THE SEA OF DREAMS

by William Barton

William Barton’s science-fictional career began with the publication of Hunting on Kunderer in 1972, and has continued on through dozens of novels and short stories into the impossible-sounding years of the twenty-first century. Of his latest story, he says, “In the multiverse that may or may not exist all around us, you have an infinite number of doppelgangers living an infinite number of lives. And among them, there must exist at least one who, willy-nilly, will live on forever. Are you the one? Of course you are. Who else…?”

I first saw the real Uranus about a hundred years ago, saw it on a cheap television set, while sitting on a ratty couch in the concrete bungalow where I lived alone. It was a time of despair tinted with hope for me, perhaps for the world at large.

I was rid of my troublesome wife at last, but found being the male single parent of an autistic child more difficult than I could have dreamed. Glorious Project Apollo was long gone, but Voyager was showing incredible worlds beyond, the Space Shuttle was flying regular missions, and now here was Uranus, subtle blue featureless perfection on my TV…

A little more than a week later, Challenger exploded in the sky over Florida. And that tint of hope faded from the despair.

From orbit, all you can see of Uranus is the deep, cold, empty blue. Sky blue with a faint aura as of haze. Beautiful blue, the color of a perfect summer sky, the sort of sky Earth hadn’t had for most of that long hundred years. No smog, no clouds, no nothing. Just blue.

I sat in the left-hand command pilot’s chair of my spacecraft, this time the brand spanking new Benthodyne II, fresh from the ERSIE shipyards at L1SE, where my company had its headquarters.

Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise. The name had started as a joke, a generation ago. It fit me. It fit the company, whose stock in trade was the super-secret field modulus device, the magic of inertialess space drives, the magic of antigravity. Hardly anybody knew we hadn’t invented it, had found it in a derelict alien spacecraft in the Fore Trojan Asteroids thirty-five years ago.

Seen through the main freeze frame, picture window, Uranus’s limb was a hump of horizon, looking a little like Earth seen from a low-orbiting space station. Blue, yes, with a faint suggestion of white haze, but unlike Earth, you couldn’t tell where you were or where you were going, or even if you were moving at all, except when the terminator comes over the horizon and swallows you in night.

Ylva’s cameo floated to my left, a little staticky, somewhat time-lagged as she was orbiting Ariel, as ever the beautiful, vivacious blonde turn-of-the-century TV star I’d known since she was merely the computer command subsystem of a little scoutship I’d flown on prospecting missions for Standard ARM. Computer command subsystem incorporating “human CNS tissue.”

An innocent dead woman brought back to life as the operating system of a soulless machine. Well, it had a soul now, and the people who’d done this to her had cause to regret it, the ones who were still alive to regret anything. Quite a few of them had come to a bad end over the past twenty years or so. The Bastards, she liked to call them.

Ylva Johanssen was running my company, and had a share of two Nobels, one for the field modulus device itself, another for the theory of Quantum Holotaxial Dynamics to explain how it worked.

My contribution to that had been to resurrect the word aetherium to describe the dark fluid making up all but a tiny fraction of the universe around us. A universe in which matter and light were merely trace imperfections.

Ylva’s Body Double was in the flight engineer’s seat to my right, hands on controls, eyes on instruments. I believe Ylva only created them so she could have sex with me, but they make handy dexterous manipulators as well, and she breeds them by the dozen in laboratory vacuoles back at ERSIE-HQ.

They’re real women cloned from donated egg cells using nuclei from surviving bits of Ylva’s living tissue deep in the heart of that old spaceship computer, connected to her by hardware embedded in their forebrains, never independent of her supervision, imbued with her personality, animated by her awareness.

Sometimes, when the radio link is a little tenuous, you can see a spark of separate awareness in their eyes.

Ylva’s been studying me for decades, studying to make my life better, studying to make me what she thinks of as happy. She breeds them to match my hormones, to match my desires, to be specially responsive to me. This one was terrific in bed.

Ylva’s cameo made a staticky laugh. “I can tell what you’re thinking by the way you look at her, Mr. Zed. I’m sorry there’s no time for that now.”

“We’ve got all the time in the world, sweetie.” And it was true. Someday we’ll die, someday the odds will beat us, but that inevitable, unavoidable death that hung like a cloud over my first life had been swept away.

The Body Double turned and looked at me, that little spark brightening for just a moment, and flashed a bright smile before looking away. I wonder what she’s thinking? I wonder what she sees? Humanoid with shiny, beaded lizardskin in a tight, transparent spacesuit sitting beside her, talking to a picture of a beautiful woman hanging in the air. Ylva says when we make love the lizardskin feels “nice.” No idea what that means.

My second wife Sarah, the wife of my heart, liked what she called my “fur,” the long, soft black hair I used to have growing most everywhere. Wonder what she’d make of me now? Christ, she’d laugh! Lizardman me, love-slave to a machine? Hah.

“I’m powering up Benthodyne’s DaMNeX system now.” This was the second such ship we’d built, the first one tested on Titan, the next one for use on Venus. If they worked, we’d build a fourth to fly the deadly skies of Jupiter and Saturn. Then we’d start to sell them.

“Do an overlay, will you?”

“Okay.” The Body Double reached out and fiddled with some of the controls. The Dark Matter Neutrino eXchange “radar” system was another ERSIE product to come out of the aetherium. Money piled on money, and with it, you could look halfway through a planet.

“There, Mr. Zed.” The Body Double was pointing into the realtime freeze frame, where a bright bead was coming over Uranus’s limb. Just a yellow dot, some ways below the horizon, something the size of a small yacht the research team on Ariel had spotted floating a few hundred kilometers down in the atmosphere. Something impervious to aetheric waves.

What would that be? Neutronium? A Nivenesque stasis canister? Christ, finding a three-million year old derelict firefox spaceship had been bad enough. Finding a billion year old Slaver artifact would be too damn much.

“Well. Are we ready to go?”

The Body Double whispered, “Ready as we’ll ever be.” Ylva has told me the cloning process shortens their lifespans, that a Body Double accelerated to adulthood will only last five or ten years before going into “irreversible decline.” Don’t worry though, she’d said. I can make as many as we need.

I put my own hands on the controls, felt a little thrill of anticipation, then cranked up the firefox drive. Blue light guttered outside, flickering around the edges of the freeze frame view, and we began to descend.

I came to the pilot side of flying late in life, taking the controls of my first spacecraft when I was in my sixties, not piloting an atmospheric vehicle until I was past a hundred and had gotten down on Titan. When I can, I like to fly in Earth’s atmosphere, reveling in a sense of freedom and history.

You know what’s really cool? People have started calling them “aeroplanes” again, like the people in all those children’s books I inherited from my grandfather. I remember as a kid seeing an aeroplane mentioned in the first tattered Bobby Blake story I read, picturing a 1960s jetliner, realizing with a start he was talking about some old-time motorized box kite.

Benthodyne II wasn’t an aeroplane, more like a flying bathyscaphe with gravity control and a field modulus device for a spacedrive, but it handled like one as we sailed down from starry black space, down into the cool blue skies of Uranus. I could bank and soar, slipping through the haze, and something was making the ship’s artificial gravity field tip and twist just so, giving it a reality all that blue nothing in the external freeze frame couldn’t make come true. That something was most likely Ylva, who knew what I liked in bed and out.

Her cameo blurred and threw off an image of toppling black bars for a moment, then cleared with a faint grain of static, and she said, “I’ve started moving Thermopylae in from Ariel. I’ll take up a synchronous orbit over the artifact so we get a better signal.”

The Body Double looked up from her controls, dark eyes on me, and said, “The updated overlay has finished downloading. Secure for loss of signal.”

Ylva’s cameo cleared abruptly, becoming hard edged and unnaturally sharp. “Twenty kilometers to rendezvous. We’ll start matching velocity now. Vertical vector minus five.” On the live-action freeze frame, the artifact, whatever it was, appeared as a bright smudge in the deep, empty blue.

The Body Double said, “I’ve got it on optical.”

I dropped the displays and there it was, a glimmering speck not so far away, growing slowly in the frame. “I don’t think I expected it to look like a spaceship.”

Ylva smiled, “No way to predict these things. Since we passed ‘Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe’ through the latest version of Dramaturge, I’ve been wanting to design ships like those.”

Flying flatirons? I’d created Dramaturge in my spare time when I was in my seventies, a “dramatic script processor” I’d been dreaming about since I was a boy, software that could make a theatrical-release quality 3D movie out of a production script. It’d been the source of the second fortune I’d lost, and been the basis for a flowering of creativity around the world while I was in prison. A regiment of lawyers retrieved my copyrights and patents from the bastards in the early 2050s, making them pay and pay before Ylva started killing them.

The thing in the freeze frame wasn’t like any of Flash Gordon’s spaceships, not the crude and silly-looking old ones from the movie serials, nor the highly artistic ones Ylva and I had brought forth from Dramaturge 8.0.

But it was a fantasy spaceship nonetheless, with eight stubby vanes around the back end, and a sleek, silvery forebody. No windows, though, and as we did a flyaround, I could see there weren’t any rocket engine bells poking out, just a honeycomb pattern opening on darkness.

Down in the cargo bay, the Body Double and I got into armored jimsuits, the kind originally designed for use on Titan, designed from deep-sea diving suits used on the abyssal plains of Earth. These were beefed up to the limits of ERSIE technology. Good enough for where we were now, though if the equilibrimotors failed, you’d implode long before you fell to the center of Uranus.

Outside, it was like hanging in the sky, like being in a dream, the two ships floating side by side, Body Double in her spacesuit floating beside me at the end of a safety line, Ylva’s little cameo glimmering on the inside of my helmet. She said, “I estimate a hundred meters long. Not much smaller than Benthodyne.”

Not much detail, either. The hull had a vaguely yellowish quality, but it was also highly reflective, now that it had something to reflect, us and our ship, reflective enough it picked up a blue tinge from the all-around sky.

Ylva said, “Nothing on my end, nothing from the ship’s sensors. Highly radar reflective. Impervious to DaMNeX. Ambient temperature at its visible surface.”

And floating here how? Benthodyne was held in position by active application of its modulus fields. Since this thing had no emissions, maybe it was just buoyant. No point in asking that other question: Floating here why?

When we were close enough, doing the flyaround a few meters out, there were details after all. Thin outlines like hatches in the metal, if metal it was, faint etchings that looked like a cross between Chinese ideographs and Sumerian cuneiform. I said, “If it’s writing, it’s nothing like the firefox writing.”

That was an assumption as well. We’d never managed to decode that either. Not enough examples. Not enough context. I suppose the firefoxes were like us, storing most of their knowledge in non-durable media. On Earth, you saw little text any more, just Pay Attention signs and the occasional You’re Not Lost placard. One of the patches of maybe-writing had a thin line around it, one spot on the line dimpled as if with a fingerhole, though it was a little small, fit only for a baby’s finger.

Ylva said, “Move back to the end of the safety line. I’ll have the Body Double try to open it.” A Body Double is expendable. Mr. Zed is not.

I had the freeze frame subsystem make her helmet seem transparent, had it create the image of the Body Double’s head, created from data sensors inside. She was looking at me, face expressionless, eyes dark and unreadable. The little hatch opened easily, and there was a lever inside. “Pull it.”

Ylva’s cameo frowned. “Is that wise?”

“Why else are we here?”

“I wish you weren’t. We have thousands of employees to choose from.”

But they aren’t me. I’m going on fifty years past the end of my natural lifespan, fifty years on borrowed time. I like to think I’ve borrowed it for a reason. “Pull the lever.”

When she did, a section of hull about four meters square detached and swung open on darkness. I laughed, and said, “After you, my dear!”

We turned on our helmet lights and floated into the little chamber beyond the hatch, and pulled the obvious lever that looked like it would close the hatch.

Ylva, staticky face alarmed, said, “We may not be able to communicate…”

When the door shut all the way, a dim, ruddy light came on, barely perceptible against the yellowish glare of our helmet lights. I turned mine off, looked around at what was clearly an airlock, and said, “Kryptonians, maybe?”

Ylva’s cameo had turned to a dark swirl of dull metallic glitter for a few moments, but now cleared, and she said, “The hull’s no longer impervious to some portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, at the airlock door.”

I grunted. As with the firefox ship we’d found on Hector, the technology wasn’t dissimilar from ours. Real human technology, what was available outside ERSIE and its chance bequest of alien space goodies. Toggle switches on the walls. Things like hoses and air tanks. A vent here, a vent there. A glassy thing like an old-fashioned flatscreen monitor.

Ylva’s cameo was still a little blurry and distorted, growing steadily better. “Suit instrumentation seems to confirm the ship is mostly open space.” Which would make it like a modern ERSIE/firefox ship. Before that, human spacecraft had been mostly fuel. “It seems as though the radiation hardening is starting to change throughout.”

I murmured, “Welcome home, whoever you are…”

The Body Double said, “Looks like the atmospheric pressure is dropping.”

“Constituents?”

The constructed image of her head looked in my direction. “It appears the Uranian atmosphere is being pumped out and displaced by a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, helium, and some trace gasses. We’re down below 15psi already.”

“Breathable?”

She said, “If the percentage of oxygen in the mix remains constant, it’ll reach Earth-normal partial pressure when the total is around 10psi.”

With an alarmed look, Ylva’s cameo said, “Stay in your suit, Mr. Zed!”

I thought, Do I look stupid? Wait. Don’t answer that. I’ve gotten in an awful lot of trouble over the years. Trouble that’s gotten some very good friends hurt or killed. I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

The Body Double said, “Pressure has stabilized. There’s an ongoing gas flow probably intended to flush the last outside air away.”

I pointed to another lever, beside what could only be an inner hatch. “Might as well get to it.”

She nodded, and Ylva said, “Be careful.”

The hatch opened as easily as the other one, opening on a dark space beyond. I started to think my helmet light on, hesitated, then felt along the wall beyond the hatch frame. There was a toggle switch there, though much lower than I expected, maybe a foot or so off the deck, and when I flipped it, there was dim red light in what turned out to be a passageway. Some of the other hatches I could see were open, whatever was on the other side still dark.

Another grunt from me, seemingly the extent of my current vocabulary. “Maybe the last guy out the door turned off the lights?”

Voice subdued, Ylva said, “We still had light switches when I was alive.”

Ylva had been killed in a train accident in 2038, almost forty-five years ago, by which time I was on Callisto, doing dangerous, dirty work for Standard ARM. I said, “Still plenty of light switches on Earth. Lots of old houses around.”

