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Analog SFF, November 2011
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction

Dell Magazines
www.analogsf.com

Copyright ©2011 by Dell Magazines

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

Cover Art by Shutterstock

Cover design by Victoria Green

CONTENTS

Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: SIMPLE SOLUTIONS by Stanley Schmidt

Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

Novella: WITH UNCLEAN HANDS by Adam-Troy Castro

Science Fact: REPAIRING A BROKEN HEART: MOVING BEYOND ELECTRONIC PACEMAKERS by Richard B. Robinson, Ph.D.

Short Story: DIG SITE by Jack McDevitt

Short Story: THE BUDDY SYSTEM by Don D'Ammassa

Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: INTELLECTUAL PROXIES by Jeffery D. Kooistra

Short Story: ROCKET SCIENCE by Jerry Oltion

Short Story: CHUMBOLONE by Bill Johnson

Novelette: IAN, ISAAC, AND JOHN by Paul Levinson

Novelette: THE BONELESS ONE by Alec Nevala-Lee

Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers

Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis

* * * *

Vol. CXXXI No. 11 November 2011

Stanley Schmidt, Editor

Trevor Quachri, Managing Editor

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Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXXI, No. 11, November 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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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: SIMPLE SOLUTIONS
by Stanley Schmidt

The billboard said: “A plant-based diet: The only way to avert global catastrophe.”

A speaker at the World Technology Summit, in New York in late 2010, describing an ingenious new agricultural technique for growing more food more economically, prefaced his remarks by saying that the planet will have to feed seven billion people almost immediately, and substantially larger numbers (which he estimated) at various dates not very far off.

The lead article in the January 2011 issue of National Geographic was titled “Population 7 Billion,” with the blurb, on the contents page, “Find out why you shouldn't panic—at least, not yet.” Near the end, after mentioning some of the oft-heard suggestions for ways people can alleviate the strains caused by rapidly growing population, it quotes demographer Hervé Le Bras as saying, “Eating less meat seems more reasonable to me than saying, ‘Have fewer children!'”

The disturbing common element in all of these observations is that they make a very complicated problem sound much simpler than it is—and imply that there are correspondingly simple solutions. By doing that, they encourage people to shrug off the need to pursue the real solutions that are needed and will require multi-pronged approaches. In particular, they encourage people to continue their deeply entrenched habit of ignoring the most important of the many variables that need to be controlled, which hardly anybody wants to admit needs control.

That billboard, taken at face value, implies that a plant-based diet is not only necessary, but sufficient to head off problems. It isn't. It's one thing that could help, if all you care about is averting widespread starvation, but if population continues to grow, it will eventually catch up with the ability to produce enough plants to feed everybody. And even if everybody switched to a plant-based diet, that in itself would do nothing about the growing demand for energy, living space, and other resources. The billboard's catchy slogan is the sort of thing most likely to be uttered by an evangelistic vegetarian who is too fired up about converting everybody to his or her way of thinking about that one issue to have given much thought to all the other issues tangled up with it.

I had to admire the ingenuity of that new form of farming, and the speaker's enthusiasm for how much it could do to help feed the increasingly teeming masses. But I found it disturbing that he took the idea that we would have to feed that many people as a given, a fact that simply existed and had to be dealt with, rather than as a variable that might itself be subject to adjustment. If I'd been giving his presentation, I might have been just as enthused about the technology—but I would have taken pains to put it in context as one thing that could help, while explicitly mentioning other options that can and should be pursued concurrently.

The tone of the National Geographic article, made explicit in that blurb, encourages people to downplay concerns about overpopulation as a serious problem in itself—which is regrettable because it is a serious problem in itself, and shrugging it off is more likely to delay a solution than contribute to one. The Le Bras quote is way too simplistic. Eating less meat or having fewer children is not an either-or choice. People may have to eat less meat, but they will surely have to have fewer children. And the extent to which they have to eat less meat, and make other sacrifices in quality of life, will depend on large measure on the extent to which they do have fewer children.

As I have mentioned on numerous previous occasions, any change you make to bring some variable like fuel consumption or air pollution into balance with our present population will be negated as soon as the population grows by a corresponding percentage. So population growth is the one variable that will have to be controlled, no matter what else is done. Even if everybody eats less meat, burns less fuel, and lives in a smaller home, people will still have to have fewer babies, too.

Of course, that's not the “only way,” either. Even if the rate of population growth could be magically brought to zero right now, other changes would still need to be made. The population is already so large that, just to sustain it (and I hope no one seriously advocates taking active measures to reduce it), we need to reduce its impact on a whole slew of other variables.

But how much change has to be made to any of them depends on how much change is made in the others.

Demographers assure us that one reason we “shouldn't panic” at the present population and near-term projections for growth is that in the slightly longer term, we can expect that population growth will slow spontaneously because of a widely recurrent effect called the “demographic transition.” Very poor populations tend, for good reasons, to have large families, short life spans, and relatively little per capita impact on their environment. If and when their standard of living rises, as it has done repeatedly in “First World” countries and is now doing in other parts of the world, family size drops—but life expectancy and per capita consumption and waste production increase. With two sets of variables changing in opposite directions, their effects partly offset each other, and “per country” environmental impact doesn't change as much as you might expect.

Those who treat massively growing population as a given, something we must accept and deal with rather taking responsibility for, would often have us believe one of two things (or some combination of them): Those who are now well off should cheerfully choose to be less so, to accommodate swelling numbers elsewhere; or ways will always somehow be found to feed and otherwise provide for ever more people.

That last supposition, which may be a comforting but dangerous myth, is fed by the repeated failure of Thomas Malthus's eighteenth-century prediction—that uncontrolled population growth would lead to uncontrollable famine and collapse—to materialize. But just because we've dodged the bullet several times in the past doesn't mean we can count on always doing so, though apparently even Malthus was tempted to think so. Late in the same book where he made his dire prediction, he also wrote, “The exertions that men find it necessary to make, in order to support themselves or families, frequently awaken faculties that might otherwise have lain for ever dormant, and it has been commonly remarked that new and extraordinary situations generally create minds adequate to grapple with the difficulties in which they are involved.”

Or, as others have (more succinctly) put it: “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

But invention is limited by the laws of nature, and how satisfactory a solution is is limited by human proclivities and predilections. No doubt it is possible to find ways to cram a lot more people onto this planet—but to what extent is it desirable? Personally, I will not cheerfully accept squalor or extreme crowding just to enable others to indulge their reproductive impulses without restraint or concern for their long-range consequences. Certainly finding more efficient and less wasteful ways to do all the business of life can allow more people to survive—but those same ways could allow more people to do more than just survive, if they also control their numbers. We can, at least up to a point, keep cramming more people into the planet, provided they're willing to make do with less room, food, travel, and whatever else they might want. Or we can use the same capabilities to allow a larger fraction of a more modest number to enjoy something better than mere subsistence, and a world in which they are surrounded by more than just other people.

Tastes differ (which is one reason we need other homes for humanity). But if we want as many people as possible not just to survive, but to have comfortable and rewarding lives, we're going to have to improve our management of all those variables, and stop pretending that population growth, alone among them, is off limits.

Copyright © 2011 Stanley Schmidt

[Back to Table of Contents]

Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

Our December issue starts off with a spectacular Bob Eggleton cover for Brad R. Torgersen's novelette, “Ray of Light,” which is one of the more unusual post-apocalypse stories you're likely to read. Given a catastrophe big enough to force practically everybody into hiding, one of the central and most important questions is, “When can you go back out?” It's especially difficult when your hiding place is as unusual as this one, and when you have to stay there long enough to start forgetting what's outside. . . .

Richard A. Lovett's science fact article is about a sneakier, closer-to-home problem. We've all heard a lot about the potential perils of excessive global warming, but Lovett examines a subtle side effect: Given that the rate of chemical reactions depends on temperature, would increasing global temperatures pack a double whammy by making toxins more toxic?

We'll also have a typically wide range of other stories, by writers like Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Charles E. Gannon, Brad Aiken, Susan Forest, Kyle Kirkland, Dave Creek—and maybe a little something for the season.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Novella: WITH UNCLEAN HANDS
by Adam-Troy Castro

Does “incomprehensible” mean you can't understand—or you don't want to?

Counselor Andrea Cort escaped the reception at the Zinn capitol at something like the local equivalent of midnight, feeling more out of place among her fellow human beings than most people feel visiting alien civilizations.

It had been a grim occasion. For three hours she'd had to endure the conversations that pointedly excluded her, the snatches of overheard scandalized conversation that were about her, the banal embassy politics that had nothing to do with her, and the thousand-and-one manifestations of interpersonal drama that had started before her arrival and would no doubt continue in their endless variety after she left, so unaffected by her passage that she might as well have been a ghost, incapable of any affect but the offensive.

Cort was only a couple of solo assignments into her Dip Corps career. She was still young and untested, had yet to develop a professional reputation, and was not yet inured to the nauseated look that appeared on the faces of her purported colleagues when they put face to name and recognized her as the infamous child war criminal whose blood-soaked image had once scandalized civilized space. Her personal armor was a harsh and even off-putting personality marked by cold manners and a habitual scowl on a face that otherwise might have been perceived as delicate or even beautiful. Within a very few years her frigid mask would become notorious. But it had not yet become impermeable. At this point, she was still capable of exposing weakness when her feelings were hurt.

So she wandered away from the discordant Zinn music and the even more discordant banter between her human colleagues, got lost in the labyrinthine corridors of the ancient Zinn capitol, and found herself outdoors, on a balcony garden just outside a chamber she guessed to be the equivalent of a chapel.

It was a cool evening, tinged with the spice of the unspoiled forest that grew, undisturbed by civilization, on much of the Zinn homeworld. There were only a few lights shining up from the valley below, site of the ancient city of Purehome that now housed the entire population of the once-numerous, once galaxy-spanning race. In the dark, Cort could not see just how high this mountaintop embassy loomed over the city and thus didn't have to fight the special kind of vertigo that always came complete with the overwhelming urge to jump. She could imagine herself still aboard one of the orbital habitats she had long preferred to planets, peering through a viewport at stars too far away to burn.

