “Now that Brother Porter is dead,” they would ask, exact wording to change, but point always the same, “don't you have some doubts? And if you have some doubts, well, then, isn't the game already over?” They were tiresome, but they paid for their Hawaiian punch just like everyone else and we all knew Brother Porter wouldn't have wanted them kept away.

Frankie was let off by reason of insanity. Exactly two days later Harry Capps walked into breakfast just when Winnifred Allington was telling us how badly she'd slept the night before on account of her arthritis. By the time he ran out of bullets, four more immortals were dead.

Harry's defense was no defense. “Not one of them ever got a good night's sleep,” he said. “Someone had to show them what a good night's sleep was."

The politicians blamed the overly-lenient Frankie Frye verdict for the four new deaths and swore the same mistake would not be made twice. Harry got life.

Why I'm Still Here:

Everyone else either died or left and now I'm the whole of it. The last of the immortals; City of Always, population one. I moved up to the big house and I'm the postmistress now, along with anything else I care to keep going. I get a salary from the government with benefits and a pension they'll regret if I live forever. They have a powerful faith I won't.

The arcade is closed except for the peep shows, which cost a quarter now and don't need me to do anything to run them but collect the coins after. People don't come through so much since they built the 17, but I still get customers from time to time. They buy a postcard and they want the Always postmark on it.

Wilt came to fetch me after the noise died down. “I brought you here,” he said. “Seems like I should take you away.” He never did understand why I wouldn't leave. He hadn't lived here long enough to understand it.

I tried the easy answer first. I got shot by Harry Capps, I said. Right through the heart. Was supposed to die. Didn't.

But then I tried again, because that wasn't the real answer and if I'd ever loved anyone, I'd loved Wilt. Who'll take care of the redwoods if I go? I asked him. Who'll take care of the mountains? He still didn't get it, though he said he did. I wouldn't have known how to leave even if I'd wanted to. What I was and what he was—they weren't the same thing at all anymore. There was no way back to what I'd been. The actual living forever part? That was always, always the least of it.

Which is the last thing I'm going to say on the subject. There is no question you can ask I haven't already answered and answered and answered again. Time without end.

Copyright © 2007 Karen Joy Fowler

[Back to Table of Contents]

Le Verrier would have named

His planet for himself

The Glassmaker's planet

Sand transformed

To transparency

Focusing the light of stars

Over the Milky Way.

-

Under alternate skies

Heavens not our own

Astrologers forecast:

The brittle planet

Rising to a cusp

Foredooms a crisis

Unless the ever unpredictable

Tombaugh's X

Planet of mystery

Should countervail.

-

Industrious Farmer George

Herschel's agrarian planet

Is good to plant by.

—Ruth Berman

Copyright © 2007 Ruth Berman

[Herschel, patriotically, wanted to name the planet he had discovered the Georgian Star, after King George III. Other astronomers complained, as they did also over Le Verrier's choice. These planets became known as Uranus and Neptune, instead. Tombaugh's X became known as Pluto. The name “george” comes from georgos, the Greek for “farmer."]

[Back to Table of Contents]

"In another age, I was a customs officer on the northern border. During winter nights, when the temperature sank to forty below, and the blizzards came and the traffic stopped, it was Asimov's that kept me alert. I retain my passion for the magazine to this day, and sympathize with those unfortunate souls who have never known what it means to catch the late freight to Polaris."—Jack McDevitt

Jack McDevitt recently won the Southeastern Science Fiction Achievement (SESFA) Awards for best novel, Seeker, and lifetime achievement by a Southern writer. He is believed to be the only Philadelphia taxi driver ever to have claimed either award.

Francis A. Gelper had been a biologist. He wasn't especially well known outside Lockport. Won one or two minor awards, but nothing that raised any eyebrows. But everyone who knew him said he was brilliant. And they said it in a way that told me they meant it. They liked him, too. They all did. His colleagues shook their heads in disbelief that he was gone; several of his students openly cried when I tried to interview them. In his spare time, he was a Little League coach, and he even helped out down at the senior center. Wednesday evenings, he played competitive bridge.

He'd been on his way back to his apartment after a social gathering at the university—they'd been celebrating a prize given to one of the astrophysicists—when he apparently fell asleep at the wheel and drove his hybrid over an embankment. He was thirty-eight years old.

I'd never actually met him. I'd seen him from a distance on several occasions, and spotted him at the supermarket now and then. I'd always planned to do a feature story on him. Biologist With a Heart. Instead I got to do a postmortem appreciation.