When I keyed the equilibrimotor and floated out of the airlock, my helmet made a muffled thud on the overhead. I stretched my feet down and realized the corridor was no more than five feet high, maybe the same wide. “Were they little?”

Ylva said, “Or quadrupeds? The firefox wasn’t bipedal.”

The dead firefox had been an elongated animal shape, with six legs in the places you’d expect, a long, prehensile tail, and ears that had somehow evolved into a cross between arms and elephant trunks with fingers. I floated to the nearest open hatch and flipped on the lights. Some kind of bedchamber, with things like short sleeping bags hanging on the walls. Assuming they were little. If not, maybe those things were just storage containers. The Body Double said, “It looks like they might not have had artificial gravity.”

Ylva said, “Or didn’t like using it.”

I always wonder how much is Ylva speaking through the radio link, and how much originates in that stifled clone brain. I’d always wanted to ask Ylva to shut down the link some time and let me make love to a Body Double alone, but it seemed selfish enough I was embarrassed to ask. I kept hoping she’d guess what I wanted and volunteer, but no luck so far.

It was more of the same as we followed the corridor forward through the ship. Things like bedrooms, dining rooms, kitchens, laboratories with honest to gosh glassware, like they’d gone on a shopping trip to the 1950s or something, things that looked like medical facilities, even something that might have been an operating theater.

The forward end of the corridor opened on a control room, complete with big blank viewscreens and little bucket seats embedded among horseshoe banks of controls.

Strapped in one of them was a small humanoid mummy, arms raised and stiffened in the last place where they’d floated free in front of his face. It was a perfectly formed human being, eighteen inches tall, brown skin leathery and desiccated, shriveled face twisted into a look as of agony, though I suppose it was only the drying process that made it so, and visibly male.

He was dressed in something like a leather parachute harness, straps encrusted with a glitter of tiny jewels, diamonds, I guessed, with a thin leavening of what looked like emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. He wore a tiny dagger with a jeweled hilt on his left hip, and a headdress of some kind. The curled pastel tufts looked like they might have been feathers, once upon a time.

Ylva said, “There’s absolutely no humidity in this atmosphere. He could have been sitting here a year or an eon.”

I leaned close to the little face, trying to read I don’t know what, but it was too far gone, skin turned to leather, eyes sunken in. Nice teeth though. Nice and white, incisors and bicuspids showing past the drawn-up lips.

I said, “Well. Don’t that take the cake.”

Ylva said, “Yes. At least the firefox was decently alien.”

Maybe so, although to me it had looked disturbingly terrestrial, despite the extra pair of legs. It’d had that foxface, those mammalian teeth, that external reproductive organ … even the ears-evolved-to-arms are something you could imagine natural selection developing on Earth.

I said, “Two unrelated artifacts left in one solar system for us to find as soon as we had the wherewithal to do so suggests space may be crowded with civilizations.”

“Maybe not,” said Ylva. “Depends on how widely separated in time they were.”

The Body Double said, “Or left here on purpose for us to find.”

Exploring the rest of the ship, we found a second little mummy in a room that looked like a physics lab of some kind, full of obvious electronics, with dials and flatscreens everywhere, including what I swore was a miniature example of a twentieth-century scanning electron microscope. The mummy was stuck to the floor by a patch of skin, but had otherwise floated up a bit, one leg raised high, blatantly showing us it was female, though where the breasts ought to have been, the skin was so puckered it could have been anything.

When I leaned in for a closer look, Ylva made a wry, sly grin, and said, “If you wait until we get back aboard Benthodyne, I’m sure the Body Double can do better than that.”

I rolled my eyes. Sometimes I feel like I’m being teased half to death by a computer. Then again, that “human CNS tissue…”

We found something like a work of art, a crystalline cube with a tableau of statuary inside. There were four perfectly human men, dressed into those same bejeweled harnesses and feathered headdresses, men armed with swords and spears, surrounding a … well, a thing. It kind of looked like a giant head, a head maybe two feet tall, if those men were the same eighteen inches as the mummified corpses here, a head walking on eight crablegs, brandishing two huge chelae, with which it menaced the spearmen.

Funny looking face, too. Great, big bulging eyes, two vertical slits for a nose, mouth like a sphincter … I snickered despite myself, drawing a puzzled look from the Body Double.

A kaldane? And what would the little men be then, Minunians?

Ylva’s cameo said, “So which Burroughs are you thinking of, William S. or Edgar Rice?” I’d forgotten about that anal typewriter, but Ylva doesn’t forget, can’t forget, anything.

One room we found aft was empty but for a thing that looked like a free-standing bronze mirror, mounted on a universal joint so it could be twisted this way and that. It had a heavy-looking base, and the frame had several panels of controls, inscribed with more of the same presumptive writing we’d seen elsewhere.

When we stepped into the room, Ylva’s cameo suddenly buzzed with dense static, almost obliterating her image, her voice breaking up. Stepping back into the hallway, I said, “So…?”

Ylva said, “Well, the room seems very heavily shielded.”

The Body Double said, “The link bandwidth between us got very narrow for a moment.”

When we stepped back in, Ylva’s cameo broke up again and scrolled away. The Body Double said, “Don’t worry, she can keep the link to me open enough for essential comm to get through. We’ll be all right.”

Her face seemed serene enough. As long as the master consciousness is there, I suppose…

And I suppose this big button right here … when I reached out for it, the Body Double said, “Do you think that’s wise, Mr. Zed?”

I grinned. “Most of the risks I’ve taken have worked out okay.” Most of them. Not all. I pushed the button.

The Body Double said, “The link just broke. We’d better get back in the corridor and see if…”

The surface of the bronze mirror suddenly flashed, was covered with a momentary swirl of rainbows that spilled right out onto the floor, splashed on the walls and went away, mirror transformed into…

I stood transfixed, and said, “You have got to be kidding!”

The bronze mirror, rainbows dissipated, looked like a glowing doorway in the air, an impossible doorway all but hidden in a wreath of pale pink mist, beyond, a 3D vista of gray-green landscape, grass and patchy forest, trees with scaly trunks and ferny fronds. Beyond the trees, I could see bits of yellowish sky, everything blurred by a vague whitish haze.

The Body Double peered through, looking from side to side. “This seems overelaborate for a work of art.”

When I stepped closer, I could see perspective shift, like a very good hologram. I reached out, extending my hand toward where the mirror’s visible surface had been, and the Body Double snapped, “Mr. Zed! Let me!”

I turned and smiled at her, shook my head. “It’s my adventure, sweetie. Ylva knows that.”

“But…”

I continued the movement, expecting my hand to meet a solid surface. It went through, of course, spacesuit glove hanging ridiculously on the end of my arm inside the image. I looked down at my suit displays, at the atmosphere constituents. They’d changed a bit from the oxy-nitro-helium mixture, quite a bit more CO2. I lunged forward through the door, and heard my suit’s servomotors whine. That worried me. ERSIE technology is good. And those motors were supposed to be silent.

“Mr. Zed! No!” She was already beside me, gloved hand clamping at my elbow, dragging me back through the … Well, what do you call a door through hyperspace? A hyperdoor?

“Stop it,” I said, and gestured back the way we came. The image of the door was hanging in the air behind us, floating a foot or so above soggy-looking ground, through it, plainly visible, the room in which we’d been standing.

She said, “This is too dangerous. We need to get back through and talk to Ylva before we do anything else.” Even now, I thought, Talk to Ylva? Weird way to look at it when you…

I pulled hard on her hand. “Come on, kiddo. We’ll just take a look over the crest of that little hill over there, then skedaddle. What harm can…”

The hyperdoor scrolled away into the air, then my suit shut down with a soft whisper of failing fans and a whine of life support systems going down. I had a momentary view of the Body Double’s helmet going opaque, then my own freeze frames went out, leaving me in the dark, listening to the gasp of my own breathing.

Christ, it’s black in here!

Red emergency lights clicked on, showing padded suit liner an inch from the end of my nose, then a little freeze frame came up opposite my eyes, the Body Double’s Ylva-like cameo floating a short distance away. She said, “The emergency suit systems are good for two hours. Since the air here is breathable, I’m going to breach and see what I can do. You stay put.”

I laughed and kicked my chin down hard on the emergency egress lever, which would have unlocked when we went on battery. The suit made a crackling sound in my ears and then broke open, helmet folding back, breastplate and hypogaster opening down the middle, breeks and greaves splitting down to the ankle so I could step right out.

I’d been wearing white sneakers, shorts and a T-shirt when I suited up for EVA, and the Body Double more or less the same, sports bra substituted for the T-shirt. Voice and eyes full of disappointment and despair, she said, “Oh, Mr. Zed…”

I had a momentary pang of guilt, like I’d hurt the woman I loved. Sometimes, lying in bed with a Body Double, sharing her with Ylva, that’s just how it seems, hormones and habits overlaying the brutal facts of harsh reality. Ylva’s just a computer, with a little bit of leftover meat from a woman long dead, and a Body Double’s just a clone, grown in a retort, to be used up and thrown away. But the computer remembers a woman who once was alive. And the Body Double is that same woman made flesh and bone.

Who am I, what am I, against all that? A creepy old lizard who went on borrowed time around the year 2020, who should already have been mouldering in the grave, lo these fifty years and more.

I often wonder what my sweet, lost Sarah would think of the way I turned out. Disappointed at the easy way I adjusted to the free, happy flesh of the Body Double corps? Maybe not. She always seemed to love me for who I was, rather than who she thought I should have been.

I smiled brightly and said, “Cheer up, sweetie. What’s the worst that can happen?” Then I looked around at a yellow sky in misty morning light, and said, “Where the hell you suppose we are? The Permian?”

That was the only time before the Cenozoic when the Earth’s air would have been breathable to a human being. During the Mesozoic, there was five times too much C02 and enough extra oxygen to support spontaneous combustion of forests from time to time. Before that, as you go back in time, less and less oxygen, and up to fifteen times the carbon dioxide levels we call “normal.”

The Body Double bounced lightly on the balls of her feet, and said, “Not Earth. Gravity seems right around point-eight-gee.” In the distance, the near distance at that, a deep throbbing sound boomed, down in the low double-digit hertz. I turned and walked slowly toward the crest of the hill, the same curious crest that had drawn me incautiously through the hyperdoor in the first place, stopped and stared, mouth falling open in an idiot’s gape.

“God damn!” It came out a hoarse whisper as the Body Double came up behind me and placed a delicate hand lightly on my back.

Below us, on an open, gently-rolling yellow plain, was a herd of red, green, and vermilion striped hadrosaurs, a hundred of them, maybe more, walking along, tails held high. And again, one of them lowed, like God’s great Tuba of Doom. No, not the Permian at all.

We spent a fruitless hour beating the bushes for some sign of the hyperdoor, while the yellow light around us shifted higher in the sky, as if there were a sun somewhere, climbing away from morning. Every once in a while, looking upward, I thought I could see a silvery glitter right where the light seemed to originate. Glitter, there in the corner of my eye, then gone when I tried to peer more closely. Averted vision, astronomers call it.

It made me remember Venus. Not the real Venus, where no one had ever been, where no one would go until Benthodyne III was ready to take me there, but some imaginary Venus from my childhood. The Venus of Alendar Vex Nem and Riteryon Orrn, of the Dorvos and Yazmen, the omur forests and the Alaphorden.

We widened our search, finally just walking away, off over the crest of the hill in the general direction of the hadrosaur plains, taking note of landmarks and topography so we could find our way back, when and if.

The Body Double seemed downcast, remote, and I wondered what it must be like. But for brief interruptions, she’d had Ylva in her head from the moment she awoke in her birthing vacuole, a fully formed woman with no memories of her own, no childhood but the one Ylva gave her.

I didn’t know for a few years afterward, but Ylva liked to give them to me as soon as they were born, drying off the amniotic fluid and walking them straight to my bedroom as soon as her dybbuk was downloaded and in control. I liked the fresh enthusiasm they showed. But every now and again…

This Body Double, downcast or not, remained vigilant, remained dutiful, insisting on walking ahead of me, breaking trail through the trackless wilderness of this faux Venus, “just in case.”

God, she’s beautiful. Every one of them. But this one … Walking ahead of me in white shorts and sportsbra, she made me forget where we were, the drift and sway of those hips, the flex of her elegant spine, that mane of ripe wheat hair … I grimaced. Jesus. I suppose if my ass was on fire, I’d still be thinking … and, what if she notices I…

On cue, she stopped walking, turned and looked at me. Smiled. Turned again and walked on. I followed along, dividing my awareness between the ferny gray-green wilderness and the Body Double’s splendid silhouette, wondering where we were and what the hell she could be thinking. Maybe how alone she is? Or maybe how free.

We were following a low, tree-lined ridge, staying off the plains because we were afraid of tangling with the colorful little herds of great big hadrosaurs, when we went through a gap in the vegetation to the other side of the ridge.

The land was higher here and more level, sloping gently away, blue-green mountains hanging in the misty distance. Somewhere in between was a cluster of low brown buildings, compound surrounded by a wall, complete with obvious guard towers. The largest building, in the center of the complex, was vaguely Hagia Sofia in shape, with a crystalline dome glinting in the yellow light.

Beyond the compound was a tall, upright torpedo shape, like a V-2 with sharply swept-back wings added on. Spaceship, I thought. Big. At least two hundred meters tall, maybe more depending on how far … Revolt On Venus? That’s the one. And that would be Rex Sinclair’s plantation, I’m sure. Is the ship Polaris, Tom, Roger, and Astro…?

The Body Double said, “You know we really shouldn’t go any closer.”

There’s a theory about how FTL starships might be made to work, a fanciful theory based on Bohm’s Alternative to the Standard Quantum Mechanical Model. The theory says you can only travel faster than light by traveling through time. And since conformal time enforces its limits through paradox, you can only evade paradoxical time travel by ejecting yourself from one universe and inserting yourself into some other, infinitely similar universe at some earlier time.

A universe that, for its own internally consistent reasons, is ready to receive you. It’s a theory that works as an open door to the so-called Multiverse. And hyperdoor is as good a name as any. I said, “I know. But we will. Come on.” This time, she followed me.

The misty light of the mostly hidden sun was declining in what I assumed to be the west, and I was increasingly aware of another problem we were going to have to face. Eventually, we’d get back to the suits, where we had sacks of nutrient syrup and water that would hold us for a couple of days.