Lightheaded from the intoxicant buzzpops she'd taken to settle her nerves before the party, she found a small knee-high retaining wall enclosing a clutch of swaying pink flowers, for the moment enjoying the absence of any oppressive, intrusive, condescending, despicable, patently other people. For a few seconds she did not want to die.

Then an unaccented voice asked, “Are you in pain?”

It sounded like a human girl. It could, of course, be any one of a number of different species currently maintaining embassies on this world; though the reception had been meant for the human contingent only, she had spotted a Tchi, a K'cenhowten, and a Szabi among the alien dignitaries visiting from their respective embassies. But when Cort turned, she saw that the questioner was a Zinn, albeit one who stood only as tall as her, which made it approximately half the height the species averaged in adulthood. Its head was a thin vertical crescent ringed at the midpoint with a dozen black marble eyes, its torso a series of boneless, puffy sacs connected at hinged joints and descending in a train three-quarters of the way to the tiled floor. The two multi-jointed limbs that served as the Zinn's legs and the two that served as its arms were all anchored at the disk-shaped shoulder bone, just below that sickle of a head.

Cort had not been on-planet long enough to master the subtle visual cues a human needed to distinguish any one of the race's four sexes from another, let alone whatever they used for body language, but it was simple enough to make an elementary deduction from this one's relatively short stature. “Are you a child?”

The little Zinn emitted a series of short whistles that might have been its kind's equivalent of laughter. “Yes. Are you?”

“I may be a little on the short side for females of my species,” Cort said, “but not by that much. I'm an adult.”

More whistles. “I apologize for any offense.”

“None taken. I'm impressed by your command of Hom.Sap Mercantile. Do you live here?”

“Yes. I am the project administrator's fotir."

That was the word for an offspring belonging to the Zinn's egg-producing gender, not the completely separate egg-incubating gender or the two actually responsible for copulation. Under the circumstances, it was simplest, and most acceptable under local interspecies etiquette, to consider this individual as a little girl.

But even before Cort finished working that out, the Zinn child said, “I am still concerned. Are you in pain?”

“Why would you ask me that?”

“I know a little bit about the emotional displays of human beings. Your eyes are leaking fluid.”

Cort dabbed at her cheeks and discovered to her chagrin that some tears had escaped. “It's just an involuntary discharge. It doesn't always indicate pain.”

“Why then are you not with the others at the reception?”

Truth, Cort decided, was simplest. “I was not enjoying myself.”

“Adults can be boring,” the alien child agreed, with a slight dip of the head.

“Sometimes worse than boring,” Cort said.

“What's your name?”

“Andrea Cort. And yours?”

The little fotir provided a long string of unpronounceable sounds, punctuated by whistles and snorts and extending long enough to fill several sentences in Cort's preferred tongue of Hom.Sap Mercantile. “Our names are more like what you would call autobiographical essays, and get longer as we age. For simplicity you may call me First-Given.”

“It is an honor to meet you, First-Given.”

“And to meet you, Andrea Cort. You are my first human being.”

Cort found that odd. “This is your capitol. Alien ambassadors must visit here all the time.”

“I have met Riirgaans, Tchi, Bursteeni, and even a few K'cenhowten. I like the Bursteeni best; they're funny. But I've always been told to stay in my room when human beings are around. My parents said that my presence would disrupt the negotiations.”

Cort didn't see how, but supposed that alien parents could be as inscrutable as human ones. “So you're breaking the rules by talking to me?”

“I don't believe so. The exchange is almost settled, now, and everybody's so excited about the prisoner you're turning over to us that the family security's gotten careless, and I was able to get out and find you. This makes me glad. It is a good thing in a short life to have made friends with one human being.”

Cort reflected that it was more than she'd ever managed to do, then shook her head angrily; aside from being untrue, it was also downright maudlin. “It's not that impressive an accomplishment, First-Given. We're awful.”

“I know that a few of you are supposed to be. My teachers have told me frightening stories about ones like your Hitler, your Dunnevad, your Beast Magrison. And then, of course, there's the prisoner; he is evil in ways we find impossible to understand. We have no such individuals in my species. But I do not make the mistake of believing that you're all like those.”

Or like me, Cort thought with a pang. “Your species is fortunate, First-Given.”

“My species is not fortunate,” First-Given said. “My species has been dying for longer than yours has been rising.”

The collapse of the Zinn empire might have taken thousands of years, but it had been no less inexorable for that, a total retreat from other advancing civilizations that had amounted to the ceding of entire clusters without so much as a shot being fired. These days they barely stirred themselves to procreate, and would likely fall below the critical genetic viability threshold within a very few generations. It hadn't ever occurred to Cort, before, how much that knowledge would weigh on the young of the species. “I'm sorry.”

“There is no need to apologize,” First-Given said. “This has been a short life and I do not have time for it. May I think of you as a friend?”

Cort usually responded to such offers with the firm announcement that she wasn't looking for any. But the innocence of the request, and the apparent absence of the hidden agendas Cort had grown used to finding in the overtures of the kind of people capable of wanting to collect the likes of her as friend, touched a part of her she had considered buried since childhood. “Yes, First-Given. I would like that.”

“As would I,” the alien child said. “I suspect it will prove a comfort.”

Cort was about to ask First-Given how old she was, by the standard of her species, when a sudden commotion erupted behind her.

She had just enough time to say “What the hell—” before the Confederate Ambassador, Mira Valcek, grabbed her by the arm and yanked her off her feet.

Valcek loomed two heads taller than the compact Cort. She had bulging athletic shoulders and a flat, fearsome face with cheeks rippling from parallel lines carved into the flesh from some kind of ritual scarification. Her eyes were a cold arctic blue beneath red locks cut into a fierce military buzz. The inescapable implications about the kind of society she must have come from, and what it said about her that she'd still ended up working for an organization devoted to keeping the peace, rendered her a formidable enemy, if that was indeed what she wanted to be. The jury was still out on that; she'd been courteous, if cold, since Cort's arrival on-world three days earlier. But there was nothing but fury in her eyes now. “Just what the hell do you think you're doing?”

There were a dozen other figures, all told, some human and some Zinn, all scandalized, all indignant at what seemed to be a massive breach of protocol and all determined to stop the conversation between Cort and First-Given before it went any further. Four adult Zinn had surrounded First-Given and were now sweeping her away without so much as a word; about twice as many human beings backed Valcek, providing her with a physical advantage she didn't even come close to needing.

Cort said, “In most advanced civilizations it's known as talking.”

“In diplomacy,” Valcek said, “it's unauthorized contact.”

“She's a child, Ambassador. She spoke to me, I returned the favor. What was I supposed to do? Treat her like she was beneath my notice?”

Valcek's furious glare might have drawn blood from someone less exquisitely armored. “At your level of inexperience you don't just wander away from an embassy reception, where the attending locals are authorized to speak to you, to have unsupervised conversations with those who aren't. You could be affecting issues you don't even have a clue about, endangering agreements that we were hammering out a year before you showed up to provide your official rubber stamp. At the very least, you could be endangering your own . . .”

A tuxedoed Dip Corps functionary who Cort had overheard earlier that evening referring to her as a monster pressed his way past the phalanx of indentures and leaned in close to whisper in Valcek's ear.

Valcek's eyebrows knit. She gave the functionary a sour look. He murmured something else Valcek couldn't hear, and Valcek's rage burned darker.

“They want you,” she said.

* * * *

Flanked by a pair of adult Zinn who towered above her like construction cranes, Cort was escorted down a series of hallways, up a series of graduated rises that might have qualified as a human stairway had the steps been uniform in interval or height, and down a corridor where, for no reason making sense to her, the walls all waxed convex, giving the space between them the outline of an hourglass. She was left in an egg-shaped room with a rippled, glowing floor and a pair of thick fabric slings hanging from the ceiling.

There was no obvious place to sit, so Cort just stood beside one of the hanging slings waiting for the consequences to play themselves out until something not quite a door-opening happened at the far side of the room, and an adult Zinn appeared there.

It spoke to her in a voice not quite as unaccented as the little fotir's, the tinny Mercantile testifying to the use of a hidden translator. “There is no furniture designed for the use of human beings in this part of the facility, but you may use the sling as a an improvised seat, if you wish. It will bear your weight as well as it bears ours.”

Cort sat, her legs dangling in a manner that brought back vivid memories of a swing set the local children had played with during a childhood she had not yet known to be doomed.

The Zinn rested its weight on the other sling, its head and all four of its limbs dangling over the side closer to Cort, its segmented torso dangling to the ground on the other. The position looked hideously uncomfortable to her, but then she didn't have Zinn anatomy; for all she knew the pose might have been downright indolent.

It said, “My name is,” then erupted into a series of whistles and snorts and grunts, three times longer in duration than the one Cort had heard from First-Given. “I am the administrator of the project involving the prisoner. You may call me by my job title, Feeder-Of-Prisoners.”

Cort's heart thumped. “Is that what I am to you? A prisoner?”

The crescent-shaped head tilted at her. “Do you believe that you should be?”

“Not for anything I've done tonight. Am I correct that First-Given is your child?”

The translation program conveyed a certain wry amusement. “She is in a greater sense our world's child. But yes, she is genetically mine.”

“Then, if by exchanging friendly words with her I violated some primal law or taboo of your society, or local diplomatic protocol, I did so without malice, and I apologize.”

The crescent-shaped head tilted to one side, and the dozen black marble eyes blinked, one after another, as if in reaction to an invisible object passing close to the concave curve of the face. After a moment, Feeder-Of-Prisoners said, “You have committed other crimes in your life. Crimes against children.”

Oh. So that's what this was about. “Yes, I did. Many years ago, when I was only a child myself.”