He was from Twin Rivers, Alabama. I thought the body would be shipped back for the funeral, but they conducted the service locally, at the McComber Funeral Home on Park Street. The place was packed with friends and students. The crowd spilled out into the street.

The service was one of those attempts to celebrate his life rather than recognize his death. They never work, if you ask me. But there were a lot of people who wanted to say something about him. And the speakers all had trouble with their voices.

When it was over, I stood outside with Harvey Pointer, the biology department chairman, watching the crowd dissipate. Harvey and I had gone to school together, been in Scouts together. He was a little guy with an outsize mustache and the same mischievous smile that always made him the prime suspect when something happened. “Did he have a girlfriend?” I asked. “Any marital prospects?"

He shook his head. “I don't think he was the marrying type."

I let the comment go.

"You know, Ron,” he said, “Frank got caught up in the genesis problem and he devoted his life to it. He could have gotten a grant in any one of several research areas, but he wanted to settle that one issue. It was the driving force in his career."

It was one of those hard, bright, sunny days when you have to stand facing away from the sun. “What's the genesis problem?” I asked.

Harvey grinned. “How life got started. Where the first cell came from."

"I thought that got settled years ago,” I said. “In a laboratory somewhere. Didn't they mix some chemicals and add heat and water? Or was it electricity?"

"No.” Harvey stopped to talk to a couple of people from the department. Yeah, they were going to miss him. Damn shame. Then they were gone. “There've always been claims,” he said, continuing where he'd left off, “but nothing's ever stood up.” He jammed his hands down into his topcoat pockets. “Pity. Solve that one and you get to take a Nobel home."

Genesis. It would make a nice bit to add to the story I'd already half-written.

As far as we could tell, none of Gelper's family had shown up. His mother and father were still living, and he had a brother and sister. When I broached the subject to Harvey he said he didn't know any details. Gelper hadn't talked much about his family. “I don't think he liked them much,” he added.

I'd seen odder things over the years, like Arnold Brown's religious conversion at his mother's funeral, and Morey Thomas's insistence when they buried his father that it was no use because the old man wouldn't stay dead. But usually death has a way of bringing families together. Especially when the loss is unexpected.

I wrote the story and went back to covering the routine social calendar for Lockport, doing weddings and visiting authors at the library and writing features on anybody who did anything out of the ordinary. If you discovered you could play a banjo standing on your head, you could make the front page of the Register.

So I'd forgotten about Gelper and his missing family when, about a month after the funeral, Harvey called me. “Got something you might be interested in,” he said.

"What is it, Harvey?"

"Can you come over?"

You'd expect a department chairman to be set up in a reasonably elaborate office. In fact, he was worse off than I was. They had him jammed into a space about the size of a large closet. He sat behind a desk piled high with folders, magazines, disks, and legal pads. Behind him, a bulletin board had all but disappeared behind a legion of Post-its, schedules, and articles cut from magazines.

He got up when I appeared at the door, waved me in, shook my hand, and indicated a chair. “Good to see you, Ron,” he said, leaning back against his desk and folding his arms.

We did a couple of minutes of small talk before he came to the point. “You remember I told you what Frank was working on when he died?"

"Sure,” I said. “How life got started."

"You knew he left his papers to the university?"

"No, I didn't. In fact, I hadn't thought of it at all."

"I've been looking through them."

"And—?"

He walked around behind the desk, took his seat, shifted back and forth a few times, and put his hands together. Announcement coming. “I could have called CNN. And the A.P., Ron. Instead I called you."

"I appreciate that, Harvey."

He had sharp brown eyes that could look through you. At the moment they had gone dull, as if he'd gone away somewhere. “Frank found the solution."

"To what?"

"Genesis.” I stared at him. The eyes came back from wherever they'd been. “He worked out the process by which the first living cells appeared."

The words just hung there. “Are you serious, Harvey?"

He nodded. “You think I'd make jokes about something like that? It's true. At least, as far as we can tell. We haven't run all the tests yet, but the numbers seem to be right."

"Well, you're an honest man, Harvey. You could have taken that for yourself. Claimed credit for a major discovery. Who would have known?"

"What makes you think I won't?"

"How much cash is involved?"

He rubbed his index finger across his mustache. “Truth is, I thought about it, Ron. But I couldn't have gotten away with it."

"Why not?"

"I could never have done the equations. And everybody in the department knows it.” He chuckled. “No, this needed somebody brighter than I am.” He glanced out through the single window at Culbertson Hall, directly across from us. It was the home of the student center.