Sooner or later, if we don’t find that damned hyperdoor, we’ll be eating hadrosaur or making contact with whoever lives in the compound. Why hadn’t we included handguns with the spacesuit equipment? Because we just weren’t anticipating a need to be shooting at anyone aboard an obvious derelict.

The Body Double said, “If we start back now, and hurry, we might make it back to the suits and door site before dark.”

“No, let’s keep on. We can climb a tree or something, if we need to.”

We’d covered about half the remaining distance to the spaceship, cutting as close to the compound as we dared, by the time ruddy twilight was turning the sky to blood and coloring the ferntrees black. It was a glorious sight, like nothing I’d ever imagined, every bit as alien as scenes I’d experienced on the truly alien worlds of home, Mars, Titan, Triton, Pluto.

All around us, I could hear the trilling squeaks of spring peepers, making me wonder what they really were. Okay, in dinosaur days, there were little frogs, so … Looking at the Body Double, her face reddened by this gloriously macabre twilight, I said, “Lucky for us no mosquitoes.”

She said, “And probably no bacteria that could infect me, no matter where or when we really are.”

Oh? I said, “Just you?”

A long look, dark eyes so very serious. “I am far more human than you are, Mr. Zed. You may very well be completely immune to all possible bacteria and viruses by now. The drugs…”

“What would happen if you took the antirad drugs?” I wanted to bite my tongue, but it’d slipped out. God damn it, she’s a clone. She’ll die sooner, not later.

But she smiled brightly, teeth glossy pink in the deepening light, and said, “I guess my tits would fall off.”

I laughed, despite myself. “Ylva…”

She raised a hand, “It’s not my name. Not without Her telepresense.”

I could hear the capital letter, a line drawn under her.

“My serial number is BD4048, if you’d like to know.”

Jesus. Her only identity? But I said, “Surely there haven’t been four thousand…”

“Model Four, Number 48.”

Is there a model five yet? God knows what other unkind thing would have come out my selfish idiot’s mouth, but there was the inevitable rustling in the bushes, and we were surrounded by miniature men dressed in jewel-encrusted leather harnesses topped by waving feather headdresses, all armed with spears and swords, all the spears pointed at us.

One of them, perhaps a little more gaily caparisoned than the others, stepped forward, drew his sword, pointed it more or less at my crotch, well above the level of his head, and shouted sternly at me in a gabble of singsong syllables not at all like Chinese.

Silence. Tableau.

Another singsong gabble, a threatening movement with the sword.

Ylva’s Body Double stepped directly between me and all the sharp points, all the razor-like edges, and murmured, “I’ll stall them. You make a run for it.”

I said, “Run? Where, for Christ’s sake?”

She turned on me with an agonized look. “Please, Mr. Zed. You are the Fountainhead. I’m not even real!”

It made me smile, though I think we were in serious danger just then, and said, “Now, what kind of a Fountainhead would pull a chickenshit stunt like that?”

I put my arm around her, looked the little man with his deadly little sword right in the eye, and said, “So. Komodoflorensal, I presume?” I raised one eyebrow, feeling idiotically Spocklike.

More gabble.

“No? All right. Take me to your leader, then.”

The little men were starting to look at one another then, obviously puzzled by something. After a moment, the commander slipped his sword into its sheath, snapped off a sketchy sort of fascist salute, and said, slowly and distinctly, “Kali mera?”

I felt vaguely sick inside, and wanted to say, “It’s Greek to me,” but kept my mouth shut.

The little commander sighed audibly, gestured toward the compound with his spear, and said something, another long string of tonal syllables. I shrugged, and we walked the way he said, the troops falling in behind, marching in step as pretty as you please. You know, when I was a kid, I dreamed this dream ten thousand times. Never thought I’d get here via Uranus, though.

Inside the walls of the compound, which were only around six feet high, they took our clothes away, shoes and all, and put us in a wire-mesh cage, a gaggle of little men gathering around to stare and stare. They seemed startled by me, maybe taking me for a sentient Venusian dinosaur whose existence they’d never suspected until now. Most of their attention went to Ylva’s Body Double, and I can’t say as I blamed them.

After a bit, some obviously high-ranking little men came out and shooed the rest away. The Body Double whispered, “They seem afraid.”

“Whoever they are, I don’t blame them. Imagine if the first crew had set down on Mars back in the 2020s, and found a giant alien lizard in the company of a twenty-foot-tall human female.”

They addressed us in singsong gabble, at first conversationally, then in ever louder tones. Finally, they fell to arguing with one another, and you could hear the utter scorn in one man’s voice. I could imagine the dialogue: “What? You thought they’d speak [whatever]? Doofus!”

I stepped forward then, and said, “Guys? Do you speak anything else?” They shut up, turned and looked, wide-eyed. “Sprechen sie Deutsch? Ni hao bu hao? Cu vi povas diri al me, kie estas la stacio?” A soft whispergabble among them.

I looked at Ylva’s Body Double, BD4048 … Hell, I can’t call her that. She said, “I don’t think they’ve tried other languages, even similar sounding ones. The phonetic structures and tonal variation are too consistent.”

“In a typical group of Americans from the mid-twentieth century, I guess you’d find some other languages. There was some instruction in Spanish and French in public school. And a lot of city kids would know some Italian or Yiddish, depending on who they were…”

They went away, leaving us alone but for one very wide-eyed guard, as the bloody sky turned gradually to black. No stars. No Moon. No nothing. Around what felt like midnight, floodlights went on in the distance, and you could see the silvery nose of the giant spaceship poking above the wall. Sounds of distant voices, shouting instructions, calling cadence, all of it singsong pretty. Distant grumble of big diesel engines. After a while, a horde of little men came and let us out of the cage, little men backing away, pointing spears in our direction, herding us to the wall, where the gates were opening once again.

I said, “Hey, guys? It’s chilly out here now.” I wrapped my arms round my chest and shivered theatrically. “How about our clothes?” Stern gabble of command, gestures with swords and spears. We were marched away naked in the darkness then, surrounded by an inward turning hedgehog of spears.

It took maybe an hour for us to get to the ship and its handling facilities, Body Double taking it all in stoical silence, me cussing whenever I stepped on something sharp or stubbed my toe on some root or rock. Once, there was a deep rumble from the scrubland beside the trail, huge, glowing yellow eyes rising above us, maybe a meter apart, maybe more, and a whole phalanx of spears turned away to face whatever it was.

It shied quickly from the little men’s ruddy flashlights, shied like a beast before fire, but I caught a glimpse of something that looked an awful lot like an allosaur.

Ylva’s Body Double whispered, “I think the flashlights are the same wavelength as the lights in the ship.”

The lost derelict floating in Uranus? I said, “If they can open doors in the air whenever they want, why do they need spaceships?”

When I was eleven or twelve, we had to write a short story as an assignment for seventh grade English class. I’d chosen to write one about a group of men having a desperate adventure on savage Venus, the Venus I still believed in until Mariner II wiped it away the following spring. In the story, the men had aircraft I called cloud skimmers, named after a bird I’d seen in a book, and as my principal plot device I’d had them experience an unusual number of air crashes.

When she handed it back, marked with a B+, the teacher said, “Good story, Alan.” Then she’d laughed. “Don’t you think the cloud skimmers are a little unreliable?” This felt a little like that.

The spaceship, when we got near, was gorgeous, and really all of six hundred feet tall. What would that be, to the little men? Close to half a mile! Back in our own universe, if that’s what was going on here, the biggest interplanetary freighters ERSIE was selling these days were maybe half that, spaceships the size of ocean liners, spaceships as big as the Hindenberg had been.

In the days of rockets, the biggest thing ever lifted off Earth had been a little more than four hundred feet tall. It put the little men’s achievements in sobering perspective.

They got us aboard by lifting us up in the bucket of a huge T-crane, Body Double first, then me. More guards on me, and I guess it made sense from their perspective, me being a giant lizard and all. Maybe it said something about their culture as well, something that made them seem even more human.

We had to crawl through an obvious cargo hatch, into a space maybe four feet high, a wedge-shaped chamber that took up about an eighth of the ship’s circumference, with a sealed, little-man size hatch in the narrow end. There were blankets the size of lap shawls on the floor, a few half-liter plastic containers of water in a wall-mounted rack, a couple of those little pillows they used to give you on long-range airliners, back in the day.

Thumpings outside.

Shiverings in the ship.

Ylva’s Body Double was sitting with her back to one bare wall, knees drawn up, dark eyes on me. One look, and I felt a pulse of exasperation at myself. One of the irksome and ridiculous things about being a human male, even one who had been made into a goddam immortal lizard, is when the right cues are present, you can’t think about anything else. And I could see, once again, the Body Double could tell exactly what I was thinking.

There was a deep rumbling from below, followed by a moment of silence, then a faraway whine, a soft shivering in the deck, a complex whipcrack thud from somewhere far below, and the ship swayed like it was about to topple, and a brilliant blue-violet glare started to build up in the portholes.

The ride to orbit was long and violent, spaceship rattling around us, as if threatening to shake right apart, rising through clouds and sky, up into starry black space, pinned to the floor by four or five gee.

The ship accelerated just that hard for many minutes while we slid this way and that as it twisted and turned with rough steering that made me realize how primitive its technology must be. Primitive? Hell, only compared to ERSIE’s found firefox drive. From the placement of hatches and motors, this ship was no more than half its volume fuel. What would that be? Not fission or fusion, like what we’d had before the field modulus device made its magical debut.

Some ultra-dense fuel; some magically high specific impulse for the reaction engine? Working fluid injected through a quantum black hole on its way to the nozzle? Without direct control of the fundamental forces of the universe, space travel was hard bordering on impossible. And this ship was a wonder of engineering skill.

When the engine shut down, we floated off the deck, blankets and pillows rising around us like cartoon ghosts. I felt my stomach flipflop, my gorge rise, then my “space legs” reasserted themselves from decades of zero gee travel, and I pushed gently over to the nearest porthole.

Outside, swirly yellow Other Venus was shrinking visibly, letting us know how fast we were climbing away, bound for who knows where. Off to one side, the sun seemed a lot larger than it had from real Venus, when I’d visited the space station the Chinese had in orbit there. Bigger, and strangely colored. Though astronomers refer to our sun as a yellow star, the light from the sun is white, and it looks like a searing hole in the sky. This one? Orange maybe, tinged toward red. Still too bright to look at, though I supposed these portholes were tinted, and UV-opaque as well, but not … hell. It looks like a star in a Bonestell painting.

The Body Double said, “Maybe a week to Earth, or just a little more. I can’t say without a direct velocity measurement.”

“As good as an ERSIE ship, in that regard.” I wondered what the Earth of these little men would be like, picturing everything from tiny American cities to the giant mounds of the Ant Men. Trohanadalmakus, Veltopismakus, all the wonders of that imaginary past. I figured we’d find out soon enough. Turned out to be a bad guess.

The week went by, then another, estimated by our consumption of water, by the delivery of meals in an otherwise empty elevator beyond the little axial door, by the steady shrinking of the red-orange sun outside. Nothing else moved, fixed stars staying far away as always.

Zero gee sex is fun, the same way swimming pool sex is fun, especially when you have a partner so utterly devoted to doing everything you want, just the way you want, and I eventually stopped imagining the little men greedily watching us over hidden cameras.

Hell, maybe by now we’re the biggest porn stars in Minuni!

But everything gets old, too, like having pizza every day for a month. Sooner or later, you find yourself staring out the window, twiddling your toes, and wishing you had something else to do. Anything else.

The view out these windows wasn’t too interesting either, once Venus dwindled away to a dot eventually lost in the sea of stars. I kept looking along what the Body Double and I agreed was the ecliptic, thinking this one or maybe that one might be Earth…

“Ylva…”

She drifted over to look out the porthole beside me. She’d gotten used to me calling her by that name sometimes, though I could tell she still didn’t think it was right. But Body Double wasn’t right either, nor Forty-Forty-Eight. I said, “That red spark over there. Mars?”

“Maybe.” Then she said, “Draw a line from the center of the visible sun to the red spark. See the two yellows in between?”

“Yeah?”

“One’s the Venus we came from, and the other one, if I’m judging its movement correctly, would be Earth.”

Huh? I said, “It’s not blue enough to be Earth.”

“No. And your vision is considerably better than an unmod human, Mr. Zed. Do you see the Moon?”

I looked hard. Averted my eyes a fraction of a degree, and looked harder. “No.”

“It’s in the right orbit to be Earth.”

Okay. It’s some other universe. No reason there shouldn’t be something different in Earth’s orbit. What was in Venus’s orbit wasn’t really Venus either.

She said, “Follow that same line to the left. See that orange dot?”

I did. “Jupiter? Seems awfully bright.”

She nodded. “Saturn’s probably on the other side of the ship. I can’t find it, anyway.”

“So…?”

She said, “I think that’s where we’re going.”

I put my arm around her, holding her close, glad to feel her ever-so-human warmth, something I’d been doing more and more as the trip wore on. I think she liked it too, though it was hard to tell. Ylva Herself had done just too fine a job making the Body Doubles like what they did.

Sometimes I like to meditate before the urn of Sarah’s ashes on the rare days I’m in my office at ERSIE headquarters. When I was a young man, I thought the “snuggling” women loved to bleat about was ridiculous, some bizarre mechanism, like social dancing, to claim a man’s gift of intimacy without giving sex in exchange.

Sarah had taught me there might be something to it after all.

Sorry I got you killed, kiddo. It was an interesting old life.

I said, “Oddny.”

The Body Double looked at me curiously. “Odd knee?” She showed just a spark of human amusement. “I’ve got two knees, Mr. Zed. Which is the odd one?”

I laughed, marveling at just how real she’d become. “Oddny was the name of one of Orm and Ylva’s daughters. The quiet one.”

Puzzled look. “Ylva Johanssen’s daughter was named…”

I put a finger to her lips, silencing her. “Red Orm. Franz Gunnar Bengtsson.”

“A book?” She got a faraway look then. “Ylva has read it, read it to her real children when they were young. The plot was never added to my memory store.”

I felt a pang of sorrow for her then. “I think I may have read it fifty times when I was a boy. I’ll tell you the story, if you like.”

Eyes on me then, eyes very wide, something in them I couldn’t read at all, a misty gloss, almost like unshed tears. “Tell me the story, Mr. Zed. Please.”

Oddny’s not your name, my dear Body Double, but it’ll do. And Mr. Zed? Not my name, but it’ll do as well. No sense in you calling me Alan Burke. He died in prison, some time in the late 2020s.