“Tell me about them.”

Cort had spent too much of her life attending to those who wanted the gory details to recount the same old story without protest. “It's common knowledge, sir. It also would have been provided to your people, when you were sent my credentials. . . .”

“Nevertheless. Tell me about them.”

She wanted to tell Feeder-Of-Prisoners to go to hell. But she was young and unsure of where the boundaries were drawn and not at all used to being in over her head . . . so she heaved a deep sigh of resignation and reported the weight she was doomed to carry for the rest of her life. “I was raised in a small utopian community on a world known as Bocai. It was just humans and Bocaians, two species that resemble each other quite a bit and normally get along quite well. Where we lived, they even participated in the rearing of one another's children.”

“It must have been interesting. Continue.”

“Everything was peaceful until what I suppose you'd call a night of sudden madness. There might have been some kind of environmental reason, some kind of psychoactive agent we don't know about. Nobody knows for sure. But the humans and their Bocaian neighbors turned on one another without warning, friends killing friends, married couples killing each other, children killing other children. When it passed, I was one of the few survivors left standing.” Cort hesitated. “I was eight years old. That's very early childhood, by human measurement.”

“You had killed, by then?”

“Yes.”

“How many times?”

“I direct you to the official record. I'm certain that Ambassador Valcek could help you with that.”

“Do you remember the experience?”

“Every waking moment of my life.”

“What did it feel like?”

Cort was incredulous. “Killing?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell difference does it make what it felt like?”

“I ask what I need to ask in order to learn.”

Cort remembered her pounding heart, her bloody hands, the joy in holding part of what had once been a beloved Bocaian adult in her own tiny fingers.

“When I was in the grip of whatever caused it, it felt good.”

“And afterward?”

“The memories still make me want to commit suicide. Is this really necessary?”

Feeder-Of-Prisoners asked, “Have you ever killed any other sentients since then?”

The unfortunate, hated answer was yes; Cort had been the equivalent of a convict for what remained of her childhood, and on a couple of occasions had been obliged to take extreme measures against people responsible for guarding her, when they'd taken advantages that only monsters take with the children in their care. “I prefer not to answer that question.”

“Is that a tacit admission of guilt?”

“No, sir, it's a tacit line being drawn between what you have the right to ask me and what's none of your fucking business. If you honestly believe that I meant the child harm, or that my mere presence threatened her in any way, then declare me persona non grata, expel me from your world, and do a better job of supervising her so she doesn't run into random human beings who might be wandering your facilities late at night.”

Feeder-Of-Prisoners stepped out of the sling, paced in a slow circle, then looked at Cort again. “You are not accused of being a physical threat to her.”

“Then what's the problem?”

“The problem is inherent with our status as a declining species. Our numbers are now few, and our reliance on our few remaining children extreme. They are now all raised from infancy with a firm understanding of the specific roles they must someday play in our society. We were concerned that your conversation, however innocently intended, might have introduced new variables serious enough to compromise First-Given's training. Can you tell me what you spoke about?”

Cort had had more than enough of this shit. “I was upset for reasons that are also none of your business. She asked me why I was crying. I told her my tears were nothing to worry about. We exchanged names, and she said it was nice to have met one human who could be her friend. I gave her no reason to believe otherwise. That, sir, is as far as the conversation had a chance to go. If it was enough to compromise her training in some way, I apologize, but I should say I'm damned if I can see how.”

Feeder-Of-Prisoners performed that little circle of his once again. “Adjustments may need to be made, but if that is truly all that passed between you, I don't believe you have caused any permanent damage. I may even allow First-Given to speak to you again. I will have you returned to your embassy, with the proviso that you do not leave Zinn territory until we have decided how to proceed.”

Cort wasn't happy about that either; her remaining duties on-world would be completed in a day. Having to spend any longer than that among diplomats who despised her, while aliens decided whether to prosecute her, wasn't her idea of a productive way to use her time. But it couldn't be helped. She hopped out of the sling and spat, “I'll try not to have any more unnecessary conversations while I'm here.”

Feeder-Of-Prisoners didn't seem to recognize the sarcasm. “We appreciate your cooperation.”

* * * *

The chief annoyance of unwittingly sparking a diplomatic incident is that you need to take shit for it not once but twice, answering at length to your own side after you've answered at length to the other's.

By the time Cort was shuttled back to the Confederate Embassy, subjected to the standard hour or so of cooling her heels in her quarters, and then escorted to the ambassador's office for a proper reaming, Valcek was at her desk, chin on fist, all of her attention focused on a full-body hologram of the prisoner in her embassy's improvised holding cell.

It was a still, not a real-time image, and it was a significantly dated portrait, as it came from his criminal record and reflected what he'd looked like on the day of his arrest thirteen years ago more than the way he looked now. It depicted a large, round-shouldered man with a thin hatch of straw-colored hair and an expression that some slight asymmetry in the set of his jaw transformed into a crooked grin. He didn't look like evil incarnate, more like some paragon-of-harmlessness who had always been thirty seconds behind in every conversation he'd ever had, whose only option as he struggled to keep up was gentle self-deprecating humor at his own stupidity.

Cort had endured several unpleasant conversations with Simon Farr, in the course of confirming his willingness to surrender himself to Zinn custody, and knew that nothing about that impression was true. He was not stupid. He was not self-deprecating. And he was as close to evil incarnate as anybody she had ever met, no small achievement given that her life had already forced her into close contact with several people who belonged in the same general category . . . the same category, not so incidentally, so many others had placed her in for so long.

Valcek stared at the slowly rotating image, as if hoping to find in Farr's curved shoulders or slight pot belly some clue to the corruption the holo had failed to capture. Brooding, she tapped her bare desktop with a fingernail, beating a martial refrain that stopped only when she spoke without looking up. “You know there's a pretty crucial trade deal at stake, here.”

“I spoke to a child, Ambassador.”

Valcek ignored that. “The Zinn may be on their last legs. They may live like a defeated people about to expire from culture shock. But technologically they're millennia ahead of us. The knowledge they're willing to turn over, in exchange for this sorry sack of shit,” she indicated the holo of Simon Farr, “is expected to give humanity an economic and military advantage that'll put us on top for centuries. Centuries.”

“And again,” Cort said, “all I did was speak to a child.”

The ambassador didn't look up. “All you were brought here to do was provide a legal rubber stamp. You were here to confirm Farr's informed consent, inspect the conditions at the facility where he's to be housed, and authorize the final transaction. Anything else, including conversations with indigenous children, was extraneous.”

“So's attending fancy receptions, and, if you'll excuse me, getting called on the carpet for acting the way anybody addressed by a child would have acted. I suspect that this isn't really about what I did. It's about who I happened to be when I did it.”

For the first time during the meeting, Valcek met her eyes. “You have quite a persecution complex, Counselor.”

“It's appropriate for someone who's spent her life being persecuted.”

The ambassador straightened, her cold eyes never leaving Cort's, never admitting a single moment of warmth. “That has a lot to do with why I told New London that you were absolutely the wrong person for the job.”

Cort almost appreciated Valcek's belated honesty. After all, many in the ambassador's position would have drawn rhetorical circles around the topic, calling attention to it only insofar as a satellite describing an elliptical orbit around an unseen mass manages to prove that object's existence by mere trajectory. A direct and immediate attack came as a relief. “Do you actually imagine me incapable of providing you with your rubber stamp?”

“For that job I actually consider you overqualified. I'm certain that you have a promising future, if you can get past the prejudice of others. But this is a highly sensitive situation, and I honestly don't think your substantial capabilities have anything to do with why the Corps chose you to handle it when they could have chosen any number of advocates with more experience. No. I think they sent you, instead of all the possible candidates for this assignment, specifically because you're the one with the most despicable history.”

Cort stiffened. “Is that also how they decided to appoint you ambassador?”

“Listen to my actual words. I'm not abusing you, I'm warning you. The piece of scum you're here to represent is only here in the first place because the Zinn wanted custody of a specimen of human evil and were willing to hand over unbelievable wealth to get him. Given your past—which I am otherwise perfectly willing to leave in the past—you need to consider the possibility that our superiors might have thought they were handing you over as a special bonus.”

Cort searched the ambassador's martial features for signs of duplicity and found none. “You want me to believe that you're trying to protect me.”

“I don't give a shit what you believe. But your reputation does put you at special risk.”

“Unfortunately,” Cort said, in words as sharp as ice, “my reputation travels with me wherever I go. Once I start using it as an excuse to avoid situations I'll never get out of bed in the morning.”

Valcek studied her for several seconds, while tapping the desktop again, a three-four-three refrain that repeated several times before wrapping up in a sharp series of knocks. “What does get you out of bed in the morning, Andrea? I know it's not pleasure in the company of your fellow human beings.”

“My work. Which I have not endangered in any way.”

Valcek drummed the desktop. “You have a lot to learn about professional detachment. Someday it'll bite you. But I suppose that's something you'll have to learn for yourself. You're free to go.”

The moment called for something more, but the half-dozen exit lines that occurred to Cort all struck her as inadequate or inappropriate or simply asking for more trouble. It didn't help that she was lost in the minefield that was interaction with other people, and expected that she'd always be. After a moment she offered a stiff nod that could have meant anything.

She hated the pity in the nod she received in return, but was willing to take it as long as that provided her with an excuse to leave.

* * * *

Cort really needed to get some sleep before inspecting the facilities the Zinn had built to house their new acquisition, but she was restless, at odds, feeling a disquiet that went far beyond the professional nightmare of somehow endangering a major interspecies trade agreement in a way that still escaped her. For no particular reason she found herself going to check up on the prisoner.

