NOVELLA

Friday, April 1, 2011

Hiding Place

Adam-Troy Castro

The only prisoner in the interrogation room consisted of two women and one man. The women, Mi and Zi Diyamen, appeared to be identical twins of either the natural or cloned variety. White-haired...

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NOVELLA

Hiding Place

Adam-Troy Castro

The only prisoner in the interrogation room consisted of two women and one man.

The women, Mi and Zi Diyamen, appeared to be identical twins of either the natural or cloned variety. White-haired despite their apparent youth, wispier in form and more delicate in appearance than any of the handful of cylinked people I’d met (who, starting with my lovers the Porrinyards and continuing through the various others I’d encountered in the last few years, had always tended toward the physically robust), they seemed to exist only as pale echoes of the man who sat between them. Their skin was so pale that it was possible to follow the thin trace of veins at their temples, and their eyes were a shade of blue transparent enough to disappear against their irises.

Ernest Harriman, who sat between them, was a bear: round shouldered, ruddy faced, massive without crossing the border into fat, either old enough or sufficiently well-removed from his most recent rejuvenation to look like he could have been father to the two women beside him. His impressive physical presence and the defiant cast of his smile belied the features of an otherwise weak man: watery eyes, flabby cheeks, and a chin that receded from his lower lip as if eager to join the thick curve of his neck.

The Diyamens bracketed Harriman at the table where all three sat, resting their delicate hands on his thicker wrists.

It was impossible to behold this cozy triptych without considering the women nothing more than Harriman’s personal accessories, but I knew enough about the nature of the acquired condition the three shared to know that this was no more than an illusion, one that they might well have been cultivating for psychological advantage over their jailers.

In truth, the three were not only equals but parts of the same person: closer than lovers, closer than siblings, less like separate people than limbs of the same composite organism.

They were three. And they were one.

Oscin and Skye Porrinyard spoke in unison. “They’re not faking.”

The pair, who bracketed me the way the wispy women on the other side of the one-way transparent field bracketed the bear-shaped man, were like the three prisoners, a single cylinked mind sharing one combined personality. When the male Oscin and the female Skye spoke together, as they did much of the time, they balanced the tones of their respective individual voices to create a shared one that didn’t seem to originate from either mouth but rather from some compromise location between them.

This was not something I’d ever gotten used to, years after their entrance into my life. I was no longer thrown by the vocal gymnastics, but they had never lost their delicious ability to jolt.

Unlike the Diyamens, who seemed to court insubstantiality, the Porrinyards were physical paragons: enhanced athletes who upon our first meeting had been employed as high-altitude workers. Nor were they identical like the Diyamens; Oscin was taller and bulkier than the slim, athletically built Skye, and her facial features were elfin whereas his were blocky, almost square. Even so, they still favored each other in many ways, from their preference for clothing that exposed far more skin than it covered, and the close-shaved silvery stubble of their hair, to the fierce shared intelligence in both sets of eyes.

I asked them a stupid question. “Are you certain?”

It was a stupid question because the Porrinyards had never offered me a conclusion unless they were certain.

They said, “Yes, Andrea. I’ve been watching their respiration, their eye movements, even the pulse rates visible in their respective wrists.”

I glanced at both Oscin and Skye in turn—redundant, I know, but I still feel I’m neglecting one if the other gets all the eye contact. “Industrious of you.”

They nodded in unison. “Yes, well. You’ve come to expect it.”

“And?”

“As far as I can tell, they’re in perfect synch. This would of course vary in circumstances where one body was more or less healthy than the others, or engaged in more or less physical activity, but the autonomic functions of cylinked component bodies do tend to approach equilibrium when all other factors are rendered equal. I say they’re what they claim to be: a unit. Not just Mi and Zi Diyamen, who look the part, but this Harriman as well.”

Behind us, Prosecutor Lyra Bengid tapped the tapered green fingernails of her right hand against the bejeweled silver bracelet on her opposite wrist. “That’s pretty much the way we figured it, Andrea, though it took us several days of medical testing to confirm what your friends here were able to discern in minutes.”

“I’m surprised it took you days,” the Porrinyards remarked. “True cylinkage is an almost impossible condition to fake. Most unrehearsed single-minds attempting to synch actions make a serious mistake of some kind within minutes.”

Bengid’s brow knit in annoyance. “Is that what your kind call us? Single-minds?”

They chuckled. “The individual who became Skye and the individual who became Oscin were both single-minds, not so many years ago. The phrase is not intended as a slur, Counselor; just a descriptive.”

Bengid didn’t roll her eyes, not exactly, but she did hold the moment long enough to convey her healthy skepticism. “Right. In any event, confirming their condition wasn’t quite so easy in their case. They haven’t attempted that chorus-speak of yours. For some reason, they’ll only speak through Harriman.”

“That’s unusual,” the Porrinyards said. “For the most part, cylinked people don’t favor one body unless the other is incapacitated for some reason.”

“Nevertheless,” Bengid said. “Any questions asked of any one of them, even if we place them in separate rooms, are answered through Harriman’s mouth, or not at all.”

I scratched the itchy fuzz on my recently shaved scalp. “Answering questions they’re asked out of earshot seems pretty definitive proof of linkage too.”

Bengid’s gaze flickered toward the top of my head, as it had every five seconds since my arrival; she was clearly dying to ask, but had so far resisted temptation. “Maybe so, but we saw no other way to proceed before you got here other than doing whatever we could to confirm and document the nature of the unusual problem that faces us. Your—” she hesitated, “—relationship with,” she regarded the Porrinyards and hesitated again, “these two . . . ”

She stopped mid sentence, momentarily at a loss.

Sentences involving the cylinked often suffer from a paucity of appropriate pronouns.

The Porrinyards flashed identical tolerant smiles. “Please, Counselor. I’m not sensitive. Use any syntax that makes you comfortable.”

“Thank you,” Bengid said, before turning her attention back to me. “Anyway, Andrea, your personal history with cylinked people makes you the closest thing we have to a local expert in the pitfalls of prosecuting them for murder.”

We were aboard a Confederate Security vessel called the Negev, which had been dispatched some time ago to take Ernest Harriman into custody.

From what I’d gathered, Harriman and the Diyamens were the surviving residents of a four-man research facility operating in deep space, at a fixed point two astronomical units outside the New London system.

The only possible reason to post anybody in that particular spot, as far from the usual shipping routes as it was from centers of population, was an almost pathological concern with isolation. The facility, and the work being done there, just wasn’t supposed to exist.

Harriman and the Diyamens had shared it with the now-deceased Aman al-Afiq, who Harriman had bludgeoned to death.

Given his detailed confession, exactly what qualified the crime as a mystery continued to elude me.

And yet there was something about this situation that the authorities sharing this room with us—which included, in addition to Bengid, a couple of security officers and a small phalanx of assistants—seemed to consider a first-class Gordian Knot.

Whatever it was had been enough for her to draw upon her at best limited currency with me, in order to summon me here from my home in New London not three days into the medical sabbatical that was supposed to have prevented me from being called to duty for any reason.

Her frustration and bafflement were so thick that I’d tasted them the moment the Porrinyards and I stepped off our personal transport.

Thinking about it, I absently ran a hand over the top of my head, wincing again at the two-day stubble there. I was so used to having hair. I’d never worn it long as an adult, except for one brief period as an honored guest on the planet Xana, but the absence of any real weight up there made me feel like my head was about to fly off into space. I could only wonder how bald men can take it. . . .

“Andrea?”

There was more appraisal in Bengid’s expression than I liked, more than I had received from my former law school roommate in years. Never a friend, she still knew me better than anybody other than the Porrinyards and one or two others ever had, and had to be sensing something off about me, something deeper than the cosmetic changes to my appearance.

The only escape from that was the business at hand. “I can understand why you’d think me an expert, Lyra, but I’m really not. To date I haven’t ever prosecuted any cylinked people either.”

“It isn’t that our kind is unusually law-abiding,” the Porrinyards explained, identical half-smiles imparting identical senses of mischief, “but that there still aren’t all that many of us around.”

The procedure that linked multiple minds, proprietary tech of that conglomeration of ancient software intelligences known as the AIsource, was illegal throughout much Confederate Space. There had never been enough linked people around to qualify as more than an oddity; and even where it was not against the law, most so-called civilized people considered the practice unnatural, a perversion.

Still, a discussion of the compensatory benefits wasn’t necessarily relevant to this situation. I said, “I still don’t understand why you think you have a problem. Your three prisoners in there are medically one person. As long as you can get any expert witness to testify to that, you establish that any murder committed by any one of the individual bodies reflects a decision the consensus personality made as a unit. Even if you can’t find a statute that would allow you to prosecute all three for the crime committed by one, there still shouldn’t be any serious impediment to proving that the other two were equal partners in what amounts to a conspiracy.”

Bengid’s deep weariness did not seem natural on a woman who had always struck me as a tireless dynamo. “You would think so. We have a confession. We have a prisoner—three prisoners, if you prefer—in custody. We even have that surveillance holo of Harriman committing the murder.” She took a deep breath. “The only thing we don’t know how to do is separate the innocent from the guilty.”

“There’s only one will between them, Lyra. They’re either all innocent or all guilty.”

“Not in this case.”

I frowned. “Why not?”

“They weren’t a linked trio when they were assigned to the project.”

“The Diyamens—”

“The Diyamens were only a linked pair. Harriman was an entirely separate individual. From what we can gather, the Diyamens joined with Harriman after he committed the murder, but before they reported the crime.”

The one being on the other side of the phased transparency of the wall, and the three individuals who now comprised it, seemed to be smiling.

The Porrinyards said, “Now, this is an interesting moral question.”

I muttered to myself. “Juje.”

Bengid escorted us from the Negev’s holding facility to its conference room, a space magisterial enough for the space-faring criminal trials it sometimes housed. The bulkheads here weren’t made of dark woods but had been designed to look like they were, and the wall behind the unoccupied judge’s bench projected the traditional, if gratuitous, image of ancient Blind Justice overlaid with both the seal of the farce known as the Confederacy and the shield that represented the even bigger farce of my specific employers, the Dip Corps.

(And if that strikes you as cynical, you’re right. But the attitude’s not a pose. I came by it honestly, through years of exploitation by those who should have been my protectors.)

A side table bore carafes of bruj, a beverage that tasted like curdled milk but contained enough pure stimulant to erase any threat of me nodding off at any point this millennium, and slabs of a doughy something that the crew of the Negev must have been obliged to consider pastry. Oscin, who had always found it easier to burn calories, took a pastry, which Skye enjoyed along with him without actually ingesting any herself; the two don’t both need to indulge in order to share the taste. I poured myself some bruj, sans any of the flavoring tablets provided.

Lyra Bengid sat down at the head of the prosecutor’s table, unbuckled the tight collar button of her gray suit, and removed the jagged filament comb that had pinned her straw-colored hair into a harsh bun on top of her head. As the locks spilled down to her shoulders, looking shaggy, the rest of her seemed to sag. Her prosecutorial bearing, Dip Corps reserve, and deadly seriousness all gave way to the exhaustion that had been visible since the moment of our arrival.

I could only wonder how long she’d been awake. “Like old times.”

She frowned. “What?”

“All-nighters.”

Her bright blue eyes widened a little at that. I’d never been one for nostalgia or idle conversation or even friendliness, not for as long as she’d known me.

When I was nineteen years old and just entering law school, my Dip Corps handlers decided to assign Bengid as compassionate and understanding roommate. They’d raised me in what amounted to a prison following my eight-year-old self’s involvement in a notorious massacre on the planet Bocai. Now they saw that they were in danger of winding up with an emotional basketcase unstable enough to be dependent upon them her entire life, rather than the valued asset my test scores indicated I could be instead. Bengid, then just beginning her indentured servitude to the civilian justice system, had tested so high for empathy that the Corps had pulled strings with her own contract holders and gotten them to offer her a choice of career assignments as long as she agreed to be the kind and compassionate roommate that they imagined would make their pet child war criminal more social.

In this she had failed. I’d suspected a nefarious agenda and frozen her out in all respects but the academic. She’d gone on to a stellar career in the civilian courts while I’d begun my own career at the end of a Dip Corps leash.

It wasn’t until much later, long after it was too late to do anything about it, that I’d realized the joke was not just on me but on my superiors. Though Bengid had taken the career incentives, her determination to help me had been nothing but genuine.

As I’ve said, we’d never become friends. But she’d also never treated me with anything but courtesy and respect, not then and not in any of our dozen or so professional encounters since, at a number of Dip Corps embassies throughout Confederate space.

I’d been through just enough dramatic changes, of late, to show a little belated warmth.

The only problem was that any conciliatory gesture was such an alien response coming from me that she didn’t know what to make of it. “We never really had any old times, Andrea.”

“They wouldn’t have been any fun, given what I’ve always been like. It didn’t stop you from trying.”

She faltered a little. “It wasn’t exactly like you to notice.”

“I noticed and I should have appreciated it.”

It affected her so visibly that I was surprised her eyes remained dry. Once again, her gaze flickered toward my shaved head. “You’re almost human today. Is there anything I should know about what the hell’s happening with you?”

“Maybe later. Right now I’d like to get to the bottom of your problem.”

“All right,” she said, sharing my palpable relief at being able to return to business. “First: I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything at all about the project these people were working on together. What little I know myself from my own investigation, I’ve been told I’d be charged with capital treason for sharing. Can we just take as given that it was considered of vital importance to the Confederacy, and conducted under conditions of absolute secrecy?”

Bengid didn’t know that I had committed capital treason more than once in my adult life or that some of my crimes were still ongoing. “Go on.”

“When they were first assigned to their project, three years ago, Hom.Sap Mercantile, Harriman and al-Afiq were individuals, the Diyamens a completely separate linked pair designated as both maintenance workers and morale officers. Their combined mission directives included an extraordinary extended moratorium on communication with the outside world, except for progress reports sent to their superiors. Their supply drops were automated, any outgoing personal mail to their loved ones was censored to near-incomprehensibility, and they were all subject to severe professional penalties for quitting at any point before their five-year contract was up. Key to our situation, they were even provided an onboard AIsource Medical kiosk, rather than risk any possibility of an emergency that would oblige them to summon any other assistance from off-station.”

I could only boggle at this latest intelligence. The advanced automated care offered by AIsource Medical was expensive enough to be well outside the reach of some entire planetary civilizations. If whoever bankrolled this particular research project had been willing to underwrite a system that would only be used for the benefit of four people, then the need for secrecy here went beyond profound into the realm of the obsessive.

Bengid tapped her tapered green nails against the tabletop. “al-Afiq’s murder took place fourteen months into their contracted tour of duty, and for a long time went unreported in any of the station’s communications with the people in charge. His name was still among the appended signatures on every progress report the others sent home until just about one month ago, which was when the Diyamens deigned to inform the authorities that he was dead.” She grimaced. “The bastards actually invited us to come and arrest them. Or, if you prefer, ‘dared.’”

“Go on.”

“When we got here, The Diyamens identified themselves, presented us with the holo and other forensic evidence, and stopped talking. Harriman waived counsel and provided us with a full confession confirming that he had with total premeditation and complete malice aforethought flattened his colleague’s skull.” She massaged the bridge of her nose. “If not for his assurances that he went into the lab that day fully prepared to commit the murder, I’d entertain arguments that it was a crime of passion. The holo we have documents over a hundred blows, most of them long after al-Afiq’s skull shattered to pieces.”

I winced. “That’s not a crime of passion. That’s a total psychotic break.”

“I’m inclined to agree. And, under the circumstances this should have been an open-and-shut case. But then we have our complication: the Diyamens being sufficiently protective of Harriman to make special arrangements for him to remain beyond our reach.”

“Something they could do because there just happened to be an AIsource Medical kiosk on board.”

Bengid saw my fury. “Right.”

The picture she’d painted was almost a thing of beauty. It buried the simple geometry of the crime beneath a tangle of metaphysical questions about how much guilt could still be ascribed to an individual after that individual no longer continued to exist.

Bengid brushed a blond lock away from her eye. “I guess it’s no news to you that the procedure takes about five months.”

“It’s actually a few hundred separate procedures,” the Porrinyards explained, “that must be completed at the rate of one or two a day. But yes, five months is about right.”

Bengid studied their faces. “It sounds like an ordeal.”

“The time investment is so negligible that it can be countered by just waking up fifteen minutes earlier every day.”

Bengid seemed skeptical about this too. “And what happens at the end? Somebody just flicks a switch?”

“You could look at it that way, Counselor. But it’s not traumatic at all. It feels more like waking up than being born.”

She nodded. “In any event, they had the time and the privacy they needed to get it done. But when the procedures were completed, there was no Harriman and there were no Diyamens. There was just this new entity bearing their names, an entity who could remember what it had been like to be both Harriman and the Diyamens but who was now a composite of both.”

“Carrying the weight,” I murmured, “too heavy to be borne by one.”

It was several seconds before I registered that everybody in the room was staring at me; the Porrinyards because they knew me and Lyra Bengid because she still did not know me quite well enough.

Bengid looked puzzled again, but soldiered on anyway. “So that’s the problem we’re faced with. If we charge Harriman alone and throw his ass in prison, then it’s no real punishment for him. He could languish in the most subterranean dungeon in existence and still continue to enjoy freedom by proxy, as long as Diyamens are out in the world, living however they want.” She addressed the Porrinyards. “I am right about that, yes? That there’s no way to cut the link and shield him off from their experiences?”

“No legal way,” the Porrinyards said. “There is only one person in there, even if their separate bodies are doing different things.”

Oscin spoke alone: “The two of me have been thousands of kilometers apart at times.”

Now Skye: “Sometimes more than that.”

Oscin: “My two bodies operate independently all the time.”

Skye: “If they couldn’t, my enhanced condition would offer no net gain.”

They concluded as one: “But in real-world terms, it still amounts to a left hand and a right hand, operating under the control of a mind that is equally adept at using both. Unless one of my bodies is sleeping or, as happened a few months back, seriously incapacitated for some reason, I am always aware of what both Oscin and Skye are doing. And you’re right: You could imprison one of me and it would be little prison at all as long as I could still see and hear and enjoy a full life via the experiences of the other.”

Bengid blinked multiple times. After a second or two, she managed, “That’s a hell of a cabaret act you two have got there.”

“I think so too,” they said. “Unfortunately, Skye’s the only one with a decent singing voice.”

Bengid’s smile was polite but false. “So you see what I’m talking about. It makes no sense to prosecute Harriman alone. And neither can we prosecute all three because if we did, we’d be prosecuting the two-thirds of the collective who were not even present at the time of the murder. I don’t know what to do.”

They asked her, “Are you afraid of being overturned by the appellate court?”

“No,” Bengid snapped. “I’m afraid of being wrong.”

The Porrinyards considered that. “You could always charge Harriman with murder and the Diyamens as accessories after the fact, for keeping the crime a secret for so long. They’d all receive equivalent sentences and no individual body’s sensory input would be capable of providing the gestalt with any significant relief from an incarceration they’d all share.”

Bengid shook her head as she got up to pour herself some of the noxious bruj. “They were well ahead of us there too. The first thing Diyamens showed us was a station log entry, time-stamped only three hours after the murder. In it, they report that they’ve placed Harriman under arrest for murder. They confirm that they’ve collected all pertinent evidence, and placed it in storage for safe-keeping. They also say that while they will let Harriman continue to work on the project, it will only be under very close supervision, to ensure that he doesn’t escape. All of this was entirely above-board—and while it was highly irregular to then not report the crime for months and months, the delay is not out of the question given the ground rules that had been established for them. If they hadn’t done what they also did, arrange to link minds with the murderer, the delay wouldn’t even have been remarked upon, and we wouldn’t be here in this room having this conversation.”

I’d been listening, silent and heavy lidded, for a while, letting the Porrinyards contribute for me, but I stirred now. “I’m sure you also considered just giving up and declaring Harriman, the original singlet Harriman, dead and beyond your reach . . . in effect solving the problem by abdicating it.”

Bengid sipped her bruj, made a disgusted face, and sipped again. “That’s been suggested, at levels higher than you even want to think about. After all, that individual committed personality suicide at the moment he linked with the Diyamens. The man he was, the man who bludgeoned al-Afiq, no longer exists. And I’d almost endorse that judgment myself, just to wipe my hands of this impossible situation. But I can’t live with letting that. . . letting those . . .”

“Freaks?” the Porrinyards suggested.

She shot them a poisonous look, enraged that they would accuse her of such bigotry. “Please. Murderers. I refuse to let that murderer, those murderers, however the hell you choose to parse the sentence, get away with killing al-Afiq, just because their superiors equipped their workplace with the means to change an I to a we. That would be an obscenity.”

The Porrinyards glanced at each other, a gesture I’d long since come to recognize as, not a moment of consultation it would be for any two singlets, but rather a moment of deep self-examination. When they spoke again, it was with soft humility. “I’m sorry, Counselor Bengid. I misjudged you. You’re right, of course. But not just for the reasons you think.”

“What other reason is there?”

“I don’t know how much you knew about cylinking before this incident,” they told her, “but deciding to join your soul, your self, to another human being’s, and become part of what is in effect an entirely new person, is the ultimate act of faith. In many ways, it is more profound, more life-altering, and to me more sacred, than any known form of matrimony. It requires total sublimation of the prior self, and permanent commitment from every mind contributing to the intended gestalt.”

“So?”

“So reducing that sacred communion to a legal trick, to nothing more than a loophole the unscrupulous can seize for expediency, is as much an obscenity to me as your killing. It lessens everything I am, everything the singlet versions of Oscin and Skye made the conscious decision to become. That gestalt personality in there cannot be allowed to get away with it. I will not let them . . . and neither will Andrea, for exactly the same reason.”

It was the last phrase that clued Bengis in. Until that, she had registered but not quite felt their meaning, as their condition was far too alien to her experience for her to see it as anything but an abstraction.

Her reaction was the same one I expected to experience from others in a few short months. She blinked, narrowed her eyes, sensed the size of the leap she was being asked to make . . . and then, with stunned shock, made it.

She struggled to reject the epiphany, as if it were some substance her body had identified as poison. And then she stared at my shaved head, and put it together. “Andrea? Are . . . are you . . . ?”

I offered her one of my rare smiles. “No. I’m still alone in this skull, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“B-but you’re . . .”

“That’s what my sabbatical was for. We were about to start the treatments when you sent for me. We only put it off until we can get back to New London. Within a few months, all three of us will be parts of somebody new. Somebody better.”

Her mouth hung open. Her expression was a mixture of shock, amazement, horror, sadness . . . even a degree of hurt and loss that surprised me, coming from someone I had never allowed into my life.

I would likely have to address that before I left here.

But not now.

“Now,” I said, standing, “with your permission, I’d like to talk to your prisoners.”

* * *

Harriman and the Diyamens had been returned to separate cells for the duration of our briefing. Now, with me already sitting at the questioner’s side of the table, they trudged in again, walking with an exaggerated geriatric gait enforced by the neurological inhibitor collars around their respective necks.

I normally don’t require prisoners called before me to be restrained, as I have enough weaponry hidden on my person to overcome almost anybody. But I appreciated it in this case. Linked pairs—and, by inexorable extension, triads—are known for their extraordinary grace, and are almost impossible for a singlet of any training to defeat in a fight.

Without those collars reducing their physical coordination to the level of an unrejuvenated ninety-year-old, these three would have had no trouble killing me in a single moment of anger.

I allowed myself a moment of grim amusement at the realization that if this trio did manage such a thing, it would at least offer the benefit of solving that pesky prosecution problem.

Once again, the three positioned themselves in what seemed to be their preferred orientation, with Harriman in the center and the two silent women at his sides.

He said, “You’re a new one.”

“Yes, sir, I am. I’m Counselor Andrea Cort. Prosecutor At Large, for the Judge Advocate’s office of the Confederate Diplomatic Corps.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never heard of that title, ‘Prosecutor At Large.’”

“I’m not surprised. It was invented just for me.”

The infuriating grin tugging at the corners of his lips was not echoed on the pale faces of the Diyamens, who remained impassive beyond their façade of catatonia. “Impressive. But if you’re Dip Corps, you’re also a little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you? As far as I understand it, there’s nothing about this case that involves any sovereign government other than New London’s.”

“There isn’t,” I said. “Counselor Bengid just called me in to offer my own take on some of the more troubling points of law here. Once they’re resolved, I’ll likely never see you again.”

He glanced at my scalp. “I see. And since it doesn’t take legal expertise of any kind to know that premeditated murder is a crime, I assume that you’ve been called in as an expert on linked personalities.”

“Hardly an expert, sir.”

“I presume that the rest of the sentence would be, ‘not yet.’ But soon enough, eh, Counselor? I thought I sensed the aura of the pilgrim about you. Have you scheduled your treatments yet?”

I’d already learned what it was like to live with lovers who had twice the normal human capacity for forging rapid connections, but the Porrinyards had never used it for anything more threatening to me than puncturing my more dishonest emotional pretenses. I’d encountered one other pair with a somewhat deeper and darker agenda, but they hadn’t been interested in using it against me either. This would be the first time I’d ever have to out think and out-maneuver a criminal who amounted to a human being cubed.

I decided on a strategic retreat. “Yes. We’ll be starting very soon.”

His smile would have been easy to take for genuine warmth. “I envy you your journey. I promise you, it’s not at all what you expect.”

“Oh, really. How so?”

“I can only repeat, not at all. I’m sure that you think you’re just adding yourself to whoever you chose as your partner. But when you forge all those new neural connections, you’re not really adding personalities together; you’re multiplying them. You’re creating the equivalent of a new molecular compound with properties entirely different from those of the individual basic elements that went into it.”

“Like guilt,” I suggested, in an effort to bring this back around to the crime.

He chuckled, almost paternally. “I’ve always been more than willing to admit what I’ve done, and that I remain fully subject to any legal penalty the authorities consider appropriate.”

“You do recognize, of course, that the authorities are having some trouble determining what’s appropriate.”

“Yes, I do. And I’ll even admit that I expected them to. After all, it was Harriman who wielded that spanner, Harriman whose hands were stained by blood. But I’ll abide by whatever the prosecutorial conclusions might be.”

Had there been a hint of sarcastic arrogance in that answer? “I hope you recognize that your future is not a question of what you’re willing to accept. It’s a question of how your case is decided.”

“Still,” he said, “a guilty plea would make that easier for everybody, wouldn’t it?”

I was sure of it, now. This wasn’t remorse or expiation. The bastard—no, the bastards; the Diyamens were so withdrawn for some reason that it was difficult to remember that he was speaking for all three of them—the bastards were running a game on us. But to what end?

“Tell me about it, then.”

He sighed, glanced at the shut-down transparency of the wall behind me, and faced me again. Throughout, the women remained blanks, lost behind their apparent shield of catatonia.

He said, “What would you like to know, Counselor? Why I loathed the toxic son of a bitch with every fiber of my being?”

“If you’d like.”

“Aman al-Afiq was a brilliant man, but he was also a terribly sick one, incapable of relating to other human beings, except to hurt them any way he could. Outside dry shop talk, his sole interest in social interaction seemed to be psychological dissection through verbal cruelty. He reveled in finding the most sensitive exposed nerves and then inserting needles, to maximize any emotional agony he could cause. Within one week of their arrival on this station, the singlet Harriman had already had one screaming match with him; within two, there had already been a fistfight; within three, Harriman was already suffering in silence, struggling to endure long hours of abuse without giving in to the impulse to strangle the unholy prick.”

I’d been accused of being like al-Afiq more than once, myself. “Go on.”

“When the Diyamens threatened to report his behavior, or even quit the project in protest, al-Afiq countered with promises to destroy their own reputations with false counter-charges. He bragged that he had done this many times before, on projects before this one, and went so far as naming the names of those whose careers had been destroyed by lies he’d started.”

“And you didn’t know al-Afiq was like this before you signed on?”

Harriman shook his head. “Harriman had never heard of him before. Neither had the Diyamens.”

“How was that even possible, if they were colleagues?”

“They didn’t initiate the project. It involved a certain cross-fertilization of al-Afiq’s preferred way of looking at a fundamental problem, and Harriman’s take on another. The entire crew consisted of hired guns, previously unknown to each other, and assigned their tasks by a greater mind too busy to participate in the project herself.”

It hurt so much not to know the purpose of all this that I almost had to physically restrain myself from pursuing that line of questioning any further. “And what were the Diyamens there for?”

“Their key responsibility was the maintenance of the station. Also,” he shrugged, “given the years of expected isolation, as morale officers. After all, everybody was going to be locked together for a long time: five years, by the most conservative estimate. The powers that be decided that with four people instead of two—even if two of them were really just different vehicles for one personality—there were more chances for friendships, fewer for poisonous stress.”

I was beginning to see the ugly picture. Assuming there was any truth to Harriman’s version of events—and none of these details offered any particular reason for doubt—the powers behind this project had made the fatal mistake of valuing secrecy over social viability. Had they assigned a crew of fifty, well within the budget of any power capable of paying for AIsource Medical service, a personality as parasitical as al-Afiq’s would have been little more than the common annoyance that united everybody else in their shared resentment. In a crew of four, al-Afiq became unavoidable, a malignant tumor that insisted on burrowing its way into the skulls of anybody forced to be locked up with him.

After a pause, I focused on the two silent women, who stared back at me with eyes as communicative as buttons sewn on cloth. “How did the Diyamens get on with this al-Afiq?”

Harriman continued to answer for them. “His verbal abuse of them was less effective, as they were more emotionally grounded and harder to upset.”

“Did they hate him?”

“Yes, but they didn’t give al-Afiq the satisfaction of showing it. The real problem for them was dealing with the level of tension aboard the station. They had to work themselves to the point of exhaustion just keeping Harriman and al-Afiq separated as much as possible. It was, for all of them, an impossible situation, and if al-Afiq’s vile threats and the potential damage to their careers hadn’t prevented the others from resigning, the slimy bastard might have been working in the solitude he deserved as soon as they could relay their resignations to home base.”

I kept my eyes focused on the Diyamens, who continued to project eerie blankness. “The two of them must have had nothing but sympathy for you.”

“For Harriman,” the man who had been Harriman corrected me, his eyes twinkling with puckish humor at this insistence on precision. “Would you like to hear about the killing now?”

I considered it, but decided not. The killing itself was, by and large, a known quantity. The tormentor had been alive and was now dead; Harriman had killed him and had been honest about killing him. Knowing exactly what hateful words had proven the final incentive, how many blows had rained down and how long it had taken al-Afiq to die, were all matters for Bengid and her team of prosecutors. My sole duty was finding a legal way to separate the inseparable.

I stood. “It’s been a long day. I just arrived here, after all. I believe I’ll check some of your assertions and resume tomorrow morning.”

“Until then,” Harriman said.

I turned and left the three of them behind. But just as the ionic field at the door discorporated for me, he had one more thing to say. “Counselor?”

I turned to face him.

He said, “I can only hope that you’ve chosen the best partner for your joining.”

I’ve dealt with many sociopaths in my career. Between my past and my ruthless streak I’ve even been accused of the condition myself. I’d long ago learned how to recognize it in others. But it was not what I saw in Harriman. That empathy he projected felt too real to me. I would have bet anything I owned that it was not at all feigned, that the capacity to commit murder had not robbed him, no, them, of the capacity to feel for the concerns of a near-stranger . . . even when, as in this case, that stranger was searching for the means to condemn them to prison.

It didn’t stop me from considering their willingness to use their gestalt as a hiding place for their own guilt the obscenity the Porrinyards had so correctly called it.

I didn’t owe his best wishes enough respect to thank him. I just nodded and left the room without another word.

Three hours later, I sat alone in the conference center, paging through hytex files on the principals. I’d told the Porrinyards, who were randy and wanted to turn in, that I needed to go through the respective backgrounds on my own; just why I didn’t ask them to help, I didn’t know, since they were much faster at sifting raw data than I ever could be and could have found me every relevant datum in a fraction of the time. But they’d experienced my occasional need for solitude before and took it for what it was, wishing me a gentle good night before leaving me to my work.

They didn’t need my help to act on their randiness right now. They had each other. It might have been masturbation in the psychological sense, but could not be better in the physical. I had no reason to doubt their assurances that it was even better when I participated, but it wasn’t because I was so brilliant, but because lovemaking is always better when another separate person is involved, and they didn’t have that unless I was there.

Of course, I wouldn’t be “separate” when we were all sharing one mind.

For the triad we’d become, alone in our multiple heads, the dating pool would certainly provide its own share of challenges . . .

I gritted my teeth, put the thought away, and dove into the files.

There was no information on just what fields Harriman and al-Afiq happened to be trained in, but I found plenty on what they were like as human beings.

I don’t know what I’d expected of someone with the name al-Afiq, but the holo attached to his file depicted a slight, wide-eyed Nordic type, with a high forehead and hair the color of spun gold. His smile was as ingratiating as any I’d ever seen. It made friends with the recording technology and suggested a gentle sense of humor he would use on himself long before he ever thought of targeting anybody else.

But his file, or at least those portions of it I could access without pulling rank on the system, told a different story. In the last quarter century the man had been married six times, in each case for less than two years. Of the five women involved, one had killed herself after less than six weeks with him, two others had taken transports to distant systems, and a fourth had followed a mental breakdown with a trip to a nanopsychologist, where she completely wiped the memories of the year and a half she’d endured in her nightmare husband’s company. That last one had led to a cute but infuriating sequel where he sought her out and seduced her into marriage a second time, a scheme that following the inevitable second divorce had come within a hair’s breadth of leading to yet another memory wipe and another trip on the merry-go-round before a protective friend found out what was happening and hustled her away for her own protection.

At least a dozen colleagues who had worked with al-Afiq on past projects had filed preference papers declaring that they’d never work with him again, not for any amount of career compensation. Four others had been fired from their positions either for assaulting him or for charges related to counter-complaints he filed when they tried to report his pattern of escalating mental abuse.

He sounded like a charming guy.

To remain in demand despite all this history, he must have been not only brilliant but indispensable.

Personally, I liked to believe that if I’d ever found himself unfortunate enough to be locked up with the little shit for any extended period of time, I would have broken him long before he found a way to break me. After all, as many people including the Porrinyards had told me, I can be a real bitch when I want to be, and just as frequently when I don’t. It was flattering to believe that the delight this walking slab of vomit took in recreational cruelty might not have been up to my willingness to wield the same skill set upon the deserving. But that was just self-flattery. I was brittle and broke often. As far as I could tell, al-Afiq never had.

Ernest Harriman’s most serious negative citation was an allegation of emotional instability, from an administrator at one of the several universities he’d taught at. Aside from that, he had nothing but laudatory reports, as both a researcher and a team player. There was one subtle trouble sign: a brief sabbatical he’d taken at the behest of one supervisor. The reason given was “exhaustion,” but none of his other colleagues on that project had taken any unscheduled time off except for one who had needed to return home to attend an ailing daughter and another who had needed medical attention for one of the few cancers that could not be cured on site. In context, the terse explanation of “exhaustion” was almost certainly a mercy on the part of a boss reluctant to damage Harriman’s career. An emotional breakdown? A mental collapse?

The reports on him struggled to acknowledge a certain degree of instability without condemning him for it. It was a sign that, whatever his shortcomings, people generally liked the man and wished him well.

It didn’t speak well of this project’s unknown sponsors that they’d assign one man noted for his emotional frailty to work in close quarters with one known to abuse his colleagues without mercy.

The background available on the Diyamens provided no similar overtones of impending doom, which isn’t even remotely the same thing as saying that it offered no surprises. It turned out that Mi and Zi were not the siblings or clones I’d presumed them to be, but two people born light-years apart, on two separate colonies at far ends of Confederate Space. Their previous names meant nothing to me and nothing in their previous lives offered me any path to understanding how they’d been chosen for the project. The big surprise was that Mi had been male and Zi female; and that their pre-enhancement holos portrayed two human beings who failed to resemble each other in any way. After a short period working together on a habitat construction project for Dejahcorp, a company I’d encountered a number of times in the past, they’d fallen in love and for some reason that I can only presume must have made sense to them at the time decided that cylinking offered a better shared future than living together as lovers.

However it was that they’d come to this epiphany, they seemed to be serious about it, as cylinking wasn’t the only change the two had made in themselves. It went beyond altering their appearances to become as identical outside as they now were inside. Apparently, they now weren’t the women I’d taken them for, but surgical neuters, devoid of any sexual equipment either internal or external.

I blinked at this intelligence and thought, This must have made them fun morale officers.

Maybe the project really didn’t have to do with anything Harriman and al-Afiq were doing. Maybe, unknown to themselves, they were the subjects being studied, and the Diyamens were there just to observe the inevitable explosion from the perspective of the ultimate control specimens.

And maybe I’d had too much bruj.

Another couple of hours passed. It was now past midnight by the ship’s clock. The Negev wasn’t a warship, running on constant adrenaline. Aside from the most skeletal of skeleton crews assigned to make sure the automated systems didn’t do something stupid to us while we slept, everybody else would be in their rooms, locked down.

I sighed, shut down the files, and sat before the fading holo debating whether to continue pouring my attention down a black hole, or join the Porrinyards in what would (if not immediately, then at least eventually) be sleep.

I was still rubbing my eyes when the door slid open.

Lyra Bengid poked her head around the corner, like a blond head on a stick. “Andrea? Am I interrupting?”

“Yes,” I said. “And you’re just in time. Come in.”

She entered. She’d had a little sleep, it seemed; her eyes were a little less puffy, her skin a little less drawn. Her hair had been done up in another bun, this one at the back of her head instead of on top of it. But she’d let a couple of locks hang loose, one on either side of her face. She had changed from her suit to a casual tunic, with cutouts at the shoulders. As she grabbed one of the now-stale pastries from the array of refreshments, she asked, “How’s it going?”

“About as well as I expected. This al-Afiq seems to have been a real piece of work. I might have killed him myself.”

“You probably would have.” She registered my sudden scowl and added. “Oh, come on, you should know me better than that. That wasn’t a reference to your record.”

I fought to restrain my reflexive chill. “Only my pathology, right?”

She didn’t rise to the bait. “Any crimes you committed in childhood were a long, long time ago, and I’ve never once in my entire life given you any shit because of anything you did back then. Or since. Come on, I thought you suddenly wanted to get along. Talk to me like a person for once.”

She sat down at the same chair as before, but this time leaned back and propped her legs on the tabletop, crossed at the ankles. She was barefoot. I happened to notice that the littlest toe on the right foot failed to line up with the others, the way it might have been if she’d broken it once and never bothered to have it corrected when it healed wrong. When I looked from there to her face I was just in time to see her take a huge messy bite of the pastry, with an excessive twist of the jaw that both implied defiance and made it a deliberate burlesque.

Bengid had always had a funny streak, and had wasted a lot of effort, in our old days, trying to josh me out of my perpetual bad mood. She’d never managed more than a break in my constant cloud cover, which always closed up again as soon as the new storms could rush in, but it had never stopped her from trying.

For a long time I’d found that annoying as hell. I’d resented her, maybe even hated her.

Now my cheeks hurt. The muscles there were not used to grinning.

She needed several seconds to swallow the mouthful of pastry, but when she was done she used what was left in her hand as a pointer. “You know, I haven’t seen nearly enough of that, over the years. The way you usually act, it’s like you’re afraid your jaw’s going to fall off.”

“Where the hell are your shoes, anyway?”

“If I had my way, the ship recycling system. Terrible, hateful things. They pinch my heels. I’ve come to prefer a cold deck on my toesies whenever I’m not being Queen Bitch Prosecutor. You should try it sometime.” She took another, more reasonable, bite of the pastry, chewed contentedly for several seconds, and said, “So, have you come up with any ideas how I’m going to wrap this puppy up?”

The sudden return to business felt like a delaying action. “Maybe. I’ve noticed something significant that I think I’m going to need to explore a little bit more. But that’s not exactly what you came here to talk about, is it?”

She considered that. “No.”

“Go ahead, then. I know you want to ask.”

She lifted her heels off the edge of the table, returned her feet to the floor, and pulled her chair in close. “Why would you want to do this thing to yourself?”

I’d almost forgotten her skill as a prosecutor and her willingness to frame questions like daggers. “Because I love them.”

“I didn’t think you were even capable of the emotion. Surprised the hell out of me, when I heard you’d moved in together.”

It was a simple statement of fact, uncontaminated by venom. So I remained serene. “It surprised me too.”

“I’ve also got to admit that once I had time to think about it a little, I was really happy for you. I’d always wanted somebody somewhere to get past that prickly skin of yours, and there’s a certain logic to who you chose, as it probably takes two people just to tolerate you.”

This was an observation that others who knew me had made; a joke that the three of us had long made among ourselves. Bengid was going to have to do better if she expected to provoke me with such tired iterations of the obvious.

“And Lord knows,” she said, suddenly back to groping, the point she wanted to make still somewhere in the undiscovered country ahead of her, “with those two, the sex is probably a record breaker.” Something must have flashed across my face because she grimaced from the unwanted image. “Don’t answer that. I’ve been stuck in a personal drought since my last divorce.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. This conversation isn’t about me.”

I nodded. “All right.”

She spent several seconds studying the Confederate and Dip Corps symbols on the wall, as if expecting to find some answers there. “You used to be the angriest person I’d ever met. You weren’t willing to be anything more than the sum total of all the bad things you’ve been blamed for. You’re probably still no walk at the beach . . . but they’ve calmed you down, a lot. I give them credit for that.”

“Tell them that.”

“I would, if it was the same thing as saying I approve. But subsuming everything you are to some composite personality that doesn’t even exist yet? Where the hell does that come from?”

“I told you. Love.”

“Oh, bullshit, ‘love,’” she snapped, with a rush of venom darker than any I’d ever expected from her. “My parents broke up when I was six. I’ve had two terrible marriages. I understand that letting a partner into your life means compromising some of your personal autonomy, but I also know that anybody who asks you to give up everything you’ve ever been sure as shit isn’t operating under any reasonable definition of a healthy relationship.”

I shook my head in knowing pity. “It’s not really giving up anything, Lyra.”

“Oh?” She leaned back and folded her arms under her breasts. “Then disabuse me.”

“It’s evolving to the next stage. It’s keeping everything I always was and adding it to everything they always were. It’s seeing everything they see, feeling everything they feel, sharing all my worst secrets with them and welcoming them to do the same with me. It’s remembering every experience they ever lived, and letting them remember all of mine. It’s becoming a new person, who’s not only all of us put together, but all of us transcended.”

“Wow.” Her arms remained folded, but now she’d raised an eyebrow as well, in the quietly incredulous manner she had always employed whenever she heard crazy talk. “It’s just too bad that when you’re done there won’t be an individual who thinks of herself as Andrea Cort anymore.”