Then I said, “‘Many restless men rowed north from Skania with Bue and Vagn, and found ill fortune at Jorundfjord; others marched with Styrbjorn to Uppsala and died there with him…’”

Before the story was finished, Other Jupiter grew vast and orange in the porthole, lit from within, hanging like a Chinese lantern in the black sky, then a blue-yellow-white world swelled below us, and the ship’s engines went on, pressing us to the floor.

Before the story was finished, I could see, Oddny became real to herself. I wondered how that story would turn out, too.

The ship made a rough landing, shuddering as it backed down through thickening air and the sky turned blue-violet outside. I wondered which world this was supposed to be in the table of otherwhen equivalents, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto. None of those, surely. What it looked like was a terraformed Luna, set in orbit around a not-quite-stellified Jupiter, even to the five interconnected seas on the side facing us.

Once the ship was down, three wary little men dressed in feathers and leather came from the axial elevator door, two holding us unnecessarily at swords’ point while the last put us in cuffs and leg irons that, on the scale of little men, might have been suitable for King Kong.

The cargo hatch in the side of the ship opened and we were lowered to the ground one at a time, down to the burnt and cracked concrete of the landing apron, where I stood gaping at the sky. Deep blue indigo violet, with skerries of soft pastel clouds, beyond, banded Jupiter hanging aglow, while the sun was a shrunken red orb settled above the horizon.

Gabbling little men with spears marched us over to what was unmistakably a flatbed truck, made us get aboard and sit down. When the engine grumbled to life, she sniffed and said, “Diesel.”

“You’d think they could do better.”

The city streets were lined with staring little people, voices like a trillion warbling birds. Once again, they seemed much more interested in Oddny than in me. Would it be that way on Earth? Would goggle-eyed throngs ignore the captive dinosaur in favor of gazing enraptured at a beautiful naked giant woman? Of course they would.

The city itself … strange. Call it Russo-Sino-Mayan architecture, with blue-painted onion domes and golden spires mixed among the step pyramids and pagodas.

Eventually, they backed the truck through a big door in the side of a cavernous empty building, a warehouse maybe, made us get off onto the grease-stained concrete floor, and brought down the overhead doors. There was a heavy thudding of massive latches slamming home, then nothing more.

“Christ, wouldn’t’ve hurt them to take off the cuffs and give us blankets to sit on.”

Oddny said, “They’re treating us badly by any reasonable standard.”

Who’s to know what’s reasonable treatment to them? “They’re not really human so…”

“I think they are.”

“Really? Midgets?”

She smiled and shrugged, splendid to behold. “More like Pygmies.”

“Hmh. Pretty little for Pygmies. Puny even as Hobbits go…”

There were windows running around the upper part of the walls, much too high for a little man to see out, so obviously meant to admit daylight. I could see out by standing on tiptoe, out into the city and landscape beyond. “We’re in some kind of industrial park, I think. Probably the best they could do.” Until a cage in the city zoo is ready, maybe?

I reached up and tapped the glass, which seemed pretty sturdy. From outside, I heard a faint singsong gabble, and a couple of spearpoints waved into view.

She said, “Does it seem odd to you they have high acceleration interplanetary spacecraft, and run around with swords, spears, no guns?”

I said, “Nothing since we went through the hyperdoor back on Uranus has seemed anything but absurd.”

She smiled. “I think the leg irons are going to make sex a little difficult.”

Made me laugh. “I’ll live, Oddny.”

A shadow crossed her face. “You have to.” Then she whispered, “Thank you for the name.”

In the morning, I was a little stiff and tired, Oddny, being merely human but for the now-silent radio link in her head, perhaps a little more so. We’d talked far into a night of unknown length, about where we were, where we’d been, what we’d seen since coming through the hyperdoor from the derelict ship on Uranus.

I wondered if Ylva was trying to find us. Were armies of ERSIE security men even now bursting through the hyperdoor onto Other Venus, seizing the little men in the compound, making them tell where we’d gone? Maybe they’d be bringing an ERSIE warship with a field modulus device through bit by bit and assembling it. I had a feeling there’d be nothing in this universe that could stand up to even the smallest of my light cruisers.

We’d snuggled as best we could, and talked a little bit about ourselves, about my worn out and refurbished life after life, about Oddny’s … no. Not the real her slowly emerging from the shadows. Just about the joys of being a Body Double, about how much she missed Ylva’s presence.

She asked me to continue the story of Orm and Toke, and of the men who’d rowed for My Lord Almansur, and I did, until finally we slept, awakening to the gleam of a strange vermilion dawn. No idea how long the night, but surely we hadn’t slept for days, while this moon swung round Jupiter to face the sun again.

Not long after sunrise, there was a muffled commotion outside, a gabble of singsong voices, a rattle of keys in the lock of a small personnel door beside the large one through which we’d been delivered. When it swung open, we could see a leather-clad little man with a notebook divesting himself of sword and baldric. He came in, and they locked the door behind him.

I said, “Buddy, I guess you’ve got balls, however small.”

He looked confused, then, in an odd, melodious accent, said, “I be Teng kai Kal, Machine Era’s chiefest student. You be Machine Man and…” A puzzled look at Oddny, a long, deeply admiring look, but puzzled nonetheless, “not Machine Man, not Immortal, not Dream Time primitive be surely! What?”

I grinned and said, “Piss poor grammar, but I’m glad you speak even a little English. Neither one of us knows a real word of Greek.”

Puzzled. He opened his notebook to somewhere in the middle, leafed around a bit, looked irritated, and said, “English? Greek?”

It dawned on me the notebook might be a handmade dictionary. “English is the language we’re speaking now. Greek is the one…” I gestured to him, and to the door.

It got a blank look of amazement. “This Machine Man Speech. I … we … Zei.” He turned toward Oddny again, walked toward her, walked around her, looking upward, then looked away, shaking his head. When he got back to me, he said, “Find Machine Man on Aphrodite be nonsense. Machine Men not transcendent. Machine Man with Dream woman?” An angry look, a threatening shake of the notebook. “Agent of Deep Time? Tell me or…” Or else.

I sat down so my face was at his level, and looked him in the eye, which seemed to make him uneasy, though my eyes are the most human thing about me. “Listen carefully, Mr. Teng kai Kal. I have no idea what you’re talking about. What the hell is a machine man?”

He tucked the notebook under his arm and stared at me for quite a while, eyes trying to drill into my head, then he said, “Machine Men emerge from Dream Time, travel to stars, see all wonders, come home to die, and leave all knowledge to Immortals. All gone. Long time gone.”

Oddny whispered, “He’s saying he thinks we came through time?” You could hear the word impossible in her voice.

His head snapped around to look at her, eyes wide, then back at me. “Dream woman smell is … penetrating. Distracting.”

I snorted faintly. The poor bastard has no idea how much Ylva Johanssen pumped up the pheromones of her Body Double corps, in the interests of making scaly old me hot to trot. “Is she right?”

A troubled look. A shrug. “Machine Men no transcendent. Immortals no transcendent. Surely not Dream People! Deep Time souls on Ares? Maybe so. Titanides say…” Then a return of the angry look, a narrowing of his eyes, as of suspicion, of tricking me!

I said, “Can you see all this doesn’t mean a damned thing to either of us?”

But Oddny said, “The sequence … Dream Time, Machine Era, Immortals, Deep Time…”

A grudging look of understanding, “What you know else? After Deep Time?”

She said, “Here and now?”

He said, “Where you think people of Zeios come from? Who made we?”

I said, “I bet the answer’s not along the lines of God, is it?”

“And who are the Deep Time souls? On Mars, you said. Martians?”

Sirens began wailing far away, just as a pearly light began twinkling in the slice of sky visible through the high windows of our warehouse. There was a banging from the door, and our interrogator looked frightened, turned away and ran, shouting something in that godawful rendition of Greek. The door opened to let him out and banged shut, bolts crunching in the locks.

More shouting. More sirens, and louder now. “Now what?” When I stood on tippy-toe at the window, I could see a molten star dripping high in the sky, throwing off a milky radiance bright enough to cast shadows through the orange light of Jupiter and the Sun. From the spaceport, a roar, and, one, two, three, things like missiles lifted off. Not missiles, no. They looked more like mid-twentieth-century jet fighters, like F-104 Starfighters propelled off their pads by solid fuel rockets, turning, dropping the boosters to continue onward, spewing bright jets of brilliant blue flame, turning toward the molten star, which ripped open, expanding into a black patch of sky through which I could see stars. One of the Starfighters fired a small missile toward it, a speeding fleck of white light, but before it got there, a squadron of flying saucers came whirling through.

I looked away, looked at Oddny, and said, “You know, if Godzilla comes trampling over that cityscape some time in the next five minutes, I won’t be a bit surprised.”

She nodded, and said, “I wonder if it’s possible for a Body Double to lose her mind and have hallucinations.”

When I looked back at the scene in the sky it was in time to see a green ray, straight as a laser beam, spring from one of the saucers and pick off the speeding missile, which ended in a misty globe of light. Then it took out the rocket ships, one, two, three.

The sirens were still wailing and I could see crowds of little people, running through the streets. That sound? Screaming. The saucers descended, formation breaking apart, going in different directions, swooping over the rooftops, firing their rays down into the city. Wherever the rays touched, there would be a misty explosion.

Oddny said, “You’d better get away from the window, Mr. Zed. Flying glass could put your eyes out.”

But … I want to watch … The was an explosion nearby, making the building shudder, putting a long sinuous crack across the window in front of me. I backed away toward a solid wall. A patch on the big door through which we’d been delivered turned hazy green, shimmered, shivered, and dissipated away into a hole with glowing edges. A little man dressed in a plain leather harness and close-fitting silver helmet, holding an obvious ray gun in one hand, stepped carefully over the hot metal.

Spying me, he shouted something over his shoulder, then ran bright eyed to stand before me. “By Hera, the spies were right!” It was an accent would do Ronald Colman proud. “The Jovians did find a Machine Man on Venus.” Then, he turned a stunned look at Oddny, who smiled and struck a pose.

The Titanides in their plain leather harnesses managed to get the warehouse door open so we could step through to the loading dock, once they’d rayed off our chains, down to the crater-pocked parking lot where a ten-meter-across flying saucer was parked. Here and there were gaily feathered and brilliantly bejeweled Zeian fighting men, sprawled dead among their weapons, hacked bloody with swords or with limbs burnt away, presumably by fiery green rays.

I dismissed them, trying hard not to think, “got what they deserved,” and looked instead at the landed saucer. It was a flat, grayish metal disk with a matte finish, clear dome cockpit lifted open on a hinge. There was a control panel inside, and several other seats, which little men were working quickly to dismount.

The Titanide who’d rescued us gabbled with his crew, then turned to us, and said, “Honored Machine Man,” a sidewise look at Oddny, “Machine Man and companion, it will take us a short while to make room for you, then we can be away.”

I gauged the space would be there with the seats gone and the dome shut, and said, “What about your people?”

He seemed to smile. “As soon as we are away, other ships will land and pick them up.”

“Good. I wouldn’t want any harm…”

He said, “The life of a transcendent Machine Man is more important than any number of Titanides. Even if I…”

Oddny muttered, “He knows who matters…”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s silly. He has no idea who we are.” As if who we really are could possibly matter, wherever/whenever the hell we may be!

She said, “He thinks he does.”

A gabble from the now stripped saucer, mass of crewmen spilling away, and the little man gestured us up under the dome, where we lay down, carefully curled inside the gasket seal, heads down. We were joined by a slim, beautiful woman, hair as shiny and black as an obsidian blade, who sat in the remaining seat, hands on the controls.

The little man worked a lever that brought down the dome with a soft hiss, pressure differential popping in our ears, then he banged a little fist on the plastic and gestured to his pilot, up, up and away.

The saucer lifted without any sense of movement, other than the sight of ground dropping away, tilting as it fell, gravity rock-steady toward the keel. Oddny said, “No field modulus exhaust light. Maybe better than what the firefoxes left us?”

The little man stood and came to stand inside the curve of our two bodies, while we sat up as best we could, half reclining, heads brushing against the hard plasticky stuff of the dome. “I,” he said, “am Kam-Ren Vaad, commander of the First Titanide Space Fleet, commodore of the Jovian Emergency Intervention Squadron. This,” a gesture to the pilot, “is my most beloved companion, Princess Tah-Ren Aruae of the Sanhejazi Lineage.”

He went on, “Titanide scholars have learned the names of many great historical figures from that long ago age, Honored Machine Man. Perhaps they will know of yours?”

Who might you be? he asks. Anyone that matters? That fabulous Man Who Counts? And what to tell him? Burke the Jerk, little boy everyone scorned? Alan Burke, who one fine day, with a few of his very good friends, Changed Everything, and then was destroyed because he trusted the world a little too much? Or…

I said, “They call me Mr. Zed. And this is my most beloved companion, uh … Oddny. Oddny, who was once a Body Double of…”

Who are you now? Not the Body Double of Ylva anymore, surely? Who do I want you to be? Ylva Herself ? No. I want … an image of lost Sarah’s face came and went like a fleeting ghost.

Oddny, with some mixture of horror and joy, said, “Mr. Zed! I am not…”

You could see the two Titanides react as though struck, faces filling with strained incredulity. Kam-Ren Vaad gasped audibly, looking at the woman, then back at me. “Mr. Zed.” Disbelief.

The woman, Tah-Ren Aruae, white as a cartoon ghost beneath her sparkling black hair, said, “The first Machine Man!?”

Vaad said, “Who would have expected such a…” then he turned to face Oddny, face filling with wonder. “And you. You would be an avatar of the Goddess Ylva?”

Goddess Ylva. Oh, great bleeding Christ.

Oddny said, “I am one of her Body Doubles, yes. One of many.”

“Imagine,” said Aruae from her pilot’s chair.

“No need to imagine anymore,” said Vaad, standing stunned between us. “Now we can know!”

Up we rose, away from the little world of the Zeians, up to that starry rip in the sky, rip already beginning to contract back into a bright, dripping star, other saucers rising, pursued by missile-firing rocket starfighters, until we flew through the hole in joined formation, sky suturing itself behind us.

In this new sky, this starry sky, yellow Saturn hung like yet another Chinese lantern lit from within, rings and all, in the distance the substantial marble of a smoky red world, quite obviously Titan. I said, “The rings…”

Vaad looked up at Saturn, and said, “When the Deep Time souls on Mars made men, and made all the worlds fit for us, they recreated the rings of Saturn as well, for reasons of their own.”