The Confederate Embassy to Purehome had been built decades earlier, after the Dip Corps started negotiating for embargoed Zinn technology but before the species settled on its strange interest in human murderers. Its one-convict prison facility was therefore a retrofit of what had once been a standard embassy ballroom, with all the furniture and wall decorations removed. Farr's actual living space, complete with cot, real-water shower stall, sink and toilet, occupied a narrow strip at the far wall, marked off by red stripes on the floor. The rest of his half of the ballroom was a vast empty space, just large enough to afford him the opportunity to spend his day walking in as many circles as he wanted. The boundary of his freedom was marked by a single black line, slicing the dance floor at the midpoint. A nano-implant in his brain ensured that he could not step even one pace over that line without experiencing a severe jolt of pain; a second line, ten paces closer to the entrance, marked the line that would cause instant unconsciousness.

This was more security than most other prisoners would have merited, and it had not been enough to prevent Farr from being the kind of prisoner jailers not only hate but fervently wish they had the right to summarily execute. Here, as in the obscure prison on an obscure planet he had come from, he had proven the kind of convict who so completely considered any kind of cooperation a contemptible surrender that he hoarded his own excrement for throwing purposes. (During the briefing, Valcek had confessed to being tagged more than once, and Cort had begun her own association with the man by telling him that she would hurt him if he ever pulled that on her.)

For long periods during the many months of final negotiations over the terms of the custody transfer, he'd been punished by necessity to confinement to a strip of floor barely as wide as his bed, with barely enough room to move from cot to toilet and back again. The amount of free space he had now was testament to his recent good behavior, which translated to being merely unpleasant instead of vicious and uncontrollable.

Cort, who had not been noticeably better behaved during her own years of incarceration as an adolescent, secretly didn't blame him. After all, every prison ever built, whether actual or metaphoric, was about confinement within confined spaces. Human beings, whether criminal or law-abiding, were by their very nature built to rebel against them. If any prisoner's only means of self-respect was to render every interaction with him a torment for the guards, then that was inevitably what the prisoner did.

But that was where her sympathy for Simon Farr ended.

The man was nothing. In his life as a free man he'd been a thief, a rapist, an extortion artist, a sadist, and a multiple murderer, but even his sickening crimes hadn't earned enough respect to be considered notorious. Cort might have understood, if hardly condoned, the Zinn's determination to take custody of him had he been one of humanity's epic beasts, the kind of man or woman or neuter like those First-Given had mentioned, someone like Dunnevad or Magrison whose very name had come to embody the worst of the species. But Farr had committed most of his brutal acts as a low-level if exceptionally enthusiastic thug, taking the orders of a local criminal syndicate on some nameless backwater planet with little of note to distinguish it from any other.

He had likely been as surprised as anybody else when the Zinn chose him, out of all the thousands of other sordid human killers they'd interviewed all over Confederate space by that time, as their choice of pet. Or maybe not. A man like Farr is the center of his own universe, to start with; to him, the Zinn offer might have been nothing less than confirmation of everything he'd always believed in whatever passed for his heart.

She signed in with the guards at the entrance to the ballroom, noting as she did how the one on the left seemed to recoil from her, establishing that even those who caged a Simon Farr were not inured to the foul reputation of an Andrea Cort. “How's he doing?”

The guard on the right, a thin pale man bearing the look of a man bored and disgusted by his duty, shrugged. “Who cares?”

“You should, sir. Guarding a dangerous animal means keeping close track of its moods.”

“And what if I say he has only one mood? Vicious and pissed off?”

“Then I say you're not paying attention. A narrow spectrum is still a spectrum.”

The other guard, the one Cort had seen curl his lip at her, suddenly grinned; and there was nothing at all nasty about the grin, even though it was as lopsided as the sneer she'd perceived a moment before. He brushed at his sparse blond hair with one hand and said, “Yeah, I got you, Counselor. Last time I spoke to him, a couple of hours ago, he was within a stone's throw of civility. He didn't entirely refrain from being disgusting, but I think what I got was mostly out of habit. It's as close to human as the son of a bitch gets.”

Cort nodded. “Thank you. That'll make this easier.”

She entered the ballroom and stopped just short of the unconsciousness line, by general agreement the last safe distance for any interaction with the prisoner. “Simon.”

Farr, who rarely slept at night and contented himself with two or three daily naps of a couple of hours apiece, had been walking in circles near his cot. Upon her entrance he'd approached as close as was safe for him, his toes positioned a hair's-breadth away of the line that brought pain. “Counselor. What brings such a pretty lady to my cozy room at this ungodly hour of the morning?”

He was still the man the holo in Valcek's office depicted, only thirteen years older and fatter. There was no obvious sadism to him, unless Cort was willing to give that little half smile of his the worst possible interpretation.

Sometimes, Cort knew from intimate personal experience, the very worst of us look like saints.

After all, she'd been often told that she had a sweet face herself.

“I wanted another look at you.”

Farr's lips twitched. “You could come to my side of the line and look real close.”

“Putting myself in a position where I'd have to kill you in self-defense would do far more harm to my career than I'm willing to accept.”

He chuckled. “I like the way you talk. But I could rip you in half without breathing hard.”

“And if I told you that each of those halves would still be more than capable of dealing with you, you'd only counter with another silly threat and force me to walk out with our business unconcluded. I've told you before that I'm not frightened of you, Mr. Farr. Even if you were still at your physical peak, which you're not, I've defended myself from people worse than you before breakfast, and would have no trouble doing so again. That's not why I'm here now, and, frankly, a little common courtesy for your advocate would not be out of line here.”

Farr showed teeth, rubbed his unshaven jaw, and grinned with what could have been genuine affection. “You're a hell of a woman. On another world, I would have made a play for you.”

“On another world, you would have tried to take me without my consent. Fortunately, sir, we're on this one, and I only have a few hours to go before I inspect the facilities the Zinn have built for you. So I ask you again whether there's anything you want me to ask on your behalf.”

He raised an appreciative eyebrow, rubbed his jaw again, and began to pace on his side of the line, like any other imprisoned animal searching for the weak spots in his cage. “Your guys have been hashing that out for months. I'm supposed to get sunshine, my choice of food and recreational drugs, anything I want in the way of holos or neurecs for entertainment, some woods I can walk in when I want to . . . you know. We covered all this long before you even showed up.”

“Anything already covered you want me to double-check on?”

For a moment, he looked almost wistful. “I told them I wanted to be able to swim every day. I got used to that, as a kid. We lived by the ocean, and I liked being in the water more than I ever liked dealing with shithead people on dry land. Mind you, my homeworld was a factory planet indentured to the Bettelhine Munitions Corporation, and the oceans there were just about the most polluted soup you ever saw. You could probably figure out where I lived on my planet by sampling my blood and measuring how many toxins I still got mucking around in there.”

“Swimming. Right.” She made a mental note of that. “Anything last minute?”

“I've also been wishing for some tactile porn,” he said, with a suggestive waggle of his eyebrows, “but I think that's already been covered in the neurec deal. You haven't performed in any, have you? I'd put that on the top of the list.”

Cort ignored that. “One last question before I leave you for now. We've covered it before, but I feel the need to double-check.”

“All right.”

“Once I approve this deal, the Zinn will have sole responsibility for your welfare. No human agency will ever have anything further to do with you. You will likely never see any individuals of your own species ever again. Are you really prepared for that?”

Farr smirked. “Why? Do you expect me to get lonely?”

“Remember that I'm your appointed advocate, try to imagine any reason I'd be asking that question other than your own good and give me the courtesy of a straight answer.”

There were precious few occasions when something like emotional honesty could be extracted from a sociopath like Simon Farr. It only happened when honesty benefited him, when truth was the sole path to what he would have had no problem killing for. His respectful nod only looked that way because he knew that respect conferred an advantage. But there was nothing in what he said next that struck Cort as bullshit. “Look, Counselor. I'm the worst of the worst. I was never going to be allowed to mix with the general prison population, because I make too much trouble. I start fights. I carry grudges. I hurt people. In my last prison I was only allowed out of my cell for half an hour of supervised exercise once a day, and they had to stop even that because I figured out a way to scar up one of my guards. For five years after that they fed me through a slit at the bottom of the door, and they spoke to me only to tell me when to go to the back of my cell. I don't have anybody on the outside who gives a crap what happens to me, and I don't want any. I've long since used up my ‘other human being’ privileges . . . and, frankly, have been without them for so long that I don't find conversations like this one with you anything but a pain in the ass.”

“You might feel differently,” Cort pointed out, “when you know they won't ever happen again.”

“Little chance of that. All my life, other human beings have just been something I had to deal with to get what I wanted . . . and being in prison only meant that dealing with them was harder and what I could get from them was smaller. These Zinn bugs just offered me a better deal, more reward for less work. I really don't see any possibility of regretting it. I just wish you people would get on with arranging it, already.”

Cort had no reason to disbelieve him. There had to be more he wasn't saying. A creature like him would consider absolute honesty a sign of weakness. But this sounded close enough. The omissions, whatever they might have been, weren't fundamental. “I'll see if I can expedite things. Good night, Mr. Farr.”

“And fuck you,” he said genially, “Counselor Cort.”

* * * *

A few hours later, when her bracelet buzzed the wake-up chime, Cort enjoyed one of the real-water showers that a woman raised in an orbital environment and accustomed to sonic bathing got to indulge in only infrequently, then spent more time before her mirror getting the only long lock of hair on an otherwise tight cut to hug the side of her face, it being both a grim secret joke and public statement of pain that it should seem to bisect her right cheek like a scar. She ate cold rations in her room, therefore sparing herself any unwanted social congress in the embassy mess, then dressed in one of her habitual severe black suits and went to meet Ambassador Valcek on the facility roof, where the Zinn were scheduled to pick them up for the flight to Farr's future prison.

Valcek was already there, her eyes narrowing as she scanned the morning sky for the Zinn flier. She looked more martial than usual, having colored her ritual scars with blood dye, some of which had run just enough to resemble hemorrhaging wounds. “Good morning, Counselor. I was beginning to worry about you. Another five minutes and I might have sent someone to hurry you along.”