“That individual will still have everything Andrea Cort was in her. I know it can be hard to understand, because it took me a while to understand it, but it’s like a couple of different rivers, merging at a fork to become a bigger one. All the water that led to that point is still part of the mix; if you cared enough to try, you could examine any individual scrap of flotsam on the surface and see which river deposited it. But the river itself remembers being both.”

“It just won’t be Andrea Cort.”

I had trouble believing that she was being so thick. “No, but then there won’t be Porrinyards either. There’ll be—”

“Somebody bigger and better. Yeah, yeah, I’m not an idiot. I’ve had more than enough of that crap from you already. I think I got more than enough from the prick who used to be Harriman. But you’re forgetting something. I know the individual who thinks of herself as Andrea Cort. I lived with the individual who thinks of herself as Andrea Cort. I tried like hell to get the individual who thinks of herself as Andrea Cort to drop her guard around me. And I finally had to accept that, like it or not, being guarded and angry and suspicious and difficult were all things that made Andrea Cort what she is.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “You say you’re happy for me, but you don’t want me to change—”

“Don’t give me that infantile, self-pitying crap.”

This stunned me.

She lowered her voice and spoke with even greater urgency. “Of course I want you to change. For two years I sweated blood trying to help you find your own way to change. But I want you to change without giving up who you are, and what you are has always meant being defiant about who you are. The second that you, out of all the people I’ve ever met, start talking about relinquishing your very identity like it’s a suit that no longer fits, I start looking for another agenda—something that may be a little closer to what our defendants are looking for than you may be capable of admitting to yourself.”

My calm had vanished. My heart pounding harder than it ever had at rest, I put a dangerous chill in my voice and challenged her. “Why don’t you tell me what you think that is.”

Bengid delivered each of the next three words with excessive precision, clipping the syllables like bombs in danger of exploding if not handled with care. “A hiding place.”

This was outrageous. I rose from my chair, ready to slam her with the rebuttal that would reduce that ridiculous charge to kindling.

She didn’t let me utter a syllable. “Yeah, that’s the real truth, isn’t it? All the terrible crimes you were accused of, all the bad memories you’ve spent your life running from, all the bad things you’ve done since then that you’re afraid of anybody else finding out—you’ve always had more than your share of them, haven’t you, Andrea? And now you can be part of this magical new person—just how did you put it, before? Oh, yes—this magical new person ‘carrying the weight too great to be borne by one.’”

Now standing, I glared at her with something like hatred. “How dare you? What gives you the right—”

She stood up so abruptly that the chair rolled backward until it slammed against the limits of its inlaid track. “I paid the entrance fee, Andrea!”

I drew back, speechless.

She slammed me with the full force of her anger. “For two years I lived with your black moods, your shame, your self-hatred, your rejection of anybody who tried to get close to you, the way you somehow used all that pain to stay strong. When you waltz onto this ship grinning like a vapid young girl in the first throes of puppy love and tell me that you look forward to changing who you are, you know what it reminds me of, more than anything else? It reminds me of something a therapist friend once told me, a long time ago: that when a person who’s been more than half suicidal for as long as you’ve known her suddenly shows up calm and happy and smiling, the explanation might not be that she’s suddenly gotten a handle on all her troubles. The answer might be that she’s made up her mind to go ahead and end them already.”

The anger hadn’t fled me, not entirely; my chest still hurt from the hammering of my heart, and the sheen of sweat on my forehead still burned, less like perspiration and more like something more primordial. But I felt stricken. “Is that’s what you think? That this is suicide?”

“No. I think that part of you wants it to be suicide.”

Knowing how I felt inside but understanding at last why Bengid would see any mere assurances on my part as inadequate, I could only say, “It’s not like that. I swear to you, I’m sure about this. I love them.”

“I can see that.”

“And they love me.”

“And you know, Andrea, honestly, I’ve sensed that too.” She turned her back to me and approached the conference center door. As it slid open, revealing the brighter light of the corridor, she turned around and stood there backlit for several seconds, making up her mind whether to go further. Her last words before she walked out the door were, “But, you know . . . if their version of love really does require you to end the person you are . . . maybe you should consider that they might not be the only ones who give a damn about you. To everybody else but them, putting an end to yourself is a seriously shitty thing to do.”

I found the Porrinyards in the guest quarters the Negev had allocated for us. It was a VIP suite and still as snug as a marsupial’s pouch, dominated by a bed that was big enough for two only if those two were so attuned to each others’ nocturnal movements that they were able to avoid beating the crap out of one another as they slept. Many ardent civilian couples, traveling aboard ships of this class, suffered through a few days of tormented attempts at shared domestic arrangements but then elected to sleep in shifts or beg for separate rooms.

Our own private transport, still docked in the Negev’s hangar, featured shared quarters modified to fit all three of us in comfort, and would have been much more congenial for us than the one-size-fits-all design of a vessel designed for adult human beings who, by and large, rarely slept together in groups larger than two. But some things, like refusing the hospitality of a vessel where you’ve been summoned to give your expert opinion, just aren’t done—and besides, it had never been necessary, not with the special Porrinyard breed of grace extending to their uncanny unobtrusiveness while asleep. Even tucked between them, in beds small enough to call this one expansive, I never knew they were on either side of me unless they wanted me to.

When I found them they were lying nude above the covers, Oscin’s larger form curled to mimic Skye’s. His bare rear end may have protruded over the edge of the mattress to such an extent that only the supported parts of his body kept him from falling out of bed, and she may have allowed only a couple of millimeters of clearance between the tip of her button nose and the wall on her side, but they had left room for me: a virtual outline, defined by the negative space between his body and hers. I didn’t have to listen to know that they were breathing in unison; I’d ended many of the nights I woke from traumatic nightmares finding comfort in the shared refrain of their breath, sounding in perfect unison on opposite sides of me.

They were, together, the best person I’d ever met. They’d saved my life twice within three days of our first meeting, and many uncounted times since then. They’d saved my sanity just as often, and given me more than I’ve ever thought I could have, not least among those many gifts a reason to look forward to waking up in the morning. Their willingness—hell, that wasn’t even the right word—eagerness, to not only tolerate the baggage I’d brought into our relationship but claim it as part of their own, to become for the rest of their lives someone who would remember what it had been like to be Andrea Cort, struck me as breathtaking—more than I’d ever asked for and certainly more than I’d ever deserved.

There was no doubt about it: With them, I’d finally become a lucky woman.

But it was also true that I’d only known them as the shared creature they’d become. I’d never met the young man who had become Oscin or the young woman who had become Skye, and in fact knew very little about them. I knew that they’d both hailed from a world where people had settled the upper branches of mile-high trees; that they’d been in love but not very good at being in love; that they’d fought hard and fought often and spent almost as much time fighting as they had loving. I knew that the woman had been braver and more adventurous than the man; that he had prized caution to a degree that infuriated her and prompted more than one of their breakups.

I knew that they’d gotten into some kind of serious legal trouble on their home world, something that had prompted their decision to indenture themselves to the Dip Corps. I knew that their decision to link had as much to do with their inability to get along as singlets as it did with the hope that, offered as a unit, they would always be posted in the same places. I finally knew that once they were together as a single mind they were as much the solitary prisoner of two skulls as any individual person is in one; that their own lovemaking amounted to athletic self-gratification and that they’d always needed to seek out others, like me, for company.

Somehow I’d always interpreted their story as a triumph of their commitment to one another. And it could be seen that way, but was it not also the ultimate failure of that commitment? Seen another way, the boy who became Oscin had, in fact, lost the girl who became Skye; she no longer existed, except as an integral part of himself. And she had, in turn, lost him.

In a sense, so had I. I’d never had the chance to meet that Oscin and Skye. Would I have fallen in love with either that boy or that girl? Would I have even liked them? Would I have been upset to learn of their plans to meld the boy and the girl into a new personality, larger than them both? Would I have mourned?

In the future we were now planning, the future where there would be no separate composite personality known as Oscin-and-Skye-Porrinyard and no separate individual personality known as Andrea Cort, but instead a new composite personality as yet unknown to us—would that new person miss being three people, and then two people, who had once been loved by others outside themselves? How long would it be before that linked triad found itself seeking out someone new, a fresh soul to fill the void that only grew ever more cavernous the more the souls that defined it were shared?

Was Bengid right?

“Andrea?” They had lifted their heads to look at me, each sleepy expression of concern identical to the other. “Are you all right?”

I dabbed at my eye with a thumb. “Just watching you sleep, love.”

“Sounds fascinating. It can’t be time to get up yet.”

“No,” I said. “We still have a few hours.”

“Then get your clothes off and come to bed, already. You have a busy day tomorrow.”

I might have hesitated. I was too churned up inside, too unsure of my own feelings. But that would have raised questions I was not ready to answer right now. So I complied, peeling off my severe black suit, placing it folded on the counter by the stateroom entrance, and crawling on hands and knees into the empty space between my lovers. When I was in position and comfortable, the central parenthesis in a set of three, Oscin’s pulled close behind me, and Skye’s slighter one inched backward, between them forming an embrace I could feel on both sides. Oscin kissed me on the ear, and together they said, “It’ll be all right.”

I’ve already said that when they speak together, they split the tones and phonemes, creating a stereo effect that makes their voice seem to originate from some undefined empty space between them.

When they were as close to me as they were now that undefined empty space their voice filled was inside me.

On most other nights, I took comfort in that.

The next morning our wake-up call came with summons to a meeting about unspecified but ominous-sounding new developments.

We rushed to dress, were last to the gathering in the courtroom, and entered with Bengid and myself the two leads in a tiny small melodrama played out in avoided eye contact. The subtle thaw in a relationship years old had been replaced by something like an open wound, one that neither one of us wanted to acknowledge in front of the half-dozen legal functionaries who comprised her staff and certainly not in front of Oscin and Skye.

I could tell that the Porrinyards sensed something was wrong. As my assistants, they knew to keep quiet in professional situations when I couldn’t share information right away, but it was almost as impossible to hide the existence of a secret now as it would be in the future, when there would no longer be any such thing as a secret between us.

Bengid said, “It turns out that we’re down to the wire. I’ve heard from some people very high up. I can’t tell you exactly how high up, but they consider themselves important enough to quash criminal investigations for the convenience of some crony’s pet project.”

To my eyes, the fresh-faced male staffer who asked the next question seemed young enough to be mistaken for a zygote. “Are they?”

“They might well be,” Bengid said.

“That’s ridiculous!”

“It might well be, but there are some big dogs behind them, people who want Harriman and the Diyamens released into their custody, to resume the work the murder of al-Afiq interrupted. I gather that if that ends up happening, the incentive will amount to a de facto amnesty. It would be an outrage, of course, but they back it with all the talk of national interest I can stand. On our side there are a few old-fashioned people who believe that murder is wrong, and understand that in this case it’s not unreasonable to take a few extra days to fashion a proper prosecution that won’t reduce open-and-shut facts to legalistic travesty. Between them they’re not exactly ordering me to cover up al-Afiq’s murder, but they are saying that if I don’t structure these charges in a manner that takes the special nature of our culprits into account, anything I do will be subject to hostile judicial review, and our killer—killers, if you prefer—will likely end up being released on what amounts to their own recognizance.”

“They might actually get away with it,” the zygote marveled.

Bengid’s glare would not have been out of place on one of the mythological gorgons. “Yes. Yes, Marcus, we are in danger of that. And that seems to be what our piece-of-crap criminal seems to have been counting on all along.”

“What do we do?”

“Unless we can form a rock-solid precedent that takes all the identity issues into account and still leaves no doubt that we’re charging those three, that one, that however-you-want-to-count-them, in the proper proportion—leaving absolutely no doubt that none of the gestalt’s component personalities are being charged too much or too little—anything we do will go up in a puff of smoke, courtesy of all the parties with a vested interest in making this damn mess go away.”

Another of Bengid’s people, this one a young redheaded woman who looked all of twelve, raised her tremulous hand. “How much more time do we have?”

“End of the day to declare our intentions, end of tomorrow to submit the charges.”

There was an explosion of dismay and anger over this. Somebody said that New London was rewriting its entire Constitution. Somebody else told him he was naïve for even believing in the Constitution. A dozen other voices protested only that “they” could not do this, a weak objection on the face of it since “they” clearly were.

Bengid commanded silence with a raised palm. “I know it stinks, people. But if nobody comes up with an answer in the next eight hours, we’ll have to file an imperfect case and watch from a distance as it falls to pieces at the first strong wind from New London. I need brilliance, people. Go.”

Her staff filed out, murmuring. I had worked for a prosecutor as high-powered as Bengid, once upon a time, and knew exactly what was passing through their heads: dark, defiant damns of the luck that had decided to position them at the front lines of this particular no-win situation. Wherever they went from here, a humiliating failure on what the future would see as a simple case botched by incompetent prosecution would remain in their records for the rest of their careers, if not destroying their ambitions, then at least slowing their rise.

As the primary prosecutor, Bengid had even more to lose than the rest of them. She wouldn’t look at me, but still seemed to have aged almost ten years. “Could they have planned this?”

“It’s possible,” the Porrinyards said. “Improved space for computation means improved calculation of variables. You should try to beat me at a good game of chess, sometime.”

Bengid emitted a forlorn laugh. “Never learned it.”

I was sick and tired of waiting for her to look at me. “It’s time for some truth, Lyra.”

“What truth did you have in mind?”

“This didn’t just happen to come up out of the blue this morning, and you didn’t just happen to call me in to finesse some fine point of legal ambiguity. The truth is, you were under pressure to drop this case from the very moment it fell in your lap, and you called me because your other options had failed and you no longer had any other choice. It had nothing to do with finding the approach that best served justice and everything to do with not losing. Am I right?”

She shuddered. “They’re not exactly incompatible, you know.” Then she looked up, a weary resignation lowering her eyelids to half mast. “But that’s a point. You have no official standing here, Andrea. If you have no ideas, there’s no reason you have to swallow any part of this poison pill yourself. You can leave right now if you want to.”

“Go to hell,” I said. “Just to punish you for getting in my face, I’m going to go interview your person of interest again and solve your silly little problem in record time, while you watch.”

She stared. She blinked. She looked at the Porrinyards and then at me and something happened to all that hopelessness and frustration on her face; it just dissipated, like a black storm cloud pierced by the rays of the sun. The corners of her lips twitched. “That . . . would be damned cruel of you, Andrea.”

Beside me, Skye Porrinyard spoke alone. “What else would you expect, Counselor Bengid? She’s always been a vindictive bitch.”

Once again, I took my place in the interrogation room. Once again, I watched in silence as Harriman and the Diyamens were brought in, and as they took their habitual positions on the opposite side of the table: Harriman dominating in the center, the two women shrinking, nurturing ghosts at his sides. Once again, Harriman offered a pleasant smile as he took his seat. “Hello, Counselor. If this is going to become a habit, I really wish you’d bring our future link-siblings in with you. I would have liked to meet them.”

“Don’t worry,” I advised him. “They’re watching.”

He glanced at the opaque wall behind me. “Really? They should be in here with us, then. You have nothing to gain from such cheap theatrics.”

I showed teeth. “Don’t I, Mr. Harriman?”

He shook his head. It was the sad, solemn patience of an adult who has seen a slow child, taught the same lesson multiple times, prove once again her inability to get the point. “I really don’t know how I can be much clearer about this. I’ve confessed to the crime more than once already. I’ll confess to it again now, if that’s convenient to you. I hated al-Afiq. I wanted him dead. I planned to kill him. I waited until he said something so vile that it was beyond redemption, so I could feel no compunction over pounding on al-Afiq’s skull until everything above his neck was a thick, crunchy soup. I’d do it again. I’m proud of doing it. I’ll plead guilty, if you want, and accept any punishment you’re willing to give me.”

“And that,” I said, “is exactly what I find so interesting about this. It all comes down to the charges we can file against all three of you, while retaining a clear conscience.”

Mi and Zi Diyamen curled a little closer toward Harriman, as if trying to fold their slight forms into his more expansive outline. Their expressions were dead enough to mimic catatonia; it was as if they’d become appendixes or extra limbs. I wondered what they had been like before linking with Harriman and what they had been like as individuals before linking with each other, before arranging their new lives as neuters. I almost wondered what they were like now until common sense prevailed, and I reminded myself: You already know. You’ve been talking to them all along.

I leaned back in my chair. “I’d like to go over it again.”

He sighed. “What would you like to know about?”

“The beginning. The first time anybody brought up killing al-Afiq.”

Were they surprised by this? Did Harriman straighten up a little bit and regard me through new eyes? Did the Diyamens? “All right, I’ll admit that much. It was . . . a frequent subject of conversation very early on, and by that I mean within the first month.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Whenever the work shift was done and the torments of the day were over, Harriman and the Diyamens used to retreat to some private place and commiserate about how much they hated the prick. Sometimes it was just him blowing off steam, grim flights of fancy about how much fun it would be to throttle him, or poison him, or throw him into the airlock and pump enough air in to slowly compress him to the size of a meal pack. At first, it was just a bitter joke. I’m sure you’ve had conversations like that yourself, whenever you’ve had to work with somebody who irritated you that much.”

“Never,” I said, pleasantly enough. “But I have inspired more than my share.”

“Really?”

“Some entire alien civilizations, actually. You have absolutely no idea.”

That threw them. They had no idea whether to believe me or not. I could have offered him specific citations, but then he shrugged it off and went on. “Other times, bad days, Harriman stormed around in circles yelling that he was going to kill that bastard and the Diyamens were left doing whatever they could to calm him down. It often ended with him weeping, almost suicidal. He had never been that strong a personality, you understand: A born victim of those stronger than himself, he had almost no natural defenses against predators like al-Afiq, and the feelings of helplessness, of rage, threatened to destroy him. Before very long . . . when he told the Diyamens that he was going to kill al-Afiq someday, it wasn’t so much of a joke anymore.”

“And how did the Diyamens react to this?”

“With more concern for Harriman than for al-Afiq. The bastard had, of course, not treated them any better, but they were better equipped to shrug it off. And their own empathy for Harriman didn’t mitigate their own moral duty to try for a resolution. More than once, Zi stayed with the raging Harriman while Mi went to confront al-Afiq on his behavior. More than once, they begged al-Afiq to lighten up on the abuse before something awful happened, and more than once the son of a bitch just laughed at them. It was like they’d asked him to stop breathing.”

I leaned in close. “So tell me again about the day Harriman killed him.”

“I told you about that day just a few minutes ago.”

“Describe the precipitating event.”

“It was one of those terrible shifts when Harriman and al-Afiq could not indulge their separate specialties in separate labs but instead had to operate in close proximity. Their work had reached a bit of an impasse, and al-Afiq had been keeping up a steady rain of filth all afternoon, accusing Harriman of incompetence and worse. At last he descended to insults so vile, so much more an indictment of himself for speaking them than Harriman for hearing them, that I still refuse to sully my own lips by repeating them now.”

“I don’t need to know the exact words,” I said. “They translate as some version of ‘I hate you,’ anyway.”

“Very much so.”

“But whatever they were, you could have laughed him off. You could have reminded yourself that he was just following his own sick compulsions and that nothing he said could he taken at face value.”

“I could have,” he agreed. “But I didn’t want to. I’d long since decided that this would end with me killing him, and found a terrible dark peace in that fact. Someday, I knew, he’d work with other unfortunates, people who would be destroyed by him in the same way he claimed to have destroyed so many others. It was just a matter of waiting for him to say one thing too many, something that finally made me angry enough to cross that threshold from wanting to doing.”

“And the Diyamens?”

“The Diyamens were performing necessary extravehicular maintenance at the time. They were not present in the chamber during the killing but arrived soon afterward, taking Harriman’s confession and placing him under formal arrest. I can show you the holos to confirm that.”

“That’s not necessary,” I said.

I turned around and faced the blankness of the phased wall, willing myself to see beyond it, to the room where Bengid and the Porrinyards would be watching. Bengid must have seen the triumph in my posture and not understood it; the Porrinyards would understand it and likely be appalled by it. They don’t particularly like the perverse thrill I take in quantifying evil.

Facing Harriman again, I said, “Summarizing. This was not a crime of passion. You had been prepared to kill him for some time, and were just waiting until you were angry enough.”

“That’s all true,” he said. “And it’s been true for as long as I’ve been saying it.”

“Then say it again. Say you made a conscious decision to kill him.”

“I made a conscious decision to kill him.”

“You were prepared to kill him.”

“I was prepared to kill him,” Harriman said, with only a brief pause before he added, “And I did kill him.”

“You struck him over a hundred times.”

“I didn’t realize how angry I was. It consumed me, destroyed every civilized thought I ever had. I hated him so much that there was nothing in me, no rationality, no conscience, no mercy, nothing but the need to keep bludgeoning that hated face again and again. I think I thought that if I obliterated him from the Universe I’d not only be free of all the things he might have said to me in the future but also everything he’d ever said to me in the past. I didn’t just want to destroy him. I wanted him expunged.”

“And later? How did you feel later?”

“When later?”

“Let’s say, when the Diyamens came in.”

I had no reason to disbelieve the tears in his eyes. “You mean, when they saw Harriman looking down at the monster he had beaten to death.”

“Yes. Then.”

“That felt even worse. It was like I had ripped out my soul. I knew that it was the end of me. I wanted to die.”

“One last question. Your decision to link?”

He regarded the two silent figures at his sides, as if reveling in his love for them; the imitation of a being capable of loving them as separate beings, and not as manifestations of his own personality, was so perfect that I felt an unavoidable pang, that I could only hope failed to show on my face. “The Diyamens,” he said, with an expansiveness that seemed like a father’s pride in talented daughters, “offered to join everything they were with a traumatized man on the edge of total breakdown. During the months of treatments, it was the only thing that offered him hope and stopped him from destroying himself . . . and in the end, his last thought as a single-mind was wonder that the Universe contained at least one person capable of that much compassion.”

My eyes burned. I nodded, pressed both palms against the table, and stood, only to spend the next few moments staring down at him from a position of relative height. He just blinked back at me. I was able to isolate the precise moment when it dawned that I’d won. The illusory passivity of the Diyamens vanished as well, replaced by a deep and desolate contempt.

I felt a dark fury. “Your confession is not going to save you.”

For the first time, the Diyamens answered me themselves, while the bear of a man between them remained silent. Unlike the shared voice of the Porrinyards, which embodies both genders at once, theirs was an empty, sexless thing, more like a virtual personality than a real one. They said, “I suspect that I am no longer worth saving.”

It had not been a long session, not for a woman who had interviewed suspects for ten hours or more. But I emerged feeling worse than gut-punched, as if some angry god had just grabbed me by the heart and ripped me inside out. I half walked, half staggered to a nearby shelf where a carafe of water was waiting, and drank three full cups, each cold enough to feel like a spike in my skull.

Bengid and the Porrinyards were both waiting for me to finish, but in different ways. The Porrinyards had understood everything I’d done in there. They’d figured out everything I’d figured out about the crime and might have even progressed as far as the worst of its implications. But to Bengid’s ears my interview with Harriman had sounded just like all of hers, revealing nothing more than what she thought she knew.

I didn’t turn around to enlighten her. I just faced the wall, feeling the water turn to acid in my belly as I murmured those words the Porrinyards had spoken to me, during the case where we first met, words that had then referred to nothing more than friendship, but which meant even more when discussing their acquired condition. “Carrying the weight too great to be borne by one.”

The seconds stretched until Bengid said, “I don’t see it.”

“No,” I said, without turning around. “I don’t suppose you would. But then you’ve never lived with linked people or contemplated becoming one. The phenomenon isn’t a daily part of your life, but just a strange, frightening, alien procedure, one you don’t even want to consider, let alone understand.”

“So?”

“So you let Harriman give you a full confession that tells you everything while revealing nothing, and it never once occurred to you that the absolute truth being told in there might be hiding another one, a bigger one, right there in plain sight.”

I turned. Bengid was wide-eyed, uncomprehending, aware that I’d figured out something terrible but unable to discern its nature.

“You’re crying.”

I hadn’t noticed. I brushed my burning tears into a pair of identical smears alongside my cheeks, and said, “I’m not surprised.”

“For God’s sake, Andrea, what’s wrong with you?”

I took a deep breath, gulped, wiped my face again, and said, “Essentially? The difference between what they knew they couldn’t hide and what they hoped they could.”

She shook her head. “I don’t—”

“I know you don’t,” I snapped, my cracking voice providing the lightest hint of the hysteria I held at bay. “Nor will you until I demonstrate.”

I turned to the Porrinyards, both of whom were standing in the back of the room, facing me with identical expressions of wariness and concern. They knew something was wrong, all right. They just didn’t know how wrong.

I took a deep breath. “Forgive me for turning you into performers, but I need to show Lyra how it works. Skye, get down on the floor for a second and then stand up. Oscin, step out into the corridor for a second and then come back. When you’re back together, link hands. Then I’ll ask you some questions.”

They nodded at me and, with Bengid looking on in complete bafflement, complied to the letter. Skye knelt, Oscin exited the room, Skye stood up, and Oscin came back.

By the time they linked hands and faced me again, Bengid must have thought I’d gone completely insane. But then I turned my back on them—knowing that they were behind me, but taking as much comfort as I could in not having to look at their faces. “Oscin? Who knelt on the floor?”

Behind me, Oscin spoke alone. “Skye did.”

“Skye, who went out into the hallway?”

Skye took that one. “Oscin did.”

“Just a couple more. Oscin, who went out into the hallway?”

He said, “Oscin did.”

“Skye? Who knelt on the floor?”

She said, “Skye did.”

“Now, finally, once you were done, who clasped hands?”

They answered in their familiar shared voice. “I did.”

I tried to grin at Bengid, but it likely came out looking more like a joyless grimace.

She was at sea. “What the hell was all that supposed to prove?”

“You fell afoul of it yourself, more than once, didn’t you, Lyra? Hell, you ran into it more than once just during our first briefing, alone.”

“So help me, Andrea, if you don’t start making sense right now . . . ”

“Will you just listen?”

She folded her arms and waited.

I closed my eyes, concentrated on holding myself together for the next few minutes, and gave myself leave to fall apart if I needed to, once those few minutes were done. I could always be a robot, finding refuge in the facts. I had before.

My voice, when it came, sounded tremulously old, but grew stronger as the ideas began to spill out.

“Look, it’s very simple. In the short time they’ve been around, cylinked people have made a name for themselves as one of the most aggravating subjects of conversation in human civilization. And it’s not because they’re the most aggravating people in human civilization . . .”

“Though we can be,” the Porrinyards interjected.

“. . . but because nothing about them fits syntax that was originally designed to reference individual people occupying individual bodies. Talking about linked pairs, or to linked pairs, you can’t help running into pronoun trouble and ambiguous plurals, and a dozen other causes of the kind of semantic knot that kept you freezing up in mid-sentence, several times during our first briefing.

“So linked people and those who live alongside them are forced to make the most of the linguistic tools at hand. For instance, Oscin and Skye aren’t really separate people, but they retain their individual names. Why? Because, even though the individual bodies are no more separate individuals than your left and right hands are separate creatures, they do remain capable of individual action and must therefore retain the capacity to describe those actions individually. It doesn’t matter to them which body is talking. The first person singular, ‘I,’ always refers to something they’ve both done, and their proper names always refer to something only one has done.

“Even then,” I continued, “ambiguities pop up from time to time, but that can’t be helped, nor can you claim that the ambiguity started with linked people. Just think about how many times you’ve used the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘they,’ after neglecting to give sufficient precedent, and then had to waste time backpedaling in order to explain exactly who you meant to include. But if you’re smart, that can be an advantage. There are worlds of wiggle room within those ambiguities, a chance to sow confusion and hide what you really mean.

“So put all that together with the key anomaly marking the behavior of your prisoners, their refusal to talk in any voice but Harriman’s, and it becomes clear that it was all about giving you fewer chances to notice something very important.

“Review everything Harriman said in there, and I presume everything Harriman ever said to you in any of your interviews with him, I’m sure you’ll remember that he sometimes referred to himself in the first person and sometimes in the third person.”

Bengid blinked. “He always seemed to switch back and forth at whim.”

“Never at whim, Lyra; never when counting on you missing this one critical point was key to getting away with the crime. Examine everything he told me about the murder and you’ll notice something very interesting. Whenever he described the physical act of murder, he referred to ‘Harriman.’ And whenever he described the decision to commit the crime, he said, ‘I.’

“If you even noticed this at all, you were probably too busy swimming upstream through the special semantics of a physical condition strange to you to make any special sense of it.

“But that’s what the linked triad in there was counting on. They wanted you confused, because they thought they could make your natural confusion rebound to their benefit—by giving at least part of their collective a chance at freedom and possibly ruining your prosecution of the remainder.

“It was all just a matter of pronouns.

“Parse the confession correctly—and you have plenty of time to do that, because it’s on hand and no doubt echoes everything else they’ve ever said to you—and you’ll see what they didn’t want you to see before.

“Harriman, the singlet, didn’t decide to kill al-Afiq.

“Harriman, the body, only picked up the weapon.

“The truth is that they all decided to kill al-Afiq.

“Because they were all already one shared personality at the time of the crime.”

Bengid blinked. Then blinked again. Mentally reviewed everything she’d established in every interview with Harriman. Then went through it a second time and reviewed everything she’d just assumed, everything Harriman had merely permitted her to believe.

Then she looked dizzy. Then filled with hope.

And then, she just went to one of the chairs and sat.

I wondered if she had any idea how much I hated her right now.

I spared a quick look at the Porrinyards. They had seen me like this before, so enraptured with the solution to a problem that it seemed to burn inside me like a fever. They knew that it could be both triumph and torment, depending on how personally I took the question at hand.

But was that all they saw? Had they been hit with the very worst of it, as I had?

I didn’t want to think about that.

Instead I went to the chair next to Bengid’s and slammed her with the rest, not raising my voice at all but still hoping it hurt.

“And now, we come to why they didn’t report the crime for so long.

“It’s really nothing more than another canny use of ambiguity. Had they contacted the authorities right away, let’s say with the body only a few hours or days old, and had they ever let anybody know that they’d linked personalities, it would have naturally followed that there hadn’t been enough time to link after the crime, and therefore must have all been equally complicit in the killing.

“By keeping the crime secret for so long, they stood a chance of supporting the fiction that they’d linked afterward, to protect Harriman from the traumatic aftermath of a murder he’d committed on his own.

“As it happens, they spoke the absolute truth when they had Harriman claim that that the Diyamens had offered their union to help a weak and traumatized man on the edge of a total emotional breakdown. But that truth,” my voice buckled, “the truth didn’t mean what we were intended to believe it meant. Because he’d just finished describing the guilt and shame that followed the killing, I was supposed to assume a direct chronological progression and assume that they linked to protect him from the emotional consequences. But replay what they actually said to me and you’ll note that at the point they were answering a different question, one that actually amounted to a change of subject. They must have used similar misdirection on you, as it was the key thing they needed you to be wrong about.

“In actuality, the breakdown they saved Harriman from was the one that loomed many months earlier, the one being brought on by al-Afiq’s abuse.

“We already know that the situation was already a serious one at that point. The man was weak, almost meek. He had already been relieved from one project for emotional exhaustion; he spent his off-hours in increasing rage and hysteria over al-Afiq; and there was nothing the Diyamens could do to either placate him or end the abuse that was destroying him.

“Maybe it was only because they were desperate, too, but in the end they offered to help him carry the weight.”

That phrase felt like poison in my mouth. But I was almost done. I bit my lip and continued. Not long now.

“I don’t know how much persuasion he required, but as the man was already on the verge of hurting himself or al-Afiq, it may not have taken much. He may have even seen the offer as a godsend. Ultimately, he agreed, and the three commenced treatment.

“This is, by the way, why Harriman’s stories about the three of them commiserating as separate people reflected events very early in their stay; with al-Afiq riding him daily, it didn’t take Harriman very long to reach the breaking point or the Diyamens very long to see no other alternative.”

I took a deep breath and tried to make the next thought an academic thing that only existed in theory.

“The saddest part of all this is that it was likely an attempt on their part to avoid violence. The Diyamens must have thought that the new individual they were becoming would be strong enough to contain all of Harriman’s rage.

“But they were wrong.” My voice trembled. “Harriman the singlet expelled all his anger with raging tantrums. He might not have given in to his violent urges at all. The new personality containing Harriman and the Diyamens together may have been more centered on an emotional level, but it harbored their considerable resentments as well as his, in addition to their increased personal initiative. On the subject of the toxic al-Afiq, this combination could only be explosive.

“It was as a unit that they decided that they still hated al-Afiq enough to want him dead.

“And it was as a unit that they started obsessing on the prospect of killing him.

“It may not have started as any more to the consensus personality than a nasty but comforting fantasy, but that didn’t help when that personality could no longer resist the impulse. Nor does it really matter that Harriman’s body was the only one physically present during the killing, or that the Diyamens were working outside the station, by accident or design establishing an alibi that nobody would ever have questioned. The crime itself was still driven by their shared will. They all wanted al-Afiq dead. And so they all killed him.

“After that,” I spread my hands, palms up, “it just became an issue of framing the narrative that could keep them all free. The citizen’s arrest, the months of silence before reporting the crime, and the passivity the Diyamens affected were all part of that.

“It almost worked.

“But,” I said, standing up, hearing only the slightest hint of hysteria in my voice, and denying it because I was now almost done, “you have the confessions on hand, and now that you understand the syntax you should have absolutely no trouble finding what you need to lock up all three of them.”

Bengid grinned. For me, it was like ten years had fallen from her face, and all the freshness of the years when I’d first known her had all come rushing back, all at once. Beauty, the kind of face that made people want to know her, had always been the least of her sins. “You always were better than me at oral arguments, Andrea. I . . .”

I no longer had the puzzle to occupy me, and so my own voice chose that moment to show her how dead I felt. “Don’t you ever dare to ask for my help again.”

I’d gone from rational assessor of facts to a shattered woman in the interval between one sentence and the next. Even with all she’d gone through, just knowing me, this was extreme. She could only utter a little gasp of surprise as I turned my back on her and made a beeline for the door to the corridor.

My rush to exit was so sudden, so fierce, that even the Porrinyards were taken by surprise. Though they were between me and the door when I started to walk, they were so startled at my momentum and at the ferocious slash of my mouth that they parted ways even as I advanced upon them, and allowed me to pass.

Bengid’s cries and the protests of the Porrinyards followed me as I exited the room, turned right to follow the corridor, and started picking up speed. I soon heard them a few steps behind me, calling my name, wondering what the hell could possibly be wrong with the problem solved and nothing but a long-planned happy ending ahead of me.

By the time I had progressed twenty steps they must have known that I was not headed for our quarters but for the hangar where our transport was waiting. I knew intellectually that I couldn’t get there and board and complete all the pre-departure procedures and leave the Negev without anybody stopping me, and that I certainly couldn’t leave my life partners behind without either explanation or way home. I also knew that if I’d had a chance to plan my escape a little more rationally, I might have asked to stay over one more night and fled as they slept; yes, that might have been the thing to do, that might have spared them my reasons and granted them the consolation of hating me.

The Porrinyards caught up with me at a T-shaped intersection, just under the graphic of a two-headed arrow pointing left to the hangar and right toward the food stores. I’d had to slow down a little just to make the turn, and so the Porrinyards were able to grab me by one arm apiece, spinning me around and pressing me up against the bulkhead, with not quite enough force to qualify as a slam.

As with everything they did, the coordination between their two bodies was perfect. Though I tried to shrug them off, they countered with ease and only consolidated their hold.

Bengid rushed up behind them, her eyes wide, her expression stricken and uncomprehending. In a silly gesture I’d only seen her make once or twice, at times of extreme upset, she covered her mouth with both fists, thumbs against her lips, the knuckles of the fingers fitting together like interlocking puzzles. It had been a little girl’s gesture then and looked like a little girl’s gesture now.

I raged. “Let me go—”

“I’m not going to do that,” the Porrinyards said. “Not until you tell me what’s wrong.”

I struggled again. I win most of the fights I get into, but I’d never won one with Oscin and Skye, never even had one with them. I loved them, but would have broken their arms to get them to let me go, if I could; would have blown my own head off rather than say what they were going to force me to say.

I couldn’t breathe to tell them. There was nothing inside me but an empty, airless place, and it made me unfit to be with people, especially unfit to be with them.

But Bengid was there too: Bengid, the silly cow who’d walked me up to the edge of the precipice and pushed me over, not realizing that yesterday’s heart-to-heart had gotten the dangers precisely backward.

The big worry was not that cylinking would destroy Andrea Cort.

I hated her for bringing me to this place where I’d had to realize such an awful thing. I tried to lunge at her, but the Porrinyards pulled me back and pressed me up against the wall again.

They said, “I can keep this up all day, Andrea. It’ll be a great workout.”

My breath was already coming in ragged gasps, and there was no telling how long speech would even be an option. When I managed to get out a couple of words, they sounded like untamed things, escaped from some internal cage. “They . . . were kind.”

“What?”

“They were . . . kind. They . . . tried to help him. Like you . . . they had . . . a damaged . . . broken person . . . and they wanted . . . to help him. I don’t know . . . maybe . . . they even loved him. They thought . . . that by making him . . . part of what they were . . . they could take away his pain . . . dilute the worst . . . of what he was. But . . . they couldn’t. They didn’t . . . make him better. He . . . made them . . . worse!”

The last words were almost a wail. I tried to break free again, kicking at Skye’s shin, but she pinned my leg with a simple shift of her own and pressed me back against the bulkhead. I closed my eyes and thought about all the bad choices I’d made, all the bad things I’d done, all the anger and bitterness that had filled too many of my years, all the darkness that had been a poison inside me and that would now pollute them, the one person I loved most.

My eyes were still shut against the awfulness of the prospect when their weight shifted, and two pairs of lips kissed me on the cheeks.

They said, “You’ve never made us worse, Andrea.”

My knees lost all strength. I sank to the deck, weeping, not knowing what I was going to do but no longer considering flight one of the options. They followed me all the way down. My arms came free and I wrapped them around Oscin’s shoulders, shaking uncontrollably from the impact of all the doubt that I’d foolishly imagined gone and replaced with a certainty that exists nowhere in this world. Skye came around to hug me from the back, her perfect cheek resting against the corded knot of my back.

I don’t know how much time it took me to realize that Bengid had stayed.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Andrea Cort made her debut in “Unseen Demons,” from the July/August 2002 Analog; her subsequent adventures include the novels Emissaries From The Dead, The Third Claw of God, and the available-only-in-Germany Fall of The Marionettes. This story takes place after the third book, but doesn’t require knowledge of it.)

Copyright © 2011 Adam-Troy Castro

 NOVELETTES

NOVELETTES

Ian’s Ions and Eons

Paul Levinson

Ian’s Ions and Eons . . . that’s what the neon sign said, in glowing script above the door. I don’t know when it first opened. I had been out of town for about a year, and I never could get a straight...

Balm of Hurt Minds

Thomas R. Dulski

“For some must watch, while some must sleep So runs the world away.” ShakespeareHamlet, Act II, scene ii Reflecting Pool News Service: The recent recall of the sleep-aid Somnomol has raised a number...

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NOVELETTES

Ian’s Ions and Eons

Paul Levinson

Ian’s Ions and Eons . . . that’s what the neon sign said, in glowing script above the door. I don’t know when it first opened. I had been out of town for about a year, and I never could get a straight answer out of Ian. I don’t know what everyone else in the neighborhood thought when they walked by Ian’s on Johnson Avenue in the Bronx. Some kind of computer store, an electronic gimmick shop, a latter-day Radio Shack, perched on the second floor above a dry cleaner?

“We’re a travel agency,” Ian told me.

“Oh? Where do the ‘ions’ fit in, then?” I asked him. “Some kind of faster-than-hypersonic propulsion?”

“Nope. Not like that at all.”

I looked around the store. It was nondescript. I guess that was a bit self-refuting. There was an old picture of the Parthenon on one wall and a drawing of the Roman Coliseum on another, next to a stained photo of some Mayan ruin. “You specialize in travel to ancient places, like Rome and Athens, and that’s where the ‘eons’ come in?”

“Something like that,” Ian replied. He stroked his mustache. It was a fine mix of black and white. His hair was a little lighter, his eyes a little darker.

“What’ll it cost me to travel back to 2000?”

“So you knew what we do, all along.”

“Word gets around,” I replied. “You’d be surprised—or maybe you wouldn’t.”

Ian shook his head.

“So what’s your pricing?” I asked again.

“2000 isn’t too far back; we consider it part of the twenty-first century, a break for you. The rest of the price would depend on the purpose of your trip—personal or societal?”

“Strictly personal.”

Ian scowled.

He explained that nothing was strictly personal in his business—you want to go back and kiss that girl again in the seventh grade, well that could still have unforeseen consequences for the world. And that meant such a trip required all the standard precautions, which were expensive. But they were less costly than protection from the possible results of a trip intended to change some kind of public event.

He quoted me a price, 20 percent less than the standard societal rate. “All inclusive.”

“Jeez.” I shook my head and whistled. “That’s still a small fortune.”

“You’re welcome to try the competition,” Ian said blandly. He knew that I knew there was none.

“You’ll need the complete payment up-front?”

“Obviously.”

I nodded and pressed in my account number and the desired dates of my journey on the thin terminal embedded in front of me on the counter. It fast-printed a twenty-five-page itinerary. Ian still did some of his business the old-fashioned way.

I looked at the first page. “A train?”

“Yep—somewhere between Philadelphia and Wilmington. That’s the way we do it.”

“For the East Coast?”

“For any coast.”

The itinerary was fairly explicit. Go down to Penn-Moynihan Station beneath the Farley Post Office. Fare already paid for, included in the package. Take the Tricela to Washington . . .

“Any Tricela?” I asked Ian. “They run every half hour, don’t they?”

He nodded. “The specific Tricela doesn’t matter. You supplied the date and time. It’s the speed, the curve, and what they got going on down there, under the ground, between Philadelphia and Wilmington.”

“That’s where the ‘ions’ come in?”

He nodded again. “Some kind of future underground technology produces them. They poke a little hole in the fabric of time. And if you hit it just right—at the speed and angle at which the Tricela is traveling—you get through.”

“But it doesn’t affect anyone else on the train?” I asked.

“It does not,” Ian replied. “You have to be in just the right spot on the train, at just the right time. Plus, you need to be wearing this.” Ian reached under the counter, rummaged around, and pulled out a blue-gray woolen vest with silvery buttons.

“You’ve got the 2000 model,” Ian advised. “It’s the micro-weave that attracts the ions.”

