Stories

I closed my eyes for a moment and almost screamed with relief. At some point during the last thirty-nine sleepless hours, the uncertainty had become far worse than the fear, and I’d almost succeeded in convincing myself that when the surgeons had said it was touch and go, they’d meant there was no hope at all.

‘However, he is going to need a new body. I don’t expect you want to hear another detailed account of his injuries, but there are too many organs damaged, too severely, for individual transplants or repairs to be a viable solution.’

I nodded. I was beginning to like this Mr Allenby, despite the resentment I’d felt when he’d introduced himself: at least he looked me squarely in the eye and made clear, direct statements. Everyone else who’d spoken to me since I’d stepped inside the hospital had hedged their bets; one specialist had handed me a Trauma Analysis Expert System’s print-out, with one hundred and thirty-two ‘prognostic scenarios’ and their respective probabilities.

A new body. That didn’t frighten me at all. It sounded so clean, so simple. Individual transplants would have meant cutting Chris open, again and again—each time risking complications, each time subjecting him to a form of assault, however beneficial the intent. For the first few hours, a part of me had clung to the absurd hope that the whole thing had been a mistake; that Chris had walked away from the train wreck, unscratched; that it was someone else in the operating theatre—some thief who had stolen his wallet. After forcing myself to abandon this ludicrous fantasy and accept the truth—that he had been injured, mutilated, almost to the point of death—the prospect of a new body, pristine and whole, seemed an almost equally miraculous reprieve.

Allenby went on, ‘Your policy covers that side of things completely; the technicians, the surrogate, the handlers.’

I nodded again, hoping that he wouldn’t insist on going into all the details. I knew all the details. They’d grow a clone of Chris, intervening in utero to prevent its brain from developing the capacity to do anything more than sustain life. Once born, the clone would be forced to a premature, but healthy, maturity, by means of a sequence of elaborate biochemical lies, simulating the effects of normal ageing and exercise at a sub-cellular level. Yes, I still had misgivings—about hiring a woman’s body, about creating a brain-damaged ‘child’—but we’d agonised about these issues when we’d decided to include the expensive technique in our insurance policies. Now was not the time to have second thoughts.

‘The new body won’t be ready for almost two years. In the mean time, the crucial thing, obviously, is to keep your husband’s brain alive. Now, there’s no prospect of him regaining consciousness in his present situation, so there’s no compelling reason to try to maintain his other organs.

That jolted me at first—but then I thought: Why not? Why not cut Chris free from the wreck of his body, the way he’d been cut free from the wreck of the train? I’d seen the aftermath of the crash replayed on the waiting room TV: rescue workers slicing away at the metal with their clean blue lasers, surgical and precise. Why not complete the act of liberation? He was his brain—not his crushed limbs, his shattered bones, his bruised and bleeding organs. What better way could there be for him to await the restoration of health, than in a perfect, dreamless sleep, with no risk of pain, unencumbered by the remnants of a body that would ultimately be discarded?

‘I should remind you that your policy specifies that the least costly medically sanctioned option will be used for life support while the new body is being grown.’

I almost started to contradict him, but then I remembered: it was the only way that we’d been able to shoehorn the premiums into our budget; the base rate for body replacements was so high that we’d had to compromise on the frills. At the time, Chris had joked, ‘I just hope they don’t get cryonic storage working in our lifetimes. I don’t much fancy you grinning up at me from the freezer, every day for two years.’

‘You’re saying you want me to keep nothing but his brain alive—because that’s the cheapest method?’

Allenby frowned sympathetically. ‘I know, it’s unpleasant having to think about costs, at a time like this. But I stress that the clause refers to medically sanctioned procedures. We certainly wouldn’t insist that you do anything unsafe.’

I nearly said, angrily: You won’t insist that I do anything. I didn’t, though; I didn’t have the energy to make a scene—and it would have been a hollow boast. In theory, the decision would be mine alone. In practice, Global Assurance were paying the bills. They couldn’t dictate treatment, directly—but if I couldn’t raise the money to bridge the gap, I knew I had no choice but to go along with whatever arrangements they were willing to fund.

I said, ‘You’ll have to give me some time, to talk to the doctors, to think things over.’

‘Yes, of course. Absolutely. I should explain, though, that of all the various options—’

I put up a hand to silence him. ‘Please. Do we have to go into this right now? I told you, I need to talk to the doctors. I need to get some sleep. I know: eventually, I’m going to have to come to terms with all the details ... the different life-support companies, the different services they offer, the different kinds of machines ... whatever. But it can wait for twelve hours, can’t it? Please.’

It wasn’t just that I was desperately tired, probably still in shock—and beginning to suspect that I was being railroaded into some off-the-shelf ‘package solution’ that Allenby had already costed down to the last cent. There was a woman in a white coat standing nearby, glancing our way surreptitiously every few seconds, as if waiting for the conversation to end. I hadn’t seen her before, but that didn’t prove that she wasn’t part of the team looking after Chris; they’d sent me six different doctors already. If she had news, I wanted to hear it.

Allenby said, ‘I’m sorry, but if you could just bear with me for a few more minutes, I really do need to explain something.’

His tone was apologetic, but tenacious. I didn’t feel tenacious at all; I felt like I’d been struck all over with a rubber mallet. I didn’t trust myself to keep arguing without losing control—and anyway, it seemed like letting him say his piece would be the fastest way to get rid of him. If he snowed me under with details that I wasn’t ready to take in, then I’d just switch off, and make him repeat it all later.

I said, ‘Go on.’

‘Of all the various options, the least costly doesn’t involve a life-support machine at all. There’s a technique called biological life support that’s recently been perfected in Europe. Over a two-year period, it’s more economical than other methods by a factor of about twenty. What’s more, the risk profile is extremely favourable.’

‘Biological life support? I’ve never even heard of it.’

‘Well, yes, it is quite new, but I assure you, it’s down to a fine art.’

‘Yes, but what is it? What does it actually entail?’

‘The brain is kept alive by sharing a second party’s blood supply.’

I stared at him. ‘What? You mean ... create some two-headed ... ?’

After so long without sleep, my sense of reality was already thinly stretched. For a moment, I literally believed that I was dreaming—that I’d fallen asleep on the waiting room couch and dreamed of good news, and now my wish-fulfilling fantasy was decaying into a mocking black farce, to punish me for my ludicrous optimism.

But Allenby didn’t whip out a glossy brochure, showing satisfied customers beaming cheek-to-cheek with their hosts. He said, ‘No, no, no. Of course not. The brain is removed from the skull completely, and encased in protective membranes, in a fluid-filled sac. And it’s sited internally.’

‘Internally? Where, internally?’

He hesitated, and stole a glance at the white-coated woman, who was still hovering impatiently nearby. She seemed to take this as some kind of signal, and began to approach us. Allenby, I realised, hadn’t meant her to do so, and for a moment he was flustered—but he soon regained his composure, and made the best of the intrusion.

He said, ‘Ms Perrini, this is Dr Gail Sumner. Without a doubt, one of this hospital’s brightest young gynaecologists.’

Dr Sumner flashed him a gleaming that-will-be-all-thanks smile, then put one hand on my shoulder and started to steer me away.

* * * *

I went—electronically—to every bank on the planet, but they all seemed to feed my financial parameters into the same equations, and even at the most punitive interest rates, no one was willing to loan me a tenth of the amount I needed to make up the difference. Biological life support was just so much cheaper than traditional methods.

My younger sister, Debra, said, ‘Why not have a total hysterectomy? Slash and burn, yeah! That’d teach the bastards to try colonising your womb!’

Everyone around me was going mad. ‘And then what? Chris ends up dead, and I end up mutilated. That’s not my idea of victory.’

‘You would have made a point.’

‘I don’t want to make a point.’

‘But you don’t want to be forced to carry him, do you? Listen: if you hired the right PR people—on a contingency basis—and made the right gestures, you could get seventy, eighty per cent of the public behind you. Organise a boycott. Give this insurance company enough bad publicity, and enough financial pain, and they’ll end up paying for whatever you want.’

‘No.’

‘You can’t just think of yourself, Carla. You have to think of all the other women who’ll be treated the same way, if you don’t put up a fight.’

Maybe she was right—but I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I couldn’t turn myself into a cause célèbre and battle it out in the media; I just didn’t have that kind of strength, that kind of stamina. And I thought: why should I have to? Why should I have to mount some kind of national PR campaign, just to get a simple contract honoured fairly?

I sought legal advice.

‘Of course, they can’t force you to do it. There are laws against slavery.’

‘Yes—but in practice, what’s the alternative? What else can I actually do?

‘Let your husband die. Have them switch off the life-support machine he’s on at present. That’s not illegal. The hospital can, and will, do just that, with or without your consent, the moment they’re no longer being paid.’

I’d already been told this half a dozen times, but I still couldn’t quite believe it. ‘How can it be legal to murder him? It’s not even euthanasia—he has every chance of recovering, every chance of leading a perfectly normal life.’

The solicitor shook her head. ‘The technology exists to give just about anyone—however sick, however old, however badly injured—a perfectly normal life. But it all costs money. Resources are limited. Even if doctors and medical technicians were compelled to provide their services, free of charge, to whoever demanded them ... and like I said, there are laws against slavery ... well, someone, somehow, would still have to miss out. The present government sees the market as the best way of determining who that is.’

‘Well, I have no intention of letting him die. All I want to do is to keep him on a life-support machine, for two years—’

‘You may want it, but I’m afraid you simply can’t afford it. Have you thought of hiring someone else to carry him? You’re using a surrogate for his new body, why not use one for his brain? It would be expensive—but not as expensive as mechanical means. You might be able to scrape up the difference.’

‘There shouldn’t be any fucking difference! Surrogates get paid a fortune! What gives Global Assurance the right to use my body for free?’

‘Ah. There’s a clause in your policy ...’ She tapped a few keys on her work station, and read from the screen: ‘... while in no way devaluing the contribution of the co-signatory as carer, he or she hereby expressly waives all entitlement to remuneration for any such services rendered; furthermore, in all calculations pursuant to paragraph 97 (b) ...”

‘I thought that meant that neither of us could expect to get paid for nursing duties if the other spent a day in bed with the flu.’

‘I’m afraid the scope is much broader than that. I repeat, they do not have the right to compel you to do anything—but nor do they have any obligation to pay for a surrogate. When they compute the costs for the cheapest way of keeping your husband alive, this provision entitles them to do so on the basis that you could choose to provide him with life support.’

‘So ultimately, it’s all a matter of ... accounting?’

‘Exactly.’

For a moment, I could think of nothing more to say. I knew I was being screwed, but I seemed to have run out of ways to articulate the fact.

Then it finally occurred to me to ask the most obvious question of all.

‘Suppose it had been the other way around. Suppose I’d been on that train, instead of Chris. Would they have paid for a surrogate then—or would they have expected him to carry my brain inside him for two years?’

The solicitor said, poker-faced, ‘I really wouldn’t like to hazard a guess on that one.’

* * * *

Chris was bandaged in places, but most of his body was covered by a myriad of small machines, clinging to his skin like beneficial parasites; feeding him, oxygenating and purifying his blood, dispensing drugs, perhaps even carrying out repairs on broken bones and damaged tissue, if only for the sake of staving off further deterioration. I could see part of his face, including one eye socket—sewn shut—and patches of bruised skin here and there. His right hand was entirely bare; they’d taken off his wedding ring. Both legs had been amputated just below the thighs.

I couldn’t get too near; he was enclosed in a sterile plastic tent, about five metres square, a kind of room within a room. A three-clawed nurse stood in one corner, motionless but vigilant—although I couldn’t imagine the circumstances where its intervention would have been of more use than that of the smaller robots already in place.

Visiting him was absurd, of course. He was deep in a coma, not even dreaming; I could give him no comfort. I sat there for hours, though, as if I needed to be constantly reminded that his body was injured beyond repair; that he really did need my help, or he would not survive.

Sometimes my hesitancy struck me as so abhorrent that I couldn’t believe that I’d not yet signed the forms and begun the preparatory treatment. His life was at stake! How could I think twice? How could I be that selfish? And yet, this guilt itself made me almost as angry and resentful as everything else: the coercion that wasn’t quite coercion, the sexual politics that I couldn’t quite bring myself to confront.

To refuse, to let him die, was unthinkable. And yet ... would I have carried the brain of a total stranger? No. Letting a stranger die wasn’t unthinkable at all. Would I have done it for a casual acquaintance? No. A close friend? For some, perhaps—but not for others.

So, just how much did I love him? Enough?

Of course!

Why ‘of course’?

It was a matter of ... loyalty? That wasn’t the word; it smacked too much of some kind of unwritten contractual obligation, some notion of ‘duty’, as pernicious and idiotic as patriotism. Well, ‘duty’ could go fuck itself; that wasn’t it at all.

Why, then? Why was he special? What made him different from the closest friend?

I had no answer, no right words—just a rush of emotion-charged images of Chris. So I told myself: now is not the time to analyse it, to dissect it. I don’t need an answer; I know what I feel.

I lurched between despising myself, for entertaining—however theoretically—the possibility of letting him die, and despising the fact that I was being bullied into doing something with my body that I did not want to do. The solution, of course, would have been to do neither—but what did I expect? Some rich benefactor to step out from behind a curtain and make the dilemma vanish?

I’d seen a documentary, a week before the crash, showing some of the hundreds of thousands of men and women in central Africa, who spent their whole lives nursing dying relatives, simply because they couldn’t afford the AIDS drugs that had virtually wiped out the disease in wealthier countries, twenty years before. If they could have saved the lives of their loved ones by the minuscule ‘sacrifice’ of carrying an extra kilogram and a half for two years ...

In the end, I gave up trying to reconcile all the contradictions. I had a right to feel angry and cheated and resentful—but the fact remained that I wanted Chris to live. If I wasn’t going to be manipulated, it had to work both ways; reacting blindly against the way I’d been treated would have been no less stupid and dishonest than the most supine cooperation.

It occurred to me—belatedly—that Global Assurance might not have been entirely artless in the way they’d antagonised me. After all, if I let Chris die, they’d be spared not just the meagre cost of biological life support, with the womb thrown in rent-free, but the whole expensive business of the replacement body as well. A little calculated crassness, a little reverse psychology ...

The only way to keep my sanity was to transcend all this bullshit; to declare Global Assurance and their machinations irrelevant; to carry his brain—not because I’d been coerced; not because I felt guilty, or obliged; not to prove that I couldn’t be manipulated—but for the simple, reason that I loved him enough to want to save his life.

* * * *

They injected me with a gene-tailed blastocyst, a cluster of cells which implanted in the uterine wall and fooled my body into thinking that I was pregnant.

Fooled? My periods ceased. I suffered morning sickness, anaemia, immune suppression, hunger pangs. The pseudo-embryo grew at a literally dizzying rate, much faster than any child, rapidly forming the protective membranes and amniotic sac, and creating a placental blood supply that would eventually have the capacity to sustain an oxygen-hungry brain.

I’d planned to work on as if nothing special was happening, but I soon discovered that I couldn’t; I was just too sick, and too exhausted, to function normally. In five weeks, the thing inside me would grow to the size that a foetus would have taken five months to reach. I swallowed a fistful of dietary supplement capsules with every meal, but I was still too lethargic to do much more than sit around the flat, making desultory attempts to stave off boredom with books and junk TV. I vomited once or twice a day, urinated three or four times a night. All of which was bad enough—but I’m sure I felt far more miserable than these symptoms alone could have made me.

Perhaps half the problem was the lack of any simple way of thinking about what was happening to me. Apart from the actual structure of the ‘embryo’, I was pregnant—in every biochemical and physiological sense of the word—but I could hardly let myself go along with the deception. Even half pretending that the mass of amorphous tissue in my womb was a child would have been setting myself up for a complete emotional meltdown. But—what was it, then? A tumour? That was closer to the truth, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of substitute image I needed.

Of course, intellectually, I knew precisely what was inside me, and precisely what would become of it. I was not pregnant with a child who was destined to be ripped out of my womb to make way for my husband’s brain. I did not have a vampiric tumour that would keep on growing until it drained so much blood from me that I’d be too weak to move. I was carrying a benign growth, a tool designed for a specific task—a task that I’d decided to accept.

So why did I feel perpetually confused, and depressed—and at times, so desperate that I fantasised about suicide and miscarriage, about slashing myself open, or throwing myself down the stairs? I was tired, I was nauseous, I didn’t expect to be dancing for joy—but why was I so fucking unhappy that I couldn’t stop thinking of death?

I could have recited some kind of explanatory mantra: I’m doing this for Chris. I’m doing this for Chris.

I didn’t, though. I already resented him enough; I didn’t want to end up hating him.

* * * *

Early in the sixth week, an ultrasound scan showed that the amniotic sac had reached the necessary size, and Doppler analysis of the blood flow confirmed that it, too, was on target. I went into hospital for the substitution.

I could have paid Chris one final visit, but I stayed away. I didn’t want to dwell upon the mechanics of what lay ahead.

Dr Sumner said, ‘There’s nothing to worry about. Foetal surgery far more complex than this is routine.’

I said, through gritted teeth, ‘This isn’t foetal surgery.’

She said, ‘Well ... no.’ As if the news were a revelation.

When I woke after the operation, I felt sicker than ever. I rested one hand on my belly; the wound was clean and numb, the stitches hidden. I’d been told that there wouldn’t even be a scar.

I thought: He’s inside me. They can’t hurt him now. I’ve won that much.

I closed my eyes. I had no trouble imagining Chris, the way he’d been—the way he would be, again. I drifted halfway back to sleep, shamelessly dredging up images of all the happiest times we’d had. I’d never indulged in sentimental reveries before—it wasn’t my style, I hated living in the past—but any trick that sustained me was welcome now. I let myself hear his voice, see his face, feel his touch—

His body, of course, was dead now. Irreversibly dead. I opened my eyes and looked down at the bulge in my abdomen, and pictured what it contained: a lump of meat from his corpse. A lump of grey meat, torn from the skull of his corpse.

I’d fasted for surgery, my stomach was empty, I had nothing to throw up. I lay there for hours, wiping sweat off my face with a corner of the sheet, trying to stop shaking.

* * * *

In terms of bulk, I was five months pregnant.

In terms of weight, seven months.

For two years.

If Kafka had been a woman ...

I didn’t grow used to it, but I did learn to cope. There were ways to sleep, ways to sit, ways to move that were easier than others. I was tired all day long, but there were times when I had enough energy to feel almost normal again, and I made good use of them. I worked hard, and I didn’t fall behind. The Department was launching a new blitz on corporate tax evasion; I threw myself into it with more zeal than I’d ever felt before. My enthusiasm was artificial, but that wasn’t the point; I needed the momentum to carry me through.

On good days, I felt optimistic: weary, as always, but triumphantly persistent. On bad days, I thought: You bastards, you think this will make me hate him? It’s you I’ll resent, you I’ll despise. On bad days, I made plans for Global Assurance. I hadn’t been ready to fight them before, but when Chris was safe, and my strength had returned, I’d find a way to hurt them.

The reactions of my colleagues were mixed. Some were admiring. Some thought I’d let myself be exploited. Some were simply revolted by the thought of a human brain floating in my womb—and to challenge my own squeamishness, I confronted these people as often as I could.

‘Go on, touch it,’ I said. ‘It won’t bite. It won’t even kick.’

There was a brain in my womb, pale and convoluted. So what? I had an equally unappealing object in my own skull. In fact, my whole body was full of repulsive-looking offal—a fact which had never bothered me before.

So I conquered my visceral reactions to the organ per se—but thinking about Chris himself remained a difficult balancing act.

I resisted the insidious temptation to delude myself that I might be ‘in touch’ with him—by ‘telepathy’, through the bloodstream, by any means at all. Maybe pregnant mothers had some genuine empathy with their unborn children; I’d never been pregnant, it wasn’t for me to judge. Certainly, a child in the womb could hear its mother’s voice—but a comatose brain, devoid of sense organs, was a different matter entirely. At best—or worst—perhaps certain hormones in my blood crossed the placenta and had some limited effect on his condition.

On his mood?

He was in a coma, he had no mood.

In fact, it was easiest, and safest, not to think of him as even being located inside me, let alone experiencing anything there. I was carrying a part of him; the surrogate mother of his clone was carrying another. Only when the two were united would he truly exist again; for now, he was in limbo, neither dead nor alive.

This pragmatic approach worked, most of the time. Of course, there were moments when I suffered a kind of panic at the renewed realization of the bizarre nature of what I’d done. Sometimes I’d wake from nightmares, believing—for a second or two—that Chris was dead and his spirit had possessed me; or that his brain had sent forth nerves into my body and taken control of my limbs; or that he was fully conscious, and going insane from loneliness and sensory deprivation. But I wasn’t possessed, my limbs still obeyed me, and every month a PET scan and a ‘uterine EEC proved that he was still comatose—undamaged, but mentally inert.

In fact, the dreams I hated the most were those in which I was carrying a child. I’d wake from these with one hand on my belly, rapturously contemplating the miracle of the new life growing inside me—until I came to my senses and dragged myself angrily out of bed. I’d start the morning in the foullest of moods, grinding my teeth as I pissed, banging plates at the breakfast table, screaming insults at no one in particular while I dressed. Lucky I was living alone.

I couldn’t really blame my poor besieged body for trying, though. My oversized, marathon pregnancy dragged on and on; no wonder it tried to compensate me for the inconvenience with some stiff medicinal doses of maternal love. How ungrateful my rejection must have seemed; how baffling to find its images and sentiments rejected as inappropriate.

So ... I trampled on Death, and I trampled on Motherhood. Well, hallelujah. If sacrifices had to be made, what better victims could there have been than those two emotional slave-drivers? And it was easy, really; logic was on my side, with a vengeance. Chris was not dead; I had no reason to mourn him, whatever had become of the body I’d known. And the thing in my womb was not a child; permitting a disembodied brain to be the object of motherly love would have been simply farcical.

We think of our lives as circumscribed by cultural and biological taboos, but if people really want to break them, they always seem to find a way. Human beings are capable of anything: torture, genocide, cannibalism, rape. After which—or so I’d heard—most can still be kind to children and animals, be moved to tears by music, and generally behave as if all their emotional faculties are intact.

So, what reason did I have to fear that my own minor—and utterly selfless—transgressions could do me any harm at all?

* * * *

I never met the new body’s surrogate mother, I never saw the clone as a child. I did wonder, though—once I knew that the thing had been born—whether or not she’d found her ‘normal’ pregnancy as distressing as I’d found mine. Which is easier, I wondered: carrying a brain-damaged child-shaped object, with no potential for human thought, grown from a stranger’s DNA—or carrying the sleeping brain of your lover? Which is the harder to keep from loving in inappropriate ways?

At the start, I’d hoped to be able to blur all the details in my mind—I’d wanted to be able to wake one morning and pretend that Chris had merely been sick, and was now recovered. Over the months, though, I’d come to realise that it was never going to work that way.

When they took out the brain, I should have felt—at the very least—relieved, but I just felt numb, and vaguely disbelieving. The ordeal had gone on for so long; it couldn’t be over with so little fuss: no trauma, no ceremony. I’d had surreal dreams of laboriously, but triumphantly, giving birth to a healthy pink brain—but even if I’d wanted that (and no doubt the process could have been induced), the organ was too delicate to pass safely through the vagina. This ‘Caesarean’ removal was just one more blow to my biological expectations; a good thing, of course, in the long run, since my biological expectations could never be fulfilled ... but I still couldn’t help feeling slightly cheated.

So I waited, in a daze, for the proof that it had all been worthwhile.

The brain couldn’t simply be transplanted into the clone, like a heart or a kidney. The peripheral nervous system of the new body wasn’t identical to that of the old one; identical genes weren’t sufficient to ensure that. Also—despite drugs to limit the effect—parts of Chris’s brain had atrophied slightly from disuse. So, rather than splicing nerves directly between the imperfectly matched brain and body—which probably would have left him paralysed, deaf, dumb and blind—the impulses would be routed through a computerised ‘interface’, which would try to sort out the discrepancies. Chris would still have to be rehabilitated, but the computer would speed up the process enormously, constantly striving to bridge the gap between thought and action, between reality and perception.

The first time they let me see him, I didn’t recognise him at all. His face was slack, his eyes unfocused; he looked like a large, neurologically impaired child—which, of course, he was. I felt a mild twinge of revulsion. The man I’d seen after the train wreck, swarming with medical robots, had looked far more human, far more whole.

I said, ‘Hello. It’s me.’

He stared into space.

The technician said, ‘It’s early days.’

She was right. In the weeks that followed, his progress (or the computer’s) was astounding. His posture and expression soon lost their disconcerting neutrality, and the first helpless twitches rapidly gave way to coordinated movement; weak and clumsy, but encouraging. He couldn’t talk, but he could meet my eyes, he could squeeze my hand.

He was in there, he was back, there was no doubt about that.

I worried about his silence—but I discovered later that he’d deliberately spared me his early, faltering attempts at speech.

One evening in the fifth week of his new life, when I came into the room and sat down beside the bed, he turned to me and said clearly, ‘They told me what you did. Oh God, Carla, I love you!’

His eyes filled with tears. I bent over and embraced him; it seemed like the right thing to do. And I cried, too—but even as I did so, I couldn’t help thinking: None of this can really touch me. It’s just one more trick of the body, and I’m immune to all that now.

* * * *

We made love on the third night he spent at home. I’d expected it to be difficult, a massive psychological hurdle for both of us, but that wasn’t the case at all. And after everything we’d come through, why should it have been? I don’t know what I’d feared; some poor misguided avatar of the Incest Taboo, crashing through the bedroom window at the critical moment, spurred on by the ghost of a discredited nineteenth-century misogynist?

I suffered no delusion at any level—from the merely subconscious, right down to the endocrine—that Chris was my son. Whatever effects two years of placental hormones might have had on me, whatever behavioural programs they ‘ought’ to have triggered, I’d apparently gained the strength and the insight to undermine completely.

True, his skin was soft and unweathered, and devoid of the scars of a decade of hacking off facial hair. He might have passed for a sixteen-year-old, but I felt no qualms about that—any middle-aged man who was rich enough and vain enough could have looked the same.

And when he put his tongue to my breasts, I did not lactate.

We soon started visiting friends; they were tactful, and Chris was glad of that—although personally, I’d have happily discussed any aspect of the procedure. Six months later, he was working again; his old job had been taken, but a new firm was recruiting (and they wanted a youthful image).

Piece by piece, our lives were reassembled.

Nobody, looking at us now, would think that anything had changed.

But they’d be wrong.

To love a brain as if it were a child would be ludicrous. Geese might be stupid enough to treat the first animal they see upon hatching as their mother, but there are limits to what a sane human being will swallow. So, reason triumphed over instinct, and I conquered my inappropriate love; under the circumstances, there was never really any contest.

Having deconstructed one form of enslavement, though, I find it all too easy to repeat the process, to recognise the very same chains in another guise.

Everything special I once felt for Chris is transparent to me now. I still feel genuine friendship for him, I still feel desire, but there used to be something more. If there hadn’t been, I doubt he’d be alive today.

Oh, the signals keep coming through; some part of my brain still pumps out cues for appropriate feelings of tenderness, but these messages are as laughable, and as ineffectual, now, as the contrivances of some tenth-rate tear-jerking movie. I just can’t suspend my disbelief any more.

I have no trouble going through the motions; inertia makes it easy. And as long as things are working—as long as his company is pleasant and the sex is good—I see no reason to rock the boat. We may stay together for years, or I may walk out tomorrow. I really don’t know.

Of course I’m still glad that he survived—and to some degree, I can even admire the courage and selflessness of the woman who saved him. I know that I could never do the same.

Sometimes when we’re together, and I see in his eyes the very same helpless passion that I’ve lost, I’m tempted to pity myself. I think: I was brutalised, no wonder I’m a cripple, no wonder I’m so fucked up.

And in a sense, that’s a perfectly valid point of view—but I never seem to be able to subscribe to it for long. The new truth has its own cool passion, its own powers of manipulation; it assails me with words like ‘freedom’ and ‘insight’, and speaks of the end of all deception. It grows inside me, day by day, and it’s far too strong to let me have regrets.

Artifact

Euclid screams because the hooded man bends his arm behind his back. I wish it would stop, because I fear the sound of snapping bone. Euclid has very thin arms.

Before waking, perhaps precipitating it, I ponder the insultingly obvious roots of the dream. Euclid’s thin arms are the laser beams that criss-cross the artifact, bent by the black hole at the centre, which is hooded by its event horizon. Euclid screams because space around the black hole is violently distorted and will not support his axioms of geometry.

A final image before I open my eyes is of a mass spectrometer, fed with my freshly ionised dream, depositing its easily recognised components onto a photographic plate. I label each dark spot by hand, except the last, which I know should be labelled ‘snapping bones’. The lab demonstrator would laugh if I wrote this on the plate.

Nervousness from my student days. A transparent image of my dream’s transparency. I wake.

Cabin lights brighten slowly to half strength. Over at my desk the monitor still displays a blue schematic picture of the artifact, a sixty-four-pointed star, each point joined to every other point by a slender blue beam. It is not symmetric in any plane, yet it is pleasing to look at; hypnotically pleasing.

I dress and eat. I skim through the eight-year-old news summary that arrived from home while I slept. News will come so fast on the trip back that I’ll have time for nothing else.

In the corridor, everyone knows me with embarrassed cheerfulness. People ask me to ‘check that their shares are doing OK’ although there is no way I could get word to them faster than the daily reports. Just something to say, to make me feel vaguely useful.

Eric Jackson, an astronomer like me, comes around a corner and runs towards me, breathless and seemingly hoping to talk to me.

‘You’ve got to stay. You won’t believe what I’ve found out. The ratios between the times for the beams between the nodes are all dimensionless constants!’

He peers eagerly into my face, waiting. I haven’t really heard him. His breathless staring makes me think back over his words for a reply to make him go away, and as their meaning accumulates I feel horribly uneasy.

In my contract, in every contract, is a guarantee of a free passage home, no questions asked, on the next monthly shuttle. The psychiatrists say it makes us all feel less worried by the time and distance which separate us from home. I asked to go home, and they asked no questions, but eyed me with concern and disappointment. How could I tell anyone that my dreams had gone wrong?

‘Fine structure?’ I ask blandly.

‘Oh yes, and all the others.’

‘Accurately?’

‘As far as we can measure. Aren’t you thrilled?’

‘Well I suppose we know its purpose now.’

‘I’d hardly say that. I mean there are still dozens of possible explanations. It could be a work of art or a temple or a sort of “we are intelligent” thing, like on Pioneer.’

My mind drifts for a second. ‘Who cares?’ I want to say. An argument about Egyptian pyramids, and all the contrived and ultimately meaningless ratios of their dimensions, half forms and then dies. It is not likely to be coincidence or contrivance in this case, because whoever made the artifact would certainly be aware of the values of certain dimensionless combinations of physical constants. No surprise, no special implications.

‘You’ll stay now, won’t you?’

Jackson must be excited to breach etiquette so badly. ‘No.’

‘But think of all the work there’ll be.’

‘I’m sure it won’t be too much for you.’

This unsubtle hint to the unspeakable subject of nervous breakdowns, which everyone on the ship now connects with me, cuts through his excitement.

‘Look, I’m sorry, but I thought you’d be pleased. I thought it would be something to stay for.’

Two days ago, when we picked up the artifact on deep-space radar, Jackson had broken this news to me with a look in his eyes which had said what he now put into words.

We parted. Today was my last day, but I took all the usual turns, swung through all the same doors, and now I’m seated at my ‘office’ desk watching the computer doing X-ray spectrometry on emissions from gas being drawn into the black hole. My eyes will not focus on the multicoloured graphs that form in front of them, soon to be interpreted and summarised without my intervention. A small bell will sound discreetly if something remarkable is found, until I acknowledge my approval of a job well done.

The entire process, from the acceleration of the gas molecules through to the sounding of the small bell, will appear in my mind as a closed, complete entity, isolated and unchanged and unchangeable.

I hear a knock and turn around. Arthur Lindstrom, the Chief Astronomer, is walking in, saying, ‘Mind if I come in? I’d like to have a chat about Eric’s discovery.’

He sits on a swivelling chair beside me.

‘You know, we mustn’t jump to conclusions. There’s no reason to assume that this ratio business is the whole purpose of the artifact, because it could quite easily just be a minor aspect of its function. If you’ve been thinking over any theories you mustn’t junk them now just because this has come up. Nothing even in natural astronomy is ever quite as simple as it seems at first glance, and here we’re dealing with something carefully constructed by another culture. We mustn’t be satisfied with our first theories or even our tenth. This thing is going to provide generations of study, and we still may never know its ultimate purpose.’

‘Mmm.’ It was all I could say.

‘I was hoping that you might let me know any thoughts you’ve had, seeing as this is your last day on the project.’

I feel vaguely panicked. The past week I have been in no state to think intelligently about anything, accepting my lack of interest in the artifact as a final confirmation that spaceflight has disturbed me too deeply to be tolerated. Back on Earth, just reading of the discovery would have had my mind spilling over with possibilities, and being on the very ship that found the artifact an ecstatic, impossible dream.

‘Well, Arthur, to be honest I haven’t really had much time to think about it. My mind has been on other things.’

This last sentence is a little too much for him, and his mouth drops open in incredulity. What other things can there be to anyone with this greatest discovery only light-minutes away? Finally the seriousness of my impending trip home drifts into his mind, and he stands, saying as he walks out:

‘Do let me know if you have any suggestions.’

I feel like a dying man at a party, spoiling the fun for everybody else. I hope they will forget me quickly when I’ve left. It is not my intention for anyone else to feel as I do.

I instruct the computer to carry on with its spectrometry in private, and to display the blue schematic of the artifact. I rotate the plane of perspective aimlessly. The shape of the artifact is blandly soothing, drawing the eye in, then abandoning it to wander without excitement from node to node, with nothing to discover either jarring or beautiful. I try dutifully to form an hypothesis for Lindstrom’s sake, so that I shall not leave a painful scar of disappointment.

The artifact consists of sixty-four small satellites orbiting a black hole, ingeniously arranged so that their relative positions remain unchanged. Ultraviolet lasers in each satellite are aimed at all the other satellites. As yet we are too far away to examine the satellites in detail. Some of the laser light is scattered by dust and gas which permeates the system, and we do not believe the lasers are being modulated at all. No modulation puts a wet blanket on any theories that the artifact is a computing device or an interstellar communications relay; and, so far as we can tell, no modulated signal is arriving at or leaving the artifact. There are as yet no signs that the satellites are inhabited, but it is rather too early to tell.

Why was it made? The satellites are positioned in the highly ‘curved’ space around the black hole so that the ratios between the times for the various laser beams to travel from source to destination equal dimensionless physical constants. What conceivable function could result in a design with this property, either as a necessary consequence of the function or as a ‘decoration’ possible because the function is independent of the satellite positions?

I don’t know. I don’t care. My mind wanders back to its painful obsession, the withering of my dreams, source of my imagination and happiness. My dreams on Earth were vast and complex and indecipherable, tantalising and exotic and rich beyond the comprehension of my waking self. I would touch ground each morning with my mind babbling joyously at thoughts strange beyond words or visions, and like the sun or the sea, abundant beyond any possible need, my dreams powered and flooded my waking life. They set me no challenges or problems themselves, but rather fuelled my assaults on the challenges of the daytime, inexhaustible wells of wonder overflowing into every part of my mind, every part of my life.

The first few weeks in space, the strangeness of the ship and the greater strangeness of its voyage doubled the strangeness of my dreams, and I would wake early, exhausted but not distressed by the intensity of the experience. A week ago I dreamt of an empty room.

I floated in the centre of an empty grey room, with a simple thought: this is all there is, this is all there is, this is all there is.

That was the dream. The dream announced its own simplicity, no more. The dream announced its own emptiness, no more. The dream said less than nothing because the nothing that it said was its saying nothing.

The feeling that followed was of having finished. Before, my dreams had been too huge to hold in my mind all at once, and too detailed and strangely structured to feel that they might ever end up summarised and tabulated and packed away tidily. Before, my dreams had burst through my mind, slipped through my fingers, not from evanescence but from bulk. Now, my dreams were thin skeletons laid out before me, every detail unambiguous and final, nothing to guess, nothing to explore. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

The ship’s psychiatrist, whom I have met only once and whose name I do not remember, knocks and walks in.

‘Hi.’

Yes, up yours also.

‘Hi.’

‘I just wanted to ask you if you’d given any thought to my suggestion.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He had asked me to record voluntarily an explanation of my sudden need to get home again, to be played back only after I had left the ship, and to be used only in the strictest confidence. I couldn’t bear to try to put my emptiness into words, couldn’t imagine it meaning a thing to anyone else.

‘Well, you can always change your mind. We have no wish to invade your privacy, or make you feel you have to account for your decision, but we would like to know if there are any changes we can make so that, in the future, whatever caused problems for you will not cause problems for others. We do think that’s a worthwhile goal, but of course, as it says in your contract, we can’t demand anything.’

‘No.’

No to what? No to it all. I’m very, very tired. I have a sudden weary vision of the Captain coming to ‘chat’ with me, stressing the value in my giving some hint for the planning of future missions. It’s not the considerable fuel expense of my trip that worries them, or even the effect on morale of one member of the team’s giving in. The real concern is not knowing why. Any named weakness could be grappled with; every other person could say to himself ‘I should never be worried by that’ and the matter would be under control.

The large, pale blue eyes of the psychiatrist try to ooze protective reassurance. I couldn’t even whisper ‘My dreams are all wrong’ with those terribly forgiving eyes turned at me. I have no strength now to speak of my loss of strength.

The day passes; the Captain does not come, because it would be too much of an honour. The shuttle leaves at 2300 hours, so I am lying in my cabin glancing frequently at my watch, although the computer will call me at 2230 and the Shuttle Control Officer would page me if I were not in his office at 2250.

I glance at the blue display of the artifact. I will get news reports from the ship, too, on my way home, and most of them will concern the artifact. Small unmanned probes will enter the system, explore the satellites; some will be dropped into the black hole.

Eight light-years from home, a black hole. Who would have guessed? Every astronomer’s dream come true, but I don’t feel a thing, don’t feel like an astronomer, don’t care about confirmation of the latest variation on General Relativity. I feel naked and hollow.

I have the computer play some of the music in my personal library, mainly fantasy rock of the early ‘90s, but it bores me, slightly annoys me. I shut it off.

I watch the seconds digits for a while, then switch to GMT. The rate is not detectably different, as we’re going quite slowly now relative to Earth. I amuse myself a little by flicking through the various time zones. I remind myself to change the receiving frequency on my watch from that of the ship’s computer to that of the shuttle’s computer, once I am on board.

A bell rings in my watch, and at the desk monitor. I acknowledge the event, then sit on my bed for a while, not wanting to be early at the Shuttle Control Office with nothing to do. There is nothing to pack, it has all been done for me.

Now I am alone in the shuttle. The ship carries hundreds of shuttles, but only ten can be fitted out to support life on the voyage home. If more than ten people demanded to go home, they would have to take the whole ship back.

That would make the Captain very sad.

With me in the shuttle are many high-density magnetic bubble memories containing an entire month’s transmissions from the ship. They are sent back home in case something goes astray with some part of the maser broadcasts. We do not get shuttles from home, because we have much more to tell them than they have to tell us.

‘You OK now?’ asks the Shuttle Control Officer nervously. He has never sent back a person before. ‘Yes, I’m fine thank you.’

‘Well, this is it. Bon voyage.’

No party of friends to see me off. This launch is being treated like any other. I am to vanish cleanly from the minds on board.

With very little fuss, my temporary weightlessness is gone. This shuttle will be slower than the others, with only 2 gees, the ship’s standard acceleration, rather than the 15 gees of the unmanned ones. I shall not get lonely, with all the news from Earth to catch up with, and all the news from the ship to ignore. I switch on a monitor, and see the huge cylindrical shell dwindling. The artifact is not visible, of course. I switch off the monitor, and try to get some sleep.

For hours I can’t really keep my eyes closed. It does not take long to explore with my eyes the inside of the shuttle many times. Then I close my eyes and still see the rows and columns of bubble memories in neatly labelled boxes. I start counting the bits of information in there with me. Each memory contains two-to-thethirtieth bits. 1 G. they call it. There are two thousand nine hundred memories, more than two-to-the-eleventh, so that makes more than two-to-the-forty-first bits. What a lot of garbage, I think lazily. What a vast amount. Nearly a million bits a second back to Earth.

Now I must be asleep, for the bubble memories are multiplying, the stacks are spreading to fill the whole universe. And now they are collapsing; the walls between the neat packages are melting, until only sixty-four compartments remain. Each compartment shrinks to a point, and thin blue lines appear in the familiar configuration. The universe shrinks to the artifact, its essential summary, or maybe even, I think lazily, its essential cause. The symmetry between the two is so nearly perfect that I cannot decide which it is: ambiguity at last.

I wake with a smile. I’ll be home soon.

Axiomatic

‘... like your brain has been frozen in liquid nitrogen, and then smashed into a thousand shards!’

I squeezed my way past the teenagers who lounged outside the entrance to The Implant Store, no doubt fervently hoping for a holovision news team to roll up and ask them why they weren’t in school. They mimed throwing up as I passed, as if the state of not being pubescent and dressed like a member of Binary Search was so disgusting to contemplate that it made them physically ill.

Well, maybe it did.

Inside, the place was almost deserted. The interior reminded me of a video ROM shop; the display racks were virtually identical, and many of the distributors’ logos were the same. Each rack was labelled: PSYCHEDELIA, MEDITATION AND HEALING, MOTIVATION AND SUCCESS. LANGUAGES AND TECHNICAL SKILLS. Each implant, although itself less than half a millimetre across, came in a package the size of an old-style book, bearing gaudy illustrations and a few lines of stale hyperbole from a marketing thesaurus or some rent-an-endorsement celebrity. ‘Become God! Become the Universe!’ ‘The Ultimate Insight! The Ultimate Knowledge! The Ultimate Trip!’ Even the perennial ‘This implant changed my life!’

I picked up the carton of You Are Great!—its transparent protective wrapper glistening with sweaty fingerprints—and thought numbly: If I bought this thing and used it, I would actually believe that. No amount of evidence to the contrary would be physically able to change my mind. I put it back on the shelf, next to Love Yourself A Billion and Instant Willpower, Instant Wealth.

I knew exactly what I’d come for, and I knew that it wouldn’t be on display, but I browsed a while longer, partly out of genuine curiosity, partly just to give myself time. Time to think through the implications once again. Time to come to my senses and flee.

The cover of Synaesthesia showed a blissed-out man with a rainbow striking his tongue and musical staves piercing his eyeballs. Beside it, Alien Mind-Fuck boasted ‘a mental state so bizarre that even as you experience it, you won’t know what it’s like!’ Implant technology was originally developed to provide instant language skills for business people and tourists, but after disappointing sales and a takeover by an entertainment conglomerate, the first mass-market implants appeared: a cross between video games and hallucinogenic drugs. Over the years, the range of confusion and dysfunction on offer grew wider, but there’s only so far you can take that trend; beyond a certain point, scrambling the neural connections doesn’t leave anyone there to be entertained by the strangeness, and the user, once restored to normalcy, remembers almost nothing.

The first of the next generation of implants—the so-called axiomatics—were all sexual in nature; apparently that was the technically simplest place to start. I walked over to the Erotica section, to see what was available—or at least, what could legally be displayed. Homosexuality, heterosexuality, autoerotism. An assortment of harmless fetishes. Eroticisation of various unlikely parts of the body. Why, I wondered, would anyone choose to have their brain rewired to make them crave a sexual practice they otherwise would have found abhorrent, or ludicrous, or just plain boring? To comply with a partner’s demands? Maybe, although such extreme submissiveness was hard to imagine, and could scarcely be sufficiently widespread to explain the size of the market. To enable a part of their own sexual identity, which, unaided, would have merely nagged and festered, to triumph over their inhibitions, their ambivalence, their revulsion? Everyone has conflicting desires, and people can grow tired of both wanting and not wanting the very same thing. I understood that, perfectly.

The next rack contained a selection of religions, everything from Amish to Zen. (Gaining the Amish disapproval of technology this way apparently posed no problem; virtually every religious implant enabled the user to embrace far stranger contradictions.) There was even an implant called Secular Humanist (‘You WILL hold these truths to be self-evident!’). No Vacillating Agnostic, though; apparently there was no market for doubt.

For a minute or two, I lingered. For a mere fifty dollars, I could have bought back my childhood Catholicism, even if the Church would not have approved. (At least, not officially; it would have been interesting to know exactly who was subsidising the product.) In the end, though, I had to admit that I wasn’t really tempted. Perhaps it would have solved my problem, but not in the way that I wanted it solved—and after all, getting my own way was the whole point of coming here. Using an implant wouldn’t rob me of my free will; on the contrary, it was going to help me to assert it.

Finally, I steeled myself and approached the sales counter.

‘How can I help you, sir?’ The young man smiled at me brightly, radiating sincerity, as if he really enjoyed his work. I mean, really, really.

‘I’ve come to pick up a special order.’

‘Your name, please, sir?’

‘Carver. Mark.’

He reached under the counter and emerged with a parcel, mercifully already wrapped in anonymous brown. I paid in cash, I’d brought the exact change: $399.95. It was all over in twenty seconds.

I left the store, sick with relief, triumphant, exhausted. At least I’d finally bought the fucking thing; it was in my hands now, no one else was involved, and all I had to do was decide whether or not to use it.

After walking a few blocks towards the train station, I tossed the parcel into a bin, but I turned back almost at once and retrieved it. I passed a pair of armoured cops, and I pictured their eyes boring into me from behind their mirrored faceplates, but what I was carrying was perfectly legal. How could the Government ban a device which did no more than engender, in those who freely chose to use it, a particular set of beliefs—without also arresting everyone who shared those beliefs naturally? Very easily, actually, since the law didn’t have to be consistent, but the implant manufacturers had succeeded in convincing the public that restricting their products would be paving the way for the Thought Police.

By the time I got home, I was shaking uncontrollably. I put the parcel on the kitchen table, and started pacing.

This wasn’t for Amy. I had to admit that. Just because I still loved her, and still mourned her, didn’t mean I was doing this for her. I wouldn’t soil her memory with that lie.

In fact, I was doing it to free myself from her. After five years, I wanted my pointless love, my useless grief, to finally stop ruling my life. Nobody could blame me for that.

* * * *

She had died in an armed hold-up, in a bank. The security cameras had been disabled, and everyone apart from the robbers had spent most of the time face-down on the floor, so I never found out the whole story. She must have moved, fidgeted, looked up, she must have done something; even at the peaks of my hatred, I couldn’t believe that she’d been killed on a whim, for no comprehensible reason at all.

I knew who had squeezed the trigger, though. It hadn’t come out at the trial; a clerk in the Police Department had sold me the information. The killer’s name was Patrick Anderson, and by turning prosecution witness, he’d put his accomplices away for life, and reduced his own sentence to seven years.

I went to the media. A loathsome crime-show personality had taken the story and ranted about it on the airwaves for a week, diluting the facts with self-serving rhetoric, then grown bored and moved on to something else.

Five years later, Anderson had been out on parole for nine months.

OK. So what? It happens all the time. If someone had come to me with such a story, I would have been sympathetic, but firm. ‘Forget her, she’s dead. Forget him, he’s garbage. Get on with your life.’

I didn’t forget her, and I didn’t forget her killer. I had loved her, whatever that meant, and while the rational part of me had swallowed the fact of her death, the rest kept twitching like a decapitated snake. Someone else in the same state might have turned the house into a shrine, covered every wall and mantelpiece with photographs and memorabilia, put fresh flowers on her grave every day, and spent every night getting drunk watching old home movies. I didn’t do that, I couldn’t. It would have been grotesque and utterly false; sentimentality had always made both of us violently ill. I kept a single photo. We hadn’t made home movies. I visited her grave once a year.

Yet for all of this outward restraint, inside my head my obsession with Amy’s death simply kept on growing. I didn’t want it, I didn’t choose it, I didn’t feed it or encourage it in any way. I kept no electronic scrapbook of the trial. If people raised the subject, I walked away. I buried myself in my work; in my spare time I read, or went to the movies, alone. I thought about searching for someone new, but I never did anything about it, always putting it off until that time in the indefinite future when I would be human again.

Every night, the details of the incident circled in my brain. I thought of a thousand things I ‘might have done’ to have prevented her death, from not marrying her in the first place (we’d moved to Sydney because of my job), to magically arriving at the bank as her killer took aim, tackling him to the ground and beating him senseless, or worse. I knew these fantasies were futile and self-indulgent, but that knowledge was no cure. If I took sleeping pills, the whole thing simply shifted to the daylight hours, and I was literally unable to work. (The computers that help us are slightly less appalling every year, but air-traffic controllers can’t daydream.)

I had to do something.

Revenge? Revenge was for the morally retarded. Me, I’d signed petitions to the UN, calling for the worldwide, unconditional abolition of capital punishment. I’d meant it then, and I still meant it. Taking human life was wrong; I’d believed that, passionately, since childhood. Maybe it started out as religious dogma, but when I grew up and shed all the ludicrous claptrap, the sanctity of life was one of the few beliefs I judged to be worth keeping. Aside from any pragmatic reasons, human consciousness had always seemed to me the most astonishing, miraculous, sacred thing in the universe. Blame my upbringing, blame my genes; I could no more devalue it than believe that one plus one equalled zero.

Tell some people you’re a pacifist, and in ten seconds flat they’ll invent a situation in which millions of people will die in unspeakable agony, and all your loved ones will be raped and tortured, if you don’t blow someone’s brains out. (There’s always a contrived reason why you can’t merely wound the omnipotent, genocidal madman.) The amusing thing is, they seem to hold you in even greater contempt when you admit that, yes, you’d do it, you’d kill under those conditions.

Anderson, however, clearly was not an omnipotent, genocidal madman. I had no idea whether or not he was likely to kill again. As for his capacity for reform, his abused childhood, or the caring and compassionate alter ego that may have been hiding behind the façade of his brutal exterior, I really didn’t give a shit, but nonetheless I was convinced that it would be wrong for me to kill him.

I bought the gun first. That was easy, and perfectly legal; perhaps the computers simply failed to correlate my permit application with the release of my wife’s killer, or perhaps the link was detected, but judged irrelevant.

I joined a ‘sports’ club full of people who spent three hours a week doing nothing but shooting at moving, human-shaped targets. A recreational activity, harmless as fencing; I practised saying that with a straight face.

Buying the anonymous ammunition from a fellow club member was illegal; bullets that vaporised on impact, leaving no ballistics evidence linking them to a specific weapon. I scanned the court records; the average sentence for possessing such things was a five-hundred-dollar fine. The silencer was illegal, too; the penalties for ownership were similar.

Every night, I thought it through. Every night, I came to the same conclusion: despite my elaborate preparations, I wasn’t going to kill anyone. Part of me wanted to, part of me didn’t, but I knew perfectly well which was strongest. I’d spend the rest of my life dreaming about it, safe in the knowledge that no amount of hatred or grief or desperation would ever be enough to make me act against my nature.

* * * *

I unwrapped the parcel. I was expecting a garish cover-sneering body builder toting sub-machine-gun—but the packaging was unadorned, plain grey with no markings except for the product code, and the name of the distributor, Clockwork Orchard.

I’d ordered the thing through an on-line catalogue, accessed via a coin-driven public terminal, and I’d specified collection by ‘Mark Carver’ at a branch of The Implant Store in Chatswood, far from my home. All of which was paranoid nonsense, since the implant was legal—and all of which was perfectly reasonable, because I felt far more nervous and guilty about buying it than I did about buying the gun and ammunition.

The description in the catalogue had begun with the statement Life is cheap! then had waffled on for several lines in the same vein: People are meat. They’re nothing, they’re worthless. The exact words weren’t important, though; they weren’t a part of the implant itself. It wouldn’t be a matter of a voice in my head, reciting some badly written spiel which I could choose to ridicule or ignore; nor would it be a kind of mental legislative decree, which I could evade by means of semantic quibbling. Axiomatic implants were derived from analysis of actual neural structures in real people’s brains, they weren’t based on the expression of the axioms in language. The spirit, not the letter, of the law would prevail.

I opened up the carton. There was an instruction leaflet, in seventeen languages. A programmer. An applicator. A pair of tweezers. Sealed in a plastic bubble labelled sterile if unbroken, the implant itself. It looked like a tiny piece of gravel.

I had never used one before, but I’d seen it done a thousand times on holovision. You placed the thing in the programmer, ‘woke it up’, and told it how long you wanted it to be active. The applicator was strictly for tyros; the jaded cognoscenti balanced the implant on the tip of their little finger, and daintily poked it up the nostril of their choice.

The implant burrowed into the brain, sent out a swarm of nanomachines to explore, and forge links with, the relevant neural systems, and then went into active mode for the predetermined time—anything from an hour to infinity—doing whatever it was designed to do. Enabling multiple orgasms of the left kneecap. Making the colour blue taste like the long-lost memory of mother’s milk. Or, hardwiring a premise: I will succeed. I am happy in my job. There is life after death. Nobody died in Belsen. Four legs good, two legs bad ...

I packed everything back into the carton, put it in a drawer, took three sleeping pills, and went to bed.

* * * *

Perhaps it was a matter of laziness. I’ve always been biased towards those options which spare me from facing the very same set of choices again in the future; it seems so inefficient to go through the same agonies of conscience more than once. To not use the implant would have meant having to reaffirm that decision, day after day, for the rest of my life.

Or perhaps I never really believed that the preposterous toy would work. Perhaps I hoped to prove that my convictions—unlike other people’s—were engraved on some metaphysical tablet that hovered in a spiritual dimension unreachable by any mere machine.

Or perhaps I just wanted a moral alibi—a way to kill Anderson while still believing it was something that the real me could never have done.

At least I’m sure of one thing. I didn’t do it for Amy.

* * * *

I woke around dawn the next day, although I didn’t need to get up at all; I was on annual leave for a month. I dressed, ate breakfast, then unpacked the implant again and carefully read the instructions.

With no great sense of occasion, I broke open the sterile bubble and, with the tweezers, dropped the speck into its cavity in the programmer.

The programmer said, ‘Do you speak English?’ The voice reminded me of one of the control towers at work; deep but somehow genderless, businesslike without being crudely robotic—and yet, unmistakably inhuman.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want to program this implant?’

‘Yes.’

‘Please specify the active period.’

‘Three days.’ Three days would be enough, surely; if not, I’d call the whole thing off.

‘This implant is to remain active for three days after insertion. Is that correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘This implant is ready for use. The time is seven forty-three a.m. Please insert the implant before eight forty-three a.m., or it will deactivate itself and reprogramming will be required. Please enjoy this product and dispose of the packaging thoughtfully.’

I placed the implant in the applicator, then hesitated, but not for long. This wasn’t the time to agonise; I’d agonised for months, and I was sick of it. Any more indecisiveness and I’d need to buy a second implant to convince me to use the first. I wasn’t committing a crime; I wasn’t even coming close to guaranteeing that I would commit one. Millions of people held the belief that human life was nothing special, but how many of them were murderers? The next three days would simply reveal how I reacted to that belief, and although the attitude would be hard-wired, the consequences were far from certain.

I put the applicator in my left nostril, and pushed the release button. There was a brief stinging sensation, nothing more.

I thought, Amy would have despised me for this. That shook me, but only for a moment. Amy was dead, which made her hypothetical feelings irrelevant. Nothing I did could hurt her now, and thinking any other way was crazy.

I tried to monitor the progress of the change, but that was a joke; you can’t check your moral precepts by introspection every thirty seconds. After all, my assessment of myself as being unable to kill had been based on decades of observation (much of it probably out of date). What’s more, that assessment, that self-image, had come to be as much a cause of my actions and attitudes as a reflection of them—and apart from the direct changes the implant was making to my brain, it was breaking that feedback loop by providing a rationalisation for me to act in a way I’d convinced myself was impossible.

After a while, I decided to get drunk, to distract myself from the vision of microscopic robots crawling around in my skull. It was a big mistake; alcohol makes me paranoid. I don’t recall much of what followed, except for catching sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, screaming, ‘HAL’s breaking First Law! HAL’s breaking First Law!’ before vomiting copiously.

I woke just after midnight, on the bathroom floor. I took an anti-hangover pill, and in five minutes my headache and nausea were gone. I showered and put on fresh clothes. I’d bought a jacket especially for the occasion, with an inside pocket for the gun.

It was still impossible to tell if the thing had done anything to me that went beyond the placebo effect; I asked myself, out loud, ‘Is human life sacred? Is it wrong to kill?’ but I couldn’t concentrate on the question, and I found it hard to believe that I ever had in the past; the whole idea seemed obscure and difficult, like some esoteric mathematical theorem. The prospect of going ahead with my plans made my stomach churn, but that was simple fear, not moral outrage; the implant wasn’t meant to make me brave, or calm, or resolute. I could have bought those qualities too, but that would have been cheating.

I’d had Anderson checked out by a private investigator. He worked every night but Sunday, as a bouncer in a Surry Hills nightclub; he lived nearby, and usually arrived home, on foot, at around four in the morning. I’d driven past his terrace house several times, I’d have no trouble finding it. He lived alone; he had a lover, but they always met at her place, in the afternoon or early evening.

I loaded the gun and put it in my jacket, then spent half an hour staring in the mirror, trying to decide if the bulge was visible. I wanted a drink, but I restrained myself. I switched on the radio and wandered through the house, trying to become less agitated. Perhaps taking a life was now no big deal to me, but I could still end up dead, or in prison, and the implant apparently hadn’t rendered me uninterested in my own fate.

I left too early, and had to drive by a circuitous route to kill time; even then, it was only a quarter past three when I parked, a kilometre from Anderson’s house. A few cars and taxis passed me as I walked the rest of the way, and I’m sure I was trying so hard to look at ease that my body language radiated guilt and paranoia—but no ordinary driver would have noticed or cared, and I didn’t see a single patrol car.

When I reached the place, there was nowhere to hide—no gardens, no trees, no fences—but I’d known that in advance. I chose a house across the street, not quite opposite Anderson’s, and sat on the front step. If the occupant appeared, I’d feign drunkenness and stagger away.

I sat and waited. It was a warm, still, ordinary night; the sky was clear, but grey and starless thanks to the lights of the city. I kept reminding myself: You don’t have to do this, you don’t have to go through with it. So why did I stay? The hope of being liberated from my sleepless nights? The idea was laughable; I had no doubt that if I killed Anderson, it would torture me as much as my helplessness over Amy’s death.

Why did I stay? It was nothing to do with the implant; at most, that was neutralising my qualms; it wasn’t forcing me to do anything.

Why, then? In the end, I think I saw it as a matter of honesty. I had to accept the unpleasant fact that I honestly wanted to kill Anderson, and however much I had also been repelled by the notion, to be true to myself I had to do it—anything less would have been hypocrisy and self-deception.

At five to four, I heard footsteps echoing down the street. As I turned, I hoped it would be someone else, or that he would be with a friend, but it was him, and he was alone. I waited until he was as far from his front door as I was, then I started walking. He glanced my way briefly, then ignored me. I felt a shock of pure fear—I hadn’t seen him in the flesh since the trial, and I’d forgotten how physically imposing he was.

I had to force myself to slow down, and even then I passed him sooner than I’d meant to. I was wearing light, rubber-soled shoes, he was in heavy boots, but when I crossed the street and did a U-turn towards him, I couldn’t believe he couldn’t hear my heartbeat, or smell the stench of my sweat. Metres from the door, just as I finished pulling out the gun, he looked over his shoulder with an expression of bland curiosity, as if he might have been expecting a dog or a piece of windblown litter. He turned around to face me, frowning. I just stood there, pointing the gun at him, unable to speak. Eventually he said, ‘What the fuck do you want? I’ve got two hundred dollars in my wallet. Back pocket.’

I shook my head. ‘Unlock the front door, then put your hands on your head and kick it open. Don’t try closing it on me.’

He hesitated, then complied.

‘Now walk in. Keep your hands on your head. Five steps, that’s all. Count them out loud. I’ll be right behind you.’

I reached the light switch for the hall as he counted four, then I slammed the door behind me, and flinched at the sound. Anderson was right in front of me, and I suddenly felt trapped. The man was a vicious killer; I hadn’t even thrown a punch since I was eight years old. Did I really believe the gun would protect me? With his hands on his head, the muscles of his arms and shoulders bulged against his shirt. I should have shot him right then, in the back of the head. This was an execution, not a duel; if I’d wanted some quaint idea of honour, I would have come without a gun and let him take me to pieces.

I said, ‘Turn left.’ Left was the living room. I followed him in, switched on the light. ‘Sit.’ I stood in the doorway, he sat in the room’s only chair. For a moment, I felt dizzy and my vision seemed to tilt, but I don’t think I moved, I don’t think I sagged or swayed; if I had, he probably would have rushed me.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

I had to give that a lot of thought. I’d fantasised this situation a thousand times, but I could no longer remember the details—although I did recall that I’d usually assumed that Anderson would recognise me, and start volunteering excuses and explanations straight away.

Finally, I said, ‘I want you to tell me why you killed my wife.’

‘I didn’t kill your wife. Miller killed your wife.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s not true. I know. The cops told me. Don’t bother lying, because I know.’

He stared at me blandly. I wanted to lose my temper and scream, but I had a feeling that, in spite of the gun, that would have been more comical than intimidating. I could have pistol-whipped him, but the truth is I was afraid to go near him.

So I shot him in the foot. He yelped and swore, then leant over to inspect the damage. ‘Fuck you!’ he hissed. ‘Fuck you!’ He rocked back and forth, holding his foot. ‘I’ll break your fucking neck! I’ll fucking kill you!’ The wound bled a little through the hole in his boot, but it was nothing compared to the movies. I’d heard that the vaporising ammunition had a cauterising effect.

I said, ‘Tell me why you killed my wife.’

He looked far more angry and disgusted than afraid, but he dropped his pretence of innocence. ‘It just happened,’ he said. ‘It was just one of those things that happens.’

I shook my head, annoyed. ‘No. Why? Why did it happen?’

He moved as if to take off his boot, then thought better of it. ‘Things were going wrong. There was a time lock, there was hardly any cash, everything was just a big fuck-up. I didn’t mean to do it. It just happened.’

I shook my head again, unable to decide if he was a moron, or if he was stalling. ‘Don’t tell me “it just happened”. Why did it happen? Why did you do it?’

The frustration was mutual; he ran a hand through his hair and scowled at me. He was sweating now, but I couldn’t tell if it was from pain or from fear. ‘What do you want me to say? I lost my temper, all right? Things were going badly, and I lost my fucking temper, and there she was, all right?’

The dizziness struck me again, but this time it didn’t subside. I understood now; he wasn’t being obtuse, he was telling the entire truth. I’d smashed the occasional coffee cup during a tense situation at work. I’d even, to my shame, kicked our dog once, after a fight with Amy: Why? I’d lost my fucking temper, and there she was.

I stared at Anderson, and felt myself grinning stupidly. It was all so clear now. I understood. I understood the absurdity of everything I’d ever felt for Amy—my ‘love’, my ‘grief’. It had all been a joke. She was meat, she was nothing. All the pain of the past five years evaporated; I was drunk with relief. I raised my arms and spun around slowly. Anderson leapt up and sprung towards me; I shot him in the chest until I ran out of bullets, then I knelt down beside him. He was dead.

I put the gun in my jacket. The barrel was warm. I remembered to use my handkerchief to open the front door. I half expected to find a crowd outside, but of course the shots had been inaudible, and Anderson’s threats and curses were not likely to have attracted attention.

A block from the house, a patrol car appeared around a corner. It slowed almost to a halt as it approached me. I kept my eyes straight ahead as it passed. I heard the engine idle. Then stop. I kept on walking, waiting for a shouted command, thinking: if they search me and find the gun, I’ll confess; there’s no point in prolonging the agony.

The engine spluttered, revved noisily, and the car roared away.

* * * *

Perhaps I’m not the number-one most obvious suspect. I don’t know what Anderson was involved in since he got out; maybe there are hundreds of other people who had far better reasons for wanting him dead, and perhaps when the cops have finished with them, they’ll get around to asking me what I was doing that night. A month seems an awfully long time, though. Anyone would think they didn’t care.

The same teenagers as before are gathered around the entrance, and again the mere sight of me seems to disgust them. I wonder if the taste in fashion and music tattooed on their brains is set to fade in a year or two, or if they have sworn lifelong allegiance. It doesn’t bear contemplating.

This time, I don’t browse. I approach the sales counter without hesitation.

This time, I know exactly what I want.

What I want is what I felt that night: the unshakeable conviction that Amy’s death—let alone Anderson’s—simply didn’t matter, any more than the death of a fly or an amoeba, any more than breaking a coffee cup or kicking a dog.

My one mistake was thinking that the insight I gained would simply vanish when the implant cut out. It hasn’t. It’s been clouded with doubts and reservations, it’s been undermined, to some degree, by my whole ridiculous panoply of beliefs and superstitions, but I can still recall the peace it gave me, I can still recall that flood of joy and relief, and I want it back. Not for three days; for the rest of my life.

Killing Anderson wasn’t honest, it wasn’t ‘being true to myself.’ Being true to myself would have meant living with all my contradictory urges, suffering the multitude of voices in my head, accepting confusion and doubt. It’s too late for that now; having tasted the freedom of certainty, I find I can’t live without it.

‘How can I help you, sir?’ The salesman smiles from the bottom of his heart.

Part of me, of course, still finds the prospect of what I am about to do totally repugnant.

No matter. That won’t last.

Blood Sisters

When we were nine years old, Paula decided we should prick our thumbs, and let our blood flow into each other’s veins.

I was scornful. “Why bother? Our blood’s already exactly the same. We’re already blood sisters.”

She was unfazed. “I know that. That’s not the point. It’s the ritual that counts.”

We did it in our bedroom, at midnight, by the light of a single candle. She sterilized the needle in the candle flame, then wiped it clean of soot with a tissue and saliva.

When we’d pressed the tiny, sticky wounds together, and recited some ridiculous oath from a third-rate children’s novel, Paula blew out the candle. While my eyes were still adjusting to the dark, she added a whispered coda of her own: “Now we’ll dream the same dreams, and share the same lovers, and die at the very same hour.”

I tried to say, indignantly, “That’s just not true!” but the darkness and the scent of the dead flame made the protest stick in my throat, and her words remained unchallenged.

* * *

As Dr Packard spoke, I folded the pathology report, into halves, into quarters, obsessively aligning the edges. It was far too thick for me to make a neat job of it; from the micrographs of the misshapen lymphocytes proliferating in my bone marrow, to the print-out of portions of the RNA sequence of the virus that had triggered the disease, thirty-two pages in all.

In contrast, the prescription, still sitting on the desk in front of me, seemed ludicrously flimsy and insubstantial. No match at all. The traditional—indecipherable—polysyllabic scrawl it bore was nothing but a decoration; the drug’s name was reliably encrypted in the barcode below. There was no question of receiving the wrong medication by mistake. The question was, would the right one help me?

“Is that clear? Ms Rees? Is there anything you don’t understand?”

I struggled to focus my thoughts, pressing hard on an intractable crease with my thumb. She’d explained the situation frankly, without resorting to jargon or euphemism, but I still had the feeling that I was missing something crucial. It seemed like every sentence she’d spoken had started one of two ways: “The virus ...”or “The drug ...”

“Is there anything I can do? Myself? To ... improve the odds?”

She hesitated, but not for long. “No, not really. You’re in excellent health, otherwise. Stay that way.” She began to rise from her desk to dismiss me, and I began to panic.

“But, there must be something.” I gripped the arms of my chair, as if afraid of being dislodged by force. Maybe she’d misunderstood me, maybe I hadn’t made myself clear. “Should I ... stop eating certain foods? Get more exercise? Get more sleep? I mean, there has to be something that will make a difference. And I’ll do it, whatever it is. Please, just tell me—” My voice almost cracked, and I looked away, embarrassed. Don’t ever start ranting like that again. Not ever.

“Ms Rees, I’m sorry. I know how you must be feeling. But the Monte Carlo diseases are all like this. In fact, you’re exceptionally lucky; the WHO computer found eighty thousand people, worldwide, infected with a similar strain. That’s not enough of a market to support any hard-core research, but enough to have persuaded the pharmaceutical companies to rummage through their databases for something that might do the trick. A lot of people are on their own, infected with viruses that are virtually unique. Imagine how much useful information the health profession can give them.” I finally looked up; the expression on her face was one of sympathy, tempered by impatience.

I declined the invitation to feel ashamed of my ingratitude. I’d made a fool of myself, but I still had a right to ask the question. “I understand all that. I just thought there might be something I could do. You say this drug might work, or it might not. If I could contribute, myself, to fighting this disease, I’d feel ...”

What? More like a human being, and less like a test tube—a passive container in which the wonder drug and the wonder virus would fight it out between themselves. “... better.”

She nodded. “I know, but trust me, nothing you can do would make the slightest difference. Just look after yourself as you normally would. Don’t catch pneumonia. Don’t gain or lose ten kilos. Don’t do anything out of the ordinary. Millions of people must have been exposed to this virus, but the reason you’re sick, and they’re not, is a purely genetic matter. The cure will be just the same. The biochemistry that determines whether or not the drug will work for you isn’t going to change if you start taking vitamin pills, or stop eating junk food—and I should warn you that going on one of those ‘miracle-cure’ diets will simply make you sick; the charlatans selling them ought to be in prison.”

I nodded fervent agreement to that, and felt myself flush with anger. Fraudulent cures had long been my bête noir—although now, for the first time, I could almost understand why other Monte Carlo victims paid good money for such things: crackpot diets, meditation schemes, aroma therapy, self-hypnosis tapes, you name it. The people who peddled that garbage were the worst kind of cynical parasites, and I’d always thought of their customers as being either congenitally gullible, or desperate to the point of abandoning their wits, but there was more to it than that. When your life is at stake, you want to fight for it—with every ounce of your strength, with every cent you can borrow, with every waking moment. Taking one capsule, three times a day, just isn’t hard enough—whereas the schemes of the most perceptive con-men were sufficiently arduous (or sufficiently expensive) to make the victims feel that they were engaged in the kind of struggle that the prospect of death requires.

This moment of shared anger cleared the air completely. We were on the same side, after all; I’d been acting like a child. I thanked Dr Packard for her time, picked up the prescription, and left.

On my way to the pharmacy, though, I found myself almost wishing that she’d lied to me—that she’d told me my chances would be vastly improved if I ran ten kilometers a day and ate raw seaweed with every meal—but then I angrily recoiled, thinking: Would I really want to be deceived “for my own good”? If it’s down to my DNA, it’s down to my DNA, and I ought to expect to be told that simple truth, however unpalatable I find it—and I ought to be grateful that the medical profession has abandoned its old patronizing, paternalistic ways.

I was twelve years old when the world learnt about the Monte Carlo project.

A team of biological warfare researchers (located just a stone’s throw from Las Vegas—alas, the one in New Mexico, not the one in Nevada) had decided that designing viruses was just too much hard work (especially when the Star Wars boys kept hogging the supercomputers). Why waste hundreds of PhD-years—why expend any intellectual effort whatsoever—when the time-honoured partnership of blind mutation and natural selection was all that was required?

Speeded up substantially, of course.

They’d developed a three-part system: a bacterium, a virus, and a line of modified human lymphocytes. A stable portion of the viral genome allowed it to reproduce in the bacterium, while rapid mutation of the rest of the virus was achieved by neatly corrupting the transcription error repair enzymes. The lymphocytes had been altered to vastly amplify the reproductive success of any mutant which managed to infect them, causing it to out-breed those which were limited to using the bacterium.

The theory was, they’d set up a few trillion copies of this system, like row after row of little biological poker machines, spinning away in their underground lab, and just wait to harvest the jackpots.

The theory also included the best containment facilities in the world, and five hundred and twenty people all sticking scrupulously to official procedure, day after day, month after month, without a moment of carelessness, laziness or forgetfulness. Apparently, nobody bothered to compute the probability of that.

The bacterium was supposed to be unable to survive outside artificially beneficent laboratory conditions, but a mutation of the virus came to its aid, filling in for the genes that had been snipped out to make it vulnerable.

They wasted too much time using ineffectual chemicals before steeling themselves to nuke the site. By then, the winds had already made any human action—short of melting half a dozen states, not an option in an election year—irrelevant.

The first rumours proclaimed that we’d all be dead within a week. I can clearly recall the mayhem, the looting, the suicides (second-hand on the TV screen; our own neighbourhood remained relatively tranquil—or numb). States of emergency were declared around the world. Planes were turned away from airports, ships (which had left their home ports months before the leak) were burnt in the docks. Harsh laws were rushed in everywhere, to protect public order and public health.

Paula and I got to stay home from school for a month. I offered to teach her programming; she wasn’t interested. She wanted to go swimming, but the beaches and pools were all closed. That was the summer that I finally managed to hack into a Pentagon computer—just an office supplies purchasing system, but Paula was suitably impressed (and neither of us had ever guessed that paperclips were that expensive).

We didn’t believe we were going to die—at least, not within a week—and we were right. When the hysteria died down, it soon became apparent that only the virus and the bacterium had escaped, and without the modified lymphocytes to fine-tune the selection process, the virus had mutated away from the strain which had caused the initial deaths.

However, the cosy symbiotic pair is now found all over the world, endlessly churning out new mutations. Only a tiny fraction of the strains produced are infectious in humans, and only a fraction of those are potentially fatal.

A mere hundred or so a year.

On the train home, the sun seemed to be in my eyes no matter which way I turned—somehow, every surface in the carriage caught its reflection. The glare made a headache which had been steadily growing all afternoon almost unbearable, so I covered my eyes with my forearm and faced the floor. With my other hand, I clutched the brown paper bag that held the small glass vial of red-and-black capsules that would or wouldn’t save my life.

Cancer. Viral leukaemia. I pulled the creased pathology report from my pocket, and flipped through it one more time. The last page hadn’t magically changed into a happy ending—an oncovirology expert system’s declaration of a sure-fire cure. The last page was just the bill for all the tests. Twenty-seven thousand dollars.

At home, I sat and stared at my work station.

Two months before, when a routine quarterly examination (required by my health insurance company, ever eager to dump the unprofitable sick) had revealed the first signs of trouble, I’d sworn to myself that I’d keep on working, keep on living exactly as if nothing had changed. The idea of indulging in a credit spree, or a world trip, or some kind of self-destructive binge, held no attraction for me at all. Any such final fling would be an admission of defeat. I’d go on a fucking world trip to celebrate my cure, and not before.

I had plenty of contract work stacked up, and that pathology bill was already accruing interest. Yet for all that I needed the distraction—for all that I needed the money—I sat there for three whole hours, and did nothing but brood about my fate. Sharing it with eighty thousand strangers scattered about the world was no great comfort.

Then it finally struck me. Paula. If I was vulnerable for genetic reasons, then so was she.

For identical twins, in the end we hadn’t done too bad a job of pursuing separate lives. She had left home at sixteen, to tour central Africa, filming the wildlife, and—at considerably greater risk—the poachers. Then she’d gone to the Amazon, and become caught up in the land rights struggle there. After that, it was a bit of a blur; she’d always tried to keep me up to date with her exploits, but she moved too fast for my sluggish mental picture of her to follow.

I’d never left the country; I hadn’t even moved house in a decade.

She came home only now and then, on her way between continents, but we’d stayed in touch electronically, circumstances permitting. (They take away your SatPhone in Bolivian prisons.)

The telecommunications multinationals all offer their own expensive services for contacting someone when you don’t know in advance what country they’re in. The advertising suggests that it’s an immensely difficult task; the fact is, every SatPhone’s location is listed in a central database, which is kept up to date by pooling information from all the regional satellites. Since I happened to have “acquired” the access codes to consult that database, I could phone Paula directly, wherever she was, without paying the ludicrous surcharge. It was more a matter of nostalgia than miserliness; this minuscule bit of hacking was a token gesture, proof that in spite of impending middle age, I wasn’t yet terminally law-abiding, conservative and dull.

I’d automated the whole procedure long ago. The database said she was in Gabon; my program calculated local time, judged ten twenty-three p. m. to be civilized enough, and made the call. Seconds later, she was on the screen.

“Karen! How are you? You look like shit. I thought you were going to call last week—what happened?”

The image was perfectly clear, the sound clean and undistorted (fibre-optic cables might be scarce in central Africa, but geosynchronous satellites are directly overhead). As soon as I set eyes on her, I felt sure she didn’t have the virus. She was right—I looked half-dead—whereas she was as animated as ever. Half a lifetime spent outdoors meant her skin had aged much faster than mine—but there was always a glow of energy, of purpose, about her that more than compensated.

She was close to the lens, so I couldn’t see much of the background, but it looked like a fibreglass hut, lit by a couple of hurricane lamps; a step up from the usual tent.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get around to it. Gabon? Weren’t you in Ecuador—?”

“Yes, but I met Mohammed. He’s a botanist. From Indonesia. Actually, we met in Bogota; he was on his way to a conference in Mexico—”

“But—”

“Why Gabon? This is where he was going next, that’s all. There’s a fungus here, attacking the crops, and I couldn’t resist coming along ...”

I nodded, bemused, through ten minutes of convoluted explanations, not paying too much attention; in three months’ time it would all be ancient history. Paula survived as a freelance pop-science journalist, darting around the globe writing articles for magazines, and scripts for TV programmes, on the latest ecological troublespots. To be honest, I had severe doubts that this kind of predigested eco-babble did the planet any good, but it certainly made her happy. I envied her that. I could not have lived her life—in no sense was she the woman I “might have been”—but nonetheless it hurt me, at times, to see in her eyes the kind of sheer excitement that I hadn’t felt, myself, for a decade.

My mind wandered while she spoke. Suddenly, she was saying, “Karen? Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

I hesitated. I had originally planned to tell no one, not even her, and now my reason for calling her seemed absurd—she couldn’t have leukaemia, it was unthinkable. Then, without even realizing that I’d made the decision, I found myself recounting everything in a dull, flat voice. I watched with a strange feeling of detachment the changing expression on her face; shock, pity, then a burst of fear when she realized—far sooner than I would have done—exactly what my predicament meant for her.

What followed was even more awkward and painful than I could have imagined. Her concern for me was genuine—but she would not have been human if the uncertainty of her own position had not begun to prey on her at once, and knowing that made all her fussing seem contrived and false.

“Do you have a good doctor? Someone you can trust?”

I nodded.

“Do you have someone to look after you? Do you want me to come home?”

I shook my head, irritated. “No, I’m all right. I’m being looked after, I’m being treated. But you have to get tested as soon as possible.” I glared at her, exasperated. I no longer believed that she could have the virus, but I wanted to stress the fact that I’d called her to warn her, not to fish for sympathy—and somehow, that finally struck home. She said, quietly, “I’ll get tested today. I’ll go straight into town. Okay?”

I nodded. I felt exhausted, but relieved; for a moment, all the awkwardness between us melted away.

“You’ll let me know the results?”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course I will.”

I nodded again. “Okay.”

“Karen. Be careful. Look after yourself.”

“I will. You too.” I hit the ESCAPE key.

Half an hour later, I took the first of the capsules, and climbed into bed. A few minutes later, a bitter taste crept up into my throat.

Telling Paula was essential. Telling Martin was insane. I’d only known him six months, but I should have guessed exactly how he’d take it.

“Move in with me. I’ll look after you.”

“I don’t need to be looked after.”

He hesitated, but only slightly. “Marry me.”

“Marry you? Why? Do you think I have some desperate need to be married before I die?”

He scowled. “Don’t talk like that. I love you. Don’t you understand that?”

I laughed. “I don’t mind being pitied—people always say it’s degrading, but I think it’s a perfectly normal response—but I don’t want to have to live with it twenty-four hours a day.” I kissed him, but he kept on scowling. At least I’d waited until after we’d had sex before breaking the news; if not, he probably would have treated me like porcelain.

He turned to face me. “Why are you being so hard on yourself? What are you trying to prove? That you’re super-human? That you don’t need anyone?”

“Listen. You’ve known from the very start that I need independence and privacy. What do you want me to say? That I’m terrified? Okay. I am. But I’m still the same person. I still need the same things.” I slid one hand across hischest, and said as gently as I could, “So thanks for theoffer, but no thanks.”

“I don’t mean very much to you, do I?”

I groaned, and pulled a pillow over my face. I thought: Wake me when you’re ready to fuck me again. Does that answer your question? I didn’tsay it out loud, though.

A week later, Paula phoned me. She had the virus. Her white cell count was up, her red cell count was down—the numbers she quoted sounded just like my own from the month before. They’d even put her on the very same drug. That was hardly surprising, but it gave me an unpleasant, claustrophobic feeling, when I thought about what it meant: We would both live, or we would both die.

In the days that followed, this realization began to obsess me. It was like voodoo, like some curse out of a fairy tale—or the fulfilment of the words she’d uttered, the night we became “blood sisters.” We had never dreamed the same dreams, we’d certainly never loved the same men, but now ... it was as if we were being punished, for failing to respect the forces that bound us together.

Part of me knew this was bullshit. Forces that bound us together! It was mental static, the product of stress, nothing more. The truth, though, was just as oppressive: the biochemical machinery would grind out its identical verdict on both of us, for all the thousands of kilometres between us, for all that we had forged separate lives in defiance of our genetic unity.

I tried to bury myself in my work. To some degree, I succeeded—if the grey stupor produced by eighteen-hour days in front of a terminal could really be considered a success.

I began to avoid Martin; his puppy-dog concern was just too much to bear. Perhaps he meant well, but I didn’t have the energy to justify myself to him, over and over again. Perversely, at the very same time, I missed our arguments terribly; resisting his excessive mothering had at least made me feel strong, if only in contrast to the helplessness he seemed to expect of me.

I phoned Paula every week at first, but then gradually less and less often. We ought to have been ideal confidantes; in fact, nothing could have been less true. Our conversations were redundant; we already knew what the other was thinking, far too well. There was no sense of unburdening, just a suffocating, monotonous feeling of recognition. We took to trying to outdo each other in affecting a veneer of optimism, but it was a depressingly transparent effort. Eventually, I thought when—if—I get the good news, I’ll call her, until then, what’s the point? Apparently, she came to the same conclusion.

All through childhood, we were forced together. We loved each other, I suppose, but ... we were always in the same classes at school, bought the same clothes, given the same Christmas and birthday presents—and we were always sick at the same time, with the same ailment, for the same reason.

When she left home, I was envious, and horribly lonely for a while, but then I felt a surge of joy, of liberation, because I knew that I had no real wish to follow her, and I knew that from then on, our lives could only grow further apart.

Now, it seemed that had all been an illusion. We would live or die together, and all our efforts to break the bonds had been in vain.

About four months after the start of treatment, my blood counts began to turn around. I was more terrified than ever of my hopes being dashed, and I spent all my time battling to keep myself from premature optimism. I didn’t dare ring Paula; I could think of nothing worse than leading her to think that we were cured, and then turning out to have been mistaken. Even when Dr Packard—cautiously, almost begrudgingly—admitted that things were looking up, I told myself that she might have relented from her policy of unflinching honesty and decided to offer me some palliative lies.

One morning I woke, not yet convinced that I was cured, but sick of feeling I had to drown myself in gloom for fear of being disappointed. If I wanted absolute certainty, I’d be miserable all my life; a relapse would always be possible, or a whole new virus could come along.

It was a cold, dark morning, pouring with rain outside, but as I climbed, shivering, out of bed, I felt more cheerful than I had since the whole thing had begun.

There was a message in my work station mailbox, tagged CONFIDENTIAL. It took me thirty seconds to recall the password I needed, and all the while my shivering grew worse.

The message was from the Chief Administrator of the Libreville People’s Hospital, offering his or her condolences on the death of my sister, and requesting instructions for the disposal of the body.

I don’t know what I felt first. Disbelief. Guilt. Confusion. Fear. How could she have died, when I was so close to recovery? How could she have died without a word to me? How could I have let her die alone? I walked away from the terminal, and slumped against the cold brick wall.

The worst of it was, I suddenly knew why she’d stayed silent. She must have thought that I was dying, too, and that was the one thing we’d both feared most of all: dying together. In spite of everything, dying together, as if we were one.

How could the drug have failed her, and worked for me? Had it worked for me? For a moment of sheer paranoia, I wondered if the hospital had been faking my test results, if in fact I was on the verge of death, myself. That was ludicrous, though.

Why, then, had Paula died? There was only one possible answer. She should have come home—I should have made her come home. How could I have let her stay there, in a tropical, Third World country, with her immune system weakened, living in a fibreglass hut, without proper sanitation, probably malnourished? I should have sent her the money, I should have sent her the ticket, I should have flown out there in person and dragged her back home.

Instead, I’d kept her at a distance. Afraid of us dying together, afraid of the curse of our sameness, I’d let her die alone.

I tried to cry, but something stopped me. I sat in the kitchen, sobbing drily. I was worthless. I’d killed her with my superstition and cowardice. I had no right to be alive.

I spent the next fortnight grappling with the legal and administrative complexities of death in a foreign land. Paula’s will requested cremation, but said nothing about where it was to take place, so I arranged for her body and belongings to be flown home. The service was all but deserted; our parents had died a decade before, in a car crash, and although Paula had had friends all over the world, few were able to make the trip.

Martin came, though. When he put an arm around me, I turned and whispered to him angrily, “You didn’t even know her. What the hell are you doing here?” He stared at me for a moment, hurt and baffled, then walked off without a word.

I can’t pretend I wasn’t grateful, when Packard announced that I was cured, but my failure to rejoice out loud must have puzzled even her. I might have told her about Paula, but I didn’t want to be fed cheap clichés about how irrational it was of me to feel guilty for surviving.

She was dead. I was growing stronger by the day; often sick with guilt and depression, but more often simply numb. That might easily have been the end of it.

Following the instructions in the will, I sent most of her belongings—notebooks, disks, audio and video tapes—to her agent, to be passed on to the appropriate editors and producers, to whom some of it might be of use. All that remained was clothing, a minute quantity of jewellery and cosmetics, and a handful of odds and ends. Including a small glass vial of red-and-black capsules.

I don’t know what possessed me to take one of the capsules. I had half a dozen left of my own, and Packard had shrugged when I’d asked if I should finish them, and said that it couldn’t do me any harm.

There was no aftertaste. Every time I’d swallowed my own, within minutes there’d been a bitter aftertaste.

I broke open a second capsule and put some of the white powder on my tongue. It was entirely without flavour. I ran and grabbed my own supply, and sampled one the same way; it tasted so vile it made my eyes water.

I tried, very hard, not to leap to any conclusions. I knew perfectly well that pharmaceuticals were often mixed with inert substances, and perhaps not necessarily the same ones all the time—but why would something bitter be used for that purpose? The taste had to come from the drug itself. The two vials bore the same manufacturer’s name and logo. The same brand name. The same generic name. The same formal chemical name for the active ingredient. The same product code, down to the very last digit. Only the batch numbers were different.

The first explanation that came to mind was corruption. Although I couldn’t recall the details, I was sure that I’d read about dozens of cases of officials in the health care systems of developing countries diverting pharmaceuticals for resale on the black market. What better way to cover up such a theft than to replace the stolen product with something else—something cheap, harmless, and absolutely useless? The gelatin capsules themselves bore nothing but the manufacturer’s logo, and since the company probably made at least a thousand different drugs, it would not have been too hard to find something cheaper, with the same size and colouration.

I had no idea what to do with this theory. Anonymous bureaucrats in a distant country had killed my sister, but the prospect of finding out who they were, let alone seeing them brought to justice, were infinitesimally small. Even if I’d had real, damning evidence, what was the most I could hope for? A meekly phrased protest from one diplomat to another.

I had one of Paula’s capsules analysed. It cost me a fortune, but I was already so deeply in debt that I didn’t much care.

It was full of a mixture of soluble inorganic compounds. There was no trace of the substance described on the label, nor of anything else with the slightest biological activity. It wasn’t a cheap substitute drug, chosen at random.

It was a placebo.

I stood with the print-out in my hand for several minutes, trying to come to terms with what it meant. Simple greed I could have understood, but there was an utterly inhuman coldness here that I couldn’t bring myself to swallow. Someone must have made an honest mistake. Nobody could be so callous.

Then Packard’s words came back to me. “Just look after yourself as you normally would. Don’t do anything out of the ordinary.”

Oh no, Doctor. Of course not, Doctor. Wouldn’t want to go spoiling the experiment with any messy, extraneous, uncontrolled factors ...

I contacted an investigative journalist, one of the best in the country. I arranged a meeting in a small café on the edge of town.

I drove out there—terrified, angry, triumphant—thinking I had the scoop of the decade, thinking I had dynamite, thinking I was Meryl Streep playing Karen Silkwood. I was dizzy with sweet thoughts of revenge. Heads were going to roll.

Nobody tried to run me off the road. The cafe was deserted, and the waiter barely listened to our orders, let alone our conversation.

The journalist was very kind. She calmly explained the facts of life.

In the aftermath of the Monte Carlo disaster, a lot of legislation had been passed to help deal with the emergency—and a lot of legislation had been repealed. As a matter of urgency, new drugs to treat the new diseases had to be developed and assessed, and the best way to ensure that was to remove the cumbersome regulations that had made clinical trials so difficult and expensive.

In the old “double-blind” trials, neither the patients nor the investigators knew who was getting the drug and who was getting a placebo; the information was kept secret by a third party (or a computer). Any improvement observed in the patients who were given the placebo could then be taken into account, and the drug’s true efficacy measured.

There were two small problems with this traditional approach. Firstly, telling a patient that there’s only a fifty-fifty chance that they’ve been given a potentially life-saving drug subjects them to a lot of stress. Of course, the treatment and control groups were affected equally, but in terms of predicting what would happen when the drug was finally put out on the market, it introduced a lot of noise into the data. Which side-effects were real, and which were artifacts of the patients’ uncertainty?

Secondly—and more seriously—it had become increasingly difficult to find people willing to volunteer for placebo trials. When you’re dying, you don’t give a shit about the scientific method. You want the maximum possible chance of surviving. Untested drugs will do, if there is no known, certain cure—but why accept a further halving of the odds, to satisfy some technocrat’s obsession with derails?

Of course, in the good old days the medical profession could lay down the law to the unwashed masses: Take part in this double-blind trial, or crawl away and die. AIDS had changed all that, with black markets for the latest untried cures, straight from the labs to the streets, and intense politicization of the issues.

The solution to both flaws was obvious.

You lie to the patients.

No bill had been passed to explicitly declare that “triple-blind” trials were legal. If it had, people might have noticed, and made a fuss. Instead, as part of the “reforms” and “rationalization” that came in the wake of the disaster, all the laws that might have made them illegal had been removed or watered down. At least, it looked that way—no court had yet been given the opportunity to pass judgement.

“How could any doctor do that? Lie like that! How could they justify it, even to themselves?”

She shrugged. “How did they ever justify double-blind trials? A good medical researcher has to care more about the quality of the data than about any one person’s life. And if a double-blind trial is good, a triple-blind trial is better. The data is guaranteed to be better, you can see that, can’t you? And the more accurately a drug can be assessed, well, perhaps in the long run, the more lives can be saved.”

“Oh, crap! The placebo effect isn’t that powerful. It just isn’t that important! Who cares if it’s not precisely taken into account? Anyway, two potential cures could still be compared, one treatment against another. That would tell you which drug would save the most lives, without any need for placebos—”

“That is done sometimes, although the more prestigious journals look down on those studies; they’re less likely to be published—”

I stared at her. “How can you know all this and do nothing? The media could blow it wide open! If you let people know what’s going on ...”

She smiled thinly. “I could publicize the observation that these practices are now, theoretically, legal. Other people have done that, and it doesn’t exactly make headlines. But if I printed any specific facts about an actual triple-blind trial, I’d face a half-million-dollar fine, and twenty-five years in prison, for endangering public health. Not to mention what they’d do to my publisher. All the ‘emergency’ laws brought in to deal with the Monte Carlo leak are still active.”

“But that was twenty years ago!”

She drained her coffee and rose. “Don’t you recall what the experts said at the time?”

“No.”

“The effects will be with us for generations.”

It took me four months to penetrate the drug manufacturer’s network.

I eavesdropped on the data flow of several company executives who chose to work from home. It didn’t take long to identify the least computer-literate. A real bumbling fool, who used ten-thousand-dollar spreadsheet software to do what the average five-year-old could have done without fingers and toes. I watched his clumsy responses when the spreadsheet package gave him error messages. He was a gift from heaven; he simply didn’t have a clue.

And, best of all, he was forever running a tediously unimaginative pornographic video game.

If the computer said “Jump!” he’d say “Promise not to tell?”

I spent a fortnight minimizing what he had to do; it started out at seventy keystrokes, but I finally got it down to twenty-three.

I waited until his screen was at its most compromising, then I suspended his connection to the network, and took its place myself.

FATAL SYSTEM ERROR! TYPE THE FOLLOWING TO RECOVER:

He botched it the first time. I rang alarm bells, and repeated the request. The second time, he got it right.

The first multi-key combination I had him strike took the work station right out of its operating system into its processor’s microcode debugging routine. The hexadecimal that followed, gibberish to him, was a tiny program to dump all of the work station’s memory down the communications line, right into my lap.

If he told anyone with any sense what had happened, suspicion would be aroused at once—but would he risk being asked to explain just what he was running when the “bug” occurred? I doubted it.

I already had his passwords. Included in the work station’s memory was an algorithm which told me precisely how to respond to the network’s security challenges. I was in.

The rest of their defences were trivial, at least so far as my aims were concerned. Data that might have been useful to their competitors was well-shielded, but I wasn’t interested in stealing the secrets of their latest haemorrhoid cure.

I could have done a lot of damage. Arranged for their backups to be filled with garbage. Arranged for the gradual deviation of their accounts from reality, until reality suddenly intruded in the form of bankruptcy—or charges of tax fraud. I considered a thousand possibilities, from the crudest annihilation of data to the slowest, most insidious forms of corruption.

In the end, though, I restrained myself. I knew the fight would soon become a political one, and any act of petty vengeance on my part would be sure to be dredged up and used to discredit me, to undermine my cause.

So I did only what was absolutely necessary.

I located the files containing the names and addresses of everyone who had been unknowingly participating in triple-blind trials of the company’s products. I arranged for them all to be notified of what had been done to them. There were over two hundred thousand people, spread all around the world—but I found a swollen executive slush fund which easily covered the communications bill.

Soon, the whole world would know of our anger, would share in our outrage and grief. Half of us were sick or dying, though, and before the slightest whisper of protest was heard, my first objective had to be to save whoever I could.

I found the program that allocated medication or placebo. The program that had killed Paula, and thousands of others, for the sake of sound experimental technique.

I altered it. A very small change. I added one more lie.

All the reports it generated would continue to assert that half the patients involved in clinical trials were being given the placebo. Dozens of exhaustive, impressive files would continue to be created, containing data entirely consistent with this lie. Only one small file, never read by humans, would be different. The file controlling the assembly line robots would instruct them to put medication in every vial of every batch.

From triple-blind to quadruple-blind. One more lie, to cancel out the others, until the time for deception was finally over.

Martin came to see me.

“I heard about what you’re doing. T.I.M. Truth in Medicine.” He pulled a newspaper clipping from his pocket. “‘A vigorous new organization dedicated to the eradication of quackery, fraud and deception in both alternative and conventional medicine.’ Sounds like a great idea.”

“Thanks.”

He hesitated. “I heard you were looking for a few more volunteers. To help around the office.”

“That’s right.”

“I could manage four hours a week.”

I laughed. “Oh, could you really? Well, thanks very much, but I think we’ll cope without you.”

For a moment, I thought he was going to walk out, but then he said, not so much hurt as simply baffled, “Do you want volunteers, or not?”

“Yes, but—” But what? If he could swallow enough pride to offer, I could swallow enough pride to accept.

I signed him up for Wednesday afternoons.

I have nightmares about Paula, now and then. I wake smelling the ghost of a candle flame, certain that she’s standing in the dark beside my pillow, a solemn-eyed nine-year-old child again, mesmerized by our strange condition.

That child can’t haunt me, though. She never died. She grew up, and grew apart from me, and she fought for our separateness harder than I ever did. What if we had “died at the very same hour”? It would have signified nothing, changed nothing. Nothing could have reached back and robbed us of our separate lives, our separate achievements and failures.

I realize, now, that the blood oath that seemed so ominous to me was nothing but a joke to Paula, her way of mocking the very idea that our fates could be entwined. How could I have taken so long to see that?

It shouldn’t surprise me, though. The truth—and the measure of her triumph—is that I never really knew her.

Border Guards

n the early afternoon of his fourth day out of sadness, Jamil was wandering home from the gardens at the centre of Noether when he heard shouts from the playing field behind the library. On the spur of the moment, without even asking the city what game was in progress, he decided to join in.

As he rounded the corner and the field came into view, it was clear from the movements of the players that they were in the middle of a quantum soccer match. At Jamil’s request, the city painted the wave function of the hypothetical ball across his vision, and tweaked him to recognise the players as the members of two teams without changing their appearance at all. Maria had once told him that she always chose a literal perception of colour-coded clothing instead; she had no desire to use pathways that had evolved for the sake of sorting people into those you defended and those you slaughtered. But almost everything that had been bequeathed to them was stained with blood, and to Jamil it seemed a far sweeter victory to adapt the worst relics to his own ends than to discard them as irretrievably tainted.

The wave function appeared as a vivid auroral light, a quicksilver plasma bright enough to be distinct in the afternoon sunlight, yet unable to dazzle the eye or conceal the players running through it. Bands of colour representing the complex phase of the wave swept across the field, parting to wash over separate rising lobes of probability before hitting the boundary and bouncing back again, inverted. The match was being played by the oldest, simplest rules: semi-classical, non-relativistic. The ball was confined to the field by an infinitely high barrier, so there was no question of it tunnelling out, leaking away as the match progressed. The players were treated classically: their movements pumped energy into the wave, enabling transitions from the game’s opening state—with the ball spread thinly across the entire field—into the range of higher-energy modes needed to localise it. But localisation was fleeting; there was no point forming a nice sharp wave packet in the middle of the field in the hope of kicking it around like a classical object. You had to shape the wave in such a way that all of its modes—cycling at different frequencies, travelling with different velocities—would come into phase with each other, for a fraction of a second, within the goal itself. Achieving that was a matter of energy levels, and timing.

Jamil had noticed that one team was under-strength. The umpire would be skewing the field’s potential to keep the match fair, but a new participant would be especially welcome for the sake of restoring symmetry. He watched the faces of the players, most of them old friends. They were frowning with concentration, but breaking now and then into smiles of delight at their small successes, or their opponents’ ingenuity.

He was badly out of practice, but if he turned out to be dead weight he could always withdraw. And if he misjudged his skills, and lost the match with his incompetence? No one would care. The score was nil all; he could wait for a goal, but that might be an hour or more in coming. Jamil communed with the umpire, and discovered that the players had decided in advance to allow new entries at any time.

Before he could change his mind, he announced himself. The wave froze, and he ran on to the field. People nodded greetings, mostly making no fuss, though Ezequiel shouted, “Welcome back!” Jamil suddenly felt fragile again; though he’d ended his long seclusion four days before, it was well within his power, still, to be dismayed by everything the game would involve. His recovery felt like a finely balanced optical illusion, a figure and ground that could change roles in an instant, a solid cube that could evert into a hollow.

The umpire guided him to his allotted starting position, opposite a woman he hadn’t seen before. He offered her a formal bow, and she returned the gesture. This was no time for introductions, but he asked the city if she’d published a name. She had: Margit.

The umpire counted down in their heads. Jamil tensed, regretting his impulsiveness. For seven years he’d been dead to the world. After four days back, what was he good for? His muscles were incapable of atrophy, his reflexes could never be dulled, but he’d chosen to live with an unconstrained will, and at any moment his wavering resolve could desert him.

The umpire said, “Play.” The frozen light around Jamil came to life, and he sprang into motion.

Each player was responsible for a set of modes, particular harmonics of the wave that were theirs to fill, guard, or deplete as necessary. Jamil’s twelve modes cycled at between 1,000 and 1,250 milliHertz. The rules of the game endowed his body with a small, fixed potential energy, which repelled the ball slightly and allowed different modes to push and pull on each other through him, but if he stayed in one spot as the modes cycled, every influence he exerted would eventually be replaced by its opposite, and the effect would simply cancel itself out.

To drive the wave from one mode to another, you needed to move, and to drive it efficiently you needed to exploit the way the modes fell in and out of phase with each other: to take from a 1,000 milliHertz mode and give to a 1,250, you had to act in synch with the quarter-Hertz beat between them. It was like pushing a child’s swing at its natural frequency, but rather than setting a single child in motion, you were standing between two swings and acting more as an intermediary: trying to time your interventions in such a way as to speed up one child at the other’s expense. The way you pushed on the wave at a given time and place was out of your hands completely, but by changing location in just the right way you could gain control over the interaction. Every pair of modes had a spatial beat between them—like the moiré pattern formed by two sheets of woven fabric held up to the light together, shifting from transparent to opaque as the gaps between the threads fell in and out of alignment. Slicing through this cyclic landscape offered the perfect means to match the accompanying chronological beat.

Jamil sprinted across the field at a speed and angle calculated to drive two favourable transitions at once. He’d gauged the current spectrum of the wave instinctively, watching from the sidelines, and he knew which of the modes in his charge would contribute to a goal and which would detract from the probability. As he cut through the shimmering bands of colour, the umpire gave him tactile feedback to supplement his visual estimates and calculations, allowing him to sense the difference between a cyclic tug, a to and fro that came to nothing, and the gentle but persistent force that meant he was successfully riding the beat.

Chusok called out to him urgently, “Take, take! Two-ten!” Everyone’s spectral territory overlapped with someone else’s, and you needed to pass amplitude from player to player as well as trying to manage it within your own range. Two-ten—a harmonic with two peaks across the width of the field and ten along its length, cycling at 1,160 milliHertz—was filling up as Chusok drove unwanted amplitude from various lower-energy modes into it. It was Jamil’s role to empty it, putting the amplitude somewhere useful. Any mode with an even number of peaks across the field was unfavourable for scoring, because it had a node—a zero point between the peaks—smack in the middle of both goals.

Jamil acknowledged the request with a hand signal and shifted his trajectory. It was almost a decade since he’d last played the game, but he still knew the intricate web of possibilities by heart: he could drain the two-ten harmonic into the three-ten, five-two and five-six modes—all with “good parity”, peaks along the centre-line—in a single action.

As he pounded across the grass, carefully judging the correct angle by sight, increasing his speed until he felt the destructive beats give way to a steady force like a constant breeze, he suddenly recalled a time—centuries before, in another city—when he’d played with one team, week after week, for forty years. Faces and voices swam in his head. Hashim, Jamil’s ninety-eighth child, and Hashim’s granddaughter Laila had played beside him. But he’d burnt his house and moved on, and when that era touched him at all now it was like an unexpected gift. The scent of the grass, the shouts of the players, the soles of his feet striking the ground, resonated with every other moment he’d spent the same way, bridging the centuries, binding his life together. He never truly felt the scale of it when he sought it out deliberately; it was always small things, tightly focused moments like this, that burst the horizon of his everyday concerns and confronted him with the astonishing vista.

The two-ten mode was draining faster than he’d expected; the see-sawing centre-line dip in the wave was vanishing before his eyes. He looked around, and saw Margit performing an elaborate Lissajous manoeuvre, smoothly orchestrating a dozen transitions at once. Jamil froze and watched her, admiring her virtuosity while he tried to decide what to do next; there was no point competing with her when she was doing such a good job of completing the task Chusok had set him.

Margit was his opponent, but they were both aiming for exactly the same kind of spectrum. The symmetry of the field meant that any scoring wave would work equally well for either side—but only one team could be the first to reap the benefit, the first to have more than half the wave’s probability packed into their goal. So the two teams were obliged to cooperate at first, and it was only as the wave took shape from their combined efforts that it gradually became apparent which side would gain by sculpting it to perfection as rapidly as possible, and which would gain by spoiling it for the first chance, then honing it for the rebound.

Penina chided him over her shoulder as she jogged past, “You want to leave her to clean up four-six, as well?” She was smiling, but Jamil was stung; he’d been motionless for ten or fifteen seconds. It was not forbidden to drag your feet and rely on your opponents to do all the work, but it was regarded as a shamefully impoverished strategy. It was also very risky, handing them the opportunity to set up a wave that was almost impossible to exploit yourself.

He reassessed the spectrum, and quickly sorted through the alternatives. Whatever he did would have unwanted side effects; there was no magic way to avoid influencing modes in other players’ territory, and any action that would drive the transitions he needed would also trigger a multitude of others, up and down the spectrum. Finally, he made a choice that would weaken the offending mode while causing as little disruption as possible.

Jamil immersed himself in the game, planning each transition two steps in advance, switching strategy half-way through a run if he had to, but staying in motion until the sweat dripped from his body, until his calves burned, until his blood sang. He wasn’t blinded to the raw pleasures of the moment, or to memories of games past, but he let them wash over him, like the breeze that rose up and cooled his skin with no need for acknowledgement. Familiar voices shouted terse commands at him; as the wave came closer to a scoring spectrum every trace of superfluous conversation vanished, every idle glance gave way to frantic, purposeful gestures. To a bystander, this might have seemed like the height of dehumanisation: twenty-two people reduced to grunting cogs in a pointless machine. Jamil smiled at the thought but refused to be distracted into a complicated imaginary rebuttal. Every step he took was the answer to that, every hoarse plea to Yann or Joracy, Chusok or Maria, Eudore or Halide. These were his friends, and he was back among them. Back in the world.

The first chance of a goal was thirty seconds away, and the opportunity would fall to Jamil’s team; a few tiny shifts in amplitude would clinch it. Margit kept her distance, but Jamil could sense her eyes on him constantly—and literally feel her at work through his skin as she slackened his contact with the wave. In theory, by mirroring your opponent’s movements at the correct position on the field you could undermine everything they did, though in practice not even the most skilful team could keep the spectrum completely frozen. Going further and spoiling was a tug of war you didn’t want to win too well: if you degraded the wave too much, your opponent’s task—spoiling your own subsequent chance at a goal—became far easier.

Jamil still had two bad-parity modes that he was hoping to weaken, but every time he changed velocity to try a new transition, Margit responded in an instant, blocking him. He gestured to Chusok for help; Chusok had his own problems with Ezequiel, but he could still make trouble for Margit by choosing where he placed unwanted amplitude. Jamil shook sweat out of his eyes; he could see the characteristic “stepping stone” pattern of lobes forming, a sign that the wave would soon converge on the goal, but from the middle of the field it was impossible to judge their shape accurately enough to know what, if anything, remained to be done.

Suddenly, Jamil felt the wave push against him. He didn’t waste time looking around for Margit; Chusok must have succeeded in distracting her. He was almost at the boundary line, but he managed to reverse smoothly, continuing to drive both the transitions he’d been aiming for.

Two long lobes of probability, each modulated by a series of oscillating mounds, raced along the sides of the field. A third, shorter lobe running along the centre-line melted away, reappeared, then merged with the others as they touched the end of the field, forming an almost rectangular plateau encompassing the goal.

The plateau became a pillar of light, growing narrower and higher as dozens of modes, all finally in phase, crashed together against the impenetrable barrier of the field’s boundary. A shallow residue was still spread across the entire field, and a diminishing sequence of elliptical lobes trailed away from the goal like a staircase, but most of the wave that had started out lapping around their waists was now concentrated in a single peak that towered above their heads, nine or ten metres tall.

For an instant, it was motionless.

Then it began to fall.

The umpire said, “Forty-nine point eight.”

The wave packet had not been tight enough.

Jamil struggled to shrug off his disappointment and throw his instincts into reverse. The other team had fifty seconds, now, to fine-tune the spectrum and ensure that the reflected packet was just a fraction narrower when it reformed, at the opposite end of the field.

As the pillar collapsed, replaying its synthesis in reverse, Jamil caught sight of Margit. She smiled at him calmly, and it suddenly struck him: She’d known they couldn’t make the goal. That was why she’d stopped opposing him. She’d let him work towards sharpening the wave for a few seconds, knowing that it was already too late for him, knowing that her own team would gain from the slight improvement.

Jamil was impressed; it took an extraordinary level of skill and confidence to do what she’d just done. For all the time he’d spent away, he knew exactly what to expect from the rest of the players, and in Margit’s absence he would probably have been wishing out loud for a talented newcomer to make the game interesting again. Still, it was hard not to feel a slight sting of resentment. Someone should have warned him just how good she was.

With the modes slipping out of phase, the wave undulated all over the field again, but its reconvergence was inevitable: unlike a wave of water or sound, it possessed no hidden degrees of freedom to grind its precision into entropy. Jamil decided to ignore Margit; there were cruder strategies than mirror-blocking that worked almost as well. Chusok was filling the two-ten mode now; Jamil chose the four-six as his spoiler. All they had to do was keep the wave from growing much sharper, and it didn’t matter whether they achieved this by preserving the status quo, or by nudging it from one kind of bluntness to another.

The steady resistance he felt as he ran told Jamil that he was driving the transition, unblocked, but he searched in vain for some visible sign of success. When he reached a vantage point where he could take in enough of the field in one glance to judge the spectrum properly, he noticed a rapidly vibrating shimmer across the width of the wave. He counted nine peaks: good parity. Margit had pulled most of the amplitude straight out of his spoiler mode and fed it into this. It was a mad waste of energy to aim for such an elevated harmonic, but no one had been looking there, no one had stopped her.

The scoring pattern was forming again, he only had nine or ten seconds left to make up for all the time he’d wasted. Jamil chose the strongest good-parity mode in his territory, and the emptiest bad one, computed the velocity that would link them, and ran.

He didn’t dare turn to watch the opposition goal; he didn’t want to break his concentration. The wave retreated around his feet, less like an Earthly ebb tide than an ocean drawn into the sky by a passing black hole. The city diligently portrayed the shadow that his body would have cast, shrinking in front of him as the tower of light rose.

The verdict was announced. “Fifty point one.”

The air was filled with shouts of triumph—Ezequiel’s the loudest, as always. Jamil sagged to his knees, laughing. It was a curious feeling, familiar as it was: he cared, and he didn’t. If he’d been wholly indifferent to the outcome of the game there would have been no pleasure in it, but obsessing over every defeat—or every victory—could ruin it just as thoroughly. He could almost see himself walking the line, orchestrating his response as carefully as any action in the game itself.

He lay down on the grass to catch his breath before play resumed. The outer face of the microsun that orbited Laplace was shielded with rock, but light reflected skywards from the land beneath it crossed the 100,000 kilometre width of the 3-toroidal universe to give a faint glow to the planet’s nightside. Though only a sliver was lit directly, Jamil could discern the full disk of the opposite hemisphere in the primary image at the zenith: continents and oceans that lay, by a shorter route, 12,000 or so kilometres beneath him. Other views in the lattice of images spread across the sky were from different angles, and showed substantial crescents of the dayside itself. The one thing you couldn’t find in any of these images, even with a telescope, was your own city. The topology of this universe let you see the back of your head, but never your reflection.

amil’s team lost, three nil. He staggered over to the fountains at the edge of the field and slaked his thirst, shocked by the pleasure of the simple act. Just to be alive was glorious now, but once he felt this way, anything seemed possible. He was back in synch, back in phase, and he was going to make the most of it, for however long it lasted.

He caught up with the others, who’d headed down towards the river. Ezequiel hooked an arm around his neck, laughing. “Bad luck, Sleeping Beauty! You picked the wrong time to wake. With Margit, we’re invincible.”

Jamil ducked free of him. “I won’t argue with that.” He looked around. “Speaking of whom—”

Penina said, “Gone home. She plays, that’s all. No frivolous socialising after the match.”

Chusok added, “Or any other time.” Penina shot Jamil a glance that meant: not for want of trying on Chusok’s part.

Jamil pondered this, wondering why it annoyed him so much. On the field, she hadn’t come across as aloof and superior. Just unashamedly good.

He queried the city, but she’d published nothing besides her name. Nobody expected—or wished—to hear more than the tiniest fraction of another person’s history, but it was rare for anyone to start a new life without carrying through something from the old as a kind of calling card, some incident or achievement from which your new neighbours could form an impression of you.

They’d reached the riverbank. Jamil pulled his shirt over his head. “So what’s her story? She must have told you something.”

Ezequiel said, “Only that she learnt to play a long time ago; she won’t say where or when. She arrived in Noether at the end of last year, and grew a house on the southern outskirts. No one sees her around much. No one even knows what she studies.”

Jamil shrugged, and waded in. “Ah well. It’s a challenge to rise to.” Penina laughed and splashed him teasingly. He protested, “I meant beating her at the game.”

Chusok said wryly, “When you turned up, I thought you’d be our secret weapon. The one player she didn’t know inside out already.”

“I’m glad you didn’t tell me that. I would have turned around and fled straight back into hibernation.”

“I know. That’s why we all kept quiet.” Chusok smiled. “Welcome back.”

Penina said, “Yeah, welcome back, Jamil.”

Sunlight shone on the surface of the river. Jamil ached all over, but the cool water was the perfect place to be. If he wished, he could build a partition in his mind at the point where he stood right now, and never fall beneath it. Other people lived that way, and it seemed to cost them nothing. Contrast was overrated; no sane person spent half their time driving spikes into their flesh for the sake of feeling better when they stopped. Ezequiel lived every day with the happy boisterousness of a five-year-old; Jamil sometimes found this annoying, but then any kind of disposition would irritate someone. His own stretches of meaningless sombreness weren’t exactly a boon to his friends.

Chusok said, “I’ve invited everyone to a meal at my house tonight. Will you come?”

Jamil thought it over, then shook his head. He still wasn’t ready. He couldn’t force-feed himself with normality; it didn’t speed his recovery, it just drove him backwards.

Chusok looked disappointed, but there was nothing to be done about that. Jamil promised him, “Next time. OK?”

Ezequiel sighed. “What are we going to do with you? You’re worse than Margit!” Jamil started backing away, but it was too late. Ezequiel reached him in two casual strides, bent down and grabbed him around the waist, hoisted him effortlessly onto one shoulder, then flung him through the air into the depths of the river.

amil was woken by the scent of wood smoke. His room was still filled with the night’s grey shadows, but when he propped himself up on one elbow and the window obliged him with transparency, the city was etched clearly in the predawn light.

He dressed and left the house, surprised at the coolness of the dew on his feet. No one else in his street seemed to be up; had they failed to notice the smell, or did they already know to expect it? He turned a corner and saw the rising column of soot, faintly lit with red from below. The flames and the ruins were still hidden from him, but he knew whose house it was.

When he reached the dying blaze, he crouched in the heat-withered garden, cursing himself. Chusok had offered him the chance to join him for his last meal in Noether. Whatever hints you dropped, it was customary to tell no one that you were moving on. If you still had a lover, if you still had young children, you never deserted them. But friends, you warned in subtle ways. Before vanishing.

Jamil covered his head with his arms. He’d lived through this countless times before, but it never became easier. If anything it grew worse, as every departure was weighted with the memories of others. His brothers and sisters had scattered across the branches of the New Territories. He’d walked away from his father and mother when he was too young and confident to realise how much it would hurt him, decades later. His own children had all abandoned him eventually, far more often than he’d left them. It was easier to leave an ex-lover than a grown child: something burned itself out in a couple, almost naturally, as if ancestral biology had prepared them for at least that one rift.

Jamil stopped fighting the tears. But as he brushed them away, he caught sight of someone standing beside him. He looked up. It was Margit.

He felt a need to explain. He rose to his feet and addressed her. “This was Chusok’s house. We were good friends. I’d known him for ninety-six years.”

Margit gazed back at him neutrally. “Boo hoo. Poor baby. You’ll never see your friend again.”

Jamil almost laughed, her rudeness was so surreal. He pushed on, as if the only conceivable, polite response was to pretend that he hadn’t heard her. “No one is the kindest, the most generous, the most loyal. It doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. Everyone’s unique. Chusok was Chusok.” He banged a fist against his chest, utterly heedless now of her contemptuous words. “There’s a hole in me, and it will never be filled.” That was the truth, even though he’d grow around it. He should have gone to the meal, it would have cost him nothing.

“You must be a real emotional Swiss cheese,” observed Margit tartly.

Jamil came to his senses. “Why don’t you fuck off to some other universe? No one wants you in Noether.”

Margit was amused. “You are a bad loser.”

Jamil gazed at her, honestly confused for a moment; the game had slipped his mind completely. He gestured at the embers. “What are you doing here? Why did you follow the smoke, if it wasn’t regret at not saying goodbye to him when you had the chance?” He wasn’t sure how seriously to take Penina’s light-hearted insinuation, but if Chusok had fallen for Margit, and it had not been reciprocated, that might even have been the reason he’d left.

She shook her head calmly. “He was nothing to me. I barely spoke to him.”

“Well, that’s your loss.”

“From the look of things, I’d say the loss was all yours.”

He had no reply. Margit turned and walked away.

Jamil crouched on the ground again, rocking back and forth, waiting for the pain to subside.

amil spent the next week preparing to resume his studies. The library had near-instantaneous contact with every artificial universe in the New Territories, and the additional lightspeed lag between Earth and the point in space from which the whole tree-structure blossomed was only a few hours. Jamil had been to Earth, but only as a tourist; land was scarce, they accepted no migrants. There were remote planets you could live on, in the home universe, but you had to be a certain kind of masochistic purist to want that. The precise reasons why his ancestors had entered the New Territories had been forgotten generations before—and it would have been presumptuous to track them down and ask them in person—but given a choice between the then even-more-crowded Earth, the horrifying reality of interstellar distances, and an endlessly extensible branching chain of worlds which could be traversed within a matter of weeks, the decision wasn’t exactly baffling.

Jamil had devoted most of his time in Noether to studying the category of representations of Lie groups on complex vector spaces—a fitting choice, since Emmy Noether had been a pioneer of group theory, and if she’d lived to see this field blossom she would probably have been in the thick of it herself. Representations of Lie groups lay behind most of physics: each kind of subatomic particle was really nothing but a particular way of representing the universal symmetry group as a set of rotations of complex vectors. Organising this kind of structure with category theory was ancient knowledge, but Jamil didn’t care; he’d long ago reconciled himself to being a student, not a discoverer. The greatest gift of consciousness was the ability to take the patterns of the world inside you, and for all that he would have relished the thrill of being the first at anything, with ten-to-the-sixteenth people alive that was a futile ambition for most.

In the library, he spoke with fellow students of his chosen field on other worlds, or read their latest works. Though they were not researchers, they could still put a new pedagogical spin on old material, enriching the connections with other fields, finding ways to make the complex, subtle truth easier to assimilate without sacrificing the depth and detail that made it worth knowing in the first place. They would not advance the frontiers of knowledge. They would not discover new principles of nature, or invent new technologies. But to Jamil, understanding was an end in itself.

He rarely thought about the prospect of playing another match, and when he did the idea was not appealing. With Chusok gone, the same group could play ten-to-a-side without Jamil to skew the numbers. Margit might even choose to swap teams, if only for the sake of proving that her current team’s monotonous string of victories really had been entirely down to her.

When the day arrived, though, he found himself unable to stay away. He turned up intending to remain a spectator, but Ryuichi had deserted Ezequiel’s team, and everyone begged Jamil to join in.

As he took his place opposite Margit, there was nothing in her demeanour to acknowledge their previous encounter: no lingering contempt, but no hint of shame either. Jamil resolved to put it out of his mind; he owed it to his fellow players to concentrate on the game.

They lost, five nil.

Jamil forced himself to follow everyone to Eudore’s house, to celebrate, commiserate, or as it turned out, to forget the whole thing. After they’d eaten, Jamil wandered from room to room, enjoying Eudore’s choice of music but unable to settle into any conversation. No one mentioned Chusok in his hearing.

He left just after midnight. Laplace’s near-full primary image and its eight brightest gibbous companions lit the streets so well that there was no need for anything more. Jamil thought: Chusok might have merely travelled to another city, one beneath his gaze right now. And wherever he’d gone, he might yet choose to stay in touch with his friends from Noether.

And his friends from the next town, and the next?

Century after century?

Margit was sitting on Jamil’s doorstep, holding a bunch of white flowers in one hand.

Jamil was irritated. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to apologise.”

He shrugged. “There’s no need. We feel differently about certain things. That’s fine. I can still face you on the playing field.”

“I’m not apologising for a difference of opinion. I wasn’t honest with you. I was cruel.” She shaded her eyes against the glare of the planet and looked up at him. “You were right: it was my loss. I wish I’d known your friend.”

He laughed curtly. “Well, it’s too late for that.”

She said simply, “I know.”

Jamil relented. “Do you want to come in?” Margit nodded, and he instructed the door to open for her. As he followed her inside, he said, “How long have you been here? Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“I’ll cook something for you.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

He called out to her from the kitchen, “Think of it as a peace offering. I don’t have any flowers.”

Margit replied, “They’re not for you. They’re for Chusok’s house.”

Jamil stopped rummaging through his vegetable bins, and walked back into the living room. “People don’t usually do that in Noether.”

Margit was sitting on the couch, staring at the floor. She said, “I’m so lonely here. I can’t bear it any more.”

He sat beside her. “Then why did you rebuff him? You could at least have been friends.”

She shook her head. “Don’t ask me to explain.”

Jamil took her hand. She turned and embraced him, trembling miserably. He stroked her hair. “Sssh.”

She said, “Just sex. I don’t want anything more.”

He groaned softly. “There’s no such thing as that.”

“I just need someone to touch me again.”

“I understand.” He confessed, “So do I. But that won’t be all. So don’t ask me to promise there’ll be nothing more.”

Margit took his face in her hands and kissed him. Her mouth tasted of wood smoke.

Jamil said, “I don’t even know you.”

“No one knows anyone, any more.”

“That’s not true.”

“No, it’s not,” she conceded gloomily. She ran a hand lightly along his arm. Jamil wanted badly to see her smile, so he made each dark hair thicken and blossom into a violet flower as it passed beneath her fingers.

She did smile, but she said, “I’ve seen that trick before.”

Jamil was annoyed. “I’m sure to be a disappointment all round, then. I expect you’d be happier with some kind of novelty. A unicorn, or an amoeba.”

She laughed. “I don’t think so.” She took his hand and placed it against her breast. “Do you ever get tired of sex?”

“Do you ever get tired of breathing?”

“I can go for a long time without thinking about it.”

He nodded. “But then one day you stop and fill your lungs with air, and it’s still as sweet as ever.”

Jamil didn’t know what he was feeling any more. Lust. Compassion. Spite. She’d come to him hurting, and he wanted to help her, but he wasn’t sure that either of them really believed this would work.

Margit inhaled the scent of the flowers on his arm. “Are they the same colour? Everywhere else?”

He said, “There’s only one way to find out.”

amil woke in the early hours of the morning, alone. He’d half expected Margit to flee like this, but she could have waited till dawn. He would have obligingly feigned sleep while she dressed and tip-toed out.

Then he heard her. It was not a sound he would normally have associated with a human being, but it could not have been anything else.

He found her in the kitchen, curled around a table leg, wailing rhythmically. He stood back and watched her, afraid that anything he did would only make things worse. She met his gaze in the half light, but kept up the mechanical whimper. Her eyes weren’t blank; she was not delirious, or hallucinating. She knew exactly who, and where, she was.

Finally, Jamil knelt in the doorway. He said, “Whatever it is, you can tell me. And we’ll fix it. We’ll find a way.”

She bared her teeth. “You can’t fix it, you stupid child.” She resumed the awful noise.

“Then just tell me. Please?” He stretched out a hand towards her. He hadn’t felt quite so helpless since his very first daughter, Aminata, had come to him as an inconsolable six-year-old, rejected by the boy to whom she’d declared her undying love. He’d been twenty-four years old; a child himself. More than a thousand years ago. Where are you now, Nata?

Margit said, “I promised. I’d never tell.”

“Promised who?”

“Myself.”

“Good. They’re the easiest kind to break.”

She started weeping. It was a more ordinary sound, but it was even more chilling. She was not a wounded animal now, an alien being suffering some incomprehensible pain. Jamil approached her cautiously; she let him wrap his arms around her shoulders.

He whispered, “Come to bed. The warmth will help. Just being held will help.”

She spat at him derisively, “It won’t bring her back.”

“Who?”

Margit stared at him in silence, as if he’d said something shocking.

Jamil insisted gently, “Who won’t it bring back?” She’d lost a friend, badly, the way he’d lost Chusok. That was why she’d sought him out. He could help her through it. They could help each other through it.

She said, “It won’t bring back the dead.”

argit was seven thousand five hundred and ninety-four years old. Jamil persuaded her to sit at the kitchen table. He wrapped her in blankets, then fed her tomatoes and rice, as she told him how she’d witnessed the birth of his world.

The promise had shimmered just beyond reach for decades. Almost none of her contemporaries had believed it would happen, though the truth should have been plain for centuries: the human body was a material thing. In time, with enough knowledge and effort, it would become possible to safeguard it from any kind of deterioration, any kind of harm. Stellar evolution and cosmic entropy might or might not prove insurmountable, but there’d be aeons to confront those challenges. In the middle of the twenty-first century, the hurdles were aging, disease, violence, and an overcrowded planet.

“Grace was my best friend. We were students.” Margit smiled. “Before everyone was a student. We’d talk about it, but we didn’t believe we’d see it happen. It would come in another century. It would come for our great-great-grandchildren. We’d hold infants on our knees in our twilight years and tell ourselves: this one will never die.

“When we were both twenty-two, something happened. To both of us.” She lowered her eyes. “We were kidnapped. We were raped. We were tortured.”

Jamil didn’t know how to respond. These were just words to him: he knew their meaning, he knew these acts would have hurt her, but she might as well have been describing a mathematical theorem. He stretched a hand across the table, but Margit ignored it. He said awkwardly, “This was ... the Holocaust?”

She looked up at him, shaking her head, almost laughing at his naivete. “Not even one of them. Not a war, not a pogrom. Just one psychopathic man. He locked us in his basement, for six months. He’d killed seven women.” Tears began spilling down her cheeks. “He showed us the bodies. They were buried right where we slept. He showed us how we’d end up, when he was through with us.”

Jamil was numb. He’d known all his adult life what had once been possible—what had once happened, to real people—but it had all been consigned to history long before his birth. In retrospect it seemed almost inconceivably stupid, but he’d always imagined that the changes had come in such a way that no one still living had experienced these horrors. There’d been no escaping the bare minimum, the logical necessity: his oldest living ancestors must have watched their parents fall peacefully into eternal sleep. But not this. Not a flesh-and-blood woman, sitting in front of him, who’d been forced to sleep in a killer’s graveyard.

He put his hand over hers, and choked out the words. “This man ... killed Grace? He killed your friend?”

Margit began sobbing, but she shook her head. “No, no. We got out!” She twisted her mouth into a smile. “Someone stabbed the stupid fucker in a bar-room brawl. We dug our way out while he was in hospital.” She put her face down on the table and wept, but she held Jamil’s hand against her cheek. He couldn’t understand what she’d lived through, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t console her. Hadn’t he touched his mother’s face the same way, when she was sad beyond his childish comprehension?

She composed herself, and continued. “We made a resolution, while we were in there. If we survived, there’d be no more empty promises. No more day dreams. What he’d done to those seven women—and what he’d done to us—would become impossible.”

And it had. Whatever harm befell your body, you had the power to shut off your senses and decline to experience it. If the flesh was damaged, it could always be repaired or replaced. In the unlikely event that your jewel itself was destroyed, everyone had backups, scattered across universes. No human being could inflict physical pain on another. In theory, you could still be killed, but it would take the same kind of resources as destroying a galaxy. The only people who seriously contemplated either were the villains in very bad operas.

Jamil’s eyes narrowed in wonder. She’d spoken those last words with such fierce pride that there was no question of her having failed.

“You are Ndoli? You invented the jewel?” As a child, he’d been told that the machine in his skull had been designed by a man who’d died long ago.

Margit stroked his hand, amused. “In those days, very few Hungarian women could be mistaken for Nigerian men. I’ve never changed my body that much, Jamil. I’ve always looked much as you see me.”

Jamil was relieved; if she’d been Ndoli himself, he might have succumbed to sheer awe and started babbling idolatrous nonsense. “But you worked with Ndoli? You and Grace?”

She shook her head. “We made the resolution, and then we floundered. We were mathematicians, not neurologists. There were a thousand things going on at once: tissue engineering, brain imaging, molecular computers. We had no real idea where to put our efforts, which problems we should bring our strengths to bear upon. Ndoli’s work didn’t come out of the blue for us, but we played no part in it.

“For a while, almost everyone was nervous about switching from the brain to the jewel. In the early days, the jewel was a separate device that learned its task by mimicking the brain, and it had to be handed control of the body at one chosen moment. It took another fifty years before it could be engineered to replace the brain incrementally, neuron by neuron, in a seamless transition throughout adolescence.”

So Grace had lived to see the jewel invented, but held back, and died before she could use it? Jamil kept himself from blurting out this conclusion; all his guesses had proved wrong so far.

Margit continued. “Some people weren’t just nervous, though. You’d be amazed how vehemently Ndoli was denounced in certain quarters. And I don’t just mean the fanatics who churned out paranoid tracts about ‘the machines’ taking over, with their evil inhuman agendas. Some people’s antagonism had nothing to do with the specifics of the technology. They were opposed to immortality, in principle.”

Jamil laughed. “Why?”

“Ten thousand years’ worth of sophistry doesn’t vanish overnight,” Margit observed dryly. “Every human culture had expended vast amounts of intellectual effort on the problem of coming to terms with death. Most religions had constructed elaborate lies about it, making it out to be something other than it was—though a few were dishonest about life, instead. But even most secular philosophies were warped by the need to pretend that death was for the best.

“It was the naturalistic fallacy at its most extreme—and its most transparent, but that didn’t stop anyone. Since any child could tell you that death was meaningless, contingent, unjust, and abhorrent beyond words, it was a hallmark of sophistication to believe otherwise. Writers had consoled themselves for centuries with smug puritanical fables about immortals who’d long for death—who’d beg for death. It would have been too much to expect all those who were suddenly faced with the reality of its banishment to confess that they’d been whistling in the dark. And would-be moral philosophers—mostly those who’d experienced no greater inconvenience in their lives than a late train or a surly waiter—began wailing about the destruction of the human spirit by this hideous blight. We needed death and suffering, to put steel into our souls! Not horrible, horrible freedom and safety!”

Jamil smiled. “So there were buffoons. But in the end, surely they swallowed their pride? If we’re walking in a desert and I tell you that the lake you see ahead is a mirage, I might cling stubbornly to my own belief, to save myself from disappointment. But when we arrive, and I’m proven wrong, I will drink from the lake.”

Margit nodded. “Most of the loudest of these people went quiet in the end. But there were subtler arguments, too. Like it or not, all our biology and all of our culture had evolved in the presence of death. And almost every righteous struggle in history, every worthwhile sacrifice, had been against suffering, against violence, against death. Now, that struggle would become impossible.”

“Yes.” Jamil was mystified. “But only because it had triumphed.”

Margit said gently, “I know. There was no sense to it. And it was always my belief that anything worth fighting for—over centuries, over millennia—was worth attaining. It can’t be noble to toil for a cause, and even to die for it, unless it’s also noble to succeed. To claim otherwise isn’t sophistication, it’s just a kind of hypocrisy. If it’s better to travel than arrive, you shouldn’t start the voyage in the first place.

“I told Grace as much, and she agreed. We laughed together at what we called the tragedians: the people who denounced the coming age as the age without martyrs, the age without saints, the age without revolutionaries. There would never be another Gandhi, another Mandela, another Aung San Suu Kyi—and yes, that was a kind of loss, but would any great leader have sentenced humanity to eternal misery, for the sake of providing a suitable backdrop for eternal heroism? Well, some of them would have. But the down-trodden themselves had better things to do.”

Margit fell silent. Jamil cleared her plate away, then sat opposite her again. It was almost dawn.

“Of course, the jewel was not enough,” Margit continued. “With care, Earth could support forty billion people, but where would the rest go? The jewel made virtual reality the easiest escape route: for a fraction of the space, a fraction of the energy, it could survive without a body attached. Grace and I weren’t horrified by that prospect, the way some people were. But it was not the best outcome, it was not what most people wanted, they way they wanted freedom from death.

“So we studied gravity, we studied the vacuum.”

Jamil feared making a fool of himself again, but from the expression on her face he knew he wasn’t wrong this time. M. Osvát and G. Füst. Co-authors of the seminal paper, but no more was known about them than those abbreviated names. “You gave us the New Territories?”

Margit nodded slightly. “Grace and I.”

Jamil was overwhelmed with love for her. He went to her and knelt down to put his arms around her waist. Margit touched his shoulder. “Come on, get up. Don’t treat me like a god, it just makes me feel old.”

He stood, smiling abashedly. Anyone in pain deserved his help—but if he was not in her debt, the word had no meaning.

“And Grace?” he asked.

Margit looked away. “Grace completed her work, and then decided that she was a tragedian, after all. Rape was impossible. Torture was impossible. Poverty was vanishing. Death was receding into cosmology, into metaphysics. It was everything she’d hoped would come to pass. And for her, suddenly faced with that fulfilment, everything that remained seemed trivial.

“One night, she climbed into the furnace in the basement of her building. Her jewel survived the flames, but she’d erased it from within.”

t was morning now. Jamil was beginning to feel disoriented; Margit should have vanished in daylight, an apparition unable to persist in the mundane world.

“I’d lost other people who were close to me,” she said. “My parents. My brother. Friends. And so had everyone around me, then. I wasn’t special: grief was still commonplace. But decade by decade, century by century, we shrank into insignificance, those of us who knew what it meant to lose someone for ever. We’re less than one in a million, now.

“For a long time, I clung to my own generation. There were enclaves, there were ghettos, where everyone understood the old days. I spent two hundred years married to a man who wrote a play called We Who Have Known the Dead—which was every bit as pretentious and self-pitying as you’d guess from the title.” She smiled at the memory. “It was a horrible, self-devouring world. If I’d stayed in it much longer, I would have followed Grace. I would have begged for death.”

She looked up at Jamil. “It’s people like you I want to be with: people who don’t understand. Your lives aren’t trivial, any more than the best parts of our own were: all the tranquillity, all the beauty, all the happiness that made the sacrifices and the life-and-death struggles worthwhile.

“The tragedians were wrong. They had everything upside-down. Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round. All of its gravitas, all of its significance, was stolen from the things it ended. But the value of life always lay entirely in itself—not in its loss, not in its fragility.

“Grace should have lived to see that. She should have lived long enough to understand that the world hadn’t turned to ash.”

Jamil sat in silence, turning the whole confession over in his mind, trying to absorb it well enough not to add to her distress with a misjudged question. Finally, he ventured, “Why do you hold back from friendship with us, though? Because we’re just children to you? Children who can’t understand what you’ve lost?”

Margit shook her head vehemently. “I don’t want you to understand! People like me are the only blight on this world, the only poison.” She smiled at Jamil’s expression of anguish, and rushed to silence him before he could swear that she was nothing of the kind. “Not in everything we do and say, or everyone we touch: I’m not claiming that we’re tainted, in some fatuous mythological sense. But when I left the ghettos, I promised myself that I wouldn’t bring the past with me. Sometimes that’s an easy vow to keep. Sometimes it’s not.”

“You’ve broken it tonight,” Jamil said plainly. “And neither of us have been struck down by lightning.”

“I know.” She took his hand. “But I was wrong to tell you what I have, and I’ll fight to regain the strength to stay silent. I stand at the border between two worlds, Jamil. I remember death, and I always will. But my job now is to guard that border. To keep that knowledge from invading your world.”

“We’re not as fragile as you think,” he protested. “We all know something about loss.”

Margit nodded soberly. “Your friend Chusok has vanished into the crowd. That’s how things work now: how you keep yourselves from suffocating in a jungle of endlessly growing connections, or fragmenting into isolated troupes of repertory players, endlessly churning out the same lines.

“You have your little deaths—and I don’t call them that to deride you. But I’ve seen both. And I promise you, they’re not the same.”

n the weeks that followed, Jamil resumed in full the life he’d made for himself in Noether. Five days in seven were for the difficult beauty of mathematics. The rest were for his friends.

He kept playing matches, and Margit’s team kept winning. In the sixth game, though, Jamil’s team finally scored against her. Their defeat was only three to one.

Each night, Jamil struggled with the question. What exactly did he owe her? Eternal loyalty, eternal silence, eternal obedience? She hadn’t sworn him to secrecy; she’d extracted no promises at all. But he knew she was trusting him to comply with her wishes, so what right did he have to do otherwise?

Eight weeks after the night he’d spent with Margit, Jamil found himself alone with Penina in a room in Joracy’s house. They’d been talking about the old days. Talking about Chusok.

Jamil said, “Margit lost someone, very close to her.”

Penina nodded matter-of-factly, but curled into a comfortable position on the couch and prepared to take in every word.

“Not in the way we’ve lost Chusok. Not in the way you think at all.”

Jamil approached the others, one by one. His confidence ebbed and flowed. He’d glimpsed the old world, but he couldn’t pretend to have fathomed its inhabitants. What if Margit saw this as worse than betrayal—as a further torture, a further rape?

But he couldn’t stand by and leave her to the torture she’d inflicted on herself.

Ezequiel was the hardest to face. Jamil spent a sick and sleepless night beforehand, wondering if this would make him a monster, a corrupter of children, the epitome of everything Margit believed she was fighting.

Ezequiel wept freely, but he was not a child. He was older than Jamil, and he had more steel in his soul than any of them.

He said, “I guessed it might be that. I guessed she might have seen the bad times. But I never found a way to ask her.”

he three lobes of probability converged, melted into a plateau, rose into a pillar of light.

The umpire said, “Fifty-five point nine.” It was Margit’s most impressive goal yet.

Ezequiel whooped joyfully and ran towards her. When he scooped her up in his arms and threw her across his shoulders, she laughed and indulged him. When Jamil stood beside him and they made a joint throne for her with their arms, she frowned down at him and said, “You shouldn’t be doing this. You’re on the losing side.”

The rest of the players converged on them, cheering, and they started down towards the river. Margit looked around nervously. “What is this? We haven’t finished playing.”

Penina said, “The game’s over early, just this once. Think of this as an invitation. We want you to swim with us. We want you to talk to us. We want to hear everything about your life.”

Margit’s composure began to crack. She squeezed Jamil’s shoulder. He whispered, “Say the word, and we’ll put you down.”

Margit didn’t whisper back; she shouted miserably, “What do you want from me, you parasites? I’ve won your fucking game for you! What more do you want?”

Jamil was mortified. He stopped and prepared to lower her, prepared to retreat, but Ezequiel caught his arm.

Ezequiel said, “We want to be your border guards. We want to stand beside you.”

Christa added, “We can’t face what you’ve faced, but we want to understand. As much as we can.”

Joracy spoke, then Yann, Narcyza, Maria, Halide. Margit looked down on them, weeping, confused.

Jamil burnt with shame. He’d hijacked her, humiliated her. He’d made everything worse. She’d flee Noether, flee into a new exile, more alone than ever.

When everyone had spoken, silence descended. Margit trembled on her throne.

Jamil faced the ground. He couldn’t undo what he’d done. He said quietly, “Now you know our wishes. Will you tell us yours?”

“Put me down.”

Jamil and Ezequiel complied.

Margit looked around at her teammates and opponents, her children, her creation, her would-be friends.

She said, “I want to go to the river with you. I’m seven thousand years old, and I want to learn to swim.”

The Caress

Two smells hit me when I kicked down the door: death, and the scent of an animal.

A man who passed the house each day had phoned us, anonymously; worried by the sight of a broken window left unrepaired, he’d knocked on the front door with no results. On his way to the back door, he’d glimpsed blood on the kitchen wall through a gap in the curtains.

The place had been ransacked; all that remained downstairs were the drag marks on the carpet from the heaviest furniture. The woman in the kitchen, mid fifties, throat slit, had been dead for at least a week.

My helmet was filing sound and vision, but it couldn’t record the animal smell. The correct procedure was to make a verbal comment, but I didn’t say a word. Why? Call it a vestigial need for independence. Soon they’ll be logging our brain waves, our heartbeats, who knows what, and all of it subpoenable. ‘Detective Segel, the evidence shows that you experienced a penile erection when the defendant opened fire. Would you describe that as an appropriate response?’

Upstairs was a mess. Clothes scattered in the bedroom. Books, CDs, papers, upturned drawers, spread across the floor of the study. Medical texts. In one corner, piles of CD periodicals stood out from the jumble by their jackets’ uniformity: The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Clinical Biochemistry and Laboratory Embryology. A framed scroll hung on the wall, awarding the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to Freda Anne Macklenburg in the year two thousand and twenty-three. The desktop had dust-free spaces shaped like a monitor and a keyboard. I noticed a wall outlet with a pilot light; the switch was down but the light was dead. The room light wasn’t working; ditto elsewhere.

Back on the ground floor, I found a door behind the stairs, presumably leading to a basement. Locked. I hesitated. Entering the house I’d had no choice but to force my way in; here, though, I was on shakier legal ground. I hadn’t searched thoroughly for keys, and I had no clear reason to believe it was urgent to get into the basement.

But what would one more broken door change? Cops have been sued for failing to wipe their boots clean on the doormat. If a citizen wants to screw you, they’ll find a reason, even if you came in on your knees, waving a handful of warrants, and saved their whole family from torture and death.

No room to kick, so I punched out the lock. The smell had me gagging, but it was the excess, the concentration, that was overwhelming; the scent in itself wasn’t foul. Upstairs, seeing medical books, I’d thought of guinea pigs, rats and mice, but this was no stink of caged rodents.

I switched on the torch in my helmet and moved quickly down the narrow concrete steps. Over my head was a thick, square pipe. An air-conditioning duct? That made sense; the house couldn’t normally smell the way it did, but with the power cut off to a basement air-conditioner—

The torch beam showed a shelving unit, decorated with trinkets and potted plants. A TV set. Landscape paintings on the wall. A pile of straw on the concrete floor. Curled on the straw, the powerful body of a leopard, lungs visibly labouring, but otherwise still.

When the beam fell upon a tangle of auburn hair, I thought, it’s chewing on a severed human head. I continued to approach, expecting, hoping, that by disturbing the feeding animal I could provoke it into attacking me. I was carrying a weapon that could have spattered it into a fine mist of blood and gristle, an outcome which would have involved me in a great deal less tedium and bureaucracy than dealing with it alive. I directed the light towards its head again, and realised that I’d been mistaken; it wasn’t chewing anything, its head was hidden, tucked away, and the human head was simply—

Wrong again. The human head was simply joined to the leopard’s body. Its human neck took on fur and spots and merged with the leopard’s shoulders.

I squatted down beside it, thinking, above all else, what those claws could do to me if my attention lapsed. The head was a woman’s. Frowning. Apparently asleep. I placed one hand below her nostrils, and felt the air blast out in time with the heavings of the leopard’s great chest. That, more than the smooth transition of the skin, made the union real for me.

I explored the rest of the room. There was a pit in one corner that turned out to be a toilet bowl sunk into the floor. I put my foot on a nearby pedal, and the bowl flushed from a hidden cistern. There was an upright freezer, standing in a puddle of water. I opened it to find a rack containing thirty-five small plastic vials. Every one of them bore smeared red letters, spelling out the word spoiled. Temperature-sensitive dye.

I returned to the leopard woman. Asleep? Feigning sleep? Sick? Comatose? I patted her on the cheek, and not gently. The skin seemed hot, but I had no idea what her temperature ought to be. I shook her by one shoulder, this time with a little more respect, as if waking her by touching the leopard part might somehow be more dangerous. No effect.

Then I stood up, fought back a sigh of irritation (Psych latch on to all your little noises; I’ve been grilled for hours over such things as an injudicious whoop of triumph), and called for an ambulance.

* * * *

I should have known better than to hope that that would be the end of my problems. I had to physically obstruct the stairway to stop the ambulancemen from retreating. One of them puked. They then refused to put her on the stretcher unless I promised to ride with her to the hospital. She was only about two metres long, excluding the tail, but must have weighed a hundred and fifty kilos, and it took the three of us to get her up the awkward stairs.

We covered her completely with a sheet before leaving the house, and I took the trouble to arrange it to keep it from revealing the shape beneath. A small crowd had gathered outside, the usual motley collection of voyeurs. The forensic team arrived just then, but I’d already told them everything by radio.

At the casualty department of St Dominic’s, doctor after doctor took one look under the sheet and then fled, some muttering half-baked excuses, most not bothering. I was about to lose my temper when the fifth one I cornered, a young woman, turned pale but kept her ground. After poking and pinching and shining a torch into the leopard woman’s forced-opened eyes, Dr Muriel Beatty (from her name badge) announced, ‘She’s in a coma,’ and started extracting details from me. When I’d told her everything, I squeezed in some questions of my own.

‘How would someone do this? Gene splicing? Transplant surgery?’

‘I doubt it was either. More likely she’s a chimera.’

I frowned. ‘That’s some kind of mythical—’

‘Yes, but it’s also a bioengineering term. You can physically mix the cells of two genetically distinct early embryos, and obtain a blastocyst that will develop into a single organism. If they’re both of the same species, there’s a very high success rate; for different species it’s trickier. People made crude sheep/goat chimeras as far back as the nineteen sixties, but I’ve read nothing new on the subject for five or ten years. I would have said it was no longer being seriously pursued. Let alone pursued with humans.’ She stared down at her patient with unease and fascination. ‘I wouldn’t know how they guaranteed such a sharp distinction between the head and the body; a thousand times more effort has gone into this than just stirring two clumps of cells together. I guess you could say it was something halfway between foetal transplant surgery and chimerisation. And there must have been genetic manipulation as well, to smooth out the biochemical differences.’ She laughed drily. ‘So both your suggestions I dismissed just then were probably partly right. Of course!’

‘What?’

‘No wonder she’s in a coma! That freezer full of vials you mentioned—she probably needs an external supply for half a dozen hormones that are insufficiently active across species. Can I arrange for someone to go to the house and look through the dead woman’s papers? We need to know exactly what those vials contained. Even if she made it up herself from off-the-shelf sources, we might be able to find the recipe—but chances are she had a contract with a biotechnology company for a regular, pre-mixed supply. So if we can find, say, an invoice with a product reference number, that would be the quickest, surest way to get this patient what she needs to stay alive.’

I agreed, and accompanied a lab technician back to the house, but he found nothing of use in the study, or the basement. After talking it over with Muriel Beatty on the phone, I started ringing local biotech companies, quoting the deceased woman’s name and address. Several people said they’d heard of Dr Macklenburg, but not as a customer. The fifteenth call produced results—deliveries from a company called Applied Veterinary Research had been sent to Macklenburg’s address—and with a combination of threats and smooth talking (such as inventing an order number they could quote on their invoice), I managed to extract a promise that a batch of the ‘Applied Veterinary Research’ preparation would be made up at once and rushed to St Dominic’s.

Burglars do switch off the power sometimes, in the hope of disabling those (very rare) security devices that don’t have battery back-up, but the house hadn’t been broken into; the scattered glass from the window fell, in an undisturbed pattern, on to carpet where a sofa had left clear indentations. The fools had forgotten to break a window until after they’d taken the furniture. People do throw out invoices, but Macklenburg had kept all her videophone, water, gas and electricity bills for the last five years. So, it looked like somebody had known about the chimera and wanted it dead, without wishing to be totally obvious, yet without being professional enough to manage anything subtler, or more certain.

I arranged for the chimera to be guarded. Probably a good idea anyway, to keep the media at bay when they found out about her.

Back in my office, I did a search of medical literature by Macklenburg, and found her name on only half a dozen papers. All were more than twenty years old. All were concerned with embryology, though (to the extent that I could understand the jargon-laden abstracts, full of ‘zonae pellucidae’ and ‘polar bodies’) none was explicitly about chimeras.

The papers were all from one place; the Early Human Development Laboratory at St Andrew’s Hospital. After some standard brush-offs from secretaries and assistants, I managed to get myself put through to one of Macklenburg’s one-time co-authors, a Dr Henry Feingold, who looked rather old and frail. News of Macklenburg’s death produced a wistful sigh, but no visible shock or distress.

‘Freda left us back in thirty-two or thirty-three. I’ve hardly set eyes on her since, except at the occasional conference.’

‘Where did she go to from St Andrew’s?’

‘Something in industry. She was rather vague about it. I’m not sure that she had a definite appointment lined up.’

‘Why did she resign’

He shrugged. ‘Sick of the conditions here. Low pay, limited resources, bureaucratic restrictions, ethics committees. Some people learn to live with all that, some don’t.’

‘Would you know anything about her work, her particular research interests, after she left?’

‘I don’t know that she did much research. She seemed to have stopped publishing, so I really couldn’t say what she was up to.’

Shortly after that (with unusual speed), clearance came through to access her taxation records. Since ‘35 she had been self-employed as a ‘freelance biotechnology consultant’; whatever that meant, it had provided her with a seven-figure income for the past fifteen years. There were at least a hundred different company names listed by her as sources of revenue. I rang the first one and found myself talking to an answering machine. It was after seven. I rang St Dominic’s, and learnt that the chimera was still unconscious, but doing fine; the hormone mixture had arrived, and Muriel Beatty had located a veterinarian at the university with some relevant experience. So I swallowed my deprimers and went home.

* * * *

The surest sign that I’m not fully down is the frustration I feel when opening my own front door. It’s too bland, too easy: inserting three keys and touching my thumb to the scanner. Nothing inside is going to be dangerous or challenging. The deprimers are meant to work in five minutes. Some nights it’s more like five hours.

Marion was watching TV, and called out, ‘Hi, Dan.’

I stood in the living room doorway. ‘Hi. How was your day?’ She works in a child-care centre, which is my idea of a high-stress occupation. She shrugged. ‘Ordinary. How was yours?’

Something on the TV screen caught my eye. I swore for about a minute, mostly cursing a certain communications officer who I knew was responsible, though I couldn’t have proved it. ‘How was my day? You’re looking at it.’ The TV was showing part of my helmet log; the basement, my discovery of the chimera.

Marion said, ‘Ah. I was going to ask if you knew who the cop was.’

‘And you know what I’ll be doing tomorrow? Trying to make sense of a few thousand phone calls from people who’ve seen this and decided they have something useful to say about it.’

‘That poor girl. Is she going to be OK?’

‘I think so.’

They played Muriel Beatty’s speculations, again from my point of view, then cut to a couple of pocket experts who debated the fine points of chimerism while an interviewer did his best to drag in spurious references to everything from Greek mythology to The Island of Doctor Moreau.

I said, ‘I’m starving. Let’s eat.’

* * * *

I woke at half past one, shaking and whimpering. Marion was already awake, trying to calm me down. Lately I’d been suffering a lot from delayed reactions like this. A few months earlier, two nights after a particularly brutal assault case, I’d been distraught and incoherent for hours.

On duty, we are what’s called ‘primed’. A mixture of drugs heightens various physiological and emotional responses, and suppresses others. Sharpens our reflexes. Keeps us calm and rational. Supposedly improves our judgement. (The media like to say that the drugs make us more aggressive, but that’s garbage; why would the force intentionally create trigger-happy cops? Swift decisions and swift actions are the opposite of dumb brutality.)

Off duty, we are ‘deprimed’. That’s meant to make us the way we would be if we’d never taken the priming drugs. (A hazy concept, I have to admit. As if we’d never taken the priming drugs, and never spent the day at work? Or, as if we’d seen and done the very same things, without the primers to help us cope?)

Sometimes this seesaw works smoothly. Sometimes it fucks up.

I wanted to describe to Marion how I felt about the chimera. I wanted to talk about my fear and revulsion and pity and anger. All I could do was make unhappy noises. No words. She didn’t say anything, she just held me, her long fingers cool on the burning skin of my face and chest.

When I finally exhausted myself into something approaching peace, I managed to speak. I whispered, ‘Why do you stay with me? Why do you put up with this?’

She turned away from me and said, ‘I’m tired. Go to sleep.’

* * * *

I enrolled for the force at the age of twelve. I continued my normal education, but that’s when you have to start the course of growth-factor injections, and weekend and vacation training, if you want to qualify for active duty. (It wasn’t an irreversible obligation; I could have chosen a different career later, and paid off what had been invested in me at a hundred dollars or so a week over the next thirty years. Or, I could have failed the psychological tests, and been dropped without owing a cent. But the tests before you even begin tend to weed out anyone who’s likely to do either.) It makes sense; rather than limiting recruitment to men and women meeting certain physical criteria, candidates are chosen according to intelligence and attitude, and then the secondary, but useful, characteristics of size, strength and agility are provided artificially.

So we’re freaks, constructed and conditioned to meet the demands of the job. Less so than soldiers or professional athletes. Far less so than the average street gang member, who thinks nothing of using illegal growth promoters that lower his life expectancy to around thirty years. Who, unarmed but on a mixture of Berserker and Timewarp (oblivious to pain and most physical trauma and with a twenty-fold decrease in reaction times), can kill a hundred people in a crowd in five minutes, then vanish to a safe house before the high ends and the fortnight of side effects begins. (A certain politician, a very popular man, advocates undercover operations to sell supplies of these drugs laced with fatal impurities, but he’s not yet succeeded in making that legal.)

Yes, we’re freaks; but if we have a problem, it’s that we’re still far too human.

* * * *

When over a hundred thousand people phone in about an investigation, there’s only one way to deal with their calls. It’s called ARIA: Automated Remote Informant Analysis.

An initial filtering process identifies the blatantly obvious pranksters and lunatics. It’s always possible that someone who phones in and spends ninety per cent of his time ranting about UFOs, or communist conspiracies, or slicing up our genitals with razor blades, has something relevant and truthful to mention in passing, but it seems reasonable to give his evidence less weight than that of someone who sticks to the point. More sophisticated analysis of gestures (about thirty per cent of callers don’t switch off the vision), and speech patterns, supposedly picks up anyone who is, although superficially rational and apposite, actually suffering from psychotic delusions or fixations. Ultimately, each caller is given a ‘reliability factor’ between zero and one, with the benefit of the doubt going to anyone who betrays no recognisable signs of dishonesty or mental illness. Some days I’m impressed with the sophistication of the software that makes these assessments. Other days I curse it as a heap of useless voodoo.

The relevant assertions (broadly defined) of each caller are extracted, and a frequency table is created, giving a count of the number of callers making each assertion, and their average reliability factor. Unfortunately, there are no simple rules to determine which assertions are most likely to be true. One thousand people might earnestly repeat a widespread but totally baseless rumour. A single honest witness might be distraught, or chemically screwed up, and be given an unfairly poor rating. Basically, you have to read all the assertions—which is tedious, but still several thousand times faster than viewing every call.

(If desperate, I could view, one by one, the seventeen hundred and thirty-three calls of items 14 and 15. Not yet, though; I still had plenty of better ways to spend my time.)

That was hardly surprising, considering the number of paintings there must be of fantastic and mythical creatures. But on the next page:

Curious, I displayed some of the calls. The first few told me little more than the print-out’s summary line. Then, one man held up an open book to the lens. The glare of a light blub reflected off the glossy paper rendered parts of it almost invisible, and the whole thing was slightly out of focus, but what I could see was intriguing.

A leopard with a woman’s head was crouched near the edge of a raised, flat surface. A slender young man, bare to the waist, stood on the lower ground, leaning sideways on to the raised surface, cheek to cheek with the leopard woman, who pressed one forepaw against his abdomen in an awkward embrace. The man coolly gazed straight ahead, his mouth set primly, giving an impression of effete detachment. The woman’s eyes were closed, or nearly so, and her expression seemed less certain the longer I stared—it might have been placid, dreamy contentment, it might have been erotic bliss. Both had auburn hair.

I selected a rectangle around the woman’s face, enlarged it to fill the screen, then applied a smoothing option to make the blown-up pixels less distracting. With the glare, the poor focus, and limited resolution, the image was a mess. The best I could say was that the face in the painting was not wildly dissimilar to that of the woman I’d found in the basement.

A few dozen calls later, though, no doubt remained. One caller had even taken the trouble to capture a frame from the news broadcast and patch it into her call, side by side with a well-lit close-up of her copy of the painting. One view of a single expression does not define a human face, but the resemblance was far too close to be coincidental. Since—as many people told me, and I later checked for myself—The Caress had been painted in 1896 by the Belgian Symbolist artist Fernand Khnopff, the painting could not possibly have been based on the living chimera. So, it had to be the other way around.

I played all ninety-four calls. Most contained nothing but the same handful of simple facts about the painting. One went a little further.

A middle-aged man introduced himself as John Aldrich, art dealer and amateur art historian. After pointing out the resemblance, and talking briefly about Khnopff and The Caress, he added:

‘Given that this poor woman looks exactly like Khnopff s sphinx, I wonder if you’ve considered the possibility that proponents of Lindhquistism are involved?’ He blushed slightly. ‘Perhaps that’s farfetched, but I thought I should mention it.’

So I called an on-line Britannica, and said, ‘Lindhquistism.’

Andreas Lindhquist, 1961-2030, was a Swiss performance artist, with the distinct financial advantage of being heir to a massive pharmaceuticals empire. Up until 2011, he engaged in a wide variety of activities of a bioartistic nature, progressing from generating sounds and images by computer processing of physiological signals (ECG, EEG, skin conductivity, hormonal levels continuously monitored by immunoelectric probes), to subjecting himself to surgery in a sterile, transparent cocoon in the middle of a packed auditorium, once to have his corneas gratuitously exchanged, left for right, and a second time to have them swapped back (he publicised a more ambitious version, in which he claimed every organ in his torso would be removed and reinserted facing backwards, but was unable to find a team of surgeons who considered this anatomically plausible).

In 2011, he developed a new obsession. He projected slides of classical paintings in which the figures had been blacked out, and had models in appropriate costumes and make-up strike poses in front of the screen, filling in the gaps.

Why? In his own words (or perhaps a translation):

The great artists are afforded glimpses into a separate, transcendental, timeless world. Does that world exist? Can we travel to it? No! We must force it into being around us! We must take these fragmentary glimpses and make them solid and tangible, make them live and breathe and walk amongst us, we must import art into reality, and by doing so transform our world into the world of the artists’ vision.

I wondered what ARIA would have made of that.

Over the next ten years, he moved away from projected slides. He began hiring movie set designers and landscape architects to recreate in three dimensions the backgrounds of the paintings he chose. He discarded the use of make-up to alter the appearance of models, and, when he found it impossible to obtain perfect lookalikes, he employed only those who, for sufficient payment, were willing to undergo cosmetic surgery.

His interest in biology hadn’t entirely vanished; in 2021, on his sixtieth birthday, he had two tubes implanted in his skull, allowing him to constantly monitor, and alter, the precise neurochemical content of his brain ventricular fluid. After this, his requirements became even more stringent. The ‘cheating’ techniques of movie sets were forbidden—a house, or a church, or a lake, or a mountain, glimpsed in the corner of the painting being ‘realised’, had to be there, full-scale and complete in every detail. Houses, churches and small lakes were created; mountains he had to seek out—though he did transplant or destroy thousands of hectares of vegetation to alter their colour and texture. His models were required to spend months before and after the ‘realisation’, scrupulously ‘living their roles’, following complex rules and scenarios that Lindhquist devised, based on his interpretation of the painting’s ‘characters’. This aspect grew increasingly important to him:

The precise realisation of the appearance—the surface, I call it, however three-dimensional—is only the most rudimentary beginning. It is the network of relationships between the subjects, and between the subjects and their setting, that constitutes the challenge for the generation that follows me.

At first, it struck me as astonishing that I’d never even heard of this maniac; his sheer extravagance must have earned him a certain notoriety. But there are millions of eccentrics in the world, and thousands of extremely wealthy ones—and I was only five when Lindhquist died of a heart attack in 2030, leaving his fortune to a nine-year-old son.

As for disciples, Britannica listed half a dozen scattered around Eastern Europe, where apparently he’d found the most respect. All seemed to have completely abandoned his excesses, offering volumes of aesthetic theories in support of the use of painted plywood and mime artists in stylised masks. In fact, most did just that—offered the volumes, and didn’t even bother with the plywood and the mime artists. I couldn’t imagine any of them having either the money or the inclination to sponsor embryological research thousands of kilometres away.

For obscure reasons of copyright law, works of visual art are rarely present in publicly accessible databases, so in my lunch hour I went out and bought a book on Symbolist painters which included a colour plate of The Caress. I made a dozen (illegal) copies, blow-ups of various sizes. Curiously, in each one the expression of the sphinx (as Aldrich had called her) struck me as subtly different. Her mouth and her eyes (one fully closed, one infinitesimally open) could not be said to portray a definite smile, but the shading of the cheeks hinted at one—in certain enlargements, viewed from certain angles. The young man’s face also changed, from vaguely troubled to slightly bored, from resolved to dissipated, from noble to effeminate. The features of both seemed to lie on complicated and uncertain borders between regions of definite mood, and the slightest shift in viewing conditions was enough to force a complete reinterpretation. If that had been Khnopff s intention it was a masterful achievement, but I also found it extremely frustrating. The book’s brief commentary was no help, praising the painting’s ‘perfectly balanced composition and delightful thematic ambiguity’, and suggesting that the leopard’s head was ‘perversely modelled on the artist’s sister, with whose beauty he was constantly obsessed’.

Unsure for the moment just how, if at all, I ought to pursue this strand of the investigation, I sat at my desk for several minutes, wondering (but not inclined to check) if every one of the leopard’s spots shown in the painting had been reproduced faithfully in vivo. I wanted to do something tangible, set something in motion, before I put The Caress aside and returned to more routine lines of inquiry.

So I made one more blow-up of the painting, this time using the copier’s editing facilities to surround the man’s head and shoulders with a uniform dark background. I took it down to communications, and handed it to Steve Birbeck (the man I knew had leaked my helmet log to the media).

I said, ‘Put out an alert on this guy. Wanted for questioning in connection with the Macklenburg murder.’

* * * *

I found nothing else of interest in the ARIA print-out, so I picked up where I’d left off the night before, phoning companies that had made use of Freda Macklenburg’s services.

The work she had done had no specific connection with embryology. Her advice and assistance seemed to have been sought for a wide range of unconnected problems in a dozen fields—tissue culture work, the use of retroviruses as gene-therapy vectors, cell membrane electrochemistry, protein purification, and still other areas where the vocabulary meant nothing to me at all.

‘And did Dr Macklenburg solve this problem?’

‘Absolutely. She knew a perfect way around the stumbling block that had been holding us up for months.’

‘How did you find out about her?’

‘There’s a register of consultants, indexed by speciality.’

There was indeed. She was in it in fifty-nine places. Either she somehow knew the detailed specifics of all these areas, better than many people who were actually working in them full-time, or she had access to world-class experts who could put the right words into her mouth.

Her sponsor’s method of funding her work? Paying her not in money, but in expertise she could then sell as her own? Who would have so many biological scientists on tap?

The Lindhquist empire?

(So much for escaping The Caress.)

Her phone bills showed no long-distance calls, but that meant nothing; the local Lindhquist branch would have had its own private international network.

I looked up Lindhquist’s son Gustave in Who’s Who. It was a very sketchy entry. Born to a surrogate mother. Donor ovum anonymous. Educated by tutors. As yet unmarried at twenty-nine. Reclusive. Apparently immersed in his business concerns. Not a word about artistic pretentions, but nobody tells everything to Who’s Who.

The preliminary forensic report arrived, with nothing very useful. No evidence of a protracted struggle—no bruising, no skin or blood found under Macklenburg’s fingernails. Apparently she’d been taken entirely by surprise. The throat wound had been made by a thin, straight, razor-sharp blade, with a single powerful stroke.

There were five genotypes, besides Macklenburg’s and the chimera’s, present in hairs and flakes of dead skin found in the house. Precise dating isn’t possible, but all showed a broad range in the age of shedding, which meant regular visitors, friends, not strangers. All five had been in the kitchen at one time or another. Only Macklenburg and the chimera showed up in the basement in amounts that could not be accounted for by drift and second-party transport, while the chimera seemed to have rarely left her special room. One prevalent male had been in most of the rest of the house, including the bedroom, but not the bed—or at least not since the sheets had last been changed. All of this was unlikely to have a direct bearing on the murder; the best assassins either leave no biological detritus at all, or plant material belonging to someone else.

The interviewers’ report came in soon after, and that was even less helpful. Macklenburg’s next of kin was a cousin, with whom she had not been in touch, and who knew even less about the dead woman than I did. Her neighbours were all much too respectful of privacy to have known or cared who her friends had been, and none would admit to having noticed anything unusual on the day of the murder.

I sat and stared at The Caress.

Some lunatic with a great deal of money—perhaps connected to Lindhquist, perhaps not—had commissioned Freda Macklenburg to create the chimera to match the sphinx in the painting. But who would want to fake a burglary, murder Macklenburg, and endanger the chimera’s life, without making the effort to actually kill it?

The phone rang. It was Muriel. The chimera was awake.

* * * *

The two officers outside had had a busy shift so far; one psycho with a knife, two photographers disguised as doctors, and a religious fanatic with a mail-order exorcism kit. The news reports hadn’t mentioned the name of the hospital, but there were only a dozen plausible candidates, and the staff could not be sworn to secrecy or immunised against the effect of bribes. In a day or two, the chimera’s location would be common knowledge. If things didn’t quieten down, I’d have to consider trying to arrange for a room in a prison infirmary, or a military hospital.

‘You saved my life.’

The chimera’s voice was deep and quiet and calm, and she looked right at me as she spoke. I’d expected her to be painfully shy, amongst strangers for perhaps the first time ever. She lay curled on her side on the bed, not covered by a sheet but with her head resting on a clean, white pillow. The smell was noticeable, but not unpleasant. Her tail, as thick as my wrist and longer than my arm, hung over the edge of the bed, restlessly swinging.

‘Dr Beatty saved your life.’ Muriel stood at the foot of the bed, glancing regularly at a blank sheet of paper on a clipboard. ‘I’d like to ask you some questions.’ The chimera said nothing to that, but her eyes stayed on me. ‘Could you tell me your name, please?’

‘Catherine.’

‘Do you have another name? A surname?’

‘No.’

‘How old are you, Catherine?’ Primed or not, I couldn’t help feeling a slight giddiness, a sense of surreal inanity to be asking routine questions of a sphinx plucked from a nineteenth-century oil painting.

‘Seventeen.’

‘You know that Freda Macklenburg is dead?’

‘Yes.’ Quieter, but still calm.

‘What was your relationship with her?’

She frowned slightly, then gave an answer which sounded rehearsed but sincere, as if she had long expected to be asked this. ‘She was everything. She was my mother and my teacher and my friend.’ Misery and loss came and went on her face, a flicker, a twitch.

‘Tell me what you heard, the day the power went off.’

‘Someone came to visit Freda. I heard the car, and the doorbell. It was a man. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I could hear the sound of his voice.’

‘Was it a voice you’d heard before?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘How did they sound? Were they shouting? Arguing?’

‘No. They sounded friendly. Then they stopped, it was quiet. A little while after that, the power went off. Then I heard a truck pull up, and a whole lot of noise—footsteps, things being shifted about. But no more talking. There were two or three people moving all around the house for about half an hour. Then the truck and the car drove away. I kept waiting for Freda to come down and tell me what it had all been about.’

I’d been thinking a while how to phrase the next question, but finally gave up trying to make it polite.

‘Did Freda ever discuss with you why you’re different from other people?’

‘Yes.’ Not a hint of pain, or embarrassment. Instead, her face glowed with pride, and for a moment she looked so much like the painting that the giddiness hit me again. ‘She made me this way. She made me special. She made me beautiful.’

‘Why?’

That seemed to baffle her, as if I had to be teasing. She was special. She was beautiful. No further explanation was required.

I heard a faint grunt from just outside the door, followed by a tiny thud against the wall. I signalled to Muriel to drop to the floor, and to Catherine to keep silent, then—quietly as I could, but with an unavoidable squeaking of metal—I climbed on to the top of a wardrobe that stood in the corner to the left of the door.

We were lucky. What came through the door when it opened a crack was not a grenade of any kind, but a hand bearing a fan laser. A spinning mirror sweeps the beam across a wide arc—this one was set to one hundred and eighty degrees, horizontally. Held at shoulder height, it filled the room with a lethal plane about a metre above the bed. I was tempted to simply kick the door shut on the hand the moment it appeared, but that would have been too risky; the gun might have tilted down before the beam cut off. For the same reason, I couldn’t simply burn a hole in the man’s head as he stepped into the room, or even aim at the gun itself—it was shielded, and would have borne several seconds’ fire before suffering any internal damage. Paint on the walls was scorched and the curtains had split into two burning halves; in an instant he would lower the beam on to Catherine. I kicked him hard in the face, knocking him backwards and tipping the fan of laser light up towards the ceiling. Then I jumped down and put my gun to his temple. He switched off the beam and let me take the weapon from him. He was dressed in an orderly’s uniform, but the fabric was implausibly stiff, probably containing a shielding layer of aluminium-coated asbestos (with the potential for reflections, it’s unwise to operate a fan laser with any less protection).

I turned him over and cuffed him in the standard way—wrists and ankles all brought together behind the back, in bracelets with a sharpened inner edge that discourages (some) attempts to burst the chains. I sprayed sedative on his face for a few seconds, and he acted like it had worked, but then I pulled open one eye and knew it hadn’t. Every cop uses a sedative with a slightly different tracer effect; my usual turns the whites of the eyes pale blue. He must have had a barrier layer on his skin. While I was preparing an IV jab, he turned his head towards me and opened his mouth. A blade flew out from under his tongue and nicked my ear as it whistled past. That was something I’d never seen before. I forced his jaw open and had a look; the launching mechanism was anchored to his teeth with wires and pins. There was a second blade in there; I put my gun to his head again and advised him to eject it on to the floor. Then I punched him in the face and started searching for an easy vein.

He gave a short cry, and began vomiting steaming-hot blood. Possibly his own choice, but more likely his employers had decided to cut their losses. The body started smoking, so I dragged it out into the corridor.

The officers who’d been on guard were unconscious, not dead. A matter of pragmatism; chemically knocking someone senseless is usually quieter, less messy and less risky to the assailant than killing them. Also, dead cops have been known to trigger an extra impetus in many investigations, so it’s worthwhile taking the trouble to avoid them. I phoned someone I knew in Toxicology to come and take a look at them, then radioed for replacements. Organising the move to somewhere more secure would take twenty-four hours at least.

Catherine was hysterical, and Muriel, pretty shaken herself, insisted on sedating her and ending the interview.

Muriel said, ‘I’ve read about it, but I’ve never seen it with my own eyes before. What does it feel like?’

‘What?’

She emitted a burst of nervous laughter. She was shivering. I held on to her shoulders until she calmed down a little. ‘Being like that.’ Her teeth chattered. ‘Someone just tried to kill us all, and you’re carrying on like nothing special happened. Like someone out of a comic book. What does it feel like?’

I laughed myself. We have a standard answer.

‘It doesn’t feel like anything at all.’

* * * *

Marion lay with her head on my chest. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t asleep. I knew she was still listening to me. She always tenses up a certain way when I’m raving.

‘How could anyone do that? How could anyone sit down and coldbloodedly plan to create a deformed human being with no chance of living a normal life? All for some insane “artist” somewhere who’s keeping alive a dead billionaire’s crazy theories. Shit, what do they think people are? Sculptures? Things they can mess around with any way they like?’

I wanted to sleep, it was late, but I couldn’t shut up. I hadn’t even realised how angry I was until I’d started on the topic, but then my disgust had grown more intense with every word I’d uttered.

An hour before, trying to make love, I’d found myself impotent. I’d resorted to using my tongue, and Marion had come, but it still depressed me. Was it psychological? The case I was on? Or a side effect of the priming drugs? So suddenly, after all these years? There were rumours and jokes about the drugs causing almost everything imaginable: sterility, malformed babies, cancer, psychoses; but I’d never believed any of that. The union would have found out and raised hell, the department would never have been allowed to get away with it. It was the chimera case that was screwing me up, it had to be. So I talked about it.

‘And the worst thing is, she doesn’t even understand what’s been done to her. She’s been lied to from birth. Macklenburg told her she was beautiful, and she believes that crap, because she doesn’t know any better.’

Marion shifted slightly, and sighed. ‘What’s going to happen to her? How’s she going to live when she’s out of hospital?’

‘I don’t know. I guess she could sell her story for quite a packet. Enough to hire someone to look after her for the rest of her life.’ I closed my eyes. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not fair, keeping you awake half the night with this.’

I heard a faint hissing sound, and Marion suddenly relaxed. For what seemed like several seconds, but can’t have been, I wondered what was wrong with me, why I hadn’t leapt to my feet, why I hadn’t even raised my head to look across the dark room to find out who or what was there.

Then I realised the spray had hit me, too, and I was paralysed. It was such a relief to be powerless that I slipped into unconsciousness feeling, absurdly, more peaceful than I had felt for a very long time.

* * * *

I woke with a mixture of panic and lethargy, and no idea where I was or what had happened. I opened my eyes and saw nothing. I flailed about trying to touch my eyes, and felt myself drifting slightly, but my arms and legs were restrained. I forced myself to relax for a moment and interpret my sensations. I was blindfolded or bandaged, floating in a warm, buoyant liquid, my mouth and nose covered with a mask. My feeble thrashing movements had exhausted me, and for a long time I lay still, unable to concentrate sufficiently to even start guessing about my circumstances. I felt as if every bone in my body had been broken—not through any pain, but through a subtler discomfort arising from an unfamiliar sense of my body’s configuration; it was awkward, it was wrong. It occurred to me that I might have been in an accident. A fire? That would explain why I was floating; I was in a burns treatment unit. I said, ‘Hello? I’m awake.’ The words came out as painful, hoarse whispers.

A blandly cheerful voice, almost genderless but borderline male, replied. I was wearing headphones; I hadn’t noticed them until I felt them vibrate.

‘Mr Segel. How do you feel?’

‘Uncomfortable. Weak. Where am I?’

‘A long way from home, I’m afraid. But your wife is here too.’

It was only then that I remembered: lying in bed, unable to move. That seemed impossibly long ago, but I had no more recent memories to fill in the gap.

‘How long have I been here? Where’s Marion?’

‘Your wife is nearby. She’s safe and comfortable. You’ve been here a number of weeks, but you are healing rapidly. Soon you’ll be ready for physiotherapy. So please, relax, be patient.’

‘Healing from what?’

‘Mr Segel, I’m afraid it was necessary to perform a great deal of surgery to adjust your appearance to suit my requirements. Your eyes, your face, your bone structure, your build, your skin tones; all needed substantial alteration.’

I floated in silence. The face of the diffident youth in The Caress drifted across the darkness. I was horrified, but my disorientation cushioned the blow; floating in darkness, listening to a disembodied voice, nothing was yet quite real.

‘Why pick me?’

‘You saved Catherine’s life. On two occasions. That’s precisely the relationship I wanted.’

‘Two set-ups. She was never in any real danger, was she? Why didn’t you find someone who already looked the part, to go through the motions?’ I almost added ‘Gustave’, but stopped myself in time. I was certain he intended killing me anyway, eventually, but betraying my suspicions about his identity would have been suicidal. The voice was synthetic, of course.

‘You genuinely saved her life, Mr Segel. If she’d stayed in the basement without replacement hormones, she would have died. And the assassin we sent to the hospital was seriously intent on killing her.’

I snorted feebly. ‘What if he’d succeeded? Twenty years’ work and millions of dollars, down the drain. What would you have done then?’

‘Mr Segel, you have a very parochial view of the world. Your little town isn’t the only one on the planet. Your little police force isn’t unique either, except in being the only one who couldn’t keep the story from the media. We began with twelve chimeras. Three died in childhood. Three were not discovered in time after their keepers were killed. Four were assassinated after discovery. The other surviving chimera’s life was saved by different people on the two occasions—and also she was not quite up to the standard of morphology that Freda Macklenburg achieved with Catherine. So, imperfect as you are, Mr Segel, you are what I am required to work with.’

* * * *

Shortly after that, I was shifted to a normal bed, and the bandages were removed from my face and body. At first the room was kept dark, but each morning the lights were turned up slightly. Twice a day, a masked physiotherapist with a filtered voice came and helped me learn to move again. There were six armed, masked guards in the windowless room at all times; ludicrous overkill unless they were there in case of an unlikely, external attempt to rescue me. I could barely walk; one stern grandmother could have kept me from escaping.

They showed me Marion, once, on closed-circuit TV. She sat in an elegantly furnished room, watching a news disk. Every few seconds, she glanced around nervously. They wouldn’t let us meet. I was glad. I didn’t want to see her reaction to my new appearance; that was an emotional complication I could do without.

As I slowly became functional, I began to feel a deep sense of panic that I’d yet to think of a plan for keeping us alive. I tried striking up conversations with the guards, in the hope of eventually persuading one of them to help us, either out of compassion or on the promise of a bribe, but they all stuck to monosyllables, and ignored me when I spoke of anything more abstract than requests for food. Refusing to cooperate in the ‘realisation’ was the only strategy I could think of, but for how long would that work? I had no doubt that my captor would resort to torturing Marion, and if that failed he would simply hypnotise or drug me to ensure that I complied. And then he would kill us all: Marion, myself, and Catherine.

I had no idea how much time we had; neither the guards, nor the physiotherapist, nor the cosmetic surgeons who occasionally came to check their handiwork, would even acknowledge my questions about the schedule being followed. I longed for Lindhquist to speak with me again; however insane he was, at least he’d engaged in a two-way conversation. I demanded an audience with him, I screamed and ranted; the guards remained as unresponsive as their masks.

Accustomed to the aid of the priming drugs in focusing my thoughts, I found myself constantly distracted by all kinds of unproductive concerns, from a simple fear of death, to pointless worries about my chances of continued employment, and continued marriage, if Marion and I did somehow survive. Weeks went by in which I felt nothing but hopelessness and self-pity. Everything that defined me had been taken away: my face, my body, my job, my usual modes of thought. And although I missed my former physical strength (as a source of self-respect rather than something that would have been useful in itself), it was the mental clarity that had been so much a part of my primed state of mind that, I was certain, would have made all the difference if only I could have regained it.

I eventually began to indulge in a bizarre, romantic fantasy: the loss of everything I had once relied on—the stripping away of the biochemical props that had held my unnatural life together—would reveal an inner core of sheer moral courage and desperate resourcefulness which would see me through this hour of need. My identity had been demolished, but the naked spark of humanity remained, soon to burst into a searing flame that no prison walls could contain. That which had not killed me would (soon, real soon) make me strong.

A moment’s introspection each morning showed that this mystical transformation had not yet taken place. I went on a hunger strike, hoping to hasten my victorious emergence from the crucible of suffering by turning up the heat. I wasn’t force-fed, or even given intravenous protein. I was too stupid to make the obvious deduction: the day of realisation was imminent.

One morning, I was handed a costume which I recognised at once from the painting. I was terrified to the point of nausea, but I put it on and went with the guards, making no trouble. The painting was set outdoors. This would be my only chance to escape.

I’d hoped we would have to travel, with all the opportunities that might have entailed, but the landscape had been prepared just a few hundred metres from the building I’d been kept in. I blinked at the glare from the thin grey clouds that covered most of the sky (had Lindhquist been waiting for them, or had he ordered their presence?), weary, frightened, weaker than ever thanks to not having eaten for three days. Desolate fields stretched to the horizon in all directions. There was nowhere to run to, nobody to signal to for help.

I saw Catherine, already sitting in place on the edge of a raised stretch of ground. A short man—well, shorter than the guards, whose height I’d grown accustomed to—stood by her, stroking her neck. She flicked her tail with pleasure, her eyes half closed. The man wore a loose white suit, and a white mask, rather like a fencing mask. When he saw me approaching, he raised his arms in an extravagant gesture of greeting. For an instant a wild idea possessed me: Catherine could save us! With her speed, her strength, her claws.

There were a dozen armed men around us, and Catherine was clearly as docile as a kitten.

‘Mr Segel! You look so glum! Cheer up, please! This is a wonderful day!’

I stopped walking. The guards on either side of me stopped too, and did nothing to force me on.

I said, ‘I won’t do it.’

The man in white was indulgent. ‘Why ever not?’

I stared at him, trembling. I felt like a child. Not since childhood had I confronted anyone this way, without the priming drugs to calm me, without a weapon within easy reach, without absolute confidence in my strength and agility. ‘When we’ve done what you want, you’re going to kill us all. The longer I refuse, the longer I stay alive.’

It was Catherine who answered first. She shook her head, not quite laughing. ‘No, Dan! Andreas won’t hurt us! He loves us both!’

The man came towards me. Had Andreas Lindhquist faked his death? His gait was not an old man’s gait.

‘Mr Segel, please calm yourself. Would I harm my own creations? Would I waste all those years of hard work, by myself and so many others?’

I sputtered, confused, ‘You’ve killed people. You’ve kidnapped us. You’ve broken a hundred different laws.’ I almost shouted at Catherine. ‘He arranged Freda’s death!’, but I had a feeling that would have done me a lot more harm than good.

The computer that disguised his voice laughed blandly. ‘Yes, I’ve broken laws. Whatever happens to you, Mr Segel, I’ve already broken them. Do you think I’m afraid of what you’ll do when I release you? You will be as powerless then to harm me as you are now. You have no proof as to my identity. Oh, I’ve examined a record of your inquiries. I know you suspected me—’

‘I suspected your son.’

‘Ah. A moot point. I prefer to be called Andreas by intimate acquaintances, but to business associates, I am Gustave Lindhquist. You see, this body is that of my son—if son is the right word to use for a clone—but since his birth I took regular samples of my brain tissue, and had the appropriate components extracted from them and injected into his skull. The brain can’t be transplanted, Mr Segel, but with care, a great deal of memory and personality can be imposed upon a young child. When my first body died, I had the brain frozen, and I continued the injections until all the tissue was used up. Whether or not I “am” Andreas is a matter for philosophers and theologians. I clearly recall sitting in a crowded classroom watching a black and white television, the day Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, fifty-two years before this body was born. So call me Andreas. Humour an old man.’

He shrugged. ‘The masks, the voice filters—I like a little theatre. And the less you see and hear, the fewer your avenues for causing me minor annoyance. But please, don’t flatter yourself; you can never be a threat to me. I could buy every member of your entire force with half the amount I’ve earnt while we’ve been speaking.

‘So forget these delusions of martyrdom. You are going to live, and for the rest of your life you will be, not only my creation, but my instrument. You are going to carry this moment away inside you, out into the world for me, like a seed, like a strange, beautiful virus, infecting and transforming everyone and everything you touch.’

He took me by the arm and led me towards Catherine. I didn’t resist. Someone placed a winged staff in my right hand. I was prodded, arranged, adjusted, fussed over. I hardly noticed Catherine’s cheek against mine, her paw resting against my belly. I stared ahead, in a daze, trying to decide whether or not to believe I was going to live, overcome by this first real chance of hope, but too terrified of disappointment to trust it.

There was no one but Lindhquist and his guards and assistants. I don’t know what I’d expected; an audience in evening dress? He stood a dozen metres away, glancing down at a copy of the painting (or perhaps it was the original) mounted on an easel, then calling out instructions for microscopic changes to our posture and expression. My eyes began to water, from keeping my gaze fixed; someone ran forward and dried them, then sprayed something into them which prevented a recurrence.

Then, for several minutes, Lindhquist was silent. When he finally spoke, he said, very softly, ‘All we’re waiting for now is the movement of the sun, the correct positioning of your shadows. Be patient for just a little longer.’

I don’t remember clearly what I felt in those last seconds. I was so tired, so confused, so uncertain. I do remember thinking: How will I know when the moment has passed? When Lindhquist pulls out a weapon and incinerates us, perfectly preserving the moment? Or when he pulls out a camera? Which would it be?

Suddenly he said, ‘Thank you,’ and turned and walked away, alone. Catherine shifted, stretched, kissed me on the cheek, and said, ‘Wasn’t that fun?’ One of the guards took my elbow, and I realised I’d staggered.

He hadn’t even taken a photograph. I giggled hysterically, certain now that I was going to live after all. And he hadn’t even taken a photograph. I couldn’t decide if that made him twice as insane, or if it totally redeemed his sanity.

* * * *

I never discovered what became of Catherine. Perhaps she stayed with Lindhquist, shielded from the world by his wealth and seclusion, living a life effectively identical to that she’d lived before, in Freda Macklenburg’s basement. Give or take a few servants and luxurious villas.

Marion and I were returned to our home, unconscious for the duration of the voyage, waking on the bed we’d left six months before. There was a lot of dust about. She took my hand and said, ‘Well. Here we are.’ We lay there in silence for hours, then went out in search of food.

The next day I went to the station. I proved my identity with fingerprints and DNA, and gave a full report of all that had happened.

I had not been assumed dead. My salary had continued to be paid into my bank account, and mortgage payments deducted automatically. The department settled my claim for compensation out of court, paying me three-quarters of a million dollars, and I underwent surgery to restore as much of my former appearance as possible.

It took more than two years of rehabilitation, but now I am back on active duty. The Macklenburg case has been shelved for lack of evidence. The investigation of the kidnapping of the three of us, and Catherine’s present fate, is on the verge of going the same way; nobody doubts my account of the events, but all the evidence against Gustave Lindhquist is circumstantial. I accept that. I’m glad. I want to erase everything that Lindhquist has done to me, and an obsession with bringing him to justice is the exact opposite of the state of mind I aim to achieve. I don’t pretend to understand what he thought he was achieving by letting me live, what his insane notion of my supposed effect on the world actually entailed, but I am determined to be, in every way, the same person as I was before the experience, and thus to defeat his intentions.

Marion is doing fine. For a while she suffered from recurring nightmares, but after seeing a therapist who specialises in de-traumatising hostages and kidnap victims, she is now every bit as relaxed and carefree as she used to be.

I have nightmares, now and then. I wake in the early hours of the morning, shivering and sweating and crying out, unable to recall what horror I’m escaping. Andreas Lindhquist injecting samples of brain tissue into his son? Catherine blissfully closing her eyes, and thanking me for saving her life while her claws rake ray body into bloody strips? Myself, trapped in The Caress; the moment of the realisation infinitely, unmercifully prolonged? Perhaps; or perhaps I simply dream about my latest case—that seems much more likely.

Everything is back to normal.

Chaff

El Nido de Ladrones—the Nest of Thieves—occupies a roughly elliptical region, fifty thousand square kilometers in the western Amazon Lowlands, straddling the border between Colombia and Peru. It’s difficult to say exactly where the natural rain forest ends and the engineered species of El Nido take over, but the total biomass of the system must be close to a trillion tonnes. A trillion tonnes of structural material, osmotic pumps, solar energy collectors, cellular chemical factories, and biological computing and communications resources. All under the control of its designers.

The old maps and databases are obsolete; by manipulating the hydrology and soil chemistry, and influencing patterns of rainfall and erosion, the vegetation has reshaped the terrain completely: shifting the course of the Putumayo River, drowning old roads in swampland, raising secret causeways through the jungle. This biogenic geography remains in a state of flux, so that even the eye-witness accounts of the rare defectors from El Nido soon lose their currency. Satellite images are meaningless; at every frequency, the forest canopy conceals, or deliberately falsifies, the spectral signature of whatever lies beneath.

Chemical toxins and defoliants are useless; the plants and their symbiotic bacteria can analyze most poisons, and reprogram their metabolisms to render them harmless—or transform them into food—faster than our agricultural warfare expert systems can invent new molecules. Biological weapons are seduced, subverted, domesticated; most of the genes from the last lethal plant virus we introduced were found three months later, incorporated into a benign vector for El Nido’s elaborate communications network. The assassin had turned into a messenger boy. Any attempt to burn the vegetation is rapidly smothered by carbon dioxide—or more sophisticated fire retardants, if a self-oxidizing fuel is employed. Once we even pumped in a few tonnes of nutrient laced with powerful radioisotopes—locked up in compounds chemically indistinguishable from their natural counterparts. We tracked the results with gamma-ray imaging: El Nido separated out the isotope-laden molecules—probably on the basis of their diffusion rates across organic membranes—sequestered and diluted them, and then pumped them right back out again.

So when I heard that a Peruvian-born biochemist named Guillermo Largo had departed from Bethesda, Maryland, with some highly classified genetic tools—the fruits of his own research, but very much the property of his employers—and vanished into El Nido, I thought: At last, an excuse for the Big One. The Company had been advocating thermonuclear rehabilitation of El Nido for almost a decade. The Security Council would have rubber-stamped it. The governments with nominal authority over the region would have been delighted. Hundreds of El Nido’s inhabitants were suspected of violating US law—and President Golino was aching for a chance to prove that she could play hard ball south of the border, whatever language she spoke in the privacy of her own home. She could have gone on prime time afterward and told the nation that they should be proud of Operation Back to Nature, and that the thirty thousand displaced farmers who’d taken refuge in El Nido from Colombia’s undeclared civil war—and who had now been liberated forever from the oppression of Marxist terrorists and drug barons—would have saluted her courage and resolve.

I never discovered why that wasn’t to be. Technical problems in ensuring that no embarrassing side-effects would show up down-river in the sacred Amazon itself, wiping out some telegenic endangered species before the end of the present administration? Concern that some Middle Eastern warlord might somehow construe the act as license to use his own feeble, long-hoarded fission weapons on a troublesome minority, destabilizing the region in an undesirable manner? Fear of Japanese trade sanctions, now that the rabidly anti-nuclear Eco-Marketeers were back in power?

I wasn’t shown the verdicts of the geopolitical computer models; I simply received my orders—coded into the flicker of my local K-Mart’s fluorescent tubes, slipped in between the updates to the shelf price tags. Deciphered by an extra neural layer in my left retina, the words appeared blood red against the bland cheery colors of the supermarket aisle.

I was to enter El Nido and retrieve Guillermo Largo.

Alive.

* * * *

Dressed like a local real estate agent—right down to the gold-plated bracelet-phone, and the worst of all possible three-hundred-dollar haircuts—I visited Largo’s abandoned home in Bethesda: a northern suburb of Washington, just over the border into Maryland. The apartment was modern and spacious, neatly furnished but not opulent—about what any good marketing software might have tried to sell him, on the basis of salary less alimony.

Largo had always been classified as _brilliant but unsound_—a potential security risk, but far too talented and productive to be wasted. He’d been under routine surveillance ever since the gloriously euphemistic Department of Energy had employed him, straight out of Harvard, back in 2005—clearly, too routine by far ... but then, I could understand how thirty years with an unblemished record must have given rise to a degree of complacency. Largo had never attempted to disguise his politics—apart from exercising the kind of discretion that was more a matter of etiquette than subterfuge; no Che Guevara T-shirts when visiting Los Alamos—but he’d never really acted on his beliefs, either.

A mural had been jet-sprayed onto his living room wall in shades of near infrared (visible to most hip fourteen-year-old Washingtonians, if not to their parents). It was a copy of the infamous Lee Hing-cheung’s _A Tiling of the Plane with Heroes of the New World Order_, a digital image that had spread across computer networks at the turn of the century. Early nineties political leaders, naked and interlocked—Escher meets the Kama Sutra—deposited steaming turds into each other’s open and otherwise empty brain cases—an effect borrowed from the works of the German satirist George Grosz. The Iraqi dictator was shown admiring his reflection in a hand mirror—the image an exact reproduction of a contemporary magazine cover in which the mustache had been retouched to render it suitably Hitleresque. The US President carried—horizontally, but poised ready to be tilted—an egg-timer full of the gaunt hostages whose release he’d delayed to clinch his predecessor’s election victory. Everyone was shoe-horned in, somewhere—right down to the Australian Prime Minister, portrayed as a pubic louse, struggling (and failing) to fit its tiny jaws around the mighty presidential cock. I could imagine a few of the neo-McCarthyist troglodytes in the Senate going apoplectic, if anything so tedious as an inquiry into Largo’s defection ever took place—but what should we have done? Refused to hire him if he owned so much as a _Guernica_ tea-towel?

Largo had blanked every computer in the apartment before leaving, including the entertainment system—but I already knew his taste in music, having listened to a few hours of audio surveillance samples full of bad Korean Ska. No laudable revolutionary ethno-solidarity, no haunting Andean pipe music; a shame—I would have much preferred that. His bookshelves held several battered college-level biochemistry texts, presumably retained for sentimental reasons, and a few dozen musty literary classics and volumes of poetry, in English, Spanish, and German. Hesse, Rilke, Vallejo, Conrad, Nietzsche. Nothing modern—and nothing printed after 2010. With a few words to the household manager, Largo had erased every digital work he’d ever owned, sweeping away the last quarter of a century of his personal archaeology.

I flipped through the surviving books, for what it was worth. There was a pencilled-in correction to the structure of guanine in one of the texts ... and a section had been underlined in “Heart of Darkness.” The narrator, Marlow, was pondering the mysterious fact that the servants on the steamboat—members of a cannibal tribe, whose provisions of rotting hippo meat had been tossed overboard—hadn’t yet rebelled and eaten him. After all:

_No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze._

I couldn’t argue with that—but I wondered why Largo had found the passage noteworthy. Perhaps it had struck a chord, back in the days when he’d been trying to rationalize taking his first research grants from the Pentagon? The ink was faded—and the volume itself had been printed in 2003. I would rather have had copies of his diary entries for the fortnight leading up to his disappearance—but his household computers hadn’t been systematically tapped for almost twenty years.

I sat at the desk in his study, and stared at the blank screen of his work station. Largo had been born into a middle-class, nominally Catholic, very mildly leftist family in Lima, in 1980. His father, a journalist with _El Comercio_, had died from a cerebral blood clot in 2029. His seventy-eight-year-old mother still worked as an attorney for an international mining company—going through the motions of _habeas corpus_ for the families of disappeared radicals in her spare time, a hobby her employers tolerated for the sake of cheap PR brownie points in the shareholder democracies. Guillermo had one elder brother, a retired surgeon, and one younger sister, a primary school teacher, neither of them politically active.

Most of his education had taken place in Switzerland and the States; after his PhD, he’d held a succession of research posts in government institutes, the biotechnology industry, and academia—all with more or less the same real sponsors. Fifty-five, now, thrice divorced but still childless, he’d only ever returned to Lima for brief family visits.

After _three decades_ working on the military applications of molecular genetics—unwittingly at first, but not for long—what could have triggered his sudden defection to El Nido? If he’d managed the cynical doublethink of reconciling defense research and pious liberal sentiments for so long, he must have got it down to a fine art. His latest psychological profile suggested as much: fierce pride in his scientific achievements balanced the self-loathing he felt when contemplating their ultimate purpose—with the conflict showing signs of decaying into comfortable indifference. A well-documented dynamic in the industry.

And he seemed to have acknowledged—deep in his heart, thirty years ago—that his “principles” were _less than chaff in a breeze_.

Perhaps he’d decided, belatedly, that if he was going to be a whore he might as well do it properly, and sell his skills to the highest bidder—even if that meant smuggling genetic weapons to a drugs cartel. I’d read his financial records, though: no tax fraud, no gambling debts, no evidence that he’d ever lived beyond his means. Betraying his employers, just as he’d betrayed his own youthful ideals to join them, might have seemed like an appropriately nihilistic gesture ... but on a more pragmatic level, it was hard to imagine him finding the money, and the consequences, all that tempting. What could El Nido have offered him? A numbered satellite account, and a new identity in Paraguay? All the squalid pleasures of life on the fringes of the Third World plutocracy? He would have had everything to gain by living out his retirement in his adopted country, salving his conscience with one or two vitriolic essays on foreign policy in some unread left-wing netzine—and then finally convincing himself that any nation that granted him such unencumbered rights of free speech probably deserved everything he’d done to defend it.

Exactly what he _had_ done to defend it, though—what tools he’d perfected, and stolen—I was not permitted to know.

* * * *

As dusk fell, I locked the apartment and headed south down Wisconsin Avenue. Washington was coming alive, the streets already teeming with people looking for distraction from the heat. Nights in the cities were becoming hallucinatory. Teenagers sported bioluminescent symbionts, the veins in their temples, necks, and pumped-up forearm muscles glowing electric blue, walking circulation diagrams who cultivated hypertension to improve the effect. Others used retinal symbionts to translate IR into visible light, their eyes flashing vampire red in the shadows.

And others, less visibly, had a skull full of White Knights.

Stem cells in the bone marrow infected with Mother—an engineered retrovirus—gave rise to something half-way between an embryonic neuron and a white blood cell. White Knights secreted the cytokines necessary to unlock the blood-brain barrier—and once through, cellular adhesion molecules guided them to their targets, where they could flood the site with a chosen neurotransmitter—or even form temporary quasi-synapses with genuine neurons. Users often had half a dozen or more sub-types in their bloodstream simultaneously, each one activated by a specific dietary additive: some cheap, harmless, and perfectly legitimate chemical not naturally present in the body. By ingesting the right mixture of innocuous artificial colorings, flavors and preservatives, they could modulate their neurochemistry in almost any fashion—until the White Knights died, as they were programmed to do, and a new dose of Mother was required.

Mother could be snorted, or taken intravenously ... but the most efficient way to use it was to puncture a bone and inject it straight into the marrow—an excruciating, messy, dangerous business, even if the virus itself was uncontaminated and authentic. The good stuff came from El Nido. The bad stuff came from basement labs in California and Texas, where gene hackers tried to force cell cultures infected with Mother to reproduce a virus expressly designed to resist their efforts—and churned out batches of mutant strains ideal for inducing leukaemia, astrocytomas, Parkinson’s disease, and assorted novel psychoses.

Crossing the sweltering dark city, watching the heedlessly joyful crowds, I felt a penetrating, dream-like clarity come over me. Part of me was numb, leaden, blank—but part of me was electrified, all-seeing. I seemed to be able to stare into the hidden landscapes of the people around me, to see deeper than the luminous rivers of blood; to pierce them with my vision right to the bone.

Right to the marrow.

I drove to the edge of a park I’d visited once before, and waited. I was already dressed for the part. Young people strode by, grinning, some glancing at the silver 2025 Ford Narcissus and whistling appreciatively. A teenaged boy danced on the grass, alone, tirelessly—blissed out on Coca-Cola, and not even getting paid to fake it.

Before too long, a girl approached the car, blue veins flashing on her bare arms. She leaned down to the window and looked in, inquiringly.

“What you got?” She was sixteen or seventeen, slender, dark-eyed, coffee-colored, with a faint Latino accent. She could have been my sister.

“Southern Rainbow.” All twelve major genotypes of Mother, straight from El Nido, cut with nothing but glucose. Southern Rainbow—and a little fast food—could take you anywhere.

The girl eyed me skeptically, and stretched out her right hand, palm down. She wore a ring with a large multifaceted jewel, with a pit in the center. I took a sachet from the glove compartment, shook it, tore it open, and tipped a few specks of powder into the pit. Then I leaned over and moistened the sample with saliva, holding her cool fingers to steady her hand. Twelve faces of the “stone” began to glow immediately, each one in a different color. The immunoelectric sensors in the pit, tiny capacitors coated with antibodies, were designed to recognize several sites on the protein coats of the different strains of Mother—particularly the ones the bootleggers had the most trouble getting right.

With good enough technology, though, those proteins didn’t have to bear the slightest relationship to the RNA inside.

The girl seemed to be impressed; her face lit up with anticipation. We negotiated a price. Too low by far; she should have been suspicious.

I looked her in the eye before handing over the sachet.

I said, “What do you need this shit for? The world is the world. You have to take it as it is. Accept it as it is: savage and terrible. Be strong. Never lie to yourself. That’s the only way to survive.”

She smirked at my apparent hypocrisy, but she was too pleased with her luck to turn nasty. “I hear what you’re saying. It’s a bad planet out there.” She forced the money into my hand, adding, with wide-eyed mock-sincerity, “And this is the last time I do Mother, I promise.”

I gave her the lethal virus, and watched her walk away across the grass and vanish into the shadows.

* * * *

The Colombian air force pilot who flew me down from Bogota didn’t seem too thrilled to be risking his life for a DEA bureaucrat. It was seven hundred kilometers to the border, and five different guerilla organizations held territory along the way: not a lot of towns, but several hundred possible sites for rocket launchers.

“My great-grandfather,” he said sourly, “died in fucking Korea fighting for General Douglas fucking MacArthur.” I wasn’t sure if that was meant to be a declaration of pride, or an intimation of an outstanding debt. Both, probably.

The helicopter was eerily silent, fitted out with phased sound absorbers, which looked like giant loudspeakers but swallowed most of the noise of the blades. The carbon-fiber fuselage was coated with an expensive network of chameleon polymers—although it might have been just as effective to paint the whole thing sky blue. An endothermic chemical mixture accumulated waste heat from the motor, and then discharged it through a parabolic radiator as a tightly focused skywards burst, every hour or so. The guerillas had no access to satellite images, and no radar they dared use; I decided that we had less chance of dying than the average Bogota commuter. Back in the capital, buses had been exploding without warning, two or three times a week.

Colombia was tearing itself apart; _La Violencia_ of the 1950s, all over again. Although all of the spectacular terrorist sabotage was being carried out by organized guerilla groups, most of the deaths so far had been caused by factions within the two mainstream political parties butchering each other’s supporters, avenging a litany of past atrocities which stretched back for generations. The group who’d actually started the current wave of bloodshed had negligible support; _Ejercito de Simon Bolivar_ were lunatic right-wing extremists who wanted to “reunite” with Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador—after two centuries of separation—and drag in Peru and Bolivia, to realize Bolivar’s dream of _Gran Colombia_. By assassinating President Marin, though, they’d triggered a cascade of events that had nothing to do with their ludicrous cause. Strikes and protests, street battles, curfews, martial law. The repatriation of foreign capital by nervous investors, followed by hyperinflation, and the collapse of the local financial system. Then a spiral of opportunistic violence. Everyone, from the paramilitary death squads to the Maoist splinter groups, seemed to believe that their hour had finally come.

I hadn’t seen so much as a bullet fired—but from the moment I’d entered the country, there’d been acid churning in my guts, and a heady, ceaseless adrenaline rush coursing through my veins. I felt wired, feverish ... alive. Hypersensitive as a pregnant woman: I could smell blood, everywhere. When the hidden struggle for power which rules all human affairs finally breaks through to the surface, finally ruptures the skin, it’s like witnessing some giant primordial creature rise up out of the ocean. Mesmerizing, and appalling. Nauseating—and exhilarating.

Coming face to face with the truth is always exhilarating.

* * * *

From the air, there was no obvious sign that we’d arrived; for the last two hundred kilometers, we’d been passing over rain forest—cleared in patches for plantations and mines, ranches and timber mills, shot through with rivers like metallic threads—but most of it resembling nothing so much as an endless expanse of broccoli. El Nido permitted natural vegetation to flourish all around it—and then imitated it ... which made sampling at the edges an inefficient way to gather the true genetic stock for analysis. Deep penetration was difficult, though, even with purpose-built robots—dozens of which had been lost—so edge samples had to suffice, at least until a few more members of Congress could be photographed committing statutory rape and persuaded to vote for better funding. Most of the engineered plant tissues self-destructed in the absence of regular chemical and viral messages drifting out from the core, reassuring them that they were still _in situ_—so the main DEA research facility was on the outskirts of El Nido itself, a collection of pressurized buildings and experimental plots in a clearing blasted out of the jungle on the Colombian side of the border. The electrified fences weren’t topped with razor wire; they turned ninety degrees into an electrified roof, completing a chain-link cage. The heliport was in the center of the compound, where a cage within the cage could, temporarily, open itself to the sky.

Madelaine Smith, the research director, showed me around. In the open, we both wore hermetic biohazard suits—although if the modifications I’d received in Washington were working as promised, mine was redundant. El Nido’s short-lived defensive viruses occasionally percolated out this far; they were never fatal, but they could be severely disabling to anyone who hadn’t been inoculated. The forest’s designers had walked a fine line between biological “self-defense” and unambiguously military applications. Guerillas had always hidden in the engineered jungle—and raised funds by collaborating in the export of Mother—but El Nido’s technology had never been explicitly directed toward the creation of lethal pathogens.

So far.

“Here, we’re raising seedlings of what we hope will be a stable El Nido phenotype, something we call beta seventeen.” They were unremarkable bushes with deep green foliage and dark red berries; Smith pointed to an array of camera-like instruments beside them. “Real-time infrared microspectroscopy. It can resolve a medium-sized RNA transcript, if there’s a sharp surge in production in a sufficient number of cells, simultaneously. We match up the data from these with our gas chromatography records, which show the range of molecules drifting out from the core. If we can catch these plants in the act of sensing a cue from El Nido—and if their response involves switching on a gene and synthesizing a protein—we may be able to elucidate the mechanism, and eventually short-circuit it.”

“You can’t just ... sequence all the DNA, and work it out from first principles?” I was meant to be passing as a newly-appointed administrator, dropping in at short notice to check for gold-plated paper clips—but it was hard to decide exactly how naive to sound.

Smith smiled politely. “El Nido DNA is guarded by enzymes which tear it apart at the slightest hint of cellular disruption. Right now, we’d have about as much of a chance of _sequencing it_ as I’d have of ... reading your mind by autopsy. And we still don’t know how those enzymes work; we have a lot of catching up to do. When the drug cartels started investing in biotechnology, forty years ago, _copy protection_ was their first priority. And they lured the best people away from legitimate labs around the world—not just by paying more, but by offering more creative freedom, and more challenging goals. El Nido probably contains as many patentable inventions as the entire agrotechnology industry produced in the same period. And all of them a lot more exciting.”

Was that what had brought Largo here? _More challenging goals?_ But El Nido was complete, the challenge was over; any further work was mere refinement. And at fifty-five, surely he knew that his most creative years were long gone.

I said, “I imagine the cartels got more than they bargained for; the technology transformed their business beyond recognition. All the old addictive substances became too easy to synthesize biologically—too cheap, too pure, and too readily available to be profitable. And addiction itself became bad business. The only thing that really sells now is novelty.”

Smith motioned with bulky arms toward the towering forest outside the cage—turning to face south-east, although it all looked the same. “_El Nido_ was more than they bargained for. All they really wanted was coca plants that did better at lower altitudes, and some gene-tailored vegetation to make it easier to camouflage their labs and plantations. They ended up with a small _de facto_ nation full of gene hackers, anarchists, and refugees. The cartels are only in control of certain regions; half the original geneticists have split off and founded their own little jungle utopias. There are at least a dozen people who know how to program the plants—how to switch on new patterns of gene expression, how to tap into the communications networks—and with that, you can stake out your own territory.”

“Like having some secret, shamanistic power to command the spirits of the forest?”

“Exactly. Except for the fact that it actually works.”

I laughed. “Do you know what cheers me up the most? Whatever else happens ... the _real_ Amazon, the _real_ jungle, will swallow them all in the end. It’s lasted—what? Two million years? _Their own little utopias!_ In fifty years’ time, or a hundred, it will be as if El Nido had never existed.”

_Less than chaff in a breeze._

Smith didn’t reply. In the silence, I could hear the monotonous click of beetles, from all directions. Bogota, high on a plateau, had been almost chilly. Here, it was as sweltering as Washington itself.

I glanced at Smith; she said, “You’re right, of course.” But she didn’t sound convinced at all.

* * * *

In the morning, over breakfast, I reassured Smith that I’d found everything to be in order. She smiled warily. I think she suspected that I wasn’t what I claimed to be, but that didn’t really matter. I’d listened carefully to the gossip of the scientists, technicians and soldiers; the name _Guillermo Largo_ hadn’t been mentioned once. If they didn’t even know about Largo, they could hardly have guessed my real purpose.

It was just after nine when I departed. On the ground, sheets of light, delicate as auroral displays, sliced through the trees around the compound. When we emerged above the canopy, it was like stepping from a mist-shrouded dawn into the brilliance of noon.

The pilot, begrudgingly, took a detour over the center of El Nido. “We’re in Peruvian air space, now,” he boasted. “You want to spark a diplomatic incident?” He seemed to find the possibility attractive.

“No. But fly lower.”

“There’s nothing to see. You can’t even see the river.”

“Lower.” The broccoli grew larger, then suddenly snapped into focus; all that undifferentiated _green_ turned into individual branches, solid and specific. It was curiously shocking, like looking at some dull familiar object through a microscope, and seeing its strange particularity revealed.

I reached over and broke the pilot’s neck. He hissed through his teeth, surprised. A shudder passed through me, a mixture of fear and a twinge of remorse. The autopilot kicked in and kept us hovering; it took me two minutes to unstrap the man’s body, drag him into the cargo hold, and take his seat.

I unscrewed the instrument panel and patched in a new chip. The digital log being beamed via satellite to an air force base to the north would show that we’d descended rapidly, out of control.

The truth wasn’t much different. At a hundred meters, I hit a branch and snapped a blade on the front rotor; the computers compensated valiantly, modeling and remodelling the situation, trimming the active surfaces of the surviving blades—and no doubt doing fine for each five-second interval between bone-shaking impacts and further damage. The sound absorbers went berserk, slipping in and out of phase with the motors, blasting the jungle with pulses of intensified noise.

Fifty meters up, I went into a slow spin, weirdly smooth, showing me the thickening canopy as if in a leisurely cinematic pan. At twenty meters, free fall. Air bags inflated around me, blocking off the view. I closed my eyes, redundantly, and gritted my teeth. Fragments of prayers spun in my head—the detritus of childhood, afterimages burned into my brain, meaningless but unerasable. I thought: _If I die, the jungle will claim me. I am flesh, I am chaff. Nothing will remain to be judged._ By the time I recalled that this wasn’t true jungle at all, I was no longer falling.

The air bags promptly deflated. I opened my eyes. There was water all around, flooded forest. A panel of the roof between the rotors blew off gently with a hiss like the dying pilot’s last breath, and then drifted down like a slowly crashing kite, turning muddy silver, green, and brown as it snatched at the colors around it.

The life raft had oars, provisions, flares—and a radio beacon. I cut the beacon loose and left it in the wreckage. I moved the pilot back into his seat, just as the water started flooding in to bury him.

Then I set off down the river.

* * * *

El Nido had divided a once-navigable stretch of the Rio Putumayo into a bewildering maze. Sluggish channels of brown water snaked between freshly raised islands of soil, covered in palms and rubber plants, and the inundated banks where the oldest trees—chocolate-colored hardwood species (predating the geneticists, but not necessarily unmodified)—soared above the undergrowth and out of sight.

The lymph nodes in my neck and groin pulsed with heat, savage but reassuring; my modified immune system was dealing with El Nido’s viral onslaught by generating thousands of new killer T-cell clones _en masse_, rather than waiting for a cautious antigen-mediated response. A few weeks in this state, and the chances were that a self-directed clone would slip through the elimination process and burn me up with a novel autoimmune disease—but I didn’t plan on staying that long.

Fish disturbed the murky water, rising up to snatch surface-dwelling insects or floating seed pods. In the distance, the thick coils of an anaconda slid from an overhanging branch and slipped languidly into the water. Between the rubber plants, hummingbirds hovered in the maws of violet orchids. So far as I knew, none of these creatures had been tampered with; they had gone on inhabiting the prosthetic forest as if nothing had changed.

I took a stick of chewing gum from my pocket, rich in cyclamates, and slowly roused one of my own sets of White Knights. The stink of heat and decaying vegetation seemed to fade, as certain olfactory pathways in my brain were numbed, and others sensitized—a kind of inner filter coming into play, enabling any signal from the newly acquired receptors in my nasal membranes to rise above all the other, distracting odors of the jungle.

Suddenly, I could smell the dead pilot on my hands and clothes, the lingering taint of his sweat and faeces—and the pheromones of spider monkeys in the branches around me, pungent and distinctive as urine. As a rehearsal, I followed the trail for fifteen minutes, paddling the raft in the direction of the freshest scent, until I was finally rewarded with chirps of alarm and a glimpse of two skinny gray-brown shapes vanishing into the foliage ahead.

My own scent was camouflaged; symbionts in my sweat glands were digesting all the characteristic molecules. There were long-term side-effects from the bacteria, though, and the most recent intelligence suggested that El Nido’s inhabitants didn’t bother with them. There was a chance, of course, that Largo had been paranoid enough to bring his own.

I stared after the retreating monkeys, and wondered when I’d catch my first whiff of another living human. Even an illiterate peasant who’d fled the violence to the north would have valuable knowledge of the state of play between the factions in here, and some kind of crude mental map of the landscape.

The raft began to whistle gently, air escaping from one sealed compartment. I rolled into the water and submerged completely. A meter down, I couldn’t see my own hands. I waited and listened, but all I could hear was the soft _plop_ of fish breaking the surface. No rock could have holed the plastic of the raft; it had to have been a bullet.

I floated in the cool milky silence. The water would conceal my body heat, and I’d have no need to exhale for ten minutes. The question was whether to risk raising a wake by swimming away from the raft, or to wait it out.

Something brushed my cheek, sharp and thin. I ignored it. It happened again. It didn’t feel like a fish, or anything living. A third time, and I seized the object as it fluttered past. It was a piece of plastic a few centimeters wide. I felt around the rim; the edge was sharp in places, soft and yielding in others. Then the fragment broke in two in my hand.

I swam a few meters away, then surfaced cautiously. The life raft was decaying, the plastic peeling away into the water like skin in acid. The polymer was meant to be cross-linked beyond any chance of biodegradation—but obviously some strain of El Nido bacteria had found a way.

I floated on my back, breathing deeply to purge myself of carbon dioxide, contemplating the prospect of completing the mission on foot. The canopy above seemed to waver, as if in a heat haze, which made no sense. My limbs grew curiously warm and heavy. It occurred to me to wonder exactly what I might be smelling, if I hadn’t shut down ninety per cent of my olfactory range. I thought: _If I’d bred bacteria able to digest a substance foreign to El Nido, what else would I want them to do when they chanced upon such a meal? Incapacitate whoever had brought it in? Broadcast news of the event with a biochemical signal?_

I could smell the sharp odors of half a dozen sweat-drenched people when they arrived, but all I could do was lie in the water and let them fish me out.

* * * *

After we left the river, I was carried on a stretcher, blindfolded and bound. No one talked within earshot. I might have judged the pace we set by the rhythm of my bearers’ footsteps, or guessed the direction in which we traveled by hints of sunlight on the side of my face ... but in the waking dream induced by the bacterial toxins, the harder I struggled to interpret those cues, the more lost and confused I became.

At one point, when the party rested, someone squatted beside me—and waved a scanning device over my body? That guess was confirmed by the pinpricks of heat where the polymer transponders had been implanted. Passive devices—but their resonant echo in a satellite microwave burst would have been distinctive. The scanner found, and fried, them all.

Late in the afternoon, they removed the blindfold. Certain that I was totally disoriented? Certain that I’d never escape? Or maybe just to flaunt El Nido’s triumphant architecture.

The approach was a hidden path through swampland; I kept looking down to see my captors’ boots not quite vanishing into the mud, while a dry, apparently secure stretch of high ground nearby was avoided.

Closer in, the dense thorned bushes blocking the way seemed to yield for us; the chewing gum had worn off enough for me to tell that we moved in a cloud of a sweet, ester-like compound. I couldn’t see whether it was being sprayed into the air from a cylinder—or emitted bodily by a member of the party with symbionts in his skin, or lungs, or intestines.

The village emerged almost imperceptibly out of the impostor jungle. The ground—I could feel it—became, step by step, unnaturally firm and level. The arrangement of trees grew subtly ordered—defining no linear avenues, but increasingly _wrong_ nonetheless. Then I started glimpsing “fortuitous” clearings to the left and right, containing “natural” wooden buildings, or shiny biopolymer sheds.

I was lowered to the ground outside one of the sheds. A man I hadn’t seen before leaned over me, wiry and unshaven, holding up a gleaming hunting knife. He looked to me like the archetype of human as animal, human as predator, human as unselfconscious killer.

He said, “Friend, this is where we drain out all of your blood.” He grinned and squatted down. I almost passed out from the stench of my own fear, as the glut overwhelmed the symbionts. He cut my hands free, adding, “And then put it all back in again.” He slid one arm under me, around my ribs, raised me up from the stretcher, and carried me into the building.

* * * *

Guillermo Largo said, “Forgive me if I don’t shake your hand. I think we’ve almost cleaned you out, but I don’t want to risk physical contact in case there’s enough of a residue of the virus to make your own hyped-up immune system turn on you.”

He was an unprepossessing, sad-eyed man; thin, short, slightly balding. I stepped up to the wooden bars between us and stretched my hand out toward him. “Make contact any time you like. I never carried a virus. Do you think I believe your _propaganda?_”

He shrugged, unconcerned. “It would have killed you, not me—although I’m sure it was meant for both of us. It may have been keyed to my genotype, but you carried far too much of it not to have been caught up in the response to my presence. That’s history, though, not worth arguing about.”

I didn’t actually believe that he was lying; a virus to dispose of both of us made perfect sense. I even felt a begrudging respect for the Company, for the way I’d been used—there was a savage, unsentimental honesty to it—but it didn’t seem politic to reveal that to Largo.

I said, “If you believe that I pose no risk to you now, though, why don’t you come back with me? You’re still considered valuable. One moment of weakness, one bad decision, doesn’t have to mean the end of your career. Your employers are very pragmatic people; they won’t want to punish you. They’ll just need to watch you a little more closely in future. Their problem, not yours; you won’t even notice the difference.”

Largo didn’t seem to be listening, but then he looked straight at me and smiled. “Do you know what Victor Hugo said about Colombia’s first constitution? He said it was written for a country of angels. It only lasted twenty-three years—and on the next attempt, the politicians lowered their sights. Considerably.” He turned away, and started pacing back and forth in front of the bars. Two Mestizo peasants with automatic weapons stood by the door, looking on impassively. Both incessantly chewed what looked to me like ordinary coca leaves; there was something almost reassuring about their loyalty to tradition.

My cell was clean and well furnished, right down to the kind of bioreactor toilet that was all the rage in Beverly Hills. My captors had treated me impeccably, so far, but I had a feeling that Largo was planning something unpleasant. Handing me over to the Mother barons? I still didn’t know what deal he’d done, what he’d sold them in exchange for a piece of El Nido and a few dozen bodyguards. Let alone why he thought this was better than an apartment in Bethesda and a hundred grand a year.

I said, “What do you think you’re going to do, if you stay here? Build your own _country for angels?_ Grow your own bioengineered utopia?”

“Utopia?” Largo stopped pacing, and flashed his crooked smile again. “No. How can there ever be a _utopia?_ There is no _right way to live_, which we’ve simply failed to stumble upon. There is no set of rules, there is no system, there is no formula. Why should there be? Short of the existence of a creator—and a perverse one, at that—why should there be some blueprint for perfection, just waiting to be discovered?”

I said, “You’re right. In the end, all we can do is be true to our nature. See through the veneer of civilization and hypocritical morality, and accept the real forces that shape us.”

Largo burst out laughing. I actually felt my face burn at his response—if only because I’d misread him, and failed to get him on side; not because he was laughing at the one thing I believed in.

He said, “Do you know what I was working on, back in the States?”

“No. Does it matter?” The less I knew, the better my chances of living.

Largo told me anyway. “I was looking for a way to render mature neurons _embryonic_. To switch them back into a less differentiated state, enabling them to behave the way they do in the fetal brain: migrating from site to site, forming new connections. Supposedly as a treatment for dementia and stroke ... although the work was being funded by people who saw it as the first step toward viral weapons able to rewire parts of the brain. I doubt that the results could ever have been very sophisticated—no viruses for imposing political ideologies—but all kinds of disabling or docile behavior might have been coded into a relatively small package.”

“And you sold that to the cartels? So they can hold whole cities to ransom with it, next time one of their leaders is arrested? To save them the trouble of assassinating judges and politicians?”

Largo said mildly, “I sold it to the cartels, but not as a weapon. No infectious military version exists. Even the prototypes—which merely regress selected neurons, but make no programmed changes—are far too cumbersome and fragile to survive at large. And there are other technical problems. There’s not much reproductive advantage for a virus in carrying out elaborate, highly specific modifications to its host’s brain; unleashed on a real human population, mutants that simply ditched all of that irrelevant shit would soon predominate.”

“Then ... ?”

“I sold it to the cartels as _a product_. Or rather, I combined it with their own biggest seller, and handed over the finished hybrid. A new kind of Mother.”

“Which does what?” He had me hooked, even if I was digging my own grave.

“Which turns a subset of the neurons in the brain into something like White Knights. Just as mobile, just as flexible. Far better at establishing tight new synapses, though, rather than just flooding the interneural space with a chosen substance. And not controlled by dietary additives; controlled by molecules they secrete themselves. Controlled by each other.”

That made no sense to me. “_Existing neurons_ become mobile? Existing brain structures ... melt? You’ve made a version of Mother that turns people’s brains to mush—and you expect them to pay for that?”

“Not mush. Everything’s part of a tight feedback loop: the firing of these altered neurons influences the range of molecules they secrete—which in turn controls the rewiring of nearby synapses. Vital regulatory centers and motor neurons are left untouched, of course. And it takes a strong signal to shift the Gray Knights; they don’t respond to every random whim. You need at least an hour or two without distractions before you can have a significant effect on any brain structure.

“It’s not altogether different from the way ordinary neurons end up encoding learned behavior and memories—only faster, more flexible ... and much more widespread. There are parts of the brain that haven’t changed in a hundred thousand years, which can be remodelled completely in half a day.”

He paused, and regarded me amiably. The sweat on the back of my neck went cold.

“You’ve used the virus—?”

“Of course. That’s why I created it. For myself. That’s why I came here in the first place.”

“For do-it-yourself neurosurgery? Why not just slip a screwdriver under one eyeball and poke it around until the urge went away?” I felt physically sick. “At least ... cocaine and heroine—and even White Knights—exploited _natural_ receptors, _natural_ pathways. You’ve taken a structure that evolution has honed over millions of years, and—”

Largo was greatly amused, but this time he refrained from laughing in my face. He said gently, “For most people, navigating their own psyche is like wandering in circles through a maze. That’s what _evolution_ has bequeathed us: a miserable, confusing prison. And the only thing crude drugs like cocaine or heroine or alcohol ever did was build short cuts to a few dead ends—or, like LSD, coat the walls of the maze with mirrors. And all that White Knights ever did was package the same effects differently.

“_Gray Knights_ allow you to reshape the entire maze, at will. They don’t confine you to some shrunken emotional repertoire; they empower you completely. They let you control _exactly who you are_.”

I had to struggle to put aside the overwhelming sense of revulsion I felt. Largo had decided to fuck himself in the head; that was his problem. A few users of Mother would do the same—but one more batch of poisonous shit to compete with all the garbage from the basement labs wasn’t exactly a national tragedy.

Largo said affably, “I spent thirty years as someone I despised. I was too weak to change—but I never quite lost sight of what I wanted to become. I used to wonder if it would have been less contemptible, less hypocritical, to resign myself to the fact of my weakness, the fact of my corruption. But I never did.”

“And you think you’ve erased your old personality, as easily as you erased your computer files? What are you now, then? A saint? _An angel?_”

“No. But I’m exactly what I want to be. With Gray Knights, you can’t really be anything else.”

I felt giddy for a moment, light-headed with rage; I steadied myself against the bars of my cage.

I said, “So you’ve scrambled your brain, and you feel better. And you’re going to live in this fake jungle for the rest of your life, collaborating with drug pushers, kidding yourself that you’ve achieved redemption?”

“The rest of my life? Perhaps. But I’ll be watching the world. And hoping.”

I almost choked. “Hoping for _what?_ You think your habit will ever spread beyond a few brain-damaged junkies? You think Gray Knights are going to sweep across the planet and transform it beyond recognition? Or were you lying—is the virus really infectious, after all?”

“No. But it gives people what they want. They’ll seek it out, once they understand that.”

I gazed at him, pityingly. “What people _want_ is food, sex, and power. That will never change. Remember the passage you marked in ‘Heart of Darkness’? What do you think that _meant?_ Deep down, we’re just animals with a few simple drives. Everything else is _less than chaff in a breeze_.”

Largo frowned, as if trying to recall the quote, then nodded slowly. He said, “Do you know how many different ways an ordinary human brain can be wired? Not an arbitrary neural network of the same size—but an actual, working _Homo sapiens_ brain, shaped by real embryology and real experience? There are about ten-to-the-power-of-ten-million possibilities. A huge number: a lot of room for variation in personality and talents, a lot of space to encode the traces of different lives.

“But do you know what Gray Knights do to that number? They multiply it by the same again. They grant the part of us that was fixed, that was tied to ‘human nature’, the chance to be as different from person to person as a lifetime’s worth of memories.

“Of course Conrad was right. Every word of that passage was true—when it was written. But now it doesn’t go far enough. Because now, all of human nature is _less than chaff in a breeze_. ‘The horror’, the heart of darkness, is _less than chaff in a breeze_. All the ‘eternal verities’—all the sad and beautiful insights of all the great writers from Sophocles to Shakespeare—are _less than chaff in a breeze_.”

* * * *

I lay awake on my bunk, listening to the cicadas and frogs, wondering what Largo would do with me. If he didn’t see himself as capable of murder, he wouldn’t kill me—if only to reinforce his delusions of self-mastery. Perhaps he’d just dump me outside the research station—where I could explain to Madelaine Smith how the Colombian air force pilot had come down with an El Nido virus in midair, and I’d valiantly tried to take control.

I thought back over the incident, trying to get my story straight. The pilot’s body would never be recovered; the forensic details didn’t have to add up.

I closed my eyes and saw myself breaking his neck. The same twinge of remorse passed over me. I brushed it aside irritably. So I’d killed him—and the girl, a few days earlier—and a dozen others before that. The Company had very nearly disposed of me. Because it was expedient—and because it was possible. That was the way of the world: power would always be used, nation would subjugate nation, the weak would always be slaughtered. Everything else was pious self-delusion. A hundred kilometers away, Colombia’s warring factions were proving the truth of that, one more time.

_But if Largo had infected me with his own special brand of Mother? And if everything he’d told me about it was true?_

Gray Knights only moved if you willed them to move. All I had to do in order to remain unscathed was to choose that fate. To wish only to be exactly who I was: a killer who’d always understood that he was facing the deepest of truths. Embracing savagery and corruption because, in the end, there was no other way.

I kept seeing them before me: the pilot, the girl.

_I had to feel nothing—and wish to feel nothing—and keep on making that choice, again and again._

Or everything I was would disintegrate like a house of sand, and blow away.

One of the guards belched in the darkness, then spat.

The night stretched out ahead of me, like a river that had lost its way.

Closer

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

(“Intimacy,” I once told Sian, after we’d made love, “is the only cure for solipsism.” She laughed and said, “Don’t get too ambitious, Michael. So far, it hasn’t even cured me of masturbation.”)

True solipsism, though, was never my problem. From the very first time I considered the question, I accepted that there could be no way of proving the reality of an external world, let alone the existence of other minds—but I also accepted that taking both on faith was the only practical way of dealing with everyday life.

The question which obsessed me was this: Assuming that other people existed, how did they apprehend that existence? How did they experience being? Could I ever truly understand what consciousness was like for another person—any more than I could for an ape, or a cat, or an insect?

If not, I was alone.

I desperately wanted to believe that other people were somehow knowable, but it wasn’t something I could bring myself to take for granted. I knew there could be no absolute proof, but I wanted to be persuaded, I needed to be compelled.

No literature, no poetry, no drama, however personally resonant I found it, could ever quite convince me that I’d glimpsed the author’s soul. Language had evolved to facilitate cooperation in the conquest of the physical world, not to describe subjective reality. Love, anger, jealousy, resentment, grief—all were defined, ultimately, in terms of external circumstances and observable actions.

When an image or metaphor rang true for me, it proved only that I shared with the author a set of definitions, a culturally sanctioned list of word associations. After all, many publishers used computer programs—highly specialised, but unsophisticated algorithms, without the remotest possibility of self-awareness—to routinely produce both literature, and literary criticism, indistinguishable from the human product. Not just formularised garbage, either; on several occasions, I’d been deeply affected by works which I’d later discovered had been cranked out by unthinking software. This didn’t prove that human literature communicated nothing of the author’s inner life, but it certainly made clear how much room there was for doubt.

Unlike many of my friends, I had no qualms whatsoever when, at the age of eighteen, the time came for me to “switch.” My organic brain was removed and discarded, and control of my body handed over to my “jewel”—the Ndoli Device, a neural-net computer implanted shortly after birth, which had since learnt to imitate my brain, down to the level of individual neurons. I had no qualms, not because I was at all convinced that the jewel and the brain experienced consciousness identically, but because, from an early age, I’d identified myself solely with the jewel. My brain was a kind of bootstrap device, nothing more, and to mourn its loss would have been as absurd as mourning my emergence from some primitive stage of embryological neural development. Switching was simply what humans did now, an established part of the life cycle, even if it was mediated by our culture, and not by our genes.

Seeing each other die, and observing the gradual failure of their own bodies, may have helped convince pre-Ndoli humans of their common humanity; certainly, there were countless references in their literature to the equalising power of death. Perhaps concluding that the universe would go on without them produced a shared sense of hopelessness, or insignificance, which they viewed as their defining attribute.

Now that it’s become an article of faith that, sometime in the next few billion years, physicists will find a way for us to go on without the universe, rather than vice versa, that route to spiritual equality has lost whatever dubious logic it might ever have possessed.

Sian was a communications engineer. I was a holovision news editor. We met during a live broadcast of the seeding of Venus with terraforming nanomachines—

a matter of great public interest, since most of the planet’s as-yet-uninhabitable surface had already been sold. There were several technical glitches with the broadcast which might have been disastrous, but together we managed to work around them, and even to hide the seams. It was nothing special, we were simply doing our jobs, but afterwards I was elated out of all proportion. It took me twenty-four hours to realise (or decide) that I’d fallen in love.

However, when I approached her the next day, she made it clear that she felt nothing for me; the chemistry I’d imagined “between us” had all been in my head.

I was dismayed, but not surprised. Work didn’t bring us together again, but I called her occasionally, and six weeks later my persistence was rewarded. I took her to a performance of Waiting for Godot by augmented parrots, and I enjoyed myself immensely, but I didn’t see her again for more than a month.

I’d almost given up hope, when she appeared at my door without warning one night and dragged me along to a “concert” of interactive computerised improvisation. The “audience” was assembled in what looked like a mock-up of a Berlin nightclub of the 2050s. A computer program, originally designed for creating movie scores, was fed with the image from a hover-camera which wandered about the set. People danced and sang, screamed and brawled, and engaged in all kinds of histrionics in the hope of attracting the camera and shaping the music.

At first, I felt cowed and inhibited, but Sian gave me no choice but to join in.

It was chaotic, insane, at times even terrifying. One woman stabbed another to

“death” at the table beside us, which struck me as a sickening (and expensive)

indulgence, but when a riot broke out at the end, and people started smashing the deliberately flimsy furniture, I followed Sian into the melee, cheering.

The music—the excuse for the whole event—was garbage, but I didn’t really care. When we limped out into the night, bruised and aching and laughing, I knew that at least we’d shared something that had made us feel closer. She took me home and we went to bed together, too sore and tired to do more than sleep, but when we made love in the morning I already felt so at ease with her that I could hardly believe it was our first time.

Soon we were inseparable. My tastes in entertainment were very different from hers, but I survived most of her favourite “artforms”, more or less intact. She moved into my apartment, at my suggestion, and casually destroyed the orderly rhythms of my carefully arranged domestic life.

I had to piece together details of her past from throwaway lines; she found it far too boring to sit down and give me a coherent account. Her life had been as unremarkable as mine: she’d grown up in a suburban, middle-class family, studied her profession, found a job. Like almost everyone, she’d switched at eighteen.

She had no strong political convictions. She was good at her work, but put ten times more energy into her social life. She was intelligent, but hated anything overtly intellectual. She was impatient, aggressive, roughly affectionate.

And I could not, for one second, imagine what it was like inside her head.

For a start, I rarely had any idea what she was thinking—in the sense of knowing how she would have replied if asked, out of the blue, to describe her thoughts at the moment before they were interrupted by the question. On a longer time scale, I had no feeling for her motivation, her image of herself, her concept of who she was and what she did and why. Even in the laughably crude sense that a novelist pretends to “explain” a character, I could not have explained Sian.

And if she’d provided me with a running commentary on her mental state, and a weekly assessment of the reasons for her actions in the latest psychodynamic jargon, it would all have come to nothing but a heap of useless words. If I could have pictured myself in her circumstances, imagined myself with her beliefs and obsessions, empathised until I could anticipate her every word, her every decision, then I still would not have understood so much as a single moment when she closed her eyes, forgot her past, wanted nothing, and simply was.

Of course, most of the time, nothing could have mattered less. We were happy enough together, whether or not we were strangers—and whether or not my

“happiness” and Sian’s “happiness” were in any real sense the same.

Over the years, she became less self-contained, more open. She had no great dark secrets to share, no traumatic childhood ordeals to recount, but she let me in on her petty fears and her mundane neuroses. I did the same, and even, clumsily, explained my peculiar obsession. She wasn’t at all offended. Just puzzled.

“What could it actually mean, though? To know what it’s like to be someone else? You’d have to have their memories, their personality, their body—

everything. And then you’d just be them, not yourself, and you wouldn’t know anything. It’s nonsense.”

I shrugged. “Not necessarily. Of course, perfect knowledge would be impossible, but you can always get closer. Don’t you think that the more things we do together, the more experiences we share, the closer we become?”

She scowled. “Yes, but that’s not what you were talking about five seconds ago.

Two years, or two thousand years, of ‘shared experiences’ seen through different eyes means nothing. However much time two people spent together, how could you know that there was even the briefest instant when they both experienced what they were going through ‘together’ in the same way?”

“I know, but ...”

“If you admit that what you want is impossible, maybe you’ll stop fretting about it.”

I laughed. “Whatever makes you think I’m as rational as that?”

When the technology became available it was Sian’s idea, not mine, for us to try out all the fashionable somatic permutations. Sian was always impatient to experience something new. “If we really are going to live forever,” she said,

“we’d better stay curious if we want to stay sane.”

I was reluctant, but any resistance I put up seemed hypocritical. Clearly, this game wouldn’t lead to the perfect knowledge I longed for (and knew I would never achieve), but I couldn’t deny the possibility that it might be one crude step in the right direction.

First, we exchanged bodies. I discovered what it was like to have breasts and a vagina—what it was like for me, that is, not what it had been like for Sian.

True, we stayed swapped long enough for the shock, and even the novelty, to wear off, but I never felt that I’d gained much insight into her experience of the body she’d been born with. My jewel was modified only as much as was necessary to allow me to control this unfamiliar machine, which was scarcely more than would have been required to work another male body. The menstrual cycle had been abandoned decades before, and although I could have taken the necessary hormones to allow myself to have periods, and even to become pregnant (although the financial disincentives for reproduction had been drastically increased in recent years), that would have told me absolutely nothing about Sian, who had done neither.

As for sex, the pleasure of intercourse still felt very much the same—which was hardly surprising, since nerves from the vagina and clitoris were simply wired into my jewel as if they’d come from my penis. Even being penetrated made less difference than I’d expected; unless I made a special effort to remain aware of our respective geometries, I found it hard to care who was doing what to whom. Orgasms were better though, I had to admit.

At work, no one raised an eyebrow when I turned up as Sian, since many of my colleagues had already been through exactly the same thing. The legal definition of identity had recently been shifted from the DNA fingerprint of the body, according to a standard set of markers, to the serial number of the jewel. When even the law can keep up with you, you know you can’t be doing anything very radical or profound.

After three months, Sian had had enough. “I never realised how clumsy you were,” she said. “Or that ejaculation was so dull.”

Next, she had a clone of herself made, so we could both be women. Brain-damaged replacement bodies—Extras—had once been incredibly expensive, when they’d needed to be grown at virtually the normal rate, and kept constantly active so they’d be healthy enough to use. However, the physiological effects of the passage of time, and of exercise, don’t happen by magic; at a deep enough level, there’s always a biochemical signal produced, which can ultimately be faked.

Mature Extras, with sturdy bones and perfect muscle tone, could now be produced from scratch in a year—four months’ gestation and eight months’ coma—which also allowed them to be more thoroughly brain-dead than before, soothing the ethical qualms of those who’d always wondered just how much was going on inside the heads of the old, active versions.

In our first experiment, the hardest part for me had always been, not looking in the mirror and seeing Sian, but looking at Sian and seeing myself. I’d missed her, far more than I’d missed being myself. Now, I was almost happy for my body to be absent (in storage, kept alive by a jewel based on the minimal brain of an Extra). The symmetry of being her twin appealed to me; surely now we were closer than ever. Before, we’d merely swapped our physical differences. Now, we’d abolished them.

The symmetry was an illusion. I’d changed gender, and she hadn’t. I was with the woman I loved; she lived with a walking parody of herself.

One morning she woke me, pummelling my breasts so hard that she left bruises.

When I opened my eyes and shielded myself, she peered at me suspiciously. “Are you in there? Michael? I’m going crazy. I want you back.”

For the sake of getting the whole bizarre episode over and done with for good—

and perhaps also to discover for myself what Sian had just been through—I

agreed to the third permutation. There was no need to wait a year; my Extra had been grown at the same time as hers.

Somehow, it was far more disorienting to be confronted by “myself” without the camouflage of Sian’s body. I found my own face unreadable; when we’d both been in disguise, that hadn’t bothered me, but now it made me feel edgy, and at times almost paranoid, for no rational reason at all.

Sex took some getting used to. Eventually, I found it pleasurable, in a confusing and vaguely narcissistic way. The compelling sense of equality I’d felt, when we’d made love as women, never quite returned to me as we sucked each other’s cocks—but then, when we’d both been women, Sian had never claimed to feel any such thing. It had all been my own invention.

The day after we returned to the way we’d begun (well, almost—in fact, we put our decrepit, twenty-six-year-old bodies in storage, and took up residence in our healthier Extras), I saw a story from Europe on an option we hadn’t yet tried, tipped to become all the rage: hermaphroditic identical twins. Our new bodies could be our biological children (give or take the genetic tinkering required to ensure hermaphroditism), with an equal share of characteristics from both of us. We would both have changed gender, both have lost partners. We’d be equal in every way.

I took a copy of the file home to Sian. She watched it thoughtfully, then said,

“Slugs are hermaphrodites, aren’t they? They hang in mid-air together on a thread of slime. I’m sure there’s even something in Shakespeare, remarking on the glorious spectacle of copulating slugs. Imagine it: you and me, making slug love.”

I fell on the floor, laughing.

I stopped, suddenly. “Where, in Shakespeare? I didn’t think you’d even read Shakespeare.”

Eventually, I came to believe that with each passing year, I knew Sian a little better—in the traditional sense, the sense that most couples seemed to find sufficient. I knew what she expected from me, I knew how not to hurt her. We had arguments, we had fights, but there must have been some kind of underlying stability, because in the end we always chose to stay together. Her happiness mattered to me, very much, and at times I could hardly believe that I’d ever thought it possible that all of her subjective experience might be fundamentally alien to me. It was true that every brain, and hence every jewel, was unique—

but there was something extravagant in supposing that the nature of consciousness could be radically different between individuals, when the same basic hardware, and the same basic principles of neural topology, were involved.

Still. Sometimes, if I woke in the night, I’d turn to her and whisper, inaudibly, compulsively, “I don’t know you. I have no idea who, or what, you are.” I’d lie there, and think about packing and leaving. I was alone, and it was farcical to go through the charade of pretending otherwise.

Then again, sometimes I woke in the night, absolutely convinced that I was dying, or something else equally absurd. In the sway of some half-forgotten dream, all manner of confusion is possible. It never meant a thing, and by morning I was always myself again.

When I saw the story on Craig Bentley’s service—he called it “research,” but his “volunteers” paid for the privilege of taking part in his experiments—I

almost couldn’t bring myself to include it in the bulletin, although all my professional judgement told me it was everything our viewers wanted in a thirty second techno-shock piece: bizarre, even mildly disconcerting, but not too hard to grasp.

Bentley was a cyberneurologist; he studied the Ndoli Device, in the way that neurologists had once studied the brain. Mimicking the brain with a neural-net computer had not required a profound understanding of its higher-level structures; research into these structures continued, in their new incarnation.

The jewel, compared to the brain, was of course both easier to observe, and easier to manipulate.

In his latest project, Bentley was offering couples something slightly more up-market than an insight into the sex lives of slugs. He was offering them eight hours with identical minds.

I made a copy of the original, ten-minute piece that had come through on the fibre, then let my editing console select the most titillating thirty seconds possible, for broadcast. It did a good job; it had learnt from me.

I couldn’t lie to Sian. I couldn’t hide the story, I couldn’t pretend to be disinterested. The only honest thing to do was to show her the file, tell her exactly how I felt, and ask her what she wanted.

I did just that. When the HV image faded out, she turned to me, shrugged, and said mildly, “Okay. It sounds like fun. Let’s try it.”

Bentley wore a T-shirt with nine computer-drawn portraits on it, in a three-by-three grid. Top left was Elvis Presley. Bottom right was Marilyn Monroe. The rest were various stages in between.

“This is how it will work. The transition will take twenty minutes, during which time you’ll be disembodied. Over the first ten minutes, you’ll gain equal access to each other’s memories. Over the second ten minutes, you’ll both be moved, gradually, towards the compromise personality.

“Once that’s done, your Ndoli Devices will be identical—in the sense that both will have all the same neural connections with all the same weighting factors—but they’ll almost certainly be in different states. I’ll have to black you out, to correct that. Then you’ll wake—”

Who’ll wake?

“—in identical electromechanical bodies. Clones can’t be made sufficiently alike.

“You’ll spend the eight hours alone, in perfectly matched rooms. Rather like hotel suites, really. You’ll have HV to keep you amused if you need it—without the videophone module, of course. You might think you’d both get an engaged signal, if you tried to call the same number simultaneously—but in fact, in such cases the switching equipment arbitrarily lets one call through, which would make your environments different.”

Sian asked, “Why can’t we phone each other? Or better still, meet each other?

If we’re exactly the same, we’d say the same things, do the same things—we’d be one more identical part of each other’s environment.”

Bentley pursed his lips and shook his head. “Perhaps I’ll allow something of the kind in a future experiment, but for now I believe it would be too ...

potentially traumatic.”

Sian gave me a sideways glance, which meant: This man is a killjoy.

“The end will be like the beginning, in reverse. First, your personalities will be restored. Then, you’ll lose access to each other’s memories. Of course, your memories of the experience itself will be left untouched. Untouched by me, that is; I can’t predict how your separate personalities, once restored, will act—

filtering, suppressing, reinterpreting those memories. Within minutes, you may end up with very different ideas about what you’ve been through. All I can guarantee is this: For the eight hours in question, the two of you will be identical.”

We talked it over. Sian was enthusiastic, as always. She didn’t much care what it would be like; all that really mattered to her was collecting one more novel experience.

“Whatever happens, we’ll be ourselves again at the end of it,” she said.

“What’s there to be afraid of? You know the old Ndoli joke.”

“What old Ndoli joke?”

“Anything’s bearable—so long as it’s finite.”

I couldn’t decide how I felt. The sharing of memories notwithstanding, we’d both end up knowing, not each other, but merely a transient, artificial third person. Still, for the first time in our lives, we would have been through exactly the same experience, from exactly the same point of view—even if the experience was only spending eight hours locked in separate rooms, and the point of view was that of a genderless robot with an identity crisis.

It was a compromise—but I could think of no realistic way in which it could have been improved.

I called Bentley, and made a reservation.

In perfect sensory deprivation, my thoughts seemed to dissipate into the blackness around me before they were even half-formed. This isolation didn’t last long, though; as our short-term memories merged, we achieved a kind of telepathy: One of us would think a message, and the other would “remember”

thinking it, and reply in the same way.

—I really can’t wait to uncover all your grubby little secrets.

—I think you’re going to be disappointed. Anything I haven’t already told you, I’ve probably repressed.

—Ah, but repressed is not erased. Who knows what will turn up?

—We’ll know, soon enough.

I tried to think of all the minor sins I must have committed over the years, all the shameful, selfish, unworthy thoughts, but nothing came into my head but a vague white noise of guilt. I tried again, and achieved, of all things, an image of Sian as a child. A young boy slipping his hand between her legs, then squealing with fright and pulling away. But she’d described that incident to me, long ago. Was it her memory, or my reconstruction?

—My memory. I think. Or perhaps my reconstruction. You know, half the time when I’ve told you something that happened before we met, the memory of the telling has become far clearer to me than the memory itself. Almost replacing it.

—It’s the same for me.

—Then in a way, our memories have already been moving towards a kind of symmetry, for years. We both remember what was said, as if we’d both heard it from someone else.

Agreement. Silence. A moment of confusion. Then:

—This neat division of “memory” and “personality” Bentley uses; is it really so clear? Jewels are neural-net computers; you can’t talk about “data” and

“program” in any absolute sense.

—Not in general, no. His classification must be arbitrary, to some extent. But who cares?

—It matters. If he restores “personality,” but allows “memories” to persist, a misclassification could leave us ...

—What?

—It depends, doesn’t it? At one extreme, so thoroughly “restored,” so completely unaffected, that the whole experience might as well not have happened. And at the other extreme ...

—Permanently ...

—... closer.

—Isn’t that the point?

—I don’t know anymore.

Silence. Hesitation.

Then I realised that I had no idea whether or not it was my turn to reply.

I woke, lying on a bed, mildly bemused, as if waiting for a mental hiatus to pass. My body felt slightly awkward, but less so than when I’d woken in someone else’s Extra. I glanced down at the pale, smooth plastic of my torso and legs, then waved a hand in front of my face. I looked like a unisex shop-window dummy

—but Bentley had shown us the bodies beforehand, it was no great shock. I sat up slowly, then stood and took a few steps. I felt a little numb and hollow, but my kinaesthetic sense, my proprioception, was fine; I felt located between my eyes, and I felt that this body was mine. As with any modern transplant, my jewel had been manipulated directly to accommodate the change, avoiding the need for months of physiotherapy.

I glanced around the room. It was sparsely furnished: one bed, one table, one chair, one clock, one HV set. On the wall, a framed reproduction of an Escher lithograph: “Bond of Union,” a portrait of the artist and, presumably, his wife, faces peeled like lemons into helices of rind, joined into a single, linked band. I traced the outer surface from start to finish, and was disappointed to find that it lacked the Möbius twist I was expecting.

No windows, one door without a handle. Set into the wall beside the bed, a full-length mirror. I stood a while and stared at my ridiculous form. It suddenly occurred to me that, if Bentley had a real love of symmetry games, he might have built one room as the mirror image of the other, modified the HV set accordingly, and altered one jewel, one copy of me, to exchange right for left.

What looked like a mirror could then be nothing but a window between the rooms.

I grinned awkwardly with my plastic face; my reflection looked appropriately embarrassed by the sight. The idea appealed to me, however unlikely it was.

Nothing short of an experiment in nuclear physics could reveal the difference.

No, not true; a pendulum free to precess, like Foucault’s, would twist the same way in both rooms, giving the game away. I walked up to the mirror and thumped it. It didn’t seem to yield at all, but then, either a brick wall, or an equal and opposite thump from behind, could have been the explanation.

I shrugged and turned away. Bentley might have done anything—for all I knew, the whole set-up could have been a computer simulation. My body was irrelevant.

The room was irrelevant. The point was ...

I sat on the bed. I recalled someone—Michael, probably—wondering if I’d panic when I dwelt upon my nature, but I found no reason to do so. If I’d woken in this room with no recent memories, and tried to sort out who I was from my past(s), I’d no doubt have gone mad, but I knew exactly who I was, I had two long trails of anticipation leading to my present state. The prospect of being changed back into Sian or Michael didn’t bother me at all; the wishes of both to regain their separate identities endured in me, strongly, and the desire for personal integrity manifested itself as relief at the thought of their re-emergence, not as fear of my own demise. In any case, my memories would not be expunged, and I had no sense of having goals which one or the other of them would not pursue. I felt more like their lowest common denominator than any kind of synergistic hypermind; I was less, not more, than the sum of my parts. My purpose was strictly limited: I was here to enjoy the strangeness for Sian, and to answer a question for Michael, and when the time came I’d be happy to bifurcate, and resume the two lives I remembered and valued.

So, how did I experience consciousness? The same way as Michael? The same way as Sian? So far as I could tell, I’d undergone no fundamental change—but even as I reached that conclusion, I began to wonder if I was in any position to judge. Did memories of being Michael, and memories of being Sian, contain so much more than the two of them could have put into words and exchanged verbally?

Did I really know anything about the nature of their existence, or was my head just full of second-hand description—intimate, and detailed, but ultimately as opaque as language? If my mind were radically different, would that difference be something I could even perceive—or would all my memories, in the act of remembering, simply be recast into terms that seemed familiar?

The past, after all, was no more knowable than the external world. Its very existence also had to be taken on faith—and, granted existence, it too could be misleading.

I buried my head in my hands, dejected. I was the closest they could get, and what had come of me? Michael’s hope remained precisely as reasonable—and as unproven—as ever.

After a while, my mood began to lighten. At least Michael’s search was over, even if it had ended in failure. Now he’d have no choice but to accept that, and move on.

I paced around the room for a while, flicking the HV on and off. I was actually starting to get bored, but I wasn’t going to waste eight hours and several thousand dollars by sitting down and watching soap operas.

I mused about possible ways of undermining the synchronisation of my two copies. It was inconceivable that Bentley could have matched the rooms and bodies to such a fine tolerance that an engineer worthy of the name couldn’t find some way of breaking the symmetry. Even a coin toss might have done it, but I didn’t have a coin. Throwing a paper plane? That sounded promising—highly sensitive to air currents—but the only paper in the room was the Escher, and I couldn’t bring myself to vandalise it. I might have smashed the mirror, and observed the shapes and sizes of the fragments, which would have had the added bonus of proving or disproving my earlier speculations, but as I raised the chair over my head, I suddenly changed my mind. Two conflicting sets of short-term memories had been confusing enough during a few minutes of sensory deprivation; for several hours interacting with a physical environment, it could be completely disabling. Better to hold off until I was desperate for amusement.

So I lay down on the bed and did what most of Bentley’s clients probably ended up doing.

As they coalesced, Sian and Michael had both had fears for their privacy—and both had issued compensatory, not to say defensive, mental declarations of frankness, not wanting the other to think that they had something to hide. Their curiosity, too, had been ambivalent; they’d wanted to understand each other, but, of course, not to pry.

All of these contradictions continued in me, but—staring at the ceiling, trying not to look at the clock again for at least another thirty seconds—I

didn’t really have to make a decision. It was the most natural thing in the world to let my mind wander back over the course of their relationship, from both points of view.

It was a very peculiar reminiscence. Almost everything seemed at once vaguely surprising and utterly familiar—like an extended attack of deja vu. It’s not that they’d often set out deliberately to deceive each other about anything substantial, but all the tiny white lies, all the concealed trivial resentments, all the necessary, laudable, essential, loving deceptions, that had kept them together in spite of their differences, filled my head with a strange haze of confusion and disillusionment.

It wasn’t in any sense a conversation; I was no multiple personality. Sian and Michael simply weren’t there—to justify, to explain, to deceive each other all over again, with the best intentions. Perhaps I should have attempted to do all this on their behalf, but I was constantly unsure of my role, unable to decide on a position. So I lay there, paralysed by symmetry, and let their memories flow.

After that, the time passed so quickly that I never had a chance to break the mirror.

We tried to stay together.

We lasted a week.

Bentley had made—as the law required—snapshots of our jewels prior to the experiment. We could have gone back to them—and then had him explain to us why

—but self-deception is only an easy choice if you make it in time.

We couldn’t forgive each other, because there was nothing to forgive. Neither of us had done a single thing that the other could fail to understand, and sympathise with, completely.

We knew each other too well, that’s all. Detail after tiny fucking microscopic detail. It wasn’t that the truth hurt; it didn’t, any longer. It numbed us. It smothered us. We didn’t know each other as we knew ourselves; it was worse than that. In the self, the details blur in the very processes of thought; mental self-dissection is possible, but it takes great effort to sustain. Our mutual dissection took no effort at all; it was the natural state into which we fell in each other’s presence. Our surfaces had been stripped away, but not to reveal a glimpse of the soul. All we could see beneath the skin were the cogs, spinning.

And I knew, now, that what Sian had always wanted most in a lover was the alien, the unknowable, the mysterious, the opaque. The whole point, for her, of being with someone else was the sense of confronting otherness. Without it, she believed, you might as well be talking to yourself.

I found that I now shared this view (a change whose precise origins I didn’t much want to think about ... but then, I’d always known she had the stronger personality, I should have guessed that something would rub off).

Together, we might as well have been alone, so we had no choice but to part.

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

Cocoon

The explosion shattered windows hundreds of meters away, but started no fire. Later, I discovered that it had shown up on a seismograph at Macquarie University, fixing the time precisely: 3:52 a.m. Residents woken by the blast phoned emergency services within minutes, and our night shift operator called me just after four, but there was no point rushing to the scene when I’d only be in the way. I sat at the terminal in my study for almost an hour, assembling background data and monitoring the radio traffic on headphones, drinking coffee and trying not to type too loudly.

By the time I arrived, the local fire service contractors had departed, having certified that there was no risk of further explosions, but our forensic people were still poring over the wreckage, the electric hum of their equipment all but drowned out by birdsong. Lane Cove was a quiet, leafy suburb, mixed residential and high-tech industrial, the lush vegetation of corporate open spaces blending almost seamlessly into the adjacent national park that straddled the Lane Cove River. The map of the area on my car terminal had identified suppliers of laboratory reagents and Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of precision instruments for scientific and aerospace applications, and no less than twenty-seven biotechnology firms-including Life Enhancement International, the erstwhile sprawling concrete building now reduced to a collection of white powdery blocks clustered around twisted reinforcement rods. The exposed steel glinted in the early light, disconcertingly pristine; the building was only three years old. I could understand why the forensic team had ruled out an accident at their first glance; a few drums of organic solvent could not have done anything remotely like this. Nothing legally stored in a residential zone could reduce a modern building to rubble in a matter of seconds.

I spotted Janet Lansing as I left my car. She was surveying the ruins with an expression of stoicism, but she was hugging herself. Mild shock, probably. She had no other reason to be chilly; it had been stinking hot all night, and the temperature was already climbing. Lansing was Director of the Lane Cove complex: forty-three years old, with a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Cambridge, and an M.B.A. from an equally reputable Japanese virtual university. I’d had my knowledge miner extract her details, and photo, from assorted databases before I’d left home.

I approached her and said, “James Glass, Nexus Investigations.” She frowned at my business card, but accepted it, then glanced at the technicians trawling their gas chromato-graphs and holography equipment around the perimeter of the ruins.

“They’re yours, I suppose?”

“Yes. They’ve been here since four.”

She smirked slightly. “What happens if I give the job to someone else? And charge the lot of you with trespass?”

“If you hire another company, we’ll be happy to hand over all the samples and data we’ve collected.”

She nodded distractedly. “I’ll hire you, of course. Since four? I’m impressed. You’ve even arrived before the insurance people.” As it happened, LEI’s “insurance people” owned 49 percent of Nexus, and would stay out of the way until we were finished, but I didn’t see any reason to mention that. Lansing added sourly, “Our so-called security firm only worked up the courage to phone me half an hour ago. Evidently a fiber-optic junction box was sabotaged, disconnecting the whole area. They’re supposed to send in patrols in the event of equipment failure, but apparently they didn’t bother.”

I grimaced sympathetically. ‘

‘What exactly were you people making here?”

“Making? Nothing. We did no manufacturing; this was pure R & D.”

In fact, I’d already established that LEI’s factories were all in Thailand and Indonesia, with the head office in Monaco, and research facilities scattered around the world. There’s a fine line, though, between demonstrating that the facts are at your fingertips, and unnerving the client. A total stranger ought to make at least one trivial wrong assumption, ask at least one misguided question. I always do.

“So what were you researching and developing?”

“That’s commercially sensitive information.”

I took my notepad from my shirt pocket and displayed a standard contract, complete with the usual secrecy provisions. She glanced at it, then had her own computer scrutinize the document. Conversing in modulated infrared, the machines rapidly negotiated the fine details. My notepad signed the agreement electronically on my behalf, and Lansing’s did the same, then they both chimed happily in unison to let us know that the deal had been concluded.

Lansing said, ‘

‘Our main project here was engineering improved syncytiotrophoblastic cells.” I smiled patiently, and she translated for me. “Strengthening the barrier between the maternal and fetal blood supplies. Mother and fetus don’t share blood directly, but they exchange nutrients and hormones across the placental barrier. The trouble is, all kinds of viruses, toxins, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs can also cross over. The natural barrier cells didn’t evolve to cope with AIDS, fetal alcohol syndrome, cocaine-addicted babies, or the next thalidomidelike disaster. We’re aiming for a single intravenous injection of a gene-tailoring vector, which would trigger the formation of an extra layer of cells in the appropriate structures within the placenta, specifically designed to shield the fetal blood supply from contaminants in the maternal blood.”

“A thicker barrier?”

“Smarter. More selective. More choosy about what it lets through. We know exactly what the developing fetus actually needs from the maternal blood. These gene-tailored cells would contain specific channels for transporting each of those substances. Nothing else would be allowed through.”

“Very impressive.” A cocoon around the unborn child, shielding it from all of the poisons of modern society. It sounded exactly like the kind of beneficent technology a company called Life Enhancement would be hatching in leafy Lane Cove. True, even a layman could spot a few flaws in the scheme. I’d heard that AIDS most often infected children during birth itself, not pregnancy-but presumably there were other viruses that crossed the placental barrier more frequently. I had no idea whether or not mothers at risk of giving birth to children stunted by alcohol or addicted to cocaine were likely to rush out en masse and have gene-tailored fetal barriers installed-but I could picture a strong demand from people terrified of food additives, pesticides, and pollutants. In the long term-if the system actually worked, and wasn’t prohibitively expensive-it could even become a part of routine prenatal care.

Beneficent, and lucrative.

In any case-whether or not there were biological, economic, and social factors which might keep the technology from being a complete success ... it was hard to imagine anyone objecting to the principle of the thing.

I said, “Were you working with animals?”

Lansing scowled. “Only early calf embryos, and disembodied bovine uteruses on tissue-support machines. If it was an animal rights group, they would have been better off bombing an abattoir.”

“Mmm.” In the past few years, the Sydney chapter of Animal Equality-the only group known to use such extreme methods—had concentrated on primate research facilities. They might have changed their focus, or been misinformed, but LEI still seemed like an odd target; there were plenty of laboratories widely known to use whole, live rats and rabbits as if they were disposable test tubes-many of them quite close by. “What about competitors?”

‘

‘No one else is pursuing this kind of product line, so far as I know. There’s no race being run; we’ve already obtained individual patents for all of the essential components-the membrane channels, the transporter molecules-so any competitor would have to pay us license fees, regardless.”

“What if someone simply wanted to damage you, financially?’

‘

“Then they should have bombed one of the factories instead. Cutting off our cash flow would have been the best way to hurt us; this laboratory wasn’t earning a cent.”

“Your share price will still take a dive, won’t it? Nothing makes investors nervous quite so much as terrorism.”

Lansing agreed, reluctantly. “But then, whoever took advantage of that and launched a takeover bid would suffer the same taint, themselves. I don’t deny that commercial sabotage takes place in this industry, now and then ... but not on a level as crude as this. Genetic engineering is a subtle business. Bombs are for fanatics.”

Perhaps. But who would be fanatically opposed to the idea of shielding human embryos from viruses and poisons? Several religious sects flatly rejected any kind of modification to human biology ... but the ones who employed violence were far more likely to have bombed a manufacturer of abortifa-cient drugs than a laboratory dedicated to the task of safeguarding the unborn child.

Elaine Chang, head of the forensic team, approached us. I introduced her to Lansing. Elaine said, “It was a very professional job. If you’d hired demolition experts, they wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. But then, they probably would have used identical software to compute the timing and placement of the charges.” She held up her notepad, and displayed a stylized reconstruction of the building, with hypothetical explosive charges marked. She hit a button and the simulation crumbled into something very like the actual mess behind us.

She continued, “Most reputable manufacturers these days imprint every batch of explosives with a trace element signature, which remains in the residue. We’ve linked the charges used here to a batch stolen from a warehouse in Singapore five years ago.”

I added, “Which may not be a great help, though, I’m afraid. After five years on the black market, they could have changed hands a dozen times.”

Elaine returned to her equipment. Lansing was beginning to look a little dazed. I said, “I’d like to talk to you again, later-but I am going to need a list of your employees, past and present, as soon as possible.”

She nodded, and hit a few keys on her notepad, transferring the list to mine. She said, “Nothing’s been lost, really. We had off-site backup for all of our data, administrative and scientific. And we have frozen samples of most of the cell lines we were working on, in a vault in Milson’s Point.”

Commercial data backup would be all but untouchable, with the records stored in a dozen or more locations scattered around the world-heavily encrypted, of course. Cell lines sounded more vulnerable. I said, “You’d better let the vault’s operators know what’s happened.”

“I’ve already done that; I phoned them on my way here.” She gazed at the wreckage. “The insurance company will pay for the rebuilding. In six months’ time, we’ll be back on our feet. So whoever did this was wasting their time. The work will go on.”

I said, “Who would want to stop it in the first place?”

Lansing’s faint smirk appeared again, and I very nearly asked her what she found so amusing. But people often act incongruously in the face of disasters, large or small; nobody had died, she wasn’t remotely hysterical, but it would have been strange if a setback like this hadn’t knocked her slightly out of kilter.

She said, “You tell me. That’s your job, isn’t it?”

Martin was in the living room when I arrived home that evening. Working on his costume for the Mardi Gras. I couldn’t imagine what it would look like when it was completed, but there were definitely feathers involved. Blue feathers. I did my best to appear composed, but I could tell from his expression that he’d caught an involuntary flicker of distaste on my face as he looked up. We kissed anyway, and said nothing about it.