“That would have been a mistake,” Cort said. “Aside from the obvious evidence that I'm not late, the finite list of things I need to accomplish in order to face my day would not be shortened by the need to argue with a messenger sent to tell me something I already know.”

The ambassador's lips twitched. “You really do start up first thing in the morning, don't you?”

“Always have.”

“In the future, you might want to take it down a notch and avoid unnecessary arguments with people who are only making conversation.”

The Zinn flier appeared to the east, swelling from a black speck on the horizon to a vehicle settled on the embassy roof in less time than it took Cort to note that its approach had begun. Even the most advanced human atmospheric vehicle, regardless of top speed, would have slowed down at least a little when it drew near, to avoid a catastrophic impact if anything went wrong, but this one went from supersonic to still without any obvious transition, the sense of movement seeming to arrive a fraction of a second behind it.

Millennia ahead of us, Cort thought with a chill, and then, with what felt even worse: dying.

The flier was a smooth black bus of a thing, so light absorbent that it more closely resembled an object-shaped hole in the world than an actual object with weight and depth. Part of the darkness lightened to a neutral gray, and Feeder-Of-Prisoners emerged, crossing the distance between the vehicle and its intended human passengers with a grace that made his gait seem like a hover only partially assisted by limbs.

“Greetings of a new dawn,” he said.

“And of the sunset and the night.” Valcek bowed.

“I look forward to escorting the two of you to Mr. Farr's new prison, but before we go I must pause long enough to apologize to the counselor for her ordeal last night. In the interim I have questioned my fotir and confirmed that the encounter was no more intrusive than you reported.”

Cort was not mollified. “I'm insulted that it needed to be confirmed.”

“I'm certain you are, but I'm also sure you understand that one must always take special care with one's children. As she was quite taken with you, I hope you won't mind that I have arranged for you to see her again.”

Cort could only hope that the biological divide between species was enough to prevent the apparently well-meaning alien dignitary from noting the dismay on her face. It wasn't that she hadn't liked First-Given, as much as she was capable of liking any sentient, but the fleeting conversation hadn't amounted to a relationship—and now that it was being treated as one, she was obligated. And, even worse, she sensed more to this than that: the sense of some other purpose at play, some other protocol being observed. Nor was Cort alone in this suspicion. From the disquiet on Valcek's face, she sensed it too.

Cort could only say, “Thank you.”

“No thanks are necessary. You have honored us. Come, let us board.”

Feeder-Of-Prisoners turned his back and glided through the grayer place on the flier's fuselage, a spot that even close up looked no less solid, no more revelatory of the vehicle's interior, than the rest of the metal shell.

Cort reached out a hand to the threshold, felt a slight resistance as she touched what looked solid, then a tingle as it softened enough to admit her entry.

She pulled her hand back and then probed the gray spot again, with identical results.

Behind her, Valcek murmured, “Never seen anything like it, right?”

“No.”

“It struck me dumb the first time I saw it too. It's a selective alloy, connected to just enough of an onboard AI to render it capable of recognizing those solid objects with a defensible reason to enter. Just one of the more minor technologies we've been negotiating for. Worth a piece of shit like Farr, isn't it?”

“If that's all they're really charging,” Cort murmured, before passing through.

The interior was an oval chamber with rounded walls that faded toward transparency as they curved upward toward a high-vaulted ceiling. The interior space was as cavernous for somebody scaled to human dimensions as it must have been snug for the towering Zinn. There was no obvious pilot's station, just a passenger cabin with a couple of dangling slings for Zinn use and a couple of plush chairs brought aboard for the use of human beings. As Cort and Valcek came aboard, Feeder-Of-Prisoners was just getting situated in the only empty sling, the other being already occupied by his fotir, First-Given.

It was impossible for human eyes to discern any expression on Zinn features, but the bob of the child's head and the twitch of the dangling abdomen communicated an excitement the face could not. “Andrea Cort. It is a pleasure to see my human friend again.”

Cort couldn't escape the impression that she'd just been ambushed, but she could not for the life of her imagine for what purpose. “Hello, First-Given. It is a pleasure to see my young Zinn friend, as well. I gather that you're joining us on our tour today?”

“I have been taken to visit the island many times during its construction. As you will see, it is a beautiful place. I believe the murderer Mr. Farr will find it a most pleasant home. In the meantime, if you do not mind, I have constructed a token of our friendship. May I show you?”

“My fotir,” Feeder-Of-Prisoners explained, “is in her spare time a very talented artist.”

Her crest falling with every moment, Cort gave her assent.

First-Given produced a featureless disk, manipulated it in some manner too subtle to follow, and projected a startlingly realistic holographic bust of Andrea Cort, as she had appeared the night before, glistening tear-tracks and all. The colors were all a shade off, with odd purple highlights that could have reflected either artistic license or some quirk of Zinn color perception; the perspective was strange, and the eyes were larger and rounder than anything ever seen on an actual human face, but the likeness was undeniable, and the impression of deep hurt and sadness, mixed with anger, was so vivid that even Cort, normally opaque to art, blinked with surprise at how deeply the little alien child seemed to have understood her at first encounter.

For a moment Cort couldn't speak. Her cheeks burned at the knowledge that Valcek could also see this representation of herself at her most vulnerable. Then she managed, “Thank you, First-Given. I am honored.”

“To the contrary,” the fotir said. “It is rare in such a short life for the artist to have such a perfect subject.”

Ears burning, Cort took the disk and put it away in a jacket pocket. As she took her seat, she looked through the transparent sections of fuselage and saw that though only seconds had passed since her entry into the Zinn vehicle, and despite the absence of any sense of sudden acceleration, the vehicle had already taken off and left the last remaining city of the Zinn far behind; they were now speeding over dense green forest, unmarked by roads or any other local signs of habitation. She winced. “Excuse me, Feeder-Of-Prisoners, but is it possible to do something about this view? Heights and I don't exactly get along.”

“My pleasure,” Feeder-Of-Prisoners said. He took no obvious action, but the walls opaqued.

Valcek grinned, her martial scarring and war paint removing all genuine mirth from the impression. “You live in a city on a satellite. How do you avoid looking out the windows?”

There was a little more chill in Cort's reply than she intended. “By walking fast.”

“And if you have to be near a great height and can't walk fast?”

“Then I endure.”

There was a moment of silence after that. Valcek looked puzzled and frustrated. The two Zinn, insofar as they could be read at all, looked like witnesses to some alien rite they had not understood but were struggling to parse.

Then First-Given said, “It's all right, Andrea. I know what it's like to be afraid.”

Relieved at the opportunity to change the subject, Cort allowed a smile to tug at the corners of her lips. “What scares you, First-Given?”

“Failure. I don't want my life to be a wasted one.”

Cort nodded. “Good for you.”

“I'm also afraid of evil, mostly because it's so alien and disturbing a concept. The prospect of a being whose sole interaction with the universe has been to serve his own selfish needs, and whose sole legacy has been to cause others pain, keeps me awake at night. I find it frightening as well as fascinating that such a thing can exist, and would not want to live if I thought I possessed the quality.”

Andrea Cort, who had spent much of her adolescence considering herself such a thing, attempting suicide on more than one occasion because she didn't want to live as one either, massaged the hairline scars on her right wrist. “You're not alone there.”

“Yes, I am aware that this frightens human beings as well, and find that a fascinating paradox, given that your species produces so many with the property. I have heard the number estimated at up to ten percent of you, which is an astounding ratio. It would be nice to know where such evil comes from.”

Feeder-Of-Prisoners cut in. “Be careful, child. You might cause offense to our guests.”

“No offense taken,” Cort snapped, with a sharp irritation that surprised her. She turned back to First-Given and said, “Your parent is wise, but he overestimates our willingness to take offense. There's never shame in candor. In fact, you deserve credit for being a very smart child, by identifying one of what our kind calls the great eternal questions.”

“Thank you,” First-Given said. “But I am not so smart. I have heard the question many times.”

“As have I. What else frightens you, First-Given?”

“Death,” the child said.

Valcek proved that she could smile without looking like a savage beast, that she was in fact capable of genuine warmth. “That frightens everybody.”

“That should be comforting to know. But death has frightened me since I was very young, since I first found out what death was.”

Cort said, “That's not unusual either. I think all sentients go through that.”

“Not all sentients belong to a dying species. Sometimes I look at the stars and remind myself that we used to be that beyond number. And then I look down at the city and I remind myself that there are fewer of us every day. It's frightening to think of the world going on after I'm gone, but I don't want that death to be just the smallest part of the greater death that later comes for all things Zinn.” The child hesitated for a moment. “Can I change my answer? I suppose that I'm not scared of death, so much as extinction.”

The silence that followed this was even more oppressive than the first. Cort glanced at the child's parent, Feeder-Of-Prisoners, half-expecting him to rush to his fotir's side. But though he'd cocked his crescent-shaped head in a manner she had come to recognize as a sign that he was paying attention, he said and did nothing, his alien face as inscrutable as a stone wall.

It was, as always, impossible to read everything that was happening, from alien faces on bodies employing alien body language.

But there was something familiar about the weight of the moment.

Cort didn't know how she knew it, but she was certain she was right; even if she didn't know the degree to which love figured in Zinn family relationships, she could feel something especially off in this case.

He doesn't love her.

* * * *

Farr had told his future jailers that he liked warm weather and loathed the cold, could not abide heavy rain or bothersome insects, liked sweet fruit, enjoyed birdsong, and preferred light breezes to high winds or the still doldrums of dead air.

The Zinn had accordingly constructed a small island off the coast of an otherwise abandoned continent, installing sonics to drive away pests and weather stations to keep the temperature, precipitation, and wind speed within their prisoner's chosen tolerances. They'd bioengineered trees abundant with fruit designed to appeal to his taste buds, and stocked the island with colorful flying creatures, not birds but a fine local substitute, that communicated with one another in trills of song.

