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Wednesday, December 1, 2010

EDITORIAL

Stanley Schmidt

About three years ago (in “Which Stitch in Time?,” March 2008) I mentioned the concern among biologists about the proliferation of Burmese pythons in Everglades National Park, in Florida. As their name suggests, they don’t belong there; they originated on the other side of the ...

IN TIMES TO COME

Our next issue starts off 2011 with a double issue offering an uncommonly wide and varied selection of stories, articles, and special features. Juliette Wade has only recently started appearing in Analog, but immediately made a big impression on readers with her tales of truly alien yet very believable...

THE ALTERNATE VIEW

John G. Cramer

Much of science fiction is set on and around planets that are orbiting stars other than our Sun. How are the planets arranged in other star systems? The usual assumption is that we can take our own Solar System as a model. By this logic, each star should have a set of inner planets, with perhaps one...

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

Don Sakers

This being the December issue, it’s the time of year when everyone is thinking about gift giving. And for a lot of Analog readers, giving gifts means giving books and other stuff to read. Naturally, you want to give science fiction—what better way to spread good will? The single best ...

UPCOMING EVENTS

Anthony Lewis

14–17 January 2011 ARISIA 2011 (Boston area SF conference) at Weston Boston Waterfront Hotel. Writer Guest of Honor: Kelley Armstrong; Artist Guest of Honor; Josh Simpson; Fan Guest of Honor: René Walling; Webcomic Guest of Honor: Shaenon Garrity. Membership: $50 until 31 December 2010,...

BRASS TACKS

Dear Stan, Thanks for printing my letter, and for the factual correction on “bahiana.” Thanks also for recounting your math-class experience (similar to many of my experiences in school) in “The Halo Handicap.” Many of the folks I know—many of whom read Analog—find...

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EDITORIAL

EUTHANIZING THE EUPHEMISM

Stanley Schmidt

About three years ago (in “Which Stitch in Time?,” March 2008) I mentioned the concern among biologists about the proliferation of Burmese pythons in Everglades National Park, in Florida. As their name suggests, they don’t belong there; they originated on the other side of the planet—but in an environment so similar that once they get into the Everglades, they flourish. To an individual pet owner who bought one as a baby and belatedly realizes he’s taken on more than he or she can handle, releasing it next to the Tamiami Trail may seem like no big deal. It lets the snake live, and how much impact on the environment can one snake have?

Quite a bit, as it turns out—and since this happens fairly often, it’s not just one snake. A Burmese python can grow to twenty feet and 200 pounds. Doing so obviously requires quite a lot of food intake, and for a release, that means local wildlife ranging from mice to deer and alligators. Furthermore, they reproduce prolifically. In July 2007 the New York Times reported that about 350 had been found in the park since 2002. In 2010 (after the Nebula Awards and the shuttle Atlantis launch) I returned to the Everglades myself and was told by a tour guide who seemed to know his natural history that there were then estimated to be about 150,000. That doesn’t really mean the population increased by a factor of more than 400 in three years, of course. The 350 reported in 2007 was the number found, which was almost certainly just a small fraction of the number actually present. It’s hard to say exactly how small the fraction is, but it’s unlikely to be as small as a quarter of a percent. So the numbers suggest that the python population has been growing quite rapidly during the last several years. The ecological impact of so many predators that can take such a wide range of prey has to be considerable, and it’s getting worse.

Therefore, the aforementioned guide said, he and his colleagues were under standing orders to promptly report any python sightings, whereupon the National Park Service would send someone out to “euthanize” the snake.

This statement immediately struck me as odd—not because it was unthinkable that the NPS would ever intentionally kill animals, but because the guide’s description of the act seemed a completely inappropriate use of the word “euthanize.” The general policy of the NPS these days (in marked contract to that in some decades gone by) is to try to preserve complete ecosystems in their natural state, which means letting established predator-prey relationships play out without human interference—but not allowing invasive species to become established and disrupt a system that works. When an invasive is as large, disruptive, and hard to relocate as the Burmese python, killing them when they’re found where they don’t belong seems a perfectly reasonable, if regrettable, response.

Bt it isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, euthanasia. The Greek prefix “eu-” means “good”; “euthanasia” is sometimes called mercy killing and is considered good in the sense that its intent is to cause a relatively painless death as a preferable alternative to a life that has become one of hopeless suffering because of incurable illness or injury. In our culture it is widely accepted as a merciful thing to do to domestic animals under some circumstances (though many still find it unthinkable that the same principle might ever apply to human beings). But it’s never something that any decent person would undertake lightly, and the object, to use a simple popular phrase, is always to put a fellow being out of its misery.

Its misery—not somebody else’s.

The park service’s python policy does not even remotely meet this test. The pythons aren’t at all miserable; they’re in a position a bit like the proverbial kid in a candy store. If you asked one, and it were bright enough to answer, it would probably tell you it was having the time of its life. They’re not being killed to end their suffering; they’re being killed to curb a threat to an established ecosystem into which they’ve been introduced through no fault of their own.

This is not to say that they shouldn’t be killed. It’s an unfortunate situation all around, but calling it “euthanizing” instead of “killing” seems less than honest. It appears to be an attempt to make the people who must do it—and park visitors who go partly to be entertained, and who help support the parks with their taxes—feel less guilty about an unpleasant duty. And while to some extent people do need ways to ease the pain of having to do regrettable things, I question whether outright misrepresentation is a good way to do that. I may not like what I have to do, but should I be allowed to delude myself about what it is that I’m doing?

Although I have spent quite a while on this one example, my primary concern here is not Burmese pythons in Florida, but the dangers inherent in misuse of euphemisms. Pythons are just one timely example. There are many others, such as the indiscriminate use of “improvement” or “development” to describe any human-made change in a piece of real estate, or imposing a new requirement on people and telling them you’re “offering them an opportunity.”

Euphemisms have been with us for a long time. Sometimes they even serve a useful purpose, as one of a large class of practices I call “cultural anesthetics.” If you’re trying to get someone else to change a habit you find annoying, they’re more likely to be amenable to your suggestion if you can word it in a way that suggests what they’re doing is not so bad, but what you’re suggesting might be even better, rather than bluntly telling them that what they’re doing is terrible and has to stop. That kind of euphemism is part of courtesy, which has been described as the lubricant that keeps society running smoothly.

But, as I pointed out in a long-ago editorial (“Cultural Anesthetics,” January 5, 1981), anesthetics don’t just block pain during a temporary and ultimately beneficial process like surgery. They block all kinds of sensation, including pleasant ones and the pains that serve to warn us of imminent danger, like heat from a fire. Excessive or inappropriate use of euphemisms carries similar risks—e.g., they can enable us to hide even from ourselves the fact that we’re doing something that, even though it may be necessary, we should feel a little bit guilty about. Calling every change to land an “improvement” may blind us to the fact that some changes are quite the opposite. Calling every new tax an “opportunity” may encourage legislators to keep piling on more and more. We all sometimes have to do things that we wish we didn’t, but in general I question whether we should be allowed to forget that they are what they are.

Maybe an important distinction that we need to make in deciding whether euphemisms are appropriate and useful is whose actions we’re euphemizing. Looking back over my earlier examples, I’ll venture as a zero-order hypothesis that it’s often a good idea to use mild language (at least at first) in describing somebody else’s behavior that you hope to change, and dangerous to describe your own actions in terms that make them sound better than they are. For that way lies the temptation to justify more and more by kidding yourself about what you’re really doing.

And some words, while they’re often used as euphemisms, also have quite precise meanings; and those will be eroded if we let ourselves and others use them in ways that disregard those meanings.

So “euthanize” may really be the right word for what we need to do to a lot of such euphemisms—like “euthanize” as a blanket substitute for virtually any killing of anything not human. They’re words that used to do important jobs of precise communication, but have been so weakened by misuse that they can no longer do that. They must find that terribly frustrating.

Maybe we should put them out of their misery.

Copyright © 2010 Stanley Schmidt

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IN TIMES TO COME

Our next issue starts off 2011 with a double issue offering an uncommonly wide and varied selection of stories, articles, and special features. Juliette Wade has only recently started appearing in Analog, but immediately made a big impression on readers with her tales of truly alien yet very believable cultures seen from within. It’s one of the hardest things to attempt in science fiction, but she has a special knack for it, no doubt due in part due to her background in linguistics—and living with alien cultures. Next month she leads off our double issue with another fine example, “At Cross Purposes,” which inspired Bob Eggleton’s cover.

A well-known theme in science fiction is the generation ship, in which humans embark on a voyage so long that generations will live and die on board before anyone reaches the destination. In many such stories the successive generations lose sight of what the trip was for and the original mission is never accomplished; but next month Domingo Santos, one of Spain’s most prominent science fiction writers, looks at the problem from a different angle: How can you make sure that the would-be colonists don’t forget their purpose, and even if you find a way, what actually happens when they get there? The answer may involve an unusual combination of very old and very new ideas....

Astronomer Kevin Walsh has a science fact article about what Earth’s past stages may tell us about the prospects for Earthlike planets elsewhere, and Richard A. Lovett has another of his popular special features about writing, this time about incorporating autobiographical material into fiction. Last but by no means least, the rest of our stellar line-up includes a wide range of stories by Michael F. Flynn, Stephen L. Burns, Dave Creek, Sean McMullen, Donald Moffitt, Norman Spinrad, and perhaps a promising newcomer or two.

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THE ALTERNATE VIEW

WHAT IS A “TYPICAL” SOLAR SYSTEM?

John G. Cramer

Much of science fiction is set on and around planets that are orbiting stars other than our Sun. How are the planets arranged in other star systems? The usual assumption is that we can take our own Solar System as a model. By this logic, each star should have a set of inner planets, with perhaps one or two that are Earth-like and habitable, an asteroid belt, and a set of outer gas giants, perhaps some with rings like those of Saturn.

There are, of course, variations. One alternate scenario is a Jupiter-like gas giant that is close enough to the parent star to have an Earth-like planet as a moon. The rebel base on the moon Yavin-4 in Star Wars 4: A New Hope and the moon Pandora in Avatar are examples of habitable moons of gas giant planets. Another is a pair of habitable planets orbiting each other as the orbit the parent star, as in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Nevertheless, for most of SF our Solar System is the model.

But is our Solar System really a typical star system? The Nice Model described in a recent AV column (see my March 2010 AV) suggests that during its evolution, our own Solar System was subjected to a major rearrangement. A 2:1 orbital resonance occurred between Jupiter and Saturn that produced the Late Heavy Bombardment of the inner solar system and the orbit-swapping of Neptune and Uranus as they were flung out to larger orbits. This violent and chaotic behavior of the gas giants in our Solar System might just as well have produced configurations of planets that are very different from the present one. Further, the Nice scenario depends directly on the fact that our Solar System has four gas giants. Is that typical?

Let me begin with some planetary astronomy basics. Because of Newtonian physics, planetary orbits have the geometric shape of an ellipse, with the parent star located at one focus of the ellipse. The size of the orbit of a planet is characterized by its semi-major axis, represented by the symbol a. The semi-major axis a is half of the width of the ellipse along its long axis. Astronomers like to describe orbital sizes by using Earth’s orbit as the standard. Thus, the orbit of the Earth is exactly one astronomical unit (a = 1.0 AU), and the orbit of Jupiter has a = 5.2 AU.

During the past decade, astronomers have been able to detect over 400 extrasolar planets of relatively nearby stars. These planets orbiting other stars have been detected mainly using the Doppler radial velocity technique, in which the “wobble” of a star induced by a close-orbiting planet is observed. The overwhelming majority of the planets detected have been short orbital-period gas giants with masses comparable to those of Jupiter or Saturn. This dominance of gas giants is to be expected, of course, because the Doppler radial velocity technique is strongly biased toward the detection of planets with large masses and short orbital periods. If a planet has a mass less than 35 Earth-masses or an a greater than 7.5 AU, the wobble induced in the parent star will be too small to be observed, and the Doppler radial velocity technique will not detect the planet.

It is important to note that most of the stars studied with this technique do not show any indication of the presence of planets. The detection of planets in some systems and not in others raises the question of how common gas giants really are in the star systems of our Galaxy. Astronomers have carefully examined this question using all available data and have concluded that between 24% and 50% of all stars have gas giants in orbits with a less than 20 AU (i.e., inside the orbit of Uranus). Thus, the majority of all stars do not have Jupiter-like gas giants at a = 5 to 20 AU orbits that would affect the inner, possibly Earth-like, planets. Possibly this is because the density of pre-planetary matter is too low in many cases to support the runaway formation of gas giants in the early stages of planet formation.

How, then, are the planetary systems configured in these more typical star systems, around half of which have no gas giants in Jupiter-like orbits? Andrew W. Mann and Eric Gaidos (University of Hawaii) and B. Scott Gaudi (Ohio State University) have used computer simulations to address this question. They have numerically studied the evolution of one-solar-mass star systems using 230 different sets of starting conditions. They followed the disk of gas and matter around a new star as it developed planets from protoplanets (which they call “oligarchs”) and the smaller “planetesimal” chunks of orbiting matter until stable orbits are reached. The calculations spanned a system time period of about five billion years. The planet-formation scenario used consisted of three phases: (1) the runaway accretion of protoplanets from the primordial disk of planetesimals; (2) the slower growth of oligarchs from these protoplanets as they consume neighboring planetesimals and each other; and (3) the chaotic or giant impact phase that is reached when the mass in residual planetesimals is less than that in the protoplanets and the oligarchs’ orbits began to cross and resonate. The phase 3 behavior resembles the Nice Scenario (described in the March 2010 AV) but is somewhat less violent because the oligarch masses are smaller.

The calculations are focused on planet formation beyond the “ice line”, an adjustable parameter of the calculations (varied from a = 2.7 to 5 AU) corresponding to the orbital radius at which ambient water is a solid, increasing the probability of planet formation. The calculations also vary the starting oligarch number (2 to 12) and oligarch spacing, as well as the initial oligarch masses (0.44 to 3.63 Earth-masses) and the mass of ice initially resident in the disk (10 to 35 Earth-masses). Some 230 different simulations were run for five billion years (model time), enabling certain conclusions and generalizations to be proposed, based on the results.

One conclusion that one can draw from the calculations is that “oligarch swapping” is common, and the closest-in oligarch at the start of the process does not always end up as the innermost planet. When only two oligarchs are present, each has about a 50% chance of ending up as the inner planet. Sometimes, particularly when more than two initial oligarchs are present, one or more of them may be ejected from the system. The inner oligarch in all cases migrates inward from the ice line, typically becoming the most massive planet of the system and moving inward by more than 3 AU, most often settling in an orbit between 1.2 and 1.9 AU. In our Solar System that would be roughly at the orbit of Mars (1.6 AU). A massive planet so close to the small inner planets (not included in the planet-formation simulation) would be expected to cause disruption of orbits.

The role of inner planets was investigated in two sets of runs by putting analogs of Venus and Earth with appropriate masses in orbits at 0.7 and 1.0 AU and observing the effects and orbit stability. It was found that while the presence of these inner planets had little effect on outer planet formation beyond the ice line, the effect of the outer planets on the inner ones was significant. In all 10 runs of one simulation, the “Earth” and “Venus” analogs collided after 15 to 70 million years, leaving a single planet of a few Earth-masses in an orbit around 0.8 AU. The conclusion from this is that in the most probable scenario, in which no gas giants form, planetary systems with multiple inner planets are unlikely. With no gas giants, you would get only one crack at having an Earth-like planet.

The authors concluded by considering the future testability of their results. They considered the chances that existing planet-detection techniques and proposed space missions might detect planets of the masses and orbits predicted by their calculations. In particular, they consider ground-based Doppler and microlensing detection and the space missions Kepler and the space interferometry mission SIM-Lite. They concluded that the Doppler technique could detect none of the predicted planets. Microlensing studies at large ground-based telescopes might be able to detect the half of the predicted planets having orbits with a less than 6 AU. The Kepler and SIM-Lite missions are less sensitive, but might detect roughly a third of the predicted planets with a less than 2.5 AU. In other words, we can expect the predictions of the calculations to be tested in the next few years, primarily with ground-based microlensing techniques.

From the point of view of science fiction, the message of these calculations is a bit dismaying. Our own Solar System is not a model that we expect to find repeated elsewhere in the galaxy. It is the unlikely product of gas giant formation followed by a resonant period of chaotic Late Heavy Bombardment that happened to place Jupiter at 5.2 AU. This was far enough out to leave the inner system relatively unperturbed, so that Venus, Earth, and Mars could form and have stable orbits in the inner region.

The more likely scenario is that no gas giants form. Instead, a set of outer planets with masses less than that of Uranus form, the largest of which, with 10 or so Earth-masses, orbits at about 1.5 AU. This probably leaves room for only one inner planet, which may or may not have a mass, orbit, and water and heavy metal content appropriate to be Earth-like and to support life. The universe is a difficult and hostile place for life, and only a multiple series of lucky accidents prepared the Earth as a cradle for life.

We would be well advised to take better care of our Cradle.

AV Columns Online: Electronic reprints of over 150 “The Alternate View” columns by John G. Cramer, previously published in Analog, are available online at: http://www.npl.washington.edu/av.

References:

Detection of Extrasolar Planets:

“The Keck Planet Search: Detectability and the Minimum Mass and Orbital Period Distribution of Extrasolar Planets,” A. Cumming, R.P. Butler, G.W. Marcy, S.S. Vogt, J.T. Wright, and D.A. Fischer, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 120, 531—554 (2008).

See also The Catalog of Nearby Exoplanets, http://www.exoplanets.org

Computer Simulations of Outer Planet Formation:

“The Invisible Majority: Evolution and Detection of Outer Planetary Systems without Gas Giants,” A.W. Mann, E. Gaidos, and B.S. Gaudi; arXiv e-print: 1007.2881v1.

Copyright © 2010 John G. Cramer

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THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

Don Sakers

This being the December issue, it’s the time of year when everyone is thinking about gift giving. And for a lot of Analog readers, giving gifts means giving books and other stuff to read. Naturally, you want to give science fiction—what better way to spread good will?

The single best gift for any SF reader is, of course, a subscription to Analog. If you want a book for someone who’s already an Analog subscriber, I’ve reviewed many fine titles over the past year. But suppose you have family or friends who aren’t exactly Analog-type readers? (Don’t be ashamed, so does everyone.) In that case, I have some good books here that you can give with confidence. And who knows? You might want to read some of them yourself.

Unwind

Neal Shusterman

Simon & Schuster, 352 pages,

$8.99 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-4169-1205-7

Genre: Young Adult SF

For the teen reader on your list, you can’t do much better than Unwind. In addition to being a great adventure story, this is science fiction in the best tradition. After a bitter civil war over the issue of abortion, a compromise was reached in the so-called “Bill of Life.” Life is sacred and abortion is strictly illegal. However, between the ages of 13 and 18, unwanted children can be retroactively aborted, at which time their organs are harvested to keep others alive. This process is called “unwinding.”

The story introduces us to three teens who are due for unwinding. Risa is an orphan girl at an orphanage with budget problems; unwinding her is one way of reducing costs. Lev, son of strict religionists, has known all his life that he will be unwound. And Connor is a mischievous boy whose parents just want to be rid of the trouble.

Fleeing their fate, these three kids find each other and set out to elude authorities and somehow survive until they turn 18 and escape unwinding.

Shusterman is an old hand at young adult SF and fantasy; he is a great storyteller and his characters ring completely true. His exploration of the social implications of unwinding is worthy of Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth. Unwind is gripping, disturbing, and thought-provoking. Smart teens will love it, and even adults can get a lot out of the book.

The War That Came Early: West and East

Harry Turtledove

Del Rey, 436 pages, $27.00 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 978-0-345-49184-8

Genre: Alternate History

Series: War That Came Early 2

For the military history buff (or even the straight history fan), Harry Turtledove is a sure bet. Here, the emperor of alternate history returns to territory he’s mined before: World War II. In Hitler’s War, the first book in this series, Hitler started the war in 1938 with an attack on Czechoslovakia, rather than in 1939 attacking Poland. In fact, as the German army conquers Holland, Belgium, and northern France, Poland becomes a German ally—as does Spain, under a different leader than Franco.

West and East takes up the story where the previous volume left off, with Allied forces successfully defending Paris and German-Polish forces bogged down in Russia. In his usual style, Turtledove shows us the unfolding of his alternate history through a variety of sympathetic and well-drawn characters: American soldier Pete McGill in Japanese-controlled Singapore, American Peggy Druce marooned in Germany, the German Jewish family the Goldmans, and a host of combatants on both sides. Throughout the book, the main question becomes: when will America enter the war?

For someone who hasn’t read the first book, East and West stands on its own. Turtledove is a master at making each book in a series readable without familiarity with earlier volumes; you can trust him.

Just as the best SF can be enjoyed even by a reader not familiar with all the details of cutting-edge science, East and West is a book that one can enjoy without knowing Chamberlain from Khrushchev or Byelorussia from Belgium. At the same time, a history buff with an encyclopedic knowledge of the war will be delighted at all the references and speculations.

The Passage

Justin Cronin

Ballantine, 786 pages, $27.00 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 978-0-345-50496-8

Genres: Post-Apocalyptic, Literary

If you have a friend or family member who is of a literary bent, do I have a book for you!

In literary circles, the hot buzzword is “post-apocalyptic.” Post-Apocalyptic literary fiction traces its lineage back to George Stewart’s 1949 book Earth Abides, but only became respectable and popular when Cormac McCarthy won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for The Road. (What’s that? You say science fiction was there decades before, that we had pretty much mined out the post-apocalyptic story by the mid-1980s? Yeah, but those books and stories weren’t Serious, you see. Literary fiction is Serious and Meaningful, don’tcha know?)

The Passage is Serious and Meaningful enough to please any literary fiction reader, yet a good enough story for even Analog’s more experienced readers to get a kick out of. The book is set in the standard Century After the Disaster, in this case, with a vampire-creating plague developed by scientists working in a secret government lab (oh, when will they ever learn?). All that’s left of normal humanity is a small, walled colony off in the woods.

Then, walking out of the woods as if nothing is wrong, comes a teenage girl. Does she bring salvation, or the end of everything?

Okay, it’s fun to have a good laugh at the literary folks getting excited over stories that were old news in SF last century, but the fact is that The Passage is a good story, well-written and filled with believable characters and plenty of well-imagined detail—over 750 pages of it! Give it to your literary friends, and maybe in the ensuing dialogue you can slip in the fact that Theodore Sturgeon was already there 60 (gasp) years ago.

After America

John Birmingham

Del Rey, 480 pages, $26.00

ISBN: 978-0-345-50291-9

Genres: Post-Apocalyptic, Techno-Thriller

Series: Without Warning 2

Another post-apocalyptic, this one aimed at the techno-thriller crowd who made Tom Clancy and Dale Brown household names. Birmingham has fused SF and techno-thrillers before, in his Axis of Time series (in which a U.S. Navy ship from 2021 time-travels back to 1942 and settles that whole World War II unpleasantness with great dispatch), so he’s no stranger to this territory.

In the first book, Without Warning, a mysterious energy wave devastates nearly the entire continental United States in March 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. The rest of the book is a rather fun romp through a world in which the U.S. no longer exists as a superpower, the resettlement of America, and the rise of engineer James Kipper to the post of U.S. President.

After America continues the fun. President Kipper has his plate full with pirates, carpet-baggers, an incomprehensible military, and a Texas despot who has gone and seceded from the Union. Meanwhile, a cast of characters across the world deals with rogue agents, international criminals, and other lowlifes.

Neither Without Warning or After America are too heavy on the military acronym-speak that occurs in most techno-thrillers (although an occasional M249 SAW gunner or MPAT round does sneak in), so they’re pretty accessible. Birmingham is Australian, and there’s enough wry Aussie tongue-in-cheek to keep any reader amused, even if the politics of post-apocalyptic survival aren’t quite enough.

The Ocean Dark

Jack Rogan

Ballantine, 368 pages, $7.99 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-345-52072-2

Genre: SF/Horror

Just a couple of decades ago, horror fiction was considered to be (no pun intended) a dying field. Things got so bad that Stephen King was about the only writer making money in horror, and even he was telling people that he didn’t write horror anymore. Fortunately there has been a resurgence, and nowadays horror fiction is quite healthy.

The line dividing SF from horror has always been a porous one; take out the supernatural element, throw in a mad scientist or two, and you’ve got a horror story that’s borderline SF. But recently there’s been more than the usual amount of cross-fertilization between the two fields; readers on both sides are getting more accustomed to having horror and SF interpenetrate.

If you have a horror reader on your shopping list, do them a favor and give them The Ocean Dark.

It starts out so innocently, as they always do. Tori Austin, a woman on the run, takes a job with a shipping company and ships out of Miami on board the container ship Antoinette. The ship is a rusty old bucket filled with mysterious containers and unsettling crewmen. Gradually it dawns on Tori that things are not as they seem: there’s gun-smuggling going on. Tori finds FBI agent Rachel Voss working undercover on the ship, trying to track down the bad guys.

When the Antoinette makes an unscheduled stop at an uncharted Caribbean island, Tori and Rachel expect a latter-day Tortuga, but the story takes a more dramatic turn. There are these creatures, you see ... ocean-dwelling vampiric creatures, the source of the legends of sirens.

Enter scientist Alena Boudreau and her grandson David, the only people to have survived an encounter with the sirens. They join up with Tori and Rachel and suddenly the four of them are on the run, hunted by these critters and desperate to survive.

The three things that make horror stories good are unusual threats, interesting locales, and good characters. The Ocean Dark has all three in abundance. It’s refreshing to see a horror novel with so many strong women as main characters; gone are the days when the woman’s job was to scream and faint in the monster’s clutches (and good riddance!). There’s enough science to give the sirens a justification, and the resolution is nicely satisfying. To top it off, The Ocean Dark succeeds in the one indispensable job of any horror story: it’s scary.

Blood Law

Jeannie Holmes

Dell, 400 pages, $7.99

ISBN: 978-0-553-59267-2

Genre: Paranormal Romance

It’s possible that you might want a gift for a romance reader. I don’t think I’m off base in assuming that romances are a bit outside the comfort range of the average Analog reader. If you’re picturing Barbara Cartland, Danielle Steel, and lurid Harlequin paperbacks, don’t worry—this isn’t going to hurt anywhere near as much as you fear.

So far we’ve had viral vampires in The Passage and aquatic vampires in The Ocean Dark; now you’re going to have to bear with me as we take a cautious step into paranormal romance territory. It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been watching popular culture that vampires are big these days. We’ve been fairly insulated inside the safe confines of the SF/fantasy fields, but the fact is that international treaties now mandate that 7 out of 10 books published must contain at least one vampire. Paranormal romance authors have been doing more than their part so that SF writers don’t have to.

Truth is, there are many different ways to write vampires, and some of them are much more palatable than others.

Take Alexandra (“Alex”) Sabian, for example. She’s a vampire ... but she’s also an enforcer with the FBPI (the Federal Bureau of Preternatural Investigators). To escape the pressures of the big-city preternatural crime scene, she transfers to a quiet Mississippi town where half the 6,000-odd population are vampires. Things aren’t as bucolic as she hopes, though: the local sheriff is a vampire-hating bigot, and there are a lot of tensions between the humans and the vampires.

When those tensions begin to erupt in a series of gruesome murders of innocent vampires, Alex calls the home office for backup. They send the worst person possible: Varik Baudelaire, who just happens to be Alex’s ex-boyfriend. In the course of catching the vampire-killers, typical romantic difficulties ensue between Alex and Varik.

There’s enough of a love story here to interest any romance reader, but there’s much more. Jeannie Holmes does a masterful job of imagining and depicting the implications of a society in which vampires are another group in the multicultural stew. She uses many of the same tools and techniques as an SF writer exploring a premise (as Shusterman did in Unwind, for example). Alex Sabian is a great character, and she’s slated to return next year in a sequel.

Spread the love: Give Blood Law to your favorite romance reader. You will be thanked.

Nights of Villjamur

Mark Charan Newton

Spectra, 438 pages, $26.00

ISBN: 978-0-345-52084-5

Genre: Dying Earth

Series: Legends of the Red Sun 1

From H.G. Wells to Jack Vance and Michael Moorcock to Arthur C. Clarke, many writers have set stories at the End of Time, when a dying red sun hangs in the sky, the world is crumbling to an end, and the boundaries between science and magic are blurred. It’s always interesting to argue whether these stories are SF or fantasy.

For our purposes right now, it doesn’t matter. If you know any fantasy fans and you want to give them a good book, Nights of Villjamur fits the bill perfectly.

Villjamur is a city on an alien world, a world that is slowly dying in an all-encompassing ice age. The city is inhabited by a number of different species: humans, the long-lived rumel, the avian garuda, and banshees (who are just disturbing). Conditions outside the city are worsening, to the point that refugees surround the city while more continue to pour into the area. Villjamur, once the capital of Empire, is now the last city in the world.

The Emperor’s oldest daughter, Jamur Rika, becomes Queen and, with the help of her younger sister Jamur Eir, struggles to deal with the rising chaos. There is corruption, and conspiracies, and hidden identities. There are murders and investigations. There are military threats from outside the city’s walls—possibly even from beyond the planet. It’s all a delicious, decadent mess.

Newton is a superb guide to this intricate, absorbing world. Villjamur is one of those imagined places that very quickly becomes real. The characters are varied and interesting, especially the rumel investigator Rumex Jeryd. The politics and personal relationships are fascinating, and the story doesn’t get bogged down in them the way so many epic fantasies do. A dozen pages in and the reader is caught; 437 pages in and the reader is wondering why there isn’t any more. (Relax, this one is the first in a series. There’s more coming.)

Science fiction? Fantasy? Don’t worry about it. Readers of both will be happy.

And that’s it for this year’s gift suggestions. Safe and happy holidays, and may the new year be a rewarding one for all.

Copyright © Don Sakers

Don Sakers is the author of A Rose From Old Terra and Dance for the Ivory Madonna. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Anthony Lewis

14–17 January 2011

ARISIA 2011 (Boston area SF conference) at Weston Boston Waterfront Hotel. Writer Guest of Honor: Kelley Armstrong; Artist Guest of Honor; Josh Simpson; Fan Guest of Honor: René Walling; Webcomic Guest of Honor: Shaenon Garrity. Membership: $50 until 31 December 2010, $60 thereafter and at the door, students (13-25) $25. Info: www.arisia.org; info@arisia.org; PO Box 391596, Cambridge, MA 02139.

11–13 February 2011

CORFLU 28 (Fanzine fan conference) at The Domain Hotel, Sunnyvale, CA. Attending: USD60, GBP40, EUR55, AUD75, CAD65; Supporting: USD10, GBP5, EUR10, AUD12, CAD10. Info: http://corflu.org/registration.html; CorFlu28@gmail.com; CorFlu 28, 962 West Weddell Dr. 15, Sunnyvale, CA 94043 OR Claire Brialey, 59 Shirley Road, Croydon, Surrey CR0 7ES, UK (UK and European registration—GBP only).

18–20 February 2011

BOSKONE 48 (New England Regional SF conference) at Boston Westin Waterfront Hotel. Guest of Honor: Charles Stross; Official Artist: Gregory Manchess; Special Guest: Charlaine Harris; Featured Filker: Erica Neely. Membership: $49 until 18 January 2011; more thereafter and at the door. Info: www.nesfa.org/boskone; info-b48@boskone.org; (617) 776-3243 (FAX); Boskone 48, PO Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701.

18–20 February 2011

CONDFW X (Dallas/Fort Worth SF conference) at Crowne Plaza Suites, Dallas, TX. Guests of Honor: Jack McDevitt, Tim Powers, Brandon Sanderson. Membership: at the door $35/$15 adult/child 3-day; $20/$10 adult /child 1-day. Info: http://www.condfw.org/; info@condfw.org; ConDFW, 750 South Main, Suite 150, PMB 14, Keller, TX 76248.

25–27 February 2011

CONDOR (San Diego area SF conference) at Town and Country Resort Hotel, San Diego, CA. Theme: “Putting the science in science fiction.” Guest of Honor: Gregory Benford. Membership: $40 until 31 December 2010; $45 until 16 February 2011; $50 at the door; kids (13-17) $20; kids 12 and under, in tow free with paying adult. Info: http://condorcon.org/html/mainmenu.html; ConDor, P.O. Box 15771, San Diego, CA 92175-5771.

17–21 August 2011

RENOVATION (69th World Science Fiction Convention) at Reno-Sparks Convention Center, Reno, Nevada. Guests of Honor: Ellen Asher, Charles N. Brown, Tim Powers, Boris Vallejo. Membership from 1 October 2010 until some later date (see website for latest details): Attending adult: $180; Attending 17 to 21: $100; Attending 0 to 16: $75; Supporting: $50. [Ages as of 17 August 2011]. This is the SF universe’s annual get-together. Professionals and readers from all over the world will be in attendance. Talks, panels, films, fancy dress competition—the works. Nominate and vote for the Hugos. Info: http://www.renovationsf.org/, info@renovationsf.org, PO Box 13278, Portland, OR 97213-0278. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/RenovationThe-69th-World-Science-Fiction-Convention/112169025477179?ref=ts; LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/renovationsf/

Copyright © 2010 Anthony Lewis

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BRASS TACKS

Dear Stan,

Thanks for printing my letter, and for the factual correction on “bahiana.” Thanks also for recounting your math-class experience (similar to many of my experiences in school) in “The Halo Handicap.” Many of the folks I know—many of whom read Analog—find it hard to believe that any teacher could teach as poorly and wrongly as some of the teachers I’ve had; when they read your similar experience, they may at least find it possible to believe that, yes, this is routinely done to children in our culture. (Is it routinely done to children in other cultures? Are they, too, routinely told that their conceptual leaps should have waited for next year? I do not know—I would very much like to know, and I would like even more to know how and why any culture gets the idea that it should do this to children.)

In this issue (September 2010) “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” leaves me feeling more wonder and amazement than I’ve felt from an Analog story in years. (This contrasts to Analog’s editorials and nonfiction, which routinely amaze me.)

“Pupa” pleased me, too, in large part for its smooth handling of a difficulty common in science fiction writing (how to create an alien name that’s unusual enough to seem plausibly alien, without being impossibly difficult for the Terran—and often English-speaking and monolingual—reader?) but even more for an element it shared with “Leviathan”: the effect on non-humans of various human ideas (specifically, ideas of freedom and self-determination). SF is full of stories where humans learn important things from aliens who—it seems—have no need whatsoever to learn anything correspondingly important from us: it is good to see the tables turned. After all—as far as we know—Analog’s readers are all humans. Readers enjoy seeing their own species have a thing or two to teach the rest of the cosmos. Come to think of it, a third story in this issue—“Spludge”—also uses that same notion.

Another tale, “Red Letter Day,” deserves some kind of award from whoever gives out awards for the best new twist on time-travel.

And “Eight Miles” was a Victorian marvel in miniature. As promised, the tale left me unsure that it hadn’t really happened.

Kate Gladstone

Dear Dr. Schmidt,

Your editorial in the September issue, “The Halo Handicap,” was interesting and well considered—up to a point. Toyota Motors was a good example of mistakes made by folks with a long history of not making them. Recently (early June), Major League Baseball provided another example. A pitcher for the Detroit Tigers was one out away from completing a perfect game. Then the 27th batter hit a routine ground ball and was thrown out at first. But the umpire screwed up and called him safe.

Predictably, this umpire suffered a fate similar to what you described for Toyota, and for your long-ago schoolteacher. Expected to be perfect, the ump (who seems to have a history of making reliably good calls) made a perfectly human mistake, and had to endure scorn, ridicule, and regrets that would never have been visited on someone who screwed up routinely. Worse, his mistake was made at the most unfortunate time, so its consequences were uncommonly dramatic. If the same thing had happened in, say, the middle of the third inning, then thoughts about a perfect game would never have been an issue. The bad call would have been just like others that are made often enough, and the pitcher might have been thrilled to throw a one-hit game. Timing and circumstances can change the magnitude of mistakes in ways way out of proportion to the mistakes themselves.

So our expectations, along with timing and circumstance, can quickly turn good people into bums. And, as you observed, it doesn’t seem fair to hold mistakes more strongly against those who don’t make many. Even more important, it’s seriously unwise to attempt to draw conclusions from too few data.

But it’s natural and healthy to notice and wonder when something happens that seems unlikely. And if disciplined minds find themselves with too few data, they don’t just refuse to draw conclusions. They go looking for more data. The first question that comes to my mind when I see an unexpected mistake is “Why?” Yes, mistakes just happen sometimes. Maybe that’s all there is to it. But maybe not.

A good teacher stomps on a good student at the exact moment when that student has done something a good teacher should praise and encourage? That seems very unlikely, unless there were other factors at work. Maybe this teacher wasn’t really that good, and had a history of demanding compliance at the expense of learning, but the student in question had just never encountered or recognized this weakness in the teacher before. Maybe the teacher had some personal problems on her mind, and would have snapped at anything out of the ordinary on that particular day. Maybe the teacher had prior experience with students who liked to jump ahead, to show off things they really didn’t understand, and who needed stern discipline to avoid letting misguided self-confidence derail their learning the basics of division with remainders. Maybe she was just going with the odds when she barked at you.

There might have been good reasons, or innocent ones, or sinister motives, or something else. It’s those possibilities, I think, or at least the questions about what other data might exist, which often bring extra attention to mistakes that come from unexpected sources.

Were Toyota’s quality problems really just mistakes of the kind that are to be expected because no company is perfect? Perhaps. Probably. But Toyota does have that history—that long, long record of building outstanding cars. They know how to avoid mistakes, or at least to find and correct them before they’re delivered to customers. If there really are problems with unintended acceleration, that means someone designed something with flaws, and others manufactured a flawed design, and still others allowed it to pass tests and inspections, and someone else, who heard the earliest questions or complaints from customers, failed to raise a red flag (at least publicly). That’s a lot of mistakes! Any one or two of them might have been unremarkable. But all of them at once? Not impossible, of course; but it still raises questions and demands more data.

If the computer in my home office shut down suddenly, and a light bulb in my bedroom burned out, and my toaster caught fire in the kitchen, all at once, it might be just an unlikely set of coincidences. But I’d still wonder if there was something wrong with the entire electrical system, or maybe with the incoming power to my home. (Unless, of course, the computer was frequently flaky, the light bulb was old, and the toaster was a fire hazard anyway. Then my expectations would be low, and I’d just count myself lucky the whole house didn’t burn down.) What appears an unlikely set of coincidences might actually be evidence of a common, systemic problem.

If a car maker can build uncommonly good cars for years and years, and then make an unlikely combination of mistakes, maybe that means that Toyota has systemic problems, as well. As you said, it would be minor news if a company with a poor quality record had encountered the same problems. But we know from experience that car makers with chronic quality problems usually have systemic problems too. Incompetent management, short-term thinking, contentious labor relations, etc. And if we understand the causal relationship between systems and products in other cases, it’s only reasonable to wonder (wonder, not just assume or conclude) if Toyota might be following a general widespread pattern of behavior, rather than deviating from the specific pattern we thought we’d seen in their past performance.

If a teacher does something that seems out of character, that might be just an anomalous point on her overall data chart. Or it might be that there were flaws in the data we’d previously noted, and that our conclusions and expectations needed to be reconsidered.

Please understand, I don’t claim to know the answers to any of these questions. I just think the questions themselves are proper and necessary. Unlikely events are sometimes just signs that we’re not very good at knowing what’s likely. And they deserve special attention, if only for that reason.