I massaged the textile between my thumb and forefinger. “Feels like wool. . . . Okay if I try this on right here?”

“By all means,” Ian said. “As I told you, the vest attracts the ions only on the Tricela, between Philadelphia and Wilmington—”

I tried on the vest.

“One size fits all,” Ian said.

“Good,” I said. “And how do I get this back to you?”

“It’s all in the itinerary,” Ian replied. He pulled the counter screen back toward him and regarded it. “Let’s see . . . in 2000, you’ll find yourself on a Metroliner. You do your business back there. Then get on a northbound Metroliner. Wear the vest. And somewhere just south of Trenton, you’ll go to the right place in the train and the next thing you’ll know, you’ll be back on the Tricela, heading north, in our time. The fabric of time ‘remembers’ you. It’ll pull you back to the time you left, as long as you’re wearing the vest. The fabric of time attracts the fabric of your vest. It’s all in the itinerary,” he said again.

I looked at it again. The relevant line began, ‘Go to the café car, just as in the Tricela—’ I nodded. “When exactly in 2000 do I arrive? Can I specify the arrival date?”

“You get there on whatever month, day, hour, minute, second you leave in our time. Nothing other than the year changes. Same with the return—you get back here on whatever month, day, et cetera in 2000 you happen to find yourself on the Metroliner heading north, south of Trenton. It’s all in the itin—”

“Okay. How come the jump to the past takes place between Philadelphia and Wilmington, and the jump back to the present between Philadelphia and Trenton?”

“Several reasons. The Metroliner has a space-time configuration slightly different from the Tricela—it’s heavier than the Tricela, therefore cuts through space in a slightly different way—even when the two are moving at the exact same speed. And it’s actually helpful that the going and returning happen in different places—too much action in the same place could tear the temporal fabric with who knows what consequences.” Ian shrugged. “That’s what it is. The snap in the space-time continuum is ‘elastic,’ extending from Wilmington to Trenton. You all set?” His tone indicated he was about through with the conversation.

I tried one more question, anyway. “And you wouldn’t happen to know who built this future underground technology?”

“I would not,” Ian answered. “I’m just an agent selling tickets on a river boat. I have no idea how the river was created.”

Many people consider the post office an anachronism. E-mail has been on mobile media for decades, and if you want to mail a package, hey, just fill out a Web form, and someone will be by your side to pick up your parcel in under an hour, in most parts of the country.

One thing neither the post office or the Web could ever do, though, is mail people. That still required planes and trains. Fortunately, the famous inscription above this post office usually worked as well for trains: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Trains had become swift. They usually kept their appointments. I knew it wasn’t always that way. There was a time, right around the turn of the century, when most people thought trains were all but finished. . . .

I looked up at the inscription one more time for good luck and hurried downstairs to board my Tricela. It was new and gleaming. I found my seat, reserved in the itinerary, and sat down next to a blonde. She was pretty nice too.

“Going to Washington?” she asked politely.

I entered my ID into the terminal on my armrest. It beeped confirmation. “Actually, Philadelphia.” I didn’t want her to wonder where I was when we headed south from Philadelphia.

She smiled. Her eyes were agate gray and sparkled slightly in the soft train light. “Oh, I think you’ll be going down to Washington, eventually.”

I looked at her. “You’re with Ian.”

“Don’t worry—I’m included in the package.”

“But you’re not in the itinerary,” I said.

“Ian didn’t want you looking for me on the train—didn’t want you to look as if you were looking for someone you couldn’t find. That could attract attention you don’t need. Especially given the significance of your mission.”

The train sighed and glided imperceptibly into its journey. My head felt as if it was moving a million times faster.

“So . . . Ian knows I was lying, about my business being personal.”

“Of course he does. How could he not? He checked the past and the future. It’s his business.”

She caught my expression. “Don’t worry, I’m not here to stop you, I can assure you. I’m here to help. I’m part of the package,” she repeated.

“But Ian charged me for the personal trip?” I asked.

The blonde smiled. “As Ian probably told you, there’s really no such thing as a purely personal trip in time, as far as unforeseen major consequences go. We just keep the ‘personal rate’ as an incentive for our customers. People like a bargain. It’s a lot of money.”

The train sped under the Hudson. “Philadelphia, twenty minutes,” an announcement advised. “Next stop, Philadelphia. No stops at Newark or Trenton on the Tricela.”

“Think of me as your guide and your guardian,” the blonde said. “My name’s Ilene. With an ‘I.’”

“So Ian has no problem with what I really want to do in 2000?” I asked her.

“He has no problem with your plans for Washington. But people who listen in on Ian’s Ions and Eons might feel differently. That’s another reason he was happy to go along with your ‘personal business’ cover story.”

I considered.

“Eavesdropping is unavoidable,” Ilene continued. “It’s cat and mouse, provisions to stop eavesdropping versus eavesdropping, whatever the age.”

“If I succeed, history could be hashed. Ian’s okay with that?”

“He’s mapped all of the time-lines,” Ilene replied. “He does well in all of them. . . . ”

“And me?” It couldn’t hurt to ask.

Ilene arched an attractive eyebrow. “You know the terms and the rules. Ian makes no guarantees, except to do all in his power to get you to the past and back.” She leaned closer. “And the guiding principle, always, is that once a plan is in motion, there are few certainties, positive or negative. . . .”

The train slid out of Philadelphia. “Wilmington, next stop,” the announcement said.

“Better get to the café car,” Ilene advised. “You want to stand in the vestibule adjacent to the car. No problem if one or two other people are around—the time disturbance will blind them for a split second. Then they’ll have tears in their eyes. They’ll think it’s an allergy to the air in the train or whatever. When they wipe their tears away, they’ll just think you moved on—”

“I know, it’s in the itinerary.”

She smiled again.

I looked at her lilac sweater. It was a thin weave, a snug fit. I doubted there was a vest or any other clothing underneath.

“Right,” she said. “You’ll be going alone. I’ll be here for you on the Tricela back to New York.”

“Looking forward to that.”

I made my way to the designated vestibule. It was filled with passengers, overflowing from the line in the café car.

I tried to look as inconspicuous as possible.

To no avail.

“The guy behind the counter in there looks like he has arthritis,” the man in front of me said. “The line hasn’t moved in five minutes.” He looked at me for confirmation.

I nodded.

The train lurched. Was this the launch of my jump through time? Seemed a minute or two earlier than the timetable. . . . I looked at my watch. It was exactly forty-two seconds too soon. And I was still in the same Tricela vestibule. It was just a lurch.

But it made the man even angrier. “Why can’t they give smoother rides?” He clutched his stomach. “Maybe we’re lucky we haven’t eaten yet!”

I touched my own midsection in solidarity.

The man was not consoled. “I’m going back to my seat.”

“Yeah.” Actually, this could be a good tack—let him think I went back to my seat, when the tears cleared from his eyes. I stroked my vest.

But he was staring intently at me, a fellow traveler in suffering. No way he would not wonder what had happened to me . . . when I disappeared just a second or two from now.

Ilene came through the door. She had on a nice short skirt too. She slipped and fell all over the man—

And I was off. Nothing lurched. It felt more like the cosmos had kissed me.

. . . after drinking some stinking beer. The place reeked of some kind of brew. I saw suds on the floor. The door opened. A woman with dark hair entered and delicately side-stepped the wet part of the floor—then swerved past me, as the train took another sharp turn. She steadied herself against the side of the vestibule.

It was definitely not the same compartment I had just been in. This one was bigger, warmer . . . and stank of beer.

“Traveling to Washington?” she inquired sweetly.

“And you would be?”

“Irene,” she replied and smiled.

“Everyone in Ian’s organization has a name that begins with ‘I’?”

“I know an Eileen whose name begins with an ‘E,’” Irene replied. “And we have an Ellen.”

“Of course.” Irene was dressed more casually than Ilene, in jeans and a plum-colored sweater. I didn’t bother to ask her if some shade of purple was required for Ian’s employees.

She gestured to the door. “I have a seat for you.”

We left the vestibule and entered the adjacent car. The seats were plush blue.

“Don’t let those cushions fool you,” Irene advised. “This is definitely less comfortable than where you’ve just been. The past usually is.”

I sat in a seat by the window, and she by my side. It was raining outside. Big beads of water pelted the pane, slightly stained with some kind of white. It had been crystal clear where I had just been—the result of a sunny day and a new kind of genetically engineered glass. I hadn’t realized it had been so clear, then, until now. Funny how you don’t appreciate some things until you encounter their opposite.

Irene was right about the comfort. My back and legs were accustomed to better things. “So, anything special I should know about this time?” I asked. I realized I had not yet confirmed just when this was.

“The Supreme Court will announce its decision the day after tomorrow. Gore’s people want the recount to proceed in Florida, Bush’s do not. Everyone expects the decision to be very close. But you know that.”

I nodded. Good. “Will you be . . . helping me in Washington?”

“No,” Irene answered. “I’m strictly for the trains.”

We parted company in Union Station. “Remember, a thousand bucks is the limit,” she said and walked away. She had given me a bank card for expenses. “Comes with the package.”

I spotted an antique ATM and took out some cash. I broke a $10 bill for singles and change. I looked for a public phone. Good they still had them back here—mobile phones left trails.

The first five phones I encountered were broken, broken, in use, broken, in use. I got lucky with the sixth. I put in a quarter, waited for the tone, and carefully dialed the number I had stored on a piece of paper without a name in my pocket. I didn’t want to fumble with the itinerary in public in the past. A man’s voice answered.

I told him the reason for my call. It was dangerous, of course, but anything I did back here was dangerous, and I could use his help and had no choice but to contact this guy. It was in bold letters on the itinerary.

There was a long silence. “Okay,” he finally said and gave me his address. Confirmation of what I already knew, but that was important.

I stepped outside into the rain and summoned a cab.

We sped through the slick wet streets of Georgetown and pulled up to a brownstone on Wisconsin. The gray rain had given way to early evening.

I walked up the stairs. At closer view, the pits and scrapes were visible. The building had seen better days.

He was waiting for me inside the front door. He looked like his picture—wire-rimmed glasses, straight brown hair combed back, button-down pin-striped shirt, and an argyle sweater. Anonymous to this time and world, well known to me, even though I knew him only from his image. He looked to be about twenty-five, but I had a feeling he was older. He looked me over and nodded. I guess I looked enough like my picture.

He invited me into his ground floor apartment. It smelled faintly of butterscotch, not unpleasant.

We exchanged the usual introductions.

“What do I call you?” he asked me.

“Tom, though it’s not my name.”

He nodded. “Eric, which actually is my name,” he said.

“Right,” I said.

“Good to meet you,” he said, and we shook hands.

Then we talked.

“It’s wrong,” he said.

“The decision or—”

“Both,” he said.

“Sometimes two wrongs can make a right.”

He shook his head dubiously.

“He’ll be out of commission for only two months,” I continued. “And if that cowboy gets into office—”

“I know the future as well as you,” he said.

I nodded but continued anyway, “We’ll see the damaging effects far into the future.”

“I know,” he repeated, far less amicably, and he hadn’t been too amicable the first time.

“So—”

“Their decision was wrong, outrageous,” he said. “A coup-d’état by the Court. It was wrong. They had no right to override the state on this. It went against their own principles. Most future historians agree. But removing the Chief Justice from the decision, making him unable to sit in this case—”

“His health is deteriorating anyway,” I said. “This might well have happened even without my intervention.”

“But it didn’t.” Eric looked at me. “So you’re a subscriber to the principle that it’s okay to make changes that accentuate or further what may already be happening on its own.”

“That’s about right, yes,” I responded.

“And what if I’m in favor of not making any changes at all?”

“I’d wonder if what you are doing here is providing a fair consideration of what I propose to do, or if your mind is already made up on this,” I replied. Eric came with the itinerary provided by Ian. He was supposed to be one last check and balance, one last hurdle I had to overcome, in order to proceed. He was supposed to help with the logistics if my plan received his final approval. Except I had lied to Ian and told him my mission was personal, and Ian had known that. I hadn’t known that Ian had known that, so now I was here being grilled by Eric about my plan to incapacitate a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I guess that’s what I got for lying.

“I can provide means to accomplish your mission, if I agree that it makes sense, and isn’t too dangerous to the future,” Eric said.

“Understood,” I said. I knew I’d be entitled to a 50 percent refund if Eric said no, but that’s not what I wanted. I also knew Ian’s rationale for keeping his 50 percent if the mission was not approved—“it’s payment for the thrill of time travel, even if you’re not given the final go-ahead,” the itinerary explained, and I couldn’t completely disagree. “So what do I do to convince you?”

Eric gestured to a chair. “Sit down and talk a little more about it. What are you drinking?”

I sipped a ginger ale. I envisioned my future, hypothetical biography, which of course would never be written, because time travelers inevitably had to be anonymous: “He was no fun when time-traveling. Having a clear head trumped everything.”

Eric apparently had no such mandates. He was on his second glass of dark red wine. He rested it on the maple coffee table and turned to the paperwork he had prepared and I had just gone through. I couldn’t really begrudge Ian his 50 percent if my mission was not approved, if only because of this paperwork. It represented a huge amount of preparation and research, almost as much as I had done, and I had been working on this for years.

“So I think we can go quickly through the obvious basics,” Eric said. “Obama will still be elected in 2008, even with Gore in the White House for the eight years before.”

“Right,” I agreed. “Lieberman won’t get the nomination in 2008—he’s way too centrist for the Democratic voters.”

“A Republican in Democratic clothing, as his bio says,” Eric said and nodded.

“And the immediate downsides of Gore as President?” I asked, though I knew it was really only one.

“His work on the greenhouse effect and his Nobel prize is postponed,” Eric replied. “No big deal—the danger wasn’t as imminent as they made it out to be back then, anyway.”

I nodded. “And you might count as a downside that Gore in office won’t stop September 11—but that’s not really a downside to Gore, since it is highly unlikely that any President or administration could have stopped that.”

“Agreed. Bush didn’t. And Clinton was really no better at containing Bin Laden than was Bush. Hastings in the 2030s was not much better with Bin Laden’s successor, and she had all kinds of early warnings going for her. They never see it until it’s too late.”

“Yep.”

“Okay, let’s look at the short-range positives of Gore as President,” Eric said.

“No war in Iraq, no economic collapse worse than anything since the 1930s Great Depression,” I said.

Eric agreed. “Those are impressive benefits, I’ll grant you.”

“And the economic is especially significant,” I continued. “Without Bush mangling the economy, the U.S. continues as a superpower until well into the twenty-first century. Obama’s able to build on the Gore prosperity, just as Gore built on Clinton. China grows but doesn’t dominate the world.”

Eric agreed again.

“So where’s the long-range downside?” I asked.

Eric took a long sip of wine before answering. “The space program could be damaged.”

“The space program?” I asked. “Obama succeeding Bush made a big show of turning space exploration over to private enterprise, going to Mars, not the Moon. Never really took off. And the space program continued to slide. Obama had no real choice, given the economic mess that Bush left him. Whatever money Obama had at his disposal was spent here on Earth. How could Obama succeeding Gore be any worse for space?”

“The focus on spending money to improve the Earth, before we extend to the cosmos,” Eric replied, “really takes root in the Gore administration, according to our projections. Obama’s not inclined to go against that. And since the Earth has so many problems, the Earth-first approach means we never really get beyond the planet, and space travel becomes a blip of the twentieth century.”

I considered. “A lot of speculation there.”

“Yes,” Eric said. “But that’s what all of this is—pro arguments as well as con to your intervention.”

“The damage of the economic near-depression brought on by Bush is not speculation, it was very real in our time-line and is still causing problems, including shrinking the space program, as you know.”

“True,” Eric conceded. “Perhaps Gore versus Bush is a draw in terms of our future in space.”

“Agreed. Any other negatives?” I asked.

“Well, there is the immorality of nearly killing somebody,” Eric replied.

“I want to prevent him from participating in the final decision, incapacitate him, not kill him,” I replied.

“Without your intervention, Rehnquist dies of anaplastic thyroid cancer on 3 September 2005,” Eric said. “He has less than five years of life remaining. It’s an aggressive cancer. Obliging him to be hospitalized and sidelined from his life’s work for even two months at this point is an action that should not be taken lightly.”

I considered. “Fair enough.”

Eric nodded. “Let’s turn to the means.”

I reached into my pocket and extracted a vial. “This will trigger all the symptoms of a stroke, which will continue on and off for about two months, but it won’t be a stroke. There will be no lasting damage.”

“May I?” Eric reached for the vial. I gave it to him. It was made of plastic as tough as steel, so there was no chance of it breaking. And I had two backup vials in different parts of my clothing, in case Eric wanted to get nasty and lose this one.

Eric held it up to the light. “Good thing there are no customs inspectors at time-travel portals,” he said and smiled.

“That’s more or less your job, isn’t it?” I replied.

“True.”

“When can I have your decision?” There was not much more for us to talk about.

“This is a very difficult matter,” Eric replied.

“I know.”

“Mixed potential consequences for society, plus it’s always a problem when you diminish anyone’s life.”

I knew all of this and saw no point in rehashing. Nonetheless—“You want to talk about this more? You need more time to think about it? There are only two days until the Supreme Court’s decision is announced.”

He shook his head slowly. “You made your points clearly enough. No need for further conversation. I have just one final question for you, and then I’ll give you my decision.”

I looked at him.

“Why did you lie to Ian about the purpose of this trip being personal? It was more than the money. I need you to be truthful with me.”

I saw no advantage in further deception at this point. “I was concerned that he might not have sold me this trip to 2000 Washington if he knew its real purpose.”

“And yet here we are discussing precisely that purpose of this trip.”

“Yes.”

Eric sighed. “That’s the way it is about time travel and truth. No matter how hard you try to disguise or avoid it, when you travel through time the truth sooner or later jumps up through the floor board and bites you.”

Ian was a businessman; this guy apparently was a philosopher.

“My answer is yes,” Eric said.

I exhaled slowly. “I—”

“No need to be so relieved,” Eric said. “It’s in the itinerary. It says we make every effort to accommodate the time traveler’s goal. And in difficult, close decisions, we side with the time traveler, not with conflicting historical situations or moral principles. It’s part of Ian’s commitment—which also includes delivering the contents of this vial not to the personal relation you lied to Ian about, but to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.”

I wondered why Eric didn’t tack on some penalty payment for what must have been the far more difficult task of triggering a faux stroke in the Chief Justice, but I decided not to press my luck with this conversation. For all I knew, Ian would be insisting on an additional hefty payment when I returned his vest. “How are you going to do that? You know someone close to the Chief Justice? A law clerk?” I had researched two excellent possible agents. For all I knew, Eric would be enlisting one or both of them. If not, or if Eric’s special delivery failed to get to Rehnquist for any reason, I still had just enough time to use one of the vials I had in my pockets. But it made sense to let Eric do the heavy lifting. If his plan was to betray me, he could do that even if I walked out of here and told him I could take care of this myself.

Eric smiled. “You know I can’t reveal those details.”

I was hoping Eric might have offered a room to me in his brownstone—I would have liked to have kept an eye on him and the proceedings—but no such luck, and it was not in the itinerary. I settled for a room in a comfortable hotel and stayed focused on the television.

The news came through the next morning. Rehnquist was stricken, not clear as yet if he could continue on Bush v. Gore. I had researched this carefully. The case would be argued before the Court today, December 11, 2000. Had Rehnquist been stricken earlier, he might well have temporarily mustered enough strength to hear and decide this case. Getting the fast-acting pseudo-stroke inducer to him early in the morning was cutting it very close and left little room for error, but there was no other way.

More good news on the television: Rehnquist would not be hearing the Bush v. Gore arguments today and would not be participating in the decision. The court reporter on CNN explained that, in view of the importance of the case, the Court would have wanted to wait until Rehnquist was better and could sit with them for the decision. But given the urgency of rendering a decision in time for the electoral college meeting on December 18—the “safe harbor” for determining the electors having already been set as December 12—the Court had no choice but to go ahead with the proceedings without Rehnquist. I of course had no definite knowledge of how any of this would play out in the Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, only hopes and expectations. The good result wasn’t part of history I knew, the history I wanted to change. It was happening for the first time, due to my intervention, or, more precisely, Eric’s getting the contents of the vial into Rehnquist. I watched with intense attention. I ate, drank, paced as I watched this primitive television. I kept half an eye on it as I went to the bathroom. The light from the two-dimensional screen hurt my eyes. But what I was seeing on the screen made me increasingly happy.

I slept fitfully with the television on. I showered and put on fresh clothes the next morning. After what seemed an eternity, but was only a matter of hours, the announcement was made: the Court had split 4-4 on the decision. Exactly the same as with the original 5-4 decision in favor of Bush, stopping the Florida recount, but with Rehnquist out if it. The split decision meant the Florida high court decision requiring the recount would be left standing. The recount would resume.

I ordered a celebratory meal from room service. The steak wasn’t as good as in my time, too many antibiotics or whatever in this beef, but I enjoyed every bite of it anyway. Everything was falling into place. Bill Clinton addressed the nation in the evening. He thanked the Court for its wise decision and wished the Chief Justice a speedy recovery. The Florida recount was complete and certified the next morning: Gore won the state by 1,731 votes. I wanted to go out onto the streets of Washington and tell the world what I had done. I wanted to be hoisted on the shoulders of a grateful populace and cheered for my daring, trumpets blaring. But I knew better. Staying in the hotel room, interacting with as few people as possible, was part of the necessary regimen, written in big letters all over the itinerary.

Bush conceded the next morning—December 14, 2000, a day after Gore had conceded in my history, because Bush had to wait for the recount. Gore made a gracious, conciliatory speech in the afternoon. I called Eric to thank him but received no answer. I left no message.

I still had some money left. I ordered another good dinner, the best bottle of wine on the menu, and went to bed early. I had a train to catch, back to New York and my time, a better time than it had been, tomorrow morning.

I don’t know what I had expected to see at Union Station the next morning, but it was great. Gore’s victory headlined on every newspaper, broadcast on every radio, telling me this was real, real, real! I savored my eggs over easy and looked at the passersby. Truthfully, they seemed no happier than when I had arrived a few days earlier, when the results of the election were still in doubt. Maybe that was because half the country was Republican. I didn’t really care. I had no idea whether these people would have seemed happier or sadder had the outcome gone the other way, with Bush the winner, before I had stepped in and made the change. All I knew is that I was happier, because I knew what would have been. For that matter, if I understood how time travel worked, the only people who would know that there had once been a reality in which George W. Bush had been made the winner by the Supreme Court in 2000 would be me, Ian, and the people in Ian’s organization. As a part of the reality that had changed this reality, we and we alone would retain knowledge of the original Bush-wins world, as I did right now.

I finished my eggs and coffee—a little too acidic for my future tastes—and proceeded to the boarding gate. I patted my vest for what must have been the twentieth time, to make sure it was on. I would soon be back in New York. I knew there could be no guarantees about the consequences of changing the past, but—

“You seem very happy today, sir,” the wom-an collecting the tickets at the gate said to me.

I broadened my smile. “Thank you. I am.”

I walked to my train. Interestingly, the Acela—direct precursor, two models removed, from the Tricela in my time—had commenced regular service on this line just a few days ago. It would have been fun to ride it, but the itinerary called for the older Metroliner, which would continue in service until 2006.

I sat in my reserved seat by the window, with an empty seat next to me in the aisle. I assumed Irene would soon be joining me, but recalled from the trip down that I wasn’t supposed to look for any of the escorts Ian had provided for me. I half closed my eyes, put my head back, and saw a purple sweater and a smile. “Irene,” I said and smiled back up at her.

She took the seat. “So it went well,” she said.

I nodded.

“I bet you can’t wait to see how your world’s changed in the future,” she said.

“That, and a decent cup of coffee,” I replied.

“People who don’t know any better think everything tasted better in the past,” Irene said. “Not true. Depends on the time. The year 2000 is still a while before complete genetic engineering kicked in and the age of artificial ingredients washed out.”

“Yeah.” I’d been thinking of getting a cup of Amtrak coffee. Maybe not. But I was tired. I’d gotten at best one night’s sleep in the past few days, on the night before I’d boarded the Tricela in New York City.

“We’ve got about two hours until your departure at Trenton,” Irene said. “I won’t take it personally if you take a nap.”

I hesitated. “I don’t know if I like the idea of falling sound asleep on a public train, in a time not my own. I don’t know if that makes any sense—”

“It makes perfect sense,” Irene said. “You’re wise to be cautious. That’s part of my job. To make sure no harm comes to you.”

“And I do no harm to others.”

She nodded.

I patted my vest and closed my eyes but didn’t sleep. I daydreamed instead, about taking off that purple sweater, which was brushing softly against my arm. I switched from Irene to Ilene, from plum to lilac, and then to what I thought each looked like with nothing on at all. I led them to the bed in my hotel room. I thought I liked Ilene a little better. No, I liked them both. I was still in a celebratory mood.

I took my leave of Irene a little south of Trenton and walked to the Metroliner’s café car. Irene had gone over the drill with me one more time. It was the same as on the trip down. I stepped into the vestibule at the back of the car, in the appointed place. This time the café was empty. The train clanked against the tracks, keeping pace with my pulse, and—

I got kissed again by the cosmos, a kiss far sweeter than even the ones in my daydreams. I opened my eyes, which had shut momentarily, involuntarily, and saw a leaner train. The ride was smoother, the contours around me more cleanly defined.

I looked down the corridor. A lilac sweater and sparkling eyes approached me. But I could see something more than sparkle in those eyes as Ilene got closer, and she was not smiling. For the first time in this trip I felt sick.

“How could that happen?” I had asked her this five times already.

“Please, don’t shout,” Ilene said, looking around the train car. “Attracting attention won’t help any of us.”

I shook my head. I had done all I could do not to scream even louder. Fortunately, there were few people in this car, and most seemed asleep or entwined in their gossamer headphones. I didn’t really care—

“Here, sit with me, let’s talk,” Ilene said soothingly, and gestured to a seat by the window.

“You still haven’t given me an answer,” I said. I took the seat.

She sat down next to me. “That’s because I really don’t know. Please believe me.”

There was a downy soft screen in front of each of us. I punched up Wikipedia on mine and went to “George Walker Bush . . . served as the 43rd President of the United States from 2001 to 2009. . . . ” I clenched my fist and managed to punch just the cushion above the screen.

“I wouldn’t lie to you about that,” Ilene said. “I don’t blame you for being furious.”

“The recount had gone to Gore before I left,” I said. “How did this happen?”

Ilene shook her head.

“How long have you known about it?”

“All of my life,” she said. “The itinerary explains how that works. For me, George W. Bush was always President back then. Our history texts explain all about the recount, and how the Supreme Court stopped that—”

“And I stopped that Supreme Court!”

“I know,” Ilene said. “I know. A part of me, a small part of me, remembers that you had indeed changed that. But—”

I looked at her. Her lilac sweater and agate-gray eyes were no longer so appealing. I started to stand. “Would you mind getting out of my way? You’re no help to me here.”

Ilene stood but didn’t move. “There’s nothing you can do down in Wilmington. Trust me.”

“I don’t trust you,” I said with controlled raw anger. “But maybe I trust this process, a little. I know the weave in the vest was programmed to work only on the specified date. But maybe—”

“It won’t work now,” Ilene said.

Her deadpan tone was convincing. I didn’t care.

“And if you leave now, I’ll have to call the authorities. And if I don’t put a call in to Ian soon, he’ll call the authorities.”

“A fine operation you run here,” I said. “You take my money and . . . at very least, Ian owes me a complete refund and a big explanation.”

“That’s your only real option,” Ilene said.

“Taking it up with Ian?”

She nodded.

“How do I know he’ll even be there, in the Bronx?”

“I can call him right now,” Ilene said. “And I can come with you to see him. Right after we get off of this train. I won’t leave your sight.”

That was as much to keep an eye on me as my keeping an eye on her, I knew.

“You can take this up with Ian,” Ilene said again. “He’ll know things about this that I do not.”

It occurred to me, after I’d sat in edgy silence next to Ilene for at least fifteen minutes, that maybe the screen in front of me had been programmed by her or Ian to give me the George Walker Bush bad news, which wasn’t in fact the truth, for whatever twisted reasons Ian may have had.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I said and rose. “Is that all right with you?”

“I’ll have to accompany you, at least to the door,” Ilene said.

“Next stop, Newark,” the train’s voice announced.

We walked to the bathroom at the front of the car. “Okay, I was lying,” I told Ilene. “I want to see what Wikipedia says on another screen.”

“No problem,” Ilene said. She pointed to an empty seat and the computer screen in front of it.

“Let’s walk forward a few cars,” I said. “That okay with you?”

She nodded.

I picked an empty seat, suddenly, in the middle of the next car and punched up Wikipedia on the screen. I got the same infuriating words about George W. Bush.

Ilene looked at me. “There would be nothing in it for Ian or me to lie to you about this.”

“I still haven’t gotten over wondering what was in it for you and Ian to lie to me about this whole expensive trip in the first place,” I said.

“I didn’t lie to you,” Ilene said.

I thought I saw, maybe, a tear in her eye.

“You want to check another screen?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“If you saw the same on every screen, that still would not be absolute proof that George W. Bush was President and what you did was reversed,” Ilene said quietly. “For all you know, Ian could have gotten to every outlet on this train.”

“I know,” I said tiredly. “For all I know, Ian could have hacked into every computer in New York City.” The truth was that I didn’t know what to think.

“He didn’t,” Ilene said. “Of that, I’m pretty sure. But that’s why I think your only recourse is to talk directly to Ian—he said he’ll be waiting for us.”

The MetroNorth spur left us about a block and a half from Ian’s. We walked quickly to the glowing neon sign on the second story above the dry cleaner’s on Johnson Avenue. Ian opened the door and invited us in.

“I don’t usually do business so early,” he said without much of a smile. It was 2:20 in the afternoon.

I glared at him. “You—”

“You’d like me to explain what happened, I know,” Ian said. “I can tell you that Eric did exactly as instructed. The pseudo-stroke inducer was administered. The Chief Justice was stricken and the Court decided the case without him, and the recount in Florida continued, making Gore the winner.”

“I know that—” I said.

“He knows that—” Ilene said at the same time.

“You got exactly what was promised in the itinerary,” Ian interrupted us both. “No less, no more.”

“That’s no answer,” I said. I pounded my fist on the counter. I spoke quietly but was even more furious than I was on the train. “I want to know how it came to be that Bush became President, even though, as you say, Gore was the winner.”

Ian regarded me.

“I want to know, in other words, how it is that even though I got exactly what was promised in the itinerary, the state of reality now is precisely the opposite of what I was promised, as if what I was promised never came to be.”

I could feel Ilene looking at me. I was 100 percent sure that if I made any kind of hostile move toward Ian, she’d be on me with who knows what kind of weapon. My fist on the counter had put her on the verge. This was no doubt also the reason that she had accompanied me here.

“You’re not our only customer,” Ian said.

“What?”

“You’re not the only person who wants to travel to the past to right some wrong, real or imagined. You’ve got historical sympathies for the Democrats? There are just as many who feel the same way about the Republicans. Maybe more, since the Republicans are no longer around.”

“And—”

“You’re a smart guy. Figure it out. We’re a business. Equal opportunity for our customers.”

I thought for a moment and realized just what he was saying. “You’re telling me—”

“That’s right,” Ian said. “I booked a trip for someone to go back and undo what you did.”

I had all I could do not to wring Ian’s throat. Not to smash whatever weapon Ilene produced, smash it right out of her hand, and pummel Ian—but I controlled myself. “I swear to God I’m going to take you to court and sue you for every dollar you’ve got. You gave me a contract, the itinerary. You can’t just—”

Now Ian smiled slightly. “First of all, be my guest. Take me to any court you like. No one will believe you. Even if they did, you’ll find none has jurisdiction. Second, I didn’t violate your itinerary in the slightest. You’ve read it. It has no non-compete clause.”

“So,” I was practically sputtering, “you sell trips to the past to people who want to change the past, and then turn around and sell trips to people who want to undo the changes? That’s how you conduct this business?”

“Not all of this business, no,” Ian replied.

“I’m not getting you,” I said.

“Clause 37,” Ilene spoke. “This is the first time I’ve seen it invoked like this.”

“There is no 37,” I said. I knew my damned itinerary by heart. It had only thirty-six clauses.

“Not in your itinerary, no,” Ian said.

“There are other packages?”

“Yes, more expensive,” Ian replied.

I was beginning to understand. “The societal itinerary?”

“That’s right,” Ian said. “Our societal packages come with a Clause 37, which commits us to not selling a trip to any individual intent on undoing the societal change intended in the original itinerary.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”

“You lied to me. I asked you the purpose of your trip. You flat-out lied to me and said it was personal, not societal. So I gave you the personal contract.”

“You punished me for lying?”

“That’s not the way we see it,” Ian said. “You got personal enjoyment out of your trip—you had the time of your life back there, just thinking that you had changed history, didn’t you? That’s what you paid for, and that’s exactly what you received. No more, no less.”

I also understood something else. “And you had no big problem with my lying, with my getting the contract without the clause; didn’t even charge me for the extra work Eric did with my target being a public figure like Rehnquist, because you knew you’d be able to sell a second trip to someone who wanted to undo what I did.”

“I’m a businessman,” Ian said.

“But I still care about the history . . . okay, exactly what would it cost me to go back a second time and undo what was undone . . . or . . . but I guess the Clause 37 in the contract that succeeded mine wouldn’t allow that.”

“That’s right,” Ian said. “It’s in effect a clause that makes a trip to change something of societal importance in the past a one-time-only event, or a part of history that we allow to be changed only once. It’s the only way we can maintain some modicum of sanity in these circumstances. Otherwise, we’d be losing our minds with history changing back and forth, back and forth, ad infinitum. As you know, we here at Ian’s maintain memories of all the histories—”

“I know.” My mind was speeding through possibilities. “But maybe I could still purchase another trip, one which would have nothing directly to do with the 2000 election. But one which would still have the same ultimate effect. Like if I did something to make George Bush the father lose the 1988 election for President, or—”

“But I couldn’t sell you a trip like that, if you told me that was its ultimate purpose.” And now Ian was smiling, almost fully, for the first time.

“I understand,” I said.

“And a trip like that would be very expensive,” Ian said. “Societal, and earlier than the twenty-first century. Could you afford it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I know one way of reducing the cost,” Ilene said, looking tentatively at Ian.

Ian nodded slightly. “Your middle name is Isidor, is it not?” he asked me.

“Yes, but I never use it.”

“Think about using it,” Ian said. “We give a 50 percent discount to employees.”

Copyright © 2011 Paul Levinson

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NOVELETTES

Balm of Hurt Minds

Thomas R. Dulski

“For some must watch, while some must sleep So runs the world away.”

Shakespeare
Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

Reflecting Pool News Service:

The recent recall of the sleep-aid Somnomol has raised a number of questions in regard to both drug regulation and international patent law. Eighteen months ago Somnomol was introduced with much fanfare and a multi-billion-dollar advertising campaign by Compcare Pharmaceuticals, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Fidelis Group of holding companies. Somnomol was sold as an over-the-counter sleeping pill purported to be uniquely free of the dangers of both over-dosage and drug dependency. Moreover, Somnomol was the first sleep-aid product to offer precisely timed periods of sleep, based on a one-pill or two-pill dosage instruction. Government testing programs conducted over a three-year period prior to the drug’s release supported the company’s claims, and recently contacted officials affirmed that no new negative findings have been uncovered. Company administrators have asserted that the recall of Somnomol was strictly a corporate economic decision. However, several consumer advocacy groups in this country and abroad have recently raised issues concerning the drug’s safety. Dr. Adrian B. Evans of the New York-based UNERCO Institute, which initially tested Somnomol, was subpoenaed to testify before a closed-door session of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee. However, no further action by the U.S. Congress is anticipated.

I

It was a one-note, resonant cry—loud, but not shrill, echoing, somehow searching and unfinished—quite unlike any other birdcall. Tomma Lee Evans studied the holo-image as it glided across her theater table, flapping its wings just once to soar over a city nightscape. As the dark shape passed each glowing window, the lights winked out. It was spreading a blanket of sleep over the high-rise complexes. The music swelled softly as the word “Somnomol” materialized over the darkening metropolis. Once more the cry of the now distant bird was heard and then the muted, confident male baritone: “Sleep without worry or dependence. Comforting, restful sleep.”

Tomma Lee paused the commercial and sipped at a now-cold espresso, relishing the bitter flood on her tongue. McDermott had quit unexpectedly, and Cliff had saddled her with the extra job of writing the “Doc Challenger” consumer advocate column. It was a popular feature, but Tomma Lee had no affection for McDermott’s folksy style—and now she would have to mimic it. With a few clicks she superimposed Rod McDermott’s unfinished copy on the frozen cityscape:

Doc’s Corner:

Over the years, we’ve had the rooster, the teddy bear, and the Luna moth as Big Pharma’s symbols for new sleeping pills. Now it looks like some ad agency has doctored-up what we used to call a nighthawk as the emblem for a product called “Somnomol.” They’re not hawks, and they don’t just fly at night, but some Madison Avenue types must have figured folks might associate that loud “peent!” with bedtime. I know I did as a kid when we’d sit on the back porch on summer nights listening to those little birds calling as they feasted on mosquitoes and other nocturnal bugs. At any rate, it’s just possible this new logo might be standing for something really new. This pill company makes some pretty startling claims. Now, personally, I’ve found that an honest day of hard work was all I ever needed to get my forty winks . . .

Tomma Lee wrinkled her nose. It was a throw-away piece with no particular research behind it. Somnomol was forecast to be a big money-maker even before they launched their media blitz. McDermitt hadn’t intended to rock that boat beyond his usual harangue about artificially created medical needs. She drained the demitasse and set it down with a clatter on the table edge, just below the luminous text. The current time glowed next to the saucer edge. It was well past midnight. Tomma Lee rubbed her eyes and yawned. The late afternoon launch of lunar dome components from the Vostochny Cosmodrome was scheduled in another hour and she wanted to capture some video for a story she’d written on the newest class of Russian Angara heavy- lift rockets. She got up from the sofa and fixed herself another double espresso, peering out at the twinkling Seattle skyline between parted drapes as the steam hissed from the machine.

She realized that being a staff writer for a feature web journal had its advantages once she had learned to keep crazy hours and sleep in daylight. Ninety-percent of her research, interviews, and writing could be done in her apartment, but tomorrow Cliff had called a meeting and the text had been explicit: “Not a Teleconference! BE THERE!” Tomma Lee stirred a packet of sweetener and a curl of lemon zest into the steaming foam and carried the tiny cup and saucer back to the couch. She frowned again at the folksy wisdom of “Doc Challenger,” then on an impulse reduced the text and cycled back to the start of the commercial.

The table filled with a darkened bedroom. A young couple in bed; the man sleeping peacefully, the woman wide wake, staring into space as a clock ticked loudly. Low register strings—cellos and bass viols—as the baritone narration begins: “Afraid to take a sleep-aid, afraid you’ll oversleep, feel groggy all day?” The window is throwing a rectangle of light across the foot of the bed. A moving shadow—a bird in flight—moves across the blanket, accompanied by its reverberating one-note cry. Then again the male voice: “Somnomol now brings you dependable, precisely timed, refreshing sleep with no next-day effects.” The woman’s eyelids flutter and close. A smile forms on her lips. “Somnomol is the first sleep-aid that is dosage calibrated. Each pill brings you four hours of precisely timed, rest-giving sleep. Somnomol is not habit-forming—use it as often or as little as you like. There is no danger of overdosage since the body does not respond to more than two pills consumed in any twenty-four-hour period.” The scene now backs away from the sleeping couple. There is a rapid fade to the cityscape. The bird is swooping down lighted canyons of high-rise buildings as a swath of darkness follows it.

Tomma Lee listened for its final echoing cry, then dialed up a bleak plain in southeastern Russia—the new launch complex, designed to replace Baikonur. She tucked her legs under her and sipped espresso, watching boil-off vapors from an eight-inch rocket drift toward the table edge.

* * *

II

Tomma Lee bicycled to work after noting a forecast for another day free of rain. She had tossed and turned for an hour after making it to bed at 4 A.M., then had been startled awake by the 7:30 chime she had set. A cool breeze was now dispelling the mental cobwebs as she glided past streams of Seattle’s health-conscious joggers. The Murdock-Gates Building was a few blocks away from the venerable Space Needle. She passed under the aging monorail and pedaled up a curved ramp to an already crowded bike rack. She hopped off with a sprightliness she didn’t feel and walked the bicycle to a short line, filling the remaining spaces. She waved back absently at a coworker just entering at the main entrance glass doors. It had been Avery, the new trainee in photography, who was young, horny, and a little too friendly. Inside at the elevators she was glad to see that he hadn’t waited for her. But at the sixteenth floor, as she stepped out, she noted with a grimace that he was waiting for her in the reception area under the bas relief plaque depicting a nude Narcissus contemplating his image in a still pond. Avery grinned boyishly beneath the publication’s logo. “Going to morning exercises, Tomma Lee?” he asked.

It had been “Miss Evans” only a few days ago—a formality she much preferred from him.

“No, the coffee urn.”

“Let me buy you one,” he said, beaming.

The morning wire services were full of Silly Season stuff. Tomma Lee rapidly scanned the stories from one of the pop-up terminals as a few other early-arriving staffers dribbled into the meeting room. Some stringer in New England was peddling ghost stories—people hearing voices—but it was a little too soon for Halloween features. Twins had been born at the lunar north polar base. There was some video of an Angora kitten in free fall. Tomma Lee tapped her teeth with a stylus. Cliff would want something substantial from her for next week’s Our Times column. She dialed for another service and found more of the same fluff: A California man wants to marry his dog; the U.S. President to present the National Healthy Weight Loss Award. . . . Here was something: Holy Alliance issues a webcast denouncing the Neighbors as the UN’s satanic partner.

Tomma Lee frowned at the screen image. The Neighbors were not photogenic, but they made good copy. Cliff was already scrawling something about the Neighbors on the cleverboard at the front of the room, and so it wasn’t rocket science that this could tie in nicely. She saved the story to her ID.

Cliff Barnes was totally occupied with a list of names and assignments, pausing for a moment with the light pen at his hip, then scribbling rapidly. It was the work schedule for a special issue. Tomma Lee noted that her name had not been added yet.

Two sports writers sat down, laughing about something from last night’s Ironman semi-finals. The entertainment editor was typing and sipping a canned cola. The room was filling now. A bunch of people were absorbed in phone conversations and the noise level was rising rapidly. The new political editor, Alex Fincke, was the last in. He was young but razor sharp, Tomma Lee had discovered. An interesting guy with just enough intelligent wit and sarcasm to maybe someday get himself in trouble with Cliff and the powers above him.