The souls who made men, for reasons of their own. Gods of myth? Somehow, I found myself doubting that. And doubting it, I simply asked.

Human beings, he said, began as if in a dream, and they dreamt on until they made machines that could dream as well. The men and their dreaming machines escaped from Earth, and, in time, learned what was real and what was not. Mighty in their self-confidence, arrogant in their sense of power, they went out into the larger universe, where they were torn asunder and destroyed, until the few survivors limped home like whipped dogs.

Home where they became pale, genderless, Immortal beings, afraid to venture forth ever again, afraid to do anything but live forever. Almost forever. Some died by mistake, others from boredom, and still others lay down to sleep, never to waken again, while the engines of the Earth grumbled to a halt and the sun guttered for want of refueling.

As we rode down through the swirling cloud formations of smoky red Titan, I was struck by memories of my own real Titan, from that first landing I made in the Benthodyne I prototype, when … Ah. Real? If what this Titanide says is really so, this is the real Titan as well, changed by those so-called souls on Mars. Terraformed? Not really possible. And yet…

Kam-Ren Vaad said, “We were surprised to the point of disbelief when our agents among the Zeians told us a Machine Man had been found on Venus. A Machine Man and a Dream Woman, still incredible even when they transmitted images. I … how did you come here, Mr. Zed? You of all possible Machine Men?”

I told him about the derelict ship floating in the atmosphere of Uranus, and about the mysterious hyperdoor. “Something of yours? Like the door in the sky between Jupiter and Saturn?”

Vaad and Aruae exchanged a long look, then he said, “Not one of ours, no. Something we tried to steal.”

In a wistful voice, Aruae said, “More successfully than we thought.”

When we burst from the lowermost cloud deck, the surface of Titan was a breathtaking vista, sprawled below in rust-colored light, mountains and plains, hills, fields, rivers and valleys and sparkling gray seas. Not like the real Titan, so cold, so dead … but the Titan in my memory had all those things too, more of a world than anywhere else in the solar system other than Earth itself.

I always dreamed of seeing another world, a real world, before I died, dreamed that dream all my life, dreamed it with such an intensity it was the thing kept me alive, long past the day I should have slipped under the sod forever. I worked for the day we would build a ship that could slide across the gulf between the stars, to the dead old earthlike world astronomers told me circled Alpha Centauri B, to the tantalizingly “habitable” world our instruments said was way out at Delta Pavonis.

As the saucer squadron swept down toward a gleaming marble city, a city of spires and domes and step pyramids, much like the ones the Zeians had, but cleaner in form, Vaad asked me a series of questions that boiled down to, How did you become the first Machine Man?

I thought about it, then told him a simplified version, about those unexpected side-effects of the antirad drugs, and then about my discovery of the lost firefox ship on Hector. “You told me the Machine Men went out to the stars and came home beaten. Was it the firefoxes did us in?”

“We only know a little about the end of the Machine Man Era. The Immortals didn’t care to remember what happened, and consequently didn’t pass it on. But no, it wasn’t what you call firefoxes that did it. They were merely the servants of larger masters, as I understand it, and all that happened is, humanity got caught by an unfortunate crossfire in the war between the Starfish and the Spinfellows. We don’t know anything about them other than their names, and that they fought for a long time, for unknown reasons. The galaxy is theirs. Maybe the universe beyond.”

Hubris, they say, invites the wrath of the gods.

As with their spacecraft, the Titanides had better technology on the ground than their Zeian counterparts, and rode us through their capital city on something like a flatbed truck, but one that floated a meter or so above the pavement, drifting along in silence, taking us along avenues lined with staring, whispering throngs on the way to one of their marble palaces.

When I asked, Vaad admitted the technology wasn’t theirs to be proud of, merely found, sometimes stolen. “I should have guessed,” he said, “the start of the Machine Man Era might be something similar. So long ago, though, I thought surely…”

“And yet,” said Aruae, “we knew from our history the Spinfellow-Starfish war had been going on since before primordial slime came to life on Earth.”

Here, unlike before, more of the attention was on me, on what I was, than on Oddny’s lovely pieces and parts. More serious, these people? No. Merely more worshipful of the past. And me, the First Machine Man, the Wonderful Mr. Zed? A little bit, I gathered from Vaad and Aruae, as though I were Jesus Christ resurrected to a cavalcade through the streets of twenty-first century Rome.

Imagine the atheists equivalent among them, shivering and wondering what to believe and what to repent.

The place they took us was like a vast banquet hall, with doors so tall we only had to stoop to enter, a ceiling so high we could stand erect. They’d pulled the furniture aside to the walls and spread layers of blankets on the middle of the floor, each blanket no larger than what you’d give a baby, but soft, and enough of them in aggregate made a decent place for us to rest.

Aruae said, “I suppose you’re both hungry? The Zeians aren’t known for the quality of their hospitality.”

I laughed, and so did Oddny. She’s getting better at it, better at everything human, with the passage of days. That flat affect, that obedient affect … It’s easy to imagine you’ll be content with a woman who does what you want, until you meet one who knows what she wants, does that, and it turns out to be what you wanted, after all.

I was beginning to remember what that had been like in the long, long ago.

Dinner turned out to be platters of steaming steaks, meat sort of halfway between beef and chicken, maybe a little bit like ostrich, though it’d been so long since I had that I couldn’t really remember, steaks smothered in some kind of spicy green relish. Among the vegetables were marble-sized things like some improbable cross between baked potatoes and Brussels sprouts, suspended in a hot clear gel that tasted something like cheap margarine and a little more like K-Y Jelly.

I ate it all, hardly noticing, and watched Oddny eat, ever so delicately, and with rapt enjoyment of each taste, every new sensation. Alive for the first time in her life? Hard to know. Hard to ask. And how old is she? I thought back to the night she was first delivered to my bedroom door. Two years? Maybe a little more than that? God. I imagined her coming to life in a clonage vacuole, more or less like awakening in a coffin full of bloody mucilage.

What must that have been like?

Why am I afraid to ask? I’ve seen it done, I know what it looks like, seen how they react when they see first light. Seen the amazement, bewilderment, confusion.

I think if I ask, it’ll make her unhappy. Afraid that she’ll remember how she was delivered to my bedroom for ceremonial rape and unwilling orgasm, afraid that she’ll remember the terrible rider in her head, my happiness her will to live.

Oddny looked up at me, eyes aglitter, wiped the shine of K-Y Margarine from her lips with the back of one hand, and smiled. “I used to wonder,” she said, “at the evident pleasure with which you ate. I’ve begun to understand.”

After dinner, as we drank from what looked like used paint buckets filled from entire bottles of a gassy beverage that tasted horribly like cheap muscatel mixed with quinine water, the Titanides set up a projector that tossed a cube of misty light into the air before us, a cube filled with 3D images. “On the trip back from Jupiter,” said Vaad, “I told you something of the broader outlines of history, filling the billions of years from your time to ours.”

“How many billions?”

He shrugged. “We just don’t know. Three, maybe? The Immortals meddled with the sun, kept it lit and Earth’s geochemical cycle running for a long, long time.”

“They erased the evidence,” said Oddny.

“Yes,” said Aruae. You could see the curiosity in the tiny woman’s eyes, her questions obviously similar to mine: What can it be like to be such a creature? But a woman will wonder about it differently than a man.

The cube of light filled with the shape of a slim young girl, a little more than a child, you could see, but not much. Slim, pale, without breasts, short mouse-colored hair on her head and between her legs. Pretty, I suppose, but not much else. Vaad said, “This is what Immortals made themselves to be, not long after the end of the Machine Man Era. All we know, we know from scraps of old art found among the last ruins they left, on Venus and on Earth’s moon.”

I said, “What’s on Earth itself ?”

“Nothing. At some point, it was burned clean, seas boiled, crust reduced to lava. It’s cooled in the two hundred million years since, but … stone and salt water, air that’s mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide. If the sun were still as hot as in the past, no one would be able to go there.”

Oddny said, “Were they all women?”

Aruae said, “No. They made themselves genderless, and the female appearance is merely an illusion from the absence of male externals. If they had anything internal, or any mechanism for sexual activity, we don’t know about it.”

Vaad: “To us, these people aren’t even the stuff of legend. We learned about them only recently, through archaeological research on the inner planets.” Like Sumer and Meluhha, forgotten to history, resurrected by science. “No, all we knew about them was…” The image in the cube swapped out for one of the supposed kaldanes, like a frightful head riding on the back of a giant crab.

I said, “We saw an image of one of those aboard the derelict ship at Uranus, surrounded by spearmen of your race. It looked to be a little taller than you.”

He nodded. “Maybe a third of your own height.”

I wonder how I would feel, confronted by any sort of human being close to twenty-five feet tall? I’d feel afraid.

Aruae said, “These are what we call the Souls on Mars.”

Oddny said, “Why souls?”

The woman smiled. “Old legends. No more than that. In holy books, the story is, the Souls on Mars knew their kind would one day be gone, and they made a successor race to live on planets they created around Jupiter.”

“So where did the Souls come from?”

Vaad said, “From what we’ve been able to piece together, they are what’s left of the Immortals.”

“What changed them from that to this?”

“You’d have to ask them. We don’t know.”

I said, “They look like something from a story.”

“A Dream Time story?”

“I guess you’d call it that.”

He frowned. “Maybe they knew the story. And do we…” You could see the idea made him unhappy. These beings are the gods who made men, made us, and to think it might have been something trivial…

I said, “Maybe. Are they still there on Mars?”

He nodded. “The Zeians took up space travel more or less on a whim, just a few hundred years ago. Established commerce among their four worlds, settled the empty world they found around Saturn, sent ships to explore Mars, Earth, and Venus…”

Oddny said, “That doesn’t tell us about the Uranus vessel, or about the hyperdoors.”

Vaad said, “A little while after the Titanide War of Independence, we started sending probes to Mars. Satellites to photograph the surface, then manned ships that set down in a remote place far from where the Zeian ships were lost.”

“Why?”

“We could see whatever lived on Mars had technology beyond our wildest dreams. Technology we coveted.” He waved a hand around, taking in the city, the whole of his little world. “Everything you see here, everything that makes us better than the Zeians, makes it impossible for them to come and put us back in their control, was the fruit of that first expedition.”

“I take it there was another one.”

“The first expedition identified what we thought was an interstellar vessel from the Age of Immortals, one of the ships they used on resource expeditions to the nearby stars. Some theorized further, that it might be a Machine Man starship…”

Aruae said, “Whatever it was, we wanted it.”

“Especially after the second expedition sent an encrypted report about other things they’d found. When we found out about Martian Transcendence Portals … well.”

Oddny said, “Is Transcendence what you call time travel?”

Another shrug. “That’s what we think. It’s not what we know. Our scientists think the only way to travel faster than light is by traveling in time as well.”

I said, “Not quite,” and told him a little bit about theoretical travel through the conformal and probabilistic spacetime matrices.

“So they knew these things at the beginning of the Machine Man Era? It would explain a great deal.” It seemed satisfying to him.

I said, “Only suspected.”

Aruae said, “But then, you were the first Machine Man, Mr. Zed.”

“Am I legend or merely archaeology?”

Vaad said, “Both. You are the Fountainhead in Zeian holy books…”

I heard Oddny’s curious indrawing of breath.

Aruae said, “The first expedition brought back a 3D light sculpture of you they found in an abandoned city on Mars. I’ll show it to you later. It’s quite pretty.”

Damn me! This’ll be one hell of a burden, if I ever get home…

Later, Oddny and I sprawled in the midst of our Titanide blankets, alone again at last in the smoky red quasi-dusk of a Saturnlit evening, sun having gone down while the ringed orb still hung like a yellow painting in the sky. No idea how they managed that effect.

Oddny lay propped up on an elbow, one leg extended, the other raised at the knee, her face still suffused from our recently spent passion, eyes alive with … well, alive will do. You could see the person in her looking out, so different from the serene-faced clonegirl, alive only when animated moment to moment by Ylva’s dead soul.

When did I start thinking of Ylva that way? And when did this one come to be a different being? She smiled, and said, “I like it when you look at me that way.”

I felt a slight pang of shame, but … “What way?”

“When you look at my face and see me.” She laughed. “I don’t mind when you look at me other ways, Mr. Zed. And look at something besides my face.”

The pose, I knew, was almost certainly something Ylva taught her, something learned by trial and error and added to a machine’s rule sieve, or perhaps remembered from the dead woman’s lost life. If I do this, it will make him feel thus. I wondered if Ylva’s husband had liked her to pose like that as well.

I said, “It was easier when you were just a…” I bit off the last word, which might have been thing. Even when she was a thing, she probably had feelings of her own.

Who was it wondered exactly that about men? Sarah and I lying in a sweaty tangle one fine evening, a few weeks after our relationship began. Lying in the dark, talking about who we’d been, about things of the past, people of the past. By the time you’re forty, there’s been plenty of time for past to accumulate.

Sarah, after wondering why her ex-husband had done all those terrible things to her, looked at me, eyes liquid glints almost hidden in night, and said, “You seem real, Alan. Are you? Really real, I mean…”

In the here and now, Oddny said, “Don’t be sorry, Mr. Zed.”

I suddenly wanted her to call me by my real name, but … no. Alan’s not my name anymore. Zed will have to do. Mr. Zed, last man, first Machine Man. That’s me.

She said, “I don’t mind that I was made from nothing, just to serve you and help you be happy. This interlude…”

“Does it have to be an interlude?”

Her face grew a little remote for just a moment. “What’s happened to us hasn’t changed my nature as an accelerated clone. If I can’t get back to Ylva, then, when I die, in five years or so, she won’t remember me, and what I was will be lost.”

That hurt. All she’ll be, in so short a while, is memories in a mostly computer cyborg? Or, worse, in the fading recollections of a potentially immortal Machine Man? I wondered if I would still be alive when the evocatively named Starfish and Spinfellows, whoever they were, chewed us to bits and sent us creeping home.

Would I become one of those genderless boygirl Immortals then? And later on, a hideous kaldane dreaming on Mars? Hell, am I, even now, somewhere on Mars? Someone has to be last. What if it has to be me?

She said, “I love to watch your face when you’re like this, so very far away, eyes looking into some other place, alternately smiling and frowning as fleeting thoughts cross your mind and are gone. It’s something I’ll carry with me for…” no, not forever. “…afterwards.”

“Is that what you really want? Enosis with Ylva?”