Bells went off in the building. I listened to doors opening, the sudden rush of voices in the corridors. “What a pity,” I said.

"How do you mean?"

"He makes a major discovery. And is killed before he can announce it. Is it really worth a Nobel?"

"Yes,” he said. “If everything bears out, as I suspect it will. But I think there's a misunderstanding. This wasn't a current set of results, Ron. It looks as if he's had it locked up for more than seven years."

I asked whether he could explain it to me. In layman's language, so I could pass it on to my readers. The short answer was no. But that didn't stop him from trying. I got out my recorder and he started talking about primal conditions and triggers and carbon and God knows what else. “Could we duplicate it in a laboratory?” I asked.

"Already have."

"Really? You've made life?"

"Well, we've done it virtually."

"Okay.” What else would my readers want to know? “Why didn't he announce the discovery?"

Harvey had no idea. “It makes no sense,” he said. “This was the grail."

"What's he been doing since?"

"Refining his results, looks like."

"Stalling?"

"Maybe.” He took a deep breath. “Are you interested in knowing what the odds were against life developing?"

"I've no idea. I've always assumed it was more or less inevitable."

"Not hardly. In fact, if Frank has it right, the possibility was one in trillions."

"That's a big number."

"Actually, it goes up another level. Quadrillions.” He pushed back and the chair squeaked. “That first living thing requires a precise sequence of a long series of extraordinarily unlikely events. Then it has to survive to reproduce. We were the longest of long shots, Ron."

We stood looking at each other. “I guess it explains why those SETI guys never hear anything."

Nobody who knew Gelper could offer any explanation why he might have withheld his breakthrough. When Harvey reported that the testing results continued to confirm everything, I wondered whether he might have been unaware of the implications. “No,” said Harvey. “Not a chance."

So that was how I wrote a story that collected world-wide attention. It's true that hardly anybody in Lockport got excited, but I found myself filing for the A.P. and getting interviewed, along with Harvey, on the Science Channel.

Harvey was getting credit for the work, since he had made it public, and gradually Gelper disappeared into the background. I tracked down a few women who'd dated Gelper on and off, but none of them had suspected he'd been harboring a secret.

Eventually, I called his parents, got the father, and offered my sympathies. He thanked me, but his voice was distant. "You're one of his friends?" he asked.

"I'm a reporter for The Lockport Register,” I said.

"Oh."

"Your son did some very important work, Mr. Gelper. You must be proud of him."

"I've read the stories."

"He did the breakthrough research years ago. But he never released the results."

"So I understand."

"Did he tell you what he was doing?"

"No."

"If you don't mind my saying so, Mr. Gelper, that seems strange. I'd expect you would be the first person he'd confide in."

"Mr.—?"

"Haight."

"Mr. Haight, my son and I have not been close. For a long time."

"Oh. I'm sorry to hear it.” There was silence at the other end. “Can you imagine any reason why he'd have withheld this kind of information?"

"I'm not surprised he did," he said. Then: "Thanks for calling."

"Why?” I asked. “Why are you not surprised?"

"Please let it go."

And I was listening to a dial tone.

He wouldn't agree to an interview. Wouldn't return my calls. So I persuaded Harvey to draw up a departmental certificate of recognition to Francis Gelper. We framed it, and I bought a ticket to Huntsville, on my own dime, rented a car, and drove to Twin Rivers.

Gelper Senior was a retired real estate dealer. He'd been an automobile salesman at one time, had run unsuccessfully for the Twin Rivers school board, and had home-schooled his kids. He was semi-retired at the time of his son's death. Showed up once a week at Gelper and Martin, which specialized in developing new properties.

His wife had, for a few years, been a math instructor at the local high school. They lived just outside town in a two-story brick home with columns and maybe a quarter-acre. A gardener was digging at some azalea bushes when I pulled into the driveway.

Mrs. Gelper answered the door. I'd seen no recent photos of her, but she was easy to recognize. She was well into her sixties, with blonde hair pulled back, blue eyes, and the sort of disconnected gaze that let me know I was of minor significance. “Yes?” she said, glancing down at the envelope in which I carried Frank's award.

I introduced myself and explained that I'd come from Lockport University. In Maryland. She made no move to invite me inside.

"They've issued your son a certificate of appreciation,” I continued.

"Oh,” she said. “That's very kind of them.” We stood there looking at each other.

A voice in back somewhere broke in: “Who's at the door, Margaret?"

She stepped aside and I saw Gelper Senior, Charlie Gelper, who had apparently been asleep on the sofa. “Please come in,” she said. Then, to her husband: “He's brought something. For Frank."