Cliff pulled the door closed with a significant click, and the murmur of voices dimmed and ceased. The entertainment editor folded his screen. Cliff had his usual disheveled look as he turned to them—shirt opened at the collar, loosened tie, sleeves rolled, and a salt-and-pepper mustache that could use a trim.

“Morning, people,” he said. “Before we get into the grind I want to thank you all for the work you did on the Street Drugs feature in the March 2 issue. Rumors are strong that we’re up for a Pulitzer on that. If we get it, I’m dedicating it to all of you.”

Tomma Lee remembered the piece she’d done on the new hallucinogen “Chinese Superman” and the political connections she’d uncovered between three far eastern countries and certain members of the U.S. Congress. Barnes had been scared shitless and almost suppressed it.

Cliff started pacing in front of the still incomplete outline. “Hard news is slow this week, so we’re going to use the lull for a big special issue spread on the Neighbors.” Muffled groans came from several people. “I know, I know, it’s all been done before by us and a dozen other journals, but we’re approaching a twenty-year anniversary with those guys. Everybody’s going to be doing a feature on it, but we’ll be the first. We want to cover the history—from the first radio telemetry that SETI picked up in the ’20s when the Hive entered the Oort Cloud. Jason, I’m counting on you to give us a nice opening spread with audio and visuals from the archives. Ken and Tammy, you’re covering the science stuff,” Cliff said, pointing to his scrawl on the board. “Remember to keep it down to ninth-grade level. We got e-mails on that topology piece you guys did last month. Alex, you’re covering political history—the UN Exo-Relations Committee, UNERCO’s internal squabbles, the bidding war for Neighborly gifts.

Cliff regarded his still incomplete list on the glowing cleverboard. “I’ll cover the current political scene in my Reflections editorial. I want Annie on the light humor side—maybe something on the physical size of the Hive ship. No insecticide jokes. See what the art department can come up with for a political cartoon.” Annie was scribbling furiously on a notescreen. She was new, but she was good.

Cliff looked around the room. “Tomma Lee, I’m depending on you to come up with a big human/Neighbor interest story we can headline on our homepage. And people, I’m still expecting all the standard features—sports, business, entertainment—with whatever kind of ‘Neighbors-cast’ you can lend to the basic info.” Cliff jotted some illegible marks on the board and tucked the light pen behind an ear. “Friday deadline for features, Sunday noon for all news. For God’s sake, don’t make us wait for you!” He turned and waved an end to the meeting. “That’s it then. Good luck!”

As the staff began streaming out of the room, Cliff motioned to Tomma Lee as she was getting up. “Just wanted to give you a heads-up,” he said. “That rich guy, Friel, is just back from some pow-wow at the Hive. If you’re looking for a lead he may have something for you. And doesn’t your ex work with them too? You might . . .”

Tomma Lee forced a smile but ignored the ex-husband remark. “N. Joel Friel? The Americas Cup guy?”

Cliff snapped off the cleverboard. “That’s him. I hear he’s full of Neighbors stories. He might agree to an interview. Try the Fidelis Group home office, or . . . Wait a minute, I just might have the number of his executive secretary.” Cliff relit the board and began scrolling through a file of phone numbers.

III

Margaret Cunningham took a secret pleasure in the isolation that her odd behavior had thrust upon her. The local ladies had all warned their children not to venture into her yard, and as a result she had the only untrodden flowerbed in her little corner of a small Charleston suburb.

She surveyed the undisturbed rows of zinnias and marigolds and smiled to herself. She was thinking of Louis again, talking to him as if he were still with her. There was nothing wrong with that, she told herself. When you live with a man for forty years it’s not easy to stop talking to him. If her lips moved once in a while . . . Well, if people didn’t like it that was fine with her.

What a gorgeous day! A beautiful high sky. God’s in his heaven. That’s what you used to say on a day like this. God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.

Mrs. Cunningham knelt down and felt the yielding earth cushion her aching knees. Carefully, she plucked an intruding weed from between the flower rows.

Peg, you know sometimes I think that you believe those flowers are your children.

A bee was nosing along one of the rows. She could just hear its faint buzz. Out in the street a van rushed past the gate with a faint electric whine.

It had been the long, unspoken sadness between them—the child they never had. They had both pretended that it didn’t matter until they were both too old.

You know, Peg, I never told a story. I mean, sometimes I imagine myself telling some kid a bedtime story. Isn’t it funny, the odd things you think about?

Tell me a story, Louis.

He never did, though.

Mrs. Cunningham wiped her forehead with her arm. It was going to be another hot late September day. The air held a stillness that promised another relentless afternoon. She should get a watering can and a sunbonnet. As she started to rise from the ground a mild dizziness brought her back to her knees.

They’re following me! Please help!, a strange voice said.

Mrs. Cunningham looked around, but there was no intruder in the yard.

They’re everywhere! Hide me!

The dizziness was passing. “Go away!” she said aloud. “You’re not Louis!”

IV

Tomma Lee was at her seldom-used cubicle punching up video of one of Noel Joel Friel’s news conferences. He had a young but deeply tanned and weather-beaten face that contrasted with a blond mane and goatee, and was sporting a white, toothy grin. There was an anchor tattoo on his bare right forearm, which was wrapped around the oily carapace of an alien monstrosity. Tomma Lee couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something sinister about the image that went beyond its shocking contrasts. She had spent an hour reading at length about Friel’s special relationship with the Neighbors, and how his cartel’s sealed bids at the United Nations had won the development rights to most of the technological gifts the aliens had offered to the human race. Tomma Lee was keenly aware that Cliff was not looking for another journalistic crusade, but her palms itched—a sure sign that there was a hidden story buried here.

She was pondering a notion, wondering if her professionalism outweighed her personal feelings, but knowing that it always did. And yet this would be opening old wounds. Reluctantly, but from bitter memory, she typed the UNERCO Institute number.

Adrian’s lab phone directed the call to another number, and with a click she heard music and laughter. “Tomma Lee!” the familiar voice acknowledged. “I can’t open video right now—I’m not exactly dressed.” A woman’s laugh punctuated the brief silence. It was 2 P.M. on the east coast.

She fought the instinct to hang up. “Adrian, I’ve got some questions for an article. When can we talk?”

There were five seconds of dead air; he’d hit a mute key. When sound returned the music was subdued. “Tomma Lee, you’re looking good. Listen, I want to talk, but give me half an hour.” A female giggle near the mic. “Look, I’ll call—thirty minutes, I promise.” The circuit closed.

Well, he was getting his end wet again somewhere. Adrian had never been discerning about who, when, or where. Tomma Lee had badgered him into a marriage—was it almost a decade ago?—in the vain hope that it would end his profligate ways. But it had hardly slowed him down. Adrian had turned a teenage vasectomy into a lifetime of promiscuity. He’d been shooting blanks since the age of eighteen and anything young and female was a potential target. Their marriage had held together for almost five years, until Tomma Lee had let it end in a cheap no-fault divorce when his shallow “I don’t really care if you believe me” lies had become intolerable. She’d moved across country, leaving a great job at the New Yorker to write features for the Reflecting Pool, just to make the cleanest break with Adrian.

Tomma Lee slumped in the office chair, staring at the cluttered homepage screen. The really sad part was the contrast between his brain and his morals. Adrian was lying pond scum encased in a brilliant intellect. He’d published the first definitive studies of several of the Neighbor’s technological gifts—the genetic code restructuring that had nearly ended the threat of cancer and autoimmune disease, the catalyzed fusion power source that was making Middle East oil an economic irrelevancy (even as it had engendered an unholy Holy Alliance). Adrian was even modest about it all, more concerned with diddling some nubile floozy than receiving the Presidential Science Medal.

Tomma Lee struggled with her feelings as she drummed her fingers on the desktop. Then with a sigh she evoked a specialized crawler to harvest web data on the intersection of Friel, the Neighbors, and her ex. Seconds later a huge file dropped out. Over a terabyte. Too big to even scan, she tried several qualifiers, but nothing manageable emerged. Finally, due to a half-conscious memory of an old news story or perhaps because of that sleep-aid commercial she typed “sleep.” Instantly, about five hundred kilobytes of text and video loaded. One of the earliest entries was a decade old: An LA Times article used as back-page filler:

* * *

Institute Scientist Reveals:

Aliens Don’t Sleep

In a report published in Science this week UNERCO Institute scientist Adrian Evans described yet another startling discovery about the reclusive visitors who have maintained an orbiting habitat above the Earth’s atmosphere for the last decade. “We were quite surprised by the revelation,” Dr. Evans commented at a press conference yesterday. “It had always been assumed that the Neighbors’ physiology allowed for some regular period of dormancy, such as that required by all forms of animal life on Earth. In higher animals on this planet, sleep is required to reset brain function and to allow the body to repair itself. Apparently, the Neighbors have evolved a more efficient means of accomplishing similar ends.” In a related development N. Joel Friel, the scion of the Fidelis cartel that has been frequently selected to exploit “Neighborly Gifts” under the UN proviso, announced the initiation of a cooperative study of human sleep disorders involving his company’s Compcare Pharmaceuticals division and the UNERCO Institute.

Tomma Lee filed the ten-year-old copy, then dialed the San Diego number Cliff had given her. The receptionist was a pretty simulacrum and within minutes an even prettier real-life amanuensis was on the screen. “Mr. Friel prefers a face-to-face interview,” she said after a brief hold. “We’re only an hour away. Can I have our pilot pick you up tomorrow morning?”

V

Joseph Greyfox was the only full-blooded Navajo on the payroll of Southern Arizona Power and Light. Right now he was fighting with the old panel truck’s second gear and swearing mildly under his breath. There had been servomotor trouble at the Yuma Solar Boiler, and he was on his way home after sixteen hours on the job.

Joe squinted through the dust-coated windshield at the gathering darkness. The transmission line towers with their gently sagging cables were being endlessly sketched against the desert sunset, and the effect was mildly hypnotic.

Joe blinked, and with a subtle twist of his aching wrist and arm he wrestled the truck into third gear. The antiquated transmission groaned in submission, then the engine smoothed out. “Christ!” he muttered, “they give us this shit to drive while the engineers tool around in new hydroelectrics.” But he was too tired to be really annoyed. His muscles were trembling from climbing ladders all day, and he needed some sleep.

The interstate was nearly devoid of traffic, except for an occasional massive tractor-trailer that would roar out of the dim grayness in the opposing lane, then disappear into the gathering dark behind. Most had their headlights on. It was growing visibly darker now in the west, and Joe found the panel truck’s lights. Some thunderheads seemed to be rolling in over the mountains. It might rain within the next hour.

At times like this, during the long drive home from a job, Joe would find himself captured by the desert tableaux, thinking about his distant ancestors and the time when this land had been theirs. The desert and the mountains hadn’t changed, not in any fundamental way, except for the thin thread of transmission cable and a few streaks of highway. He had seen it from the company helicopters. It could be a moonscape or the baked side of Mercury, but it was Mother Earth. And down here life went on. The prairie dogs still sniffed the wind from the top of their mounds, and the giant saguaro cactus still stretched their ghostly arms. What had changed long ago was that it was no longer the home of his people. It had all been decided centuries ago, before his great-grandfather had been born. The birthright to the land had been lost. Now you had to prove yourself just to belong. The alternative was shame, emptiness, and a wasted life.

Joe thought of the old men in the Yucca Bar, drinking away the afternoons in the air-conditioned dimness, telling each other lies and gambling. Each one concealing some hurt for which there was no name. His father had been one of them.

A suborbital liner was etching a contrail across the sky toward the approaching storm.

So you play the game, Joe thought. You hope, maybe they accept you.

The contrail merged into the dark thunderheads, probably headed for a bumpy ride into LAX.

Please don’t hit me again!

“I didn’t hit you!” Joe said—a sleep-starved reflex, before he realized it had been a voice in his head. He squinted into the darkening landscape. He was losing it, dreaming in a half-conscious state. Hang on, he told himself, gripping the steering wheel with suddenly sweating palms.

I love you! Don’t hit me! It was a pleading woman’s voice. Not that slut, Briana, who had rifled his wallet. He’d never hit her, although he wanted to. That was a month ago. He was dreaming. He felt a tremor run down his arms. My brother will kill you!

Joe reached up to his damp forehead to try to stifle the soundless words. “Who are you?” he said aloud.

The jackrabbit came out of nowhere, appearing suddenly in the middle of the road, momentarily paralyzed by the panel truck’s headlights. Joe felt himself braking hard, the rear of the truck fishtailing to the right. Tires screamed against the still hot asphalt. Like a slow-motion dream, he felt himself going backward over the road embankment.

There was a hard bump that slammed his jaws together, then a sickening backward roll. Instinctively, he killed the ignition. There were billows of dust in his headlights, then the airbags exploded around him.

Instantly, the bag pressing against his face began to sag, the translucent plastic drooping across the dash. His head clearing, Joe fought away the air bags and seatbelt and wrenched open the truck door. The panel truck had come to rest against a large rock on the side of a steep drop-off. It was pitched toward the passenger side, so that he had to jump down to get clear of it. His feet sent a small avalanche of rocks and pebbles rolling down the hillside as he scrambled up the slope.

The road was empty and darkness was closing in. I’m sorry! someone said in his head.

VI

Noel Joel Friel helped Tomma Lee onboard the rocking deck of his sleek schooner, the Sand Dollar. Although noticeably older than in the archival video, he was still tanned and muscular. He was in trunks and sandals, the blond goatee outlining his toothy grin.

It had been a brief flight to San Diego in a private suborbital, and the multibillionaire had arranged for a car to bring her down to the Harbor Island marina slip where his racing yacht was moored.

“So, Miss Evans, you’re interested in our friends up there at L5.” Friel motioned to a deck chair and settled into one himself.

Tomma Lee was taken a bit off-guard by Friel’s unexpected grinning bonhomie, conscious of the fact that she was talking to the heir to a purported trillion-dollar empire. She was dressed in conservative walking shorts and a tennis blouse in contrast to his blond hairy informality. It felt awkward, even a bit disturbing, and she wished he would put away that Cheshire smile. She began with what he already knew: “The Reflecting Pool is doing a feature on the Neighbors, and we were hoping you could share some anecdotes . . . ”

Friel produced two cans from a cooler. “Lemonade?”

Tomma Lee shook her head as he snapped a lid, putting away the other can. “I would have thought the press had their fill of Neighbors stories by now, “ he said, sipping deeply.

“We’re looking for a fresh approach,” she said. “In a few months it’ll be twenty years since they set up shop in Earth orbit. There must be stories that haven’t been told.”

Friel rubbed his eyes and then blinked, and she noticed that one pale blue iris was artificial. It didn’t dilate as a passing cloud shielded the morning glare. “You’ll be stealing some of my thunder, you know,” he said, still with that obscene toothy grin. “I was planning a memoir one day. But to be perfectly frank, Miss Evans, I’ll probably never find the time to write it.” He scratched his goatee and took another swallow from the can. “We have several outfits that work closely with the Neighbors, I suppose you know. I oversee a lot of that.”

Outfits, Tomma Lee mused, was shorthand for three multi-national corporations that were all major players in commodity chemicals, insurance, and heavy-lift transport, each with God knew how many smaller spin-offs. Friel’s deceased father had been involved with the UN’s early contact team that had forged the first licensing agreements. The Neighbors’ high-tech gifts to humanity were channeled through UN bureaucracy to private enterprise in sealed-bid auctions. Somehow, Friel père et fils had managed to snag most of the contracts.

“Our people probably have had more contact—I mean close, informal contact—with our friends up there than even the diplomats.” Friel wiped beads of moisture from his hairy chin. “We work with them routinely now. I’ve been up at the Hive more times than I can recall.” He blinked slowly, but the lid on the dead eye only half closed. “The atmosphere in there is not toxic, as some press stories have related, but the odor takes some getting used to. The Neighbors aren’t offended by the use of respirators—I don’t think they would even completely understand the notion—but I’ve forced myself to do without one. As you know, communication is by voice synthesizer because they don’t have a larynx and we don’t have vibratory labial palps. The holo-net images are very good, but they don’t give you the feel of the place—the Hive, I mean.” Friel waved the can expansively. “It’s big—immense by our standards—larger than anything we’ve ever built in space.” He rubbed a shaggy blond eyebrow, staring off at the row of yachts and the bay and Coronado beyond. “There’s large parts of it—a huge central core—that no human has ever seen. I’ve asked about it on quite a few occasions. Even got myself kicked out once for snooping around the periphery of the forbidden areas. It took almost a year to get back in their good graces.”

Tomma Lee remembered the story in the wire dailies a few years back: “Friel Cartel Scion Gets Neighborly Boot.” “That sounds like something we could use,” she said. “Tell me about it.”

Friel turned in his chair with what she regarded as a wolfish expression. “It’s rather a long story—to tell it in detail, I mean. Why don’t we adjourn to a local bistro, and I’ll spin my Neighbor tales over lunch?”

VII

Betty was seventy-four give or take some years, but she felt like she was sixteen when her patch was working. They were little things, like Band-Aids—a transdermal medication the doctors at the free clinic had given her. A pack of one hundred, there were about a dozen left now. She was pushing the rusted shopping cart that contained her worldly goods. The wheels squeaked something awful as she pushed uphill toward San Francisco’s Chinatown. Mr. Wong had promised a meal if she got to the Heavenly Panda before noon, when the lunchtime crowd was expected. And he might let her sleep there tonight if she helped with the cleanup.

She had been awakened that morning from a damp bench in Golden Gate Park by a nice policeman who actually offered to drive her somewhere. Only she had nowhere she could tell him, since Mr. Wong’s restaurant didn’t unlock until 11:00 A.M. It had been a long, slow walk through a maze of streets, once she reached what they used to call the Tenderloin, an area of layers of lost dreams. It had always been a place where poor people lived. Betty had been told she was born there, in one of the second-floor apartments in a row of tenements. She no longer remembered which one, not even certain any longer of the exact street.

Somewhere here, among the layers of failed renovation, her mother had laid her in a dumpster in an alley. A Vietnamese girl, doing dope in the alley between Johns, had heard her squeals and kept her like a pet until she was five. The Catholic Charity people took her away then, and she stayed in a clean place where they fed and tested her. The other children her age teased and tormented her, and she came to hate it there. At about age seven she found her moment and ran away, to live in the streets and sleep in the parks, to steal food and live by her wits. At thirteen she had learned to sell herself; at fifteen she joined a brothel. At nineteen she was a specialist for discerning clients with special tastes.

The voices had started then, though she tried to ignore them. Some clients would get spooked by her, and she fought the voices, but they always came back. She was labeled a “head case,” for those with predilections for the bizarre. At twenty-eight she was dead-weight for the house, and they let her go—in the rain, with a toothache. She pulled the tooth herself with a rusted pair of needle-nosed pliers and somehow survived. The voices made her do odd things. She was arrested and then put in a hospital. They gave her the patches that made the voices . . . go behind, like they could be ignored. She’d been on the patches now for more than forty years. Every three months the clinic gave her a packet. They helped. They were her lifeline.

When the voice came she checked her shoulder and found that the patch was still there. You think you’re so smart! it said. But I’m on to you. Show that diploma to a carnival freak show! This was new. Usually, men’s voices told her little secrets about people she knew or saw, but this was loud and angry, and in a woman’s voice. It felt real, like a reproof for something she had done.

The cart hit an uneven spot in the sidewalk, and Bob, the bear with the missing eye, went flying into a storefront. She retrieved him quickly. You and your grad school friends! the voice yelled in her head. Coming over here, talking down to me, like I don’t belong in my own house!

Betty stopped and leaned on her cart, a trickle of the old fear running through her. She was in front of a locked and boarded tattoo parlor. She hated the familiar painted sign, “Screaming Skull Tattoos,” that had once whispered to her when she forgot her patches. But now the skull had a different voice. You’re getting nothing tonight, it said. Go sleep in the cellar!

VIII

It was early afternoon, and lunch had been an elegant Dungeness crab salad and a sherry-laced chowder. They were sipping a Veuve Clicquot Grande Dame champagne, and Friel was relating the last of a dozen stories.

“You can’t help ascribing human motivations to them,” he was saying, “but you’re almost always proven wrong.” He rubbed a finger on the condensed moisture on the tulip glass. “Just think of the distance between us,” he said. “We’re more closely related to an earthworm, or a . . . rosebush than we are to them. The Neighbors’ genetic system developed under a different sun, with an entirely different basis.”

Tomma Lee was feeling lightheaded and set her glass down half drained. “Why do you think they came here?” she asked. “And what did they hope to gain?”

Friel nodded. “It’s been asked a hundred times. With a hundred different answers. I asked it once. There was a Neighbor who worked closely with us. Its name came through the translator as just a number. A lot of them have numbers—I don’t know why. But anyway, our people had developed a kind of rapport with it, discussing a lot of chemistry—comparing concepts, that kind of thing. I got the impression that, like a lot of our other Neighbor contacts, it was kind of an outcast. I had thought, well, they’re expecting to get something in return for all the technological gifts they were bestowing on the human race. So I went ahead and asked the anthropocentric question: ‘What are you getting out of this?’”

Tomma Lee looked up expectantly as Friel drained his glass. “There’s a move they make,” he said. “It’s something like a sudden bow. It was to show me an egg case on its back.” Friel seemed agitated, and his good eye glared at her. “Humans are preternaturally selfish, Miss Evans, including our self-sacrificing martyrs who die for a heavenly reward. My question was full of implied meaning. But the Neighbors are nothing like that. Their distinction between the discrete individual and collective society is less rigid than our own. They seem to live for future generations, possibly a future beyond their own understanding. Their immediate goal is an archive, part of which is locked in that forbidden area of the Hive.”

“What’s in the archive?”

Friel nodded, his gaze now vacant. “That’s the key question. Nobody knows. This low-caste chemist pointed with a feeler to that mass of slime on its back. The voice synthesizer said, ‘They will see and know.’”

“That’s all?” Tomma Lee said. “I’m not sure I follow.”

“The Neighbors seem to think centuries ahead, expending great efforts for unborn generations. I gathered that they came to our solar system as part of a massive campaign to gather knowledge. I imagine thousands of Hives searching for inhabited worlds within some sphere of space near their home system. ‘Near,’ of course is the relevant word.”

“They still haven’t . . .”

“It’s one of their cardinal rules. They have never revealed where they came from. I gather they’re afraid we’ll eventually build a star drive, hunt them down, and exterminate them.” Friel reached for the bottle and refilled his glass. “I don’t blame them,” he said. “We just might.”

IX

Mrs. Cunningham had decided that what she really needed was a nice glass of iced tea. The yellow curtains above the sink were rippling gently with a slight early afternoon breeze. She found herself humming an old tune as she filled the kettle.

That business earlier with the strange voice in her head had really been very upsetting. She thought for a while that what people were saying about her was really true. Maybe she was more than a little crazy. Maybe somebody who talks to her husband six years after he was gone is apt to lose hold one day.

Still, she had heard that voice. And not at all like she heard Louis. Louis was with her in a sense because he had always been with her. But that voice, that other, had sounded strange. And frightened. It was trying to hide from something.

She carried the kettle over to the old gas range and clicked on the flame. That voice had sounded desperate. I wonder what Louis would say about it?

For God’s sake, Peg! For the last time—there’s nobody downstairs! Now get some sleep!

She took down the can of Twinings and the small green-glazed teapot. Sugar. A nice lemon. Oh, my! I wonder if there’s any ice? Yes. She’d filled the trays yesterday.

The whole business was silly, now that she thought about it, letting that strange voice upset her. People imagine lots of strange things when they live alone.

She spooned the Earl Grey into the pot and cut several slices of lemon, wrapping the rest in plastic and returning it to the refrigerator bin. You’re just a foolish old woman, she thought.

For God’s sake! They’re right outside, you’ve got to hide me!

Peg, don’t listen to him!

“I won’t, Louis.” Mrs. Cunningham put her hands on her hips and stamped her foot on the kitchen tiles. “Get out of here,” she said. “Right now!”

But . . .

“I mean it! Right now! Go!”

She heard it go then, the pleading voice fading.

That’s my girl, Peg. That was a brave thing you did.

“Thank you, Louis.”

On the stove the tea kettle began its high, merry whistle.

* * *

X

Back in Seattle in her apartment, Tomma Lee found Adrian’s return call among a list of recent messages. There were several obsessive reminders from Cliff about details she’d already handled, some ads she’d forgotten to deselect, a dues notice from a journalists’ society, and a surprising job offer from Scott Narvick, a old schoolmate and one-time boyfriend who was launching a web journal with the unlikely name, Spare the Messenger. She hadn’t thought about Scott in years. They had played Romeo and Juliet in Theater Arts class. Scott had been sweet but always a little wild—just the sort to pour his last penny into a politically incorrect soapbox for rabble-rousers. Adrian’s message had been entered at 10:15 A.M. this morning, about twenty hours after the time he had promised. The playback was about what she had expected: simpering apologies for the delay in responding, sincere-sounding pledges of help where needed. Tomma Lee felt a real need for information and would have to hold him to those promises. She froze the recording of the apologetic, now fully clothed Adrian while she quickly dialed the real one.

He was in his lab office at the Institute, looking disheveled amid a clutter of papers and molecular models. “Tomma Lee . . . I called . . . ”

“I was in San Diego.” She hadn’t yet managed to inure herself to speaking with her former spouse. A clipped, businesslike approach helped a bit but didn’t conceal her disgust. “I’m calling for information. I’m working on a Neighbors feature.”

“Sure, anything.” Adrian ran a hand through his hair. “You’re looking lovely as always, Tomma Lee.”

She gritted her teeth at the compliment. “Has your group handled any part of the clinical testing of the Somnomol sleeping pill?” she said, hoping for a link with the “Doc Challenger” column. Friel had been dismissive when she had asked about the product. “A marginal profit market,” he had told her; it was evidently not one of the highly lucrative “Neighborly gifts” that his cartel had marketed.

Adrian arched an expressive brow. “Somnomol? That was about five years ago. No, just the initial screening. The Fidelis Group outbid some Pacific Rim big pharma interests and ran it through the USFDA trials. They usually do a pretty thorough job.”

“So how does it work?”

Adrian shuffled through a pile of stacked files but quickly gave up. “It worked on a distinct brain region. That was one of its unique features. All the over-the-counter and prescription pills we had before were just GABA-receptor agonists, like alcohol and barbiturates, although pharmacologically more similar to benzodiazepine tranquilizers.”

“You’re losing me.”

“Okay, GABA stands for gamma aminobutyric acid. Around 1950 it was discovered to be an essential feature of all mammalian nervous systems, bonded to trans-membrane receptors in nerve cells. It regulates the flow of ions into and out of the neuron, which in turn controls the electrical potential at the synapse. The old sleep-aids worked by binding to the GABA receptor complex, which allowed some chloride ions to flow into the nerve cell producing hyperpolarization.”

Tomma Lee frowned at the screen.

“All that means is that it inhibited the firing of the neuron. The GABA receptors are all through the body. Bind enough of them and you go to sleep.”

“Bind too many?”

Adrian nodded. “Right. You die. Overdose and synergetic effects with alcohol and other drugs were dangers that were never eliminated.”

“Until Somnomol,” Tomma Lee offered.

“Yes, the Neighbors solved the potential for accidental or intentional abuse by developing an entirely new approach.” Adrian paused, searching his memory. “Did you ever hear of REM-atonia?”

“Is that a disease?”

He shook his head, knocking loose a dangling forelock. “No. Actually, it’s the normal state in Rapid Eye Movement sleep, when the release of neurotransmitters like adrenalin and serotonin is suppressed. The Neighbors came up with a drug that works on the pontene tegmentum region of the brain that is particularly active during REM sleep.”

He paused again, looking for a response that showed understanding, but Tomma Lee continued to frown.

“REM sleep,” he began, “is a deep phase of sleep in which dreaming occurs while the body is immobilized. Motor neurons are not being stimulated. If that didn’t occur, if you dreamt you were dancing say, your legs would be going through those motions. Sometimes, in fact, that does occur, especially in some animals. Did you ever see a sleeping dog moving its legs, like it was chasing a cat in its sleep? In humans that’s called REM Behavior Disorder.”

Tomma Lee was jotting notes. “So this Somnomol produces REM-atonia?”

“Yes, directly, and for precisely timed periods. The pills produce four hours of sleep, each including about an hour of REM sleep for average-body-weight adults. The amazing feature is that an overdose is impossible because the pills contain a nano-molecular antagonist that circulates in the bloodstream for twenty-four hours, scavenging any additional drug. After that time two—but only two—pills become effective again.”

Tomma Lee didn’t look up as she scribbled on a notescreen. “So you can’t kill yourself with Somnomol?”

“We checked that thoroughly before turning our work over to the USFDA and other nations’ regulatory agencies. About twenty pills will produce nausea and mild diarrhea and a general torpor, followed by a two-day period in which the drug is ineffective.”

“So you gave Somnomol your seal of approval?”

“We decided to let the national agencies check for genetic effects and confirm our studies for carcinogenic and teratological effects, but we found nothing that would prevent its release.”

Tomma Lee looked up at Adrian, who was smiling back at her from the theater table. There was still something—perhaps those expressive brows—that touched her in a way that she now would no longer admit to herself. Just for a moment she wondered if there was anyone or anything that could affect him so deeply that he would forsake the next nubile target of opportunity. Then a new thought cleared her mind. “What about the Neighbors? There was an old news story that said they didn’t sleep. How could a race that never slept design a sleeping pill for humans?”

Adrian nodded rapidly, “We thought about that too. You know, we actually understand very little about the Neighbors’ physiology.” He brushed his hair back, to no effect. “It’s certain that they don’t sleep over any time interval we have been able to measure. Some have speculated that they hibernate over periods unknown to us. But I suspect not. I think they don’t sleep at all. That led to some speculation on the purpose of sleep for humans and other mammals.”

“So you got into that?”

“A little. Philosophers and medical people have talked about the nature of and need for sleep for centuries. The metaphor used for a time was the ‘defrag’ process in computer memory, but sleep clearly involves more than sorting and arranging conscious experiences. The fact is that there has been a lot of both open and classified military research in the area for the last hundred years or so. We know a lot about the stages of human sleep but still only theories about their function.”

Tomma Lee bit her stylus thoughtfully. “Give me a little of that. And what’s the interest of the military?”

Adrian shrugged. “I’m not a specialist, but basically NREM—that’s non-rapid eye movement sleep—has four stages, each progressively deeper, characterized by electroencephalographic patterns and a sizeable list of other measurements. In stage one most people think they are just sleepy or ‘resting their eyes’ but the EEG trace shows the onset of the theta wave and the disappearance of the fully awake alpha wave. In the second stage the individual is asleep but easily awakened. Stages three and four are both termed ‘slow-wave sleep.’ These have the highest arousal threshold—that is, they are the deepest stages of NREM sleep. If you are awakened here you will be groggy and possibly confused for a time. Dreaming occurs in the deepest stage—stage four—but dreams recollected from this stage are always vague and disconnected. Stage four appears to be the most needed period since deprivation of stage four produces a longer stage four in the next opportunity for sleep.”

Tomma Lee looked up. “And what about REM?”

Adrian blinked and nodded. “It seems to be very important. There are several periods of REM sleep—short ones early on and longer ones later, some as long as two hours. Vivid dreams occur during REM sleep. While the motor neurons are shut down, areas of the brain are engaged in dramaturgy based on procedural and spatial memories. REM sleep appears to be critical to brain development. Babies spend 80 percent of their sleep time in REM sleep, aging adults 20 percent or less.

“And Somnomol produces an hour of REM sleep per pill?”

“Apparently, along with three hours of NREM.”

“So what’s the military interest in sleep research?”

Adrian wrinkled his brow. “You know, that goes way back, long before the Neighbors. The old declassified studies had to do with sleep deprivation—studies for troop effectiveness and prisoner interrogation.”

“And lately?”

Adrian smiled and shook his head. “I don’t know much, and I can’t talk about what I’ve seen.”

Tomma Lee tapped her lips with the stylus. “The Neighbors don’t sleep,” she said, trying for a response.

“Their nervous system is entirely different—delocalized along a huge central cord with nodes along its length. They’ve let us do EEG studies using modified equipment, but so far we haven’t made much sense of the data.”

Tomma Lee wanted to ask what it was like probing the electrical activity in the nervous system of a five-foot exoskeleton, but the image repulsed her. Instead she said, “Thank you, Adrian. You’ve been very helpful.”

Adrian was looking for something among the clutter on his desk, finally holding up a photo. It was the two of them in Paris on their honeymoon. They had asked someone to take their picture against the flying buttresses at the back of Notre Dame. “Hey, Tomma Lee,” he said. “Remember this?”

Tomma Lee saw herself in shorts and sunglasses, smiling broadly, her head on Adrian’s shoulder. He appeared to be saying something. The dead past caught in her throat and she looked away. “Good-bye, Adrian. Thanks again,” she said and hung up, staring for a full minute at the bare tabletop.

XI

Joe Greyfox had sat at the edge of the interstate, his chin on his knees, for nearly half an hour, watching the growing storm. The voice would talk to him from time to time, simpering with confused regret and sobbing accusations. “God, lady, what do you want?” he said at one point as lightning flashed in the distance. There had been no answer.

Years ago, as a teenager, some of his friends had dared him to eat the sacred mushroom. Then, too, there had been lightning in the desert sky. He had heard the voices of his ancestors. Joe had read about flashbacks, but that had been, what, twenty years ago? His great-grandfather—a man who had died before his father had been born—had spoken painful, shameful accusations: “Why haven’t you reclaimed what is ours?” He had wept bitterly through a four-hour bad trip, his girlfriend holding his head in her lap and rocking him through most of it.

But this was different. Hold me, Johnny! I know you didn’t mean it!

“Get out of my head, lady,” he muttered, rubbing sore ribs. “I’m not Johnny!”

It was fully dark now. Several cars had raced past him in the opposing lane, not noticing, or perhaps not caring to get involved.

Eventually, he had remembered the old phone in the panel truck’s glove box and peered down into the darkness. He could dimly make out the truck, poised perilously, and imagined his weight pitching the truck in a tumbling roll into the steep ravine. Too dangerous. And he was hallucinating. No, it was better to stay here and thumb a ride, he thought. But traffic was light and mostly in the wrong direction.

Maybe direction didn’t matter. He stood up with a painful grunt, determined to flag down the next approaching vehicle in whatever direction.

That gun scares me, Johnny. Get rid of it, you don’t need that!

“Jesus! Am I going nuts?” he said. “I’m Joseph Greyfox, and all I want to do is get back to my apartment in Phoenix!”

If you go out with that gun I won’t be here when you get back!

The headlights of an eighteen-wheeler were approaching in the near lane. The distant twin beams glared at him. With something like the effort of will that had finally stifled the voice of his great-grandfather, Joe pushed at the woman’s voice and felt it fade. He stepped out onto the asphalt, determined to stop the speeding trailer or be run down, as the first drops of rain began to fall.

XII

Tomma Lee had showered early and was in her pajamas by 8 P.M., finishing the Doc Challenger piece. She had incorporated enough of the technical background Adrian had supplied to satisfy her professional integrity while adding enough folksy superficiality to simulate the original Doc Challenger’s style. She had made the Neighbors’ purported lack of sleep the butt of a joke about their invention of a sleeping pill. Mimicking the “down-home” patois had been easy but distasteful, and she decided to ask Cliff to assign future columns to someone else.

The feature story on the Neighbors was more problematic. She had wasted an hour reviewing old video of Friel in the Hive, chumming it up with what struck her as five-foot cockroaches. It wasn’t coming together, and her palms still itched. Sorting through notes from Friel’s anecdotes increasingly felt like they were all irrelevant fluff. She couldn’t shake the notion that there was a story—maybe a big story—here, but she hadn’t found it.

At eleven she gave up in frustration and began scanning the news channels. The BBC was covering breaking news—a bombing of the UNERCO headquarters in Paris that had occurred only hours ago. She killed the mute key: “. . . a stolen traffic helicopter loaded with high explosives crashed into the roof of the UNERCO Headquarters Building at the Place de Fontenoy . . .” the reporter was saying, as in the distance police floodlights played across the smoking ruin, encircled with the blinking red lights of fire trucks and police cars. “In a recorded message, Holy Alliance leader Liam O’Brian claimed responsibility for the attack, in which thirty-one are known dead and over two hundred have been taken to the hospital, some with life-threatening injuries . . . ”

Tomma Lee stared at the still night-darkened recorded scene, shaking her head absently. The Holy Alliance were a group of strange bedfellows who had temporarily stopped hating each other in order to focus their collective hatred on the aliens and the people who worked with them. This would mean tightened security around the UNERCO Institute in New York. She found herself wishing desperately for Adrian to remain safe.

The terrorist attack would, of course, now dominate the Reflecting Pool special issue, but she would still be under the gun to compose a human interest feature on Neighborly contacts. The networks and wire services would be full of this story for days. Hundreds of political and religious leaders would be badgered for comment. Dialing through the channels she already saw several interviews were running—the politicos vowing support for UNERCO and hinting at the search for a scapegoat for the security breach, the religious leaders all distancing themselves from the terrorists.

Tomma Lee wanted espresso, but fear of another sleepless night led her to the refrigerator, where she stood for a moment frowning at its meager contents. With a shrug of resignation she grabbed a plate of cooked shrimp and a bottle of tomato juice. She poured some juice and carried the shrimp back to the sofa. Tucking her legs under her she dialed through a second menu of news channels.

Even the secondary sources were hitting the terrorist bombing. One was rerunning a documentary on the Holy Alliance. The theater table filled with file footage of early group rallies in Cairo, Rome, and Dublin. There was lots of yelling, placards depicting the Neighbors with their stubby antennae enhanced into devil horns. Crosses, lunar crescents, and six-pointed stars were all in evidence.

A local channel was showing a recent meeting of a U.S.-based splinter group: the Holy Union. By publicly renouncing violence they were considered legal, but on several government agencies’ “watch lists.” In one scene the milling throng had taken up a chant, raising and lowering their placards with the refrain: “Godless! Godless!” The speaker at the podium—a clean-shaven cleric of some sort with white hair and wire-rim spectacles—shouted them down: “It had two horns like a lamb,” he was saying, “but it spoke like a dragon!” The chanting subsided. “It deceived the inhabitants of the Earth with the signs it was allowed to perform! Soon no one could buy or sell except those who bore its evil number!”

Tomma Lee recognized the paraphrase from the Book of Revelation, but she also recognized a familiar face in the crowd of enthused believers. She sipped the tomato juice and chewed a shrimp thoughtfully. Yes, it was Avery, the kid from photography. He was holding a placard that read, “They Are NOT My Neighbor!” and was listening to the speaker with rapt attention. A mop of auburn hair had fallen on his forehead, and he seemed eager to restart his chants.

He was soon given his chance. The speaker leaned toward the crowd over the podium. “Shall we let these minions of that Evil One, the Lord of the Flies, despoil this Earth that God has sanctified?”

The chorus of “No!” soon melded back to “Godless!”

Tomma Lee spun the dial but found nothing else of interest. Hard news had driven out most of the Silly Season, except for the white kitten in zero G. Some ad agency had already adapted it for a soft drink commercial. Some new ghost voice stories had appeared, but that was likely copycat hysteria—a reflection of world tensions. She drained the juice glass and snapped off the table.

Tossing the shrimp remains in the disposal, Tomma Lee peered out between parted drapes at the delicate array of light pinpoints that was the Seattle skyline. She scratched her left palm. There was a Neighbor story for her somewhere. Possibly that local splinter group. She could talk to Avery tomorrow, get some names of the leaders. She would keep it confidential since Cliff would likely fire the kid if he knew about his playmates. Tomma Lee grimaced at the thought of a sub rosa tête-à-tête with the concupiscent dweeb, but right now it was the only new approach she could think of.

She had better try to get some sleep. The deadline was approaching and tomorrow was likely to be a long day. She shut off the apartment lights, and in a few minutes climbed into bed.

Two hours later, Tomma Lee was still awake. She was sweating and her hair was matted. Men’s faces kept intruding on her thoughts: Adrian, Friel, Avery, Cliff, even Scott Narvick. This is nuts, she told herself, I’ve got to get some rest. She threw back the blanket and swung her legs over the side of the bed, peering blearily at the time: 3:10 A.M. Blinking at the darkened bedroom she felt herself coming fully awake. I’ll be walking around like a zombie tomorrow. There was too much on her plate right now for this. She stood up and padded across the rug, snapping on the bathroom light. Tomma Lee yawned at her pale image in the mirror.

And there it was. Still in the sealed box Cliff had given her when he turned over McDermott’s notes and the half-finished “Doc Challenger” column. Tomma Lee picked it up and squinted at the cityscape logo with the shadowy bird in flight.

It took almost a minute to get past the box and bottle seals. Then she spilled two tiny yellow pills onto her palm. Inexplicably, they frightened her a little; she had never taken any sleeping pills. If they worked she would get to work by noon, catch Avery at lunch, and maybe have the leads for a feature on anti-Neighbor hate groups in America.

Adrian and the USFDA said they were safe. She filled a cup with cold water, popped the pills with a shrug, drank, then crawled back into bed.

XIII

Mr. Wong let Betty store her shopping cart in a pantry closet in the Heavenly Panda’s kitchen. The kitchen staff had been busily preparing dim sum for the lunchtime crowd when she staggered in the restaurant’s back door, still struggling to push away the woman’s voice, which came and went in intervals. Betty had decades of practice in acting natural as the voices whispered to her; it was the technique that had won her release from the hospital. That and the patches. She had checked that her patch was still on her shoulder several times during the tiring climb into Chinatown, because this voice was new and different—loud and insistent.

Mr. Wong smiled at her from across the steam-filled kitchen as she and her cart had appeared framed in the alley doorway. “Betty,” he said, “you long face. You come, I give you nice chicken lo mein with fresh egg noodle!” They quickly set up a place for her at the end of a counter and brought hot food and tea. Mr. Wong barked some orders, then came over to her and leaned on the counter, resting his chin on his hand. “It go pretty rough for you?”

She nodded, picking at the steaming food. The woman’s voice was sobbing just then, and the sound of it made her sad.

Mr. Wong studied her face for several minutes. “Betty, you sick? Need doctor?”

She shook her head, but a tear squeezed out of her left eye and rolled down her cheek as she sipped the tea.

“I bet those hoodlum teasing you again. You stay here tonight. I make bed for you in one of the booths when we close.”

The voice made some muffled sobs, but it was fading. It was going away now finally, she somehow knew, as a familiar voice began whispering in her ear.