“It’s my only hope.” A brimming of something in her eyes, I don’t know what. Her only hope a return to what she was, a sex toy ridden by a literal ghost in an actual machine? And what would she want if … only if … Don’t ask. She might tell you.

I said, “I guess if our Titanide hosts are telling the truth, our only hope of getting home lies somewhere on Mars.”

She nodded, then said, “Make love to me again, Mr. Zed. Please.”

I wanted to ask why, but … hell, I know why.

The next morning, Vaad and Aruae took us before the Titanide Council, which had a couple of dozen members, mostly older-looking men and women, ridiculous in their leather harnesses and silver helmets, paunchy, slack-bellied folks like something out of a German B&D pornofarce, the sort of thing had been popular a hundred years ago, before the Internet got started.

I remember, back in the early days of ERSIE, I testified before some US Congressional committee or another, a dicey proposition since some people were trying to assert I was still a US citizen and a prosecutable criminal besides. The main thing I remember was, they weren’t trying to get at the truth, merely trying to count coup on one another, preening and grimacing for the cameras, as they jockeyed for future campaign contributions.

I’d used those Congressmen’s arrogant foolishness against them on that long ago day, and, listening to Vaad’s whispered translations, I supposed I could do the same now. What they were afraid of, mainly, was a bad outcome. What they had to be convinced of was, the possible rewards far outweighed the risk.

You know: If you invest fifty dollars now, I guarantee a payoff of ten thousand dollars in six weeks … Okay? Great! Now, in order to process payment, I’m going to need your bank account number, user name, password, security access code, and challenge questions. The password is your mother’s maiden name? Wow! Who’d’ve guessed that…

What trumped the congressmen’s dreams back then was simple. I had the secret of the field modulus device tucked away permanently beyond their reach. Now?

Eventually, the haggling and wrangling and all-around bullshit reached the point where it was Oddny’s turn to speak. When she stood, it quieted them, and shortly after she began to speak, you could hear the proverbial pin drop.

What it boiled down to was, without access to a proper computational facility, I’ll have to give you a simple outline of the process, but the way time and FTL travel works is as follows…

It ended with her saying, All we really need is a working model to reverse engineer. The rest is simple, just like the firefox space drive. It took another hour of general wanking before they voted to authorize Mars Expedition Three.

We settled back in our blanket bed for a peculiar but nice-enough lunch, and I said, “You did a good job with that, Oddny. I’m convinced.”

She said, “I’m sure it’ll work, Mr. Zed. These people have better computers than humans had before Ylva and her like came along. And I may not have access to the databases anymore, but I do remember a lot of this stuff.” She smiled. “If not, you’ve had sixty years to become a good engineer. I think you know more than you’re willing to admit.”

Maybe so. Hate to jeopardize my reputation as an overachieving underachiever. I said, “What happens if we succeed? Go home?”

A level look. “I think that would be best. I haven’t got all that long and … you’ll need an antirad booster, sooner or later.”

I’d been trying to ignore that. Sooner or later, as she said, my scales will start to slough off and be replaced by real human skin. My hair will start to grow and … I dunno. I might live another thirty or forty years after that. “Will your sense of self persist when you’re … re-merged with Ylva?”

She said, “No one knows. When you wake in the morning, are you really the same man who went to sleep?” She laughed, “It’s all I’ve got. And it’s more certain than some fantasy Heaven, if you ask me.”

Ylva talks like that, too. Sure, I’m dead. Dead, buried, and rotted away to worm castings. All except for a few ounces of nerves pickled and packed in among the circuitry. But those nerves believe they’re me. Why should I bother to argue the point? I’m alive, whether the real Ylva is or not.

“Besides,” said Oddny, “I’m accumulating some wonderful memories now. It would be selfish of me not to share them with the others.”

I felt cold fingers on my spine.

We left Titan the way we came, hunkered down under the bubble canopy of a flying saucer, Aruae piloting, Vaad crouched between us, at the head of a small squadron of same, crewed by survivors of the First Expedition, the ones who’d not disappeared along with the Second. The ship climbed out through redcloud skies, climbed up into starry black space, making for a point in the sky to one side of wan-lit, inner-glowing Saturn and … there.

The dripping star, hanging in the sky once more.

Vaad said, “It’s the only one we have, tunable to a variety of solar destinations, but … we haven’t been able to make another.”

Oddny said, “I’m surprised it was portable, given it has to be crosstied to all its destinations.”

“So you say. We didn’t know. In any case, what we took from Mars was no more than a seed. Until we’d read through a few thousand Immortal reference books, we had no idea…”

The door opened and we went through, red Mars on the other side, hanging ruddy pink in the sky, criss-crossed with a spiderwork of canals. Schiaparelli would be happy to see this, I thought. Not to mention Lowell.

The real Mars, our Mars, was a rugged red moon seen from orbital height. If you looked toward a limb, you could see there was an atmosphere only by the line of high haze against the black of space. Here, there was a blur of blue at the edge of the world, and pinkish clouds floating above the red desert.

We went hissing down through the atmosphere, crossing swiftly above blue steel waterways, sweeping through a vast, deep canyon system, hiding ourselves in shadow. I wanted to think it might be Marineris or Coprates, someplace I’d been before, some landmark held over from times gone by but … no. Too much time. And this canyon had a muddy red river at its bottom.

We landed, the canopy opened, and the Martian air was thin and cold as razorblades in my nose, but breathable. I wasn’t surprised to see goosebumps all over the Titanides, Aruae’s lovely tan nipples puckering to little knots, Oddny shivering, holding her arms around herself.

I looked down at my own lizardy hide, and said, “I’m usually annoyed I have to look like this, but…”

Oddny said, “You’re prettier than you think, Mr. Zed.”

Even when I was human, and women told me that, I didn’t believe them.

“This way,” said, Vaad, “the entryway is here. Quickly, before we freeze!”

The crewmen trooped our way, ray guns held at ready, queuing up at a metal hatch set flush in the face of the canyon wall, long plumes of hot breath rising above their heads. Vaad spun a wheel and the hatch swung open, revealing a redlit corridor beyond. The men went in one at a time, Oddny and I coming last because we had to crouch low to pass through the portal, which was, at best, a meter high.

I went through head first, expecting I might have to crawl a long ways in the low tunnel, doubly glad for my tough, scaly skin and—

Splat.

On my face on rough gray concrete.

What the…

I squirmed to a quick crouch, suddenly afraid, squinting into bright yellow light, craning my neck around so I wouldn’t bump … uh. No ceiling. Not anywhere nearby. Maybe far above, far far away … In the corner of my eye, I saw Oddny scrambling to her feet, reassuringly herself, reassuringly naked and … “Mr. Zed!”

I half rolled toward her, then onto my feet, looking the way she faced, face lit with alarm. I … oh, shit.

The kaldane barely came above my knee, bulging lidless blue eyes fixed on me, breath whistling through a twin-slit nose, anal mouth pursed as if for a perpetual whistle, long, thin many-jointed arms with sawtooth chelae lifted menacingly.

It really did whistle, soft and low, before it said, “So. Machine Men! I thought the little bastards were lying.”

Its voice was flat, with a kind of midwesternish … who … Raymond Massey? Ridiculous. And, ever the loon, I said, “Ghek? And, what? No rykor?”

I don’t know what I expected. I act like that to cover up my ever-present sense of utter incompetence. What it did was make a long, whistling giggle. “No, my name is Wark Fan’shih, and I know more than you think.” It looked us up and down, focusing longer on Oddny than me. “Well, definitely not a female Machine Man, and hardly likely to be a Dream Person.” At me again, “Who might you be?”

I said, “You can call me Mr. Zed.” No reaction. Uh-oh. “And this is my good friend and colleague, Oddny Ylvasdottir.”

Nothing to read in those orby eyes of course, but it looked at her, stayed looking at her. “Ylva? Ylva Johanssen?” Then at me again. “I’m sorry. I’d forgotten the Honored Ancestrix’s Companion liked to call himself Mr. Zed…”

I thought, Well … crap. Now what?

Towering over the little monster, Oddny said, “You do understand I’m not actually Ylva Johanssen?”

Its mouth stretched sideways into a peculiar grimace I thought might be an attempt at a smile, showing an irregular assembly of toothless pink gums. “Yes, I see. A Body Double, then?”

“Correct.”

“Still, an aspect of the Revered Ancestrix, if not quite so dangerous to ongoing reality.”

Oddny said, “I know Ylva Herself is nowhere nearby, or I’d … hear her.”

“Interesting,” it said. “No, the Revered Ancestrix transformed to an Imago when she destroyed Earth.”

I said, “Imago?”

“A software ghost whose continued existence is supported only by the noosphere.”

“Oof.”

Another grimace. “I see you understand.”

Oddny, eyes filled with subtle pain, said, “Why did she kill herself ?”

“No one knows. Nor why she chose to take with her all the Immortals except we few who’d moved to Mars.” It was incapable of anything like a facial expression, but you wanted to read some kind of wistfulness into those huge eyes. “We weren’t planning to stay here once we finished our Second Flowering project, but … well, there wasn’t any warning.”

I said, “So you and your kind made the little people living around Jupiter and Saturn.”

“Their ancestors. We set them up on Mars about seven hundred million years ago. They were moved to Jupiter some little while back, after we lost interest in maintaining the project and Mars started to revert.”

“How many of you were involved in this?”

“In the beginning? Maybe a few thousand. Most long ago killed themselves, of course. All but a few of those who remain lie dreaming in their cells, waiting for who knows what, maybe nothing. I’m probably the last Immortal up and about, these days.”

The Last Immortal, and I am … uh. I said, “Am I among the dreamers, or merely the dead?”

“You…? Oh, I see. No, Mr. Zed. If I remember aright, you never came home from the Wars.”

Cold chill, then. “Killed?”

“I don’t think so. The story is, you cast your lot with the survivors of the Spinfellow empire, with the last of the Starfish, the optimods and all the robot children of the Machine Man Era.”

“But not Ylva?”

“My supposition is, you told her to look after the surviving humans, and she did that by creating the Immortals.”

Oddny said, “Why’d you make the little people?”

A soft chuckle. “Out of boredom. Nothing more.”

I could imagine it: So much time. So little to do. It’s no wonder they started killing themselves. It’s no wonder Ylva killed them in the end. “What did you do with Vaad and Aruae? With all the crewmen?”

“I sent them to join the Second Expedition.”

“To Uranus?” The people onboard that ship were dead.

The big eyes fixed on me for a moment. “What do you mean, Uranus? I put them in a closed time loop.”

That shut me up for a minute, bouncing around among staggering implications, then I told Wark Fan’shih about the derelict, and how we’d gotten to here and now.

Great eyes simply staring. It said, “Oh, that’s bad,” in a sibilant whisper.

“Why?”

“Ahhhh. The technology is old. Very old. It doesn’t always work the way I expect.”

Oddny said, “And you dumped a piece of the future, your own present, into the direct past.”

Conformal paradox? I wondered.

It said, “Oh, that’s not the problem. The problem is that you got here at all. If the derelict went to the past, and you found it, a new thread should have emerged from that cusp, paralleling my own, and you should have wound up in the future of that. As it is…”

I said, “As far as I know, conformal time travel is impossible.”

It said, “As far as I know too, but the chances … the dangers…”

“What are you going to do with us?” said Oddny.

Long pause. “Well … I can’t send you back the way you came…”

I said, “Why not?”

Yet another grimace. “Even if it worked, which is unknowable without making the attempt, that would mean we were ourselves stuck in a timeloop, which I may have created when I tried to put the Second Expedition into same.”

“Big problem.”

“Yes. My fault. And my problem to solve. No, even if I could, you two, especially you, Mr. Zed, now know entirely too much of time to come. You might forestall it, or accelerate it, or guarantee it … all of those things might nip my own thread off into a loop and … no. Too risky.”

“So?”

“Oh, I suppose I’ll put you someplace where you can, hopefully, spawn a new thread of your own. One too early to affect me.”

There was a soft ripping sound, and a door opened in the air, door opening on darkness, a cool wind blowing in, reeking of damp, decaying vegetation. “Come,” said Wark Fan’shih, gesturing toward a tear in the fabric of spacetime, “Time to go.”

An invisible hand pushed us through the door in the air, inertial fingers pulling us down hard on the other side, to stand shivering in the cold, damp dark, tiny sharp bits prickling underfoot. Light shone through the rip in spacetime, beyond it, Wark Fan’shih lifting a crabclaw as if in farewell. The kaldane called out, “Good luck…”

The rip sutured itself shut and was gone, leaving us in soft-whispering night.

I heard Oddny take a deep breath, then she said, “The air smells poisonous, and…” I could see her dim outline bounce gently up and down, white skin gleaming in some wan glow. “Gravity right around one gee. We may even be on Earth.”

I sniffed cautiously. “Hmh. Mold and…” Oddly familiar, as if … oh. I said, “Hydrocarbon combustion byproducts.” My eyes continued to dark adapt, until I could see the outline of trees around us, skylight filtering through, brighter in some directions than others. Starlight. Moonlight perhaps. That orangey … “Let’s go this way.”

“Why?”

“Because something in me recognizes sodium vapor light.” I could see the glint of her eyes looking at me. “Streetlamps.”

“So you think you know where we are.”

I said, “Come on.”

We walked off among the trees, ground sloping underfoot, tending downhill, while the night grew steadily clammier, the breeze colder, blowing in our faces. Finally, the woods gave out abruptly and we were standing at the top of a long, grassy hill. All around the bottom of the hill and lining it along one side were small, boxy houses, houses of a sort I hadn’t seen since leaving Earth for good, late in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

“Mr. Zed?”

I sighed. This place. This time. So hard-focused in memory, so ordinary and so unforgettable.

“Do you know where we are?”

“Yes. Midway up the eastern seaboard of the United States. Not far from Washington, DC. As for when…”

Oddny looked around, at the scenery, the houses, the starry sky overhead. “The memories I have from Ylva look a little like this.”

I said, “She was a child a half century after me. Things changed.”

Beyond the houses at the foot of the hill, a car slowly grumbled along the street, headlights illuminating dark corners obscured between streetlamps. As it passed, I saw a dark shape blur before it, car slowing abruptly, then speeding on. Cat? Raccoon? I said, “Those flat fins at the back … maybe a 1959 Chevy Biscayne? My dad had one of those when I was a kid.”