I couldn't say the guy was hostile. But he clearly wanted me out of there. Apparently misunderstanding, he said that Frank was dead.

"It's an award,” I said. “In recognition of his service."

He got up from the couch and watched while I removed the certificate from a padded manila envelope and held it out for whichever of them might choose to take it. Margaret did. She looked at it and smiled. “Thank you,” she said.

Gelper nodded. “Tell them we appreciate it.” I could see the son in the father. Same features, same wide shoulders, same eyes. He waited his turn, took the certificate from her, frowned at it, and said thanks again. The presentation was over.

"I don't know whether you're aware,” I said, “but he's made a significant contribution to his field."

"So we've heard,” said Margaret.

"They're mystified at the school.” I tried to be casual. And of course when you try hard to be casual you know what happens.

She exchanged smiles with her husband. “Can I get you something? Coffee, maybe?"

"Yes, please.” I was grateful she'd loosened up a bit.

Gelper laid the certificate on a side table. We were standing in the living room. They didn't lack for money. Leather furniture. Large double windows looking out on the grounds. Etched glassware. Finely carved bookshelves.

A copy of The Hunting Digest lay on a chair, and half a dozen books were arranged on one of the shelves. The others were devoted to artificial flowers, reproductions of classic art works, and framed photos.

"You from Lockport?” Gelper asked.

"Yes, sir. Lived there all my life."

I steered the conversation onto hunting, admitted I knew nothing about it, pretended it was something I'd always wanted to do. The coffee came. Margaret asked how well I'd known their son.

"Only in passing,” I said. “But everybody he worked with, and his students, all thought very highly of him."

Eventually I was able to get back to Frank's failure to report what he'd found. “It baffles everybody. Harvey, his department head, says if he'd revealed what he knew, he'd have won the Nobel."

Margaret nodded. “I can tell you why he said nothing.” Her voice shook.

"Why?” I asked.

"The newspapers say the process is so convoluted, that it requires such a conjunction of unlikely events, that the odds against it are almost infinite."

"And—?” I said.

"Scientists,"—she said it as if she were referring to a disreputable pack—"were expecting that it would be routine. You get water, and sunlight, and a few basic elements, and next thing you know you have squirrels."

"It didn't work out that way,” I said, trying to encourage her.

She nodded. “No. Despite all the talk, it took the hand of God. That's what Frank proved, what he wanted to deny. It's the fifth day.” Tears were beginning to run down her cheeks.

Gelper came up behind her, held her shoulders, and looked down at me. He was an imposing figure. “He couldn't have stood that kind of result,” he said in a soft voice. “He abandoned his faith a long time ago. I don't know whether you understand what that means. But it's why he kept it quiet. He lived in denial. Denied everything we know to be true.” He looked shaken. “He was denying the Lord right to the end. Think about it. At this moment, our son is in hell."

Well, I didn't know how to respond to that so I said thanks for your time and left. As soon as I was clear of the neighborhood, I called Harvey. “I don't think his folks approved of him."

"You figure out why?"

"It's a religious thing, apparently. They said something about a fifth day."

"It figures. They would have been referring to Genesis, I guess. The fifth day was when God created the first living things."

"It was a sad scene back there, Harvey. I thought religion was supposed to be a comfort."

"Not always. I guess his being gay didn't help, either."

"You didn't say he was gay."

"I couldn't see any reason to spread it around, Ron. I slipped just now, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't print it."

"I won't. But I've interviewed some women who said they had dated him."

"I guess you could say he played both sides of the aisle."

I thought about Gelper standing there trembling and it occurred to me that he was the one in hell.

I rode down to the local library, commandeered a computer, and did a search on Francis Gelper. I'd done that before, of course, when I'd been putting the original story together. Thousands of entries had popped up. Gelper on telomeres for Nature. Gelper discusses evolutionary extracts for The Darwin Newsletter. Gelper on cell cycle checkpoints for Scientific American.

But this time I narrowed the search. I added “gay."

The usual range of off-the-subject results showed up. Joe Gelper plays Gaylord Batterly in Over the Top, with George Francis conducting. Time travel novel Back to the Gay Nineties by Marie Gelper, one of the year's best, according to Mark Francis. Then I saw the one that froze me. It was from something called The Revelation Bulletin:

Exorcism Rites Performed on Three Boys

Twin Rivers, Ala. April 11. Three teenaged boys received exorcism rites this past Sunday at the Divine Beneficence Church. The ceremony was conducted by the Rev. Harry Parver, while hundreds of worshippers watched in awe.