I liked the example of the baseball umpire for a couple reasons. First, it was clear and simple, with no controversy about what actually happened. The video replays left no doubt. Second, it offered a look at the “Halo Handicap” in reverse. Perfect games are so rare in baseball that even coming close to one is a big deal. Perfection wasn’t expected, so when it got to be late in the game, and a bit of baseball history seemed within reach, the whole world (except maybe the opposing team) was rooting for the pitcher to make it. And even when he came up short (officially, the ump’s call was law, right or wrong, and the batter was safe at first), he was still given popular credit for accomplishing something special.

So our tendency to attach special importance to unlikely events can turn people into heroes, too. And maybe the only real handicap at work is our own natural longing for perfection in any form. A car maker we can trust. A teacher who always gets it right. A pitcher throwing a perfect game. Those things move us. They inspire us. We love almost anything that even comes close. And, of course, we’re hurt and disappointed when others fall short of what we hope for, or when our own hopes and dreams turn out to be unrealistic.

But I’m not sure that’s a problem. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s just the way it should be.

Kirk Gordon

You make some good, thoughtful observations. But to clarify my personal example, my teacher did not “snap” or “bark”—she simply marked my answer wrong, as calmly and professionally as if it really were, which it wasn’t.

As for the Toyota example, while I’m not familiar with its intimate details, I do know that the “chain of errors” you describe is not particularly improbable or dependent on multiple people making mistakes they should have been able to recognize. If you make a design change in a complicated mechanism, it can sometimes cause a failure mode that nobody would anticipate on the basis of past experience and that doesn’t show up until the mechanism has been in use for a prolonged period. Once that has happened a number of times, designers and inspectors will know new things to watch for in the future—but the first time, they can’t and won’t know that a problem is going to develop.

Stan,

I think there might be a slight fallacy in your thinking, regarding “The Halo Handicap” in the September issue of Analog. The idea that we sort of forgive people who routinely make mistakes for making another one versus people who don’t when they make one, is actually quite rational. It is not whether the two entities deserve to be treated the same or differently but a case of what we expect of them. I would not likely buy a ticket on an airline that routinely lost aircraft on cross-country flights but would not hesitate to fly one that had a perfect record. So I would be less than enamored if the latter crashed. It has to do with what I expect from the source.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand what you’re saying. In 1951, I attended a punched card accounting school at Fort Benjamin Harrison near Indianapolis, Indiana as a member of the U.S. Army. On the final exam, I answered a question that asked: How many punched card positions can this machine compare on at one time? The correct answer was sixteen, but I answered thirty-two. Why? I had read the programming instruction manual outside of class and had learned that the two sixteen position comparators in the machine could be coupled to provide a thirty-two position effect for some operations.

When I questioned the instructor about this anomaly, I was told that, “technically my answer was true, but I hadn’t been taught that in class.” I was upset of course, since that was the only incorrect answer on my final exam. In that case, I still ended up on what is usually referred to as the “Dean’s List,” and my CO was quite impressed, though he gave me a royal chewing out for not mentioning it when I returned to my unit.

Years later when my ire had slackened a bit, I realized the instructor was correct. That’s part of the problem of being an instructor. Perhaps the class should have been warned that examinations following a course of instruction are testing the student’s retention of the content of the course, not knowledge gained elsewhere or outside opinions. But this practice of warning students is rarely followed. I suspect instructors don’t usually like to look like their protecting themselves from malpractice lawsuits.

Leonard R. Cook

Goleta, CA

I can’t agree that your instructor was “correct.”If the question was how many can the machine do and it could do 32, the correct answer was 32, whether he had taught you that or not. I’ve seldom heard such a blatant admission that a test was designed to measure parroting ability rather than relevant knowledge, and I see no pedagogical justification for such a practice—especially without the warning you suggest.

Copyright © 2010 Stanley Schmidt

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The Man From Downstream

By Shane Tourtellotte

Marcia Balbi tapped the shoulder of her freedman, just as the wagon rolled through the Porta Superior town gate. “I’ll get off here, Alastor,” Marcia said. “You collect the...

Home Is Where the Hub Is

By Christopher L. Bennett

Nashira Wing fidgeted with the straps of her slinky dress as she signaled at the door of Suite 47. She practically jumped out of said dress when the door opened and a huge, slavering carnivore thrust...

Primum Non Nocere

H.G. Stratmann

The tall trim man in the cream-colored coat stood looking down at me with a sinister smile. His bristly graying hair and piercing eyes enhanced an air of professional superiority and power. He toyed with the knot of his tie as if eager to start his work. Sardonic lips curled around ivory teeth as he...

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The Man From Downstream

Is quitting ever the wisest course?

By Shane Tourtellotte

Marcia Balbi tapped the shoulder of her freedman, just as the wagon rolled through the Porta Superior town gate. “I’ll get off here, Alastor,” Marcia said. “You collect the new plough and drive it home. I’ll walk back.”

“Yes, domina,” said Alastor, unruffled; he was used to this arrangement. He reined in the oxen long enough for Marcia to step down, then drove straight ahead. Marcia cinched up her stola to keep its hem out of the dust and mire and made a right turn toward the familiar workshop, the clang of metal already reaching her ears.

Nobody greeted her at the door, as everyone was at the main worktable, hammering away at a perplexing gridiron of metal bars. A smaller table near her held a collection of gears and a clock face, so there was little doubt about today’s project. Remnants of earlier work stood on shelves along the walls: a crank and boiling chamber for the steam-driven mill that ground out his fire-powders, pots of binding glue, and a few discarded hand molds for printing type. In the far corner, a pendulum clock marked the time, unheard over the din.

She took a step closer and finally caught one laborer’s eye. He lowered the hammer he had been about to swing, and leaned toward the older man nearby who had still not noticed. “Quintus Julius, you have a visitor.”

“You mean a customer? Then—aah.”

Quintus Julius Americus did not look like an extraordinary man. He wore a smudged tunic and sandals, like his hired workmen. He stood something over medium height, but his shoulders slumped and his gray hair was starting to thin. A rustic beard covered his chin, its gray fading toward white. He had shaved for his recent trip to Roma, where fashion only abided a bare chin, but began regrowing his beard the day he returned home. He did not look like anyone who would appear on a marble bust, even if some people—including Marcia—thought he might deserve it.

“Marcia, salve,” Americus said with a smile. “What brings you here today?”

“I came into town with Alastor,” Marcia said. “He’s collecting our new plough. There won’t be room in the cart for me on his return, so I thought you could see me home.”

The workers, used to such obvious pretenses, all encouraged Americus with their usual familiarity to help his lady. “Nice try, boys,” Americus said, “but we still have work. It’s not tenth hour yet, and you’re not getting—”

A chime interrupted him. The clock in the corner, pendulum swinging in its stately arc, had just rung the hour. The laborers all laughed, Marcia nearly joining. Americus could only yield with good humor. “That’s why we’re building this one: better accuracy. Very well, let’s clean up the shop, then we can all go home.”

Soon after, he and Marcia were out of town, walking south on the footpath along the down-sloping Via Flaminia toward her farm. His gait was still stiff, maybe slower than usual. She made no comment, as always, merely adjusting her own pace and drawing her mantle over her head against the sun.

Marcia talked briefly of her day’s work, mostly preparing for sowing of the winter wheat, then asked about his day. Americus spoke of a few curious customers and a funny story one of his workers had told, but stuck largely with the new clock project. He always had new ideas.

He went on smoothly, few promptings needed to encourage the flow. That gave Marcia a chance to listen close, hoping to catch some clues to the puzzles that still surrounded this man after more than two years.

The greatest mystery was why this man, of all people, was so terribly sad.

He hid it, of course. He hid many things, most concealed better than his misery. Some of them hidden very well indeed.

He arrived in the spring of 726 ab urbe condita: a northbound wanderer on the Via Flaminia, past middle age, weary beneath a heavy pack, and obviously not from these parts. His dusty tunic was of excellent material, better than someone who needed to walk would usually wear. It wasn’t local linen. Might it be Egyptian?

He spied her watching him from the garden and approached with an upraised hand. “Domina, salve. I am a traveler, named Americus. Might I speak to the lord of the house?”

His name was strange, his Latin peculiar, and his accent barbarian. His assumption was also mistaken. “The house is mine, viator,” she said, standing and brushing dirt off her hands. “My husband is dead.”

“Oh, my apologies, lady. May I ask if you are willing to take on a boarder?” His lips gave a curious curl. “I have come as far as I need to.”

Marcia didn’t have much to offer a boarder. The farm had been just adequate to support the household when Aulus had been alive. After he joined Caesar Octavianus’s army—and perished of disease at Actium—she had struggled terribly to support herself, the two children, and their slave.

That was all the more reason to get some money while she could. It might preserve her a while from needing to sell out to the big local landholders—or to accept one of the opportunistic suitors she had had. That might be worth admitting a stranger into the household, with all its unknowable risks.

But she did not fear this man. Something about his fancy tunic ... before she had married, Marcia’s family cognomen had been Ralla. This literally meant a tunic of fine fabric, just like his. She didn’t believe strongly in omens, having seen so few in her life, but this one ...

She named a price as high as she dared, three sestertii a day, and prepared to haggle. Instead, Americus rummaged through his pack and produced a small, shining ingot, stamped with unfamiliar characters.

“Will this suffice for the first four months?” he asked. Stunned, Marcia quickly said yes and held out her hands. The ingot was genuine silver, and if later she learned he had underpaid about a tenth, she still thought herself far ahead in the bargain.

Despite his oddness, Americus adapted himself to the household. Granted, he seemed unaccustomed to rising at dawn or earlier, to the limited variety of the food, or even to having his main meal properly at midday. He was used to an easier, richer life. Yet he humbly adjusted himself to their ways, not something Marcia would expect of most rich folk.

After two days of settling in, he finally made his first excursion into town early one morning. “Well, I’m off to Narnia,” he told her with that curious smile of his. The name of the town was always an unspoken joke with him, and Marcia had never learned the secret.

More surprises sprang out of his pack in Narnia. He had a large stash of goods that he began trading for money. Rumors soon began flying that he was a thief, plying stolen wares upon them. The rich folk of Narnia and the surrounding towns he visited didn’t believe it or didn’t care. They gladly bought his cinnamon sticks, his silks, his pearls. They hesitated at the dye—it didn’t have the distinctive smell of true Tyrian purple—but the color was right, and someone finally bought it. Probably Quintus Seius Avitus, parading himself about like a Senator.

Then there were those little blue pills Americus sold to Gnaeus Labienus Flaccus. What a scandal that was—as long as the supply held out. What Gnaeus Labienus then tried in place of the Blue Fives, as he called them, was a worse scandal, and not nearly as enjoyable.

Americus could have lived very well on his proceeds. Instead, he rented that modest workshop on the edge of town, and didn’t even think of leaving Marcia’s farmhouse. He said he liked the peace of the countryside, liked walking to work. Not even now, when his legs labored, did he rethink that.

Soon, he and the skilled freedmen he hired for the workshop began producing things. Remarkable things.

“It’s because metals expand a little as they grow warmer,” Americus was saying, explaining why the new pendulum for his clocks was so complicated. “Clocks will thus run a little slower in summer. But different metals, like iron and lead, expand at different rates. I can use the lead rods, running up, to balance out the iron rods running down, and the pendulum will stay the same length, however hot or cold.”

“I ... see.” Marcia said nothing for a moment, working it out in her head. “Could you use this somehow to make your clocks run properly? Twelve hours from sunrise to sunset, whatever the season?”

Americus grimaced. He had this rigid, almost Greek notion of hours being the same duration year-round, as opposed to the more natural Roman concept. “I couldn’t make that work,” he said, “even with this innovation. But this will keep time much more precisely than any water clock or hour candle ever invented.”

His grimace worsened. Marcia knew it was his legs. She made an exaggerated brush of her forehead, nearly dislodging her mantle. “I’ve gotten warm. Could we sit at the milestone and have a drink?”

“Certainly, Marcia.”

Another hundred short paces brought them to the fifty-fifth milestone. He sat on the stone bench left there for travelers, while Marcia got them water from the nearby fountain, fed by Narnia’s local springs. They refreshed themselves in comfortable silence, before Marcia got them walking again. Americus grunted as he stood.

“I’d gladly stay longer,” Marcia said, “but the Sun keeps its own time.”

Americus smirked. “A fair point. Let’s go.”

She might tease him, but she truly respected his mechanical clock. It was one of his earliest inventions, one that sold well to the richer families of Umbria and Tuscania. This new variety might revive that market.

She heard the clop of hooves and the growl of wheels behind them. Knowing those sounds intimately, she was calling out “You have the plough, Alastor?” before she had turned her head.

“Certainly, domina.” It sat gently swaying in the back. “There’s even a little space left for the two of you, if you wish.”

“No, go on home. We’ll be there soon.” Americus watched the oxen trudge past with only a hint of regret.

That was another of Americus’ innovations, of course, with both its wheels and the iron sheeting laid over the wood blade. He sold several, for rather low prices, before letting some local carpenters and ironworkers build the design for a share of their takings. Marcia was sure they were cheating him, and just as sure that Americus knew and didn’t care. It was enough, apparently, to endear himself strongly to the local farmers.

He did not endear himself to local scribes with his printing press, but he had anticipated their resistance. He argued to the scribes that they were naturals for typesetting jobs: literate, intelligent, good at fine work and at avoiding mistakes. His calculated flattery didn’t convince them all, but it convinced enough. Many of them even adopted his novel ideas about adding spaces between words and marks after sentences, to simplify reading.

Nobody embraced his notions for new letters, the bottom-curved I and rounded V, but he took that rebuff in good humor.

Thanks to his flourishing printing shops, books were much more plentiful, and cheaper. Marcia had even bought a couple herself, without his prodding. She was not used to reading for pleasure, but she had gotten through Cicero’s Philippics, mainly on her shared detestation of Antony.

His printing method didn’t work properly on scrolls, but Americus had a solution. He was so proud of his codex, flat pages bound together at the margins. Marcia almost hated to show him an old ledger of Aulus’ from the Pharsalus campaign. Julius Caesar had beaten Americus to this idea, though now it could have a wider application.

That hadn’t been Americus’ sole disappointment, or the worst. He had so much faith in his steam engines, and if he had troubles building them on the grand scale he envisioned, they still worked well on smaller scales. His richer customers were glad to use them for curiosities, toys to amuse themselves and impress their friends, but his vision to use them for works on a massive scale went unappreciated.

And why should he have expected otherwise? Why build a hulking, boiling, bashing, scalding machine to do the work a couple of dozen slaves could do, and probably better for their having some measure of intelligence?

Americus threw himself against that pragmatic barrier, railed against it, and could not budge it. The rebuff left him stumped and dismayed—until he decided that if competition against slave muscle demanded more power, he’d produce more power.

Once again, he had planned ahead. He sank much of his early earnings into scouring the countryside to find and buy nitrum, an obscure mineral. Once he had managed to purify it to his liking—he called the result “salt-stone”—he combined his stocks with sulfur and charcoal, mixing them in a bronze mill powered by one of his disdained steam engines.

The result on the day of his first experiment was a thunderclap that, in time, reached the ears of the Princeps himself.

Enough of this fire-powder could blast through earth or even stone, doing the work of hundreds or thousands of laborers in a flash of flame. That people could use, for road-building, quarrying, a host of constructive purposes. Destructive ones as well: It could change the art of siege-craft forever.

Americus could not produce it fast enough, for lack of nitrum. He set up a strange alternative source that involved aging urine and wood ashes, but it needed almost a year to produce anything. Fortunately, someone simplified the matter. Augustus bought up the secrets of fire-powder as a state monopoly, for a rich bounty of money—and what was far more, the citizenship.

Americus went to Roma a few months ago, along with the jumped-up Quintus Seius Avitus as his nominal sponsor, to meet the Princeps and receive the citizenship from those majestic hands. He came home with his new name: Quintus to honor his sponsor, Julius to honor Augustus for granting him the citizenship—and Americus as his cognomen, as that was who he was.

What he didn’t bring home was happiness. He should have been in exaltation on his return to Narnia, but Marcia saw through the mask of his appearance, to the despondency beneath.

Americus’ talk had wound down, much like his clocks if neglected. “What are your next plans,” Marcia asked him, “after you master this problem?”

Such thoughts usually raised his mood, but this time it did little. He had a couple of notions—using glass and silver to make an improved mirror, attaching a steam engine to a cart to drive it without animal power—but they sounded perfunctory. “And we know how nobody likes my steam machines, except for playthings,” he grumbled.

Americus usually brimmed with ideas, and with enthusiasm for them. His joy was in imagining and creating. It was when a project ended that the melancholy asserted itself, no less painful in the wake of success than of failure. As it was taking him now, in the letdown after his day’s work.

None too soon, they were home. She left him at the front door, with a cheerfulness she feared was wasted on him, to do the rounds of the farm. He would probably retreat to his bedroom and work on his plans and diagrams. Maybe that would let him feel better.

She found Alastor and the new plough in the shed, and gave the new implement her inspection and approval. She sent him to the pen to feed their chickens, pigs, and sheep—they could be shorn soon—and went to the olive grove herself.

The old trees wouldn’t need harvesting for more than a month, so she paid attention to the new ones. Alastor had freshly manured them this morning, and they were all growing well. It would be another three years before they began yielding, and when they did, the olives and their oil would bring good prices.

Americus’ rent payments had risen steadily, always on his initiative. The money had first been a buffer against destitution, then a stepping-stone to something akin to prosperity. Marcia used the money cautiously—who could know when Americus might depart?—but made steady improvements on the farm. Better tools, more sheep for wool and cheese, a few other animals for the luxury of meat, and of course the olive saplings added to the four old trees. It took away land for grain, but the days when her family needed to depend on the farm for all its food were fading into the past.

The only trouble came when Marcia bought Eudokia.

A second slave was a great help in the household, but it left Americus disturbed, almost affronted. It was not long before he quietly began offering to buy both Eudokia and Alastor, with the intent of freeing them. His notions about slavery were in some ways admirable, but also shockingly naïve.

Still, both of them had good characters, not unworthy of liberty. She finally reached a quiet compromise with her boarder. Marcia would do the freeing, as was proper for the head of a household, but Americus would provide the money she would pay them as their wages. He overpaid, naturally, but that hadn’t yet made them indolen or insolent. They worked as hard as before, and if Marcia knew anything about men and women, she’d have a marriage to celebrate soon.

She made her way back to the house, with plans to set the children to a few last chores before vespern a. She found them in the atrium playing, to her slight surprise, with Americus. It was his game, of course: using letter tiles to spell words across a demarcated board.

Marcilla pointed at the tiles she and her elder brother were playing together. “It spells ‘volup,’ Aulus. Play it.”

“There’s no place to play it. We need to cross somewhere. And don’t tell him our—oh, Mother.”

Marcia looked down sternly. “Is this how you finish your work, children?”

“They told me they finished their chores before we got home,” Americus said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have played with them.”

“We did, mamma, we really did,” Marcilla said. “I swept the atrium, and Aulus brought in the f irewood and water, and everything.”

Marcia looked along the atrium floor, taking her time. She couldn’t have them think her indulgence came easily. “Very well, but be sure to finish the game before we eat.” Her decision brought cries of thankful joy from the children, and a small nod from Americus.

He had applied his covert persuasion again regarding their education. On most local farms, a boy of nine and a girl of seven would be working most of the day, with maybe a couple hours for someone in the family to give them lessons. Americus thought they should be schooled in town, offering to pay the teacher’s fees—and for Marcilla as much as young Aulus, which was a pleasant surprise to Marcia.

She told him no. And he let the matter drop. He didn’t coerce her; he didn’t use his money as a cudgel. She changed her answer days later, giving the assent she always meant to, once she was convinced that he did not mean to impose himself as the new master of the family. Most men she knew would, in like circumstances, but Americus granted Marcia her control, and her dignity.

He had never even made any kind of advance on her. As she looked back, watching him play his ingenious little teaching game with her children, she regretted that, and not for the first time.

She knew Americus had once had a wife, and that she had died, violently. Perhaps the wounds that inflicted made him unwilling to yield to Venus again. It could even be the reason for his greater melancholy, but she did not think so. One got on with life—at least she had after losing her Aulus.

Marcia helped Eudokia in the kitchen, doing those little things she had meant Marcilla to do. The game in the atrium reached its end just as the clock—one of Americus’, naturally—chimed the hour. She brought out the vegetable bowl as young Aulus hurried to the table. “And did you win, son?”

“No, Mother. Americus is too smart.”

Marcilla joined him. “Very smart. But we’ll do better than him someday. Someday soon.”

Americus patted their shoulders. “I’m sure you will.” He put on a smile, but Marcia saw straight through it. She could do nothing for his pain now, though, except possibly distract it.

Vespern a was mainly what was left over from noontime cena. Plenty of garden vegetables filled the bowls, while one plate held the last scraps of cold chicken. Everyone sat at the table together, their distinctions of age and station set aside.

Even with her raised circumstances, Marcia had never cared to buy couches for dining. It would cost something of the closeness: of having Eudokia nearby as she traded gentle words with Alastor, of seeing her children working together to pick individual favorites from the vegetable bowl, and of Americus’ quiet, benign company at her right hand.

The meal passed with its familiar pleasantness. Americus seemed as happy as everyone else at the table. Perhaps he was happy, for this moment. Marcia still had not plumbed the sorrow beneath, but there was always tomorrow. She offered him the chicken platter, thinking to keep this moment happy.

Marcia ate her jentaculum of bread and cheese quietly in her bedroom as dawn crept through the window shutters. Aulus and Marcilla were already off to Narnia for school, though she didn’t recall Americus walking with them, as he usually did. Perhaps he had left earlier.

She was finishing off her last crust when she heard the sob. She listened close and heard it again. No muffling could disguise whence it issued, or from whom. Her first thought was to try to ignore this unexpected breakdown—but a more determined thought moved her.

Marcia strode into the atrium, waving away both Alastor and Eudokia before they could approach his room. She swept aside the doorway curtain and looked down at Americus, sitting on his bed, his fists balled up against his eyes.

“I don’t need anything, Eudokia,” he moaned. “Leave me.”

“I will not.”

He started at the unexpected voice and seemed to shrink, mortified at his exposure. “Forgive me, my Marcia. I’ve had a bad morning, that is all.”

“It’s more than one morning.” She stepped inside, keeping her voice low, however useless it might be in keeping the servants from eavesdropping. “You’ve suffered for longer than that. Much longer. It’s time I knew why.”

Americus said nothing, hoping for some escape Marcia wasn’t going to grant him. “I could demand to know as your landlady, but,” she said, her hand outstretched, “I’d prefer to hear it as your friend.”

His pain and bewilderment faded, and he began to stir. “Yes. I suppose it’s finally time.” He rose unsteadily, taking Marcia’s hand. “I can explain this best down by the river. Will you walk there with me?”

“Certainly, my Americus.” She glanced past him, to his cluttered worktable. “But would you go ahead of me? I have to give Alastor and Eudokia instructions. I’ll catch up as soon as I can.”

“Very well.” Americus walked out of the room, and Marcia quickly snatched up the bread he had left uneaten on his table. Once he was out the front door, she hastened to the kitchen, where the servants had withdrawn.

“You,” she snapped, pointing to Alastor, “why are you idling, with the fields unplowed? And Eudokia, help him somehow. Pull up stones, or weed the garden, or anything, but out of this house!” They fled the resurgence of her old temper as fast as they could manage.

Once they were safely gone, Marcia opened the larder to take out a little cake of far grain, and then a second. She went to the hearth, and the lararium next to it, the statuette standing within its cupboard. Carefully, she placed a cake inside the hearth, taking care not to smother the fire with her offerings. The familiar smoke and odor rose into her nostrils.

Marcia made sacrifice to the lar familiaris, the household guardian spirit, most mornings, but today she had a particular boon to ask. She put in the second far cake, then took Americus’ wedge of bread, tore it in half, and fed one piece to the flame. She then knelt before the lar’s cupboard. Her prayers were a cascading jumble, but the same desire moved them throughout.

“... Show me how to help him ... he has enriched our household, allowed us to show you greater honor ... part of this familia, as though born here ... grant him your protection ... grant me the wisdom to help him ...” She continued her devotions as long as she dared, before starting off after Americus.

Across the Via Flaminia, the land sloped, steeply in places, down to the Nar. She soon spied Americus, skirting the woods of oak and chestnut that formed the south border of Marcus Titurius Sabinus’ land. She reached him just ahead of a sharper slope.

He looked curiously at her hand, where she realized she was still carrying part of his bread. “I thought you might want it,” she said, offering it. He took the bread, but only tucked it inside his tunic.

“I suppose you’re ready to talk, not eat.” He replied with a silent, pensive nod. The ground beneath their feet turned steeper. “Will you take my arm?” Marcia offered.

Americus declined, determined to traverse the ground unaided. His face twitched with pain and the effort to suppress it. Finally, with a sigh, he spoke. “You’ve told me a few times how clever you think me with devices and such.”

“You needn’t be falsely modest with me. You’re a master of invention. Even Augustus knows this.”

“Very well, I’m a master. In fact, you probably think me capable of building any contraption you can imagine.”

“Well ... perhaps not anything,” Marcia said, “but I wouldn’t say it was impossible.”

Americus chuckled, a dry and stony sound. “An excellent choice of words, my dear Marcia. For back home—quite close to Roma, actually—I had some part in building a device many people thought utterly impossible.”

He hesitated, only pretending to concentrate on his footing to justify his silence. Marcia had to prod him. “Tell me.”

Americus looked over, ready to read her face. “A time-traveling machine.”

Marcia stopped. Sensations rushed through her, wonder and awe and enlightenment, but no doubt, not even an instant’s worth. This was power worthy of a god, even if Americus was far from a god.

Americus diffidently turned away. He looked down at his hands, slapped one with the other, then shook his head as though disappointed in their solidity. “I wasn’t the true inventor, of course,” he said, starting to walk again. “Others formulated the theories. I was only building things to their specifications.”

“But still ... so where are you from? I mean, when?”

That elicited a smile. “The ‘where’ was not far outside Roma, as I said. I was actually born elsewhere, a place no Roman has ever traveled.”

“Called America, I presume.”

“Precisely. But I met ... the woman I would marry, and followed her to Italia.” His voice quavered. “Without her, I never would have been involved with the time machine.”

“And the ‘when’?”

“If you can believe it, something over two thousand years in your future.” The number staggered her, but again there was no doubt. “It’s an age of a million remarkable inventions, and I have only copied a few of the older and more practical ones, here and now. But the time machine was the greatest of them all.”

“Truly, yours was an age of wonders. But not of perfection, was it? If it could not keep Sofia safe?”

He looked sharply at her. “No. It wasn’t. Let’s head to that rock there,” he said, pointing to a flat boulder wide enough for both of them to sit.

“I’m sorry I hurt you, Americus, but you did say once she was killed by bandits. Or was that a story you used, to conceal the impossible truth?”

“It was ... close enough to truth. Sofia was murdered, and I suffered. I suffered terribly.” He swallowed. “And then a week after Sofia died, I saw her.”

They reached the rock, with an excellent view of the Nar River below. Marcia put her arm around his shoulders as he lowered himself gingerly, and let it linger there a second as she sat beside him. “Thank you,” he said absently.

“I knew it was a hallucination, of course. I went to my doctor for an explanation. She did tests, and then more tests, and then she told me what I had: the earliest stages of Lewy body dementia.”

Marcia shuddered. She did not know what a Lewy was, but she understood dementia.

“Hallucinations are a classic symptom. They gave her a lucky clue. I had a couple years before serious problems would develop—more serious than being haunted by my dead wife—but of all our miracles, a cure still wasn’t one of them. I’m going to fall apart, physically and mentally, until I’m helpless and senile.

“It’s a terrible way to die, and it scared me so much. I wanted to die, right then, to end the agonies I had and the agonies coming.” His head sank. “But I couldn’t. I just was not capable.”

The bald statement disturbed Marcia. She turned away, to hide the flush of disgust, even of contempt, his admission brought. He noticed anyway.

“Yes, perhaps that makes me a coward. Or perhaps my Christian upbringing has deeper roots than I realized.”

Marcia turned back. “Christian?”

“Something after your time. A widespread religion in the future, one of whose teachings is of the evil and futility of suicide. Faith in our God lets us bear whatever may come.”

“So, like the Stoics, then?”

“No. Well, maybe a little, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t overcome my nature. It left me trapped.”

In the midst of pitying Americus, Marcia thought of her own Aulus. He had proved his bravery before age twenty, fighting for Julius Caesar. His service gained him his land, which brought him his wife, and then his children. And all of those were not enough to hold him when Octavian and Antony began to clash. Withholding his service felt like an act of cowardice, despite what he had done before. So he went, and he died.

Strange, for her to realize that brave Aulus and fearful Americus were the same in this way. Each man had his nature, and neither could escape it. So she could not truly despise Americus for a coward or a Christian or whatever.

“I needed a way to escape,” Americus said, “any way. And almost like a vision, I saw this one: coming to this time and place. I knew the language and the history; I was in Italia, so the spatial displacement was no great problem. I took a few days to prepare, gathering goods to support me and my work, collecting plans for my inventions, paper and pens—”

“But why?” This sudden torrent had left Marcia baffled. “Did you hope to find a cure here?” she asked, and his face instantly showed he hadn’t. “So what could this accomplish?”

His smile was as sad as his earlier weeping. “To achieve indirectly what I could not do by my own hand. To end my life mercifully—by preventing myself from ever having existed.”

This was nonsense. From any other person, she would take these words as a token of madness. Only because this was Americus was she incredulous instead of purely disbelieving.

He saw the incredulity, accepting it as if expected. “I will try to explain. Take a look at the Nar.”

The river was still partly shadowed by the hillside, turning its olive-gray waters to a clouded darkness. The Nar flowed south passing the town, then curved west near where they sat, running down to a small shipyard they could just see past the woods. Birds followed the course of the river, well above the water but below Marcia and Americus.

He stretched out his arm. “Say that today is there, below us. My era would be down there, by the docks. Time in its natural course flows from the past,” he said, waving toward Narnia, “to the present, to the future.”

“And you found a way to walk upstream along the bank.”

“More like a leap, but yes. I came here and I began carving a new channel for the river, intending to change its course. Your time didn’t originally have all the inventions I’ve brought to it, so the flow of time, of the river, is now different. Once time is running in its new course, the old riverbed would dry up. The future from which I came would be gone. I would never have been.”

Marcia envisioned what he was saying, imagining the Nar cutting through the hillside on the opposite bank and off into the distance. “Does time truly work that way?”

He sighed. “Nobody really knows. The scienti—” He grimaced. “Latin doesn’t have the word, or really the concept. Call them ‘natural philosophers,’ instead. They were able to design the time machine, make it work, without fully understanding why it worked, what physical laws it followed. That’s part of why nobody went through before I did: Everyone feared what effects it might cause in their present.”

“But you knew? Or thought you did?”

“Most of us thought we knew. There were many congenial mealtime arguments about which overarching theory of time travel was the true one. I had my ideas, but they dismissed them. I wasn’t one of them; I didn’t understand.” He pounded a fist into his thigh, a startling burst of violence. “But their theories were such violations of common sense!”

“More so than causing yourself never to have existed?”

Americus winced at the sharp question, but made no reproach. “Judge for yourself, my Marcia. Their most popular theory was that, instead of diverting the river, my actions would instead make two branches, coexisting.

“You’re about to say that makes sense—but the same theory states that this same thing happens every time some decision is made in the world. When we sat here instead of walking farther down the valley; when you came into my room rather than letting me weep in privacy.” He pointed down to a black bird cruising above the river. “When that jackdaw flew straight instead of turning left or right. Down to the tiniest instance where something could happen one way or another, it happens both ways.

“And each time, the river splits, and splits again, and again, into millions of millions of channels. The waters constantly dividing and re-dividing, until there’s less than a drop for each time-stream—and that drop is itself dividing even as you look at it. Either that, or there are infinite waters gushing from nowhere to fill each riverbed. Absurdity, whichever way you turn.”

He slumped, drained from his outburst. “I am not a genius, Marcia, just a practical man. I didn’t have the great ideas, I just built what other geniuses had imagined. Much like I’ve done here.” Marcia took this in somberly. “So I’m not so loftily intelligent that I can make myself believe garbage like that.”

Marcia covered her mouth, faking a cough to cover a laugh. “I do find it hard to credit—but then I am practical like you. Surely I am no genius. But I wonder ...”

“Yes?”

“When engineers change a river’s course, it’s against the natural inclination of the river. It wants to flow where it is. Could time act the same way? Could it seek its old bed, guided by ... by whatever’s underneath, its own hills and valleys? Could it regain its course, before the shipyard downstream, so you would remain alive?” Americus stared. Marcia turned aside. “I’m sorry if that’s terribly stupid.”

“Marcia, no.” He took both her hands. “That theory, regression to the original, an idea the experts struggle with, you’ve just intuitively grasped after five minutes’ exposure to temporal theory. Why, next you’ll be reinventing Polchinski’s paradox.”

“I—what—?”

“Oh, don’t mind me. I’m babbling. Anyway, all my inventions should have prevented that. We should have diverged so far from the original history that all my changes couldn’t be lost or forgotten.

“But ... it hasn’t worked that way. Maybe my works will vanish into history, or maybe making a second branch of time doesn’t erase me from the first. I’ll never know why, but I was wrong.” His voice cracked. “And I’m trapped.”

“You mean you cannot return home?” Marcia said. “Has your machine broken? Can you not repair it?”

“It didn’t travel with me. It doesn’t carry you like a wagon, it hurls you like a catapult. Somebody back home could have located me and pulled me back, but that would have happened by now. I’m never going back. I’ll be here until I die—and through everything that comes before then.”

He was trembling, barely holding himself together. Marcia waited quietly, not daring to speak any unwise word that would shatter him. He finally spoke in a whisper. “I saw her this morning, Marcia. I saw Sofia.”

Marcia nodded gravely. “I’m sorry your hallucinations have come again.”

“Oh, I’ve had them these past two years. I’ve learned to recognize and ignore them.” His voice was rising; the shakes were worsening. “But I couldn’t remember—” He turned his eyes on Marcia, and tears were welling there. “Not until you spoke it yourself—I couldn’t—oh, Marcia, I couldn’t remember my wife’s name!”

It all came pouring out, the anguish and terror and helplessness. Marcia took him in her arms, laying his head on her lap, stroking him as she might Marcilla after a nightmare. And she began to think.

“It’s going to come on me fast now,” he sobbed. “I’ve had the muscle stiffness slowing me down, and now the tremors are coming. Soon I’ll be confused and delusional—or maybe I am already. How would I know?”

“You aren’t. Trust me.” The notion that his stories of time-traveling were a grand delusion flashed briefly through her mind before she killed it.

“But I will be. Nothing can stop it, hard as I tried.” A short, hideous laugh escaped him. “I came so far, and it got me nowhere.”

He lapsed back into tears. Despite her quiet disappointment that he could not be stronger, Marcia let him cry himself out. She needed the time to compose her own emotions, and her thoughts. When she was as sure of herself as she could be, she spoke.

“Quintus Julius Americus, are you asking me to help you die?”

He jolted upright, pulling out of her arms. He managed to compose himself and start to summon some bravery, but a gentle pat stopped him before he could speak.

“No, I see you aren’t, and I’ll admit I’m relieved. So that leaves us with one good solution, Americus. I’ll have to marry you.”

She shocked him again, but happily with none of the revulsion of last time. He needed three tries before he could stammer out, “What can you mean?”

“I mean you will need someone to look after you in your decline, someone attentive and caring. Who else but me? But I am too practical a woman not to seek fair compensation.”

Americus looked ready to bolt; perhaps it was only his stiff legs that kept him seated. “There’s no need for you to suffer on my account, Marcia. When the time comes, I will depart as I came. I’ll leave you no burden to bear.”

“Oh, Americus,” Marcia said, “for all your intelligence, you still don’t understand us Romans. You’ve been a part of my household for over two years. We are in hospitium together; we have obligations to each other that cannot be cut loose casually. Certainly not when I won’t let them be.” She waited as he digested her words, and his itch to flee weakened.

“I would care for you no matter what,” she continued, “but I appeal to that obligation between us, and to your sense of fairness. That, I know, is very strong. I trust, entirely, that you would never exploit the power you had over me as my husband.”

He reached to clasp her hands. “I wouldn’t. Of course not.” He looked down at his hands, surprised at what they had done, though he didn’t let go. “But what else would you expect of me?”

Marcia was halfway home. He hadn’t said no, she now needed to bring him to a yes. She opted for candor, knowing he’d respect that. “It’s simple. You would draw up a will, in which we would inherit everything. The money, the inventions, all of it. We would never fear poverty again. That is my price.”

Americus pondered this. “I do know something of Roman law. As my wife, you could only inherit a third of my estate.”

“That’s right. A third for me, a third for Aulus, and a third for Marcilla. Simple enough.”

He nodded. “Yes. But then what about Alastor and Eudokia? And my workers?”

“Oh—” She stopped herself just short of an unwise outburst. “You’ve been generous to them in the past, and I’m sure you’ll be likewise in the future. But on this point, I must insist.” She shifted her hands so they now clutched his. “I’ve hard a hard life, sometimes very hard. I’ve learned I must be practical—even now, when it would be so easy to give way.”

The spoken plea lingered in her eyes. The surprise that came to Americus this time was a slow dawning. “My Marcia, I ... I never knew. I never imagined.”

“Come now, you must at least have imagined. There’s been gossip in Narnia these two years, gossip I never really tried to deny.”

“Oh, I heard that. I ignored it. Resentful women, maybe a few disappointed men.”

Marcia smiled at that. “I have refused a few men in the last five years. But not today.”

Americus began to smile, but it drained away. “I’m not sure what kind of a husband I could be to you.”

“You would be the man you’ve always been. Kind to me, good with my children, excellent at—oh, wait. You mean sex, don’t you?”

He spluttered, turning red. Marcia was amused at his reacting like a sheltered maiden, until she remembered his trading days. “Those Blue Fives. You wish you had them back now, don’t you?”

“I—I—I confess, Marcia, I had those pills because I needed them myself, while Sofia was alive. Now ...” That smile, unbidden, crept back. “The change in diet, I suppose, has done me some good.”

Marcia didn’t hide her smile, letting it shine like a lamp in a doorway, beckoning. He looked into her eyes with the warmth of a kindling desire ... until he turned to the ground, trying to look introspective.

“My Americus, what holds you back?” She almost spoke Sofia’s name, but Marcia sensed she could not defeat this woman in a direct fight. She chose a more oblique approach. “Is it that you are forbidden to remarry?” She held his hand tight in both of hers. “Does your stern Christian god also demand that a widower must remain alone?”

Americus raised his eyes toward the far distance. A minute passed in silence, then another. Marcia almost missed it when he began to squeeze her hand tighter.

“No. He does not.”

The wedding came within the month, on the earliest auspicious day. Marcia lent her tunica recta and flame-colored veil to Eudokia for her ceremony two nundinae later. And none too soon: Eudokia began getting sick in the mornings almost before the last garlands had been taken down.

Much of the daily routine did not change. Americus walked into Narnia most mornings to work, making incremental improvements on his creations. Marcia arranged to be in town a few more afternoons to walk home with him. Now that she knew what she was looking for, she did see the progress of his infirmity: a twitch of the hand, a blank expression, a snappish reply.

She did not see the despair.

Perhaps the passing joys of a newlywed were making him forget his pain. Or perhaps all he had needed was someone else to support and fortify him, the one thing he had lost at the worst time. Whatever the case, he had gained from being a husband again.

This balanced the scales, for Marcia could count herself satisfied to be a wife again. Sometimes very satisfied.