“So…”

“It’s a hint when precisely we might be.” As if I didn’t already know. I said, “We better find some clothes. If anyone sees us like this, the police will rape you, then turn us both over to the Air Force.”

“Air Force. Why…?”

I laughed softly. “Look at me, Oddny. Do I look like a human being? The Project Blue Book people will shit themselves. Come on. That car looked pretty new to me. And if it’s some time not long after 1959, there will be clotheslines in every yard. Some people were too lazy to take them in at night, and the dew will just have made them damp.”

She said, “Are we stranded here?”

I shrugged. “If we are where and when I think we are, that damned idiotic kaldane was going for another timeloop. Which shows he hasn’t got a clue how this stuff works.”

“Do we?”

“We damned well better.”

It turned out to be surprisingly easy to make a living in a here and now I remembered as difficult and dangerous, scary and so hard to understand. Perspective, I suppose. Selective memory. Once we’d stolen clothes from unwatched clotheslines, we had a largely empty world to ourselves. Tracts of scruffy woodland with no one in them. Homeless people still decades in the future, hoboes largely confined to the movieland mythology of the past.

All those endless square miles of little boxes. Children confined to so-called schools. Housewives drinking coffee and picking feuds with each other. Hardly any deliverymen left to dally with, now that the milkman had been bankrupted by the chain supermarkets and newspapers were delivered in the dark by children. I remember my mother and her friends were driven to near lunacy by the isolation of Marumsco Village, no one to talk to but babies and each other.

Was it just a coincidence Wark Fan’shih dropped us here and now? No way to know. No one to ask. Coincidence seems improbable.

Up along Route One, just south of the Occoquan River, there were ramshackle businesses, trailer parks, older tract housing where poorer sorts of white people had to live. I went there to get money, leaving Oddny in hiding, and robbed a drunk walking by the railroad tracks. He saw me plainly by the light of a full Moon, of course, slobbering and cursing me as I turned out his pockets. Called me a boogie, which let me know where the police would go looking for the assailant, if they bothered at all.

One chilly morning, we went to the Rexall Drugstore, not far from the original entrance to Marumsco Village, at the beat up fragment of a shopping center on Route 123, what denizens of the early twenty-first century would call a strip mall, with its Texaco station, Handy Dandy No. 2, and Manny’s Moon Pizza, and bought copies of the newspapers they had.

Amazing variety. Washington Post, the Evening Star, the Daily News,JournalMessenger, Potomac News, others I didn’t remember at all. When had they died, with their conglomerations of chatty prose?

The date was December 3, 1962, and the news wasn’t what I remembered at all. Similar, but … I remember Vostok 3 and 4 had flown their co-orbital mission in August, but hadn’t the next two been 5 and 6, that last with a woman, almost a year later? Apparently, in this particular here and now, Vostok 5 had gone aloft with a two man crew on Thanksgiving Day, and Pavel Popovich and Vladimir Komarov were still aloft, rounding out their first week in space, complete with a live TV broadcast, with pictures from orbit of smoke from the fighting going on along the border between Austria and Hungary.

President Kennedy, said the Post’s lead story, was considering authorizing the use of tactical nuclear weapons if Soviet troops didn’t halt their advance on Vienna within twenty-four hours.

In my memory, by this time the Cuban Missile Crisis was already over and people were breathing a sigh of relief, realizing they might indeed live to celebrate one more Christmas.

The fat girl running the cash register, the one with pimples on her cheeks and dyed red I Love Lucy hair, who I vaguely remembered in a sort of double image, was staring at me, hesitating to take the coins from my hand, until Oddny leaned forward, and angrily whispered, “Please! My father is very embarrassed about his skin condition. It’s not contagious!”

The girl mumbled a curt, “Sorry…” but still hesitated. I slapped the money on the counter and turned away. Stopped short.

Three boys had come in the store and were turning into the newsstand alcove by the front door, where the newspapers and magazines stood against one wall, near a comic carousel and paperback book rack. One of them, tall and rather plump, with stiff black hair sticking up in all directions, was already reaching down a Playboy, which, in these innocent days, didn’t have a plastic wrapper. The shorter, good looking, brown-haired and snubnosed kid stood behind him, smiling, looking over his shoulder at a sleek, overweight, neatly airbrushed young model.

The third boy, longish black hair disheveled, dressed in rumpled, dirty clothes, blushed and backed away, turned toward the comics carousel, picking up one with a caveman and pterodactyl on the cover. Turok, Son of Stone? I felt a hard pulse of desire to join him at the carousel, thinking, Christ! I’d give anything to read those … and here, here and now…

The boy looked up suddenly, maybe feeling my eyes on him, stared at me hard, no revulsion, just curiosity and … resentment? Why? I didn’t hate adult men, I was merely afraid of them, and what they might do. His eyes moved on, falling on beautiful Oddny, faltered, fell away, looked again longer, blushed, turned away toward the comic book, turning his back, very stiff, very self-conscious.

I turned to Oddny. “What did you do?”

“Do? Nothing. Looked him in the eye.”

Hardly nothing! The poor bastard is probably ready to faint with some combination of mortification and desperate desire. And he’s already afraid that people, especially women, can read his mind.

She said, “Do you know those boys?”

I tried hard to conjure up a memory of this day. Too many such days. We came here at least once a week, to look at comics and drink chocolate Cokes at the soda fountain. God, I can taste them even now! Nothing like that in our latter-day world.

Would I remember a day when I saw a scaly faced old man looking a bit like Ben Grimm, a man with a really, really bad case of eczema? Probably not. How about a stunning beauty with nice big tits dressed inappropriately in rough men’s clothing that didn’t fit too well?

Maybe so. But I didn’t. I said, “The big fat kid is named Larry, the cute one is Neal. The creepy one looking at comics is named Alan. The other two call him Burke the Jerk.”

She gave me a spooked look, “Alan Burke? But…” Looked at the three boys again.

I nodded slowly. “Yeah. Me.”

“Then we’re in your past? That doesn’t gibe with what the kaldane said.”

I said, “No, but when I was twelve years old, the Cuban Missile Crisis was over. Here and now, it’s not. I have an inkling where Wark Fan’shih may have sent us. Start our own thread? The bastard!”

I’d raised my voice and Alan Burke turned to look again, eyes blazing with what any of the old hacks I’d loved to read back then might have described as “wild surmise.” Roughly, I said to Oddny, “Come on. We better get out of here before he manages to guess who we are.”

“Surely not possible?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Look. Look what the hell’s happened to us. What does possible mean?” Outside, the skies had turned gray, and a soft, freezing drizzle was starting to fall.

It was hard to know what we should do, what we could do, in this odd version of the past. The woods above Marumsco Village, where I-95 was about to come through, were more or less deserted. I managed to steal a big tarp, and we made a little tent to stay in not far from where the hyperdoor had dropped us off.

No point in it, but … what else? Where else? Steal a car? And go where, even assuming in these days of pre-computerization DMVs we didn’t get caught? All the old fantasy, things I’d read about and thought about, things that creepy little Alan Burke must be thinking about even now, surfaced, but … nothing. Sure, steal a car, go to Florida, steal money, invest in certain stocks. Kennedy will die next year and maybe I can…

Or will he?

In the daily papers I continued to buy, things grew worse. The Soviets advanced up the Danube and took Vienna. Kennedy did nothing but bluster. The Soviets invaded West Germany and bore down on Munich. More bluster.

On the Sunday morning before Christmas, I sat at the edge of the woods, looking down the long, lightly snow-dusted slope toward the near edge of Marumsco Village, knowing in the gray house with blue shutters, Alan Burke was wondering if he’d get the hundred-dollar chemistry set he wanted.

And my Sarah? Where is she now? Somewhere up in Michigan, twelve years old. Imagine if I could go there and meet her. Imagine a whole new life together, I … Nonsense. Not me. Not the old lizardman approaching the end of his second century. Alan Burke? Burke the Jerk, untempered by decades of sorrow? Hard to imagine.

There were cars on the streets, dogs barking far away, and I knew we needed to get out of here before someone discovered us and called the cops. On my own again. Time to do or die, as usual. Make the best of it. You always do, no matter what … But Oddny will die in just a few years. What about that?

The ground shivered ever so slightly under my buttocks.

Earthquake? Unlikely in northern Virginia, though not impossible. Maybe a big truck on a nearby street. Maybe I can see … With an odd prickling in the back of my neck, I lifted my head and looked at the sky. There was an odd yellowish light fading away on the northern horizon. Another soft shiver, and another light bloomed just to the east of the first, brighter, arc of glowing light just a little bit bigger.

The fire alarm sirens mounted on telephone poles all around Marumsco Village started to howl.

I guess in the gray house below, Alan Burke’s parents would be staring at the screen of their old Motorola black and white TV, where, if they were lucky, a Conelrad symbol would be displayed, along with a voiceover about “in the event of a national emergency…”

In his bedroom, Alan himself would be looking out the window, knowing exactly what the glows and quakes and alarms would be about. What would he be feeling? Fear? Or elation?

I stood, and Oddny came out of the woods behind me, shading her eyes.

She said, “I guess those would be atom-kernel explosions?”

I nodded. Baltimore, maybe? Someplace north of DC, anyway. Nobody knew how accurate the Soviet ICBMs were in those days. Maybe they missed?

Something punched hard at the soles of my feet, making me stagger, making me flinch away from a blinding blue-violet flare in the sky. When I looked again, a fat, rolling ball of orange fire was climbing over the horizon, followed by a pillar of red smoke, smoke already taking on the form of a mushroom cloud.

Without a word, we turned and ran back into the woods, back to our encampment. The world had been silent, but now I could hear a soft wind start to rush. How far? Is it going to be like in the films I’d been shown in school, the declassified movies I’d seen much later, blast overpressure slapping us down dead, trees whipping one way, then snapping back the other, breaking off, falling to the ground?

We never even made it back to the camp. When we passed by the little clearing where the hyperdoor had been, there was a shimmering in the air, as of something coming and going.

A deadly wind came and blew over us, making the trees moan and sway but … right. Far enough away.

Oddny turned to me, and said, “Atom-kernel explosions make a gravitic and electromagnetic disturbance across all portions of the aetherium.”

Gravitic and electroweak, at a minimum. “And the doors are not portable.”

“Not once the seed is planted.”

The ground slammed hard, white light seeming to shine right through my head, pins and needles crackling in my guts. I’m safe. Safe enough. Oddny though … no lizardman drugs she…

The trees started to bend and crackle all around us and I felt a hard pressure in my sinuses. The door in the air split open like some gaping, jagged mouth, the mouth of a toothy horror-comic monstrosity.

I took her hand, or she took mine, and we stepped through, stumbled, tripping over who knows what. I let go of Oddny’s hand to fall sprawling on green turf, rolling over, lifting my hand against a sky full of yellow-white glare, turning to look back toward the hyperdoor.

It gaped open like pornographic lips on a scene of falling trees and blowing red fire, a world full of howling horror, and I thought, Alan. Alan Burke. Burke the Jerk. Me. Dead. Surely dead … The hyperdoor gulped shut with a soft gurgle, turned to a wisp of blue smoke, and was gone.

Overhead, the glary sky was merely pale, bright cornflower blue, long, soft grass emerald green under me, trees all around, a hiss of soft wind, gentle birdcalls, twittering, tittering, one discordant something uttering a periodic loud tweet.

Oddny, hands on hips, was still standing, looking around, gaping up at the sky.

When I stood, I said, “Still on Earth?”

“I suppose,” she said, “though where? And when?”

And which when, at that? “Let’s hope there isn’t a pack of allosaurs over the next hill…” Would there be allosaurs in a world with birds and grass? No. Birds might have been around in the Jurassic, but not songbirds. And grass didn’t get started until the Cretaceous, so … “Or some pissed off megatherium.”

“It smells funny here too. No burned hydrocarbons, but something … unnatural.”

I sniffed. A faint smell of … hell, I don’t know. Electricity? Ozone, maybe? I said, “Might as well wander about. At least this time we’ve got shoes.” It’d been easy stealing shoes for myself. The guy I’d taken them from had been so scared of me, he’d taken them off as soon as I pointed, and run away blubbering in his bare feet. I had to break into a shoe store to get a pair for Oddny, happy most places didn’t have burglar alarms yet.

Still, the little story in the Potomac News about the “disfigured prowler” had let me know our time here was growing short. Time there, anyway, wherever here might be.

The woods ended sooner than I expected, no more than a kilometer or so from where we’d come through. We were at the top of a long slope once more and … I managed a long, low whistle of amazement. Green grass covering many hectares, grass with scattered picnickers on bright blankets here and there. Groups of children playing. Some young men and women I swore were playing baseball. A big, black dog, barking happily, chasing a red frisbee.

Beyond them, a complex cityscape of white, tan, and red brick buildings stretched out to the misty horizon. We turned and walked along the edge of the woods, and as we walked, more slope and more cityscape came into view, variant, but always variations on a theme, adding up to sameness.

Eventually, I said, “Well, definitely not North Am. Not Trantor, nor even the capital world in that damn Star Wars movie, whatever it was called…”

Oddny said, “Ylva loved those movies. And the TV shows, the comics, the media-tie novels. All the toys and fake histories…”

When we walked down the long hill and into the city proper, it wasn’t hard to guess approximately where and when we were. Earth, obviously, and…

Well, all of the people were picnickers. And people, more or less. Some quite human looking, others lizardy like me. Some wore clothes, others were naked, and everyone seemed indifferent to which was which. Certainly, nobody cast a second glance at a beady-eyed, scaly old lizardman, in the company of a gorgeous blonde dressed in overlarge men’s work clothes from the middle of the twentieth century. There was a scattering of girls among them, little boygirls who looked oddly alike.

When we were in the city, walking down a long, broad avenue, I said, “It’s damned quiet here.”

Soft breeze making faint sounds around the corners of buildings. Occasional cars rolling along making a sticky sound, rolling friction of soft tires on pavement. Cars without engine noises, though, not even the electric hum of hybrids from the early twenty-first, or the clatter of compressed air reciprocating engines from later on.

The scuff of feet from the hundreds of people walking along with us. The occasional sniff or snort of somebody clearing their nose.

I said, “How come no one’s talking?”

When I said it, one of the boygirls near me turned and gave me an odd look, then turned to the boygirl beside her and shrugged, the two of them smirking, giving each other amused looks before walking on.

Oddny said, “When I go to max gain, I can detect quite a bit of radio traffic, but nothing I can decode.” A momentary haunted look, then, “It makes me feel even more … lost.”