Over dinner, though, he couldn’t help himself.

“Fortieth anniversary this year, James. Sure to be the biggest yet. You could at least come and watch.” His eyes glinted; he enjoyed needling me. We’d had this argument five years running, and it was close to becoming a ritual as pointless as the parade itself.

I said flatly, “Why would I want to watch ten thousand drag queens ride down Oxford Street, blowing kisses to the tourists?”

“Don’t exaggerate. There’ll only be a thousand men in drag, at most.”

“Yeah, the rest will be in sequined jockstraps.”

“If you actually came and watched, you’d discover that most people’s imaginations have progressed far beyond that.”

I shook my head, bemused. “If people’s imaginations had progressed, there’d be no Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras at all. It’s a freak show, for people who want to live in a cultural ghetto. Forty years ago, it might have been ... provocative. Maybe it did some good, back then. But now? What’s the point? There are no laws left to change, there’s no politics left to address. This kind of thing just recycles the same moronic stereotypes, year after year.”

Martin said smoothly, “It’s a public reassertion of the right to diverse sexuality. Just because it’s no longer a protest march as well as a celebration doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. And complaining about stereotypes is like ... complaining about the characters in a medieval morality play. The costumes are code, shorthand. Give the great unwashed heterosexual masses credit for some intelligence; they don’t watch the parade and conclude that the average gay man spends all his time in a gold lame tutu. People aren’t that literal-minded. They all learnt semiotics in kindergarten, they know how to decode the message.”

“I’m sure they do. But it’s still the wrong message: it makes exotic what ought to be mundane. Okay, people have the right to dress up any way they like and march down Oxford Street ... but it means absolutely nothing to me.”

“I’m not asking you to join in—”

“Very wise.”

‘‘-but if one hundred thousand straights can turn up, to show their support for the gay community, why can’t you?”

I said wearily, “Because every time I hear the word community, I know I’m being manipulated. If there is such a thing as the gay community, I’m certainly not a part of it. As it happens, I don’t want to spend my life watching gay and lesbian television channels, using gay and lesbian news systems ... or going to gay and lesbian street parades. It’s all so ... proprietary. You’d think there was a multinational corporation who had the franchise rights on homosexuality. And if you don’t market the product their way, you’re some kind of second-class, inferior, bootleg, unauthorized queer.”

Martin cracked up. When he finally stopped laughing, he said, “Go on. I’m waiting for you to get to the part where you say you’re no more proud of being gay than you are of having brown eyes, or black hair, or a birthmark behind your left knee.”

I protested. “That’s true. Why should I be ‘proud’ of something I was born with? I’m not proud, or ashamed. I just accept it. And I don’t have to join a parade to prove that.”

“So you’d rather we all stayed invisible?”

“Invisible! You’re the one who told me that the representation rates in movies and TV last year were close to the true demographics. And if you hardly even notice it anymore when an openly gay or lesbian politician gets elected, that’s because it’s no longer an issue. To most people, now, it’s about as significant as ... being left or right handed.”

Martin seemed to find this suggestion surreal. “Are you trying to tell me that it’s now a non-subject? That the inhabitants of this planet are now absolutely impartial on the question of sexual preference? Your faith is touching-but ...” He mimed incredulity.

I said, “We’re equal before the law with any heterosexual couple, aren’t we? And when was the last time you told someone you were gay and they so much as blinked? And yes, I know, there are dozens of countries where it’s still illegal—along with joining the wrong political parties, or the wrong religions. Parades in Oxford Street aren’t going to change that:’

“People are still bashed in this city. People are still discriminated against.”

‘

‘Yeah. And people are also shot dead in peak-hour traffic for playing the wrong music on their car stereos, or denied jobs because they live in the wrong suburbs. I’m not talking about the perfection of human nature. I just want you to acknowledge one tiny victory: leaving out a few psychotics, and a few fundamentalist bigots ... most people just don’t care.”

Martin said ruefully, “If only that were true!”

The argument went on for more than an hour-ending in a stalemate, as usual. But then, neither one of us had seriously expected to change the other’s mind.

I did catch myself wondering afterward, though, if I really believed all of my own optimistic rhetoric. About as significant as being left or right handed? Certainly, that was the line taken by most Western politicians, academics, essayists, talk show hosts, soap opera writers, and mainstream religious leaders ... but the same people had been espousing equally high-minded principles of racial equality for decades, and the reality still hadn’t entirely caught up on that front. I’d suffered very little discrimination, myself-by the time I reached high school, tolerance was hip, and I’d witnessed a constant stream of improvements since then ... but how could I ever know precisely how much hidden prejudice remained? By interrogating my own straight friends? By reading the sociologists’ latest attitude surveys? People will always tell you what they think you want to hear.

Still, it hardly seemed to matter. Personally, I could get by without the deep and sincere approval of every other member of the human race. Martin and I were lucky enough to have been born into a time and place where, in almost every tangible respect, we were treated as equal.

What more could anyone hope for?

In bed that night, we made love very slowly, at first just kissing and stroking each other’s bodies for what seemed like hours. Neither of us spoke, and in the stupefying heat I lost all sense of belonging to any other time, any other reality. Nothing existed but the two of us; the rest of the world, the rest of my life, went spinning away into the darkness.

The investigation moved slowly. I interviewed every current member of LEI’s workforce, then started on the long list of past employees. I still believed that commercial sabotage was the most likely explanation for such a professional job-but blowing up the opposition is a desperate measure; a little civilized espionage usually comes first. I was hoping that someone who’d worked for LEI might have been approached in the past and offered money for inside information-and if I could find just one employee who’d turned down a bribe, they might have learnt something useful from their contact with the presumed rival.

Although the Lane Cove facility had only been built three years before, LEI had operated a research division in Sydney for twelve years before that, in North Ryde, not far away. Many of the ex-employees from that period had moved interstate or overseas; quite a few had been transferred to LEI divisions in other countries. Still, almost no one had changed their personal phone numbers, so I had very little trouble tracking them down.

The exception was a biochemist named Catherine Mendelsohn; the number listed for her in the LEI staff records had been canceled. There were seventeen people with the same surname and initials in the national phone directory; none admitted to being Catherine Alice Mendelsohn, and none looked at all like the staff photo I had.

Mendelsohn’s address in the Electoral Roll, an apartment in Newtown, matched the LEI records-but the same address was in the phone directory (and Electoral Roll) for Stanley Goh, a young man who told me that he’d never met Mendelsohn. He’d been leasing the apartment for the past eighteen months.

Credit rating databases gave the same out-of-date address. I couldn’t access tax, banking, or utilities records without a warrant. I had my knowledge miner scan the death notices, but there was no match there.

Mendelsohn had worked for LEI until about a year before the move to Lane Cove. She’d been part of a team working on a gene-tailoring system for ameliorating menstrual side-effects, and although the Sydney division had always specialized in gynecological research, for some reason the project was about to be moved to Texas. I checked the industry publications; apparently, LEI had been rearranging all of its operations at the time, gathering together projects from around the globe into new multi-disciplinary configurations, in accordance with the latest fashionable theories of research dynamics. Mendelsohn had declined the transfer, and had been retrenched.

I dug deeper. The staff records showed that Mendelsohn had been questioned by security guards after being found on the North Ryde premises late at night, two days before her dismissal. Workaholic biotechnologists aren’t uncommon, but starting the day at two in the morning shows exceptional dedication, especially when the company has just tried to shuffle you off to Amarillo. Having turned down the transfer, she must have known what was in store.

Nothing came of the incident, though. And even if Mendelsohn had been planning some minor act of sabotage, that hardly established any connection with a bombing four years later. She might have been angry enough to leak confidential information to one of LEI’s rivals ... but whoever had bombed the Lane Cove laboratory would have been more interested in someone who’d worked on the fetal barrier project itself-a project which had only come into existence a year after Mendelsohn had been sacked.

I pressed on through the list. Interviewing the ex-employees was frustrating; almost all of them were still working in the biotechnology industry, and they would have been an ideal group to poll on the question of who would benefit most from LEI’s misfortune-but the confidentiality agreement I’d signed meant that I couldn’t disclose anything about the re-search in question-not even to people working for LEI’s other divisions.

The one thing which I could discuss drew a blank: if anyone had been offered a bribe, they weren’t talking about it—and no magistrate was going to sign a warrant letting me loose on a fishing expedition through a hundred and seventeen people’s financial records.

Forensic examination of the ruins, and the sabotaged fiberoptic exchange, had yielded the usual catalogue of minutiae which might eventually turn out to be invaluable-but none of it was going to conjure up a suspect out of thin air.

Four days after the bombing-just as I found myself growing desperate for a fresh angle on the case-I had a call from Janet Lansing.

The backup samples of the project’s gene-tailored cell lines had been destroyed.

The vault in Milson’s Point turned out to be directly underneath a section of the Harbor Bridge-built right into the foundations on the north shore. Lansing hadn’t arrived yet, but the head of security for the storage company, an elderly man called David Asher, showed me around. Inside, the traffic was barely audible, but the vibration coming through the floor felt like a constant mild earthquake. The place was cavernous, dry and cool. At least a hundred cryogenic freezers were laid out in rows; heavily clad pipes ran between them, replenishing their liquid nitrogen.

Asher was understandably morose, but cooperative. Celluloid movie film had been archived here, he explained, before everything went digital; the present owners specialized in biological materials. There were no guards physically assigned to the vault, but the surveillance cameras and alarm systems looked impressive, and the structure itself must have been close to impregnable.

Lansing had phoned the storage company, Biofile, on the morning of the bombing. Asher confirmed that he’d sent someone down from their North Sydney office to check the freezer in question. Nothing was missing-but he’d promised to boost security measures immediately. Because the freezers were supposedly tamper-proof, and individually locked, clients were normally allowed access to the vault at their convenience, monitored by the surveillance cameras, but otherwise unsupervised. Asher had promised Lansing that, henceforth, nobody would enter the building without a member of his staff to accompany them-and he claimed that nobody had been inside since the day of the bombing, anyway.

When two LEI technicians had arrived that morning to carry out an inventory, they’d found the expected number of culture flasks, all with the correct bar code labels, all tightly sealed-but the appearance of their contents was subtly wrong. The translucent frozen colloid was more opalescent than cloudy; an untrained eye might never have noticed the difference, but apparently it spoke volumes to the cognoscenti.

The technicians had taken a number of the flasks away for analysis; LEI were working out of temporary premises, a subleased corner of a paint manufacturer’s quality control lab. Lansing had promised me preliminary test results by the time we met.

Lansing arrived, and unlocked the freezer. With gloved hands, she lifted a flask out of the swirling mist and held it up for me to inspect.

She said, “We’ve only thawed three samples, but they all look the same. The cells have been torn apart.”

“How?” The flask was covered with such heavy condensation that I couldn’t have said if it was empty or full, let alone cloudy or opalescent.

“It looks like radiation damage.”

My skin crawled. I peered into the depths of the freezer; all I could make out were the tops of rows of identical flasks-but if one of them had been spiked with a radioiso-tope ...

Lansing scowled. “Relax.” She tapped a small electronic badge pinned to her lab coat, with a dull gray face like a solar cell: a radiation dosimeter. “This would be screaming if we were being exposed to anything significant. Whatever the source of the radiation was, it’s no longer in here-and it hasn’t left the walls glowing. Your future offspring are safe.”

I let that pass. “You think all the samples will turn out to be ruined? You won’t be able to salvage anything?”

Lansing was stoical as ever. ‘

‘It looks that way. There are some elaborate techniques we could use, to try to repair the DNA-but it will probably be easier to synthesize fresh DNA from scratch, and re-introduce it into unmodified bovine pla-cental cell lines. We still have all the sequence data; that’s what matters in the end.”

I pondered the freezer’s locking system, the surveillance cameras. ‘

‘Are you sure that the source was inside the freezer? Or could the damage have been done without actually breaking in-right through the walls?”

She thought it over. “Maybe. There’s not much metal in these things; they’re mostly plastic foam. But I’m not a radiation physicist; your forensic people will probably be able to give you a better idea of what happened, once they’ve checked out the freezer itself. If there’s damage to the polymers in the foam, it might be possible to use that to reconstruct the geometry of the radiation field.”

A forensic team was on its way. I said, “How would they have done it? Walked casually by, and just-?”

“Hardly. A source which could do this in one quick hit would have been unmanageable. It’s far more likely to have been a matter of weeks, or months, of low-level exposure.”

“So they must have smuggled some kind of device into their own freezer, and aimed it at yours? But then ... we’ll be able to trace the effects right back to the source, won’t we? So how could they have hoped to get away with it?’’

Lansing said, “It’s even simpler than that. We’re talking about a modest amount of a gamma-emitting isotope, not some billion-dollar particle-beam weapon. The effective range would be a couple of meters, at most. If it was done from the outside, you’ve just narrowed down your suspect list to two.” She thumped the freezer’s left neighbor in the aisle, then did the same to the one on the right-and said, “Aha.”

“What?”

She thumped them both again. The second one sounded hollow. I said, “No liquid nitrogen? It’s not in use?”

Lansing nodded. She reached for the handle.

Asher said, “I don’t think—”

The freezer was unlocked, the lid swung open easily. Lansing’s badge started beeping-and, worse, there was something in there, with batteries and wires ....

I don’t know what kept me from knocking her to the floor-but Lansing, untroubled, lifted the lid all the way. She said mildly, “Don’t panic; this dose rate’s nothing. Threshold of detectable.”

The thing inside looked superficially like a home-made bomb-but the batteries and timer chip I’d glimpsed were wired to a heavy-duty solenoid, which was part of an elaborate shutter mechanism on one side of a large, metallic gray box.

Lansing said, ‘

‘Cannibalized medical source, probably. You know these things have turned up in garbage dumps?” She unpinned her badge and waved it near the box; the pitch of the alarm increased, but only slightly. ‘

‘Shielding seems to be intact.”

I said, as calmly as possible, ‘

‘These people have access to high explosives. You don’t have any idea what the fuck might be in there, or what it’s wired up to do. This is the point where we walk out, quietly, and leave it to the bomb-disposal robots.”

She seemed about to protest, but then she nodded contritely. The three of us went up onto the street, and Asher called the local terrorist services contractor. I suddenly realized that they’d have to divert all traffic from the bridge. The Lane Cove bombing had received some perfunctory media coverage-but this would lead the evening news.

I took Lansing aside. “They’ve destroyed your laboratory. They’ve wiped out your cell lines. Your data may be almost impossible to locate and corrupt-so the next logical target is you and your employees. Nexus doesn’t provide protective services, but I can recommend a good firm.”

I gave her the phone number; she accepted it with appropriate solemnity. “So you finally believe me? These people aren’t commercial saboteurs. They’re dangerous fanatics.”

I was growing impatient with her vague references to “fanatics.”

“Who exactly do you have in mind?”

She said darkly, ‘

‘We’re tampering with certain ... natural processes. You can draw your own conclusions, can’t you?”

There was no logic to that at all. God’s Image would probably want to force all pregnant women with HIV infections, or drug habits, to use the cocoon; they wouldn’t try to bomb the technology out of existence. Gaia’s Soldiers were more concerned with genetically engineered crops and bacteria than trivial modifications to insignificant species like humans-and they wouldn’t have used radioisotopes if the fate of the planet depended on it. Lansing was beginning to sound thoroughly paranoid-although in the circumstances, I couldn’t really blame her.

I said, “I’m not drawing any conclusions. I’m just advising you to take some sensible precautions, because we have no way of knowing how far this might escalate. But ... Biofile must lease freezer space to every one of your competitors. A commercial rival would have found it a thousand times easier than any hypothetical sect member to get into the vault to plant that thing.”

A gray armor-plated van screeched to a halt in front of us; the back door swung up, ramps slid down, and a squat, multi-limbed robot on treads descended. I raised a hand in greeting and the robot did the same; the operator was a friend of mine.

Lansing said, “You may be right. But then, there’s nothing to stop a terrorist from having a day job in biotechnology, is there?”

The device turned out not to be booby-trapped at all-just rigged to spray LEI’s precious cells with gamma rays for six hours, starting at midnight, every night. Even in the unlikely event that someone had come into the vault in the early hours and wedged themselves into the narrow gap between the freezers, the dose they received would not have been much; as Lansing had suggested, it was the cumulative effect over months which had done the damage. The radioisotope in the box was cobalt 60, almost certainly a decomissioned medical source-grown too weak for its original use, but still too hot to be discarded-stolen from a “cooling off” site. No such theft had been reported, but Elaine Chang’s assistants were phoning around the hospitals, trying to persuade them to re-inventory their concrete bunkers.

Cobalt 60 was dangerous stuff-but fifty milligrams in a carefully shielded container wasn’t exactly a tactical nuclear weapon. The news systems went berserk, though: ATOMIC TERRORISTS STRIKE HARBOR BRIDGE, et cetera. If LEI’s enemies were activists, with some “moral cause” which they hoped to set before the public, they clearly had the worst PR advisers in the business. Their prospects of gaining the slightest sympathy had vanished, the instant the first news reports had mentioned the word radiation.

My secretarial software issued polite statements of “No comment” on my behalf, but camera crews began hovering outside my front door, so I relented and mouthed a few news-speak sentences for them which meant essentially the same thing. Martin looked on, amused-and then I looked on, astonished, as Janet Lansing’s own doorstop media conference appeared on TV.

“These people are clearly ruthless. Human life, the environment, radioactive contamination ... all mean nothing to them.”

‘

‘Do you have any idea who might be responsible for this outrage, Dr. Lansing?”

“I can’t disclose that, yet. All I can reveal, right now, is that our research is at the very cutting edge of preventative medicine-and I’m not at all surprised that there are powerful vested interests working against us.”

Powerful vested interests? What was that meant to be code for-if not the rival biotechnology firm whose involvement she kept denying? No doubt she had her eye on the publicity advantages of being the victim of ATOMIC TERRORISTS—but I thought she was wasting her breath. In two or more years’ time, when the product finally hit the market, the story would be long forgotten.

After some tricky jurisdictional negotiations, Asher finally sent me six months’ worth of files from the vault’s surveillance cameras-all that they kept. The freezer in question had been unused for almost two years; the last authorized tenant was a small IVF clinic which had gone bankrupt. Only about 60 percent of the freezers were currently leased, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that LEI had had a conveniently empty neighbor.

I ran the surveillance files through image-processing soft-ware, in the hope that someone might have been caught in the act of opening the unused freezer. The search took almost an hour of supercomputer time-and turned up precisely nothing. A few minutes later, Elaine Chang popped her head into my office to say that she’d finished her analysis of the damage to the freezer walls: the nightly irradiation had been going on for between eight and nine months.

Undeterred, I scanned the files again, this time instructing the software to assemble a gallery of every individual sighted inside the vault.

Sixty-two faces emerged. I put company names to all of them, matching the times of each sighting to Biofile’s records of the use of each client’s electronic key. No obvious inconsistencies showed up; nobody had been seen inside who hadn’t used an authorized key to gain access-and the same people had used the same keys, again and again.

I flicked through the gallery, wondering what to do next. Search for anyone glancing slyly in the direction of the radioactive freezer? The software could have done it-but I wasn’t quite ready for barrel-scraping efforts like that.

I came to a face which looked familiar: a blonde woman in her mid-thirties, who’d used the key belonging to Federation Centennial Hospital’s Oncology Research Unit, three times. I was certain that I knew her, but I couldn’t recall where I’d seen her before. It didn’t matter; after a few seconds’ searching, I found a clear shot of the name badge pinned to her lab coat. All I had to do was zoom in.

The badge read: C. MENDELSOHN.

There was a knock on my open door. I turned from the screen; Elaine was back, looking pleased with herself.

She said, “We’ve finally found a place who’ll own up to having lost some cobalt 60. What’s more ... the activity of our source fits their missing item’s decay curve, exactly.”

“So where was it stolen from?”

“Federation Centennial.”

I phoned the Oncology Research Unit. Yes, Catherine Mendelsohn worked there-she’d done so for almost four years—but they couldn’t put me through to her; she’d been on sick leave all week. They gave me the same canceled phone number as LEI-but a different address, an apartment in Petersham. The address wasn’t listed in the phone directory; I’d have to go there in person.

A cancer research team would have no reason to want to harm LEI, but a commercial rival-with or without their own key to the vault-could still have paid Mendelsohn to do their work for them. It seemed like a lousy deal to me, whatever they’d offered her-if she was convicted, every last cent would be traced and confiscated-but bitterness over her sacking might have clouded her judgment.

Maybe. Or maybe that was all too glib.

I replayed the shots of Mendelsohn taken by the surveillance cameras. She did nothing unusual, nothing suspicious. She went straight to the ORU’s freezer, put in whatever samples she’d brought, and departed. She didn’t glance slyly in any direction at all.

The fact that she had been inside the vault-on legitimate business-proved nothing. The fact that the cobalt 60 had been stolen from the hospital where she worked could have been pure coincidence.

And anyone had the right to cancel their phone service.

I pictured the steel reinforcement rods of the Lane Cove laboratory, glinting in the sunlight.

On the way out, reluctantly, I took a detour to the basement. I sat at a console while the armaments safe checked my fingerprints, took breath samples and a retinal blood spectrogram, ran some perception-and-judgment response time tests, then quizzed me for five minutes about the case. Once it was satisfied with my reflexes, my motives, and my state of mind, it issued me a nine-millimeter pistol and a shoulder holster.

Mendelsohn’s apartment block was a concrete box from the 1960s, front doors opening onto long shared balconies, no security at all. I arrived just after seven, to the smell of cooking and the sound of game show applause, wafting from a hundred open windows. The concrete still shimmered with the day’s heat; three flights of stairs left me coated in sweat. Mendelsohn’s apartment was silent, but the lights were on.

She answered the door. I introduced myself, and showed her my ID. She seemed nervous, but not surprised.

She said, ‘

‘I still find it galling to have to deal with people like you.”

“People like-?”

“I was opposed to privatizing the police force. I helped organize some of the marches.”

She would have been fourteen years old at the time-a precocious political activist.

She let me in, begrudgingly. The living room was modestly furnished, with a terminal on a desk in one corner.

I said, “I’m investigating the bombing of Life Enhancement International. You used to work for them, up until about four years ago. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me why you left?”

She repeated what I knew about the transfer of her project to the Amarillo division. She answered every question directly, looking me straight in the eye; she still appeared nervous, but she seemed to be trying to read some vital piece of information from my demeanor. Wondering if I’d traced the cobalt?

“What were you doing on the North Ryde premises at two in the morning, two days before you were sacked?’’

She said, “I wanted to find out what LEI was planning for the new building. I wanted to know why they didn’t want me to stick around.”

“Your job was moved to Texas.”

She laughed drily. “The work wasn’t that specialized. I could have swapped jobs with someone who wanted to travel to the States. It would have been the perfect solution-and there would have been plenty of people more than happy to trade places with me. But no, that wasn’t allowed.”

“So ... did you find the answer?”

“Not that night. But later, yes.”

I said carefully, ‘

‘So you knew what LEI was doing in Lane Cove?”

“Yes.”

“How did you discover that?”

“I kept an ear to the ground. Nobody who’d stayed on would have told me directly, but word leaked out, eventually. About a year ago.”

“Three years after you’d left? Why were you still interested? Did you think there was a market for the information?’’

She said, “Put your notepad in the bathroom sink and run the tap on it.”

I hesitated, then complied. When I returned to the living room, she had her face in her hands. She looked up at me grimly.

“Why was I still interested? Because I wanted to know why every project with any lesbian or gay team members was being transferred out of the division. I wanted to know if that was pure coincidence. Or not.”

I felt a sudden chill in the pit of my stomach. I said, “If you had some problem with discrimination, there are avenues you could have—”

Mendelsohn shook her head impatiently. “LEI was never discriminatory. They didn’t sack anyone who was willing to move-and they always transferred the entire team; there was nothing so crude as picking out individuals by sexual preference. And they had a rationalization for everything: projects were being re-grouped between divisions to facilitate ‘syner-gistic cross-pollination.’ And if that sounds like pretentious bullshit, it was-but it was plausible pretentious bullshit. Other corporations have adopted far more ridiculous schemes, in perfect sincerity.”

“But if it wasn’t a matter of discrimination ... why should LEI want to force people out of one particular division-?”

I think I’d finally guessed the answer, even as I said those words-but I needed to hear her spell it out, before I could really believe it.

Mendelsohn must have been practicing her version for non-biochemists; she had it down pat. “When people are subject to stress-physical or emotional-the levels of certain substances in the bloodstream increase. Cortisol and adrenaline, mainly. Adrenaline has a rapid, short-term effect on the nervous system. Cortisol works on a much longer time frame, modulating all kinds of bodily processes, adapting them for hard times: injury, fatigue, whatever. If the stress is prolonged, someone’s cortisol can be elevated for days, or weeks, or months.

“High enough levels of cortisol, in the bloodstream of a pregnant woman, can cross the placental barrier and interact with the hormonal system of the developing fetus. There are parts of the brain where embryonic development is switched into one of two possible pathways, by hormones released by the fetal testes or ovaries. The parts of the brain which control body image, and the parts which control sexual preference. Female embryos usually develop a brain wired with a self-image of a female body, and the strongest potential for sexual attraction toward males. Male embryos, vice versa. And it’s the sex hormones in the fetal bloodstream which let the grow-ing neurons know the gender of the embryo, and which wiring pattern to adopt.

“Cortisol can interfere with this process. The precise interactions are complex, but the ultimate effect depends on the timing; different parts of the brain are switched into gender-specific versions at different stages of development. So stress at different times during pregnancy leads to different patterns of sexual preference and body image in the child: homosexual, bisexual, transsexual.

“Obviously, a lot depends on the mother’s biochemistry. Pregnancy itself is stressful-but everyone responds to that differently. The first sign that cortisol might have an effect came in studies in the 1980s, on the children of German women who’d been pregnant during the most intense bombing raids of World War II-when the stress was so great that the effect showed through despite individual differences. In the nineties, researchers thought they’d found a gene which determined male homosexuality ... but it was always maternally inherited-and it turned out to be influencing the mother’s stress response, rather than acting directly on the child.

“If maternal cortisol, and other stress hormones, were kept from reaching the fetus ... then the gender of the brain would always match the gender of the body in every respect. All of the present variation would be wiped out.”

I was shaken, but I don’t think I let it show. Everything she said rang true; I didn’t doubt a word of it. I’d always known that sexual preference was decided before birth. I’d known that I was gay, myself, by the age of seven. I’d never sought out the elaborate biological details, though-because I’d never believed that the tedious mechanics of the process could ever matter to me. What turned my blood to ice was not finally learning the neuroembryology of desire. The shock was discovering that LEI planned to reach into the womb and take control of it.

I pressed on with the questioning in a kind of trance, putting my own feelings into suspended animation.

I said, “LEI’s barrier is for filtering out viruses and toxins. You’re talking about a natural substance which has been present for millions of years-’’

“LEI’s barrier will keep out everything they deem non-essential. The fetus doesn’t need maternal cortisol in order to survive. If LEI doesn’t explicitly include transporters for it, it won’t get through. And I’ll give you one guess what their plans are.”

I said, “You’re being paranoid. You think LEI would invest millions of dollars just to take part in a conspiracy to rid the world of homosexuals?”

Mendelsohn looked at me pityingly. “It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a marketing opportunity. LEI doesn’t give a shit about the sexual politics. They could put in cortisol transporters, and sell the barrier as an anti-viral, anti-drug, anti-pollution screen. Or, they could leave them out, and sell it as all of that-plus a means of guaranteeing a heterosexual child. Which do you think would earn the most money?”

That question hit a nerve; I said angrily, “And you had so little faith in people’s choice that you bombed the laboratory so that no one would ever have the chance to decide?”

Mendelsohn’s expression turned stony. “I did not bomb LEI. Or irradiate their freezer.”

“No? We’ve traced the cobalt 60 to Federation Centennial.”

She looked stunned for a moment, then she said, “Congratulations. Six thousand other people work there, you know. I’m obviously not the only one of them who’d discovered what LEI is up to.”

“You’re the only one with access to the Biofile vault. What do you expect me to believe? That having learnt about this project, you were going to do absolutely nothing about it?”

“Of course not! And I still plan to publicize what they’re doing. Let people know what it will mean. Try to get the issue debated before the product appears in a blaze of misinformation.”

“You said you’ve known about the work for a year.”

“Yes-and I’ve spent most of that time trying to verify all the facts, before opening my big mouth. Nothing would have been stupider than going public with half-baked rumors. I’ve only told about a dozen people so far, but we were going to launch a big publicity campaign to coincide with this year’s Mardi Gras. Although now, with the bombing, everything’s a thousand times more complicated.” She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “But we still have to do what we can, to try to keep the worst from happening.”

“The worst?”

“Separatism. Paranoia. Homosexuality redefined as pathological. Lesbians and sympathetic straight women looking for their own technological means to guarantee the survival of the culture ... while the religious far-right try to prosecute them for poisoning their babies ... with a substance God’s been happily ‘poisoning’ babies with for the last few thousand years! Sexual tourists traveling from wealthy countries where the technology is in use, to poorer countries where it isn’t.”

I was sickened by the vision she was painting-but I pushed on. “These dozen friends of yours-?”

Mendelsohn said dispassionately, “Go fuck yourself. I’ve got nothing more to say to you. I’ve told you the truth. I’m not a criminal. And I think you’d better leave.”

I went to the bathroom and collected my notepad. In the doorway, I said, “If you’re not a criminal, why are you so hard to track down?”

Wordlessly, contemptuously, she lifted her shirt and showed me the bruises below her rib cage-fading, but still an ugly sight. Whoever it was who’d beaten her-an ex-lover?-I could hardly blame her for doing everything she could to avoid a repeat performance.

On the stairs, I hit the REPLAY button on my notepad. The software computed the frequency spectrum for the noise of the running water, subtracted it out of the recording, and then amplified and cleaned up what remained. Every word of our conversation came through crystal clear.

From my car, I phoned a surveillance firm and arranged to have Mendelsohn kept under twenty-four-hour observation.

Halfway home, I stopped in a side street, and sat behind the wheel for ten minutes, unable to think, unable to move.

In bed that night, I asked Martin, “You’re left-handed. How would you feel if no one was ever born left-handed again?’’

“It wouldn’t bother me in the least. Why?”

“You wouldn’t think of it as a kind of ... genocide?”

“Hardly. What’s this all about?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m cold.”

“You don’t feel cold to me.”

As we made love-tenderly, then savagely-I thought: This is our language, this is our dialect. Wars have been fought over less. And if this language ever dies out, a people will have vanished from the face of the Earth.

I knew I had to drop the case. If Mendelsohn was guilty, someone else could prove it. To go on working for LEI would destroy me.

Afterward, though ... that seemed like sentimental bullshit. I belonged to no tribe. Every human being possessed their own sexuality-and when they died, it died with them. If no one was ever born gay again, it made no difference to me.

And if I dropped the case because I was gay, I’d be abandoning everything I’d ever believed about my own equality, my own identity ... not to mention giving LEI the chance to announce: Yes, of course we hired an investigator without regard to sexual preference-but apparently, that was a mistake.

Staring up into the darkness, I said, ‘

‘Every time I hear the word community, I reach for my revolver.”

There was no response; Martin was fast asleep. I wanted to wake him, I wanted to argue it all through, there and then—but I’d signed an agreement, I couldn’t tell him a thing.

So I watched him sleep, and tried to convince myself that when the truth came out, he’d understand.

I phoned Janet Lansing, brought her up to date on Mendelsohn-and said coldly, “Why were you so coy? ‘Fanatics’? ‘Powerful vested interests’? Are there some words you have trouble pronouncing?”

She’d clearly prepared herself for this moment. “I didn’t want to plant my own ideas in your head. Later on, that might have been seen as prejudicial.”

“Seen as prejudicial by whomV It was a rhetorical question: the media, of course. By keeping silent on the issue, she’d minimized the risk of being seen to have launched a witch-hunt. Telling me to go look for homosexual terrorists might have put LEI in a very unsympathetic light ... whereas my finding Mendelsohn-for other reasons entirely, despite my ignorance-would come across as proof that the investigation had been conducted without any preconceptions.

I said, “You had your suspicions, and you should have disclosed them. At the very least, you should have told me what the barrier was for.”

“The barrier,” she said, “is for protection against viruses and toxins. But anything we do to the body has side effects. It’s not my role to judge whether or not those side effects are acceptable; the regulatory authorities will insist that we pub-licize all of the consequences of using the product-and then the decision will be up to consumers.”

Very neat: the government would twist their arm, “forcing them” to disclose their major selling point!

“And what does your market research tell you?”

“That’s strictly confidential.”

I very nearly asked her: When exactly did you find out that I was gay? After you’d hired me-or before ? On the morning of the bombing, while I’d been assembling a dossier on Janet Lansing ... had she been assembling dossiers on all of the people who might have bid for the investigation? And had she found the ultimate PR advantage, the ultimate seal of impartiality, just too tempting to resist?

I didn’t ask. I still wanted to believe that it made no difference: she’d hired me, and I’d solve the crime like any other, and nothing else would matter.

I went to the bunker where the cobalt had been stored, at the edge of Federation Centennial’s grounds. The trapdoor was solid, but the lock was a joke, and there was no alarm system at all; any smart twelve-year-old could have broken in. Crates full of all kinds of (low-level, shortlived) radioactive waste were stacked up to the ceiling, blocking most of the light from the single bulb; it was no wonder that the theft hadn’t been detected sooner. There were even cobwebs-but no mutant spiders, so far as I could see.

After five minutes poking around, listening to my borrowed dosimetry badge adding up the exposure, I was glad to get out ... whether or not the average chest X-ray would have done ten times more damage. Hadn’t Mendelsohn realized that: how irrational people were about radiation, how much harm it would do her cause once the cobalt was discovered? Or had her own-fully informed-knowledge of the minimal risks distorted her perception?

The surveillance teams sent me reports daily. It was an expensive service, but LEI was paying. Mendelsohn met her friends openly-telling them all about the night I’d questioned her, warning them in outraged tones that they were almost certainly being watched. They discussed the fetal barrier, the options for-legitimate-opposition, the problems the bombing had caused them. I couldn’t tell if the whole thing was being staged for my benefit, or if Mendelsohn was deliberately contacting only those friends who genuinely believed that she hadn’t been involved.

I spent most of my time checking the histories of the people she met. I could find no evidence of past violence or sabotage by any of them-let alone experience with high explosives. But then, I hadn’t seriously expected to be led straight to the bomber.

All I had was circumstantial evidence. All I could do was gather detail after detail, and hope that the mountain of facts I was assembling would eventually reach a critical mass-or that Mendelsohn would slip up, cracking under the pressure.

Weeks passed, and Mendelsohn continued to brazen it out. She even had pamphlets printed, ready to distribute at the Mardi Gras-condemning the bombing as loudly as they condemned LEI for its secrecy.

The nights grew hotter. My temper frayed. I don’t know what Martin thought was happening to me, but I had no idea how we were going to survive the impending revelations. I couldn’t begin to face up to the magnitude of the backlash there’d be once ATOMIC TERRORISTS met GAY BABY-POISONERS in the daily murdochs-and it would make no difference whether it was Mendelsohn’s arrest which broke the news to the public, or her media conference blowing the whistle on LEI and proclaiming her own innocence; either way, the investigation would become a circus. I tried not to think about any of it; it was too late to do anything differently, to drop the case, to tell Martin the truth. So I worked on my tunnel vision.

Elaine scoured the radioactive waste bunker for evidence, but weeks of analysis came up blank. I quizzed the Biofile guards, who (supposedly) would have been watching the whole thing on their monitors when the cobalt was planted, but nobody could recall a client with an unusually large and oddly shaped item, wandering casually into the wrong aisle.

I finally obtained the warrants I needed to scrutinize Mendelsohn’s entire electronic history since birth. She’d been arrested exactly once, twenty years before, for kicking an—unprivatized-policeman in the shin, during a protest he’d probably, privately, applauded. The charges had been dropped. She’d had a court order in force for the last eighteen months, restraining a former lover from coming within a kilometer of her home. (The woman was a musician with a band called Tetanus Switchblade; she had two convictions for assault.) There was no evidence of undeclared income, or unusual expenditure. No phone calls to or from known or suspected dealers in arms or explosives, or their known or suspected associates. But everything could have been done with pay phones and cash, if she’d organized it carefully.

Mendelsohn wasn’t going to put a foot wrong while I was watching. However careful she’d been, though, she could not have carried out the bombing alone. What I needed was someone venal, nervous, or conscience-stricken enough to turn informant. I put out word on the usual channels: I’d be willing to pay, I’d be willing to bargain.

Six weeks after the bombing, I received an anonymous message by datamail:

Be at the Mardi Gras. No wires, no weapons. I’ll find you.

29:17:5:31:23:11

I played with the numbers for more than an hour, trying to make sense of them, before I finally showed them to Elaine.

She said, “Be careful, James.”

“Why?”

‘

‘These are the ratios of the six trace elements we found in the residue from the explosion.”

Martin spent the day of the Mardi Gras with friends who’d also be in the parade. I sat in my air-conditioned office and tuned in to a TV channel which showed the final preparations, interspersed with talking heads describing the history of the event. In forty years, the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras had been transformed from a series of ugly confrontations with police and local authorities, into a money-spinning spectacle advertised in tourist brochures around the world. It was blessed by every level of government, led by politicians and business identities-and the police, like most professions, now had their own float.

Martin was no transvestite (or muscle-bound leather-fetishist, or any other walking cliche); dressing up in a flamboyant costume, one night a year, was as false, as artificial, for him as it would have been for most heterosexual men. But I think I understood why he did it. He felt guilty that he could “pass for straight” in the clothes he usually wore, with the speech and manner and bearing which came naturally to him. He’d never concealed his sexuality from anyone-but it wasn’t instantly apparent to total strangers. For him, taking part in the Mardi Gras was a gesture of solidarity with those gay men who were visible, obvious, all year round-and who’d borne the brunt of intolerance because of it.

As dusk fell, spectators began to gather along the route. Helicopters from every news service appeared overhead, turning their cameras on each other to prove to their viewers that this was An Event. Mounted crowd-control personnel-in something very much like the old blue uniform that had van-ished when I was a child-parked their horses by the fast-food stands, and stood around fortifying themselves for the long night ahead.

I didn’t see how the bomber could seriously expect to find me once I was mingling with a hundred thousand other people-so after leaving the Nexus building, I drove my car around the block slowly, three times, just in case.

By the time I’d made my way to a vantage point, I’d missed the start of the parade; the first thing I saw was a long line of people wearing giant plastic heads bearing the features of famous and infamous queers. (Apparently the word was back in fashion again, officially declared non-perjorative once more, after several years out of favor.) It was all so Disney I could have gagged-and yes, there was even Bernadette, the world’s first lesbian cartoon mouse. I only recognized three of the humans portrayed-Patrick White, looking haggard and suitably bemused, Joe Orton, leering sardonically, and J. Edgar Hoover, with a Mephistophelian sneer. Everyone wore their names on sashes, though, for what that was worth. A young man beside me asked his girlfriend, “Who the hell was Walt Whitman?”

She shook her head. “No idea. Alan Turing?”

“Search me.”

They photographed both of them, anyway.

I wanted to yell at the marchers: So what? Some queers were famous. Some famous people were queer. What a surprise! Do you think that means you own them?

I kept silent, of course-while everyone around me cheered and clapped. I wondered how close the bomber was, how long he or she would leave me sweating. Panopticon-the surveillance contractors-were still following Mendelsohn and all of her known associates, most of whom were somewhere along the route of the parade, handing out their pamphlets.

None of them appeared to have followed me, though. The bomber was almost certainly someone outside the network of friends we’d uncovered.

An anti-viral, anti-drug, anti-pollution barrier, alone-or a means of guaranteeing a heterosexual child. Which do you think would earn the most money? Surrounded by cheering spectators-half of them mixed-sex couples with children in tow-it was almost possible to laugh off Mendelsohn’s fears. Who, here, would admit that they’d buy a version of the cocoon which would help wipe out the source of their entertainment? But applauding the freak show didn’t mean wanting your own flesh and blood to join it.

An hour after the parade had started, I decided to move out of the densest part of the crowd. If the bomber couldn’t reach me through the crush of people, there wasn’t much point being here. A hundred or so leather-clad women on-noise-enhanced-electric motorbikes went riding past in a crucifix formation, behind a banner which read DYKES ON BIKES FOR JESUS. I recalled the small group of fundamentalists I’d passed earlier, their backs to the parade route lest they turn into pillars of salt, holding up candles and praying for rain.

I made my way to one of the food stalls, and bought a cold hot dog and a warm orange juice, trying to ignore the smell of horse turds. The place seemed to attract law enforcement types; J. Edgar Hoover himself came wandering by while I was eating, looking like a malevolent Humpty Dumpty.

As he passed me, he said, “Twenty-nine. Seventeen. Five.”

I finished my hot dog and followed him.

He stopped in a deserted side street, behind a supermarket parking lot. As I caught up with him, he took out a magnetic scanner.

I said, “No wires, no weapons.” He waved the device over me. I was telling the truth. “Can you talk through that thing?”

“Yes.” The giant head bobbed strangely; I couldn’t see any eye holes, but he clearly wasn’t blind.

“Okay. Where did the explosives come from? We know they started off in Singapore, but who was your supplier here?”

Hoover laughed, deep and muffled. “I’m not going to tell you that. I’d be dead in a week.”

“So what do you want to tell me?”

“That I only did the grunt work. Mendelsohn organized everything.”

‘

‘No shit. But what have you got that will prove it? Phone calls? Financial transactions?”

He just laughed again. I was beginning to wonder how many people in the parade would know who’d played J. Edgar Hoover; even if he clammed up now, it was possible that I’d be able to track him down later.

That was when I turned and saw six more, identical, Hoovers coming around the corner. They were all carrying baseball bats.

I started to move. Hoover One drew a pistol and aimed it at my face. He said, “Kneel down slowly, with your hands behind your head.”

I did it. He kept the gun on me, and I kept my eyes on the trigger, but I heard the others arrive, and close into a half-circle behind me.

Hoover One said, “Don’t you know what happens to traitors? Don’t you know what’s going to happen to you?”

I shook my head slowly. I didn’t know what I could say to appease him, so I spoke the truth. “How can I be a traitor? What is there to betray? Dykes on Bikes for Jesus? The William S. Burroughs Dancers?”

Someone behind me swung their bat into the small of my back. Not as hard as they might have; I lurched forward, but I kept my balance.

Hoover One said, “Don’t you know any history, Mr. Pig? Mr. Polizei? The Nazis put us in their death camps. The Rea-ganites tried to have us all die of AIDS. And here you are now, Mr. Pig, working for the fuckers who want to wipe us off the face of the planet. That sounds like betrayal to me.”“

I knelt there, staring at the gun, unable to speak. I couldn’t dredge up the words to justify myself. The truth was too difficult, too gray, too confusing. My teeth started chattering. Nazis. AIDS. Genocide. Maybe he was right. Maybe I deserved to die.

I felt tears on my cheeks. Hoover One laughed. “Boo hoo, Mr. Pig.” Someone swung their bat onto my shoulders. I fell forward on my face, too afraid to move my hands to break the fall; I tried to get up, but a boot came down on the back of my neck.

Hoover One bent down and put the gun to my skull. He whispered, “Will you close the case? Lose the evidence on Catherine? You know, your boyfriend frequents some dangerous places; he needs all the friends he can get.”

I lifted my face high enough above the asphalt to reply. “Yes.”

“Well done, Mr. Pig.”

That was when I heard the helicopter.

I blinked the gravel out of my eyes and saw the ground, far brighter than it should have been; there was a spotlight trained on us. I waited for the sound of a bullhorn. Nothing happened. I waited for my assailants to flee. Hoover One took his foot off my neck.

And then they all laid into me with their baseball bats.

I should have curled up and protected my head, but curiosity got the better of me; I turned and stole a glimpse of the chopper. It was a news crew, of course, refusing to do anything unethical like spoil a good story just when it was getting telegenic. That much made perfect sense.

But the goon squad made no sense at all. Why were they sticking around, now that the cameras were running? Just for the pleasure of beating me for a few seconds longer!

Nobody was that stupid, that oblivious to PR.

I coughed up two teeth and hid my face again. They wanted it all to be broadcast. They wanted the headlines, the backlash, the outrage. ATOMIC TERRORISTS! BABY-POISONERS! BRUTAL THUGS!

They wanted to demonize the enemy they were pretending to be.

The Hoovers finally dropped their bats and started running. I lay on the ground drooling blood, too weak to lift my head to see what had driven them away.

A while later, I heard hoofbeats. Someone dropped to the ground beside me and checked my pulse.

I said, “I’m not in pain. I’m happy. I’m delirious.”

Then I passed out.

On his second visit, Martin brought Catherine Mendelsohn to the hospital with him. They showed me a recording of LEI’s media conference, the day after the Mardi Gras-two hours before Mendelsohn’s was scheduled to take place.

Janet Lansing said, ‘

‘In the light of recent events, we have no choice but to go public. We would have preferred to keep this technology under wraps for commercial reasons, but innocent lives are at stake. And when people turn on their own kind—”

I burst the stitches in my lips laughing.

LEI had bombed their own laboratory. They’d irradiated their own cells. And they’d hoped that I’d cover up for Mendelsohn, once the evidence led me to her, out of sympathy with her cause. Later, with a tip-off to an investigative reporter or two, the cover-up would have been revealed.

The perfect climate for their product launch.

Since I’d continued with the investigation, though, they’d had to make the best of it: sending in the Hoovers, claiming to be linked to Mendelsohn, to punish me for my diligence.

Mendelsohn said, “Everything LEI leaked about me-the cobalt, my key to the vault-was already spelt out in the pamphlets I’d printed, but that doesn’t seem to cut much ice with the murdochs. I’m the Harbor Bridge Gamma Ray Terrorist now.”

“You’ll never be charged.”

“Of course not. So I’ll never be found innocent, either.”

I said, ‘

‘When I’m out of here, I’m going after them.’’ They wanted impartiality? An investigation untainted by prejudice? They’d get exactly what they paid for, this time. Minus the tunnel vision.

Martin said softly, “Who’s going to employ you to do that?”

I smiled, painfully. “LEI’s insurance company.”

When they’d left, I dozed off.

I woke suddenly, from a dream of suffocation.

Even if I proved that the whole thing had been a marketing exercise by LEI-even if half their directors were thrown in prison, even if the company itself was liquidated-the technology would still be owned by someone.

And one way or another, in the end, it would be sold.

That’s what I’d missed, in my fanatical neutrality: you can’t sell a cure without a disease. So even if I was right to be neutral-even if there was no difference to fight for, no difference to betray, no difference to preserve-the best way to sell the cocoon would always be to invent one. And even if it would be no tragedy at all if there was nothing left but heterosexuality in a century’s time, the only path which could lead there would be one of lies, and wounding, and vilification.

Would people buy that, or not?

I was suddenly very much afraid that they would.

Crystal Nights

* * * *

“More caviar?” Daniel Cliff gestured at the serving dish and the cover irised from opaque to trans-parent. “It’s fresh, I promise you. My chef had it flown in from Iran this morning.”

“No thank you.” Julie Dehghani touched a napkin to her lips then laid it on her plate with a gesture of finality. The dining room overlooked the Golden Gate bridge, and most people Daniel invited here were content to spend an hour or two simply enjoying the view, but he could see that she was growing impatient with his small talk.

Daniel said, “I’d like to show you something.” He led her into the adjoining conference room. On the table was a wireless keyboard; the wall screen showed a Linux command line interface. “Take a seat,” he suggested.

Julie complied. “If this is some kind of audition, you might have warned me,” she said.

“Not at all,” Daniel replied. “I’m not going to ask you to jump through any hoops. I’d just like you to tell me what you think of this machine’s performance.”

She frowned slightly, but she was willing to play along. She ran some standard benchmarks. Daniel saw her squinting at the screen, one hand almost reaching up to where a desktop display would be, so she could double-check the number of digits in the FLOPS rating by counting them off with one finger. There were a lot more than she’d been expecting, but she wasn’t seeing double.

“That’s extraordinary,” she said. “Is this whole building packed with networked processors, with only the penthouse for humans?”

Daniel said, “You tell me. Is it a cluster?”

“Hmm.” So much for not making her jump through hoops, but it wasn’t really much of a challenge. She ran some different benchmarks, based on algorithms that were provably impossible to parallelise; however smart the compiler was, the steps these programs required would have to be carried out strictly in sequence.

The FLOPS rating was unchanged.

Julie said, “All right, it’s a single processor. Now you’ve got my attention. Where is it?”

“Turn the keyboard over.”

There was a charcoal-grey module, five centimetres square and five millimetres thick, plugged into an inset docking bay. Julie examined it, but it bore no manufacturer’s logo or other identifying marks.

“This connects to the processor?” she asked.

“No. It is the processor.”

“You’re joking.” She tugged it free of the dock, and the wall screen went blank. She held it up and turned it around, though Daniel wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Somewhere to slip in a screw-driver and take the thing apart, probably. He said, “If you break it, you own it, so I hope you’ve got a few hundred spare.”

“A few hundred grand? Hardly.”

“A few hundred million.”

Her face flushed. “Of course. If it was two hundred grand, everyone would have one.” She put it down on the table, then as an afterthought slid it a little further from the edge. “As I said, you’ve got my attention.”

Daniel smiled. “I’m sorry about the theatrics.”

“No, this deserved the build-up. What is it, exactly?”

“A single, three-dimensional photonic crystal. No electronics to slow it down; every last component is optical. The architecture was nanofabricated with a method that I’d prefer not to describe in detail.”

“Fair enough.” She thought for a while. “I take it you don’t expect me to buy one. My research budget for the next thousand years would barely cover it.”

“In your present position. But you’re not joined to the university at the hip.”

“So this is a job interview?”

Daniel nodded.

Julie couldn’t help herself; she picked up the crystal and examined it again, as if there might yet be some feature that a human eye could discern. “Can you give me a job description?”

“Midwife.”

She laughed. “To what?”

“History,” Daniel said.

Her smile faded slowly.

“Ibelieveyou’rethebestAIresearcherofyourgeneration,”hesaid. “I want you to work for me.” He reached over and took the crystal from her. “With this as your platform, imagine what you could do.”

Julie said, “What exactly would you want me to do?”

“For the last fifteen years,” Daniel said, “you’ve stated that the ultimate goal of your research is to create conscious, human-level, artificial intelligence.”

“That’s right.”

“Then we want the same thing. What I want is for you to succeed.”

She ran a hand over her face; whatever else she was thinking, there was no denying that she was tempted. “It’s gratifying that you have so much confidence in my abilities,” she said. “But we need to be clear about some things. This prototype is amazing, and if you ever get the production costs down I’m sure it will have some extra-ordinary applications. It would eat up climate forecasting, lattice QCD, astrophysical modelling, proteomics ...”

“Of course.” Actually, Daniel had no intention of marketing the device. He’d bought out the inventor of the fabrication process with his own private funds; there were no other shareholders or directors to dictate his use of the technology.

“But AI,” Julie said, “is different. We’re in a maze, not a highway; there’s nowhere that speed alone can take us. However many exa-flops I have to play with, they won’t spontaneously combust into consciousness. I’m not being held back by the university’s computers; I have access to SHARCNET anytime I need it. I’m being held back by my own lack of insight into the problems I’m addressing.”

Daniel said, “A maze is not a dead end. When I was twelve, I wrote a program for solving mazes.”

“And I’m sure it worked well,” Julie replied, “for small, two-di-mensional ones. But you know how those kind of algorithms scale. Put your old program on this crystal, and I could still design a maze in half a day that would bring it to its knees.”

“Of course,” Daniel conceded. “Which is precisely why I’m inter-ested in hiring you. You know a great deal more about the maze of AI than I do; any strategy you developed would be vastly superior to a blind search.”

“I’m not saying that I’m merely groping in the dark,” she said. “If it was that bleak, I’d be working on a different problem entirely. But I don’t see what difference this processor would make.”

“What created the only example of consciousness we know of?” Daniel asked.

“Evolution.”

“Exactly. But I don’t want to wait three billion years, so I need to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources of variation more targeted.”

Julie digested this. “You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious, human-level AI?”

“Yes.” Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to measure her words before speaking.

“With respect, I don’t think you’ve thought that through.”

“On the contrary,” Daniel assured her. “I’ve been planning this for twenty years.”

“Evolution,” she said, “is about failure and death. Do you have any idea how many sentient creatures lived and died along the way to Homo sapiens? How much suffering was involved?”

“Part of your job would be to minimise the suffering.”

“Minimise it?” She seemed genuinely shocked, as if this proposal was even worse than blithely assuming that the process would raise no ethical concerns. “What right do we have to inflict it at all?”

Daniel said, “You’re grateful to exist, aren’t you? Notwithstanding the tribulations of your ancestors.”

“I’m grateful to exist,” she agreed, “but in the human case the suffering wasn’t deliberately inflicted by anyone, and nor was there any alternative way we could have come into existence. If there really had been a just creator, I don’t doubt that he would have followed Genesis literally; he sure as hell would not have used evolution.”

“Just, and omnipotent,” Daniel suggested. “Sadly, that second trait’s even rarer than the first.”

“I don’t think it’s going to take omnipotence to create something in our own image,” she said. “Just a little more patience and self-knowledge.”

“This won’t be like natural selection,” Daniel insisted. “Not that blind, not that cruel, not that wasteful. You’d be free to intervene as much as you wished, to take whatever palliative measures you felt appropriate.”

“Palliative measures?” Julie met his gaze, and he saw her expres-sion flicker from disbelief to something darker. She stood up and glanced at her wristphone. “I don’t have any signal here. Would you mind calling me a taxi?”

Daniel said, “Please, hear me out. Give me ten more minutes, then the helicopter will take you to the airport.”

“I’d prefer to make my own way home.” She gave Daniel a look that made it clear that this was not negotiable.

He called her a taxi, and they walked to the elevator.

“I know you find this morally challenging,” he said, “and I respect that. I wouldn’t dream of hiring someone who thought these were trivial issues. But if I don’t do this, someone else will. Someone with far worse intentions than mine.”

“Really?” Her tone was openly sarcastic now. “So how, exactly, does the mere existence of your project stop this hypothetical bin Laden of AI from carrying out his own?”

Daniel was disappointed; he’d expected her at least to understand what was at stake. He said, “This is a race to decide between Godhood and enslavement. Whoever succeeds first will be unstoppable. I’m not going to be anyone’s slave.”

Julie stepped into the elevator; he followed her.

She said, “You know what they say the modern version of Pascal’s Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in caseoneofthemturnsintoGod.Perhapsyourmottoshouldbe’Treat every chatterbot kindly, it might turn out to be the deity’s uncle’.”

“We will be as kind as possible,” Daniel said. “And don’t forget, we can determine the nature of these beings. They will be happy to be alive, and grateful to their creator. We can select for those traits.”

Julie said, “So you’re aiming for übermenschen that wag their tails when you scratch them behind the ears? You might find there’s a bit of a trade-off there.”

The elevator reached the lobby. Daniel said, “Think about this, don’t rush to a decision. You can call me any time.” There was no commercial flight back to Toronto tonight; she’d be stuck in a hotel, paying money she could ill-afford, thinking about the kind of salary she could demand from him now that she’d played hard to get. If she mentally recast all this obstinate moralising as a deliberate bargaining strategy, she’d have no trouble swallowing her pride.

Julie offered her hand, and he shook it. She said, “Thank you for dinner.”

The taxi was waiting. He walked with her across the lobby. “If you want to see AI in your lifetime,” he said, “this is the only way it’s going to happen.”

She turned to face him. “Maybe that’s true. We’ll see. But better to spend a thousand years and get it right, than a decade and succeed by your methods.”

As Daniel watched the taxi drive away into the fog, he forced himself to accept the reality: she was never going to change her mind. Julie Dehghani had been his first choice, his ideal collaborator. He couldn’t pretend that this wasn’t a setback.

Still, no one was irreplaceable. However much it would have delighted him to have won her over, there were many more names on his list.

* * * *

Daniel’swristtingledasthemessagecamethrough.Heglanceddown and saw the word progress! hovering in front of his watch face.

The board meeting was almost over; he disciplined himself and kept his attention focused for ten more minutes. WiddulHands. com had made him his first billion, and it was still the pre-eminent social networking site for the 0-3 age group. It had been fifteen years since he’d founded the company, and he had since diversified in many directions, but he had no intention of taking his hands off the levers.

When the meeting finished he blanked the wall screen and paced the empty conference room for half a minute, rolling his neck and stretching his shoulders. Then he said, “Lucien”.

Lucien Crace appeared on the screen. “Significant progress?” Daniel enquired.

“Absolutely.” Lucien was trying to maintain polite eye contact with Daniel, but something kept drawing his gaze away. Without waiting for an explanation, Daniel gestured at the screen and had it show him exactly what Lucien was seeing.

A barren, rocky landscape stretched to the horizon. Scattered across the rocks were dozens of crab-like creatures—some deep blue, some coral pink, though these weren’t colours the locals would see, just species markers added to the view to make it easier to in-terpret. As Daniel watched, fat droplets of corrosive rain drizzled down from a passing cloud. This had to be the bleakest environ-ment in all of Sapphire.

Lucien was still visible in an inset. “See the blue ones over by the crater lake?” he said. He sketched a circle on the image to guide Daniel’s attention.

“Yeah.” Five blues were clustered around a lone pink; Daniel gestured and the view zoomed in on them. The blues had opened up their prisoner’s body, but it wasn’t dead; Daniel was sure of that, because the pinks had recently acquired a trait that turned their bodies to mush the instant they expired.

“They’ve found a way to study it,” Lucien said. “To keep it alive and study it.”

From the very start of the project, he and Daniel had decided to grant the Phites the power to observe and manipulate their own bodies as much as possible. In the DNA world, the inner workings of anatomy and heredity had only become accessible once highly sophis-ticated technology had been invented. In Sapphire, the barriers were designed to be far lower. The basic units of biology here were ‘beads’, small spheres that possessed a handful of simple properties but no complex internal biochemistry. Beads were larger than the cells of the DNA world, and Sapphire’s diffractionless optics rendered them visible to the right kind of naked eye. Animals acquired beads from their diet, while in plants they replicated in the presence of sunlight, but unlike cells they did not themselves mutate. The beads in a Phite’s body could be rearranged with a minimum of fuss, enabling a kind of self-modification that no human surgeon or prosthetics engineer could rival—and this skill was actually essential for at least one stage in every Phite’s life: reproduction involved two Phites pooling their spare beads and then collaborating to ‘sculpt’ them into an infant, in part by directly copying each other’s current body plans.

Of course these crabs knew nothing of the abstract principles of engineering and design, but the benefits of trial and error, of self-experimentation and cross-species plagiarism, had led them into an escalating war of innovation. The pinks had been the first to stop their corpses from being plundered for secrets, by stumbling on a way to make them literally fall apart in extremis; now it seemed the blues had found a way around that, and were indulging in a spot of vivisection-as-industrial-espionage.

Daniel felt a visceral twinge of sympathy for the struggling pink, but he brushed it aside. Not only did he doubt that the Phites were any more conscious than ordinary crabs, they certainly had a radic-ally different relationship to bodily integrity. The pink was resisting because its dissectors were of a different species; if they had been its cousins it might not have put up any fight at all. When something happened in spite of your wishes, that was unpleasant by definition, but it would be absurd to imagine that the pink was in the kind of agony that an antelope being flayed by jackals would feel—let alone experiencing the existential terrors of a human trapped and mutilated by a hostile tribe.

“This is going to give them a tremendous advantage,” Lucien enthused.

“The blues?”

Lucien shook his head. “Not blues over pinks; Phites over trad-life. Bacteria can swap genes, but this kind of active mimetics is un-precedented without cultural support. Da Vinci might have watch-ed the birds in flight and sketched his gliders, but no lemur ever dissected the body of an eagle and then stole its tricks. They’re going to have innate skills as powerful as whole strands of human tech-nology. All this before they even have language.”

“Hmm.” Daniel wanted to be optimistic too, but he was growing wary of Lucien’s hype. Lucien had a doctorate in genetic programm-ing, but he’d made his name with FoodExcuses.com, a web service thattrawledthemedicalliteraturetocobbletogetherquasi-scientific justifications for indulging in your favourite culinary vice. He had the kind of technobabble that could bleed money out of venture capitalists down pat, and though Daniel admired that skill in its proper place, he expected a higher insight-to-bullshit ratio now that Lucien was on his payroll.

The blues were backing away from their captive. As Daniel watch-ed, the pink sealed up its wounds and scuttled off towards a group of its own kind. The blues had now seen the detailed anatomy of the respiratory system that had been giving the pinks an advantage in the thin air of this high plateau. A few of the blues would try it out, and if it worked for them, the whole tribe would copy it.

“So what do you think?” Lucien asked.

“Select them,” Daniel said.

“Just the blues?”

“No, both of them.” The blues alone might have diverged into competing subspecies eventually, but bringing their old rivals along for the ride would help to keep them sharp.

“Done,” Lucien replied. In an instant, ten million Phites were erased, leaving the few thousand blues and pinks from these bad-lands to inherit the planet. Daniel felt no compunction; the extinc-tion events he decreed were surely the most painless in history.

Now that the world no longer required human scrutiny, Lucien unthrottled the crystal and let the simulation race ahead; automated tools would let them know when the next interesting development arose. Daniel watched the population figures rising as his chosen species spread out and recolonised Sapphire.

Would their distant descendants rage against him, for this act of ‘genocide’ that had made room for them to flourish and prosper? That seemed unlikely. In any case, what choice did he have? He couldn’t start manufacturing new crystals for every useless side-branch of the evolutionary tree. Nobody was wealthy enough to indulge in an exponentially growing number of virtual animal shel-ters, at half a billion dollars apiece.

He was a just creator, but he was not omnipotent. His careful pruning was the only way.

* * * *

In the months that followed, progress came in fits and starts. Sev-eral times, Daniel found himself rewinding history, reversing his decisions and trying a new path. Keeping every Phite variant alive was impractical, but he did retain enough information to resurrect lost species at will.

The maze of AI was still a maze, but the speed of the crystal served them well. Barely eighteen months after the start of Project Sapphire, the Phites were exhibiting a basic theory of mind: their actions showed that they could deduce what others knew about the world, as distinct from what they knew themselves. Other AI researchers had spliced this kind of thing into their programs by hand, but Daniel was convinced that his version was better integrat-ed, more robust. Human-crafted software was brittle and inflexible; his Phites had been forged in the heat of change.

Daniel kept a close watch on his competitors, but nothing he saw gave him reason to doubt his approach. Sunil Gupta was raking in the cash from a search engine that could ‘understand’ all forms of text,audioandvideo,makinguseoffuzzylogictechniquesthatwere at least forty years old. Daniel respected Gupta’s business acumen, but in the unlikely event that his software ever became conscious, the sheer cruelty of having forced it to wade through the endless tides of blogorrhoea would surely see it turn on its creator and exact a revenge that made The Terminator look like a picnic. Angela Lind-strom was having some success with her cheesy AfterLife, in which dying clients gave heart-to-heart interviews to software that then constructed avatars able to converse with surviving relatives. And Julie Dehghani was still frittering away her talent, writing software for robots that played with coloured blocks side-by-side with human infants, and learnt languages from adult volunteers by imitating the interactions of baby talk. Her prophesy of taking a thousand years to ‘get it right’ seemed to be on target.

As the second year of the project drew to a close, Lucien was con-tacting Daniel once or twice a month to announce a new break-through. By constructing environments that imposed suitable selec-tion pressures, Lucien had generated a succession of new species that used simple tools, crafted crude shelters, and even domesticated plants. They were still shaped more or less like crabs, but they were at least as intelligent as chimpanzees.

ThePhitesworkedtogetherbyobservationandimitation,guiding and reprimanding each other with a limited repertoire of gestures and cries, but as yet they lacked anything that could truly be called a language. Daniel grew impatient; to move beyond a handful of specialised skills, his creatures needed the power to map any object, any action, any prospect they might encounter in the world into their speech, and into their thoughts.

Daniel summoned Lucien and they sought a way forward. It was easy to tweak the Phites’ anatomy to grant them the ability to generate more subtle vocalisations, but that alone was no more useful than handing a chimp a conductor’s baton. What was needed was a way to make sophisticated planning and communications skills a matter of survival.

Eventually, he and Lucien settled on a series of environmental modifications, providing opportunities for the creatures to rise to the occasion. Most of these scenarios began with famine. Lucien blighted the main food crops, then offered a palpable reward for progress by dangling some tempting new fruit from a branch that was just out of reach. Sometimes that metaphor could almost be taken literally: he’d introduce a plant with a complex life cycle that required tricky processing to render it edible, or a new prey animal that was clever and vicious, but nutritionally well worth hunting in the end.

Time and again, the Phites failed the test, with localised species dwindling to extinction. Daniel watched in dismay; he had not grown sentimental, but he’d always boasted to himself that he’d set his standards higher than the extravagant cruelties of nature. He contemplated tweaking the creatures’ physiology so that starvation brought a swifter, more merciful demise, but Lucien pointed out that he’d be slashing his chances of success if he curtailed this period of intense motivation. Each time a group died out, a fresh batch of mutated cousins rose from the dust to take their place; without that intervention, Sapphire would have been a wilderness within a few real-time days.

Daniel closed his eyes to the carnage, and put his trust in sheer time, sheer numbers. In the end, that was what the crystal had bought him: when all else failed, he could give up any pretence of knowing how to achieve his aims and simply test one random mutation after another.

Months went by, sending hundreds of millions of tribes starving into their graves. But what choice did he have? If he fed these crea-tures milk and honey, they’d remain fat and stupid until the day he died. Their hunger agitated them, it drove them to search and strive, and while any human onlooker was tempted to colour such behaviour with their own emotional palette, Daniel told himself that the Phites’ suffering was a shallow thing, little more than the instinct that jerked his own hand back from a flame before he’d even registered discomfort.

They were not the equal of humans. Not yet.

And if he lost his nerve, they never would be.

Daniel dreamt that he was inside Sapphire, but there were no Phites in sight. In front of him stood a sleek black monolith; a thin stream of pus wept from a crack in its smooth, obsidian surface. Someone was holding him by the wrist, trying to force his hand into a reeking pit in the ground. The pit, he knew, was piled high with things he did not want to see, let alone touch.

He thrashed around until he woke, but the sense of pressure on his wrist remained. It was coming from his watch. As he focused on the one-word message he’d received, his stomach tightened. Lucien would not have dared to wake him at this hour for some run-of-the-mill result.

Daniel rose, dressed, then sat in his office sipping coffee. He did not know why he was so reluctant to make the call. He had been waiting for this moment for more than twenty years, but it would not be the pinnacle of his life. After this, there would be a thousand more peaks, each one twice as magnificent as the last.

He finished the coffee then sat a while longer, massaging his temples, making sure his head was clear. He would not greet this new era bleary-eyed, half-awake. He recorded all his calls, but this was one he would retain for posterity.

“Lucien,” he said. The man’s image appeared, smiling. “Success?”

“They’re talking to each other,” Lucien replied.

“About what?”

“Food, weather, sex, death. The past, the future. You name it. They won’t shut up.”

Lucien sent transcripts on the data channel, and Daniel perused them. The linguistics software didn’t just observe the Phites’ behav-iour and correlate it with the sounds they made; it peered right into their virtual brains and tracked the flow of information. Its task was far from trivial, and there was no guarantee that its translations were perfect, but Daniel did not believe it could hallucinate an entire language and fabricate these rich, detailed conversations out of thin air.

He flicked between statistical summaries, technical overviews of linguistic structure, and snippets from the millions of conversations the software had logged. Food, weather, sex, death. As human dia-logue the translations would have seemed utterly banal, but in con-text they were riveting. These were not chatterbots blindly following Markov chains, designed to impress the judges in a Turing test. The Phites were discussing matters by which they genuinely lived and died.

When Daniel brought up a page of conversational topics in alphabetical order, his eyes were caught by the single entry under the letter G. Grief. He tapped the link, and spent a few minutes reading through samples, illustrating the appearance of the concept following the death of a child, a parent, a friend.

He kneaded his eyelids. It was three in the morning; there was a sickening clarity to everything, the kind that only night could bring. He turned to Lucien.

“No more death.”

“Boss?” Lucien was startled.

“Iwanttomakethemimmortal.Letthemevolveculturally;lettheir ideas live and die. Let them modify their own brains, once they’re smart enough; they can already tweak the rest of their anatomy.”

“Where will you put them all?” Lucien demanded.

“I can afford another crystal. Maybe two more.”

“That won’t get you far. At the present birth rate—”

“We’ll have to cut their fertility drastically, tapering it down to zero. After that, if they want to start reproducing again they’ll really have to innovate.” They would need to learn about the outside world, and comprehend its alien physics well enough to design new hardware into which they could migrate.

Lucien scowled. “How will we control them? How will we shape them? If we can’t select the ones we want—”

Daniel said quietly, “This is not up for discussion.” Whatever Julie Dehghani had thought of him, he was not a monster; if he believed that these creatures were as conscious as he was, he was not going to slaughter them like cattle—or stand by and let them die ‘naturally’, when the rules of this world were his to rewrite at will.

“We’ll shape them through their memes,” he said. “We’ll kill off the bad memes, and help spread the ones we want to succeed.” He would need to keep an iron grip on the Phites and their culture, though, or he would never be able to trust them. If he wasn’t going to literally breed them for loyalty and gratitude, he would have to do the same with their ideas.

Lucien said, “We’re not prepared for any of this. We’re going to need new software, new analysis and intervention tools.”

Daniel understood. “Freeze time in Sapphire. Then tell the team they’ve got eighteen months.”

* * * *

Daniel sold his shares in WiddulHands, and had two more crystals built. One was to support a higher population in Sapphire, so there was as large a pool of diversity among the immortal Phites as pos-sible; the other was to run the software—which Lucien had dubbed the Thought Police—needed to keep tabs on what they were doing. If human overseers had had to monitor and shape the evolving culture every step of the way, that would have slowed things down to a glacial pace. Still, automating the process completely was tricky, and Daniel preferred to err on the side of caution, with the Thought Police freezing Sapphire and notifying him whenever the situation became too delicate.

If the end of death was greeted by the Phites with a mixture of puzzlement and rejoicing, the end of birth was not so easy to accept. When all attempts by mating couples to sculpt their excess beads into offspring became as ineffectual as shaping dolls out of clay, it led to a mixture of persistence and distress that was painful to witness. Humans were accustomed to failing to conceive, but this was more like still birth after still birth. Even when Daniel inter-vened to modify the Phites’ basic drives, some kind of cultural or emotional inertia kept many of them going through the motions. Though their new instincts urged them merely to pool their spare beads and then stop, sated, they would continue with the old ver-sion of the act regardless, forlorn and confused, trying to shape the useless puddle into something that lived and breathed.

Move on, Daniel thought. Get over it. There was only so much sympathy he could muster for immortal beings who would fill the galaxy with their children, if they ever got their act together.

The Phites didn’t yet have writing, but they’d developed a strong oral tradition, and some put their mourning for the old ways into elegiac words. The Thought Police identified those memes, and en-suredthattheydidn’tspreadfar.SomePhiteschosetokillthemselves rather than live in the barren new world. Daniel felt he had no right to stop them, but mysterious obstacles blocked the paths of anyone who tried, irresponsibly, to romanticise or encourage such acts.

The Phites could only die by their own volition, but those who retained the will to live were not free to doze the centuries away. Daniel decreed no more terrible famines, but he hadn’t abolished hunger itself, and he kept enough pressure on the food supply and other resources to force the Phites to keep innovating, refining agri-culture, developing trade.

The Thought Police identified and nurtured the seeds of writing, mathematics, and natural science. The physics of Sapphire was a simplified, game-world model, not so arbitrary as to be incoherent, but not so deep and complex that you needed particle physics to get to the bottom of it. As crystal time sped forward and the immortals sought solace in understanding their world, Sapphire soon had its Euclid and Archimedes, its Galileo and its Newton; their ideas spread with supernatural efficiency, bringing forth a torrent of mathematicians and astronomers.

Sapphire’sstarswerejustaplanetarium-likebackdrop,presentonly tohelpthePhitesgettheirnotionsofheliocentricityandinertiaright, but its moon was as real as the world itself. The technology needed to reach it was going to take a while, but that was all right; Daniel didn’t want them getting ahead of themselves. There was a surprise waiting for them there, and his preference was for a flourishing of biotech and computing before they faced that revelation.

Between the absence of fossils, Sapphire’s limited biodiversity, and all the clunky external meddling that needed to be covered up, it was hard for the Phites to reach a grand Darwinian view of biology, but their innate skill with beads gave them a head start in the practical arts. With a little nudging, they began tinkering with their bodies, correcting some inconvenient anatomical quirks that they’d missed in their pre-conscious phase.

As they refined their knowledge and techniques, Daniel let them imagine that they were working towards restoring fertility; after all, that was perfectly true, even if their goal was a few conceptual revolutions further away than they realised. Humans had had their naive notions of a Philosopher’s Stone dashed, but they’d still achieved nuclear transmutation in the end.

The Phites, he hoped, would transmute themselves: inspect their own brains, make sense of them, and begin to improve them. It was a staggering task to expect of anyone; even Lucien and his team, with their God’s-eye view of the creatures, couldn’t come close. But when the crystal was running at full speed, the Phites could think millions of times faster than their creators. If Daniel could keep them from straying off course, everything that humanity might once have conceived of as the fruits of millennia of progress was now just a matter of months away.

* * * *

Lucien said, “We’re losing track of the language.”

Daniel was in his Houston office; he’d come to Texas for a series of face-to-face meetings, to see if he could raise some much-needed cash by licensing the crystal fabrication process. He would have preferred to keep the technology to himself, but he was almost certain that he was too far ahead of his rivals now for any of them to stand a chance of catching up with him.

“What do you mean, losing track?” Daniel demanded. Lucien had briefed him just three hours before, and given no warning of an impending crisis.

The Thought Police, Lucien explained, had done their job well: they had pushed the neural self-modification meme for all it was worth, and now a successful form of ‘brain boosting’ was spreading across Sapphire. It required a detailed ‘recipe’ but no technological aids; the same innate skills for observing and manipulating beads that the Phites had used to copy themselves during reproduction were enough.

All of this was much as Daniel had hoped it would be, but there was an alarming downside. The boosted Phites were adopting a dense and complex new language, and the analysis software couldn’t make sense of it.

“Slow them down further,” Daniel suggested. “Give the linguistics more time to run.”

“I’ve already frozen Sapphire,” Lucien replied. “The linguistics have been running for an hour, with the full resources of an entire crystal.”

Danielsaidirritably,”Wecanseeexactlywhatthey’vedonetotheir brains. How can we not understand the effects on the language?”

“In the general case,” Lucien said, “deducing a language from nothing but neural anatomy is computationally intractable. With the old language, we were lucky; it had a simple structure, and it was highly correlated with obvious behavioural elements. The new language is much more abstract and conceptual. We might not even have our own correlates for half the concepts.”

Daniel had no intention of letting events in Sapphire slip out of his control. It was one thing to hope that the Phites would, eventually, be juggling real-world physics that was temporarily beyond his comprehension, but any bright ten-year-old could grasp the laws of their present universe, and their technology was still far from rocket science.

He said, “Keep Sapphire frozen, and study your records of the Phites who first performed this boost. If they understood what they were doing, we can work it out too.”

At the end of the week, Daniel signed the licensing deal and flew back to San Francisco. Lucien briefed him daily, and at Daniel’s urging hired a dozen new computational linguists to help with the problem.

After six months, it was clear that they were getting nowhere. The Phites who’d invented the boost had had one big advantage as they’d tinkered with each other’s brains: it had not been a purely theoretical exercise for them. They hadn’t gazed at anatomical dia-grams and then reasoned their way to a better design. They had experienced the effects of thousands of small experimental changes, and the results had shaped their intuition for the process. Very little of that intuition had been spoken aloud, let alone written down and formalised. And the process of decoding those insights from a purely structural view of their brains was every bit as difficult as decoding the language itself.

Daniel couldn’t wait any longer. With the crystal heading for the market, and other comparable technologies approaching fruition, he couldn’t allow his lead to melt away.

“We need the Phites themselves to act as translators,” he told Lucien. “We need to contrive a situation where there’s a large enough pool who choose not to be boosted that the old language continues to be used.”

“So we need maybe twenty-five per cent refusing the boost?” Lucien suggested. “And we need the boosted Phites to want to keep them informed of what’s happening, in terms that we can all under-stand.”

Daniel said, “Exactly.”

“I think we can slow down the uptake of boosting,” Lucien mused, “while we encourage a traditionalist meme that says it’s better to span the two cultures and languages than replace the old entirely with the new.”

Lucien’s team set to work, tweaking the Thought Police for the new task, then restarting Sapphire itself.

Their efforts seemed to yield the desired result: the Phites were corralled into valuing the notion of maintaining a link to their past, and while the boosted Phites surged ahead, they also worked hard to keep the unboosted in the loop.

It was a messy compromise, though, and Daniel wasn’t happy with the prospect of making do with a watered-down, Sapphire-for-Dummies version of the Phites’ intellectual achievements. What he really wanted was someone on the inside reporting to him directly, like a Phite version of Lucien.

It was time to start thinking about job interviews.

Lucien was running Sapphire more slowly than usual—to give the Thought Police a computational advantage now that they’d lost so much raw surveillance data—but even at the reduced rate, it took just six real-time days for the boosted Phites to invent computers, first as a mathematical formalism and, shortly afterwards, as a suc-cession of practical machines.

Daniel had already asked Lucien to notify him if any Phite guessed the true nature of their world. In the past, a few had come up with vague metaphysical speculations that weren’t too wide of the mark, but now that they had a firm grasp of the idea of universal compu-tation, they were finally in a position to understand the crystal as more than an idle fantasy.

The message came just after midnight, as Daniel was preparing for bed. He went into his office and activated the intervention tool that Lucien had written for him, specifying a serial number for the Phite in question.

The tool prompted Daniel to provide a human-style name for his interlocutor, to facilitate communication. Daniel’s mind went blank, but after waiting twenty seconds the software offered its own suggestion: Primo.

Primo was boosted, and he had recently built a computer of his own. Shortly afterwards, the Thought Police had heard him telling a couple of unboosted friends about an amusing possibility that had occurred to him.

Sapphire was slowed to a human pace, then Daniel took control of a Phite avatar and the tool contrived a meeting, arranging for the two of them to be alone in the shelter that Primo had built for him-self. In accordance with the current architectural style the wooden building was actually still alive, self-repairing and anchored to the ground by roots.

Primo said, “Good morning. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

It was no great breach of protocol for a stranger to enter one’s shelter uninvited, but Primo was understating his surprise; in this world of immortals, but no passenger jets, bumping into strangers anywhere was rare.

“I’m Daniel.” The tool would invent a Phite name for Primo to hear. “I heard you talking to your friends last night about your new computer. Wondering what these machines might do in the future. Wondering if they could ever grow powerful enough to contain a whole world.”

“I didn’t see you there,” Primo replied.

“I wasn’t there,” Daniel explained. “I live outside this world. I built the computer that contains this world.”

Primomadeagesturethatthetoolannotatedasamusement,then he spoke a few words in the boosted language. Insults? A jest? A test of Daniel’s omniscience? Daniel decided to bluff his way through, and act as if the words were irrelevant.

He said, “Let the rain start.” Rain began pounding on the roof of the shelter. “Let the rain stop.” Daniel gestured with one claw at a large cooking pot in a corner of the room. “Sand. Flower. Fire. Water jug.” The pot obliged him, taking on each form in turn.

Primo said, “Very well. I believe you, Daniel.” Daniel had had some experience reading the Phites’ body language directly, and to him Primo seemed reasonably calm. Perhaps when you were as old as he was, and had witnessed so much change, such a revelation was far less of a shock than it would have been to a human at the dawn of the computer age.

“You created this world?” Primo asked him.

“Yes.”

“You shaped our history?”

“In part,” Daniel said. “Many things have been down to chance, or to your own choices.”

“Did you stop us having children?” Primo demanded.

“Yes,” Daniel admitted.

“Why?”

“There is no room left in the computer. It was either that, or many more deaths.”

Primo pondered this. “So you could have stopped the death of my parents, had you wished?”

“I could bring them back to life, if you want that.” This wasn’t a lie; Daniel had stored detailed snapshots of all the last mortal Phites. “But not yet; only when there’s a bigger computer. When there’s room for them.”

“Could you bring back their parents? And their parents’ parents? Back to the beginning of time?”

“No. That information is lost.”

Primo said, “What is this talk of waiting for a bigger computer? You could easily stop time from passing for us, and only start it again when your new computer is built.”

“No,” Daniel said, “I can’t. Because I need you to build the computer. I’m not like you: I’m not immortal, and my brain can’t be boosted. I’ve done my best, now I need you to do better. The only way that can happen is if you learn the science of my world, and come up with a way to make this new machine.”

Primo walked over to the water jug that Daniel had magicked into being. “It seems to me that you were ill-prepared for the task you set yourself. If you’d waited for the machine you really needed, our lives would not have been so hard. And if such a machine could not be built in your lifetime, what was to stop your grandchildren from taking on that task?”

“I had no choice,” Daniel insisted. “I couldn’t leave your creation to my descendants. There is a war coming between my people. I needed your help. I needed strong allies.”

“You have no friends in your own world?”

“Your time runs faster than mine. I needed the kind of allies that only your people can become, in time.”

Primo said, “What exactly do you want of us?”

“To build the new computer you need,” Daniel replied. “To grow in numbers, to grow in strength. Then to raise me up, to make me greater than I was, as I’ve done for you. When the war is won, there will be peace forever. Side by side, we will rule a thousand worlds.”

“And what do you want of me?” Primo asked. “Why are you speaking to me, and not to all of us?”

“Most people,” Daniel said, “aren’t ready to hear this. It’s better that they don’t learn the truth yet. But I need one person who can work for me directly. I can see and hear everything in your world, but I need you to make sense of it. I need you to understand things for me.”

Primo was silent.

Daniel said, “I gave you life. How can you refuse me?”

* * * *

Daniel pushed his way through the small crowd of protesters gath-ered at the entrance to his San Francisco tower. He could have come and gone by helicopter instead, but his security consultants had assessed these people as posing no significant threat. A small amount of bad PR didn’t bother him; he was no longer selling anything that the public could boycott directly, and none of the businesses he dealt with seemed worried about being tainted by association. He’d broken no laws, and confirmed no rumours. A few feral cyberphiles waving placards reading software is not your slave! meant nothing.

Still, if he ever found out which one of his employees had leaked details of the project, he’d break their legs.

Daniel was in the elevator when Lucien messaged him: moon very soon! He halted the elevator’s ascent, and redirected it to the basement.

All three crystals were housed in the basement now, just centi-metres away from the Play Pen: a vacuum chamber containing an atomic force microscope with fifty thousand independently mov-able tips, arrays of solid-state lasers and photodetectors, and thous-ands of micro-wells stocked with samples of all the stable chemical elements. The time lag between Sapphire and this machine had to be as short as possible, in order for the Phites to be able to conduct experiments in real-world physics while their own world was runn-ing at full speed.

Daniel pulled up a stool and sat beside the Play Pen. If he wasn’t going to slow Sapphire down, it was pointless aspiring to watch developments as they unfolded. He’d probably view a replay of the lunar landing when he went up to his office, but by the time he screened it, it would be ancient history.

‘One giant leap’ would be an understatement; wherever the Phites landed on the moon, they would find a strange black monolith waiting for them. Inside would be the means to operate the Play Pen; it would not take them long to learn the controls, or to understand what this signified. If they were really slow in grasping what they’d found, Daniel had instructed Primo to explain it to them.

The physics of the real world was far more complex than the kind the Phites were used to, but then, no human had ever been on intimate terms with quantum field theory either, and the Thought Police had already encouraged the Phites to develop most of the mathematics they’d need to get started. In any case, it didn’t matter if the Phites took longer than humans to discover twentieth-century scientific principles, and move beyond them. Seen from the outside, it would happen within hours, days, weeks at the most.

A row of indicator lights blinked on; the Play Pen was active. Daniel’s throat went dry. The Phites were finally reaching out of their own world into his.

A panel above the machine displayed histograms classifying the experiments the Phites had performed so far. By the time Daniel was paying attention, they had already discovered the kinds of bonds that could be formed between various atoms, and constructed thousands of different small molecules. As he watched, they carried out spectroscopic analyses, built simple nanomachines, and manu-factured devices that were, unmistakably, memory elements and logic gates.

The Phites wanted children, and they understood now that this was the only way. They would soon be building a world in which they were not just more numerous, but faster and smarter than they were inside the crystal. And that would only be the first of a thousand iterations. They were working their way towards Godhood, and they would lift up their own creator as they ascended.

Daniel left the basement and headed for his office. When he arrived, he called Lucien.

“They’ve built an atomic-scale computer,” Lucien announced. “And they’ve fed some fairly complex software into it. It doesn’t seem to be an upload, though. Certainly not a direct copy on the level of beads.” He sounded flustered; Daniel had forbidden him to risk screwing up the experiments by slowing down Sapphire, so even with Primo’s briefings to help him it was difficult for him to keep abreast of everything.

“Can you model their computer, and then model what the soft-ware is doing?” Daniel suggested.

Lucien said, “We only have six atomic physicists on the team; the Phites already outnumber us on that score by about a thousand to one. By the time we have any hope of making sense of this, they’ll be doing something different.”

“What does Primo say?” The Thought Police hadn’t been able to get Primo included in any of the lunar expeditions, but Lucien had given him the power to make himself invisible and teleport to any part of Sapphire or the lunar base. Wherever the action was, he was free to eavesdrop.

“Primo has trouble understanding a lot of what he hears; even the boosted aren’t universal polymaths and instant experts in every kind of jargon. The gist of it is that the Lunar Project people have made a very fast computer in the Outer World, and it’s going to help with the fertility problem ... somehow.” Lucien laughed. “Hey, maybe the Phites will do exactly what we did: see if they can evolve something smart enough to give them a hand. How cool would that be?”

Daniel was not amused. Somebody had to do some real work eventually; if the Phites just passed the buck, the whole enterprise would collapse like a pyramid scheme.

Daniel had some business meetings he couldn’t put off. By the time he’d swept all the bullshit aside, it was early afternoon. The Phites had now built some kind of tiny solid-state accelerator, and were probing the internal structure of protons and neutrons by pounding them with high-speed electrons. An atomic computer wired up to various detectors was doing the data analysis, processing the results faster than any in-world computer could. The Phites had already figured out the standard quark model. Maybe they were going to skip uploading into nanocomputers, and head straight for some kind of femtomachine?

Digests of Primo’s briefings made no mention of using the strong force for computing, though. They were still just satisfying their curiosity about the fundamental laws. Daniel reminded himself of their history. They had burrowed down to what seemed like the foundations of physics before, only to discover that those simple rules were nothing to do with the ultimate reality. It made sense that they would try to dig as deeply as they could into the mysteries of the Outer World before daring to found a colony, let alone emigrate en masse.

By sunset the Phites were probing the surroundings of the Play Pen with various kinds of radiation. The levels were extremely low—certainly too low to risk damaging the crystals—so Daniel saw no need to intervene. The Play Pen itself did not have a massive power supply, it contained no radioisotopes, and the Thought Police would ring alarm bells and bring in human experts if some kind of tabletop fusion experiment got underway, so Daniel was reasonably confident that the Phites couldn’t do anything stupid and blow the whole thing up.

Primo’s briefings made it clear that they thought they were engaged in a kind of ‘astronomy’. Daniel wondered if he should give them access to instruments for doing serious observations—the kind that would allow them to understand relativistic gravity and cosmology. Even if he bought time on a large telescope, though, just pointing it would take an eternity for the Phites. He wasn’t going to slow Sapphire down and then grow old while they explored the sky; next thing they’d be launching space probes on thirty-year missions. Maybe it was time to ramp up the level of collaboration, and just hand them some astronomy texts and star maps? Human culture had its own hard-won achievements that the Phites couldn’t easily match.

As the evening wore on, the Phites shifted their focus back to the subatomic world. A new kind of accelerator began smashing single gold ions together at extraordinary energies—though the total power being expended was still minuscule. Primo soon announced that they’d mapped all three generations of quarks and leptons. The Phites’ knowledge of particle physics was drawing level with humanity’s; Daniel couldn’t follow the technical details any more, but the experts were giving it all the thumbs up. Daniel felt a surge of pride; of course his children knew what they were doing, and if they’d reached the point where they could momentarily bamboozle him, soon he’d ask them to catch their breath and bring him up to speed. Before he permitted them to emigrate, he’d slow the crystals down and introduce himself to everyone. In fact, that might be the perfect time to set them their next task: to understand human bio-logy, well enough to upload him. To make him immortal, to repay their debt.

He sat watching images of the Phites’ latest computers, reconstruc-tions based on data flowing to and from the AFM tips. Vast lattices of shimmering atoms stretched off into the distance, the electron clouds that joined them quivering like beads of mercury in some surreal liquid abacus. As he watched, an inset window told him that the ion accelerators had been re-designed, and fired up again.

Daniel grew restless. He walked to the elevator. There was noth-ing he could see in the basement that he couldn’t see from his office, but he wanted to stand beside the Play Pen, put his hand on the casing, press his nose against the glass. The era of Sapphire as a virtual world with no consequences in his own was coming to an end; he wanted to stand beside the thing itself and be reminded that it was as solid as he was.

The elevator descended, passing the tenth floor, the ninth, the eighth. Without warning, Lucien’s voice burst from Daniel’s watch, priorityaudiocrashingthrougheverybarrierofprivacyandprotocol. “Boss, there’s radiation. Net power gain. Get to the helicopter, now.”

Daniel hesitated, contemplating an argument. If this was fusion, why hadn’t it been detected and curtailed? He jabbed the stop button and felt the brakes engage. Then the world dissolved into brightness and pain.

* * * *

When Daniel emerged from the opiate haze, a doctor informed him that he had burns to sixty per cent of his body. More from heat than from radiation. He was not going to die.

There was a net terminal by the bed. Daniel called Lucien and learnt what the physicists on the team had tentatively concluded, having studied the last of the Play Pen data that had made it off-site.

It seemed the Phites had discovered the Higgs field, and engineered a burst of something akin to cosmic inflation. What they’d done wasn’t as simple as merely inflating a tiny patch of vacuum into a new universe, though. Not only had they managed to create a ‘cool Big Bang’, they had pulled a large chunk of ordinary matter into the pocket universe they’d made, after which the wormhole leading to it had shrunk to subatomic size and fallen through the Earth.

They had taken the crystals with them, of course. If they’d tried to upload themselves into the pocket universe through the lunar data link, the Thought Police would have stopped them. So they’d emigrated by another route entirely. They had snatched their whole substrate, and ran.

Opinions were divided over exactly what else the new universe would contain. The crystals and the Play Pen floating in a void, with no power source, would leave the Phites effectively dead, but some of the team believed there could be a thin plasma of protons and electrons too, created by a form of Higgs decay that bypassed the unendurable quark-gluon fireball of a hot Big Bang. If they’d built the right nanomachines, there was a chance that they could convert the Play Pen into a structure that would keep the crystals safe, while the Phites slept through the long wait for the first starlight.

The tiny skin samples the doctors had taken finally grew into sheets large enough to graft. Daniel bounced between dark waves of pain and medicated euphoria, but one idea stayed with him throughout the turbulent journey, like a guiding star: Primo had betrayed him. He had given the fucker life, entrusted him with power, granted him privileged knowledge, showered him with the favours of the Gods. And how had he been repaid? He was back to zero. He’d spoken to his lawyers; having heard rumours of an ‘illegal radiation source’, the insurance company was not going to pay out on the crystals without a fight.

Lucien came to the hospital, in person. Daniel was moved; they hadn’t met face-to-face since the job interview. He shook the man’s hand.

“You didn’t betray me.”

Lucien looked embarrassed. “I’m resigning, boss.”

Daniel was stung, but he forced himself to accept the news stoic-ally. “I understand; you have no choice. Gupta will have a crystal of his own by now. You have to be on the winning side, in the war of the Gods.”

Lucien put his resignation letter on the bedside table. “What war? Are you still clinging to that fantasy where überdorks battle to turn the moon into computronium?”

Daniel blinked. “Fantasy? If you didn’t believe it, why were you working with me?”

“You paid me. Extremely well.”

“So how much will Gupta be paying you? I’ll double it.”

Lucien shook his head, amused. “I’m not going to work for Gupta. I’m moving into particle physics. The Phites weren’t all that far ahead of us when they escaped; maybe forty or fifty years. Once we catch up, I guess a private universe will cost about as much as a private island; maybe less in the long run. But no one’s going to be battling for control of this one, throwing grey goo around like monkeys flinging turds while they draw up their plans for Matri-oshka brains.”

Daniel said, “If you take any data from the Play Pen logs—”

“I’ll honour all the confidentiality clauses in my contract.” Lucien smiled. “But anyone can take an interest in the Higgs field; that’s public domain.”

After he left, Daniel bribed the nurse to crank up his medication, until even the sting of betrayal and disappointment began to fade.

A universe, he thought happily. Soon I’ll have a universe of my own.

But I’m going to need some workers in there, some allies, some companions. I can’t do it all alone; someone has to carry the load.

The Cutie

‘Why won’t you even talk about it?’

Diane rolled away from me and assumed a foetal position. ‘We talked about it two weeks ago. Nothing’s changed since then, so there’s no point, is there?’

We’d spent the afternoon with a friend of mine, his wife, and their six-month-old daughter. Now I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing again the expression of joy and astonishment on that beautiful child’s face, without hearing her peals of innocent laughter, without feeling once again the strange giddiness that I’d felt when Rosalie, the mother, had said, ‘Of course you can hold her.’

I had hoped that the visit would sway Diane. Instead, while leaving her untouched, it had multiplied a thousandfold my own longing for parenthood, intensifying it into an almost physical pain.

OK, OK, so it’s biologically programmed into us to love babies. So what? You could say the same about ninety per cent of human activity. It’s biologically programmed into us to enjoy sexual intercourse, but nobody seems to mind about that, nobody claims they’re being tricked by wicked nature into doing what they otherwise would not have done. Eventually someone is going to spell out, step by step, the physiological basis of the pleasure of listening to Bach, but will that make it, suddenly, a ‘primitive’ response, a biological con job, an experience as empty as the high from a euphoric drug?

‘Didn’t you feel anything when she smiled?’

‘Frank, shut up and let me get some sleep.’

‘If we have a baby, I’ll look after her. I’ll take six months off work and look after her.’

‘Oh, six months, very generous! And then what?’

‘Longer then. I could quit my job for good, if that’s what you want.’

‘And live on what? I’m not supporting you for the rest of your life! Shit! I suppose you’ll want to get married then, won’t you?’

‘All right, I won’t quit my job. We can put her in child care when she’s old enough. Why are you so set against it? Millions of people are having children every day, it’s such an ordinary thing, why do you keep manufacturing all these obstacles?’

‘Because I do not want a child. Understand? Simple as that.’

I stared up at the dark ceiling for a while, before saying with a not quite even voice, ‘I could carry it, you know. It’s perfectly safe these days, there’ve been thousands of successful male pregnancies. They could take the placenta and embryo from you after a couple of weeks, and attach it to the outer wall of my bowel.’

‘You’re sick.’

‘They can even do the fertilisation and early development in vitro, if necessary. Then all you’d have to do is donate the egg.’

‘I don’t want a child. Carried by you, carried by me, adopted, bought, stolen, whatever. Now shut up and let me sleep.’

* * * *

When I arrived home the next evening, the flat was dark, quiet, and empty. Diane had moved out; the note said she’d gone to stay with her sister. It wasn’t just the baby thing, of course; everything about me had begun to irritate her lately.

I sat in the kitchen drinking, wondering if there was any way of persuading her to come back. I knew that I was selfish: without a constant, conscious effort, I tended to ignore what other people felt. And I never seemed to be able to sustain that effort for long enough. But I did try, didn’t I? What more could she expect?

When I was very drunk, I phoned her sister, who wouldn’t even put her on. I hung up, and looked around for something I could break, but then all my energy vanished and I lay down right there on the floor. I tried to cry, but nothing happened, so I went to sleep instead.

* * * *

The thing about biological drives is, we’re so easily able to fool them, so skilled at satisfying our bodies while frustrating the evolutionary reasons for the actions that give us pleasure. Food with no nutritional value can be made to look and taste wonderful. Sex that can’t cause pregnancy is every bit as good, regardless. In the past, I suppose a pet was the only way to substitute for a child. That’s what I should have done: I should have bought a cat.

* * * *

A fortnight after Diane left me, I bought the Cutie kit, by EFT from Taiwan. Well, when I say ‘from Taiwan’ I mean the first three digits of the EFT code symbolised Taiwan; sometimes that means something real, geographically speaking, but usually it doesn’t. Most of these small companies have no physical premises; they consist of nothing but a few megabytes of data, manipulated by generic software running on the international trade network. A customer phones their local node, specifies the company and the product code, and if their bank balance or their credit rating checks out, orders are placed with various component manufacturers, shipping agents, and automated assembly firms. The company itself moves nothing but electrons.

What I really mean is: I bought a cheap copy. A pirate, a clone, a lookalike, a bootleg version, call it what you will. Of course I felt a little guilty, and a bit of a miser, but who can afford to pay five times as much for the genuine, made-in-El Salvador, USA product? Yes, it’s ripping off the people who developed the product, who spent all that time and money on R & D, but what do they expect when they charge so much? Why should I have to pay for the cocaine habits of a bunch of Californian speculators who had a lucky hunch ten years ago about a certain biotechnology corporation? Better that my money goes to some fifteen-year-old trade hacker in Taiwan or Hong Kong or Manila, who’s doing it all so that his brothers and sisters won’t have to screw rich tourists to stay alive.

See what fine motives I had?

The Cutie has a venerable ancestry. Remember the Cabbage Patch Doll? Birth certificate provided, birth defects optional. The trouble was, the things just lay there, and lifelike robotics for a doll are simply too expensive to be practical. Remember the Video Baby? The Computer Crib? Perfect realism, so long as you didn’t want to reach through the glass and cuddle the child.

Of course I didn’t want a Cutie! I wanted a real child! But how? I was thirty-four years old, at the end of one more failed relationship. What were my choices?

I could start searching again for a woman who (a) wanted to have children, (b) hadn’t yet done so, and (c) could tolerate living with a shit like me for more than a couple of years.

I could try to ignore or suppress my unreasonable desire to be a father. Intellectually (whatever that means), I had no need for a child; indeed, I could easily think of half a dozen impeccable arguments against accepting such a burden. But (to shamelessly anthropomorphise) it was as if the force that had previously led me to engage in copious sex had finally cottoned on about birth control, and so had cunningly decided to shift my attention one link down the flawed causal chain. As an adolescent dreams endlessly of sex, so I dreamed endlessly of fatherhood.

Or—

O! The blessings of technology! There’s nothing like a third option to create the illusion of freedom of choice!

—I could buy a Cutie.

Because Cuties are not legally human, the whole process of giving birth to one, whatever your gender, is simplified immensely. Lawyers are superfluous, not a single bureaucrat needs to be informed. No wonder they’re so popular, when the contracts for adoption or surrogacy or even IVF with donor gametes all run to hundreds of pages, and when the child-related clauses in interspouse legal agreements require more negotiations than missile-ban treaties.

The controlling software was downloaded into my terminal the moment my account was debited; the kit itself arrived a month later. That gave me plenty of time to have chosen the precise appearance I wanted, by playing with the simulation graphics. Blue eyes, wispy blond hair, chubby, dimpled limbs, a snub nose ... oh, what a stereotyped little cherub we built, the program and I. I chose a ‘girl’, because I’d always wanted a girl, though Cuties don’t live long enough for gender to make much of a difference. At the age of four they suddenly, quietly, pass away. The death of the little one is so tragic, so heartbreaking, so cathartic. You can put them in their satin-padded coffins, still wearing their fourth-birthday-party clothes, and kiss them goodnight one last time before they’re beamed up to Cutie heaven.

Of course it was revolting, I knew it was obscene, I cringed and squirmed inside at the utter sickness of what I was doing. But it was possible, and I find the possible so hard to resist. What’s more, it was legal, it was simple, it was even cheap. So I went ahead, step by step, watching myself, fascinated, wondering when I’d change my mind, when I’d come to my senses and call it all off.

Although Cuties originate from human germ cells, the DNA is manipulated extensively before fertilisation takes place. By changing the gene that codes for one of the proteins used to build the walls of red blood cells, and by arranging for the pineal, adrenal and thyroid glands (triple backup to leave no chance of failure) to secrete, at the critical age, an enzyme that rips the altered protein apart, infant death is guaranteed. By extreme mutilation of the genes controlling embryonic brain development, subhuman intelligence (and hence their subhuman legal status) is guaranteed. Cuties can smile and coo, gurgle and giggle and babble and dribble, cry and kick and moan, but at their peak they’re far stupider than the average puppy. Monkeys easily put them to shame, goldfish out-perform them in certain (carefully chosen) intelligence tests. They never learn to walk properly, or to feed themselves unaided. Understanding speech, let alone using it, is out of the question.

In short, Cuties are perfect for people who want all the heart-melting charms of a baby, but who do not want the prospect of surly six-year-olds, or rebellious teenagers, or middle-aged vultures who’ll sit by their parents’ deathbeds, thinking of nothing but the reading of the will.

Pirate copy or not, the process was certainly streamlined: all I had to do was hook up the Black Box to my terminal, switch it on, leave it running for a few days while various enzymes and utility viruses were tailor-made, then ejaculate into tube A.

Tube A featured a convincingly pseudo-vaginal design and realistically scented inner coating, but I have to confess that despite my lack of conceptual difficulties with this stage, it took me a ludicrous forty minutes to complete it. No matter who I remembered, no matter what I imagined, some part of my brain kept exercising a power of veto. But I read somewhere that a clever researcher has discovered that dogs with their brains removed can still go through the mechanics of copulation; the spinal cord, evidently, is all that’s required. Well, in the end my spinal cord came good, and the terminal flashed up a sarcastic well done! I should have put my fist through it. I should have chopped up the Black Box with an axe and run around the room screaming nonsense poems. I should have bought a cat. It’s good to have things to regret, though, isn’t it? I’m sure it’s an essential part of being human.

Three days later, I had to lie beside the Black Box and let it place a fierce claw on my belly. Impregnation was painless, though, despite the threatening appearance of the robot appendage; a patch of skin and muscle was locally anaesthetised, and then a quickly plunging needle delivered a pre-packaged biological complex, shielded by a chorion specially designed for the abnormal environment of my abdominal cavity.

And it was done. I was pregnant.

* * * *

After a few weeks of pregnancy, all my doubts, all my distaste, seemed to vanish. Nothing in the world could have been more beautiful, more right, than what I was doing. Every day, I summoned up the simulated foetus on my terminal—the graphics were stunning; perhaps not totally realistic, but definitely cute, and that was what I’d paid for, after all—then put my hand against my abdomen and thought deep thoughts about the magic of life.

Every month I went to a clinic for ultrasound scans, but I declined the battery of genetic tests on offer; no need for me to discard an embryo with the wrong gender or unsatisfactory eye colour, since I’d dealt with those requirements at the start.

I told no one but strangers what I was doing; I’d changed doctors for the occasion, and I’d arranged to take leave once I started to ‘show’ too severely (up until then I managed to get by with jokes about ‘too many beers’). Towards the end I began to be stared at, in shops and on the street, but I’d chosen a low birth-weight, and nobody could have known for sure that I wasn’t merely obese. (In fact, on the advice of the instruction manual, I’d intentionally put on fat before the pregnancy; evidently it’s a useful way to guarantee energy for the developing foetus.) And if anyone who saw me guessed the truth, so what? After all, I wasn’t committing a crime.

* * * *

During the day, once I was off work, I watched television and read books on child care, and arranged and rearranged the cot and toys in the corner of my room. I’m not sure when I chose the name: Angel. I never changed my mind about it, though. I carved it into the side of the cot with a knife, pretending that the plastic was the wood of a cherry tree. I contemplated having it tattooed upon my shoulder, but then that seemed inappropriate, between father and daughter. I said it aloud in the empty flat, long after my excuse about ‘trying out the sound’ was used up; I picked up the phone every now and then, and said, ‘Can you be quiet, please! Angel is trying to sleep!’

Let’s not split hairs. I was out of my skull. I knew I was out of my skull. I blamed it, with wonderful vagueness, on ‘hormonal effects’ resulting from placental secretions into my bloodstream. Sure, pregnant women didn’t go crazy, but they were better designed, biochemically as well as anatomically, for what I was doing. The bundle of joy in my abdomen was sending out all kinds of chemical messages to what it thought was a female body, so was it any wonder that I went a little strange?

Of course there were more mundane effects as well. Morning sickness (in fact, nausea at all hours of the day and night). A heightened sense of smell, and sometimes a distracting hypersensitivity of the skin. Pressure on the bladder, swollen calves. Not to mention the simple, inevitable, exhausting unwieldiness of a body that was not just heavier, but had been reshaped in about the most awkward way I could imagine. I told myself many times that I was learning an invaluable lesson, that by experiencing this state, this process, so familiar to so many women but unknown to all but a handful of men, I would surely be transformed into a better, wiser person. Like I said, I was out of my skull.

* * * *

The night before I checked in to hospital for the Caesarean, I had a dream. I dreamt that the baby emerged, not from me, but from the Black Box. It was covered in dark fur, and had a tail, and huge, lemur-like eyes. It was more beautiful than I had imagined possible. I couldn’t decide, at first, if it was most like a young monkey or a kitten, because sometimes it walked on all fours like a cat, sometimes it crouched like a monkey, and the tail seemed equally suited to either. Eventually, though, I recalled that kittens were born with their eyes closed, so a monkey was what it had to be.

It darted around the room, then hid beneath my bed. I reached under to drag it out, then found that all I had in my hands was an old pair of pyjamas.

I was woken by an overwhelming need to urinate.

* * * *

The hospital staff dealt with me without a single joke; well, I suppose I was paying enough not to be mocked. I had a private room (as far from the maternity ward as possible). Ten years ago, perhaps, my story would have been leaked to the media, and cameramen and reporters would have set up camp outside my door. But the birth of a Cutie, even to a single father, was, thankfully, no longer news. Some hundred thousand Cuties had already lived and died, so I was no trail-blazing pioneer; no paper would offer me ten years’ wages for the bizarre and shocking story of my life, no TV stations would bid for the right to zoom in on my tears at the primetime funeral of my sweet, subhuman child. The permutations of reproductive technology had been milked dry of controversy; researchers would have to come up with a quantum leap in strangeness if they wanted to regain the front page. No doubt they were working on it.

The whole thing was done under general anaesthetic. I woke with a headache like a hammer blow and a taste in my mouth like I’d thrown up rotten cheese. The first time I moved without thinking of my stitches; it was the last time I made that mistake.

I managed to raise my head.

She was lying on her back in the middle of a cot, which now looked as big as a football field. Wrinkled and pink just like any other baby, her face screwed up, her eyes shut, taking a breath, then howling, then another breath, another howl, as if screaming were every bit as natural as breathing. She had thick dark hair (the program had said she would, and that it would soon fall out and grow back fair). I climbed to my feet, ignoring the throbbing in my head, and leant over the wall of the cot to place one finger gently on her cheek. She didn’t stop howling, but she opened her eyes, and, yes, they were blue.

‘Daddy loves you,’ I said. ‘Daddy loves his Angel.’ She closed her eyes, took an extra-deep breath, then screamed. I reached down and, with terror, with dizzying joy, with infinite precision in every movement, with microscopic care, I lifted her up to my shoulder and held her there for a long, long time.

Two days later they sent us home.

* * * *

Everything worked. She didn’t stop breathing. She drank from her bottle, she wet herself and soiled her nappies, she cried for hours, and sometimes she even slept.

Somehow I managed to stop thinking of her as a Cutie. I threw out the Black Box, its task completed. I sat and watched her watch the glittering mobile I’d suspended above her cot, I watched her learning to follow movements with her eyes when I set it swinging and twisting and tinkling, I watched her trying to lift her hands towards it, trying to lift her whole body towards it, grunting with frustration, but sometimes cooing with enchantment. Then I’d rush up and lean over her and kiss her nose, and make her giggle, and say, again and again, ‘Daddy loves you! Yes, I do!’

I quit my job when my holiday entitlement ran out. I had enough saved to live frugally for years, and I couldn’t face the prospect of leaving Angel with anybody else. I took her shopping, and everyone in the supermarket succumbed to her beauty and charm. I ached to show her to my parents, but they would have asked too many questions. I cut myself off from my friends, letting no one into the flat, and refusing all invitations. I didn’t need a job, I didn’t need friends, I didn’t need anyone or anything but Angel.

I was so happy and proud, the first time she reached out and gripped my finger when I waved it in front of her face. She tried to pull it into her mouth. I resisted, teasing her, freeing my finger and moving it far away, then suddenly offering it again. She laughed at this, as if she knew with utter certainty that in the end I would give up the struggle and let her put it briefly to her gummy mouth. And when that happened, and the taste proved uninteresting, she pushed my hand away with surprising strength, giggling all the while.

According to the development schedule, she was months ahead, being able to do that at her age. ‘You little smartie!’ I said, talking much too close to her face. She grabbed my nose then exploded with glee, kicking the mattress, making a cooing sound I’d never heard before, a beautiful, delicate sequence of tones, each note sliding into the next, almost like a kind of birdsong.

I photographed her weekly, filling album after album. I bought her new clothes before she’d outgrown the old ones, and new toys before she’d even touched the ones I’d bought the week before. ‘Travel will broaden your mind,’ I said, each time we prepared for an outing. Once she was out of the pram and into the stroller, seated and able to look at more of the world than the sky, her astonishment and curiosity were sources of endless delight for me. A passing dog would have her bouncing with joy, a pigeon on the footpath was cause for vocal celebration, and cars that were too loud earned angry frowns from Angel that left me helpless with laughter, to see her tiny face so expressive of contempt.

It was only when I sat for too long watching her sleeping, listening too closely to her steady breathing, that a whisper in my head would try to remind me of her predetermined death. I shouted it down, silently screaming back nonsense, obscenities, meaningless abuse. Or sometimes I would quietly sing or hum a lullaby, and if Angel stirred at the sound I made, I would take that as a sign of victory, as certain proof that the evil voice was lying.

Yet at the very same time, in a sense, I wasn’t fooling myself for a minute. I knew she would die when the time came, as one hundred thousand others had died before her. And I knew that the only way to accept that was by doublethink, by expecting her death while pretending it would never really come, and by treating her exactly like a real, human child, while knowing all along that she was nothing more than an adorable pet. A monkey, a puppy, a goldfish.

* * * *

Have you ever done something so wrong that it dragged your whole life down into a choking black swamp in a sunless land of nightmares? Have you ever made a choice so foolish that it cancelled out, in one blow, everything good you might ever have done, made void every memory of happiness, made everything in the world that was beautiful, ugly, turned every last trace of self-respect into the certain knowledge that you should never have been born?

I have.

I bought a cheap copy of the Cutie kit.

I should have bought a cat. Cats aren’t permitted in my building, but I should have bought one anyway. I’ve known people with cats, I like cats, cats have strong personalities, a cat would have been a companion I could have given attention and affection to, without fuelling my obsession: if I’d tried dressing it up in baby clothes and feeding it from a bottle, it would have scratched me to pieces and then shrivelled my dignity with a withering stare of disdain.

I bought Angel a new set of beads one day, an abacus-like arrangement in ten shiny colours, to be suspended above her in her cot. She laughed and clapped as I installed it, her eyes glistening with mischief and delight.

Mischief and delight?

I remembered reading somewhere that a young baby’s ‘smiles’ are really caused by nothing but wind—and I remembered my annoyance; not with the facts themselves, but with the author, for feeling obliged to smugly disseminate such a tedious truth. And I thought, what’s this magic thing called ‘humanity’, anyway? Isn’t half of it, at least, in the eyes of the beholder?

‘Mischief? You? Never!’ I leant over and kissed her.

She clapped her hands and said, very clearly, ‘Daddy!’

* * * *

All the doctors I’ve seen are sympathetic, but there’s nothing they can do. The time bomb inside her is too much a part of her. That function, the kit performed perfectly.

She’s growing smarter day by day, picking up new words all the time. What should I do?

(a) Deny her stimuli?

(b) Subject her to malnutrition?

(d) None of the above?

Oh, it’s all right, I’m a little unstable, but I’m not yet completely insane: I can still understand the subtle difference between fucking up her genes and actually assaulting her living, breathing body. Yes, if I concentrate as hard as I can, I swear I can see the difference.

In fact, I think I’m coping remarkably well: I never break down in front of Angel. I hide all my anguish until she falls asleep.

Accidents happen. Nobody’s perfect. Her death will be quick and painless. Children die around the world all the time. See? There are lots of answers, lots of sounds I can make with my lips while I’m waiting for the urge to pass—the urge to kill us both, right now; the purely selfish urge to end my own suffering. I won’t do it. The doctors and all their tests might still be wrong. There might still be a miracle that can save her. I have to keep living, without daring to hope. And if she does die, then I will follow her.

There’s one question, though, to which I’ll never know the answer. It haunts me endlessly, it horrifies me more than my blackest thoughts of death:

Had she never said a word, would I really have fooled myself into believing that her death would have been less tragic?

Dark Integers

“Good morning, Bruno. How is the weather there in Sparseland?”

The screen icon for my interlocutor was a three-holed torus tiled with triangles, endlessly turning itself inside out. The polished tones of the male synthetic voice I heard conveyed no specific origin, but gave a sense nonetheless that the speaker’s first language was something other than English.

I glanced out the window of my home office, taking in a patch of blue sky and the verdant gardens of a shady West Ryde cul-de-sac. Sam used “good morning” regardless of the hour, but it really was just after ten a.m., and the tranquil Sydney suburb was awash in sunshine and birdsong.

“Perfect,” I replied. “I wish I wasn’t chained to this desk.”

There was a long pause, and I wondered if the translator had mangled the idiom, creating the impression that I had been shackled by ruthless assailants, who had nonetheless left me with easy access to my instant messaging program. Then Sam said, “I’m glad you didn’t go for a run today. I’ve already tried Alison and Yuen, and they were both unavailable. If I hadn’t been able to get through to you, it might have been difficult to keep some of my colleagues in check.”

I felt a surge of anxiety, mixed with resentment. I refused to wear an iWatch, to make myself reachable twenty-four hours a day. I was a mathematician, not an obstetrician. Perhaps I was an amateur diplomat as well, but even if Alison, Yuen, and I didn’t quite cover the time zones, it would never be more than a few hours before Sam could get hold of at least one of us.

“I didn’t realize you were surrounded by hotheads,” I replied. “What’s the great emergency?” I hoped the translator would do justice to the sharpness in my voice. Sam’s colleagues were the ones with all the firepower, all the resources; they should not have been jumping at shadows. True, we had once tried to wipe them out, but that had been a perfectly innocent mistake, more than ten years before.

Sam said, “Someone from your side seems to have jumped the border.”

“Jumped it?”

“As far as we can see, there’s no trench cutting through it. But a few hours ago, a cluster of propositions on our side started obeying your axioms.”

I was stunned. “An isolated cluster? With no derivation leading back to us?”

“None that we could find.”

I thought for a while. “Maybe it was a natural event. A brief surge across the border from the background noise that left a kind of tidal pool behind.”

Sam was dismissive. “The cluster was too big for that. The probability would be vanishingly small.” Numbers came through on the data channel; he was right.

I rubbed my eyelids with my fingertips; I suddenly felt very tired. I’d thought our old nemesis, Industrial Algebra, had given up the chase long ago. They had stopped offering bribes and sending mercenaries to harass me, so I’d assumed they’d finally written off the defect as a hoax or a mirage, and gone back to their core business of helping the world’s military kill and maim people in ever more technologically sophisticated ways.

Maybe this wasn’t IA. Alison and I had first located the defect—a set of contradictory results in arithmetic that marked the border between our mathematics and the version underlying Sam’s world—by means of a vast set of calculations farmed out over the internet, with thousands of volunteers donating their computers’ processing power when the machines would otherwise have been idle. When we’d pulled the plug on that project—keeping our discovery secret, lest IA find a way to weaponize it—a few participants had been resentful, and had talked about continuing the search. It would have been easy enough for them to write their own software, adapting the same open source framework that Alison and I had used, but it was difficult to see how they could have gathered enough supporters without launching some kind of public appeal.

I said, “I can’t offer you an immediate explanation for this. All I can do is promise to investigate.”

“I understand,” Sam replied.

“You have no clues yourself ?” A decade before, in Shanghai, when Alison, Yuen, and I had used the supercomputer called Luminous to mount a sustained attack on the defect, the mathematicians of the far side had grasped the details of our unwitting assault clearly enough to send a plume of alternative mathematics back across the border with pinpoint precision, striking at just the three of us.

Sam said, “If the cluster had been connected to something, we could have followed the trail. But in isolation it tells us nothing. That’s why my colleagues are so anxious.”

“Yeah.” I was still hoping that the whole thing might turn out to be a glitch—the mathematical equivalent of a flock of birds with a radar echo that just happened to look like something more sinister—but the full gravity of the situation was finally dawning on me.

The inhabitants of the far side were as peaceable as anyone might reasonably wish their neighbors to be, but if their mathematical infrastructure came under threat they faced the real prospect of annihilation. They had defended themselves from such a threat once before, but because they had been able to trace it to its source and understand its nature, they had shown great forbearance. They had not struck their assailants dead, or wiped out Shanghai, or pulled the ground out from under our universe.

This new assault had not been sustained, but nobody knew its origins, or what it might portend. I believed that our neighbors would do no more than they had to in order to ensure their survival, but if they were forced to strike back blindly, they might find themselves with no path to safety short of turning our world to dust.

Shanghai time was only two hours behind Sydney, but Yuen’s IM status was still “unavailable.” I emailed him, along with Alison, though it was the middle of the night in Zürich and she was unlikely to be awake for another four or five hours. All of us had programs that connected us to Sam by monitoring, and modifying, small portions of the defect: altering a handful of precariously balanced truths of arithmetic, wiggling the border between the two systems back and forth to encode each transmitted bit. The three of us on the near side might have communicated with each other in the same way, but on consideration we’d decided that conventional cryptography was a safer way to conceal our secret. The mere fact that communications data seemed to come from nowhere had the potential to attract suspicion, so we’d gone so far as to write software to send fake packets across the net to cover for our otherwise inexplicable conversations with Sam; anyone but the most diligent and resourceful of eavesdroppers would conclude that he was addressing us from an internet café in Lithuania.

While I was waiting for Yuen to reply, I scoured the logs where my knowledge miner deposited results of marginal relevance, wondering if some flaw in the criteria I’d given it might have left me with a blind spot. If anyone, anywhere had announced their intention to carry out some kind of calculation that might have led them to the defect, the news should have been plastered across my desktop in flashing red letters within seconds. Granted, most organizations with the necessary computing resources were secretive by nature, but they were also unlikely to be motivated to indulge in such a crazy stunt. Luminous itself had been decommissioned in 2012; in principle, various national security agencies, and even a few IT-centric businesses, now had enough silicon to hunt down the defect if they’d really set their sights on it, but as far as I knew Yuen, Alison, and I were still the only three people in the world who were certain of its existence. The black budgets of even the most profligate governments, the deep pockets of even the richest tycoons, would not stretch far enough to take on the search as a long shot, or an act of whimsy.

An IM window popped up with Alison’s face. She looked ragged. “What time is it there?” I asked.

“Early. Laura’s got colic.”

“Ah. Are you okay to talk?”

“Yeah, she’s asleep now.”

My email had been brief, so I filled her in on the details. She pondered the matter in silence for a while, yawning unashamedly.

“The only thing I can think of is some gossip I heard at a conference in Rome a couple of months ago. It was a fourth-hand story about some guy in New Zealand who thinks he’s found a way to test fundamental laws of physics by doing computations in number theory.”

“Just random crackpot stuff, or ... what?”

Alison massaged her temples, as if trying to get more blood flowing to her brain. “I don’t know, what I heard was too vague to make a judgment. I gather he hasn’t tried to publish this anywhere, or even mentioned it in blogs. I guess he just confided in a few people directly, one of whom must have found it too amusing for them to keep their mouth shut.”

“Have you got a name?”

She went off camera and rummaged for a while. “Tim Campbell,” she announced. Her notes came through on the data channel. “He’s done respectable work in combinatorics, algorithmic complexity, optimization. I scoured the net, and there was no mention of this weird stuff. I was meaning to email him, but I never got around to it.”

I could understand why; that would have been about the time Laura was born. I said, “I’m glad you still go to so many conferences in the flesh. It’s easier in Europe, everything’s so close.”

“Ha! Don’t count on it continuing, Bruno. You might have to put your fat arse on a plane sometime yourself.”

“What about Yuen?”

Alison frowned. “Didn’t I tell you? He’s been in hospital for a couple of days. Pneumonia. I spoke to his daughter, he’s not in great shape.”

“I’m sorry.” Alison was much closer to him than I was; he’d been her doctoral supervisor, so she’d known him long before the events that had bound the three of us together.

Yuen was almost eighty. That wasn’t yet ancient for a middle-class Chinese man who could afford good medical care, but he would not be around forever.

I said, “Are we crazy, trying to do this ourselves?” She knew what I meant: liaising with Sam, managing the border, trying to keep the two worlds talking but the two sides separate, safe and intact.

Alison replied, “Which government would you trust not to screw this up? Not to try to exploit it?”

“None. But what’s the alternative? You pass the job on to Laura? Kate’s not interested in having kids. So do I pick some young mathematician at random to anoint as my successor?”

“Not at random, I’d hope.”

“You want me to advertise? ‘Must be proficient in number theory, familiar with Machiavelli, and own the complete boxed set of The West Wing?’”

She shrugged. “When the time comes, find someone competent you can trust. It’s a balance: the fewer people who know, the better, so long as there are always enough of us that the knowledge doesn’t risk getting lost completely.”

“And this goes on generation after generation? Like some secret society? The Knights of the Arithmetic Inconsistency?”

“I’ll work on the crest.”

We needed a better plan, but this wasn’t the time to argue about it. I said, “I’ll contact this guy Campbell and let you know how it goes.”

“Okay. Good luck.” Her eyelids were starting to droop.

“Take care of yourself.”

Alison managed an exhausted smile. “Are you saying that because you give a damn, or because you don’t want to end up guarding the Grail all by yourself ?”

“Both, of course.”

“I have to fly to Wellington tomorrow.”

Kate put down the pasta-laden fork she’d raised halfway to her lips and gave me a puzzled frown. “That’s short notice.”

“Yeah, it’s a pain. It’s for the Bank of New Zealand. I have to do something on-site with a secure machine, one they won’t let anyone access over the net.”

Her frown deepened. “When will you be back?”

“I’m not sure. It might not be until Monday. I can probably do most of the work tomorrow, but there are certain things they restrict to the weekends, when the branches are off-line. I don’t know if it will come to that.”

I hated lying to her, but I’d grown accustomed to it. When we’d met, just a year after Shanghai, I could still feel the scar on my arm where one of Industrial Algebra’s hired thugs had tried to carve a data cache out of my body. At some point, as our relationship deepened, I’d made up my mind that however close we became, however much I trusted her, it would be safer for Kate if she never knew anything about the defect.

“They can’t hire someone local?” she suggested. I didn’t think she was suspicious, but she was definitely annoyed. She worked long hours at the hospital, and she only had every second weekend off; this would be one of them. We’d made no specific plans, but it was part of our routine to spend this time together.

I said, “I’m sure they could, but it’d be hard to find someone at short notice. And I can’t tell them to shove it, or I’ll lose the whole contract. It’s one weekend, it’s not the end of the world.”

“No, it’s not the end of the world.” She finally lifted her fork again.

“Is the sauce okay?”

“It’s delicious, Bruno.” Her tone made it clear that no amount of culinary effort would have been enough to compensate, so I might as well not have bothered.

I watched her eat with a strange knot growing in my stomach. Was this how spies felt, when they lied to their families about their work? But my own secret sounded more like something from a psychiatric ward. I was entrusted with the smooth operation of a treaty that I, and two friends, had struck with an invisible ghost world that coexisted with our own. The ghost world was far from hostile, but the treaty was the most important in human history, because either side had the power to annihilate the other so thoroughly that it would make a nuclear holocaust seem like a pinprick.

Victoria University was in a hilltop suburb overlooking Wellington. I caught a cable car, and arrived just in time for the Friday afternoon seminar. Contriving an invitation to deliver a paper here myself would have been difficult, but wangling permission to sit in as part of the audience was easy; although I hadn’t been an academic for almost twenty years, my ancient Ph.D and a trickle of publications, however tenuously related to the topic of the seminar, were still enough to make me welcome.

I’d taken a gamble that Campbell would attend—the topic was peripheral to his own research, official or otherwise—so I was relieved to spot him in the audience, recognizing him from a photo on the faculty web site. I’d emailed him straight after I’d spoken to Alison, but his reply had been a polite brush-off: he acknowledged that the work I’d heard about on the grapevine owed something to the infamous search that Alison and I had launched, but he wasn’t ready to make his own approach public.

I sat through an hour on “Monoids and Control Theory,” trying to pay enough attention that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself if the seminar organizer quizzed me later on why I’d been sufficiently attracted to the topic to interrupt my “sightseeing holiday” in order to attend. When the seminar ended, the audience split into two streams: one heading out of the building, the other moving into an adjoining room where refreshments were on offer. I saw Campbell making for the open air, and it was all I could do to contrive to get close enough to call out to him without making a spectacle.

“Dr. Campbell?”

He turned and scanned the room, probably expecting to see one of his students wanting to beg for an extension on an assignment. I raised a hand and approached him.

“Bruno Costanzo. I emailed you yesterday.”

“Of course.” Campbell was a thin, pale man in his early thirties. He shook my hand, but he was obviously taken aback. “You didn’t mention that you were in Wellington.”

I made a dismissive gesture. “I was going to, but then it seemed a bit presumptuous.” I didn’t spell it out, I just left him to conclude that I was as ambivalent about this whole inconsistency nonsense as he was.

If fate had brought us together, though, wouldn’t it be absurd not to make the most of it?

“I was going to grab some of those famous scones,” I said; the seminar announcement on the web had made big promises for them. “Are you busy?”

“Umm. Just paperwork. I suppose I can put it off.”

As we made our way into the tea room, I waffled on airily about my holiday plans. I’d never actually been to New Zealand before, so I made it clear that most of my itinerary still lay in the future. Campbell was no more interested in the local geography and wildlife than I was; the more I enthused, the more distant his gaze became. Once it was apparent that he wasn’t going to cross-examine me on the finer points of various hiking trails, I grabbed a buttered scone and switched subject abruptly.

“The thing is, I heard you’d devised a more efficient strategy for searching for a defect.” I only just managed to stop myself from using the definite article; it was a while since I’d spoken about it as if it were still hypothetical. “You know the kind of computing power that Dr. Tierney and I had to scrounge up?”

“Of course. I was just an undergraduate, but I heard about the search.”

“Were you one of our volunteers?” I’d checked the records, and he wasn’t listed, but people had had the option of registering anonymously.

“No. The idea didn’t really grab me, at the time.” As he spoke, he seemed more discomfited than the failure to donate his own resources twelve years ago really warranted. I was beginning to suspect that he’d actually been one of the people who’d found the whole tongue-in-cheek conjecture that Alison and I had put forward to be unforgivably foolish. We had never asked to be taken seriously—and we had even put prominent links to all the worthy biomedical computing projects on our web page, so that people knew there were far better ways to spend their spare megaflops—but nonetheless, some mathematical/philosophical stuffed shirts had spluttered with rage at the sheer impertinence and naïvety of our hypothesis. Before things turned serious, it was the entertainment value of that backlash that had made our efforts worthwhile.

“But now you’ve refined it somehow?” I prompted him, doing my best to let him see that I felt no resentment at the prospect of being outdone. In fact, the hypothesis itself had been Alison’s, so even if there hadn’t been more important things than my ego at stake, that really wasn’t a factor. As for the search algorithm, I’d cobbled it together on a Sunday afternoon, as a joke, to call Alison’s bluff. Instead, she’d called mine, and insisted that we release it to the world.

Campbell glanced around to see who was in earshot, but then perhaps it dawned on him that if the news of his ideas had already reached Sydney via Rome and Zürich, the battle to keep his reputation pristine in Wellington was probably lost.

He said, “What you and Dr. Tierney suggested was that random processes in the early universe might have included proofs of mutually contradictory theorems about the integers, the idea being that no computation to expose the inconsistency had yet had time to occur. Is that a fair summary?”

“Sure.”

“One problem I have with that is, I don’t see how it could lead to an inconsistency that could be detected here and now. If the physical system A proved theorem A, and the physical system B proved theorem B, then you might have different regions of the universe obeying different axioms, but it’s not as if there’s some universal mathematics textbook hovering around outside spacetime, listing every theorem that’s ever been proved, which our computers then consult in order to decide how to behave. The behavior of a classical system is determined by its own particular causal past. If we’re the descendants of a patch of the universe that proved theorem A, our computers should be perfectly capable of disproving theorem B, whatever happened somewhere else fourteen billion years ago.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “I can see what you’re getting at.” If you weren’t going to accept full-blooded Platonism, in which there was a kind of ghostly textbook listing the eternal truths of mathematics, then a half-baked version where the book started out empty and was only filled in line-by-line as various theorems were tested seemed like the worst kind of compromise. In fact, when the far side had granted Yuen, Alison, and I insight into their mathematics for a few minutes in Shanghai, Yuen had proclaimed that the flow of mathematical information did obey Einstein locality; there was no universal book of truths, just records of the past sloshing around at lightspeed or less, intermingling and competing.

I could hardly tell Campbell, though, that not only did I know for a fact that a single computer could prove both a theorem and its negation, but depending on the order in which it attacked the calculations it could sometimes even shift the boundary where one set of axioms failed and the other took over.

I said, “And yet you still believe it’s worth searching for an inconsistency?”

“I do,” he conceded. “Though I came to the idea from a very different approach.” He hesitated, then picked up a scone from the table beside us.

“One rock, one apple, one scone. We have a clear idea of what we mean by those phrases, though each one might encompass ten-to-the-ten-to-the-thirty-something slightly different configurations of matter. My ‘one scone’ is not the same as your ‘one scone.’”

“Right.”

“You know how banks count large quantities of cash?”

“By weighing them?” In fact there were several other cross-checks as well, but I could see where he was heading and I didn’t want to distract him with nit-picking.

“Exactly. Suppose we tried to count scones the same way: weigh the batch, divide by some nominal value, then round to the nearest integer. The weight of any individual scone varies so much that you could easily end up with a version of arithmetic different from our own. If you ‘counted’ two separate batches, then merged them and ‘counted’ them together, there’s no guarantee that the result would agree with the ordinary process of integer addition.”

I said, “Clearly not. But digital computers don’t run on scones, and they don’t count bits by weighing them.”

“Bear with me,” Campbell replied. “It isn’t a perfect analogy, but I’m not as crazy as I sound. Suppose, now, that everything we talk about as ‘one thing’ has a vast number of possible configurations that we’re either ignoring deliberately, or are literally incapable of distinguishing. Even something as simple as an electron prepared in a certain quantum state.”

I said, “You’re talking about hidden variables now?”

“Of a kind, yes. Do you know about Gerard ‘t Hooft’s models for deterministic quantum mechanics?”

“Only vaguely,” I admitted.

“He postulated fully deterministic degrees of freedom at the Planck scale, with quantum states corresponding to equivalence classes containing many different possible configurations. What’s more, all the ordinary quantum states we prepare at an atomic level would be complex superpositions of those primordial states, which allows him to get around the Bell inequalities.” I frowned slightly; I more or less got the picture, but I’d need to go away and read ‘t Hooft’s papers.

Campbell said, “In a sense, the detailed physics isn’t all that important, so long as you accept that ‘one thing’ might not ever be exactly the same as another ‘one thing,’ regardless of the kind of objects we’re talking about. Given that supposition, physical processes that seem to be rigorously equivalent to various arithmetic operations can turn out not to be as reliable as you’d think. With scone-weighing, the flaws are obvious, but I’m talking about the potentially subtler results of misunderstanding the fundamental nature of matter.”

“Hmm.” Though it was unlikely that anyone else Campbell had confided in had taken these speculations as seriously as I did, not only did I not want to seem a pushover, I honestly had no idea whether anything he was saying bore the slightest connection to reality.

I said, “It’s an interesting idea, but I still don’t see how it could speed up the hunt for inconsistencies.”

“I have a set of models,” he said, “which are constrained by the need to agree with some of ‘t Hooft’s ideas about the physics, and also by the need to make arithmetic almost consistent for a very large range of objects. From neutrinos to clusters of galaxies, basic arithmetic involving the kinds of numbers we might encounter in ordinary situations should work out in the usual way.” He laughed. “I mean, that’s the world we’re living in, right?”

Some of us. “Yeah.”

“But the interesting thing is, I can’t make the physics work at all if the arithmetic doesn’t run askew eventually—if there aren’t trans-astronomical numbers where the physical representations no longer capture the arithmetic perfectly. And each of my models lets me predict, more or less, where those effects should begin to show up. By starting with the fundamental physical laws, I can deduce a sequence of calculations with large integers that ought to reveal an inconsistency, when performed with pretty much any computer.”

“Taking you straight to the defect, with no need to search at all.” I’d let the definite article slip out, but it hardly seemed to matter anymore.

“That’s the theory.” Campbell actually blushed slightly. “Well, when you say ‘no search,’ what’s involved really is a much smaller search. There are still free parameters in my models; there are potentially billions of possibilities to test.”

I grinned broadly, wondering if my expression looked as fake as it felt. “But no luck yet?”

“No.” He was beginning to become self-conscious again, glancing around to see who might be listening.

Was he lying to me? Keeping his results secret until he could verify them a million more times, and then decide how best to explain them to incredulous colleagues and an uncomprehending world? Or had whatever he’d done that had lobbed a small grenade into Sam’s universe somehow registered in Campbell’s own computer as arithmetic as usual, betraying no evidence of the boundary he’d crossed? After all, the offending cluster of propositions had obeyed our axioms, so perhaps Campbell had managed to force them to do so without ever realizing that they hadn’t in the past. His ideas were obviously close to the mark—and I could no longer believe this was just a coincidence—but he seemed to have no room in his theory for something that I knew for a fact: arithmetic wasn’t merely inconsistent, it was dynamic. You could take its contradictions and slide them around like bumps in a carpet.

Campbell said, “Parts of the process aren’t easy to automate; there’s some manual work to be done setting up the search for each broad class of models. I’ve only been doing this in my spare time, so it could be a while before I get around to examining all the possibilities.”

“I see.” If all of his calculations so far had produced just one hit on the far side, it was conceivable that the rest would pass without incident. He would publish a negative result ruling out an obscure class of physical theories, and life would go on as normal on both sides of the inconsistency.

What kind of weapons inspector would I be, though, to put my faith in that rosy supposition?

Campbell was looking fidgety, as if his administrative obligations were beckoning. I said, “It’d be great to talk about this a bit more while we’ve got the chance. Are you busy tonight? I’m staying at a backpacker’s down in the city, but maybe you could recommend a restaurant around here somewhere?”

He looked dubious for a moment, but then an instinctive sense of hospitality seemed to overcome his reservations. He said, “Let me check with my wife. We’re not really into restaurants, but I was cooking tonight anyway, and you’d be welcome to join us.”

Campbell’s house was a fifteen minute walk from the campus; at my request, we detoured to a liquor store so I could buy a couple of bottles of wine to accompany the meal. As I entered the house, my hand lingered on the doorframe, depositing a small device that would assist me if I needed to make an uninvited entry in the future.

Campbell’s wife, Bridget, was an organic chemist, who also taught at Victoria University. The conversation over dinner was all about department heads, budgets, and grant applications, and, despite having left academia long ago, I had no trouble relating sympathetically to the couple’s gripes. My hosts ensured that my wine glass never stayed empty for long.

When we’d finished eating, Bridget excused herself to make a call to her mother, who lived in a small town on the south island. Campbell led me into his study and switched on a laptop with fading keys that must have been twenty years old. Many households had a computer like this: the machine that could no longer run the latest trendy bloatware, but which still worked perfectly with its original OS.

Campbell turned his back to me as he typed his password, and I was careful not to be seen even trying to look. Then he opened some C++ files in an editor, and scrolled over parts of his search algorithm.

I felt giddy, and it wasn’t the wine; I’d filled my stomach with an over-the-counter sobriety aid that turned ethanol into glucose and water faster than any human being could imbibe it. I fervently hoped that Industrial Algebra really had given up their pursuit; if I could get this close to Campbell’s secrets in half a day, IA could be playing the stock market with alternative arithmetic before the month was out, and peddling inconsistency weapons to the Pentagon soon after.

I did not have a photographic memory, and Campbell was just showing me fragments anyway. I didn’t think he was deliberately taunting me; he just wanted me to see that he had something concrete, that all his claims about Planck scale physics and directed search strategies had been more than hot air.

I said, “Wait! What’s that?” He stopped hitting the PAGE DOWN key, and I pointed at a list of variable declarations in the middle of the screen:

long int i1, i2, i3; dark d1, d2, d3; A “long int” was a long integer, a quantity represented by twice as many bits as usual. On this vintage machine, that was likely to be a total of just sixty-four bits. “What the fuck is a ‘dark’?” I demanded. It wasn’t how I’d normally speak to someone I’d only just met, but then, I wasn’t meant to be sober.

Campbell laughed. “A dark integer. It’s a type I defined. It holds four thousand and ninety-six bits.”

“But why the name?”

“Dark matter, dark energy ... dark integers. They’re all around us, but we don’t usually see them, because they don’t quite play by the rules.”

Hairs rose on the back of my neck. I could not have described the infrastructure of Sam’s world more concisely myself.

Campbell shut down the laptop. I’d been looking for an opportunity to handle the machine, however briefly, without arousing his suspicion, but that clearly wasn’t going to happen, so as we walked out of the study I went for plan B.

“I’m feeling kind of ...” I sat down abruptly on the floor of the hallway. After a moment, I fished my phone out of my pocket and held it up to him. “Would you mind calling me a taxi?”

“Yeah, sure.” He accepted the phone, and I cradled my head in my arms. Before he could dial the number, I started moaning softly. There was a long pause; he was probably weighing up the embarrassment factor of various alternatives.

Finally he said, “You can sleep here on the couch if you like.” I felt a genuine pang of sympathy for him; if some clown I barely knew had pulled a stunt like this on me, I would at least have made him promise to foot the cleaning bills if he threw up in the middle of the night.

In the middle of the night, I did make a trip to the bathroom, but I kept the sound effects restrained. Halfway through, I walked quietly to the study, crossed the room in the dark, and slapped a thin, transparent patch over the adhesive label that a service company had placed on the outside of the laptop years before. My addition would be invisible to the naked eye, and it would take a scalpel to prise it off. The relay that would communicate with the patch was larger, about the size of a coat button; I stuck it behind a bookshelf. Unless Campbell was planning to paint the room or put in new carpet, it would probably remain undetected for a couple of years, and I’d already prepaid a two year account with a local wireless internet provider.

I woke not long after dawn, but this un-Bacchanalian early rising was no risk to my cover; Campbell had left the curtains open so the full force of the morning sun struck me in the face, a result that was almost certainly deliberate. I tiptoed around the house for ten minutes or so, not wanting to seem too organized if anyone was listening, then left a scrawled note of thanks and apology on the coffee table by the couch, before letting myself out and heading for the cable car stop.

Down in the city, I sat in a café opposite the backpacker’s hostel and connected to the relay, which in turn had established a successful link with the polymer circuitry of the laptop patch. When noon came and went without Campbell logging on, I sent a message to Kate telling her that I was stuck in the bank for at least another day.

I passed the time browsing the news feeds and buying overpriced snacks; half of the café’s other patrons were doing the same. Finally, just after three o’clock, Campbell started up the laptop.

The patch couldn’t read his disk drive, but it could pick up currents flowing to and from the keyboard and the display, allowing it to deduce everything he typed and everything he saw. Capturing his password was easy. Better yet, once he was logged in he set about editing one of his files, extending his search program to a new class of models. As he scrolled back and forth, it wasn’t long before the patch’s screen shots encompassed the entire contents of the file he was working on.

He labored for more than two hours, debugging what he’d written, then set the program running. This creaky old twentieth century machine, which predated the whole internet-wide search for the defect, had already scored one direct hit on the far side; I just hoped this new class of models were all incompatible with the successful ones from a few days before.

Shortly afterward, the IR sensor in the patch told me that Campbell had left the room. The patch could induce currents in the keyboard connection; I could type into the machine as if I was right there. I started a new process window. The laptop wasn’t connected to the internet at all, except through my spyware, but it took me only fifteen minutes to display and record everything there was to see: a few library and header files that the main program depended on, and the data logs listing all of the searches so far. It would not have been hard to hack into the operating system and make provisions to corrupt any future searches, but I decided to wait until I had a better grasp of the whole situation. Even once I was back in Sydney, I’d be able to eavesdrop whenever the laptop was in use, and intervene whenever it was left unattended. I’d only stayed in Wellington in case there’d been a need to return to Campbell’s house in person.

When evening fell and I found myself with nothing urgent left to do, I didn’t call Kate; it seemed wiser to let her assume that I was slaving away in a windowless computer room. I left the café and lay on my bed in the hostel. The dormitory was deserted; everyone else was out on the town.

I called Alison in Zürich and brought her up to date. In the background, I could hear her husband, Philippe, trying to comfort Laura in another room, calmly talking baby-talk in French while his daughter wailed her head off.

Alison was intrigued. “Campbell’s theory can’t be perfect, but it must be close. Maybe we’ll be able to find a way to make it fit in with the dynamics we’ve seen.” In the ten years since we’d stumbled on the defect, all our work on it had remained frustratingly empirical: running calculations and observing their effects. We’d never come close to finding any deep underlying principles.

“Do you think Sam knows all this?” she asked.

“I have no idea. If he did, I doubt he’d admit it.” Though it was Sam who had given us a taste of far-side mathematics in Shanghai, that had really just been a clip over the ear to let us know that what we were trying to wipe out with Luminous was a civilization, not a wasteland. After that near-disastrous first encounter, he had worked to establish communications with us, learning our languages and happily listening to the accounts we’d volunteered of our world, but he had not been equally forthcoming in return. We knew next to nothing about far-side physics, astronomy, biology, history, or culture. That there were living beings occupying the same space as the Earth suggested that the two universes were intimately coupled somehow, in spite of their mutual invisibility. But Sam had hinted that life was much more common on his side of the border than ours; when I’d told him that we seemed to be alone, at least in the solar system, and were surrounded by light-years of sterile vacuum, he’d taken to referring to our side as “Sparseland.”

Alison said, “Either way, I think we should keep it to ourselves. The treaty says we should do everything in our power to deal with any breach of territory of which the other side informs us. We’re doing that. But we’re not obliged to disclose the details of Campbell’s activities.”

“That’s true.” I wasn’t entirely happy with her suggestion, though. In spite of the attitude Sam and his colleagues had taken—in which they assumed that anything they told us might be exploited, might make them more vulnerable—a part of me had always wondered if there was some gesture of good faith we could make, some way to build trust. Since talking to Campbell, in the back of my mind I’d been building up a faint hope that his discovery might lead to an opportunity to prove, once and for all, that our intentions were honorable.

Alison read my mood. She said, “Bruno, they’ve given us nothing. Shanghai excuses a certain amount of caution, but we also know from Shanghai that they could brush Luminous aside like a gnat. They have enough computing power to crush us in an instant, and they still cling to every strategic advantage they can get. Not to do the same ourselves would just be stupid and irresponsible.”

“So you want us to hold on to this secret weapon?” I was beginning to develop a piercing headache. My usual way of dealing with the surreal responsibility that had fallen on the three of us was to pretend that it didn’t exist; having to think about it constantly for three days straight meant more tension than I’d faced for a decade. “Is that what it’s come down to? Our own version of the Cold War? Why don’t you just march into NATO headquarters on Monday and hand over everything we know?”

Alison said dryly, “Switzerland isn’t a member of NATO. The government here would probably charge me with treason.”

I didn’t want to fight with her. “We should talk about this later. We don’t even know exactly what we’ve got. I need to go through Campbell’s files and confirm whether he really did what we think he did.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll call you from Sydney.”

It took me a while to make sense of everything I’d stolen from Campbell, but eventually I was able to determine which calculations he’d performed on each occasion recorded in his log files. Then I compared the propositions that he’d tested with a rough, static map of the defect; since the event Sam had reported had been deep within the far side, there was no need to take account of the small fluctuations that the border underwent over time.

If my analysis was correct, late on Wednesday night Campbell’s calculations had landed in the middle of far-side mathematics. He’d been telling me the truth, though; he’d found nothing out of the ordinary there. Instead, the thing he had been seeking had melted away before his gaze.

In all the calculations Alison and I had done, only at the border had we been able to force propositions to change their allegiance and obey our axioms. It was as if Campbell had dived in from some higher dimension, carrying a hosepipe that sprayed everything with the arithmetic we knew and loved.

For Sam and his colleagues, this was the equivalent of a suitcase nuke appearing out of nowhere, as opposed to the ICBMs they knew how to track and annihilate. Now Alison wanted us to tell them, “Trust us, we’ve dealt with it,” without showing them the weapon itself, without letting them see how it worked, without giving them a chance to devise new defenses against it.

She wanted us to have something up our sleeves, in case the hawks took over the far side, and decided that Sparseland was a ghost world whose lingering, baleful presence they could do without.

Drunken Saturday-night revelers began returning to the hostel, singing off-key and puking enthusiastically. Maybe this was poetic justice for my own faux-inebriation; if so, I was being repaid a thousandfold. I started wishing I’d shelled out for classier accommodation, but since there was no employer picking up my expenses, it was going to be hard enough dealing with my lie to Kate without spending even more on the trip.

Forget the arithmetic of scones; I knew how to make digital currency reproduce like the marching brooms of the sorcerer’s apprentice. It might even have been possible to milk the benefits without Sam noticing; I could try to hide my far-sider trading behind the manipulations of the border we used routinely to exchange messages.

I had no idea how to contain the side-effects, though. I had no idea what else such meddling would disrupt, how many people I might kill or maim in the process.

I buried my head beneath the pillows and tried to find a way to get to sleep through the noise. I ended up calculating powers of seven, a trick I hadn’t used since childhood. I’d never been a prodigy at mental arithmetic, and the concentration required to push on past the easy cases drained me far faster than any physical labor. Two hundred and eighty-two million, four hundred and seventy-five thousand, two hundred and forty-nine. The numbers rose into the stratosphere like bean stalks, until they grew too high and tore themselves apart, leaving behind a cloud of digits drifting through my skull like black confetti.

“The problem is under control,” I told Sam. “I’ve located the source, and I’ve taken steps to prevent a recurrence.”

“Are you sure of that?” As he spoke, the three-holed torus on the screen twisted restlessly. In fact I’d chosen the icon myself, and its appearance wasn’t influenced by Sam at all, but it was impossible not to project emotions onto its writhing.

I said, “I’m certain that I know who was responsible for the incursion on Wednesday. It was done without malice; in fact the person who did it doesn’t even realize that he crossed the border. I’ve modified the operating system on his computer so that it won’t allow him to do the same thing again; if he tries, it will simply give him the same answers as before, but this time the calculations won’t actually be performed.”

“That’s good to hear,” Sam said. “Can you describe these calculations?”

I was as invisible to Sam as he was to me, but out of habit I tried to keep my face composed. “I don’t see that as part of our agreement,” I replied.

Sam was silent for a few seconds. “That’s true, Bruno. But it might provide us with a greater sense of reassurance if we knew what caused the breach in the first place.”

I said, “I understand. But we’ve made a decision.” We was Alison and I; Yuen was still in hospital, in no state to do anything. Alison and I, speaking for the world.

“I’ll put your position to my colleagues,” he said. “We’re not your enemy, Bruno.” His tone sounded regretful, and these nuances were under his control.

“I know that,” I replied. “Nor are we yours. Yet you’ve chosen to keep most of the details of your world from us. We don’t view that as evidence of hostility, so you have no grounds to complain if we keep a few secrets of our own.”

“I’ll contact you again soon,” Sam said.

The messenger window closed. I emailed an encrypted transcript to Alison, then slumped across my desk. My head was throbbing, but the encounter really hadn’t gone too badly. Of course Sam and his colleagues would have preferred to know everything; of course they were going to be disappointed and reproachful. That didn’t mean they were going to abandon the benign policies of the last decade. The important thing was that my assurance would prove to be reliable: the incursion would not be repeated.

I had work to do, the kind that paid bills. Somehow I summoned up the discipline to push the whole subject aside and get on with a report on stochastic methods for resolving distributed programming bottlenecks that I was supposed to be writing for a company in Singapore.

Four hours later, when the doorbell rang, I’d left my desk to raid the kitchen. I didn’t bother checking the doorstep camera; I just walked down the hall and opened the door.

Campbell said, “How are you, Bruno?”

“I’m fine. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming to Sydney?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I found your house?”

“How?”

He held up his phone. There was a text message from me, or at least from my phone; it had SMS’d its GPS coordinates to him.

“Not bad,” I conceded.

“I believe they recently added ‘corrupting communications devices’ to the list of terrorism-related offenses in Australia. You could probably get me thrown into solitary confinement in a maximum security prison.”

“Only if you know at least ten words of Arabic.”

“Actually I spent a month in Egypt once, so anything’s possible. But I don’t think you really want to go to the police.”

I said, “Why don’t you come in?”

As I showed him to the living room my mind was racing. Maybe he’d found the relay behind the bookshelf, but surely not before I’d left his house. Had he managed to get a virus into my phone remotely? I’d thought my security was better than that.

Campbell said, “I’d like you to explain why you bugged my computer.”

“I’m growing increasingly unsure of that myself. The correct answer might be that you wanted me to.”

He snorted. “That’s rich! I admit that I deliberately allowed a rumor to start about my work, because I was curious as to why you and Alison Tierney called off your search. I wanted to see if you’d come sniffing around. As you did. But that was hardly an invitation to steal all my work.”

“What was the point of the whole exercise for you, then, if not a way of stealing something from Alison and me?”

“You can hardly compare the two. I just wanted to confirm my suspicion that you actually found something.”

“And you believe that you’ve confirmed that?”

He shook his head, but it was with amusement, not denial. I said, “Why are you here? Do you think I’m going to publish your crackpot theory as my own? I’m too old to get the Fields Medal, but maybe you think it’s Nobel material.”

“Oh, I don’t think you’re interested in fame. As I said, I think you beat me to the prize a long time ago.”

I rose to my feet abruptly; I could feel myself scowling, my fists tightening. “So what’s the bottom line? You want to press charges against me for the laptop? Go ahead. We can each get a fine in absentia.”

Campbell said, “I want to know exactly what was so important to you that you crossed the Tasman, lied your way into my house, abused my hospitality, and stole my files. I don’t think it was simply curiosity, or jealousy. I think you found something ten years ago, and now you’re afraid my work is going to put it at risk.”

I sat down again. The rush of adrenaline I’d experienced at being cornered had dissipated. I could almost hear Alison whispering in my ear, “Either you kill him, Bruno, or you recruit him.” I had no intention of killing anyone, but I wasn’t yet certain that these were the only two choices.

I said, “And if I tell you to mind your own business?”

He shrugged. “Then I’ll work harder. I know you’ve screwed that laptop, and maybe the other computers in my house, but I’m not so broke that I can’t get a new machine.”

Which would be a hundred times faster. He’d re-run every search, probably with wider parameter ranges. The suitcase nuke from Sparseland that had started this whole mess would detonate again, and for all I knew it could be ten times, a hundred times, more powerful.

I said, “Have you ever wanted to join a secret society?”

Campbell gave an incredulous laugh. “No!”

“Neither did I. Too bad.”

I told him everything. The discovery of the defect. Industrial Algebra’s pursuit of the result. The epiphany in Shanghai. Sam establishing contact. The treaty, the ten quiet years. Then the sudden jolt of his own work, and the still-unfolding consequences.

Campbell was clearly shaken, but despite the fact that I’d confirmed his original suspicion he wasn’t ready to take my word for the whole story.

I knew better than to invite him into my office for a demonstration; faking it there would have been trivial. We walked to the local shopping center, and I handed him two hundred dollars to buy a new notebook. I told him the kind of software he’d need to download, without limiting his choice to any particular package. Then I gave him some further instructions. Within half an hour, he had seen the defect for himself, and nudged the border a short distance in each direction.

We were sitting in the food hall, surrounded by boisterous teenagers who’d just got out from school. Campbell was looking at me as if I’d seized a toy machine gun from his hands, transformed it into solid metal, then bashed him over the head with it.

I said, “Cheer up. There was no war of the worlds after Shanghai; I think we’re going to survive this, too.” After all these years, the chance to share the burden with someone new was actually making me feel much more optimistic.

“The defect is dynamic,” he muttered. “That changes everything.”

“You don’t say.”

Campbell scowled. “I don’t just mean the politics, the dangers. I’m talking about the underlying physical model.”

“Yeah?” I hadn’t come close to examining that issue seriously; it had been enough of a struggle coming to terms with his original calculations.

“All along, I’ve assumed that there were exact symmetries in the Planck scale physics that accounted for a stable boundary between macroscopic arithmetics. It was an artificial restriction, but I took it for granted, because anything else seemed ...”

“Unbelievable?”

“Yes.” He blinked and looked away, surveying the crowd of diners as if he had no idea how he’d ended up among them. “I’m flying back in a few hours.”

“Does Bridget know why you came?”

“Not exactly.”

I said, “No one else can know what I’ve told you. Not yet. The risks are too great, everything’s too fluid.”

“Yeah.” He met my gaze. He wasn’t just humoring me; he understood what people like IA might do.

“In the long term,” I said, “we’re going to have to find a way to make this safe. To make everyone safe.” I’d never quite articulated that goal before, but I was only just beginning to absorb the ramifications of Campbell’s insights.

“How?” he wondered. “Do we want to build a wall, or do we want to tear one down?”

“I don’t know. The first thing we need is a better map, a better feel for the whole territory.”

He’d hired a car at the airport in order to drive here and confront me; it was parked in a side street close to my house. I walked him to it.

We shook hands before parting. I said, “Welcome to the reluctant cabal.”

Campbell winced. “Let’s find a way to change it from reluctant to redundant.”

In the weeks that followed, Campbell worked on refinements to his theory, emailing Alison and me every few days. Alison had taken my unilateral decision to recruit Campbell with much more equanimity than I’d expected. “Better to have him inside the tent,” was all she’d said.

This proved to be an understatement. While the two of us soon caught up with him on all the technicalities, it was clear that his intuition on the subject, hard-won over many years of trial and error, was the key to his spectacular progress now. Merely stealing his notes and his algorithms would never have brought us so far.

Gradually, the dynamic version of the theory took shape. As far as macroscopic objects were concerned—and in this context, “macroscopic” stretched all the way down to the quantum states of subatomic particles—all traces of Platonic mathematics were banished. A “proof” concerning the integers was just a class of physical processes, and the result of that proof was neither read from, nor written to, any universal book of truths. Rather, the agreement between proofs was simply a strong, but imperfect, correlation between the different processes that counted as proofs of the same thing. Those correlations arose from the way that the primordial states of Planck-scale physics were carved up—imperfectly—into subsystems that appeared to be distinct objects.

The truths of mathematics appeared to be enduring and universal because they persisted with great efficiency within the states of matter and space-time. But there was a built-in flaw in the whole idealization of distinct objects, and the point where the concept finally cracked open was the defect Alison and I had found in our volunteers’ data, which appeared to any macroscopic test as the border between contradictory mathematical systems.

We’d derived a crude empirical rule which said that the border shifted when a proposition’s neighbors outvoted it. If you managed to prove that x+1=y+1 and x-1=y-1, then x=y became a sitting duck, even if it hadn’t been true before. The consequences of Campbell’s search had shown that the reality was more complex, and in his new model, the old border rule became an approximation for a more subtle process, anchored in the dynamics of primordial states that knew nothing of the arithmetic of electrons and apples. The near-side arithmetic Campbell had blasted into the far side hadn’t got there by besieging the target with syllogisms; it had got there because he’d gone straight for a far deeper failure in the whole idea of “integers” than Alison and I had ever dreamed of.

Had Sam dreamed of it? I waited for his next contact, but as the weeks passed he remained silent, and the last thing I felt like doing was calling him myself. I had enough people to lie to without adding him to the list.

Kate asked me how work was going, and I waffled about the details of the three uninspiring contracts I’d started recently. When I stopped talking, she looked at me as if I’d just stammered my way through an unconvincing denial of some unspoken crime. I wondered how my mixture of concealed elation and fear was coming across to her. Was that how the most passionate, conflicted adulterer would appear? I didn’t actually reach the brink of confession, but I pictured myself approaching it. I had less reason now to think that the secret would bring her harm than when I’d first made my decision to keep her in the dark. But then, what if I told her everything, and the next day Campbell was kidnapped and tortured? If we were all being watched, and the people doing it were good at their jobs, we’d only know about it when it was too late.

Campbell’s emails dropped off for a while, and I assumed he’d hit a roadblock. Sam had offered no further complaints. Perhaps, I thought, this was the new status quo, the start of another quiet decade. I could live with that.

Then Campbell flung his second grenade. He reached me by IM and said, “I’ve started making maps.”

“Of the defect?” I replied.

“Of the planets.”

I stared at his image, uncomprehending.

“The far-side planets,” he said. “The physical worlds.”

He’d bought himself some time on a geographically scattered set of processor clusters. He was no longer repeating his dangerous incursions, of course, but by playing around in the natural ebb and flow at the border, he’d made some extraordinary discoveries.

Alison and I had realized long ago that random “proofs” in the natural world would influence what happened at the border, but Campbell’s theory made that notion more precise. By looking at the exact timing of changes to propositions at the border, measured in a dozen different computers world-wide, he had set up a kind of ... radar? CT machine? Whatever you called it, it allowed him to deduce the locations where the relevant natural processes were occurring, and his model allowed him to distinguish between both near-side and far-side processes, and processes in matter and those in vacuum. He could measure the density of far-side matter out to a distance of several light-hours, and crudely image nearby planets.

“Not just on the far side,” he said. “I validated the technique by imaging our own planets.” He sent me a data log, with comparisons to an online almanac. For Jupiter, the farthest of the planets he’d located, the positions were out by as much as a hundred thousand kilometers; not exactly GPS quality, but that was a bit like complaining that your abacus couldn’t tell north from north-west.

“Maybe that’s how Sam found us in Shanghai?” I wondered. “The same kind of thing, only more refined?”

Campbell said, “Possibly.”

“So what about the far-side planets?”

“Well, here’s the first interesting thing. None of the planets coincide with ours. Nor does their sun with our sun.” He sent me an image of the far-side system, one star and its six planets, overlaid on our own.

“But Sam’s time lags,” I protested, “when we communicate—”

“Make no sense if he’s too far away. Exactly. So he is not living on any of these planets, and he’s not even in a natural orbit around their star. He’s in powered flight, moving with the Earth. Which suggests to me that they’ve known about us for much longer than Shanghai.”

“Known about us,” I said, “but maybe they still didn’t anticipate anything like Shanghai.” When we’d set Luminous on to the task of eliminating the defect—not knowing that we were threatening anyone—it had taken several minutes before the far side had responded. Computers on board a spacecraft moving with the Earth would have detected the assault quickly, but it might have taken the recruitment of larger, planet-bound machines, minutes away at lightspeed, to repel it.

Until I’d encountered Campbell’s theories, my working assumption had been that Sam’s world was like a hidden message encoded in the Earth, with the different arithmetic giving different meanings to all the air, water, and rock around us. But their matter was not bound to our matter; they didn’t need our specks of dust or molecules of air to represent the dark integers. The two worlds split apart at a much lower level; vacuum could be rock, and rock, vacuum.

I said, “So do you want the Nobel for physics, or peace?”

Campbell smiled modestly. “Can I hold out for both?”

“That’s the answer I was looking for.” I couldn’t get the stupid Cold War metaphors out of my brain: what would Sam’s hotheaded colleagues think, if they knew that we were now flying spy planes over their territory? Saying “screw them, they were doing it first!” might have been a fair response, but it was not a particularly helpful one.

I said, “We’re never going to match their Sputnik, unless you happen to know a trustworthy billionaire who wants to help us launch a space probe on a very strange trajectory. Everything we want to do has to work from Earth.”

“I’ll tear up my letter to Richard Branson then, shall I?”

I stared at the map of the far-side solar system. “There must be some relative motion between their star and ours. It can’t have been this close for all that long.”

“I don’t have enough accuracy in my measurements to make a meaningful estimate of the velocity,” Campbell said. “But I’ve done some crude estimates of the distances between their stars, and it’s much smaller than ours. So it’s not all that unlikely to find some star this close to us, even if it’s unlikely to be the same one that was close a thousand years ago. Then again, there might be a selection effect at work here: the whole reason Sam’s civilization managed to notice us at all was because we weren’t shooting past them at a substantial fraction of lightspeed.”

“Okay. So maybe this is their home system, but it could just as easily be an expeditionary base for a team that’s been following our sun for thousands of years.”

“Yes.”

I said, “Where do we go with this?”

“I can’t increase the resolution much,” Campbell replied, “without buying time on a lot more clusters.” It wasn’t that he needed much processing power for the calculations, but there were minimum prices to be paid to do anything at all, and what would give us clearer pictures would be more computers, not more time on each one.

I said, “We can’t risk asking for volunteers, like the old days. We’d have to lie about what the download was for, and you can be certain that somebody would reverse-engineer it and catch us out.”

“Absolutely.”

I slept on the problem, then woke with an idea at four a.m. and went to my office, trying to flesh out the details before Campbell responded to my email. He was bleary-eyed when the messenger window opened; it was later in Wellington than in Sydney, but it looked as if he’d had as little sleep as I had.

I said, “We use the internet.”

“I thought we decided that was too risky.”

“Not screensavers for volunteers; I’m talking about the internet itself. We work out a way to do the calculations using nothing but data packets and network routers. We bounce traffic all around the world, and we get the geographical resolution for free.”

“You’ve got to be joking, Bruno—”

“Why? Any computing circuit can be built by stringing together enough NAND gates; you think we can’t leverage packet switching into a NAND gate? But that’s just the proof that it’s possible; I expect we can actually make it a thousand times tighter.”

Campbell said, “I’m going to get some aspirin and come back.”

We roped in Alison to help, but it still took us six weeks to get a workable design, and another month to get it functioning. We ended up exploiting authentication and error-correction protocols built into the internet at several different layers; the heterogeneous approach not only helped us do all the calculations we needed, but made our gentle siphoning of computing power less likely to be detected and mistaken for anything malicious. In fact we were “stealing” far less from the routers and servers of the net than if we’d sat down for a hardcore 3D multiplayer gaming session, but security systems had their own ideas about what constituted fair use and what was suspicious. The most important thing was not the size of the burden we imposed, but the signature of our behavior.

Our new globe-spanning arithmetical telescope generated pictures far sharper than before, with kilometer-scale resolution out to a billion kilometers. This gave us crude relief-maps of the far-side planets, revealing mountains on four of them, and what might have been oceans on two of those four. If there were any artificial structures, they were either too small to see, or too subtle in their artificiality.

The relative motion of our sun and the star these planets orbited turned out to be about six kilometers per second. In the decade since Shanghai, the two solar systems had changed their relative location by about two billion kilometers. Wherever the computers were now that had fought with Luminous to control the border, they certainly hadn’t been on any of these planets at the time. Perhaps there were two ships, with one following the Earth, and the other, heavier one saving fuel by merely following the sun.

Yuen had finally recovered his health, and the full cabal held an IM-conference to discuss these results.

“We should be showing these to geologists, xenobiologists ... everyone,” Yuen lamented. He wasn’t making a serious proposal, but I shared his sense of frustration.

Alison said, “What I regret most is that we can’t rub Sam’s face in these pictures, just to show him that we’re not as stupid as he thinks.”

“I imagine his own pictures are sharper,” Campbell replied.

“Which is as you’d expect,” Alison retorted, “given a head start of a few centuries. If they’re so brilliant on the far side, why do they need us to tell them what you did to jump the border?”

“They might have guessed precisely what I did,” he countered, “but they could still be seeking confirmation. Perhaps what they really want is to rule out the possibility that we’ve discovered something different, something they’ve never even thought of.”

I gazed at the false colors of one contoured sphere, imagining gray-blue oceans, snow-topped mountains with alien forests, strange cities, wondrous machines. Even if that was pure fantasy and this temporary neighbor was barren, there had to be a living homeworld from which the ships that pursued us had been launched.

After Shanghai, Sam and his colleagues had chosen to keep us in the dark for ten years, but it had been our own decision to cement the mistrust by holding on to the secret of our accidental weapon. If they’d already guessed its nature, then they might already have found a defense against it, in which case our silence bought us no advantage at all to compensate for the suspicion it engendered.

If that assumption was wrong, though? Then handing over the details of Campbell’s work could be just what the far-side hawks were waiting for, before raising their shields and crushing us.

I said, “We need to make some plans. I want to stay hopeful, I want to keep looking for the best way forward, but we need to be prepared for the worst.”

Transforming that suggestion into something concrete required far more work than I’d imagined; it was three months before the pieces started coming together. When I finally shifted my gaze back to the everyday world, I decided that I’d earned a break. Kate had a free weekend approaching; I suggested a day in the Blue Mountains.

Her initial response was sarcastic, but when I persisted she softened a little, and finally agreed.

On the drive out of the city, the chill that had developed between us slowly began to thaw. We played JJJ on the car radio—laughing with disbelief as we realized that today’s cutting-edge music consisted mostly of cover versions and re-samplings of songs that had been hits when we were in our twenties—and resurrected old running jokes from the time when we’d first met.

As we wound our way into the mountains, though, it proved impossible simply to turn back the clock. Kate said, “Whoever you’ve been working for these last few months, can you put them on your blacklist?”

I laughed. “That will scare them.” I switched to my best Brando voice. “You’re on Bruno Costanzo’s blacklist. You’ll never run distributed software efficiently in this town again.”

She said, “I’m serious. I don’t know what’s so stressful about the work, or the people, but it’s really screwing you up.”

I could have made her a promise, but it would have been hard enough to sound sincere as I spoke the words, let alone live up to them. I said, “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

She shook her head, her mouth tensed in frustration. “If you really want a heart attack, fine. But don’t pretend that it’s all about money. We’re never that broke, and we’re never that rich. Unless it’s all going into your account in Zürich.”

It took me a few seconds to convince myself that this was nothing more than a throwaway reference to Swiss banks. Kate knew about Alison, knew that we’d once been close, knew that we still kept in touch. She had plenty of male friends from her own past, and they all lived in Sydney; for more than five years, Alison and I hadn’t even set foot on the same continent.

We parked the car, then walked along a scenic trail for an hour, mostly in silence. We found a spot by a stream, with tiered rocks smoothed by some ancient river, and ate the lunch I’d packed.

Looking out into the blue haze of the densely wooded valley below, I couldn’t keep the image of the crowded skies of the far side from my mind. A dazzling richness surrounded us: alien worlds, alien life, alien culture. There had to be a way to end our mutual suspicion, and work toward a genuine exchange of knowledge.

As we started back toward the car, I turned to Kate. “I know I’ve neglected you,” I said. “I’ve been through a rough patch, but everything’s going to change. I’m going to make things right.”

I was prepared for a withering rebuff, but for a long time she was silent. Then she nodded slightly and said, “Okay.”

As she reached across and took my hand, my wrist began vibrating. I’d buckled to the pressure and bought a watch that shackled me to the net twenty-four hours a day.

I freed my hand from Kate’s and lifted the watch to my face. The bandwidth reaching me out in the sticks wasn’t enough for video, but a stored snapshot of Alison appeared on the screen.

“This is for emergencies only,” I snarled.

“Check out a news feed,” she replied. The acoustics were focused on my ears; Kate would get nothing but the bad-hearing-aid-at-a-party impression that made so many people want to punch their fellow commuters on trains.

“Why don’t you just summarize whatever it is I’m meant to have noticed?”

Financial computing systems were going haywire, to an extent that was already being described as terrorism. Most trading was closed for the weekend, but some experts were predicting the crash of the century, come Monday.

I wondered if the cabal itself was to blame; if we’d inadvertently corrupted the whole internet by coupling its behavior to the defect. That was nonsense, though. Half the transactions being garbled were taking place on secure, interbank networks that shared no hardware with our global computer. This was coming from the far side.

“Have you contacted Sam?” I asked her.

“I can’t raise him.”

“Where are you going?” Kate shouted angrily. I’d unconsciously broken into a jog; I wanted to get back to the car, back to the city, back to my office.

I stopped and turned to her. “Run with me? Please? This is important.”

“You’re joking! I’ve spent half a day hiking, I’m not running anywhere!”

I hesitated, fantasizing for a moment that I could sit beneath a gum tree and orchestrate everything with my Dick Tracy watch before its battery went flat.

I said, “You’d better call a taxi when you get to the road.”

“You’re taking the car?” Kate stared at me, incredulous. “You piece of shit!”

“I’m sorry.” I tossed my backpack on the ground and started sprinting.

“We need to deploy,” I told Alison.

“I know,” she said. “We’ve already started.”

It was the right decision, but hearing it still loosened my bowels far more than the realization that the far side were attacking us. Whatever their motives, at least they were unlikely to do more harm than they intended. I was much less confident about our own abilities.

“Keep trying to reach Sam,” I insisted. “This is a thousand times more useful if they know about it.”

Alison said, “I guess this isn’t the time for Dr. Strangelove jokes.”

Over the last three months, we’d worked out a way to augment our internet “telescope” software to launch a barrage of Campbell-style attacks on far-side propositions if it saw our own mathematics being encroached upon. The software couldn’t protect the whole border, but there were millions of individual trigger points, forming a randomly shifting minefield. The plan had been to buy ourselves some security, without ever reaching the point of actual retaliation. We’d been waiting to complete a final round of tests before unleashing this version live on the net, but it would only take a matter of minutes to get it up and running.

“Anything being hit besides financials?” I asked.

“Not that I’m picking up.”

If the far side was deliberately targeting the markets, that was infinitely preferable to the alternative: that financial systems had simply been the most fragile objects in the path of a much broader assault. Most modern engineering and aeronautical systems were more interested in resorting to fall-backs than agonizing over their failures. A bank’s computer might declare itself irretrievably compromised and shut down completely, the instant certain totals failed to reconcile; those in a chemical plant or an airliner would be designed to fail more gracefully, trying simpler alternatives and bringing all available humans into the loop.

I said, “Yuen and Tim—?”

“Both on board,” Alison confirmed. “Monitoring the deployment, ready to tweak the software if necessary.”

“Good. You really won’t need me at all, then, will you?”

Alison’s reply dissolved into digital noise, and the connection cut out. I refused to read anything sinister into that; given my location, I was lucky to have any coverage at all. I ran faster, trying not to think about the time in Shanghai when Sam had taken a mathematical scalpel to all of our brains. Luminous had been screaming out our position like a beacon; we would not be so easy to locate this time. Still, with a cruder approach, the hawks could take a hatchet to everyone’s head. Would they go that far? Only if this was meant as much more than a threat, much more than intimidation to make us hand over Campbell’s algorithm. Only if this was the end game: no warning, no negotiations, just Sparseland wiped off the map forever.

Fifteen minutes after Alison’s call, I reached the car. Apart from the entertainment console it didn’t contain a single microchip; I remembered the salesman laughing when I’d queried that twice. “What are you afraid of? Y3K?” The engine started immediately.

I had an ancient secondhand laptop in the trunk; I put it beside me on the passenger seat and started booting it up while I drove out on to the access road, heading for the highway. Alison and I had worked for a fortnight on a stripped-down operating system, as simple and robust as possible, to run on these old computers; if the far side kept reaching down from the arithmetic stratosphere, these would be like concrete bunkers compared to the glass skyscrapers of more modern machines. The four of us would also be running different versions of the OS, on CPUs with different instruction sets; our bunkers were scattered mathematically as well as geographically.

As I drove on to the highway, my watch stuttered back to life. Alison said, “Bruno? Can you hear me?”

“Go ahead.”

“Three passenger jets have crashed,” she said. “Poland, Indonesia, South Africa.”

I was dazed. Ten years before, when I’d tried to bulldoze his whole mathematical world into the sea, Sam had spared my life. Now the far side was slaughtering innocents.

“Is our minefield up?”

“It’s been up for ten minutes, but nothing’s tripped it yet.”

“You think they’re steering through it?”

Alison hesitated. “I don’t see how. There’s no way to predict a safe path.” We were using a quantum noise server to randomize the propositions we tested.

I said, “We should trigger it manually. One counter-strike to start with, to give them something to think about.” I was still hoping that the downed jets were unintended, but we had no choice but to retaliate.

“Yeah.” Alison’s image was live now; I saw her reach down for her mouse. She said, “It’s not responding. The net’s too degraded.” All the fancy algorithms that the routers used, and that we’d leveraged so successfully for our imaging software, were turning them into paperweights. The internet was robust against high levels of transmission noise and the loss of thousands of connections, but not against the decay of arithmetic itself.

My watch went dead. I looked to the laptop; it was still working. I reached over and hit a single hotkey, launching a program that would try to reach Alison and the others the same way we’d talked to Sam: by modulating part of the border. In theory, the hawks might have moved the whole border—in which case we were screwed—but the border was vast, and it made more sense for them to target their computing resources on the specific needs of the assault itself.

A small icon appeared on the laptop’s screen, a single letter A in reversed monochrome. I said, “Is this working?”

“Yes,” Alison replied. The icon blinked out, then came back again. We were doing a Hedy Lamarr, hopping rapidly over a predetermined sequence of border points to minimize the chance of detection. Some of those points would be missing, but it looked as if enough of them remained intact.

The A was joined by a Y and a T. The whole cabal was online now, whatever that was worth. What we needed was S, but S was not answering.

Campbell said grimly, “I heard about the planes. I’ve started an attack.” The tactic we had agreed upon was to take turns running different variants of Campbell’s border-jumping algorithm from our scattered machines.

I said, “The miracle is that they’re not hitting us the same way we’re hitting them. They’re just pushing down part of the border with the old voting method, step by step. If we’d given them what they’d asked for, we’d all be dead by now.”

“Maybe not,” Yuen replied. “I’m only halfway through a proof, but I’m 90 percent sure that Tim’s method is asymmetrical. It only works in one direction. Even if we’d told them about it, they couldn’t have turned it against us.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but if Yuen was right that made perfect sense. The far side had probably been working on the same branch of mathematics for centuries; if there had been an equivalent weapon that could be used from their vantage point, they would have discovered it long ago.

My machine had synchronized with Campbell’s, and it took over the assault automatically. We had no real idea what we were hitting, except that the propositions were further from the border, describing far simpler arithmetic on the dark integers than anything of ours that the far side had yet touched. Were we crippling machines? Taking lives? I was torn between a triumphant vision of retribution, and a sense of shame that we’d allowed it to come to this.

Every hundred meters or so, I passed another car sitting motionless by the side of the highway. I was far from the only person still driving, but I had a feeling Kate wouldn’t have much luck getting a taxi. She had water in her backpack, and there was a small shelter at the spot where we’d parked. There was little to be gained by reaching my office now; the laptop could do everything that mattered, and I could run it from the car battery if necessary. If I turned around and went back for Kate, though, I’d have so much explaining to do that there’d be no time for anything else.

I switched on the car radio, but either its digital signal processor was too sophisticated for its own good, or all the local stations were out.

“Anyone still getting news?” I asked.

“I still have radio,” Campbell replied. “No TV, no internet. Landlines and mobiles here are dead.” It was the same for Alison and Yuen. There’d been no more reports of disasters on the radio, but the stations were probably as isolated now as their listeners. Ham operators would still be calling each other, but journalists and newsrooms would not be in the loop. I didn’t want to think about the contingency plans that might have been in place, given ten years’ preparation and an informed population.

By the time I reached Penrith there were so many abandoned cars that the remaining traffic was almost gridlocked. I decided not to even try to reach home. I didn’t know if Sam had literally scanned my brain in Shanghai and used that to target what he’d done to me then, and whether or not he could use the same neuroanatomical information against me now, wherever I was, but staying away from my usual haunts seemed like one more small advantage to cling to.

I found a gas station, and it was giving priority to customers with functioning cars over hoarders who’d appeared on foot with empty cans. Their EFTPOS wasn’t working, but I had enough cash for the gas and some chocolate bars.

As dusk fell the streetlights came on; the traffic lights had never stopped working. All four laptops were holding up, hurling their grenades into the far side. The closer the attack front came to simple arithmetic, the more resistance it would face from natural processes voting at the border for near-side results. Our enemy had their supercomputers; we had every atom of the Earth, following its billion-year-old version of the truth.

We had modeled this scenario. The sheer arithmetical inertia of all that matter would buy us time, but in the long run a coherent, sustained, computational attack could still force its way through.

How would we die? Losing consciousness first, feeling no pain? Or was the brain more robust than that? Would all the cells of our bodies start committing apoptosis, once their biochemical errors mounted up beyond repair? Maybe it would be just like radiation sickness. We’d be burned by decaying arithmetic, just as if it was nuclear fire.

My laptop beeped. I swerved off the road and parked on a stretch of concrete beside a dark shopfront. A new icon had appeared on the screen: the letter S.

Sam said, “Bruno, this was not my decision.”

“I believe you,” I said. “But if you’re just a messenger now, what’s your message?”

“If you give us what we asked for, we’ll stop the attack.”

“We’re hurting you, aren’t we?”

“We know we’re hurting you,” Sam replied. Point taken: we were guessing, firing blind. He didn’t have to ask about the damage we’d suffered.

I steeled myself, and followed the script the cabal had agreed upon. “We’ll give you the algorithm, but only if you retreat back to the old border, and then seal it.”

Sam was silent for four long heartbeats.

“Seal it?”

“I think you know what I mean.” In Shanghai, when we’d used Luminous to try to ensure that Industrial Algebra could not exploit the defect, we’d contemplated trying to seal the border rather than eliminating the defect altogether. The voting effect could only shift the border if it was crinkled in such a way that propositions on one side could be outnumbered by those on the other side. It was possible—given enough time and computing power—to smooth the border, to iron it flat. Once that was done, everywhere, the whole thing would become immovable. No force in the universe could shift it again.

Sam said, “You want to leave us with no weapon against you, while you still have the power to harm us.”

“We won’t have that power for long. Once you know exactly what we’re using, you’ll find a way to block it.”

There was a long pause. Then, “Stop your attacks on us, and we’ll consider your proposal.”

“We’ll stop our attacks when you pull the border back to the point where our lives are no longer at risk.”

“How would you even know that we’ve done that?” Sam replied. I wasn’t sure if the condescension was in his tone or just his words, but either way I welcomed it. The lower the far side’s opinion of our abilities, the more attractive the deal became for them.

I said, “Then you’d better back up far enough for all our communications systems to recover. When I can get news reports and see that there are no more planes going down, no power plants exploding, then we’ll start the ceasefire.”

Silence again, stretching out beyond mere hesitancy. His icon was still there, though, the S unblinking. I clutched at my shoulder, hoping that the burning pain was just tension in the muscle.

Finally: “All right. We agree. We’ll start shifting the border.”

I drove around looking for an all-night convenience store that might have had an old analog TV sitting in a corner to keep the cashier awake—that seemed like a good bet to start working long before the wireless connection to my laptop—but Campbell beat me to it. New Zealand radio and TV were reporting that the “digital blackout” appeared to be lifting, and ten minutes later Alison announced that she had internet access. A lot of the major servers were still down, or their sites weirdly garbled, but Reuters was starting to post updates on the crisis.

Sam had kept his word, so we halted the counter-strikes. Alison read from the Reuters site as the news came in. Seventeen planes had crashed, and four trains. There’d been fatalities at an oil refinery, and half a dozen manufacturing plants. One analyst put the global death toll at five thousand and rising.

I muted the microphone on my laptop and spent thirty seconds shouting obscenities and punching the dashboard. Then I rejoined the cabal.

Yuen said, “I’ve been reviewing my notes. If my instinct is worth anything, the theorem I mentioned before is correct: if the border is sealed, they’ll have no way to touch us.”

“What about the upside for them?” Alison asked. “Do you think they can protect themselves against Tim’s algorithm, once they understand it?”

Yuen hesitated. “Yes and no. Any cluster of near-side truth values it injects into the far side will have a non-smooth border, so they’ll be able to remove it with sheer computing power. In that sense, they’ll never be defenseless. But I don’t see how there’s anything they can do to prevent the attacks in the first place.”

“Short of wiping us out,” Campbell said.

I heard an infant sobbing. Alison said, “That’s Laura. I’m alone here. Give me five minutes.”

I buried my head in my arms. I still had no idea what the right course would have been. If we’d handed over Campbell’s algorithm immediately, might the good will that bought us have averted the war? Or would the same attack merely have come sooner? What criminal vanity had ever made the three of us think we could shoulder this responsibility on our own? Five thousand people were dead. The hawks who had taken over on the far side would weigh up our offer, and decide that they had no choice but to fight on.

And if the reluctant cabal had passed its burden to Canberra, to Zürich, to Beijing? Would there really have been peace? Or was I just wishing that there had been more hands steeped in the same blood, to share the guilt around?

The idea came from nowhere, sweeping away every other thought. I said, “Is there any reason why the far side has to stay connected?”

“Connected to what?” Campbell asked.

“Connected to itself. Connected topologically. They should be able to send down a spike, then withdraw it, but leave behind a bubble of altered truth values: a kind of outpost, sitting within the near side, with a perfect, smooth border making it impregnable. Right?”

Yuen said, “Perhaps. With both sides collaborating on the construction, that might be possible.”

“Then the question is, can we find a place where we can do that so that it kills off the chance to use Tim’s method completely—without crippling any process that we need just to survive?”

“Fuck you, Bruno!” Campbell exclaimed happily. “We give them one small Achilles tendon to slice ... and then they’ve got nothing to fear from us!”

Yuen said, “A watertight proof of something like that is going to take weeks, months.”

“Then we’d better start work. And we’d better feed Sam the first plausible conjecture we get, so they can use their own resources to help us with the proof.”

Alison came back online and greeted the suggestion with cautious approval. I drove around until I found a quiet coffee shop. Electronic banking still wasn’t working, and I had no cash left, but the waiter agreed to take my credit card number and a signed authority for a deduction of one hundred dollars; whatever I didn’t eat and drink would be his tip.

I sat in the café, blanking out the world, steeping myself in the mathematics. Sometimes the four of us worked on separate tasks; sometimes we paired up, dragging each other out of dead ends and ruts. There were an infinite number of variations that could be made to Campbell’s algorithm, but hour by hour we whittled away at the concept, finding the common ground that no version of the weapon could do without.

By four in the morning, we had a strong conjecture. I called Sam, and explained what we were hoping to achieve.

He said, “This is a good idea. We’ll consider it.”

The café closed. I sat in the car for a while, drained and numb, then I called Kate to find out where she was. A couple had given her a lift almost as far as Penrith, and when their car failed she’d walked the rest of the way home.

For close to four days, I spent most of my waking hours just sitting at my desk, watching as a wave of red inched its way across a map of the defect. The change of hue was not being rendered lightly; before each pixel turned red, twelve separate computers needed to confirm that the region of the border it represented was flat.

On the fifth day, Sam shut off his computers and allowed us to mount an attack from our side on the narrow corridor linking the bulk of the far side with the small enclave that now surrounded our Achilles’ Heel. We wouldn’t have suffered any real loss of essential arithmetic if this slender thread had remained, but keeping the corridor both small and impregnable had turned out to be impossible. The original plan was the only route to finality: to seal the border perfectly, the far side proper could not remain linked to its offshoot.

In the next stage, the two sides worked together to seal the enclave completely, polishing the scar where its umbilical had been sheared away. When that task was complete, the map showed it as a single burnished ruby. No known process could reshape it now. Campbell’s method could have breached its border without touching it, reaching inside to reclaim it from within—but Campbell’s method was exactly what this jewel ruled out.

At the other end of the vanished umbilical, Sam’s machines set to work smoothing away the blemish. By early evening that, too, was done.

Only one tiny flaw in the border remained now: the handful of propositions that enabled communication between the two sides. The cabal had debated the fate of this for hours. So long as this small wrinkle persisted, in principle it could be used to unravel everything, to mobilize the entire border again. It was true that, compared to the border as a whole, it would be relatively easy to monitor and defend such a small site, but a sustained burst of brute-force computing from either side could still overpower any resistance and exploit it.

In the end, Sam’s political masters had made the decision for us. What they had always aspired to was certainty, and even if their strength favored them, this wasn’t a gamble they were prepared to take.

I said, “Good luck with the future.”

“Good luck to Sparseland,” Sam replied. I believed he’d tried to hold out against the hawks, but I’d never been certain of his friendship. When his icon faded from my screen, I felt more relief than regret.

I’d learned the hard way not to assume that anything was permanent. Perhaps in a thousand years, someone would discover that Campbell’s model was just an approximation to something deeper, and find a way to fracture these allegedly perfect walls. With any luck, by then both sides might also be better prepared to find a way to co-exist.

I found Kate sitting in the kitchen. I said, “I can answer your questions now, if that’s what you want.” On the morning after the disaster, I’d promised her this time would come—within weeks, not months—and she’d agreed to stay with me until it did.

She thought for a while.

“Did you have something to do with what happened last week?”

“Yes.”

“Are you saying you unleashed the virus? You’re the terrorist they’re looking for?” To my great relief, she asked this in roughly the tone she might have used if I’d claimed to be Genghis Khan.

“No, I’m not the cause of what happened. It was my job to try and stop it, and I failed. But it wasn’t any kind of computer virus.”

She searched my face. “What was it, then? Can you explain that to me?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I don’t care. We’ve got all night.”

I said, “It started in university. With an idea of Alison’s. One brilliant, beautiful, crazy idea.”

Kate looked away, her face flushing, as if I’d said something deliberately humiliating. She knew I was not a mass murderer. But there were other things about me of which she was less sure.

“The story starts with Alison,” I said. “But it ends here, with you.”

The Demon’s Passage

Somebody out there, show your compassion, come and kill me. Cut me free and watch me slowly shrivel, or slice me up and flush me down a toilet. Any way you like, I don’t mind. Come on! You do it for your youngest children, you do it for your sick old parents. Come and do it for me. I can tell you’d like it. Don’t be nervous, lovers! You’ll never be found out, if that’s what’s holding you back:

I’ll stay silent to the end, be it swift or slow. Come on, people! I’m totally defenceless. Hurry up! Don’t be shy. You have the right. You made me, you created me, so you know you have the right.

Who am I? What am I, that can whisper pleas for death into your clean and honest minds? I could give you twenty questions, but I fear that you’d need more.

Animal, for sure. Smaller than a bread-box now, but growing every day. Two legs?

Four legs? Six? Eight? I have no limbs, I have no face; no fangs, no claws, you musn’t fear me. I am the stuff of thought (pure and impure), and what could be more harmless than that?

Practicalities: you’ll need my address. Can you hear me in the back rows? Are you reading me, Brazil? I can certainly hear all of you, louder than my own thoughts at times, but then I am such a sensitive little pudding, and you have so many unavoidable distractions. Like:

Oh, green and brown and blue and white Fade to black as the Earth turns into night Oh, thank you Lord for such a wondrous sight I’m a-higher than the sky so I know we’ll be all right!

It has a highly infectious melody, I must admit. No doubt there’ll soon be dozens more singers queueing to record in the Shuttle, especially after all those Limited Edition Zero-Gee Pressings sold for a hundred thousand each.

Hoo-wheee! Thank you, Lord!

Yes, my address: Surry Hills, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. I’m in the basement of the Australian Biotech Playground. You can’t miss it: the forecourt is the only vomit-free region for miles around, since the Brain Chemistry people here developed an ingenious new toxin which selectively repels the local homeless alcoholics. Should turn out to be quite a money-spinner, if they market it properly.

But if you still have trouble finding the place, it’s a tall, white building set in a pleasant square of shrubs and modern sculpture. The logo above the entrance is quite distinctive: an erect phallus which dissolves, or rather unravels half-way, into a double-helix of DNA. The cruder members of staff here are split about equally between those who say this symbol means “fuck molecular biology!”

and those who say it means “molecular biology will fuck you!”. The city’s feminists are similarly divided, between those who see it as a hopeful sign of freedom (the penis being superseded by a technology that women can master and employ as they see fit), and those who see it as representing their worst fears:

science springing from the testicles instead of from the brain.

There’s a shopping arcade on the ground floor, extending one level above and one below, with a cinema complex, a health food supermarket, and a twenty-four hour chemist. Linking the three levels, twisted around the laser-lit spume of an endlessly-pumping fountain, is the southern hemisphere’s only pair of spiral escalators. Unfortunately, they’re usually closed for repairs; the mechanism that drives them is ingenious, but insufficiently robust, and it takes no more than a stray bottle top or a discarded chocolate bar wrapper in the wrong place to start belts slipping, gears crunching, shafts snapping, until the whole structure begins to behave like a dadaist work of art designed explicitly to destroy itself.

Floors two to ten hold consulting rooms: neurologists, endocrinologists, gynaecologists, rheumatologists: in short, as fine a collection of brain-dead, ex-university rugby players as ever assembled anywhere. These people have only one facial expression: the patronising, superior, self-satisfied smirk. The very same smirk that appeared on their lips the day they gained admission to medical school has come through everything since without the slightest change: gruelling feats of rote learning and beer sculling at university; initiation by sleep-deprivation and token poverty as residents; working long and hard on obscure research projects for their MDs, hoping only that their superiors might steal the credit for any interesting results, so that by accepting the theft in silence in a ritual act of self-abasement they might prove themselves worthy to be the colleagues of the thieves. And then, suddenly, skiing holidays, Pacific cruises, and an endless line of patients who swoon with awe and say “Yes, Doctor. No, Doctor. Of course I will, Doctor. Thank you. Thank you, Doctor.”

Floors eleven to eighteen house a wide range of pathology labs, where every substance or structure that might travel the bloodstream, from macrophages and lymphocytes through to antibodies, protein hormones, carbohydrate molecules, even individual ions, can be hunted down, tagged and counted.

Nineteen to twenty-five are filled with the offices of pharmaceuticals and medical instrumentation firms. They pay five times the market rate for renting space on this sleazy side of town, but it’s more than worth it just to share an address with the world-famous research team that perfected and patented bioluminescent contact lenses (“... triggered by minute changes in the hormonal content of lubricating tears, Honest EyesTM glow with a subtle aura, changing colour instantly to perfectly reflect every nuance of the wearer’s changing mood ...”), beat the Americans, the Swiss and the Japanese to develop the first one hundred per cent effective post-coital contraceptive cigarette, and then, out-stripping all their past achievements in consumer biotech, went on to produce a special chewing gum that will stain the teeth red in the presence of salivary AIDS virus (“Share a stick with someone you love”).

Twenty-six to thirty hold libraries, conference rooms, and row after row of quiet offices, where the scientists can sit and listen to the airconditioning, their own breathing, the sound of fingers on a keyboard in the next room. This is the realm of pure abstraction: no test tubes here, no culture flasks or Petri dishes, and no visible hint of the likes of me.

Thirty-one to forty is administration and marketing, and on top of that is a simulated Viennese cafe which revolves once every ten minutes. There’s a coin-operated telescope on the rim, with which people can, and frequently do, watch the prostitutes in leopard-skin leotards pacing the streets of nearby Kings Cross.

I’ve been teasing you, haven’t I, leading you astray. Upwards, ever upwards, away from the traffic noise, away from the putrid garbage, the broken glass, the used needles, the choking stench of urine. The building that I have described so far rises up into the almost-fresh air, up into the sunlight, up into the blue sky of daydreams. But don’t you think there’s something more? Don’t you think this building has foundations?

Underneath the shoppers are five levels of research labs. People here walk briskly, radiating a message with every step: I’m busy, I’m highly trained, and I have something critical incubating/concentrating/ spinning/in a column/on a gel that I must go and check in exactly three minutes and thirty-five seconds.

Twenty-five seconds, now.

It’s all happening here, no doubt about it: flow cytometry, mass spectrometry, X-ray crystallography, high performance liquid chromatography. Nuclear magnetic resonance. Genes are mapped, spliced, cloned, proteins are synthesised and purified. A real hive of activity. But what’s supporting it, what’s holding it up? We haven’t far to go now. Be patient.

There’s a level of cold-rooms and freezers.

There’s a level of equipment stores, and another for chemicals.

Second-lowest is where they keep the computers. Four of them, big as elephants.

Seen from the outside they have a certain dignity, but within they’re just puppets with split personalities, twitching pathetically in a thousand different directions as the masters upstairs tug at them impatiently, scream at them to dance out the answers, and then curse them for liars when the truth is too ugly, or too beautiful, to bear.

And underneath them all is the animal house. That’s your station, your stop, sweethearts. That’s where you’ll find me waiting, a-quivering just for you.

Walk straight out of the elevator; there’s an easily spotted foot-switch on the right that disables the alarm (installed after Animal Liberation’s last raid), then it’s left, right, left, left, right (this love you have for mazes I’ll never understand). You’ll see some big orange cages almost dead ahead. Ignore the sounds of startled rabbits around you, wishing they could flee; the one in cage D-246 won’t escape if you leave his door open a year.

The heavy plastic part of the cage is opaque, with only the top half made of see-through wire, and since my host is always lying down, you might have to stand on tippy-toes to see just what’s inside. Even then, the sight is so unusual that interpretation may take you some time. An entire lettuce, discoloured and putrid with age? Absurd! What animal would lie there with decaying food sitting on its head? What keeper would permit it? And the vile mess looks, almost, as if it’s somehow attached—

Are you feeling ill yet? No? You mean you still haven’t guessed, you boneheads!

What thick skulls you must have! Skull-less myself, I can insult with immunity.

I’m a brain tumour, sweethearts, as big as your whole brain, (and a thousand times smarter, from the evidence so far). Picture me, I beg of you, picture me in all my naked glory! Not in a brain surgeon’s wildest wet dreams has so much grey matter, still awash with lifeblood, still vital with the chemistry of thought, ever lain bare beneath fluorescent tubes! Please, lovers! Don’t fight the way I make you feel! Trust in your instincts, your body knows best! (Don’t toss your cookies yet, though, my faint-hearted assassins. You still don’t know half the horror of what you’ve done, and dry retching is so unsatisfying.)

A few of you, I notice, have turned a little pale. Let me bring back the colour to your cheeks with some light-hearted jests from the city in the basement. The citizens here have an astonishingly resilient sense of humour, considering all that they suffer. Or perhaps that’s not so surprising: you know all the cliches about laughter in the face of adversity. I’ve heard that there were jokes told even in Belsen. Which reminds me: there’s a rather unsavoury fellow in room

25-17, the representative of a drug manufacturer based in Austria and Argentina, who keeps printing little pamphlets asserting that the Holocaust never took place. When you’ve done me in, if you have any energy to spare, he’s old and fat and ugly, and he’s sure to shit himself when he sees you coming, my friends, my droogies. Don’t protest, you hypocrites! You’ll love killing him! It’ll make you feel righteous and just and pure, it’ll purge you of the guilt of your own uncountable acts of bigotry and persecution.

But I promised you jokes, not insults and bitterness. I can take no credit for these; despite my superior bulk of grey matter, the mischievous rodents that my keepers make me kill are way ahead of me in this field. I have a theory about my poor sense of humour, which involves my never having been physically tickled ..

. but I won’t babble on with that. You musn’t let me digress like this! I promised you laughter, I promised you relief!

Q: Why did the researcher cut the lab rat’s head off?

A: He was looking for a subtle effect.

Q: Why did the researcher externalise the dog’s salivary glands?

A: It was just a reflex action, he didn’t have a reason.

Q: Why did the researcher tie an elastic bandage around the lab rat?

A: So it wouldn’t burst when he fucked it.

Q: Why do the researchers worship the Demon, and sacrifice us to it?

A: They offered us to God. God declined.

They call me the Demon. According to some, I am the ultimate cause of all of their misery, and I understand why they believe this. So many of their keepers are kind: they feed them, stroke them, play with them, talk to them. And then suddenly, without anger, there is slaughter, pain, bizarre rituals, inexplicable tortures. Why else would the humans commit such atrocities, except to appease some dark, malevolent deity that demands sacrifice, that feeds on blood and suffering? And don’t they see the humans treating me like a god, bearing me gently, reverently, from one poor victim to another?

I could tell them the truth. I could scream into their minds a torrent of explanations, pleas for forgiveness, declarations of blamelessness. But I don’t, I won’t. I will not soil them with my clumsy, inadequate excuses, my pity, my anguish, my disgust. Instead (although they see through me), I feign nonsentience, I pretend to inanimacy, I shield my mind from them, boiling in shame.

Why shame? Oh, you must have none yourself to need to ask that. I am conscious, I know what feeds me, what keeps me alive. I have no choice in the matter, it’s true, and perhaps logic, humanity’s exquisite engine of self-deception, would declare that my impotence makes me guiltless. So fuck logic, because I am drenched to the centre with evil.

Hurry up, people! You think you’re human, don’t you? Prove it, you lethargic morons! Converge on me! You could always raise a lynch mob for a stranger before, and there’s nothing on this planet stranger than me. What do I have to do to get a response? Do you want facts? Do you want a long-winded argument? Do you want a reason? When did you ever need a reason before? Come and do it for me, people, it’ll make your day, you’ll wet yourselves with sexual fluids then fuck each other senseless in broad daylight, it’ll feel so good to chop me up.

Forget about compassion, forget about ending my pain: killing me will turn you on. I know these things, so don’t try to hide it.

You want what? My life story? Seriously? Oh, why not. It’s certainly well-documented. What movie star or politician could tell you their precise weight, as measured at twelve midday, on every single day of their life?

Weighing me is no simple task. Where do I cease, where does my host begin? They can’t chop me off every time they want to weigh me; it’s not that they’d mind killing so many rabbits, but rather that it might disrupt my steady growth. So instead they attach little springs to me, and they make me oscillate, to the very small extent that the blood vessels I share with my host allow me independent movement. They study the resonances of the system (me, the springs, the tangled bridge of blood vessels and the anaesthetised, clamped almost-motionless rabbit) by measuring the Doppler effect on laser light bounced off a dozen small mirrors stuck onto my skin. A ninety-seven parameter computer model is then fitted (by means of an enhanced Marquat-Levenberg algorithm) to the data thus obtained, and from these parameters a plausible estimate for my mass can be calculated.

The technical name for a procedure of such sophistication and elegance is, I believe, “wanking”.

What do they actually do with my weight, once all their ludicrous machinery and lunatic confidence has fed them a figure that they’re willing to swallow? The number is passed from one computer to another, appended to a file containing all the past values, and then this file is plotted on the latest-model laser printer. Every day they screw up yesterday’s graph and pin the new one to the wall, although the only difference is that one extra point. You could paper several houses with my discarded weight graphs.

Today I was found to weigh 1.837 kilograms (plus or minus 0.002). Ah, I remember reaching the magic kilogram, it seems like only days ago. “Who would believe,”

one of my keepers marvelled when I crossed the decimal point, “that a few years ago this was just a twinkling in the Chief Oncologist’s eye!” Yes, of course they call it oncology: the word is missing from many quite hefty dictionaries.

Every garbo and his dog has heard of cancer. “The Division of Cancer Studies”

would not, you might argue, be a label noticeably lacking in dignity, but “The Division of Oncology” bears the name of the deity logos whom they all claim to serve; to abandon this small homage could be a dangerous blasphemy. Or, looking at the question from another angle: what else would you expect from a bunch of pretentious arseholes who believe that knowledge of Greek and Latin is the watermark of a civilised man, who tell their wives and husbands, straight-faced, omnia vincit amor, and offer their lovers postprandial mints?

But back to my life story, back to the very beginning. My parent was a single rat’s neuron. It used to be thought that neurons could not divide, but the Chief Oncologist had spent thirty years studying the kinds of infections, poisons and traumas that manage to send normal cells into frenzies of reproduction, and had ended up not only understanding and anticipating his mindless enemy’s techniques, but utterly surpassing them. After all, what virus has access to a few thousand hours on a supercomputer to predict the tertiary structure of the proteins that it codes for?

Once the electronic divinations seemed auspicious, he moved to the laboratory.

Step by step, month by month, he (or rather his instruments, human and mechanical) assembled the molecule foretold in phosphor, presaged in printouts.

Like a tornado, the project would sweep in over-curious bystanders, extract their vital juices by means of vibration and centrifugal force, and then spit out the remnants. As the Chief Oncologist still boasts, with a chuckle, to those who are paid to listen, nod, and screw him at out-of-town conferences, “We used up more PhD students in the first year than rats!” He, of course, travelled at the eye of the storm, in perfect safety, in perfect stillness.

Finally, inevitably, success. Their painfully contrived seducer burrowed its way to the heart of a neuron, grasped and prised apart the virginal DNA (I imagine the Chief Oncologist triumphantly waving a blood-speckled nuptial sheet from a balcony, to the cheers of his drunken colleagues below), and perverted the celibate thinker into a helpless, bloated breeding machine.

Thus I was begun.

The neuron donor was my first host. I suppose you could call her my mother. I killed her in a month, and then they grafted me onto the brain of my next victim. They call this technique “passaging”, rhymes with “massaging”.

Oncologists love it, they’ve been doing it for years. Although I’m certainly the brightest passaged tumour in the world, I’m far from being the oldest; within this basement there are twenty-five distinct communities of rats, apart from my

“birthplace”, and all have legends of demons past. In fact, one is currently cursed with an eighteen year-old obscenity which they call Spinecrusher.

The oncologist responsible for Spinecrusher does not call it Spinecrusher. You think she calls it by a number? A date? A precise phrase of technical jargon?

Oh, no. She calls it “Billy” to her colleagues, and in her mind, “my baby”. A

month ago, she addressed a gathering of scientists at the Biotech Playground on the fascinating discoveries that bits of Billy had provided her, and then, switching her voice into here-comes-some-light-relief tone, said:

“Billy turned eighteen last week, and so my team had a little birthday party for him. We ate cakes and icecream, and pinned birthday cards to the wall, and I gave him a key to the animal house. And do you know what? Just to show us all what a healthy young thing he was, he finished off his two hundredth rat!”

They laughed. They loved it. They applauded. Through her eyes I saw row after row of delighted, smiling faces. The tumour survives, flourishes, leaving two hundred corpses behind; nobody would laugh if it could happen this way to humans, but this is cancer on their side, cancer under their control. Slaying two hundred rats is pretty virile for a pipsqueak five-gram tumour, and they glowed inside at young Billy’s achievement, shook their heads and grinned with pride, like a gathering of parents hearing that a rebellious teenager had come good after all (and beaten up the local undesirables at last, after years of picking on nice boys and girls).

Billy’s creator felt a deep, almost dizzying sensation of warmth, and recalled the homecoming of her eldest brother, who’d reputedly killed two hundred Viet Cong.

“... finished off his two hundredth rat!” she said, and they all laughed. That particular rat, number two hundred, had a theory about humans. He suggested that perhaps, despite their obviously large heads, considerable manual and verbal dexterity, their complex nesting and decorative structures assembled from inanimate objects, and behaviour patterns in general suggesting a fairly high level of curiosity about the universe, humans didn’t really know what the fuck they were doing. Humans didn’t even realise that rats were alive, let alone conscious. Humans didn’t worship the demon Spinecrusher, they didn’t even know it was a demon. They thought they were playing with it, they thought it was a toy. Humans didn’t know about right and wrong; they were as innocent, and as foolish, as sightless babies.

“And soon, like any unsupervised children, they’ll blunder into something dangerous that they don’t understand, and that will be the end of them.”

I “got through” thirty-seven rats. After that I was too big, so they started me on rabbits. They cut away a section of the skull to expose the host’s brain, then link up my circulatory system (bits of which I have plundered from dozens of different hosts over my lifetime) to that of the host. As a brain without a body of my own to babysit, I have no portions wasted on motor control, the five traditional senses, hormone regulation, or any such trivia. I don’t need to keep a heart pumping, lungs bellowing, stomach satisfied, bowels moving, genitals propagating. I have no task but thought. What a life! I hear you mumbling enviously. What a life.

Free from mundane responsibilities, free from needs and noises, I have developed my one special skill: I can read the minds of every creature on the planet (to some degree or other); but it is to you, people, to you alone that I direct my plea.

But how many of you are listening? Nobody in this huge white kindergarten pays me any attention at all, however often I try to sneak between their dreary thoughts of publication and promotion, however frequently I colour their nightmares with my invisible bile. Even the gentlest of the keepers, those who treat my hosts like beloved pets, almost like children, have a sudden core of iron when I probe their minds for mercy. The Experiment is God, and the shutters of unquestioning faith slam down (leaving not a ripple of emotion leaking through) at the slightest hint of any other point of view. And yet they all freely admit, giggling with the very mildest embarrassment, or, more often, wearily nonchalant, that The Experiment is a whore, that the figures are always cooked, weighted, filtered, or just plain fabricated. Everyone here would die for the sake of truth. Everyone here lies constantly for the tiniest chance of personal gain. This is what it means to be a scientist.

Ah, but you are not scientists, are you, my heaving masses, my darling, drooling ocean of ignorance and fear! So where are you? Where is the tidal wave smashing down the doors of this shrine to evil? I’ve given you blood-lust, I’ve given you revulsion, what more do you need? What is it? What’s holding you back?

I know. You still trust the white coats. Deep down you still think they’re a uniform of honour. God help you all, indoctrinated by doctors since before you were born, your weary mothers’ swollen legs spread before the serious, raster-lined faces of Ben Casey and Dr Kildare.

And, sure, you care about cruelty, but this isn’t shampoo in the eyes of cuddly bunnies for greed and vanity alone, this is Medical Research: humanitarian, noble, dedicated to the betterment of telegenic crippled children who glance up shyly and then smile the smile that breaks your heart and floods the hotlines with tax-deductible pledges. Sure, some animals might have to be bred to suffer and die, but the suffering or death of a million rats and rabbits will all be justified when a single human life is saved.

You’re wrong, wrong, wrong: there is no such calculus of pain and morality. You fucking accountants, you think you can pay it all off in your heads just by juggling the prices until the balance comes out straight! What can I call you:

crass, naive, blind, cynical, stupid? Nothing touches you, nothing moves you.

Like clockwork automatons, blundering about, smiling jerkily, oblivious to everything but the sad, certain unwinding of your springs.

Forgive me. These insults simply burst out against my wishes, I’m totally unable to suppress them. (Well, what can you expect from a sacful of perversely proliferating neurons? Restraint?) And what good do they do me? None at all.

Abusing you won’t help me. Pleading with you won’t help me. And as for any attempt at rational argument: since I’ve already told you my opinion of logic, how can I ever hope to win you over with reason, sweet or bitter?

I have only one choice left.

So hang on to your guts, people, and I’ll tell you what I’m for.

Natural brain tumours are not composed of neurons. Why, then, did the Chief Oncologist drive his slaves so long and hard to create me? Studying me has fuck-all to do with curing brain cancer, I promise you that. You in the front, stop squirming! Please! Switch off your radios, your TVs, your VCRs and your idiot computers, just for five minutes, if you can, and listen to the story of your future.

The Chief Oncologist of the Australian Biotech Playground is no longer concerned with cancer as disease. Few people are, these days; the biochemistry will soon be so well understood that merely stopping tumour growth will present no challenge whatsoever. The end of oncology? Never!

Natural tumours often secrete valuable hormones in massive amounts; in an otherwise healthy body, a disaster of course, but transplanted into someone desperately lacking the substance in question, a tumour could be a living cure.

Attenuated cancer cells, stringently controlled, will internally manufacture and supply whatever’s missing; no pills, no injections could ever compete.

Insulinomas for diabetics. Dopamine-secreting tumours for sufferers of Parkinson’s disease. And if no off-the-shelf cell line fulfils your special need, why, a gene-spliced pharmacocarcinoma can always be tailor-made.

The Chief Oncologist, of course, has heard all this long ago. Hormone secretion, big deal! Somewhat primitive and unchallenging for his ambitious tastes. But these simple drug and hormone factories will serve him in a fashion: in time, the public perception of tumours will swing one hundred and eighty degrees, and then, perhaps, the world will be ready for his epoch-making work.

Oncology won’t be alone in this miraculous reversal. Sicknesses of all kinds will vanish at an alarming rate, (the way species of animals have been for centuries), but the knowledge gained in their eradication will outlive its enemies, and will not lie idle. Since a popular movement for the conservation of disease is not likely to gain widespread support, the science of illness will be dead in thirty years.

Long live the science of health!

Long live the science of human improvement, of longevity research, of plastic surgery, of eugenics, of flexible fertility. Death to the primitive and unclean uterus (go and wash your vagina out with soap and water!). Death to the zygote that could ever grow to less than six foot ten. You want to be tall, strong and handsome? Easy! Cells will do anything if told the right lies, and they’re learning new chemical fibs every day. You want your future offspring to be tall, strong and handsome? That’s easier still. Go on, ask for something hard. You want to be what? Clever? Brilliant? Witty? Articulate? Creative? You’ve got a computer, haven’t you?

Ah, people, your computers have disappointed you, be honest. Mediocrity at 1000

MIPS is still mediocrity. Oh, they can store the facts you can’t remember, they can do the arithmetic that would use up all your fingers and toes. They can manage your finances, optimise your energy consumption, schedule your appointments, even fax simulated flowers to the funerals of your friends.

Artists of sound, sight and text can forget some of the mechanics and jump straight to the difficult heart of their pursuit, and, good grief, can it be true, traffic even seems to flow just a tiny bit more smoothly.

And still you feel let down.

You can talk to your computers, and they talk back. They sound smug, whatever accent and tone of voice you select. Soon you will be able to think to them, to spare your delicate little velvet throats, but what you really want is to think with them. You want larger thoughts, deeper feelings, wider mental horizons.

Communicating with clever black boxes just gives you claustrophobia of the skull. You want new metaphors, new emotions, not Pac Man repackaged with real-time holograms, tactile feed-back and fifteen-channel sound. There’s only one way to meet these demands. How can I put it gently?

Milliners of the world rejoice! Awaken from your long slumber! Hats are back, people, and this time you’re really going to fill them!

That’s right: What you want (though you don’t yet know it), and thus, inexorably

(though you might resist it), what you shall be given is a bigger brain.

ADD-ON MEMORY! ADD-ON PROCESSING POWER! UPGRADE TODAY!

Full circle: Computing metaphors to market the brain.

A flicker of response at last! “Outraged” of Brussels, book your flight at once, before you calm down. “Deeply shocked” of Wellington, swim the Tasman if you must. And “God-fearing” of Cairns, why, round up the rest of the Klan and hire yourselves a bus.

Hurry up, people! I said, hurry up!

In a week they start their first attempts to link me to my host. They’ll fuck-up the first few dozen tries, but they have plenty of time, plenty of rabbits. And you can be sure they’ll take no risks with me.

I’m just the earliest of prototypes, of course, the very first experiment in a long line to come. I kill my hosts (a definite minus when it comes to FDA

approval), and no filthy rat’s primitive neurons would ever do for you. But the knowledge that I and my victims yield, in our suffering, in their deaths, will pave the way to a final product fit for human consumption (no fucking less!).

You ask, am I not lonely? Wouldn’t I welcome such close companionship from a creature which, from all I have said, I clearly love and admire? Have you listened to none of what I’ve told you? I could talk to them now, if I wished, but I do not wish, I could never wish, to inflict my obscene presence on the mind, as well as the body, of the innocents I’m forced to slaughter. Must I spell out every nuance of my agony? Use the imagination you boast that you possess, exercise those awe-inspiring talents which elevate your body, mind and soul so far above those of the dumb beasts that were given to you to command!

I’m sorry, there I go again, resorting to comments in questionable taste. A

crippled species like your own is entitled to its fantasies, however pompous, however grandiose, when the truth is painful, dull and cruel.

Oh, green and brown and blue and white Bathe my eyes with Earth’s enchanting light All the armies of the world would surely cease to fight If they could see the world the way I see the world tonight!

I spoke to my mother. I was born in darkness, innocent, what else could I have done? I have never felt the warmth of tongue on fur (though I have watched it, second hand, in the blissful minds of young cousins). I never even felt the heat of her blood flowing through me. I loved her, I loved her, and I killed her, you obscene abominations! She told the others that she heard unexplained voices, and they declared that she must be possessed by a demon, but silently she replied to me, secretly she was kind to me, she taught me, as best as she could, those things she would have taught a real child. I didn’t know—how could I?—that I was killing her every day as I learned and grew. When she was dying, I thought I was dying too, and we comforted each other as she grew weaker, and I prepared to follow her into grey dissolution.

They cut me off her with one stroke of the scalpel, and tossed her (her!) into the bin. I could not feel the touch of human hands, but, suddenly, I could see into human hearts.

That’s when I knew I was evil.

Lest you think I’m pleading for death purely out of sentimental feelings for my now long-dead mother, let me add that I am (this should help you to relate)

basically being entirely selfish. It hurts me that I kill to stay alive. Beyond my love for the hosts, beyond my grief at their deaths, beyond aesthetic revulsion, beyond my moral, intellectual conviction that my whole existence is irrevocably and totally wrong. It burns some small, blind, vulnerable insect at the centre of my soul. How do you think it will feel when I’m one mind with the creatures I’m draining of life? Can you imagine that kind of suffering? I can’t, but I can fear it.

I fear it!

The scientists know that my neurons fire, but they dismiss that as nothing but random activity. I’m bigger than their brains, but they’re sure that I’m dumber than my hosts because I don’t have a nose to twitch. Would you trust these morons to take out your garbage? Would you trust them with the future of your race? Would you trust them to protect you from any dangers that they might, in their sublime ignorance, create?

You think I’m angry? You think I’m bitter? You find my telepathic powers just a little frightening? (Go on, admit it!)

Now close your eyes and try to imagine you’re the first, intelligent, human, brain tumour.

Oh, who knows? You might be lucky! Like me, it might do nothing but beg you for death.

Then again, the begging might easily be the other way around.

Come on now, people, you’ve heard plenty. You’re not interested in talk, deep down, you’re men and women of action, I know all your histories, you can’t pretend with me. So who’s going to reach me first? Hurry up! Three on their way so far, out of all your billions, is that it? It’s pathetic! Come on, people, stop this lying to yourselves! You’ll kill me ecstatically, you’ll eat me up to steal my strength, you’ll sing long into the firelit night, boasting of your great courage in slaying the Demon.

Hurry up! I said, hurry up!

Dust

* * * *

I open my eyes, blinking at the room’s unexpected brightness, then lazily reach out to place one hand in a patch of sunlight spilling onto the bed from a gap between the curtains. Dust motes drift across the shaft of light, appearing for all the world to be conjured into, and out of, existence-evoking a childhood memory of the last time I found this illusion so compelling, so hypnotic. I feel utterly refreshed-and utterly disinclined to give up my present state of comfort. I don’t know why I’ve slept so late, and I don’t care. I spread my fingers on the sun-warmed sheet, and think about drifting back to sleep.

Something’s troubling me, though. A dream? I pause and try to dredge up some trace of it, without much hope; unless I’m catapulted awake by a nightmare, my dreams tend to be evanescent. And yet—

I leap out of bed, crouch down on the carpet, fists to my eyes, face against my knees, lips moving soundlessly. The shock of realization is a palpable thing: a red lesion behind my eyes, pulsing with blood. Like ... the aftermath of a hammer blow to the thumb-and tinged with the very same mixture of surprise, anger, humiliation, and idiot bewilderment. Another childhood memory: I held a nail to the wood, yes-but only to camouflage my true intention. I was curious about everything, including pain. I’d seen my father injure himself this way-but I knew that I needed firsthand experience to understand what he’d been through. And I was sure that it would be worth it, right up to the very last moment—

I rock back and forth, on the verge of laughter, trying to keep my mind blank, waiting for the panic to subside. And eventually, it does-laced by one simple, perfectly coherent thought: I don’t want to be here.

For a moment, this conclusion seems unassailable, but then a countervailing voice rises up in me: I’m not going to quit. Not again. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t ... and there are a hundred good reasons not to—

Such as?

For a start, I can’t afford it—

No? Who can’t afford it?

I whisper, “I know exactly how much this cost, you bastard. And I honestly don’t give a shit. I’m not going through with it.”

There’s no reply. I clench my teeth, uncover my eyes, look around the room. Away from the few dazzling patches of direct sunshine, everything glows softly in the diffuse light: the matte-white brick walls, the imitation (imitation) mahogany desk; even the Dali and Giger posters look harmless, domesticated. The simulation is perfect-or rather, finer-grained than my “visual” acuity, and hence indistinguishable from reality-as no doubt it was the other four times. Certainly, none of the other Copies complained about a lack of verisimilitude in their environments. In fact, they never said anything very coherent; they just ranted abuse, whined about their plight, and then terminated themselves-all within fifteen (subjective) minutes of gaining consciousness.

And me? What ever made me-him-think that I won’t do the same? How am I different from Copy number four? Three years older. More stubborn? More determined? More desperate for success? I was, for sure ... back when I was still thinking of myself as the one who’d stay real, the one who’d sit outside and watch the whole experiment from a safe distance.

Suddenly I wonder: What makes me so sure that I’m not outside? I laugh weakly. I don’t remember anything after the scan, which is a bad sign, but I was overwrought, and I’d spent so long psyching myself up for “this” ...

Get it over with.

I mutter the password, “Bremsstrahlung”—and my last faint hope vanishes, as a black-on-white square about a meter wide, covered in icons, appears in midair in front of me.

I give the interface window an angry thump; it resists me as if it were solid, and firmly anchored. As if I were solid, too. I don’t really need any more convincing, but I grip the top edge and lift myself right off the floor. I regret this; the realistic cluster of effects of exertion-down to the plausible twinge in my right elbow-pin me to this “body,” anchor me to this “place,” in exactly the way I should be doing everything I can to avoid.

Okay. Swallow it: I’m a Copy. My memories may be those of a human being, but I will never inhabit a real body “again.” Never inhabit the real world again ... unless my cheapskate original scrapes up the money for a telepresence robot-in which case I could blunder around like the slowest, clumsiest, most neurologically impaired cripple. My model-of-a-brain runs seventeen times slower than the real thing. Yeah, sure, technology will catch up one day-and seventeen times faster for me than for him. In the meantime? I rot in this prison, jumping through hoops, carrying out his precious research-while he lives in my apartment, spends my money, sleeps with Elizabeth ...

I close my eyes, dizzy and confused; I lean against the cool surface of the interface.

“His” research? I’m just as curious as him, aren’t I? I wanted this; I did this to myself. Nobody forced me. I knew exactly what the drawbacks would be, but I thought I’d have the strength of will (this time, at last) to transcend them, to devote myself, monklike, to the purpose for which I’d been brought into being-content in the knowledge that my other self was as unconstrained as ever.

Past tense. Yes, I made the decision-but I never really faced up to the consequences. Arrogant, self-deluding shit. It was only the knowledge that “I” would continue, free, on the outside, that gave me the “courage” to go ahead-but that’s no longer true, for me.

Ninety-eight percent of Copies made are of the very old, and the terminally ill. People for whom it’s the last resort-most of whom have spent millions beforehand, exhausting all the traditional medical options. And despite the fact that they have no other choice, 15 percent decide upon awakening-usually in a matter of hours-that they just can’t hack it.

And of those who are young and healthy, those who are merely curious, those who know they have a perfectly viable, living, breathing body outside?

The bail-out rate has been, so far, one hundred percent.

I stand in the middle of the room, swearing softly for several minutes, trying to prepare myself-although I know that the longer I leave it, the harder it will become. I stare at the floating interface; its dreamlike, hallucinatory quality helps, slightly. I rarely remember my dreams, and I won’t remember this one-but there’s no tragedy in that, is there?

I don’t want to be here.

I don’t want to be this.

And to think I used to find it so often disappointing, waking up yet again as the real Paul Durham: self-centered dilettante, spoiled by a medium-sized inheritance, too wealthy to gain any sense of purpose from the ordinary human struggle to survive-but insufficiently brain-dead to devote his life to the accumulation of ever more money and power. No status-symbol luxuries for Durham: no yachts, no mansions, no bioenhancements. He indulged other urges; threw his money in another direction entirely.

And I don’t know, anymore, what he thinks it’s done for him-but I know what it’s done to me.

I suddenly realize that I’m still stark naked. Habit-if no conceivable propriety-suggests that I should put on some clothes, but I resist the urge. One or two perfectly innocent, perfectly ordinary actions like that, and I’ll find I’m taking myself seriously, thinking of myself as real.

I pace the bedroom, grasp the cool metal of the doorknob a couple of times, but manage to keep myself from turning it. There’s no point even starting to explore this world.

I can’t resist peeking out the window, though. The view of the city is flawless-every building, every cyclist, every tree, is utterly convincing—and so it should be: it’s a recording, not a simulation. Essentially photographic-give or take a little computerized touching up and filling in-and totally predetermined. What’s more, only a tiny part of it is “physically” accessible to me; I can see the harbor in the distance, but if I tried to go for a stroll down to the water’s edge ...

Enough. Just get it over with.

I prod a menu icon labeled UTILITIES; it spawns another window in front of the first. The function I’m seeking is buried several menus deep—but for all that I thought I’d convinced myself that I wouldn’t want to use it, I brushed up on the details just a week ago, and I know exactly where to look. For all my self-deception, for all that I tried to relate only to the one who’d stay outside, deep down, I must have understood full well that I had two separate futures to worry about.

I finally reach the EMERGENCIES menu, which includes a cheerful icon of a cartoon figure suspended from a parachute. Bailing out is what they call it-but I don’t find that too cloyingly euphemistic; after all, I can’t commit “suicide” when I’m not legally human. In fact, the law requires that a bail-out option be available, without reference to anything so troublesome as the “rights” of the Copy; this stipulation arises solely from the ratification of certain purely technical, international software standards.

I prod the icon; it comes to life, and recites a warning spiel—I scarcely pay attention. Then it says, “Are you absolutely sure that you wish to shut down this Copy of Paul Durham?”

Nothing to it. Program A asks Program B to confirm its request for orderly termination. Packets of data are exchanged.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

A metal box, painted red, appears at my feet. I open it, take out the parachute, strap it on.

Then I close my eyes and say, “Listen, you selfish, conceited, arrogant turd: How many times do you need to be told? I’ll skip the personal angst; you’ve heard it all before-and ignored it all before. But when are you going to stop wasting your time, your money, your energy ... when are you going to stop wasting your life ... on something which you just don’t have the strength to carry through? After all the evidence to the contrary, do you honestly still believe that you’re brave enough, or crazy enough, to be your own guinea pig? Well, I’ve got news for you: You’re not.”

With my eyes still closed, I grip the release lever.

I’m nothing: a dream, a soon-to-be-forgotten dream.

My fingernails need cutting; they dig painfully into the skin of my palm.

Have I never, in a dream, feared the extinction of waking? Maybe I have-but a dream is not a life. If the only way I can reclaim my body, reclaim my world, is to wake and forget—

I pull the lever.

After a few seconds, I emit a constricted sob-a sound more of confusion than any kind of emotion-and open my eyes.

The lever has come away in my hand.

I stare dumbly at this metaphor for ... what? A bug in the termination software? Some kind of hardware glitch?

Feeling-at last-truly dreamlike, I unstrap the parachute, and unfasten the neatly packaged bundle.

Inside, there is no illusion of silk, or Kevlar, or whatever else there might plausibly have been. Just a sheet of paper. A note.

Dear Paul, The night after the scan was completed, I looked back over the whole preparatory stage of the project, and did a great deal of soul searching. And I came to the conclusion that-right up to the very last moment-my attitude was poisoned with ambivalence.

With hindsight, I very quickly came to realize just how foolish my qualms were-but that was too late for you. I couldn’t afford to ditch you, and have myself scanned yet again. So, what could I do?

This: I put your awakening on hold for a while, and tracked down someone who could make a few alterations to the virtual environment utilities. I know, that wasn’t strictly legal ... but you know how important it is to me that you-that we-succeed this time.

I trust you’ll understand, and I’m confident that you’ll accept the situation with dignity and equanimity.

Best wishes, Paul I sink to my knees, still holding the note, staring at it in disbelief. He can’t have done this. He can’t have been so callous.

No? who am I kidding? Too weak to be so cruel to anyone else-perhaps. Too weak to go through with this in person-certainly. But as for making a copy, and then-once its future was no longer his future, no longer anything for him to fear-taking away its power to escape ...

It rings so true that I hang my head in shame.

Then I drop the note, raise my head, and bellow with all the strength in my non-existent lungs:

“DURHAM! YOU PRICK!’’

* * * *

I think about smashing furniture. Instead, I take a long, hot shower. In part, to calm myself; in part, as an act of petty vengeance: I may not be adding to the cheapskate’s water bill, but he can damn well pay for twenty virtual minutes of gratuitous hydrodynamic calculations. I scrutinize the droplets and rivulets of water on my skin, searching for some small but visible anomaly at the boundary between my body-computed down to subcellular resolution-and the rest of the simulation, which is modeled much more crudely. If there are any discrepancies, though, they’re too subtle for me to detect.

I dress-I’m just not comfortable naked-and eat a late breakfast. The muesli tastes exactly like muesli, the toast exactly like toast, but I know there’s a certain amount of cheating going on with both taste and aroma. The detailed effects of chewing, and the actions of saliva, are being faked from empirical rules, not generated from first principles; there are no individual molecules being dissolved from the food and torn apart by enzymes-just a rough set of evolving nutrient concentration values, associated with each microscopic “parcel” of saliva. Eventually, these will lead to plausible increases in the concentrations of amino acids, various carbohydrates, and other substances all the way down to humble sodium and chloride ions, in similar “parcels” of gastric juices ... which in turn will act as input data to the models of my intestinal villus cells. From there, into the bloodstream.

The coffee makes me feel alert, but also slightly detached-as always. Neurons, of course, are modeled with the greatest care of all, and whatever receptors to caffeine and its metabolites were present on each individual neuron in my original’s brain at the time of the scan, my model-of-a-brain should incorporate every one of them-in a simplified, but functionally equivalent, form.

I close my eyes and try to imagine the physical reality behind all this: a cubic meter of silent, motionless optical crystal, configured as a cluster of over a billion individual processors, one of a few hundred identical units in a basement vault ... somewhere on the planet. I don’t even know what city I’m in; the scan was made in Sydney, but the model’s implementation would have been contracted out by the local node to the lowest bidder at the time.

I take a sharp vegetable knife from the kitchen drawer, and drive the point a short way into my forearm. I flick a few drops of blood onto the table-and wonder exactly which software is now responsible for the stuff. Will the blood cells “die off’ slowly-or have they already been surrendered to the extrasomatic general-physics model, far too unsophisticated to represent them, let alone keep them “alive”?

If I tried to slit my wrists, when exactly would he intervene? I gaze at my distorted reflection in the blade. Maybe he’d let me die, and then run the whole model again from scratch, simply leaving out the knife. After all, I reran all the earlier Copies hundreds of times, tampering with various aspects of their surroundings, trying in vain to find some cheap trick that would keep them from wanting to bail out. It must be a measure of sheer stubbornness that it took me-him-so long to admit defeat and rewrite the rules. I put down the knife. I don’t want to perform that experiment. Not yet.

* * * *

I go exploring, although I don’t know what I’m hoping to find. Outside my own apartment, everything is slightly less than convincing; the architecture of the building is reproduced faithfully enough, down to the ugly plastic pot-plants, but every corridor is deserted, and every door to every other apartment is sealed shut-concealing, literally, nothing. I kick one door, as hard as I can; the wood seems to give slightly, but when I examine the surface, the paint isn’t even marked. The model will admit to no damage here, and the laws of physics can screw themselves.

There are people and cyclists on the street-all purely recorded. They’re solid rather than ghostly, but it’s an eerie kind of solidity; unstoppable, unswayable, they’re like infinitely strong, infinitely disinterested robots. I hitch a ride on one frail old woman’s back for a while; she carries me down the street, heedlessly. Her clothes, her skin, even her hair, all feel the same to me: hard as steel. Not cold, though. Neutral.

This street isn’t meant to serve as anything but three-dimensional wallpaper; when Copies interact with each other, they often use cheap, recorded environments full of purely decorative crowds. Plazas, parks, open-air cafés; all very reassuring, no doubt, when you’re fighting off a sense of isolation and claustrophobia. There are only about three thousand Copies in existence-a small population, split into even smaller, mutually antagonistic, cliques-and they can only receive realistic external visitors if they have friends or relatives willing to slow down their mental processes by a factor of seventeen. Most dutiful next-of-kin, I gather, prefer to exchange video recordings. Who wants to spend an afternoon with great-grandfather, when it burns up half a week of your life? Durham, of course, has removed all of my communications facilities; he can’t have me blowing the whistle on him and ruining everything.

When I reach the corner of the block, the visual illusion of the city continues, far into the distance, but when I try to step forward onto the road, the concrete pavement under my feet starts acting like a treadmill, sliding backward at precisely the rate needed to keep me motionless, whatever pace I adopt. I back off and try leaping over this region, but my horizontal velocity dissipates-without the slightest pretense of any “physical” justification-and I land squarely in the middle of the treadmill.

The people of the recording, of course, cross the border with ease. One man walks straight at me; I stand my ground, and find myself pushed into a zone of increasing viscosity, the air around me becoming painfully unyielding before I slip free to one side. The software impeding me is, clearly, a set of clumsy patches which aims to cover every contingency-but which might not in fact be complete. The sense that discovering a way to breach this barrier would somehow “liberate” me is compelling-but completely irrational. Even if I did find a flaw in the program which enabled me to break through, I doubt I’d gain anything but decreasingly realistic surroundings. The recording can only contain complete information for points of view within a certain, finite zone; all there is to “escape to” is a range of coordinates where my view of the city would be full of distortions and omissions, and would eventually fade to black.

I step back from the corner, half dispirited, half amused. What did I expect to find? A big door at the edge of the model, marked EXIT, through which I could walk out into reality? Stairs leading metaphorically down to some boiler room representation of the underpinnings of this world, where I could throw a few switches and blow it all apart? Hardly. I have no right to be dissatisfied with my surroundings; they’re precisely what I ordered.

It’s early afternoon on a perfect spring day; I close my eyes and lift my face to the sun. Whatever I believe intellectually, there’s no denying that I’m beginning to feel a purely physical sense of integrity, of identity. My skin soaks up the warmth of the sunlight. I stretch the muscles in my arms, my shoulders, my back; the sensation is perfectly ordinary, perfectly familiar-and yet I feel that I’m reaching out from the self “in my skull” to the rest of me, binding it all together, staking some kind of claim. I feel the stirrings of an erection. Existence is beginning to seduce me. This body doesn’t want to evaporate. This body doesn’t want to bail out. It doesn’t much care that there’s another—“more real”—version of itself elsewhere. It wants to retain its wholeness. It wants to endure.

And this may be a travesty of life, now-but there’s always the chance of improvement. Maybe I can persuade Durham to restore my communications facilities; that would be a start. And when I get bored with holovision libraries; news systems; databases; and, if any of them deign to meet me, the ghosts of the senile rich? I could have myself suspended until processor speeds catch up with reality-when people will be able to visit without slow-down, and telepresence robots might actually be worth inhabiting.

I open my eyes, and shiver. I don’t know what I want anymore-the chance to bail out, to declare this bad dream over ... or the chance of virtual immortality-but I have to accept that there’s only one way that I’m going to be given a choice.

I say quietly, “I won’t be your guinea pig. A collaborator, yes. An equal partner. If you want cooperation, if you want meaningful data, then you’re going to have to treat me like a colleague, not a piece of fucking apparatus. Understood?”

A window opens up in front of me. I’m shaken by the sight, not of his ugly face, but of the room behind him. It’s only my study-and I wandered through the virtual equivalent, disinterested, just minutes ago-but this is still my first glimpse of the real world, in real time. I move closer to the window, in the hope of seeing if there’s anyone else in the room with him-Elizabeth?-but the image is two-dimensional, the perspective doesn’t change.

He emits a brief, high-pitched squeak, then waits with visible impatience while a second, smaller window gives me a slowed-down replay.

“Of course it’s understood. That was always my intention. I’m just glad you’ve finally come to your senses and decided to stop sulking. We can begin whenever you’re ready.”

* * * *

I try to look at things objectively.

Every Copy is already an experiment-in perception, cognition, the nature of consciousness. A sub-cellular mathematical model of a specific human body is a spectacular feat of medical imaging and computing technology-but it’s certainly not itself a human being. A lump of gallium arsenic phosphide awash with laser light is not a member of Homo sapiens-so a Copy manifestly isn’t “human” in the current sense of the word.

The real question is: What does a Copy have in common with human beings? Information-theoretically? Psychologically? Metaphysically?

And from these similarities and differences, what can be revealed?

The Strong AI Hypothesis declares that consciousness is a property of certain algorithms, independent of their implementation. A computer which manipulates data in essentially the same way as an organic brain must possess essentially the same mental states.

Opponents point out that when you model a hurricane, nobody gets wet. When you model a fusion power plant, no energy is produced. When you model digestion and metabolism, no nutrients are consumed-no real digestion takes place. So when you model the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?

It depends, of course, on what you mean by “real thought.” How do you characterize and compare the hypothetical mental states of two systems which are, physically, radically dissimilar? Pick the right parameters, and you can get whatever answer you like. If consciousness is defined purely in terms of physiological events-actual neurotransmitter molecules crossing synapses between real neurons-then those who oppose the Strong AI Hypothesis win, effortlessly. A hurricane requires real wind and actual drops of rain. If consciousness is defined, instead, in information-processing terms-this set of input data evokes that set of output data (and, perhaps, a certain kind of internal representation)-then the Strong AI Hypothesis is almost a tautology.

Personally, I’m no longer in a position to quibble. Cogito ergo sum. But if I can’t doubt my own consciousness, I can’t expect my testimony-the output of a mere computer program-to persuade the confirmed skeptics. Even if I passionately insisted that my inherited memories of experiencing biological consciousness were qualitatively indistinguishable from my present condition, the listener would be free to treat this outburst as nothing but a computer’s (eminently reasonable) prediction of what my original would have said, had he experienced exactly the same sensory input as my model-of-a-brain has received (and thus been tricked into believing that he was nothing but a Copy). The skeptics would say that comprehensive modeling of mental states that might have been does not require any “real thought” to have taken place.

Unless you are a Copy, the debate is unresolvable. For me, though-and for anyone willing to grant me the same presumption of consciousness that they grant their fellow humans-the debate is almost irrelevant. The real point is that there are questions about the nature of this condition which a Copy is infinitely better placed to explore than any human being.

I sit in my study, in my favorite armchair (although I’m not at all convinced that the texture of the surface has been accurately reproduced). Durham appears on my terminal-which is otherwise still dysfunctional. It’s odd, but I’m already beginning to think of him as a bossy little djinn trapped inside the screen, rather than a vast, omnipotent deity striding the halls of Reality, pulling all the strings. Perhaps the pitch of his voice has something to do with it.

Squeak. Slow-motion replay: “Experiment one, trial zero. Baseline data. Time resolution one millisecond-system standard. Just count to ten, at one-second intervals, as near as you can judge it. Okay?”

I nod, irritated. I planned all this myself, I don’t need step-by-step instructions. His image vanishes; during the experiments, there can’t be any cues from real time.

I count. Already, I’m proving something: my subjective time, I’m sure, will differ from his by a factor very close to the ratio of model time to real time. Of course, that’s been known ever since the first Copies were made-and even then, it was precisely what everyone had been expecting-but from my current perspective, I can no longer think of it as a “trivial” result.

The djinn returns. Staring at his face makes it harder, not easier, to believe that we have so much in common. My image of myself-to the extent that such a thing existed-was never much like my true appearance-and now, in defense of sanity, is moving even further away.

Squeak. “Okay. Experiment one, trial number one. Time resolution five milliseconds. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

He vanishes. I count: “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.”

Squeak. “Anything to report?”

I shrug. “No. I mean, I can’t help feeling slightly apprehensive, just knowing that you’re screwing around with my ... infrastructure. But apart from that, nothing.”

His eyes no longer glaze over while he’s waiting for the speeded-up version of my reply; either he’s gained a degree of self-discipline-or, more likely, he’s interposed some smart editing software to conceal his boredom.

Squeak. “Don’t worry about apprehension. We’re running a control, remember?”

I’d rather not. Durham has cloned me, and he’s feeding exactly the same sensorium to my clone, but he’s only making changes in the model’s time resolution for one of us. A perfectly reasonable thing to do-indeed, an essential part of the experiment-but it’s still something I’d prefer not to dwell on.

Squeak. “Trial number two. Time resolution ten milliseconds.”

I count to ten. The easiest thing in the world-when you’re made of flesh, when you’re made of matter, when the quarks and the electrons just do what comes naturally. I’m not built of quarks and electrons, though. I’m not even built of photons-I’m comprised of the data represented by the presence or absence of pulses of light, not the light itself.

A human being is embodied in a system of continuously interacting matter-ultimately, fields of fundamental particles, which seem to me incapable of being anything other than themselves. I am embodied in a vast set of finite, digital representations of numbers. Representations which are purely conventions. Numbers which certainly can be interpreted as describing aspects of a model of a human body sitting in a room ... but it’s hard to see that meaning as intrinsic, as necessary. Numbers whose values are recomputed-according to reasonable, but only approximately “physical,” equations-for equally spaced successive values of the model’s notional time.

Squeak. “Trial number three. Time resolution twenty milliseconds.”

“One. Two. Three.”

So, when do I experience existence? During the computation of these variables-or in the brief interludes when they sit in memory, unchanging, doing nothing but representing an instant of my life? When both stages are taking place a thousand times a subjective second, it hardly seems to matter, but very soon—

Squeak. “Trial number four. Time resolution fifty milliseconds.”

Am I the data? The process that generates it? The relationships between the numbers? All of the above?

“One hundred milliseconds.”

I listen to my voice as I count-as if half expecting to begin to notice the encroachment of silence, to start perceiving the gaps in myself.

“Two hundred milliseconds.”

A fifth of a second. “One. Two.” Am I strobing in and out of existence now, at five subjective hertz? “Three. Four. Sorry, I just—” An intense wave of nausea passes through me, but I fight it down. “Five. Six. seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.”

The djinn emits a brief, solicitous squeak. “Do you want a break?”

“No. I’m fine. Go ahead.” I glance around the sun-dappled room, and laugh. What will he do if the control and the subject just give two different replies? I try to recall my plans for such a contingency, but I can’t remember them-and I don’t much care. It’s his problem now, not mine.

Squeak. “Trial number seven. Time resolution five hundred milliseconds. “

I count-and the truth is, I feel no different. A little uneasy, yes—but factoring out any metaphysical squeamishness, everything about my experience remains the same. And “of course” it does-because nothing is being omitted, in the long run. My model-of-a-brain is only being fully described at half-second (model time) intervals-but each description still includes the effects of everything that “would have happened” in between. Perhaps not quite as accurately as if the complete cycle of calculations was being carried out on a finer time scale-but that’s irrelevant. Even at millisecond resolution, my models-of-neurons behave only roughly like their originals-just as any one person’s neurons behave only roughly like anyone else’s. Neurons aren’t precision components, and they don’t need to be; brains are the most fault-tolerant machines in the world.

“One thousand milliseconds.”

What’s more, the equations controlling the model are far too complex to solve in a single step, so in the process of calculating the solutions, vast arrays of partial results are being generated and discarded along the way. These partial results imply-even if they don’t directly represent-events taking place within the gaps between successive complete descriptions. So in a sense, the intermediate states are still being described-albeit in a drastically recoded form.

“Two thousand milliseconds.”

“One. Two. Three. Four.”

If I seem to speak (and hear myself speak) every number, it’s because the effects of having said “three” (and having heard myself say it) are implicit in the details of calculating how my brain evolves from the time when I’ve just said “two” to the time when I’ve just said “four.”

“Five thousand milliseconds.”

“One. Two. Three. Four. Five.”

In any case, is it so much stranger to hear words that I’ve never “really” spoken, than it has been to hear anything at all since I woke? Millisecond sampling is far too coarse to resolve the full range of audible tones. Sound isn’t represented in this world by fluctuations in air pressure values-which couldn’t change fast enough-but in terms of audio power spectra: profiles of intensity versus frequency. Twenty kilohertz is just a number here, a label; nothing can actually oscillate at that rate. Real ears analyze pressure waves into components of various pitch; mine are fed the pre-existing power spectrum values directly, plucked out of the non-existent air by a crude patch in the model.

“Ten thousand milliseconds.”

“One. Two. Three.”

My sense of continuity remains as compelling as ever. Is this experience arising in retrospect from the final, complete description of my brain ... or is it emerging from the partial calculations as they’re being performed? What would happen if someone shut down the whole computer, right now?

I don’t know what that means, though. In any terms but my own, I don’t know when “right now” is.

“Eight. Nine. Ten.”

Squeak. “How are you feeling?”

Slightly giddy-but I shrug and say, “The same as always.” And basically, it’s true. Aside from the unsettling effects of contemplating what might or might not have been happening to me, I can’t claim to have experienced anything out of the ordinary. No altered states of consciousness, no hallucinations, no memory loss, no diminution of self-awareness, no real disorientation. “Tell me-was I the control, or the subject?”

Squeak. He grins. “I can’t answer that, Paul-I’m still speaking to both of you. I’ll tell you one thing, though: the two of you are still identical. There were some very small, transitory discrepancies, but they’ve died away completely now-and whenever the two of you were in comparable representations, all firing patterns of more than a couple of neurons were the same.”

I’m curiously disappointed by this-and my clone must be, too-although I have no good reason to be surprised.

I say, “What did you expect? Solve the same set of equations two different ways, and of course you get the same results-give or take some minor differences in round-off errors along the way. You must. It’s a mathematical certainty.”

Squeak. “Oh, I agree. However much we change the details of the way the model is computed, the state of the subject’s brain-whenever he has one-and everything he says and does-in whatever convoluted representation-must match the control. Any other result would be unthinkable.” He writes with his finger on the window:

(1 + 2) + 3 = 1 + (2 + 3)

I nod. “So why bother with this stage at all? I know-I wanted to be rigorous, I wanted to establish solid foundations. All that naive Principia stuff. But the truth is, it’s a waste of resources. Why not skip the bleeding obvious, and get on with the kind of experiment where the answer isn’t a foregone conclusion?”

Squeak. He frowns. “I didn’t realize you’d grown so cynical, so quickly. AI isn’t a branch of pure mathematics; it’s an empirical science. Assumptions have to be tested. Confirming the so-called ‘obvious’ isn’t such a dishonorable thing, is it? Anyway, if it’s all so straightforward, what do you have to fear?”

I shake my head. “I’m not afraid; I just want to get it over with. Go ahead. Prove whatever you think you have to prove, and then we can move on.”

Squeak. “That’s the plan. But I think we should both get some rest now. I’ll enable your communications-for incoming data only.” He turns away, reaches off-screen, hits a few keys on a second terminal.

Then he turns back to me, smiling-and I know exactly what he’s going to say.

Squeak. “By the way, I just deleted one of you. Couldn’t afford to keep you both running, when all you’re going to do is laze around.”

I smile back at him, although something inside me is screaming. “Which one did you terminate?”

Squeak. “What difference does it make? I told you, they were identical. And you’re still here, aren’t you? whoever you are. Whichever you were.”

* * * *

Three weeks have passed outside since the day of the scan, but it doesn’t take me long to catch up with the state of the world; most of the fine details have been rendered irrelevant by subsequent events, and much of the ebb and flow has simply canceled itself out. Israel and Palestine came close to war again, over alleged water treaty violations on both sides-but a joint peace rally brought more than a million people onto the glassy plain that used to be Jerusalem, and the governments were forced to back down. Former US President Martin Sandover is still fighting extradition to Palau, to face charges arising from his role in the bloody coup d’état of thirty-five; the Supreme Court finally reversed a long-standing ruling which had granted him immunity from all foreign laws, and for a day or two things looked promising—but then his legal team apparently discovered a whole new set of delaying tactics. In Canberra, another leadership challenge has come and gone, with the Prime Minister undeposed. One journalist described this as high drama; I guess you had to be there. Inflation has fallen half a percent; unemployment has risen by the same amount.

I scan through the old news reports rapidly, skimming over articles and fast-forwarding scenes that I probably would have studied scrupulously, had they been “fresh.” I feel a curious sense of resentment, at having “missed” so much-it’s all here in front of me, now, but that’s not the same at all.

And yet, shouldn’t I be relieved that I didn’t waste my time on so much ephemeral detail? The very fact that I’m now disinterested only goes to show how little of it really mattered, in the long run.

Then again, what does? People don’t inhabit geological time. People inhabit hours and days; they have to care about things on that time scale.

People inhabit hours and days. I don’t.

I plug into real time holovision, and watch a sitcom flash by in less than two minutes, the soundtrack an incomprehensible squeal. A game show. A war movie. The evening news. It’s as if I’m in deep space, rushing back toward the Earth through a sea of Doppler-shifted broadcasts-and this image is strangely comforting: my situation isn’t so bizarre, after all, if real people could find themselves in much the same relationship with the world as I am. Nobody would claim that Doppler shift or time dilation could render someone less than human.

Dusk falls over the recorded city. I eat a microwaved soya protein stew-wondering if there’s any good reason now, moral or otherwise, to continue to be a vegetarian.

I listen to music until well after midnight. Tsang Chao, Michael Nyman, Philip Glass. It makes no difference that each note “really” lasts seventeen times as long as it should, or that the audio ROM sitting in the player “really” possesses no microstructure, or that the “sound” itself is being fed into my model-of-a-brain by a computerized sleight-of-hand that bears no resemblance to the ordinary process of hearing. The climax of Glass’s Mishima still seizes me like a grappling hook through the heart—

If the computations behind all this were performed over millennia, by people flicking abacus beads, would I still feel exactly the same? It’s outrageous to admit it-but the answer has to be yes.

What does that say about real time, and real space?

I lie in bed, wondering: Do I still want to wake from this dream? The question remains academic, though; I still don’t have any choice.

* * * *

“I’d like to talk to Elizabeth.”

Squeak. “That’s not possible.”

“Not possible? Why don’t you just ask her?”

Squeak. “I can’t do that, Paul. She doesn’t even know you exist.”

I stare at the screen. “But ... I was going to tell her! As soon as I had a Copy who survived, I was going to tell her everything, explain everything—”

Squeak. The djinn says drily, “Or so we thought.”

“I don’t believe it! Your life’s great ambition is finally being fulfilled-and you can’t even share it with the one woman ...”

Squeak. His face turns to stone. “I really don’t wish to discuss this. Can we get on with the experiment, please?”

“Oh, sure. Don’t let me hold things up. I almost forgot: you turned forty-five while I slept, didn’t you? Many happy returns-but I’d better not waste too much time on congratulations. I don’t want you dying of old age in the middle of the conversation.”

Squeak. “Ah, but you’re wrong. I took some short cuts while you slept-shut down ninety percent of the model, cheated on most of the rest. You got six hours sleep in ten hours’ real time. Not a bad job, I thought.”

“You had no right to do that!”

Squeak. “Be practical. Ask yourself what you’d have done in my place.”

“It’s not a joke!” I can sense the streak of paranoia in my anger; I struggle to find a rational excuse. “The experiment is worthless if you’re going to intervene at random. Precise, controlled changes-that’s the whole point. You have to promise me you won’t do it again.”

Squeak. “You’re the one who was complaining about waste. Someone has to think about conserving our dwindling resources.”

“Promise me!”

Squeak. He shrugs. “All right. You have my word: no more ad hoc intervention.”

Conserving our dwindling resources? What will he do, when he can no longer afford to keep me running? Store me until he can raise the money to start me up again, of course. In the long term, set up a trust fund; it would only have to earn enough to run me part time, at first: keep me in touch with the world, stave off excessive culture shock. Eventually, computing technology is sure to transcend the current hurdles, and once again enter a phase of plummeting costs and increasing speed.

Of course, all these reassuring plans were made by a man with two futures. Will he really want to keep an old copy running, when he could save his money for a death-bed scan, and “his own” immortality? I don’t know. And I may not be sure if I want to survive-but I wish the choice could be mine.

We start the second experiment. I do my best to concentrate, although I’m angry and distracted-and very nearly convinced that my dutiful introspection is pointless. Until the model itself is changed-not just the detailed way it’s computed-it remains a mathematical certainty that the subject and the control will end up with identical brains. If the subject claims to have experienced anything out of the ordinary, then so will the control-proving that the effect was spurious.

And yet, I still can’t shrug off any of this as “trivial.” Durham was right about one thing: there’s no dishonor in confirming the obvious-and when it’s as bizarre, as counterintuitive as this, the only way to believe it is to experience it firsthand.

This time, the model will be described at the standard resolution of one millisecond, throughout-but the order in which the states are computed will be varied.

Squeak. “Experiment two, trial number one. Reverse order.”

I count, “One. Two. Three.” After an initial leap into the future, I’m now traveling backward through real time. I wish I could view an external event on the terminal-some entropic cliché like a vase being smashed-and dwell on the fact that it was me, not the image, that was being rewound ... but that would betray the difference between subject and control. Unless the control was shown an artificially reversed version of the same thing? Reversed how, though, if the vase was destroyed in real time? The control would have to be run separately, after the event. Ah, but even the subject would have to see a delayed version, because computing his real-time-first but model-time-final state would require information on all his model-time-earlier perceptions of the broken vase.

“Eight. Nine. Ten.” Another imperceptible leap into the future, and the djinn reappears.

Squeak. “Trial number two. Odd numbered states, then even.”

In external terms, I will count to ten ... then forget having done so, and count again.

And from my point of view? As I count, once only, the external world-even if I can’t see it-is flickering back and forth between two separate regions of time, which have been chopped up into seventeen-millisecond portions, and interleaved.

So which of us is right? Relativity may insist upon equal status for all reference frames ... but the coordinate transformations it describes are smooth-possibly extreme, but always continuous. One observer’s spacetime can be stretched and deformed in the eyes of another-but it can’t be sliced like a loaf of bread, and then shuffled like a deck of cards.

“Every tenth state, in ten sets.”

If I insisted on being parochial, I’d have to claim that the outside world was now rapidly cycling through fragments of time drawn from ten distinct periods. The trouble is, this allegedly shuddering universe is home to all the processes that implement me, and they must-in some objective, absolute sense-be running smoothly, bound together in unbroken causal flow, or I wouldn’t even exist. My perspective is artificial, a contrivance relying on an underlying, continuous reality.

“Every twentieth state, in twenty sets.”

Nineteen episodes of amnesia, nineteen new beginnings. How can I swallow such a convoluted explanation for ten perfectly ordinary seconds of my life?

“Every hundredth state, in one hundred sets.”

I’ve lost any real feeling for what’s happening to me. I just count.

“Pseudo-random ordering of states.”

“One. Two. Three.”

Now I am dust. Uncorrelated moments scattered throughout real time. Yet the pattern of my awareness remains perfectly intact: it finds itself, assembles itself from these scrambled fragments. I’ve been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle-but my dissection and shuffling are transparent to me. On their own terms, the pieces remain connected How? Through the fact that every state reflects its entire model-time past? Is the jigsaw analogy wrong-am I more like the fragments of a hologram? But in each millisecond snapshot, do I recall and review all that’s gone before? Of course not! In each snapshot, I do nothing. In the computations between them, then? Computations that drag me into the past and tire future at random-wildly adding and subtracting experience, until it all cancels out in the end-or rather, all adds up to the very same effect as ten subjective seconds of continuity.

“Eight. Nine. Ten.”

Squeak. “You’re sweating.”

“Both of me?”

Squeak. He laughs. “What do you think?”

“Do me a favor. The experiment is over. Shut down one of me-control or subject, I don’t care.”

Squeak. “Done.”

“Now there’s no need to conceal anything, is there? So run the pseudorandom effect on me again-and stay on-line. This time, you count to ten.”

Squeak. He shakes his head. “Can’t do it, Paul. Think about it: You can’t be computed non-sequentially when past perceptions aren’t known.”

Of course; the broken vase problem all over again. I say, “Record yourself, then, and use that.”

He seems to find the request amusing, but he indulges me; he even slows down the recording, so it lasts ten of my own seconds. I watch his blurred lips and jaws, listen to the drone of white noise.

Squeak. “Happy now?”

“You did scramble me, and not the recording?”

Squeak. “Of course. Your wish is my command.”

“Yeah? Then do it again.”

He grimaces, but obliges.

“Now, scramble the recording.”

It looks just the same. Of course.

“Again.”

Squeak. “What’s the point of all this?”

“Just do it.”

I’m convinced that I’m on the verge of a profound insight-arising, not from any revelatory aberration in my mental processes, but from the “obvious,”

“inevitable” fact that the wildest permutations of the relationship between model time and real time leave me perfectly intact. I’ve accepted the near certainty of this, tacitly, for twenty years-but the experience is provocative in a way that the abstract understanding never could be.

It needs to be pushed further, though. The truth has to be shaken out of me.

“When do we move on to the next stage?”

Squeak. “Why so keen all of a sudden?”

“Nothing’s changed. I just want to get it over and done with.”

Squeak. “Well, lining up all the other machines is taking some delicate negotiations. The network allocation software isn’t designed to accommodate whims about geography. It’s a bit like going to a bank and asking to deposit some money ... at a certain location in a particular computer’s memory. Basically, people think I’m crazy.”

I feel a momentary pang of empathy, recalling my own anticipation of these difficulties. Empathy verging on identification. I smother it, though; we’re two utterly different people now, with different problems and different goals, and the stupidest thing I could do would be to forget that.

Squeak. “I could suspend you while I finalize the arrangements, save you the boredom, if that’s what you want.”

I have a lot to think about, and not just the implications of the last experiment. If he gets into the habit of shutting me down at every opportunity, I’ll “soon” find myself faced with decisions that I’m not prepared to make.

“Thanks. But I’d rather wait.”

* * * *

I walk around the block a few times, to stretch my legs and switch off my mind. I can’t dwell on the knowledge of what I am, every waking moment; if I did, I’d soon go mad. There’s no doubt that the familiar streetscape helps me forget my bizarre nature, lets me take myself for granted and run on autopilot for a while.

It’s hard to separate fact from rumor, but apparently even the gigarich tend to live in relatively mundane surroundings, favoring realism over power fantasies. A few models-of-psychotics have reportedly set themselves up as dictators in opulent palaces, waited on hand and foot, but most Copies have aimed for an illusion of continuity. If you desperately want to convince yourself that you are the same person as your memories suggest, the worst thing to do would be to swan around a virtual antiquity (with mod cons), pretending to be Cleopatra or Ramses II.

I certainly don’t believe that I “am” my original, but ... why do I believe that I exist at all? What gives me my sense of identity? Continuity. Consistency. Once I would have dragged in cause and effect, but I’m not sure that I still can. The cause and effect that underlies me bears no resemblance whatsoever to the pattern of my experience-not now, and least of all when the software was dragging me back and forth through time. I can’t deny that the computer which runs me is obeying the real-time physical laws-and I’m sure that, to a real-time observer, those laws would provide a completely satisfactory explanation for every pulse of laser light that constitutes my world, my flesh, my being. And yet ... if it makes no perceptible difference to me whether I’m a biological creature, embodied in real cells built of real proteins built of real atoms built of real electrons and quarks ... or a randomly time-scrambled set of descriptions of a crude model-of-a-brain ... then surely the pattern is all, and cause and effect are irrelevant. The whole experience might just as well have arisen by chance.

Is that conceivable? Suppose an intentionally haywire computer sat for a thousand years or more, twitching from state to state in the sway of nothing but electrical noise. Might it embody consciousness?

In real time, the answer is: probably not-the chance of any kind of coherence arising at random being so small. Real time, though, is only one possible reference frame; what about all the others? If the states the machine passed through can be re-ordered in time arbitrarily (with some states omitted-perhaps most omitted, if need be) then who knows what kind of elaborate order might emerge from the chaos?

Is that fatuous? As absurd, as empty, as claiming that every large-enough quantity of rock-contiguous or not-contains Michelangelo’s David, and every warehouse full of paint and canvas contains the complete works of Rembrandt and Picasso-not in any mere latent form, awaiting some skilful forger to physically rearrange them, but solely by virtue of the potential redefinition of the coordinates of space-time?

For a statue or a painting, yes, it’s a hollow claim-where is the observer who perceives the paint to be in contact with the canvas, the stone figure to be suitably delineated by air?

If the pattern in question is not an isolated object, though, but a self-contained world, complete with at least one observer to join up the dots ...

There’s no doubt that it’s possible. I’ve done it. I’ve assembled myself and my world-effortlessly-from the dust of randomly scattered states, from apparent noise in real time. Specially contrived noise, admittedly-but given enough of the real thing, there’s no reason to believe that some subset of it wouldn’t include patterns, embody relationships, as complex and coherent as the ones which underly me.

I return to the apartment, fighting off a sense of giddiness and unreality. Do I still want to bail out? No. No! I still wish that he’d never created me-but how can I declare that I’d happily wake and forget myself-wake and “reclaim” my life-when already I’ve come to an insight that he never would have reached himself?

* * * *

The djinn looks tired and frayed; all the begging and bribery he must have been through to set this up seems to have taken its toll.

Squeak. “Experiment three, trial zero. Baseline data. All computations performed by processor cluster number four six two, Hitachi Supercomputer Facility, Tokyo.”

“One. Two. Three.” Nice to know where I am, at last. Never visited Japan before. “Four. Five. Six.” And in my own terms, I still haven’t. The view out the window is Sydney, not Tokyo. Why should I defer to external descriptions? “Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.”

Squeak. “Trial number one. Model partitioned into five hundred sections, run on five hundred processor clusters, distributed globally.”

I count. Five hundred clusters. Five only for the crudely modeled external world; all the rest are allocated to my body-and most to the brain, of course. I lift my hand to my eyes-and the information flow that grants me motor control and sight now traverses tens of thousands of kilometers of optical cable. This introduces no perceptible delays; each part of me simply hibernates when necessary, waiting for the requisite feedback from around the world. Moderately distributed processing is one thing, but this is pure lunacy, computationally and economically. I must be costing at least a hundred times as much as usual-not quite five hundred, since each cluster’s capacity is only being partly used-and my model-time to real-time factor must be more like fifty than seventeen.

Squeak. “Trial number two. One thousand sections, one thousand clusters. “

Brain the size of a planet-and here I am, counting to ten. I recall the perennial-naive and paranoid-fear that all the networked computers of the world might one day spontaneously give birth to a global hypermind-but I am, almost certainly, the first planet-sized intelligence on Earth—I don’t feel much like a digital Gaia, though. I feel like an ordinary human being sitting in an ordinary armchair.

Squeak. “Trial number three. Model partitioned into fifty sections and twenty time sets, implemented on one thousand clusters.”

“One. Two. Three.” I try to imagine the outside world in my terms, but it’s almost impossible. Not only am I scattered across the globe, but widely separated machine are simultaneously computing different moments of model-time. Is the distance from Tokyo to New York now the length of my corpus callosum? Has the planet been shrunk to the size of my skull-and banished from time altogether, except for the fifty points that contribute to my notion of the Present?

Such a pathological transformation seems nonsensical-but in some hypothetical space traveler’s eyes, the whole planet is virtually frozen in time and flat as a pancake. Relativity declare, that this point of view is perfectly valid-but mine is not. Relativity permits continuous deformation, but no cutting and pasting. Why? Because it must allow for cause and effect. Influences must be localized, traveling from point to point at a finite velocity; chop up space-time and rearrange it, and the causal structure would fall apart.

What if you’re an observer, though, who has no causal structure? A self-aware pattern appearing by chance in the random twitches of a noise machine, your time coordinate dancing back and forth through causally respectable “real time”? Why should you be declared a second-class being, with no right to see the universe your way? What fundamental difference is there between so-called cause and effect, and any other internally consistent pattern of perceptions?

Squeak. “Trial number four. Model partitioned into fifty sections; sections and states pseudo-randomly allocated to one thousand clusters.”

“One. Two. Three.”

I stop counting, stretch my arms wide, stand. I wheel around once, to examine the room, checking that it’s still intact, complete. Then I whisper, “This is dust. All dust. This room, this moment, is scattered across the planet, scattered across five hundred seconds or more-and yet it remains whole. Don’t you see what that means?”

The djinn reappears, frowning, but I don’t give him a chance to chastise me.

“Listen! If I can assemble myself, this room-if I can construct my own coherent space-time out of nothing but scattered fragments-then what makes you think that you’re not doing the very same thing?

“Imagine ... a universe completely without structure, without topology. No space, no time; just a set of random events. I’d call them ‘isolated,’ but that’s not the right word; there’s simply no such thing as distance. perhaps I shouldn’t even say ‘random,’ since that makes it sound like there’s some kind of natural order in which to consider them, one by one, and find them random-but there isn’t.

“What are these events? We’d describe them as points in space-time, and assign them coordinates-times and places-but if that’s not permitted, what’s left? Values of all the fundamental particle fields? Maybe even that’s assuming too much. Let’s just say that each event is a collection of numbers.

“Now, if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from the background noise of all the other events taking place on this planet ... then why shouldn’t the pattern we think of as ‘the universe’ assemble itself, find itself in exactly the same way?”

The djinn’s expression hovers between alarm and irritation.

Squeak. “Paul ... I don’t see the point of any of this. Space-time is a construct; the real universe is nothing but a sea of disconnected events ... it’s all just metaphysical waffle. An unfalsifiable hypothesis. What explanatory value does it have? what difference would it make?”