“I mus go,” Mr. Wong said, patting her shoulder. “We open now. You eat. We talk later.”

Betty stirred the bowl of noodles with her fork. The old voices were back, but the patch kept them from hurting. It was somehow comforting.

Life was good.

XIV

They had left the Saturday afternoon crowds at the Louvre and strolled along the shaded quai des Tuileries with the placid Seine on their right. It was a warm day in late July, and couples and families were enjoying the weather and the view. Some sat on the grass watching the light river traffic. Others milled around the stands of the street vendors. The great museum stretched out on their left across a stream of taxis, Smart Cars, and bicycles. Eventually, they reached the Pont Neuf, the oldest “new” bridge in Paris, and walked across to the Île de la Cité, pausing several times to watch tour boats glide up and down the waterway. Descending the steps behind King Henry IV’s statue, they followed the crowds down the island’s streets to Notre Dame. There they joined the queue on the Place du Parvis to enter the imposing cathedral at its Portal of the Last Judgment.

Once inside the cavernous church, Tomma Lee looked back from the nave aisle at the immense west rose window over the portal they had just entered. When she turned, Adrian was already headed toward a second line at the entrance to the north tower. He waved to her to hurry: “The gargoyles. Come on!”

He saved a place for her in the line to the disapproving frowns of the people behind. Tomma Lee was mildly annoyed. She had wanted to take in more of the church interior. This was, after all, a thousand years of history—where the Crusades had been proclaimed, where the revolutionaries had danced and mocked in a renamed “Temple of Reason,” where Napoleon had crowned himself emperor.

Adrian noted something in her expression. “What’s the matter?” he said, arching a brow. “Are you okay?”

She just shook her head. “No, I’m fine. Just a little headache.”

They began to climb the stone steps as part of an endless line of tourists. Nearly four hundred steps later they had reached the open gallery between the two towers. The gargoyles, in all manner of open-mouthed horror, were drainpipes. There were also various grotesque beasts, demons, and sharp-beaked griffins. A cool breeze blew Tomma Lee’s hair across her face.

“The south tower has the biggest bell,” Adrian was saying. “Are you up for another climb?”

Tomma Lee had been studying the view of Paris while pushing back her hair. “Whatever you think . . .” she started to say, but when she turned, it wasn’t Adrian, but one of the Neighbors—all orange and oily and working its mouthparts. “Who are you?” she gasped, stricken with fear and revulsion. “Where is my husband?”

XV

Tomma Lee awoke without an alarm at 11 A.M., after nearly eight hours of refreshing sleep. She was left with only the faintest impression of a dream of indistinct content. The little yellow pills had done their job. She couldn’t remember when she had felt better rested.

Normally not a breakfast eater, today she was ravenous. She microwaved pancakes and sausage and poured juice, not coffee. She found herself pedaling to the office with unaccustomed enthusiasm, even after she remembered her intention to squeeze a story out of Avery.

The late breakfast had quenched her appetite, but she kept to her plan to intercept the secret Holy Unionist in the lunchroom. Tomma Lee surveyed the small throng milling among the vending machines and the knots of people at the lunch tables. No Avery. She was a bit surprised. On days when she was in the office she had always avoided the lunchroom at this hour to discourage his embarrassing youthful attentions. Could Cliff have caught the local news story last night and already fired him? Unlikely.

Tomma Lee walked back toward the production graphics wing and tried the knob at photography. Sometimes it was locked if they were set up for a shoot, but the door opened easily. The lights were on, but no one appeared to be about. Tomma Lee stepped carefully around a maze of cables and light tripods toward an inner office area. Peering around the open doorway, she found the kid with his head down on folded arms on a desktop, apparently asleep.

She hesitated for a moment, envisioning a disturbing scene in which the would-be Lothario would take this as a cue for action. But she needed to find out more about the Holy Union network—leaders’ names, links, if any, to the Eurasian terrorist Holy Alliance. The possibility of the kind of feature story tie-in to yesterday’s Paris bombing that Cliff would want. She would have to promise to keep Avery’s name out of it, if he would spill what he knew. It would be blackmail, but this was the news business. Anyway, she told herself, the kid was keeping nasty company.

“Avery!”

Evidently, the kid had been lightly dozing because he reacted like a firecracker had just gone off in the room. When he saw Tomma Lee standing in the doorway he began to shake.

The effect she had produced shocked Tomma Lee. “Are you okay? What’s the matter?”

“Tomma . . . Miss Evans . . .” Avery’s hands were trembling, and he hid them under the desk.

“I didn’t mean to startle you. Were you sleeping?”

“Yes . . . ah, no just . . . thinking . . .”

Avery’s reaction was not at all what she had expected. He was behaving strangely, almost as if he were frightened of her.

Tomma Lee pulled up an office chair and sat down. “Something’s bothering you, Avery.” She touched his arm, and he stared at her wide eyed. “You can tell me about it,” she said, forcing a smile.

“I think I’m losing it, Miss Evans,” he said.

She gave him a questioning look, trying to retain the smile.

Avery stared at the wall, unable to meet her eyes. “I . . . heard you this morning,” he said. “It was your voice. I was sure it was you . . . I even started to answer. But I looked around in the elevator and you weren’t there.”

“Maybe it was somebody else,” Tomma Lee suggested. “Somebody who just sounded like me.”

Avery shook his head, still not looking at her. “Only a guy from the mailroom. You should have seen the look he gave me.”

Tomma Lee knitted her brow, the glimmer of an idea forming. “What did you hear? I mean, what did I say?”

“‘How high are we?’ ” Avery licked his lips. “And then something about wind. I thought you were making a joke, so I said, ‘Tomma Lee, there’s no wind in an elevator.’ ” Avery forced himself to look at her and smiled weakly. “Then you said, ‘Who are you?,’ like I had butted in on a private conversation. And then you yelled, real loud, like you were scared, ‘Where is my husband?’ ”

Avery looked down, his hands knitted in his lap. “I heard it, Miss Evans. I know you’re not married, but I heard you say that.”

XVI

Tomma Lee spent an hour in her cubicle, combing the net for recent stories of apparently sane people who had reported hearing voices. Avery’s description of his elevator episode had evoked enough of her dimly remembered dream to suggest something unexpected and potentially the key to a big story. Her dream had been a disturbingly altered version of the Paris honeymoon with Adrian a decade ago, probably evoked by the news coverage of the UNERCO bombing and all this recent preoccupation with the Neighbors.

The ghost voice reports were scattered all over the place, but she had to dig for them. Individually, they still looked like Silly Season filler: A light-plane lands in an Iowa cornfield, the lone pilot claiming that someone had begun screaming in his earphones; a nun in Naples reports hearing an angel’s warning about the Neighbors; a New York City cabbie abandons his taxi at an intersection when a voice yells in his head to run for cover; a man in a Moscow suburb is arrested for shooting at a microwave tower with a rifle, claiming it was broadcasting into his brain.

By 2:30 she had collected a dozen stories from all over the world and was dialing Adrian, hoping he was still at the Institute.

“Yo, Tomma Lee! What’s up?” His hair was again tousled, his eyes looked bleary, and he was scratching at a five o’clock shadow. He bore the marks of a prolonged lunchtime tryst, but Tomma Lee was glad he was safe.

She got right to the point: “Adrian, what do you know about telepathy?”

“Hmm?”

“Is it possible?”

Adrian gave her a heavy-lidded stare and leaned back in his chair. “You come up with some interesting questions, Tomma Lee.” He ran a hand through his hair, but it fell back in disarray. “Actually, a few years back we were speculating about those noises the Neighbors make, then digitally convert into human languages. Some people thought the whole process was for human consumption, that they communicate telepathically to each other. We never got very far with that. Paranormal research has been pretty much on a back burner around here since the Neighbors were evasive about the subject.”

Tomma Lee was determined to get more information. “But is it real? Can you give me a capsule summary of what you know about it?”

Adrian rubbed his chin. “The subject’s been around a long time, in and out of favor as either science or pseudo-science for a couple of centuries. Serious study of parapsychology began in the 1880s with the British. A lot of famous people got into it: scientists like William Crookes, politicians like Arthur Balfour, even writers like Arthur Conan Doyle. The U.S. followed soon after, led by the psychologist/philosopher William James. Lots of schools took it up in the twentieth century: Stanford, and especially Duke University, where Joseph Rhine did a lot of controlled—presumably controlled—studies. I read somewhere that even Wolfgang Pauli—you know, the exclusion principle?”

Tomma Lee shook her head.

“Well, even a highly regarded physicist like Pauli became a believer.”

“So, is telepathy real?”

Adrian snatched a pencil and began tapping a nervous rhythm on his desktop. “That’s the million-dollar question,” he said. “I think it was Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, who got the Parapsychological Association affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AAAS is as big and prestigious as scientific societies get. Over the years some members, like the physicist John Wheeler, tried to get the connection broken, but as far as I know they are still linked up.”

“So a lot of scientists believe there is something to it?”

Adrian spread his palms. “It’s hard to say how many. The subject goes up and down in interest. In the 1970s and ’80s a lot of work went on in Europe, America, and the former Soviet Union, but by the early twenty-first century many active centers, like the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab, were shutting down. The work never completely stopped, though, because private funding kept other labs going. And lately, interest has been picking up again.”

Tomma Lee was not satisfied. “Do you believe in it?” she asked.

Adrian grimaced a little. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll answer that, but then you’ve got to tell me what this is all about.” He leaned back in the office chair, the pencil between his hands. “I’ve read a lot of research reports on paranormal studies: ESP, precognition, clairvoyance, you name it. Thanks to watchdog organizations like the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the James Randi Educational Foundation there are now very few cases of purposeful fraud in the technical literature. Most recent investigations appear to be properly designed experiments, something that was decidedly not the case in many of the twentieth century studies. A persistent problem, though, is the improper use of meta-analysis in combining results for publication.”

“You’re going to tell me what that means?”

“It’s bias on what low-population data sets get selected to create a statistically significant large data set. You ignore, or reject as flawed, studies that are inconsistent with your preconceived conclusion.”

Tomma Lee couldn’t help a brief smile. “You scientific types wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“Sometimes, its just honest stupidity,” he said, grinning. “But to finally answer your question, Tomma Lee, I believe there is a small, but undeniable, positive deviation from pure chance that doesn’t go away when all sources of bias have been removed. Yes, I think telepathy exists, but it is a rare and wild effect about which we know nothing substantive.”

Tomma Lee realized that she now owed Adrian an explanation for this call. “Okay, then,” she said. “I have another question for you.” Adrian raised his eyebrows expectantly. “What if that rare talent could be chemically induced?”

XVII

Two days later, when the weekly edition of the Reflecting Pool appeared on the net, it did not contain a story about the Somnomol sleep-aid broadcasting people’s nightmares into the heads of unsuspecting citizenry.

Tomma Lee had spent two hours discussing the possibilities with Adrian and another two downloading the “ghost voices” stories from more than twenty wire services. The writing had taken most of the night. But Cliff had rejected the feature after reading the first two pages.

“Too speculative,” he had typed back. “You’ve got no hard evidence. And those pills have been approved for over-the-counter sale by the food and drug agencies of over forty countries. Friel would sue us. When I gave you that ‘Doc’s Corner’ assignment I didn’t expect this . . .”

It had hurt. Especially because Tomma Lee, writing it almost as a personal memoir, had qualified her conclusions on every page. She had clearly conceded that Somnomol was undoubtedly safe for the person who uses it. But she had also suggested that mental disturbance and possibly grave physical harm could accrue to those unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of the nightmare transmissions. On the net she had found several auto and one plane crash that sounded like the results of the effect. God only knew how many people kept their experience hidden, or how many had sought psychiatric care.

Tomma Lee was pacing the floor in her apartment, the homepage of the Reflecting Pool glowing in the air above her theater table. Cliff had assigned Alex a feature on world reaction to the terror attack in Paris, complete with “talking-head” clips as a replacement for her copy. The “Doc’s Corner” filler on Somnomol ran as she had originally submitted it, with no reference to any problem with the drug.

There had been a time, when she had first come out west, when Cliff would have run her story. Back then the journal was trying to make a name for itself. Now crusading journalism was boat-rocking. She had no idea what kinds of pressure Cliff now responded to. The Fidelis Group and its huge pharmaceutical arm, Compcare, had a long reach, she knew. Running Tomma Lee’s feature would have been like asking for some sort of real or imagined behind-the-scenes corporate retribution. Even Adrian had waffled when she suggested that he reopen the investigation of the drug at the Institute. The only promise she could evoke was a follow-up study if her write-up received the positive response they both expected. It amounted to more gutless fear of a reprisal of some kind from Friel.

God! Even Adrian!

Tomma Lee stopped pacing and began the familiar ritual of loading the black-and-metal espresso machine. Minutes later the steaming demitasse was in her hand as she dialed the number Cliff had given her.

Friel’s private secretary put her on hold. After a full two minutes of watching a rotating Fidelis Group logo, the young woman’s face reappeared. “Mr. Friel is currently en route to our Compcare division in Melbourne, but he is available. I’ll connect you.”

Immediately, the toothy grin appeared, framed by the blond beard. Friel was wearing a white cable-knit turtleneck. He was seated in a leather reclining chair and there was an iced drink in his hand.

“I’ve read your current issue, Miss Evans, but I missed your by-line.”

Tomma Lee chose to ignore the comment. “Mr. Friel, this time I’ve got a story to tell you.”

“Noel, please . . . We’re old friends now . . .” He sipped at the glass and sat back expectantly. “Please go ahead, I’ve got a good half hour before touchdown.”

Tomma Lee gave him the whole story with all the qualifications and provisos that she could remember from the rejected article.

When she had finished, Friel was pensive and silent for a minute. “They wouldn’t print it?” he asked at last.

Tomma Lee shook her head, hardly knowing what to expect from him.

“While I appreciate your editor’s caution, if your premise proves valid, sooner rather than later someone else will go public with this. We’ve got a couple of billion units out worldwide. Right now I’m on my way to a meeting about expanding production.” Friel reached off-camera and retrieved his drink. “Miss Evans, do you remember our talk about the motivations of the Neighbors and that forbidden area in the Hive?”

Tomma Lee bit her lower lip. “I’ve thought about that quite a bit lately,” she said. “What if the Holy Alliance and the Holy Union are right, in essence? What if the Neighbors want the Earth, and the forbidden area of the Hive is a brood hatchery of future colonists?”

Friel was about to drink, but stopped and glared at her. “And they’re trying to kill us off with our own projected dreams? No, Miss Evans, if the Neighbors had wanted the Earth they would have taken it long ago. Your discovery has suggested a quite different motivation. They could be trying to stimulate a latent mental potential.”

“To make humans telepathic? Why?”

“The forbidden area of the Hive comes out of the translators as ‘archive.’ The Neighbors came here for information about us—deep information about how our minds are structured and how our thought processes work. It makes a kind of sense that a telepathic race would make such details transparent to them.”

Tomma Lee had forgotten that she still held the demitasse. She drained it and set it down. “Could the way we think be that different?”

Friel was not smiling now. “I believe that they sent these Hives from their home world to learn all the myriad modes of sentient intelligence. It may be more vastly varied than we, or even the Neighbors, can imagine.” His face took on a pensive expression. “Somnomol was likely meant as a test to check on the biochemical response. The next gift could be something much more potent . . .” His voice trailed off.

Tomma Lee felt a tremor run down her spine. “They intend to just give us this power?”

“In order to understand us more completely. But all the Neighborly gifts have been beneficial. No harm could result.” Friel now seemed to be talking to himself. “I wonder, though, why they haven’t been more open about this. . . .”

Tomma Lee felt for a moment that he’d almost forgotten her. “Even with the best of intentions,” she said, “how well do the Neighbors know us? Isn’t that gift a bit like giving a nuclear bomb to a pack of howling lemurs?”

Friel snapped out of his reverie and fixed her with his good eye. “It seems to me, Miss Evans, that we handled that crisis ourselves a century ago. I see no reason that we won’t handle this one as well. Knowing each others’ thoughts and feelings could be just what we need to finally grow up, live in peace, join in an interstellar community . . .”

“You’re joking! We’re nowhere near ready . . .”

Friel smiled dismissively. “We’re approaching the airport. I really must be signing off, Miss Evans. It was a pleasure. . . .” And the connection was cut.

When Tomma Lee tried to replay the conversation she found the recording had been coded to self-erase. For several moments she was stunned, struggling with the irrational feeling that Cliff and Adrian and Friel had conspired against her, yet knowing that they were each separately acting out of self interest. She spun the theater table dial, her hands cold and trembling. A special report on the latest round of threats and demands from Liam O’Brien appeared. All of it now seemed to have taken on the aspect of a strange dream.

What had Adrian called REM sleep? Dramaturgy.

We’re all actors, she thought, a decision taking shape in her mind. Such stuff as dreams are made on.

Then Tomma Lee typed short messages to Cliff Barnes and Scott Narvick, resigning one role and accepting another.

Reflecting Pool News Service:

. . . The recall of the Somnomol sleep-aid has had a significant negative impact on the third quarter earnings figures for Compcare Pharmaceuticals. However, division vice president Malcolm Seabring has expressed confidence that a new vitamin-supplement formulation currently under development, which the company claims enhances mental clarity, will improve the outlook for the next fiscal year. N. Joel Friel, who, as chairman of the Fidelis Group, sits on the Compcare board, was unavailable for comment, having undertaken a solo around-the-world voyage on his racing yacht, the Sand Dollar.

Copyright © 2011 Thonas R. Dulski

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Two Look at Two

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Blessed Are the Bleak

Edward M. Lerner

The meek did not inherit the Earth. Neither did the just, the charitable, the brave, nor even—as I might have expected, considering—the smartest. I admit I am none of those things. It wouldn’t have...

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Dave Creek

Dacia’s comm buzzed, awakening her from a deep sleep. Her hand reached from beneath her covers to accept the call, audio only. “Yes?” she muttered. “It’s Detective Nafasi, Constable Stark. Sorry to...

Quack

Jerry Oltion

Stage lighting always made Dustin sweat. At least that’s what he blamed for the sudden burst of perspiration whenever he found himself on a sound stage, facing yet another fraud practitioner of...

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The Flare Weed

Larry Niven

The Qarasht surveyor hefted a bark-brown teardrop that looked to me like the pod off a branch of seaweed, but much bigger. She set it on the table, using eight-fingered hands that looked like clustered chicken feet. Her sense cluster was extruded; she clearly wanted to talk. “Truly, this was not even the interesting part,” she said.

“Tell us a story,” I said, “for a drink on the house.” I could afford it. She was drinking beef broth with vodka, nothing exotic.

The Draco Tavern wasn’t crowded tonight. We were all clustered round the big table. The Qarasht spoke for me and half a dozen customers of varied species, so that her translator chattered in many competing voices. Noisy, but the sound suppressors were working.

“The sun was about to flare,” she said. “Not a supernova, you understand, but the kind of flare a star puts out when it’s going to be a red giant. You get great visuals. Wild and wonderful explosion shells expand around the star at almost lightspeed. We set up to make a documentary.

“This sun had a water world. We looked it over for inhabitants. Oxygen atmosphere. The seas were alive with oxygen and sulphur users, but with no sapience. There wasn’t much land and there wasn’t much on it, but some Tee Tee Sine Torus Gleesh had evolved far enough to have astronomers. So we explained what was going on, and offered the Gleesh a shield—the law says we must—and they took the deal and paid with artwork and historical records. Nothing really valuable.”

I used my phone to boot up Wiki Search. “Tee tee sine torus gleesh would be like otters? With better hands?”

“Mph? Sure. Little, but with big heads and four limbs. Now, the flare was coming, but we got the force dome up in time. Then I left the rest of the crew behind and went out with my gear to watch the flare. I didn’t want to be under the dome.”

“You’d need a lot of protection yourself.”

“Oh yes, armor and a place to dump the heat. I set up on a raft over deep ocean. I like to be alone when I run a documentary, and besides, my crew was mixed species. It would have been a babble. Come to that—” She stopped. Her sense cluster retracted.

A Chirp asked, “Are you in health, honored—”

The sense cluster popped out. “I’m well. It now dawns on me that that was the only reason I had a translator box with me. I would have missed half of what was going on.

“Here came the flare. A shell peeled off the sun over several hours, and my gear caught it all even if I couldn’t see it. The sea started simmering at the surface. There’s a limit to how hot that can get, so I could still pump heat into it as long as the water lasted. It was all going pretty much as expected. Then a stalk rose out of the water, almost under my raft. It blocked the sun, so it was all shadow, but it looked like a tall tree. It grew like a tree, but fast, and then it put out a great fuzzy black flower.

“I was moving, trying to get the raft out of range, not just to save the raft from being knocked spinning, but also to get my cameras back on the sun.

“My translator said, ‘Awesome!’”

“I hadn’t been expecting company. I asked, ‘Who speaks?’”

“I am I. What are you?”

“We wrestled with that. I was talking to the plant, of course. It’s a form of intelligence I’m not familiar with. I’ve talked to some Chirpsithra since, and they don’t know of it either. We’re calling it a Flare Weed.

“Now, I managed to keep it talking while I recorded. That wasn’t easy. After all, its time was limited, and it was just learning about the world around itself. I told it some of what it had missed. I put us in contact with the Gleesh under their dome, and the Flare Weed chatted with them for a while.

“When resources are poor, the Flare Weed lives very slowly. It anchors itself to an ocean bottom and hardly grows at all. Sometimes seabottom becomes dry land, and then it’s static. When the sun goes active, it blossoms. An early sun, a T Tauri type, is just what it needs, or a late sun, expanding and throwing off flare shells. It lives fast then, in a flood of energy. It can support intelligence. It doesn’t notice all the time that passes while the sun is quiet. It lives its life in climaxes.”

I asked, “How does it breed?” “It makes solar sails. It builds a blowpipe that can put sailseeds into the solar wind. A few of those seeds reach other stars. It was growing its blowpipe all the time we were talking.”

I said, “That’s wonderful. How did it evolve?”

“Not known to me. Not known to it.”

“How old is it?”

“Billions of years, I think, my years or yours, but it hasn’t seen much of that time. In terms of life experience it does not do much better than—” She hesitated, then said, “—you.”

They’re longer lived than we are, the Qarasht. I broke an awkward moment by going to the bar and came back with two Bull Shots in beer mugs, one for me. I said, “You all survived the flare, I take it.”

“Sure, even the Gleesh, until next time. The flare is over and the Flare Weed is back on the seabottom, the sea moderately depleted. The thing is, I made a deal. It wants its seed planted.”

“Ah. And you got copyright?”

“Yes. Getting me to carry it to another planet is a more efficient way to spread itself than using its natural solar sail. I wondered if anyone would mind my planting it here, in the ocean—”

“We’ve already got some alien life here,” I said. Immigrant sea life was running the fishing industry in the equatorial Pacific, and Folk were still touring Africa. “The United Nations might object. You should check.” Or just dump the damn thing, I thought, and don’t get caught. “How many seeds are you carrying?”

“Eight.”

“And it’ll be a long time before it blooms.”

“The Flare Weed doesn’t mind.”

“It wouldn’t bother us any,” I surmised.

“Plausible,” she said.

I don’t normally dream, which I suppose is odd given my occupation, but a nightmare came that night. Light glared from a brilliant sky. Fire ran across the land. The ocean boiled. I woke with a scream locked in my throat.

It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder, until then, why a Quarasht would want to plant a Flare Weed on Earth.

It doesn’t matter, I told myself. A Flare Weed must be patient. It could wait four or five billion years until Sol expands.

And I haven’t had that dream since.

Copyright © 2011 Larry Niven

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Two Look at Two

Paula S. Jordan

“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” Sara said, seeing the set of Jason’s grizzled jaw.

He had stopped along the path, eyes fixed on the beloved old oak that now dropped heavy branches on the barn with every storm. He laid an arm across her shoulders and squeezed.

“I’ll try to get it cut before winter.”

“No,” she said. “I meant . . .”

He gave her another hug, still sweet, and strong for a man nearing seventy.

“I knew what you meant,” he said. Then he sighed. “Yeah, I saw another one this morning.” He looked down at her blue eyes. They were sad now, in a face more used for smiling. He turned away so as to not show her all his worry. “It was a rabbit this time, a little one.” He shook his head. “One ear half bit off, then stuck back on again. A gash all but healed on its side. Neat, too, like it’d all been stitched up by a surgeon. Darndest thing.”

But they didn’t dwell on it.

It was a perfect fall day on their North Carolina mountain, and their anniversary. Sara’s late class at the local college would be taught tonight by a substitute, and all but Jason’s most needful chores would wait for tomor row. He whistled for Shep, the border collie, and followed its stiff, old dog’s lope along the path that led out through the fields and up the mountainside into the forest. Sara, deep in thought, followed after.

Neither spoke of the silences, hours long sometimes, when the whole forest had gone still. Each time the small scurryings and bird calls had returned to normal. But once, not long ago, the red fox had limped a little when she reappeared on her twilight hunt along the forest’s edge. Her hurt healed quickly, but in the weeks that followed there had been other injuries. Sara told herself that there had to be an explanation. Whatever the intruder might be—a bear? a mountain cat?—it would soon wander on to higher ridges in search of larger game.

The thought eased her, and she looked up toward the forest where fall colors glowed in bright, late afternoon light. Then she sighed. Jason, playing “fetch” with Shep along the path, seemed to be shifting his weight to one side as he walked, maybe favoring a sore knee. Well, they were no spring chicks, were they? Either of them. But it would spoil his fun to worry him with it now. She smiled and moved ahead to walk at his side.

They spoke of small things and laughed at Shep’s antics. He had worked out much of his stiffness in the game and bounded away upslope or down, then back again, joyful as a pup. But his old training held. At the edge of the pasture he settled into lead position, ahead and to the right of his humans. Jason called “Good boy” as they all climbed higher into the forest.

At the final open space, where an ancient chimney leaned in a thicket of wild rose and rusted farming gear, Jason’s stride shortened. He turned as he walked, to look back the way they had come, then stopped and picked up a stick to whack at the path-side weeds.

“Maybe we should go back,” he said. “You do have class in the morning.”

“No! This is wonderful!” Sara breathed deeply, savoring the clean, crisp air. “We don’t get up here nearly enough anymore.” She gave his arm a playful tug and continued along the crumbling fieldstone wall that bordered the abandoned farm.

Jason stood worrying, whacking hard at the weeds, as Sara braced her hands on the wall, stepped over, and took a seat on its shifting stones. She looked back at him, laughing, as Shep sniffed out small mysteries in the weed-choked garden beyond the wall.

Finally, Jason gave in to her mood. He dropped the stick and had almost reached her side when a heart-stopping screech from the highest part of the woods froze the smiles on both their faces.

Shep pricked up his ears and scrambled over the garden’s far wall, barking long and loud as he barreled through the underbrush on a beeline to the source of the sound.

“Don’t move from this spot,” Jason ordered, and hurried back toward the ruined cabin. But Sara went the other way, along Shep’s trail of swaying weeds and over the far wall to struggle upslope through underbrush and man-high boulders, following the dog’s receding voice. The screech—half mountain cat and half God-knew-what—sounded again and again through the deepening forest until far away, just at the edge of hearing, the collie yowled in pain and fell silent.

Sara called his name till her throat hurt, but with no real hope for an answer. Then she was climbing again, grasping tree roots and low branches to pull herself up the steeper slopes, far beyond any part of the mountain she knew. Finally, gasping for breath and aching in every joint, she clambered up a stone outcropping and settled on a boulder to rest. When her breathing had steadied she called again, and nearly collapsed with relief at joyous deep-throated peals of doggy laughter.

She stretched her aching back and arms, wishing that she could rest on her rock for hours. But with rays of sunlight slanting ever lower through the leaves, she turned back, winded and wobble-kneed, to follow her trail of broken branches down the mountain. She listened as she went, tracking Shep’s yips and rustlings behind her as he made his own way down the slope. Whatever had happened to him, there would be an explanation for it. There had to be.

She had neared the overgrown garden when the dog bounded from the underbrush to circle joyfully around her legs. But when she reached down to pet him, she touched dampness and a swath of newly trimmed fur along his flank. She told him to sit, but could only study the spot for a moment before he wriggled away and was gone again, scrambling noisily back into the forest. Still, Sara had seen it—a hideous wound extending almost the length of the shorn area. It was new, no question about that, but already more than half healed.

Sara stared after the dog, frozen in place. The barking and rustling had quieted a bit and settled in one spot, nearer this time. Beyond that the forest was silent. What on Earth could be out there?

Finally, heart thudding, she took one cautious step in Shep’s direction. Then another. Stillness. Silence. Even the dog had quieted.

A few steps more and she stopped again, unable to force herself farther.

For long moments she stared, seeing nothing but massive trees and faint dapples of late day sunlight on leaf-strewn ground. Then—something. A presence more sensed than seen. A deer gone still at her approach? No. Just beyond an ancient hemlock there was a patch of green—not quite the green of the dark feathery needles, not quite man-height above the ground. And above the green, something gave off a dull metallic glint. She stood breathless, deerlike herself, watching the patch of color behind the hemlock.

As she watched, a pale shape began to move across the green. It continued upward to the metal, briefly blocking its glint before retreating. A sound then, faint, no louder than the whisper of the rising breeze, but inflected, voicelike. Leaves fluttered, revealing hints of other hues.

Still staring, taking quick, shallow breaths, Sara began to see it—a single slender figure, perhaps a head taller than she was, all but invisible within the drooping hemlock curtain. It stood as she was standing, watchful and very, very still.

Abruptly the voice stopped, and the pale shape—was that a hand?—moved again, back across the patch of forest-green garment, and up, to touch again at the higher metallic shape. Sara gasped. This creature, watching her from hiding, was unlike any other she had ever seen.

The voice spoke again, this time in sounds she could almost understand.

“Our animal . . .”

A branch snapped behind her and Sara jumped, glanced back. Jason stood among the trees holding a rusty scythe.

“Where were you, Sara? I have been looking all up and down the path.”

She signaled him to stay where he was, then looked ahead again. The figure edged to one side, blending into deeper shadow behind the tree.

More twigs crunched. Jason was moving closer, still hefting his scythe. She signaled him again, frantically, but he came on.

“What the hell is it, Sara? Come away and let me—”

“No!” She whispered as loud as she dared. “It’s . . . I don’t know . . . just be quiet and look, behind the hemlock.”

Jason stepped over a fallen log and came even with her, gripping the scythe, and peered into gathering darkness.

With a sudden yapping and rustle of leaves Shep barreled out of the forest behind the hemlock to nuzzle the tall figure’s . . . hand? Was that really a hand? The figure moved more noticeably then, and Jason gave a low whistle of surprise.

“Dear God! Sara, I told you, get back to the path.”

“Jason, wait! I don’t think—”

He ignored her. “Shep, heel!”

The dog looked first at Jason, then at the figure. He bounded over to stand at Jason’s left, still looking intently into the trees. Jason crouched down beside him, eyes never leaving the figure under the hemlock, and steadied the dog by his collar. Then he dropped the collar to stroke his heaving flank, and felt the half-healed wound on his side.

“What the hell?”

Eyes still fixed on the figure, he laid the scythe down beside him and nudged Shep forward into a patch of sunlight, glancing down quickly at his side. Then, glaring at the figure, he patted the dog again, released him, and reached for the scythe.

“Shep! Go to Sara!”

Shep obeyed. Jason climbed to his feet, leaning on the scythe, then raised it high above his head, knees bent, ready for attack.

“Jason, please wait. I think it’s okay. I think they’re—”

“I don’t care who or what they are, I’ll not have anyone torturing or . . . or whatever they’re doing to our dog!”

“No.”

It was a windy sort of “no,” more sigh than speech.

The figure moved toward them slowly, revealing a curious, coiled metal contraption above the dark green cloak, where normal folk would wear a head and a face. It raised the pale shape again. A hand, yes, but very odd.

“It was not our harm,” it sighed again.

It stopped, turned its head far around to look upslope almost directly behind itself, and made its gentle soughing sounds into the forest. In moments there was more rustling and a second figure, taller than the first, stepped from among the branches. It led something on a leash, oddly colored and with far too many legs, all with claws. The creature scrabbled forward, straining at its leash, and extended a long fleshy snout toward the dog. The snout quivered briefly, then rolled up tight against its body.

Shep’s hackles rose. He locked eyes with the beast and moved forward, head lowered, front legs tensed and crouching, teeth bared. He growled low in his throat.

The beast growled back, the sound escalating into that deafening screech.

Jason tensed and started forward. Sara grabbed for his arm, but he was out of reach, drawing back the scythe for the strike.

At the same moment the first figure motioned, and the second, straining at the leash, pulled the beast back to a safer distance. Its many legs scrabbled to resist.

The first figure turned back to the humans.

“Our familiar animal—our pet?—got out of her place. She is mothering soon, and does not like the smells here.” It gestured to Shep. “We regret . . .”

Jason gripped his scythe, white knuckled, and shifted about for a better view of the figures. Shep held his post, protecting Sara, eyes riveted on the beast.

Suddenly, the first figure turned, soughing urgency.

The second soughed briefly in response, then fastened the leash to a sturdy branch and with slow, deliberate movements began to remove its outer garment. Beneath was a body much stranger than the dark cloak had suggested: long, supple limbs and a short, flat torso, all tightly sheathed in thick, moist-looking fabric; a head about human size—small for its height—the face pale gold, lion-color, dominated by the metallic form curving over its head.

The first figure removed its cloak as well, and both stood watching the human pair, as if expecting some response. Then each reached behind its head and detached the metallic tube from something at its back, uncoiled it, and unplugged it from a single nostril centered on its wide face. The nostril was bracketed by a small, tightly pursed mouth below and two large brownish eyes above. The eyes were set wide apart and bulged a bit from the flattish faces, but peered almost gently at the human pair.

Each pair watched the other. Carefully. Breathlessly. Shep and the beast eyed one another, wary but silent.

At last Jason let out a long breath, lowered the scythe to his shoulder, and told Shep, “Enough.” Then the others—the aliens—their tawny color now faded to pasty beige, reattached their breathing gear and pulled on their cloaks.

The first one spoke again.

“We could not make your animal well. Not this soon. But he will heal, and his hurting . . . from age . . . will not return.”

Sara moved closer. “His arthritis? You’ve healed his arthritis?”

The aliens didn’t answer, but loosed the beast’s leash from the tree and led it back the way they had come.

“Wait! Please, wait!”

The first alien looked back briefly. “We must go, now that we have been seen. And we will not return in your time. But we will protect—”

A tone sounded through the trees, rich, melodic, but obviously not to be ignored. Both aliens moved quickly up the slope.

The human pair stood looking after them until long after they were gone from sight. Finally Sara, shivering in the gathering dark, turned toward home, touching Jason’s arm as she passed. Jason crouched down and waited for Shep to come to him, petted him, and gave him a treat from his pocket. Then he removed his belt to leash the dog and followed Sara down the path.

At the cabin he dropped the scythe beside the wall and took Sara’s hand as they continued in silence down the darkening path.

“You think we ought to tell someone?” she asked at last.

He looked at her, puzzled. “Like who?”

“I don’t know. A scientist maybe. Someone who knows about aliens from other stars.”

He gave a doubtful one-shoulder shrug.

Sara persisted. “Or the sheriff?”

He laughed. “That fool? We’d have . . .” He stopped and turned to face her, the laugh turned to concern. “We’d have a bloodbath up here, Sara.”

They walked on in silence. Then Sara squeezed his hand.

“What was it that changed your mind?”

“You mean me and my trusty scythe?” He shook his head. “Not sure I know. They didn’t attack, for one thing. And they just seemed so . . . decent.”

It was full dark when they reached the barn. Jason stopped there as usual, gazing upward.

“Which one do you suppose they came from?” he asked suddenly.

“Which what?” She had thought he was studying the old oak, its bare branches silvered in the light of a quarter moon. But he was looking beyond it.

“Which one of all those stars?”

She leaned on his shoulder, looking up. The sky felt different, with all those eyes up there, looking back. “Sure would be hard to say.”

His arms closed around her, his bristly cheek easy against her face.

“Just think, Sara. People out there, among the stars.”

“People?”

“Yeah. You know. People. Who can think.”

She smiled in the darkness. “Oh.”

He shivered a little. “Must be millions of ’em too. Up our hillside or . . . it doesn’t matter where. They sure are out there, aren’t they?”

“I’ve always thought they might be,” she said. “But I never thought of them coming here.”

Jason followed Sara and Shep through the gate, closed it, and leaned on the weathered post, his worn face thoughtful in the moonlight.

“Sara, you and I—not all our kind are like us, are they?”

“No.”

“So, all those folks out there, you suppose they’re all as good as these?”

Sara opened her mouth but could not answer.

With thanks to Robert Frost, whose poem by the same title told of a different meeting with strangeness on a mountainside in New England.

Copyright © 2011 Paula S. Jordan

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Blessed Are the Bleak

Edward M. Lerner

The meek did not inherit the Earth.

Neither did the just, the charitable, the brave, nor even—as I might have expected, considering—the smartest.

I admit I am none of those things. It wouldn’t have mattered. Anyone who cares to eat, to have shelter against the elements, cannot survive on the scant resources sufficient unto a Virt.

And that is why, knees knocking and heart pounding, I come to stand on the brink of an abyss.

Preparing to jump.

This isn’t the life I signed up for.

I got computers. I lived computers. My house and appliances more or less ran themselves. My car drove itself, navigated itself, parked itself. I spent my commute on the net, and my workday—then surfed, IMed, and tweeted yet more once I got back home. I owned an eighty-eight-inch holovision, often found my options wanting, and did a fair amount of virtual-reality gaming.

I should have seen this coming.

Not that many years ago, I was just another tiny cog in a really huge machine. Sure, the world was changing, faster and faster every year. I’d have admitted that. But some things were constant. Death. Taxes. More and more money expended in the futile effort to put off death. Healthcare was a quarter of the economy and still rising. What position could be more secure than something implementing cost controls in the healthcare industry? None, surely.

Except the situation I fell into: a civil-service slot when healthcare got nationalized. At Universal Care. The big UC.

Just don’t get caught by management pronouncing that “yuck.”

I brace myself against the gusts that threaten to send me, unprepared, over the cliff. Whipped by the frigid wind, my cape flutters behind me.

It’s not truly cold, I know. Somehow it feels cold. The chill breath of mortality.

Seabirds circle overhead, piping mournfully. The air has a salt tang and a bit of fishy smell through the nose plugs of my headset. The gear wouldn’t be of much use if the pickups blocked sensation. Anything I fail to see or hear or smell or feel, the Virts won’t . . .

Is sense the right word? Thankfully, I don’t know. Trying not to think about it, I’m unavoidably aware of a zillion tiny prickles from the microelectrodes of my snug-fitting helmet’s neural interface. My scalp is suddenly crawling. . . .

Does that show up on the recording? Maybe, like my fear, it’s part of the experience.

Far below, the ocean roars. The surf crashes. Craning my neck, I peer down. My goggles superimpose an irregular outline over the crashing waves. The thin, red line marks the supposedly safe landing zone: between boulders and where the water is deep enough—barring an untimely trough—that I might not pound myself like a tent stake into the sea-bottom muck.

Another day, another dollar.

Maybe you’ve seen me online. In more than one virtual world, I was the Caped Avenger: fast with a sword, faster with a healing spell. With one tool or the other, I succored the weak and protected the blameless. I undertook noble quests. I meted out justice. In hindsight, I was using VR to balance a cosmic scale.

Because with each passing day my job, more than anything else, involved implementing new ways to say “no.”

And as I sought, in vain, for relief, some of the newest players got good. Damned good. Impossibly good. Turns out they were more virtual than me. Uploads, they called themselves: ascended to a better place. Upchucks, one of my gamer friends called them: Some things got lost in the translation.

But one thing I have to admit about Virts—they were masters of the games. You could say they had been reborn to them.

I should have seen this coming.

Don’t blame me for the waiting lines for care. Or for disallowing treatments as medically unnecessary, or experimental, or off-label, or “too risky” given the age of the patient. Or for . . . whatever policy stymied you. I only maintained the software that made it easy to do those things. And when “queue management” failed to reconcile an aging population with a shrinking work force, it was suggested to me that a bit of electronic misfiling might help. Most people would wait for a while before following up. Or forget. Or give up. Or die.

You can blame me for being an enabler.

And so later and later into the evenings the Caped Avenger did his best to do virtual good. At least enough good so that afterward I might sleep.

Only the Virts, more of them playing by the day, made doing good harder and harder. Virts were mean. I didn’t understand their problem. Would they have been happier checked out altogether?

I should have seen this coming.

The more people become Virts, the faster the economy deflates. Implodes. Few people actually make anything anymore. Mostly they shuffle information in and among computers.

I’m damned good at that.

But hardly as fast as someone already in the computer. And when your room-and-board budget only has to cover a bit of silicon and a trickle of electricity, you can underbid anyone who is still flesh and blood.

And the little work that still requires hands? Every new Virt means a bit less need for farmers, or construction workers, or—you name the trade. More than enough people who know those tasks compete for ever fewer jobs. Dilettantes need never apply.

Which leaves . . . ?

I turn my head, trying to psych out the motion of the waves, the probable undertow, the hazards of flotsam and jetsam and sharks. The red outline marking my target shifts as I move my head, but as for any other dangers my headset gives no clues.

You Virts will have your fun.

I was without a clue when Reggie hobbled into my office that day and plunked his e-reader on my desk. It wasn’t only the hesitant gait: he looked prematurely old. He had some rare disorder, one of the orphan diseases, a condition he didn’t discuss. Maybe if I had understood that his prognosis was all downhill. Or that the only possible treatment was personalized gene therapy, very expensive, for which the UC waiting line was out the wazoo. Maybe.

But he was just . . . Reggie.

“Hi, Malcolm,” Reggie said.

“Morning,” I replied. “What’s up?”

“Good choice of words,” Reggie said. “Uploads fix everything.”

The odd statement brought to mind film cameras. They still existed, not that it was easy to find the film. The people who used them—the people who inexplicably thought their antiques were the norm, to be fussily distinguished from digital cameras—were our most expensive clients. Fixing was the magical, near-medieval process of rendering permanent an image from film. Chiseling the image, if not quite into stone, in silver halide.

Synapses are strange and wondrous things. I didn’t get uploading them.

“Have a seat,” I told Reggie. “I’ll bite. What, exactly, do uploads fix?”

“Budgets,” he said. He swiveled a guest chair and settled, legs casually astraddle, elbows folded across the thinly upholstered back. Smug as hell about something. “Fixes UC’s budget forever.”