Which made it all the harder on the January day when he disappeared.

Nobody saw or heard him leave the house, and he never reached the workshop. By noon, Marcia had her servants, his workmen, and even some neighbors scouring town and country for him. She climbed down the valley, in the teeth of a biting cold wind, to search along the Nar herself.

Had a fit of confusion seized him, sending him wandering? Americus’s wits had been weakening at times, but not deserting him. She did not believe it.

Had his happiness been a sham, and he had finally mustered the courage to end himself? Now, while the pleasures of life still outweighed the pain? She could not believe it.

Marcia stopped next to a large flat rock and scanned the banks of the Nar from town to shipyard. She could see one walking figure far downstream, but that full head of black hair could not be Americus’. She called his name, but only the echoes answered.

A pair of jackdaws flew up the river, then separated, turning left and right. Her memory sparked, Marcia thought of that day again. Could it have happened? Could the river finally have diverged?

Impossible. He himself had conceded his mistake. Besides, what new change had he wrought in the last four months?

Marcia thought of Eudokia, how she was already showing. Her hand glided down her cloak, settling upon her belly. And she wondered.

She would wonder the rest of her days.

Copyright © 2010 Shane Tourtellotte

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Novelettes

Home Is Where the Hub Is

Is an obviously better way always the best choice?

By Christopher L. Bennett

Nashira Wing fidgeted with the straps of her slinky dress as she signaled at the door of Suite 47. She practically jumped out of said dress when the door opened and a huge, slavering carnivore thrust out its head. “Are you room service?” it said. “About time. I’m starving.” Several snaketongue tentacles darted out to sniff at her limbs. “Are the exposed parts the ones that will grow back? Don’t worry, my venom anesthetizes you.”

“Ahh, no,” Nashira said, regaining her aplomb. She stared down banal and pointless death every day; at least the sight of a huge hyperdentate mouth got the adrenaline flowing a bit. “Sorry, I must’ve hit the wrong button. I want Room 4.”

The beast—more properly, the Qhpong—reared its head and all its tongues back. “Oh, you must be David’s mating partner! Of course, I should’ve recognized the species. Hard to tell with your scent masked like that.”

“Yeah, we’re funny that way.”

The Qhpong looked her over again, with its eyes this time. “And so many exposed parts too. A pity. But never mind. I like that David. Such a polite fellow. And he smells delicious. You’re a lucky female.”

“I am? Um. Sure. Yes, I am.”

The Qhpong went back inside, muttering about calling room service and threatening to eat some of their parts without anesthesia. Nashira again hit the door signal, hoping that this time it would connect her to the right facet of the tesseract-shaped suite within. By now, thanks to the inept maintenance in this fleatrap hotel, virtually all of the suite’s other occupants had become aware of her frequent visits to David LaMacchia, and they’d become an object of gossip around Hubstation 3742. David liked it that way, but Nashira could do without the embarrassment.

This time, the dimensional interface worked properly and David answered. “Oh, great, you’re here!” The young, sandy-haired American ushered her in quickly, shut the door, and activated the small cubic room’s privacy field. His eyes went straight to her purse. “Is that it?”

Nashira glared. “What? No comment about the dress?”

“What? Oh, you look gorgeous,” he said absently. “Now, come on, let me see the module.”

Gorgeous? Nashira was too nonplussed to resist as David took the purse and rummaged through it, retrieving the gravitational sensor module she’d been smuggling aboard her Hubdiver ship for the past week. After a moment, she shook it off. Why should she care whether this feckless rube noticed her? She could do better any day of the week. Or she could if her arrangement with David didn’t require the pretense that their private meetings were of a personal nature. She sighed. What a waste of good perfume.

All David cared about, of course, was his quest to crack the secrets of the Hub and thereby prove humanity’s worth to interstellar civilization. Not that Nashira couldn’t sympathize with his goals; if it were possible to predict which entry vector into that bizarre hole in reality would lead to which point in the greater galaxy, she would no longer have to risk her life testing Hub vectors at random in the remote hope of finding a useful one. But what David saw as the fresh, unbiased perspective of a new, young species, Nashira saw only as terminal cluelessness.

And even David’s optimism could only take him so far. After a while, he groaned, tossing the instruments aside. “Still nothing.”

“Don’t tell me that still surprises you,” Nashira said. “I’ve made more slow dives this month than a base jumper on Phobos, but the transition’s still as good as instantaneous. And even if it weren’t, the Hub leaks signal from every radiating body within a hundred kiloparsecs. There’s no way to tease any data out of that wall-to-wall white noise. What, you think you’re the first person to try it this way in sixteen thousand years?”

“Nashira, if there were no chance, we wouldn’t have to put on this act. The fact that the Dosperhag want to stop us means there must be a way.”

“You mean the fact they tried to bloody kill us.” The Dosperhag were generous enough as a rule, sharing the Hub they’d discovered with the races of the greater galaxy. But they could afford to be, given the immense profits they made from their stake in the single means of faster-than-light travel in the known universe. If someone cracked the secret of the Hub and used it to create an alternate means of FTL travel, the Dospers would lose their position of privilege. So their benevolence had its limits, as David and Nashira had learned the hard way.

Nashira was startled by a chime at the door. “Oh, get that, will you?” David asked. “That’ll be Rynyan.”

“Rynyan!” Nashira raced to the entrance and yanked the Sosyryn inside, looking around furtively. “What are you doing here?” she hissed as she shut the door.

The tawny, leonine-faced biped absently preened his feathery mane. “David invited me.”

“What?! Nobody saw you, did they?”

“Oh, I just had a charming conversation with the Qhpong in Room 5. Don’t worry, I didn’t blow our cover; I told her I was here for a threesome.”

Nashira winced, cursing under her breath in Cantonese. Putting up with David was manageable, but it meant putting up with Rynyan as well. The obscenely wealthy Sosyryn race prided themselves on their generosity and competed ruthlessly to out-donate one another; funding hopeless causes like David’s was a particular mark of prestige. Nashira didn’t mind Rynyan’s generous bribes for smuggling David’s equipment, but she could do without his supercilious attitude and his relentless come-ons. And she still resented him for jumping the claim on the greatest find of her career, cheating her out of her one chance at escaping this life. Only the fact that he’d inadvertently saved her life in the process kept her from ending his. Having no concept of failure or deprivation, though, Rynyan kept on cheerfully flirting no matter how often she shot him down. At least David’s inability to accept failure was due to good old human self-delusion ... though he would call it hope.

Rynyan looked her over. “And she was right, you do look good enough to eat. What do you say we make me an honest Sosyryn? Although I could live with telling a small lie, if you’d rather we just had a twosome. Either way, I do need accurate details to post on my daily journal.”

Nashira stifled a scream, causing David to look up in alarm. “That’s it! Risking my arse is one thing, but my reputation can’t take any more of this!” She stormed to the door. “No more fake trysts. If you two want to scan the Hub any more, you’ll just have to come on a dive and take your bloody chances along with me.”

Perversely, predictably, David grinned at the prospect, leaping off the bed. “Great! I’ve been dying to get back into space! Can we go tomorrow?”

She should’ve known counting on David’s sanity was a mistake. “If you don’t mind risking instant and horrible deaths, sure.”

He shrugged. “You told me you scan for sabotage before every dive session now.”

“There may be other ways they can screw us.”

“Here at the Hub, with so many witnesses, they wouldn’t dare. And on the other end, they can’t do anything.” He smiled and took her hands. “Besides ... I trust you to take good care of us.”

Her heart raced, and she cursed herself. How did he always manage to get through her armor? She turned to Rynyan. “Don’t tell me—you’re coming along too. Even though we could die.”

“Oh, relax,” Rynyan replied glibly. “Death is something that happens to other people.”

The call from Dosp came at the worst possible moment for Mokak Vekredi. Had it been any other caller, he would have told them he was on vacation. But his job, and thus the survival of his large and growing family (growing at this very moment), depended on pleasing his superiors. So he had his companions (he’d trained himself not to think of them as his children, lest he slip up and confess the relationship in public) help him over to the quantelope tank and then strive to conduct the ongoing operation as silently as possible—though Vekredi himself was the one who would normally make the most noise. “I’m—I’m here, Morjepas,” he managed to get out, keeping his gasps to a minimum.

The quantelope turned its adorable little stubby-horned face toward Vekredi and spoke in a reedy Dosperhag voice, carried instantaneously across the light-hours from Dosp by the quantum link binding this ’lope to its entanglemate in Morjepas’s office. “Vekredi, are you all right?”

“Per-perfectly! Aah!” He was grateful the small purple creatures could only mimic the sounds their entanglemates heard and not reproduce the sights. “There’s ... unh ... nothing going on here! Nnn yaah!”

“You’re giving birth, aren’t you?”

“Why, sir!” he got out between grunts. “I have no comprehension ... what you mean. I’m simply doing ... paperwork.” The first baby came free and began emitting peeping cries. “Oh, pardon me, that’s a ... call I need to put on hold.” He gestured frantically at one of his companions to take the baby into the other room.

“Oh, please,” Morjepas said through the ’lope. “Everyone knows Verzhik are prolific breeders. You’re not fooling anyone.”

“Was there ... some specific reason you ... needed me, Morjepas?”

“It can wait a few hours.”

“No, really ... I’m not doing ... anything important.”

The quantelope sighed. “Very well, have it your way. It’s about your report that the human LaMacchia is taking dives with Scout Wing again.”

“Yes ... that is correct.”

“You’re permitting this?”

“I have no ... grounds for denying it. Aaah!” The second baby was reluctant to come out. Or maybe Vekredi was just too tense. This was an extremely private thing, only for Verzhik. Even the scrutiny of a quantelope was deeply humiliating.

“That’s true,” Morjepas said after a moment. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance their relationship is actually sexual?”

Vekredi’s cringe had nothing to do with his labor pains. What was private for Verzhik should be private for everyone, particularly for such disgustingly non-hermaphroditic creatures as humans. “I have no opinion.”

“Well, we’re fairly certain it’s a cover for his continued investigations of the Hub. The dimensional walls in his hotel suite are thin, and our agent there has heard no sounds consistent with human copulation.”

At this rate, Vekredi’s cringe muscles would be as sore as ... certain others. “Stipulated! Stipulated. What do you propose we do to deter them?”

“Now, Vekredi, you know that the Dosperhag officially have no objection to Hub research.”

“Of course.”

“So it has to look like an accident.”

Vekredi winced, for more reasons than one. He imagined the second baby was looking at him sullenly as another companion took it away. He hoped this call would end soon so he could begin nursing. “What do you have in mind?”

“The next time Scout Wing takes LaMacchia on a dive, assign her to the following Hub vector.” The quantelope recited a string of numbers. Vekredi called them up from his memory implant and reviewed the information.

“But Morjepas ... that’s a dormant vector! Two consecutive scouts disappeared there. The last was only ... twelve years ago.” If the danger had persisted for the five years between scouts, it was doubtful the Hub-point had drifted away from it since then. Procedure dictated waiting at least twenty years before a third attempt.

“Vekredi, you do understand the point of this exercise, don’t you?”

With a sigh, Vekredi said, “Yes, Morjepas. I’ll assign Scout Wing the vector.”

“I’m sorry about this, Mokak. Are you fond of Scout Wing?”

Vekredi pondered the question. “Actually, no.” The thought cheered him. Having to replace a Hubdiver ship and train a new scout would be a hassle. Such losses were part of the business, but it clashed with his orderly administrative impulses to bring them on deliberately. But being spared Nashira Wing’s unruly, disrespectful manner and her constant taunts about his alleged parenthood (he sighed as the third baby finally came out—only five more to go!) would be a definite consolation.

Humans. Nothing but trouble, the lot of them. And more of them keep infesting my nice orderly Hubstation. They breed like vermin, that’s the problem. He shuddered as the fourth baby made its way down the birth canal.

It was a long way from Hubstation 3742 to the Shell that contained the Hub itself. The inner habitat rings were reserved for the more prominent or ancient species within the Hub Network, while junior worlds like Earth got relegated to the more remote, crowded outer rings. A Hub scout like Nashira got priority clearance, but still it took a good twenty minutes for Nashira’s Hubdiver, the Starship Entropy, to reach the Shell. David didn’t mind, since it gave him plenty of time to drink in the gorgeous view of the galaxy’s Central Bulge filling half the sky.

The view within the Shell was almost as spectacular, a kilometers-wide spherical space filled with the elaborate tracks and launch rails that propelled ships on their finely calibrated dive vectors into the Hub itself at the center. David continued to be amazed at the precision of the Shell’s technology, necessary since the tiniest error in angle or velocity could send a ship to the wrong galaxy altogether; but he was glad he didn’t need it. His mission—well, Nashira’s mission, with him tagging along—was to deliberately take those unknown vectors that others tried to avoid. Which was so much cooler than sticking to the known routes. He just wished he could get Nashira to appreciate that. He’d switch places with her in a second—if he knew the first thing about piloting spaceships.

“I keep telling you, there’s nothing glamorous about it,” Nashira insisted. He hadn’t said anything; she must’ve seen the look in his eyes as he watched her working the controls. “I just punch in the numbers they assign me and hope they don’t come out in the middle of a star. I dive in, I climb out, I dive in again. I’m a bloody elevator operator.”

“Yeah, but what an elevator!” She glared, and David figured he should’ve refined that metaphor a little more.

The voice of Nashira’s supervisor came over the radio. “Please try to stick to the assigned vectors today, Scout Wing,” Vekredi said. “I’ve received more complaints about your ... improvisations. Any more and there will be penalties.”

“Shouldn’t you be on maternity leave, Kred?” Nashira asked. “Your office is no place for nursing babies.”

Indeed, David could hear peeping and suckling sounds over the speaker, followed by an offended snuffling from Vekredi. “Just ... follow the assigned schedule, Scout Wing! That is an order! Out.”

“How rude,” Rynyan said. “One should always be courteous to one’s inferiors.”

Nashira threw him a glare, then smirked. “That explains it, then. Nobody’s got more inferiority than Kred.”

“So you want to ditch the plan anyway?” David ventured.

Nashira grinned at him, a refreshing change from her usual scowls. “Just to screw with him?” She thought about it. “Nah. Not worth the penalties. Almost, though.” She punched in the first vector, and the launch rail obligingly maneuvered the Entropy into position. In the viewing wall, the ships and equipment within the Shell wheeled dizzyingly, but the Hub itself, that strange, faintly glowing pucker of spacetime that David’s eyes refused to focus on no matter how hard he tried, remained a fixed, unchanging point, the fulcrum around which galaxies revolved in more ways than one.

“Get your gizmos ready, we go in sixty,” Nashira said. She glanced over as David activated the gravity sensor. “I thought you’d given up on that.”

“I changed my mind. I was thinking about the Hub last night, how it’s the center of mass of the Milky Way, its satellite galaxies, and its dark-matter halo.”

Nashira sighed. “Just say ‘greater galaxy’ like everyone else.”

“Well, I thought about how an object acts like all its matter is concentrated at the center of mass. And the Hub acts like every point in the ... the greater galaxy is concentrated in it. I think there’s got to be a link there. Something to do with mass.”

“Congratulations,” Nashira said. “You’ve just discovered the first, most obvious theory that every civilization in history has come up with about the Hub. Only took you six weeks.”

“Well, maybe they just gave up on it too easily.”

“Or it’s a dead end. Everyone agrees it’s part of why the Hub exists, but it doesn’t explain the link between vectors and destinations. If it’s all clumped together, it should be random, not consistent for the same vector.” She stared at him. “How can you be determined to learn the Hub’s secrets and not know something this basic?”

“I didn’t want to be trapped by past assumptions.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, brilliant. This way you just repeat everyone else’s failures. That’s much better.”

“Or try something they never thought of.”

“I’ll give you that. No genius in history has ever thought like you. Fifteen seconds.”

David stared into the Hub, in awe of its cosmic centrality. Despite his outward confidence, Nashira’s words were sobering. How could he believe that a college dropout from the backwater of the galaxy could succeed where so many advanced civilizations had failed?

Because there are no backwaters, he reminded himself. Every point in nine galaxies is in there—all of them one, all of them equal. The Hub is inside me. I’m inside it. So I’m as worthy as anybody to figure it out.

“Here we go,” Nashira said. “Last chance to make your peace with the Universe.”

David smiled at her. “I’m good.” She blinked, genuinely surprised.

Then Rynyan ruined the mood. “No problem. The Universe and I are mutual fans.”

Nashira sighed as the ship thrust forward into the center of all things ...

And the alarms sounded. “Christ, we’re in a gravity well!”

“Of what?” David cried.

“Won’t matter unless we make orbital vee,” she said, regaining the calm of a seasoned pilot. The fusion engines fired, pressing them back in their seats. Whatever they were trying to orbit was behind them, out of sight, and Nashira was too busy to work the aft sensors. David took it upon himself to switch the view.

“Uhh ... Nashira?”

“In a mo.”

“But—Okay, whenever you’re ready.”

“All right,” Nashira said after a moment, looking up toward the display wall. “The ship can take it fro—Holy Christ on a cassowa ry!”

The planet below them was beautiful. Its sunlit half was shining blue oceans and vivid turquoise forests. Its nighttime half was festooned with city lights. The display wall called out thousands of satellites and stations in orbit. An inhabited, spacefaring civilization—the find of a lifetime for any Hub scout. “Nashira!” David cried. “This is—” “Don’t,” Nashira said. “This can’t be what it seems.”

“But look, it’s right there!”

“No, you don’t get it. A Hub scout’s lucky to make one major find in a lifetime. Two in as many months? No sodding way can that happen!”

“It’s random. It’s as likely as anything else.” He smiled. “Maybe Rynyan and I are good luck charms.”

“Rynyan.” She whirled on the Sosyryn. “Don’t you dare leave this cockpit! I will break your legs before I let you steal another claim!”

But Rynyan was staring at the planet on the display wall. “Much as I love it when you get physical with me, my dear, I think the Ziovris would be rather annoyed if I tried to stake a claim.”

“What have the Ziovris got to do with this?” Nashira asked. David recognized the name from news reports, a fairly prominent species in the Hub Network, but couldn’t recall the specifics.

“Oh, you know how they are about their property. It totally ruined my charity expedition here a few decades back. They nationalized all my donations! The Migration Bureau said they’d decide when and how to distribute it. So come tallying season I could only report one recipient from the whole expedition! It was a huge embarrassment. I was the laughing stock of all Rysos.” He smiled. “Luckily Vnebnil was struck by that asteroid the following year. A prime donating opportunity there, and I was quick to get in on the ground floor.”

Nashira glared at him. “I’m happy for you that all those people died so you could improve your social standing, but can we stay on topic? Where are we?”

“Why, the Ziovris homeworld, of course.”

Nashira stared at the world on the viewer. Then she dove for the controls and spent several minutes verifying Rynyan’s claim. “No, this ... this can’t be. I mean ... no way could I make a find this great!” She was starting to grin despite herself.

But David was confused. “How can it be a great find if it’s already in the Hub Network?”

“Damn, you really are from the middle of nowhere. And so’s the Ziovris Hubpoint. It’s thousands of AUs out in their cometary cloud. Months from here.”

“Terribly inconvenient,” Rynyan added. “Cold sleep simply ruins the sheen of my mane. That’s the other reason I wouldn’t want to claim this place. Oh, and the service? Simply terrible. I mean, sure, building a mega-structure out at the Hubpoint and mobilizing the whole population to move there can be distracting, but it’s simply no excuse for poor hospitality.”

Nashira rolled her eyes. “Mr. Sensitive here’s right about one thing. That remote Hubpoint’s been rough on the Ziovris. Uprooting their whole civilization, sinking all their resources into the move ... the strict rules they have to follow to keep that huge migration running smoothly ... it’s no way to live.” She beamed. “Can you imagine what it’ll mean to these people to gain a second Hubpoint practically right on their orbit?”

“Yeah,” David breathed. A Hubpoint was a species’ one and only link to the wealth and wonders of the galaxy. Hub contact had transformed Earth, bringing resources and technologies that offered greater prosperity than humanity had ever known—though far too gradually, at least until humanity could prove it had something to offer in return and become a genuine trading partner rather than a charity case. He recalled the long, expensive commute to Sol’s Hubpoint just outside Saturn’s orbit, and could understand why the Ziovris would be willing to relocate to their far more remote Hubpoint, as numerous other civilizations had in the past. But what might they give to be spared the trouble? “Nashira, this is great! You’ll be rich! No, better, you’ll be a hero!” Brightening, he reached out and grabbed her hand. “A human being finding something this important—Nashira, you’ve put us on the map!”

She blushed. “Well ... you’ll get your share of the fame too.”

“I don’t want fame for me. Just for humanity.”

“Typical.” She chuckled and didn’t seem to be in any hurry to pull away her hand.

Then the alarms sounded again. Nashira spun to the controls. “Incoming ship! It’s a military cruiser! They’ve got a laser lock on us, warning strength!”

“Quick, get us out of here!” Rynyan cried. “Especially me!”

“I can’t! We’ve waited too long, the return beam’s shut off! And there’s no time to signal for a new one!” That meant the Hubpoint was closed. They couldn’t go anywhere except on the Entropy’s fusion drive, which was far less powerful than the warship’s engines. “Bollocks!” Nashira cursed. “I knew this was too good to be true!”

A hail came in and Nashira accepted it promptly, not wishing to cause trouble. The being that appeared on the viewer had an upright body plan similar to a human’s or Sosyryn’s, but David could see other crew-beings in the background with four legs apiece, a forward-facing pair stacked atop a shorter rear-facing pair. Their skin was vivid blue and they bore elongated heads that resembled claw hammers from the side. “This is Commander Relniv of the regulatory enforcement vessel Mzinlix,” intoned the officer in the foreground. “Your presence in Ziovris orbital space is irregular, undocumented, and unauthorized. Identify your-selves and justify your departure from procedure.”

“This is Nashira Wing of the Hubdiver Starship Entropy. I’m a Hub scout, Commander.”

“No, you’re not. No arrivals from the Hubpoint are scheduled. And your craft is not equipped for a journey of that duration.”

“We didn’t come from that Hubpoint, Commander.” Nashira trembled with barely restrained excitement. “You’re recording this, right? Well, I hereby inform you that I, Nashira Wing, Hub scout Blue 662 Red 769—”

“Of Earth,” David interposed.

“—have just discovered a new Hubpoint in proximity to Ziovris’s orbit.”

Relniv stared. “What? No. You’ve discovered no such thing. I say again, justify your departure from procedure or—”

“No, ma’am, I swear.” How Nashira could tell Relniv was female was beyond David. “The Hubpoint’s closed now, but if you’ll just let me send a quantelope signal back to the Hub, they’ll reopen the vector and you can see the return beam for yourself.”

“No unauthorized communications will be permitted. I have the authorization to fi re upon you should you attempt it!”

“Um, excuse me,” David put in. “Hi. David LaMacchia, also of Earth. Don’t you see what this means, uh, ma’am? You have a Hubpoint right next to your planet now!”

“No,” Relniv interjected. “Just stop it. Cease these absurd claims at once.”

“I don’t get it,” David said. “I thought you’d be happy.”

Rynyan stepped forward. “Here, I know how to handle this.” He faced the Ziovris commander and gave her the Sosyryn equivalent of a smarmy grin. “Hello. I am Rynyan Zynara ad Surynyyyyyy’a, and I just want to say that whatever dole your government allots to you, it isn’t nearly enough, and I’d be happy to supplement it in exchange for your not shooting us. And may I also say you look very sexually desirable in that nice crisp uniform?”

“Rynyan!” Nashira pulled him away from the viewer and got in front of him. “Just ignore him, he’s not with us, really. Look, no tricks, no bribes, just let me send one little ’lope message, please.”

“The policy on intruders in Ziovris airspace is very clear—no communication allowed.”

“Why? Who could we contact that would hurt you? If there weren’t a known Hubpoint nearby, then—”

“Wait.” Relniv took on the distant look of someone listening to a commimplant. “I’ve received orders to secure your vessel and escort you to the surface. Do not attempt to disobey our instructions or the penalties will be severe.”

“Okay, okay. We don’t want any—”

“And you will discuss this with no one. ” Relniv paused, listening to her comm again. “What? Me? Sorry, I thought you meant ... no, of course I won’t discuss ... but why ...” She straightened. “Understood. Out.” She sighed, looking thoughtful, maybe confused. It was hard to read a new species’ expressions, but caution and hesitation could be recognized in most species’ body language. Another common manifestation was a startled jump, which Relniv performed when she noticed that Nashira and the others were still watching her. “You didn’t hear that!” she barked, and cut off the transmission.

Nashira was expecting a prison cell. So when Commander Relniv and her soldiers deposited them in a luxury hotel suite larger than Hubstation 3742’s entire scout staging area, lavishly appointed with all the comforts she could imagine, it put her far more on edge.

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Rynyan said once their escort had left them alone. “They expect me to stay here? I have tool sheds larger than this.”

“Maybe they finally figured out this is good news and they’re thanking us,” David said.

Sometimes Nashira almost envied the kid for his simple idealism. Unfortunately, in practice it meant he’d probably get himself or others killed if she didn’t babysit him constantly. “The way they made sure we couldn’t contact anybody? More like they’re fattening us up for the kill.”

“Maybe they want it to be a surprise?”

Nashira just rolled her eyes.

“He has a point,” Rynyan said. “News like this should be announced with proper pomp and ceremony. Music, parades, fireworks, gourmet feasts ... local females hurling themselves at the feet of the heroic discoverers ... ahhh. You know, the one good thing about my last visit was that those four legs allow for some very interesting positions.”

“That much could be arranged,” came a new voice. Nashira whirled. A fat, well-dressed Ziovris male stood in the doorway, flanked by Relniv and her guards. He had the look of a being that was well fed, lazy, prone to overindulgences of all kinds, and dependent on advanced medicine to ease the ravages of that lifestyle. “Stay outside,” he told Relniv.

“But, sir—”

He whirled on her, surprisingly fast for one of his bulk. “Did you say ‘but’?”

Relniv lowered her elongated head. “No, sir.”

“Of course you didn’t.” The fat male stepped inside, the door closing behind them. “Greetings. I am Cerou Gamrios, and on behalf of the Ziov Union I formally apologize for your cold welcome to Renziov. We would be happy to compensate you for your inconvenience. However, the ... proper avenue for such compensation is not as, ah, public as you suggest.”

“What the hell?” Nashira asked. “We just found a Hubpoint, mister. One practically right next to your planet.”

“No, Scout Wing, you did not.”

“Yes, we did! Don’t you understand what this discovery means for your people?”

“I understand better than you, Scout Wing. And I assure you, you have not discovered a Hubpoint.”

“Look, stop it, Ballpeenhead! I’m sick of the bureaucratic doublespeak!”

He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “And rest assured you will be richly rewarded for that non-discovery.”

She blinked. “I’m listening.”

“Nashira!” David cried.

“Why would you reward us for not helping your people?” Rynyan asked. “And more importantly, why didn’t you compensate me the last time you stole credit for my aid?!”

“But you would be helping our people,” Gamrios said. “You saw how distraught Commander Relniv was at the very suggestion of a new Hubpoint. Can you imagine that multiplied across our entire population?”

“But with a more convenient Hubpoint,” Rynyan said, “you’d have no more of those nasty long commutes, those pathetic cubbyholes you call homes ...”

“And you wouldn’t need to waste all those resources on the move,” David put in before Rynyan could make things any worse.

“Waste?” Gamrios asked. “The Union has spent a generation organizing the most efficient, streamlined relocation of a planetary population in the history of the Network. Every move has been precisely calculated to optimize resources and energy. An entire planetary economy, infrastructure, and social order all completely devoted to a single massive undertaking, all executed with a discipline and commitment that makes the Ziovris the envy of the Network! Our people have dedicated their lives, not to mention their resources, to that undertaking. To systematically pack away an entire planet’s wealth, technology, architecture, art, historical documents, flora, fauna, even the occasional natural wonder, and smoothly, economically relocate it all to our new world.

“If that great flow were interrupted, if we tried to halt or reverse its momentum, the waste would be unconscionable! Not only the waste of energy, the waste of time, the waste of resources—but the waste of our people’s pride and dedication! Imagine the despair that would bring! To leave the great work unfinished—just because we don’t need to do it? Unconscionable!”

“So you just keep on living in a police state for no reason?” David asked.

“Our discipline and self-sacrifice are reason in themselves. They give every one of us a purpose, a role to play in the great work. If a closer Hubpoint were found, then all of that meaning and structure, that sense of higher purpose, would be torn away, and what would be left to believe in?”

“How about the truth?” David said.

“Now, David,” Nashira said. “The way I see it, everyone’s entitled to their own belief systems.”

“Nashira, they’re trying to bribe us into lying!”

“There’s no lie and no bribe,” Gamrios said cheerfully. “You did not discover that Hubpoint, and you will do our people a great service by not claiming its discovery.” He went on before David could formulate a protest. “Just as I did them a service when I did not claim its discovery.”

Nashira stared. “What?”

The fat Ziovris sighed. “As a youth, I chafed against the disciplines of our society and left home for the Hub in search of a new life. But thanks to my limited means, there was no place for me there save the role of Hub scout. Maybe it was before your time, or maybe our paths simply never crossed; yours is such a minor species, no offense.” David fumed, but Nashira ignored it. “And one day, I took a dive through the Hub and found myself ... home. Oh, Renziov was at a different point in its orbit, so I didn’t arrive right above it as you did, but I knew my own sun, my own starscape.”

“Wait.” Nashira frowned. “They wouldn’t send me on a known vector.”

“Oh, they didn’t.” Gamrios trundled toward the window, gazing out at the gorgeous, sunlit oceanscape beyond. “I was filled with excitement at first. A convenient Hubpoint for Renziov! It would change everything. It would make me rich enough to get out of the life, famous enough to write my own ticket back home. I went back to the quantelope tank to report ... and on the way, it hit me.”

“What did?”

“Why, the sheer unlikelihood that I would emerge next to my own homeworld. That of all the scouts in the Hub, it was a Ziovris who found the Hubpoint near Renziov. That couldn’t be random chance. That was order. Of all the scouts who could have discovered such a Hubpoint, the Universe chose the one scout who would understand the importance of keeping it undiscovered. I couldn’t deny the synchronicity of that. I, Cerou Gamrios, had my own special role to play within the Great Migration. Even in my attempt at defiance, I had served the cause without knowing it.

“And once I recognized that, I understood how wrong it would be to disrupt that order. I realized how much our society depended on this grand, organized project in which every citizen, myself included, had a part to play. What is the Hub compared to that? The Network is too big, too expansive, too chaotic. The individual is lost in the shuffle. But here, everything fits together, everything makes sense, and everyone is needed in the great work. I couldn’t take that away from my people by reporting what I’d found.”

“Didn’t you think your people deserved a say in that?” David pressed.

“Oh, they did. The Hubpoint beam on my arrival was detected by a nearby mining vessel and a regulatory enforcer. Independently, they both hailed me and begged me to tell them they hadn’t seen what they thought they’d seen—that the commitment and sacrifices we’ve made still had meaning. I was happy to confirm that it was merely a glitch in my comm laser.”

Gamrios straightened, insofar as his bulbous frame allowed. “Of course, this left me with a dilemma, for I could never return to the Hub. But as you can see,” he went on, gesturing at the suite around them, “patriotism can have very tangible rewards. Those who became aware of my service to the Great Migration were happy to compensate me for my loss of employment. I was given a new identity and a, ah, position commensurate with the value of my service. I finally advanced,” he said proudly, “but within the system, not despite it. Though I still have the Hub to thank.”

“Oh my God,” Nashira said. “Kred! That diu puk gai! He knew! He gave me a dead vector! He bloody tried to kill us!” She’d known a second discovery of this magnitude was too good to be true. It figured that it wasn’t her discovery after all.

“Yes, I was surprised to see another scout so soon,” Gamrios said. “That is my position in the system: to help ensure the continued non-discovery of the Hubpoint. It’s an easy job, true, given the, ah, years between attempts, but you can’t deny it’s an essential one. The second scout came through at roughly the expected time, so my department was able to intercept him before he could alert the Hub. Yes, we weren’t just sitting around earning a lavish state subsidy for nothing, we were ready.” He fidgeted. “True, we, ah, weren’t expecting the third for much longer, so no one can blame us for being a little slow on the response this time around. It’s, ah, quite fortunate that you happened to materialize in our orbital space so you could be intercepted promptly.”

“Fortunate for you, you mean,” Nashira said.

“And for you as well, if you have the sense to follow my lead.” He gestured out the window. “Look at it. All that vast, open beauty. Eventually there will be no one left on Renziov except for a very few who choose to remain isolated from the galaxy. And those few will have the resources of a whole world to divide among them. They will all be incredibly wealthy.”

“So we stay here where nobody will ever find us, and live in luxury for the rest of our lives?”

“Exactly. Your predecessor scout was offered the same arrangement and wisely accepted. We’ve had no complaints.”

Gamrios moved closer to her. “And why wouldn’t he? You know what the life of a scout is like as well as I do. The constant danger ... the endless tedium ... the meager rewards. Who wouldn’t give up that life in a heartbeat if offered something better? What loyalty do you owe to someone who tried sending you to your death?”

As her fellow scout held her eyes, Nashira found she couldn’t dismiss his words. Find a paradise planet and retire there without ever telling the boss? It was every Hub scout’s secret fantasy.

She smiled at Gamrios. “Why don’t you let me think about it for a while?” she said. Just because it was her fantasy, that didn’t mean she couldn’t milk it for all the Ziovris were worth.

The suite’s facilities were indeed luxurious. Rynyan wasted no time sampling the food printer and the bar, while Nashira availed herself of a bathtub big enough to qualify as an Olympic pool. David left them to it. He needed to think for a while.

When Nashira came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel—a rather small one, since most Ziovris had slimmer frames than humans—she was indignant to find David leaning against the wall right outside the bathroom door. “What are you doing here?” she exclaimed, tightening her grip on the towel.

“Keeping watch,” he said. “In case Rynyan tried to peek at you or something.”

“Oh.” Her gaze softened. “That’s ... really sweet.” She seemed to mean it, but she also seemed vaguely disappointed for some reason David couldn’t figure. Maybe she was just disappointed not to have something to yell about. She couldn’t let herself be happy or optimistic about anything. David liked to think he’d taught her a thing or two about hope over the past month, though. She smiled more these days than when they’d first met.

But David wasn’t in the mood to smile. For once, he felt he had to be the skeptical one. As she headed for her room, he stepped in her path. “Nashira, we have to talk.”

She held his gaze. “I’m listening.”

She was breathing heavily, her stare intense. David realized he was standing awfully close, probably making her nervous. He stepped back, looking away. “I ... I mean after you get dressed.”

“Oh. Of course.” There was that weird sense of disappointment again. It was like she’d have been happier if he stayed in her personal space so she could be mad at him. She swept past him and into her room. She let the scant towel fall a little too soon, and he quickly looked away. He’d be a poor friend and partner if he let himself notice her in that way. And she’d probably kill him if she knew he’d seen her butt. He tried not to think about it.

But boy, she sure was fit.

Luckily, he had his concerns to keep him distracted. “Are you really going to go along with this?” he asked Nashira once she emerged, attired in a fetching blue dress that the suite’s fabricator must have made for her.

“Look around, kid,” she said with a laugh. “This is the good life! Everything I could ever want at my fingertips, a whole planet to wander around in without a lot of people to bother me, and best of all, no more daily risk of instant death or terminal boredom. No more Kred looking down his little rat nose at me.”

“But what about our quest? What about humanity?”

She fell back onto an enormous couch. “Your quest was a fantasy. Humanity’s got nothing new to offer the Network, and we’re lucky to get the charity we do. Things are decent now for folks back home; why make waves?”

“Because decent isn’t good enough. Because there’s a whole galaxy of wonders we deserve to be a part of.”

“Even so, you and I weren’t going to change things. You don’t know what you’re doing, and I don’t ruddy care.”

David sighed. “Do you care about the Ziovris? Is it really okay with you to get this kind of luxury in exchange for helping a government keep lying to its people?”

“That’s what governments do. They’re all scams to keep people in line.”

“No, they aren’t. Look at the Sosyryn. Everyone’s free and equal there.”

“That just means everyone’s in on the scam. They scam themselves into thinking their condescending charity gives meaning to their empty lives, and they scam rubes like you into thinking it makes them nobler than the rest of us.” She shook her head. “Do-gooders are just as self-serving as everyone else. They just get rewarded in ego points.” She leaned back and stroked the couch’s velvety contours. “Me, I’d rather get more tangible rewards.”

“Hmph,” said Rynyan, who’d wandered over after hearing his people mentioned. “You call this a reward? The minibar only serves eighty kinds of liquor. And I checked—they only have ten masseuses on call and only six will take their clothes off!”

“Oh, learn to rough it.”

“I ‘rough it’ quite enough slumming in your squalid little Hubstation. I want to go home!”

“And how are you going to arrange that, hmm?”

“Didn’t you see the way that female guard was looking at me?” Rynyan preened his feathery mane. “Leave it to me, I’ll persuade her to let us out of here.”

Nashira stood to face him, having some difficulty getting off the pillowy couch. “Try it and you’ll get us all in trouble!”

“Exactly,” David said. “We have to be united in this. We need you with us, Nashira. Please.”

“David, it’s okay. Just immerse yourself in the luxury and let it wash those pesky ideals away. You’ll be happier.”

“Would you really be happy here? What about ... companionship? Human ... companionship?”

She looked at him through lowered lashes, a rakish tilt to one brow. “That could be arranged.”

“How? By having the suite fabricate a man for you? Get real, Nashira!”

“Oh, the hell with you!” she cried, turning to stride away. “Go on, try to escape, get your arse thrown in prison for all I care.”

“We’re already in prison.” That froze her in her tracks. David went to her, turning her around and gripping her bare shoulders. “Look, you’re the one always complaining about a Hub scout’s life. How oppressed and hopeless you are. This whole world’s like that. Every Ziovris is living the life you want to get away from. Worse—a life that people would take up Hub scouting to escape.”

“It’s what they’ve chosen. It matters to them.”

“It what they’ve learned to settle for,” David countered. “Because they’ve lost hope that things can change. Because they’re afraid to let themselves believe there can be a better life.”

He clasped her hands, looking deep into her eyes. “Do you really want to be like them, Nashira? At least in the Hub, you have a chance. You have something to strive for. To hope for. Are you really ready to give that up?”

After a moment, she turned away, storming over to the picture window to gaze out at the blazing, gorgeous sunset. “You are so ... damn ... selfless. Didn’t say a word about what you wanted, didn’t try to get me to do it for you.” She whirled. “It’s not fair, you know. Makes me feel inadequate for being selfish.”

“You’re not selfish, Nashira. You just want a better life. We all do. Including the Ziovris.”

She winced and clenched her fists, letting out a shriek. “Okay, then. Let’s do this before I bloody change my mind. Or just strangle you.”

“Great!” David cried. “On to freedom!”

She rolled her eyes. “But I’m keeping the damn dress.”

Rynyan’s plan to seduce the guard proved disturbingly successful. Nashira couldn’t understand why a self-respecting female of any species would fall for his bald advances. But it didn’t take Rynyan long at all to talk the guard into trying out the bathtub with him while allowing the humans to slip away. Maybe the Ziovris were just too accustomed to being submissive, and the guard had responded to the Sosyryn’s air of superiority and entitlement. Not that Rynyan would see it that way; to him, he was doing the guard a favor. Better her than me, Nashira thought. And then she tried very hard not to think about it anymore.