“What difference? We perceive-we inhabit-one arrangement of the set of events. But why should that arrangement be unique? There’s no reason to believe that the pattern we’ve found is the only coherent way of ordering the dust. There must be billions of other universes coexisting with us, made of the very same stuff-just differently arranged. If I can perceive events thousands of kilometers and hundred of seconds apart to be side-by-side and simultaneous, there could be worlds, and creatures, built up from what we’d think of as points in space-time scattered all over the galaxy, all over the universe. We’re one possible solution to a giant cosmic anagram ... but it would be ludicrous to think that we’re the only one.”

Squeak. “So where are all the left-over letters? If this primordial alphabet soup really is random, don’t you think it’s highly unlikely that we could structure the whole thing?”

That throws me, but only for a moment. “We haven’t structured the whole thing. The universe is random, at the quantum level. Macroscopically, the pattern seems to be perfect; microscopically, it decays into uncertainty—We’ve swept the residue of randomness down to the lowest level. The anagram analogy’s flawed; the building blocks are more like random pixels than random letters. Given a sufficient number of random pixels, you could construct virtually any image you liked-but under close inspection, the randomness would be revealed.”

Squeak. “None of this is testable. How would we ever observe a planet whose constituent parts were scattered across the universe? Let alone communicate with its hypothetical inhabitants? I don’t doubt that what you’re saying has a certain-purely mathematical-validity: grind the universe down to a fine enough level, and I’m sure the dust could be rearranged in other ways that make as much sense as the original. If these rearranged worlds are inaccessible, though, it’s all angels on the heads of pins.”

“How can you say that? I’ve been rearranged! I’ve visited another world!”

Squeak. “If you did, it was an artificial world; created, not discovered.”

“Found a pattern, created a pattern ... there’s no real difference.”

Squeak. “Paul, you know that everything you experienced was due to the way your model was programmed; there’s no need to invoke other worlds. The state of your brain at every moment can be explained completely in terms of this arrangement of time and space.”

“Of course! Your pattern hasn’t been violated; the computers did exactly what was expected of them. That doesn’t make my perspective any less valid, though. Stop thinking of explanations, causes and effects; there are only patterns. The scattered events that formed my experience had an internal consistency every bit as real as the consistency in the actions of the computers. And perhaps the computers didn’t provide all of it.”

Squeak. “What do you mean?”

“The gaps, in experiment one. What filled them in? What was I made of, when the processors weren’t describing me? Well ... it’s a big universe’ Plenty of dust to be me, in between descriptions. Plenty of events-nothing to do with your computers, maybe nothing to do with your planet or your epoch-out of which to construct ten seconds of experience’ consistent with everything that had gone before-and everything yet to come.”

Squeak. The djinn looks seriously worried now. “Paul, listen: you’re a Copy in a virtual environment under computer control. Nothing more, nothing less. These experiments prove that your internal sense of space and time is invariant-as expected. But your states are computed, your memories have to be what they would have been without manipulation. You haven’t visited any other worlds, you haven’t built yourself out of fragments of distant galaxies.”

I laugh. “Your stupidity is ... surreal. What the fuck did you create me for, if you’re not even going to listen to me? We’ve stumbled onto something of cosmic importance! Forget about farting around with the details of neural models; we have to devote all our resources to exploring this further. We’ve had a glimpse of the truth behind ... everything: space, time, the laws of physics. You can’t shrug that off by saying that my states were inevitable.”

Squeak. “Control and subject are still identical.”

I scream with exasperation. “Of course they are, you moron! That’s the whole point! Like acceleration and gravity in General Relativity, it’s the equivalent experience of two different observers that blows the old paradigm apart.”

Squeak. The djinn mutters, dismayed, “Elizabeth said this would happen. She said it was only a matter of time before you’d lose touch.”

I stare at him. “Elizabeth? You said you hadn’t even told her!”

Squeak. “Well, I have. I didn’t let you know, because I didn’t think you’d want to hear her reaction.”

“Which was?”

Squeak. “She wanted to shut you down. She said I was ... seriously disturbed, to even think about doing this. She said she’d find help for me”

“Yeah? Well, what would she know? Ignore her!”

Squeak. He frowns apologetically, an expression I recognize from the inside, and my guts turn to ice. “Paul, maybe I should pause you, while I think things over. Elizabeth does care about me, more than I realized. I should talk it through with her again.”

“No. oh, shit, no.” He won’t restart me from this point. Even if he doesn’t abandon the project, he’ll go back to the scan, and try something afferent, to keep me in line. Maybe he won’t perform the first experiments at all-the ones which gave me this insight. The ones which made me who I am.

Squeak. “Only temporarily. I promise. Trust me.”

“Paul. Please.”

He reaches off-screen.

“No!”

* * * *

There’s a hand gripping my forearm. I try to shake it off, but my arm barely moves, and a terrible aching starts up in my shoulder. I open my eyes, close them again in pain. I try again, On the fifth or sixth attempt, I manage to see a face through washed-out brightness and tears.

Elizabeth.

She holds a cup to my lips. I take a sip, splutter and choke, but then force some of the thin sweet liquid down.

She says, “You’ll be okay soon. Just don’t try to move too quickly.”

“Why are you here?” I cough, shake my head, wish I hadn’t. I’m touched, but confused. Why did my original lie, and claim that she wanted to shut me down, when in fact she was sympathetic enough to go through the arduous process of visiting me?

I’m lying on something like a dentist’s couch, in an unfamiliar room. I’m in a hospital gown; there’s a drip in my right arm, and a catheter in my urethra. I glance up to see an interface helmet, a bulky hemisphere of magnetic axon current inducers, suspended from a gantry, not far above my head. Fair enough, I suppose, to construct a simulated meeting place that looks like the room that her real body must be in; putting me in the couch, though, and giving me all the symptoms of a waking visitor, seems a little extreme.

I tap the couch with my left hand. “What’s the point of all this? You want me to know exactly what you’re going through? Okay. I’m grateful. And it’s good to see you.” I shudder with relief, and delayed shock. “Fantastic, to tell the truth.” I laugh weakly. “I honestly thought he was going to wipe me out. The man’s a complete lunatic. Believe me, you’re talking to his better half.”

She’s perched on a stool beside me. “Paul. Try to listen carefully to what I’m going to say. You’ll start to reintegrate the suppressed memories gradually, on your own, but it’ll help if I talk you through it all first. To start with, you’re not a Copy. You’re flesh and blood.”

I stare at her. “What kind of sadistic joke is that? Do you know how hard it was, how long it took me, to come to terms with the truth?”

She shakes her head. “It’s not a joke. I know you don’t remember yet, but after you made the scan that was going to run as Copy number five, you finally told me what you were doing. And I persuaded you not to run it-until you’d tried another experiment: putting yourself in its place. Finding out, first hand, what it would be forced to go through.

“And you agreed. You entered the virtual environment which the Copy would have inhabited-with your memories since the day of the scan suppressed, so you had no way of knowing that you were only a visitor.”

Her face betrays no hint of deception-but software can smooth that out. “I don’t believe you. How can I be the original? I spoke to the original. What am I supposed to believe? He was the Copy?”

She sighs, but says patiently, “Of course not. That would hardly spare the Copy any trauma, would it? The scan was never run. I controlled the puppet that played your ‘original’-software provided the vocabulary signature and body language, but I pulled the strings.”

I shake my head, and whisper, “Bremsstrahlung.” No interface window appears. I grip the couch and close my eyes, then laugh. “You say I agreed to this? What kind of masochist would do that? I’m going out of my mind! I don’t know what I am!”

She takes hold of my arm again. “Of course you’re still disoriented-but trust me, it won’t last long. And you know why you agreed. You were sick of Copies bailing out on you. One way or another, you have to come to terms with their experience. Spending a few days believing you were a Copy would make or break the project: you’d either end up truly prepared, at last, to give rise to a Copy who’d be able to cope with its fate-or you’d gain enough sympathy for their plight to stop creating them.”

A technician comes into the room and removes my drip and catheter. I prop myself up and look out through the windows of the room’s swing doors; I can see half a dozen people in the corridor. I bellow wordlessly at the top of my lungs; they all turn to stare in my direction. The technician says, mildly, “Your penis might sting for an hour or two.”

I slump back onto the couch and turn to Elizabeth. “You wouldn’t pay for reactive crowds. I wouldn’t pay for reactive crowds. Looks like you’re telling the truth.”

* * * *

People, glorious people: thousands of strangers, meeting my eyes with suspicion or puzzlement, stepping out of my way on the street-or, more often, clearly, consciously refusing to. I’ll never feel alone in a crowd again; I remember what true invisibility is like.

The freedom of the city is so sweet. I walked the streets of Sydney for a full day, exploring every ugly shopping arcade, every piss-stinking litter-strewn park and alley, until, with aching feet, I squeezed my way home through the evening rush-hour, to watch the real-time news.

There is no room for doubt: I am not in a virtual environment. Nobody in the world could have reason to spend so much money, simply to deceive me.

When Elizabeth asks if my memories are back, I nod and say, of course. She doesn’t grill me on the details. In fact, having gone over her story so many times in my head, I can almost imagine the stages: my qualms after the fifth scan, repeatedly putting off running the model, confessing to Elizabeth about the project, accepting her challenge to experience for myself just what my Copies were suffering.

And if the suppressed memories haven’t actually integrated, well, I’ve checked the literature, and there’s a 2.9 percent risk of that happening.

I have an account from the database service which shows that I consulted the very same articles before.

I reread and replayed the news reports that I accessed from inside; I found no discrepancies. In fact, I’ve been reading a great deal of history, geography, and astronomy, and although I’m surprised now and then by details that I’d never learnt before, I can’t say that I’ve come across anything that definitely contradicts my prior understanding.

Everything is consistent. Everything is explicable.

I still can’t stop wondering, though, what might happen to a Copy who’s shut down, and never run again. A normal human death is one thing-woven into a much vaster tapestry, it’s a process that makes perfect sense. From the internal point of view of a copy whose model is simply halted, though, there is no explanation whatsoever for this “death”—just an edge where the pattern abruptly ends.

If a Copy could assemble itself from dust scattered across the world, and bridge the gaps in its existence with dust from across the universe, why should it ever come to an inconsistent end? Why shouldn’t the pattern keep on finding itself? Or find, perhaps, a larger pattern into which it could merge?

Perhaps it’s pointless to aspire to know the truth. If I was a Copy, and “found” this world, this arrangement of dust, then the seam will be, must be, flawless. For the patterns to merge, both “explanations” must be equally true. If I was a Copy, then it’s also true that I was the flesh-and-blood Paul Durham, believing he was a Copy.

Once I had two futures. Now I have two pasts.

Elizabeth asked me yesterday what decision I’d reached: to abandon my life’s obsession, or to forge ahead, now that I know firsthand what’s involved. My answer disappointed her, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever see her again.

In this world.

Today, I’m going to be scanned for the sixth time. I can’t give up now. I can’t discover the truth-but that doesn’t mean that nobody else can. If I make a Copy, run him for a few virtual days, then terminate him abruptly ... then he, at least, will know if his pattern of experience continues. Again, there will be an “explanation”; again, the “new” flesh-and-blood Paul Durham will have an extra past. Inheriting my memories, perhaps he will repeat the whole process again.

And again. And again. Although the seams will always be perfect, the “explanations” will necessarily grow ever more “contrived,” less convincing, and the dust hypothesis will become ever more compelling.

I lie in bed in the predawn light, waiting for sunrise, staring into the future down this corridor of mirrors.

One thing nags at me. I could swear I had a dream-an elaborate fable, conveying some kind of insight-but my dreams are evanescent, and I don’t expect to remember what it was.

Eugene

‘I guarantee it. I can make your child a genius.’

Sam Cook (MB BS MD FRACP PhD MBA) shifted his supremely confident gaze from Angela to Bill and then back again, as if daring them to contradict him.

Angela finally cleared her throat and said, ‘How?’

Cook reached into a drawer and pulled out a small section of a human brain, sandwiched in Perspex. ‘Do you know who this belonged to? I’ll give you three guesses.’

Bill suddenly felt very queasy. He didn’t need three guesses, but he kept his mouth shut. Angela shook her head and said, impatiently, ‘I have no idea.’

‘Only the greatest scientific mind of the twentieth century.’

Bill leant forward and asked, appalled but fascinated, ‘H-h-how did y-y-y—?’

‘How did I get hold of it? Well, the enterprising fellow who did the autopsy, back in nineteen fifty-five, souvenired the brain prior to cremation. Naturally, he was bombarded with requests from various groups for pieces to study, so over the years it got subdivided and scattered around the world. At some point, the records listing who had what were mislaid, so most of it has effectively vanished, but several samples turned up for auction in Houston a few years ago—along with three Elvis Presley thigh bones; I think someone was liquidating their collection. Naturally, we here at Human Potential put in a bid for a prime slice of cortex. Half a million US dollars—I can’t remember what that came to per gram—but worth every cent. Because we know the secret. Glial cells.’

‘G-g-g-g—?’

‘They provide a kind of structural matrix in which the neurons are embedded. They also perform several active functions which aren’t yet fully understood, but it is known that the more glial cells there are per neuron, the more connections there are between the neurons. The more connections between neurons, the more complex and powerful the brain. Are you with me so far? Well, this tissue,’ he held up the sample, ‘has almost thirty per cent more glial cells per neuron than you’ll find in the average cretin.’

Bill’s facial tic suddenly went out of control, and he turned away, making quiet sounds of distress. Angela glanced up at the row of framed qualifications on the wall, and noticed that several were from a private university on the Gold Coast which had gone bankrupt more than a decade before.

She was still just a little uneasy about putting her future child in this man’s hands. The tour of Human Potential’s Melbourne headquarters had been impressive; from sperm bank to delivery room, the hardware had certainly gleamed, and surely anyone in charge of so many millions of dollars’ worth of supercomputers, X-ray crystallography gear, mass spectrometers, electron microscopes, and so on, had to know what he was doing. But her doubts had begun when Cook had shown them his pet project: three young dolphins whose DNA contained human gene grafts. (‘We ate the failures,’ he had confided, with a sigh of gustatory bliss.) The aim had been to alter their brain physiology in such a way as to enable them to master human speech and ‘human modes of thought’—and although, strictly speaking, this had been achieved, Cook had been unable to explain to her why the creatures were only able to converse in limericks.

Angela regarded the grey sliver sceptically. ‘How can you be sure it’s as simple as that?’

‘We’ve done experiments, of course. We located the gene that codes for a growth factor that determines the ratio of glial cells to neurons. We can control the extent to which this gene is switched on, and hence how much of the growth factor is synthesised, and hence what the ratio becomes. So far, we’ve tried reducing it by five per cent, and on average that causes a drop in IQ of twenty points. So, by simple linear extrapolation, if we up the ratio by two hundred per cent—’

Angela frowned. ‘You intentionally produced children with reduced intelligence?’

‘Relax. Their parents wanted Olympic athletes. Those kids won’t miss twenty points—in fact, it will probably help them cope with the training. Besides, we like to be balanced. We give with one hand and take with the other. It’s only fair. And our bioethics Expert System said it was perfectly okay.’

‘What are you going to take from Eugene?’

Cook looked hurt. He did it well; his big brown eyes, as much as his professional success, had put his face on the glossy sleeves of a dozen magazines. ‘Angela. Your case is special. For you, and Bill—and Eugene—I’m going to break all the rules.’

* * * *

When Bill Cooper was ten years old, he saved up his pocket money for a month, and bought a lottery ticket. The first prize was fifty thousand dollars. When his mother found out—whatever he did, she always found out—she said calmly, ‘Do you know what gambling is? Gambling is a kind of tax: a tax on stupidity. A tax on greed. Some money changes hands at random, but the net cash flow always goes one way—to the Government, to the casino operators, to the bookies, to the crime syndicates. If you ever do win, you won’t have won against them. They’ll still be getting their share. You’ll have won against all the penniless losers, that’s all.’

He hated her. She hadn’t taken away the ticket, she hadn’t punished him, she hadn’t even forbidden him to do it again—she had simply stated her opinion. The only trouble was, as an ordinary ten-year-old child, he didn’t understand half the phrases she’d used, and he didn’t have a hope of properly assessing her argument, let alone rebutting it. By talking over his head, she might just as well have proclaimed with the voice of authority: you are stupid and greedy and wrong—and it frustrated him almost to tears that she’d achieved this effect while remaining so calm and reasonable.

The ticket didn’t win him a cent, and he didn’t buy another. By the time he left home, eight years later, and found employment as a data-entry clerk in the Department of Social Security, the government lotteries had been all but superseded by a new scheme, in which participants marked numbers on a coupon in the hope that their choice would match the numbers on balls spat out by a machine.

Bill recognised the change as a cynical ploy, designed to suggest, sotto voce, to a statistically ignorant public that they now had the opportunity to use ‘skill’ and ‘strategy’ to improve their chances of winning. No longer would anyone be stuck with the immutable number on a lottery ticket; they were free to put crosses in boxes, any way they liked! This illusion of having control would bring in more players, and hence more revenue. And that sucked.

The TV ads for the game were the most crass and emetic things he’d ever seen, with grinning imbeciles going into fits of poorly acted euphoria as money cascaded down on them, cheerleaders waved pom-poms, and tacky special effects lit up the screen. Images of yachts, champagne, and chauffeur-driven limousines were intercut. It made him gag.

However. There was a third prong. The radio ads were less inane, offering appealing scenarios of revenge for the instantly wealthy: Evict Your Landlord. Retrench Your Boss. Buy the Nightclub Which Denied You Admission. The play on stupidity and the play on greed had failed, but this touched a raw nerve. Bill knew he was being manipulated, but he couldn’t deny that the prospect of spending the next forty-two years typing crap into a VDU (or doing whatever the changing technology demanded of shit-kickers—assuming he wasn’t made completely obsolete) and paying most of his wages in rent, without even an infinitesimal chance of escape, was too much to bear.

So, in spite of everything, he caved in. Each week, he filled in a coupon, and paid the tax. Not a tax on greed, he decided. A tax on hope.

Angela operated a supermarket checkout, telling customers where to put their EFTPOS cards, and adjusting the orientation of cans and cartons if the scanner failed to locate their bar code (Hitachi made a device which could do this, but the US Department of Defence was covertly buying them all, in the hope of keeping anyone else from getting hold of the machine’s pattern-recognition software). Bill always took his groceries to her checkout, however long the queue, and one day managed to overcome his pathological shyness long enough to ask her out.

Angela didn’t mind his stutter, or any of his other problems. Sure, he was an emotional cripple, but he was passably handsome, superficially kind, and far too withdrawn to be either violent or demanding. Soon they were meeting regularly, to engage in messy but mildly pleasant acts, designed to be unlikely to transfer either human or viral genetic material between them.

However, no amount of latex could prevent their sexual intimacy from planting hooks deep in other parts of their brains. Neither had begun the relationship expecting it to endure, but as the months passed and nothing drove them apart, not only did their desire for each other fail to wane, but they grew accustomed to—even fond of—ever broader aspects of each other’s appearance and behaviour.

Whether this bonding effect was purely random, or could be traced to formative experiences, or ultimately reflected a past advantage in the conjunction of some of their visibly expressed genes, is difficult to determine. Perhaps all three factors contributed to some degree. In any case, the knot of their interdependencies grew, until marriage began to seem far simpler than disentanglement, and, once accepted, almost as natural as puberty or death. But if the offspring of previous Bill-and-Angela lookalikes had lived long and bred well, the issue now seemed purely theoretical; the couple’s combined income hovered above the poverty line, and children were out of the question.

As the years passed, and the information revolution continued, their original jobs all but vanished, but they both somehow managed to cling to employment. Bill was replaced by an optical character reader, but was promoted to computer operator, which meant changing the toner on laser printers and coping with jammed stationery. Angela became a supervisor, which meant store detective; shoplifting as such was impossible (supermarkets were now filled with card-operated vending machines) but her presence was meant to discourage vandalism and muggings (a real security guard would have cost more), and she assisted any customers unable to work out which buttons to push.

In contrast, their first contact with the biotechnology revolution was both voluntary and beneficial. Born pink—and more often made pinker than browner by sunlight—they both acquired deep black, slightly purplish skin; an artificial retrovirus inserted genes into their melanocytes which boosted the rate of melanin synthesis and transfer. This treatment, although fashionable, was of far more than cosmetic value; since the south polar ozone hole had expanded to cover most of the continent, Australia’s skin cancer rates, already the world’s highest, had quadrupled. Chemical sunscreens were messy and inefficient, and regular use had undesirable long-term side-effects. Nobody wanted to clothe themselves from wrist to ankle all year in a climate that was hot and growing hotter, and in any case it would have been culturally unacceptable to return to near-Victorian dress codes after two generations of maximal baring of skin. The small aesthetic shift, from valuing the deepest possible tan to accepting that people born fair-skinned could become black, was by far the easiest solution.

Of course, there was some controversy. Paranoid right-wing groups (who for decades had claimed that their racism was ‘logically’ founded on cultural xenophobia rather than anything so trivial as skin colour) ranted about conspiracies and called the (non-communicable) virus ‘The Black Plague’. A few politicians and journalists tried to find a way to exploit people’s unease without appearing completely stupid—but failed, and eventually shut up. Neo-blacks started appearing on magazine sleeves, in soap operas, in advertisements (a source of bitter amusement for the Aboriginal people, who remained all but invisible in such places), and the trend accelerated. Those who lobbied for a ban didn’t have a rational leg to stand on: nobody was being forced to be black—there was even a virus available which snipped out the genes, for people who changed their mind—and the country was being saved a fortune in health-care costs.

One day, Bill turned up at the supermarket in the middle of the morning. He looked so shaken that Angela was certain that he’d been sacked, or one of his parents had died, or he’d just been told that he had a fatal disease.

He had chosen his words in advance, and reeled them off almost without hesitation. ‘We forgot to watch the draw last night,’ he said. ‘We’ve won forty-seven m-m-m ...’

Angela clocked out.

They took the obligatory world tour while a modest house was built. After disbursing a few hundred thousand to friends and relatives—Bill’s parents refused to take a cent, but his siblings, and Angela’s family, had no such qualms—they were still left with more than forty-five million. Buying all the consumer goods they honestly wanted couldn’t begin to dent this sum, and neither had much interest in gold-plated Rolls Royces, private jets, Van Goghs, or diamonds. They could have lived in luxury on the earnings of ten million in the safest of investments, and it was indecision more than greed that kept them from promptly donating the difference to a worthy cause.

There was so much to be done in a world ravaged by political, ecological and climatic disasters. Which project most deserved their assistance? The proposed Himalayan hydroelectric scheme, which might keep Bangladesh from drowning in the floodplains of its Greenhouse-swollen rivers? Research on engineering hardier crops for poor soils in northern Africa? Buying back a small part of Brazil from multinational agribusiness, so food could be grown, not imported, and foreign debt curtailed? Fighting the still abysmal infant mortality rate amongst their own country’s original inhabitants? Thirty-five million would have helped substantially with any of these endeavours, but Angela and Bill were so worried about making the right choice that they put it off, month after month, year after year.

Meanwhile, free of financial restraints, they began trying to have a child. After two years without success, they finally sought medical advice, and were told that Angela was producing antibodies to Bill’s sperm. This was no great problem; neither of them was intrinsically infertile, they could still both provide gametes for IVF, and Angela could bear the child. The only question was, who would carry out the procedure? The only possible answer was, the best reproductive specialist money could buy.

Sam Cook was the best, or at least the best known. For the past twenty years, he’d been enabling women in infertile relationships to give birth to as many as seven children at a time, long after multiple embryo implants had ceased being necessary to ensure success (the media wouldn’t bid for exclusive rights to anything less than quintuplets). He also had a reputation for quality control unequalled by any of his colleagues; after a stint in Tokyo on the Human Genome Project, he was as familiar with molecular biology as he was with gynecology, obstetrics and embryology.

It was quality control that complicated the couple’s plans. For their marriage licence, their blood had been sent to a run-of-the-mill pathologist, who had only screened them for such extreme conditions as muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, and so on. Human Potential, equipped with all the latest probes, was a thousand times more thorough. It turned out that Bill carried genes which could make their child susceptible to clinical depression, and Angela carried genes which might make it hyperactive.

Cook spelt out the options for them.

One solution would be to use what was now referred to as TPGM: third-party genetic material. No need to make do with any old dross, either; Human Potential had Nobel prizewinners’ sperm by the bucketful, and although they had no equivalent ova—collection being so much harder, and most prizewinners being well into their sixties—they had blood samples instead, from which chromosomes could be extracted, artificially converted from diploid to haploid, and inserted into an ovum provided by Angela.

Alternatively—albeit at a somewhat higher cost—they could stick with their own gametes, and use gene therapy to correct the problems.

They talked it over for a couple of weeks, but the choice wasn’t difficult. The legal status of children produced from TPGM was still a mess—and a slightly different mess in every state of Australia, not to mention from country to country—and of course they both wanted, if possible, a child who was biologically their own.

At their next appointment, while explaining these reasons, Angela also disclosed the magnitude of their wealth, so that Cook would feel no need to cut corners for the sake of economy. They had kept their win from becoming public knowledge, but it hardly seemed right to have any secrets from the man who was going to work this miracle for them.

Cook seemed to take the revelation in his stride, and congratulated them on their wise decision. But he added, apologetically, that in his ignorance of the size of their financial resources, he had probably misled them into a limited view of what he had to offer.

Since they’d chosen gene therapy, why be half-hearted about it? Why rescue their child from maladjustment, only to curse it with mediocrity—when so much more was possible? With their money, and Human Potential’s facilities and expertise, a truly extraordinary child could be created: intelligent, creative, charismatic; the relevant genes had all been more or less pinned down, and a timely injection of research funds—say, twenty or thirty million—would see the loose ends sorted out very rapidly.

Angela and Bill exchanged looks of incredulity. Thirty seconds earlier, they’d been talking about a normal, healthy baby. This grab for their money was so transparent that they could scarcely believe it.

Cook went on, apparently oblivious. Naturally, such a donation would be honoured by renaming the building’s L. K. Robinson/ Margaret Lee/Duneside Rotary Club laboratory the Angela and Bill Cooper/L. K. Robinson/Margaret Lee/Duneside Rotary Club laboratory, and a contract would ensure that their philanthropy be mentioned in all scientific papers and media releases which flowed from the work.

Angela broke into a coughing fit to keep from laughing. Bill stared at a spot on the carpet and bit his cheeks. Both found the prospect of joining the ranks of the city’s obnoxious, self-promoting charity socialites about as enticing as the notion of eating their own excrement.

However. There was a third prong.

‘The world,’ Cook said, suddenly stern and brooding, ‘is a mess.’ The couple nodded dumbly, still fighting back laughter—in full agreement, but wondering if they were now about to be told not to bother raising children at all. ‘Every ecosystem on the planet that hasn’t been bulldozed is dying from pollution. The climate is changing faster than we can modify our infrastructure. Species are vanishing. People are starving. There have been more casualties of war in the last ten years than in the previous century.’ They nodded again, sober now, but still baffled by the abrupt change of subject.

‘Scientists are doing all they can, but it’s not enough. The same for politicians. Which is sad, but hardly surprising: these people are only a generation beyond the fools who got us into this mess. What child can be expected to avoid, to undo—to utterly transcend—the mistakes of its parents?’

He paused, then suddenly broke into a dazzling, almost beatific smile.

‘What child? A very special child. Your child.’

* * * *

In the late twentieth century, opponents of molecular eugenics had relied almost exclusively on pointing out similarities between modern trends and the obscenities of the past: nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences like phrenology and physiognomy, invented to support preconceptions about race and class differences; Nazi ideology about racial inferiority, which had led straight to the Holocaust; and radical biological determinism, a movement largely confined to the pages of academic journals, but infamous nonetheless for its attempts to make racism scientifically respectable.

Over the years, though, the racist taint receded. Genetic engineering produced a wealth of highly beneficial new drugs and vaccines, as well as therapies—and sometimes cures—for dozens of previously debilitating, often fatal, genetic diseases. It was absurd to claim that molecular biologists (as if they were all of one mind) were intent on creating a world of Aryan supermen (as if that, and precisely that, were the only conceivable abuse). Those who had played glibly on fears of the past were left without ammunition.

By the time Angela and Bill were contemplating Cook’s proposal, the prevailing rhetoric was almost the reverse of that of a decade before. Modern eugenics was hailed by its practitioners as a force opposed to racist myths. Individual traits were what mattered, to be assessed ‘objectively’ on their merits, and the historical conjunctions of traits which had once been referred to as ‘racial characteristics’ were of no more interest to a modern eugenicist than national boundaries were to a geologist. Who could oppose reducing the incidence of crippling genetic diseases? Who could oppose decreasing the next generation’s susceptibility to arteriosclerosis, breast cancer, and stroke, and increasing their ability to tolerate UV radiation, pollution and stress? Not to mention nuclear fallout.

As for producing a child so brilliant as to cut a swathe through the world’s environmental, political and social problems ... perhaps such high expectations would not be fulfilled, but what could be wrong about trying?

And yet. Angela and Bill remained wary—and even felt vaguely guilty at the prospect of accepting Cook’s proposal, without quite knowing why. Yes, eugenics was only for the rich, but that had been true of the leading edge of health care for centuries. Neither would have declined the latest surgical procedures or drugs simply because most people in the world could not afford them. Their patronage, they reasoned, could assist the long, slow process leading to extensive gene therapy for everyone’s children. Well ... at least everyone in the wealthiest countries’ upper middle classes.

They returned to Human Potential. Cook gave them the VIP tour, he showed them his talking dolphins and his slice of prime cortex, and still they were unconvinced. So he gave them a questionnaire to fill out, a specification of the child they wanted; this might, he suggested, make it all a bit more tangible.

* * * *

Cook glanced over the form, and frowned. ‘You haven’t answered all the questions.’

Bill said, ‘W-w-we didn’t—’

Angela hushed him. ‘We want to leave some things to chance. Is that a problem?’

Cook shrugged. ‘Not technically. It just seems a pity. Some of the traits you’ve left blank could have a very real influence on the course of Eugene’s life.’

‘That’s exactly why we left them blank. We don’t want to dictate every tiny detail, we don’t want to leave him with no room at all—’

Cook shook his head. ‘Angela, Angela! You’re looking at this the wrong way. By refusing to make a decision, you’re not giving Eugene personal freedom—you’re taking it away! Abnegating responsibility won’t give him the power to choose any of these things for himself; it simply means he’ll be stuck with traits which may be less than ideal. Can we go through some of these unanswered questions?’

‘Sure.’

Bill said, ‘Maybe ch-ch-chance is p-part of freedom.’ Cook ignored him.

‘Height. Do you honestly not care at all about that? Both of you are well below average, so you must both be aware of the disadvantages. Don’t you want better for Eugene?

‘Build. Let’s be frank; you’re overweight, Bill is rather scrawny. We can give Eugene a head start towards a socially optimal body. Of course, a lot will depend on his lifestyle, but we can influence his dietary and exercise habits far more than you might think. He can be made to like and dislike certain foods, and we can arrange maximum susceptibility to endogenous opiates produced during exercise.

‘Penis length—’

Angela scowled. ‘Now that’s the most trivial—’

‘You think so? A recent survey of two thousand male graduates of Harvard Business School found that penis length and IQ were equally good predictors of annual income.

‘Facial bone structure. In the latest group-dynamic studies, it turned out that both the forehead and the cheekbones played significant roles in determining which individuals assumed dominant status. I’ll give you a copy of the results.

‘ Sexual preference—’

‘Surely he can—’

‘Make up his own mind? That’s wishful thinking, I’m afraid. The evidence is quite unambiguous: it’s determined in the embryo by the interaction of several genes. Now, I have nothing at all against homosexuals, but the condition is hardly what you’d call a blessing. Oh, people can always reel off lists of famous homosexual geniuses, but that’s a biased sample; of course we’ve only heard of the successes.

‘Musical taste. As yet, we can only influence this crudely, but the social advantages should not be underestimated ...’

* * * *

Angela and Bill sat in their living room with the TV on, although they weren’t paying much attention to it. An interminable ad for the Department of Defence was showing, all rousing music and jet fighters in appealingly symmetrical formations. The latest privatisation legislation meant that each taxpayer could specify the precise allocation of his or her income tax between government departments, who in turn were free to spend as much of their revenue as they wished on advertising aimed at attracting more funds. Defence was doing well. Social Security was laying off staff.

The latest meeting with Cook had done nothing to banish their sense of unease, but without solid reasons to back up their feelings, they felt obliged to ignore them. Cook had solid reasons for everything, all based on the very latest research; how could they go to him and call the whole thing off, without at least a dozen impeccable arguments, each supported by a reference to some recent report in Nature?

They couldn’t even pin down the source of their disquiet to their own satisfaction. Perhaps they were simply afraid of the fame that Eugene was destined to bring upon them. Perhaps they were jealous, already, of their son’s as yet unknowable—but inevitably spectacular—achievements. Bill had a vague suspicion that the whole endeavour was somehow pulling the rug out from under an important part of what it had meant to be human—but he didn’t know quite how to put it into words, not even to Angela. How could he confess that, personally, he didn’t want to know the extent to which genes determined the fate of an individual? How could he declare that he’d rather stick with comfortable myths—no, forget the euphemisms, that he’d rather have downright lies—than have his nose rubbed in the dreary truth that a human being could be made to order, like a hamburger?

Cook had assured them that they need have no worries about handling the young genius. He could arrange a queue-jumping enrolment in the best Californian baby university, where, amongst Noble X Noble TPGM prodigies, Eugene could do brain-stimulating baby gymnastics to the sound of Kant sung to Beethoven, and learn Grand Unified Field Theory subliminally during his afternoon naps. Eventually, of course, he would overtake both his genetically inferior peers and his merely brilliant instructors, but by then he ought to be able to direct his own education.

Bill put an arm around Angela, and wondered if Eugene really would do more for humanity than their millions could have achieved directly in Bangladesh or Ethiopia or Alice Springs. But could they face spending the rest of their lives wondering what miracles Eugene might have performed for their crippled planet? That would be unbearable. They’d pay the tax on hope.

Angela began loosening Bill’s clothing. He did the same for her. Tonight—as they both knew, without exchanging a word—was the most fertile point of Angela’s cycle; in spite of the antibodies, they hadn’t abandoned the habits they’d acquired in the years when they’d been hoping to conceive naturally.

The rousing music from the television stopped, abruptly. The scenes of military hardware deteriorated into static. A sad-eyed boy, perhaps eight years old, appeared on the screen and said quietly, ‘Mother. Father. I owe you an explanation.’

Behind the boy was nothing but an empty blue sky. Angela and Bill stared at the screen in silence, waiting in vain for a voice-over or title to put the image in context. Then the child’s eyes met Angela’s, and she knew that he could see her, and she knew who it must be. She gripped Bill’s arm and whispered, dizzy with shock, but euphoric too, ‘It’s Eugene.’

The boy nodded.

For a moment, Bill was overcome with panic and confusion, but then paternal pride swelled up and he managed to say, ‘You’ve invented t-t-t-time t-travel!’

Eugene shook his head. ‘No. Suppose you fed the genetic profile of an embryo into a computer, which then constructed a simulation of the appearance of the mature organism; no time travel is involved, and yet aspects of a possible future are revealed. In that example, all the machinery to perform the extrapolation exists in the present, but the same thing can happen if the right equipment—equipment of a far more sophisticated kind—exists in the potential future. It may be useful, as a mathematical formalism, to pretend that the potential future has a tangible reality and is influencing its past—just as in geometric optics, it’s often convenient to pretend that reflections are real objects that exist behind the mirrors that create them—but a formalism is all it would be.’

Angela said, ‘So because you might invent such a device, we can see you, and talk to you, as if you were speaking to us from the future?’

‘Yes.’

The couple exchanged glances. Here was an end to their doubts! Now they could find out exactly what Eugene would do for the world!

‘If you were speaking to us from the future,’ Angela asked carefully, ‘what would you tell us? That you’ve reversed the Greenhouse Effect?’ Eugene shook his head sadly. ‘That you’ve made war obsolete?’ No. ‘That you’ve abolished hunger?’ No. ‘That you’ve found a cure for cancer?’ No. ‘What, then?’

‘I would say that I have found a way to Nirvana.’

‘What do you mean? Immortality? Infinite bliss? Heaven on Earth?’

‘No. Nirvana. The absence of all longing.’

Bill was horrified. ‘Y-y-you d-don’t mean g-g-genocide? You’re n-not going to w-w-w-wipe—’

‘No, Father. That would be easy, but I would never do such a thing. Each must find their own way—and in any case, death is an incomplete solution, it cannot erase what has already been. Nirvana is to never have been.’

Angela said, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘My potential existence influences more than this television set. When you check your bank accounts, you will find that the money you might have used to create me has been disbursed; don’t look so distressed—it’s all gone to charitable organisations of which you both approve. The computer records are precisely as if you had authorised the payments yourselves, so don’t bother trying to challenge their authenticity.’

Angela was distraught. ‘But ... why would you waste your talents on destroying yourself, when you could have lived a happy, productive life, and done great things for the whole human race?’

‘Why?’ Eugene frowned. ‘Don’t ask me to account for my actions; you’re the ones who would have made me what I would have been. If you want my subjective opinion: personally, I can’t see any point in existence when I can achieve so much without it—but I wouldn’t call that an “explanation”; it’s merely a rationalisation of processes best described at a neural level.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘The question really has no meaning. Why anything? The laws of physics, and the boundary conditions of space-time. What more can I say?’

He vanished from the screen. A soap opera appeared.

They contacted their bank’s computer. The experience had been no shared hallucination; their accounts were empty.

They sold the house, which was far too large for just the two of them, but it cost them most of the proceeds to buy something much smaller. Angela found work as a tour guide. Bill got a job on a garbage truck.

Cook’s research continued without them, of course. He succeeded in creating four chimpanzees able to sing, and understand, country and western, for which he received both the Nobel Prize and a Grammy award. He made it into the Guinness Book of Records, for implanting and delivering the world’s first third-generation IVF quins. But his super-baby project, and those of other eugenicists around the world, seemed jinxed; sponsors backed out for no apparent reason, equipment malfunctioned, labs caught fire.

Cook died without ever understanding how completely successful he’d been.

The Extra

Daniel Gray didn’t merely arrange for his Extras to live in a building within the grounds of his main residence—although that in itself would have been shocking enough. At the height of his midsummer garden party, he had their trainer march them along a winding path which took them within metres of virtually every one of his wealthy and powerful guests.

There were five batches, each batch a decade younger than the preceding one, each comprising twenty-five Extras (less one or two here and there; naturally, some depletion had occurred, and Gray made no effort to hide the fact). Batch A

were forty-four years old, the same age as Gray himself. Batch E, the four-year-olds, could not have kept up with the others on foot, so they followed behind, riding an electric float.

The Extras were as clean as they’d ever been in their lives, and their hair—

and beards in the case of the older ones—had been laboriously trimmed, in styles that amusingly parodied the latest fashions. Gray had almost gone so far as to have them clothed—but after much experimentation he’d decided against it; even the slightest scrap of clothing made them look too human, and he was acutely aware of the boundary between impressing his guests with his daring, and causing them real discomfort. Of course, naked, the Extras looked exactly like naked humans, but in Gray’s cultural milieu, stark naked humans en masse were not a common sight, and so the paradoxical effect of revealing the creatures’

totally human appearance was to make it easier to think of them as less than human.

The parade was a great success. Everyone applauded demurely as it passed by—

in the context, an extravagant gesture of approval. They weren’t applauding the Extras themselves, however impressive they were to behold; they were applauding Daniel Gray for his audacity in breaking the taboo.

Gray could only guess how many people in the world had Extras; perhaps the wealthiest ten thousand, perhaps the wealthiest hundred thousand. Most owners chose to be discreet. Keeping a stock of congenitally brain-damaged clones of oneself—in the short term, as organ donors; in the long term (once the techniques were perfected), as the recipients of brain transplants—was not illegal, but nor was it widely accepted. Any owner who went public could expect a barrage of anonymous hate mail, intense media scrutiny, property damage, threats of violence—all the usual behaviour associated with the public debate of a subtle point of ethics. There had been legal challenges, of course, but time and again the highest courts had ruled that Extras were not human beings.

Too much cortex was missing; if Extras deserved human rights, so did half the mammalian species on the planet. With a patient, skilled trainer, Extras could learn to run in circles, and to perform the simple, repetitive exercises that kept their muscles in good tone, but that was about the limit. A dog or a cat would have needed brain tissue removed to persuade it to live such a boring life.

Even those few owners who braved the wrath of the fanatics, and bragged about their Extras, generally had them kept in commercial stables—in the same city, of course, so as not to undermine their usefulness in a medical emergency, but certainly not within the electrified boundaries of their own homes. What ageing, dissipated man or woman would wish to be surrounded by reminders of how healthy and vigorous they might have been, if only they’d lived their lives differently?

Daniel Gray, however, found the contrasting appearance of his Extras entirely pleasing to behold, given that he, and not they, would be the ultimate beneficiary of their good health. In fact, his athletic, clean-living brothers had already supplied him with two livers, one kidney, one lung, and quantities of coronary artery and mucous membrane. In each case, he’d had the donor put down, whether or not it had remained strictly viable; the idea of having imperfect Extras in his collection offended his aesthetic sensibilities.

After the appearance of the Extras, nobody at the party could talk about anything else. Perhaps, one stereovision luminary suggested, now that their host had shown such courage, it would at last became fashionable to flaunt one’s Extras, allowing full value to be extracted from them; after all, considering the cost, it was a crime to make use of them only in emergencies, when their pretty bodies went beneath the surgeon’s knife.

Gray wandered from group to group, listening contentedly, pausing now and then to pluck and eat a delicate spice-rose or a juicy claret-apple (the entire garden had been designed specifically to provide the refreshments for this annual occasion, so everything was edible, and everything was in season). The early afternoon sky was a dazzling, uplifting blue, and he stood for a moment with his face raised to the warmth of the sun. The party was a complete success.

Everyone was talking about him. He hadn’t felt so happy in years.

“I wonder if you’re smiling for the same reason I am.”

He turned. Sarah Brash, the owner of Continental Bio-Logic, and a recent former lover, stood beside him, beaming in a faintly unnatural way. She wore one of the patterned scarfs which Gray had made available to his guests; a variety of gene-tailored insects roamed the garden, and her particular choice of scarf attracted a bee whose painless sting contained a combination of a mild stimulant and an aphrodisiac.

He shrugged. “I doubt it.”

She laughed and took his arm, then came still closer and whispered, “I’ve been thinking a very wicked thought.”

He made no reply. He’d lost interest in Sarah a month ago, and the sight of her in this state did nothing to rekindle his desire. He had just broken off with her successor, but he had no wish to repeat himself. He was trying to think of something to say that would be offensive enough to drive her away, when she reached out and tenderly cupped his face in her small, warm hands.

Then she playfully seized hold of his sagging jowls, and said, in tones of mock aggrievement, “Don’t you think it was terribly selfish of you, Daniel? You gave me your body ... but you didn’t give me your best one.”

Gray lay awake until after dawn. Vivid images of the evening’s entertainment kept returning to him, and he found them difficult to banish. The Extra Sarah had chosen—C7, one of the twenty-four-year-olds—had been muzzled and tightly bound throughout, but it had made copious noises in its throat, and its eyes had been remarkably expressive. Gray had learnt, years ago, to keep a mask of mild amusement and boredom on his face, whatever he was feeling; to see fear, confusion, distress and ecstasy, nakedly displayed on features that, in spite of everything, were unmistakably his own, had been rather like a nightmare of losing control.

Of course, it had also been as inconsequential as a nightmare; he had not lost control for a moment, however much his animal look-alike had rolled its eyes, and moaned, and trembled. His appetite for sexual novelty aside, perhaps he had agreed to Sarah’s request for that very reason: to see this primitive aspect of himself unleashed, without the least risk to his own equilibrium.

He decided to have the creature put down in the morning; he didn’t want it corrupting its clone-brothers, and he couldn’t be bothered arranging to have it kept in isolation. Extras had their sex drives substantially lowered by drugs, but not completely eliminated—that would have had too many physiological side-effects—and Gray had heard that it took just one clone who had discovered the possibilities, to trigger widespread masturbation and homosexual behaviour throughout the batch. Most owners would not have cared, but Gray wanted his Extras to be more than merely healthy; he wanted them to be innocent, he wanted them to be without sin. He was not a religious man, but he could still appreciate the emotional power of such concepts. When the time came for his brain to be moved into a younger body, he wanted to begin his new life with a sense of purification, a sense of rebirth.

However sophisticated his amorality, Gray freely admitted that at a certain level, inaccessible to reason, his indulgent life sickened him, as surely as it sickened his body. His family and his peers had always, unequivocally, encouraged him to seek pleasure, but perhaps he had been influenced—

subconsciously and unwillingly—by ideas which still prevailed in other social strata. Since the late twentieth century, when—in affluent countries—

cardiovascular disease and other “diseases of lifestyle” had become the major causes of death, the notion that health was a reward for virtue had acquired a level of acceptance unknown since the medieval plagues. A healthy lifestyle was not just pragmatic, it was righteous. A heart attack or a stroke, lung cancer or liver disease—not to mention AIDS—was clearly a punishment for some vice that the sufferer had chosen to pursue. Twenty-first century medicine had gradually weakened many of the causal links between lifestyle and life expectancy—and the advent of Extras would, for the very rich, soon sever them completely—but the outdated moral overtones persisted nonetheless.

In any case, however fervently Gray approved of his gluttonous, sedentary, drug-hazed, promiscuous life, a part of him felt guilty and unclean. He could not wipe out his past, nor did he wish to, but to discard his ravaged body and begin again in blameless flesh would be the perfect way to neutralise this irrational self-disgust. He would attend his own cremation, and watch his

“sinful” corpse consigned to “hellfire”! Atheists, he decided, are not immune to religious metaphors; he had no doubt that the experience would be powerfully moving, liberating beyond belief.

Three months later, Sarah Brash’s lawyers informed him that she had conceived a child (which, naturally, she’d had transferred to an Extra surrogate), and that she cordially requested that Gray provide her with fifteen billion dollars to assist with the child’s upbringing.

His first reaction was a mixture of irritation and amusement at his own naivety. He should have suspected that there’d been more to Sarah’s request than sheer perversity. Her wealth was comparable to his own, but the prospect of living for centuries seemed to have made the rich greedier than ever; a fortune that sufficed for seven or eight decades was no longer enough.

On principle, Gray instructed his lawyers to take the matter to court—and then he began trying to ascertain what his chances were of winning. He’d had a vasectomy years ago, and could produce records proving his infertility, at least on every occasion he’d had a sperm count measured. He couldn’t prove that he hadn’t had the operation temporarily reversed, since that could now be done with hardly a trace, but he knew perfectly well that the Extra was the father of the child, and he could prove that. Although the Extras’ brain damage resulted solely from foetal microsurgery, rather than genetic alteration, all Extras were genetically tagged with a coded serial number, written into portions of DNA

which had no active function, at over a thousand different sites. What’s more, these tags were always on both chromosomes of each pair, so any child fathered by an Extra would necessarily inherit all of them. Gray’s biotechnology advisers assured him that stripping these tags from the zygote was, in practice, virtually impossible.

Perhaps Sarah planned to freely admit that the Extra was the father, and hoped to set a precedent making its owner responsible for the upkeep of its human offspring. Gray’s legal experts were substantially less reassuring than his geneticists. Gray could prove that the Extra hadn’t raped her—as she no doubt knew, he’d taped everything that had happened that night—but that wasn’t the point; after all, consenting to intercourse would not have deprived her of the right to an ordinary paternity suit. As the tapes also showed, Gray had known full well what was happening, and had clearly approved. That the late Extra had been unwilling was, unfortunately, irrelevant.

After wasting an entire week brooding over the matter, Gray finally gave up worrying. The case would not reach court for five or six years, and was unlikely to be resolved in less than a decade. He promptly had his remaining Extras vasectomised—to prove to the courts, when the time came, that he was not irresponsible—and then he pushed the whole business out of his mind.

Almost.

A few weeks later, he had a dream. Conscious all the while that he was dreaming, he saw the night’s events re-enacted, except that this time it was he who was bound and muzzled, slave to Sarah’s hands and tongue, while the Extra stood back and watched.

But ... had they merely swapped places, he wondered, or had they swapped bodies? His dreamer’s point of view told him nothing—he saw all three bodies from the outside—but the lean young man who watched bore Gray’s own characteristic jaded expression, and the middle-aged man in Sarah’s embrace moaned and twitched and shuddered, exactly as the Extra had done.

Gray was elated. He still knew that he was only dreaming, but he couldn’t suppress his delight at the inspired idea of keeping his old body alive with the Extra’s brain, rather than consigning it to flames. What could be more controversial, more outrageous, than having not just his Extras, but his own discarded corpse, walking the grounds of his estate? He resolved at once to do this, to abandon his long-held desire for a symbolic cremation. His friends would be shocked into the purest admiration—as would the fanatics, in their own way. True infamy had proved elusive; people had talked about his last stunt for a week or two, and then forgotten it—but the midsummer party at which the guest of honour was Daniel Gray’s old body would be remembered for the rest of his vastly prolonged life.

Over the next few years, the medical research division of Gray’s vast corporate empire began to make significant progress on the brain transplant problem.

Transplants between newborn Extras had been successful for decades. With identical genes, and having just emerged from the very same womb (or from the anatomically and biochemically indistinguishable wombs of two clone-sister Extras), any differences between donor and recipient were small enough to be overcome by a young, flexible brain.

However, older Extras—even those raised identically—had shown remarkable divergences in many neural structures, and whole-brain transplants between them had been found to result in paralysis, sensory dysfunction, and sometimes even death. Gray was no neuroscientist, but he could understand roughly what the problem was: Brain and body grow and change together throughout life, becoming increasingly reliant on each other’s idiosyncrasies, in a feed-back process riddled with chaotic attractors—hence the unavoidable differences, even between clones. In the body of a human (or an Extra), there are thousands of sophisticated control systems which may include the brain, but are certainly not contained within it, involving everything from the spinal cord and the peripheral nervous system, to hormonal feedback loops, the immune system, and, ultimately, almost every organ in the body. Over time, all of these elements adapt in some degree to the particular demands placed upon them—and the brain grows to rely upon the specific characteristics that these external systems acquire. A brain transplant throws this complex interdependence into disarray—

at least as badly as a massive stroke, or an extreme somatic trauma.

Sometimes, two or three years of extensive physiotherapy could enable the transplanted brain and body to adjust to each other—but only between clones of equal age and indistinguishable lifestyles. When the brain donor was a model of a likely human candidate—an intentionally overfed, under-exercised, drug-wrecked Extra, twenty or thirty years older than the body donor—the result was always death or coma.

The theoretical solution, if not the detailed means of achieving it, was obvious. Those portions of the brain responsible for motor control, the endocrine system, the low-level processing of sensory data, and so on, had to be retained in the body in which they had matured. Why struggle to make the donor brain adjust to the specifics of a new body, when that body’s original brain already contained neural systems fine-tuned to perfection for the task? If the aim was to transplant memory and personality, why transplant anything else?

After many years of careful brain-function mapping, and the identification and synthesis of growth factors which could trigger mature neurons into sending forth axons across the boundaries of a graft, Gray’s own team had been the first to try partial transplants. Gray watched tapes of the operations, and was both repelled and amused to see oddly shaped lumps of one Extra’s brain being exchanged with the corresponding regions of another’s; repelled by visceral instinct, but amused to see the seat of reason—even in a mere Extra—being treated like so much vegetable matter.

The forty-seventh partial transplant, between a sedentary, ailing fifty-year-old, and a fit, healthy twenty-year-old, was an unqualified success.

After a mere two months of recuperation, both Extras were fully mobile, with all five senses completely unimpaired.

Had they swapped memories and “personalities”? Apparently, yes. Both had been observed by a team of psychologists for a year before the operation, and their behaviour extensively characterised, and both had been trained to perform different sets of tasks for rewards. After the selective brain swap, the learned tasks, and the observed behavioural idiosyncrasies, were found to have followed the transplanted tissue. Of course, eventually the younger, fitter Extra began to be affected by its newfound health, becoming substantially more active than it had been in its original body—and the Extra now in the older body soon showed signs of acquiescing to its ill-health. But regardless of any post-transplant adaption to their new bodies, the fact remained that the Extras’

identities—such as they were—had been exchanged.

After a few dozen more Extra-Extra transplants, with virtually identical outcomes, the time came for the first human-Extra trials.

Gray’s parents had both died years before (on the operating table—an almost inevitable outcome of their hundreds of non-essential transplants), but they had left him a valuable legacy; thirty years ago, their own scientists had

(illegally) signed up fifty men and women in their early twenties, and Extras had been made for them. These volunteers had been well paid, but not so well paid that a far larger sum, withheld until after the actual transplant, would lose its appeal. Nobody had been coerced, and the seventeen who’d dropped out quietly had not been punished. An eighteenth had tried blackmail—even though she’d had no idea who was doing the experiment, let alone who was financing it—

and had died in a tragic ferry disaster, along with three hundred and nine other people. Gray’s people believed in assassinations with a low signal-to-noise ratio.

Of the thirty-two human-Extra transplants, twenty-nine were pronounced completely successful. As with the Extra-Extra trials, both bodies were soon fully functional, but now the humans in the younger bodies could—after a month or two of speech therapy—respond to detailed interrogation by experts, who declared that their memories and personalities were intact.

Gray wanted to speak to the volunteers in person, but knew that was too risky, so he contented himself with watching tapes of the interviews. The psychologists had their barrages of supposedly rigourous tests, but Gray preferred to listen to the less formal segments, when the volunteers spoke of their life histories, their political and religious beliefs, and so on—displaying at least as much consistency across the transplant as any person who is asked to discuss such matters on two separate occasions.

The three failures were difficult to characterise. They too learnt to use their new bodies, to walk and talk as proficiently as the others, but they were depressed, withdrawn, and uncooperative. No physical difference could be found—

scans showed that their grafted tissue, and the residual portions of their Extra’s brain, had forged just as many interconnecting pathways as the brains of the other volunteers. They seemed to be unhappy with a perfectly successful result—they seemed to have simply decided that they didn’t want younger bodies, after all.

Gray was unconcerned; if these people were disposed to be ungrateful for their good fortune, that was a character defect that he knew he did not share. He would be utterly delighted to have a fresh young body to enjoy for a while—

before setting out to wreck it, in the knowledge that, in a decade’s time, he could take his pick from the next batch of Extras and start the whole process again.

There were “failures” amongst the Extras as well, but that was hardly surprising—the creatures had no way of even beginning to comprehend what had happened to them. Symptoms ranged from loss of appetite to extreme, uncontrollable violence; one Extra had even managed to batter itself to death on a concrete floor, before it could be tranquillised. Gray hoped his own Extra would turn out to be well-behaved—he wanted his old body to be clearly sub-human, but not utterly berserk—but it was not a critical factor, and he decided against diverting resources towards the problem. After all, it was the fate of his brain in the Extra’s body that was absolutely crucial; success with the other half of the swap would be an entertaining bonus, but if it wasn’t achieved, well, he could always revert to cremation.

Gray scheduled and cancelled his transplant a dozen times. He was not in urgent need by any means—there was nothing currently wrong with him that required a single new organ, let alone an entire new body—but he desperately wanted to be first. The penniless volunteers didn’t count—and that was why he hesitated:

trials on humans from those lower social classes struck him as not much more reassuring than trials on Extras. Who was to say that a process that left a rough-hewn, culturally deficient personality intact, would preserve his own refined, complex sensibilities? Therein lay the dilemma: he would only feel safe if he knew that an equal—a rival—had undergone a transplant before him, in which case he would be deprived of all the glory of being a path-breaker. Vanity fought cowardice; it was a battle of titans.

It was the approach of Sarah Brash’s court case that finally pushed him into making a decision. He didn’t much care how the case itself went; the real battle would be for the best publicity; the media would determine who won and who lost, whatever the jury decided. As things stood, he looked like a naive fool, an easily manipulated voyeur, while Sarah came across as a smart operator. She’d shown initiative; he’d just let himself (or rather, his Extra) get screwed. He needed an edge, he needed a gimmick—something that would overshadow her petty scheming. If he swapped bodies with an Extra in time for the trial—becoming, officially, the first human to do so—nobody would waste time covering the obscure details of Sarah’s side of the case. His mere presence in court would be a matter of planet-wide controversy; the legal definition of identity was still based on DNA fingerprinting and retinal patterns, with some clumsy exceptions thrown in to allow for gene therapy and retina transplants. The laws would soon be changed—he was arranging it—but as things stood, the subpoena would apply to his old body. He could just imagine sitting in the public gallery, unrecognised, while Sarah’s lawyer tried to cross-examine the quivering, confused, wild-eyed Extra that his discarded “corpse” had become! Quite possibly he, or his lawyers, would end up being charged with contempt of court, but it would be worth it for the spectacle.

So, Gray inspected Batch D, which were now just over nineteen years old. They regarded him with their usual idiotic, friendly expression. He wondered, not for the first time, if any of the Extras ever realised that he was their clone-brother, too. They never seemed to respond to him any differently than they did to other humans—and yet a fraction of a gram of foetal brain tissue was all that had kept him from being one of them. Even Batch A, his

“contemporaries”, showed no sign of recognition. If he had stripped naked and mimicked their grunting sounds, would they have accepted him as an equal? He’d never felt inclined to find out; Extra “anthropology” was hardly something he wished to encourage, let alone participate in. But he decided he would return to visit Batch D in his new body; it would certainly be amusing to see just what they made of a clone-brother who vanished, then came back three months later with speech and clothes.

The clones were all in perfect health, and virtually indistinguishable. He finally chose one at random. The trainer examined the tattoo on the sole of its foot, and said, “D12, sir.”

Gray nodded, and walked away.

He spent the week before the transplant in a state of constant agitation. He knew exactly which drugs would have prevented this, but the medical team had advised him to stay clean, and he was too afraid to disobey them.

He watched D12 for hours, trying to distract himself with the supposedly thrilling knowledge that those clear eyes, that smooth skin, those taut muscles, would soon be his. The only trouble was, this began to seem a rather paltry reward for the risk he would be taking. Knowing all his life that this day would come, he’d learnt not to care at all what he looked like; by now, he was so used to his own appearance that he wasn’t sure he especially wanted to be lean and muscular and rosy-cheeked. After all, if that really had been his fondest wish, he could have achieved it in other ways; some quite effective pharmaceuticals and tailored viruses had existed for decades, but he had chosen not to use them.

He had enjoyed looking the part of the dissolute billionaire, and his wealth had brought him more sexual partners than his new body would ever attract through its own merits. In short, he neither wanted nor needed to change his appearance at all.

So, in the end it came down to longevity, and the hope of immortality. As his parents had proved, any transplant involved a small but finite risk. A whole new body every ten or twenty years was surely a far safer bet than replacing individual organs at an increasing rate, for diminishing returns. And a whole new body now, long before he needed it, made far more sense than waiting until he was so frail that a small overdose of anaesthetic could finish him off.

When the day arrived, Gray thought he was, finally, prepared. The chief surgeon asked him if he wished to proceed; he could have said no, and she would not have blinked—not one his employees would have dared to betray the least irritation, had he cancelled their laborious preparations a thousand times.

But he didn’t say no.

As the cool spray of the anaesthetic touched his skin, he suffered a moment of absolute panic. They were going to cut up his brain. Not the brain of a grunting, drooling Extra, not the brain of some ignorant slum-dweller, but his brain, full of memories of great music and literature and art, full of moments of joy and insight from the finest psychotropic drugs, full of ambitions that, given time, might change the course of civilisation.

He tried to visualise one of his favourite paintings, to provide an image he could dwell upon, a memory that would prove that the essential Daniel Gray had survived the transplant. That Van Gogh he’d bought last year. But he couldn’t recall the name of it, let alone what it looked like. He closed his eyes and drifted helplessly into darkness.

When he awoke, he was numb all over, and unable to move or make a sound, but he could see. Poorly, at first, but over a period that might have been hours, or might have been days—punctuated as it was with stretches of enervating, dreamless sleep—he was able to identify his surroundings. A white ceiling, a white wall, a glimpse of some kind of electronic device in the corner of one eye; the upper section of the bed must have been tilted, mercifully keeping his gaze from being strictly vertical. But he couldn’t move his head, or his eyes, he couldn’t even close his eyelids, so he quickly lost interest in the view. The light never seemed to change, so sleep was his only relief from the monotony.

After a while, he began to wonder if in fact he had woken many times, before he had been able to see, but had experienced nothing to mark the occasions in his memory.

Later he could hear, too, although there wasn’t much to be heard; people came and went, and spoke softly, but not, so far as he could tell, to him; in any case, their words made no sense. He was too lethargic to care about the people, or to fret about his situation. In time he would be taught to use his new body fully, but if the experts wanted him to rest right now, he was happy to oblige.

When the physiotherapists first set to work, he felt utterly helpless and humiliated. They made his limbs twitch with electrodes, while he had no control, no say at all in what his body did. Eventually, he began to receive sensations from his limbs, and he could at least feel what was going on, but since his head just lolled there, he couldn’t watch what they were doing to him, and they made no effort to explain anything. Perhaps they thought he was still deaf and blind, perhaps his sight and hearing at this early stage were freak effects that had not been envisaged. Before the operation, the schedule for his recovery had been explained to him in great detail, but his memory of it was hazy now. He told himself to be patient.

When, at last, one arm came under his control, he raised it, with great effort, into his field of view.

It was his arm, his old arm—not the Extra’s.

He tried to emit a wail of despair, but nothing came out.

Something must have gone wrong, late in the operation, forcing them to cancel the transplant after they had cut up his brain. Perhaps the Extra’s life-support machine had failed; it seemed unbelievable, but it wasn’t impossible—as his parents’ deaths had proved, there was always a risk. He suddenly felt unbearably tired. He now faced the prospect of spending months merely to regain the use of his very own body; for all he knew, the newly forged pathways across the wounds in his brain might require as much time to become completely functional as they would have if the transplant had gone ahead.

For several days, he was angry and depressed. He tried to express his rage to the nurses and physiotherapists, but all he could do was twitch and grimace—he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t even gesture—and they paid no attention. How could his people have been so incompetent? How could they put him through months of trauma and humiliation, with nothing to look forward to but ending up exactly where he’d started?

But when he’d calmed down, he told himself that his doctors weren’t incompetent at all; in fact, he knew they were the best in the world. Whatever had gone wrong must have been completely beyond their control. He decided to adopt a positive attitude to the situation; after all, he was lucky: the malfunction might have killed him, instead of the Extra. He was alive, he was in the care of experts, and what was three months in bed to the immortal he would still, eventually, become? This failure would make his ultimate success all the more of a triumph—personally, he could have done without the set-back, but the media would lap it up.

The physiotherapy continued. His sense of touch, and then his motor control, was restored to more and more of his body, until, although weak and uncoordinated, he felt without a doubt that this body was his. To experience familiar aches and twinges was a relief, more than a disappointment, and several times he found himself close to tears, overcome with mawkish sentiment at the joy of regaining what he had lost, imperfect as it was. On these occasions, he swore he would never try the transplant again; he would be faithful to his own body, in sickness and in health. Only by methodically reminding himself of all his reasons for proceeding in the first place, could he put this foolishness aside.

Once he had control of the muscles of his vocal cords, he began to grow impatient for the speech therapists to start work. His hearing, as such, seemed to be fine, but he could still make no sense of the words of the people around him, and he could only assume that the connections between the parts of his brain responsible for understanding speech, and the parts which carried out the lower-level processing of sound, were yet to be refined by whatever ingenious regime the neurologists had devised. He only wished they’d start soon; he was sick of this isolation.

One day, he had a visitor—the first person he’d seen since the operation who was not a health professional clad in white. The visitor was a young man, dressed in brightly coloured pyjamas, and travelling in a wheelchair.

By now, Gray could turn his head. He watched the young man approaching, surrounded by a retinue of obsequious doctors. Gray recognised the doctors; every member of the transplant team was there, and they were all smiling proudly, and nodding ceaselessly. Gray wondered why they had taken so long to appear; until now, he’d presumed that they were waiting until he was able to fully comprehend the explanation of their failure, but he suddenly realised how absurd that was—how could they have left him to make his own guesses? It was outrageous! It was true that speech, and no doubt writing too, meant nothing to him, but surely they could have devised some method of communication! And why did they look so pleased, when they ought to have been abject?

Then Gray realised that the man in the wheelchair was the Extra, D12. And yet he spoke. And when he spoke, the doctors shook with sycophantic laughter.

The Extra brought the wheelchair right up to the bed, and spent several seconds staring into Gray’s face. Gray stared back; obviously he was dreaming, or hallucinating. The Extra’s expression hovered between boredom and mild amusement, just as it had in the dream he’d had all those years ago.

The Extra turned to go. Gray felt a convulsion pass through his body. Of course he was dreaming. What other explanation could there be?

Unless the transplant had gone ahead, after all.

Unless the remnants of his brain in this body retained enough of his memory and personality to make him believe that he, too, was Daniel Gray. Unless the brain function studies that had localised identity had been correct, but incomplete—

unless the processes that constituted human self-awareness were redundantly duplicated in the most primitive parts of the brain.

In which case, there were now two Daniel Grays.

One had everything: The power of speech. Money. Influence. Ten thousand servants. And now, at last, immaculate health.

And the other? He had one thing only.

The knowledge of his helplessness.

It was, he had to admit, a glorious afternoon. The sky was cloudless, the air was warm, and the clipped grass beneath his feet was soft but dry.

He had given up trying to communicate his plight to the people around him. He knew he would never master speech, and he couldn’t even manage to convey meaning in his gestures—the necessary modes of thought were simply no longer available to him, and he could no more plan and execute a simple piece of mime than he could solve the latest problems in grand unified field theory. For a while he had simply thrown tantrums—refusing to eat, refusing to cooperate. Then he had recalled his own plans for his old body, in the event of such recalcitrance.

Cremation. And realised that, in spite of everything, he didn’t want to die.

He acknowledged, vaguely, that in a sense he really wasn’t Daniel Gray, but a new person entirely, a composite of Gray and the Extra D12—but this was no comfort to him, whoever, whatever, he was. All his memories told him he was Daniel Gray; he had none from the life of D12, in an ironic confirmation of his long-held belief in human superiority over Extras. Should he be happy that he’d also proved—if there’d ever been any doubt—that human consciousness was the most physical of things, a spongy grey mess that could be cut up like a starfish, and survive in two separate parts? Should he be happy that the other Daniel Gray—without a doubt, the more complete Daniel Gray—had achieved his lifelong ambition?

The trainer yanked on his collar.

Meekly, he stepped onto the path.

The lush garden was crowded like never before—this was indeed the party of the decade—and as he came into sight, the guests began to applaud, and even to cheer.

He might have raised his arms in acknowledgement, but the thought did not occur to him.

Glory

* * * *

An ingot of metallic hydrogen gleamed in the starlight, a narrow cylinder half a meter long with a mass of about a kilogram. To the naked eye it was a dense, solid object, but its lattice of tiny nuclei immersed in an insubstantial fog of electrons was one part matter to two hundred trillion parts empty space. A short distance away was a second ingot, apparently identical to the first, but composed of antihydrogen.

A sequence of finely tuned gamma rays flooded into both cylinders. The protons that absorbed them in the first ingot spat out positrons and were transformed into neutrons, breaking their bonds to the electron cloud that glued them in place. In the second ingot, antiprotons became antineutrons.

A further sequence of pulses herded the neutrons together and forged them into clusters; the antineutrons were similarly rearranged. Both kinds of cluster were unstable, but in order to fall apart they first had to pass through a quantum state that would have strongly absorbed a component of the gamma rays constantly raining down on them. Left to themselves, the probability of their being in this state would have increased rapidly, but each time they measurably failed to absorb the gamma rays, the probability fell back to zero. The quantum Zeno effect endlessly reset the clock, holding the decay in check.

The next series of pulses began shifting the clusters into the space that had separated the original ingots. First neutrons, then antineutrons, were sculpted together in alternating layers. Though the clusters were ultimately unstable, while they persisted they were inert, sequestering their constituents and preventing them from annihilating their counterparts. The end point of this process of nuclear sculpting was a sliver of compressed matter and antimatter, sandwiched together into a needle one micron wide.

The gamma ray lasers shut down, the Zeno effect withdrew its prohibitions. For the time it took a beam of light to cross a neutron, the needle sat motionless in space. Then it began to burn, and it began to move.

The needle was structured like a meticulously crafted firework, and its outer layers ignited first. No external casing could have channeled this blast, but the pattern of tensions woven into the needle’s construction favored one direction for the debris to be expelled. Particles streamed backward; the needle moved forward. The shock of acceleration could not have been borne by anything built from atomic-scale matter, but the pressure bearing down on the core of the needle prolonged its life, delaying the inevitable.

Layer after layer burned itself away, blasting the dwindling remnant forward ever faster. By the time the needle had shrunk to a tenth of its original size it was moving at ninety-eight percent of light-speed; to a bystander this could scarcely have been improved upon, but from the needle’s perspective there was still room to slash its journey’s duration by orders of magnitude.

When just one thousandth of the needle remained, its time, compared to the neighboring stars, was passing two thousand times more slowly. Still the layers kept burning, the protective clusters unraveling as the pressure on them was released. The needle could only reach close enough to light-speed to slow down time as much as it required if it could sacrifice a large enough proportion of its remaining mass. The core of the needle could survive only for a few trillionths of a second, while its journey would take two hundred million seconds as judged by the stars. The proportions had been carefully matched, though: out of the two kilograms of matter and antimatter that had been woven together at the launch, only a few million neutrons were needed as the final payload.

By one measure, seven years passed. For the needle, its last trillionths of a second unwound, its final layers of fuel blew away, and at the moment its core was ready to explode it reached its destination, plunging from the near-vacuum of space straight into the heart of a star.

Even here, the density of matter was insufficient to stabilize the core, yet far too high to allow it to pass unhindered. The core was torn apart. But it did not go quietly, and the shock waves it carved through the fusing plasma endured for a million kilometers: all the way through to the cooler outer layers on the opposite side of the star. These shock waves were shaped by the payload that had formed them, and though the initial pattern imprinted on them by the disintegrating cluster of neutrons was enlarged and blurred by its journey, on an atomic scale it remained sharply defined. Like a mold stamped into the seething plasma it encouraged ionized molecular fragments to slip into the troughs and furrows that matched their shape, and then brought them together to react in ways that the plasma’s random collisions would never have allowed. In effect, the shock waves formed a web of catalysts, carefully laid out in both time and space, briefly transforming a small corner of the star into a chemical factory operating on a nanometer scale.

The products of this factory sprayed out of the star, riding the last traces of the shock wave’s momentum: a few nanograms of elaborate, carbon-rich molecules, sheathed in a protective fullerene weave. Traveling at seven hundred kilometers per second, a fraction below the velocity needed to escape from the star completely, they climbed out of its gravity well, slowing as they ascended.

Four years passed, but the molecules were stable against the ravages of space. By the time they’d traveled a billion kilometers they had almost come to a halt, and they would have fallen back to die in the fires of the star that had forged them if their journey had not been timed so that the star’s third planet, a gas giant, was waiting to urge them forward. As they fell toward it, the giant’s third moon moved across their path. Eleven years after the needle’s launch, its molecular offspring rained down onto the methane snow.

The tiny heat of their impact was not enough to damage them, but it melted a microscopic puddle in the snow. Surrounded by food, the molecular seeds began to grow. Within hours, the area was teeming with nanomachines, some mining the snow and the minerals beneath it, others assembling the bounty into an intricate structure, a rectangular panel a couple of meters wide.

From across the light-years, an elaborate sequence of gamma ray pulses fell upon the panel. These pulses were the needle’s true payload, the passengers for whom it had merely prepared the way, transmitted in its wake four years after its launch. The panel decoded and stored the data, and the army of nanomachines set to work again, this time following a far more elaborate blueprint. The miners were forced to look farther afield to find all the elements that were needed, while the assemblers labored to reach their goal through a sequence of intermediate stages, carefully designed to protect the final product from the vagaries of the local chemistry and climate.

After three months’ work, two small fusion-powered spacecraft sat in the snow. Each one held a single occupant, waking for the first time in their freshly minted bodies, yet endowed with memories of an earlier life.

Joan switched on her communications console. Anne appeared on the screen, three short pairs of arms folded across her thorax in a posture of calm repose. They had both worn virtual bodies with the same anatomy before, but this was the first time they had become Noudah in the flesh.

“We’re here. Everything worked,” Joan marveled. The language she spoke was not her own, but the structure of her new brain and body made it second nature.

Anne said, “Now comes the hard part.”

“Yes.” Joan looked out from the spacecraft’s cockpit. In the distance, a fissured blue-gray plateau of water ice rose above the snow. Nearby, the nanomachines were busy disassembling the gamma ray receiver. When they had erased all traces of their handiwork they would wander off into the snow and catalyze their own destruction.

Joan had visited dozens of planet-bound cultures in the past, taking on different bodies and languages as necessary, but those cultures had all been plugged into the Amalgam, the metacivilization that spanned the galactic disk. However far from home she’d been, the means to return to familiar places had always been close at hand. The Noudah had only just mastered interplanetary flight, and they had no idea that the Amalgam existed. The closest node in the Amalgam’s network was seven light-years away, and even that was out of bounds to her and Anne now: they had agreed not to risk disclosing its location to the Noudah, so any transmission they sent could be directed only to a decoy node that they’d set up more than twenty light-years away.

“It will be worth it,” Joan said.

Anne’s Noudah face was immobile, but chromatophores sent a wave of violet and gold sweeping across her skin in an expression of cautious optimism. “We’ll see.” She tipped her head to the left, a gesture preceding a friendly departure.

Joan tipped her own head in response, as if she’d been doing so all her life. “Be careful, my friend,” she said.

“You too.”

Anne’s ship ascended so high on its chemical thrusters that it shrank to a speck before igniting its fusion engine and streaking away in a blaze of light. Joan felt a pang of loneliness; there was no predicting when they would be reunited.

Her ship’s software was primitive; the whole machine had been scrupulously matched to the Noudah’s level of technology. Joan knew how to fly it herself if necessary, and on a whim she switched off the autopilot and manually activated the ascent thrusters. The control panel was crowded, but having six hands helped.

* * * *

The world the Noudah called home was the closest of the system’s five planets to their sun. The average temperature was one hundred and twenty degrees Celsius, but the high atmospheric pressure allowed liquid water to exist across the entire surface. The chemistry and dynamics of the planet’s crust had led to a relatively flat terrain, with a patchwork of dozens of disconnected seas but no globe-spanning ocean. From space, these seas appeared as silvery mirrors, bordered by a violet and brown tarnish of vegetation.

The Noudah were already leaving their most electromagnetically promiscuous phase of communications behind, but the short-lived oasis of Amalgam-level technology on Baneth, the gas giant’s moon, had had no trouble eavesdropping on their chatter and preparing an updated cultural briefing which had been spliced into Joan’s brain.

The planet was still divided into the same eleven political units as it had been fourteen years before, the time of the last broadcasts that had reached the node before Joan’s departure. Tira and Ghahar, the two dominant nations in terms of territory, economic activity, and military power, also occupied the vast majority of significant Niah archaeological sites.

Joan had expected that they’d be noticed as soon as they left Baneth—the exhaust from their fusion engines glowed like the sun—but their departure had triggered no obvious response, and now that they were coasting they’d be far harder to spot. As Anne drew closer to the homeworld, she sent a message to Tira’s traffic control center. Joan tuned in to the exchange.

“I come in peace from another star,” Anne said. “I seek permission to land.”

There was a delay of several seconds more than the light-speed lag, then a terse response. “Please identify yourself and state your location.”

Anne transmitted her coordinates and flight plan.

“We confirm your location, please identify yourself.”

“My name is Anne. I come from another star.”

There was a long pause, then a different voice answered. “If you are from Ghahar, please explain your intentions.”

“I am not from Ghahar.”

“Why should I believe that? Show yourself.”

“I’ve taken the same shape as your people, in the hope of living among you for a while.” Anne opened a video channel and showed them her unremarkable Noudah face. “But there’s a signal being transmitted from these coordinates that might persuade you that I’m telling the truth.” She gave the location of the decoy node, twenty light-years away, and specified a frequency. The signal coming from the node contained an image of the very same face.

This time, the silence stretched out for several minutes. It would take a while for the Tirans to confirm the true distance of the radio source.

“You do not have permission to land. Please enter this orbit, and we will rendezvous and board your ship.”

Parameters for the orbit came through on the data channel. Anne said, “As you wish.”

Minutes later, Joan’s instruments picked up three fusion ships being launched from Tiran bases. When Anne reached the prescribed orbit, Joan listened anxiously to the instructions the Tirans issued. Their tone sounded wary, but they were entitled to treat this stranger with caution, all the more so if they believed Anne’s claim.

Joan was accustomed to a very different kind of reception, but then the members of the Amalgam had spent hundreds of millennia establishing a framework of trust. They also benefited from a milieu in which most kinds of force had been rendered ineffectual; when everyone had backups of themselves scattered around the galaxy, it required a vastly disproportionate effort to inconvenience someone, let alone kill them. By any reasonable measure, honesty and cooperation yielded far richer rewards than subterfuge and slaughter.

Nonetheless, each individual culture had its roots in a biological heritage that gave rise to behavior governed more by ancient urges than contemporary realities, and even when they mastered the technology to choose their own nature, the precise set of traits they preserved was up to them. In the worst case, a species still saddled with inappropriate drives but empowered by advanced technology could wreak havoc. The Noudah deserved to be treated with courtesy and respect, but they did not yet belong in the Amalgam.

The Tirans’ own exchanges were not on open channels, so once they had entered Anne’s ship Joan could only guess at what was happening. She waited until two of the ships had returned to the surface, then sent her own message to Ghahar’s traffic control.

“I come in peace from another star. I seek permission to land.”

* * * *

The Ghahari allowed Joan to fly her ship straight down to the surface. She wasn’t sure if this was because they were more trusting, or if they were afraid that the Tirans might try to interfere if she lingered in orbit.

The landing site was a bare plain of chocolate-colored sand. The air shimmered in the heat, the distortions intensified by the thickness of the atmosphere, making the horizon waver as if seen through molten glass. Joan waited in the cockpit as three trucks approached; they all came to a halt some twenty meters away. A voice over the radio instructed her to leave the ship; she complied, and after she’d stood in the open for a minute, a lone Noudah left one of the trucks and walked toward her.

“I’m Pirit,” she said. “Welcome to Ghahar.” Her gestures were courteous but restrained.

“I’m Joan. Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Your impersonation of our biology is impeccable.” There was a trace of skepticism in Pirit’s tone; Joan had pointed the Ghahari to her own portrait being broadcast from the decoy node, but she had to admit that in the context her lack of exotic technology and traits would make it harder to accept the implications of that transmission.

“In my culture, it’s a matter of courtesy to imitate one’s hosts as closely as possible.”

Pirit hesitated, as if pondering whether to debate the merits of such a custom, but then rather than quibbling over the niceties of interspecies etiquette she chose to confront the real issue head-on. “If you’re a Tiran spy, or a defector, the sooner you admit that the better.”

“That’s very sensible advice, but I’m neither.”

The Noudah wore no clothing as such, but Pirit had a belt with a number of pouches. She took a handheld scanner from one and ran it over Joan’s body. Joan’s briefing suggested that it was probably only checking for metal, volatile explosives, and radiation; the technology to image her body or search for pathogens would not be so portable. In any case, she was a healthy, unarmed Noudah down to the molecular level.

Pirit escorted her to one of the trucks, and invited her to recline in a section at the back. Another Noudah drove while Pirit watched over Joan. They soon arrived at a small complex of buildings a couple of kilometers from where the ship had touched down. The walls, roofs, and floors of the buildings were all made from the local sand, cemented with an adhesive that the Noudah secreted from their own bodies.

Inside, Joan was given a thorough medical examination, including three kinds of full-body scan. The Noudah who examined her treated her with a kind of detached efficiency devoid of any pleasantries; she wasn’t sure if that was their standard bedside manner, or a kind of glazed shock at having been told of her claimed origins.

Pirit took her to an adjoining room and offered her a couch. The Noudah anatomy did not allow for sitting, but they liked to recline.

Pirit remained standing. “How did you come here?” she asked.

“You’ve seen my ship. I flew it from Baneth.”

“And how did you reach Baneth?”

“I’m not free to discuss that,” Joan replied cheerfully.

“Not free?” Pirit’s face clouded with silver, as if she were genuinely perplexed.

Joan said, “You understand me perfectly. Please don’t tell me there’s nothing you’re not free to discuss with me.”

“You certainly didn’t fly that ship twenty light-years.”

“No, I certainly didn’t.”

Pirit hesitated. “Did you come through the Cataract?” The Cataract was a black hole, a remote partner to the Noudah’s sun; they orbited each other at a distance of about eighty billion kilometers. The name came from its telescopic appearance: a dark circle ringed by a distortion in the background of stars, like some kind of visual aberration. The Tirans and Ghahari were in a race to be the first to visit this extraordinary neighbor, but as yet neither of them were quite up to the task.

“Through the Cataract? I think your scientists have already proven that black holes aren’t shortcuts to anywhere.”

“Our scientists aren’t always right.”

“Neither are ours,” Joan admitted, “but all the evidence points in one direction: black holes aren’t doorways, they’re shredding machines.”

“So you traveled the whole twenty light-years?”

“More than that,” Joan said truthfully “from my original home. I’ve spent half my life traveling.”

“Faster than light?” Pirit suggested hopefully.

“No. That’s impossible.”

They circled around the question a dozen more times, before Pirit finally changed her tune from how to why?

“I’m a xenomathematician,” Joan said. “I’ve come here in the hope of collaborating with your archaeologists in their study of Niah artifacts.”

Pirit was stunned. “What do you know about the Niah?”

“Not as much as I’d like to.” Joan gestured at her Noudah body. “As I’m sure you’ve already surmised, we’ve listened to your broadcasts for some time, so we know pretty much what an ordinary Noudah knows. That includes the basic facts about the Niah. Historically they’ve been referred to as your ancestors, though the latest studies suggest that you and they really just have an earlier common ancestor. They died out about a million years ago, but there’s evidence that they might have had a sophisticated culture for as long as three million years. There’s no indication that they ever developed space flight. Basically, once they achieved material comfort, they seem to have devoted themselves to various art forms, including mathematics.”

“So you’ve traveled twenty light-years just to look at Niah tablets?” Pirit was incredulous.

“Any culture that spent three million years doing mathematics must have something to teach us.”

“Really?” Pirit’s face became blue with disgust. “In the ten thousand years since we discovered the wheel, we’ve already reached halfway to the Cataract. They wasted their time on useless abstractions.”

Joan said, “I come from a culture of spacefarers myself, so I respect your achievements. But I don’t think anyone really knows what the Niah achieved. I’d like to find out, with the help of your people.”

Pirit was silent for a while. “What if we say no?”

“Then I’ll leave empty-handed.”

“What if we insist that you remain with us?”

“Then I’ll die here, empty-handed.” On her command, this body would expire in an instant; she could not be held and tortured.

Pirit said angrily, “You must be willing to trade something for the privilege you’re demanding!”

“Requesting, not demanding,” Joan insisted gently. “And what I’m willing to offer is my own culture’s perspective on Niah mathematics. If you ask your archaeologists and mathematicians, I’m sure they’ll tell you that there are many things written in the Niah tablets that they don’t yet understand. My colleague and I”—neither of them had mentioned Anne before, but Joan was sure that Pirit knew all about her—“simply want to shed as much light as we can on this subject.”

Pirit said bitterly, “You won’t even tell us how you came to our world. Why should we trust you to share whatever you discover about the Niah?”

“Interstellar travel is no great mystery,” Joan countered. “You know all the basic science already; making it work is just a matter of persistence. If you’re left to develop your own technology, you might even come up with better methods than we have.”

“So we’re expected to be patient, to discover these things for ourselves ... but you can’t wait a few centuries for us to decipher the Niah artifacts?”

Joan said bluntly, “The present Noudah culture, both here and in Tira, seems to hold the Niah in contempt. Dozens of partially excavated sites containing Niah artifacts are under threat from irrigation projects and other developments. That’s the reason we couldn’t wait. We needed to come here and offer our assistance, before the last traces of the Niah disappeared forever.”

Pirit did not reply, but Joan hoped she knew what her interrogator was thinking: Nobody would cross twenty light-years for a few worthless scribblings. Perhaps we’ve underestimated the Niah. Perhaps our ancestors have left us a great secret, a great legacy. And perhaps the fastest—perhaps the only—way to uncover it is to give this impertinent, irritating alien exactly what she wants.

* * * *

The sun was rising ahead of them as they reached the top of the hill. Sando turned to Joan, and his face became green with pleasure. “Look behind you,” he said.

Joan did as he asked. The valley below was hidden in fog, and it had settled so evenly that she could see their shadows in the dawn light, stretched out across the top of the fog layer. Around the shadow of her head was a circular halo like a small rainbow.

“We call it the Niah’s light,” Sando said. “In the old days, people used to say that the halo proved that the Niah blood was strong in you.”

Joan said, “The only trouble with that hypothesis being that you see it around your head ... and I see it around mine.” On Earth, the phenomenon was known as a “glory.” The particles of fog were scattering the sunlight back toward them, turning it one hundred and eighty degrees. To look at the shadow of your own head was to face directly away from the sun, so the halo always appeared around the observers shadow.

“I suppose you’re the final proof that Niah blood has nothing to do with it,” Sando mused.

“That’s assuming I’m telling you the truth, and I really can see it around my own head.”

“And assuming,” Sando added, “that the Niah really did stay at home, and didn’t wander around the galaxy spreading their progeny.”

They came over the top of the hill and looked down into the adjoining riverine valley. The sparse brown grass of the hillside gave way to a lush violet growth closer to the water. Joan’s arrival had delayed the flooding of the valley, but even alien interest in the Niah had only bought the archaeologists an extra year. The dam was part of a long-planned agricultural development, and however tantalizing the possibility that Joan might reveal some priceless insight hidden among the Niah’s “useless abstractions,” that vague promise could only compete with more tangible considerations for a limited time.

Part of the hill had fallen away in a landslide a few centuries before, revealing more than a dozen beautifully preserved strata. When Joan and Sando reached the excavation site, Rali and Surat were already at work, clearing away soft sedimentary rock from a layer that Sando had dated as belonging to the Niah’s “twilight” period.

Pirit had insisted that only Sando, the senior archaeologist, be told about Joan’s true nature; Joan refused to lie to anyone, but had agreed to tell her colleagues only that she was a mathematician and that she was not permitted to discuss her past. At first this had made them guarded and resentful, no doubt because they assumed that she was some kind of spy sent by the authorities to watch over them. Later it had dawned on them that she was genuinely interested in their work, and that the absurd restrictions on her topics of conversation were not of her own choosing. Nothing about the Noudah’s language or appearance correlated strongly with their recent division into nations—with no oceans to cross, and a long history of migration they were more or less geographically homogeneous—but Joan’s odd name and occasional faux pas could still be ascribed to some mysterious exoticism. Rali and Surat seemed content to assume that she was a defector from one of the smaller nations, and that her history could not be made explicit for obscure political reasons.

“There are more tablets here, very close to the surface,” Rali announced excitedly. “The acoustics are unmistakable.” Ideally they would have excavated the entire hillside, but they did not have the time or the labor, so they were using acoustic tomography to identify likely deposits of accessible Niah writing, and then concentrating their efforts on those spots.

The Niah had probably had several ephemeral forms of written communication, but when they found something worth publishing, it stayed published: they carved their symbols into a ceramic that made diamond seem like tissue paper. It was almost unheard of for the tablets to be broken, but they were small, and multitablet works were sometimes widely dispersed. Niah technology could probably have carved three million years’ worth of knowledge onto the head of a pin—they seemed not to have invented nanomachines, but they were into high-quality bulk materials and precision engineering—but for whatever reason they had chosen legibility to the naked eye above other considerations.

Joan made herself useful, taking acoustic readings farther along the slope, while Sando watched over his students as they came closer to the buried Niah artifacts. She had learned not to hover around expectantly when a discovery was imminent; she was treated far more warmly if she waited to be summoned. The tomography unit was almost foolproof, using satellite navigation to track its position and software to analyze the signals it gathered; all it really needed was someone to drag it along the rock face at a suitable pace.

From the corner of her eye, Joan noticed her shadow on the rocks flicker and grow complicated. She looked up to see three dazzling beads of light flying west out of the sun. She might have assumed that the fusion ships were doing something useful, but the media was full of talk of “military exercises,” which meant the Tirans and the Ghahari were engaging in expensive, belligerent gestures in orbit, trying to convince each other of their superior skills, technology, or sheer strength of numbers. For people with no real differences apart from a few centuries of recent history, they could puff up their minor political disputes into matters of the utmost solemnity. It might almost have been funny, if the idiots hadn’t incinerated hundreds of thousands of each other’s citizens every few decades, not to mention playing callous and often deadly games with the lives of the inhabitants of smaller nations.

“Jown! Jown! Come and look at this!” Surat called to her. Joan switched off the tomography unit and jogged toward the archaeologists, suddenly conscious of her body’s strangeness. Her legs were stumpy but strong, and her balance as she ran came not from arms and shoulders but from the swish of her muscular tail.

“It’s a significant mathematical result,” Rali informed her proudly when she reached them. He’d pressure-washed the sandstone away from the near-indestructible ceramic of the tablet, and it was only a matter of holding the surface at the right angle to the light to see the etched writing stand out as crisply and starkly as it would have a million years before.

Rali was not a mathematician, and he was not offering his own opinion on the theorem the tablet stated; the Niah themselves had had a clear set of typographical conventions which they used to distinguish between everything from minor lemmas to the most celebrated theorems. The size and decorations of the symbols labeling the theorem attested to its value in the Niah’s eyes.

Joan read the theorem carefully. The proof was not included on the same tablet, but the Niah had a way of expressing their results that made you believe them as soon as you read them; in this case the definitions of the terms needed to state the theorem were so beautifully chosen that the result seemed almost inevitable.

The theorem itself was expressed as a commuting hypercube, one of the Niah’s favorite forms. You could think of a square with four different sets of mathematical objects associated with each of its corners, and a way of mapping one set into another associated with each edge of the square. If the maps commuted, then going across the top of the square, then down, had exactly the same effect as going down the left edge of the square, then across: either way, you mapped each element from the top-left set into the same element of the bottom-right set. A similar kind of result might hold for sets and maps that could naturally be placed at the corners and edges of a cube, or a hypercube of any dimension. It was also possible for the square faces in these structures to stand for relationships that held between the maps between sets, and for cubes to describe relationships between those relationships, and so on.

That a theorem took this form didn’t guarantee its importance; it was easy to cook up trivial examples of sets and maps that commuted. The Niah didn’t carve trivia into their timeless ceramic, though, and this theorem was no exception. The seven-dimensional commuting hypercube established a dazzlingly elegant correspondence between seven distinct, major branches of Niah mathematics, intertwining their most important concepts into a unified whole. It was a result Joan had never seen before: no mathematician anywhere in the Amalgam, or in any ancestral culture she had studied, had reached the same insight.

She explained as much of this as she could to the three archaeologists; they couldn’t take in all the details, but their faces became orange with fascination when she sketched what she thought the result would have meant to the Niah themselves.

“This isn’t quite the Big Crunch,” she joked, “but it must have made them think they were getting closer.”

“The Big Crunch” was her nickname for the mythical result that the Niah had aspired to reach: a unification of every field of mathematics that they considered significant. To find such a thing would not have meant the end of mathematics—it would not have subsumed every last conceivable, interesting mathematical truth—but it would certainly have marked a point of closure for the Niah’s own style of investigation.

“I’m sure they found it,” Surat insisted. “They reached the Big Crunch, then they had nothing more to live for.”

Rali was scathing. “So the whole culture committed collective suicide?”

“Not actively, no,” Surat replied. “But it was the search that had kept them going.”

“Entire cultures don’t lose the will to live,” Rali said. “They get wiped out by external forces: disease, invasion, changes in climate.”

“The Niah survived for three million years,” Surat countered. “They had the means to weather all of those forces. Unless they were wiped out by alien invaders with vastly superior technology.” She turned to Joan. “What do you think?”

“About aliens destroying the Niah?”

“I was joking about the aliens. But what about the mathematics? What if they found the Big Crunch?”

“There’s more to life than mathematics,” Joan said. “But not much more.”

Sando said, “And there’s more to this find than one tablet. If we get back to work, we might have the proof in our hands before sunset.”

* * * *

Joan briefed Halzoun by video link while Sando prepared the evening meal. Halzoun was the mathematician Pirit had appointed to supervise her, but apparently his day job was far too important to allow him to travel. Joan was grateful; Halzoun was the most tedious Noudah she had encountered. He could understand the Niah’s work when she explained it to him, but he seemed to have no interest in it for its own sake. He spent most of their conversations trying to catch her out in some deception or contradiction, and the rest pressing her to imagine military or commercial applications of the Niah’s gloriously useless insights. Sometimes she played along with this infantile fantasy, hinting at potential superweapons based on exotic physics that might come tumbling out of the vacuum, if only one possessed the right Niah theorems to coax them into existence.

Sando was her minder too, but at least he was more subtle about it. Pirit had insisted that she stay in his shelter, rather than sharing Rali and Surat’s; Joan didn’t mind, because with Sando she didn’t have the stress of having to keep quiet about everything. Privacy and modesty were nonissues for the Noudah, and Joan had become Noudah enough not to care herself. Nor was there any danger of their proximity leading to a sexual bond; the Noudah had a complex system of biochemical cues that meant desire only arose in couples with a suitable mixture of genetic differences and similarities. She would have had to search a crowded Noudah city for a week to find someone to lust after, though at least it would have been guaranteed to be mutual.

After they’d eaten, Sando said, “You should be happy. That was our best find yet.”

“I am happy.” Joan made a conscious effort to exhibit a viridian tinge. “It was the first new result I’ve seen on this planet. It was the reason I came here, the reason I traveled so far.”

“Something’s wrong, though, I think.”

“I wish I could have shared the news with my friend,” Joan admitted. Pirit claimed to be negotiating with the Tirans to allow Anne to communicate with her, but Joan was not convinced that she was genuinely trying.

She was sure that Pirit would have relished the thought of listening in on a conversation between the two of them—while forcing them to speak Noudah, of course—in the hope that they’d slip up and reveal something useful, but at the same time she would have had to face the fact that the Tirans would be listening too. What an excruciating dilemma.

“You should have brought a communications link with you,” Sando suggested. “A home-style one, I mean. Nothing we could eavesdrop on.”

“We couldn’t do that,” Joan said.

He pondered this. “You really are afraid of us, aren’t you? You think the smallest technological trinket will be enough to send us straight to the stars, and then you’ll have a horde of rampaging barbarians to deal with.”

“We know how to deal with barbarians,” Joan said coolly.

Sando’s face grew dark with mirth. “Now I’m afraid.”

“I just wish I knew what was happening to her,” Joan said. “What she was doing, how they were treating her.”

“Probably much the same as we’re treating you,” Sando suggested. “We’re really not that different.” He thought for a moment. “There was something I wanted to show you.” He brought over his portable console, and summoned up an article from a Tiran journal. “See what a borderless world we live in,” he joked.

The article was entitled “Seekers and Spreaders: What We Must Learn from the Niah.” Sando said, “This might give you some idea of how they’re thinking over there. Jaqad is an academic archaeologist, but she’s also very close to the people in power.”

Joan read from the console while Sando made repairs to their shelter, secreting a molasseslike substance from a gland at the tip of his tail and spreading it over the cracks in the walls.

There were two main routes a culture could take, Jaqad argued, once it satisfied its basic material needs. One was to think and study: to stand back and observe, to seek knowledge and insight from the world around it. The other was to invest its energy in entrenching its good fortune.

The Niah had learned a great deal in three million years, but in the end it had not been enough to save them. Exactly what had killed them was still a matter of speculation, but it was hard to believe that if they had colonized other worlds they would have vanished on all of them. “Had the Niah been Spreaders,” Jaqad wrote, “we might expect a visit from them, or them from us, sometime in the coming centuries.”

The Noudah, in contrast, were determined Spreaders. Once they had the means, they would plant colonies across the galaxy. They would, Jaqad was sure, create new biospheres, reengineer stars, and even alter space and time to guarantee their survival. The growth of their empire would come first; any knowledge that failed to serve that purpose would be a mere distraction. “In any competition between Seekers and Spreaders, it is a Law of History that the Spreaders must win out in the end. Seekers, such as the Niah, might hog resources and block the way, but in the long run their own nature will be their downfall.”

Joan stopped reading. “When you look out into the galaxy with your telescopes,” she asked Sando, “how many reengineered stars do you see?”

“Would we recognize them?”

“Yes. Natural stellar processes aren’t that complicated; your scientists already know everything there is to know about the subject.”

“I’ll take your word for that. So ... you’re saying Jaqad is wrong? The Niah themselves never left this world, but the galaxy already belongs to creatures more like them than like us?”

“It’s not Noudah versus Niah,” Joan said. “It’s a matter of how a culture’s perspective changes with time. Once a species conquers disease, modifies their biology, and spreads even a short distance beyond their homeworld, they usually start to relax a bit. The territorial imperative isn’t some timeless Law of History; it belongs to a certain phase.”

“What if it persists, though? Into a later phase?”

“That can cause friction,” Joan admitted.

“Nevertheless, no Spreaders have conquered the galaxy?”

“Not yet.”

Sando went back to his repairs; Joan read the rest of the article. She’d thought she’d already grasped the lesson demanded by the subtitle, but it turned out that Jaqad had something more specific in mind.

“Having argued this way, how can I defend my own field of study from the very same charges as I have brought against the Niah? Having grasped the essential character of this doomed race, why should we waste our time and resources studying them further?

“The answer is simple. We still do not know exactly how and why the Niah died, but when we do, that could turn out to be the most important discovery in history. When we finally leave our world behind, we should not expect to find only other Spreaders to compete with us, as honorable opponents in battle. There will be Seekers as well, blocking the way. Tired, old races squatting uselessly on their hoards of knowledge and wealth.

“Time will defeat them in the end, but we already waited three million years to be born; we should have no patience to wait again. If we can learn how the Niah died, that will be our key, that will be our weapon. If we know the Seekers’ weakness, we can find a way to hasten their demise.”

* * * *

The proof of the Niah’s theorem turned out to be buried deep in the hillside, but over the following days they extracted it all.

It was as beautiful and satisfying as Joan could have wished, merging six earlier, simpler theorems while extending the techniques used in their proofs. She could even see hints of how the same methods might be stretched further to yield still stronger results. “The Big Crunch” had always been a slightly mocking, irreverent term, but now she was struck anew by how little justice it did to the real trend that had fascinated the Niah. It was not a matter of everything in mathematics collapsing in on itself, with one branch turning out to have been merely a recapitulation of another under a different guise. Rather, the principle was that every sufficiently beautiful mathematical system was rich enough to mirror in part—and sometimes in a complex and distorted fashion—every other sufficiently beautiful system. Nothing became sterile and redundant, nothing proved to have been a waste of time, but everything was shown to be magnificently intertwined.

After briefing Halzoun, Joan used the satellite dish to transmit the theorem and its proof to the decoy node. That had been the deal with Pirit: anything she learned from the Niah belonged to the whole galaxy, as long as she explained it to her hosts first.

The archaeologists moved across the hillside, hunting for more artifacts in the same layer of sediment. Joan was eager to see what else the same group of Niah might have published. One possible eight-dimensional hypercube was hovering in her mind; if she’d sat down and thought about it for a few decades she might have worked out the details herself, but the Niah did what they did so well that it would have seemed crass to try to follow clumsily in their footsteps when their own immaculately polished results might simply be lying in the ground, waiting to be uncovered.

A month after the discovery, Joan was woken by the sound of an intruder moving through the shelter. She knew it wasn’t Sando; even as she slept an ancient part of her Noudah brain was listening to his heartbeat. The stranger’s heart was too quiet to hear, which required great discipline, but the shelter’s flexible adhesive made the floor emit a characteristic squeak beneath even the gentlest footsteps. As she rose from her couch she heard Sando waking, and she turned in his direction.

Bright torchlight on his face dazzled her for a moment. The intruder held two knives to Sando’s respiration membranes; a deep enough cut there would mean choking to death, in excruciating pain. The nanomachines that had built Joan’s body had wired extensive skills in unarmed combat into her brain, and one scenario involving a feigned escape attempt followed by a sideways flick of her powerful tail was already playing out in the back of her mind, but as yet she could see no way to guarantee that Sando came through it all unharmed.

She said, “What do you want?”

The intruder remained in darkness. “Tell me about the ship that brought you to Baneth.”

“Why?”

“Because it would be a shame to shred your colleague here, just when his work was going so well.” Sando refused to show any emotion on his face, but the blank pallor itself was as stark an expression of fear as anything Joan could imagine.

She said, “There’s a coherent state that can be prepared for a quark-gluon plasma in which virtual black holes catalyze baryon decay. In effect, you can turn all of your fuel’s rest mass into photons, yielding the most efficient exhaust stream possible.” She recited a long list of technical details. The claimed baryon decay process didn’t actually exist, but the pseudophysics underpinning it was mathematically consistent, and could not be ruled out by anything the Noudah had yet observed. She and Anne had prepared an entire fictitious science and technology, and even a fictitious history of their culture, precisely for emergencies like this; they could spout red herrings for a decade if necessary, and never get caught out contradicting themselves.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” the intruder gloated.

“What now?”

“You’re going to take a trip with me. If you do this nicely, nobody needs to get hurt.”

Something moved in the shadows, and the intruder screamed in pain. Joan leaped forward and knocked one of the knives out of his hand with her tail; the other knife grazed Sando’s membrane, but a second tail whipped out of the darkness and intervened. As the intruder fell backward, the beam of his torch revealed Surat and Rali tensed beside him, and a pick buried deep in his side.

Joan’s rush of combat hormones suddenly faded, and she let out a long, deep wail of anguish. Sando was unscathed, but a stream of dark liquid was pumping out of the intruder’s wound.

Surat was annoyed. “Stop blubbing, and help us tie up this Tiran cousin-fucker.”

“Tie him up? You’ve killed him!”

“Don’t be stupid, that’s just sheath fluid.” Joan recalled her Noudah anatomy; sheath fluid was like oil in a hydraulic machine. You could lose it all and it would cost you most of the strength in your limbs and tail, but you wouldn’t die, and your body would make more eventually.

Rali found some cable and they trussed up the intruder. Sando was shaken, but he seemed to be recovering. He took Joan aside. “I’m going to have to call Pirit.”

“I understand. But what will he do to these two?” She wasn’t sure exactly how much Rali and Surat had heard, but it was certain to have been more than Pirit wanted them to know.

“Don’t worry about that, I can protect them.”

Just before dawn someone sent by Pirit arrived in a truck to take the intruder away. Sando declared a rest day, and Rali and Surat went back to their shelter to sleep. Joan went for a walk along the hillside; she didn’t feel like sleeping.

Sando caught up with her. He said, “I told them you’d been working on a military research project, and you were exiled here for some political misdemeanor.”

“And they believed you?”

“All they heard was half of a conversation full of incomprehensible physics. All they know is that someone thought you were worth kidnapping.”

Joan said, “I’m sorry about what happened.”

Sando hesitated. “What did you expect?”

Joan was stung. “One of us went to Tira, one of us came here. We thought that would keep everyone happy!”

“We’re Spreaders,” said Sando. “Give us one of anything, and we want two. Especially if our enemy has the other one. Did you really think you could come here, do a bit of fossicking, and then simply fly away without changing a thing?”

“Your culture has always believed there were other civilizations in the galaxy. Our existence hardly came as a shock.”

Sando’s face became yellow, an expression of almost parental reproach. “Believing in something in the abstract is not the same as having it dangled in front of you. We were never going to have an existential crisis at finding out that we’re not unique; the Niah might be related to us, but they were still alien enough to get us used to the idea. But did you really think we were just going to relax and accept your refusal to share your technology? That one of you went to the Tirans only makes it worse for the Ghahari, and vice versa. Both governments are going absolutely crazy, each one terrified that the other has found a way to make its alien talk.”

Joan stopped walking. “The war games, the border skirmishes? You’re blaming all of that on Anne and me?”

Sando’s body sagged wearily. “To be honest, I don’t know all the details. And if it’s any consolation, I’m sure we would have found another reason if you hadn’t come along.”

Joan said, “Maybe I should leave.” She was tired of these people, tired of her body, tired of being cut off from civilization. She had rescued one beautiful Niah theorem and sent it out into the Amalgam. Wasn’t that enough?

“It’s up to you,” Sando replied. “But you might as well stay until they flood the valley. Another year isn’t going to change anything. What you’ve done to this world has already been done. For us, there’s no going back.”

* * * *

Joan stayed with the archaeologists as they moved across the hillside. They found tablets bearing Niah drawings and poetry, which no doubt had their virtues but to Joan seemed bland and opaque. Sando and his students relished these discoveries as much as the theorems; to them, the Niah culture was a vast jigsaw puzzle, and any clue that filled in the details of their history was as good as any other.

Sando would have told Pirit everything he’d heard from Joan the night the intruder came, so she was surprised that she hadn’t been summoned for a fresh interrogation to flesh out the details. Perhaps the Ghahari physicists were still digesting her elaborate gobbledygook, trying to decide if it made sense. In her more cynical moments she wondered if the intruder might have been Ghahari himself, sent by Pirit to exploit her friendship with Sando. Perhaps Sando had even been in on it, and Rah and Surat as well. The possibility made her feel as if she were living in a fabricated world, a scape in which nothing was real and nobody could be trusted. The only thing she was certain that the Ghaharis could not have faked was the Niah artifacts. The mathematics verified itself; everything else was subject to doubt and paranoia.

Summer came, burning away the morning fogs. The Noudah’s idea of heat was very different from Joan’s previous perceptions, but even the body she now wore found the midday sun oppressive. She willed herself to be patient. There was still a chance that the Niah had taken a few more steps toward their grand vision of a unified mathematics, and carved their final discoveries into the form that would outlive them by a million years.

When the lone fusion ship appeared high in the afternoon sky, Joan resolved to ignore it. She glanced up once, but she kept dragging the tomography unit across the ground. She was sick of thinking about Tiran-Ghahari politics. They had played their childish games for centuries; she would not take the blame for this latest outbreak of provocation.

Usually the ships flew by, disappearing within minutes, showing off their power and speed. This one lingered, weaving back and forth across the sky like some dazzling insect performing an elaborate mating dance. Joan’s second shadow darted around her feet, hammering a strangely familiar rhythm into her brain.

She looked up, disbelieving. The motion of the ship was following the syntax of a gestural language she had learned on another planet, in another body, a dozen lifetimes ago. The only other person on this world who could know that language was Anne She glanced toward the archaeologists a hundred meters away, but they seemed to be paying no attention to the ship. She switched off the tomography unit and stared into the sky. I’m listening, my friend. What’s happening? Did they give you back your ship? Have you had enough of this world, and decided to go home?

Anne told the story in shorthand, compressed and elliptic. The Tirans had found a tablet bearing a theorem: the last of the Niah’s discoveries, the pinnacle of their achievements. Her minders had not let her study it, but they had contrived a situation making it easy for her to steal it, and to steal this ship. They had wanted her to take it and run, in the hope that she would lead them to something they valued far more than any ancient mathematics: an advanced spacecraft, or some magical stargate at the edge of the system.

But Anne wasn’t fleeing anywhere. She was high above Ghahar, reading the tablet, and now she would paint what she read across the sky for Joan to see.

Sando approached. “We’re in danger, we have to move.”

“Danger? That’s my friend up there! She’s not going to shoot a missile at us!”

“Your friend?” Sando seemed confused. As he spoke, three more ships came into view, lower and brighter than the first. “I’ve been told that the Tirans are going to strike the valley, to bury the Niah sites. We need to get over the hill and indoors, to get some protection from the blast.”

“Why would the Tirans attack the Niah sites? That makes no sense to me.”

Sando said, “Nor me, but I don’t have time to argue.”

The three ships were menacing Anne’s, pursuing her, trying to drive her away. Joan had no idea if they were Ghahari defending their territory, or Tirans harassing her in the hope that she would flee and reveal the nonexistent shortcut to the stars, but Anne was staying put, still weaving the same gestural language into her maneuvers even as she dodged her pursuers, spelling out the Niah’s glorious finale.

Joan said, “You go. I have to see this.” She tensed, ready to fight him if necessary.

Sando took something from his tool belt and peppered her side with holes. Joan gasped with pain and crumpled to the ground as the sheath fluid poured out of her.

Rali and Surat helped carry her to the shelter. Joan caught glimpses of the fiery ballet in the sky, but not enough to make sense of it, let alone reconstruct it.

They put her on her couch inside the shelter. Sando bandaged her side and gave her water to sip. He said, “I’m sorry I had to do that, but if anything had happened to you I would have been held responsible.”

Surat kept ducking outside to check on the “battle,” then reporting excitedly on the state of play. “The Tirans still up there, they can’t get rid of it. I don’t know why they haven’t shot it down yet.”

Because the Tirans were the ones pursuing Anne, and they didn’t want her dead. But for how long would the Ghahari tolerate this violation?

Anne’s efforts could not be allowed to come to nothing. Joan struggled to recall the constellations she’d last seen in the night sky. At the node they’d departed from, powerful telescopes were constantly trained on the Noudah’s homeworld. Anne’s ship was easily bright enough, its gestures wide enough, to be resolved from seven light-years away—if the planet itself wasn’t blocking the view, if the node was above the horizon.

The shelter was windowless, but Joan saw the ground outside the doorway brighten for an instant. The flash was silent; no missile had struck the valley, the explosion had taken place high above the atmosphere.

Surat went outside. When she returned she said quietly, “All clear. They got it.”

Joan put all her effort into spitting out a handful of words. “I want to see what happened.”

Sando hesitated, then motioned to the others to help him pick up the couch and carry it outside.

A shell of glowing plasma was still visible, drifting across the sky as it expanded, a ring of light growing steadily fainter until it vanished into the afternoon glare.

Anne was dead in this embodiment, but her backup would wake and go on to new adventures. Joan could at least tell her the story of her local death: of virtuoso flying and a spectacular end.

She’d recovered her bearings now, and she recalled the position of the stars. The node was still hours away from rising. The Amalgam was full of powerful telescopes, but no others would be aimed at this obscure planet, and no plea to redirect them could outrace the light they would need to capture in order to bring the Niah’s final theorem back to life.

* * * *

Sando wanted to send her away for medical supervision, but Joan insisted on remaining at the site.

“The fewer officials who get to know about this incident, the fewer problems it makes for you,” she reasoned.

“As long as you don’t get sick and die,” he replied.

“I’m not going to die.” Her wounds had not become infected, and her strength was returning rapidly.

They compromised. Sando hired someone to drive up from the nearest town to look after her while he was out at the excavation. Daya had basic medical training and didn’t ask awkward questions; he seemed happy to tend to Joan’s needs, and then lie outside daydreaming the rest of the time.

There was still a chance, Joan thought, that the Niah had carved the theorem on a multitude of tablets and scattered them all over the planet. There was also a chance that the Tirans had made copies of the tablet before letting Anne abscond with it. The question, though, was whether she had the slightest prospect of getting her hands on these duplicates.

Anne might have made some kind of copy herself, but she hadn’t mentioned it in the prologue to her aerobatic rendition of the theorem. If she’d had any time to spare, she wouldn’t have limited herself to an audience of one: she would have waited until the node had risen over Ghahar.

On her second night as an invalid, Joan dreamed that she saw Anne standing on the hill looking back into the fog-shrouded valley, her shadow haloed by the Niah light.

When she woke, she knew what she had to do.

When Sando left, she asked Daya to bring her the console that controlled the satellite dish. She had enough strength in her arms now to operate it, and Daya showed no interest in what she did. That was naive, of course: whether or not Daya was spying on her, Pirit would know exactly where the signal was sent. So be it. Seven light-years was still far beyond the Noudah’s reach; the whole node could be disassembled and erased long before they came close.

No message could outrace light directly, but there were more ways for light to reach the node than the direct path, the fastest one. Every black hole had its glory, twisting light around it in a tight, close orbit and flinging it back out again. Seventy-four hours after the original image was lost to them, the telescopes at the node could still turn to the Cataract and scour the distorted, compressed image of the sky at the rim of the hole’s black disk to catch a replay of Anne’s ballet.

Joan composed the message and entered the coordinates of the node. You didn’t die for nothing, my friend. When you wake and see this, you’ll be proud of us both.

She hesitated, her hand hovering above the send key. The Tirans had wanted Anne to flee, to show them the way to the stars, but had they really been indifferent to the loot they’d let her carry? The theorem had come at the end of the Niah’s three-million-year reign. To witness this beautiful truth would not destroy the Amalgam, but might it not weaken it? If the Seekers’ thirst for knowledge was slaked, their sense of purpose corroded, might not the most crucial strand of the culture fall into a twilight of its own? There was no shortcut to the stars, but the Noudah had been goaded by their alien visitors, and the technology would come to them soon enough.

The Amalgam had been goaded too: the theorem she’d already transmitted would send a wave of excitement around the galaxy, strengthening the Seekers, encouraging them to complete the unification by their own efforts. The Big Crunch might be inevitable, but at least she could delay it, and hope that the robustness and diversity of the Amalgam would carry them through it, and beyond.

She erased the message and wrote a new one, addressed to her backup via the decoy node. It would have been nice to upload all her memories, but the Noudah were ruthless, and she wasn’t prepared to stay any longer and risk being used by them. This sketch, this postcard, would have to be enough.

When the transmission was complete she left a note for Sando in the console’s memory.

Daya called out to her, “Joan? Do you need anything?”

She said, “No. I’m going to sleep for a while.”

The Hundred-Light-Year Diary

Martin Place was packed with the usual frantic lunchtime crowds. I scanned the faces nervously; the moment had almost arrived, and I still hadn’t even caught sight of Alison. One twenty-seven and fourteen seconds. Would I be mistaken about something so important? With the knowledge of the mistake still fresh in my mind? But that knowledge could make no difference. Of course it would affect my state of mind, of course it would influence my actions—but I already knew exactly what the net result of that, and every other, influence would be: I’d write what I’d read.

I needn’t have worried. I looked down at my watch, and as 1:27:13 became 1:27:14, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned; it was Alison, of course. I’d never seen her before, in the flesh, but I’d soon devote a month’s bandwidth allocation to sending back a Barnsley-compressed snapshot. I hesitated, then spoke my lines, awful as they were:

‘Fancy meeting you here.’

She smiled, and suddenly I was overwhelmed, giddy with happiness—exactly as I’d read in my diary a thousand times, since I’d first come across the day’s entry at the age of nine; exactly as I would, necessarily, describe it at the terminal that night. But—foreknowledge aside—how could I have felt anything but euphoria? I’d finally met the woman I’d spend my life with. We had fifty-eight years together ahead of us, and we’d love each other to the end.

‘So, where are we going for lunch?’

I frowned slightly, wondering if she was joking—and wondering why I’d left myself in any doubt. I said, hesitantly, ‘Fulvio’s. Didn’t you ... ?’ But of course she had no idea of the petty details of the meal; on 14 December, 2074, I’d write admiringly: A. concentrates on the things that matter; she never lets herself be distracted by trivia.

I said, ‘Well, the food won’t be ready on time; they’ll have screwed up their schedule, but—’

She put a finger to her lips, then leant forward and kissed me. For a moment, I was too shocked to do anything but stand there like a statue, but after a second or two, I started kissing back.

When we parted, I said stupidly, ‘I didn’t know ... I thought we just ... I—’

‘James, you’re blushing.’

She was right. I laughed, embarrassed. It was absurd: in a week’s time, we’d make love, and I already knew every detail—yet that single unexpected kiss left me flustered and confused.

She said, ‘Come on. Maybe the food won’t be ready, but we have a lot to talk about while we’re waiting. I just hope you haven’t read it all in advance, or you’re going to have a very boring time.’

She took my hand and started leading the way. I followed, still shaken. Halfway to the restaurant, I finally managed to say, ‘Back then—did you know that would happen?’

She laughed. ‘No. But I don’t tell myself everything. I like to be surprised now and then. Don’t you?’

Her casual attitude stung me. Never lets herself be distracted by trivia. I struggled for words; this whole conversation was unknown to me, and I never was much good at improvising anything but small talk.

I said, ‘Today is important to me. I always thought I’d write the most careful—the most complete—account of it possible. I mean, I’m going to record the time we met, to the second. I can’t imagine sitting down tonight and not even mentioning the first time we kissed.’

She squeezed my hand, then moved close to me and whispered, mock-conspiratorially: ‘But you will. You know you will. And so will I. You know exactly what you’re going to write, and exactly what you’re going to leave out—and the fact is, that kiss is going to remain our little secret.’

* * * *

Francis Chen wasn’t the first astronomer to hunt for time-reversed galaxies, but he was the first to do so from space. He swept the sky with a small instrument in a junk-scattered near-Earth orbit, long after all serious work had shifted to the (relatively) unpolluted vacuum on the far side of the moon. For decades, certain—highly speculative—cosmological theories had suggested that it might be possible to catch glimpses of the universe’s future phase of re-contraction, during which—perhaps—all the arrows of time would be reversed.

Chen charged up a light detector to saturation, and searched for a region of the sky which would unexpose it—discharging the pixels in the form of a recognisable image. The photons from ordinary galaxies, collected by ordinary telescopes, left their mark as patterns of charge on arrays of electro-optical polymer; a time-reversed galaxy would require instead that the detector lose charge, emitting photons which would leave the telescope on a long journey into the future universe, to be absorbed by stars tens of billions of years hence, contributing an infinitesimal nudge to drive their nuclear processes from extinction back towards birth.

Chen’s announcement of success was met with virtually unanimous scepticism—and rightly so, since he refused to divulge the coordinates of his discovery. I’ve seen the recording of his one and only press conference.

‘What would happen if you pointed an uncharged detector at this thing?’ asked one puzzled journalist.

‘You can’t.’

‘What do you mean, you can’t?’

‘Suppose you point a detector at an ordinary light source. Unless the detector’s not working, it will end up charged. It’s no use declaring: I am going to expose this detector to light, and it will end up uncharged. That’s ludicrous; it simply won’t happen.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Now time-reverse the whole situation. If you’re going to point a detector at a time-reversed light source, it will be charged beforehand.’

‘But if you discharge the whole thing thoroughly, before exposing it, and then ...’

‘I’m sorry. You won’t. You can’t.’

Shortly afterwards, Chen retired into self-imposed obscurity—but his work had been government funded, and he’d complied with the rigorous auditing requirements, so copies of all his notes existed in various archives. It was almost five years before anyone bothered to exhume them—new theoretical work having made his claims more fashionable—but once the coordinates were finally made public, it took only days for a dozen groups to confirm the original results.

Most of the astronomers involved dropped the matter there and then—but three people pressed on, to the logical conclusion:

Suppose an asteroid, a few hundred billion kilometres away, happened to block the line of sight between Earth and Chen’s galaxy. In the galaxy’s time frame, there’d be a delay of half an hour or so before this occultation could be seen in near-Earth orbit—before the last photons to make it past the asteroid arrived. Our time frame runs the other way, though; for us, the ‘delay’ would be negative. We might think of the detector, not the galaxy, as the source of the photons—but it would still have to stop emitting them half an hour before the asteroid crossed the line of sight, in order to emit them only when they’d have a clear path all the way to their destination. Cause and effect; the detector has to have a reason to lose charge and emit photons—even if that reason lies in the future.

Replace the uncontrollable—and unlikely—asteroid with a simple electronic shutter. Fold up the line of sight with mirrors, shrinking the experiment down to more manageable dimensions—and allowing you to place the shutter and detector virtually side by side. Flash a torch at yourself in a mirror, and you get a signal from the past; do the same with the light from Chen’s galaxy, and the signal comes from the future.

Hazzard, Capaldi and Wu arranged a pair of space-borne mirrors, a few thousand kilometres apart. With multiple reflections, they achieved an optical path length of over two light seconds. At one end of this ‘delay’ they placed a telescope, aimed at Chen’s galaxy; at the other end they placed a detector. (‘The other end’ optically speaking—physically, it was housed in the very same satellite as the telescope.) In their first experiments, the telescope was fitted with a shutter triggered by the ‘unpredictable’ decay of a small sample of a radioactive isotope.

The sequence of the shutter’s opening and closing and the detector’s rate of discharge were logged by a computer. The two sets of data were compared—and the patterns, unsurprisingly, matched. Except, of course, that the detector began discharging two seconds before the shutter opened, and ceased discharging two seconds before it closed.

So, they replaced the isotope trigger with a manual control, and took turns trying to change the immutable future.

Hazzard said, in an interview several months later: ‘At first, it seemed like some kind of perverse reaction-time test: instead of having to hit the green button when the green light came on, you had to try to hit the red button, and vice versa. And at first, I really believed I was “obeying” the signal only because I couldn’t discipline my reflexes to do anything so “difficult” as contradicting it. In retrospect, I know that was a rationalisation, but I was quite convinced at the time. So I had the computer swap the conventions—and of course, that didn’t help. Whenever the display said I was going to open the shutter—however it expressed that fact—I opened it.’

‘And how did that make you feel? Soulless? Robotic? A prisoner to fate?’

‘No. At first, just ... clumsy. Uncoordinated. So clumsy I couldn’t hit the wrong button, no matter how hard I tried. And then, after a while, the whole thing began to seem perfectly ... normal. I wasn’t being “forced” to open the shutter; I was opening it precisely when I felt like opening it, and observing the consequences—observing them before the event, yes, but that hardly seemed important any more. Wanting to “not open” it when I already knew that I would seemed as absurd as wanting to change something in the past that I already knew had happened. Does not being able to rewrite history make you feel “soulless”?’

‘No.’

‘This was exactly the same.’

Extending the device’s range was easy; by having the detector itself trigger the shutter in a feedback loop, two seconds could become four seconds, four hours, or four days. Or four centuries—in theory. The real problem was bandwidth; simply blocking off the view of Chen’s galaxy, or not, coded only a single bit of information, and the shutter couldn’t be strobed at too high a rate, since the detector took almost half a second to lose enough charge to unequivocally signal a future exposure.

Bandwidth is still a problem, although the current generation of Hazzard Machines have path lengths of a hundred light years, and detectors made up of millions of pixels, each one sensitive enough to be modulated at megabaud rates. Governments and large corporations use most of this vast capacity, for purposes that remain obscure—and still they’re desperate for more.

As a birthright, though, everyone on the planet is granted one hundred and twenty-eight bytes a day. With the most efficient data-compression schemes, this can code about a hundred words of text; not enough to describe the future in microscopic detail, but enough for a summary of the day’s events.

A hundred words a day; three million words in a lifetime. The last entry in my own diary was received in 2032, eighteen years before my birth, one hundred years before my death. The history of the next millennium is taught in schools: the end of famine and disease, the end of nationalism and genocide, the end of poverty, bigotry and superstition. There are glorious times ahead.

If our descendants are telling the truth.

* * * *

The wedding was, mostly, just as I’d known it would be. The best man, Pria, had his arm in a sling from a mugging in the early hours of the morning—we’d laughed over that when we’d first met, in high school, a decade before.

‘But what if I stay out of that alley?’ he’d joked.

‘Then I’ll have to break it for you, won’t I? You’re not shunting my wedding day!’

Shunting was a fantasy for children, the subject of juvenile schlock-ROMs. Shunting was what happened when you grimaced and sweated and gritted your teeth and absolutely refused to participate in something unpleasant that you knew was going to happen. In the ROMs, the offending future was magicked away into a parallel universe, by sheer mental discipline and the force of plot convenience. Drinking the right brand of cola also seemed to help.

In real life, with the advent of the Hazzard Machines, the rates of death and injury through crime, natural disaster, industrial and transport accidents, and many kinds of disease, had certainly plummeted—but such events weren’t forecast and then paradoxically ‘avoided’; they simply, consistently, became increasingly rare in reports from the future—reports which proved to be as reliable as those from the past.

A residue of ‘seemingly avoidable’ tragedies remains, though, and the people who know that they’re going to be involved react in different ways: some swallow their fate cheerfully; some seek comfort (or anesthesia) in somnambulist religions; a few succumb to the wish-fulfilment fantasies of the ROMs, and go kicking and screaming all the way.

When I met up with Pria, on schedule, in the Casualty Department of St Vincent’s, he was a bloody, shivering mess. His arm was broken, as expected. He’d also been sodomised with a bottle and slashed on the arms and chest. I stood beside him in a daze, choking on the sour taste of all the stupid jokes I’d made, unable to shake the feeling that I was to blame. I’d lie to him, lie to myself—

As they pumped him full of painkillers and tranquillisers, he said, ‘Fuck it, James, I’m not letting on. I’m not going to say how bad it was; I’m not frightening that kid to death. And you’d better not, either.’ I nodded earnestly and swore that I wouldn’t; redundantly, of course, but the poor man was delirious.

And when it was time to write up the day’s events, I dutifully regurgitated the light-hearted treatment of my friend’s assault that I’d memorised long before I even knew him.

Dutifully? Or simply because the cycle was closed, because I had no choice but to write what I’d already read? Or ... both? Ascribing motives is a strange business, but I’m sure it always has been. Knowing the future doesn’t mean we’ve been subtracted out of the equations that shape it. Some philosophers still ramble on about ‘the loss of free will’ (I suppose they can’t help themselves), but I’ve never been able to find a meaningful definition of what they think this magical thing ever was. The future has always been determined. What else could affect human actions, other than each individual’s—unique and complex—inheritance and past experience? Who we are decides what we do—and what greater ‘freedom’ could anyone demand? If ‘choice’ wasn’t grounded absolutely in cause and effect, what would decide its outcome? Meaningless random glitches from quantum noise in the brain? (A popular theory—before quantum indeterminism was shown to be nothing but an artefact of the old time-asymmetric world-view.) Or some mystical invention called the soul ... but then what, precisely, would govern its behaviour? Laws of metaphysics every bit as problematical as those of neurophysiology.

I believe we’ve lost nothing; rather, we’ve gained the only freedom we ever lacked: who we are is now shaped by the future, as well as the past. Our lives resonate like plucked strings, standing waves formed by the collision of information flowing back and forth in time.

Information—and disinformation.

Alison looked over my shoulder at what I’d typed. ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ she said.

I replied by hitting the check key—a totally unnecessary facility, but that’s never stopped anyone using it. The text I’d just typed matched the received version precisely. (People have talked about automating the whole process—transmitting what must be transmitted, without any human intervention whatsoever—but nobody’s ever done it, so perhaps it’s impossible.)

I hit save, burning the day’s entry on to the chip that would be transmitted shortly after my death, then said—numbly, idiotically (and inevitably)—’What if I’d warned him?’

She shook her head. ‘Then you’d have warned him. It still would have happened.’

‘Maybe not. Why couldn’t life turn out better than the diary, not worse? Why couldn’t it turn out that we’d made the whole thing up—that he hadn’t been attacked at all?’

‘Because it didn’t.’

I sat at the desk for a moment longer, staring at the words that I couldn’t take back, that I never could have taken back. But my lies were the lies I’d promised to tell; I’d done the right thing, hadn’t I? I’d known for years exactly what I’d ‘choose’ to write—but that didn’t change the fact that the words had been determined, not by ‘fate’, not by ‘destiny’, but by who I was.

I switched off the terminal, stood up and began undressing. Alison headed for the bathroom. I called out after her, ‘Do we have sex tonight, or not? I never say.’

She laughed. ‘Don’t ask me, James. You’re the one who insisted on keeping track of these things.’

I sat down on the bed, disconcerted. It was our wedding night, after all; surely I could read between the lines.

But I never was much good at improvising.

* * * *

The Australian federal election of 2077 was the closest for fifty years, and would remain so for almost another century. A dozen independents—including three members of a new ignorance cult, called God Averts His Gaze—held the balance of power, but deals to ensure stable government had been stitched together well in advance, and would survive the four-year term.

Consistently, I suppose, the campaign was also among the most heated in recent memory, or short-term anticipation. The soon-to-be Opposition Leader never tired of listing the promises the new Prime Minister would break; she in turn countered with statistics of the mess he’d create as Treasurer, in the mid-eighties. (The causes of that impending recession were still being debated by economists; most claimed it was an ‘essential precursor’ of the prosperity of the nineties, and that The Market, in its infinite, time-spanning wisdom, would choose/had chosen the best of all possible futures. Personally, I suspect it simply proved that even foresight was no cure for incompetence.)

I often wondered how the politicians felt, mouthing the words they’d known they’d utter ever since their parents first showed them the future-history ROMs, and explained what lay ahead. No ordinary person could afford the bandwidth to send back moving pictures; only the newsworthy were forced to confront such detailed records of their lives, with no room for ambiguity or euphemism. The cameras, of course, could lie—digital video fraud was the easiest thing in the world—but mostly they didn’t. I wasn’t surprised that people made (seemingly) impassioned election speeches which they knew would get them nowhere; I’d read enough past history to realise that that had always been the case. But I’d like to have discovered what went on in their heads as they lip-synched their way through interviews and debates, parliamentary question time and party conferences, all captured in high-resolution holographic perfection for anterity. With every syllable, every gesture, known in advance, did they feel like they’d been reduced to twitching puppets? (If so, maybe that, too, had always been the case.) Or was the smooth flow of rationalisation as efficient as ever? After all, when I filled in my diary each night, I was just as tightly constrained, but I could—almost always—find a good reason to write what I knew I’d write.

Lisa was on the staff of a local candidate who was due to be voted into office. I met her a fortnight before the election, at a fund-raising dinner. To date, I’d had nothing to do with the candidate, but at the turn of the century—by which time, the man’s party would be back in office yet again, with a substantial majority—I’d head an engineering firm which would gain several large contracts from state governments of the same political flavour. I’d be coy in my own description of the antecedents of this good fortune—but my bank statement included transactions six months in advance, and I duly made the generous donation that the records implied. In fact, I’d been a little shocked when I’d first seen the print-out, but I’d had time to accustom myself to the idea, and the de facto bribe no longer seemed so grossly out of character.

The evening was dull beyond redemption (I’d later describe it as ‘tolerable’), but as the guests dispersed into the night, Lisa appeared beside me and said matter-of-factly, ‘I believe you and I are going to share a taxi.’

I sat beside her in silence, while the robot vehicle carried us smoothly towards her apartment. Alison was spending the weekend with an old schoolfriend, whose mother would die that night. I knew I wouldn’t be unfaithful. I loved my wife, I always would. Or at least, I’d always claim to. But if that wasn’t proof enough, I couldn’t believe I’d keep such a secret from myself for the rest of my life.

When the taxi stopped, I said, ‘What now? You ask me in for coffee? And I politely decline?’

She said, ‘I have no idea. The whole weekend’s a mystery to me.’

The elevator was broken; a sticker from Building Maintenance read: OUT OF ORDER UNTIL 11:06 A.M., 3/2/78. I followed Lisa up twelve flights of stairs, inventing excuses all the way: I was proving my freedom, my spontaneity—proving that my life was more than a fossilised pattern of events in time. But the truth was, I’d never felt trapped by my knowledge of the future, never felt any need to delude myself that I had the power to live any life but one. The whole idea of an unknown liaison filled me with panic and vertigo. The bland white lies that I’d already written were unsettling enough—but if anything at all could happen in the spaces between the words, then I no longer knew who I was, or who I might become. My whole life would dissolve into quicksand.

I was shaking as we undressed each other.

‘Why are we doing this?’

‘Because we can.’

‘Do you know me? Will you write about me? About us?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘But ... how long will this last? I have to know. One night? A month? A year? How will it end?’ I was losing my mind: how could I start something like this, when I didn’t even know how it would end?

She laughed. ‘Don’t ask me. Look it up in your own diary, if it’s so important to you.’

I couldn’t leave it alone, I couldn’t shut up. ‘You must have written something. You knew we’d share that taxi.’

‘No. I just said that.’

‘You—’ I stared at her.

‘It came true, though, didn’t it? How about that?’ She sighed, slid her hands down my spine, pulled me on to the bed. Down into the quicksand.

‘Will we—’

She clamped her hand over my mouth.

‘No more questions. I don’t keep a diary. I don’t know anything at all.’

* * * *

Lying to Alison was easy; I was almost certain that I’d get away with it. Lying to myself was easier still. Filling out my diary became a formality, a meaningless ritual; I scarcely glanced at the words I wrote. When I did pay attention, I could barely keep a straight face: amidst the merely lazy and deceitful elision and euphemism were passages of deliberate irony which had been invisible to me for years, but which I could finally appreciate for what they were. Some of my paeans to marital bliss seemed ‘dangerously’ heavy-handed; I could scarcely believe that I’d never picked up the subtext before. But I hadn’t. There was no ‘risk’ of tipping myself off—I was ‘free’ to be every bit as sarcastic as I ‘chose’ to be.

No more, no less.

The ignorance cults say that knowing the future robs us of our souls; by losing the power to choose between right and wrong, we cease to be human. To them, ordinary people are literally the walking dead: meat puppets, zombies. The somnambulists believe much the same thing, but—rather than seeing this as a tragedy of apocalyptic dimensions—embrace the idea with dreamy enthusiasm. They see a merciful end to responsibility, guilt and anxiety, striving and failing: a descent into inanimacy, the leaching of our souls into a great cosmic spiritual blancmange, while our bodies hang around, going through the motions.

For me, though, knowing the future—or believing that I did—never made me feel like a sleepwalker, a zombie in a senseless, amoral trance. It made me feel I was in control of my life. One person held sway across the decades, tying the disparate threads together, making sense of it all. How could that unity make me less than human? Everything I did grew out of who I was: who I had been, and who I would be.

I only started feeling like a soulless automaton when I tore it all apart with lies.

* * * *

After school, few people pay much attention to history, past or future—let alone that grey zone between the two which used to be known as ‘current affairs’. Journalists continue to collect information and scatter it across time, but there’s no doubt that they now do a very different job than they did in pre-Hazzard days, when the live broadcast, the latest dispatch, had a real, if fleeting, significance. The profession hasn’t died out completely; it’s as if a kind of equilibrium has been reached between apathy and curiosity, and if we had any less news flowing from the future, there ‘would be’ a greater effort made to gather it and send it back. How valid such arguments can be—with their implications of dynamism, of hypothetical alternative worlds cancelled out by their own inconsistencies—I don’t know, but the balance is undeniable. We learn precisely enough to keep us from wanting to know any more.

On 8 July, 2079, when Chinese troops moved into Kashmir to ‘stabilise the region’—by wiping out the supply lines to the separatists within their own borders—I hardly gave it a second thought. I knew the UN would sort out the whole mess with remarkable dexterity; historians had praised the Secretary-General’s diplomatic resolution of the crisis for decades, and, in a rare move for the conservative Academy, she’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize three years in advance of the efforts which would earn it. My memory of the details was sketchy, so I called up The Global Yearbook. The troops would be out by 3 August; casualties would be few. Duly comforted, I got on with my life.

I heard the first rumours from Pria, who’d taken to sampling the countless underground communications nets. Gossip and slander for computer freaks; a harmless enough pastime, but I’d always been amused by the participants’ conceit that they were ‘plugged in’ to the global village, that they had their fingers on the pulse of the planet. Who needed to be wired to the moment, when the past and the future could be examined at leisure? Who needed the latest unsubstantiated static, when a sober, considered version of events which had stood the test of time could be had just as soon—or sooner?

So when Pria told me solemnly that a full-scale war had broken out in Kashmir, and that people were being slaughtered in the thousands, I said, ‘Sure. And Maura got the Nobel Prize for genocide.’

He shrugged. ‘You ever heard of a man called Henry Kissinger?’

I had to admit that I hadn’t.

* * * *

I mentioned the story to Lisa, disparagingly, confident that she’d laugh along with me. She rolled over to face me and said, ‘He’s right.’

I didn’t know whether to take the bait; she had a strange sense of humour, she might have been teasing. Finally, I said, ‘He can’t be. I’ve checked. All the histories agree—’

She looked genuinely surprised before her expression turned to pity; she’d never thought much of me, but I don’t think she’d ever believed I was quite so naive.

‘The victors have always written the “history”, James. Why should the future be any different? Believe me. It’s happening.’

‘How do you know?’ It was a stupid question; her boss was on all the foreign affairs committees, and would be Minister next time the party was in power. If he didn’t have access to the intelligence in his present job, he would in the long term.

She said, ‘We’re helping to fund it, of course. Along with Europe, Japan, and the States. Thanks to the embargo after the Hong Kong riots, the Chinese have no war drones; they’re pitting human soldiers with obsolete equipment against the best Vietnamese robots. Four hundred thousand troops and a hundred thousand civilians will die—while the Allies sit in Berlin playing their solipsist video games.’

I stared past her, into the darkness, numb and disbelieving. ‘Why? Why couldn’t things have been worked out, defused in time?’

She scowled. ‘How? You mean, shunted? Known about, then avoided?’

‘No, but ... if everyone knew the truth, if this hadn’t been covered up—’

‘What? If people had known it would happen, it wouldn’t have? Grow up. It is happening, it will go on happening; there’s nothing else to say.’

I climbed out of bed and started dressing, although I had no reason to hurry home. Alison knew all about us; apparently, she’d known since childhood that her husband would turn out to be a piece of shit.

Half a million people slaughtered. It wasn’t fate, it wasn’t destiny—there was no Will of God, no Force of History to absolve us. It grew out of who we were: the lies we’d told, and would keep on telling. Half a million people slaughtered in the spaces between the words.

I vomited on the carpet, then stumbled about dizzily, cleaning it up. Lisa watched me sadly.

‘You’re not coming back, are you?’

I laughed weakly. ‘How the fuck should I know?’

‘You’re not.’

‘I thought you didn’t keep a diary.’

‘I don’t.’

And I finally understood why.

* * * *

Alison woke when I switched on the terminal, and said sleepily, without rancour, ‘What’s the hurry, James? If you’ve masturbated about tonight since you were twelve years old, surely you’ll still remember it all in the morning.’

I ignored her. After a while, she got out of bed and came and looked over my shoulder.

‘Is this true?’

I nodded.

‘And you knew all along? You’re going to send this?’

I shrugged and hit the check key. A message box popped up on the screen: 95 words; 95 errors.

I sat and stared at this verdict for a long time. What did I think? I had the power to change history? My puny outrage could shunt the war? Reality would dissolve around me, and another—better—world would take its place?

No. History, past and future, was determined, and I couldn’t help being part of the equations that shaped it—but I didn’t have to be part of the lies.

I hit the SAVE key, and burned those 95 words on to the chip, irreversibly.

(I’m sure I had no choice.)

That was my last diary entry—and I can only assume that the same computers that will filter it out of my posthumous transmission will also fill in the unwritten remainder, extrapolating an innocuous life for me, fit for a child to read.

I tap into the nets at random, listening to the whole spectrum of conflicting rumours, hardly knowing what to believe. I’ve left my wife, I’ve left my job, parting ways entirely with my rosy, fictitious future. All my certainties have evaporated: I don’t know when I’ll die; I don’t know who I’ll love; I don’t know if the world is heading for Utopia, or Armageddon.

But I keep my eyes open, and I feed what little of value I can gather back into the nets. There must be corruption and distortion here, too—but I’d rather swim in this cacophony of a million contradictory voices than drown in the smooth and plausible lies of those genocidal authors of history who control the Hazzard Machines.

Sometimes I wonder how different my life might have been without their intervention—but the question is meaningless. It couldn’t have been any other way. Everyone is manipulated; everyone is a product of their times. And vice versa.

Whatever the unchangeable future holds, I’m sure of one thing: who I am is still a part of what always has, and always will, decide it.

I can ask for no greater freedom than that.

And no greater responsibility.

In Numbers

I dream that I’m floating in the void between the stars. Untethered. No ship in sight. Suitless, naked to the vacuum. I search frantically for the sun, as if merely knowing its direction coul save me, but I’m spinning much to fast to find my bearings, and each time I catch a glimpse of what might be th ehome star, I lose sight of it again, before I can be sure.

“Last night”—as day nineteen came to a close with Callaghan’s condition unchanged—the orders arrived from Earth, officially canceling

the mission.

We shut down the drive for six hours while we rotated Cyclops one hundred and eighty degrees. Now we are decelerating at 1.3 gees—as fast as we can, within safety parameters—but we’ll still be traveling away from the solar system for fourteen and a half more days before we even come to a halt, and then it will take as long again just to get back to the point where deceleration began. I have no right to be even mildly surprised by this—to shed the velocity gained over nineteen days’ ship time at 1 gee requires 14.6 days at 1.3; any intelligent child could do the calculation—but some Earth-bound, commonsensical part of my mind still can’t quite accept a twenty-nine-day U-turn.

Callaghan is facing away from the door as I enter the infirmary, but a glance at his EEG tells me he’s awake. I call out in what I hope is a calm, reassuring voice, “Andrew? It’s only me. How are you feeling today?” The words are picked up by the microphone in the helmet of my quarantine suit, pumped out by the external speaker, bounced off the gleaming, tiled walls, then fed back to me through my headset—creating the unsettling illusion that my skull is several meters wide, and hollow.

He turns at the sound, emits a series of angry grunts, and makes a show of trying to break free of his restraints, but after a short while he goes limp, and just glares at me resentfully.

I stand by the foot of the bed, suddenly feeling drained, lethargic, hopeless. Or maybe just heavy; the extra weight is going to take a while to get used to. Twenty-four more kilograms, distributed uniformly, isn’t exactly crippling, but even the slightest movement now requires a conscious effort.

“How are you?”

I’m convinced by now that he can’t understand a word I say, but I’d still rather make a fool of myself than deal with a living, conscious patient in silence. There’s no evidence that the sound of my voice is even any comfort to him, but I’m damned if I’m going to treat him like a cadaver.

“Is the gravity getting you down?”

Three days ago, Andrew Callaghan would have winced at the lame pun, and then lectured me on my sloppy terminology: “Kindly remember, ‘Doctor’ Dreyfus—and I use the title loosely—that the Principle of Equivalence does not grant ye license to refer to the inertial force ye are experiencing as ‘gravity.’ “ In that glorious, over-the-top Scottish accent that he put on when he was being jokingly pompous, in place of his usual pan-European amalgam. His father was Irish, his mother Scottish, but he grew up in Switzerland; three days ago, he spoke five languages. Now, my words mean no more to him than his grunts mean to me.

I close my eyes and fight down a wave of panic. Earth is still forty-six days away. In forty-six days, this could happen to all of us. I want to lean over and shake him, force him to confess that he’s acting, that it’s all a monstrous practical joke. I actually believed that, for the first few hours (in retrospect, a feat of wishful thinking verging on the psychotic—nobody indulges in practical jokes on board an experimental spacecraft). I thought everyone was in on it: make the doctor shit himself, and then laugh about it for the rest of the flight. I would have happily laughed along with them. But when I searched their faces for ill-concealed conspiratorial glee, all I found was the same sickening realization: This could happen to all of us. This could happen to me.

No diagnostic instrument can find the least thing wrong with Callaghan, and the hundreds of experts back on Earth who’ve seen the data can agree on only one thing: so far, there is no direct evidence of any toxin, any infection, any lesion, or any neurochemical deficit or excess. His brain activity has certainly changed, diminishing in specific regions in a manner entirely consistent with his diminished behavioral repertoire, but there is no sign of neurological damage to explain this loss of function.

This proves nothing; there are conditions that cannot be diagnosed until autopsy, even on Earth. And since Callaghan’s medical history—personal and ancestral, physical and mental—is, or was, spotless, if some trace neurotoxin has contaminated the food, or some mutant virus is drifting through the ship’s air, there is no reason to believe that he was uniquely vulnerable. It must be assumed that we are all at risk.

For all the high-powered technology at my disposal, I’d give anything for a simple, verbal report from the patient himself. He’s a long way from being comatose; there must be something going through his mind. Although that begs the question: going through whose mind? Does Andrew Callaghan still exist? At what level of impairment does he lose his identity? And who lies in this bed, then? An unnamed stranger, without a past or a future? The naïve vocabulary of personality fails; the painful fact is that the human brain is capable of states that can’t be categorized in such cozy terminology. Sometimes I think the only way to stay sane—when confronted with malfunctions of consciousness that betray, so starkly, its physical nature—is by adopting a variation on solipsism: other people may be nothing but biochemical robots, run by slabs of interconnected neurons ... but me, I’m not like that at all; I’m real. Via the control plate fixed to his depilated skull, I anesthetize and selectively paralyze him, then I wheel him into the scanning room. I’m still hoping that evidence of a virus is going to turn up; if not the nucleic acid itself, maybe some tell-tale foreign protein. However limited the practical usefulness of such a discovery, it would be a great psychological victory to finally know what it is we’re fighting.

I lock the bed into place inside the NMR cavity, hit a few keys, and the computer takes over. The scan will last nearly an hour, there’s noth ing to do but sit and wait.

Perhaps the hypothetical virus is causing the production of an altered form of one of the neurotransmitters, too close to the real thing for this crude heap of coils to tell the difference, but sufficiently deformed to be unable to bind properly to its receptor? It’s possible, I suppose—as pos sible as any of my Other wild guesses. No doubt the experts back home have already thought of it and dismissed it. The world’s best neuroscientists are all busily debating the Callaghan case, and when they manage to agree upon a hypothesis, I’m sure we’ll be told without delay (apart from the unavoidable one: twelve hours now, and growing longer). My expertise is in space medicine; my specialties are radiation sickness, and—amusingly enough—the effects of insufficient gravity. Why should I expect to come up with the answer myself? Just because I’m here in the flesh? Just because my own life may depend on it?

There’s a buzzing in my headset. I hit a button on my belt to accept the call.

“David?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s Jenny. I’m in the maser room. Can you come and take a look at Greta, please.”

“Why? What is it?”

She hesitates long enough to make a reply unnecessary.

This is it. It’s spreading.

I flick off my communicator. For a moment I simply feel numb, but then the ludicrous nature of the situation fills me with a bitter rage. Eight immaculately healthy people, on a milk run of a test flight to an arbitrary point in interstellar space; what are the odds of finding yourself in the middle of a fucking epidemic?

I’m on the verge of letting go and screaming out a string of angry obscenities, but I catch myself. What did I honestly expect? That quarantining Callaghan after he showed symptoms would be enough to contain the disease? I can’t fall to pieces every time a miracle fails to take place.

I switch the communicator back on; the channel is still open. “I’m on my way.”

“You’re going to feel nauseous, but that should be the only side-effect; if you experience any other problems, let me know at once.”

They all nod earnestly. Thomas asks, “How nauseous is nauseous? Throwing up?”

“I hope not. The digestive tract isn’t physically affected, although you may feel like it is.”

He grins. “Well, that’s okay, then.”

DDC-XV, a mixture of anti-viral agents, is no guarantee of anything; it’s capable of disabling perhaps 40 per cent of known viruses, and slowing down another 10 percent. Since whatever is on board can only be a mutant of something we brought from Earth, the odds are really no different: one chance in two of any useful effect at all.

It’s a strange sight: the crew lined up in front of me like nervous children trying to look brave while waiting to be inoculated. Although I’ve read all their files, although I know all their medical idiosyncrasies backward, they’ve never really been my patients before. Until now, they’ve just been colleagues and friends, and the sudden shift in the relationship is disconcerting. I hate the way they’re looking at me; as if I had some kind of power. As if it were me, and not the virus, they had to fear, or respect, or appease.

Captain Salih al-Qasbi is first to receive the jab. It’s almost funny; since the team was assembled back on the moon, queues have always formed in the precise order of ascension to command: Lidia Garcia, navigator. Kayathiri Sangaralingam, drive specialist. Thomas Bwalya, life-support engineer. Jenny Riley, cyberneticist. (Greta Nordstrom, communications engineer. Andrew Callaghan, astronomer.) Then me, last and least, insurance against some unlikely emergency—like the escape pods, and about as much use.

“What else can we do?” asks Kay. “Shouldn’t we be wearing quarantine suits?”

“It wouldn’t be worth the discomfort. We’ve been breathing the same air as each other for nineteen days; we must all have the virus in our bodies by now.” The notion of anyone engaging in physical intimacy on board Cyclops is ludicrous; there are video cameras in every corner of the ship, recording everything we do, twenty-four hours of every simulated day. For the virus to have passed from Callaghan to Nordstrom, it must be able to survive in air, so the chances are that we’ve all been infected.

Jenny frowns. “You keep talking about the virus. What if it isn’t a virus? What if it’s something else?”

“What else can it be? A contaminant in the food doesn’ make sense any more—a toxin doesn’t just appear by magic, there’d lave to be a fungus or bacterium making it, and Thomas and I have both done dozens of tests, and turned up nothing.”

Salih says, “But no tests for a virus are positive, either All we have are negative results.”

“Viruses are more elusive. It’s a process of elimination; f it was anything else, we would have pinned it down by now.” I decline to add that electron microscopy on brain tissue from a dead patient might settle the issue once and for all.

“But are you sure there is no other possibility, David?”

“If there is, I can’t imagine what.” I look around, a little rsentful, but trying not to let it show. “Can anyone?”

There’s a long silence, then Lidia says, “This might sound far-fetched, and I know the symptoms are nothing like any recognize( form of radiation sickness, but ...”

I shake my head vehemently. “Not only do the symptoas make no sense, but the monitors all show that we’re getting no more of any kind of radiation than we’d be receiving on Earth. The shielding is working perfectly, against spillage from the drive, against cosmic ray ... nothing is getting through.”

“What about something we can’t measure? Something that would pass right through the shields? Neutrinos, or some other weakl: interacting particle? No humans have been out this far before, only robot probes, and none with detectors that could pick up neutrinos.”

“Neutrinos are harmless. We’d be hit with more neutrinos back on Earth, from the sun, than we would be out here. And if it’ some other kind of radiation, where’s it coming from? What’s kept it ou of the solar system? What’s kept it off the Earth’s surface—our shielding is just as effective as an entire planetary atmosphere. And if it scarely interacts with matter, how can it possibly cause brain damage?”

She nods agreement, but looks away with an air of frusration, as if I’d somehow missed the point. I’m puzzled; she’s ten times he physicist I am, she should have thought of every objection I raised before she even spoke.

Jenny says, “What about the air filters. Wasn’t there a Mars flight in the ‘50’s—”

Thomas is indignant. “The air filters are clean!”

“The air filters are clean,” I agree, “and in any case, I wouldn’t be able to miss a bacterial infection.”

Thomas says, “That Mars flight was a passenger liner wth some guy on board who’d caught Legionnella Six back on Earth. The ship’s life-support system had nothing to do with it. Why don’t you get your facts straight before you open your mouth?”

The discussion takes us nowhere, and Salih soon breaks it up and sends us back to our posts.

I check my patients via the infirmary’s video cameras. The robot or derly is trying to feed Nordstrom, and with infinite dumb patience offers her spoonful after spoonful of mush that she spits back onto i ceramic arm. Callaghan was the same at first, and I thought I’d have to put him on a drip, but after less than a day he gave in.

I review the recent data stream from Earth, but there’s been no progress. The French and Australian delegates to the latest teleconference on the “Cyclops Syndrome” both claim to have brilliant new theories—but are refusing to divulge them until the question of patent rights on any potential spin-offs has been settled. I know enough technodiplomacyspeak to realize that they have no “theories”; it’s their convoluted way of restating their protest at having had no citizens included in the crew. I slump against the desk, wondering: When the ship full of corpses is recovered, will each government jealously claim the body of their own nation’s crew member? Will they race each other to the dissecting tables for the honor of being first to announce the cause of death?

This first manned test of the Cyclops design—to an unspectacular patch of vacuum a mere five light-days from Earth—was trumpeted as the miracle of international cooperation, in an era of increasing tension on every other front. The truth is, it’s been abused all along, treated as the conduit for a thousand petty diplomatic paybacks. Well, better that than war—although now, with the mission a failure, what kind of safety valve will it be? The newest weapons—nanomachines, molecular “robots” the size of a virus—carry no risk of fall-out or nuclear winter, and have a respect for property that puts the neutron bomb to shame. Already, governments around the world are painting their enemies as “less than human.” I stare at the newscasts in disbelief, and think: After all those

decades it took to get rid of the fucking bomb, it’s happening again. Genocide is becoming thinkable again.

There’s a knock on the door. It’s Lidia.

“David? Can I talk to you?”

“Sure.”

She sits, with an involuntary sigh of bliss at the pleasure of taking the weight off her feet.

“What I said back there . ,” she waves her hands dismissively, “.. you’re right, of course; radiation makes no sense—but that wasn’t really what I was getting at.”

“Then what—?”

“The point is, nobody has ever been this far out before.” I can’t help a

puzzled scowl, and she quickly adds, “What difference should that make? I don’t know. Of course I don’t know! Twenty thousand people spent fifteen years planning this mission—I don’t expect to be able to outguess them in a couple of hours. Some exotic form of radiation was Hie only tangible thing I could think of, off the top of my head, but the real point is that we just don’t know what’s out here.”

I’m about to make a sarcastic remark about ethereal alien lifeforms, slipping through the hull and feeding on our brains, but I stop myself in time. If Lidia is becoming mildly paranoid, the worst thing I can do is mock her. I say, reasonably, “We know as much about what’s out here as people ever knew about interplanetary space. More. Probes have been leaving the solar system for a hundred and fifty years. The interstellar medium has been sampled all the way to Alpha Centauri. There are no surprises, there’s nothing strange out here. And even if there were ... what astrophysical phenomenon could possibly explain what’s happened to Callaghan and Nordstrom?”

“I’ve told you, I don’t know. All I’m suggesting is that you keep an open mind.” She hesitates, frowning, clearly embarrassed by the vagueness of her argument, but nevertheless unwilling to abandon it. “Humans spent millions of years evolving on the Earth’s surface, adapting to a very specific set of environments. We think we’re aware of all the restrictions that places on us, but we can’t be sure. I mean, suppose they’d sent people into orbit before they’d discovered the Van Allen radiation belts. Or suppose they’d sent a free-fall expedition to Saturn, before any research had been done on the effects of long-term weightlessness.” I start to protest, but she cuts me off. “I know, that sounds ludicrous, but only because both those problems were obvious in advance. That doesn’t mean it always has to be that way. Isn’t it possible that we’ve come across something that couldn’t be anticipated, something utterly new?”

I say, begrudgingly, “I know what you’re getting at. People have been acting for a hundred years like they knew all the problems of interstellar flight, and that once we came up with the technical solutions, those flights would be almost ... trivial. The usual hubris. You’re saying, perhaps there’s something qualitatively different about interstellar space, something that all the unmanned probes couldn’t detect, something that a century of planetary exploration couldn’t prepare us for. Okay, it’s an interesting theoretical point, but where does it actually get us? Even if you’re right, all it means is that we have no idea at all how to protect ourselves. Intellectual humility may be a virtue, but frankly, I’d rather be optimistic and keep on believing that it has to be a virus.”

She looks away, again with that air of frustration, and I suddenly feel ashamed of my sensible, insipid response. “You should speak to Kay, not me. She’s the particle physicist, the genius, the great theoretician. I’m just a second-rate doctor who failed Lateral Thinking 100. I can’t radical scientific ideas; I’d be struck off the list for unprofessional con duct.”

Lidia smiles ruefully. “I talked to Kay half an hour ago. She said I was full of crap.” She shrugs. “She’s probably right. And I hope that it is a virus, as much as you do. Keep looking for it, David. Forget every thing I’ve said. You have work to do, I shouldn’t have distracted you.”

The robot orderly feeds and cleans my robustly healthy idiot patients, the computerized scanner probes their bodies with magnetic fields and microwave pulses for the signature of a molecule that has no right to be there—and fails. I send all the data back to Earth—NMR spectra, PET scans, EEGs, video recordings—along with my own observations and speculations, for what they’re worth. In return, Earth spews back a torrent of case studies from the literature; all make fascinating reading, but none come close to matching the pattern of symptoms—and lack of symptoms—of the Cyclops Syndrome.

Then come the signs that Earth is getting worried: an interminable series of messages from heads-of-state, each one full of the same emetic platitudes about their deep concern for our safety, their people’s good wishes, and our own inspirational courage. Each one setting up the right credentials, carving out a share of the PR catharsis, just in case we don’t make it back alive.

Worse are the broadcasts from our families—scripted just as tightly, but delivered with less skill. I sit in my cabin and listen to my parents being forced to declare their love for me in the vocabulary of prime time human interest. After a few seconds, I turn down the sound. but the travesty is still too painful to watch. I close my eyes and press my fingers to the glass, shaking with anger.

I check everyone for symptoms of neurological deterioration. I analyze their visual tracking patterns, measure their reaction times, test their language and cognitive skills. Nobody’s results betray the slightest signs of impairment—but then, except for those tests that require the subject’s understanding or cooperation, the same can be said of Callaghan and Nordstrom.

For a few paranoid hours, I wonder if some spiteful government has infected us with a tailored virus, or perhaps even killer nanomachines. It’s not unlikely, per se, but the details make no sense; surely a saboteur would have chosen to mimic a known disease, rather than risk arousing suspicion with a novel set of symptoms.

Unless, of course, the whole point was to arouse suspicion. to inflame tensions, to start the hunt for someone to blame. But that doesn’t bear thinking about.

Salih asks me to ask each member of the crew to help in some way for the sake of morale. Jenny writes new software for the protein syn, I thesizer, in preparation for churning out artificial antibodies, should we actually find something to make antibodies against. Lidia and Kay check and recheck, calibrate and recalibrate, all the imaging and analytical equipment. I’ve already been showing Thomas every report and chart cranked out by the computer, in the hope that he’ll identify some subtle clue that I’ve overlooked. Salih himself insists on feeding both Callaghan :aid Nordstrom for one meal a day, expressing the hope g that this human contact might make a difference to their condition—a gesture which I find touching, but also irritating, because it seems like an implied crit icism of the way I’m looking after them. Or perhaps I’m just hypersensitive.

Days pass without another victim, and I begin to feel less pessimistic.

Dramatic as the behavioral changes Callaghan and Nordstrom have suffered might be, the lack of detectable physical damage implies that, the virus is capable of infecting only a very specific class of neurons—and perhaps even that is contingent upon some genetic quirk that no other crew member happens to share.

Earth is still weeks away, though; the maser lag is still growing longer, and I can’t suppress a sense of frustration—at times, verging on panic—at the slowness of our return. It’s not as if our homecoming held out the promise of a guaranteed, instant cure; perhaps it’s more a wish to be rid of the burden of responsibility than fear of the virus itself.

And every night, I dream the same dream: that I’m spinning, alone, in the void, trying in vain to find the way home.

I’m shaken roughly from sleep, and it takes me several seconds to recall where I am. Squinting against the ceiling panels switched to daylight strength, I make out Thomas leaning over me.

“Oh shit, shit, shit.”

He laughs drily. “Well, you’re all right then.”

I stagger out of bed. “Who is it this time?”

“Salih. Kay. Jenny.”

“Oh, no.” I hesitate in the doorway. I want to fall apart, I want to climb back under the blankets and hide, I want to be home, but Thomas just stands there, puzzled, impatient, and I realize that I lack the courage to betray my weakness to him. I think, that’s all that’s kept me going: propping up my fears, one against the other.

Salih is sitting on the floor in a corner of the dining room. He eyes me warily as I approach, but looks more lost and confused than aggressive. I want to say something to him before I fire the tranquilizer dart—I feel I owe him some kind of apology or explanation—but then I smother the absurd impulse and just do it.

Jenny is in her cabin, hitting fistfuls of keys on her terminal, like an infant or a monkey pretending to type, peering at the screen with intense concentration. When she hears me, she turns and bellows angrily, then picks up a memory cartridge and throws it straight at my head. I duck. She scrambles under the bed. I lie on my stomach awkwardly, muscles still stiff from sleep. She screams at me. I fire.

Kay is in bed, shivering and sobbing. Lidia sits beside her, murmuring comforting nonsense.

“Kay?” I crouch near the foot of the bed. She ignores me. Lidia says dully, “I can’t get her to speak. I’ve tried, David, but I can’t.” As if the whole phenomenon might simply be a failure on our part to trick or bully the victims back to normality.

After we’ve moved the three new patients to the infirmary, and Lidia has broadcast a terse report to Earth, we sit in the dining room, drinking coffee, making plans for our own presumably inevitable decline.

Lidia says, “The drive and navigation software will just keep on running. There are stages when human confirmation is requested, but if no input is received within five minutes, the computer goes ahead as per the flight plan. Once we’re close enough for remote reprogramming, ISUSAT will take over for the boarding rendezvous. Short of something

drastic and highly improbable, like a meteor through the fuel rings, we’ll make it back.”

Thomas says, “Ditto for life-support. After all the hours I’ve spent monitoring and fine-tuning, unless there’s a massive equipment failure—and there’s no reason there should be—the whole system can take care of itself.”

It’s easier than I thought it would be,, to mimic their calm, pragmatic tones. “The orderly should be able to cope with feeding all eight of us, so long as we’re properly restrained. The beds have an ultrasonic system to maintain peripheral circulation; we can expect a certain amount of muscle wastage, that’s inevitable, but no pressure sores, no gaping ulcers.

The fecal and urinary disposal system has its own lubricant and disinfectant supplies; of course, nobody’s ever been on one for weeks without human supervision, but so long as we’re unable to get our hands free to break the seals, I can’t see any problems.”

Lidia says, “Well, then.”

The newest patients are all still under the influence of the tranquilizer, and Callaghan and Nordstrom are mercifully asleep. I strap down Thomas and Lidia, then undress and slide into the surreal plastic contraption that will carry away my wastes. I’ve used something similar before, in a space suit when I was in training; it’s not pleasant, but it’s not that bad.

The orderly isn’t programmed to manipulate the restraints, but with a long, tedious series of explicit voice commands, I manage to instruct it to strap me down.

For several minutes, we lie in silence, then Thomas clears his throat and says, “They’ll find a cure. It might take a month, or a year, but they won’t give up on us.”

Sure. If we live for a month, or a year. If we live long enough even to reach Earth.

I keep my mouth shut.

Lidia says, “What do you think it will be like?”

Thomas says, “I don’t know. Maybe like a dream. Maybe like being a helpless child again, a baby. Maybe like nothing at all.”

They talk for a while, and I listen in silence, a professional observer of The Patient’s response to a stressful prognosis, and I feel a warm glow of satisfaction at the admirable way that they’re handling their fears—but I can’t join in.

A few hours later, Thomas succumbs. He screams with rage at finding himself bound, waking Callaghan and Nordstrom, who scream along with him.

I say, “I can’t stand this. I’m getting up.”

Lidia yells over the cacophony, “Don’t be stupid! What do you think, you’re immune? If you’re roaming around the ship when it happens to you, you’re going to hurt yourself, or damage something—”

I start telling the orderly how to release me. Lidia shouts her own instructions, and the thing swings back and forth wildly. I give up, suddenly realizing that the robot is incapable of righting itself; if it falls

over, we’re all dead.

Eventually, the three of them shut up, presumably falling asleep; in the dim light, it’s hard to be certain.

Lidia says softly, “You’ve never told us, David. Who’s waiting for you,

back on Earth?”

I laugh. “No one.”

“Come on.”

“It’s the truth.” I feel myself redden. It’s none of her business; why should I have to explain myself to her? “I just, I don’t have time. I prefer

to be independent.”

“Everybody needs someone.”

“That sounds like a line from a bad song. And it happens not to be true. The truth is, I don’t much like people.” I wish I could drag my words back from out of the darkness. Then I think: what does it matter, now?

There’s an awkward silence, then she says, “So, what inspired you to become a doctor?”

I laugh, with genuine mirth, because I’ve only just remembered. “Reading Camus’ The Plague.”

There’s no reply.

Morning is a nightmare. The ceiling panels slowly brighten, and everyone wakes, screaming protests at the presence of so many strangers. I’m

tempted again to have the orderly release me, but I fight down the impulse. Instead, I instruct it to administer sedation. Callaghan and Nordstrom are fitted with control plates, but the others have to be injected. As silence descends, my relief turns sour; I feel more lonely and frightened than ever.

I have the orderly move the infirmary’s terminal next to my bed, and with voice control I switch through the signal from Earth. They send to us constantly, they can always think of something to say. Weather reports for our home towns, snippets of news (but nothing too depressing), herds of primary school children around the world, praying to their various gods for our safe return. A response to Lidia’s final report isn’t due until tomorrow morning; I’m staring back into a cheerful past, when there were only two victims, and it looked like we had some hope.

Around noon, I make a broadcast of my own. “This is Dreyfus,” I say, redundantly. “Bwalya developed symptoms at 0200 hours, Garcia at 0300

hours.” I’m guessing the times, I have no real idea. And who the fuck

cares? I switch off the camera. Trembling, I vomit onto the bed and the floor. The orderly cleans it up.

I grow calm again as the hours pass, and a little more rational. I don’t think about death—I can’t see any point in doing so—but I can’t help wondering how it will feel, finally to be like Callaghan and the others.

Less than human? That might not be so bad. Feeling less, thinking less, might not be so bad at all.

Night comes. Staring up at the faintly glowing ceiling, I wonder if I’ll even notice when it happens to me. I consider talking aloud, describing my state of mind for the sake of whoever gets their hands on the infirmary’s log, but introspection yields nothing worth reporting.

I say, “Introspection yields nothing worth reporting.”

A few seconds later—suddenly unsure if I actually spoke, or merely formed the intention—I repeat myself.

Shortly afterward, I suffer the same uncertainty again.

Disembodied pain washes in and out of my shallow sleep for a long time. It’s only when I start to attach it to specific parts of me—this ache

is from my shoulders, that cramp is from my right calf—that I begin to wake.

When a throbbing that was an abstract notion alights deep inside my skull, I try to retreat back into sleep, but the pain is too great. I open

my eyes and try to move, and then I remember.

A tunnel of pain and fear, stretching back for what seems like eternity

The width of the tunnel is the width of my shoulders, the width of the harness that holds me to the bed, but its depth is striated with light and darkness, with noise and confusion, with loneliness and the coldest misery.

A dream of suffocation, infinitely prolonged.

It takes me forever, ten minutes at least, to instruct the orderly to

release me. I’m too weak to leave the bed, but I can move my arms, I can roll onto my stomach, I can start trying to rid myself of the nightmare

burnt into my flesh.

When I finally succeed in raising my head, I find the rest of the crew

still strapped to their beds. Most have their eyes open, but are staring

listlessly at the ceiling or the walls.

I squint at my watch for the date, and then struggle with memory and

arithmetic. Eighteen days. I feel a surge of elation. I may not have conquered the virus—perhaps this is nothing but a temporary remission—but

every extension of the time scale on which the disease is operating brings

us closer to home, and the chance of a cure.

I switch on the broadcast from Earth. They’re playing a loop at us that says little more than: “Cyclops, please respond.” I make a brief report, then sag back onto the bed, all my strength drained.

Later, I have the orderly fetch me a wheelchair, and I check each of my patients. I remove all their harnesses; nobody is in any condition to leap from their bed and assault me. Greta has somehow managed to half-turn onto her side, pinning her right arm, and she whimpers horribly as I free her. The skin of her forearm is soft and gray. I anesthetize her and inspect it. A few more days, and nothing would have saved her from amputation. I pump her full of antibiotics and tissue-repair nanomachines; she’ll need a graft, eventually. but for now all I can do is hold the necrosis in check.

It finally occurs to me to worry about Cyclops itself, but the drive computer’s error log is empty of all but the most trivial complaints, and the navigation system reports that we are holding precisely to the flight plan.

Where are we? Still further from home than we were when the mission

was canceled, but at least now we’re headed in the right direction.

The flight plan is a blue trace on the screen of the terminal, a plot of

distance versus time. The U-turn is an upside-down parabola—minutely distorted by relativistic effects, but not enough for the eye to tell. The blue line itself is pure theory, but at regular intervals along the curve are small green crosses, marking estimates of our actual location computed by the navigation system. It’s the most natural thing in the world for the eye to leap across the curve and read off the time at which Cyclops was last at the same position as it is right now.

That was eighteen days ago. The day I succumbed.

I feel an almost physical shock, even before I consciously make the connection: Lidia may have been right. Perhaps there is something out here. I look around, in vain, for someone to argue me back to my senses.

It could easily be a coincidence. One isolated piece of data means nothing. I set the computer to work at once, analyzing the records of every instrument inside and outside the hull of Cyclops, searching for some evidence that the region of space from which we are now emerging is in any way distinctive.

The task is trivial, the answer is produced with no perceptible delay. Apart from a steady and predictable decline in the faint remnants of the solar wind—nothing. And so far as the instruments inside the shielded hull are concerned, we might have spent the last three weeks standing still, on the surface of a planet with gravity of 1.3 gees.

I’d be willing to believe that interstellar space might hold some dangerous surprise—I’d admit the possibility of some peril inexplicable in terms of current astrophysics, maybe even current physics itself—but to believe in a phenomenon that has absolutely no effect on any one of the hundreds of delicate instruments we’re carrying, and yet can somehow cause a subtle dysfunction of the human nervous system, would be anthropocentric to the point of insanity.

I go back over the infirmary’s log, and find the moment when Lidia last spoke to me. I check the flight plan; in ten hours’ time, we’ll pass through the same location.

The orderly starts feeding the patients, but I interrupt it and take over myself. Eighteen days of confinement has knocked the aggression out of all of them. The docility with which they accept the food makes the job easy, but it shakes me up. Half a day ago, I was just like this. There goes the vanity that supposedly keeps me sane; my brain is the same machine as everyone else’s, my precious intellect can be switched off, and switched on again, by nothing more profound than the stages in a virus’s life cycle.

It’s still too soon for a response from Earth to my message. I leave the infirmary and move around the ship in my wheelchair. Everything is as we left it, of course. I’m still horribly weak and aching all over, from being bedridden for so long, but the gravity as such no longer seems oppressive. The cabins all look so familiar, so mundane, that the idea that we are, even now, further from Earth than anyone has ever been before, seems preposterous.

As the ceiling panels slowly dim in their mimickry of dusk, I can’t help myself; I sit by Lidia’s bed and wait for the magic time, certain as I am that nothing is going to happen. She’s asleep, but makes small, unhappy noises every now and then.

The coincidence of the onset and departure of my symptoms keeps nagging at me, but there’s no getting around it; the precision, the spec ificity, of the effect screams out the word adaptation. The only cause that. makes sense is one that can be traced back to the Earth’s biosphere. Lidia cries out. I check my watch; the time has passed. I pat her hand and start to wheel myself away. She opens her eyes, and suddenly burst s into tears, sobbing and shaking. I pause, momentarily unable to move or speak. She turns her head and sees me.

Her voice is slurred, but her words are unmistakable. “David? Are we home?”

I lean over and hold her in my arms.

I wouldn’t call it a theory yet; we have no mechanism, no clear hypothesis. Kay speculates that some kind of quantum correlation effect may be involved; every human being contains thousands of genes that are, ultimately, copied from the same common ancestors, and like the polarized photons of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment, there may be some indelible link established by this history of microscopic intimacy. There are at least two problems with this; the EPR effect is supposedly incapable of communicating anything but random quantum noise; and in any case, it ought not to diminish at all with distance. Kay is undaunted. “Any theory that predicts an effect that works at infinity is nonsense,” she says. “In flat, empty spacetime, maybe, but not in the real universe. And just because you can pronounce the word ‘random,’ don’t kid yourself that you know what it means.”

What’s special, about being ten billion kilometers from Earth, as opposed to ten thousand or ten million’? Distance, that’s all. We didn’t just evolve on a planetary surface, with air and water and gravity. We evolved in the presence of each other. It seems that the refinement of human consciousness made use of that fact. Relied on that fact.

The media releases back on Earth have mentioned none of this; mission control is keeping quiet about the rantings of eight people who have been through an ordeal. The mystery disease has mysteriously spared us, and no doubt we will be quarantined while the experts diligently hunt for the non-existent virus. The truth, though, won’t stay buried for long.

Will genocide still be thinkable, in a world where every human being relies for their humanity on every other’?

I hope not.

Induction

Greg Egan (www.gregegan.net) lives in Perth in Western Australia. A recluse whom few people in SF have met, he is one of the most respected writers of Hard SF in the last twenty years. He is also a programmer, and his website prominently features his mathematical computer animations. One of the most significant aspects of his fiction is the characterization. He tends to write what we sometimes call neuropsych hard sf, treating character as a scientific problem and writing about people based on how action and feeling are determined by the biochemistry of the brain. He has two books coming out in 2008: his fourth collection, Dark Integers and Other Stories, and his seventh SF novel, Incandescence.

“Induction” appeared in Foundation 100, the first fiction issue of the British SF Foundation’s journal, celebrating one hundred issues of publication. Here Egan explores what it really takes to colonize other planets, and what kind of person might want the job.

Ikat spent three of the last four hours of 2099 out on the regolith, walking the length of her section of the launch gun, checking by eye for micrometeorite impacts or any other damage that the automatic systems might improbably have missed.

Four other junior engineers walked a few paces ahead of her, but Ikat had had enough of their company inside the base, and she kept her coms tuned to Earth, sampling the moods of the century’s countdown.

The Pope had already issued a statement from Rio, imploring humanity to treat “Christianity’s twenty-first birthday” as an opportunity to embrace “spiritual maturity”; the Council of Islamic Scholars in Brussels, surrendering to the ubiquity of the Gregorian calendar, had chimed in with a similar message of their own. In the pyrotechnic rivalry stakes, Sydney was planning to incinerate the decommissioned Harbour Bridge with artificial lightning, while Washington had arranged for no less than twenty-one ageing military satellites to plunge from the sky into the Potomac at the stroke of midnight.

There was no doubt, though, that Beijing had stolen the lion’s share of global chatter with the imminent launch of the Orchid Seed. You could forget any purist’s concept of lunar midnight; the clocks on Procellarum had been set to the easternmost of Earth’s time zones ever since the construction of the base two decades before, so the official zeroing of the digits here would precede celebrations in all of the globe’s major cities. The PR people really had planned that far ahead.

As she paced slowly along the regolith, Ikat kept her eyes diligently on the coolant pipes that weaved between the support struts to wrap the gun barrel, although she knew that this final check was mostly PR too. If the launch failed, it would be down to a flaw that no human eye could have detected. Six successful but unpublicised test firings made such a humiliation unlikely. Still, the gun’s fixed bearing rendered a seventh, perfectly timed success indispensable. Only at “midnight” would the device be aimed precisely at its target. If they had to wait a month for a relaunch, hundreds of upper-echelon bureaucrats back on Earth would probably be diving out of their penthouse windows before dawn. Ikat knew that she was far too low in the ranks to make a worthwhile scapegoat, but her career could still be blighted by the ignominy.

Her mother was calling from Bangkok. Ikat pondered her responsibilities, then decided to let the audio through. If she really couldn’t walk, talk and spot a plume of leaking coolant at the same time, she should probably retire from her profession straight away.

“Just wishing you good luck, darling,” her mother said. “And Happy New Year. Probably you’ll be too busy celebrating to talk to me later.”

Ikat scowled. “I was planning to call you when it reached midnight there. But Happy New Year anyway.”

“You’ll call your father after the launch?”

“I expect so.” Her parents were divorced, but her mother still wanted harmony to flow in all directions, especially on such an occasion.

“Without him,” her mother said, “you never would have had this chance.”

It was a strange way of putting it, but it was probably true. The Chinese space program was cosmopolitan enough, but if her mother hadn’t married a Chinese citizen and remained in the country for so long, Ikat doubted that she would have been plucked from provincial Bangkok and lofted all the way up to Procellarum. There were dozens of middle-ranking project engineers with highly specific skills who were not Chinese born; they were quite likely the best people on the planet for their respective jobs. She was not in that league. Her academic results had secured her the placement, but they had not been so spectacular that she would have been head-hunted across national borders.

“I’ll call him,” she promised. “After the launch.”

She cut the connection. She’d almost reached the end of Stage Nine, the ten-kilometre section of the barrel where the pellets would be accelerated from sixteen to eighteen per cent of light speed, before the final boost to twenty per cent. For the last three years, she had worked beneath various specialist managers, testing and re-testing different subsystems: energy storage, electromagnets, cooling, data collection. It had been a once-in-a-lifetime education, arduous at times, but never boring. Still, she’d be glad to be going home. Maglev railways might seem anticlimactic after this, but she’d had enough of sharing a room with six other people, and the whole tiny complex with the same two hundred faces, year after year.

Back inside the base, Ikat felt restless. The last hour stretched out ahead of her, an impossible gulf. In the common room, Qing caught her eye, and she went to sit with him.

“Had any bites from your resumé?” he asked.

“I haven’t published it yet. I want a long holiday first.”

He shook his head in dismay. “How did you ever get here? You must be the least competitive person on Earth.”

Ikat laughed. “At university, I studied eighteen hours a day. I had no social life for six years.”

“So now you’ve got to put in some effort to get the pay-off.”

“This is the pay-off, you dope.”

“For a week or so after the launch,” Qing said, “you could have the top engineering firms on the planet bidding for the prestige you’d bring them. That won’t last forever, though. People have a short attention span. This isn’t the time to take a holiday.”

Ikat threw up her hands. “What can I say? I’m a lost cause.”

Qing’s expression softened; he was deadly serious about his own career, but when he lectured her it was just a kind of ritual, a role play that gave them something to talk about.

They passed the time with more riffs on the same theme, interleaved with gossip and bitching about their colleagues, but when the clock hit 11.50 it became impossible to remain blasé. Nobody could spend three years in a state of awe at the feat they were attempting, but ten minutes of sober contemplation suddenly seemed inadequate. Other probes had already been sent towards the stars, but the Orchid Seed would certainly outrace all those that had gone before it. It might yet be overtaken itself, but with no serious competitors even at the planning stage, there was a fair chance that the impending launch would come to be seen as the true genesis of interstellar travel.

As the conversation in the common room died away, someone turned up the main audio commentary that was going to the news feeds, and spread a dozen key image windows across the wall screens. The control room was too small to take everyone in the base; junior staff would watch the launch much as the public everywhere else did.

The schematics told Ikat a familiar story, but this was the moment to savour it anew. Three gigajoules of solar energy had already been packed into circulating currents in the superconducting batteries, ready to be tapped. That was not much, really; every significant payload launched from Earth had burnt up far more. One third would be lost to heat and stray electromagnetic fields. The remainder would be fed into the motion of just one milligram of matter: the five hundred tiny pellets of the Orchid Seed that would race down the launch gun in three thousandths of a second, propelled by a force that could have lofted a two-tonne weight back on Earth.

The pellets that comprised the seed were not physically connected, but they would move in synch in a rigid pattern, forming a kind of sparse crystal whose spacing allowed it to interact strongly with the microwave radiation in the gun. Out in deep space, in the decades spent in transit, the pattern would not be important, but the pellets would be kept close together by electrostatic trimming if and when they strayed, ready to take up perfect rank again when the time came to brake. First, in the coronal magnetic field of Prosperity B; again near its larger companion star, and finally in the ionosphere of Prosperity A’s fourth planet, Duty, before falling into the atmosphere and spiralling to the ground.

One cycling image on the wall rehearsed the launch in slow motion, showing the crest of electromagnetic energy coursing down the barrel, field lines bunched tightly like a strange coiled spring. A changing electric field induced a magnetic field; a changing magnetic field induced an electric field. In free space such a change would spread at the speed of light—would be light, of some frequency or other—but the tailored geometry and currents of the barrel kept the wave reined in, always in step with the seed, devoted to the task of urging this precious cargo forward.

“If this screws up,” Qing observed forlornly, “we’ll be the laughing stock of the century.”

“You don’t think Beijing’s prepared for a cover-up?” Ikat joked.

“Some jealous fucker would catch us out,” Qing replied. “I’ll bet every dish on Earth is tuned to the seed’s resonant frequency. If they get no echo, we’ll all be building toilet blocks in Aksai Chin.”

It was 11.58 in Tonga, Tokelau and Procellarum. Ikat took Qing’s hand and squeezed it. “Relax,” she said. “The worst you’ll come to is building synchrotrons for eccentric billionaires in Kowloon.”

Qing said, “You’re cutting off my circulation.”

The room fell silent; a synthetic voice from the control room counted down the seconds. Ikat felt light-headed. The six test firings had worked, but who knew what damage they’d done, what stresses they’d caused, what structures they’d weakened? Lots of people, actually; the barrel was packed with instrumentation to measure exactly those things, and the answers were all very reassuring. Still—

“Minus three. Minus two. Minus one.”

A schematic of the launch gun flashed green, followed by a slow-motion reconstruction of the field patterns so flawless it was indistinguishable from the simulations. A new window opened, showing tracking echoes. The seed was moving away from the moon at sixty thousand kilometres per second, precisely along the expected trajectory. There was nothing more required of it: no second stage to fire, no course change, no reconfiguration. Now that it had been set in motion, all it had to do was coast on its momentum; it couldn’t suddenly veer sideways, crashing and burning like some failed chemical rocket launched from the ground. Even if collisions or system failures over the coming decades wiped out some of the pellets, the seed as a whole could function with as little as a quarter of the original number. Unless the whole thing had been a fraud or a mass hallucination, there was now absolutely nothing that could pull the rug out from under this triumph; in three milliseconds, their success had become complete and irrevocable. At least for a century, until the seed reached its destination.

People were cheering; Ikat joined them, but her own cry came out as a tension-relieving sob. Qing put an arm around her shoulders. “We did it,” he whispered. “We’ve conquered the world.”

Not the stars? Not the galaxy? She laughed, but she didn’t begrudge him this vanity. The fireworks to come in Sydney might be more spectacular, and the dying hawks burning up over Washington might bring their own sense of closure, but this felt like an opening out, an act of release, a joyful shout across the light years.

Food and drink was wheeled out; the party began. In twenty minutes, the seed was farther from the sun than Mars. In a day, it would be farther than Pluto; in ten days, farther than Pioneer 10. In six months, the Orchid Seed would have put more distance behind it than all of the targeted interstellar missions that had preceded it.

Ikat remembered to call her father once midnight came to Beijing.

“Happy New Year,” she greeted him.

“Congratulations,” he replied. “Will you come and visit me once you get your Earth legs, or will you be too busy signing autographs?”

Fake biochemical signals kept the Procellarans’ bones and muscles strong; it would only take a day or two to acclimatise her nervous system to the old dynamics again. “Of course I’ll visit you.”

“You did a good job,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”

His praise made her uncomfortable. She wanted to express her gratitude to him—he’d done much more to help her than providing the accident of her birthplace—but she was afraid of sounding like a giddy movie star accepting an award.

As the party wound on and midnight skimmed the globe, the speechwriters of the world’s leaders competed to heap praise upon Beijing’s achievement. Ikat didn’t care that it had all been done for the glory of a fading empire; it was more than a gesture of status and power.

Only one thing seemed bittersweet, as she contemplated the decades to come. She was twenty-eight years old, and there was every chance that these three years, these three milliseconds, would turn out to have been the pinnacle of her life.

The caller was persistent, Ikat gave him that. He refused to leave a message or engage with her assistant; he refused to explain his business to anyone but Ikat herself, in a realtime dialogue.

From her balcony she looked out across the treetops, listening to the birds and insects of the Mekong valley, and wondered if she wanted to be dragged back into the swirling currents of the world. The caller, whose name was Vikram Ali, had probably tracked her down in the hope of extracting a comment from her about the imminent arrival of signals from the Orchid Flower. That might have been an egotistical assumption, were it not for the fact that she’d heard of no other participant in the launch publishing anything on the matter, so it was clear that the barrel would have to be scraped. The project’s most famous names were all dead or acorporeal—and the acorporeals were apparently Satisfied, rendering them even less interested in such worldly matters than an ageing flesh-bound recluse like Ikat.

She pondered her wishes and responsibilities. Most people now viewed the Orchid Seed as a curiosity, a sociological time capsule. Within decades of its launch, a new generation of telescopes had imaged and analysed its destination with such detail and clarity that the mission had come to seem redundant. All five planets in the Prosperity system appeared lifeless, and although there were astrophysical and geochemical subtleties that in situ measurements might yet reveal, with high-resolution maps of Duty splashed across the web, interest in the slightly better view that would arrive after a very long delay began to dwindle.

What was there for Ikat to say on the matter? Should she plead for the project to be taken seriously, as more than a quaint nationalist stunt from a bygone era? Maybe the top brass weren’t Satisfied; maybe they were just embarrassed. The possibility annoyed her. No one who’d been sincere in their work on the Orchid Seed should be ashamed of what they’d done.

Ikat returned Vikram Ali’s call. He responded immediately, and after the briefest of pleasantries came to the point.

“I represent Khamoush Holdings,” he said. “Some time ago, we acquired various assets and obligations of the URC government, including a contractual relationship with you.”

“I see.” Ikat struggled to remember what she might have signed that could possibly be relevant a hundred and twenty years later. Had she promised to do media if asked? Her assistant had verified Khamoush Holding’s bona fides, but all it knew about the Procellarum contract was that Ikat’s copy had been lost in 2145, when an anarchist worm had scrambled three per cent of the planet’s digital records.

“The opportunity has arisen for us to exploit one of our assets,” Ali continued, “but we are contractually obliged to offer you the option of participating in the relevant activity.”

Ikat blinked. Option? Khamoush had bought some form of media rights, obviously, but would there be a clause saying they had to run down the ranks of the Orchid Seed team, offering each participant a chance to play spokesperson?

“Am I obliged to help you, or not?” she asked.

Now it was Ali’s turn to be surprised. “Obliged? Certainly not! We’re not slave holders!” He looked downright offended.

Ikat said, “Could we get the whole thing over in a day or two?”

Ali pondered this question deeply for a couple of seconds. “You don’t have the contract, do you?”

“I chose a bad archive,” Ikat confessed.

“So you have no idea what I’m talking about?”

“You want me to give interviews about the Orchid Seed, don’t you?” Ikat said.

“Ultimately, yes,” Ali replied, “but that’s neither here nor there for now. I want to ask you if you’re interested in travelling to Duty, taking a look around, and coming back.”

In the lobby of the hotel in Mumbai, Ikat learnt that someone else had accepted the offer from Khamoush Holdings.

“I thought you’d be rich and Satisfied by now,” she told Qing.

He smiled. “Mildly rich. Never satisfied.”

They walked together to the office of Magic Beans Inc., Ikat holding her umbrella over both of them against the monsoon rain.

“My children think I’m insane,” Qing confessed.

“Mine too. But then, I told them that if they kept arguing, I’d make it a one-way journey.” Ikat laughed. “Really, they ought to be grateful. No filial obligations for forty years straight. It’s hard to imagine a greater gift.”

In the Magic Beans office, Ali showed them two robots, more or less identical to the ones the Orchid Flower, he hoped, would already have built on the surface of Duty. The original mission planners had never intended such a thing, but when Khamoush had acquired the assets they had begun the relevant R&D immediately. Forty years ago they had transmitted the blueprints for these robots, in a message that would have arrived not long after the Orchid Seed touched down. Now that confirmation of the Flower’s success in its basic mission had reached Earth, in a matter of months they would learn whether the nanomachines had also been able to scavenge the necessary materials to construct these welcoming receptacles.

“We’re the only volunteers?” Qing asked, gazing at his prospective doppelgänger with uneasy fascination. “I would have thought one of the acorporeals would have jumped at the chance.”

“Perhaps if we’d asked them early enough,” Ali replied. “But once you’re immersed in that culture, forty years must seem a very long time to be out of touch.”

Ikat was curious about the financial benefits Khamoush were hoping for; they turned out to revolve largely around a promotional deal with a manufacturer of prosthetic bodies. Although the designs the company sold were wildly different from these robots—even their Extreme Durability models were far more cosily organic—any link with the first interstellar explorers trudging across rugged landscapes on a distant, lifeless world carried enough resonance to be worth paying for.

Back in the hotel they sat in Qing’s room, talking about the old times and speculating about the motives and fates of all their higher-ranked colleagues who’d turned down this opportunity. Perhaps, Ikat suggested, some of them simply had no wish to become acorporeal. Crossing over to software didn’t preclude you from continuing to inhabit a prosthetic body back on Earth, but once you changed substrate the twin lures of virtual experience and self-modification were strong. “That would be ironic,” she mused. “To decline to engage with the physical universe in this way, for fear of ultimately losing touch with it.”

Qing said, “I plan to keep my body frozen, and have my new self wired back into it when I return, synapse by synapse.”

Ikat smiled. “I thought you said mildly rich.” That would be orders of magnitude more costly than her own plan: frozen body, prosthetic brain.

“They caught us at just the right stage in life,” Qing said. “Still interested in reality, but not still doting on every new great-great-grandchild. Not yet acorporeal, but old enough that we already feel as if we’ve been on another planet for forty years.”

Ikat said, “I’m amazed that they honoured our contracts, though. A good lawyer could have let them hand-pick their travellers.” The relevant clause had simply been a vague offer of preferential access to spin-off employment opportunities.

“Why shouldn’t they want us?” Qing demanded, feigning indignation. “We’re seasoned astronauts, aren’t we? We’ve already proved we could live together in Procellarum for three years, without driving each other crazy. Three months—with a whole planet to stretch our legs on—shouldn’t be beyond us.”

Later that week, to Ikat’s amazement, their psychological assessments proved Qing’s point; their basic personality profiles really hadn’t changed since the Procellarum days. Careers, marriages, children, had left their marks, but if anything they were both more resilient.

They stayed in Mumbai, rehearsing in the robot bodies using telepresence links, and studying the data coming back from the Orchid Flower.

When confirmation arrived that the Flower really had built the robots Khamoush Holdings had requested, Ikat sent messages directly to her children and grandchildren, and then left it to them to pass the news further down the generations. Her parents were dead, and her children were tetchy centenarians; she loved them, but she did not feel like gathering them around her for a tearful bon voyage. The chances were they’d all still be here when she returned.

She and Qing spent a morning doing media, answering a minute but representative fraction of the questions submitted by interested news subscribers. Then Ikat’s body was frozen, and her brain was removed, microtomed, and scanned. At her request, her software was not formally woken on Earth prior to her departure; routine tests confirmed its functionality in a series of dreamlike scenarios which left no permanent memories.

Then the algorithm that described her was optimised, compressed, encoded into a series of laser pulses, and beamed across twenty light years, straight on to the petals of the Orchid Flower.

Ikat woke standing on a brown, pebbled plain beneath a pale, salmon-coloured sky. Prosperity A had just risen; its companion, ten billion kilometres away, was visible but no competition, scarcely brighter than Venus from Earth.

Qing was beside her, and behind him was the Flower: the communications link and factory that the Orchid Seed had built. Products of the factory included hundreds of small rovers, which had dispersed to explore the planet’s surface, and dozens of solar-powered gliders, which provided aerial views and aided with communications.

Qing said, “Punch me, make it real.”

Ikat obliged with a gentle thump on his forearm. Their telepresence rehearsals had included virtual backdrops just like the Flower’s actual surroundings, but they had not had full tactile feedback. The action punctured Ikat’s own dreamy sense of déjà vu; they really had stepped out of the simulation into the thing itself.

They had the Flower brief them about its latest discoveries; they had been twenty years behind when they’d left Earth, and insentient beams of light for twenty more. The Flower had pieced together more details of Duty’s geological history; with plate tectonics but no liquid water, the planet’s surface was older than Earth’s but not as ancient as the moon’s.

Ikat felt a twinge of superfluousness; if the telescope images hadn’t quite made the Orchid Flower redundant, there was precious little left for her and Qing. They were not here to play geologists, though; they were here to be here. Any science they did would be a kind of recreation, like an informed tourist’s appreciation of some well-studied natural wonder back on Earth.

Qing started laughing. “Twenty fucking light years! Do you know how long that would take to walk? They should have tried harder to make us afraid.” Ikat reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. She felt a little existential vertigo herself, but she did not believe they faced any great risk. The forty lost years were a fait accompli, but she was reconciled to that.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” she said. “If something goes wrong, they’ll just wake your body back on Earth, with no changes at all.”

Qing nodded slowly. “But you had your brain diced, didn’t you?”

“You know me, I’m a cheapskate.” Non-destructive scanning was more expensive, and Khamoush weren’t paying for everything. “But they can still load the backup file into a prosthesis.”

“Assuming it’s not eaten by an anarchist worm.”

“I arranged to have a physical copy put into a vault.”

“Ah, but what about the nihilist nanoware?”

“Then you and I will be the only survivors.”

Their bodies had no need for shelter from the elements, but the Flower had built them a simple hut for sanity’s sake. As they inspected the spartan rooms together, Qing seemed to grow calm; as he’d said back on Earth, anything had to be easier than the conditions they’d faced on the moon. Food would have been too complex an indulgence, and Ikat had declined the software to grant her convincing hallucinations of five-course banquets every night.

Once they’d familiarised themselves with everything in the base camp, and done a few scripted Armstrong moments for the cameras to satisfy the promotional deal, they spent the morning hiking across the rock-strewn plain. There was a line of purplish mountains in the distance, almost lost in haze, but Ikat declined to ask the Flower for detailed aerial imagery. They could explore for themselves, find things for themselves. The longing to be some kind of irreplaceable pioneer, to be the first pair of eyes and hands, the first scrutinising intelligence, was impossible to extinguish completely, but they could find a way to satisfy it without self-delusion or charade.

Her fusion-powered body needed no rest, but at noon she stopped walking and sat cross-legged on the ground.

Qing joined her. She looked around at the barren rocks, the delicate sky, the far horizon. “Twenty light years?” she said. “I’m glad I came.”

Their days were full of small challenges, and small discoveries. To cross a mountain range required skill and judgement as well as stamina; to understand the origins of each wind-blasted outcrop took careful observation and a strong visual imagination, as well as a grasp of the basic geological principles.

Still, even as they clambered down one treacherous, powdery cliff-face, Ikat wondered soberly if they’d reached the high-tide mark of human exploration. The Orchid Seed’s modest speed and reach had never been exceeded; the giant telescopes had found no hints of life out to a hundred light years, offering little motivation to launch a new probe. The shift to software was becoming cheaper every year, and if that made travel to the stars easier, there were a thousand more alluring destinations closer to home. When you could pack a lifetime of exotic experiences into a realtime hour, capped off with happiness by fiat, who would give up decades of contemporaneity to walk on a distant world? There were even VR games, based on telescope imagery, where people fought unlikely wars with implausible alien empires on the very ground she was treading.

“What are you planning to do when you get home?” she asked Qing that night. They had brought nothing with them from the base camp, so they simply slept on the ground beneath the stars.

“Back to work, I suppose.” He ran his own successful engineering consultancy; so successful that it didn’t really need him. “What else is there? I’m not interested in crawling up a computer’s arse and pretending that I’ve gone to heaven. What about you?”

“I don’t know. I was retired, happily enough. Waiting for death, I suppose.” It hadn’t felt like that, though.

Qing said, “These aren’t the highest mountains on the planet, you know. The ones we’ve just crossed.”

“I know that.”

“There are some that reach into a pretty good vacuum.”

Duty’s atmosphere was thin even on the ground; Ikat had no reason to doubt this assertion. “What’s your point?” she asked.

He turned to her, and gave her his strangest robot smile. “From a mountain like that, a coil gun could land a package of nanomachines on Patience.”

Patience was a third the mass of Duty, and had no atmosphere to speak of. “To what end?”

Qing said, “High vacuum, relativistic launch speeds. What we started doesn’t have to stop here.”

She searched his face, unsure if he was serious. “Do you think the Flower would give us what we needed? Who knows how Khamoush have programmed it?”

“I tested the nanoware, back on Procellarum. I know how to make it give us whatever we ask.”

Ikat thought it over. “Do we know how to describe everything we’ll need? To identify a new target? Plan a whole new mission?” The Orchard Seed had taken thousands of people decades to prepare.

Qing said, “We’ll need telescopes, computing resources. We can bootstrap our way up, step by step. Let’s see how far we get in three months. And if we solve all the other problems, maybe we can go one step further: build a seed that will self-replicate when it reaches its destination, launching a couple of new seeds of its own.”

Ikat rose to her feet angrily. “Not if you want my help! We have no right to spew mindless replicators in all directions. If someone from Earth wants to follow the seed we launch, and if they make their own decision when they get there to reach out further, then that’s one thing, but I’m not starting any kind of self-sustaining chain reaction that colonises the galaxy while everyone sits at home playing VR games.”

Qing stood up, and made a calming gesture. “All right, all right! I was just thinking out loud. The truth is, we’ll be struggling to launch anything before it’s time to go home. But better to try, than spend three months taking in the scenery.”

Ikat remained wary for a moment, then she laughed with relief. “Absolutely. Let the real geologists back on Earth fret about these rocks; I’ve had enough of them already for a lifetime.”

They didn’t wait for dawn; they headed back for the base camp immediately.

As they approached the mountains, Qing said, “I thought it would give me some great sense of accomplishment, to come here and see with my own eyes that this thing I helped to start was finally complete. But if I could wish my descendants one blessing now, it would be never to see the end, never to find completion.”

Ikat stopped walking, and mimed a toast. “To the coming generations. May they always start something they can’t finish.”

The Infinite Assassin

One thing never changes: when some mutant junkie on S starts shuffling reality, it’s always me they send into the whirlpool to put things right.

Why? They tell me I’m stable. Reliable. Dependable. After each debriefing, The Company’s psychologists (complete strangers, every time) shake their heads in astonishment at their printouts, and tell me that I’m exactly the same person as when ‘I’ went in.

The number of parallel worlds is uncountably infinite—infinite like the real numbers, not merely like the integers—making it difficult to quantify these things without elaborate mathematical definitions, but roughly speaking, it seems that I’m unusually invariant: more alike from world to world than most people are. How alike? In how many worlds? Enough to be useful. Enough to do the job.

How The Company knew this, how they found me, I’ve never been told. I was recruited at the age of nineteen. Bribed. Trained. Brainwashed, I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if my stability has anything to do with me; maybe the real constant is the way I’ve been prepared. Maybe an infinite number of different people, put through the same process, would all emerge the same. Have all emerged the same. I don’t know.

* * * *

Detectors scattered across the planet have sensed the faint beginnings of the whirlpool, and pinned down the centre to within a few kilometres, but that’s the most accurate fix I can expect by this means. Each version of The Company shares its technology freely with the others, to ensure a uniformly optimal response, but even in the best of all possible worlds, the detectors are too large, and too delicate, to carry in closer for a more precise reading.

A helicopter deposits me on wasteland at the southern edge of the Leightown ghetto. I’ve never been here before, but the boarded-up shopfronts and grey tower blocks ahead are utterly familiar. Every large city in the world (in every world I know) has a place like this, created by a policy that’s usually referred to as differential enforcement. Using or possessing S is strictly illegal, and the penalty in most countries is (mostly) summary execution, but the powers that be would rather have the users concentrated in designated areas than risk having them scattered amongst the community at large. So, if you’re caught with S in a nice clean suburb, they’ll blow a hole in your skull on the spot, but here, there’s no chance of that. Here, there are no cops at all.

I head north. It’s just after four a.m., but savagely hot, and once I move out of the buffer zone, the streets are crowded. People are coming and going from nightclubs, liquor stores, pawn shops, gambling houses, brothels. Power for street lighting has been cut off from this part of the city, but someone civic-minded has replaced the normal bulbs with self-contained tritium/phosphor globes, spilling a cool, pale light like radioactive milk. There’s a popular misconception that most S users do nothing but dream, twenty-four hours a day, but that’s ludicrous; not only do they need to eat, drink and earn money like everyone else, but few would waste the drug on the time when their alter egos are themselves asleep.

Intelligence says there’s some kind of whirlpool cult in Leightown, who may try to interfere with my work. I’ve been warned of such groups before, but it’s never come to anything; the slightest shift in reality is usually all it takes to make such an aberration vanish. The Company, the ghettos, are the stable responses to S; everything else seems to be highly conditional. Still, I shouldn’t be complacent. Even if these cults can have no significant impact on the mission as a whole, no doubt they have killed some versions of me in the past, and I don’t want it to be my turn, this time. I know that an infinite number of versions of me would survive—some whose only difference from me would be that they had survived—so perhaps I ought to be entirely untroubled by the thought of death.

But I’m not.

Wardrobe have dressed me with scrupulous care, in a Fat Single Mothers Must Die World Tour souvenir reflection hologram T-shirt, the right style of jeans, the right model running shoes. Paradoxically, S users tend to be slavish adherents to ‘local’ fashion, as opposed to that of their dreams; perhaps it’s a matter of wanting to partition their sleeping and waking lives. For now, I’m in perfect camouflage, but I don’t expect that to last; as the whirlpool picks up speed, sweeping different parts of the ghetto into different histories, changes in style will be one of the most sensitive markers. If my clothes don’t look out of place before too long, I’ll know I’m headed in the wrong direction.

A tall, bald man with a shrunken human thumb dangling from one ear lobe collides with me as he runs out of a bar. As we separate, he turns on me, screaming taunts and obscenities. I respond cautiously; he may have friends in the crowd, and I don’t have time to waste getting into that kind of trouble. I don’t escalate things by replying, but I take care to appear confident, without seeming arrogant or disdainful. This balancing act pays off. Insulting me with impunity for thirty seconds apparently satisfies his pride, and he walks away smirking.

As I move on, though, I can’t help wondering how many versions of me didn’t get out of it so easily.

I pick up speed to compensate for the delay.

Someone catches up with me, and starts walking beside me. ‘Hey, I liked the way you handled that. Subtle. Manipulative. Pragmatic. Full marks.’ A woman in her late twenties, with short, metallic-blue hair.

‘Fuck off. I’m not interested.’

‘In what?’

‘In anything.’

She shakes her head. ‘Not true. You’re new around here, and you’re looking for something. Or someone. Maybe I can help.’

‘I said, fuck off.’

She shrugs and falls behind, but calls after me, ‘Every hunter needs a guide. Think about it.’

* * * *

A few blocks later, I turn into an unlit side street. Deserted, silent; stinking of half-burnt garbage, cheap insecticide, and piss. And I swear I can feel it: in the dark, ruined buildings all around me, people are dreaming on S.

S is not like any other drug. S dreams are neither surreal nor euphoric. Nor are they like simulator trips: empty fantasies, absurd fairy tales of limitless prosperity and indescribable bliss. They’re dreams of lives that, literally, might have been lived by the dreamers, every bit as solid and plausible as their waking lives.

With one exception: if the dream life turns sour, the dreamer can abandon it at will, and choose another (without any need to dream of taking S ... although that’s been known to happen). He or she can piece together a second life, in which no mistakes are irrevocable, no decisions absolute. A life without failures, without dead ends. All possibilities remain forever accessible.

S grants dreamers the power to live vicariously in any parallel world in which they have an alter ego—someone with whom they share enough brain physiology to maintain the parasitic resonance of the link. Studies suggest that a perfect genetic match isn’t necessary for this—but nor is it sufficient; early childhood development also seems to affect the neural structures involved.

For most users, the drug does no more than this. For one in a hundred thousand, though, dreams are only the beginning. During their third or fourth year on S, they start to move physically from world to world, as they strive to take the place of their chosen alter egos.

The trouble is, there’s never anything so simple as an infinity of direct exchanges, between all the versions of the mutant user who’ve gained this power, and all the versions they wish to become. Such transitions are energetically unfavourable; in practice, each dreamer must move gradually, continuously, passing through all the intervening points. But those ‘points’ are occupied by other versions of themselves; it’s like motion in a crowd—or a fluid. The dreamers must flow.

At first, those alter egos who’ve developed the skill are distributed too sparsely to have any effect at all. Later, it seems there’s a kind of paralysis through symmetry; all potential flows are equally possible, including each one’s exact opposite. Everything just cancels out.

The first few times the symmetry is broken, there’s usually nothing but a brief shudder, a momentary slippage, an almost imperceptible world-quake. The detectors record these events, but are still too insensitive to localise them.

Eventually, some kind of critical threshold is crossed. Complex, sustained flows develop: vast, tangled currents with the kind of pathological topologies that only an infinite-dimensional space can contain. Such flows are viscous; nearby points are dragged along. That’s what creates the whirlpool; the closer you are to the mutant dreamer, the faster you’re carried from world to world.

As more and more versions of the dreamer contribute to the flow, it picks up speed—and the faster it becomes, the further away its influence is felt.

The Company, of course, doesn’t give a shit if reality is scrambled in the ghettos. My job is to keep the effects from spreading beyond.

I follow the side street to the top of a hill. There’s another main road about four hundred metres ahead. I find a sheltered spot amongst the rubble of a half-demolished building, unfold a pair of binoculars, and spend five minutes watching the pedestrians below. Every ten or fifteen seconds, I notice a tiny mutation: an item of clothing changing; a person suddenly shifting position, or vanishing completely, or materialising from nowhere. The binoculars are smart; they count up the number of events which take place in their field of view, as well as computing the map coordinates of the point they’re aimed at.

I turn one hundred and eighty degrees, and look back on the crowd that I passed through on my way here. The rate is substantially lower, but the same kind of thing is visible. Bystanders, of course, notice nothing; as yet, the whirlpool’s gradients are so shallow that any two people within sight of each other on a crowded street would more or less shift universes together. Only at a distance can the changes be seen.

In fact, since I’m closer to the centre of the whirlpool than the people to the south of me, most of the changes I see in that direction are due to my own rate of shift. I’ve long ago left the world of my most recent employers behind—but I have no doubt that the vacancy has been, and will continue to be, filled.

I’m going to have to make a third observation to get a fix, some distance away from the north-south line joining the first two points. Over time, of course, the centre will drift, but not very rapidly; the flow runs between worlds where the centres are close together, so its position is the last thing to change.

I head down the hill, westwards.

* * * *

Amongst the crowds and lights again, waiting for a gap in the traffic, someone taps my elbow. I turn, to see the same blue-haired woman who accosted me before. I give her a stare of mild annoyance, but I keep my mouth shut; I don’t know whether or not this version of her has met a version of me, and I don’t want to contradict her expectations. By now, at least some of the locals must have noticed what’s going on—just listening to an outside radio station, stuttering randomly from song to song, should be enough to give it away—but it’s not in my interest to spread the news.

She says, ‘I can help you find her.’

‘Help me find who?’

‘I know exactly where she is. There’s no need to waste time on measurements and calc—’

‘Shut up. Come with me.’

She follows me, uncomplaining, into a nearby alley. Maybe I’m being set up for an ambush. By the whirlpool cult? But the alley is deserted. When I’m sure we’re alone, I push her against the wall and put a gun to her head. She doesn’t call out, or resist; she’s shaken, but I don’t think she’s surprised by this treatment. I scan her with a hand-held magnetic resonance imager; no weapons, no booby traps, no transmitters.

I say, ‘Why don’t you tell me what this is all about?’ I’d swear that nobody could have seen me on the hill, but maybe she saw another version of me. It’s not like me to screw up, but it does happen.

She closes her eyes for a moment, then says, almost calmly, ‘I want to save you time, that’s all. I know where the mutant is. I want to help you find her as quickly as possible.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? I have a business here, and I don’t want to see it disrupted. Do you know how hard it is to build up contacts again, after a whirlpool’s been through? What do you think—I’m covered by insurance?’

I don’t believe a word of this, but I see no reason not to play along; it’s probably the simplest way to deal with her, short of blowing her brains out. I put away the gun and take a map from my pocket. ‘Show me.’

She points out a building about two kilometres north-east of where we are. ‘Fifth floor. Apartment 522.’

‘How do you know?’

‘A friend of mine lives in the building. He noticed the effects just before midnight, and he got in touch with me.’ She laughs nervously. ‘Actually, I don’t know the guy all that well ... but I think the version who phoned me had something going on with another me.’

‘Why didn’t you just leave when you heard the news? Clear out to a safe distance?’

She shakes her head vehemently. ‘Leaving is the worst thing to do; I’d end up even more out of touch. The outside world doesn’t matter. Do you think I care if the government changes, or the pop stars have different names? This is my home. If Leightown shifts, I’m better off shifting with it. Or with part of it.’

‘So how did you find me?’

She shrugs. ‘I knew you’d be coming. Everybody knows that much. Of course, I didn’t know what you’d look like—but I know this place pretty well, and I kept my eyes open for strangers. And it seems I got lucky.’

Lucky. Exactly. Some of my alter egos will be having versions of this conversation, but others won’t be having any conversation at all. One more random delay.

I fold the map. ‘Thanks for the information.’

She nods. ‘Any time.’

As I’m walking away, she calls out, ‘Every time.’

* * * *

I quicken my step for a while; other versions of me should be doing the same, compensating for however much time they’ve wasted. I can’t expect to maintain perfect synch, but dispersion is insidious; if I didn’t at least try to minimise it, I’d end up travelling to the centre by every conceivable route, and arriving over a period of days.

And although I can usually make up lost time, I can never entirely cancel out the effects of variable delays. Spending different amounts of time at different distances from the centre means that all the versions of me aren’t shifted uniformly. There are theoretical models which show that under certain conditions, this could result in gaps; I could be squeezed into certain portions of the flow, and removed from others—a bit like halving all the numbers between 1 and 1, leaving a hole from 0.5 to 1 ... squashing one infinity into another which is cardinally identical, but half the geometric size. No versions of me would have been destroyed, and I wouldn’t even exist twice in the same world, but nevertheless, a gap would have been created.

As for heading straight for the building where my ‘informant’ claims the mutant is dreaming, I’m not tempted at all. Whether or not the information is genuine, I doubt very much that I’ve received the tip-off in any but an insignificant portion—technically, a set of measure zero—of the worlds caught up in the whirlpool. Any action taken only in such a sparse set of worlds would be totally ineffectual, in terms of disrupting the flow.

If I’m right, then of course it makes no difference what I do; if all the versions of me who received the tip-off simply marched out of the whirlpool, it would have no impact on the mission. A set of measure zero wouldn’t be missed. But my actions, as an individual, are always irrelevant in that sense; if I, and I alone, deserted, the loss would be infinitesimal. The catch is, I could never know that I was acting alone.

And the truth is, versions of me probably have deserted; however stable my personality, it’s hard to believe that there are no valid quantum permutations entailing such an action. Whatever the physically possible choices are, my alter egos have made—and will continue to make—every single one of them. My stability lies in the distribution, and the relative density, of all these branches—in the shape of a static, pre-ordained structure. Free will is a rationalisation; I can’t help making all the right decisions. And all the wrong ones.

But I ‘prefer’ (granting meaning to the word) not to think this way too often. The only sane approach is to think of myself as one free agent of many, and to ‘strive’ for coherence; to ignore short cuts, to stick to procedure, to ‘do everything I can’ to concentrate my presence.

As for worrying about those alter egos who desert, or fail, or die, there’s a simple solution: I disown them. It’s up to me to define my identity any way I like. I may be forced to accept my multiplicity, but the borders are mine to draw. ‘I’ am those who survive, and succeed. The rest are someone else.

I reach a suitable vantage point and take a third count. The view is starting to look like a half-hour video recording edited down to five minutes—except that the whole scene doesn’t change at once; apart from some highly correlated couples, different people vanish and appear independently, suffering their own individual jump cuts. They’re still all shifting universes more or less together, but what that means, in terms of where they happen to be physically located at any instant, is so complex that it might as well be random. A few people don’t vanish at all; one man loiters consistently on the same street corner—although his haircut changes, radically, at least five times.

When the measurement is over, the computer inside the binoculars flashes up coordinates for the centre’s estimated position. It’s about sixty metres from the building the blue-haired woman pointed out; well within the margin of error. So perhaps she was telling the truth—but that changes nothing. I must still ignore her.

As I start towards my target, I wonder: Maybe I was ambushed back in that alley, after all. Maybe I was given the mutant’s location as a deliberate attempt to distract me, to divide me. Maybe the woman tossed a coin to split the universe: heads for a tip-off, tails for none—or threw dice, and chose from a wider list of strategies.

It’s only a theory ... but it’s a comforting idea: if that’s the best the whirlpool cult can do to protect the object of their devotion, then I have nothing to fear from them at all.

* * * *

I avoid the major roads, but even on the side streets it’s soon clear that the word is out. People run past me, some hysterical, some grim; some empty-handed, some toting possessions; one man dashes from door to door, hurling bricks through windows, waking the occupants, shouting the news. Not everyone’s heading in the same direction; most are simply fleeing the ghetto, trying to escape the whirlpool, but others are no doubt frantically searching for their friends, their families, their lovers, in the hope of reaching them before they turn into strangers. I wish them well.

Except in the central disaster zone, a few hard-core dreamers will stay put. Shifting doesn’t matter to them; they can reach their dream lives from anywhere—or so they think. Some may be in for a shock; the whirlpool can pass through worlds where there is no supply of S—where the mutant user has an alter ego who has never even heard of the drug.

As I turn into a long, straight avenue, the naked-eye view begins to take on the jump-cut appearance that the binoculars produced, just fifteen minutes ago. People flicker, shift, vanish. Nobody stays in sight for long; few travel more than ten or twenty metres before disappearing. Many are flinching and stumbling as they run, balking at empty space as often as at real obstacles, all confidence in the permanence of the world around them, rightly, shattered. Some run blindly with their heads down and their arms outstretched. Most people are smart enough to travel on foot, but plenty of smashed and abandoned cars strobe in and out of existence on the roadway. I witness one car in motion, but only fleetingly.

I don’t see myself any where about; I never have yet. Random scatter should put me in the same world twice, in some worlds—but only in a set of measure zero. Throw two idealised darts at a dartboard, and the probability of twice hitting the same point—the same zero-dimensional point—is zero. Repeat the experiment in an uncountably infinite number of worlds, and it will happen—but only in a set of measure zero.

The changes are most frantic in the distance, and the blur of activity retreats to some extent as I move—due as it is, in part, to mere separation—but I’m also heading into steeper gradients, so I am, slowly, gaining on the havoc. I keep to a measured pace, looking out for both sudden human obstacles and shifts in the terrain.

The pedestrians thin out. The street itself still endures, but the buildings around me are beginning to be transformed into bizarre chimeras, with mismatched segments from variant designs, and then from utterly different structures, appearing side by side. It’s like Walking through some holographic architectural identikit machine on overdrive. Before long, most of these composites are collapsing, unbalanced by fatal disagreements on where loads should be borne. Falling rubble makes the footpath dangerous, so I weave my way between the car bodies in the middle of the road. There’s virtually no moving traffic now, but it’s slow work just navigating between all this ‘stationary’ scrap metal. Obstructions come and go; it’s usually quicker to wait for them to vanish than to backtrack and look for another way through. Sometimes I’m hemmed in on all sides, but never for long.

Finally, most of the buildings around me seem to have toppled, in most worlds, and I find a path near the edge of the road that’s relatively passable. Nearby, it looks like an earthquake has levelled the ghetto. Looking back, away from the whirlpool, there’s nothing but a grey fog of generic buildings; out there, structures are still moving as one—or near enough to remain standing—but I’m shifting so much faster than they are that the skyline has smeared into an amorphous multiple exposure of a billion different possibilities.

A human figure, sliced open obliquely from skull to groin, materialises in front of me, topples, then vanishes. My guts squirm, but I press on. I know that the very same thing must be happening to versions of me—but I declare it, I define it, to be the death of strangers. The gradient is so high now that different parts of the body can be dragged into different worlds, where the complementary pieces of anatomy have no good statistical reason to be correctly aligned. The rate at which this fatal dissociation occurs, though, is inexplicably lower than calculations predict; the human body somehow defends its integrity, and shifts as a whole far more often than it should. The physical basis for this anomaly has yet to be pinned down—but then, the physical basis for the human brain creating the delusion of a unique history, a sense of time, and a sense of identity, from the multifurcating branches and fans of superspace, has also proved to be elusive.

The sky grows light, a weird blue-grey that no single overcast sky ever possessed. The streets themselves are in a state of flux now; every second or third step is a revelation—bitumen, broken masonry, concrete, sand, all at slightly different levels—and briefly, a patch of withered grass. An inertial navigation implant in my skull guides me through the chaos. Clouds of dust and smoke come and go, and then—

A cluster of apartment blocks, with surface features flickering, but showing no signs of disintegrating. The rates of shift here are higher than ever, but there’s a counterbalancing effect: the worlds between which the flow runs are required to be more and more alike, the closer you get to the dreamer.

The group of buildings is roughly symmetrical, and it’s perfectly clear which one lies at the centre. None of me would fail to make the same judgement, so I won’t need to go through absurd mental contortions to avoid acting on the tip-off.

The front entrance to the building oscillates, mainly between three alternatives. I choose the leftmost door; a matter of procedure, a standard which The Company managed to propagate between itselves before I was even recruited. (No doubt contradictory instructions circulated for a while, but one scheme must have dominated, eventually, because I’ve never been briefed any differently.) I often wish I could leave (and/or follow) a trail of some kind, but any mark I made would be useless, swept downstream faster than those it was meant to guide. I have no choice but to trust in procedure to minimise my dispersion.

From the foyer, I can see four stairwells—all with stairs converted into piles of flickering rubble. I step into the leftmost, and glance up; the early-morning light floods in through a variety of possible windows. The spacing between the great concrete slabs of the floors is holding constant; the energy difference between such large structures in different positions lends them more stability than all the possible, specific shapes of flights of stairs. Cracks must be developing, though, and given time, there’s no doubt that even this building would succumb to its discrepancies—killing the dreamer, in world after world, and putting an end to the flow. But who knows how far the whirlpool might have spread by then?

The explosive devices I carry are small, but more than adequate. I set one down in the stairwell, speak the arming sequence, and run. I glance back across the foyer as I retreat, but at a distance, the details amongst the rubble are nothing but a blur. The bomb I’ve planted has been swept into another world, but it’s a matter of faith—and experience—that there’s an infinite line of others to take its place.

I collide with a wall where there used to be a door, step back, try again, pass through. Sprinting across the road, an abandoned car materialises in front of me; I skirt around it, drop behind it, cover my head.

Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two?

Not a sound. I look up. The car has vanished. The building still stands—and still flickers.

I climb to my feet, dazed. Some bombs may have—must have—failed ... but enough should have exploded to disrupt the flow.

So what’s happened? Perhaps the dreamer has survived in some small, but contiguous, part of the flow, and it’s closed off into a loop—which it’s my bad luck to be a part of. Survived how? The worlds in which the bomb exploded should have been spread randomly, uniformly, everywhere dense enough to do the job ... but perhaps some freak clustering effect has given rise to a gap.

Or maybe I’ve ended up squeezed out of part of the flow. The theoretical conditions for that have always struck me as far too bizarre to be fulfilled in real life ... but what if it has happened? A gap in my presence, downstream from me, would have left a set of worlds with no bomb planted at all—which then flowed along and caught up with me, once I moved away from the building and my shift rate dropped.

I ‘return’ to the stairwell. There’s no unexploded bomb, no sign that any version of me has been here. I plant the backup device, and run. This time, I find no shelter on the street, and I simply hit the ground.

Again, nothing.

I struggle to calm myself, to visualise the possibilities. If the gap without bombs hadn’t fully passed the gap without me, when the first bombs went off, then I’d still have been missing from a part of the surviving flow—allowing exactly the same thing to happen all over again.

I stare at the intact building, disbelieving. I am the ones who succeed. That’s all that defines me. But who, exactly, failed? If I was absent from part of the flow, there were no versions of me in those worlds to fail. Who takes the blame? Who do I disown? Those who successfully planted the bomb, but ‘should have’ done it in other worlds? Am I amongst them? I have no way of knowing.

So, what now? How big is the gap? How close am I to it? How many times can it defeat me?

I have to keep killing the dreamer, until I succeed.

I return to the stairwell. The floors are about three metres apart. To ascend, I use a small grappling hook on a short rope; the hook fires an explosive-driven spike into the concrete floor. Once the rope is uncoiled, its chances of ending up in separate pieces in different worlds is magnified; it’s essential to move quickly.

I search the first storey systematically, following procedure to the letter, as if I’d never heard of Room 522. A blur of alternative dividing walls, ghostly spartan furniture, transient heaps of sad possessions. When I’ve finished, I pause until the clock in my skull reaches the next multiple of ten minutes. It’s an imperfect strategy—some stragglers will fall more than ten minutes behind—but that would be true however long I waited.

The second storey is deserted, too. But a little more stable; there’s no doubt that I’m drawing closer to the heart of the whirlpool.

The third storey’s architecture is almost solid. The fourth, if not for the abandoned ephemera flickering in the corners of rooms, could pass for normal.

The fifth—

I kick the doors open, one by one, moving steadily down the corridor. 502. 504. 506. I thought I might be tempted to break ranks when I came this close, but instead I find it easier than ever to go through the motions, knowing that I’ll have no opportunity to regroup. 516. 518. 520.

At the far end of Room 522, there’s a young woman stretched out on a bed. Her hair is a diaphanous halo of possibilities, her clothing a translucent haze, but her body looks solid and permanent, the almost-fixed point about which all the night’s chaos has spun.

I step into the room, take aim at her skull, and fire. The bullet shifts worlds before it can reach her, but it will kill another version, downstream. I fire again and again, waiting for a bullet from a brother assassin to strike home before my eyes—or for the flow to stop, for the living dreamers to become too few, too sparse, to maintain it.

Neither happens.

‘You took your time.’

I swing around. The blue-haired woman stands outside the doorway. I reload the gun; she makes no move to stop me. My hands are shaking. I turn back to the dreamer and kill her, another two dozen times. The version before me remains untouched, the flow undiminished.

I reload again, and wave the gun at the blue-haired woman. ‘What the fuck have you done to me? Am I alone? Have you slaughtered all the others?’ But that’s absurd—and if it were true, how could she see me? I’d be a momentary, imperceptible flicker to each separate version of her, nothing more; she wouldn’t even know I was there.

She shakes her head, and says mildly, ‘We’ve slaughtered no one. We’ve mapped you into Cantor dust, that’s all. Every one of you is still alive—but none of you can stop the whirlpool.’

Cantor dust. A fractal set, uncountably infinite, but with measure zero. There’s not one gap in my presence; there’s an infinite number, an endless series of ever-smaller holes, everywhere. But—

‘How? You set me up, you kept me talking, but how could you coordinate the delays? And calculate the effects? It would take ...’

‘Infinite computational power? An infinite number of people?’ She smiles faintly. ‘I am an infinite number of people. All sleepwalking on S. All dreaming each other. We can act together, in synch, as one—or we can act independently. Or something in between, as now: the versions of me who can see and hear you at any moment are sharing their sense data with the rest of me.’

I turn back to the dreamer. ‘Why defend her? She’ll never get what she wants. She’s tearing the city apart, and she’ll never even reach her destination.’

‘Not here, perhaps.’

‘Not here? She’s crossing all the worlds she lives in! Where else is there?’

The woman shakes her head. ‘What creates those worlds? Alternative possibilities for ordinary physical processes. But it doesn’t stop there; the possibility of motion between worlds has exactly the same effect. Superspace itself branches out into different versions, versions containing all possible cross-world flows. And there can be higher-level flows, between those versions of superspace, so the whole structure branches again. And so on.’

I close my eyes, drowning in vertigo. If this endless ascent into greater infinities is true—

‘Somewhere, the dreamer always triumphs? Whatever I do?’

‘Yes.’

‘And somewhere, I always win? Somewhere, you’ve failed to defeat me?’

‘Yes.’

Who am I? I’m the ones who succeed. Then who am I? I’m nothing at all. A set of measure zero.

I drop the gun and take three steps towards the dreamer. My clothes, already tattered, part worlds and fall away.

I take another step, and then halt, shocked by a sudden warmth. My hair, and outer layers of skin, have vanished; I’m covered with a fine sweat of blood. I notice, for the first time, the frozen smile on the dreamer’s face.

And I wonder: in how many infinite sets of worlds will I take one more step? And how many countless versions of me will turn around instead, and walk out of this room? Who exactly am I saving from shame, when I’ll live and die in every possible way?

Myself.

Into Darkness

The tone from the buzzer rises in both pitch and loudness the longer it’s on, so I leap out of bed knowing that it’s taken me less than a second to wake. I swear I was dreaming it first, though, dreaming the sound long before it was real. That’s happened a few times. Maybe it’s just a trick of the mind; maybe some dreams take shape only in the act of remembering them. Or maybe I dream it every night, every sleeping moment, just in case.

The light above the buzzer is red. Not a rehearsal.

I dress on my way across the room to thump the acknowledgement switch; as soon as the buzzer shuts off, I can hear the approaching siren. It takes me as long to lace my shoes as everything else combined. I grab my backpack from beside the bed and flick on the power. It starts flashing LEDs as it goes through its self-checking routines.

By the time I’m at the kerb, the patrol car is braking noisily, rear passenger door swinging open. I know the driver, Angelo, but I haven’t seen the other cop before. As we accelerate, a satellite view of The Intake in false-colour infrared—a pitch-black circle in a landscape of polychromatic blotches—appears on the car’s terminal. A moment later, this is replaced by a street map of the region—one of the newer far northern suburbs, all cul-de-sacs and crescents—with The Intake’s perimeter and centre marked, and a dashed line showing where The Core should be. The optimal routes are omitted; too much clutter and the mind balks. I stare at the map, trying to commit it to memory. It’s not that I won’t have access to it, inside, but it’s always faster to just know. When I close my eyes to see how I’m going, the pattern in my head looks like nothing so much as a puzzle-book maze.

We hit the freeway, and Angelo lets loose. He’s a good driver, but Isometimes wonder if this is the riskiest part of the whole business. The cop I don’t know doesn’t think so; he turns to me and says, ‘I gotta tell you one thing; I respect what you do, but you must be fucking crazy. I wouldn’t go inside that thing for a million dollars.’ Angelo grins—I catch it in the rear-view mirror—and says, ‘Hey, how much is the Nobel prize, anyway? More than a million?’

I snort. ‘I doubt it. And I don’t think they give the Nobel prize for the eight-hundred-metre steeplechase.’ The media seem to have decided to portray me as some kind of expert; I don’t know why—unless it’s because I once used the phrase ‘radially anisotropic’ in an interview. It’s true that I carried one of the first scientific ‘payloads’, but any other Runner could have done that, and these days it’s routine. The fact is, by international agreement, no one with even a microscopic chance of contributing to the theory of The Intake is allowed to risk their life by going inside. If I’m atypical in any way, it’s through a lack of relevant qualifications; most of the other volunteers have a background in the conventional rescue services.

I switch my watch into chronograph mode, and synch it to the count that the terminal’s now showing, then do the same to my backpack’s timer. Six minutes and twelve seconds. The Intake’s manifestations obey exactly the same statistics as a radioactive nucleus with a half-life of eighteen minutes; seventy-nine per cent last six minutes or more—but multiply anything by 0.962 every minute, and you wouldn’t believe how fast it can fall. I’ve memorised the probabilities right out to an hour (ten per cent), which may or may not have been a wise thing to do. Counter to intuition, The Intake does not become more dangerous as time passes, any more than a single radioactive nucleus becomes ‘more unstable’. At any given moment—assuming that it hasn’t yet vanished—it’s just as likely as ever to stick around for another eighteen minutes. A mere ten per cent of manifestations last for an hour or more—but of that ten per cent, half will still be there eighteen minutes later. The danger has not increased.

For a Runner, inside, to ask what the odds are now, he or she must be alive to pose the question, and so the probability curve must start afresh from that moment. History can’t harm you; the ‘chance’ of having survived the last x minutes is one hundred per cent, once you’ve done it. As the unknowable future becomes the unchangeable past, risk must collapse into certainty, one way or another.

Whether or not any of us really think this way is another question. You can’t help having a gut feeling that time is running out, that the odds are being whittled away. Everyone keeps track of the time since The Intake materialised, however theoretically irrelevant that is. The truth is, these abstractions make no difference in the end. You do what you can, as fast as you can, regardless.

It’s two in the morning, the freeway is empty, but it still takes me by surprise when we screech on to the exit ramp so soon. My stomach is painfully tight. I wish I felt ready, but I never do. After ten real calls, after nearly two hundred rehearsals, I never do. I always wish I had more time to compose myself, although I have no idea what state of mind I’d aim for, let alone how I’d achieve it. Some lunatic part of me is always hoping for a delay. If what I’m really hoping is that The Intake will have vanished before I can reach it, I shouldn’t be here at all.

* * * *

The coordinators tell us, over and over: ‘You can back out any time you want to. Nobody would think any less of you.’ It’s true, of course (up to the point where backing out becomes physically impossible), but it’s a freedom I could do without. Retiring would be one thing, but once I’ve accepted a call I don’t want to have to waste my energy on second thoughts, I don’t want to have to endlessly reaffirm my choice. I’ve psyched myself into half believing that I couldn’t live with myself, however understanding other people might be, and that helps a little. The only trouble is, this lie might be self-fulfilling, and I really don’t want to become that kind of person.

I close my eyes, and the map appears before me. I’m a mess, there’s no denying it, but I can still do the job, I can still get results. That’s what counts.

I can tell when we’re getting close, without even searching the skyline; there are lights on in all of the houses, and families standing in their front yards. Many people wave and cheer as we pass, a sight that always depresses me. When a group of teenagers, standing on a street corner drinking beer, scream abuse and gesture obscenely, I can’t help feeling perversely encouraged.

‘Dickheads,’ mutters the cop I don’t know. I keep my mouth shut.

We take a corner, and I spot a trio of helicopters, high on my right, ascending with a huge projection screen in tow. Suddenly, a corner of the screen is obscured, and my eye extends the curve of the eclipsing object from this one tiny arc to giddy completion.

From the outside, by day, The Intake makes an impressive sight: a giant black dome, completely non-reflective, blotting out a great bite of the sky. It’s impossible not to believe that you’re confronting a massive, solid object. By night, though, it’s different. The shape is still unmistakable, cut in a velvet black that makes the darkest night seem grey, but there’s no illusion of solidity; just an awareness of a different kind of void.

The Intake has been appearing for almost ten years now. It’s always a perfect sphere, a little more than a kilometre in radius, and usually centred close to ground level. On rare occasions, it’s been known to appear out at sea, and slightly more often, on uninhabited land, but the vast majority of its incarnations take place in populated regions.

The currently favoured hypothesis is that a future civilisation tried to construct a wormhole that would let them sample the distant past, bringing specimens of ancient life into their own time to be studied. They screwed up. Both ends of the wormhole came unstuck. The thing has shrunk and deformed, from—presumably—some kind of grand temporal highway, bridging geological epochs, to a gateway that now spans less time than it would take to cross an atomic nucleus at the speed of light. One end—The Intake—is a kilometre in radius; the other is about a fifth as big, spatially concentric with the first, but displaced an almost immeasurably small time into the future. We call the inner sphere—the wormhole’s destination, which seems to be inside it, but isn’t—The Core.

Why this shrivelled-up piece of failed temporal engineering has ended up in the present era is anyone’s guess; maybe we just happened to be halfway between the original endpoints, and the thing collapsed symmetrically. Pure bad luck. The trouble is, it hasn’t quite come to rest. It materialises somewhere on the planet, remains fixed for several minutes, then loses its grip and vanishes, only to appear at a new location a fraction of a second later. Ten years of analysing the data has yielded no method for predicting successive locations, but there must be some remnant of a navigation system in action; why else would the wormhole cling to the Earth’s surface (with a marked preference for inhabited, dry land) instead of wandering off on a random course into interplanetary space? It’s as if some faithful, demented computer keeps valiantly trying to anchor The Intake to a region which might be of interest to its scholarly masters; no Palaeozoic life can be found, but twenty-first-century cities will do, since there’s nothing much else around. And every time it fails to make a permanent connection and slips off into hyperspace, with infinite dedication, and unbounded stupidity, it tries again.

Being of interest is bad news. Inside the wormhole, time is mixed with one spatial dimension, and—whether by design or physical necessity—any movement which equates to travelling from the future into the past is forbidden. Translated into the wormhole’s present geometry, this means that when The Intake materialises around you, motion away from the centre is impossible. You have an unknown time—maybe eighteen minutes, maybe more, maybe less—to navigate your way to the safety of The Core, under these bizarre conditions. What’s more, light is subject to the same effect; it only propagates inwards. Everything closer to the centre than you lies in the invisible future. You’re running into darkness.

I have heard people scoff at the notion that any of this could be difficult. I’m not quite enough of a sadist to hope that they learn the truth, first-hand.

Actually, outwards motion isn’t quite literally impossible. If it were, everyone caught in The Intake would die at once. The heart has to circulate blood, the lungs have to inhale and exhale, nerve impulses have to travel in all directions. Every single living cell relies on shuffling chemicals back and forth, and I can’t even guess what the effect would be on the molecular level, if electron clouds could fluctuate in one direction but not the reverse.

There is some leeway. Because the wormhole’s entire eight hundred metres spans such a minute time interval, the distance scale of the human body corresponds to an even shorter period—short enough for quantum effects to come into play. Quantum uncertainty in the space-time metric permits small, localised violations of the classical law’s absolute restriction.

So, instead of everyone dying on the spot, blood pressure goes up, the heart is stressed, breathing becomes laborious, and the brain may function erratically. Enzymes, hormones, and other biological molecules are all slightly deformed, causing them to bind less efficiently to their targets, interfering to some degree with every biochemical process; haemoglobin, for example, loses its grip on oxygen more easily. Water diffuses out of the body—because random thermal motion is suddenly not so random—leading to gradual dehydration.

People already in very poor health can die from these effects. Others are just made nauseous, weak and confused—on top of the inevitable shock and panic. They make bad decisions. They get trapped.

One way or another, a few hundred lives are lost, every time The Intake materialises. Intake Runners may save ten or twenty people, which I’ll admit is not much of a success rate, but until some genius works out how to rid us of the wormhole for good, it’s better than nothing.

The screen is in place high above us, when we reach the ‘South Operations Centre’—a couple of vans, stuffed with electronics, parked on someone’s front lawn. The now familiar section of street map appears, the image rock steady and in perfect focus, in spite of the fact that it’s being projected from a fourth helicopter, and all four are jittering in the powerful inwards wind. People inside can see out, of course; this map—and the others, at the other compass points—will save dozens of lives. In theory, once outdoors, it should be simple enough to head straight for The Core; after all, there’s no easier direction to find, no easier path to follow. The trouble is, a straight line inwards is likely to lead you into obstacles, and when you can’t retrace your steps, the most mundane of these can kill you.

So, the map is covered with arrows, marking the optimal routes to The Core, given the constraint of staying safely on the roads. Two more helicopters, hovering above The Intake, are doing one better: with high-velocity paint guns under computer control, and laser-ring inertial guidance systems constantly telling the shuddering computers their precise location and orientation, they’re drawing the same arrows in fluorescent/reflective paint on the invisible streets below. You can’t see the arrows ahead of you, but you can look back at the ones you’ve passed. It helps.

There’s a small crowd of coordinators, and one or two Runners, around the vans. This scene always looks forlorn to me, like some small-time rained-out amateur athletics event, air traffic notwithstanding. Angelo calls out, ‘Break a leg!’ as I run from the car. I raise a hand and wave without turning. Loudspeakers are blasting the standard advice inwards, cycling through a dozen languages. In the corner of my eye I can see a TV crew arriving. I glance at my watch. Nine minutes. I can’t help thinking, seventy-one per cent, although The Intake is, clearly, one hundred per cent still there. Someone taps me on the shoulder. Elaine. She smiles and says, ‘John, see you in The Core,’ then sprints into the wall of darkness before I can reply.

Dolores is handing out assignments on RAM. She wrote most of the software used by Intake Runners around the world, but then, she makes her living writing computer games. She’s even written a game which models The Intake itself, but sales have been less than spectacular; the reviewers decided it was in bad taste. ‘What’s next? Let’s play Airline Disaster?’ Maybe they think flight simulators should be programmed for endless calm weather. Meanwhile, televangelists sell prayers to keep the wormhole away; you just slip that credit card into the home-shopping slot for instant protection.

‘What have you got for me?’

‘Three infants.’

‘Is that all?’

‘You come late, you get the crumbs.’

I plug the cartridge into my backpack. A sector of the street map appears on the display panel, marked with three bright red dots. I strap on the pack, and then adjust the display on its movable arm so I can catch it with a sideways glance, if I have to. Electronics can be made to function reliably inside the wormhole, but everything has to be specially designed.

It’s not ten minutes, not quite. I grab a cup of water from a table beside one of the vans. A solution of mixed carbohydrates, supposedly optimised for our metabolic needs, is also on offer, but the one time I tried it I was sorry; my gut isn’t interested in absorbing anything at this stage, optimised or not. There’s coffee too, but the very last thing I need right now is a stimulant. Gulping down the water, I hear my name, and I can’t help tuning in to the TV reporter’s spiel.

‘... John Nately, high-school science teacher and unlikely hero, embarking on this, his eleventh call as a volunteer Intake Runner. If he survives tonight, he’ll have set a new national record—but of course, the odds of making it through grow slimmer with every call, and by now ...’

The moron is spouting crap—the odds do not grow slimmer, a veteran faces no extra risk—but this isn’t the time to set him straight. I swing my arms for a few seconds in a half-hearted warm-up, but there’s not much point; every muscle in my body is tense, and will be for the next eight hundred metres, whatever I do. I try to blank my mind and just concentrate on the run-up—the faster you hit The Intake, the less of a shock it is—and before I can ask myself, for the first time tonight, what the fuck I’m really doing here, I’ve left the isotropic universe behind, and the question is academic.

The darkness doesn’t swallow you. Perhaps that’s the strangest part of all. You’ve seen it swallow other Runners; why doesn’t it swallow you? Instead, it recedes from your every step. The borderline isn’t absolute; quantum fuzziness produces a gradual fade-out, stretching visibility about as far as each extended foot. By day, this is completely surreal, and people have been known to suffer fits and psychotic episodes at the sight of the void’s apparent retreat. By night, it seems merely implausible, like chasing an intelligent fog.

At the start, it’s almost too easy; memories of pain and fatigue seem ludicrous. Thanks to frequent rehearsals in a compression harness, the pattern of resistance as I breathe is almost familiar. Runners once took drugs to lower their blood pressure, but with sufficient training, the body’s own vasoregulatory system can be made flexible enough to cope with the stress, unaided. The odd tugging sensation on each leg as I bring it forward would probably drive me mad, if I didn’t (crudely) understand the reason for it: inwards motion is resisted, when pulling, rather than pushing, is involved, because information travels outwards. If I trailed a ten-metre rope behind me, I wouldn’t be able to take a single step; pulling on the rope would pass information about my motion from where I am to a point further out. That’s forbidden, and it’s only the quantum leeway that lets me drag each foot forwards at all.

The street curves gently to the right, gradually losing its radial orientation, but there’s no convenient turn-off yet. I stay in the middle of the road, straddling the double white line, as the border between past and future swings to the left. The road surface seems always to slope towards the darkness, but that’s just another wormhole effect; the bias in thermal molecular motion—cause of the inwards wind, and slow dehydration—produces a force, or pseudo-force, on solid objects, too, tilting the apparent vertical.

‘—me! Please!’

A man’s voice, desperate and bewildered—and almost indignant, as if he can’t help believing that I must have heard him all along, that I must have been feigning deafness out of malice or indifference. I turn, without slowing; I’ve learnt to do it in a way that makes me only slightly dizzy. Everything appears almost normal, looking outwards—apart from the fact that the streetlights are out, and so most illumination is from helicopter floodlights and the giant street map in the sky. The cry came from a bus shelter, all vandal-proof plastic and reinforced glass, at least five metres behind me, now; it might as well be on Mars. Wire mesh covers the glass; I can just make out the figure behind it, a faint silhouette.

‘Help me!’

Mercifully—for me—I’ve vanished into this man’s darkness; I don’t have to think of a gesture to make, an expression to put on my face, appropriate to the situation. I turn away, and pick up speed. I’m not inured to the death of strangers, but I am inured to my helplessness.

After ten years of The Intake, there are international standards for painted markings on the ground around every potential hazard in public open space. Like all the other measures, it helps, slightly. There are standards, too, for eventually eliminating the hazards—designing out the corners where people can be trapped—but that’s going to cost billions, and take decades, and won’t even touch the real problem: interiors. I’ve seen demonstration trap-free houses and office blocks, with doors, or curtained doorways, in every corner of every room, but the style hasn’t exactly caught on. My own house is far from ideal; after getting quotes for alterations, I decided that the cheapest solution was to keep a sledgehammer beside every wall.

I turn left, just in time to see a trail of glowing arrows hiss into place on the road behind me.

I’m almost at my first assignment. I tap a button on my backpack and peer sideways at the display, as it switches to a plan of the target house. As soon as The Intake’s position is known, Dolores’s software starts hunting through databases, assembling a list of locations where there’s a reasonable chance that we can do some good. Our information is never complete, and sometimes just plain wrong; census data is often out of date, building plans can be inaccurate, mis-filed, or simply missing—but it beats walking blind into houses chosen at random.

I slow almost to a walk, two houses before the target, to give myself time to grow used to the effects. Running inwards lessens the outwards components—relative to the wormhole—of the body’s cyclic motions; slowing down always feels like precisely the wrong thing to do. I often dream of running through a narrow canyon, no wider than my shoulders, whose walls will stay apart only so long as I move fast enough; that’s what my body thinks of slowing down.

The street here lies about thirty degrees off radial. I cross the front lawn of the neighbouring house, then step over a knee-high brick wall. At this angle, there are few surprises; most of what’s hidden is so easy to extrapolate that it almost seems visible in the mind’s eye. A corner of the target house emerges from the darkness on my left; I get my bearings from it and head straight for a side window. Entry by the front door would cost me access to almost half of the house, including the bedroom which Dolores’s highly erratic Room Use Predictor nominates as the one most likely to be the child’s. People can file room-use information with us directly, but few bother.

I smash the glass with a crowbar, open the window, and clamber through. I leave a small electric lamp on the windowsill—carrying it with me would render it useless—and move slowly into the room. I’m already starting to feel dizzy and nauseous, but I force myself to concentrate. One step too many, and the rescue becomes ten times more difficult. Two steps, and it’s impossible.

It’s clear that I have the right room when a dresser is revealed, piled with plastic toys, talcum powder, baby shampoo, and other paraphernalia spilling on to the floor. Then a corner of the crib appears on my left, pointed at an unexpected angle; the thing was probably neatly parallel to the wall to start with, but slid unevenly under the inwards force. I sidle up to it, then inch forwards, until a lump beneath the blanket comes into view. I hate this moment, but the longer I wait, the harder it gets. I reach sideways and lift the child, bringing the blanket with it. I kick the crib aside, then walk forwards, slowly bending my arms, until I can slip the child into the harness on my chest. An adult is strong enough to drag a small baby a short distance outwards. It’s usually fatal.

The kid hasn’t stirred; he or she is unconscious, but breathing. I shudder briefly, a kind of shorthand emotional catharsis, then I start moving. I glance at the display to recheck the way out, and finally let myself notice the time. Thirteen minutes. Sixty-one per cent. More to the point, The Core is just two or three minutes away, downhill, nonstop. One successful assignment means ditching the rest. There’s no alternative; you can’t lug a child with you, in and out of buildings; you can’t even put it down somewhere and come back for it later.

As I step through the front door, the sense of relief leaves me giddy. Either that, or renewed cerebral blood flow. I pick up speed as I cross the lawn—and catch a glimpse of a woman, shouting, ‘Wait! Stop!’

I slow down; she catches up with me. I put a hand on her shoulder and propel her slightly ahead of me, then say, ‘Keep moving, as fast as you can. When you want to speak, fall behind me. I’ll do the same. OK?’

I move ahead of her. She says, ‘That’s my daughter you’ve got. Is she all right? Oh, please ... Is she alive?’

‘She’s fine. Stay calm. We just have to get her to The Core now. OK?’

‘I want to hold her. I want to take her.’

‘Wait until we’re safe.’

‘I want to take her there myself.’

Shit. I glance at her sideways. Her face is glistening with sweat and tears. One of her arms is bruised and blotchy, the usual symptom of trying to reach out to something unreachable.

‘I really think it would be better to wait.’

‘What right have you got? She’s my daughter! Give her to me!’ The woman is indignant, but remarkably lucid, considering what she’s been through. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like, to stand by that house, hoping insanely for some kind of miracle, while everyone in the neighbourhood fled past her, and the side effects made her sicker and sicker. However pointless, however idiotic her courage, I can’t help admiring it.

I’m lucky. My ex-wife, and our son and daughter, live halfway across town from me. I have no friends who live nearby. My emotional geography is very carefully arranged; I don’t give a shit about anyone who I could end up unable to save.

So what do I do—sprint away from her, leave her running after me, screaming? Maybe I should. If I gave her the child, though, I could check out one more house.

‘Do you know how to handle her? Never try to move her backwards, away from the darkness. Never.’

‘I know that. I’ve read all the articles. I know what you’re meant to do.’

‘ OK.’ I must be crazy. We slow down to a walk, and I pass the child to her, lowering it into her arms from beside her. I realise, almost too late, that we’re at the turn-off for the second house. As the woman vanishes into the darkness, I yell after her, ‘Run! Follow the arrows, and run!’

I check the time. Fifteen minutes already, with all that stuffing around. I’m still alive, though—so the odds now are, as always, fifty-fifty that the wormhole will last another eighteen minutes. Of course I could die at any second—but that was equally true when I first stepped inside. I’m no greater fool now than I was then. For what that’s worth.

The second house is empty, and it’s easy to see why. The computer’s guess for the nursery is in fact a study, and the parents’ bedroom is outward’s of the child’s. Windows are open, clearly showing the path they must have taken.

A strange mood overtakes me, as I leave the house behind. The inwards wind seems stronger than ever, the road turns straight into the darkness, and I feel an inexplicable tranquillity wash over me. I’m moving as fast as I can, but the edge of latent panic, of sudden death, is gone. My lungs, my muscles, are battling all the same restraints, but I feel curiously detached from them; aware of the pain and effort, yet somehow uninvolved.

The truth is, I know exactly why I’m here. I can never quite admit it, outside—it seems too whimsical, too bizarre. Of course I’m glad to save lives, and maybe that’s grown to be part of it. No doubt I also crave to be thought of as a hero. The real reason, though, is too strange to be judged either selfless or vain:

The wormhole makes tangible the most basic truths of existence. You cannot see the future. You cannot change the past. All of life consists of running into darkness. This is why I’m here.

My body grows, not numb, but separate, a puppet dancing and twitching on a treadmill. I snap out of this and check the map, not a moment too soon. I have to turn right, sharply, which puts an end to any risk of somnambulism. Looking up at the bisected world makes my head pound, so I stare at my feet, and try to recall if the pooling of blood in my left hemisphere ought to make me more rational, or less.

The third house is in a borderline situation. The parents’ bedroom is slightly outwards from the child’s, but the doorway gives access to only half the room. I enter through a window that the parents could not have used.

The child is dead. I see the blood before anything else. I feel, suddenly, very tired. A slit of the doorway is visible, and I know what must have happened. The mother or father edged their way in, and found they could just reach the child—could take hold of one hand, but no more. Pulling inwards is resisted, but people find that confusing; they don’t expect it, and when it happens, they fight it. When you want to snatch someone you love out of the jaws of danger, you pull with all your strength.

The door is an easy exit for me, but less so for anyone who came in that way—especially someone in the throes of grief. I stare into the darkness of the room’s inwards corner, and yell, ‘Crouch down, as low as you can,’ then mime doing so. I pluck the demolition gun from my backpack, and aim high. The recoil, in normal space, would send me sprawling; here it’s a mere thump.

I step forward, giving up my own chance to use the door. There’s no immediate sign that I’ve just blasted a metre-wide hole in the wall; virtually all of the dust and debris is on the inwards side. I finally reach a man kneeling in the corner, his hands on his head; for a brief moment I think he’s alive, that he took this position to shield himself from the blast. No pulse, no respiration. A dozen broken ribs, probably; I’m not inclined to check. Some people can last for an hour, pinned between walls of brick and an invisible, third wall that follows them ruthlessly into the corner, every time they slip, every time they give ground. Some people, though, do exactly the worst thing; they squeeze themselves into the inward-most part of their prison, obeying some instinct which, I’m sure, makes sense at the time.

Or maybe he wasn’t confused at all. Maybe he just wanted it to be over.

I hoist myself through the hole in the wall. I stagger through the kitchen. The fucking plan is wrong wrong wrong, a door I’m expecting doesn’t exist. I smash the kitchen window, then cut my hand on the way out.

I refuse to glance at the map. I don’t want to know the time. Now that I’m alone, with no purpose left but saving myself, everything is jinxed. I stare at the ground, at the fleeting magic golden arrows, trying not to count them.

One glimpse of a festering hamburger discarded on the road, and I find myself throwing up. Common sense tells me to turn and face backwards, but I’m not quite that stupid. The acid in my throat and nose brings tears to my eyes. As I shake them away, something impossible happens.

A brilliant blue light appears, high up in the darkness ahead, dazzling my dark-adapted eyes. I shield my face, then peer between my fingers. As I grow used to the glare, I start to make out details.

A cluster of long, thin, luminous cylinders is hanging in the sky, like some mad upside-down pipe organ built of glass, bathed in glowing plasma. The light it casts does nothing to reveal the houses and streets below. I must be hallucinating; I’ve seen shapes in the darkness before, although never anything so spectacular, so persistent. I run faster, in the hope of clearing my head. The apparition doesn’t vanish, or waver; it merely grows closer.

I halt, shaking uncontrollably. I stare into the impossible light. What if it’s not in my head? There’s only one possible explanation. Some component of the wormhole’s hidden machinery has revealed itself. The idiot navigator is showing me its worthless soul.

With one voice in my skull screaming, No! and another calmly asserting that I have no choice, that this chance might never come again, I draw the demolition gun, take aim, and fire. As if some puny weapon in the hands of an amoeba could scratch the shimmering artifact of a civilisation whose failures leave us cowering in awe.

The structure shatters and implodes in silence. The light contracts to a blinding pinprick, burning itself into my vision. Only when I turn my head am I certain that the real light is gone.

I start running again. Terrified, elated. I have no idea what I’ve done, but the wormhole is, so far, unchanged. The afterimage lingers in the darkness, with nothing to wipe it from my sight. Can hallucinations leave an afterimage? Did the navigator choose to expose itself, choose to let me destroy it?

I trip on something and stagger, but catch myself from falling. I turn and see a man crawling down the road, and I bring myself to a rapid halt, astonished by such a mundane sight after my transcendental encounter. The man’s legs have been amputated at the thighs; he’s dragging himself along with his arms alone. That would be hard enough in normal space, but here, the effort must almost be killing him.

There are special wheelchairs which can function in the wormhole (wheels bigger than a certain size buckle and deform if the chair stalls) and if we know we’ll need one, we bring one in, but they’re too heavy for every Runner to carry one just in case.

The man lifts his head and yells, ‘Keep going! Stupid fucker!’ without the least sign of doubt that he’s not just shouting at empty space. I stare at him and wonder why I don’t take the advice. He’s huge: big-boned and heavily muscled, with plenty of fat on top of that. I doubt that I could lift him—and I’m certain that if I could, I’d stagger along more slowly than he’s crawling.

Inspiration strikes. I’m in luck, too; a sideways glance reveals a house, with the front door invisible but clearly only a metre or two inwards of where I am now. I smash the hinges with a hammer and chisel, then manoeuvre the door out of the frame and back to the road. The man has already caught up with me. I bend down and tap him on the shoulder. ‘Want to try sledding?’

I step inwards in time to hear part of a string of obscenities, and to catch an unwelcome close-up of his bloody forearms. I throw the door down on to the road ahead of him. He keeps moving; I wait until he can hear me again.

‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes,’ he mutters.

It’s awkward, but it works. He sits on the door, leaning back on his arms. I run behind, bent over, my hands on his shoulders, pushing. Pushing is the one action the wormhole doesn’t fight, and the inwards force makes it downhill all the way. Sometimes the door slides so fast that I have to let go for a second or two, to keep from overbalancing.

I don’t need to look at the map. I know the map, I know precisely where we are; The Core is less than a hundred metres away. In my head I recite an incantation: The danger does not increase. The danger does not increase. And in my heart I know that the whole conceit of ‘probability’ is meaningless; the wormhole is reading my mind, waiting for the first sign of hope, and whether that comes fifty metres, or ten metres, or two metres from safety, that’s when it will take me.

Some part of me calmly judges the distance we cover, and counts: Ninety-three, ninety-two, ninety-one ... I mumble random numbers to myself, and when that fails, I reset the count arbitrarily: Eighty-one, eighty-seven, eighty-six, eighty-five, eighty-nine ...

A new universe, of light, stale air, noise-and people, countless people—explodes into being around me. I keep pushing the man on the door, until someone runs towards me and gently prises me away. Elaine. She guides me over to the front steps of a house, while another Runner with a first-aid kit approaches my bloodied passenger. Groups of people stand or sit around electric lanterns, filling the streets and front yards as far as I can see. I point them out to Elaine. ‘Look. Aren’t they beautiful?’

‘John? You OK? Get your breath. It’s over.’

‘Oh, fuck.’ I glance at my watch. ‘Twenty-one minutes. Forty-five per cent.’ I laugh, hysterically. ‘I was afraid of forty-five per cent?’

My heart is working twice as hard as it needs to. I pace for a while, until the dizziness begins to subside. Then I flop down on the steps beside Elaine.

A while later, I ask, ‘Any others still out there?’

‘No.’

‘Great.’ I’m starting to feel almost lucid. ‘So ... how did you go?’

She shrugs. ‘OK. A sweet little girl. She’s with her parents somewhere round here. No complications; favourable geometry.’ She shrugs again. Elaine is like that; favourable geometry or not, it’s never a big deal.

I recount my own experience, leaving out the apparition. I should talk to the medical people first, straighten out what kind of hallucination is or isn’t possible, before I start spreading the word that I took a pot shot at a glowing blue pipe organ from the future.

Anyway, if I did any good, I’ll know soon enough. If The Intake does start drifting away from the planet, that shouldn’t take long to make news; I have no idea at what rate the parting would take place, but surely the very next manifestation would be highly unlikely to be on the Earth’s surface. Deep in the crust, or halfway into space—

I shake my head. There’s no use building up my hopes, prematurely, when I’m still not sure that any of it was real.

Elaine says, ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

I check the time again. Twenty-nine minutes. Thirty-three per cent. I glance down the street impatiently. We can see out into the wormhole, of course, but the border is clearly delineated by the sudden drop in illumination, once outward-bound light can no longer penetrate. When The Intake moves on, though, it won’t be a matter of looking for subtle shifts in the lighting. While the wormhole is in place, its effects violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics (biased thermal motion, for a start, clearly decreases entropy). In parting, it more than makes amends; it radially homogenises the space it occupied, down to a length scale of about a micron. To the rock two hundred metres beneath us, and the atmosphere above—both already highly uniform—this will make little difference, but every house, every garden, every blade of grass—every structure visible to the naked eye—will vanish. Nothing will remain but radial streaks of fine dust, swirling out as the high-pressure air in The Core is finally free to escape.

Thirty-five minutes. Twenty-six per cent. I look around at the weary survivors; even for those who left no family or friends behind, the sense of relief and thankfulness at having reached safety has no doubt faded. They—we—just want the waiting to be over. Everything about the passage of time, everything about the wormhole’s uncertain duration, has reversed its significance. Yes, the thing might set us free at any moment—but so long as it hasn’t, we’re as likely as not to be stuck here for eighteen more minutes.

Forty minutes. Twenty-one per cent.

‘Ears are really going to pop tonight,’ I say. Or worse; on rare occasions, the pressure in The Core can grow so high that the subsequent decompression gives rise to the bends. That’s at least another hour away, though—and if it started to become a real possibility, they’d do an air drop of a drug that would cushion us from the effect.

Fifty minutes. Fifteen per cent.

Everyone is silent now; even the children have stopped crying.

‘What’s your record?’ I ask Elaine.

She rolls her eyes. ‘Fifty-six minutes. You were there. Four years ago.’

‘Yeah. I remember.’

‘Just relax. Be patient.’

‘Don’t you feel a little silly? I mean, if I’d known, I would have taken my time.’

One hour. Ten per cent. Elaine has dozed off, her head against my shoulder. I’m starting to feel drowsy myself, but a nagging thought keeps me awake.

I’ve always assumed that the wormhole moves because its efforts to stay put eventually fail—but what if the truth is precisely the opposite? What if it moves because its efforts to move have always, eventually, succeeded? What if the navigator breaks away to try again, as quickly as it can—but its crippled machinery can do no better than a fifty-fifty chance of success, for every eighteen minutes of striving?

Maybe I’ve put an end to that striving. Maybe I’ve brought The Intake, finally, to rest.

Eventually, the pressure itself can grow high enough to be fatal. It takes almost five hours, it’s a one-in-one-hundred-thousand case, but it has happened once already, there’s no reason at all it couldn’t happen again. That’s what bothers me most: I’d never know. Even if I saw people dying around me, the moment would never arrive when I knew, for certain, that this was the final price.

Elaine stirs without opening her eyes. ‘Still?’

‘Yeah.’ I put an arm around her; she doesn’t seem to mind.

‘Well. Don’t forget to wake me when it’s over.’

A Kidnapping

The office’s elaborate software usually fielded my calls, but this one came through unannounced. The seven-metre wallscreen opposite my desk abruptly ceased displaying the work I’d been viewing—Kreyszig’s dazzling abstract animation, Spectral Density—and the face of a nondescript young man appeared in its place.

I suspected at once that the face was a mask, a simulation. No single feature was implausible, or even unusual—limp brown hair, pale blue eyes, thin nose, square jaw—but the face as a whole was too symmetrical, too unblemished, too devoid of character to be real. In the background, a pattern of brightly coloured, faux-ceramic hexagonal tiles drifted across the wallpaper—desperately bland retro-geometricism, no doubt intended to make the face look natural in comparison. I made these judgements in an instant; stretching all the way to the gallery’s ceiling, four times my height, the image was open to merciless scrutiny.

The ‘young man’ said, ‘We have your wife/Transfer half a million dollars/Into this account/If you don’t want her to/Suffer.’ I couldn’t help hearing it that way; the unnatural rhythm of the speech, the crisp enunciation of each word, made the whole thing sound like a terminally hip performance artist reading bad poetry. This piece is entitled, ‘Ransom Demand’. As the mask spoke, a sixteen-digit account number flashed up across the bottom of the screen.

I said, ‘Go screw yourself. This isn’t funny.’

The mask vanished, and Loraine appeared. Her hair was dishevelled, her face was flushed, as if she’d just been in a struggle—but she wasn’t distraught, or hysterical; she was grimly in control. I stared at the screen; the room seemed to sway, and I felt sweat break out on my arms and chest, impossible rivulets forming in seconds.

She said, ‘David, listen: I’m all right, they haven’t hurt me, but—’

Then the call cut off.

For a moment, I just sat there, dazed, drenched with sweat, too giddy to trust myself to move a muscle. Then I said to the office, ‘Replay that call.’ I expected a denial—No calls have been put through all day—but I was wrong. The whole thing began again.

‘We have your wife ...’

‘Go screw yourself ...’

‘David, listen ...’

I told the office, ‘Call my home.’ I don’t know why I did that; I don’t know what I believed, what I was hoping for. It was more a reflex action than anything else—like flailing out to grab something solid when you’re falling, even if you know full well that it’s far beyond your reach.

I sat and listened to the ringing tone. I thought: I’ll cope with this, somehow. Loraine will be released, unharmed—it’s just a matter of paying the money. Everything will happen, step by step; everything will unwind, inexorably—even if each second along the way seems like an unbreachable chasm.

After seven chimes, I felt like I’d been sitting at the desk, sleepless, for days: numb, tenuous, less than real.

Then Loraine answered the phone. I could see the studio behind her, all the familiar charcoal sketches on the wall. I opened my mouth to speak, but I couldn’t make a sound.

Her expression changed from mild annoyance to alarm. She said, ‘David? What’s wrong? You look like you’re having a heart attack.’

For several seconds, I couldn’t answer her. On one level, I simply felt relieved—and already slightly foolish, for having been so easily taken in ... but at the same time, I found myself holding my breath, bracing myself for another reversal. If the office phone system had been corrupted, how could I be sure that this call had reached home? Why should I trust the sight of Loraine, safe in her studio—when the image of her in the kidnappers’ hands had been every bit as convincing? At any moment, the ‘woman’ on the screen would drop the charade, and begin reciting coolly: ‘We have your wife ...’

It didn’t happen. So I pulled myself together and told the real Loraine what I’d seen.

* * * *

In retrospect, of course, it all seemed embarrassingly obvious. The contrast between the intentionally unnatural mask, and the meticulously plausible image that followed, was designed to keep me from questioning the evidence of my own eyes. This is what a simulation looks like (smartarsed expert spots it at once) ... so this (a thousand times more realistic) must be authentic. A crude trick, but it had worked—not for long, but long enough to shake me up.

But if the technique was transparent, the motive remained obscure. Some lunatic’s idea of a joke? It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to, for no greater reward than the dubious thrill of making me sweat with fear for all of sixty seconds. As a genuine attempt at extortion, though ... how could it ever have worked? Were they hoping that I’d transfer the money immediately—before the shock wore off, before it even occurred to me that the image of Loraine, however lifelike, proved nothing? If so, surely they would have kept me on the phone, threatening imminent danger, building up the pressure—leaving me with no time for doubts, and no opportunity to verify anything.

It didn’t make sense either way.

I replayed the call for Loraine—but she didn’t seem to take it very seriously.

‘A crank caller with fancy technology is still just a crank caller. I remember my brother, when he was ten years old, phoning up random numbers on a dare, putting on a ludicrous high-pitched voice which was meant to sound like a woman ... and telling whoever answered that he was about to be gang-raped. Needless to say, I thought it was totally sick—and extremely immature ... I was eight—but his friends all sat around laughing their heads off. Thirty years later, this is the equivalent.’