Reggie was a political junkie, an amateur policy wonk, who refused to get that not everyone was. But Reggie was also our office’s lead sys admin. If you’ve never programmed for a living, that title won’t mean much to you. Think of him as the office manager, the boss’s secretary, or that guy in Accounting who has to sign off on your expense reports. Someone on whose bad side it’s most unpleasant to be.

“Fixes how?” I asked.

He tapped something on his e-reader, and a headline popped up: AG Amicus Curiae in Radowitz.

“Uh-huh,” I said. I understood one word of that headline. The preposition.

“Friend of the court. The attorney general is testifying today at the Supreme Court.”

Okay, that left only one word to explain. “Radowitz?”

“Bazillionaire hedge-fund manager. Got himself a terminal case of H5N1. Put his money into a trust before he went. The son is the trust’s beneficiary, and he’s suing to take control. Technically, the case is Radowitz v. Radowitz Trust.”

H5N1: dog flu. An unpleasant way to go, but all too common and surely not Reggie’s point. I wondered how much money had to be at issue before an estate dispute percolated up to the Supreme Court.

“Uh-huh,” I said again.

Reggie laughed. “Radowitz, Sr. became a Virt.”

The fog began to lift. “So Senior, uploaded, still controls the trust.”

Reggie nodded. “Make the trust pay out, and the attorney managing the trust for Senior loses a very cushy job.”

A four-wheeled dolly, one wheel clattering, wobbled past my open door. More office furniture for the ever-growing empire that was Universal Care.

“And uploading fixes something,” I said dubiously. For Junior or Senior? I had no idea.

* * *

As I shiver in the wind and cold spray—and a bit, too, from the rush of oppressive memories—two quick clicks sound in my headset earphones. “We’re not paying to watch you stand.”

Virts, among their many deficiencies, have no patience. But maybe if my brain had been disassembled synapse by synapse for readout, I’d be testy too.

What the hell does it matter? However long I take to work up my nerve, the delay, like those two clicks, like the nag, will be edited out. I say, “I’m waiting for the gusts to let up a bit.”

Life would be much simpler if I wasn’t naturally healthy.

If Radowitz, Sr. was still alive, his bazillions remained his. The money would stay in his trust, and Junior would wait forever for the wealth over which he salivated. And the Feds would not get their cut.

I quoted my mom, quoting some senator from her youth. “A billion here, and a billion there, and soon you’re talking real money. No wonder the AG is there. Estate tax.”

Reggie smiled crookedly. “What’s a billion compared to healthcare? Peanuts. We’re talking precedent here. Watch and learn.”

He had CNN streaming in a window on his e-reader, and shushed my meandering speculations when the AG appeared on the steps of the Supreme Court to give her statement. She said, “Is a person less a person for wearing glasses? Having a hip replaced? How about one of our fine young men and women in uniform, sent home without a limb to be fitted for a prosthetic? The measure of a man or woman is not what fraction of their body is ‘natural.’”

Lawyers will argue anything, I thought.

I tried again. “Why are we—”

“Just watch,” Reggie said.

We watched. I fidgeted with a stapler as I tried to parse Reggie’s interests. (Don’t ask why I had a stapler, but no desk could be without one.) If the Supremes ruled that a Virt was alive . . .

“Are you saying uploading will become . . . a medical procedure?”

Reggie nodded. “Readout costs nothing compared to bypass surgery, or hip replacements, or . . . choose your poison.”

Poison: That’s what, at Yuck, we called chemo. And radiation. And a nice, personalized retrovirus cocktail. That last one was on Reggie’s mind, and I had no idea.

I knew no Virts personally, but the VR games had become overrun with them. Shadows of former people. Mean shadows.

Bored shadows?

“Okay,” I said, “readout is cheap. So what? Who would choose uploading over, say, a hip replacement? You upload when you have to.”

“Choose?” Reggie smirked. “Yuck doesn’t let people choose their course of treatment. You accept the recommended treatment, or you’re on your own. And the frosting on the cake: After uploading, a Virt never incurs another medical cost.”

“Why are you so into this?” I finally thought to ask.

“Did I not mention? The government siding with Senior wasn’t the AG’s idea; it was at the UC’s recommendation. Nor was it the brainstorm of some Yuck High Muckety-Muck, either.

“Not to be modest”—Reggie buffed the nails of one hand on his shirt—“I suggested it.”

Maybe Virts are alive. So the Supremes have ruled, and so they gave us our first real shove down the Teflon slope.

Suppose the Supremes are right. Then Normals and Virts are at war! And for a mess of retroviruses—rather than upload himself—Reggie sold out his own kind.

Seniors voted more than any other demographic. That led to untouchable entitlements and almost to national bankruptcy—until Radowitz v. Radowitz Trust. Now Virts vote, too, and they can’t imagine the government spending too much on VR. Their “homes” are many-times fault-tolerant and widely distributed.

And still a bargain compared to medical care.

As Universal Care morphed into Universal Computing, I agonized. The Virts were taking over—everything. Nothing short of Armageddon could physically stop the process.

Could I destroy enough copies to make a difference? No. Could I plant a sufficiently effective virus or a worm? I looked and looked and never found a way.

Could I do anything? The conundrum kept me sleepless every night, got me moving every morning— Until the day I found out I had missed my chance.

Yuck had laid me off. Henceforth, for a pittance, a Virt would be doing my job.

* * *

The wind died. Trying to ignore the omen, I leap.

Seventy feet. The math is simple: a hair over two seconds.

The waves rise up to swat me. Math be damned, they take their time. Long enough for my life to flash before my eyes. Long enough to think:

—The meek have not inherited the Earth. The mean did.

—Given my deeds as a cog within Yuck, I am little better than they.

—Maybe no better.

—That my cape is a stupid affectation.

—How ironic it is that Reggie, after the Faustian bargain by which he got proper treatment for his illness, was flattened by a wayward bus. Smashed, even, beyond uploading.

—As, quite possibly, I am about to be flattened.

And finally, as the surface rushes toward me, to think: This is my life henceforth. One spectacular act of daring—of choreographed insanity—after another, until my luck runs out. Every merely reckless and painful entertainment has been recorded already. I’ve looked.

And so, here I am.

Waves lunge at me. Massive, jagged rocks stare hungrily at me through the spray. The air buffets me and the red outline of my target drifts.

This is my life. Unless . . .

I had never found a way to plant a suitable virus. But what about a meme?

I twist and stretch my body to alter my wind resistance. To swerve outside the boundary. Thinking dark—honest—thoughts about what we all, Virts and Normals alike, have become.

There is an instant of excruciating pain—

My eyes fly open.

I’m not sure where, or even who, I am. I’m dead, surely. But faster than I can marvel—there is a heaven—the fog begins to lift.

I can see—sort of. And hear—sort of. And I know who I am. What I am.

Not Malcolm Jenkins.

And yet a trace of Malcolm persists: a ghost in the machine. Enough to be horrified by the giddy digitalized persona of—among how many others?—one Elizabeth Tyler Andrews.

Who is excitedly queuing up the madly popular feelie for another playback. . . .

Copyright © 2011 Edward M. Lerner

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SHORT STORIES

Remembering Rachel

Dave Creek

Dacia’s comm buzzed, awakening her from a deep sleep. Her hand reached from beneath her covers to accept the call, audio only. “Yes?” she muttered.

“It’s Detective Nafasi, Constable Stark. Sorry to bother you on a Saturday morning.”

Dacia sat up in bed. “What’s happened? Something to do with those Earth Alliance bastards?”

“No, ma’am, thank goodness for that. But it’s bad enough. Level 15, Apartment 24. A woman named Rachel Cantara. Materials researcher at LunaLab.”

“I take it she’s dead.”

“That’s what sensors tell us. Sort of.”

Dacia planted her feet on the floor and stood, slowly in the Lunar grav. “What’s ‘sort of’ mean?” she asked as she began to dress.

“It means she’s been missing for hours and traces of her don’t register anywhere in the city except in her room. But that’s only residue.”

“Residue? As if she’s been disintegrated or something?”

“Exactly that, ma’am.”

“So you haven’t forced the door.”

“We haven’t,” Detective Nafasi said.

“Do so, on my authority. If her body is there, examine it, and if she’s alive get her to the hospital.”

“And if she’s not?”

“Don’t touch a thing.”

“Yes, ma’am. But . . . something you ought to know.”

“Yes?”

“The dead woman is Secretary Grayson Whitford’s fiancé.”

Oh, shit , was Dacia’s first thought. The only man who might be able to force the “peacekeepers” off-world. And, almost inevitably, the prime suspect. “I’ll be right there,” she said.

Dacia finished dressing and soon was pedaling about one hundred kilometers per hour down emergency lanes that let her bypass both wheeled and foot traffic. As she pedaled through the Earthlike landscape of Armstrong Park, she passed other bicyclists gliding along paved byways and families walking across gentle grass-covered slopes. Overhead, sport fliers spread their artificial wings and soared, many launching from the wide ledge at the apex of the vast concrete dome covering the city.

Each time she approached Earth Alliance peacekeepers at the inevitable checkpoints, she flashed the constable’s shield that hung around her neck. To her relief, even as they waylaid innocent families who would never dream of violence against the Alliance, they waved her on each time. These troops were the last lingering insult from the home world, and their presence was the subject of continued intense negotiations between Brussels and Tranquility City.

Negotiations that Grayson Whitford headed up on the Lunar side.

As she skirted downtown, though, she saw the lingering evidence of those who advocated a violent overthrow of Alliance rule—stores with windows under repair and walls that still bore the scars of recent fires.

And she remembered her anger at having to take people into custody whom she agreed with politically.

Within ten minutes Dacia reached Level 15, stashed her bike in a small storage room at the end of a hallway, and walked out onto the main residential area.

Level 15 was a typical row of living quarters overlooking Armstrong Park. Outside number 24, Rachel Cantara’s apartment, stood Detective Nafasi, along with a crime scene tech and two deputies. They’d opened the apartment door, but still stood outside. Which means she’s dead , Dacia thought. One hope shattered.

To her distaste, an Alliance peacekeeper, armored and with a pulse rifle shouldered, stood several doorways down. He was just far enough away not to be intruding upon the scene, but close enough to see what was going on.

Set that aside for now , Dacia thought, and went up to Nafasi and shook his hand, giving the other personnel on the scene a quick nod. “What do we have?”

Nafasi indicated the interior of the apartment. It was typical of living quarters here in Tranquility; a primary living area featured just room enough for a sofa bed, a couple of chairs, and a desk. Beyond were a small kitchen and a bathroom.

No one was inside.

Nafasi said, “Sensor readings show residual genetic material of the victim.”

“Of Rachel Cantara.”

“Yes. We also detected readings of what we presume was the murder weapon, apparently set to overload and destroy itself.”

Dacia asked, “So we don’t know the exact make of the weapon itself?”

“We don’t.”

“Any signs that anyone else has been here recently?”

“Grayson Whitford. But as the fiancé—”

“That’s not unexpected. I understand. Any time frame on when he was last here?”

Nafasi shook his head. “Given the destruction of the body, and of the weapon itself within such a small space, time-frame readings aren’t reliable.”

“What about Whitford himself?”

“I haven’t notified him.”

So the honor falls to me , Dacia thought. Great.

“Another thing,” Nafasi said. “The door wasn’t forced.”

“So whoever killed her is probably someone she knew and let in.”

“Seems that way,” Nafasi said.

“What about surveillance records?”

“Security holos verify she left work at LunaLab at her usual time yesterday afternoon. But cameras haven’t been installed yet at the entrances to this living level.”

“Anything from someone who actually saw her?”

“Still working on that. Her mother reported the first concerns about her this morning. She hasn’t been notified yet.”

Dacia asked, “Do you have your interrogation kit?”

Detective Nafasi patted a small pouch at his side. “Right here.”

“Then let’s go see Whitford.”

Dacia and Nafasi retrieved their bikes. Using her law enforcement privacy override, Dacia punched in a request for Whitford’s location. I should’ve realized , she thought as the display came back. Not at home . At the embassy.

Another quick bike ride, as Dacia and Nafasi skirted Armstrong Park and headed directly for Cernan Plaza. Along the way, Dacia arranged for an officer and a chaplain to visit Cantara’s mother, who lived on the other side of Tranquility City, and give her the tragic news.

Once at the plaza, Dacia and Nafasi placed their bikes in a public rack, moon-hopped up the wide stairs that led to the building that housed Embassy Row, and stopped cold at the top. To one side of the main entrance stood a pair of Alliance peacekeepers with shouldered rifles. To the other stood two Lunar Authority security guards. They wore no armor, and their only weapons were holstered pulse pistols.

Even as Dacia pulled out her constable’s shield, she knew it would have no magical powers to get her inside. One of the Lunar security guards spoke up: “These are important negotiations going on inside—” He took a close look at the shield. “—Constable Stark. Not to be disturbed.”

Dacia took a deep breath and told the guard, “I have an urgent and personal message for Secretary Whitford.”

“He in particular is not to be disturbed.”

“I’m investigating a homicide.” That was usually the trump card in most conversations, but it elicited only a raised eyebrow from the guard, who said, “I’ll take your concern inside.” He looked toward the Alliance peacekeepers. “If that’s acceptable.”

One of the peacekeepers turned his head toward them and made a single slow nod. Dacia suppressed a sigh as the Lunar guard entered the building.

Nafasi asked, “So, what do you think the odds are?”

“That we’ll get in?”

“Yeah.”

“Pretty good. That you’ll get to use your interrogation kit? Slim.”

From behind her: “Constable Stark.” She turned, and the Lunar guard waved them inside.

As Dacia and Detective Nafasi were shown into Grayson Whitford’s office, Dacia’s first impression of him was of a man in complete control of himself. He awaited their arrival, seemingly relaxed and open, before his uncluttered desk. He offered a hand to shake quickly enough, while flashing the professional smile of a diplomat. But Dacia saw the lines around his mouth and eyes that came from maintaining his polite, I’m-just-a-regular-guy façade, saw the overlay of practiced emotion that guarded while pretending to reveal. “So, Constable Stark and Detective Nafasi, is it?” he asked. “I’m told you have a message of some importance.”

“Quite tragic news, I’m afraid. Your fiancé, Rachel Cantara, has died.”

Whitford’s smile faded, but the eyes didn’t react at first. “What? How?”

Nafasi said, “We believe she was murdered sometime after arriving home last night. Disintegrated, with a weapon that then destroyed itself.”

Whitford’s eyes squeezed shut, and he stumbled backward against his desk, bracing himself with his hands. “Who did this?”

Dacia said, “That’s what I’m investigating.”

Whitford regained some of his composure and looked at Dacia. “I’m a prime suspect, of course. Being the fiancé.”

“I’d be insulting you if I told you differently.”

“Then let’s get your investigation of me out of the way, so you can find Rachel’s real killer.”

“What about your negotiations?”

“I’ll have to suspend them, at least for awhile. To get these charges behind me.”

“I’ve filed no charges.”

Whitford managed a grim smile. “‘Yet,’ was the unspoken word there. Besides, Constable Stark, I think a day or so to begin to come to terms with my loss isn’t unreasonable.” His voice faltered and he covered his face with his hand.

“Of course,” Dacia said. She wasn’t about to give Whitford a respite. If I’m making a false assumption, I can bring out my most sincere apologies , she thought. But I don’t think I am. She gestured toward Nafasi and he took out his interrogation kit. To Whitford, she said, “You’re entitled to a lawyer, of course.”

“I am a lawyer.” His hand sketched a chopping gesture. “And I won’t hear anything about having a fool for a client. I have nothing to hide.”

“Then you won’t mind if Detective Nafasi uses this device.”

“Of course not.”

Dacia nodded to Nafasi, who activated the interrogation kit. Its sensors, without touching Whitford, would monitor and record reactions ranging from pulse and respiration to brain-wave responses, as well as audio and video of him answering her questions. “Let’s get some base reactions,” Dacia told Whitford. “Name?”

“Lawrence Grayson Whitford.”

“Occupation?”

“Chief Negotiator, Lunar Government.”

“Lie to me. Where were you born?”

“Uh—San Francisco.”

Dacia turned to Nafasi, who nodded for her to go ahead with the real questioning. “Let’s get right to it. You understand you don’t have to speak to us and can end this questioning right now without prejudice?”

“I understand, Constable. You can dispense with all these legal niceties, and with your standard interrogation techniques. I’m already in a comfortable environment, and I know you’re not here to provide sympathy or empathy, or to be impartial.”

“Very well, then. Did you kill your fiancé Rachel Cantara, or arrange for her to be killed?”

“No.”

“Did you see her or speak with her last night?”

“No.”

“Why not? Most men would be eager to see their fiancé any chance they get.”

“It’s the press of negotiations,” Whitford said. “She understands . . . understood . . . that.”

“Were you taking part in negotiations last night?”

“No. They concluded late yesterday afternoon.”

“Yet you still didn’t go see Miss Cantara, or even speak with her.”

“I’m negotiating the future of the Lunar government. Violent reactions from either side are still a possibility. Even when I’m not actually taking part in talks, I have to prepare for them.”

Dacia asked, “So you were in preparation for today’s talks last night?”

“Yes.”

“Was anyone else helping you?”

“No.”

“Did you do anything we might be able to obtain a record of? Call anyone on the comm or order in a meal, for example?”

“I didn’t.”

Dacia glanced at Nafasi, who gave a slight head tilt that she knew meant Whitford was being truthful. But an equally slight raised eyebrow meant something else. Returning her attention to Whitford, she said, “I suppose those are all my questions for now. Given your situation, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you to stay in town.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Constable. May I ask if you have any other leads in this case?”

“You may ask, Mr. Whitford. But I don’t have any answers I can give you right now.”

“I understand. Ongoing investigation and all that. If you’ll excuse me, I need to call Rachel’s mother. She’ll be heartsick over this. They were very close.”

“I’m sorry for your loss. I hope you can continue negotiations soon. All of us are counting on you.”

Dacia waited until they’d left the Embassy Row building and made their way back down those wide steps before telling Detective Nafasi, “I saw that raised eyebrow. So if Whitford’s telling the truth, what was wrong back there?”

“He didn’t say anything that was a lie—at least as far as he remembers.”

“What does that mean, ‘as far as he remembers?’”

“It means,” Nafasi said, “that he’s had a memory snip.”

Dacia worried that her hand comp wasn’t secure given possible Earth Alliance surveillance, so her and Nafasi’s next bike trip was to her office. She accessed her main comp there to get the names and locations of Tranquility City’s emotion shapers and memory snippers along with background on their employees—especially any legal difficulties they might have had.

“Look here,” she told Nafasi. “Just three such businesses in a population of four thousand.”

“We don’t have need of such things up here,” Nafasi said. “That’s mostly for Earthers with too much time and too much guilt.”

“Now, now—be kind. Although guilt is exactly what Whitford is hoping the snip will prevent us from seeing. Essentially, he can lie to us and be completely believable.”

“There’s an interesting fellow,” Nafasi said, pointing to the holo-record before them. “Haywood McCutcheon—left Tranquility City for Earth two days ago, apparently for good. Paid off all his creditors, shut down his store, and was on the next shuttle out. Quite a trick, given the political situation.”

“Makes it all the tougher to try to prosecute Whitford, if he really doesn’t remember the crime. He’ll come across to a jury as an innocent man being victimized by authority, especially since our physical evidence is lacking.”

Nafasi said, “We like our freedoms here on the Moon. We like government not interfering with business or violating our privacy. But we didn’t come here to make murder easier.”

“Maybe we can get some diplomatic help,” Dacia said. “I’ve got some back-channel contacts over there at Embassy Row. I think they’re about to come in handy.”

Dacia met with Earth Ambassador Kasinda Obote on the Moon’s most hallowed ground. Tranquility Base stood untouched by human footsteps other than those Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin made during their two and a half hours walking on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. A high wall of laminated glass surrounded the entire area to ensure it remained undisturbed.

Dacia was all too aware of her own breathing inside her spacesuit and the fact that only several layers of polymers, metals, and cloth kept her from her imagined fate of rupturing lungs and vaporizing blood. I guess I’m just not made for the outdoors , she thought.

“This site still inspires me,” Dacia said.

The descent stage of the spiderlike lunar module still sat upon the landscape Aldrin had described as “magnificent desolation.” He and Armstrong had left over one hundred items behind here, from a laser experiment measuring the distance between the Moon and the Earth to boots, a TV camera, a hammer, and bags filled with human waste. All of it remained as it had for 107 years, even the American flag that fell over as the lunar module’s ascent module’s lifted off. Whether it was more respectful to right it or leave it on the ground was an ongoing controversy.

Ambassador Obote said, “It’s good to see it before it becomes a tourist attraction.”

“I thought that was an Earth company wanting to do that?”

“It is. Now it’s negotiating to sell its rights to a Lunar company—depending, of course, on the outcome of the current political situation.”

“I hate to see that, either way.”

“Constable, I assume you’ve brought us to what might be considered neutral ground to talk about the possible charges against Secretary Whitford.”

It took a moment for Dacia to find her voice. She became aware of the drone of her spacesuit’s life-support systems and its constant circulation of air across her face. “How do you know about that?”

“Your Secretary Whitford is quite a skilled opponent, more skilled than I in rhetoric and playing to the masses. My only advantage is staying better informed. So get to your point, Constable.”

“An Earth citizen, Haywood McCutcheon, is crucial to my investigation.”

“I’m not going to extradite him. And I’ve told him that.”

“I’m—”

“‘Investigating a homicide.’ Yes, I know the phrase.”

“It doesn’t seem to be working for me much lately.”

Ambassador Obote said, “I sympathize with those who grieve for Miss Cantara. And I’m horrified that an Earth citizen would be connected with such a crime.”

“But not horrified enough to help me.”

“You have nothing to do with it, Constable. Nor do I. Dozens of people, in Tranquility and elsewhere, have died in this first conflict between human worlds. I grieve the dead, but must concern myself with the living.”

“So you would deal with a murderer. And to think I hesitated to approach you for fear of disrupting the negotiations.”

“You haven’t proven your case against Secretary Whitford, at least not to an outside observer. But I have something you would dearly love to get your hands on, I suspect.”

“Just what might that be?”

“When I spoke to Mr. McCutcheon, he told me he made a recording of the events he ‘snipped’—horrible term, that—from Secretary Whitford.”

“That’s the evidence I need to convict him!”

“And you’ll have it—after negotiations between Earth and Moon conclude.”

“Have you viewed the recording?”

“I have not. Nor do I intend to. We’re averting a possible war, here. The population of the Moon may be small, but high technology gives even small nations potentially great power.”

Dacia smiled and asked, “Are you so afraid of us?”

She could see the ambassador’s grim expression through his faceplate. “What we fear is the possibility of raining nuclear fire down upon people who were once our friends. ‘Genocide’ is such a nasty term.”

Dacia had no words. The flow of air within her spacesuit skimmed between the hairs on her arms and grazed the back of her neck, bringing a disconcerting chill.

Ambassador Obote continued: “In the meantime, I can deal with your man Whitford. He’s tough, but also patient and calm.”

“Doesn’t sound like the kind of man to commit a murder.”

“Then, Constable, you should commit your efforts toward resolving that dilemma. In the meantime, Secretary Whitford and I have a much larger dilemma to solve.”

Ambassador Obote began the return journey to the nearest airlock, leaving Dacia standing there staring at history and listening to her own breathing.

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Whitford asked. His image on Dacia’s office phone showed him in a nondescript hallway, probably somewhere in Embassy Row. “I’m trying to get these negotiations to some sort of conclusion and you’re talking to Obote, telling him I’m a murder suspect?”

Dacia kept her features still as stone. “You are a murder suspect, Secretary Whitford. Besides, he already knew.”

“So you see what I’m up against here. I can’t stay ahead of what he knows—he’s a trained diplomat, and I’m not, and that puts me at a severe disadvantage.”

“That’s not my problem.”

“I’m dealing with Obote. I’m dealing with the Asian Non-Aligned Nations and the Martian ambassador, trying to get their support. And I’ve got Lunar activists who say I’d better get something signed and get those Alliance peacekeepers off our world.”

“You continue with your job, Secretary Whitford. I’ll continue with mine.”

“I need to put this behind me, Constable. I can’t allow myself to be distracted like this.”

“I agree. Because how much credibility will negotiations with a suspected murderer have? Ambassador Obote told me he can work with you, that he wanted me to postpone my investigation until after the negotiations are complete.”

“That bastard. He wants me to step right into a trap. He’ll bring us right to the threshold of an agreement, then—”

“Then,” Dacia said, “he destroys your credibility, all in an instant.”

“How could he do that?”

“Perhaps you should ask him about a memory recording he obtained from a certain Mr. McCutcheon.”

“Who the hell is that?”

“If you really don’t know,” Dacia said, “you won’t hesitate to ask.”

A day later, Dacia found herself in Whitford’s office, next to his uncluttered desk again, standing alongside him and Earth Ambassador Kasinda Obote. Whitford held a small electronic chip in his hand. “Ambassador Obote was kind enough to provide me with the recording this Haywood McCutcheon gave him.”

Obote said, “You mean you badgered and threatened me until I agreed to provide it to you.”

Dacia stared at Whitford, then Obote, then back at Whitford. What in the world is each of them thinking? Does Whitford really think this recording is going to clear him? Does Obote really believe he can continue to work with a man revealed to be a killer?

Is that what Obote wants? Has Whitford walked into a trap after all?

Whitford raised his other hand and produced two more chips. “I’ve had the original copied. I believe we should all experience them together.”

“No,” Dacia said. “That’s not an experience I want to have, certainly not one I want to share.”

“What are you afraid of? That you’ll be proven wrong?”

“Really,” Obote said, “this is all quite irregular.”

Whitford said, “This whole thing is irregular. The Moon struggling to become a sovereign state, our home planet trying to suppress us—”

“This isn’t the time for speeches, Grayson!”

“Neither is it the time for hesitation. I’ve been falsely accused, and I know it deep within my bones. I’m here to put this aside so that I can concentrate on negotiations and so the constable here can search for the real killer.”

“Let’s get this over with,” Dacia said. “How’s it work?”

Whitford placed his chip against one temple. “Right there—then just press.”

Dacia placed, then pressed:

A whirlwind of sensory impressions—the chill of the corridor outside Rachel’s room, the sight of it blurred, all sounds muted, the difference between memory and sharp reality.

And above all the most intense impression, Whitford’s concern about why she’d called him.

Dacia was still just aware enough of her own consciousness to admit her confusion—Rachel had called Whitford to her? And why was his predominant emotion concern rather than rage or some other emotion that could easily turn murderous?

Memory-Whitford buzzes at Rachel’s door as sensory impressions settle down, whether the hard surface of the door, the artificial illumination of the corridor, or the delighted screams of kids from the pool in the plaza fifteen levels down.

Dacia realizes Whitford isn’t armed.

Rachel opens the door and senses begin to whirl again, Rachel screaming at him, one hand pushing flat against Whitford’s chest: “You know how neglected I feel,” she says, her voice somehow distant, as if being heard through a filter or a poor transmission.

“Now, honey, just stay calm,” Whitford says, his demeanor that of her loving fiancé and an experienced diplomat.

Rachel’s the one with the gun; she’s pointing it at Whitford’s head, telling him, “You don’t have any time for me. I may as well shoot you as marry you if this is what I have to look forward to.”

Then it’s all more of a blur, Whitford trying to explain about diplomatic protocols, political realities, and Rachel doesn’t want to hear it, telling him her father ran away when she was a toddler, her mother’s never loved her, and now Whitford has no time for her, either.

Whitford protests that they’ve hashed this out before, and the fate of the negotiations rest upon him, the future of Lunar society itself, including their future children.

“To hell with our future children,” Rachel says, and places the gun on overload. Before it can destroy itself, though, she places its barrel to her head and fires.

Rachel disintegrates slowly, her agonized screams cut off as she turns to dust before Whitford.

Dacia reached up and tore the chip from her temple. Tears streamed down her face, perspiration down her back, and she was bent double, breathing as hard as if she’d just completed a marathon under Earth grav.

Next to her, Ambassador Obote had removed his chip as well and stood impassively next to her. “You’re a damn cool one,” Dacia told him.

He said, “Constable, I’ve negotiated peace between tribes that massacred one another with knives and spears. I went right to the scene after the Volgograd mini-nuke strike. I don’t deny what we saw was disturbing. But I’ve dealt with much worse.”

Whitford removed his chip. He stumbled backward and caught the edge of his desk to keep from falling. His features revealed lines they never had before; his eyes were haunted in a way Dacia doubted would ever fade. “I . . . loved her so much,” he said.

Dacia said, “We know you did. Do you remember everything now?”

“Only what I just saw. But I can figure out the rest, if it’s the same way I feel right now. I couldn’t bear the sight of her . . . killing herself. I knew trying to keep the negotiations going while grieving would be difficult enough, and to have that image before me, moment by moment—it would be too much.”

“And McCutcheon escaping to Earth?”

“Even if he experienced the recording, he couldn’t know the context. Just that a politician wanted something suppressed.”

Ambassador Obote said, “I had the impression he wasn’t taking any chances.” He went to Whitford and grasped his shoulder. “We’ll continue negotiations whenever you’re able. In fact, I’m going to recommend taking down the checkpoints and having our troops stand down.”

“Thank you,” Whitford said.

Obote excused himself and left. Whitford said, “I’ve been foolish. And selfish. And I failed Rachel.”

“Rachel was troubled,” Dacia said. “And you had bigger responsibilities.”

“I won’t after the Moon is free. No more diplomacy.”

“What will you do?”

“What I should’ve done before. Remember Rachel.”

Copyright © 2011 Dave Creek

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SHORT STORIES

Quack

Jerry Oltion

Stage lighting always made Dustin sweat. At least that’s what he blamed for the sudden burst of perspiration whenever he found himself on a sound stage, facing yet another fraud practitioner of “alternative medicine.”

It couldn’t be the competition. These guys were idiots. They could barely tie their shoes, much less debate medicine on national television. Take tonight’s offering, for example: a homeopath. Doctor—though how he had acquired a medical degree Dustin could hardly imagine—Nathan LeTourneau, MD, CCH, DHPh. He and other practitioners of his particular brand of quackery claimed that medicine could be diluted millions of times—diluted so much, in fact, that not a single molecule of the original remained in the final concoction. Yet they claimed that their oil-less snake oils were as beneficial as the real thing, that somehow they were more beneficial after dilution, though the final result was 99.999999 and as many nines as you cared to add percent distilled water. Total nonsense.

LeTourneau seemed a pleasant enough man. He had shaken Dustin’s hand and said, “I’m very happy to meet you,” when he arrived at the studio, and he engaged the technicians in small talk as they snaked his microphone up through his shirt and clipped it to his lapel. He said, “Check, check . . . check please,” for the sound check, then added, “Garçon, l’addition s’il vous plaît” and smiled and said, “It’s nothing, a little joke,” when the technicians looked at him in puzzlement. He had no facial tics or other obvious nervous quirks that so many proponents of alternative medicine displayed when faced with the scrutiny of scientific inquiry. It was almost a shame that Dustin would have to tear him apart in public.

“It’s interesting to see the part of the studio that the cameras don’t show you, isn’t it?” he said to Dustin.

“Gives you a new perspective on the ‘glamour’ of show business,” Dustin admitted.

They were seated at an angle to one another on either side of the empty chair that Shelly Nguyen, the show’s host, would sit in during their debate. The chairs were plushly upholstered, their wood trim stained a deep brown. The glass coffee table in front of them gleamed, not a speck of dust on it. The floor was carpeted in an understated tan twill that complemented the upholstery and the woodwork, and the backdrop behind them was a translucent panel upon which the evening view of the city from some distant hilltop was being projected from behind. The whole set was bathed in brilliant white light from eight or ten spotlights, four of which were bouncing off big white umbrella-shaped diffusers to cut down on shadows. Yet just to the side, outside the range of the cameras, stood a battered metal cart with an equally battered television on it, facing them so the people on stage could see how they looked on screen. Wires snaked from that to the control board, a four-foot-wide panel of switches and sliders on a 2 x 4 frame that looked more like a garage workbench than a high-tech information center. A nest of wiring below the bench served as a foot rest for the operator.

The floor was concrete with a few throw rugs scattered here and there to deaden echoes. Plywood panels braced with more 2 x 4’s stood at angles around the stage, also hung with carpet.

Noting Dustin’s gaze, LeTourneau said, “I expected Sonex. The pointy, egg-cartony foam stuff.”

Dustin snorted. “Sonex is expensive.”

“Ah.” LeTourneau seemed disappointed by that revelation.

It had surprised Dustin, too, when he’d done his first talk show. He’d imagined riches showering down upon every aspect of television production, but he’d soon learned that the money went to the owners and the stars. The studios got enough to function, nothing more. And people like him, the occasional guests, got nothing at all, save the satisfaction of speaking out for true science in the face of vast public ignorance.

Shelly swept into the studio, perfection in motion. Her black hair was cut in layers that looked casually windblown, but Dustin knew each lock had been carefully placed. Her dark brown pants were tight enough to show off the curve of her legs, her lavender blouse was cut low to show more curves, with the tiny black microphone nestled just off center like a beauty mark against the pale white mound of her left breast.

“Two minutes, gentlemen,” she said. She sat and plugged her microphone wire into the jack dangling over the side of her chair, then tucked the wire out of sight behind her. “Everyone comfortable?”

“Fine,” Dustin said.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” said LeTourneau.

“Remember, look at each other or at me, not at the cameras,” she said.

Dustin glanced outward at the two cameras, ridiculously tiny things the size of personal camcorders atop wheeled pedestals big enough to hold research-grade telescopes, with wide motorcycle-style handlebars sticking outward so the operators could swivel the cameras smoothly as they panned this way and that.

He looked back to LeTourneau, sweating under the lights.

“Good luck, doctor,” he said.

The sound tech stood beside the monitor on the cart and said, “Ready in fifteen. Ten. Five.” Then he switched to hand signals and silently waved four fingers, three, two, one, and a closed fist.

“Hello, and welcome to The Second Opinion,” Shelly said. “I’m Shelly Nguyen, and with me tonight are Doctors Dustin Wegner of the Centers for Disease Control and Doctor Nathan LeTourneau of the Institute for Holistic Naturopathy.” She nodded at each in turn, then looked directly at the camera on the left. The host, apparently, could get away with that. “Let’s get right to it. Dr. Wegner believes in what we’ve come to call conventional medicine. Dr. LeTourneau believes in what we often call alternative medicine. His specialty is homeopathy, the treatment of disease with medicines that are so incredibly diluted that scientists would be hard pressed to tell them apart from distilled water. Dr. LeTourneau, would you care to elaborate a little on how homeopathy works?”

LeTourneau laughed. “I wish I could, but any explanation I could give would be nonsense. The simple fact of the matter is that neither I, nor anyone practicing homeopathy, knows how it works. Anyone who says they do is a fraud.”

Dustin felt his pulse quicken. “Hey, you’re stealing my lines,” he said. He laughed for the camera, but he wasn’t laughing inside. What was this guy up to?

“My apologies, doctor,” said LeTourneau. “Believe me, there is much more to say in the same vein, and I would not presume to debate you on the science, or lack thereof, in a field of medicine that relies almost entirely upon anecdotal evidence. So I would like to skip over all that, concede that the science is sorely lacking, and move on to a more interesting and perhaps more fruitful topic of discussion.”

“What topic might that be?” asked Shelly, just a touch of frost in her voice. She didn’t like having her show hijacked.

“The fact that homeopathy does work.”

Dustin smiled. “I can debate that.”

“I’m sure you can,” replied LeTourneau. “So I will concede to all your arguments in advance. It certainly doesn’t work in a vast number of cases. Its efficacy is perhaps only a tiny bit better than the placebo effect. As a scientific method of medical treatment, it is at best a cruel joke. It—”

Dustin leaned forward. “Are you sure you even need me here?”

LeTourneau nodded vigorously. “I need you desperately, Doctor. I need you to help me understand why it does work when it does, and why it doesn’t when it doesn’t.”

“It doesn’t work because it’s not science,” Dustin said. He leaned back in his chair, once again on familiar ground, but before he could launch into his canned spiel on what science was, Shelly interrupted.

“That sounds like a challenge,” she said. “Dr. LeTourneau, are you seriously asking Dr. Wegner to collaborate with you on a scientific study of homeopathic medicine?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what homeopathy—indeed, all of the so-called ‘alternative’ methods, need. We know so li—”

“Oh, no you don’t,” Dustin said. “I’m not going to get drawn into some kooky attempt to legitimize fringe medicine by waving the chicken entrails of science over it.”

That type of statement usually tipped a true believer over the edge, provoking a righteous rant that Dustin could refute point-by-point for the rest of the hour, but LeTourneau merely nodded as if Dustin had agreed with him and said, “Without someone of your stature taking an active role in the study, chicken entrails are all it will ever be. If I, as a practitioner of this miserably misunderstood art, performed the most perfect double-blind study in the history of medicine, my results would still be suspect. But if you join me in designing the experiments, and in collecting the data, and in interpreting the data we collect, perhaps we can truly understand what is—or is not—actually happening.”

Dustin sat back in his chair, stunned by the sudden reversal of roles. How had this . . . this charlatan . . . outflanked him?

Shelly leaped on the freshly wounded with the instincts of a broadcast journalist. “That’s an incredible offer,” she said. “How about it, Dr. Wegner? Are you game to put your money where your mouth is, as the saying goes?”

Thank you, Jesus, Dustin thought. Aloud, he said, “Speaking of money, how do you propose to fund this study of yours? Real science takes money.”

LeTourneau nodded. “Indeed it does, which is why studies of homeopathy and other naturopathic remedies have been so poorly executed, if you will pardon the pun. And which is why I propose that the producers of this very program, The Second Opinion, fund our joint venture. You can make medical history, Ms. Nguyen. You can either prove or disprove the value of an entire branch of alternative medicine once and for all.”

Shelly turned white. “You want us to pay for the study?”

Dustin couldn’t help himself. He said, “That sounds like a challenge. Are you game to put your money where your mouth is? As the saying goes?”

Shelly looked at him as if he’d just suggested she take her clothes off on camera. Then she burst out laughing. “Do you have any idea how much money this show makes? Or doesn’t make, I should say.”

“It takes in two point three million dollars in advertising revenue per installment,” LeTourneau said. “I took the liberty of looking it up. And your salary is seventy-six thousand per episode, somewhat over a thousand dollars a minute. The study I propose should—”

“Cut!” Shelly shouted. She stood up from her chair. Her microphone cord snagged on the chair’s arm and tugged her blouse downward, momentarily exposing a great deal more of her breast than she had intended. “Cut the feed. Go to commercial.”

The technician at the control board slapped switches and turned to face Shelly. “I cut it at ‘minute.’ Sorry; we’ve been on short delay since the space station snafu.”

She scowled at him, then at LeTourneau. “Who the hell do you think you are, giving out my salary on the air?”

“I’m a medical practitioner who needs your help. And yours,” he added, nodding toward Dustin.

“You’ve got a damned strange way of asking for it,” said Dustin.

LeTourneau shrugged. “Would either of you have helped me any other way?”

“You’re not getting any help, buster, except out the door. Sammy, show this kook to his car.”

One of the camera operators stepped forward, but the tech at the control bench said, “Uh, Shel? Phones are lighting up. We’ve got all eight lines stacked. I don’t think you want to come back to an empty set and take these phone calls for forty more minutes.”

Shelly considered that. “You’re right, I don’t.” She unplugged her microphone and stepped down off the set, but the tech said, “Ninety seconds,” and she paused, thinking. Dustin did the math in his head: two point three mil in advertising revenue, call it two-thirds of that that wouldn’t run if the show went dark for the rest of the hour; she was looking at a potential loss of over a million and a half dollars if she threw a tantrum. Even at seventy-six thou per episode, she’d be working off that debt for the rest of the year.

“Use the phone callers,” LeTourneau said. “Take the challenge to them.”

Two and a half minutes later, after an additional minute of public service announcements while Shelly and the show’s producer argued over the phone, they were back on the air.

“Live in fifteen, ten, five,” and the silent countdown.

Shelly was seated in her chair, once again perfect. A big red prop phone rested on the glass table in front of her.

“Welcome back to round two of The Second Opinion,” she said. “For those of you who might have just joined us, this is Dr. Dustin Wegner on my right and Dr. Nathan LeTourneau on my left. Dr. LeTourneau has laid down an interesting challenge, to say the least: He has challenged Dr. Wegner to assist him in a scientific study of homeopathic medicine, to be conducted under the rigorous standards of the Centers for Disease Control—and funded by The Second Opinion. While I’m not exactly happy with his announcing my salary over the air, I have to admit he’s made his point: I can afford to put my money where my mouth is. So I hereby agree to donate my earnings from today’s entire program to Dr. LeTourneau’s project.”

She grinned and looked directly into the camera again. “But only if you do the same. So now I issue the challenge to each and every one of our listeners: Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? How about it? There are hundreds of you on the phone right now, calling in to tell me we should fund this study. Dr. Wegner has agreed to do it if the funding is adequate to do the job right. So it’s up to you. Are you willing to put a day’s wages into science to clear up one of the biggest mysteries in medical history?”

When, exactly had Dustin agreed to this cockamamie scheme? He didn’t recall saying he would, but then he supposed his challenge to Shelly could easily count as such. And to be honest, he was starting to like the idea of proving homeopathy wrong once and for all. If Shelly could swing the bucks, he’d happily run the double-blind tests.

Shelly picked up the phone. “Hello, you’re on the air,” she said. “Are you willing to support our effort to answer this question once and for all? We’re asking one day’s salary from every caller. One day for science. Are you with us?”

There was a long silence. Dustin wondered if the caller had hung up, or if the phone patch to the studio monitor had been switched off, but then the caller’s hesitant voice said, “Well, I don’t make much at McDonald’s, but, sure, I guess I could do that.”

They took two million dollars in pledges by the end of the show. Money up front, largely paid by credit card. When the technician waved his four-three-two-one and zero-fingered hand at them, Shelly leaned over and kissed LeTourneau full on the lips.

“You have no idea how much you just helped this network,” she told him. “Viewership will double when news of this gets out.” Then, to Dustin, she said, “I want you to squash homeopathy like a bug. You’re back on in three months with your report.”

“Three months isn’t enough time to investigate a stubbed toe,” Dustin said.

“It should be enough time to put the final nail in the homeopathy coffin,” she replied.

“Not scientifically,” said LeTourneau. “We’re talking more like a year to determine how it works. Maybe two. If it can be done at all.”