Which just led her to think about her own sexual prospects. “That could be arranged?” What was I thinking? A lifetime here with David as my only possible lover? Okay, he was reasonably cute in a lost-puppy kind of way ... and sweet ... and generous ... and kind ... and sometimes when he gazed into her eyes and made those passionate, idealistic speeches, it stirred something inside her that she thought she’d lost a long time ago ... but no. He was pure man-child. Completely immature, and not even in the fun way. Her flirtations had gone right over his head; even flashing her bum hadn’t gotten a rise. She must’ve been desperate even to try it—so blinded by the wealth and luxury Gamrios offered that she forgot how much she’d miss the company of real men. The hell with the plight of the Ziovris people—she was escaping in the name of getting well and properly laid ever again.

Not to mention the reward for finding the new Hubpoint. It might not be wealth as endless as what Gamrios had been peddling, but she could still come out of this a rich woman.

And, okay, helping the Ziovris throw off the yoke of oppression would be nice too. It wasn’t like she had anything against them.

Though when they reached the door to the quantelope shack and Commander Relniv emerged with her firearm pointed right at Nashira’s chest, she began to rethink that opinion.

“Why are you here?” Relniv asked.

“Us? Oh, nothing, we were just ... looking for the gym.” Nashira shut herself up before she said anything stupider.

So naturally David did it for her. “We’re trying to escape, Commander. Holding us here is wrong.”

“No,” Relniv said. “I mean, why are you here?” She gestured around at the luxurious facility. “Why would they take you to this place?” Nashira belatedly recognized the dismay and confusion in the commander’s alien features. “If you were lying about a new Hubpoint, why would they reward you?”

“Because we’re not lying,” David said. “They are. And they don’t want us to tell anyone.”

“No.” The crests at the rear of her head quivered in negation. “Tell me it’s not true. Tell me there’s no Hubpoint. Tell me there’s some other reason you’re here. It has to be a lie!”

David frowned. “Why?”

Relniv stared at him. “The system exists for a purpose. I have my own role to play, my duties to fulfill, and there’s a reason for it all. There has to be. If there isn’t ... if there’s a closer Hubpoint and we don’t have to migrate after all ... then all the sacrifices I’ve made ...” She looked away. “All the sacrifices I’ve ... enforced ... will have been for nothing. For a lie. My whole life ... it will have been meaningless.”

David stepped closer and did that sincere thing with his face. “It doesn’t have to be,” he told Relniv. “You can give your life a new meaning. A better meaning. Help us help your people.”

Relniv’s weapon hand wavered and lowered. Nashira’s first impulse was to knock it out of her hand, punch her lights out, and step over her trembling body to get to the quantelopes. Somehow, though, she found herself waiting, giving David’s way a chance to work.

“But what would happen?” Relniv asked. “It would be chaos. We’ve already shipped out so many of us, so much of what we have. If that movement stopped ... it would be so hard to reverse it, to get things back.”

“That’s what Mr. Gamrios said,” David replied. “But it seems to me, there’s a Hubpoint here and there’s a Hubpoint out there.” He shrugged. “Maybe you’re far apart the normal way, but you’re right next door the Hub way. So you don’t have to stop or reverse anything. Just keep going forward, then bring it right back around through the back door.

“Or some of you could stay out there and others could stay here. You’d be only moments apart through the Hub. Okay, hours. Maybe days, if it’s really busy. But that’s better than months. There’d be no need to fight over where to live. You’d still be one society.”

Relniv still hesitated. “But the great machine ... it has so much inertia. There are so many who won’t want things to change ... or who won’t know how. They’ll resist—by force if necessary.”

“Not to worry!” It was Rynyan, who’d arrived behind them, smelling of what Nashira hoped was just his species’ version of sweat. “The Sosyryn would be glad to exert our diplomatic clout toward ensuring a smooth transition. If all your bureaucrats are as fond of bribery as Mister Gamrios, it should be easy enough. And I personally will be happy to see to the needs of any Ziovris who fall victim to whatever social upheavals may result in the meantime.” His mane trembled with his excitement. “That will more than make up for my last visit here,” he told Nashira. “I knew the Universe would make amends for that little embarrassment in time.”

Relniv had mercifully ignored that last part, squeezing her eyes shut as she wrestled with her conscience. Finally she met David’s eyes. “I don’t know if I can do this. All my life, I’ve known my purpose, had my place prepared for me. If I do this, I have no idea what will lie ahead.”

David smiled. “I know that feeling. I’ve felt it every day since I left home for the Hub.”

“And ... how do you endure it?”

“Endure it? I love it! Where’s the fun in a story where you always know what happens next?”

Relniv looked confused, but there was something contagious about David’s enthusiasm. “This will violate so many regulations ... they’ll send me to an asteroid mine for the rest of my life.”

“You can come with us. There’s a whole universe out there.”

She looked tempted, but finally said, “No. This is my home. I’ll take my chances. And maybe ... maybe those regulations won’t apply anymore.” She looked shocked at even being able to formulate the concept—but excited that she had.

David clasped her hand and they went into the quantelope shack together. Nashira couldn’t resist glancing back at Rynyan, though. “The way you talked about it, I thought you and that lady guard would be at it a lot longer.”

Rynyan puffed out his chest and his mane. “My dear, when you’re as skilled in the arts of sex as I am, you don’t need long at all.”

Soon after Nashira notified the Hub of her discovery—and her distress—a flotilla of ships belonging to the Mkubnir, one of the species that cooperated in overseeing Hub Network security, emerged through the new Hubpoint, revealing its existence for all to see. The escapees were soon intercepted by Gamrios’ forces, but the bloated bureaucrat had already been warned by the Mkubnir that no harm must come to the Hub scout or her passengers. Nashira enjoyed watching him squirm as he offered to escort them back to the Starship Entropy.

The only thing better was the look on Mokak Vekredi’s face when she stormed into his office back at the Hubstation. The hermaphrodite was nursing “his” babies when she charged in, and he squawked and ducked behind the desk—whether to hide the evidence of Verzhik prolificacy or merely to hide from her wrath was unclear. “Scout Wing! You should not be in here without invitation!”

“Stow it, Kred. Be glad your babies are here, since they’re the only thing keeping me from ripping your little buckteeth out. I took a look at the dive logs when I got back, did some digging to find out how a dormant vector got on my dive schedule, and guess whose authorization code I found on the system access.”

Kred trembled in fear, peeping almost as pathetically as the babies. “I was only following orders, Scout Wing!”

She waved it aside. “Of course you were. That’s all you know how to do.” She strode forward to stand before his desk, gazing intimidatingly down at his hunkered form. “It doesn’t bother me so much that you tried to kill me—again. That’s more or less in your job description. But going after civilians is another matter.

“So you tell your Dosper bosses: I’m willing to keep quiet about their attempt on our lives. Everybody’s so thrilled about the new Ziovris Hubpoint—no sense ruining that with a scandal. But only if they leave David and me alone.” She paused. “And Rynyan, I guess. Anything happens to us, those access records gets released. Got it?”

“I–I will convey that information.”

“Good.” She flopped back into a chair and put her feet up on his desk. “Now, there’s the little matter of my finder’s fee to talk about.” It sent an almost sexual thrill through Nashira to say it. The reporters were already calling this the find of the century, or whatever units they used. Between that and her blackmail power, she could make enough from this to leave the Hub scout life behind forever and never have to put up with David LaMacchia and Rynyan again.

But David will be lost without you, she told herself.

Shut up. I’ll hire him a babysitter.

But Kred was straightening up and gaining more confidence than he should have at this point in the conversation. In fact, he even seemed to be doing the Verzhik equivalent of smiling. “What ... fee ... would that be, Ms. Wing?”

“No games, Kred!”

“Ah, for the record, Ms. Wing.”

She leaned forward and spoke slowly and loudly. “My bonus for discovering the new Ziovris Hubpoint.”

Kred continued to smile. “As I understand it, that Hubpoint was actually discovered by a Ziovris scout some seventeen years ago.”

“Who forfeited his rights by failing to report it. I reported it, so I get the reward!”

“Ah, I see. Here is the crux of your misunderstanding: To receive a Hubpoint discovery bonus from the Hub administration, one must be acting in the capacity of a Hub scout.”

Nashira stared in disbelief. “Hello? Who’ve you been calling ‘Scout Wing’ all this time?”

“A temporary error, Ms. Wing, arising from my distress. You see, when you failed to report after your initial dive yesterday, I naturally followed proper procedure and had you declared dead.”

She gaped. “What? I’m dead? ”

“At the moment, yes.” He tilted his head. “Technically, I shouldn’t even be speaking to you. It could constitute either evidence of mental illness or an inappropriate on-duty religious observance.”

“Kred!”

“And since you were therefore not a Hub employee—or even legally a person—at the time the new Ziovris Hubpoint was reported, it has been classed as a Ziovris discovery that went unreported due to negligence and fell into default. Thus, the Dosperhag have claimed it as a windfall. All profits from its discovery go to the Hub administration. Which, naturally, will set aside a generous reserve thereof for investment in the restoration of the Ziovris economy. After all, we are all neighbors in the Network.”

Nashira shot to her feet. “So I get nothing? Not even credit for finding it?” To her surprise, she felt angrier on David’s behalf than hers. Having humans make this discovery wouldn’t have counted for as much as he thought—any moron in a Hubdiver could’ve done the same—but it would’ve been good publicity, at least.

“You get to live, Ms. Wing, and to be left alone by the Dosperhag. Count yourself fortunate.”

“And what if I threaten to expose what I know if I don’t get what’s owed me?”

Kred leaned forward, carefully sheltering his nursing young in his arms. “Understand, Ms. Wing. The Dosperhag have the resources of the entire Hub Network at their disposal. Any evidence you have, they can counter or eradicate. I believe they can be persuaded to leave you and your ... colleagues alone in exchange for avoiding a public scandal, but if you create such a scandal, they will punish you, and you will end up wishing you had not returned from that dive.”

Nashira was sobered. They had her totally beaten, coming and going. She would kill David for convincing her to leave Renziov, if she didn’t feel so bad for him right now. Though she was sure he’d get over it quickly and find hope in his next lunatic scheme. And Rynyan, as usual, had come out ahead on the whole deal. So as usual, Nashira Wing was the only one who got screwed—and not in the fun way.

Kred looked at her with feigned sympathy. “I understand this is difficult for you, Ms. Wing. If it would help, you could always apply for the Hub scout position left vacant by your tragic death ...”

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The Hub appeared earlier in “The Hub of the Matter” [March 2010].)

Copyright © 2010 Christopher L. Bennett

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Novelettes

Primum Non Nocere

What does a “system” do to the people who run it?

H.G. Stratmann

The tall trim man in the cream-colored coat stood looking down at me with a sinister smile. His bristly graying hair and piercing eyes enhanced an air of professional superiority and power. He toyed with the knot of his tie as if eager to start his work. Sardonic lips curled around ivory teeth as he spoke to me.

“We have ways of making you well.”

A whiff of wintergreen mouthwash wafted toward me on his breath. The sickly scent of musk cologne grew stronger as he leaned over me with an expression of oily confidence—examining my face and flesh with scientific interest as I lay cowering on the bed. His pupils dilated, as if he could see completely through the coarse, flimsy gown I wore that barely covered my nakedness.

Behind him, lurking in a corner of the shadowy room, two men waited to carry out his orders. They’d already prepared me for his ministrations—stripping me of my clothes, attaching devices to monitor the inner workings of my body, and inserting sharp needles into my veins. Their starched alabaster uniforms made them blend into the room’s dingy pale walls with chameleonlike concealment. But one word from this man who held the power of life and death over me would bring that well-trained pair back to my side.

My captor extracted a heavy metal cylinder from a pocket in his lab coat. He twisted the end of the silvery instrument and turned a clicking wheel to adjust the device’s dazzling beam for proper focus. Satisfied it’d be ready when needed, he returned the cylinder to his pocket and pried a tablet computer from its dock at the foot of my bed.

His manicured fingertip touched the computer’s screen with delicate precision, studying the intimate information it contained about me. Though he’d shielded the screen from me, I imagined my record beginning with the data printed on the plastic bracelet encircling my left wrist.

Name: Thompson, Esther A. Gender: F. DOB:9/15/2030. Age:28. IDN:398457820.

But while he learned every documented detail of my life and misdeeds, the only information about himself he’d imparted was his name—sewn in blood-red cursive above his coat’s left upper pocket.

Hans G. Schuller.

Then the interrogation began. Schuller’s cold visage shifted from the computer’s screen to me. I pictured him squinting down on a monocle and speaking with a Prussian accent. “Your file contains disturbing information, Ms. Thompson. We have a great deal of work to do on you. It will go much easier if you cooperate.”

I shivered and shrank back in the bed.

A wolfish grin creased Schuller’s face as he glanced at his computer. “The toxicology screen we performed on you shows numerous abnormal values. Your LDL cholesterol is well above the prescribed upper limit of 100 mg/dl. Blood levels of apolipoprotein B, hemoglobin A1c, and triglycerides are equally dangerous.

“Even if you hadn’t been caught in possession of illegal substances, your addiction was obvious. The clothes you were wearing when you were arrested were several sizes too small. Even a layperson could see your BMI was above the legal limit of 29.9.”

The two nurses standing behind him frowned as Hans Schuller, M.D., pronounced his diagnosis. “Ms. Thompson, you are guilty of Class I Obesity. Before I’m finished with you I’ll know how and why you committed your crimes.”

The physician placed the computer back into its dock. “Fortunately, your condition can be reversed. We’ll treat you using a standard protocol to purge the toxins you’ve ingested from your system. You’ll be injected with atherophilic nanobots to remove the fatty streaks and minor plaquing our diagnostic probes found in your coronary arteries and aorta. Carrier bots will transport activated stem cells obtained from your blood and bone marrow to your heart and other organs to repair the early damage we detected in them. Within a few days your circulatory system and viscera will be healthy again.”

He studied the fatty folds quivering on the bottoms of my upper arms. “Dealing with the hyperadiposity and cosmetic components of your medical problems will take longer. Lipophagic nanobots will selectively eliminate the largest collections of adipose tissue. Then weight-adjusted doses of medications will make your body catabolize remaining excess fat stores. Our goal is to reduce your body mass index to a normal range of 18.5 to 24.9. You’ll also be placed on a regimen of diet and exercise to improve your overall conditioning and help you maintain your ideal body weight in the future.”

I looked at him innocently. “That all sounds very technical, doctor. But I know you’re trying to help me.”

“Naturally!”

The physician gave the two burly male nurses behind him jargon-filled orders beyond the understanding of anyone who wasn’t a medical professional. As the pair left to carry out his instructions for my treatment, Schuller’s gaze bored into my pudgy face.

“Everything I’ve described so far is designed to treat your symptoms and not your underlying problem, Ms. Thompson. And we both know what that is, don’t we?”

I lowered my eyes. “Yes ...”

The doctor sighed. “It’s bad enough that what you did is antisocial and illegal. But the worst thing is the damage it’s done to your health. For the sake of tasting the ‘forbidden calories’ you’ve put your life at risk. You’ll need intensive behavior modification treatment to prevent you from harming yourself again.”

I tried looking penitent. There was no concealing my guilt as Dr. Schuller performed a physical exam. I winced when he extracted the silver ophthalmoscope from his pocket again and shone its blinding light in my eyes. Thick layers of fat lining my chest and abdomen were exposed to his scrutiny as he brushed a frigid stethoscope head across them. My overstuffed thighs and buttocks lay bare to his sight and touch.

The doctor retrieved his tablet computer, then pressed the tip of his right index finger against the thick disc a centimeter wide implanted just above my left breast. His fingertip massaged the skin over my pill-sized MNM as he watched information appear on the computer’s screen.

Schuller stopped palpating me. “Now I know how you became fat, Ms. Thompson. Your Metabolic NanoMonitor maintains a continuous record of your body chemistry and overall health. I just made it turn ‘informer’ on you.”

He flexed his right index finger. “There’s a programmer the size of a grain of rice implanted in my fingertip. That device communicated with your MNM using a coded ultra-short range radio signal. I had it command your MNM to download all the data it has accumulated on you over the past year.”

The doctor showed me graphs and tables of information on the computer’s screen. “Here’s what your MNM recorded about your physiological status over that time, its analysis of the types and amounts of foods you ate, and your daily activity level. Now I have all the results I need to deal with you. It would be in your best interest to give me the details of what brought you to this sorry state.”

I brushed blond bangs from my perspiring forehead. “You must’ve heard this kind of story before, doctor. A friend invited me and several other people to a party about a year ago. After we’d been munching on fresh fruit and soy snacks for a while, our hostess brought out a small white cardboard box. It was filled with doughnuts dusted with powdered sugar.”

The doctor nodded. “Simple doughnuts like that are still legal. Anyone at least twenty-one years old can buy them in a grocery store that has a confection license. Eaten in moderation, with proper attention to one’s daily nutritional and calorie limits, they’re really not harmful. But after trying one, some people get hooked on them.”

I sniffled. “I know that now ... but it happened so gradually I didn’t realize what was going on until it was too late. At first, we all limited ourselves to the one doughnut our MNMs allowed us to eat. But later I saw my friend sneak a second doughnut out of the box. Yes, she paid for it later that evening. I saw her turn pale and sweaty before rushing to the bathroom and emptying her stomach. But she survived and didn’t seem remorseful. She told me that second doughnut was so delicious it was worth getting sick to eat it.

“For days afterward I couldn’t get the taste of that doughnut I’d eaten out of my mouth. It’d been so flaky and sweet! I kept fantasizing about eating another. Later that week I bought a packaged doughnut at a grocery store. I took it home—planning to just nibble at it to stretch it out over the entire evening. But seconds later there were only crumbs on my plate.”

My eyes moistened. “Before long I was starting every morning with a doughnut. I visited websites that told what else you could do with one and tried every perversion possible. Sometimes I licked the powdered sugar off first before devouring the doughnut’s naked crust. Others I dunked in coffee. I even broke the doughnut into bite-size pieces and gorged myself on those chewy chunks.

“As long as I was careful about what I ate the rest of the day, I felt fine. No—the ‘sugar rush’ they talk about made me feel great. But after a while a single doughnut a day wasn’t enough. I tried to buy more than one doughnut at a time, but I couldn’t—at least not legally. Every store I went to obeyed the ‘one to a customer per twenty-four hours’ rule. And since all stores’ computer systems are connected to the national financial network, going to a different store the same day to buy another doughnut didn’t work. When I tried, the second store flagged me as being over my recommended daily allowance.”

The doctor said, “Let me guess how you got around that. You bought a doughnut one day—but didn’t eat it until you could buy a second one the next day. Then you had a ‘twofer’ orgy.”

“Yes. But then my MNM made me pay for my sin.”

Schuller grunted. “A Metabolic NanoMonitor is programmed to react when a person’s diet deviates from his or her optimal nutritional profile. The reaction you had to eating two doughnuts at once was caused by your MNM detecting excess carbohydrate absorption and a surge in your serum glucose. It also analyzed levels of trans fats and other dangerous substances in your blood, then ‘reconstructed’ what kind and amount of food you’d ingested.

“After determining that what you ate was above healthy limits, the MNM activated chemoreceptors and mechanoreceptors in your stomach and other areas of the gastrointestinal tract. That in turn stimulated parts of your central and peripheral nervous systems to cause the smooth muscle contractions, reverse peristalsis, and other effects you experienced.”

My eyes widened. “That sounds so complicated, doctor. All I know is I felt sick and threw up.”

The physician explained, “Although what the MNM does makes you feel bad at the time, ultimately it’s for your own good. First, it expels those harmful materials from your body. Second, it helps condition you to avoid performing that unhealthy behavior again. It’s similar to the effects of an obsolete medication, disulfiram, which was once used to treat alcoholics. People taking disulfiram experienced symptoms similar to yours if they drank alcohol—and would thus be motivated to not drink it again.

“But the MNM does more than that. When working properly, it also monitors your body continuously to make sure it’s ‘tuned up’ for optimal health. The MNM checks and regulates your entire body chemistry—electrolytes, hormones, et cetera—to keep all your organ systems working well. It even initiates first aid when it detects malignant cells or other life-threatening problems. When it can’t repair a particular problem, such as if someone were injured in a serious accident, its transceiver automatically notifies the local healthcare system so a person can receive definitive help.”

I lowered my head. “I found out about that the day I discovered how serious my addiction was—and did something that nearly killed me.

“I hoarded two extra doughnuts and ate three at once!”

The doctor’s face showed slight sympathy. “After the initial ‘high’ you must’ve been very ill.”

“Yes. But besides making me feel miserable my MNM also notified Emergency Medical Services. I was rushed to the nearest hospital and treated for my overdose. Then I was admitted to an intensive care unit and evaluated by a psychiatrist. After she determined I wasn’t suicidal I was released. Of course, the emergency room doctor had to report what I’d done to the authorities. But since this was my first offense they decided not to prosecute.”

I drew my knees up and hugged my legs. “I should’ve learned my lesson and sworn off illicit amounts of sweets—and for a while I did. But then my craving got the better of me again. My doctors had cautioned me to avoid doughnuts and anything with above-average amounts of sugar or other carbs, because they were afraid I couldn’t eat just one.

“They were right. Maybe I would’ve stayed sober if I hadn’t convinced myself it was all right for me to read about and see pictures of doughnuts and pastries. I found websites that—for a fee—let you download images and information about them. You’re a doctor and have to study such things, but most people my age have probably never heard of some of the names I learned. Cream puffs and crullers. Cobblers and éclairs. Baklava and Napoleons—shall I go on?”

The doctor licked his lips. “Some basic bakery goods are available licitly, with strict limits on how much a person can buy.”

I shook my head. “That wasn’t good enough for someone as addicted to them as I was. And the few pastries sold legally are so healthy they’re nearly tasteless—like putting a dab of frosting on the plastic they’re sealed in.

“So I did some checking. The ‘double-dipping’ friend whose party had started me on my road to ruin told me she knew a dealer—a former baker who’d worked for Gooey Glaze Doughnuts before the government outlawed them. She told me he gave the first one for free....”

I turned my face away from the doctor. “I’m ashamed to admit I’d become so depraved I would’ve sold my body for a Long John with white frosting and rainbow sprinkles. What that dealer offered me was more alluring—a genuine Gooey Glaze! It wasn’t that I’d be doing something illegal or immoral that held me back. I knew how my MNM would react if I became addicted to those delicacies. So I did the only thing I could to let me feed my doughnut habit without fear of exposure—at least not right away.”

Schuller glanced at the computer screen. “It’s all here in the data I downloaded from your MNM. You committed the most serious sin against your health imaginable. You had an illegal MNM operation performed—reprogramming your device so it could still analyze what you were eating but not respond appropriately to the harmful substances you ingested. That way you could gorge yourself without fear of sickness or detection—until your fat-filled body itself exposed your crime.

“Fortunately you didn’t have your MNM explanted. Everyone is warned of the danger of doing that when the device is inserted. Yet each year, thousands die at the hands of back-street butchers who claim they can safely remove it—for a price. Those illegal operations are uniformly fatal because the MNM, like the CPU in a computer, is only the coordinating component of a vast data processing and control system within a person’s body.”

The doctor continued, “Some people forget that when their MNMs were implanted they were also injected with nanoscale replicators. Those tiny machines produce fibrils and other materials that infiltrate a person’s nerves and major organ systems—acting like the wires in an electrical system to feed information back to the MNM and carry out its commands. That network the replicators create can’t be removed. It’s like a spider web pervading a person’s body. And if its connection with the MNM is suddenly disrupted when someone cuts out that device, the effects on the brain and other vital organs are catastrophic.”

He shuddered. “Maybe, instead of just telling people what happens when an MNM is removed, they should be shown the look of indescribable agony on a dead victim’s face. Perhaps then fewer would inadvertently commit suicide by having that illegal procedure.”

As Schuller finished his cautionary tale, the two nurses returned. One of them held a pistol-like injector. The doctor said, “I’m glad you didn’t make the mistake of having your MNM removed, Ms. Thompson. But now we must correct the mistakes you did make. Don’t worry, the injection won’t be too painful....”

I cringed as the injector’s cold metal tip pressed against my arm. There was a snap and hiss—followed by a sensation like cobra venom coursing through my body.

“What are you in for?”

I glanced at the elderly man speaking near my right elbow. He was walking on a moving treadmill beside me, identical to the one where I struggled to maintain a brisk pace. My partner in the large exercise room wore the same style of fluorescent-orange jumpsuit I did. His white hair and fluffy beard were damp with sweat. A smile beamed from his rosy face.

My gaze flitted to the front of the room, where two dozen of our morbidly obese compatriots walked silently in side-by-side pairs on their own individual treadmills. The three brawny physical therapists seated far away, supervising this session, weren’t looking toward us. I took a chance they wouldn’t hear my reply above the rumbling motors powering our treadmills and direct their attention my way.

I whispered, “Doughnuts. They’re so scrumptious I couldn’t get enough of them!”

The man’s round belly shook like a bowlful of jelly. “I’m too fond of cookies and milk.”

His eyes twinkled as he gripped the horizontal iron bar in front of him. “The name’s Nick. I’d shake your hand, but this treadmill’s moving so fast if I let go I’ll fly off the end!”

The therapists guarding us were suddenly preoccupied hoisting up a rotund wheezing woman who’d fallen face-down on her own machine’s moving belt.

“I’m Esther. Been here long?”

Nick groaned. “They nabbed me three weeks ago—the night before Christmas. I should’ve stayed in my house, but the snow falling outside my window that evening looked so beautiful I went out to enjoy it. Just my luck a patrol car spotted me giving toys I’d made to the neighborhood children playing outside. I told the police I looked so round because I was wearing extra layers of clothing under my coat to keep warm. They knew better.

“Then the cops raided my house and found my secret stash of goodies. They booked me, then brought me here.”

He glanced down at his jiggling midsection. “You should’ve seen me before they injected their fat-munching nanobots into me and put me on a strict regimen of diet and exercise. Dr. Schuller says it’ll be at another ten weeks of treatment before I’m ‘normal.’ And before we leave he’ll make sure our MNMs are working again—unless we do something about it.”

I sighed. “What can we do? Everyone here is guilty of the same crime—having our MNMs illegally modified so we could eat what we want. A nurse told me that when we’re released we’ll always be on a ‘convicted overeater’ registry. Each of us will also get a small reader to place over the MNM every week. It’ll transmit a summary of everything we’ve eaten to a central monitoring station. If we don’t do it, we’ll wind up back here!”

Nick’s snowy beard shuddered. “And if we have our MNMs illegally disabled again and get caught, they’ll put us someplace worse. There’s a special Limbic System Aversion Therapy ward here for repeat offenders. They use techniques that will definitely ‘cure’ us—if we can stand the pain and survive the treatment. Afterward we’ll never be naughty again ... or good for anything either!”

I looked up and saw attendants wheel the fallen woman at the front of the room out on a stretcher. Soon the therapists would be focusing their attention back on us. I murmured, “I guess we have no choice but to be nice and let our MNMs alone when we leave here.”

Nick shook his head. “That won’t work either. Our MNMs are supposed to keep us healthy and help us live longer. But that’s not all they do.

“They’re also programmed to kill us!”

I didn’t learn what he meant—at least not then. Before I could ask him, the therapists announced our exercise session was over and herded us all out to a gray room with concrete walls for our communal lunch. There guards marched us to several rows of long rectangular steel tables. Each of us was directed to a preassigned seat where scowling orderlies placed a meal individualized for our nutritional needs.

Nick was ordered to a chair well away from mine. I could only exchange glances with him as I chewed the chalky chicken-flavored protein patty, soggy squash, and wilted lettuce leaves on my aluminum plate. Sipping my vegetable juice from a tin cup, I wondered what he knew.

I didn’t find out at our next destination either. The guards were more laissez-faire about where each of their charges sat in that lecture room. But although Nick was able to squeeze into the hard wooden seat on my left, we couldn’t share any private words due to the unremitting attention of our lecturer. She was a prim matron with hair stretched taut like barbed wires. A white lab coat buttoned in front like a cassock reached down to her ankles, sheathing an ectomorphic figure. Her face resembled a grinning skull dabbed with cyanotic eye shadow and blood-red lipstick.

Her enthusiasm for the subject matter didn’t spread to her captive audience. Ms. Natural’s encomium to a healthy diet and exercise induced head nodding and snores in the warm room. Hard nudges from our guards terminated those naps.

Our instructor made holographic calorie charts, nutritional information, and anatomical models float before us. She contrasted the gigantic 3-D image of a ruddy, healthy kidney cheerfully filtering blood, to its shriveled, waste-clogged twin. A green gallbladder, steaming intestines, and juglike stomach introduced us to the mysteries of digestion. A rotating life-sized overweight body showed disgusting yellowish fat globules foaming up under the skin of its trunk, buttocks, and thighs—just like those, our lecturer explained, we reprobates had created in our own bodies.

She concluded today’s reeducation session with a sobering suggestion. “I suspect many of you don’t realize how ugly and misshapen your bodies are. Perhaps, standing unclothed in front of a full-length mirror after a shower, you mentally filter out what your reflection shows and don’t see yourself as obese.

“So I want each of you to picture how the rest of your comrades in this room would look naked. Imagine how unappetizing those mounds of fat, sagging skin, and bloated bellies are! And as you visualize how repulsive your neighbors look, remember—you look just as repellent to them!”

As we ruminated on that disturbing vision, our instructor continued, “What you’ve done to your bodies shows what happens when an MNM is prevented from doing its work. Modern medicine can stabilize or cure cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other major killers of the past using high-tech methods like nanomedicine, genetic engineering, and stem cell therapy. Average life expectancy is now nearly one hundred years.

“But it’s much more effective and less expensive to prevent people from becoming ill than to treat them when they do. Without MNMs helping people stay healthy, the cost of medical care might still be as outrageously high as it was decades ago. In the 2010s, our country spent several trillion dollars annually for healthcare, mainly to treat chronic diseases, provide end-of-life care for the elderly and terminally ill—and deal with illnesses caused by poor lifestyle choices, such as tobacco use and overeating.”

She looked at us accusingly. “All of you have a responsibility to keep healthcare costs as low as possible. Medical treatments are now more effective than they were decades ago—but like then, they’re still expensive. Because millions of your civic-minded fellow citizens have let their MNMs help them stay healthy, society now spends far less money to treat preventable health problems.

“MNMs are so cost-effective that the number of dollar-draining clinics and hospitals required to treat the seriously ill has also fallen dramatically. Far fewer medical professionals like physicians, nurses, and technologists are needed, saving billions more in salaries. Hospitals like this one keep only several surgeons, trained in using robotic tools to perform operations like reattaching a severed limb. A handful of internists manage medical problems more complex than your MNMs can treat. And because you made bad health choices, we still need specialists in rehabilitation medicine like Dr. Schuller.”

Nick’s voice boomed beside me. “So if we all lived healthy lifestyles and let our MNMs regulate what we eat and do, there’d be even less need for doctors and nurses than there is now?”

The instructor nodded. “Precisely!”

My companion gave a jolly smile. “Thank you for enlightening us. If we all followed your advice, there wouldn’t even be a need to pay people to deliver lectures on the virtues of healthy living!”

Our instructor focused a toxic gaze on Nick as our corpulent comrades laughed. It seemed they too had a hard time swallowing the ideas she’d fed us.

I didn’t get to speak with Nick until the next morning. Fortunately, we were assigned to chairs next to each other in the dining room for breakfast. As my fork poked at the clay-colored tofu links and ersatz eggs lumped on my plate, Nick nudged me. “Look who walked in.”

Dr. Schuller strutted through the parallel lines of seated patients in a majestic one-man parade. He paused occasionally to reassure one of his charges that the glistening gelatinous globs on her plate were indeed edible, or to praise another for looking less cetaceous than yesterday. With the sleeves of his white coat gesticulating like flapping wings, he resembled a hungry hawk hovering over a family of field mice reassuring them of his benign intentions.

As the physician strolled near us, Nick bellowed, “We appreciate what you and your staff are doing for us, doctor. That talk yesterday about how doing everything we can to stay healthy is good for us and saves money was fascinating.”

Schuller grinned. “I’m glad you thought so. As the saying goes, ‘A dollar of prevention is worth a million of cure.’”

He glanced approvingly at the morsel of wheat toast a grandmotherly patient nibbled. “Most of you are old enough to remember when millions of people had heart disease and other serious medical problems at least partly caused by them making poor choices about their health. They cut years off their lives and made their remaining ones unnecessarily miserable for themselves and costly for society.

“For example, when the Surgeon General issued his landmark report on the hazards of smoking a century ago, around half of Americans were smokers. Before MNMs became available, about a quarter still used tobacco. Now only a masochist would try it. The way MNMs make you react when you eat two or three doughnuts is nothing compared to how terrible a person feels after lighting up!”

Nick smiled. “Now that we’ve been shown the errors of our ways, I’m sure we’ll all follow your recommendations for diet and exercise. So why are we still required to have our MNMs reactivated before we leave?”

The doctor raised his voice to ensure all the room’s occupants heard his words of wisdom. “Technically, you aren’t required to have your MNMs working properly. However, the reasons for doing that are so compelling it would be foolish to refuse.”

A pineapple-shaped woman younger than me piped up, “I had to get an MNM put in before I could start high school.”

Schuller nodded. “Yes, it’s the law now that everyone is required to have an MNM implanted during early adolescence. Good health habits need to start early. But when a person reaches eighteen years old and becomes a legal adult, it’s possible to file a request to have the MNM deactivated. And everyone who was at least that old when the law was passed can still choose whether or not to have an MNM placed.”

A potbellied gray-haired man old enough to be my father said, “Some choice! Getting an MNM is supposed to be optional, but my company told me that if I didn’t I’d lose my job!”

Several other speakers shouted their own stories. “I couldn’t get a loan to buy a car unless I had an MNM put in!” “They wouldn’t renew my driver’s license if I didn’t get one!” “You can’t even register to vote if you don’t have an MNM!”

Nick added, “Wouldn’t it be better if people could freely choose to have an MNM or not without all those punishments if they don’t?”

The physician nervously tried to drown out the grumbling in the room. “There are good reasons for incentives like that. Certainly individual freedom and the right to choose how we live are important values—but sometimes they aren’t the most important. One of the old poets was right—‘No man is an island.’ What each person does affects not only that individual but also to some degree the people around him, for good or ill. And when enough people freely make bad choices, both they and society as a whole suffer.

“In the past, society was more lenient about where it drew the line about allowing harmful behaviors. A century ago there were virtually no restrictions on tobacco. Then some types of advertising were banned. Largely because of the hazards of second-hand smoke, many public places became smoke-free. But despite those efforts millions of people were still smokers. Society paid billions of dollars to treat cancers and cardiopulmonary disease in individuals who freely decided to smoke. And their exercise of that right also meant exposing others who didn’t choose to do that, like children living in their homes, to carcinogens and other poisons in tobacco smoke.”

The doctor’s words seemed to placate his audience. He continued, “When I was a child, people could eat any kind and amount of food they wanted. Despite the costly health problems overeating caused, and the ‘obesity epidemic,’ people were only encouraged to make healthy choices—and far too many of them didn’t. Even when the first MNMs came on the market, having one implanted was voluntary. But despite financial incentives for having one placed, like lower health insurance premiums, for the vast bulk of people saving money wasn’t reason enough to limit what they ate.

“It’s because so many individuals still freely made bad choices about their health—even though they knew better—that MNMs have effectively become mandatory. If enough people ever learn to freely make good choices instead, those devices may not be required anymore. And though we Americans may have lost a little freedom, we’ve gained something more important. By letting your MNMs do their jobs and cooperating with us who want to help you, each of you has an excellent chance of enjoying good health throughout your natural life-span!”

For a moment I thought some of my fellow patients were about to applaud Dr. Schuller’s stirring defense of the modern healthcare system and his profession. But Nick interjected, “That was very inspiring, doctor. But you forgot to mention several other things. We get our MNMs and other preventive medical care for free. But the Universal Health System gives all of us only a fixed amount of money as an ‘allowance’ to pay for any treatments we receive if we do become sick or injured anytime during our lifetimes.”

He smiled at our colleagues. “In case any of you didn’t know, each one of us is paying for our current therapy out of that allowance. And when it’s used up, we’ll have to spend our own money to buy any additional medical care we need for the rest of our lives. In the bad old days, there were lots of different health insurance plans available. They were expensive and far from perfect, but at least they gave people some degree of choice. Now, under the current system, it’s one-size-fits-all.’

“And no matter how healthy a lifestyle we live, whether from bad luck, accidents, or our bodies just wearing out as we get older, eventually every one of us will get sick or hurt and need some of those high-tech but expensive treatments our doctors have. At some point, even if it’s many years from now, each of us will use up our medical allowance and no longer be able to pay for the care needed to keep our damaged, decrepit, or senile bodies alive. Who’s going to decide if it costs more to keep a person alive than it’s worth—and what happens then?”

Schuller began, “Every individual has a right to refuse extraordinary care—” But as the angry murmurs from our fellow patients grew louder, Nick interrupted him. “What if we don’t have that choice either? Our MNMs condition us to avoid overeating and other unhealthy activities by making us nauseated and feel bad if we do them. But what if they can do more than just punish us? What if, when the MNMs detect we’re too sick, too old and frail, too expensive to keep alive or cure, they put us out of our misery permanently—”

The doctor winced as a dried-out waffle hit his forehead. Stains blossomed on his impeccable white lab coat as scrambled artificial eggs, cupfuls of cold coffee, and nutritious vegipatties pelted him. He scampered for the exit leaving his dignity behind—escaping before any of his lumbering pursuers could catch him. I joined my fellow rioters as we threw our weight around—overturning tables and chairs, splattering the walls with half-eaten food, and sending plates and utensils crashing to the floor. Someone shouted we should storm the cafeteria where hospital staff ate and see what they were having for breakfast. Somebody else yelled he’d heard doctors and nurses dined on real food like bacon and maple syrupdrenched buttermilk pancakes, and we needed to protect their health by eating that stuff ourselves.

But before our raiding party got organized, a counterattack by security guards and orderlies stopped it. The cattle prod-like neuralshockers they brandished as they corralled my comrades and me curbed our enthusiasm. But as we huddled in the middle of the trashed room, the smiles creasing our broad faces showed that this frustrated putsch had been worth it.

They put us on lockdown in our tiny windowless rooms for two days. During that time in solitary, like my fellow prisoners I had nothing to occupy my time or entertain me except for a small TV monitor. Unfortunately it only showed one thirty-minute program that repeated continuously twenty-four hours a day. Its endless message of how eating generous servings of vegetables and fruits would help keep me healthy was a worthy one. However, even a kindergartener would’ve found the animated “Adventures of Rudy Rutabaga and Katie Kumquat in the Magical Land of Gardens and Orchards” thin on plot and lacking in sophisticated dialogue.

It was almost a relief when they herded us back to the exercise room for more sessions on those hyperkinetic treadmills. But after the extra workouts they made us do to make up for those we missed during our recent “time out,” my legs felt like hunks of tenderized beef brisket. As we settled in for an insipid supper of soy steaks and Styrofoam-like vegetables, Dr. Schuller entered the dining room. His lab coat had recovered its ivory gleam. But if anyone was tempted to sully it again by throwing the asparagus spears served with our meal at him, the menacing orderlies accompanying him were powerful dissuaders.

The shriveled, browning apples attendants tossed on our plates for dessert failed to keep the doctor away. As Schuller exhorted us to serve our sentences without further disruptions Nick whispered in my ear, “We’ve got to talk.”