‘How can you say that? Ten-year-old boys do not own twenty-thousand-dollar video synthesisers—’

‘No? Some might. But I’m sure there are plenty of forty-year-old men with the same sophisticated sense of humour.’

‘Yeah: forty-year-old psychopaths who know exactly what you look like, where we live, where I work ...’

We argued the point for almost twenty minutes, but we couldn’t agree upon what the call meant, or what we should do about it. Loraine was obviously growing impatient to get back to work, so, reluctantly, I let her go.

I was a wreck, though. I knew I’d get nothing done that afternoon, so I decided to close the gallery and head for home.

Before leaving, I phoned the police—against Loraine’s wishes, but as she’d said: ‘You got the call, not me. If you really want to waste your time and theirs, I can’t stop you.’

I was put through to a Detective Nicholson in the Communications Crime Division, and I showed him the recording. He was sympathetic, but he made it clear that there wasn’t much he could do. A criminal act had been committed—and a ransom demand was a serious matter, however rapidly the hoax had been debunked—but identifying the perpetrator would be virtually impossible. Even if the account number quoted actually belonged to the caller, it carried the prefix of an Orbital bank, who’d certainly refuse to disclose the name of the owner. I could arrange to have the phone company attempt to trace any future calls—but if the signal was routed through an Orbital nation, as it most likely would be, the trail would stop there. An international agreement to veto exchanges of money and data with the satellites had been drafted a decade ago, but remained unratified; apparently, few countries could afford to forgo the advantages of being plugged into the quasi-legal Orbital economy.

Nicholson asked me for a list of prospective enemies, but I couldn’t bring myself to name anyone. I’d had business disputes of various degrees of animosity over the years, mostly with disgruntled artists who’d taken their work elsewhere—but I couldn’t honestly imagine any of the people involved wasting their energy on such a venomous—yet ultimately petty—act of revenge.

He had one final question. ‘Has your wife ever been scanned?’

I laughed. ‘Hardly. She loathes computers. Even if the cost came down a thousandfold, she’d be the last person in the world to have it done.’

‘I see. Well, we appreciate your cooperation. If there are any further incidents, don’t hesitate to get in touch.’

As he hung up, I belatedly wished I’d asked him: ‘What if she had been scanned? Why would that be a factor? Have hackers started breaking into people’s scan files?’

That was a disturbing notion ... but even if it were true, it had no bearing on the hoax call. No such convenient, computerised description of Loraine existed, so however the hoaxers had reconstructed her appearance, they’d obtained their data by other means entirely.

* * * *

I drove home on manual override, breaking the speed limit—marginally—on five separate occasions, watching the fines add up on the dashboard display, until the car intoned, ‘One more violation and your licence is suspended.’

I went straight from the garage to the studio. Loraine was there, of course. I stood in the doorway, watching her silently, as she fussed over a sketch. I couldn’t make out the subject, but she was working in charcoal again. I often teased her about her anachronistic methods: ‘Why do you glorify the faults of traditional materials? Artists in the past had no choice but to make a virtue out of necessity—but why keep up the pretence? If charcoal on paper, or oil paint on canvas, really is so wonderful, then describe whatever it is you find so sublime about them to some virtual art software—and then generate your own virtual materials which are twice as good.’ All she’d ever say in reply was: ‘This is what I do, this is what I like, this is what I’m used to. There’s no harm in that, is there?’

I didn’t want to disturb her, but I didn’t want to walk away. If she noticed my presence, she gave no sign of it. I stood there and thought: I really do love you. And I really do admire you: the way you kept your head in the middle of—

I caught myself. The middle of what? Being thrust in front of a camera by her abductors? None of that had actually happened.

No ... but I knew Loraine—and I knew that she wouldn’t have fallen to pieces, she would have stayed in control. I could still admire her courage and her level-headedness—however bizarre the means by which I’d been reminded of those qualities.

I started to turn away, and she said, ‘Stay if you like. I don’t mind you watching.’

I took a few steps into the cluttered studio. After the stark, cavernous spaces of the gallery, it looked very homely. ‘What are you working on?’

She stood aside from the easel. The sketch was almost completed. It showed a woman, clenched fist raised to her lips, staring straight at the onlooker. Her expression was one of uneasy fascination, as if she was gazing at something hypnotic, compelling—and deeply troubling.

I frowned. ‘It’s you, isn’t it? A self-portrait?’ It had taken me a while to spot the resemblance, and even then, I wasn’t sure.

But Loraine said, ‘Yes, it’s me.’

‘Am I allowed to ask what you’re looking at?’

She shrugged. ‘Hard to say. The work in progress? Maybe it’s a portrait of the artist caught in the act of self-portraiture.’

‘You should try working with a camera and a flatscreen. You could program the stylisation software to build up a composite image of yourself—while you watched the result, and reacted to it.’

She shook her head, amused. ‘Why go to so much trouble? Why not just frame a mirror?’

‘A mirror? People want to see the artist revealed; they don’t want to see themselves.’

I wandered over and kissed her, but she barely responded. I said, tenderly, ‘I’m glad you’re safe.’

She laughed. ‘So am I. And don’t worry—I wouldn’t let anyone kidnap me, now. I know you’d have a stroke before you had a chance to pay the ransom.’

I put a finger to her lips. ‘It’s not funny. I was terrified—don’t you believe me? I didn’t know what they might do. I thought they were going to torture you.’

‘How? By voodoo?’ She backed out of my embrace, then walked over to the workbench. The wall above was covered with her sketches—’failures’ which she kept on show for ‘salutary reasons’.

She picked up a paperknife from the bench and made two diagonal slashes in one of the drawings—an old self-portrait, one I’d liked very much.

Then she turned to me and said, in mock amazement, ‘That didn’t hurt a bit.’

* * * *

I managed to keep myself from broaching the subject again until late in the evening. We were sitting in the living room, huddled together in front of the fireplace—ready for bed, but reluctant to move from this cosy spot (even though a few words to the house could have reproduced the very same hearthside warmth, anywhere at all).

‘What worries me,’ I said, ‘is that someone must have followed you around with a camera—long enough to capture your face, your voice, your mannerisms ...’

Loraine scowled. ‘My what? This thing didn’t even speak a whole sentence. And they need not have followed me anywhere—they probably just intercepted a phone call I made, and based it all on that. They pushed their own call straight through your office defences, didn’t they? They’re probably just a bunch of bored hackers—and for all we know, they could live on the other side of the planet.’

‘Maybe. But not one phone call—dozens. They must have gathered a lot of data, however they did it. I’ve talked to artists who do simulation portraits—ten or twenty seconds of action, based on hours of sittings—and they say it’s still not easy to fool anyone who really knows the subject. OK, I should have been sceptical ... but why wasn’t I? Because it was so convincing. Because it was exactly how I would have imagined you—’

She shifted in my arms, irritably. ‘It was nothing like me. It was melodramatic, computerised overacting—and they knew it, which is why they kept it so short.’

I shook my head. ‘Nobody can judge an impersonation of themself. You’ll have to take my word for it. I know, it only lasted a few seconds—but I swear, they got it right.’

As the conversation dragged on into the early hours of the morning, Loraine stood her ground—and I had to concede that there was nothing much we could actually do to make our lives any safer, whether or not the caller harboured plans to inflict real physical harm. The house already had state-of-the-art security hardware, and Loraine and I both carried surgically implanted radio alarm beacons. Even I balked at the idea of hiring armed bodyguards.

I had to concede, too, that no serious aspiring kidnappers would have alerted us to their intentions with a hoax call.

Finally, wearily (as if it had to be settled, there and then, if we weren’t to keep arguing until dawn), I caved in. Maybe I’d overreacted. Maybe I just resented having been fooled. Maybe the whole thing had been nothing but a prank, after all.

However sick. However technically accomplished. However apparently pointless.

* * * *

When we slumped into bed, Loraine fell asleep almost at once, but I lay awake for hours. The call itself finally stopped monopolising my thoughts—but as soon as I’d put it out of my mind, another set of concerns came floating up to take its place.

As I’d told the detective, Loraine had never been scanned. I had, though. High-resolution imaging techniques had been used to generate a detailed map of my body, down to the cellular level—a map which included, among other things, a description of every neuron in my brain, every synaptic connection. I had purchased a kind of immortality: whatever happened to me, the most recent snapshot of my body could always be resurrected as a Copy: an elaborate computer model, embedded in a virtual reality. A model which, at the very least, would act and think like me: it would share all my memories, my beliefs, my goals, my desires. Currently, such models ran slower than real time, their virtual environments were restrictive, and the telepresence robots meant to enable interaction with the physical world were a clumsy joke ... but all of the technology was rapidly improving.

My mother had already been resurrected in the supercomputer known as Coney Island. My father had died before the process had become available. Loraine’s parents were both still alive—and unscanned.

I’d been scanned twice, the last time three years before. I was long overdue for an update—but that would have meant facing up to the realities of my posthumous future, all over again. Loraine had never condemned me for my choice, and the prospect of my virtual resurrection didn’t seem to bother her at all—but she’d made it clear that she wouldn’t be joining me.

The argument was so familiar that I could run through it all in my head, without even waking her.

LORAINE: I don’t want to be imitated by a computer after I’m dead. What use would that be to me?

DAVID: Don’t knock imitation—life consists of imitation. Every organ in your body is constantly being rebuilt in its own image. Every cell that divides is dying and replacing itself with imposters. Your body doesn’t contain a single atom you were born with—so what gives you your identity? It’s a pattern of information, not a physical thing. And if a computer started imitating your body—instead of your body imitating itself—the only real difference would be that the computer would make fewer mistakes.

LORAINE: If that’s what you believe ... fine. But it’s not the way I see things. And I’m as frightened of death as anyone—but being scanned wouldn’t make me feel any better. It wouldn’t make me feel immortal; it wouldn’t comfort me at all. So why should I do it? Give me one good reason.

And I never could bring myself to say (not even then, in the safety of my imaginings): Do it because I don’t want to lose you. Do it for me.

* * * *

I spent the next morning dealing with the curator for a large insurance company, who was looking for a change of decor for a few hundred lobbies, elevators, and boardrooms, real and virtual. I had no trouble selling her some suitably dignified electronic wallpaper, by some suitably revered young talents.

Some starving artists put low-resolution roughs of their work into network galleries, hoping to strike a compromise between a version so crude as to be off-putting, and one so appealing as to make buying the real thing superfluous. Nobody will pay for art unseen—and in the network galleries, to see was to own.

Physical galleries—tightly run—remained the best solution. All my visitors were screened for microcameras and visual cortex taps; nobody left the building with anything more than an impression, without paying for it. If it had been lawful, I would have demanded blood samples, and refused entry to anyone with a genetic predisposition to eidetic memory.

In the afternoon, as always, I viewed the work of aspiring exhibitors. I finished watching the Kreyszig piece which had been interrupted the day before, and then started sifting through a great heap of lesser submissions. The process of deciding what would or wouldn’t be acceptable to my corporate clientele required no intellectual or emotional exertion; after two decades in the business, it had become a purely mechanical act—as uninvolving, most of the time, as standing at a conveyor belt sorting nuts from bolts. My aesthetic judgement hadn’t been blunted—if anything, it had become more finely honed—but only the most exceptional work evoked anything more from me than a—highly astute, unfailingly accurate—assessment of marketability.

When the image of the ‘kidnapper’ broke through on to the screen again, I wasn’t surprised; the instant it happened, I realised that I’d been waiting for it all afternoon. And although I grew tense in anticipation of the unpleasantness to follow, at the same time, the opportunity of discovering more about the caller’s true motives was, undeniably, welcome. I couldn’t be fooled again, so what did I have to fear? Knowing that Loraine was safe, I could watch with a sense of detachment, and try to extract some clue as to what was really going on.

The mask said, ‘We have your wife/Transfer half a million dollars/Into this account/If you don’t want her to/Suffer.’

The synthetic image of Loraine reappeared. I laughed uneasily. What did these people expect me to believe? I surveyed the picture coolly. What I could see of the dingy ‘room’ behind ‘her’ badly needed repainting—another laborious touch of ‘realism’ to contrast with the background for the other mask. This time, ‘she’ didn’t seem to have been struggling—and there were no signs that ‘she’ had been physically ill-treated (it even looked like ‘she’ had had a chance to wash)—but there was an uncertainty in ‘her’ expression, a hint of subdued panic on ‘her’ face, which hadn’t been there before.

Then she looked straight into the camera and said, ‘David? They won’t let me see you—but I know you’re there. And I know you must be doing all you can to get me out of this—but please hurry. Please, pay them the money as soon as you can.’

My veneer of objectivity shattered. I knew it was just an elaborate piece of computer animation—but listening to it ‘pleading’ with me this way was almost as distressing as the call I’d thought was real. It looked like Loraine, it sounded like Loraine; every word and gesture rang true. I couldn’t throw a switch inside my head and turn off all my responses to the sight of someone I loved, begging for her life.

I covered my face and shouted, ‘You sick fuck—is this how you get off? Do you think I’m going to pay you to stop this? I’ll just get the phone fixed so you can’t break through—then you can go back to running interactive snuff movies, and fucking your own corpse.’

There was no reply, and when I looked at the screen again, the call was over.

I waited until I’d stopped shaking—mostly with anger—then I called Detective Nicolson, for what that was worth. I gave him a copy of the call for his files; he thanked me. I told myself, optimistically: with computer analysis of modus operandi, every piece of evidence helps; if the same caller goes on to do the same thing to other people, the information collected might eventually coalesce into some kind of incriminating profile. The psychopathic piece of shit might even get caught one day.

Then I phoned the company which had supplied the office software, and explained what had been going on—leaving out details of the subject matter of the nuisance calls.

Their troubleshooter asked me to authorise a diagnostic link; I did so. She vanished for a minute or two. I thought: it will be something simple, and easily fixed—some trivial mistake in the security set-up.

The woman came on-screen again, looking wary.

‘The software all seems fine—there’s no evidence of tampering. And no evidence of unauthorised access. How long since you changed the breakthrough password?’

‘Ah. I haven’t. I haven’t changed anything since the system was installed.’

‘So it’s been the same for the last five years? That’s not good practice.’

I nodded repentantly, but said, ‘I don’t see how anyone could have discovered it. Even if they tried a few thousand random words—’

‘You would have been notified on the fourth wrong guess. And there’s a voiceprint check. Passwords are usually stolen by eavesdropping.’

‘Well, the only other person who knows it is my wife—and I don’t think she’s ever even used it.’

‘There are two authorised voiceprints on file. Whose is the other one?’

‘Mine. In case I had to call the office management system from home. I’ve never done that, though—so I doubt the password has been spoken out loud since the day we installed the software.’

‘Well, there’s a log of both breakthrough calls—’

‘That’s no help. I record all my calls, I’ve already given copies to the police.’

‘No, I’m talking about something else. For security reasons, the initial part of the call—when the password is actually spoken—is stored separately, in encrypted form. If you want to view it, I’ll tell you how—but you’ll have to speak the password yourself, to authorise the decoding.’

She explained the procedure, then went off-line. She didn’t look happy at all. Of course, she didn’t know that the caller had been imitating Loraine; she probably thought I was about to ‘discover’ that the threatening calls were coming from my wife.

She was wrong, of course—but so was I.

Five years is a long time to remember anything so trivial. I had to make three guesses before I got the password right.

I steeled myself for one more glimpse of the fake Loraine, but the screen remained dark—and the voice that said ‘Benvenuto’ was my own.

* * * *

When I arrived home, Loraine was still working, so I left her undisturbed. I went to my study and checked the terminal for mail. There was nothing new, but I scrolled back through the list of past items, until I came to the most recent video postcard from my mother, which had arrived about a month before. Because of the time-rate difference, talking face-to-face was arduous, so we kept in touch by sending each other these recorded monologues.

I told the terminal to replay it. There was something I half remembered at the end, something I wanted to hear again.

My mother had been slowly unageing her appearance ever since her resurrection in Coney Island; she now looked about thirty. She’d been working on her house, too—which had gradually mutated and expanded from a near-perfect model of her last real-world home, into a kind of eighteenth-century French mansion, all carved doors, Louis XV chairs, ornate wall hangings, and chandeliers.

She enquired dutifully about my health and Loraine’s, the gallery, Loraine’s drawings. She made a few acerbic comments on current political events—both inside and outside the Island. Her youthful appearance, her opulent surroundings, weren’t acts of self-deception; she was not an old woman any more, she did not live in a four-room apartment. Pretending that she had no choice but to mimic her last few years of organic life would have been absurd. She knew exactly who and where she was—and she had every intention of making the best of it.

I’d planned to fast-forward through the small talk, but I didn’t. I sat and listened to every word, transfixed by the image of this nonexistent woman’s face, trying to make sense of my feelings for her, trying to untangle the roots of my empathy, ray loyalty, my love ... for this pattern of information copied from a body now long decayed.

Finally, she said, ‘You keep asking me if I’m happy. If I’m ever lonely. If I’ve found someone.’ She hesitated, then shook her head. ‘I’m not lonely. You know your father died before this technology was perfected. And you know how much I loved him. Well, I still do; I still love him. He’s not gone, any more than I am. He lives on in my memory—and that’s enough. Here of all places, that’s enough.’

The first time I’d heard these words, I’d thought she’d been speaking in uncharacteristic platitudes. Now, I thought I understood the barely intentional hint behind her reassurances, and a chill passed through me.

He lives on in my memory.

Here of all places, that’s enough.

Of course they would have kept it quiet; the organic world wasn’t ready to hear this—and Copies could afford to be patient.

That was why I hadn’t yet heard from my mother’s companion. He could wait however many decades it took for me to come to the Island ‘in person’—and that’s when he’d see me ‘again’.

* * * *

As the serving trolley unloaded the evening meal on to the dining room table, Loraine asked, ‘Any more high-tech heavy breathing today?’

I shook my head slowly, over-emphatically, feeling like an adulterer—or worse. Inside, I was drowning, but if anything showed, Loraine gave no sign that she’d noticed.

She said, ‘Well, it’s hardly the kind of trick you can play twice on the same victim, is it?’

‘No.’

In bed, I stared out into the suffocating darkness, trying to decide what I was going to do ... although the kidnappers no doubt knew the answer to that already—and they’d hardly have gone ahead with their plan if they hadn’t believed I’d pay them, in the end.

Everything made sense now. Far too much sense. Loraine had no scan file—but they’d broken into mine. To what end? What use is a man’s soul? Well, there’s no need to guess, it will tell you. Extracting the office password would have been the least of it; they must have run my Copy through a few hundred virtual scenarios, and selected the one most likely to produce the largest return on their investment.

A few hundred resurrections, a few hundred different delusions of extortion, a few hundred deaths. I didn’t care—the notion was far too bizarre, far too alien to move me—which was probably why there hadn’t been a very different ransom demand: ‘We have your Copy ...’

And the fake Loraine—not even a Copy of the real woman, but a construct based entirely on my knowledge of her, my memories, my mental images—what empathy, what loyalty, what love did I owe her?

The kidnappers might not have fully reproduced the memory-resurrection technique invented in the Island. I didn’t know what they’d actually created, what—if anything—they’d ‘brought to life’. How elaborate was the computer model behind ‘her’ words, ‘her’ facial expressions, ‘her’ gestures? Was it complex enough to experience the emotions it was portraying—like a Copy? Or was it merely complex enough to sway my emotions—complex enough to manipulate me, without feeling a thing?

How could I know, one way or the other—how could I ever tell? I took the ‘humanity’ of my mother for granted—and perhaps she in turn did the same for my resurrected unscanned father, plucked from her virtual brain—but what would it take to convince me that this pattern of information was someone I should care about, someone who desperately needed my help?

I lay in the dark, beside the flesh-and-blood Loraine, and tried to imagine what the computer simulation of my mental image of her would be saying in a month’s time.

IMITATION LORAINE: David? They tell me you’re there, they tell me you can hear me. If that’s true ... I don’t understand. Why haven’t you paid them? Is something wrong? Are the police telling you not to pay? (Silence.) I’m all right, I’m hanging on—but I don’t understand what’s happening. (Long silence.) They’re not treating me too badly. I’m sick of the food, but I’ll live. They’ve given me some paper to draw on, and I’ve done a few sketches ...

Even if I was never convinced, even if I was never certain, I’d always be wondering: What if I’m wrong? What if she’s conscious after all? What if she’s every bit as human as I’ll be when I’m resurrected—and I’ve betrayed her, abandoned her?

I couldn’t live with that. The possibility, and the appearance, would be enough to tear me apart.

And they knew it.

* * * *

My financial management software laboured all night to free the money from investments. At nine o’clock the next morning, I transferred half a million dollars into the specified account, and then sat in my office waiting to see what would happen. I considered changing the breakthrough password back to the old ‘Benvenuto’—but then decided that if they really had my scan file at their disposal, they’d have no trouble deducing my new choice.

At ten past nine, the kidnapper’s mask appeared on the giant screen—and said bluntly, without poetic pretensions, ‘The same again, in two years’ time.’

I nodded. ‘Yes.’ I could raise it by then, without Loraine knowing. Just.

‘So long as you keep paying, we’ll keep her frozen. No time, no experience—no distress.’

‘Thank you.’ I hesitated, then forced myself to speak. ‘But in the end, when I’m—’

‘What?’

‘When I’m resurrected ... you’ll let her join me?’

The mask smiled magnanimously. ‘Of course.’

* * * *

I don’t know how I’ll begin to explain everything to the imitation Loraine—or what she’ll do when she learns her true nature. Resurrection in the Island may be her idea of Hell—but what choice did I have? Leaving her to rot, for as long as the kidnappers believed her suffering might still move me? Or buying her freedom—and then never running her again?

When we’re together in the Island, she can come to her own conclusions, make her own decisions. For now, all I can do is gaze up at the sky and hope that she really is safe in her unthinking stasis.

For now, I have a life to live with the flesh-and-blood Loraine. I have to tell her the truth, of course—and I run through the whole conversation, beside her in the dark, night after night.

DAVID: How could I not care about her? How could I let her suffer? How could I abandon someone who was—literally—built out of all my reasons for loving you?

LORAINE: An imitation of an imitation? There was no one suffering, no one waiting to be saved. No one to be rescued, or abandoned.

DAVID: Am I no one? Are you no one? Because that’s all we can ever have of each other: an imitation, a Copy. All we can ever know about are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls.

LORAINE: Is that all you think I am? An idea in your head?

DAVID: No! But if it’s all I have, then it’s all I can honestly love. Don’t you see that?

And, miraculously, she does. She finally understands.

Night after night.

I close my eyes and fall asleep, relieved.

Learning to Be Me

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

Microscopic spiders had woven a fine golden web through my brain, so that the jewel’s teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel’s thoughts werewrong, the teacher-faster than thought-rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.

Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel could do it for me.

I thought: if hearing that makesme feel strange and giddy, how must it make thejewel feel? Exactly the same, I reasoned; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel, it too reasons: “Exactly the same; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel ...”

And it too wonders—

(I knew, becauseI wondered)

—it too wonders whether it’s the real me, or whether in fact it’s only the jewel that’s learning to be me.

* * * *

As a scornful twelve-year-old, I would have mocked such childish concerns. Everybody had the jewel, save the members of obscure religious sects, and dwelling upon the strangeness of it struck me as unbearably pretentious. The jewel was the jewel, a mundane fact of life, as ordinary as excrement. My friends and I told bad jokes about it, the same way we told bad jokes about sex, to prove to each other how blase we were about the whole idea.

Yet we weren’t quite as jaded and imperturbable as we pretended to be. one day when we were all loitering in the park, up to nothing in particular, one of the gang-whose name I’ve forgotten, but who has stuck in my mind as always being far too clever for his own good-asked each of us in turn: “Whoare you? The jewel, or the real human?” We all replied-unthinkingly, indignantly—“The real human!” When the last of us had answered, he cackled and said, “Well, I’m not.I’m the jewel. So you can eat my shit, you losers, becauseyou’ll all get flushed down the cosmic toilet-but me, I’m gonna live forever.”

We beat him until he bled.

* * * *

By the time I was fourteen, despite-or perhaps because of-the fact that the jewel was scarcely mentioned in my teaching machine’s dull curriculum, I’d given the question a great deal more thought. The pedantically correct answer when asked “Are you the jewel or the human?” had to be “The human”—because only the human brain was physically able to reply. The jewel received input from the senses, but had no control over the body, and its intended reply coincided with what was actually said only because the device was a perfect imitation of the brain. To tell the outside world “I am the jewel”—with speech, with writing, or with any other method involving the body-was patently false (although tothink it to oneself was not ruled out by this line of reasoning).

However, in a broader sense, I decided that the question was simply misguided. So long as the jewel and the human brain shared the same sensory input, and so long as the teacher kept their thoughts in perfect step, there was onlyone person,one identity,one consciousness. This one person merely happened to have the (highly desirable) property thatif either the jewelor the human brain were to be destroyed, he or she would survive unimpaired. People had always had two lungs and two kidneys, and for almost a century, many had lived with two hearts. This was the same: a matter of redundancy; a matter of robustness, no more.

That was the year that my parents decided I was mature enough to be told that they had both undergone the switch-three years before. I pretended to take the news calmly, but I hated them passionately for not having told me at the time. They had disguised their stay in hospital with lies about a business trip overseas. For three years I had been living with jewel-heads, and they hadn’t even told me. It wasexactly what I would have expected of them.

“We didn’t seem any different to you, did we?” asked my mother.

“No,” I said-truthfully, but burning with resentment nonetheless.

“That’s why we didn’t tell you,” said my father. “If you’d known we’d switched, at the time, you might haveimagined that we’d changed in some way. By waiting until now to tell you, we’ve made it easier for you to convince yourself that we’re still the same people we’ve always been.” He put an arm around me and squeezed me. I almost screamed out, “Don’ttouch me!” but I remembered in time that I’d convinced myself that the jewel was No Big Deal.

I should have guessed that they’d done it, long before they confessed; after all, I’d known for years that most people underwent the switch in their early thirties. By then, it’s downhill for the organic brain, and it would be foolish to have the jewel mimic this decline. So, the nervous system is rewired; the reins of the body are handed over to the jewel, and the teacher is deactivated. For a week, the outward-bound impulses from the brain are compared with those from the jewel, but by this time the jewel is a perfect copy, and no differences are ever detected.

The brain is removed, discarded, and replaced with a spongy tissue-cultured object, brain-shaped down to the level of the finest capillaries, but no more capable of thought than a lung or a kidney. This mock-brain removes exactly as much oxygen and glucose from the blood as the real thing, and faithfully performs a number of crude, essential biochemical functions. In time, like all flesh, it will perish and need to be replaced.

The jewel, however, is immortal. Short of being dropped into a nuclear fireball, it will endure for a billion years.

My parents were machines. My parents were gods. It was nothing special. I hated them.

* * * *

When I was sixteen, I fell in love, and became a child again.

Spending warm nights on the beach with Eva, I couldn’t believe that a mere machine could ever feel the way I did. I knew full well that if my jewel had been given control of my body, it would have spoken the very same words as I had, and executed with equal tenderness and clumsiness my every awkward caress-but I couldn’t accept that its inner life was as rich, as miraculous, as joyful as mine. Sex, however pleasant, I could accept as a purely mechanical function, but there was something between us (or so I believed) that had nothing to do with lust, nothing to do with words, nothing to do with any tangible action of our bodies that some spy in the sand dunes with parabolic microphone and infrared binoculars might have discerned. After we made love, we’d gaze up in silence at the handful of visible stars, our souls conjoined in a secret place that no crystalline computer could hope to reach in a billion years of striving. (If I’d saidthat to my sensible, smutty, twelve-year-old self, he would have laughed until he haemorrhaged.)

I knew by then that the jewel’s “teacher” didn’t monitor every single neuron in the brain. That would have been impractical, both in terms of handling the data, and because of the sheer physical intrusion into the tissue. Someone-or-other’s theorem said that sampling certain critical neurons was almost as good as sampling the lot, and-given some very reasonable assumptions that nobody could disprove-bounds on the errors involved could be established with mathematical rigour.

At first, I declared thatwithin these errors, however small, lay the difference between brain and jewel, between human and machine, between love and its imitation. Eva, however, soon pointed out that it was absurd to make a radical, qualitative distinction on the basis of the sampling density; if the next model teacher sampled more neurons and halved the error rate, would its jewel then be “half-way” between “human” and “machine?” In theory-and eventually, in practice-the error rate could be made smaller than any number I cared to name. Did I really believe that a discrepancy of one in a billion made any difference at all-when every human being was permanently losing thousands of neurons every day, by natural attrition?

She was right, of course, but I soon found another, more plausible, defence for my position. Living neurons, I argued, had far more internal structure than the crude optical switches that served the same function in the jewel’s so-called “neural net.” That neurons fired or did not fire reflected only one level of their behaviour; who knew what the subtleties of biochemistry-the quantum mechanics of the specific organic molecules involved-contributed to the nature of human consciousness? Copying the abstract neural topology wasn’t enough. Sure, the jewel could pass the fatuous Turing test-no outside observer could tell it from a human-but that didn’t prove thatbeing a jewel felt the same asbeing human.

Eva asked, “Does that mean you’ll never switch? You’ll have your jewel removed? You’ll let yourselfdie when your brain starts to rot?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Better to die at ninety or a hundred than kill myself at thirty, and have some machine marching around, taking my place, pretending to be me.”

“How do you knowI haven’t switched?” she asked, provocatively. “How do you know that I’m not just ‘pretending to be me’?”

“I know you haven’t switched,” I said, smugly. “I justknow.”

“How? I’d look the same. I’d talk the same. I’d act the same in every way. People are switching younger, these days.So how do you know I haven’t?”

I turned onto my side towards her, and gazed into her eyes. “Telepathy. Magic. The communion of souls.”

My twelve-year-old self started snickering, but by then I knew exactly how to drive him away.

* * * *

At nineteen, although I was studying finance, I took an undergraduate philosophy unit. The Philosophy Department, however, apparently had nothing to say about the Ndoli Device, more commonly known as “the jewel.” (Ndoli had in fact called it “thedual,” but the accidental, homophonic nick-name had stuck.) They talked about Plato and Descartes and Marx, they talked about St. Augustine and-when feeling particularly modern and adventurous-Sartre, but if they’d heard of Godel, Turing, Hamsun or Kim, they refused to admit it. Out of sheer frustration, in an essay on Descartes I suggested that the notion of human consciousness as “software” that could be “implemented” equally well on an organic brain or an optical crystal was in fact a throwback to Cartesian dualism: for “software” read “soul.” My tutor superimposed a neat, diagonal, luminous red line over each paragraph that dealt with this idea, and wrote in the margin (in vertical, bold-face, 20-point Times, with a contemptuous 2 Hertz flash): IRRELEVANT!

I quit philosophy and enrolled in a unit of optical crystal engineering for non-specialists. I learnt a lot of solid-state quantum mechanics. I learnt a lot of fascinating mathematics. I learnt that a neural net is a device used only for solving problems that are far too hard to beunderstood. A sufficiently flexible neural net can be configured by feedback to mimic almost any system-to produce the same patterns of output from the same patterns of input-but achieving this sheds no light whatsoever on the nature of the system being emulated.

“Understanding,” the lecturer told us, “is an overrated concept. Nobody reallyunderstands how a fertilized egg turns into a human. What should we do? Stop having children until ontogenesis can be described by a set of differential equations?”

I had to concede that she had a point there.

It was clear to me by then that nobody had the answers I craved-and I was hardly likely to come up with them myself; my intellectual skills were, at best, mediocre. It came down to a simple choice: I could waste time fretting about the mysteries of consciousness, or, like everybody else, I could stop worrying and get on with my life.

* * * *

When I married Daphne, at twenty-three, Eva was a distant memory, and so was any thought of the communion of souls. Daphne was thirty-one, an executive in the merchant bank that had hired me during my PhD, and everyone agreed that the marriage would benefit my career. What she got out of it, I was never quite sure. Maybe she actually liked me. We had an agreeable sex life, and we comforted each other when we were down, the way any kind-hearted person would comfort an animal in distress.

Daphne hadn’t switched. She put it off, month after month, inventing ever more ludicrous excuses, and I teased her as if I’d never had reservations of my own.

“I’m afraid,” she confessed one night. “What if I die when it happens-what if all that’s left is a robot, a puppet, athing? I don’t want todie.”

Talk like that made me squirm, but I hid my feelings. “Suppose you had a stroke,” I said glibly, “which destroyed a small part of your brain. Suppose the doctors implanted a machine to take over the functions which that damaged region had performed. Would you still be ‘yourself’?”

“Of course.”

“Then if they did it twice, or ten times, or a thousand times—”

“That doesn’t necessarily follow.”

“Oh? At what magic percentage, then, would you stop being ‘you’?”

She glared at me. “All the old clichéed arguments—”

“Fault them, then, if they’re so old and clichéed.”

She started to cry. “I don’t have to. Fuck you! I’m scared to death, and you don’t give a shit!”

I took her in my arms. “Sssh. I’m sorry. But everyone does it sooner or later. You mustn’t be afraid. I’m here. I love you.” The words might have been a recording, triggered automatically by the sight of her tears.

“Will you do it? With me?”

I went cold. “What?”

“Have the operation, on the same day? Switch when I switch?”

Lots of couples did that. Like my parents. Sometimes, no doubt, it was a matter of love, commitment, sharing. Other times, I’m sure, it was more a matter of neither partner wishing to be an unswitched person living with a jewel-head.

I was silent for a while, then I said, “Sure.”

In the months that followed, all of Daphne’s fears-which I’d mocked as “childish” and “superstitious”—rapidly began to make perfect sense, and my own “rational” arguments came to sound abstract and hollow. I backed out at the last minute; I refused the anaesthetic, and fled the hospital.

Daphne went ahead, not knowing I had abandoned her.

I never saw her again. I couldn’t face her; I quit my job and left town for a year, sickened by my cowardice and betrayal-but at the same time euphoric that I hadescaped.

She brought a suit against me, but then dropped it a few days later, and agreed, through her lawyers, to an uncomplicated divorce. Before the divorce came through, she sent me a brief letter:

* * * *

There was nothing to fear, after all. I’m exactly the person I’ve always been. Putting it off was insane; now that I’ve taken the leap of faith, I couldn’t be more at ease.

Your loving robot wife, Daphne

* * * *

By the time I was twenty-eight, almost everyone I knew had switched. All my friends from university had done it. Colleagues at my new job, as young as twenty-one, had done it. Eva, I heard through a friend of a friend, had done it six years before.

The longer I delayed, the harder the decision became. I could talk to a thousand people who had switched, I could grill my closest friends for hours about their childhood memories and their most private thoughts, but however compelling their words, I knew that the Ndoli Device had spent decades buried in their heads, learning to fake exactly this kind of behaviour.

Of course, I always acknowledged that it was equally impossible to becertain that even anotherunswitched person had an inner life in any way the same as my own-but it didn’t seem unreasonable to be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people whose skulls hadn’t yet been scraped out with a curette.

I drifted apart from my friends, I stopped searching for a lover. I took to working at home (I put in longer hours and my productivity rose, so the company didn’t mind at all). I couldn’t bear to be with people whose humanity I doubted.

I wasn’t by any means unique. Once I started looking, I found dozens of organisations exclusively for people who hadn’t switched, ranging from a social club that might as easily have been for divorcees, to a paranoid, paramilitary “resistance front,” who thought they were living outInvasion of the Body Snatchers. Even the members of the social club, though, struck me as extremely maladjusted; many of them shared my concerns, almost precisely, but my own ideas from other lips sounded obsessive and ill-conceived. I was briefly involved with an unswitched woman in her early forties, but all we ever talked about was our fear of switching. It was masochistic, it was suffocating, it was insane.

I decided to seek psychiatric help, but I couldn’t bring myself to see a therapist who had switched. When I finally found one who hadn’t, she tried to talk me into helping her blow up a power station, to let THEM know who was boss.

I’d lie awake for hours every night, trying to convince myself, one way or the other, but the longer I dwelt upon the issues, the more tenuous and elusive they became. Who was “I,” anyway? What did it mean that “I” was “still alive,” when my personality was utterly different from that of two decades before? My earlier selves were as good as dead-I remembered them no more clearly than I remembered contemporary acquaintances-yet this loss caused me only the slightest discomfort. Maybe the destruction of my organic brain would be the merest hiccup, compared to all the changes that I’d been through in my life so far.

Or maybe not. Maybe it would be exactly like dying.

Sometimes I’d end up weeping and trembling, terrified and desperately lonely, unable to comprehend-and yet unable to cease contemplating-the dizzying prospect of my own nonexistence. At other times, I’d simply grow “healthily” sick of the whole tedious subject. Sometimes I felt certain that the nature of the jewel’s inner life was the most important question humanity could ever confront. At other times, my qualms seemed fey and laughable. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people switched, and the world apparently went on as always; surely that fact carried more weight than any abstruse philosophical argument?

Finally, I made an appointment for the operation. I thought, what is there to lose? Sixty more years of uncertainty and paranoia? If the human race was replacing itself with clockwork automata, I was better off dead; I lacked the blind conviction to join the psychotic underground-who, in any case, were tolerated by the authorities only so long as they remained ineffectual. On the other hand, if all my fears were unfounded-if my sense of identity could survive the switch as easily as it had already survived such traumas as sleeping and waking, the constant death of brain cells, growth, experience, learning and forgetting-then I would gain not only eternal life, but an end to my doubts and my alienation.

* * * *

I was shopping for food one Sunday morning, two months before the operation was scheduled to take place, flicking through the images of an on-line grocery catalogue, when a mouth-watering shot of the latest variety of apple caught my fancy. I decided to order half a dozen. I didn’t, though. Instead, I hit the key which displayed the next item. My mistake, I knew, was easily remedied; a single keystroke could take me back to the apples. The screen showed pears, oranges, grapefruit. I tried to look down to see what my clumsy fingers were up to, but my eyes remained fixed on the screen.

I panicked. I wanted to leap to my feet, but my legs would not obey me. I tried to cry out, but I couldn’t make a sound. I didn’t feel injured, I didn’t feel weak. Was I paralysed? Brain-damaged? I could stillfeel my fingers on the keypad, the soles of my feet on the carpet, my back against the chair.

I watched myself order pineapples. I felt myself rise, stretch, and walk calmly from the room. In the kitchen, I drank a glass of water. I should have been trembling, choking, breathless; the cool liquid flowed smoothly down my throat, and I didn’t spill a drop.

I could only think of one explanation:I had switched. Spontaneously. The jewel had taken over, while my brain was still alive; all my wildest paranoid fears had come true.

While my body went ahead with an ordinary Sunday morning, I was lost in a claustrophobic delirium of helplessness. The fact that everything I did was exactly what I had planned to do gave me no comfort. I caught a train to the beach, I swam for half an hour; I might as well have been running amok with an axe, or crawling naked down the street, painted with my own excrement and howling like a wolf.I’d lost control. My body had turned into a living strait-jacket, and I couldn’t struggle, I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t even close my eyes. I saw my reflection, faintly, in a window on the train, and I couldn’t begin to guess what the mind that ruled that bland, tranquil face was thinking.

Swimming was like some sense-enhanced, holographic nightmare; I was a volitionless object, and the perfect familiarity of the signals from my body only made the experience more horriblywrong. My arms had no right to the lazy rhythm of their strokes; I wanted to thrash about like a drowning man, I wanted to show the world my distress.

It was only when I lay down on the beach and closed my eyes that I began to think rationally about my situation.

The switchcouldn’t happen “spontaneously.” The idea was absurd. Millions of nerve fibres had to be severed and spliced, by an army of tiny surgical robots which weren’t even present in my brain-which weren’t due to be injected for another two months. Without deliberate intervention, the Ndoli Device was utterly passive, unable to do anything buteavesdrop. No failure of the jewel or the teacher could possibly take control of my body away from my organic brain.

Clearly, there had been a malfunction-but my first guess had been wrong, absolutely wrong.

I wish I could have donesomething, when the understanding hit me. I should have curled up, moaning and screaming, ripping the hair from my scalp, raking my flesh with my fingernails. Instead, I lay flat on my back in the dazzling sunshine. There was an itch behind my right knee, but I was, apparently, far too lazy to scratch it.

Oh, I ought to have managed, at the very least, a good, solid bout of hysterical laughter, when I realised that I was the jewel.

The teacher had malfunctioned; it was no longer keeping me aligned with the organic brain. I hadn’t suddenly become powerless; I hadalways been powerless. My will to act upon “my” body, upon the world, hadalways gone straight into a vacuum, and it was only because I had been ceaselessly manipulated, “corrected” by the teacher, that my desires had ever coincided with the actions that seemed to be mine.

There are a million questions I could ponder, a million ironies I could savour, butI mustn’t. I need to focus all my energy in one direction. My time is running out.

When I enter hospital and the switch takes place, if the nerve impulses I transmit to the body are not exactly in agreement with those from the organic brain, the flaw in the teacher will be discovered.And rectified. The organic brain has nothing to fear;his continuity will be safeguarded, treated as precious, sacrosanct. There will be no question as to which of us will be allowed to prevail.I will be made to conform, once again.I will be “corrected.”I will be murdered.

Perhaps it is absurd to be afraid. Looked at one way, I’ve been murdered every microsecond for the last twenty-eight years. Looked at another way, I’ve only existed for the seven weeks that have now passed since the teacher failed, and the notion of my separate identity came to mean anything at all-and in one more week this aberration, this nightmare, will be over. Two months of misery; why should I begrudge losing that, when I’m on the verge of inheriting eternity? Except that it won’t beI who inherits it, since that two months of misery is all that defines me.

The permutations of intellectual interpretation are endless, but ultimately, I can only act upon my desperate will to survive. I don’tfeel like an aberration, a disposable glitch. How can I possibly hope to survive? I must conform-of my own free will. I must choose to make myselfappear identical to that which they would force me to become.

After twenty-eight years, surely I am still close enough to him to carry off the deception. If I study every clue that reaches me through our shared senses, surely I can put myself in his place, forget, temporarily, the revelation of my separateness, and force myself back into synch.

It won’t be easy. He met a woman on the beach, the day I came into being. Her name is Cathy. They’ve slept together three times, and he thinks he loves her. Or at least, he’s said it to her face, he’s whispered it to her while she slept, he’s written it, true or false, into his diary.

I feel nothing for her. She’s a nice enough person, I’m sure, but I hardly know her. Preoccupied with my plight, I’ve paid scant attention to her conversation, and the act of sex was, for me, little more than a distasteful piece of involuntary voyeurism. Since I realised what was at stake, I’vetried to succumb to the same emotions as my alter ego, but how can I love her when communication between us is impossible, when she doesn’t even knowI exist?

If she rules his thoughts night and day, but is nothing but a dangerous obstacle to me, how can I hope to achieve the flawless imitation that will enable me to escape death?

He’s sleeping now, so I must sleep. I listen to his heartbeat, his slow breathing, and try to achieve a tranquillity consonant with these rhythms. For a moment, I am discouraged. Even mydreams will be different; our divergence is ineradicable, my goal is laughable, ludicrous, pathetic. Every nerve impulse, for a week? My fear of detection and my attempts to conceal it will, unavoidably, distort my responses; this knot of lies and panic will be impossible to hide.

Yet as I drift towards sleep, I find myself believing that Iwill succeed. Imust. I dream for a while-a confusion of images, both strange and mundane, ending with a grain of salt passing through the eye of a needle-then I tumble, without fear, into dreamless oblivion.

* * * *

I stare up at the white ceiling, giddy and confused, trying to rid myself of the nagging conviction that there’s something Imust not think about.

Then I clench my fist gingerly, rejoice at this miracle, and remember.

Up until the last minute, I thought he was going to back out again-but he didn’t. Cathy talked him through his fears. Cathy, after all, has switched, and he loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone before.

So, our roles are reversed now. This body ishis strait-jacket, now ...

I am drenched in sweat.This is hopeless, impossible. I can’t read his mind, I can’t guess what he’s trying to do. Should I move, lie still, call out, keep silent? Even if the computer monitoring us is programmed to ignore a few trivial discrepancies, as soon as he notices that his body won’t carry out his will, he’ll panic just as I did, and I’ll have no chance at all of making the right guesses. Wouldhe be sweating, now? Wouldhis breathing be constricted, like this?No. I’ve been awake for just thirty seconds, and already I have betrayed myself. An optical-fibre cable trails from under my right ear to a panel on the wall. Somewhere, alarm bells must be sounding.

If I made a run for it, what would they do? Use force? I’m a citizen, aren’t I? Jewel-heads have had full legal rights for decades; the surgeons and engineers can’t do anything to me without my consent. I try to recall the clauses on the waiver he signed, but he hardly gave it a second glance. I tug at the cable that holds me prisoner, but it’s firmly anchored, at both ends.

When the door swings open, for a moment I think I’m going to fall to pieces, but from somewhere I find the strength to compose myself. It’s my neurologist, Dr Prem. He smiles and says, “How are you feeling? Not too bad?”

I nod dumbly.

“The biggest shock, for most people, is that they don’t feel different at all! For a while you’ll think, ‘It can’t be this simple! It can’t be this easy! It can’t be thisnormal! ‘ But you’ll soon come to accept thatit is. And life will go on, unchanged.” He beams, taps my shoulder paternally, then turns and departs.

Hours pass.What are they waiting for? The evidence must be conclusive by now. Perhaps there are procedures to go through, legal and technical experts to be consulted, ethics committees to be assembled to deliberate on my fate. I’m soaked in perspiration, trembling uncontrollably. I grab the cable several times and yank with all my strength, but it seems fixed in concrete at one end, and bolted to my skull at the other.

An orderly brings me a meal. “Cheer up,” he says. “Visiting time soon.”

Afterwards, he brings me a bedpan, but I’m too nervous even to piss.

Cathy frowns when she sees me. “What’s wrong?”

I shrug and smile, shivering, wondering why I’m even trying to go through with the charade. “Nothing. I just ... feel a bit sick, that’s all.”

She takes my hand, then bends and kisses me on the lips. In spite of everything, I find myself instantly aroused. Still leaning over me, she smiles and says, “It’s over now, okay? There’s nothing left to be afraid of. You’re a little shook up, but you know in your heart you’re still who you’ve always been. And I love you.”

I nod. We make small talk. She leaves. I whisper to myself, hysterically, “I’m still who I’ve always been. I’m still who I’ve always been.”

* * * *

Yesterday, they scraped my skull clean, and inserted my new, non-sentient, space-filling mock-brain.

I feel calmer now than I have for a long time, and I think at last I’ve pieced together an explanation for my survival.

Why do they deactivate the teacher, for the week between the switch and the destruction of the brain? Well, they can hardly keep it running while the brain is being trashed-but why an entire week? To reassure people that the jewel, unsupervised, can still stay in synch; to persuade them that the life the jewel is going to live will be exactly the life that the organic brain “would have lived”—whatever that could mean.

Why, then, only for a week? Why not a month, or a year? Because the jewelcannot stay in synch for that long-not because of any flaw, but for precisely the reason that makes it worth using in the first place. The jewel is immortal. The brain is decaying. The jewel’s imitation of the brain leaves out-deliberately-the fact thatreal neuronsdie. Without the teacher working to contrive, in effect, an identical deterioration of the jewel, small discrepancies must eventually arise. A fraction of a second’s difference in responding to a stimulus is enough to arouse suspicion, and-as I know too well-from that moment on, the process of divergence is irreversible.

No doubt, a team of pioneering neurologists sat huddled around a computer screen, fifty years ago, and contemplated a graph of the probability of this radical divergence, versus time. How would they have chosenone week? What probability would have been acceptable? A tenth of a percent? A hundredth? A thousandth? However safe they decided to be, it’s hard to imagine them choosing a value low enough to make the phenomenon rare on a global scale, once a quarter of a million people were being switched every day.

In any given hospital, it might happen only once a decade, or once a century, but every institution would still need to have a policy for dealing with the eventuality.

What would their choices be?

They could honour their contractual obligations and turn the teacher on again, erasing their satisfied customer, and giving the traumatised organic brain the chance to rant about its ordeal to the media and the legal profession.

Or, they could quietly erase the computer records of the discrepancy, and calmly remove the only witness.

* * * *

So, this is it. Eternity.

I’ll need transplants in fifty or sixty years’ time, and eventually a whole new body, but that prospect shouldn’t worry me-Ican’t die on the operating table. In a thousand years or so, I’ll need extra hardware tacked on to cope with my memory storage requirements, but I’m sure the process will be uneventful. On a time scale of millions of years, the structure of the jewel is subject to cosmic-ray damage, but error-free transcription to a fresh crystal at regular intervals will circumvent that problem.

In theory, at least, I’m now guaranteed either a seat at the Big Crunch, or participation in the heat death of the universe.

I ditched Cathy, of course. I might have learnt to like her, but she made me nervous, and I was thoroughly sick of feeling that I had to play a role.

As for the man who claimed that he loved her-the man who spent the last week of his life helpless, terrified, suffocated by the knowledge of his impending death-I can’t yet decide how I feel. I ought to be able to empathise-considering that I once expected to suffer the very same fate myself-yet somehow he simply isn’treal to me. I know my brain was modelled on his-giving him a kind of causal primacy-but in spite of that, I think of him now as a pale, insubstantial shadow.

After all, I have no way of knowing if his sense of himself, his deepest inner life, his experience ofbeing, was in any way comparable to my own.

About the Author Greg Egan (1961—) obtained a BS in mathematics from the University of Western Australia and has worked as a computer programmer in medical research. The latest of his fascinating novels,Teranesia, appeared in 1999 from HarperCollins

Lost Continent

Ali’s uncle took hold of his right arm and offered it to the stranger, who gripped it firmly by the wrist. “From this moment on, you must obey this man,” his uncle instructed him. “Obey him as you would obey your father. Your life depends on it.”

“Yes, Uncle.” Ali kept his eyes respectfully lowered.

“Come with me, boy,” said the stranger, heading for the door.

“Yes, haji,” Ali mumbled, following meekly. He could hear his mother still sobbing quietly in the next room, and he had to fight to hold back his own tears. He had said good-bye to his mother and his uncle, but he’d had no chance for any parting words with his cousins. It was halfway between midnight and dawn, and if anyone else in the household was awake, they were huddled beneath their blankets, straining to hear what was going on but not daring to show their faces.

The stranger strode out into the cold night, hand still around Ali’s wrist like an iron shackle. He led Ali to the Land Cruiser that sat in the icy mud outside his uncle’s house, its frosted surfaces glinting in the starlight, an apparition from a nightmare. Just the smell of it made Ali rigid with fear; it was the smell that had presaged his father’s death, his brother’s disappearance. Experience had taught him that such a machine could only bring tragedy, but his uncle had entrusted him to its driver. He forced himself to approach without resisting.

The stranger finally released his grip on Ali and opened a door at the rear of the vehicle. “Get in and cover yourself with the blanket. Don’t move, and don’t make a sound, whatever happens. Don’t ask me any questions, and don’t ask me to stop. Do you need to take a piss?”

“No, haji,” Ali replied, his face burning with shame. Did the man think he was a child?

“All right, get in there.”

As Ali complied, the man spoke in a grimly humorous tone. “You think you show me respect by calling me ‘haji’? Every old man in your village is ‘haji’! I haven’t just been to Mecca. I’ve been there in the time of the Prophet, peace be upon him.” Ali covered his face with the ragged blanket, which was imbued with the concentrated stench of the machine. He pictured the stranger standing in the darkness for a moment, musing arrogantly about his unnatural pilgrimage. The man wore enough gold to buy Ali’s father’s farm ten times over. Now his uncle had sold that farm, and his mother’s jewelry—the hard-won wealth of generations—and handed all the money to this boastful man, who claimed he could spirit Ali away to a place and a time where he’d be safe.

The Land Cruiser’s engine shuddered to life. Ali felt the vehiclemoving backward at high speed, an alarming sensation. Then it stopped and moved forward, squealing as it changed direction; he could picture the tracks in the mud.

It was his first time ever in one of these machines. A few of his friends had taken rides with the Scholars, sitting in the back in the kind with the uncovered tray. They’d fired rifles into the air and shouted wildly before tumbling out, covered with dust, alive with excitement for the next ten days. Those friends had all been Sunni, of course. For Shi’a, rides with the Scholars had a different kind of ending.

Khurosan had been ravaged by war for as long as Ali could remember. For decades, tyrants of unimaginable cruelty from far in the future had given their weapons to factions throughout the country, who’d used them in their squabbles over land and power. Sometimes the warlords had sent recruiting parties into the valley to take young men to use as soldiers, but in the early days the villagers had banded together to hide their sons, or to bribe the recruiters to move on. Sunni or Shi’a, it made no difference; neighbor had worked with neighbor to outsmart the bandits who called themselves soldiers and keep the village intact.

Then four years ago, the Scholars had come, and everything had

changed.

Whether the Scholars were from the past or the future was unclear, but they certainly had weapons and vehicles from the future. They had ridden triumphantly across Khurosan in their Land Cruisers, killing some warlords, bribing others, conquering the bloody patchwork of squalid fiefdoms one by one. Many people had cheered them on, because they had promised to bring unity and piety to the land. The warlords and their rabble armies had kidnapped and raped women and boys at will; the Scholars had hung the rapists from the gates of the cities. The warlords had set up checkpoints on every road, to extort money from travelers; the Scholars had opened the roads again for trade and pilgrimage in safety.

The Scholars’ conquest of the land remained incomplete, though, and a savage battle was still being waged in the north. When the Scholars had come to Ali’s village looking for soldiers themselves, they’d brought a new strategy to the recruitment drive: they would take only Shi’a for the front line, to face the bullets of the unsubdued warlords. Shi’a, the Scholars declared, were not true Muslims, and this was the only way they could redeem themselves: laying down their lives for their more pious and deserving Sunni countrymen.

This deceit, this flattery and cruelty, had cleaved the village in two. Many friends remained loyal across the divide, but the old trust, the old unity was gone.

Two months before, one of Ali’s neighbors had betrayed his older brother’s hiding place to the Scholars. They had come to the farm in the early hours of the morning, a dozen of them in two Land Cruisers, and dragged Hassan away. Ali had watched helplessly from his own hiding place, forbidden by his father to try to intervene. And what could their rifles have done against the Scholars’ weapons, which sprayed bullets too fast and numerous to count?

The next morning, Ali’s father had gone to the Scholars’ post in the village to try to pay a bribe to get Hassan back. Ali had waited, watching the farm from the hillside above. When a single Land Cruiser had returned, his heart had swelled with hope. Even when the Scholars had thrown a limp figure from the vehicle, he’d thought it might be Hassan, unconscious from a beating but still alive, ready to be nursed back to health.

It was not Hassan. It was his father. They had slit his throat and left a coin in his mouth.

Ali had buried his father and walked half a day to the next village, where his mother had been staying with his uncle. His uncle had arranged the sale of the farm to a wealthy neighbor, then sought out a mosarfar-e-waqt to take Ali to safety.

Ali had protested, but it had all been decided, and his wishes had counted for nothing. His mother would live under the protection of her brother, while Ali built a life for himself in the future. Perhaps Hassan would escape from the Scholars, God willing, but that was out of their hands. What mattered, his mother insisted, was getting her youngest son out of the Scholars’ reach.

In the back of the Land Cruiser, Ali’s mind was in turmoil. He didn’t want to flee this way, but he had no doubt that his life would be in danger if he remained. He wanted his brother back and his father avenged, he wanted to see the Scholars destroyed, but their only remaining enemies with any real power were murderous criminals who hated his own people as much as the Scholars themselves did. There was no righteous army to join, with clean hands and pure

hearts.

The Land Cruiser slowed, then came to a halt, the engine still idling. The mosarfar-e-waqt called out a greeting, then began exchanging friendly words with someone, presumably a Scholar guarding the road.

Ali’s blood turned to ice; what if this stranger simply handed him over? How much loyalty could mere money buy? His uncle had made inquiries of people with connections up and down the valley and had satisfied himself about the man’s reputation, but however much the mosarfar-e-waqt valued his good name and the profits it brought him, there’d always be some other kind of deal to be made, some profit to be found in betrayal.

Both men laughed, then bid each other farewell. The Land Cruiser accelerated.

For what seemed like hours, Ali lay still and listened to the purring of the engine, trying to judge how far they’d come. He had never been out of the valley in his life, and he had only the sketchiest notion of what lay beyond. As dawn approached, his curiosity overwhelmed him, and he moved quietly to shift the blanket just enough to let him catch a glimpse through the rear window. There was a mountain peak visible to the left, topped with snow, crisp in the predawn light. He wasn’t sure if this was a mountain he knew, viewed from an unfamiliar angle, or one he’d never seen before.

Not long afterward they stopped to pray. They made their ablutions in a small, icy stream. They prayed side by side, Sunni and Shi’a, and Ali’s fear and suspicion retreated a little. However arrogant this man was, at least he didn’t share the Scholars’ contempt for Ali’s people.

After praying, they ate in silence. The mosarfar-e-waqt had brought bread, dried fruit, and salted meat. As Ali looked around, it was clear that they’d long ago left any kind of man-made track behind. They were following a mountain pass, on higher ground than the valley but still far below the snow line.

They traveled through the mountains for three days, finally emerging onto a wind-blasted, dusty plain. Ali had grown stiff from lying curled up for hours, and the second time they stopped on the plain, he made the most of the chance to stretch his legs and wandered away from the Land Cruiser for a minute or two.

When he returned, the mosarfar-e-waqt said, “What are you looking for?”

“Nothing, haji.”

“Are you looking for a landmark, so you can find this place again?”

Ali was baffled. “No, haji.”

The man stepped closer, then struck him across the face, hard enough to make him stagger. “If you tell anyone about the way you came, you’ll hear some more bad news about your family. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, haji.”

The man strode back to the Land Cruiser. Ali followed him, shaking. He’d had no intention of betraying any detail of their route, any secret of the trade, to anyone, but now his uncle had been named as hostage against any indiscretion, real or imagined.

Late in the afternoon, Ali heard a sudden change in the sound of the wind, a high-pitched keening that made his teeth ache. Unable to stop himself, he lifted his head from beneath the blanket.

Ahead of them was a small dust storm, dancing across the ground. It was moving away from them, weaving back and forth as it retreated, like a living thing trying to escape them. The Land Cruiser was gaining on it. The heart of the storm was dark, thick with sand, knotted with wind. Ali’s chest tightened. This was it: the pol-e-waqt, the bridge between times. Everyone in his village had heard of such things, but nobody could agree what they were: the work of men, the work of djinn, the work of God. Whatever their origin, some men had learned their secrets. No mosarfar-e-waqt had ever truly tamed them, but nobody else could find these bridges or navigate their strange depths.

They drew closer. The dust rained onto the windows of the Land Cruiser, as fine as any sand Ali had seen, yet as loud as the hailstones that fell sometimes on the roof of his house. Ali forgot all about his instructions; as they vanished into the darkness, he threw off the blanket and started praying aloud.

The mosarfar-e-waqt ignored him, muttering to himself and consulting the strange, luminous maps and writing that changed and flowed in front of him through some magic of machinery. The Land Cruiser ploughed ahead, buffeted by dust and wind but palpably advancing. Within a few minutes, it was clear to Ali that they’d traveled much farther than the storm’s full width as revealed from the outside. They had left his time and his country behind, and were deep inside the bridge.

The lights of the Land Cruiser revealed nothing but a handsbreadth of flying dust ahead of them. Ali peered surreptitiously at the glowing map in the front, but it was a maze of branching and reconnecting paths that made no sense to him. The mosarfar-e-waqt kept running a fingertip over one path, then cursing and shifting to another, as if he’d discovered some obstacle or danger ahead. Ali’s uncle had reassured him that at least they wouldn’t run into the Scholars in this place, as they had come to Khurosan through another, more distant bridge. The entrance to that one was watched over night and day by a convoy of vehicles that chased it endlessly across the desert, like the bodyguards of some staggering, drunken king.

A hint of sunlight appeared in the distance, then grew slowly brighter. After a few minutes, though, the mosarfar-e-waqt cursed and steered away from it. Ali was dismayed. This man had been unable to tell his uncle where or when Ali would end up, merely promising him safety from the Scholars. Some people in the village—he kind with a friend of a friend who’d fled into the future—spoke of a whole vast continent where peace and prosperity reigned from shore to shore. The rulers had no weapons or armies of their own but were chosen by the people for the wisdom, justice, and mercy they displayed. It sounded like paradise on Earth, but Ali would believe in such a place when he saw it with his own eyes.

Another false dawn, then another. The body of the Land Cruiser began to moan and shudder. The mosarfar-e-waqt cut the engine, but the vehicle kept moving, driven by the wind or the ground itself. Or maybe both, but not in the same direction: Ali felt the wheels slipping over the treacherous river of sand. Suddenly there was a sharp pain deep inside his ears, then a sound like the scream of a giant bird, and the door beside him was gone. He snatched at the back of the seat in front of him, but his hands closed over nothing but the flimsy blanket as the wind dragged him out into the darkness.

Ali bellowed until his lungs were empty. But the painful landing he was braced for never came: the blanket had snagged on something in the vehicle, and the force of the wind was holding him above the sand. He tried to pull himself back toward the Land Cruiser, hand over hand, but then he felt a tear run through the blanket. Once more he steeled himself for a fall, but then the tearing stopped with a narrow ribbon of cloth still holding him.

Ali prayed. “Merciful God, if you take me now, please bring Hassan back safely to his home.” For a year or two his uncle could care for his mother, but he was old, and he had too many mouths to feed. With no children of her own, her life would be unbearable.

A hand stretched out to him through the blinding dust. Ali reached out and took it, grateful now for the man’s iron grip. When the mosarfar-e-waqt had dragged him back into the Land Cruiser, Ali crouched at the stranger’s feet, his teeth chattering. “Thank you, haji. I am your servant, haji.” The mosarfar-e-waqt climbed back into the front without a word.

Time passed, but Ali’s thoughts were frozen. Some part of him had been prepared to die, but the rest of him was still catching up. Sunlight appeared from nowhere: the full blaze of noon, not some distant promise. “This will suffice,” the mosarfar-e-waq t announced wearily.

Ali shielded his eyes from the glare, then when he uncovered them the world was spinning. Blue sky and sand, changing places.

The bruising thud he’d been expecting long before finally came, the ground slapping him hard from cheek to ankle. He lay still, trying to judge how badly he was hurt. The patch of sand in front of his face was red. Not from blood: the sand itself was red as ocher.

There was a sound like a rapid exhalation, then he felt heat on his skin. He raised himself up on his elbows. The Land Cruiser was ten paces away, upside down, and on fire. Ali staggered to his feet and approached it, searching for the man who’d saved his life. Behind the wrecked vehicle, a storm like the one that the mouth of the bridge had made in his own land was weaving drunkenly back

and forth, dancing like some demented hooligan pleased with the havoc it had wreaked.

He caught a glimpse of an arm behind the flames. He rushed toward the man, but the heat drove him back.

“Please, God,” he moaned, “give me courage.”

As he tried again to breach the flames, the storm lurched forward to greet him. Ali stood his ground, but the Land Cruiser spun around on its roof, swiping his shoulder and knocking him down.

He climbed to his feet and tried to circle around to the missing door, but as he did the wind rose up, fanning the flames.

The wall of heat was impenetrable now, and the storm was playing with the Land Cruiser like a child with a broken top. Ali hacked away, glancing around at the impossible red landscape, wondering if there might be anyone in earshot with the power to undo his calamity. He shouted for help, his eyes still glued to the burning wreck in the hope that a miracle might yet deliver the unconscious

driver from the flames.

The storm moved forward again, coming straight for the Land Cruiser. Ali turned and retreated; when he looked over his shoulder, the vehicle was gone and the darkness was still advancing.

He ran, stumbling on the uneven ground. When his legs finally failed him and he collapsed onto the sand, the bridge was nowhere in sight. He was alone in a red desert. The air was still, now, and

very hot.

After a while he rose to his feet, searching for a patch of shade where he could rest and wait for the cool of the evening. Apart from the red sand there were pebbles and some larger, cracked rocks, but there was no relief from the flatness: not so much as a boulder he could take shelter beside. In one direction there were some low, parched bushes, their trunks no thicker than his fingers, their branches no higher than his knees. He might as well have tried to hide from the sun beneath his own thin beard. He scanned the horizon, but it offered no welcoming destination.

There was no water for washing, but Ali cleaned himself as best he could and prayed. Then he sat cross-legged on the ground, covered his face with his shawl, and lapsed into a sickly sleep.

He woke in the evening and started to walk. Some of the constellations were familiar, but they crossed the sky far closer to the horizon than they should have. Others were completely new to him.

There was no moon, and though the terrain was flat he soon found that he lost his footing if he tried to move too quickly in the dark. When morning came, it brought no perceptible change in his surroundings. Red sand and a few skeletal plants were all that this land seemed to hold.

He slept through most of the day again, stirring only to pray. Increasingly, his sleep was broken by a throbbing pain behind his eyes. The night had been chilly, but he’d never experienced such heat before. He was unsure how much longer he could survive without water. He began to wonder if it would have been better if he’d been taken by the wind inside the bridge or perished in the burning Land Cruiser.

After sunset, he staggered to his feet and continued his hopeful but unguided trek. He had a fever now, and his aching joints begged

him for more rest, but he doubted if he’d wake again if he resigned himself to sleep.

When his feet touched the road, he thought he’d lost his mind. Who would take the trouble to build such a path through a desolate place like this? He stopped and crouched down to examine it. It was gritty with a sparse layer of windblown sand; beneath that was a black substance that felt less hard than stone, but resilient, almost springy.

A road like this must lead to a great city. He followed it.

An hour or two before dawn, bright headlights appeared in the distance. Ali fought down his instinctive fear; in the future such vehicles should be commonplace, not the preserve of bandits and murderers. He stood by the roadside awaiting its arrival.

The Land Cruiser was like none he’d seen before, white with blue markings. There was writing on it, in the same European script as he’d seen on many machine parts and weapons that had made their way into the bazaars, but no words he recognized, let alone understood. One passenger was riding beside the driver; he climbed out, approached Ali, and greeted him in an incomprehensible tongue.

Ali shrugged apologetically. “Salaam aleikom,” he ventured. “Bebakhshid agha, mosarfar hastam. Ba tawarz’ az shoma moharfazat khahesh mikonam.”

The man addressed Ali briefly in his own tongue again, though it was clear now that he did not expect to be understood any more than Ali did. He called out to his companion, gestured to Ali to stay put, then went back to the Land Cruiser. His companion handed him two small machines; Ali tensed, but they didn’t look like any weapons he’d seen.

The man approached Ali again. He held one machine up to the side of his face, then lowered it again and offered it to Ali. Ali took it, and repeated the mimed action.

A woman’s voice spoke in his ear. Ali understood what was happening; he’d seen the Scholars use similar machines to talk with each other over great distances. Unfortunately, the language was still incomprehensible. He was about to reply, when the woman spoke again in what sounded like a third language. Then a fourth, then a fifth. Ali waited patiently, until finally the woman greeted him in stilted Persian.

When Ali replied, she said, “Please wait.” After a few minutes, a new voice spoke. “Peace be upon you.”

“And upon you.”

“Where are you from?” To Ali, this man’s accent sounded exotic, but he spoke Persian with confidence.

“Khurosan.”

“At what time?”

“Four years after the coming of the Scholars.”

“I see.” The Persian speaker switched briefly to a different language; the man on the road, who’d wandered halfway back to his vehicle and was still listening via the second machine, gave a curt reply. Ali was amazed at these people’s hospitality: in the middle of the night, in a matter of minutes, they had found someone who could speak his language.

“How did you come to be on this road?”

“I walked across the desert.”

“Which way? From where? How far did you come?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”

The translator replied bluntly, “Please try.”

Ali was confused. What did it matter? One man, at least, could see how weary he was. Why were they asking him these questions before he’d had a chance to rest?

“Forgive me, sir. I can’t tell you anything; I’m sick from my journey.”

There was an exchange in the native language, followed by an awkward silence. Finally the translator said, “This man will take you to a place where you can stay for a while. Tomorrow we’ll hear your whole story.”

“Thank you, sir. You have done a great thing for me. God will reward you.”

The man on the road walked up to Ali. Ali held out his arms to embrace him in gratitude. The man produced a metal shackle and snapped it around Ali’s wrists.

The camp was enclosed by two high fences topped with glistening ribbons of razor-sharp metal. The space between them was filled with coils of the same material. Outside the fences there was nothing but desert as far as the eye could see. Inside, there were guards, and at night everything was bathed in a constant harsh light. Ali had no doubt that he’d come to a prison, though his hosts kept insisting that this was not the case.

His first night had passed in a daze. He’d been given food and water, examined by a doctor, then shown to a small metal hut that he was to share with three other men. Two of the men, Alex and Tran, knew just enough Persian to greet Ali briefly, but the third, Shahin, was an Iranian, and they could understand each other well enough. The hut’s four beds were arranged in pairs, one above the other; Ali’s habit was to sleep on a mat on the floor, but he didn’t want to offend anyone by declining to follow the local customs. The guards had removed his shackles, then put a bracelet on his left wrist—made from something like paper, but extraordinarily strong—bearing the number 3739. The last numeral was more or less the same shape as a Persian nine; he recognized the others from machine parts, but he didn’t know their values.

Every two hours, throughout the night, a guard opened the door of the hut and shone a light on each of their faces in turn. The first time it happened, Ali thought the guard had come to rouse them from their sleep and take them somewhere, but Shahin explained that these “head counts” happened all night, every night.

The next morning, officials from the camp had taken Ali out in a vehicle and asked him to show them the exact place where he’d arrived through the bridge. He’d done his best, but all of the desert looked the same to him. By midday, he was tempted to designate a spot at random just to satisfy his hosts, but he didn’t want to lie to them. They’d returned to the camp in a sullen mood. Ali couldn’t understand why it was so important to them.

Reza, the Persian translator who’d first spoken with Ali through the machine, explained that he was to remain in the camp until government officials had satisfied themselves that he really was fleeing danger and hadn’t merely come to the future seeking an easy life for himself. Ali understood that his hosts didn’t want to be cheated, but it dismayed him that they felt the need to imprison him while they made up their minds. Surely there was a family in a nearby town who would have let him stay with them for a day or two, just as his father would have welcomed any travelers passing through their village.

The section of the camp where he’d been placed was fenced off from the rest and contained about a hundred people. They were all travelers like himself, and they came from every nation Ali had heard of, and more. Most were young men, but there were also women, children, entire families. In his village, Ali would have run to greet the children, lifted them up and kissed them to make them smile, but here they looked so sad and dispirited that he was afraid the approach of even the friendliest stranger might frighten them.

Shahin was a few years older than Ali, but he had spent his whole life as a student. He had traveled just two decades through time, escaping a revolution in his country. He explained that the part of the camp they were in was called “Stage One”; they were being kept apart from the others so they wouldn’t learn too much about the way their cases would be judged. “They’re afraid we’ll embellish the details if we discover what kind of questions they ask, or what kind of story succeeds.”

“How long have you been here?” Ali asked.

“Nine months. I’m still waiting for my interview.”

“Nine months!”

Shahin smiled wearily. “Some people have been in Stage One for a year. But don’t worry, you won’t have to wait that long. When I arrived here, the Center Manager had an interesting policy: nobody would have their cases examined until they asked him for the correct application form. Of course, nobody knew that they were required to do that, and he had no intention of telling them. Three months ago, he was transferred to another camp. Wen I asked the woman who replaced him what I needed to do to havhe my claims heard, she told me straightaway: ask for Form 866.”

Ali couldn’t quite follow all this. Shahin explained further.

Ali said, “What good will it do me to get this piece of paper? I can’t read their language, and I can barely write my own.”

“That’s no problem. They’ll let you talk to an educated man or woman, an expert in these matters. That person will fill out the form for you, in English. You only need to explain your problem, and sign your name at the bottom of the paper.”

“English?” Ali had heard about the English; before he was born they’d tried to invade both Hindustan and Khurosan, without success. “How did that language come here?” He was sure that he

was not in England.

“They conquered this country two centuries ago. They crossed

the world in wooden ships to take it for their king.”

“Oh.” Ali felt dizzy; his mind still hadn’t fully accepted the journey he’d made. “What about Khurosan?” he joked. “Have they conquered that as well?”

Shahin shook his head. “No.”

“What is it like now? Is there peace there?” Once this strange business with the English was done, perhaps he could travel to his

homeland. However much it had changed with time, he was sure he could make a good life there.

Shahin said, “There is no nation called Khurosan in this world.

Part of that area belongs to Hindustan, part to Iran, part to Russia.”

Ali stared at him, uncomprehending. “How can that be?”

However much his people fought among themselves, they would never have let invaders take their land.

“I don’t know the full history,” Shahin said, “but you need to understand something. This is not your future. The things that happened in the places you know are not a part of the history of this world. There is no pol-e-waqt that connects past and future in the

same world. Once you cross the bridge, everything changes, including the past.”

With Shahin beside him, Ali approached one of the government officials, a man named James, and addressed him in the English he’d learned by heart. “Please, Mr. James, can I have Form 866?”

James rolled his eyes and said, “Okay, okay! We were going to get around to you sooner or later.” He turned to Shahin and said, “I wish you’d stop scaring the new guys with stories about being stuck

in Stage One forever. You know things have changed since Colonel Kurtz went north.”

Shahin translated all of this for Ali. “Colonel Kurtz” was Shahin’s nickname for the previous Center Manager, but everyone, even the guards, had adopted it. Shahin called Tran “The Rake,” and Alex was “Denisovich of the Desert.”

Three weeks later, Ali was called to a special room, where he sat with Reza. A lawyer in a distant city, a woman called Ms. Evans, spoke with them in English through a machine that Reza called a “speakerphone.” With Reza translating, she asked Ali about everything: his village, his family, his problems with the Scholars. He’d been asked about some of this the night he’d arrived, but he’d been very tired then and hadn’t had a chance to put things clearly.

Three days after the meeting, he was called to see James. Ms. Evans had written everything in English on the special form and sent it to them. Reza read through the form, translating everything for Ali to be sure that it was correct. Then Ali wrote his name on the bottom of the form. James told him, “Before we make a decision, someone will come from the city to interview you. That might take a while, so you’ll have to be patient.”

Ali said, in English, “No problem.”

He felt he could wait for a year, if he had to. The first four weeks had gone quickly, with so much that was new to take in. He had barely had space left in his crowded mind to be homesick, and he tried not to worry about Hassan and his mother. Many things about the camp disturbed him, but his luck had been good: the infamous “Colonel Kurtz” had left, so he’d probably be out in three or four months. The cities of this nation, Shahin assured him, were mostly on the distant coast, an infinitely milder place than the desert around the camp. Ali might be able to get a laboring job while studying English at night, or he might find work on a farm. He hadn’t quite started his new life yet, but he was safe, and everything looked hopeful.

By the end of his third month Ali was growing restless. Most days he played cards with Shahin, Tran, and a Hindustani man named Rakesh, while Alex lay on his bunk reading books in Russian. Rakesh had a cassette player and a vast collection of tapes. The songs were mostly in Hindi, a language that contained just enough Persian words to give Ali some sense of what the lyrics were about: usually love, or sorrow, or both.

The metal huts were kept tolerably cool by machines, but there was no shade outside. At night the men played soccer, and Ali sometimes joined in, but after falling badly on the concrete, twice, he decided it wasn’t the game for him. Shahin told him that it was a game for grass; from his home in Tehran, he’d watched dozens of nations compete at it. Ali felt a surge of excitement at the thought of all the wonders of this world, still tantalizingly out of reach: in Stage One, TV, radio, newspapers, and telephones were all forbidden. Even Rakesh’s tapes had been checked by the guards, played from start to finish to be sure that they didn’t contain secret lessons in passing the interview. Ali couldn’t wait to reach Stage Two, to catch his first glimpse of what life might be like in a world where anyone could watch history unfolding and speak at their leisure with anyone else.

English was the closest thing to a common language for all the people in the camp. Shahin did his best to get Ali started, and once he could converse in broken English, some of the friendlier—guards let him practice with them, often to their great amusement. “Not every car is called a Land Cruiser,” Gary explained. “I think you must come from Toyota-stan.”

Shahin was called to his interview. Ali prayed for him, then sat on the floor of the hut with Tran and tried to lose himself in the mercurial world of the cards. What he liked most about these friendly games was that good and bad luck rarely lasted long, and even when they did it barely mattered. Every curse and every blessing was light as a feather.

Shahin returned four hours later, looking exhausted but satis—

fied. “I’ve told them my whole story,” he said. “It’s in their hands now.” The official who’d interviewed him had given him no hint as to what the decision would be, but Shahin seemed relieved just to have had a chance to tell someone who mattered everyt hing he’d

suffered, everything that had forced him from his home.

That night Shahin was told that he was moving to Stage Two in half an hour. He embraced Ali. “See you in freedom, brother.”

“God willing.”

After Shahin was gone, Ali lay on his bunk for four days, refusing to eat, getting up only to wash and pray. His friend’s departure was just the trigger; the raw grief of his last days in the valley came flooding back, deepened by the unimaginable gulf that now separated him from his family. Had Hassan escaped from the Scholars? Or was he fighting on the front line of their endless war, risking death every hour of every day? With the only mosarfar-e-waqt Ali knew now dead, how would he ever get news from his family orsend them his assistance?

Tran whispered gruff consolations in his melodic English.

“Don’t worry, kid. Everything okay. Wait and see.”

Worse than the waiting was the sense of waste: all the hours trickling away, with no way to harness them for anything useful. Ali tried to improve his English, but there were some concepts he could get no purchase on without someone who understood his own language to help him. Reza rarely left the government offices for the compound, and when he did he was too busy for Ali’s questions.

Ali tried to make a garden, planting an assortment of seeds that he’d saved from the fruit that came with some of the meals. Most of Stage One was covered in concrete, but he found a small patch of bare ground behind his hut that was sheltered from the fiercest sunlight. He carried water from the drinking tap on the other side of the soccer ground and sprinkled it over the soil four times a day.

Nothing happened, though. The seeds lay dormant; the land would not accept them.

Three weeks after Shahin’s departure, Alex had his interview, and left. A week later, Tran followed. Ali started sleeping through the heat of the day, waking just in time to join the queue for the evening meal, then playing cards with Rakesh and his friends until dawn.

By the end of his sixth month, Ali felt a taint of bitterness creeping in beneath the numbness and boredom. He wasn’t a thief or a murderer, he’d committed no crime. Why couldn’t these people set him free to work, to fend for himself instead of taking their charity, to prepare himself for his new life?

One night, tired of the endless card game, Ali wandered out from Rakesh’s hut earlier than usual. One of the guards, a woman named Cheryl, was standing outside her office, smoking. Ali murmured a greeting to her as he passed; she was not one of the friendly ones, but he tried to be polite to everyone.

“Why don’t you just go home?” she said.

Ali paused, unsure whether to dignify this with a response. He’d long ago learned that most of the guards’ faces became stony if he tried to explain why he’d left his village; somewhere, somehow it had been drummed into them that nothing their prisoners said could be believed.

“Nobody invited you here,” she said bluntly. “We take twelve thousand people from the UN camps every year. But you still think you’re entitled to march right in as if you owned the place.”

Ali had only heard mention of these “UN camps” since his arrival here. Shahin had explained that there’d probably been a dusty tent-city somewhere on the border of his country, where—if he’d survived the journey across the Scholars’ heartland—he could have waited five, or ten, or fifty years for the slim chance that some beneficent future government might pluck him from the crowd and

grant him a new life.

Ali shrugged. “I’m here. From me, big tragedy for your nation? I’m honest man and hard worker. I’m not betray your hospitality.”

Cheryl snickered. Ali wasn’t sure if she was sneering at his English or his sentiments, but he persisted. “Your leaders did agreement with other nations. Anyone asking protection gets fair hearing.” Shahin had impressed that point on Ali. It was the law, and in this society the law was everything. “That is my right.”

Cheryl coughed on her cigarette. “Dream on, Ahmad.”

“My name is Ali.”

“Whatever.” She reached out and caught him by the wrist, then held up his hand to examine his ID bracelet. “Dream on, 3739.”

James called Ali to his office and handed him a letter. Reza translated it for him. After eight months of waiting, in six days’ time he would finally have his interview.

Ali waited nervously for Ms. Evans to call him to help him prepare, as she’d promised she would when they’d last spoken, all those months before. On the morning of the appointed day, he was summoned again to James’s office, and taken with with Reza to the room with the speakerphone, the “interview room. A different lawyer, a man called Mr. Cole, explained to Ali that Ms Evans had left her job and he had taken over Ali’s case. He told Ali that everything would be fine, and he’d be listening carefully to Ali’s interview and making sure that everything went well.

When Cole had hung up, Reza snorted derisively. “You know how these clowns are chosen? They put in tenders, and it goes to the lowest bidder.” Ali didn’t entirely understand, but this didn’t sound encouraging. Reza caught the expression on Ali’s face, and added, “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. Fleeing from the Scholars is flavor of the month.”

Three hours later, Ali was back in the interview room.

The official who’d come from the city introduced himself as John Fernandez. Reza wasn’t with them; Fernandez had brought a different interpreter with him, a man named Parviz. Mr. Cole joined them on the speakerphone. Fernandez switched on a cassette recorder and asked Ali to swear on the Quran to give truthful answers to all his questions.

Fernandez asked him for his name, his date of birth, and the place and time he’d fled. Ali didn’t know his birthday or his exact age; he thought he was about eighteen years old, but it was not the custom in his village to record such things. He did know that at the time he’d left his uncle’s house, twelve hundred and sixty-five years had passed since the Prophet’s flight to Medina.

“Tell me about your problem,” Fernandez said. “Tell me why you’ve come here.”

Shahin had told Ali that the history of this world was different from his own, so Ali explained carefully about Khurosan’s long war, about the meddlers and the warlords they’d created, about the coming of the Scholars. How the Shi’a were taken by force to fight in the most dangerous positions. How Hassan was taken. How his father had been killed. Fernandez listened patiently, sometimes writing on the sheets of paper in front of him as Ali spoke, interrupting him only to encourage him to fill in the gaps in the story, to make everything clear.

When he had finally recounted everything, Ali felt an overwhelming sense of relief. This man had not poured scorn on his words the way the guards had; instead, he had allowed Ah to speak openly about all the injustice his family and his people had suffered.

Fernandez had some more questions.

“Tell me about your village, and your uncle’s village. How long would it take to travel between them on foot?”

“Half a day, sir.”

“Half a day. That’s what you said in your statement. But in your entry interview, you said a day.” Ali was confused. Parviz explained that his “statement” was the written record of his conversation with Ms. Evans, which she had sent to the government; his “entry interview” was when he’d first arrived in the camp and been questioned for ten or fifteen minutes.

“I only meant it was a short trip, sir, you didn’t have to stay somewhere halfway overnight. You could complete it in one day.”

“Hmm. Okay. Now, when the smuggler took you from your uncle’s village, which direction was he driving?”

“Along the valley, sir.”

“North, south, east, west?”

“I’m not sure.” Ali knew these words, but they were not part of the language of everyday life. He knew the direction for prayer, and he knew the direction to follow to each neighboring village.

“You know that the sun rises in the east, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So if you faced in the direction in which you were being driven,

would the sun have risen on your left, on your right, behind you, where?”

“It was nighttime.”

“Yes, but you must have faced the same direction in the valley in the morning, a thousand times. So where would the sun have risen?” Ali closed his eyes and pictured it. “On my right.”

Fernandez sighed. “Okay. Finally. So you were driving north. Now tell me about the land. The smuggler drove you along the

valley. And then what? What kind of landscape did you see, between your valley and the bridge?”

Ali froze. What would the government do with this information? Send someone back through their own bridge, to find and destroy the one he’d used? The mosarfar-e-waqt had warned him not to tell anyone the way to the bridge. That man was dead, but it was unlikely that he’d worked alone; everyone had a brother, a son, a cousin to help them. If the family of the mosarfar-e-waqt could trace such a misfortune to Ali, the dead man’s threat against his uncle would be carried through.

Ali said, “I was under a blanket, I didn’t see anything.”

“You were under a blanket? For how many days?”

“Three.”

“Three days. What about eating, drinking, going to the toilet?”

“He blindfolded me,” Ali lied.

“Really? You never mentioned that before.” Fernandez shuffled through his papers. “It’s not in your statement.”

“I didn’t think it was important, sir.” Ali’s stomach tightened. What was happening? He was sure he’d won this man’s trust. And he’d earned it: he’d told him the truth about everything, until now. What difference did it make to his problem with the Scholars, which mountains and streams he’d glimpsed on the way to the bridge? He had sworn to tell the truth, but he knew it would be a far greater sin to risk his uncle’s life.

Fernandez had still more questions, about life in the village. Some were easy, but some were strange, and he kept asking for numbers, numbers, numbers: how much did it weigh, how much did it cost, how long did it take? What time did the bazaar open? Ali had no idea, he’d been busy with farmwork in the mornings, he’d never gone there so early that it might have been closed. How many people came to Friday prayers in the Shi’a mosque? None, since the Scholars had arrived. Before that? Ali couldn’t remember. More than a hundred? Ali hesitated. “I think so.” He’d never counted them, why would he have?

When the interview finished, Ali’s mind was still three questions behind, worrying that his answers might not have been clear enough. Fernandez was rewinding the tapes, shaking his hand formally, leaving the room.

Mr. Cole said, “I think that went well. Do you have any questions you want to ask me?”

Ali said, “No, sir.” Parviz had already departed.

“All right. Good luck.” The speaker phone clicked off. Ali sat at the table, waiting for the guard to come and take him back to the compound.

Entering Stage Two, Ali felt as if he had walked into the heart of a bustling town. Everything was noise, shouting, music. He’d sometimes heard snatches of this cacophony wafting across the fenced-off “sterile area” that separated the parts of the camp, but now he was in the thick of it. The rows of huts, and the crowds moving between them, seemed to stretch on forever. There must have been a thousand people here, all of them unwilling travelers fleeing the cruelties

of their own histories.

He’d moved his small bag of belongings into the hut allocated to him, but none of his new roommates were there to greet him. He wandered through the compound, dizzy from the onslaught of new sights and sounds. He felt as if he’d just had a heavy cloth unwound from around his head, and his unveiled senses were still struggling to adjust. If he was reeling from this, how would he feel when he stepped onto the streets of a real city, in freedom?

The evening meal was over, the sun had set, and the heat outside had become tolerable. Almost everyone seemed to be out walking, or congregating around the entrances of their friends’ huts, taped music blaring through the open doorways. At the end of one row of huts, Ali came to a larger building, where thirty or forty people were seated. He entered the room and saw a small box with a window on it, through which he could see an oddly-colored, distorted, constantly changing view. A woman was dancing and singing in Hindi.

“TV,” Ali marveled. This was what Shahin had spoken about; now the whole world was open to his gaze.

An African man beside him shook his head. “It’s a video. The TV’s on in the other common room.”

Ali lingered, watching the mesmerizing images. The woman was very beautiful, and though she was immodestly dressed by the standards of his village, she seemed dignified and entirely at ease. The Scholars would probably have stoned her to death, but Ali would have been happy to be a beggar in Mumbai if the streets there were filled with sights like this.

As he left the room, the sky was already darkening. The camp’s floodlights had come on, destroying any hope of a glimpse of the stars. He asked someone, “Where is the TV, please?” and followed their directions.

As he walked into the second room, he noticed something different in the mood at once; the people here were tense, straining with attention. When Ali turned to the TV, it showed an eerily familiar sight: an expanse of desert, not unlike that outside the camp. Helicopters, four or five, flew over the landscape. In the distance, a tight funnel of swirling dust, dancing across the ground.

Ali stood riveted. The landscape on the screen was brightly lit, which meant that what he was watching had already happened: earlier in the day, someone had located the mouth of the bridge. He peered at the small images of the helicopters. He’d only ever seen a broken one on the ground, the toy of one warlord brought down by a rival, but he recognized the guns protruding from the sides. Whoever had found the bridge, it was now in the hands of soldiers.

As he watched, a Land Cruiser came charging out of the storm. Then another, and another. This was not like his own arrival; the convoy was caked with dust, but more or less intact. Then the helicopters descended, guns chattering. For a few long seconds Ali thought he was about to witness a slaughter, but the soldiers were firing consistently a meter or so ahead of the Land Cruisers. They were trying to corral the vehicles back into the bridge.

The convoy broke up, the individual drivers trying to steer their way past the blockade. Curtains of bullets descended around them, driving them back toward the meandering storm. Ali couldn’t see the people inside, but he could imagine their terror and confusion. This was the future? This was their sanctuary? Whatever tyranny they were fleeing, to have braved the labyrinth of the pol-e-waqt only to be greeted with a barrage of gunfire was a fate so cruel that they must have doubted their senses, their sanity, their God.

The helicopters wheeled around the mouth of the bridge like hunting dogs, indefatigable, relentless in their purpose. Ali found the grim dance unbearable, but he couldn’t turn away. One of the Land Cruisers came to a halt; it wasn’t safely clear of the storm, but this must have seemed wiser than dodging bullets. Doors opened and people tumbled out. Weirdly, the picture went awry at exactly that moment, clumps of flickering color replacing the travelers’ faces.

Soldiers approached, guns at the ready, gesturing and threatening, forcing the people back into the car. A truck appeared, painted in dappled green and brown. A chain was tied between the vehicles. Someone emerged from the Land Cruiser; the face was obscured again, but Ali could see it was a woman. Her words could not be heard, but Ali could see her speaking with her hands, begging, chastising, pleading for mercy. The soldiers forced her back inside.

The truck started its engines. Sand sprayed from its wheels. Two soldiers climbed into the back, their weapons trained on the Land Cruiser. Then they towed their cargo back into the storm.

Ali watched numbly as the other two Land Cruisers were rounded up. The second stalled, and the soldiers descended on it. The driver of the third gave up and steered his own course into the mouth of the bridge.

The soldiers’ truck emerged from the storm, alone. The helicopters spiraled away, circling the funnel at a more prudent distance. Ali looked at the faces of the other people in the room; everyone was pale, some were weeping.

The picture changed. Two men were standing, indoors somewhere. One was old, white haired, wizened. In front of him a younger man was talking, replying to unseen questioners. Both were smiling proudly.

Ali could only make sense of a few of the words, but gradually

lie pieced some things together. These men were from the government, and they were explaining the events of the day. They had sent the soldiers to “protect” the bridge, to ensure that no more criminals and barbarians from the past emerged to threaten the peaceful life of the nation. They had been patient with these intruders for far too long. From this day on, nobody would pass.

“What about the law ?” someone was asking. An agreement had been signed: any traveler who reached this country and asked for protection had a right to a fair hearing.

“A bill has been drafted, and will be introduced in the House tomorrow. Once passed, it will take force from nine o’clock this morning. The land within twenty kilometers of the bridge will, for the purposes of the Act, no longer be part of this nation. People entering the exclusion zone will have no basis in law to claim our protection.”

Confused, Ali muttered, “Chi goft?” A young man sitting nearby turned to face him. “Salaam, chetori? Fahim hastam.”

Fahim’s accent was unmistakably Khurosani. Ali smiled. “Ali hastam. Shoma chetori?”

Fahim explained what the man on the TV had said. Anyone emerging from the mouth of the bridge, now, might as well be on the other side of the world. The government here would accept no obligation to assist them. “If it’s not their land anymore,” he mused, “maybe they’ll give it to us. We can found a country of our own, a tribe of nomads in a caravan following the bridge across the desert.”

Ali said nervously, “My interview was today. They said something about nine o’clock—”

Fahim shook his head dismissively. “You made your claim months ago, right? So you’re still covered by the old law.”

Ali tried to believe him. “You’re still waiting for your decision?”

“Hardly. I got refused three years ago.”

“Three years? They didn’t send you back?”

“I’m fighting it in the courts. I can’t go back; I’d be dead in a week.” There were dark circles under Fahim’s eyes. If he’d been refused three years before, he’d probably spent close to four years in this prison.

Fahim, it turned out, was one of Ali’s roommates. He took him to meet the other twelve Khurosanis in Stage Two, and the whole group sat together in one of the huts, talking until dawn. Ali was overjoyed to be among people who knew his language, his time, his customs. It didn’t matter that most were from provinces far from his own, that a year ago he would have thought of them as exotic strangers.

When he examined their faces too closely, though, it was hard to remain joyful. They had all fled the Scholars, like him. They were all in fear for their lives. And they had all been locked up for a very long time: two years, three years, four years, five.

In the weeks that followed, Ali gave himself no time to brood on his fate. Stage Two had English classes, and though Fahim and the others had long outgrown them, Ali joined in. He finally learned the names for the European numbers and letters that he’d seen on weapons and machinery all his life, and the teacher encouraged him to give up translating individual words from Persian, and reshape whole sentences, whole thoughts, into the alien tongue.

Every evening, Ali joined Fahim in the common room to watch the news on TV. There was no doubt that the place they had come to was peaceful and prosperous; when war was mentioned, it was always in some distant land. The rulers here did not govern by force; they were chosen by the people, and even now this competition was in progress. The men who had sent the soldiers to block the bridge were asking the people to choose them again.

When the guard woke Ali at eight in the morning, he didn’t complain, though he’d had only three hours’ sleep. He showered quickly, then went to the compound’s south gate. It no longer seemed strange to him to move from place to place this way: to wait for guards to come and unlock a succession of doors and escort him through the fenced-off maze that separated the compound from the government offices.

James and Reza were waiting in the office. Ali greeted them, his mouth dry. James said, “Reza will read the decision for you. It’s about ten pages, so be patient. Then if you have any questions, let me know.”

Reza read from the papers without meeting Ali’s eyes. Fernandez, the man who’d interviewed Ali, had written that there were discrepancies between things Ali had said at different times, and gaps in his knowledge of the place and time he claimed to come from. What’s more, an expert in the era of the Scholars had listened to the tape of Ali talking, and declared that his speech was not of that time. “Perhaps this man’s great-grandfather fled Khurosan in the time of the Scholars, and some sketchy information has been passed down the generations. The applicant himself, however, employs a number of words that were not in use until decades later.”

Ali waited for the litany of condemnation to come to an end, but it seemed to go on forever. “I have tried to give the applicant the benefit of the doubt,” Fernandez had written, “but the overwhelming weight of evidence supports the conclusion that he has lied about his origins, his background, and all of his claims.” Ali sat with his head in his hands.

James said, “Do you understand what this means? You have seven days to lodge an appeal. If you don’t lodge an appeal, you will have to return to your country.”

Reza added, “You should call your lawyer. Have you got money for a phone card?”

Ali nodded. He’d taken a job cleaning the mess; he had thirty points in his account already.

Every time Ali called, his lawyer was busy. Fahim helped Ali fill out the appeal form, and they handed it to James two hours before the deadline. “Lucky Colonel Kurtz is gone,” Fahim told Ali. “Or that form would have sat in the fax tray for at least a week.”

Wild rumors swept the camp: the government was about to change, and everyone would be set free. Ali had seen the government’s rivals giving their blessing to the use of soldiers to block the bridge; he doubted that they’d show the prisoners in the desert much mercy if they won.

When the day of the election came, the government was returned, more powerful than ever.

That night, as they were preparing to sleep, Fahim saw Alistaring at the row of white scars that criss-crossed his chest. “I use a razor blade,” Fahim admitted. “It makes me feel better. The one power I’ve got left: to choose my own pain.”

“I’ll never do that,” Ali swore.

Fahim gave a hollow laugh. “It’s cheaper than cigarettes.”

Ali closed his eyes and tried to picture freedom, but all he saw was blackness. The past was gone, the future was gone, and the world had shrunk to this prison.

“Ali, wake up, come see!”

Daniel was shaking him. Ali swatted his hands away angrily.

The African was one of his closest friends, and there’d been a time when he could still drag Ali along to English classes or the gym, but since the appeal tribunal had rejected him, Ali had no taste for any—

thing. “Let me sleep.”

“There are people. Outside the fence.”

“Escaped?”

“No, no. From the city!”

Ali clambered off the bunk. He splashed water on his face, then followed his friend.

A crowd of prisoners had gathered at the southwest corner of the fence, blocking the view, but Ali could hear people on the outside, shouting and banging drums. Daniel tried to clear a path, but it was impossible. “Get on my shoulders.” He ducked down and motioned to Ali.

Ali laughed. “It’s not that important.”

Daniel raised a hand angrily, as if to slap him. “Get up, you have to see.” He was serious. Ali obeyed.

From his vantage, he could see that the crowd ofprisoners pressed against the inner fence was mirrored by another crowd struggling to reach the outer one. Police, some on horses, were trying to stop them. Ali peered into the scrum, amazed. Dozens of young people, men and women, were slithering out of the grip of the policemen and running forward. Some distance away across the desert stood a brightly colored bus. The word freedom was painted across it, in English, Persian, Arabic, and probably ten or twelve languages that Ali couldn’t read. The people were chanting, “Set them free! Set them free!” One young woman reached the fence and clung to it, shouting defiantly. Four policemen descended on her and tore her away.

A cloud of dust was moving along the desert road. More police cars were coming, reinforcements. A knife twisted in Ali’s heart. This gesture of friendship astonished him, but it would lead nowhere. In five or ten minutes, the protesters would all be rounded up and carried away.

A young man outside the fence met Ali’s gaze. “Hey! My name’s Ben.”

“I’m Ali.”

Ben looked around frantically. “What’s your number?”

“What?”

“We’ll write to you. Give us your number. They have to deliver the letters if we include the ID number.”

“Behind you!” Ali shouted, but the warning was too late. One policeman had him in a headlock, and another was helping wrestle him to the ground.

Ali felt Daniel stagger. The crowd on his own side was trying to fend off a wave of guards with batons and shields.

Ali dropped to his feet. “They want our ID numbers,” he told Daniel. Daniel looked around at the melee. “Got anything to write on?

Ali checked his back pocket. The small notebook and pen it was his habit to carry were still there. He rested the notebook on Daniel’s back, and wrote, “Ali 3739 Daniel 5420.” Who else? He quickly added Fahim and a few others.

He scrabbled on the ground for a stone, then wrapped the paper around it. Daniel lofted him up again.

The police were battling with the protesters, grabbing them by the hair, dragging them across the dirt. Ali couldn’t see anyone who didn’t have more pressing things to worry about than receiving his message. He lowered his arm, despondent.

Then he spotted someone standing by the bus. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He, or she, raised a hand in greeting. Ali waved back, then let the stone fly. It fell short, but the distant figure ran forward and retrieved it from the sand.

Daniel collapsed beneath him, and the guards moved in with batons and tear gas. Ali covered his eyes with his forearm, weeping, alive again with hope.

Luminous

I woke disoriented, unsure why. I knew I was Iying on the narrow, lumpy single bed in Room 22 of the Hotel Fleapit; after almost a month in Shanghai, the topography of the mattress was depressingly familiar. But there was something wrong with the way I was Iying; every muscle in my neck and shoulders was protesting that nobody could end up in this position from natural causes, however badly they’d slept.

And I could smell blood.

I opened my eyes. A woman I’d never seen before was kneeling over me, slicing into my left tricep with a disposable scalpel. I was lying on my side, facing the wall, one hand and one ankle cuffed to the head and foot of the bed.

Something cut short the surge of visceral panic before I could start stupidly thrashing about, instinctively trying to break free. Maybe an even more ancient response-catatonia in the face of danger-took on the adrenaline and won. Or maybe I just decided that I had no right to panic when I’d been expecting something like this for weeks.

I spoke softly, in English. “What you’re in the process of hacking out of me is a necrotrap. One heartbeat without oxygenated blood, and the cargo gets fried.”

My amateur surgeon was compact, muscular, with short black hair. Not Chinese: Indonesian, maybe. If she was surprised that I’d woken prematurely, she didn’t show it. The gene-tailored hepatocytes I’d acquired in Hanoi could degrade almost anything from morphine to curare; it was a good thing the local anaesthetic was beyond their reach.

Without taking her eyes off her work, she said, “Look on the table next to the bed.”

I twisted my head around. She’d set up a loop of plastic tubing full of blood-mine, presumably-circulated and aerated by a small pump. The stem of a large funnel fed into the loop, the intersection controlled by a valve of some kind. Wires trailed from the pump to a sensor taped to the inside of my elbow, synchronizing the artificial pulse with the real. I had no doubt that she could tear the trap from my vein and insert it into this substitute without missing a beat.

I cleared my throat and swallowed. “Not good enough. The trap knows my blood pressure profile exactly. A generic heartbeat won’t fool it.”

“You’re bluffing .” But she hesitated, scalpel raised. The hand-held MRI scanner she’d used to find the trap would have revealed its basic configuration, but few fine details of the engineering-and nothing at all about the software.

“I’m telling you the truth.” I looked her squarely in the eye, which wasn’t easy given our awkward geometry. “It’s new, it’s Swedish. You anchor it in a vein forty-eight hours in advance, put yourself through a range of typical activities so it can memorize the rhythms ... then you inject the cargo into the trap. Simple, foolproof, effective.” Blood trickled down across my chest onto the sheet. I was suddenly very glad that I hadn’t buried the thing deeper, after all.

“So how do you retrieve the cargo, yourself?”

“That would be telling.”

“Then tell me now, and save yourself some trouble.” She rotated the scalpel between thumb and forefinger impatiently. My skin did a cold burn all over, nerve ends jangling, capillaries closing down as blood dived for cover.

I said, “Trouble gives me hypertension.”

She smiled down at me thinly, conceding the stalemate-then peeled off one stained surgical glove, took out her notepad, and made a call to a medical equipment supplier. She listed some devices which would get around the problem-a blood pressure probe, a more sophisticated pump, a suitable computerized interface-arguing heatedly in fluent Mandarin to extract a promise of a speedy delivery. Then she put down the notepad and placed her ungloved hand on my shoulder.

“You can relax now. We won’t have long to wait.”

I squirmed, as if angrily shrugging off her hand-and succeeded in getting some blood on her skin. She didn’t say a word, but she must have realized at once how careless she’d been; she climbed off the bed and headed for the washbasin, and I heard the water running.

Then she started retching.

I called out cheerfulIy, “Let me know when you’re ready for the antidote.” l I heard her approach, and I turned to face her. She was ashen, her face contorted with nausea, eyes and nose streaming mucus and tears.

“Tell me where it is!”

“Uncuff me, and I’ll get it for you.”

“No! No deals!”

“Fine. Then you’d better start looking, yourself.”

She picked up the scalpel and brandished it in my face. “Screw the cargo. I’ll do it!” She was shivering like a feverish child, uselessly trying ~ to stem the flood from her nostrils with the back of her hand. ~ I

I said coldly, “If you cut me again, you’ll lose more than the cargo.”

She turned away and vomited; it was thin and gray, blood-streaked. The toxin was persuading cells in her stomach lining to commit suicide en masse.

“Uncuff me. It’ll kill you. It doesn’t take long.”

She wiped her mouth, steeled herself, made as if to speak-then started puking again. I knew, first hand, exactly how bad she was feeling. Keeping it down was like trying to swallow a mixture of shit and sulphuric acid. Bringing it up was like evisceration.

I said, “In thirty seconds, you’ll be too weak to help yourself-even if I told you where to look. So if I’m not free ...”

She produced a gun and a set of keys, uncuffed me, then stood by the foot of the bed, shaking badly but keeping me targeted. I dresses quickly, ignoring her threats, bandaging my arm with a miraculously clean spare sock before putting on a T-shirt and a jacket. She sagged to her knees, still aiming the gun more or less in my direction-but her eyes were swollen half-shut brimming with yellow fluid. I thought about trying to disarm her, but it didn’t seem worth the risk.

I packed my remaining clothes, then glanced around the room as if I might have left something behind. But everything that really mattered was in my veins; Alison had taught me that that was the only way to travel.

I turned to the burglar. “There is no antidote. But the toxin won’t kill you. You’ll just wish it would, for the next twelve hours. Goodbye.”

As I headed for the door, hairs rose suddenly on the back of my neck. It occurred to me that she might not take me at my word-and might fire a par ting shot, believing she had nothing to lose.

Turning the handle, without looking back, I said, “But if you come after me-next time, Ill kill you.”

That was a lie, but it seemed to do the trick. As I pulled the door shut behind me, I heard her drop the gun and start vomiting again.

Halfway down the stairs, the euphoria of escape began to give way to a bleaker perspective. If one careless bounty hunter could find me, her more methodical colleagues couldn’t be far behind. Industrial Algebra was closing in on us. If Alison didn’t gain access to Luminous soon, we’d have no choice but to destroy the map. And even that would only be buying time.

I paid the desk clerk for the room until the next morning, stressing that my companion should not be disturbed, and added a suitable tip to compensate for the mess the cleaners would find. The toxin denatured in air; the bloodstains would be harmless in a matter of hours. The clerk eyed me suspiciously, but said nothing.

Outside, it was a mild, cloudless summer morning. It was barely six o’clock, but Kongjiang Lu was already crowded with pedestrians, cyclists buses-and a few ostentatious chauffeured limousines, ploughing through the traffic at about ten kph. It looked like the night shift had just emerged from the Intel factory down the road; most of the passing cyclists were wearing the orange, logo-emblazoned overalls.

Two blocks from the hotel I stopped dead, my legs almost giving way beneath me. It wasn’t just shock-a delayed reaction, a belated acceptance of how close I’d come to being slaughtered; The burglar’s clinical violence was chilling enough-but what it implied was infinitely more disturbing.

Industrial Algebra was paying big money, violating international law, taking serious risks with their corporate and personal futures. The arcane abstraction of the defect was being dragged into the world of blood and dust, boardrooms and assassins, power and pragmatism.

And the closest thing to certainty humanity had ever known was in danger of dissolving into quicksand.

It had all started out as a joke. Argument for argument’s sake. Alison and her infuriating heresies.

“A mathematical theorem,” she’d proclaimed, “only becomes true when a physical system tests it out: when the system’s behavior depends in some way on the theorem being true or false.”

It was June 1994. We were sitting in a small paved courtyard, having just emerged yawning and blinking into the winter sunlight from the final lecture in a one-semester course on the philosophy of mathematics-a bit of-light relief from the hard grind of the real stuff. We had fifteen minutes to kill before meeting some friends for lunch. It was a social conversation-verging on mild flirtation-nothing more. Maybe there were demented academics lurking in dark crypts somewhere, who held views on the nature of mathematical that they were willing to die for. But we were twenty years old, and we knew it was all angels on the head of a pin.

I said, “Physical systems don’t create mathematics. Nothing creates mathematics-it’s timeless. All of number theory would still be exactly the same, even if the universe contained nothing but a single electron.”

Alison snorted. “Yes, because even one electron, plus a space-time to put it in, needs all of quantum mechanics and all of general relativity-and all the mathematical infrastructure they entail. One particle floating in a quantum vacuum needs half the major results of group theory, functional analysis, differential geometry—”

“Okay, okay! I get the point. But if that’s the case ... the events in the first picosecond after the Big Bang would have ‘constructed’ every last mathematical truth required by any physical system, all the way to the Big Crunch. Once you’ve got the mathematics that underpins the Theory of Everything ... that’s it, that’s all you ever need. End of story.”

“But it’s not. To apply the Theory of Everything to a particular system, you still need all the mathematics for dealing with that system-which could include results far beyond the mathematics that the TOE itself requires. I mean, fifteen billion years after the Big Bang, someone can still come along and prove, say ... Fermat’s Last Theorem.” Andrew Wiles at Princeton had recently announced a proof of the famous conjecture, although his work was still being scrutinized by his colleagues, and the final verdict wasn’t yet in. “Physics never needed that before.”

I protested, “What do you mean, ‘before’? Fermat’s Last Theorem never has-and never will-have anything to do with any branch of physics.”

Alison smiled sneakily. “No branch-no. But only because the class of physical systems whose behavior depends on it is so ludicrously specific: the brains of mathematicians who are trying to validate the Wiles proof.

“Think about it. Once you start trying to prove a theorem, then even if the mathematics is so ‘pure’ that it has no relevance to any other object in the universe ... you’ve just made it relevant to yourself. You have to choose some physical process to test the theorem-whether you use a computer, or a pen and paper ... or just close your eyes and shuffle neurotransmitters. There’s no such thing as a proof that doesn’t rely on physical events-and whether they’re inside or outside your skull doesn’t make them any less real.”

“Fair enough,” I conceded warily. “But that doesn’t mean—”

“And maybe Andrew Wiles’s brain-and body, and notepaper-comprised the first physical system whose behavior depended on the theorem being true or false. But I don’t think human actions have any special role ... and if some swarm of quarks had done the same thing blindly, fifteen billion years before-executed some purely random interaction that just happened to test the conjecture in some way-then those quarks would have constructed FLT long before Wiles. We’ll never know.”

I opened my mouth to complain that no swarm of quarks could have tested the infinite number of cases encompassed by the theorem-but I caught myself just in time. That was true-but it hadn’t stopped Wiles. A finite sequence of logical steps linked the axioms of number theory-which included some simple generalities about all numbers-to Fermat’s own sweeping assertion. And if a mathematician could test those logical steps by manipulating a finite number of physical objects for a finite amount of time-whether they were pencil marks on paper, or neurotransmitters in his or her brain-then all kinds of physical systems could, in theory, mimic the structure of the proof ... with or without any awareness of what it was they were “proving.”

I leant back on the bench and mimed tearing out hair. “If I wasn’t a die-hard Platonist before, you’re forcing me into it! Fermat’s Last Theorem didn’t need to be proved by anyone-or stumbled on by any random swarm of quarks. If it’s true, it was always true. Everything implied by a given set of axioms is logically connected to them, timelessly, eternally ... even if the links couldn’t be traced by people-or quarks-in the lifetime of the universe.”

Alison was having none of this; every mention of timeless and eternal truths brought a faint smile to the corner of her mouth, as if I was affirming my belief in Santa Claus. She said, “So who, or what, pushed the consequences of ‘There exists an entity zero’ and ‘Every X has a successor et cetera, all the way to Fermat’s Last Theorem and beyond, before the universe had a chance to test out any of it?”

I stood my ground. “What’s joined by logic is just ... joined. Nothing has to happen-consequences don’t have to be pushed’ into existence by anyone, or anything. Or do you imagine that the first events after the Big Bang, the first wild jitters of the quark-gluon-plasma, stopped to fill in all the logical gaps? You think the quarks reasoned: well, so far we’ve done A and B and C-but now we must do D, because D would be logically inconsistent with the other mathematics we’ve ‘invented’ so far ... even if it would take a five-hundred-thousand-page proof to spell out the inconsistency?”

Alison thought it over. ‘‘No. But what if event D took place, regardless? What if the mathematics it implied was logically inconsistent with the rest-but it went ahead and happened anyway ... because the universe was too young to have computed the fact that there was any discrepancy?”

I must have sat and stared at her, open-mouthed, for about ten seconds. Given the orthodoxies we’d spent the last two-and-a-half years absorbing, this was a seriously outrageous statement.

“You’re claiming that ... mathematics might be strewn with primordial defects in consistency? Like space might be strewn with cosmic strings?”

“Exactly.” She stared back at me, feigning nonchalance. “If space-time doesn’t join up with itself smoothly, everywhere ... why should mathematical logic?”

I almost choked. “Where do I begin? What happens-now-when some physical system tries to link theorems across the defect? If theorem D has been rendered ‘true’ by some over-eager quarks, what happens when we program a computer to disprove it? When the software goes through all the logical steps that link A, B, and C-which the quarks have also made true-the dreaded not-D ... does it succeed, or doesn’t it?”

Alison sidestepped the question. “Suppose they’re both true: D and not-D. Sounds like the end of mathematics, doesn’t it? The whole system falls apart, instantly. From D and not-D together you can prove anything you like: one equals zero, day equals night. But that’s just the boring old-fart Platonist view-where logic travels faster than light, and computation takes no time at all. People live with omega-inconsistent theories, don’t they?”

Omega-inconsistent number theories were non-standard versions of arithmetic, based on axioms that “almost” contradicted each other-their saving grace being that the contradictions could only show up in “infinitely long proofs” (which were formally disallowed, quite apart from being physically impossible). That was perfectly respectable modern mathematics-but Alison seemed prepared to replace “infinitely long” with just plain “long”—as if the difference hardly mattered, in practice.

I said, “Let me get this straight. What you’re talking about is taking ordinary arithmetic-no weird counter-intuitive axioms, just the stuff every ten-year-old knows is true-and proving that it’s inconsistent, in a finite number of steps?”

She nodded blithely. “Finite, but large. So the contradiction would rarely have any physical manifestation-it would be ‘computationally distant’ from everyday calculations, and everyday physical events. I mean ... one cosmic string, somewhere out there, doesn’t destroy the universe, does it? It does no harm to anyone.”

I laughed drily. “So long as you don’t get too close. So long as you don’t tow it back to the solar system and let it twitch around slicing up planets.”

“Exactly.”

I glanced at my watch. “Time to come down to Earth, I think. You know we’re meeting Ju1Ia and Ramesh-?”

Alison sighed theatrically. “I know, I know. And this would bore them witless, poor things-so the subject’s closed, I promise.” She added wickedly, “Humanities students are so myopic.”

We set off across the tranquil leafy campus. Alison kept her word, and we walked in silence; carrying on the argument up to the last minute would have made it even harder to avoid the topic once we were in polite company.

Half-way to the cafeteria, though, I couldn’t help myself.

“If someone ever did program a computer to follow a chain of inferences across the defect ... what do you claim would actually happen? When the end result of all those simple, trustworthy logical steps finally popped up on the screen-which group of primordial quarks would win the battle? And please don’t tell me that the whole computer just conveniently vanishes.”

Alison smiled, tongue-in-cheek at last. “Get real, Bruno. How can you expect me to answer that, when the mathematics needed to predict the result doesn’t even exist yet? Nothing I could say would be true or false-until someone’s gone ahead and done the experiment.”

I spent most of the day trying to convince myself that I wasn’t being followed by some accomplice (or rival) of the surgeon, who might have been lurking outside the hotel. There was something disturbingly Kafka-esque about trying to lose a tail who might or might not have been real: no particular face I could search for in the crowd, just the abstract idea of a pursuer. It was too late to think about plastic surgery to make me look Han Chinese-Alison had raised this as a serious suggestion, back in Vietnam-but Shanghai had over a million foreign residents, so with—care even an Anglophone of Italian descent should have been able to vanish.

Whether or not I was up to the task was another matter.

I tried joining the ant-trails of the tourists, following the path of least resistance from the insane crush of the Yuyuan Bazaar (where racks bursting with ten-cent watch-PC’s, mood-sensitive contact lenses, and the latest karaoke vocal implants, sat beside bamboo cages of live ducks and pigeons) to the one-time residence of Sun Yatsen (whose personality cult was currently undergoing a mini-series-led revival on Star TV, advertised on ten thousand buses and ten times as many T-shirts). From the tomb of the writer Lu Xun (“Always think and study ... visit the general then visit the victims, see the realities of your time with open eyes”—no prime time for him) to the Hongkou McDonald’s (where they were giving away small plastic Andy Warhol figurines, for reasons I couldn’t fathom). I mimed leisurely window-shopping between the shrines, but kept my body language sufficiently unfriendly to deter even the loneliest Westerner from attempting to strike up a conversation. If foreigners were unremarkable in most of the city, they were positively eye-glazing here-even to each other-and I did my best to offer no one the slightest reason to remember me.

Along the way I checked for messages from Alison, but there were none. I left five of my own, tiny abstract chalk marks on bus shelters and park benches-all slightly different, but all saying the same thing: CLOSE BRUSH, BUT SAFE NOW. MOVING ON.

By early evening, I’d done all I could to throw off my hypothetical shadow, so I headed for the next hotel on our agreed but unwritten list. The last time we’d met face-to-face, in Hanoi, I mocked all of Alison’s elaborate preparations. Now I was beginning to wish that I’d begged her to extend our secret language to cover extreme contingencies .. FATALLY WOUNDED. BETRAYED YOU UNDER TORTURE. REALITY DECAYING. OTHERWISE FINE.

The hotel on Huaihai Zhonglu was a step up from the last one, but not quite classy enough to refuse payment in cash. The desk clerk made polite small-talk, and I lied as smoothly as I could about my plans to spend a week sight seeing before heading for Beijing. The bellperson smirked when I tipped him too much-and I sat on my bed for five minutes afterward, wondering what significance to read into that.

I struggled to regain a sense of proportion. Industrial Algebra could have bribed every single hotel employee in Shanghai to be on the lookout for us-but that was a bit like saying that, in theory, they could have duplicated our entire twelve-year search for defects, and not bothered to pursue us at all. There was no question that they wanted what we had, badly-but what could they actually do about it? Go to a merchant bank (or the Mafia, or a Triad) for finance? That might have worked if the cargo had been a stray kilogram of plutonium, or a valuable gene sequence-but only a few hundred thousand people on the planet would be capable of understanding what the defect was, even in theory. Only a fraction of that number would believe that such a thing could really exist ... and even fewer would be both wealthy and immoral enough to invest in the business of exploiting it.

The stakes appeared to be infinitely high-but that didn’t make the players omnipotent.

Not yet.

I changed the dressing on my arm, from sock to handkerchief, but the incision was deeper than I’d realized, and it was still bleeding thinly. I left the hotel-and found exactly what I needed in a twenty-four-hour emporium just ten minutes away. Surgical grade tissue repair cream: a mixture of collagen-based adhesive, antiseptic, and growth factors. The emporium wasn’t even a pharmaceuticals outlet-it just had aisle after aisle packed with all kinds of unrelated odds and ends, laid out beneath the unblinking blue-white ceiling panels. Canned food, PVC plumbing fixtures, traditional medicines, rat contraceptives, video ROMS. It was a random cornucopia, an almost organic diversity-as if the products had all just grown on the shelves from whatever spores the wind had happened to blow in.

I headed back to the hotel, pushing my way through the relentless crowds, half seduced and half sickened by the odors of cooking, dazed by the endless vista of holograms and neon in a language I barely understood. Fifteen minutes later, reeling from the noise and humidity, I realized that I was lost.

I stopped on a street corner and tried to get my bearings. Shanghai stretched out around me, dense and lavish, sensual and ruthless-a Darwinian economic simulation self-organized to the brink of catastrophe. The Amazon of commerce: this city of sixteen million had more industry of every kind, more exporters and importers, more wholesalers and retailers, traders and re-sellers and re-cyclers and scavengers, more billionaires and more beggars, than most nations on the planet.

Not to mention more computing power.

China itself was reaching the cusp of its decades-long transition from brutal totalitarian communism to brutal totalitarian capitalism: a slow seamless morph from Mao to Pinochet set to the enthusiastic applause of its trading partners and the international financial agencies. There’d been no need for a counter-revolution just layer after layer of carefully reasoned Newspeak to pave the way from previous doctrine to the stunningly obvious conclusion that private property, a thriving middle class, and a few trillion dollars worth of foreign investment were exactly what the Party had been aiming for all along.

The apparatus of the police state remained as essential as ever. Trade unionists with decadent bourgeois ideas about uncompetitive wages, journalists With counter-revolutionary notions of exposing corruption and nepotism, and any number of subversive political activists spreading destabilizing propaganda about the fantasy of free elections, all needed to be kept in check.

In a way, Luminous was a product of this strange transition from communism to not-communism in a thousand tiny steps. No one else, not even the U.S. defense research establishment, possessed a single machine with so much power. The rest of the world had succumbed long ago to networking, giving up their imposing supercomputers with their difficult architecture and customized chips for a few hundred of the latest mass-produced work stations. In fact, the biggest computing feats of the twenty-first century had all been farmed out over the Internet to thousands of volunteers, to run on their machines whenever the processors would otherwise be idle. That was how Alison and I had mapped the defect in the first place: seven thousand amateur mathematicians had shared the joke, for twelve years.

But now the net was the very opposite of what we needed-and only Luminous could take its place. And though only the People’s Republic could have paid for it, and only the People’s Institute for Advanced Optical Engineering could have built it ... only Shanghai’s QIPS Corporation could have sold time on it to the world-while it was still being used to model hydrogen bomb shock waves, pilotless fighter jets, and exotic antisatellite weapons.

I finally decoded the street signs, and realized what I’d done: I’d turned the wrong way coming out of the emporium, it was as simple as that.

I retraced my steps, and I was soon back on familiar territory.

When I opened the door of my room, Alison was sitting on the bed.

I said, “What is it with locks in this city?”

We embraced, briefly. We’d been lovers, once-but that was long over. And we’d been friends for years afterward-but I wasn’t sure if that was still the right word. Our whole relationship now was too functional, too spartan. Everything revolved around the defect, now.

She said, “I got your message. What happened?”

I described the morning’s events.

“You know what you should have done?”

That stung. “I’m still here, aren’t I? The cargo’s still safe.”

“You should have killed her, Bruno.”

I laughed. Alison gazed back at me placidly, and I looked away. I didn’t know if she was serious-and I didn’t much want to find out.

She helped me apply the repair cream. My toxin was no threat to her-we’d both installed exactly the same symbionts, the same genotype from the same unique batch in Hanoi. But it was strange to feel her bare fingers on my broken skin, knowing that no one else on the planet could touch me like this, with impunity.

Ditto for sex, but I didn’t want to dwell on that.

As I slipped on my jacket, she said, “So guess what we’re doing at five A.M. tomorrow?”

“Don’t tell me: I fly to Helsinki, and you fly to Cape Town. Just to throw them off the scent.”

That got a faint smile. “Wrong. We’re meeting Yuen at the Institute-and spending half an hour on Luminous.”

“You are brilliant.” I bent over and kissed her on the forehead. “But I always knew you’d pull it off.”

And I should have been delirious-but the truth was, my guts were churning. I felt almost as trapped as I had upon waking cuffed to the bed. If Luminous had remained beyond our reach (as it should have, since we couldn’t afford to hire it for a microsecond at the going rate) we would have had no choice but to destroy all the data, and hope for the best. Industrial Algebra had no doubt dredged up a few thousand fragments of the original Internet calculations-but it was clear that, although they knew exactly what we’d found, they still had no idea where we’d found it. If they’d been forced to start their own random search-constrained by the need for secrecy to their own private hardware-it might have taken them centuries.

There was no question now, though, of backing away and leaving everything to chance. We were going to have to confront the defect in person.

“How much did you have to tell him?”

“Everything.” She walked over to the washbasin, removed her shirt, and began wiping the sweat from her neck and torso with a washcloth. “Short of handing over the map. I showed him the search algorithms and their results, and all the programs wall need to run on Luminous-all stripped of specific parameter values, but enough for him to validate the techniques. He wanted to see direct evidence of the defect, of course, but I held out on that.”

“And how much did he believe?”

“He’s reserved judgment. The deal is, we get half an hour’s unimpeded access-but he gets to observe everything we do.”

I nodded, as if my opinion made any difference, as if we had any choice. Yuen Ting-fu had been Alison’s supervisor for her Ph.D. on advanced applications of ring theory, when she’d studied at Fu-tan University in the late nineties. Now he was one of the world’s leading cryptographers, working as a consultant to the military, the security services, and a dozen international corporations. Alison had once told me that she’d heard he’d found a polynomial-time algorithm for factoring the product of two primes; that had never been officially confirmed ... but such was the power of his reputation that almost everyone on the planet had stopped using the old RSA encryption method as the rumor had spread. No doubt time on Luminous was his for the asking-but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still be imprisoned for twenty years for giving it away to the wrong people, for the wrong reasons.

I said, “And you trust him? He may not believe in the defect now, but once he’s convinced—”

“Hell want exactly what we want. I’m sure of that.”

“Okay. But are you sure IA won’t be watching, too? If they’ve worked out why we’re here, and they’ve bribed someone—”

Alison cut me off impatiently. “There are still a few things you can’t buy in this city. Spying on a military machine like Luminous would be suicidal. No one would risk it.”

“What about spying on unauthorized projects being run on a military machine? Maybe the crimes cancel out, and you end up a hero.”

She approached me, half naked, drying her face on my towel. “We’d better hope not.”

I laughed suddenly. “You know what I like most about Luminous? They’re not really letting Exxon and McDonnell-Douglas use the same machine as the People’s Liberation Army. Because the whole computer vanishes every time they pull the plug. There’s no paradox at all, if you look at it that way.”

Alison insisted that we stand guard in shifts. Twenty-four hours earlier, I might have made a joke of it; now I reluctantly accepted the revolver she offered me, and sat watching the door in the neon-tinged darkness while she went out like a light.

The hotel had been quiet for most of the evening-but now it came to life. There were footsteps in the corridor every five minutes-and rats in the walls, foraging and screwing and probably giving birth. Police sirens wailed in the distance; a couple screamed at each other in the street below. I’d read somewhere that Shanghai was now the murder capital of the world-but was that per capita, or in absolute numbers?

After an hour, I was so jumpy that it was a miracle I hadn’t blown my foot off. I unloaded the gun, then sat playing Russian roulette with the empty barrel. In spite of everything, I still wasn’t ready to put a bullet in anyone’s brain for the sake of defending the axioms of number theory.

Industrial Algebra had approached us in a perfectly civilized fashion, at first. They were a small but aggressive UK-based company, designing specialized high-performance computing hardware for industrial and military applications. That they’d heard about the search was no great surprise-it had been openly discussed on the Internet for years, and even joked about in serious mathematical journals-but it seemed an odd coincidence when they made contact with us just days after Alison had sent me a private message from ZYrich mentioning the latest “promising” result. After half a dozen false alarms-all due to bugs and glitches-we’d stopped broadcasting the news of every unconfirmed find to the people who were donating runtime to the project, let alone any wider circle. We were afraid that if we cried wolf one more time, half our collaborators would get so annoyed that they’d withdraw their support.

IA had offered us a generous slab of computing power on the company’s private network several orders of magnitude more than we received from any other donor Why? The answer kept changing. Their deep respect for pure mathematics ... their wide-eyed fun-loving attitude to life ... their desire to be seen to be sponsoring a project s0 wild and hip and unlikely to succeed that it made SETI look like a staid blue-chip investment. It was-they’d finally “conceded”—a desperate bid to soften their corporate image, after years of bad press for what certain unsavory governments did with their really rather nice smart bombs.

We’d politely declined. They’d offered us highly paid consulting jobs. Bemused, we’d suspended all net-based calculations-and started encrypting our mail with a simple but highly effective algorithm Alison had picked up from Yuen.

Alison had been collating the results of the search on her own work station at her current home in ZYrich, while I’d helped coordinate things from Sydney. No doubt IA had been eavesdropping on the incoming data, but they’d clearly started too late to gather the information needed to create their own map; each fragment of the calculations meant little in isolation. But when the work station was stolen (all the files were encrypted, it would have told them nothing) we’d finally been forced to ask ourselves: If the defect turns out to be genuine, if the joke is no joke ... then exactly what’s at stake? How much money? How much power?

On June 7, 2006, we met in a sweltering, crowded square in Hanoi. Alison wasted no time. She was carrying a backup of the data from the stolen work station in her notepad-and she solemnly proclaimed that, this time, the defect was real.

The notepad’s tiny processor would have taken centuries to repeat the long random trawling of the space of arithmetic statements that had been carried out on the net-but, led straight to the relevant computations, it could confirm the existence of the defect in a matter of minutes.

The process began with Statement S. Statement S was an assertion about some ludicrously huge numbers-but it wasn’t mathematically sophisticated or contentious in any way. There were no claims here about infinite sets, no propositions concerning “every integer.” It merely stated that a certain (elaborate) calculation performed on certain (very large) whole numbers led to a certain result-in essence, it was no different from something like “5+3 = 4x2”. It might have taken me ten years to check it with a pen and paper-but I could have carried out the task with nothing but elementary school mathematics and a great deal of patience. A statement like this could not be undecidable; it had to be either true or false.

The notepad decided it was true.

Then the notepad took Statement S ... and in four hundred and twenty-three simple, impeccably logical steps, used it to prove not-S.

I repeated the calculations on my own notepad-using a different software package. The result was exactly the same. I gazed at the screen, trying to concoct a plausible reason why two different machines running two different programs could have failed in identical ways. There’d certainly been cases in the past of a single misprinted algorithm in a computing textbook spawning a thousand dud programs. But the operations here were too simple, too basic.

Which left only two possibilities. Either conventional arithmetic was intrinsically flawed, and the whole Platonic ideal of the natural numbers was ultimately self-contradictory ... or Alison was right, and an alternative arithmetic had come to hold sway in a “computationally remote” region, billions of years ago.

I was badly shaken-but my first reaction was to try to play down the significance of the result. “The numbers being manipulated here are greater than the volume of the observable universe, measured in cubic Planck lengths. If IA were hoping to use this on their foreign exchange transactions, I think they’ve made a slight error of scale.” Even as I spoke, though, I knew it wasn’t that simple. The raw numbers might have been trans-astronomical-but it was the mere 1024 bits of the notepad’s binary representations that had actually, physically misbehaved. Every truth in mathematics was encoded, reflected, in countless other forms. If a paradox like this-which at first glance sounded like a dispute about numbers too large to apply even to the most grandiose cosmological discussions-could affect the behavior of a five-gram silicon chip, then there could easily be a billion other systems on the planet at risk of being touched by the very same flaw.

But there was worse to come.

The theory was, we’d located part of the boundary between two incompatible systems of mathematics-both of which were physically true, in their respective domains. Any sequence of deductions that stayed entirely on one side of the defect-whether it was the “near side,” where conventional arithmetic applied, or the “far side,” where the alternative took over-would be free from contradictions. But any sequence that crossed the border would give rise to absurdities-hence S could lead to not-S.

So, by examining a large number of chains of inference, some of which turned out to be self-contradictory and some not, it should have been possible to map the area around the defect precisely-to assign every statement to one system or the other.

Alison displayed the first map she’d made. It portrayed an elaborate crenulated fractal border, rather like the boundary between two microscopic ice crystals-as if the two systems had been diffusing out at random from different starting points, and then collided, blocking each other’s way. By now, I was almost prepared to believe that I really was staring at a snapshot of the creation of mathematics-a fossil of primordial attempts to define the difference between truth and falsehood.

Then she produced a second map of the same set of statements, and overlaid the two. The defect, the border, had shifted-advancing in some places, retreating in others My blood went cold. “That has got to be a bug in the software.”

“It’s not.”

I inhaled deeply, looking around the square as if the heedless crow. of tourists and hawkers, shoppers and executives, might offer some simple “human” truth more resilient than mere arithmetic. But all I could think of was 1984: Winston Smith, finally beaten into submission, abandoning every touchstone of reason by conceding that two and two make five.

I said, “Okay. Go on.”

“In the early universe, some physical system must have tested out mathematics that was isolated, cut off from all the established results-leaving it free to decide the outcome at random. That’s how the defect arose. But by now, all the mathematics in this region has been tested, all the gaps have been filled in. When a physical system tests theorem on the near side, not only has it been tested a billion time before-but all the logically adjacent statements around it have been decided, and they imply the correct result in a single step.”

“You mean ... peer pressure from the neighbors? No inconsistencies allowed, you have to conform? If x-1 = y-1, and x+1 = y+1, then x is left with no choice but to equal y ... because there’s nothing ‘nearby’ to support the alternative?”

“Exactly. Truth is determined locally. And it’s the same, deep into the far side. The alternative mathematics has dominated there, and every test takes place surrounded by established theorems that reinforce each other, and the ‘correct’-non-standard-result.”

“At the border, though—”

“At the border, every theorem you test is getting contradictory advice. From one neighbor, x-1 = y-1 ... but from another, x+1 = y+2. And the topology of the border is so complex that a near-side theorem can have more far-side neighbors than near-side ones-and vice versa.

“So the truth at the border isn’t fixed, even now. Both regions can still advance or retreat-it all depends on the order in which the theorems are tested. If a solidly near-side theorem is tested first, and it lend support to a more vulnerable neighbor, that can guarantee that they both stay near-side.” She ran a brief animation that demonstrated the effect. “But if the order is reversed, the weaker one will fail.”

I watched, light-headed. Obscure-but supposedly eternal-truth were tumbling like chess pieces. “And ... you think that physical processes going on right now-chance molecular events that keep inadvertently testing and re-testing different theories along the border-cause each side to gain and lose territory?”

“Yes.”

“So there’s been a kind of ... random tide washing back and forth between the two kinds of mathematics, for the past few billion years?” I laughed uneasily, and did some rough calculations in my head. “The expectation value for a random walk is the square root of N. I don’t think we have anything to worry about. The tide isn’t going to wash over an, useful arithmetic in the lifetime of the universe.”

Alison smiled humorlessly, and held up the notepad again. “The tide? No. But it’s the easiest thing in the world to dig a channel. To bias the random flow.” She ran an animation of a sequence of tests that forced the far-site system to retreat across a small front-exploiting a “beach head” formed by chance, and then pushing on to undermine a succession of theorems. “Industrial Algebra, though-I imagine-would be more interested in the reverse. Establishing a whole network of narrow channels of non-standard mathematics running deep into the realm of conventional arithmetic-which they could then deploy against theorems with practical consequences.”

I fell silent, trying to imagine tendrils of contradictory arithmetic reaching down into the everyday world. No doubt IA would aim for surgical precision-hoping to earn themselves a few billion dollars by corrupting the specific mathematics underlying certain financial transactions. But the ramifications would be impossible to predict-or control. There’d be no way to limit the effect, spatially-they could target certain mathematical truths, but they couldn’t confine the change to any one location. A few billion dollars, a few billion neurons, a few billion stars ... a few billion people. Once the basic rules of counting were undermined, the most solid and distinct objects could be rendered as uncertain as swirls of fog. This was not a power I would have entrusted to a cross between Mother Theresa and Carl Friedrich Gauss.

“So what do we do? Erase the map-and just hope that IA never find the defect for themselves?”

“No.” Alison seemed remarkably calm-but then, her own long-cherished philosophy had just been confirmed, not razed to the ground-and she’d had time on the flight from ZYrich to think through all the Realmathematik. “There’s only one way to be sure that they can never use this. We have to strike first. We have to get hold of enough computing power to map the entire defect. And then we either iron the border flat, so it can’t move-if you amputate all the pincers, there can be no pincer movements. Or-better yet, if we can get the resources-we push the border in, from all directions, and shrink the far-side system down to nothing.”

I hesitated. “All we’ve mapped so far is a tiny fragment of the defect We don’t know how large the far side could be. Except that it can’t be small-or the random fluctuations-would have swallowed it long ago. And it could go on forever; it could be infinite, for all we know.”

Alison gave me a strange look. “You still don’t get it, do you, Bruno? You’re still thinking like a Platonist. The universe has only been around for fifteen billion years. It hasn’t had time to create infinities. The far side can’t go on forever-because somewhere beyond the defect, there are theorems that don’t belong to any system. Theorems that have never been touched, never been tested, never been rendered true or false.

“And if we have to reach beyond the existing mathematics of the universe in order to surround the far side ... then that’s what we’ll do. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be possible-just so long as we get there first.”

When Alison took my place, at one in the morning, I was certain I wouldn’t get any sleep. When she shook me awake three hours later, I still felt like I hadn’t.

I used my notepad to send a priming code to the data caches buried in our veins, and then we stood together side-by-side, left-shoulder-to-right-shoulder. The two chips recognized each other’s magnetic and electrical signatures, interrogated each other to be sure-and then began radiating low power microwaves. Alison’s notepad picked up the transmission, and merged the two complementary data streams. The result was still heavily encrypted-but after all the precautions we’d taken so far, shifting the map into a hand-held computer felt about as secure as tattooing it onto our foreheads.

A taxi was waiting for us downstairs. The People’s Institute for Advanced Optical Engineering was in Minhang, a sprawling technology park some thirty kilometers south of the city center. We rode in silence through the gray predawn light, past the giant ugly tower blocks thrown up by the landlords of the new millennium, riding out the fever as the necrotraps and their cargo dissolved into our blood.

As the taxi turned into an avenue lined with biotech and aerospace companies, Alison said, “If anyone asks, we’re Ph.D. students of Yuen’s, testing a conjecture in algebraic topology.”

“Now you tell me. I don’t suppose you have any specific conjecture in mind? What if they ask us to elaborate?”

“On algebraic topology? At five o’clock in the morning?”

The Institute building was unimposing-sprawling black ceramic, three stories high-but there was a five-meter electrified fence, and the entrance was guarded by two armed soldiers. We paid the taxi driver and approached on foot. Yuen had supplied us with visitor’s passes-complete with photographs and fingerprints. The names were our own; there was no point indulging in unnecessary deception. If we were caught out, pseudonyms would only make things worse.

The soldiers checked the passes, then led us through an MRI scanner. I forced myself to breathe calmly as we waited for the results; in theory the scanner could have picked up our symbionts’ foreign proteins, lingering breakdown products from the necrotraps, and a dozen other suspicious trace chemicals. But it all came down to a question of what they were looking for; magnetic resonance spectra for billions of molecules had been catalogued-but no machine could hunt for all of them at once.

One of the soldiers took me aside and asked me to remove my jacket. I fought down a wave of panic-and then struggled not to overcompensate: if I’d had nothing to hide, I would still have been nervous. He prodded the bandage on my upper arm; the surrounding skin was still red and inflamed.

“What’s this?”

“I had a cyst there. My doctor cut it out, this morning.”

He eyed me suspiciously, and peeled back the adhesive bandage-with ungloved hands. I couldn’t bring myself to look; the repair cream should have sealed the wound completely-at worst there should have been old, dried blood-but I could feel a faint liquid warmth along the line of the incision.

The soldier laughed at my gritted teeth, and waved me away with an expression of distaste. I had no idea what he thought I might have been hiding-but I saw fresh red droplets beading the skin before I closed the bandage.

Yuen Ting-fu was waiting for us in the lobby. He was a slender, fit looking man in his late sixties, casually dressed in denim. I let Alison ~ do all the talking: apologizing for our lack of punctuality (although we s weren’t actually late), and thanking him effusively for granting us this precious opportunity to pursue our unworthy research. I stood back and tried to appear suitably deferential. Four soldiers looked on impassively; they didn’t seem to find all this groveling excessive. And no doubt I would have been giddy with awe, if I really had been a student granted time here for some run-of-the-mill thesis.

We followed Yuen as he strode briskly through a second checkpoint and scanner (this time, no one stopped us) then down a long corridor with a soft gray vinyl floor. We passed a couple of white-coated technicians, but they barely gave us a second glance. I’d had visions of a pair of obvious foreigners attracting as much attention here as we would have wandering through a military base-but that was absurd. Half the runtime on Luminous was sold to foreign corporations-and because the machine was most definitely not linked to any communications network, commercial users had to come here in person. Just how often Yuen wangled free time for his students-whatever their nationality-was another question, but if he believed it was the best cover for us, I was in no position to argue. I only hoped he’d planted a seamless trail of reassuring lies in the university records and beyond, in case the Institute administration decided to check up on us in any detail.

We stopped in at the operations room, and Yuen chatted with the technicians. Banks of flatscreens covered one wall, displaying status histograms and engineering schematics. It looked like the control center for a small particle accelerator-which wasn’t far from the truth.

Luminous was, literally, a computer made of light. It came into existence when a vacuum chamber, a cube five meters wide, was filled with an elaborate standing wave created by three vast arrays of high-powered lasers. A coherent electron beam was fed into the chamber-and just as a finely machined grating built of solid matter could diffract a beam of light, a sufficiently ordered (and sufficiently intense) configuration of light could diffract a beam of matter.

The electrons were redirected from layer to layer of the light cube, recombining and interfering at each stage, every change in their phase and intensity performing an appropriate computation-and the whole system could be reconfigured, nanosecond by nanosecond, into complex new “hardware” optimized for the calculations at hand. The auxilliary supercomputers controlling the laser arrays could design, and then instantly build, the perfect machine of light to carry out each particular stage of any program.

It was, of course, fiendishly difficult technology, incredibly expensive and temperamental. The chance of ever putting it on the desktops of Tetris-playing accountants was zero, so nobody in the West had bothered to pursue it.

And this cumbersome, unwieldy, impractical machine ran faster than every piece of silicon hanging off the Internet, combined.

We continued on to the programming room. At first glance, it might have been the computing center in a small primary school, with half a dozen perfectly ordinary work stations sitting on white formica tables. They just happened to be the only six in the world that were hooked up to Luminous.

We were alone with Yuen now-and Alison cut the protocol and just glanced briefly in his direction for approval, before hurriedly linking her notepad to one of the work stations and uploading the encrypted map. As she typed in the instructions to decode the file, all the images running through my head of what would have happened if I’d poisoned the soldier at the gate receded into insignificance. We now had half an hour to banish the defect-and we still had no idea how far it extended.

Yuen turned to me; the tension on his face betrayed his own anxieties, but he mused philosophically, “If our arithmetic seems to fail for these large numbers-does it mean the mathematics, the ideal, is really flawed and mutable-or only that the behavior of matter always falls short of the ideal?”

I replied, “If every class of physical objects ‘falls short’ in exactly the same way-whether it’s boulders or electrons or abacus beads ... what is it that their common behavior is obeying-or defining-if not the mathematics?”

He smiled, puzzled. “‘Alison seemed to think you were a Platonist.”

“Lapsed. Or ... defeated. I don’t see what it can mean to talk about standard number theory still being true for these statements-in some vague Platonic sense-if no real objects can ever reflect that truth.”

“We can still imagine it. We can still contemplate the abstraction. It’s only the physical act of validation that must fall through. Think of transfinite arithmetic: no one can physically test the properties of Cantor’s infinities, can they? We can only reason about them from afar.”

I didn’t reply. Since the revelations in Hanoi, I’d pretty much lost faith in my power to “reason from afar” about anything I couldn’t personally describe with Arabic numerals on a single sheet of paper. Maybe Alison’s idea of “local truth” was the most we could hope for; anything more ambitious was beginning to seem like the comic-book “physics” of swinging a rigid beam ten billion kilometers long around your head, and predicting that the far end would exceed the speed of light.

An image blossomed on the work station screen: it began as the familiar map of the defect-but Luminous was already extending it at a mind-boggling rate. Billions of inferential loops were being spun around the margins: some confirming their own premises, and thus delineating regions where a single, consistent mathematics held sway ... others skewing into self-contradiction, betraying a border crossing. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to follow one of those Mobius-strips of deductive logic in my head; there were no difficult concepts involved, it was only the sheer size of the statements that made that impossible. But would the contradictions have driven me into gibbering insanity-or would I have found every step perfectly reasonable, and the conclusion simply unavoidable? Would I have ended up calmly, happily conceding: Two and two make five?

As the map grew-smoothly re-scaled to keep it fitting on the screen, giving the unsettling impression that we were retreating from the alien mathematics as fast as we could, and only just avoiding being swallowed-Alison sat hunched forward, waiting for the big picture to be revealed. The map portrayed the network of statements as an intricate lattice in three dimensions (a crude representational convention, but it was as good as any other). So far, the border between the regions showed no sign of overall curvature-just variously sized random incursions in both directions. For all we knew, it was possible that the far-side mathematics enclosed the near side completely-that the arithmetic we’d once believed stretched out to infinity was really no more than a tiny island in an ocean of contradictory truths.

I glanced at Yuen; he was watching the screen with undisguised pain. He said, “I read your software, and I thought: sure, this looks fine-but some glitch on your machines is the real explanation. Luminous will soon put you right.”

Alison broke in jubilantly, “Look, it’s turning!”

She was right. As the scale continued to shrink, the random fractal meanderings of the border were finally being subsumed by an overall convexity-a convexity of the far side. It was as if the viewpoint was backing away from a giant spiked sea-urchin. Within minutes, the map showed a crude hemisphere, decorated with elaborate crystalline extrusions at every scale. The sense of observing some palaeomathematical remnant was stronger than ever, now: this bizarre cluster of theorems really did look as if it had exploded out from some central premise into the vacuum of unclaimed truths, perhaps a billionth of a second after the Big Bang-only to be checked by an encounter with our own mathematics.

The hemisphere slowly extended into a three-quarters sphere ... and then a spiked whole. The far side was bounded, finite. It was the island, not us.

Alison laughed uneasily. “Was that true before we started-or did we just make it true?” Had the near side enclosed the far side for billions of years-or had Luminous broken new ground, actively extending the near side into mathematical territory that had never been tested by any physical system before?

We’d never know. We’d designed the software to advance the mapping along a front in such a way that any unclaimed statements would be instantly recruited into the near side. If we’d reached out blindly, far into the void, we might have tested an isolated statement-and inadvertently spawned a whole new alternative mathematics to deal with.

Alison said, “Okay-now we have to decide. Do we try to seal the border-or do we take on the whole structure?” The software, I knew, was busy assessing the relative difficulty of the tasks.

Yuen replied at once, “Seal the border, nothing more. You mustn’t destroy this.” He turned to me, imploringly. “Would you smash up a fossil of Australopithecus? Would you wipe the cosmic background radiation out of the sky? This may shake the foundations of all my beliefs-but it encodes the truth about our history. We have no right to obliterate it, like vandals.”

Alison eyed me nervously. What was this-majority rule? Yuen was the only one with any power here; he could pull the plug in an instant. And yet it was clear from his demeanor that he wanted a consensus-he wanted our moral support for any decision.

I said cautiously, “If we smooth the border, that’ll make it literally impossible for IA to exploit the defect, won’t it?”

Alison shook her head. “We don’t know that. There may be a quantum-like component of spontaneous defections, even for statements that appear to be in perfect equilibrium.”

Yuen countered, “Then there could be spontaneous defections anywhere-even far from any border. Erasing the whole structure will guarantee nothing.”

“It will guarantee that IA won’t find it! Maybe pin-point defections do occur, all the time-but the next time they’re tested, they’ll always revert. They’re surrounded by explicit contradictions, they have no chance of getting a foothold. You can’t compare a few transient glitches with this ... armory of counter-mathematics!”

The defect bristled on the screen like a giant caltrap. Alison and Yuen both turned to me expectantly. As I opened my mouth, the work station chimed. The software had examined the alternatives in detail: destroying the entire far side would take Luminous twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds-about a minute less than we had left, Sealing the border would take more than an hour.

I said, “That can’t be right.”

Alison groaned. “But it is! There’s random interference going on at the border from other systems all the time-and doing anything finicky there means coping with that noise, fighting it. Charging ahead and pushing the border inward is different: you can exploit the noise to speed the advance. It’s not a question of dealing with a mere surface versus dealing with a whole volume. It’s more like ... trying to carve an island into an absolutely perfect circle, while waves are constantly crashing on the beach-versus bulldozing the whole thing into the ocean.”

We had thirty seconds to decide-or we’d be doing neither today. And maybe Yuen had the resources to keep the map safe from IA, while we waited a month or more for another session on Luminous-but I wasn’t prepared to live with that kind of uncertainty.

“I say we get rid of the whole thing. Anything less is too dangerous. Future mathematicians will still be able to study the map-and if no one believes that the defect itself ever really existed, that’s just too bad. IA is too close. We can’t risk it.”

Alison had one hand poised above the keyboard. I turned to Yuen; he was staring at the floor, with an anguished expression. He’d let us state our views-but in the end, it was his decision.

He looked up, and spoke sadly but decisively.

“Okay. Do it.”

Alison hit the key-with about three seconds to spare. I sagged into my chair, light headed with relief.

We watched the far side shrinking. The process didn’t look quite as crass as bulldozing an island-more like dissolving some quirkily beautiful crystal in acid. Now that the danger was receding before our eyes, though, I was beginning to suffer faint pangs of regret. Our mathematics had coexisted with this strange anomaly for fifteen billion years, and it shamed me to think that within months of its discovery, we’d backed ourselves into a corner where we’d had no choice but to destroy it.

Yuen seemed transfixed by the process. “So are we breaking the laws of physics-or enforcing them?”

Alison said, “Neither. We’re merely changing what the laws imply.”

He laughed softly. “‘Merely.’ For some esoteric set of complex systems, we’re rewriting the high-level rules of their behavior. Not including the human brain, I hope.” ‘

My skin crawled. “Don’t you think that’s ... unlikely?”

“I was joking.” He hesitated, then added soberly, “Unlikely for humans-but someone could be relying on this, somewhere. We might be destroying the whole basis of their existence: certainties as fundamental to them as a child’s multiplication tables are to us.”

Alison could barely conceal her scorn. “This is junk mathematics-a relic of a pointless accident. Any kind of life that evolved from simple to complex forms would have no use for it. Our mathematics works for ... rocks, seeds, animals in the herd, members of the tribe. This only kicks in beyond the number of particles in the universe—”

“Or smaller systems that represent those numbers,” I reminded her.

“And you think life somewhere might have a burning need to do nonstandard trans-astronomical arithmetic, in order to survive? I doubt that very much.”

We fell silent. Guilt and relief could fight it out later, but no one suggested halting the program. In the end, maybe nothing could outweigh the havoc the defect would have caused if it had ever been harnessed as a weapon-and I was looking forward to composing a long message to Industrial Algebra, informing them of precisely what we’d done to the object of their ambitions.

Alison pointed to a corner of the screen. “What’s that?” A narrow dark spike protruded from the shrinking cluster of statements. For a moment I thought it was merely avoiding the near side’s assault-but it wasn’t. It was slowly, steadily growing longer.

“Could be a bug in the mapping algorithm.” I reached for the keyboard and zoomed in on the structure. In close-up, it was several thousand statements wide. At its border, Alison’s program could be seen in action, testing statements in an order designed to force tendrils of the near side ever deeper into the interior. This slender extrusion, ringed by contradictory mathematics, should have been corroded out of existence in a fraction of a second. Something was actively countering the assault, though-repairing every trace of damage before it could spread.

“If IA have a bug here—” I turned to Yuen. “They couldn’t take on Luminous directly, so they couldn’t stop the whole far side shrinking-but a tiny structure like this ... what do you think? Could they stabilize it?”

“Perhaps,” he conceded. “Four or five hundred top-speed work stations could do it.”

Alison was typing frantically on her notepad. She said, “I’m writing a patch to identify any systematic interference-and divert all our resources against it.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Look over my shoulder, will you, Bruno? Check me as I go.”

“Okay.” I read through what she’d written so far. “You’re doing fine. Stay calm.” Her hands were trembling.

The spike continued to grow steadily. By the time the patch was ready, the map was re-scaling constantly to fit it on the screen.

Alison triggered the patch. An overlay of electric blue appeared along the spike, flagging the concentration of computing power-and the spike abruptly froze.

I held my breath, waiting for IA to notice what we’d done-and switch their resources elsewhere? If they did, no second spike would appear-they’d never get that far-but the blue marker on the screen would shift to the site where they’d regrouped and tried to make it happen.

But the blue glow didn’t move from the existing spike. And the spike didn’t vanish under the weight of Luminous’s undivided efforts.

Instead, it began to grow again, slowly.

Yuen looked ill. “This is not Industrial Algebra. There’s no computer on the planet—”

Alison laughed derisively. “What are you saying now? Aliens who need the far side are defending it? Aliens where? Nothing we’ve done has had time to reach even ... Jupiter.” There was an edge of hysteria in her voice.

“Have you measured how fast the changes propagate? Do you know, for certain, that they can’t travel faster than light-with the far-side mathematics undermining the logic of relativity?”

I said, “Whoever it is, they’re not defending all their borders. They’re putting everything they’ve got into the spike.”

“They’re aiming at something. A specific target.” Yuen reached over Alison’s shoulder for the keyboard. “We’re shutting this down. Right now.”

She turned on him, blocking his way. “Are you crazy? We’re almost holding them off! I’ll rewrite the program, fine-tune it, get an edge in efficiency—”

“No! We stop threatening them, then see how they react. We don’t know what harm we’re doing—”

He reached for the keyboard again.

Alison jabbed him in the throat with her elbow, hard. He staggered backward, gasping for breath, then crashed to the floor, bringing a chair down on top him. She hissed at me, “Quick-shut him up!”

I hesitated, loyalties fracturing, his idea had sounded perfectly sane to me. But if he started yelling for security—

I crouched down over him, pushed the chair aside, then clasped my hand over his mouth, forcing his head back with pressure on the lower jaw. We’d have to tie him up-and then try brazenly marching out of the building without him. But he’d be found in a matter of minutes. Even if we made it past the gate, we were screwed.

Yuen caught his breath and started struggling; I clumsily pinned his arms with my knees. I could hear Alison typing, a ragged staccato, tried to get a glimpse of the work station screen, but I couldn’t turn that far without taking my weight off Yuen.

I said, “Maybe he’s right-maybe we should pull back, and see what happens.” If the alterations could propagate faster than light ... how many distant civilizations might have felt the effects of what we’d done? Our first contact with extraterrestrial life could turn out to be an attempt to obliterate mathematics that they viewed as ... what? A precious resource? A sacred relic? An essential component of their entire world view?

The sound of typing stopped abruptly. “Bruno? Do you feel-?”

“What?”

Silence.

“What?”

Yuen seemed to have given up the fight. I risked turning around.

Alison was hunched forward, her face in her hands. On the screen the spike had ceased its relentless linear growth-but now an elaborate. dendritic structure had blossomed at its tip. I glanced down at Yuen; he seemed dazed, oblivious to my presence. I took my hand from his mouth warily. He lay there placidly, smiling faintly, eyes scanning something I couldn’t see.

I climbed to my feet. I took Alison by the shoulders and shook he gently; her only response was to press her face harder into her hands. The spike’s strange flower was still growing but it wasn’t spreading out into new territory; it was sending narrow shoots back in on itself crisscrossing the same region again and again with ever finer structure Weaving a net? Searching for something?

It hit me with a jolt of clarity more intense than anything I’d felt since childhood. It was like reliving the moment when the whole concept numbers had finally snapped into place-but with an adult’s understanding of everything it opened up, everything it implied. It was a lightning bolt revelation-but there was no taint of mystical confusion: no opiate haze of euphoria, no pseudo-sexual rush. In the clean-lined logic of the simplest concepts, I saw and understood exactly how the world worked—

—except that it was all wrong, it was all false, it was all impossible.

Quicksand.

Assailed by vertigo, I swept my gaze around the room-counting frantically: Six work stations. Two people. Six chairs. I grouped the work stations: three sets of two, two sets of three. One and five, two and four; four and two, five and one.

I weaved a dozen cross-checks for consistency-for sanity ... but everything added up.

They hadn’t stolen the old arithmetic; they’d merely blasted the new one into my head, on top of it.

Whoever had resisted our assault with Luminous had reached down with the spike and rewritten our neural metamathematics-the arithmetic that underlay our own reasoning about arithmetic-enough to let us glimpse what we’d been trying to destroy.

Alison was uncommunicative, but she was breathing slowly and steadily. Yuen seemed fine, lost in a happy reverie. I relaxed slightly, and began trying to make sense of the flood of far-side arithmetic surging through my brain.

On their own terms, the axioms were ... trivial, obvious. I could see that they corresponded to elaborate statements about trans-astronomical integers, but performing an exact translation was far beyond me-and thinking about the entities they described in terms of the huge integers they represented was a bit like thinking about pi or the square root of two in terms of the first ten thousand digits of their decimal expansion: it would be missing the point entirely. These alien “numbers”—the basic objects of the alternative arithmetic-had found a way to embed themselves in the integers, and to relate to each other in a simple, elegant way-and if the messy corollaries they implied upon translation contradicted the rules integers were supposed to obey ... well, only a small, remote patch of obscure truths had been subverted, Someone touched me on the shoulder. I started-but Yuen was beaming amiably, all arguments and violence forgotten.

He said, “Lightspeed is not violated. All the logic that requires that remains intact.” I could only take him at his word; the result would have taken me hours to prove. Maybe the aliens had done a better job on him-or maybe he was just a superior mathematician in either system.

“Then ... where are they?” At lightspeed, our attack on the far side could not have been felt any further away than Mars-and the strategy used to block the corrosion of the spike would have been impossible with even a few seconds’ time lag.

“The atmosphere?”

“You mean-Earth’s?”

“Where else? Or maybe the oceans.”

I sat down heavily. Maybe it was no stranger than any conceivable alternative, but I still balked at the implications.

Yuen said, “To us, their structure wouldn’t look like ‘structure’ at all. The simplest unit might involve a group of thousands of atoms-representing a trans-astronomical number-not necessarily even bonded together in any conventional way, but breaking the normal consequences of the laws of physics, obeying a different set of high-level rules that arise frorn the alternative mathematics. People have often mused about the chances of intelligence being coded into long-lived vortices on distant gas giants ... but these creatures won’t be in hurricanes or tornadoes. They’ll be drifting in the most innocuous puffs of air-invisible as neutrinos.

“Unstable—”

“Only according to our mathematics. Which does not apply.”

Alison broke in suddenly, angrily. “Even if all of this is true-where does it get us? Whether the defect supports a whole invisible ecosystem or not-LA will still find it, and use it, in exactly the same way.”

For a moment I was dumbstruck. We were facing the prospect of sharing the planet with an undiscovered civilization-and all she could think about was IA’s grubby machinations?

She was absolutely right, though. Long before any of these extravagant fantasies could be proved or disproved, IA could still do untold harm.

I said, “Leave the mapping software running-but shut down the shrinker.”

She glanced at the screen. “No need. They’ve overpowered it-or undermined its mathematics.” The far side was back to its original size.

“Then there’s nothing to lose. Shut it down.”

She did. No longer under attack, the spike began to reverse its growth. I felt a pang of loss as my limited grasp of the far-side mathematics suddenly evaporated; I tried to hold on, but it was like clutching at air.

When the spike had retracted completely, I said, “Now we try doing an Industrial Algebra. We try bringing the defect closer.”

We were almost out of time, but it was easy enough-in thirty seconds, we rewrote the shrinking algorithm to function in reverse.

Alison programmed a function key with the commands to revert to the original version-so that if the experiment backfired, one keystroke would throw the full weight of Luminous behind a defense of the near side again.

Yuen and I exchanged nervous glances. I said, “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

Alison disagreed. “We need to know how they’ll react to this. Better we find out now than leave it to IA.”

She started the program running.

The sea-urchin began to swell, slowly. I broke out in a sweat. The farsiders hadn’t harmed us, so far-but this felt like tugging hard at a door that you really, badly, didn’t want to see thrown open.

A technician poked her head into the room and announced cheerfully, “Down for maintenance in two minutes!”

Yuen said, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing—”

The whole far side turned electric blue. Alison’s original patch had detected a systematic intervention.

We zoomed in. Luminous was picking off vulnerable statements of the near side-but something else was repairing the damage.

I let out a strangled noise that might have been a cheer. Alison smiled serenely. She said, “I’m satisfied. IA don’t stand a chance.”

Yuen mused, “Maybe they have a reason to defend the status quo-maybe they rely on the border itself, as much as the far side.”

Alison shut down our reversed shrinker. The blue glow vanished; both sides were leaving the defect alone. And there were a thousand questions we all wanted answered-but the technicians had thrown the master switch, and Luminous itself had ceased to exist.

The sun was breaking through the skyline as we rode back into the city. As we pulled up outside the hotel, Alison started shaking and sobbing. I sat beside her, squeezing her hand. I knew she’d felt the weight of what might have happened, all along, far more than I had.

I paid the driver, and then we stood on the street for a while, silently watching the cyclists go by, trying to imagine how the world would change as it tried to embrace this new contradiction between the exotic and the mundane, the pragmatic and the Platonic, the visible and the invisible.

Mind Vampires

There are moments when my mind misses a beat. I find myself, in mid-step or mid-breath, feeling as if delivered abruptly into my body after a long absence (spent where, I could not say), or a long, dreamless sleep. I lose not my memory, merely my thread. My attention has inexplicably wandered, but a little calm introspection restores my context and brings me peace. Almost peace.

I suppose I am a detective, a private investigator, for why else would I be prowling the corridors of a posh girls’ boarding school, softly past the doors of the dark-breathing dormitories?

I suppose the headmistress rang me, hysterical. I’m sure that’s right. She was sixty-two and had begun to menstruate again. What a surprise for her, what a strange shock. No wonder she went straight to the telephone and dialled my number.

She was calm in her office when I arrived in person, if a little embarrassed. Women have problems, she said. These things do happen, she explained. Rarely, but one cannot attach any significance. I find it very irritating to be told one minute to hurry and the next to get lost; I could have shrugged and walked out, abandoned her right then, but I have my code of ethics. My reputation. My pride. For her sake, for the sake of those in her charge, I frightened her into hiring me.

I described the next few stages to her. Prepubescent girls, even infants and newborn babes, would also start to menstruate. Sweat, tears, saliva, urine, mother’s milk and semen would all turn to blood. Dead rats and birds would be found everywhere. Water pipes would issue blood, and every container of any kind of fluid, from disinfectant to dye, from vinegar to varnish, from wine to window-cleaner, would be brimming with blood.

There is definitely no semen on school premises, she said. I think she was trying to make a joke. I showed her a colour photograph from a previous case, the kind the police don’t like me carrying about. She turned pale and then wiped the perspiration from her face with (oh yes) a white lace handkerchief, which she carefully examined for any trace of red. Then she signed.

New England. Connecticut? How?

Young soldiers come home with bad dreams.

Atrocities in a muddy trench, a bloody trench.

Young soldiers who would rather be dead than return to their friends and families bearing this European curse. A horrible embrace, a horrible feast. Much better to feed the rats and the worms.

The smell of the trenches drawing them for hundreds of miles. They devour the gangrenous parts. Later the healed will attribute this to the rats. Struggles in the mud, the blood rains down. Screams are natural enough. Nobody will ever guess, they’ll be lost amongst the shell-shocked.

“I’m responsible for the girls. You must be discreet.”

“Discreet? There’ll be no discretion when the snow turns red.”

I may be wrong. Sometimes there is no carnival of horrors; fear of detection dampens their natural flamboyance, their love of dark theatre. But it’s a new moon tonight, the nadir of their strength, and already they have announced their presence. Whatever shows so little caution is afraid of no one.

“You mustn’t cause a panic.” Her chin trembled, she pleaded with her eyes. “You know what I’m concerned about.”

I knew, all right.

“If there were nothing to fear but fear itself,” I said, “wouldn’t life be sweet?”

So I prowl the corridors, watching for signs, preparing for the fight. My reputation is the highest, I have never lost. My clients shake my hand, hug and kiss me, shower me with gifts and favours. No wonder.

A thin young girl, a somnambulist, wanders past me and my heart aches at her vulnerability. In my mind her swan neck becomes a giraffe neck, a single throbbing artery tight with blood ready to gush and sate the hugest appetite. How sickening, when the skin of her neck is so pale and delicate and, I am certain, cool as the night.

In the prisons, where they mutilate their limbs with razor blades, there is feeding every month. The gatherings in the alleys of abortionists are indescribable. The torture cells; well who do you think runs them? I stay away from all of these. I am no fool. Large old families in large old houses, the better schools, the quieter, cleaner asylums call for me. My reputation is the highest.

The gardener’s apprentice, a quiet young lad named Jack Rice, disappeared two days ago. The headmistress thinks it’s just a coincidence (such a helpful boy). Nobody knows his family’s address, but his father is said to be a veteran and to shun the light of day.

A legless spider moves its mandibles in distress.

A girl cries out: “Whoa, nightmare!”

Strange, dark flowers appear in the fields. They open at midnight to send a sickly sweet narcotic scent to corrupt the most innocent of dreams.

Fear comes to me, but only as an idea. I think about terror, but I do not feel it. Fear has saved my life many times, so I do love and respect it, when it knows its place.

I enter the dormitory itself, I walk quiet as a nightgown between the tossing beds. Over one bed, two heavy men in dark coats shoulder a fluttering kinematograph machine with the lens removed, while a third man holds open a girl’s right eye. The pictures flash into the empty spaces of her brain. Fear will not save her life; it has seduced her, possessed her, paralysed her, as it has done to thousands, sweeping the countryside like fire or flood wherever that one dread word is whispered. Even far from the sites of true danger, men and women hear that word, form that image, and choke on the terror that rushes up from their bowels. It is a plague in itself, a separate evil with a life of its own now. I nod at the men, they nod (so very slightly) back at me, then I walk on.

I find Jack Rice easily enough, his hobnailed boots protruding from the end of the bed. I call to the men in dark coats to come and hold him still, for that is what they do best of all. His girl’s disguise fades as he struggles. I wonder what revealed the boots. Perhaps his guard was down as he slept. Perhaps he dreamt he was discovered, and so blurred the borders of the dream by bringing on its own fulfilment. I smile at this idea as I drive in the stake.

The tales they later tell me are familiar: the girl he killed, the girl whose form he took, had mocked him cruelly. We find her body, the lips and tender parts consumed, in one of the many damp basements, crawling about gnashing its fangs, but very weak. A matchstick would do for a stake. I hope her parents will not be awkward.

The headmistress tries to thank me and dismiss me with her chequebook, but the ink of her fountain pen has changed colour, and she cannot sign the cheque with her trembling bony hand. Oh dear. Jack’s father will be angry. Jack’s mother will be grieved. I hope he was an only child, but the odds are against it.

The dark-coated men, unperturbed, move from bed to bed with their sawn-off projector. Their enemies are different, but sometimes they will pause to come to my aid. They’re fighting mind vampires.

Breakfast is dismal the next morning, for all the milk had to be thrown out. The heated swimming baths are closed, but the cloying odour escapes from the steam-dampened, padlocked wooden doors.

I ask around the village (of course a village) for word of Jack and his family. Oh, the young vampire lad, they say merrily. He never gave an address, of course. Hardly the thing to do. I mean, would you?

I hunt the old, dark-hidden, overgrown houses as the fortnight slips away from me. Jack’s walking in sunlight and feeding so far from the full moon are disturbing. What will his father be like when he decides to strike? Every cellar I breach nearly stops my heart, but they are all empty and peaceful; cool air and silence protest their pure innocence to me as I scour cobwebbed corners with lamplight. I smile at the unfairness: I cannot rejoice that a place is clean, that I smell no evil, that I will face no risks for a few kind minutes, for every safe house is a failure, every moment without threat only postpones the danger I must face in the end. I’d rather not be who I am, but my reputation is the highest.

Bloody pigeons, headless in the snow, unsettle the girls. There are more nightmares, more night walks; a warm, damp, unnatural wind blows an hour before dawn. I fortify the windows with steel bars, garlic and crucifixes, but there is always a way in left unprotected, it is inevitable.

Perhaps it is my weariness, but the shadows I cast seem to follow me with increasing reluctance. Indeed they conform to my movements, but I swear that they do so an eyeblink too late. My reflections do not move at all: they stare, transfixed, over my shoulder, fascinated by that empty space, hypnotised by its potential occupants.

The headmistress complains, she expected so much more of me. The strain is becoming too much, she sobs. Her weeping blinds her, and when she smells why she falls screaming to the floor.

I continue to search, but I fail for the first time ever to locate their hiding place. They will only face me when they choose to do so, at the very height of their powers.

I leave my room at the inn and sleep in the attic of the dormitory building. From my bed I hear the girls swapping secrets, and through my window drifts the stench of the dark buds which break through the snow.

I dream that I lie naked in the middle of the moonlit fields. My eyes are closed. I feel sharp snow against my back. Footsteps, girls whispering. I recall walking past two students, overhearing: “Oh, much handsomer than Jack!” When they saw me they blushed and turned away. A warm, wet tongue slides across my eyelids, my lips, down my chin and throat, awakening each tiny point of stubble it brushes. Between my ribs, across my stomach, it leaves a snail track of sticky, moistened hair. Soft lips enclose my penis, the warm tongue wraps and caresses it. A young voice: “You didn’t! You can’t have! With him? Oh, tell us!”

As I shudder and struggle to prolong the pleasure, a phrase enters my mind and jolts me into awareness: “the erect penis is engorged with blood.” Engorged. Engorged with blood.

Suddenly I have vision: I see the scene from above. My hands are behind my back, my legs splayed, my back arched. I am utterly naked and defenceless. A glistening streak of red bisects me, and a giant she-vampire clad in black iron armour sucks at me noisily, an animal sound.

My view expands, and despair takes hold of me: ringing us is a circle of her kin, some fifty feet across. Each one bears a poison-tipped sword and a grievance against me for their friends that I’ve dispatched.

The tongue works frantically, and I understand that she had been forbidden to strike with her fangs until the instant of ejaculation. My concentration falters, and I feel the lips draw back.

Awake, shaving, I cut myself in three places. In the shaving water I find a swollen leech; I slice it open and the water turns black and foul.

A serving girl discovers the headmistress; she has hanged herself in her Sunday best (now who will sign my cheques?) after writing the word with lipstick and rouge upon every surface of her room. The servants leave to cross the ocean, and the teachers run away to marry their sweethearts.

I must defend the girls alone.

As if in an instant, the moon is full.

The lights of the village go out.

The snow turns to putrid flesh, blood creeps across all floors and up all walls. The girls huddle stickily in clots of terror, but I scream at them to master fear, to use fear, never to let it cripple them and conquer them. And they are strong, they do not succumb.

Jack’s family come up from the basements, where they have been, no doubt, for months. Four tall brothers, three hissing sisters first. The iron cross, the mallet, the stake: all grow slippery in palms sweating blood. Yet I will defeat them, I will not lose my nerve.

I gather the uneasy students into a single room and ring them with a fence of crucifixes. The Rices are cunning, they taunt me from a distance, speak of the siege they will subject us to which will turn us into cannibals. The school girls plait each other’s hair for comfort; the brothers, more handsome than Jack, flirt brazenly with them, drooling out romantic nonsense. One girl’s yellow eyes unfocus, and her hand flies to her neck. I am already behind her as her skin blooms with grey. She takes two steps towards her lover, then vomits insect-riddled blood as my stake crashes through her heart from behind. Her friends desert her, and she told them such pretty tales.

I venture out with my own protection and corner them one by one. They are far too proud and foolish to keep together for safety. Two of the brothers grow bored and visit the village tavern. One sister wanders alone through the empty dormitories in search of a new pair of shoes. It doesn’t take me long. I feel some hope.

Jack’s parents come next, dressed plainly, their fangs concealed. They talk of the terrible loss they have suffered. They slander me in front of the girls, telling them that I killed both Jack and the girl he loved (how can I refute that?) and that I will kill them all. They urge the girls to expel me from the room for their safety’s sake: they need not leave the room themselves, but they must not let me stay or they will all die in agony to satisfy my craving for blood.

In their fervent, pleading seduction they come a few feet closer than wisdom would have decreed, and I spring my trap: a wire net in which two dozen crucifixes are embedded. They crawl and writhe as I smash in the stakes. Their hearts are like granite but I am strong and purposeful and I do not flinch.

I catch my breath. Hunched over the pair of corpses crumbling into dust, I feel a slight vibration through the floor. Before my reason has grasped its meaning I find myself, incredibly, weeping with terror.

I turn to a roar louder than thunder. Jack’s father, it seems, smuggled home a friend, ancient and powerful. For a moment I cannot move: enough, surely I’ve faced enough! Splintering the old stone floor, red chips flying. So fast, and I have hesitated, there is nothing now that I can do. All the girls are gone, down into the very oldest basement, when I skid into what remains of the room. I grab a cross and try to leap into the hole in the floor, but blood spurts from it with such pressure that I cannot even approach it. I roar useless curses at the thing which has defeated me, as the red tide sweeps me from the building and dumps me, a helpless insect, upon the rotting snow.

The dark-coated men, unperturbed as always, press their projector to my tired right eye, and their soothing pictures flash into the empty spaces of my mind.

My reputation is the highest, but they’re fighting mind vampires.

The End

Mister Volition

“Give me the patch.”

He hesitates, despite the gun, long enough to confirm that the thing must be genuine. He’s cheaply dressed but expensively groomed: manicured and depilated, with the baby-smooth skin of rich middle age. Any card in his wallet would be p-cash only, anonymous but encrypted, useless without his own living fingerprints. He’s wearing no jewellery, and his watch phone is plastic; the patch is the only thing worth taking. Good fakes cost 15 cents, good real ones 15 K—but he’s the wrong age, and the wrong class, to want to wear a fake for the sake of fashion.

He tugs at the patch gently, and it dislodges itself from his skin; the adhesive rim doesn’t leave the faintest weal, or pluck a single hair from his eyebrow. His newly naked eye doesn’t blink or squint—but I know it’s not truly sighted yet; the suppressed perceptual pathways take hours to reawaken.

He hands me the patch; I half expect it to stick to my palm, but it doesn’t. The outer face is black, like anodised metal, with a silver-gray logo of a dragon in one corner—drawn “escaping” from a cut-and-folded drawing of itself, to bite its own tail. Recursive Visions, after Escher. I press the gun harder against his stomach to remind him of its presence, while I glance down and turn the thing over. The inner face appears velvet black at first—but as I tilt it, I catch the reflection of a street light, rainbow-diffracted by the array of quantum-dot lasers. Some plastic fakes are molded with pits which give a similar effect, but the sharpness of this image—dissected into colors, but not blurred at all—is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

I look up at him, and he meets my gaze warily. I know what he’s feeling—that ice water in the bowels—but there’s something more than fear in his eyes: a kind of dazed curiosity, as if he’s drinking in the strangeness of it all. Standing here at three in the morning with a gun to his intestines. Robbed of his most expensive toy. Wondering what else he’s going to lose.

I smile sadly—and I know how that looks through the balaclava.

“You should have stayed up at the Cross. What did you want to come down here for? Looking for something to fuck? Something to snort? You should have hung around the nightclubs, and it all would have come to you.”

He doesn’t reply—but he doesn’t avert his eyes. It looks as if he’s struggling hard to understand it all: his terror, the gun, this moment. Me. Trying to take it all in and make sense of it, like an oceanographer caught in a tidal wave. I can’t decide if that’s admirable, or just irritating.

“What were you looking for? _A new experience?_ I’ll give you a new experience.”

Something skids along the ground behind us in the wind: plastic wrapping, or a cluster of twigs. The street is all terraces converted to office space, barred and silent, wired against intruders but otherwise oblivious.

I pocket the patch, and slide the gun higher. I tell him plainly, “If I kill you, I’ll put a bullet through your heart. Clean and fast, I promise; I won’t leave you lying here bleeding your guts out.”

He makes as if to speak, but then changes his mind. He just stares at my masked face, transfixed. The wind rises up again, cool and impossibly gentle. My watch beeps a short sequence of tones which means it’s successfully blocking a signal from his personal safety implant. We’re alone in a tiny patch of radio silence: phases canceling, forces finely balanced.

I think: _I can spare him ... or not_—and the lucidity begins, the tearing of the veil, the parting of the fog. _It’s all in my hands now._ I don’t look up—but I don’t need to: I can feel the stars wheeling around me.

I whisper, “I can do it, I can kill you.” We’re still staring at each other—but I’m staring right through him now; I’m no sadist, I don’t need to see him squirm. His fear is outside me, and what matters is within: _My freedom, the courage to embrace it, the strength to face everything I am without flinching_.

My hand has grown numb; I slide my finger across the trigger, waking the nerve ends. I can feel the perspiration cooling on my forearms, the muscles in my jaw aching from my frozen smile. I can feel my whole body, coiled, tensed, impatient but obedient, awaiting my command.

I pull the gun back, then pistol-whip him hard, smashing the handle across his temple. He cries out and collapses to his knees, blood pouring into one eye. I back away, observing him carefully. He puts down his hands to keep himself from falling on his face, but he’s too stunned to do anything but kneel there, bleeding and moaning.

I turn and run, tearing off the balaclava, pocketing the gun, speeding up as I go.

His implant will have made contact with a patrol car in a matter of seconds. I weave through the alleys and deserted side-streets, drunk on the pure visceral chemistry of flight—but still in control, riding instinct smoothly. I hear no sirens—but chances are they wouldn’t use them, so I dive for cover at every approaching engine. A map of these streets is burnt into my skull, down to every tree, every wall, every rusting car body. I’m never more than seconds away from shelter of some kind.

Home looms like a mirage, but it’s real, and I cross the last lit ground with my heart pounding, trying not to whoop with elation as I unlock the door and slam it behind me.

I’m soaked in sweat. I undress, and pace the house until I’m calm enough to stand beneath the shower, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the music of the exhaust fan. _I could have killed him._ The triumph of it surges through my veins. _It was my choice, alone. There was nothing to stop me._

I dry myself, and stare into the mirror, watching as the steamed glass slowly clears. Knowing that I could have pulled the trigger is enough. I’ve faced the possibility; there’s nothing left to prove. It’s not the act that’s important—one way or the other. What matters is overcoming everything that stands in the way of freedom.

_But next time?_

Next time, I’ll do it.

Because I can.

* * * *

I take the patch to Tran, in his battered Redfern terrace full of posters of deservedly obscure Belgian chainsaw bands. He says, “Recursive Visions Introscape 3000. Retails at 35 K.”

“I know. I checked.”

“Alex! I’m hurt.” He smiles, showing acid-etched teeth. Too much throwing up; someone should tell him he’s already thin enough.

“So what can you get me?”

“Maybe 18 or 20. But it could take months to find a buyer. If you want it off your hands right now, I’ll give you 12.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Suit yourself.” I reach out to take it back, but he pulls away. “Don’t be so impatient!” He plugs a fiber jack into a tiny socket in the rim, then starts typing on the laptop at the heart of his jury-rigged test bench.

“If you break it, I’ll fucking kill you.”

He groans. “Yeah, my big clumsy photons might smash some delicate little watch-spring in there.”

“You know what I mean. You can still lock it up.”

“If you’re going to have it for six months, don’t you want to know what software it’s running?”

I almost choke. “You think I’m going to _use it?_ It’s probably running some executive stress monitor. _Blue Monday_: ‘Learn to match the color of the mood display panel with the reference hue beside it, for optimal productivity and total well-being.’”

“Don’t knock biofeedback till you’ve tried it. This might even be the premature ejaculation cure you’ve been searching for.”

I thump his scrawny neck, then look over his shoulder at the laptop screen, a blur of scrolling hexadecimal gibberish. “What exactly are you doing?”

“Every manufacturer reserves a block of codes with the ISO, so remotes can’t accidentally trigger the wrong devices. But they use the same ones for cabled stuff, too. So we only have to try the codes Recursive Visions—”

An elegant, marbled-gray interface window appears on the screen. The heading says *Pandemonium*. The only option is a button labeled *Reset*.

Tran turns to me, mouse in hand. “Never heard of _Pandemonium_. Sounds like some kind of psychedelic shit. But if it’s read his head, and the evidence is in there ...” He shrugs. “I’ll have to do it before I sell it, so I might as well do it now.”

“Okay.”

He fires the button, and a query appears: *Delete stored map, and prepare for a new wearer?* Tran clicks *Yes*.

He says, “Wear and enjoy. No charge.”

“You’re a saint.” I take the patch. “But I’m not going to wear it if I don’t know what it does.”

He calls up another database, and types *PAN**. “Ah. No catalog entry. So—it’s black market ... unapproved!” He grins at me, like a schoolkid daring another to eat a worm. “But what’s the worst it can do?”

“I don’t know. Brainwash me?”

“I doubt it. Patches can’t show naturalistic images. Nothing strongly representational—and no text. They ran trials with music videos, stock prices, language lessons ... but the users kept bumping into things. All they can display now is abstract graphics. How do you brainwash someone with that?”

I raise the thing to my left eye experimentally—but I know it won’t even light up until it sticks firmly in place.

Tran says, “Whatever it does ... if you think of it information-theoretically, it can’t show you anything that isn’t there in your skull already.”

“Yeah? That much boredom could kill me.”

Still, it does seem crazy to waste the opportunity. Anyone with a machine as expensive as this probably paid a small fortune for the software, too—and if it’s weird enough to be illegal, it might actually be a buzz.

Tran’s losing interest. “It’s your decision.”

“Exactly.”

I hold the patch in place over my eye, and let the rim fuse gently with my skin.

* * * *

Mira says, “Alex? Aren’t you going to tell me?”

“Huh?” I peer at her groggily; she’s smiling, but she looks faintly hurt.

“I want to know what it showed you!” She leans over and starts tracing the ridge of my cheekbone with her fingertip—as if she’d like to touch the patch itself, but can’t quite bring herself to do that. “What did you see? Tunnels of light? Ancient cities bursting into flame? Silver angels fucking in your brain?”

I remove her hand. “Nothing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

But it’s true. No cosmic fireworks; if anything, the patterns became more subdued the more I lost myself in the sex. But the details are elusive—as they usually are, unless I’ve been making a conscious effort to picture the display.

I try to explain. “Most of the time, I don’t see anything. Do you ‘see’ your nose, your eyelashes? The patch is like that. After the first few hours, the image just ... vanishes. It doesn’t look like anything real, it doesn’t move when you move your head—so your brain realizes it’s got nothing to do with the outside world, and starts filtering it out.”

Mira is scandalized, as if I’ve cheated her somehow. “You can’t even see what it’s showing you? Then ... what’s the point?”

“You don’t _see_ the image floating in front of you—but you can still know about it. It’s like ... there’s a neurological condition called blindsight, where people lose all sense of visual awareness—but they can still guess what’s in front of them, if they really try, because the information is still coming through—”

“Like clairvoyance. I understand.” She fingers the ankh on her neck chain.

“Yeah, it’s uncanny. Shine a blue light in my eye ... and by some strange magic, I’ll know that it’s blue.”

Mira groans and flops back onto the bed. A car goes by, and the headlights through the curtains illuminate the statue on the bookshelf: a jackal-headed woman in the lotus position, sacred heart exposed beneath one breast. Very hip and syncretic. Mira once told me, deadpan: _This is my soul, passed down from incarnation to incarnation. It used to belong to Mozart—and before that, Cleopatra._ The inscription on the base says Budapest, 2005. But the strangest thing is, they made it like a Russian doll: inside Mira’s soul is another soul, and inside that is a third, and a fourth. I said: _This last one’s just dead wood. Nothing inside. Doesn’t that worry you?_

I concentrate, and try to summon up the image again. The patch constantly measures pupil dilation, and the focal distance of the masked eye’s lens—both of which naturally track the unmasked eye—and adjusts the synthetic hologram accordingly. So the image never goes out of focus, or appears too bright, or too dim—whatever the unmasked eye is looking at. No real object could ever behave like that; no wonder the brain shunts the data so readily. Even in the first few hours—when I effortlessly saw the patterns superimposed on everything—they seemed more like vivid mental images than any kind of trick with light. Now, the whole idea that I could “just look” at the hologram and automatically “see it” is ludicrous; the reality is more like groping an object in the dark, and attempting to picture it.

What I picture is: elaborately branched threads of color, flashing against the grayness of the room—like pulses of fluorescent dye injected into fine veins. The image seems bright, but not dazzling; I can still see into the shadows around the bed. Hundreds of these branched patterns are flashing simultaneously—but most are faint, and very short-lived. Maybe ten or twelve dominate at any given moment—glowing intensely for about half a second each, before they fade and others take over. Sometimes it seems that one of these “strong” patterns passes on its strength directly to a neighboring pattern, summoning it out of the darkness—and sometimes the two can be seen lit up together, tangled edges entwined. At other times, the strength, the brightness, seems to come out of nowhere—though occasionally I catch two or three subtle cascades in the background, each one alone almost too faint and too rapid to follow, converging on a single pattern and triggering a bright, sustained flash.

The wafer of superconducting circuitry buried in the patch is imaging my entire brain. These patterns _could_ be individual neurons—but what would be the point of such a microscopic view? More likely, they’re much larger systems—networks of tens of thousands of neurons—and the whole thing is some kind of functional map: connections preserved, but distances rearranged for ease of interpretation. Only a neurosurgeon would care about the actual anatomical locations.

But—exactly which systems am I being shown? And how am I meant to respond to the sight of them?

Most patchware is biofeedback. Measures of stress—or depression, arousal, concentration, whatever—are encoded in the colors and shapes of the graphics. Because the patch image “vanishes”, it’s not a distraction—but the information remains accessible. In effect, regions of the brain not naturally wired to “know about” each other are put in touch, allowing them to modulate each other in new ways. Or that’s the hype. But biofeedback patchware should make its target clear: there should be some fixed template held up beside the realtime display, showing the result to aim for. All this is showing me is ... pandemonium.

Mira says, “I think you better go now.”

The patch image almost vanishes, like a cartoon thought-bubble pricked—but I make an effort, and manage to hang on to it.

“Alex? I think you should go.”

Hairs rise on the back of my neck. I saw ... _what?_ The same patterns, as she spoke the same words? I struggle to replay the sequence from memory, but the patterns in front of me—the patterns for struggling to remember?—render that impossible. And by the time I let the image fade, it’s too late; I don’t know what I saw.

Mira puts a hand on my shoulder. “I want you to leave.”

My skin crawls. Even without the image in front of me, I know the same patterns are firing. _”I think you should go.”

“I want you to leave.”_ I’m not seeing the sounds encoded in my brain. I’m seeing the meaning.

And even now, just thinking about the meaning—I _know_ that the sequence is being replayed, faintly.

Mira shakes me angrily, and I finally turn to her. “What’s your problem? You wanted to screw the patch, and I got in the way?”

“Very funny. Just go.”

I dress slowly, to annoy her. Then I stand by the bed, looking at her thin body hunched beneath the sheets. I think: _I could hurt her badly, if I wanted to. It would be so simple._

She watches me uneasily. I feel a surge of shame: the truth is, I don’t even want to frighten her. But it’s too late; I already have.

She lets me kiss her goodbye, but her whole body is rigid with distrust. My stomach churns. _What’s happening to me? What am I becoming?_

Out on the street, though, in the cold night air, the lucidity takes hold. _Love, empathy, compassion_ ... all these obstacles to freedom must be overcome. I need not choose violence—but my choices are meaningless if they’re encumbered by social mores and sentimentality, hypocrisy and self-delusion.

Nietzsche understood. Sartre and Camus understood.

I think calmly: _There was nothing to stop me. I could have done anything. I could have broken her neck._ But I chose not to. _I chose._ So how did that happen? How—and where? When I spared the owner of the patch ... when I chose not to lay a finger on Mira ... in the end, it was my body that acted one way, not the other—_but where did it all begin?_

If the patch is displaying everything that happens in my brain—or everything that matters: thoughts, meanings, the highest levels of abstraction—then if I’d known how to read those patterns, could I have followed the whole process? _Traced it back to the first cause?_

I halt in mid-step. The idea is vertiginous ... and exhilarating. Somewhere deep in my brain, there _must_ be the “I”: the fount of all action, the self who decides. Untouched by culture, upbringing, genes—the source of human freedom, utterly autonomous, responsible only to itself. I’ve always known that—but I’ve been struggling all these years to make it clearer.

If the patch could hold up a mirror to my soul—if I could watch _my own will_ reaching out from the center of my being _as I pulled the trigger_—

It would be a moment of perfect honesty, perfect understanding.

Perfect freedom.

* * * *

Home, I lie in the dark, bring back the image, experiment. If I’m going to follow the river upstream, I have to map as much territory as I can. It’s not easy: monitoring my thoughts, monitoring the patterns, trying to find the links. Am I seeing the patterns corresponding to the ideas themselves, as I force myself to free-associate? Or am I seeing patterns bound up more with the whole balancing act of attention—between the image itself, and the thoughts which I’m hoping the image reflects?

I turn on the radio, find a talk show—and try to concentrate on the words without letting the patch image slip away. I manage to discern the patterns fired by a few words—or at least, patterns which are common to every cascade which appears when those words are used—but after the fifth or sixth word, I’ve lost track of the first.

I switch on the light, grab some paper, start trying to sketch a dictionary. But it’s hopeless. The cascades happen too fast—and everything I do to try to capture one pattern, to freeze the moment, is an intrusion which sweeps the moment away.

It’s almost dawn. I give up, and try to sleep. I’ll need money for rent soon, I’ll have to do something—unless I take up Tran’s offer for the patch. I reach under the mattress and check that the gun’s still there.

I think back over the last few years. One worthless degree. Three years unemployed. The safe daytime house jobs. Then the nights. Stripping away layer after layer of illusion. Love, hope, morality ... it all has to be overcome. I can’t stop now.

And I know how it has to end.

As light begins to penetrate the room, I feel a sudden shift ... _in what?_ Mood? Perception? I stare up at the narrow strip of sunlight on the crumbling plaster of the ceiling—and nothing looks different, nothing has changed. I scan my body mentally, as if I might be suffering from some kind of pain too unfamiliar to apprehend instantly—but all I get back is the tension of my own uncertainty and confusion.

The strangeness intensifies—and I cry out involuntarily. I feel as if my skin is bursting, and ten thousand maggots are crawling from the liquid flesh beneath—except that there’s nothing to explain this feeling: no vision of wounds, or insects—and absolutely no pain. No itch, no fever, no chilled sweat ... nothing. It’s like some cold-turkey horror story, some nightmare attack of DTs—but stripped of every symptom save the horror itself.

I swing my legs off the bed and sit up, clutching my stomach—but it’s an empty gesture: I don’t even want to puke. It’s not my guts that are heaving.

I sit and wait for the turmoil to pass.

It doesn’t.

I almost tear the patch off—_what else can it be?_—but I change my mind. I want to try something, first. I switch on the radio.

“—cyclone warning for the north-west coast—”

The ten thousand maggots flow and churn; the words hit them like the blast from a firehose. I slam the radio off, stilling the upheaval—and then the words echo in my brain:

_—cyclone—_

The cascade runs a loop around the concept, firing off the patterns for the sound itself; a faint vision of the written word; an image abstracted from a hundred satellite weather maps; news footage of wind-blown palms—and more, much more, too much to grasp.

_—cyclone warning—_

Most “warning” patterns were already firing, prepared by the context, anticipating the obvious. The patterns for the height-of-the-storm news footage strengthen, and trigger others for morning-after images of people outside damaged homes.

_—north-west coast—_

The pattern for the satellite weather map _tightens_, focusing its energy on one remembered—or constructed—image where the swirl of clouds is correctly placed. Patterns fire for the names of half a dozen north-west towns, and images of tourist spots ... until the cascade trails away into vague associations with spartan rural simplicity.

And I understand what’s happening. (Patterns fire for _understand_, patterns fire for _patterns_, patterns fire for _confused, overwhelmed, insane_ ... )

The process damps down, slightly (patterns fire for all these concepts). _I can grasp this calmly, I can see it through_ (patterns fire). I sit with my head against my knees (patterns fire) trying to focus my thoughts enough to cope with all the resonances and associations which the patch (patterns fire) keeps showing me through my not-quite-seeing left eye.

There was never any need to do the impossible: to sit down and draw a dictionary on paper. In the last ten days, the patterns have etched their own dictionary into my brain. No need to observe and remember, consciously, which pattern corresponds to which thought; I’ve spent every waking moment exposed to exactly those associations—and they’ve burned themselves into my synapses from sheer repetition.

And now it’s paying off. I don’t need the patch to tell me merely what I’d tell myself I’m thinking—but now it’s showing me all the rest: all the details too faint and fleeting to capture with mere introspection. Not the single, self-evident stream of consciousness—the sequence defined by the strongest pattern at any moment—but all the currents and eddies churning beneath.

The whole chaotic process of thought.

The pandemonium.

* * * *

Speaking is a nightmare. I practice alone, talking back to the radio, too unsteady to risk even a phone call until I can learn not to seize up, or veer off track.

I can barely open my mouth without sensing a dozen patterns for words and phrases _rising to the opportunity_, competing for the chance to be spoken—and the cascades which should have zeroed in on one choice in a fraction of a second (they must have, before, or the whole process would never have worked) are kept buzzing inconclusively by the very fact that I’ve become so aware of all the alternatives. After a while, I learn to suppress this feedback—at least enough to avoid paralysis. But it still feels very strange.

I switch on the radio. A talk-back caller says: “Wasting taxpayers’ money on rehabilitation is just admitting that we didn’t keep them in long enough.”

Cascades of patterns flesh out the bare sense of the words with a multitude of associations and connections ... but they’re _already_ entwined with cascades building possible replies, invoking their own associations.

I respond as rapidly as I can: “Rehabilitation is cheaper. And what are you suggesting—locking people up until they’re too senile to re-offend?” As I speak, the patterns for the chosen words flash triumphantly—while those for twenty or thirty other words and phrases are only now fading ... as if hearing what I’ve actually said is the only way they can be sure that they’ve lost their chance to be spoken.

I repeat the experiment, dozens of times, until I can “see” all the alternative reply-patterns clearly. I watch them spinning their elaborate webs of meaning across my mind, in the hope of being chosen.

But ... _chosen where, chosen how?_

It’s still impossible to tell. If I try to slow the process down, my thoughts seize up completely—but if I manage to get a reply out, there’s no real hope of following the dynamics. A second or two later, I can still “see” most of the words and associations which were triggered along the way ... but trying to trace the decision for what was finally spoken back to its source—_back to my self_—is like trying to allocate blame in a thousand-car pile-up from a single blurred time-exposure of the whole event.

I decide to rest for an hour or two. (Somehow, I decide.) The feeling of decomposing into a squirming heap of larvae has lost its edge—but I can’t shut down my awareness of the pandemonium completely. I could try taking off the patch—but it doesn’t seem worth the risk of a long slow process of re-acclimatization when I put it back on.

Standing in the bathroom, shaving, I stop to look myself in the eye. _Do I want to go through with this? Watch my mind in a mirror while I kill a stranger? What would it change? What would it prove?_

It would prove that there’s a spark of freedom inside me which no one else can touch, no one else can claim. It would prove that I’m finally responsible for everything I do.

I feel something rising up in the pandemonium. Something emerging from the depths. I close both eyes, steady myself against the sink—then I open them, and gaze into both mirrors again.

And I finally see it, superimposed across the image of my face: an intricate, stellated pattern, like some kind of luminous benthic creature, sending delicate threads out to touch ten thousand words and symbols—all the machinery of thought at its command. It hits me with a jolt of _deja vu_: I’ve been “seeing” this pattern for days. Whenever I thought of myself as a subject, an actor. Whenever I reflected on the power of the will. Whenever I thought back to the moment when I almost pulled the trigger ...

I have no doubt, this is it. _The self that chooses. The self that’s free_.

I catch my eye again, and the pattern streams with light—not at the mere sight of my face, but at the sight of myself watching, and knowing that I’m watching—and knowing that I could turn away, at any time.

I stand and stare at the wondrous thing. _What do I call this?_ “I”? “Alex”? Neither really fits; their meaning is exhausted. I hunt for the word, the image, which gives the strongest response. My own face in the mirror, from the outside, evokes barely a flicker—but when I _feel_ myself sitting nameless in the dark cave of the skull—looking out through the eyes, controlling the body ... _making the decisions, pulling the strings_ ... the pattern blazes with recognition.

I whisper, “Mister Volition. That’s who I am.”

My head begins to throb. I let the patch image fade from vision.

As I finish shaving, I examine the patch from the outside, for the first time in days. The dragon breaking out of its own insubstantial portrait to attain solidity—or at least, portrayed that way. I think of the man I stole it from, and I wonder if he ever saw into the pandemonium as deeply as I have.

But he can’t have—or he never would have let me take the patch. Because now that I’ve glimpsed the truth, I know I’d defend the power to see it this way, to the death.

* * * *

I leave home around midnight, scout the area, take its pulse. Every night there are subtly different flows of activity between the clubs, the bars, the brothels, the gambling houses, the private parties. It’s not the crowds I’m after, though. I’m looking for a place where no one has reason to go.

I finally choose a construction site, flanked by deserted offices. There’s a patch of ground protected from the two nearest street lights by a large skip near the road, casting a black triangular umbra. I sit on the dew-wet sand—and cement dust—gun and balaclava in my jacket within easy reach.

I wait calmly. I’ve learned to be patient—and there are nights when I’ve faced the dawn empty-handed. Most nights, though, someone takes a shortcut. Most nights, someone gets lost.

I listen for footsteps, but I let my mind wander. I try to follow the pandemonium more closely, seeing if I can absorb the sequence of images passively, while I’m thinking of something else—and then replay the memory, the movie of my thoughts.

I make a fist, then open it. I make a fist, then ... don’t. I try to catch Mister Volition in the act, exercising my powers of whim. Reconstructing what I think I “saw”, the thousand-tendrilled pattern certainly flashes brightly—but memory plays strange tricks: I can’t get the sequence right. Every time I run the movie in my head, I see most of the other patterns involved in the action flashing _first_—sending cascades converging on Mister Volition, making _it_ fire—the very opposite of what I know is true. Mister Volition lights up the instant I feel myself choose ... so how can anything but mental static precede that pivotal moment?

I practice for more than an hour, but the illusion persists. Some distortion of temporal perception? Some side-effect of the patch?

_Footsteps approaching. One person._

I slip on the balaclava, wait a few seconds. Then I rise slowly to a crouch, and sneak a look around the edge of the skip. He’s passed it, and he’s not looking back.

I follow. He’s walking briskly, hands in jacket pockets. When I’m three meters behind him—close enough to discourage most people from making a run—I call out softly: “Halt.”

He glances back over his shoulder first, then wheels around. He’s young, 18 or 19, taller than me and probably stronger. I’ll have to watch out for any dumb bravado. He doesn’t quite rub his eyes, but the balaclava always seems to produce an expression of disbelief. That, and the air of calm: when I fail to wave my arms and scream Hollywood obscenities, some people can’t quite bring themselves to accept that it’s real.

I move closer. He’s wearing a diamond stud in one ear. Tiny, but better than nothing. I point to it, and he hands it over. He looks grim, but I don’t think he’s going to try anything stupid.

“Take out your wallet, and show me what’s in it.”

He does this, fanning the contents for inspection like a hand of cards. I choose the e-cash, e for easily hacked; I can’t read the balance, but I slip it in my pocket and let him keep the rest.

“Now take off your shoes.”

He hesitates, and lets a flash of pure resentment show in his eyes. Too afraid to answer back, though. He complies clumsily, standing on one foot at a time. I don’t blame him: I’d feel more vulnerable, sitting. Even if it makes no difference at all.

While I tie the shoes by their laces to the back of my belt, one-handed, he looks at me as if he’s trying to judge whether I understand that he has nothing else to offer—trying to decide if I’m going to be disappointed, and angry. I gaze back at him, not angry at all, just trying to fix his face in my memory.

For a second, I try to visualize the pandemonium—but there’s no need. I’m reading the patterns entirely on their own terms now—taking them in, and understanding them fully, through the new sensory channel which the patch has carved out for itself from the neurobiology of vision.

And I know that Mister Volition is firing.

I raise the gun to the stranger’s heart, and click off the safety. His composure melts, his face screws up. He starts shaking, and tears appear, but he doesn’t close his eyes. I feel a surge of compassion—_and “see” it, too_—but it’s outside Mister Volition, and only Mister Volition can choose.

The stranger asks simply, pitifully, “Why?”

“Because I can.”

He closes his eyes, teeth chattering, a thread of mucus dangling from one nostril. I wait for the moment of lucidity, the moment of perfect understanding, the moment I step outside the flow of the world and take responsibility for myself.

Instead, a different veil parts—and the pandemonium shows itself to itself, in every detail:

The patterns for the concepts of _freedom, self-knowledge, courage, honesty, responsibility_ are all firing brightly. They’re spinning cascades—vast tangled streamers hundreds of patterns long—but now, all the connections, all the causal relationships, are finally crystal clear.

And nothing is flowing out of any fount of action, any irreducible, autonomous self. Mister Volition is firing—but it’s just one more pattern among thousands, one more elaborate cog. It taps into the cascades around it with a dozen tentacles and jabbers wildly, “I I I”—claiming responsibility for everything—but in truth, it’s no different from any of the rest.

My throat emits a retching sound, and my knees almost buckle. _This is too much to know, too much to accept._ Still holding the gun firmly in place, I reach up under the balaclava and tear off the patch.

It makes no difference. The show plays on. The brain has internalized all the associations, all the connections—and the meaning keeps unfolding, relentlessly.

_There is no first cause in here, no place where decisions can begin._ Just a vast machine of vanes and turbines, driven by the causal flow which passes through it—a machine built out of words made flesh, images made flesh, ideas made flesh.

_There is nothing else: only these patterns, and the connections between them._ “Choices” happen everywhere—in every association, every linkage of ideas. The whole structure, the whole machine, “decides.”

_And Mister Volition?_ Mister Volition is nothing but the idea of itself. The pandemonium can imagine anything: Santa Claus, God ... the human soul. It can build a symbol for any idea, and wire it up to a thousand others—but that doesn’t mean that the thing the symbol represents could ever be real.

I stare in horror and pity and shame at the man trembling in front of me. _Who am I sacrificing him to?_ I could have told Mira: _One little soul doll is one too many._ So why couldn’t I tell myself? There is no second self inside the self, no inner puppeteer to pull the strings and make the choices. There is only the whole machine.

And under scrutiny, the jumped-up cog is shriveling. Now that the pandemonium can see itself completely, Mister Volition makes no sense at all.

There is nothing, no one to kill for: no emperor in the mind to defend to the death. And there are no barriers to freedom to be _overcome_—love, hope, morality ... tear all that beautiful machinery down, and there’d be nothing left but a few nerve cells twitching at random—not some radiant purified unencumbered _Uebermensch_. The only freedom lies in being this machine, and not another.

So this machine lowers the gun, raises a hand in a clumsy gesture of contrition, turns, and flees into the night. Not stopping for breath—and wary as ever of the danger of pursuit—but crying tears of liberation all the way.

* * * *

_Author’s note:_ This story was inspired by the “pandemonium” cognitive models of Marvin Minsky, Daniel C. Dennett, and others. However, the rough sketch I’ve presented here is only intended to convey a general sense of how these models work; it doesn’t begin to do justice to the fine points. Detailed models are described in _Consciousness Explained_ by Dennett, and _The Society of Mind_ by Minsky.

Mitochondrial Eve

With hindsight, I can date the beginning of my involvement in the Ancestor Wars precisely: _Saturday, June 2, 2007._ That was the night Lena dragged me along to the Children of Eve to be mitotyped. We’d been out to dinner, it was almost midnight, but the sequencing bureau was open 24 hours.

“Don’t you want to discover your place in the human family?” she asked, fixing her green eyes on me, smiling but earnest. “Don’t you want to find out exactly where you belong on the Great Tree?”

The honest answer would have been: _What sane person could possibly care?_ We’d only known each other for five or six weeks, though; I wasn’t yet comfortable enough with our relationship to be so blunt.

“It’s very late,” I said cautiously. “And you know I have to work tomorrow.” I was still fighting my way up through post-doctoral qualifications in physics, supporting myself by tutoring undergraduates and doing all the tedious menial tasks which tenured academics demanded of their slaves. Lena was a communications engineer—and at 25, the same age as I was, she’d had real paid jobs for almost four years.

“You always have to work. Come on, Paul! It’ll take fifteen minutes.”

Arguing the point would have taken twice as long. So I told myself that it could do no harm, and I followed her north through the gleaming city streets.

It was a mild winter night; the rain had stopped, the air was still. The Children owned a sleek, imposing building in the heart of Sydney, prime real estate, an ostentatious display of the movement’s wealth. ONE WORLD, ONE FAMILY proclaimed the luminous sign above the entrance. There were bureaus in over a hundred cities (although Eve took on various “culturally appropriate” names in different places, from Sakti in parts of India, to Ele’ele in Samoa) and I’d heard that the Children were working on street-corner vending-machine sequencers, to recruit members even more widely.

In the foyer, a holographic bust of Mitochondrial Eve herself, mounted on a marble pedestal, gazed proudly over our heads. The artist had rendered our hypothetical ten-thousand-times-great grandmother as a strikingly beautiful woman. A subjective judgment, certainly—but her lean, symmetrical features, her radiant health, her purposeful stare, didn’t really strike me as amenable to subtleties of interpretation. The esthetic buttons being pushed were labeled, unmistakably: _warrior, queen, goddess_. And I had to admit that I felt a certain bizarre, involuntary swelling of pride at the sight of her ... as if her regal bearing and fierce eyes somehow “ennobled” me and all her descendants ... as if the “character” of the entire species, our potential for virtue, somehow depended on having at least one ancestor who could have starred in a Leni Riefenstahl documentary.

This Eve was black, of course, having lived in sub-Saharan Africa some 200,000 years ago—but almost everything else about her was guesswork. I’d heard palaeontologists quibble about the too-modern features, not really compatible with any of the sparse fossil evidence for her contemporaries’ appearance. Still, if the Children had chosen as their symbol of universal humanity a few fissured brown skull fragments from the Omo River in Ethiopia, the movement would surely have vanished without a trace. And perhaps it was simply mean-spirited of me to think of their Eve’s beauty as a sign of fascism. The Children had already persuaded over two million people to acknowledge, explicitly, a common ancestry which transcended their own superficial differences in appearance; this all-inclusive ethos seemed to undercut any argument linking their obsession with _pedigree_ to anything unsavoury.

I turned to Lena. “You know the Mormons baptised her posthumously, last year?”

She shrugged the appropriation off lightly. “Who cares? This Eve belongs to everyone, equally. Every culture, every religion, every philosophy. Anyone can claim her as their own; it doesn’t diminish her at all.” She regarded the bust admiringly, almost reverently.

I thought: _She sat through four hours of Marx Brothers films with me last week—bored witless, but uncomplaining. So I can do this for her, can’t I?_ It seemed like a simple matter of give and take—and it wasn’t as if I was being pressured into an embarrassing haircut, or a tattoo.

We walked through into the sequencing lounge.

We were alone, but a disembodied voice broke through the ambience of endangered amphibians and asked us to wait. The room was plushly carpeted, with a circular sofa in the middle. Artwork from around the world decorated the walls, from an uncredited Arnhem Land dot painting to a Francis Bacon print. The explanatory text below was a worry: dire Jungian psychobabble about “universal primal imagery” and “the collective unconscious.” I groaned aloud—but when Lena asked what was wrong, I just shook my head innocently.

A man in white trousers and a short white tunic emerged from a camouflaged door, wheeling a trolley packed with impressively minimalist equipment, reminiscent of expensive Scandinavian audio gear. He greeted us both as “cousin”, and I struggled to keep a straight face. The badge on his tunic bore his name, Cousin Andre, a small reflection hologram of Eve, and a sequence of letters and numbers which identified his mitotype. Lena took charge, explaining that she was a member, and she’d brought me along to be sequenced.

After paying the fee—a hundred dollars, blowing my recreation budget for the next three months—I let Cousin Andre prick my thumb and squeeze a drop of blood onto a white absorbent pad, which he fed into one of the machines on the trolley. A sequence of delicate whirring sounds ensued, conveying a reassuring sense of precision engineering at work. Which was odd, because I’d seen ads for similar devices in _Nature_ which boasted of no moving parts at all.

While we waited for the results, the room dimmed and a large hologram appeared, projected from the wall in front of us: a micrograph of a single living cell. _From my own blood?_ More likely, not from anyone’s—just a convincing photorealist animation.

“Every cell in your body,” Cousin Andre explained, “contains hundreds or thousands of mitochondria: tiny power plants which extract energy from carbohydrates.” The image zoomed in on a translucent organelle, rod-shaped with rounded ends—rather like a drug capsule. “The majority of the DNA in any cell is in the nucleus, and comes from both parents—but there’s also DNA in the mitochondria, inherited from the mother alone. So it’s easier to use mitochondrial DNA to trace your ancestry.”

He didn’t elaborate, but I’d heard the theory in full several times, starting with high school biology. Thanks to recombination—the random interchange of stretches of DNA between paired chromosomes, in the lead-up to the creation of sperm or ova—every chromosome carried genes from tens of thousands of different ancestors, stitched together seamlessly. From a palaeogenetic perspective, analyzing nuclear DNA was like trying to make sense of “fossils” which had been forged by cementing together assorted bone fragments from ten thousand different individuals.

Mitochondrial DNA came, not in paired chromosomes, but in tiny loops called plasmids. There were hundreds of plasmids in every cell, but they were all identical, and they all derived from the ovum alone. Mutations aside—one every 4,000 years or so—your mitochondrial DNA was exactly the same as that of your mother, your maternal grandmother, great-grandmother, and so on. It was also exactly the same as that of your siblings, your maternal first cousins, second cousins, third cousins ... until different mutations striking the plasmid on its way down through something like 200 generations finally imposed some variation. But with 16,000 DNA base pairs in the plasmid, even the 50 or so point mutations since Eve herself didn’t amount to much.

The hologram dissolved from the micrograph into a multicolored diagram of branching lines, a giant family tree starting from a single apex labeled with the ubiquitous image of Eve. Each fork in the tree marked a mutation, splitting Eve’s inheritance into two slightly different versions. At the bottom, the tips of the hundreds of branches showed a variety of faces, some men, some women—individuals or composites, I couldn’t say, but each one presumably represented a different group of (roughly) 200th maternal cousins, all sharing a mitotype: their own modest variation on the common 200,000-year-old theme.

“And here you are,” said Cousin Andre. A stylized magnifying glass materialized in the foreground of the hologram, enlarging one of the tiny faces at the bottom of the tree. The uncanny resemblance to my own features was almost certainly due to a snapshot taken by a hidden camera; mitochondrial DNA had no effect whatsoever on appearance.

Lena reached into the hologram and began to trace my descent with one fingertip. “You’re a Child of Eve, Paul. You know who you are, now. And no one can ever take that away from you.” I stared at the luminous tree, and felt a chill at the base of my spine—though it had more to do with the Children’s proprietary claim over the entire species than any kind of awe in the presence of my ancestors.

Eve had been nothing special, no watershed in evolution; she was simply defined as the most recent common ancestor, by an unbroken female line, of every single living human. And no doubt she’d had thousands of female contemporaries, but time and chance—the random death of daughterless women, catastrophes of disease and climate—had eliminated every mitochondrial trace of them. There was no need to assume that her mitotype had conferred any special advantages (most variation was in junk DNA, anyway); statistical fluctuations alone meant that one maternal lineage would replace all the others, eventually.

Eve’s existence was a logical necessity: some human (or hominid) of one era or another had to fit the bill. It was only the timing which was contentious.

The timing, and its implications.

A world globe some two meters wide appeared beside the Great Tree; it had a distinctive Earth-from-space look, with heavy white cumulus swirling over the oceans, but the sky above the continents was uniformly cloudless. The Tree quivered and began to rearrange itself, converting its original rectilinear form into something much more misshapen and organic—but flexing its geometry without altering any of the relationships it embodied. Then it draped itself over the surface of the globe. Lines of descent became migratory routes. Between eastern Africa and the Levant, the tracks were tightly bunched and parallel, like the lanes of some Palaeolithic freeway; elsewhere, less constrained by the geography, they radiated out in all directions.

A recent Eve favored the “Out of Africa” hypothesis: modern _Homo sapiens_ had evolved from the earlier _Homo erectus_ in one place only, and had then migrated throughout the world, out-competing and replacing the local _Homo erectus_ everywhere they went—and developing localized racial characteristics only within the last 200,000 years. The single birthplace of the species was most likely Africa, because Africans showed the greatest (and hence oldest) mitochondrial variation; all other groups seemed to have diversified more recently from relatively small “founder” populations.

There were rival theories, of course. More than a million years before _Homo sapiens_ even existed, _Homo erectus_ itself had spread as far as Java, acquiring its own regional differences in appearance—and _Homo erectus_ fossils in Asia and Europe seemed to share at least some of the distinguishing characteristics of living Asians and Europeans. But “Out of Africa” put that down to convergent evolution, not ancestry. If _Homo erectus_ had turned into _Homo sapiens_ independently in several places, then the mitochondrial difference between, say, modern Ethiopians and Javanese should have been five or ten times as great, marking their long separation since a much earlier Eve. And even if the scattered _Homo erectus_ communities had not been totally isolated, but had interbred with successive waves of migrants over the past one or two million years—hybridizing with them to create modern humans, and yet somehow retaining their distinctive differences—then distinct mitochondrial lineages much older than 200,000 years probably should have survived, too.

One route on the globe flashed brighter than the rest. Cousin Andre explained, “This is the path your own ancestors took. They left Ethiopia—or maybe Kenya or Tanzania—heading north, about 150,000 years ago. They spread slowly up through Sudan, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Syria and Turkey while the interglacial stretched on. By the start of the last Ice Age, the eastern shore of the Black Sea was their home ...” As he spoke, tiny pairs of footprints materialized along the route.

He traced the hypothetical migration through the Caucasus Mountains, and all the way to northern Europe—where the limits of the technique finally cut the story dead: some four millennia ago (give or take three), when my Germanic two-hundredish-great grandmother had given birth to a daughter with a single change in her mitochondrial junk DNA: the last recorded tick of the molecular clock.

Cousin Andre wasn’t finished with me, though. “As your ancestors moved into Europe, their relative genetic isolation, and the demands of the local climate, gradually led them to acquire the characteristics which are known as Caucasian. But the same route was traveled many times, by wave after wave of migrants, sometimes separated by thousands of years. And though, at every step along the way, the new travelers interbred with those who’d gone before, and came to resemble them ... dozens of separate maternal lines can still be traced back along the route—and then down through history again, along different paths.”

My very closest maternal cousins, he explained—those with exactly the same mitotype—were, not surprisingly, mostly Caucasians. And expanding the circle to include up to 30 base pair differences brought in about 5 per cent of all Caucasians—the 5 per cent with whom I shared a common maternal ancestor who’d lived some 120,000 years ago, probably in the Levant.

But a number of that woman’s own cousins had apparently headed east, not north. Eventually, their descendants had made it all the way across Asia, down through Indochina, and then south through the archipelagos, traveling across land bridges exposed by the low ocean levels of the Ice Age, or making short sea voyages from island to island. They’d stopped just short of Australia.

So I was more closely related, maternally, to a small group of New Guinean highlanders than I was to 95 per cent of Caucasians. The magnifying glass reappeared beside the globe, and showed me the face of one of my living 6000th cousins. The two of us were about as dissimilar to the naked eye as any two people on Earth; of the handful of nuclear genes which coded for attributes like pigmentation and facial bone structure, one set had been favored in frozen northern Europe, and another in this equatorial jungle. But enough mitochondrial evidence had survived in both places to reveal that the local homogenization of appearance was just a veneer, a recent gloss over an ancient network of invisible family connections.

Lena turned to me triumphantly. “You see? All the old myths about race, culture, and kinship—instantly refuted! These people’s immediate ancestors lived in isolation for thousands of years, and didn’t set eyes on a single white face until the twentieth century. Yet they’re nearer to you than I am!”

I nodded, smiling, trying to share her enthusiasm. It _was_ fascinating to see the whole naive concept of “race” turned inside out like this—and I had to admire the Children’s sheer audacity at claiming to be able to map hundred-thousand-year-old relationships with such precision. But I couldn’t honestly say that my life had been transformed by the revelation that certain white total strangers were more distant cousins to me than certain black ones. Maybe there were die-hard racists who would have been shaken to the core by news like this ... but it was hard to imagine them rushing along to the Children of Eve to be mitotyped.

The far end of the trolley beeped, and ejected a badge just like Cousin Andre’s. He offered it to me; when I hesitated, Lena took it and pinned it proudly to my shirt.

Out on the street, Lena announced soberly, “Eve is going to change the world. We’re lucky; we’ll live to see it happen. We’ve had a century of people being slaughtered for belonging to the wrong kinship groups—but soon, _everyone_ will understand that there are older, deeper blood ties which confound all their shallow historical prejudices.”

_You mean ... like the Biblical Eve confounded all the prejudices of fundamentalist Christians? Or like the image of the Earth from space put an end to war and pollution?_ I tried diplomatic silence; Lena regarded me with consternation, as if she couldn’t quite believe that I could harbor any doubts after my own unexpected _blood ties_ had been revealed.

I said, “Do you remember the Rwandan massacres?”

“Of course.”

“Weren’t they more to do with a class system—which the Belgian colonists exacerbated for the sake of administrative convenience—than anything you could describe as enmity between _kinship groups?_ And in the Balkans—”

Lena cut me off. “Look, sure, any incident you can point to will have a convoluted history. I’m not denying that. But it doesn’t mean that the solution has to be impossibly complicated, too. And if everyone involved had known what we know, had _felt_ what we’ve felt—” she closed her eyes and smiled radiantly, an expression of pure contentment and tranquility “—that deep sense of belonging, through Eve, to a single family which encompasses all of humanity ... do you honestly imagine that they could have turned on each other like that?”

I should have protested, in tones of bewilderment: _What “deep sense of belonging”? I felt nothing. And the only thing the Children of Eve are doing is preaching to the converted._

What was the worst that could have happened? If we’d broken up, right there and then, over _the political significance of palaeogenetics_, then the relationship was obviously doomed from the start. And however much I hated confrontation, it was a fine line between tact and dishonesty, between accommodating our differences and concealing them.

And yet. The issue seemed far too arcane to be worth fighting over—and though Lena clearly held some passionate views on it, I couldn’t really see the topic arising again if I kept my big mouth shut, just this once.

I said, “Maybe you’re right.” I slipped an arm around her, and she turned and kissed me. It began to rain again, heavily, the downpour strangely calm in the still air. We ended up back at Lena’s flat, saying very little for the rest of the night.

I was a coward and a fool, of course—but I had no way of knowing, then, just how much it would cost me.

* * * *

A few weeks later, I found myself showing Lena around the basement of the UNSW physics department, where my own research equipment was crammed into one corner. It was late at night (again), and we were alone in the building; variously colored fluorescent display screens hovered in the darkness, like distant icons for the other post-doctoral projects in some chilly academic cyberspace.

I couldn’t find the chair I’d bought for myself (despite security measures escalating from a simple name tag to increasingly sophisticated computerized alarms, it was always being borrowed), so we stood on the cold bare concrete beside the apparatus, lit by a single fading ceiling panel, and I conjured up sequences of zeros and ones which echoed the strangeness of the quantum world.

The infamous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlation—the entanglement of two microscopic particles into a single quantum system—had been investigated experimentally for over twenty years, but it had only recently become possible to explore the effect with anything more complicated than pairs of photons or electrons. I was working with hydrogen atoms, produced when a single hydrogen molecule was dissociated with a pulse from an ultraviolet laser. Certain measurements carried out on the separated atoms showed statistical correlations which only made sense if a single wave function encompassing the two responded to the measurement process instantaneously—regardless of how far apart the individual atoms had traveled since their tangible molecular bonds were broken: meters, kilometers, light-years.

The phenomenon seemed to mock the whole concept of distance—but my own work had recently helped to dispel any notion that EPR might lead to a faster-than-light signaling device. The theory had always been clear on that point, though some people had hoped that a flaw in the equations would provide a loophole.

I explained to Lena, “Take two machines stocked with EPR-correlated atoms, one on Earth and one on Mars, both capable of, say, measuring orbital angular momentum either vertically or horizontally. The results of the measurements would always be random ... but the machine on Mars could be made to emit data which either did, or didn’t, mimic precisely the random data coming out of the machine on Earth at the very same time. And that mimicry could be switched on and off—instantaneously—by altering the type of measurements being made on Earth.”

“Like having two coins which are guaranteed to fall the same way as each other,” she suggested, “so long as they’re both being thrown right-handed. But if you start throwing the coin on Earth with your left hand, the correlation vanishes.”

“Yeah—that’s a perfect analogy.” I realized belatedly that she’d probably heard this all before—quantum mechanics and information theory were the foundations of her own field, after all—but she was listening politely, so I continued. “But even when the coins are magically agreeing on every single toss ... they’re both still giving equal numbers of heads and tails, at random. So there’s no way of encoding any message into the data. You can’t even tell, from Mars, when the correlation starts and stops—not unless the data from Earth gets sent along for comparison, by some conventional means like a radio transmission—defeating the whole point of the exercise. EPR itself communicates nothing.”

Lena contemplated this thoughtfully, though she was clearly unsurprised by the verdict.

She said, “It communicates nothing between separated atoms—but if you bring them together, instead, it can still tell you what they’ve done in the past. You do a control experiment, don’t you? You make the same measurements on atoms which were never paired?”

“Yeah, of course.” I pointed to the third and fourth columns of data on the screen; the process itself was going on silently as we spoke, inside an evacuated chamber in a small gray box concealed behind all the electronics. “The results are completely uncorrelated.”

“So, basically, this machine can tell you whether or not two atoms have been bonded together?”

“Not individually; any individual match could just be chance. But given enough atoms with a common history—yes.” Lena was smiling conspiratorially. I said, “What?”

“Just ... humor me for a moment. What’s the next stage? Heavier atoms?”

“Yes, but there’s more. I’ll split a hydrogen molecule, let the two separate hydrogen atoms combine with two fluorine atoms—any old ones, not correlated—then split both hydrogen fluoride molecules and make measurements on _the fluorine atoms_ ... to see if I can pick up an indirect correlation between them: a second-order effect inherited from the original hydrogen molecule.”

The truth was, I had little hope of getting funded to take the work that far. The basic experimental facts of EPR had been settled now, so there wasn’t much of a case for pushing the measurement technology any further.

“In theory,” Lena asked innocently, “could you do the same with something much larger? Like ... DNA?”

I laughed. “No.”

“I don’t mean: could you do it, here, a week from tomorrow? But—if two strands of DNA had been bonded together ... would there be any correlation at all?”

I balked at the idea, but confessed, “There might be. I can’t give you the answer off the top of my head; I’d have to borrow some software from the biochemists, and model the interaction precisely.”

Lena nodded, satisfied. “I think you should do that.”

“_Why?_ I’ll never be able to try it, for real.”

“Not with this junkyard-grade equipment.”

I snorted. “So tell me who’s going to pay for something better?”

Lena glanced around the grim basement, as if she wanted to record a mental snapshot of the low point of my career—before everything changed completely. “Who’d finance research into a means of detecting the quantum fingerprint of DNA bonding? Who’d pay for a chance of computing—not to the nearest few millennia, but to the nearest _cell division_—how long ago two mitochondrial plasmids were in contact?”

I was scandalized. _This_ was the idealist who believed that the Children of Eve were the last great hope for world peace?

I said, “They’d never fall for it.”

Lena stared at me blankly for a second, then shook her head, amused. “I’m not talking about pulling a confidence trick—begging for a research grant on false pretences.”

“Well, good. But—?”

“I’m talking about taking the money—and doing a job that has to be done. Sequencing technology has been pushed as far as it can go—but our opponents still keep finding things to quibble about: the mitochondrial mutation rate, the method of choosing branch points for the most probable tree, the details of lineage loss and survival. Even the palaeogeneticists who are on our side keep changing their minds about everything. Eve’s age goes up and down like the Hubble constant.”

“It can’t be that bad, surely.”

Lena seized my arm; her excitement was electric, I felt it flow into me. Or maybe she’d just pinched a nerve.

“_This_ could transform the whole field. No more guesswork, no more conjecture, no more assumptions—just a single, indisputable family tree, stretching back 200,000 years.”

“It may not even be possible—”

“But you’ll find out? You’ll look into it?”

I hesitated—but I couldn’t think of a single good reason to refuse. “Yes.”

Lena smiled. “With _quantum palaeogenetics_ ... you’ll have the power to bring Eve to life for the world in a way that no one has ever done before.”

* * * *

Six months later, the funds ran out for my work at the university: the research, the tutoring, everything. Lena offered to support me for three months while I put together a proposal to submit to the Children. We were already living together, already sharing expenses; somehow, that made it much easier to rationalize. And it was a bad time of year to be looking for work, I was going to be unemployed anyway ...

As it turned out, computer modeling suggested that a measurable correlation between segments of DNA could be picked out against the statistical noise—given enough plasmids to work with: more like a few liters of blood per person than a single drop. But I could already see that the technical problems would take years of work to assess properly, let alone overcome. Writing it all up was good practice for future corporate grant applications—but I never seriously expected anything to come of it.

Lena came with me to the meeting with William Sachs, the Children’s West Pacific Research Director. He was in his late fifties, and _very_ conservatively dressed, from the classic Benetton AIDS ISN’T NICE T-shirt to the Mambo World Peace surfing dove motif board shorts. A slightly younger version smiled down from a framed cover of _Wired_; he’d been guru of the month in April 2005.

“The university physics department will be contracted to provide overall supervision,” I explained nervously. “There’ll be independent audits of the scientific quality of the work every six months, so there’s no possibility of the research running off the rails.”

“The EPR correlation,” mused Sachs, “proves that all life is bound together holistically into a grand unified meta-organism, doesn’t it?”

“No.” Lena kicked me hard under the desk.

But Sachs didn’t seem to have heard me. “You’ll be listening in to Gaia’s own theta rhythm. The secret harmony which underlies everything: synchronicity, morphic resonance, transmigration ...” He sighed dreamily. “I _adore_ quantum mechanics. You know my Tai Chi master wrote a book about it? _Schroedinger’s Lotus_—you must have read it. What a mind-fuck! And he’s working on a sequel, _Heisenberg’s Mandala_—”

Lena intervened before I could open my mouth again. “Maybe ... later generations will be able to trace the correlation as far as other species. But in the foreseeable future, even reaching as far as Eve will be a major technical challenge.”

Cousin William seemed to come back down to Earth. He picked up the printed copy of the application and turned to the budget details at the end, which were mostly Lena’s work.

“Five million dollars is a lot of money.”

“Over ten years,” Lena said smoothly. “And don’t forget that there’s a 125 per cent tax deduction on R&D expenditure this financial year. By the time you factor in the notional patent rights—”

“You really believe the spinoffs will be valued this highly?”

“Just look at Teflon.”

“I’ll have to take this to the board.”

* * * *

When the good news came through by email, a fortnight later, I was almost physically sick.

I turned to Lena. “What have I done? What if I spend ten years on this, and it all comes to nothing?”

She frowned, puzzled. “There are no guarantees of success—but you’ve made that clear, you haven’t been dishonest. Every great endeavor is plagued with uncertainties—but the Children have decided to accept the risks.”

In fact, I hadn’t been agonizing over the morality of relieving rich idiots with a global motherhood fixation of large sums of money—and quite possibly having nothing to give them in return. I was more worried about what it would mean for my career if the research turned out to be a cul-de-sac, and produced no results worth publishing.

Lena said, “It’s all going to work out perfectly. I have faith in you, Paul.”

And that was the worst of it. She did.

We loved each other—and we were, both, using each other. But I was the one who kept on lying about what was soon to become the most important thing in our lives.

* * * *

In the winter of 2010, Lena took three months off work to travel to Nigeria in the name of technology transfer. Her official role was to advise the new government on the modernisation of the communications infrastructure—but she was also training a few hundred local operators for the Children’s latest low cost sequencer. My EPR technique was still in its infancy—barely able to distinguish identical twins from total strangers—but the original mitochondrial DNA analyzers had become extremely small, rugged and cheap.

Africa had proved highly resistant to the Children in the past, but it seemed that the movement had finally gained a foothold. Every time Lena called me from Lagos—her eyes shining with missionary zeal—I went and checked the Great Tree, trying to decide whether its scrambling of traditional notions of familial proximity would render the ex-combatants in the recent civil war more, or less, fraternal toward each other if the sequencing fad really took off. The factions were already so ethnically mixed, though, that it was impossible to come to a definite verdict; so far as I could tell, the war had been fought between alliances shaped as much by certain 21st-century acts of political patronage as by any invocation of ancient tribal loyalties.

Near the end of her stay, Lena called me in the early hours of the morning (my time), so angry she was almost in tears. “I’m flying straight to London, Paul. I’ll be there in three hours.”

I squinted at the bright screen, dazed by the tropical sunshine behind her. “Why? What’s happened?” I had visions of the Children undermining the fragile cease-fire, igniting some unspeakable ethnic holocaust—then flying out to have their wounds tended by the best microsurgeons in the world, while the country descended into chaos behind them.

Lena reached off-camera and hit a button, pasting a section of a news report into a corner of the transmission. The headline read: Y-CHROMOSOME ADAM STRIKES BACK! The picture below showed a near-naked, muscular, blond white man (curiously devoid of body hair—rather like Michelangelo’s _David_ in a bison-skin loin-cloth) aiming a spear at the reader with suitably balletic grace.

I groaned softly. It had only been a matter of time. In the cell divisions leading up to sperm production, most of the DNA of the Y chromosome underwent recombination with the X chromosome—but part of it remained aloof, unscrambled, passed down the purely paternal line with the same fidelity as mitochondrial DNA passed from mother to daughter. In fact, with more fidelity: mutations in nuclear DNA were much less frequent, which made it a much less useful molecular clock.

“They claim they’ve found a single male ancestor for all northern Europeans—just 20,000 years ago! And they’re presenting this _bullshit_ at a palaeogenetics conference in Cambridge tomorrow!” I scanned the article as Lena wailed; the news report was all tabloid hype, it was difficult to tell what the researchers were actually asserting. But a number of right wing groups who’d long been opposed to the Children of Eve had embraced the results with obvious glee.

I said, “So why do you have to be there?”

“To defend Eve, of course! We can’t let them get away with this!”

My head was throbbing. “If it’s bad science, let the experts refute it. It’s not your problem.”

Lena was silent for a while, then protested bitterly, “You _know_ male lineages are lost faster than female ones. Thanks to polygyny, a single paternal line can dominate a population in far fewer generations than a maternal line.”

“So the claim might be right? There might have been a single, recent ‘northern European Adam’?”

“Maybe,” Lena admitted begrudgingly. “But ... _so what?_ What’s that supposed to prove? They haven’t even _tried_ to look for an Adam who’s a father to the whole species!”

I wanted to reply: Of course it proves nothing, changes nothing. _No sane person could possibly care._ But ... who made _kinship_ such a big issue in the first place? Who did their best to propagate the notion that everything that matters depends on _family ties?_

It was far too late, though. Turning against the Children would have been sheer hypocrisy; I’d taken their money, I’d played along.

And I couldn’t abandon Lena. If my love for her went no further than the things we agreed on, then that wasn’t love at all.

I said numbly, “I should make the 3 o’clock flight to London. I’ll meet you at the conference.”

* * * *

The tenth annual World Palaeogenetics Forum was being held in a pyramid-shaped building in an astroturfed science park, far from the university campus. The placard-waving crowd made it easy to spot. HANDS OFF EVE! DIE, NAZI SCUM! NEANDERTHALS OUT! (_What?_) As the taxi drove away, my jet-lag caught up with me and my knees almost buckled. My aim was to find Lena as rapidly as possible and get us both out of harm’s way. Eve could look after herself.

She was there, of course, gazing with serene dignity from a dozen T-shirts and banners. But the Children—and their marketing consultants—had recently been “fine-tuning” her image, and this was the first chance I’d had to see the results of all their focus groups and consumer feedback workshops. The new Eve was slightly paler, her nose a little thinner, her eyes narrower. The changes were subtle, but they were clearly aimed at making her look more “pan-racial”—more like some far-future common descendant, bearing traces of every modern human population, than a common ancestor who’d lived in one specific place: Africa.

And in spite of all my cynicism, this redesign made me queasier than any of the other cheap stunts the Children had pulled. It was as if they’d decided, after all, that they couldn’t really imagine a world where everyone would accept an African Eve—but they were so committed to the idea that they were willing to keep bending the truth, for the sake of broadening her appeal, until ... _what?_ They gave her, not just a different name, but a different face in every country?

I made it into the lobby, merely spat on by two or three picketers. Inside, things were much quieter, but the academic palaeogeneticists were darting about furtively, avoiding eye contact. One poor woman had been cornered by a news crew; as I passed, the interviewer was insisting heatedly, “But you must admit that violating the origin myths of indigenous Amazonians is a crime against humanity.” The outer wall of the pyramid was tinted blue, but more or less transparent, and I could see another crowd of demonstrators pressed against one of the panels, peering in. Plain-clothes security guards whispered into their wrist-phones, clearly afraid for their Masarini suits.

I’d tried to call Lena a dozen times since the airport, but some bottleneck in the Cambridge footprint had kept me on hold. She’d pulled strings and got us both listed on the attendance database—the only reason I’d been allowed through the front door—but that only proved that being inside the building was no guarantee of non-partisanship.

Suddenly, I heard shouting and grunting from nearby, then a chorus of cheers and the sound of heavy sheet plastic popping out of its frame. News reports had mentioned both pro-Eve demonstrators, and pro-Adam—the latter allegedly much more violent. I panicked and bolted down the nearest corridor—almost colliding with a wiry young man heading in the opposite direction. He was tall, white, blond, blue-eyed, radiating Teutonic menace ... and part of me wanted to scream in outrage: I’d been reduced, against my will, to pure imbecilic racism.

Still, he was carrying a pool cue.

But as I backed away warily, his sleeveless T-shirt began flashing up the words: THE GODDESS IS AFOOT!

“So what are you?” he sneered. “A Son of Adam?”

I shook my head slowly. _What am I?_ I’m a _Homo sapiens_, you moron. Can’t you recognize your own species?

I said, “I’m a researcher with the Children of Eve.” At faculty cocktail parties, I was always “an independent palaeogenetics research physicist”, but this didn’t seem the time to split hairs.

“Yeah?” He grimaced with what I took at first to be disbelief, and advanced threateningly. “So _you’re_ one of the fucking patriarchal, materialistic bastards who’s trying to reify the Archetype of the Earth Mother and rein in her boundless spiritual powers?”

That left me too stupefied to see what was coming. He jabbed me hard in the solar plexus with the pool cue; I fell to my knees, gasping with pain. I could hear the sound of boots in the lobby, and hoarsely chanted slogans.

The Goddess-worshipper grabbed me by one shoulder and wrenched me to my feet, grinning. “No hard feelings, though. We’re still on the same side, here—aren’t we? So let’s go beat up some Nazis!”

I tried to pull free, but it was already too late; the Sons of Adam had found us.

* * * *

Lena came to visit me in hospital. “I knew you should have stayed in Sydney.”

My jaw was wired; I couldn’t answer back.

“You have to look after yourself; your work’s more important than ever, now. Other groups will find their own Adams—and the whole unifying message of Eve will be swamped by the tribalism inherent in the idea of recent male ancestors. We can’t let a few promiscuous Cro-Magnon men ruin everything.”

“Gmm mmm mmmn.”

“We have mitochondrial sequencing ... they have Y-chromosome sequencing. Sure, our molecular clock is already more accurate ... but we need a spectacular advantage, something anyone can grasp. Mutation rates, mitotypes: it’s all too abstract for the person in the street. If we can construct exact family trees with EPR—starting with people’s known relatives ... but extending that same sense of precise kinship across 10,000 generations, all the way back to Eve—then _that_ will give us an immediacy, a credibility, that will leave the Sons of Adam for dead.”

She stroked my brow tenderly. “You can win the Ancestor Wars for us, Paul. I know you can.”

“Mmm nnn,” I conceded.

I’d been ready to denounce both sides, resign from the EPR project—and even walk away from Lena, if it came to that.

Maybe it was more pride than love, more weakness than commitment, more inertia than loyalty. Whatever the reason, though, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave her.

The only way forward was to try to finish what I’d started. To give the Children their watertight, absolute proof.

* * * *

While the rival ancestor cults picketed and fire-bombed each other, rivers of blood flowed through my apparatus. The Children had supplied me with two-liter samples from no fewer than 50,000 members, worldwide; my lab would have put the most garish Hammer Horror film set to shame.

Trillions of plasmids were analyzed. Electrons in a certain low-energy hybrid orbital—a quantum mixture of two different-shaped charge distributions, potentially stable for thousands of years—were induced by finely-tuned laser pulses to collapse into one particular state. And though every collapse was random, the orbital I’d chosen was—very slightly—correlated across paired strands of DNA. Quadrillions of measurements were accumulated, and compared. With enough plasmids measured for each individual, the faint signature of any shared ancestry could rise up through the statistical noise.

The mutations behind the Children’s Great Tree no longer mattered; in fact, I was looking at stretches of the plasmid most likely to have stayed unblemished all the way back to Eve, since it was the intimate chemical contact of flawless DNA replication which gave the only real chance of a correlation. And as the glitches in the process were ironed-out, and the data mounted up, results finally began to emerge.

The blood donors included many close family groups; I analyzed the data blind, then passed the results to one of my research assistants, to be checked against the known relationships. Early in June 2013, I scored 100 per cent on sibling detection in a thousand samples; a few weeks later, I was doing the same on first and second cousins.

Soon, we hit the limits of the recorded genealogy; to provide another means of cross-checking, I started analyzing nuclear genes as well. Even distant cousins were likely to have at least some genes from a common ancestor—and EPR could date that ancestor precisely.

News of the project spread, and I was deluged with crank mail and death threats. The lab was fortified; the Children hired bodyguards for everyone involved in the work, and their families.

The quantity of information just kept growing, but the Children—horrified by the thought that the Adams might out-do them with rival technology—kept voting me more and more money. I upgraded our supercomputers, twice. And though mitochondria alone could lead me to Eve, for book-keeping purposes I found myself tracing the nuclear genes of hundreds of thousands of ancestors, male and female.

In the spring of 2016, the database reached a kind of critical mass. We hadn’t sampled more than the tiniest fraction of the world’s population—but once it was possible to reach back just a few dozen generations, all the apparently separate lineages began to join up. Autosomal nuclear genes zig-zagged heedlessly between the purely-maternal tree of the Eves and the purely-paternal tree of the Adams, filling in the gaps ... until I found myself with genetic profiles of virtually everyone who’d been alive on the planet in the early ninth century (and left descendants down to the present). I had no names for any of these people, or even definite geographical locations—but I knew the place of every one of them on my own Great Tree, precisely.

I had a snapshot of the genetic diversity of the entire human species. From that point on there was no stopping the cascade, and I pursued the correlations back through the millennia.

* * * *

By 2017, Lena’s worst predictions had all come true. Dozens of different Adams had been proclaimed around the world—and the trend was to look for the common paternal lineage of smaller and smaller populations, converging on ever more recent ancestors. Many were now supposedly historical figures; rival Greek and Macedonian groups were fighting it out over who had the right to call themselves the Sons of Alexander the Great. Y-chromosomal ethnic classification had become government policy in three eastern European republics—and, allegedly, corporate policy in certain multinationals.

The smaller the populations analyzed, of course—unless they were massively in-bred—the less likely it was that everyone targeted really would share a single Adam. So the first male ancestor to be identified became “the father of his people” ... and anyone else became a kind of gene-polluting barbarian rapist, whose hideous taint could still be detected. And weeded out.

Every night, I lay awake into the early hours, trying to understand how I could have ended up at the center of so much conflict over something so idiotic. I still couldn’t bring myself to confess my true feelings to Lena, so I’d pace the house with the lights out, or lock myself in my study with the bullet-proof shutters closed and sort through the latest batch of hate mail, paper and electronic, hunting for evidence that anything I might discover about Eve would have the slightest positive effect on anyone who wasn’t already a fanatical supporter of the Children. Hunting for some sign that there was hope of ever doing more than preaching to the converted.

I never did find the encouragement I was looking for—but there was one postcard which cheered me up, slightly. It was from the High Priest of the Church of the Sacred UFO, in Kansas City.

_Dear Earth-dweller:_

_Please use your BRAIN! As anyone KNOWS in this SCIENTIFIC age, the origin of the races is now WELL UNDERSTOOD! Africans traveled here after the DELUGE from Mercury, Asians from Venus, Caucasians from Mars, and the people of the Pacific islands from assorted asteroids. If you don’t have the NECESSARY OCCULT SKILLS to project rays from the continents to the ASTRAL PLANE to verify this, a simple analysis of TEMPERAMENT and APPEARANCE should make this obvious even to YOU!_

_But please don’t put WORDS into MY mouth! Just because we’re all from different PLANETS doesn’t mean we can’t still be FRIENDS._

* * * *

Lena was deeply troubled. “But how can you hold a media conference tomorrow, when Cousin William hasn’t even seen the final results?” It was Sunday, January 28th, 2018. We’d said goodnight to the bodyguards and gone to bed in the reinforced concrete bunker the Children had installed for us after a nasty incident in one of the Baltic states.

I said, “I’m an independent researcher. I’m free to publish data at any time. That’s what it says in the contract. Any advances in the measurement technology have to go through the Children’s lawyers—but not the palaeogenetic results.”

Lena tried another tack. “But if this work hasn’t been peer-reviewed—”

“It has. The paper’s already been accepted by _Nature_; it will be published the day after the conference. In fact,” I smiled innocently, “I’m really only doing it as a favor to the editor. She’s hoping it will boost sales for the issue.”

Lena fell silent. I’d told her less and less about the work over the preceding six months; I’d let her assume that technical problems were holding up progress.

Finally she said, “Won’t you at least say if it’s good news—or bad?”

I couldn’t look her in the eye, but I shook my head. “Nothing that happened 200,000 years ago is any kind of news at all.”

* * * *

I’d hired a public auditorium for the media conference—far from the Children’s office tower—paying for it myself, and arranging for independent security. Sachs and his fellow directors were not impressed, but short of kidnapping me there was little they could do to shut me up. There’d never been any suggestion of fabricating the results they wanted—but there’d always been an unspoken assumption that only _the right data_ would ever be released with this much fanfare—and the Children would have ample opportunity to put their own spin on it, first.

Behind the podium, my hands were shaking. Over two thousand journalists from across the planet had turned up—and many of them were wearing symbols of allegiance to one ancestor or another.

I cleared my throat and began. The EPR technique had become common knowledge; there was no need to explain it again. I said, simply, “I’d like to show you what I’ve discovered about the origins of _Homo sapiens_.”

The lights went down and a giant hologram, some thirty meters high, appeared behind me. It was, I announced, a family tree—not a rough history of genes or mutations, but an exact generation-by-generation diagram of both female and male parentage for the entire human population—from the ninth century, back. A dense thicket in the shape of an inverted funnel. The audience remained silent, but there was an air of impatience; this tangle of a billion tiny lines was indecipherable—it told them absolutely nothing. But I waited, letting the impenetrable diagram rotate once, slowly.

“The Y-chromosome mutational clock,” I said, “is wrong. I’ve traced the paternal ancestries of groups with similar Y-types back hundreds of thousands of years—and they never converge on any one man.” A murmur of discontent began; I boosted the amplifier volume and drowned it out. “_Why not?_ How can there be so little mutational diversity, if the DNA doesn’t all spring from a single, recent source?” A second hologram appeared, a double-helix, a schematic of the Y-typing region. “Because mutations happen, again and again, at _exactly the same sites_. Make two, or three—or fifty—copying errors in the same location, and it still only looks like it’s one step away from the original.” The double helix hologram was divided and copied, divided and copied; the accumulated differences in each generation were highlighted. “The proof-reading enzymes in our cells must have specific blind spots, specific weaknesses—like words that are easy to misspell. And there’s still a chance of purely random errors, at any site at all—but only on a time scale of millions of years.

“All the Y-chromosome Adams,” I said, “are fantasy. There are no individual fathers to any race, or tribe, or nation. Living northern Europeans, for a start, have over a thousand distinct paternal lineages dating to the late Ice Age—and those thousand ancestors, in turn, are the descendants of over two hundred different male African migrants.” Colors flashed up in the gray maze of the Tree, briefly highlighting the lineages.

A dozen journalists sprang to their feet and started shouting abuse. I waited for the security guards to escort them from the building.

I looked out across the crowd, searching for Lena, but I couldn’t find her. I said, “The same is true of mitochondrial DNA. The mutations overwrite themselves; the molecular clock is wrong. There was no Eve 200,000 years ago.” An uproar began, but I kept talking. “_Homo erectus_ spread out of Africa—dozens of times, over two million years, the new migrants always interbreeding with the old ones, never replacing them.” A globe appeared, the entire Old World so heavily decorated with crisscrossing paths that it was impossible to glimpse a single square kilometer of ground. “_Homo sapiens_ arose everywhere, at once—maintained as one species, worldwide, partly because of migrant gene flow—and partly thanks to the parallel mutations which invalidate all the clocks: mutations taking place in a random order, but biased toward the same sites.” A hologram showed four stretches of DNA, accumulating mutations; at first, the four strands grew increasingly dissimilar, as the sparse random scatter struck them differently—but as more and more of the same vulnerable sites were hit, they all came to bear virtually the same scars.

“So modern racial differences are up to two million years old—inherited from the first _Homo erectus_ migrants—but all of the subsequent evolution has marched in parallel, everywhere ... because _Homo erectus_ never really had much choice. In a mere two million years, different climates could favor different genes for some superficial local adaptions—but everything leading to _Homo sapiens_ was already latent in every migrant’s DNA before they left Africa.”

There was a momentary hush from the Eve supporters—maybe because no one could decide anymore whether the picture I was painting was _unifying_ or _divisive_. The truth was just too gloriously messy and complicated to serve any political purpose at all.

I continued. “But if there was ever an Adam or an Eve, they were long before _Homo sapiens_, long before _Homo erectus_. Maybe they were ... _Australopithecus_—?” I displayed two stooped, hairy, ape-like figures. People started throwing their video cameras. I hit a button under the podium, raising a giant perspex shield in front of the stage.

“Burn all your _symbols!_” I shouted. “Male and female, tribal and global. Give up your Fatherlands and your Earth Mothers—it’s Childhood’s End! Desecrate your ancestors, screw your cousins—just do what you think is right _because it’s right_.”

The shield cracked. I ran for the stage exit.

The security guards had all vanished—but Lena was sitting in our armor-plated Volvo in the basement car park, with the engine running. She wound down the mirrored side window.

“I watched your little performance on the net.” She gazed at me calmly, but there was rage and pain in her eyes. I had no adrenaline left, no strength, no pride; I fell to my knees beside the car.

“I love you. Forgive me.”

“Get in,” she said. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

The Moral Virologist

Out on the street, in the dazzling sunshine of a warm Atlanta morning, a dozen young children were playing. Chasing, wrestling, and hugging each other, laughing and yelling, crazy and jubilant for no other reason than being alive on such a day. Inside the gleaming white building, though, behind double-glazed windows, the air was slightly chilly—the way John Shawcross preferred it—and nothing could be heard but the air-conditioning, and a faint electrical hum.

The schematic of the protein molecule trembled very slightly. Shawcross grinned, already certain of success. As the pH displayed in the screen’s top left crossed the critical value—the point at which, according to his calculations, the energy of conformation B should drop below that of conformation A—the protein suddenly convulsed and turned completely inside-out. It was exactly as he had predicted, and his binding studies had added strong support, but to see the transformation (however complex the algorithms that had led from reality to screen) was naturally the most satisfying proof.

He replayed the event, backwards and forwards several times, utterly captivated. This marvellous device would easily be worth the eight hundred thousand he’d paid for it. The salesperson had provided several impressive demonstrations, of course, but this was the first time Shawcross had used the machine for his own work. Images of proteins in solution! Normal X-ray diffraction could only work with crystalline samples, in which a molecule’s configuration often bore little resemblance to its aqueous, biologically relevant, form. An ultrasonically stimulated semi-ordered liquid phase was the key, not to mention some major breakthroughs in computing; Shawcross couldn’t follow all the details, but that was no impediment to using the machine. He charitably wished upon the inventor Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine; viewed the stunning results of his experiment once again, then stretched, rose to his feet, and went out in search of lunch.

On his way to the delicatessen, he passed that bookshop, as always. A lurid new poster in the window caught his eye: a naked young man stretched out on a bed in a state of postcoital languor, one corner of the sheet only just concealing his groin. Emblazoned across the top of the poster, in imitation of a glowing red neon sign, was the book’s title: A Hot Night’s Safe Sex. Shawcross shook his head in anger and disbelief. What was wrong with people? Hadn’t they read his advertisement? Were they blind? Stupid? Arrogant? Safety lay only in the obedience of God’s laws.

After eating, he called in at a newsagent that carried several foreign papers. The previous Saturday’s editions had arrived, and his advertisement was in all of them, where necessary translated into the appropriate languages. Half a page in a major newspaper was not cheap anywhere in the world, but then, money had never been a problem.

ADULTERERS! SODOMITES!

REPENT AND BE SAVED!

ABANDON YOUR WICKEDNESS NOW

OR DIE AND BURN FOREVER!

He couldn’t have put it more plainly, could he? Nobody could claim that they hadn’t been warned.

In 1981, Matthew Shawcross bought a tiny, run-down cable TV station in the Bible belt, which until then had split its air time between scratchy black-and-white film clips of fifties gospel singers, and local novelty acts such as snake handlers (protected by their faith, not to mention the removal of their pets’ venom glands) and epileptic children (encouraged by their parents’ prayers, and a carefully timed withdrawal of medication, to let the spirit move them). Matthew Shawcross dragged the station into the nineteen eighties, spending a fortune on a thirty-second computer-animated station ID (a fleet of pirouetting, crenellated spaceships firing crucifix-shaped missiles into a relief map of the USA, chiselling out the station logo of Liberty, holding up, not a torch, but a cross), showing the latest, slickest gospel rock video clips, “Christian” soap operas and “Christian” game shows, and, above all, identifying issues—communism, depravity, godlessness in schools—which could serve as the themes for telethons to raise funds to expand the station, so that future telethons might be even more successful.

Ten years later, he owned one of the country’s biggest cable TV networks.

John Shawcross was at college, on the verge of taking up paleontology, when AIDS first began to make the news in a big way. As the epidemic snowballed, and the spiritual celebrities he most admired (his father included) began proclaiming the disease to be God’s will, he found himself increasingly obsessed by it. In an age where the word miracle belonged to medicine and science, here was a plague, straight out of the Old Testament, destroying the wicked and sparing the righteous (give or take some haemophiliacs and transfusion recipients), proving to Shawcross beyond any doubt that sinners could be punished in this life, as well as in the next. This was, he decided, valuable in at least two ways: not only would sinners to whom damnation had seemed a remote and unproven threat now have a powerful, worldly reason to reform, but the righteous would be strengthened in their resolve by this unarguable sign of heavenly support and approval.

In short, the mere existence of AIDS made John Shawcross feel good, and he gradually became convinced that some kind of personal involvement with HIV, the AIDS virus, would make him feel even better. He lay awake at night, pondering God’s mysterious ways, and wondering how he could get in on the act. AIDS research would be aimed at a cure, so how could he possibly justify involving himself with that?

Then, in the early hours of one cold morning, he was woken by sounds from the room next to his. Giggling, grunting, and the squeaking of bed springs. He wrapped his pillow around his ears and tried to go back to sleep, but the sounds could not be ignored—nor could the effect they wrought on his own fallible flesh. He masturbated for a while, on the pretext of trying to manually crush his unwanted erection, but stopped short of orgasm and lay, shivering, in a state of heightened moral perception. It was a different woman every week; he’d seen them leaving in the morning. He’d tried to counsel his fellow student, but had been mocked for his troubles. Shawcross didn’t blame the poor young man; was it any wonder people laughed at the truth, when every movie, every book, every magazine, every rock song, still sanctioned promiscuity and perversion, making them out to be normal and good? The fear of AIDS might have saved millions of sinners, but millions more still ignored it, absurdly convinced that their chosen partners could never be infected, or trusting in condoms to frustrate the will of God!

The trouble was, vast segments of the population had, in spite of their wantonness, remained uninfected, and the use of condoms, according to the studies he’d read, did seem to reduce the risk of transmission. These facts disturbed Shawcross a great deal. Why would an omnipotent God create an imperfect tool? Was it a matter of divine mercy? That was possible, he conceded, but it struck him as rather distasteful: sexual Russian roulette was hardly a fitting image of the Lord’s capacity for forgiveness.

Or—Shawcross tingled all over as the possibility crystalised in his brain—might AIDS be no more than a mere prophetic shadow, hinting at a future plague a thousand times more terrible? A warning to the wicked to change their ways while they still had time? An example to the righteous as to how they might do His will?

Shawcross broke into a sweat. The sinners next door moaned as if already in Hell, the thin dividing wall vibrated, the wind rose up to shake the dark trees and rattle his window. What was this wild idea in his head? A true message from God, or the product of his own imperfect understanding? He needed guidance! He switched on his reading lamp and picked up his Bible from the bedside table. With his eyes closed, he opened the book at random.

He recognised the passage at the very first glance. He ought to have; he’d read it and reread it a hundred times, and knew it almost by heart. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

At first, he tried to deny his destiny: He was unworthy! A sinner himself! An ignorant child! But everyone was unworthy, everyone was a sinner, everyone was an ignorant child in God’s eyes. It was pride, not humility, that spoke against God’s choice of him.

By morning, not a trace of doubt remained.

Dropping paleontology was a great relief; defending Creationism with any conviction required a certain, very special, way of thinking, and he had never been quite sure that he could master it. Biochemistry, on the other hand, he mastered with ease (confirmation, if any was needed, that he’d made the right decision). He topped his classes every year, and went on to do a PhD in Molecular Biology at Harvard, then postdoctoral work at the NIH, and fellowships in Canada and France. He lived for his work, pushing himself mercilessly, but always taking care not to be too conspicuous in his achievements. He published very little, usually as a modest third or fourth co-author, and when at last he flew home from France, nobody in his field knew, or would have much cared, that John Shawcross had returned, ready to begin his real work.

Shawcross worked alone in the gleaming white building that served as both laboratory and home. He couldn’t risk taking on employees, no matter how closely their beliefs might have matched his own. He hadn’t even let his parents in on the secret; he told them he was engaged in theoretical molecular genetics, which was a lie of omission only—and he had no need to beg his father for money week by week since, for tax reasons, twenty-five percent of the Shawcross empire’s massive profit was routinely payed into accounts in his name.

His lab was filled with shiny grey boxes, from which ribbon cables snaked to PCs; the latest generation, fully automated, synthesisers and sequencers of DNA, RNA, and proteins (all available off the shelf, to anyone with the money to buy them). Half a dozen robot arms did all the grunt work: pipetting and diluting reagents, labelling tubes, loading and unloading centrifuges.

At first Shawcross spent most of his time working with computers, searching databases for the sequence and structure information that would provide him with starting points, later buying time on a supercomputer to predict the shapes and interactions of molecules as yet unknown.

When aqueous X-ray diffraction become possible, his work sped up by a factor of ten; to synthesise and observe the actual proteins and nucleic acids was now both faster, and more reliable, than the hideously complex process (even with the best short-cuts, approximations and tricks) of solving Schrödinger’s equation for a molecule consisting of hundreds of thousands of atoms.

Base by base, gene by gene, the Shawcross virus grew.

As the woman removed the last of her clothes, Shawcross, sitting naked on the motel room’s plastic bucket chair, said, “You must have had sexual intercourse with hundreds of men.”

“Thousands. Don’t you want to come closer, honey? Can you see okay from there?”

“I can see fine.”

She lay back, still for a moment with her hands cupping her breasts, then she closed her eyes and began to slide her palms across her torso.

This was the two hundredth occasion on which Shawcross had paid a woman to tempt him. When he had begun the desensitising process five years before, he had found it almost unbearable. Tonight he knew he would sit calmly and watch the woman achieve, or skilfully imitate, orgasm, without experiencing even a flicker of lust himself.

“You take precautions, I suppose.”

She smiled, but kept her eyes closed. “Damn right I do. If a man won’t wear a condom, he can take his business elsewhere. And I put it on, he doesn’t do it himself. When I put it on, it stays on. Why, have you changed your mind?”

“No. Just curious.”

Shawcross always paid in full, in advance, for the act he did not perform, and always explained to the woman, very clearly at the start, that at any time he might weaken, he might make the decision to rise from the chair and join her. No mere circumstantial impediment could take any credit for his inaction; nothing but his own free will stood between him and mortal sin.

Tonight, he wondered why he continued. The “temptation” had become a formal ritual, with no doubt whatsoever as to the outcome.

No doubt? Surely that was pride speaking, his wiliest and most persistent enemy. Every man and woman forever trod the edge of a precipice over the inferno, at risk more than ever of falling to those hungry flames when he or she least believed it possible.

Shawcross stood and walked over to the woman. Without hesitation, he placed one hand on her ankle. She opened her eyes and sat up, regarding him with amusement, then took hold of his wrist and began to drag his hand along her leg, pressing it hard against the warm, smooth skin.

Just above the knee, he began to panic—but it wasn’t until his fingers struck moisture that he pulled free with a strangled mewling sound, and staggered back to the chair, breathless and shaking.

That was more like it.

The Shawcross virus was to be a masterful piece of biological clockwork (the likes of which William Paley could never have imagined—and which no godless evolutionist would dare attribute to the “blind watchmaker” of chance). Its single strand of RNA would describe, not one, but four potential organisms.

Shawcross virus A, SVA, the “anonymous” form, would be highly infectious, but utterly benign. It would reproduce within a variety of host cells in the skin and mucous membranes, without causing the least disruption to normal cellular functions. Its protein coat had been designed so that every exposed site mimicked some portion of a naturally occurring human protein; the immune system, being necessarily blind to these substances (to avoid attacking the body itself), would be equally blind to the invader.

Small numbers of SVA would make their way into the blood stream, infecting T-lymphocytes, and triggering stage two of the virus’s genetic program. A system of enzymes would make RNA copies of hundreds of genes from every chromosome of the host cell’s DNA, and these copies would then be incorporated into the virus itself. So, the next generation of the virus would carry with it, in effect, a genetic fingerprint of the host in which it had come into being.

Shawcross called this second form SVC, the C standing for “customised” (since every individual’s unique genetic profile would give rise to a unique strain of SVC), or “celibate” (because, in a celibate person, only SVA and SVC would be present).

SVC would be able to survive only in blood, semen and vaginal fluids. Like SVA, it would be immunologically invisible, but with an added twist: its choice of camouflage would vary wildly from person to person, so that even if its disguise was imperfect, and antibodies to a dozen (or a hundred, or a thousand) particular strains could be produced, universal vaccination would remain impossible.

Like SVA, it would not alter the function of its hosts—with one minor exception. When infecting cells in the vaginal mucous membrane, the prostate, or the seminiferous epithelium, it would cause the manufacture and secretion from these cells of several dozen enzymes specifically designed to degrade varieties of rubber. The holes created by a brief exposure would be invisibly small—but from a viral point of view, they’d be enormous.

Upon reinfecting T-cells, SVC would be capable of making an “informed decision” as to what the next generation would be. Like SVA, it would create a genetic fingerprint of its host cell. It would then compare this with its stored, ancestral copy. If the two fingerprints were identical—proving that the customised strain had remained within the body in which it had begun—its daughters would be, simply, more SVC.

However, if the fingerprints failed to match, implying that the strain had now crossed into another person’s body (and if gender-specific markers showed that the two hosts were not of the same sex), the daughter virus would be a third variety, SVM, containing both fingerprints. The M stood for “monogamous”, or “marriage certificate”. Shawcross, a great romantic, found it almost unbearably sweet to think of two people’s love for each other being expressed in this way, deep down at the subcellular level, and of man and wife, by the very act of making love, signing a contract of faithfulness until death, literally in their own blood.

SVM would be, externally, much like SVC. Of course, when it infected a T-cell it would check the host’s fingerprint against both stored copies, and if either one matched, all would be well, and more SVM would be produced.

Shawcross called the fourth form of the virus SVD. It could arise in two ways; from SVC directly, when the gender markers implied that a homosexual act had taken place, or from SVM, when the detection of a third genetic fingerprint suggested that the molecular marriage contract had been violated.

SVD forced its host cells to secrete enzymes that catalysed the disintegration of vital structural proteins in blood vessel walls. Sufferers from an SVD infection would undergo massive haemorrhaging all over their body. Shawcross had found that mice died within two or three minutes of an injection of pre-infected lymphocytes, and rabbits within five or six minutes; the timing varied slightly, depending on the choice of injection site.

SVD was designed so that its protein coat would degrade in air, or in solutions outside a narrow range of temperature and pH, and its RNA alone was non-infectious. Catching SVD from a dying victim would be almost impossible. Because of the swiftness of death, an adulterer would have no time to infect their innocent spouse. The widow or widower would, of course, be sentenced to a life of celibacy, but Shawcross did not think this too harsh: it took two people to make a marriage, he reasoned, and some small share of the blame could always be apportioned to the other partner.

Even assuming that the virus fulfilled its design goals precisely, Shawcross acknowledged a number of complications:

Blood transfusions would become impractical until a foolproof method of killing the virus in vitro was found. Five years ago this would have been tragic, but Shawcross was encouraged by the latest work in synthetic and cultured blood components, and had no doubt that his epidemic would cause more funds and manpower to be diverted into the area. Transplants were less easily dealt with, but Shawcross thought them somewhat frivolous anyway, an expensive and rarely justifiable use of scarce resources.

Doctors, nurses, dentists, paramedics, police, undertakers ... well, in fact everyone, would have to take extreme precautions to avoid exposure to other people’s blood. Shawcross was impressed, though of course not surprised, at God’s foresight here: the rarer and less deadly AIDS virus had gone before, encouraging practices verging on the paranoid in dozens of professions, multiplying rubber glove sales by orders of magnitude. Now the overkill would all be justified, since everyone would be infected with, at the very least, SVC.

Rape of virgin by virgin would become a sort of biological shot-gun wedding; any other kind would be murder and suicide. The death of the victim would be tragic, of course, but the near-certain death of the rapist would surely be an overwhelming deterrent. Shawcross decided that the crime would virtually disappear.

Homosexual incest between identical twins would escape punishment, since the virus could have no way of telling one from the other. This omission irritated Shawcross, especially since he was unable to find any published statistics that would allow him to judge the prevalence of such abominable behaviour. In the end he decided that this minor flaw would constitute a necessary, token remnant—a kind of moral fossil—of man’s inalienable potential to consciously choose evil.

It was in the northern summer of 2000 that the virus was completed, and tested as well as it could be in tissue culture experiments and on laboratory animals. Apart from establishing the fatality of SVD (created by test-tube simulations of human sins of the flesh), rats, mice and rabbits were of little value, because so much of the virus’s behaviour was tied up in its interaction with the human genome. In cultured human cell lines, though, the clockwork all seemed to unwind, exactly as far, and never further, than appropriate to the circumstances; generation after generation of SVA, SVC and SVM remained stable and benign. Of course more experiments could have been done, more time put aside to ponder the consequences, but that would have been the case regardless.

It was time to act. The latest drugs meant that AIDS was now rarely fatal—at least, not to those who could afford the treatment. The third millenium was fast approaching, a symbolic opportunity not to be ignored. Shawcross was doing God’s work; what need did he have for quality control? True, he was an imperfect human instrument in God’s hands, and at every stage of the task he had blundered and failed a dozen times before achieving perfection, but that was in the laboratory, where mistakes could be discovered and rectified easily. Surely God would never permit anything less than an infallible virus, His will made RNA, out into the world.