The island even had a fine white-sand beach the texture of baby powder, abutting an ocean as warm as bathwater. Feeder-Of-Prisoners explained that the shallows extended for several kilometers and that Farr would be able to wade out far enough to leave the island a mere dark patch on the horizon before first encountering water over his head. “Of course,” he said, leading Valcek, Cort, and First-Given down a stretch of that ivory beach, “we are aware that a being like Farr might be inclined to do something naive or mischievous, like attempt to swim out farther than is strictly safe for him. Rest assured that he will be monitored every single moment of his stay here and will not come to any harm even if he decides to attempt to inflict damage on himself.”

“That's a drawback,” Cort murmured.

She hadn't meant the comment to be overheard, but First-Given's sickle of a head swiveled on its disc-shaped base to glance at her. “In what way?”

Ambassador Valcek rolled her eyes. “Don't worry about it. It was just the counselor's ill-conceived idea of a joke.”

“I don't understand.”

“Neither do I,” Feeder-Of-Prisoners added. “Since I will soon be interacting with this human on a regular basis, perhaps you should explain it to me. I promise that I will not take offense, even if it's at my own expense.”

Ambassador Valcek's glare communicated about five separate species of warning against taking the Zinn up on that invitation.

Cort had just enough of a tension headache to defy her. “Let's just say it's difficult for us to work up much of an emotional attachment to Farr's well-being.”

“I still don't understand. You wish him harmed?”

Ambassador Valcek interceded. “It's a subtle point, sir. Counselor Cort was recognizing your duty to keep the prisoner safe while also acknowledging, in all humor, that if he did die under violent circumstances it would not be a tragic loss for the human race.”

“And you feel this way as well?”

“Most human beings rebel at the idea at a criminal as vicious as Farr being imprisoned under conditions that the wealthiest members of our species would happily arrange for themselves, if they could. We believe that prison should be an unpleasant ordeal, on some level.”

Feeder-Of-Prisoners turned his attention to Andrea Cort. “And you believe this too? Even though you were in prison yourself?”

The Dip Corps facility where Cort had been incarcerated for most of her childhood hadn't been a prison by most definitions of the word, but it had been sufficiently close to one in its treatment of her that she saw no real point in drawing the distinction now. “Yes. Yes, sir, I do. They don't have to be brutal and they don't have to be inhumane, but nobody thinks that they should be pleasant.”

“Interesting. We proceed from different assumptions.” Feeder-Of-Prisoners gestured at a small path cutting through the foliage and leading toward the island's interior. “Come, we'll share more on the way to the house.”

The four sentients proceeded up the path, Feeder-Of-Prisoners leading the way, Cort, Valcek, and First-Given following close behind. On the way up the slight incline to the house atop the overlook at the island's center, they passed a number of flowerbeds, all carefully cultivated, all breaking the lush green of the wild growth with oases of bright color. Sweet scents rose up all around them to provide plenty of local relief from the tang of the nearby sea. The promised birdsong, not quite birdsong but something else very much like it, serenaded them from all sides.

On the way, Feeder-Of-Prisoners said, “It is like this. My species evolved from peaceful herbivores. The very idea of killing is alien to us. We never even had the capacity. Indeed, we built what you would call an empire only because it took us so long, among the stars, to encounter any potential for conflict. Once that happened, we retreated, because the alternative was unspeakable to us. Do you understand?”

Cort not only understood but envied it. “I believe so.”

“You have always been obliged to build giant warehouses to house all of the diseased, violent individuals of your species who must be segregated from the rest of your kind for the good of all. Given the limited resources of a society that must also serve the needs of your law-abiding, the difficulties involved in caging so many aggressive creatures in a confined space, and your own conviction that they need to be punished for what they have done, you have grown used to the idea that their confinement must be—forgive me—distinguished by confined spaces and various deprivations both large and small. It is not a philosophy that serves our situation. We have never had a murderer, or even a serious criminal, at any point in our recorded history. Once he is turned over to us, we will have a total prison population of exactly one individual, and will not need to marshal our resources to care for many. So we have no reason to house him in anything but maximum comfort.”

“Except,” Cort said, “that he doesn't deserve it.”

“Perhaps not. But deserve does not enter into our calculations.”

They walked on, and after a few more minutes caught sight of the house: a small L-shaped white building atop the island's only hill, overlooking the forest and beaches on all sides. It seemed to have been built to quaint human specifications, down to a sloping tile roof topped with chimney; the windows glittered from the rays of the sun. There was nothing about it that screamed prison cell, and Cort imagined that there wouldn't be; with the entire island a prison, there was no particular reason why Farr would ever need to be locked inside the room where he slept. But it still seemed terribly wrong in its innocence.

Inside, the house turned out to be everything Feeder-Of-Prisoners had promised. It was modest, even with the kitchen and sitting area included, but it was still larger and sunnier than the cramped quarters where Cort lived on New London. The only concession to Simon Farr's status as a dangerous prisoner was the absence of a front door; instead, the exterior wall boasted a hard panel constructed out of one of the Zinn's selective surfaces, which according to Feeder-Of-Prisoners could be rendered solid in the event of any pressing security reason to lock him inside. Of course, it would serve him just as well as a means of keeping local wildlife out while he came and went as he pleased. In the end he would likely greet it as a convenience.

Farr had been right. For a man with no use for his fellow human beings, who had spent so many years in a succession of tiny cells that he only left under the escort of heavy guards, this would easily qualify as luxury.

As they left the house, Feeder-Of Prisoners said, “By the time he moves in, there will be a device installed which he will be able to use to communicate with us. Any staples will be delivered upon request on a regular basis. He will be monitored, but the means are unobtrusive, and the illusion of privacy will be total.”

“I almost wish I could retire here myself,” Valcek said.

“You have not killed anybody.” There was a terrible pause, during which Andrea Cort realized what was coming, sensed the world clearing a space for it, and could do nothing to head it off. By the time Feeder-Of-Prisoners turned toward her and spoke his next words, it was like an old wound, being ripped open a second time. “You, of course, have. And if you ever want to move in, all you need to do is ask.”

She knew that the Zinn had not meant to insult her, but her entire body stiffened anyway. The terrible fire that had always smoldered inside her now became a raging flame once again. Time slowed to a crawl, her cheeks flushed to deep scarlet, and she fought to bite back the only possible response but failed. “Why?”

Feeder-Of-Prisoners raised both of his grasping limbs in a placating gesture. “If this habitat is not to your liking, we would be happy to build another.”

“That's not what I meant. I meant, why are you doing this? What possible interest could you have in playing host to a subhuman like Simon Farr? Why are you willing to give our people so much in exchange for him, and why the hell do you think I'd be so honored by the chance to become part of it? At long last, sir, what are you really after?”

“You're angry,” Feeder-Of-Prisoners said.

“Damn right I'm angry. I get that way when I'm insulted, and even more when I'm lied to, even if they're only lies of omission. Did you really think I wouldn't see the gaping hole in all of this? There's something filthy about this whole deal, something so bloody off about all of this that unless I get some straight answers from you I'm going to spike this exchange on general principle. I—”

* * * *

"Andrea!"

Cort stopped in mid-sentence, belatedly aware that this was not the first time in the past few seconds that First-Given had called her name. She'd cried it multiple times, at first softly, then more urgently as Cort's anger rose, and just now with something approaching terror.

She whirled and saw something in First-Given's posture that she had never seen on a Zinn before. The sacs that made up the child's dangling torso had shriveled like deflating balloons, each of them flattening, retreating, pulling the entire structure closer to the disk-shaped construct that anchored the sickle of a head. Together, they'd diminished to a little less than half their total prior size.

It looked like the reaction of a creature poisoned by unexpected exposure to something venomous in its environment.

Then First-Given said, “Please, don't murder my parent,” and Cort felt her stomach sink with terrible understanding.

She hadn't known this about the Zinn, but in context the body language was clear. All of First-Given's currently unnecessary bodily structures had folded themselves up and packed themselves away, both to present a smaller target and to streamline the organ-bearing part of the body for the most graceful possible retreat. Of course, this only happened when a Zinn was threatened; when a Zinn was mortally terrified.

When a Zinn felt like a child in the presence of a monster.

Cort's cheeks burned. “I'm sorry for frightening you, First-Given. I was indeed angry with your parent, but I have no intention of harming him.”

First-Given's dangling spheres inflated, but only a little. Her head trembled so much it actually seemed to blur. “Is—is it not true that human beings sometimes grow so angry that they cause harm without conscious intent?”

“Yes, that is true. But the state you're talking about is not mere anger. It's something far more dangerous, which our kind calls fury, and I'm very, very far from feeling that. This is just a disagreement that has become personal, nothing more. Believe me, I can be much angrier with your parent than I am and still harbor no intentions of hurting him . . . if only because doing so would mean that you and I could no longer be friends, and I like being your friend too much to ever want that. All right?”

A human child might have sniffed and wiped away tears. First-Given's torso inflated to its full prior size, and the trembling of the head diminished to the just barely discernable. It meant the same. “Un . . . understood.”

Valcek's features had tightened into a scowl of burning disappointment, of the sort entirely expected from a professional ambassador who has just seen a know-nothing from home base almost cause a second diplomatic incident less than twenty-four hours after the first. Cort knew she'd pay for what had just happened with a stern lecture later. And unlike last night's dressing-down, which Cort had faced with open defiance, it wasn't even anything Cort could argue with. This time Cort felt like shit.

Feeder-Of-Prisoners whistled a few times in rapid succession. “Human beings,” he said, “provide no shortage of interesting behaviors . . .”

* * * *

Cort would have liked to come up with a single objection permitting her to reject the facility as unsuitable. Given any choice in the matter, she would have liked to issue a peremptory ruling against the transfer, just on the basis of the vague feeling of disquiet that burned hotter in her breast the longer she stayed on this world, but in the end knew she couldn't. Not without just cause, and not when she was just a simple bureaucratic functionary here to certify a result everybody wanted and already knew to be inevitable.