I nodded—but we couldn’t converse with our keepers so close. We finally had a chance to communicate during a lecture that evening. Nick and I sat in the back of the room as a professorial gentleman who made Rudy Rutabaga look like a steroids-stuffed action hero expounded on the importance of a well-regulated colon.

Nick extracted a small notebook from his pocket and showed me a handwritten page.

We’ve got to escape from here before they reactivate our MNMs. Are you with me?

I thought about what he was suggesting. Then my lips silently formed the word, “Maybe.”

Nick was an optimist, for he turned the page to show me what he’d already written. I’ll come to your room tonight and talk with you.

I didn’t know how well he could read lips, so I didn’t mouth my question as to how he could do that considering they locked us in our rooms before “lights out.” Instead I just nodded as our lecturer showed us his personal collection of fecaliths.

Later that night, I lay down on the bed in my room after getting everything ready in case Nick did miraculously show up at my locked door. Still waiting for him, I fell asleep. But I jerked awake when my door swiveled slowly open. I turned on the only light in my room and blinked at the rotund apparition in the doorway.

Nick padded into my room and closed the door. He was dressed in an extra-large set of scarlet hospital scrubs. A pale burlap laundry bag was slung over his right shoulder.

He smiled down at me from beside the bed and whispered, “I bet you thought I wasn’t going to show up.”

I kept my voice low too. “How’d you manage to escape from your room and get in here?”

Nick laid a finger aside of his nose. “Trade secret.”

He opened the bag. “I brought some presents for you. Everything you need to look inconspicuous on our way out.”

I frowned at the green scrub suit and pair of white slip-on shoes he pulled from his sack. “Are you serious, Nick? Do you really think we can get out of here?”

“No guarantees. But I think we stand a good chance.”

I kept my blanket wrapped around me. “I’m not sure this is a good idea. I don’t know what they’ll do to us if we’re caught, but I bet it won’t be pleasant. Even if we do escape, what comes next? They know who we are, and the police will just track us down! Maybe it’d be better if we stayed here and finished our sentences.”

Nick shook his head. “If we play by their rules, they’ll reactivate our MNMs before we leave. Do you really want to go back to having that nanotechnology nanny controlling your life? And I wasn’t kidding the other day when I said that MNMs can also act as executioners!”

He scowled. “There are people on the outside who agree with me that it’s better to be free and make our own choices, even if we don’t stay quite as healthy or live as long. Once we get out, they’ll help set you up with a new identity far from here.”

My face showed fear. “You make it sound like you’re part of one of those terrorist organizations I’ve heard about!”

“No, we’re not terrorists. But we do have an organization—the Eaters Liberation Front. Several of the hospital staff who’ve been working with us here are actually on ELF’s payroll. They aren’t part of our group, but they’re willing to take our money to supplement that pittance the hospital pays them. In return for those bribes they’ve been helping me and the rest of you when they can—like getting me the scrubs I’m wearing and this set for you.”

“Considering how everybody here has treated us, it’s hard to believe any of them is really trying to help us! Which members of the staff are working with you?”

Nick grinned. “I’ll keep that information to myself until we know each other a little better.”

“Have you talked with anyone else about escaping tonight?”

“No, just you.”

I took the scrub suit from him. “Why’d you pick me? How do you know I won’t scream for help and turn you in? Maybe they’d give me some real food for a reward!”

Nick’s smile faded. “I am taking a risk by bringing you in on my plan. But, as I’ll explain later, I need help to do what has to be done and get us both out of here. And you seemed like my best candidate for a new recruit.”

“Why’s that?”

His gaze settled on my overstuffed form. “I’ll tell you what convinced me you’d do anything to keep from having your MNM reactivated. I could see it in your eyes when you talked about how you feel about doughnuts. To be honest, you look like someone who loves to eat!”

Nick stood in a corner of the room facing the wall, discreetly respecting my modesty as I put on the scrubs. He murmured, “We’ll have to pass through the hospital itself to get out. The rehab center we’re in is connected to it through an underground tunnel. There’s an isolated fire exit on the first floor of the hospital that we can use to escape.”

I wriggled into the wide pants and tied the drawstrings in front. “What if we meet somebody along the way? They might have a video surveillance system too!”

“That’s why we’re wearing these scrubs—so we’ll blend in to look like the real staff. Yes, there are video cameras with microphones everywhere—but except for a few places we’ll avoid, nobody monitors what they see and hear in real time. They’re just connected to a recording system in case Security needs to review something later.”

I slid the scrub top down over my head. “I’m decent now.”

Nick turned around and pulled more goodies out of his bag. “Here’s a surgical cap for you, and one for me. I’ll help you tie the strings on the back of it.”

“That’s okay. I can manage.”

He put on his own aquamarine paper headwear as I secured mine, and said, “These caps disguise us a little. It’d be nice if we could wear surgical masks too, but nobody does that outside the operating rooms—and we’ll be avoiding them. One thing in our favor is that it’s three A.M. There’s only a skeleton staff on duty now. Some of them might be taking catnaps at their stations.”

Nick extracted two last items from his sack. I examined the hospital nametag he gave me. The picture on it was mine, but its black lettering read “Cherry Ames R.N.”

He clipped his own nametag to the upper left pocket on the front of his scrub top and motioned me to do the same. His badge identified him as “Konrad Styner M.D.”

Nick said, “The pictures on these things are the front views of the ‘mug shots’ they made of each of us when we came here.”

“Let me guess. One of your accomplices in the hospital accessed them on its computer system and forged these nametags.”

Nick chuckled. “Now you’re catching on.”

After turning off the light, we slipped out of the room and quietly closed the door behind us. Padding down the hallway, we listened for the approaching footsteps of any guards. Soon we reached a closed metal door with “Stairway” printed in red letters above it. Slowly, keeping its hinges from creaking too much, Nick pushed in the horizontal metal bar mechanism spanning the heavy door’s middle to open it. Closing the door just as carefully, we descended a stairway whose concrete walls looked filthy in the dim fluorescent light.

The tunnel we entered through another door on the building’s lowest floor was a bit wider and higher than the hallways in the rehab center. Its painted stone sides, linoleum floor, and foam ceiling panels were all shades of dirty white. I pictured this tunnel being used to wheel a stretcher holding that woman who’d fallen on the treadmill several days ago from the rehab center to the hospital’s ER. It was as if we were entombed inside a catacomb—quiet as a grave except for our panting and footsteps. But as we rounded a shallow bend a sudden brief whirring sound startled me.

Nick pointed up at a small video camera that had just swiveled to look at us. He whispered reassuringly, “Remember what I told you. It can see us, but nobody’s looking at its display right now. By the time anybody reviews the recording we’ll be long gone.”

Just then a hulking shape rounded the sharp corner about fifteen meters ahead of us. There was no place to hide from the man walking toward us on shiny black boots. His ebony uniform and gold badge conferred an aura of menace intensified by the clublike neural-shocker clipped to his belt and swinging at his side.

Nick nudged my shoulder to keep me walking briskly beside him. As we reached the man, my companion shouted, “What’ve they got in the cafeteria this morning?”

The guard shrugged as he walked past us. “The usual mystery meat.”

Nick bellowed back, “Yum-o! We’ll have to scarf it down fast before our break is over!”

Seconds later we turned the corner that the guard had appeared from and were alone again. Nick murmured, “See, you just have to act like you’re not doing anything wrong!”

A sign on the wall indicated the main hospital complex was just ahead. I whispered, “How far are we from the exit?”

“It’s on the other side of the hospital. We have to make a little detour to reach it.”

Soon we came to an elevator and went up two floors. Its doors opened onto a drab hospital ward. I tried to look as nonchalant as Nick as we strolled down a long hall lined with dark silent patient rooms. The two nurses’ stations we passed were centers of inactivity. Several staff members wearing scrubs similar to ours sat at each station. They glanced at the alarms intermittently chiming from the patient monitors to make sure the problem wasn’t too life-threatening and ignored us as they entered data into computer workstations.

We’d almost reached the end of the hall when Nick and I stopped abruptly. Our path was suddenly blocked by three nurses wheeling a stretcher straight out from the room just ahead of us on the right. A human form with a bulging abdomen lay atop the stretcher, covered completely by a thick white sheet. As the nurses struggled to turn that cart with its heavy burden in our direction, a bare arm with rolls of fat slipped out from beneath the covering cloth. Its pudgy fingers dangled near one of the stretcher’s squeaking wheels before a nurse noticed it and tucked the lifeless limb back under the shroud.

As they passed us with their burden one of them muttered sadly, “Another one bites the dust.” Nick and I kept walking as I realized that nurse’s comment was more literally true than she knew. I’d recognized the ornate gold ring on the deceased hand we’d glimpsed. It belonged to the woman in our group who’d fallen on the treadmill several days ago.

Nick led me into another elevator and pushed the button to descend one floor. As its doors closed I whispered, “Are we near the exit yet?”

“It’s close. But there’s something important we need to do before we leave.”

We exited the elevator into another empty hallway. Nick led me to an inconspicuous closed door. He unlocked it with a key from his pocket and motioned me to follow.

It was pitch-black inside the tiny room after he closed the door. I heard the click of a light switch and blinked in the dim light.

We were squeezed together into a storage closet. Its walls were lined with skeletal metal racks stuffed with boxes of sterile surgical gauze, scalpels, needles, and syringes. This surgeons’ toy chest had little free space in its center to begin with, and our larger-than-average bodies made it an even tighter fit.

Nick’s face was of necessity close to mine in our cramped quarters. “I bet you’re wondering why I brought you here. Remember that detour I mentioned we had to make before we escape? This is it.”

I looked around at this prison cell he’d trapped me in and wondered what he was up to. He said, “Look up at the ceiling.”

All I saw was the typical institutional foam panels, with a silver ventilation grill right above me. Nick confirmed my suspicions when he continued, “Yes, our way out leads through the ventilation system.”

He glanced down at his fulsome belly, then at the significantly smaller opening above us. “Obviously I can’t get through it. But you’ve lost enough weight now that I think you can. That’s the other reason why I chose you. You’re the only person in our group who’s young and thin enough to get up there and go where I tell you for my little mission. There was another person in ELF who was supposed to be brought here with me. Unfortunately, the hospital filled its last empty bed and went on diversion just before my friend was arrested too. She must’ve been taken to another facility.”

I frowned. “You sound like you got yourself arrested on purpose—and that you’re really here for some kind of sabotage! I don’t want to be involved in anything violent!”

“Neither do I. What I want you to do won’t hurt anyone. In fact, it’ll help countless innocent people who’ve been persecuted for their eating habits just like us! It’s a little dangerous, but I’m hoping you’ll agree to do it ...”

Moments later I was crawling through a tight horizontal shaft in near-darkness. The penlight Nick had given me was clutched in my right hand, but its glowing tip gave little light. My left held another item pulled from his pocket—a scrap of paper with lines drawn on it as a crude map, showing me which of the ninety-degree turns in the shaft I had to follow to reach the destination he’d given me.

Back in the storage closet, while I was still deciding what to do, Nick had pulled three sturdy boxes from a nearby shelf. He’d stacked two of them on top of each other and used the third, pushed against the side of the bottom member of that pair, as an impromptu stepladder. Reaching up from his perch atop the two boxes, he’d yanked the grill off, exposing a gaping square hole that, he’d said, I should just be able to slip through.

I decided to keep going along with him and see what his plan was. He’d given me one last item to put in my back pocket before boosting me up through the opening. It was a thin, narrow card made of blank white plastic he told me he’d smuggled in when they’d brought him to the rehab center. I asked Nick how he’d managed to keep it from being discovered during that thorough search they’d done on us and our possessions when we’d arrived. He smiled and said it was a good thing Dr. Schuller had deferred his prostate exam.

Finally I reached the vertical shaft Nick told me about. It dropped down the height of two floors to my target area. After stuffing the flashlight and map into a pocket, I wedged myself legs first into that dark opening. Then, like my companion’s saintly namesake descending a chimney on Christmas Eve, I carefully scooted down it. The shaft was just wide enough to let me bend my knees and press them along with my hands and elbows against its slick metal sides to keep from falling through it.

It was tricky to coordinate those cycles of pressing and releasing the shaft’s walls with my limbs just right so I slid down it only a little at a time. After kicking out the shaft’s covering ventilation grill, I lowered myself about two meters through the ceiling to the floor of a new, brightly lit room. It was smaller than the storage closet I’d started from but seemed bigger because it wasn’t stuffed with metal shelving or anything else.

The chamber had four gray metal walls like a bank vault’s. Two walls were bare, while the other pair had closed doors centered in them and set opposite each other. Both doors were made of clear, thick plastic that looked bulletproof. Through one I saw another room unlit except for tiny red and green lights blinking along its walls. A peek through the other door showed a well-lighted anteroom. It contained an empty chair at a desk topped by a computer workstation.

Nick was right when he’d said the security station outside wasn’t manned this early in the morning. As I watched he entered through an outside door and waved to me. Several more steps and we stood facing each other, separated only by that clear door between the two rooms.

He pointed toward a small slot near me. I swiped the white card he’d given me through it. There was a brief buzz, then Nick pushed the door open. After closing it he whispered, “There’s a key pad outside that door they use to open it from the security station’s side. Unfortunately, they change the access code every day. There was no way my fellow hackers in ELF could find out what the code was and get that information to me soon enough for me to use it.

“That’s why you had to do all that crawling to get in here. Once somebody’s inside this room, unlocking it on this side just requires a key card whose code stays the same for months at a time.”

I said, “You haven’t told me why we’re here.”

He pointed to the darkened room behind me. “That’s ELF’s holy grail—the hospital’s server room. Those computers contain the programs and data we need to cripple this corrupt healthcare system that treats us like numbers on a balance sheet instead of human beings!”

He took the white card back from me and walked to the server room’s door. A swipe through a slot identical to the one at the other door made this one open too. There was a similar door and wall a meter away from that one. Nick motioned me to follow him into that cramped space, then let the first door close and lock behind us.

He said, “This little area is called a mantrap. To get into the server room itself, you have to open and then close that first door. Now, if I can’t get through this second door, we’re trapped here until security ‘rescues’ us.”

Nick took a deep breath. “Here goes!” He pressed his thumb against a small plate beside that second door.

He sighed in relief as, with another brief buzz, this final barrier opened. “You have no idea how hard it was for me to get my fingerprint into that thing’s database. But it worked!”

I followed Nick as he flipped a light switch to illuminate our surroundings, then moved to one of the metal racks holding squat rectangular server units. The room was uncomfortably cool. My teeth chattered as I asked, “What are you going to do now?”

Nick didn’t answer but went straight to his work. He pulled a server unit out on sliding rails from its rack and flipped up a monitor screen. His fingers raced across a keyboard sitting atop the unit.

Finally he replied, “This server unit is connected to only an extremely restricted part of the hospital’s intranet. Hackers like me can’t access it from the outside or even from hospital workstations. Special server systems like this one store the secret programs and codes used to control MNMs and those implanted devices doctors use to interrogate them. All those files are classified as ‘top secret’ and heavily encrypted. However, I’ve managed to fake a high enough permission level to copy them, even though I can’t use them yet. Once I get them back to my fellow hackers with ELF, we have a distributed computing system powerful enough to crack the encryption on those files.

“After we do that, we’ll be able to create our own working programmers and deactivate anybody’s MNM! Even better, we’ll have a copy of the Thanatos program inside every MNM that the government doesn’t want the public to know about. We’ll send proof of its existence to the media and broadcast it every way we can. Then people can decide for themselves whether they want something inside their bodies that will kill them when they become too expensive to keep alive!”

Nick stopped typing. “May I have my penlight back?”

I complied. He unscrewed the penlight’s back end, removed a small black disk concealed there, and inserted the disk into a shallow depression in the server unit’s top. “It’ll take just a few minutes to save the files I need onto the storage disk. Then we’ll be through with this detour and on our way out. I have a friend waiting for us in her car outside in the parking lot. Before long we’ll be making our getaway!”

I frowned. “You’d think, considering how sensitive this information is, that the security here would be even tighter than it is. Not that anything we’ve done has been easy or simple, but I’m surprised we’ve been able to get this far.”

“Until recently, security here was too tight to do this. Then the powers-that-be decided to save some money in their budget by scrimping on tighter measures. That’s why, in a classic case of bureaucratic shortsightedness, that station outside isn’t guarded anymore between midnight and six A.M. Everything we’ve done is being recorded by video cameras. But, just like in the rest of the hospital, they’re not watched in real time.”

He tapped the keyboard several more times. Then he extracted the storage disk and secured it back inside the penlight before slipping the instrument into his pocket. After returning the server unit and other equipment to their original locations, he turned off the light. We retraced our steps through that series of now unlocked doors, placed the ventilation grill I’d kicked out back where it belonged, and then exited this “secure” area leaving no obvious sign any unauthorized personnel had been there. Soon we were once again in the unrestricted part of the hospital.

As the two of us sauntered through a hallway on the first floor, Nick smiled at the few people we passed. He even whistled the opening bars of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” as we strolled past a wall-mounted security camera.

Then we arrived at a secluded fire exit door. Nick held it open for me, and for the first time in days I walked free beneath a starry night sky. A refreshing breeze caressed my face. Though it was cold enough on this winter night for me to see my breath, I felt warm inside knowing everything was going to work out fine.

There weren’t many cars in the hospital parking lot we soon reached. Scattered lights dangling from poles shaped like gibbets cast a faint pale glow over our path. Nick nudged my arm happily as he spotted his friend’s car nestled in a small cluster of other vehicles. He trotted ahead of me and tapped merrily on the window beside the shadowed driver—

Suddenly the lights around us flared like white-hot searchlights. I squinted through that dazzling glare to see the doors of the vehicles nearby swing open and uniformed men brandishing neuralshockers pour out into the parking lot. They grabbed Nick and handcuffed him before I could say a word.

Then the driver’s door of the vehicle belonging to Nick’s friend opened. My vision had recovered enough in the radiance surrounding me to recognize that familiar white lab coat and its wearer.

Dr. Schuller stood a close but safe distance away as Nick struggled in the arms of the police officers. The doctor said, “Look who’s out for an early morning stroll. Don’t you know it’s important to get enough sleep every night to stay healthy?”

Two officers removed Nick’s forged name-tag, penlight, and other incriminating evidence. Schuller smirked, “I understand you have a special interest in how MNMs work. Let me give you a demonstration.”

Nick’s frenzied attempt to twist away from the doctor ended as the touch from a neural-shocker made him go limp. Schuller raised the black glove sheathing his right hand. Nick’s eyes bulged as the glove came ever closer until the tip of the doctor’s right index finger rested over his patient’s MNM.

Seconds later Nick’s eyes rolled back into his skull. His mouth sagged open and exposed a lolling pink tongue. Even the white whiskers on his face seemed to droop as his head listed to one side—suddenly grown too heavy for his neck.

I doubted Nick heard the doctor reassure him, “Don’t worry. I gave your MNM a command to give your heart extra vagal stimulation and stop it for only ten seconds. It should be beating fine again now. You’ll recover soon.”

Then Dr. Schuller grinned at me. “Now it’s time to give you your just desserts ...”

Three weeks later I stood barefoot in my room, admiring my naked body in a full-length mirror attached to the back wall. The fat-devouring nanobots and other medicines Dr. Schuller prescribed during my stay had indeed sculpted my body back to centerfold standards. Those painful exercise sessions had paid off by toning my limbs, abdomen, and buttocks to athletic levels. The doctor’s expert medical regimen had even enhanced and firmed my bustline. And I was sure my internal organs were just as beautiful and in tip-top shape from those treatments too.

The alarm clock on the cute nightstand they’d given me showed ten A.M.—time for me to finally check out of this “resort.” I’d laid out all the new clothes a smiling orderly had brought me this morning on my bed. The underwear, pantyhose, frilly flowered skirt, and scarlet blouse looked like they’d fit my svelte figure perfectly. After I dressed and finished dabbing my face with the contents of the makeup case on my pillow, I’d be a vision of loveliness.

Without a warning knock or greeting, the door to my room opened. Dr. Schuller closed it—and blinked when I turned around and smiled at him. But he seemed to recover his professional insensitivity to nudity and focused mainly on my face as he spoke.

“I hope you had a good night’s sleep, Ms. Thompson. This is a big day for you. Think of it as the beginning of a new, healthier life.”

I interlaced my fingers behind my neck and arched my back to accentuate the fine job he’d done on my breasts. “I’m ready, doctor!”

I bent over to retrieve my panties from the bed and slip them on. Behind me the physician stammered slightly, “Of course, before you leave your MNM has to be reactivated. That’s what I’ve come here to do. Let your MNM help you, and you’ll stay as healthy as you are now.”

The mattress creaked as I sat on it facing him and raised each leg in turn to slide into my pantyhose. “I appreciate what you’ve done for me, doctor. With the way I look now, I won’t have to worry about spending my nights alone anymore. But after all those wonderful lectures we received on good eating habits and exercise, I don’t think I need my MNM to help me. I can watch what I eat on my own.”

The physician shook his head as I took lots of time putting on my bra. “I’m sorry. You can file an application to do that, but processing it typically takes months. Until you get official approval to keep your MNM deactivated, the law says it has to be working. And don’t forget all those penalties like not being able to get a job or have a bank account if your MNM isn’t activated. Plus, no matter how motivated you feel now, there’s a high rate of recidivism back to bad eating habits without that device to help you!”

As I wiggled my skirt on I leaned over and displayed a generous helping of cleavage. I murmured, “I bet there are ways around those rules. If you were to certify you reactivated my MNM without really doing it, who would know? I imagine you even know how to fudge the monitoring reports it’s supposed to send on me to confirm I’m behaving myself.”

My lustrous golden hair fluttered breezily after I pulled the blouse down over my head. Slipping on a nice new pair of Mary Janes finished my reverse striptease. The doctor seemed unsure what to say as I applied my pink lipstick and other makeup. Then I stood up and displayed my fully clothed and preened glory to him.

There was only a single entendre in the coy smile I flashed at him. “Remember that first time you interviewed me, doctor? I wasn’t joking when I told you what I’d do for a Long John with frosting. If you help me with my MNM, I’ll give you a treat too.”

I nodded toward the bed. “I can get undressed again so you can give me a very complete physical right now and make house calls on me after I’m released. What do you say?”

His first response was wordless. He shoved his hands into his lab coat’s side pockets and pulled its flaps together in front—as if trying to conceal any anatomical evidence my words and actions had produced an effect on him. But what he said sounded coldly matter-of-fact.

“What you’re suggesting is illegal and violates professional ethics. I’ll ignore what you said this time, but if you persist I’ll have to take further action.”

I doubted his refusal was based on moral qualms—merely the risk of getting caught. But I was confident that Plan B would win him over.

I smiled sweetly. “I never told you how I got my MNM deactivated. The Gooey Glaze guy gave me the name of someone who helped people like me. One night, after blindfolding me so I couldn’t see where we were going, she drove me someplace where I could get ‘fixed.’ I pictured her parking in the alley of some backstreet and leading me through the rear door of a slum building.

“When she took off my blindfold we were in a darkened rundown room. I sat in a wooden chair while we waited. My contact told me even she didn’t know who the guy coming to treat me was. They’d met and arranged these appointments online.”

I sat on the bed. “Finally he showed up. The room was so badly lit I never got a good look at him, but he seemed tall and trim. His clothes were nondescript and covered him from head to toe. He wore the same kind of black hood with eyeholes that medieval executioners did. His black gloves kept him from leaving fingerprints.

“The man never spoke. He pressed the tip of his right index finger over my MNM for several seconds, then nodded to my contact. She paid him his cut of what I’d given her—then he was gone. We had to wait ten minutes to give him time to get away. Then she put my blindfold back on and we left too.”

I grinned innocently. “I’ve read that those programmers like the one he had implanted in his fingertip are issued legally to only specially licensed doctors. Each device is designed to work only when it detects that physician’s individual genetic code in the surrounding tissue.

“I’ve heard some unscrupulous types once tried to hijack a programmer by severing a poor doctor’s finger. But the device is clever enough to recognize the change in body chemistry that occurs when that’s done and it automatically self-destructs. Other drastic steps like kidnapping the whole physician or threatening that poor professional’s loved ones don’t work either, because the programmer senses the surge of neurotransmitters and hormones those stresses cause and destroys itself then too.”

I winked at him. “In fact, the only way one of those devices can be used for an illegal MNM deactivation is for the doctor to do it voluntarily. Naturally, the physicians who have them are supposed to adhere to the highest ethical standards and not even think about doing that. But if one ever did, I’ve heard the penalties for such a breach in professional conduct are very severe—perhaps even fatal.”

Dr. Schuller rubbed the tip of his right index finger against his thumb. “Everything you’ve said about programmers like the one I have is correct. But I don’t see how this is relevant to—”

I interrupted him. “You know, I feel sorry for doctors like you. Once you were treated almost like gods—respected for your knowledge, training, and compassion. Now you’re just underpaid pill pushers and technicians. The only way you can get your jollies these days is by lording it over the defenseless patients entrusted to your tender mercies. No wonder some of you might be tempted to supplement your income by using the very system that’s ruined you for your own ends.

“Of course, I can’t say for sure who the poor doctor who treated me was or why he did it. However, I do remember that, when he leaned over to deactivate my MNM, I caught a strong whiff of wintergreen mouthwash and musk cologne. That might be enough of a clue for the authorities to track him down. I might even get a reward for doing my civic duty and helping to bring him to justice!”

Dr. Schuller studied me with the cold glare a pathologist might direct at a messy corpse before starting an autopsy. There was no fear in his voice. “I don’t recall you ever asking what happened to your erstwhile partner in crime, Ms. Thompson. He proved obstinate when the authorities questioned him about his other accomplices.

“Eventually they brought him back here for further treatment. As per protocol, I initiated Limbic System Aversion Therapy. He proved unusually resistant.”

A whiff of wintergreen mouthwash wafted from the doctor’s lips. His musk cologne made me nauseous. “The last time I saw Mr. Myra, he was sitting in a comfortable chair and smiling. Unfortunately, that’s all he does anymore. We give him just enough water and enteric feedings through his nasogastric tube for him to maintain a healthy rate of weight loss.

“It’s a strain on the nurses and orderlies to shift his position occasionally and clean him after he soils himself. But they won’t have to do it much longer. Soon he will exhaust the money in his personal Universal Health System account. When that happens, his MNM will ensure that, the next time he goes peacefully to sleep, he won’t wake up.”

Schuller indicated the mirror, alarm clock, and other little luxuries in my room. “Three weeks ago you told us Mr. Myra was coming to your room. You agreed to play along with him until we found out what he had planned and collected evidence against him. We monitored both of you using the video surveillance system and the staff members you encountered during your excursion.

“You’ve been rewarded for informing on him. Don’t jeopardize the good will the hospital and I currently have toward you by trying to seduce or threaten me. If you don’t let me reactivate your MNM, I’ll have to refer you for LSAT too. Perhaps you and Mr. Myra can sit together and smile at each other before he leaves us.”

I laughed. “I guess what happens now depends on how big a gambler you are, doctor. For one of us to be a big winner, the other has to be a big loser. Or we could cut a deal where we both get some of what we want. If you don’t reactivate my MNM, I’ll eat just enough extra doughnuts and other goodies for me to be able to exercise the excess calories off and stay just below the legal weight limit. That way no one will know it isn’t working, and we’ll both be safe.

“What’s in it for you is that you won’t have to defend yourself from accusations about illegal moonlighting. Maybe nobody will believe me—but what if the authorities start checking on what you do in your spare time? Do you want to take even a small chance of that? Even if I’m caught, you can claim I had somebody else deactivate my MNM again after I left here—and leave just me holding the bag!”

I lay down on the mattress. “And that offer to let you play gynecologist with me still stands. For you, I’d be a very nice partner in crime.”

Schuller glowered at me. I waited as he calculated the risks and benefits for each of his choices. Finally he said, “Sit up.”

There was a softness in his voice that motivated me to obey. While his right index finger pressed down on my MNM, his palm rested below it against my left breast and gave it a furtive massage.

Then he leaned away and said, “Your MNM is now registered as being activated on the national monitoring network. If anyone discovers that it’s really still deactivated, I’ll deny everything. As you said, it’s in both our interests for you to follow the rules for healthy living you learned here. Don’t overeat, exercise regularly—and I’ll be visiting you soon to see how you’re doing.”

I stood up, wrapped my arms around him, and gave him a long lingering kiss that he returned hungrily. Then I sighed in his ear, “You don’t know how much that means to me.”

The doctor started to walk me backwards toward the bed. But I giggled away from him and said, “Maybe we should be a little more discrete. Somebody might walk in and be shocked by your bedside manner. I’ll call you tomorrow to set up a private consultation at my apartment.”

Schuller reluctantly accepted the wisdom of that plan. He wiped my lipstick from his face with a handkerchief before regaining his usual professional air. Then he pressed the call button near my bed and informed the nurse who answered it that I was ready for discharge.

The two male nurses who’d accompanied him on my first day here arrived a moment later. Schuller said, “I’m going out to write the discharge orders for Ms. Thompson now.”

The taller of the two burly nurses smiled. “No, you aren’t.”

He pulled a badge from his back pocket. “CDC. You’re under arrest.”

They grabbed the doctor and wrestled him to the floor. Schuller screamed like a terrified toddler as one of them rolled him into a prone position and held him down with a knee in the back as the other handcuffed his arms behind him.

The physician spluttered expletives and threats as the pair dragged him from the room. I followed behind as they transferred him in the hallway to three other Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agents dressed in conventional garb. As Schuller and his trio of traveling companions left, he glanced back at me as if he were confused why I wasn’t in custody too.

Jim Rhodes retrieved the badge he’d dropped in my room during that violent arrest and stood beside me. He grinned, “There’s no way Schuller can squirm out of this. Besides the testimony you’ll give at his trial, we watched and recorded everything you two said and did through the miniature video camera and microphone hidden inside that full-length mirror in your room. I’m sure the judge and jury will find that recording very interesting. I know I did.”

Tom Colby, the other undercover CDC agent, piped in, “Ditto!”

A maidenly blush warmed my cheeks. I tittered, “All in a good cause. Just call me Lady Godiva.”

Jim said, “I bet you’ll get a commendation for this. Not only are you responsible for catching red-handed the doctor suspected of being one of the top MNM bootleggers in this state, but you also prevented what would’ve been a major terrorist attack by ELF!”

I shrugged modestly. “I’m glad Schuller will get what he deserves for all the harm he’s done by deactivating MNMs. He must’ve performed so many illegal deactivations he’s lost track of whom he’s done, because he didn’t realize I was bluffing when I told him he’d done mine. Maybe he even believes that garbage I told him about how doctors have fallen from grace and used it to rationalize his crimes. His biggest mistake was that he couldn’t adapt to how times and his profession have changed—and now he’s going to pay for it.

“But I feel bad about what happened to Nick. Yes, he and terrorist organizations like ELF are responsible for poisoning people’s minds, and they have to be stopped. But I don’t think they’re intentionally evil—just misguided. Maybe, with the right kind of persuasion, some of them might come around to the correct way of thinking before it’s too late—like it is for Nick.”

I sighed. “But all I want to do right now is to go home and take a nice hot shower. After being around a dirt ball like Schuller for so long and giving him those cheap thrills to trip him up, I feel all scuzzy on the inside and outside.”

Jim and Tom seemed ready to volunteer to accompany me and help lather me back to cleanliness. But though I appreciated their interest, right now I needed some quality time alone. They could read my full report after I filed it online at home after my shower.

Moments later, as I walked out into the hospital parking lot on this comfortably cool morning, I reveled in the warm sunshine bathing me and the leers young males bestowed on my new and improved body. But after I entered the empty car reserved for me and blended into traffic, I mulled over everything I’d done the past few weeks.

There were pros and cons to being an undercover agent for the CDC. Although I was doing my country a great service, it meant I had to consort with the most pathetic members of the society I was protecting. Despite their differences, Schuller and Nick had one flaw in common. They were both living in the past—refusing to accept the changes that were today’s new reality. They’d been tilting against windmills and, as always, the windmills won.

I was smarter than them. I’d accepted the system as it was and come out the winner. After I graduated from medical school, I could’ve gone down the same dead-end path Schuller and other physicians did. I could’ve become a pill pusher like him, or maybe a surgical robo-jockey—an insignificant lordling of a tiny domain, eventually brought low by wounded pride, frustration, and greed. But instead I’d used my M.D. degree as a stepping stone to becoming a satisfied cog in a great healthcare juggernaut.

No, the system I’d embraced wasn’t perfect—but it was much better than it used to be. MNMs really did dramatically improve everyone’s health and lower the cost of medical care. And when cure was impossible and quality of life was gone, those devices impartially gave a quick and painless death with dignity—with no difficult decisions for those individuals or their loved ones to make. Surely a little loss of freedom about what people ate or how they behaved was worth all that.

And I’d put myself in a position where I didn’t have to choose between good health and the freedom to indulge my appetites. It was part of my job as an undercover agent to temporarily adopt the depraved lifestyle and look the part of the overeaters and couch potatoes I worked among so I could root out those who helped corrupt them. Before my next assignment, I’d have carte blanche from the CDC to order every controlled and illegal substance I wanted. Dozens of doughnuts, cases of cookies, gallons of ice cream—my bosses encouraged me to gorge on them so I’d be ready that much sooner to go underground again.

The nice figure and glowing health I now enjoyed had its pleasures and perks. But so did sitting on a sofa watching soap operas and talk shows on holoTV while munching on chips and guzzling soda.

As I drove home to that relaxing shower, I felt a bit smug knowing how lucky I was compared to everyone around me. Their MNMs gave them good health bought at the price of a bland and boring existence. Most would never thrill to the taste of the forbidden doughnut.

But I had the best of both worlds.

Copyright © 2010 H.G. Stratmann

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Science Fact

Tips for the Budget Time-Traveler

Shane Tourtellotte

Time travel is a favorite topic for science fiction, but one that, by its nature, resists the kind of rigorous factual analysis its readers and writers would put into orbital dynamics or genetic Seldom...

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Novelettes   Short Stories

Science Fact

Tips for the Budget Time-Traveler

Shane Tourtellotte

Chart 1: Gold/silver value ratio, 1845–2008 (London quotes)

Time travel is a favorite topic for science fiction, but one that, by its nature, resists the kind of rigorous factual analysis its readers and writers would put into orbital dynamics or genetic recombination. Still, there are practical issues one must tackle if visiting another era. Language is one, a topic covered admirably in L. Sprague de Camp’s “Language for Time Travelers.” Another is the matter of money.

Seldom in SF do we see a time-traveler arrive in a past society with the financial resources needed to support himself for any length of time. Many stories ignore the matter altogether; others have the traveler fall in with some benefactor; in others the time travel was unplanned and precipitous. A protagonist who takes intelligent steps to fund his sojourn is uncommon. For a reading audience that likes rigorous storytelling, this cannot really satisfy.

It would be simple and convenient to posit a filthy rich time-traveler who can overcome this problem by brute force. Too simple, too convenient. Suppose, instead, that the expenses of building your time machine have tapped you out, that you have a relative pittance left to back your trip to Agincourt or Marathon or the court of Cleopatra. How can you maximize your limited budget to support your adventure in the past? This essay will provide some answers.

To illustrate various principles, I will use the specific example of traveling to the early Roman Empire. The Augustan Era, along with being a popular period likely to draw a time-traveler’s interest, provides excellent examples on several points. The methodology presented should help you cope with any other past period you choose to visit.

So, our first question arises: how to get the money you’ll need in the past?

Heavy Metal

Ideally, you would have a stash of the currency used in the period you’ll be visiting. Realistically, your coin collection probably isn’t that extensive, and buying up genuine ancient coins would be overly expensive due to scarcity and other factors. You might contemplate counterfeiting period currency, but besides still being an expensive venture, it would be highly risky both in the present and the past.

Go back more than a few centuries, though, and your options widen. People will accept more than standardized, state-produced currency. Precious metals, gold and silver, will pass well, as long as the recipient can be reasonably sure of weight and purity. Taking back bulk gold and silver will be much more efficient than buying period gold or silver coinage with the same money. If need be, you can purchase period currency with your metals in the past, at a much more lenient premium than at a coin dealer or an online auction today.

But of your two main options, gold and silver, which will get you further in the past?

The value ratio of gold to silver was remarkably steady for most of human history. From far antiquity to the start of the sixteenth century, an ounce of gold was roughly 12 times more valuable than an ounce of silver. There were local fluctuations, such as when Rome’s access to silver was cut off during the Second Punic War, but global systemic movements were glacial.

The ratio shifted when Spain’s silver mines in South America began producing, depressing prices for silver and moving the ratio to between 15 and 16 to 1. The greater dislocation came in the nineteenth century, when the Western nations, led by Great Britain, abandoned silver standards for their currencies in favor of gold. Deprived of this support for its value, silver fell, especially compared to gold, which gained that very support.

The gold-silver ratio has been increasingly volatile for the last century and a half. Through many economic upheavals, including the global abandonment of the gold standard, the ratio has soared almost to 100 to 1, and plummeted back to 14 to 1, nearly as low as the ancient norm. (See Chart 1.) We sit between the extremes as I write, with gold somewhat about 65 times as valuable as silver.

If you are going back to ancient Rome—or to virtually any time before the American Civil War—silver is more cost-efficient, getting you roughly five times the value for the present-day expenditure. The problem is that silver is far less mass efficient. Walk any distance with sixty pounds of silver on your back, and you may wish you had paid that 400% premium for a nice, portable five pounds of gold that will be worth just as much to the locals.

Silver is at best a partial solution for the budget time-traveler. Some of your assets should go into that, for solid value and easy convertibility. The rest would be better used in something a little more speculative, but capable of producing far greater returns: trade goods.

The Wealth of Bygone Nations

If you’re going to be a cross-time trader, you need to keep economic basics in mind. The most important in your situation is: Know your market. This means knowing what the locals use as money, in all its denominations, knowing your customers’ likes and habits, and knowing local price conditions. All of these require historical research, and for the latter two, one soon comes to appreciate how patchy our knowledge of quotidian matters from the distant past really is, even in such a famous nation as ancient Rome. Famous writers whose works have reached us do often expound on cultural matters of what products are in vogue, but dry price listings are far less common. And who can blame them? If a Jane Austen novel digressed for five pages on the prices at a local market, you’d yawn and skip ahead to the next ball.

Some price listings do reach us from the Roman Empire. The Emperor Diocletian, reigning around A.D. 300, attempted to control rampant inflation with mandatory price controls, and the list of these maximum prices survives. Cato the Elder covers prices related to farming in his De Agri Cultura, but these have a necessarily limited application to us. Our best and broadest source comes from the closest thing Rome produced to a modern scientist: Pliny the Elder.

Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (Natural History), published soon before his death in A.D. 79, can plausibly be called the first encyclopedia. Among his exhaustive listings of natural facts are a number of prices for botanical, mineralogical, and other items useful to a time-trader. Pliny did make his share of errors in trying to encapsulate the known Roman world, but taken with care and some fact checking, his Natural History is invaluable.

Your dealings will also have to follow the most famous economic maxim: Buy low, sell high. One part of this will be where you do your buying and selling. Large cities will create pricing premiums, in the past as today: Bread, for example, cost twice as much in ancient Rome as in the countryside. The greater application is in finding goods that are cheap for you, but not only expensive for the buyers, but still things they will want to purchase at those prices. Your advantage as a time-traveler here, in the added knowledge you possess, is key. You will know which items, mundane and plentiful for you, are captivating and rare for your customers.

Rarity is a crucial point. The best guarantor of high prices is scarcity; even a mediocre commodity can fetch high prices if it is rare enough to gain cachet as a luxury item. And the best creator of scarcity, across most of human history, is great distance between a good’s source and its market.