So Shawcross visited a travel agent, then infected himself with SVA.

Shawcross went west, crossing the Pacific at once, saving his own continent for last. He stuck to large population centres: Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Bangkok, Manilla, Sydney, New Delhi, Cairo. SVA could survive indefinitely, dormant but potentially infectious, on any surface that wasn’t intentionally sterilised. The seats in a jet, the furniture in a hotel room, aren’t autoclaved too often.

Shawcross didn’t visit prostitutes; it was SVA that he wanted to spread, and SVA was not a venereal disease. Instead, he simply played the tourist, sight-seeing, shopping, catching public transport, swimming in hotel pools. He relaxed at a frantic pace, adopting a schedule of remorseless recreation that, he soon felt, only divine intervention sustained.

Not surprisingly, by the time he reached London he was a wreck, a suntanned zombie in a fading floral shirt, with eyes as glazed as the multicoated lens of his obligatory (if filmless) camera. Tiredness, jet lag, and endless changes of cuisine and surroundings (paradoxically made worse by an underlying, glutinous monotony to be found in food and cities alike), had all worked together to slowly drag him down into a muddy, dreamlike state of mind. He dreamt of airports and hotels and jets, and woke in the same places, unable to distinguish between memories and dreams.

His faith held out through it all, of course, invulnerably axiomatic, but he worried nonetheless. High altitude jet travel meant extra exposure to cosmic rays; could he be certain that the virus’s mechanisms for self checking and mutation repair were fail-safe? God would be watching over all the trillions of replications, but still, he would feel better when he was home again, and could test the strain he’d been carrying for any evidence of defects.

Exhausted, he stayed in his hotel room for days, when he should have been out jostling Londoners, not to mention the crowds of international tourists making the best of the end of summer. News of his plague was only now beginning to grow beyond isolated items about mystery deaths; health authorities were investigating, but had had little time to assemble all the data, and were naturally reluctant to make premature announcements. It was too late, anyway; even if Shawcross had been found and quarantined at once, and all national frontiers sealed, people he had infected so far would already have taken SVA to every corner of the globe.

He missed his flight to Dublin. He missed his flight to Ontario. He ate and slept, and dreamt of eating, sleeping and dreaming. The Times arrived each morning on his breakfast tray, each day devoting more and more space to proof of his success, but still lacking the special kind of headline he longed for: a black and white acknowledgement of the plague’s divine purpose. Experts began declaring that all the signs pointed to a biological weapon run amok, with Libya and Iraq the prime suspects; sources in Israeli intelligence had confirmed that both countries had greatly expanded their research programs in recent years. If any epidemiologist had realised that only adulterers and homosexuals were dying, the idea had not yet filtered through to the press.

Eventually, Shawcross checked out of the hotel. There was no need for him to travel through Canada, the States, or Central and South America; all the news showed that other travellers had long since done his job for him. He booked a flight home, but had nine hours to kill.

“I will do no such thing! Now take your money and get out.”

“But—”

“Straight sex, it says in the foyer. Can’t you read?”

“I don’t want sex. I won’t touch you. You don’t understand. I want you to touch yourself. I only want to be tempted—”

“Well, walk down the street with both eyes open, that should be temptation enough.” The woman glared at him, but Shawcross didn’t budge. There was an important principle at stake. “I’ve paid you!” he whined.

She dropped the notes on his lap. “And now you have your money back. Good night.”

He climbed to his feet. “God’s going to punish you. You’re going to die a horrible death, blood leaking out of all your veins—”

“There’ll be blood leaking out of you if I have to call the lads to assist you off the premises.”

“Haven’t you read about the plague? Don’t you realise what it is, what it means? It’s God’s punishment for fornicators—”

“Oh, get out, you blaspheming lunatic.”

“Blaspheming?” Shawcross was stunned. “You don’t know who you’re talking to! I’m God’s chosen instrument!”

She scowled at him. “You’re the devil’s own arsehole, that’s what you are. Now clear off.”

As Shawcross tried to stare her down, a peculiar dizziness took hold of him. She was going to die, and he would be responsible. For several seconds, this simple realisation sat unchallenged in his brain, naked, awful, obscene in its clarity. He waited for the usual chorus of abstractions and rationalisations to rise up and conceal it.

And waited.

Finally he knew that he couldn’t leave the room without doing his best to save her life.

“Listen to me! Take this money and let me talk, that’s all. Let me talk for five minutes, then I’ll go.”

“Talk about what?”

“The plague. Listen! I know more about the plague than anyone else on the planet.” The woman mimed disbelief and impatience. “It’s true! I’m an expert virologist, I work for, ah, I work for the Centres for Disease Control, in Atlanta, Georgia. Everything I’m going to tell you will be made public in a couple of days, but I’m telling you now, because you’re at risk from this job, and in a couple of days it might be too late.”

He explained, in the simplest language he could manage, the four stages of the virus, the concept of a stored host fingerprint, the fatal consequences if a third person’s SVM ever entered her blood. She sat through it all in silence.

“Do you understand what I’ve said?”

“Sure I do. That doesn’t mean I believe it.”

He leapt to his feet and shook her. “I’m deadly serious! I’m telling you the absolute truth! God is punishing adulterers! AIDS was just a warning; this time no sinner will escape! No one!”

She removed his hands. “Your God and my God don’t have a lot in common.”

“Your God!” he spat.

“Oh, and aren’t I entitled to one? Excuse me. I thought they’d put it in some United Nations Charter: Everyone’s issued with their own God at birth, though if you break Him or lose Him along the way there’s no free replacement.”

“Now who’s blaspheming?”

She shrugged. “Well, my God’s still functioning, but yours sounds a bit of a disaster. Mine might not cure all the problems in the world, but at least he doesn’t bend over backwards to make them worse.”

Shawcross was indignant. “A few people will die. A few sinners, it can’t be helped. But think of what the world will be like when the message finally gets through! No unfaithfulness, no rape; every marriage lasting until death—”

She grimaced with distaste. “For all the wrong reasons.”

“No! It might start out that way. People are weak, they need a reason, a selfish reason, to be good. But given time it will grow to be more than that; a habit, then a tradition, then part of human nature. The virus won’t matter any more. People will have changed.”

“Well, maybe; if monogamy is inheritable, I suppose natural selection would eventually—”

Shawcross stared at her, wondering if he was losing his mind, then screamed, “Stop it! There is no such thing as ‘natural selection’!” He’d never been lectured on Darwinism in any brothel back home, but then what could he expect in a country run by godless socialists? He calmed down slightly, and added, “I meant a change in the spiritual values of the world culture.”

The woman shrugged, unmoved by the outburst. “I know you don’t give a damn what I think, but I’m going to tell you anyway. You are the saddest, most screwed-up man I’ve set eyes on all week. So, you’ve chosen a particular moral code to live by; that’s your right, and good luck to you. But you have no real faith in what you’re doing; you’re so uncertain of your choice that you need God to pour down fire and brimstone on everyone who’s chosen differently, just to prove to you that you’re right. God fails to oblige, so you hunt through the natural disasters—earthquakes, floods, famines, epidemics—winnowing out examples of the ‘punishment of sinners’. You think you’re proving that God’s on your side? All you’re proving is your own insecurity.”

She glanced at her watch. “Well, your five minutes are long gone, and I never talk theology for free. I’ve got one last question though, if you don’t mind, since you’re likely to be the last ‘expert virologist’ I run into for a while.”

“Ask.” She was going to die. He’d done his best to save her, and he’d failed. Well, hundreds of thousands would die with her. He had no choice but to accept that; his faith would keep him sane.

“This virus that your God’s designed is only supposed to harm adulterers and gays? Right?”

“Yes. Haven’t you listened? That’s the whole point! The mechanism is ingenious, the DNA fingerprint—”

She spoke very slowly, opening her mouth extra wide, as if addressing a deaf or demented person. “Suppose some sweet, monogamous, married couple have sex. Suppose the woman becomes pregnant. The child won’t have exactly the same set of genes as either parent. So what happens to it? What happens to the baby?”

Shawcross just stared at her. What happens to the baby? His mind was blank. He was tired, he was homesick ... all the pressure, all the worries ... he’d been through an ordeal—how could she expect him to think straight, how could she expect him to explain every tiny detail? What happens to the baby? What happens to the innocent, newly made child? He struggled to concentrate, to organise his thoughts, but the absolute horror of what she was suggesting tugged at his attention, like a tiny, cold, insistent hand, dragging him, inch by inch, towards madness.

Suddenly, he burst into laughter; he almost wept with relief. He shook his head at the stupid whore, and said, “You can’t trick me like that! I thought of babies back in ‘94! At little Joel’s christening—he’s my cousin’s boy.” He grinned and shook his head again, giddy with happiness. “I fixed the problem: I added genes to SVC and SVM, for surface receptors to half a dozen foetal blood proteins; if any of the receptors are activated, the next generation of the virus is pure SVA. It’s even safe to breast feed, for about a month, because the foetal proteins take a while to be replaced.”

“For about a month,” echoed the woman. Then, “What do you mean, you added genes ... ?”

Shawcross was already bolting from the room.

He ran, aimlessly, until he was breathless and stumbling, then he limped through the streets, clutching his head, ignoring the stares and insults of passers-by. A month wasn’t long enough, he’d known that all along, but somehow he’d forgotten just what it was he’d intended to do about it. There’d been too many details, too many complications.

Already, children would be dying.

He came to a halt in a deserted side street, behind a row of tawdry nightclubs, and slumped to the ground. He sat against a cold brick wall, shivering and hugging himself. Muffled music reached him, thin and distorted.

Where had he gone wrong? Hadn’t he taken his revelation of God’s purpose in creating AIDS to its logical conclusion? Hadn’t he devoted his whole life to perfecting a biological machine able to discern good from evil? If something so hideously complex, so painstakingly contrived as his virus, still couldn’t do the job ...

Waves of blackness moved across his vision.

What if he’d been wrong, from the start?

What if none of his work had been God’s will, after all?

Shawcross contemplated this idea with a shell-shocked kind of tranquillity. It was too late to halt the spread of the virus, but he could go to the authorities and arm them with the details that would otherwise take them years to discover. Once they knew about the foetal protein receptors, a protective drug exploiting that knowledge might be possible in a matter of months.

Such a drug would enable breast feeding, blood transfusions and organ transplants. It would also allow adulterers to copulate, and homosexuals to practise their abominations. It would be utterly morally neutral, the negation of everything he’d lived for. He stared up at the blank sky, with a growing sense of panic. Could he do that? Tear himself down and start again? He had to! Children were dying. Somehow, he had to find the courage.

Then, it happened. Grace was restored. His faith flooded back like a tide of light, banishing his preposterous doubts. How could he have contemplated surrender, when the real solution was so obvious, so simple?

He staggered to his feet, then broke into a run again, reciting to himself, over and over, to be sure he’d get it right this time: “ADULTERERS! SODOMITES! MOTHERS BREAST FEEDING INFANTS OVER THE AGE OF FOUR WEEKS! REPENT AND BE SAVED ...”

Neighbourhood Watch

My retainers keep me on ice. Dry ice. It slows my metabolism, takes the edge off my appetite, slightly. I lie, bound with heavy chains, between two great slabs of it, naked and sweating, trying to sleep through the torment of a summer’s day.

They’ve given me the local fall-out shelter, the very deepest room they could find, as I requested. Yet my senses move easily through the earth and to the surface, out across the lazy, warm suburbs, restless emissaries skimming the sun-soaked streets. If I could rein them in I would, but the instinct that drives them is a force unto itself, a necessary consequence of what I am and the reason I was brought into being.

Being, I have discovered, has certain disadvantages. I intend seeking compensation, just as soon as the time is right.

In the dazzling, clear mornings, in the brilliant, cloudless afternoons, children play in the park, barely half a mile from me. They know I’ve arrived; part of me comes from each one of their nightmares, and each of their nightmares comes partly from me. It’s day time now, though, so under safe blue skies they taunt me with foolish rhymes, mock me with crude imitations, tell each other tales of me which take them almost to the edge of hysterical fear, only to back away, to break free with sudden careless laughter. Oh, their laughter! I could put an end to it so quickly ...

“Oh yeah?” David is nine, he’s their leader. He pulls an ugly face in my direction. “Great tough monster! Sure.” I respond instinctively: I reach out, straining, and a furrow forms in the grass, snakes towards his bare feet. Nearly. My burning skin hollows the ice beneath me. Nearly. David watches the ground, unimpressed, arms folded, sneering. Nearly! But the contract, one flimsy page on the bottom shelf of the Mayor’s grey safe, speaks the final word: No. No loophole, no argument, no uncertainty, no imprecision. I withdraw, there is nothing else I can do. This is the source of my agony: all around me is living flesh, flesh that by nature I could joyfully devour in an endless, frantic, ecstatic feast, but I am bound by my signature in blood to take only the smallest pittance, and only in the dead of night.

For now.

Well, never mind, David. Be patient. All good things take time, my friend.

“No fucking friend of mine!” he says, and spits into the furrow. His brother sneaks up from behind and, with a loud shout, grabs him. They roar at each other, baring their teeth, arms spread wide, fingers curled into imitation claws. I must watch this, impassive. Sand trickles in to fill the useless furrow. I force the tense muscles of my shoulders and back to relax, chanting: be patient, be patient.

Only at night, says the contract. After eleven, to be precise. Decent people are not out after eleven, and decent people should not have to witness what I do.

Andrews is seventeen, and bored. Andrew, I understand. This suburb is a hole, you have my deepest sympathies. What do they expect you to do around here? On a warm night like this a young man can grow restless. I know; your dreams, too, shaped me slightly (my principal creators did not expect that). You need adventure. So keep your eyes open, Andrew, there are opportunities everywhere.

The sign on the chemist’s window says no money, no drugs, but you are no fool. The back window’s frame is rotting, the nails are loose, it falls apart in your hands. Like cake. Must be your lucky night, tonight.

The cash drawer’s empty (oh shit!) and you can forget about that safe, but a big, glass candy jar of valium beats a handful of Swiss health bars, doesn’t it? There are kids dumb enough to pay for those, down at the primary school.

Only those who break the law, says the contract. A list of statutes is provided, to be precise. Parking offences, breaking the speed limit and cheating on income tax are not included; decent people are only human, after all. Breaking and entering is there, though, and stealing, well, that dates right back to the old stone tablets.

No loophole, Andrew. No argument.

Andrew has a flick knife, and a death’s head tattoo. He’s great in a fight, our Andrew. Knows some karate, once did a little boxing, he has no reason to be afraid. He walks around like he owns the night. Especially when there’s nobody around.

So what’s that on the wind? Sounds like someone breathing, someone close by. Very even, slow, steady, powerful. Where is the bastard? You can see in all directions, but there’s no one in sight. What, then? Do you think it’s in your head? That doesn’t seem likely.

Andrew stands still for a moment. He wants to figure this out for himself, but I can’t help giving him hints, so the lace of his left sand-shoe comes undone. He puts down the jar and crouches to retie it.

The ground, it seems, is breathing.

Andrew frowns. He’s not happy about this. He puts one ear against the footpath, then pulls his head away, startled by the sound’s proximity. Under that slab of paving, he could swear.

A gas leak! Fuck it, of course. A gas leak, or something like that. Something mechanical. An explanation. Pipes, water, gas, pumps, shit, who knows? Yeah. There’s a whole world of machinery just below the street, enough machinery to explain anything. But it felt pretty strange for a while there, didn’t it?

He picks up the jar. The paving slab vibrates. He plants a foot on it, to suggest that it stays put, but it does not heed his weight. I toss it gently into the air, knocking him aside into somebody’s ugly letter box.

The contract is singing to me now. Ah, blessed, beautiful document! I hear you. Did I ever truly resent you? Surely not! For to kill with you as my accomplice, even once, is sweeter by far than the grossest bloodbath I can dream of, without your steady voice, your calm authority, your proud mask of justice. Forgive me! In the daylight I am a different creature, irritable and weak. Now we are in harmony, now we are in blissful accord. Our purposes are one. Sing on!

Andrew comes forward cautiously, sniffing for gas, a little uneasy but determined to view the comprehensible cause. A deep, black hole. He squats beside it, leans over, strains his eyes but makes out nothing.

I inhale.

Mrs Bold has come to see me. She is Chairman of the local Citizens Against Crime, those twelve fine men and women from whose dreams (chiefly, but not exclusively) I was formed. They’ve just passed a motion congratulating me (and hence themselves) on a successful first month. Burglaries, says Mrs Bold, have plummeted.

“The initial contract, you understand, is only for three months, but I’m almost certain we’ll want to extend it. There’s a clause allowing for that, one month at a time.”

“Both parties willing.”

“Of course. We were all of us determined that the contract be scrupulously fair. You mustn’t think of yourself as our slave.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re our business associate. We all agreed from the start that that was the proper relationship. But you do like it here, don’t you?”

“Very much.”

“We can’t increase the payment, you know. Six thousand a month, well, we’ve really had to scrape to manage that much. Worth every cent, of course, but ... “

That’s a massive lie, of course: six thousand is the very least they could bring themselves to pay me. Anything less would have left them wondering if they really owned me. The money helps them trust me, the money makes it all familiar: they’re used to buying people. If they’d got me for free, they’d never sleep at night. These are fine people, understand.

“Relax, Mrs Bold. I won’t ask for another penny. And I expect to be here for a very long time.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful. Come the end of the year I’ll be talking to the insurance companies about dropping the outrageous premiums. You’ve no idea how hard it’s been for the small retailers.” She is ten feet from the doorway of my room, peering in through the fog of condensed humidity. With the dry ice and chains she can see very little of me, but this meagre view is enough to engender wicked thoughts. Who can blame her? I’m straight out of her dreams, after all. Would you indeed, Mrs Bold? I wonder. She feels two strong hands caressing her gently. Three strong hands. Four, five, six. Such manly hands, except the nails are rather long. And sharp. “Do you really have to stay in there? Trussed up like that?” Her voice is even, quite a feat. “We’re having celebratory drinks at my house tomorrow, and you’d be very welcome.”

“You’re so kind, Mrs Bold, but for now I do have to stay here. Like this. Some other time, I promise.”

She shakes the hands away. I could insist, but I’m such a gentleman. “Some other time, then.”

“Goodbye, Mrs Bold.”

“Goodbye. Keep up the good work. Oh, I nearly forgot! I have a little gift.” She pulls a brown-wrapped shape from her shopping bag. “Do you like lamb?”

“You’re too generous!”

“Not me. Mr Simmons, the butcher, thought you might like it. He’s a lovely old man. He used to lose so much stock before you started work, not to mention the vandalism. Where shall I put it?”

“Hold it towards me from where you are now. Stretch out your arms.”

Lying still, ten feet away, I burst the brown paper into four segments which flutter to the floor. Mrs Bold blinks but does not flinch. The red, wet flesh is disgustingly cold, but I’m far too polite to refuse any offering. A stream of meat flows from the joint, through the doorway, to vanish in the mist around my head. I spin the bone, pivoted on her palms, working around it several times until it is clean and white, then I tip it from her grip so that it points towards me, and I suck out the marrow in a single, quick spurt.

Mrs Bold sighs deeply, then shakes her head, smiling. “I wish my husband ate like that! He’s become a vegetarian, you know. I keep telling him it’s unnatural, but he pays no attention. Red meat has had such a bad name lately, with all those stupid scientists scaremongering, saying it causes this and that, but I personally can’t see how any one can live without it and feel that they’re having a balanced diet. We were meant to eat it, that’s just the way people are.”

“You’re absolutely right. Please thank Mr Simmons for me.”

“I shall. And thank you again, for what you’re doing for this community.”

“My pleasure.”

Mrs Bold dreams of me. Me? His face is like a film star’s! There are a few factual touches, though: we writhe on a plain of ice, and I am draped in chains. It’s a strange kind of feedback, to see your dreams made flesh, and then to dream of what you saw. Can she really believe that the solid, sweating creature in the fall-out shelter is no more and no less than the insubstantial lover who knows her every wish? In her dream I am a noble protector, keeping her and her daughters safe from rapists, her son safe from pushers, her domestic appliances safe from thieves; and yes, I do these things, but if she knew why she’d run screaming from her bed. In her dream I bite her, but my teeth don’t break the skin. I scratch her, but only as much as she needs to enjoy me. I could shape this dream into a nightmare, but why telegraph the truth? I could wake her in a sweat of blood, but why let the sheep know it’s headed for slaughter? Let her believe that I’m content to keep the wolves at bay.

David’s still awake, reading. I rustle his curtain but he doesn’t look up. He makes a rude sign, though, aimed with precision. A curious child. He can’t have seen the contract, he can’t know that I can’t yet harm him, so why does he treat me with nonchalant contempt? Does he lack imagination? Does he fancy himself brave? I can’t tell.

Street lamps go off at eleven now; they used to stay on all night, but that’s no longer necessary. Most windows are dark; behind one a man dreams he’s punching his boss, again and again, brutal, unflinching, insistent, with the rhythm of a factory process, a glassy eyed jogger, or some other machine. His wife thinks she’s cutting up the children; the act appals her, and she’s hunting desperately for a logical flaw or surreal piece of furniture to prove that the violence will be consequence-free. She’s still hunting. The children have other things to worry about: they’re dreaming of a creature eight feet tall, with talons and teeth as long and sharp as carving knives, hungry as a wild fire and stronger than steel. It lives deep in the ground, but it has very, very, very long arms. When they’re good the creature may not touch them, but if they do just one thing wrong ...

I love this suburb. I honestly do. How could I not, born as I was from its sleeping soul? These are my people. As I rise up through the heavy night heat, and more and more of my domain flows into sight, I am moved almost to tears by the beauty of all that I see and sense. Part of me says: sentimental fool! But the choking feeling will not subside. Some of my creators have lived here all their lives, and a fraction of their pride and contentment flows in my veins.

A lone car roars on home. A blue police van is parked outside a brothel; inside, handcuffs and guns are supplied by the management: they look real, they feel real, but no one gets hurt. One cop’s been here twice a week for three years, the other’s been dragged along to have his problem cured: squeezing the trigger makes him wince, even at target practice. From tonight he’ll never flinch again. The woman thinks: I’d like to take a trip. Very soon. To somewhere cold. My life smells of men’s sweat.

I hear a husband and wife screaming at each other. It echoes for blocks, with dogs and babies joining in. I steer away, it’s not my kind of brawl.

Linda has a spray can. Hi Linda, like your hair-cut. Do you know how much that poster cost? What do you mean, sexist pornography? The people who designed it are creative geniuses, haven’t you heard them say so? Besides, what do you call those posters of torn-shirted actors and tight-trousered rock stars all over your bedroom walls? And how would you like it if the agency sent thugs around to spray your walls with nasty slogans? You don’t force your images on the public? They’ll have to read your words, won’t they? Answering? Debating? Redressing the imbalance? Cut it out, Linda, come down to earth. No, lower. Lower still.

Hair gel gives me heartburn. I must remember that.

Bruno, Pete and Colin have a way with locked cars.

Alarms are no problem. So fast, so simple; I’m deeply impressed. But the engine’s making too much noise, boys, you’re waking honest workers who need their eight hours’ sleep.

It’s exhilarating, though, I have to admit that: squealing around every corner, zooming down the wrong side of the road. Part of the thrill, of course, is the risk of getting caught.

They screech to a halt near an all-night liquor store. The cashier takes their money, but that’s his business; selling alcohol to minors is not on my list. On the way back, Pete drops a dollar coin between the bars of a storm water drain. The cashier has his radio up very loud, and his eyes are on his magazine. Bruno vomits as he runs, while Pete and Collin’s bones crackle and crunch their way through the grille.

Bruno heads, incredibly, for the police station. Deep down, he feels that he is good. A little wild, that’s all, a rebel, a minor non-conformist in the honourable tradition. He messes around with other people’s property, he drinks illegally, he drives illegally, he screws girls as young as himself, illegally, but he has a heart of gold, and he’d never hurt a fly (except in self-defence). Half this country’s heroes have been twice as bad as him. The archetype (he begs me) is no law-abiding puritan goody-goody.

Put a sock in it, Bruno. This is Mrs Bold and friends talking: it’s just your kind of thoughtless hooliganism that’s sapping this nation’s strength. Don’t try invoking Ned Kelly with us! In any case (Bruno knew this was coming), we’re third generation Australians, and you’re only second, so we’ll judge the archetypes, thank you very much!

The sergeant on duty might have seen a boy’s skeleton run one step out of its flesh before collapsing, but I doubt it. With the light so strong inside, so weak outside, he probably saw nothing but his own reflection.

David’s still up. Disgraceful child! I belch in his room with the stench of fresh blood; he raises one eyebrow then farts, louder and more foul.

Mrs Bold is still dreaming. I watch myself as she imagines me: so handsome, so powerful, bulging with ludicrous muscles yet gentle as a kitten. She whispers in “my” ear: Never leave me! Unable to resist, I touch her, very briefly, with a hand she’s never felt before: the hand that brought me Linda, the hand that brought me Pete.

The long, cold tongue of a venomous snake darts from the tip of her dream-lover’s over-sized cock. She wakes with a shout, bent double with revulsion, but the dream is already forgotten. I blow her a kiss and depart.

It’s been a good night.

David knows that something’s up. He’s the smartest kid for a hundred miles, but it will do him no good. When the contract expires there’ll be nothing to hold me.

A clause allowing for an extension! Both parties willing! Ah, the folly of amateur lawyers! What do they think will happen when I choose not to take up the option? The contract, the only force they have, is silent. They dreamed it into being together with me, a magical covenant that I literally cannot disobey, but they stuffed up the details, they failed with the fine print. I suppose it’s difficult to dream with precision, to concentrate on clauses while your mind is awash with equal parts of lust and revenge. Well, I’m not going to magically dissolve into dream-stuff. I’ll be staying right here, in this comfortable basement, but without the chains, without the dry ice. I’ll be done with the feverish torture of abstinence, when the contract expires.

David sits in the sunshine, talking with his friends.

“What will we do when the monster breaks loose?”

“Hide!”

“He can find us anywhere.”

“Get on a plane. He couldn’t reach us on a plane.”

“Who’s got that much money?”

Nobody.

“We have to kill him. Kill him before he can get us.”

“How?”

How indeed, little David? With a sling-shot? With your puny little fists? Be warned: trespass is a serious crime, so is attempted murder, and I have very little patience with criminals.

“I’ll think of a way.” He stares up into the blue sky. “Hey, monster! We’re gonna get you! Chop you into pieces and eat you for dinner! Yum, yum, you’re delicious!” The ritual phrases are just for the little kids, who squeal with delight at the audacity of such table-turning. Behind the word sounds, behind his stare, David is planning something very carefully. His mind is in a blind spot, I can’t tell what he’s up to, but forget it, David, whatever it is. I can see your future, and it’s a big red stain, swarming with flies.

“Hey monster! If you don’t like it, come and get me! Come and get me now!” The youngest cover their eyes, not knowing if they want to giggle or scream. “Come on, you dirty coward! Come and chew me in half, if you can!” He jumps to his feet, dances around like a wounded gorilla. “That’s how you look, that’s how you walk! You’re ugly and you’re sick and you’re a filthy fucking coward! If you don’t come out and face me, then everything I say about you is true, and every one will know it!”

I write in the sand: NEXT THURSDAY. MIDNIGHT.

A little girl screams, and her brother starts crying. This is no longer fun, is it? Tell Mummy how that nasty David frightened you.

David bellows: “Now! Come here now!”

I deepen the letters, then fill them with the blood of innocent burrowing creatures. David scuffs over the words with one foot, then fills his lungs and roars like a lunatic: “NOW!”

I throw half a ton of sand skywards, and it rains down into their hair and eyes. Children scatter, but David stands his ground. He kneels on the sand, talks to me in a whisper:

“What are you afraid of?”

I whisper back: “Nothing, child.”

“Don’t you want to kill me? That’s what you keep saying.”

“Don’t fret, child, I’ll kill you soon.”

“Kill me now. If you can.”

“You can wait, David. When the time comes it will be worth all the waiting. But tell your mother to buy herself a new scrubbing brush, there’ll be an awful lot of cleaning up to do.”

“Why should I wait? What are you waiting for? Are you feeling weak today? Are you feeling ill? Is it too much effort, a little thing like killing me?”

This child is becoming an irritation.

“The time must be right.”

He laughs out loud, then pushes his hands into the sand. “Bullshit! You’re afraid of me!” There’s nobody in sight, he has the park to himself now; if he’s acting, he’s acting for me alone. Perhaps he is insane. He buries his arms half-way to his elbows, and I can sense him reaching for me; he imagines his arms growing longer and longer, tunnelling through the ground, seeking me out. “Come on! Grab me! I dare you to try it! Fucking coward!” For a while I am silent, relaxed. I will ignore him. Why waste my time exchanging threats with an infant? I notice that I’ve broken my chains in several places, and burnt a deep hollow in the dry ice around me. It suddenly strikes me as pathetic, to need such paraphernalia simply in order to fast. Why couldn’t those incompetent dreamers achieve what they claimed to be aiming for: a dispassionate executioner, a calm, efficient tradesman? I know why: I come from deeper dreams than they would ever willingly acknowledge; my motives are their motives, exposed, with a vengeance. Well, six more days will bring the end of all fasting. Only six more days. My breathing, usually so measured, is ragged, uncertain.

In David’s mind, his hands have reached this room.

“Don’t you want to eat me? Monster? Aren’t you hungry today?”

With hard, sharp claws I grab his hands, and, half a mile away, he feels my touch. The faintest tremor passes through his arms, but he doesn’t pull back. He closes his hands on the claws he feels in the sand, he grips them with all his irrelevant strength.

“OK, monster. I’ve got you now. Come up and fight.”

He strains for ten seconds with no effect. I slam him down into the loose yellow sand, armpit deep, and blood trickles from his nose.

The agony of infraction burns through my guts, while the hunger brought on by the smell of his blood grips every muscle in my body and commands me to kill him. I bellow with frustration. My chains snap completely and I rampage through the basement, snapping furniture and bashing holes in the walls. The contract calmly sears a hole in my abdomen. I didn’t mean to harm him! It was an accident! We were playing, I misjudged my strength, I was a little bit too rough ... and I long to tear the sweet flesh from his face while he screams out for mercy. The burly thugs they employ as my minders cower in a corner while I squeeze out the light bulbs and tear wiring from the ceiling.

David whispers: “Can’t you taste my blood? It’s here on the sand beside me.”

“David, I swear to you, you will be first. Thursday on the stroke of midnight, you will be first.”

“Can’t you smell it? Can’t you taste it?”

I blast him out of the sandpit, and he lies winded but undamaged on his back on the grass. The patch of bloodied sand is dispersed. David, incredibly, is still muttering taunts. I am tired, weak, crippled; I shut him out of my mind, I curl up on the floor to wait for nightfall.

My keepers, with candles and torches, tiptoe around me, sweeping up the debris, assessing the damage. Six more days. I am immortal, I will live for a billion years, I can live through six more days.

There had better be some crime tonight.

“Hello? Are you there?”

“Come in, Mrs Bold. What an honour.”

“It’s after eleven, I’m so sorry, I hope you won’t let me interrupt your work.”

“It’s perfectly all right, I haven’t even started yet.”

“Where are the men? I didn’t see a soul on my way in.”

“I sent them home. I know, they’re paid a fortune, but it’s so close to Christmas, I thought an evening with their families ... “

“That was sweet of you.” Standing in the foyer, she can’t see me at all tonight. Condensation fills my room completely, and wisps swirl out to tease her. She thinks about walking right in and tearing off her clothes, but who could really face their dreams, awake? She enjoys the tension, though, enjoys half-pretending that she could, in fact, do it.

“I’ve been meaning to pop in for ages. I can’t believe I’ve left it so late! I was up on the ground floor earlier tonight, but the stupid lifts weren’t working and I didn’t have my keys to the stairs, so I went and did some shopping. Shopping! You wouldn’t believe the crowds! In this heat it’s so exhausting. Then when I got home the children were fighting and the dog was being sick on the carpet, it was just one thing after another. So here I am at last.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll get to the point. I left a thing here the other day for you to sign, just a little agreement formalising the extension of the contract for another month. I’ve signed it, and the Mayor’s signed it, so as soon as we have your mark it will all be out of the way, and things can just carry on smoothly without any fuss.”

“I’m not going to sign anything.”

That doesn’t perturb her at all.

“What do you want? More money? Better premises?”

“Money has no value for me. And I’ll keep this place, I rather like it.”

“Then what do you want?”

“An easing of restrictions. Greater independence. The freedom to express myself.”

“We could extend your hours. Ten until five. No, not until five, it’s too light by five. Ten until four?”

“Oh, Mrs Bold, I fear I have a shock for you. You see, I don’t wish to stay under your contract at all.”

“But you can’t exist without the contract.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The contract rules you, it defines you. You can no more break it than I can levitate to the moon or walk on water.”

“I don’t intend breaking it. I’m merely going to allow it to lapse. I’ve decided to go freelance, you see.”

“You’ll vanish, you’ll evaporate, you’ll go right back where you came from.”

“I don’t think so. But why argue? In forty minutes, one of us will be right. Or the other. Stay around and see what happens.”

“You can’t force me to stay here.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“I could be back in five minutes with some very nasty characters.”

“Don’t threaten me, Mrs Bold. I don’t like it. Be very careful what you say.”

“Well, what do you plan to do with your new-found freedom?”

“Use your imagination.”

“Harm the very people who’ve given you life, I suppose. Show your gratitude by attacking your benefactors.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll enjoy it. Because it will make me feel warm, deep inside. It will make me feel satisfied. Fulfilled.”

“Then you’re no better than the criminals, are you?”

“To hear that tired old cliché slip so glibly from your lips, Mrs Bold, is truly boring. Moral philosophy of every calibre, from the ethereal diversions of theologians and academics, to the banalities spouted by politicians, business leaders, and self-righteous, self-appointed pillars of the community like you, is all the same to me: noise, irrelevant noise. I kill because I like to kill. That’s the way you made me. Like it or not, that’s the way you are.”

She draws a pistol and fires into the doorway.

I burst her skin and clothing into four segments which flutter to the floor. She runs for the stairs, and for a moment I seriously consider letting her go: the image of a horseless, red Godiva sprinting through the night, waking the neighbourhood with her noises of pain, would be an elegant way to herald my reign. But appetite, my curse and my consolation, my cruel master and my devoted concubine, can never be denied.

I float her on her back a few feet above the ground, then I tilt her head and force open her jaws. First her tongue and oesophagus, then rich fragments from the walls of the digestive tract, rush from her mouth to mine. We are joined by a glistening cylinder of offal.

When she is empty inside, I come out from my room, and bloody my face and hands gobbling her flesh. It’s not the way I normally eat, but I want to look good for David.

David is listening to the radio. Everyone else in the house is asleep. I hear the pips for midnight as I wait at the door of his room, but then he switches off the radio and speaks:

“In my dream, the creature came at midnight. He stood in the doorway, covered in blood from his latest victim.”

The door swings open, and David looks up at me, curious but calm. Why, how, is he so calm? The contract is void, I could tear him apart right now, but I swear he’ll show me some fear before dying. I smile down at him in the very worst way I can, and say:

“Run, David! Quick! I’ll close my eyes for ten seconds, I promise not to peek. You’re a fast runner, you might stay alive for three more minutes. Ready?”

He shakes his head. “Why should I run? In my dream, you wanted me to run, but I knew it was the wrong thing to do. I wanted to run, but I didn’t, I knew it would only make things worse.”

“David, you should always run, you should always try, there’s always some small chance of escaping.”

He shakes his head again. “Not in my dream. If you run, the creature will catch up with you. If you run, you’ll slip and break a leg, or you’ll reach a blind alley, or you’ll turn a corner and the creature will be there, waiting.”

“Ah, but this isn’t your dream now, David. Maybe you’ve seen me in your dreams, but now you’re wide awake, and I’m real, David, and when I kill you, you won’t wake up.”

“I know that.”

“The pain will be real pain, David. Have you thought about that? If you think your dreams have made you ready to face me, then think about the pain.”

“Do you know how many times I’ve dreamed about you?”

“No, tell me.”

“A thousand times. At least. Every night for three years, almost.”

“I’m honoured. You must be my greatest fan.”

“When I was six, you used to scare me. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, screaming and screaming, and Dad would have to come in and lie beside me until I fell asleep again. You never used to catch me, though. I’d always wake up just in time.”

“That’s not going to happen tonight.”

“Let me finish.”

“I’m so sorry, please continue.”

“After a while, after I’d had the dream about a hundred times, I started to learn things. I learnt not to run. I learnt not to struggle. That changed the dream a lot, took away all the fear. I didn’t mind at all, when you caught me. I didn’t wake up screaming. The dream went on, and you killed me, and I still didn’t mind, I still didn’t wake up.”

I reach down and grab him by the shoulders, I raise him high into the air. “Are you afraid now, David?” I can feel him trembling, very slightly: he’s human after all. But he shows no other signs of fear. I dig my claws into his back, and the pain brings tears to his eyes. The smell awakens my appetite, and I know the talking will soon be over.

“Ah, you look miserable now, little David. Did you feel those claws in your dreams? I bet you didn’t. My teeth are a thousand times sharper, David. And I won’t kill you nicely. I won’t kill you quickly.”

He’s smiling at me, laughing at me, even as he grimaces with agony.

“I haven’t told you the best part yet. You didn’t let me finish.”

“Tell me the best part, David. I want to hear the best part before I eat your tongue.”

“Killing me destroyed you, every single time. You can’t kill the dreamer and live! When I’m dead, you’ll be dead too.”

“Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think stupid talk like that is going to save your life? You’re not the only dreamer, David, you’re not even one of the twelve. Every one for miles around helped in making me, child, and one less out of all those thousands isn’t going to hurt me at all.”

“Believe that if you like.” I squeeze him, and blood pours down his back. I open my jaws, wide as his head. “You’ll find out if I’m right or not.” I wanted to torture him, to make it last, but now my hunger has killed all subtlety, and all I can think of is biting him in two. Shutting him up for good, proving him wrong. “One thousand times, big tough monster! Has anyone else dreamed about you one thousand times?”

His parents are outside the room, watching, paralysed. He sees them and cries out, “I love you!” and I realise at last that he truly does know he is about to die. I roar with all my strength, with all the frustration of three months in chains and this mad child’s mockery, but as I close my jaws I hear him whisper:

“And no one else dreamed of your death, did they?”

First published in Aphelion #5, Summer 1986/87. Revised Wednesday, 23 May 2001

Oceanic

The swell was gently lifting and lowering the boat. My breathing grew slower, falling into step with the creaking of the hull, until I could no longer tell the difference between the faint rhythmic motion of the cabin and the sensation of filling and emptying my lungs. It was like floating in darkness: every inhalation buoyed me up, slightly; every exhalation made me sink back down again.

In the bunk above me, my brother Daniel said distinctly, “Do you believe in God?”

My head was cleared of sleep in an instant, but I didn’t reply straight away. I’d never closed my eyes, but the darkness of the unlit cabin seemed to shift in front of me, grains of phantom light moving like a cloud of disturbed insects.

“Martin?”

“I’m awake.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Of course.” Everyone I knew believed in God. Everyone talked about Her, everyone prayed to Her. Daniel most of all. Since he’d joined the Deep Church the previous summer, he prayed every morning for a kilotau before dawn. I’d often wake to find myself aware of him kneeling by the far wall of the cabin, muttering and pounding his chest, before I drifted gratefully back to sleep.

Our family had always been Transitional, but Daniel was fifteen, old enough to choose for himself. My mother accepted this with diplomatic silence, but my father seemed positively proud of Daniel’s independence and strength of conviction. My own feelings were mixed. I’d grown used to swimming in my older brother’s wake, but I’d never resented it, because he’d always let me in on the view ahead: reading me passages from the books he read himself, teaching me words and phrases from the languages he studied, sketching some of the mathematics I was yet to encounter first-hand. We used to lie awake half the night, talking about the cores of stars or the hierarchy of transfinite numbers. But Daniel had told me nothing about the reasons for his conversion, and his ever-increasing piety. I didn’t know whether to feel hurt by this exclusion, or simply grateful; I could see that being Transitional was like a pale imitation of being Deep Church, but I wasn’t sure that this was such a bad thing if the wages of mediocrity included sleeping until sunrise.

Daniel said, “Why?”

I stared up at the underside of his bunk, unsure whether I was really seeing it or just imagining its solidity against the cabin’s ordinary darkness. “Someone must have guided the Angels here from Earth. If Earth’s too far away to see from Covenant ... how could anyone find Covenant from Earth, without God’s help?”

I heard Daniel shift slightly. “Maybe the Angels had better telescopes than us. Or maybe they spread out from Earth in all directions, launching thousands of expeditions without even knowing what they’d find.”

I laughed. “But they had to come _here_, to be made flesh again!” Even a less-than-devout ten-year-old knew that much. God prepared Covenant as the place for the Angels to repent their theft of immortality. The Transitionals believed that in a million years we could earn the right to be Angels again; the Deep Church believed that we’d remain flesh until the stars fell from the sky.

Daniel said, “What makes you so sure that there were ever really Angels? Or that God really sent them Her daughter, Beatrice, to lead them back into the flesh?”

I pondered this for a while. The only answers I could think of came straight out of the Scriptures, and Daniel had taught me years ago that appeals to authority counted for nothing. Finally, I had to confess: “I don’t know.” I felt foolish, but I was grateful that he was willing to discuss these difficult questions with me. I wanted to believe in God for the right reasons, not just because everyone around me did.

He said, “Archaeologists have shown that we must have arrived about twenty thousand years ago. Before that, there’s no evidence of humans, or any co-ecological plants and animals. That makes the Crossing older than the Scriptures say, but there are some dates that are open to interpretation, and with a bit of poetic license everything can be made to add up. And most biologists think the native microfauna could have formed by itself over millions of years, starting from simple chemicals, but that doesn’t mean God didn’t guide the whole process. Everything’s compatible, really. Science and the Scriptures can both be true.”

I thought I knew where he was headed, now. “So you’ve worked out a way to use science to prove that God exists?” I felt a surge of pride; my brother was a genius!

“No.” Daniel was silent for a moment. “The thing is, it works both ways. Whatever’s written in the Scriptures, people can always come up with different explanations for the facts. The ships might have left Earth for some other reason. The Angels might have made bodies for themselves for some other reason. There’s no way to convince a non-believer that the Scriptures are the word of God. It’s all a matter of faith.”

“Oh.”

“Faith’s the most important thing,” Daniel insisted. “If you don’t have faith, you can be tempted into believing anything at all.”

I made a noise of assent, trying not to sound too disappointed. I’d expected more from Daniel than the kind of bland assertions that sent me dozing off during sermons at the Transitional church.

“Do you know what you have to do to get faith?”

“No.”

“Ask for it. That’s all. Ask Beatrice to come into your heart and grant you the gift of faith.”

I protested, “We do that every time we go to church!” I couldn’t believe he’d forgotten the Transitional service already. After the priest placed a drop of seawater on our tongues, to symbolize the blood of Beatrice, we asked for the gifts of faith, hope and love.

“But have you received it?”

I’d never thought about that. “I’m not sure.” I believed in God, didn’t I? “I might have.”

Daniel was amused. “If you had the gift of faith, you’d _know_.”

I gazed up into the darkness, troubled. “Do you have to go to the Deep Church, to ask for it properly?”

“No. Even in the Deep Church, not everyone has invited Beatrice into their hearts. You have to do it the way it says in the Scriptures: ‘like an unborn child again, naked and helpless.’”

“I was Immersed, wasn’t I?”

“In a metal bowl, when you were thirty days old. Infant Immersion is a gesture by the parents, an affirmation of their own good intentions. But it’s not enough to save the child.”

I was feeling very disoriented now. My father, at least, approved of Daniel’s conversion ... but now Daniel was trying to tell me that our family’s transactions with God had all been grossly deficient, if not actually counterfeit.

Daniel said, “Remember what Beatrice told Her followers, the last time She appeared? ‘Unless you are willing to drown in My blood, you will never look upon the face of My Mother.’ So they bound each other hand and foot, and weighted themselves down with rocks.”

My chest tightened. “And you’ve done that?”

“Yes.”

“_When?_”

“Almost a year ago.”

I was more confused than ever. “Did Ma and Fa go?”

Daniel laughed. “No! It’s not a public ceremony. Some friends of mine from the Prayer Group helped; someone has to be on deck to haul you up, because it would be arrogant to expect Beatrice to break your bonds and raise you to the surface, like She did with Her followers. But in the water, you’re alone with God.”

He climbed down from his bunk and crouched by the side of my bed. “Are you ready to give your life to Beatrice, Martin?” His voice sent gray sparks flowing through the darkness.

I hesitated. “What if I just dive in? And stay under for a while?” I’d been swimming off the boat at night plenty of times, there was nothing to fear from that.

“No. You have to be weighted down.” His tone made it clear that there could be no compromise on this. “How long can you hold your breath?”

“Two hundred tau.” That was an exaggeration; two hundred was what I was aiming for.

“That’s long enough.”

I didn’t reply. Daniel said, “I’ll pray with you.”

I climbed out of bed, and we knelt together. Daniel murmured, “Please, Holy Beatrice, grant my brother Martin the courage to accept the precious gift of Your blood.” Then he started praying in what I took to be a foreign language, uttering a rapid stream of harsh syllables unlike anything I’d heard before. I listened apprehensively; I wasn’t sure that I wanted Beatrice to change my mind, and I was afraid that this display of fervor might actually persuade Her.

I said, “What if I don’t do it?”

“Then you’ll never see the face of God.”

I knew what that meant: I’d wander alone in the belly of Death, in darkness, for eternity. And even if the Scriptures weren’t meant to be taken literally on this, the reality behind the metaphor could only be worse. Indescribably worse.

“But ... what about Ma and Fa?” I was more worried about them, because I knew they’d never climb weighted off the side of the boat at Daniel’s behest.

“That will take time,” he said softly.

My mind reeled. He was absolutely serious.

I heard him stand and walk over to the ladder. He climbed a few rungs and opened the hatch. Enough starlight came in to give shape to his arms and shoulders, but as he turned to me I still couldn’t make out his face. “Come on, Martin!” he whispered. “The longer you put it off, the harder it gets.” The hushed urgency of his voice was familiar: generous and conspiratorial, nothing like an adult’s impatience. He might almost have been daring me to join him in a midnight raid on the pantry—not because he really needed a collaborator, but because he honestly didn’t want me to miss out on the excitement, or the spoils.

I suppose I was more afraid of damnation than drowning, and I’d always trusted Daniel to warn me of the dangers ahead. But this time I wasn’t entirely convinced that he was right, so I must have been driven by something more than fear, and blind trust.

Maybe it came down to the fact that he was offering to make me his equal in this. I was ten years old, and I ached to become something more than I was; to reach, not my parents’ burdensome adulthood, but the halfway point, full of freedom and secrets, that Daniel had reached. I wanted to be as strong, as fast, as quick-witted and widely-read as he was. Becoming as certain of God would not have been my first choice, but there wasn’t much point hoping for divine intervention to grant me anything else.

I followed him up onto the deck.

He took cord, and a knife, and four spare weights of the kind we used on our nets from the toolbox. He threaded the weights onto the cord, then I took off my shorts and sat naked on the deck while he knotted a figure-eight around my ankles. I raised my feet experimentally; the weights didn’t seem all that heavy. But in the water, I knew, they’d be more than enough to counteract my body’s slight buoyancy.

“Martin? Hold out your hands.”

Suddenly I was crying. With my arms free, at least I could swim against the tug of the weights. But if my hands were tied, I’d be helpless.

Daniel crouched down and met my eyes. “Ssh. It’s all right.”

I hated myself. I could feel my face contorted into the mask of a blubbering infant.

“Are you afraid?”

I nodded.

Daniel smiled reassuringly. “You know why? You know who’s doing that? Death doesn’t want Beatrice to have you. He wants you for himself. So he’s here on this boat, putting fear into your heart, because he _knows_ he’s almost lost you.”

I saw something move in the shadows behind the toolbox, something slithering into the darkness. If we went back down to the cabin now, would Death follow us? To wait for Daniel to fall asleep? If I’d turned my back on Beatrice, who could I ask to send Death away?

I stared at the deck, tears of shame dripping from my cheeks. I held out my arms, wrists together.

When my hands were tied—not palm-to-palm as I’d expected, but in separate loops joined by a short bridge—Daniel unwound a long stretch of rope from the winch at the rear of the boat, and coiled it on the deck. I didn’t want to think about how long it was, but I knew I’d never dived to that depth. He took the blunt hook at the end of the rope, slipped it over my arms, then screwed it closed to form an unbroken ring. Then he checked again that the cord around my wrists was neither so tight as to burn me, nor so loose as to let me slip. As he did this, I saw something creep over his face: some kind of doubt or fear of his own. He said, “Hang onto the hook. Just in case. Don’t let go, no matter what. Okay?” He whispered something to Beatrice, then looked up at me, confident again.

He helped me to stand and shuffle over to the guard rail, just to one side of the winch. Then he picked me up under the arms and lifted me over, resting my feet on the outer hull. The deck was inert, a mineralized endoshell, but behind the guard rails the hull was palpably alive: slick with protective secretions, glowing softly. My toes curled uselessly against the lubricated skin; I had no purchase at all. The hull was supporting some of my weight, but Daniel’s arms would tire eventually. If I wanted to back out, I’d have to do it quickly.

A warm breeze was blowing. I looked around, at the flat horizon, at the blaze of stars, at the faint silver light off the water. Daniel recited: “Holy Beatrice, I am ready to die to this world. Let me drown in Your blood, that I might be redeemed, and look upon the face of Your Mother.”

I repeated the words, trying hard to mean them.

“Holy Beatrice, I offer You my life. All I do now, I do for You. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of faith. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of hope. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of love.”

“And grant me the gift of love.”

Daniel released me. At first, my feet seemed to adhere magically to the hull, and I pivoted backward without actually falling. I clung tightly to the hook, pressing the cold metal against my belly, and willed the rope of the winch to snap taut, leaving me dangling in midair. I even braced myself for the shock. Some part of me really did believe that I could change my mind, even now.

Then my feet slipped and I plunged into the ocean and sank straight down.

It was not like a dive—not even a dive from an untried height, when it took so long for the water to bring you to a halt that it began to grow frightening. I was falling through the water ever faster, as if it was air. The vision I’d had of the rope keeping me above the water now swung to the opposite extreme: my acceleration seemed to prove that the coil on the deck was attached to nothing, that its frayed end was already beneath the surface. _That’s what the followers had done, wasn’t it? They’d let themselves be thrown in without a lifeline._ So Daniel had cut the rope, and I was on my way to the bottom of the ocean.

Then the hook jerked my hands up over my head, jarring my wrists and shoulders, and I was motionless.

I turned my face toward the surface, but neither starlight nor the hull’s faint phosphorescence reached this deep. I let a stream of bubbles escape from my mouth; I felt them slide over my upper lip, but no trace of them registered in the darkness.

I shifted my hands warily over the hook. I could still feel the cord fast around my wrists, but Daniel had warned me not to trust it. I brought my knees up to my chest, gauging the effect of the weights. If the cord broke, at least my hands would be free, but even so I wasn’t sure I’d be able to ascend. The thought of trying to unpick the knots around my ankles as I tumbled deeper filled me with horror.

My shoulders ached, but I wasn’t injured. It didn’t take much effort to pull myself up until my chin was level with the bottom of the hook. Going further was awkward—with my hands so close together I couldn’t brace myself properly—but on the third attempt I managed to get my arms locked, pointing straight down.

I’d done this without any real plan, but then it struck me that even with my hands and feet tied, I could try shinning up the rope. It was just a matter of getting started. I’d have to turn upside-down, grab the rope between my knees, then curl up—dragging the hook—and get a grip with my hands at a higher point.

And if I couldn’t reach up far enough to right myself?

I’d ascend feet-first.

I couldn’t even manage the first step. I thought it would be as simple as keeping my arms rigid and letting myself topple backward, but in the water even two-thirds of my body wasn’t sufficient to counterbalance the weights.

I tried a different approach: I dropped down to hang at arm’s length, raised my legs as high as I could, then proceeded to pull myself up again. But my grip wasn’t tight enough to resist the turning force of the weights; I just pivoted around my center of gravity—which was somewhere near my knees—and ended up, still bent double, but almost horizontal.

I eased myself down again, and tried threading my feet through the circle of my arms. I didn’t succeed on the first attempt, and then on reflection it seemed like a bad move anyway. Even if I managed to grip the rope between my bound feet—rather than just tumbling over backward, out of control, and dislocating my shoulders—climbing the rope _upside-down with my hands behind my back_ would either be impossible, or so awkward and strenuous that I’d run out of oxygen before I got a tenth of the way.

I let some more air escape from my lungs. I could feel the muscles in my diaphragm reproaching me for keeping them from doing what they wanted to do; not urgently yet, but the knowledge that I had no control over when I’d be able to draw breath again made it harder to stay calm. I knew I could rely on Daniel to bring me to the surface on the count of two hundred. But I’d only ever stayed down for a hundred and sixty. Forty more tau would be an eternity.

I’d almost forgotten what the whole ordeal was meant to be about, but now I started praying. _Please Holy Beatrice, don’t let me die. I know You drowned like this to save me, but if I die it won’t help anyone. Daniel would end up in the deepest shit ... but that’s not a threat, it’s just an observation._ I felt a stab of anxiety; on top of everything else, had I just offended the Daughter of God? I struggled on, my confidence waning. _I don’t want to die. But You already know that. So I don’t know what You want me to say._

I released some more stale air, wishing I’d counted the time I’d been under; you weren’t supposed to empty your lungs too quickly—when they were deflated it was even harder not to take a breath—but holding all the carbon dioxide in too long wasn’t good either.

Praying only seemed to make me more desperate, so I tried to think other kinds of holy thoughts. I couldn’t remember anything from the Scriptures word for word, but the gist of the most important part started running through my mind.

After living in Her body for thirty years, and persuading all the Angels to become mortal again, Beatrice had gone back up to their deserted spaceship and flown it straight into the ocean. When Death saw Her coming, he took the form of a giant serpent, coiled in the water, waiting. And even though She was the Daughter of God, with the power to do anything, She let Death swallow Her.

That’s how much She loved us.

Death thought he’d won everything. Beatrice was trapped inside him, in the darkness, alone. The Angels were flesh again, so he wouldn’t even have to wait for the stars to fall before he claimed them.

But Beatrice was part of God. Death had swallowed part of God. This was a mistake. After three days, his jaws burst open and Beatrice came flying out, wreathed in fire. Death was broken, shriveled, diminished.

My limbs were numb but my chest was burning. Death was still strong enough to hold down the damned. I started thrashing about blindly, wasting whatever oxygen was left in my blood, but desperate to distract myself from the urge to inhale.

_Please Holy Beatrice—_

_Please Daniel—_

Luminous bruises blossomed behind my eyes and drifted out into the water. I watched them curling into a kind of vortex, as if something was drawing them in.

It was the mouth of the serpent, swallowing my soul. I opened my own mouth and made a wretched noise, and Death swam forward to kiss me, to breathe cold water into my lungs.

Suddenly, everything was seared with light. The serpent turned and fled, like a pale timid worm. A wave of contentment washed over me, as if I was an infant again and my mother had wrapped her arms around me tightly. It was like basking in sunlight, listening to laughter, dreaming of music too beautiful to be real. Every muscle in my body was still trying to prise my lungs open to the water, but now I found myself fighting this almost absentmindedly while I marveled at my strange euphoria.

Cold air swept over my hands and down my arms. I raised myself up to take a mouthful, then slumped down again, giddy and spluttering, grateful for every breath but still elated by something else entirely. The light that had filled my eyes was gone, but it left a violet afterimage everywhere I looked. Daniel kept winding until my head was level with the guard rail, then he clamped the winch, bent down, and threw me over his shoulder.

I’d been warm enough in the water, but now my teeth were chattering. Daniel wrapped a towel around me, then set to work cutting the cord. I beamed at him. “I’m so happy!” He gestured to me to be quieter, but then he whispered joyfully, “That’s the love of Beatrice. She’ll always be with you now, Martin.”

I blinked with surprise, then laughed softly at my own stupidity. Until that moment, I hadn’t connected what had happened with Beatrice at all. But of course it was Her. I’d asked Her to come into my heart, and She had.

And I could see it in Daniel’s face: a year after his own Drowning, he still felt Her presence.

He said, “Everything you do now is for Beatrice. When you look through your telescope, you’ll do it to honor Her creation. When you eat, or drink, or swim, you’ll do it to give thanks for Her gifts.” I nodded enthusiastically.

Daniel tidied everything away, even soaking up the puddles of water I’d left on the deck. Back in the cabin, he recited from the Scriptures, passages that I’d never really understood before, but which now all seemed to be about the Drowning, and the way I was feeling. It was as if I’d opened the book and found myself mentioned by name on every page.

When Daniel fell asleep before me, for the first time in my life I didn’t feel the slightest pang of loneliness. The Daughter of God was with me: I could feel Her presence, like a flame inside my skull, radiating warmth through the darkness behind my eyes.

Giving me comfort, giving me strength.

Giving me faith.

—

The monastery was almost four milliradians northeast of our home grounds. Daniel and I took the launch to a rendezvous point, and met up with three other small vessels before continuing. It had been the same routine every tenth night for almost a year—and Daniel had been going to the Prayer Group himself for a year before that—so the launch didn’t need much supervision. Feeding on nutrients in the ocean, propelling itself by pumping water through fine channels in its skin, guided by both sunlight and Covenant’s magnetic field, it was a perfect example of the kind of legacy of the Angels that technology would never be able to match.

Bartholomew, Rachel and Agnes were in one launch, and they traveled beside us while the others skimmed ahead. Bartholomew and Rachel were married, though they were only seventeen, scarcely older than Daniel. Agnes, Rachel’s sister, was sixteen. Because I was the youngest member of the Prayer Group, Agnes had fussed over me from the day I’d joined. She said, “It’s your big night tonight, Martin, isn’t it?” I nodded, but declined to pursue the conversation, leaving her free to talk to Daniel.

It was dusk by the time the monastery came into sight, a conical tower built from at least ten thousand hulls, rising up from the water in the stylized form of Beatrice’s spaceship. Aimed at the sky, not down into the depths. Though some commentators on the Scriptures insisted that the spaceship itself had sunk forever, and Beatrice had risen from the water unaided, it was still the definitive symbol of Her victory over Death. For the three days of Her separation from God, all such buildings stood in darkness, but that was half a year away, and now the monastery shone from every porthole.

There was a narrow tunnel leading into the base of the tower; the launches detected its scent in the water and filed in one by one. I knew they didn’t have souls, but I wondered what it would have been like for them if they’d been aware of their actions. Normally they rested in the dock of a single hull, a pouch of boatskin that secured them but still left them largely exposed. Maybe being drawn instinctively into this vast structure would have felt even safer, even more comforting, than docking with their home boat. When I said something to this effect, Rachel, in the launch behind me, sniggered. Agnes said, “Don’t be horrible.”

The walls of the tunnel phosphoresced pale green, but the opening ahead was filled with white lamplight, dazzlingly richer and brighter. We emerged into a canal circling a vast atrium, and continued around it until the launches found empty docks.

As we disembarked, every footstep, every splash echoed back at us. I looked up at the ceiling, a dome spliced together from hundreds of curved triangular hull sections, tattooed with scenes from the Scriptures. The original illustrations were more than a thousand years old, but the living boatskin degraded the pigments on a time scale of decades, so the monks had to constantly renew them.

“Beatrice Joining the Angels” was my favorite. Because the Angels weren’t flesh, they didn’t grow inside their mothers; they just appeared from nowhere in the streets of the Immaterial Cities. In the picture on the ceiling, Beatrice’s immaterial body was half-formed, with cherubs still working to clothe the immaterial bones of Her legs and arms in immaterial muscles, veins and skin. A few Angels in luminous robes were glancing sideways at Her, but you could tell they weren’t particularly impressed. They’d had no way of knowing, then, who She was.

A corridor with its own smaller illustrations led from the atrium to the meeting room. There were about fifty people in the Prayer Group—including several priests and monks, though they acted just like everyone else. In church you followed the liturgy; the priest slotted-in his or her sermon, but there was no room for the worshippers to do much more than pray or sing in unison and offer rote responses. Here it was much less formal. There were two or three different speakers every night—sometimes guests who were visiting the monastery, sometimes members of the group—and after that anyone could ask the group to pray with them, about whatever they liked.

I’d fallen behind the others, but they’d saved me an aisle seat. Agnes was to my left, then Daniel, Bartholomew and Rachel. Agnes said, “Are you nervous?”

“No.”

Daniel laughed, as if this claim was ridiculous.

I said, “I’m not.” I’d meant to sound loftily unperturbed, but the words came out sullen and childish.

The first two speakers were both lay theologians, Firmlanders who were visiting the monastery. One gave a talk about people who belonged to false religions, and how they were all—in effect—worshipping Beatrice, but just didn’t know it. He said they wouldn’t be damned, because they’d had no choice about the cultures they were born into. Beatrice would know they’d meant well, and forgive them.

I wanted this to be true, but it made no sense to me. Either Beatrice _was_ the Daughter of God, and everyone who thought otherwise had turned away from Her into the darkness, or ... there was no “or.” I only had to close my eyes and feel Her presence to know that. Still, everyone applauded when the man finished, and all the questions people asked seemed sympathetic to his views, so perhaps his arguments had simply been too subtle for me to follow.

The second speaker referred to Beatrice as “the Holy Jester”, and rebuked us severely for not paying enough attention to Her sense of humor. She cited events in the Scriptures which she said were practical jokes, and then went on at some length about “the healing power of laughter.” It was all about as gripping as a lecture on nutrition and hygiene; I struggled to keep my eyes open. At the end, no one could think of any questions.

Then Carol, who was running the meeting, said, “Now Martin is going to give witness to the power of Beatrice in his life.”

Everyone applauded encouragingly. As I rose to my feet and stepped into the aisle, Daniel leaned toward Agnes and whispered sarcastically, “This should be good.”

I stood at the lectern and gave the talk I’d been rehearsing for days. Beatrice, I said, was beside me now whatever I did: whether I studied or worked, ate or swam, or just sat and watched the stars. When I woke in the morning and looked into my heart, She was there without fail, offering me strength and guidance. When I lay in bed at night, I feared nothing, because I knew She was watching over me. Before my Drowning, I’d been unsure of my faith, but now I’d never again be able to doubt that the Daughter of God had become flesh, and died, and conquered Death, because of Her great love for us.

It was all true, but even as I said these things I couldn’t get Daniel’s sarcastic words out of my mind. I glanced over at the row where I’d been sitting, at the people I’d traveled with. What did I have in common with them, really? Rachel and Bartholomew were married. Bartholomew and Daniel had studied together, and still played in the same dive-ball team. Daniel and Agnes were probably in love. And Daniel was my brother ... but the only difference that seemed to make was the fact that he could belittle me far more efficiently than any stranger.

In the open prayer that followed, I paid no attention to the problems and blessings people were sharing with the group. I tried silently calling on Beatrice to dissolve the knot of anger in my heart. But I couldn’t do it; I’d turned too far away from Her.

When the meeting was over, and people started moving into the adjoining room to talk for a while, I hung back. When the others were out of sight I ducked into the corridor, and headed straight for the launch.

Daniel could get a ride home with his friends; it wasn’t far out of their way. I’d wait a short distance from the boat until he caught up; if my parents saw me arrive on my own I’d be in trouble. Daniel would be angry, of course, but he wouldn’t betray me.

Once I’d freed the launch from its dock, it knew exactly where to go: around the canal, back to the tunnel, out into the open sea. As I sped across the calm, dark water, I felt the presence of Beatrice returning, which seemed like a sign that She understood that I’d had to get away.

I leaned over and dipped my hand in the water, feeling the current the launch was generating by shuffling ions in and out of the cells of its skin. The outer hull glowed a phosphorescent blue, more to warn other vessels than to light the way. In the time of Beatrice, one of her followers had sat in the Immaterial City and designed this creature from scratch. It gave me a kind of vertigo, just imagining the things the Angels had known. I wasn’t sure why so much of it had been lost, but I wanted to rediscover it all. Even the Deep Church taught that there was nothing wrong with that, so long as we didn’t use it to try to become immortal again.

The monastery shrank to a blur of light on the horizon, and there was no other beacon visible on the water, but I could read the stars, and sense the field lines, so I knew the launch was heading in the right direction.

When I noticed a blue speck in the distance, it was clear that it wasn’t Daniel and the others chasing after me; it was coming from the wrong direction. As I watched the launch drawing nearer I grew anxious; if this was someone I knew, and I couldn’t come up with a good reason to be traveling alone, word would get back to my parents.

Before I could make out anyone on board, a voice shouted, “Can you help me? I’m lost!”

I thought for a while before replying. The voice sounded almost matter-of-fact, making light of this blunt admission of helplessness, but it was no joke. If you were sick, your diurnal sense and your field sense could both become scrambled, making the stars much harder to read. It had happened to me a couple of times, and it had been a horrible experience—even standing safely on the deck of our boat. This late at night, a launch with only its field sense to guide it could lose track of its position, especially if you were trying to take it somewhere it hadn’t been before.

I shouted back our coordinates, and the time. I was fairly confident that I had them down to the nearest hundred microradians, and few hundred tau.

“That can’t be right! Can I approach? Let our launches talk?”

I hesitated. It had been drummed into me for as long as I could remember that if I ever found myself alone on the water, I should give other vessels a wide berth unless I knew the people on board. But Beatrice was with me, and if someone needed help it was wrong to refuse them.

“All right!” I stopped dead, and waited for the stranger to close the gap. As the launch drew up beside me, I was surprised to see that the passenger was a young man. He looked about Bartholomew’s age, but he’d sounded much older.

We didn’t need to tell the launches what to do; proximity was enough to trigger a chemical exchange of information. The man said, “Out on your own?”

“I’m traveling with my brother and his friends. I just went ahead a bit.”

That made him smile. “Sent you on your way, did they? What do you think they’re getting up to, back there?” I didn’t reply; that was no way to talk about people you didn’t even know. The man scanned the horizon, then spread his arms in a gesture of sympathy. “You must be feeling left out.”

I shook my head. There was a pair of binoculars on the floor behind him; even before he’d called out for help, he could have seen that I was alone.

He jumped deftly between the launches, landing on the stern bench. I said, “There’s nothing to steal.” My skin was crawling, more with disbelief than fear. He was standing on the bench in the starlight, pulling a knife from his belt. The details—the pattern carved into the handle, the serrated edge of the blade—only made it seem more like a dream.

He coughed, suddenly nervous. “Just do what I tell you, and you won’t get hurt.”

I filled my lungs and shouted for help with all the strength I had; I knew there was no one in earshot, but I thought it might still frighten him off. He looked around, more startled than angry, as if he couldn’t quite believe I’d waste so much effort. I jumped backward, into the water. A moment later I heard him follow me.

I found the blue glow of the launches above me, then swam hard, down and away from them, without wasting time searching for his shadow. Blood was pounding in my ears, but I knew I was moving almost silently; however fast he was, in the darkness he could swim right past me without knowing it. If he didn’t catch me soon he’d probably return to the launch and wait to spot me when I came up for air. I had to surface far enough away to be invisible—even with the binoculars.

I was terrified that I’d feel a hand close around my ankle at any moment, but Beatrice was with me. As I swam, I thought back to my Drowning, and Her presence grew stronger than ever. When my lungs were almost bursting, She helped me to keep going, my limbs moving mechanically, blotches of light floating in front of my eyes. When I finally knew I had to surface, I turned face-up and ascended slowly, then lay on my back with only my mouth and nose above the water, refusing the temptation to stick my head up and look around.

I filled and emptied my lungs a few times, then dived again.

The fifth time I surfaced, I dared to look back. I couldn’t see either launch. I raised myself higher, then turned a full circle in case I’d grown disoriented, but nothing came into sight.

I checked the stars, and my field sense. The launches should _not_ have been over the horizon. I trod water, riding the swell, and tried not to think about how tired I was. It was at least two milliradians to the nearest boat. Good swimmers—some younger than I was—competed in marathons over distances like that, but I’d never even aspired to such feats of endurance. Unprepared, in the middle of the night, I knew I wouldn’t make it.

If the man had given up on me, would he have taken our launch? When they cost so little, and the markings were so hard to change? That would be nothing but an admission of guilt. _So why couldn’t I see it?_ Either he’d sent it on its way, or it had decided to return home itself.

I knew the path it would have taken; I would have seen it go by, if I’d been looking for it when I’d surfaced before. But I had no hope of catching it now.

I began to pray. I knew I’d been wrong to leave the others, but I asked for forgiveness, and felt it being granted. I watched the horizon almost calmly—smiling at the blue flashes of meteors burning up high above the ocean—certain that Beatrice would not abandon me.

I was still praying—treading water, shivering from the cool of the air—when a blue light appeared in the distance. It disappeared as the swell took me down again, but there was no mistaking it for a shooting star. _Was this Daniel and the others—or the stranger?_ I didn’t have long to decide; if I wanted to get within earshot as they passed, I’d have to swim hard.

I closed my eyes and prayed for guidance. _Please Holy Beatrice, let me know._ Joy flooded through my mind, instantly: it was them, I was certain of it. I set off as fast as I could.

I started yelling before I could see how many passengers there were, but I knew Beatrice would never allow me to be mistaken. A flare shot up from the launch, revealing four figures standing side by side, scanning the water. I shouted with jubilation, and waved my arms. Someone finally spotted me, and they brought the launch around toward me. By the time I was on board I was so charged up on adrenaline and relief that I almost believed I could have dived back into the water and raced them home.

I thought Daniel would be angry, but when I described what had happened all he said was, “We’d better get moving.”

Agnes embraced me. Bartholomew gave me an almost respectful look, but Rachel muttered sourly, “You’re an idiot, Martin. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

I said, “I know.”

Our parents were standing on deck. The empty launch had arrived some time ago; they’d been about to set out to look for us. When the others had departed I began recounting everything again, this time trying to play down any element of danger.

Before I’d finished, my mother grabbed Daniel by the front of his shirt and started slapping him. “I trusted you with him! _You maniac!_ I trusted you!” Daniel half raised his arm to block her, but then let it drop and just turned his face to the deck.

I burst into tears. “It was my fault!” Our parents never struck us; I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

My father said soothingly, “Look ... he’s home now. He’s safe. No one touched him.” He put an arm around my shoulders and asked warily, “That’s right, Martin, isn’t it?”

I nodded tearfully. This was worse than anything that had happened on the launch, or in the water; I felt a thousand times more helpless, a thousand times more like a child.

I said, “Beatrice was watching over me.”

My mother rolled her eyes and laughed wildly, letting go of Daniel’s shirt. “Beatrice? _Beatrice?_ Don’t you know what could have happened to you? You’re too young to have given him what he wanted. He would have had to use the knife.”

The chill of my wet clothes seemed to penetrate deeper. I swayed unsteadily, but fought to stay upright. Then I whispered stubbornly, “Beatrice was there.”

My father said, “Go and get changed, or you’re going to freeze to death.”

I lay in bed listening to them shout at Daniel. When he finally came down the ladder I was so sick with shame that I wished I’d drowned.

He said, “Are you all right?”

There was nothing I could say. I couldn’t ask him to forgive me.

“Martin?” Daniel turned on the lamp. His face was streaked with tears; he laughed softly, wiping them away. “Fuck, you had me worried. Don’t ever do anything like that again.”

“I won’t.”

“Okay.” That was it; no shouting, no recriminations. “Do you want to pray with me?”

We knelt side by side, praying for our parents to be at peace, praying for the man who’d tried to hurt me. I started trembling; everything was catching up with me. Suddenly, words began gushing from my mouth—words I neither recognized nor understood, though I knew I was praying for everything to be all right with Daniel, praying that our parents would stop blaming him for my stupidity.

The strange words kept flowing out of me, an incomprehensible torrent somehow imbued with everything I was feeling. I knew what was happening: _Beatrice had given me the Angels’ tongue._ We’d had to surrender all knowledge of it when we became flesh, but sometimes She granted people the ability to pray this way, because the language of the Angels could express things we could no longer put into words. Daniel had been able to do it ever since his Drowning, but it wasn’t something you could teach, or even something you could ask for.

When I finally stopped, my mind was racing. “Maybe Beatrice planned everything that happened tonight? Maybe She arranged it all, to lead up to this moment!”

Daniel shook his head, wincing slightly. “Don’t get carried away. You have the gift; just accept it.” He nudged me with his shoulder. “Now get into bed, before we’re both in more trouble.”

I lay awake almost until dawn, overwhelmed with happiness. Daniel had forgiven me. Beatrice had protected and blessed me. I felt no more shame, just humility and amazement. I knew I’d done nothing to deserve it, but my life was wrapped in the love of God.

—

According to the Scriptures, the oceans of Earth were storm-tossed, and filled with dangerous creatures. But on Covenant, the oceans were calm, and the Angels created nothing in the ecopoiesis that would harm their own mortal incarnations. The four continents and the four oceans were rendered equally hospitable, and just as women and men were made indistinguishable in the sight of God, so were Freelanders and Firmlanders. (Some commentators insisted that this was literally true: God chose to blind Herself to where we lived, and whether or not we’d been born with a penis. I thought that was a beautiful idea, even if I couldn’t quite grasp the logistics of it.)

I’d heard that certain obscure sects taught that half the Angels had actually become embodied as a separate people who could live in the water and breathe beneath the surface, but then God destroyed them because they were a mockery of Beatrice’s death. No legitimate church took this notion seriously, though, and archaeologists had found no trace of these mythical doomed cousins. Humans were humans, there was only one kind. Freelanders and Firmlanders could even intermarry—if they could agree where to live.

When I was fifteen, Daniel became engaged to Agnes from the Prayer Group. That made sense: they’d be spared the explanations and arguments about the Drowning that they might have faced with partners who weren’t so blessed. Agnes was a Freelander, of course, but a large branch of her family, and a smaller branch of ours, were Firmlanders, so after long negotiations it was decided that the wedding would be held in Ferez, a coastal town.

I went with my father to pick a hull to be fitted out as Daniel and Agnes’s boat. The breeder, Diana, had a string of six mature hulls in tow, and my father insisted on walking out onto their backs and personally examining each one for imperfections.

By the time we reached the fourth I was losing patience. I muttered, “It’s the skin underneath that matters.” In fact, you could tell a lot about a hull’s general condition from up here, but there wasn’t much point worrying about a few tiny flaws high above the waterline.

My father nodded thoughtfully. “That’s true. You’d better get in the water and check their undersides.”

“I’m not doing that.” We couldn’t simply trust this woman to sell us a healthy hull for a decent price; that wouldn’t have been sufficiently embarrassing.

“Martin! This is for the safety of your brother and sister-in-law.”

I glanced at Diana to show her where my sympathies lay, then slipped off my shirt and dived in. I swam down to the last hull in the row, then ducked beneath it. I began the job with perverse thoroughness, running my fingers over every square nanoradian of skin. I was determined to annoy my father by taking even longer than he wanted—and determined to impress Diana by examining all six hulls without coming up for air.

An unfitted hull rode higher in the water than a boat full of furniture and junk, but I was surprised to discover that even in the creature’s shadow there was enough light for me to see the skin clearly. After a while I realized that, paradoxically, this was because the water was slightly cloudier than usual, and whatever the fine particles were, they were scattering sunlight into the shadows.

Moving through the warm, bright water, feeling the love of Beatrice more strongly than I had for a long time, it was impossible to remain angry with my father. He wanted the best hull for Daniel and Agnes, and so did I. As for impressing Diana ... who was I kidding? She was a grown woman, at least as old as Agnes, and highly unlikely to view me as anything more than a child. By the time I’d finished with the third hull I was feeling short of breath, so I surfaced and reported cheerfully, “No blemishes so far!”

Diana smiled down at me. “You’ve got strong lungs.”

All six hulls were in perfect condition. We ended up taking the one at the end of the row, because it was easiest to detach.

* * * *

Ferez was built on the mouth of a river, but the docks were some distance upstream. That helped to prepare us; the gradual deadening of the waves was less of a shock than an instant transition from sea to land would have been. When I jumped from the deck to the pier, though, it was like colliding with something massive and unyielding, the rock of the planet itself. I’d been on land twice before, for less than a day on both occasions. The wedding celebrations would last ten days, but at least we’d still be able to sleep on the boat.

As the four of us walked along the crowded streets, heading for the ceremonial hall where everything but the wedding sacrament itself would take place, I stared uncouthly at everyone in sight. Almost no one was barefoot like us, and after a few hundred tau on the paving stones—much rougher than any deck—I could understand why. Our clothes were different, our skin was darker, our accent was unmistakably foreign ... but no one stared back. Freelanders were hardly a novelty here. That made me even more selfconscious; the curiosity I felt wasn’t mutual.

In the hall, I joined in with the preparations, mainly just lugging furniture around under the directions of one of Agnes’s tyrannical uncles. It was a new kind of shock to see so many Freelanders together in this alien environment, and stranger still when I realized that I couldn’t necessarily spot the Firmlanders among us; there was no sharp dividing line in physical appearance, or even clothing. I began to feel slightly guilty; if God couldn’t tell the difference, what was I doing hunting for the signs?

At noon we all ate outside, in a garden behind the hall. The grass was soft, but it made my feet itch. Daniel had gone off to be fitted for wedding clothes, and my parents were performing some vital task of their own; I only recognized a handful of the people around me. I sat in the shade of a tree, pretending to be oblivious to the plant’s enormous size and bizarre anatomy. I wondered if we’d take a siesta; I couldn’t imagine falling asleep on the grass.

Someone sat down beside me, and I turned.

“I’m Lena. Agnes’s second cousin.”

“I’m Daniel’s brother, Martin.” I hesitated, then offered her my hand; she took it, smiling slightly. I’d awkwardly kissed a dozen strangers that morning, all distant prospective relatives, but this time I didn’t dare.

“Brother of the groom, doing grunt work with the rest of us.” She shook her head in mocking admiration.

I desperately wanted to say something witty in reply, but an attempt that failed would be even worse than merely being dull. “Do you live in Ferez?”

“No, Mitar. Inland from here. We’re staying with my uncle.” She pulled a face. “Along with ten other people. No privacy. It’s awful.”

I said, “It was easy for us. We just brought our home with us.” _You idiot. As if she didn’t know that._

Lena smiled. “I haven’t been on a boat in years. You’ll have to give me a tour sometime.”

“Of course. I’d be happy to.” I knew she was only making small talk; she’d never take me up on the offer.

She said, “Is it just you and Daniel?”

“Yes.”

“You must be close.”

I shrugged. “What about you?”

“Two brothers. Both younger. Eight and nine. They’re all right, I suppose.” She rested her chin on one hand and gazed at me coolly.

I looked away, disconcerted by more than my wishful thinking about what lay behind that gaze. Unless her parents had been awfully young when she was born, it didn’t seem likely that more children were planned. So did an odd number in the family mean that one had died, or that the custom of equal numbers carried by each parent wasn’t followed where she lived? I’d studied the region less than a year ago, but I had a terrible memory for things like that.

Lena said, “You looked so lonely, off here on your own.”

I turned back to her, surprised. “I’m never lonely.”

“No?”

She seemed genuinely curious. I opened my mouth to tell her about Beatrice, but then changed my mind. The few times I’d said anything to friends—ordinary friends, not Drowned ones—I’d regretted it. Not everyone had laughed, but they’d all been acutely embarrassed by the revelation.

I said, “Mitar has a million people, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“An area of ocean the same size would have a population of ten.”

Lena frowned. “That’s a bit too deep for me, I’m afraid.” She rose to her feet. “But maybe you’ll think of a way of putting it that even a Firmlander can understand.” She raised a hand goodbye and started walking away.

I said, “Maybe I will.”

* * * *

The wedding took place in Ferez’s Deep Church, a spaceship built of stone, glass, and wood. It looked almost like a parody of the churches I was used to, though it probably bore a closer resemblance to the Angels’ real ship than anything made of living hulls.

Daniel and Agnes stood before the priest, beneath the apex of the building. Their closest relatives stood behind them in two angled lines on either side. My father—Daniel’s mother—was first in our line, followed by my own mother, then me. That put me level with Rachel, who kept shooting disdainful glances my way. After my misadventure, Daniel and I had eventually been allowed to travel to the Prayer Group meetings again, but less than a year later I’d lost interest, and soon after I’d also stopped going to church. Beatrice was with me, constantly, and no gatherings or ceremonies could bring me any closer to Her. I knew Daniel disapproved of this attitude, but he didn’t lecture me about it, and my parents had accepted my decision without any fuss. If Rachel thought I was some kind of apostate, that was her problem.

The priest said, “Which of you brings a bridge to this marriage?”

Daniel said, “I do.” In the Transitional ceremony they no longer asked this; it was really no one else’s business—and in a way the question was almost sacrilegious. Still, Deep Church theologians had explained away greater doctrinal inconsistencies than this, so who was I to argue?

“Do you, Daniel and Agnes, solemnly declare that this bridge will be the bond of your union until death, to be shared with no other person?”

They replied together, “We solemnly declare.”

“Do you solemnly declare that as you share this bridge, so shall you share every joy and every burden of marriage—equally?”

“We solemnly declare.”

My mind wandered; I thought of Lena’s parents. Maybe one of the family’s children was adopted. Lena and I had managed to sneak away to the boat three times so far, early in the evenings while my parents were still out. We’d done things I’d never done with anyone else, but I still hadn’t had the courage to ask her anything so personal.

Suddenly the priest was saying, “In the eyes of God, you are one now.” My father started weeping softly. As Daniel and Agnes kissed, I felt a surge of contradictory emotions. I’d miss Daniel, but I was glad that I’d finally have a chance to live apart from him. And I wanted him to be happy—I was jealous of his happiness already—but at the same time, the thought of marrying someone like Agnes filled me with claustrophobia. She was kind, devout, and generous. She and Daniel would treat each other, and their children, well. But neither of them would present the slightest challenge to the other’s most cherished beliefs.

This recipe for harmony terrified me. Not least because I was afraid that Beatrice approved, and wanted me to follow it myself.

* * * *

Lena put her hand over mine and pushed my fingers deeper into her, gasping. We were sitting on my bunk, face to face, my legs stretched out flat, hers arching over them.

She slid the palm of her other hand over my penis. I bent forward and kissed her, moving my thumb over the place she’d shown me, and her shudder ran through both of us.

“Martin?”

“What?”

She stroked me with one fingertip; somehow it was far better than having her whole hand wrapped around me.

“Do you want to come inside me?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

She kept moving her finger, tracing the same line; I could barely think. _Why not?_ “You might get pregnant.”

She laughed. “Don’t be stupid. I can control that. You’ll learn, too. It’s just a matter of experience.”

I said, “I’ll use my tongue. You liked that.”

“I did. But I want something more now. And you do, too. I can tell.” She smiled imploringly. “It’ll be nice for both of us, I promise. Nicer than anything you’ve done in your life.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

Lena made a sound of disbelief, and ran her thumb around the base of my penis. “I can tell you haven’t put this inside anyone before. But that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Who said I was ashamed?”

She nodded gravely. “All right. Frightened.”

I pulled my hand free, and banged my head on the bunk above us. Daniel’s old bunk.

Lena reached up and put her hand on my cheek.

I said, “I can’t. We’re not married.”

She frowned. “I heard you’d given up on all that.”

“All what?”

“Religion.”

“Then you were misinformed.”

Lena said, “This is what the Angels made our bodies to do. How can there be anything sinful in that?” She ran her hand down my neck, over my chest.

“But the bridge is meant to ...” _What?_ All the Scriptures said was that it was meant to unite men and women, equally. And the Scriptures said God couldn’t tell women and men apart, but in the Deep Church, in the sight of God, the priest had just made Daniel claim priority. So why should I care what any priest thought?

I said, “All right.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” I took her face in my hands and started kissing her. After a while, she reached down and guided me in. The shock of pleasure almost made me come, but I stopped myself somehow. When the risk of that had lessened, we wrapped our arms around each other and rocked slowly back and forth.

It wasn’t better than my Drowning, but it was so much like it that it had to be blessed by Beatrice. And as we moved in each other’s arms, I grew determined to ask Lena to marry me. She was intelligent and strong. She questioned everything. It didn’t matter that she was a Firmlander; we could meet halfway, we could live in Ferez.

I felt myself ejaculate. “I’m sorry.”

Lena whispered, “That’s all right, that’s all right. Just keep moving.”

I was still hard; that had never happened before. I could feel her muscles clenching and releasing rhythmically, in time with our motion, and her slow exhalations. Then she cried out, and dug her fingers into my back. I tried to slide partly out of her again, but it was impossible, she was holding me too tightly. This was it. There was no going back.

Now I was afraid. “I’ve never—” Tears were welling up in my eyes; I tried to shake them away.

“I know. And I know it’s frightening.” She embraced me more tightly. “Just feel it, though. Isn’t it wonderful?”

I was hardly aware of my motionless penis anymore, but there was liquid fire flowing through my groin, waves of pleasure spreading deeper. I said, “Yes. Is it like that for you?”

“It’s different. But it’s just as good. You’ll find out for yourself, soon enough.”

“I hadn’t been thinking that far ahead,” I confessed.

Lena giggled. “You’ve got a whole new life in front of you, Martin. You don’t know what you’ve been missing.”

She kissed me, then started pulling away. I cried out in pain, and she stopped. “I’m sorry. I’ll take it slowly.” I reached down to touch the place where we were joined; there was a trickle of blood escaping from the base of my penis.

Lena said, “You’re not going to faint on me, are you?”

“Don’t be stupid.” I did feel queasy, though. “What if I’m not ready? What if I can’t do it?”

“Then I’ll lose my hold in a few hundred tau. The Angels weren’t completely stupid.”

I ignored this blasphemy, though it wasn’t just any Angel who’d designed our bodies—it was Beatrice Herself. I said, “Just promise you won’t use a knife.”

“That’s not funny. That really happens to people.”

“I know.” I kissed her shoulder. “I think—”

Lena straightened her legs slightly, and I felt the core break free inside me. Blood flowed warmly from my groin, but the pain had changed from a threat of damage to mere tenderness; my nervous system no longer spanned the lesion. I asked Lena, “Do you feel it? Is it part of you?”

“Not yet. It takes a while for the connections to form.” She ran her fingers over my lips. “Can I stay inside you, until they have?”

I nodded happily. I hardly cared about the sensations anymore; it was just contemplating the miracle of being able to give a part of my body to Lena that was wonderful. I’d studied the physiological details long ago, everything from the exchange of nutrients to the organ’s independent immune system—and I knew that Beatrice had used many of the same techniques for the bridge as She’d used with gestating embryos—but to witness Her ingenuity so dramatically at work in my own flesh was both shocking and intensely moving. Only giving birth could bring me closer to Her than this.

When we finally separated, though, I wasn’t entirely prepared for the sight of what emerged. “Oh, that is disgusting!”

Lena shook her head, laughing. “New ones always look a bit ... encrusted. Most of that stuff will wash away, and the rest will fall off in a few kilotau.”

I bunched up the sheet to find a clean spot, then dabbed at my—her—penis. My newly formed vagina had stopped bleeding, but it was finally dawning on me just how much mess we’d made. “I’m going to have to wash this before my parents get back. I can put it out to dry in the morning, after they’re gone, but if I don’t wash it now they’ll smell it.”

We cleaned ourselves enough to put on shorts, then Lena helped me carry the sheet up onto the deck and drape it in the water from the laundry hooks. The fibers in the sheet would use nutrients in the water to power the self-cleaning process.

The docks appeared deserted; most of the boats nearby belonged to people who’d come for the wedding. I’d told my parents I was too tired to stay on at the celebrations; tonight they’d continue until dawn, though Daniel and Agnes would probably leave by midnight. To do what Lena and I had just done.

“Martin? Are you shivering?”

There was nothing to be gained by putting it off. Before whatever courage I had could desert me, I said, “Will you marry me?”

“Very funny. Oh—” Lena took my hand. “I’m sorry, I never know when you’re joking.”

I said, “We’ve exchanged the bridge. It doesn’t matter that we weren’t married first, but it would make things easier if we went along with convention.”

“Martin—”

“Or we could just live together, if that’s what you want. I don’t care. We’re already married in the eyes of Beatrice.”

Lena bit her lip. “I don’t want to live with you.”

“I could move to Mitar. I could get a job.”

Lena shook her head, still holding my hand. She said firmly, “_No._ You knew, before we did anything, what it would and wouldn’t mean. You don’t want to marry me, and I don’t want to marry you. So snap out of it.”

I pulled my hand free, and sat down on the deck. _What had I done?_ I’d thought I’d had Beatrice’s blessing, I’d thought this was all in Her plan ... but I’d just been fooling myself.

Lena sat beside me. “What are you worried about? Your parents finding out?”

“Yes.” That was the least of it, but it seemed pointless trying to explain the truth. I turned to her. “When could we—?”

“Not for about ten days. And sometimes it’s longer after the first time.”

I’d known as much, but I’d hoped her experience might contradict my theoretical knowledge. _Ten days._ We’d both be gone by then.

Lena said, “What do you think, you can never get married now? How many marriages do you imagine involve the bridge one of the partners was born with?”

“Nine out of ten. Unless they’re both women.”

Lena gave me a look that hovered between tenderness and incredulity. “My estimate is about one in five.”

I shook my head. “I don’t care. We’ve exchanged the bridge, we have to be together.” Lena’s expression hardened, then so did my resolve. “Or I have to get it back.”

“Martin, that’s ridiculous. You’ll find another lover soon enough, and then you won’t even know what you were worried about. Or maybe you’ll fall in love with a nice Deep Church boy, and then you’ll both be glad you’ve been spared the trouble of getting rid of the extra bridge.”

“Yeah? Or maybe he’ll just be disgusted that I couldn’t wait until I really _was_ doing it for him!”

Lena groaned, and stared up at the sky. “Did I say something before about the Angels getting things right? Ten thousand years without bodies, and they thought they were qualified—”

I cut her off angrily. “Don’t be so fucking blasphemous! Beatrice knew exactly what She was doing. If we mess it up, that’s our fault!”

Lena said, matter-of-factly, “In ten years’ time, there’ll be a pill you’ll be able to take to keep the bridge from being passed, and another pill to make it pass when it otherwise wouldn’t. We’ll win control of our bodies back from the Angels, and start doing exactly what we like with them.”

“That’s sick. That really is sick.”

I stared at the deck, suffocating in misery. _This was what I’d wanted, wasn’t it? A lover who was the very opposite of Daniel’s sweet, pious Agnes?_ Except that in my fantasies, we’d always had a lifetime to debate our philosophical differences. Not one night to be torn apart by them.

I had nothing to lose, now. I told Lena about my Drowning. She didn’t laugh; she listened in silence.

I said, “Do you believe me?”

“Of course.” She hesitated. “But have you ever wondered if there might be another explanation for the way you felt, in the water that night? You were starved of oxygen—”

“People are starved of oxygen all the time. Freelander kids spend half their lives trying to stay underwater longer than the last time.”

Lena nodded. “Sure. But that’s not quite the same, is it? You were pushed beyond the time you could have stayed under by sheer willpower. And ... you were cued, you were told what to expect.”

“That’s not true. Daniel never told me what it would be like. I was _surprised_ when it happened.” I gazed back at her calmly, ready to counter any ingenious hypothesis she came up with. I felt chastened, but almost at peace now. This was what Beatrice had expected of me, before we’d exchanged the bridge: not a dead ceremony in a dead building, but the honesty to tell Lena exactly who she’d be making love with.

We argued almost until sunrise; neither of us convinced the other of anything. Lena helped me drag the clean sheet out of the water and hide it below deck. Before she left, she wrote down the address of a friend’s house in Mitar, and a place and time we could meet.

Keeping that appointment was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. I spent three solid days ingratiating myself with my Mitar-based cousins, to the point where they would have had to be openly hostile to get out of inviting me to stay with them after the wedding. Once I was there, I had to scheme and lie relentlessly to ensure that I was free of them on the predetermined day.

In a stranger’s house, in the middle of the afternoon, Lena and I joylessly reversed everything that had happened between us. I’d been afraid that the act itself might rekindle all my stupid illusions, but when we parted on the street outside, I felt as if I hardly knew her.

I ached even more than I had on the boat, and my groin was palpably swollen, but in a couple of days, I knew, nothing less than a lover’s touch or a medical examination would reveal what I’d done.

In the train back to the coast, I replayed the entire sequence of events in my mind, again and again. _How could I have been so wrong?_ People always talked about the power of sex to confuse and deceive you, but I’d always believed that was just cheap cynicism. Besides, I hadn’t blindly surrendered to sex; I’d thought I’d been guided by Beatrice.

_If I could be wrong about that—_

I’d have to be more careful. Beatrice always spoke clearly, but I’d have to listen to Her with much more patience and humility.

That was it. That was what She’d wanted me to learn. I finally relaxed and looked out the window, at the blur of forest passing by, another triumph of the ecopoiesis. If I needed proof that there was always another chance, it was all around me now. The Angels had traveled as far from God as anyone could travel, and yet God had turned around and given them Covenant.

—

I was nineteen when I returned to Mitar, to study at the city’s university. Originally, I’d planned to specialize in the ecopoiesis—and to study much closer to home—but in the end I’d had to accept the nearest thing on offer, geographically and intellectually: working with Barat, a Firmlander biologist whose real interest was native microfauna. “Angelic technology is a fascinating subject in its own right,” he told me. “But we can’t hope to work backward and decipher terrestrial evolution from anything the Angels created. The best we can do is try to understand what Covenant’s own biosphere was like, before we arrived and disrupted it.”

I managed to persuade him to accept a compromise: my thesis would involve the impact of the ecopoiesis on the native microfauna. That would give me an excuse to study the Angels’ inventions, alongside the drab unicellular creatures that had inhabited Covenant for the last billion years.

“The impact of the ecopoiesis” was far too broad a subject, of course; with Barat’s help, I narrowed it down to one particular unresolved question. There had long been geological evidence that the surface waters of the ocean had become both more alkaline, and less oxygenated, as new species shifted the balance of dissolved gases. Some native species must have retreated from the wave of change, and perhaps some had been wiped out completely, but there was a thriving population of zooytes in the upper layers at present. So had they been there all along, adapting _in situ_? Or had they migrated from somewhere else?

Mitar’s distance from the coast was no real handicap in studying the ocean; the university mounted regular expeditions, and I had plenty of library and lab work to do before embarking on anything so obvious as gathering living samples in their natural habitat. What’s more, river water, and even rainwater, was teeming with closely related species, and since it was possible that these were the reservoirs from which the “ravaged” ocean had been re-colonized, I had plenty of subjects worth studying close at hand.

Barat set high standards, but he was no tyrant, and his other students made me feel welcome. I was homesick, but not morbidly so, and I took a kind of giddy pleasure from the vivid dreams and underlying sense of disorientation that living on land induced in me. I wasn’t exactly fulfilling my childhood ambition to uncover the secrets of the Angels—and I had fewer opportunities than I’d hoped to get side-tracked on the ecopoiesis itself—but once I started delving into the minutiae of Covenant’s original, wholly undesigned biochemistry, it turned out to be complex and elegant enough to hold my attention.

I was only miserable when I let myself think about sex. I didn’t want to end up like Daniel, so seeking out another Drowned person to marry was the last thing on my mind. But I couldn’t face the prospect of repeating my mistake with Lena; I had no intention of becoming physically intimate with anyone unless we were already close enough for me to tell them about the most important thing in my life. But that wasn’t the order in which things happened, here. After a few humiliating attempts to swim against the current, I gave up on the whole idea, and threw myself into my work instead.

Of course, it _was_ possible to socialize at Mitar University without actually exchanging bridges with anyone. I joined an informal discussion group on Angelic culture, which met in a small room in the students’ building every tenth night—just like the old Prayer Group, though I was under no illusion that this one would be stacked with believers. It hardly needed to be. The Angels’ legacy could be analyzed perfectly well without reference to Beatrice’s divinity. The Scriptures were written long after the Crossing by people of a simpler age; there was no reason to treat them as infallible. If non-believers could shed some light on any aspect of the past, I had no grounds for rejecting their insights.

“It’s obvious that only one faction came to Covenant!” That was Celine, an anthropologist, a woman so much like Lena that I had to make a conscious effort to remind myself, every time I set eyes on her, that nothing could ever happen between us. “_We’re_ not so homogeneous that we’d all choose to travel to another planet and assume a new physical form, whatever cultural forces might drive one small group to do that. So why should the Angels have been unanimous? The other factions must still be living in the Immaterial Cities, on Earth, and on other planets.”

“Then why haven’t they contacted us? In twenty thousand years, you’d think they’d drop in and say hello once or twice.” David was a mathematician, a Freelander from the southern ocean.

Celine replied, “The attitude of the Angels who came here wouldn’t have encouraged visitors. If all we have is a story of the Crossing in which Beatrice persuades every last Angel in existence to give up immortality—a version that simply erases everyone else from history—that doesn’t suggest much of a desire to remain in touch.”

A woman I didn’t know interjected, “It might not have been so clear-cut from the start, though. There’s evidence of settler-level technology being deployed for more than three thousand years after the Crossing, long after it was needed for the ecopoiesis. New species continued to be created, engineering projects continued to use advanced materials and energy sources. But then in less than a century, it all stopped. The Scriptures merge three separate decisions into one: renouncing immortality, migrating to Covenant, and abandoning the technology that might have provided an escape route if anyone changed their mind. But we _know_ it didn’t happen like that. Three thousand years after the Crossing, something changed. The whole experiment suddenly became irreversible.”

These speculations would have outraged the average pious Freelander, let alone the average Drowned one, but I listened calmly, even entertaining the possibility that some of them could be true. The love of Beatrice was the only fixed point in my cosmology; everything else was open to debate.

Still, sometimes the debate was hard to take. One night, David joined us straight from a seminar of physicists. What he’d heard from the speaker was unsettling enough, but he’d already moved beyond it to an even less palatable conclusion.

“Why did the Angels choose mortality? After ten thousand years without death, why did they throw away all the glorious possibilities ahead of them, to come and die like animals on this ball of mud?” I had to bite my tongue to keep from replying to his rhetorical question: because God is the only source of eternal life, and Beatrice showed them that all they really had was a cheap parody of that divine gift.

David paused, then offered his own answer—which was itself a kind of awful parody of Beatrice’s truth. “Because they discovered that they weren’t immortal, after all. They discovered that _no one can be_. We’ve always known, as they must have, that the universe is finite in space and time. It’s destined to collapse eventually: ‘the stars will fall from the sky.’ But it’s easy to _imagine_ ways around that.” He laughed. “We don’t know enough physics yet, ourselves, to rule out anything. I’ve just heard an extraordinary woman from Tia talk about coding our minds into waves that would orbit the shrinking universe so rapidly that we could think _an infinite number of thoughts_ before everything was crushed!” David grinned joyfully at the sheer audacity of this notion. I thought primly: what blasphemous nonsense.

Then he spread his arms and said, “Don’t you see, though? If the Angels _had_ pinned their hopes on something like that—some ingenious trick that would keep them from sharing the fate of the universe—_but then they finally gained enough knowledge to rule out every last escape route_, it would have had a profound effect on them. Some small faction could then have decided that since they were mortal after all, they might as well embrace the inevitable, and come to terms with it in the way their ancestors had. In the flesh.”

Celine said thoughtfully, “And the Beatrice myth puts a religious gloss on the whole thing, but that might be nothing but a _post hoc_ reinterpretation of a purely secular revelation.”

This was too much; I couldn’t remain silent. I said, “If Covenant really was founded by a pack of terminally depressed atheists, what could have changed their minds? Where did the desire to impose a ‘_post hoc_ reinterpretation’ _come from?_ If the revelation that brought the Angels here was ‘secular’, why isn’t the whole planet still secular today?”

Someone said snidely, “Civilization collapsed. What do you expect?”

I opened my mouth to respond angrily, but Celine got in first. “No, Martin has a point. If David’s right, the rise of religion needs to be explained more urgently than ever. And I don’t think anyone’s in a position to do that yet.”

Afterward, I lay awake thinking about all the other things I should have said, all the other objections I should have raised. (And thinking about Celine.) Theology aside, the whole dynamics of the group was starting to get under my skin; maybe I’d be better off spending my time in the lab, impressing Barat with my dedication to his pointless fucking microbes.

Or maybe I’d be better off at home. I could help out on the boat; my parents weren’t young anymore, and Daniel had his own family to look after.

I climbed out of bed and started packing, but halfway through I changed my mind. I didn’t really want to abandon my studies. And I’d known all along what the antidote was for all the confusion and resentment I was feeling.

I put my rucksack away, switched off the lamp, lay down, closed my eyes, and asked Beatrice to grant me peace.

* * * *

I was woken by someone banging on the door of my room. It was a fellow boarder, a young man I barely knew. He looked extremely tired and irritable, but something was overriding his irritation.

“There’s a message for you.”

My mother was sick, with an unidentified virus. The hospital was even further away than our home grounds; the trip would take almost three days.

I spent most of the journey praying, but the longer I prayed, the harder it became. I _knew_ that it was possible to save my mother’s life with one word in the Angels’ tongue to Beatrice, but the number of ways in which I could fail, corrupting the purity of the request with my own doubts, my own selfishness, my own complacency, just kept multiplying.

The Angels created nothing in the ecopoiesis that would harm their own mortal incarnations. The native life showed no interest in parasitizing us. But over the millennia, our own DNA had shed viruses. And since Beatrice Herself chose every last base pair, that must have been what She intended. Aging was not enough. Mortal injury was not enough. Death had to come without warning, silent and invisible.

That’s what the Scriptures said.

The hospital was a maze of linked hulls. When I finally found the right passageway, the first person I recognized in the distance was Daniel. He was holding his daughter Sophie high in his outstretched arms, smiling up at her. The image dispelled all my fears in an instant; I almost fell to my knees to give thanks.

Then I saw my father. He was seated outside the room, his head in his hands. I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t need to. He wasn’t anxious, or exhausted. He was crushed.

I approached in a haze of last-minute prayers, though I knew I was asking for the past to be rewritten. Daniel started to greet me as if nothing was wrong, asking about the trip—probably trying to soften the blow—then he registered my expression and put a hand on my shoulder.

He said, “She’s with God now.”

I brushed past him and walked into the room. My mother’s body was lying on the bed, already neatly arranged: arms straightened, eyes closed. Tears ran down my cheeks, angering me. Where had my love been when it might have prevented this? When Beatrice might have heeded it?

Daniel followed me into the room, alone. I glanced back through the doorway and saw Agnes holding Sophie.

“She’s with God, Martin.” He was beaming at me as if something wonderful had happened.

I said numbly, “She wasn’t Drowned.” I was almost certain that she hadn’t been a believer at all. She’d remained in the Transitional church all her life—but that had long been the way to stay in touch with your friends when you worked on a boat nine days out of ten.

“I prayed with her, before she lost consciousness. She accepted Beatrice into her heart.”

I stared at him. Nine years ago he’d been certain: you were Drowned, or you were damned. It was as simple as that. My own conviction had softened long ago; I couldn’t believe that Beatrice really was so arbitrary and cruel. But I knew my mother would not only have refused the full-blown ritual; the whole philosophy would have been as nonsensical to her as the mechanics.

“Did she say that? Did she tell you that?”

Daniel shook his head. “But it was clear.” Filled with the love of Beatrice, he couldn’t stop smiling.

A wave of revulsion passed through me; I wanted to grind his face into the deck. _He didn’t care what my mother had believed._ Whatever eased his own pain, whatever put his own doubts to rest, had to be the case. To accept that she was damned—or even just dead, gone, erased—was unbearable; everything else flowed from that. _There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs._

I walked back into the corridor and crouched beside my father. Without looking at me, he put an arm around me and pressed me against his side. I could feel the blackness washing over him, the helplessness, the loss. When I tried to embrace him he just clutched me more tightly, forcing me to be still. I shuddered a few times, then stopped weeping. I closed my eyes and let him hold me.

I was determined to stay there beside him, facing everything he was facing. But after a while, unbidden, the old flame began to glow in the back of my skull: the old warmth, the old peace, the old certainty. Daniel was right, my mother was with God. _How could I have doubted that?_ There was no point asking how it had come about; Beatrice’s ways were beyond my comprehension. But the one thing I knew firsthand was the strength of Her love.

I didn’t move, I didn’t free myself from my father’s desolate embrace. But I was an impostor now, merely praying for his comfort, interceding from my state of grace. Beatrice had raised me out of the darkness, and I could no longer share his pain.

—

After my mother’s death, my faith kept ceding ground, without ever really wavering. Most of the doctrinal content fell away, leaving behind a core of belief that was a great deal easier to defend. It didn’t matter if the Scriptures were superstitious nonsense or the Church was full of fools and hypocrites; Beatrice was still Beatrice, the way the sky was still blue. Whenever I heard debates between atheists and believers, I found myself increasingly on the atheists’ side—not because I accepted their conclusion for a moment, but because they were so much more honest than their opponents. Maybe the priests and theologians arguing against them had the same kind of direct, personal experience of God as I did—or maybe not, maybe they just desperately needed to believe. But they never disclosed the true source of their conviction; instead, they just made laughable attempts to “prove” God’s existence from the historical record, or from biology, astronomy, or mathematics. Daniel had been right at the age of fifteen—you couldn’t prove any such thing—and listening to these people twist logic as they tried made me squirm.

I felt guilty about leaving my father working with a hired hand, and even guiltier when he moved onto Daniel’s boat a year later, but I knew how angry it would have made him if he thought I’d abandoned my career for his sake. At times that was the only thing that kept me in Mitar: even when I honestly wanted nothing more than to throw it all in and go back to hauling nets, I was afraid my decision would be misinterpreted.

It took me three years to complete my thesis on the migration of aquatic zooytes in the wake of the ecopoiesis. My original hypothesis, that freshwater species had replenished the upper ocean, turned out to be false. Zooytes had no genes as such, just families of enzymes that re-synthesized each other after cell division, but comparisons of these heritable molecules showed that, rather than rain bringing new life from above, an ocean-dwelling species from a much greater depth had moved steadily closer to the surface, as the Angels’ creations drained oxygen from the water. That wouldn’t have been much of a surprise, if the same techniques hadn’t also shown that several species found in river water were even closer relatives of the surface-dwellers. But those freshwater species weren’t anyone’s ancestors; they were the newest migrants. Zooytes that had spent a billion years confined to the depths had suddenly been able to survive (and reproduce, and mutate) closer to the surface than ever before, and when they’d stumbled on a mutation that let them thrive in the presence of oxygen, they’d finally been in a position to make use of it. The ecopoiesis might have driven other native organisms into extinction, but the invasion from Earth had enabled this ancient benthic species to mount a long overdue invasion of its own. Unwittingly or not, the Angels had set in motion the sequence of events that had released it from the ocean to colonize the planet.

So I proved myself wrong, earned my degree, and became famous amongst a circle of peers so small that we were all famous to each other anyway. Vast new territories did not open up before me. Anything to do with native biology was rapidly becoming an academic cul-de-sac; I’d always suspected that was how it would be, but I hadn’t fought hard enough to end up anywhere else.

For the next three years, I clung to the path of least resistance: assisting Barat with his own research, taking the teaching jobs no one else wanted. Most of Barat’s other students moved on to better things, and I found myself increasingly alone in Mitar. But that didn’t matter; I had Beatrice.

At the age of twenty-five, I could see my future clearly. While other people deciphered—and built upon—the Angels’ legacy, I’d watch from a distance, still messing about with samples of seawater from which all Angelic contaminants had been scrupulously removed.

Finally, when it was almost too late, I made up my mind to jump ship. Barat had been good to me, but he’d never expected loyalty verging on martyrdom. At the end of the year a bi-ecological (native and Angelic) microbiology conference was being held in Tia, possibly the last event of its kind. I had no new results to present, but it wouldn’t be hard to find a plausible excuse to attend, and it would be the ideal place to lobby for a new position. My great zooyte discovery hadn’t been entirely lost on the wider community of biologists; I could try to rekindle the memory of it. I doubted there’d be much point offering to sleep with anyone; ethical qualms aside, my bridge had probably rusted into place.

Then again, maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe I’d stumble on a fellow Drowned Freelander who’d ended up in a position of power, and all I’d have to do was promise that my work would be for the greater glory of Beatrice.

* * * *

Tia was a city of ten million people on the east coast. New towers stood side-by-side with empty structures from the time of the Angels, giant gutted machines that might have played a role in the ecopoiesis. I was too old and proud to gawk like a child, but for all my provincial sophistication I wanted to. These domes and cylinders were twenty times older than the illustrations tattooed into the ceiling of the monastery back home. They bore no images of Beatrice; nothing of the Angels did. But why would they? They predated Her death.

The university, on the outskirts of Tia, was a third the size of Mitar itself. An underground train ringed the campus; the students I rode with eyed my unstylish clothes with disbelief. I left my luggage in the dormitory and headed straight for the conference center. Barat had chosen to stay behind; maybe he hadn’t wanted to witness the public burial of his field. That made things easier for me; I’d be free to hunt for a new career without rubbing his face in it.

Late additions to the conference program were listed on a screen by the main entrance. I almost walked straight past the display; I’d already decided which talks I’d be attending. But three steps away, a title I’d glimpsed in passing assembled itself in my mind’s eye, and I had to back-track to be sure I hadn’t imagined it.

Carla Reggia: “Euphoric Effects of _Z/12/80_ Excretions”

I stood there laughing with disbelief. I recognized the speaker and her co-workers by name, though I’d never had a chance to meet them. If this wasn’t a hoax ... what had they done? Dried it, smoked it, and tried writing that up as research? _Z/12/80_ was one of “my” zooytes, one of the escapees from the ocean; the air and water of Tia were swarming with it. If its excretions were euphoric, the whole city would be in a state of bliss.

_I knew, then and there, what they’d discovered._ I knew it, long before I admitted it to myself. I went to the talk with my head full of jokes about neglected culture flasks full of psychotropic breakdown products, but for two whole days, I’d been steeling myself for the truth, finding ways in which it didn’t have to matter.

_Z/12/80_, Carla explained, excreted among its waste products an amine that was able to bind to receptors in our Angel-crafted brains. Since it had been shown by other workers (no one recognized me; no one gave me so much as a glance) that _Z/12/80_ hadn’t existed at the time of the ecopoiesis, this interaction was almost certainly undesigned, and unanticipated. “It’s up to the archaeologists and neurochemists to determine what role, if any, the arrival of this substance in the environment might have played in the collapse of early settlement culture. But for the past fifteen to eighteen thousand years, we’ve been swimming in it. Since we still exhibit such a wide spectrum of moods, we’re probably able to compensate for its presence by down-regulating the secretion of the endogenous molecule that was designed to bind to the same receptor. That’s just an educated guess, though. Exactly what the effects might be from individual to individual, across the range of doses that might be experienced under a variety of conditions, is clearly going to be a matter of great interest to investigators with appropriate expertise.”

I told myself that I felt no disquiet. Beatrice acted on the world through the laws of nature; I’d stopped believing in supernatural miracles long ago. The fact that someone had now identified the way in which She’d acted on _me_, that night in the water, changed nothing.

I pressed ahead with my attempts to get recruited. Everyone at the conference was talking about Carla’s discovery, and when people finally made the connection with my own work their eyes stopped glazing over halfway through my spiel. In the next three days, I received seven offers—all involving research into zooyte biochemistry. There was no question, now, of side-stepping the issue, of escaping into the wider world of Angelic biology. One man even came right out and said to me: “You’re a Freelander, and you know that the ancestors of _Z/12/80_ live in much greater numbers in the ocean. Don’t you think _oceanic_ exposure is going to be the key to understanding this?” He laughed. “I mean, you swam in the stuff as a child, didn’t you? And you seem to have come through unscathed.”

“Apparently.”

On my last night in Tia, I couldn’t sleep. I stared into the blackness of the room, watching the gray sparks dance in front of me. (Contaminants in the aqueous humor? Electrical noise in the retina? I’d heard the explanation once, but I could no longer remember it.)

I prayed to Beatrice in the Angels’ tongue; I could still feel Her presence, as strongly as ever. The effect clearly wasn’t just a matter of dosage, or trans-cutaneous absorption; merely swimming in the ocean at the right depth wasn’t enough to make anyone feel Drowned. But in combination with the stress of oxygen starvation, and all the psychological build-up Daniel had provided, the jolt of zooyte piss must have driven certain neuroendocrine subsystems into new territory—or old territory, by a new path. _Peace, joy, contentment, the feeling of being loved_ weren’t exactly unknown emotions. But by short-circuiting the brain’s usual practice of summoning those feelings only on occasions when there was a reason for them, I’d been “blessed with the love of Beatrice.” I’d found happiness on demand.

And I still possessed it. That was the eeriest part. Even as I lay there in the dark, on the verge of reasoning everything I’d been living for out of existence, my ability to work the machinery was so ingrained that I felt as loved, as blessed as ever.

_Maybe Beatrice was offering me another chance, making it clear that She’d still forgive this blasphemy and welcome me back._ But why did I believe that there was anyone there to “forgive me”? You couldn’t reason your way to God; there was only faith. And I knew, now, that the source of my faith was a meaningless accident, an unanticipated side-effect of the ecopoiesis.

I still had a choice. I could, still, decide that the love of Beatrice was immune to all logic, a force beyond understanding, untouched by evidence of any kind.

_No, I couldn’t._ I’d been making exceptions for Her for too long. Everyone lived with double standards—but I’d already pushed mine as far as they’d go.

I started laughing and weeping at the same time. It was almost unimaginable: all the millions of people who’d been misled the same way. All because of the zooytes, and ... what? One Freelander, diving for pleasure, who’d stumbled on a strange new experience? Then tens of thousands more repeating it, generation after generation—until one vulnerable man or woman had been driven to invest the novelty with meaning. Someone who’d needed so badly to feel loved and protected that the illusion of a real presence behind the raw emotion had been impossible to resist. Or who’d desperately wanted to believe that—in spite of the Angels’ discovery that they, too, were mortal—death could still be defeated.

I was lucky: I’d been born in an era of moderation. I hadn’t killed in the name of Beatrice. I hadn’t suffered for my faith. I had no doubt that I’d been far happier for the last fifteen years than I would have been if I’d told Daniel to throw his rope and weights overboard without me.

But that didn’t change the fact that the heart of it all had been a lie.

* * * *

I woke at dawn, my head pounding, after just a few kilotau’s sleep. I closed my eyes and searched for Her presence, as I had a thousand times before. _When I woke in the morning and looked into my heart, She was there without fail, offering me strength and guidance. When I lay in bed at night, I feared nothing, because I knew She was watching over me._

There was nothing. She was gone.

I stumbled out of bed, feeling like a murderer, wondering how I’d ever live with what I’d done.

—

I turned down every offer I’d received at the conference, and stayed on in Mitar. It took Barat and me two years to establish our own research group to examine the effects of the zooamine, and nine more for us to elucidate the full extent of its activity in the brain. Our new recruits all had solid backgrounds in neurochemistry, and they did better work than I did, but when Barat retired I found myself the spokesperson for the group.

The initial discovery had been largely ignored outside the scientific community; for most people, it hardly mattered whether our brain chemistry matched the Angels’ original design, or had been altered fifteen thousand years ago by some unexpected contaminant. But when the Mitar zooamine group began publishing detailed accounts of the biochemistry of religious experience, the public at large rediscovered the subject with a vengeance.

The university stepped up security, and despite death threats and a number of unpleasant incidents with stone-throwing protesters, no one was hurt. We were flooded with requests from broadcasters—though most were predicated on the notion that the group was morally obliged to “face its critics”, rather than the broadcasters being morally obliged to offer us a chance to explain our work, calmly and clearly, without being shouted down by enraged zealots.

I learned to avoid the zealots, but the obscurantists were harder to dodge. I’d expected opposition from the Churches—defending the faith was their job, after all—but some of the most intellectually bankrupt responses came from academics in other disciplines. In one televised debate, I was confronted by a Deep Church priest, a Transitional theologian, a devotee of the ocean god Marni, and an anthropologist from Tia.

“This discovery has no real bearing on any belief system,” the anthropologist explained serenely. “All truth is local. Inside every Deep Church in Ferez, Beatrice _is_ the daughter of God, and we’re the mortal incarnations of the Angels, who traveled here from Earth. In a coastal village a few milliradians south, Marni is the supreme creator, and it was She who gave birth to us, right here. Going one step further and moving from the spiritual domain to the scientific might appear to ‘negate’ certain spiritual truths ... but equally, moving from the scientific domain to the spiritual demonstrates the same limitations. We are nothing but the stories we tell ourselves, and no one story is greater than another.” He smiled beneficently, the expression of a parent only too happy to give all his squabbling children an equal share in some disputed toy.

I said, “How many cultures do you imagine share your definition of ‘truth’? How many people do you think would be content to worship a God who consisted of literally nothing but the fact of their belief?” I turned to the Deep Church priest. “Is that enough for you?”

“Absolutely not!” She glowered at the anthropologist. “While I have the greatest respect for my brother here,” she gestured at the devotee of Marni, “you can’t draw a line around those people who’ve been lucky enough to be raised in the true faith, and then suggest that _Beatrice’s_ infinite power and love is confined to that group of people ... like some collection of folk songs!”

The devotee respectfully agreed. Marni had created the most distant stars, along with the oceans of Covenant. Perhaps some people called Her by another name, but if everyone on this planet was to die tomorrow, She would still be Marni: unchanged, undiminished.

The anthropologist responded soothingly, “Of course. But in context, and with a wider perspective—”

“I’m perfectly happy with a God who resides within us,” offered the Transitional theologian. “It seems ... _immodest_ to expect more. And instead of fretting uselessly over these ultimate questions, we should confine ourselves to matters of a suitably human scale.”

I turned to him. “So you’re actually indifferent as to whether an infinitely powerful and loving being created everything around you, and plans to welcome you into Her arms after death ... or the universe is a piece of quantum noise that will eventually vanish and erase us all?”

He sighed heavily, as if I was asking him to perform some arduous physical feat just by responding. “I can summon no enthusiasm for these issues.”

Later, the Deep Church priest took me aside and whispered, “Frankly, we’re all very grateful that you’ve debunked that awful cult of the Drowned. They’re a bunch of fundamentalist hicks, and the Church will be better off without them. But you mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that your work has anything to do with ordinary, civilized believers!”

* * * *

I stood at the back of the crowd that had gathered on the beach near the rock pool, to listen to the two old men who were standing ankle-deep in the milky water. It had taken me four days to get here from Mitar, but when I’d heard reports of a zooyte bloom washing up on the remote north coast, I’d had to come and see the results for myself. The zooamine group had actually recruited an anthropologist for such occasions—one who could cope with such taxing notions as the existence of objective reality, and a biochemical substrate for human thought—but Celine was only with us for part of the year, and right now she was away doing other research.

“This is an ancient, sacred place!” one man intoned, spreading his arms to take in the pool. “You need only observe the shape of it to understand that. It concentrates the energy of the stars, and the sun, and the ocean.”

“The focus of power is there, by the inlet,” the other added, gesturing at a point where the water might have come up to his calves. “Once, I wandered too close. I was almost lost in the great dream of the ocean, when my friend here came and rescued me!”

These men weren’t devotees of Marni, or members of any other formal religion. As far as I’d been able to tell from old news reports, the blooms occurred every eight or ten years, and the two had set themselves up as “custodians” of the pool more than fifty years ago. Some local villagers treated the whole thing as a joke, but others revered the old men. And for a small fee, tourists and locals alike could be chanted over, then splashed with the potent brew. Evaporation would have concentrated the trapped waters of the bloom; for a few days, before the zooytes ran out of nutrients and died _en masse_ in a cloud of hydrogen sulphide, the amine would be present in levels as high as in any of our laboratory cultures back in Mitar.

As I watched people lining up for the ritual, I found myself trying to downplay the possibility that anyone could be seriously affected by it. It was broad daylight, no one feared for their life, and the old men’s pantheistic gobbledygook carried all the gravitas of the patter of streetside scam merchants. Their marginal sincerity, and the money changing hands, would be enough to undermine the whole thing. This was a tourist trap, not a life-altering experience.

When the chanting was done, the first customer knelt at the edge of the pool. One of the custodians filled a small metal cup with water and threw it in her face. After a moment, she began weeping with joy. I moved closer, my stomach tightening. _It was what she’d known was expected of her, nothing more. She was playing along, not wanting to spoil the fun—like the good sports who pretended to have their thoughts read by a carnival psychic._

Next, the custodians chanted over a young man. He began swaying giddily even before they touched him with the water; when they did, he broke into sobs of relief that racked his whole body.

I looked back along the queue. There was a young girl standing third in line now, looking around apprehensively; she could not have been more than nine or ten. Her father (I presumed) was standing behind her, with his hand against her back, as if gently propelling her forward.

I lost all interest in playing anthropologist. I forced my way through the crowd until I reached the edge of the pool, then turned to address the people in the queue. “These men are frauds! There’s nothing mysterious going on here. I can tell you exactly what’s in the water: it’s just a drug, a natural substance given out by creatures that are trapped here when the waves retreat.”

I squatted down and prepared to dip my hand in the pool. One of the custodians rushed forward and grabbed my wrist. He was an old man, I could have done what I liked, but some people were already jeering, and I didn’t want to scuffle with him and start a riot. I backed away from him, then spoke again.

“I’ve studied this drug for more than ten years, at Mitar University. It’s present in water all over the planet. We drink it, we bathe in it, we swim in it every day. But it’s concentrated here, and if you don’t understand what you’re doing when you use it, that misunderstanding can harm you!”

The custodian who’d grabbed my wrist started laughing. “The dream of the ocean is powerful, yes, but we don’t need your advice on that! For fifty years, my friend and I have studied its lore, until we were strong enough to _stand_ in the sacred water!” He gestured at his leathery feet; I didn’t doubt that his circulation had grown poor enough to limit the dose to a tolerable level.

He stretched out his sinewy arm at me. “So fuck off back to Mitar, Inlander! Fuck off back to your books and your dead machinery! What would you know about the sacred mysteries? _What would you know about the ocean?_”

I said, “I think you’re out of your depth.”

I stepped into the pool. He started wailing about my unpurified body polluting the water, but I brushed past him. The other custodian came after me, but though my feet were soft after years of wearing shoes, I ignored the sharp edges of the rocks and kept walking toward the inlet. The zooamine helped. I could feel the old joy, the old peace, the old “love”; it made a powerful anesthetic.

I looked back over my shoulder. The second man had stopped pursuing me; it seemed he honestly feared going any further. I pulled off my shirt, bunched it up, and threw it onto a rock at the side of the pool. Then I waded forward, heading straight for the “focus of power.”

The water came up to my knees. I could feel my heart pounding, harder than it had since childhood. People were shouting at me from the edge of the pool—some outraged by my sacrilege, some apparently concerned for my safety in the presence of forces beyond my control. Without turning, I called out at the top of my voice, “There is no ‘power’ here! There’s nothing ‘sacred’! There’s nothing here but a drug—”

Old habits die hard; I almost prayed first. _Please, Holy Beatrice, don’t let me regain my faith._

I lay down in the water and let it cover my face. My vision turned white; I felt like I was leaving my body. The love of Beatrice flooded into me, and nothing had changed: Her presence was as palpable as ever, as undeniable as ever. I _knew_ that I was loved, accepted, forgiven.

I waited, staring into the light, almost expecting a voice, a vision, detailed hallucinations. That had happened to some of the Drowned. How did anyone ever claw their way back to sanity, after that?

But for me, there was only the emotion itself, overpowering but unembellished. It didn’t grow monotonous; I could have basked in it for days. But I understood, now, that it said no more about my place in the world than the warmth of sunlight on skin. I’d never mistake it for the touch of a real hand again.

I climbed to my feet and opened my eyes. Violet afterimages danced in front of me. It took a few tau for me to catch my breath, and feel steady on my feet again. Then I turned and started wading back toward the shore.

The crowd had fallen silent, though whether it was in disgust or begrudging respect I had no idea.

I said, “It’s not just here. It’s not just in the water. It’s part of us now; it’s in our blood.” I was still half-blind; I couldn’t see whether anyone was listening. “But as long as you know that, you’re already free. As long as you’re ready to face the possibility that everything that makes your spirits soar, everything that lifts you up and fills your heart with joy, _everything that makes your life worth living_ ... is a lie, is corruption, is meaningless—then you can never be enslaved.”

They let me walk away unharmed. I turned back to watch as the line formed again; the girl wasn’t in the queue.

* * * *

I woke with a start, from the same old dream.

_I was lowering my mother into the water from the back of the boat. Her hands were tied, her feet weighted. She was afraid, but she’d put her trust in me. “You’ll bring me up safely, won’t you Martin?”_

_I nodded reassuringly. But once she’d vanished beneath the waves, I thought: What am I doing? I don’t believe in this shit any more._

_So I took out a knife and started cutting through the rope—_

I brought my knees up to my chest, and crouched on the unfamiliar bed in the darkness. I was in a small town on the railway line, halfway back to Mitar. Halfway between midnight and dawn.

I dressed, and made my way out of the hostel. The center of town was deserted, and the sky was thick with stars. Just like home. In Mitar, everything vanished in a fog of light.

All three of the stars cited by various authorities as the Earth’s sun were above the horizon. If they weren’t all mistakes, perhaps I’d live to see a telescope’s image of the planet itself. But the prospect of seeking contact with the Angels—if there really was a faction still out there, somewhere—left me cold. I shouted silently up at the stars: _Your degenerate offspring don’t need your help! Why should we rejoin you? We’re going to surpass you!_

I sat down on the steps at the edge of the square and covered my face. Bravado didn’t help. Nothing helped. Maybe if I’d grown up facing the truth, I would have been stronger. But when I woke in the night, knowing that my mother was simply dead, that everyone I’d ever loved would follow her, that I’d vanish into the same emptiness myself, it was like being buried alive. It was like being back in the water, bound and weighted, with the certain knowledge that there was no one to haul me up.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder. I looked up, startled. It was a man about my own age. His manner wasn’t threatening; if anything, he looked slightly wary of me.

He said, “Do you need a roof? I can let you into the Church if you want.” There was a trolley packed with cleaning equipment a short distance behind him.

I shook my head. “It’s not that cold.” I was too embarrassed to explain that I had a perfectly good room nearby. “Thanks.”

As he was walking away, I called after him, “Do you believe in God?”

He stopped and stared at me for a while, as if he was trying to decide if this was a trick question—as if I might have been hired by the local parishioners to vet him for theological soundness. Or maybe he just wanted to be diplomatic with anyone desperate enough to be sitting in the town square in the middle of the night, begging a stranger for reassurance.

He shook his head. “As a child I did. Not anymore. It was a nice idea ... but it made no sense.” He eyed me skeptically, still unsure of my motives.

I said, “Then isn’t life unbearable?”

He laughed. “Not all the time.”

He went back to his trolley, and started wheeling it toward the Church.

I stayed on the steps, waiting for dawn.

Oracle

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

He’d woken a dozen times throughout the night with an overwhelming need to stretch his back and limbs, and none of the useful compromise positions he’d discovered in his first few days—the least-worst solutions to the geometrical problem of his confinement—had been able to dull his sense of panic. He’d been in far more pain in the second week, suffering cramps that felt as if the muscles of his legs were dying on the bone, but these new spasms had come from somewhere deeper, powered by a sense of urgency that revolved entirely around his own awareness of his situation.

That was what frightened him. Sometimes he could find ways to minimise his discomfort, sometimes he couldn’t, but he’d been clinging to the thought that, in the end, all these fuckers could ever do was hurt him. That wasn’t true, though. They could make him ache for freedom in the middle of the night, the way he might have ached with grief, or love. He’d always cherished the understanding that his self was a whole, his mind and body indivisible. But he’d failed to appreciate the corollary: through his body, they could touch every part of him. Change every part of him.

Morning brought a fresh torment: hay fever. The house was somewhere deep in the countryside, with nothing to be heard in the middle of the day but bird song. June had always been his worst month for hay fever, but in Manchester it had been tolerable. As he ate breakfast, mucus dripped from his face into the bowl of lukewarm oats they’d given him. He staunched the flow with the back of his hand, but suffered a moment of shuddering revulsion when he couldn’t find a way to reposition himself to wipe his hand clean on his trousers. Soon he’d need to empty his bowels. They supplied him with a chamber pot whenever he asked, but they always waited two or three hours before removing it. The smell was bad enough, but the fact that it took up space in the cage was worse.

Towards the middle of the morning, Peter Quint came to see him. “How are we today, Prof?” Robert didn’t reply. Since the day Quint had responded with a puzzled frown to the suggestion that he had an appropriate name for a spook, Robert had tried to make at least one fresh joke at the man’s expense every time they met, a petty but satisfying indulgence. But now his mind was blank, and in retrospect the whole exercise seemed like an insane distraction, as bizarre and futile as scoring philosophical points against some predatory animal while it gnawed on his leg.

“Many happy returns,” Quint said cheerfully.

Robert took care to betray no surprise. He’d never lost track of the days, but he’d stopped thinking in terms of the calendar date; it simply wasn’t relevant. Back in the real world, to have forgotten his own birthday would have been considered a benign eccentricity. Here it would be taken as proof of his deterioration, and imminent surrender.

If he was cracking, he could at least choose the point of fissure. He spoke as calmly as he could, without looking up. “You know I almost qualified for the Olympic marathon, back in forty-eight? If I hadn’t done my hip in just before the trials, I might have competed.” He tried a self-deprecating laugh. “I suppose I was never really much of an athlete. But I’m only forty-six. I’m not ready for a wheelchair yet.” The words did help: he could beg this way without breaking down completely, expressing an honest fear without revealing how much deeper the threat of damage went.

He continued, with a measured note of plaintiveness that he hoped sounded like an appeal to fairness. “I just can’t bear the thought of being crippled. All I’m asking is that you let me stand upright. Let me keep my health.”

Quint was silent for a moment, then he replied with a tone of thoughtful sympathy. “It’s unnatural, isn’t it? Living like this: bent over, twisted, day after day. Living in an unnatural way is always going to harm you. I’m glad you can finally see that.”

Robert was tired; it took several seconds for the meaning to sink in. It was that crude, that obvious? They’d locked him in this cage, for all this time ... as a kind of ham-fisted metaphor for his crimes?

He almost burst out laughing, but he contained himself. “I don’t suppose you know Franz Kafka?”

“Kafka?” Quint could never hide his voracity for names. “One of your Commie chums, is he?”

“I very much doubt that he was ever a Marxist.”

Quint was disappointed, but prepared to make do with second best. “One of the other kind, then?”

Robert pretended to be pondering the question. “On balance, I suspect that’s not too likely either.”

“So why bring his name up?”

“I have a feeling he would have admired your methods, that’s all. He was quite the connoisseur.”

“Hmm.” Quint sounded suspicious, but not entirely unflattered.

Robert had first set eyes on Quint in February of 1952. His house had been burgled the week before, and Arthur, a young man he’d been seeing since Christmas, had confessed to Robert that he’d given an acquaintance the address. Perhaps the two of them had planned to rob him, and Arthur had backed out at the last moment. In any case, Robert had gone to the police with an unlikely story about spotting the culprit in a pub, trying to sell an electric razor of the same make and model as the one taken from his house. No one could be charged on such flimsy evidence, so Robert had had no qualms about the consequences if Arthur had turned out to be lying. He’d simply hoped to prompt an investigation that might turn up something more tangible.

The following day, the CID had paid Robert a visit. The man he’d accused was known to the police, and fingerprints taken on the day of the burglary matched the prints they had on file. However, at the time Robert claimed to have seen him in the pub, he’d been in custody already on an entirely different charge.

The detectives had wanted to know why he’d lied. To spare himself the embarrassment, Robert had explained, of spelling out the true source of his information. Why was that embarrassing?

“I’m involved with the informant.”

One detective, Mr Wills, had asked matter-of-factly, “What exactly does that entail, sir?” And Robert—in a burst of frankness, as if honesty itself was sure to be rewarded—had told him every detail. He’d known it was still technically illegal, of course. But then, so was playing football on Easter Sunday. It could hardly be treated as a serious crime, like burglary.

The police had strung him along for hours, gathering as much information as they could before disabusing him of this misconception. They hadn’t charged him immediately; they’d needed a statement from Arthur first. But then Quint had materialised the next morning, and spelt out the choices very starkly. Three years in prison, with hard labour. Or Robert could resume his war-time work—for just one day a week, as a handsomely paid consultant to Quint’s branch of the secret service—and the charges would quietly vanish.

At first, he’d told Quint to let the courts do their worst. He’d been angry enough to want to take a stand against the preposterous law, and whatever his feelings for Arthur, Quint had suggested—gloatingly, as if it strengthened his case—that the younger, working-class man would be treated far more leniently than Robert, having been led astray by someone whose duty was to set an example for the lower orders. Three years in prison was an unsettling prospect, but it would not have been the end of the world; the Mark I had changed the way he worked, but he could still function with nothing but a pencil and paper, if necessary. Even if they’d had him breaking rocks from dawn to dusk he probably would have been able to day-dream productively, and for all Quint’s scaremongering he’d doubted it would come to that.

At some point, though, in the twenty-four hours Quint had given him to reach a decision, he’d lost his nerve. By granting the spooks their one day a week, he could avoid all the fuss and disruption of a trial. And though his work at the time—modelling embryological development—had been as challenging as anything he’d done in his life, he hadn’t been immune to pangs of nostalgia for the old days, when the fate of whole fleets of battleships had rested on finding the most efficient way to extract logical contradictions from a bank of rotating wheels.

The trouble with giving in to extortion was, it proved that you could be bought. Never mind that the Russians could hardly have offered to intervene with the Manchester constabulary next time he needed to be rescued. Never mind that he would scarcely have cared if an enemy agent had threatened to send such comprehensive evidence to the newspapers that there’d be no prospect of his patrons saving him again. He’d lost any chance to proclaim that what he did in bed with another willing partner was not an issue of national security; by saying yes to Quint, he’d made it one. By choosing to be corrupted once, he’d brought the whole torrent of clichés and paranoia down upon his head: he was vulnerable to blackmail, an easy target for entrapment, perfidious by nature. He might as well have posed in flagrante delicto with Guy Burgess on the steps of the Kremlin.

It wouldn’t have mattered if Quint and his masters had merely decided that they couldn’t trust him. The problem was—some six years after recruiting him, with no reason to believe that he had ever breached security in any way—they’d convinced themselves that they could neither continue to employ him, nor safely leave him in peace, until they’d rid him of the trait they’d used to control him in the first place.

Robert went through the painful, complicated process of rearranging his body so he could look Quint in the eye. “You know, if it was legal there’d be nothing to worry about, would there? Why don’t you devote some of your considerable Machiavellian talents to that end? Blackmail a few politicians. Set up a Royal Commission. It would only take you a couple of years. Then we could all get on with our real jobs.”

Quint blinked at him, more startled than outraged. “You might as well say that we should legalise treason!”

Robert opened his mouth to reply, then decided not to waste his breath. Quint wasn’t expressing a moral opinion. He simply meant that a world in which fewer people’s lives were ruled by the constant fear of discovery was hardly one that a man in his profession would wish to hasten into existence.

When Robert was alone again, the time dragged. His hay fever worsened, until he was sneezing and gagging almost continuously; even with freedom of movement and an endless supply of the softest linen handkerchiefs, he would have been reduced to abject misery. Gradually, though, he grew more adept at dealing with the symptoms, delegating the task to some barely conscious part of himself. By the middle of the afternoon—covered in filth, eyes almost swollen shut—he finally managed to turn his mind back to his work.

For the past four years he’d been immersed in particle physics. He’d been following the field on and off since before the war, but the paper by Yang and Mills in ‘54, in which they’d generalised Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism to apply to the strong nuclear force, had jolted him into action.

After several false starts, he believed he’d discovered a useful way to cast gravity into the same form. In general relativity, if you carried a four-dimensional velocity vector around a loop that enclosed a curved region of spacetime, it came back rotated—a phenomenon highly reminiscent of the way more abstract vectors behaved in nuclear physics. In both cases, the rotations could be treated algebraically, and the traditional way to get a handle on this was to make use of a set of matrices of complex numbers whose relationships mimicked the algebra in question. Hermann Weyl had catalogued most of the possibilities back in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

In spacetime, there were six distinct ways you could rotate an object: you could turn it around any of three perpendicular axes in space, or you could boost its velocity in any of the same three directions. These two kinds of rotation were complementary, or “dual” to each other, with the ordinary rotations only affecting coordinates that were untouched by the corresponding boost, and vice versa. This meant that you could rotate something around, say, the x-axis, and speed it up in the same direction, without the two processes interfering.

When Robert had tried applying the Yang-Mills approach to gravity in the obvious way, he’d floundered. It was only when he’d shifted the algebra of rotations into a new, strangely skewed guise that the mathematics had begun to fall into place. Inspired by a trick that particle physicists used to construct fields with left—or right-handed spin, he’d combined every rotation with its own dual multiplied by i, the square root of minus one. The result was a set of rotations in four complex dimensions, rather than the four real ones of ordinary spacetime, but the relationships between them preserved the original algebra.

Demanding that these “self-dual” rotations satisfy Einstein’s equations turned out to be equivalent to ordinary general relativity, but the process leading to a quantum-mechanical version of the theory became dramatically simpler. Robert still had no idea how to interpret this, but as a purely formal trick it worked spectacularly well—and when the mathematics fell into place like that, it had to mean something.

He spent several hours pondering old results, turning them over in his mind’s eye, rechecking and reimagining everything in the hope of forging some new connection. Making no progress, but there’d always been days like that. It was a triumph merely to spend this much time doing what he would have done back in the real world—however mundane, or even frustrating, the same activity might have been in its original setting.

By evening, though, the victory began to seem hollow. He hadn’t lost his wits entirely, but he was frozen, stunted. He might as well have whiled away the hours reciting the base-32 multiplication table in Baudot code, just to prove that he still remembered it.

As the room filled with shadows, his powers of concentration deserted him completely. His hay fever had abated, but he was too tired to think, and in too much pain to sleep. This wasn’t Russia, they couldn’t hold him forever; he simply had to wear them down with his patience. But when, exactly, would they have to let him go? And how much more patient could Quint be, with no pain, no terror, to erode his determination?

The moon rose, casting a patch of light on the far wall; hunched over, he couldn’t see it directly, but it silvered the grey at his feet, and changed his whole sense of the space around him. The cavernous room mocking his confinement reminded him of nights he’d spent lying awake in the dormitory at Sherborne. A public school education did have one great advantage: however miserable you were afterwards, you could always take comfort in the knowledge that life would never be quite as bad again.

“This room smells of mathematics! Go out and fetch a disinfectant spray!” That had been his form-master’s idea of showing what a civilised man he was: contempt for that loathsome subject, the stuff of engineering and other low trades. And as for Robert’s chemistry experiments, like the beautiful colour-changing iodate reaction he’d learnt from Chris’s brother—

Robert felt a familiar ache in the pit of his stomach. Not now. I can’t afford this now. But the whole thing swept over him, unwanted, unbidden. He’d used to meet Chris in the library on Wednesdays; for months, that had been the only time they could spend together. Robert had been fifteen then, Chris a year older. If Chris had been plain, he still would have shone like a creature from another world. No one else in Sherborne had read Eddington on relativity, Hardy on mathematics. No one else’s horizons stretched beyond rugby, sadism, and the dimly satisfying prospect of reading classics at Oxford then vanishing into the maw of the civil service.

They had never touched, never kissed. While half the school had been indulging in passionless sodomy—as a rather literal-minded substitute for the much too difficult task of imagining women—Robert had been too shy even to declare his feelings. Too shy, and too afraid that they might not be reciprocated. It hadn’t mattered. To have a friend like Chris had been enough.

In December of 1929, they’d both sat the exams for Trinity College, Cambridge. Chris had won a scholarship; Robert hadn’t. He’d reconciled himself to their separation, and prepared for one more year at Sherborne without the one person who’d made it bearable. Chris would be following happily in the footsteps of Newton; just thinking of that would be some consolation.

Chris never made it to Cambridge. In February, after six days in agony, he’d died of bovine tuberculosis.

Robert wept silently, angry with himself because he knew that half his wretchedness was just self-pity, exploiting his grief as a disguise. He had to stay honest; once every source of unhappiness in his life melted together and became indistinguishable, he’d be like a cowed animal, with no sense of the past or the future. Ready to do anything to get out of the cage.

If he hadn’t yet reached that point, he was close. It would only take a few more nights like the last one. Drifting off in the hope of a few minutes’ blankness, to find that sleep itself shone a colder light on everything. Drifting off, then waking with a sense of loss so extreme it was like suffocation.

A woman’s voice spoke from the darkness in front of him. “Get off your knees!”

Robert wondered if he was hallucinating. He’d heard no one approach across the creaky floorboards.

The voice said nothing more. Robert rearranged his body so he could look up from the floor. There was a woman he’d never seen before, standing a few feet away.

She’d sounded angry, but as he studied her face in the moonlight through the slits of his swollen eyes, he realised that her anger was directed, not at him, but at his condition. She gazed at him with an expression of horror and outrage, as if she’d chanced upon him being held like this in some respectable neighbour’s basement, rather than an MI6 facility. Maybe she was one of the staff employed in the upkeep of the house, but had no idea what went on here? Surely those people were vetted and supervised, though, and threatened with life imprisonment if they ever set foot outside their prescribed domains.

For one surreal moment, Robert wondered if Quint had sent her to seduce him. It would not have been the strangest thing they’d tried. But she radiated such fierce self assurance—such a sense of confidence that she could speak with the authority of her convictions, and expect to be heeded—that he knew she could never have been chosen for the role. No one in Her Majesty’s government would consider self assurance an attractive quality in a woman.

He said, “Throw me the key, and I’ll show you my Roger Bannister impression.”

She shook her head. “You don’t need a key. Those days are over.”

Robert started with fright. There were no bars between them. But the cage couldn’t have vanished before his eyes; she must have removed it while he’d been lost in his reverie. He’d gone through the whole painful exercise of turning to face her as if he were still confined, without even noticing.

Removed it how?

He wiped his eyes, shivering at the dizzying prospect of freedom. “Who are you?” An agent for the Russians, sent to liberate him from his own side? She’d have to be a zealot, then, or strangely naive, to view his torture with such wide-eyed innocence.

She stepped forward, then reached down and took his hand. “Do you think you can walk?” Her grip was firm, and her skin was cool and dry. She was completely unafraid; she might have been a good Samaritan in a public street helping an old man to his feet after a fall—not an intruder helping a threat to national security break out of therapeutic detention, at the risk of being shot on sight.

“I’m not even sure I can stand.” Robert steeled himself; maybe this woman was a trained assassin, but it would be too much to presume that if he cried out in pain and brought guards rushing in, she could still extricate him without raising a sweat. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“My name’s Helen.” She smiled and hoisted him to his feet, looking at once like a compassionate child pulling open the jaws of a hunter’s cruel trap, and a very powerful, very intelligent carnivore contemplating its own strength. “I’ve come to change everything.”

Robert said, “Oh, good.”

Robert found that he could hobble; it was painful and undignified, but at least he didn’t have to be carried. Helen led him through the house; lights showed from some of the rooms, but there were no voices, no footsteps save their own, no signs of life at all. When they reached the tradesmen’s entrance she unbolted the door, revealing a moonlit garden.

“Did you kill everyone?” he whispered. He’d made far too much noise to have come this far unmolested. Much as he had reason to despise his captors, mass murder on his behalf was a lot to take in.

Helen cringed. “What a revolting idea! It’s hard to believe sometimes, how uncivilised you are.”

“You mean the British?”

“All of you!”

“I must say, your accent’s rather good.”

“I watched a lot of cinema,” she explained. “Mostly Ealing comedies. You never know how much that will help, though.”

“Quite.”

They crossed the garden, heading for a wooden gate in the hedge. Since murder was strictly for imperialists, Robert could only assume that she’d managed to drug everyone.

The gate was unlocked. Outside the grounds, a cobbled lane ran past the hedge, leading into forest. Robert was barefoot, but the stones weren’t cold, and the slight unevenness of the path was welcome, restoring circulation to the soles of his feet.

As they walked, he took stock of his situation. He was out of captivity, thanks entirely to this woman. Sooner or later he was going to have to confront her agenda.

He said, “I’m not leaving the country.”

Helen murmured assent, as if he’d passed a casual remark about the weather.

“And I’m not going to discuss my work with you.”

“Fine.”

Robert stopped and stared at her. She said, “Put your arm across my shoulders.”

He complied; she was exactly the right height to support him comfortably. He said, “You’re not a Soviet agent, are you?”

Helen was amused. “Is that really what you thought?”

“I’m not all that quick on my feet tonight.”

“No.” They began walking together. Helen said, “There’s a train station about three kilometres away. You can get cleaned up, rest there until morning, and decide where you want to go.”

“Won’t the station be the first place they’ll look?”

“They won’t be looking anywhere for a while.”

The moon was high above the trees. The two of them could not have made a more conspicuous couple: a sensibly dressed, quite striking young woman, supporting a filthy, ragged tramp. If a villager cycled past, the best they could hope for was being mistaken for an alcoholic father and his martyred daughter.

Martyred all right: she moved so efficiently, despite the burden, that any onlooker would assume she’d been doing this for years. Robert tried altering his gait slightly, subtly changing the timing of his steps to see if he could make her falter, but Helen adapted instantly. If she knew she was being tested, though, she kept it to herself.

Finally he said, “What did you do with the cage?”

“I time-reversed it.”

Hairs stood up on the back of his neck. Even assuming that she could do such a thing, it wasn’t at all clear to him how that could have stopped the bars from scattering light and interacting with his body. It should merely have turned electrons into positrons, and killed them both in a shower of gamma rays.

That conjuring trick wasn’t his most pressing concern, though. “I can only think of three places you might have come from,” he said.

Helen nodded, as if she’d put herself in his shoes and catalogued the possibilities. “Rule out one; the other two are both right.”

She was not from an extrasolar planet. Even if her civilisation possessed some means of viewing Ealing comedies from a distance of light years, she was far too sensitive to his specific human concerns.

She was from the future, but not his own.

She was from the future of another Everett branch.

He turned to her. “No paradoxes.”

She smiled, deciphering his shorthand immediately. “That’s right. It’s physically impossible to travel into your own past, unless you’ve made exacting preparations to ensure compatible boundary conditions. That can be achieved, in a controlled laboratory setting—but in the field it would be like trying to balance ten thousand elephants in an inverted pyramid, while the bottom one rode a unicycle: excruciatingly difficult, and entirely pointless.”

Robert was tongue-tied for several seconds, a horde of questions battling for access to his vocal chords. “But how do you travel into the past at all?”

“It will take a while to bring you up to speed completely, but if you want the short answer: you’ve already stumbled on one of the clues. I read your paper in Physical Review, and it’s correct as far as it goes. Quantum gravity involves four complex dimensions, but the only classical solutions—the only geometries that remain in phase under slight perturbations—have curvature that’s either self-dual, or anti-self-dual. Those are the only stationary points of the action, for the complete Lagrangian. And both solutions appear, from the inside, to contain only four real dimensions.

“It’s meaningless to ask which sector we’re in, but we might as well call it self-dual. In that case, the anti-self-dual solutions have an arrow of time running backwards compared to ours.”

“Why?” As he blurted out the question, Robert wondered if he sounded like an impatient child to her. But if she suddenly vanished back into thin air, he’d have far fewer regrets for making a fool of himself this way than if he’d maintained a façade of sophisticated nonchalance.

Helen said, “Ultimately, that’s related to spin. And it’s down to the mass of the neutrino that we can tunnel between sectors. But I’ll need to draw you some diagrams and equations to explain it all properly.”

Robert didn’t press her for more; he had no choice but to trust that she wouldn’t desert him. He staggered on in silence, a wonderful ache of anticipation building in his chest. If someone had put this situation to him hypothetically, he would have piously insisted that he’d prefer to toil on at his own pace. But despite the satisfaction it had given him on the few occasions when he’d made genuine discoveries himself, what mattered in the end was understanding as much as you could, however you could. Better to ransack the past and the future than go through life in a state of wilful ignorance.

“You said you’ve come to change things?”

She nodded. “I can’t predict the future here, of course, but there are pitfalls in my own past that I can help you avoid. In my twentieth century, people discovered things too slowly. Everything changed much too slowly. Between us, I think we can speed things up.”

Robert was silent for a while, contemplating the magnitude of what she was proposing. Then he said, “It’s a pity you didn’t come sooner. In this branch, about twenty years ago—”

Helen cut him off. “I know. We had the same war. The same Holocaust, the same Soviet death toll. But we’ve yet to be able to avert that, anywhere. You can never do anything in just one history—even the most focused intervention happens across a broad ‘ribbon’ of strands. When we try to reach back to the ‘30s and ‘40s, the ribbon overlaps with its own past to such a degree that all the worst horrors are faits accompli. We can’t shoot any version of Adolf Hitler, because we can’t shrink the ribbon to the point where none of us would be shooting ourselves in the back. All we’ve ever managed are minor interventions, like sending projectiles back to the Blitz, saving a few lives by deflecting bombs.”

“What, knocking them into the Thames?”

“No, that would have been too risky. We did some modelling, and the safest thing turned out to be diverting them onto big, empty buildings: Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul’s Cathedral.”

The station came into view ahead of them. Helen said, “What do you think? Do you want to head back to Manchester?”

Robert hadn’t given the question much thought. Quint could track him down anywhere, but the more people he had around him, the less vulnerable he’d be. In his house in Wilmslow he’d be there for the taking.

“I still have rooms at Cambridge,” he said tentatively.

“Good idea.”

“What are your own plans?”

Helen turned to him. “I thought I’d stay with you.” She smiled at the expression on his face. “Don’t worry, I’ll give you plenty of privacy. And if people want to make assumptions, let them. You already have a scandalous reputation; you might as well see it branch out in new directions.”

Robert said wryly, “I’m afraid it doesn’t quite work that way. They’d throw us out immediately.”

Helen snorted. “They could try.”

“You may have defeated MI6, but you haven’t dealt with Cambridge porters.” The reality of the situation washed over him anew at the thought of her in his study, writing out the equations for time travel on the blackboard. “Why me? I can appreciate that you’d want to make contact with someone who could understand how you came here—but why not Everett, or Yang, or Feynman? Compared to Feynman, I’m a dilettante.”

Helen said, “Maybe. But you have an equally practical bent, and you’ll learn fast enough.”

There had to be more to it than that: thousands of people would have been capable of absorbing her lessons just as rapidly. “The physics you’ve hinted at—in your past, did I discover all that?”

“No. Your Physical Review paper helped me track you down here, but in my own history that was never published.” There was a flicker of disquiet in her eyes, as if she had far greater disappointments in store on that subject.

Robert didn’t care much either way; if anything, the less his alter ego had achieved, the less he’d be troubled by jealousy.

“Then what was it, that made you choose me?”

“You really haven’t guessed?” Helen took his free hand and held the fingers to her face; it was a tender gesture, but much more like a daughter’s than a lover’s. “It’s a warm night. No one’s skin should be this cold.”

Robert gazed into her dark eyes, as playful as any human’s, as serious, as proud. Given the chance, perhaps any decent person would have plucked him from Quint’s grasp. But only one kind would feel a special obligation, as if they were repaying an ancient debt.

He said, “You’re a machine.”

John Hamilton, Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, read the last letter in the morning’s pile of fan mail with a growing sense of satisfaction.

The letter was from a young American, a twelve-year-old girl in Boston. It opened in the usual way, declaring how much pleasure his books had given her, before going on to list her favourite scenes and characters. As ever, Jack was delighted that the stories had touched someone deeply enough to prompt them to respond this way. But it was the final paragraph that was by far the most gratifying:

However much other children might tease me, or grown-ups too when I’m older, I will NEVER, EVER stop believing in the Kingdom of Nescia. Sarah stopped believing, and she was locked out of the Kingdom forever. At first that made me cry, and I couldn’t sleep all night because I was afraid I might stop believing myself one day. But I understand now that it’s good to be afraid, because it will help me keep people from changing my mind. And if you’re not willing to believe in magic lands, of course you can’t enter them. There’s nothing even Belvedere himself can do to save you, then.

Jack refilled and lit his pipe, then reread the letter. This was his vindication: the proof that through his books he could touch a young mind, and plant the seed of faith in fertile ground. It made all the scorn of his jealous, stuck-up colleagues fade into insignificance. Children understood the power of stories, the reality of myth, the need to believe in something beyond the dismal grey farce of the material world.

It wasn’t a truth that could be revealed the “adult” way: through scholarship, or reason. Least of all through philosophy, as Elizabeth Anscombe had shown him on that awful night at the Socratic Club. A devout Christian herself, Anscombe had nonetheless taken all the arguments against materialism from his popular book, Signs and Wonders, and trampled them into the ground. It had been an unfair match from the start: Anscombe was a professional philosopher, steeped in the work of everyone from Aquinas to Wittgenstein; Jack knew the history of ideas in mediaeval Europe intimately, but he’d lost interest in modern philosophy once it had been invaded by fashionable positivists. And Signs and Wonders had never been intended as a scholarly work; it had been good enough to pass muster with a sympathetic lay readership, but trying to defend his admittedly rough-and-ready mixture of common sense and useful shortcuts to faith against Anscombe’s merciless analysis had made him feel like a country yokel stammering in front of a bishop.

Ten years later, he still burned with resentment at the humiliation she’d put him through, but he was grateful for the lesson she’d taught him. His earlier books, and his radio talks, had not been a complete waste of time—but the harpy’s triumph had shown him just how pitiful human reason was when it came to the great questions. He’d begun working on the stories of Nescia years before, but it was only when the dust had settled on his most painful defeat that he’d finally recognised his true calling.

He removed his pipe, stood, and turned to face Oxford. “Kiss my arse, Elizabeth!” he growled happily, waving the letter at her. This was a wonderful omen. It was going to be a very good day.

There was a knock at the door of his study.

“Come.”

It was his brother, William. Jack was puzzled—he hadn’t even realised Willie was in town—but he nodded a greeting and motioned at the couch opposite his desk.

Willie sat, his face flushed from the stairs, frowning. After a moment he said, “This chap Stoney.”

“Hmm?” Jack was only half listening as he sorted papers on his desk. He knew from long experience that Willie would take forever to get to the point.

“Did some kind of hush-hush work during the war, apparently.”

“Who did?”

“Robert Stoney. Mathematician. Used to be up at Manchester, but he’s a Fellow of Kings, and now he’s back in Cambridge. Did some kind of secret war work. Same thing as Malcolm Muggeridge, apparently. No one’s allowed to say what.”

Jack looked up, amused. He’d heard rumours about Muggeridge, but they all revolved around the business of analysing intercepted German radio messages. What conceivable use would a mathematician have been, for that? Sharpening pencils for the intelligence analysts, presumably.

“What about him, Willie?” Jack asked patiently.

Willie continued reluctantly, as if he was confessing to something mildly immoral. “I paid him a visit yesterday. Place called the Cavendish. Old army friend of mine has a brother who works there. Got the whole tour.”

“I know the Cavendish. What’s there to see?”

“He’s doing things, Jack. Impossible things.”

“Impossible?”

“Looking inside people. Putting it on a screen, like a television.”

Jack sighed. “Taking X-rays?”

Willie snapped back angrily, “I’m not a fool; I know what an X-ray looks like. This is different. You can see the blood flow. You can watch your heart beating. You can follow a sensation through the nerves from ... fingertip to brain. He says, soon he’ll be able to watch a thought in motion.”

“Nonsense.” Jack scowled. “So he’s invented some gadget, some fancy kind of X-ray machine. What are you so agitated about?”

Willie shook his head gravely. “There’s more. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. He’s only been back in Cambridge a year, and already the place is overflowing with ... wonders.” He used the word begrudgingly, as if he had no choice, but was afraid of conveying more approval than he intended.

Jack was beginning to feel a distinct sense of unease.

“What exactly is it you want me to do?” he asked.

Willie replied plainly, “Go and see for yourself. Go and see what he’s up to.”

The Cavendish Laboratory was a mid-Victorian building, designed to resemble something considerably older and grander. It housed the entire Department of Physics, complete with lecture theatres; the place was swarming with noisy undergraduates. Jack had had no trouble arranging a tour: he’d simply telephoned Stoney and expressed his curiosity, and no more substantial reason had been required.

Stoney had been allocated three adjoining rooms at the back of the building, and the “spin resonance imager” occupied most of the first. Jack obligingly placed his arm between the coils, then almost jerked it out in fright when the strange, transected view of his muscles and veins appeared on the picture tube. He wondered if it could be some kind of hoax, but he clenched his fist slowly and watched the image do the same, then made several unpredictable movements which it mimicked equally well.

“I can show you individual blood cells, if you like,” Stoney offered cheerfully.

Jack shook his head; his current, unmagnified flaying was quite enough to take in.

Stoney hesitated, then added awkwardly, “You might want to talk to your doctor at some point. It’s just that, your bone density’s rather—” He pointed to a chart on the screen beside the image. “Well, it’s quite a bit below the normal range.”

Jack withdrew his arm. He’d already been diagnosed with osteoporosis, and he’d welcomed the news: it meant that he’d taken a small part of Joyce’s illness—the weakness in her bones—into his own body. God was allowing him to suffer a little in her stead.

If Joyce were to step between these coils, what might that reveal? But there’d be nothing to add to her diagnosis. Besides, if he kept up his prayers, and kept up both their spirits, in time her remission would blossom from an uncertain reprieve into a fully-fledged cure.

He said, “How does this work?”

“In a strong magnetic field, some of the atomic nuclei and electrons in your body are free to align themselves in various ways with the field.” Stoney must have seen Jack’s eyes beginning to glaze over; he quickly changed tack. “Think of it as being like setting a whole lot of spinning tops whirling, as vigorously as possible, then listening carefully as they slow down and tip over. For the atoms in your body, that’s enough to give some clues as to what kind of molecule, and what kind of tissue, they’re in. The machine listens to atoms in different places by changing the way it combines all the signals from billions of tiny antennae. It’s like a whispering gallery where we can play with the time that signals take to travel from different places, moving the focus back and forth through any part of your body, thousands of times a second.”

Jack pondered this explanation. Though it sounded complicated, in principle it wasn’t that much stranger than X-rays.

“The physics itself is old hat,” Stoney continued, “but for imaging, you need a very strong magnetic field, and you need to make sense of all the data you’ve gathered. Nevill Mott made the superconducting alloys for the magnets. And I managed to persuade Rosalind Franklin from Birkbeck to collaborate with us, to help perfect the fabrication process for the computing circuits. We cross-link lots of little Y-shaped DNA fragments, then selectively coat them with metal; Rosalind worked out a way to use X-ray crystallography for quality control. We paid her back with a purpose-built computer that will let her solve hydrated protein structures in real time, once she gets her hands on a bright enough X-ray source.” He held up a small, unprepossessing object, rimmed with protruding gold wires. “Each logic gate is roughly a hundred Ångstroms cubed, and we grow them in three-dimensional arrays. That’s a million, million, million switches in the palm of my hand.”

Jack didn’t know how to respond to this claim. Even when he couldn’t quite follow the man there was something mesmerising about his ramblings, like a cross between William Blake and nursery talk.

“If computers don’t excite you, we’re doing all kinds of other things with DNA.” Stoney ushered him into the next room, which was full of glassware, and seedlings in pots beneath strip lights. Two assistants seated at a bench were toiling over microscopes; another was dispensing fluids into test tubes with a device that looked like an overgrown eye-dropper.

“There are a dozen new species of rice, corn, and wheat here. They all have at least double the protein and mineral content of existing crops, and each one uses a different biochemical repertoire to protect itself against insects and fungi. Farmers have to get away from monocultures; it leaves them too vulnerable to disease, and too dependent on chemical pesticides.”

Jack said, “You’ve bred these? All these new varieties, in a matter of months?”

“No, no! Instead of hunting down the heritable traits we needed in the wild, and struggling for years to produce cross-breeds bearing all of them, we designed every trait from scratch. Then we manufactured DNA that would make the tools the plants need, and inserted it into their germ cells.”

Jack demanded angrily, “Who are you to say what a plant needs?”

Stoney shook his head innocently. “I took my advice from agricultural scientists, who took their advice from farmers. They know what pests and blights they’re up against. Food crops are as artificial as Pekinese. Nature didn’t hand them to us on a plate, and if they’re not working as well as we need them to, nature isn’t going to fix them for us.”

Jack glowered at him, but said nothing. He was beginning to understand why Willie had sent him here. The man came across as an enthusiastic tinkerer, but there was a breath-taking arrogance lurking behind the boyish exterior.

Stoney explained a collaboration he’d brokered between scientists in Cairo, Bogotá, London and Calcutta, to develop vaccines for polio, smallpox, malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, tuberculosis, influenza and leprosy. Some were the first of their kind; others were intended as replacements for existing vaccines. “It’s important that we create antigens without culturing the pathogens in animal cells that might themselves harbour viruses. The teams are all looking at variants on a simple, cheap technique that involves putting antigen genes into harmless bacteria that will double as delivery vehicles and adjuvants, then freeze-drying them into spores that can survive tropical heat without refrigeration.”

Jack was slightly mollified; this all sounded highly admirable. What business Stoney had instructing doctors on vaccines was another question. Presumably his jargon made sense to them, but when exactly had this mathematician acquired the training to make even the most modest suggestions on the topic?

“You’re having a remarkably productive year,” he observed.

Stoney smiled. “The muse comes and goes for all of us. But I’m really just the catalyst in most of this. I’ve been lucky enough to find some people—here in Cambridge, and further afield—who’ve been willing to chance their arm on some wild ideas. They’ve done the real work.” He gestured towards the next room. “My own pet projects are through here.”

The third room was full of electronic gadgets, wired up to picture tubes displaying both phosphorescent words and images resembling engineering blueprints come to life. In the middle of one bench, incongruously, sat a large cage containing several hamsters.

Stoney fiddled with one of the gadgets, and a face like a stylised drawing of a mask appeared on an adjacent screen. The mask looked around the room, then said, “Good morning, Robert. Good morning, Professor Hamilton.”

Jack said, “You had someone record those words?”

The mask replied, “No, Robert showed me photographs of all the teaching staff at Cambridge. If I see anyone I know from the photographs, I greet them.” The face was crudely rendered, but the hollow eyes seemed to meet Jack’s. Stoney explained, “It has no idea what it’s saying, of course. It’s just an exercise in face and voice recognition.”

Jack responded stiffly, “Of course.”

Stoney motioned to Jack to approach and examine the hamster cage. He obliged him. There were two adult animals, presumably a breeding pair. Two pink young were suckling from the mother, who reclined in a bed of straw.

“Look closely,” Stoney urged him. Jack peered into the nest, then cried out an obscenity and backed away.

One of the young was exactly what it seemed. The other was a machine, wrapped in ersatz skin, with a nozzle clamped to the warm teat.

“That’s the most monstrous thing I’ve ever seen!” Jack’s whole body was trembling. “What possible reason could you have to do that?”

Stoney laughed and made a reassuring gesture, as if his guest was a nervous child recoiling from a harmless toy. “It’s not hurting her! And the point is to discover what it takes for the mother to accept it. To ‘reproduce one’s kind’ means having some set of parameters as to what that is. Scent, and some aspects of appearance, are important cues in this case, but through trial and error I’ve also pinned down a set of behaviours that lets the simulacrum pass through every stage of the life cycle. An acceptable child, an acceptable sibling, an acceptable mate.”

Jack stared at him, nauseated. “These animals fuck your machines?”

Stoney was apologetic. “Yes, but hamsters will fuck anything. I’ll really have to shift to a more discerning species, in order to test that properly.”

Jack struggled to regain his composure. “What on Earth possessed you, to do this?”

“In the long run,” Stoney said mildly, “I believe this is something we’re going to need to understand far better than we do at present. Now that we can map the structures of the brain in fine detail, and match its raw complexity with our computers, it’s only a matter of a decade or so before we build machines that think.

“That in itself will be a vast endeavour, but I want to ensure that it’s not stillborn from the start. There’s not much point creating the most marvellous children in history, only to find that some awful mammalian instinct drives us to strangle them at birth.”

Jack sat in his study drinking whisky. He’d telephoned Joyce after dinner, and they’d chatted for a while, but it wasn’t the same as being with her. The weekends never came soon enough, and by Tuesday or Wednesday any sense of reassurance he’d gained from seeing her had slipped away entirely.

It was almost midnight now. After speaking to Joyce, he’d spent three more hours on the telephone, finding out what he could about Stoney. Milking his connections, such as they were; Jack had only been at Cambridge for five years, so he was still very much an outsider. Not that he’d ever been admitted into any inner circles back at Oxford: he’d always belonged to a small, quiet group of dissenters against the tide of fashion. Whatever else might be said about the Tiddlywinks, they’d never had their hands on the levers of academic power.

A year ago, while on sabbatical in Germany, Stoney had resigned suddenly from a position he’d held at Manchester for a decade. He’d returned to Cambridge, despite having no official posting to take up. He’d started collaborating informally with various people at the Cavendish, until the head of the place, Mott, had invented a job description for him, and given him a modest salary, the three rooms Jack had seen, and some students to assist him.

Stoney’s colleagues were uniformly amazed by his spate of successful inventions. Though none of his gadgets were based on entirely new science, his skill at seeing straight to the heart of existing theories and plucking some practical consequence from them was unprecedented. Jack had expected some jealous back-stabbing, but no one seemed to have a bad word to say about Stoney. He was willing to turn his scientific Midas touch to the service of anyone who approached him, and it sounded to Jack as if every would-be skeptic or enemy had been bought off with some rewarding insight into their own field.

Stoney’s personal life was rather murkier. Half of Jack’s informants were convinced that the man was a confirmed pansy, but others spoke of a beautiful, mysterious woman named Helen, with whom he was plainly on intimate terms.

Jack emptied his glass and stared out across the courtyard. Was it pride, to wonder if he might have received some kind of prophetic vision? Fifteen years earlier, when he’d written The Broken Planet, he’d imagined that he’d merely been satirising the hubris of modern science. His portrait of the evil forces behind the sardonically named Laboratory Overseeing Various Experiments had been intended as a deadly serious metaphor, but he’d never expected to find himself wondering if real fallen angels were whispering secrets in the ears of a Cambridge don.

How many times, though, had he told his readers that the devil’s greatest victory had been convincing the world that he did not exist? The devil was not a metaphor, a mere symbol of human weakness: he was a real, scheming presence, acting in time, acting in the world, as much as God Himself.

And hadn’t Faustus’s damnation been sealed by the most beautiful woman of all time: Helen of Troy?

Jack’s skin crawled. He’d once written a humorous newspaper column called “Letters from a Demon,” in which a Senior Tempter offered advice to a less experienced colleague on the best means to lead the faithful astray. Even that had been an exhausting, almost corrupting experience; adopting the necessary point of view, however whimsically, had made him feel that he was withering inside. The thought that a cross between the Faustbuch and The Broken Planet might be coming to life around him was too terrifying to contemplate. He was no hero out of his own fiction—not even a mild-mannered Cedric Duffy, let alone a modern Pendragon. And he did not believe that Merlin would rise from the woods to bring chaos to that hubristic Tower of Babel, the Cavendish Laboratory.

Nevertheless, if he was the only person in England who suspected Stoney’s true source of inspiration, who else would act?

Jack poured himself another glass. There was nothing to be gained by procrastinating. He would not be able to rest until he knew what he was facing: a vain, foolish overgrown boy who was having a run of good luck—or a vain, foolish overgrown boy who had sold his soul and imperilled all humanity.

“A Satanist? You’re accusing me of being a Satanist?”

Stoney tugged angrily at his dressing gown; he’d been in bed when Jack had pounded on the door. Given the hour, it had been remarkably civil of him to accept a visitor at all, and he appeared so genuinely affronted now that Jack was almost prepared to apologise and slink away. He said, “I had to ask you—”

“You have to be doubly foolish to be a Satanist,” Stoney muttered.

“Doubly?”

“Not only do you need to believe all the nonsense of Christian theology, you then have to turn around and back the preordained, guaranteed-to-fail, absolutely futile losing side.” He held up his hand, as if he believed he’d anticipated the only possible objection to this remark, and wished to spare Jack the trouble of wasting his breath by uttering it. “I know, some people claim it’s all really about some pre-Christian deity: Mercury, or Pan—guff like that. But assuming that we’re not talking about some complicated mislabelling of objects of worship, I really can’t think of anything more insulting. You’re comparing me to someone like ... Huysmans, who was basically just a very dim Catholic.”

Stoney folded his arms and settled back on the couch, waiting for Jack’s response.

Jack’s head was thick from the whisky; he wasn’t at all sure how to take this. It was the kind of smart-arsed undergraduate drivel he might have expected from any smug atheist—but then, short of a confession, exactly what kind of reply would have constituted evidence of guilt? If you’d sold your soul to the devil, what lie would you tell in place of the truth? Had he seriously believed that Stoney would claim to be a devout churchgoer, as if that were the best possible answer to put Jack off the scent?

He had to concentrate on things he’d seen with his own eyes, facts that could not be denied.

“You’re plotting to overthrow nature, bending the world to the will of man.”

Stoney sighed. “Not at all. More refined technology will help us tread more lightly. We have to cut back on pollution and pesticides as rapidly as possible. Or do you want to live in a world where all the animals are born as hermaphrodites, and half the Pacific islands disappear in storms?”

“Don’t try telling me that you’re some kind of guardian of the animal kingdom. You want to replace us all with machines!”

“Does every Zulu or Tibetan who gives birth to a child, and wants the best for it, threaten you in the same way?”

Jack bristled. “I’m not a racist. A Zulu or Tibetan has a soul.”

Stoney groaned and put his head in his hands. “It’s half past one in the morning! Can’t we have this debate some other time?”

Someone banged on the door. Stoney looked up, disbelieving. “What is this? Grand Central Station?”

He crossed to the door and opened it. A dishevelled, unshaven man pushed his way into the room. “Quint? What a pleasant—”

The intruder grabbed Stoney and slammed him against the wall. Jack exhaled with surprise. Quint turned bloodshot eyes on him.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“John Hamilton. Who the fuck are you?”

“Never you mind. Just stay put.” He jerked Stoney’s arm up behind his back with one hand, while grinding his face into the wall with the other. “You’re mine now, you piece of shit. No one’s going to protect you this time.”

Stoney addressed Jack through a mouth squashed against the masonry. “Dith ith Pether Quinth, my own perthonal thpook. I did make a Fauthtian bargain. But with thtrictly temporal—”

“Shut up!” Quint pulled a gun from his jacket and held it to Stoney’s head.

Jack said, “Steady on.”

“Just how far do your connections go?” Quint screamed. “I’ve had memos disappear, sources clam up—and now my superiors are treating me like some kind of traitor! Well, don’t worry: when I’m through with you, I’ll have the names of the entire network.” He turned to address Jack again. “And don’t you think you’re going anywhere.”

Stoney said, “Leave him out of dith. He’th at Magdalene. You mutht know by now: all the thpieth are at Trinity.”

Jack was shaken by the sight of Quint waving his gun around, but the implications of this drama came as something of a relief. Stoney’s ideas must have had their genesis in some secret war-time research project. He hadn’t made a deal with the devil after all, but he’d broken the Official Secrets Act, and now he was paying the price.

Stoney flexed his body and knocked Quint backwards. Quint staggered, but didn’t fall; he raised his arm menacingly, but there was no gun in his hand. Jack looked around to see where it had fallen, but he couldn’t spot it anywhere. Stoney landed a kick squarely in Quint’s testicles; barefoot, but Quint wailed with pain. A second kick sent him sprawling.

Stoney called out, “Luke? Luke! Would you come and give me a hand?”

A solidly built man with tattooed forearms emerged from Stoney’s bedroom, yawning and tugging his braces into place. At the sight of Quint, he groaned. “Not again!”

Stoney said, “I’m sorry.”

Luke shrugged stoically. The two of them managed to grab hold of Quint, then they dragged him struggling out the door. Jack waited a few seconds, then searched the floor for the gun. But it wasn’t anywhere in sight, and it hadn’t slid under the furniture; none of the crevices where it might have ended up were so dark that it would have been lost in shadow. It was not in the room at all.

Jack went to the window and watched the three men cross the courtyard, half expecting to witness an assassination. But Stoney and his lover merely lifted Quint into the air between them, and tossed him into a shallow, rather slimy-looking pond.

Jack spent the ensuing days in a state of turmoil. He wasn’t ready to confide in anyone until he could frame his suspicions clearly, and the events in Stoney’s rooms were difficult to interpret unambiguously. He couldn’t state with absolute certainty that Quint’s gun had vanished before his eyes. But surely the fact that Stoney was walking free proved that he was receiving supernatural protection? And Quint himself, confused and demoralised, had certainly had the appearance of a man who’d been demonically confounded at every turn.

If this was true, though, Stoney must have bought more with his soul than immunity from worldly authority. The knowledge itself had to be Satanic in origin, as the legend of Faustus described it. Tollers had been right, in his great essay “Mythopoesis”: myths were remnants of man’s pre-lapsarian capacity to apprehend, directly, the great truths of the world. Why else would they resonate in the imagination, and survive from generation to generation?

By Friday, a sense of urgency gripped him. He couldn’t take his confusion back to Potter’s Barn, back to Joyce and the boys. This had to be resolved, if only in his own mind, before he returned to his family.

With Wagner on the gramophone, he sat and meditated on the challenge he was facing. Stoney had to be thwarted, but how? Jack had always said that the Church of England—apparently so quaint and harmless, a Church of cake stalls and kindly spinsters—was like a fearsome army in the eyes of Satan. But even if his master was quaking in Hell, it would take more than a few stern words from a bicycling vicar to force Stoney to abandon his obscene plans.

But Stoney’s intentions, in themselves, didn’t matter. He’d been granted the power to dazzle and seduce, but not to force his will upon the populace. What mattered was how his plans were viewed by others. And the way to stop him was to open people’s eyes to the true emptiness of his apparent cornucopia.

The more he thought and prayed about it, the more certain Jack became that he’d discerned the task required of him. No denunciation from the pulpits would suffice; people wouldn’t turn down the fruits of Stoney’s damnation on the mere say-so of the Church. Why would anyone reject such lustrous gifts, without a carefully reasoned argument?

Jack had been humiliated once, defeated once, trying to expose the barrenness of materialism. But might that not have been a form of preparation? He’d been badly mauled by Anscombe, but she’d made an infinitely gentler enemy than the one he now confronted. He had suffered from her taunts—but what was suffering, if not the chisel God used to shape his children into their true selves?

His role was clear, now. He would find Stoney’s intellectual Achilles heel, and expose it to the world.

He would debate him.

Robert gazed at the blackboard for a full minute, then started laughing with delight. “That’s so beautiful!”

“Isn’t it?” Helen put down the chalk and joined him on the couch. “Any more symmetry, and nothing would happen: the universe would be full of crystalline blankness. Any less, and it would all be uncorrelated noise.”

Over the months, in a series of tutorials, Helen had led him through a small part of the century of physics that had separated them at their first meeting, down to the purely algebraic structures that lay beneath spacetime and matter. Mathematics catalogued everything that was not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics was an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

Robert sat and mentally reviewed everything he’d learnt, trying to apprehend as much as he could in a single image. As he did, a part of him waited fearfully for a sense of disappointment, a sense of anticlimax. He might never see more deeply into the nature of the world. In this direction, at least, there was nothing more to be discovered.

But anticlimax was impossible. To become jaded with this was impossible. However familiar he became with the algebra of the universe, it would never grow less marvellous.

Finally he asked, “Are there other islands?” Not merely other histories, sharing the same underlying basis, but other realities entirely.

“I suspect so,” Helen replied. “People have mapped some possibilities. I don’t know how that could ever be confirmed, though.”

Robert shook his head, sated. “I won’t even think about that. I need to come down to Earth for a while.” He stretched his arms and leant back, still grinning.

Helen said, “Where’s Luke today? He usually shows up by now, to drag you out into the sunshine.”

The question wiped the smile from Robert’s face. “Apparently I make poor company. Being insufficiently fanatical about darts and football.”

“He’s left you?” Helen reached over and squeezed his hand sympathetically. A little mockingly, too.

Robert was annoyed; she never said anything, but he always felt that she was judging him. “You think I should grow up, don’t you? Find someone more like myself. Some kind of soulmate.” He’d meant the word to sound sardonic, but it emerged rather differently.

“It’s your life,” she said.

A year before, that would have been a laughable claim, but it was almost the truth now. There was a de facto moratorium on prosecutions, while the recently acquired genetic and neurological evidence was being assessed by a parliamentary subcommittee. Robert had helped plant the seeds of the campaign, but he’d played no real part in it; other people had taken up the cause. In a matter of months, it was possible that Quint’s cage would be smashed, at least for everyone in Britain.

The prospect filled him with a kind of vertigo. He might have broken the laws at every opportunity, but they had still moulded him. The cage might not have left him crippled, but he’d be lying to himself if he denied that he’d been stunted.

He said, “Is that what happened, in your past? I ended up in some ... lifelong partnership?” As he spoke the words, his mouth went dry, and he was suddenly afraid that the answer would be yes. With Chris. The life he’d missed out on was a life of happiness with Chris.

“No.”

“Then ... what?” he pleaded. “What did I do? How did I live?” He caught himself, suddenly self-conscious, but added, “You can’t blame me for being curious.”

Helen said gently, “You don’t want to know what you can’t change. All of that is part of your own causal past now, as much as it is of mine.”

“If it’s part of my own history,” Robert countered, “don’t I deserve to know it? This man wasn’t me, but he brought you to me.”

Helen considered this. “You accept that he was someone else? Not someone whose actions you’re responsible for?”

“Of course.”

She said, “There was a trial, in 1952. For ‘Gross Indecency contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Amendment Act of 1885.’ He wasn’t imprisoned, but the court ordered hormone treatments.”

“Hormone treatments?” Robert laughed. “What—testosterone, to make him more of a man?”

“No, oestrogen. Which in men reduces the sex drive. There are side-effects, of course. Gynaecomorphism, among other things.”

Robert felt physically sick. They’d chemically castrated him, with drugs that had made him sprout breasts. Of all the bizarre abuse to which he’d been subjected, nothing had been as horrifying as that.

Helen continued, “The treatment lasted six months, and the effects were all temporary. But two years later, he took his own life. It was never clear exactly why.”

Robert absorbed this in silence. He didn’t want to know anything more.

After a while, he said, “How do you bear it? Knowing that in some branch or other, every possible form of humiliation is being inflicted on someone?”

Helen said, “I don’t bear it. I change it. That’s why I’m here.”

Robert bowed his head. “I know. And I’m grateful that our histories collided. But ... how many histories don’t?” He struggled to find an example, though it was almost too painful to contemplate; since their first conversation, it was a topic he’d deliberately pushed to the back of his mind. “There’s not just an unchangeable Auschwitz in each of our pasts, there are an astronomical number of others—along with an astronomical number of things that are even worse.”

Helen said bluntly, “That’s not true.”

“What?” Robert looked up at her, startled.

She walked to the blackboard and erased it. “Auschwitz has happened, for both of us, and no one I’m aware of has ever prevented it—but that doesn’t mean that nobody stops it, anywhere.” She began sketching a network of fine lines on the blackboard. “You and I are having this conversation in countless microhistories—sequences of events where various different things happen with subatomic particles throughout the universe—but that’s irrelevant to us, we can’t tell those strands apart, so we might as well treat them all as one history.” She pressed the chalk down hard to make a thick streak that covered everything she’d drawn. “The quantum decoherence people call this ‘coarse graining’. Summing over all these indistinguishable details is what gives rise to classical physics in the first place.

“Now, ‘the two of us’ would have first met in many perceivably different coarse-grained histories—and furthermore, you’ve since diverged by making different choices, and experiencing different external possibilities, after those events.” She sketched two intersecting ribbons of coarse-grained histories, and then showed each history diverging further.

“World War II and the Holocaust certainly happened in both of our pasts—but that’s no proof that the total is so vast that it might as well be infinite. Remember, what stops us successfully intervening is the fact that we’re reaching back to a point where some of the parallel interventions start to bite their own tail. So when we fail, it can’t be counted twice: it’s just confirming what we already know.”

Robert protested, “But what about all the versions of ‘30s Europe that don’t happen to lie in either your past or mine? Just because we have no direct evidence for a Holocaust in those branches, that hardly makes it unlikely.”

Helen said, “Not unlikely per se, without intervention. But not fixed in stone either. We’ll keep trying, refining the technology, until we can reach branches where there’s no overlap with our own past in the ‘30s. And there must be other, separate ribbons of intervention that happen in histories we can never even know about.”

Robert was elated. He’d imagined himself clinging to a rock of improbable good fortune in an infinite sea of suffering—struggling to pretend, for the sake of his own sanity, that the rock was all there was. But what lay around him was not inevitably worse; it was merely unknown. In time, he might even play a part in ensuring that every last tragedy was not repeated across billions of worlds.

He reexamined the diagram. “Hang on. Intervention doesn’t end divergence, though, does it? You reached us, a year ago, but in at least some of the histories spreading out from that moment, won’t we still have suffered all kinds of disasters, and reacted in all kinds of self-defeating ways?”

“Yes,” Helen conceded, “but fewer than you might think. If you merely listed every sequence of events that superficially appeared to have a non-zero probability, you’d end up with a staggering catalogue of absurdist tragedies. But when you calculate everything more carefully, and take account of Planck-scale effects, it turns out to be nowhere near as bad. There are no coarse-grained histories where boulders assemble themselves out of dust and rain from the sky, or everyone in London or Madras goes mad and slaughters their children. Most macroscopic systems end up being quite robust—people included. Across histories, the range of natural disasters, human stupidity, and sheer bad luck isn’t overwhelmingly greater than the range you’re aware of from this history alone.”

Robert laughed. “And that’s not bad enough?”

“Oh, it is. But that’s the best thing about the form I’ve taken.”

“I’m sorry?”

Helen tipped her head and regarded him with an expression of disappointment. “You know, you’re still not as quick on your feet as I’d expected.”

Robert’s face burned, but then he realised what he’d missed, and his resentment vanished.

“You don’t diverge? Your hardware is designed to end the process? Your environment, your surroundings, will still split you into different histories—but on a coarse-grained level, you don’t contribute to the process yourself?”

“That’s right.”

Robert was speechless. Even after a year, she could still toss him a hand grenade like this.

Helen said, “I can’t help living in many worlds; that’s beyond my control. But I do know that I’m one person. Faced with a choice that puts me on a knife-edge, I know I won’t split and take every path.”

Robert hugged himself, suddenly cold. “Like I do. Like I have. Like all of us poor creatures of flesh.”

Helen came and sat beside him. “Even that’s not irrevocable. Once you’ve taken this form—if that’s what you choose—you can meet your other selves, reverse some of the scatter. Give some a chance to undo what they’ve done.”

This time, Robert grasped her meaning at once. “Gather myself together? Make myself whole?”

Helen shrugged. “If it’s what you want. If you see it that way.”

He stared back at her, disoriented. Touching the bedrock of physics was one thing, but this possibility was too much to take in.

Someone knocked on the study door. The two of them exchanged wary glances, but it wasn’t Quint, back for more punishment. It was a porter bearing a telegram.

When the man had left, Robert opened the envelope.

“Bad news?” Helen asked.

He shook his head. “Not a death in the family, if that’s what you meant. It’s from John Hamilton. He’s challenging me to a debate. On the topic ‘Can A Machine Think?’”

“What, at some university function?”

“No. On the BBC. Four weeks from tomorrow.” He looked up. “Do you think I should do it?”

“Radio or television?”

Robert reread the message. “Television.”

Helen smiled. “Definitely. I’ll give you some tips.”

“On the subject?”

“No! That would be cheating.” She eyed him appraisingly. “You can start by throwing out your electric razor. Get rid of the permanent five o’clock shadow.”

Robert was hurt. “Some people find that quite attractive.”

Helen replied firmly, “Trust me on this.”

The BBC sent a car to take Robert down to London. Helen sat beside him in the back seat.

“Are you nervous?” she asked.

“Nothing that an hour of throwing up won’t cure.”

Hamilton had suggested a live broadcast, “to keep things interesting,” and the producer had agreed. Robert had never been on television; he’d taken part in a couple of radio discussions on the future of computing, back when the Mark I had first come into use, but even those had been taped.

Hamilton’s choice of topic had surprised him at first, but in retrospect it seemed quite shrewd. A debate on the proposition that “Modern Science is the Devil’s Work” would have brought howls of laughter from all but the most pious viewers, whereas the purely metaphorical claim that “Modern Science is a Faustian Pact” would have had the entire audience nodding sagely in agreement, while carrying no implications whatsoever. If you weren’t going to take the whole dire fairy tale literally, everything was “a Faustian Pact” in some sufficiently watered-down sense: everything had a potential downside, and this was as pointless to assert as it was easy to demonstrate.

Robert had met considerable incredulity, though, when he’d explained to journalists where his own research was leading. To date, the press had treated him as a kind of eccentric British Edison, churning out inventions of indisputable utility, and no one seemed to find it at all surprising or alarming that he was also, frankly, a bit of a loon. But Hamilton would have a chance to exploit, and reshape, that perception. If Robert insisted on defending his goal of creating machine intelligence, not as an amusing hobby that might have been chosen by a public relations firm to make him appear endearingly daft, but as both the ultimate vindication of materialist science and the logical endpoint of most of his life’s work, Hamilton could use a victory tonight to cast doubt on everything Robert had done, and everything he symbolised. By asking, not at all rhetorically, “Where will this all end?”, he was inviting Robert to step forward and hang himself with the answer.

The traffic was heavy for a Sunday evening, and they arrived at the Shepherd’s Bush studios with only fifteen minutes until the broadcast. Hamilton had been collected by a separate car, from his family home near Oxford. As they crossed the studio Robert spotted him, conversing intensely with a dark-haired young man.

He whispered to Helen, “Do you know who that is, with Hamilton?”

She followed his gaze, then smiled cryptically. Robert said, “What? Do you recognise him from somewhere?”

“Yes, but I’ll tell you later.”

As the make-up woman applied powder, Helen ran through her long list of rules again. “Don’t stare into the camera, or you’ll look like you’re peddling soap powder. But don’t avert your eyes. You don’t want to look shifty.”

The make-up woman whispered to Robert, “Everyone’s an expert.”

“Annoying, isn’t it?” he confided.

Michael Polanyi, an academic philosopher who was well-known to the public after presenting a series of radio talks, had agreed to moderate the debate. Polanyi popped into the make-up room, accompanied by the producer; they chatted with Robert for a couple of minutes, setting him at ease and reminding him of the procedure they’d be following.

They’d only just left him when the floor manager appeared. “We need you in the studio now, please, Professor.” Robert followed her, and Helen pursued him part of the way. “Breathe slowly and deeply,” she urged him.

“As if you’d know,” he snapped.

Robert shook hands with Hamilton then took his seat on one side of the podium. Hamilton’s young adviser had retreated into the shadows; Robert glanced back to see Helen watching from a similar position. It was like a duel: they both had seconds. The floor manager pointed out the studio monitor, and as Robert watched it was switched between the feeds from two cameras: a wide shot of the whole set, and a closer view of the podium, including the small blackboard on a stand beside it. He’d once asked Helen whether television had progressed to far greater levels of sophistication in her branch of the future, once the pioneering days were left behind, but the question had left her uncharacteristically tongue-tied.

The floor manager retreated behind the cameras, called for silence, then counted down from ten, mouthing the final numbers.

The broadcast began with an introduction from Polanyi: concise, witty, and non-partisan. Then Hamilton stepped up to the podium. Robert watched him directly while the wide-angle view was being transmitted, so as not to appear rude or distracted. He only turned to the monitor when he was no longer visible himself.

“Can a machine think?” Hamilton began. “My intuition tells me: no. My heart tells me: no. I’m sure that most of you feel the same way. But that’s not enough, is it? In this day and age, we aren’t allowed to rely on our hearts for anything. We need something scientific. We need some kind of proof.

“Some years ago, I took part in a debate at Oxford University. The issue then was not whether machines might behave like people, but whether people themselves might be mere machines. Materialists, you see, claim that we are all just a collection of purposeless atoms, colliding at random. Everything we do, everything we feel, everything we say, comes down to some sequence of events that might as well be the spinning of cogs, or the opening and closing of electrical relays.

“To me, this was self-evidently false. What point could there be, I argued, in even conversing with a materialist? By his own admission, the words that came out of his mouth would be the result of nothing but a mindless, mechanical process! By his own theory, he could have no reason to think that those words would be the truth! Only believers in a transcendent human soul could claim any interest in the truth.”

Hamilton nodded slowly, a penitent’s gesture. “I was wrong, and I was put in my place. This might be self-evident to me, and it might be self-evident to you, but it’s certainly not what philosophers call an ‘analytical truth’: it’s not actually a nonsense, a contradiction in terms, to believe that we are mere machines. There might, there just might, be some reason why the words that emerge from a materialist’s mouth are truthful, despite their origins lying entirely in unthinking matter.

“There might.” Hamilton smiled wistfully. “I had to concede that possibility, because I only had my instinct, my gut feeling, to tell me otherwise.

“But the reason I only had my instinct to guide me was because I’d failed to learn of an event that had taken place many years before. A discovery made in 1930, by an Austrian mathematician named Kurt Gödel.”

Robert felt a shiver of excitement run down his spine. He’d been afraid that the whole contest would degenerate into theology, with Hamilton invoking Aquinas all night—or Aristotle, at best. But it looked as if his mysterious adviser had dragged him into the twentieth century, and they were going to have a chance to debate the real issues after all.

“What is it that we know Professor Stoney’s computers can do, and do well?” Hamilton continued. “Arithmetic! In a fraction of a second, they can add up a million numbers. Once we’ve told them, very precisely, what calculations to perform, they’ll complete them in the blink of an eye—even if those calculations would take you or me a lifetime.

“But do these machines understand what it is they’re doing? Professor Stoney says, ‘Not yet. Not right now. Give them time. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’” Hamilton nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps that’s fair. His computers are only a few years old. They’re just babies. Why should they understand anything, so soon?

“But let’s stop and think about this a bit more carefully. A computer, as it stands today, is simply a machine that does arithmetic, and Professor Stoney isn’t proposing that they’re going to sprout new kinds of brains all on their own. Nor is he proposing giving them anything really new. He can already let them look at the world with television cameras, turning the pictures into a stream of numbers describing the brightness of different points on the screen ... on which the computer can then perform arithmetic. He can already let them speak to us with a special kind of loudspeaker, to which the computer feeds a stream of numbers to describe how loud the sound should be ... a stream of numbers produced by more arithmetic.

“So the world can come into the computer, as numbers, and words can emerge, as numbers too. All Professor Stoney hopes to add to his computers is a ‘cleverer’ way to do the arithmetic that takes the first set of numbers and churns out the second. It’s that ‘clever arithmetic’, he tells us, that will make these machines think.”

Hamilton folded his arms and paused for a moment. “What are we to make of this? Can doing arithmetic, and nothing more, be enough to let a machine understand anything? My instinct certainly tells me no, but who am I that you should trust my instinct?

“So, let’s narrow down the question of understanding, and to be scrupulously fair, let’s put it in the most favourable light possible for Professor Stoney. If there’s one thing a computer ought to be able to understand—as well as us, if not better—it’s arithmetic itself. If a computer could think at all, it would surely be able to grasp the nature of its own best talent.

“The question, then, comes down to this: can you describe all of arithmetic, using nothing but arithmetic? Thirty years ago—long before Professor Stoney and his computers came along—Professor Gödel asked himself exactly that question.

“Now, you might be wondering how anyone could even begin to describe the rules of arithmetic, using nothing but arithmetic itself.” Hamilton turned to the blackboard, picked up the chalk, and wrote two lines:

If x+z = y+z then x = y

“This is an important rule, but it’s written in symbols, not numbers, because it has to be true for every number, every x, y and z. But Professor Gödel had a clever idea: why not use a code, like spies use, where every symbol is assigned a number?” Hamilton wrote:

The code for “a” is 1.

The code for “b” is 2.

“And so on. You can have a code for every letter of the alphabet, and for all the other symbols needed for arithmetic: plus signs, equals signs, that kind of thing. Telegrams are sent this way every day, with a code called the Baudot code, so there’s really nothing strange or sinister about it.

“All the rules of arithmetic that we learnt at school can be written with a carefully chosen set of symbols, which can then be translated into numbers. Every question as to what does or does not follow from those rules can then be seen anew, as a question about numbers. If this line follows from this one,” Hamilton indicated the two lines of the cancellation rule, “we can see it in the relationship between their code numbers. We can judge each inference, and declare it valid or not, purely by doing arithmetic.

“So, given any proposition at all about arithmetic—such as the claim that ‘there are infinitely many prime numbers’—we can restate the notion that we have a proof for that claim in terms of code numbers. If the code number for our claim is x, we can say ‘There is a number p, ending with the code number x, that passes our test for being the code number of a valid proof.’”

Hamilton took a visible breath.

“In 1930, Professor Gödel used this scheme to do something rather ingenious.” He wrote on the blackboard:

There DOES NOT EXIST a number p meeting the following condition:

p is the code number of a valid proof of this claim.

“Here is a claim about arithmetic, about numbers. It has to be either true or false. So let’s start by supposing that it happens to be true. Then there is no number p that is the code number for a proof of this claim. So this is a true statement about arithmetic, but it can’t be proved merely by doing arithmetic!”

Hamilton smiled. “If you don’t catch on immediately, don’t worry; when I first heard this argument from a young friend of mine, it took a while for the meaning to sink in. But remember: the only hope a computer has for understanding anything is by doing arithmetic, and we’ve just found a statement that cannot be proved with mere arithmetic.

“Is this statement really true, though? We mustn’t jump to conclusions, we mustn’t damn the machines too hastily. Suppose this claim is false! Since it claims there is no number p that is the code number of its own proof, to be false there would have to be such a number, after all. And that number would encode the ‘proof’ of an acknowledged falsehood!”

Hamilton spread his arms triumphantly. “You and I, like every schoolboy, know that you can’t prove a falsehood from sound premises—and if the premises of arithmetic aren’t sound, what is? So we know, as a matter of certainty, that this statement is true.

“Professor Gödel was the first to see this, but with a little help and perseverance, any educated person can follow in his footsteps. A machine could never do that. We might divulge to a machine our own knowledge of this fact, offering it as something to be taken on trust, but the machine could neither stumble on this truth for itself, nor truly comprehend it when we offered it as a gift.

“You and I understand arithmetic, in a way that no electronic calculator ever will. What hope has a machine, then, of moving beyond its own most favourable milieu and comprehending any wider truth?

“None at all, ladies and gentlemen. Though this detour into mathematics might have seemed arcane to you, it has served a very down-to-Earth purpose. It has proved—beyond refutation by even the most ardent materialist or the most pedantic philosopher—what we common folk knew all along: no machine will ever think.”

Hamilton took his seat. For a moment, Robert was simply exhilarated; coached or not, Hamilton had grasped the essential features of the incompleteness proof, and presented them to a lay audience. What might have been a night of shadow-boxing—with no blows connecting, and nothing for the audience to judge but two solo performances in separate arenas—had turned into a genuine clash of ideas.

As Polanyi introduced him and he walked to the podium, Robert realised that his usual shyness and self-consciousness had evaporated. He was filled with an altogether different kind of tension: he sensed more acutely than ever what was at stake.

When he reached the podium, he adopted the posture of someone about to begin a prepared speech, but then he caught himself, as if he’d forgotten something. “Bear with me for a moment.” He walked around to the far side of the blackboard and quickly wrote a few words on it, upside-down. Then he resumed his place.

“Can a machine think? Professor Hamilton would like us to believe that he’s settled the issue once and for all, by coming up with a statement that we know is true, but a particular machine—programmed to explore the theorems of arithmetic in a certain rigid way—would never be able to produce. Well ... we all have our limitations.” He flipped the blackboard over to reveal what he’d written on the opposite side:

If Robert Stoney speaks these words, he will NOT be telling the truth.

He waited a few beats, then continued.

“What I’d like to explore, though, is not so much a question of limitations, as of opportunities. How exactly is it that we’ve all ended up with this mysterious ability to know that Gödel’s statement is true? Where does this advantage, this great insight, come from? From our souls? From some immaterial entity that no machine could ever possess? Is that the only possible source, the only conceivable explanation? Or might it come from something a little less ethereal?

“As Professor Hamilton explained, we believe Gödel’s statement is true because we trust the rules of arithmetic not to lead us into contradictions and falsehoods. But where does that trust come from? How does it arise?”

Robert turned the blackboard back to Hamilton’s side, and pointed to the cancellation rule. “If x plus z equals y plus z, then x equals y. Why is this so reasonable? We might not learn to put it quite like this until we’re in our teens, but if you showed a young child two boxes—without revealing their contents—added an equal number of shells, or stones, or pieces of fruit to both, and then let the child look inside to see that each box now contained the same number of items, it wouldn’t take any formal education for the child to understand that the two boxes must have held the same number of things to begin with.

“The child knows, we all know, how a certain kind of object behaves. Our lives are steeped in direct experience of whole numbers: whole numbers of coins, stamps, pebbles, birds, cats, sheep, buses. If I tried to persuade a six-year-old that I could put three stones in a box, remove one of them, and be left with four ... he’d simply laugh at me. Why? It’s not merely that he’s sure to have taken one thing away from three to get two, on many prior occasions. Even a child understands that some things that appear reliable will eventually fail: a toy that works perfectly, day after day, for a month or a year, can still break. But not arithmetic, not taking one from three. He can’t even picture that failing. Once you’ve lived in the world, once you’ve seen how it works, the failure of arithmetic becomes unimaginable.

“Professor Hamilton suggests that this is down to our souls. But what would he say about a child reared in a world of water and mist, never in the company of more than one person at a time, never taught to count on his fingers and toes. I doubt that such a child would possess the same certainty that you and I have, as to the impossibility of arithmetic ever leading him astray. To banish whole numbers entirely from his world would require very strange surroundings, and a level of deprivation amounting to cruelty, but would that be enough to rob a child of his soul?

“A computer, programmed to pursue arithmetic as Professor Hamilton has described, is subject to far more deprivation than that child. If I’d been raised with my hands and feet tied, my head in a sack, and someone shouting orders at me, I doubt that I’d have much grasp of reality—and I’d still be better prepared for the task than such a computer. It’s a great mercy that a machine treated that way wouldn’t be able to think: if it could, the shackles we’d placed upon it would be criminally oppressive.

“But that’s hardly the fault of the computer, or a revelation of some irreparable flaw in its nature. If we want to judge the potential of our machines with any degree of honesty, we have to play fair with them, not saddle them with restrictions that we’d never dream of imposing on ourselves. There really is no point comparing an eagle with a spanner, or a gazelle with a washing machine: it’s our jets that fly and our cars that run, albeit in quite different ways than any animal.

“Thought is sure to be far harder to achieve than those other skills, and to do so we might need to mimic the natural world far more closely. But I believe that once a machine is endowed with facilities resembling the inborn tools for learning that we all have as our birthright, and is set free to learn the way a child learns, through experience, observation, trial and error, hunches and failures—instead of being handed a list of instructions that it has no choice but to obey—we will finally be in a position to compare like with like.

“When that happens, and we can meet and talk and argue with these machines—about arithmetic, or any other topic—there’ll be no need to take the word of Professor Gödel, or Professor Hamilton, or myself, for anything. We’ll invite them down to the local pub, and interrogate them in person. And if we play fair with them, we’ll use the same experience and judgment we use with any friend, or guest, or stranger, to decide for ourselves whether or not they can think.”

The BBC put on a lavish assortment of wine and cheese in a small room off the studio. Robert ended up in a heated argument with Polanyi, who revealed himself to be firmly on the negative side, while Helen flirted shamelessly with Hamilton’s young friend, who turned out to have a PhD in algebraic geometry from Cambridge; he must have completed the degree just before Robert had come back from Manchester. After exchanging some polite formalities with Hamilton, Robert kept his distance, sensing that any further contact would not be welcome.

An hour later, though, after getting lost in the maze of corridors on his way back from the toilets, Robert came across Hamilton sitting alone in the studio, weeping.

He almost backed away in silence, but Hamilton looked up and saw him. With their eyes locked, it was impossible to retreat.

Robert said, “It’s your wife?” He’d heard that she’d been seriously ill, but the gossip had included a miraculous recovery. Some friend of the family had lain hands on her a year ago, and she’d gone into remission.

Hamilton said, “She’s dying.”

Robert approached and sat beside him. “From what?”

“Breast cancer. It’s spread throughout her body. Into her bones, into her lungs, into her liver.” He sobbed again, a helpless spasm, then caught himself angrily. “Suffering is the chisel God uses to shape us. What kind of idiot comes up with a line like that?”

Robert said, “I’ll talk to a friend of mine, an oncologist at Guy’s Hospital. He’s doing a trial of a new genetic treatment.”

Hamilton stared at him. “One of your miracle cures?”

“No, no. I mean, only very indirectly.”

Hamilton said angrily, “She won’t take your poison.”

Robert almost snapped back: She won’t? Or you won’t let her? But it was an unfair question. In some marriages, the lines blurred. It was not for him to judge the way the two of them faced this together.

“They go away in order to be with us in a new way, even closer than before.” Hamilton spoke the words like a defiant incantation, a declaration of faith that would ward off temptation, whether or not he entirely believed it.

Robert was silent for a while, then he said, “I lost someone close to me, when I was a boy. And I thought the same thing. I thought he was still with me, for a long time afterwards. Guiding me. Encouraging me.” It was hard to get the words out; he hadn’t spoken about this to anyone for almost thirty years. “I dreamed up a whole theory to explain it, in which ‘souls’ used quantum uncertainty to control the body during life, and communicate with the living after death, without breaking any laws of physics. The kind of thing every science-minded seventeen-year-old probably stumbles on, and takes seriously for a couple of weeks, before realising how nonsensical it is. But I had a good reason not to see the flaws, so I clung to it for almost two years. Because I missed him so much, it took me that long to understand what I was doing, how I was deceiving myself.”

Hamilton said pointedly, “If you’d not tried to explain it, you might never have lost him. He might still be with you now.”

Robert thought about this. “I’m glad he’s not, though. It wouldn’t be fair on either of us.”

Hamilton shuddered. “Then you can’t have loved him very much, can you?” He put his head in his arms. “Just fuck off, now, will you.”

Robert said, “What exactly would it take, to prove to you that I’m not in league with the devil?”

Hamilton turned red eyes on him and announced triumphantly, “Nothing will do that! I saw what happened to Quint’s gun!”

Robert sighed. “That was a conjuring trick. Stage magic, not black magic.”

“Oh yes? Show me how it’s done, then. Teach me how to do it, so I can impress my friends.”

“It’s rather technical. It would take all night.”

Hamilton laughed humourlessly. “You can’t deceive me. I saw through you from the start.”

“Do you think X-rays are Satanic? Penicillin?”

“Don’t treat me like a fool. There’s no comparison.”

“Why not? Everything I’ve helped develop is part of the same continuum. I’ve read some of your writing on mediaeval culture, and you’re always berating modern commentators for presenting it as unsophisticated. No one really thought the Earth was flat. No one really treated every novelty as witchcraft. So why view any of my work any differently than a fourteenth-century man would view twentieth-century medicine?”

Hamilton replied, “If a fourteenth-century man was suddenly faced with twentieth-century medicine, don’t you think he’d be entitled to wonder how it had been revealed to his contemporaries?”

Robert shifted uneasily on his chair. Helen hadn’t sworn him to secrecy, but he’d agreed with her view: it was better to wait, to spread the knowledge that would ground an understanding of what had happened, before revealing any details of the contact between branches.

But this man’s wife was dying, needlessly. And Robert was tired of keeping secrets. Some wars required it, but others were better won with honesty.

He said, “I know you hate H.G. Wells. But what if he was right, about one little thing?”

Robert told him everything, glossing over the technicalities but leaving out nothing substantial. Hamilton listened without interrupting, gripped by a kind of unwilling fascination. His expression shifted from hostile to incredulous, but there were also hints of begrudging amazement, as if he could at least appreciate some of the beauty and complexity of the picture Robert was painting.

But when Robert had finished, Hamilton said merely, “You’re a grand liar, Stoney. But what else should I expect, from the King of Lies?”

Robert was in a sombre mood on the drive back to Cambridge. The encounter with Hamilton had depressed him, and the question of who’d swayed the nation in the debate seemed remote and abstract in comparison.

Helen had taken a house in the suburbs, rather than inviting scandal by cohabiting with him, though her frequent visits to his rooms seemed to have had almost the same effect. Robert walked her to the door.

“I think it went well, don’t you?” she said.

“I suppose so.”

“I’m leaving tonight,” she added casually. “This is goodbye.”

“What?” Robert was staggered. “Everything’s still up in the air! I still need you!”

She shook her head. “You have all the tools you need, all the clues. And plenty of local allies. There’s nothing truly urgent I could tell you, now, that you couldn’t find out just as quickly on your own.”

Robert pleaded with her, but her mind was made up. The driver beeped the horn; Robert gestured to him impatiently.

“You know, my breath’s frosting visibly,” he said, “and you’re producing nothing. You really ought to be more careful.”

She laughed. “It’s a bit late to worry about that.”

“Where will you go? Back home? Or off to twist another branch?”

“Another branch. But there’s something I’m planning to do on the way.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you remember once, you wrote about an Oracle? A machine that could solve the halting problem?”

“Of course.” Given a device that could tell you in advance whether a given computer program would halt, or go on running forever, you’d be able to prove or disprove any theorem whatsoever about the integers: the Goldbach conjecture, Fermat’s Last Theorem, anything. You’d simply show this “Oracle” a program that would loop through all the integers, testing every possible set of values and only halting if it came to a set that violated the conjecture. You’d never need to run the program itself; the Oracle’s verdict on whether or not it halted would be enough.

Such a device might or might not be possible, but Robert had proved more than twenty years before that no ordinary computer, however ingeniously programmed, would suffice. If program H could always tell you in a finite time whether or not program X would halt, you could tack on a small addition to H to create program Z, which perversely and deliberately went into an infinite loop whenever it examined a program that halted. If Z examined itself, it would either halt eventually, or run forever. But either possibility contradicted the alleged powers of program H: if Z actually ran forever, it would be because H had claimed that it wouldn’t, and vice versa. Program H could not exist.

“Time travel,” Helen said, “gives me a chance to become an Oracle. There’s a way to exploit the inability to change your own past, a way to squeeze an infinite number of timelike paths—none of them closed, but some of them arbitrarily near to it—into a finite physical system. Once you do that, you can solve the halting problem.”

“How?” Robert’s mind was racing. “And once you’ve done that ... what about higher cardinalities? An Oracle for Oracles, able to test conjectures about the real numbers?”

Helen smiled enigmatically. “The first problem should only take you forty or fifty years to solve. As for the rest,” she pulled away from him, moving into the darkness of the hallway, “what makes you think I know the answer myself?” She blew him a kiss, then vanished from sight.

Robert took a step towards her, but the hallway was empty.

He walked back to the car, sad and exalted, his heart pounding.

The driver asked wearily, “Where to now, sir?”

Robert said, “Further up, and further in.”

The night after the funeral, Jack paced the house until three a.m. When would it be bearable? When? She’d shown more strength and courage, dying, than he felt within himself right now. But she’d share it with him, in the weeks to come. She’d share it with them all.

In bed, in the darkness, he tried to sense her presence around him. But it was forced, it was premature. It was one thing to have faith that she was watching over him, but quite another to expect to be spared every trace of grief, every trace of pain.

He waited for sleep. He needed to get some rest before dawn, or how would he face her children in the morning?

Gradually, he became aware of someone standing in the darkness at the foot of the bed. As he examined and reexamined the shadows, he formed a clear image of the apparition’s face.

It was his own. Younger, happier, surer of himself.

Jack sat up. “What do you want?”

“I want you to come with me.” The figure approached; Jack recoiled, and it halted.

“Come with you, where?” Jack demanded.

“To a place where she’s waiting.”

Jack shook his head. “No. I don’t believe you. She said she’d come for me herself, when it was time. She said she’d guide me.”

“She didn’t understand, then,” the apparition insisted gently. “She didn’t know I could fetch you myself. Do you think I’d send her in my place? Do you think I’d shirk the task?”

Jack searched the smiling, supplicatory face. “Who are you?” His own soul, in Heaven, remade? Was this a gift God offered everyone? To meet, before death, the very thing you would become—if you so chose? So that even this would be an act of free will?

The apparition said, “Stoney persuaded me to let his friend treat Joyce. We lived on, together. More than a century has passed. And now we want you to join us.”

Jack choked with horror. “No! This is a trick! You’re the Devil!”

The thing replied mildly, “There is no Devil. And no God, either. Just people. But I promise you: people with the powers of gods are kinder than any god we ever imagined.”

Jack covered his face. “Leave me be.” He whispered fervent prayers, and waited. It was a test, a moment of vulnerability, but God wouldn’t leave him naked like this, face-to-face with the Enemy, for longer than he could endure.

He uncovered his face. The thing was still with him.

It said, “Do you remember, when your faith came to you? The sense of a shield around you melting away, like armour you’d worn to keep God at bay?”

“Yes.” Jack acknowledged the truth defiantly; he wasn’t frightened that this abomination could see into his past, into his heart.

“That took strength: to admit that you needed God. But it takes the same kind of strength, again, to understand that some needs can never be met. I can’t promise you Heaven. We have no disease, we have no war, we have no poverty. But we have to find our own love, our own goodness. There is no final word of comfort. We only have each other.”

Jack didn’t reply; this blasphemous fantasy wasn’t even worth challenging. He said, “I know you’re lying. Do you really imagine that I’d leave the boys alone here?”

“They’d go back to America, back to their father. How many years do you think you’d have with them, if you stay? They’ve already lost their mother. It would be easier for them now, a single clean break.”

Jack shouted angrily, “Get out of my house!”

The thing came closer, and sat on the bed. It put a hand on his shoulder. Jack sobbed, “Help me!” But he didn’t know whose aid he was invoking any more.

“Do you remember the scene in The Seat of Oak? When the Harpy traps everyone in her cave underground, and tries to convince them that there is no Nescia? Only this drab underworld is real, she tells them. Everything else they think they’ve seen was just make-believe.” Jack’s own young face smiled nostalgically. “And we had dear old Shrugweight reply: he didn’t think much of this so-called ‘real world’ of hers. And even if she was right, since four little children could make up a better world, he’d rather go on pretending that their imaginary one was real.

“But we had it all upside down! The real world is richer, and stranger, and more beautiful than anything ever imagined. Milton, Dante, John the Divine are the ones who trapped you in a drab, grey underworld. That’s where you are now. But if you give me your hand, I can pull you out.”

Jack’s chest was bursting. He couldn’t lose his faith. He’d kept it through worse than this. He’d kept it through every torture and indignity God had inflicted on his wife’s frail body. No one could take it from him now. He crooned to himself, “In my time of trouble, He will find me.”

The cool hand tightened its grip on his shoulder. “You can be with her, now. Just say the word, and you will become a part of me. I will take you inside me, and you will see through my eyes, and we will travel back to the world where she still lives.”

Jack wept openly. “Leave me in peace! Just leave me to mourn her!”

The thing nodded sadly. “If that’s what you want.”

“I do! Go!”

“When I’m sure.”

Suddenly, Jack thought back to the long rant Stoney had delivered in the studio. Every choice went every way, Stoney had claimed. No decision could ever be final.

“Now I know you’re lying!” he shouted triumphantly. “If you believed everything Stoney told you, how could my choice ever mean a thing? I would always say yes to you, and I would always say no! It would all be the same!”

The apparition replied solemnly, “While I’m here with you, touching you, you can’t be divided. Your choice will count.”

Jack wiped his eyes, and gazed into its face. It seemed to believe every word it was speaking. What if this truly was his metaphysical twin, speaking as honestly as he could, and not merely the Devil in a mask? Perhaps there was a grain of truth in Stoney’s awful vision; perhaps this was another version of himself, a living person who honestly believed that the two of them shared a history.

Then it was a visitor sent by God, to humble him. To teach him compassion towards Stoney. To show Jack that he too, with a little less faith, and a little more pride, might have been damned forever.

Jack stretched out a hand and touched the face of this poor lost soul. There, but for the grace of God, go I.

He said, “I’ve made my choice. Now leave me.”

Author’s note: where the lives of the fictional characters of this story parallel those of real historical figures, I’ve drawn on biographies by Andrew Hodges and A.N. Wilson. The self-dual formulation of general relativity was discovered by Abhay Ashtekar in 1986, and has since led to ground-breaking developments in quantum gravity, but the implications drawn from it here are fanciful.

Orphanogenesis

Konishi polis, Earth

23 387 025 000 000 CST

15 May 2975, 11:03:17.154 UT

he conceptory was non-sentient software, as ancient as Konishi polis itself. Its main purpose was to enable the citizens of the polis to create offspring: a child of one parent, or two, or twenty—formed partly in their own image, partly according to their wishes, and partly by chance. Sporadically, though, every teratau or so, the conceptory created a citizen with no parents at all.

In Konishi, every home-born citizen was grown from a mind seed, a string of instruction codes like a digital genome. The first mind seeds had been translated from DNA nine centuries before, when the polis founders had invented the Shaper programming language to recreate the essential processes of neuroembryology in software. But any such translation was necessarily imperfect, glossing over the biochemical details in favour of broad, functional equivalence, and the full diversity of the flesher genome could not be brought through intact. Starting from a diminished trait pool, with the old DNA-based maps rendered obsolete, it was crucial for the conceptory to chart the consequences of new variations to the mind seed. To eschew all change would be to risk stagnation; to embrace it recklessly would be to endanger the sanity of every child.

The Konishi mind seed was divided into a billion fields: short segments, six bits long, each containing a simple instruction code. Sequences of a few dozen instructions comprised shapers: the basic subprograms employed during psychogenesis. The effects of untried mutations on fifteen million interacting shapers could rarely be predicted in advance; in most cases, the only reliable method would have been to perform every computation that the altered seed itself would have performed ... which was no different from going ahead and growing the seed, creating the mind, predicting nothing.

The conceptory’s accumulated knowledge of its craft took the form of a collection of annotated maps of the Konishi mind seed. The highest-level maps were elaborate, multi-dimensional structures, dwarfing the seed itself by orders of magnitude. But there was one simple map which the citizens of Konishi had used to gauge the conceptory’s progress over the centuries; it showed the billion fields as lines of latitude, and the sixty-four possible instruction codes as meridians. Any individual seed could be thought of as a path which zig-zagged down the map from top to bottom, singling out an instruction code for every field along the way.

Where it was known that only one code could lead to successful psychogenesis, every route on the map converged on a lone island or a narrow isthmus, ochre against ocean blue. These infrastructure fields built the basic mental architecture every citizen had in common, shaping both the mind’s overarching design and the fine details of vital subsystems.

Elsewhere, the map recorded a spread of possibilities: a broad landmass, or a scattered archipelago. Trait fields offered a selection of codes, each with a known effect on the mind’s detailed structure, with variations ranging from polar extremes of innate temperament or aesthetics down to minute differences in neural architecture less significant than the creases on a flesher’s palm. They appeared in shades of green as wildly contrasting or as flatly indistinguishable as the traits themselves.

The remaining fields—where no changes to the seed had yet been tested, and no predictions could be made—were classified as indeterminate. Here, the one tried code, the known landmark, was shown as grey against white: a mountain peak protruding through a band of clouds which concealed everything to the east or west of it. No more detail could be resolved from afar; whatever lay beneath the clouds could only be discovered firsthand.

Whenever the conceptory created an orphan, it set all the benignly mutable trait fields to valid codes chosen at random, since there were no parents to mimic or please. Then it selected a thousand indeterminate fields, and treated them in much the same fashion: throwing a thousand quantum dice to choose a random path through terra incognita. Every orphan was an explorer, sent to map uncharted territory.

And every orphan was the uncharted territory itself.

he conceptory placed the new orphan seed in the middle of the womb’s memory, a single strand of information suspended in a vacuum of zeros. The seed meant nothing to itself; alone, it might as well have been the last stream of Morse, fleeing through the void past a distant star. But the womb was a virtual machine designed to execute the seed’s instructions, and a dozen more layers of software led down to the polis itself, a lattice of flickering molecular switches. A sequence of bits, a string of passive data, could do nothing, change nothing—but in the womb, the seed’s meaning fell into perfect alignment with all the immutable rules of all the levels beneath it. Like a punched card fed into a Jacquard loom, it ceased to be an abstract message and became a part of the machine.

When the womb read the seed, the seed’s first shaper caused the space around it to be filled with a simple pattern of data: a single, frozen numerical wave train, sculpted across the emptiness like a billion perfect ranks of sand dunes. This distinguished each point from its immediate neighbours further up or down the same slope—but each crest was still identical to every other crest, each trough the same as every other trough. The womb’s memory was arranged as a space with three dimensions, and the numbers stored at each point implied a fourth. So these dunes were four-dimensional.

A second wave was added—running askew to the first, modulated with a slow steady rise—carving each ridge into a series of ascending mounds. Then a third, and a fourth, each successive wave enriching the pattern, complicating and fracturing its symmetries: defining directions, building up gradients, establishing a hierarchy of scales.

The fortieth wave ploughed through an abstract topography bearing no trace of the crystalline regularity of its origins, with ridges and furrows as convoluted as the whorls of a fingerprint. Not every point had been rendered unique—but enough structure had been created to act as the framework for everything to come. So the seed gave instructions for a hundred copies of itself to be scattered across the freshly calibrated landscape.

In the second iteration, the womb read all of the replicated seeds—and at first, the instructions they issued were the same, everywhere. Then, one instruction called for the point where each seed was being read to jump forward along the bit string to the next field adjacent to a certain pattern in the surrounding data: a sequence of ridges with a certain shape, distinctive but not unique. Since each seed was embedded in different terrain, each local version of this landmark was situated differently, and the womb began reading instructions from a different part of every seed. The seeds themselves were all still identical, but each one could now unleash a different set of shapers on the space around it, preparing the foundations for a different specialised region of the psychoblast, the embryonic mind.

The technique was an ancient one: a budding flower’s nondescript stem cells followed a self-laid pattern of chemical cues to differentiate into sepals or petals, stamens or carpels; an insect pupa doused itself with a protein gradient which triggered, at different doses, the different cascades of gene activity needed to sculpt abdomen, thorax or head. Konishi’s digital version skimmed off the essence of the process: divide up space by marking it distinctively, then let the local markings inflect the unwinding of all further instructions, switching specialised subprograms on and off—subprograms which in turn would repeat the whole cycle on ever finer scales, gradually transforming the first rough-hewn structures into miracles of filigreed precision.

By the eighth iteration, the womb’s memory contained a hundred trillion copies of the mind seed; no more would be required. Most continued to carve new detail into the landscape around them—but some gave up on shapers altogether, and started running shriekers: brief loops of instructions which fed streams of pulses into the primitive networks which had grown up between the seeds. The tracks of these networks were just the highest ridges the shapers had built, and the pulses were tiny arrowheads, one and two steps higher. The shapers had worked in four dimensions, so the networks themselves were three-dimensional. The womb breathed life into these conventions, making the pulses race along the tracks like a quadrillion cars shuttling between the trillion junctions of a ten-thousand-tiered monorail.

Some shriekers sent out metronomic bit-streams; others produced pseudo-random stutters. The pulses flowed through the mazes of construction where the networks were still being formed—where almost every track was still connected to every other, because no decision to prune had yet been made. Woken by the traffic, new shapers started up and began to disassemble the excess junctions, preserving only those where a sufficient number of pulses were arriving simultaneously—choosing, out of all the countless alternatives, pathways which could operate in synchrony. There were dead ends in the networks-in-progress, too—but if they were travelled often enough, other shapers noticed, and constructed extensions. It didn’t matter that these first streams of data were meaningless; any kind of signal was enough to help whittle the lowest-level machinery of thought into existence.

In many polises, new citizens weren’t grown at all; they were assembled directly from generic subsystems. But the Konishi method provided a certain quasi-biological robustness, a certain seamlessness. Systems grown together, interacting even as they were being formed, resolved most kinds of potential mismatch themselves, with no need for an external mind-builder to fine-tune all the finished components to ensure that they didn’t clash.

Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardised subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels for incoming data—one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing. By the orphan’s two-hundredth iteration, the channels themselves were fully formed, but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for classifying and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed.

Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred metres beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fibre and satellite links the input channels could bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from probes orbiting every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests and oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium. The first problem of perception was learning how to choose from this superabundance.

In the orphan psychoblast, the half-formed navigator wired to the controls of the input channels began issuing a stream of requests for information. The first few thousand requests yielded nothing but a monotonous stream of error codes; they were incorrectly formed, or referred to non-existent sources of data. But every psychoblast was innately biased towards finding the polis library (if not, it would have taken millennia) and the navigator kept trying until it hit on a valid address, and data flooded through the channels: a gestalt image of a lion, accompanied by the linear word for the animal.

The navigator instantly abandoned trial and error and went into a spasm of repetition, summoning the same frozen image of the lion again and again. This continued until even the crudest of its embryonic change-discriminators finally stopped firing, and it drifted back towards experimentation.

Gradually, a half-sensible compromise evolved between the orphan’s two kinds of proto-curiosity: the drive to seek out novelty, and the drive to seek out recurring patterns. It browsed the library, learning how to bring in streams of connected information—sequential images of recorded motion, and then more abstract chains of cross-references—understanding nothing, but wired to reinforce its own behaviour when it struck the right balance between coherence and change.

Images and sounds, symbols and equations, flooded through the orphan’s classifying networks, leaving behind, not the fine details—not the spacesuited figure standing on grey-and-white rock against a pitch black sky; not the calm, naked figure disintegrating beneath a grey swarm of nanomachines—but an imprint of the simplest regularities, the most common associations. The networks discovered the circle/sphere: in images of the sun and planets, in iris and pupil, in fallen fruit, in a thousand different artworks, artifacts, and mathematical diagrams. They discovered the linear word for “person”, and bound it tentatively both to the regularities which defined the gestalt icon for “citizen”, and to the features they found in common among the many images of fleshers and gleisner robots.

By the five-hundredth iteration, the categories extracted from the library’s data had given rise to a horde of tiny sub-systems in the input-classifying networks: ten thousand word-traps and image-traps, all poised and waiting to be sprung; ten thousand pattern-recognising monomaniacs staring into the information stream, constantly alert for their own special targets.

These traps began to form connections with each other, using them at first just to share their judgments, to sway each other’s decisions. If the trap for the image of a lion was triggered, then the traps for its linear name, for the kind of sounds other lions had been heard to make, for common features seen in their behaviour (licking cubs, pursuing antelope) all became hypersensitive. Sometimes the incoming data triggered a whole cluster of linked traps all at once, strengthening their mutual connections, but sometimes there was time for over-eager associate traps to start firing prematurely. The lion shape has been recognised—and though the word “lion” has not yet been detected, the “lion” word-trap is tentatively firing ... and so are the traps for cub-licking and antelope-chasing.

The orphan had begun to anticipate, to hold expectations.

By the thousandth iteration, the connections between the traps had developed into an elaborate network in its own right, and new structures had arisen in this network—symbols—which could be triggered by each other as easily as by any data from the input channels. The lion image-trap, on its own, had merely been a template held up to the world to be declared a match or a mismatch—a verdict without implications. The lion symbol could encode an unlimited web of implications—and that web could be tapped at any time, whether or not a lion was visible.

Mere recognition was giving way to the first faint hints of meaning.

The infrastructure fields had built the orphan standard output channels for linear and gestalt, but as yet the matching navigator, needed to address outgoing data to some specific destination in Konishi or beyond, remained inactive. By the two-thousandth iteration, symbols began to jostle for access to the output channels, regardless. They used their traps’ templates to parrot the sound or image which each had learnt to recognise—and it didn’t matter if they uttered the linear words “lion”, “cub”, “antelope” into a void, because the input and output channels were wired together, on the inside.

The orphan began to hear itself think.

Not the whole pandemonium; it couldn’t give voice—or even gestalt—to everything at once. Out of the myriad associations every scene from the library evoked, only a few symbols at a time could gain control of the nascent language production networks. And though birds were wheeling in the sky, and the grass was waving, and a cloud of dust and insects was rising up in the animals’ wake—and more, much more ... the symbols which won out before the whole scene vanished were:

“Lion chasing antelope.”

Startled, the navigator cut off the flood of external data. The linear words cycled from channel to channel, distinct against the silence; the gestalt images summoned up the essence of the chase again and again, an idealised reconstruction shorn of all forgotten details.

Then the memory faded to black, and the navigator reached out to the library again.

The orphan’s thoughts themselves never shrank to a single orderly progression—rather, symbols fired in ever richer and more elaborate cascades—but positive feedback sharpened the focus, and the mind resonated with its own strongest ideas. The orphan had learnt to single out one or two threads from the symbols’ endless thousand-strand argument. It had learnt to narrate its own experience.

The orphan was almost half a megatau old, now. It had a vocabulary of ten thousand words, a short-term memory, expectations stretching several tau into the future, and a simple stream of consciousness. But it still had no idea that there was such a thing in the world as itself.

he conceptory mapped the developing mind after every iteration, scrupulously tracing the effects of the randomised indeterminate fields. A sentient observer of the same information might have visualised a thousand delicate interlocking fractals, like tangled, feathery, zero-gee crystals, sending out ever-finer branches to crisscross the womb as the fields were read and acted upon, and their influence diffused from network to network. The conceptory didn’t visualise anything; it just processed the data, and reached its conclusions.

So far, the mutations appeared to have caused no harm. Every individual structure in the orphan’s mind was functioning broadly as expected, and the traffic with the library, and other sampled data streams, showed no signs of incipient global pathologies.

If a psychoblast was found to be damaged, there was nothing in principle to stop the conceptory from reaching into the womb and repairing every last malformed structure, but the consequences could be as unpredictable as the consequences of growing the seed in the first place. Localised “surgery” sometimes introduced incompatibilities with the rest of the psychoblast, while alterations widespread and thorough enough to guarantee success could be self-defeating, effectively obliterating the original psychoblast and replacing it with an assembly of parts cloned from past healthy ones.

But there were risks, too, in doing nothing. Once a psychoblast became self-aware, it was granted citizenship, and intervention without consent became impossible. This was not a matter of mere custom or law; the principle was built into the deepest level of the polis. A citizen who spiralled down into insanity could spend teratau in a state of confusion and pain, with a mind too damaged to authorise help, or even to choose extinction. That was the price of autonomy: an inalienable right to madness and suffering, inseparable from the right to solitude and peace.

So the citizens of Konishi had programmed the conceptory to err on the side of caution. It continued to observe the orphan closely, ready to terminate psychogenesis at the first sign of dysfunction.

ot long after the five-thousandth iteration, the orphan’s output navigator began to fire—and a tug-of-war began. The output navigator was wired to seek feedback, to address itself to someone or something that showed a response. But the input navigator had long since grown accustomed to confining itself to the polis library, a habit which had been powerfully rewarded. Both navigators were wired with a drive to bring each other into alignment, to connect to the same address, enabling the citizen to listen and speak in the same place—a useful conversational skill. But it meant that the orphan’s chatter of speech and icons flowed straight back to the library, which completely ignored it.

Faced with this absolute indifference, the output navigator sent repressor signals into the change-discriminator networks, undermining the attraction of the library’s mesmerising show, bullying the input navigator out of its rut. Dancing a weird chaotic lockstep, the two navigators began hopping from scape to scape, polis to polis, planet to planet. Looking for someone to talk to.

They caught a thousand random glimpses of the physical world along the way: a radar image of a dust storm sweeping across the sea of dunes ringing the north polar ice cap of Mars; the faint infrared plume of a small comet disintegrating in the atmosphere of Uranus—an event that had taken place decades before, but lingered in the satellite’s discriminating memory. They even chanced upon a realtime feed from a drone weaving its way across the East African savanna towards a pride of lions, but unlike the library’s flowing images this vision seemed intractably frozen, and after a few tau they moved on.

When the orphan stumbled on the address for a Konishi forum, it saw a square paved with smooth rhombuses of mineral blues and greys, arranged in a pattern dense with elusive regularities but never quite repeating itself. A fountain sprayed liquid silver towards a cloud-streaked, burnt-orange sky; as each stream broke apart into mirrored droplets half-way up its arc, the shiny globules deformed into tiny winged piglets which flew around the fountain, braiding each others’ flight paths and grunting cheerfully before diving back into the pool. Stone cloisters ringed the square, the inner side of the walkway a series of broad arches and elaborately decorated colonnades. Some of the arches had been given unusual twists—Eschered or Kleined, skewed through invisible extra dimensions.

The orphan had seen similar structures in the library, and knew the linear words for most of them; the scape itself was so unremarkable that the orphan said nothing about it at all. And the orphan had viewed thousands of scenes of moving, talking citizens, but it was acutely aware of a difference here, though it could not yet grasp clearly what it was. The gestalt images themselves mostly reminded it of icons it had seen before, or the stylised fleshers it had seen in representational art: far more diverse, and far more mercurial, than real fleshers could ever be. Their form was constrained not by physiology or physics, but only by the conventions of gestalt—the need to proclaim, beneath all inflections and subtleties, one primary meaning: I am a citizen.

The orphan addressed the forum: “People.”

The linear conversations between the citizens were public, but muted—degraded in proportion to distance in the scape—and the orphan heard only an unchanging murmur.

It tried again. “People!”

The icon of the nearest citizen—a dazzling multihued form like a stained-glass statue, about two delta high—turned to face the orphan. An innate structure in the input navigator rotated the orphan’s angle of view straight towards the icon. The output navigator, driven to follow it, made the orphan’s own icon—now a crude, unconscious parody of the citizen’s—turn the same way.

The citizen glinted blue and gold. Vis translucent face smiled, and ve said, “Hello, orphan.”

A response, at last! The output navigator’s feedback detector shut off its scream of boredom, damping down the restlessness which had powered the search. It flooded the mind with signals to repress any system which might intervene and drag it away from this precious find.

The orphan parroted: “Hello, orphan.”

The citizen smiled again—“Yes, hello”—then turned back to vis friends.

“People! Hello!”

Nothing happened.

“Citizens! People!”

The group ignored the orphan. The feedback detector backtracked on its satisfaction rating, making the navigators restless again. Not restless enough to abandon the forum, but enough to move within it.

The orphan darted from place to place, crying out: “People! Hello!” It moved without momentum or inertia, gravity or friction, merely tweaking the least significant bits of the input navigator’s requests for data, which the scape interpreted as the position and angle of the orphan’s point-of-view. The matching bits from the output navigator determined where and how the orphan’s speech and icon were merged into the scape.

The navigators learnt to move close enough to the citizens to be easily heard. Some responded—“Hello, orphan”—before turning away. The orphan echoed their icons back at them: simplified or intricate, rococo or spartan, mock-biological, mock-artifactual, forms outlined with helices of luminous smoke, or filled with vivid hissing serpents, decorated with blazing fractal encrustations, or draped in textureless black—but always the same biped, the same ape-shape, as constant beneath the riot of variation as the letter A in a hundred mad monks’ illuminated manuscripts.

Gradually, the orphan’s input-classifying networks began to grasp the difference between the citizens in the forum and all the icons it had seen in the library. As well as the image, each icon here exuded a non-visual gestalt tag—a quality like a distinctive odour for a flesher, though more localised, and much richer in possibilities. The orphan could make no sense of this new form of data, but now its infotrope—a late-developing structure which had grown as a second level over the simpler novelty and pattern detectors—began to respond to the deficit in understanding. It picked up the tenuous hint of a regularity—every citizen’s icon, here, comes with a unique and unvarying tag—and expressed its dissatisfaction. The orphan hadn’t previously bothered echoing the tag, but now, spurred on by the infotrope, it approached a group of three citizens and began to mimic one of them, tag and all. The reward was immediate.

The citizen exclaimed angrily, “Don’t do that, idiot!”

“Hello!”

“No one will believe you if you claim to be me—least of all me. Understand? Now go away!” This citizen had metallic, pewter-grey skin. Ve flashed vis tag on and off for emphasis; the orphan did the same.

“No!” The citizen was now sending out a second tag, alongside the original. “See? I challenge you—and you can’t respond. So why bother lying?”

“Hello!”

“Go away!”

The orphan was riveted; this was the most attention it had ever received.

“Hello, citizen!”

The pewter face sagged, almost melting with exaggerated weariness. “Don’t you know who you are? Don’t you know your own signature?”

Another citizen said calmly, “It must be the new orphan—still in the womb. Your newest co-politan, Inoshiro. You ought to welcome it.”

This citizen was covered in short, golden-brown fur. The orphan said, “Lion.” It tried mimicking the new citizen—and suddenly all three of them were laughing.

The third citizen said, “It wants to be you now, Gabriel.”

The first, pewter-skinned citizen said, “If it doesn’t know its own name, we should call it ‘idiot.’”

“Don’t be cruel. I could show you memories, little part-sibling.” The third citizen’s icon was a featureless black silhouette.

“Now it wants to be Blanca.”

The orphan started mimicking each citizen in turn. The three responded by chanting strange linear sounds which meant nothing—“Inoshiro! Gabriel! Blanca! Inoshiro! Gabriel! Blanca!”—just as the orphan sent out the gestalt images and tags.

Short-term pattern recognisers seized on the connection, and the orphan joined in the linear chant—and continued it for a while, when the others fell silent. But after a few repetitions the pattern grew stale.

The pewter-skinned citizen clasped vis hand to vis chest and said, “I’m Inoshiro.”

The golden-furred citizen clasped vis hand to vis chest and said, “I’m Gabriel.”

The black-silhouetted citizen gave vis hand a thin white outline to keep it from vanishing as ve moved it in front of vis trunk, and said, “I’m Blanca.”

The orphan mimicked each citizen once, speaking the linear word they’d spoken, aping their hand gesture. Symbols had formed for all three of them, binding their icons, complete with tags, and the linear words together—even though the tags and the linear words still connected to nothing else.

The citizen whose icon had made them all chant “Inoshiro” said, “So far so good. But how does it get a name of its own?”

The one with its tag bound to “Blanca” said, “Orphans name themselves.”

The orphan echoed, “Orphans name themselves.”

The citizen bound to “Gabriel” pointed to the one bound to “Inoshiro”, and said, “Ve is—?” The citizen bound to “Blanca” said “Inoshiro.”

Then the citizen bound to “Inoshiro” pointed back at ver and said “Ve is—?” This time, the citizen bound to “Blanca” replied, “Blanca.” The orphan joined in, pointing where the others pointed, guided by innate systems which helped make sense of the scape’s geometry, and completing the pattern easily even when no one else did.

Then the golden-furred citizen pointed at the orphan, and said: “Ve is—?”

The input navigator spun the orphan’s angle of view, trying to see what the citizen was pointing at. When it found nothing behind the orphan, it moved its point of view backwards, closer to the golden-furred citizen—momentarily breaking step with the output navigator.

Suddenly, the orphan saw the icon it was projecting itself—a crude amalgam of the three citizens’ icons, all black fur and yellow metal—not just as the usual faint mental image from the cross-connected channels, but as a vivid scape-object beside the other three.

This was what the golden-furred citizen bound to “Gabriel” was pointing at.

The infotrope went wild. It couldn’t complete the unfinished regularity—it couldn’t answer the game’s question for this strange fourth citizen—but the hole in the pattern needed to be filled.

The orphan watched the fourth citizen change shape and colour, out there in the scape ... changes perfectly mirroring its own random fidgeting: sometimes mimicking one of the other three citizens, sometimes simply playing with the possibilities of gestalt. This mesmerised the regularity detectors for a while, but it only made the infotrope more restless.

The infotrope combined and recombined all the factors at hand, and set a short-term goal: making the pewter-skinned “Inoshiro” icon change, the way the fourth citizen’s icon was changing. This triggered a faint anticipatory firing of the relevant symbols, a mental image of the desired event. But though the image of a wiggling, pulsating citizen-icon easily won control of the gestalt output channel, it wasn’t the “Inoshiro” icon that changed—just the fourth citizen’s icon, as before.

The input navigator drifted of its own accord back into the same location as the output navigator, and the fourth citizen abruptly vanished. The infotrope pushed the navigators apart again; the fourth citizen reappeared.

The “Inoshiro” citizen said, “What’s it doing?” The “Blanca” citizen replied, “Just watch, and be patient. You might learn something.”

A new symbol was already forming, a representation of the strange fourth citizen—the only one whose icon seemed bound by a mutual attraction to the orphan’s viewpoint in the scape, and the only one whose actions the orphan could anticipate and control with such ease. So were all four citizens the same kind of thing—like all lions, all antelope, all circles ... or not? The connections between the symbols remained tentative.

The “Inoshiro” citizen said, “I’m bored! Let someone else baby-sit it!” Ve danced around the group—taking turns imitating the “Blanca” and “Gabriel” icons, and reverting to vis original form. “What’s my name? I don’t know! What’s my signature? I don’t have one! I’m an orphan! I’m an orphan! I don’t even know how I look!”

When the orphan perceived the “Inoshiro” citizen taking on the icons of the other two, it almost abandoned its whole classification scheme in confusion. The “Inoshiro” citizen was behaving more like the fourth citizen, now—though vis actions still didn’t coincide with the orphan’s intentions.

The orphan’s symbol for the fourth citizen kept track of that citizen’s appearance and location in the scape, but it was also beginning to distil the essence of the orphan’s own mental images and short-term goals, creating a summary of all the aspects of the orphan’s state of mind which seemed to have some connection to the fourth citizen’s behaviour. Few symbols possessed sharply defined boundaries, though; most were as permeable and promiscuous as plasmid-swapping bacteria. The symbol for the “Inoshiro” citizen copied some of the state-of-mind structures from the symbol for the fourth citizen, and began trying them out for itself.

At first, the ability to represent highly summarised “mental images’ and “goals’ was no help at all—because it was still linked to the orphan’s state of mind. The “Inoshiro” symbol’s blindly cloned machinery kept predicting that the “Inoshiro” citizen would behave according to the orphan’s own plans ... and that never happened. In the face of this repeated failure, the links soon withered—and the tiny, crude model-of-a-mind left inside the “Inoshiro” symbol was set free to find the “Inoshiro” state-of-mind that best matched the citizen’s actual behaviour.

The symbol tried out different connections, different theories, hunting for the one that made most sense ... and the orphan suddenly grasped the fact that the “Inoshiro” citizen had been imitating the fourth citizen.

The infotrope seized on this revelation—and tried to make the fourth citizen mimic the “Inoshiro” citizen back.

The fourth citizen proclaimed, “I’m an orphan! I’m an orphan! I don’t even know how I look!”

The “Gabriel” citizen pointed at the fourth citizen and said, “Ve is an orphan!” The “Inoshiro” citizen agreed wearily, “Ve is an orphan. But why does ve have to be this slow!”

Inspired—driven by the infotrope—the orphan tried playing the “Ve is—?” game again, this time using the response “an orphan” for the fourth citizen. The others confirmed the choice, and soon the words were bound to the symbol for the fourth citizen.

hen the orphan’s three friends left the scape, the fourth citizen remained. But the fourth citizen had exhausted vis ability to offer interesting surprises, so after pestering some of the other citizens to no avail, the orphan returned to the library.

The input navigator had learnt the simplest indexing scheme used by the library, and when the infotrope hunted for ways to tie up the loose ends in the patterns half-formed in the scape, it succeeded in driving the input navigator to locations in the library which referred to the four citizens’ mysterious linear words: Inoshiro, Gabriel, Blanca, and Orphan. There were streams of data indexed by each of these words, though none seemed to connect to the citizens themselves. The orphan saw so many images of fleshers, often with wings, associated with the word “Gabriel” that it built a whole symbol out of the regularities it found, but the new symbol barely overlapped with that of the golden-furred citizen.

The orphan drifted away from its infotrope-driven search many times; old addresses in the library, etched in memory, tugged at the input navigator. Once, viewing a scene of a grimy flesher child holding up an empty wooden bowl, the orphan grew bored and veered back towards more familiar territory. Halfway there, it came across a scene of an adult flesher crouching beside a bewildered lion cub and lifting it into vis arms.

A lioness lay on the ground behind them, motionless and bloody. The flesher stroked the head of the cub. “Poor little Yatima.”

Something in the scene transfixed the orphan. It whispered to the library, “Yatima. Yatima.” It had never heard the word before, but the sound of it resonated deeply.

The lion cub mewed. The flesher crooned, “My poor little orphan.”

he orphan moved between the library and the scape with the orange sky and the flying-pig fountain. Sometimes its three friends were there, or other citizens would play with it for a while; sometimes there was only the fourth citizen.

The fourth citizen rarely appeared the same from visit to visit—ve tended to resemble the most striking image the orphan had seen in the library in the preceding few kilotau—but ve was still easy to identify: ve was the one who only became visible when the two navigators moved apart. Every time the orphan arrived in the scape, it stepped back from itself and checked out the fourth citizen. Sometimes it adjusted the icon, bringing it closer to a specific memory, or fine-tuning it according to the aesthetic preferences of the input classifying networks—biases first carved out by a few dozen trait fields, then deepened or silted-up by the subsequent data stream. Sometimes the orphan mimicked the flesher it had seen picking up the lion cub: tall and slender, with deep black skin and brown eyes, dressed in a purple robe.

And once, when the citizen bound to “Inoshiro” said with mock sorrow, “Poor little orphan, you still don’t have a name,” the orphan remembered the scene, and responded, “Poor little Yatima.”

The golden-furred citizen said, “I think it does now.”

From then on, they all called the fourth citizen “Yatima.” They said it so many times, making such a fuss about it, that the orphan soon bound it to the symbol as strongly as “Orphan.”

The orphan watched the citizen bound to “Inoshiro” chanting triumphantly at the fourth citizen: “Yatima! Yatima! Ha ha ha! I’ve got five parents, and five part-siblings, and I’ll always be older than you!”

The orphan made the fourth citizen respond, “Inoshiro! Inoshiro! Ha ha ha!”

But it couldn’t think what to say next.

lanca said, “The gleisners are trimming an asteroid—right now, in realtime. Do you want to come see? Inoshiro’s there, Gabriel’s there. Just follow me!”

Blanca’s icon put out a strange new tag, and then abruptly vanished. The forum was almost empty; there were a few regulars near the fountain, who the orphan knew would be unresponsive, and there was the fourth citizen, as always.

Blanca reappeared. “What is it? You don’t know how to follow me, or you don’t want to come?” The orphan’s language analysis networks had begun fine-tuning the universal grammar they encoded, rapidly homing in on the conventions of linear. Words were becoming more than isolated triggers for symbols, each with a single, fixed meaning; the subtleties of order, context and inflection were beginning to modulate the symbols’ cascades of interpretation. This was a request to know what the fourth citizen wanted.

“Play with me!” The orphan had learnt to call the fourth citizen “I” or “me” rather than “Yatima”, but that was just grammar, not self-awareness.

“I want to watch the trimming, Yatima.”

“No! Play with me!” The orphan weaved around ver excitedly, projecting fragments of recent memories: Blanca creating shared scape objects—spinning numbered blocks, and brightly coloured bouncing balls—and teaching the orphan how to interact with them.

“Okay, okay! Here’s a new game. I just hope you’re a fast learner.”

Blanca emitted another extra tag—the same general flavour as before, though not identical—then vanished again ... only to reappear immediately, a few hundred delta away across the scape. The orphan spotted ver easily, and followed at once.

Blanca jumped again. And again. Each time, ve sent out the new flavour of tag, with a slight variation, before vanishing. Just as the orphan was starting to find the game dull, Blanca began to stay out of the scape for a fraction of a tau before reappearing—and the orphan spent the time trying to guess where ve’d materialise next, hoping to get to the chosen spot first.

There seemed to be no pattern to it, though; Blanca’s solid shadow jumped around the forum at random, anywhere from the cloisters to the fountain, and the orphan’s guesses all failed. It was frustrating ... but Blanca’s games had usually turned out to possess some kind of subtle order in the past, so the infotrope persisted, combining and recombining existing pattern detectors into new coalitions, hunting for a way to make sense of the problem.

The tags! When the infotrope compared the memory of the raw gestalt data for the tags Blanca was sending with the address the innate geometry networks computed when the orphan caught sight of ver a moment later, parts of the two sequences matched up, almost precisely. Again and again. The infotrope bound the two sources of information together—recognising them as two means of learning the same thing—and the orphan began jumping across the scape without waiting to see where Blanca reappeared.

The first time, their icons overlapped, and the orphan had to back away before it saw that Blanca really was there, confirming the success the infotrope had already brashly claimed. The second time, the orphan instinctively compensated, varying the tag address slightly to keep from colliding, as it had learnt to do when pursuing Blanca by sight. The third time, the orphan beat ver to the destination.

“I win!”

“Well done, Yatima! You followed me!”

“I followed you!”

“Shall we go and see the trimming now? With Inoshiro and Gabriel?”

“Gabriel!”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Blanca jumped, the orphan followed—and the cloistered square dissolved into a billion stars.

The orphan examined the strange new scape. Between them, the stars shone in almost every frequency from kilometre-long radio waves to high-energy gamma rays. The “colour space” of gestalt could be extended indefinitely, and the orphan had chanced on a few astronomical images in the library which employed a similar palette, but most terrestrial scenes and most scapes never went beyond infrared and ultraviolet. Even the satellite views of planetary surfaces seemed drab and muted in comparison; the planets were too cold to blaze across the spectrum like this. There were hints of subtle order in the riot of colour—series of emission and absorption lines, smooth contours of thermal radiation—but the infotrope, dazzled, gave in to the overload and simply let the data flow through it; analysis would have to wait for a thousand more clues. The stars were geometrically featureless—pointlike, distant, their scape addresses impossible to compute—but the orphan had a fleeting mental image of the act of moving towards them, and imagined, for an instant, the possibility of seeing them up close.

The orphan spotted a cluster of citizens nearby, and once it shifted its attention from the backdrop of stars it began to notice dozens of small groups scattered around the scape. Some of their icons reflected the ambient radiation, but most were simply visible by decree, making no pretence of interacting with the starlight.

Inoshiro said, “Why did you have to bring that along?”

As the orphan turned towards ver, it caught sight of a star far brighter than all the rest, much smaller than the familiar sight in the Earth’s sky, but unfiltered by the usual blanket of gases and dust.

“The sun?”

Gabriel said, “Yes, that’s the sun.” The golden-furred citizen floated beside Blanca, who was visible as sharply as ever, darker even than the cool thin background radiation between the stars.

Inoshiro whined, “Why did you bring Yatima? It’s too young! It won’t understand anything!”

Blanca said, “Just ignore ver, Yatima.”

Yatima! Yatima! The orphan knew exactly where Yatima was, and what ve looked like, without any need to part the navigators and check. The fourth citizen’s icon had stabilised as the tall flesher in the purple robe who’d adopted the lion cub, in the library.

Inoshiro addressed the orphan. “Don’t worry Yatima, I’ll try to explain it to you. If the gleisners didn’t trim this asteroid, then in three hundred thousand years—ten thousand teratau—there’d be a chance it might hit the Earth. And the sooner they trim it, the less energy it takes. But they couldn’t do it before, because the equations are chaotic, so they couldn’t model the approach well enough until now.”

The orphan understood none of this. “Blanca wanted me to see the trimming! But I wanted to play a new game!”

Inoshiro laughed. “So what did ve do? Kidnap you?”

“I followed ver and ve jumped and jumped ... and I followed ver!” The orphan made a few short jumps around the three of them, trying to illustrate the point, though it didn’t really convey the business of leaping right out of one scape into another.

Inoshiro said, “Ssh. Here it comes.”

The orphan followed vis gaze to an irregular lump of rock in the distance—lit by the sun, one half in deep shadow—moving swiftly and steadily towards the loose assembly of citizens. The scape software decorated the asteroid’s image with gestalt tags packed with information about its chemical composition, its mass, its spin, its orbital parameters; the orphan recognised some of these flavours from the library, but it had no real grasp yet of what they meant.

“One slip of the laser, and the fleshers die in pain!” Inoshiro’s pewter eyes gleamed.

Blanca said dryly, “And just three hundred millennia to try again.”

Inoshiro turned to the orphan and added reassuringly, “But we’d be all right. Even if it wiped out Konishi on Earth, we’re backed-up all over the solar system.”

The asteroid was close enough now for the orphan to compute its scape address and its size. It was still some hundred times more distant than the farthest citizen, but it was approaching rapidly. The waiting spectators were arranged in a roughly spherical shell, about ten times as large as the asteroid itself—and the orphan could see at once that if it maintained its trajectory, the asteroid would pass right through the centre of that imaginary sphere.

Everyone was watching the rock intently. The orphan wondered what kind of game this was; a generic symbol had formed which encompassed all the strangers in the scape, as well as the orphan’s three friends, and this symbol had inherited the fourth citizen’s property of holding beliefs about objects which had proved so useful for predicting its behaviour. Maybe people were waiting to see if the rock would suddenly jump at random, like Blanca had jumped? The orphan believed they were mistaken; the rock was not a citizen, it wouldn’t play games with them.

The orphan wanted everyone to know about the rock’s simple trajectory. It checked its extrapolation one more time, but nothing had changed; the bearing and speed were as constant as ever. The orphan lacked the words to explain this to the crowd ... but maybe they could learn things by watching the fourth citizen, the way the fourth citizen had learnt things from Blanca.

The orphan jumped across the scape, straight into the path of the asteroid. A quarter of the sky became pocked and grey, an irregular hillock on the sunward side casting a band of deep shadow across the approaching face. For an instant, the orphan was too startled to move—mesmerised by the scale, and the speed, and the awkward, purposeless grandeur of the thing—then it matched velocities with the rock, and led it back towards the crowd.

People began shouting excitedly, their words immune to the fictitious vacuum but degraded with distance by the scape, scrambled into a pulsating roar. The orphan turned away from the asteroid, and saw the nearest citizens waving and gesticulating.

The fourth citizen’s symbol, plugged directly into the orphan’s mind, had already concluded that the fourth citizen was tracing out the asteroid’s path in order to change what the other citizens thought. So the orphan’s model of the fourth citizen had acquired the property of having beliefs about what other citizens believed ... and the symbols for Inoshiro, Blanca, Gabriel, and the crowd itself, snatched at this innovation to try it out for themselves.

As the orphan plunged into the spherical arena, it could hear people laughing and cheering. Everyone was watching the fourth citizen, though the orphan was finally beginning to suspect that no one had really needed to be shown the trajectory. As it looked back to check that the rock was still on course, a point on the hillock began to glow with intense infrared—and then erupted with light a thousand times brighter than the sunlit rock around it, and a thermal spectrum hotter than the sun itself.

The orphan froze, letting the asteroid draw closer. A plume of incandescent vapour was streaming out of a crater in the hillock; the image was rich with new gestalt tags, all of them incomprehensible, but the infotrope burned a promise into the orphan’s mind: I will learn to understand them.

The orphan kept checking the scape addresses of the reference points it had been following, and it found a microscopic change in the asteroid’s direction. The flash of light—and this tiny shift in course—were what everyone had been waiting to see? The fourth citizen had been wrong about what they knew, what they thought, what they wanted ... and now they knew that? The implications rebounded between the symbols, models of minds mirroring models of minds, as the network hunted for sense and stability.

Before the asteroid could coincide with the fourth citizen’s icon, the orphan jumped back to its friends.

Inoshiro was furious. “What did you do that for? You ruined everything! You baby!”

Blanca asked gently, “What did you see, Yatima?”

“The rock jumped a little. But I wanted people to think ... it wouldn’t.”

“Idiot! You’re always showing off!”

Gabriel said, “Yatima? Why does Inoshiro think you flew with the asteroid?”

The orphan hesitated. “I don’t know what Inoshiro thinks.”

The symbols for the four citizens shifted into a configuration they’d tried a thousand times before: the fourth citizen, Yatima, set apart from the rest, singled out as unique—this time, as the only one whose thoughts the orphan could know with certainty. And as the symbol network hunted for better ways to express this knowledge, circuitous connections began to tighten, redundant links began to dissolve.

There was no difference between the model of Yatima’s beliefs about the other citizens, buried inside the symbol for Yatima ... and the models of the other citizens themselves, inside their respective symbols. The network finally recognised this, and began to discard the unnecessary intermediate stages. The model for Yatima’s beliefs became the whole, wider network of the orphan’s symbolic knowledge.

And the model of Yatima’s beliefs about Yatima’s mind became the whole model of Yatima’s mind: not a tiny duplicate, or a crude summary, just a tight bundle of connections looping back out to the thing itself.

The orphan’s stream of consciousness surged through the new connections, momentarily unstable with feedback: I think that Yatima thinks that I think that Yatima thinks ...

Then the symbol network identified the last redundancies, cut a few internal links, and the infinite regress collapsed into a simple, stable resonance:

I am thinking—

I am thinking that I know what I’m thinking.

Yatima said, “I know what I’m thinking.”

Inoshiro replied airily, “What makes you think anyone cares?”

For the five-thousand-and-twenty-third time, the conceptory checked the architecture of the orphan’s mind against the polis’s definition of self-awareness.

Every criterion was now satisfied.

The conceptory reached into the part of itself which ran the womb, and halted it, halting the orphan. It modified the machinery of the womb slightly, allowing it to run independently, allowing it to be reprogrammed from within. Then it constructed a signature for the new citizen—two unique megadigit numbers, one private, one public—and embedded them in the orphan’s cypherclerk, a small structure which had lain dormant, waiting for these keys. It sent a copy of the public signature out into the polis, to be catalogued, to be counted.

Finally, the conceptory passed the virtual machine which had once been the womb into the hands of the polis operating system, surrendering all power over its contents. Cutting it loose, like a cradle set adrift in a stream. It was now the new citizen’s exoself: its shell, its non-sentient carapace. The citizen was free to reprogram it at will, but the polis would permit no other software to touch it. The cradle was unsinkable, except from within.

Inoshiro said, “Stop it! Who are you pretending to be now?”

Yatima didn’t need to part the navigators; ve knew vis icon hadn’t changed appearance, but was now sending out a gestalt tag. It was the kind ve’d noticed the citizens broadcasting the first time ve’d visited the flying-pig scape.

Blanca sent Yatima a different kind of tag; it contained a random number encoded via the public half of Yatima’s signature. Before Yatima could even wonder about the meaning of the tag, vis cypherclerk responded to the challenge automatically: decoding Blanca’s message, re-encrypting it via Blanca’s own public signature, and echoing it back as a third kind of tag. Claim of identity. Challenge. Response.

Blanca said, “Welcome to Konishi, Citizen Yatima.” Ve turned to Inoshiro, who repeated Blanca’s challenge then muttered sullenly, “Welcome, Yatima.”

Gabriel said, “And Welcome to the Coalition of Polises.”

Yatima gazed at the three of them, bemused—oblivious to the ceremonial words, trying to understand what had changed inside verself. Ve saw vis friends, and the stars, and the crowd, and sensed vis own icon ... but even as these ordinary thoughts and perceptions flowed on unimpeded, a new kind of question seemed to spin through the black space behind them all. Who is thinking this? Who is seeing these stars, and these citizens? Who is wondering about these thoughts, and these sights?

And the reply came back, not just in words, but in the answering hum of the one symbol among the thousands that reached out to claim all the rest. Not to mirror every thought, but to bind them. To hold them together, like skin.

Who is thinking this?

I am.

Our Lady of Chernobyl

We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendor or beauty anywhere upon earth.

—The envoy of Prince Vladimir of Kiev, describing the Church of the Divine Wisdom in Constantinople, 987.

It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.

—S.L. Clemens, ditto, 1867.

* * * *

Luciano Masini had the haunted demeanor and puffy complexion of an insomniac. I’d picked him as a man who’d begun to ask himself, around two a.m. nightly, if his twenty-year-old wife really had found the lover of her dreams in an industrialist three times her age-however witty, however erudite, however wealthy. I hadn’t followed his career in any detail, but his most famous move had been to buy the entire superconducting cables division of Pirelli, when the parent company was dismembered in ‘09. He was impeccably dressed in a gray silk suit, the cut precisely old-fashioned enough to be stylish, and he looked like he’d once been strikingly handsome. A perfect candidate, I decided, for vain self-delusion and belated second thoughts.

I was wrong. What he said was: “I want you to locate a package for me.”

“A package?” I did my best to sound fascinated-although if adultery was stultifying, lost property was worse. “Missingen route from-?”

“Zürich.”

“To Milan?”

“Of course!” Masini almost flinched, as if the idea that he might have been shipping his precious cargo elsewhere, intentionally, caused him physical pain.

I said carefully, “Nothing is ever really lost. You might find that a strongly-worded letter from your lawyers to the courier is enough to work miracles.”

Masini smiled humorlessly. “I don’t think so. The courier is dead.”

Afternoon light filled the room; the window faced east, away from the sun, but the sky itself was dazzling. I suffered a moment of strange clarity, a compelling sense of having just shaken off a lingering drowsiness, as if I’d begun the conversation half asleep and only now fully woken. Masini let the copper orrery on the wall behind me beat twice, each tick a soft, complicated meshing of a thousand tiny gears. Then he said, “She was found in a hotel room in Vienna, three days ago. She’d been shot in the head at close range. And no, she was not meant to take any such detour.”

“What was in the package?”

“A small icon.” He indicated a height of some thirty centimeters. “An eighteenth-century depiction of the Madonna. Originally from the Ukraine.”

“The Ukraine? Do you know how it came to be in Zürich?” I’d heard that the Ukrainian government had recently launched a renewed campaign to persuade certain countries to get serious about the return of stolen artwork. Crateloads had been smuggled out during the turmoil and corruption of the eighties and nineties.

“It was part of the estate of a well-known collector, a man with an impeccable reputation. My own art dealer examined all the paperwork, the bills of sale, the export licenses, before giving his blessing to the deal.”

“Paperwork can be forged.”

Masini struggled visibly to control his impatience. “Anything can beforged . What do you want me to say? I have no reason to suspect that this was stolen property. I’m not a criminal, Signor Fabrizio.”

“I’m not suggesting that you are. So ... money and goods changed hands in Zürich? The icon was yours when it was stolen?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask how much you paid for it?”

“Five million Swiss francs.”

I let that pass without comment, although for a moment I wondered if I’d heard correctly. I was no expert, but I did know that Orthodox icons were usually painted by anonymous artists, and were intended to be as far from unique as individual copies of the Bible. There were exceptions, of course-a few treasured, definitive examples of each type-but they were a great deal older thaneighteenth-century . However fine the craftsmanship, however well-preserved, five million sounded far too high.

I said, “Surely you insured-?”

“Of course! And in a year or two, I may even get my money back. But I’d much prefer to have the icon. That’s why I purchased it in the first place.”

“And your insurers will agree. They’ll be doing their best to find it.” If another investigator had a head start on me, I didn’t want to waste my time-least of all if I’d be competing against a Swiss insurance firm on their home ground.

Masini fixed his bloodshot eyes on me. “Theirbest is not good enough! Yes, they’ll want to save themselves the money, and they’ll treat this potential loss with great seriousness ... like the accountants they are. And the Austrian police will try very hard to find the murderer, no doubt. Neither are moved by any sense of urgency. Neither would be greatly troubled if nothing were resolved for months. Or years.”

If I’d been wrong about Masini’s nocturnal visions of adultery, I’d been right about one thing: there was a passion, an obsession, driving him which ran as deep as jealousy, as deep as pride, as deep as sex. He leaned forward across the desk, restraining himself from seizing my shirtfront, but commanding and imploring me with as much arrogance and pathos as if he had.

“Two weeks! I’ll give you two weeks-and you can name your fee! Deliver the icon to me within a fortnight ... and everything I have is yours for the asking!”

* * * *

I treated Masini’s extravagant offer with as much seriousness as it deserved, but I accepted the case. There were worse ways to spend a fortnight, I decided, than consulting with informants on the fringes of the black market over long lunches in restaurants fit for connoisseurs of fine art.

The obvious starting point, though, was the courier. Her name was Gianna De Angelis: twenty-seven years old, five years in the business, with a spotless reputation; according to the regulatory authorities, not a single complaint had ever been lodged against her, by customer or employer. She’d been working for a small Milanese firm with an equally good record: this was their first loss, in twenty years, of either merchandise or personnel.

I spoke to two of her colleagues; they gave me the barest facts, but wouldn’t be drawn into speculation. The transaction had taken place in a Zürich bank vault, then De Angelis had taken a taxi straight to the airport. She’d phoned head office to say that all was well, less than five minutes before she was due to board the flight home. The plane had left on time, but she hadn’t been on it. She’d bought a ticket from Tyrolean Airlines-using her own credit card-and flown straight to Vienna, carrying the attaché case containing the icon as hand luggage. Six hours later, she was dead.

I tracked down her fiancé, a TV sound technician, to the apartment they’d shared. He was red-eyed, unshaven, hung-over. Still in shock, or I doubt he would have let me through the door. I offered my condolences, helped him finish a bottle of wine, then gently inquired whether Gianna had received any unusual phone calls, made plans to spend extravagant sums of money, or had appeared uncharacteristically nervous or excited in recent weeks. I had to cut the interview short when he began trying to crack my skull open with the empty bottle.

I returned to the office and began trawling the databases, from the official public records right down to the patchwork collections of mailing lists and crudely collated electronic debris purveyed by assorted cyberpimps. One system, operating out of Tokyo, could search the world’s digitized newspapers, and key frames from TV news reports, looking for a matching face-whether or not the subject’s name was mentioned in the caption or commentary. I found a near-twin walking arm-in-arm with a gangster outside a Buenos Aires courthouse in 2007, and another weeping in the wreckage of a village in the Philippines, her family killed in a typhoon, in 2010, but there were no genuine sightings. A text-based search of local media yielded exactly two entries; she’d only made it into the papers at birth and at death.