Shelly unplugged her microphone and stood up. “Six months, then. And a sixty-second progress report once a week suitable for airing on the show. Otherwise the audience will forget who you are.”

Dustin nodded. He could do that. Compared to some grant conditions he had worked under, this was a free lunch.

He walked with LeTourneau to the parking lot. “No offense, he said, “but I feel like I’ve just been conned into voting Republican. How the hell did you do that?”

LeTourneau grinned. “Voodoo puppetry. I have a little doll of you on strings in my office.”

“Yeah, right.” But as he drove home, he had to wonder.

They met in that office three days later. If there was a voodoo doll, it was nowhere in evidence. In fact, the entire clinic in which LeTourneau worked looked like any legitimate outpatient facility might: two receptionists out front, nurses and PAs ushering patients in and out and taking vital signs, other doctors bustling from appointment to appointment. As he watched LeTourneau in action, though, Dustin noticed one significant difference between him and his mainstream counterparts: He took more time to talk with his patients about the treatments they were receiving.

“You’ve got tension in your muscles,” he told one woman who complained of jaw pain after a dental visit over a month ago. “So I’m going to make you an infusion of a substance called Nux Vomica, which is a powerful muscle constrictor. At full strength it can make muscles tighten so hard and so quickly that it can break bones. But I’m going to dilute it by a factor of millions. In fact, by the time I’m done there won’t be any of the Nux left in the solution at all. But the water I dilute it with will retain the memory of the compound’s ability, and when I inject it into your jaw muscles, it will seek out whatever is making your jaw muscles clench and it will dilute that agent as well.”

Dustin snorted. LeTourneau shot him a pained look, and Dustin said, “Sorry. Must be my allergies.”

“I could help you with that,” LeTourneau said. He turned back to his patient. “The important thing to remember is that the medicine I’ll be giving you will relax your jaw muscles, and you’ll feel better by morning.”

He’s counting on the placebo effect, Dustin thought. If a patient with a subjective ailment believed that they were being treated, their symptoms often disappeared. He said as much to LeTourneau when they were alone. He expected LeTourneau to deny it, but the homeopath simply nodded and said, “That’s the only logical explanation for what’s happening. What I want to know is whether that’s the only actual explanation, and if so, how to make it more reliable. Because this only works about seventy percent of the time.”

“How often?”

“Seventy percent.”

“You mean 20 percent over random chance, not to 70 percent of your patients.”

“No, I mean 70 percent of my patients get better. Random chance would give me something like a 5 or 10 percent success rate.”

“I can’t believe you have that kind of success.”

LeTourneau smiled. “I would be as skeptical as you if I hadn’t seen it demonstrated over and over again. So let’s design a study that will convince you, or reveal me as a self-deluded quack.”

Designing a double-blind study—a study in which neither the experimenter nor the subjects knew whether they were in the control group—was a simple process. Implementing it was considerably tougher. Human ailments didn’t come in standardized units, nor were there an infinite supply of similar complaints to compare against one another. Dustin finally decided on a simple qualitative analysis of pain: Patients either felt that they’d been relieved of their pain or they didn’t. Half the participants in the study would get real homeopathic remedies, while half would get normal saline solution that had been nowhere near Dr. LeTourneau or any of his colleagues until LeTourneau gave it to them. Half of each group would be told that the remedies were genuine, and half would be told that they were getting saline. They would be asked several other questions to mask the ones Dustin and LeTourneau were most interested in, so they would be less likely to give the answers they thought the doctors wanted to hear.

Dustin expected the results to be in perfect harmony with established placebo trials, in which about thirty percent of the patients perceived an improvement in their symptoms even when not given any real medication, but right from the start he was proven wrong. Wildly wrong. If anything, Dr. LeTourneau’s estimate of a 70 percent success rate was low. The number was closer to seventy-seven, just over three-quarters of the time. Intensity of pain didn’t correlate with the success rate, either: The most intractable conditions responded as well as the simplest.

They wouldn’t open the records and learn which patients had received what until after the data were all collected. But just the overall success rate was enough to astound both doctors.

“Something’s not right here,” Dustin said when the data became irrefutable.

“My thought exactly,” said LeTourneau. “It should be more like 90 percent if there’s something real going on. Or 30, like normal placebo studies, if there’s not.”

“Three-quarters. That’s significant. What are we doing three-quarters of the time?”

They sifted through the data yet again, but until they opened up the records and discovered who received what, and who had been told what, they were stuck scratching their heads.

So they shot a sixty-second video of themselves scratching their heads and gave it to Shelly to air at the tail end of her program. Ratings went up by 30 percent.

The more Dustin watched the homeopath in action, the less he understood. With some of his concoctions, LeTourneau would rap the flask against the table during one or another of the intermediate dilution steps, explaining that the process was called “succussion.” Supposedly the water would remember its infinitely diluted solute better that way.

“This makes no sense, you know,” Dustin said. “Less than no sense.”

“I know,” LeTourneau said. “But I also know that I have more positive results when I do this than when I don’t. Only with some preparations, however.”

“You need another double-blind test to see if that’s really true.”

“Of course. Once this study is done, I’d love to try it. Of course I’d have to try it for every preparation I make, and vary the procedure at each stage of the dilution. The combinations are almost infinite.” He held a yellowish tincture up to the light, then tapped it on the table half a dozen more times. “Which explains why this field is basically a hand-me-down series of processes that have worked for other people at some time in the past. It’s so difficult to isolate all the variables, most practitioners just go with what’s been shown to work.”

“Provided you trust the source,” Dustin said.

“There’s always that factor to consider,” LeTourneau said. “Some of us, I’m sure, are quacks. An additional complication.”

A month ago, Dustin would have said something snide. Now he just nodded and said, “You’re not alone there. We have them in my field too. They’re just easier to expose.”

He wondered how many people were attempting to do just that to him. Word was spreading that he had gone off the deep end. Colleagues were sending him e-mails with “WTF?” in the subject line. Others were calling him a sellout and a fraud. Treating him, in fact, pretty much like he had treated practitioners of alternative medicine until now.

He couldn’t ignore the data, though. The results spoke for themselves. Dr. LeTourneau—and he used that term now without wincing —was clearly doing better than chance or mere placebo effect. The only thing now was to figure out exactly how what he was doing worked. Once they did that, and could reproduce it reliably, Dustin could have the last laugh.

They had to run the trial for six months to gather enough data to be meaningful. Dustin and LeTourneau both waited with all the patience of a boiling teakettle, and their weekly reports to The Second Opinion became more and more frenetic as they speculated wildly about what might be going on. Viewership rose week by week until Shelly decided they should unseal their data live on the air.

“Er . . . think again,” Dustin told her. “It’ll take days to crunch the numbers, and weeks to understand what they mean, if there are any meaningful correlations at all.”

“I’ll give you an hour,” she said. “You can unseal it at the beginning of the show, and we’ll cut to you in an inset every couple of minutes during a debate between two of your colleagues to keep the audience in suspense. Then at the end of the hour you’ll announce whatever preliminary conclusions you can come to by then.”

“This isn’t how science is done,” he protested, but she merely shook her head and said, “This is how journalism is done, and we’re the ones footing the bill. We want to show you crunching the numbers, and we want to see results at the end of the hour.”

“And I want those results to be genuine. My professional reputation is on the line.”

“So is mine,” Shelly replied coolly. “Need I remind you who owns the data? If you won’t analyze it on my program, I’ll find someone who will.”

That got Dustin’s attention. To get this close and not be allowed to crunch the data would be the worst possible scenario, worse even than learning that homeopathy was genuine. And he had no doubt Shelly would give it to someone else if he pushed her. She wasn’t in this for science; she was in it for the ratings.

Dustin continued his protest out of form, but in truth, he had enough suspicions about what the data would show that he could prepare in advance. And if it didn’t go the way he expected, that would tell him plenty too. Whichever way it went, he could have a ready-made hypothesis to explain it.

On the night of the great unveiling, he and LeTourneau sat side by side at the desk in the advertising director’s office, the only space in the studio besides Shelly’s set that looked professional enough to show on the air. A camera in the doorway covered both the doctors and the widescreen monitor hooked to Dustin’s laptop computer. It didn’t take a supercomputer to crunch statistical data; it simply took a spreadsheet and a little insight.

The lights were on. The camera was on. Shelly and her two guests were on the sound stage down the hallway, with audio and video piped into a monitor just to the side of Dustin and LeTourneau’s computer screen. The cameraman in the doorway counted down from fifteen just like the sound tech in the main studio, then Shelly said, “Hello, and welcome to The Second Opinion, where tonight we’re going to prove once and for all whether there’s anything to alternative medicine. Doctors Dustin Wegner and Nathan LeTourneau are at their computer where they will unlock the data they’ve been collecting for the last six months and will do the analysis while my guests for tonight, Doctor Frederick Helms of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation for Claims of the Paranormal, and Doctor Diane Westmoreland of the Northwest Coalition of Naturopathic Healers, speculate on what the data will reveal. At the end of the hour, one of these fine doctors will wind up with egg on his face . . . or her face, as the case may be. Doctors, are you ready?”

How did this become a horse race? Dustin wondered, but he heard himself say, “Ready,” just as LeTourneau and Helms and Westmoreland said the same.

“Then let’s get started,” Shelly said. “Go!”

Dustin clicked on the spreadsheet he and LeTourneau had prepared, then imported the data from the file their assistants had assembled from the sealed treatment records. The spreadsheet’s cells filled with information: patient code numbers, control group numbers, treatment options, and so on. The automated data controls that Dustin had worked on for the last month color-coded the trials and the success versus failure rates, and Dustin could immediately see that the data were not random. There were major clumps of color, indicating that certain tests were much more successful than others. They clearly had a real phenomenon here. The trick would be figuring out what it was.

“Put the most successful treatments at the top,” LeTourneau said, and Dustin ran the macro that did that. The clumping of the colors became even more evident in some columns. Dustin expected those columns to be the ones in which the patient was given the homeopathic remedy, as opposed to the saline control, but those columns hardly correlated at all. The biggest correlation was with the column labeled “patient confidence.” That wasn’t even one of the major controls; it was just one of the outliers that they had tacked onto the form to help identify the placebo effect in their samples. They expected the standard 30 percent increase in success rate among this group, but what they saw was more like 99. Nearly every positive outcome also had a high patient confidence in homeopathy.

“Holy shit,” Dustin said when he saw that. “It’s the placebo effect on steroids.”

“How many of the people who were told they were getting a placebo reported a positive effect?” asked LeTourneau.

Dustin looked for the color-coding on that variable. Down at the bottom of the chart. “Almost none,” he said. “But look at this: There’s almost no correlation between success and what they actually got. It’s only what they were told that matters.”

LeTourneau shook his head. “So you were right. All the dilutions and succussion is quackery. It’s the patient’s own belief in the cure that matters.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions here,” Dustin said. “There could be plenty of other interpretations.” But the more they examined the data, the more likely their first impression became.

“Belief,” said Dustin. “That’s all it comes down to. You’re doing faith healing. And very damned effectively, too, pardon my French.”

“Faith,” LeTourneau said, a tone of distaste in his voice. “Merde, and pardon my français. I had thought I was doing science. Fringe science, perhaps, but science.”

“You are! Look at these numbers. Pfizer would kill for correlations as strong as these. It’s just not the kind of science you expected.”

Dustin heard a commotion from the studio monitor and saw Dr. Helms and Dr. Westmoreland red faced and shouting at one another while Shelly tried to calm them down. He heard her say, “Let’s cut to Doctors Wegner and LeTourneau. How are you two doing in there?”

“Should we tell her?” whispered LeTourneau? “It will kill any last hope for alternative medicine.”

“Nonsense,” Dustin said aloud. “It’ll bring it into the mainstream.”

“Bring what into the mainstream?” Shelly said. Along with her voice came the sound of her guests still bickering. Something banged, like a chair tipping over, but the studio monitor showed only Dustin and LeTourneau. Facing the wrong way.

Dustin swiveled around on his chair to face the camera and tugged LeTourneau to do the same. “Homeopathy. Naturopathy. Reiki. Hell, probably even voodoo. We’ve got a correlation here that’ll knock your socks off.”

“Don’t,” LeTourneau said. “Think of your career.”

“Think of everyone’s,” Dustin countered. “This is revolutionary. When the dust settles, medicine will be light-years beyond where we are today.”

“What?” Shelly said. “What have you found?”

Dustin swiveled back and pointed to the screen. “Zoom in on this,” he said to the camera operator in the doorway. “This is nothing short of mind over matter.”

The headlines read, “Doctor Loses Mind Over Nonsensical Matter” and “Second Opinion: He’s a Quack.” Dustin didn’t care. This was repeatable. This was science. And it blew everything practically everyone thought they knew about medicine right out of the water.

Trouble was, most people had enough vested in the status quo to dismiss his and Dr. LeTourneau’s findings out of hand. Within seconds of their announcement, Shelly Nguyen’s feuding guests had joined forces to denounce both Dustin and Dr. LeTourneau, accusing them of fraud, chicanery, and general malfeasance, and they were just the tip of the iceberg.

He and LeTourneau wrote up their results and shopped for a publisher anyway, weathering rejections from the Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Not even The Lancet would take them.

Shelly Nguyen took pity on them—or simply knew an audience draw when she saw one—and had Dustin back on her show, but Dustin found himself on the other side of the debate now, trying to convince a skeptical mainstream doctor that his data were real while enduring the ad hominem attacks on his integrity and intelligence that he had enjoyed laying on others not so long ago.

Finally, he had had enough. Interrupting his tormentor in mid tirade, he said, “Do you know what science actually is?”

“Of course I do,” said Dr. Warren Morgan of the British National Institute for Clinical Excellence. “It’s you who has apparently for gotten.” “What would you do if you had incontrovertible proof that faith healing worked?”

“You don’t have such proof. That’s what I’ve been—”

“That’s not what I asked you. I asked what you would do if you had such proof. What would you, as a scientist, do with that data?”

“That’s a nonsense question. Such data doesn’t exist. It can’t. It—”

“So you admit you’re so closed-minded that you can’t even speculate on what you would do if you encountered data that conflicted with what you currently believe to be true.”

“I admit no such thing,” Dr. Morgan spluttered.

“Then answer the question. If you had proof that faith healing works, what would you do?”

Dr. Morgan said, “Certainly not what you’re trying. By going public with this poorly designed study of yours, you’re undermining belief in established medicine.”

“That’s your problem?” Dustin said. “I’m causing people to lose their faith?” He laughed. “So it’s not the act of believing that bothers you; it’s what people believe in?” He pressed ahead over Morgan’s objection. “You would suppress data that conflicts with your world view because it might lead to people losing their faith in the system. You call that science? I’ll show you science.” He turned directly to the camera and held the manuscript for his article out before him. “I’ve got data here that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that a person’s belief in a cure is what actually cures them up to 99 percent of the time. It doesn’t matter what—”

“Nonsense!” shouted Morgan.

“—what you believe in, so long as you actually believe it. I could tell you that holding your hand on your television set while I wave this study in front of the camera will cure your insomnia, and as long as you actually believe it, it will.”

“You can’t prove that,” Dr. Morgan growled.

“Ah, but I can. Let’s give it a try. Here’s the deal: I’ll bet you a thousand bucks that at least 80 percent of the people who try this tonight will call this show tomorrow and report having a good night’s sleep. I’d claim 99, except some poor misguided souls are going to believe you rather than me. But I’ve got the real science right here, and I’m betting that the public is quicker to accept the truth than any number of supposed scientists who stick their heads in the sand at the first sign of data they don’t like.”

Shelly said, “You’re going to perform a faith healing? Right here? Right now?”

“Why not? I believe it’ll work. The data says it will. And I’m betting enough people out there believe it’ll work too. I could potentially help more people tonight than I’ve cured in my entire medical career.”

Dr. Morgan snorted. “That might not be something to brag about.”

“We’ll see who’s bragging in the morning,” said Dustin. “So here’s the deal,” he said to the camera and the millions of people watching through it. “If you suffer from insomnia, then get up and come to the television set. If you can’t get up, then reach out to it. I’m going to wave this manuscript three times in the air, and because you believe it’s going to work—because a scientifically designed double-blind study says it will work—your insomnia will be cured.”

“This is ridiculous!” Dr. Morgan said.

“This is the future of medicine,” Dustin shot back. “Adapt or admit you’re a dinosaur. Ready? Hands on your televisions! Reach out to the power of science! On the count of three. One . . . two . . . three!” He waved his manuscript up and down. “Your insomnia is gone. Now go to bed and have a good night’s sleep and call me in the morning to tell me how well it worked.”

He heard a soft rustle to his side and looked over just in time to see Shelly slip downward in her chair, her head lolling to the side. Both he and Dr. Morgan leaped toward her to steady her before she hit her head on the arm of her chair. Had she had a stroke? A heart attack? Years of training helped Dustin assess her condition in a few short seconds, and he realized she was fine. She had simply fallen asleep.

“Well, doctor,” he said to Morgan. “What more proof do you need?”

Dr. Morgan looked at Shelly, who began to snore. Then at the manuscript in Dustin’s hand. “I think,” he said, “I’d like to have a closer look at your data.”

Copyright © 2011 Jerry Oltion

Previous Article   SCIENCE FACT

SCIENCE FACT

Smart Seti

Gregory and James Benford

2010 marked the 50th anniversary of the first Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, SETI. With no detections in the near-zone search—we’ve scanned some 500 stars within a few hundred...

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SHORT STORIES   PROBABILITY ZERO

SCIENCE FACT

Smart Seti

Gregory and James Benford

2010 marked the 50th anniversary of the first Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, SETI. With no detections in the near-zone search—we’ve scanned some 500 stars within a few hundred light-years—it’s time to rethink the problem.

While the total SETI listening time is only about a month spread over those 50 years, the silence is striking. Apparently, we don’t have neighbors who want to talk. Or have we missed something in our assumptions?

We decided to study the underlying conventional wisdom behind the search.

The traditional, targeted SETI strategy has much to recommend it. The background noise minimum in the “water hole” region near 1 GHz seemed plausible, as did the assumption that the altruistic radiator would beam forth steady, targeted signals of very narrow bandwidth, to make detection easy.

But we looked at SETI from the viewpoint of those who would pay the bill—and found very different conclusions than traditional SETI. Traditional SETI research takes the point of view of receivers, not transmitters. This ignores what signals should look like in general, and especially ignores the high emitting costs, which a receiver does not pay. We assumed, like conventional SETI, that microwaves are simpler for planetary societies, since they can easily outshine their star in microwaves.

Broadcasting is expensive. Some appear to believe that beacons—that is, signals detectable beyond 1,000 light-years (ly)—can be cheap. Our analysis says otherwise. With the very lowest priced technology we have today, beacons that can stand out above the background noise cost $200,000 per light-year. A more likely cost is at least ten times that. So a 1,000-ly beacon will cost $200 million to more than $2 billion. Even hailing Alpha Centauri would cost close to a million dollars. None of the small groups who have sent brief signals to the stars have paid this price, and their messages will not be heard beyond a few light-years.

Motivations

Why, given such costs, should anyone bother?

All search strategies must assume something about the beacon builder. SETI has assumed a high-minded search for other life forms. But other motives are possible.

What could drive a beacon builder? Human history suggests two major categories of long-term messages that finite, mortal beings send across vast time scales:

• Kilroy Was Here: These can be signatures verging on graffiti. Names chiseled into walls have survived from ancient times. More recently, we sent compact disks on interplanetary probes, often bearing people’s names and short messages that can endure for millennia.

• High Church: These are designed for durability, to convey the culture’s highest achievements. The essential message is This was the best we did; remember it.

A society that is stable over thousands of years may invest resources in either of these paths. The human prospect has advanced enormously in only a few centuries; the lifespan in the advanced societies has risen by 50% in each of the last two centuries. Living longer, we contemplate grander legacies. Time capsules and ever-proliferating monuments testify to our urge to leave behind tributes or works in concrete ways (sometimes literally). Marvin Minsky argues that the urge to propagate culture quite probably will be a universal aspect of intelligent, technological, mortal species.

Thinking broadly, high-power transmitters might be built for a wide variety of goals other than two-way communication driven by curiosity. For example:

• The Funeral Pyre: A civilization near the end of its life announces its existence.

• Ozymandias: Here the motivation is sheer pride. The beacon announces the existence of a high civilization, even though it may be extinct, and the beacon tended by robots. This recalls the classic Percy Bysshe Shelly lines,

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my works, Ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

• Help! Quite possibly societies that plan over time scales on the order of 1,000 years will foresee physical problems and wish to discover if others have surmounted them. An example is a civilization whose star is warming (as ours is), which may wish to move their planet outward with gravitational tugs. Many others are possible.

• Leakage Radiation: These are unintentional, much like objects left accidentally in ancient sites and uncovered long after. They do carry messages, even if inadvertent: technological fingerprints. These can be not merely radio and television broadcasts radiating isotropically, which are fairly weak, but deep space radar and beaming of energy over solar-system distances. This includes “industrial” spaceship launchers, beam-driven sails, “planetary defense” radars scanning for killer asteroids, and cosmic power beaming driving interstellar starships with beams of lasers, millimeter or microwaves.

• Join Us: Religion may be commonplace in the galaxy; after all, it is here. Seeking converts is common, too, and electromagnetic preaching fits a frequent meme.

Thrifty Aliens

Our grandfather used to puff on his corncob pipe and say, “Talk is cheap, but whisky costs money.” In SETI, even talk (broadcasting) is not cheap.

So is cost/benefit analysis arguably universal?

Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources. Social species evolve to an equilibrium in which each species unconsciously carries out “environmental coordination,” which can follow rules like those of a market, especially among plants. Economics will matter.

A SETI broadcaster will face competing claims on resources, some from direct economic competition. Beaming will be essentially altruistic, since replies will take centuries if not millennia. SETI need not tax an advanced society’s resources. The power demands are for average powers less than a GW, far less than the 17 TW we use globally. Still, setting up a beaming complex will cost a lot, judged by our mature microwave technology.

We can’t assume aliens will be infinitely rich, either. Do the rich of our world spend money on interstellar broadcasts? After all, receiving is cheaper and you gain more real information. So far, attempts have been few and weak.

But even altruistic beacon builders will have to contend with other competing altruistic causes, just as humans do. Only by minimizing cost/benefit will their effort succeed. This is parsimony, meaning “less is better,” a concept of frugality, economy. Philosophers use this term for Occam’s Razor, but here we mean the press of economic demands in any society that contemplates long-term projects like SETI.

Note that parsimony directly contradicts the Altruistic Alien Argument that the beacon builders will be vastly wealthy and make everything easy for us. An omnidirectional beacon, radiating at the entire galactic plane, for example, would have to be enormously powerful and expensive, and so not be parsimonious. (We estimate one would cost nearly the total output of Earth for a year. Good luck asking the United Nations for that.)

Parsimony has implications for SETI. For transmitting time t, receiver detectability scales as t1/2. But at constant power, transmitter cost increases as t, so short pulses (“pings”) are economically smart (cheaper) for the transmitting society. A one-second pulse sent every 10 minutes to 600 targets would be 1/600 as expensive per target, yet only approximately 1/25 times harder to detect. Interstellar scintillation limits the pulse time to greater than 10-6 sec, which is within the range of all existing high-power microwave devices. Such pings would have small information content, attracting attention to weaker, high content messages.

Even if Earth economics generally works similarly in other technological societies, why should it apply to their transmitting beacons? Even on Earth, larger goals often override economic dictates, such as military security, aesthetics, religion, et cetera. But two aspects of SETI undermine this intuition:

1. SETI assumes long time scales for sender and receiver. Still, while cultural passions can set goals, economics determines how they get done. Many momentary, spectacular projects such as the pyramids of Egypt lasted only a century or two, then met economic limits. The Taj Mahal so taxed its province that the second, black Taj was never built. The grand cathedrals of medieval Europe suffered cost constraints and so, to avoid swamping local economies, took several centuries of large effort. Passion is temporary; costs remain.

2. We found that the optimum cost strategy leads directly to a remarkable cost insensitivity to the details of economic scaling. The ratio of costs for antenna area and transmitter power is about one. The two costs are usually equal and their ratio does not depend on the details of the technology and varies on Earth by only a factor of two. Both these costs may well be related principally to labor cost; if so, labor cost cancels out. This means fashions in underlying technology will matter little, and our experience may robustly represent that of other technological societies.

Our quantifying approach is sobering, as it forces trad-offs on otherwise open-ended speculations. But it also advances the subject, which many beacon ideas do not do. It’s simply much clearer to pick a major organizing principle—economics—than generalize from a special design, or guess at alien ideas.

What if we suppose, for example, that aliens have very low cost labor, i.e., slaves or automata? With a finite number of automata, you can use them to do a finite number of tasks. And so you pick and choose by assigning value to the tasks, balancing the equivalent value of the labor used to prosecute those tasks. So choices are still made on the basis of available labor.

The only case where labor has no value is where labor has no limit. That might be if aliens may live forever or have limitless armies of self-replicating automata. But even such labor costs something, because to support it demands resources, materials and energy, which are not free.

Smart SETI, we feel, should take account of this basic constraint.

Counting Costs

Since the early SETI era of the 1960s, microwave emission powers have increased orders of magnitude and new technologies have altered our ways of emitting very powerful signals. The highest peak power systems on Earth (peak powers over 1 GW) trade peak power for average power in order to get to a much stronger signal at distance at the lowest cost.

Fig. 1. Antenna, microwave power and total costs of Beacon with effective isotropic radiated power of 1017 watts, range 600 light years. Cost is in billions of dollars, and power in gigawatts (109 watts, the power of a large nuclear reactor). It radiates at frequency 1 GHz and has costs typical of ours today. Minimum total occurs when the antenna cost and power cost are equal.

Most of these high power devices operate in bursts of short pulses and for fundamental reasons are not extremely narrow band, having bandwidths D f/f, with f the frequency) of 0.01–1% of the beaming frequency. Economical beacons are also likely to be pulsed. Frank Drake, who started SETI in 1960, remarked in 1990, “The most rational ET signal would be a series of pulses that would be evidence of intelligent design.” This would be similar to the strategy of the lighthouse, pulsing and swinging the beam to get noticed.

To minimize cost, we wrote down the cost scaling of two major terms: the electrical power needed and antenna building cost, which depends on the antenna area. Quite generally, we found that minimum capital cost occurs when the cost is equally divided between antenna gain and radiated power. High power Earth systems show this general feature, no matter the application.

How could we send a broadcast? Arrays of antennas are the only means of producing the large radiating areas (~km2) that interstellar beacons require. They also have high reliability and degrade gracefully, as loss of a few antennas does not mean failure. Arrays are widely used in radio astronomy receiving and are being planned for the new Deep Space Network refit.

A typical case SETI broadcaster, by our calculations, has parameters that scale like in Figure 1.

This basic approach gives us many implications:

To attract attention, beam in pulses, not steadily. It’s cheaper. Steady signals are vastly more expensive.

High powers demand broadband emission. At very high voltage and currents, the electrical breakdown threshold is much higher for short pulses, so a machine of a given size can radiate much more powerfully.

Conventional SETI looks for narrowband microwaves near 1 GHz, steadily beamed. We find that on Earth, cost declines with frequency. The galactic background noise spectrum is flat between 1 GHz and 10 GHz. This is also the lowest-attenuation region of Earth’s atmosphere. The most favored spectral region is near 10 GHz, since this minimizes the cost of the beacon while imposing no increased cost on the receiver.

This is quite different from some SETI thought, which privileges the “water hole” region between 1 and 2 GHz. Indeed, the metaphorical resonance between the spectral lines of H I and OH with “meeting at the water hole” may be a classic case of anthropic reasoning. The secondary reasons given as early as the 1970s Project Cyclops—that the low end of this band demands less stringent frequency stability—vanishes if the beacon is broadband, as we argue is essential for high powers.

Since that era, detection of over 100 spectral lines in the interstellar medium, many of them organic, undermines the classic argument. Further, synchrotron radiation in the 1 GHz region increases going inward toward the galactic center, where the highest density of older stars peaks. A further benefit of higher frequencies for both beacon and receiver: Interstellar scintillation fades quickly with frequency and can be ignored around and above 10 GHz. As beacon builders we will prefer that the listener not be confused by scintillation.

Our conclusion is that cost, noise, and scintillation argue for radiating above the “water hole,” especially if space-based. In the atmosphere, the optimum will be below 10 GHz where atmospheric attenuation minimizes.

Cost-efficient beacons will be pulsed, narrowly directed, and broadband in the 1–10 GHz region, with a cost preference for the higher frequencies.

This means that SETI may be looking for the wrong kinds of signals.

Traditional SETI burdens itself with adjusting their receivers for narrow-band signals. This means they must account for Earth’s motion, and so introduce Doppler shift corrections. But at distances greater than 1,000 light-years, Doppler adjustment to offset relative motions, as nearby SETI searches do, becomes pointless; with many stars in the field of view, none is especially addressed. Further, distortion of signals from greater than1,000 light-years arises from interstellar scintillation. Such “twinkling” of the signal comes from both the dispersion of differing frequencies and delays in arrival time for pulses moving along slightly different pathways, due to refraction. Temporal broadening probably would limit bandwidth to greater than 1 MHz, as we know from the broadening of pulsar signals.

So there’s a gain from realizing that thrifty beacons will be broadband—we can ignore Doppler corrections and just look for quick, broad pulses.

Thrifty beacon systems would still be large and costly. They would have narrow “searchlight” beams and short “dwell times” when the beacon would be seen by an alien observer at target areas in the sky. They may revisit an area infrequently, perhaps only annually.

If this is right, what strategies should SETI change to?

Where to Look

A natural corridor to broadcast in lies along the galactic spiral’s radius or along the spiral galactic arm we are in.

To see beacons as we envision them, SETI should search in the plane of the spiral disk. From Earth, 90% of the galaxy’s stars lie within 9% of the sky’s area, in the plane and hub of the galaxy. This suggests a limited sky survey.

We will need to be patient and wait for recurring events that may arrive in intermittent bursts. Special attention should be paid to areas along the Galactic Disk where SETI searches have seen coherent signals that don’t recur in their limited listening time intervals. Since most stars lie close to the galactic plane, as viewed from Earth, occasional pulses at small angles from that plane should have priority.

Whatever forms might dwell farther in from us toward the center, they must know the basic symmetry of the spiral. This suggests the natural corridor for communication is along the spiral’s radius from Galactic Center or toward it, a simple direction known to everyone. This avenue maximizes the number of stars within a telescope’s view, especially by staring at the galactic hub.

A beacon near the center should at least broadcast outward in both directions, while societies at the far reaches may save half their cost by not emitting outward, since there is much less chance of advanced societies there. Radiating into the full disk takes far more time and power, so beams may only occasionally visit any sector of the radial plane. We listeners fairly far out (and fairly young) should look inward, within a narrow angle (about 10 degrees) toward the constellation Sagittarius. (Fig. 2)

We are newcomers. Most stars of our type lie inward and on average are about a billion years older than ours. Listening outward seems less efficient, since fewer life sites lie that way.

Fig. 2 We could see a cost-optimized beacon if it is part of a narrowly directed radial interstellar communication link. Art copyright Jon Lomberg 2009.

Life sites like ours will also know two rough time scales—a year and a day, from constraints on planetary habitable zones and biosphere mechanics. Observing every day over a year span might have a better chance of seeing intermittent bursts that revisit our part of the sky on a yearly time scale. To lower costs and have the best viewing range, sites near the equator seem optimal.

Have We Seen Beacons?

Our most important conclusion is that distant, cost-optimized beacons will appear for much less time than conventional SETI assumes. Many such signals may last for only fractions of a second.

If so, a receiver gets a short burst of pulsed microwaves and does not see it again until maybe a year later. Given the many possible local transient transmissions near a receiver (automobile spark plugs and other short-range machine time scales), a persistent signal for few seconds could be intuitively the best choice.

A beacon would linger a moment or two in our skies and be back within something like a year. No search we know could have been likely to see such an event. None checked back steadily over a year. Given the shortness of pulses in of such a strategy, perhaps cost-optimized beacons will be built to cover smaller, promising portions of the sky, and so revisit more often.

Earlier searches have seen pulsed intermittent signals resembling what we think beacons may be like, and may provide useful clues. We should observe the spots in the sky seen in previous work for hints of such activity but over yearlong periods. Perhaps newer search methods, directed at short transient signals, will be more likely to see the beacons we have described.

Have we already seen potential beacons? A provocative example is Sullivan’s survey of 1997, which lasted about 2.5 hours, with 190 1.2-minute integrations. With many repeat observations, they saw nothing that did not seem manmade. However, they “recorded intriguing, non-repeatable, narrowband signals, apparently not of manmade origin and with some degree of concentration toward the galactic plane . . .” Similar searches also saw one-time signals, not repeated. These searches had slow times to revisit or reconfirm, often days. Overall, few searches lasted more than hours, with lagging confirmation checks.

Another striking example is the “WOW” signal seen at the Ohio SETI site. Though its signal was strong, there was no electronic ability to search for a true message in this event. The check-back time was fairly long, and subsequent studies observed for short times. Further, the total time spent searching the WOW signal site, directly toward galactic center, is about 0.1% of a year. This fact illuminates the constraints that a Galactic Center Search Strategy imposes: A yearlong campaign will require more effort than SETI has employed over the last half century.

We conclude that SETI searches may have been looking for the wrong thing. SETI has largely sought signals at the lower end of the cost-optimum frequencies. They also may have taken needless care adjusting Doppler shifts, since broadband beacons will need none. Searches have seen coherent signals that are non-recurring on their limited listening time intervals. Those searches may have seen beacons, but could not verify them because they did not steadily observe over periods of years.

Transmission strategy for a distant, cost-conscious beacon may well be a rapid scan of the galactic plane, to cover the angular space. Such pulses will be infrequent events for the receiver. Such beacons built by distant advanced, wealthy societies will have very different characteristics from what SETI researchers seek. Future searches should pay special attention to areas along the Galactic Disk where SETI searches have seen coherent signals that have not recurred on the limited listening time intervals we have used so far.

Perhaps the galaxy does have many SETI beacons, but we haven’t been bright enough to see them.

References:

Our papers, with many references to these ideas, are:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.3966

http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.3964

http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.5938

About the Authors

James Benford is President of Microwave Sciences, which deals with high power microwave systems from conceptual designs to hardware. A Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, he has written 135 scientific papers and six books on physics topics, including the textbook, High Power Microwaves, now in its second edition.

Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, working in astrophysics and plasma physics. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, his fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape.

Copyright © 2011 Gregory and James Benford

 PROBABILITY ZERO

PROBABILITY ZERO

Small Penalties

Alastair Mayer

The helicopter cruised over the tundra at five hundred feet. In the passenger compartment, Agent Steve Grant gazed out the window. His prisoner, Samuel “Spam Lord” Walford, sat manacled to the...

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SCIENCE FACT   READER’S DEPARTMENTS

PROBABILITY ZERO

Small Penalties

Alastair Mayer

The helicopter cruised over the tundra at five hundred feet. In the passenger compartment, Agent Steve Grant gazed out the window. His prisoner, Samuel “Spam Lord” Walford, sat manacled to the aluminum seat frame across from him. The pilot’s warning sounded in his headset.

“Ten more minutes!” Grant relayed to Walford, shouting over the noise of the chopper.

“This is cruel and unusual punishment!”

“Come on, Walford, your lawyers tried that. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence. You’re getting off easy. Five days in exile and you’re a free man.” Grant shouted to be heard; it took the sarcastic edge off his voice.

“Yeah, if I survive. It’s not fair. I didn’t hurt anyone, just sent a few e-mails.”

“You were convicted of almost thirty million separate counts of sending unsolicited commercial e-mail. That was for just one day. That’s not ‘a few.’”

“James Atkins sent a hundred million a day. So did Koralev. I didn’t do so much.”

“Koralev got fined thirty seven million dollars . . . under the old laws. Thirty million is just what your prosecutors went with.” Grant looked out the window. The ground below was green with new spring growth, scattered with shallow pools of snowmelt. He turned back to the Spam Lord. “If I had a nickel for every thousand spams you sent during your ‘career,’ I’d be a millionaire. Oh wait, you do and you are. Or were. That’s billions of e-mails.”

“E-mail never hurt anybody. Don’t want it? Just delete it. Two seconds.”

“You stole their time. You stole everyone’s time. Two seconds per spam e-mail? That’s a lifetime per billion emails. How many lifetimes did you destroy? It’s like murder.”

“So you’re going to leave me to die.”

“No single thing out there will kill you. You can hike out in three or four days at a good pace. Plenty of daylight this time of year.”

“What about polar bears?”

“The coast is two hundred miles away. They don’t come this far inland.”

“There’s wolves.”

“There’s a paintball gun in your pack—”

“Paintball! What the hell? How about a real gun?”

“Not for a criminal. The pellets are skunk juice. Hit a wolf and, between the sting and the smell, it’ll back off.”

“Huh. What about bug repellent?”

“A few bugs never hurt anybody. Just brush them off. Two seconds.” Grant grinned, showing teeth to make it a snarl. Walford glared at him.

For a few minutes they just watched the terrain out the window, feeling the vibration of the helicopter. Grant broke the silence. “What makes it worse is that spam is so stupid. Like my wife needs twenty e-mails a day for penis enlargement.”

Walford sneered. “Married to you? Maybe she does.”

Grant forced down a surge of anger. He’d been transferring prisoners for too long to let insults get to him. There were more subtle responses than physical violence.

“You’re kind of lucky. The peak of mosquito season has about passed. Their bite is like a hypodermic stick.”

Walford’s sneer faded. “But that’s passed?”

“Only the peak; there are still plenty around. Plenty of black flies too. They bite a chunk out of your skin, but they inject you with an anesthetic first so you don’t notice it.”

Walford seemed to relax a bit. “You’re shitting me, right?”

“Nope. Ask anyone who’s been up here.” Grant paused, then grinned his feral grin. “There’s more. That anesthetic is a nerve poison. It wears off, but if you get a few hundred bites in an hour, you’ll feel it. You’ll get confused, disoriented. Maybe want to puke. If you keep getting bitten, well . . .”

“But that’s a lot of bites, right? I mean, how many black flies can there be up here?”

Grant leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Let me tell you about a bad fly day. Mosquitoes will cloud around your head, whining. Black flies will crawl on your skin and clothes, crawl up your sleeves and down your collar, crawl into your boots. You’ll squash a hundred flies with one slap; your hands will be bloody. You’ll want to breathe through your teeth so you don’t inhale them. You’ll find dead flies in your pockets and in your hair.”

The color had left Walford’s face. “Just for a few e-mails?”

“That’s less than one fly per ten-thousand e-mails.”

“But, that’s on a bad fly day, right?”

The pilot broke in then to tell them to prepare for landing, and the whine of the rotor changed in pitch as the helicopter descended.

“Up here in summer, if it’s not howling with wind or freezing cold, it’s a bad fly day. Oh, the forecast calls for nice weather.”

The helicopter settled onto a low mossy rise, the rotor downwash kicking up spray from the surrounding puddles. The pilot called back, “I’ll keep the rotor turning to blow the bugs away. Keep your head down!”

Grant unlocked Walford’s restraints, but Walford held onto his seat in a knuckle-whitening grip. “You can’t make me get out!”

Grant unholstered his Taser. “We can do this the easy way, where you get out on your own, or the hard way.”

“Fuck you. All right, I’m going. Where’s my gear?”

Grant pulled a pack from beside the seat and tossed it out the door. It hit the ground with a rattle and clank.

“What the hell’s in there?”

“Your supplies. Water bottle and filter. Food for five days.”

“Canned food?”

“Hormel pork luncheon meat, to be precise. Now get going.” Grant held up the Taser.

“Canned Spam? You are a bastard.” Walford climbed out of the helicopter, ducking his head as he picked up the pack. He crouched below the rotor blades, reluctant to leave.

“There’s a GPS in your pack!” Grant shouted. “Head south to the river and follow it to town. It’s about a hundred miles.” He didn’t expect Walford to make even half that, but the formalities must be observed.

Walford crouched there watching as Grant slid the door closed and signaled the pilot to take them up. As they climbed and turned south, Grant looked back to see Walford pawing through his pack one-handed, the other slapping at his neck. Beyond, a wispy cloud, like smoke, drifted towards him.

The black flies were coming.

Copyright © 2011 Alastair Mayer

 READER’S DEPARTMENTS

READER’S DEPARTMENTS

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THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

Don Sakers

Perhaps the most overused phrase in science fiction publishing (besides “space opera”) is “eagerly awaited.” It’s not a claim that’s easily disproved—after all, every book is eagerly awaited by someone, if only its author. But that’s not how the marketers want you to see it. They want to give the...

BRASS TACKS

Dear Stan, In regards to Don Sakers’ November 2010 “Reference Library” about Space Opera: right on. Some of that old stuff needs to be reprinted. A great but often overlooked story is the “Earth Dreams” trilogy by Janet Norris. It’s written in adult language (words longer than four letters) by...

UPCOMING EVENTS

Anthony Lewis

28 April–1 May 2011 WORLD HORROR CONVENTION at Doubletree Hotel Austin, Austin, TX. Guests: Sarah Langan, Joe Hill, Joe R. Lansdale, Vincent Chong, and Brian Keene. Membership: $125 until 1 March 2011, $150 at the door, supporting $60. Info: http://whc2011.org/; WHC 2011, PO Box 170045, Austin, TX...

INFORMATION

Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXXI, No. 4, April 2011. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST#123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription $55.90 in the...

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READER’S DEPARTMENTS

EDITORIAL

Stanley Schmidt

A SEASONAL DILEMMA

It’s long been traditional in the U.S. for the “school year” to run from approximately September to May or June, with summers off for most students and teachers. For a shorter but significant time, it’s been fairly common for various groups to advocate radically changing that practice, in ways ranging from assigning ever-increasing amounts of homework to be done over “vacation,” to flat-out abolishing the vacation and running school through the whole calendar. The most recent example to strongly catch my eye was the cover story in the August 2, 2010 issue of Time, with the chilling (at least for me) title “The Case Against Summer Vacation.”

I personally find such proposals chilling because when I look back on my own life, I find that not only did summer vacations provide a much-needed change of pace, they actually contributed far more to my education than most of my formal schooling, at least through junior high and (with a few conspicuous exceptions) high school. If that’s true for many other people, abolishing summer vacation would represent a profound cultural shift and likely have a major impact on how our future develops—and not necessarily the one its proponents expect.