We easily forget this today, when it can be more economical to import even the cheapest items from ten thousand miles away than to manufacture them locally. But reduce today’s web of global shipping to a few tenuous trade routes stretching across mountains, deserts, or oceans, and prices can spiral to dizzying heights. Historically, distance is a strong price multiplier, a fact we will have occasion to exploit.

Beyond this theoretical grounding, there are practical concerns. As mentioned with silver, high value is a mixed blessing if it comes with backbreaking weight. Ideally, you want a high ratio of value to mass and bulk. Also, you want something you can convert easily into money or property. A hundred-dollar bill is legal tender today, but you’ll have trouble spending it at the local kids’ lemonade stand. And no matter how valuable your “Sunflowers” by van Gogh is, the faster you need to sell it, the smaller the fraction of its worth you’ll get. Similar troubles will arise if you try to conduct business in the past with a ten-pound gold ingot or a five-carat emerald.

So we have a concise set of rules. We want compact trade goods, cheap today but dear in the past, with enough demand to support whatever we wish to sell. Our value baseline is silver, which was set by Caesar Augustus’s monetary reforms as 84 denarii per libra. Buying a denarius’s weight of silver costs us roughly $2.25 today. If your trade good doesn’t fetch more money per pound than this in the past, you’re likely better off taking back silver instead.

So what goods are ideal for our temporal argonaut setting down in ancient Rome?

The Spice Must Flow

Spices and aromatics from the Orient were popular in Rome of the Augustan Age and later. Imported spices went into food, wine, and perfume in limitless combinations and voracious quantities. Pliny the Elder lamented that twenty-five million denarii a year went East to buy such goods from India at enormous markups Here is a tremendous—but elusive—opportunity.

Pepper is famed for its value to Romans: When Alaric the Visigoth besieged Rome in A.D. 408, part of the ransom he demanded to spare the city was three thousand pounds of pepper. Its unit price, however, is disappointing. Pliny recorded that black pepper sold for a mere four denarii per libra, and long pepper, the most expensive variety, came in at 15 d/lb. Buying pepper today to sell at those prices is a worse bargain than silver.

Frankincense and myrrh, aromatics famed from the New Testament, seem to hold promise, but again Pliny dashes that hope. Top-quality frankincense brings only six d/lb, he says, and myrrh tops out at 16 d/lb.

Pliny never gives a price for saffron, but does say it is the commodity most often falsified, so there was plenty of perceived value in passing off fakes. However, the reason saffron is so obvious a luxury item to us is that it is so expensive today. The highest quality saffron goes for around ten dollars a gram—and Romans paid attention to quality, so it’s a poor idea to try scraping by with cheap stuff. Odds are low that saffron would be worth so much more to Romans to justify the expense, not to mention the risk that buyers will think this suspicious stranger is trying to pass off bogus saffron.

Pliny’s information on cinnamon is interesting, partly because it covers several different plants. The foodstuff generally sold in America today as cinnamon is actually cassia. Pliny says the highest quality of cassia will sell for 50 denarii per libra, and the lowest at five: not up to our requirements. He gives a more promising price for daphnoides, or isocinnamon, at three hundred denarii a libra. The trouble here is that we are not certain what plant Pliny meant, a variety of cassia or another plant altogether.

We are surer of the identity of Pliny’s true cinnamon, as being Cinnamomum zeylanicum, the cinnamon tree native to Sri Lanka. The extant price he quotes for it is a disappointing 10 d/lb, useless for our purposes. But then he adds this fascinating line: “The price of it was formerly as much as a thousand denarii per pound....”

What happened to bring the price of cinnamon down by 99%, in a timeframe apparently within Pliny’s living memory? The answer seems to have been a revolution in navigation, or at least the uncovering of a trade secret, by the Romans.

Originally, Roman ships sailing from Egypt to India would have had to hug the coastlines of Arabia and Persia, rather than risk a long open-water crossing of the Arabian Sea. This meant a round-trip time of three years to deliver one shipment of goods from India. Few Romans cared to take the time and risks, and trade with the East was left in the hands of Arabian middlemen, who charged immense premiums. (Pliny mentions them scornfully in connection to the pepper trade, opining that they sell pepper to Romans for a hundred times what they paid for it in India.)

Some time roughly in the fifth decade A.D., a Greek sailor named Hippalus discovered the course and pattern of monsoon winds in the Arabian Sea. Winds blew from the southwest from April to October, then from the north-east the rest of the year. Sailing from the Gulf of Aden to the Indian coast could now be accomplished in forty days, and the round-trip time from Egypt to India was slashed to one year. It still required daring to cross the Arabian Sea, trusting to the winds and primitive navigation, but Roman sailors now liked their odds much more, especially considering the very high reward. With the Arabian middle-men cut out, prices tumbled dramatically.

This was good news for the Romans of Pliny’s era—and even better for the time-traveler going back before that time. True cinnamon may sell today for roughly a hundred dollars a pound (in stick form, far preferred by Romans), but reselling it for a thousand denarii per libra is an excellent profit. That’s twenty times better than silver, in a commodity worth as many denarii per ounce as silver is per pound.

And other spices now gain in retrospect. Pepper may have been worth far more in Augustus’ time than in Pliny’s, worth a calculated risk. Indeed, anything coming from India—or farther east, like China—is a plausible trading item in the time-traveler’s cache, a fact we will return to later.

Pearls of Great Price

Precious stones are an obvious candidate for cross-time trading. They’re very small and light, pack lots of value into their volumes, and Romans of this period were hungry for them. Finding an ideal trade item among them, however, is again tricky.

Diamond, Pliny said, “possesses the greatest value, not only among the precious stones, but of all human possessions.” Romans prized it not merely for display, but for supposed medical benefits, to neutralize poison and cure mental disruptions. They knew only raw diamonds, as diamond cutting and polishing were developments far in their future; one can only speculate how much more they would pay for our modern multi-faceted marvels.

The practical trouble here is that we esteem diamonds, if anything, even more highly. They’re a by-word for excellence and luxury, a near-mandatory component of our matrimonial customs (both before and after), and an effective monopoly keeps their prices even higher than what they would naturally fetch. At best, trading diamonds would be an expensive speculation, with serious risk of losing value in the bargain. Emeralds, also noted by Pliny as much beloved, carry the same draw-back: We find them similarly valuable. Rubies, not quite as alluring to Romans, are even more costly per carat to us than diamonds.

Our best hope is in finding a stone that is commoner to us than it was to Romans. Opals show some promise here, as large finds in Australia have expanded that market. But we can do better—much better, in fact—with the stone Pliny placed only behind diamond, and ahead of emerald, in the esteem of Romans: pearls.

Roman literature amply records the great worth they placed on pearls. Lollia Paulina, one of the wives of the Emperor Caligula, is reported to have worn ten million denarii worth of pearls and emeralds at a time. The historian Suetonius says that Julius Caesar paid 1.5 million denarii for a single pearl he gave to his mistress Servilia. And Cleopatra herself is fabled to have dissolved and drunk a pearl worth 2.5 million denarii to impress Mark Antony with her immense wealth (which she could put behind his military and political ambitions). Even if, as is quite possible, all three of these tales are exaggerated or wholly fictitious, they speak clearly to how highly Romans valued pearls.

Here we gain a clear advantage. Though Romans did raise oysters for eating, they never conceived of helping those oysters produce pearls. Our pearl culturing industry gives us much cheaper pearls for the size and quality. To give an example, in 1917 the famed jeweler Pierre Cartier bought a Fifth Avenue mansion in Manhattan for a double-strand of matched pearls worth $1 million. Forty years later, after pearl culture was well established, the same pearl necklace sold at auction for a mere $157,000. Due to intervening inflation, this drop is even more precipitous than the apparent 84%.

Do not try to pass off fake (as distinct from cultured or natural) pearls for a little extra profit. Romans were discriminating and attentive in their luxuries, and will spot a fake pearl easily, to your severe inconvenience. That said, cultured pearls promise high profits in a small package, even if the initial expenditure may be substantial.

Other Ways of Showing Off

Other luxury items offer excellent prospects, two of them coming again from the fabulous Orient that captivated the Roman imagination.

Silks first reached Roman attention in the first century B.C., with imports from China via the Parthians. Silk’s charm became so popular that the Senate passed several sumptuary restrictions or outright bans on silk clothing, both to stanch the flow of money east and to fight the decadence of such sheer and revealing material. These edicts had the effect you would expect—silk became even more popular—so you will be able to sell your silk with little problem, and at a good profit. Raw silk is recommended, though: Romans liked to blend their silk with linen for a while, before the decadence truly set in during the first century A.D. and pure silk garments came into vogue.

Another potential prize is porcelain. History tells of the Murrine cups imported at immense cost from the East, and scholars think this may have been porcelain. The Emperor Nero paid a quarter-million denarii for a single Murrine cup. You oughtn’t count on doing that well yourself, and the scholars may be wrong, but taking back a good-quality porcelain cup in hopes of finding a rich buyer is a sound calculated risk.

Closer to home, dyes, and specifically the famed Tyrian purple, have potential. The Romans could only extract purple dye from certain eastern Mediterranean sea snails, in a process so inefficient that hundreds of thousands of these snails perished to produce one ounce of dye. The purple dye was worth its weight in silver in the fourth century B.C., and by the second century A.D., when Rome provided much heightened demand, Pliny the Younger reported it fetched a thousand d/lb, roughly worth its weight in gold.

Bringing back modern artificial dye, far less costly to you, is a good profit opportunity, though with caveats. Roman law tightly restricted who was allowed to wear purple-dyed clothing, so your market is limited. Also, we are not certain of the shade that was Tyrian purple, since ancient records conflict, though it’s possible a range of colors would have passed as such. An artificial dye might also arouse suspicions with people used to handling the natural dye. Purple dye is no sure thing, but it’s another good risk.

All the Modern Conveniences

So far, all our proposed trade commodities have been things the Romans had for themselves. But what’s the fun in time traveling if you can’t sell the proverbial Sherman tank to Julius Caesar? This essay won’t speak to fun, but profit isn’t as easy as you might think.

The problem with many modern devices is that they need the infrastructure of modern society in order to keep functioning. A revolver will need fresh supplies of bullets; a pocket computer will need new batteries; a car needs refined fuel, and will soon fail if you try to skate by on something cruder. Without this support, you have short-lived curiosities, with a correspondingly small market. You can try passing them off as something more durable only if you plan on skipping town fast.

Modern materials like rubber or plastic could impress Roman customers, but they have long experience working with other materials, and may think the practical gains from yours merely incremental. Your best option could be to position them as novelties, to gain the luxury premium. This would offset the problem of plastic and rubber being bulky, again limiting how much you can bring along.

As before, something light and valuable is your best bet. Medicines and antibiotics fit, and provide benefits the Romans could produce for themselves sporadically at best. Many medicines, though, will take days to show clear effects (in, say, fighting a wound infection or reversing a vitamin deficiency). You will want something immediate, if you want to prove its worth quickly for sale.

Aspirin and other analgesics are good—pack some—but there is something better still: erectile drugs. Roman literature, like many others, is full of men going to all manner of extremes in hopes of bestirring themselves. Find the right rich man, give him a single pill as proof of concept, and you can virtually name your price for the rest. Yes, it’s exploitative, but you’ll be giving actual value for money, which is more than most of the charlatans leeching off his troubles will manage.

Turning a Profit

Most of this essay has concerned acquiring the most money in the past for the least expenditure in the present. But many time-travelers intend, or at least hope, to return eventually to their present. For those on a budget, the appeal of bringing something back that will repay all their outlays, and more, is naturally strong. Our question is now reversed: What can a time-traveler buy in ancient Rome that will be worth the most in the present?

Artwork is a temptation, but in most cases carries the same strong disadvantage. Whether it’s a marble or bronze sculpture, a mosaic, or a mural painting (Romans did most of their paintings on walls), the artwork in question will be heavy, bulky, and very difficult to transport, the same problem we guarded against in bringing trade goods to Rome. One exception is Roman painting done on wood. We know it was done, but no examples have survived two millennia. Any example of that would be unique, and valued as such, and could reasonably be carried by an enterprising time-traveler.

Another possibility, one that would make many scholars ache with yearning, is bringing back lost literature. Many Roman writers are known to us only through reputation, with nothing but fragments of their writings surviving. Others are missing parts of their canon, even pieces of individual works. Perhaps most tantalizing, Roman libraries would be a conduit to the great Greek playwrights—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes—all of whom have many lost plays. (See Table 1.) A moderate expenditure for a light and portable scroll is virtually a no-lose proposition.

How remunerative these lost works would be is debatable. A lost Sophoclean tragedy would draw bids not from Hollywood studios, but from Classics departments at universities with much less money to offer. Quality is also a concern; the works most likely to vanish from history would probably be the ones thought least worth copying and preserving. But tastes do change. Plays and essays the Romans would have shrugged at might speak much better to people of today. The difference for our time-traveler would probably be between a merely great investment and a bonanza.

And for anyone wary of yet more speculations, there’s a far simpler method for making money: Spend your silver to buy gold. It will be worth five times as much back in the present, and it will probably be a while before copycat time-travelers glut the modern gold market and depress the price.

Conclusion

I hope this article has shown, engagingly and accurately, the principles for stretching your time-traveling dollar its farthest in bygone ages and societies. For certain practical reasons, the examples given are speculative, and your experiences may vary. I heartily encourage anyone who does travel into the past to correct me on any points where they find I was in error, ideally in this magazine. You will have keen and enthusiastic readers, myself first among them.

Copyright © 2010 Shane Tourtellotte

Short Stories

Short Stories

The Hebras and the Demons and the Damned

Brenda Cooper

I’m going to ramble a bit. Let me; I’m no roamer speaking over a communal fire. I’m not sure I know which parts of the story you want. But this is part of how Fremont was saved and kind of an alien contact story too. My name is Chaunce, and I am one of the few left on Fremont who...

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Short Stories

The Hebras and the Demons and the Damned

First contact may go not only not how you expect, but with whom you expect.

Brenda Cooper

I’m going to ramble a bit. Let me; I’m no roamer speaking over a communal fire. I’m not sure I know which parts of the story you want. But this is part of how Fremont was saved and kind of an alien contact story too.

My name is Chaunce, and I am one of the few left on Fremont who remembers the home we left behind. Deerfly. Stupid name for a planet, if you ask me. But we didn’t leave Deerfly over its wreck of a name. Rather, it was too smart for us, everybody there becoming stronger, faster beings, almost becoming computers or robots with flesh, leaving us true humans behind, some of them wearing no more than a thin skin of flesh to fool the eye.

Fremont was too smart for us too. In the time I’m telling you about, we’d been here seventeen years. Instead of doing what a self-respecting colony does, grow, we kept losing people to tooth and claw and cliff.

Real humans had grown up on colony planets like this, but Deerfly had gone tame generations ago.

We needed help. Needed to find some accord with this place before it killed us. It gnawed at me that I’d done little for the colony except backbreaking work and staying alive. I’d left the leading to others, and Fremont needed more from me than that. Since I managed horse farms back on Deerfly, I looked to the animals.

Now, there are a lot of animals on Fremont, but most wouldn’t work for what I needed.

The cats had decided we were dinner the day we landed, and they were too big to be un-decided in any way I could think of. A foot-long scar on my right calf throbbed in the cold of winter—a reminder.

We had a few domestic dogs we’d brought shipboard and more we were planning to birth and raise up. We weren’t going to lack for best friends, for herding beasts to keep goats in bunches, or four-footed pranksters to steal the chickens. But dogs are smaller than humans, and smaller than most beings of tooth and claw here. I was glad of them, but on Fremont they needed protecting just like we did. They’d give us warning, but they’d die trying to save us from paw cats or yellow snakes. And given how we mostly loved them, humans sometimes died saving their dogs.

Fremont has its own four-footed and single-tailed beasts with a canine look. They run in packs, and people call them demon dogs. But they should never, ever be confused for real dogs. These demons have no soul, and they exist to eat. Worse, I’ve seen them hunt, and I’m sure they are communicating with each other more than any of our native animals from Deerfly, or the ones our fathers brought from Earth. Demons don’t speak, but they work like a team with radios. They make humans mildly sick to eat too. So they’re not even good for food.

I had high hopes for the djuri: four-footed prey that run in packs, fleeing for their lives from the demon dogs. It turned out the djuri were too shy to help. Hard to find, always running and hiding and bleating. Not too bright, either, and not big enough to really help us. Humans can look down on them, or maybe look a big one straight in the eye. Well, all right. A few are even bigger than that. The bucks. But still, they’re not hefty creatures. Keep in mind that we can look a paw cat in the eye, too, and they outweigh us and have claws long as fingers and hard as knives. The truly good thing about djuri is they are incredibly good to eat.

That’s pretty much the rundown on the bigger animals we’d seen here so far, except the hebras. They were our last hope for an answer. I took a while to realize this, even though I sat at the edge of the cliff by the promise of our town, looking down over the grass plains every day for two summers. The grass there is scary big, bigger than a man’s head by the end of summer. When it dries, it’s sharp like a million razors trying to flay the skin from anything as soft as a human. I still have scars on my fingers from it, and on my shoulders.

As tall as the grass is, the hebras’ heads rise above it. They’ve got legs that come to a man’s head. Instead of straight backs like horses, their backs slope up to shoulders, and their necks measure the tiniest bit longer than their backs. Their coats are solid, striped, or covered with great spots like the shadow pattern of leaves on the forest floor. Their colors are all variations of gold and green, brown and black, and sometimes the barest bit of red like a red-haired woman being touched by the sun.

Make no mistake. Hebras are prey animals. Paw cats hunt them all summer, and demons get the weak and the slow and the young. But they are so much more. Remember how I told you about the demon dogs? Perhaps being prey on a planet full of thorns made them smarter than any of the horses I ever rode or trained or showed or loved.

One day, far below me, the demon dogs hunted hebras. I’d given up digging out the smelter’s foundation for the day, my muscles screaming sore and my back feeling on fire. I stood at the edge of the cliff looking down, letting the cooling breeze of near-dusk tease sweat from my skin. The sun shone bright enough to wash everything dull and soft, with that little extra bit of gold that the late part of the day brings. The air smelled of seeds and harvest and of the fall that would soon touch us.

Below me a herd of hebras grazed, rotating between watcher and eater, the distance making animals with heads towering above my own look small.

A breeze kissed the tops of the grasses, bending them south in ripples. A few lines of grass moved the wrong way as a pack of seven demons surrounded twice as many hebras. I spotted the dogs’ path even before the wily old watch-hebra bugled fear and loathing.

The hebras ran together, almost lockstep, all of them trying for a gap between two of the demons, heading sideways to me, their heads bobbing up and down with their ungainly rocking run.

The dogs raced to make a line in front of the hebras, cutting them off. They began to bay, a high long-winded howl that instilled fear in me even though I stood so far above them the sound was faint and thin.

The hebras turned, all together, a wave of long necks and thin tails.

The dogs flowed behind them.

The tallest hebra let out a short high-pitched squeal, and the hebras twitched and broke into three lines, 180-degree turns, as if they practiced every day. Maybe they did. They had it down, stretching out long, taking turns teasing the dogs. The gap between grazer and hunter widened.

A dog nipped at the last animal in one line, a brown blur flashing momentarily up above the high grass and then falling back down. The target hebra twisted, probably kicking even though I couldn’t see its legs for the grass, and then put on a burst of speed. It passed two other hebras, and a different animal became last, running right in front of the slavering dogs.

I’d been in the grass the week before. It pulled and cloyed and knotted and tripped. But the hebras and the demons slid though it, streams of living beings, barking and baying and bugling.

The air had cooled down a little, but I stood with goose bumps rising on my forearms, transfixed and afraid that if I moved I’d somehow change the outcome of the race down below.

It was nearly too dark to see by the time the first of the dogs stopped, the grass swallowing the hunter as it became still. I lost the place it stood entirely in the space of two breaths.

As the stars and two of our moons brightened in the black sky above me, I realized the hebras had won fairly easily. They were off grazing somewhere else, and the dogs would have a hungry night.

If it had been fourteen unarmed humans against seven demons, I’d have bet on the dogs.

Our roving scientists brought back a lot of djuri bones, jaws, and the thick back legs cracked open by teeth. But not many hebra bones. Some. They did die. But not very fast, or very easy.

So I swore I’d figure out how to tame them. Not that we’d gotten within two hundred meters by then. The great beasts were shy of us, and fast.

I couldn’t catch one myself. I was almost sixty already, and slowing. I took my story to the town council, which was led by Jove Alma at the time, a nervous man with a deep focus on making and keeping plans. He thought the tighter he gripped our choices in his and the council’s fists, the more of us would live. Some believed him, some hated him, but everyone obeyed. The previous leader had been a risk-taker and cost almost all of us people we loved. That’s the long way round of saying that catching animals wasn’t in Jove’s plan, and the council turned me down flat. There was a city being built and the chill of winter already clinging to every dawn.

The winter was the second harshest we’d ever had, with snow in town instead of just in the hills and two sheet-ice storms. We lost ten more people. Two froze to death on a trip out into the woods to bring back samples of winter plants, leaving behind two orphans to add to our growing stockpile. The third one who went with them lost three fingers and part of her sanity. Cats ate two adults and a babe, fire claimed a family of four, and one of the men my age hanged himself in the middle of town. We had two less births than deaths that season.

All that long cold I thought of the hebras. Sometimes I glimpsed them down below on the cold grass plains. Fire had flamed the grass flat and low and the hebras sometimes loped like shadows at the edge of the plain near the sea, clearly visible when frost turned the stubble white and hoary in the early dawn. But mostly they hid in the Lace Forest that surrounded us.

Come spring, we stopped huddling together in the buildings we’d made for guild halls and finished up some of the houses. I built mine at the edge of town, as close to the cliff as the town council would let me. Mornings, as dawn split the sky open, I sat and watched the fading moons and the greening grass below. The hebras returned, sleeping on the plain, two watch beasts circling the sleepers restlessly, heads way up. I was pretty sure they traded off watches just like we did, and for the same reason. It made me feel kindred.

One morning when the grass was knee-high to a human and the first spindly-legged baby hebras clung to their dams, Jove came and stood silently beside me, looking down at the plains. His gaze was unfocused, as if he saw the whole thing and the sea beyond, but not the hebras right below. “Three of the orphans got in trouble last night. Fought each other and one’s fetched up in the infirmary with a broken leg.”

He’d hate that. Jove hated all disorder. I waited him out, curious what he’d say next.

“Council met, and we figure you got room for two boys.”

Shock gave way to liking the idea pretty fast. I’d never married, never had kids, just managed farms and hired help. But there was no help to hire here. My ancestors had farmed Deerfly by making babies, back in the days before there were too many bots and androids to count and people didn’t have any work to do that looked like farming except training exotics. So I didn’t stand and blink stupidly at Jove for long, but instead I just said, “Thank you.”

He looked surprised at that, like he’d been expecting resistance, so it was his turn to pause for a beat too long and then say, “Thank you,” himself. He smiled before he walked away, the sun fully risen now, shoving his shadow behind him as he walked back to town.

The boys were Derk and Sho. Derk was thin and wiry, and won the boys informal footraces. Sho plodded and had so much patience I couldn’t imagine what had made him part of the fight at all until one day I came across two other boys teasing him in high, mean voices for being stupid. They were wrong, I already knew that. But sometimes being the silent type means people make their own decisions about who you are.

Sho and Derk had school and then work every day, but since they were only twelve, they had energy to spare in spite of the harsh schedules. It only took a few days before they stood beside me at the cliff’s edge, looking down at the herd.

Sho started drawing hebras in the dirt with sticks, and they both started naming them.

As the days got longer, we gave up sleep to pick our way down the steep path between Artistos and the wide road on the plains where we’d trucked tools and technology from the shuttles at our makeshift spaceport.

The boy with the broken leg, Niko, recovered enough to follow us down the path and soon all three of them laughed together, their raised voices surely spreading all across the plain. Soon half the teens and a few of the old singles from town began to join us at the crack of dawn.

Some of the watchers wanted to catch a hebra, some to stun one. Those weren’t the right answers. I knew it deep in my gut, found it hard to say why I knew so hard, so I just told them, “If we scare them off, they might never come back.” I never let them get close to the herds, just to watch them. The boys helped me—all three of them now living with me, and acting like herd dogs to the new people.

The trail from town to plain lay nearly naked against the cliff, a thin ribbon of dirt with no place big enough for predators to hide. We could stand safely or sit on small rocks and talk. The hebras knew we were there, sometimes lifting their heads and pointing their broad, bearded faces at us. I wanted them to know we weren’t their enemy. We kept it up all summer, the crowd straining against my calls for patience. Sho stood beside me, facing them, telling them off with his eyes and his stance, and they listened. Derk and Niko stood quietly at the rear, watching everyone and all the hebras, eyes darting from one to one to one, keeping count and order.

Some of the boys were fascinated with the hebras’ beards, maybe because they had the first hint of stubble on their own chins. They started drawing pictures of the girls in town with beards and longish necks, and giggling.

The grass stretched its fairy-duster seedpods toward the autumn sky, tall as me if I stood inside it. Demons started hunting more, sometimes running the hebras twice a day. The herd lost one old hebra and one very young one that twisted a leg. The pack lost one old dog and two pups. So in a way, the hebras were winning. Except, of course, that one hebra fed all the dogs and dead dogs didn’t feed the hebras anything.

The cats stayed away. I suspect our scent and presence did that. They were just as quick to hunt us as they would the hebra, but they liked us in small groups. There were about twenty humans on the path most mornings.

Once a week or so Jove came and watched, always walking away before the bells rang for breakfast. I knew what he was thinking, but it did no good to push Jove, and thus no good to push the town council. But if the plains burned below us, we’d have to wait another year to capture even one hebra.

One morning after Jove ghosted away from us, Sho asked, “Is he scared of catching one?”

“Hard work to run a colony. He has to choose.”

“He should see how much we and the hebras need each other.”

I suspected the boy had the right of it, but it does no good to downtalk leaders. “Jove is a busy man.”

“Can you ask him for some rope?”

“What are you going to do with rope?”

“Catch a hebra.”

“Probably not. You think about how to do that, and we’ll try your idea if I can get rope. Rope is dear.” We had what we’d brought, and some we’d made. But none of our homemade rope was strong enough for this.

“Please ask.”

The persistence of boys. “If an opening comes up.”

About noon that same day, Jove came by to watch us raise the roof on the smelter. The metal slabs had come all the way from Deerfly and been brought in pieces from Traveler in one of the little shuttles a year ago. Jove stood to the side as we used chain to hoist the metal, the chain sliding over a tall wooden post-and-beam structure we’d lashed together just for this job. Even with the leverage, it took three men sweating to get the last and largest section up and held while three more of us fastened it with nails also brought from the ship.

At the end, Jove came and stood silently beside me. “Good job, Chaunce. Now we can make our own nails.”

“That’s what we did all this work for? Nails?”

“And hinges. And maybe bits for those animals down below.” He nodded at the roof. “One of your beasts might have pulled that easier.”

It wasn’t a use I had thought of—I’d been thinking of riding them. I felt doubtful they’d be pullers. But if they were—we could make wagons and flatbeds and farm tools. The thought was good. “Can I have some rope?”

“You might get hurt. Or die. The boys might die.”

“We’ve gotta find accord with some of the wild things here. We can’t fear them all forever.” But then, he’d lost a wife to a pack of demons, found her in pieces three days after we landed. Years had passed, but some memories burn your soul.

He toed the ground for a while.

I could get enough of the council to override him if I really tried. But he was a good leader, and I’d learned that if you undermine a good leader you can be rewarded with a worse one.

He swallowed and looked off at some distant spot in the sky before he said, “Let’s go get it.”

I had plenty of time to think, lurching home in the darkening night with three hundred feet of rope coiled over my right shoulder. I understood Jove’s issue: Time breathed down on us. We were failing, dying by bits each year as we missed goals, became food for the local predators, fought amongst each other, and tried ever so hard to learn the dangers and opportunities here. We needed more stout, warm buildings, to retrieve the rest of our supplies from Traveler before the shuttles ran out of fuel, to build better perimeters, and to breed more children than Fremont took from us. Taking the three boys out on the plains represented a hefty risk of our future. Better to risk boys than girls, but still ...

When I dropped my load of rope on the ground outside the house, the three of them tumbled out right away, faces full of excitement. They’d been planning. Sho came up to me and said, “We can’t get that over their heads. We can’t get it around their legs or we might break them.”

I considered. I’d been thinking of horses. But we were not cowboys. I’d never tried to catch a wild animal in my life. Ran from a few here. The animals on my farms had been born in warm stables and grown up unafraid of me. This was a puzzle. “We can’t cut the rope too short or we’ll never be able to use it for anything else.”

So we made walls on two sides, using the cliff as the third.

We lost a whole day hiking to the Lace Forest and finding four big logs, dragging them back, and posting them upright into the ground. About the time we finished that, the work crews had broken for the day. They helped us string and tie the rope walls, the lowest rope at hebra-knee height, which was about our waists, and the highest something I could barely touch with my hands.

When we finished, the dark brown rope stood out against the pale green grasses of late autumn. The corral did not look like it would work for much of anything. Besides, I wasn’t at all sure how we were going to get them anywhere near it.

Now we had to do what Jove was afraid of. We had to walk through the tall grass and get the hebras to walk away from us and into the makeshift corral. Maybe we shouldn’t have done this—maybe we should have tried to get close without rope. Maybe we should have tried to find them in the winter woods. At any rate, it no longer mattered what we should have done. The shadow of night was knifing across the plains, and it was time to beat it up the cliff and bed down.

I slept fine, but before first light all three boys came to my room. Derk, the biggest, rested his arms on Niko’s and Sho’s shoulders. “Sho was dreaming of hebras, and when he came to wake me up, I was dreaming about them too.”

Sho nodded. “We dreamed they got caught in the walls we made and the dogs got them, rising up over their back legs and standing on their backs.” He stopped, his eyes wide. He might cry if I let him keep worrying, and then he’d lose face and maybe be the next one to end up with a broken leg.

“And biting their necks.” Niko added, not helping.

“Did you dream too?” I asked Niko.

He shook his head. “No. But I’m worried about the hebras.”

“Well, I’m glad you care. That should make it easier to catch them.”

“Really?” Sho asked.

“Yes,” I assured them all. Might as well believe in success. It couldn’t hurt.

“Can we sit in here with you?” Niko asked.

So I let them stay. In ten minutes they had fallen asleep all over the bed like a litter of puppies, and I got up to watch for the light and pack us all a good lunch. The apple trees had come in well this fall, and Jove’s new wife, Maria, made excellent goat’s-milk cheese. We’d be set if we added a bit of fresh bread from the communal kitchen. Even though the morning shadows were still black ghosts, the first loaves should already be out. I shrugged into my coat and opened the door.

I nearly jumped as a shadow moved nearby. Jove. Wordlessly, he held out three loaves of bread.

“I don’t need that many.”

“Yes, you do. I gave everyone on your shift the day off.”

I raised my eyebrows and spoke more boldly than I ever had to him. “Big risk for you.”

Although I really only still had moonlight to see by, I swear his cheeks reddened. “I had trouble sleeping. I kept doing math in my head. Doing just what we’re doing, if we keep dying so fast, there won’t be anything left of us in two hundred years.” He looked directly at me for the first time in a few days. “I remember what you said when you brought your ideas to us. Last year. We have to risk.”

I could barely imagine what that cost him. People followed him because they were afraid. Like him. And now he was being brave. This would change us, and only success would change us for the better. The stakes had just risen.

Together, Jove and I made up sandwiches for thirty people. My shiftmates started gathering outside, stamping against the morning cold, dressed in layers against the heat that would follow by midday. They chattered amongst themselves, a few nervous, a few excited. Laughter broke out over and over.

The boys didn’t want anything more than excitement for breakfast, but I got them each to take a bread heel down in their coat pockets against the hunger that would threaten them as soon as we stopped and waited. At first I worried that Jove would try to take over, although in truth, neither he nor I knew much of anything about hunting hebras.

He didn’t take charge. He stood to the side, curious and watchful and very silent. People looked to him at first, and then when he looked to me, they did too. A relief and a worry.

We handed out stunners to all of the adults, two to the good shots. Half of our total stock, a firepower that scared even me. The stunners quieted everyone a bit. One shot would stop a human, two a demon, three a paw cat.

The hebra herd watched us come down, and of course, we watched them.

I expected them to think it was like any other morning, since we always came down at dawn to watch. But they scattered before we were even halfway down. Maybe because we started later than usual. Maybe just something in the way we walked, like we had a purpose instead of a simple curiosity.

Jove spoke what I was thinking. “Maybe they don’t want us any more than the rest of this cursed planet wants us.”

There were twenty-five of us total. I broke us into groups and sent four groups of five off. I thought about keeping Jove with us, but since I was keeping all three boys I decided I needed a shooter I could count on, and so I sent Jove off with the group that I figured would be safest. So that’s how me, the three boys, and my second in command from the smelter project, Campbell, all went over to stand downwind of the rope corral.

The boys ate their bread. Campbell and I watched, keeping companionable silence. The boys fidgeted. Campbell and I made them stretch in the grass, crawling and parting the fronds, reminding them to close their eyes and mouths as they moved through it, like swimmers. We sent them one by one up onto a small pile of rocks to look around the plain and see if they spotted the hebras (or anything else). They got bored and hungry and finished their bread heels and drank half the whole day’s water supply. Derk got bit by something nasty and flying and a welt came up on his arm. He didn’t complain, though. Good kid. It warmed and we stripped off our outer layer of coats.

The first group came in, including Jove. He shook his head at me. “Nothing.”

The second and third groups found each other and came in together, then the fourth. No one reported seeing anything bigger than a jumping-prickle or a long-tailed rat. We made a long string of humans and sandwiches at the base of the cliff, still downwind from the ropes. We rested on warm rocks. The three boys abandoned me and Jove. I figured they’d be watched well enough between so many of us. Besides, they too had seen cats bring down a baby hebra this spring. Surely they’d be cautious.

“Did you see anything interesting out there?” I asked Jove.

“Grass.”

Well, true enough. His right cheek showed a set of thin lines where he’d seen the grass too closely, and one had been deep enough that it was slightly crusted with blood.

“You should clean up before that starts itching.” I dug an antiseptic cloth out of my bag, adding a bit of water from my canteen to bring it to life. Some plants here were the antidotes to other plants, and we had a whole team of botanists doing nothing more than cataloging everything we learned. This was one of their gifts. Jove took the cloth, and while he wiped up his cheek and a deeper cut I hadn’t noticed on his forearm, I said, “They know we’re here. They’ve been grazing here every day for two years except winters and today—maybe they’re territorial and this is the territory for this herd. They’ve been watching us watch them, but they don’t like us all the way down here.”

“What next?” he asked.

We still had half of this day. “Let’s try again today, send everyone in one group except me and Campbell and the boys. Have you all go together along the road so you get farther away, and then make two teams and go forward. Maybe you can get far enough out for the hebras to be between you and me. Just don’t spook them. Sometimes they sleep during the day, but they’ll have watchers.”

He handed me back the cloth instead of just putting it in his own pocket.

I took it.

“How do you know what they do during the day? You’re always working.”

“I ask around the fire at night. Almost no one sees them during the day. One theory suggests they go into the woods, another that they sleep when the big predators sleep. I kinda like—”

A scream cut my sentence off. One of the boys. “Demons!”

No! They slept during the day. I knew that. Everybody knew that. Dammit—what did I know? I leapt up, dropping the rest of my lunch, and scrambled to a higher rock behind me. Our line—stretched out maybe twenty meters—did the same, people backing up against the cliff.

“To me,” I called. The demons would try and surround the ends first, to isolate a single person or two and then kill them easily. I tried to recall who was where, couldn’t remember. Lousy leading.

A demon bayed as if answering me, the same call I’d heard from the cliff, shuddering. It was worse down here, and diffuse, like the wail came from all around, the grass and the plains themselves hunting us.

I couldn’t tell where the demon was.

The boys.

Derk and Niko came running up to me, panting, standing one at each side of me, looking out. They trembled, but neither cried.

“Where’s Sho?” I demanded, voice high and worried.

Another bay, and a yip. People gathered around us.

Derk found his breath. “Up. On the cliff.”

Indeed, over the chaos of gathering, drawing stunners, screeching for each other, demons yipping and baying, I heard the high slip of Sho’s voice.

I looked up.

He stood three meters above me, his feet dug into the cliff, apparently balanced on a ledge too small for me to see from below. He hung onto a tree growing thin and spindly out of dirt caught between rocks, leaning out. Close to falling. Now that I was looking at him, I could see he was screaming details. “Six of them. To the right.”

I looked right. My head was above the grass, but barely. The stones we’d sat on made a small clearing, the grass close enough to throw shadows at our feet.

Sho would see them coming for us, but we wouldn’t know until the grass parted in front of our faces.

The demon cries were still a bit away, but confident. Maybe the demons didn’t care we were all together.

“One almost there!” Sho cried. “By you, Chaunce.”

I raised my stunner, hand shaking. I’d fired at a demon once, missed as it came right at me fast as lightning. Louise had been behind me and she hadn’t missed. Now the boys were behind me, small, no stunners.

The dog burst through the grass, long and sinewy, teeth bared, eyes black and full of hunger.

I fired.

Someone else fired.

The dog fell. Its coat rippled as another shot hit it.

“Stop!” I yelled. “Don’t waste shots!”

“There!” Sho.

A second dog burst through in almost the same place, its body landing on the other one. This time we used four shots.

Derk pushed past me, knife in hand, bent on killing the stunned animals.

To my right, someone screamed, and in a moment of shock I heard the slick of another stunner and another thump. Who screamed?

A hebra bugled, high and long. The same sound I’d heard a hundred times when this hunt played out below me and I merely watched.

“Back!” Sho screamed. The watch hebra. That’s what Sho did for us.

Sho and a real hebra. What was the hebra doing here?

I backed.

Derk ducked, his right hand now covered in demon blood.

A head rose over mine, above the grass, the neck long and thin, a white beard like my grandfather’s last.

I backed faster.

The hebra passed between me and Derk in its lurching fast run, bigger than I expected, an animal the color of spring grass with gold spots on its knobby knees. It breathed deep and rattling but ran strong. A dog followed it, too fast for me to bring up my stunner.

The woman next to me, Paulette, screamed in joy, clapping.

“Watch!” Sho still sounded scared. “Stay back!”

More hebras, the whole herd of them, and dogs, all running together. The dogs had given up on us. They moved away a bit, the hebras now silent except for deep, sharp breathing, the dogs yipping and baying on their heels.

“Shoot the dogs!” I couldn’t tell who yelled, the command a shiver down my spine.

Instinct told me. “No! The hebras can do this.”

I stood as still as I could, the grass waving around me, the sounds of animals racing through it and the call and yips of hunter, hunted, and humans all distinct and all around.

A high-pitched squeal touched my heart. A hebra. I heard its body fall, a sound like a sack of flour thrown from the roof of a storage barn. Me and Jove and Campbell raced toward the fallen hebra. A dog passed right in front of me, its tail slapping me sideways. I raised my stunner and hit its flank.

It cried in pain, stopped, stood still, didn’t fall.

I hit it again.

It mewled, sounded like a child needing help, like it didn’t understand, and then it fell.

Ahead of me, the fallen hebra struggled up, blood dripping down its leg from a slash in its thigh. Shaking. Not broken.

Someone else dropped a dog to my right.

Two other hebras raced past us, screaming.