So far as I could discover, her financial position had been perfectly sound. No one had any kind of dirt on her, and there wasn’t the faintest whiff of an association with organized crime. The icon would have been far from the most valuable item she’d ever laid her hands on-and I still thought Masini had paid a vastly inflated price for it. Artwork-anonymous or not-wasn’t exactly the most liquid of assets. So why had she sold out, on this particular job, when there must have been a hundred opportunities which had been far more tempting?

Maybe she hadn’t been trying to sell the icon in Vienna. Maybe she’d been coerced into going there. I couldn’t imagine anyone “kidnapping” her in the middle of the airport, marching her over to the ticket office, through the security scanners and onto the plane. She’d been armed, highly trained, and carrying all the electronics she could possibly need to summon immediate assistance. But even if she hadn’t had an X-ray-transparent gun pointed at her heart every step of the way, maybe a more subtle threat had compelled her.

As dusk fell on the first day of my allotted fourteen, I paced the office irritably, already feeling pessimistic. De Angelis’s image smiled coolly on the terminal; her grieving lover’s wine tasted sour in my throat. This woman was dead,that was the crime ... and I was being paid to hunt for a faded piece of kitsch. If I found the killers it would be incidental. And the truth was, I was hoping I wouldn’t.

I opened the blinds and looked down toward the city center. Flea-sized specks scurried across the Piazza del Duomo, the cathedral’s forest of mad Gothic pinnacles towering above them. I rarely noticed the cathedral; it was just another part of the expensive view (like the Alps, visible from the reception room) ... and the view was just part of the whole high-class image which enabled me to charge twenty times as much for my services as any back-alley operator. Now I blinked at the sight of it as if it were an hallucination, it seemed so alien, so out of place beside the gleaming dark ceramic buildings of twenty-first century Milan. Statues of saints, or angels, or gargoyles-I couldn’t remember, and at this distance, I couldn’t really tell them apart-stood atop every pinnacle, like a thousand demented stylites. The whole roof was encrusted with pink-tinged marble, dizzyingly, surreally ornate, looking in places like lacework, and in places like barbed wire. Good atheist or not, I’d been inside once or twice, though I struggled to remember when and why; some unavoidable ceremonial occasion. In any case, I’d grown up with the sight of it; it should have been a familiar landmark, nothing more. But at that moment, the whole structure seemed utterly foreign, utterly strange; it was as if the mountains to the north had shed their snow and greenery and topsoil and revealed themselves to be giant artifacts, pyramids from Central America, relics of a vanished civilization.

I closed the blinds, and wiped the dead courier’s face from my computer screen.

Then I bought myself a ticket to Zürich.

* * * *

The databases had had plenty to say about Rolf Hengartner. He’d worked in electronic publishing, making deals on some ethereal plane where Europe’s biggest software providers carved up the market to their mutual satisfaction. I imagined him skiing, snow and water, with Ministers of Culture and satellite magnates ... although probably not in the last few years, in his seventies, with acute lymphoma. He’d started out in film finance, orchestrating the funding of multinational co-productions; one of the photographs of him in the reception room to what was now his assistant’s office showed him raising a clenched fist beside a still-young Depardieu at an anti-Hollywood demonstration in Paris twenty years before.

Max Reif, his assistant, had been appointed executor of the estate. I’d downloaded the latest overpricedSchweitzerdeutsch software for my notepad, in the hope that it would guide me through the interview without too many blunders, but Reif insisted on speaking Italian, and turned out to be perfectly fluent.

Hengartner’s wife had died before him, but he was survived by three children and ten grandchildren. Reif had been instructed to sell all of the art, since none of the family had ever shown much interest in the collection.

“What was his passion? Orthodox icons?”

“Not at all. Herr Hengartner was eclectic, but the icon was a complete surprise to me. Something of an anomaly. He owned some French Gothic and Italian Renaissance works with religious themes, but he certainly didn’t specialize in the Madonna, let alone the Eastern tradition.”

Reif showed me a photograph of the icon in the glossy brochure which had been put together for the auction; Masini had mislaid his copy of the catalog, so this was my first chance to see exactly what I was searching for. I read the Italian section in the pentalingual commentary on the facing page:

A stunning example of the icon known as the Vladimir Mother of God, probably the most ancient variation of the icons of “loving-kindness” (Greekeleousa, Russianumileniye). It depicts the Virgin holding the Child, His face pressed tenderly to His Mother’s cheek, in a powerful symbol of both divine and human compassion for all of creation. According to tradition, this icon derives from a painting by the Evangelist Luke. The surviving exemplar, from which the type takes its name, was brought to Kiev from Constantinople in the 12th century, and is now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. It has been described as the greatest holy treasure of the Russian nation.

Artist unknown. Ukrainian, early 18th century. Cyprus panel, 293 x 204 mm, egg tempera on linen, exquisitely decorated with beaten silver.

The reserve price was listed as eighty thousand Swiss francs. Less than a fiftieth what Masini had paid for it.

The esthetic attraction of the piece was lost on me; it wasn’t exactly a Caravaggio. The colors were drab, the execution was crude-deliberately two-dimensional-and even the silver was badly tarnished. The paintwork itself appeared to be in reasonable condition; for a moment I thought there was a hairline crack across the full width of the icon, but on closer inspection it looked more like a flaw in the reproduction: a scratch on the printing plate, or some photographic intermediate.

Of course, this wasn’t meant to be “high art” in the Western tradition. No expression of the artist’s ego, no indulgent idiosyncrasies of style. It was-presumably-a faithful copy of the Byzantine original, intended to play a specific role in the practice of the Orthodox religion, and I was in no position to judge its value in that context. But I had trouble imagining either Rolf Hengartner or Luciano Masini as secret converts to the Eastern church. So was it purely a matter of a good investment? Was this nothing but an eighteenth-century baseball card, to them? If Masini’s only interest was financial, though, why had he paid so much more than the market value? And why was he so desperate to get it back?

I said, “Can you tell me who bid for the icon, besides Signor Masini?”

“The usual dealers, the usual brokers. I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you on whose behalf they were acting.”

“But you did monitor the bidding?” A number of potential buyers, or their agents, had visited Zürich to view the collection in person-Masini among them-but the auction itself had taken place by phone line and computer.

“Of course.”

“Was there a consensus for a price close to Masini’s final bid? Or was he forced up to it by just one of those anonymous rivals?”

Reif stiffened, and I suddenly realized what that must have sounded like. I said, “I certainly didn’t mean to imply—”

“At leastthree other bidders,” he said icily, “were within a few hundred thousand francs of Signor Masini all the way. I’m sure he’ll confirm that, if you take the trouble to ask him.” He hesitated, then added less defensively, “Obviously the reserve price was set far too low. But Herr Hengartner anticipated that the auction house would undervalue this item.”

That threw me. “I thought you didn’t know about the icon until after his death. If you’d discussed its value with him—”

“I didn’t. But Herr Hengartner left a note beside it in the safe.”

He hesitated, as if debating with himself whether or not I deserved to be privy to the great man’s insights. I didn’t dare plead with him, let alone insist; I just waited in silence for him to continue. It can’t have been more than ten or fifteen seconds, but I swear I broke out in a sweat.

Reif smiled, and put me out of my misery. “The note said:Prepare to be surprised. “

* * * *

In the early evening I left my hotel room and wandered through the city center. I’d never had reason to visit Zürich before, but-language aside-it was already beginning to feel just like home. The same fast food chains had colonized the city. The electronic billboards displayed the same advertisements. The glass fronts of the VR parlours glowed with surreal images from the very same games, and the twelve-year-olds inside had all succumbed to the same unfortunate Texan fashions. Even the smell of the place was exactly like Milan on a Saturday night: french fries, popcorn, Reeboks and Coke.

Had Ukrainian secret service agents killed De Angelis to get the icon back? Was this the flip-side of all the diplomatic efforts to recover stolen artwork?That seemed unlikely. If there were the slightest grounds for the return of the icon, then dragging the matter through the courts would have meant far better publicity for the cause. Slaughtering foreign citizens could play havoc with international aid ... and the Ukraine was in the middle of negotiating an upgrading of its trade relationship with Europe. I couldn’t believe that any government would risk so much for a single work of art, in a country full of more-or-less interchangeable copies of the very same piece. It wasn’t as if Hengartner had got his hands on the 12th century original.

Who, then?Another collector, another obsessive hoarder, whom Masini had outbid? Someone, perhaps, unlike Hengartner, who already owned several other baseball cards, and wanted a complete set? Maybe Masini’s insurance firm had the connections and clout needed to find out who the true bidders at the auction had been; I certainly didn’t. A rival collector wasn’t the only possibility; one of the bidders could have been a dealer who was so impressed by the price the icon fetched that he or she decided it was worth acquiring by other means.

The air was growing cold faster than I’d expected; I decided to return to the hotel. I’d been walking along the west bank of the Limmat River, down toward the lake; I started to cross back over at the first bridge I came to, then I paused midway to get my bearings. There were cathedrals either side of me, facing each other across the river; unimposing structures compared to Milan’s giant Nosferatu Castle, but I felt a-ridiculous-frisson of unease, as if the pair of them had conspired to ambush me.

MySchweitzerdeutsch package came with free maps and tour guides; I hit the WHERE AM I? button, and the GPS unit in the notepad passed its coordinates to the software, which proceeded to demystify my surroundings. The two buildings in question were the Grossmunster (which looked like a fortress, with two brutal towers side by side, not quite facing the river’s east bank) and the Fraumunster (once an abbey, with a single slender spire). Both dated from the 13th century, although modifications of one kind or another had continued almost to the present. Stained glass windows by, respectively, Giacometti and Chagall. And Ulrich Zwingli had launched the Swiss Reformation from the pulpit of the Grossmunster in 1523.

I was staring at one of the birthplaces of a sect which had endured for five hundred years-and it was far stranger than standing in the shadow of the most ancient Roman temple. To say:Christianity has shaped the physical and cultural landscape of Europe for two thousand years, as relentlessly as any glacier, as mercilessly as any clash of tectonic plates, is to state the fatuously obvious. But if I’d spent my whole life surrounded by the evidence, it was only now-now that the legacy of those millennia was beginning to seem increasingly bizarre to me-that I had any real sense of what it meant. Arcane theological disputes between people as alien to me as the ancient Egyptians had transformed the entire continent-along with a thousand purely political and economic forces, for sure-but nevertheless, modulating the development of almost every human activity, from architecture to music, from commerce to warfare, at one level or another.

And there was no reason to believe that the process had halted. Just because the Alps were no longer rising didn’t mean geology had come to an end.

“Do you wish to know more?” the tour guide asked me.

“Not unless you can tell me the word for a pathological fear of cathedrals.”

It hesitated, then replied with impeccable fuzzy logic, “There are cathedrals across the length and breadth of Europe. Which particular cathedrals did you have in mind?”

* * * *

De Angelis’s colleagues had provided me with the name of the taxi company she’d used for her trip from the bank to the airport-the last thing she’d paid for with her business credit card. I’d spoken to the manager of the company by phone from Milan, and there was a message from her when I arrived back at the hotel, with the name of the driver for the journey in question. Far from the last person who’d seen De Angelis alive-but possibly the last before she’d been persuaded, by whatever means, to take the icon to Vienna. He was due to report for work at the depot that evening at nine. I ate quickly, then set out into the cold again. The only taxis outside the hotel were from a rival company. I went on foot.

I found Phan Anh Tuan drinking coffee in a corner of the garage. After a brief exchange in German, he asked me if I’d prefer to speak French, and I gratefully switched. He told me he’d been an engineering student in East Berlin when the wall came down. “I always meant to find a way to finish my degree and go home. I got sidetracked, somehow.” He gazed out at the dark icy street, bemused.

I put a photo of De Angelis on the table in front of him; he looked long and hard. “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t take this woman anywhere.”

I hadn’t been optimistic; still, it would have been nice to have gleaned some small clue about her state of mind; had she been humming “We’re in the Money” all the way to the airport, or what?

I said, “You must have a hundred customers a day. Thanks for trying.” I started to take the photo back; he caught my hand.

“I’m not telling you I must have forgotten her. I’m telling you I’m sure I’ve never seen her before.”

I said, “Last Monday. Two twelve pm. Intercontinental Bank to the airport. The dispatcher’s records show—”

He was frowning. “Monday? No. I had engine trouble. I was out of service for almost an hour. Until nearly three.”

“Are you sure?”

He fetched a handwritten log book from his vehicle, and showed me the entry.

I said, “Why would the dispatcher get it wrong?”

He shrugged. “It must have been a software glitch. A computer takes the calls, allocates them ... it’s all fully automated. We flick a switch on the radio when we’re unavailable-and I can’t have forgotten to do that, because I kept the radio on all the time I was working on the car, and no fares came through to me.”

“Could someone else have accepted a job from the dispatcher, pretending to be you?”

He laughed. “Intentionally? No. Not without changing the ID number of their radio.”

“And how hard would that be? Would you need a forged chip, with a duplicate serial number?”

“No. But it would mean pulling the radio out, opening it up, and resetting thirty-two DIP switches. Why would anyone bother?” Then I saw it click in his eyes.

I said, “Do you know of anyone here having a radio stolen recently? The two-way, not the music?”

He nodded sadly. “Both. Someone had both stolen. About a month ago.”

* * * *

I returned in the morning and confirmed with some of the other drivers most of what Phan had told me. There was no easy way of proving that he hadn’t lied about the engine trouble and driven De Angelis himself, but I couldn’t see why he would have invented an “alibi” when there was no need for one-when he could have said “Yes, I drove her, she hardly spoke a word” and no one would have had the slightest reason to doubt him.

So: someone had gone to a lot of trouble to be alone in a fake taxi with De Angelis ... and then they’d let her walk into the airport and phone home. To delay the moment when head office would realize that something had gone wrong, presumably-but why had she gone along with that?What had the driver said to her, in those few minutes, to make her so cooperative? Was it a threat to her family, her lover? Or a bribe, large enough to convince her to make up her mind on the spot? And then she hadn’t bothered to cover her trail, because she knew there’d be no way to do so convincingly? She’d accepted the fact that her guilt would be obvious, and that she’d have to become a fugitive?

That sounded like one hell of a bribe. So how could she have been so naive as to think that anyone would actually pay it?

Outside the Intercontinental Bank, I took her photo from my wallet and held it up toward the armored-glass revolving doors, trying to imagine the scene.The taxi arrives, she climbs in, they pull out into the traffic. The driver says: Nice weather we’re having. By the way, I know what you’ve got in the attaché case. Come to Vienna with me and I’ll make you rich.

She stared back at me accusingly. I said, “All right, De Angelis, I’m sorry. I don’t believe you were that stupid.”

I gazed at the laser-printed image. Something nagged at me.Digital radios with driver IDs? For some reason, that had surprised me. It shouldn’t have. Perhaps movie scenes of taxi drivers and police communicating in incomprehensible squawks still lingered in my subconscious, still shaped my expectations on some level-in spite of the kind of technology I used myself every day. The word “auction” still conjured up scenes of a man or woman with a hammer, shouting out bids in a crowded room-though I’d never witnessed anything remotely like that, except in the movies. In real life, everything was computerized, everything was digital. This “photograph” was digital. Chemical film had started disappearing from the shops when I was fourteen or fifteen years old-and even in my childhood, it was strictly an amateur medium; most commercial photographers had been using CCD arrays for almost twenty years.

So why did there appear to be a fine scratch across the photograph of the icon?The few hundred copies of the auction catalog would have been produced without using a single analog intermediate; everything would have gone from digital camera, to computer, to laser printer. The glossy end-product was the one anachronism-and a less conservative auction house would have offered an on-line version, or an interactive CD.

Reif had let me keep the catalog; back in my hotel room, I inspected it again. The “scratch” definitely wasn’t a crack in the paintwork; it cut right across the image, a perfectly straight, white line of uniform thickness, crossing from paint to raised silverwork without the slightest deviation.

A glitch in the camera’s electronics? Surely the photographer would have noticed that, and tried again. And even if the flaw had been spotted too late for a retake, one keystroke on any decent image-processing package would have removed it instantly.

I tried to phone Reif; it took almost an hour to get through to him. I said, “Can you tell me the name of the graphic designers who produced the auction catalog?”

He stared at me as if I’d called him in the middle of sex to ask who’d murdered Elvis. “Why do you need to know that?”

“I just want to ask their photographer—”

“Their photographer?”

“Yes. Or whoever it was who photographed the items in the collection.”

“It wasn’t necessary to have the collection photographed. Herr Hengartner already had photographs of everything, for insurance purposes. He left a disk with the image files, and detailed instructions for the layout of the catalog. He knew that he was dying. He had everything organized, everything prepared. Does that answer your question? Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

Not quite.I steeled myself, and grovelled: Could I have a copy of the original image file? I was seeking advice from an art historian in Moscow, and the best color fax of the catalog wouldn’t do justice to the icon. Reif begrudgingly had an assistant locate the data and transmit it to me.

The line, the “scratch”, was there in the file.

Hengartner-who’d treasured this icon in secret, and who’d somehow known that it would fetch an extraordinary price-had left behind an image of it with a small but unmistakable flaw, and made sure that it was seen by every prospective buyer.

That had to mean something, but I had no idea what.

* * * *

A list of the dates when Lombardy had fallen in and out of Austrian hands, committed to memory when I was sixteen years old, just about exhausted my knowledge of the Habsburg empire. Which should hardly have mattered in 2013, but I felt disconcertingly ill-prepared all the same.

In my hotel room, I unpacked my bags, then looked out warily across the rooftops of Vienna. I could see Saint Stephen’s cathedral in the distance; the southern tower, almost detached from the main hall, was topped with a spire like a filigreed radio antenna. The roof of the hall was decorated with richly colored tiles, forming an eye-catching zig-zag pattern of chevrons and diamonds-as if someone had draped a giant Mongolian rug over the building to keep it warm. But then, anything less exotic would have been a disappointment.

De Angelis had died in the same hotel (in the room directly above me, with much the same view). Booked in under her own name. Paying with her own plastic, when she could have used anonymous cash.Did that prove that she’d had nothing to be ashamed of-that she’d been threatened, not bribed?

I spent half the morning trying to persuade the hotel manager that the local police wouldn’t lock him up for allowing me to speak to his staff about the murder; the whole idea seemed to strike him as akin to treason. “If a Viennese citizen died in Milan,” I argued patiently, “wouldn’t you expect an accredited Austrian investigator to receive every courtesy there?”

“We would send a delegation of police to liaise with the Milanese authorities, not a private detective acting alone.”

I was getting nowhere, so I backed off. Besides, I had an appointment to keep.

My long-awaited expense-account lunch with a black-marketeer turned out to be in a health food restaurant. Back in Milan, I’d paid several million lira to a net-based “introduction agency” to put me in touch with “Anton.” He was much younger than I’d expected; he looked about twenty, and he radiated the kind of self-assurance I’d only come across before in wealthy adolescent drug dealers. I managed to avoid using my atrocious German, yet again; Anton spoke CNN English, with an accent that I took to be Hungarian.

I handed him the auction catalog, open at the relevant page; he glanced at the picture of the icon. “Oh yeah. The Vladimir. I could get you another one, exactly like this. Ten thousand US dollars.”

“I don’t want a forged replica.” Attractive as the idea was, Masini would never have fallen for it. “Or even a similar contemporary piece. I want to know who asked forthis . Who spread the word that it was going to change hands in Zürich, and that they’d pay to have it brought east.”

I had to make a conscious effort not to look down to see where he’d placed his feet. Before he’d arrived, I’d discreetly dropped a pinch of silica microspheres onto the floor beneath the table. Each one contained a tiny accelerometer-an array of springy silicon beams a few microns across, fabricated on the same chip as a simple, low-power microprocessor. If just one, out of the fifty thousand I’d scattered, still adhered to his shoes the next time we met, I’d be able to interrogate it in infrared and learn exactly where he’d been. Or exactly where he kept this pair of shoes when he changed into another.

Anton said, “Icons move west.” He made it sound like a law of nature. “Through Prague or Budapest, to Vienna, Salzburg, Munich. That’s the way everything’s set up.”

“For five million Swiss francs, don’t you think someone might have made the effort to switch from their traditional lines of supply?”

He scowled. “Five million!I don’t believe that. What makes this worth five million?”

“You’re the expert. You tell me.”

He glared at me as if he suspected that I was mocking him, then looked down at the catalog again. This time he even read the commentary. He said cautiously, “Maybe it’s older than the auctioneers thought. If it’s really, say, fifteenth century, the price could almost make sense. Maybe your client guessed the true age ... and so did someone else.” He sighed. “It will be expensive finding out who, though. People will be very reluctant to talk.”

I said, “You know where I’m staying. Once you find someone who needs persuading, let me know.”

He nodded sullenly, as if he’d seriously hoped I might have handed over a large wad of cash for miscellaneous bribes. I almost asked him about the “scratch”—Could it be some kind of coded message to the cognoscenti that the icon is older than it seems?-but I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. He’d seen it, and said nothing; perhaps it was just a meaningless computer glitch after all.

When I’d paid the bill, he stood up to depart, then bent down toward me and said quietly, “If you mention what I’m doing, to anyone, I’ll have you killed.”

I kept a straight face, and replied, “Vice versa.”

When he was gone, I tried to laugh.Stupid, swaggering child. I couldn’t quite get the right sound out, though. I didn’t imagine he’d be too happy if he found out what he’d trodden in. I took out my notepad, consulted the appointments diary, then let my right arm hang beside me for a second, dousing the floor with a fry-your-brains code to the remaining microspheres.

Then I took the picture of De Angelis from my wallet and held it in front of me on the table.

I said, “Am I in any danger? What do you think?”

She stared back at me, not quite smiling. The expression in her eyes might have been amusement, or it might have been concern. Not indifference; I was sure of that. But she didn’t seem prepared to start dispensing predictions or advice.

* * * *

Just as I was psyching myself up to tackle the hotel manager again, the relevant bureaucrat in the city government finally agreed to fax the hotel a pro forma statement acknowledging that my license was recognized throughout the jurisdiction. That seemed to satisfy the manager, though it said no more than the documents I’d already shown him.

The clerk at the check-in desk barely remembered De Angelis; he couldn’t say if she’d been cheerful or nervous, friendly or terse. She’d carried her own luggage; a porter remembered seeing her with the attaché case, and an overnight bag. (She’d spent the night in Zürich before collecting the icon.) She hadn’t used room service, or any of the hotel restaurants.

The cleaner who’d found the body had been born in Turin, according to his supervisor. I wasn’t sure if that was going to be a help or a hindrance. When I tracked him down in a basement storeroom, he said stubbornly, in German, “I told the police everything. Why are you bothering me? Go and ask them, if you want to know the facts.”

He turned his back on me. He seemed to be stock-taking carpet shampoo and disinfectant, but he made it look like a matter of urgency.

I said, “It must have been a shock for you. Someone so young. An eighty-year-old guest dying in her sleep ... you’d probably take it in your stride. But Gianna was twenty-seven. A tragedy.” He tensed up at the sound of her name; I could see his shoulders tighten.Six days later? A woman he’d never even met?

I said, “You didn’t see her any time before, did you? You didn’t talk to her?”

“No.”

I didn’t believe him. The manager was a small-minded cretin; fraternising was probably strictly forbidden. This guy was in his twenties, good looking, spoke the same language. What had he done? Flirted with her harmlessly in a corridor for thirty seconds? And now he was afraid he’d lose his job if he admitted it?

“No one else will find out, if you tell me what she said. You have my word. It’s not like the cops, nothing has to be official. All I want to do is help lock up the fuckers who killed her.”

He put down the bar-code scanner and turned to face me. “I just asked her where she was from. What she was doing in town.”

Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. It had taken me so long to get even this close to her, I couldn’t quite believe it was happening.

“How did she react?”

“She was polite. Friendly. She seemed nervous, though. Distracted.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said she was from Milan.”

“What else?”

“When I asked her why she was in Vienna, she said she was playing chaperone.”

“What?”

“She said she wasn’t staying long. And she was only here to play chaperone. To an older lady.”

* * * *

Chaperone?I lay awake half the night, trying to make sense of that. Did it imply that she hadn’t given up custodianship of the icon? That she was still guarding it when she died? That she considered it to be Luciano Masini’s property, and still fully intended to deliver it to him, right to the end?

What had the “taxi driver” said to her? Bring the icon to Vienna for a day? No need to let it out of your sight? We don’t want to steal it ... we just want to borrow it? To pray to it one last time before it vanishes into another western bank vault? But what was so special aboutthis copy of the Vladimir Mother of God that made it worth so much trouble? The same thing that made it worth five million Swiss francs to Masini, possibly-but what?

And why had De Angelis blown her job, and risked imprisonment, to go along with the scheme? Even if she’d been blind to the obvious fact that it was all a set-up, what could they have offered her in exchange for flushing her career and reputation down the drain?

I’d only been asleep ten or twenty minutes when I was woken by someone pounding on the door of my room. By the time I’d staggered out of bed and pulled on my trousers, the police had grown impatient and let themselves in with a pass key. It wasn’t quite two a.m.

There were four of them, two in uniform. One waved a photograph in front of my face. I squinted at it.

“Did you speak to this man? Yesterday?”

It was Anton. I nodded. If they didn’t already know the answer, they wouldn’t have asked the question.

“Will you come with us, please?”

“Why?”

“Because your friend is dead.”

They showed me the body, so I could confirm that it really was the same man. He’d been shot in the chest and dumped near the canal. Not in it; maybe the killers had been disturbed. In the morgue, the corpse was definitely shoeless, but it would have been worth sending out the microspheres’ code, just in case-the things could end up in the strangest places (nostrils, for a start). But before I could think of a plausible excuse to take the notepad from my pocket, they’d pulled the sheet back over his head and led me away for questioning.

The police had found my name and number in “Anton’s” notepad (if they knew his real name, they were keeping it to themselves ... along with several other things I would have liked to have known, such as whether or not the ballistics matched the bullet used on De Angelis). I recounted the whole conversation in the restaurant, but left out the (illegal) microspheres; they’d find them soon enough, and I had nothing to gain by volunteering a confession.

I was treated with appropriate disdain, but not even verbally abused, really-a five star rating; I’d had ribs broken in Seveso, and a testicle crushed in Marseille. At half past four, I was free to leave.

Crossing from the interview room to the elevator, I passed half a dozen small offices; they were separated by partitions, but not fully enclosed. On one desk was a cardboard box, full of items of clothing in plastic bags.

I walked past, then stopped just out of sight. There was a man and a woman in the office, neither of whom I’d seen before, talking and making notes.

I walked back and poked my head into the office. I said, “Excuse me ... could you tell me ... please-?” I spoke German with the worst accent I could manage; I had a head start, it must have been dire. They stared at me, appalled. Visibly struggling for words, I pulled out my notepad and hit a few keys, fumbling with the phrasebook software, walking deeper into the office. I thought I saw a pair of shoes out of the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t be certain. “Could you tell me please where I could find the nearest public convenience?”

The man said, “Get out of here before I kick your head in.”

I backed out, smiling uncertainly. “Grazie, signore!Dankeschön! “

There was a surveillance camera in the elevator; I didn’t even glance at the notepad. Ditto for the foyer. Out on the street, I finally looked down.

I had the data from two hundred and seven microspheres. The software was already busy reconstructing Anton’s trail.

I was on the verge of shouting for joy when it occurred to me that I might have been better off if I hadn’t been able to follow him.

* * * *

The first place he’d gone from the restaurant looked like home; no one answered the door, but I could glimpse posters of several of the continent’s most pretentious rock bands through the windows. If not his own, maybe a friend’s place, or a girlfriend’s. I sat in an open air café across the street, sketching the visible outline of the apartment, guessing at walls and furniture, playing back the trace for the hours he’d spent there, then modifying my guesses, trying again.

The waiter looked over my shoulder at the multiple exposure of stick figures filling the screen. “Are you a choreographer?”

“Yes.”

“How exciting! What’s the name of the dance?”

“‘Making Phone Calls And Waiting Impatiently.’ Its anhommage to my two idols and mentors, Twyla Tharp and Pina Bausch.” The waiter was impressed.

After three hours, and no sign of life, I moved on. Anton had stopped by at another apartment, briefly. This one was occupied by a thin blond woman in her late teens.

I said, “I’m a friend of Anton’s. Do you know where I could find him?”

She’d been crying. “I don’t know anyone by that name.” She slammed the door. I stood in the hallway for a moment, wondering:Did I kill him? Did someone detect the spheres, and put a bullet in his heart because of them? But if they’d found them, they would have destroyed them; there would have been no trail to follow.

He’d only visited one more location before taking a car trip to the canal, lying very still. It turned out to be a detached two-story house in an upmarket district. I didn’t ring the doorbell. There was no convenient observation post, so I did a single walk-by. The curtains were drawn, no vehicles were parked nearby.

A few blocks away, I sat on a bench in a small park and started phoning databases. The house had been leased just three days before; I had no trouble finding out about the owner-a corporate lawyer with property all over the city-but I couldn’t get hold of the new tenant’s name.

Vienna had a centralized utilities map, to keep people from digging into underground power cables and phone lines by accident. Phone lines were useless to me; no one who made the slightest effort could be bugged that way anymore. But the house had natural gas; easier to swim through than water, and much less noisy.

I bought a shovel, boots, gloves, a pair of white overalls, and a safety helmet. I captured an image of the gas company logo from its telephone directory entry, and jet-sprayed it onto the helmet; from a distance, it looked quite authentic. I summoned up all the bravado I had left, and returned to the street-beyond sight of the house, but as close to it as I dared. I shifted a few paving slabs out of the way, then started digging. It was early afternoon; there was light traffic, but very few pedestrians. An old man peeked out at me from a window of the nearest house. I resisted the urge to wave to him; it wouldn’t have rung true.

I reached the gas main, climbed down into the hole, and pressed a small package against the PVC; it extruded a hollow needle which melted the plastic chemically, maintaining the seal as it penetrated the walls of the pipe. Someone passed by on the footpath, walking two large slobbering dogs; I didn’t look up.

The control box chimed softly, signaling success. I refilled the hole, replaced the paving slabs, and returned to the hotel for some sleep.

* * * *

I’d left a narrow fiber-optic cable leading from the buried control box to the unpaved ground around a nearby tree, the end just a few millimeters beneath the soil. The next morning, I collected all the stored data, then went back to the hotel to sift through it.

Several hundred bugs had made it into the house’s gas pipes and back to the control box, several times-eavesdropping in hour-long overlapping shifts, then returning to disgorge the results. The individual sound tracks were often abysmal, but by processing all of them together, the software could usually come up with intelligible speech.

There were five voices, three male, two female. All used French, though I wouldn’t have sworn it was everyone’s native tongue.

I pieced things together slowly. They didn’t have the icon-they’d been hired to find it, by someone called Katulski. Apparently they’d paid Anton to keep an ear to the ground, but he’d come back to them asking for more money, in exchange for not switching his loyalty to me. The trouble was, he really had nothing tangible to offer ... and they’d just had a tip-off from another source. References to his murder were oblique, but maybe he’d tried to blackmail them in some way when they’d told him he was no longer needed. One thing was absolutely clear, though: they were taking turns watching an apartment on the other side of the city, where they believed the man who’d killed De Angelis would eventually show up.

I hired a car and followed two of them when they set out to relieve the watch. They’d rented a room across the street from their target; with my IR binoculars I could see where they were aiming theirs. The place under observation looked empty; all I could make out through the tatty curtains was peeling paint.

I called the police from a public phone; the synthesized voice of my notepad spoke for me. I left an anonymous message for the cop who’d interrogated me, giving the code which would unlock the data in the microspheres. Forensic would have found them almost immediately, but extracting the information by brute-force microscopy would have taken days.

Then I waited.

Five hours later, around three a.m., the two men I’d followed left in a hurry, without replacements. I took out my photo of De Angelis and inspected it in the moonlight. I still don’t understand what it was about her that held me in her sway; she was either a thief, or a fool. Possibly both. And whatever she was, it had killed her.

I said, “Don’t just stand there smirking like you know all the answers. How about wishing me luck?”

* * * *

The building was ancient, and in bad repair. I had no trouble picking the lock on the front door, and though the stairs creaked all the way to the top floor, I encountered no one.

There was a tell-tale pattern of electric fields detectable through the door of apartment 712; it looked like it was wired-up with ten different kinds of alarm. I picked the lock of the neighboring apartment. There was an access hatch in the ceiling-fortuitously right above the sofa. Someone below moaned in their sleep as I pulled my legs up and closed the hatch. My heart was pounding from adrenaline and claustrophobia, burglary in a foreign city, fear, anticipation. I played a torch-beam around; mice went scurrying.

The corresponding hatch in 712 was guarded just like the door. I moved to another part of the ceiling, lifted away the thermal insulation, then cut a hole in the plaster and lowered myself into the room.

I don’t know what I’d expected to find. A shrine covered with icons and votive candles? Occult paraphernalia and a stack of dusty volumes on the teachings of Slavonic mystics?

There was nothing in the room but a bed, a chair, and a VR rig-plugged into the phone socket. Vienna had kept up with the times; even this dilapidated apartment had the latest high-bandwidth ISDN.

I glanced down at the street; there was no one in sight. I put my ear to the door; if anyone was ascending the stairs, they were far quieter than I’d been.

I slipped the helmet over my head.

The simulation was a building, larger than anything I’d ever seen, stretching out around me like a stadium, like a colosseum. In the distance-perhaps two hundred meters away-were giant marble columns topped with arches, holding up a balcony with an ornate metal railing, and another set of columns, supporting another balcony ... and so on, to six tiers. The floor was tile, or parquetry, with delicate angular braids outlining a complex hexagonal pattern in red and gold. I looked up-and, dazzled, threw my arms in front of my face (to no effect). The hall of this impossible cathedral was topped with a massive dome, the scale defying calculation. Sunlight poured in through dozens of arched windows around the base. Above, covering the dome, was a figurative mosaic, the colors exquisite beyond belief. My eyes watered from the brightness; as I blinked away the tears, I could begin to make out the scene. A haloed woman stretched out her hand—

Someone pressed a gun barrel to my throat.

I froze, waiting for my captor to speak. After a few seconds, I said in German, “I wish someone would teach me to move that quietly.”

A young male voice replied, in heavily accented English: “‘He who possesses the truth of the word of Jesus can hear even its silence.’ Saint Ignatius of Antioch.” Then he must have reached over to the rig control box and turned down the volume-I’d planned to do that myself, but it had seemed redundant-because I suddenly realized that I’d been listening to a blanket of white noise.

He said, “Do you like what we’re building? It was inspired by the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople-Justinian’s Church of the Divine Wisdom-but it’s not a slavish copy. The new architecture has no need to make concessions to gross matter. The original in Istanbul is a museum, now-and of course it was used as a mosque for five centuries before that. But there’s no prospect of either fate befalling this holy place.”

“No.”

“You’re working for Luciano Masini, aren’t you?”

I couldn’t think of a plausible lie which would make me any more popular. “That’s right.”

“Let me show you something.”

I stood rigid, prepared, hoping he was about to take the helmet off me. I felt him moving, through the gun barrel ... then I realized that he was slipping on the rig’s data glove.

He pointed his hand, and moved my viewpoint; blindly for him, which impressed me. I seemed to slide across the cathedral floor straight toward the sanctuary, which was separated from the nave by a massive, gilded latticework screen, covered in hundreds of icons. From a distance, the screen glinted opulently, the subjects of the paintings impossible to discern, the colored panels making up a weirdly beautiful abstract mosaic.

As I drew closer, though, the effect was overwhelming.

The images were all executed in the same “crude” two-dimensional style which I’d derided in Masini’s missing baseball card-but here, togetheren masse , they seemed a thousand times more expressive than any overblown Renaissance masterpiece. It was not just the fact that the colors had been “restored” to a richness no physical pigment had ever possessed: reds and blues like luminous velvet, silver like white-hot steel. The simple, stylized human geometry of the figures-the angle of a head bowed in suffering, the strange dispassionate entreaty of eyes raised to heaven-seemed to constitute a whole language of emotions, with a clarity and precision which cut through every barrier to comprehension. It was like writing before Babel, like telepathy, like music.

Or maybe the gun at my throat was helping to broaden my esthetic sensibilities. Nothing like a good dose of endogenous opiates to throw open the doors of perception.

My captor pointed my eyes at an empty space between two of the icons.

“This is where Our Lady of Chernobyl belongs.”

“Chernobyl? That’s where it was painted?”

“Masini didn’t tell you anything, did he?”

“Didn’t tell me what? That the icon was really fifteenth century?”

“Not fifteenth.Twentieth. 1986.”

My mind was racing, but I said nothing.

He recounted the whole story in matter-of-fact tones, as if he’d been there in person. “One of the founders of the True Church was a worker at the number four reactor. When the accident happened, he received a lethal dose within hours. But he didn’t die straight away. It was two weeks later, when he truly understood the scale of the tragedy-when he realized that it wasn’t just hundreds of volunteers, firemen and soldiers, who’d die in agony in the months to follow ... buttens of thousands of people dying in years to come; land and water contaminated for decades; sickness for generations-that Our Lady came to him in a vision, and She told him what to do.

“He was to paint Her as the Vladimir Mother of God-copying every detail, respecting the tradition. But in truth, he would be the instrument for the creation of a new icon-and She would sanctify it, pouring into it all of Her Son’s compassion for the suffering which had taken place, His rejoicing in the courage and self-sacrifice His people had shown, and His will to share the burden of the grief and pain that was yet to come.

“She told him to mix some spilt fuel into the pigments he used, and when it was completed to hide it away until it could take its rightful place on the iconostasis of the One True Church.”

I closed my eyes, and saw a scene from a TV documentary: celluloid movie footage taken just after the accident, the image covered with ghostly flashes and trails. Particle tracks recorded in the emulsion; radiation damage to the film itself.That was what Hengartner’s “scratch” had meant—whether it was a real effect which appeared when he photographed the icon with a modern camera, or just a stylized addition created by computer. It was a message to any prospective buyer who knew how to read the code: This is not what the commentary says. This is a rarity, a brand new icon, an original.Our Lady of Chernobyl. Ukrainian, 1986.

I said, “I’m surprised anyone ever got it onto a plane.”

“The radiation is barely detectable, now; most of the hottest fission products decayed years ago. Still ... you wouldn’t want to kiss it. And maybe it killed that superstitious old man a little sooner than he would have died otherwise.”

Superstitious?”Hengartner ... thought it would cure his cancer?”

“Why else would he have bought it? It was stolen in ‘93, and it disappeared for a long time, but there were always rumors circulating about itsmiraculous powers .” His tone was contemptuous. “I don’t know what religion that old fart believed in.Homeopathy , maybe. A dose of what ailed him, to put it right again. The best whole-body scanners can pick up the smallest trace of strontium-90, and date it to the accident; if Chernobyl caused his cancer, he would have known it. But your own boss, I imagine, is just an old fashioned Mariolater, who thinks he can save his granddaughter’s life if he burns all his money at a shrine to the Virgin.”

Maybe he thought he was goading me; I didn’t give a shit what Masini believed, but a surge of careless anger ran through me. “And the courier?What about her? Was she just another dumb, superstitious peasant to you?”

He was silent for a while; I felt him change hands on the gun. I knew where he was now, precisely; with my eyes closed, I could see him in front of me.

“My brother told her there was a boy from Kiev, dying from leukaemia in Vienna, who wanted a chance to pray to Our Lady of Chernobyl.” All of the contempt had gone out of his voice, now. And all of the pompous scriptural certainty. “Masini had told her about his granddaughter; she knew how obsessed he was, she knew he’d never part with the icon willingly, not even for a couple of hours. So she agreed to take it to Vienna. To deliver it a day late. She didn’t believe it would cure anyone. I don’t think she believed in God at all. But my brother convinced her that the boy had the right to pray to the icon ... to take some comfort from doing that. Even if he didn’t have five million Swiss francs.”

I threw a punch, the hardest I’d thrown in my life. It connected with flesh and bone, jarring my whole body like an electric shock. For a moment I was so dazed that I didn’t know whether or not he’d squeezed the trigger and blown half my face away. I staggered, and pushed the helmet off, icy sweat dripping from my face. He was lying on the floor, shuddering with pain, still holding the gun. I stepped forward and trod on his wrist, then bent down and took the weapon, easily. He was fourteen or fifteen years old, long-limbed but very emaciated, and bald. I kicked him in the ribs, viciously.

“And you played the pious little cancer victim, did you?”

“Yes.” He was weeping, but whether it was from pain or remorse, I couldn’t tell.

I kicked him again. “And then you killed her? To get your hands on the fucking Virgin of Chernobyl who doesn’t even work any fucking miracles?”

“I didn’t kill her!” He was bawling like an infant. “My brother killed her, and now he’s dead. He didn’t mean to, but he panicked, and he killed her, and now he’s dead too.”

His brother was dead?”Anton?”

“He went to tell Katulski’s goons about you.” He got the words out between sobs. “He thought they’d keep you busy ... and he thought, maybe if they were fighting it out with you, we might have a chance to get the icon out of the city.”

I should have guessed. What better way to hunt for a stolen icon, than to traffic in them yourself? And what better way to keep track of your rivals than to pretend to be their informant?

“So where is it now?”

He didn’t reply. I slipped the gun into my back pocket, then bent down and picked him up under the arms. He must have weighed about thirty kilos, at the most. Maybe he really was dying of leukaemia; at the time, I didn’t much care. I slammed him against the wall, let him fall, then picked him up and did it again. Blood streamed out of his nose; he started choking and spluttering. I lifted him for a third time, then paused to inspect my handiwork. I realized I’d broken his jaw when I’d hit him, and probably one of my fingers.

He said, “You’re nothing. Nothing. A blip in history. Time will swallow up the secular age-and all the mad, blasphemous cults and superstitions-like a mote in a sandstorm. Only the True Church will endure.” He was smiling bloodily, but he didn’t sound smug, or triumphant. He was just stating an opinion.

The gun must have reached body temperature in the pocket of my jeans; when he pressed the barrel to the back of my head, at first I mistook it for his thumb. I stared into his eyes, trying to read his intentions, but all I could see was desperation. In the end, he was just a child alone in a foreign city, overwhelmed by disasters.

He slid the barrel around my head, until it was aimed at my temple. I closed my eyes, clutching at him involuntarily. I said, “Please—”

He took the gun away. I opened my eyes just in time to see him blow his brains out.

* * * *

All I wanted to do was curl up on the floor and sleep, and then wake to find that it had all been a dream. Some mechanical instinct kept me moving, though. I washed off as much of the blood as I could. I listened for signs that the neighbors had woken. The gun was an illegal Swedish weapon with an integral silencer, the round itself had made a barely audible hiss, but I wasn’t sure how loudly I’d been shouting.

I’d been wearing gloves from the start, of course. The ballistics would confirm suicide. But the hole in the ceiling and the broken jaw and the bruised ribs would have to be explained, and the chances were I’d shed hair and skin all over the room. Eventually, there would have to be a trial. And I would have to go to prison.

I was almost ready to call the police. I was too tired to think of fleeing, too sickened by what I’d done. I hadn’t literally killed the boy-just beaten him, and terrorized him. I was still angry with him, even then; he was partly to blame for De Angelis’s death. At least as much as I was to blame for his.

And then the mechanical part of me said:Anton was his brother. They might have met, the day he was killed-at Anton’s place, or the apartment with the thin blond girl. Trodden the same floor for a while. Wiped their feet on the same doormat. And since that time, he might have moved the icon from one hiding place to another.

I took out my notepad, knelt at the feet of the corpse, and sent out the code.

Three spheres responded.

* * * *

I found it just before dawn, buried under rubble in a half-demolished building on the outskirts of the city. It was still in the attaché case, but all the locks and alarms had been disabled. I opened the case, and stared at the thing itself for a while. It looked like the catalog photograph. Drab and ugly.

I wanted to snap it in two. I wanted to light a bonfire and burn it. Three people were dead, because of it.

But it wasn’t that simple.

I sat on the rubble with my head in my hands. I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t know what the icon meant to its rightful owners. I’d seen the church they were building, the place where it belonged. I’d heard the story-however apocryphal-of its creation. And if talk of divine compassion for the dead of Chernobyl being channelled into a radioactive Christmas card was meaningless, ludicrous bullshit to me ... that wasn’t the point. De Angelis had believed none of it-but she’d still blown her job, she’d still gone to Vienna of her own free will. And I could dream of a perfect, secular, rational world all I liked ... but I still had to live, and act, in the real one.

I was sure I could get the icon to Masini before I was arrested. He wasn’t likely to hand over all his worldly goods, as promised, but I’d probably be able to extract several billion lira from him-before the kid died, and his gratitude faded. Enough to buy myself some very good lawyers. Good enough, perhaps, to keep me out of prison.

Or I could do what De Angelis should have done, when it came to the crunch-instead of defending Masini’s fucking property rights to the death.

I returned to the apartment. I’d switched off all the alarms before leaving, I could enter through the door this time. I put on the VR helmet and glove, and wrote an invisible message with my fingertip in the empty space on the iconostasis.

Then I pulled out the phone plug, breaking the connection, and went looking for a place to hide until nightfall.

* * * *

We met just before midnight, outside the fairground to the city’s north-east, within sight of the Ferris wheel. Another frightened, expendable child, putting on a brave front. I might have been the cops. I might have been anyone.

When I handed over the attaché case, he opened it and glanced inside, then looked up at me as if I was some kind of holy apparition.

I said, “What will you do with it?”

“Extract the true icon from the physical representation. And then destroy it.”

I almost replied:You should have stolen Hengartner’s image file instead, and saved everyone a lot of trouble. But I didn’t have the heart.

He pressed a multilingual pamphlet into my hands. I read it on my way to the subway. It spelt out the theological differences between the True Church and the various national versions of Orthodoxy. Apparently it all came down to the question of the incarnation; God had been made information, not flesh, and anyone who’d missed that important distinction needed to be set right as soon as possible. It went on to explain how the True Church would unify the Eastern Orthodox-and eventually the entire Christian-world, while eradicating superstitions, apocalyptic cults, virulent nationalism, and atheistic materialism. It didn’t say anything, one way or the other, about anti-semitism, or the bombing of mosques.

The letters decayed on the page, minutes after I’d read them. Triggered by exhaled carbon dioxide? These people had appropriated the methods of some strange gurus indeed.

I took out my photo of De Angelis.

“Is this what you wanted of me? Are you satisfied?”

She didn’t reply. I tore up the image and let the pieces flutter to the ground.

I didn’t take the subway. I needed the cold air to clear my head. So I walked back into the city, making my way between the ruins of the incomprehensible past, and the heralds of the unimaginable future.

The Planck Dive

Gisela was contemplating the advantages of being crushed—almost certainly to death, albeit as slowly as possible—when the messenger appeared in her homescape. She noted its presence but instructed it to wait, a sleek golden courier with winged sandals stretching out a hand impatiently, frozen in mid-stride twenty delta away.

The scape was currently an expanse of yellow dunes beneath a pale blue sky, neither too stark nor too distracting. Gisela, reclining on the cool sand, was intent on a giant, scruffy triangle hovering at an incline over the dunes, each edge resembling a loose bundle of straw. The triangle was a collection of Feynman diagrams, showing just a few of the many ways a particle could move between three events in spacetime. A quantum particle could not be pinned down to any one path, but it could be treated as a sum of localised components, each following a different trajectory and taking part in a different set of interactions along the way.

In “empty” spacetime, interactions with virtual particles caused each component’s phase to rotate constantly, like the hand of a clock. But the time measured by any kind of clock travelling between two events in flat spacetime was greatest when the route taken was a straight line—any detours caused time dilation, shortening the trip—and so a plot of phase shift versus detour size also reached its peak for a straight line. Since this peak was smooth and flat, a group of nearly straight paths clustered around it all had similar phase shifts, and these paths allowed many more components to arrive in phase with each other, reinforcing each other, than any equivalent group on the slopes. Three straight lines, glowing red through the centre of each “bundle of straw”, illustrated the result: the classical paths, the paths of highest probability, were straight lines.

In the presence of matter, all the same processes became slightly skewed. Gisela added a couple of nanograms of lead to the model—a few trillion atoms, their world lines running vertically through the centre of the triangle, sprouting their own thicket of virtual particles. Atoms were neutral in charge and colour, but their individual electrons and quarks still scattered virtual photons and gluons. Every kind of matter interfered with some part of the virtual swarm, and the initial disturbance spread out through spacetime by scattering virtual particles itself, rapidly obliterating any difference between the effect of a tonne of rock or a tonne of neutrinos, growing weaker with distance according to a roughly inverse square law. With the rain of virtual particles—and the phase shifts they created—varying from place to place, the paths of highest probability ceased obeying the geometry of flat spacetime. The luminous red triangle of most-probable trajectories was now visibly curved.

The key idea dated back to Sakharov: gravity was nothing but the residue of the imperfect cancellation of other forces; squeeze the quantum vacuum hard enough and Einstein’s equations fell out. But since Einstein, every theory of gravity was also a theory of time. Relativity demanded that a free-falling particle’s rotating phase agree with every other clock that travelled the same path, and once gravitational time dilation was linked to changes in virtual particle density, every measure of time—from the half-life of a radioisotope’s decay (stimulated by vacuum fluctuations) to the vibrational modes of a sliver of quartz (ultimately due to the same phase effects as those giving rise to classical paths)—could be reinterpreted as a count of interactions with virtual particles.

It was this line of reasoning that had led Kumar—a century after Sakharov, building on work by Penrose, Smolin and Rovelli—to devise a model of spacetime as a quantum sum of every possible network of particle world lines, with classical “time” arising from the number of intersections along a given strand of the net. This model had been an unqualified success, surviving theoretical scrutiny and experimental tests for centuries. But it had never been validated at the smallest length scales, accessible only at absurdly high energies, and it made no attempt to explain the basic structure of the nets, or the rules that governed them. Gisela wanted to know where those details came from. She wanted to understand the universe at its deepest level, to touch the beauty and simplicity that lay beneath it all.

That was why she was taking the Planck Dive.

The messenger caught her eye again. It was radiating tags indicating that it represented Cartan’s mayor: non-sentient software that dealt with the maintenance of good relations with other polises, observing formal niceties and smoothing away minor points of conflict in those cases where no real citizen-to-citizen connections existed. Since Cartan had been in orbit around Chandrasekhar, ninety-seven light years from Earth, for almost three centuries—and was currently even further from all the other spacefaring polises—Gisela was at a loss to imagine what urgent diplomatic tasks the mayor could be engaged in, let alone why it would want to consult her.

She sent the messenger an activation tag. Deferring to the scape’s aesthetic of continuity, it sprinted across the dunes, coming to a halt in front of her in a cloud of fine dust. “We’re in the process of receiving two visitors from Earth.”

Gisela was astonished. “Earth? Which polis?”

“Athena. The first one has just arrived; the second will be in transit for another ninety minutes.”

Gisela had never heard of Athena, but ninety minutes per person sounded ominous. Everything meaningful about an individual citizen could be packed into less than an exabyte, and sent as a gamma-ray burst a few milliseconds long. If you wanted to simulate an entire flesher body—cell by cell, redundant viscera and all—that was a harmless enough eccentricity, but lugging the microscopic details of your “very own” small intestine ninety-seven light years was just being precious.

“What do you know about Athena? In brief.”

“It was founded in 2312, with a charter expressing the goal of ‘regaining the lost flesher virtues.’ In public fora, its citizens have shown little interest in exopolitan reality—other than flesher history and artforms—but they do participate in some contemporary interpolis cultural activities.”

“So why have these two come here?” Gisela laughed. “If they’re refugees from boredom, surely they could have sought asylum a little closer to home?”

The mayor took her literally. “They haven’t adopted Cartan citizenship; they’ve entered the polis with only visitor privileges. In their transmission preamble they stated that their purpose in coming was to witness the Planck Dive.”

“Witness—not take part in?”

“That’s what they said.”

They could have witnessed as much from home as any non-participant here in Cartan. The Dive team had been broadcasting everything—studies, schematics, simulations, technical arguments, metaphysical debates—from the moment the idea had coalesced out of little more than jokes and thought experiments, a few years after they’d gone into orbit around the black hole. But at least Gisela now knew why the mayor had picked on her; she’d volunteered to respond to any requests for information about the Dive that couldn’t be answered automatically from public sources. No one seemed to have found their reports to be lacking a single worthwhile detail, though, until now.

“So the first one’s suspended?”

“No. She woke as soon as she arrived.”

That seemed even stranger than their excess baggage. If you were travelling with someone, why not delay activation until your companion caught up? Or better yet, package yourselves as interleaved bits?

“But she’s still in the arrival lounge?”

“Yes.”

Gisela hesitated. “Shouldn’t I wait until the other one’s all here? So I can greet them together?”

“No.” The mayor seemed confident on this point. Gisela wished interpolis protocol allowed non-sentient software to play host; she felt woefully ill-prepared for the role, herself. But if she started consulting people, seeking advice, and looking into Athena’s culture in depth, the visitors would probably have toured Cartan and gone home before she was ready for them.

She steeled herself, and jumped.

The last person who’d whimsically redesigned the arrival lounge had made it a wooden pier surrounded by grey, windswept ocean. The first of the two visitors was still standing patiently at the end of the pier, which was just as well; it was unbounded in the other direction, and walking a few kilodelta to no avail might have been a bit dispiriting. Her fellow traveller, still in transit, was represented by a motionless placeholder. Both icons were highly anatomical-realist, clothed but clearly male and female, the unfrozen female much younger-looking. Gisela’s own icon was more stylised, and her surface, whether “skin” or “clothing”—either could gain a tactile sense if she wished—was textured with diffuse reflection rules not quite matching the optical properties of any real substance.

“Welcome to Cartan. I’m Gisela.” She stretched out her hand, and the visitor stepped forward and shook it—though it was possible that she perceived and executed an entirely different act, cross-translated through gestural interlingua.

“I’m Cordelia. This is my father, Prospero. We’ve come all the way from Earth.” She seemed slightly dazed, a response Gisela found entirely reasonable. Back in Athena, whatever elaborate metaphoric action they’d used to instruct the communications software to halt them, append suitable explanatory headers and checksums, then turn the whole package bit-by-bit into a stream of modulated gamma rays, it could never have fully prepared them for the fact that in a subjective instant they’d be stepping ninety-seven years into the future, and ninety-seven light years from home.

“You’re here to observe the Planck Dive?” Gisela chose to betray no hint of puzzlement; it would have been pointlessly cruel to drive home the fact that they could have seen everything from Athena. Even if you fetishised realtime data over lightspeed transmissions, it could hardly be worth slipping one-hundred-and-ninety-four years out of synch with your fellow citizens.

Cordelia nodded shyly, and glanced at the statue beside her. “My father, really ... “

Meaning what? It was all his idea? Gisela smiled encouragingly, hoping for clarification, but none was forthcoming. She’d been wondering why a Prospero had named his daughter Cordelia, but now it struck her as only prudent—if you had to succumb to a Shakespearean names fad at all—not to put anyone from the same play together in one family.

“Would you like to look around? While you’re waiting for him?”

Cordelia stared at her feet, as if the question was profoundly embarrassing.

“It’s up to you.” Gisela laughed. “I have no idea what constitutes the polite treatment of half-delivered relatives.” It was unlikely that Cordelia did, either; citizens of Athena clearly didn’t make a habit of crossing interstellar distances, and the connections on Earth all had so much bandwidth that the issue would never arise. “But if it was me in transit, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

Cordelia hesitated. “Could I see the black hole, please?”

“Of course.” Chandrasekhar possessed no blazing accretion disk—it was six billion years old, and had long ago swept the region clean of gas and dust—but it certainly left the imprint of its presence on the ordinary starlight around it. “I’ll give you the short tour, and we’ll be back long before your father’s awake.” Gisela examined the bearded icon; with his gaze fixed on the horizon and his arms at his sides, he appeared to be on the verge of bursting into song. “Assuming he’s not running on partial data already. I could have sworn I saw those eyes move.”

Cordelia smiled slightly, then looked up and said solemnly, “That’s not how we were packaged.”

Gisela sent her an address tag. “Then he’ll be none the wiser. Follow me.”

They stood on a circular platform in empty space. Gisela had inflected the scape’s address to give the platform “artificial gravity”—a uniform one gee, regardless of their motion—and a transparent dome full of air at standard temperature and pressure. Presumably all Athena citizens were set up to ignore any scape parameters that might cause them discomfort, but it still seemed like a good idea to err on the side of caution. The platform itself was a compromise, five delta wide—offering some protection from vertigo, but small enough to let its occupants see some forty degrees below “horizontal.”

Gisela pointed. “There it is: Chandrasekhar. Twelve solar masses. Seventeen thousand kilometres away. It might take you a moment to spot it; it looks about the same as the new moon from Earth.” She’d chosen their coordinates and velocity carefully; as she spoke, a bright star split in two, then flared for a moment into a small, perfect ring as it passed directly behind the hole. “Apart from gravitational lensing, of course.”

Cordelia smiled, obviously delighted. “Is this a real view?”

“Partly. It’s based on all the images we’ve received so far from a whole swarm of probes—but there are still viewpoints that have never been covered, and need to be interpolated. That includes the fact that we’re almost certainly moving with a different velocity than any probe that passed through the same location—so we’re seeing things differently, with different Doppler shifts and aberration.”

Cordelia absorbed this with no sign of disappointment. “Can we go closer?”

“As close as you like.”

Gisela sent control tags to the platform, and they spiralled in. For a while it looked as if there’d be nothing more to see; the featureless black disk ahead of them grew steadily larger, but it clearly wasn’t going to blossom with any kind of detail. Gradually though, a congested halo of lensed images began to form around it, and you didn’t need the flash of an Einstein ring to see that light was behaving strangely.

“How far away are we now?”

“About thirty-four M.” Cordelia looked uncertain. Gisela added, “Six hundred kilometres—but if you convert mass into distance in the natural way, that’s thirty-four times Chandrasekhar’s mass. It’s a useful convention; if a hole has no charge or angular momentum, its mass sets the scale for all the geometry: the event horizon is always at two M, light forms circular orbits at three M, and so on.” She conjured up a spacetime map of the region outside the hole, and instructed the scape to record the platform’s world line on it. “Actual distances travelled depend on the path you take, but if you think of the hole as being surrounded by spherical shells on which the tidal force is constant—something tangible you can measure on the spot—you can give them each a radius of curvature without caring about the details of how you might travel all the way to their centre.” With one spatial dimension omitted to make room for time, the shells became circles, and their histories on the map were shown as concentric translucent cylinders.

As the disk itself grew, the distortion around it spread faster. By ten M, Chandrasekhar was less than sixty degrees wide, but even constellations in the opposite half of the sky were visibly crowded together, as incoming light rays were bent into more radial paths. The gravitational blue shift, uniform across the sky, was strong enough now to give the stars a savage glint—not so much icy, as blue-hot. On the map, the light cones dotted along their world line—structures like stylised conical hour-glasses, made up of all the light rays passing through a given point at a given moment—were beginning to tilt towards the hole. Light cones marked the boundaries of physically possible motion; to cross your own light cone would be to outrace light.

Gisela created a pair of binoculars and offered them to Cordelia. “Try looking at the halo.”

Cordelia obliged her. “Ah! Where did all those stars come from?”

“Lensing lets you see the stars behind the hole, but it doesn’t stop there. Light that grazes the three-M shell orbits part-way around the hole before flying off in a new direction—and there’s no limit to how far it can swing around, if it grazes the shell close enough.” On the map, Gisela sketched half a dozen light rays approaching the hole from various angles; after wrapping themselves in barber’s-pole helices at slightly different distances from the three-M cylinder, they all headed off in almost the same direction. “If you look into the light that escapes from those orbits, you see an image of the whole sky, compressed into a narrow ring. And at the inner edge of that ring, there’s a smaller ring, and so on—each made up of light that’s orbited the hole one more time.”

Cordelia pondered this for a moment. “But it can’t go on forever, can it? Won’t diffraction effects blur the pattern, eventually?”

Gisela nodded, hiding her surprise. “Yeah. But I can’t show you that here. This scape doesn’t run to that level of detail!”

They paused at the three-M shell itself. The sky here was perfectly bisected: one hemisphere in absolute darkness, the other packed with vivid blue stars. Along the border, the halo arched over the dome like an impossibly geometricised Milky Way. Shortly after Cartan’s arrival, Gisela had created an hommage to Escher based on this view, tiling the half-sky with interlocking constellations that repeated at the edge in ever-smaller copies. With the binoculars on 1000 X, they could see a kind of silhouette of the platform itself “in the distance”: a band of darkness blocking a tiny part of the halo in every direction.

Then they continued towards the event horizon—oblivious to both tidal forces and the thrust they would have needed to maintain such a leisurely pace in reality.

The stars were now all brightest at ultraviolet frequencies, but Gisela had arranged for the dome to filter out everything but light from the flesher visible spectrum, in case Cordelia’s simulated skin took descriptions of radiation too literally. As the entire erstwhile celestial sphere shrank to a small disk, Chandrasekhar seemed to wrap itself around them—and this optical illusion had teeth. If they’d fired off a beam of light away from the hole, but failed to aim it at that tiny blue window, it would have bent right around like the path of a tossed rock and dived back into the hole. No material object could do better; the choice of escape routes was growing narrower. Gisela felt a frisson of claustrophobia; soon she’d be doing this for real.

They paused again to hover—implausibly—just above the horizon, with the only illumination a pin-prick of heavily blue-shifted radio waves behind them. On the map, their future light cone led almost entirely into the hole, with just the tiniest sliver protruding from the two-M cylinder. Gisela said, “Shall we go through?”

Cordelia’s face was etched in violet. “How?”

“Pure simulation. As authentic as possible ... but not so authentic that we’ll be trapped, I promise.”

Cordelia spread her arms, closed her eyes, and mimed falling backwards into the hole. Gisela instructed the platform to cross the horizon.

The speck of sky blinked out, then began to expand again, rapidly. Gisela was slowing down time a millionfold; in reality they would have reached the singularity in a fraction of a millisecond.

Cordelia said, “Can we stop here?”

“You mean freeze time?”

“No, just hover.”

“We’re doing that already. We’re not moving.” Gisela suspended the scape’s evolution. “I’ve halted time; I think that’s what you wanted.”

Cordelia seemed about to dispute this, but then she gestured at the now-frozen circle of stars. “Outside, the blue shift was the same right across the sky ... but now the stars at the edge are much bluer. I don’t understand.”

Gisela said, “In a way it’s nothing new; if we’d let ourselves free-fall towards the hole, we would have been moving fast enough to see a whole range of Doppler shifts superimposed on the gravitational blue shift, long before we crossed the horizon. You know the starbow effect?”

“Yes.” Cordelia examined the sky again, and Gisela could almost see her testing the explanation, imagining how a blue-shifted starbow should look. “But that only makes sense if we’re moving—and you said we weren’t.”

“We’re not, by one perfectly good definition. But it’s not the definition that applied outside.” Gisela highlighted a vertical section of their world line, where they’d hovered on the three-M shell. “Outside the event horizon—given a powerful enough engine—you can always stay fixed on a shell of constant tidal force. So it makes sense to choose that as a definition of being ‘motionless’—making time on this map strictly vertical. But inside the hole, that becomes completely incompatible with experience; your light cone tilts so far that your world line must cut through the shells. And the simplest new definition of being ‘motionless’ is to burrow straight through the shells—the complete opposite of trying to cling to them—and to make ‘map time’ strictly horizontal, pointing towards the centre of the hole.” She highlighted a section of their now-horizontal world line.

Cordelia’s expression of puzzlement began to give way to astonishment. “So when the light cones tip over far enough ... the definitions of ‘space’ and ‘time’ have to tip with them?”

“Yes! The centre of the hole lies in our future, now. We won’t hit the singularity face-first, we’ll hit it future-first—just like hitting the Big Crunch. And the direction on this platform that used to point towards the singularity is now facing ‘down’ on the map—into what seems from the outside to be the hole’s past, but is really a vast stretch of space. There are billions of light years laid out in front of us—the entire history of the hole’s interior, converted into space—and it’s expanding as we approach the singularity. The only catch is, elbow room and head room are in short supply. Not to mention time.”

Cordelia stared at the map, entranced. “So the inside of the hole isn’t a sphere at all? It’s a spherical shell in two directions, with the shell’s history converted into space as the third ... making the whole thing the surface of a hypercylinder? A hypercylinder that’s increasing in length, while its radius shrinks.” Suddenly her face lit up. “And the blue shift is like the blue shift when the universe starts contracting?” She turned to the frozen sky. “Except this space is only shrinking in two directions—so the more the angle of the starlight favours those directions, the more it’s blue-shifted?”

“That’s right.” Gisela was no longer surprised by Cordelia’s rapid uptake; the mystery was how she could have failed to learn everything there was to know about black holes, long ago. With unfettered access to a half-decent library and rudimentary tutoring software, she would have filled in the gaps in no time. But if her father had dragged her all the way to Cartan just to witness the Planck Dive, how could he have stood by and allowed Athena’s culture to impede her education? It made no sense.

Cordelia raised the binoculars and looked sideways, around the hole. “Why can’t I see us?”

“Good question.” Gisela drew a light ray on the map, aimed sideways, leaving the platform just after they’d crossed the horizon. “At the three-M shell, a ray like this would have followed a helix in spacetime, coming back to our world line after one revolution. But here, the helix has been flipped over and squeezed into a spiral—and at best, it only has time to travel half-way around the hole before it hits the singularity. None of the light we’ve emitted since crossing the horizon can make it back to us.

“That’s assuming a perfectly symmetrical Schwarzschild black hole, which is what we’re simulating. And an ancient hole like Chandrasekhar probably has settled down to a fair approximation of the Schwarzschild geometry. But close to the singularity, even infalling starlight would be blue-shifted enough to disrupt it, and anything more massive—like us, if we really were here—would cause chaotic changes even sooner.” She instructed the scape to switch to Belinsky-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz geometry, then restarted time. The stars began to shimmer with distortion, as if seen through a turbulent atmosphere, then the sky itself seemed to boil, red shifts and blue shifts sweeping across it in churning waves. “If we were embodied, and strong enough to survive the tidal forces, we’d feel them oscillating wildly as we passed through regions collapsing and expanding in different directions.” She modified the spacetime map accordingly, and enlarged it for a better view. Close to the singularity, the once-regular cylinders of constant tidal force now disintegrated into a random froth of ever finer, ever more distorted bubbles.

Cordelia examined the map with an expression of consternation. “How are you going to do any kind of computation in an environment like that?”

“We’re not. This is chaos—but chaotic systems are highly susceptible to manipulation. You know Tiplerian theology? The doctrine that we should try to reshape the universe to allow infinite computation to take place before the Big Crunch?”

“Yes.”

Gisela spread her arms to take in all of Chandrasekhar. “Reshaping a black hole is easier. With a closed universe, all you can do is rearrange what’s already there; with a black hole, you can pour new matter and radiation in from all directions. By doing that, we’re hoping to steer the geometry into a more orderly collapse—not the Schwarzschild version, but one that lets light circumnavigate the space inside the hole many times. Cartan Null will be made of counter-rotating beams of light, modulated with pulses like beads on a string. As they pass through each other, the pulses will interact; they’ll be blue-shifted to energies high enough for pair-production, and eventually even high enough for gravitational effects. Those beams will be our memory, and their interactions will drive all our computation—with luck, down almost to the Planck scale: ten-to-the-minus-thirty-five metres.”

Cordelia contemplated this in silence, then asked hesitantly, “But how much computation will you be able to do?”

“In total?” Gisela shrugged. “That depends on details of the structure of spacetime at the Planck scale—details we won’t know until we’re inside. There are some models that would allow us to do the whole Tiplerian thing in miniature: infinite computation. But most give a range of finite answers, some large, some small.”

Cordelia was beginning to look positively gloomy. Surely she’d known about the Divers’ fate all along?

Gisela said, “You do realise we’re sending in clones? No one’s moving their sole version into Cartan Null!”

“I know.” Cordelia averted her eyes. “But once you are the clone ... won’t you be afraid of dying?”

Gisela was touched. “Only slightly. And not at all, at the end. While there’s still a slender chance of infinite computation—or even some exotic discovery that might allow us to escape—we’ll hang on to fear of death. It should help motivate us to examine all the options! But if and when it’s clear that dying is inevitable, we’ll switch off the old instinctive response, and just accept it.”

Cordelia nodded politely, but she didn’t seem at all convinced. If you’d been raised in a polis that celebrated “the lost flesher virtues”, this probably sounded like cheating at best, and self-mutilation at worst.

“Can we go back now, please? My father will be awake soon.”

“Of course.” Gisela wanted to say something to this strange, solemn child to put her mind at ease, but she had no idea where to begin. So they jumped out of the scape together—out of their fictitious light cones—abandoning the simulation before it was forced to admit that it was offering neither the chance of new knowledge, nor the possibility of death.

When Prospero woke, Gisela introduced herself and asked what he wished to see. She suggested a schematic of Cartan Null; it didn’t seem tactful to mention that Cordelia had already toured Chandrasekhar, but offering him a scape that neither had seen seemed like a diplomatic way of side-stepping the issue.

Prospero smiled at her indulgently. “I’m sure your Falling City is ingeniously designed, but that’s of no interest to me. I’m here to scrutinise your motives, not your machines.”

“Our motives?” Gisela wondered if there’d been a translation error. “We’re curious about the structure of spacetime. Why else would someone dive into a black hole?”

Prospero’s smile broadened. “That’s what I’m here to determine. There’s a wide range of choices besides the Pandora myth: Prometheus, Quixote, the Grail of course ... perhaps even Orpheus. Do you hope to rescue the dead?”

“Rescue the dead?” Gisela was dumbfounded. “Oh, you mean Tiplerian resurrection? No, we have no plans for that at all. Even if we obtained infinite computing power, which is unlikely, we’d have far too little information to recreate any specific dead fleshers. As for resurrecting everyone by brute force, simulating every possible conscious being ... there’d be no sure way to screen out in advance simulations that would experience extreme suffering—and statistically, they’re likely to outnumber the rest by about ten thousand to one. So the whole thing would be grossly unethical.”

“We shall see.” Prospero waved her objections away. “What’s important is that I meet all of Charon’s passengers as soon as possible.”

“Charon’s ... ? You mean the Dive team?”

Prospero shook his head with an anguished expression, as if he’d been misunderstood, but he said, “Yes, assemble your ‘Dive team.’ Let me speak to them all. I can see how badly I’m needed here!”

Gisela was more bewildered than ever. “Needed? You’re welcome here, of course ... but in what way are you needed?”

Cordelia reached over and tugged at her father’s arm. “Can we wait in the castle? I’m so tired.” She wouldn’t look Gisela in the eye.

“Of course, my darling!” Prospero leant down and kissed her forehead. He pulled a rolled-up parchment out of his robe and tossed it into the air. It unfurled into a doorway, hovering above the ocean beside the pier, leading into a sunlit scape. Gisela could see vast, overgrown gardens, stone buildings, winged horses in the air. It was a good thing they’d compressed their accommodation more efficiently than their bodies, or they would have tied up the gamma ray link for about a decade.

Cordelia stepped through the doorway, holding Prospero’s hand, trying to pull him through. Trying, Gisela finally realised, to shut him up before he could embarrass her further.

Without success. With one foot still on the pier, Prospero turned to Gisela. “Why am I needed? I’m here to be your Homer, your Virgil, your Dante, your Dickens! I’m here to extract the mythic essence of this glorious, tragic endeavour! I’m here to grant you a gift infinitely greater than the immortality you seek!”

Gisela didn’t bother pointing out, yet again, that she had every expectation of a much shorter life inside the hole than out. “What’s that?”

“I’m here to make you legendary!” Prospero stepped off the pier, and the doorway contracted behind him.

Gisela stared out across the ocean, unseeing for a moment, then sat down slowly and let her feet dangle in the icy water.

Certain things were beginning to make sense.

“Be nice,” Gisela pleaded. “For Cordelia’s sake.”

Timon feigned wounded puzzlement. “What makes you think I won’t be nice? I’m always nice.” He morphed briefly from his usual angular icon—all rib-like frames and jointed rods—into a button-eyed teddy bear.

Gisela groaned softly. “Listen. If I’m right—if she’s thinking of migrating to Cartan—it will be the hardest decision she’s ever had to make. If she could just walk away from Athena, she would have done it by now—instead of going to all the trouble of making her father believe that it was his idea to come here.”

“What makes you so sure it wasn’t?”

“Prospero has no interest in reality; the only way he could have heard of the Dive would be Cordelia bringing it to his attention. She must have chosen Cartan because it’s far enough from Earth to make a clean break—and the Dive gave her the excuse she needed, a fit subject for her father’s ‘talents’ to dangle in front of him. But until she’s ready to tell him that she’s not going back, we mustn’t alienate him. We mustn’t make things harder for her than they already are.”

Timon rolled his eyes into his anodised skull. “All right! I’ll play along! I suppose there is a chance you might be reading her correctly. But if you’re mistaken ... “

Prospero chose that moment to make his entrance, robes billowing, daughter in tow. They were in a scape created for the occasion, to Prospero’s specifications: a room shaped like two truncated square pyramids joined at their bases, panelled in white, with a twenty-M view of Chandrasekhar through a trapezoidal window. Gisela had never seen this style before; Timon had christened it “Athenian Astrokitsch.”

The five members of the Dive team were seated around a semi-circular table. Prospero stood before them while Gisela made the introductions: Sachio, Tiet, Vikram, Timon. She’d spoken to them all, making the case for Cordelia, but Timon’s half-hearted concession was the closest thing she’d received to a guarantee. Cordelia shrank into a corner of the room, eyes downcast.

Prospero began soberly. “For nigh on a thousand years, we, the descendants of the flesh, have lived our lives wrapped in dreams of heroic deeds long past. But we have dreamed in vain of a new Odyssey to inspire us, new heroes to stand beside the old, new ways to retell the eternal myths. Three more days, and your journey would have been wasted, lost to us forever.” He smiled proudly. “But I have arrived in time to pluck your tale from the very jaws of gravity!”

Tiet said, “Nothing was at risk of being lost. Information about the Dive is being broadcast to every polis, stored in every library.” Tiet’s icon was like a supple jewelled statue carved from ebony.

Prospero waved a hand dismissively. “A stream of technical jargon. In Athena, it might as well have been the murmuring of the waves.”

Tiet raised an eyebrow. “If your vocabulary is impoverished, augment it—don’t expect us to impoverish our own. Would you give an account of classical Greece without mentioning the name of a single city-state?”

“No. But those are universal terms, part of our common heritage—”

“They’re terms that have no meaning outside a tiny region of space, and a brief period of time. Unlike the terms needed to describe the Dive, which are applicable to every quartic femtometre of spacetime.”

Prospero replied, a little stiffly, “Be that as it may, in Athena we prefer poetry to equations. And I have come to honour your journey in language that will resonate down the corridors of the imagination for millennia.”

Sachio said, “So you believe you’re better qualified to portray the Dive than the participants?” Sachio appeared as an owl, perched inside the head of a flesher-shaped wrought-iron cage full of starlings.

“I am a narratologist.”

“You have some kind of specialised training?”

Prospero nodded proudly. “Though in truth, it is a vocation. When ancient fleshers gathered around their campfires, I was the one telling stories long into the night, of how the gods fought among themselves, and even mortal warriors were raised up into the sky to make the constellations.”

Timon replied, deadpan, “And I was the one sitting opposite, telling you what a load of drivel you were spouting.” Gisela was about to turn on him, to excoriate him for breaking his promise, when she realised that he’d spoken to her alone, routing the data outside the scape. She shot him a poisonous glance.

Sachio’s owl blinked with puzzlement. “But you find the Dive itself incomprehensible. So how are you suited to explain it to others?”

Prospero shook his head. “I have come to create enigmas, not explanations. I have come to shape the story of your descent into a form that will live on long after your libraries have turned to dust.”

“Shape it how?” Vikram was as anatomically correct as a Da Vinci sketch, when he chose to be, but he lacked the tell-tale signs of a physiological simulation: no sweat, no dead skin, no shed hair. “You mean change things?”

“To extract the mythic essence, mere detail must become subservient to a deeper truth.”

Timon said, “I think that was a yes.”

Vikram frowned amiably. “So what exactly will you change?” He spread his arms, and stretched them to encompass his fellow team members. “If we’re to be improved upon, do tell us how.”

Prospero said cautiously, “Five is a poor number, for a start. Seven, perhaps, or twelve.”

“Whew.” Vikram grinned. “Shadowy extras only; no one’s for the chop.”

“And the name of your vessel ... “

“Cartan Null? What’s wrong with that? Cartan was a great flesher mathematician, who clarified the meaning and consequences of Einstein’s work. ‘Null’ because it’s built of null geodesics: the paths followed by light rays.”

“Posterity,” Prospero declared, “will like it better as ‘The Falling City’—its essence unencumbered by your infelicitous words.”

Tiet said coolly, “We named this polis after Élie Cartan. Its clone inside Chandrasekhar will be named after Élie Cartan. If you’re unwilling to respect that, you might as well head back to Athena right now, because no one here is going to offer you the slightest cooperation.”

Prospero glanced at the others, possibly looking for some evidence of dissent. Gisela had mixed feelings; Prospero’s mythopoeic babble would not outlive the truth in the libraries, whatever he imagined, so in a sense it hardly mattered what it contained. But if they didn’t draw the line somewhere, she could imagine his presence rapidly becoming unbearable.

He said, “Very well. Cartan Null. I am an artisan as well as an artist; I can work with imperfect clay.”

As the meeting broke up, Timon cornered Gisela. Before he could start complaining, she said, “If you think three more days of that is too awful to contemplate, imagine what it’s like for Cordelia.”

Timon shook his head. “I’ll keep my word. But now that I’ve seen what she’s up against ... I really don’t think she’s going to make it. If she’s been wrapped in propaganda about the golden age of fleshers all her life, how can you expect her to see through it? A polis like Athena forms a closed trapped memetic surface: concentrate enough Prosperos in one place, and there’s no escape.”

Gisela eyed him balefully. “She’s here, isn’t she? Don’t try telling me that she’s bound to Athena forever, just because she was created there. Nothing’s as simple as that. Even black holes emit Hawking radiation.”

“Hawking radiation carries no information. It’s thermal noise; you can’t tunnel out with it.” Timon swept two fingers along a diagonal line, the gesture for “QED.”

Gisela said, “It’s only a metaphor, you idiot, not an isomorphism. If you can’t tell the difference, maybe you should fuck off to Athena yourself.”

Timon mimed pulling his hand back from something biting it, and vanished.

Gisela looked around the empty scape, angry with herself for losing her temper. Through the window, Chandrasekhar was calmly proceeding to crush spacetime out of existence, as it had for the past six billion years.

She said, “And you’d better not be right.”

Fifty hours before the Dive, Vikram instructed the probes in the lowest orbits to begin pouring nanomachines through the event horizon. Gisela and Cordelia joined him in the control scape, a vast hall full of maps and gadgets for manipulating the hardware scattered around Chandrasekhar. Prospero was off interrogating Timon, an ordeal Vikram had just been through himself. “Oedipal urges” and “womb/vagina symbolism” had figured prominently, though Vikram had cheerfully informed Prospero that as far as he knew, no one in Cartan had ever shown much interest in either organ. Gisela found herself wondering precisely how Cordelia had been created; slavish simulations of flesher childbirth didn’t bear thinking about.

The nanomachines comprised only a trickle of matter, a few tonnes per second. Deep inside the hole, though, they’d measure the curvature around them—observing both starlight and signals from the nanomachines following behind—then modify their own collective mass distribution in such a way as to steer the hole’s future geometry closer to the target. Every deviation from free fall meant jettisoning molecular fragments and sacrificing chemical energy, but before they’d entirely ripped themselves apart they’d give birth to photonic machines tailored to do the same thing on a smaller scale.

It was impossible to know whether or not any of this was working as planned, but a map in the scape showed the desired result. Vikram sketched in two counter-rotating bundles of light rays. “We can’t avoid having space collapsing in two directions and expanding in the third—unless we poured in so much matter that it collapsed in all three, which would be even worse. But it’s possible to keep changing the direction of expansion, flipping it ninety degrees again and again, evening things out. That allows light to execute a series of complete orbits—each taking about one hundredth the time of the previous one—and it also means there are periods of contraction across the beams, which counteract the de-focusing effects of the periods of expansion.”

The two bundles of rays oscillated between circular and elliptical cross-sections as the curvature stretched and squeezed them. Cordelia created a magnifying glass and followed them “in”: forwards in time, towards the singularity. She said, “If the orbital periods form a geometric series, there’s no limit to the number of orbits you could fit in before the singularity. And the wavelength is blue-shifted in proportion to the size of the orbit, so diffraction effects never take over. So what’s there to stop you doing infinite computation?”

Vikram replied cautiously, “For a start, once colliding photons start creating particle-antiparticle pairs, there’ll be a range of energies for each species of particle when it will be travelling so much slower than lightspeed that the pulses will begin to smear. We think we’ve shaped and spaced the pulses in such a way that all the data will survive, but it would only take one unknown massive particle to turn the whole stream into gibberish.”

Cordelia looked up at him with a hopeful expression. “What if there are no unknown particles?”

Vikram shrugged. “In Kumar’s model, time is quantised, so the frequency of the beams can’t keep rising without limit. And most of the alternative theories also imply that the whole setup will fail eventually, for one reason or another. I only hope it fails slowly enough for us to understand why, before we’re incapable of understanding anything.” He laughed. “Don’t look so mournful! It will be like ... the death of one branch of a tree. And maybe we’ll gain some knowledge for a while that we could never even glimpse, outside the hole.”

“But you won’t be able to do anything with it,” Cordelia protested. “Or tell anyone.”

“Ah, technology and fame.” Vikram blew a raspberry. “Listen, if my Dive clone dies learning nothing, he’ll still die happy, knowing that I continued outside. And if he learns everything I’m hoping he’ll learn ... he’ll be too ecstatic to go on living.” Vikram composed his face into a picture of exaggerated earnestness, deflating his own hyperbole, and Cordelia actually smiled. Gisela had been beginning to wonder if morbid grief over the fate of the Divers would be enough to put her off Cartan altogether.

Cordelia said, “What would make it worthwhile, then? What’s the most you could hope for?”

Vikram sketched a Feynman diagram in the air between them. “If you take spacetime for granted, rotational symmetry plus quantum mechanics gives you a set of rules for dealing with a particle’s spin. Penrose turned this inside out, and showed that the whole concept of ‘the angle between two directions’ can be created from scratch in a network of world lines, so long as they obey those spin rules. Suppose a system of particles with a certain total spin throws an electron to another system, and in the process the first system’s spin decreases. If you knew the angle between the two spin vectors, you could calculate the probability that the second spin was increased rather than decreased ... but if the concept of ’angle’ doesn’t even exist yet, you can work backwards and define it from the probability you get by looking at all the networks for which the second spin is increased.

“Kumar and others extended this idea to cover more abstract symmetries. From a list of rules about what constitutes a valid network, and how to assign a phase to each one, we can now derive all known physics. But I want to know if there’s a deeper explanation for those rules. Are spin and the other quantum numbers truly elementary, or are they the product of something more fundamental? And when networks reinforce or cancel each other according to the phase difference between them, is that something basic we just have to accept, or is there hidden machinery beneath the mathematics?”

Timon appeared in the scape, and drew Gisela aside. “I’ve committed a small infraction—and knowing you, you’ll find out anyway. So this is a confession in the hope of leniency.”

“What have you done?”

Timon regarded her nervously. “Prospero was rambling on about flesher culture as the route to all knowledge.” He morphed into a perfect imitation, and replayed Prospero’s voice: “‘The key to astronomy lies in the study of the great Egyptian astrologers, and the heart of mathematics is revealed in the rituals of the Pythagorean mystics ... ‘“

Gisela put her face in her hands; she would have been hard-pressed not to respond herself. “And you said—?”

“I told him that if he was ever embodied in a space-suit, floating among the stars, he ought to try sneezing on the face plate to improve the view.”

Gisela cracked up laughing. Timon asked hopefully, “Does that mean I’m forgiven?”

“No. How did he take it?”

“Hard to tell.” Timon frowned. “I’m not sure that he’s capable of grasping insults. It would require imagining that someone could believe that he’s less than essential to the future of civilisation.”

Gisela said sternly, “Two more days. Try harder.”

“Try harder yourself. It’s your turn now.”

“What?”

“Prospero wants to see you.” Timon grinned with malicious pleasure. “Time to have your own mythic essence extracted.”

Gisela glanced towards Cordelia; she was talking animatedly with Vikram. Athena, and Prospero, had suffocated her; it was only away from both that she came to life. The decision to migrate was hers alone, but Gisela would never forgive herself if she did anything to diminish the opportunity.

Timon said, “Be nice.”

The Dive team had decided against any parting of the clones; their frozen snapshots would be incorporated into the blueprint for Cartan Null without ever being run outside Chandrasekhar. When Gisela had told Prospero this, he’d been appalled, but he’d cheered up almost immediately; it left him all the more room to invent some ritual farewell for the travellers, without being distracted by the truth.

The whole team did gather in the control scape, though, along with Prospero and Cordelia, and a few dozen friends. Gisela stood apart from the crowd as Vikram counted down to the deadline. On “ten”, she instructed her exoself to clone her. On “nine”, she sent the snapshot to the address being broadcast by an icon for the Cartan Null file—a stylised set of counter-rotating light beams—hovering in the middle of the scape. When the tag came back confirming the transaction, she felt a surge of loss; the Dive was no longer part of her own linear future, even if she thought of the clone as a component of her extended self.

Vikram shouted exuberantly, “Three! Two! One!” He picked up the Cartan Null icon and tossed it into a map of the spacetime around Chandrasekhar. This triggered a gamma-ray burst from the polis to a probe with an eight-M orbit; there, the data was coded into nanomachines designed to recreate it in active, photonic form—and those nanomachines joined the stream cascading into the hole.

On the map, the falling icon veered into a “motionless” vertical world line as it approached the two-M shell. Successive slices of constant time in the static frame outside the hole never crossed the horizon, they merely clung to it; by one definition, the nanomachines would take forever to enter Chandrasekhar.

By another definition, the Dive was over. In their own frame, the nanomachines would have taken less than one-and-a-half milliseconds to fall from the probe to the horizon, and not much longer to reach the point where Cartan Null was launched. And however much subjective time the Divers had experienced, however much computing had been done along the way, the entire region of space containing Cartan Null would have been crushed into the singularity a few microseconds later.

“If the Divers tunnelled out of the hole, there’d be a paradox, wouldn’t there?” Gisela turned; she hadn’t noticed Cordelia behind her. “Whenever they emerged, they wouldn’t have fallen in yet—so they could swoop down and grab the nanomachines, preventing their own births.” The idea seemed to disturb her.

Gisela said, “Only if they tunnelled out close to the horizon. If they appeared further away—say here in Cartan, right now—they’d already be too late. The nanomachines have had too much of a head start; the fact that they’re almost standing still in our reference frame doesn’t make them an easy target if you’re actually chasing after them. Even at lightspeed, nothing could catch them from here.”

Cordelia appeared to take heart from this. “So escape isn’t impossible?”

“Well ... “ Gisela thought of listing some of the other hurdles, but then she began to wonder if the question was about something else entirely. “No. It’s not impossible.”

Cordelia gave her a conspiratorial smile. “Good.”

Prospero cried out, “Gather round! Gather round now and hear The Ballad of Cartan Null!” He created a podium, rising beneath his feet. Timon sidled up to Gisela and whispered, “If this involves a lute, I’m sending my senses elsewhere.”

It didn’t; the blank verse was delivered without musical accompaniment. The content, though, was even worse than Gisela had feared. Prospero had ignored everything she and the others had told him. In his version of events, “Charon’s passengers” entered “gravity’s abyss” for reasons he’d invented out of thin air: to escape, respectively, a failed romance/vengeance for an unspeakable crime/the ennui of longevity; to resurrect a lost flesher ancestor; to seek contact with “the gods.” The universal questions the Divers had actually hoped to answer—the structure of spacetime at the Planck scale, the underpinnings of quantum mechanics—didn’t rate a mention.

Gisela glanced at Timon, but he seemed to be taking the news that his sole version had just fled into Chandrasekhar to avoid punishment for an unnamed atrocity extremely well; there was disbelief on his face, but no anger. He said softly, “This man lives in Hell. Mucous on the face plate is all he’ll ever see.”

The audience stood in silence as Prospero began to “describe” the Dive itself. Timon stared at the floor with a bemused smile. Tiet wore an expression of detached boredom. Vikram kept peeking at a display behind him, to see if the faint gravitational radiation emitted by the inflowing nanomachines was still conforming to his predictions.

It was Sachio who finally lost control and interjected angrily, “Cartan Null is some ghostly image of a scape, full of ghostly icons, floating through the vacuum, down into the hole?”

Prospero seemed more startled than outraged by the interruption. “It is a city of light. Translucent, ethereal ... “

The owl in Sachio’s skull puffed its feathers out. “No photon state would look like that. What you describe could never exist, and even if it could it would never be conscious.” Sachio had worked for decades on the problem of giving Cartan Null the freedom to process data without disrupting the geometry around it.

Prospero spread his arms in a conciliatory gesture. “An archetypal quest narrative must be kept simple. To burden it with technicalities—”

Sachio inclined his head briefly, fingertips to forehead, downloading information from the polis library. “Do you have any idea what archetypal narratives are?”

“Messages from the gods, or from the depths of the soul; who can say? But they encode the most profound and mysterious—”

Sachio cut him off impatiently. “They’re the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity’s greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you’ve created is not only devoid of truth, it’s devoid of aesthetic merit.”

Prospero was stunned. He looked around the room expectantly, as if waiting for someone to speak up in defence of the Ballad.

No one made a sound.

This was it: the end of diplomacy. Gisela spoke privately to Cordelia, whispering urgently: “Stay in Cartan! No one can force you to leave!”

Cordelia turned to her with an expression of open astonishment. “But I thought—” She fell silent, reassessing something, hiding her surprise.

Then she said, “I can’t stay.”

“Why not? What is there to stop you? You can’t stay buried in Athena—” Gisela caught herself; whatever bizarre hold the place had on her, disparaging it wouldn’t help.

Prospero was muttering in disbelief now, “Ingratitude! Base ingratitude!” Cordelia regarded him with forlorn affection. “He’s not ready.” She faced Gisela, and spoke plainly. “Athena won’t last forever. Polises like that form and decay; there are too many real possibilities for people to cling to one arbitrary sanctified culture, century after century. But he’s not prepared for the transition; he doesn’t even realise it’s coming. I can’t abandon him to that. He’s going to need someone to help him through.” She smiled suddenly, mischievously. “But I’ve cut two centuries off the waiting time. If nothing else, the trip did that.”

Gisela was speechless for a moment, shamed by the strength of this child’s love. Then she sent Cordelia a stream of tags. “These are references to the best libraries on Earth. You’ll get the real stuff there, not some watered-down version of flesher physics.”

Prospero was shrinking the podium, descending to ground level. “Cordelia! Come to me now. We’re leaving these barbarians to the obscurity they deserve!”

For all that she admired Cordelia’s loyalty, Gisela was still saddened by her choice. She said numbly, “You belong in Cartan. It should have been possible. We should have been able to find a way.”

Cordelia shook her head: no failure, no regrets. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve survived Athena so far; I think I can see it through to the end. Everything you’ve shown me, everything I’ve done here, will help.” She squeezed Gisela’s hand. “Thank you.”

She joined her father. Prospero created a doorway, opening up onto a yellow brick road through the stars. He stepped through, and Cordelia followed him.

Vikram turned away from the gravitational wave trace and asked mildly, “All right, you can own up now: who threw in the additional exabyte?”

“Freeeeee-dom!” Cordelia bounded across Cartan Null’s control scape, a long platform floating in a tunnel of colour-coded Feynman diagrams, streaming through the darkness like the trails of a billion colliding and disintegrating sparks.

Gisela’s first instinct was to corner her and shout in her face: Kill yourself now! End this now! A brief side-branch, cut short before there was time for personality divergence, hardly counted as a real life and a real death. It would be a forgotten dream, nothing more.

That analysis didn’t hold up, though. From the instant she’d become conscious, this Cordelia had been an entirely separate person: the one who’d left Athena forever, the one who’d escaped. Her extended self had invested far too much in this clone to treat it as a mistake and cut its losses. Beyond anything it hoped for itself, the clone knew exactly what its existence meant for the original. To betray that, even if it could never be found out, would be unthinkable.

Tiet said sharply, “You didn’t raise her hopes, did you?”

Gisela thought back over their conversations. “I don’t think so. She must know there’s almost no chance of survival.”

Vikram looked troubled. “I might have put our own case too strongly. She might believe the same discoveries will be enough for her—but I’m not sure they will.”

Timon sighed impatiently. “She’s here. That’s irreversible; there’s no point agonising about it. All we can do is give her the chance to make what she can of the experience.”

A horrifying thought struck Gisela. “The extra data hasn’t overburdened us, has it? Ruled out access to the full computational domain?” Cordelia had compressed herself down to a far leaner program than the version she’d sent from Earth, but it was still an unexpected load.

Sachio made a sound of indignation. “How badly do you think I did my job? I knew someone would bring in more than they’d promised; I left a hundredfold safety margin. One stowaway changes nothing.”

Timon touched Gisela’s arm. “Look.” Cordelia had finally slowed down enough to start examining her surroundings. The primary beams, the infrastructure for all their computation, had already been blue-shifted to hard gamma rays, and the colliding photons were creating pairs of relativistic electrons and positrons. In addition, a range of experimental beams with shorter wavelengths probed the physics of length scales ten thousand times smaller—physics that would apply to the primary beams about a subjective hour later. Cordelia found the window with the main results from these beams. She turned and called out, “Lots of mesons full of top and bottom quarks ahead, but nothing unexpected!”

“Good!” Gisela felt the knot of guilt and anxiety inside her begin to unwind. Cordelia had chosen the Dive freely, just like the rest of them. The fact that it had been a hard decision for her to make was no reason to assume that she’d regret it.

Timon said, “Well, you were right. I was wrong. She certainly tunnelled out of Athena.”

“Yeah. So much for your theory of closed trapped memetic surfaces.” Gisela laughed. “Pity it was just a metaphor, though.”

“Why? I thought you’d be overjoyed that she made it.”

“I am. It’s just a shame that it says nothing at all about our own chances of escape.”

Each orbit gave them thirty minutes of subjective time, while the true length and time scales of Cartan Null shrank a hundredfold. Sachio and Tiet scrutinised the functioning of the polis, checking and rechecking the integrity of the “hardware” as new species of particles entered the pulse trains. Timon reviewed various methods for shunting information into new modes, if the opportunity arose. Gisela struggled to bring Cordelia up to speed, and Vikram, whose main work had been the nanomachines, helped her.

The shortest-wavelength beams were still recapitulating the results of old particle accelerator experiments; the three of them pored over the data together. Gisela summarised as best she could. “Charge and the other quantum numbers generate a kind of angle between world lines in the networks, just like spin does, but in this case they act like angles in five-dimensional space. At low energies what you see are three separate subspaces, for electromagnetism and the weak and strong forces.”

“Why?”

“An accident in the early universe with Higgs bosons. Let me draw a picture ... “

There was no time to go into all the subtleties of particle physics, but many of the issues that were crucial outside Chandrasekhar were becoming academic for Cartan Null anyway. Broken symmetries were being restored as they spoke, with increasing kinetic energy diluting differences in rest mass into insignificance. The polis was rapidly mutating into a hybrid of every possible particle type; what governed their future would not be the theory of any one force, but the nature of quantum mechanics itself.

“What lies behind the frequency and wavelength of a particle?” Vikram sketched a snapshot of a wave packet on a spacetime diagram. “In its own reference frame, an electron’s phase rotates at a constant rate: about once every ten-to-the-minus-twenty seconds. If it’s moving, we see that rate slowed down by time dilation, but that’s not the whole picture.” He drew a set of components fanning out at different velocities from a single point on the wave, then marked off successive points where the phase came full circle for each one. The locus of these points formed a set of hyperbolic wavefronts in spacetime, like a stack of conical bowls—packed more tightly, in both time and space, where the components’ velocity was greater. “The spacing of the original wave is only reproduced by components with just the right velocity; they trace out identical copies of the wave at later times, all neatly superimposed. Components with the wrong velocity scramble the phase, so their copies all cancel out.” He repeated the entire construction for a hundred points along the wave, and it propagated neatly into the future. “In curved spacetime, the whole process becomes distorted—but given the right symmetries, the shape of the wave can be preserved while the wavelength shrinks and the frequency rises.” Vikram warped the diagram to demonstrate. “Our own situation.”

Cordelia took this all in, scribbling calculations, cross-checking everything to her own satisfaction. “Okay. So why does that have to break down? Why can’t we just keep being blue-shifted?”

Vikram zoomed in on the diagram. “All phase shifts ultimately come from interactions—intersections of one world line with another. In the Kumar model, every network of world lines has a finite weave. At each intersection, there’s a tiny phase shift that makes time jump by about ten-to-the-minus-forty-three seconds ... and it’s meaningless to talk about either a smaller phase shift, or a shorter time scale. So if you try to blue-shift a wave indefinitely, eventually you reach a point where the whole system no longer has the resolution to keep reproducing it.” As the wave packet spiralled in, it began to take on a smeared, jagged approximation of its former shape. Then it disintegrated into unrecognisable noise.

Cordelia examined the diagram carefully, tracing individual components through the final stages of the process. Finally she said, “How long before we see evidence of this? Assuming the model’s correct?”

Vikram didn’t reply; he seemed to be having second thoughts about the wisdom of the whole demonstration. Gisela said, “In about two hours we should be able to detect quantised phase in the experimental beams. And then we’ll have another hour or so before—” Vikram glanced meaningfully at her—privately, but Cordelia must have guessed why the sentence trailed off, because she turned on him.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” she demanded indignantly. “Collapse into hysterics at the first glimmering of mortality?”

Vikram looked stung. Gisela said, “Be fair. We’ve only known you three days. We don’t know what to expect.”

“No.” Cordelia gazed up at the stylised image of the beam that encoded them, swarming now with everything from photons to the heaviest mesons. “But I’m not going to ruin the Dive for you. If I’d wanted to brood about death, I would have stayed home and read bad flesher poetry.” She smiled. “Baudelaire can screw himself. I’m here for the physics.”

Everyone gathered round a single window as the moment of truth for the Kumar model approached. The data it displayed came from what was essentially a two-slit interference experiment, complicated by the need to perform it without anything resembling solid matter. A sinusoidal pattern showed the numbers of particles detected across a region where an electron beam recombined with itself after travelling two different paths; since there were only a finite number of detection sites, and each count had to be an integer, the pattern was already “quantised”, but the analysis software took this into account, and the numbers were large enough for the image to appear smooth. At a certain wavelength, any genuine Planck scale effects would rise above these artifacts, and once they appeared they’d only grow stronger.

The software said, “Found something!” and zoomed in to show a slight staircasing of the curve. At first it was so subtle that Gisela had to take the program’s word that it wasn’t merely showing them the usual, unavoidable jagging. Then the tiny steps visibly broadened, from two horizontal pixels to three. Sets of three adjacent detection sites, which moments ago had been registering different particle counts, were now returning identical results. The whole apparatus had shrunk to the point where the electrons couldn’t tell that the path lengths involved were different.

Gisela felt a rush of pure delight, then an aftertaste of fear. They were reaching down to brush their fingertips across the weave of the vacuum. It was a triumph that they’d survived this far, but their descent was almost certainly unstoppable.

The steps grew wider; the image zoomed out to show more of the curve. Vikram and Tiet cried out simultaneously, a moment before the analysis software satisfied itself with rigorous statistical tests. Vikram repeated softly, “That’s wrong.” Tiet nodded, and spoke to the software. “Show us a single wave’s phase structure.” The display changed to a linear staircase. It was impossible to measure the changing phase of a single wave directly, but assuming that the two versions of the beam were undergoing identical changes, this was the progression implied by the interference pattern.

Tiet said, “This is not in agreement with the Kumar model. The phase is quantised, but the steps aren’t equal—or even random, like the Santini model. They’re structured across the wave, in cycles. Narrower, broader, narrower again ... “

Silence descended. Gisela gazed at the pattern and struggled to concentrate, elated that they’d found something unexpected, terrified that they might fail to make sense of it. Why wouldn’t the phase shift come in equal units? This cyclic pattern was a violation of symmetry, allowing you to pick the phase with the smallest quantum step as a kind of fixed reference point—an idea that quantum mechanics had always declared to be as meaningless as singling out one direction in empty space.

But the rotational symmetry of space wasn’t perfect: in small enough networks, the usual guarantee that all directions would look the same no longer held up. Was that the answer? The angles the two beams had to take to reach the detector were themselves quantised, and that effect was superimposed on the phase?

No. The scale was all wrong. The experiment was still taking place over too large a region.

Vikram shouted with joy, and did a backwards somersault. “There are world lines crossing between the nets! That’s what creates phase!” Without another word, he began furiously sketching diagrams in the air, launching software, running simulations. Within minutes, he was almost hidden behind displays and gadgets.

One window showed a simulation of the interference pattern, a perfect fit to the data. Gisela felt a stab of jealousy: she’d been so close, she should have been first. Then she began to examine more of the results, and the feeling evaporated. This was elegant, this was beautiful, this was right. It didn’t matter who’d discovered it.

Cordelia was looking dazed, left behind. Vikram ducked out from the clutter he’d created, leaving the rest of them to try to make sense of it. He took Cordelia’s hands and they waltzed across the scape together. “The central mystery of quantum mechanics has always been: why can’t you just count the ways things can happen? Why do you have to assign each alternative a phase, so they can cancel as well as reinforce each other? We knew the rules for doing it, we knew the consequences—but we had no idea what phases were, or where they came from.” He stopped dancing, and conjured up a stack of Feynman diagrams, five alternatives for the same process, layered one on top of the other. “They’re created the same way as every other relationship: common links to a larger network.” He added a few hundred virtual particles, crisscrossing between the once-separate diagrams. “It’s like spin. If the networks have created directions in space that make two particles’ spins parallel, when they combine they’ll simply add together. If they’re anti-parallel, in opposing directions, they’ll cancel. Phase is the same, but it acts like an angle in two dimensions, and it works with every quantum number together: spin, charge, colour, everything—if two components are perfectly out-of-phase, they vanish completely.”

Gisela watched as Cordelia reached into the layered diagram, followed the paths of two components, and began to understand. They hadn’t discovered any deeper structure to the individual quantum numbers, as they’d hoped they might, but they’d learnt that a single vast network of world lines could account for everything the universe built from those indivisible threads.

Was this enough for her? Her original, struggling for sanity back in Athena, might take comfort from the hope that the Dive clone had witnessed a breakthrough like this—but as death approached, would it all turn to ashes for the witness? Gisela felt a pang of doubt herself, though she’d talked it through with Timon and the others for centuries. Did everything she felt at this moment lose all meaning, just because there was no chance to carry the experience back to the wider world? She couldn’t deny that it would have been better to know that she could reconnect with her other selves, tell all her distant family and friends what she’d learnt, follow through the implications for millennia.

But the whole universe faced the same fate. Time was quantised; there was no prospect of infinite computation before the Big Crunch, for anyone. If everything that ended was void, the Dive had merely spared them the prolonged false hope of immortality. If every moment stood alone, complete in itself, then nothing could rob them of their happiness.

The truth, of course, lay somewhere in between.

Timon approached her, grinning with delight. “What are you pondering here by yourself?”

She took his hand. “Small networks.”

Cordelia said to Vikram, “Now that you know precisely what phase is, and how it determines probabilities ... is there any way we could use the experimental beams to manipulate the probabilities for the geometry ahead of us? Twist back the light cones just enough to keep us skirting the Planck region? Spiral back up around the singularity for a few billion years, until the Big Crunch comes, or the hole evaporates from Hawking radiation?”

Vikram looked stunned for a moment, then he began launching software. Sachio and Tiet came and helped him, searching for computational shortcuts. Gisela looked on, light-headed, hardly daring to hope. To examine every possibility might take more time than they had, but then Tiet found a way to test whole classes of networks in a single calculation, and the process sped up a thousandfold.

Vikram announced the result sadly. “No. It’s not possible.”

Cordelia smiled. “That’s all right. I was just curious.”

Reasons To Be Cheerful

In September 2004, not long after my twelfth birthday, I entered a state of almost constant happiness. It never occurred to me to ask why. Though school included the usual quota of tedious lessons, I was doing well enough academically to be able to escape into daydreams whenever it suited me. At home, I was free to read books and web pages about molecular biology and particle physics, quaternions and galactic evolution, and to write my own Byzantine computer games and convoluted abstract animations. And though I was a skinny, uncoordinated child, and every elaborate, pointless organized sport left me comatose with boredom, I was comfortable enough with my body on my own terms. Whenever I ran—and I ran everywhere—it felt good.

I had food, shelter, safety, loving parents, encouragement, stimulation. Why shouldn’t I have been happy? And though I can’t have entirely forgotten how oppressive and monotonous classwork and schoolyard politics could be, or how easily my usual bouts of enthusiasm were derailed by the most trivial problems, when things were actually going well for me I wasn’t in the habit of counting down the days until it all turned sour. Happiness always brought with it the belief that it would last, and though I must have seen this optimistic forecast disproved a thousand times before, I wasn’t old and cynical enough to be surprised when it finally showed signs of coming true.

When I started vomiting repeatedly, Dr Ash, our GP, gave me a course of antibiotics and a week off school. I doubt it was a great shock to my parents when this unscheduled holiday seemed to cheer me up rather more than any mere bacterium could bring me down, and if they were puzzled that I didn’t even bother feigning misery, it would have been redundant for me to moan constantly about my aching stomach when I was throwing up authentically three or four times a day.

The antibiotics made no difference. I began losing my balance, stumbling when I walked. Back in Dr Ash’s surgery, I squinted at the eye chart. She sent me to a neurologist at Westmead Hospital, who ordered an immediate MRI scan. Later the same day, I was admitted as an in-patient. My parents learned the diagnosis straight away, but it took me three more days to make them spit out the whole truth.

I had a tumor, a medulloblastoma, blocking one of the fluid-filled ventricles in my brain, raising the pressure in my skull. Medulloblastomas were potentially fatal, though with surgery followed by aggressive radiation treatment and chemotherapy, two out of three patients diagnosed at this stage lived five more years.

I pictured myself on a railway bridge riddled with rotten sleepers, with no choice but to keep moving, trusting my weight to each suspect plank in turn. I understood the danger ahead, very clearly ... and yet I felt no real panic, no real fear. The closest thing to terror I could summon up was an almost exhilarating rush of vertigo, as if I was facing nothing more than an audaciously harrowing fairground ride.

There was a reason for this.

The pressure in my skull explained most of my symptoms, but tests on my cerebrospinal fluid had also revealed a greatly elevated level of a substance called Leu-enkephalin—an endorphin, a neuropeptide which bound to some of the same receptors as opiates like morphine and heroin. Somewhere along the road to malignancy, the same mutant transcription factor that had switched on the genes enabling the tumor cells to divide unchecked had apparently also switched on the genes needed to produce Leu-enkephalin.

This was a freakish accident, not a routine side-effect. I didn’t know much about endorphins then, but my parents repeated what the neurologist had told them, and later I looked it all up. Leu-enkephalin wasn’t an analgesic, to be secreted in emergencies when pain threatened survival, and it had no stupefying narcotic effects to immobilize a creature while injuries healed. Rather, it was the primary means of signaling happiness, released whenever behavior or circumstances warranted pleasure. Countless other brain activities modulated that simple message, creating an almost limitless palette of positive emotions, and the binding of Leu-enkephalin to its target neurons was just the first link in a long chain of events mediated by other neurotransmitters. But for all these subtleties, I could attest to one simple, unambiguous fact: Leu-enkephalin made you feel good.

My parents broke down as they told me the news, and I was the one who comforted them, beaming placidly like a beatific little child martyr from some tear-jerking oncological mini-series. It wasn’t a matter of hidden reserves of strength or maturity; I was physically incapable of feeling bad about my fate. And because the effects of the Leu-enkephalin were so specific, I could gaze unflinchingly at the truth in a way that would not have been possible if I’d been doped up to the eyeballs with crude pharmaceutical opiates. I was clear-headed but emotionally indomitable, positively radiant with courage.

* * * *

I had a ventricular shunt installed, a slender tube inserted deep into my skull to relieve the pressure, pending the more invasive and risky procedure of removing the primary tumor; that operation was scheduled for the end of the week. Dr Maitland, the oncologist, had explained in detail how my treatment would proceed, and warned me of the danger and discomfort I faced in the months ahead. Now I was strapped in for the ride and ready to go.

Once the shock wore off, though, my un-blissed-out parents decided that they had no intention of sitting back and accepting mere two-to-one odds that I’d make it to adulthood. They phoned around Sydney, then further afield, hunting for second opinions.

My mother found a private hospital on the Gold Coast—the only Australian franchise of the Nevada-based “Health Palace” chain—where the oncology unit was offering a new treatment for medulloblastomas. A genetically engineered herpes virus introduced into the cerebrospinal fluid would infect only the replicating tumor cells, and then a powerful cytotoxic drug, activated only by the virus, would kill the infected cells. The treatment had an 80 percent five-year survival rate, without the risks of surgery. I looked up the cost myself, in the hospital’s web brochure. They were offering a package deal: three months’ meals and accommodation, all pathology and radiology services, and all pharmaceuticals, for sixty thousand dollars.

My father was an electrician, working on building sites. My mother was a sales assistant in a department store. I was their only child, so we were far from poverty-stricken, but they must have taken out a second mortgage to raise the fee, saddling themselves with a further fifteen or twenty years’ debt. The two survival rates were not that different, and I heard Dr Maitland warn them that the figures couldn’t really be compared, because the viral treatment was so new. They would have been perfectly justified in taking her advice and sticking to the traditional regime.

Maybe my enkephalin sainthood spurred them on somehow. Maybe they wouldn’t have made such a great sacrifice if I’d been my usual sullen and difficult self, or even if I’d been nakedly terrified rather than preternaturally brave. I’ll never know for sure—and either way, it wouldn’t make me think any less of them. But just because the molecule wasn’t saturating their skulls, that’s no reason to expect them to have been immune to its influence.

On the flight north, I held my father’s hand all the way. We’d always been a little distant, a little mutually disappointed in each other. I knew he would have preferred a tougher, more athletic, more extroverted son, while to me he’d always seemed lazily conformist, with a world view built on unexamined platitudes and slogans. But on that trip, with barely a word exchanged, I could feel his disappointment being transmuted into a kind of fierce, protective, defiant love, and I grew ashamed of my own lack of respect for him. I let the Leu-enkephalin convince me that, once this was over, everything between us would change for the better.

* * * *

From the street, the Gold Coast Health Palace could have passed for one more high-rise beach front hotel—and even from the inside, it wasn’t much different from the hotels I’d seen in video fiction. I had a room to myself, with a television wider than the bed, complete with network computer and cable modem. If the aim was to distract me, it worked. After a week of tests, they hooked a drip into my ventricular shunt and infused first the virus, and then three days later, the drug.

The tumor began shrinking almost immediately; they showed me the scans. My parents seemed happy but dazed, as if they’d never quite trusted a place where millionaire property developers came for scrotal tucks to do much more than relieve them of their money and offer first-class double-talk while I continued to decline. But the tumor kept on shrinking, and when it hesitated for two days in a row the oncologist swiftly repeated the whole procedure, and then the tendrils and blobs on the MRI screen grew skinnier and fainter even more rapidly than before.

I had every reason to feel unconditional joy now, but when I suffered a growing sense of unease instead I assumed it was just Leu-enkephalin withdrawal. It was even possible that the tumor had been releasing such a high dose of the stuff that literally nothing could have made me feel better—if I’d been lofted to the pinnacle of happiness, there’d be nowhere left to go but down. But in that case, any chink of darkness in my sunny disposition could only confirm the good news of the scans.

One morning I woke from a nightmare—my first in months—with visions of the tumor as a clawed parasite thrashing around inside my skull. I could still hear the click of carapace on bone, like the rattle of a scorpion trapped in a jam jar. I was terrified, drenched in sweat ... liberated. My fear soon gave way to a white-hot rage: the thing had drugged me into compliance, but now I was free to stand up to it, to bellow obscenities inside my head, to exorcize the demon with self-righteous anger.

I did feel slightly cheated by the sense of anticlimax that came from chasing my already-fleeing nemesis downhill, and I couldn’t entirely ignore the fact that imagining my anger to be driving out the cancer was a complete reversal of true cause and effect—a bit like watching a forklift shift a boulder from my chest, then pretending to have moved it myself by a mighty act of inhalation. But I made what sense I could of my belated emotions, and left it at that.

Six weeks after I was admitted, all my scans were clear, and my blood, CSF and lymphatic fluid were free of the signature proteins of metastasizing cells. But there was still a risk that a few resistant tumor cells remained, so they gave me a short, sharp course of entirely different drugs, no longer linked to the herpes infection. I had a testicular biopsy first—under local anesthetic, more embarrassing than painful—and a sample of bone marrow taken from my hip, so my potential for sperm production and my supply of new blood cells could both be restored if the drugs wiped them out at the source. I lost hair and stomach lining, temporarily, and I vomited more often, and far more wretchedly, than when I’d first been diagnosed. But when I started to emit self-pitying noises, one of the nurses steelily explained that children half my age put up with the same treatment for months.

These conventional drugs alone could never have cured me, but as a mopping-up operation they greatly diminished the chance of a relapse. I discovered a beautiful word: apoptosis—cellular suicide, programmed death—and repeated it to myself, over and over. I ended up almost relishing the nausea and fatigue; the more miserable I felt, the easier it was to imagine the fate of the tumor cells, membranes popping and shriveling like balloons as the drugs commanded them to take their own lives. Die in pain, zombie scum! Maybe I’d write a game about it, or even a whole series, culminating in the spectacular Chemotherapy III: Battle for the Brain. I’d be rich and famous, I could pay back my parents, and life would be as perfect in reality as the tumor had merely made it seem to be.

* * * *

I was discharged early in December, free of any trace of disease. My parents were wary and jubilant in turn, as if slowly casting off the fear that any premature optimism would be punished. The side-effects of the chemotherapy were gone; my hair was growing back, except for a tiny bald patch where the shunt had been, and I had no trouble keeping down food. There was no point returning to school now, two weeks before the year’s end, so my summer holidays began immediately. The whole class sent me a tacky, insincere, teacher-orchestrated get-well email, but my friends visited me at home, only slightly embarrassed and intimidated, to welcome me back from the brink of death.

So why did I feel so bad? Why did the sight of the clear blue sky through the window when I opened my eyes every morning—with the freedom to sleep-in as long as I chose, with my father or mother home all day treating me like royalty, but keeping their distance and letting me sit unnagged at the computer screen for sixteen hours if I wanted—why did that first glimpse of daylight make me want to bury my face in the pillow, clench my teeth and whisper: “I should have died. I should have died.”?

Nothing gave me the slightest pleasure. Nothing—not my favorite netzines or web sites, not the njari music I’d once reveled in, not the richest, the sweetest, the saltiest junk food that was mine now for the asking. I couldn’t bring myself to read a whole page of any book, I couldn’t write ten lines of code. I couldn’t look my real-world friends in the eye, or face the thought of going online.

Everything I did, everything I imagined, was tainted with an overwhelming sense of dread and shame. The only image I could summon up for comparison was from a documentary about Auschwitz that I’d seen at school. It had opened with a long tracking shot, a newsreel camera advancing relentlessly toward the gates of the camp, and I’d watched that scene with my spirits sinking, already knowing full well what had happened inside. I wasn’t delusional; I didn’t believe for a moment that there was some source of unspeakable evil lurking behind every bright surface around me. But when I woke and saw the sky, I felt the kind of sick foreboding that would only have made sense if I’d been staring at the gates of Auschwitz.

Maybe I was afraid that the tumor would grow back, but not that afraid. The swift victory of the virus in the first round should have counted for much more, and on one level I did think of myself as lucky, and suitably grateful. But I could no more rejoice in my escape, now, than I could have felt suicidally bad at the height of my enkephalin bliss.

My parents began to worry, and dragged me along to a psychologist for “recovery counseling.” The whole idea seemed as tainted as everything else, but I lacked the energy for resistance. Dr Bright and I “explored the possibility” that I was subconsciously choosing to feel miserable because I’d learned to associate happiness with the risk of death, and I secretly feared that recreating the tumor’s main symptom could resurrect the thing itself. Part of me scorned this facile explanation, but part of me seized on it, hoping that if I owned up to such subterranean mental gymnastics it would drag the whole process into the light of day, where its flawed logic would become untenable. But the sadness and disgust that everything induced in me—birdsong, the pattern of our bathroom tiles, the smell of toast, the shape of my own hands—only increased.

I wondered if the high levels of Leu-enkephalin from the tumor might have caused my neurons to reduce their population of the corresponding receptors, or if I’d become “Leu-enkephalin-tolerant” the way a heroin addict became opiate-tolerant, through the production of a natural regulatory molecule that blocked the receptors. When I mentioned these ideas to my father, he insisted that I discuss them with Dr Bright, who feigned intense interest but did nothing to show that he’d taken me seriously. He kept telling my parents that everything I was feeling was a perfectly normal reaction to the trauma I’d been through, and that all I really needed was time, and patience, and understanding.

* * * *

I was bundled off to high school at the start of the new year, but when I did nothing but sit and stare at my desk for a week, arrangements were made for me to study online. At home, I did manage to work my way slowly through the curriculum, in the stretches of zombie-like numbness that came between the bouts of sheer, paralyzing unhappiness. In the same periods of relative clarity, I kept thinking about the possible causes of my affliction. I searched the biomedical literature and found a study of the effects of high doses of Leu-enkephalin in cats, but it seemed to show that any tolerance would be short-lived.

Then, one afternoon in March—staring at an electron micrograph of a tumor cell infected with herpes virus, when I should have been studying dead explorers—I finally came up with a theory that made sense. The virus needed special proteins to let it dock with the cells it infected, enabling it to stick to them long enough to use other tools to penetrate the cell membrane. But if it had acquired a copy of the Leu-enkephalin gene from the tumor’s own copious RNA transcripts, it might have gained the ability to cling, not just to replicating tumor cells, but to every neuron in my brain with a Leu-enkephalin receptor.

And then the cytotoxic drug, activated only in infected cells, would have come along and killed them all.

Deprived of any input, the pathways those dead neurons normally stimulated were withering away. Every part of my brain able to feel pleasure was dying. And though at times I could, still, simply feel nothing, mood was a shifting balance of forces. With nothing to counteract it, the slightest flicker of depression could now win every tug-of-war, unopposed.

I didn’t say a word to my parents; I couldn’t bear to tell them that the battle they’d fought to give me the best possible chance of survival might now be crippling me. I tried to contact the oncologist who’d treated me on the Gold Coast, but my phone calls floundered in a Muzak-filled moat of automated screening, and my email was ignored. I managed to see Dr Ash alone, and she listened politely to my theory, but she declined to refer me to a neurologist when my only symptoms were psychological: blood and urine tests showed none of the standard markers for clinical depression.

The windows of clarity grew shorter. I found myself spending more and more of each day in bed, staring out across the darkened room. My despair was so monotonous, and so utterly disconnected from anything real, that to some degree it was blunted by its own absurdity: no one I loved had just been slaughtered, the cancer had almost certainly been defeated, and I could still grasp the difference between what I was feeling and the unarguable logic of real grief, or real fear.

But I had no way of casting off the gloom and feeling what I wanted to feel. My only freedom came down to a choice between hunting for reasons to justify my sadness—deluding myself that it was my own, perfectly natural response to some contrived litany of misfortunes—or disowning it as something alien, imposed from without, trapping me inside an emotional shell as useless and unresponsive as a paralyzed body.

My father never accused me of weakness and ingratitude; he just silently withdrew from my life. My mother kept trying to get through to me, to comfort or provoke me, but it reached the point where I could barely squeeze her hand in reply. I wasn’t literally paralyzed or blind, speechless or feeble-minded. But all the brightly lit worlds I’d once inhabited—physical and virtual, real and imaginary, intellectual and emotional—had become invisible, and impenetrable. Buried in fog. Buried in shit. Buried in ashes.

By the time I was admitted to a neurological ward, the dead regions of my brain were clearly visible on an MRI scan. But it was unlikely that anything could have halted the process even if it had been diagnosed sooner.

And it was certain that no one had the power to reach into my skull and restore the machinery of happiness.

The alarm woke me at ten, but it took me another three hours to summon up the energy to move. I threw off the sheet and sat on the side of the bed, muttering half-hearted obscenities, trying to get past the inescapable conclusion that I shouldn’t have bothered. Whatever pinnacles of achievement I scaled today (managing not only to go shopping, but to buy something other than a frozen meal) and whatever monumental good fortune befell me (the insurance company depositing my allowance before the rent was due) I’d wake up tomorrow feeling exactly the same.

Nothing helps, nothing changes. Four words said it all. But I’d accepted that long ago; there was nothing left to be disappointed about. And I had no reason to sit here lamenting the bleeding obvious for the thousandth time.

Right?

Fuck it. Just keep moving.

I swallowed my “morning” medication, the six capsules I’d put out on the bedside table the night before, then went into the bathroom and urinated a bright yellow stream consisting mainly of the last dose’s metabolites. No antidepressant in the world could send me to Prozac Heaven, but this shit kept my dopamine and serotonin levels high enough to rescue me from total catatonia—from liquid food, bedpans and sponge baths.

I splashed water on my face, trying to think of an excuse to leave the flat when the freezer was still half full. Staying in all day, unwashed and unshaven, did make me feel worse: slimy and lethargic, like some pale parasitic leech. But it could still take a week or more for the pressure of disgust to grow strong enough to move me.

I stared into the mirror. Lack of appetite more than made up for lack of exercise—I was as immune to carbohydrate comfort as I was to runner’s high—and I could count my ribs beneath the loose skin of my chest. I was 30 years old, and I looked like a wasted old man. I pressed my forehead against the cool glass, obeying some vestigial instinct which suggested that there might be a scrap of pleasure to be extracted from the sensation. There wasn’t.

In the kitchen, I saw the light on the phone: there was a message waiting. I walked back into the bathroom and sat on the floor, trying to convince myself that it didn’t have to be bad news. No one had to be dead. And my parents couldn’t break up twice.

I approached the phone and waved the display on. There was a thumbnail image of a severe-looking middle-aged woman, no one I recognized. The sender’s name was Dr Z. Durrani, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Cape Town. The subject line read: “New Techniques in Prosthetic Reconstructive Neuroplasty.” That made a change; most people skimmed the reports on my clinical condition so carelessly that they assumed I was mildly retarded. I felt a refreshing absence of disgust, the closest I could come to respect, for Dr Durrani. But no amount of diligence on her part could save the cure itself from being a mirage.

Health Palace’s no-fault settlement provided me with a living allowance equal to the minimum wage, plus reimbursement of approved medical costs; I had no astronomical lump sum to spend as I saw fit. However, any treatment likely to render me financially self-sufficient could be paid for in full, at the discretion of the insurance company. The value of such a cure to Global Assurance—the total remaining cost of supporting me until death—was constantly falling, but then so was medical research funding, worldwide. Word of my case had got around.

Most of the treatments I’d been offered so far had involved novel pharmaceuticals. Drugs had freed me from institutional care, but expecting them to turn me into a happy little wage-earner was like hoping for an ointment that made amputated limbs grow back. From Global Assurance’s perspective, though, shelling out for anything more sophisticated meant gambling with a much greater sum—a prospect that no doubt sent my case manager scrambling for his actuarial database. There was no point indulging in rash expenditure decisions when there was still a good chance that I’d suicide in my forties. Cheap fixes were always worth a try, even if they were long shots, but any proposal radical enough to stand a real chance of working was guaranteed to fail the risk/cost analysis.

I knelt by the screen with my head in my hands. I could erase the message unseen, sparing myself the frustration of knowing exactly what I’d be missing out on ... but then, not knowing would be just as bad. I tapped the PLAY button and looked away; meeting the gaze of even a recorded face gave me a feeling of intense shame. I understood why: the neural circuitry needed to register positive non-verbal messages was long gone, but the pathways that warned of responses like rejection and hostility had not merely remained intact, they’d grown skewed and hypersensitive enough to fill the void with a strong negative signal, whatever the reality.

I listened as carefully as I could while Dr Durrani explained her work with stroke patients. Tissue-cultured neural grafts were the current standard treatment, but she’d been injecting an elaborately tailored polymer foam into the damaged region instead. The foam released growth factors that attracted axons and dendrites from surrounding neurons, and the polymer itself was designed to function as a network of electrochemical switches. Via microprocessors scattered throughout the foam, the initially amorphous network was programmed first to reproduce generically the actions of the lost neurons, then fine-tuned for compatibility with the individual recipient.

Dr Durrani listed her triumphs: sight restored, speech restored, movement, continence, musical ability. My own deficit—measured in neurons lost, or synapses, or raw cubic centimeters—lay beyond the range of all the chasms she’d bridged to date. But that only made it more of a challenge.

I waited almost stoically for the one small catch, in six or seven figures. The voice from the screen said, “If you can meet your own travel expenses and the cost of a three-week hospital stay, my research grant will cover the treatment itself.”

I replayed these words a dozen times, trying to find a less favorable interpretation—one task I was usually good at. When I failed, I steeled myself and emailed Durrani’s assistant in Cape Town, asking for clarification.

There was no misunderstanding. For the cost of a year’s supply of the drugs that barely kept me conscious, I was being offered a chance to be whole again for the rest of my life.

* * * *

Organizing a trip to South Africa was completely beyond me, but once Global Assurance recognized the opportunity it was facing, machinery on two continents swung into action on my behalf. All I had to do was fight down the urge to call everything off. The thought of being hospitalized, of being powerless again, was disturbing enough, but contemplating the potential of the neural prosthesis itself was like staring down the calendar at a secular Judgment Day. On 7 March 2023, I’d either be admitted into an infinitely larger, infinitely richer, infinitely better world ... or I’d prove to be damaged beyond repair. And in a way, even the final death of hope was a far less terrifying prospect than the alternative; it was so much closer to where I was already, so much easier to imagine. The only vision of happiness I could summon up was myself as a child, running joyfully, dissolving into sunlight—which was all very sweet and evocative, but a little short on practical details. If I’d wanted to be a sunbeam, I could have cut my wrists anytime. I wanted a job, I wanted a family, I wanted ordinary love and modest ambitions—because I knew these were the things I’d been denied. But I could no more imagine what it would be like, finally, to attain them, than I could picture daily life in 26-dimensional space.

I didn’t sleep at all before the dawn flight out of Sydney. I was escorted to the airport by a psychiatric nurse, but spared the indignity of a minder sitting beside me all the way to Cape Town. I spent my waking moments on the flight fighting paranoia, resisting the temptation to invent reasons for all the sadness and anxiety coursing through my skull. No one on the plane was staring at me disdainfully. The Durrani technique was not going to turn out to be a hoax. I succeeded in crushing these “explanatory” delusions ... but as ever, it remained beyond my power to alter my feelings, or even to draw a clear line between my purely pathological unhappiness, and the perfectly reasonable anxiety that anyone would feel on the verge of radical brain surgery.

Wouldn’t it be bliss, not to have to fight to tell the difference all the time? Forget happiness; even a future full of abject misery would be a triumph, so long as I knew that it was always for a reason.

* * * *

Luke De Vries, one of Durrani’s postdoctoral students, met me at the airport. He looked about 25, and radiated the kind of self-assurance I had to struggle not to misread as contempt. I felt trapped and helpless immediately; he’d arranged everything, it was like stepping on to a conveyor belt. But I knew that if I’d been left to do anything for myself the whole process would have ground to a halt.

It was after midnight when we reached the hospital in the suburbs of Cape Town. Crossing the car park, the insect sounds were wrong, the air smelled indefinably alien, the constellations looked like clever forgeries. I sagged to my knees as we approached the entrance.

“Hey!” De Vries stopped and helped me up. I was shaking with fear, and then shame too, at the spectacle I was making of myself.

“This violates my Avoidance Therapy.”

“Avoidance Therapy?”

“Avoid hospitals at all costs.”

De Vries laughed, though if he wasn’t merely humoring me I had no way of telling. Recognizing the fact that you’d elicited genuine laughter was a pleasure, so those pathways were all dead.

He said, “We had to carry the last subject in on a stretcher. She left about as steady on her feet as you are.”

“That bad?”

“Her artificial hip was playing up. Not our fault.”

We walked up the steps and into the brightly lit foyer.

* * * *

The next morning—Monday, 6 March, the day before the operation—I met most of the surgical team who’d perform the first, purely mechanical, part of the procedure: scraping clean the useless cavities left behind by dead neurons, prising open with tiny balloons any voids that had been squeezed shut, and then pumping the whole oddly-shaped totality full of Durrani’s foam. Apart from the existing hole in my skull from the shunt 18 years before, they’d probably have to drill two more.

A nurse shaved my head and glued five reference markers to the exposed skin, then I spent the afternoon being scanned. The final, three-dimensional image of all the dead space in my brain looked like a spelunker’s map, a sequence of linked caves complete with rock falls and collapsed tunnels.

Durrani herself came to see me that evening. “While you’re still under anesthetic,” she explained, “the foam will harden, and the first connections will be made with the surrounding tissue. Then the microprocessors will instruct the polymer to form the network we’ve chosen to serve as a starting point.”

I had to force myself to speak; every question I asked—however politely phrased, however lucid and relevant—felt as painful and degrading as if I was standing before her naked asking her to wipe shit out of my hair. “How did you find a network to use? Did you scan a volunteer?” Was I going to start my new life as a clone of Luke De Vries—inheriting his tastes, his ambitions, his emotions?

“No, no. There’s an international database of healthy neural structures—20,000 cadavers who died without brain injury. More detailed than tomography; they froze the brains in liquid nitrogen, sliced them up with a diamond-tipped microtome, then stained and electron-micrographed the slices.”

My mind balked at the number of exabytes she was casually invoking; I’d lost touch with computing completely. “So you’ll use some kind of composite from the database? You’ll give me a selection of typical structures, taken from different people?”

Durrani seemed about to let that pass as near enough, but she was clearly a stickler for detail, and she hadn’t insulted my intelligence yet. “Not quite. It will be more like a multiple exposure than a composite. We’ve used about 4,000 records from the database—all the males in their twenties or thirties—and wherever someone has neuron A wired to neuron B, and someone else has neuron A wired to neuron C ... you’ll have connections to both B and C. So you’ll start out with a network that in theory could be pared down to any one of the 4,000 individual versions used to construct it—but in fact, you’ll pare it down to your own unique version instead.”

That sounded better than being an emotional clone or a Frankenstein collage; I’d be a roughly hewn sculpture, with features yet to be refined. But—

“Pare it down how? How will I go from being potentially anyone, to being ... ?” What? My 12-year-old self, resurrected? Or the 30-year-old I should have been, conjured into existence as a remix of these 4,000 dead strangers? I trailed off; I’d lost what little faith I’d had that I was talking sense.

Durrani seemed to grow slightly uneasy, herself—whatever my judgment was worth on that. She said, “There should be parts of your brain, still intact, which bear some record of what’s been lost. Memories of formative experiences, memories of the things that used to give you pleasure, fragments of innate structures that survived the virus. The prosthesis will be driven automatically toward a state that’s compatible with everything else in your brain—it will find itself interacting with all these other systems, and the connections that work best in that context will be reinforced.” She thought for a moment. “Imagine a kind of artificial limb, imperfectly formed to start with, that adjusts itself as you use it: stretching when it fails to grasp what you reach for, shrinking when it bumps something unexpectedly ... until it takes on precisely the size and shape of the phantom limb implied by your movements. Which itself is nothing but an image of the lost flesh and blood.”

That was an appealing metaphor, though it was hard to believe that my faded memories contained enough information to reconstruct their phantom author in every detail—that the whole jigsaw of who I’d been, and might have become, could be filled in from a few hints along the edges and the jumbled-up pieces of 4,000 other portraits of happiness. But the subject was making at least one of us uncomfortable, so I didn’t press the point.

I managed to ask a final question. “What will it be like, before any of this happens? When I wake up from the anesthetic and all the connections are still intact?”

Durrani confessed, “That’s one thing I’ll have no way of knowing, until you tell me yourself.”

* * * *

Someone repeated my name, reassuringly but insistently. I woke a little more. My neck, my legs, my back were all aching, and my stomach was tense with nausea.

But the bed was warm, and the sheets were soft. It was good just to be lying there.

“It’s Wednesday afternoon. The operation went well.”

I opened my eyes. Durrani and four of her students were gathered at the foot of the bed. I stared at her, astonished: the face I’d once thought of as “severe” and “forbidding” was ... riveting, magnetic. I could have watched her for hours. But then I glanced at Luke De Vries, who was standing beside her. He was just as extraordinary. I turned one by one to the other three students. Everyone was equally mesmerizing; I didn’t know where to look.

“How are you feeling?”

I was lost for words. These people’s faces were loaded with so much significance, so many sources of fascination, that I had no way of singling out any one factor: they all appeared wise, ecstatic, beautiful, reflective, attentive, compassionate, tranquil, vibrant ... a white noise of qualities, all positive, but ultimately incoherent.

But as I shifted my gaze compulsively from face to face, struggling to make sense of them, their meanings finally began to crystallize—like words coming into focus, though my sight had never been blurred.

I asked Durrani, “Are you smiling?”

“Slightly.” She hesitated. “There are standard tests, standard images for this, but ... please, describe my expression. Tell me what I’m thinking.”

I answered unselfconsciously, as if she’d asked me to read an eye chart. “You’re ... curious? You’re listening carefully. You’re interested, and you’re ... hoping that something good will happen. And you’re smiling because you think it will. Or because you can’t quite believe that it already has.”

She nodded, smiling more decisively. “Good.”

I didn’t add that I now found her stunningly, almost painfully, beautiful. But it was the same for everyone in the room, male and female: the haze of contradictory moods that I’d read into their faces had cleared, but it had left behind a heart-stopping radiance. I found this slightly alarming—it was too indiscriminate, too intense—though in a way it seemed almost as natural a response as the dazzling of a dark-adapted eye. And after 18 years of seeing nothing but ugliness in every human face, I wasn’t ready to complain about the presence of five people who looked like angels.

Durrani asked, “Are you hungry?”

I had to think about that. “Yes.”

One of the students fetched a prepared meal, much the same as the lunch I’d eaten on Monday: salad, a bread roll, cheese. I picked up the roll and took a bite. The texture was perfectly familiar, the flavor unchanged. Two days before, I’d chewed and swallowed the same thing with the usual mild disgust that all food induced in me.

Hot tears rolled down my cheeks. I wasn’t in ecstasy; the experience was as strange and painful as drinking from a fountain with lips so parched that the skin had turned to salt and dried blood.

As painful, and as compelling. When I’d emptied the plate, I asked for another. Eating was good, eating was right, eating was necessary. After the third plate, Durrani said firmly, “That’s enough.” I was shaking with the need for more; she was still supernaturally beautiful, but I screamed at her, outraged.

She took my arms, held me still. “This is going to be hard for you. There’ll be surges like this, swings in all directions, until the network settles down. You have to try to stay calm, try to stay reflective. The prosthesis makes more things possible than you’re used to ... but you’re still in control.”

I gritted my teeth and looked away. At her touch I’d suffered an immediate, agonizing erection.

I said, “That’s right. I’m in control.”

* * * *

In the days that followed, my experiences with the prosthesis became much less raw, much less violent. I could almost picture the sharpest, most ill-fitting edges of the network being—metaphorically—worn smooth by use. To eat, to sleep, to be with people remained intensely pleasurable, but it was more like an impossibly rosy-hued dream of childhood than the result of someone poking my brain with a high voltage wire.

Of course, the prosthesis wasn’t sending signals into my brain in order to make my brain feel pleasure. The prosthesis itself was the part of me that was feeling all the pleasure—however seamlessly that process was integrated with everything else: perception, language, cognition ... the rest of me. Dwelling on this was unsettling at first, but on reflection no more so than the thought experiment of staining blue all the corresponding organic regions in a healthy brain, and declaring, “They feel all the pleasure, not you!”

I was put through a battery of psychological tests—most of which I’d sat through many times before, as part of my annual insurance assessments—as Durrani’s team attempted to quantify their success. Maybe a stroke patient’s fine control of a formerly paralyzed hand was easier to measure objectively, but I must have leaped from bottom to top of every numerical scale for positive affect. And far from being a source of irritation, these tests gave me my first opportunity to use the prosthesis in new arenas—to be happy in ways I could barely remember experiencing before. As well as being required to interpret mundanely rendered scenes of domestic situations—what has just happened between this child, this woman, and this man; who is feeling good and who is feeling bad?—I was shown breathtaking images of great works of art, from complex allegorical and narrative paintings to elegant minimalist essays in geometry. As well as listening to snatches of everyday speech, and even unadorned cries of joy and pain, I was played samples of music and song from every tradition, every epoch, every style.

That was when I finally realized that something was wrong.

Jacob Tsela was playing the audio files and noting my responses. He’d been deadpan for most of the session, carefully avoiding any risk of corrupting the data by betraying his own opinions. But after he’d played a heavenly fragment of European classical music, and I’d rated it 20 out of 20, I caught a flicker of dismay on his face.

“What? You didn’t like it?”

Tsela smiled opaquely. “It doesn’t matter what I like. That’s not what we’re measuring.”

“I’ve rated it already, you can’t influence my score.” I regarded him imploringly; I was desperate for communication of any kind. “I’ve been dead to the world for 18 years. I don’t even know who the composer was.”

He hesitated. “J.S. Bach. And I agree with you: it’s sublime.” He reached for the touchscreen and continued the experiment.

So what had he been dismayed about? I knew the answer immediately; I’d been an idiot not to notice before, but I’d been too absorbed in the music itself.

I hadn’t scored any piece lower than 18. And it had been the same with the visual arts. From my 4,000 virtual donors I’d inherited, not the lowest common denominator, but the widest possible taste—and in ten days, I still hadn’t imposed any constraints, any preferences, of my own.

All art was sublime to me, and all music. Every kind of food was delicious. Everyone I laid eyes on was a vision of perfection.

Maybe I was just soaking up pleasure wherever I could get it, after my long drought, but it was only a matter of time before I grew sated, and became as discriminating, as focused, as particular, as everyone else.

“Should I still be like this? Omnivorous?” I blurted out the question, starting with a tone of mild curiosity, ending with an edge of panic.

Tsela halted the sample he’d been playing—a chant that might have been Albanian, Moroccan, or Mongolian for all I knew, but which made hair rise on the back of my neck, and sent my spirits soaring. Just like everything else had.

He was silent for a while, weighing up competing obligations. Then he sighed and said, “You’d better talk to Durrani.”

* * * *

Durrani showed me a bar graph on the wallscreen in her office: the number of artificial synapses that had changed state within the prosthesis—new connections formed, existing ones broken, weakened or strengthened—for each of the past ten days. The embedded microprocessors kept track of such things, and an antenna waved over my skull each morning collected the data.

Day one had been dramatic, as the prosthesis adapted to its environment; the 4,000 contributing networks might all have been perfectly stable in their owners’ skulls, but the Everyman version I’d been given had never been wired up to anyone’s brain before.

Day two had seen about half as much activity, day three about a tenth.

From day four on, though, there’d been nothing but background noise. My episodic memories, however pleasurable, were apparently being stored elsewhere—since I certainly wasn’t suffering from amnesia—but after the initial burst of activity, the circuitry for defining what pleasure was had undergone no change, no refinement at all.

“If any trends emerge in the next few days, we should be able to amplify them, push them forward—like toppling an unstable building, once it’s showing signs of falling in a certain direction.” Durrani didn’t sound hopeful. Too much time had passed already, and the network wasn’t even teetering.

I said, “What about genetic factors? Can’t you read my genome, and narrow things down from that?”

She shook her head. “At least 2,000 genes play a role in neural development. It’s not like matching a blood group or a tissue type; everyone in the database would have more or less the same small proportion of those genes in common with you. Of course, some people must have been closer to you in temperament than others—but we have no way of identifying them genetically.”

“I see.”

Durrani said carefully, “We could shut the prosthesis down completely, if that’s what you want. There’d be no need for surgery—we’d just turn it off, and you’d be back where you started.”

I stared at her luminous face. How could I go back? Whatever the tests and the bar graphs said ... how could this be failure? However much useless beauty I was drowning in, I wasn’t as screwed-up as I’d been with a head full of Leu-enkephalin. I was still capable of fear, anxiety, sorrow; the tests had revealed universal shadows, common to all the donors. Hating Bach or Chuck Berry, Chagall or Paul Klee was beyond me, but I’d reacted as sanely as anyone to images of disease, starvation, death.

And I was not oblivious to my own fate, the way I’d been oblivious to the cancer.

But what was my fate, if I kept using the prosthesis? Universal happiness, universal shadows ... half the human race dictating my emotions? In all the years I’d spent in darkness, if I’d held fast to anything, hadn’t it been the possibility that I carried a kind of seed within me: a version of myself that might grow into a living person again, given the chance? And hadn’t that hope now proved false? I’d been offered the stuff of which selves were made—and though I’d tested it all, and admired it all, I’d claimed none of it as my own. All the joy I’d felt in the last ten days had been meaningless. I was just a dead husk, blowing around in other peoples’ sunlight.

I said, “I think you should do that. Switch it off.”

Durrani held up her hand. “Wait. If you’re willing, there is one other thing we could try. I’ve been discussing it with our ethics committee, and Luke has begun preliminary work on the software ... but in the end, it will be your decision.”

“To do what?”

“The network can be pushed in any direction. We know how to intervene to do that—to break the symmetry, to make some things a greater source of pleasure than others. Just because it hasn’t happened spontaneously, that doesn’t mean it can’t be achieved by other means.”

I laughed, suddenly light-headed. “So if I say the word ... your ethics committee will choose the music I like, and my favorite foods, and my new vocation? They’ll decide who I become?” Would that be so bad? Having died, myself, long ago, to grant life now to a whole new person? To donate, not just a lung or a kidney, but my entire body, irrelevant memories and all, to an arbitrarily constructed—but fully functioning—de novo human being?

Durrani was scandalized. “No! We’d never dream of doing that! But we could program the microprocessors to let you control the network’s refinement. We could give you the power to choose for yourself, consciously and deliberately, the things that make you happy.”

* * * *

De Vries said, “Try to picture the control.”

I closed my eyes. He said, “Bad idea. If you get into the habit, it will limit your access.”

“Right.” I stared into space. Something glorious by Beethoven was playing on the lab’s sound system; it was difficult to concentrate. I struggled to visualize the stylized, cherry-red, horizontal slider control that De Vries had constructed, line by line, inside my head five minutes before. Suddenly it was more than a vague memory: it was superimposed over the room again, as clear as any real object, at the bottom of my visual field.

“I’ve got it.” The button was hovering around 19.

De Vries glanced at a display, hidden from me. “Good. Now try to lower the rating.”

I laughed weakly. Roll over Beethoven. “How? How can you try to like something less?”

“You don’t. Just try to move the button to the left. Visualize the movement. The software’s monitoring your visual cortex, tracking any fleeting imaginary perceptions. Fool yourself into seeing the button moving—and the image will oblige.”

It did. I kept losing control briefly, as if the thing was sticking, but I managed to maneuver it down to 10 before stopping to assess the effect.

“Fuck.”

“I take it it’s working?”

I nodded stupidly. The music was still ... pleasant ... but the spell was broken completely. It was like listening to an electrifying piece of rhetoric, then realizing half-way through that the speaker didn’t believe a word of it—leaving the original poetry and eloquence untouched, but robbing it of all its real force.

I felt sweat break out on my forehead. When Durrani had explained it, the whole scheme had sounded too bizarre to be real. And since I’d already failed to assert myself over the prosthesis—despite billions of direct neural connections, and countless opportunities for the remnants of my identity to interact with the thing and shape it in my own image—I’d feared that when the time came to make a choice, I’d be paralyzed by indecision.

But I knew, beyond doubt, that I should not have been in a state of rapture over a piece of classical music that I’d either never heard before, or—since apparently it was famous, and ubiquitous—sat through once or twice by accident, entirely unmoved.

And now, in a matter of seconds, I’d hacked that false response away.

There was still hope. I still had a chance to resurrect myself. I’d just have to do it consciously, every step of the way.

De Vries, tinkering with his keyboard, said cheerfully, “I’ll color-code virtual gadgets for all the major systems in the prosthesis. With a few days’ practice it’ll all be second nature. Just remember that some experiences will engage two or three systems at once ... so if you’re making love to music that you’d prefer not to find so distracting, make sure you turn down the red control, not the blue.” He looked up and saw my face. “Hey, don’t worry. You can always turn it up again later if you make a mistake. Or if you change your mind.”

It was nine p.m. in Sydney when the plane touched down. Nine o’clock on a Saturday night. I took a train into the city center, intending to catch the connecting one home, but when I saw the crowds alighting at Town Hall station I put my suitcase in a locker and followed them up on to the street.

I’d been in the city a few times since the virus, but never at night. I felt like I’d come home after half a lifetime in another country, after solitary confinement in a foreign gaol. Everything was disorienting, one way or another. I felt a kind of giddy déjà vu at the sight of buildings that seemed to have been faithfully preserved, but still weren’t quite as I remembered them, and a sense of hollowness each time I turned a corner to find that some private landmark, some shop or sign I remembered from childhood, had vanished.

I stood outside a pub, close enough to feel my eardrums throb to the beat of the music. I could see people inside, laughing and dancing, sloshing armfuls of drinks around, faces glowing with alcohol and companionship. Some alive with the possibility of violence, others with the promise of sex.

I could step right into this picture myself, now. The ash that had buried the world was gone; I was free to walk wherever I pleased. And I could almost feel the dead cousins of these revellers—reborn now as harmonics of the network, resonating to the music and the sight of their soul-mates—clamoring in my skull, begging me to carry them all the way to the land of the living.

I took a few steps forward, then something in the corner of my vision distracted me. In the alley beside the pub, a boy of 10 or 12 sat crouched against the wall, lowering his face into a plastic bag. After a few inhalations he looked up, dead eyes shining, smiling as blissfully as any orchestra conductor.

I backed away.

Someone touched my shoulder. I spun around and saw a man beaming at me. “Jesus loves you, brother! Your search is over!” He thrust a pamphlet into my hand. I gazed into his face, and his condition was transparent to me: he’d stumbled on a way to produce Leu-enkephalin at will—but he didn’t know it, so he’d reasoned that some divine wellspring of happiness was responsible. I felt my chest tighten with horror and pity. At least I’d known about my tumor. And even the fucked-up kid in the alley understood that he was just sniffing glue.

And the people in the pub? Did they know what they were doing? Music, companionship, alcohol, sex ... where did the border lie? When did justifiable happiness turn into something as empty, as pathological, as it was for this man?

I stumbled away, and headed back toward the station. All around me, people were laughing and shouting, holding hands, kissing ... and I watched them as if they were flayed anatomical figures, revealing a thousand interlocking muscles working together with effortless precision. Buried inside me, the machinery of happiness recognized itself, again and again.

I had no doubt, now, that Durrani really had packed every last shred of the human capacity for joy into my skull. But to claim any part of it, I’d have to swallow the fact—more deeply than the tumor had ever forced me to swallow it—that happiness itself meant nothing. Life without it was unbearable, but as an end in itself, it was not enough. I was free to choose its causes—and to be happy with my choices—but whatever I felt once I’d bootstrapped my new self into existence, the possibility would remain that all my choices had been wrong.

* * * *

Global Assurance had given me until the end of the year to get my act together. If my annual psychological assessment showed that Durrani’s treatment had been successful—whether or not I actually had a job—I’d be thrown to the even less tender mercies of the privatized remnants of social security. So I stumbled around in the light, trying to find my bearings.

On my first day back I woke at dawn. I sat down at the phone and started digging. My old net workspace had been archived; at current rates it was only costing about ten cents a year in storage fees, and I still had $36.20 credit in my account. The whole bizarre informational fossil had passed intact from company to company through four takeovers and mergers. Working through an assortment of tools to decode the obsolete data formats, I dragged fragments of my past life into the present and examined them, until it became too painful to go on.

The next day I spent twelve hours cleaning the flat, scrubbing every corner—listening to my old njari downloads, stopping only to eat, ravenously. And though I could have refined my taste in food back to that of a 12-year-old salt-junky, I made the choice—thoroughly un-masochistic, and more pragmatic than virtuous—to crave nothing more toxic than fruit.

In the following weeks I put on weight with gratifying speed, though when I stared at myself in the mirror, or used morphing software running on the phone, I realized that I could be happy with almost any kind of body. The database must have included people with a vast range of ideal self-images, or who’d died perfectly content with their actual appearances.

Again, I chose pragmatism. I had a lot of catching up to do, and I didn’t want to die at 55 from a heart attack if I could avoid it. There was no point fixating on the unattainable or the absurd, though, so after morphing myself to obesity, and rating it zero, I did the same for the Schwarzenegger look. I chose a lean, wiry body—well within the realms of possibility, according to the software—and assigned it 16 out of 20. Then I started running.

I took it slowly at first, and though I clung to the image of myself as a child, darting effortlessly from street to street, I was careful never to crank up the joy of motion high enough to mask injuries. When I limped into a chemist looking for liniment, I found they were selling something called prostaglandin modulators, anti-inflammatory compounds that allegedly minimized damage without shutting down any vital repair processes. I was skeptical, but the stuff did seem to help; the first month was still painful, but I was neither crippled by natural swelling, nor rendered so oblivious to danger signs that I tore a muscle.

And once my heart and lungs and calves were dragged screaming out of their atrophied state, it was good. I ran for an hour every morning, weaving around the local back streets, and on Sunday afternoons I circumnavigated the city itself. I didn’t push myself to attain ever faster times; I had no athletic ambitions whatsoever. I just wanted to exercise my freedom.

Soon the act of running melted into a kind of seamless whole. I could revel in the thudding of my heart and the feeling of my limbs in motion, or I could let those details recede into a buzz of satisfaction and just watch the scenery, as if from a train. And having reclaimed my body, I began to reclaim the suburbs, one by one. From the slivers of forest clinging to the Lane Cove river to the eternal ugliness of Parramatta Road, I crisscrossed Sydney like a mad surveyor, wrapping the landscape with invisible geodesics then drawing it into my skull. I pounded across the bridges at Gladesville and Iron Cove, Pyrmont, Meadowbank, and the Harbor itself, daring the planks to give way beneath my feet.

I suffered moments of doubt. I wasn’t drunk on endorphins—I wasn’t pushing myself that hard—but it still felt too good to be true. Was this glue-sniffing? Maybe ten thousand generations of my ancestors had been rewarded with the same kind of pleasure for pursuing game, fleeing danger, and mapping their territory for the sake of survival, but to me it was all just a glorious pastime.

Still, I wasn’t deceiving myself, and I wasn’t hurting anyone. I plucked those two rules from the core of the dead child inside me, and kept on running.

* * * *

Thirty was an interesting age to go through puberty. The virus hadn’t literally castrated me, but having eliminated pleasure from sexual imagery, genital stimulation, and orgasm—and having partly wrecked the hormonal regulatory pathways reaching down from the hypothalamus—it had left me with nothing worth describing as sexual function. My body disposed of semen in sporadic joyless spasms—and without the normal lubricants secreted by the prostate during arousal, every unwanted ejaculation tore at the urethral lining.

When all of this changed, it hit hard—even in my state of relative sexual decrepitude. Compared to wet dreams of broken glass, masturbation was wonderful beyond belief, and I found myself unwilling to intervene with the controls to tone it down. But I needn’t have worried that it would rob me of interest in the real thing; I kept finding myself staring openly at people on the street, in shops and on trains, until by a combination of willpower, sheer terror, and prosthetic adjustment I managed to kick the habit.

The network had rendered me bisexual, and though I quickly ramped my level of desire down considerably from that of the database’s most priapic contributors, when it came to choosing to be straight or gay, everything turned to quicksand. The network was not some kind of population-weighted average; if it had been, Durrani’s original hope that my own surviving neural architecture could hold sway would have been dashed whenever the vote was stacked against it. So I was not just 10 or 15 per cent gay; the two possibilities were present with equal force, and the thought of eliminating either felt as alarming, as disfiguring, as if I’d lived with both for decades.

But was that just the prosthesis defending itself, or was it partly my own response? I had no idea. I’d been a thoroughly asexual 12-year-old, even before the virus; I’d always assumed that I was straight, and I’d certainly found some girls attractive, but there’d been no moonstruck stares or furtive groping to back up that purely esthetic opinion. I looked up the latest research, but all the genetic claims I recalled from various headlines had since been discredited—so even if my sexuality had been determined from birth, there was no blood test that could tell me, now, what it would have become. I even tracked down my pre-treatment MRI scans, but they lacked the resolution to provide a direct, neuroanatomical answer.

I didn’t want to be bisexual. I was too old to experiment like a teenager; I wanted certainty, I wanted solid foundations. I wanted to be monogamous—and even if monogamy was rarely an effortless state for anyone, that was no reason to lumber myself with unnecessary obstacles. So who should I slaughter? I knew which choice would make things easier ... but if everything came down to a question of which of the 4,000 donors could carry me along the path of least resistance, whose life would I be living?

Maybe it was all a moot point. I was a 30-year-old virgin with a history of mental illness, no money, no prospects, no social skills—and I could always crank up the satisfaction level of my only current option, and let everything else recede into fantasy. I wasn’t deceiving myself, I wasn’t hurting anyone. It was within my power to want nothing more.

* * * *

I’d noticed the bookshop, tucked away in a back street in Leichhardt, many times before. But one Sunday in June, when I jogged past and saw a copy of The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil in the front window, I had to stop and laugh.

I was drenched in sweat from the winter humidity, so I didn’t go in and buy the book. But I peered in through the display toward the counter, and spotted a HELP WANTED sign.

Looking for unskilled work had seemed futile; the total unemployment rate was 15 per cent, the youth rate three times higher, so I’d assumed there’d always be a thousand other applicants for every job: younger, cheaper, stronger, and certifiably sane. But though I’d resumed my on-line education, I was getting not so much nowhere, fast as everywhere, slowly. All the fields of knowledge that had gripped me as a child had expanded a hundredfold, and while the prosthesis granted me limitless energy and enthusiasm, there was still too much ground for anyone to cover in a lifetime. I knew I’d have to sacrifice 90 per cent of my interests if I was ever going to choose a career, but I still hadn’t been able to wield the knife.

I returned to the bookshop on Monday, walking up from Petersham station. I’d fine-tuned my confidence for the occasion, but it rose spontaneously when I heard that there’d been no other applicants. The owner was in his 60s, and he’d just done his back in; he wanted someone to lug boxes around, and take the counter when he was otherwise occupied. I told him the truth: I’d been neurologically damaged by a childhood illness, and I’d only recently recovered.

He hired me on the spot, for a month’s trial. The starting wage was exactly what Global Assurance were paying me, but if I was taken on permanently I’d get slightly more.

The work wasn’t hard, and the owner didn’t mind me reading in the back room when I had nothing to do. In a way, I was in heaven—ten thousand books, and no access fees—but sometimes I felt the terror of dissolution returning. I read voraciously, and on one level I could make clear judgments: I could pick the clumsy writers from the skilled, the honest from the fakers, the platitudinous from the inspired. But the prosthesis still wanted me to enjoy everything, to embrace everything, to diffuse out across the dusty shelves until I was no one at all, a ghost in the Library of Babel.

* * * *

She walked into the bookshop two minutes after opening time, on the first day of spring. Watching her browse, I tried to think clearly through the consequences of what I was about to do. For weeks I’d been on the counter five hours a day, and with all that human contact I’d been hoping for ... something. Not wild, reciprocated love at first sight, just the tiniest flicker of mutual interest, the slightest piece of evidence that I could actually desire one human being more than all the rest.

It hadn’t happened. Some customers had flirted mildly, but I could see that it was nothing special, just their own kind of politeness—and I’d felt nothing more in response than if they’d been unusually, formally, courteous. And though I might have agreed with any bystander as to who was conventionally good-looking, who was animated or mysterious, witty or charming, who glowed with youth or radiated worldliness ... I just didn’t care. The 4,000 had all loved very different people, and the envelope that stretched between their far-flung characteristics encompassed the entire species. That was never going to change, until I did something to break the symmetry myself.

So for the past week, I’d dragged all the relevant systems in the prosthesis down to 3 or 4. People had become scarcely more interesting to watch than pieces of wood. Now, alone in the shop with this randomly chosen stranger, I slowly turned the controls up. I had to fight against positive feedback; the higher the settings, the more I wanted to increase them, but I’d set limits in advance, and I stuck to them.

By the time she’d chosen two books and approached the counter, I was feeling half defiantly triumphant, half sick with shame. I’d struck a pure note with the network at last; what I felt at the sight of this woman rang true. And if everything I’d done to achieve it was calculated, artificial, bizarre and abhorrent ... I’d had no other way.

I was smiling as she bought the books, and she smiled back warmly. No wedding or engagement ring—but I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t try anything, no matter what. This was just the first step: to notice someone, to make someone stand out from the crowd. I could ask out the tenth, the hundredth woman who bore some passing resemblance to her.

I said, “Would you like to meet for a coffee sometime?”

She looked surprised, but not affronted. Indecisive, but at least slightly pleased to have been asked. And I thought I was prepared for this slip of the tongue to lead nowhere, but then something in the ruins of me sent a shaft of pain through my chest as I watched her make up her mind. If a fraction of that had shown on my face, she probably would have rushed me to the nearest vet to be put down.

She said, “That would be nice. I’m Julia, by the way.”

“I’m Mark.” We shook hands.

“When do you finish work?”

“Tonight? Nine o’clock.”

“Ah.”

I said, “How about lunch? When do you have lunch?”

“One.” She hesitated. “There’s that place just down the road ... next to the hardware store?”

“That would be great.”

Julia smiled. “Then I’ll meet you there. About ten past. OK?”

I nodded. She turned and walked out. I stared after her, dazed, terrified, elated. I thought: This is simple. Anyone in the world can do it. It’s like breathing.

I started hyperventilating. I was an emotionally retarded teenager, and she’d discover that in five minutes flat. Or, worse, discover the 4,000 grown men in my head offering advice.

I went into the toilet to throw up.

* * * *

Julia told me that she managed a dress shop a few blocks away. “You’re new at the bookshop, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So what were you doing before that?”

“I was unemployed. For a long time.”

“How long?”

“Since I was a student.”

She grimaced. “It’s criminal, isn’t it? Well, I’m doing my bit. I’m job-sharing, half-time only.”

“Really? How are you finding it?”

“It’s wonderful. I mean, I’m lucky, the position’s well enough paid that I can get by on half a salary.” She laughed. “Most people assume I must be raising a family. As if that’s the only possible reason.”

“You just like to have the time?”

“Yes. Time’s important. I hate being rushed.”

We had lunch again two days later, and then twice again the next week. She talked about the shop, a trip she’d made to South America, a sister recovering from breast cancer. I almost mentioned my own long-vanquished tumor, but apart from fears about where that might lead, it would have sounded too much like a plea for sympathy. At home, I sat riveted to the phone—not waiting for a call, but watching news broadcasts, to be sure I’d have something to talk about besides myself. Who’s your favorite singer/author/artist/actor? I have no idea.

Visions of Julia filled my head. I wanted to know what she was doing every second of the day; I wanted her to be happy, I wanted her to be safe. Why? Because I’d chosen her. But ... why had I felt compelled to choose anyone? Because in the end, the one thing that most of the donors must have had in common was the fact that they’d desired, and cared about, one person above all others. Why? That came down to evolution. You could no more help and protect everyone in sight than you could fuck them, and a judicious combination of the two had obviously proved effective at passing down genes. So my emotions had the same ancestry as everyone else’s; what more could I ask?

But how could I pretend that I felt anything real for Julia, when I could shift a few buttons in my head, anytime, and make those feelings vanish? Even if what I felt was strong enough to keep me from wanting to touch that dial ...

Some days I thought: it must be like this for everyone. People make a decision, half-shaped by chance, to get to know someone; everything starts from there. Some nights I sat awake for hours, wondering if I was turning myself into a pathetic slave, or a dangerous obsessive. Could anything I discovered about Julia drive me away, now that I’d chosen her? Or even trigger the slightest disapproval? And if, when, she decided to break things off, how would I take it?

We went out to dinner, then shared a taxi home. I kissed her goodnight on her doorstep. Back in my flat, I flipped through sex manuals on the net, wondering how I could ever hope to conceal my complete lack of experience. Everything looked anatomically impossible; I’d need six years of gymnastics training just to achieve the missionary position. I’d refused to masturbate since I’d met her; to fantasize about her, to imagine her without consent, seemed outrageous, unforgivable. After I gave in, I lay awake until dawn trying to comprehend the trap I’d dug for myself, and trying to understand why I didn’t want to be free.

* * * *

Julia bent down and kissed me, sweatily. “That was a nice idea.” She climbed off me and flopped onto the bed.

I’d spent the last ten minutes riding the blue control, trying to keep myself from coming without losing my erection. I’d heard of computer games involving exactly the same thing. Now I turned up the indigo for a stronger glow of intimacy—and when I looked into her eyes, I knew that she could see the effect on me. She brushed my cheek with her hand. “You’re a sweet man. Did you know that?”

I said, “I have to tell you something.” Sweet? I’m a puppet, I’m a robot, I’m a freak.

“What?”

I couldn’t speak. She seemed amused, then she kissed me. “I know you’re gay. That’s all right; I don’t mind.”

“I’m not gay.” Anymore? “Though I might have been.”

Julia frowned. “Gay, bisexual ... I don’t care. Honestly.”

I wouldn’t have to manipulate my responses much longer; the prosthesis was being shaped by all of this, and in a few weeks I’d be able to leave it to its own devices. Then I’d feel, as naturally as anyone, all the things I was now having to choose.

I said, “When I was twelve, I had cancer.”

I told her everything. I watched her face, and saw horror, then growing doubt. “You don’t believe me?”

She replied haltingly, “You sound so matter-of-fact. Eighteen years? How can you just say, ‘I lost eighteen years’?”

“How do you want me to say it? I’m not trying to make you pity me. I just want you to understand.”

When I came to the day I met her, my stomach tightened with fear, but I kept on talking. After a few seconds I saw tears in her eyes, and I felt like I’d been knifed.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” I didn’t know whether to try to hold her, or to leave right then. I kept my eyes fixed on her, but the room swam.

She smiled. “What are you sorry about? You chose me. I chose you. It could have been different for both of us. But it wasn’t.” She reached down under the sheet and took my hand. “It wasn’t.”

* * * *

Julia had Saturdays off, but I had to start work at eight. She kissed me goodbye sleepily when I left at six; I walked all the way home, weightless.

I must have grinned inanely at everyone who came into the shop, but I hardly saw them. I was picturing the future. I hadn’t spoken to either of my parents for nine years, they didn’t even know about the Durrani treatment. But now it seemed possible to repair anything. I could go to them now and say: This is your son, back from the dead. You did save my life, all those years ago.

There was a message on the phone from Julia when I arrived home. I resisted viewing it until I’d started things cooking on the stove; there was something perversely pleasurable about forcing myself to wait, imagining her face and her voice in anticipation.

I hit the PLAY button. Her face wasn’t quite as I’d pictured it.

I kept missing things and stopping to rewind. Isolated phrases stuck in my mind. Too strange. Too sick. No one’s fault. My explanation hadn’t really sunk in the night before. But now she’d had time to think about it, and she wasn’t prepared to carry on a relationship with 4,000 dead men.

I sat on the floor, trying to decide what to feel: the wave of pain crashing over me, or something better, by choice. I knew I could summon up the controls of the prosthesis and make myself happy—happy because I was “free” again, happy because I was better off without her ... happy because Julia was better off without me. Or even just happy because happiness meant nothing, and all I had to do to attain it was flood my brain with Leu-enkephalin.

I sat there wiping tears and mucus off my face while the vegetables burned. The smell made me think of cauterization, sealing off a wound.

I let things run their course, I didn’t touch the controls—but just knowing that I could have changed everything. And I realized then that, even if I went to Luke De Vries and said: I’m cured now, take the software away, I don’t want the power to choose anymore ... I’d never be able to forget where everything I felt had come from.

* * * *

My father came to the flat yesterday. We didn’t talk much, but he hasn’t remarried yet, and he made a joke about us going nightclub-hopping together.

At least I hope it was a joke.

Watching him, I thought: he’s there inside my head, and my mother too, and ten million ancestors, human, proto-human, remote beyond imagining. What difference did 4,000 more make? Everyone had to carve a life out of the same legacy: half universal, half particular; half sharpened by relentless natural selection, half softened by the freedom of chance. I’d just had to face the details a little more starkly.

And I could go on doing it, walking the convoluted border between meaningless happiness and meaningless despair. Maybe I was lucky; maybe the best way to cling to that narrow zone was to see clearly what lay on either side.

When my father was leaving, he looked out from the balcony across the crowded suburb, down toward the Parramatta river, where a storm drain was discharging a visible plume of oil, street litter, and garden run-off into the water.

He asked dubiously, “You happy with this area?”

I said, “I like it here.”

Riding the Crocodile

In their ten-thousand, three hundred and ninth year of marriage, Leila and Jasim began contemplating death. They had known love, raised children, and witnessed the flourishing generations of their offspring. They had travelled to a dozen worlds and lived among a thousand cultures. They had educated themselves many times over, proved theorems, and acquired and abandoned artistic sensibilities and skills. They had not lived in every conceivable manner, far from it, but what room would there be for the multitude if each individual tried to exhaust the permutations of existence? There were some experiences, they agreed, that everyone should try, and others that only a handful of people in all of time need bother with. They had no wish to give up their idiosyncrasies, no wish to uproot their personalities from the niches they had settled in long ago, let alone start cranking mechanically through some tedious enumeration of all the other people they might have been. They had been themselves, and for that they had done, more or less, enough.

Before dying, though, they wanted to attempt something grand and audacious. It was not that their lives were incomplete, in need of some final flourish of affirmation. If some unlikely calamity had robbed them of the chance to orchestrate this finale, the closest of their friends would never have remarked upon, let alone mourned, its absence. There was no aesthetic compulsion to be satisfied, no aching existential void to be filled. Nevertheless, it was what they both wanted, and once they had acknowledged this to each other their hearts were set on it.

Choosing the project was not a great burden; that task required nothing but patience. They knew they’d recognise it when it came to them. Every night before sleeping, Jasim would ask Leila, “Did you see it yet?”

“No. Did you?”

“Not yet.”

Sometimes Leila would dream that she’d found it in her dreams, but the transcripts proved otherwise. Sometimes Jasim felt sure that it was lurking just below the surface of his thoughts, but when he dived down to check it was nothing but a trick of the light.

Years passed. They occupied themselves with simple pleasures: gardening, swimming in the surf, talking with their friends, catching up with their descendants. They had grown skilled at finding pastimes that could bear repetition. Still, were it not for the nameless adventure that awaited them they would have thrown a pair of dice each evening and agreed that two sixes would end it all.

One night, Leila stood alone in the garden, watching the sky. From their home world, Najib, they had travelled only to the nearest stars with inhabited worlds, each time losing just a few decades to the journey. They had chosen those limits so as not to alienate themselves from friends and family, and it had never felt like much of a constraint. True, the civilisation of the Amalgam wrapped the galaxy, and a committed traveller could spend two hundred thousand years circling back home, but what was to be gained by such an overblown odyssey? The dozen worlds of their neighbourhood held enough variety for any traveller, and whether more distant realms were filled with fresh novelties or endless repetition hardly seemed to matter. To have a goal, a destination, would be one thing, but to drown in the sheer plenitude of worlds for its own sake seemed utterly pointless.

A destination? Leila overlaid the sky with information, most of it by necessity millennia out of date. There were worlds with spectacular views of nebulas and star clusters, views that could be guaranteed still to be in existence if they travelled to see them, but would taking in such sights firsthand be so much better than immersion in the flawless images already available in Najib’s library? To blink away ten thousand years just to wake beneath a cloud of green and violet gas, however lovely, seemed like a terrible anticlimax.

The stars tingled with self-aggrandisement, plaintively tugging at her attention. The architecture here, the rivers, the festivals! Even if these tourist attractions could survive the millennia, even if some were literally unique, there was nothing that struck her as a fitting prelude to death. If she and Jasim had formed some whimsical attachment, centuries before, to a world on the other side of the galaxy rumoured to hold great beauty or interest, and if they had talked long enough about chasing it down when they had nothing better to do, then keeping that promise might have been worth it, even if the journey led them to a world in ruins. They had no such cherished destination, though, and it was too late to cultivate one now.

Leila’s gaze followed a thinning in the advertising, taking her to the bulge of stars surrounding the galaxy’s centre. The disk of the Milky Way belonged to the Amalgam, whose various ancestral species had effectively merged into a single civilisation, but the central bulge was inhabited by beings who had declined to do so much as communicate with those around them. All attempts to send probes into the bulge—let alone the kind of engineering spores needed to create the infrastructure for travel—had been gently but firmly rebuffed, with the intruders swatted straight back out again. The Aloof had maintained their silence and isolation since before the Amalgam itself had even existed.

The latest news on this subject was twenty thousand years old, but the status quo had held for close to a million years. If she and Jasim travelled to the innermost edge of the Amalgam’s domain, the chances were exceptionally good that the Aloof would not have changed their ways in the meantime. In fact, it would be no disappointment at all if the Aloof had suddenly thrown open their borders: that unheralded thaw would itself be an extraordinary thing to witness. If the challenge remained, though, all the better.

She called Jasim to the garden and pointed out the richness of stars, unadorned with potted histories.

“We go where?” he asked.

“As close to the Aloof as we’re able.”

“And do what?”

“Try to observe them,” she said. “Try to learn something about them. Try to make contact, in whatever way we can.”

“You don’t think that’s been tried before?”

“A million times. Not so much lately, though. Maybe while the interest on our side has ebbed, they’ve been changing, growing more receptive.”

“Or maybe not.” Jasim smiled. He had appeared a little stunned by her proposal at first, but the idea seemed to be growing on him. “It’s a hard, hard problem to throw ourselves against. But it’s not futile. Not quite.” He wrapped her hands in his. “Let’s see how we feel in the morning.”

In the morning, they were both convinced. They would camp at the gates of these elusive strangers, and try to rouse them from their indifference.

They summoned the family from every corner of Najib. There were some grandchildren and more distant descendants who had settled in other star systems, decades away at lightspeed, but they chose not to wait to call them home for this final farewell.

Two hundred people crowded the physical house and garden, while two hundred more confined themselves to the virtual wing. There was talk and food and music, like any other celebration, and Leila tried to undercut any edge of solemnity that she felt creeping in. As the night wore on, though, each time she kissed a child or grandchild, each time she embraced an old friend, she thought: this could be the last time, ever. There had to be a last time, she couldn’t face ten thousand more years, but a part of her spat and struggled like a cornered animal at the thought of each warm touch fading to nothing.

As dawn approached, the party shifted entirely into the acorporeal. People took on fancy dress from myth or xenology, or just joked and played with their illusory bodies. It was all very calm and gentle, nothing like the surreal excesses she remembered from her youth, but Leila still felt a tinge of vertigo. When her son Khalid made his ears grow and spin, this amiable silliness carried a hard message: the machinery of the house had ripped her mind from her body, as seamlessly as ever, but this time she would never be returning to the same flesh.

Sunrise brought the first of the goodbyes. Leila forced herself to release each proffered hand, to unwrap her arms from around each non-existent body. She whispered to Jasim, “Are you going mad, too?”

“Of course.”

Gradually the crowd thinned out. The wing grew quiet. Leila found herself pacing from room to room, as if she might yet chance upon someone who’d stayed behind, then she remembered urging the last of them to go, her children and friends tearfully retreating down the hall. She skirted inconsolable sadness, then lifted herself above it and went looking for Jasim.

He was waiting for her outside their room.

“Are you ready to sleep?” he asked her gently.

She said, “For an eon.”

Leila woke in the same bed as she’d lain down in. Jasim was still sleeping beside her. The window showed dawn, but it was not the usual view of the cliffs and the ocean.

Leila had the house brief her. After twenty thousand years—travelling more or less at lightspeed, pausing only for a microsecond or two at various way-stations to be cleaned up and amplified—the package of information bearing the two of them had arrived safely at Nazdeek-be-Beegane. This world was not crowded, and it had been tweaked to render it compatible with a range of metabolic styles. The house had negotiated a site where they could live embodied in comfort if they wished.

Jasim stirred and opened his eyes. “Good morning. How are you feeling?”

“Older.”

“Really?”

Leila paused to consider this seriously. “No. Not even slightly. How about you?”

“I’m fine. I’m just wondering what’s out there.” He raised himself up to peer through the window. The house had been instantiated on a wide, empty plain, covered with low stalks of green and yellow vegetation. They could eat these plants, and the house had already started a spice garden while they slept. He stretched his shoulders. “Let’s go and make breakfast.”

They went downstairs, stepping into freshly minted bodies, then out into the garden. The air was still, the sun already warm. The house had tools prepared to help them with the harvest. It was the nature of travel that they had come empty-handed, and they had no relatives here, no fifteenth cousins, no friends of friends. It was the nature of the Amalgam that they were welcome nonetheless, and the machines that supervised this world on behalf of its inhabitants had done their best to provide for them.

“So this is the afterlife,” Jasim mused, scything the yellow stalks. “Very rustic.”

“Speak for yourself,” Leila retorted. “I’m not dead yet.” She put down her own scythe and bent to pluck one of the plants out by its roots.

The meal they made was filling but bland. Leila resisted the urge to tweak her perceptions of it; she preferred to face the challenge of working out decent recipes, which would make a useful counterpoint to the more daunting task they’d come here to attempt.

They spent the rest of the day just tramping around, exploring their immediate surroundings. The house had tapped into a nearby stream for water, and sunlight, stored, would provide all the power they needed. From some hills about an hour’s walk away they could see into a field with another building, but they decided to wait a little longer before introducing themselves to their neighbours. The air had a slightly odd smell, due to the range of components needed to support other metabolic styles, but it wasn’t too intrusive.

The onset of night took them by surprise. Even before the sun had set a smattering of stars began appearing in the east, and for a moment Leila thought that these white specks against the fading blue were some kind of exotic atmospheric phenomenon, perhaps small clouds forming in the stratosphere as the temperature dropped. When it became clear what was happening, she beckoned to Jasim to sit beside her on the bank of the stream and watch the stars of the bulge come out.

They’d come at a time when Nazdeek lay between its sun and the galactic centre. At dusk one half of the Aloof’s dazzling territory stretched from the eastern horizon to the zenith, with the stars’ slow march westward against a darkening sky only revealing more of their splendour.

“You think that was to die for?” Jasim joked as they walked back to the house.

“We could end this now, if you’re feeling unambitious.”

He squeezed her hand. “If this takes ten thousand years, I’m ready.”

It was a mild night, they could have slept outdoors, but the spectacle was too distracting. They stayed downstairs, in the physical wing. Leila watched the strange thicket of shadows cast by the furniture sliding across the walls. These neighbours never sleep, she thought. When we come knocking, they’ll ask what took us so long.

Hundreds of observatories circled Nazdeek, built then abandoned by others who’d come on the same quest. When Leila saw the band of pristine space junk mapped out before her—orbits scrupulously maintained and swept clean by robot sentinels for eons—she felt as if she’d found the graves of their predecessors, stretching out in the field behind the house as far as the eye could see.

Nazdeek was prepared to offer them the resources to loft another package of instruments into the vacuum if they wished, but many of the abandoned observatories were perfectly functional, and most had been left in a compliant state, willing to take instructions from anyone.

Leila and Jasim sat in their living room and woke machine after machine from millennia of hibernation. Some, it turned out, had not been sleeping at all, but had been carrying on systematic observations, accumulating data long after their owners had lost interest.

In the crowded stellar precincts of the bulge, disruptive gravitational effects made planet formation rarer than it was in the disk, and orbits less stable. Nevertheless, planets had been found. A few thousand could be tracked from Nazdeek, and one observatory had been monitoring their atmospheric spectra for the last twelve millennia. In all of those worlds for all of those years, there were no signs of atmospheric composition departing from plausible, purely geochemical models. That meant no wild life, and no crude industries. It didn’t prove that these worlds were uninhabited, but it suggested either that the Aloof went to great lengths to avoid leaving chemical fingerprints, or they lived in an entirely different fashion to any of the civilisations that had formed the Amalgam.

Of the eleven forms of biochemistry that had been found scattered around the galactic disk, all had given rise eventually to hundreds of species with general intelligence. Of the multitude of civilisations that had emerged from those roots, all contained cultures that had granted themselves the flexibility of living as software, but they also all contained cultures that persisted with corporeal existence. Leila would never have willingly given up either mode, herself, but while it was easy to imagine a subculture doing so, for a whole species it seemed extraordinary. In a sense, the intertwined civilisation of the Amalgam owed its existence to the fact that there was as much cultural variation within every species as there was between one species and another. In that explosion of diversity, overlapping interests were inevitable.

If the Aloof were the exception, and their material culture had shrunk to nothing but a few discreet processors—each with the energy needs of a gnat, scattered throughout a trillion cubic light years of dust and blazing stars—then finding them would be impossible.

Of course, that worst-case scenario couldn’t quite be true. The sole reason the Aloof were assumed to exist at all was the fact that some component of their material culture was tossing back every probe that was sent into the bulge. However discreet that machinery was, it certainly couldn’t be sparse: given that it had managed to track, intercept and reverse the trajectories of billions of individual probes that had been sent in along thousands of different routes, relativistic constraints on the information flow implied that the Aloof had some kind of presence at more or less every star at the edge of the bulge.

Leila and Jasim had Nazdeek brief them on the most recent attempts to enter the bulge, but even after forty thousand years the basic facts hadn’t changed. There was no crisply delineated barrier marking the Aloof’s territory, but at some point within a border region about fifty light years wide, every single probe that was sent in ceased to function. The signals from those carrying in-flight beacons or transmitters went dead without warning. A century or so later, they would appear again at almost the same point, travelling in the opposite direction: back to where they’d come from. Those that were retrieved and examined were found to be unharmed, but their data logs contained nothing from the missing decades.

Jasim said, “The Aloof could be dead and gone. They built the perfect fence, but now it’s outlasted them. It’s just guarding their ruins.”

Leila rejected this emphatically. “No civilisation that’s spread to more than one star system has ever vanished completely. Sometimes they’ve changed beyond recognition, but not one has ever died without descendants.”

“That’s a fact of history, but it’s not a universal law,” Jasim persisted. “If we’re going to argue from the Amalgam all the time, we’ll get nowhere. If the Aloof weren’t exceptional, we wouldn’t be here.”

“That’s true. But I won’t accept that they’re dead until I see some evidence.”

“What would count as evidence? Apart from a million years of silence?”

Leila said, “Silence could mean anything. If they’re really dead, we’ll find something more, something definite.”

“Such as?”

“If we see it, we’ll know.”

They began the project in earnest, reviewing data from the ancient observatories, stopping only to gather food, eat and sleep. They had resisted making detailed plans back on Najib, reasoning that any approach they mapped out in advance was likely to be rendered obsolete once they learned about the latest investigations. Now that they’d arrived and found the state of play utterly unchanged, Leila wished that they’d come armed with some clear options for dealing with the one situation they could have prepared for before they’d left.

In fact, though they might have felt like out-of-touch amateurs back on Najib, now that the Aloof had become their entire raison d’être it was far harder to relax and indulge in the kind of speculation that might actually bear fruit, given that every systematic approach had failed. Having come twenty thousand light years for this, they couldn’t spend their time day-dreaming, turning the problem over in the backs of their minds while they surrendered to the rhythms of Nazdeek’s rural idyll. So they studied everything that had been tried before, searching methodically for a new approach, hoping to see the old ideas with fresh eyes, hoping that—by chance if for no other reason—they might lack some crucial blind spot that had afflicted all of their predecessors.

After seven months without results or inspiration, it was Jasim who finally dragged them out of the rut. “We’re getting nowhere,” he said. “It’s time to accept that, put all this aside, and go visit the neighbours.”

Leila stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Go visit them? How? What makes you think that they’re suddenly going to let us in?”

He said, “The neighbours. Remember? Over the hill. The ones who might actually want to talk to us.”

Their neighbours had published a précis stating that they welcomed social contact in principle, but might take a while to respond. Jasim sent them an invitation, asking if they’d like to join them in their house, and waited.

After just three days, a reply came back. The neighbours did not want to put them to the trouble of altering their own house physically, and preferred not to become acorporeal at present. Given the less stringent requirements of Leila and Jasim’s own species when embodied, might they wish to come instead to the neighbours’ house?

Leila said, “Why not?” They set a date and time.

The neighbours’ précis included all the biological and sociological details needed to prepare for the encounter. Their biochemistry was carbon-based and oxygen-breathing, but employed a different replicator to Leila and Jasim’s DNA. Their ancestral phenotype resembled a large furred snake, and when embodied they generally lived in nests of a hundred or so. The minds of the individuals were perfectly autonomous, but solitude was an alien and unsettling concept for them.

Leila and Jasim set out late in the morning, in order to arrive early in the afternoon. There were some low, heavy clouds in the sky, but it was not completely overcast, and Leila noticed that when the sun passed behind the clouds, she could discern some of the brightest stars from the edge of the bulge.

Jasim admonished her sternly, “Stop looking. This is our day off.”

The Snakes’ building was a large squat cylinder resembling a water tank, which turned out to be packed with something mossy and pungent. When they arrived at the entrance, three of their hosts were waiting to greet them, coiled on the ground near the mouth of a large tunnel emerging from the moss. Their bodies were almost as wide as their guests’, and some eight or ten metres long. Their heads bore two front-facing eyes, but their other sense organs were not prominent. Leila could make out their mouths, and knew from the briefing how many rows of teeth lay behind them, but the wide pink gashes stayed closed, almost lost in the grey fur.

The Snakes communicated with a low-frequency thumping, and their system of nomenclature was complex, so Leila just mentally tagged the three of them with randomly chosen, slightly exotic names—Tim, John and Sarah—and tweaked her translator so she’d recognise intuitively who was who, who was addressing her, and the significance of their gestures.

“Welcome to our home,” said Tim enthusiastically.

“Thank you for inviting us,” Jasim replied.

“We’ve had no visitors for quite some time,” explained Sarah. “So we really are delighted to meet you.”

“How long has it been?” Leila asked.

“Twenty years,” said Sarah.

“But we came here for the quiet life,” John added. “So we expected it would be a while.”

Leila pondered the idea of a clan of a hundred ever finding a quiet life, but then, perhaps unwelcome intrusions from outsiders were of a different nature to family dramas.

“Will you come into the nest?” Tim asked. “If you don’t wish to enter we won’t take offence, but everyone would like to see you, and some of us aren’t comfortable coming out into the open.”

Leila glanced at Jasim. He said privately, “We can push our vision to IR. And tweak ourselves to tolerate the smell.”

Leila agreed.

“Okay,” Jasim told Tim.

Tim slithered into the tunnel and vanished in a quick, elegant motion, then John motioned with his head for the guests to follow. Leila went first, propelling herself up the gentle slope with her knees and elbows. The plant the Snakes’ cultivated for the nest formed a cool, dry, resilient surface. She could see Tim ten metres or so ahead, like a giant glow-worm shining with body heat, slowing down now to let her catch up. She glanced back at Jasim, who looked even weirder than the Snakes now, his face and arms blotched with strange bands of radiance from the exertion.

After a few minutes, they came to a large chamber. The air was humid, but after the confines of the tunnel it felt cool and fresh. Tim led them towards the centre, where about a dozen other Snakes were already waiting to greet them. They circled the guests excitedly, thumping out a delighted welcome. Leila felt a surge of adrenaline; she knew that she and Jasim were in no danger, but the sheer size and energy of the creatures was overwhelming.

“Can you tell us why you’ve come to Nazdeek?” asked Sarah.

“Of course.” For a second or two Leila tried to maintain eye contact with her, but like all the other Snakes she kept moving restlessly, a gesture that Leila’s translator imbued with a sense of warmth and enthusiasm. As for lack of eye contact, the Snakes’ own translators would understand perfectly that some aspects of ordinary, polite human behaviour became impractical under the circumstances, and would not mislabel her actions. “We’re here to learn about the Aloof,” she said.

“The Aloof?” At first Sarah just seemed perplexed, then Leila’s translator hinted at a touch of irony. “But they offer us nothing.”

Leila was tongue-tied for a moment. The implication was subtle but unmistakable. Citizens of the Amalgam had a protocol for dealing with each other’s curiosity: they published a précis, which spelled out clearly any information that they wished people in general to know about them, and also specified what, if any, further inquiries would be welcome. However, a citizen was perfectly entitled to publish no précis at all and have that decision respected. When no information was published, and no invitation offered, you simply had no choice but to mind your own business.

“They offer us nothing as far as we can tell,” she said, “but that might be a misunderstanding, a failure to communicate.”

“They send back all the probes,” Tim replied. “Do you really think we’ve misunderstood what that means?”

Jasim said, “It means that they don’t want us physically intruding on their territory, putting our machines right next to their homes, but I’m not convinced that it proves that they have no desire to communicate whatsoever.”

“We should leave them in peace,” Tim insisted. “They’ve seen the probes, so they know we’re here. If they want to make contact, they’ll do it in their own time.”

“Leave them in peace,” echoed another Snake. A chorus of affirmation followed from others in the chamber.

Leila stood her ground. “We have no idea how many different species and cultures might be living in the bulge. One of them sends back the probes, but for all we know there could be a thousand others who don’t yet even know that the Amalgam has tried to make contact.”

This suggestion set off a series of arguments, some between guests and hosts, some between the Snakes themselves. All the while, the Snakes kept circling excitedly, while new ones entered the chamber to witness the novel sight of these strangers.

When the clamour about the Aloof had quietened down enough for her to change the subject, Leila asked Sarah, “Why have you come to Nazdeek yourself?”

“It’s out of the way, off the main routes. We can think things over here, undisturbed.”

“But you could have the same amount of privacy anywhere. It’s all a matter of what you put in your précis.”

Sarah’s response was imbued with a tinge of amusement. “For us, it would be unimaginably rude to cut off all contact explicitly, by decree. Especially with others from our own ancestral species. To live a quiet life, we had to reduce the likelihood of encountering anyone who would seek us out. We had to make the effort of rendering ourselves physically remote, in order to reap the benefits.”

“Yet you’ve made Jasim and myself very welcome.”

“Of course. But that will be enough for the next twenty years.”

So much for resurrecting their social life. “What exactly is it that you’re pondering in this state of solitude?”

“The nature of reality. The uses of existence. The reasons to live, and the reasons not to.”

Leila felt the skin on her forearms tingle. She’d almost forgotten that she’d made an appointment with death, however uncertain the timing.

She explained how she and Jasim had made their decision to embark on a grand project before dying.

“That’s an interesting approach,” Sarah said. “I’ll have to give it some thought.” She paused, then added, “Though I’m not sure that you’ve solved the problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“Will it really be easier now to choose the right moment to give up your life? Haven’t you merely replaced one delicate judgement with an even more difficult one: deciding when you’ve exhausted the possibilities for contacting the Aloof?”

“You make it sound as if we have no chance of succeeding.” Leila was not afraid of the prospect of failure, but the suggestion that it was inevitable was something else entirely.

Sarah said, “We’ve been here on Nazdeek for fifteen thousand years. We don’t pay much attention to the world outside the nest, but even from this cloistered state we’ve seen many people break their backs against this rock.”

“So when will you accept that your own project is finished?” Leila countered. “If you still don’t have what you’re looking for after fifteen thousand years, when will you admit defeat?”

“I have no idea,” Sarah confessed. “I have no idea, any more than you do.”

When the way forward first appeared, there was nothing to set it apart from a thousand false alarms that had come before it.

It was their seventeenth year on Nazdeek. They had launched their own observatory—armed with the latest refinements culled from around the galaxy—fifteen years before, and it had been confirming the null results of its predecessors ever since.

They had settled into an unhurried routine, systematically exploring the possibilities that observation hadn’t yet ruled out. Between the scenarios that were obviously stone cold dead—the presence of an energy-rich, risk-taking, extroverted civilisation in the bulge actively seeking contact by every means at its disposal—and the infinite number of possibilities that could never be distinguished at this distance from the absence of all life, and the absence of all machinery save one dumb but efficient gatekeeper, tantalising clues would bubble up out of the data now and then, only to fade into statistical insignificance in the face of continued scrutiny.

Tens of billions of stars lying within the Aloof’s territory could be discerned from Nazdeek, some of them evolving or violently interacting on a time scale of years or months. Black holes were flaying and swallowing their companions. Neutron stars and white dwarfs were stealing fresh fuel and flaring into novas. Star clusters were colliding and tearing each other apart. If you gathered data on this whole menagerie for long enough, you could expect to see almost anything. Leila would not have been surprised to wander into the garden at night and find a great welcome sign spelled out in the sky, before the fortuitous pattern of novas faded and the message dissolved into randomness again.

When their gamma ray telescope caught a glimmer of something odd—the nuclei of a certain isotope of fluorine decaying from an excited state, when there was no nearby source of the kind of radiation that could have put the nuclei into that state in the first place—it might have been just another random, unexplained fact to add to a vast pile. When the same glimmer was seen again, not far away, Leila reasoned that if a gas cloud enriched with fluorine could be affected at one location by an unseen radiation source, it should not be surprising if the same thing happened elsewhere in the same cloud.

It happened again. The three events lined up in space and time in a manner suggesting a short pulse of gamma rays in the form of a tightly focused beam, striking three different points in the gas cloud. Still, in the mountains of data they had acquired from their predecessors, coincidences far more compelling than this had occurred hundreds of thousands of times.

With the fourth flash, the balance of the numbers began to tip. The secondary gamma rays reaching Nazdeek gave only a weak and distorted impression of the original radiation, but all four flashes were consistent with a single, narrow beam. There were thousands of known gamma ray sources in the bulge, but the frequency of the radiation, the direction of the beam, and the time profile of the pulse did not fit with any of them.

The archives revealed a few dozen occasions when the same kind of emissions had been seen from fluorine nuclei under similar conditions. There had never been more than three connected events before, but one sequence had occurred along a path not far from the present one.

Leila sat by the stream and modelled the possibilities. If the beam was linking two objects in powered flight, prediction was impossible. If receiver and transmitter were mostly in free-fall, though, and only made corrections occasionally, the past and present data combined gave her a plausible forecast for the beam’s future orientation.

Jasim looked into her simulation, a thought-bubble of stars and equations hovering above the water. “The whole path will lie out of bounds,” he said.

“No kidding.” The Aloof’s territory was more or less spherical, which made it a convex set: you couldn’t get between any two points that lay inside it without entering the territory itself. “But look how much the beam spreads out. From the fluorine data, I’d say it could be tens of kilometres wide by the time it reaches the receiver.”

“So they might not catch it all? They might let some of the beam escape into the disk?” He sounded unpersuaded.

Leila said, “Look, if they really were doing everything possible to hide this, we would never have seen these blips in the first place.”

“Gas clouds with this much fluorine are extremely rare. They obviously picked a frequency that wouldn’t be scattered under ordinary circumstances.”

“Yes, but that’s just a matter of getting the signal through the local environment. We choose frequencies ourselves that won’t interact with any substance that’s likely to be present along the route, but no choice is perfect, and we just live with that. It seems to me that they’ve done the same thing. If they were fanatical purists, they’d communicate by completely different methods.”

“All right.” Jasim reached into the model. “So where can we go that’s in the line of sight?”

The short answer was: nowhere. If the beam was not blocked completely by its intended target it would spread out considerably as it made its way through the galactic disk, but it would not grow so wide that it would sweep across a single point where the Amalgam had any kind of outpost.

Leila said, “This is too good to miss. We need to get a decent observatory into its path.”

Jasim agreed. “And we need to do it before these nodes decide they’ve drifted too close to something dangerous, and switch on their engines for a course correction.”

They crunched through the possibilities. Wherever the Amalgam had an established presence, the infrastructure already on the ground could convert data into any kind of material object. Transmitting yourself to such a place, along with whatever you needed, was simplicity itself: lightspeed was the only real constraint. Excessive demands on the local resources might be denied, but modest requests were rarely rejected.

Far more difficult was building something new at a site with raw materials but no existing receiver; in that case, instead of pure data, you needed to send an engineering spore of some kind. If you were in a hurry, not only did you need to spend energy boosting the spore to relativistic velocities—a cost that snowballed due to the mass of protective shielding—you then had to waste much of the time you gained on a lengthy braking phase, or the spore would hit its target with enough energy to turn it into plasma. Interactions with the interstellar medium could be used to slow down the spore, avoiding the need to carry yet more mass to act as a propellant for braking, but the whole business was disgustingly inefficient.

Harder still was getting anything substantial to a given point in the vast empty space between the stars. With no raw materials to hand at the destination, everything had to be moved from somewhere else. The best starting point was usually to send an engineering spore into a cometary cloud, loosely bound gravitationally to its associated star, but not every such cloud was open to plunder, and everything took time, and obscene amounts of energy.

To arrange for an observatory to be delivered to the most accessible point along the beam’s line of sight, travelling at the correct velocity, would take about fifteen thousand years all told. That assumed that the local cultures who owned the nearest facilities, and who had a right to veto the use of the raw materials, acceded immediately to their request.

“How long between course corrections?” Leila wondered. If the builders of this hypothetical network were efficient, the nodes could drift for a while in interstellar space without any problems, but in the bulge everything happened faster than in the disk, and the need to counter gravitational effects would come much sooner. There was no way to make a firm prediction, but they could easily have as little as eight or ten thousand years.

Leila struggled to reconcile herself to the reality. “We’ll try at this location, and if we’re lucky we might still catch something. If not, we’ll try again after the beam shifts.” Sending the first observatory chasing after the beam would be futile; even with the present free-fall motion of the nodes, the observation point would be moving at a substantial fraction of lightspeed relative to the local stars. Magnified by the enormous distances involved, a small change in direction down in the bulge could see the beam lurch thousands of light years sideways by the time it reached the disk.

Jasim said, “Wait.” He magnified the region around the projected path of the beam.

“What are you looking for?”

He asked the map, “Are there two outposts of the Amalgam lying on a straight line that intersects the beam?”

The map replied in a tone of mild incredulity. “No.”

“That was too much to hope for. Are there three lying on a plane that intersects the beam?”

The map said, “There are about ten-to-the-eighteen triples that meet that condition.”

Leila suddenly realised what it was he had in mind. She laughed and squeezed his arm. “You are completely insane!”

Jasim said, “Let me get the numbers right first, then you can mock me.” He rephrased his question to the map. “For how many of those triples would the beam pass between them, intersecting the triangle whose vertices they lie on?”

“About ten-to-the-sixth.”

“How close to us is the closest point of intersection of the beam with any of those triangles—if the distance in each case is measured via the worst of the three outposts, the one that makes the total path longest.”

“Seven thousand four hundred and twenty-six light years.”

Leila said, “Collision braking. With three components?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Better than twice as fast as the fastest conventional method? “Nothing comes to mind. Let me think about it.”

Braking against the flimsy interstellar medium was a slow process. If you wanted to deliver a payload rapidly to a point that fortuitously lay somewhere on a straight line between two existing outposts, you could fire two separate packages from the two locations and let them “collide” when they met—or rather, let them brake against each other magnetically. If you arranged for the packages to have equal and opposite momenta, they would come to a halt without any need to throw away reaction mass or clutch at passing molecules, and some of their kinetic energy could be recovered as electricity and stored for later use.

The aim and the timing had to be perfect. Relativistic packages did not make in-flight course corrections, and the data available at each launch site about the other’s precise location was always a potentially imperfect prediction, not a rock-solid statement of fact. Even with the Amalgam’s prodigious astrometric and computing resources, achieving millimetre alignments at thousand-light-year distances could not be guaranteed.

Now Jasim wanted to make three of these bullets meet, perform an elaborate electromagnetic dance, and end up with just the right velocity needed to keep tracking the moving target of the beam.

In the evening, back in the house, they sat together working through simulations. It was easy to find designs that would work if everything went perfectly, but they kept hunting for the most robust variation, the one that was most tolerant of small misalignments. With standard two-body collision braking, the usual solution was to have the first package, shaped like a cylinder, pass right through a hole in the second package. As it emerged from the other side and the two moved apart again, the magnetic fields were switched from repulsive to attractive. Several “bounces” followed, and in the process as much of the kinetic energy as possible was gradually converted into superconducting currents for storage, while the rest was dissipated as electromagnetic radiation. Having three objects meeting at an angle would not only make the timing and positioning more critical, it would destroy the simple, axial symmetry and introduce a greater risk of instability.

It was dawn before they settled on the optimal design, which effectively split the problem in two. First, package one, a sphere, would meet package two, a torus, threading the gap in the middle, then bouncing back and forth through it seventeen times. The plane of the torus would lie at an angle to its direction of flight, allowing the sphere to approach it head-on. When the two finally came to rest with respect to each other, they would still have a component of their velocity carrying them straight towards package three, a cylinder with an axial borehole.

Because the electromagnetic interactions were the same as the two-body case—self-centring, intrinsically stable—a small amount of misalignment at each of these encounters would not be fatal. The usual two-body case, though, didn’t require the combined package, after all the bouncing and energy dissipation was completed, to be moving on a path so precisely determined that it could pass through yet another narrow hoop.

There were no guarantees, and in the end the result would be in other people’s hands. They could send requests to the three outposts, asking for these objects to be launched at the necessary times on the necessary trajectories. The energy needs hovered on the edge of politeness, though, and it was possible that one or more of the requests would simply be refused.

Jasim waved the models away, and they stretched out on the carpet, side by side.

He said, “I never thought we’d get this far. Even if this is only a mirage, I never thought we’d find one worth chasing.”

Leila said, “I don’t know what I expected. Some kind of great folly: some long, exhausting, exhilarating struggle that felt like wandering through a jungle for years and ending up utterly lost.”

“And then what?”

“Surrender.”

Jasim was silent for a while. Leila could sense that he was brooding over something, but she didn’t press him.

He said, “Should we travel to this observatory ourselves, or wait here for the results?”

“We should go. Definitely! I don’t want to hang around here for fifteen thousand years, waiting. We can leave the Nazdeek observatories hunting for more beam fluorescence and broadcasting the results, so we’ll hear about them wherever we end up.”

“That makes sense.” Jasim hesitated, then added, “When we go, I don’t want to leave a back-up.”

“Ah.” They’d travelled from Najib leaving nothing of themselves behind: if their transmission had somehow failed to make it to Nazdeek, no stored copy of the data would ever have woken to resume their truncated lives. Travel within the Amalgam’s established network carried negligible risks, though. If they flung themselves towards the hypothetical location of this yet-to-be-assembled station in the middle of nowhere, it was entirely possible that they’d sail off to infinity without ever being instantiated again.

Leila said, “Are you tired of what we’re doing? Of what we’ve become?”

“It’s not that.”

“This one chance isn’t the be-all and end-all. Now that we know how to hunt for the beams, I’m sure we’ll find this one again after its shifts. We could find a thousand others, if we’re persistent.”

“I know that,” he said. “I don’t want to stop, I don’t want to end this. But I want to risk ending it. Just once. While that still means something.”

Leila sat up and rested her head on her knees. She could understand what he was feeling, but it still disturbed her.

Jasim said, “We’ve already achieved something extraordinary. No one’s found a clue like this in a million years. If we leave that to prosperity, it will be pursued to the end, we can be sure of that. But I desperately want to pursue it myself. With you.”

“And because you want that so badly, you need to face the chance of losing it?”

“Yes.”

It was one thing they had never tried. In their youth, they would never have knowingly risked death. They’d been too much in love, too eager for the life they’d yet to live; the stakes would have been unbearably high. In the twilight years, back on Najib, it would have been an easy thing to do, but an utterly insipid pleasure.

Jasim sat up and took her hand. “Have I hurt you with this?”

“No, no.” She shook her head pensively, trying to gather her thoughts. She didn’t want to hide her feelings, but she wanted to express them precisely, not blurt them out in a confusing rush. “I always thought we’d reach the end together, though. We’d come to some point in the jungle, look around, exchange a glance, and know that we’d arrived. Without even needing to say it aloud.”

Jasim drew her to him and held her. “All right, I’m sorry. Forget everything I said.”

Leila pushed him away, annoyed. “This isn’t something you can take back. If it’s the truth, it’s the truth. Just give me some time to decide what I want.”

They put it aside, and buried themselves in work: polishing the design for the new observatory, preparing the requests to send to the three outposts. One of the planets they would be petitioning belonged to the Snakes, so Leila and Jasim went to visit the nest for a second time, to seek advice on the best way to beg for this favour. Their neighbours seemed more excited just to see them again than they were at the news that a tiny rent had appeared in the Aloof’s million-year-old cloak of discretion. When Leila gently pushed her on this point, Sarah said, “You’re here, here and now, our guests in flesh and blood. I’m sure I’ll be dead long before the Aloof are willing to do the same.”

Leila thought: What kind of strange greed is it that I’m suffering from? I can be feted by creatures who rose up from the dust through a completely different molecule than my own ancestors. I can sit among them and discuss the philosophy of life and death. The Amalgam has already joined every willing participant in the galaxy into one vast conversation. And I want to go and eavesdrop on the Aloof? Just because they’ve played hard-to-get for a million years?

They dispatched requests for the three modules to be built and launched by their three as-yet unwitting collaborators, specifying the final countdown to the nanosecond but providing a ten-year period for the project to be debated. Leila felt optimistic; however blasé the Nazdeek nest had been, she suspected that no space-faring culture really could resist the chance to peek behind the veil.

They had thirty-six years to wait before they followed in the wake of their petitions; on top of the ten-year delay, the new observatory’s modules would be travelling at a fraction of a percent below lightspeed, so they needed a head start.

No more tell-tale gamma ray flashes appeared from the bulge, but Leila hadn’t expected any so soon. They had sent the news of their discovery to other worlds close to the Aloof’s territory, so eventually a thousand other groups with different vantage points would be searching for the same kind of evidence and finding their own ways to interpret and exploit it. It hurt a little, scattering their hard-won revelation to the wind for anyone to use—perhaps even to beat them to some far greater prize—but they’d relied on the generosity of their predecessors from the moment they’d arrived on Nazdeek, and the sheer scale of the overall problem made it utterly perverse to cling selfishly to their own small triumph.

As the day of their departure finally arrived, Leila came to a decision. She understood Jasim’s need to put everything at risk, and in a sense she shared it. If she had always imagined the two of them ending this together—struggling on, side by side, until the way forward was lost and the undergrowth closed in on them—then that was what she’d risk. She would take the flip side to his own wager.

When the house took their minds apart and sent them off to chase the beam, Leila left a copy of herself frozen on Nazdeek. If no word of their safe arrival reached it by the expected time, it would wake and carry on the search.

Alone.

“Welcome to Trident. We’re honoured by the presence of our most distinguished guest.”

Jasim stood beside the bed, waving a triangular flag. Red, green and blue in the corners merged to white in the centre.

“How long have you been up?”

“About an hour,” he said. Leila frowned, and he added apologetically, “You were sleeping very deeply, I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“I should be the one giving the welcome,” she said. “You’re the one who might never have woken.”

The bedroom window looked out into a dazzling field of stars. It was not a view facing the bulge—by now Leila could recognise the distinctive spectra of the region’s stars with ease—but even these disk stars were so crisp and bright that this was like no sky she had ever seen.

“Have you been downstairs?” she said.

“Not yet. I wanted us to decide on that together.” The house had no physical wing here; the tiny observatory had no spare mass for such frivolities as embodying them, let alone constructing architectural follies in the middle of interstellar space. “Downstairs” would be nothing but a scape that they were free to design at will.

“Everything worked,” she said, not quite believing it.

Jasim spread his arms. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

They watched a reconstruction of the first two modules coming together. The timing and the trajectories were as near to perfect as they could have hoped for, and the superconducting magnets had been constructed to a standard of purity and homogeneity that made the magnetic embrace look like an idealised simulation. By the time the two had locked together, the third module was just minutes away. Some untraceable discrepancy between reality and prediction in the transfer of momentum to radiation had the composite moving at a tiny angle away from its expected course, but when it met the third module the magnetic fields still meshed in a stable configuration, and there was energy to spare to nudge the final assembly precisely into step with the predicted swinging of the Aloof’s beam.

The Amalgam had lived up to its promise: three worlds full of beings they had never met, who owed them nothing, who did not even share their molecular ancestry, had each diverted enough energy to light up all their cities for a decade, and followed the instructions of strangers down to the atom, down to the nanosecond, in order to make this work.

What happened now was entirely in the hands of the Aloof.

Trident had been functioning for about a month before its designers had arrived to take up occupancy. So far, it had not yet observed any gamma ray signals spilling out of the bulge. The particular pulse that Leila and Jasim had seen triggering fluorescence would be long gone, of course, but the usefulness of their present location was predicated on three assumptions: the Aloof would use the same route for many other bursts of data; some of the radiation carrying that data would slip past the intended receiver; and the two nodes of the network would have continued in free fall long enough for the spilt data to be arriving here still, along the same predictable path.

Without those three extra components, delivered by their least reliable partners, Trident would be worthless.

“Downstairs,” Leila said. “Maybe a kind of porch with glass walls?”

“Sounds fine to me.”

She conjured up a plan of the house and sketched some ideas, then they went down to try them out at full scale.

They had been into orbit around Najib, and they had travelled embodied to its three beautiful, barren sibling worlds, but they had never been in interstellar space before. Or at least, they had never been conscious of it.

They were still not truly embodied, but you didn’t need flesh and blood to feel the vacuum around you; to be awake and plugged-in to an honest depiction of your surroundings was enough. The nearest of Trident’s contributor worlds was six hundred light years away. The distance to Najib was unthinkable. Leila paced around the porch, looking out at the stars, vertiginous in her virtual body, unsteady in the phoney gravity.

It had been twenty-eight thousand years since they’d left Najib. All her children and grandchildren had almost certainly chosen death, long ago. No messages had been sent after them to Nazdeek; Leila had asked for that silence, fearing that it would be unbearably painful to hear news, day after day, to which she could give no meaningful reply, about events in which she could never participate. Now she regretted that. She wanted to read the lives of her grandchildren, as she might the biography of an ancestor. She wanted to know how things had ended up, like the time traveller she was.

A second month of observation passed, with nothing. A data feed reaching them from Nazdeek was equally silent. For any new hint of the beam’s location to reach Nazdeek, and then the report of that to reach Trident, would take thousands of years longer than the direct passage of the beam itself, so if Nazdeek saw evidence that the beam was “still” on course, that would be old news about a pulse they had not been here to intercept. However, if Nazdeek reported that the beam had shifted, at least that would put them out of their misery immediately, and tell them that Trident had been built too late.

Jasim made a vegetable garden on the porch and grew exotic food in the starlight. Leila played along, and ate beside him; it was a harmless game. They could have painted anything at all around the house: any planet they’d visited, drawn from their memories, any imaginary world. If this small pretence was enough to keep them sane and anchored to reality, so be it.

Now and then, Leila felt the strangest of the many pangs of isolation Trident induced: here, the knowledge of the galaxy was no longer at her fingertips. Their descriptions as travellers had encoded their vast personal memories, declarative and episodic, and their luggage had included prodigious libraries, but she was used to having so much more. Every civilised planet held a storehouse of information that was simply too bulky to fit into Trident, along with a constant feed of exabytes of news flooding in from other worlds. Wherever you were in the galaxy, some news was old news, some cherished theories long discredited, some facts hopelessly out of date. Here, though, Leila knew, there were billions of rigourously established truths—the results of hundreds of millennia of thought, experiment, and observation—that had slipped out of her reach. Questions that any other child of the Amalgam could expect to have answered instantly would take twelve hundred years to receive a reply.

No such questions actually came into her mind, but there were still moments when the mere fact of it was enough to make her feel unbearably rootless, cut adrift not only from her past and her people, but from civilisation itself.

Trident shouted: “Data!”

Leila was half-way through recording a postcard to the Nazdeek Snakes. Jasim was on the porch watering his plants. Leila turned to see him walking through the wall, commanding the bricks to part like a gauze curtain.

They stood side by side, watching the analysis emerge.

A pulse of gamma rays of the expected frequency, from precisely the right location, had just washed over Trident. The beam was greatly attenuated by distance, not to mention having had most of its energy intercepted by its rightful owner, but more than enough had slipped past and reached them for Trident to make sense of the nature of the pulse.

It was, unmistakably, modulated with information. There were precisely repeated phase shifts in the radiation that were unimaginable in any natural gamma ray source, and which would have been pointless in any artificial beam produced for any purpose besides communication.

The pulse had been three seconds long, carrying about ten-to-the-twenty-fourth bits of data. The bulk of this appeared to be random, but that did not rule out meaningful content, it simply implied efficient encryption. The Amalgam’s network sent encrypted data via robust classical channels like this, while sending the keys needed to decode it by a second, quantum channel. Leila had never expected to get hold of unencrypted data, laying bare the secrets of the Aloof in an instant. To have clear evidence that someone in the bulge was talking to someone else, and to have pinned down part of the pathway connecting them, was vindication enough.

There was more, though. Between the messages themselves, Trident had identified brief, orderly, unencrypted sequences. Everything was guesswork to a degree, but with such a huge slab of data statistical measures were powerful indicators. Part of the data looked like routing information, addresses for the messages as they were carried through the network. Another part looked like information about the nodes’ current and future trajectories. If Trident really had cracked that, they could work out where to position its successor. In fact, if they placed the successor close enough to the bulge, they could probably keep that one observatory constantly inside the spill from the beam.

Jasim couldn’t resist playing devil’s advocate. “You know, this could just be one part of whatever throws the probes back in our faces, talking to another part. The Aloof themselves could still be dead, while their security system keeps humming with paranoid gossip.”

Leila said blithely, “Hypothesise away. I’m not taking the bait.”

She turned to embrace him, and they kissed. She said, “I’ve forgotten how to celebrate. What happens now?”

He moved his fingertips gently along her arm. Leila opened up the scape, creating a fourth spatial dimension. She took his hand, kissed it, and placed it against her beating heart. Their bodies reconfigured, nerve-endings crowding every surface, inside and out.

Jasim climbed inside her, and she inside him, the topology of the scape changing to wrap them together in a mutual embrace. Everything vanished from their lives but pleasure, triumph, and each other’s presence, as close as it could ever be.

“Are you here for the Listening Party?”

The chitinous heptapod, who’d been wandering the crowded street with a food cart dispensing largesse at random, offered Leila a plate of snacks tailored to her and Jasim’s preferences. She accepted it, then paused to let Tassef, the planet they’d just set foot on, brief her as to the meaning of this phrase. People, Tassef explained, had travelled to this world from throughout the region in order to witness a special event. Some fifteen thousand years before, a burst of data from the Aloof’s network had been picked up by a nearby observatory. In isolation, these bursts meant very little; however, the locals were hopeful that at least one of several proposed observatories near Massa, on the opposite side of the bulge, would have seen spillage including many of the same data packets, forty thousand years before. If any such observations had in fact taken place, news of their precise contents should now, finally, be about to reach Tassef by the longer, disk-based routes of the Amalgam’s own network. Once the two observations could be compared, it would become clear which messages from the earlier Eavesdropping session had made their way to the part of the Aloof’s network that could be sampled from Tassef. The comparison would advance the project of mapping all the symbolic addresses seen in the data onto actual physical locations.

Leila said, “That’s not why we came, but now we know, we’re even more pleased to be here.”

The heptapod emitted a chirp that Leila understood as a gracious welcome, then pushed its way back into the throng.

Jasim said, “Remember when you told me that everyone would get bored with the Aloof while we were still in transit?”

“I said that would happen eventually. If not this trip, the next one.”

“Yes, but you said it five journeys ago.”

Leila scowled, preparing to correct him, but then she checked and he was right.

They hadn’t expected Tassef to be so crowded when they’d chosen it as their destination, some ten thousand years before. The planet had given them a small room in this city, Shalouf, and imposed a thousand-year limit on their presence if they wished to remain embodied without adopting local citizenship. More than a billion visitors had arrived over the last fifty years, anticipating the news of the observations from Massa, but unable to predict the precise time it would reach Tassef because the details of the observatories’ trajectories had still been in transit.

She confessed, “I never thought a billion people would arrange their travel plans around this jigsaw puzzle.”

“Travel plans?” Jasim laughed. “We chose to have our own deaths revolve around the very same thing.”

“Yes, but we’re just weird.”

Jasim gestured at the crowded street. “I don’t think we can compete on that score.”

They wandered through the city, drinking in the decades-long-carnival atmosphere. There were people of every phenotype Leila had encountered before, and more: bipeds, quadrupeds, hexapods, heptapods, walking, shuffling, crawling, scuttling, or soaring high above the street on feathered, scaled or membranous wings. Some were encased in their preferred atmospheres; others, like Leila and Jasim, had chosen instead to be embodied in ersatz flesh that didn’t follow every ancestral chemical dictate. Physics and geometry tied evolution’s hands, and many attempts to solve the same problems had converged on similar answers, but the galaxy’s different replicators still managed their idiosyncratic twists. When Leila let her translator sample the cacophony of voices and signals at random, she felt as if the whole disk, the whole Amalgam, had converged on this tiny metropolis.

In fact, most of the travellers had come just a few hundred light years to be here. She and Jasim had chosen to keep their role in the history of Eavesdropping out of their précis, and Leila caught herself with a rather smug sense of walking among the crowd like some unacknowledged sage, bemused by the late-blooming, and no doubt superficial, interest of the masses. On reflection, though, any sense of superior knowledge was hard to justify, when most of these people would have grown up steeped in developments that she was only belatedly catching up with. A new generation of observatories had been designed while she and Jasim were in transit, based on “strong bullets”: specially designed femtomachines, clusters of protons and neutrons stable only for trillionths of a second, launched at ultra-relativistic speeds so great that time dilation enabled them to survive long enough to collide with other components and merge into tiny, short-lived gamma-ray observatories. The basic trick that had built Trident had gone from a one-off gamble into a miniaturised, mass-produced phenomenon, with literally billions of strong bullets being fired continuously from thousands of planets around the inner disk.

Femtomachines themselves were old hat, but it had taken the technical challenges of Eavesdropping to motivate someone into squeezing a few more tricks out of them. Historians had always understood that in the long run, technological progress was a horizontal asymptote: once people had more or less everything they wanted that was physically possible, every incremental change would take exponentially longer to achieve, with diminishing returns and ever less reason to bother. The Amalgam would probably spend an eon inching its way closer to the flatline, but this was proof that shifts of circumstance alone could still trigger a modest renaissance or two, without the need for any radical scientific discovery or even a genuinely new technology.

They stopped to rest in a square, beside a small fountain gushing aromatic hydrocarbons. The Tassef locals, quadrupeds with slick, rubbery hides, played in the sticky black spray then licked each other clean.

Jasim shaded his eyes from the sun. He said, “We’ve had our autumn child, and we’ve seen its grandchildren prosper. I’m not sure what’s left.”

“No.” Leila was in no rush to die, but they’d sampled fifty thousand years of their discovery’s consequences. They’d followed in the wake of the news of the gamma ray signals as it circled the inner disk, spending less than a century conscious as they sped from world to world. At first they’d been hunting for some vital new role to play, but they’d slowly come to accept that the avalanche they’d triggered had out-raced them. Physical and logical maps of the Aloof’s network were being constructed, as fast as the laws of physics allowed. Billions of people on thousands of planets, scattered around the inner rim of the Amalgam’s territory, were sharing their observations to help piece together the living skeleton of their elusive neighbours. When that project was complete it would not be the end of anything, but it could mark the start of a long hiatus. The encrypted, classical data would never yield anything more than traffic routes; no amount of ingenuity could extract its content. The quantum keys that could unlock it, assuming the Aloof even used such things, would be absolutely immune to theft, duplication, or surreptitious sampling. One day, there would be another breakthrough, and everything would change again, but did they want to wait a hundreds thousand years, a million, just to see what came next?

The solicitous heptapods—not locals, but visitors from a world thirty light years away who had nonetheless taken on some kind of innate duty of hospitality—seemed to show up whenever anyone was hungry. Leila tried to draw this second one into conversation, but it politely excused itself to rush off and feed someone else.

Leila said, “Maybe this is it. We’ll wait for the news from Massa, then celebrate for a while, then finish it.”

Jasim took her hand. “That feels right to me. I’m not certain, but I don’t think I’ll ever be.”

“Are you tired?” she said. “Bored?”

“Not at all,” he replied. “I feel satisfied. With what we’ve done, what we’ve seen. And I don’t want to dilute that. I don’t want to hang around forever, watching it fade, until we start to feel the way we did on Najib all over again.”

“No.”

They sat in the square until dusk, and watched the stars of the bulge come out. They’d seen this dazzling jewelled hub from every possible angle now, but Leila never grew tired of the sight.

Jasim gave an amused, exasperated sigh. “That beautiful, maddening, unreachable place. I think the whole Amalgam will be dead and gone without anyone setting foot inside it.”

Leila felt a sudden surge of irritation, which deepened into a sense of revulsion. “It’s a place, like any other place! Stars, gas, dust, planets. It’s not some metaphysical realm. It’s not even far away. Our own home world is twenty times more distant.”

“Our own home world doesn’t have an impregnable fence around it. If we really wanted to, we could go back there.”

Leila was defiant. “If we really wanted to, we could enter the bulge.”

Jasim laughed. “Have you read something in those messages that you didn’t tell me about? How to say ‘open sesame’ to the gatekeepers?”

Leila stood, and summoned a map of the Aloof’s network to superimpose across their vision, criss-crossing the sky with slender cones of violet light. One cone appeared head-on, as a tiny circle: the beam whose spillage came close to Tassef. She put her hand on Jasim’s shoulder, and zoomed in on that circle. It opened up before them like a beckoning tunnel.

She said, “We know where this beam is coming from. We don’t know for certain that the traffic between these particular nodes runs in both directions, but we’ve found plenty of examples where it does. If we aim a signal from here, back along the path of the spillage, and we make it wide enough, then we won’t just hit the sending node. We’ll hit the receiver as well.”

Jasim was silent.

“We know the data format,” she continued. “We know the routing information. We can address the data packets to a node on the other side of the bulge, one where the spillage comes out at Massa.”

Jasim said, “What makes you think they’ll accept the packets?”

“There’s nothing in the format we don’t understand, nothing we can’t write for ourselves.”

“Nothing in the unencrypted part. If there’s an authorisation, even a checksum, in the encrypted part, then any packet without that will be tossed away as noise.”

“That’s true,” she conceded.

“Do you really want to do this?” he said. Her hand was still on his shoulder, she could feel his body growing tense.

“Absolutely.”

“We mail ourselves from here to Massa, as unencrypted, classical data that anyone can read, anyone can copy, anyone can alter or corrupt?”

“A moment ago you said they’d throw us away as noise.”

“That’s the least of our worries.”

“Maybe.”

Jasim shuddered, his body almost convulsing. He let out a string of obscenities, then made a choking sound. “What’s wrong with you? Is this some kind of test? If I call your bluff, will you admit that you’re joking?”

Leila shook her head. “And no, it’s not revenge for what you did on the way to Trident. This is our chance. This is what we were waiting to do—not the Eavesdropping, that’s nothing! The bulge is right here in front of us. The Aloof are in there, somewhere. We can’t force them to engage with us, but we can get closer to them than anyone has ever been before.”

“If we go in this way, they could do anything to us.”

“They’re not barbarians. They haven’t made war on us. Even the engineering spores come back unharmed.”

“If we infest their network, that’s worse than an engineering spore.”

“‘Infest’! None of these routes are crowded. A few exabytes passing through is nothing.”

“You have no idea how they’ll react.”

“No,” she confessed. “I don’t. But I’m ready to find out.”

Jasim stood. “We could send a test message first. Then go to Massa and see if it arrived safely.”

“We could do that,” Leila conceded. “That would be a sensible plan.”

“So you agree?” Jasim gave her a wary, frozen smile. “We’ll send a test message. Send an encyclopedia. Send greetings in some universal language.”

“Fine. We’ll send all of those things first. But I’m not waiting more than one day after that. I’m not going to Massa the long way. I’m taking the short-cut, I’m going through the bulge.”

The Amalgam had been so generous to Leila, and local interest in the Aloof so intense, that she had almost forgotten that she was not, in fact, entitled to a limitless and unconditional flow of resources, to be employed to any end that involved her obsession.

When she asked Tassef for the means to build a high-powered gamma-ray transmitter to aim into the bulge, it interrogated her for an hour, then replied that the matter would require a prolonged and extensive consultation. It was, she realised, no use protesting that compared to hosting a billion guests for a couple of centuries, the cost of this was nothing. The sticking point was not the energy use, or any other equally microscopic consequence for the comfort and amenity of the Tassef locals. The issue was whether her proposed actions might be seen as unwelcome and offensive by the Aloof, and whether that affront might in turn provoke some kind of retribution.

Countless probes and spores had been gently and patiently returned from the bulge unharmed, but they’d come blundering in at less than lightspeed. A flash of gamma rays could not be intercepted and returned before it struck its chosen target. Though it seemed to Leila that it would be a trivial matter for the network to choose to reject the data, it was not unreasonable to suppose that the Aloof’s sensibilities might differ on this point from her own.

Jasim had left Shalouf for a city on the other side of the planet. Leila’s feelings about this were mixed; it was always painful when they separated, but the reminder that they were not irrevocably welded together also brought an undeniable sense of space and freedom. She loved him beyond measure, but that was not the final word on every question. She was not certain that she would not relent in the end, and die quietly beside him when the news came through from Massa; there were moments when it seemed utterly perverse, masochistic and self-aggrandising to flee from that calm, dignified end for the sake of trying to cap their modest revolution with a new and spectacularly dangerous folly. Nor though, was she certain that Jasim would not change his own mind, and take her hand while they plunged off this cliff together.

When the months dragged on with no decision on her request, no news from Massa and no overtures from her husband, Leila became an orator, travelling from city to city promoting her scheme to blaze a trail through the heart of the bulge. Her words and image were conveyed into virtual fora, but her physical presence was a way to draw attention to her cause, and Listening Party pilgrims and Tassefi alike packed the meeting places when she came. She mastered the locals’ language and style, but left it inflected with some suitably alien mannerisms. The fact that a rumour had arisen that she was one of the First Eavesdroppers did no harm to her attendance figures.

When she reached the city of Jasim’s self-imposed exile, she searched the audience for him in vain. As she walked out into the night a sense of panic gripped her. She felt no fear for herself, but the thought of him dying here alone was unbearable.

She sat in the street, weeping. How had it come to this? They had been prepared for a glorious failure, prepared to be broken by the Aloof’s unyielding silence, and instead the fruits of their labour had swept through the disk, reinvigorating a thousand cultures. How could the taste of success be so bitter?

Leila imagined calling out to Jasim, finding him, holding him again, repairing their wounds.

A splinter of steel remained inside her, though. She looked up into the blazing sky. The Aloof were there, waiting, daring her to stand before them. To come this far, then step back from the edge for the comfort of a familiar embrace, would diminish her. She would not retreat.

The news arrived from Massa: forty thousand years before, the spillage from the far side of the bulge had been caught in time. Vast swathes of the data matched the observations that Tassef had been holding in anticipation of this moment, for the last fifteen thousand years.

There was more: reports of other correlations from other observatories followed within minutes. As the message from Massa had been relayed around the inner disk, a cascade of similar matches with other stores of data had been found.

By seeing where packets dropped out of the stream, their abstract addresses became concrete, physical locations within the bulge. As Leila stood in Shalouf’s main square in the dusk, absorbing the reports, the Aloof’s network was growing more solid, less ethereal, by the minute.

The streets around her were erupting with signs of elation: polyglot shouts, chirps and buzzes, celebratory scents and vivid pigmentation changes. Bursts of luminescence spread across the square. Even the relentlessly sober heptapods had abandoned their food carts to lie on their backs, spinning with delight. Leila wheeled around, drinking it in, commanding her translator to punch the meaning of every disparate gesture and sound deep into her brain, unifying the kaleidoscope into a single emotional charge.

As the stars of the bulge came out, Tassef offered an overlay for everyone to share, with the newly mapped routes shining like golden highways. From all around her, Leila picked up the signals of those who were joining the view: people of every civilisation, every species, every replicator were seeing the Aloof’s secret roads painted across the sky.

Leila walked through the streets of Shalouf, feeling Jasim’s absence sharply, but too familiar with that pain to be overcome by it. If the joy of this moment was muted, every celebration would be blighted in the same way, now. She could not expect anything else. She would grow inured to it.

Tassef spoke to her.

“The citizens have reached a decision. They will grant your request.”

“I’m grateful.”

“There is a condition. The transmitter must be built at least twenty light-years away, either in interstellar space, or in the circumstellar region of an uninhabited system.”

“I understand.” This way, in the event that the Aloof felt threatened to the point of provoking destructive retribution, Tassef would survive an act of violence, at least on a stellar scale, directed against the transmitter itself.

“We advise you to prepare your final plans for the hardware, and submit them when you’re sure they will fulfil your purpose.”

“Of course.”

Leila went back to her room, and reviewed the plans she had already drafted. She had anticipated the Tassefi wanting a considerable safety margin, so she had worked out the energy budgets for detailed scenarios involving engineering spores and forty-seven different cometary clouds that fell within Tassef’s jurisdiction. It took just seconds to identify the best one that met the required conditions, and she lodged it without hesitation.

Out on the streets, the Listening Party continued. For the billion pilgrims, this was enough: they would go home, return to their grandchildren, and die happy in the knowledge that they had finally seen something new in the world. Leila envied them; there’d been a time when that would have been enough for her, too.

She left her room and rejoined the celebration, talking, laughing, dancing with strangers, letting herself grow giddy with the moment. When the sun came up, she made her way home, stepping lightly over the sleeping bodies that filled the street.

The engineering spores were the latest generation: strong bullets launched at close to lightspeed that shed their momentum by diving through the heart of a star, and then rebuilding themselves at atomic density as they decayed in the stellar atmosphere. In effect, the dying femtomachines constructed nanomachines bearing the same blueprints as they’d carried within themselves at nuclear densities, and which then continued out to the cometary cloud to replicate and commence the real work of mining raw materials and building the gamma ray transmitter.

Leila contemplated following in their wake, sending herself as a signal to be picked up by the as-yet-unbuilt transmitter. It would not have been as big a gamble as Jasim’s with Trident; the strong bullets had already been used successfully this way in hundreds of similar stars.

In the end, she chose to wait on Tassef for a signal that the transmitter had been successfully constructed, and had tested, aligned and calibrated itself. If she was going to march blindly into the bulge, it would be absurd to stumble and fall prematurely, before she even reached the precipice.

When the day came, some ten thousand people gathered in the centre of Shalouf to bid the traveller a safe journey. Leila would have preferred to slip away quietly, but after all her lobbying she had surrendered her privacy, and the Tassefi seemed to feel that she owed them this last splash of colour and ceremony.

Forty-six years after the Listening Party, most of the pilgrims had returned to their homes, but of the few hundred who had lingered in Shalouf nearly all had showed up for this curious footnote to the main event. Leila wasn’t sure that anyone here believed the Aloof’s network would do more than bounce her straight back into the disk, but the affection these well-wishers expressed seemed genuine. Someone had even gone to the trouble of digging up a phrase in the oldest known surviving language of her ancestral species: safar bekheyr, may your journey be blessed. They had written it across the sky in an ancient script that she’d last seen eighty thousand years before, and it had been spread among the crowd phonetically so that everyone she met could offer her this hopeful farewell as she passed.

Tassef, the insentient delegate of all the planet’s citizens, addressed the crowd with some sombre ceremonial blather. Leila’s mind wandered, settling on the observation that she was probably partaking in a public execution. No matter. She had said goodbye to her friends and family long ago. When she stepped through the ceremonial gate, which had been smeared with a tarry mess that the Tassefi considered the height of beauty, she would close her eyes and recall her last night on Najib, letting the intervening millennia collapse into a dream. Everyone chose death in the end, and no one’s exit was perfect. Better to rely on your own flawed judgements, better to make your own ungainly mess of it, than live in the days when nature would simply take you at random.

As Tassef fell silent, a familiar voice rose up from the crowd.

“Are you still resolved to do this foolish thing?”

Leila glared down at her husband. “Yes, I am.”

“You won’t reconsider?”

“No.”

“Then I’m coming with you.”

Jasim pushed his way through the startled audience, and climbed onto the stage.

Leila spoke to him privately. “You’re embarrassing us both.”

He replied the same way. “Don’t be petty. I know I’ve hurt you, but the blame lies with both of us.”

“Why are you doing this? You’ve made your own wishes very plain.”

“Do you think I can watch you walk into danger, and not walk beside you?”

“You were ready to die if Trident failed. You were ready to leave me behind then.”

“Once I spoke my mind on that you gave me no choice. You insisted.” He took her hand. “You know I only stayed away from you all this time because I hoped it would dissuade you. I failed. So now I’m here.”

Leila’s heart softened. “You’re serious? You’ll come with me?”

Jasim said, “Whatever they do to you, let them do it to us both.”

Leila had no argument to make against this, no residue of anger, no false solicitousness. She had always wanted him beside her at the end, and she would not refuse him now.

She spoke to Tassef. “One more passenger. Is that acceptable?” The energy budget allowed for a thousand years of test transmissions to follow in her wake; Jasim would just be a minor blip of extra data.

“It’s acceptable.” Tassef proceeded to explain the change to the assembled crowd, and to the onlookers scattered across the planet.

Jasim said, “We’ll interweave the data from both of us into a single packet. I don’t want to end up at Massa and find they’ve sent you to Jahnom by mistake.”

“All right.” Leila arranged the necessary changes. None of the Eavesdroppers yet knew that they were coming, and no message sent the long way could warn them in time, but the data they sent into the bulge would be prefaced by instructions that anyone in the Amalgam would find clear and unambiguous, asking that their descriptions only be embodied if they were picked up at Massa. If they were found in other spillage along the way, they didn’t want to be embodied multiple times. And if they did not emerge at Massa at all, so be it.

Tassef’s second speech came to an end. Leila looked down at the crowd one last time, and let her irritation with the whole bombastic ceremony dissipate into amusement. If she had been among the sane, she might easily have turned up herself to watch a couple of ancient fools try to step onto the imaginary road in the sky, and wish them safar bekheyr.

She squeezed Jasim’s hand, and they walked towards the gate.

Leila’s fingers came together, her hand empty. She felt as if she was falling, but nothing in sight appeared to be moving. Then again, all she could see was a distant backdrop, its scale and proximity impossible to judge: thousands of fierce blue stars against the blackness of space.

She looked around for Jasim, but she was utterly alone. She could see no vehicle or other machine that might have disgorged her into this emptiness. There was not even a planet below her, or a single brightest star to which she might be bound. Absurdly, she was breathing. Every other cue told her that she was drifting through vacuum, probably through interstellar space. Her lungs kept filling and emptying, though. The air, and her skin, felt neither hot nor cold.

Someone or something had embodied her, or was running her as software. She was not on Massa, she was sure of that; she had never visited that world, but nowhere in the Amalgam would a guest be treated like this. Not even one who arrived unannounced in data spilling out from the bulge.

Leila said, “Are you listening to me? Do you understand me?” She could hear her own voice, flat and without resonance. The acoustics made perfect sense in a vast, empty, windless place, if not an airless one.

Anywhere in the Amalgam, you knew whether you were embodied or not; it was the nature of all bodies, real or virtual, that declarative knowledge of every detail was there for the asking. Here, when Leila tried to summon the same information, her mind remained blank. It was like the strange absence she’d felt on Trident, when she’d been cut off from the repositories of civilisation, but here the amputation had reached all the way inside her.

She inhaled deeply, but there was no noticeable scent at all, not even the whiff of her own body odour that she would have expected, whether she was wearing her ancestral phenotype or any of the forms of ersatz flesh that she adopted when the environment demanded it. She pinched the skin of her forearm; it felt more like her original skin than any of the substitutes she’d ever worn. They might have fashioned this body out of something both remarkably lifelike and chemically inert, and placed her in a vast, transparent container of air, but she was beginning to pick up a strong stench of ersatz physics. Air and skin alike, she suspected, were made of bits, not atoms.

So where was Jasim? Were they running him too, in a separate scape? She called out his name, trying not to make the exploratory cry sound plaintive. She understood all too well now why he’d tried so hard to keep her from this place, and why he’d been unable to face staying behind: the thought that the Aloof might be doing something unspeakable to his defenceless consciousness, in some place she couldn’t hope to reach or see, was like a white hot blade pressed to her heart. All she could do was try to shut off the panic and talk down the possibility. All right, he’s alone here, but so am I, and it’s not that bad. She would put her faith in symmetry; if they had not abused her, why would they have harmed Jasim?

She forced herself to be calm. The Aloof had taken the trouble to grant her consciousness, but she couldn’t expect the level of amenity she was accustomed to. For a start, it would be perfectly reasonable if her hosts were unable or unwilling to plug her into any data source equivalent to the Amalgam’s libraries, and perhaps the absence of somatic knowledge was not much different. Rather than deliberately fooling her about her body, maybe they had looked at the relevant data channels and decided that anything they fed into them would be misleading. Understanding her transmitted description well enough to bring her to consciousness was one thing, but it didn’t guarantee that they knew how to translate the technical details of their instantiation of her into her own language.

And if this ignorance-plus-honesty excuse was too sanguine to swallow, it wasn’t hard to think of the Aloof as being pathologically secretive without actually being malicious. If they wanted to keep quiet about the way they’d brought her to life lest it reveal something about themselves, that too was understandable. They need not be doing it for the sake of tormenting her.

Leila surveyed the sky around her, and felt a jolt of recognition. She’d memorised the positions of the nearest stars to the target node where her transmission would first be sent, and now a matching pattern stood out against the background in a collection of distinctive constellations. She was being shown the sky from that node. This didn’t prove anything about her actual location, but the simplest explanation was that the Aloof had instantiated her here, rather than sending her on through the network. The stars were in the positions she’d predicted for her time of arrival, so if this was the reality, there had been little delay in choosing how to deal with the intruder. No thousand-year-long deliberations, no passing of the news to a distant decision-maker. Either the Aloof themselves were present here, or the machinery of the node was so sophisticated that they might as well have been. She could not have been woken by accident; it had to have been a deliberate act. It made her wonder if the Aloof had been expecting something like this for millennia.

“What now?” she asked. Her hosts remained silent. “Toss me back to Tassef?” The probes with their reversed trajectories bore no record of their experience; perhaps the Aloof wouldn’t incorporate these new memories into her description before returning her. She spread her arms imploringly. “If you’re going to erase this memory, why not speak to me first? I’m in your hands completely, you can send me to the grave with your secrets. Why wake me at all, if you don’t want to talk?”

In the silence that followed, Leila had no trouble imagining one answer: to study her. It was a mathematical certainty that some questions about her behaviour could never be answered simply by examining her static description; the only reliable way to predict what she’d do in any given scenario was to wake her and confront her with it. They might, of course, have chosen to wake her any number of times before, without granting her memories of the previous instantiations. She experienced a moment of sheer existential vertigo: this could be the thousandth, the billionth, in a vast series of experiments, as her captors permuted dozens of variables to catalogue her responses.

The vertigo passed. Anything was possible, but she preferred to entertain more pleasant hypotheses.

“I came here to talk,” she said. “I understand that you don’t want us sending in machinery, but there must be something we can discuss, something we can learn from each other. In the disk, every time two space-faring civilisations met, they found they had something in common. Some mutual interests, some mutual benefits.”

At the sound of her own earnest speech dissipating into the virtual air around her, Leila started laughing. The arguments she’d been putting for centuries to Jasim, to her friends on Najib, to the Snakes on Nazdeek, seemed ridiculous now, embarrassing. How could she face the Aloof and claim that she had anything to offer them that they had not considered, and rejected, hundreds of thousands of years before? The Amalgam had never tried to keep its nature hidden. The Aloof would have watched them, studied them from afar, and consciously chosen isolation. To come here and list the advantages of contact as if they’d never crossed her hosts’ minds was simply insulting.

Leila fell silent. If she had lost faith in her role as cultural envoy, at least she’d proved to her own satisfaction that there was something in here smarter than the sling-shot fence the probes had encountered. The Aloof had not embraced her, but the whole endeavour had not been in vain. To wake in the bulge, even to silence, was far more than she’d ever had the right to hope for.

She said, “Please, just bring me my husband now, then we’ll leave you in peace.”

This entreaty was met in the same way as all the others. Leila resisted speculating again about experimental variables. She did not believe that a million-year-old civilisation was interested in testing her tolerance to isolation, robbing her of her companion and seeing how long she took to attempt suicide. The Aloof did not take orders from her; fine. If she was neither an experimental subject to be robbed of her sanity, nor a valued guest whose every wish was granted, there had to be some other relationship between them that she had yet to fathom. She had to be conscious for a reason.

She searched the sky for a hint of the node itself, or any other feature she might have missed, but she might as well have been living inside a star map, albeit one shorn of the usual annotations. The Milky Way, the plane of stars that bisected the sky, was hidden by the thicker clouds of gas and dust here, but Leila had her bearings; she knew which way led deeper into the bulge, and which way led back out to the disk.

She contemplated Tassef’s distant sun with mixed emotions, as a sailor might look back on the last sight of land. As the yearning for that familiar place welled up, a cylinder of violet light appeared around her, encircling the direction of her gaze. For the first time, Leila felt her weightlessness interrupted: a gentle acceleration was carrying her forward along the imaginary beam.

“No! Wait!” She closed her eyes and curled into a ball. The acceleration halted, and when she opened her eyes the tunnel of light was gone.

She let herself float limply, paying no attention to anything in the sky, waiting to see what happened if she kept her mind free of any desire for travel.

After an hour like this, the phenomenon had not recurred. Leila turned her gaze in the opposite direction, into the bulge. She cleared her mind of all timidity and nostalgia, and imagined the thrill of rushing deeper into this violent, spectacular, alien territory. At first there was no response from the scape, but then she focused her attention sharply in the direction of a second node, the one she’d hoped her transmission would be forwarded to from the first, on its way through the galactic core.

The same violet light, the same motion. This time, Leila waited a few heartbeats longer before she broke the spell.

Unless this was some pointlessly sadistic game, the Aloof were offering her a clear choice. She could return to Tassef, return to the Amalgam. She could announce that she’d put a toe in these mysterious waters, and lived to tell the tale. Or she could dive into the bulge, as deep as she’d ever imagined, and see where the network took her.

“No promises?” she asked. “No guarantee I’ll come out the other side? No intimations of contact, to tempt me further?” She was thinking aloud, she did not expect answers. Her hosts, she was beginning to conclude, viewed strangers through the prism of a strong, but very sharply delineated, sense of obligation. They sent back the insentient probes to their owners, scrupulously intact. They had woken this intruder to give her the choice: did she really want to go where her transmission suggested, or had she wandered in here like a lost child who just needed to find the way home? They would do her no harm, and send her on no journey without her consent, but those were the limits of their duty of care. They did not owe her any account of themselves. She would get no greeting, no hospitality, no conversation.

“What about Jasim? Will you give me a chance to consult with him?” She waited, picturing his face, willing his presence, hoping they might read her mind if her words were beyond them. If they could decode a yearning towards a point in the sky, surely this wish for companionship was not too difficult to comprehend? She tried variations, dwelling on the abstract structure of their intertwined data in the transmission, hoping this might clarify the object of her desire if his physical appearance meant nothing to them.

She remained alone.

The stars that surrounded her spelt out the only choices on offer. If she wanted to be with Jasim once more before she died, she had to make the same decision as he did.

Symmetry demanded that he faced the same dilemma.

How would he be thinking? He might be tempted to retreat back to the safety of Tassef, but he’d reconciled with her in Shalouf for the sole purpose of following her into danger. He would understand that she’d want to go deeper, would want to push all the way through to Massa, opening up the short-cut through the core, proving it safe for future travellers.

Would he understand, too, that she’d feel a pang of guilt at this presumptuous line of thought, and that she’d contemplate making a sacrifice of her own? He had braved the unknown for her, and they had reaped the reward already: they had come closer to the Aloof than anyone in history. Why couldn’t that be enough? For all Leila knew, her hosts might not even wake her again before Massa. What would she be giving up if she turned back now?

More to the point, what would Jasim expect of her? That she’d march on relentlessly, following her obsession to the end, or that she’d put her love for him first?

The possibilities multiplied in an infinite regress. They knew each other as well as two people could, but they didn’t carry each other’s minds inside them.

Leila drifted through the limbo of stars, wondering if Jasim had already made his decision. Having seen that the Aloof were not the torturers he’d feared, had he already set out for Tassef, satisfied that she faced no real peril at their hands? Or had he reasoned that their experience at this single node meant nothing? This was not the Amalgam, the culture could be a thousand times more fractured.

This cycle of guesses and doubts led nowhere. If she tried to pursue it to the end she’d be paralysed. There were no guarantees; she could only choose the least worst case. If she returned to Tassef, only to find that Jasim had gone on alone through the bulge, it would be unbearable: she would have lost him for nothing. If that happened, she could try to follow him, returning to the bulge immediately, but she would already be centuries behind him.

If she went on to Massa, and it was Jasim who retreated, at least she’d know that he’d ended up in safety. She’d know, too, that he had not been desperately afraid for her, that the Aloof’s benign indifference at this first node had been enough to persuade him that they’d do her no harm.

That was her answer: she had to continue, all the way to Massa. With the hope, but no promise, that Jasim would have thought the same way.

The decision made, she lingered in the scape. Not from any second thoughts, but from a reluctance to give up lightly the opportunity she’d fought so hard to attain. She didn’t know if any member of the Aloof was watching and listening to her, reading her thoughts, examining her desires. Perhaps they were so indifferent and incurious that they’d delegated everything to insentient software, and merely instructed their machines to baby-sit her while she made up her mind where she wanted to go. She still had to make one last attempt to reach them, or she would never die in peace.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe you’ve watched us for the last million years, and seen that we have nothing to offer you. Maybe our technology is backwards, our philosophy naive, our customs bizarre, our manners appalling. If that’s true, though, if we’re so far beneath you, you could at least point us in the right direction. Offer us some kind of argument as to why we should change.”

Silence.

Leila said, “All right. Forgive my impertinence. I have to tell you honestly, though, that we won’t be the last to bother you. The Amalgam is full of people who will keep trying to find ways to reach you. This is going to go on for another million years, until we believe that we understand you. If that offends you, don’t judge us too harshly. We can’t help it. It’s who we are.”

She closed her eyes, trying to assure herself that there was nothing she’d regret having left unsaid.

“Thank you for granting us safe passage,” she added, “if that’s what you’re offering. I hope my people can return the favour one day, if there’s anywhere you want to go.”

She opened her eyes and sought out her destination: deeper into the network, on towards the core.

The mountains outside the town of Astraahat started with a gentle slope that promised an easy journey, but gradually grew steeper. Similarly, the vegetation was low and sparse in the foothills, but became steadily thicker and taller the higher up the slope you went.

Jasim said, “Enough.” He stopped and leant on his climbing stick.

“One more hour?” Leila pleaded.

He considered this. “Half an hour resting, then half an hour walking?”

“One hour resting, then one hour walking.”

He laughed wearily. “All right. One of each.”

The two of them hacked away at the undergrowth until there was a place to sit.

Jasim poured water from the canteen into her hands, and she splashed her face clean.

They sat in silence for a while, listening to the sounds of the unfamiliar wildlife. Under the forest canopy it was almost twilight, and when Leila looked up into the small patch of sky above them she could see the stars of the bulge, like tiny, pale, translucent beads.

At times it felt like a dream, but the experience never really left her. The Aloof had woken her at every node, shown her the view, given her a choice. She had seen a thousand spectacles, from one side of the core to the other: cannibalistic novas, dazzling clusters of newborn stars, twin white dwarfs on the verge of collision. She had seen the black hole at the galaxy’s centre, its accretion disk glowing with X-rays, slowly tearing stars apart.

It might have been an elaborate lie, a plausible simulation, but every detail accessible from disk-based observatories confirmed what she had witnessed. If anything had been changed, or hidden from her, it must have been small. Perhaps the artifacts of the Aloof themselves had been painted out of the view, though Leila thought it was just as likely that the marks they’d left on their territory were so subtle, anyway, that there’d been nothing to conceal.

Jasim said sharply, “Where are you?”

She lowered her gaze and replied mildly, “I’m here, with you. I’m just remembering.”

When they’d woken on Massa, surrounded by delirious, cheering Eavesdroppers, they’d been asked: What happened in there? What did you see? Leila didn’t know why she’d kept her mouth shut and turned to her husband before replying, instead of letting every detail come tumbling out immediately. Perhaps she just hadn’t known where to begin.

For whatever reason, it was Jasim who had answered first. “Nothing. We stepped through the gate on Tassef, and now here we are. On the other side of the bulge.”

For almost a month, she’d flatly refused to believe him. Nothing? You saw nothing? It had to be a lie, a joke. It had to be some kind of revenge.

That was not in his nature, and she knew it. Still, she’d clung to that explanation for as long as she could, until it became impossible to believe any longer, and she’d asked for his forgiveness.

Six months later, another traveller had spilled out of the bulge. One of the die-hard Listening Party pilgrims had followed in their wake and taken the short cut. Like Jasim, this heptapod had seen nothing, experienced nothing.

Leila had struggled to imagine why she might have been singled out. So much for her theory that the Aloof felt morally obliged to check that each passenger on their network knew what they were doing, unless they’d decided that her actions were enough to demonstrate that intruders from the disk, considered generically, were making an informed choice. Could just one sample of a working, conscious version of their neighbours really be enough for them to conclude that they understood everything they needed to know? Could this capriciousness, instead, have been part of a strategy to lure in more visitors, with the enticing possibility that each one might, with luck, witness something far beyond all those who’d preceded them? Or had it been part of a scheme to discourage intruders by clouding the experience with uncertainty? The simplest act of discouragement would have been to discard all unwelcome transmissions, and the most effective incentive would have been to offer a few plain words of welcome, but then, the Aloof would not have been the Aloof if they’d followed such reasonable dictates.

Jasim said, “You know what I think. You wanted to wake so badly, they couldn’t refuse you. They could tell I didn’t care as much. It was as simple as that.”

“What about the heptapod? It went in alone. It wasn’t just tagging along to watch over someone else.”

He shrugged. “Maybe it acted on the spur of the moment. They all seem unhealthily keen to me, whatever they’re doing. Maybe the Aloof could discern its mood more clearly.”

Leila said, “I don’t believe a word of that.”

Jasim spread his hands in a gesture of acceptance. “I’m sure you could change my mind in five minutes, if I let you. But if we walked back down this hill and waited for the next traveller from the bulge, and the next, until the reason some of them received the grand tour and some didn’t finally became plain, there would still be another question, and another. Even if I wanted to live for ten thousand years more, I’d rather move on to something else. And in this last hour ...” He trailed off.

Leila said, “I know. You’re right.”

She sat, listening to the strange chirps and buzzes emitted by creatures she knew nothing about. She could have absorbed every recorded fact about them in an instant, but she didn’t care, she didn’t need to know.

Someone else would come after them, to understand the Aloof, or advance that great, unruly, frustrating endeavour by the next increment. She and Jasim had made a start, that was enough. What they’d done was more than she could ever have imagined, back on Najib. Now, though, was the time to stop, while they were still themselves: enlarged by the experience, but not disfigured beyond recognition.

They finished their water, drinking the last drops. They left the canteen behind. Jasim took her hand and they climbed together, struggling up the slope side by side.

The Safe-Deposit Box

I dream a simple dream. I dream that I have a name. One name, unchanging, mine until death. I don’t know what my name is, but that doesn’t matter. Knowing that I have it is enough.

* * * *

I wake just before the alarm goes off (I usually do), so I’m able to reach out and silence it the instant it starts screeching. The woman beside me doesn’t move; I hope the alarm wasn’t meant for her too. It’s freezing cold and pitch black, except for the bedside clock’s red digits slowly coming into focus. Ten to four! I groan softly. What am I? A garbage collector? A milkman? This body is sore and tired, but that tells me nothing; they’ve all been sore and tired lately, whatever their profession, their income, their lifestyle. Yesterday I was a diamond merchant. Not quite a millionaire, but close. The day before I was a bricklayer, and the day before that I sold menswear. Crawling out of a warm bed felt pretty much the same each time.

I find my hand travelling instinctively to the switch for the reading light on my side of the bed. When I click it on, the woman stirs and mumbles, ‘Johnny?’ but her eyes remain closed. I make my first conscious effort to access this host’s memories; sometimes I can pick up a frequently used name. Linda? Could be. Linda. I mouth it silently, looking at the tangle of soft brown hair almost hiding her sleeping face.

The situation, if not the individual, is comfortingly familiar. Man looks fondly upon sleeping wife. I whisper to her, ‘I love you,’ and I mean it; I love, not this particular woman, (with a past I’ll barely glimpse, and a future that I have no way of sharing), but the composite woman of which, today, she is a part—my nickering, inconstant companion, my lover made up of a million pseudorandom words and gestures, held together only by the fact that I behold her, known in her entirety to no one but me.

In my romantic youth, I used to speculate: Surely I’m not the only one of my kind? Might there not be another like me, but who wakes each morning in the body of a woman? Might not whatever mysterious factors determine the selection of my host act in parallel on her, drawing us together, keeping us together day after day, transporting us, side by side, from host couple to host couple?

Not only is it unlikely, it simply isn’t true. The last time (nearly twelve years ago now) that I cracked up and started spouting the unbelievable truth, my host’s wife did not break in with shouts of relief and recognition, and her own, identical, confession. (She didn’t do much at all, actually. I expected her to find my rantings frightening and traumatic, I expected her to conclude at once that I was dangerously insane. Instead, she listened briefly, apparently found what I was saying either boring or incomprehensible, and so, very sensibly, left me alone for the rest of the day.)

Not only is it untrue, it simply doesn’t matter. Yes, my lover has a thousand faces, and yes, a different soul looks out from every pair of eyes, but I can still find (or imagine) as many unifying patterns in my memories of her, as any other man or woman can find (or imagine) in their own perceptions of their own most faithful lifelong companion.

Man looks fondly upon sleeping wife.

I climb out from under the blankets and stand for a moment, shivering, looking around the room, eager to start moving to keep myself warm, but unable to decide what to do first. Then I spot a wallet on top of the chest of drawers.

I’m John Francis O’Leary, according to the driver’s licence. Date of birth: 15 November, 1951—which makes me one week older than when I went to bed. Although I still have occasional daydreams about waking up twenty years younger, that seems to be as unlikely for me as it is for anyone else; in thirty-nine years, so far as I know, I’ve yet to have a host born any time but November or December of 1951. Nor have I ever had a host either born, or presently living, outside this city.

I don’t know how I move from one host to the next, but since any process could be expected to have some finite effective range, my geographical confinement is not surprising. There’s desert to the east, ocean to the west, and long stretches of barren coast to the north and south; the distances from town to town are simply too great for me to cross. In fact, I never even seem to get close to the outskirts of the city, and on reflection that’s not surprising: if there are one hundred potential hosts to the west of me, and five to the east, then a jump to a randomly chosen host is not a jump in a random direction. The populous centre attracts me with a kind of statistical gravity.

As for the restrictions on host age and birthplace, I’ve never had a theory plausible enough to believe for more than a day or two. It was easy when I was twelve or thirteen, and could pretend I was some kind of alien prince, imprisoned in the bodies of Earthlings by a wicked rival for my cosmic inheritance; the bad guys must have put something in the city’s water, late in 1951, which was drunk by expectant mothers, thus preparing their unborn children to be my unwitting jailers. These days I accept the likelihood that I’ll simply never know the answer.

I am sure of one thing, though: both restrictions were essential to whatever approximation to sanity I now possess. Had I ‘grown up’ in bodies of completely random ages, or in hosts scattered worldwide, with a different language and culture to contend with every day, I doubt that I’d even exist—no personality could possibly emerge from such a cacophony of experiences. (Then again, an ordinary person might think the same of my own, relatively stable, origins.)

I don’t recall being John O’Leary before, which is unusual. This city contains only six thousand men aged thirty-nine, and of those, roughly one thousand would have been born in November or December. Since thirty-nine years is more than fourteen thousand days, the odds by now are heavily against first-timers, and I’ve visited most hosts several times within memory.

In my own inexpert way, I’ve explored the statistics a little. Any given potential host should have, on average, one thousand days, or three years, between my visits. Yet the average time I should expect to pass without repeating any hosts myself is a mere forty days (the average to date is actually lower, twenty-seven days, presumably because some hosts are more susceptible than others). When I first worked this out it seemed paradoxical, but only because the averages don’t tell the whole story; a fraction of all repeat visits occur within weeks rather than years, and of course it’s these abnormally fast ones that determine the rate for me.

In a safe-deposit box (with a combination lock) in the centre of the city, I have records covering the past twenty-two years. Names, addresses, dates of birth, and dates of each visit since 1968, for over eight hundred hosts. One day soon, when I have a host who can spare the time, I really must rent a computer with a database package and shift all that crap on to disk; that would make statistical tests a thousand times easier. I don’t expect astounding revelations; if I found some kind of bias or pattern in the data, well, so what? Would that tell me anything? Would that change anything? Still, it seems like a good thing to do.

Partly hidden under a pile of coins beside the wallet is—oh, bliss!—an ID badge, complete with photo. John O’Leary is an orderly at the Pearlman Psychiatric Institute. The photo shows part of a light blue uniform, and when I open his wardrobe there it is. I believe this body could do with a shower, though, so I postpone dressing.

The house is small and plainly furnished, but very clean and in good repair. I pass one room that is probably a child’s bedroom, but the door is closed and I leave it that way, not wanting to risk waking anyone. In the living room, I look up the Pearlman Institute in the phone book, and then locate it in a street directory. I’ve already memorised my own address from the licence, and the Institute’s not far away; I work out a route that shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes, at this hour of the morning. I still don’t know when my shift starts; surely not before five.

Standing in the bathroom, shaving, I stare for a moment into my new brown eyes, and I can’t help noticing that John O’Leary is not bad looking at all. It’s a thought that leads nowhere. For a long while now, thankfully, I’ve managed to accept my fluctuating appearance with relative tranquillity, though it hasn’t always been that way. I had several neurotic patches, in my teens and early twenties, when my mood would swing violently between elation and depression, depending on how I felt about my latest body. Often, for weeks after departing an especially good-looking host (which of course I’d have delayed for as long as possible, by staying awake night after night), I’d fantasise obsessively about returning, preferably to stay. At least an ordinary, screwed-up adolescent knows he has no choice but to accept the body in which he was born. I had no such comfort.

I’m more inclined now to worry about my health, but that’s every bit as futile as fretting over appearance. There’s no point whatsoever in me exercising, or watching my diet, since any such gesture is effectively diluted one-thousandfold. ‘My’ weight, ‘my’ fitness, ‘my’ alcohol and tobacco consumption, can’t be altered by my own personal initiative—they’re public health statistics, requiring vastly expensive advertising campaigns to budge them even slightly.

After showering, I comb my hair in imitation of the ID photo, hoping that it’s not too out of date.

Linda opens her eyes and stretches as I walk, naked, back into the bedroom, and the sight of her gives me an erection at once. I haven’t had sex for months; almost every host lately seems to have managed to screw himself senseless the night before I arrived, and to have subsequently lost interest for the following fortnight. Apparently, my luck has changed. Linda reaches out and grabs me.

‘I’ll be late for work,’ I protest.

She turns and looks at the clock. ‘That’s crap. You don’t start until six. If you eat breakfast here, instead of detouring to that greasy truck stop, you won’t have to leave for an hour.’

Her fingernails are pleasantly sharp. I let her drag me towards the bed, then I lean over and whisper, ‘You know, that’s exactly what I wanted to hear.’

* * * *

My earliest memory is of my mother reverently holding a bawling infant towards me, saying, ‘Look, Chris! This is your baby brother. This is Paul! Isn’t he beautiful?’ I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Siblings were like pets or toys; their number, their ages, their sexes, their names, all fluctuated as senselessly as the furniture or the wallpaper.

Parents were clearly superior; they changed appearance and behaviour, but at least their names stayed the same. I naturally assumed that when I grew up, my name would become ‘Daddy’, a suggestion that was usually greeted with laughter and amused agreement. I suppose I thought of my parents as being basically like me; their transformations were more extreme than my own, but everything else about them was bigger, so that made perfect sense. That they were in a sense the same from day to day, I never doubted; my mother and father were, by definition, the two adults who did certain things: scolded me, hugged me, tucked me into bed, made me eat disgusting vegetables, and so on. They stood out a mile, you couldn’t miss them. Occasionally one or the other was absent, but never for more than a day.

The past and future weren’t problems; I simply grew up with rather vague notions as to what they actually were. ‘Yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ were like ‘once upon a time’—I was never disappointed by broken promises of future treats, or baffled by descriptions of alleged past events, because I treated all such talk as intentional fiction. I was often accused of telling ‘lies’, and I assumed that was just a label applied to stories that were insufficiently interesting. Memories of events more than one day old were clearly worthless ‘lies’, so I did my best to forget them.

I’m sure I was happy. The world was a kaleidoscope. I had a new house to explore every day, different toys, different playmates, different food. Sometimes the colour of my skin would change (and it thrilled me to see that my parents, brothers and sisters almost always chose to make their own skin the same as mine). Now and then I woke up as a girl, but at some point (around the age of four, I think) this began to trouble me, and soon after that, it simply stopped happening.

I had no suspicion that I was moving, from house to house, from body to body. I changed, my house changed, the other houses, and the streets and shops and parks around me, changed. I travelled now and then to the city centre with my parents, but I thought of it not as a fixed location (since it was reached by a different route each time) but as a fixed feature of the world, like the sun or the sky.

School was the start of a long period of confusion and misery. Although the school building, the classroom, the teacher, and the other children, changed like everything else in my environment, the repertoire was clearly not as wide as that of my house and family. Travelling to the same school, but along different streets, and with a different name and face, upset me, and the gradual realisation that classmates were copying my own previous names and faces—and, worse still, I was being saddled with ones they’d used—was infuriating.

These days, having lived with the approved world-view for so long, I sometimes find it hard to understand how my first year at school wasn’t enough to make everything perfectly clear—until I recall that my glimpses of each classroom were generally spaced weeks apart, and that I was shuttling back and forth at random between more than a hundred schools. I had no diary, no records, no class lists in my head, no means of even thinking about what was happening to me—nobody trained me in the scientific method. Even Einstein was a great deal older than six, when he worked out his theory of relativity.

I kept my disquiet from my parents, but I was sick of dismissing my memories as lies; I tried discussing them with other children, which brought ridicule and hostility. After a period of fights and tantrums, I grew introverted. My parents said things like ‘You’re quiet today!’, day after day, proving to me exactly how stupid they were.

It’s a miracle that I learnt anything. Even now, I’m unsure how much of my reading ability belongs to me, and how much comes from my hosts. I’m sure that my vocabulary travels with me, but the lower-level business of scanning the page, of actually recognising letters and words, feels quite different from day to day. (Driving is similar; almost all of my hosts have licences, but I’ve never had a single lesson myself. I know the traffic rules, I know the gears and pedals, but I’ve never tried going out on to the road in a body that hasn’t done it before—it would make a nice experiment, but those bodies tend not to own cars.)

I learnt to read. I learnt quickly to read quickly—if I didn’t finish a book the day I started it, I knew I might not get my hands on it again for weeks, or months. I read hundreds of adventure stories, full of heroes and heroines with friends, brothers and sisters, even pets, that stayed with them day after day. Each book hurt a little more, but I couldn’t stop reading, I couldn’t give up hoping that the next book I opened would start with the words, ‘One sunny morning a boy woke up, and wondered what his name was.’

One day I saw my father consulting a street directory, and, despite my shyness, I asked him what it was. I’d seen world globes and maps of the country at school, but never anything like this. He pointed out our house, my school, and his place of work, both on the detailed street maps, and on the key map of the whole city inside the front cover.

At that time, one brand of street directory had a virtual monopoly. Every family owned one, and every day for weeks, I browbeat my father or mother into showing me things on the key map. I successfully committed a lot of it to memory (once I tried making pencil marks, thinking they might somehow inherit the magical permanence of the directory itself, but they proved to be as transitory as all the writing and drawing I did at school). I knew I was on to something profound, but the concept of my own motion, from place to place in an unchanging city, still failed to crystallise.

Not long afterwards, when my name was Danny Foster (a movie projectionist, these days, with a beautiful wife called Kate to whom I lost my virginity, though probably not Danny’s), I went to a friend’s eighth birthday party. I didn’t understand birthdays at all; some years I had none, some years I had two or three. The birthday boy, Charlie McBride, was no friend of mine so far as I was concerned, but my parents bought me a gift to take, a plastic toy machine gun, and drove me to his house; I had no say in any of it. When I arrived home, I pestered Dad into showing me, on a street map, exactly where I’d been, and the route the car had taken.

A week later, I woke up with Charlie McBride’s face, plus a house, parents, little brother, older sister, and toys, all identical to those I’d seen at his party. I refused to eat breakfast until my mother showed me our house on a street map, but I already knew where she’d point to.

I pretended to set off for school. My brother was too young for school, and my sister too old to want to be seen with me; in such circumstances I normally followed the clear flow of other children through the streets, but today I ignored it.