The article went on to name the teens. One of them was Francis Gelper. I checked the date. He would have been fifteen.

I looked up the Divine Beneficence Church, and drove over. It was a picturesque place, not as big as it sounded in the story. It was freshly painted, with a white picket fence sealing off the grounds, and a large signboard exhorting everyone to attend the Mighty Soldiers of the Lord Revival that weekend. The Rev. Parver was listed as rector.

Ten minutes later I was back at the Gelper place.

They were surprised to see me. “Tell me about the exorcism,” I said.

Margaret went pale; Gelper took to glaring at me. “I don't see how it's any of your business,” he said.

"What did he have to do? Stand at the front of the church while all his friends watched? And somebody prayed over him?"

Margaret looked through me. “We had no choice. We were fighting for his soul."

"Did he have to confess his sins to the entire congregation?"

Gelper started for me. “Get out,” he said.

"That explains why he kept it quiet, doesn't it?"

"I already told you why. He was denying his God. No wonder he died young."

He was moving toward me with his fists balled. I'm not normally all that brave when it comes to physical confrontations. But on that afternoon I was in a rage and I stood my ground. “You got it wrong, Gelper,” I said. “He knew the conclusion you'd jump to. That his results supported your notions of creation. And he didn't want that. He wasn't denying God. He was denying your vision of things. He was denying you. He sacrificed everything rather than allow you to misread his work."

Harvey informs me the odds against life in any one place are so remote that they exceed the estimated number of worlds in biozones in the entire universe by a factor of three. If we assume that the sort of life we know, the carbon-based type that needs liquid water, is the only kind possible, then the chances were two to one against the appearance anywhere of a single living creature. We got lucky. That's what Harvey says.

But the estimate of the number of eligible planets is wildly speculative. Nobody has a clue how big the universe actually is. So all the talk about probabilities is, in the end, just talk.

Still, when I look at the night sky now, it's different from what it used to be. It feels cold. And impersonal. Just a machine.

I wonder if Frank Gelper had felt the same way. And if, in the end, that was the real reason he kept everything to himself.

Copyright © 2007 Jack McDevitt

[Back to Table of Contents]

"It's hard for me to believe that Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine has turned thirty. I recall early issues when Isaac himself peeped out of the “O” in Asimov's, issues to which he was a regular contributor. Heavenly days, I recall Isaac, gracious, funny, and smart. There was never a quicker man with a quip, nor a man more concerned to see that his quips gave no one serious pain. He was a man I knew and counted as a friend, and a man I would have liked to know much better. “His magazine is the same way. I've read it since the first issue. I've sold it stories, beginning I believe with “The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus” in January of 1979. I've chatted with George Scithers, Gardner Dozois, and Sheila Williams whenever I got the opportunity. It is one of the few magazines I'll always subscribe to. But I don't know it from the inside, and I'm hoping Sheila will tell us a little about that now.—Gene Wolfe

This celebrated author's most recent books include the two-volume fantasy Wizard Knight series, which consists of The Wizard and The Knight, and Soldier of Sidon, which was published by Tor Books late last year. In his newest story, Gene upends reality to take a disquieting look at life under...

The passage, so narrow his shoulder rubbed its slick walls, ended abruptly at a wide space in which a naked woman sat cross-legged, her eyes closed, as though meditating. He thought of speaking, then of coughing. They seemed to him equally impolite. Silently, he seated himself instead and studied her.

She was young, hardly more than a girl. Brown hair—long, soft, and nearly straight—veiled her shoulders. Her face was lovely without being conventionally pretty, a face (he thought) as pure and clean as spring water. If she was not real...

He admitted the possibility. It was possible, in fact very probable, that she was not. If she was not, he hoped to go insane. To believe her, a soulless phantom conjured from his own fevered imagination, wholly real and as human as he.

Anything else, any smallest shred of doubt, would be unbearable.

She was sitting in the middle of an open area. He propped his back against a featureless green wall and sat facing her. There was no time. No day and no night. His mind wandered, and for the most part wandered among nothing, nowhere.

At last she looked up and smiled. “Hello? Are you real?"

He grinned, “I think so. What are they going to do with us?"

"Watch us together, maybe. If you're real. Can you get us out of here?"

"I can't even get myself out. What about you?"

"No. I—I meet people here. People who aren't real. Some of them are people I know. Knew."

He nodded. “Same here."

"I ask them to get me out. They say they will, or that they'll try. Only I never do. What's your name?"