The most she could do, when the tour was completed, was put her decision off. She informed Feeder-Of-Prisoners that she had no further questions and that she would issue her ruling within one planetary cycle. And then withdrew into herself on the flight back, listening to the polite conversation without allowing herself to become part of it. Inside, she thought of Bocai, of bodies on the ground, of her own hands stained with the blood of a sentient she'd loved, of sudden fear in the posture of an alien child . . . and then she shook her head and banished those thoughts with savage self-loathing. This is not just me, she thought, as the cycle of self-recrimination began again.

There was more when the Zinn transport returned to the roof of the Confederate embassy. As Cort murmured a thank you to Feeder-Of-Prisoners and got up to disembark, First-Given said, “Wait.”

Cort waited.

“I have been watching you. At some points during the flight you seemed to be close to discharging liquid from your eyes again. I know that you told me that doesn't always indicate pain, but I believe that it might in this case.”

The last thing Cort had wanted, now, was for Valcek to know how upset she was. “So?”

“So I believe that I might be the cause. If I am, I apologize. Please understand that while I have been taught about human beings since the day I was born, I still don't comprehend them all that well. I don't want to leave you for what might be the last time without expressing my regrets if you have been left insulted by my earlier unfortunate misunderstanding. May I still look back on you as a human friend?”

Anger and annoyance warred with shame in Andrea Cort's heart. “Yes. Yes, you may, First-Given. I hope I'll get to see you again.”

First-Given offered an approximation of a human curtsey, a gesture not natural to her that she might have picked up only after long and difficult practice. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” Cort said.

She followed Valcek out the selective hatch and stood watching with the ambassador as the Zinn transport took off and all but popped out of existence in its instantaneous acceleration to full speed. A breeze blew in its wake, pulling the one lock of hair Cort left long over her left eye. She brushed it away and stood there, frowning, feeling more uneasy than ever as the coming of night killed what was left of the glow on the horizon.

Beside her, Valcek said, “I don't know what objections you still have, but in the absence of something cataclysmic I'll expect your authorization by first thing tomorrow morning.”

Cort brushed the lock of hair away from her eye, bit her lip, and addressed the open air more than the authority figure issuing demands. “Doesn't this deal strike you as profoundly fucked up?”

“Of course I think that,” Valcek said. “I can't think of a damned thing about this whole deal that isn't profoundly fucked up. But you're dealing with aliens, one; and a profoundly fucked-up human being, two; and what your government's decided it wants at the very highest level, three; and tech that'll vastly improve the lot of the human race, four. Not to mention the feelers Feeder-Of-Prisoners just put out about acquiring you as a second zoo animal, five. Trust me, Counselor. If you want to go anywhere in the Corps you'll just have to learn that there comes a point when there's no longer a point in worrying about what's profoundly fucked up, when what you really have to worry about is getting your ass off-world while you still have a chance.”

Cort groped for an answer. “We are selling a human being, after all. We could always invoke the interspecies covenant against slavery . . .”

“It's slavery only if the affected sentient has a right to freedom. Farr gave up his through his own actions long before the Zinn ever heard of him. And when all is said and done, he really is surrendering to them of his own free will, and getting an existence that's far too good for him. Even he wins.”

Cort had thought of all that, shooting down her own idea a fraction of a second before Valcek did. There really was no good reason to avoid going through with this. But why did she imagine something else, something that worried her, something like a monstrous shape glimpsed only in part through a portal too small to present a clear look?

A weight landed on her shoulder. It took Cort a moment to identify it as Valcek's hand, placed there in a stab at false camaraderie. She hated being touched without permission and in other circumstances might have slapped the hand away, but permitted its presence without conceding the relationship. It would give her a few more seconds to think.

“Look,” Valcek said, her tone cajoling. “Give your consent, and by this time next week the Confederacy will take possession of a fully functional Zinn starship, with a Zinn drive a thousand years ahead of anything we have. We'll have the operation manual, a Zinn engineer to answer all our questions, and enough time and freedom to reverse-engineer everything else. You tell me that's not a win-win. You tell me that's not enough to improve the lot of the human race. If you say yes, your name will be part of that.”

“And if I say absolutely not?” Cort murmured, her own voice sounding like it came from the opposite end of a long tunnel.

“If you deprive the human race of that historic opportunity, without cause? Your name will be part of that too. Forever. And you don't need that, Andrea. With everything else you have dragging down your reputation, you most definitely don't need that.”

Cort thought of two children, decades apart: one a little human girl whose peaceful life had been torn apart by a night of madness, and one a little Zinn fotir who had sensed a little bit of that madness and reared back in fear.

She thought about how some things would never change, for her.

And, at a low ebb, she did what she might not have done, on any other day: what was in every other way unlike her, and what she would have refused to do had she not been so young and beleaguered and heartsick and so pressured by politics larger than herself to do what was expedient over what her instincts told her was right.

She surrendered.

“All right.”

“What?”

“I said, all right. I'll return to my quarters and draw up the documents. You'll have my authorization in your database, for countersigning, within the hour.”

“Outstanding!” The hand on Cort's shoulder drew back and slapped her there in what she supposed to be a gesture of congratulation. “But you don't have to do it right away. Let's have some dinner first, so we can . . .”

“No,” Cort said.

“What?”

“No,” she repeated. She lifted the ambassador's hand off her shoulder, moved it clear of her personal space, and let it fall, rejected. “I don't eat with other people, if I can help it. I'll get to it right away and then go to bed. For some reason, I'm exhausted.”

She turned her back and stormed away, leaving Valcek stunned and staring behind her.

* * * *

The documents were easy enough, as she already had the templates. All Cort had to do when she returned to her quarters was draft a personal statement attesting to her interviews with Simon Farr and inspection of the Zinn holding facility. She added a personal statement witnessing Farr's willing abandonment of all further contact with his fellow human beings, as well as providing her own assurance that she had come to these conclusions of her own free will and had not been under any unusual duress.

She stared at the text for a good fifteen minutes, hating it, knowing that her work was half-assed and not seeing what she had missed.

Then she sent the file and sat back, wondering why her heart was pounding so hard.

It didn't matter. Half-assed or not, the job was over. In another couple of days she'd be back in the bluegel crypt on her transport, safely packed away for the trip back to New London. She'd suffer the usual dire nightmares just before waking, but she was used to those, just as she was used to the barrage of extradition requests from alien governments who still wanted the prestige of prosecuting her for what she had done as a child. Before long, she'd have another assignment. And then another, and another.

The problems were all she had, all she was confident she would ever have.

They distracted from being so unfit for human company.

She put the disk First-Given had given her on her end table, tapped it to summon the melancholy portrait of herself, stared at the miserable woman in the image for several seconds and wondered if her unhappiness was as clear to other human beings as it had been to a little Zinn child who had otherwise never met one.

Then she took out her satchel and unpacked one of her buzzpops, an intoxicant mixture illegal in most Confederate Space but popular among diplomatic indentures stationed on alien worlds that didn't prosecute their importation. It was a dose far more invasive than the mere calmative she'd taken for the reception at the capitol. A slap against the skin and the immediate, cooling rush of the drug flooded her senses, masking everything that made her miserable behind a tidal wave of enforced euphoria. Closing her eyes, aware that this means of escape solved nothing, but grateful to be able to turn herself off for just a little while, she went to the bed and curled into a fetal position, dreaming.

For a long time—hours—she floated in serene oblivion.

Then the happy trip began its transition to drugged sleep, and memories came. They always came, whenever she was not actively working on a problem. But they were like images from a melodrama that didn't involve her. The massacre at Bocai, the feel of the blood on her hands, the

Feeder-Of-Prisoners

the look on the face of Cort's Bocaian vaafir, a being she had loved as much a second father, as he lay dying from wounds the young Cort had inflicted

First-Given

the hateful touch of the rapist among Cort's keepers in the Dip Corps holding facility

We have never had a murderer

the terrible revenge she took upon the

I have been taught about human beings since the day I was born

and then back to Bocai, and the bloody objects she'd been playing with the next day when they found her

Feeder of Prisoners

The tiniest of frowns disturbed the drugged peace of Andrea Cort's rest.

She rolled over, moaning, feeling the shape of something great and terrible rising up all around her. Old memories tried to reassert themselves, torturing her as always with the blood already on her hands, but there was something awful about the word already in that sentence, something that warned her of more in her immediate future.

Her mind began to work.

She thought of the Zinn combing human space for suitable murderers, making extraordinarily exorbitant offers until they got one.

I have been taught about human beings since the day I was born.

Since the day she was born? Really?

Raised, from infancy, with a firm understanding of the specific roles they must someday play in our society.

From infancy? Really?

It has been a short life and I don't have time for it.

What do you mean, short life? What do you mean, you don't have time for it?

Please, don't murder my parent.

Cort thrashed again.

Evil. So alien and disturbing a concept. It would be nice to know where it comes from. You have committed other crimes in your life, crimes against children. How did it feel? I ask what I need to in order to learn. If you ever want to move in, all you need to do is ask.

On many of the nights when I don't worry about evil, I lie awake wondering whether my life will matter.

I suppose I'm not scared of death, so much as extinction.

Everybody's so excited about the prisoner you're turning over to us.

I don't want to leave you for what might be the last time.

All raised, from infancy, with a firm understanding of the specific roles they must someday play in our society.

And then, like drumbeats, the two names.

Feeder-Of-Prisoners.

First-Given.

Andrea Cort didn't care. She couldn't. The buzzpop deadened all caring, made the petty troubles of the universe look like a play performed by mute actors, mouthing dialogue that didn't matter against a backdrop of droning irrelevance. But she was sitting up. The lights in her quarters were still on, but the absence of any ambient sound from the corridor suggested an embassy whose indentures had all settled into their respective beds for the night. A massive lurching effort of will provided the impetus to turn left, toward a wall-mounted local clock. The hour was thirty: long past midnight, local time.