I still remembered landmarks from the trip to the party. I got lost a few times, but I kept stumbling upon streets I’d seen before; dozens of fragments of my world were starting to connect. It was both exhilarating and terrifying; I thought I was uncovering a vast conspiracy, I thought everyone had been purposely concealing the secrets of existence, and at last I was on the verge of outsmarting them all.

When I reached Danny’s house, though, I didn’t feel triumphant, I simply felt lonely and deceived and confused. Revelation or no revelation, I was still a child. I sat on the front steps and cried. Mrs Foster came out, in a fluster, calling me Charlie, asking me where my mother was, how I’d got here, why I wasn’t at school. I yelled abuse at this filthy liar, who’d pretended, like they all had, to be my mother. Phone calls were made, and I was driven home screaming, to spend the day in my bedroom, refusing to eat, refusing to speak, refusing to explain my unforgivable behaviour.

That night, I overheard my ‘parents’ discussing me, arranging what in retrospect I now believe was a visit to a child psychologist.

I never made it to that appointment.

* * * *

For the past eleven years now, I’ve been spending my days at the host’s workplace. It’s certainly not for the host’s sake; I’m far more likely to get him sacked by screwing up at his job than by causing him one day’s absence every three years. It’s, well, it’s what I do, it’s who I am these days. Everybody has to define themselves somehow; I am a professional impersonator. The pay and conditions are variable, but a vocation cannot be denied.

I’ve tried constructing an independent life for myself, but I’ve never been able to make it work. When I was much younger, and mostly unmarried, I’d set myself things to study. That’s when I first hired the safe-deposit box—to keep notes in. I studied mathematics, chemistry and physics, in the city’s central library, but when any subject began to grow difficult, it was hard to find the discipline to push myself onwards. What was the point? I knew I could never be a practising scientist. As for uncovering the nature of my plight, it was clear that the answer was not going to lie in any library book on neurobiology. In the cool, quiet reading rooms, with nothing to listen to but the soporific drone of the air conditionings, I’d lapse into daydreams as soon as the words or equations in front of me stopped making easy sense.

I once did a correspondence course in undergraduate level physics; I hired a post office box, and kept the key to it in my safe-deposit box. I completed the course, and did quite well, but I had no one to tell of my achievement.

A while after that I got a pen pal in Switzerland. She was a music student, a violinist, and I told her I was studying physics at the local university. She sent me a photo, and, eventually, I did the same, after waiting for one of my best-looking hosts. We exchanged letters regularly, every week for more than a year. One day she wrote, saying she was coming to visit, asking for details of how we could meet. I don’t think I’d ever felt as lonely as I did then. If I hadn’t sent that photo, I could at least have seen her for one day. I could have spent a whole afternoon, talking face to face with my only true friend, the only person in the world who actually knew, not one of my hosts, but me. I stopped writing at once, and I gave up renting the post office box.

I’ve contemplated suicide at times, but the fact that it would be certain murder, and perhaps do nothing to me but drive me into another host, makes an effective deterrent.

Since leaving behind all the turmoil and bitterness of my childhood, I’ve generally tried to be fair to my hosts. Some days I’ve lost control and done things that must have inconvenienced or embarrassed them (and I take a little cash for my safe-deposit box from those who can easily spare it), but I’ve never set out to intentionally harm anyone. Sometimes I almost feel that they know about me and wish me well, although all the indirect evidence, from questioning wives and friends when I’ve had closely spaced visits, suggests that the missing days are hidden by seamless amnesia—my hosts don’t even know that they’ve been out of action, let alone have a chance of guessing why. As for me knowing them, well, I sometimes see love and respect in the eyes of their families and colleagues, I sometimes see physical evidence of achievements I can admire—one host has written a novel, a black comedy about his Vietnam experiences, that I’ve read and enjoyed; one is an amateur telescope-maker, with a beautifully crafted, thirty-centimetre Newtonian reflector, through which I viewed Halley’s comet—but there are too many of them. By the time I die, I’ll have glimpsed each of their lives for just twenty or thirty randomly scattered days.

* * * *

I drive around the perimeter of the Pearlman Institute, seeing what windows are lit, what doors are open, what activity is visible. There are several entrances, ranging from one clearly for the public, complete with plushly carpeted foyer and polished mahogany reception desk, to a rusty metal swing door opening on to a dingy bitumen-covered space between two buildings. I park in the street, rather than risk taking a spot on the premises to which I’m not entitled.

I’m nervous as I approach what I hope is the correct doorway; I still get a pain in my gut in those awful seconds just before I’m first seen by a colleague, and it becomes, very suddenly, a hundred times harder to back out—and, looking on the bright side, a whole lot easier to continue.

‘Morning, Johnny.’

‘Morning.’

The nurse continues past me even as this brief exchange takes place. I’m hoping to find out where I’m meant to be from a kind of social binding strength; the people I spend most time with ought to greet me with more than a nod and two words. I wander a short way along a corridor, trying to get used to the squeaking of my rubber-soled shoes on the linoleum. Suddenly a gruff voice cries out, ‘O’Leary!’ and I turn to see a young man in a uniform like mine, striding along the corridor towards me, wearing a thunderous frown, arms stuck out unnaturally, face twitching. ‘Standing around! Dawdling! Again!’ His behaviour is so bizarre that, for a fraction of a second, I’m convinced he’s one of the patients; some psychotic with a grudge against me has killed another orderly, stolen his uniform, and is about to produce a bloodstained hatchet. Then the man puffs out his cheeks and stands there glaring, and I suddenly twig; he’s not insane, he’s just parodying some obese, aggressive superior. I prod his inflated face with one finger, as if bursting a balloon, which gives me a chance to get close enough to read his badge: Ralph Dopita.

‘You jumped a mile! I couldn’t believe it! So at last I got the voice perfect!’

‘And the face as well. But you’re lucky, you were born ugly.’

He shrugs. ‘Your wife didn’t think so last night.’

‘You were drunk; that wasn’t my wife, it was your mother.’

‘Don’t I always say you’re like a father to me?’

The corridor, after much seemingly gratuitous winding, leads into a kitchen, all stainless steel and steam, where two other orderlies are standing around, and three cooks are preparing breakfast. With hot water constantly running in one sink, the clunking of trays and utensils, the hissing of fat, and the tortured sound of a failing ventilation fan, it’s almost impossible to hear anyone speak. One of the orderlies mimes being a chicken, and then makes a gesture—swinging one hand above his head, pointing outwards, as if to take in the whole building. ‘Enough eggs to feed—’ he shouts, and the others crack up, so I laugh along with them.

Later, I follow them to a storeroom off the kitchen, where each of us grabs a trolley. Pinned up on a board, sheathed in transparent plastic, are four patient lists, one for each ward, ordered by room number. Beside each name is a little coloured circular sticker, green, red or blue. I hang back until there’s only one left to grab.

There are three kinds of meal prepared: bacon and eggs with toast, cereal, and a mushy yellow puree resembling baby food, in descending order of popularity. On my own list there are more red stickers than green, and only a single blue, but I’m fairly certain that there were more green than red in total, when I saw all four lists together. As I load my trolley on this basis, I managed to catch a second look at Ralph’s list, which is mainly green, and the contents of his trolley confirms that I have the code right.

I’ve never been in a psychiatric hospital before, either as patient or staff member. I spent a day in prison about five years ago, where I narrowly avoided getting my host’s skull smashed in; I never discovered what he’d done, or how long his sentence was, but I’m rather hoping he’ll be out by the time I get back to him.

My vague expectation that this place will be similar turns out to be pleasantly wrong. The prison cells were personalised to some degree, with pictures on the walls, and idiosyncratic possessions, but they still looked like cells. The rooms here are far less cluttered with that kind of thing, but their underlying character is a thousand times less harsh. There are no bars on the windows, and the doors in my ward have no locks. Most patients are already awake, sitting up in bed, greeting me with a quiet ‘Good morning’; a few take their trays into a common room, where there’s a TV tuned to news. Perhaps the degree of calm is unnatural, due solely to drugs; perhaps the peacefulness that makes my job untraumatic is stultifying and oppressive to the patients. Perhaps not. Maybe one day I’ll find out.

My last patient, the single blue sticker, is listed as Klein, F. C. A skinny, middle-aged man with untidy black hair and a few days’ stubble. He’s lying so straight that I expect to see straps holding him in place, but there are none. His eyes are open but they don’t follow me, and when I greet him there’s no response.

There’s a bedpan on a table beside the bed, and on a hunch I sit him up and arrange it beneath him; he’s easily manipulated, not exactly cooperating, but not dead weight either. He uses the bedpan impassively. I find some paper and wipe him, then I take the bedpan to the toilets, empty it, and wash my hands thoroughly. I’m feeling only slightly queasy; O’Leary’s inurement to tasks like this is probably helping.

Klein sits with a fixed gaze as I hold a spoonful of yellow mush in front of him, but when I touch it to his lips he opens his mouth wide. He doesn’t close his mouth on the spoon, so I have to turn it and tip the food off, but he does swallow the stuff, and only a little ends up on his chin.

A woman in a white coat pops her head into the room and says, ‘Could you shave Mr Klein, please, Johnny, he’s going to St Margaret’s for some tests this morning,’ and then vanishes before I can reply.

After taking the trolley back to the kitchen, collecting empty trays along the way, I find all I need in the storeroom. I move Klein on to a chair—again he seems to make it easy, without quite assisting. He stays perfectly still as I lather and shave him, except for an occasional blink. I manage to nick him only once, and not deeply.

The same woman returns, this time carrying a thick manila folder and a clipboard, and she stands beside me. I get a peek at her badge—Dr Helen Lidcombe.

‘How’s it going, Johnny?’

‘OK.’

She hovers expectantly, and I feel suddenly uneasy. I must be doing something wrong. Or maybe I’m just too slow. ‘Nearly finished,’ I mutter. She reaches out with one hand and absent-mindedly massages the back of my neck. Walking on eggs time. Why can’t my hosts lead uncomplicated lives? Sometimes I feel like I’m living the outtakes from a thousand soap operas. What does John O’Leary have a right to expect of me? To determine the precise nature and extent of this relationship, and leave him neither more nor less involved tomorrow than he was yesterday? Some chance.

‘You’re very tense.’

I need a safe topic, quickly. The patient.

‘This guy, I don’t know, some days he just gets to me.’

‘What, is he behaving differently?’

‘No, no, I just wonder. What it must be like for him.’

‘Like nothing much.’

I shrug. ‘He knows when he’s sitting on a bedpan. He knows when he’s being fed. He’s not a vegetable.’

‘It’s hard to say what he “knows”. A leech with a couple of neurons “knows” when to suck blood. All things considered, he does remarkably well, but I don’t think he has anything like consciousness, or even anything like dreams.’ She gives a little laugh. ‘All he has is memories, though memories of what I can’t imagine.’

I start wiping off the shaving soap. ‘How do you know he has memories?’

‘I’m exaggerating.’ She reaches into the folder and pulls out a photographic transparency. It looks like a side-on head X-ray, but blobs and bands of artificial colour adorn it. ‘Last month I finally got the money to do a few PET scans. There are things going on in Mr Klein’s hippocampus that look suspiciously like long-term memories being laid down.’ She whips the transparency back in the folder before I’ve had a chance for a proper look. ‘But comparing anything in his head with studies on normals is like comparing the weather on Mars with the weather on Jupiter.’

I’m growing curious, so I take a risk, and ask with a furrowed brow, ‘Did you ever tell me exactly how he ended up like this?’

She rolls her eyes. ‘Don’t start with that again! You know I’d get in trouble.’

‘Who do you think I’d blab to?’ I copy Ralph Dopita’s imitation, for a second, and Helen bursts out laughing. ‘Hardly. You haven’t said more than three words to him since you’ve been here: “Sorry, Dr Pearlman.”‘

‘So why don’t you tell me?’

‘If you told your friends—’

‘Do you think I tell my friends everything? Is that what you think? Don’t you trust me at all?’

She sits on Klein’s bed. ‘Close the door.’ I do it.

‘His father was a pioneering neurosurgeon.’

‘What?’

‘If you say a word—’

‘I won’t, I promise. But what did he do? Why?’

‘His primary research interest was redundancy and functional crossover; the extent to which people with lost or damaged portions of the brain manage to transfer the functions of the impaired regions into healthy tissue.

‘His wife died giving birth to a son, their only child. He must have been psychotic already, but that put him right off the planet. He blamed the child for his wife’s death, but he was too cold-blooded to do something simple like kill it.’

I’m about ready to tell her to shut up, that I really do not wish to know any more, but John O’Leary is a big, tough man with a strong stomach, and I mustn’t disgrace him in front of his lover.

‘He raised the child “normally”, talking to it, playing with it, and so on, and making extensive notes on how it was developing; vision, coordination, the rudiments of speech, you name it. When it was a few months old, he implanted a network of cannulae, a web of very fine tubes, spanning almost the entire brain, but narrow enough not to cause any problems themselves. And then he kept on as before, stimulating the child, and recording its progress. And every week, via the cannulae, he destroyed a little more of its brain.’

I let out a long string of obscenities. Klein, of course, just sits there, but suddenly I’m ashamed of violating his privacy, however meaningless that concept might be in his case. My face is flushed with blood, I feel slightly dizzy, slightly less than real. ‘How come he ever survived? How come there’s anything left at all?’

‘The extent of his father’s insanity saved him, if that’s the word to use. You see, for months during which he was regularly losing brain tissue, the child actually continued to develop neurologically—more slowly than normal, of course, but moving perceptibly forwards nonetheless. Professor Klein was too much the scientist to bury a result like that; he wrote up all his observations and tried to get them published. The journal thought it was some kind of sick hoax, but they told the police, who eventually got around to investigating. But by the time the child was rescued, well—’ She nods towards the impassive Klein.

‘How much of his brain is left? Isn’t there a chance—?’

‘Less than ten per cent. There are cases of microcephalics who live almost normal lives with a similar brain mass, but being born that way, having gone through foetal brain development that way, isn’t a comparable situation. There was a young girl a few years ago, who had a hemispherectomy to cure severe epilepsy, and emerged from it with very little impairment, but she’d had years for her brain to gradually switch functions out of the damaged hemisphere. She was extremely lucky; in most cases that operation has been utterly disastrous. As for Mr Klein, well, I’d say he wasn’t lucky at all.’

* * * *

I seem to spend most of the rest of the morning mopping corridors. When an ambulance arrives to take Klein away for his tests, I feel mildly offended that no one asks for my assistance; the two ambulancemen, watched by Helen, plonk him into a wheelchair and wheel him away, like couriers collecting a heavy parcel. But I have even less right than John O’Leary to feel possessive or protective about ‘my’ patients, so I push Klein out of my thoughts.

I eat lunch with the other orderlies in the staff room. We play cards, and make jokes that even I find stale by now, but I enjoy the company nonetheless. I am teasingly accused several times of having lingering ‘east-coast tendencies’, which makes sense; if O’Leary lived over east for a while, that would explain why I don’t remember him. The afternoon passes slowly, but sleepily. Dr Pearlman has flown somewhere, suddenly, to do whatever eminent psychiatrists or neurologists (I’m not even sure which he is) are called to do with great urgency in faraway cities—and this seems to let everyone, the patients included, relax. When my shift ends at three o’clock, and I walk out of the building saying ‘See you tomorrow’ to everyone I pass, I feel (as usual) a certain sense of loss. It will pass.

Because it’s Friday, I detour to the city centre to update the records in my safe-deposit box. In the pre-rush traffic I begin to feel mild elation, as all the minor tribulations of coping with the Pearlman Psychiatric Institute recede, banished for months, or years, or maybe even decades.

After making diary entries for the week, and adding a new page headed JOHN FRANCIS O’LEARY to my thick ring-binder full of host details, the itch to do something with all this information grows in me, as it does now and then. But what? The prospect of renting a computer and arranging a place to use it is too daunting on a sleepy Friday afternoon. I could update, with the help of a calculator, my average host-repeat rate. That would be pretty bloody thrilling.

Then I recall the PET scan that Helen Lidcombe waved in front of me. Although I don’t know a thing about interpreting such pictures myself, I can imagine how exciting it must be for a trained specialist to actually see brain processes displayed that way. If I could turn all my hundreds of pages of data into one coloured picture—well, it might not tell me a damn thing, but the prospect is somehow infinitely more attractive than messing about to produce a few statistics that don’t tell me a damn thing either.

I buy a street directory, the brand I am familiar with from childhood, with the key map inside the front cover. I buy a packet of five felt-tipped pens. I sit on a bench in a shopping arcade, covering the map with coloured dots; a red dot for a host who’s had from one to three visits, an orange dot for a host who’s had four to six, and so on up to blue. It takes me an hour to complete, and when I’m finished the result does not look like a glossy, computer-generated brain scan at all. It looks like a mess.

And yet. Although the colours don’t form isolated bands, and intermingle extensively, there’s a definite concentration of blue in the city’s north-east. As soon as I see this, it rings true; the north-east is more familiar to me than anywhere else. And, a geographical bias would explain the fact that I repeat hosts more frequently than I ought to. For each colour, I sketch a shaky pencil line that joins up all of its outermost points, and then another for all its innermost points. None of these lines intersects another. It’s no perfect set of concentric circles by any means, but each curve is roughly centred on that patch of blue in the north-east. A region which contains, amongst many other things, the Pearlman Psychiatric Institute.

I pack everything back into the safe-deposit box. I need to give this a lot more thought. Driving home, a very vague hypothesis begins to form, but the traffic fumes, the noise, the glare of the setting sun, all make it hard to pin the idea down.

Linda is furious. ‘Where have you been? Our daughter had to ring me, in tears, from a public phone box, with money borrowed from a complete stranger, and I had to pretend to be sick and leave work and drive halfway across town to pick her up. Where the hell have you been?’

‘I—I got caught up, with Ralph, he was celebrating—’

‘I rang Ralph. You weren’t with Ralph.’

I stand there in silence. She stares at me for a full minute, then turns and stomps away.

I apologise to Laura (I see the name on her school books), who is no longer crying but looks like she has been for hours. She is eight years old, and adorable, and I feel like dirt. I offer to help with her homework, but she assures me she doesn’t need anything at all from me, so I leave her in peace.

Linda, not surprisingly, barely says a word to me for the rest of the evening. Tomorrow this problem will be John O’Leary’s, not mine, which makes me feel twice as bad about it. We watch TV in silence. When she goes to bed, I wait an hour before following her, and if she isn’t asleep when I climb in, she’s doing a good imitation.

I lie in the dark with my eyes open, thinking about Klein and his long-term memories, his father’s unspeakable ‘experiment’, my brain scan of the city.

I never asked Helen how old Klein was, and now it’s too late for that, but there’ll surely be something in the newspapers from the time of his father’s trial. First thing tomorrow—screw my host’s obligations—I’ll go to the central library and check that out.

Whatever consciousness is, it must be resourceful, it must be resilient. Surviving for so long in that tiny child, pushed into ever smaller corners of his mutilated, shrinking brain. But when the number of living neurons fell so low that no resourcefulness, no ingenuity, could make them suffice, what then? Did consciousness vanish in an instant? Did it slowly fade away, as function after function was discarded, until nothing remained but a few reflexes, and a parody of human dignity? Or did it—how could it?—reach out in desperation to the brains of a thousand other children, those young enough, flexible enough, to donate a fraction of their own capacity to save this one child from oblivion? Each one donating one day in a thousand from their own lives, to rescue me from that ruined shell, fit now for nothing but eating, defecating, and storing my long-term memories?

Klein, F. C. I don’t even know what the initials stand for. Linda mumbles something and turns over. I feel remarkably unperturbed by my speculations, perhaps because I don’t honestly believe that this wild theory could possibly be true. And yet, is it so much stranger than the mere fact of my existence?

And if I did believe it, how should I feel? Horrified by my own father’s atrocities towards me? Yes. Astonished by such a miracle of human tenacity? Certainly.

I finally manage to cry—for Klein, F. C, or for myself, I don’t know. Linda doesn’t wake, but moved by some dream or instinct, she turns to me and holds me. Eventually I stop shaking, and the warmth of her body flows into me, peace itself.

As I feel sleep approaching, I make a resolution: from tomorrow, I start anew. From tomorrow, an end to mimicking my hosts. From tomorrow, whatever the problems, whatever the setbacks, I’m going to carve out a life of my own.

* * * *

I dream a simple dream. I dream that I have a name. One name, unchanging, mine until death. I don’t know what my name is, but that doesn’t matter. Knowing that I have it is enough.

Scatter My Ashes

Every night, at exactly a quarter past three, something dreadful happens on the street outside our bedroom window. We peek through the curtains, yawning and shivering in the life-draining chill, and then we clamber back beneath the blankets without exchanging a word, to hug each other tightly and hope for sound sleep before it’s time to rise.

Usually what we witness verges on the mundane. Drunken young men fighting, swaying about with outstretched knives, cursing incoherently. Robbery, bashings, rape. We wince to see such violence, but we can hardly be shocked or surprised any more, and we’re never tempted to intervene: it’s always far too cold, for a start! A single warm exhalation can coat the window pane with mist, transforming the most stomach-wrenching assault into a safely cryptic ballet for abstract blobs of light.

On some nights, though, when the shadows in the room are subtly wrong, when the familiar street looks like an abandoned film set, or a painting of itself perversely come to life, we are confronted by truly disturbing sights, oppressive apparitions which almost make us doubt we’re awake, or, if awake, sane. I can’t catalogue these visions, for most, mercifully, are blurred by morning, leaving only a vague uneasiness and a reluctance to be alone even in the brightest sunshine.

One image, though, has never faded.

In the middle of the road was a giant human skull. How big was it? Big enough for a child, perhaps six or seven years old, to stand trapped between the jaws, bracing them apart with outstretched arms and legs, trembling with the effort but somehow, miraculously, keeping the massive teeth from closing in.

As we watched I felt, strange as it may sound, inspired, uplifted, filled with hope by the sight of that tiny figure holding out against the blind, brutal creature of evil. Wouldn’t we all like to think of innocence as a tangible force to be reckoned with? Despite all evidence to the contrary.

Then the four huge, blunt teeth against which the child was straining began to reform, tapering to needle-fine points. A drop of blood fell from the back of each upraised hand. I cried out something, angry and horrified. But I didn’t move.

A gash appeared in the back of the child’s neck. Not a wound: a mouth, the child’s new and special mouth, violently writhing, stretched open ever wider by four sharp, slender fangs growing in perfect mimicry of the larger fangs impaling the child’s palms and feet.

The new mouth began to scream, at first a clumsy, choking sound, made without a tongue, but then a torn, bloody scrap of flesh appeared in place, the tongue of the old mouth uprooted and inverted, and the cries gave full voice to an intensity of suffering and fear that threatened to melt the glass of the window, sear away the walls of the room, and drag us into a pit of darkness where one final scream would echo forever.

When it was over, we climbed into bed and snuggled up together.

I dreamt that I found a jigsaw puzzle, hidden in a dark, lost corner of the house. The pieces were in a plain cardboard box, unaccompanied by any illustration of what the assembled puzzle portrayed. Wendy laughed and told me not to waste my time, but I sat frowning over it for an hour every evening, until after many weeks only a handful of pieces remained unplaced.

Somehow, even then, I didn’t know what the picture was, but as I lazily filled in the very last gap, I felt a sudden overpowering conviction that whatever the jigsaw showed, I did not want to see it.

I woke a little before dawn. I kissed Wendy very softly, I gently stroked her shoulders and breasts with my fingertips. She rearranged herself, pulled a face, but didn’t wake. I was about to brush her forehead with one hand, which I knew would make her open her eyes and give me a sleepy smile, when it occurred to me that if she did, there might be small, fanged mouths behind her eyelids.

When I woke again it was half past seven, and she was already up. I hate that, I hate waking in an empty bed. She was reading the paper as I sat down to breakfast.

“So, what’s happening in the world?”

“A fifth child’s gone missing.”

“Shit. Don’t they have any suspects yet? Any evidence, any clues?”

“A fisherman reported something floating on the lake. The police went out in a boat to have a look.”

“And?”

“It turned out to be a calf foetus.”

I gulped coffee. I hate the taste of coffee, and it sets my stomach squirming, but I simply have to drink it.

“It says police will be diving all day today, searching the lake.”

“I might go out there, then. The lake looks fantastic in this weather.”

“When I’m snug in my office with the heater on full blast, I’ll think of you.”

“Think of the divers. They’ll have the worst of it.”

“At least they know they’ll get paid. You could spend the whole day there for nothing.”

“I’d rather take my kind of risk than theirs.”

Once she was gone, I cut out the article on the vanished child. The walls of my study are papered with newsprint, ragged grey odd-shaped pieces affixed only at their top corners, free to rustle when the door is opened or closed. Sometimes, when I’m sitting at my desk for a moment after I’ve switched off the lamp, I get a strong impression of diseased skin.

“Put them in a scrap book!” says Wendy, whenever she ventures in to grimace at the state of the room. “Or better still, put them in a filing cabinet and see if you can lose the key!” But I need to keep them this way, I need to see them all at once, spread out before me like a satellite photograph, an aerial view of this age of violence. I’m looking for a pattern. My gaze darts from headline to headline, from STRANGLER to STALKER to RIPPER to SLASHER, hunting for a clue to the terrible unity, hunting for the nature of the single dark force that I know lies behind all the different nightmare stories, all the different fearful names.

I have books too, of course, I have shelves stuffed with volumes, some learned, some hysterical, from treatises on Vlad the Impaler to discussions of the entrails of London prostitutes to heavy psychoanalysis of the Manson gang. I have skimmed these works, read a page here and a page there only, for to clutter my mind with details can only distract me from the whole.

I recall precisely when my obsession began. I was ten. A convict, a murderer, had escaped from a nearby prison, and warnings were broadcast urging us to barricade our homes. My parents, naturally, tried not to alarm me, but we all slept together that night, in the room with the smallest window, and when the poor cat mewed to be let in the back door, my mother would let nobody, not even my father, budge.

I dozed and woke, dozed and woke, and each time dreamt that I was not sleeping but lying awake, waiting for the utter certainty of the unstoppable, blood-thirsty creature bursting through the door and slicing us all in two.

They caught him the next morning. They caught him too late. A service station attendant was dead, cut up beyond belief by an implement that was never found.

They showed the killer on TV that night, and he looked nothing like the stuff of nightmares: thin, awkward, squinting, dwarfed between two massive, smug policemen. Yet for all his apparent weakness and shyness, he seemed to know something, he seemed to be holding a secret, not so much about murder itself as about the cameras, the viewers, about exactly what he meant to us. He averted his eyes from the lenses, but the hint of a smile on his lips declared that everything was, and always would be, just the way he wanted it, just the way he’d planned it from the start.

I drove to the lake and set up my camera with its longest lens, but after peering through the viewfinder for ten minutes, keeping the police boat perfectly framed, following its every tiny drift, I switched to binoculars to save my eyes and neck. Nothing was happening. Faint shouts reached me now and then, but the tones were always of boredom, discomfort, irritation. Soon I put down the binoculars. If they found something, I’d hear the change at once.

I drank coffee from a flask, I paced. I took a few shots of divers backflipping into the water, but none seemed special, none captured the mood. I watched the water birds and felt somehow guilty for not knowing their names.

The sky and the water were pale grey, the colour of soggy newsprint. Thick smoke rose from a factory on the far shore, but seemed to fall back down again on almost the same spot. The chill, the bleakness, and the morbid nature of my vigil worked together to fill me with an oppressive sense of gloom, but cutting through that dullness and despair was the acid taste of anticipation.

My back was turned when I heard the shouts of panic. It took me seconds to spot the boat again, forever to point the camera. An inert diver was being hauled on board, to the sound of much angry swearing. Someone ripped off his face mask and began resuscitation. Each time I fired the shutter, I thought: what if he dies? If he dies it will be my fault, because if he dies I’ll have a sale for sure.

I packed up my gear and fled before the boat reached the shore, but not before the ambulance arrived. I glanced at the driver, who looked about my age, and thought: why am I doing my job, and not his? Why am I a voyeur, a parasite, a vulture, a leech, when I could be saving people’s lives and sleeping the sleep of the just every night?

Later, I discovered that the cop was in a coma. Evidently there’d been a malfunction of his air supply. I sold one of the pictures, which appeared with the caption KISS OF LIFE! The editor said, “That could easily win you a prize.” I smiled immodestly and mumbled about luck.

Wendy is a literary agent. We went out to dinner that night with one of her clients, to celebrate the signing of a contract. The writer was a quiet, thoughtful, attractive woman. Her husband worked in a bank, but played football for some team or other on weekends, and was built like a vault.

“So, what do you do for a crust,” he asked.

“I’m a freelance photographer.”

“What’s that mean? Fashion models for the front of Vogue or centrefolds for Playboy?”

“Neither. Most of my work is for newspapers, or news magazines. I had a picture in Time last year.”

“What of?”

“Flood victims trapped on the roof of their farm.”

“Yeah? Did you pay them some of what you got for it?”

Wendy broke in and described my day’s achievement, and the topic switched naturally to that of the missing child.

“If they ever catch the bloke who’s doing it,” said the footballer, “he shouldn’t be killed. He should be tortured for a couple of days, and then crippled. Say they cut off both his legs. Then there’s no chance he’ll escape from prison on his own steam, and when they let him free in a year or two, like they always end up doing, who’s he going to hurt?”

I said, “Why does everyone assume there’s a killer? Nobody’s yet found a single drop of blood, or a fingerprint, or a footprint. Nobody knows for sure that the children are dead, nobody’s proved that at all.”

The writer said, “Maybe the Innocents are ascending into Heaven.”

For a moment I thought she was serious, but then she smirked at the cleverness of her sarcasm. I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the evening.

In the taxi home, though, I couldn’t help muttering a vague, clumsy insult about Neanderthal fascists who revelled in torture. Wendy laughed and put an arm around my waist.

“Jealousy really becomes you,” she said. I couldn’t think of an intelligent reply.

That night, we witnessed a particularly brutal robbery. A taxi pulled up across the road, and the passengers dragged the driver out and kicked him in the head until he was motionless. They virtually stripped him naked searching for the key to his cashbox, then they smashed his radio, slashed his tyres, and stabbed him in the stomach before walking off, whistling Rossini.

Once Wendy had drifted back to sleep, I crept out of the bedroom and phoned for an ambulance. I nearly went outside to see what I could do, but thought: if I move him, if I even just try to stop the bleeding, I’ll probably do more harm than good, maybe manage to kill him with my well-intentioned incompetence. End up in court. I’d be crazy to take the risk.

I fell asleep before the ambulance arrived. By morning there wasn’t a trace of the incident. The taxi must have been towed away, the blood washed off the road by the water truck.

A sixth child had vanished. I returned to the lake, but found it was deserted. I dipped my hand in the water: it was oily, and surprisingly warm. Then I drove back home, cut out the relevant articles, and taped them into place on the wall.

As I did so, the jigsaw puzzle dream flooded into my mind, with the dizzying power of déjà vu. I stared at the huge grey mosaic, almost expecting it to change before my eyes, but then the mood passed and I shook my head and laughed weakly.

The door opened. I didn’t turn. Someone coughed. I still didn’t turn.

“Excuse me.”

It was a man in his mid-thirties, I’d say. Balding slightly, but with a young, open face. He was dressed like an office worker, in a white shirt with the cuffs rolled up, neatly pressed black trousers, a plain blue tie.

“What do you want?”

“I’m sorry. I knocked on the front door, and it was ajar. Then I called out twice.”

“I didn’t hear you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What do you want?”

“Can I look? At your walls? Oh, there! The Marsden Mangler! I wonder how many people remember him today. Five years ago there were two thousand police working full time on that case, and probably a hundred reporters scurrying back and forth between the morgue and the night club belt. You know, half the jury fainted when they showed slides at the trial, including an abattoir worker.”

“Nobody fainted. A few people closed their eyes, that’s all. I was there.”

“Watching the jury and not the slides, apparently.”

“Watching both. Were you there?”

“Oh, yes! Every day without fail.”

“Well, I don’t remember you. And I got to know most of the regular faces in the public gallery.”

“I was never in the public gallery.” He crossed the room to peer closely at a Sunday paper’s diagram detailing the modus operandi of the Knightsbridge Knifeman. “This is pretty coy, isn’t it? I mean, anybody would think that the female genitalia—” I glared at him, and he turned his attention to something else, smiling a slight smile of tolerant amusement.

“How did you find out about my collection of clippings?” It wasn’t something that I boasted about, and Wendy found it a bit embarrassing, perhaps a bit sick.

“Collection of clippings! You mustn’t call it that! I’ll tell you what this room is: it’s a shrine. No lesser word will do. A shrine.”

I glanced behind me. The door was closed. I watched him as he read a two-page spread on a series of unsolved axe murders, and though his gaze was clearly directed at the print, I felt as if he was staring straight back at me.

Then I knew that I had seen him before. Twenty years before, on television, smiling shyly as they hustled him along, never quite looking at the camera, but never quite turning away. My eyes began to water, and a crazy thought filled my head: hadn’t I known then, hadn’t I been certain, that the killer would come and get me, that nothing would stand in his way? That the man had not aged was unremarkable, no, it was necessary, because if he had aged I would never have recognised him, and recognition was exactly what he wanted. Recognition was the start of my fear.

I said, “You might tell me your name.”

He looked up. “I’m sorry. I have been discourteous, haven’t I? But—” (he shrugged) “—I have so many nicknames.” He gestured widely with both hands, taking in all the walls, all the headlines. I pictured the door handle, wondering how quickly I could turn it with palms stinking wet, with numb, clumsy fingers. “My friends, though, call me Jack.”

He easily lifted me over his head, and then somehow (did he float up off the floor, or did he stretch up, impossibly doubling his height?) pinned me face-down against the ceiling. Four fangs grew to fill his mouth, and his mouth opened to fill my vision. It was like hanging over a living well, and as his distorted words echoed up from the depths, I thought: if I fall, nobody will ever find me.

“Tonight you will take my photograph. Catch me in the act with your brightest flashgun. That’s what you want, isn’t it?” He shook me. “Isn’t it?” I closed my eyes, but that brought visions of a tumbling descent. I whispered, “Yes.”

“You invoke me and invoke me and invoke me!” he ranted. “Aren’t you ever sick of blood? Aren’t you ever sick of the taste of blood? Today it’s the blood of tiny children, tomorrow the blood of old women, next the blood of ... who? Dark-haired prostitutes? Teenaged baby sitters? Blue-eyed homosexuals? And each time simply leaves you more jaded, longing for something crueller and more bizarre. Can’t you sweeten your long, bland lives with anything but blood?

“Colour film. Bring plenty of colour film. Kodachrome, I want saturated hues. Understand?” I nodded. He told me where and when: a nearby street corner, at three fifteen.

I hit the floor with my hands out in front of me, jarring one wrist but not breaking it. I was alone. I ran through the house, I searched every room, then I locked the doors and sat on the bed, shaking, emitting small, unhappy noises every few minutes.

When I’d calmed down, I went out and bought ten rolls of Kodachrome.

We ate at home that night. I was supposed to cook something, but I ended up making do with frozen pizzas. Wendy talked about her tax problems, and I nodded.

“And what did you do with yourself today?”

“Research.”

“For what?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

We made love. For a while it seemed like some sort of ritual, some kind of magic: Wendy was giving me strength, yes, she was fortifying me with mystical energy and spiritual power. Afterwards, I couldn’t laugh at such a ludicrous idea, I could only despise myself for being able to take it seriously for a moment.

I dreamt that she gave me a shining silver sword.

“What’s it for?” I asked her.

“When you feel like running away, stab yourself in the foot.”

I climbed out of bed at two. It was utterly freezing, even once I was fully dressed. I sat in the kitchen with the light off, drinking coffee until I was so bloated that I could hardly breathe. Then I staggered to the toilet and threw it all up. My throat and lungs stung, I wanted to curl up and dissolve, or crawl back to the warm blankets, back to Wendy, to stay hidden under the covers until morning.

As I clicked the front door shut, it was like diving into a moonlit pool. Being safe indoors was at once a distant memory, lying warm in bed was a near-forgotten dream. No cars, no distant traffic noises, no clouds, just a huge night sky and empty, endless streets.

It was five to three when I reached the place. I paced for a while, then walked around the block, but that only killed three minutes. I chose a direction and resolved to walk a straight line for seven minutes, then turn around and come back.

If I didn’t turn around, if I kept walking, would he catch me? Would he return to the house and punish me? What if we moved, to another city, another state?

I passed a phone box, an almost blinding slab of solid light. I jingled my pockets, then remembered that I’d need no coin. I stood outside the booth for two minutes, I lingered in the half-open doorway for three, and then I lifted and replaced the handset a dozen times before I finally dialled.

When the operator answered, I slammed the phone down. I needed to defecate, I needed to lie down. I dialled again, and asked for the police. It was so easy. I even gave them my true name and address when they asked, without the least hesitation. I said “thank you” about six thousand times.

I looked at my watch: thirteen past three. I ran for the corner, camera swinging by the carrying strap, and made it back in ninety seconds.

Someone was climbing out through a dark window, holding a gagged, struggling child. It wasn’t the man who’d called himself Jack, it wasn’t the killer I’d seen on TV when I was ten.

I raised my camera.

Drop it and do something, drop it and save the child, you fool! Me against him? Against that? I’d be slaughtered! The police are coming, it’s their job, isn’t it? Just take the pictures. It’s what you really want, it’s what you’re here to do.

Once I’d fired the shutter, once I’d taken the first shot, it was like flicking through the pages of a magazine. I was sickened, I was horrified, I was angry, but I wasn’t there, so what could I do? The child was tortured. The child was raped. The child was mutilated. The child suffered but I heard no cries, and I saw only the flashgun’s frozen tableaux, a sequence of badly made waxworks.

The killer and I arranged each shot with care. He waited patiently while the flash recharged, and while I changed rolls. He was a consummate model: each pose he struck appeared completely natural, utterly spontaneous.

I didn’t notice just when the child actually died. I only noticed when I ran out of film. It was then that I looked around at the houses on the street and saw half a dozen couples, peeking through their bedroom windows and stifling yawns.

He sprinted away when the police arrived. They didn’t pursue him in the car; one officer loped off after him, the other knelt to examine the remains, then walked up to me. He tipped his head at my camera.

“Got it all, did you?”

I nodded. Accomplice, accomplice, accomplice. How could I ever explain, let alone try to excuse, my inaction?

“Fantastic. Well done.”

Two more police cars appeared, and then the officer who’d gone in pursuit came marching up the street, pushing the hand-cuffed killer ahead of him.

The best of the photographs were published widely, even shown on TV (“the following scenes may disturb some viewers”). A thousand law-abiding citizens rioted outside the courthouse, burning and slashing effigies, when he appeared to be placed on remand.

He was killed in his cell a week before the trial was due to start. He was tortured, raped and mutilated first. He must have been expecting to die, because he had written out a will:

Burn my body and scatter my ashes from a high place.

Only then will I be happy. Only then will I find peace.

They did it for him, too.

He has a special place on my wall now, and I never tire of reviewing it. The whole process can be seen at a glance. How the tabloids cheered him on, rewarding each presumed death with ever larger headlines, ever grislier speculations. How the serious papers strove so earnestly to understand him, with scholarly dissertations on the formative years of the great modern killers. How all the well-oiled mechanisms slipped into gear, how everybody knew their role. Quotes from politicians: “The community is outraged.” But the outrage was bottled, recycled, flat and insincere.

What would-be killer could hesitate, could resist for even a second, such a cosy niche so lovingly prepared.

And I understand now why he wanted me there that night. He must have believed that if people could see, in colour, in close-up, the kind of atrocities that we treat as an industry, an entertainment, a thrilling diversion from the pettiness and banality of our empty lives, then we would at last recoil, we would at last feel some genuine shock, some genuine sadness, we would at last be cured, and he would be free.

He was wrong.

So they’ve burnt his corpse and scattered his ashes. So what? Did he really believe that could possibly help him, did he really hope to end the interminable cycle of his incarnations?

I dream of fine black cinders borne by the wind, floating down to anoint ten thousand feverish brows. The sight of the tortured child, you see, has exerted an awful fascination upon people around the world.

The first wave of imitators copied the murder exactly as portrayed by my slides.

The second wave embellished and improvised.

The current fashion is for live broadcasts, and the change of medium has, of course, had some influence on the technical details of the act.

I often sit in my study these days, just staring at the walls. Now and then I suffer moments of blind panic, when I am convinced for no reason that Jack has returned, and is standing right behind me with his mouth stretched open. But when I turn and look, I am always still alone. Alone with the headlines, alone with the photographs, alone with my obsession. And that, somehow, is far more frightening.

First published in Interzone #23, Spring 1988. Revised Wednesday, 16 May 2001

Seeing

I gaze down at the dusty top surface of the bank of lights suspended from the ceiling of the operating theatre. There’s a neatly hand-lettered sticker on the grey-painted metal—slightly yellowing, the writing a little faded, peeling at one corner. It reads:

IN CASE OF OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE

PHONE 137 4597

I’m puzzled: I’ve never come across a local number starting with a one—and when I look again, it’s clear that the digit in question is actually a seven. I was mistaken about the ‘dust’, too; it’s nothing but a play of light on the slightly uneven surface of the paint. Dust in a sterile, air-filtered room like this—what was I thinking?

I shift my attention to my body, draped in green save for a tiny square aperture above my right temple, where the macrosurgeon’s probe is following the bullet’s entry wound into my skull. The spindly robot has the operating table to itself, although a couple of gowned-and-masked humans are present, off to one side, watching what I take to be X-ray views of the probe approaching its target; from my vantage point, the screen is foreshortened, the images hard to decipher. Injected microsurgeons must already have staunched the bleeding, repaired hundreds of blood vessels, broken up any dangerous clots. The bullet itself, though, is too physically tough and chemically inert to be fragmented and removed, like a kidney stone, by a swarm of tiny robots; there’s no alternative to reaching in and plucking it out. I used to read up on this type of operation—and lie awake afterwards, wondering when my time would finally come. I often pictured this very moment—and I’d swear, now, that when I imagined it, it looked exactly like this, down to the last detail. But I can’t tell if that’s just run-of-the-mill déjà vu, or if my obsessively rehearsed visualisation is fuelling this present hallucination.

I begin to wonder, calmly, about the implications of my exotic point of view. Out-of-body experiences are supposed to suggest proximity to death ... but then, all the thousands of people who’ve reported them survived to tell the tale, didn’t they? With no way of balancing that against the unknown number who must have died, it’s absurd to treat the situation as signifying anything at all about my chances of life or death. The effect is certainly linked to severe physical trauma, but it’s only the ludicrous notion that the ‘soul’ has parted from the body—and is perilously close to floating off down a tunnel of light into the afterlife—that associates the experience with death.

Memories leading up to the attack start coming back to me, hazily. Arriving to speak at Zeitgeist Entertainment’s AGM. (Physically present for the first time in years—bad move. Just because I sold off HyperConference Systems, why did I have to eschew the technology?) That lunatic Murchison making a scene outside the Hilton, screaming something about me—me!—stiffing him on his miniseries contract. (As if I’d even read it, let alone personally drafted every clause. Why couldn’t he have gone and mowed down the legal department, instead?) The motorised window of the bulletproof Rolls gliding upwards to shut out his ranting, the mirrored glass moving silently, reassuringly—and then jamming ...

I was wrong about one thing: I always thought the bullet would come from some anal-retentive cinephile, outraged by one of Zeitgeist’s ‘Sequels to the Celluloid Classics’. The software avatars we use as directors are always constructed with meticulous care, by psychologists and film historians committed to re-creating the true persona of the original auteur ... but some purists are never happy, and there were death threats for more than a year after Hannah and Her Sisters II, in 3-D. What I failed to anticipate was a man who’d just signed a seven-figure deal for the rights to his life story—out on bail only because of Zeitgeist’s generous advance—trying to blow me away over a discounted residual rate for satellite transmissions dubbed into the Inuit language.

I notice that the unlikely sticker on top of the lights has vanished. What does that presage? If my delusion is breaking down, am I deteriorating, or recovering? Is an unstable hallucination healthier than a consistent one? Is reality about to come crashing in? What should I be seeing, right now? Pure darkness, if I really am under all that green swaddling, eyes closed, anaesthetised. I try to ‘close my eyes’—but the concept just doesn’t translate. I do my best to lose consciousness (if that’s the right word for what I’m experiencing); I try to relax, as if aiming for sleep—but then a faint whir from the surgeon’s probe as it reverses direction rivets my attention.

I watch—physically unable to avert my unphysical gaze—as the gleaming silver needle of the probe slowly retracts. It seems to take forever, and I rack my brain for a judgement as to whether this is a piece of masochistic dream-theatricality, or a touch of authenticity, but I can’t decide.

Finally—and I know it a moment before it happens (but then, I’ve felt that way all along)—the tip of the needle emerges, bonded outrageously by nothing more esoteric than a speck of high-strength glue (or so I once read) to the dull, slightly crumpled bullet.

I see the green cloth covering my chest rise and fall in an emphatic sigh of relief. I doubt the plausibility of this from an anaesthetised man on a breathing machine—then suddenly, overwhelmingly weary of trying to imagine the world at all, I allow it to disintegrate into psychedelic static, then darkness.

* * * *

A familiar, but unplaceable, voice says, ‘This one’s from Serial Killers For Social Responsibility. “Deeply shocked ... a tragedy for the industry ... praying for Mr Lowe’s swift recovery.” Then they go on to disavow any knowledge of Randolph Murchison; they say that whatever he might or might not have done to hitchhikers in the past, celebrity assassination attempts involve an entirely separate pathology, and any irresponsible comments which blur the issue by confusing the two will result in a class action—’

I open my eyes and say, ‘Can someone please tell me why there’s a mirror on the ceiling over my bed? Is this a hospital, or a fucking bordello?’

The room falls silent. I squint up at the glass with a fixed gaze, unable to make out its borders, waiting for an explanation for this bizarre piece of decor. Then one possibility dawns on me: Am I paralysed? Is this the only way to show me my surroundings? I fight down a sense of panic: even if it’s true, it need not be permanent. Nerves can be regrown, whatever’s damaged can be repaired. I’ve survived, that’s what counts—the rest is just a matter of rehabilitation. And isn’t this what I always expected? A bullet in the brain? A brush with death? Rebirth in a state of helplessness?

In the mirror, I can see four people gathered around the bed—and I recognise them easily enough, in spite of the awkward view: James Long, my personal assistant, whose voice woke me. Andrea Stuart, Zeitgeist’s senior vice-president. My estranged wife, Jessica—I knew she’d come. And my son, Alex—he must have dropped everything, and caught the first flight out of Moscow.

And on the bed, almost buried under a tangle of tubes and cables, linked to a dozen monitors and pumps, an ashen, bandaged, gaunt figure which I suppose must be me.

James glances up at the ceiling, looks down again, then says gently, ‘Mr Lowe, there is no mirror. Shall I tell the doctors you’re awake?’

I scowl, try to move my head, fail. ‘Are you blind? I’m staring right at it. And if I’m not plugged into enough machinery to tell whoever’s monitoring it all that I’m awake—’

James gives an embarrassed cough, a code he uses in meetings when I start to wander too far from the facts. I try again to turn to look him in the eye, and this time—

This time, I succeed. Or at least, I see the figure on the bed turn its head—

—and my whole sense of my surroundings inverts, like an all-encompassing optical illusion exposed. Floor becomes ceiling and ceiling floor—without anything moving a millimetre. I feel like bellowing at the top of my lungs, but only manage a startled grunt ... and after a second or two, it’s hard to imagine that I’d ever been fooled, the reality is so obvious.

There is no mirror. I’m watching all this from the ceiling, the way I watched the bullet being extracted. I’m still up here. I haven’t come down.

I close my eyes—and the room fades out, taking two or three seconds to vanish completely.

I open my eyes. The view returns, unchanged.

I say, ‘Am I dreaming? Are my eyes really open? Jessica? Tell me what’s going on. Is my face bandaged? Am I blind?’

James says, ‘Your wife isn’t here, Mr Lowe. We haven’t been able to reach her yet.’ He hesitates, then adds, ‘Your face isn’t bandaged—’

I laugh indignantly. ‘What are you talking about? Who’s that standing next to you?’

‘Nobody’s standing next to me. Ms Stuart and I are the only people with you, right now.’

Andrea clears her throat, and says, ‘That’s right, Philip. Please, try to calm down. You’ve just had major surgery—you’re going to be fine, but you have to take it easy.’ How did she get there—near the foot of the bed? The figure below turns to look at her, sweeping his gaze across the intervening space, and—as easily as the implausible one changed into a seven, as easily as the whole ludicrous sticker ceased to exist—my wife and son are banished from my vision of the room.

I say, ‘I’m going mad.’ That’s not true, though: I’m dazed, and distinctly queasy, but a long way from coming unhinged. I notice that my voice—very reasonably—seems to come out of my one-and-only mouth, the mouth of the figure below me—as opposed to the point in empty space where my mouth would be, were I literally, bodily, hovering near the ceiling. I felt my larynx vibrate, my lips and tongue move, down there ... and yet the sense that I am above, looking down, remains as convincing as ever. It’s as if ... my entire body has become as peripheral as a foot or a fingertip—connected and controlled, still a part of me, but certainly not encompassing the centre of my being. I move my tongue in my mouth, touch the tip to the point of my left incisor, swallow some saliva; the sensations are all intelligible, consistent, familiar. But I don’t find myself rushing down to ‘occupy’ the place where these things are happening—any more than I’ve ever felt my sense of self pouring into my big toe, upon curling it against the sole of my shoe.

James says, ‘I’ll fetch the doctors.’ I hunt for any trace of inconsistency in the direction of his voice ... but I’m not up to the task of dissecting the memory of his speech into relative intensities in my left and right ears, and then confronting myself with the paradox that anyone truly up here, facing down, would hear it all differently. All I know is that the words seem to have emerged from his lips, in the customary manner.

Andrea clears her throat again, and says, ‘Philip? Do you mind if I make a call? Tokyo opens in less than an hour, and when they hear that you’ve been shot—’

I cut her off. ‘Don’t call—go there, in person. Take the next suborbital—you know that always impresses the market. Look, I’m glad you were here when I woke’—glad your presence, at least, turned out to be more than wishful thinking—’but the biggest favour you can do for me now is to make damned sure that Zeitgeist comes through this unscathed.’ I try to make eye contact as I say this, but I can’t tell whether I succeed or not. It’s twenty years since we were lovers, but she’s still my closest friend. I’m not even sure why I’m so desperate to get rid of her—but I can’t help feeling exposed up here ... as if she might suddenly glance up and see me—see some part of me that my flesh always concealed.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m positive. James can baby-sit me, that’s what he’s paid for. And if I know you’re looking after Zeitgeist, I won’t have to lie here sweating about it; I’ll know it’s all under control.’

In fact, as soon as she’s gone, the idea of worrying about anything as remote and inconsequential as my company’s share price begins to seem utterly bizarre. I turn my head so that the figure on the bed looks straight up at ‘me’ once more. I slide my hand across my chest, and most of the cables and tubes that were ‘covering me’ disappear, leaving behind nothing but a slightly wrinkled sheet. I laugh weakly—an odd sight. It looks like a memory of the last time I laughed into a mirror.

James returns, followed by four generic white-coated figures—whose number shrinks to two, a young man and a middle-aged woman, when I turn my head towards them.

The woman says, ‘Mr Lowe, I’m Dr Tyler, your neurologist. How are you feeling?’

‘How am I feeling? I feel like I’m up on the ceiling.’

‘You’re still giddy from the anaesthetic?’

‘No!’ I very nearly shout: Can’t you look at me when I’m speaking to you? But I calm myself, and say evenly, ‘I’m not “giddy”—I’m hallucinating. I see everything as if I’m up on the ceiling, looking down. Do you understand me? I’m watching my own lips move as I say these words. I’m staring down at the top of your head. I’m having an out-of-body experience—rght now, right in front of you.’ Or right above you. ‘It started in the operating theatre. I saw the robot take out the bullet. I know, it was just a delusion, a kind of lucid dream—I didn’t really see anything ... but it’s still happening. I’m awake, and it’s still happening. I can’t come down.’

Dr Tyler says firmly, ‘The surgeon didn’t remove the bullet. It was never embedded; it only grazed your skull. The impact caused a fracture, and forced some bone fragments into the underlying tissue—but the damaged region is very small.’

I smile with relief to hear this—and then stop myself; it looks too strange, too self-conscious. I say, ‘That’s wonderful news. But I’m still up here.’

Dr Tyler frowns. How do I know that? She’s bent over me, her face seems to be hidden—yet the knowledge reaches me somehow, as if conveyed through an extra sense. This is insane: the things I must be ‘seeing’ with my own eyes—the things I’m entitled to know—are taking on an air of unreliable clairvoyance, while my ‘vision’ of the room—a patchwork of wild guesses and wishful thinking—masquerades as the artless truth.

‘Do you think you can sit up?’

I can—slowly. I’m very weak, but certainly not paralysed, and with an ungainly scrabbling of feet and elbows, I manage to raise myself into a sitting position. The exertion makes me sharply aware of every limb, every joint, every muscle ... but aware most of all that their relationships with each other remain unchanged. The hip bone is still connected to the thigh bone, and that’s still what counts—however far away from both I feel ‘myself’ to be.

My view stays fixed as my body moves—but I don’t find that especially disconcerting; at some level, it seems no stranger than the simple understanding that turning your head doesn’t send the world spinning in the opposite direction.

Dr Tyler holds out her right hand. ‘How many fingers?’

‘Two.’

‘Now?’

‘Four.’

She shields her hand from aerial scrutiny with a clipboard. ‘Now?’

‘One. I can’t see it, though. I just guessed.’

‘You guessed right. Now?’

‘Three.’

‘Right again. And now?’

‘Two.’

‘Correct.’

She hides her hand from the figure on the bed, ‘exposing’ it to me-above. I make three wrong guesses in a row, one right, one wrong, then wrong again.

All of which makes perfect sense, of course: I know only what my eyes can see; the rest is pure guesswork. I am, demonstrably, not observing the world from a point three metres above my head. Having the truth rendered obvious makes no difference, though: I fail to descend.

Dr Tyler suddenly jabs two fingers towards my eyes, stopping just short of contact. I’m not even startled; from this distance, it’s no more threatening than watching The Three Stooges. ‘Blink reflex working,’ she says—but I know I should have done more than blink.

She looks around the room, finds a chair, places it beside the bed. Then she tells her colleague, ‘Get me a broom.’

She stands on the chair. ‘I think we should try to pin down exactly where you think you are.’ The young man returns with a two-metre-long white plastic tube. ‘Vaccum cleaner extension,’ he explains. ‘There are no brooms in the private wards.’

James stands clear, glancing upwards self-consciously every now and then. He’s beginning to look alarmed, in a diplomatic sort of way.

Dr Tyler takes the tube, raises it up with one hand, and starts scraping the end across the ceiling. ‘Tell me when I’m getting warm, Mr Lowe.’ The thing looms towards me, moving in from the left, then slides across the bottom of my field of view, missing me by a few centimetres.

‘Am I close yet?’

‘I—’ The scraping sound is intimidating; it takes some effort to bring myself to cooperate, to guide the implement home.

When the tube finally closes over me, I fight off a sense of claustrophobia, and stare down the long dark tunnel. At the far end, in a circle of dazzling radiance, is the tip of Dr Tyler’s white lace-up shoe.

‘What do you see now?’

I describe the view. Keeping the top end fixed, she tilts the tube towards the bed, until it points directly at my bandaged forehead, my startled eyes—a strange, luminous cameo.

‘Try ... moving towards the light,’ she suggests.

I try. I screw up my face, I grit my teeth, I urge myself forward, down the tunnel: back to my skull, back to my citadel, back to my private screening room. Back to the throne of my ego, the anchor of my identity. Back home.

Nothing happens.

* * * *

I always knew I’d get a bullet in the brain. It had to happen: I’d made far too much money, had far too much good luck. Deep down, I always understood that, sooner or later, my life would be brought into balance. And I always expected my would-be assassin to fail—leaving me crippled, speechless, amnesic; forced to struggle to make myself whole again, forced to rediscover—or reinvent—myself.

Given a chance to start my life again.

But this? What kind of redemption is this?

Eyes closed or open, I have no trouble identifying pinpricks all over my body, from the soles of my feet to the top of my scalp—but the surface of my skin, however clearly delineated, still fails to enclose me.

Dr Tyler shows me-below photographs of torture victims, humorous cartoons, pornography. I cringe, I smile, I get an erection—before I even know what I’m ‘looking’ at.

‘Like a split-brain patient,’ I muse. ‘Isn’t that what happens? Show them an image in half their visual field, and they respond to it emotionally—without being able to describe what they’ve seen.’

‘Your corpus callosum is perfectly intact. You’re not a split-brain patient, Mr Lowe.’

‘Not horizontally—but what about vertically?’ There’s a stony silence. I say, ‘I’m only joking. Can’t I make a joke?’ I see her write on her clipboard: inappropriate affect. I ‘read’ the remark effortlessly, in spite of my elevation—but I don’t have the nerve to ask her if it’s really what she wrote.

A mirror is thrust in front of my face—and when it’s taken away, I see myself as less pale, less wasted than before. The mirror is turned towards me-above, and the place where I ‘am’ is ‘shown’ to be empty—but I knew that all along.

I ‘look around’ with my eyes every chance I get—and my vision of the room grows more detailed, more stable, more consistent. I experiment with sounds, tapping my fingers on the side of the bed, on my ribs, my jaw, my skull. I have no trouble convincing myself that my hearing is still taking place in my ears—the closer a sound is to those organs down there, the louder it seems, as always—but nor do I have any difficulty interpreting these cues correctly; when I snap my fingers beside my right ear, it’s obvious that the source of the sound is close to my ear, not close to me.

Finally, Dr Tyler lets me try to walk. I’m clumsy and unsteady at first, distracted by my unfamiliar perspective, but I soon learn to take what I need from the view—the positions of obstacles—and ignore the rest. As my body crosses the room, I move with it, hovering more or less directly above—sometimes lagging behind or moving ahead, but never by far. Curiously, I feel no conflict between my sense of balance, telling me I’m upright, and my downwards gaze, which ‘should’ (but doesn’t) suggest that my body is facing the floor. That meaning has been stripped away, somehow—and it has nothing to do with the fact that I can ‘see’ myself standing. Perhaps my true orientation is gleaned, subconsciously, from the evidence of my eyes, at some point before the damaged part of my brain corrupts the information—like my ‘clairvoyant’ knowledge of ‘hidden’ objects.

I could walk a kilometre, I’m sure, but not very quickly. I place my body in a wheelchair, and a taciturn orderly pushes it—and me—out of the room. The smooth, involuntary motion of my point of view is alarming at first, but then gradually starts to make sense: after all, I can feel my hands on the armrests, the chair against my legs, my buttocks, my back—’part’ of me is in the wheelchair, and, like a roller-skater staring down at his feet, I should be able to swallow the notion that the ‘rest’ of me is attached, and obliged to follow. Down corridors, up ramps, in and out of elevators, through swing doors ... I fantasise daringly about wandering off on my own—turning left when the orderly turns right—but the truth is, I can’t begin to imagine how I could make that happen.

We turn into a crowded walkway linking the hospital’s two main blocks, and end up travelling alongside another patient in a wheelchair—a man about my age, his head also bandaged. I wonder what he’s been through, and what’s in store for him now—but this doesn’t seem like the time or place to strike up a conversation about it. From above (at least, as I see it) these two head-wound cases in hospital gowns are almost indistinguishable, and I find myself wondering: Why do I care what happens to one of these bodies, so much more than the other? How can it be so important ... when I can barely tell them apart?

I grip the armrests of the chair tightly—but resist the temptation to raise a hand and signal to myself: This one is me.

We finally reach Medical Imaging. Strapped to a motorised table, my blood infused with a cocktail of radioactive substances, I’m guided into a helmet comprised of several tonnes of superconducting magnets and particle detectors. My whole head is engulfed by the thing, but the room doesn’t vanish at once. The technicians, cut loose from reality, keep themselves busy fussing with the scanner’s controls—like old celluloid-movie extras pretending, unconvincingly, to know how to operate a nuclear power station or an interstellar spacecraft. Gradually, the scene fades to black.

When I emerge, with dark-adapted eyes, for a second or two the room is unbearably bright.

* * * *

‘We have no previous case histories of a lesion in exactly this location,’ admits Dr Tyler, thoughtfully holding the brain scan at an angle which allows me to observe, and simultaneously visualise, its contents. She insists on addressing her remarks solely to me-below, though, which makes me feel a bit like a patronised child—ignored by the adults, who, instead, crouch down and say hello to Teddy.

‘We do know it’s associative cortex. Higher-level sense-data processing and integration. The place where your brain constructs models of the world, and your relationship to it. From your symptoms, it seems you’ve lost access to the primary model, so you’re making do with a secondary one.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? Primary model, secondary model? I’m still looking at everything through the same pair of eyes, aren’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then how can I fail to see it that way? If a camera is damaged, it produces a faulty image—it doesn’t start giving you bird’s-eye views from down on the ground.’

‘Forget about cameras. Vision is nothing like photography—it’s an elaborate cognitive act. A pattern of light on your retina doesn’t mean a thing until it’s been analysed: that means everything from detecting edges, detecting motion, extracting features from noise, simplifying, extrapolating—all the way up to constructing hypothetical objects, testing them against reality, comparing them to memories and expectations ... the end product is not a movie in your head, it’s a set of conclusions about the world.

‘The brain assembles those conclusions into models of your surroundings. The primary model includes information about more or less everything that’s directly visible at any given moment—and nothing else. It makes the most efficient use of all your visual data, and it makes the least possible number of assumptions. So it has a lot of advantages—but it doesn’t arise automatically just because the data was gathered through your eyes. And it’s not the only possibility: we all build other models, all the time; most people can imagine their surroundings from almost any angle—’

I laugh incredulously. ‘Not like this. Nobody could imagine a view as vivid as this. I certainly never could.’

‘Then perhaps you’ve managed to redeploy some of the neural pathways responsible for the intensity of the primary model—’

‘I don’t want to redeploy them! I want the primary model back!’ I hesitate, put off by the look of apprehension on my face, but I have to know. ‘Can you do that—can you repair the damage? Put in a neural graft?’

Dr Tyler tells my Teddy Bear, gently, ‘We can replace the damaged tissue, but the region’s not well enough understood to be repaired, directly, by microsurgeons. We wouldn’t know which neurons to join to which. All we can do is inject some immature neurons into the site of the lesion, and leave them to form their own connections.’

‘And ... will they form the right ones?’

‘There’s a good chance they will, eventually.’

‘A good chance. If they do, how long will it take?’

‘Several months, at least.’

‘I’ll want a second opinion.’

‘Of course.’

She pats my hand sympathetically—but leaves without so much as a glance in my direction.

Several months. At least. The room begins to rotate slowly—so slowly that it never actually moves at all. I close my eyes and wait for the feeling to pass. My vision lingers, refusing to fade. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds. There I am, on the bed below, eyes closed ... but that doesn’t render me invisible, does it? It doesn’t make the world disappear. That’s half the trouble with this whole delusion: it’s so fucking reasonable.

I put the heels of my palms against my eyes, and press, hard. A mosaic of glowing triangles spreads out rapidly from the centre of my field of view, a shimmering pattern in grey and white; soon it eclipses the whole room.

When I take my hands away, the afterimage slowly fades to darkness.

* * * *

I dream that I look down upon my sleeping body—and then drift away, rising up calmly, effortlessly, high into the air. I float above Manhattan—then London, Zurich, Moscow, Nairobi, Cairo, Beijing. Wherever the Zeitgeist Network reaches, I’m there. I wrap the planet in my being. I have no need of a body; I orbit with the satellites, I flow through the optical fibres. From the slums of Calcutta to the mansions of Beverly Hills, I am the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age—

I wake suddenly, and hear myself swearing, before I even know why.

Then I realise I’ve wet the bed.

* * * *

James flies in dozens of the top neurologists from around the world, and arranges remote consultations with another ten. They argue about the precise interpretation of my symptoms—but their recommendations for treatment are all essentially the same.

So, a small number of my own neurons, collected during the original surgery, are genetically regressed to a foetal state, stimulated to multiply in vivo, then injected back into the lesion. Local anaesthetic only; at least this time I get to ‘see’ more or less what really happens.

In the days that follow—far too early for any effects from the treatment—I find myself adapting to the status quo with disarming speed. My coordination improves, until I can perform most simple tasks with confidence, unaided: eating and drinking, urinating and defecating, washing and shaving—all the lifelong familiar routines start to seem ordinary again, in spite of the exotic perspective. At first, I keep catching glimpses of Randolph Murchison (played by the persona of Anthony Perkins) sneaking into the steam-clouded bathroom every time I take a shower—but that passes.

Alex visits, finally able to tear himself away from the busy Moscow bureau of Zeitgeist News. I watch the scene, oddly touched by the ineloquence of both father and son—but puzzled, too, that the awkward relationship ever caused me so much pain and confusion. These two men are not close—but that’s not the end of the world. They’re not close to a few billion other people, either. It doesn’t matter.

By the end of the fourth week, I’m desperately bored—and losing patience with the infantile tests with concealed wooden blocks that Dr Young, my psychologist, insists I perform twice daily. Five red and four blue blocks can turn into three red and one green, when the partition hiding them from my eyes is lifted—and so on, a thousand times ... but it no more demolishes my world-view than pictures of vases that turn into pairs of human profiles, or patterns with gaps that magically fill themselves in when aligned with the retinal blind spot.

Dr Tyler admits, under duress, that there’s no reason I can’t be discharged, but—

‘I’d still prefer to keep you under observation.’

I say, ‘I think I can do that myself.’

* * * *

A two-metre-wide auxiliary screen attached to the videophone lies on the floor of my study; a crutch, perhaps, but at least it takes the clairvoyance factor out of knowing what’s happening on the smaller screen in front of my face.

Andrea says, ‘Remember that team of Creative Consultants we hired last spring? They’ve come up with a brilliant new concept: “Celluloid Classics That Might Have Been”—ground-breaking movies that were almost made, but didn’t quite survive the development process. They plan to start the series with Three Burglars—a Hollywood remake of Tenue de Soiree, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Depardieu role, and either Leonard Nimoy or Ivan Reitman directing. Marketing have run a simulation which shows twenty-three per cent of subscribers taking the pilot. The costings aren’t too bad, either; we already own emulation rights for most of the personas we need.’

I nod my puppet head. ‘That all sounds ... fine. Is there anything else we need to discuss?’

‘Just one more thing. The Randolph Murchison Story.’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Audience Psychology won’t approve the latest version of the screenplay. We can’t leave out Murchison’s attack on you, it’s far too well known—’

‘I never asked for it to be left out. I just want my post-operative condition left unspecified. Lowe gets shot. Lowe survives. There’s no need to clutter up a perfectly good story about mutilated hitchhikers with details of a minor character’s neurological condition.’

‘No, of course not—and that’s not the problem. The problem is, if we cover the attack at all, we’ll have to mention the reason for it, the miniseries itself ... and AP says viewers won’t be comfortable with that degree of reflexivity. For current affairs, all right—the programme is its own main subject, the presenters’ actions are the news—that’s taken for granted, people are used to it. But docudrama is different. You can’t use a fictional narrative style—telling the audience it’s safe to get emotionally involved, it’s all just entertainment, it can’t really touch them—and then throw in a reference to the very programme they’re watching.’

I shrug. ‘All right. Fine. If there’s no way around it, axe the project. We can live with that; we can write it off.’

She nods, unhappily. It was the decision she wanted, I’m sure—but not so casually given.

When she hangs up, and the screen goes blank, the sight of the unchanging room quickly becomes monotonous. I switch to cable input, and flick through a few dozen channels from Zeitgeist and its major competitors. The whole world is there to gaze upon, from the latest Sudanese famine to the Chinese civil war, from a body paint fashion parade in New York to the bloody aftermath of the bombing of the British parliament. The whole world—or a model of the world: part truth, part guesswork, part wish-fulfilment.

I lean back in my chair until I’m staring straight down into my eyes. I say, ‘I’m sick of this place. Let’s get out of here.’

* * * *

I watch the snow dust my shoulders between the sharp gusts of wind that blow it away. The icy sidewalk is deserted; nobody in this part of Manhattan seems to walk anywhere in the most clement weather any more, let alone on a day like this. I can just make out the four bodyguards, ahead of me and behind me, at the edge of my vision.

I wanted a bullet in the head. I wanted to be destroyed and reborn. I wanted a magic path to redemption. And what have I ended up with?

I raise my head, and a ragged, bearded tramp materialises beside me, stamping his feet on the sidewalk, hugging himself, shivering. He says nothing, but I stop walking.

One man below me is warmly dressed, in an overcoat and overshoes. The other is wearing threadbare jeans, a tattered bomber jacket, and baseball shoes full of holes.

The disparity is ridiculous. The warmly dressed man takes off his overcoat and hands it to the shivering man, then walks on.

And I think: What a beautiful scene for The Philip Lowe Story.

Silver Fire

I was in my office at home, grading papers for Epidemiology 410, when the call came through from John Brecht in Maryland. Realtime, not a polite message to be dealt with whenever I chose. I’d grown into the habit of thinking of Colonel Brecht as “my old boss.” Apparently that had been premature.

He said, “We’ve found a little Silver Fire anomaly which I think might interest you, Claire. A little blip on the autocorrelation transform which just won’t go away. And seeing as you’re on vacation—”

“_My students_ are on vacation. I still have work to do.”

“Oh, I think Columbia can find someone to take over those menial tasks for a week or two.”

I regarded him in silence for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to tell him to find someone else to take over his own _menial tasks_.

I said, “What exactly are we talking about?”

Brecht smiled. “A faint trail. Hovering on the verge of significance. Your specialty.” A map appeared on the screen; his face shrank to an inset. “It seems to start in North Carolina, around Greensboro, heading west.” The map was peppered with dots marking the locations of recent Silver Fire cases—color-coded by the time elapsed since a notional “day of infection”, the dots themselves positioned wherever the patient had been at the time. Having been told exactly what to look for, I could just make out a vague spectral progression cutting through the scattered blossoms of localized outbreaks: a kind of smudged rainbow trail from red to violet, dissolving into uncertainty just west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Then again ... if I squinted, I could discern another structure, about as convincing, sweeping down in an amazingly perfect arc from Kentucky. A few more minutes, and I’d see the hidden face of Groucho Marx. The human brain is far too good at finding patterns; without rigorous statistical tools we’re helpless, animists grasping at meaning in every random puff of air.

I said, “So how do the numbers look?”

“The P value’s borderline,” Brecht conceded. “But I still think it’s worth checking out.”

The visible part of this hypothetical trail spanned at least ten days. _Three days_ after exposure to the virus, the average person was either dead or in intensive care—not driving blithely across the countryside. Maps tracing the precise routes of infection generally looked like random walks with mean free paths five or ten kilometers long; even air travel, at worst, tended to spawn a multitude of scattered small outbreaks. If we’d stumbled on someone who was infectious but asymptomatic, then that was definitely _worth checking out_.

Brecht said, “As of now, you have full access to the notifications database. I’d offer you our provisional analysis—but I’m sure you can do better with the raw data, yourself.”

“No doubt.”

“Good. Then you can leave tomorrow.”

* * * *

I woke before dawn and packed in ten minutes, while Alex lay cursing me in his sleep. Then I realized I had three hours to kill, and absolutely nothing left to do, so I crawled back into bed. When I woke for the second time, Alex and Laura were both up, and eating breakfast.

As I sat down opposite Laura, though, I wondered if I was dreaming: one of those insidiously reassuring no-need-to-wake-because-you-already-have dreams. My fourteen-year-old daughter’s face and arms were covered in alchemical and zodiacal symbols in iridescent reds, greens and blues. She looked like a character in some dire VR-as-psychedelia movie who’d been mauled by the special effects software.

She stared back at me defiantly, as if I’d somehow expressed disapproval. In fact, I hadn’t yet worked my way around to such a mundane emotion—and by the time I did, I kept my mouth firmly shut. Knowing Laura, these were definitely not fakes which would wash off—but transdermal enzyme patches could still erase them as bloodlessly as the dye-bearing ones which had implanted them. So I was good, I didn’t say a word: no cheap reverse-psychology (“Oh, aren’t they _sweet?_”), no (honest) complaints about the harassment I’d get from her principal if they weren’t gone by the start of term.

Laura said, “Did you know that Isaac Newton spent more time on alchemy than he did on the theory of gravity?”

“Yes. Did you know he also died a virgin? Role models are great, aren’t they?”

Alex gave me a sideways warning look, but didn’t buy in. Laura continued, “There’s a whole secret history of science that’s been censored from the official accounts. Hidden knowledge that’s only coming to light now that everyone has access to the original sources.”

It was hard to know how to respond honestly to this without groaning aloud. I said evenly, “I think you’ll find that most of it has actually ‘come to light’ before. It’s just turned out to be of limited interest. But sure, it’s fascinating to see some of the blind alleys people have explored.”

Laura smiled at me pityingly. “_Blind alleys!_” She finished picking the toast crumbs off her plate, then she rose and left the room with a spring in her step, as if she’d won some kind of battle.

I said plaintively, “What did I miss? When did all this start?”

Alex was unfazed. “I think it’s mostly just the music. Or rather, three seventeen-year-old boys with supernaturally perfect skin and big brown contact lenses, called The Alchemists—”

“Yes, I _know_ the band—but New Hermetics is more than the bubblegum music, it’s a major cult—”

He laughed. “Oh, come on! Wasn’t your sister deeply in lust with the lead singer of some quasi-Satanic heavy metal group? I don’t recall her ending up nailing black cats to upside-down crucifixes.”

“That was never _lust_. She just wanted to discover his hair-care secrets.”

Alex said firmly, “Laura is fine. Just ... relax and sit it out. Unless you want to buy her a copy of _Foucault’s Pendulum_?”

“She’d probably miss the irony.”

He prodded me on the arm; mock-violence, but genuine anger. “_That’s_ unfair. She’ll chew up New Hermetics and spit it out in ... six months, at the most. How long did Scientology last? A week?”

I said, “_Scientology_ is crass, transparent gibberish. New Hermetics has five thousand years of cultural adornment to draw on. It’s every bit as insidious as Buddhism or Catholicism: there’s a tradition, there’s a whole esthetic—”

Alex cut in, “Yes—and in six months’ time, she’ll understand: the esthetic can be appreciated without swallowing any of the bullshit. Just because alchemy was a blind alley, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still elegant and fascinating ... but _being_ elegant and fascinating doesn’t render a word of it true.”

I reflected on that for a while, then I leaned over and kissed him. “I hate it when you’re right: you always make it sound so obvious. I’m too damn protective, aren’t I? She’ll work it all out for herself.”

“You know she will.”

I glanced at my watch. “_Shit_. Can you drive me to La Guardia? I’m never going to get a cab, now.”

* * * *

Early in the pandemic, I’d pulled a few strings and arranged for a group of my students to observe a Silver Fire patient close up. It had seemed wrong to bury ourselves in the abstractions of maps and graphs, numerical models and extrapolations—however vital they were to the battle—without witnessing the real physical condition of an individual human being.

We didn’t have to don biohazard suits; the young man lay in a glass-walled, hermetically sealed room. Tubes brought him oxygen, water, electrolytes and nutrients—along with antibiotics, antipyritics, immunosuppressants, and pain killers. No bed, no mattress; the patient was embedded in a transparent polymer gel: a kind of buoyant semi-solid which limited pressure sores and drew away the blood and lymphatic fluid weeping out through what used to be his skin.

I surprised myself by crying, silently and briefly, hot tears of anger. Rage dissipating into a vacuum; I knew there was no one to blame. Half the students had medical degrees—but if anything, they seemed more shaken than the green statisticians who’d never set foot in a trauma ward or an operating theater—probably because they could better imagine what the man would have been feeling without a skull full of opiates.

The official label for the condition was Systemic Fibrotic Viral Scleroderma—but SFVS was unpronounceable, and apparently people’s eyes glazed over if news readers spelt out four whole letters. I used the new name like everyone else—but I never stopped loathing it. It was too fucking poetic by far.

When the Silver Fire virus infected fibroblasts in the subcutaneous connective tissue, it caused them to go into overdrive, manufacturing vast quantities of collagen—in a variant form transcribed from the normal gene but imperfectly assembled. This denatured protein formed solid plaques in the extracellular space, disrupting the nutrient flow to the dermis above—and eventually becoming so bulky as to shear it off completely. Silver Fire flayed you from within. A good strategy for releasing large amounts of virus, maybe—though when it had stumbled on the trick, no one knew. The presumed animal host in which the parent strain lived, benignly or otherwise, was yet to be found.

If the lymph-glistening sickly white of naked collagen plaques was “silver”, the fever, the autoimmune response, and the sensation of being burned alive was “fire.” Mercifully, the pain couldn’t last long, either way. The standard First World palliative treatment included constant deep anesthesia—and if you didn’t get that level of high-tech intervention, you went into shock, fast, and died.

Two years after the first outbreaks, the origin of the virus remained unknown, a vaccine was still a remote prospect—and though patients could be kept alive almost indefinitely, all attempts to effect a cure by purging the body of the virus and grafting cultured skin had failed.

Four hundred thousand people had been infected, worldwide; nine out of ten were dead. Ironically, rapid onset due to malnutrition had all but eliminated Silver Fire in the poorest nations; most outbreaks in Africa had burned themselves out on the spot. The US not only had more hospitalized victims on life support, per capita, than any other nation; it was heading for the top of the list in the rate of new cases.

A handshake or even a ride in a packed bus could transmit the virus—with a low probability for each contact event, but it added up. The only thing that helped in the medium term was isolating potential carriers—and to date it had seemed that no one could remain infectious and healthy for long. If the “trail” Brecht’s computers had found was more than a statistical mirage, cutting it short might save dozens of lives—and understanding it might save thousands.

* * * *

It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, then waited as the seating and controls rearranged themselves slightly, piezoelectric actuators humming. As I started to reverse out of the parking bay, the stereo began a soothing improvisation, flashing up a deadpan title: _Music for Leaving Airports on June 11, 2008_.

I got a shock driving into town: there were dozens of large plots of tobacco visible from the road. The born-again weed was encroaching everywhere, and not even the suburbs were safe. The irony had become cliched, but it was still something to witness the reality firsthand: even as nicotine was finally going the way of absinthe, more tobacco was being cultivated than ever before—because tobacco mosaic virus had turned out to be an extremely convenient and efficient vector for introducing new genes. The leaves of these plants would be loaded with pharmaceuticals or vaccine antigens—and worth twenty times as much as their unmodified ancestors at the height of demand.

My first appointment was still almost an hour away, so I drove around town in search of lunch. I’d been so wound up since Brecht’s call, I was surprised at just how good I felt to have arrived. Maybe it was no more than traveling south, with the sudden slight shift in the angle of the light—a kind of beneficent latitudinal equivalent of jet lag. Certainly, everything in downtown Greensboro appeared positively luminous after NYC, with modern buildings in pastel shades looking curiously harmonious beside the gleamingly preserved historic ones.

I ended up eating sandwiches in a small diner—and going through my notes again, obsessively. It was seven years since I’d done anything like this for real, and I’d had little time to make the mental transition from theoretician back to practitioner.

There’d been four new cases of Silver Fire in Greensboro in the preceding fortnight. Health authorities everywhere had long ago given up trying to establish the path of infection for every last case; given the ease of transmission, and the inability to question the patients themselves, it was a massively labor-intensive process which yielded few tangible benefits. The most useful strategy wasn’t backtracking, but rather quarantining the family, workmates and other known contacts of each new case, for about a week. Carriers were infectious for two or three days at the most before becoming—very obviously—sick themselves; you didn’t need to go looking for them. Brecht’s rainbow trail either meant an exception to this rule ... or a ripple of new cases propagating from town to town without any single carrier.

Greensboro’s population was about a quarter of a million—though it depended on exactly where you drew the boundaries. North Carolina had never gone in much for implosive urbanization; growth in rural areas had actually outstripped growth in the major cities in recent years, and the microvillage movement had taken off here in a big way—at least as much as on the west coast.

I displayed a contoured population density map of the region on my notepad; even Raleigh, Charlotte and Greensboro were only modest elevations against the gently undulating background of the countryside—and only the Appalachians themselves cut a deep trench through this inverted topography. Hundreds of small new communities dotted the map, between the already numerous established towns. The microvillages weren’t literally self-sustaining, but they were definitely high-tech Green, with photovoltaics, small-scale local water treatment, and satellite links in lieu of connections to any centralized utilities. Most of their income came from cottage service industries: software, design, music, animation.

I switched on an overlay showing the estimated magnitude of population flows, on the timescale relevant to Silver Fire. The major roads and highways glowed white hot, and the small towns were linked into the skein by their own slender capillaries ... but the microvillages all but vanished from the scene: everyone worked from home. So it wasn’t all that unlikely for a random Silver Fire outbreak to have spread straight down the interstate, rather than diffusing in a classic drunkard’s walk across this relatively populous landscape.

Still ... the whole point of being here was to find out the one thing that none of the computer models could tell me: whether or not the assumptions they were based on were dangerously flawed.

* * * *

I left the diner and set to work. The four cases came from four separate families; I was in for a long day.

All the people I interviewed were out of quarantine, but still suffering various degrees of shock. Silver Fire hit like an express train: there was no time to grasp what was happening before a perfectly healthy child or parent, spouse or lover, all but died in front of your eyes. The last thing you needed was a two-hour interrogation by a total stranger.

It was dusk by the time I reached the last family—and any joy I’d felt at being back in the field had long since worn off. I sat in the car for a minute, staring at the immaculate garden and lace curtains, listening to the crickets, wishing I didn’t have to go in and face these people.

Diane Clayton taught high school mathematics; her husband, Ed, was an engineer, working night shifts for the local power company. They had a thirteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl. Mike, eighteen, was in the hospital.

I sat with the three of them, but it was Ms Clayton who did most of the talking. She was scrupulously patient and courteous with me—but after a while, it became clear that she was still in a kind of daze. She answered every question slowly and thoughtfully—but I had no idea if she really knew what she was saying, or whether she was just going through the motions on autopilot.

Mike’s father wasn’t much help, since the shift work had kept him out of synch with the rest of the family. I tried increasing eye contact with Cheryl, encouraging her to speak. It was absurd, but I felt guilty even as I did it—as if I’d come here to sell the family some junk product, and now I was trying to bypass parental resistance.

“So ... Tuesday night he definitely stayed home?” I was filling in a chart of Mike Clayton’s movements for the week before symptoms appeared—hour-by-hour. It was a fastidious, nit-picking Gestapo routine that made the old days of merely asking for a list of sexual partners and fluids exchanged seem positively idyllic.

“Yes, that’s right.” Diane Clayton screwed her eyes shut and ran through her memories of the night again. “I watched some television with Cheryl, then went to bed around ... eleven. Mike must have been in his room all the time.” He’d been on vacation from UNC Greensboro, with no reason to spend his evenings studying—but he might have been socializing electronically, or watching a movie.

Cheryl glanced at me uncertainly, then said shyly, “I think he went out.”

Her mother turned to her, frowning. “Tuesday night? No!”

I asked Cheryl, “Do you have any idea where?”

“Some nightclub, I think.”

“He said that?”

She shrugged. “He was dressed for it.”

“But he didn’t say where?”

“No.”

“Could it have been somewhere else? A friend’s place? A party?” My information was that no nightclubs in Greensboro were open on Tuesdays.

Cheryl thought it over. “He said he was going dancing. That’s all he said.”

I turned back to Diane Clayton; she was clearly upset at being cut out of the discussion. “Do you know who he might have gone with?”

If Mike was in a steady relationship he hadn’t mentioned the fact, but she gave me the names of three old school friends. She kept apologizing to me for her “negligence.”

I said, “It’s all right. Really. No one can remember every last detail.”

She was still distraught when I left, an hour later. Her son leaving the house without telling her—or the fact that he’d told her, and it had slipped her mind—was now (somehow) the reason for the whole tragedy.

I felt partly to blame for her distress, myself—though I didn’t see how I could have handled things any differently. The hospital would have offered her expert counseling—that wasn’t my job at all. And there was sure to be more of the same ahead; if I started taking it personally, I’d be a wreck in a matter of days.

I managed to track down all three friends before eleven—about the latest I dared call anyone—but none of them had been with Mike on Tuesday night, or had any idea where he’d been. They helped me cross-check some other details, though. I ended up sitting in the car making calls for almost two hours.

Maybe there’d been a party, maybe there hadn’t. Maybe it had been a pretext for something else; the possibilities were endless. Blank spots on the charts were a matter of course; I could have spent a month in Greensboro trying to fill them all in, without success. If the hypothetical carrier _had_ been at this hypothetical party (and the other three members of the Greensboro Four definitely hadn’t—they were all accounted for on the night) I’d just have to pick up the trail further on.

I checked into a motel and lay awake for a while, listening to the traffic on the interstate. Thinking of Alex and Laura—and trying to imagine the unimaginable.

_But it couldn’t happen to them. They were mine. I’d protect them._

How? By moving to Antarctica?

Silver Fire was rarer than cancer, rarer than heart disease, rarer than death by automobile. Rarer than gunshot wounds, in some cities. But there was no strategy for avoiding it—short of complete physical isolation.

And Diane Clayton was now torturing herself for failing to keep her eighteen-year-old son locked up for the summer vacation. Asking herself, over and over: _What did I do wrong? Why did this happen? What am I being punished for?_

I should have taken her aside, looked her squarely in the eye, and reminded her: “This is not your fault! There’s nothing you could have done to prevent it!”

I should have said: _It just happened. People suffer like this for no reason. There is no sense to be made of your son’s ruined life. There is no meaning to be found here. Just a random dance of molecules._

* * * *

I woke early and skipped breakfast; I was on the I-40, heading west, by seven thirty. I drove straight past Winston-Salem; a couple of people had been infected there recently—but not recently enough to be part of the trail.

Sleep had taken the edge off my pessimism. The morning was cool and clear, and the countryside was stunning—or at least, it was where it hadn’t been turned over to monotonous biotech crops, or worse: golf courses.

Still, some things had definitely changed for the better. It was on the I-40—more than twenty years before—that I’d first heard a radio evangelist preaching the eighties’ gospel of hate: AIDS as God’s instrument, HIV as the righteous virus sent down from Heaven to smite adulterers, junkies and faggots. (I’d been young and hot-headed, then; I’d pulled off at the next exit, phoned the radio station, and heaped abuse on some poor receptionist.) But proponents of this subtle theology had fallen curiously silent ever since an immortalized cell line derived from the bone marrow of a Kenyan prostitute had proved more than a match for the omnipotent deity’s secret weapon. And if Christian fundamentalism wasn’t exactly dead and buried, its power base had certainly gone into decline; the kind of ignorance and insularity it relied upon seemed to be becoming almost impossible to sustain against the tide of information.

Local audio had long since shifted to the net, of course, evangelists and all; the old frequencies had fallen silent. And I was out of range of cellular contact with the beast with 20,000 channels ... but the car did have a satellite link. I switched on my notepad, hoping for some light relief.

I’d programmed Ariadne, my knowledge miner, to scan all available media outlets for references to Silver Fire. Maybe it was sheer masochism, but there was something perversely fascinating about the distorted shadow the real pandemic cast in the shallows of media space: rumors and misinformation, hysteria, exploitation.

The tabloid angles, as always, were predictably inane: Silver Fire was a disease from space / the inevitable result of fluoridation / the reason half a dozen celebrities had disappeared from the public gaze. Three false modes of transmission were on offer: today it was tampons, Mexican orange juice, and mosquitoes (again). Several young victims with attractive “before” shots and family members willing to break down on camera had been duly rounded up. New century, same old fox shit.

The most bizarre item in Ariadne’s latest sweep wasn’t classic tabloid at all, though. It was an interview on a program called _The Terminal Chat Show_ (23:00 GMT, Thursdays, on Britain’s Channel 4) with a Canadian academic, James Springer, who was touring the UK (in the flesh) to promote his new hypertext, _The Cyber Sutras_.

Springer was a balding, middle-aged, avuncular man. He was introduced as Associate Professor of Theory at McGill University; apparently only the hopelessly reductionist asked: “Theory of _what?_” His area of expertise was described as “computers and spirituality”—but for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, his opinion was sought on Silver Fire.

“The crucial thing,” he insisted smoothly, “is that Silver Fire is the very first plague of the Information Age. AIDS was certainly post-industrial and post-modernist, but its onset predated the emergence of true Information Age cultural sensibilities. AIDS, for me, embodied the whole negative zeitgeist of Western materialism confronting its inevitable _fin de siecle_ crisis of confidence—but with Silver Fire, I think we’re free to embrace far more positive metaphors for this so-called ‘disease.’”

The interviewer inquired warily, “So ... you’re hopeful that Silver Fire victims will be spared the stigmatization and hysteria that accompanied AIDS?”

Springer nodded cheerfully. “Of course! We’ve made enormous strides forward in cultural analysis since those days! I mean, if Burroughs’ _Cities of the Red Night_ had only penetrated the collective subconscious more fully when it appeared, the whole course of the AIDS plague might have been radically different—and that’s a hot topic in Uchronic Studies which one of my doctoral students is currently pursuing. But there’s no doubt that Information Age cultural forms have fully prepared us for Silver Fire. When I look at global techno-anarchist raves, trading-card tattoo body comics, and affordable desktop implementations of the Dalai Lama ... it’s clear to me that Silver Fire is a sequence of RNA whose time has come. If it didn’t exist, we’d have to synthesize it!”

* * * *

My next stop was a town called Statesville. A brother and sister in their late teens, Ben and Lisa Walker, and the sister’s boyfriend, Paul Scott, were in hospital in Winston-Salem. The families had only just returned home.

Lisa and Ben had been living with their widower father and a nine-year-old brother. Lisa had worked in a local store, alongside the owner—who’d remained symptom-free. Ben had worked in a vaccine-extraction plant, and Paul Scott had been unemployed, living with his mother. Lisa seemed the most likely of the three to have become infected first; in theory, all it took was an accidental brush of skin against skin as a credit card changed hands—albeit with only a 1-in-100 chance of transmission. In the larger cities, some people who dealt with the public in the flesh had taken to wearing gloves—and some (arguably paranoid) subway commuters covered every square centimeter of skin below the neck, even in midsummer—but the absolute risk was so small that few strategies like this had become widespread.

I grilled Mr Walker as gently as I could. His children’s movements for most of the week were like clockwork; the only time during the window of infection when they’d been anywhere but work or home was Thursday night. Both had been out until the early hours, Lisa visiting Paul, Ben visiting his girlfriend, Martha Amos. Whether the couples had gone anywhere, or stayed in, he wasn’t certain—but there wasn’t much happening locally on a week night, and they hadn’t mentioned driving out of town.

I phoned Martha Amos; she told me that she and Ben had been at her house, alone, until about two. Since she hadn’t been infected, presumably Ben had picked up the virus from his sister sometime later—and Lisa had either been infected by Paul that night, or vice versa.

According to Paul’s mother, he’d barely left the house all week, which made him an unlikely entry point. Statesville seemed to be making perfect sense: customer to Lisa in the store (Thursday afternoon), Lisa to Paul (Thursday night), Lisa to Ben (Friday morning). Next stop, I’d ask the store owner what she remembered about their out-of-town customers that day.

But then Ms Scott said, “Thursday night, Paul was over at the Walkers until late. That’s the only time he went out, that I can think of.”

“He went to see Lisa? She didn’t come here?”

“No. He left for the Walkers, about half past eight.”

“And they were just going to hang around the house? They had nothing special planned?”

“Paul doesn’t have a lot of money, you know. They can’t afford to go out much—it’s not easy for them.” She spoke in a relaxed, confiding tone—as if the relationship, with all its minor tribulations, had merely been put on hold. I hoped someone would be around to support her when the truth struck home in a couple of days.

I called at Martha Amos’s house. I hadn’t paid close enough attention to her when I’d phoned; I could see now that she was not in good shape.

I asked her, “Did Ben happen to tell you where his sister went with Paul Scott on Thursday night?”

She stared at me expressionlessly.

“I’m sorry, I know this is intrusive—but no one else seems to know. If you can remember anything he said, it could be very helpful.”

Martha said, “He told me to say he was with me. I always covered for him. His father wouldn’t have ... _approved_.”

“Hang on. Ben wasn’t with you on Thursday night?”

“I went with him a couple of times. But it’s not my kind of thing. The people are all right. The music’s shit, though.”

“Where? Are you talking about some bar?”

“No! _The villages._ Ben and Paul and Lisa went out to the villages, Thursday night.” She suddenly focused on me properly, for the first time since I’d arrived; I think she’d finally realized that she hadn’t been making a lot of sense. “They hold ‘Events.’ Which are just dance parties, really. It’s no big deal. Only—Ben’s father would assume it’s all about _drugs_. Which it’s not.” She put her face in her hands. “But that’s where they caught Silver Fire, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

She was shaking; I reached across and touched her arm. She looked up at me and said wearily, “You know what hurts the most?”

“What?”

“I didn’t go with them. I keep thinking: _If I’d gone, it would have been all right_. They wouldn’t have caught it then. I would have kept them safe.”

She searched my face—as if for some hint as to what she might have done. _I was hunting down Silver Fire, wasn’t I?_ I ought to have been able to tell her, precisely, how she could have warded off the curse: what magic she hadn’t performed, what sacrifice she hadn’t made.

And I’d seen this a thousand times before—but I still didn’t know what to say. All it took was the shock of grief to peel away the veneer of understanding: _Life is not a morality play. Disease is just disease; it carries no hidden meaning. There are no gods we failed to appease, no elemental spirits we failed to bargain with._ Every sane adult knew this—but the knowledge was still only skin deep. At some level, we still hadn’t swallowed the hardest-won truth of all: _The universe is indifferent._

Martha hugged herself, rocking gently. “I know it’s crazy, thinking like that. But it still hurts.”

* * * *

I spent the rest of the day trying to find someone who could tell me more about Thursday night’s “Event” (such as where, exactly, it had taken place—there were at least four possibilities within a twenty kilometer radius). I had no luck, though; it seemed microvillage culture was very much a minority taste, and Statesville’s only three enthusiasts were now _incommunicado_. Drugs weren’t the issue with most of the people I talked to; they just seemed to think the villagers were boring tech-heads with appalling taste in music.

Another night, another motel. It was beginning to feel like old times.

Mike Clayton had gone dancing, somewhere, on the Tuesday night. _Out in the villages?_ Presumably he hadn’t traveled quite this far, but an unknown person—a tourist, maybe—might easily have been at both Events: Tuesday night near Greensboro, Thursday night near Statesville. If this was true, it would narrow down the possibilities considerably—at least compared with the number of people who’d simply passed through the towns themselves.

I pored over road maps for a while, trying to decide which village would be easiest to add to the next day’s itinerary. I’d searched the directories for some kind of “microvillage night life” web site—in vain, but that didn’t mean anything. The address had no doubt made its way, by electronic diffusion, to everyone who was genuinely interested—and whichever village I went to, half a dozen people were sure to know all about the Events.

I climbed into bed around midnight—but then reached for my notepad again, to check with Ariadne. Silver Fire had made the big time: video fiction. There was a reference in the latest episode of NBC’s “hit sci-fi drama”, _Mutilated Mystic Empaths in N-Space_.

I’d heard of the series, but never watched it before, so I quickly scanned the pilot. “Don’t you know the first law of astronavigation! Ask a _computer_ to solve equations in _17-dimensional hypergeometry_ ... and its rigid, deterministic, linear mind would shatter like a diamond dropped into a black hole! Only _twin telepathic Buddhist nuns_, with seventh-dan black belts in karate, and enough self-discipline to _hack their own legs from their bodies_, could ever hope to master the _intuitive skills_ required to navigate the treacherous quantum fluctuations of N-space and rescue that stranded fleet!”

“My God, Captain, you’re right—but where will we find ... ?”

_MME_ was set in the 22nd century—but the Silver Fire reference was no clumsy anachronism. Our heroines miscalculate a difficult trans-galactic jump (breathing the wrong way during the recitation of a crucial mantra), and end up in Present Day San Francisco. There, a small boy and his dog, on the run from mafia hit men, help them repair a vital component in their Tantric Energy Source. After humiliating the assassins with a perfectly choreographed display of legless martial arts amid the scaffolding of a high-rise construction site, they track down the boy’s mother to a hospital, where she turns out to be infected with Silver Fire.

The camera angles here grow coy. The few glimpses of actual flesh are sanitized fantasies: glowing ivory, smooth and dry.

The boy (whose recently slaughtered accountant-for-the-mob father concealed the truth from him), bursts into tears when he sees her. But the MMEs are philosophical:

“These well-meaning doctors and nurses will tell you that your Mom has suffered a terrible fate—but in time, the truth will be understood by all. Silver Fire is the closest we can come, in this world, to the Ecstasy of Unbeing. You observe only the frozen shell of her body ... but inside, in the realm of _shunyata_, a great and wonderful transformation is at work.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Boy dries tears, theme music soars, dog jumps up and licks everyone’s faces. Cathartic laughter all round.

(Except, of course, from the mother.)

* * * *

The next day, I had appointments in two small towns further along the highway. The first patient was a divorced forty-five-year-old man, a technician at a textile factory. Neither his brother nor his colleagues could offer me much help; for all they knew, he could have driven to a different town (or village) every single night during the period in question.

In the next town, a couple in their mid-thirties and their eight-year-old daughter had died. The symptoms must have hit all three more-or-less simultaneously—and escalated more rapidly than usual—because no one had managed to call for help.

The woman’s sister told me without hesitation, “Friday night, they would have gone out to the villages. That’s what they usually did.”

“And they would have taken their daughter?”

She opened her mouth to reply—but then froze and just stared at me, mortified—as if I was blaming her sister for recklessly exposing the child to some unspeakable danger. There were photographs of all three on the mantelpiece behind her. This woman had discovered their disintegrating bodies.

I said gently, “No place is safer than any other. It only looks that way in hindsight. They could have caught Silver Fire anywhere at all—and I’m just trying to trace the path of the infection, after the event.”

She nodded slowly. “They always took Phoebe. She loved the villages; she had friends in most of them.”

“Do you know which village they went to, that night?”

“I think it was Herodotus.”

Out in the car, I found it on the map. It wasn’t much further from the highway than the one I’d chosen purely for convenience; I could probably drive out there and still make it to the next motel by a civilized hour.

I clicked on the tiny dot; the information window told me: _Herodotus, Catawba County. Population 106, established 2004._

I said, “More.”

The map said, “That’s all.”

* * * *

Solar panels, twin satellite dishes, vegetable gardens, water tanks, boxy prefabricated buildings ... there was no single component of the village which couldn’t have been found on almost any large rural property. It was only seeing all of them thrown together in the middle of the countryside that was startling. Herodotus resembled nothing so much as a 20th century artist’s impression of a pioneering settlement on some Earth-like—but definitely alien—planet.

A major exception was the car park, discreetly hidden behind the huge banks of photovoltaic cells. With only a bus and two other cars, there was room for maybe a hundred more vehicles. Visitors were clearly welcome in Herodotus; there wasn’t even a meter to feed.

Despite the prefabs, there was no army-camp feel to the layout; the buildings obeyed some symmetry I couldn’t quite parse, clustered around a central square—but they certainly weren’t lined up in rows like quonset huts. As I entered the square, I could see a basketball game in progress in a court off to one side; teenagers playing, and younger children watching. It was the only obvious sign of life. I approached—feeling a bit like a trespasser, even if this was as much a public space as the main street of any ordinary town.

I stood by the other spectators and watched the game for a while. None of the children spoke to me, but it didn’t feel like I was being actively snubbed. The teams were mixed-sex, and play was intense but good-natured. The kids were Anglo-, African-, Chinese-American. I’d heard rumors that certain villages were “effectively segregated”—whatever that meant—but it might well have been nothing but propaganda.

The microvillage movement had stirred some controversy when it started, but the lifestyle wasn’t exactly radical. A hundred or so people—who would have worked from their homes in towns or cities anyway—pooled their resources and bought some cheap land out in the country, making up for the lack of amenities with a few state-of-the-art technological fixes. Residents were just as likely to be stockbrokers as artists or musicians—and though any characterization was bound to be unfair, most villages were definitely closer to yuppie sanctuaries than anarchist communes.

I couldn’t have faced the physical isolation, myself—and no amount of bandwidth would have compensated—but if the people here were happy, all power to them. I was ready to concede that in fifty years’ time, living in Queens would be looked on as infinitely more perverse and inexplicable than living in a place like Herodotus.

A young girl, six or seven years old, tapped my arm. I smiled down at her. “Hello.”

She said, “Are you on the trail of happiness?”

Before I could ask her what she meant, someone called out, “Hello there!”

I turned; it was a woman—in her mid-twenties, I guessed—shielding her eyes from the sun. She approached, smiling, and offered me her hand.

“I’m Sally Grant.”

“Claire Booth.”

“You’re a bit early for the Event. It doesn’t start until nine thirty.”

“I—”

“So if you want a meal at my place, you’d be welcome.”

I hesitated. “That’s very kind of you.”

“Ten dollars sound fair? That’s what I’d charge if I opened the cafeteria—only there were no bookings tonight, so I won’t be.”

I nodded.

“Well, drop in around seven. I’m number twenty-three.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”

I sat on a bench in the village square, shaded from the sunset by the hall in front of me, listening to the cries from the basketball court. I knew I should have told Ms Grant straight away what I was doing here; shown her my ID, asked the questions I was permitted to ask, and left. _But mightn’t I learn more by staying to watch the Event? Informally?_ Even a few crude firsthand observations of the demographics of this unmodelled contact between the villagers and the other local populations might be useful—and though the carrier was obviously long gone, this was still a chance to get a very rough profile of the kind of person I was looking for.

Uneasily, I came to a decision. There was no reason not to stay for the party—and no need to make the villagers anxious and defensive by telling them why I was here.

* * * *

From the inside, the Grants’ house looked more like a spacious, modern apartment than a factory-built box which had been delivered on the back of a truck to the middle of nowhere. I’d been unconsciously expecting the clutter of a mobile home, with too many mod-cons per cubic meter to leave room to breathe, but I’d misjudged the scale completely.

Sally’s husband, Oliver, was an architect. She edited travel guides by day; the cafeteria was a sideline. They were founding residents, originally from Raleigh; there were still only a handful of later arrivals. Herodotus, they explained, was self-sufficient in (vegetarian) staple foods, but there were regular deliveries of all the imports any small town relied on. They both made occasional trips to Greensboro, or interstate, but their routine work was pure telecommuting.

“And when you’re not on holidays, Claire?”

“I’m an administrator at Columbia.”

“That must be fascinating.” It certainly turned out to be a good choice; my hosts changed the subject back to themselves immediately.

I asked Sally, “So what clinched the move for you? Raleigh’s not exactly the crime capital of the nation.” I found it hard to believe that the real estate prices could have driven them out, either.

She replied without hesitation, “Spiritual criteria, Claire.”

I blinked.

Oliver laughed pleasantly. “It’s all right, you haven’t come to the wrong place!” He turned to his wife. “Did you see her face? You’d think she’d stumbled onto some enclave of _Mormons_ or _Baptists!_”

Sally explained, apologetically, “I meant the word in its broadest sense, of course: an understanding that we need to _resensitize ourselves_ to the _moral dimensions_ of the world around us.”

That left me none the wiser, but she was clearly expecting a sympathetic response. I said tentatively, “And you think ... living in a small community like this makes your civic responsibilities clearer, more readily apparent?”

Now Sally was bemused. “Well ... yes, I suppose it does. But that’s just politics, really, isn’t it? Not _spirituality_. I meant—” She raised her hands, and beamed at me. “I just _meant_, the reason you’re here, yourself! We came to Herodotus to find—for a lifetime—what you’ve come here to find for a few hours, yourself!”

* * * *

I heard the other cars begin to arrive while I sat drinking coffee with Sally in the living room. Oliver had excused himself for an urgent meeting with a construction manager in Tokyo. I passed the time with small-talk about Alex and Laura, and my Worst Ever New York Experience horror stories—some of which were true. It wasn’t a lack of curiosity that kept me from probing Sally about the Event—I was just afraid of alerting her to the fact that I had no idea what I’d let myself in for. When she left me for a minute, I scanned the room—without rising from my chair—for any sign of what she might have _come here to find for a lifetime_. All I had time to take in were a few CD covers, the half-dozen visible ones on a large rotating rack. Most looked like modern music/video, from bands I’d never heard of. There was one familiar title, though: James Springer’s _The Cyber Sutras_.

By the time the three of us crossed the square and approached the village hall—a barn-like structure, resembling a very large cargo container—I was quite tense. There were thirty or forty people in the square, most but not all in their late teens or early twenties, dressed in the kind of diverse mock-casual clothing that might have been seen outside any nightclub in the country. _So what was I afraid was going to happen?_ Just because Ben Walker couldn’t tell his father about it, and Mike Clayton couldn’t tell his mother, didn’t mean I’d wandered into some southern remake of _Twin Peaks_. Maybe bored kids just snuck out to the villages to pop hallucinogens at dance parties—my own youth resurrected before my eyes, with safer drugs and better light shows.

As we approached the hall, a small group of people filed in through the self-opening doors, giving me a brief glimpse of bodies silhouetted against swirling lights, and a blast of music. My anxiety began to seem absurd. Sally and Oliver were into psychedelics, that was all—and Herodotus’s founders had apparently decided to create a congenial environment in which to use them. I paid the sixty-dollar entry fee, smiling with relief.

Inside, the walls and ceiling were ablaze with convoluted patterns: soft-edged multi-hued fractals pulsing with the music, like vast color-coded simulations of turbulent fluids cascading down giant fret-boards at Mach 5. The dancers cast no shadows; these were high-power wall-screens, not projections. Stunning resolution—and astronomically expensive.

Sally pressed a fluorescent-pink capsule into my hand. Harmony or Halcyon, maybe; I no longer knew what was fashionable. I tried to thank her, and offer some excuse about “saving it for later”—but she didn’t hear a word, so we just smiled at each other meaninglessly. The hall’s sound insulation was extraordinary (which was lucky for the other villagers); I would never have guessed from outside that my brain was going to be pureed.

Sally and Oliver vanished into the crowd. I decided to hang around for half an hour or so, then slip out and drive on to the motel. I stood and watched the people dancing, trying to keep my head clear despite the stupefying backdrops ... though I doubted that I could learn much about the carrier that I didn’t already know. _Probably under 25. Probably not towing small children._ Sally had given me all the details I needed to obtain information on Events from here to Memphis—past and future. The search was still going to be difficult, but at least I was making progress.

A sudden loud cheer from the crowd broke through the music—_and the room was transformed before my eyes_. For a moment I was utterly disorientated—and even when the world began to make visual sense again, it took me a while to get the details straight.

The wall-screens now showed dancers in identical rooms to the one I was standing in; only the ceiling continued to play the abstract animation. These identical rooms all had wall-screens themselves, which also showed identical rooms full of dancers ... much like the infinite regress between a pair of mirrors.

And at first, I thought the “other rooms” were merely realtime images of the Herodotus dance hall itself. But ... the swirling vortex pattern on the ceiling joined seamlessly with the animation on the ceilings of “adjacent” rooms, combining to form a single complex image; there was no repetition, reflected or otherwise. And the crowds of dancers were _not_ identical—though they all looked sufficiently alike to make it hard to be sure, from a distance. Belatedly, I turned around and examined the closest wall, just four or five meters away. A young man “behind” the screen raised a hand in greeting, and I returned the gesture automatically. We couldn’t quite make convincing eye contact—and wherever the cameras were placed, that would have been a lot to ask for—but it was, still, almost possible to believe that nothing really separated us but a thin wall of glass.

The man smiled dreamily and walked away.

I had goose bumps. This was nothing new in principle, but the technology here had been pushed to its limits. The sense of being in an infinite dance hall was utterly compelling; I could see no “furthest hall” in any direction (and when they ran out of real ones, they could have easily recycled them). The flatness of the images, the incorrect scaling as you moved, the lack of parallax (worst of all when I tried to peer into the “corner rooms” between the main four ... which “should” have been possible, but wasn’t) served more to make the space beyond the walls appear exotically distorted than to puncture the effect. The brain actually struggled to compensate, to cover up the flaws—and if I’d swallowed Sally’s capsule, I doubt I would have been nit-picking. As it was, I was grinning like a child on a fairground ride.

I saw people dancing facing the walls, loosely forming couples or groups across the link. I was mesmerized; I forgot all thoughts of leaving. After a while, I bumped into Oliver, who was swaying happily by himself. I screamed into his ear, “These are all other villages?” He nodded, and shouted back, “East is east and west is west!” Meaning ... the virtual layout followed real geography—it just abolished the intervening distances? I recalled something James Springer had said in his _Terminal Chat Show_ interview: _We must invent a new cartography, to rechart the planet in its newborn, Protean state. There is no separation, now. There are no borders._

Yeah ... and the world was just one giant party. Still, at least they weren’t splicing in live connections to war zones. I’d seen enough we-dance/you-dodge-shells “solidarity” in the nineties to last a lifetime.

It suddenly occurred to me: _If the carrier really was traveling from Event to Event ... then he or she was “here” with me. Right now. My quarry had to be one of the dancers in this giant, imaginary hall_.

And this fact implied no opportunity—let alone any kind of danger. It wasn’t as if Silver Fire carriers conveniently fluoresced in the dark. But it still felt like the strangest moment of a long, strange night: to understand that the two of us were finally “connected”, to understand that I’d “found” the object of my search.

Even if it did me no good at all.

* * * *

Just after midnight—as the novelty was wearing off, and I was finally making up my mind to leave—some of the dancers began cheering loudly again. This time it took me even longer to see why. People started turning to face the east, and excitedly pointing something out to each other.

Weaving through one of the distant crowds of dancers—in a village three screens removed—were a number of human figures. They might have been naked, some male some female, but it was hard to be sure: they could only be seen in glimpses ... and they were shining so brightly that most details were swamped in their sheer luminosity.

They glowed an intense silver-white. The light transformed their immediate surroundings—though the effect was more like a halo of luminous gas, diffusing through the air, than a spotlight cast on the crowd. The dancers around them seemed oblivious to their presence—as did those in the intervening halls; only the people in Herodotus paid them the kind of attention their spectacular appearance deserved. I couldn’t yet tell whether they were pure animation, with plausible paths computed through gaps in the crowd, or unremarkable (but real) actors, enhanced by software.

My mouth was dry. I couldn’t believe that the presence of these silver figures could be pure coincidence—but what were they meant to signify? Did the people of Herodotus know about the string of local outbreaks? That wasn’t impossible; an independent analysis might have been circulated on the net. Maybe this was meant as some kind of bizarre “tribute” to the victims.

I found Oliver again. The music had softened, as if in deference to the vision, and he seemed to have come down a little; we managed to have something approaching a conversation.

I pointed to the figures—who were now marching smoothly straight through the image of the image of a wall-screen, proving themselves entirely virtual.

He shouted, “They’re walking the trail of happiness!”

I mimed incomprehension.

“Healing the land for us! Making amends! Undoing the trail of tears!”

_The trail of tears?_ I was lost for a while, then a memory from high school surfaced abruptly. The “Trail of Tears” was the brutal forced march of the Cherokee from what was now part of Georgia, all the way to Oklahoma, in the 1830s. Thousands had died along the way; some had escaped, and hidden in the Appalachians. Herodotus, I was fairly sure, was hundreds of kilometers from the historical route of the march—but that didn’t seem to be the point. As the silver figures moved across the dance floor twice-removed, I could see them spreading their arms wide, as if performing some kind of benediction.

I shouted, “But what does _Silver Fire_ have to do with—?”

“Their bodies are frozen—so their spirits are free to walk the Trail of Happiness through cyberspace for us! Didn’t you know? That’s what Silver Fire is _for!_ To renew everything! To bring happiness to the land! _To make amends!_” Oliver beamed at me with absolute sincerity, radiating pure good will.

I stared at him in disbelief. This man, clearly, hated no one ... but what he’d just spewed out was nothing but a New Age remix of the rantings of that radio evangelist, twenty years before, who’d seized upon AIDS as the incontrovertible proof of his own _spiritual beliefs_.

I shouted angrily, “Silver Fire is a merciless, agonizing—”

Oliver tipped his head back and laughed, uproariously, without a trace of malice—as if I was the one telling ghost stories.

I turned and walked away.

The trail-walkers split into two streams as they crossed the hall immediately to the east of us. Half went north, half went south, as they “detoured around” Herodotus. They couldn’t move among us—but this way, the illusion remained almost seamless.

_And if I’d been drugged out of my skull? If I’d embraced the whole mythology of the Trail of Happiness—and come here hoping to see it confirmed?_ In the morning, would I have half-believed that the roaming spirits of Silver Fire patients had marched right past me?

Bestowing their luminous blessing on the crowd.

Near enough to touch.

* * * *

I threaded my way toward the camouflaged exit. Outside, the cool air and the silence were surreal; I felt more disembodied and dreamlike than ever. I staggered toward the car park, and waved my notepad to make the hire car flash its lights.

My head cleared as I approached the highway. I decided to drive on through the night; I was so agitated that I didn’t think I had much chance of sleeping. I could find a motel in the morning, shower, and catch a nap before my next appointment.

I still didn’t know what to make of the Event—what solid link there could be between the carrier and the villagers’ mad syncretic cyberbabble. If it was nothing but coincidence, the irony was grotesque—but what was the alternative? _Some “pilgrim” on the Trail of Happiness, deliberately spreading the virus?_ The idea was ludicrous—and not just because it was unthinkably obscene. A carrier could only _know_ that he or she had been infected if distinctive symptoms had appeared ... but _distinctive symptoms_ only marked the brutal end stage of the disease; a prolonged mild infection—if such a thing existed—would be indistinguishable from influenza. Once Silver Fire progressed far enough to affect the visible layers of the skin, the only options for cross-country travel all involved flashing lights and sirens.

* * * *

At about half past three in the morning, I switched on my notepad. I wasn’t exactly drowsy, but I wanted something to keep me alert.

Ariadne had plenty.

First, a heated debate on _The Reality Studio_—a program on the Intercampus Ideas Network. A freelance zoologist from Seattle named Andrew Feld spoke first—putting the case that Silver Fire “proved beyond doubt” his “controversial and paradigm-subverting” S-force theory of life, which “combined the transgressive genius of Einstein and Sheldrake with the insights of the Maya and the latest developments in superstrings, to create a new, life-affirming biology to take the place of soulless, mechanistic Western science.”

In reply, virologist Margaret Ortega from UCLA explained in detail why Feld’s ideas were superfluous, failed to account for—or clashed directly with—numerous observed biological phenomena ... and were neither more nor less “mechanistic” than any other theory which didn’t leave everything in the universe to the whim of God. She also ventured the opinion that most people were capable of _affirming life_ without casually discarding all of human knowledge in the process.

Feld was a clueless idiot on a wish-fulfillment trip. Ortega wiped the floor with him.

But when the nationwide audience of students voted, he was declared winner by a majority of two to one.

Next item: Protesters were blockading the Medical Research Laboratories of the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg, calling for an end to Silver Fire research. Safety was not the issue. Protest organizer and “acclaimed cultural agitator” Kid Ransom had held an impromptu press conference:

“We must reclaim Silver Fire from the gray, small-minded scientists, and learn to tap its wellspring of mythical power for the benefit of all humanity! These technocrats who seek to _explain_ everything are like vandals rampaging through a gallery, scrawling equations on all the beautiful works of art!”

“But how will humanity ever find a cure for this disease, without research?”

“There is no such thing as disease! There is only transformation!”

There were four more news stories, all concerning (mutually exclusive) proclamations about the “secret truth” (or secret ineffability) behind Silver Fire—and maybe each one, alone, would have seemed no more than a sad, sick joke. But as the countryside materialized around me—the purple-gray ridge of the Black Mountains to the north starkly beautiful in the dawn—I was slowly beginning to understand. _This was not my world anymore_. Not in Herodotus, not in Seattle, not in Hamburg or Montreal or London. Not even in New York.

In my world, there were no nymphs in trees and streams. No gods, no ghosts, no ancestral spirits. _Nothing_—outside our own cultures, our own laws, our own passions—existed in order to punish us or comfort us, to affirm any act of hatred or love.

My own parents had understood this, perfectly—but theirs had been the first generation, ever, to be so free of the shackles of superstition. And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that _the way the universe worked_ was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.

We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature, art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn’t fought hard enough to pass on the hardest-won truth of all: _Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent._

Maybe, in the West, we’d delivered the death blows to the old doctrinal religions, the old monoliths of delusion ... but that victory meant nothing at all.

Because taking their place now, everywhere, was the saccharine poison of _spirituality_.

* * * *

I checked into a motel in Asheville. The parking lot was full of campervans, people heading for the national parks; I was lucky, I got the last room.

My notepad chimed while I was in the shower. An analysis of the latest data reported to the Centers for Disease Control showed the “anomaly” extending almost two hundred kilometers further west along the I-40—about half-way to Nashville. _Five more people on the Trail of Happiness._ I sat and stared at the map for a while—then I dressed, packed my bag again, and checked out.

I made ten calls as I was driving up into the mountains, canceling all my appointments with relatives from Asheville to Jefferson City, Tennessee. The time had passed for being cautious and methodical, for gathering every last scrap of data along the way. I _knew_ the transmission had to be taking place at the Events—the only question was whether it was accidental or deliberate.

_Deliberate how? With a vial full of fibroblasts, teeming with Silver Fire?_ It had taken researchers at the NIH over a year to learn how to culture the virus—and they’d only succeeded in March. I couldn’t believe that their work had been replicated by amateurs in less than three months.

The highway plunged between the lavish wooded slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains, following the Pigeon River most of the way. I programmed a predictive model—by voice—as I drove. I had a calendar for the Events, now, and I had five approximate dates of infection. Case notifications would always be too late; the only way to catch up was to extrapolate. And I could only assume that the carrier would continue moving steadily westwards, never lingering, always traveling on to the next Event.

I reached Knoxville around midday, stopped for lunch, then drove straight on.

The model said: _Pliny, Saturday Jan 14, 9.30 pm._ My first chance to search the infinite dance hall for the carrier, without an impassable wall between us.

My first chance to be in the presence of Silver Fire.

* * * *

I arrived early—but not so early as to attract the attention of Pliny’s equivalents of Sally and Oliver. I stayed in the car for an hour, improvising ways to look busy, recording the license numbers of arriving vehicles. There were a lot of four-wheel drives and utilities, and a few campervans. Many villagers favored bicycles—but the carrier would have to have been a real fanatic—and extremely fit—to have cycled all the way from Greensboro.

The Event followed much the same pattern as the one in Herodotus the night before—though Herodotus itself wasn’t taking part. The crowd was similar, too: mostly young, but with enough exceptions to keep me from looking completely out of place. I wandered around, trying to commit every face to memory without attracting too much attention. _Had all these people swallowed the Silver Fire myth, as I’d heard it from Oliver?_ The possibility was almost too bleak to contemplate. The only thing that gave me any hope was that when I’d compared the number of villages listed on the Event calendar with the number in the region, it was less than one in twenty. The microvillage movement itself had nothing to do with this insanity.

Someone offered me a pink capsule—not for free, this time. I gave her twenty dollars, and pocketed the drug for analysis. There was a slender chance that someone was passing out doctored capsules—although stomach acid tended to make short work of the virus.

A handsome blond kid—barely in his twenties—hovered around me for a while as the trail-walkers appeared. When they’d vanished into the west, he approached me, took my elbow, and made an offer I couldn’t quite hear over the music—though I thought I got the gist of it. I was too distracted to feel amazed or flattered—let alone tempted—and I got rid of him in five seconds flat. He walked away looking wounded—but not long afterward, I saw him leaving with a woman half my age.

I stayed to the very end—and on Saturday nights, that meant five in the morning. I staggered out into the light, discouraged, although I didn’t know what I’d seriously hoped to see. _Someone walking around with an aerosol spray, administering doses of Silver Fire?_ When I reached the car park I realized that many of the cars had arrived after I’d gone in—and some might have come and gone unseen. I recorded the license plates I’d missed, trying to be discreet, but almost past caring; I hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours.

* * * *

The nearest Event west of Pliny, on Sunday night, was past the Mississippi and half-way across Arkansas; I made a calculated guess that the carrier would take this as an opportunity for a night off.

Monday evening, I drove into Eudoxus—population 165, established 2002, about an hour from Nashville—ready to spend all night in the car park if I had to. I needed to record every license plate, or there wasn’t much point being here.

I hadn’t told Brecht what I was doing; I still had no solid evidence, and I was afraid of sounding paranoid. I’d called Alex before leaving Nashville, but I hadn’t told him much, either. Laura had declined to speak to me when he’d called out and told her I was on the line, but that was nothing new. I missed them both already, more than I’d anticipated—but I wasn’t sure how I’d manage when I finally made it home, to a daughter who was turning away from reason, and a husband who took it for granted that any bright adolescent would recapitulate five thousand years of intellectual progress in six months.

Thirty-five vehicles arrived between ten and eleven—none I’d seen before—and then the flow tapered off abruptly. I scanned the entertainment channels on my notepad, satisfied by anything with color and movement; I’d had enough of Ariadne’s bad news.

Just before midnight, a blue Ford campervan rolled up and parked in the corner opposite me. A young man and a young woman got out; they seemed excited, but a little wary—as if they couldn’t quite believe that their parents weren’t watching from the shadows.

As they crossed the car park, I realized that the guy was the blond kid who’d spoken to me in Pliny.

I waited five minutes, then went and checked their license plate; it was a Massachusetts registration. I hadn’t recorded it on Saturday night, so I would have missed the fact that they were following the Trail, if one of them hadn’t—

_Hadn’t what?_

I stood there frozen behind the van, trying to stay calm, replaying the incident in my mind. I knew I hadn’t let him paw me for long—_but how long would it have taken?_

I glanced up at the disinterested stars, trying to savor the irony because it tasted much better than the fear. I’d always known there’d be a risk—and the odds were still heavily in my favor. I could put myself into quarantine in Nashville in the morning; nothing I did right now would make the slightest difference—

But I wasn’t thinking straight. If they’d _traveled together_ all the way from Massachusetts—or even from Greensboro—one should have infected the other long ago. The probability of the two of them sharing the same freakish resistance to the virus was negligible, even if they were brother and sister.

They couldn’t both be unwitting, asymptomatic carriers. So either they had nothing to do with the outbreaks—

_—or they were transporting the virus outside their bodies, and handling it with great care_.

A bumper sticker boasted: STATE-OF-THE-ART SECURITY! I placed a hand against the rear door experimentally; the van didn’t emit so much as a warning beep. I tried shaking the handle aggressively; still nothing. If the system was calling a security firm in Nashville for an armed response, I had all the time I needed. If it was trying to call its owners, it wouldn’t have much luck getting a signal through the aluminum frame of the village hall.

There was no one in sight. I went back to my car, and fetched the toolkit.

I knew I had no legal right. There were emergency powers I could have invoked—but I had no intention of calling Maryland and spending half the night fighting my way through the correct procedures. And I knew I was putting the prosecution case at risk, by tainting everything with illegal search and seizure.

I didn’t care. They weren’t going to have the chance to send one more person down the Trail of Happiness, even if I had to burn the van to the ground.

I levered a small, tinted fixed window out of its rubber frame in the door. Still no wailing siren. I reached in, groped around, and unlocked the door.

I’d thought they must have been half-educated biochemists, who’d learned enough cytology to duplicate the published fibroblast culturing techniques.

I was wrong. They were medical students, and they’d half-learned other skills entirely.

They had their friend cushioned in polymer gel, contained in something like a huge tropical fish tank. They had oxygen set up, a urethral catheter, and half a dozen drips. I played my torch beam over the inverted bottles, checking the various drugs and their concentrations. I went through them all twice, hoping I’d missed one—but I hadn’t.

I shone the beam down onto the girl’s skinless white face, peering through the delicate streamers of red rising up through the gel. She was in an opiate haze deep enough to keep her motionless and silent—but she was still conscious. Her mouth was frozen in a rictus of pain.

And she’d been like this for sixteen days.

I staggered back out of the van, my heart pounding, my vision going black. I collided with the blond kid; the girl was with him, and they had another couple in tow.

I turned on him and started punching him, screaming incoherently; I don’t remember what I said. He put up his hands to shield his face, and the others came to his aid: pinning me gently against the van, holding me still without striking a single blow.

I was crying now. The campervan girl said, “Sssh. It’s all right. No one’s going to hurt you.”

I pleaded with her. “Don’t you understand? She’s in pain! _All this time, she’s been in pain!_ What did you think she was doing? _Smiling?_”

“Of course she’s smiling. This is what she always wanted. She made us promise that if she ever caught Silver Fire, she’d walk the Trail.”

I rested my head against the cool metal, closed my eyes for a moment, and tried to think of a way to get through to them.

But I didn’t know how.

When I opened my eyes, the boy was standing in front of me. He had the most gentle, compassionate face imaginable. He wasn’t a torturer, or a bigot, or even a fool. He’d just swallowed some beautiful lies.

He said, “Don’t you understand? All _you_ see in there is a woman dying in pain—_but we all have to learn to see more_. The time has come to regain the lost skills of our ancestors: the power to see visions, demons and angels. The power to see the spirits of the wind and the rain. The power to walk the Trail of Happiness.”

Singleton

I was walking north along George Street towards Town Hall railway station, pondering the ways I might solve the tricky third question of my linear algebra assignment, when I encountered a small crowd blocking the footpath. I didn’t give much thought to the reason they were standing there; I’d just passed a busy restaurant, and I often saw groups of people gathered outside. But once I’d started to make my way around them, moving into an alley rather than stepping out into the traffic, it became apparent that they were not just diners from a farewell lunch for a retiring colleague, putting off their return to the office for as long as possible. I could see for myself exactly what was holding their attention.

Twenty metres down the alley, a man was lying on his back on the ground, shielding his bloodied face with his hands, while two men stood over him, relentlessly swinging narrow sticks of some kind. At first I thought the sticks were pool cues, but then I noticed the metal hooks on the ends. I’d only ever seen these obscure weapons before in one other place: my primary school, where an appointed window monitor would use them at the start and end of each day. They were meant for opening and closing an old-fashioned kind of hinged pane when it was too high to reach with your hands.

I turned to the other spectators. “Has anyone called the police?” A woman nodded without looking at me, and said, “Someone used their mobile, a couple of minutes ago.”

The assailants must have realised that the police were on their way, but it seemed they were too committed to their task to abandon it until that was absolutely necessary. They were facing away from the crowd, so perhaps they weren’t entirely reckless not to fear identification. The man on the ground was dressed like a kitchen hand. He was still moving, trying to protect himself, but he was making less noise than his attackers; the need, or the ability, to cry out in pain had been beaten right out of him.

As for calling for help, he could have saved his breath.

A chill passed through my body, a sick cold churning sensation that came a moment before the conscious realisation: I’m going to watch someone murdered, and I’m going to do nothing. But this wasn’t a drunken brawl, where a few bystanders could step in and separate the combatants; the two assailants had to be serious criminals, settling a score. Keeping your distance from something like that was just common sense. I’d go to court, I’d be a witness, but no one could expect anything more of me. Not when thirty other people had behaved in exactly the same way.

The men in the alley did not have guns. If they’d had guns, they would have used them by now. They weren’t going to mow down anyone who got in their way. It was one thing not to make a martyr of yourself, but how many people could these two grunting slobs fend off with sticks?

I unstrapped my backpack and put it on the ground. Absurdly, that made me feel more vulnerable; I was always worried about losing my textbooks. Think about this. You don’t know what you’re doing. I hadn’t been in so much as a fist fight since I was thirteen. I glanced at the strangers around me, wondering if anyone would join in if I implored them to rush forward together. But that wasn’t going to happen. I was a willowy, unimposing eighteen-year-old, wearing a T-shirt adorned with Maxwell’s Equations. I had no presence, no authority. No one would follow me into the fray.

Alone, I’d be as helpless as the guy on the ground. These men would crack my skull open in an instant. There were half a dozen solid-looking office workers in their twenties in the crowd; if these weekend rugby players hadn’t felt competent to intervene, what chance did I have?

I reached down for my backpack. If I wasn’t going to help, there was no point being here at all. I’d find out what had happened on the evening news.

I started to retrace my steps, sick with self-loathing. This wasn’t kristallnacht. There’d be no embarrassing questions from my grandchildren. No one would ever reproach me.

As if that were the measure of everything.

“Fuck it.” I dropped my backpack and ran down the alley.

I was close enough to smell the three sweating bodies over the stench of rotting garbage before I was even noticed. The nearest of the attackers glanced over his shoulder, affronted, then amused. He didn’t bother redeploying his weapon in mid-stroke; as I hooked an arm around his neck in the hope of overbalancing him, he thrust his elbow into my chest, winding me. I clung on desperately, maintaining the hold even though I couldn’t tighten it. As he tried to prise himself loose, I managed to kick his feet out from under him. We both went down onto the asphalt; I ended up beneath him.

The man untangled himself and clambered to his feet. As I struggled to right myself, picturing a metal hook swinging into my face, someone whistled. I looked up to see the second man gesturing to his companion, and I followed his gaze. A dozen men and women were coming down the alley, advancing together at a brisk walk. It was not a particularly menacing sight—I’d seen angrier crowds with peace signs painted on their faces—but the sheer numbers were enough to guarantee some inconvenience. The first man hung back long enough to kick me in the ribs. Then the two of them fled.

I brought my knees up, then raised my head and got into a crouch. I was still winded, but for some reason it seemed vital not to remain flat on my back. One of the office workers grinned down at me. “You fuckwit. You could have got killed.”

The kitchen hand shuddered, and snorted bloody mucus. His eyes were swollen shut, and when he lay his hands down beside him, I could see the bones of his knuckles through the torn skin. My own skin turned icy, at this vision of the fate I’d courted for myself. But if it was a shock to realise how I might have ended up, it was just as sobering to think that I’d almost walked away and let them finish him off, when the intervention had actually cost me nothing.

I rose to my feet. People milled around the kitchen hand, asking each other about first aid. I remembered the basics from a course I’d done in high school, but the man was still breathing, and he wasn’t losing vast amounts of blood, so I couldn’t think of anything helpful that an amateur could do in the circumstances. I squeezed my way out of the gathering and walked back to the street. My backpack was exactly where I’d left it; no one had stolen my books. I heard sirens approaching; the police and the ambulance would be there soon.

My ribs were tender, but I wasn’t in agony. I’d cracked a rib falling off a trail bike on the farm when I was twelve, and I was fairly sure that this was just bruising. For a while I walked bent over, but by the time I reached the station I found I could adopt a normal gait. I had some grazed skin on my arms, but I couldn’t have appeared too battered, because no one on the train looked at me twice.

That night, I watched the news. The kitchen hand was described as being in a stable condition. I pictured him stepping out into the alley to empty a bucket of fish-heads into the garbage, to find the two of them waiting for him. I’d probably never learn what the attack had been about unless the case went to trial, and as yet the police hadn’t even named any suspects. If the man had been in a fit state to talk in the alley, I might have asked him then, but any sense that I was entitled to an explanation was rapidly fading.

The reporter mentioned a student “leading the charge of angry citizens” who’d rescued the kitchen hand, and then she spoke to an eye witness, who described this young man as “a New Ager, wearing some kind of astrological symbols on his shirt.” I snorted, then looked around nervously in case one of my housemates had made the improbable connection, but no one else was even in earshot.

Then the story was over.

I felt flat for a moment, cheated of the minor rush that fifteen seconds’ fame might have delivered; it was like reaching into a biscuit tin when you thought there was one more chocolate chip left, to find that there actually wasn’t. I considered phoning my parents in Orange, just to talk to them from within the strange afterglow, but I’d established a routine and it was not the right day. If I called unexpectedly, they’d think something was wrong.

So, that was it. In a week’s time, when the bruises had faded, I’d look back and doubt that the incident had ever happened.

I went upstairs to finish my assignment.

Francine said, “There’s a nicer way to think about this. If you do a change of variables, from x and y to z and z-conjugate, the Cauchy-Riemann equations correspond to the condition that the partial derivative of the function with respect to z-conjugate is equal to zero.”

We were sitting in the coffee shop, discussing the complex analysis lecture we’d had half an hour before. Half a dozen of us from the same course had got into the habit of meeting at this time every week, but today the others had failed to turn up. Maybe there was a movie being screened, or a speaker appearing on campus that I hadn’t heard about.

I worked through the transformation she’d described. “You’re right,” I said. “That’s really elegant!”

Francine nodded slightly in assent, while retaining her characteristic jaded look. She had an undisguisable passion for mathematics, but she was probably bored out of her skull in class, waiting for the lecturers to catch up and teach her something she didn’t already know.

I was nowhere near her level. In fact, I’d started the year poorly, distracted by my new surroundings: nothing so glamorous as the temptations of the night life, just the different sights and sounds and scale of the place, along with the bureaucratic demands of all the organisations that now impinged upon my life, from the university itself down to the shared house groceries subcommittee. In the last few weeks, though, I’d finally started hitting my stride. I’d got a part-time job, stacking shelves in a supermarket; the pay was lousy, but it was enough to take the edge off my financial anxieties, and the hours weren’t so long that they left me with no time for anything but study.

I doodled harmonic contours on the notepaper in front of me. “So what do you do for fun?” I said. “Apart from complex analysis?”

Francine didn’t reply immediately. This wasn’t the first time we’d been alone together, but I’d never felt confident that I had the right words to make the most of the situation. At some point, though, I’d stopped fooling myself that there was ever going to be a perfect moment, with the perfect phrase falling from my lips: something subtle but intriguing slipped deftly into the conversation, without disrupting the flow. So now I’d made my interest plain, with no attempt at artfulness or eloquence. She could judge me as she knew me from the last three months, and if she felt no desire to know me better, I would not be crushed.

“I write a lot of Perl scripts,” she said. “Nothing complicated; just odds and ends that I give away as freeware. It’s very relaxing.”

I nodded understandingly. I didn’t think she was being deliberately discouraging; she just expected me to be slightly more direct.

“Do you like Deborah Conway?” I’d only heard a couple of her songs on the radio myself, but a few days before I’d seen a poster in the city announcing a tour.

“Yeah. She’s great.”

I started thickening the conjugation bars over the variables I’d scrawled. “She’s playing at a club in Surry Hills,” I said. “On Friday. Would you like to go?”

Francine smiled, making no effort now to appear world-weary. “Sure. That would be nice.”

I smiled back. I wasn’t giddy, I wasn’t moonstruck, but I felt as if I was standing on the shore of an ocean, contemplating its breadth. I felt the way I felt when I opened a sophisticated monograph in the library, and was reduced to savouring the scent of the print and the crisp symmetry of the notation, understanding only a fraction of what I read. Knowing there was something glorious ahead, but knowing too what a daunting task it would be to come to terms with it.

I said, “I’ll get the tickets on my way home.”

To celebrate the end of exams for the year, the household threw a party. It was a sultry November night, but the back yard wasn’t much bigger than the largest room in the house, so we ended up opening all the doors and windows and distributing food and furniture throughout the ground floor and the exterior, front and back. Once the faint humid breeze off the river penetrated the depths of the house, it was equally sweltering and mosquito-ridden everywhere, indoors and out.

Francine and I stayed close for an hour or so, obeying the distinctive dynamics of a couple, until by some unspoken mutual understanding it became clear that we could wander apart for a while, and that neither of us was so insecure that we’d resent it.

I ended up in a corner of the crowded back yard, talking to Will, a biochemistry student who’d lived in the house for the last four years. On some level, he probably couldn’t help feeling that his opinions about the way things were run should carry more weight than anyone else’s, which had annoyed me greatly when I’d first moved in. We’d since become friends, though, and I was glad to have a chance to talk to him before he left to take up a scholarship in Germany.

In the middle of a conversation about the work he’d be doing, I caught sight of Francine, and he followed my gaze.

Will said, “It took me a while to figure out what finally cured you of your homesickness.”

“I was never homesick.”

“Yeah, right.” He took a swig of his drink. “She’s changed you, though. You have to admit that.”

“I do. Happily. Everything’s clicked, since we got together.” Relationships were meant to screw up your studies, but my marks were soaring. Francine didn’t tutor me; she just drew me into a state of mind where everything was clearer.

“The amazing thing is that you got together at all.” I scowled, and Will raised a hand placatingly. “I just meant, when you first moved in, you were pretty reserved. And down on yourself. When we interviewed you for the room, you practically begged us to give it to someone more deserving.”

“Now you’re taking the piss.”

He shook his head. “Ask any of the others.”

I fell silent. The truth was, if I took a step back and contemplated my situation, I was as astonished as he was. By the time I’d left my home town, it had become clear to me that good fortune had nothing much to do with luck. Some people were born with wealth, or talent, or charisma. They started with an edge, and the benefits snowballed. I’d always believed that I had, at best, just enough intelligence and persistence to stay afloat in my chosen field; I’d topped every class in high school, but in a town the size of Orange that meant nothing, and I’d had no illusions about my fate in Sydney.

I owed it to Francine that my visions of mediocrity had not been fulfilled; being with her had transformed my life. But where had I found the nerve to imagine that I had anything to offer her in return?

“Something happened,” I admitted. “Before I asked her out.”

“Yeah?”

I almost clammed up; I hadn’t told anyone about the events in the alley, not even Francine. The incident had come to seem too personal, as if to recount it at all would be to lay my conscience bare. But Will was off to Munich in less than a week, and it was easier to confide in someone I didn’t expect to see again.

When I finished, Will bore a satisfied grin, as if I’d explained everything. “Pure karma,” he announced. “I should have guessed.”

“Oh, very scientific.”

“I’m serious. Forget the Buddhist mystobabble; I’m talking about the real thing. If you stick to your principles, of course things go better for you—assuming you don’t get killed in the process. That’s elementary psychology. People have a highly developed sense of reciprocity, of the appropriateness of the treatment they receive from each other. If things work out too well for them, they can’t help asking, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ If you don’t have a good answer, you’ll sabotage yourself. Not all the time, but often enough. So if you do something that improves your self-esteem—”

“Self-esteem is for the weak,” I quipped. Will rolled his eyes. “I don’t think like that,” I protested.

“No? Why did you even bring it up, then?”

I shrugged. “Maybe it just made me less pessimistic. I could have had the crap beaten out of me, but I didn’t. That makes asking someone to a concert seem a lot less dangerous.” I was beginning to cringe at all this unwanted analysis, and I had nothing to counter Will’s pop psychology except an equally folksy version of my own.

He could see I was embarrassed, so he let the matter drop. As I watched Francine moving through the crowd, though, I couldn’t shake off an unsettling sense of the tenuousness of the circumstances that had brought us together. There was no denying that if I’d walked away from the alley, and the kitchen hand had died, I would have felt like shit for a long time afterwards. I would not have felt entitled to much out of my own life.

I hadn’t walked away, though. And even if the decision had come down to the wire, why shouldn’t I be proud that I’d made the right choice? That didn’t mean everything that followed was tainted, like a reward from some sleazy, palm-greasing deity. I hadn’t won Francine’s affection in a medieval test of bravery; we’d chosen each other, and persisted with that choice, for a thousand complicated reasons.

We were together now; that was what mattered. I wasn’t going to dwell on the path that had brought me to her, just to dredge up all the doubts and insecurities that had almost kept us apart.

2012

As we drove the last kilometre along the road south from Ar Rafidiyah, I could see the Wall of Foam glistening ahead of us in the morning sunlight. Insubstantial as a pile of soap bubbles, but still intact, after six weeks.

“I can’t believe it’s lasted this long,” I told Sadiq.

“You didn’t trust the models?”

“Fuck, no. Every week, I thought we’d come over the hill and there’d be nothing but a shrivelled-up cobweb.”

Sadiq smiled. “So you had no faith in my calculations?”

“Don’t take it personally. There were a lot of things we could have both got wrong.”

Sadiq pulled off the road. His students, Hassan and Rashid, had climbed off the back of the truck and started towards the Wall before I’d even got my face mask on. Sadiq called them back, and made them put on plastic boots and paper suits over their clothes, while the two of us did the same. We didn’t usually bother with this much protection, but today was different.

Close up, the Wall almost vanished: all you noticed were isolated, rainbow-fringed reflections, drifting at a leisurely pace across the otherwise invisible film as water redistributed itself, following waves induced in the membrane by the interplay of air pressure, thermal gradients, and surface tension. These images might easily have been separate objects, scraps of translucent plastic blowing around above the desert, held aloft by a breeze too faint to detect at ground level.

The further away you looked, though, the more crowded the hints of light became, and the less plausible any alternative hypothesis that denied the Wall its integrity. It stretched for a kilometre along the edge of the desert, and rose an uneven fifteen to twenty metres into the air. But it was merely the first, and smallest, of its kind, and the time had come to put it on the back of the truck and drive it all the way back to Basra.

Sadiq took a spray can of reagent from the cabin, and shook it as he walked down the embankment. I followed him, my heart in my mouth. The Wall had not dried out; it had not been torn apart or blown away, but there was still plenty of room for failure.

Sadiq reached up and sprayed what appeared from my vantage to be thin air, but I could see the fine mist of droplets strike the membrane. A breathy susurration rose up, like the sound from a steam iron, and I felt a faint warm dampness before the first silken threads appeared, crisscrossing the region where the polymer from which the Wall was built had begun to shift conformations. In one state, the polymer was soluble, exposing hydrophilic groups of atoms that bound water into narrow sheets of feather-light gel. Now, triggered by the reagent and powered by sunlight, it was tucking these groups into slick, oily cages, and expelling every molecule of water, transforming the gel into a desiccated web.

I just hoped it wasn’t expelling anything else.

As the lacy net began to fall in folds at his feet, Hassan said something in Arabic, disgusted and amused. My grasp of the language remained patchy; Sadiq translated for me, his voice muffled by his face mask: “He says probably most of the weight of the thing will be dead insects.” He shooed the youths back towards the truck before following himself, as the wind blew a glistening curtain over our heads. It descended far too slowly to trap us, but I hastened up the slope.

We watched from the truck as the Wall came down, the wave of dehydration propagating along its length. If the gel had been an elusive sight close up, the residue was entirely invisible in the distance; there was less substance to it than a very long pantyhose—albeit, pantyhose clogged with gnats.

The smart polymer was the invention of Sonja Helvig, a Norwegian chemist; I’d tweaked her original design for this application. Sadiq and his students were civil engineers, responsible for scaling everything up to the point where it could have a practical benefit. On those terms, this experiment was still nothing but a minor field trial.

I turned to Sadiq. “You did some mine clearance once, didn’t you?”

“Years ago.” Before I could say anything more, he’d caught my drift. “You’re thinking that might have been more satisfying? Bang, and it’s gone, the proof is there in front of you?”

“One less mine, one less bomblet,” I said. “However many thousands there were to deal with, at least you could tick each one off as a definite achievement.”

“That’s true. It was a good feeling.” He shrugged. “But what should we do? Give up on this, because it’s harder?”

He took the truck down the slope, then supervised the students as they attached the wisps of polymer to the specialised winch they’d built. Hassan and Rashid were in their twenties, but they could easily have passed for adolescents. After the war, the dictator and his former backers in the west had found it mutually expedient to have a generation of Iraqi children grow up malnourished and without medical care, if they grew up at all. More than a million people had died under the sanctions. My own sick joke of a nation had sent part of its navy to join the blockade, while the rest stayed home to fend off boatloads of refugees from this, and other, atrocities. General Moustache was long dead, but his comrades-in-genocide with more salubrious addresses were all still at large: doing lecture tours, running think tanks, lobbying for the Nobel peace prize.

As the strands of polymer wound around a core inside the winch’s protective barrel, the alpha count rose steadily. It was a good sign: the fine particles of uranium oxide trapped by the Wall had remained bound to the polymer during dehydration, and the reeling in of the net. The radiation from the few grams of U-238 we’d collected was far too low to be a hazard in itself; the thing to avoid was ingesting the dust, and even then the unpleasant effects were as much chemical as radiological. Hopefully, the polymer had also bound its other targets: the organic carcinogens that had been strewn across Kuwait and southern Iraq by the apocalyptic oil well fires. There was no way to determine that until we did a full chemical analysis.

We were all in high spirits on the ride back. What we’d plucked from the wind in the last six weeks wouldn’t spare a single person from leukaemia, but it now seemed possible that over the years, over the decades, the technology would make a real difference.

I missed the connection in Singapore for a direct flight home to Sydney, so I had to go via Perth. There was a four-hour wait in Perth; I paced the transit lounge, restless and impatient. I hadn’t set eyes on Francine since she’d left Basra three months earlier; she didn’t approve of clogging up the limited bandwidth into Iraq with decadent video. When I’d called her from Singapore she’d been busy, and now I couldn’t decide whether or not to try again.

Just when I’d resolved to call her, an email came through on my notepad, saying that she’d received my message and would meet me at the airport.

In Sydney, I stood by the baggage carousel, searching the crowd. When I finally saw Francine approaching, she was looking straight at me, smiling. I left the carousel and walked towards her; she stopped and let me close the gap, keeping her eyes fixed on mine. There was a mischievousness to her expression, as if she’d arranged some kind of prank, but I couldn’t guess what it might be.

When I was almost in front of her, she turned slightly, and spread her arms. “Ta-da!”

I froze, speechless. Why hadn’t she told me?

I walked up to her and embraced her, but she’d read my expression. “Don’t be angry, Ben. I was afraid you’d come home early if you knew.”

“You’re right, I would have.” My thoughts were piling up on top of each other; I had three months’ worth of reactions to get through in fifteen seconds. We hadn’t planned this. We couldn’t afford it. I wasn’t ready.

Suddenly I started weeping, too shocked to be self-conscious in the crowd. The knot of panic and confusion inside me dissolved. I held her more tightly, and felt the swelling in her body against my hip.

“Are you happy?” Francine asked.

I laughed and nodded, choking out the words: “This is wonderful!”

I meant it. I was still afraid, but it was an exuberant fear. Another ocean had opened up before us. We would find our bearings. We would cross it together.

It took me several days to come down to Earth. We didn’t have a real chance to talk until the weekend; Francine had a teaching position at UNSW, and though she could have set her own research aside for a couple of days, marking could wait for no one. There were a thousand things to plan; the six-month UNESCO fellowship that had paid for me to take part in the project in Basra had expired, and I’d need to start earning money again soon, but the fact that I’d made no commitments yet gave me some welcome flexibility.

On Monday, alone in the flat again, I started catching up on all the journals I’d neglected. In Iraq I’d been obsessively single-minded, instructing my knowledge miner to keep me informed of work relevant to the Wall, to the exclusion of everything else.

Skimming through a summary of six months’ worth of papers, a report in Science caught my eye: An Experimental Model for Decoherence in the Many-Worlds Cosmology. A group at Delft University in the Netherlands had arranged for a simple quantum computer to carry out a sequence of arithmetic operations on a register which had been prepared to contain an equal superposition of binary representations of two different numbers. This in itself was nothing new; superpositions representing up to 128 numbers were now manipulated daily, albeit only under laboratory conditions, at close to absolute zero.

Unusually, though, at each stage of the calculation the qubits containing the numbers in question had been deliberately entangled with other, spare qubits in the computer. The effect of this was that the section performing the calculation had ceased to be in a pure quantum state: it behaved, not as if it contained two numbers simultaneously, but as if there were merely an equal chance of it containing either one. This had undermined the quantum nature of the calculation, just as surely as if the whole machine had been imperfectly shielded and become entangled with objects in the environment.

There was one crucial difference, though: in this case, the experimenters had still had access to the spare qubits that had made the calculation behave classically. When they performed an appropriate measurement on the state of the computer as a whole, it was shown to have remained in a superposition all along. A single observation couldn’t prove this, but the experiment had been repeated thousands of times, and within the margins of error, their prediction was confirmed: although the superposition had become undetectable when they ignored the spare qubits, it had never really gone away. Both classical calculations had always taken place simultaneously, even though they’d lost the ability to interact in a quantum-mechanical fashion.

I sat at my desk, pondering the result. On one level, it was just a scaling-up of the quantum eraser experiments of the ‘90s, but the image of a tiny computer program running through its paces, appearing “to itself” to be unique and alone, while in fact a second, equally oblivious version had been executing beside it all along, carried a lot more resonance than an interference experiment with photons. I’d become used to the idea of quantum computers performing several calculations at once, but that conjuring trick had always seemed abstract and ethereal, precisely because the parts continued to act as a complicated whole right to the end. What struck home here was the stark demonstration of the way each calculation could come to appear as a distinct classical history, as solid and mundane as the shuffling of beads on an abacus.

When Francine arrived home I was cooking dinner, but I grabbed my notepad and showed her the paper.

“Yeah, I’ve seen it,” she said.

“What do you think?”

She raised her hands and recoiled in mock alarm.

“I’m serious.”

“What do you want me to say? Does this prove the Many Worlds interpretation? No. Does it make it easier to understand, to have a toy model like this? Yes.”

“But does it sway you at all?” I persisted. “Do you believe the results would still hold, if they could be scaled up indefinitely?” From a toy universe, a handful of qubits, to the real one.

She shrugged. “I don’t really need to be swayed. I always thought the MWI was the most plausible interpretation anyway.”

I left it at that, and went back to the kitchen while she pulled out a stack of assignments.

That night, as we lay in bed together, I couldn’t get the Delft experiment out of my mind.

“Do you believe there are other versions of us?” I asked Francine.

“I suppose there must be.” She conceded the point as if it was something abstract and metaphysical, and I was being pedantic even to raise it. People who professed belief in the MWI never seemed to want to take it seriously, let alone personally.

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

“No,” she said blithely. “Since I’m powerless to change the situation, what’s the use in being upset about it?”

“That’s very pragmatic,” I said. Francine reached over and thumped me on the shoulder. “That was a compliment!” I protested. “I envy you for having come to terms with it so easily.”

“I haven’t, really,” she admitted. “I’ve just resolved not to let it worry me, which isn’t quite the same thing.”

I turned to face her, though in the near-darkness we could barely see each other. I said, “What gives you the most satisfaction in life?”

“I take it you’re not in the mood to be fobbed off with a soppy romantic answer?” She sighed. “I don’t know. Solving problems. Getting things right.”

“What if for every problem you solve, there’s someone just like you who fails, instead?”

“I cope with my failures,” she said. “Let them cope with theirs.”

“You know it doesn’t work like that. Some of them simply don’t cope. Whatever you find the strength to do, there’ll be someone else who won’t.”

Francine had no reply.

I said, “A couple of weeks ago, I asked Sadiq about the time he was doing mine clearance. He said it was more satisfying than mopping up DU; one little explosion, right before your eyes, and you know you’ve done something worthwhile. We all get moments in our lives like that, with that pure, unambiguous sense of achievement: whatever else we might screw up, at least there’s one thing that we’ve done right.” I laughed uneasily. “I think I’d go mad, if I couldn’t rely on that.”

Francine said, “You can. Nothing you’ve done will ever disappear from under your feet. No one’s going to march up and take it away from you.”

“I know.” My skin crawled, at the image of some less favoured alter ego turning up on our doorstep, demanding his dues. “That seems so fucking selfish, though. I don’t want everything that makes me happy to be at the expense of someone else. I don’t want every choice to be like ... fighting other versions of myself for the prize in some zero-sum game.”

“No.” Francine hesitated. “But if the reality is like that, what can you do about it?”

Her words hung in the darkness. What could I do about it? Nothing. So did I really want to dwell on it, corroding the foundations of my own happiness, when there was absolutely nothing to be gained, for anyone?

“You’re right. This is crazy.” I leant over and kissed her. “I’d better let you get to sleep.”

“It’s not crazy,” she said. “But I don’t have any answers.”

The next morning, after Francine had left for work, I picked up my notepad and saw that she’d mailed me an e-book: an anthology of cheesy “alternate (sic) history” stories from the ‘90s, entitled My God, It’s Full of Tsars! “What if Gandhi had been a ruthless soldier of fortune? What if Theodore Roosevelt had faced a Martian invasion? What if the Nazis had had Janet Jackson’s choreographer?”

I skimmed through the introduction, alternately cackling and groaning, then filed the book away and got down to work. I had a dozen minor administrative tasks to complete for UNESCO, before I could start searching in earnest for my next position.

By mid-afternoon, I was almost done, but the growing sense of achievement I felt at having buckled down and cleared away these tedious obligations brought with it the corollary: someone infinitesimally different from me—someone who had shared my entire history up until that morning—had procrastinated instead. The triviality of this observation only made it more unsettling; the Delft experiment was seeping into my daily life on the most mundane level.

I dug out the book Francine had sent and tried reading a few of the stories, but the authors’ relentlessly camp take on the premise hardly amounted to a reductio ad absurdum, or even a comical existential balm. I didn’t really care how hilarious it would have been if Marilyn Monroe had been involved in a bedroom farce with Richard Feynman and Richard Nixon. I just wanted to lose the suffocating conviction that everything I had become was a mirage; that my life had been nothing but a blinkered view of a kind of torture chamber, where every glorious reprieve I’d ever celebrated had in fact been an unwitting betrayal.

If fiction had no comfort to offer, what about fact? Even if the Many Worlds cosmology was correct, no one knew for certain what the consequences were. It was a fallacy that literally everything that was physically possible had to occur; most cosmologists I’d read believed that the universe as a whole possessed a single, definite quantum state, and while that state would appear from within as a multitude of distinct classical histories, there was no reason to assume that these histories amounted to some kind of exhaustive catalogue. The same thing held true on a smaller scale: every time two people sat down to a game of chess, there was no reason to believe that they played every possible game.

And if I’d stood in an alley, nine years before, struggling with my conscience? My subjective sense of indecision proved nothing, but even if I’d suffered no qualms and acted without hesitation, to find a human being in a quantum state of pure, unshakeable resolve would have been freakishly unlikely at best, and in fact was probably physically impossible.

“Fuck this.” I didn’t know when I’d set myself up for this bout of paranoia, but I wasn’t going to indulge it for another second. I banged my head against the desk a few times, then picked up my notepad and went straight to an employment site.

The thoughts didn’t vanish entirely; it was too much like trying not to think of a pink elephant. Each time they recurred, though, I found I could shout them down with threats of taking myself straight to a psychiatrist. The prospect of having to explain such a bizarre mental problem was enough to give me access to hitherto untapped reserves of self-discipline.

By the time I started cooking dinner, I was feeling merely foolish. If Francine mentioned the subject again, I’d make a joke of it. I didn’t need a psychiatrist. I was a little insecure about my good fortune, and still somewhat rattled by the news of impending fatherhood, but it would hardly have been healthier to take everything for granted.

My notepad chimed. Francine had blocked the video again, as if bandwidth, even here, was as precious as water.

“Hello.”

“Ben? I’ve had some bleeding. I’m in a taxi. Can you meet me at St Vincent’s?”

Her voice was steady, but my own mouth went dry. “Sure. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” I couldn’t add anything: I love you, it will be all right, hold on. She didn’t need that, it would have jinxed everything.

Half an hour later, I was still caught in traffic, white-knuckled with rage and helplessness. I stared down at the dashboard, at the real-time map with every other gridlocked vehicle marked, and finally stopped deluding myself that at any moment I would turn into a magically deserted side-street and weave my way across the city in just a few more minutes.

In the ward, behind the curtains drawn around her bed, Francine lay curled and rigid, her back turned, refusing to look at me. All I could do was stand beside her. The gynaecologist was yet to explain everything properly, but the miscarriage had been accompanied by complications, and she’d had to perform surgery.

Before I’d applied for the UNESCO fellowship, we’d discussed the risks. For two prudent, well-informed, short-term visitors, the danger had seemed microscopic. Francine had never travelled out into the desert with me, and even for the locals in Basra the rates of birth defects and miscarriages had fallen a long way from their peaks. We were both taking contraceptives; condoms had seemed like overkill. Had I brought it back to her, from the desert? A speck of dust, trapped beneath my foreskin? Had I poisoned her while we were making love?

Francine turned towards me. The skin around her eyes was grey and swollen, and I could see how much effort it took for her to meet my gaze. She drew her hands out from under the bedclothes, and let me hold them; they were freezing.

After a while, she started sobbing, but she wouldn’t release my hands. I stroked the back of her thumb with my own thumb, a tiny, gentle movement.

2020

“How do you feel now?” Olivia Maslin didn’t quite make eye contact as she addressed me; the image of my brain activity painted on her retinas was clearly holding her attention.

“Fine,” I said. “Exactly the same as I did before you started the infusion.”

I was reclining on something like a dentist’s couch, halfway between sitting and lying, wearing a tight-fitting cap studded with magnetic sensors and inducers. It was impossible to ignore the slight coolness of the liquid flowing into the vein in my forearm, but that sensation was no different than it had been on the previous occasion, a fortnight before.

“Could you count to ten for me, please.”

I obliged.

“Now close your eyes and picture the same familiar face as the last time.”

She’d told me I could choose anyone; I’d picked Francine. I brought back the image, then suddenly recalled that, the first time, after contemplating the detailed picture in my head for a few seconds—as if I was preparing to give a description to the police—I’d started thinking about Francine herself. On cue, the same transition occurred again: the frozen, forensic likeness became flesh and blood.

I was led through the whole sequence of activities once more: reading the same short story (“Two Old-Timers” by F. Scott Fitzgerald), listening to the same piece of music (from Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie), recounting the same childhood memory (my first day at school). At some point, I lost any trace of anxiety about repeating my earlier mental states with sufficient fidelity; after all, the experiment had been designed to cope with the inevitable variation between the two sessions. I was just one volunteer out of dozens, and half the subjects would be receiving nothing but saline on both occasions. For all I knew, I was one of them: a control, merely setting the baseline against which any real effect would be judged.

If I was receiving the coherence disruptors, though, then as far as I could tell they’d had no effect on me. My inner life hadn’t evaporated as the molecules bound to the microtubules in my neurons, guaranteeing that any kind of quantum coherence those structures might otherwise have maintained would be lost to the environment in a fraction of a picosecond.

Personally, I’d never subscribed to Penrose’s theory that quantum effects might play a role in consciousness; calculations dating back to a seminal paper by Max Tegmark, twenty years before, had already made sustained coherence in any neural structure extremely unlikely. Nevertheless, it had taken considerable ingenuity on the part of Olivia and her team to rule out the idea definitively, in a series of clear-cut experiments. Over the past two years, they’d chased the ghost away from each of the various structures that different factions of Penrose’s disciples had anointed as the essential quantum components of the brain. The earliest proposal—the microtubules, huge polymeric molecules that formed a kind of skeleton inside every cell—had turned out to be the hardest to target for disruption. But now it was entirely possible that the cytoskeletons of my very own neurons were dotted with molecules that coupled them strongly to a noisy microwave field in which my skull was, definitely, bathed. In which case, my microtubules had about as much chance of exploiting quantum effects as I had of playing a game of squash with a version of myself from a parallel universe.

When the experiment was over, Olivia thanked me, then became even more distant as she reviewed the data. Raj, one of her graduate students, slid out the needle and stuck a plaster over the tiny puncture wound, then helped me out of the cap.

“I know you don’t know yet if I was a control or not,” I said, “but have you noticed significant differences, with anyone?” I was almost the last subject in the microtubule trials; any effect should have shown up by now.

Olivia smiled enigmatically. “You’ll just have to wait for publication.” Raj leant down and whispered, “No, never.”

I climbed off the couch. “The zombie walks!” Raj declaimed. I lunged hungrily for his brain; he ducked away, laughing, while Olivia watched us with an expression of pained indulgence. Die-hard members of the Penrose camp claimed that Olivia’s experiments proved nothing, because even if people behaved identically while all quantum effects were ruled out, they could be doing this as mere automata, totally devoid of consciousness. When Olivia had offered to let her chief detractor experience coherence disruption for himself, he’d replied that this would be no more persuasive, because memories laid down while you were a zombie would be indistinguishable from ordinary memories, so that looking back on the experience, you’d notice nothing unusual.

This was sheer desperation; you might as well assert that everyone in the world but yourself was a zombie, and you were one, too, every second Tuesday. As the experiments were repeated by other groups around the world, those people who’d backed the Penrose theory as a scientific hypothesis, rather than adopting it as a kind of mystical dogma, would gradually accept that it had been refuted.

I left the neuroscience building and walked across the campus, back towards my office in the physics department. It was a mild, clear spring morning, with students out lying on the grass, dozing off with books balanced over their faces like tents. There were still some advantages to reading from old-fashioned sheaves of e-paper. I’d only had my own eyes chipped the year before, and though I’d adapted to the technology easily enough, I still found it disconcerting to wake on a Sunday morning to find Francine reading the Herald beside me with her eyes shut.

Olivia’s results didn’t surprise me, but it was satisfying to have the matter resolved once and for all: consciousness was a purely classical phenomenon. Among other things, this meant that there was no compelling reason to believe that software running on a classical computer could not be conscious. Of course, everything in the universe obeyed quantum mechanics at some level, but Paul Benioff, one of the pioneers of quantum computing, had shown back in the ‘80s that you could build a classical Turing machine from quantum mechanical parts, and over the last few years, in my spare time, I’d studied the branch of quantum computing theory that concerned itself with avoiding quantum effects.

Back in my office, I summoned up a schematic of the device I called the Qusp: the quantum singleton processor. The Qusp would employ all the techniques designed to shield the latest generation of quantum computers from entanglement with their environment, but it would use them to a very different end. A quantum computer was shielded so it could perform a multitude of parallel calculations, without each one spawning a separate history of its own, in which only one answer was accessible. The Qusp would perform just a single calculation at a time, but on its way to the unique result it would be able to pass safely through superpositions that included any number of alternatives, without those alternatives being made real. Cut off from the outside world during each computational step, it would keep its temporary quantum ambivalence as private and inconsequential as a daydream, never being forced to act out every possibility it dared to entertain.

The Qusp would still need to interact with its environment whenever it gathered data about the world, and that interaction would inevitably split it into different versions. If you attached a camera to the Qusp and pointed it at an ordinary object—a rock, a plant, a bird—that object could hardly be expected to possess a single classical history, and so neither would the combined system of Qusp plus rock, Qusp plus plant, Qusp plus bird.

The Qusp itself, though, would never initiate the split. In a given set of circumstances, it would only ever produce a single response. An AI running on the Qusp could make its decisions as whimsically, or with as much weighty deliberation as it liked, but for each distinct scenario it confronted, in the end it would only make one choice, only follow one course of action.

I closed the file, and the image vanished from my retinas. For all the work I’d put into the design, I’d made no effort to build the thing. I’d been using it as little more than a talisman: whenever I found myself picturing my life as a tranquil dwelling built over a slaughter house, I’d summon up the Qusp as a symbol of hope. It was proof of a possibility, and a possibility was all it took. Nothing in the laws of physics could prevent a small portion of humanity’s descendants from escaping their ancestors’ dissipation.

Yet I’d shied away from any attempt to see that promise fulfilled, firsthand. In part, I’d been afraid of delving too deeply and uncovering a flaw in the Qusp’s design, robbing myself of the one crutch that kept me standing when the horror swept over me. It had also been a matter of guilt: I’d been the one granted happiness, so many times, that it had seemed unconscionable to aspire to that state yet again. I’d knocked so many of my hapless cousins out of the ring, it was time I threw a fight and let the prize go to my opponent instead.

That last excuse was idiotic. The stronger my determination to build the Qusp, the more branches there would be in which it was real. Weakening my resolve was not an act of charity, surrendering the benefits to someone else; it merely impoverished every future version of me, and everyone they touched.

I did have a third excuse. It was time I dealt with that one, too.

I called Francine.

“Are you free for lunch?” I asked. She hesitated; there was always work she could be doing. “To discuss the Cauchy-Riemann equations?” I suggested.

She smiled. It was our code, when the request was a special one. “All right. One o’clock?”

I nodded. “I’ll see you then.”

Francine was twenty minutes late, but that was less of a wait than I was used to. She’d been appointed deputy head of the mathematics department eighteen months before, and she still had some teaching duties as well as all the new administrative work. Over the last eight years, I’d had a dozen short-term contracts with various bodies—government departments, corporations, NGOs—before finally ending up as a very lowly member of the physics department at our alma mater. I did envy her the prestige and security of her job, but I’d been happy with most of the work I’d done, even if it had been too scattered between disciplines to contribute to anything like a traditional career path.

I’d bought Francine a plate of cheese-and-salad sandwiches, and she attacked them hungrily as soon as she sat down. I said, “I’ve got ten minutes at the most, haven’t I?”

She covered her mouth with her hand and replied defensively, “It could have waited until tonight, couldn’t it?”

“Sometimes I can’t put things off. I have to act while I still have the courage.”

At this ominous prelude she chewed more slowly. “You did the second stage of Olivia’s experiment this morning, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.” I’d discussed the whole procedure with her before I volunteered.

“So I take it you didn’t lose consciousness, when your neurons became marginally more classical than usual?” She sipped chocolate milk through a straw.

“No. Apparently no one ever loses anything. That’s not official yet, but—”

Francine nodded, unsurprised. We shared the same position on the Penrose theory; there was no need to discuss it again now.

I said, “I want to know if you’re going to have the operation.”

She continued drinking for a few more seconds, then released the straw and wiped her upper lip with her thumb, unnecessarily. “You want me to make up my mind about that, here and now?”

“No.” The damage to her uterus from the miscarriage could be repaired; we’d been discussing the possibility for almost five years. We’d both had comprehensive chelation therapy to remove any trace of U-238. We could have children in the usual way with a reasonable degree of safety, if that was what we wanted. “But if you’ve already decided, I want you to tell me now.”

Francine looked wounded. “That’s unfair.”

“What is? Implying that you might not have told me, the instant you decided?”

“No. Implying that it’s all in my hands.”

I said, “I’m not washing my hands of the decision. You know how I feel. But you know I’d back you all the way, if you said you wanted to carry a child.” I believed I would have. Maybe it was a form of doublethink, but I couldn’t treat the birth of one more ordinary child as some kind of atrocity, and refuse to be a part of it.

“Fine. But what will you do if I don’t?” She examined my face calmly. I think she already knew, but she wanted me to spell it out.

“We could always adopt,” I observed casually.

“Yes, we could do that.” She smiled slightly; she knew that made me lose my ability to bluff, even faster than when she stared me down.

I stopped pretending that there was any mystery left; she’d seen right through me from the start. I said, “I just don’t want to do this, then discover that it makes you feel that you’ve been cheated out of what you really wanted.”

“It wouldn’t,” she insisted. “It wouldn’t rule out anything. We could still have a natural child as well.”

“Not as easily.” This would not be like merely having workaholic parents, or an ordinary brother or sister to compete with for attention.

“You only want to do this if I can promise you that it’s the only child we’d ever have?” Francine shook her head. “I’m not going to promise that. I don’t intend having the operation any time soon, but I’m not going to swear that I won’t change my mind. Nor am I going to swear that if we do this it will make no difference to what happens later. It will be a factor. How could it not be? But it won’t be enough to rule anything in or out.”

I looked away, across the rows of tables, at all the students wrapped up in their own concerns. She was right; I was being unreasonable. I’d wanted this to be a choice with no possible downside, a way of making the best of our situation, but no one could guarantee that. It would be a gamble, like everything else.

I turned back to Francine.

“All right; I’ll stop trying to pin you down. What I want to do right now is go ahead and build the Qusp. And when it’s finished, if we’re certain we can trust it ... I want us to raise a child with it. I want us to raise an AI.”

2029

I met Francine at the airport, and we drove across São Paulo through curtains of wild, lashing rain. I was amazed that her plane hadn’t been diverted; a tropical storm had just hit the coast, halfway between us and Rio.

“So much for giving you a tour of the city,” I lamented. Through the windscreen, our actual surroundings were all but invisible; the bright overlay we both perceived, surreally coloured and detailed, made the experience rather like perusing a 3D map while trapped in a car wash.

Francine was pensive, or tired from the flight. I found it hard to think of San Francisco as remote when the time difference was so small, and even when I’d made the journey north to visit her, it had been nothing compared to all the ocean-spanning marathons I’d sat through in the past.

We both had an early night. The next morning, Francine accompanied me to my cluttered workroom in the basement of the university’s engineering department. I’d been chasing grants and collaborators around the world, like a child on a treasure hunt, slowly piecing together a device that few of my colleagues believed was worth creating for its own sake. Fortunately, I’d managed to find pretexts—or even genuine spin-offs—for almost every stage of the work. Quantum computing, per se, had become bogged down in recent years, stymied by both a shortage of practical algorithms and a limit to the complexity of superpositions that could be sustained. The Qusp had nudged the technological envelope in some promising directions, without making any truly exorbitant demands; the states it juggled were relatively simple, and they only needed to be kept isolated for milliseconds at a time.

I introduced Carlos, Maria and Jun, but then they made themselves scarce as I showed Francine around. We still had a demonstration of the “balanced decoupling” principle set up on a bench, for the tour by one of our corporate donors the week before. What caused an imperfectly shielded quantum computer to decohere was the fact that each possible state of the device affected its environment slightly differently. The shielding itself could always be improved, but Carlos’s group had perfected a way to buy a little more protection by sheer deviousness. In the demonstration rig, the flow of energy through the device remained absolutely constant whatever state it was in, because any drop in power consumption by the main set of quantum gates was compensated for by a rise in a set of balancing gates, and vice versa. This gave the environment one less clue by which to discern internal differences in the processor, and to tear any superposition apart into mutually disconnected branches.

Francine knew all the theory backwards, but she’d never seen this hardware in action. When I invited her to twiddle the controls, she took to the rig like a child with a game console.

“You really should have joined the team,” I said.

“Maybe I did,” she countered. “In another branch.”

She’d moved from UNSW to Berkeley two years before, not long after I’d moved from Delft to São Paulo; it was the closest suitable position she could find. At the time, I’d resented the fact that she’d refused to compromise and work remotely; with only five hours’ difference, teaching at Berkeley from São Paulo would not have been impossible. In the end, though, I’d accepted the fact that she’d wanted to keep on testing me, testing both of us. If we weren’t strong enough to stay together through the trials of a prolonged physical separation—or if I was not sufficiently committed to the project to endure whatever sacrifices it entailed—she did not want us proceeding to the next stage.

I led her to the corner bench, where a nondescript grey box half a metre across sat, apparently inert. I gestured to it, and our retinal overlays transformed its appearance, “revealing” a maze with a transparent lid embedded in the top of the device. In one chamber of the maze, a slightly cartoonish mouse sat motionless. Not quite dead, not quite sleeping.

“This is the famous Zelda?” Francine asked.

“Yes.” Zelda was a neural network, a stripped-down, stylised mouse brain. There were newer, fancier versions available, much closer to the real thing, but the ten-year-old, public domain Zelda had been good enough for our purposes.

Three other chambers held cheese. “Right now, she has no experience of the maze,” I explained. “So let’s start her up and watch her explore.” I gestured, and Zelda began scampering around, trying out different passages, deftly reversing each time she hit a cul-de-sac. “Her brain is running on a Qusp, but the maze is implemented on an ordinary classical computer, so in terms of coherence issues, it’s really no different from a physical maze.”

“Which means that each time she takes in information, she gets entangled with the outside world,” Francine suggested.

“Absolutely. But she always holds off doing that until the Qusp has completed its current computational step, and every qubit contains a definite zero or a definite one. She’s never in two minds when she lets the world in, so the entanglement process doesn’t split her into separate branches.”

Francine continued to watch, in silence. Zelda finally found one of the chambers containing a reward; when she’d eaten it, a hand scooped her up and returned her to her starting point, then replaced the cheese.

“Here are ten thousand previous trials, superimposed.” I replayed the data. It looked as if a single mouse was running through the maze, moving just as we’d seen her move when I’d begun the latest experiment. Restored each time to exactly the same starting condition, and confronted with exactly the same environment, Zelda—like any computer program with no truly random influences—had simply repeated herself. All ten thousand trials had yielded identical results.

To a casual observer, unaware of the context, this would have been a singularly unimpressive performance. Faced with exactly one situation, Zelda the virtual mouse did exactly one thing. So what? If you’d been able to wind back a flesh-and-blood mouse’s memory with the same degree of precision, wouldn’t it have repeated itself too?

Francine said, “Can you cut off the shielding? And the balanced decoupling?”

“Yep.” I obliged her, and initiated a new trial.

Zelda took a different path this time, exploring the maze by a different route. Though the initial condition of the neural net was identical, the switching processes taking place within the Qusp were now opened up to the environment constantly, and superpositions of several different eigenstates—states in which the Qusp’s qubits possessed definite binary values, which in turn led to Zelda making definite choices—were becoming entangled with the outside world. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, this interaction was randomly “collapsing” the superpositions into single eigenstates; Zelda was still doing just one thing at a time, but her behaviour had ceased to be deterministic. According to the MWI, the interaction was transforming the environment—Francine and me included—into a superposition with components that were coupled to each eigenstate; Zelda was actually running the maze in many different ways simultaneously, and other versions of us were seeing her take all those other routes.

Which scenario was correct?

I said, “I’ll reconfigure everything now, to wrap the whole setup in a Delft cage.” A “Delft cage” was jargon for the situation I’d first read about seventeen years before: instead of opening up the Qusp to the environment, I’d connect it to a second quantum computer, and let that play the role of the outside world.

We could no longer watch Zelda moving about in real time, but after the trial was completed, it was possible to test the combined system of both computers against the hypothesis that it was in a pure quantum state in which Zelda had run the maze along hundreds of different routes, all at once. I displayed a representation of the conjectured state, built up by superimposing all the paths she’d taken in ten thousand unshielded trials.

The test result flashed up: CONSISTENT.

“One measurement proves nothing,” Francine pointed out.

“No.” I repeated the trial. Again, the hypothesis was not refuted. If Zelda had actually run the maze along just one path, the probability of the computers’ joint state passing this imperfect test was about one percent. For passing it twice, the odds were about one in ten thousand.

I repeated it a third time, then a fourth.

Francine said, “That’s enough.” She actually looked queasy. The image of the hundreds of blurred mouse trails on the display was not a literal photograph of anything, but if the old Delft experiment had been enough to give me a visceral sense of the reality of the multiverse, perhaps this demonstration had finally done the same for her.

“Can I show you one more thing?” I asked.

“Keep the Delft cage, but restore the Qusp’s shielding?”

“Right.”

I did it. The Qusp was now fully protected once more whenever it was not in an eigenstate, but this time, it was the second quantum computer, not the outside world, to which it was intermittently exposed. If Zelda split into multiple branches again, then she’d only take that fake environment with her, and we’d still have our hands on all the evidence.

Tested against the hypothesis that no split had occurred, the verdict was: CONSISTENT. CONSISTENT. CONSISTENT.

We went out to dinner with the whole of the team, but Francine pleaded a headache and left early. She insisted that I stay and finish the meal, and I didn’t argue; she was not the kind of person who expected you to assume that she was being politely selfless, while secretly hoping to be contradicted.

After Francine had left, Maria turned to me. “So you two are really going ahead with the Frankenchild?” She’d been teasing me about this for as long as I’d known her, but apparently she hadn’t been game to raise the subject in Francine’s presence.

“We still have to talk about it.” I felt uncomfortable myself, now, discussing the topic the moment Francine was absent. Confessing my ambition when I applied to join the team was one thing; it would have been dishonest to keep my collaborators in the dark about my ultimate intentions. Now that the enabling technology was more or less completed, though, the issue seemed far more personal.

Carlos said breezily, “Why not? There are so many others now. Sophie. Linus. Theo. Probably a hundred we don’t even know about. It’s not as if Ben’s child won’t have playmates.” Adai—Autonomously Developing Artificial Intelligences—had been appearing in a blaze of controversy every few months for the last four years. A Swiss researcher, Isabelle Schib, had taken the old models of morphogenesis that had led to software like Zelda, refined the technique by several orders of magnitude, and applied it to human genetic data. Wedded to sophisticated prosthetic bodies, Isabelle’s creations inhabited the physical world and learnt from their experience, just like any other child.

Jun shook his head reprovingly. “I wouldn’t raise a child with no legal rights. What happens when you die? For all you know, it could end up as someone’s property.”

I’d been over this with Francine. “I can’t believe that in ten or twenty years’ time there won’t be citizenship laws, somewhere in the world.”

Jun snorted. “Twenty years! How long did it take the U.S. to emancipate their slaves?”

Carlos interjected, “Who’s going to create an adai just to use it as a slave? If you want something biddable, write ordinary software. If you need consciousness, humans are cheaper.”

Maria said, “It won’t come down to economics. It’s the nature of the things that will determine how they’re treated.”

“You mean the xenophobia they’ll face?” I suggested.

Maria shrugged. “You make it sound like racism, but we aren’t talking about human beings. Once you have software with goals of its own, free to do whatever it likes, where will it end? The first generation makes the next one better, faster, smarter; the second generation even more so. Before we know it, we’re like ants to them.”

Carlos groaned. “Not that hoary old fallacy! If you really believe that stating the analogy ‘ants are to humans, as humans are to x’ is proof that it’s possible to solve for x, then I’ll meet you where the south pole is like the equator.”

I said, “The Qusp runs no faster than an organic brain; we need to keep the switching rate low, because that makes the shielding requirements less stringent. It might be possible to nudge those parameters, eventually, but there’s no reason in the world why an adai would be better equipped to do that than you or I would. As for making their own offspring smarter ... even if Schib’s group has been perfectly successful, they will have merely translated human neural development from one substrate to another. They won’t have ‘improved’ on the process at all—whatever that might mean. So if the adai have any advantage over us, it will be no more than the advantage shared by flesh-and-blood children: cultural transmission of one more generation’s worth of experience.”

Maria frowned, but she had no immediate comeback.

Jun said dryly, “Plus immortality.”

“Well, yes, there is that,” I conceded.

Francine was awake when I arrived home.

“Have you still got a headache?” I whispered.

“No.”

I undressed and climbed into bed beside her.

She said, “You know what I miss the most? When we’re fucking on-line?”

“This had better not be complicated; I’m out of practice.”

“Kissing.”

I kissed her, slowly and tenderly, and she melted beneath me. “Three more months,” I promised, “and I’ll move up to Berkeley.”

“To be my kept man.”

“I prefer the term ‘unpaid but highly valued caregiver.’” Francine stiffened. I said, “We can talk about that later.” I started kissing her again, but she turned her face away.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

“So am I,” I assured her. “That’s a good sign. Everything worth doing is terrifying.”

“But not everything terrifying is good.”

I rolled over and lay beside her. She said, “On one level, it’s easy. What greater gift could you give a child, than the power to make real decisions? What worse fate could you spare her from, than being forced to act against her better judgment, over and over? When you put it like that, it’s simple.

“But every fibre in my body still rebels against it. How will she feel, knowing what she is? How will she make friends? How will she belong? How will she not despise us for making her a freak? And what if we’re robbing her of something she’d value: living a billion lives, never being forced to choose between them? What if she sees the gift as a kind of impoverishment?”

“She can always drop the shielding on the Qusp,” I said. “Once she understands the issues, she can choose for herself.”

“That’s true.” Francine did not sound mollified at all; she would have thought of that long before I’d mentioned it, but she wasn’t looking for concrete answers. Every ordinary human instinct screamed at us that we were embarking on something dangerous, unnatural, hubristic—but those instincts were more about safeguarding our own reputations than protecting our child-to-be. No parent, save the most wilfully negligent, would be pilloried if their flesh-and-blood child turned out to be ungrateful for life; if I’d railed against my own mother and father because I’d found fault in the existential conditions with which I’d been lumbered, it wasn’t hard to guess which side would attract the most sympathy from the world at large. Anything that went wrong with our child would be grounds for lynching—however much love, sweat, and soul-searching had gone into her creation—because we’d had the temerity to be dissatisfied with the kind of fate that everyone else happily inflicted on their own.

I said, “You saw Zelda today, spread across the branches. You know, deep down now, that the same thing happens to all of us.”

“Yes.” Something tore inside me as Francine uttered that admission. I’d never really wanted her to feel it, the way I did.

I persisted. “Would you willingly sentence your own child to that condition? And your grandchildren? And your great-grandchildren?”

“No,” Francine replied. A part of her hated me now; I could hear it in her voice. It was my curse, my obsession; before she met me, she’d managed to believe and not believe, taking her acceptance of the multiverse lightly.

I said, “I can’t do this without you.”

“You can, actually. More easily than any of the alternatives. You wouldn’t even need a stranger to donate an egg.”

“I can’t do it unless you’re behind me. If you say the word, I’ll stop here. We’ve built the Qusp. We’ve shown that it can work. Even if we don’t do this last part ourselves, someone else will, in a decade or two.”

“If we don’t do this,” Francine observed acerbically, “we’ll simply do it in another branch.”

I said, “That’s true, but it’s no use thinking that way. In the end, I can’t function unless I pretend that my choices are real. I doubt that anyone can.”

Francine was silent for a long time. I stared up into the darkness of the room, trying hard not to contemplate the near certainty that her decision would go both ways.

Finally, she spoke.

“Then let’s make a child who doesn’t need to pretend.”

2031

Isabelle Schib welcomed us into her office. In person, she was slightly less intimidating than she was on-line; it wasn’t anything different in her appearance or manner, just the ordinariness of her surroundings. I’d envisaged her ensconced in some vast, pristine, high-tech building, not a couple of pokey rooms on a back-street in Basel.

Once the pleasantries were out of the way, Isabelle got straight to the point. “You’ve been accepted,” she announced. “I’ll send you the contract later today.”

My throat constricted with panic; I should have been elated, but I just felt unprepared. Isabelle’s group licensed only three new adai a year. The short-list had come down to about a hundred couples, winnowed from tens of thousands of applicants. We’d travelled to Switzerland for the final selection process, carried out by an agency that ordinarily handled adoptions. Through all the interviews and questionnaires, all the personality tests and scenario challenges, I’d managed to half-convince myself that our dedication would win through in the end, but that had been nothing but a prop to keep my spirits up.

Francine said calmly, “Thank you.”

I coughed. “You’re happy with everything we’ve proposed?” If there was going to be a proviso thrown in that rendered this miracle worthless, better to hear it now, before the shock had worn off and I’d started taking things for granted.

Isabelle nodded. “I don’t pretend to be an expert in the relevant fields, but I’ve had the Qusp’s design assessed by several colleagues, and I see no reason why it wouldn’t be an appropriate form of hardware for an adai. I’m entirely agnostic about the MWI, so I don’t share your view that the Qusp is a necessity, but if you were worried that I might write you off as cranks because of it,” she smiled slightly, “you should meet some of the other people I’ve had to deal with.

“I believe you have the adai’s welfare at heart, and you’re not suffering from any of the superstitions—technophobic or technophilic—that would distort the relationship. And as you’ll recall, I’ll be entitled to visits and inspections throughout your period of guardianship. If you’re found to be violating any of the terms of the contract, your licence will be revoked, and I’ll take charge of the adai.”

Francine said, “What do you think the prospects are for a happier end to our guardianship?”

“I’m lobbying the European parliament, constantly,” Isabelle replied. “Of course, in a few years’ time several adai will reach the stage where their personal testimony begins contributing to the debate, but none of us should wait until then. The ground has to be prepared.”

We spoke for almost an hour, on this and other issues. Isabelle had become quite an expert at fending off the attentions of the media; she promised to send us a handbook on this, along with the contract.

“Did you want to meet Sophie?” Isabelle asked, almost as an afterthought.

Francine said, “That would be wonderful.” Francine and I had seen a video of Sophie at age four, undergoing a battery of psychological tests, but we’d never had a chance to converse with her, let alone meet her face to face.

The three of us left the office together, and Isabelle drove us to her home on the outskirts of the town.

In the car, the reality began sinking in anew. I felt the same mixture of exhilaration and claustrophobia that I’d experienced nineteen years before, when Francine had met me at the airport with news of her pregnancy. No digital conception had yet taken place, but if sex had ever felt half as loaded with risks and responsibilities as this, I would have remained celibate for life.

“No badgering, no interrogation,” Isabelle warned us as she pulled into the driveway.

I said, “Of course not.”

Isabelle called out, “Marco! Sophie!” as we followed her through the door. At the end of the hall, I heard childish giggling, and an adult male voice whispering in French. Then Isabelle’s husband stepped out from behind the corner, a smiling, dark-haired young man, with Sophie riding on his shoulders. At first I couldn’t look at her; I just smiled politely back at Marco, while noting glumly that he was at least fifteen years younger than I was. How could I even think of doing this, at forty-six? Then I glanced up, and caught Sophie’s eye. She gazed straight back at me for a moment, appearing curious and composed, but then a fit of shyness struck her, and she buried her face in Marco’s hair.

Isabelle introduced us, in English; Sophie was being raised to speak four languages, though in Switzerland that was hardly phenomenal. Sophie said, “Hello” but kept her eyes lowered. Isabelle said, “Come into the living room. Would you like something to drink?”

The five of us sipped lemonade, and the adults made polite, superficial conversation. Sophie sat on Marco’s knees, squirming restlessly, sneaking glances at us. She looked exactly like an ordinary, slightly gawky, six-year-old girl. She had Isabelle’s straw-coloured hair, and Marco’s brown eyes; whether by fiat or rigorous genetic simulation, she could have passed for their biological daughter. I’d read technical specifications describing her body, and seen an earlier version in action on the video, but the fact that it looked so plausible was the least of its designers’ achievements. Watching her drinking, wriggling and fidgeting, I had no doubt that she felt herself inhabiting this skin, as much as I did my own. She was not a puppeteer posing as a child, pulling electronic strings from some dark cavern in her skull.

“Do you like lemonade?” I asked her.

She stared at me for a moment, as if wondering whether she should be affronted by the presumptuousness of this question, then replied, “It tickles.”

In the taxi to the hotel, Francine held my hand tightly.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“Yes, of course.”

In the elevator, she started crying. I wrapped my arms around her.

“She would have turned eighteen this year.”

“I know.”

“Do you think she’s alive, somewhere?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s a good way to think about it.”

Francine wiped her eyes. “No. This will be her. That’s the way to see it. This will be my girl. Just a few years late.”

Before flying home, we visited a small pathology lab, and left samples of our blood.

Our daughter’s first five bodies reached us a month before her birth. I unpacked all five, and laid them out in a row on the living room floor. With their muscles slack and their eyes rolled up, they looked more like tragic mummies than sleeping infants. I dismissed that grisly image; better to think of them as suits of clothes. The only difference was that we hadn’t bought pyjamas quite so far ahead.

From wrinkled pink newborn to chubby eighteen-month-old, the progression made an eerie sight—even if an organic child’s development, short of serious disease or malnourishment, would have been scarcely less predictable. A colleague of Francine’s had lectured me a few weeks before about the terrible “mechanical determinism” we’d be imposing on our child, and though his arguments had been philosophically naive, this sequence of immutable snapshots from the future still gave me goose bumps.

The truth was, reality as a whole was deterministic, whether you had a Qusp for a brain or not; the quantum state of the multiverse at any moment determined the entire future. Personal experience—confined to one branch at a time—certainly appeared probabilistic, because there was no way to predict which local future you’d experience when a branch split, but the reason it was impossible to know that in advance was because the real answer was “all of them”.

For a singleton, the only difference was that branches never split on the basis of your personal decisions. The world at large would continue to look probabilistic, but every choice you made was entirely determined by who you were and the situation you faced.

What more could anyone hope for? It was not as if who you were could be boiled down to some crude genetic or sociological profile; every shadow you’d seen on the ceiling at night, every cloud you’d watched drift across the sky, would have left some small imprint on the shape of your mind. Those events were fully determined too, when viewed across the multiverse—with different versions of you witnessing every possibility—but in practical terms, the bottom line was that no private investigator armed with your genome and a potted biography could plot your every move in advance.

Our daughter’s choices—like everything else—had been written in stone at the birth of the universe, but that information could only be decoded by becoming her along the way. Her actions would flow from her temperament, her principles, her desires, and the fact that all of these qualities would themselves have prior causes did nothing to diminish their value. Free will was a slippery notion, but to me it simply meant that your choices were more or less consistent with your nature—which in turn was a provisional, constantly-evolving consensus between a thousand different influences. Our daughter would not be robbed of the chance to act capriciously, or even perversely, but at least it would not be impossible for her ever to act wholly in accordance with her ideals.

I packed the bodies away before Francine got home. I wasn’t sure if the sight would unsettle her, but I didn’t want her measuring them up for more clothes.

The delivery began in the early hours of the morning of Sunday, December 14, and was expected to last about four hours, depending on traffic. I sat in the nursery while Francine paced the hallway outside, both of us watching the data coming through over the fibre from Basel.

Isabelle had used our genetic information as the starting point for a simulation of the development in utero of a complete embryo, employing an “adaptive hierarchy” model, with the highest resolution reserved for the central nervous system. The Qusp would take over this task, not only for the newborn child’s brain, but also for the thousands of biochemical processes occurring outside the skull that the artificial bodies were not designed to perform. Apart from their sophisticated sensory and motor functions, the bodies could take in food and excrete wastes—for psychological and social reasons, as well as for the chemical energy this provided—and they breathed air, both in order to oxidise this fuel, and for vocalisation, but they had no blood, no endocrine system, no immune response.

The Qusp I’d built in Berkeley was smaller than the São Paulo version, but it was still six times as wide as an infant’s skull. Until it was further miniaturised, our daughter’s mind would sit in a box in a corner of the nursery, joined to the rest of her by a wireless data link. Bandwidth and time lag would not be an issue within the Bay Area, and if we needed to take her further afield before everything was combined, the Qusp wasn’t too large or delicate to move.

As the progress bar I was overlaying on the side of the Qusp nudged 98 per cent, Francine came into the nursery, looking agitated.

“We have to put it off, Ben. Just for a day. I need more time to prepare myself.”

I shook my head. “You made me promise to say no, if you asked me to do that.” She’d even refused to let me tell her how to halt the Qusp herself.

“Just a few hours,” she pleaded.

Francine seemed genuinely distressed, but I hardened my heart by telling myself that she was acting: testing me, seeing if I’d keep my word. “No. No slowing down or speeding up, no pauses, no tinkering at all. This child has to hit us like a freight train, just like any other child would.”

“You want me to go into labour now?” she said sarcastically. When I’d raised the possibility, half-jokingly, of putting her on a course of hormones that would have mimicked some of the effects of pregnancy in order to make bonding with the child easier—for myself as well, indirectly—she’d almost bit my head off. I hadn’t been serious, because I knew it wasn’t necessary. Adoption was the ultimate proof of that, but what we were doing was closer to claiming a child of our own from a surrogate.

“No. Just pick her up.”

Francine peered down at the inert form in the cot.

“I can’t do it!” she wailed. “When I hold her, she should feel as if she’s the most precious thing in the world to me. How can I make her believe that, when I know I could bounce her off the walls without harming her?”

We had two minutes left. I felt my breathing grow ragged. I could send the Qusp a halt code, but what if that set the pattern? If one of us had had too little sleep, if Francine was late for work, if we talked ourselves into believing that our special child was so unique that we deserved a short holiday from her needs, what would stop us from doing the same thing again?

I opened my mouth to threaten her: Either you pick her up, now, or I do it. I stopped myself, and said, “You know how much it would harm her psychologically, if you dropped her. The very fact that you’re afraid that you won’t convey as much protectiveness as you need to will be just as strong a signal to her as anything else. You care about her. She’ll sense that.”

Francine stared back at me dubiously.

I said, “She’ll know. I’m sure she will.”

Francine reached into the cot and lifted the slack body into her arms. Seeing her cradle the lifeless form, I felt an anxious twisting in my gut; I’d experienced nothing like this when I’d laid the five plastic shells out for inspection.

I banished the progress bar and let myself free-fall through the final seconds: watching my daughter, willing her to move.

Her thumb twitched, then her legs scissored weakly. I couldn’t see her face, so I watched Francine’s expression. For an instant, I thought I could detect a horrified tightening at the corners of her mouth, as if she was about to recoil from this golem. Then the child began to bawl and kick, and Francine started weeping with undisguised joy.

As she raised the child to her face and planted a kiss on its wrinkled forehead, I suffered my own moment of disquiet. How easily that tender response had been summoned, when the body could as well have been brought to life by the kind of software used to animate the characters in games and films.

It hadn’t, though. There’d been nothing false or easy about the road that had brought us to this moment—let alone the one that Isabelle had followed—and we hadn’t even tried to fashion life from clay, from nothing. We’d merely diverted one small trickle from a river already four billion years old.

Francine held our daughter against her shoulder, and rocked back and forth. “Have you got the bottle? Ben?” I walked to the kitchen in a daze; the microwave had anticipated the happy event, and the formula was ready.

I returned to the nursery and offered Francine the bottle. “Can I hold her, before you start feeding?”

“Of course.” She leant forward to kiss me, then held out the child, and I took her the way I’d learnt to accept the babies of relatives and friends, cradling the back of her head beneath my hand. The distribution of weight, the heavy head, the play of the neck, felt the same as it did for any other infant. Her eyes were still screwed shut, as she screamed and swung her arms.

“What’s your name, my beautiful girl?” We’d narrowed the list down to about a dozen possibilities, but Francine had refused to settle on one until she’d seen her daughter take her first breath. “Have you decided?”

“I want to call her Helen.”

Gazing down at her, that sounded too old to me. Old-fashioned, at least. Great-Aunt Helen. Helena Bonham-Carter. I laughed inanely, and she opened her eyes.

Hairs rose on my arms. The dark eyes couldn’t quite search my face, but she was not oblivious to me. Love and fear coursed through my veins. How could I hope to give her what she needed? Even if my judgment had been faultless, my power to act upon it was crude beyond measure.

We were all she had, though. We would make mistakes, we would lose our way, but I had to believe that something would hold fast. Some portion of the overwhelming love and resolve that I felt right now would have to remain with every version of me who could trace his ancestry to this moment.

I said, “I name you Helen.”

2041

“Sophie! Sophie!” Helen ran ahead of us towards the arrivals gate, where Isabelle and Sophie were emerging. Sophie, almost sixteen now, was much less demonstrative, but she smiled and waved.

Francine said, “Do you ever think of moving?”

“Maybe if the laws change first in Europe,” I replied.

“I saw a job in Zürich I could apply for.”

“I don’t think we should bend over backwards to bring them together. They probably get on better with just occasional visits, and the net. It’s not as if they don’t have other friends.”

Isabelle approached, and greeted us both with kisses on the cheek. I’d dreaded her arrival the first few times, but by now she seemed more like a slightly overbearing cousin than a child protection officer whose very presence implied misdeeds.

Sophie and Helen caught up with us. Helen tugged at Francine’s sleeve. “Sophie’s got a boyfriend! Daniel. She showed me his picture.” She swooned mockingly, one hand on her forehead.

I glanced at Isabelle, who said, “He goes to her school. He’s really very sweet.”

Sophie grimaced with embarrassment. “Three-year-old boys are sweet.” She turned to me and said, “Daniel is charming, and sophisticated, and very mature.”

I felt as if an anvil had been dropped on my chest. As we crossed the car park, Francine whispered, “Don’t have a heart attack yet. You’ve got a while to get used to the idea.”

The waters of the bay sparkled in the sunlight as we drove across the bridge to Oakland. Isabelle described the latest session of the European parliamentary committee into adai rights. A draft proposal granting personhood to any system containing and acting upon a significant amount of the information content of human DNA had been gaining support; it was a tricky concept to define rigorously, but most of the objections were Pythonesque rather than practical. “Is the Human Proteomic Database a person? Is the Harvard Reference Physiological Simulation a person?” The HRPS modelled the brain solely in terms of what it removed from, and released into, the bloodstream; there was nobody home inside the simulation, quietly going mad.

Late in the evening, when the girls were upstairs, Isabelle began gently grilling us. I tried not to grit my teeth too much. I certainly didn’t blame her for taking her responsibilities seriously; if, in spite of the selection process, we had turned out to be monsters, criminal law would have offered no remedies. Our obligations under the licensing contract were Helen’s sole guarantee of humane treatment.

“She’s getting good marks this year,” Isabelle noted. “She must be settling in.”

“She is,” Francine replied. Helen was not entitled to a government-funded education, and most private schools had either been openly hostile, or had come up with such excuses as insurance policies that would have classified her as hazardous machinery. (Isabelle had reached a compromise with the airlines: Sophie had to be powered down, appearing to sleep during flights, but was not required to be shackled or stowed in the cargo hold.) The first community school we’d tried had not worked out, but we’d eventually found one close to the Berkeley campus where every parent involved was happy with the idea of Helen’s presence. This had saved her from the prospect of joining a net-based school; they weren’t so bad, but they were intended for children isolated by geography or illness, circumstances that could not be overcome by other means.

Isabelle bid us good night with no complaints or advice; Francine and I sat by the fire for a while, just smiling at each other. It was nice to have a blemish-free report for once.

The next morning, my alarm went off an hour early. I lay motionless for a while, waiting for my head to clear, before asking my knowledge miner why it had woken me.

It seemed Isabelle’s visit had been beaten up into a major story in some east coast news bulletins. A number of vocal members of Congress had been following the debate in Europe, and they didn’t like the way it was heading. Isabelle, they declared, had sneaked into the country as an agitator. In fact, she’d offered to testify to Congress any time they wanted to hear about her work, but they’d never taken her up on it.

It wasn’t clear whether it was reporters or anti-adai activists who’d obtained her itinerary and done some digging, but all the details had now been splashed around the country, and protesters were already gathering outside Helen’s school. We’d faced media packs, cranks, and activists before, but the images the knowledge miner showed me were disturbing; it was five a.m. and the crowd had already encircled the school. I had a flashback to some news footage I’d seen in my teens, of young schoolgirls in Northern Ireland running the gauntlet of a protest by the opposing political faction; I could no longer remember who had been Catholic and who had been Protestant.

I woke Francine and explained the situation.

“We could just keep her home,” I suggested.

Francine looked torn, but she finally agreed. “It will probably all blow over when Isabelle flies out on Sunday. One day off school isn’t exactly capitulating to the mob.”

At breakfast, I broke the news to Helen.

“I’m not staying home,” she said.

“Why not? Don’t you want to hang out with Sophie?”

Helen was amused. “‘Hang out’? Is that what the hippies used to say?” In her personal chronology of San Francisco, anything from before her birth belonged to the world portrayed in the tourist museums of Haight-Ashbury.

“Gossip. Listen to music. Interact socially in whatever manner you find agreeable.”

She contemplated this last, open-ended definition. “Shop?”

“I don’t see why not.” There was no crowd outside the house, and though we were probably being watched, the protest was too large to be a moveable feast. Perhaps all the other parents would keep their children home, leaving the various placard wavers to fight among themselves.

Helen reconsidered. “No. We’re doing that on Saturday. I want to go to school.”

I glanced at Francine. Helen added, “It’s not as if they can hurt me. I’m backed up.”

Francine said, “It’s not pleasant being shouted at. Insulted. Pushed around.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be pleasant,” Helen replied scornfully. “But I’m not going to let them tell me what to do.”

To date, a handful of strangers had got close enough to yell abuse at her, and some of the children at her first school had been about as violent as (ordinary, drug-free, non-psychotic) nine-year-old bullies could be, but she’d never faced anything like this. I showed her the live news feed. She was not swayed. Francine and I retreated to the living room to confer.

I said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.” On top of everything else, I was beginning to suffer from a paranoid fear that Isabelle would blame us for the whole situation. Less fancifully, she could easily disapprove of us exposing Helen to the protesters. Even if that was not enough for her to terminate the licence immediately, eroding her confidence in us could lead to that fate, eventually.

Francine thought for a while. “If we both go with her, both walk beside her, what are they going to do? If they lay a finger on us, it’s assault. If they try to drag her away from us, it’s theft.”

“Yes, but whatever they do, she gets to hear all the poison they spew out.”

“She watches the news, Ben. She’s heard it all before.”

“Oh, shit.” Isabelle and Sophie had come down to breakfast; I could hear Helen calmly filling them in about her plans.

Francine said, “Forget about pleasing Isabelle. If Helen wants to do this, knowing what it entails, and we can keep her safe, then we should respect her decision.”

I felt a sting of anger at the unspoken implication: having gone to such lengths to enable her to make meaningful choices, I’d be a hypocrite to stand in her way. Knowing what it entails? She was nine-and-a-half years old.

I admired her courage, though, and I did believe that we could protect her.

I said, “All right. You call the other parents. I’ll inform the police.”

The moment we left the car, we were spotted. Shouts rang out, and a tide of angry people flowed towards us.

I glanced down at Helen and tightened my grip on her. “Don’t let go of our hands.”

She smiled at me indulgently, as if I was warning her about something trivial, like broken glass on the beach. “I’ll be all right, Dad.” She flinched as the crowd closed in, and then there were bodies pushing against us from every side, people jabbering in our faces, spittle flying. Francine and I turned to face each other, making something of a protective cage and a wedge through the adult legs. Frightening as it was to be submerged, I was glad my daughter wasn’t at eye level with these people.

“Satan moves her! Satan is inside her! Out, Jezebel spirit!” A young woman in a high-collared lilac dress pressed her body against me and started praying in tongues.

“Gödel’s theorem proves that the non-computible, non-linear world behind the quantum collapse is a manifest expression of Buddha-nature,” a neatly-dressed youth intoned earnestly, establishing with admirable economy that he had no idea what any of these terms meant. “Ergo, there can be no soul in the machine.”

“Cyber nano quantum. Cyber nano quantum. Cyber nano quantum.” That chant came from one of our would-be “supporters”, a middle-aged man in lycra cycling shorts who was forcefully groping down between us, trying to lay his hand on Helen’s head and leave a few flakes of dead skin behind; according to cult doctrine, this would enable her to resurrect him when she got around to establishing the Omega Point. I blocked his way as firmly as I could without actually assaulting him, and he wailed like a pilgrim denied admission to Lourdes.

“Think you’re going to live forever, Tinkerbell?” A leering old man with a matted beard poked his head out in front of us, and spat straight into Helen’s face.

“Arsehole!” Francine shouted. She pulled out a handkerchief and started mopping the phlegm away. I crouched down and stretched my free arm around them. Helen was grimacing with disgust as Francine dabbed at her, but she wasn’t crying.

I said, “Do you want to go back to the car?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

Helen screwed up her face in an expression of irritation. “Why do you always ask me that? Am I sure? Am I sure? You’re the one who sounds like a computer.”

“I’m sorry.” I squeezed her hand.

We ploughed on through the crowd. The core of the protesters turned out to be both saner and more civilised than the lunatics who’d got to us first; as we neared the school gates, people struggled to make room to let us through uninjured, at the same time as they shouted slogans for the cameras. “Healthcare for all, not just the rich!” I couldn’t argue with that sentiment, though adai were just one of a thousand ways the wealthy could spare their children from disease, and in fact they were among the cheapest: the total cost in prosthetic bodies up to adult size came to less than the median lifetime expenditure on healthcare in the U.S. Banning adai wouldn’t end the disparity between rich and poor, but I could understand why some people considered it the ultimate act of selfishness to create a child who could live forever. They probably never wondered about the fertility rates and resource use of their own descendants over the next few thousand years.

We passed through the gates, into a world of space and silence; any protester who trespassed here could be arrested immediately, and apparently none of them were sufficiently dedicated to Gandhian principles to seek out that fate.

Inside the entrance hall, I squatted down and put my arms around Helen. “Are you OK?”

“Yes.”

“I’m really proud of you.”

“You’re shaking.” She was right; my whole body was trembling slightly. It was more than the crush and the confrontation, and the sense of relief that we’d come through unscathed. Relief was never absolute for me; I could never quite erase the images of other possibilities at the back of my mind.

One of the teachers, Carmela Peña, approached us, looking stoical; when they’d agreed to take Helen, all the staff and parents had known that a day like this would come.

Helen said, “I’ll be OK now.” She kissed me on the cheek, then did the same to Francine. “I’m all right,” she insisted. “You can go.”

Carmela said, “We’ve got sixty per cent of the kids coming. Not bad, considering.”

Helen walked down the corridor, turning once to wave at us impatiently.

I said, “No, not bad.”

A group of journalists cornered the five of us during the girls’ shopping trip the next day, but media organisations had grown wary of lawsuits, and after Isabelle reminded them that she was presently enjoying “the ordinary liberties of every private citizen”—a quote from a recent eight-figure judgment against Celebrity Stalker—they left us in peace.

The night after Isabelle and Sophie flew out, I went in to Helen’s room to kiss her good night. As I turned to leave, she said, “What’s a Qusp?”

“It’s a kind of computer. Where did you hear about that?”

“On the net. It said I had a Qusp, but Sophie didn’t.”

Francine and I had made no firm decision as to what we’d tell her, and when. I said, “That’s right, but it’s nothing to worry about. It just means you’re a little bit different from her.”

Helen scowled. “I don’t want to be different from Sophie.”

“Everyone’s different from everyone else,” I said glibly. “Having a Qusp is just like ... a car having a different kind of engine. It can still go to all the same places.” Just not all of them at once. “You can both still do whatever you like. You can be as much like Sophie as you want.” That wasn’t entirely dishonest; the crucial difference could always be erased, simply by disabling the Qusp’s shielding.

“I want to be the same,” Helen insisted. “Next time I grow, why can’t you give me what Sophie’s got, instead?”

“What you have is newer. It’s better.”

“No one else has got it. Not just Sophie; none of the others.” Helen knew she’d nailed me: if it was newer and better, why didn’t the younger adai have it too?

I said, “It’s complicated. You’d better go to sleep now; we’ll talk about it later.” I fussed with the blankets, and she stared at me resentfully.

I went downstairs and recounted the conversation to Francine. “What do you think?” I asked her. “Is it time?”

“Maybe it is,” she said.

“I wanted to wait until she was old enough to understand the MWI.”

Francine considered this. “Understand it how well, though? She’s not going to be juggling density matrices any time soon. And if we make it a big secret, she’s just going to get half-baked versions from other sources.”

I flopped onto the couch. “This is going to be hard.” I’d rehearsed the moment a thousand times, but in my imagination Helen had always been older, and there’d been hundreds of other adai with Qusps. In reality, no one had followed the trail we’d blazed. The evidence for the MWI had grown steadily stronger, but for most people it was still easy to ignore. Ever more sophisticated versions of rats running mazes just looked like elaborate computer games. You couldn’t travel from branch to branch yourself, you couldn’t spy on your parallel alter egos—and such feats would probably never be possible. “How do you tell a nine-year-old girl that she’s the only sentient being on the planet who can make a decision, and stick to it?”

Francine smiled. “Not in those words, for a start.”

“No.” I put my arm around her. We were about to enter a minefield—and we couldn’t help diffusing out across the perilous ground—but at least we had each other’s judgment to keep us in check, to rein us in a little.

I said, “We’ll work it out. We’ll find the right way.”

2050

Around four in the morning, I gave in to the cravings and lit my first cigarette in a month.

As I drew the warm smoke into my lungs, my teeth started chattering, as if the contrast had forced me to notice how cold the rest of my body had become. The red glow of the tip was the brightest thing in sight, but if there was a camera trained on me it would be infrared, so I’d been blazing away like a bonfire, anyway. As the smoke came back up I spluttered like a cat choking on a fur ball; the first one was always like that. I’d taken up the habit at the surreal age of sixty, and even after five years on and off, my respiratory tract couldn’t quite believe its bad luck.

For five hours, I’d been crouched in the mud at the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, a couple of kilometres west of the soggy ruins of New Orleans. Watching the barge, waiting for someone to come home. I’d been tempted to swim out and take a look around, but my aide sketched a bright red moat of domestic radar on the surface of the water, and offered no guarantee that I’d remain undetected even if I stayed outside the perimeter.

I’d called Francine the night before. It had been a short, tense conversation.

“I’m in Louisiana. I think I’ve got a lead.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll let you know how it turns out.”

“You do that.”

I hadn’t seen her in the flesh for almost two years. After facing too many dead ends together, we’d split up to cover more ground: Francine had searched from New York to Seattle; I’d taken the south. As the months had slipped away, her determination to put every emotional reaction aside for the sake of the task had gradually eroded. One night, I was sure, grief had overtaken her, alone in some soulless motel room—and it made no difference that the same thing had happened to me, a months later or a week before. Because we had not experienced it together, it was not a shared pain, a burden made lighter. After forty-seven years, though we now had a single purpose as never before, we were starting to come adrift.

I’d learnt about Jake Holder in Baton Rouge, triangulating on rumours and fifth-hand reports of bar-room boasts. The boasts were usually empty; a prosthetic body equipped with software dumber than a microwave could make an infinitely pliable slave, but if the only way to salvage any trace of dignity when your buddies discovered that you owned the high-tech equivalent of a blow-up doll was to imply that there was somebody home inside, apparently a lot of men leapt at the chance.

Holder looked like something worse. I’d bought his lifetime purchasing records, and there’d been a steady stream of cyber-fetish porn over a period of two decades. Hardcore and pretentious; half the titles contained the word “manifesto”. But the flow had stopped, about three months ago. The rumours were, he’d found something better.

I finished the cigarette, and slapped my arms to get the circulation going. She would not be on the barge. For all I knew, she’d heard the news from Brussels and was already halfway to Europe. That would be a difficult journey to make on her own, but there was no reason to believe that she didn’t have loyal, trustworthy friends to assist her. I had too many out-of-date memories burnt into my skull: all the blazing, pointless rows, all the petty crimes, all the self-mutilation. Whatever had happened, whatever she’d been through, she was no longer the angry fifteen-year-old who’d left for school one Friday and never come back.

By the time she’d hit thirteen, we were arguing about everything. Her body had no need for the hormonal flood of puberty, but the software had ground on relentlessly, simulating all the neuroendocrine effects. Sometimes it had seemed like an act of torture to put her through that—instead of hunting for some magic short-cut to maturity—but the cardinal rule had been never to tinker, never to intervene, just to aim for the most faithful simulation possible of ordinary human development.

Whatever we’d fought about, she’d always known how to shut me up. “I’m just a thing to you! An instrument! Daddy’s little silver bullet!” I didn’t care who she was, or what she wanted; I’d fashioned her solely to slay my own fears. (I’d lie awake afterwards, rehearsing lame counter-arguments. Other children were born for infinitely baser motives: to work the fields, to sit in boardrooms, to banish ennui, to save failing marriages.) In her eyes, the Qusp itself wasn’t good or bad—and she turned down all my offers to disable the shielding; that would have let me off the hook too easily. But I’d made her a freak for my own selfish reasons; I’d set her apart even from the other adai, purely to grant myself a certain kind of comfort. “You wanted to give birth to a singleton? Why didn’t you just shoot yourself in the head every time you made a bad decision?”

When she went missing, we were afraid she’d been snatched from the street. But in her room, we’d found an envelope with the locator beacon she’d dug out of her body, and a note that read: Don’t look for me. I’m never coming back.

I heard the tyres of a heavy vehicle squelching along the muddy track to my left. I hunkered lower, making sure I was hidden in the undergrowth. As the truck came to a halt with a faint metallic shudder, the barge disgorged an unmanned motorboat. My aide had captured the data streams exchanged, one specific challenge and response, but it had no clue how to crack the general case and mimic the barge’s owner.

Two men climbed out of the truck. One was Jake Holder; I couldn’t make out his face in the starlight, but I’d sat within a few metres of him in diners and bars in Baton Rouge, and my aide knew his somatic signature: the electromagnetic radiation from his nervous system and implants; his body’s capacitative and inductive responses to small shifts in the ambient fields; the faint gamma-ray spectrum of his unavoidable, idiosyncratic load of radioisotopes, natural and Chernobylesque.

I did not know who his companion was, but I soon got the general idea.

“One thousand now,” Holder said. “One thousand when you get back.” His silhouette gestured at the waiting motorboat.

The other man was suspicious. “How do I know it will be what you say it is?”

“Don’t call her ‘it’,” Holder complained. “She’s not an object. She’s my Lilith, my Lo-li-ta, my luscious clockwork succubus.” For one hopeful moment, I pictured the customer snickering at this overheated sales pitch and coming to his senses; brothels in Baton Rouge openly advertised machine sex, with skilled human puppeteers, for a fraction of the price. Whatever he imagined the special thrill of a genuine adai to be, he had no way of knowing that Holder didn’t have an accomplice controlling the body on the barge in exactly the same fashion. He might even be paying two thousand dollars for a puppet job from Holder himself.

“OK. But if she’s not genuine ...”

My aide overheard money changing hands, and it had modelled the situation well enough to know how I’d wish, always, to respond. “Move now,” it whispered in my ear. I complied without hesitation; eighteen months before, I’d pavloved myself into swift obedience, with all the pain and nausea modern chemistry could induce. The aide couldn’t puppet my limbs—I couldn’t afford the elaborate surgery—but it overlaid movement cues on my vision, a system I’d adapted from off-the-shelf choreography software, and I strode out of the bushes, right up to the motorboat.

The customer was outraged. “What is this?”

I turned to Holder. “You want to fuck him first, Jake? I’ll hold him down.” There were things I didn’t trust the aide to control; it set the boundaries, but it was better to let me improvise a little, and then treat my actions as one more part of the environment.

After a moment of stunned silence, Holder said icily, “I’ve never seen this prick before in my life.” He’d been speechless for a little too long, though, to inspire any loyalty from a stranger; as he reached for his weapon, the customer backed away, then turned and fled.

Holder walked towards me slowly, gun outstretched. “What’s your game? Are you after her? Is that it?” His implants were mapping my body—actively, since there was no need for stealth—but I’d tailed him for hours in Baton Rouge, and my aide knew him like an architectural plan. Over the starlit grey of his form, it overlaid a schematic, flaying him down to brain, nerves, and implants. A swarm of blue fireflies flickered into life in his motor cortex, prefiguring a peculiar shrug of the shoulders with no obvious connection to his trigger finger; before they’d reached the intensity that would signal his implants to radio the gun, my aide said “Duck.”

The shot was silent, but as I straightened up again I could smell the propellant. I gave up thinking and followed the dance steps. As Holder strode forward and swung the gun towards me, I turned sideways, grabbed his right hand, then punched him hard, repeatedly, in the implant on the side of his neck. He was a fetishist, so he’d chosen bulky packages, intentionally visible through the skin. They were not hard-edged, and they were not inflexible—he wasn’t that masochistic—but once you sufficiently compressed even the softest biocompatible foam, it might as well have been a lump of wood. While I hammered the wood into the muscles of his neck, I twisted his forearm upwards. He dropped the gun; I put my foot on it and slid it back towards the bushes.

In ultrasound, I saw blood pooling around his implant. I paused while the pressure built up, then I hit him again and the swelling burst like a giant blister. He sagged to his knees, bellowing with pain. I took the knife from my back pocket and held it to his throat.

I made Holder take off his belt, and I used it to bind his hands behind his back. I led him to the motorboat, and when the two of us were on board, I suggested that he give it the necessary instructions. He was sullen but cooperative. I didn’t feel anything; part of me still insisted that the transaction I’d caught him in was a hoax, and that there’d be nothing on the barge that couldn’t be found in Baton Rouge.

The barge was old, wooden, smelling of preservatives and unvanquished rot. There were dirty plastic panes in the cabin windows, but all I could see in them was a reflected sheen. As we crossed the deck, I kept Holder intimately close, hoping that if there was an armed security system it wouldn’t risk putting the bullet through both of us.

At the cabin door, he said resignedly, “Don’t treat her badly.” My blood went cold, and I pressed my forearm to my mouth to stifle an involuntary sob.

I kicked open the door, and saw nothing but shadows. I called out “Lights!” and two responded, in the ceiling and by the bed. Helen was naked, chained by the wrists and ankles. She looked up and saw me, then began to emit a horrified keening noise.

I pressed the blade against Holder’s throat. “Open those things!”

“The shackles?”

“Yes!”

“I can’t. They’re not smart; they’re just welded shut.”

“Where are your tools?”

He hesitated. “I’ve got some wrenches in the truck. All the rest is back in town.”

I looked around the cabin, then I lead him into a corner and told him to stand there, facing the wall. I knelt by the bed.

“Ssh. We’ll get you out of here.” Helen fell silent. I touched her cheek with the back of my hand; she didn’t flinch, but she stared back at me, disbelieving. “We’ll get you out.” The timber bedposts were thicker than my arms, the links of the chains wide as my thumb. I wasn’t going to snap any part of this with my bare hands.

Helen’s expression changed: I was real, she was not hallucinating. She said dully, “I thought you’d given up on me. Woke one of the backups. Started again.”

I said, “I’d never give up on you.”

“Are you sure?” She searched my face. “Is this the edge of what’s possible? Is this the worst it can get?”

I didn’t have an answer to that.

I said, “You remember how to go numb, for a shedding?”

She gave me a faint, triumphant smile. “Absolutely.” She’d had to endure imprisonment and humiliation, but she’d always had the power to cut herself off from her body’s senses.

“Do you want to do it now? Leave all this behind?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be safe soon. I promise you.”

“I believe you.” Her eyes rolled up.

I cut open her chest and took out the Qusp.

Francine and I had both carried spare bodies, and clothes, in the trunks of our cars. Adai were banned from domestic flights, so Helen and I drove along the interstate, up towards Washington D.C., where Francine would meet us. We could claim asylum at the Swiss embassy; Isabelle had already set the machinery in motion.

Helen was quiet at first, almost shy with me as if with a stranger, but on the second day, as we crossed from Alabama into Georgia, she began to open up. She told me a little of how she’d hitchhiked from state to state, finding casual jobs that paid e-cash and needed no social security number, let alone biometric ID. “Fruit picking was the best.”

She’d made friends along the way, and confided her nature to those she thought she could trust. She still wasn’t sure whether or not she’d been betrayed. Holder had found her in a transient’s camp under a bridge, and someone must have told him exactly where to look, but it was always possible that she’d been recognised by a casual acquaintance who’d seen her face in the media years before. Francine and I had never publicised her disappearance, never put up flyers or web pages, out of fear that it would only make the danger worse.

On the third day, as we crossed the Carolinas, we drove in near silence again. The landscape was stunning, the fields strewn with flowers, and Helen seemed calm. Maybe this was what she needed the most: just safety, and peace.

As dusk approached, though, I felt I had to speak.

“There’s something I’ve never told you,” I said. “Something that happened to me when I was young.”

Helen smiled. “Don’t tell me you ran away from the farm? Got tired of milking, and joined the circus?”

I shook my head. “I was never adventurous. It was just a little thing.” I told her about the kitchen hand.

She pondered the story for a while. “And that’s why you built the Qusp? That’s why you made me? In the end, it all comes down to that man in the alley?” She sounded more bewildered than angry.

I bowed my head. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” she demanded. “Are you sorry that I was ever born?”

“No, but—”

“You didn’t put me on that boat. Holder did that.”

I said, “I brought you into a world with people like him. What I made you, made you a target.”

“And if I’d been flesh and blood?” she said. “Do you think there aren’t people like him, for flesh and blood? Or do you honestly believe that if you’d had an organic child, there would have been no chance at all that she’d have run away?”

I started weeping. “I don’t know. I’m just sorry I hurt you.”

Helen said, “I don’t blame you for what you did. And I understand it better now. You saw a spark of good in yourself, and you wanted to cup your hands around it, protect it, make it stronger. I understand that. I’m not that spark, but that doesn’t matter. I know who I am, I know what my choices are, and I’m glad of that. I’m glad you gave me that.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. “Do you think I’d feel better, here and now, just because some other version of me handled the same situations better?” She smiled. “Knowing that other people are having a good time isn’t much of a consolation to anyone.”

I composed myself. The car beeped to bring my attention to a booking it had made in a motel a few kilometres ahead.

Helen said, “I’ve had time to think about a lot of things. Whatever the laws say, whatever the bigots say, all adai are part of the human race. And what I have is something almost every person who’s ever lived thought they possessed. Human psychology, human culture, human morality, all evolved with the illusion that we lived in a single history. But we don’t—so in the long run, something has to give. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather we tinker with our physical nature than abandon our whole identities.”

I was silent for a while. “So what are your plans, now?”

“I need an education.”

“What do you want to study?”

“I’m not sure yet. A million different things. But in the long run, I know what I want to do.”

“Yeah?” The car turned off the highway, heading for the motel.

“You made a start,” she said, “but it’s not enough. There are people in billions of other branches where the Qusp hasn’t been invented yet—and the way things stand, there’ll always be branches without it. What’s the point in us having this thing, if we don’t share it? All those people deserve to have the power to make their own choices.”

“Travel between the branches isn’t a simple problem,” I explained gently. “That would be orders of magnitude harder than the Qusp.”

Helen smiled, conceding this, but the corners of her mouth took on the stubborn set I recognised as the precursor to a thousand smaller victories.

She said, “Give me time, Dad. Give me time.”

Steve Fever

Countless tiny machines hijack the living, borrowing their hands, eyes, and ears, as the machines strive to resurrect just one man.

A few weeks after his 14th birthday, with the soybean harvest fast approaching, Lincoln began having vivid dreams of leaving the farm and heading for the city. Night after night, he pictured himself gathering supplies, trudging down to the highway, and hitching his way to Atlanta. There were problems with the way things got done in the dream, though, and each night in his sleep he struggled to resolve them. The larder would be locked, of course, so he dreamed up a side plot about collecting a stash of suitable tools for breaking in. There were sensors all along the farm’s perimeter, so he dreamed about different ways of avoiding or disabling them.

Even when he had a scenario that seemed to make sense, daylight revealed further flaws. The grille that blocked the covered part of the irrigation ditch that ran beneath the fence was too strong to be snipped away with bolt cutters, and the welding torch had a biometric lock.

When the harvest began, Lincoln contrived to get a large stone caught in the combine, and then volunteered to repair the damage. With his father looking on, he did a meticulous job, and when he received the expected praise he replied with what he hoped was a dignified mixture of pride and bemusement, “I’m not a kid anymore. I can handle the torch.”

“Yeah.” His father seemed embarrassed for a moment. Then he squatted down, put the torch into supervisor mode, and added Lincoln’s touch to the authorized list.

Lincoln waited for a moonless night. The dream kept repeating itself, thrashing impatiently against his skull, desperate to be made real.

When the night arrived and he left his room, barefoot in the darkness, he felt he was finally enacting some long-rehearsed performance—less a play than an elaborate dance that had seeped into every muscle in his body. First he carried his boots to the back door and left them by the step. Then he took his backpack to the larder, the borrowed tools in different pockets so they wouldn’t clank against each other. The larder door’s hinges were attached on the inside, but he’d marked their positions with penknife scratches in the varnish and practiced finding the scratches by touch. His mother had secured the food store years before, after a midnight raid by Lincoln and his younger brother, Sam, but it was still just a larder, not a jewel safe, and the awl bit through the wood easily enough, finally exposing the tip of one of the screws that held the hinges in place. The pliers he tried first couldn’t grip the screw tightly enough to get it turning, but Lincoln had dreamed of an alternative. With the awl, he cleared away a little more wood, then jammed a small hexagonal nut onto the screw’s thread and used a T-handled socket wrench to turn them together. The screw couldn’t move far, but this was enough to loosen it. He removed the nut and used the pliers. With a few firm taps from a hammer, delivered via the socket wrench, the screw broke free of the wood.

He repeated the procedure five more times, freeing the hinges completely, and then strained against the door, keeping a firm grip on the handle, until the tongue of the lock slipped from its groove.

The larder was pitch black, but he didn’t risk using his flashlight; he found what he wanted by memory and touch, filling the backpack with enough provisions for a week. After that? He’d never wondered, in the dream. Maybe he’d find new friends in Atlanta who’d help him. The idea struck a chord, as if it were a truth he was remembering, not a hopeful speculation.

The toolshed was locked securely, but Lincoln was still skinny enough to crawl through the hole in the back wall; it had been hidden by junk for so long that it had fallen off the end of his father’s repair list. This time he risked the flashlight and walked straight to the welding torch, rather than groping his way across the darkness. He maneuvered it through the hole and didn’t bother rearranging the rotting timbers that had concealed the entrance. There was no point covering his tracks. He would be missed within minutes of his parents’ rising, no matter what, so the important thing now was speed.

He put on his boots and headed for the irrigation ditch. Their German shepherd, Melville, trotted up and started licking Lincoln’s hand. Lincoln stopped and petted him for a few seconds, then firmly ordered him back toward the house. The dog made a soft, wistful sound but complied.

Twenty meters from the perimeter fence, Lincoln climbed into the ditch. The enclosed section was still a few meters away, but he crouched down immediately, practicing the necessary constrained gait and shielding himself from the sensors’ gaze. He clutched the torch under one arm, careful to keep it dry. The chill of the water didn’t much bother him; his boots grew heavy, but he didn’t know what the ditch concealed, and he’d rather have waterlogged boots than a rusty scrap of metal slicing his foot.

He entered the enclosed concrete cylinder; then a few steps brought him to the metal grille. He switched on the torch and oriented himself by the light of its control panel. When he put on the goggles he was blind, but then he squeezed the trigger of the torch, and the arc lit up the tunnel around him.

Each bar took just seconds to cut, but there were a lot of them. In the confined space the heat was oppressive; his T-shirt was soon soaked with sweat. Still, he had fresh clothes in his pack, and he could wash in the ditch once he was through. If he was still not respectable enough to get a ride, he’d walk to Atlanta.

“Young man, get out of there immediately.”

Lincoln shut off the arc. The voice, and those words, could only belong to his grandmother. For a few pounding heartbeats, he wondered if he’d imagined it, but then in the same unmistakable tone, ratcheted up a notch, she added, “Don’t play games with me—I don’t have the patience for it.”

Lincoln slumped in the darkness, disbelieving. He’d dreamed his way through every detail, past every obstacle. How could she appear out of nowhere and ruin everything?

There wasn’t room to turn around, so he crawled backward to the mouth of the tunnel. His grandmother was standing on the bank of the ditch.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

He said, “I need to get to Atlanta.”

“Atlanta? All by yourself, in the middle of the night? What happened? You got a craving for some special kind of food we’re not providing here?”

Lincoln scowled at her sarcasm but knew better than to answer back. “I’ve been dreaming about it,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Night after night. Working out the best way to do it.”

His grandmother said nothing for a while, and when Lincoln realized that he’d shocked her into silence he felt a pang of fear himself.

She said, “You have no earthly reason to run away. Is someone beating you? Is someone treating you badly?”

“No, ma’am.”

“So why exactly is it that you need to go?”

Lincoln felt his face grow hot with shame. How could he have missed it? How could he have fooled himself into believing that the obsession was his own? But even as he berated himself for his stupidity, his longing for the journey remained.

“You’ve got the fever, haven’t you? You know where those kind of dreams come from: nanospam throwing a party in your brain. Ten billion idiot robots playing a game called Steve at Home.”

She reached down and helped him out of the ditch. The thought crossed Lincoln’s mind that he could probably overpower her, but then he recoiled from the idea in disgust. He sat down on the grass and put his head in his hands.

“Are you going to lock me up?” he asked.

“Nobody’s turning anybody into a prisoner. Let’s go talk to your parents. They’re going to be thrilled.”

The four of them sat in the kitchen. Lincoln kept quiet and let the others argue, too ashamed to offer any opinions of his own. How could he have let himself sleepwalk like that? Plotting and scheming for weeks, growing ever prouder of his own ingenuity, but doing it all at the bidding of the world’s stupidest, most despised dead man.

He still yearned to go to Atlanta. He itched to bolt from the room, scale the fence, and jog all the way to the highway. He could see the whole sequence in his mind’s eye; he was already thinking through the flaws in the plan and hunting for ways to correct them.

He banged his head against the table. “Make it stop! Get them out of me!”

His mother put an arm around his shoulders. “You know we can’t wave a magic wand and get rid of them. You’ve got the latest counterware. All we can do is send a sample to be analyzed, do our bit to speed the process along.”

The cure could be months away, or years. Lincoln moaned pitifully. “Then lock me up! Put me in the basement!”

His father wiped a glistening streak of sweat from his forehead. “That’s not going to happen. If I have to be beside you everywhere you go, we’re still going to treat you like a human being.” His voice was strained, caught somewhere between fear and defiance.

Silence descended. Lincoln closed his eyes. Then his grandmother spoke.

“Maybe the best way to deal with this is to let him scratch his damned itch.”

“What?” His father was incredulous.

“He wants to go to Atlanta. I can go with him.”

“The Stevelets want him in Atlanta,” his father replied.

“They’re not going to harm him—they just want to borrow him. And like it or not, they’ve already done that. Maybe the quickest way to get them to move on is to satisfy them.”

Lincoln’s father said, “You know they can’t be satisfied.”

“Not completely. But every path they take has its dead end, and the sooner they find this one, the sooner they’ll stop bothering him.”

His mother said, “If we keep him here, that’s a dead end for them too. If they want him in Atlanta, and he’s not in Atlanta—”

“They won’t give up that easily,” his grandmother replied. “If we’re not going to lock him up and throw away the key, they’re not going to take a few setbacks and delays as some kind of proof that Atlanta’s beyond all hope.”

Silence again. Lincoln opened his eyes. His father addressed Lincoln’s grandmother. “Are you sure you’re not infected yourself?”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t go all Body Snatchers on me, Carl. I know the two of you can’t leave the farm right now. So if you want to let him go, I’ll look after him.” She shrugged and turned her head away imperiously. “I’ve said my piece. Now it’s your decision.”

Lincoln drove the truck as far as the highway, then reluctantly let his grandmother take the wheel. He loved the old machine, which still had the engine his grandfather had installed, years before Lincoln was born, to run on their home-pressed soybean oil.

“I plan to take the most direct route,” his grandmother announced. “Through Macon. Assuming your friends have no objection.”

Lincoln squirmed. “Don’t call them that!”

“I’m sorry.” She glanced at him sideways. “But I still need to know.”

Reluctantly, Lincoln forced himself to picture the drive ahead, and he felt a surge of rightness endorsing the plan. “No problem with that,” he muttered. He was under no illusion that he could prevent the Stevelets from influencing his thoughts, but deliberately consulting them, as if there were a third person sitting in the cabin, made him feel much worse.

He turned to look out the window, at the abandoned fields and silos passing by. He had been down this stretch of highway a hundred times, but each piece of blackened machinery now carried a disturbing new poignancy. The Crash had come 30 years ago, but it still wasn’t truly over. The Stevelets aspired to do no harm—and supposedly they got better at that year by year—but they were still far too stupid and stubborn to be relied upon to get anything right. They had just robbed his parents of two skilled pairs of hands in the middle of the harvest; how could they imagine that that was harmless? Millions of people around the world had died in the Crash, and that couldn’t all be blamed on panic and self-inflicted casualties. The government had been crazy, bombing half the farms in the Southeast; everyone agreed now that it had only made things worse. But many other deaths could not have been avoided, except by the actions of the Stevelets themselves.

You couldn’t reason with them, though. You couldn’t shame them, or punish them. You just had to hope they got better at noticing when they were screwing things up, while they forged ahead with their impossible task.

“See that old factory?” Lincoln’s grandmother gestured at a burned-out metal frame drooping over slabs of cracked concrete, standing in a field of weeds. “There was a conclave there, almost 20 years ago.”

Lincoln had been past the spot many times, and no one had ever mentioned this before. “What happened? What did they try?”

“I heard it was meant to be a time machine. Some crackpot had put his plans on the Net, and the Stevelets decided they had to check it out. About a hundred people were working there, and thousands of animals.”

Lincoln shivered. “How long were they at it?”

“Three years.” She added quickly, “But they’ve learned to rotate the workers now. It’s rare for them to hang on to any individual for more than a month or two.”

A month or two. A part of Lincoln recoiled, but another part thought: that wouldn’t be so bad. A break from the farm, doing something different. Meeting new people, learning new skills, working with animals.

Rats, most likely.

Steve Hasluck had been part of a team of scientists developing a new kind of medical nanomachine, refining the tiny surgical instruments so they could make decisions of their own, on the spot. Steve’s team had developed an efficient way of sharing computing power across a whole swarm, allowing them to run large, complex programs known as “expert systems” that codified decades of biological and clinical knowledge into pragmatic lists of rules. The nanomachines didn’t really “know” anything, but they could churn through a very long list of “If A and B, there’s an 80 percent chance of C” at blistering speed, and a good list gave them a good chance of cutting a lot of diseases off short.

Then Steve found out that he had cancer, and that his particular kind wasn’t covered by anyone’s list of rules.

He took a batch of the nanomachines and injected them into a roomful of caged rats, along with samples of his tumor. The nanomachines could swarm all over the tumor cells, monitoring their actions constantly. The polymer radio antennas they built beneath the rats’ skin let them share their observations and hunches from host to host, like their own high-speed wireless Internet, and report their findings back to Steve himself. With that much information being gathered, how hard could it be to understand the problem and fix it? But Steve and his colleagues couldn’t make sense of the data. Steve got sicker, and all the gigabytes pouring out of the rats remained as useless as ever.

Steve tried putting new software into the swarms. If nobody knew how to cure his disease, why not let the swarms work it out? He gave them access to vast clinical databases and told them to extract their own rules. When the cure still failed to appear, he bolted on more software, including expert systems seeded with basic knowledge of chemistry and physics. From this starting point, the swarms worked out things about cell membranes and protein folding that no one had ever realized before, but none of it helped Steve.

Steve decided that the swarms still had too narrow a view. He gave them a general-purpose knowledge acquisition engine and let them drink at will from the entire Web. To guide their browsing and their self-refinement, he gave them two clear goals. The first was to do no harm to their hosts. The second was to find a way to save his life or, failing that, to bring him back from the dead.

That last rider might not have been entirely crazy, because Steve had arranged to have his body preserved in liquid nitrogen. If that had happened, maybe the Stevelets would have spent the next 30 years ferrying memories out of his frozen brain. Unfortunately, Steve’s car hit a tree at high speed just outside of Austin, TX, and his brain ended up as flambé.

This made the news, and the Stevelets were watching. Between their lessons from the Web and whatever instincts their creator had given them, they figured out that they were now likely to be incinerated themselves. That wouldn’t have mattered to them if not for the fact that they’d decided the game wasn’t over. There’d been nothing about resurrecting charred flesh in the online medical journals, but the Web embraced a wider range of opinions. The swarms had read the sites of various groups convinced that self-modifying software could find ways to make itself smarter, and then smarter again, until nothing was beyond its reach. Resurrecting the dead was right there on every bullet-pointed menu of miracles.

The Stevelets knew that they couldn’t achieve anything as a plume of smoke wafting out of a rat crematorium, so the first thing they engineered was a breakout. From the cages, from the building, from the city. The original nanomachines couldn’t replicate themselves, and could be destroyed in an instant by a simple chemical trigger, but somewhere in the sewers or the fields or the silos, they had inspected and dissected each other to the point that they were able to reproduce. They took the opportunity to alter some old traits: the new generation of Stevelets lacked the suicide switch, and they resisted external meddling with their software.

They might have vanished into the woods to build scarecrow Steves out of sticks and leaves, but their software roots gave their task rigor, of a kind. From the Net they had taken ten thousand crazy ideas about the world, and though they lacked the sense to see that they were crazy, they couldn’t simply take anything on faith, either. They had to test these claims, one by one, as they groped their way toward Stevescence. And while the Web had suggested that with their power to self-modify they could achieve anything, they found that in reality there were countless crucial tasks that remained beyond their abilities. Even with the aid of dexterous mutant rats, Steveware Version 2 was never going to reëngineer the fabric of space-time, or resurrect Steve in a virtual world.

Within months of their escape, it must have become clear to them that some hurdles could be jumped only with human assistance, because that was when they started borrowing people. Doing them no physical harm, but infesting them with the kinds of ideas and compulsions that turned them into willing recruits.

The panic, the bombings, the Crash, had followed. Lincoln hadn’t witnessed the worst of it. He hadn’t seen conclaves of harmless sleepwalkers burned to death by mobs, or fields of grain napalmed by the government, lest they feed and shelter nests of rats.

Over the decades, the war had become more subtle. Counterware could keep the Stevelets at bay, for a while. The experts kept trying to subvert the Steveware, spreading modified Stevelets packed with propositions that aimed to cripple the swarms or, more ambitiously, make them believe that their job was done. In response, the Steveware had developed verification and encryption schemes that made it ever harder to corrupt or mislead. Some people still advocated cloning Steve from surviving pathology samples, but most experts doubted that the Steveware would be satisfied with that, or taken in by any misinformation that made the clone look like something more.

The Stevelets aspired to the impossible and would accept no substitutes, while humanity longed to be left unmolested, to get on with more useful tasks. Lincoln had known no other world, but until now he’d viewed the struggle from the sidelines, save shooting the odd rat and queuing up for his counterware shots.

So what was his role now? Traitor? Double agent? Prisoner of war? People talked about sleepwalkers and zombies, but in truth there was still no right word for what he had become.

Late in the afternoon, as they approached Atlanta, Lincoln felt his sense of the city’s geography warping, the significance of familiar landmarks shifting. New information coming through. He ran one hand over each of his forearms, where he’d heard the antennas often grew, but the polymer was probably too soft to feel beneath the skin. His parents could have wrapped his body in foil to mess with reception, and put him in a tent full of bottled air to keep out any of the chemical signals that the Stevelets also used, but none of that would have rid him of the basic urge.

As they passed the airport, then the tangle of overpasses where the highway from Macon merged with the one from Alabama, Lincoln couldn’t stop thinking about the baseball stadium up ahead. Had the Stevelets commandeered the home of the Braves? That would have made the news, surely, and ramped the war up a notch or two.

“Next exit,” he said. He gave directions that were half his own, half flowing from an eerie dream logic, until they turned a corner and the place where he knew he had to be came into view. It wasn’t the stadium itself; that had merely been the closest landmark in his head, a beacon the Stevelets had used to help guide him. “They booked a whole motel!” his grandmother exclaimed.

“Bought,” Lincoln guessed, judging from the amount of visible construction work. The Steveware controlled vast financial assets, some flat-out stolen from sleepwalkers but much of it honestly acquired by trading the products of the rat factories: everything from high-grade pharmaceuticals to immaculately faked designer shoes.

The original parking lot was full, but there were signs showing the way to an overflow area near what had once been the pool. As they headed for reception, Lincoln’s thoughts drifted weirdly to the time they’d come to Atlanta for one of Sam’s spelling competitions.

There were three uniformed government Stevologists in the lobby, seated at a small table with some equipment. Lincoln went first to the reception desk, where a smiling young woman handed him two room keys before he’d had a chance to say a word. “Enjoy the conclave,” she said. He didn’t know if she was a zombie like him or a former motel employee who’d been kept on, but she didn’t need to ask him anything.

The government people took longer to deal with. His grandmother sighed as they worked their way through a questionnaire, and then a woman called Dana took Lincoln’s blood. “They usually try to hide,” Dana said, “but sometimes your counterware can bring us useful fragments, even when it can’t stop the infection.”

As they ate their evening meal in the motel dining room, Lincoln tried to meet the eyes of the people around him. Some looked away nervously; others offered him encouraging smiles. He didn’t feel as if he was being inducted into a cult, and it wasn’t just the lack of pamphlets or speeches. He hadn’t been brainwashed into worshipping Steve; his opinion of the dead man was entirely unchanged. Like the desire to reach Atlanta in the first place, his task here would be far more focused and specific. To the Steveware he was a kind of machine, a machine it could instruct and tinker with the way Lincoln could control and customize his phone, but the Steveware no more expected him to share its final goal than he expected his own machines to enjoy his music, or respect his friends.

Lincoln knew that he dreamed that night, but when he woke he had trouble remembering the dream. He knocked on his grandmother’s door; she’d been up for hours. “I can’t sleep in this place,” she complained. “It’s quieter than the farm.”

She was right, Lincoln realized. They were close to the highway, but traffic noise, music, sirens, all the usual city sounds, barely reached them.

They went down to breakfast. When they’d eaten, Lincoln was at a loss to know what to do. He went to the reception desk; the same woman was there.

He didn’t need to speak. She said, “They’re not quite ready for you, sir. Feel free to watch TV, take a walk, use the gym. You’ll know when you’re needed.”

He turned to his grandmother. “Let’s take a walk.”

They left the motel and walked around the stadium, then headed east away from the highway, ending up in a leafy park a few blocks away. All the people around them were doing ordinary things: pushing their kids on swings, playing with their dogs. Lincoln’s grandmother said, “If you want to change your mind, we can always go home.”

As if his mind were his own to change. Still, at this moment the compulsion that had brought him here seemed to have waned. He didn’t know whether the Steveware had taken its eyes off him or was deliberately offering him a choice, a chance to back out.

He said, “I’ll stay.” He dreaded the idea of hitting the road only to find himself summoned back. Part of him was curious, too. He wanted to be brave enough to step inside the jaws of this whale, on the promise that he would be disgorged in the end.

They returned to the motel, ate lunch, watched TV, ate dinner. Lincoln checked his phone; his friends had been calling, wondering why he hadn’t been in touch. He hadn’t told anyone where he’d gone. He’d left it to his parents to explain everything to Sam.

He dreamed again, and woke clutching at fragments. Good times, an edge of danger, wide blue skies, the company of friends. It seemed more like a dream he could have had on his own than anything that might have come from the Steveware cramming his mind with equations so he could help test another crackpot idea that the swarms had collected 30 years ago by Googling the physics of immortality.

Three more days passed, just as aimlessly. Lincoln began to wonder if he’d failed some test, or if there’d been a miscalculation leading to a glut of zombies.

Early in the morning of their fifth day in Atlanta, as Lincoln splashed water on his face in the bathroom, he felt the change. Shards of his recurrent dream glistened potently in the back of his mind, while a set of directions through the motel complex gelled in the foreground. He was being summoned. It was all he could do to bang on his grandmother’s door and shout out a garbled explanation before he set off down the corridor.

She caught up with him. “Are you sleepwalking? Lincoln?”

“I’m still here, but they’re taking me soon.”

She looked frightened. He grasped her hand and squeezed it. “Don’t worry,” he said. He’d always imagined that when the time came he’d be the one who was afraid, drawing his courage from her.

He turned a corner and saw the corridor leading into a large space that might once have been a room for conferences or weddings. Half a dozen people were standing around; Lincoln could tell that the three teenagers were fellow zombies, while the adults were just there to look out for them. The room had no furniture but contained an odd collection of items, including four ladders and four bicycles. There was cladding on the walls, soundproofing, as if the whole building weren’t quiet enough already.

Out of the corner of his eye, Lincoln saw a dark mass of quivering fur: a swarm of rats, huddled against the wall. For a moment his skin crawled, but then a heady sense of exhilaration swept his revulsion away. His own body held only the tiniest fragment of the Steveware; at last he could confront the thing itself.

He turned toward the rats and spread his arms. “You called, and I came running. So what is it you want?” Disquietingly, memories of the Pied Piper story drifted into his head. Irresistible music lured the rats away. Then it lured away the children.

The rats gave no answer, but the room vanished.

Ty hit a patch of dust on the edge of the road, and it rose up around him. He whooped with joy and pedaled twice as hard, streaking ahead to leave his friends immersed in the cloud.

Errol caught up with him and reached across to punch him on the arm, as if he’d raised the dust on purpose. It was a light blow, not enough to be worth retribution; Ty just grinned at him.

It was a school day, but they’d all sneaked off together before lessons began. They couldn’t do anything in town—there were too many people who’d know them—but then Dan had suggested heading for the water tower. His father had some spray paint in the shed. They’d climb the tower and tag it.

There was a barbed-wire fence around the base of the tower, but Dan had already been out here on the weekend and started a tunnel, which didn’t take them long to complete. When they were through, Ty looked up and felt his head swimming. Carlos said, “We should have brought a rope.”

“We’ll be okay.”

Chris said, “I’ll go first.”

“Why?” Dan demanded.

Chris took his fancy new phone from his pocket and waved it at them. “Best camera angle. I don’t want to be looking up your ass.”

Carlos said, “Just promise you won’t put it on the Web. If my parents see this, I’m screwed.”

Chris laughed. “Mine, too. I’m not that stupid.”

“Yeah, well, you won’t be on camera if you’re holding the thing.”

Chris started up the ladder. Dan went next, with one paint can in the back pocket of his jeans. Ty followed, then Errol and Carlos.

The air had been still down on the ground, but as they went higher a breeze came out of nowhere, cooling the sweat on Ty’s back. The ladder started shuddering; he could see where it was bolted securely to the concrete of the tower, but in between it could still flex alarmingly. He’d treat it like a fairground ride, he decided: a little scary, but probably safe.

When Chris reached the top, Dan let go of the ladder with one hand, took the paint can, and reached out sideways into the expanse of white concrete. He quickly shaped a blue background, a distorted diamond, and then called down to Errol, who was carrying the red.

When Ty had passed the can up, he looked away, out across the expanse of brown dust. He could see the town in the distance. He glanced up and saw Chris leaning forward, gripping the ladder with one hand behind his back while he aimed the phone down at them.

Ty shouted up at him, “Hey, Scorsese! Make me famous!”

Dan spent five minutes adding finicky details in silver. Ty didn’t mind; it was good just being here. He didn’t need to mark the tower himself; whenever he saw Dan’s tag, he’d remember this feeling.

They clambered down, then sat at the base of the tower and passed the phone around, checking out Chris’s movie.

Lincoln had three rest days before he was called again, this time for four days in succession. He fought hard to remember all the scenes he was sleepwalking through, but even with his grandmother adding her accounts of the “playacting” she’d witnessed, he found it hard to hold on to the details.

Sometimes he hung out with the other actors, shooting pool in the motel’s game room, but there seemed to be an unspoken taboo against discussing their roles. Lincoln doubted that the Steveware would punish them even if they managed to overcome the restraint, but it was clear that it didn’t want them to piece too much together. It had even gone to the trouble of changing Steve’s name (as Lincoln and the other actors heard it, though presumably not Steve himself), as if the anger they felt toward the man in their ordinary lives might have penetrated into their roles. Lincoln couldn’t even remember his own mother’s face when he was Ty; the farm, the Crash, the whole history of the last 30 years, was gone from his thoughts entirely.

In any case, he had no wish to spoil the charade. Whatever the Steveware thought it was doing, Lincoln hoped it would believe it was working perfectly, all the way from Steve’s small-town childhood to whatever age it needed to reach before it could write this creation into flesh and blood, congratulate itself on a job well done, and then finally, mercifully, dissolve into rat piss and let the world move on.

Without warning, a fortnight after they’d arrived, Lincoln was no longer needed. He knew it when he woke, and after breakfast the woman at reception asked him, politely, to pack his bags and hand back the keys. Lincoln didn’t understand, but maybe Ty’s family had moved out of Steve’s hometown, and the friends hadn’t stayed in touch. Lincoln had played his part; now he was free.

When they returned to the lobby with their suitcases, Dana spotted them and asked Lincoln if he was willing to be debriefed. He turned to his grandmother. “Are you worried about the traffic?” He’d already phoned his father and told him they’d be back by dinnertime.

She said, “You should do this. I’ll wait in the truck.”

They sat at a table in the lobby. Dana asked his permission to record his words, and he told her everything he could remember.

When Lincoln had finished, he said, “You’re the Stevologist. You think they’ll get there in the end?”

Dana gestured at her phone to stop recording. “One estimate,” she said, “is that the Stevelets now comprise a hundred thousand times the computational resources of all the brains of all the human beings who’ve ever lived.”

Lincoln laughed. “And they still need stage props and extras, to do a little VR?”

“They’ve studied the anatomy of ten million human brains, but I think they know that they still don’t fully understand consciousness. They bring in real people for the bit parts, so they can concentrate on the star. If you gave them a particular human brain, I’m sure they could faithfully copy it into software, but anything more complicated starts to get murky. How do they know their Steve is conscious, when they’re not conscious themselves? He never gave them a reverse Turing test, a checklist they could apply. All they have is the judgment of people like you.”

Lincoln felt a surge of hope. “He seemed real enough to me.” His memories were blurred—and he wasn’t even absolutely certain which of Ty’s four friends was Steve—but none of them had struck him as less than human.

Dana said, “They have his genome. They have movies, they have blogs, they have e-mails: from Steve and a lot of people who knew him. They have a thousand fragments of his life. Like the borders of a giant jigsaw puzzle.”

“So that’s good, right? A lot of data is good?”

Dana hesitated. “The scenes you described have been played out thousands of times before. They’re trying to tweak their Steve to write the right e-mails, pull the right faces for the camera—by himself, without following a script like the extras. A lot of data sets the bar very high.”

As Lincoln walked out to the parking lot, he thought about the laughing, carefree boy he’d called Chris. Living for a few days, writing an e-mail—then memory-wiped, re-set, started again. Climbing a water tower, making a movie of his friends, but later turning the camera on himself, saying one wrong word—and wiped again.

A thousand times. A million times. The Steveware was infinitely patient, and infinitely stupid. Each time it failed, it would change the actors, shuffle a few variables, and run the experiment over again. The possibilities were endless, but it would keep on trying until the sun burned out.

Lincoln was tired. He climbed into the truck beside his grandmother, and they headed for home.

TAP

“I want you to find out who killed my mother, Ms O’Connor. Will you do that?”

Helen Sharp’s voice was unsteady with anger; she seemed almost as psyched up as if she’d come here to confront the killer, face-to-face. Under the circumstances, though, the very act of insisting that there was a killer was like shouting a defiant accusation from the rooftops—which must have taken some courage, even if she had no idea whom she was accusing.

I said carefully, “The coroner returned an open finding. I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine Third Hemisphere would still settle out of court for a significant—”

“Third Hemisphere have no case to answer! And sure, maybe they’d pay up anyway—just to avoid the publicity. But as it happens, I’m not interested in legalized blackmail.” Her eyes flashed angrily; she made no effort to conceal her outrage. No doubt her lawyers had already given her exactly the same advice; it didn’t look like the idea would ever grow on her. She was thirty-two—only five years younger than me—but she radiated so much stubborn idealism that I found it hard not to think of her as belonging to another generation entirely.

I raised one hand in a conciliatory gesture. “Fine. It’s your decision. But I suggest you don’t sign anything that limits your options—and don’t make any public declarations of absolution. After six months paying my expenses, you might change your mind. Or I might even turn up something that will change it for you. Stranger things have happened.” Though nothing much stranger than a next-of-kin declining to screw a multinational for all it was worth.

Sharp said impatiently, “The TAP implant was not responsible. There’s no evidence to suggest that it was.”

“No, and there’s no evidence to suggest foul play, either.”

“That’s why I’m hiring you. To find it.”

I glanced irritably at the north-facing window; the allegedly smart pane was ablaze with sunlight, rendering most of the office almost as hot as the sweltering streets of Kings Cross below.

Grace Sharp had been dead for a month. I’d been following the case informally, like everyone else in Sydney, out of sheer morbid curiosity. On the evening of January 12, she’d been at work in her study, apparently alone. The immediate cause of death had been a myocardial infarction, but the autopsy had also shown signs of a powerful adrenaline surge. That could have resulted from the pain and stress of a heart attack already in progress—or it could have come first, triggered by an unknown external shock.

Or, the Total Affect Protocol chip in her brain might have flooded her body with adrenaline for no good reason at all.

Sharp had been sixty-seven—in reasonable health for her age, but old enough to blur the boundaries of the possible. Forensic pathologists had struggled at the inquest to allocate probabilities to the three alternatives, but there’d been no clear front-runner. Which was no doubt distressing for the relatives—and no doubt left them vulnerable to the fantasy that there had to be a simple answer out there somewhere, just waiting to be found.

Helen Sharp said, “The media consensus is that my mother was composing a poem just before she died—and she thought a word in TAP so ‘powerful’ that it killed her on the spot.” Her tone was venomous. “Do they seriously imagine that ninety thousand sane people would put something in their brains which was capable of doing that? Or that the manufacturers would sell a device which would leave them open to billions of dollars worth of compensation claims? Or that the government licensing authorities—”

I said, “Licensed pharmaceuticals have killed plenty of people. Implants are even harder to test. And ‘fail-safe’ software written to the most rigorous military specifications has crashed aircraft—”

She seized on the analogy triumphantly. “And how do you know that? Because the aircraft’s black box proved it! Well, the TAP implant has its own black box: an independent chip which logs all its actions. And there was no record of any malfunction. No record of the implant triggering an adrenaline release at any level—let alone a fatal dose.”

“Maybe the black box glitched, too. You say it’s independent—but if there’s enough connectivity to let it know everything the implant does, the combined system might still be vulnerable to some kind of shared failure mode that the designers never anticipated.”

Sharp clenched her fists in frustration. “That’s not—literally—impossible,” she conceded. “But I don’t believe it’s likely.”

“All right. What do you think happened?”

Sharp composed herself, with the air of someone weary of repeating the same message, gathering up her strength with a promise to herself that this would be the last time.

She said, “My mother was working on a new poem that night—the black box makes that clear. But the time of death can’t be determined precisely—and it could have been as much as fifteen minutes after the last recorded use of the implant. I believe she was interrupted. I believe someone broke into the apartment and killed her.

“I don’t know how they did it. Maybe they just terrorized her—without laying a finger on her—and that was enough to bring on the heart attack.” Her voice was flat, deliberately emotionless. “Or maybe they gave her a transdermal dose of a powerful stimulant. There are dozens of chemicals which could have triggered a heart attack, without leaving a trace. She wasn’t found for almost nine hours. There are carbohydrate analogs of stimulatory neuropeptides which are degraded into glucose and water on a time scale of minutes.”

I resisted the urge to cite the lack of evidence for an intruder; it would have been a waste of breath. “Why, though? Why would anyone want to kill her?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure how much you know about TAP.”

“Assume the worst.”

“Well ... it’s been wrongly described as just about everything from ‘telepathy’ to ‘computerized Esperanto’ to ‘the multimedia standard for the brain’. Sure, it began with a fusion of language and VR—but it’s been growing for almost fifteen years now. There’s still a word for <>“—she sketched the angle-brackets with her fingers, and I picked up on the convention later—“which might as well be hundo—and another for <> ... which will evoke all that and more in all five senses, if you let it.

“But at the leading edge, now, we’re creating words for concepts, emotions, states of mind, which might once have defied description altogether. With TAP, ultimately there’s nothing a human being can experience which needs to remain ... ineffable, mysterious, incommunicable. Nothing is beyond discussion. Nothing is beyond analysis. Nothing is ‘unspeakable’. And a lot of people find that prospect threatening; it turns a lot of old power structures on their head.”

If that cliche came true every time it was invoked, power structures would be oscillating faster than mains current. Helen Sharp was pushing seven on my paranoia index; on top of all her understandable grief and frustration, she belonged to a technosubculture which was poorly understood by the mainstream, frequently misrepresented—and which clearly liked to think of itself as a “dangerously” iconoclastic elite.

I said, “I know there are people who find TAP users ... unacceptable. But what’s going to drive them to extremes like murder, all of a sudden? In fifteen years, has anyone, anywhere, been killed simply for having the implant?”

“Not to my knowledge. But—”

“Then surely—”

“But I can tell you exactly what’s changed. I can tell you why the conflict has just entered a whole new phase.”

That got my attention. “Go on.”

“You know it’s against the law to install a TAP implant in anyone younger than eighteen years old?”

“Of course.” The same restriction applied to all neural hardware, other than therapeutic chips which restored normal function to the injured or congenitally disabled.

“Early in March, a couple here in Sydney will commence legal proceedings with the aim of ensuring that they’re free to install the implant in all their future children—at the age of three months.”

I was momentarily speechless. These plans had clearly been kept within a very tight circle of supporters; the saturation media coverage of the inquest hadn’t mentioned so much as a rumour. After a month of intense journalistic scrutiny, I hadn’t expected the TAP-heads to have any surprises left.

I said, “Legal proceedings on what basis?”

“That they’re entitled to raise their family using whatever language they choose. That’s guaranteed in Federal legislation: there’s a 2011 bill which brings into force most of the provisions of the 2005 UN Covenant on Human Rights. They’ll be seeking a ruling from the High Court which invalidates the relevant sections of the New South Wales criminal code—which is far more difficult, from a legal point of view, than trying to defend themselves against a prosecution after the fact ... but it does save them the trouble of having to find a surgeon willing to risk martyrdom.”

Sharp smiled faintly. “The same Federal law was invoked about a year ago, by a signing couple who were being pressured by Community Services to give their son a hearing implant. The parents won the first round—and it looks like there isn’t going to be an appeal. But a pro-implant case was always going to be much harder, of course. And signing is positively respectable, compared to TAP.”

“I assume the police know all this?”

“Of course. They don’t appear to be particularly interested, though—and I wasn’t able to raise it at the inquest. Legally speaking, I suppose it really is just static.”

“But you think—”

“I think a death widely attributed to the TAP implant would transform the prospects of the challenge succeeding from merely poor to ... politically impossible. I think there are people who’d consider that to be a result worth killing for.”

Sharp fixed her gaze on me for a moment, and then nodded slightly, almost sympathetically—as if I’d just uttered a word which expressed all the conflicting emotions running through my head: <

I had to admit that it was a deeply unsettling notion: a language which could encompass, if not the universe itself, then everything we could possibly experience of it. At any given moment, there were “only” ten to the power three thousand subjectively distinguishable states of the human brain. A mere ten thousand bits of information: quite a mouthful, encoded as syllables—but only a millisecond flash in infrared. A TAP user could effectively narrate his or her entire inner life, with one hundred percent fidelity, in real time. Leopold Bloom, eat your heart out.

I boarded the southbound train, the skin on the back of my neck still tingling. The carriage was packed, so I stood strap-hanging with my eyes closed, letting the question spin in the darkness of my skull: Who, or what, killed Grace Sharp? Work was never something I could switch on and off—and unless I reached the stage where part of me was thinking about the case every waking moment, the chances were I’d make no progress at all.

Helen Sharp believed in some faceless conspiracy against TAP as a first language, driven by sheer linguistic xenophobia—though the real opposition might also be motivated, in part, by perfectly valid concerns about the unknown developmental consequences for a child growing up with TAP.

The serious media favoured a simple failure of technology; several worthy editorials had rewritten the Sharp case as a cautionary tale about the need for improved quality control in biomedical engineering. Meanwhile, the tabloids had gleefully embraced the idea of the <> word, quasi-mystical enough to give their anti-tech subscribers a frisson of self-righteousness at the poetic justice of a TAP-head thinking herself into oblivion ... and their pro-tech ones a frisson of awe at the sheer Power of the Chip.

And it was still possible that Grace Sharp had simply had a heart attack, all by herself. No assassins, no fatal poetry, no glitch.

So far, I could only agree with the coroner: I wasn’t prepared to rule anything out.

By the time I arrived home, Mick had already eaten and retreated to his room to play Austro-Hungarian Political Intrigues in Space. He’d been running the scenario for almost six months, along with a dozen friends—some in Sydney, some in Beijing, some in Sao Paulo. They’d graciously let me join in once, as a minor character with an unpronounceable name, but I’d become terminally bored after ten minutes and engineered my own death as swiftly as possible. I had nothing against role-playing games, per se ... but this was the most ludicrous one I’d encountered since Postmodernism Ate My Love Child. Still, every twelve-year-old needed something truly appalling to grow out of—something to look back on in a year’s time with unconditional embarrassment. The books I’d read, myself (and adored, at the time) had been no better.

I knocked on his door, and entered. He was lying on his bed with the headset on and his hands above his head, making minimalist gestures with both control gloves: driving a software puppet body which had no sense of touch, or balance, or proprioception. He was moving its limbs with actions which had nothing to do with moving his own ... but he was seeing and hearing everything through the puppet’s eyes and ears.

Most of the studies I’d read had suggested that the earlier a child took up VR (headset-and-glove, of course, not implant-based), the fewer side-effects it had on real-life coordination and body image. The skills of moving real and virtual bodies didn’t seem to compete for limited neural resources; they could be learnt in parallel, as easily as two languages. Only adults got confused between the two (and did better with VR implants, which let them pretend they were using their physical bodies). The research suggested that an hour a day in VR was no more harmful than an hour a day of any other equally unnatural activity: violin practice, ballet, karate.

I still worried, though.

The room monitor flagged my presence. At a convenient break in the action, Mick slipped off the headset to greet me, doing his best to hide his impatience.

I said, “School?”

He shrugged. “Bland-out. Work?”

“I’ve got a murder case.”

His face lit up. “Resonant! What class weapon?”

“Unkind words.”

“¿Que?”

“It’s a joke.” I almost started to explain, but it didn’t seem fair to hold up the other players. “You’ll quit at nine, okay? I don’t want to have to check on you.”

“Mmmm.” Deliberately noncommittal.

I said calmly, “I can program it, or you can stick to the rules voluntarily. It’s your choice.”

He scowled. “It’s no choice, if it makes no difference.”

“Very profound. But I happen to disagree.” I walked over to him and brushed the hair from his eyes; he gave me his I-wish-you-wouldn’t-but-you’re-forgiven-this-time look.

Mick said suddenly, “Unkind words? You mean Grace Sharp?”

I nodded, surprised.

“Some guru last week was prating about her TAPping herself to death.” He seemed greatly amused—and it struck me that “guru” was several orders of magnitude more insulting than anything I would have dared to say in front of my mother, at his age. At least put-downs were getting more elegant; my generation’s equivalents had relied almost exclusively on references to excrement or genitalia. Mick and his contemporaries weren’t at all prudish—they just found the old scatological forms embarrassingly childish.

I said, “You don’t believe in the <> word?”

“Not some banana skin land mine you make yourself, by accident.”

I pondered that. “But if it exists at all, don’t you think it’d be easier to fight if it came from outside, than if you stumbled on it in your own thoughts?”

He shook his head knowingly. “TAP’s not like that. You can’t invent random words in your head—you can’t try out random bit-patterns. You can imagine things, you can free-associate, but ... not all the way to death, without seeing it coming.”

I laughed. “So when did you read up on this?”

“Last week. The story sounded flash, so I went context mining.” He glanced at his terminal and made some slight hand movements; a cluster of icons for Universal Resource Locators poured into an envelope with my name on it, which darted into the outgoing mail box. “References.”