I think it is true for a good many people—but not, I’ve increasingly come to realize, for all. So my thinking has shifted a little since I wrote “A Requiem for Summer?,” which appeared here in July 1988. Not to the point of losing my reservations about whether such a move would have made my life better—I’m still convinced it wouldn’t have—but I’ve come to recognize that the dilemma of what to do about that season is more complicated than I thought. It’s also more complicated than many of the proponents of such schemes seem to realize, and it’s essential that they, too, grasp the complexity. Such a far-reaching change should not be undertaken lightly.

The central complication, I think, is the fact—simple, but too seldom acknowledged—that people aren’t all the same. My summer vacations were invaluable to me partly because the chance to go swimming, take long bicycle rides, or simply sit and watch clouds and lightning bugs provided a chance to relax and recuperate from the pressures of classes, homework, and other activities that adults had scheduled for me whether I wanted them or not. But I didn’t spend all my time like that, and those vacations were also valuable because they gave me the opportunity to read widely in an enormous range of fields, to read and write science fiction and music, and to learn to repair or build mechanical and electrical gadgets. I treated encyclopedias and dictionaries like primitive hypermedia, sometimes sitting for hours simply following cross-references wherever they might lead. In that way I learned of the existence of many subjects that had never been mentioned in my schools, and pursued ones that caught my interest in more depth. Sometimes I read whole books like Karl Jansky’s original monograph on radio astronomy and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s on orchestration.

The first illustration in the Time article shows two kids swimming in a lake, with the caption, “Summer outings like this one . . . punctuate a season of boredom.” To me, that sentence seems bizarre and utterly alien. I never found summer vacations boring—and I learned far more during them than I did in the early years of school, which generally had little new or interesting to offer me, but consumed a great deal of my time. Many creative writers, artists, and scientists have similar stories.

And yet . . .

Not everyone does. Many, perhaps most, people have little inclination to read or experiment with new activities on their own, and so they really do get bored and forget a lot that they’ve learned during summer vacation. While they, too, need time to relax and unwind, their educations do suffer when they’re left to their own devices and do nothing of educational value for three months. Might letting that happen be as unfair and counterproductive as imposing three more months of classroom drudgery on the imaginative and self-motivated would be? *

That last sentence is key: what’s good for either group may be bad for the other—so we should be wary of “one-size-fits-all” solutions. There probably are no such solutions, because different people have different needs and benefit from different kinds of approaches. So what we really need, if we want to optimize education for as many kids as possible, is the availability of more kinds of opportunities—and making sure that the kids (and their parents) know they exist.

The mere existence of opportunities, it seems, is not enough. I’ve always found it difficult to be sympathetic to moans of “There’s nothing to do,” because to me the claim seemed patently ridiculous. For me, there was always the library—both the relatively small one at home and the larger one a few blocks away (and, if I wanted something obscure, the really big one downtown, but easily accessible by bus). But then, I had the advantage of growing up in a house where I was surrounded by books from the start, with parents who encouraged me to use them and to make full and frequent use of the public libraries. Many kids don’t get that kind of encouragement, and it would simply never occur to them to go to the library, even though it’s just as available to them as to anyone else. That’s especially likely to be true of poor kids (though the correlation is far from perfect—my parents, with their house full of well-used books, grew up in poor families). Such kids, in homes where learning and the tools for doing it are at best out of sight and at worst regarded with contempt, clearly have very different needs from those who grow up surrounded by materials and enthusiasm for learning.

And any radical changes we make need to make allowance for both kinds of needs.

One point on which I remain convinced is that three more months of the kinds of schooling we now consider normal are not best for anybody. Aside from the fact that I personally found them frequently stultifying, it’s pretty clear that, on average, they don’t work very well. That Time article contains a painfully telling graph comparing the number of school days, number of classroom hours, and students’ math scores for 14 industrialized countries. The U.S. ranks low on days, extremely high on hours, and embarrassingly low on measured performance. Time presents these statistics in support of its contention that summer vacations are harmful; I submit that they could equally well support the view that our school days are excessively long and our methods ineffective. My strong suspicion is that there’s at least enough truth in the latter to raise fears that three more months of conventional school would do at least as much damage as indolent summers off.

But unconventional school may be a different matter, at least for some students. My wife participated in some special “enrichment” programs that really were both fun and enlightening, and I can easily imagine (but was never offered) some that I might have viewed in the same way. That same Time article describes several programs now running in widely scattered and quite different cities, in which kids from all kinds of backgrounds can have a great deal of fun and learn a lot too—a combination regrettably rare in conventional classroom curricula. These programs are voluntary, so they have to be run in such a way that students want to participate in them; but they’re also structured so that a lot of learning is built right into the fun. And they work—in some cases producing more measurable improvement in skills like reading than an academic year of regular school.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least; I’ve seen it happen before. John W. Campbell told me of a teacher—one of his daughters, if I remember rightly—who brought “incorrigible” readers up several grade levels in a single year by leaving comic books lying around the classroom (and was scorned by colleagues for her unorthodox methods, even though [or because?] they worked). One of my own best teachers, in a later job, did the same (and got the same reaction) by noting that many students wanted to learn to play the guitar, so he wrote and used a guitar method that tricked them into learning to read in the process.

It seems to me that there’s a loud, clear lesson in all this. We don’t need three more months of the same kind of education we now have in most of our classrooms; we need more use of methods that will make students want to learn, and enjoy the process. Summer enrichment programs have to do that—and regular classes during the “normal” academic year might be more effective if they did a lot more of it, too. As John Campbell said fervently during that long-ago conversation, “Teaching ought to have more circus in it!”

Teaching is way too important to rely on applying still more of methods that have already been demonstrated, over and over and over, to not work very well. What we need to do is find out what does work well, for which kinds of students, and make as many options as possible available—and attractive—to those who would most benefit from them. I’d like to see that include strong, effective summer programs like those in Baltimore and Indianapolis. I realize that financing them can be a challenge, especially in places (like the one where I live) where school taxes are already oppressively (some say obscenely) high. But places like Corbin, Kentucky, which has involved many community businesses and organizations in the effort, have demonstrated that it’s possible to find imaginative solutions to the funding problem.

And I’d want these programs to remain voluntary. Much as I’d like to see them available, I’d also want to keep the long summer vacation available as one option for those who prefer it and can make good use of it. Some may say, “But a good organized program could be even better!”—but I’m not so sure. I think our culture is obsessed with organization, and it’s also important for people, at least some of them, to learn to fend for themselves without always depending on organized support from others—especially if they know what they want and no organization is available to support it. In my own case, for example, I knew that one of the things I most wanted to learn to do was write science fiction. That meant I needed to read a lot of it and start trying to write it—and at that time, science fiction was so uniformly scorned by the educational establishment that I doubt I could have found a teacher to give me any support.

So a perfect solution to the seasonal dilemma probably doesn’t exist, but surely we can come up with a better one—or package of them—than we have so far. Meanwhile, I’ll toss out two morsels of food for thought:

1. As Joyce pointed out during one of several conversations in which we were kicking these ideas around, many kids these days spend a lot of their free time playing computer games. We already know that those can do wonders for developing hand-eye coordination; might they not be a huge untapped opportunity for other kinds of education as well? In an unpublished story called “Thinkertoy” that I wrote a long time ago (during my allegedly boring summer vacation between eighth and ninth grades) I imagined a rebellion being fomented by an underground that distributed cheap little computers that played games with people to trick them into learning the skills and attitudes they needed to pull it off. Might that idea have real applications in our own immediate future? When I wrote the story, nobody had any idea how to make such tiny, cheap, powerful, widely distributed computers. Most people, even in the field, would probably have said they were impossible. But now we have them! Couldn’t some really talented, sneaky programmer/educators be writing games that will be so much fun that kids will want to play them, and inevitably learn reading and math and science and languages as an integral part of the process?

2. The New York Times, in an article by Tara Parker-Pope (fortuitously dated just one day after the Time article I’ve mentioned), describes a University of Tennessee study in which students at low-income schools were simply given books at a spring fair, with the hope that they would read them. Note that I said given, not assigned. The books—600 titles—were made available, and each student was allowed to take any twelve. Being allowed to choose books they wanted to read, rather than what some stuffy adult told them was Good For Them, turned out to be a powerful—and ridiculously inexpensive—motivator. Even though their choices were seldom what teachers would have picked for them, they worked. The students who picked out free books, unlike a control group, showed a three-year improvement in reading skills equivalent to that produced by three years of summer school. And it was a lot cheaper—and, I suspect, a lot more likely to make those students want to keep reading for the rest of their lives.

Does anybody really find that surprising? Sometimes good answers really are so simple that those who need to see them look right past them.

Copyright © 2011 Stanley Schmidt

* I don’t think it’s necessarily and intrinsically terrible to have learning slow down, stop, or even backtrack for a little while. It strikes me as similar to finding an occasional level stretch or slight descent during a mountain climb. Most of us welcome the break, even though we know it will mean a little more total climbing. The problem with the educational analog is that those with lots of opportunities keep climbing inexorably, and those who don’t will eventually find themselves competing for jobs and other things with those who do. Personally, I suspect many of us could stand to learn that all of life doesn’t have to be a relentless uphill slog, but that’s a problem for another day.

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READER’S DEPARTMENTS

BIOLOG

Richard A. Lovett

ADAM-TROY CASTRO

In 2004, Adam-Troy Castro lost his job. As he describes it, it wasn’t much of a job: he was working customer service for a mail-order retailer. “There were some real horror stories involved in it,” he says. So, when he called his wife to tell her the news, her response was simple. “Good. You’re now a full-time writer.”

Since then, Castro—with 19 books and 90+ short stories to his credit—has moved from an up-and-coming new writer to a genre fixture. His current novella, “Hiding Place,” is part of a three-novel series involving prickly-but-brilliant Andrea Cort of humanity’s Diplomatic Corps. It’s also his sixth appearance in Analog. His first, “The Astronaut from Wyoming” (July 1999, co-authored with Jerry Oltion), was a Hugo and Nebula nominee and, in translation, won the Seiun award, the Japanese equivalent of a Hugo.

Like many science fiction writers, Castro started young. “I’ve been writing stories since age nine,” he says. In college, at Cornell University, he studied communication arts, with an eye to magazine layout and advertising, but didn’t make it a long-term career. In the process, he also wrote for his college humor magazine, the Cornell Lunatic, though the favorite paying job of his youth was a brief stint as a security guard in a “tunnel of love.” Mostly, that job involved being invisible and unobtrusive. But if he needed to take action, he often had to leap across the canal in the dark. “Frequently, you missed,” he says. On one memorable occasion, he came down with one foot in one boat and one foot in another . . . with the inevitable result.

All of this got channeled into a humorous bent epitomized by a series of stories he did in the 1990s about a pair of “interstellar idiots” named Vossoff and Nimmitz who inhabit the same universe (more or less) as the much-more-serious Andrea Cort. He’s also done cartoons and nonprofessional standup comedy.

What Castro prizes above all, however, is variety. “I’ve always liked to change styles,” he says. “I’ve written really crazy comedy; I’ve written dire horror. I have tried to avoid the existence of a ‘typical’ Adam-Troy Castro story.”

The result: four Spider-man novelizations, horror stories and dark fantasy . . . and a nonfiction book called “My Ox is Broken” cataloging “great moments” from the TV reality show, “The Amazing Race.”

Oddest of all, perhaps, is a collaborative novel called “Fake Alibis” about an (apparently real) Internet service that will fix you up with an alibi if you need one—so long as it’s not for criminal purposes. “If you want your wife to think you’ve gone to a business convention in Phoenix, but actually you’ve been shacked up with a girlfriend in Boston, they will provide you with a paper trail,” he says.

Castro may be an author who defies pigeonholing, but he does have one consistent characteristic: he likes character-driven stories. “I enjoy when the character just takes over and says, ‘No, the story’s not going to go this way; it’s going to go that way,’” he says.

“Hiding Place” is a case in point. “I thought it was going to be a straightforward whodunit,” he says. “Then the character took over.”

Copyright © 2011 Richard A. Lovett

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READER’S DEPARTMENTS

IN TIMES TO COME

We’re all born into a world in which everything is new and confusing, and we have to try to figure out how it all fits together and how it works and how it affects us. Most of us have help: as Alfred Korzybski said, man is a time-binding animal, and we can build on the accumulated experience and knowledge of all our forebears. For some, though, it’s not nearly so simple. Consider, for example, Erik Acharius Bateson, the young man at the heart of “Tower of Worlds,” Rajnar Vajra’s lead novella (with cover by John Allemand) in our May issue. His world is complex—far more complex than he ever imagined—and full of challenges. He has only a short time to figure out what it is, with few resources but his own, but first he has a more immediate problem: to survive. But then, he, too, is more complex than he ever imagined. . . .

We’ll also have stories by Ron Collins, Bond Elam, Bud Sparhawk, Walter L. Kleine, and Jerry Oltion, and a fact article that’s a sequel of sorts. A couple of years ago psychiatrist Nick Kanas caught your attention with an article on the psychological problems of space travel, but then he was just talking about travel to “nearby” planets. Next month he looks farther out, to trips whose sheer duration will pose problems on a far more daunting scale, with “To the Outer Solar System and Beyond.”

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READER’S DEPARTMENTS

THE ALTERNATE VIEW

Jeffery D. Kooistra

AUTHOR FALLS IN LOVE WITH E-READER

Call me old-fashioned, but until recently I never thought I would get an e-reader. You see, I love books, not just for the content, but in the feeling of sensation. I like the smell of a new book and the way new pages feel to my fingers. I love the aroma of an old book, the way aged and yellowed pages flip easily, the way it opens effortlessly, luring you to read. I like the heft of a heavy book, and delight in the near weightlessness of an old SF paperback novel, printed on cheap paper, when 160 pages or so was enough. (A few weeks ago I finished reading Space Prison by Tom Godwin. It’s an old paperback from 1958 I picked up used a few years ago—158 pages long, and every one of them leaving me anxious to read the next. That’s the kind of book I have in mind.) Also, I’ve never forgotten something Asimov pointed out a long time ago in an essay or editorial, which was simply that books do very well what it is they are supposed to do—present their content in an easy to use way, cheaply, and with complete random access.

But you can’t fit 3,500 of them between one set of covers.

Another issue I had was that most of the books I still want to own are very old. As some of you know, I collect old physics textbooks. I don’t collect them for their rarity, nor as artifacts, nor do I much care about their condition so long as I can read them. It is entirely a matter of content, for as time goes by, topics once covered in great detail are dropped or abbreviated. This doesn’t usually happen because theories change or because new data has supplanted old, or because an earlier understanding was shown to be incorrect. Rather, topics disappear to make room for new topics, more relevant to the current era. When I began collecting these books, I did not for one second think anyone would go to the trouble of digitizing many of them, and even in cases where they did, not every edition.

I was wrong about that. It is very likely, perhaps certain, that eventually every book ever written in every edition and language will find its way into digital form, available to anyone anywhere at any time, forever and ever, amen. Not only that, but also every issue of every magazine, newspaper, scientific journal, every photograph, movie, and TV show. In short, anything that can be usefully converted into electronic form will be. If that’s the way it’s going to be, then I would be remiss if I did not come to terms with the modern era and make my peace with e-readers.

What made me finally accept that I would eventually get one was an advertisement for the latest Kindle e-reader. One thing (actually, the only thing) that really struck me was the size of the unit. In length and width it’s barely bigger than an ordinary paperback, significantly thinner, and weighs only eight ounces or so. I’ve tried reading e-books on a netbook, but I hate it—I spend too much time thinking about what I’m reading with, rather than losing myself in the book. Like most people, I have a favorite place to read at home. In my case it’s an old rocker-recliner not far from the fireplace. Try as I might, I could never get comfortable reading in it with a netbook in my lap. But I had a hunch that this little Kindle might be just the ticket.

This column isn’t a review of the new Kindle. I’m not interested in pushing one kind of e-reader over another. I like what I like, and I’m sure a different e-reader—or no e-reader at all—would serve others just as well. Indeed, some of you have had an e-reader for years. Now that I own one, I find myself having some of the most optimistic thoughts I’ve had in years about the future of publishing, and of reading, and of the possibility that one day each of us will have access to the sum of all human knowledge.

I admit, I didn’t need an e-reader right now. I have more than enough books stacked up, yet to be read—more than I’ll get to before I die. I wish I could say that, like a wise and prudent consumer, I looked into all the available options, carefully weighing the pros and cons of each particular kind of e-reader, but I didn’t. A few days after seeing that ad, I took another look at the size of the Kindle, the price of the Kindle ($139 at the time), noted that my birthday was a week away, and bought it online.

So what is it like? Is it as easy as reading a book? I can’t speak to how well other e-readers work, but my little Kindle is easier to read than a book, and I’m not kidding. The screen of my device uses electronic paper, which means that like a book page, it uses ink and room light to see it. The ink pixels are simply reoriented every time you advance a page into new letters or back into white space. But unlike with a book, with my Kindle I can change the contrast, the size of the characters, the orientation of the page, the line spacing, and even the typeface. For a bifocal-wearing dude like me, the ability to turn any book into a large print edition with the flick of a finger is nearly miraculous.

Another nice thing about electronic paper is that it uses very little power. The only time any electricity is needed is when the page is changed. Once the pixels are in place, no more power is consumed, unlike with the display on a netbook or cell phone. This means you only need to charge the thing about once a month, unless you use the Wi-Fi a lot to stay connected to the Internet. In that case (the instructions say; I use the Wi-Fi sparingly), you may have to charge it every three weeks. I don’t mind that the display is monochrome. I’d be happy with it forever. But it is inevitable that future e-readers, while remaining low power devices, will have full color capability and be able to show you everything a laptop can now. [Slightly before this issue went to press, the NookColor from Barnes & Noble became available. Ed.]

I transferred some e-books into the Kindle as soon as it arrived, but the first recent book I bought in Kindle format was the outstanding biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas. I’d had my eye on it for months, and when my friends gave me an Amazon ten-dollar gift e-card for my birthday, I used it and ordered the Kindle edition of the book from Amazon. Though I completed the transaction with my laptop, a few seconds later I watched as my Kindle lit up and told me the book was incoming. Seconds later, there it was. I’m used to it now, but that first time was definitely an “I’m in the future now” moment. Over the next few days I read the book and found it engrossing. It certainly lives up to its rave reviews. As for the e-reading experience, it turned out I enjoyed reading it electronically more than I would have had it been an ordinary book. I not only looked forward to reading the book itself, but I actually looked forward to the experience of reading it on an e-reader!

Interestingly enough, the Kindle came preloaded with a friendly letter from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. In the letter he said, “Our top design objective was for Kindle to disappear in your hands—to get out of the way—so you can enjoy your reading. We hope you’ll quickly forget you’re reading on an advanced wireless device and instead be transported into that mental realm readers love . . .” Why, thank you, Mr. Bezos. Mission accomplished!

E-readers come with financial dangers I found out quite quickly while sitting there in my easy chair and trying out the wireless feature. It said it would take me to the Kindle store, so why not? Off I went and there found a category for SF books. I clicked on over to it and one of the first books I found (without even trying) available in a Kindle edition, was Space Prison. I don’t know if my jaw actually dropped open, but it should have.

Space Prison. This obscure book I picked up at a library used book sale. Never heard of it before, and only knew the author from “The Cold Equations.” But if Space Prison was available—

The Metaxas book I’d bought the old fashioned way with my laptop. But now I didn’t need my laptop, and the Kindle was already logged into the store. Next stop, religion, G. K. Chesterton, the Father Brown stories. There they were, all of them, for a buck or two. Zap! Mine! Chesterton’s Orthodoxy? Yes! Zap! The Everlasting Man? Zap!

I went on like that for a while. Two versions of the Bible, John Calvin’s commentaries on Genesis and Daniel (four volumes, all mine for a couple of dollars, and I had wanted those for years). I tried out science and without even looking, found Lorentz’s book, The Einstein Theory of Relativity, for $0.99. Zap! Of course I searched on “aether.” Bingo. Aether and Gravitation by a fella named William George Hooper. Never heard of it, but it was over 100 years old and it cost a dollar.

(About that Hooper book—I’m not sure it was worth the dollar.)

In my zest to acquire, finally and in any form, books I had long sought, I lost my head for a bit that night. It ultimately dawned on me that maybe I didn’t actually need to buy these books. Not now, anyway. Many of them I could get online, for free, any time I actually needed them, though perhaps not (yet) in Kindle format. The Internet is rapidly becoming just one big library, isn’t it? Did I really need to have my own copies of the books stored on my e-reader?

Come to think of it, weren’t we rapidly approaching the point where there would no longer be much reason to actually buy a book? Alas, the thorny question of how the writer makes any money (or the singer or the movie star) if everything is infinitely reproducible and available immediately for free (or nearly so).

I don’t know how it will all work out, but somehow or other it will. The sum of all human knowledge, available on demand instantly from the comfort of your favorite chair, will not be spurned. It’s too useful and it’s too valuable, and it’s just too darn entertaining for that not to happen, and soon. But as I found with the Hooper book, not all of that knowledge is worth knowing, or even looking at; still, I’m not in favor of letting any of it disappear. Even Hooper has his moments.

The old saying is true: “Knowledge is power.” Having all of it available in the palm of your hand is an unprecedented gift. But only for those with the wisdom to appreciate it.

Copyright © 2011 Jeffery D. Kooistra

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READER’S DEPARTMENTS

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

Don Sakers

Perhaps the most overused phrase in science fiction publishing (besides “space opera”) is “eagerly awaited.” It’s not a claim that’s easily disproved—after all, every book is eagerly awaited by someone, if only its author. But that’s not how the marketers want you to see it. They want to give the impression that hordes of rabid fans are lined up for blocks in front of bookstores, in the fashion of Harry Potter or Twilight, counting the seconds until they get the new title in their hot little hands. In this way they hope to build excitement, which leads to more sales.

And we really can’t blame the marketers; it’s their job to sell books. But let’s be honest for a moment . . . very few books are actually “eagerly awaited” by more than a comparative handful of readers. If that phrase is to mean anything useful, there ought to be some ground rules. Let’s count the ways that science fiction can legitimately be “eagerly awaited.”

First, consider the science fiction magazines. As far back as the pulp era of the 1930s, readers impatiently anticipated each new issue. Isaac Asimov told of filling school notebooks with calculations of how many seconds remained until the next issue of Astounding hit the stands. To judge from the message boards, modern subscribers to Analog know exactly how he felt. Here, then, is our first category of “eagerly awaited”: magazines—or, indeed, anything that’s published periodically on a more-or-less regular schedule (and now you know why librarian-types often call magazines “periodicals.”) Periodic anthologies also count, like the various “best of the year” reprint volumes or well-regarded original anthologies like George Mann’s Solaris Book of New Science Fiction or Roby James’ Warrior Wisewoman.

A second kind of “eagerly awaited” book is one that continues a story begun in an earlier book (or books). Cliffhanger endings are particularly effective in building eagerness; if you leave your characters in jeopardy at the end of one book, you’ll have readers salivating for the next one. But even without a cliffhanger, a continuing story has its own built-in appeal.

In the same vein, a book that completes a story can be awaited even more eagerly. Think of Return of the Jedi, E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Children of the Lens, or Anne McCaffrey’s All the Weyrs of Pern. This is the classic pattern of the trilogy: A popular first book is followed by an eagerly awaited sequel that continues the story; next comes the more eagerly awaited third book, which brings the story to a satisfactory ending.

With an ongoing series, where there is no natural end to the story, the “eagerly awaited” status comes less automatically. All things being equal, the eighth book of a series is less eagerly awaited than the concluding book of a series. In some cases, a lengthy series can even decrease the eagerness for each successive book—how often have you felt that an author ran out of steam around book six, and everything since then has been sub-par? And since we’re being honest, how many times have you stopped reading a series after book seven or eight? Now we’re into negative eagerness.

Elapsed time can help (you might think of this as the “absence makes the heart grow fonder” category). Isaac Asimov published the third Foundation book in 1953, and it wasn’t until 28 years later that the fourth book appeared. In the interim, whole generations of readers devoured the original trilogy and begged for more. Foundation’s Edge was certainly one of the most “eagerly awaited” SF novels ever. Even a lapse of a seven or eight years can ratchet the eagerness up to pretty high levels, as we’ll see below.

A good enough writer can produce high eagerness without the help of cliffhangers, continued stories, or series at all. One classic example is Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote mostly standalone novels that certainly fell into anyone’s definition of “eagerly awaited.” Here, too, a hiatus can boost eagerness—how often have you seen a book advertised as “So-and-so’s first novel in x years”? Alfred Bester and Theodore Sturgeon were both stellar writers who produced books so irregularly that each one was most “eagerly awaited.”

Finally, there are eagerly awaited books that come out of nowhere. Sometimes the eagerness stems from the author—Carl Sagan’s first SF novel, Contact, wasn’t “eagerly awaited” because the world wanted another First Contact story. If Stephen Hawking or Neil deGrasse Tyson were to write a science fiction novel, you can bet that book would be “eagerly awaited” indeed. Sometimes a movie or TV show can generate an “eagerly awaited” book, as with Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, which was marketed in 1978 as a continuation of the Star Wars story. And sometimes the subject of a book builds expectations all on its own, even if the author is relatively unknown in the field—again, we’ll see an example below.

With all this buildup, I’m sure you’re waiting to hear about some books that truly are eagerly awaited. So let’s begin.

Cryoburn

Lois McMaster Bujold

Baen, 345 pages, $25.00 (hardcover)

Baen Webscriptions: $15.00 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-4391-3394-1

Series: Miles Vorkosigan 16

Genre: Adventure SF

This may be the most eagerly awaited book here. Lois McMaster Bujold’s last Miles Vorkosigan book came out in 2002, and with each passing year readers have become more and more eager for the next. In eight years, more and more new readers have discovered the series, read all the books, and wanted more. They can’t help it, it’s a law of nature: to read a Bujold book is to want more.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Miles Vorkosigan, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. I know I did, for I came to the series late, after friends had been after me for years to give it a try. First, there is Miles himself: A man born small, weak, and fragile due to congenital deformities, but with quick wits, unconquerable will, and an ability to get himself into and out of trouble by taking the least direct routes. The son of a nobleman, Miles triumphs over adversity and obstacles and makes his own way in the universe.

Then there’s Bujold’s writing, which is like a refreshing drink from a cold, clear mountain spring. Her words sparkle and delight with ingenuity and cleverness; you’ll drive everyone around you crazy by reading the better passages aloud (and there are lots of them). She is a mesmerizing storyteller. And she’s funny to boot.

In the seven years since we last saw Miles, he’s become a father and had various adventures, but he still holds the post of Auditor for the three-planet Barrayaran Empire. He and his armsman Roic have come to a non-Imperial world, Kibou-daini, to investigate strange goings-on. Kibou-daini is dominated by the Cryocombs, where millions of citizens are frozen awaiting immortality. Huge companies—cryocorps—maintain the sleepers and, incidentally, hold their proxies for voting in planetary elections. One of these cryocorps wants to start operations in the Barrayaran Empire, which is what brought Miles to Kibou-daini.

Except things went wrong, as they do when Miles is around, and he finds himself in the company of a boy who loves animals and a group of off-the-grid rebels operating their own cryo-facility. In no time at all Miles is up to his neck in the complex and deadly politics of this strange world. Once again it’s Miles against the universe . . . and the universe is fearfully outmatched.

Read this book. If you’ve read Bujold before, you don’t need me to tell you that. If you haven’t, this is as good a place as any to jump on . . . you’ll soon be reading all the others as well.

The first edition comes with a CD that contains e-book versions of most of the other Vorkosigan novels, which makes it quite a bargain if you’re an e-book person.

Mockingjay

Suzanne Collins

Scholastic, 398 pages, $17.99 (hardcover)

Kindle, Nook: $7.58 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-439-02351-1

Series: Hunger Games 3

Genre: Post-Apocalyptic, Teen SF

Mockingjay is the concluding book of the enormously popular Hunger Games series, awaited eagerly by teens and adults alike. In the previous two books (The Hunger Games and Catching Fire) Katniss Everdeen has twice survived the Hunger Games, in which teens from the Twelve Districts of the country Panem (post-apocalypse North America) fight to the death in the Arena. In the process, Katniss became the living symbol of revolt against the despotic Capital.

Now Katniss and her family are safe in the secret District Thirteen, long thought destroyed and the base of the rebels. All of Panem is in open revolt. Katniss’ home District, Twelve, has been firebombed and its inhabitants killed. The rebels, seeing possible victory for the first time in centuries, want Katniss—in her victorious and inspirational persona of the Mockingjay—for their propaganda efforts. They tell her that she can turn the tide of battle so the Capital can be defeated once and for all. Can she trust them any more than she can trust the Capital?

Everyone wants to use the Mockingjay for their own purposes. But Katniss is her own person, and if the rebels try to control their Mockingjay, they just might be sorry.

This book brings the story to an end, and shows us the final fate of Panem and the Mockingjay. It’s as exciting and compelling as the previous two books. Don’t blame me if you find yourself staying up late to finish it.

All Clear

Connie Willis

Spectra, 641 pages, $26.00 (hardcover)

Kindle, Nook: $14.30 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-553-80767-7

Series: Oxford Historians 4

Genre: Trips in Time

It hasn’t even been a year, but to anyone who read the previous book, Blackout, All Clear is surely one of the books most eagerly awaited. Actually, they aren’t really even two separate books, any more than The Lord of the Rings is three—the two are clearly one (enormous) novel published in two volumes for convenience.

And what a novel! As a quick recap, for those who missed Blackout: Polly, Mike, and Eileen are time-traveling historians from the 2060s, stranded in London during the Blitz. Something has gone wrong with time travel, their scheduled return portals have not opened, and they must find some way to get back to their own time . . . while also surviving the worst days and months of German bombardment of London.

The main story is intercut with glimpses of various other eras and other historians, including the crew back in future Oxford who are desperately trying to rescue the timelost trio.

In a previous issue (March 2010, to be precise) I talked about the two basic theories of time travel: the multiverse and the “invariant timeline.” In the Oxford Historians books, the timeline is supposed to be invariant . . . but there are hints that maybe things aren’t as invariant as everyone thought. I’m not going to ruin it for you by telling you which side Willis ultimately comes down on, but the tension between the two definitely informs the books.

Connie Willis is a master artist at the height of her craft. You’ll find yourself glued to the text . . . and when you’re finished, you’ll feel as if you, too, were present during those dark times of World War II. Until we get real time travel, these books will do nicely.

Stargate Atlantis: Homecoming

Jo Graham & Melissa Scott

Fandemonium, 320 pages, $7.99 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-90558650-9

Series: Legacy 1

Genre: Media SF, Space Opera

In the “eagerly awaited” competition, this one has two things going for it. First, it’s a continuation of a one of the best SF television shows in a long while. Second, it’s Melissa Scott’s first book since 2001. Let me handle these in reverse order.

Melissa Scott is best known for her Roads of Heaven trilogy (Five-Twelfths of Heaven, Silence in Solitude, and Empress of Earth) and intelligent cyberpunk novels like Trouble and Her Friends and The Jazz. Scott is one of the most inventive and intelligent authors in SF; I would easily stack her up against Samuel R. Delany and Robert J. Sawyer. That she hasn’t had a new book out in ten years is a pity. (Her co-author, Jo Graham, is an up-and-coming author of marvelous historical fantasies; it’s great to see her playing on the SF side of the fence.)

Stargate Atlantis was a spinoff of its older brother, Stargate SG-1. Unlike the current spawn of the franchise, Stargate Universe, Atlantis and SG-1 were both intelligent science fiction presented with true sense of wonder, the most authentic-sounding technobabble anywhere, and more than a dollop of good humor. Atlantis was cancelled after its fifth season; what Scott and Graham have done is to plot out the unaired sixth season, and they’ll be presenting it in a series of books of which Homecoming is the first.

It was worth the wait.

At the end of the series, the flying city Atlantis had returned to Earth from the Pegasus Galaxy. In this book, set a few months later, the scattered crew comes together (along with some new faces) to take the city back to Pegasus. There they will continue the fight against the vampiric Wraith who threaten the human populations of that galaxy.

Make no mistake, this is real science fiction. Sure, the authors capture the voices and personalities of the various characters very well, and they stay faithful to the background established in the two shows—but they go beyond all that, adding new depth as only the printed word can.

Fan of Stargate or not, if you like good, intelligent space opera, you’ll like this book.

Robert A. Heinlein:

In Dialogue With His Century: Volume 1

William H. Patterson, Jr.

Tor, 622 pages, $29.99 (hardcover)

iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $14.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-7653-1960-9

Genre: Nonfiction (Biography)

Remember when I said that a book could be “eagerly awaited” because of its subject matter? Here is a perfect case in point: volume one of the authorized biography of Robert A. Heinlein.

To a large degree, science fiction is what it is because of Robert A. Heinlein. He gave shape to the field during the Campbell Revolution, he spread SF out of its pulp ghetto and into popular culture. His teen SF books brought multitudes of new readers to the genre (and, not incidentally, multitudes to careers in science and technology). He blazed trails that the rest of us are still following, nearly a quarter-century after his death.

Yet this cornerstone figure was an intensely private man, and only the barest outline of his private life was known. In a field in which writers have always had intimate connection with their readers, Heinlein was something of an enigma.

No longer.

William H. Patterson, Jr. starts at the very beginning, and takes us through Heinlein’s childhood, his training at the Naval Academy, two of his three wives (everyone thought there were only two!), and his subsequent career up to the postwar years and his marriage to Virginia. In between we learn of his health problems, his adventures and misadventures in politics, and a great deal more of the influences that made the man who was rightly called “the Dean of Science Fiction.”

If you know Heinlein’s writing at all, you’ll have a grand old time pointing and saying “So that’s where that came from!” every few pages. If you think you know something of Heinlein’s philosophical or political beliefs, you’ll find yourself surprised more than once. And if you just want to read about the fascinating life of an amazing man, you’ll get that, too.

This volume one was certainly “eagerly awaited” in the SF field. And volume two will surely be the most eagerly awaited science fiction biography . . . well, ever.

. . . And I promise that in the future, I’ll be more sparing of the term “eagerly awaited.”

Don Sakers is the author of All Roads Lead to Terra and The Leaves of October. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.

Copyright © 2011 Don Sakers

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READER’S DEPARTMENTS

BRASS TACKS

Dear Stan,

In regards to Don Sakers’ November 2010 “Reference Library” about Space Opera: right on. Some of that old stuff needs to be reprinted. A great but often overlooked story is the “Earth Dreams” trilogy by Janet Norris. It’s written in adult language (words longer than four letters) by someone who thoroughly enjoys using the English language.

Alan Townsend

Hello, Dr. Schmidt,

Your editorial in January/February 2011 issue disarmed me. Usually you write about your submissions criteria as a guide to authors, but here you address your readers, Analog’s market, and solicit feedback on your criteria, in order to please us. The concern you voice is for appropriately drawing the boundary between alternate history and science fiction, which strikes me as understandable, given your personal role as editor. Yet I think your expressed concern may be a little different from the kind of marketing feedback that you pointedly solicit. I am a great believer in the worth of market analysis, when, and only when, it is done with great care. To me it is different inherently from content specification, however discriminating it is. And your discussion of the difference between alternate history that is also science fiction and alternate history that is not seems clearly to fall into the topic or subject category of content specification. I like your distinctions, pivoting on the kind of importance that science has for a submission, but for me they are peripheral to my mo tives in subscribing, which I think, therefore, you ought to know. I want to learn something about science from stories and fact articles and discriminating thought about issues. Analog, as a publication, not a website or blog opportunity, has done that for me, every issue, for decades, both macro and micro, in a concentrated way no book about science or course in a science or, possibly, even work in a science can do. We live in a scientific age, and to participate in feeling for our lives, in it, I think we have to be deliberately in touch with as many concrete and general aspects of scientific processes and consequences as we can. Your stories need to do it, your editorials need to do it, your fact articles need to do it, and your book reviews need to do it. So do your letters. That’s what I think (“What do you think?” you conclude).

I am personally not excited by role playing and living in alternate histories, but your alternate history buys over the years have enriched me greatly by conveying insights into science I would not have without them, so I endorse your existing criteria for publishing them. My requirements aren’t really genre-focused, in that sense. I seek the widest-ranging mixture of the most intelligent explorations of the limits of what we know and how we can tell when we have reached them.

Every good and grateful wish to you,

Joseph E. Quittner

Cleveland Heights, OH

I appreciate your comments on what you’re looking for in the magazine, which are indeed helpful. However, the editorial was not intended as market research in terms of “What do readers want in the overall make-up of the magazine?” but rather as an attempt to feel out reader opinion on a quite specific question, about how they think a particular type of story fits into that overall vision.

Dear Stan;

I enjoyed Kevin Walsh’s Science Fact article, “Other Earths in Space and Time.” (January/February 2011) In fact, I read it twice. I would just like to point out that he missed the second most habitable world in the solar system.

Titan is better than Mars in my opinion. It has an atmosphere that would require no pressure suits or pressure tight habitats. It should not be necessary to live beneath a couple of meters of rock for protection from radiation. The downside is that there is no free oxygen and Titan is very, very cold. Humans will need really good insulation. A power source for light and heat to grow plants within the habitats will also take care of the lack of oxygen. I imagine, that should fusion power ever become practical, it would be easy for humanity to permanently live on Titan. For a limited stay, a well-designed fission reactor could provide power for a decade or two. The spent fuel could even be used for the core of a thermonic power source, providing heat and some power for centuries. However, I really doubt that it would be possible to find usable amounts of uranium on Titan. Getting new fuel from off world would be a requirement for long-term settlement of Titan relying of nuclear fission for power. Wind power might work, but we do not know enough about Titan’s weather to bet on it.

Sincerely,

Michael Keefer

Bremerton, WA

Dear Dr. Schmidt:

James C. Wilcox’s complaint (January/ February 2011), that too many Analog stories are about junior officers or staffers who defy orders to avert tragedy, reminds me that the late Gordon R. Dickson specialized in this trope—and makes me wonder if some of his Astounding/Analog serials may have partly triggered Wilcox’s letter. Many a Dickson hero is the only one to know What Must Be Done, and with monomaniacal devotion follows his lonely path up to or beyond the limits of human endurance, despite unrelenting pressure to follow (erroneous) Conventional Wisdom from his companions, peers, superiors and/or society at large. Only in the final pages does Dickson’s hero explain to a skeptical (at first) review board, ad-hoc committee, or kangaroo court how his actions have single-handedly averted a terrible threat to human kind.

I found this particular type of Dickson novel development and denouncement growing all too predictable before they stopped appearing in your fine magazine about 1996 or so.

Sincerely,

Richard M. Boothe

Seal Beach, CA

Dear Stan,

I don’t have a subscription yet, but I will soon. This is a real geek question: my daughter is doing a degree in computer game design and I wanted to show her an article I read decades ago in one of my father’s Analogs—probably a ’60s or early ’70s edition. It told how a couple of Navy engineers used a Cray to design a fighter pilot game and may be the first description ever of a computer game. I’ve been through my father’s incomplete collection, but can’t find it, and I can’t use the lovely database because I can’t remember the author or the title.

Please help!

Patricia Finney

I’m pretty sure that the article is called “Spacewar” and it’s by Albert W. Kuhfeld, in the July 1971 issue. That means it was probably in the works when my old thesis advisor showed me the game at MIT. I believe it was actually played on a PDP-8, though, which is a long way short of a Cray. I think it had something like 64KB RAM (but was about the size and shape of a household refrigerator].

What I now find most fascinating about the article is John Campbell’s introductory blurb saying he doubted the game would ever catch on because the playing field cost a quarter of a megabuck. Less than a decade later, my far-from-wealthy 9-year-old nephew got a much more sophisticated descendant of Spacewar as one of several Christmas presents, to be played on any available television set.

Even the best visionaries usually fell fall short in this area (and, very likely, still do)!

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READER’S DEPARTMENTS

UPCOMING EVENTS

Anthony Lewis

28 April–1 May 2011

WORLD HORROR CONVENTION at Doubletree Hotel Austin, Austin, TX. Guests: Sarah Langan, Joe Hill, Joe R. Lansdale, Vincent Chong, and Brian Keene. Membership: $125 until 1 March 2011, $150 at the door, supporting $60. Info: http://whc2011.org/; WHC 2011, PO Box 170045, Austin, TX 78717.

6–8 May 2011

LEPRECON 37 (Arizona SF & Fantasy conference with emphasis on art) at Tempe Mission Palms Hotel, Tempe, AZ. Artist Guest of Honor: John Picacio; Author Guests of Honor: Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette; Music Guest: Seanan McGuire. Membership: $35 until 31 December 2010, more later. Info: http://leprecon.org/lep37/; lep37@leprecon.org; +1.480.945.6890; Box 26665, Tempe, AZ 85285.

19–22 May 2011

NEBULA AWARDS WEEKEND (Presentation of SFWA Awards and other activities) at Washington Hilton, Washington, DC. Info: http://www.nebulaawards.com/

20–22 May 2011

KEYCON (Manitoba SF conference) at Radisson Winnipeg Downtown, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Author Guest of Honor: L. E. Modesitt, Jr.; Artist Guests of Honor: Darrell K. Sweet and Theresa Mather; Editor Guest of Honor: Barbara Galler-Smith. Membership: CAD40 until 1 May 2011, CAD50 thereafter. Info: http://www.keycon.org/

27–30 May 2011

BALTICON 45 (Baltimore area SF conference) at Marriott’s Hunt Valley Inn, Hunt Valley, MD. Guest of Honor: Dr. Benjamin Bova; Artist Guest of Honor: Vincent Di Fate; Music/Filk Guests of Honor: Bill and Brenda Sutton; Special Guest of Honor: Steve Geppi. Member ship: TBA. Info: http://www.balticon.org/; balticoninfo@balticon.org; Balticon, PO Box 686, Baltimore, MD 21203.

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/Renovation-The-69th-World-Science-Fiction-Convention/112169025477179?ref= ts; LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/renovationsf/

Running a convention? If your convention has a telephone or fax number, e-mail address, or web page, please let us know so that we can publish this information. We must have your information in hand SIX months before the date of your convention.

Attending a convention? When calling conventions for information, do not call collect and do not call too late in the evening. It is best to include a S.A.S.E. when requesting information; include an International Reply Coupon if the convention is in a different country.

Copyright © 2011Anthony Lewis

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INFORMATION

Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXXI, No. 4, April 2011. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST#123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription $55.90 in the United States and possessions, in all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks of receipt of order. When reporting change of address allow 6 to 8 weeks and give new address as well as the old address as it appears on the last label. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. (c) 2011 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Protection secured under the Universal Copyright Convention. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. All submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

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