The few dogs left didn’t draw off this time. They circled the beast that had just gotten up. One of its knees bled too.

There were four demons left. Few enough they should know better. Maybe the smell of blood drove them crazy.

Someone I couldn’t see stunned another dog.

A dog somewhere let out a high, sharp bark and in heartbeats the pack was gone. They might have never been there, the grass closed across the memory of their hungry mouths and long, powerful legs.

The injured hebra took a step and then another. Gingerly.

Two hebras walked through the grass, oblivious to us, and placed themselves on either side of the wounded one. One of the two strongest watch hebras came up to stand between me and the threesome, looking down at me. I stood there, craning my neck up, sweating, my ankle throbbing lightly from a sidestep I’d taken. Its shoulder rose above my eye, its front knee about at my chest. Its fur looked coarser than I’d expected.

I kept my gun down.

Even though its sides heaved, it looked at me as if speaking sentences. They had no language we could understand, but they were at least as smart as the herding dogs. And some days I thought the collies were smarter than me. I knew I was in the presence of something good, even on this hellhole of a planet.

We would never capture such beasts in a rope corral. But they had allied themselves with us in that moment, voted with their thundering feet and high bugle calls. We would come to some kind of accommodation, some way to trade them safety for safety.

These are the things that went through my head as I watched the beast watch me.

The boys came up beside me and still the hebra watched, the plains silent now except for the ever-present buzz of insects. It took a long time before the hebras moved off, stately, visible above the waving dry grass for a long time.

Copyright © 2010 Brenda Cooper

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Short Stories

Deca-Dad

Starflight adds a new dimension to generation gaps....

Ron Collins

I met my d-dad at Rutan Center.

Being the primary transfer point in Earth orbit, Rutan is always busy. But that day the traffic was especially heavy, and its corridors were awash with luggage runners whistling this way and that, and travelers who spewed through arrival gates to clog the tram-ways. Fidelity units hovered overhead like manta rays, their multi-scan orbs constantly scanning the throng. Re-gen stores lined the hallways and blared their info feeds along each precisely regulated ten meters of hallway. Duty Free toiletries, best price in port, screamed one. Catch Frieda Gonzales and her award-winning performance in “Diablo, Remix 7,” said the next.

I would have filtered the info feed away, but I had arrived a few minutes later than planned, and I didn’t want to miss any announcements. As a result, I heard the entire range of sound that echoed through the Rutan transfer point, and I can report dutifully that the place sounded as huge as it is.

His ship, the Translux, was already docked at LaGrange Bay 12, its surface blazing cadmium white under the service lights. I kicked myself for missing the docking, but even that couldn’t dampen my excitement.

Aldous Yazgar Hakkinan.

The name flowed off my tongue as I waited. He was my grandparent, six times removed. Hakkinan is not my name—my name is Rogerson. Like almost everyone I know, my background is so mixed that I can claim only Terra as my heritage. But I had studied all his records with great intensity during the week since he agreed to meet to talk about my project, and I knew he was clearly Finnish with little bits of Spanish and Egyptian thrown in for good measure. I knew he was small, just over 182 centimeters tall and about 220 pounds in Earth gravity. He would be self-local fifty-six years of age.

All these things I knew, yet I was still stunned to see him step off the ship and make his way through the connector tube. He wore a red and yellow travel suit, probably thirty years out of date. The collar was curled up, and the sleeves were tight around his meaty forearms. The fabric of the suit was wrinkled in a way that seemed workmanlike. His lips were downturned as he exited the tube and glanced at the transfer gate to his left.

I waved and stepped forward a bit.

“Carlo!” he yelled across the gate.

He looked like a Norse god as he strode toward me. He was physically fit in a solid, blocky way that I hadn’t expected. His shoulders were wide and his long blond hair flowed around his head like a glowing helmet. He shook my hand, and despite the fact that mine is bigger his seemed to swallow it up. He turned the handshake into an embrace, pounding me on the back with an exquisite, space-borne gusto.

“Hello, Mr. Hakkinan,” I said, taken aback by his familiarity. My family is not so intense, and his closeness felt somehow threatening.

“Mr. Hakkinan?” he said, holding me by both shoulders. “That will never do. How about D-dad?”

“D-dad?”

“I figure it’s been 250 years since my hide last saw this rock, and at twenty-five years a generation, that makes me a deca-dad.”

“Two-hundred twenty-five,” I said. “It’s been 250 years since you were born, 225 since you left Earth Solar.”

He held his arms wide and smiled with teeth as white as the paint on the Translux. “What’s a quarter century between relatives, eh?”

“Not much,” I said, deciding not to tell him that, with life spans now at a hundred and fifty years, the span he was using as a generation was now underestimated. I could scarcely contain my own smile, though. He had already exceeded all my expectations. This was a man bigger than life, a man who breathed the moment and understood exactly how to live.

“Where would you like to go?” he said. “Captain needs us back at 1500 for some big-assed announcement, so I’ve only got two hours.”

“I’ll set a timer for us,” I said. “Can we get lunch?”

“That would be absolutely fantastic, Carlo. I’m starved.”

We walked along the corridor, passing Legarzi’s, an Italian stand, and Yessington Farms, a deli. I half listened to both their info feeds; mostly I watched D-dad. He had been flying for nearly eighteen Earth years in his last stint, though it took him just over two local to his own reference. His eyes played over everything as we walked down the hallway, his head twisting left and right. He hesitated at the sight of a transfer gate. The lines around his lips grew darker.

“My god,” he said. “Last time I was here this whole thing was just a string of space junk tied together with contact tape.”

“I imagine it’s quite a bit different now.”

“No, Carlo” he said. “I don’t think you can imagine it.” We walked several paces. “So, you’re doing a project?”

“Yes. Did you get a chance to experience the files I sent you?”

“I didn’t have much time.”

“Oh. All right. I study genetics, specializing in galactic evolution.”

He laughed, or maybe it was a grumble. “And you wanted to interview a dinosaur?”

“Yes,” I said with what I hoped was a light touch. “It’s not every day you get to meet Tyrannosaurus rex.”

He made another grunt that I again took to be a laugh.

We stepped through the doorway to the observation lookout.

It was a cavernous area the size of a football field, covered by a huge geodesic dome of radiation-hardened crystal that faced the out-rim so you could see stars and the distant space haze that marked history and seemed alive with possibility. Rows upon rows of nutrient stations were built into the rounded walls, and the odors of warm food and coffee extract created a sense of welcome that permeated the dome. The room’s geometry allowed you to hear conversations from across the room, but they were ghostlike sounds that seemed to echo off into deep space before they could take shape in your ears. It seemed to me to be the perfect place to listen to stories of adventure and daring.

“Where is the kitchen?” D-dad asked.

“Kitchen?”

“You know, the grub-hub. The cafeteria. Whatever. The place you get the food?”

I almost said Just listen to your i-feed, but I stopped myself. RF genetic engineering had been in existence for a local half-century, which had probably been only ten years for him. He could not have been born with an i-line, and he had clearly been too busy riding space to get hold of an aftermarket device.

“Do you have a radio?” I said.

He pulled a clip from his breast pocket. I gave him the frequency ranges and pointed him to the nutrient stations.

“That’s outstanding,” he said as the radio recited Yessington’s menu. “Where is your receiver?”

“My ears have been adjusted to be sensitive to whatever frequencies I want.”

He shook his head and started at me with a sense of wonder. “Christ,” he said. “I’m getting old. Anything else about you been adjusted I should know about? Sense of smell? X-ray vision?”

“Yes, I can adjust my eyes to see into the X-ray spectrum, and microwaves to a degree. I can assume control of many body functions that were once involuntary. My facial features were selected by my parents. Is that what you were looking for?”

He pressed his lips together. “Anything else?”

“I don’t need sleep.”

“That’s a danged shame.”

“Why?”

“Ain’t nothing more satisfying than taking a nap on the clock, Carlo.” He smiled and pounded me on the shoulder again, though this time it was more of a punch than a pound.

“What foods do you like, D-dad?” I said, hoping to change the topic.

“Haven’t had a real burger in forever. Any chance of getting one of those?”

“You mean beef and bread? Probably not.”

“Crap,” he grumbled.

We ordered at Hava’s station. He insisted on paying. I argued with him, but he would not relent. “Money is like rocket fuel,” he said. “You spend it to get somewhere, then you look for more. Besides, I know what it’s like to be a starving college kid. This one’s on me.” His pay stick was old, though, and it took five minutes to update it so the proximity scanners could operate properly. Eventually we were seated with our wrapped sandwiches of protomeat and hard brazenbread, and our drinks that sweated condensation in the controlled climate of the observation center.

I craned my head and gazed into billions of years of space. I felt like I was floating. A thousand questions filled my thoughts. I wanted to know what it was like to ride across deep space. I knew he had visited places like Lalande and Epsilon Eridani. Had he met the Padabidan, or the Yenit? What did their language sound like to the flesh and blood of the ear? Were the Yenit’s triple eyes as vivid purple in person as they were in the images sent over light-years of space? What adventures could D-dad tell me, this man who had been merely in flight for more years than I, a student at Luna U, had even been in existence?

“What’s it like, D-dad?” I finally said. “What is it like to travel space?”

In the dome’s lighting, he looked older than his years. Lines across his skin deepened when he laughed or smiled. And that skin was rough, and I could see blemishes along his hairline. Star shine made his cheeks look almost chalky. But his eyes ... his eyes were vivid blue and they sparkled as he took a huge mouthful of his lunch and wiped the corner of his mouth on his sleeve, then set to answering my questions.

“It’s a tough life, but a glorious one.”

He talked about the early years of his life that he spent hopping lines around the three Centauris, then his mining trip to the Luyten system. He told me a story about ion pumps exploding on his craft when he thought the entire ship might vent into open space.

“Isn’t it lonely?” I asked.

“Hell, no. Why would you think that?”

“Everywhere you leave, everyone gets older. My, uh, d-mom, she’s dead. Don’t you miss her?”

“Time dilation is what it is, Carlo. Translux travels about two-nines the speed of light. That’s .99. Ninety-nine percent. And at that rate dilation is a bit more than seven Earth years for every one year I live. You just can’t avoid that. It could be worse, of course—I’ve met crews who travel four and five nines. But it’s hard to be lonely when you cabin up with thirty other people for three or four or five years at a pop, if you know what I mean. After a while you almost begin to wish for a little less company. Then you get where you’re going, do your work, and pick up with a whole new crew.”

“So there’s never been anyone special?”

“Oh, there’s always someone special.” He gave a wicked smile, then seemed to sense this might not be what I wanted to hear. “It’s like high school for adults, Carlo. You know there’s an endpoint, even on a long pull. So you grow close, but not too close. I had a serious girl on my eight-year job, but even though we talked about pairing we still broke up at the end. Neither us really wanted to be together, I guess. That’s how it is in this business.”

He ran his fingers over his eyes.

“You look tired,” I said.

“Yeah. I’m running on twenty hours without sleep, which may not be bad for you, but sucks vacuum for me.”

“How do they say it?” I said, smiling and feeling wise. “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage?”

“I guess that works,” he replied. “But really it’s all about velocity. I mean, Alpha Centauri is still pretty much 4.3 light-years from Earth, Barnie’s is still almost six out, and you’re not getting to Beta Hydri without giving up at least half your life. The only thing we can control is how fast we get from place to place, Carlo. Don’t let anyone tell you no different.”

“I see.”

Though I’m sure he didn’t mean it as such, I had taken his lecture as an attack, so I adjusted my adrenaline back down to norm before proceeding.

“I was hoping you could meet my mom and dad, but we didn’t have enough time for them to get off work and get here.”

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Maybe next time.”

“Yeah.”

He did not seem very sorry. Of course, neither Dad nor Mom had seemed particularly excited about such a meeting, either. My family enjoys nights at home with a holovid more than almost anything else. We are not adventurers by nature, despite the threads of this man’s DNA that we carry.

“Is any of this helping you on your project?” he said.

“Yes,” I replied, though in truth it wasn’t. That didn’t matter to me, though. This was never really about the project.

“So, what the hell are you planning on doing, Carlo? You’re still a kid, probably bursting to make your way in life. What’s the future gonna hold for young Carlo Rogerson? Do we have another pioneer in the family?”

I told him about my interest in evolution and what it means across galactic scales. I talked about life on alien worlds and how I thought it might give us new insights, I gushed on about studies Professor Sawchec was doing on star wombs and the signs he’d found of earliest life. I described the three latest theories of spontaneous origin.

“In a few years we might be able to actually understand the true beginning of life,” I said, out of breath.

“We’ll make a pirate of you, yet, me-hearty.” D-dad’s grin was the size of Luna U’s crater.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll be a star traveler.”

“I doubt it. Not like you, anyway.”

“You’re talking about them damned transfer gates, aren’t you?”

“Sure.”

He leaned forward, elbows on the table, his eyes suddenly sharp. “I heard about them as we came in. What are they?”

“They work just like doors, really. Once you’re scanned and prepped, you step from one side to the other and you’re there.”

“Unbelievable.”

I explained about quantum entanglement and matter linkage. “It’s how most travel is being done today. I came here from Luna just this morning.” The idea settled on him. Perhaps for the first time he realized that the majority of the clientele in the observatory were just normal people eating normal food and wearing normal business clothes.

“So it’s true?” he said. “Transfer tech?”

I nodded.

“No spaceships? No jumpers or miners or freight transports?”

I shook my head. “No need.”

I saw it on his face then. What does that mean for a man like him? Where does it leave those who have given their life to traveling in tin cans at near the speed of light?

He seemed crushed.

This, I realized, was why he had agreed to talk to me. He didn’t care for me any more than he had my d-mom, or any more than he had wanted to meet my parents. He had little interest in the chains of life he left behind, or in my case, that he had cast forward. D-dad had given his life to a different path, and now that path was closing. The first transfer point had been put in place just over ten years ago, and while news travels at the speed of light, he had probably only received the first inkling of it a self-local year ago at best.

My d-dad, I realized, was worried that he was out of a job.

And me? I was worried that perhaps there would be no such jobs ever again.

The timer rang.

“It’s been two hours,” I said. “I guess you need to get back.”

I engaged trash removal, and we returned through the complex until we came to the Translux.

D-dad turned toward me. “You’re a good boy, Carlo.”

“It’s been a real treat talking to you, D-dad. Maybe I’ll see you out in the field.”

“That would be absolutely fantastic,” he said.

We clasped hands, and he pulled me into another embrace.

I watched him as he walked back through the gate. His stride seemed to pick up speed as he progressed. Then he was gone, disappeared into the fuselage of a space craft that could travel at two-nines the speed of light.

I followed him for as long as I could.

Translux was given her decommission orders that day. They flew her to a decon station in Mars orbit, where they stripped her down for parts. He caught a job maintaining comm satellites for a bit, then did a stint with a refueling center. There was always going to be a need for short-stint space flight, though most repair functions were done more cheaply by bots and reprogramming actions than by true hands-on activity. Then, after eight months hopping around the Solar System, he joined the crew of Hubris, a Higgs-drive unit that could pull six-nines and was heading to the Cassiopeia binary—deeper space than any other crew had ever gone.

I looked up the crew roster, and smiled.

The record included the following entry:

Aldous Hakkinan—Transfer Gate Installation Technician.

I went to Rutan’s observation center the next day. I sat at the same table we had sat at and I gazed out into space, thinking about my deca-dad and feeling a sense of wanderlust that I could not adjust away.

Copyright © 2010 Ron Collins

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Short Stories

Happy Are the Bunyips

Zoos are, of course, research institutions ...

By Carl Frederick

At the boundary of the zoo, Roger Laczko, head zookeeper, picked up the first-class mail and then strolled leisurely back toward the administration building, stopping occasionally to chat with zoo visitors and let their kids pet his dog.

A wandering boy of about nine, untethered to a parent, came up to him. “Mister Zookeeper, is your dog friendly?” The boy gazed at the dog with awe, as if he were close up to a tiger.

“He loves kids.”

“He looks like a big white wolf. Can I pet him?”

“Sure.” Roger crouched to be at eye level with both dog and boy. “His name’s Sniffles.”

The boy laughed. “Sniffles?”

“Some people (the director, for example) are a little allergic to him. And they sniffle when they’re near him.”

“Oh.” The boy patted Sniffles on the head. Sniffles barked and the boy jumped back.

“It’s okay,” said Roger standing from his crouch. “It means he’s happy. He’s a very talkative dog.”

Near the administration building (too near, infact), Roger leaped lightly over the railing and up to the keeper’s entrance to an unoccupied animal enclosure. If only we had the money, we could put Sun bears in there. The enclosure had been meant for Kodiak bears, but the AZA thought the harp-wire wouldn’t hold them in. Roger keyed open the entrance, sent his dog inside, and relocked the entrance—bending first to pick up an animal exhibit sign from inside. He gritted his teeth as his dog barked in protest. The zoo director in her office could certainly hear the barking—and it would not please her. Although comfortable with lions and tigers, she was frightened of big dogs and flinched at every bark.

Roger snapped the sign to the array of harp-wires that separated the enclosure from the visitors (for the safety of the animals, not the visitors).

He stood back and observed the sign. It seemed to float in front of the enclosure. At a distance of six feet, the harp-wire was all but invisible.

Dog (“Sniffles”)

Canis domesticus

Hungarian Kuvas. Protects sheep.

(The head zookeeper’s dog)

Maybe it’s better we don’t have the money. Roger often parked Sniffles in the enclosure, occasionally even overnight when he had to travel to a zoo conference. He’s big enough to make a good zoo exhibit. It was very convenient. Roger pursed his lips. Except for the director.

He turned and trotted up the steps to the administration building, thumbing through the mail as he did so. Only three letters. He slowed his steps toward the director’s office. One of the letters was strange. Initially, he thought the return address bore the logo of The American Zoo and Aquarium Association, but instead of AZA, it displayed IZA. International Zoo Association maybe? Didn’t know there was one. He gave an internal shrug—I have other things to worry a bout—and walked into Zoo Director Angelina Grouss’s office.

“Mail’s here,” said Roger, dropping the three letters on her desk. Just at that inopportune moment, Sniffles barked. Being a warm, late spring day, the window was open and the bark reverberated through the office.

Angelina jumped at the noise. More than startled, she looked scared.

He attempted to head off a potentially unpleasant exchange with humor. “I can’t understand,” said Roger with a smile and a hearty voice, “how a zoo director can be afraid of dogs.” Roger saw Angelina’s face fill with anger. Woops! I guess she didn’t see the humor.

“Damn it, Roger.” Angelina ripped open an envelope. “An animal that big should be behind bars.” She glanced at the contents and tossed the paper into the trash.

“At the moment he is behind bars—or behind harp-wire, anyway.” Seeing another way of avoiding an argument, Roger pressed on. “And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“You mean not bringing that noisy beast of yours to the zoo?” While speaking, she dispatched the second envelope and its content to the trash.

“Sniffles is quiet around animals—most animals, that is.”

Angelina frowned and Roger worried that he might not have been misunderstood.

“Look,” said Roger. “On more than one occasion, my dog has saved me from being mauled.”

“Then you should be more careful.” She picked up the third envelope and pointed it like a knife. “Or perhaps you need to take a leave of absence to go back for more training.” She tore open the envelope. “Or maybe you need to spend less time lollygagging with our patrons.”

“That’s an important part of my job,” said Roger. “Lollygagging, as you call it. Our patrons have a need to feel connected to our animals, to talk about them. And I’m easy to spot—a man in a khaki ranger’s outfit accompanied by a large white dog.”

Again, Sniffles barked and Angelina jumped.

“The dog’s important,” Roger went on. “He breaks the ice with reserved visitors, and gives their children something big to pet.”

Angelina’s eyes left Roger’s and dropped to the sheet she was reading.

“Actually,” said Roger, trying to regain her attention, “what I wanted to talk to you about is harp-wire.”

She looked up. “What?”

“The lemurs are behind harp-wire. They’ve learned to pluck the wires. Sounds sort of nice. Musical. I think we might do a CD.”

“Are you nuts?”

“We don’t have any artistic elephants or chimpanzees, and we need revenue.”

Angelina scowled. “Not that much, we don’t.”

“But I’ve heard you’re thinking of letting one of my keepers go.”

“Oh.” Angelina seemed to turn her full attention to her head zookeeper. “I may have to. Budgets are tight.”

She lowered her eye again to the sheet of mail. Roger thought she was avoiding his eyes out of embarrassment.

“Then you need revenue,” said Roger to the top of her head.

“What?”

“I said—”

“No,” said Angelina, flourishing the sheet. “I mean this.” She tossed it to him. “Read it.”

MY DEAR DIRECTOR GROUSS:

THE IZA IS DELIGHTED TO ANNOUNCE THAT WE HAVE APPROVED YOUR APPLICATION FOR A CAPTIVE BREEDING PERMIT FOR BUNYIPS. EXPECT SHIPMENT OF TWO BUNYIPS, A YEAR’S WORTH OF FOOD FOR THE CREATURES, AND DETAILED CARE INSTRUCTIONS. YOUR UNUSED BEAR HABITAT WILL BE PERFECT FOR THEM;THE HARP-WIRE BARRIER WILL BE MORE THAN SUFFICIENT TO CONSTRAIN TWO ADULT BUNYIPS.

Roger stopped reading and raised his eyes to Angelina’s. “Bunyips?” He narrowed his eyes. “I should have been consulted about a captive breeding program.”

“None of my doing.” She reached forward, grabbed the sheet, and slapped ot onto her desk. “Some kind of a mistake.” She stared down at the paper. “And what the hell are bunyips?”

“You might check ISIS.”

Angelina pulled up her keyboard and brought up the International Species Information System. After a minute or so of key fiddling, she shook her head, then pushed away the keyboard. “Nothing!”

“Here, let me try.” Roger took up the keyboard and Angelina, with an expression of noblesse oblige, swiveled the monitor so he could see it. “Fine. Be my guest.”

Roger did a Web search. “Ah,” he said after about thirty seconds. “Here it is. Bunyip.” He scanned the article, then looked back at Angelina. “It’s an Australian animal ... that probably doesn’t exist.”

“Excuse me?”

“Some of the early Australian explorers reported seeing an unknown animal. The problem was that each of these explorers had contradictory descriptions of the animal.” Roger chuckled. “But all agreed it was pretty big—whatever that meant.”

“Give me a break,” said Angelina.

“Even now,” said Roger, “some people believe it really does exist.” He picked up the letter. “Says the animals are remarkably docile. Healthy specimens.” He laughed. “And the taller one’s named Twerx and the other one’s Korfen.”

Again, Angelina grabbed the letter. She glared at it. “Someone’s stupid idea of a joke.”

“Someone who knows our zoo,” said Roger.

Angelina crumpled the letter and, holding it between thumb and forefinger as if it were plague infested, dropped it in the trash basket. “I don’t need this right now.”

Sniffles barked.

“Damn it!” said Angelina.

Just as he’d concluded his rounds the following day, a glorious late September morning with the first bare sniff of autumn in the air, Roger received a frantic phone call from the zoo’s loading dock.

“Bunyips?” said Roger, with a sinking feeling. “I’ll be right over.” He slipped his cell phone into his pocket and, with Sniffles padding behind, rushed to the loading dock. He arrived to see three keepers peering through breathing holes in a large crate.

One of the keepers looked up as Roger approached. “You’re not going to believe this.” The keeper gestured at one of the breathing holes.

“Let’s get a better view.” Roger swung open a small hinged panel on the crate, exposing a barred feeding window. He peered in.

Two white faces peered back. They had wide eyes giving them the look of kids having just been caught raiding the cookie jar.

“Jeez!” Roger jumped back in surprise. The faces retreated as well. Roger edged closer, and again looked in—but gingerly.

Mouth open in strained belief, he saw that the alleged bunyips were between five and six feet tall, walked upright, and were covered in long white fur.

“What the hell are they?” came a Russian-accented voice from behind.

“Beats me, Sergei,” said Roger, glancing over his shoulder at his second in command. “If someone told me they were the abominable snowmen, I’d believe them.” He caught sight of another shipping crate. On its side in stenciled letters was the legend, “Bunyip Chow.” “But I guess we’ll have to call them bunyips. Any documentation come with the shipment?”

Sergei picked up a large manila mailing envelope from on top of the chow crate and handed it over.

Roger opened the clasp and flipped through the papers, finding a cover letter and a manual of care instructions. While he perused them, Sniffles sniffed at the crate, then commenced barking and wagging his tail.

“Your dog seems to like smell of our bunyips,” said Sergei.

“I guess.” Roger watched as Sniffles ran circles around the crate.

“Well,” said Sergei. “What we do with bunyips?”

Roger switched his gaze from his dog to Sergei. “For the moment anyway, let’s stow the crate in the old Kodiak bear enclosure.”

Sergei sent another keeper to fetch the forklift and then turned to Roger. “Well, I think they probably result of genetic engineering.”

“But why?” said Roger with a gentle laugh. “And how?”

Sergei shrugged.

As the forklift reached the bear enclosure, Roger ran ahead to open the entrance gate while Sergei steadied the crate.

“Move it inside,” Roger called out to the driver.

“You got it!” the driver called back.

Watching the forklift rumble through the entrance, Roger scratched Sniffles between the ears. “No more free hotel for you, I’m afraid.” He glanced toward the administration building and saw Angelina looking out at them from an open window.

The forklift driver lowered the fork. “Damn,” he said, jumping from the cab. “I forgot the rope.” He waved and headed for the gate. “Be right back.”

Glancing once more at the window, Roger saw Angelina gesturing frantically for him to come to her office.

Roger pursed his lips. I’m sure this’ll be fun. He handed the manila envelope with the care instructions to Sergei. “See to getting our bunyips settled, will you?” He turned to go, but then stopped. “No, wait.” He reclaimed the envelope. “Better leave things as they are until the director approves it.” He turned to go. “Wish me luck.”

“Udachi!” said Sergei with a laugh.

Walking toward the administration building, Roger visualized those bunyip faces. He frowned. He’d prided himself on being able to identify any living animal that had two or four legs and fur. But he couldn’t identify these. Maybe when I see them outside their crate. He shook his head. No. Sergei must be right. Genetic manipulation. It’s the only answer. By the time he’d started up the stairs to Angelina’s office, he’d decided: After work, for the sake of his professional self-respect, he’d scour the Internet to see who could have possibly engineered the creatures.

“You should take a look at them,” said Roger. “They’re sort of cute, actually—whatever they are.”

“I don’t care if they’re Bambi,” said Angelina, standing, back rigid, her face as red as a baboon’s bottom. “Send them back!”

“Who knows how long they’ve been cooped up in that crate,” said Roger, softly, trying to bring calm. “They’ve got to be let out to run around. And I’m sure they need to be fed and watered.” He glanced toward the window. “I think we should let them free where they are now—in the old bear enclosure.”

“Their comfort’s not my concern,” said Angelina, her nose slightly elevated. “I want them out of here. Send them back—immediately! Our budget is stretched enough without having to take care of these ... animals.”

Roger ruffled through the papers that came with the crate. “You used to be fond of animals,” he said, softly, almost to himself.

“Not so much after thirty years on this job,” said Angelina, equally softly.

Roger looked up from the papers. “I can’t seem to find a return address.”

“Impossible!” Angelina pulled the papers from his hand. “Let me see.”

“This will bring the zoo a lot of visitors,” said Roger as Angelina pawed through the papers. “And revenue.”

After a few more seconds, Angelina sighed. “No return address.” She slapped the papers to her desk. “I guess we have no choice. Let ’em out.” She grabbed the telephone. “But I’m going to call the AZA. They, if anyone, will know what’s going on.”

She hit the AZA button on the autodialer and explained the situation to the first voice that answered.

The receiver was at high volume so Roger couldn’t help but hear.

“Bunyips?” came the voice on the phone, followed by a laugh. “Wait a sec. Kevin should hear this.”

Another voice came on the line and Angelina explained again.

“All right. What’s this all about?”

“This is not a joke,” said Angelina, coolly.

“Come on, mate!” said the voice. “Don’t you have anything better to do than making prank calls?”

Roger heard the click of the connection being broken.

Angelina slammed down the phone. “Just let me get my hands on whoever’s behind this farce.”

Gingerly, Roger picked up the bunyip papers. “I’d better go and take care of our new exhibit.” He turned to go. “It’s my job to see that they’re happy.”

“What about seeing that I’m happy?” said Angelina under her breath.

Roger, pretending not to hear, hurried outside, relieved that Sniffles hadn’t barked during the Angelina confrontation.

With Roger and Sergei on opposite sides to stabilize it, the forklift driver raised the crate and backed it out to where it all but blocked the enclosure entrance. With Sniffles standing on guard, Roger climbed to the top of the crate and tied an end of the rope to the top of the crate’s far side, which also served as a door. He unlatched the side and lowered it like a drawbridge to the ground.

The two crate occupants bounded out and padded up to the harp-wire barrier. Roger watched them. The bunyips looked like giant lemurs, but with slightly more compact faces. They walked upright. Roger gasped as he saw that their kneecaps were on the wrong side of their knees.

“Look at way those creatures walk!” said Sergei, his eyes wide and incredulous. “Like storks!”

“Yeah.”

The bunyips grabbed onto the harp-wire.

“Opposable thumbs,” said Roger. “Primates, maybe.” He climbed down to stand beside Sergei.

“Look like prosimians.” Sergei gave a hint of a nod. “Da,” he said, more to himself than to Roger. “Is genetic engineering. Must be.”

“Must be,” Roger echoed, softly. He had the forklift driver back the crate out. Then, with Sniffles guarding the entrance, he and Sergei backed out as well. “Sniffles. Come!” Roger called out. But instead, Sniffles bounded up to the bunyips and, with tail wagging, sniffed at them. For an instant, Roger worried for the safety of his dog, but then realized that Sniffles, bred to take down wolves, could take care of himself.

The Bunyips turned from the harp-wire and looked at the dog.

Jumping up and down with legs stiff—the “come and play” sign—Sniffles barked.

The bunyips looked at one another. Then Korfen, the shorter bunyip, also barked—a perfect imitation of Sniffles.

“They’re mimics,” said Roger. “Wonder how intelligent they are.”

“As intelligent as parrots,” said Sergei.

On impulse, Roger shouted, “Are you intelligent?”

Twerx stopped playing with the dog and looked up. “Are you intelligent?” it said in Roger’s voice.

Roger laughed.

“Parrots,” said Sergei.

“Hmm.” Roger watched the three creatures play. It seemed as if Sniffles and the bunyips had already become good friends. “Our bunyips seem docile but fearless,” said Roger. He swiveled around. “Okay. We’re done. Let’s go.”

“You leave dog in with animals?”

“Sure. Why not?” Roger chuckled. “Maybe Sniffles won’t lose his hotel after all.”

At home that night, Roger searched the net. He did rank-ordered searches on “animal genetic manipulation,” “designer animals,” and “GM animals.” After eliminating the false positives, there weren’t many hits. When he’d eliminated those as well, he let his gaze roam over the false positives, and then settle on “Unique Pet Labs.” Initially, Roger had dismissed it as a pet store specializing in Labrador Retrievers. Idly, he clicked on the link.

“Ah.”

The UPL website informed that the company took domesticated animals and genetically engineered them to create new species for pets.

“That’s it! That’s got to be it.” He whistled when he saw the price, but read on. “Yes!” he exclaimed when he saw that UPL was based in Melbourne, Australia. On impulse, he phoned the company. With the time difference, they should be open. When someone answered, Roger said he wanted a custom pet and described a bunyip, leaving out mention of the reversed kneecaps. “I don’t suppose you could do that,” said Roger, “could you?”

“Oh, but we can.”

“Really?” Roger snapped alert. “Have you ... done something like this before?”

“Yes, we have, actually.”

Roger mentally crossed his fingers. “Could you ... perhaps send me pictures?”

“Unfortunately not. Client confidentiality, you understand.”

“Yes,” said Roger with a sigh. “Of course.” He asked for a brochure to be sent and hung up. Then, pondering how he could find out who that client was, Roger went to bed.

He tossed and turned much of the night, and got up very early. He felt both tired and abused. The zoo is an educational institution and not a circus freak-show. It should not be exhibiting non-existing animals. He went to his computer and brought up the UPL website. Damned publicity stunt. Probably for a movie or something. Roger emailed UPL with a demand that they tell their mysterious client to get their freaks out of his zoo.

When, later that morning, Roger dropped in on Angelina in her office, he found that she’d phoned just about every animal organization in creation, trying to track down both bunyips and who could possibly have sent them to her zoo.

She looked up from her desk at him. “What the hell are you smiling about?”

“Not in a particularly good mood this morning,” said Roger, “are we?”

An e-mail notification tone issued from her computer. Roger watched as, with a growl not unlike those he’d heard earlier on his rounds, she turned to the monitor.

After a few seconds, “Wrong zoo!” Angelina barked out. “Listen to this.” She glared at the monitor. “Sorry. Bunyips delivered to wrong zoo. Will pick up the animals in two weeks. Soonest we can come. Would appreciate if you could keep the animals until then. Feel free to exhibit them. They like visitors.” She threw a glance to the ceiling. “Sheesh!”

“Well, they do like visitors,” said Roger. “They’ve been here less than a day and already visitors are lining up to see them.” He suppressed his smile this time. It seemed that his screaming at Unique Pet Labs had worked.

“Two weeks,” said Angelina with a long breath. “Fine! But whoever’s behind this’ll certainly get a piece of my mind when they come to pick up the animals.”

Roger told her about Unique Pet Labs.

“So that’s what this is about.” Angelina shook her head.

“I think maybe we should take them off exhibit,” said Roger, softly.

“What?”

“I sort of have ethical qualms about exhibiting a non-existent species.” Roger glanced out the window at the bunyip enclosure. “And anyway, why should we help with some publicity stunt?”

“Because it’ll make money for the zoo,” said Angelina. “That’s why.” She followed his glance. “As long as there aren’t any hidden costs in exhibiting them.”

“The bunyips aren’t a problem,” said Roger, transferring his gaze to Angelina. “They’re easy to care for and interesting to watch—although they don’t seem particularly intelligent. And my dog seems to provide all the enrichment they need.”

Just then, Sniffles, off in the enclosure with the bunyips, barked. Angelina, as usual, jumped. Then came a few more barks—one on top of the other.

“The bunyips have gotten barking down pretty well,” said Roger. “Don’t you think?”

“Get out!”

Two weeks later, Roger found himself in a sad, pensive mood as he leaned on the railing in front of the bunyip enclosure. His eyes found the exhibit sign.

Bunyips (Twerx and Korfen)

Engineered in Australia (we think)

(Temporary Exhibit)

Tempora ry Exhibit. Roger knew that, any day now, UPL would come and take them away. He knew he’d miss these strange mammals with opposable thumbs and their storklike kneecaps. Not that they seemed particularly strange anymore. He’d spent a lot of time in with Sniffles and the bunyips—ostensibly studying them. And they now seemed no more unusual than any other of his charges—except they were much more social and friendly than most. When they’d first come, he’d spent time speculating on from what genetic forebears these creatures had sprung, but not any more. Now they were just his bunyips.

The bunyips, for their part, seemed delighted to observe the zoo visitors who were observing them. Roger smiled, sadly, thinking of how he’d found it hard to keep on his guard while with the bunyips. He’d been glad he had Sniffles whom he could rely on to protect him. And, of course, there’d never been any instance where he might have needed protection. He watched as Sniffles and the bunyips played. Sniffles will miss them as well.

His eye caught another exhibit sign on the harp-wire, one of Sergei’s “leetle jokes,” no doubt.

Man (“Roger”)

Homo sapiens custodis

(The dog’s zookeeper)

Yes, I have spent a lot of my time of late in with the bunyips—too much, probably.

Twerx came up to the wire and looked through with deep, lemur-eyes.

“I’m sad,” said Roger, staring back at his animal friend, “that you’ll be going home soon—wherever home might be.”

Korfen came up and stood beside Twerx. The two bunyips stood gazing at Roger.

Roger gazed back. “I hope you’ve been happy here.”

“Actually, Roger,” said Twerx, “we’ve been very happy here.”

“What?” Roger squeaked, about ready to jump out of his skin and pushing himself back from the railing.

“Oh, we’re sorry,” said Korfen. “We hope it’s all right to call you Roger.”

Roger felt his mouth drop open and no words came out. They’re mimics. This must be one of Sergei’s “leetle” jokes. “It’s ... it’s fine,” he managed. But they’re speaking with Australian accents. Sergei couldn’t have done that.

Roger drew closer to the railing. Or maybe I’ve been hallucinating. Maybe I shouldn’t have tasted that Bunyip Chow. Yeah, that must be it. He closed his eyes, trying to clear his brain.

“Excuse me,” said a bunyip. Roger snapped open his eyes. “But perhaps you could take us to your director.”

“Uh,” said Roger.

“Or just as well,” said the other bunyip, Twerx, “offer the director our compliments and request that he visit us.”

“She,” Roger muttered, numbly. “I’ll ... I’ll go get her.” He turned, paused, and turned back to the bunyips. “But what about Unique Pet Labs?”

“About what?” said Korfen.

“Do you mean pet Labrador Retrievers?” said Twerx.

I’ll ... I’ll get the director. The guys at Unique Pet Labs must think I’m a raving maniac.

“Look,” said Angelina, as Roger urged her toward the bunyip enclosure, “Just what is this big emergency?”

“You’ll see.”

“You yank me out of my office for some big catastrophe.” Angelina glanced around. “But everything looks fine to me. So, what is it?”

“Well,” said Roger, looking over his shoulder at the director. “Maybe it’s not exactly an emergency.”

Angelina stopped on the spot. “Okay. What’s going on?”

“You won’t believe it.”

“Try me.”

Roger glanced over at the enclosure. The bunyips were again playing with Sniffles. “You’ll see soon enough.” I hope.

“Roger. This had better be good.”

“It will be.” I hope. “Come up to the railing.”

“All right. Fine.” Angelina joined Roger at the railing of the enclosure. “Now what?” she said in a voice both bored and angry.

The bunyips padded up to the harp-wire and stared through.

“Well,” said Roger to the bunyips, feeling very stupid, and again entertaining the thought that somehow Sergei was behind this all. “This is Director Grouss.”

Angelina gave Roger a look saying quite clearly that she thought he was nuts.

“We are very pleased to meet you,” said Twerx.

From the corner of his eye, Roger saw Angelina go bug-eyed. Her mouth dropped open as if her nose had just become useless for breathing. “Told you so,” he whispered, mightily relieved that the bunyips had spoken again—proving he hadn’t lost his mind.

Angelina grabbed onto the railing. It looked to Roger as if she were about to faint. “But ... I thought ...”

“I was wrong about Unique Pet Labs,” Roger whispered.

Korfen put a hand down and patted Sniffles. Roger almost felt as if his dog were now theirs.

“One of your Earth philosophers, Mr. Mohandas Gandhi,” said Twerx, “wrote that the greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

“And so,” said Korfen, “to both observe your species up close, and to apply Gandhi’s prescription, we—” “Earth philosophers?” Roger abruptly shifted his attention from Angelina as Twerx’s words registered. “Are you saying you’re not from Earth?”

“Yes,” said Korfen.

“No,” said Twerx at about the same time. “I mean that we used Earth DNA to synthesize these bodies.”

“Why?” Angelina managed to utter at a whisper—more a global question than a specific.

“We’d wanted to build an appealing body,” said Korfen. “Appealing to humans, that is. And with an anatomy that could talk nicely. We wanted to try it out in a zoo.”

“We were afraid you might find our form as ugly as we find yours,” said Twerx. “Nothing personal, of course. No offense intended.”

Angelina gave a weak shake of her head.