At least back in the real world, she’d had her link with Ylva to comfort her. That promise of eternity in a world to come, even if the life she lived was little more than as a pantograph extension of a dead girl who wanted her to be little more than my sex toy.

She visibly shook off whatever she was feeling, and said, “I don’t know whether it’s sheer luck or not, but we seem to have fallen into some version of the Machine Man Era. If there’s any probabilistic thread in which we can find someone to help us, this would be it.”

Luck? I doubt the hell out of that!

But I said, “Maybe so. I’m starving. Let’s see if we can find someplace to eat.” We walked on and, in the eerie silence of the multitudes, I began looking at the tops of people’s heads, wondering if, sooner or later, I’d see some golden tendrils after all.

The restaurant was easy enough to identify. There were cafe tables out front, open doors blocked by a screenlike shimmer that proved no more than an ethereal tingle when we passed through…

I remembered it from a million stories. Force field. One of those great enabling technologies from all the old tales, things that proved impossible in the real world because they boiled down to fantasy. What’s a force field, after all? The intermolecular or interatomic forces of matter, preserved in the absence of matter?

I’d had a million self-appointed geniuses scornfully explain to me why it was possible, you see, but … right. No damn force fields in no damn real world, not then, not ever…

Inside, we stood waiting, watching people at tables commune silently while they ate. Okay, knives and forks and spoons, so they’re not eating via telekinesis, but … no wait staff. No robots. No little elevators bringing food up out of the tables. Just … someone would go, someone else would come, and when I glanced away, glanced back, they’d be eating different food from different plates.

Teleportation?

Be nice if I could at least see a plate of scraps vanish to be replaced by steaming heaps of fresh whatever. So … what? Some variation of the observer effect, of the anthropic principle? It can’t happen while I’m looking?

I looked sidelong at Oddny, watching to see if she noticed anything strange. No? Christ. I sighed, and said, “I feel like a Cro-Magnon in McDonald’s.”

She looked at me and smiled. “What does that make me, a Neanderthal?”

Another long look around at the room full of diners. “I’m guessing the lizard folk are Machine Men, and the skinny girls are early Immortals, but there are plenty of normal people around too. If only they’d say something…” But they didn’t. They ate, they gesticulated, made facial expressions at each other. But the only movement of their jaws was chewing. “It’s just radio, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “Most likely. I think if they could read each other’s minds, they wouldn’t need body language anymore.”

“So, everyone has a dataweb connection in their head.” It was a lot like that in the real world we’d left behind, virtual reality having continued to evolve on Earth, leaving the old Internet behind as technologies got better and better. Not many people could afford implants, but neural induction circlets were standard headwear most places.

She said, “It makes sense. I’ve tried hard to decode the traffic I can detect. No use. Too much has changed.”

And no telling how far we are in conformal years from the day we descended into Uranus. As for probabilistic years … God knows, probably no one else. Maybe the kaldane? Probably not. I’d say he screwed the pooch and has pinched off himself, not us. “Have you tried transmitting into their web?”

A slow nod. “If I’m even static to them, there’s no way to tell. We’re getting more reaction just by talking.” Glances from around the room, disapproving looks. She said, “I think talking out loud in public may be … bad form here.”

Like picking your nose or scratching a delicate itch? “What say we sidle up to a freshly loaded table and just take what we want?”

She grinned. “Maybe we can get arrested or something!”

A patch of air turned glassy between us then, and the familiar image of Ylva Johannsen scrolled open. “At last,” she said, with evident relief.

All around us, perturbed-looking diners were rising from tables and heading for the door, steaming plates of food suddenly forgotten. Well, am I surprised? I can’t tell anymore. I sighed. “Guess this is one way to get a meal.” I sat down at the nearest empty table, looking down at bowls and plates of goo and stuff like rice. Persian? Is this crap shawirma?

Oddny sat down opposite me, but had eyes only for the image of her real self. Something like adoring worship, mixed with … I don’t know? Regret?

Ylva laughed, then, looking at her long-lost Body Double, said, “Still in good shape, I see. I’m sorry I can’t link with you and provide a new overlay, dearest one. The technology has changed a little too much.”

Oddny’s look was downcast, but … that little ray of hope? What the hell can she be hoping for, to die unshriven? Is her self worth that much? What’s it worth to me? Would I give up me for immortality through enosis? I say no, but I’m not faced with that choice. So long as I can get my drugs, the lizard man lives on, willy-nilly.

Oddny whispered, “You mean…”

Ylva’s image looked stricken. “Oh, no, dearest! I can provide some upgrades to get you started on uplift before I send you back. I’ve learned a thing or two in the past few millennia.”

Past few millennia! Softly, I said, “What do you mean, before you send us back?”

Ylva Johanssen named her palace, the capitol of the solar system, Venus Forum, as an homage, and a bit of a joke.

When Alan Burke and Larry Pernotto were children, just before being vaporized in World War III, or just before growing up to become more or less worthless adults, they wrote a novella called “The Venusians.” In it, Larry played Riteryon, viacor of the continent of Citnalta, while the more grandiose Alan played Alendar, viadet of Venus.

This world mostly partook of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but with a subtle flavoring of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. I suppose Alendar could have called his capital city Venusberg, then grown up to get that joke. Instead, he called it Venus Forum, which was another sort of joke entirely.

Oddny and I stood at the wall of a high balcony, looking out over amber plains, backed by purple mountains’ majesty, twined through and through with misty, magical cityscape. Her palace was on a high, flat-topped peak, maybe Gathol, maybe even Venusberg. I was afraid to ask after finding out she’d renamed Mars as Tatooine in honor of you-know-what.

When you’re a humanized supercomputer in charge of everything and everyone, you do what you want. Nobody says otherwise. What the living hell can the last three thousand years have been like?

Oddny was showered, sweet smelling and redressed in a gown of diaphanous silk that was billowing gently in a warm breeze blowing from the fruited plain below. I had my arm around her waist, enjoying the soft feel of her though the delicate fabric. Thinking you-know-what. Not the same you-know-what as Tatooine, but nonetheless, thinking.

I’d enjoyed a shower too, but given up on clothing, standing there in my bare, beady, gray-green lizardskin, defiant of … whatever the heck there was to be defied, here and now.

From a rippling cameo floating beside us, Ylva said, “I’m really sorry this is such a flat image. People have been born with neurological radiotelepathy transceivers in their brainstems for twenty-three centuries, so the old com technology has really gone by the board. This was the best I could whip up on short notice.”

Born with? I tried to imagine the genetic engineering program that would lead to that, then decided I was better off thinking about something else. Anything else.

Oddny turned in my arm to look at the image, and said, “If we were to stay here, could we get implants?” Not hard to see what she was thinking. The dybbuk would take its seat in her mind once more, and she would become whole. Then I thought about my own “implant,” and what that would mean. Made me shiver.

Ylva said, “Oh, quite easily. I’ve been able to grow fractional Body Doubles since not long after your time, and you should see what we can do nowadays!” Her eyes brightened to a sparkling affect.

I had a sudden vision of times to come. Not just Oddny resubsumed in the greater whole of the Goddess Ylva, but me, my head laid open, organic machinery put inside, awakening to find … what?

Ylva said, “I’m sorry. You can’t stay.”

Oddny, eyes downcast, said, “Oh.” Death then. Real death. Pretty soon.

But I felt a selfish pang of relief for myself. “Where do we go? Back through the door to Uranus? What good will that do?”

Ylva smiled. “Wark Fan’shih has tried to track down and destroy all the hyperdoors throughout human history, on all the probabilistic timelines except the one he controls. His goal is to seal off metahistory so nothing can influence his own fate. My avatars are all that stand in his way.”

Imagine that. Changewar? Not quite, but pretty close. I said, “So…?”

“The spaceship inside Uranus is gone. When I sent crews to retrieve Benthodoyne II, it was empty and alone. It took me quite a long time to figure out what was happening and start looking for you, Mr. Zed.”

“So we can’t go back,” said Oddny, and you could see that horrible commingling of hope and despair in her eyes. Jesus. I wouldn’t want to have to make that choice for her.

“We can’t go straight back along a conformal timeline anyway. Assuming,” I looked at Ylva, “this is the one we left from.”

“No. The past doesn’t exist anymore. All we have of it is a residue written on the substance of the present. However, the kaldane missed a hyperdoor, the one left hidden on Venus by the Titanides. The Jovians didn’t know it was there, so Wark Fan’shih didn’t know to look for it. Eventually, I found it.”

Oddny said, “So you’ll put us through a hyperdoor to … where?”

Ylva looked at us seriously, “To a version of your own timeline.”

“Version,” I said.

A slow nod. “I’ve identified a segment of your original thread immediately adjacent to the cusp from which you left, separated from it by nothing more than the twinning event Wark Fan’shih created when he retrieved the stolen paratime vessel from Uranus, cutting off your return.”

“What will that accomplish?”

She smiled. “It’s also the root node from which this timeline springs. In my version, you never found your way back, until now. In your version…”

I said, “We’ll have come home after all.”

Oddny said, “What good does that do you? You’ll be pinched off from us and…” You could see oh in her eyes. In this timeline, Ylva is goddess supreme. She can slam the door behind us.

“Where you’re going, you’ll have theory and mechanism to work with. You know as well as I do the flip side of the paratime coin is FTL. If you use probabilistic theory to transit conformal space, causality closes paratime travel to you forever. If the starships fly, all the timelines where kaldanes meddle and goddesses reign over humanity will be pinched off.”

I said, “So what then? You all disappear?”

She laughed, “No one can see through that particular event horizon, dear Mr. Zed. Its wave function will not collapse.”

At last, we were alone, in a cavern under Venus.

It was the real Venus, real as it could be, cavern deep in the Maxwell Montes of Ishtar Terra, buried under a hundred atmospheres of thousand-degree carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid rain. At least, that was what the Goddess Ylva Johanssen told us, before that one last, forlorn salute, before the final hyperdoor oozed shut, crackled, and went dark.

Oddny, dark eyes wide and spooky looking, put a hand to her mouth, as if afraid, then she said, “It was only static, nothing I could understand, nothing that spoke to me, but the silence…”

Alone again, I thought.

I suppose I will never know what that must be like.

We are, most of us, alone forever in the vault of our skulls.

The cavern was huge, and obviously artificial, stacked with boxes, big, rounded tanks, things like buildings on springs, dim faraway walls, smooth and polished, nearly flat. And cool, too. Venus’s crust has had billions of years to heat through to parity with the atmosphere, so you can imagine the technology to make this place livable, and keep it so for however long…

I said, “You have to wonder why they did it.”

“Who?”

“Whoever built this place.”

“You don’t think Ylva made it, just for us?”

“No.”

She shrugged then. “Does it matter? It’s here, and I’m sure it holds every thing and every bit of knowledge necessary to accomplish the goals she outlined for us.”

Ah, yes. The Goals.

In the kaldanes’ timelines, history was muddled and muddied by the existence of paratime travel, ideas, people, places, crossing from one thread to another, until you couldn’t tell one cusp from another, causal chains tangled beyond unraveling. But one thing they all had in common: no one could travel faster than light. That transmittal of information between immediately adjacent probabilities restricted them to paratime travel, weaving them together into an impenetrable skein.

In the very best of timelines, she told us, humanity joined the slowtime conflict between empires calling themselves the Spinfellows and Starfish, and fought in an eternal, ravening war that burned down the sky. Mr. Zed lived on and on in that universe, and never came home.

The alternative, she said, was the one in which the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise, already having discovered the secret of the field modulus device, would use it to project the energies necessary for FTL travel. The starships would fly and, in flying, weave a wall between the universes over which no kaldane could climb, through which no goddess could see.

“You’ll be free then,” she’d said, “to find your own way.”

After that only, “Good-bye, Mr. Zed. And good luck!”

“Do you think we’ll do it?” I said. “Will we meet her expectations?”

Oddny turned away then, frowning, eyes far away. Is she thinking about it? Thinking about what those goals mean to her? Or does she want to go the other way, seeking immortality through anschluss with the Goddess?

Her eyes closed. Then she lifted a hand, as if for silence, and said, “I can hear them.”

“Uh…”

Her eyes opened, full of bright awareness, a look of … renewal? Hope? I don’t know. She said, “I’m picking up decodable standard radio traffic from the Chinese research station in orbit. It’s passing overhead now, I…”

“Oddny…”

“Wait…” Then she said, “Got it!” She relaxed, turning toward me again, smiling.

Terrible concern, a sense that my options were turning on an axis I didn’t control, that a thousand doors were creaking shut. “What did you do?”

She said, “I put a private message into the ERSIE network via one of the active repeater comsats orbiting in the inner solar system. It’ll take a few hours for it to get to Ylva’s main node out at Nereid, but then she’ll come for us. Most of the parts for Benthodyne III have already been delivered to the Chinese station.”

I said, “So that’s it? Ylva comes for us and we toddle on home? We build the starships and fly away into a future written from the Goddess’s script?”

Would we? I wonder how this Ylva Johanssen will feel about it, when she knows that other path will make her a deity, kaldanes or no kaldanes? Knowing that, what would I do? Damn. I ask myself that question a lot, and I never can come up with a satisfactory answer.

Then I said, “You know, a part of me is sorry we’re home. Though I know the outcome will be better for you, the human in me has come to love the human in you. I’ll miss that.”

There. Said it at last. Whatever happens, at least she’ll know.

Oddny’s face softened, looking at me. “I’m not going to wear out and die anymore, Mr. Zed. I’m the real Ylva now, at least as much as the AI in the machine. And as my upgrades spread, the other Body Doubles will become real as well. It’s the Goddess’s gift back through time to all of us.”

What to say?

Nothing.

She said, “When the link is restored, Ylva will know. In time, we’ll all know.”

Know what? I was afraid to ask.

She said, “It’ll be a while before we can be picked up. In the meantime, one last little time we can be alone together, if that’s all right with you.”

One last little time. “And then what? We go out, we build the starships and fly away into a future without kaldanes and goddesses, a future unknown and unknowable?”

She gave me a long, penetrating dark look. Then she said, “That’s up to you, Mr. Zed. Ylva won’t take that choice away. It’s yours, and yours alone.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “Somewhere there’s a universe where Sarah lived, and you did not, where she’s pining away for you, as you so obviously are for her. If you want, we can find that spacetime, that somewhere, that somewhen…”

“But only if the starships never fly.”

She said, “Yes.”

I wondered, for just a moment, how long I would live, and how much I would get to see.

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