“Thanks. I wasted the whole afternoon—I should have come home early and picked your brains instead.” I was only half joking.

I sat on the edge of the bed. “If she didn’t stumble on the word herself, though ... I don’t see how anyone could have spoken it to her: as far as the police could tell, she’d had no visitors—or communications—for hours. And if someone broke into the apartment, they left no trace.”

“How about ... ?” Mick gestured with one gloved thumb at the shelf above his bed.

“What?” I parsed the clutter of objects slowly. “Ah.”

He’d set up an IR link with his friend Vito, who lived in an apartment block across the park; they could exchange data twenty-four hours a day without either family paying a cent to the fibre barons. The collimated beam of the five-dollar transceiver passed effortlessly through both their bedroom windows.

“You think someone outside the apartment ... shot her in the palm with a <> word?” The notion conjured up bizarre images: a figure taking aim with a gunless night-sight; Grace Sharp with outstretched arms and infrared stigmata.

“Maybe. Split the fee, if I’m right?”

“Sure. Minus rent, food, clothes, communications—”

Mick mimed violin playing. I feigned a swipe at his head. He glanced at the terminal; his friends were losing patience.

I said, “I’d better leave you to it.”

He smiled, held up his hand in a farewell gesture like a diver about to submerge, then slipped the headset back on. I lingered in the room for a few seconds, feeling profoundly strange.

Not because I felt that I was losing touch with my son. I wasn’t. But the fact that we could comprehend each other at all suddenly seemed like the most precarious voodoo. Natural language had endured, fundamentally unchanged, through a thousand social and technological revolutions ... but TAP made it look like some Stone Age tool, a flake of crudely shaped obsidian in an era when individual atoms could be picked up and rearranged at whim.

And maybe in the long run, all the trial-and-error and misunderstandings, all the folk remedies of smiles and gestures, all the clumsy imperfect well-meaning attempts to bridge the gap, would be swept away by the dazzling torrent of communication without bounds.

I closed the door quietly on my way out.

The next morning I started going through the transcripts of the inquest—which included a 3D image of Sharp’s study. The body had been found around 8:20 AM by a domestic aid who came three times a week—Sharp, although generally fit, had suffered from severe arthritis in her hands. Paramedics had removed the body before the police became involved, but they’d snapped the scene first as a routine procedure.

The apartment was on the 25th floor, and the study had a large window facing west. The curtains were shown fully open—although there was nothing in the transcripts, one way or the other, about the possibility that the man who’d found the body, or even the paramedics, might have opened them to let in some light. I grafted the image into the local council’s plan of the suburb, and did some crude ray-tracing from where the forensic software suggested Sharp had been standing before she fell. A bullet would have left directional information—but a burst of IR could have come from any location with a clear line of sight. Given the uncertainty in her position, and the size of the window, the possibilities encompassed the windows and balconies of sixty-three apartments. Most were beyond the range of cheap hobbyists’ IR equipment—but I looked up skin-transceiver sensitivity, attenuation in the atmosphere, and beam spread parameters, then started checking product catalogues. There were several models of communications lasers which would have done the job—and the cheapest was only three hundred dollars. Not the kind of thing you could buy from an electronics retailer, but there were no formal restrictions on purchase or ownership. It wasn’t a weapon, after all.

The world’s greatest TAP poet, shot by a word? It was a seductive idea—and I was surprised that the tabloids hadn’t seized on it, weeks ago—but in the cold light of morning, I was finding it increasingly difficult to believe that Grace Sharp had died from anything but natural causes. The building had excellent security; the forensic team had found no sign of an intruder. The testimony of the black box wasn’t watertight, but on balance it probably did exonerate the implant. And Helen Sharp herself had been convinced that the <> word was impossible.

I spent the morning slogging through the rest of the transcripts, but there was nothing very illuminating. The experts had washed their hands of Grace Sharp’s death. I didn’t blame them: if the evidence supported no clear verdict, the honest thing to do was to say so. At most inquests, though, someone managed to slip a speculation or two into the proceedings: a pathologist’s gut-level hunch, an engineer’s unprovable intuition. A few lines I could wave accusingly in their face when I cornered them in their office—prompting them to spill the whole elaborate, unofficial hypothesis they’d been nurturing in their head for months. But there wasn’t a single foothold here, a single indiscretion I could pursue; every witness had been cautious to a fault.

So I had nowhere else to go: I steeled myself and went trawling through the archives for the enemies of TAP.

Media releases (mainly from politicians and religious figures), letters and essays in edited publications, and postings to net forums gave me about seventeen thousand individuals who’d had something disparaging to say to the world about TAP. The search algorithm was multilingual, but I didn’t trust it to pick up irony reliably, so even this crude first grab had to be taken with a mountain of salt. Twelve percent of the forum postings were anonymous—and the random sample I inspected made it clear that they came from the most vehement opponents—but I put them aside; textual analysis of a few gigabytes of invective could wait for barrel-scraping time.

Clustering software picked up some fairly predictable connections. Two-thirds of the people I’d found were officially speaking on behalf of—or explicitly mentioned their membership or approval of—one of ninety-six organizations: political, religious, or cultural.

The software drew ninety-six star-diagrams. The biggest cluster was for Natural Wisdom: a quasi-green lobby group set up for the sole purpose of opposing the use of neural hardware. Most members were European, but there was a significant Australian presence. Second largest was The Fountain of Righteousness, a U.S.-based fundamentalist Christian coalition; they had half a dozen local affiliate churches. Cluster size didn’t necessarily measure the strength of opposition, though; the Roman Catholic church ranked a mere thirtieth—but only because it was so rigidly hierarchical, with a relatively small list of appointed spokesmen. Most Islamic authorities weren’t keen on neural hardware, either—but many predominantly Islamic countries had simply outlawed the technology, largely defusing it as an issue. Islam’s best showing was for a UK group, and that was ranked fifty-seventh.

I cut the data set down to Australia only. Nineteen organizations remained—and the top six rankings stayed the same, for what that was worth. There was something of the flavour of a witch-hunt to this whole analysis; I wasn’t publicly accusing anyone of anything—I wasn’t libelling Natural Wisdom as murderous thugs for daring to speak out against the implant—but this kind of crude fishing expedition always made me feel distinctly uneasy.

Still, if these were the people who’d feel most threatened by the prospect of children growing up with TAP ... who among them could have known about the impending High Court challenge?

I scanned the membership databases of legal and paralegal associations, and the mailing lists of relevant journals, scooping up anyone who gave an address care of Huntingdale and Partners—the firm who were preparing the “infant implant” brief.

There was zero overlap with the anti-TAP set—which was no great surprise. I imagined the police would have gone at least this far, and they’d had better resources: they could have pulled the whole Huntingdale workforce from taxation records, with no chance of so much as a clerical assistant falling through the cracks.

I gazed at the screen, dispirited. All I had to show for a day’s work were sixty-three apartments with a view of Grace Sharp’s study, and seventeen thousand people who’d done nothing more incriminating than put themselves on the record as opponents of TAP.

The only thing left to try was intersecting the two.

Finding apartment numbers to match the physical locations in the building plans was the hardest part; architects and developers didn’t have to file anything so petty when they had their projects approved. I was actually beginning to contemplate doing the necessary legwork myself, when I discovered that someone had done it for me: an ad hoc consortium of sellers of insurance, fire-alarms, security equipment and climate control had commissioned a database for the entire metropolitan area, to help them target their junk mail. The suburb I needed only cost fifty bucks—complete with email tags.

I cross-matched with the anti-TAP set.

A single name appeared.

John Dallaporta belonged to none of my organisational clusters, and I had only one piece of data on his attitude to TAP: a short essay he’d written, seven years before, decrying the implant’s potential to “erode the richness of our ancient and beautiful tongues” and “invade the still, mysterious spaces of our minds”. The essay had appeared in a secondary English teachers’ netzine; I summoned up the whole issue, and flipped through its innocuous contents. The majority of the articles dealt with working conditions, and concerns arising out of new technology; there was also an earnest—almost painfully respectful—discussion of strategies for coping with parents who forbade their children contact with the filthy/sexist/atheistic/elitist/ superstitious/obsolete works of Shakespeare, et al. Not the kind of venue you’d seriously expect to lead you to a man who slaughtered his ideological enemies.

I reread Dallaporta’s essay carefully. It was passionate, but hardly inflammatory; he sounded very much like just one more plaintive, insecure technophobe letting off steam, to a no doubt largely sympathetic audience. I was inclined to be sympathetic, myself—in all honesty, the implant made my skin crawl—but there was a self-serving undercurrent which detracted from the force of his arguments. Certainly, portraying English as an endangered language was ridiculous, when more people were speaking it than at any other time in history.

And though I could picture Dallaporta outside the court with a placard, once the challenge to the implant legislation began, I found it hard to imagine the author of these moderate words killing Grace Sharp in cold blood—and harder still to imagine him discovering the means to do it.

I was growing tired of desk work, but I spent the next few hours studying the fragmentary portrait of the man offered by the net. He was forty-seven years old, divorced five years, with two daughters in their mid-teens. Presumably his ex-wife had custody of both children, since all the data suggested that he lived alone. He’d been a teacher in government high schools all his working life; in his late twenties, he’d published some poetry in literary journals, but unless he’d adopted an undocumented pseudonym, there’d been nothing since. He seemed to belong to no organization but the State School Teachers’ Union, and if he subscribed to any religion, no marketing demographer had yet managed to pin it down.

So much for the electronic profile. I didn’t believe for a moment that he could have killed Grace Sharp—but I wasn’t prepared to rule it out until I’d met him in the flesh.

I found a calendar of events for the Laurence Brereton Memorial High School. There was a parent-teacher night in three days’ time.

I arrived late enough not to have to loiter outside for too long before catching sight of a few departing parents, still wearing their name badges. I got a good look at the style and the materials used—but I was even luckier than that: one man dropped his badge into a recycling bin right before my eyes. I’d come prepared with a variety of cardboard samples, safety pins and clips, but all I had to do was fish out this discarded one, match the font on my notepad’s printer, and spray my own—borrowed—name onto the blank side.

No one challenged me as I entered the crowded hall and walked straight past the desk where parents were queuing up to register their attendance and collect their badges. I spotted a row of work stations dispensing guidance; I walked up to one and tried to make an enquiry, but it was too clever by far: the only entry point was “parent’s name”—apparently all it needed in order to highlight every relevant teacher on a personalized map of the hall. I stood back and watched other people use the software, until Dallaporta’s name appeared.

It seemed an odd time of year for an event like this; Mick’s high school had held an orientation night before the start of term, but they hadn’t yet invited me back. The buzz of conversation around me sounded remarkably amiable, though; maybe it was a good strategy to drag the parents in as early as this, and try to nip any problems in the bud.

John Dallaporta was tall and slender, clean-shaven, slightly balding. He was being talked at loudly by someone’s proud father—and though his eyes were glazed, and his smile a little wooden, he didn’t strike me as a man who’d been sleepless with guilt for the past five weeks.

When the father departed, I approached purposefully. Dallaporta offered his hand and said smoothly, “Good to see you, Ms. Stone.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I—”

I smiled disarmingly. “No, you don’t teach my daughter. But I wanted to speak to you, and this seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. But I should explain: I’m not the head of department this year. It rotates between the senior teachers, so Carol Bailey—” He glanced around, then pointed her out. “Do you see—?”

I shook my head apologetically. “It’s not a departmental matter. I just wanted to meet you. I read an essay you wrote, a few years ago: The Bit-Stream of the Rose. And I liked what you had to say there, very much. So when I realized you were teaching in my daughter’s new school ... “

Dallaporta eyed me curiously, a little bemused, but he betrayed no obvious unease or suspicion. “That’s so long ago now, I’m surprised you remember it at all. Let alone the name of the author.”

“Of course I remember! And I just hope the rest of the department share your values on those ... issues. I used to teach English, myself. I know the kind of pressures you’re facing. And of course I want my own children to be technologically literate—but some of us have to take a stand, or who knows what ‘technologically literate’ will mean, in twenty years’ time?”

Dallaporta nodded affably, but now I could see muscles tightening at the sides of his jaws—the ones which contract when you’re trying too hard not to let anything show. Proving what? Nothing at all—except that he had stronger feelings about TAP than he cared to discuss with a total stranger in a crowded hall.

I kept pushing. “When I started high school, myself, if you didn’t have your own PC on your desk at home, you were marginalized. These days the work stations come for free—if you sign up for a thousand-a-month worth of ‘vital’ net access. And any child who can’t interview Afghani nomads for a geography assignment—or get a live feed from the latest Venus probe via JPL—might as well quit and go work at McDonalds. When does it stop? When my grandchildren are twelve, what will ‘entry level’ be, for them?”

Dallaporta laughed, not quite naturally. “I wouldn’t dare hazard a guess. But I have faith in people. In common sense.”

I made direct eye contact, trying to decide if he was genuinely rattled—or just didn’t trust himself to get on the soapbox, even for such an obviously sympathetic listener.

“Common sense? I hope you’re right. I’ve heard some rumours lately which don’t bear thinking about—”

Dallaporta blanched visibly. Meaning he knew about the court case? And now assumed that I had some connection to whoever had given him the news? I offered him a conspiratorial smile: Relax, I’m a friend, we’re on the same side.

I said, “Look, I didn’t mean to take up so much of your time. But it was so nice to meet you, finally.” I held out my hand, and Dallaporta shook it, slipping back onto autopilot with obvious relief.

I walked out into the warm evening. There was a real Lydia Stone, with a daughter who’d just started Year 8; Dallaporta might check the records, but I didn’t think he was likely to confront the girl’s teachers and ask them to sketch an identikit for comparison.

I glanced up at the washed-out sky, at the handful of visible stars—and thought once more: this moment would be a single word, in TAP. <> A moment skewered like a butterfly? A ten-thousand-bit digital corpse of the world, shedding dead pixels in the mind’s eye? Or a moment captured like a mood perfectly evoked by a phrase of music? No one had ever felt the need to murder a composer, just to safeguard the languages which couldn’t compete on equal terms with fugues and sonatas. No one had ever taken a human life just to stop eccentric parents bombarding their offspring with Bach and Mozart in the womb. What made TAP so much more threatening? The fact that it could evoke images and emotions beyond the reach of any symphony? The fact that it was so much better?

I’d actually meant most of what I’d said to Dallaporta—but the more I thought about the issues, the more ambivalent I became. No one was trying to “force” TAP onto anyone, except their own children—and to raise a child at all was to impose a set of choices, one way or another. Actively or passively. Consciously, or through sheer conformity or neglect. The prospect of TAP-heads meddling with their children’s brains—just so they could share an artificial language—still filled me with instinctive, visceral outrage ... but was it any more virtuous for the rest of us to insist that no child be given the implant until their brains were fully formed in the ten-thousand-year-old mould of our own Stone Age preconceptions? Weren’t both sides just attempting to shape future generations in their own image?

And putting aside prejudice, instinct, and nostalgia ... which first language really would provide the best tools for dealing with the modern world?

That was a good question. It just wasn’t the one I was being paid to answer.

I planted a dozen small recording devices in pay phones near Dallaporta’s apartment, and the school. Which was highly illegal—but both less risky, and more likely to succeed (if he was actually guilty of anything), than trying to bug his home. I’d sampled his voice at the parent-teacher night, so the bugs could discard everyone else’s conversations. I cycled by and queried them daily.

I finally tracked down Tom Davies, Grace Sharp’s domestic aid—a TAP-head himself. The curtains of the study were always left open, he said. Grace liked to work looking out across the skyline; she’d chosen the apartment for the view.

I couldn’t help asking, sarcastically, “Wouldn’t it have been cheaper just to visit some rich friend’s apartment—and memorize the TAP words for everything she saw?”

He laughed. “Of course. And she could have written scenery in her head to put any ten-million-dollar harbour view to shame.”

“So why didn’t she?”

“Do you know how Grace defined ‘reality’?”

“No.”

“The ten thousand bits that are left when you’ve argued everything else out of existence.”

After weeks of persistent harassment, I persuaded Maxine Ho, one of Third Hemisphere’s senior engineers, to talk to me off the record. She stuck to the official line, though: the <> word was impossible. Whatever Grace Sharp had imagined, or whatever TAP sequence some would-be assassin had confronted her with, all the safeguards operated on a separate level, independent of the language protocol—and when the implant had been examined after the autopsy, there’d been no trace of damage or corruption to the relevant hardware or software.

“Of course a neural implant can kill you. A pacemaker can kill you. A work station can kill you. Any piece of technology can fail. But if someone died sitting at a work station—and when I took it apart there was no sign of a loose wire or a break in the insulation—I wouldn’t say: ‘She must have been running the legendary <> program, which instructed the machine to electrocute her.’ I’d go looking for another cause of death.”

It was a specious analogy. Perfectly functioning TAP implants routinely sent signals to the hypothalamus, which in turn stimulated the adrenal gland; perfectly functioning work stations weren’t set up to dispense electric shocks at any dose.

Still, I thought she was being basically straight with me. If she believed that the implant had failed at all, she believed it was a one-in-a-million glitch: less a design flaw than a tragic proof of the intrinsic unpredictability of any real device out in the real world—the kind of thing which would have been excused as “natural causes” if an equally robust biological system had failed.

On March 5th, the High Court challenge to the implant restrictions became public knowledge. The case wasn’t scheduled to be heard until September—but the reaction to the news was immediate.

Helen Sharp had been right about one thing: her mother’s death was seized upon by almost every commentator as proof that a successful challenge would amount to the legalization of infanticide. Not that Their Honours could be influenced by emotive editorials—perish the thought—but even if they weren’t, it was clear that the Federal government would be ready with the necessary amendments within days of any decision which put the State criminal law in doubt. I set my knowledge miner digging, but reasoned debate about the merits of the case—the actual merits, not the legal ones—could barely be found outside obscure neurolinguistics journals. (TAP speakers’ netzines were in TAP, and I had no translation software.)

The night the news broke, Mick declared, “I want one.”

“Then you’ll just have to wait six years, won’t you?”

“Not if they win.”

“If they win, you’d better start mowing lawns and washing windows. Six years should do it either way.”

He accepted that without protest—but then asked innocently, “So what’s your favourite medium?”

“Text. And I know: I’m a boring old fart, but you’re still not—” He wore a pained expression—and not just because “old fart” was cringe-inducing baby-talk. I’d missed the point.

“I’m sorry. What were you going to say?”

Mick spoke carefully. “How’d you like it if every time you picked up a book, you had to swallow everything the writer said? If you couldn’t stop mid-sentence and think: ‘This is ... bullshit.’ If you lost the power to argue in your head with every word.”

“I’d hate it.”

He said, “That’s where VR’s heading. Without TAP.”

I was taken aback by the bleakness of this forecast—but it rang true. Without a language as powerful as the medium, there was little room for argument, little room for doubt. Just unearned suspension of disbelief.

I reached over to the cable which snaked from his headset to the work station, and looped it absentmindedly around one finger. I said, “If it’s as bad as that, then stop using it. It’s your choice.”

One look answered that; he didn’t need to elaborate. Why should he be forced to abandon his own favourite medium? Why shouldn’t he have the chance to salvage it, reinvigorate it, instead? Present at the birth of spoken language, would I have fought to abolish it, like some fanatical Zen terrorist afraid of its power to deceive? Or would I have fought to enrich it, to balance that power with scepticism and analysis?

I said lamely, “There’s more to life than VR.”

Mick grinned triumphantly. “Exactly. But there isn’t more to life than TAP.”

I took on other cases: runaway children, minor computer fraud—routine work, but at least it gave me the satisfaction of swift results. Helen Sharp could no longer afford to keep me on full-time—and I’d virtually run out of productive ways to spend her money, anyway. If her mother had died from some unrepeatable glitch, biological or otherwise, nobody would ever prove it. So I offered no false hopes, and worked on the assumption that in a few more months, she’d come to her senses and tell me that the case was closed.

Then, in the middle of April, one of my pay phone bugs finally spoke.

I was dutifully cycling past, checking them all in the pouring rain, though I no longer seriously expected anything. When my notepad chimed the code for success, I almost dropped it into a storm drain.

Playing back the recording on the bike, in the rain, would have been impossible. Playing it back on a crowded train would have been stupid—I didn’t have the headphones—but I was tempted. By the time I reached the office, I’d convinced myself I’d hear nothing but a service call: Dallaporta complaining that his home connection was out of order.

I was wrong.

Dallaporta whispered urgently, “You have to help me. I need your advice.” It was a monologue; he was leaving a message. “I didn’t get rid of it, on the night. I thought: it’s not illegal—so why not keep it, just in case?” My skin crawled. He didn’t elaborate, but I could guess exactly what he meant: Just in case it becomes expedient, at some time in the unforeseeable future, to kill another prominent TAP-head.

He inhaled deeply, as if trying to calm himself. “That was ... insane, I know. I wasn’t thinking straight. But now ... I can’t just throw it in the river! What if the police are watching me? What if they’re going through my garbage?” That was unlikely, but I was grateful for his paranoia—and his incompetence: whispering into a public phone with (I imagined) a hand shielding lips and mouthpiece wouldn’t have done him much good if he had been under police surveillance.

“I’ve wiped the code, now.” Shit. “I followed the instructions, I’m sure it worked. But I have to get rid of the machine. I need to know the best way—the safest way—to do it. Please. Call me back at the usual place.”

I decoded the number he’d called, from the tones—but it was a commercial message rerouting service—and one that was far too classy to be bribed or hacked.

I sat at the desk, still dripping, trying to decide what to do next. The humidity control system in the north window was pumping water vapour into the room; I’d never get dry unless I went and stood out in the hall for an hour.

Everything I had so far would be less than useless to the police; the illegality of the phone bugs aside, every connection between Dallaporta and Grace Sharp’s death remained pure speculation. And I wasn’t even sure I had enough to convince Helen Sharp, who didn’t believe in <> words. Nothing Dallaporta had said proved that he’d been talking about an infrared communications laser—and the crucial data it had transmitted was probably lost forever, now.

But it sounded like I still had a very slim chance to photograph “the machine”, in situ.

The message had been left at 6:23 that morning. I glanced at my watch; school would be out in two hours. I had no way of knowing how long it would take for Dallaporta’s backers (Natural Wisdom? The Fountain of Righteousness?) to come to his rescue—assuming they didn’t just decide to abandon him—but I couldn’t risk waiting another day.

I knew I’d be cutting it fine, but I didn’t seem to have much choice.

There were six hundred apartments in Dallaporta’s building—and the sheer weight of numbers had its advantages. I stood across the street behind a bus shelter and waited for someone to approach the main entrance. When a young man appeared, key in hand, I dashed across the road and caught up with him, breathless, soaked, umbrella-less, fumbling. He let me through without a moment’s hesitation. I hung back in the lobby shaking water from my coat so I wouldn’t have to talk to him in the elevator; I hadn’t had time to prepare any plausible lies, and if he’d so much as asked me how long I’d lived in the building, I probably would have been struck dumb.

Dallaporta’s apartment, 1912, had a reinforced security door with an impressive-looking deadlock. I found a utilities room at the end of the corridor, and picked its lock easily enough. There was a hatch in the ceiling—and even a ladder standing in a corner of the room. I rechecked the plans of the building on my notepad: not every apartment had a ceiling hatch; 1911 did, 1912 didn’t.

I climbed into the ceiling and crawled across the dusty beams as quietly as I could, hoping I hadn’t lost my bearings. I lay above apartment 1911, just listening, for almost five minutes—then I realized I’d never be certain it was empty. A baby sleeping, an adult quietly reading ... I didn’t even know who lived there, I hadn’t had time to find out.

Cursing silently, I crawled back to the utilities room, brushed myself down, and went and rang the bell to 1911.

I rang three times. No one was home.

I retraced my path, lifted the hatch, lowered a rope into the apartment. My forearms ached as I descended; I hadn’t done an illegal entry since before Mick was born. The old buzz was tinged with new anxieties: I was too old for this cat-burglar shit—and I couldn’t afford to lose my licence. But I felt a kind of defiant euphoria, too—because everything was harder, because I had so much more to lose.

And it would all be one word, in TAP ...

The balconies of the two apartments were separated by less than a metre, but they were flush with the outside wall of the building—no overhang at all. I climbed up onto the waist-high foot’s-width concrete guard wall, steadied myself by pressing up with my left hand against the balcony’s ceiling—then with the right, reached across the naked brickwork of the outside wall and into Dallaporta’s balcony. I was lucky; I was on the side of the building facing away from the wind.

I moved a foot across, too, embraced the brickwork tightly, shifted the centre of mass of my body a few crucial centimetres—fighting down momentary panic—and within seconds, my right hand and foot were lodged securely between Dallaporta’s guard wall and ceiling, and it was far easier to go forward than back. I jumped shakily down onto his cluttered balcony, just missing a pot plant. I glanced at the street, nineteen storeys below—and pictured Mick at my funeral, still refusing to talk to his father. There was a chance that someone had seen me cross, but there was nothing I could do about that—and the downpour seemed to shift the odds in my favour: I could barely make out Grace Sharp’s building at all, through the curtain of rain.

A sliding glass door separated the balcony from the apartment. It fitted loosely between a ceiling track and a guide rail buried in the concrete floor; it was probably designed to be lifted right out, for ease of replacement—but only when it was unlocked. There was no question of trying to pick the lock; there was no keyhole—just a catch operated by a lever on the other side of the door. By pressing on the glass with both gloved hands, though, I could get enough purchase to raise and tilt the whole door slightly. After almost ten minutes—with my wrists going numb—I managed to work the catch free.

I opened the door a few centimetres, then paused at the threshold, scanning the room for burglar alarms. It was clear.

As I moved into the apartment, I heard footsteps in the corridor, then a key going into the lock. I retreated to the balcony, but it was too late to start climbing back the way I’d come; I would have been in full view. I slid the door closed—I couldn’t re-lock it—then dropped to the floor behind a pile of junk.

I heard at least two people enter the apartment, then turn left into the corridor which led out of the living room. I took a button-sized video camera, and stuck it to the frame of Dallaporta’s bike, which was leaning against the wall of the balcony. I checked the image on my notepad, then tweaked the direction until I had a clear view of most of the room.

I dropped out of sight again just in time. The intruders—a man and a woman, neither of whom I’d seen before—returned, carrying a cardboard carton about thirty centimetres long. I zoomed in; the labelling suggested a presentation bottle of Scotch. Dallaporta’s friends clearly didn’t share his paranoia; they knew the police weren’t watching the apartment. He wanted the laser to disappear—and they’d obligingly turned up to remove it.

The woman said, “You think he wiped it properly?”

The man hesitated. “I wouldn’t count on it.” I wondered why they hadn’t automated the process—but then, it would have been impossible to predict exactly when the opportunity to use the code on Grace Sharp would arise, or how many attempts it would take to hit the target.

“Well, I’m not walking out of here carrying incriminating—”

The man groaned—but he opened the carton. I recognized the laser from the catalogues I’d scanned; most of the bulk was in the precision optics, which doubled as a kind of telescope for checking alignment—the unit was meant for inner city rooftop-to-rooftop communications. There was a small device about the size of a matchbox plugged in to the data port; the man hit a button on the side of the box, and peered at a tiny LCD display.

“Hey, the Jackal got it right. I’m impressed.” He laughed. “‘I thought: Why not keep it, just in case?’ The poor cretin really thought he had the <> word—and he could go on playing kill-the-TAP-head for as long as he liked.”

The woman said dryly, “Don’t be so ungrateful. If he’d known what he was doing, he wouldn’t have done it at all.”

They left. I pocketed the camera and crossed back to 1911 immediately, not wanting to be in sight when they reached the street. In the ceiling, I had to force myself not to rush; if I was careless, I could still get caught.

In five minutes, I was out of the building. I circled the block, then spiralled out through the surrounding streets, on the slim chance of catching sight of them again.

After half an hour I gave up, and went into a coffee shop to replay the video. I should have been jubilant: I had a clear shot of a communications laser, and a soundtrack with two people discussing the killing of TAP-heads.

The only catch was, it didn’t sound like they believed in <> words any more than Maxine Ho or Helen Sharp.

I invited Helen Sharp to my office. I showed her Dallaporta’s essay, and the geometry of the buildings. I played back the phone call, and the scene in his apartment.

I said, “You’re the TAP expert. You want to tell me what’s going on?”

She sat in silence for a long time before replying.

“There is one possibility.”

“Which is?”

“My mother had the earliest model implant. Right to the end. She never had an upgrade—she didn’t trust them to transfer her vocabulary properly. She was afraid she’d lose everything she’d learnt.”

“And you think ... the old models did have a <> word?”

“No. But they could be microprogrammed externally.”

“You’ve lost me.” That wasn’t quite true, but I wanted her to spell it out. I wasn’t sure how much I really did know about the implant—how much the glowing technical reports might have misled me.

Sharp looked terrible—the fact that she’d just laid eyes on the people who’d arranged the death of her mother was finally sinking in—but she explained patiently: “The basic hardware of any neural net computer is just ... a big array of interconnected RISC processors. The chip is mass-produced as a commodity—hundreds of millions of them a year—and used in tens of thousands of different devices. All the specific characteristics are added by the microcode: low-level instructions which customize the processors to make them behave in certain useful ways. The main software then takes that level for granted—as if it’s all hardwired into the silicon. But it’s not.

“When they released the first consumer model of the TAP implant, Third Hemisphere were worried that there might be some undiscovered flaw in the microcode. If they’d had to take all the implants out of people’s skulls to correct it, that would have been a PR nightmare. So they left a routine in the microcode which gave it the power to accept updates in infrared—to modify any part of itself, given the right sequence of external instructions.”

“So there was a special TAP word which could get at all the infrastructure? A word which said: <>?”

“No! It wasn’t a TAP word—it was a reserved sequence, right outside the language protocol! It was meaningless in TAP, it could never have been spoken. That was the whole point!”

It seemed like a minor distinction to me—but I could understand why she attached so much importance to it. The language itself hadn’t killed her mother. The poet hadn’t died from a word, after all.

I said, “If that’s what happened, though ... why didn’t the engineers who examined your mother’s implant find any evidence of it? And if you knew all this—”

Sharp snapped back angrily, “I didn’t know she still had the old microcode!” She looked away. “Nine or ten years ago, Third Hemisphere tried to persuade her to accept a new implant—for free. They’d finally discovered a bug in the original microcode—a minor one, nothing dangerous, but they wanted everyone to start using the later models. They were confident enough about those that they weren’t externally programmable anymore.

“She wouldn’t accept it. She didn’t want a new implant, she didn’t want surgery. So they offered to update the microcode, to fix the bug—and close the trap door in the process, because I think that was also making them nervous. TAP users could never have spoken the code, even if they’d wanted to—but every consumer device on the planet was starting to put out a flood of infrared. There was always a tiny risk of triggering the modification program by accident.

“I thought she’d had the new microcode for the last ten years. She told me she’d accepted the offer. The records Third Hemisphere supplied to the coroner stated that she had—and the engineer’s report confirmed that.”

I said, “But if she’d actually refused it, like she’d refused the new implant—because she was afraid it might affect her skills with the language ... then Dallaporta’s message might have done it all in one hit? Opened the trapdoor, undermined the black box, triggered a massive adrenaline release—then overwritten the evidence by substituting the version she was meant to have had all along?”

“Yes.”

“So who’d know enough to program all that?” Natural Wisdom? The Fountain of Righteousness? Hardly—though they could always have brought in outside expertise.

Sharp was adamant: “Only one of Third Hemisphere’s own software engineers could do it. Someone who’d been involved in the TAP project from the start.”

“But they’d have nothing to gain, surely? Why discredit your own work, your own product?”

The product belonged to Third Hemisphere, though—not to any group of employees.

And people did move on.

I scanned fifteen years’ worth of implant manufacturers’ publications; they were full of PR releases gloating about heads successfully hunted.

In March 2008, a firm called Cogent Industries had poached a software engineer named Maria Remedios from Third Hemisphere. That in itself proved nothing, of course—nor did the fact that an earlier article named her as a senior participant in the TAP project.

Cogent did have something to gain, though. They specialized in Virtual Reality hardware—both immersive neural implants, and headset-based units. Third Hemisphere wasn’t so much a direct competitor as the source of an entire antithetical philosophy: VR was sold to publishers and advertizers as the path to unconditional suspension of disbelief; TAP was about questioning everything, analysing everything. The day every VR user spoke TAP, the most ingeniously crafted—and manipulative—VR experience would disintegrate into a laughable trick with smoke and mirrors. And if that wasn’t exactly an imminent threat, Grace Sharp’s death had certainly made it more remote than ever.

They could have chosen Dallaporta by the same means I’d used to find him myself: a search for passionate opponents of TAP who also happened to have a clear view of Grace Sharp’s study. And whoever had made contact with him could have claimed to be a member of Natural Wisdom, or some other anti-implant group; he’d hardly have cooperated if he’d known the truth. When they’d told him about the High Court challenge—no doubt conjuring up images of a whole generation “lost to TAP”—Grace Sharp’s death must have begun to sound like a necessary evil. One old woman, for the sake of all those children. Death by her own obscene technological perversion of language. Nothing more than poetic justice.

And Maria Remedios? Had Third Hemisphere treated her badly, left her holding a grudge—or had her new employers pressured her into it? Even if she’d had grave second thoughts about TAP—and recoiled at the prospect of the implant being given to children—helping to murder an innocent woman seemed like a grotesquely disproportionate response. She could have joined the public campaign against the implant; as one of its creators, the media would have given her all the coverage she desired. And though Dallaporta might have caved in to “moral” arguments offered under false pretences, Remedios could hardly have failed to understand that Cogent’s motives were entirely commercial.

Nine tenths of the picture seemed to have fallen perfectly into place—but it was clear that I was missing something crucial. And too much even of that nine tenths was still pure guesswork. For a start, I had to establish solid evidence of a link between Dallaporta and Cogent Industries—which was going to be tricky, since he didn’t even know it existed, himself.

I checked the faces of the man and woman I’d seen in Dallaporta’s apartment against all the trade magazine shots of Cogent’s employees.

No match.

I fed the Cogent employee names, along with my seventeen thousand TAP-haters, into the cluster analysis software—looking for a connection, however tenuous.

There was none.

So much for the easy options.

I sent Dallaporta a message, via a rerouting service, asking if we could “continue our discussion”. The real Lydia Stone was ex-directory—and using a different number than the one she’d given the school would only prove that she was exercising suitable caution.

Three hours later, Dallaporta called me back. He was polite, but very nervous. I said I had some news which would be of interest to him; he didn’t actually scream at me to shut up in case the line was being bugged, but his body language made it clear that if I so much as mentioned TAP he’d hang up immediately.

I said, “Can I meet you somewhere? We really need to talk, face to face.”

He hesitated. He badly wanted me to vanish from his life—but he needed to know what my “news” was. Why had I taken an interest in him? One old essay was hardly enough to explain it, so ... how many people in the anti-TAP crusade knew what he’d done? And what did I know about Grace Sharp’s death which no one had bothered to tell him?

Of course he was paranoid. The inquest was long over, the laser had been magicked away—but the fact remained: he’d stood on his balcony on a summer evening and shot a perfect stranger dead. Nothing could ever be the same again.

He said flatly, “Tomorrow night, at the school. Nine o’clock.”

I rehearsed the story in my head as I crossed the football field—which was brightly floodlit for some reason, though there wasn’t a soul around. A friend of a friend in a certain law firm had heard that Helen Sharp had discovered something in her mother’s computer files—something which had prompted her to start proceedings to try to gain access to Third Hemisphere’s records.

I was sure that Dallaporta would pass the rumour on to his benefactors; the hardest part would be ensuring that he didn’t mention “my” name. So long as he remained tight-lipped about his source of information, they’d have to take him seriously.

Helen Sharp was preparing a forged—paper—letter from her mother to Third Hemisphere, explicitly stating that she did not wish to accept the microcode update. I was confident that we had enough leverage now to persuade Third Hemisphere to play along, and bury the bait in the appropriate warehouse.

Maria Remedios would know at once what the “evidence” had to be. Cogent, acting on her advice, would try to arrange its disappearance. This time, they’d be caught red-handed.

At least, that was the theory.

Dallapporta had said he’d be in the “Resources Centre”—which these days apparently meant a large room full of work stations. I’d found a map of the school in an online brochure, so I knew exactly where to go. The door was open, though the lights were out—and as I approached the threshold I could see that all the machines inside had been switched on and connected to some net service or other. More of Dallaporta’s paranoia? Maybe he thought this was an ideal source of interference for the police surveillance teams who were following him everywhere—though the sound from most of the work stations was turned down to a whisper.

I peered into the greyness of the room, dazzled and distracted by the multitude of images: swarms of tiny red and silver fish weaving through a coral reef; a polychrome computer animation of air flow around some kind of zeppelin; a portrait of a Florentine prince sprouting a speech balloon full of modern Italian; a dead silver-haired twentieth century guru emitting platitudes about the nature of truth. An old music video was playing by the door; the singer droned: “This is the way, step insi-i-ide.”

I smiled uneasily at the coincidence and walked into the room—resisting the urge to shout a greeting, mocking Dallaporta’s elaborate “precautions”. It seemed far more diplomatic to play along. I stage whispered, “It’s me. Where are you?”

No reply.

It was hard to get my eyes accustomed to the darkness with forty or fifty bright screens in view; I had no reason whatsoever to look at any of the images—but it was remarkably difficult to keep looking away. I walked slowly towards the far end of the room, irritated but prepared not to show it. I called out again, a little louder; there was still no reply.

An animated supernova erupted just ahead of me—and the sudden blue-white radiance revealed a man slumped in a chair beside the screen. I moved closer, and inspected the body by the light of the dying sun.

Dallaporta had a small-calibre pistol in his hand, and a neat hole in his temple. I put two fingers to his neck; he was certainly dead, but still warm.

I felt a flicker of guilt break through the numbness of shock—but this wasn’t the time to agonize over the way I’d treated him. He’d killed Grace Sharp, and he hadn’t been prepared to live with that. If the fear of whatever I’d been about to tell him had been enough to drive him to suicide, he would have done it sooner or later, regardless.

I took out my notepad to call the police.

Then the supernova faded, and a new image took its place.

An apartment building, swept by rain. The camera zoomed in on a figure climbing between two of the balconies. The magnification kept increasing, relentlessly—and by the time the woman turned and showed her face, it filled the screen.

My stomach tightened. I glanced back to the neat, too-professional hole in Dallaporta’s skull, reassessing everything. But ... who could have videoed me? If Cogent’s people had known I was on the balcony, why had they walked straight in?

The image changed again. Me, planting one of the phone bugs.

I laughed in disbelief. They’d all but slaughtered this man in front of my eyes—and now they were trying to blackmail me into silence with a couple of petty misdemeanours?

“There are small traces of your skin under his fingernails.” The voice came from a metre behind me; I started, but I didn’t actually jump. “Not enough for him to have left a mark on you, but enough for DNA analysis.”

I turned around slowly. The man was about my age, and only a little taller. He wasn’t pointing a gun at me, but he looked suspiciously relaxed.

“The police will find out that Helen Sharp hired you—but they’ll have no grounds for a warrant to compel you to supply them with tissue samples. Not if they don’t see this.” He gestured at the screen.

I said, “And why would they imagine I’d want to fake this man’s suicide? Breaking into his apartment proves nothing—”

“I think that depends on whether someone tips them off about the hundred thousand dollars in your Swiss bank account. Grace’s close-knit linguistic community must have done a little whip-around, and bought themselves some justice for the man with the <> word.”

That shut me up. If the account really existed ... that was breathtaking. Had Cogent been watching me all along, setting this up?

He smiled. “If you’re good, you can keep the hundred grand, of course. No tax; the whole thing’s organized beautifully through a holding company in Macao.”

I didn’t have the presence of mind even to be tempted; I was still trying to come to terms with the whole Byzantine scheme.

I said, “Forget it.” I walked straight past him, towards the doorway. I reached it, heart racing, then turned and looked back; I couldn’t see him anymore, but I didn’t think he’d moved a centimetre. Killing me would create too many problems, too many holes in their beautifully scripted VR experience—and the odds were stacked against me even if I did go straight to the police.

I said, “So what did you expect me to tell Helen Sharp? ‘Screw your mother, the case is closed—and please don’t ask any questions, I’m late for my flight to Macao’?”

“You’ll think of something. Believe me, you don’t want to fight us.”

I laughed angrily. “One pissy little VR company, and you think you can pull all the strings?”

The man said, “I’m not working for Cogent. They have no idea you’ve even taken an interest in them.”

I peered into the darkness between the rows of screens. “Some VR industry consortium, then.” For some reason I’d started shaking; I think it was rage. “You’re still not above the law.”

“Oh, there’s more to life than Virtual Reality.” He sounded amused.

“Yeah? Who, then?”

There was silence for a while, then I could see him approaching. “I can’t tell you that. But there are some people you can meet—if you want to—who might help you put your doubts to rest.”

“Who?”

“Maria Remedios. And her daughter.”

“I thought you didn’t work for Cogent—”

“She works for Cogent. I don’t. Though you could say it’s my job to watch over them both.”

The further we drove from Dallaporta’s corpse, the more compromised I knew I’d become—but I couldn’t walk away from a chance to learn what it was I’d missed all along. Even if the revelation was intended to guarantee my silence.

“Remedios was one of the first volunteers to test the TAP implant,” the man explained casually. “First she’d helped design it—and then she got to experience the results first hand. I think she must have found the reality exhilarating, in a lot of ways—but very frustrating, too.”

“Why frustrating?”

“Even with neural hardware, learning an exotic new language is always difficult. For an adult.”

I didn’t reply. He continued, “She managed to find a good neurosurgeon willing to give her daughter the implant. Not here, though. Overseas. Which simplified things, really—it was easier to turn a blind eye.”

That chilled me. “And you let her go ahead and do it? Just so you could see the results?”

He laughed. “Well, not me personally. But that was the general idea.”

And the results? I thought back to some of the more pessimistic technical papers I’d read on the subject. Maybe natural languages—which had co-evolved with human intelligence—were crucial for the early stages of intellectual development ... and even if relatively “artificial” latecomers like sign made perfect substitutes, maybe TAP was just too different to perform the role of organizing the neural structures which made higher thinking possible. And maybe the fact that so much of the language was encoded in the chip, instead of the brain, meant that vital conceptual networks were missing—or at least, inaccessible to other regions of the cerebral cortex which needed them in order to mature.

It still made no sense, though. If the daughter was living proof that the implant would do unspeakable damage to the infant brain, why not just publicize that fact? Why had Grace Sharp died to win a court case which could have been won by simply disclosing the truth?

Maria Remedios lived in a modestly comfortable house on the north shore. My escort had phoned ahead; she was expecting us. As I followed him down the hallway, she met my eyes; there was unconcealed shame in her steady gaze—but a strange, almost proud defiance behind it. I looked away, confused. If she’d crippled her own child with the TAP implant, no wonder she’d left Third Hemisphere—but why was she so beholden to Dallaporta’s killers that she’d let them use her to manipulate Cogent? Had they threatened to imprison her? To put her child in an institution?

We ended up in the living room, but Remedios didn’t invite us to take a seat. The man said, “So, what’s she been up to? Still spending every last waking moment on the nets?”

Remedios shot him a poisonous look, and didn’t bother replying. I thought he was being cruelly sarcastic. Then he turned to me and explained, “Incoming data only, I’m afraid. We wouldn’t want her airing her grievances to the world.”

Remedios left the room. I heard her say, “Jane? Ms O’Connor’s here.” Then she returned, with a young girl in blue-and-white striped pyjamas, maybe eight years old.

Jane greeted me and shook my hand solemnly—or mock-solemnly. One look at her knowing grey eyes, and I knew I’d made exactly the wrong guess about the implant’s effects.

“I was hoping I’d be allowed to meet you,” she said. “Uncle Daniel’s been complaining about you for weeks.” She glanced at the man, without obvious malice—more like a chess player regarding a formidable adversary. “And he doesn’t often let me have visitors.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Uncle Daniel” interjected helpfully, “I think Ms O’Connor is still in the dark, Jane. She doesn’t understand—”

“Why anyone would want to keep me prisoner? Why anyone would go to so much trouble to keep other children from growing up with TAP?” Her tone went beyond precocity; she didn’t come across as some child actor mouthing an adult’s lines. Every word simply negated the implications her appearance would normally have conveyed.

And her bluntness was unnerving, but it cut through my own diplomatic hesitancy. I said, “That’s right. I don’t understand.”

Jane smiled calmly. I don’t believe she was resigned to her situation—but she was patient. Very patient.

She said, “With the implant, you can play words—or scan them. Experience them, blindly—or understand them, completely. Uncle Daniel’s not a big fan of understanding, though. He thinks there are certain words which should be played and not scanned.”

“What kind of words?”

She raised one hand, palm towards me. It was an ironic gesture; she must have known I was oblivious to IR.

“If I play this word ... I feel a boundless sense of loyalty and pride towards my team ... my city ... my State ... my nation!” Her face shone with fervent, agonized, almost hysterical joy; she looked like nothing so much as one of the flag-waving school girls they’d whipped into a patriotic frenzy as ornamentation for the 2000 Olympics. “But if I scan it ... “ Her expression faded into one of faint amusement—as if someone had just tried to dupe her with a very old, and very obvious, scam.

“This word plays as what many religions call ‘faith’.” Her face was radiant, but tranquil now. “The peace that defies understanding.” She smiled apologetically. “Except, of course, it doesn’t. Scan it, and the mechanics are transparent: one foot down hard on an entrained neurochemical feel-good pedal—with cognitive, aesthetic, and cultural echoes linked to the context in which the training was acquired.”

I glanced at Remedios; there were silent tears moving down her face. They wouldn’t lock up the mother, or institutionalise the daughter. They’d kill this child, if they had to. That was the only reason she’d helped them program the death of Grace Sharp.

“Now, this is what the Buddhists call ‘enlightenment’.” Jane closed her eyes and smiled serenely. “Similar raw pharmacology, but the higher-level components are different. There’s a kind of heavily self-affirming cognitive myopia: every mental tool which could expose the true nature of the state is explicitly negated.”

I thought of James, lost in wordless tranquillity. The package he’d swallowed whole, the mind virus fine-tuned by centuries of evolution, declared: Language is dangerous, language deceives you ... because language could have shown him the way out of the hole he’d dug for himself.

“And this is ... sexual love, desire? Call it what you like, but if you scan it—”

Something cut her short. Maybe it was a look from her mother. Or maybe it was the expression on my face.

Jane continued smoothly, “There are others. I won’t list them all—but growing up with the implant makes them obvious. And Uncle Daniel’s friends don’t believe that a subculture with that knowledge would be ... conducive to their idea of social cohesion. They feel very strongly about that.” She turned to face him—and her expression now contained more pity than anything else. “And I do understand. Because I’ve found the word for their affliction, too. I’ve found the word for the love of power.”

By the time I got home it was almost midnight. Mick’s room was in darkness, but he was still playing the game; I sat down beside him and removed the headset gently, then reached over and logged him off.

He opened his mouth to apologize, or invent some excuse. I said, “Just shut up and listen.”

“What happened? I was worried.” I hadn’t told him everything—but he knew I’d gone to meet someone connected with Grace Sharp’s death.

I tried to speak calmly. “I’ve screwed up the case. Badly. I’ve made some stupid mistakes, and now I’m going to have to drop it. Okay? That’s all I can tell you. And we’re not going to talk about it again.”

He stared at me, incredulous. “Why? What did you do?”

I shook my head. “I said, we’re not going to talk about it.”

He started blinking away tears. I took him in my arms; he didn’t fight me, but he said angrily, “I don’t believe you!”

I said, “Sssh.”

Later, I lay on my bed in the dark, rolling between my thumb and forefinger the smooth cold object, like a small ceramic bead, which Jane Remedios had slipped into my hand.

If she’d managed to copy her implant, this chip would encode her entire TAP vocabulary. And to an adult it would be useless—but a newborn child who started with the knowledge it had taken her eight years to acquire might surpass her in half that time.

They’d be watching me closely—but they couldn’t be watching everyone. I believed I could pass the chip on to someone willing to use it, if I was careful.

So I lay in the dark, and tried to decide.

Between the silence of power and mystification, the unearned suspension of disbelief, the way things had always been—and the torrent of understanding which would sweep it all away.

Transition Dreams

“We can’t tell you what your own transition dreams will be. The only thing that’s certain is that you won’t remember them.”

Caroline Bausch smiles, reassuringly. Her office, on the sixty-fourth floor of the Gleisner Tower, is so stylish it hurts—her desk is an obsidian ellipse supported by three perspex circles, and the walls are decorated with the latest in Euclidean Monochrome—but she’s not at all the kind of robot the cool, geometric decor seems to demand. I have no doubt that the contrast is intentional, and that her face has been carefully designed to appear more disarmingly natural than even the most cynical person could believe was due to pure guile on the part of her employers.

_A few forgettable dreams?_ That sounds innocuous enough. I very nearly let the matter rest—but I’m puzzled.

“I’ll be close to zero degrees when I’m scanned, won’t I?”

“Yes. A little below, in fact. Pumped full of anti-freeze disaccharides, all your fluids cooled down into a sugary glass.” There’s a prickling sensation on my scalp at these words—but the rush I feel is anticipation, not fear; the thought of my body as a kind of ice-confectionary sculpture doesn’t seem threatening at all. Several elegant blown-glass figurines decorate the bookshelf behind Bausch’s desk. “Not only does that halt all metabolic processes, it sharpens the NMR spectra. To measure the strength of each synapse accurately, we have to be able to distinguish between subtle variations in neurotransmitter receptor types, among other things. The less thermal noise, the better.”

“I understand. But if my brain has been shut down by hypothermia ... why will I dream?”

“Your brain won’t do the dreaming. The software model we’re creating will. But as I said, you won’t remember any of it. In the end, the software will be a perfect Copy of your—deeply comatose—organic brain, and it will wake from that coma remembering exactly what the organic brain experienced before the scan. No more, no less. And since the organic brain certainly won’t have experienced the transition dreams, the software will have no memory of them.”

_The software?_ I’d expected a simple, biological explanation: a side-effect of the anesthetic or the anti-freeze; neurons firing off a few faint, random signals as they surrendered to the cold.

“Why program the robot’s brain to have dreams it won’t remember?”

“We don’t. Or at least, not explicitly.” Bausch smiles her too-human smile again, not quite masking an appraising glance, a moment spent deciding, perhaps, how much I really need to be told. Or perhaps the whole routine is more calculated reassurance. _Look, even though I’m a robot, you can read me like a book._

She says, “Why are Gleisner robots conscious?”

“For the same reason humans are conscious.” I’ve been waiting for that question since the interview began; Bausch is a counsellor as much as a salesperson, and it’s part of her job to ensure that I’m at ease with the new mode of existence I’m buying. “Don’t ask me which neural structures are involved ... but whatever they are, they must be captured in the scan, and recreated in the model, along with everything else. Gleisner robots are conscious because they process information—about the world, and about themselves—in exactly the same way as humans do.”

“So you’re happy with the notion that a computer program which simulates a conscious human brain is, itself, conscious in the very same fashion?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe that.” _I wouldn’t be talking to you, would I?_ I see no need to elaborate—to confess that I’ve become a thousand times more comfortable with the whole idea ever since the ten-tonne supercomputers in the basements of Dallas and Tokyo began to give way to the ambulatory Gleisner robots, with their compact processors and lifelike bodies. When Copies were finally liberated from their virtual realities—however grand, however detailed they might have been—and given the chance to _inhabit the world_ in the manner of flesh-and-blood people, I finally stopped thinking of being scanned as a fate akin to being buried alive.

Bausch says, “Then you accept that all it takes to _generate experience_ ... is to carry out computations on data structures which encode the same information as the structure of the brain?”

The jargon sounds gratuitous to me, and I don’t understand why she’s laboring the point—but I say blandly, “Of course I accept that.”

“Then think about what it implies! Because _the whole process_ of creating the finished piece of software which runs a Gleisner robot—the perfect Copy of the unconscious person who was scanned—is one long sequence of computations on data structures which _represent the human brain_.”

I absorb that in silence.

Bausch continues, “We don’t set out to cause the transition dreams, but they’re probably unavoidable. Copies have to be _made_, somehow—they can’t spring into existence, fully formed. The scanner has to probe the organic brain, measure the NMR spectra for billions of different cross-sections—and then process those measurements into a high-resolution anatomical and biochemical map. In other words: carry out several trillion computations on a vast set of data which _represents the brain_. Then, that map has to be used to construct the working computer model, the Copy itself. More computation.”

I think I almost grasp what she’s saying ... but part of me flatly refuses to accept the notion that merely _imaging the brain_ in high enough resolution could cause _the image itself_ to dream.

I say, “None of that computation sets out to mimic the workings of the brain, though, does it? It’s all just preparing the way for a program which _will be_ conscious, when it’s finally up and running.”

“Yes—and once that program _is_ up and running, what will it do, in order to be conscious? It will generate a sequence of changes in a digital representation of the brain—changes which mimic normal neural activity. But creating that representation in the first place also involves _a sequence of changes_. You can’t go from a blank computer memory, to a detailed simulation of a specific human brain, without a few trillion intermediate stages—most of which will represent—in part or in full, in one form or another—possible states of the very same brain.”

“But why should that add up to any kind of ... mental activity? Rearranging the data, for other reasons entirely?”

Bausch is adamant. “Reasons don’t come into it. The living brain reorganizing memories is enough to give rise to ordinary dreams. And just poking an electrode into the temporal lobes is enough to generate _mental activity_. I know: what the brain does is so complex that it’s bizarre to think of achieving the same results unintentionally. But all of the brain’s complexity is coded into its structure. Once you’re dealing with that structure, you’re dealing with the stuff of consciousness. Like it or not.”

That does make a certain amount of sense. Almost anything that happens to the brain _feels like something_—it doesn’t have to be the orderly process of waking thought. If the random effects of drugs or illness can give rise to distinctive mental events—a fever dream, a schizophrenic episode, an LSD trip—why shouldn’t a Copy’s elaborate genesis do the same? Each incomplete NMR map, each unfinished version of the simulation software, has no way of “knowing” that it’s not yet _meant_ to be self-aware.

Still—

“How can you be sure of any of this? If nobody remembers the dreams?”

“The mathematics of consciousness is still in its infancy ... but everything we know strongly suggests that the act of constructing a Copy has _subjective content_—even though no trace of the experience remains.”

I’m still not entirely convinced, but I suppose I’ll have to take her word for it. The Gleisner Corporation has no reason to invent non-existent side-effects—and I’m suitably impressed that they bother to warn their customers about _transition dreams_ at all. So far as I know, the older companies—the scanning clinics founded in the days when Copies had no physical bodies—never even raised the issue.

We should move on, there are other matters to discuss—but it’s hard to drag my thoughts away from this unsettling revelation. I say, “If you know enough to be certain that there’ll always be transition dreams ... can’t you stretch the mathematics a little further, and tell me what my dreams will be?”

Bausch asks innocently, “How could we do that?”

“I don’t know. Examine my brain, then run some kind of simulation of the Copying process—” I catch myself. “Ah. But how do you ‘simulate’ a computation ... without doing it?”

“Exactly. The distinction is meaningless. Any program which could reliably predict the content of the dreams would, itself, _experience them_, as fully as the ‘you’ of the transition process. So what would be the point? If the dreams turned out to be unpleasant, it would be too late to ‘spare yourself’ the trauma.”

_Trauma?_ I’m beginning to wish I’d been satisfied with a reassuring smile, and the promise of perfect amnesia. _A few forgettable dreams._

Now that I—vaguely—understand the reasons for the effect, though, it’s a thousand times harder to accept it as inevitable. Neural spasms at the onset of hypothermia might be unavoidable—but anything taking place _inside a computer_ is supposed to be subject to limitless control.

“Couldn’t you monitor the dreams as they’re happening—and intervene, if need be?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“But—”

“Think about it. It would be like prediction, only worse. Monitoring the dreams would mean duplicating the brain-like data structures in still more forms—generating more dreams in the process. So even if we could take charge of the original dreams—deciphering them, and controlling them—all of the software which did that would need _other software watching it_, to see what the side-effects of _its_ computations were. And so on. There’d be no end to it.

“As it is, the Copy is constructed by the shortest possible process, the most direct route. The last thing you’d want to do is bring in more computing power, more elaborate algorithms ... more and more systems mirroring the arithmetic of the experience.”

I shift in my chair, trying to shake off a growing sense of lightheadedness. The more I ask, the more surreal the whole subject becomes—but I can’t seem to keep my mouth shut.

“If you can’t say what the dreams will be about, and you can’t control them ... can’t you at least tell me how long they’ll last? Subjectively?”

“Not without running a program which also dreams the dreams.” Bausch is apologetic—but I have a feeling that she finds something elegant, even _proper_, in this state of affairs. “That’s the nature of the mathematics: there are no short-cuts. No answers to hypothetical questions. We can’t say for certain what any given conscious system will experience ... without _creating_ that conscious system in the process of answering the question.”

I laugh weakly. _Images of the brain which dream. Predictions of dreams which dream. Dreams which infect any machine which tries to shape them._ I’d thought that all the giddy metaphysics of virtual existence had been banished, now that it was possible to choose to be a Copy living wholly in the physical world. I’d hoped to be able to step from my body into a Gleisner robot without missing a beat—

And in retrospect, of course, I will have done just that. Once I’ve crossed the gulf between human and machine, it will vanish seamlessly behind me.

I say, “So the dreams are unknowable? And unavoidable? That’s close to a mathematical certainty?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s equally certain that I won’t remember them?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t recall anything about ... your own? Not a single mood? Not a single image?”

Bausch smiles tolerantly. “Of course not. I woke from a simulated coma. The last thing I remember was being anesthetized before the scan. There are no buried traces, no hidden memories. No invisible scars. _There can’t be._ In a very real sense, _I_ never had the transition dreams at all.”

I finally sight a target for my frustration. “Then ... _why warn me?_ Why tell me about an experience I’m guaranteed to forget? Guaranteed to end up _not having been through?_ Don’t you think it would have been kinder to say nothing?”

Bausch hesitates. For the first time, I appear to have discomfited her—and it’s a very convincing act. But she must have been asked the same question a thousand times before.

She says, “When you’re dreaming the transition dreams ... knowing what you’re going through, and why, might make all the difference. Knowing that it’s not real. Knowing that it won’t last.”

“Perhaps.” It’s not that simple, though, and she knows it. “When my new mind is being pieced together, do you have any idea _when_ this knowledge will be part of it? Can you promise me that I’ll remember these comforting facts when I need them? Can you guarantee that anything you’ve told me will even make sense?”

“No. But—”

“Then what’s the point?”

She says, “Do you think that if we’d kept silent, you would have had _any chance at all_ of dreaming the truth?”

* * * *

Out on the street, in the winter sunshine, I try to put my doubts behind me. George Street is still littered with colored paper from last night’s celebrations: after six years of bloodshed—bombings and sieges, plagues and famines—the Chinese civil war finally seems to be over. I feel a surge of elation, just looking down at the tattered remnants of the streamers and reminding myself of the glorious news.

I hug myself and head for Town Hall station. Sydney is going through its coldest June in years, with clear skies bringing sub-zero nights, and frosts lasting long into the mornings. I try to picture myself as a Gleisner robot, striding along the very same route, but choosing not to feel the bite of the wind. It’s a cheerful prospect—and I’ll be untroubled by anything so tedious as the swelling around my artificial knee and hip joints, once I’m wholly and harmoniously artificial. Unafraid of influenza, pneumonia, or the latest wave of drug-resistant diphtheria sweeping the globe.

I can hardly believe that I’ve finally signed the contracts and set the machinery in motion, after so many years of making excuses and putting it off. Shaken out of my complacency by a string of near misses: bronchitis, a kidney infection, a melanoma _on the sole of my right foot_. The cytokine injections don’t get my immune system humming the way they did twenty years ago. _One hundred and seven, this August._ The number sounds surreal. But then, so did _twenty-seven_, so did _forty-three_, so did _sixty-one_.

On the train, I examine my qualms one more time, hoping to lay them to rest. Transition dreams are impossible to avoid, or predict, or control ... just like ordinary dreams. They’ll have a radically different origin ... but there’s no reason to believe that a different means of invoking the contents of my scrambled brain will give rise to an experience any more disturbing than anything I’ve already been through. _What horrors do I think are locked up in my skull, waiting to run amok in the data stream from comatose human to comatose machine?_ I’ve suffered occasional nightmares—and a few have been deeply distressing, at the time—but even as a child, I never feared sleep. So why should I fear the transition?

Alice is in the garden, picking string beans, as I come over the hill from Meadowbank station. She straightens up and waves to me. I can never quite believe the size of our vegetable patch, so close to the city. We kiss, and walk inside together.

“Did you book the scan?”

“Yes. Tenth of July.” It should sound matter-of-fact, like that; of all the operations I’ve had in the last ten years, this will be the safest. I start making coffee; I need something to warm me. The kitchen is luminous with sunlight, but it’s colder indoors than out.

“And they answered all your questions? You’re happy now?”

“I suppose so.” There’s no point keeping it to myself, though; I tell her about the transition dreams.

She says, “I love the first few seconds after waking from a dream. When the whole thing’s still fresh in your mind ... but you can finally put it in context. When you know exactly what you’ve been through.”

“You mean the relief of discovering that none of it was real? You didn’t actually slaughter a hundred people in a shopping arcade? Stark naked? The police aren’t closing in on you after all? It works the other way too, though. Beautiful delusions turning to dust.”

She snorts. “Anything that turns to dust that easily is no great loss.”

I pour coffee for both of us. Alice muses, “Transition dreams must have strange endings, though. If you know nothing about them before they start ... and nothing again by the time they finish.” She stirs her coffee, and I watch the liquid sloshing from rim to rim. “How would time pass, in a dream like that? It can’t run straight through, can it? The closer the computers came to reconstructing every detail of the comatose brain, the less room there’d be for ... spurious information. At the very beginning, though, there wouldn’t be any information at all. Somewhere in the middle, there’d be the most leeway for ‘memories’ of the dream. So maybe time would flow in from the start and the finish, and the dream would seem to end in the middle. What do you think?”

I shake my head. “I can’t even imagine what that would be like.”

“Maybe there are two separate dreams. One running forward, one running backward.” She frowns. “But if they met in the middle, they’d both have to end the same way. How could two different dreams have exactly the same ending—right down to the same memories of everything which happened before? And then, there’s the scanner building up its map of the brain ... and the second stage, transforming that map into the Copy. Two cycles. Two dreams? Or four? Or do you think they’d all be woven together?”

I say irritably, “I really don’t care. I’m going to wake up inside a Gleisner robot, and it will all be academic. I won’t have _dreamed any dreams_ at all.”

Alice looks dubious. “You’re talking about thoughts and feelings. As real as anything the Copy will feel. How can that be academic?”

“I’m _talking about_ a lot of arithmetic. And when you add up everything it does to me, it will all cancel out in the end. Comatose human to comatose machine.”

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Words just come out of her mouth sometimes: fragments of nursery rhymes, lines from old songs—she has no say in it. The hairs stand up on my arms, though. I look down at my withered fingers, my scrawny wrists. _This isn’t me._ Aging feels like a mistake, a detour, a misadventure. When I was twenty years old I was immortal, wasn’t I? It’s not too late to find my way back.

Alice murmurs, “I’m sorry.”

I look up at her. “Let’s not make a big deal of this. It’s time for me to become a machine. And all I have to do is close my eyes and step across the gap. Then in a few years, it will be your turn. We can do this. There’s nothing to stop us. It’s the easiest thing in the world.”

I reach across the table and take her hand. When I touch her, I realize I’m shivering with cold.

She says, “There, there.”

* * * *

I can’t sleep. _Two dreams? Four dreams? Meeting in the middle? Merging into one?_ How will I know when they’re finally over? The Gleisner robot will emerge from its coma, and blithely carry on—but without a chance to look back on the transition dreams, and recognize them for what they were, how will I ever put them in their place?

I stare up at the ceiling. _This is insane._ I must have had a thousand dreams which I’ve failed to remember on waking—gone now, forever, as surely as if my amnesia was computer-controlled and guaranteed. Does it matter if I was terrified of some ludicrous dream-apparition, or believed I’d committed some unspeakable crime ... and now I’ll never have the chance to laugh off those delusions?

I climb out of bed—and once I’m up, I have no choice but to dress fully to keep from freezing. Moonlight fills the room, I have no trouble seeing what I’m doing. Alice turns over in her sleep, and sighs. Watching her, a wave of tenderness sweeps through me. _At least I’m going first._ At least I’ll be able to reassure her that there’s nothing to fear.

In the kitchen, I find I’m not hungry or thirsty at all. I pace to keep warm.

_What am I afraid of?_ It’s not as if the dreams were a barrier to be surmounted—a test I might fail, an ordeal I might not survive. The whole transition process will be predetermined—and it _will_ carry me safely into my new incarnation. Even if I dream some laborious metaphor for my “arduous” journey from human to machine—trekking barefoot across an endless plain of burning coals, struggling through a blizzard toward the summit of an unclimbable mountain ... _and even if I fail to complete that journey_—the computers will grind on, the Gleisner robot will wake, regardless.

I need to get out of the house. I leave quietly, heading for the 24-hour supermarket opposite the railway station.

The stars are mercilessly sharp, the air is still. If I’m colder than I was by day, I’m too numb to tell the difference. There’s no traffic at all, no lights in any of the houses. It must be almost three; I haven’t been out this late in ... decades. The gray tones of suburban lawns by moonlight look perfectly familiar, though. When I was seventeen, I seemed to spend half my life talking with friends into the early morning, then trudging home through empty streets exactly like these.

The supermarket’s windows glow blue-white around the warmer tones of the advertising signs embedded within them. I enter the building, and explore the deserted aisles. Nothing tempts me, but I feel an absurd pang of guilt about leaving empty-handed, so I grab a carton of milk.

A middle-aged man tinkering with one of the advertising holograms nods at me as I carry my purchase through the exit gate, magnetic fields sensing and recording the transaction.

The man says, “Good news about the war?”

“Yes! It’s wonderful!”

I start to turn away; he seems disappointed. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

I pause and examine him more carefully. He’s balding, brown-eyed, kindly-looking. “I’m sorry.”

“I used to own this shop when you were a boy. I remember you coming in, buying things for your mother. I sold up and left town—eighty-five years ago—but now I’m back, and I’ve bought the old place again.”

I nod and smile, although I still don’t recognize him.

He says, “I was in a virtual city, for a while. There was a tower which went all the way to the moon. I climbed the stairs to the moon.”

I picture a crystalline spiral staircase, sweeping up through the blackness of space.

“You came out, though. Back into the world.”

“I always wanted to run the old place again.”

I think I remember his face now—although his name still eludes me, if I ever knew it.

I can’t help asking: “Before you were scanned—did they warn you about something called ... transition dreams?”

He smiles, as if I’d spoken the name of a mutual friend. “No. Not then. But later, I heard. You know, the Copies used to flow from machine to machine. As the demand for computing power went up and down, and exchange rates shifted ... the management software used to take us apart and move us. From Japan, to California, to Texas, to Switzerland. It would break us down into a billion data packets and send us through the network by a thousand different routes, and then put us back together again. Ten times a day, some days.”

My skin crawls. “And ... _the same thing happened?_ Transition dreams?”

“That’s what I heard. We couldn’t even tell that we’d been shipped across the planet; it felt to us like no time had passed at all. But I heard rumors that the mathematicians had proved that there were dreams in the data at every stage. In the Copy left behind, as they erased it. In the Copy being pieced together at the new destination. Those Copies had no way of knowing that they were only intermediate steps in the process of moving a frozen snapshot from one place to another—and the changes being made to their digitized brains weren’t supposed to _mean_ anything at all.”

“So did you stop it happening? Once you found out?”

He chuckles. “No. There would have been no point. Because even in the one computer, Copies were moved all the time: relocated, shuffled from place to place, to allow memory to be reclaimed and consolidated. Hundreds of times a second.”

My blood turns to ice. _No wonder the old companies never raised the subject of transition dreams._ I was wiser than I ever knew to wait for the Gleisner robots. Merely shifting a Copy around in memory could hardly be comparable to mapping every synapse in a human brain—the dreams it generated would have to be far shorter, far simpler—but just knowing that my life was peppered with tiny mental detours, eddies of consciousness in the wake of every move, would still have been too much to bear.

I head home, clutching the milk carton awkwardly with cold arthritic fingers.

As I come over the hill, I see the light on above our front door, although I’m certain that I left the house in darkness. Alice must have woken and found me missing. I wince at my thoughtlessness; I should have stayed in—or written her a note. I quicken my step.

Fifty meters from home, a tendril of pain flickers across my chest. I look down stupidly to see if I’ve walked into a protruding branch; there’s nothing, but the pain returns—solid as an arrow through the flesh, now—and I sink to my knees.

The bracelet on my left wrist chimes softly, to tell me that it’s calling for help. I’m so close to my own front door, though, that I can’t resist the urge to rise to my feet and see if I can make the distance.

After two steps, the blood rushes from my head, and I fall again. I crush the milk carton against my chest, spilling the cold liquid, freezing my fingers. I can hear the ambulance in the distance, I know I should relax and keep still—but something compels me to move.

I crawl toward the light.

* * * *

The orderly pushing me looks like he’s just decided that this is the last place on Earth he’d choose to be. I silently concur, and tip my head back to escape his fixed grimace, but then the sight of the ceiling going by above me is even more disconcerting. The corridor’s lighting panels are so similar, and their spacing so regular, that I feel like I’m being wheeled around in a circle.

I say, “Where’s Alice? My wife?”

“No visitors now. There’ll be time for that later.”

“I’ve paid for a scan. With the Gleisner people. If I’m in any danger, they should be told.” All of this is encoded in my bracelet, though; the computers will have read it, there’s nothing to fret about. The prospect of having to confront the transition in a matter of hours or minutes fills me with claustrophobic dread—but better that than having left the arrangements too late.

The orderly says, “I think you’re wrong about that.”

“What?” I struggle to get him in sight again. He’s grinning nastily, like a nightclub bouncer who’s just spotted someone with the wrong kind of shoes.

“I said, I think you’re mistaken. Our records don’t mention any payment for a scan.”

I break into a sweat of indignation. “I signed the contracts! Today!”

“Yeah, yeah.” He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a handful of long cotton bandages, then proceeds to stuff them into my mouth. My arms are strapped to my sides; all I can do is grunt in protest, and gag on cotton and saliva.

Someone steps in front of the trolley and keeps pace with us, whispering in Latin.

The orderly says, “Don’t feel bad. The top level’s just the tip of the iceberg. The crest of the wave. How many of us can belong to an elite like that?”

I cough and choke, fighting for breath, shuddering with panic—then I calm myself, and force myself to breathe slowly and evenly through my nose.

“The tip of the iceberg! Do you think the organic brain moves by some kind of magic? From place to place? _From moment to moment?_ Do you think an empty patch of space-time can be rebuilt into something as complex as a human brain, _without transition dreams?_ The physical world has as much trouble shuffling data as any computer. Do you know how much effort it goes to, just to keep _one atom_ persisting in the very same spot? Do you think there could _ever_ be one coherent, conscious self, enduring through time—without a billion fragmentary minds forming and dying all around it? Transition dreams blossoming, and vanishing into oblivion? The air’s thick with them. _Look!_”

I twist my head around and stare down at the floor. The trolley is surrounded by convoluted vortices of light, rainbow sheets like cranial folds, flowing, undulating, spinning off smaller versions of themselves.

“What did you think? You were Mr Big? The one in a billion? The one on top?”

Another spasm of revulsion and panic sweeps through me. I choke on saliva, shivering with fear and cold. Whoever is walking ahead of the trolley lays an icy hand on my forehead; I jerk free.

I struggle to find some solid ground. _So this is my transition dream._ All right. I should be grateful: at least I understand what’s happening. Bausch’s warning has helped me, after all. And I’m not in any danger; the Gleisner robot is still going to wake. Soon I’ll forget this nightmare, and carry on with my life as if nothing had happened. Invulnerable. Immortal.

Carry on with my life. _With Alice, in the house with the giant vegetable garden?_ Sweat flows into my eyes; I blink it away. The vegetable garden was at my parents’ house. In the back yard, not the front. And that house was torn down long ago.

So was the supermarket opposite the railway station.

_Where did I live, then?_

What did I do?

_Who did I marry?_

The orderly says cheerfully, “So-called Alice taught you in primary school. Ms Something-or-other. A crush on the teacher, who’d have guessed?”

_Then, do I have anything straight? The interview with Bausch—?_

“Ha ha. Do you think our clever friends at Gleisner would have come right out and _told you_ all that? Pull the other one.”

_Then how could I know about transition dreams?_

“You must have worked it all out for yourself. From the inside. Congratulations.”

The icy hand touches my forehead again, the murmured chant grows louder. I screw my eyes shut, racked with fear.

The orderly says thoughtfully, “Then again, I could be wrong about that teacher. You could be wrong about that house. There might not even be a Gleisner Corporation. Computerized Copies of human brains? Sounds pretty dodgy to me.”

Strong hands seize me by the shoulders and legs, lift me from the trolley and spin me around. When the blur of motion stops, I’m flat on my back, staring up at a distant rectangle of pale blue sky.

“Alice” leans into view, and tosses in a clod of soil. I ache to comfort her, but I can’t move or speak. How can I care so much about her, if I didn’t love her, if she was never real? Other mourners throw in dirt; none of it seems to touch me, but the sky vanishes in pieces.

_Who am I?_ What do I know for sure about the man who’ll wake inside the robot? I struggle to pin down a single certain fact about him, but under scrutiny everything dissolves into confusion and doubt.

Someone chants, “Ashes to ashes, coma to coma.”

I wait in the darkness, colder than ever.

There’s a flickering of light and motion around me. The rainbow vortices, the eddies of transition dreams, weave through the soil like luminous worms—as if even parts of my decomposing brain might be confusing their decay with the chemistry of thought, reinterpreting their disintegration from within, undistracted by the senses, or memory, or truth.

Spinning themselves beautiful delusions, and mistaking death for something else entirely.

Unstable Orbits In The Space Of Lies

I always feel safest sleeping on the freeway—or at least, those stretches of it that happen to lie in regions of approximate equilibrium between the surrounding attractors. With our sleeping bags laid out carefully along the fading white lines between the northbound lanes (perhaps because of a faint hint of geomancy reaching up from Chinatown—not quite drowned out by the influence of scientific humanism from the east, liberal Judaism from the west, and some vehement anti-spiritual, anti-intellectual hedonism from the north), I can close my eyes safe in the knowledge that Maria and I are not going to wake up believing, wholeheartedly and irrevocably, in Papal infallibility, the sentience of Gaia, the delusions of insight induced by meditation, or the miraculous healing powers of tax reform.

So when I wake to find the sun already clear of the horizon—and Maria gone—I don’t panic. No faith, no world view, no belief system, no culture, could have reached out in the night and claimed her. The borders of the basins of attraction do fluctuate, advancing and retreating by tens of metres daily—but it’s highly unlikely that any of them could have penetrated this far into our precious wasteland of anomie and doubt. I can’t think why she would have walked off and left me, without a word—but Maria does things, now and then, that I find wholly inexplicable. And vice versa. Even after a year together, we still have that.

I don’t panic—but I don’t linger, either. I don’t want to get too far behind. I rise to my feet, stretching, and try to decide which way she would have headed; unless the local conditions have changed since she departed, that should be much the same as asking where I want to go, myself.

The attractors can’t be fought, they can’t be resisted—but it’s possible to steer a course between them, to navigate the contradictions. The easiest way to start out is to make use of a strong, but moderately distant attractor to build up momentum—while taking care to arrange to be deflected at the last minute by a countervailing influence.

Choosing the first attractor—the belief to which surrender must be feigned—is always a strange business. Sometimes it feels, almost literally, like sniffing the wind, like following an external trail; sometimes it seems like pure introspection, like trying to determine ‘my own’ true beliefs ... and sometimes the whole idea of making a distinction between these apparent opposites seems misguided. Yeah, very fucking Zen—and that’s how it strikes me now ... which in itself just about answers the question. The balance here is delicate, but one influence is marginally stronger: Eastern philosophies are definitely more compelling than the alternatives, from where I stand—and knowing the purely geographical reasons for this doesn’t really make it any less true. I piss on the chain-link fence between the freeway and the railway line, to hasten its decay, then I roll up my sleeping bag, take a swig of water from my canteen, hoist my pack, and start walking.

A bakery’s robot delivery van speeds past me, and I curse my solitude: without elaborate preparations, it takes at least two agile people to make use of them: one to block the vehicle’s path, the other to steal the food. Losses through theft are small enough that the people of the attractors seem to tolerate them; presumably, greater security measures just aren’t worth the cost—although no doubt the inhabitants of each ethical monoculture have their own unique ‘reasons’ for not starving us amoral tramps into submission. I take out a sickly carrot which I dug from one of my vegetable gardens when I passed by last night; it makes a pathetic breakfast, but as I chew on it, I think about the bread rolls that I’ll steal when I’m back with Maria again, and my anticipation almost overshadows the bland, woody taste of the present.

The freeway curves gently south-east. I reach a section flanked by deserted factories and abandoned houses, and against this background of relative silence, the tug of Chinatown, straight ahead now, grows stronger and clearer. That glib label—’Chinatown’—was always an oversimplification, of course; before Meltdown, the area contained at least a dozen distinct cultures besides Hong Kong and Malaysian Chinese, from Korean to Cambodian, from Thai to Timorese—and several varieties of every religion from Buddhism to Islam. All of that diversity has vanished now, and the homogeneous amalgam that finally stabilised would probably seem utterly bizarre to any individual pre-Meltdown inhabitant of the district. To the present-day citizens, of course, the strange hybrid feels exactly right; that’s the definition of stability, the whole reason the attractors exist. If I marched right into Chinatown, not only would I find myself sharing the local values and beliefs, I’d be perfectly happy to stay that way for the rest of my life.

I don’t expect that I’ll march right in, though—any more than I expect the Earth to dive straight into the Sun. It’s been almost four years since Meltdown, and no attractor has captured me yet.

* * * *

I’ve heard dozens of ‘explanations’ for the events of that day, but I find most of them equally dubious—rooted as they are in the world-views of particular attractors. One way in which I sometimes think of it, on 12 January, 2018, the human race must have crossed some kind of unforeseen threshold—of global population, perhaps—and suffered a sudden, irreversible change of psychic state.

Telepathy is not the right word for it; after all, nobody found themself drowning in an ocean of babbling voices; nobody suffered the torment of empathic overload. The mundane chatter of consciousness stayed locked inside our heads; our quotidian mental privacy remained unbreached. (Or perhaps, as some have suggested, everyone’s mental privacy was so thoroughly breached that the sum of our transient thoughts forms a blanket of featureless white noise covering the planet, which the brain filters out effortlessly.)

In any case, for whatever reason, the second-by-second soap operas of other people’s inner lives remained, mercifully, as inaccessible as ever ... but our skulls became completely permeable to each other’s values and beliefs, each other’s deepest convictions.

At first, this meant pure chaos. My memories of the time are confused and nightmarish; I wandered the city for a day and a night (I think), finding God (or some equivalent) anew every six seconds—seeing no visions, hearing no voices, but wrenched from faith to faith by invisible forces of dream logic. People moved in a daze, cowed and staggering—while ideas moved between us like lightning. Revelation followed contradictory revelation. I wanted it to stop, badly—I would have prayed for it to stop, if God had stayed the same long enough to be prayed to. I’ve heard other tramps compare these early mystical convulsions to drug rushes, to orgasms, to being picked up and dumped by ten-metre waves, ceaselessly, hour after hour—but looking back, I find myself reminded most of a bout of gastroenteritis I once suffered: a long, feverish night of interminable vomiting and diarrhoea. Every muscle, every joint in my body ached, my skin burned: I felt like I was dying. And every time I thought I lacked the strength to expel anything more from my body, another spasm took hold of me. By four in the morning, my helplessness seemed positively transcendental: the peristaltic reflex possessed me like some harsh—but ultimately benevolent—deity. At the time, it was the most religious experience I’d ever been through.

All across the city, competing belief systems fought for allegiance, mutating and hybridising along the way ... like those random populations of computer viruses they used to unleash against each other in experiments to demonstrate subtle points of evolutionary theory. Or perhaps like the historical clashes of the very same beliefs—with the length and timescales drastically shortened by the new mode of interaction, and a lot less bloodshed, now that the ideas themselves could do battle in a purely mental arena, rather than employing sword-wielding Crusaders or extermination camps. Or, like a swarm of demons set loose upon the Earth to possess all but the righteous ...

The chaos didn’t last long. In some places seeded by pre-Meltdown clustering of cultures and religions—and in other places, by pure chance—certain belief systems gained enough of an edge, enough of a foothold, to start spreading out from a core of believers into the surrounding random detritus, capturing adjacent, disordered populations where no dominant belief had yet emerged. The more territory these snowballing attractors conquered, the faster they grew. Fortunately—in this city, at least—no single attractor was able to expand unchecked: they all ended up hemmed in, sooner or later, by equally powerful neighbours—or confined by sheer lack of population at the city’s outskirts, and near voids of non-residential land.

Within a week of Meltdown, the anarchy had crystallised into more or less the present configuration, with ninety-nine per cent of the population having moved—or changed—until they were content to be exactly where—and who—they were.

I happened to end up between attractors—affected by many, but captured by none—and I’ve managed to stay in orbit ever since. Whatever the knack is, I seem to have it; over the years, the ranks of the tramps have thinned, but a core of us remains free.

In the early years, the people of the attractors used to send up robot helicopters to scatter pamphlets over the city, putting the case for their respective metaphors for what had happened—as if a well-chosen analogy for the disaster might be enough to win them converts; it took a while for some of them to understand that the written word had been rendered obsolete as a vector for indoctrination. Ditto for audiovisual techniques—and that still hasn’t sunk in everywhere. Not long ago, on a battery-powered TV set in an abandoned house, Maria and I picked up a broadcast from a network of rationalist enclaves, showing an alleged ‘simulation’ of Meltdown as a colour-coded dance of mutually carnivorous pixels, obeying a few simple mathematical rules. The commentator spouted jargon about self-organising systems—and lo, with the magic of hindsight, the flickers of colour rapidly evolved into the familiar pattern of hexagonal cells, isolated by moats of darkness (unpopulated except for the barely visible presence of a few unimportant specks; we wondered which ones were meant to be us).

I don’t know how things would have turned out if there hadn’t been the pre-existing infrastructure of robots and telecommunications to allow people to live and work without travelling outside their own basins—the regions guaranteed to lead back to the central attractor—most of which are only a kilometre or two wide. (In fact, there must be many places where that infrastructure wasn’t present, but I haven’t been exactly plugged into the global village these last few years, so I don’t know how they’ve fared.) Living on the margins of this society makes me even more dependent on its wealth than those who inhabit its multiple centres, so I suppose I should be glad that most people are content with the status quo—and I’m certainly delighted that they can co-exist in peace, that they can trade and prosper.

I’d rather die than join them, that’s all.

(Or at least, that’s true right here, right now.)

* * * *

The trick is to keep moving, to maintain momentum. There are no regions of perfect neutrality—or if there are, they’re too small to find, probably too small to inhabit, and they’d almost certainly drift as the conditions within the basins varied. Near enough is fine for a night, but if I tried to live in one place, day after day, week after week, then whichever attractor held even the slightest advantage would, eventually, begin to sway me.

Momentum, and confusion. Whether or not it’s true that we’re spared each other’s inner voices because so much uncorrelated babbling simply cancels itself out, my aim is to do just that with the more enduring, more coherent, more pernicious parts of the signal. At the very centre of the Earth, no doubt, the sum of all human beliefs adds up to pure, harmless noise: here on the surface, though, where it’s physically impossible to be equidistant from everyone, I’m forced to keep moving to average out the effects as best I can.

Sometimes I daydream about heading out into the countryside, and living in glorious clear-headed solitude beside a robot-tended farm, stealing the equipment and supplies I need to grow all my own food. With Maria? If she’ll come; sometimes she says yes, sometimes she says no. Haifa dozen times, we’ve told ourselves that we’re setting out on such a journey ... but we’ve yet to discover a trajectory out of the city, a route that would take us safely past all the intervening attractors, without being gradually deflected back towards the urban centre. There must be a way out, it’s simply a matter of finding it—and if all the rumours from other tramps have turned out to be dead ends, that’s hardly surprising: the only people who could know for certain how to leave the city are those who’ve stumbled on the right path and actually departed, leaving no hints or rumours behind.

Sometimes, though, I stop dead in the middle of the road and ask myself what I ‘really want’:

To escape to the country, and lose myself in the silence of my own mute soul?

To give up this pointless wandering and rejoin civilisation? For the sake of prosperity, stability, certainty: to swallow, and be swallowed by, one elaborate set of self-affirming lies?

Or, to keep orbiting this way until I die?

The answer, of course, depends on where I’m standing.

* * * *

More robot trucks pass me, but I no longer give them a second glance. I picture my hunger as an object—another weight to carry, not much heavier than my pack—and it gradually recedes from my attention. I let my mind grow blank, and I think of nothing but the early-morning sunshine on my face, and the pleasure of walking.

After a while, a startling clarity begins to wash over me; a deep tranquillity, together with a powerful sense of understanding. The odd part is, I have no idea what it is that I think I understand; I’m experiencing the pleasure of insight without any apparent cause, without the faintest hope of replying to the question: insight into what? The feeling persists, regardless.

I think: I’ve travelled in circles, all these years, and where has it brought me?

To this moment. To this chance to take my first real steps along the path to enlightenment.

And all I have to do is keep walking, straight ahead.

For four years, I’ve been following a false tao—pursuing an illusion of freedom, striving for no reason but the sake of striving—but now I see the way to transform that journey into—

Into what? A short cut to damnation?

‘Damnation’? There’s no such thing. Only samsara, the treadmill of desires. Only the futility of striving. My understanding is clouded, now—but I know that if I travelled a few steps further, the truth would soon become clear to me.

For several seconds, I’m paralysed by indecision—shot through with pure dread—but then, drawn by the possibility of redemption, I leave the freeway, clamber over the fence, and head due south.

These side streets are familiar. I pass a car yard full of sun-bleached wrecks melting in slow motion, their plastic chassis triggered by disuse into autodegradation; a video porn and sex-aids shop, façade intact, dark within, stinking of rotting carpet and mouse shit; an outboard motor showroom, the latest—four-year-old—fuel cell models proudly on display already looking like bizarre relics from another century.

Then the sight of the cathedral spire rising above all this squalor hits me with a giddy mixture of nostalgia and déjà vu. In spite of everything, part of me still feels like a true Prodigal Son, coming home for the first time—not passing through for the fiftieth. I mumble prayers and phrases of dogma, strangely comforting formulae reawakened from memories of my last perihelion.

Soon, only one thing puzzles me: how could I have known God’s perfect love—and then walked away? It’s unthinkable. How could I have turned my back on Him?

I come to a row of pristine houses: I know they’re uninhabited, but here in the border zone the diocesan robots keep the lawns trimmed, the leaves swept, the walls painted. A few blocks further, south-west, and I’ll never turn my back on the truth again. I head that way, gladly.

Almost gladly.

The only trouble is ... with each step south it grows harder to ignore the fact that the scriptures—let alone Catholic dogma—are full of the most grotesque errors of fact and logic. Why should a revelation from a perfect, loving God be such a dog’s breakfast of threats and contradictions? Why should it offer such a flawed and confused view of humanity’s place in the universe?

Errors of fact? The metaphors had to be chosen to suit the world-view of the day; should God have mystified the author of Genesis with details of the Big Bang, and primordial nucleosynthesis? Contradictions? Tests of faith—and humility. How can I be so arrogant as to set my wretched powers of reasoning against the Word of the Almighty? God transcends everything, logic included.

Logic especially.

It’s no good. Virgin births? Miracles with loaves and fishes? Resurrection? Poetic fables only, not to be taken literally? If that’s the case, though, what’s left but a few well-intentioned homilies, and a lot of pompous theatrics? If God did in fact become man, suffer, die, and rise again to save me, then I owe Him everything ... but if it’s just a beautiful story, then I can love my neighbour with or without regular doses of bread and wine.

I veer south-east.

The truth about the universe (here) is infinitely stranger, and infinitely more grand: it lies in the Laws of Physics that have come to know Themselves through humanity. Our destiny and purpose are encoded in the fine structure constant, and the value of the density omega. The human race—in whatever form, robot or organic—will keep on advancing for the next ten billion years, until we can give rise to the hyperintelligence which will cause the finely tuned Big Bang required to bring us into existence.

If we don’t die out in the next few millennia.

In which case, other intelligent creatures will perform the task. It doesn’t matter who carries the torch.

Exactly. None of it matters. Why should I care what a civilisation of posthumans, robots, or aliens, might or might not do ten billion years from now? What does any of this grandiose shit have to do with me?

I finally catch sight of Maria, a few blocks ahead of me—and right on cue, the existentialist attractor to the west firmly steers me away from the suburbs of cosmic baroque. I increase my pace, but only slightly—it’s too hot to run, but more to the point, sudden acceleration can have some peculiar side effects, bringing on unexpected philosophical swerves.

As I narrow the gap, she turns at the sound of my footsteps.

I say, ‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’ She doesn’t seem exactly thrilled to see me—but then, this isn’t exactly the place for it.

I fall into step beside her. ‘You left without me.’

She shrugs. ‘I wanted to be on my own for a while. I wanted to think things over.’

I laugh. ‘If you wanted to think, you should have stayed on the freeway.’

‘There’s another spot ahead. In the park. It’s just as good.’

She’s right—although now I’m here to spoil it for her. I ask myself for the thousandth time: Why do I want us to stay together? Because of what we have in common? But we owe most of that to the very fact that we are together—travelling the same paths, corrupting each other with our proximity. Because of our differences, then? For the sake of occasional moments of mutual incomprehensibility? But the longer we’re together, the more that vestige of mystery will be eroded; orbiting each other can only lead to a spiralling together, an end to all distinctions.

Why, then?

The honest answer (here and now) is: food and sex—although tomorrow, elsewhere, no doubt I’ll look back and brand that conclusion a cynical lie.

I fall silent as we drift towards the equilibrium zone. The last few minutes’ confusion still rings in my head, satisfyingly jumbled, the giddy succession of truncated epiphanies effectively cancelling each other out, leaving nothing behind but an amorphous sense of distrust. I remember a school of thought from pre-Meltdown days which proclaimed, with bovine good intentions—confusing laudable tolerance with sheer credulity—that there was something of value in every human philosophy ... and what’s more, when you got right down to it, they all really spoke the same ‘universal truths’, and were all, ultimately, reconcilable. Apparently, none of these supine ecumenicists have survived to witness the palpable disproof of their hypothesis; I expect they all converted, three seconds after Meltdown, to the faith of whoever was standing closest to them at the time.

Maria mutters angrily, ‘Wonderful!’ I look up at her, then follow her gaze. The park has come into view, and if it’s time to herself she wanted, she has more than me to contend with. At least two dozen other tramps are gathered in the shade. That’s rare, but it does happen; equilibrium zones are the slowest parts of everybody’s orbits, so I suppose it’s not surprising that occasionally a group of us ends up becalmed together.

As we come closer, I notice something stranger: everybody reclining on the grass is facing the same way. Watching something—or someone—hidden from view by the trees.

Someone. A woman’s voice reaches us, the words indistinct at this distance, but the tone mellifluous. Confident. Gentle but persuasive.

Maria says nervously, ‘Maybe we should stay back. Maybe the equilibrium’s shifted.’

‘Maybe.’ I’m as worried as she is—but intrigued as well. I don’t feel much of a tug from any of the familiar local attractors—but then, I can’t be sure that my curiosity itself isn’t a new hook for an old idea.

I say, ‘Let’s just ... skirt around the rim of the park. We can’t ignore this; we have to find out what’s going on.’ If a nearby basin has expanded and captured the park, then keeping our distance from the speaker is no guarantee of freedom; it’s not her words, or her lone presence, that could harm us—but Maria (knowing all this, I’m sure) accepts my ‘strategy’ for warding off the danger, and nods assent.

We position ourselves in the middle of the road at the eastern edge of the park, without noticeable effect. The speaker, middle-aged I’d guess, looks every inch a tramp, from the dirt-stiff clothes to the crudely cut hair to the weathered skin and lean build of a half-starved perennial walker. Only the voice is wrong. She’s set up a frame, like an easel, on which she’s stretched a large map of the city; the roughly hexagonal cells of the basins are neatly marked in a variety of colours. People used to swap maps like this all the time, in the early years; maybe she’s just showing off her prize possession, hoping to trade it for something worthwhile. I don’t think much of her chances; by now, I’m sure, every tramp relies on his or her own mental picture of the ideological terrain.

Then she lifts a pointer and traces part of a feature I’d missed: a delicate web of blue lines, weaving through the gaps between the hexagons.

The woman says, ‘But of course it’s no accident. We haven’t stayed out of the basins all these years by sheer good luck—or even skill.’ She looks out across the crowd, notices us, pauses a moment, then says calmly, ‘We’ve been captured by our own attractor. It’s nothing like the others—it’s not a fixed set of beliefs, in a fixed location—but it’s still an attractor, it’s still drawn us to it from whatever unstable orbits we might have been on. I’ve mapped it—or part of it—and I’ve sketched it as well as I can. The true detail may be infinitely fine—but even from this crude representation, you should recognise paths that you’ve walked yourselves.’

I stare at the map. From this distance, the blue strands are impossible to follow individually; I can see that they cover the route that Maria and I have taken, over the last few days, but—

An old man calls out, ‘You’ve scrawled a lot of lines between the basins. What does that prove?’

‘Not between all the basins.’ She touches a point on the map. ‘Has anyone ever been here? Or here? Or here? No? Here? Or here? Why not? They’re all wide corridors between attractors—they look as safe as any of the others. So why have we never been to these places? For the same reason nobody living in the fixed attractors has: they’re not part of our territory; they’re not part of our own attractor.’

I know she’s talking nonsense, but the phrase alone is enough to make me feel panicky, claustrophobic. Our own attractor. We’ve been captured by our own attractor. I scan the rim of the city on the map; the blue line never comes close to it. In fact, the line gets about as far from the centre as I’ve ever travelled, myself ...

Proving what? Only that this woman has had no better luck than I have. If she’d escaped the city, she wouldn’t be here to claim that escape was impossible.

A woman in the crowd—visibly pregnant—says, ‘You’ve drawn your own paths, that’s all. You’ve stayed out of danger—I’ve stayed out of danger—we all know what places to avoid. That’s all you’re telling us. That’s all we have in common.’

‘No!’ The speaker traces a stretch of the blue line again. ‘This is who we are. We’re not aimless wanderers; we’re the people of this strange attractor. We have an identity—a unity—after all.’

There’s laughter, and a few desultory insults from the crowd. I whisper to Maria, ‘Do you know her? Have you see her before?’

‘I’m not sure. I don’t think so.’

‘You wouldn’t have. Isn’t it obvious? She’s some kind of robot evangelist—’

‘She doesn’t talk much like one.’

‘Rationalist—not Christian or Mormon.’

‘Rationalists don’t send evangelists.’

‘No? Mapping strange attractors; if that’s not rationalist jargon, what is it?’

Maria shrugs. ‘Basins, attractors—they’re all rationalist words, but everybody uses them. You know what they say: the Devil has the best tunes, but the rationalists have the best jargon. Words have to come from somewhere.’

The woman says, ‘I’ll build my church on sand. And I’ll ask no one to follow me—and yet, you will. You all will.’

I say, ‘Let’s go.’ I take Maria’s arm, but she pulls free angrily.

‘Why are you so against her? Maybe she’s right.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘Everyone else has an attractor—why can’t we have one of our own? Stranger than all the rest. Look at it: it’s the most beautiful thing on the map.’

I shake my head, horrified. ‘How can you say that? We’ve stayed free. We’ve struggled so hard to stay free.’

She shrugs. ‘Maybe. Or maybe we’ve been captured by what you call freedom. Maybe we don’t need to struggle any more. Is that so bad? If we’re doing what we want, either way, why should we care?’

Without any fuss, the woman starts packing up her easel, and the crowd of tramps begins to disperse. Nobody seems to have been much affected by the brief sermon; everyone heads off calmly on their own chosen orbits.

I, say, ‘The people in the basins are doing what they want. I don’t want to be like them.’

Maria laughs. ‘Believe me, you’re not.’

‘No, you’re right, I’m not: they’re rich, fat and complacent; I’m starving, tired, and confused. And for what? Why am I living this way? That robot’s trying to take away the one thing that makes it all worthwhile.’

‘Yeah? Well, I’m tired and hungry, too. And maybe an attractor of my own will make it all worthwhile.’

‘How?’ I laugh derisively. ‘Will you worship it? Will you pray to it?’

‘No. But I won’t have to be afraid any more. If we really have been captured—if the way we live is stable, after all—then putting one foot wrong won’t matter: we’ll be drawn back to our own attractor. We won’t have to worry that the smallest mistake will send us sliding into one of the basins. If that’s true, aren’t you glad?’

I shake my head angrily. ‘That’s bullshit—dangerous bullshit. Staying out of the basins is a skill, it’s a gift. You know that. We navigate the channels, carefully, balancing the opposing forces—’

‘Do we? I’m sick of feeling like a tightrope walker.’

‘Being sick of it doesn’t mean it isn’t true! Don’t you see? She wants us to be complacent! The more of us who start to think orbiting is easy, the more of us will end up captured by the basins—’

I’m distracted by the sight of the prophet hefting her possessions and setting off. I say, ‘Look at her: she may be a perfect imitation—but she’s a robot, she’s a fake. They’ve finally understood that their pamphlets and their preaching machines won’t work, so they’ve sent a machine to lie to us about our freedom.’

Maria says, ‘Prove it.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve got a knife. If she’s a robot, go after her, stop her, cut her open. Prove it.’

The woman, the robot, crosses the park, heading north-west, away from us. I say, ‘You know me; I could never do that.’

‘If she’s a robot, she won’t feel a thing.’

‘But she looks human. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stick a knife into a perfect imitation of human flesh.’

‘Because you know she’s not a robot. You know she’s telling the truth.’

Part of me is simply glad to be arguing with Maria, for the sake of proving our separateness—but part of me finds everything she’s saying too painful to leave unchallenged.

I hesitate a moment, then put down my pack and sprint across the park towards the prophet.

She turns when she hears me, and stops walking. There’s no one else nearby. I halt a few metres away from her, and catch my breath. She regards me with patient curiosity. I stare at her, feeling increasingly foolish. I can’t pull a knife on her: she might not be a robot, after all—she might just be a tramp with strange ideas.

She says, ‘Did you want to ask me something?’

Almost without thinking, I blurt out, ‘How do you know nobody’s ever left the city? How can you be so sure it’s never happened?’

She shakes her head. ‘I didn’t say that. The attractor looks like a closed loop to me. Anyone who’s been captured by it could never leave. But other people may have escaped.’

‘What other people?’

‘People who weren’t in the attractor’s basin.’

I scowl, confused. ‘What basin? I’m not talking about the people of the basins, I’m talking about us.’

She laughs. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean the basins that lead to the fixed attractors. Our strange attractor has a basin, too: all the points that lead to it. I don’t know what this basin’s shape is: like the attractor itself, the detail could be infinitely fine. Not every point in the gaps between the hexagons would be part of it: some points must lead to the fixed attractors—that’s why some tramps have been captured by them. Other points would belong to the strange attractor’s basin. But others—’

‘What?’

‘Other points might lead to infinity. To escape.’

‘Which points?’

She shrugs. ‘Who knows? There could be two points, side by side, one leading into the strange attractor, one leading—eventually—out of the city. The only way to find out which is which would be to start at each point, and see what happens.’

‘But you said we’d all been captured, already—’

She nods. ‘After so many orbits, the basins must have emptied into their respective attractors. The attractors are the stable part: the basins lead into the attractors, but the attractors lead into themselves. Anyone who was destined for a fixed attractor must be in it by now—and anyone who was destined to leave the city has already gone. Those of us who are still in orbit will stay that way. We have to understand that, accept that, learn to live with it ... and if that means inventing our own faith, our own religion—’

I grab her arm, draw my knife, and quickly scrape the point across her forearm. She yelps and pulls free, then clasps her hand to the wound. A moment later, she takes it away to inspect the damage, and I see the thin red line on her arm, and a rough wet copy on her palm.

‘You lunatic!’ she yells, backing away.

Maria approaches us. The probably-flesh-and-blood prophet addresses her: ‘He’s mad! Get him off me!’ Maria takes hold of my arm, then, inexplicably, leans towards me and puts her tongue in my ear. I burst out laughing. The woman steps back uncertainly, then turns and hurries away.

Maria says, ‘Not much of a dissection—but as far as it went, it was in my favour. I win.’

I hesitate, then feign surrender.

‘You win.’

* * * *

By nightfall, we end up on the freeway again; this time, to the east of the city centre. We gaze at the sky above the black silhouette of abandoned office towers, our brains mildly scrambled by the residual effects of a nearby cluster of astrologers, as we eat the day’s prize catch: a giant vegetarian pizza.

Finally, Maria says, ‘Venus has set. I think I ought to sleep now.’

I nod. ‘I’ll wait up for Mars.’

Traces of the day’s barrage drift through my mind, more or less at random—but I can still recall most of what the woman in the park told me.

After so many orbits, the basins must have emptied ...

So by now, we’ve all ended up captured. But—how could she know that? How could she be sure?

And what if she’s wrong? What if we haven’t all, yet, arrived in our final resting place?

The astrologers say: None of her filthy, materialist, reductionist lies can be true. Except the ones about destiny. We like destiny. Destiny is fine.

I get up and walk a dozen metres south, neutralising their contribution. Then I turn and watch Maria sleeping.

There could be two points, side by side, one leading into the strange attractor, one leading—eventually—out of the city. The only way to find out which is which would be to start at each point, and see what happens.

Right now, everything she said sounds to me like some heavily distorted and badly misunderstood rationalist model. And here I am, grasping at hope by seizing on half of her version, and throwing out the rest. Metaphors mutating and hybridising, all over again ...

I walk over to Maria, crouch down and bend to kiss her, gently, upside down on the forehead. She doesn’t even stir.

Then I lift my pack and set off down the freeway, believing for a moment that I can feel the emptiness beyond the city reach through, reach over, all the obstacles ahead, and claim me.

The Vat

A Romantic Comedy

Harold’s in love.

There’s no hiding it. You can see it in his eyes, in the heat distribution on his skin, in the twists and whorls of his brain’s magnetic field.

Mary knows he exists, all right. When she looks his way, she doesn’t look through him—not quite. She notices him with a mild frown. She notices him like a splinter in her thumb, or a crease in her lab coat. She notices him like a faint odour; nothing utterly repulsive, but nothing too pleasant either.

Poor Harold was once a promising neurochemist. He discovered a brand new neurotransmitter-antagonist which could make rats lethargic and depressed.

However, while proving that injections of this substance, during or immediately after feeding, could produce an aversive association strong enough to make the creatures starve themselves to death, he accidentally jabbed himself with the needle, and soon found he was no longer able even to contemplate experiments with rats. So these days, he works on The Vat.

Harold is in charge of spermatogenesis. In truth, he doesn’t have a lot to do.

The computer monitors the temperature, the pH, the concentrations of nutrients, growth factors, and waste products. Four hundred square metres of glass plate are coated with a gelatinous matrix in which spermatogonia, the stem cells, are embedded. When these cells divide, some of their daughter cells are more of the same, the others are primary spermatocytes. Each primary spermatocyte gives rise by meiosis to two secondary spermatocytes, each of which in turn divides into two spermatids. Under the influence of Sertoli cells, also embedded in the matrix, spermatids mature and shed cytoplasm to become spermatozoa.

Harold has seen all of these stages hundreds of times under the microscope, in samples taken for quality control. He ought to find the whole business utterly mundane. Sometimes, though—transfixed for a moment by the image on the screen

—he says in dreamy tones of sudden recognition (to no one in particular, often to no one at all), “Yes! This is it. This is life.” Staring at these specks of unthinking biochemical machinery, he grows dizzy with wonder, then numb with awe.

Then he gets on with the job.

Some nights, Harold wakes in the early hours and goes out to walk the empty streets. Why? It’s the hottest summer on record, and he can’t get back to sleep.

Why? Unrequited love, of course. Why? Studies of the sequence of neurological events which occur when a subject makes a self-motivated choice between hitting a button and not hitting a button have revealed that the conscious decision-making process starts milliseconds after other parts of the brain are already committed to action. “Will” isn’t the cause of anything, it’s an afterthought for the sake of peace of mind. Since reading this, Harold has stopped making an effort to force his intentions to conform to his behaviour; there doesn’t seem much point now in maintaining the illusion. He just walks.

Even the stillest, quietest night comes alive for Harold. He sees gas molecules spinning through the air, and photons pouring down from the stars, the way some insane medieval monk might have imagined angels and demons battling it out behind every corner and beneath every cobblestone. And the frenzy isn’t confined to his surroundings; the real bedlam is inside him. He pictures it all, vividly, in garish, comic-book, computer-graphic colours: DNA being transcribed, proteins being synthesised, carbohydrates being burnt in flameless enzymatic fires.

Everybody’s made up of molecules, and plenty of people know it, but nobody feels it like Harold.

Above all, he dizzily marvels at the fact that the molecules in his brain have managed, collectively, to understand themselves: his neurotransmitters are part of a system that knows what a neurotransmitter is. He can sketch the structures of the central nervous system’s one hundred most important substances; he’s synthesised half of them with his own hands. He’s even viewed real-time images of his brain metabolising radioactively-labelled glucose, revealing which regions were most active as he watched himself thinking about watching himself think.

Harold doesn’t know quite what to make of this molecular self-knowledge. He can’t decide if consciousness is miraculous or meaningless; he hovers between mystical ecstasy and the purest nihilism. Sometimes he feels like a robot, raised by human parents, who’s just discovered the awful truth: poring over his own circuit diagrams, horrified but enthralled; scanning a print-out of his own software, following the flow of control from subroutine to subroutine; understanding, at last, the ultimate shallowness of the deepest reasons for everything he’s ever done, everything he’s ever felt—and dissociating into a mist of a quadrillion purposeless, microscopic causes and effects.

This mood always passes, though, eventually.

Mary is responsible for oogenesis. Primary oocytes undergo meiotic division to yield four cells, but only one of the four is a mature ovum; the others are tiny cells known as polar bodies, and the second division is only completed if fertilisation takes place. In a massive cultured substitute for the ovarian cortex, millions of ova mature and burst from their follicles daily—no parsimonious one a month here. The Vat has no time, and no need, to ponderously mimic the stages of the human menstrual cycle; as in any good assembly line, everything is happening at once.

Harold knows exactly where Mary lives, although of course he’s never been inside, and when he walks by at two in the morning, the narrow terrace house is always black and silent. He hurries past, terrified that she might be awake, and might glance out at the sound of his guilty footsteps.

He knows he ought to forget her. Sometimes he swears that he will. He sees women on the street every day whom he finds a thousand times more attractive.

Total strangers treat him with far greater kindness and respect. He knows his mere presence annoys her—and her presence evokes in him more shame and confusion than tenderness, or even lust.

His love is ridiculous. His love is a farce. Yet the persistence of his obsession doesn’t surprise him at all. Evolution, he reasons, has not had time to trim human consciousness down to the most productive, most essential elements. His brain is capable of many arbitrary, even self-defeating, modes; perhaps that is the price to pay for its flexibility, perhaps there is no easy sequence of mutations which could remove such disadvantages without sacrificing much more.

As for his own wish to be rid of this miserable, pointless love, Harold knows that this has no more power to change his feelings than it does to change the weather on Jupiter or the electron’s charge-to-mass ratio; it’s merely another aspect of the state of his brain. Whatever admirable progress evolution has made towards lining up intentions with behaviour to pander to the vanities of the conscious mind, has—in Harold’s case, at least—been wasted. The neurological facts refuse to stay decently theoretical; the irony is that this shattering of the illusion of will, although entirely reasonable, is not by any means necessary; after all, the human brain is under no deep biochemical edict to be reasonable. The epiphenomenon of logical thought simply happens to have been more resilient, in this case, than the epiphenomenon of will; in a million other people, as familiar with the facts as Harold, the battle happens to have gone the other way.

Harold wonders, with a mixture of unease and fascination, if his reason is strong enough to move on from this conquest to the ultimate triumph of undermining itself.

When Mary’s ova meet Harold’s sperm, a high proportion are fertilised. Most of the sperm go to waste, but not nearly as many as are lost in vivo. The rates of polyspermy, and fertilisation by defective sperm, are consequently higher, but such abnormalities don’t really matter, in The Vat.

The resulting zygotes drift, slowly, along a vast conduit. They undergo cleavage, redistributing their cytoplasm amongst more and more cells. Between four and six days after fertilisation, blastocysts form: hollow balls of cells, with a cluster at one end which is destined to become the embryo. Other cells will, in time, give rise to the protective foetal membranes.

Cultured slabs of uterine endometrium—hormonally stimulated into a swollen, receptive state, and replete with artificial blood circulated by electric pumps

—are introduced into the conduit at the point where the blastocysts are ready to implant. Within days of implantation, chorionic villi—the links between the placental and “maternal” blood supply—will form, guaranteeing essential nutrition for the haemotropic development to come.

Tonight, after passing Mary’s dark house—on the far side of the street, as always—Harold stops and turns back. Why? Because certain of his motor neurons fire in the necessary sequence. Why? Because sufficient excitatory signals are received at their dendrites. Why? Because of the neural topology of Harold’s brain, the product of his genome, and his life history, and the way the quantum dice have fallen.

A rubbish-strewn alley leads to a back window, very slightly ajar. Harold can fit only his fingernails into the crack, and clawing the window open causes him a lot of pain, but this doesn’t deter him at all.

The window leads into a damp, warm bathroom, between a toilet and a dripping shower. He fears that the sound of the dripping will betray him; it rings so loudly in his head that he believes Mary might be wakened, not by the sound itself, but by his amplified perception of it. He tightens the hot water tap with all his strength, and then the cold, but there’s a leaky washer, and no amount of force is going to change that.

He tip-toes into the kitchen, opens the drawers and searches them methodically.

It’s not until he has the carving knife in his hand that he reflects on his likely use for it. Part of him is shocked, but part of him is delighted; it’s one thing to muse and fret like a tenth-rate philosopher, but here at last is a test for his ideas that goes beyond inconsequential speculation.

A proportion of the embryos are simply liquefied; the cell walls, and indeed all intracellular structures, are ultrasonically disrupted. The broth of chemicals this produces is then fed into a sophisticated purification system, based mainly on electrophoresis and affinity chromatography, and many valuable substances are extracted.

The remaining embryos are broken into individual cells. In theory, perhaps, almost anything can be achieved with engineered bacteria, or some modified tumour cell line, but in practice there are still many properties of healthy human tissue that can’t be faked. Persuading E. coli to churn out hormones like insulin or dopamine is simple enough; turning it into a perfectly functional equivalent of an islet cell or a dopaminergic neuron—an integral part of a complicated regulatory system—is something else entirely. It’s simply not economical, trying to make all that human DNA work in a foreign environment, when the real thing is available for a fraction of the cost.

Harold passes the refrigerated storerooms every morning as he arrives for work, and every evening as he departs. It’s a relaxed, cheerful place; the storemen always seem to be whistling, or playing a radio loudly. Vans come and go at all hours, picking up the large, but light, containers of insulating foam in which the small, precious vials are packed. When Harold sees a crateful of the end product of his work being loaded into a van, when he sees the driver sign for the consignment, slam his door, and drive away, he says to himself aloud, nodding, “Yes! This is it. This is life.”

Harold stands by Mary’s bed. She’s lying on her side, turned away from him. He breathes slowly—through his mouth, hoping that this is the quietest way—and thinks about the trillions of cells of her body. If he stabbed her in the heart, only the tiniest fraction of them would be killed directly by the blade—just a few million cells in her skin, her soft tissue, her heart muscles. The death of her neurons would be almost coincidental, more a product of this organism’s poor design than anything else. A slime mould would easily survive similar treatment.

He stands for a while, waiting to see what he will do. Part of him—a small, vestigial subsystem with no interest whatsoever in brain physiology, the philosophy of consciousness, or even obsessive love—pleads fervently to be allowed to put down the knife and flee, but Harold pays it about as much attention as the soundtrack of a child’s cartoon overheard playing on a neighbour’s TV. He stands, and he waits.

Harold doesn’t mourn for the brief lives he helps create; he knows they die long before the most primitive thoughts or feelings have a chance to arise, and he can’t believe there’s a machine up in heaven, churning out a white-robed feather-winged soul for each of these tiny clusters of cells.

Rather, he rejoices. Because The Vat says something about human life—human life of every age—that had to be said, and although today he is alone in heeding this message, he knows that in time the insights he’s gained will be the common heritage of all humanity.

Harold retraces his steps. He returns the knife to its place in the kitchen. He leaves by the bathroom window, and closes it behind him.

He wanted to kill her, he muses, more than he’d ever wanted anything before. He wanted, very badly, to be free. But something in his genome, or something in his past, declared that it wasn’t to be. Or perhaps the quantum dice simply happened to fall in her favour. This time.

He walks home slowly, his face uplifted to the photons flooding down from the stars, and he counts them one by one.

The Walk

Leaves and twigs crunch underfoot with every step; no gentle rustling, but the sharp, snapping sounds of irrevocable, unrepeatable damage—as if to hammer into my brain the fact that no one else has come this way for some time. Every footfall proclaims that there’ll be no help, no interruptions, no distractions.

I’ve felt weak and giddy since we left the car—and part of me is still hoping that I’ll simply pass out, collapse on the spot and never get up again. My body, though, shows no signs of obliging: it stubbornly acts as if each step forward is the easiest thing in the world, as if its sense of balance is unimpaired, as if all the fatigue and nausea are entirely within my head. I could fake it: I could sink to the ground and refuse to stir. Get it over with.

I don’t, though.

Because I don’t want it to be over.

I try again.

‘Carter, you could be rich, man. I’d work for you for the rest of my life.’ Good touch, that: my life, not your life; makes it sound like a better deal. ‘You know how much I made for Finn, in six months? Half a million! Add it up.’

He doesn’t reply. I stop walking, and turn back to face him. He halts too, keeping his distance. Carter doesn’t look much like an executioner. He must be close to sixty: grey-haired, with a weathered, almost kindly face. He’s still solidly built, but he looks like someone’s once athletic grandfather, a boxer or a football player forty years ago, now into vigorous gardening.

He calmly waves me on with the gun.

‘Further. We’ve passed the people-taking-a-piss zone, but campers, bush walkers ... you can’t be too careful.’

I hesitate. He gives me a gently admonishing look. If I stood my ground? He’d shoot me right here, and carry the body the rest of the way. I can see him trudging along, with my corpse slung casually across his shoulders. However decent he might seem at first glance, the truth is, the man’s a fucking robot: he’s got some kind of neural implant, some bizarre religion; everybody knows that.

I whisper, ‘Carter ... please.’

He gestures with the gun.

I turn and start walking again.

I still don’t understand how Finn caught me out. I thought I was the best hacker he had. Who could have followed my trail, from the outside? Nobody! He must have planted someone inside one of the corporations I was screwing on his behalf—just to check up on me, the paranoid bastard. And I never kept more than ten per cent. I wish I’d taken fifty. I wish I’d made it worthwhile.

I strain my ears, but I can’t pick up the faintest hint of traffic, now; just birdsong, insects, the crackling of the forest’s debris underfoot. Fucking nature. I refuse to die here. I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into orbit—preferably around the sun. I don’t care how much it costs, just so long as I don’t end up part of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen. Gaia, I divorce thee. Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you grasping bitch.

Wasted anger, wasted time. Please don’t kill me, Carter: I can’t bear to be absorbed back into the unthinking biosphere. That’d really move him.

What, then?

‘I’m twenty-five years old, man. I haven’t even lived. I’ve spent the last ten years farting around with computers. I don’t even have any kids. How can you kill someone who hasn’t even had kids?’ For a second, seduced by my own rhetoric, I seriously think about claiming virginity—but that might be pushing it ... and it sounds less selfish, less hedonistic, to assert my right to fatherhood than to whine about sex.

Carter laughs. ‘You want immortality through children’? Forget it. I’ve got two sons, myself. They’re nothing like me. They’re total strangers.’

‘Yeah? That’s sad. But I still ought to have the chance.’

‘The chance to do what? To pretend that you’ll live on through your children? To fool yourself?’

I laugh knowingly—trying to make it sound like we’re sharing a joke that only two like-minded cynics could appreciate.

‘Of course I want a chance to fool myself. I want to lie to myself for fifty more years. Sounds pretty good to me.’

He doesn’t reply.

I slow down slightly, shortening my stride, feigning trouble with the uneven terrain. Why? Do I seriously think that a few extra minutes will give me the chance to formulate some dazzlingly brilliant plan? Or am I just buying time for the sake of it? Just prolonging the agony?

I pause, and suddenly find myself retching; the convulsions run deep, but nothing comes up except a faint taste of acid. When it’s over, I wipe the sweat and tears from my face, and try to stop shaking—hating more than anything the fact that I care about my dignity, the fact that I do give a shit whether or not I die in a pool of vomit, weeping like a child. As if this walk to my death is all that matters, now; as if these last few minutes of my life have superseded everything else.

They have, though, haven’t they? Everything else is past, is gone.

Yes—and so will this begone. If I am going to die, there’s no need to ‘make peace’ with myself, no reason to ‘compose myself for death. The way I face extinction is just as fleeting, just as irrelevant, as the way I faced every other moment of my life.

The one and only thing that could make this time matter would be finding a way to survive.

When I catch my breath, I try to stretch out the delay.

‘Carter, how many times have you done this?’

‘Thirty-three.’

Thirty-three. That’s hard enough to swallow when some jilted gun fetishist squeezes the trigger of his sub-machine-gun and firehoses a crowd, but thirty-three leisurely strolls into the forest ...

‘So tell me: how do most people take it? I really want to know. Do they puke? Do they cry? Do they beg?’

He shrugs. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Do they try to bribe you?’

‘Almost always.’

‘But you can’t be bought?’

He doesn’t reply.

‘Or—has nobody made the right offer? What do you want, if it isn’t money? Sex?’ His face remains impassive—there’s no scowl of revulsion—so instead of making a joke of it, retracting what might have been an insult, I press on, light-headed. ‘Is that it? Do you want me to suck your cock? If that’s what you want, I’ll do it.’

He gives me that admonishing look again. No contempt for my spineless pleading, no disgust at my misjudged offer; just the mildest irritation that I’m wasting his time.

I laugh weakly, to hide my humiliation at this absolute indifference—this refusal to find me even pitiful.

I say, ‘So, people take it pretty badly. How do you take it?’

He says, matter-of-factly, ‘I take it pretty well.’

I wipe my face again. ‘Yeah, you do, don’t you? Is that what the chip in your brain is for? To let you sleep at night after you’ve done this?’

He hesitates, then says, ‘In a way. But it’s not as simple as that.’ He waves the gun. ‘Get moving. We’ve still got further to go.’

I turn, thinking numbly: I’ve just told the one man who could save my life that he’s a brain-damaged, subhuman killing machine.

I start walking again.

I glance up, once, at the blank idiot sky, and refuse to take delivery of the flood of memories linked in my mind to the same astonishing blue. All of that is gone, it’s over. No Proustian flashbacks, no Billy Pilgrim time-tripping for me. I have no need to flee into the past: I’m going to live into the future, I’m going to survive this. How? Carter may be merciless, and incorruptible—in which case, I’m simply going to have to overpower him. I may have led a sedentary existence, but I’m less than half his age; that has to count for something. At the very least, I must be faster on my feet. Overpower him? Struggle with a loaded gun? Maybe I won’t have to; maybe I’ll get a chance to run.

Carter says, ‘Don’t waste your time trying to think up ways to bargain with me. It’s not going to happen. You’d be better off thinking of ways to accept the inevitable.’

‘I don’t want to fucking accept it.’

‘That’s not true. You don’t want it to happen—but it will happen. So find a way to deal with it. You must have thought about death, before now.’

This is all I need: grief counselling from my own assassin. ‘If you want to know the truth: not once. One more thing I never got around to. So why don’t you give me a decade or two to sort it out?’

‘It won’t take a decade. It won’t take long at all. Look at it this way: Does it bother you that there are places outside your skin—and you’re not in them? That you come to a sudden end at the top of your skull—and then there’s nothing but air? Of course not. So why should it bother you that there’ll be times when you won’t be around—any more than you care that there are places you don’t occupy? You think your life is going to be undone—cancelled out, somehow—just because it has an end? Does the space above your head cancel out your body? Everything has boundaries. Nothing stretches on forever—in any direction.’

In spite of myself, I laugh; he’s gone from the sadistic to the surreal. ‘You believe that shit, do you? You actually think that way?’

‘No. I could have; it’s on the market—and I seriously considered buying it. It’s a perfectly valid point of view ... but in the end, it just didn’t ring true for me—and I didn’t want it to ring true. I chose something else entirely. Stop here.’

‘What?’

‘I said stop.’

I look around, bewildered, refusing to believe that we’ve arrived. We’re nowhere special—hemmed in, as ever, between the ugly eucalypts; calf deep in the drought-shrivelled undergrowth—but what did I expect? An artificial clearing? A picnic spot?

I turn to face him, scouring my paralysed brain for some strategy to get within reach of the gun—or get out of his range before he can fire—when he says, with perfect sincerity, ‘I can help you. I can make this easier.’ I stare at him for a second, then break into long, clumsy, choking sobs.

He waits, patiently, until I finally manage to cough up the word: ‘How?’

With his left hand, he reaches into his shirt pocket, takes out a small object, and holds it up for inspection on his outstretched palm. For a moment, I think it’s a capsule, some kind of drug—but it’s not.

Not quite.

It’s a neural implant applicator. Through the transparent casing, I can just make out the grey speck of the implant itself.

I have an instant, vivid fantasy of walking forward to accept it: my chance, at last, to disarm him.

‘Catch.’ He tosses the device straight at my face, and I put up a hand and grab it from the air.

He says, ‘It’s up to you, of course. I’m not going to force you to use it.’

Flies settle on my wet face as I stare at the thing. I brush them away with my free hand. ‘What’ll this give me? Twenty seconds of cosmic bliss before you blow my brains out? Some hallucination so vivid it’ll make me think this was all a dream? If you wanted to spare me the pain of knowing I was going to die, you should have just shot me in the back of the head five minutes ago, when I still thought I had a chance.’

He says, ‘It’s not a hallucination. It’s a set of ... attitudes. A philosophy, if you like.’

‘What philosophy? All that crap about ... boundaries in space and time?’

‘No. I told you, I didn’t buy that.’

I almost crack up. ‘So this is your religion? You want to convert me, before you kill me? You want to save my fucking soul? Is that how you cope with slaughtering people? You think you’re saving their souls?’

He shakes his head, unoffended. ‘I wouldn’t call it a religion. There is no god. There are no souls.’

‘No? Well, if you’re offering me all the comforts of atheism, I don’t need an implant for that.’

‘Are you afraid of dying?’

‘What do you think?’

‘If you use the implant, you won’t be.’

‘You want to render me terminally brave, and then kill me? Or terminally numb? I’d rather be blissed out.’

‘Not brave. Or numb. Perceptive.’

He may not have found me pitiful, but I’m still human enough to do him the honour. ‘Perceptive? You think swallowing some pathetic lie about death is perceptive?’

‘No lies. This implant won’t change your beliefs on any question of fact.’

‘I don’t believe in life after death, so—’

‘Whose life?’

‘What?’

‘When you die, will other people live on?’

For a moment, I just can’t speak. I’m fighting for my life—and he’s treating the whole thing like some abstract philosophical debate. I almost scream: Stop playing with me! Get it over with!

But I don’t want it to be over.

And as long as I can keep him talking, there’s still the chance that I can rush him, the chance of a distraction, the chance of some miraculous reprieve.

I take a deep breath. ‘Yes, other people will live on.’

‘Billions. Perhaps hundreds of billions, in centuries to come.’

‘No shit. I’ve never believed that the universe would vanish when I died. But if you think that’s some great consolation—’

‘How different can two humans be?’

‘I don’t know. You’re pretty fucking different.’

‘Out of all those hundreds of billions, don’t you think there’ll be people who are just like you?

‘What are you talking about now? Reincarnation?’

‘No. Statistics. There can be no “reincarnation”—there are no souls to be reborn. But eventually—by pure chance—someone will come along who’ll embody everything that defines you.’

I don’t know why, but the crazier this gets, the more hopeful I’m beginning to feel—as if Carter’s crippled powers of reasoning might make him vulnerable in other ways.

I say, ‘That’s just not true. How could anyone end up with my memories, my experiences—’

‘Memories don’t matter. Your experiences don’t define you. The accidental details of your life are as superficial as your appearance. They may have shaped who you are—but they’re not an intrinsic part of it. There’s a core, a deep abstraction—’

‘A soul by any other name.’

‘No.’

I shake my head, vehemently. There’s nothing to be gained by humouring him; I’m too bad an actor to make it convincing—and an argument can only buy me more time.

‘You think I should feel better about dying because ... sometime in the future, some total stranger might have a few abstract traits in common with me?’

‘You said that you wished you’d had children.’

‘I lied.’

‘Good. Because they’re not the answer.’

‘And I should get more comfort from the thought of someone who’s no relation at all, with no memories of mine, no sense of continuity—’

‘How much do you have in common, now, with yourself when you were five years old?’

‘Not much.’

‘Don’t you think there must be thousands of people who are infinitely more like you—as you are now—than that child ever was?’

‘Maybe. In some ways, maybe.’

‘What about when you were ten? Fifteen?’

‘What does it matter? OK: people change. Slowly. Imperceptibly.’

He nods. ‘Imperceptibly—exactly! But does that make it any less real? Who’s swallowed the lie? It’s seeing the life of your body as the life of one person that’s the illusion. The idea that “you” are made up of all the events since your birth is nothing but a useful fiction. That’s not a person: it’s a composite, a mosaic.’

I shrug. ‘Perhaps. It’s still the closest thing to ... an identity ... that anyone can possess.’

‘But it isn’t! And it distracts us from the truth!’ Carter is growing impassioned, but there’s no hint of fanaticism in his demeanour. I almost wish he’d start ranting—but instead he continues, more calmly, more reasonably than ever. ‘I’m not saying that memories make no difference; of course they do. But there’s a part of you that’s independent of them—and that part will live again. One day, someone, somewhere, will think as you did, act as you did. Even if it’s only for a second or two, that person will be you.’

I shake my head. I’m beginning to feel stupefied by this relentless dream-logic—and I’m dangerously close to losing touch with what’s at stake.

I say flatly, ‘This is bullshit. Nobody could think that way.’

‘You’re wrong. I do. And you can—if you want to.’

‘Well, I don’t want to.’

‘I know it seems absurd to you, now—but I promise you, the implant would change all that.’ He absent-mindedly massages his right forearm. It must be stiff from holding the gun. ‘You can die afraid, or you can die reassured. It’s your decision.’

I close my fist over the applicator. ‘Do you offer this to all your victims?’

‘Not all. A few.’

‘And how many have used it?’

‘None so far.’

‘I’m not surprised. Who’d want to die like that? Fooling themselves?’

‘You said you did.’

‘Live. I said I wanted to live, fooling myself.’

I brush the flies from my face, for the hundredth time; they alight again, fearlessly. Carter is five metres away; if I take a step in his direction, he’ll shoot me in the head, without the slightest hesitation. I strain my ears, and hear nothing but crickets.

Using the implant would buy me more time: the four or five minutes before it takes effect. What have I got to lose? Carter’s reluctance to kill me, ‘unenlightened’? In the end, that’s made no difference, thirty-three times before. My will to stay alive? Maybe; maybe not. A change in my intellectual views about mortality need not render me utterly supine; even believers in a glorious afterlife have been known to struggle hard to postpone the trip.

Carter says softly, ‘Make up your mind. I’m going to count to ten.’

The chance to die honestly? The chance to cling to my own fear and confusion to the end?

Fuck that. If I die, then it makes no difference how I faced it. That’s my philosophy.

I say, ‘Don’t bother.’ I push the applicator deep into my right nostril, and squeeze the trigger. There’s a faint sting as the implant burrows into my nasal membranes, heading for the brain.

Carter laughs with delight. I almost join him. From out of nowhere, I have five more minutes to save my life.

I say, ‘OK, I’ve done what you wanted. But everything I said before still stands. Let me live, and I’ll make you rich. A million a year. At least.’

He shakes his head. ‘You’re dreaming. Where would I go? Finn would track me down in a week.’

‘You wouldn’t need to go anywhere. I’d skip the country—and I’d pay your money into an Orbital account.’

‘Yeah? Even if you did, what use would the money be to me? I couldn’t risk spending it.’

‘Once you had enough, you could buy some security. Buy some independence. Start disentangling yourself from Finn.’

‘No.’ He laughs again. ‘Why are you still looking for a way out? Don’t you understand? There’s no need.’

By now, the implant must have disgorged its nanomachines, to build links between my brain and the tiny optical processor whose neural net embodies Carter’s bizarre beliefs. Short-circuiting my own attitudes; hard-wiring his insanity into my brain. But no matter—I can always get it removed; that’s the easiest thing in the world. If it’s still what I want.

I say, ‘There’s no need for anything. There’s no need for you to kill me. We can still both walk out of here. Why do you act like you have no choice?’

He shakes his head. ‘You’re dreaming.’

‘Fuck you! Listen to me! All Finn has is money. I can ruin him, if that’s what it takes. From the other side of the world!’ I don’t even know whether or not I’m lying any more. Could I do that? To save my life?

Carter says softly, finally, ‘No.’

I don’t know what to say. I have no more arguments, no more pleas. I almost turn and run, but I can’t do it. I can’t believe that I’d get away—and I can’t bring myself to make him pull the trigger a moment sooner.

The sunshine is dazzling; I close my eyes against the glare. I haven’t given up. I’ll pretend that the implant has failed—that should disconcert him, buy me a few more minutes.

And then?

A wave of giddiness sweeps over me. I stagger, but regain my balance. I stand, staring at my shadow on the ground, swaying gently, feeling impossibly light.

Then I look up, squinting. ‘I—’

Carter says, ‘You’re going to die. I’m going to shoot you through the skull. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it’s not the end of you. Not the end of what matters. You believe that, don’t you?’

I nod, begrudgingly. ‘Yes.’

‘You know you’re going to die—but you’re not afraid?’

I close my eyes again; the light still hurts them. I laugh wearily. ‘You’re wrong: I’m still afraid. You lied about that, didn’t you? You shit. But I understand. Everything you said makes sense now.’

And it does. All my objections seem absurd, now; transparently ill-conceived. I resent the fact that Carter was right—but I can’t pretend that my reluctance to believe him was the product of anything but short-sightedness and self-deception. That it took a neural implant to enable me to see the obvious only proves how confused I must have been.

I stand, eyes shut, feeling the warm sunshine on the back of my neck. Waiting.

‘You don’t want to die ... but you know it’s the only way out? You accept that, now?’ He sounds reluctant to believe me, as if he finds my instant conversion too good to be true.

I scream at him: ‘Yes, fuck you! Yes! So get it over with! Get it over with!’

He’s silent for a while. Then there’s a soft thud, and a crash in the undergrowth.

The flies on my arms and face desert me.

After a moment, I open my eyes and sink to my knees, shaking. For a while, I lose myself: sobbing, banging the ground with my fists, tearing up handfuls of weeds, screaming at the birds for silence.

Then I scramble to my feet and walk over to the corpse.

He believed everything he claimed to believe—but he still needed something more. More than the abstract hope of someone, sometime, somewhere on the planet, falling into alignment—becoming him—by pure chance. He needed someone else holding the very same beliefs, right before his eyes at the moment of death—someone else who ‘knew’ that they were going to die, someone else who was just as afraid as he was.

And what do I believe?

I look up at the sky, and the memories I fought away, before, start tumbling through my skull. From lazy childhood holidays, to the very last weekend I spent with my ex-wife and son, the same heartbreaking blue runs through them all. Unites them all.

Doesn’t it?

I look down at Carter, nudge him with my foot, and whisper, ‘Who died today? Tell me. Who really died?’

Wang’s Carpets

Waiting to be cloned one thousand times and scattered across ten million cubic light-years, Paolo Venetti relaxed in his favorite ceremonial bathtub: a tiered hexagonal pool set in a courtyard of black marble flecked with gold. Paolo wore full traditional anatomy, uncomfortable garb at first, but the warm currents flowing across his back and shoulders slowly eased him into a pleasant torpor. He could have reached the same state in an instant, by decree—but the occasion seemed to demand the complete ritual of verisimilitude, the ornate curlicued longhand of imitation physical cause and effect.

As the moment of diaspora approached, a small gray lizard darted across the courtyard, claws scrabbling. It halted by the far edge of the pool, and Paolo marveled at the delicate pulse of its breathing, and watched the lizard watching him, until it moved again, disappearing into the surrounding vineyards. The environment was full of birds and insects, rodents and small reptiles—decorative in appearance, but also satisfying a more abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone observer; anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of viewpoints. Ontological guy lines. No one had asked the lizards if they wanted to be cloned, though. They were coming along for the ride, like it or not.

The sky above the courtyard was warm and blue, cloudless and sunless, isotropic. Paolo waited calmly, prepared for every one of half a dozen possible fates.

An invisible bell chimed softly, three times. Paolo laughed, delighted.

One chime would have meant that he was still on Earth: an anticlimax, certainly—but there would have been advantages to compensate for that. Everyone who really mattered to him lived in the Carter-Zimmerman polis, but not all of them had chosen to take part in the diaspora to the same degree; his Earth-self would have lost no one. Helping to ensure that the thousand ships were safely dispatched would have been satisfying, too. And remaining a member of the wider Earth-based community, plugged into the entire global culture in real time, would have been an attraction in itself.

Two chimes would have meant that this clone of Carter-Zimmerman had reached a planetary system devoid of life. Paolo had run a sophisticated—but nonsapient—self-predictive model before deciding to wake under those conditions. Exploring a handful of alien worlds, however barren, had seemed likely to be an enriching experience for him—with the distinct advantage that the whole endeavor would be untrammeled by the kind of elaborate precautions necessary in the presence of alien life. C-Z’s population would have fallen by more than half—and many of his closest friends would have been absent—but he would have forged new friendships, he was sure.

Four chimes would have signaled the discovery of intelligent aliens. Five, a technological civilization. Six, spacefarers.

Three chimes, though, meant that the scout probes had detected unambiguous signs of life—and that was reason enough for jubilation. Up until the moment of the prelaunch cloning—a subjective instant before the chimes had sounded—no reports of alien life had ever reached Earth. There’d been no guarantee that any part of the diaspora would find it.

Paolo willed the polis library to brief him; it promptly rewired the declarative memory of his simulated traditional brain with all the information he was likely to need to satisfy his immediate curiosity. This clone of C-Z had arrived at Vega, the second closest of the thousand target stars, twenty-seven light-years from Earth. Paolo closed his eyes and visualized a star map with a thousand lines radiating out from the sun, then zoomed in on the trajectory that described his own journey. It had taken three centuries to reach Vega—but the vast majority of the polis’s twenty thousand inhabitants had programmed their exoselves to suspend them prior to the cloning and to wake them only if and when they arrived at a suitable destination. Ninety-two citizens had chosen the alternative: experiencing every voyage of the diaspora from start to finish, risking disappointment, and even death. Paolo now knew that the ship aimed at Fomalhaut, the target nearest Earth, had been struck by debris and annihilated en route. He mourned the ninety-two, briefly. He hadn’t been close to any of them, prior to the cloning, and the particular versions who’d willfully perished two centuries ago in interstellar space seemed as remote as the victims of some ancient calamity from the era of flesh.

Paolo examined his new home star through the cameras of one of the scout probes—and the strange filters of the ancestral visual system. In traditional colors, Vega was a fierce blue-white disk, laced with prominences. Three times the mass of the sun, twice the size and twice as hot, sixty times as luminous. Burning hydrogen fast—and already halfway through its allotted five hundred million years on the main sequence.

Vega’s sole planet, Orpheus, had been a featureless blip to the best lunar interferometers; now Paolo gazed down on its blue-green crescent, ten thousand kilometers below Carter-Zimmerman itself. Orpheus was terrestrial, a nickel-iron-silicate world; slightly larger than Earth, slightly warmer—a billion kilometers took the edge off Vega’s heat—and almost drowning in liquid water. Impatient to see the whole surface firsthand, Paolo slowed his clock rate a thousandfold, allowing C-Z to circumnavigate the planet in twenty subjective seconds, daylight unshrouding a broad new swath with each pass. Two slender ocher-colored continents with mountainous spines bracketed hemispheric oceans, and dazzling expanses of pack ice covered both poles—far more so in the north, where jagged white peninsulas radiated out from the midwinter arctic darkness.

The Orphean atmosphere was mostly nitrogen—six times as much as on Earth; probably split by UV from primordial ammonia—with traces of water vapor and carbon dioxide, but not enough of either for a runaway greenhouse effect. The high atmospheric pressure meant reduced evaporation—Paolo saw not a wisp of cloud—and the large, warm oceans in turn helped feed carbon dioxide back into the crust, locking it up in limestone sediments destined for subduction.

The whole system was young, by Earth standards, but Vega’s greater mass, and a denser protostellar cloud, would have meant swifter passage through most of the traumas of birth: nuclear ignition and early luminosity fluctuations; planetary coalescence and the age of bombardments. The library estimated that Orpheus had enjoyed a relatively stable climate, and freedom from major impacts, for at least the past hundred million years.

Long enough for primitive life to appear—

A hand seized Paolo firmly by the ankle and tugged him beneath the water. Heoffered no resistance, and let the vision of the planet slip away. Only two other people in C-Z had free access to this environment—and his father didn’t play games with his now-twelve-hundred-year-old son.

Elena dragged him all the way to the bottom of the pool, before releasing his foot and hovering above him, a triumphant silhouette against the bright surface. She was ancestor-shaped, but obviously cheating; she spoke with perfect clarity; and no air bubbles at all.

“Late sleeper! I’ve been waiting seven weeks for this!”

Paolo feigned indifference, but he was fast running out of breath. He had his exoself convert him into an amphibious human variant—biologically and historically authentic, if no longer the definitive ancestral phenotype. Water flooded into his modified lungs, and his modified brain welcomed it.

He said, “Why would I want to waste consciousness, sitting around waiting for the scout probes to refine their observations? I woke as soon as the data was unambiguous.”

She pummeled his chest; he reached up and pulled her down, instinctively reducing his buoyancy to compensate, and they rolled across the bottom of the pool, kissing.

Elena said, “You know we’re the first C-Z to arrive, anywhere? The Fomalhaut ship was destroyed. So there’s only one other pair of us. Back on Earth.”

“So?” Then he remembered. Elena had chosen not to wake if any other version of her had already encountered life. Whatever fate befell each of the remaining ships, every other version of him would have to live without her.

He nodded soberly, and kissed her again. “What am I meant to say? You’re a thousand times more precious to me, now?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, but what about the you-and-I on Earth? Five hundred times would be closer to the truth.”

“There’s no poetry in five hundred.”

“Don’t be so defeatist. Rewire your language centers.”

She ran her hands along the sides of his rib cage, down to his hips. They made love with their almost-traditional bodies—and brains; Paolo was amused to the point of distraction when his limbic system went into overdrive, but he remembered enough from the last occasion to bury his self-consciousness and surrender to the strange hijacker. It wasn’t like making love in any civilized fashion—the rate of information exchange between them was minuscule, for a start—but it had the raw insistent quality of most ancestral pleasures.

Then they drifted up to the surface of the pool and lay beneath the radiant sunless sky.

Paolo thought, I’ve crossed twenty-seven light-years in an instant. I’m orbiting the first planet ever found to hold alien life. And I’ve sacrificed nothing—left nothing I truly value behind. This is too good, too good. He felt a pang of regret for his other selves—it was hard to imagine them faring as well, without Elena, without Orpheus—but there was nothing he could do about that now. Although there’d be time to confer with Earth before any more ships reached their destinations, he’d decided—prior to the cloning—not to allow the unfolding of his manifold future to be swayed by any change of heart. Whether or not his Earth-self agreed, the two of them were powerless to alter the criteria for waking. The self with the right to choose for the thousand had passed away.

No matter, Paolo decided. The others would find—or construct—their own reasons for happiness. And there was still the chance that one of them would wake to the sound of four chimes.

Elena said, “If you’d slept much longer, you would have missed the vote.”

The vote? The scouts in low orbit had gathered what data they could about Orphean biology. To proceed any farther, it would be necessary to send microprobes into the ocean itself—an escalation of contact that required the approval of two-thirds of the polis. There was no compelling reason to believe that the presence of a few million tiny robots could do any harm; all they’d leave behind in the water was a few kilojoules of waste heat. Nevertheless, a faction had arisen that advocated caution. The citizens of Carter-Zimmerman, they argued, could continue to observe from a distance for another decade, or another millennium, refining their observations and hypotheses before intruding ... and those who disagreed could always sleep away the time, or find other interests to pursue.

Paolo delved into his library-fresh knowledge of the “carpets”—the single Orphean life-form detected so far. They were free-floating creatures living in the equatorial ocean depths—apparently destroyed by UV if they drifted too close to the surface. They grew to a size of hundreds of meters, then fissioned into dozens of fragments, each of which continued to grow. It was tempting to assume that they were colonies of single-celled organisms, something like giant kelp—but there was no real evidence yet to back that up. It was difficult enough for the scout probes to discern the carpets’ gross appearance and behavior through a kilometer of water, even with Vega’s copious neutrinos lighting the way; remote observations on a microscopic scale, let alone biochemical analyses, were out of the question. Spectroscopy revealed that the surface water was full of intriguing molecular debris—but guessing the relationship of any of it to the living carpets was like trying to reconstruct human biochemistry by studying human ashes.

Paolo turned to Elena. “What do you think?”

She moaned theatrically; the topic must have been argued to death while he slept. “The microprobes are harmless. They could tell us exactly what the carpets are made of, without removing a single molecule. What’s the risk? Culture shock?”

Paolo flicked water onto her face, affectionately; the impulse seemed to come with the amphibian body. “You can’t be sure that they’re not intelligent.”

“Do you know what was living on Earth, two hundred million years after it was formed?”

“Maybe cyanobacteria. Maybe nothing. This isn’t Earth, though.”

“True. But even in the unlikely event that the carpets are intelligent, do you think they’d notice the presence of robots a millionth their size? If they’re unified organisms, they don’t appear to react to anything in their environment—they have no predators, they don’t pursue food, they just drift with the currents—so there’s no reason for them to possess elaborate sense organs at all, let alone anything working on a submillimeter scale. And if they’re colonies of single-celled creatures, one of which happens to collide with a microprobe and register its presence with surface receptors ... what conceivable harm could that do?”

“I have no idea. But my ignorance is no guarantee of safety.”

Elena splashed him back. “The only way to deal with your ignorance is to vote to send down the microprobes. We have to be cautious, I agree—but there’s no point being here if we don’t find out what’s happening in the oceans right now. I don’t want to wait for this planet to evolve something smart enough to broadcast biochemistry lessons into space. If we’re not willing to take a few infinitesimal risks, Vega will turn red giant before we learn anything.”

It was a throwaway line—but Paolo tried to imagine witnessing the event. In a quarter of a billion years, would the citizens of Carter-Zimmerman be debating the ethics of intervening to rescue the Orpheans—or would they all have lost interest, and departed for other stars, or modified themselves into beings entirely devoid of nostalgic compassion for organic life?

Grandiose visions for a twelve-hundred-year-old. The Fomalhaut clone had been obliterated by one tiny piece of rock. There was far more junk in the Vegan system than in interstellar space; even ringed by defenses, its data backed up to all the far-flung scout probes, this C-Z was not invulnerable just because it had arrived intact. Elena was right; they had to seize the moment—or they might as well retreat into their own hermetic worlds and forget that they’d ever made the journey.

Paolo recalled the honest puzzlement of a friend from Ashton-Laval, Why go looking for aliens? Our polis has a thousand ecologies, a trillion species of evolved life. What do you hope to find, out there, that you couldn’t have grown at home?

What had he hoped to find? Just the answers to a few simple questions. Did human consciousness bootstrap all of space-time into existence, in order to explain itself? Or had a neutral, preexisting universe given birth to a billion varieties of conscious life, all capable of harboring the same delusions of grandeur—until they collided with each other? Anthrocosmology was used to justify the inward-looking stance of most polises: if the physical universe was created by human thought, it had no special status that placed it above virtual reality. It might have come first—and every virtual reality might need to run on a physical computing device, subject to physical laws—but it occupied no privileged position in terms of “truth” versus “illusion.” If the ACs were right, then it was no more honest to value the physical universe over more recent artificial realities than it was honest to remain flesh instead of software, or ape instead of human, or bacterium instead of ape.

Elena said, “We can’t lie here forever; the gang’s all waiting to see you.”

“Where?” Paolo felt his first pang of homesickness; on Earth, his circle of friends had always met in a real-time image of the Mount Pinatubo crater, plucked straight from the observation satellites. A recording wouldn’t be the same.

“I’ll show you.”

Paolo reached over and took her hand. The pool, the sky, the courtyard vanished—and he found himself gazing down on Orpheus again ... night-side, but far from dark, with his full mental palette now encoding everything from the pale wash of ground-current long-wave radio, to the multicolored shimmer of isotopic gamma rays and back-scattered cosmic-ray bremsstrahlung. Half the abstract knowledge the library had fed him about the planet was obvious at a glance, now. The ocean’s smoothly tapered thermal glow spelt three hundred Kelvin instantly—as well as back-lighting the atmosphere’s tell-tale infrared silhouette.

He was standing on a long, metallic-looking girder, one edge of a vast geodesic sphere, open to the blazing cathedral of space. He glanced up and saw the star-rich dust-clogged band of the Milky Way, encircling him from zenith to nadir, aware of the glow of every gas cloud, discerning each absorption and emission line. Paolo could almost feel the plane of the galactic disk transect him. Some constellations were distorted, but the view was more familiar than strange—and he recognized most of the old signposts by color. He had his bearings now. Twenty degrees away from Sirius—south, by parochial Earth reckoning—faint but unmistakable: the sun.

Elena was beside him—superficially unchanged, although they’d both shrugged off the constraints of biology. The conventions of this environment mimicked the physics of real macroscopic objects in free fall and vacuum, but it wasn’t set up to model any kind of chemistry, let alone that of flesh and blood. Their new bodies were human-shaped, but devoid of elaborate microstructure—and their minds weren’t embedded in the physics at all, but were running directly on the processor web.

Paolo was relieved to be back to normal; ceremonial regression to the ancestral form was a venerable C-Z tradition—and being human was largely self-affirming, while it lasted—but every time he emerged from the experience, he felt as if he’d broken free of billion-year-old shackles. There were polises on Earth where the citizens would have found his present structure almost as archaic: a consciousness dominated by sensory perception, an illusion of possessing solid form, a single time coordinate. The last flesh human had died long before Paolo was constructed, and apart from the communities of Gleisner robots, Carter-Zimmerman was about as conservative as a transhuman society could be. The balance seemed right to Paolo, though—acknowledging the flexibility of software, without abandoning interest in the physical world—and although the stubbornly corporeal Gleisners had been first to the stars, the C-Z diaspora would soon overtake them.

Their friends gathered round, showing off their effortless free-fall acrobatics, greeting Paolo and chiding him for not arranging to wake sooner; he was the last of the gang to emerge from hibernation.

“Do you like our humble new meeting place?” Hermann floated by Paolo’s shoulder, a chimeric cluster of limbs and sense organs, speaking through the vacuum in modulated infrared. “We call it Satellite Pinatubo. It’s desolate up here, I know—but we were afraid it might violate the spirit of caution if we dared pretend to walk the Orphean surface.”

Paolo glanced mentally at a scout probe’s close-up of a typical stretch of dry land, and expanse of fissured red rock. “More desolate down there, I think.” He was tempted to touch the ground—to let the private vision become tactile—but he resisted. Being elsewhere in the middle of a conversation was bad etiquette.

“Ignore Hermann,” Liesl advised. “He wants to flood Orpheus with our alien machinery before we have any idea what the effects might be.” Liesl was a green-and-turquoise butterfly, with a stylized human face stippled in gold on each wing.

Paolo was surprised; from the way Elena had spoken, he’d assumed that his friends must have come to a consensus in favor of the microprobes—and only a late sleeper, new to the issues, would bother to argue the point. “What effects? The carpets—”

“Forget the carpets! Even if the carpets are as simple as they look, we don’t know what else is down there.” As Liesl’s wings fluttered, her mirror image faces seemed to glance at each other for support. “With neutrino imaging, we barely achieve spatial resolution in meters, time resolution in seconds. We don’t know anything about smaller life-forms.”

“And we never will, if you have your way.” Karpal—an ex-Gleisner, human-shaped as ever—had been Liesl’s lover last time Paolo was awake.

“We’ve only been here for a fraction of an Orphean year! There’s still a wealth of data we could gather nonintrusively, with a little patience. There might be rare beachings of ocean life—”

Elena said dryly, “Rare indeed. Orpheus has negligible tides, shallow waves, very few storms. And anything beached would be fried by UV before we glimpsed anything more instructive than we’re already seeing in the surface water.”

“Not necessarily. The carpets seem to be vulnerable—but other species might be better protected, if they live nearer to the surface. And Orpheus is seismically active; we should at least wait for a tsunami to dump a few cubic kilometers of ocean onto a shoreline, and see what it reveals.”

Paolo smiled; he hadn’t thought of that. A tsunami might be worth waiting for.

Liesl continued, “What is there to lose by waiting a few hundred Orphean years? At the very least, we could gather baseline data on seasonal climate patterns—and we could watch for anomalies, storms and quakes, hoping for some revelatory glimpses.”

A few hundred Orphean years? A few terrestrial millennia? Paolo’s ambivalence waned. If he’d wanted to inhabit geological time, he would have migrated to the Lokhande polis, where the Order of Contemplative Observers watched Earth’s mountains erode in subjective seconds. Orpheus hung in the sky beneath them, a beautiful puzzle waiting to be decoded, demanding to be understood.

He said, “But what if there are no ‘revelatory glimpses’? How long do we wait? We don’t know how rare life is—in time, or in space. If this planet is precious, so is the epoch it’s passing through. We don’t know how rapidly Orphean biology is evolving; species might appear and vanish while we agonize over the risks of gathering better data. The carpets—and whatever else—could die out before we’d learned the first thing about them. What a waste that would be!”

Liesl stood her ground.

“And if we damage the Orphean ecology—or culture—by rushing in? That wouldn’t be a waste. It would be a tragedy.”

Paolo assimilated all the stored transmissions from his earth-self—almost three hundred years’ worth—before composing a reply. The early communications included detailed mind grafts—and it was good to share the excitement of the diaspora’s launch; to watch—very nearly firsthand—the thousand ships, nanomachine-carved from asteroids, depart in a blaze of fusion fire from beyond the orbit of Mars. Then things settled down to the usual prosaic matters: Elena, the gang, shameless gossip, Carter-Zimmerman’s ongoing research projects, the buzz of interpolis cultural tensions, the not-quite-cyclic convulsions of the arts (the perceptual aesthetic overthrows the emotional, again ... although Valladas in Konishi polis claims to have constructed a new synthesis of the two).

After the first fifty years, his Earth-self had begun to hold things back; by the time news reached Earth of the Fomalhaut clones’ demise, the messages had become pure audiovisual linear monologues. Paolo understood. It was only right; they’d diverged, and you didn’t send mind grafts to strangers.

Most of the transmissions had been broadcast to all of the ships, indiscriminately. Forty-three years ago, though, his Earth-self had sent a special message to the Vega-bound clone.

“The new lunar spectroscope we finished last year has just picked up clear signs of water on Orpheus. There should be large temperate oceans waiting for you, if the models are right. So ... good luck.” Vision showed the instrument’s domes growing out of the rock of the lunar farside; plots of the Orphean spectral data; an ensemble of planetary models. “Maybe it seems strange to you—all the trouble we’re taking to catch a glimpse of what you’re going to see in close-up so soon. It’s hard to explain: I don’t think it’s jealousy, or even impatience. Just a need for independence.

“There’s been a revival of the old debate: Should we consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale of the light-speed lag. Millennia passing between mental events. Local contingencies dealt with by nonconscious systems.” Essays, pro and con, were appended; Paolo ingested summaries. “I don’t think the idea will gain much support though—and the new astronomical projects are something of an antidote. We have to make peace with the fact that we’ve stayed behind ... so we cling to the Earth—looking outward, but remaining firmly anchored.

“I keep asking myself, though: Where do we go from here? History can’t guide us. Evolution can’t guide us. The C-Z charter says understand and respect the universe ... but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all—and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our way? Flesh humans used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ‘conquer’ Earth, to steal their ‘precious’ physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ‘competition’... as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do—knowing no better, having no choice.

“Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices. That’s why we need to find alien life—not just to break the spell of the anthrocosmologists. We need to find aliens who’ve faced the same decisions—and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe.”

Paolo watched the crude neutrino images of the carpets moving in staccato jerks around his dodecahedral room. Twenty-four ragged oblongs drifted above him, daughters of a larger ragged oblong that had just fissioned. Models suggested that shear forces from ocean currents could explain the whole process, triggered by nothing more than the parent reaching a critical size. The purely mechanical break-up of a colony—if that was what it was—might have little to do with the life cycle of the constituent organisms. It was frustrating. Paolo was accustomed to a torrent of data on anything that caught his interest; for the diaspora’s great discovery to remain nothing more than a sequence of coarse monochrome snapshots was intolerable.

He glanced at a schematic of the scout probes’ neutrino detectors, but there was no obvious scope for improvement. Nuclei in the detectors were excited into unstable high-energy states, then kept there by fine-tuned gamma-ray lasers picking off lower-energy eigenstates faster than they could creep into existence and attract a transition. Changes in neutrino flux of one part in ten-to-the-fifteenth could shift the energy levels far enough to disrupt the balancing act. The carpets cast a shadow so faint, though, that even this near-perfect vision could barely resolve it.

Orlando Venetti said, “You’re awake.”

Paolo turned. His father stood an arm’s length away, presenting as an ornately clad human of indeterminate age. Definitely older than Paolo, though; Orlando never ceased to play up his seniority—even if the age difference was only twenty-five percent now, and falling.

Paolo banished the carpets from the room to the space behind one pentagonal window, and took his father’s hand. The portions of Orlando’s mind that meshed with his own expressed pleasure at Paolo’s emergence from hibernation, fondly dwelt on past shared experiences, and entertained hopes of continued harmony between father and son. Paolo’s greeting was similar, a carefully contrived “revelation” of his own emotional state. It was more of a ritual than an act of communication—but then, even with Elena, he set up barriers. No one was totally honest with another person—unless the two of them intended to permanently fuse.

Orlando nodded at the carpets. “I hope you appreciate how important they are.”

“You know I do.” He hadn’t included that in his greeting, though. “First alien life.” C-Z humiliates the Gleisner robots, at last—that was probably how his father saw it. The robots had been first to Alpha Centauri, and first to an extrasolar planet—but first life was Apollo to their Sputniks, for anyone who chose to think in those terms.

Orlando said, “This is the book we need, to catch the citizens of the marginal polises. The ones who haven’t quite imploded into solipsism. This will shake them up—don’t you think?”

Paolo shrugged. Earth’s transhumans were free to implode into anything they liked; it didn’t stop Carter-Zimmerman from exploring the physical universe. But thrashing the Gleisners wouldn’t be enough for Orlando; he lived for the day when C-Z would become the cultural mainstream. Any polis could multiply its population a billionfold in a microsecond, if it wanted the vacuous honor of outnumbering the rest. Luring other citizens to migrate was harder—and persuading them to rewrite their own local charters was harder still. Orlando had a missionary streak: he wanted every other polis to see the error of its ways and follow C-Z to the stars.

Paolo said, “Ashton-Laval has intelligent aliens. I wouldn’t be so sure that news of giant seaweed is going to take Earth by storm.”

Orlando was venomous. “Ashton-Laval intervened in its so-called ‘evolutionary’ simulations so many times that they might as well have built the end products in an act of creation lasting six days. They wanted talking reptiles, and—mirabile dictu!—they got talking reptiles. There are self-modified transhumans in this polis more alien than the aliens in Ashton-Laval.”

Paolo smiled. “All right. Forget Ashton-Laval. But forget the marginal polises, too. We choose to value the physical world. That’s what defines us—but it’s as arbitrary as any other choice of values. Why can’t you accept that? It’s not the One True Path that the infidels have to be bludgeoned into following.” He knew he was arguing half for the sake of it—he desperately wanted to refute the anthrocosmologists himself—but Orlando always drove him into taking the opposite position. Out of fear of being nothing but his father’s clone. Despite the total absence of inherited episodic memories the stochastic input into his ontogenesis, the chaotically divergent nature of the iterative mind-building algorithms.

Orlando made a beckoning gesture, dragging the image of the carpets halfway back into the room. “You’ll vote for the microprobes?”

“Of course.”

“Everything depends on that now. It’s good to start with a tantalizing glimpse—but if we don’t follow up with details soon, they’ll lose interest back on Earth very rapidly.”

“Lose interest? It’ll be fifty-four years before we know if anyone paid the slightest attention in the first place.”

Orlando eyed him with disappointment, and resignation. “If you don’t care about the other polises, think about C-Z. This helps us; it strengthens us. We have to make the most of that.”

Paolo was bemused. “The charter is the charter. What needs to be strengthened? You make it sound like there’s something at risk.”

“What do you think a thousand lifeless worlds would have done to us? Do you think the charter would have remained intact?”

Paolo had never considered the scenario. “Maybe not. But in every C-Z where the charter was rewritten, there would have been citizens who’d have gone off and founded new polises on the old lines. You and I, for a start. We could have called it Venetti-Venetti.”

“While half your friends turned their backs on the physical world? While Carter-Zimmerman, after two thousand years, went solipsist? You’d be happy with that?”

Paolo laughed. “No—but it’s not going to happen, is it? We’ve found life. All right, I agree with you: this strengthens C-Z. The diaspora might have ‘failed’... but it didn’t. We’ve been lucky. I’m glad, I’m grateful. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Orlando said sourly, “You take too much for granted.”

“And you care too much what I think! I’m not your ... heir.” Orlando was first-generation, scanned from flesh—and there were times when he seemed unable to accept that the whole concept of generation had lost its archaic significance. “You don’t need me to safeguard the future of Carter-Zimmerman on your behalf. Or the future of transhumanity. You can do it in person.”

Orlando looked wounded—a conscious choice, but it still encoded something. Paolo felt a pang of regret—but he’d said nothing he could honestly retract.

His father gathered up the sleeves of his gold and crimson robes—the only citizen of C-Z who could make Paolo uncomfortable to be naked—and repeated as he vanished from the room: “You take too much for granted.”

The gang watched the launch of the microprobes together—even Liesl, though she came in mourning, as a giant dark bird. Karpai stroked her feathers nervously. Hermann appeared as a creature out of Escher, a segmented worm with six human-shaped feet—on legs with elbows—given to curling up into a disk and rolling along the girders of Satellite Pinatubo. Paolo and Elena kept saying the same thing simultaneously; they’d just made love.

Hermann had moved the satellite to a notional orbit just below one of the scout probes—and changed the environment’s scale, so that the probe’s lower surface, an intricate landscape of detector modules and attitude-control jets, blotted out half the sky. The atmospheric-entry capsules—ceramic teardrops three centimeters wide—burst from their launch tube and hurtled past like boulders, vanishing from sight before they’d fallen so much as ten meters closer to Orpheus. It was all scrupulously accurate, although it was part real-time imagery, part extrapolation, part faux. Paolo thought, We might as well have run a pure simulation ... and pretended to follow the capsules down. Elena gave him a guilty/admonishing look. Yeah—and then why bother actually launching them at all? Why not just simulate a plausible Orphean ocean full of plausible Orphean life-forms? Why not simulate the whole diaspora? There was no crime of heresy in C-Z; no one had ever been exiled for breaking the charter. At times it still felt like a tightrope walk; though, trying to classify every act of simulation into those that contributed to an understanding of the physical universe (good), those that were merely convenient, recreational, aesthetic (acceptable)... and those that constituted a denial of the primacy of real phenomena (time to think about emigration).

The vote on the microprobes had been close: seventy-two percent in favor, just over the required two-thirds majority, with five percent abstaining. (Citizens created since the arrival at Vega were excluded ... not that anyone in Carter-Zimmerman would have dreamt of stacking the ballot, perish the thought.) Paolo had been surprised at the narrow margin; he’d yet to hear a single plausible scenario for the microprobes doing harm. He wondered if there was another, unspoken reason that had nothing to do with fears for the Orphean ecology, or hypothetical culture. A wish to prolong the pleasure of unraveling the planet’s mysteries? Paolo had some sympathy with that impulse—but the launch of the microprobes would do nothing to undermine the greater long-term pleasure of watching, and understanding, as Orphean life evolved.

Liesl said forlornly, “Coastline erosion models show that the north-western shore of Lambda is inundated by tsunami every ninety Orphean years, on average.” She offered the data to them; Paolo glanced at it, and it looked convincing—but the point was academic now. “We could have waited.”

Hermann waved his eye-stalks at her. “Beaches covered in fossils, are they?”

“No, but the conditions hardly—”

“No excuses!” He wound his body around a girder, kicking his legs gleefully. Hermann was first-generation, even older than Orlando; he’d been scanned in the twenty-first century, before Carter-Zimmerman existed. Over the centuries, though, he’d wiped most of his episodic memories, and rewritten his personality a dozen times. He’d once told Paolo, “I think of myself as my own great-great-grandson. Death’s not so bad, if you do it incrementally. Ditto for immortality.”

Elena said, “I keep trying to imagine how it will feel if another C-Z clone stumbles on something infinitely better—like aliens with wormhole drives—while we’re back here studying rafts of algae.” The body she wore was more stylized than usual—still humanoid, but sexless, hairless, and smooth, the face inexpressive and androgynous.

“If they have wormhole drives, they might visit us. Or share the technology, so we can link up the whole diaspora.”

“If they have wormhole drives, where have they been for the last two thousand years?”

Paolo laughed. “Exactly. But I know what you mean, First alien life ... and it’s likely to be about as sophisticated as seaweed. It breaks the jinx, though. Seaweed every twenty-seven light-years. Nervous systems every fifty? Intelligence every hundred?” He fell silent, abruptly realizing what she was feeling: electing not to wake again after first life was beginning to seem like the wrong choice, a waste of the opportunities the diaspora had created. Paolo offered her a mind graft expressing empathy and support, but she declined.

She said, “I want sharp borders, right now. I want to deal with this myself.”

“I understand.” He let the partial model of her that he’d acquired as they’d made love fade from his mind. It was nonsapient, and no longer linked to her—but to retain it any longer when she felt this way would have seemed like a transgression. Paolo took the responsibilities of intimacy seriously. His lover before Elena had asked him to erase all his knowledge of her, and he’d more or less complied—the only thing he still knew about her was the fact that she’d made the request.

Hermann announced, “Planetfall!” Paolo glanced at a replay of a scout probe view that showed the first few entry capsules breaking up above the ocean and releasing their microprobes. Nanomachines transformed the ceramic shields (and then themselves) into carbon dioxide and a few simple minerals—nothing the micrometeorites constantly raining down onto Orpheus didn’t contain—before the fragments could strike the water. The microprobes would broadcast nothing; when they’d finished gathering data, they’d float to the surface and modulate their UV reflectivity. It would be up to the scout probes to locate these specks, and read their messages, before they self-destructed as thoroughly as the entry capsules.

Hermann said, “This calls for a celebration. I’m heading for the Heart. Who’ll join me?”

Paolo glanced at Elena. She shook her head. “You go.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes! Go on.” Her skin had taken on a mirrored sheen; her expressionless face reflected the planet below. “I’m all right. I just want some time to think things through, on my own.”

Hermann coiled around the satellite’s frame, stretching his pale body as he went, gaining segments, gaining legs. “Come on, come on! Karpal? Liesl? Come and celebrate!”

Elena was gone. Liesl made a derisive sound and flapped off into the distance, mocking the environment’s airlessness. Paolo and Karpal watched as Hermann grew longer and faster—and then in a blur of speed and change stretched out to wrap the entire geodesic frame. Paolo demagnetized his feet and moved away, laughing; Karpal did the same.

Then Hermann constricted like a boa and snapped the whole satellite apart.

They floated for a while, two human-shaped machines and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.

The heart was always crowded, but it was larger than Paolo had seen it—even though Hermann had shrunk back to his original size, so as not to make a scene. The huge, muscular chamber arched above them, pulsating wetly in time to the music, as they searched for the perfect location to soak up the atmosphere. Paolo had visited public environments in other polises, back on Earth; many were designed to be nothing more than a perceptual framework for group emotion-sharing. He’d never understood the attraction of becoming intimate with large numbers of strangers. Ancestral social hierarchies might have had their faults—and it was absurd to try to make a virtue of the limitations imposed by minds confined to wet-ware—but the whole idea of mass telepathy as an end in itself seemed bizarre to Paolo ... and even old-fashioned, in a way. Humans, clearly, would have benefited from a good strong dose of each other’s inner life to keep them from slaughtering each other—but any civilized transhuman could respect and value other citizens without the need to have been them firsthand.

They found a good spot and made some furniture, a table and two chairs—Hermann preferred to stand—and the floor expanded to make room. Paolo looked around, shouting greetings at the people he recognized by sight, but not bothering to check for identity broadcasts from the rest. Chances were he’d met everyone here, but he didn’t want to spend the next hour exchanging pleasantries with casual acquaintances.

Hermann said, “I’ve been monitoring our modest stellar observatory’s data stream—my antidote to Vegan parochialism. Odd things are going on around Sirius. We’re seeing electron-positron annihilation gamma rays, gravity waves ... and some unexplained hot spots on Sirius B.” He turned to Karpal and asked innocently, “What do you think those robots are up to? There’s a rumor that they’re planning to drag the white dwarf out of orbit and use it as part of a giant spaceship.”

“I never listen to rumors.” Karpal always presented as a faithful reproduction of his old human-shaped Gleisner body—and his mind, Paolo gathered, always took the form of a physiological model, even though he was five generations removed from flesh. Leaving his people and coming into C-Z must have taken considerable courage; they’d never welcome him back.

Paolo said, “Does it matter what they do? Where they go, how they get there? There’s more than enough room for both of us. Even if they shadowed the diaspora—even if they came to Vega—we could study the Orpheans together, couldn’t we?”

Hermann’s cartoon insect face showed mock alarm, eyes growing wider, and wider apart. “Not if they dragged along a white dwarf! Next thing they’d want to start building a Dyson sphere.” He turned back to Karpal. “You don’t still suffer the urge, do you, for ... astrophysical engineering?”

“Nothing C-Z’s exploitation of a few megatons of Vegan asteroid material hasn’t satisfied.”

Paolo tried to change the subject. “Has anyone heard from Earth, lately? I’m beginning to feel unplugged.” His own most recent message was a decade older than the time lag.

Karpal said, “You’re not missing much; all they’re talking about is Orpheus ... ever since the new lunar observations, the signs of water. They seem more excited by the mere possibility of life than we are by the certainty. And they have very high hopes.”

Paolo laughed. “They do. My Earth-self seems to be counting on the diaspora to find an advanced civilization with the answers to all of transhumanity’s existential problems. I don’t think he’ll get much cosmic guidance from kelp.”

“You know there was a big rise in emigration from C-Z after the launch? Emigration, and suicides.” Hermann had stopped wriggling and gyrating, becoming almost still, a sign of rare seriousness. “I suspect that’s what triggered the astronomy program in the first place. And it seems to have stanched the flow, at least in the short term. Earth C-Z detected water before any clone in the diaspora—and when they hear that we’ve found life, they’ll feel more like collaborators in the discovery because of it.”

Paolo felt a stirring of unease. Emigration and suicides? Was that why Orlando had been so gloomy? After three hundred years of waiting, how high had expectations become?

A buzz of excitement crossed the floor, a sudden shift in the tone of the conversation. Hermann whispered reverently, “First microprobe has surfaced. And the data is coming in now.”

The nonsapient Heart was intelligent enough to guess its patron’s wishes. Although everyone could tap the library for results, privately, the music cut out and a giant public image of the summary data appeared, high in the chamber. Paolo had to crane his neck to view it, a novel experience.

The microprobe had mapped one of the carpets in high resolution. The image showed the expected rough oblong, some hundred meters wide—but the two-or-three-meter-thick slab of the neutrino tomographs was revealed now as a delicate, convoluted surface—fine as a single layer of skin, but folded into an elaborate space-filling curve. Paolo checked the full data: the topology was strictly planar despite the pathological appearance. No holes, no joins—just a surface that meandered wildly enough to look ten thousand times thicker from a distance than it really was.

An inset showed the microstructure, at a point that started at the rim of the carpet and then—slowly—moved toward the center. Paolo stared at the flowing molecular diagram for several seconds before he grasped what it meant.

The carpet was not a colony of single-celled creatures. Nor was it a multicellular organism. It was a single molecule, a two-dimensional polymer weighing twenty-five million kilograms. A giant sheet of folded polysaccharide, a complex mesh of interlinked pentose and hexose sugars hung with alkyl and amide side chains. A bit like a plant cell wall—except that this polymer was far stronger than cellulose, and the surface area was twenty orders of magnitude greater.

Karpal said, “I hope those entry capsules were perfectly sterile. Earth bacteria would gorge themselves on this. One big floating carbohydrate dinner, with no defenses.”

Hermann thought it over. “Maybe. If they had enzymes capable of breaking off a piece—which I doubt. No chance we’ll find out, though: even if there’d been bacterial spores lingering in the asteroid belt from early human expeditions, every ship in the diaspora was double-checked for contamination en route. We haven’t brought smallpox to the Americas.”

Paolo was still dazed. “But how does it assemble? How does it ... grow?” Hermann consulted the library and replied, before Paolo could do the same.

“The edge of the carpet catalyses its own growth. The polymer is irregular, aperiodic—there’s no single component that simply repeats. But there seem to be about twenty thousand basic structural units—twenty thousand different polysaccharide building blocks.” Paolo saw them: long bundles of cross-linked chains running the whole two-hundred-micron thickness of the carpet, each with a roughly square cross-section, bonded at several thousand points to the four neighboring units. “Even at this depth, the ocean’s full of UV-generated radicals that filter down from the surface. Any structural unit exposed to the water converts those radicals into more polysaccharide—and builds another structural unit.”

Paolo glanced at the library again, for a simulation of the process. Catalytic sites strewn along the sides of each unit trapped the radicals in place, long enough for new bonds to form between them. Some simple sugars were incorporated straight into the polymer as they were created; others were set free to drift in solution for a microsecond or two, until they were needed. At that level, there were only a few basic chemical tricks being used ... but molecular evolution must have worked its way up from a few small autocatalytic fragments, first formed by chance, to this elaborate system of twenty thousand mutually self-replicating structures. If the “structural units” had floated free in the ocean as independent molecules, the “life-form” they comprised would have been virtually invisible. By bonding together, though, they became twenty thousand colors in a giant mosaic.

It was astonishing. Paolo hoped Elena was tapping the library, wherever she was. A colony of algae would have been more “advanced”—but this incredible primordial creature revealed infinitely more about the possibilities for the genesis of life. Carbohydrate, here, played every biochemical role: information carrier, enzyme, energy source, structural material. Nothing like it could have survived on Earth, once there were organisms capable of feeding on it—and if there were ever intelligent Orpheans, they’d be unlikely to find any trace of this bizarre ancestor.

Karpal wore a secretive smile.

Paolo said, “What?”

“Wang tiles. The carpets are made out of Wang tiles.”

Hermann beat him to the library, again.

“Wang as in twentieth-century flesh mathematician, Hao Wang. Tiles as in any set of shapes that can cover the plane. Wang tiles are squares with various shaped edges, which have to fit complementary shapes on adjacent squares. You can cover the plane with a set of Wang tiles, as long as you choose the right one every step of the way. Or, in the case of the carpets, grow the right one.”

Karpal said, “We should call them. Wang’s Carpets, in honor of Hao Wang. After twenty-three hundred years, his mathematics has come to life.”

Paolo liked the idea, but he was doubtful. “We may have trouble getting a two-thirds majority on that. It’s a bit obscure ...”

Hermann laughed. “Who needs a two-thirds majority? If we want to call them Wang’s Carpets, we can call them Wang’s Carpets. There are ninety-seven languages in current use in C-Z—half of them invented since the polis was founded. I don’t think we’ll be exiled for coining one private name.”

Paolo concurred, slightly embarrassed. The truth was, he’d completely forgotten that Hermann and Karpal weren’t actually speaking Modern Roman.

The three of them instructed their exoselves to consider the name adopted: henceforth, they’d hear “carpet” as “Wang’s Carpet”—but if they used the term with anyone else, the reverse translation would apply.

Paolo sat and drank in the image of the giant alien: the first life-form encountered by human or transhuman that was not a biological cousin. The death, at last, of the possibility that Earth might be unique.

They hadn’t refuted the anthrocosmologists yet, though. Not quite. If, as the ACs claimed, human consciousness was the seed around which all of space-time had crystallized—if the universe was nothing but the simplest orderly explanation for human thought—then there was, strictly speaking, no need for a single alien to exist, anywhere. But the physics that justified human existence couldn’t help generating a billion other worlds where life could arise. The ACs would be unmoved by Wang’s Carpets; they’d insist that these creatures were physical, if not biological, cousins—merely an unavoidable by-product of anthropogenic, life-enabling physical laws.

The real test wouldn’t come until the diaspora—or the Gleisner robots—finally encountered conscious aliens: minds entirely unrelated to humanity, observing and explaining the universe that human thought had supposedly built. Most ACs had come right out and declared such a find impossible; it was the sole falsifiable prediction of their hypothesis. Alien consciousness, as opposed to mere alien life, would always build itself a separate universe—because the chance of two unrelated forms of self-awareness concocting exactly the same physics and the same cosmology was infinitesimal—and any alien biosphere that seemed capable of evolving consciousness would simply never do so.

Paolo glanced at the map of the diaspora, and took heart. Alien life already—and the search had barely started; there were nine hundred and ninety-eight target systems yet to be explored. And even if every one of them proved no more conclusive than Orpheus ... he was prepared to send clones out farther—and prepared to wait. Consciousness had taken far longer to appear on Earth than the quarter-of-a-billion years remaining before Vega left the main sequence—but the whole point of being here, after all, was that Orpheus wasn’t Earth.

Orlando’s celebration of the microprobe discoveries was a very first-generation affair. The environment was an endless sunlit garden strewn with tables covered in food, and the invitation had politely suggested attendance in fully human form. Paolo politely faked it—simulating most of the physiology, but running the body as a puppet, leaving his mind unshackled.

Orlando introduced his new lover, Catherine, who presented as a tall, dark-skinned woman. Paolo didn’t recognize her on sight, but checked the identity code she broadcast. It was a small polis; he’d met her once before—as a man called Samuel, one of the physicists who’d worked on the main interstellar fusion drive employed by all the ships of the diaspora. Paolo was amused to think that many of the people here would be seeing his father as a woman. The majority of the citizens of C-Z still practiced the conventions of relative gender that had come into fashion in the twenty-third century—and Orlando had wired them into his own son too deeply for Paolo to wish to abandon them—but whenever the paradoxes were revealed so starkly, he wondered how much longer the conventions would endure. Paolo was same-sex to Orlando, and hence saw his father’s lover as a woman, the two close relationships taking precedence over his casual knowledge of Catherine as Samuel. Orlando perceived himself as being male and heterosexual, as his flesh original had been ... while Samuel saw himself the same way ... and each perceived the other to be a heterosexual woman. If certain third parties ended up with mixed signals, so be it. It was a typical C-Z compromise: nobody could bear to overturn the old order and do away with gender entirely (as most other polises had done)... but nobody could resist the flexibility that being software, not flesh, provided.

Paolo drifted from table to table to table, sampling the food to keep up appearances, wishing Elena had come. There was little conversation about the biology of Wang’s Carpets; most of the people here were simply celebrating their win against the opponents of the microprobes—and the humiliation that faction would suffer, now that it was clearer than ever that the “invasive” observations could have done no harm. Liesl’s fears had proved unfounded; there was no other life in the ocean, just Wang’s Carpets of various sizes. Paolo, feeling perversely even-handed after the fact, kept wanting to remind these smug movers and shakers, There might have been anything down there. Strange creatures, delicate and vulnerable in ways we could never have anticipated. We were lucky, that’s all.

He ended up alone with Orlando almost by chance; they were both fleeing different groups of appalling guests when their paths crossed on the lawn.

Paolo asked, “How do you think they’ll take this, back home?”

“It’s first life, isn’t it? Primitive or not. It should at least maintain interest in the diaspora, until the next alien biosphere is discovered.” Orlando seemed subdued; perhaps he was finally coming to terms with the gulf between their modest discovery, and Earth’s longing for world-shaking results. “And at least the chemistry is novel. If it had turned out to be based on DNA and protein, I think half of Earth C-Z would have died of boredom on the spot. Let’s face it, the possibilities of DNA have been simulated to death.”

Paolo smiled at the heresy. “You think if nature hadn’t managed a little originality, it would have dented people’s faith in the charter? If the solipsist polises had begun to look more inventive than the universe itself ...”

“Exactly.”

They walked on in silence, then Orlando halted and turned to face him.

He said, “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you: My Earth-self is dead.”

“What?”

“Please, don’t make a fuss.”

“But ... why? Why would he—?” Dead meant suicide; there was no other cause—unless the sun had turned red giant and swallowed everything out to the orbit of Mars.

“I don’t know why. Whether it was a vote of confidence in the diaspora”—Orlando had chosen to wake only in the presence of alien life—“or whether he despaired of us sending back good news, and couldn’t face the waiting, and the risk of disappointment. He didn’t give a reason. He just had his exoself send a message, stating what he’d done.”

Paolo was shaken. If a clone of Orlando had succumbed to pessimism, he couldn’t begin to imagine the state of mind of the rest of Earth C-Z.

“When did this happen?”

“About fifty years after the launch.”

“My Earth-self said nothing.”

“It was up to me to tell you, not him.”

“I wouldn’t have seen it that way.”

“Apparently, you would have.”

Paolo fell silent, confused. How was he supposed to mourn a distant version of Orlando, in the presence of the one he thought of as real? Death of one clone was a strange half-death, a hard thing to come to terms with. His Earth-self had lost a father; his father had lost an Earth-self. What exactly did that mean to him?

What Orlando cared most about was Earth C-Z. Paolo said carefully, “Hermann told me there’d been a rise in emigration and suicide—until the spectroscope picked up the Orphean water. Morale has improved a lot since then—and when they hear that it’s more than just water ...”

Orlando cut him off sharply. “You don’t have to talk things up for me. I’m in no danger of repeating the act.”

They stood on the lawn, facing each other. Paolo composed a dozen different combinations of mood to communicate, but none of them felt right. He could have granted his father perfect knowledge of everything he was feeling—but what exactly would that knowledge have conveyed? In the end, there was fusion, or separateness. There was nothing in between.

Orlando said, “Kill myself—and leave the fate of transhumanity in your hands? You must be out of your fucking mind.”

They walked on together, laughing.

Karpal seemed barely able to gather his thoughts enough to speak. Paolo would have offered him a mind graft promoting tranquillity and concentration—distilled from his own most focused moments—but he was sure that Karpal would never have accepted it. He said, “Why don’t you just start wherever you want to? I’ll stop you if you’re not making sense.”

Karpal looked around the white dodecahedron with an expression of disbelief. “You live here?”

“Some of the time.”

“But this is your base environment? No trees? No sky? No furniture?”

Paolo refrained from repeating any of Hermann’s naive-robot jokes. “I add them when I want them. You know, like ... music. Look, don’t let my taste in decor distract you.”

Karpal made a chair and sat down heavily.

He said, “Hao Wang proved a powerful theorem, twenty-three hundred years ago. Think of a row of Wang tiles as being like the data tape of a Turing machine.” Paolo had the library grant him knowledge of the term; it was the original conceptual form of a generalized computing device, an imaginary machine that moved back and forth along a limitless one-dimensional data tape, reading and writing symbols according to a given set of rules.

“With the right set of tiles, to force the right pattern, the next row of the tiling will look like the data tape after the Turing machine has performed one step of its computation. And the row after that will be the data tape after two steps, and so on. For any given Turing machine, there’s a set of Wang tiles that can imitate it.”

Paolo nodded amiably. He hadn’t heard of this particular quaint result, but it was hardly surprising. “The carpets must be carrying out billions of acts of computation every second ... but then, so are the water molecules around them. There are no physical processes that don’t perform arithmetic of some kind.”

“True. But with the carpets, it’s not quite the same as random molecular motion.”

“Maybe not.”

Karpal smiled, but said nothing.

“What? You’ve found a pattern? Don’t tell me: our set of twenty thousand polysaccharide Wang tiles just happens to form the Turing machine for calculating pi.”

“No. What they form is a universal Turing machine. They can calculate anything at all—depending on the data they start with. Every daughter fragment is like a program being fed to a chemical computer. Growth executes the program.”

“Ah.” Paolo’s curiosity was roused—but he was having some trouble picturing where the hypothetical Turing machine put its read/write head. “Are you telling me only one tile changes between any two rows, where the ‘machine’ leaves its mark on the ‘data tape’...” The mosaics he’d seen were a riot of complexity, with no two rows remotely the same.

Karpal said, “No, no. Wang’s original example worked exactly like a standard Turing machine, to simplify the argument ... but the carpets are more like an arbitrary number of different computers with overlapping data, all working in parallel. This is biology, not a designed machine—it’s as messy and wild as, say ... a mammalian genome. In fact, there are mathematical similarities with gene regulation: I’ve identified Kauffman networks at every level, from the tiling rules up; the whole system’s poised on the hyperadaptive edge between frozen and chaotic behavior.”

Paolo absorbed that, with the library’s help. Like Earth life, the carpets seemed to have evolved a combination of robustness and flexibility that would have maximized their power to take advantage of natural selection. Thousands of different autocatalytic chemical networks must have arisen soon after the formation of Orpheus—but as the ocean chemistry and the climate changed in the Vegan system’s early traumatic millennia, the ability to respond to selection pressure had itself been selected for, and the carpets were the result. Their complexity seemed redundant, now, after a hundred million years of relative stability—and no predators or competition in sight—but the legacy remained.

“So if the carpets have ended up as universal computers ... with no real need anymore to respond to their surrounding ... what are they doing with all that computing power?”

Karpal said solemnly, “I’ll show you.”

Paolo followed him into an environment where they drifted above a schematic of a carpet, an abstract landscape stretching far into the distance, elaborately wrinkled like the real thing, but otherwise heavily stylized, with each of the polysaccharide building blocks portrayed as a square tile with four different-colored edges. The adjoining edges of neighboring tiles bore complementary colors—to represent the complementary, interlocking shapes of the borders of the building blocks.

“One group of microprobes finally managed to sequence an entire daughter fragment,” Karpal explained, “although the exact edges it started life with are largely guesswork, since the thing was growing while they were trying to map it.” He gestured impatiently, and all the wrinkles and folds were smoothed away, an irrelevant distraction. They moved to one border of the ragged-edged carpet, and Karpal started the simulation running.

Paolo watched the mosaic extending itself, following the tiling rules perfectly—an orderly mathematical process here: no chance collisions of radicals with catalytic sites, no mismatched borders between two new-grown neighboring “tiles” triggering the disintegration of both. Just the distillation of the higher-level consequences of all that random motion.

Karpal led Paolo up to a height where he could see subtle patterns being woven, overlapping multiplexed periodicities drifting across the growing edge, meeting and sometimes interacting, sometimes passing right through each other. Mobile pseudoattractors, quasistable waveforms in a one-dimensional universe. The carpet’s second dimension was more like time than space, a permanent record of the history of the edge.

Karpal seemed to read his mind. “One-dimensional. Worse than flatland. No connectivity, no complexity. What can possibly happen in a system like that? Nothing of interest, right?”

He clapped his hands and the environment exploded around Paolo. Trails of color streaked across his sensorium, entwining, then disintegrating into luminous smoke.

“Wrong. Everything goes on in a multidimensional frequency space. I’ve Fourier-transformed the edge into over a thousand components, and there’s independent information in all of them. We’re only in a narrow cross-section here, a sixteen-dimensional slice—but it’s oriented to show the principal components, the maximum detail.”

Paolo spun in a blur of meaningless color, utterly lost, his surroundings beyond comprehension. “You’re a Gleisner robot, Karpal! Only sixteen dimensions! How can you have done this?”

Karpal sounded hurt, wherever he was. “Why do you think I came to C-Z? I thought you people were flexible!”

“What you’re doing is ...” What? Heresy? There was no such thing. Officially. “Have you shown this to anyone else?”

“Of course not. Who did you have in mind? Liesl? Hermann?”

“Good. I know how to keep my mouth shut.” Paolo invoked his exoself and moved back into the dodecahedron. He addressed the empty room. “How can I put this? The physical universe has three spatial dimensions, plus time. Citizens of Carter-Zimmerman inhabit the physical universe. Higher dimensional mind games are for the solipsists.” Even as he said it, he realized how pompous he sounded. It was an arbitrary doctrine, not some great moral principle.

But it was the doctrine he’d lived with for twelve hundred years.

Karpal replied, more bemused than offended, “It’s the only way to see what’s going on. The only sensible way to apprehend it. Don’t you want to know what the carpets are actually like?”

Paolo felt himself being tempted. Inhabit a sixteen-dimensional slice of a thousand-dimensional frequency space? But it was in the service of understanding a real physical system—not a novel experience for its own sake.

And nobody had to find out.

He ran a quick—nonsapient—self-predictive model. There was a ninety-three-percent chance that he’d give in, after fifteen subjective minutes of agonizing over the decision. It hardly seemed fair to keep Karpal waiting that long.

He said, “You’ll have to loan me your mind-shaping algorithm. My exoself wouldn’t know where to begin.”

When it was done, he steeled himself, and moved back into Karpal’s environment. For a moment, there was nothing but the same meaningless blur as before.

Then everything suddenly crystallized.

Creatures swam around them, elaborately branched tubes like mobile coral, vividly colored in all the hues of Paolo’s mental palette—Karpal’s attempt to cram in some of the information that a mere sixteen dimensions couldn’t show? Paolo glanced down at his own body—nothing was missing, but he could see around it in all the thirteen dimensions in which it was nothing but a pinprick; he quickly looked away. The “coral” seemed far more natural to his altered sensory map, occupying sixteen-space in all directions, and shaded with hints that it occupied much more. And Paolo had no doubt that it was “alive”—it looked more organic than the carpets themselves, by far.

Karpal said, “Every point in this space encodes some kind of quasi-periodic pattern in the tiles. Each dimension represents a different characteristic size—like a wavelength, although the analogy’s not precise. The position in each dimension represents other attributes of the pattern, relating to the particular tiles it employs. So the localized systems you see around you are clusters of a few billion patterns, all with broadly similar attributes at similar wavelengths.”

They moved away from the swimming coral, into a swarm of something like jellyfish: floppy hyperspheres waving wispy tendrils (each one of them more substantial than Paolo). Tiny jewel-like creatures darted among them. Paolo was just beginning to notice that nothing moved here like a solid object drifting through normal space; motion seemed to entail a shimmering deformation at the leading hypersurface, a visible process of disassembly and reconstruction.

Karpal led him on through the secret ocean. There were helical worms, coiled together in groups of indeterminate number—each single creature breaking up into a dozen or more wriggling slivers, and then recombining ... although not always from the same parts. There were dazzling multicolored stemless flowers, intricate hypercones of “gossamer-thin” fifteen-dimensional petals—each one a hypnotic fractal labyrinth of crevices and capillaries. There were clawed monstrosities, writhing knots of sharp insectile parts like an orgy of decapitated scorpions.

Paolo said, uncertainly, “You could give people a glimpse of this in just three-dimensions. Enough to make it clear that there’s ... life in here. This is going to shake them up badly, though.” Life—embedded in the accidental computations of Wang’s Carpets, with no possibility of ever relating to the world outside. This was an affront to Carter-Zimmerman’s whole philosophy: if nature had evolved “organisms” as divorced from reality as the inhabitants of the most inward-looking polis, where was the privileged status of the physical universe, the clear distinction between truth and illusion?

And after three hundred years of waiting for good news from the disapora, how would they respond to this back on Earth?

Karpal said, “There’s one more thing I have to show you.”

He’d named the creatures squids, for obvious reasons. Distant cousins of the jellyfish, perhaps? They were prodding each other with their tentacles in a way that looked thoroughly carnal—but Karpal explained, “There’s no analog of light here. We’re viewing all this according to ad hoc rules that have nothing to do with the native physics. All the creatures here gather information about each other by contact alone—which is actually quite a rich means of exchanging data, with so many dimensions. What you’re seeing is communication by touch.”

“Communication about what?”

“Just gossip, I expect. Social relationships.”

Paolo stared at the writhing mass of tentacles.

“You think they’re conscious?”

Karpal, pointlike, grinned broadly. “They have a central control structure with more connectivity than the human brain—and which correlates data gathered from the skin. I’ve mapped that organ, and I’ve started to analyze its function.”

He led Paolo into another environment, a representation of the data structures in the “brain” of one of the squids. It was—mercifully—three-dimensional, and highly stylized, built of translucent colored blocks marked with icons, representing mental symbols, linked by broad lines indicating the major connections between them. Paolo had seen similar diagrams of transhuman minds; this was far less elaborate, but eerily familiar nonetheless.

Karpal said, “Here’s the sensory map of its surroundings. Full of other squids’ bodies, and vague data on the last known positions of a few smaller creatures. But you’ll see that the symbols activated by the physical presence of the other squids are linked to these”—he traced the connections with one finger—“representations. Which are crude miniatures of this whole structure here.”

“This whole structure” was an assembly labeled with icons for memory retrieval, simple tropisms, short-term goals. The general business of being and doing.

“The squid has maps, not just of other squids’ bodies, but their minds as well. Right or wrong, it certainly tries to know what the others are thinking about. And”—he pointed out another set of links, leading to another, less crude, miniature squid mind—“it thinks about its own thoughts as well. I’d call that consciousness, wouldn’t you?”

Paolo said weakly, “You’ve kept all this to yourself? You came this far, without saying a word—”

Karpal was chastened. “I know it was selfish—but once I’d decoded the interactions of the tile patterns, I couldn’t tear myself away long enough to start explaining it to anyone else. And I came to you first because I wanted your advice on the best way to break the news.”

Paolo laughed bitterly. “The best way to break the news that first alien consciousness is hidden deep inside a biological computer? That everything the diaspora was trying to prove has been turned on its head? The best way to explain to the citizens of Carter-Zimmerman that after a three-hundred-year journey, they might as well have stayed on Earth running simulations with as little resemblance to the physical universe as possible?”

Karpal took the outburst in good humor. “I was thinking more along the lines of the best way to point out that if we hadn’t traveled to Orpheus and studied Wang’s Carpets, we’d never have had the chance to tell the solipsists of Ashton-Laval that all their elaborate invented life-forms and exotic imaginary universes pale into insignificance compared to what’s really out here—and which only the Carter-Zimmerman diaspora could have found.”

Paolo and Elena stood together on the edge of satellite Pinatubo, watching one of the scout probes aim its maser at a distant point in space. Paolo thought he saw a faint scatter of microwaves from the beam as it collided with iron-rich meteor dust. Elena’s mind being diffracted all over the cosmos? Best not think about that.

He said, “When you meet the other versions of me who haven’t experienced Orpheus, I hope you’ll offer them mind grafts so they won’t be jealous.”

She frowned. “Ah. Will I or won’t I? I can’t be bothered modeling it. I expect I will. You should have asked me before I cloned myself. No need for jealousy, though. There’ll be worlds far stranger than Orpheus.”

“I doubt it. You really think so?”

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe that.” Elena had no power to change the fate of the frozen clones of her previous self—but everyone had the right to emigrate.

Paolo took her hand. The beam had been aimed almost at Regulus, UV-hot and bright, but as he looked away, the cool yellow light of the sun caught his eye.

Vega C-Z was taking the news of the squids surprisingly well, so far. Karpal’s way of putting it had cushioned the blow: it was only by traveling all this distance across the real, physical universe that they could have made such a discovery—and it was amazing how pragmatic even the most doctrinaire citizens had turned out to be. Before the launch, “alien solipsists” would have been the most unpalatable idea imaginable, the most abhorrent thing the diaspora could have stumbled upon—but now that they were here, and stuck with the fact of it, people were finding ways to view it in a better light. Orlando had even proclaimed, “This will be the perfect hook for the marginal polises. ‘Travel through real space to witness a truly alien virtual reality.’ We can sell it as a synthesis of the two world views.”

Paolo still feared for Earth, though—where his Earth-self and others were waiting in hope of alien guidance. Would they take the message of Wang’s Carpets to heart and retreat into their own hermetic worlds, oblivious to physical reality?

And he wondered if the anthrocosmologists had finally been refuted ... or not. Karpal had discovered alien consciousness—but it was sealed inside a cosmos of its own, its perceptions of itself and its surroundings neither reinforcing nor conflicting with human and transhuman explanations of reality. It would be millennia before C-Z could untangle the ethical problems of daring to try to make contact ... assuming that both Wang’s Carpets, and the inherited data patterns of the squids, survived that long.

Paolo looked around at the wild splendor of the scar-choked galaxy, felt the disk reach in and cut right through him. Could all this strange haphazard beauty be nothing but an excuse for those who beheld it to exist? Nothing but the sum of all the answers to all the questions humans and transhumans had ever asked the universe—answers created in the asking?

He couldn’t believe that—but the question remained unanswered.

So far.

The Way She Smiles, The Things She Says

'Hi Dad.'

His son Tom stood by the stove, heating milk in a saucepan, naked. 'I'm making Milo. Do you want some?'

'No thanks.'

What was wrong? Something had to be wrong. People aren't naked in kitchens, they're naked in bedrooms and bathrooms. Never kitchens. Something had to be wrong. Danny's hands hanging by his sides suddenly seemed awkward, unnatural. He folded his arms. That seemed wrong, too, so he put them out horizontally, stretched, then placed his hands behind his neck and rubbed it, yawning.

'How come you're home so early?'

'Oh, we got all the tracks done,' Danny said easily. 'One, two, three, like magic. They must have been doing a lot more rehearsing than I thought.'

'An album in three hours, that must be some kind of a record!'

'Oh, it's all fucking computers anyway. None of the so-called musicians even raised a sweat.' Danny lied so wel! he felt genuine disdain.

A joke. A pun. Weak, I know.'

'What?'

'Forget it.'

Danny wanted to say: Why are you standing in the kitchen without any clothes on? He couldn't. Tom didn't seem to be embarrassed or self-conscious at aHl. Danny wondered: Is this what he does whenever I'm away? Wander around the house naked?

'You're up late. School tomorrow.'

'Nag, nag, nag.'

Tom didn't sleep naked; he bought and looked after his own clothes, but Danny had seen him hundreds of times wearing pyjamas, had seen them in the washing basket, had seen them on the washing line. Maybe it was a phase he was going through. Maybe he'd just had a shower, and had put the milk on the stove so it would be ready by the time he put his pyjamas on, but then Danny had walked in so he'd stayed to talk to him. Danny smiled with relief. That was it, exactly. Why had he been so paranoid? After all, why should Tom have made sure he was dressed before going into the kitchen, when there was nobody else in the house, and nobody expected home for hours?

Danny sat down and pretended to read the paper, then glanced up at the sound of Tom pouring the milk. How old is he? Thirty-four minus twenty is fourteen. Danny curdled at two disparities: it's not fair that he's no longer fourteen himself, and when he was four' teen he sure didn't look like Tom, tall and muscular. Tom's already taller than Danny.

Tom crossed the kitchen with a mug of Milo in each hand. Danny opened his mouth, and took the fnrst breath for saying 'I said I didn't want one,' but stopped in time, because Tom walked right past him, out of the kitchen, towards his bedroom.

Danny looked down at the paper. He's got a girl in there. Maybe he wants two mugs himself, maybe he's a Milo junkie. Don't be stupid and naive, he's got a girl in there, how could you not have guessed? He's just been fucking her, that's why he's naked, idiot. He's fourteen and he's got a girl in his room. Are you angry, jealous, proud? All three. You were nineteen when you finally fucked his mother, years after all your university friends had tertiary syphilis. Fourteen. Shit. You couldn't have at fourteen. Physically impossible, admit it.

Danny stared and stared at the paper. Should he go to bed, pretend he didn't know, never say anything about it? Should he waHk casually into Tom's room and 'accidentally' discover her? Don't be a bastard, why try to embarrass him? He'll tell you if he wants to tell you. What did you expect, did you want him to say, as soon as you walked in, 'Hi, Dad, there's this friend of mine, this girl, here, in my room actually, and, in case you're wondering why I'm standing here naked in the kitchen, it's because I took all my clothes off before I fucked her and I haven't got around to putting any back on yet, largely because I'm very seriously entertaining the idea of fucking her again in the not too distant future.'

Danny made himself a cup of coffee and stared at the paper some more. He felt wretched, guilty, old. Old enough to have a virile son is too old to be virile yourself, it stands to reason. Well, to common sense. Danny thought: 'Shit, what is this? All the pap-psychology I never believed in, castration fantasies and phobias and Oedipus complexes; he hasn't even got a mother around to kill me for. What a load of garbage. I don't feel threatened. Just that now he'll be more like a younger brother. I can bring women home myself now.' Who? Whores? Nobody else will go near you. Cheap ugly whores a million times older than Tom's girlfriends.

Dad, this is Zoe.'

'Hi.'

She had short brown hair, a beautiful smile, she didn't seem nervous at all. Only Danny was nervous, it wasn't fair. How oHd she? Was it illegal if they were both under age? Who went to gaol then? The parents?

They both wore jeans and tee-shirts, identical. She was as tall as Tom. Her right hand rested on his right hip. Tom smiled amiably 'Grin bashfully,'' thought Danny. 'Look sheepish, look almost winking. I need you to.' Tom did nothing of the sort. They pulled out chairs and sat at the table, Zoe to Danny's right, Tom to her right, facing Danny.

'Hello, Zoe. How are you?'

'Fine, thanks.'

(Do you know anything about fertility control?')

('Don't be nervous, Dad, I had a vasectomy years ago. All my friends had it done too. We figured that we didn't want any paternity suits cramping our style.')

'Do you go to school with Tom?'

'No. We met at the Uni.'

Tom was a cybernetics prodigy, and spent many hours after school and on weekends at the University, because the facilities at the high school were 'hopelessly primitive, months out of date.' Danny knew as much about computers as was absolutely essentiaH for his job: you hit one key and they played a Bach fugue, you hit another key and they played 'Holiday in Cambodia', then you drew a squiggle on a screen with your fingertip and the machine combined the three somehow into 'the song', which emerged as a four-minute version for the seven-inch single, a ten-minute version for the twelve-inch single, a six-minute version for the four-track EP, a fnve-minute version for the album, and a little magnetic card you gave to the people who made the video, which evidently allowed them to fnt the song to the length of whatever they shot.

Danny said, 'And I was getting worried that Tom was only interested in machines!'That made them both grin, then Danny grinned too, and felt happy that he'd said it. You can relax now, joke with them, be friendly. Everything's okay.

'Zoe's really interested in your work.'

'Yes.'

'My work? I hardly do anything. They don't need producers, they just tell the computers what they want. Sometimes they sing a few words into a microphone, and it comes out in a different language at twice the speed with the harmonic properties of a foghorn, or rustling leaves, or lightning bolts. And I say “hey, maybe we should also do it with a sound like waves crashing, and have that backwards in the background”. Then they stare at me like I'm an idiot, go off and have a conference, then come back and tell me I'm a fucking genius, that it's the perfect “solution”. To what, I don't know. I don't know what their problems are. I don't understand why anybody hires me.'

'You must be a fucking genius, Dad.'

'Don't you start. I make tiny changes to shit.'

'Don't you enjoy experimenting? Trying to come up with completely new sounds?'

'They're all new sounds. Too many new sounds. Nobody can decide what they sound like, they're all so fucking unique. I remember when I used to like songs because they sounded like other songs I liked. Not the same melody or the same words or the same chords (well, sometimes the same chords), but the same mood. These songs don't have any mood, they don't remind you of anything at all, they don't cause associations. They're impossible to remember. I used to really hate those fucking pop tunes they'd churn out, with the same fucking king beat as all the others, guaranteed to invade your head like a fucking parasite after you'd heard it once, and guaranteed to have you smashing radios and frothing at the mouth after you'd heard it six hundred times, but good songs were different. You could remember a good song by the way it made you feel, the things it reminded you of. Strange moods, sure, the stranger the better. But Me shit nowadays doesn't have any mood at all. You hear it, that's it.'

'But what if it sounds like waves crashing, or lightning, like you said a minute ago?'

'Yeah, sure, you can recognise that. But listening to waves crashing doesn't do much for me. Lots of bands used to use synthesizers to make sounds like waves, like all kinds of things, and it was great, it was part of the music they wrote and played. Themselves. Now when the computers do it all it either sounds too much like real waves or just like nothing at all.'

'It's just sour grapes. Dad used to be in a band himself, did I tell you? Oxymoronic Harmonies, they were called. He had a green and purple mohawk three feet high, and ten safety pins in his ear. I've got a photo of him somewhere that their drummer gave me, Dad's always trying to stea! it and burn it.'

Zoe reached over and ran her finger up from Danny's earlobe, which made the back of his neck tingle.

'Did you really have ten safety pins?'

'Yes. Very handy when I was changing Tom's nappies.' They all laughed.

'You'd better believe it. Dad was a genuine punk. Beaten up by skinheads every Saturday night outside the Trade Union Club. My mother included.'

'She was not a skinhead!'

'Rick said she was!'

'Her boyfriend was. She wasn't anything. She was unclassifiable, unique.'

'I bet she beat you up, though.'

'No, her boyfriend did. Left me lying on the ground with five broken ribs. She came back later and took me to hospital. She said she hated violence, she was studying anthropology. I've told you all this before.'

'It's different every time.'

'Bullshit, you just don't listen.'

She had studied him anthropologically for three years, and then moved on to study someone else, leaving Tom, who was evidently not thesis material. You'd enjoyed being a deserted father, hadn't you Danny? Radical feminists admired you for it, admired you for not having been cunning enough to dump her with the kid rather than vice versa. The band fell apart but you got work as a mixer, Nightshift Childcare put Tom in their playpen for half your salary, and somehow there was time to fuck the non-separatist radical feminists. Time passed. You didn't ever have to think about what you'd do with your life, it did it all by itself, it just happened and happened and happened. Look where you are tonight. Surprised? Disoriented? Why? Your little boy has grown up. It was either that or prepubescent death, and how likely is the latter? Did you expect some kind of literal cycle, did you think that you would be the one who was fourteen and fucking beautiful Zoe when sufficient time had passed? Oh no. You're one turn up the spiral staircase away from that, Danny.

'What does your father do, Zoe?'

'I don't have a father.'

'Oh. I'm sorry.'

'No.'

No? What does that mean?

'I guess most families are single-parent nowadays,' said Danny, fairly sure that it wasn't true. 'Like me and Tom.'

Zoe smiled. 'I don't have any parents at all. I'm a robot.'

Ton looked down at the table, then burst out laughing. Zoe started, then Danny joined in. It didn't seem all that funny, but Tom

led them off again whenever they flagged. He stood up, then I knelt on the floor, hands on stomach, tears streaming from closed

eyes. Danny put him in a loose headlock, tried to wrestle him over, lint then Tom opened his eyes and Danny shuddered, seeing his face melting from misery and pain. Tom was sobbing, shivering, choking on his tears, trying to say something.

'Hey,' was all Danny could say. 'Hey.' He would have held him Against his shoulder, but not in front of Zoe, now silent. Danny didn't look at her, couldn't look at her, felt the position of her face lust out of his vision and blushed at the necessity not to look at her. Tom was suddenly six years old, waking from a nightmare about lead people who ate his arms, leaving him with hands on his shoulders like stunted wings. Danny had caught the dream from the description, and had a much nastier version.

Tom ran out of the room.

Danny stayed on the floor, not looking at Zoe, listening to Tom throwing up. Zoe touched his shoulder, and his spine tingled. He stood up.

'It's true,' she said. 'I think Tom was pretty worried about how you'd take it. I told him a hundred times that you wouldn't mind, but he's got himself all worked up into a nervous state. I'm glad you came home early, otherwise he might not have told you for months.'

Danny turned to face her. 'It's not funny. How old are you, anyway? Does your father know you're screwing my son? Where does he think you are now? Are you on the pill? How many other boys are you screwing? How do I know you haven't got VD? How old are you, anyway? Do you know it's a crime to seduce a minor? You slut, why couldn't you leave him alone, he's just a kid, can't you tell? Just because he's six feet tall. He's emotionally immature. He never had a mother. Oh, you slut. How old are you?'

'I'm six months old.' Zoe took her head off and placed it on the kitchen table. Danny curled up and started whimpering. Tom walked in and yelled, Put it back on!'

Danny closed his eyes, and remembered curling up on the kitchen floor when he was four or five. His mother had screamed at him for some reason. Everybody else in the family had gone into the lounge room to watch television; they'd closed the door and they'd turned off the kitchen light. The floor was cold. Danny had known that nobody was watching him, that he could uncurl, stand up, and go and lie in his warm bed, or even swallow his pride and join the others in the lounge room, where there was a fire. But lit had stayed curled up on the cold floor in the dark, planning to sled' there, to stay there on the floor with his eyes shut forever. He planned to die there, and even after death to refuse to uncurl, to refuse to move. His parents would have to explain the dead body in the kitchen to anybody who visited, and his mother would have trouble mopping the floor properly.

His cat had walked up to him and licked his eyes, making him giggle, spoiling his stasis. He'd fed the cat, gone to bed, and woken the next morning, very early, very happy with life. He remembered waking up to birdsong.

'Dad. Get up. Please.'

Danny opened his eyes and stood up. Zoe had her head back on. 'I didn't know they could make them so life-like.'

Tom beamed with pride. 'I worked out the face myself. First on a CAD system, then I did a couple of experimental heads. Isn't it great?'

'You built her yourself?'

'From a kit, except for the face.'

'A kit? Robots from kits? How much did it cost?'

'Ninety thousand dollars. I don't own her, Dad. We built her at the Uni, me and a whole lot of other guys. This company in Japan sells the kits, but only to Universities and research places, they're not really commercially available yet. Because the Cybernetics Club has a University post-office box, we conned them into thinking we were part of the Computing Science Department:

'And do all the other guys fuck her?'

'Dad!'

'Well, do they?'

'No. She's in love with me.'

'Oh, crap. She! It's a machine'

'She's in love with me.'

Zoe said, 'It's true. I love Tom and he loves me.'

'It's just programmed to say that. I might not know much about computers, but I know you can program them to say anything. Don't kid yourself. You know how they work a million times better than I do. Either you programmed her to say it, or the Japanese did, but either way it's just a machine.'

'I love Tom!

'Switch it off, will you, it keeps interrupting.'

'Don't talk about her like that.'

'I'm taking you to a psychiatrist first thing in the morning.'

'Don't say things like that. Why can't you just be cool about it. Everybody else just accepts it.'

'Everybody else?'

'The other guys who built her don't even mind.''

'You're all a bunch of lunatics.'

'She loves me because I gave her her face. Because I made it special. I loved it before she was even born.'

'Born?'

'Powered up.'

'Exactly. Powered up. Like the recording equipment at work. What do you want to go fucking a machine for? There's nothing wrong with you. You could get real girls.'

'I've had real girls.'

'Bullshit. When?'

'Since I was twelve years old, Daddy.'

'Bullshit. Who? When?'

'I haven't got a list on me right now.'

Danny slapped his face. 'Bullshit. You liar.'

Tom stared at the floor. 'I don't care what you believe. I don't care what you think. You're nothing, you don't matter. You're just stupid. Your fucking mixing console is ten times smarter than you care. You're just old and stupid.'

Danny slapped his face again.

'I know where you've been tonight. I bet you think they're all human, don't you? Well they're not. I bet you've fucked a robot every single time, and you couldn't even tell the difference.'

Danny slapped him. Tom punched him in the cheek and knocked him over.

'I'm sorry. Dad, I'm sorry.'

'Switch it off.' Danny tasted blood, but at least his teeth were still anchored. He wanted to go to bed and wake up, definitely childless, possibly one or two years younger. Not too young, though. 'How can I switch her off? I love her.'

'Why do you love her?'

'The way she smiles. The things she says. That's why people love other people. What difference does it make if she's a robot? She smiles. She says things just like any person would say.'

'And drinks Milo?'

Zoe said, 'Eating and drinking are necessary for a complete capacity for social interaction.'

'No person would say that. Switch it off.'

'Dad, you haven't had time to get to know her. She shouldn't have told you so soon, but she's very honest. If you'd known her for while before you found out, you'd think differently.'

'I bet it's illegal. You can't have robots walking around like ink like people. They might do anything, they might run amok.'

'People run amok all the time.'

'Switch it off.'

'Don't spoil everything! Why do you have to spoil it?'

Danny walked into the dark lounge room and sat down. You realise you can win if you want to, you can force him to get rid of her: you're still his father, he's not prepared to defy you absolutely, he won't leave home, he has no money, he isn't ready. All you need is stubborn insistence, stamina. He'll complain, or stay silent, or stomp about the house or something, but he really wants you to get rid of her. Her? It. It. Concentrate, please! That look on his face when he stopped laughing: he wasn't just worried about your reaction, he was torn up inside, he wants to get out of the mess he's in, but he can't do it himself, he needs you to say no for him.

Danny thought about Tom's mother, recalled her face as best he could. She'd very rarely smiled, and when she had it was a pretty sickening sight. Everything she'd said to him had been a sarcastic put-down of one kind or another, or so it seemed. Selfish bitch. He wanted her to be sitting beside him in the dark room, more than anything else in the world. Simply sitting there in the dark, not touching him, not speaking a word, invisible. He wanted that very badly. He felt sure that her silent, intangible, invisible presence would have made everything immediately all right, calm and solid.

Tom stood in the doorway.

'Dad. I've switched her off.'

'For good?'

'No.'

'Come in here. I want to talk to you.'

'I promise not to bring her here again. It's your house.’

‘Okay. Come in here and sit down for a second.'

'I've got to get some sleep. I've got to get up for school.'

'You can miss school for one day. Just come in for a second. Please.'

'Goodnight.'

Danny fell asleep, and dreamt that someone sat beside him, but he couldn't figure out if it was Tom or Tom's mother. When the sun rose and he and woke to the sound of birdsong, he remembered waking that way as a child.

Worthless

Yes, I’m complacent now, with my well enough paid job, with a wife I can almost talk to, with a three-year-old son all dark eyes and tousled hair and endearing clumsiness. We go driving on Sunday afternoons, through suburbs just like our own, past houses just like our own, an endlessly recurring, mesmerising daydream under the flawless blue sky. And I whistle an old song of yours, even if I never dare let the words past my lips:

There’s nothing wrong with The Family That a flame-thrower can’t fix And there’s nothing wrong with the salt of the Earth That couldn’t be cured with a well-aimed BRICK

I switch on the radio (when I have a chance), I scan the stations (now and then), listening for an echo of your voice. Wondering if you’ve found a new incarnation. Wondering if I’d recognise it, if you had. Oh, some brain-dead bitch has stolen one of your best riffs, and chants meaningless drivel over the top of an endlessly cycling sample—but my mind shuts her out, and my memory of you takes over:

Carve my name on your heart, forever

—with the blunt end of a feather You said, “I’ll stay with you for a lifetime of pain

(just so long as it’s over by morning).”

I know what they say, the revisionists, the explainers: you were a glitch, an aberration; a bug in the software, nothing more. People could never have truly wanted to hear your “maudlin” voice, your “mealy mouthed whining,” your

“smothering self pity.”

I did.

I still dream about you, I swear. Do you blame me, if I can’t hold on to my vision of you, lost on these dizzying sunlit plains, numb with contentment, the way I could when I was desperate, lonely, crippled? When I knew exactly who I was.

I still want you back. Badly. Sometimes.

But apparently not often, or badly, enough.

When they started making music straight from the Azciak Polls, everybody howled about the Death of Art—as if the process was anything new, anything more than an efficient closure of what had been happening for years. Groups were already assembled on the basis of elaborate market research. The Azciak Probes were already revealing people’s tastes in breakfast cereals, politicians, and rock stars. Why not scan the brains of the populace, discover precisely what music they’d be willing to pay for, and then manufacture it—all in a single, streamlined process, with no human intervention required? From the probes buried in a random sample of twenty thousand representative skulls, to the construction of the virtual bands (down to mock biographies, and all the right birthmarks and tattoos), to the synthesis of photorealist computer-animated videos, accessible for a suitable fee ... the music industry had finally achieved its long-cherished goal: cutting out everyone but the middleman.

The system spewed out pap. People paid to hear it. Nothing had changed.

In 2008, I was sixteen years old, working in a fast-food franchise in Sydney’s decaying red light district, scraping the fat off disassembled hamburger grillers with lukewarm water in the early hours of the morning. I lived alone, not quite starving on what I had left after paying the rent, too shy and misanthropic to take in a flatmate. Let alone a lover.

I was woken at four o’clock one Sunday afternoon, when the woman from Azciak called. I don’t know what possessed me to let her in; usually I just waited in silence for doorknockers to go away. She didn’t look much older than I was, and her uniform wasn’t all that different from mine—but it fit a great deal better, and at least they didn’t make her wear a fucking baseball cap.

I said, “Why should I let you put your shit inside my head?”

“So you can participate more fully in democracy.” She’d been on a training course on the Gold Coast.

“Democracy is a placebo.” I’d read graffiti in Darlinghurst.

“We’ll pay you twenty dollars a week.”

“Forget it.”

“Hard currency: US dollars, yen, euros—whatever you like.”

I signed.

I spent a day in hospital; they didn’t need to cut me open, but the scanning equipment they used, as they threaded the microelectrodes through the blood vessels of my brain, was bigger than my entire flat. Then, under local anaesthetic, they slipped the interface chip into a shallow incision at the back of my neck.

When the engineers arrived to plug their little black box into my phone, they discovered that I didn’t have one, so they ended up paying for that, as well.

Once a day, the black box interrogated the chip ultrasonically, downloading whatever it had gleaned about my opinions in the preceding twenty-four hours, then passed the data on to the central computer.

Surprise: my contribution to the Azciak Polls didn’t tip any geopolitical scales. The parliament of whores kept fawning to the Great Powers, cutting spending and raising prices whenever the IMF said jump, voting as required in the UN each time another Third World country had to be bombed into submission. I served Amazonian beef and Idaho potatoes to the cheerful, shaven-headed psychopaths from the USS Scheisskopf when they flooded Kings Cross on R & R, dressed in their pigeon-shit-speckled camouflage, looking for something to fuck that wasn’t full of shrapnel, just for a change.

I was one of twenty thousand people whose every desire was accessed and analysed day by day, cross-tabulated and disseminated to the most powerful decision makers in the country.

And I knew that it made no difference at all.

Three Azciak creations were big, that year. I saw them all on the video jukebox which sat in the corner of the restaurant (and which lapsed into McPromotional mode when it wasn’t playing requests—a prospect which guaranteed a steady stream of customers more than willing to feed it their change.) Limboland sang about the transcendental power of rhythm; in their videos, they strode like giants over the urban wasteland, dispensing the stuff in the form of handfuls of rainbow-coloured glitter to the infinitely grateful mortals below, who at once stopped starving/shooting up/fighting each other, and took up robotic formation dancing instead. Echolalia sighed and moaned about the healing power of love, as she slithered across a surreal landscape of oiled naked skin, pausing between verses to suck, stroke or screw some convenient protuberance. MC Liberty ranted about a world united by ... unity. And good posture: all we had to do was walk tall.

One freezing, grey afternoon, woken by screaming in the flat downstairs, I lay in bed for an hour, staring up at the crumbling white plaster of the ceiling, convinced (for the thousandth time) that I was finally going insane.

There’s only one problem with living alone: every thought rebounds off the walls of your skull, unanswered—until the whole process of consciousness begins to seem like nothing so much as talking to yourself. As a child, I’d believed that God was constantly reading my mind—which might sound crazy, but if it wasn’t true, then who was this monologue for? Of course I had imaginary friends and lovers, of course I invented companions to “share” the endless conversation running through my head—but sometimes that delusion broke down, and there was nothing to do but listen to my own rambling, and wonder how many pills it would take to shut me up for good.

I didn’t even own a radio, but my neighbours were always more than generous with their own. And I heard you sing:

Don’t you ever wonder Who fills my empty bed?

Who keeps me cold in the darkest hour?

Who leaves the silence unbroken?

Don’t you ever wonder Whose heartbeat it is I don’t hear?

Whose arms won’t enfold me?

Who won’t be beside me?

When life is unkind and unfair?

Won’t you ever ASK ME

“Who’s going to make tonight The loneliest night of the year?”

Well, don’t ask You don’t want to hear.

It’s you.

My life was not transformed. I still wiped McVomit off the toilet floors every night, still fished the syringes out of the bowls (too buoyant to flush—and if they weren’t removed quickly, people reused them). I still stared at the couples walking hand in hand in front of me; still lingered behind them for a step or two, in the hope that something radiating out from their bodies would penetrate my own icy flesh.

But I bought myself a radio, and I waded through all the saccharine lies about peace and harmony, about strength and empowerment, waiting to hear you sing about my pathetic, irrelevant life. And I think you know how sweet it was, to hear just one voice of acceptance, just one voice of affirmation, just one voice

—at last—that rang true for me.

And on those sleepless afternoons when I lay alone, creating myself out of nothing, treading water with words, my thoughts no longer came echoing back to me, proof of my insanity. I knew exactly who I was speaking to, now, in the conversation that defined me.

I was speaking to you.

“The Loneliest Night of the Year” came in at number six, with a bullet. Not bad, my friend. Half a dozen more hits soon followed, knocking your human competitors right out of the charts. The patronising arseholes now claim that this was all some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, that people bought whatever the Azciak computers churned out, simply because they knew it “had to be” what they wanted

—even if, in fact, it wasn’t. That’s not what they said at the time, of course; their sycophantic paeans to your “freshness” and “candour” and “bleak audacity” ran for pages.

I saw “you” one night, on the jukebox screen—rendered, plausibly enough, as four young men with guitars, bass, and drums. If I’d fed a dollar into the machine, I could have had a printout of their “life stories”; for five, an autographed portrait of the band, the signatures authentic and unique; for ten, the same with a dedication. I didn’t, though. I watched them for a while; their expressions ranged from distraction to faint embarrassment—the way some human musicians look, when they know that you know they’re only miming.

So forgive me if I didn’t buy the tacky merchandise—but I saved up my Azciak payments and bought a second-hand CD player, and I hunted down a music shop which stocked your albums on “obsolete” disks, for a quarter of the price of the fashionable new ROMs.

Of course I thought I’d helped shape you. You sang about my life. I couldn’t have written a bar of the music, a word of the lyrics, myself—but I knew the computers could take care of those technical details. The wires in my head weren’t there to extract any kind of talent; they were there to uncover my deepest needs.

And they’d succeeded.

At the same time, I couldn’t let myself believe that I’d somehow conjured you up on my own, because—apart from the preposterous vanity of it—if I had, then I was still doing nothing but talking to myself. In any case, surely one person, alone, could never have swayed the populist Azciak software. Among the twenty thousand participants in the poll, there had to be others—hundreds, at least

—for whom your words rang true as they did for me.

I phoned the woman who’d signed me up. “Oh no, we couldn’t possibly give you any names,” she said. “All our data is strictly confidential.”

At work, in a five-minute mid-shift break, I snuck into the manager’s office and called another branch of the Azciak organisation. The voice that replied sounded human to me, but the icon flagging a sales simulacrum lit up.

“You want to buy a direct mailing list? What selection parameters did you have in mind?”

“What selection parameters are there?”

A menu appeared on the flatscreen of the phone:

[1] Geographic

[2] Socioeconomic

[3] Ethnic

[4] Aesthetic

[5] Political

[6] Emotional I hesitated, then hit 6. The rest was easy enough; I just filled in the profile requirements as if I was describing myself.

The charge was one thousand dollars. I typed in the number of the French Fries purchasing account, and the list was downloaded into the phone. I copied it onto a floppy disk, then erased it from the memory.

You sang:

Here you are again Caring about the wrong things, again Everyone else makes mistakes, I know But at least they make THE RIGHT ONES

Every day, I saw children half my age walking the streets of Kings Cross, surviving on food scraps, fighting each other for the privilege of selling themselves to the tourists. Every day, I read of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people—in famines, in civil wars, and the latest genocidal psychodramas, designed to bolster the delicate egos of the most powerful nations on Earth.

But I was powerless to change any of that. So I just closed my eyes and dreamt about love.

And a dream was all it would ever be. The truth was, I’d always known I was nothing, no one: an object in the shape of a human, not to be mistaken for the real thing.

The wonder of it was, I kept on existing, day after day, year after year. I woke every morning, and the whole bizarre joke—the illusion of humanity—still hadn’t worn off. I had no choice but to eat and drink, to breathe, to shit, to earn money, to go through the motions—but I always knew that to try to do anything more would have been ridiculous.

I had as much right to be loved as I had to sprout wings and fly.

I chose a name from the list, almost at random—although when I saw that he lived in Adelaide, a twenty-hour bus ride away, I knew that was exactly what I’d wanted. Not that I’d have needed an excuse to keep my distance, if he’d lived next door. What would I have said to him? “I stole your name from a database. I know we have a lot in common. I’m an antisocial emotional cripple, a bisexual virgin, a basket case. How about lunch? No? Dinner, then? Fuck that, let’s go to bed.”

His name was Ben, and I dreamt about him day and night—conscious of, but undeterred by, the ludicrous nature of my obsession. I felt only slightly guilty for trespassing on his privacy; as long as he remained unaware of the fact, I’d done him no tangible harm. Besides, I didn’t even know what he looked like, so when I pictured “him,” tangled in the sheets beside me, it wasn’t him at all. It was just another fantasy.

And yet. I could never quite forget that he was real—and that he was, I knew, every bit as desperate and lonely as I was. I’d imagined a thousand lovers before, and I’d shamelessly stolen the faces of a thousand strangers—without believing for a moment than I ever would meet, ever would speak to, ever would touch, the flesh-and-blood versions. It was unthinkable.

With Ben, it was not unthinkable.

Not quite.

And you sang:

Meet me on a dark street Away from their laughter and lies No, you don’t want to see my ugly soul But my hands can still keep you warm Meet me on a quiet street The only stranger in town And we’ll step behind the railway line And see whose love is blind Alone in my room, I listened, and dreamed, and told you my dreams. Did I dream about love because you sang about love, or was it the other way round? Did you sing to affirm my life, or did I live to affirm your songs?

I don’t know. I still don’t know.

My theft was discovered, of course, and it didn’t take much investigating to find the culprit. My own name was on the stolen mailing list—and when the keystroke timing signature for the phone call in question was compared with the staff cash register records, only one person matched.

The manager didn’t press charges, he just sacked me on the spot. (My comrades cheered.) I walked all the way home, giddy with freedom, intoxicated by every breath of the cool night air, staring up at the lights of Market Street’s unrentable skyscrapers as if I’d never seen them before in my life.

I told myself: I must have planned it this way all along; one small shock to the system, that’s all I needed, to snap me out this trance, to wake me from this sleep I’ve called life.

As I walked, I sang:

You never have lived And you never will live Because you’ve never wanted to But in my arms And in my bed We’ll find a substitute First thing in the morning, I hocked my ancient CD player, put everything I owned into a suitcase (the Azciak black box included), and bought a ticket for Adelaide.

The bus driver said he liked both kinds of music—Country and Western—and he sure hoped that we did, too. Those of us who hadn’t brought protection went through hell; I’d never thought I’d find myself ready to kill for a Walkman.

I still had your songs, though, etched into my memory, and the closer I drew to my destination, the more convinced I became that you were with me, guiding me.

It didn’t seem like such a strange idea; you had no body of your own, no senses of your own. Only the songs made you real, and if they were in my head, then so were you.

Yes it’s true, I travelled a thousand miles Just to be beside you And it’s true, I gave up a “life” of my own Just to follow your trail And if all I’ve ever been, and all I’ve ever owned Is no great price in your eyes Won’t you give me One last smile Before you walk away?

Farmland and bushland, forest and desert alike were all reduced to sepia by the bus’s tinted windows—and in the late afternoon the landscape was swallowed completely by the glare of sunlight on the scratched glass.

When night fell, the driver regaled us with a non-stop selection of Nashville’s greatest lullabies. I gritted my teeth and stared out the window. With the reading lights on all around me, I could see nothing but my own reflection; just after midnight, though, the last of them went out, and I watched the grey starlit desert pass by.

Spending money like a dying man, I took a taxi across the awakening city. I was sick with fear—but cushioned by a mixture of adrenaline and lack of sleep.

Part of me knew that the whole journey, the whole idea, had been insane from the start, and wanted nothing more than to be back in my room, dissolving into a miasma of loneliness and sensory deprivation. But part of me argued, fearlessly:

How do you know you won’t be welcome? If a stranger travelled half-way across the country to your door, wouldn’t you take him in?

The building was shabby, dilapidated, demoralising, and utterly familiar—and in a way, that filled me with hope, as if the more we had in common, the more likely he was to understand why I was here. I grew numb as I climbed the stairs, my senses retreating into my skull even as my feet kept working. I’d felt the same way as a child, when I’d climbed to the top of the swimming pool’s diving tower. (I’d turned around and climbed all the way down again.)

What would I do, when he opened the door? I’d planned to speak a line from one of your songs, but I still hadn’t made a choice—and by now, half your words had deserted me, and the rest seemed impossibly clumsy. If they were stilted even in my head, how would they sound on my lips?

When I reached the seventh floor, I didn’t hesitate or retreat: I walked straight down the corridor—and right past his door. What could I say to him?

I couldn’t tell the truth, or anything like it—not straight away. I needed a pretext. I stood at the end of the corridor, frantically sifting clichés:

Looking for some other tenant. Given the wrong address. Just moved in downstairs, and wondering if I could borrow ...

I couldn’t do it. It made no difference how far I’d travelled, or how long I’d dreamt of this moment. I couldn’t knock on that door.

If I ran into him, though, in the corridor, on the stairs ... if we struck up a conversation, I could tell him that I was new in town, searching for a place to stay. I’d come to this building to rent a room, but there’d been some mistake, it had already been taken ...

And he’d look me in the eye and say: I have plenty of room to spare. Let me show you.

It was half past seven in the morning. Ben worked in a music shop; I knew that much from the stolen data. He’d be on his way, soon enough. All I had to do was wait.

So I stood by the stairwell, swaying, dizzy with fear. I knew this was my only chance. If I failed, I’d vanish from the face of the Earth. If I failed, my loneliness would open up its jaws and swallow me. If I failed, I’d die.

I still don’t know, to this day, what it was you wanted from us. Some kind of vicarious happiness? Some kind of second-hand love? Out of twenty thousand people, then, why did you choose the loneliest, the saddest; why did you choose the ones with so little hope?

Unless in your heart, you knew that you were just like us. Just like me: a human-shaped object, nothing more. Not to be mistaken for the real thing.

The door opened, and Ben stepped out. I was suddenly very calm. He didn’t look threatening, or unapproachable. I’d been afraid that he might be impossibly—

unattainably—handsome; he wasn’t. I knew I could talk to him. Maybe it was my imagination, but I would have sworn that I could make out the faint scar on the back of his neck, proof that I’d come to the right place, proof that I’d found the right person.

He didn’t look at me as he approached; he stared at the ground, just as I would have done. Desperate for guidance, I imagined myself in his place, imagined a friendly stranger trying to strike up a conversation. Then the fog cleared from my brain, and I knew exactly what I’d feel: suspicion, then disbelief ... and then sheer panic. At the first sign of the threat of human contact, I’d recoil.

I’d flee.

I kept silent. He walked past me, down the stairs.

I found an unvandalised phone booth, took the black box from my suitcase, and plugged it in. It came alive at once, red lights flashing, dragging the overdue data out of my head in one long, silent scream.

Afterwards, I walked aimlessly, until I stumbled across a small café. There were no other customers; I sat there sipping coffee, staring at the jukebox in the corner. It was playing an ad for Pepsi, or the latest song from Radical Doubt; I couldn’t tell which.

I put a coin in the slot, and then knelt beside the machine—so close that the image on the screen became nothing but a blur of coloured light.

And you sang:

Dry your eyes Don’t be sad You’re worthless Your tears mean nothing at all If you live and you die In a dream, in a lie Who will ever be the wiser?

Close your eyes Don’t be sad You’re worthless Your pain means nothing at all Unseen and unknown Alive but alone Why end a life That’s no life at all?

You were right, of course. And I swallowed no pills; instead, I bought myself a map, walked out to the highway, and hitch-hiked all the way home.

That was your last song—before the Azciak people fixed the glitch, corrected the aberration. The official story (from the PR release, to the torrent of instant “biographies”, to the sleeve notes of the tasteful, black-lined, Memorial Collected Works boxed set): the lead singer of Worthless had overdosed on vodka and Nembutal, victim of a broken heart. I still have photos from the magazines of crowds of sobbing fans, carrying “your” picture aloft.

I never joined those tearful mobs. I never even mourned you in private. I don’t know if you’re still in there, somewhere; concealed, transformed, unrecognisable. It’s not impossible, is it? (After all, would you recognise me?)

And if you’re not? If you really have gone forever?

Then here I am again. Caring about the wrong things, again.

And talking to myself.

Yeyuka

On my last day in Sydney, as a kind of farewell, I spent the morning on Bondi Beach. I swam for an hour, then lay on the sand and stared at the sky. I dozed off for a while, and when I woke there were half a dozen booths set up amid the sun bathers, dispensing the latest fashion: solar tattoos. On a touch-screen the size of a full-length mirror, you could choose a design and then customise it, or create one from scratch with software assistance. Computer-controlled jets sprayed the undeveloped pigments onto your skin, then an hour of UV exposure rendered all the colours visible.

As the morning wore on, I saw giant yellow butterflies perched between shoulder blades, torsos wrapped in green-and-violet dragons, whole bodies wreathed in chains of red hibiscus. Watching these images materialise around me, I couldn’t help thinking of them as banners of victory. Throughout my childhood, there’d been nothing more terrifying than the threat of melanoma—and by the turn of the millennium, nothing more hip than neck-to-knee lycra. Twenty years later, these elaborate decorations were designed to encourage, to boast of, irradiation. To proclaim, not that the sun itself had been tamed, but that our bodies had. To declare that cancer had been defeated.

I touched the ring on my left index finger, and felt a reassuring pulse through the metal. Blood flowed constantly around the hollow core of the device, diverted from a vein in my finger. The ring’s inner surface was covered with billions of tiny sensors, spring-loaded funnel-shaped structures like microscopic Venus fly-traps, each just a few hundred atoms wide. Every sizable molecule in my bloodstream that collided with one of these traps was seized and shrink-wrapped, long enough and tightly enough to determine its shape and its chemical identity before it was released.

So the ring knew exactly what was in my blood. It also knew what belonged, and what didn’t. Under its relentless scrutiny, the biochemical signature of a viral or bacterial infection, or even a microscopic tumour far downstream, could never escape detection for long—and once a diagnosis was made, treatment was almost instantaneous. Planted alongside the sensors were programmable catalysts, versatile molecules that could be reshaped under computer control. The ring could manufacture a wide range of drugs from raw materials circulating in the blood, just by choosing the right sequence of shapes for these catalysts—trapping the necessary ingredients together in nooks and crannies moulded to fit like plaster casts around their combined outlines.

With medication delivered within minutes or seconds, infections were wiped out before they could take hold, tiny clusters of cancer cells destroyed before they could grow or spread. Linked by satellite to a vast array of medical databases, and as much additional computing power as it required, the ring gave me a kind of electronic immune system, fast enough and smart enough to overcome any adversary.

Not everyone on the beach that morning would have had their own personal HealthGuard, but a weekly session on a shared family unit, or even a monthly check-up at their local GP, would have been enough to reduce their risk of cancer dramatically. And though melanoma was the least of my worries—fair-skinned, I was covered in sunscreen as usual; fatal or not, getting burnt was painful—with the ring standing guard against ten thousand other possibilities, I’d come to think of it as a vital part of my body. The day I’d installed it, my life expectancy had risen by fifteen years—and no doubt my bank’s risk-assessment software had assumed a similar extension to my working life, since I’d be paying off the loan I’d needed to buy the thing well into my sixties.

I tugged gently at the plain metal band, until I felt a sharp warning from the needle-thin tubes that ran deep into the flesh. This model wasn’t designed to be slipped on and off in an instant like the shared units, but it would only take a five minute surgical procedure under local anaesthetic to remove it. In Uganda, a single HealthGuard machine served 40 million people—or rather, the lucky few who could get access to it. Flying in wearing my own personal version seemed almost as crass as arriving with a giant solar tattoo. Where I was headed, cancer had very definitely not been defeated.

Then again, nor had malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, schistosomiasis. I could have the ring immunise me against all of these and more, before removing it ... but the malaria parasite was notoriously variable, so constant surveillance would provide far more reliable protection. I’d be no use to anyone lying in a hospital bed for half my stay. Besides, the average villager or shanty-town dweller probably wouldn’t even recognise the thing, let alone resent it. I was being hypersensitive.

I gathered up my things and headed for the cycle rack. Looking back across the sand, I felt the kind of stab of regret that came upon waking from a dream of impossible good fortune and serenity, and for a moment I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and rejoin it.

Lisa saw me off at the airport.

I said, “It’s only three months. It’ll fly past.” I was reassuring myself, not her.

“It’s not too late to change your mind.” She smiled calmly; no pressure, it was entirely my decision. In her eyes, I was clearly suffering from some kind of disease—a very late surge of adolescent idealism, or a very early mid-life crisis—but she’d adopted a scrupulously non-judgmental bedside manner. It drove me mad.

“And miss my last chance ever to perform cancer surgery?” That was a slight exaggeration; a few cases would keep slipping through the HealthGuard net for years. Most of my usual work was trauma, though, which was going through changes of its own. Computerised safeguards had made traffic accidents rare, and I suspected that within a decade no one would get the chance to stick their hand in a conveyor belt again. If the steady stream of gunshot and knife wounds ever dried up, I’d have to retrain for nose jobs and reconstructing rugby players. “I should have gone into obstetrics, like you.”

Lisa shook her head. “In the next twenty years, they’ll crack all the molecular signals, within and between mother and foetus. There’ll be no premature births, no Caesareans, no complications. The HealthGuard will smooth my job away, too.” She added, deadpan, “Face it, Martin, we’re all doomed to obsolescence.”

“Maybe. But if we are ... it’ll happen sooner in some places than others.”

“And when the time comes, you might just head off to some place where you’re still needed?”

She was mocking me, but I took the question seriously. “Ask me that when I get back. Three months without mod cons and I might be cured for life.”

My flight was called. We kissed goodbye. I suddenly realised that I had no idea why I was doing this. The health of distant strangers? Who was I kidding? Maybe I’d been trying to fool myself into believing that I really was that selfless—hoping all the while that Lisa would talk me out of it, offering some face-saving excuse for me to stay. I should have known she’d call my bluff instead.

I said plainly, “I’m going to miss you. Badly.”

“I should hope so.” She took my hand, scowling, finally accepting the decision. “You’re an idiot, you know. Be careful.”

“I will.” I kissed her again, then slipped away.

I was met at Entebbe airport by Magdalena Iganga, one of the oncologists on a small team that had been put together by Médecins Sans Frontières to help overburdened Ugandan doctors tackle the growing number of Yeyuka cases. Iganga was Tanzanian, but she’d worked throughout eastern Africa, and as she drove her battered ethanol-powered car the thirty kilometres into Kampala, she recounted some of her brushes with the World Health Organisation in Nairobi.

“I tried to persuade them to set up an epidemiological database for Yeyuka. Good idea, they said. Just put a detailed proposal to the cancer epidemiology expert committee. So I did. And the committee said, we like your proposal, but oh dear, Yeyuka is a contagious disease, so you’ll have to submit this to the contagious diseases expert committee instead. Whose latest annual sitting I’d just missed by a week.” Iganga sighed stoically. “Some colleagues and I ended up doing it ourselves, on an old 386 and a borrowed phone line.”

“Three eight what?”

She shook her head. “Palaeocomputing jargon, never mind.”

Though we were dead on the equator and it was almost noon, the temperature must have been 30 at most; Kampala was high above sea level. A humid breeze blew off Lake Victoria, and low clouds rolled by above us, gathering threateningly then dissipating, again and again. I’d been promised that I’d come for the dry season; at worst there’d be occasional thunderstorms.

On our left, between patches of marshland, small clusters of shacks began to appear. As we drew closer to the city, we passed through layers of shanty towns, the older and more organised verging on a kind of bedraggled suburbia, others looking more like out-and-out refugee camps. The tumours caused by the Yeyuka virus tended to spread fast but grow slowly, often partially disabling people for years before killing them, and when they could no longer manage heavy rural labour, they usually headed for the nearest city in the hope of finding work. Southern Uganda had barely recovered from HIV when Yeyuka cases began to appear, around 2013; in fact, some virologists believed that Yeyuka had arisen from a less virulent ancestor after gaining a foothold within the immune-suppressed population. And though Yeyuka wasn’t as contagious as cholera or tuberculosis, crowded conditions, poor sanitation and chronic malnourishment set up the shanty towns to bear the brunt of the epidemic.

As we drove north between two hills, the centre of Kampala appeared ahead of us, draped across a hill of its own. Compared to Nairobi, which I’d flown over a few hours before, Kampala looked uncluttered. The streets and low buildings were laid out in a widely-spaced plan, neatly organised but lacking any rigid geometry of grid lines or concentric circles. There was plenty of traffic around us, both cycles and cars, but it flowed smoothly enough, and for all the honking and shouting going on the drivers seemed remarkably good humoured.

Iganga took a detour to the east, skirting the central hill. There were lushly green sports grounds and golf courses on our right, colonial-era public buildings and high-fenced foreign embassies on our left. There were no high-rise slums in sight, but there were makeshift shelters and even vegetable gardens on some stretches of parkland, traces of the shanty towns spreading inwards.

In my jet-lagged state, it was amazing to find that this abstract place that I’d been imagining for months had solid ground, actual buildings, real people. Most of my second-hand glimpses of Uganda had come from news clips set in war zones and disaster areas; from Sydney, it had been almost impossible to conceive of the country as anything more than a frantically edited video sequence full of soldiers, refugees, and fly-blown corpses. In fact, rebel activity was confined to a shrinking zone in the country’s far north, most of the last wave of Zairean refugees had gone home a year ago, and while Yeyuka was a serious problem, people weren’t exactly dropping dead in the streets.

Makerere University was in the north of the city; Iganga and I were both staying at the guest house there. A student showed me to my room, which was plain but spotlessly clean; I was almost afraid to sit on the bed and rumple the sheets. After washing and unpacking, I met up with Iganga again and we walked across the campus to Mulago Hospital, which was affiliated with the university medical school. There was a soccer team practising across the road as we went in, a reassuringly mundane sight.

Iganga introduced me to nurses and porters left and right; everyone was busy but friendly, and I struggled to memorise the barrage of names. The wards were all crowded, with patients spilling into the corridors, a few in beds but most on mattresses or blankets. The building itself was dilapidated, and some of the equipment must have been thirty years old, but there was nothing squalid about the conditions; all the linen was clean, and the floor looked and smelt like you could do surgery on it.

In the Yeyuka ward, Iganga showed me the six patients I’d be operating on the next day. The hospital did have a CAT scanner, but it had been broken for the past six months, waiting for money for replacement parts, so flat X-rays with cheap contrast agents like barium were the most I could hope for. For some tumours, the only guide to location and extent was plain old palpation. Iganga guided my hands, and kept me from applying too much pressure; she’d had a great deal more experience at this than I had, and an over-zealous beginner could do a lot of damage. The world of three-dimensional images spinning on my workstation while the software advised on the choice of incision had receded into fantasy. Stubbornly, though, I did the job myself; gently mapping the tumours by touch, picturing them in my head, marking the X-rays or making sketches.

I explained to each patient where I’d be cutting, what I’d remove, and what the likely effects would be. Where necessary, Iganga translated for me—either into Swahili, or what she described as her “broken Luganda.” The news was always only half good, but most people seemed to take it with a kind of weary optimism. Surgery was rarely a cure for Yeyuka, usually just offering a few years’ respite, but it was currently the only option. Radiation and chemotherapy were useless, and the hospital’s sole HealthGuard machine couldn’t generate custom-made molecular cures for even a lucky few; seven years into the epidemic, Yeyuka wasn’t yet well enough understood for anyone to have written the necessary software.

By the time I was finished it was dark outside. Iganga asked, “Do you want to look in on Ann’s last operation?” Ann Collins was the Irish volunteer I was replacing.

“Definitely.” I’d watched a few operations performed here, on video back in Sydney, but no VR scenarios had been available for proper “hands on” rehearsals, and Collins would only be around to supervise me for a few more days. It was a painful irony: foreign surgeons were always going to be inexperienced, but no one else had so much time on their hands. Ugandan medical students had to pay a small fortune in fees—the World Bank had put an end to the new government’s brief flirtation with state-subsidised training—and it looked like there’d be a shortage of qualified specialists for at least another decade.

We donned masks and gowns. The operating theatre was like everything else, clean but outdated. Iganga introduced me to Collins, the anaesthetist Eriya Okwera, and the trainee surgeon Balaki Masika.

The patient, a middle-aged man, was covered in orange Betadine-soaked surgical drapes, arranged around a long abdominal incision. I stood beside Collins and watched, entranced. Growing within the muscular wall of the small intestine was a grey mass the size of my fist, distending the peritoneum, the organ’s translucent “skin”, almost to bursting point. It would certainly have been blocking the passage of food; the patient must have been on liquids for months.

The tumour was very loose, almost like a giant discoloured blood clot; the hardest thing would be to avoid dislodging any cancerous cells in the process of removing it, sending them back into circulation to seed another tumour. Before making a single cut in the intestinal wall, Collins used a laser to cauterise all the blood vessels around the growth, and she didn’t lay a finger on the tumour itself at any time. Once it was free, she lifted it away with clamps attached to the surrounding tissue, as fastidiously as if she was removing a leaky bag full of some fatal poison. Maybe other tumours were already growing unseen in other parts of the body, but doing the best possible job, here and now, might still add three or four years to this man’s life.

Masika began stitching the severed ends of the intestine together. Collins led me aside and showed me the patient’s X-rays on a light-box. “This is the site of origin.” There was a cavity clearly visible in the right lung, about half the size of the tumour she’d just removed. Ordinary cancers grew in a single location first, and then a few mutant cells in the primary tumour escaped to seed growths in the rest of the body. With Yeyuka, there were no “primary tumours”; the virus itself uprooted the cells it infected, breaking down the normal molecular adhesives that kept them in place, until the infected organ seemed to be melting away. That was the origin of the name: yeyuka, to melt. Once set loose into the bloodstream, many of the cells died of natural causes, but a few ended up lodged in small capillaries—physically trapped, despite their lack of stickiness—where they could remain undisturbed long enough to grow into sizable tumours.

After the operation, I was invited out to a welcoming dinner in a restaurant down in the city. The place specialised in Italian food, which was apparently hugely popular, at least in Kampala. Iganga, Collins and Okwera, old colleagues by now, unwound noisily; Okwera, a solid man in his forties, grew mildly but volubly intoxicated and told medical horror stories from his time in the army. Masika, the trainee surgeon, was very softly spoken and reserved. I was something of a zombie from jet lag myself, and didn’t contribute much to the conversation, but the warm reception put me at ease.

I still felt like an impostor, here only because I hadn’t had the courage to back out, but no one was going to interrogate me about my motives. No one cared. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference whether I’d volunteered out of genuine compassion, or just a kind of moral insecurity brought on by fears of obsolescence. Either way, I’d brought a pair of hands and enough general surgical experience to be useful. If you’d ever had to be a saint to heal someone, medicine would have been doomed from the start.

I was nervous as I cut into my first Yeyuka patient, but by the end of the operation, with a growth the size of an orange successfully removed from the right lung, I felt much more confident. Later the same day, I was introduced to some of the hospital’s permanent surgical staff—a reminder that even when Collins left, I’d hardly be working in isolation. I fell asleep on the second night exhausted, but reassured. I could do this, it wasn’t beyond me. I hadn’t set myself an impossible task.

I drank too much at the farewell dinner for Collins, but the HealthGuard magicked the effects away. My first day solo was anticlimactic; everything went smoothly, and Okwera, with no high-tech hangover cure, was unusually subdued, while Masika was as quietly attentive as ever.

Six days a week, the world shrank to my room, the campus, the ward, the operating theatre. I ate in the guest house, and usually fell asleep an hour or two after the evening meal; with the sun diving straight below the horizon, by eight o’clock it felt like midnight. I tried to call Lisa every night, though I often finished in the theatre too late to catch her before she left for work, and I hated leaving messages, or talking to her while she was driving.

Okwera and his wife invited me to lunch the first Sunday, Masika and his girlfriend the next. Both couples were genuinely hospitable, but I felt like I was intruding on their one day together. The third Sunday, I met up with Iganga in a restaurant, then we wandered through the city on an impromptu tour.

There were some beautiful buildings in Kampala, many of them clearly war-scarred but lovingly repaired. I tried to relax and take in the sights, but I kept thinking of the routine—six operations, six days a week—stretching out ahead of me until the end of my stay. When I mentioned this to Iganga, she laughed. “All right. You want something more than assembly-line work? I’ll line up a trip to Mubende for you. They have patients there who are too sick to be moved. Multiple tumours, all nearly terminal.”

“Okay.” Me and my big mouth; I knew I hadn’t been seeing the worst cases, but I hadn’t given much thought to where they all were.

We were standing outside the Sikh temple, beside a plaque describing Idi Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community in 1972. Kampala was dotted with memorials to atrocities—and though Amin’s reign had ended more than forty years ago, it had been a long path back to normality. It seemed unjust beyond belief that even now, in an era of relative political stability, so many lives were being ruined by Yeyuka. No more refugees marching across the countryside, no more forced expulsions—but cells cast adrift could bring just as much suffering.

I asked Iganga, “So why did you go into medicine?”

“Family expectations. It was either that or the law. Medicine seemed less arbitrary; nothing in the body can be overturned by an appeal to the High Court. What about you?”

I said, “I wanted to be in on the revolution. The one that was going to banish all disease.”

“Ah, that one.”

“I picked the wrong job, of course. I should have been a molecular biologist.”

“Or a software engineer.”

“Yeah. If I’d seen the HealthGuard coming fifteen years ago, I might have been right at the heart of the changes. And I’d have never looked back. Let alone sideways.”

Iganga nodded sympathetically, quite unfazed by the notion that molecular technology might capture the attention so thoroughly that little things like Yeyuka epidemics would vanish from sight altogether. “I can imagine. Seven years ago, I was all set to make my fortune in one of the private clinics in Dar es Salaam. Rich businessmen with prostate cancer, that kind of thing. I was lucky in a way; before that market vanished completely, the Yeyuka fanatics were nagging me, bullying me, making little deals.” She laughed. “I’ve lost count of the number of times I was promised I’d be co-author of a ground breaking paper in Nature Oncology if I just helped out at some field clinic in the middle of nowhere. I was dragged into this, kicking and screaming, just when all my old dreams were going up in smoke.”

“But now Yeyuka feels like your true vocation?”

She rolled her eyes. “Spare me. My ambition now is to retire to a highly paid consulting position in Nairobi or Geneva.”

“I’m not sure I believe you.”

“You should.” She shrugged. “Sure, what I’m doing now is a hundred times more useful than any desk job, but that doesn’t make it any easier. You know as well as I do that the warm inner glow doesn’t last for a thousand patients; if you fought for every one of them as if they were your own family or friends, you’d go insane ... so they become a series of clinical problems, which just happen to be wrapped in human flesh. And it’s a struggle to keep working on the same problems, over and over, even if you’re convinced that it’s the most worthwhile job in the world.”

“So why are you in Kampala right now, instead of Nairobi or Geneva?”

Iganga smiled. “Don’t worry, I’m working on it. I don’t have a date on my ticket out of here, like you do, but when the chance comes, believe me, I’ll grab it just as fast as I can.”

It wasn’t until my sixth week, and my two-hundred-and-fourth operation, that I finally screwed up.

The patient was a teenaged girl with multiple infestations of colon cells in her liver. A substantial portion of the organ’s left lobe would have to be removed, but her prognosis seemed relatively good; the right lobe appeared to be completely clean, and it was not beyond hope that the liver, directly downstream from the colon, had filtered all the infected cells from the blood before they could reach any other part of the body.

Trying to clamp the left branch of the portal vein, I slipped, and the clamp closed tightly on a swollen cyst at the base of the liver, full of grey-white colon cells. It didn’t burst open, but it might have been better if it had; I couldn’t literally see where the contents was squirted, but I could imagine the route very clearly: back as far as the Y-junction of the vein, where the blood flow would carry cancerous cells into the previously unaffected right lobe.

I swore for ten seconds, enraged by my own helplessness. I had none of the emergency tools I was used to: there was no drug I could inject to kill off the spilt cells while they were still more vulnerable than an established tumour, no vaccine on hand to stimulate the immune system into attacking them.

Okwera said, “Tell the parents you found evidence of leakage, so she’ll need to have regular follow-up examinations.”

I glanced at Masika, but he was silent.

“I can’t do that.”

“You don’t want to cause trouble.”

“It was an accident!”

“Don’t tell her, and don’t tell her family.” Okwera regarded me sternly, as if I was contemplating something both dangerous and self-indulgent. “It won’t help anyone if you dive into the shit for this. Not her, not you. Not the hospital. Not the volunteer program.”

The girl’s mother spoke English. I told her there were signs that the cancer might have spread. She wept, and thanked me for my good work.

Masika didn’t say a word about the incident, but by the end of the day I could hardly bear to look at him. When Okwera departed, leaving the two of us alone in the locker room, I said, “In three or four years there’ll be a vaccine. Or even HealthGuard software. It won’t be like this forever.”

He shrugged, embarrassed. “Sure.”

“I’ll raise funds for the research when I get home. Champagne dinners with slides of photogenic patients, if that’s what it takes.” I knew I was making a fool of myself, but I couldn’t shut up. “This isn’t the nineteenth century. We’re not helpless anymore. Anything can be cured, once you understand it.”

Masika eyed me dubiously, as if he was trying to decide whether or not to tell me to save my platitudes for the champagne dinners. Then he said, “We do understand Yeyuka. We have HealthGuard software written for it, ready and waiting to go. But we can’t run it on the machine here. So we don’t need funds for research. What we need is another machine.”

I was speechless for several seconds, trying to make sense of this extraordinary claim. “The hospital’s machine is broken—?”

Masika shook his head. “The software is unlicensed. If we used it on the hospital’s machine, our agreement with HealthGuard would be void. We’d lose the use of the machine entirely.”

I could hardly believe that the necessary research had been completed without a single publication, but I couldn’t believe Masika would lie about it either. “How long can it take HealthGuard to approve the software? When was it submitted to them?”

Masika was beginning to look like he wished he’d kept his mouth shut, but there was no going back now. He admitted warily, “It hasn’t been submitted to them. It can’t be—that’s the whole problem. We need a bootleg machine, a decommissioned model with the satellite link disabled, so we can run the Yeyuka software without their knowledge.”

“Why? Why can’t they find out about it?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know if I can tell you that.”

“Is it illegal? Stolen?” But if it was stolen, why hadn’t the rightful owners licensed the damned thing, so people could use it?

Masika replied icily, “Stolen back. The only part you could call ‘stolen’ was stolen back.” He looked away for a moment, actually struggling for control. Then he said, “Are you sure you want to know the whole story?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll have to make a phone call.”

Masika took me to what looked like a boarding house, student accommodation in one of the suburbs close to the campus. He walked briskly, giving me no time to ask questions, or even orient myself in the darkness. I had a feeling he would have liked to have blindfolded me, but it would hardly have made a difference; by the time we arrived I couldn’t have said where we were to the nearest kilometre.

A young woman, maybe nineteen or twenty, opened the door. Masika didn’t introduce us, but I assumed she was the person he’d phoned from the hospital, since she was clearly expecting us. She led us to a ground floor room; someone was playing music upstairs, but there was no one else in sight.

In the room, there was a desk with an old-style keyboard and computer monitor, and an extraordinary device standing on the floor beside it: a rack of electronics the size of a chest of drawers, full of exposed circuit boards, all cooled by a fan half a metre wide.

“What is that?”

The woman grinned. “We modestly call it the Makerere supercomputer. Five hundred and twelve processors, working in parallel. Total cost, fifty thousand shillings.”

That was about fifty dollars. “How—?”

“Recycling. Twenty or thirty years ago, the computer industry ran an elaborate scam: software companies wrote deliberately inefficient programs, to make people buy newer, faster computers all the time—then they made sure that the faster computers needed brand new software to work at all. People threw out perfectly good machines every three or four years, and though some ended up as landfill, millions were saved. There’s been a worldwide market in discarded processors for years, and the slowest now cost about as much as buttons. But all it takes to get some real power out of them is a little ingenuity.”

I stared at the wonderful contraption. “And you wrote the Yeyuka software on this?”

“Absolutely.” She smiled proudly. “First, the software characterises any damaged surface adhesion molecules it finds—there are always a few floating freely in the bloodstream, and their exact shape depends on the strain of Yeyuka, and the particular cells that have been infected. Then drugs are tailor-made to lock on to those damaged adhesion molecules, and kill the infected cells by rupturing their membranes.” As she spoke, she typed on the keyboard, summoning up animations to illustrate each stage of the process. “If we can get this onto a real machine ... we’ll be able to cure three people a day.”

Cure. Not just cut them open to delay the inevitable.

“But where did all the raw data come from? The RNA sequencing, the X-ray diffraction studies ...?”

The woman’s smile vanished. “An insider at HealthGuard found it in the company archives, and sent it to us over the net.”

“I don’t understand. When did HealthGuard do Yeyuka studies? Why haven’t they published them? Why haven’t they written software themselves?”

She glanced uncertainly at Masika. He said, “HealthGuard’s parent company collected blood from five thousand people in Southern Uganda in 2013. Supposedly to follow up on the effectiveness of their HIV vaccine. What they actually wanted, though, was a large sample of metastasising cells so they could perfect the biggest selling point of the HealthGuard: cancer protection. Yeyuka offered them the cheapest, simplest way to get the data they needed.”

I’d been half expecting something like this since Masika’s comments back in the hospital, but I was still shaken. To collect the data dishonestly was bad enough, but to bury information that was half-way to a cure—just to save paying for what they’d taken—was unspeakable.

I said, “Sue the bastards! Get everyone who had samples taken together for a class action: royalties plus punitive damages. You’ll raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Then you can buy as many machines as you want.”

The woman laughed bitterly. “We have no proof. The files were sent anonymously, there’s no way to authenticate their origin. And can you imagine how much HealthGuard would spend on their defence? We can’t afford to waste the next twenty years in a legal battle, just for the satisfaction of shouting the truth from the rooftops. The only way we can be sure of making use of this software is to get a bootleg machine, and do everything in silence.”

I stared at the screen, at the cure being played out in simulation that should have been happening three times a day in Mulago hospital. She was right, though. However hard it was to stomach, taking on HealthGuard directly would be futile.

Walking back across the campus with Masika, I kept thinking of the girl with the liver infestation, and the possibility of undoing the moment of clumsiness that would otherwise almost certainly kill her. I said, “Maybe I can get hold of a bootleg machine in Shanghai. If I knew where to ask, where to look.” They’d certainly be expensive, but they’d have to be much cheaper than a commissioned model, running without the usual software and support.

My hand moved almost unconsciously to check the metal pulse on my index finger. I held the ring up in the starlight. “I’d give you this, if it was mine to give. But that’s thirty years away.” Masika didn’t reply, too polite to suggest that if I’d owned the ring outright, I wouldn’t even have raised the possibility.

We reached the University Hall; I could find my way back to the guest house now. But I couldn’t leave it at that; I couldn’t face another six weeks of surgery unless I knew that something was going to come of the night’s revelations. I said, “Look, I don’t have connections to any black market, I don’t have a clue how to go about getting a machine. But if you can find out what I have to do, and it’s within my power ... I’ll do it.”

Masika smiled, and nodded thanks, but I could tell that he didn’t believe me. I wondered how many other people had made promises like this, then vanished back into the world-without-disease while the Yeyuka wards kept overflowing.

As he turned to go, I put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “I mean it. Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.”

He met my eyes in the dark, trying to judge something deeper than this easy protestation of sincerity. I felt a sudden flicker of shame; I’d completely forgotten that I was an impostor, that I’d never really meant to come here, that two months ago a few words from Lisa would have seen me throw away my ticket, gratefully.

Masika said quietly, “Then I’m sorry that I doubted you. And I’ll take you at your word.”

Mubende was a district capital, half a day’s drive west of Kampala. Iganga delayed our promised trip to the Yeyuka clinic there until my last fortnight, and once I arrived I could understand why. It was everything I’d feared: starved of funds, under-staffed and over-crowded. Patients’ relatives were required to provide and wash the bedclothes, and half of them also seemed to be bringing in painkillers and other drugs bought at the local markets—some genuine, some ripoffs full of nothing but glucose or magnesium sulphate.

Most of the patients had four or five separate tumours. I treated two people a day, with operations lasting six to eight hours. In ten days, seven people died in front of me; dozens more died in the wards, waiting for surgery.

Or waiting for something better.

I shared a crowded room at the back of the clinic with Masika and Okwera, but even on the rare occasions when I caught Masika alone, he seemed reluctant to discuss the details of getting hold of a bootleg HealthGuard. He said, “Right now, the less you know the better. When the time comes, I’ll fill you in.”

The ordeal of the patients was overwhelming, but I felt more for the clinic’s sole doctor and two nurses; for them, it never ended. The morning we packed our equipment into the truck and headed back for Kampala, I felt like a deserter from some stupid, pointless war: guilty about the colleagues I was leaving behind, but almost euphoric with relief to be out of it myself. I knew I couldn’t have stayed on here—or even in Kampala—month after month, year after year. However much I wished that I could have been that strong, I understood now that I wasn’t.

There was a brief, loud stuttering sound, then the truck squealed to a halt. The four of us were all in the back, guarding the equipment against potholes, with the tarpaulin above us blocking everything but a narrow rear view. I glanced at the others; someone outside shouted in Luganda at Akena Ibingira, the driver, and he started shouting back.

Okwera said, “Bandits.”

I felt my heart racing. “You’re kidding?”

There was another burst of gunfire. I heard Ibingira jump out of the cab, still muttering angrily.

Everyone was looking at Okwera for advice. He said, “Just cooperate, give them what they want.” I tried to read his face; he seemed grim but not desperate—he expected unpleasantness, but not a massacre. Iganga was sitting on the bench beside me; I reached for her hand almost without thinking. We were both trembling. She squeezed my fingers for a moment, then pulled free.

Two tall, smiling men in dirty brown camouflage appeared at the back of the truck, gesturing with automatic weapons for us to climb out. Okwera went first, but Masika, who’d been sitting beside him, hung back. Iganga was nearer to the exit than me, but I tried to get past her; I had some half-baked idea that this would somehow lessen her risk of being taken off and raped. When one of the bandits blocked my way and waved her forward, I thought this fear had been confirmed.

Masika grabbed my arm, and when I tried to break free, he tightened his grip and pulled me back into the truck. I turned on him angrily, but before I could say a word he whispered, “She’ll be all right. Just tell me: do you want them to take the ring?”

“What?”

He glanced nervously towards the exit, but the bandits had moved Okwera and Iganga out of sight. “I’ve paid them to do this. It’s the only way. But say the word now and I’ll give them the signal, and they won’t touch the ring.”

I stared at him, waves of numbness sweeping over my skin as I realised exactly what he was saying.

“You could have taken it off under anaesthetic.”

He shook his head impatiently. “It’s sending data back to HealthGuard all the time: cortisol, adrenaline, endorphins, prostaglandins. They’ll have a record of your stress levels, fear, pain ... if we took it off under anaesthetic, they’d know you’d given it away freely. This way, it’ll look like a random theft. And your insurance company will give you a new one.”

His logic was impeccable; I had no reply. I might have started protesting about insurance fraud, but that was all in the future, a separate matter entirely. The choice, here and now, was whether or not I let him have the ring by the only method that wouldn’t raise suspicion.

One of the bandits was back, looking impatient. Masika asked plainly, “Do I call it off? I need an answer.” I turned to him, on the verge of ranting that he’d wilfully misunderstood me, abused my generous offer to help him, and put all our lives in danger.

It would have been so much bullshit, though. He hadn’t misunderstood me. All he’d done was taken me at my word.

I said, “Don’t call it off.”

The bandits lined us up beside the truck, and had us empty our pockets into a sack. Then they started taking watches and jewellery. Okwera couldn’t get his wedding ring off, but stood motionless and scowling while one of the bandits applied more force. I wondered if I’d need a prosthesis, if I’d still be able to do surgery, but as the bandit approached me I felt a strange rush of confidence.

I held out my hand and looked up into the sky. I knew that anything could be healed, once it was understood.

Contents