“The brain, of course,” Twerx went on, “was just an empty vessel, into which we downloaded parts of our own.”

“Brain transference?” Roger found it hard to shift from thinking of his furry friends as not zoo animals, but beings from an advanced civilization.

“A brain is a brain,” said Twerx, his body-language suggesting nonchalance.

“And information is information,” said Korfen, “even at the quantum level—especially at the quantum level.”

Angelina seemed to have recovered her poise and confidence. “Why did you choose my zoo?” she asked with a slight tone of confrontation.

“We’d planned to use an Australian zoo,” said Twerx. “We understand Australians are very fond of animals. But the zoo had shut down.”

“We had to chose a zoo in the English-speaking world,” said Korfen. “English is the only Earth language we’ve studied. And this was the first zoo we found that had space for us.”

Twerx spoke, presumably in his own tongue, then said, “And it’s nice you have a word in your language that includes us.”

“Alien?” said Roger.

“Animal,” said Twerx. “A species other than your own.”

“So, you can see why we chose a zoo,” said Korfen.

“Yeah,” said Roger with a hint of a shake of his head. “Of course.”

Twerx looked down at his long furry self. “Take care of our bodies, please”—he looked up at the director—“until we return.”

“Or actually until our Alien Contact Specialists re-occupy them,” said Korfen. “They’ll want you to take them to your leader.”

“You intend to meet our president looking like that?” Angelina seemed to be trying to take control of the situation.

Roger suppressed a smile. Situation normal.

“You mean you don’t think they’ll take us seriously,” said Twerx, “because we have long fur and fuzzy faces?”

“We’ll wear robes,” said Korfen.

Korfen swiveled to stare into Roger’s eyes. “We’ve been very happy here, observing your species. And the humans who’ve stopped to observe us have been nice. And human children are delightful.”

“We’re going now,” said Twerx. “Transferring up to our ship.”

“We’ll simulate a lower level species,” said Korfen, “one from your region of course, and project it into these bodies to keep them functioning properly.”

“Bye for now,” said Twerx.

The bunyips suddenly went rigid. And Roger saw the intelligence vanish from their eyes.

Sniffles, clearly sensing something was wrong, went from bunyip to bunyip, licking the creatures’ hands and whining.

After a few seconds, Angelina said, “At least there’ll be no more barking bunyips.”

Roger bit his lip. It seemed a particularly mean-spirited remark from his boss.

Then, after another quarter minute or so, the bunyips began to move—slowly, as if they were falling in molasses. The bunyips bent at the waist. Then their lower legs bent in the opposite direction than human legs would and, their speed of motion increasing, they dropped to all fours. Roger smiled in sudden understanding: the bunyips now looked not all that different from Sniffles.

A bunyip barked.

Angelina started. Roger looked and saw that she’d closed her eyes.

Then Sniffles and the other bunyip joined in the happy barking.

“Oh no,” cried Angelina. “Oh, please, no!”

Copyright © 2010 Carl Frederick

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Short Stories

A Placebo Effect

What constitutes “effective” is not always simple or obvious—especially in medicine.

Brian C. Coad

It can happen to anybody. You get older. Your working life comes to an end. You settle into complacent retirement.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a minor thing you did thirty years ago flashes up. It casts you in the villain’s role in an international incident that could lead to World War III. India versus China.

That was exactly what happened to me.

(Let it be said in passing, though, that things do not always end up the way they started.)

The situation that smote me with anxiety began on a dismally foggy September morning. After forty years of serving GBI as that great conglomerate’s patent attorney, I had been enjoying the honorable leisure of age in my small Berkeley Hills home with its fine view of San Francisco Bay. My morning routine featured a light breakfast, then a session in an overstuffed chair at my bay-view picture window, with an additional cup of coffee and the morning newspaper.

This morning began no differently. I had collected my SF Chronicle, poured my coffee, and settled in my chair. The fog deprived me of my view of the bay, but that was typical at that time of the year. All else was normal.

I took a sip of coffee. I opened the newspaper. I scanned its front-page headline. No premonitions.

The headline, large type, screamed U.S. PATENT ATTORNEY ACCUSED OF STIRRING UP INDIA–CHINA CONFRONTATION.

Naturally, this stirred up my professional interest. Patent attorneys rarely make headline news. I ran a hurried eye over the article under the headline.

I saw a name.

Wally Mason.

My name.

Before I could digest the whole article, I heard the peremptory beep of the bit of advanced technology I call my communicator, which sat on my living room desk.

I crossed to the desk. Activated the communicator.

“Wally?” A female voice.

“Yes.”

“Sally Johnson, GBI PR You remember me?”

“Of course,” Polite, but I struggled to recall her.

“You surprise me, Wally. You were about to retire when I joined GBI. We met only once, I think, during my orientation. Still, your infallible memory remains legendary among us, even today.”

“Nice to know I’m not forgotten.” I had her now, a skinny young thing with a pert nose and a fire of ambition in her eye.

“You’re enjoying your retirement?”

“Indeed I am.” Except for my brief scan of that morning’s Chronicle. “How about you?”

“I’ve been lucky. Promotion came quick. I’m now head of the PR department.”

“Congratulations.” Good for her, but I wondered what was coming next. For sure, this was not a social call.

It came.

“The CEO asked me to get in touch, Wally. Have you seen the morning paper, watched media news, anything like that?”

My habitual caution jumped in. “Not lately.”

“A pity. Your name has gone nationwide. International too. This India–China disagreement. It appears you’re at the bottom of it.”

“I couldn’t possibly be. I have nothing to do with India or China or anything else.’

“You do, though. You remember the patent you wrote for Dr. Anandas a good long time ago?”

“Vaguely.” I remembered Tony Anandas better than his patent. He was a bright young biochemist. Worked for GBI Pharmaceuticals. In fact, I got his job for him.

“Dr. Anandas, of course, died of dehydration in the Darfur desert three years ago. He had left Pharmaceutical and was on a humanitarian mission for the U.N.”

“Sorry to hear it.” I truly was. Humanitarian mission. The young Tony I remembered was typecast for that sort of thing.

“If he hadn’t died, it would probably be his name in the media instead of yours. Since he’s gone, the buck stops with you.”

“What buck? As I recall, Tony’s patent was about placebos. How could it possibly have anything to do with any disagreement between India and China?”

“You don’t do your homework anymore, Wally. Apparently you didn’t even hear of Tony’s death, although some people made almost a saint of him.”

“I no longer try to keep up with everything.”

“Why should you? You’re retired. Let me sketch the current background for you. For years, China got all stirred up with social turmoil from the poorer 80 percent of its population. Luckily, the developed 20 percent made the nation dollar-rich. Meanwhile, global warming hit India hard. Himalayan snow turned to rain, spoiling the northern Indian snowmelt irrigation programs. India wanted a lot of dollars to help build compensating dams and reservoirs. China wanted something to ease its internal turmoil. India found something to sell to China that would work for them. Long Life pills. China bought them with the dollars India needed. The pills eased China’s internal turmoil. It was a fine trading arrangement.”

“Good for India. Good for China. Where is the connection between me and Long Life pills?”

“Tony Anandas. An extension of the pills in his patent. Placebo effect—you know—people take placebos and get better. He found a new market. Built it up. When it was a growing concern, GBI sold it, lock, stock, and barrel, to Indian interests.”

“So?” I didn’t quite grasp the implications. “How come the India–China trade relationship has broken down?”

“Our recession. China’s flow of dollars declined. They wanted to buy Long Life pills for yuan, but India needed dollars. Pill supplies dried up. New turmoil in China.”

“And—”

“China put out a propaganda campaign saying the Long Life pills didn’t work. They accused India of a scam, and went to the Anandas patent, which, if you remember, is expressly about the inertness of Dr. Anandas’s placebos. China said India had been lying for years, falsely claiming benefits for a product that the patent itself proved had no beneficial properties. India countered that the pills they supply are beneficial, and the problem is simply that the patent attorney who wrote the patent failed to disclose the beneficial properties of a set of specially modified products. Meanwhile, China says you deliberately kept the patent obscure so that India could get on with its scam. Both sides blame you. Neither India nor China really wants a war. So they’re taking it out on you, a scapegoat.”

“When I worked on Tony’s patent there was something about therapeutically beneficial pills. I barely remember it. But I don’t think Tony’s development of a new product line for Pharmaceuticals Division was a con.”

“I know nothing about it. Before my time. But we’re up against reality now, Wally. The China–India disagreement. All your fault.”

“How can I possibly be blamed?”

“Power politics, Wally. Both sides put you in the hot seat.”

“What am I supposed to do, then?”

“This is why I am calling. GBI’s CEO had me in and asked me to talk to you. He wants you to see to it that there is no fallout for GBI. Accept all the blame yourself. Keep the GBI name out of it. Will you do that for your old employer, Wally?”

“I’ll have to think about it.” There was a sudden vision in my head of official investigations. National and international bodies. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The UN.

“Of course. Call me. But I expect you’ll come through for us.”

Even as the PR lady vanished from the communicator screen, I knew, yes, I would. I felt grim about it as I returned to my window chair. Isolated. Unprotected. Not even GBI on my side.

One good thing, the fog had lifted. Below my home the sunlit bay scintillated in pristine glory.

One bad thing. My coffee was cold.

What to do, I wondered, to protect myself.

While I was GBI’s patent attorney, I published a few stories based on my experiences with people and their patents. GBI management encouraged me. Good PR, they said.

I had a filing cabinet full of notes for future stories, but I rarely visited it since retiring. Writing fiction is hard work of the kind retirees are entitled to ignore.

But I had notes about Tony Anandas and his patent.

Suppose I pulled the notes out and turned them into a story. Would that do anything for me?

Yes, I thought. If accusers came snarling at me, I could repel them with a presentation of true facts. I could absolve myself of blame.

So, to my basement filing cabinet. I pulled the Anandas file. Brought it upstairs. Sat at my desk. Went through it. Plotted out the story. Set my fingers tapping on my keyboard. Got going.

Here—fact, not fiction—is the story of the Anandas patent.

I became acquainted with Tony Anandas in the spring of 1976. Noonan, GBI’s then CEO, brought us together.

At the time, I was in London, England, deposing witnesses in a patent infringement case. It was sheer boredom.

Late one evening Noonan called me in my hotel room. “I have a little side chore for you, Wally, since you’re in England.” This was typical Noonan. Any traveling corporate person could expect to be saddled with a little side chore.

“Sure,” I said.

“A young biochemist,” Noonan said. “A Ph.D., name of Tony Anandas. Résumé to Sam Burden of Pharmaceuticals Div. Lives in South Wales, Cardiff, or some such. Sam is interested. Will you break away from London for an hour and go interview the young fellow?”

“Certainly.” South Wales, I thought. More than an hour away. A half day’s relief from boredom. Maybe a full day’s relief.

“Soonest, then,” Noonan said. “My secretary now. Anandas’s address, phone number. After you’ve chatted with him, your recommendations to Sam, copy to me.”

Noonan went. His secretary came on. She gave me what I needed, including a runthrough of the Anandas application. That night I slept the happy sleep of a reprieved prisoner.

Before eight next morning I called the Anandas number. A lilting, gentle voice came on. “You have reached the Anandas residence. Tony here.” A Welsh accent, I thought. But somehow not quite.

I said who I was and why I was calling.

“You wish to visit our humble abode, Mr. Mason? Mine and my father’s?”

“Exactly. On behalf of GBI Pharmaceuticals. Sorry to be calling you at such an ungodly morning hour.”

“There is no vestige of a problem, Mr. Mason. No doubt you remain on American time. When will you come to Cardiff?”

“Today?”

“It shall be my sheer delight to welcome you. Let me talk to you of railway times. Or will you drive? Trains will be faster.”

“Train, then.”

“Very good.”

Dr. Anandas then ran me more information than I needed about train times. We settled on a schedule. I thanked him.

“Again, my pleasure, Mr. Mason. Please to take a taxi from Cardiff station. You should be warned that our domicile lies in the city’s Tiger Bay region. Be on the lookout for wallet-stealing varlets. There are many evil persons in this district, some even from my own native India.”

The accent, then. Not Welsh. Indian.

I told Tony I would be careful and rang off.

For my next task, I called my British associate and told him he would have to take over on his own for the day. Let him put up with the boredom, I thought, as I cradled the phone.

With freedom in my heart, I prepared for my day of respite.

Close to eleven that morning a taxi carried me from Cardiff station to the door of the Anandas home. As I paid the driver, I noted a tall, bearded fellow in a green turban crossing the street half a block away, but he went the other way. Evidently not one of the Tiger Bay varlets.

Houses up and down the street had a rundown look to them, but the Anandas house had a white picket fence to it, as if aspiring to suburban gentility. I passed through a small garden of roses to the front door. Above a brass knocker it had a brass plate reading:

ANANDAS

IMPHAL M.M.

I had a vague recollection of Imphal as I rattled the knocker. World War II. India–Burma border. Battlefield. My interview target, Tony, had mentioned his father. Perhaps his father had been there.

The door opened. A young man, presumably my quarry. Wavy black hair. Swarthy complexion. White shirt. Gray flannel pants. He spoke in that lilting voice of his. “So good to see you, Mr. Mason. Please be pleased to come in to our humble abode.”

The young man put his hands together in a namaste—have I got that right?—salute.

The door opened directly on a sparsely furnished living room with a flag of India on one wall. A fireplace was set but unlit. A mantelpiece had coal black elephants on it, and there were hard backed chairs around a table.

My quarry waved me into one of the chairs. He sat across the table from me. I brought a yellow note pad out of my briefcase. I had scribbled notes on it. “One moment, Dr. Anandas, while I refresh my memory.”

Tony sat expectantly while I ran my eye over the notes on the pad, taken from Noonan’s secretary.

I looked up. “So, Dr. Anandas, you have a good doctorate. From Cambridge, no less.”

“The fates were with me, Mr. Mason, as they always have been.”

“Biochemistry. A bit outside my fields of expertise, I am afraid.”

“Pharmacology, really, Mr. Mason. I am particularly interested in the effects of trace chemicals on the human physiology.”

“Homeopathic medicine?” Thanks to an article I had read recently about the therapeutic effects of trace medications, I was able to suggest I knew more than I did.

“A remarkable field of study, Mr. Mason, with great potential. But I do have broader interests.”

“Good.” The article I had read left me unsure of the effectiveness of homeopathy. “What do you know about GBI and our Pharmaceuticals Division?”

Tony told me quite a lot, some of which was new to me. Evidently he had done a good job of research on us.

“But Pharmaceuticals is a mature operation. Sam Burden, the president, likes to restrict his operations to large-scale manufacture of generic drugs, stuff like that. Why would you want to join an operation like his?”

“Where there are matters old and long established, Mr. Mason, it is my belief that a new eye of innovation can bring forth strange, unexpected blossoms.”

“Quite so.” Those words of his fed right into my professional instincts. A great deal of a patent attorney’s work has to do with the application of new insights into old established activities. “But why come to America? There must be plenty of opportunities here in Britain.”

“The British companies are less rich. I shall do better work if better financed. I am in a hurry. There is so much we do not know about so many things, particularly in President Burden’s operation, which merely totters along, when, with some innovative input, it could establish itself as the finest supplier of generic drugs in the world.”

“I like your logic. I like your attitude. Not sure about your impatience, though.” I recalled a conversation I once had with Sam Burden about new graduates. “Bumptious,” Sam had said. “Sure they can change the whole world overnight. But no sense of costs, no idea that most of the new things have been tried already.”

“There is good reason for it, Mr. Mason. With your permission, I will now bring in my father.”

I felt it was early to bring a third party into our conversation, but before I could say anything, Tony had left the room. He returned almost immediately, escorting a small, wizened individual dressed in Indian garments like those I had, in my childhood, seen on photographs of the great Mahatma Gandhi.

I stood.

“My father—Mr. Mason.”

The senior Anandas extended a bony hand to me. I shook it. “We are honored by your presence here, Mr. Mason.” His English tones, if anything, were more precise than Tony’s.

“My pleasure, Mr. Anandas.”

“My father, in fact, prefers to be Jamandar Anandas, rather than ‘mister.’” Tony guided his father to the chair he had formerly occupied and helped him onto it. “My former Army rank,” the senior said.

I sat. Tony sat.

Senior spoke again. “I hope we can do business, Mr. Mason. It is important for my son to get a good position, where he can do much good.”

“He is well qualified. I am sure he will. You were in the Indian Army, Jamandar? At Imphal?”

“I was indeed. I did a great deal of killing. To kill is evil, Mr. Mason, even when it is done in a good cause. I rely upon my son to do much good, to compensate for the evil I have done.”

Hence the impatience, I thought. Poor Tony.

“The M.M., Jamandar. That’s a Military Medal?”

“It was awarded to me by the King-Emperor George when I was privileged to be one of those representing the Indian Army at the victory parade in London, Mr. Mason. It was earned by a great deal of bloodshed.”

“You remained in this country after the parade?”

“Yes. It was permitted.”

Tony spoke. “My father had many relatives here in Cardiff.”

“Sea-going persons, mostly,” his father said. “Before the war, and I suppose to this day, many of the world’s ocean-going ships were manned by Indian persons, some of whom were our relatives. In every seaport they settled on retirement, including here.”

“But we have other relatives and friends all over the world,” Tony said.

The senior spoke again. “Especially southwest China and southeast Asia, where I ended my war with much liberation.”

“And less bloodshed,” Tony said.

“But still too much of it. You have much to do, my son, to gain absolution for your father.”

“This I know, my father.”

I didn’t care for the direction the conversation had taken. To change it, I said, “You were born here in Cardiff, Tony?”

“My son was born here. My son, it is time we refreshed our guest with hot Indian tea.”

“Yes, my father.”

Tony clapped his hands.

A tall, green-turbaned individual entered the room. He bore a silver tray with cups, teapot, cream jug, sugar. He put it on the table in front of Anandas senior and went away again.

Anandas senior poured.

As we drank tea together, I kept reminding myself that I was here to do a job interview, not to hear the wartime reminiscences of an old man. However, I was unable to wrest the conversation away from the Jamandar.

I learned a lot. Did you know the Indian Army of World War II was two million strong and saved innumerable British and American lives? But I didn’t find out much more about Tony.

However, I left with positive feelings about the young Ph.D. He was presentable. He appeared to be knowledgeable. He did his homework. Above all else, I was sure he would be highly motivated.

When I was back in London—too late to join the day’s depositions—I wrote a positive report on Tony and relayed it to Ms. Lee, my Connecticut secretary for transmission to Noonan and Sam Burden, then rewarded my good day’s work with a roast beef dinner in a Victorian restaurant that featured a blazing log fire.

A few weeks later the corporate grapevine told me my labors had not been in vain. Sam Burden’s Pharmaceutical division in Puerto Rico had hired Tony Anandas. I got a mild sense of pleasure out it. Unless he wrote a lot of patent disclosures, I didn’t expect to hear much about him again.

* * *.

Some three years later, on a dull fall afternoon that threatened snow, Sam Burden turned up unannounced at my corporate tower office in Connecticut. I was surprised. I did very little business with his division.

Sam explained that he was in Connecticut for one of those cross-fertilization meetings between divisions that had become fashionable. “Sorry if I’m intruding, Wally, but can you spare me a few minutes?”

“Surely, Sam. You want to try a cup of Ms. Lee’s famous Oolong tea?”

“Yup,” Sam said.

I checked with Ms. Lee on the intercom. “Tea is already coming, Mr. Mason,” she said.

“How are things in Puerto Rico, Sam?”

“Good, Wally, real good. I do have one small problem.”

“Oh?”

“You remember young Tony Anandas, the Indian laddie you sent me?”

“More or less. Giving you trouble?”

“Not exactly.” Sam thought for a moment, then continued. “When you sent him to us, Wally, you did us a favor. A real bright young fellow. An inspiration to all of us.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Tony was all set on doing good for humanity. Motivated. Not much outlet for that sort of thing, at staid old Pharmaceuticals.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“I gave him freedom to find some new thing for us. A large market, not served now; ready customer acceptance. That sort of thing.”

“Did he find anything?”

“Yup. Placebos. You know, the inert pills that healthcare innovators use to test new drugs, inerts to half their volunteers, the real things to the other half? See if the real things work? Well, there are thousands and thousands of tests going on and not much standardization of the inerts. Tony did a real good job of researching the possibilities. I let him go ahead, do his own marketing and everything. Presently he had a whole new product line. Our placebo line. A new profit center, with Tony heading it up. The market was not as big as I hoped, but that young man sure earned his keep.”

“Did it satisfy his humanitarian ambitions?”

“Seemed to. He said his products were an essential contribution to the research.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Just when we were well into the new line, our inerts suddenly seemed not to work. Researchers discovered GBI placebos were curing people—more effectively than the drugs being tested. Our customers roared thunder at us.”

“I’ve heard of placebo effects—inert pills inspire people to get well without other treatments.”

“This was worse than that. Customers threatened to sue us. Barely a return on investment yet, so we had to put a lot of effort into recovering our markets. Tony went about making speeches about placebo effects and reassuring customers. A persuasive lad. He also worked on his production setup. Customers drifted back, profitability returned. He had saved the situation.”

“Where is the problem, then?”

“Competitors,” Sam said.

Ms. Lee brought us our tea. Sam sipped. His face, which had held a serious expression, relaxed. Ms. Lee’s tea does that to all my visitors.

Sam continued. “Our little problem got several competitors interested. Not much damage so far, but I want a tool to shut them out. Could you write a patent for us, Wally?”

“What sort of a patent?”

“One that shows what’s special about our placebos. One that will help us with our customers. One that we can shake in the face of the upstart competition to set them floundering. I bet you know exactly what to do, Wally.”

“No promises. There has to be a real invention.”

“Sure.”

There was a sound of wet snow driven by fierce wind gusts splattering on my office window. I thought of Connecticut winter and warm Puerto Rican beaches.

“All right, Sam, I’ll come visit Tony and see what we can do.”

A week later, with a blizzard predicted and frost on the New England pumpkins, I gathered up the little file of arrangements Ms. Lee had made for me and set out on my travels.

The flight south was without incident. I had alerted Tony. He himself picked me up at the airport. Good warm sunshine watched over us as we drove to Pharmaceuticals.

Tony ushered me through my courtesy call on Sam Burden, then we went to his office, passing through his production shop in an assigned wing of the main building. The tap, tap, tap of his pill presses accompanied us.

Sam had done a good job of preparing Tony. Very soon he had me filled in on the salient details of his placebo invention. Verbally. Not written up as a formal disclosure. I had to coach him on that formality.

Tony’s invention consisted of the addition of certain substances to his pill mixes that would not only suppress any therapeutic placebo effect, but would absolutely guarantee the resulting pills would be totally inert. Anyone interested can, of course, download a copy of the final patent.

I guided Tony through our official disclosure form, plus an assignment form. He included test results from his lab notebook showing his invention worked. I was happy with him. I was even happier because I could leave him to do the rest of it on his own. He fixed me up with a taxi to my seashore hotel. I was able to spend the afternoon sunning myself.

Next morning Tony once again collected me, this time at my hotel. I ran an eye over the formal stuff he had prepared for me. I could find no good reason to postpone my return to the Connecticut blizzards and chills. We checked flights. Tony brought me to the airport. On the way there I asked after Tony’s father. The Jamandar was well.

I put another question to Tony. This one had bothered me since the previous evening. “Do you have any idea why your placebo pills suddenly lost their inertness?”

“Just normal,” Tony said. “People expect pills to do something for them. Their bodies react accordingly.”

“I wondered if it had anything to do with your interest in homeopathy.”

“Hardly. But there was one rather odd result from the publicity the media gave to our socalled therapeutic pills. People began buying them for their curative benefits.”

“Do you supply what they want?”

“Of course. Our business is to make money for GBI.”

“Who are your customers?”

“Relatives and friends, first off. Then a spread. Southeast Asia. China. One of our sales agents overseas came up with a name: Long Life pills. Supplying them is a nice adjunct to our bottom line.”

“Are you sure there is no homeopathy involved?”

Tony said nothing.

“Hmmm,” I said. “Better keep quiet about this. It could mess up the issuance of your patent.”

At the time, Tony’s inert placebo patent was my sole concern. It was why Sam Burden had brought me to sunshine. In hindsight, with the India–China affair on my back, it’s obvious to me that I should have checked further on the Long Life pills. Maybe I should have generated a cascade of patents. But I didn’t. And so, here we are.

Tony got me to the airport in good time for my plane. I flew out of the sunshine into the cold and the dark of winter.

Back to the present, then. The preceding is the Anandas patent story, exactly as I developed it from the notes in my story cabinet file. I read it over and thought it wasn’t bad. But I could not convince myself that it would protect me from impending harsh criticism. The forces arrayed against me were too powerful—India, China, the American media apparently, my own self-imposed rules of loyalty to keep GBI out of it and let no blame attach to Tony Anandas.

The more I thought about it, the more isolated and powerless I felt.

By the way, I was permitted to wallow in my discontent without interruption from my communicator. Before settling to write, I had pressed the sieve button to have the machine eliminate everything except specific important communications. Its call counter told me that it had eliminated a lot of unimportant ones—no doubt the frantic media trying to get comments, preferably incriminating, from me.

Oddly, there was no pack of slavering media folk in my front yard or behind my house.

I cooked myself a TV dinner. I sat at my picture window to eat it. To boost my courage, I set myself thinking of worse times in my long life.

There was one good thing. A glorious bay sunset. San Francisco, on my western horizon, became a golden city under a canopy brilliantly shaded in multiple tints of red and orange. The bay waters danced joyfully.

Another by the way. Rather, several of them. The Anandas patent went through smoothly. No problems introduced by the relevant examiner. After, I heard no more of Tony until the grapevine mentioned he had left Pharmaceuticals, and, later, Sally’s news of his death.

Very vaguely, I remembered hearing of the sale of Tony’s Long Life product line to Indian interests. That may have been before or after Tony left Pharmaceuticals. It was certainly at one of those usual times when I was too busy to think about it.

Well, these thoughts, along with the food and the sunset, soothed my anxieties to some small degree.

The peremptory buzz of my communicator suddenly interrupted my developing sense of hopeful tranquility. I had no choice but to go to my desk and receive whatever high priority thing was coming in.

I activated the communicator. A middle-aged individual faded in, male, clean shaven. His formal gray jacket and inconspicuous tie suggested bureaucrat.

“Mr. Wally Mason?”

“Yes. Media in disguise?” My spontaneous question told me I was still afflicted with a trace of paranoia.

“Certainly not. Government. We’ve been protecting you from the media.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. You don’t have a mob clamoring outside your house, do you?”

“No.”

“Our doing.”

“Thanks.” So that explained why I had been left in peace, although I couldn’t imagine how the government had managed it. “What can I do for you?”

“Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Hank Robinson. National Security.” He waved an official looking badge. “We need to talk to you. Me and my colleague, Jeremy Thomas.” He made room and another, somewhat younger, man appeared on the screen.

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“Face to face, if you please, Mr. Mason” “Fine. I always cooperate with government. Should I come to you?”

“No. We’ll visit. Half an hour okay?”

“You know where I am?”

“Sure. Government pretty much knows where everyone is.”

“Okay. I’ll keep a watch for you, Mr.—did you say Robinson?”

“Hank. Call me Hank. See you soon—Wally.”

Then he was gone.

I didn’t let fresh hope dominate my feelings as I returned to my picture window, but I did feel that government involvement might be beneficial. Lifelong, I had been a good citizen. The government owed me.

San Francisco, by now, was nothing but twinkling lights. The western sky had gone completely dark.

Within the specified half hour, a gray government car pulled into my driveway. I went to my side door in time to see two men get out of it. Hank Robinson and Jeremy Thomas. I advanced, shook hands, and escorted them into my humble abode. (Tony words—remember?) I settled them in a living room nook with a coffee table. They refused drinks, or rather, Jeremy did. “We have too much work to do, Mr. Mason.”

“Wally,” Hank said.

“Wally, then,” Jeremy said.

“Wally,” Hank said, “You’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest and put us in a pretty precarious situation.”

“Not that we blame you,” Jeremy said. “We don’t suppose you knew what you were doing.”

“Nevertheless,” Hank said, “the trouble you’ve started between India and China is, to say the least of it, bad for Uncle Sam.”

“The US of A doesn’t want it to develop into a war,” Jeremy said. “Wars escalate. We would be bound to be caught up in one.”

“What do we do, then?” I hoped they had a good idea that would leave me blameless. Certainly I didn’t want a war.

“Let me just review the situation,” Hank said.

Hank ran over everything: the Long Life pills, the Chinese accusations, the Indian dollar and irrigation problems—the culprit who wrote the misleading patent. It was all standard, as per media and Sally Johnson of GBI PR

“So?” Hank concluded, “It looks as if the entire mess is your fault, Wally.”

I protested. “I don’t believe I had anything to do with any of it.”

“Beside the point,” Jeremy said. “The point is that India and China are ready to go to war over it, unless they can avoid it by blaming you.”

“Luckily,” Hank said, “neither side really wants a war. If their propaganda folk can put out a strong enough case against you, they may be able to talk their people and themselves out of the crisis.”

“Talk to each other,” Jeremy said. “Maybe get the U.N. to fine you, or to impose other sanctions. Come to some sort of agreement.”

“Mainly, keep their respective peoples happy,” Hank said.

“So what we want you to do, Wally—” Jeremy this time. “—is to open it all up. Confess. Say what a bad fellow you’ve been. Say you’ll do anything to make amends.”

“Do it for love of country, in service to your homeland,” Hank added. “That sound all right to you, Wally?”

It did not sound all right.

I was totally convinced of my own innocence.

Hank picked up on my hesitation. “You’ll go into the history books, Wally.”

“As an arch-villain? No. I will not have it.” I got to my feet. “Excuse me for a moment, gentlemen.”

Hank and Jeremy stared at one another as I went to my living room desk and ran a couple of printouts of my Anandas patent story. I brought them back to the coffee nook. I handed one printout to Hank and one to Jeremy. “Read this,” I said, in a tone sounding more courageous than I felt. “You’ll see that I’m not in the least bit involved in your power politics. Moreover, there was no scam. Tony’s Long Life pills really work. China has no right to condemn India. India is in trouble because of global warming, mostly caused by us. They should sort things out between them. Show some sense. Most of all, I am not to blame!” My last few words sounded weak, even to my own ears.

Hank glanced at the hard copy in his hand. Jeremy had a concerned expression on his face. Hank first, then Jeremy, placed the manuscripts on the coffee table.

“Looks bad,” Hank said.

“Mr. Mason,” Jeremy said, “are we to take it that you refuse to accept your patriotic duty?”

“You refuse to do what we want you to do?” Hank asked. “I am disappointed in you, Wally Mason. Truly disappointed. Your refusal could result in bloodshed on a scale never before seen on Earth.”

“Can’t we convince you to change your mind?” Jeremy asked.

“Absolutely not.”

“Then we’ll have to make other plans.” Hank glared at me, nodded to Jeremy, and stood.

Jeremy stood.

The government bureaucrats left my home by the side door. They took the printouts with them.

I heard their car speed away. Screaming tires.

I went early to bed, but was too disturbed to sleep the sleep of the just.

Oddly enough, nothing happened for several days. The media went quiet on the India–China controversy. No slavering media hordes came to invade my privacy. From my point of view, it was as if nothing had happened at all.

But I continued to worry.

Suddenly my communicator called me to it with a high priority buzz.

Hank Robinson appeared on my screen.

“Wally,” Hank said, “you forced us to rethink everything. Tactics and strategy both. We did it, and everything has changed. We need you now. In Washington. There’s a limousine coming for you in two hours, and a government plane is waiting.”

No invitation. No room for me to choose whether or not to go to Washington. Hank was gone from the screen before I could say a word.

So I went to Washington. I had a limo and motorcycle escort at Dulles and a hotel suite better than any I had occupied, even at the peak of my GBI career.

Presently I had guests. Hank and Jeremy. Live.

After saying “Good to see you, Wally,” Hank activated the big screen in my living room, revealing a woman’s familiar face: the secretary of national security.

“The secretary won’t join in.” Jeremy said.

“She just wants to see what we are up to,” Hank added. “Let’s sit and get to work, Wally.”

We sank into luxurious chairs, more or less facing the screen.

“Jeremy is in charge now,” Hank said. “Tell Wally the story, Jeremy.”

“First, an apology,” Jeremy said. “We were about to make a villain of you.”

“Not anymore,” Hank said. “A hero, now.”

“You changed everything, Wally.” Jeremy again. “Your story of Tony Anandas. The Long Life pills proving to be real and effective.”

“Tony’s modesty,” Hank said. “He was a genius. Could have been a spokesperson for homeopathy, but he preferred to hide his light under a bushel.”

I managed to squeeze a word in. “That is the way I like to be. Hidden under a bushel.”

“Not this time,” Hank said. “Lots of votes are at stake: the homeopathic constituency; the anti-war constituency; the pro-Chinese; the proIndian.”

The face on the screen frowned. I thought she was going to interrupt, but she did not.

“So,” Jeremy said, “we reviewed all the intelligence about India versus China. Decided if we relay your story to both sides, war danger would vanish, and you’ll be a hero. Our review told us everything is different from what we thought. Tell Wally about the changes, Hank.”

“I’ll make it brief,” Hank said. “When the Chinese dollar supply began to dry up because of the recession, their government put out word that the Long Life pills didn’t work. This was supposed to direct internal turmoil toward India, helping them to maintain domestic tranquility.”

“It didn’t,” Jeremy said. “Trouble was, the pills really worked. There were a lot of Chinese peasants, aged and wise, who worked that out. Their government, they thought, wanted to relieve itself of the burden of so many long-life persons. Chinese social services for older people, improved from zero a few years ago, had become overextended and overtaxed. Old Chinese want the same quality of life as we have in America.”

“So the turmoil got worse,” Hank continued.

“Tough for the Chinese government,” Jeremy went on. “A shortage of dollars. A temptation to redirect the internal turmoil by going to war with India. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed. The war didn’t get started.”

“Oil,” Hank said. “The reason why India wanted the Long Life pill business to bring home the dollars was to keep the nation supplied with oil. Not so much to underwrite their irrigation schemes, although oil was needed for that, too, but to keep the whole economy afloat.”

“You can imagine the catastrophic famine if the whole economy went belly up,” Jeremy said. “Luckily, Uncle Sam’s dollars, burdened by the post-recession inflation, began to decline in value. So the interests supplying oil began to lose interest in dollars.”

Hank spoke. “Just in the last few days, the oil interests have quit the dollar standard. They’ve decided to accept other currencies.”

“Euros,” Jeremy said. “Japanese yen. Most important for us, Chinese yuan.”

Hank said, “the Chinese will now be able to use their own currency to buy Long Life pills. This will increase world demand for Chinese exports.”

“It will boost the Chinese economy,” Jeremy said. “The government will be able to provide improved social services for their aging population. Meanwhile, India can sell enough pills to maintain oil imports. In a pinch, if the irrigation schemes develop too slowly, they can boost pill production, increase yuan income, and avert famine by purchasing food wherever there is an excess supply.”

“So, Wally Mason,” Hank said, “you see what wonders the patent you wrote has wrought in the world. You and the inventor.”

Jeremy added: “We’ll put your story out, pretty much as you wrote it. A little massage here and there to improve its effectiveness.”

Hank continued. “The inventor, Anandas, is of course already a hero in some circles. For the way in which you catered to his modesty, we can turn you into a world-class hero, Wally Mason.”

As Hank spoke, I noted a pleasant smile flickering across the face on the screen.

Me. Wally Mason. Hero.

It would have been in character for me to protest, saying I didn’t need it. I didn’t protest. Maybe I’m not exactly the man I think I am.

They were going to make a world-class hero of me?

You know what? Before this was all over, they did!

Before my heroic conduct became public, I had to attend to two more duties.

First, I had to call Anandas Senior to assure the Jamandar that his son had done far more than enough good in the world to win him absolution from his sins.

That done, I had to call the current CEO of GBI to let him know that the corporation’s good name would come to no harm.

Then I began to train myself to bask in my new heroic role. Not a bad outcome, I thought, for a placebo effect.

Copyright © 2010 Brian C. Coad

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Probability Zero

Spell Czech

William Michael McCarthy

To: Northeast Institute of Higher Education Dear Sirs, I’m writing about a recent hire: Jared Jones—a graduate of your institution. Mr. Jones is a pleasant man. He always arrives for work on time and does his best to fulfill his assignments. Unfortunately, Mr. Jones’ best isn’t...

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Probability Zero

Spell Czech

William Michael McCarthy

To: Northeast Institute of Higher Education

Dear Sirs,

I’m writing about a recent hire: Jared Jones—a graduate of your institution. Mr. Jones is a pleasant man. He always arrives for work on time and does his best to fulfill his assignments. Unfortunately, Mr. Jones’ best isn’t particularly good. I’m writing to confirm that Mr. Jones actually did graduate from your school. Are his transcripts accurate? I find it difficult to believe this man has a college degree.

Since my publication is currently the recipient of government stipends, as nearly all magazines are nowadays, I’m compelled to communicate with you before taking any action against Mr. Jones.

Your cooperation in this matter is greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Calvin Dobbs,

Editor in Chief, Pacific Weekly

Dear Mr. Dobbs:

I’m righting to confirm you’re recent higher Jared Jones is in deed a graduate of the NEIHE. Further more, not only did Mr. Jones Finnish his education, but he was inn the top ten per cent of his clasp. All though ewe don’t come write out an say it inn sew many words the imp locations of your letter are clear.

I’ve been advised by council to inn form you any ax shuns taken by you against Mr. Jones will be brought up bee four the Non Ethnic Affirmative Action Council.

Sincerely,

Jeremiah Thompson

NEIHE, Dean of Alum Nigh

To: NEACC

Dear Sirs,

I’m writing concerning the matter of Jared Jones, which we spoke of on the phone the other day. As I explained to you then, I am not a racist, and have always supported affirmative action. My publication currently employs a wide variety of races and religions with no regard for gender or sexual preference. We always strive to maintain a seamlessly integrated workplace.

Notwithstanding, our case against Mr. Jones is not a frivolous action based on a discriminatory policy. Mr. Jones cannot spell. How can we run a magazine with a copy editor who can’t spell? Do visually-impaired people fly jet planes? Do people with Parkinson’s syndrome perform surgery? Every vocation has its requirements, and I’m afraid Mr. Jones is not qualified to work for the Pacific Weekly.

Sincerely,

Calvin Dobbs

Editor in Chief, Pacific Weekly

Dear Mr. Dobbs:

We have reviewed your case against Jared Jones and have determined it is entirely with out merit. Trance scripts from the NEIHE show that Mr. Jones is profishant in the use of world processors, and the Sam pulls of his work you for warded to this office donut sub stand she ate your claim.

The problem seams to be with your spell Czech soft where. Perhaps it’s time for your publication to in vest in an up grade.

Further more, yew say your not a big it. If sew, why due yew make taste less and ignorant state mints? The NEAAC is currently suing to have a visually-challenged individual obtain his Pilate’s license. And if a person with Parkinson’s sin drum wishes to be come a sturgeon we will assist them in every way passable.

Eke quill opera tuna tee for every one is hour goal.

Sincerely,

Dustin Wynde

Spokes Per Son, NEACC

Dear Jared,

You are hereby promoted to assistant editor. Your new assignment will consist of communicating with our freelancers over the telephone. If I catch you within fifty feet of a word processor, blue pencil, or red pen there will be hell to pay.

Congratulations.

Sincerely,

Calvin Dobbs

Copyright © 2010 William Michael McCarthy