May I think of you as a friend? I suspect it will prove a comfort.

And then, most chillingly of all:

Good-bye.

Cort tapped her throat contact, activating her implanted hytex. One subvocalized command later, the image of Ambassador Mira Valcek appeared before her: sitting up, groggy eyed, her ritual scars appearing naked without their covering of red paint. A naked female form stirred sleepily behind her.

“Uhh . . . counselor? Do you have any idea what time it is?”

Cort spoke with exaggerated care to avoid giving away the tremor in her voice. “This is important, am . . . ambassador. Did you tell the Zinn that I said yes to the transfer?”

“Is that what you're so concerned about at this hour? Don't worry about it. I took care of it twenty minutes after you did.”

Cort's fists clenched. “Tell me they haven't taken him yet.”

“Why? Don't tell me you wanted to say good-bye to that piece of shit.”

“Ambassador—”

“They took him hours ago,” Valcek said. “Is there a problem?”

Cort terminated the contact, seized her satchel, and flung it against the wall as hard as she could, screaming. The impact, a mild fwump, was not even remotely cathartic.

She was on the bag again a second after it hit the floor, removing another of her many items of illegal contraband, this one a dangerous anti-intoxidant capsule linked to several deaths among a number of Dip Corps indentures with excessive fondness for narcotics abuse too close to active duty hours. There were other, gentler methods of counteracting a chemical high, but the most effective aside from this one took a number of minutes; this was a jolt so violent that it was only used out of stupidity or desperation, by users who needed full sobriety within seconds and were willing to risk permanent brain damage to do it. This was the first time Cort had ever been that stupid or desperate.

She broke the capsule open under her nose, took a deep breath, and almost fell over unconscious as the nano-agents raced through her system, not so much counteracting the previous high as forcing her system to run through what remained of it in less time than it took her blood to complete a full circulation.

A wave of premature grief almost knocked her over. She reeled, felt her head throb as if preparing to explode, pressed her palm flat against the wall of her quarters, and forced herself back into an upright position, her sudden self-hatred twisting her features into a demented grimace.

She tapped her throat again and summoned the ambassador a second time.

Valcek's image appeared before her, resentment just beginning to give way to worry. “What's wrong with you, Andrea?”

“You will put me in touch with the Zinn authorities. Not in the morning, not as soon as you can wake up, not after I explain why, but now. The top priority is reaching Feeder-Of-Prisoners, but I'll talk to anybody in charge. This is not open to debate, and any failure to comply will expose you to charges of obstructing an officer of the court. I expect to hear from you within five minutes. Good-bye.”

She cut the connection.

It didn't take five minutes, but less than two.

* * * *

The flight that ensued was not a desperately friendly one like the ones that had taken her to and from Simon Farr's new home, the previous day. There were no talkative children present, no Hom.Sap or Zinn diplomats keeping conversation going for the sake of putting a friendly veneer on a most savage transaction. No human seating had been installed on this second vehicle, so Cort made do with pacing back and forth while nibbling her fingernails until the digits bled.

The only other passenger was a Zinn who had identified himself with the usual string of unidentifiable sounds and a kind invitation to call him Escort. He went on to say that he had some familial relationship with Feeder-Of-Prisoners, something that wound through the race's four genders and left Cort both angry and bored by the time he entered his second sentence.

She'd cut him off. “Doesn't that mean you're related to First-Given too?”

“Of course. My direct link of lineage is a much prized one, in our society; much as the link between the young produced by a single set of parents is in yours. I have always valued her as an important relation.”

“But did you love her?”

“We played when she was younger, if that is what you mean. There are not many young Zinn, these days, so it was a most novel experience.”

Cort's anger threatened to overwhelm her. “Novelty is something you seek from toys, not persons. Did you love her? Hell, I don't even know what love means to your kind, but did you want her to live a full and happy life? Did you care, at all, about what happened to her?”

Escort said nothing, just cocked his crescent-shaped head in bafflement so profound that in other circumstances it might have been endearing. There was no way of telling whether Cort had encountered some limitation in his Mercantile vocabulary, whether the emotion understood by human beings was too alien for him to parse, or whether he was simply stunned into silence by the depth of her vehemence. Maybe he was just like most government functionaries, acting in support of corrupt policies: He rationalized the unspeakable and thought it would keep him clean.

Cort, whose own hands would never be clean, said, “Leave me alone.”

He obliged.

The rest of the flight passed in a grim silence that was not broken until just before they reached their destination, at which point Escort stirred again and said, “If it will not make you angry, may I ask a question?”

“If you must.”

“I am only a tangential contributor to this project, but I have participated with enthusiasm, and I have spent a great deal of my free time perusing human histories. I know that some of your human rulers have ordered children drowned, or impaled on stakes, or asphyxiated in gas chambers. I know that even the empires you consider righteous have bombarded the cities of their enemies, killing untold numbers. The people who do this, it is said that they then go home and embrace their own families, seeing no inherent contradiction. I am accurate in this appraisal of the facts?”

“Yes,” Cort said. “What's your question?”

The Zinn escort asked, “How is it that more of you don't kill yourselves out of shame?”

Cort said nothing. She turned away and peered at the slightly grayer area on the vessel's dimmed hull, wishing that the Zinn could have invented a selective filter for memory to go along with the one they had for solid objects.

Several minutes later, Escort said, “We have arrived.”

Cort hadn't felt a landing. “Where's Feeder-Of-Prisoners?”

“Communicating with you, before you have completed your business, would interfere with the behavior under observation.”

Yes, of course. Of course it would. What lay beyond that gray doorway was not so much the prison Simon Farr had come from as a zoo, designed to show off his true nature; and there was no possibility of his new owners ever wanting to do anything to interfere with that which rendered him so special in their eyes.

Special . . . but not unique. Not when she was on-world too.

She hated Escort so much, by this point, that she might have killed him in his sling, without regret, but that would take a rage she'd likely need to marshal soon. So she simply bared teeth, hoping that his studies of humanity had taught him how the expression could sometimes mean more than a simple smile. “Enjoy the show.”

Then she turned her back on him and jumped out.

She landed in a crouch on the white sand of the prison's pristine beach, the heat of the tropical sun hitting her the instant she was out in the open. It was not long after dawn, and the air was already warm enough to summon an instant sheen of sweat. The tree line, verdant and inviting, beckoned a mere dozen steps ahead of her. Birds, or whatever the Zinn called their local equivalent of birds, chirped an indignant protest from cover. She looked left, then right, hating the transport's presence behind her but, for the moment at least, welcoming the relative safety of a solid object at her back, so she could get her bearings before exposing herself to the greater dangers of the island interior. In that moment she half-expected Farr to burst from the trees with some kind of weapon in hand and strike her down where she stood, but nothing of the kind occurred. She was, for the moment, safe.

Then that moment ended.

She took a deep breath and started running.

The path of stones that led deeper into the undergrowth was only a few steps down the beach. Cort took it at a dead gallop, her heart pounding, her arms pumping, the breath bursting from her lips with every step.

There was no chance of getting lost; the path of stones she'd been shown led only to the cabin at the center of the island and back, but she desperately wished that she'd paid greater attention on her prior visit and could tell from the few landmarks she recognized just how far she had left to run, just how great her chances were of getting to Farr in time. That mauve growth, not quite a flower, with the long strands of something that waved without apparent influence by the local breeze? Was that the last turn before the big hill? Or was that oddly shaped stone, that might have been carved as a bench, for the use of a prisoner weary after a hike to and from the beach? Or that collection of what looked like terrestrial beehives, only larger? Which was last on the way to the killing ground? Did this place have to have so many landmarks she hadn't bothered to note, because she hadn't ever dreamed that life and death would rest on her coming back again?

She was almost sure that she had taken a wrong turn, somehow, perhaps by blundering onto some side path she hadn't noticed before, some detour leading to another garden spot landscaped for the pleasure of the Zinn's pet murderer, when the wall of green seemed to part before her, revealing the clearing with the hill leading up to Farr's little house: an open space that she would now have to cross alone, to approach an enemy who would see her coming from a distance.

There were any number of more strategic ways to approach. They would all take time. Cort just ran the distance, arms pumping, sweat pouring, a desperate voice inside her crying out, please, please, please.

Then she neared the top of the hill and saw what looked like a Zinn corpse hidden by a shallow depression not forty feet down the slope to her right.

First-Given lay on her side, head flat against the ground, her walking and grasping limbs splayed, the organ spheres so deflated that for one terrible moment, supported by the glistening scarlet sheen over everything, it was impossible to believe anything except that she'd been hacked to pieces and her torso carried off.

For the very first time in her adult life, Andrea Cort screamed.

Then the sickle-shaped head on the corpse twitched, and turned on its circular base to focus a ring of tiny black eyes Cort's way.

“Andrea,” she said. “You should not be here.”

Cort gasped and, forgetting everything including grace, stumbled down the gentle grade to the side of the child in the pool of blood.

When she skidded to her knees at First-Given's side, she could only think that she'd arrived only in time to see the little fotir die of exsanguination. Zinn blood covered everything, from First-Given's trembling limbs to her tightly contracted organ sacs. It was wet, glistening, and more at first glance than it seemed the little body could afford to lose. Cort didn't even have the slightest idea what to touch first, what to try to repair first, how to wish all that life back into First-Given's body, and could only kneel there, her already battered soul trying to shatter to pieces inside her.

First-Given extended her limbs, which had all been chained together to keep her from running or defending herself. “You should not be here, Andrea. This is my purpose.”

“You will have to find a new purpose, First-Given. I won't let him hurt you any more.”

“He has not hurt me yet,” First-Given said, with a calm so surprising that Cort registered the lack of any weakness in her voice. “I have not even seen him yet.”

“I don't understand. All this blood—”

“I am afraid,” First-Given said.

“It's going to be okay.”

“I am not asking for reassurance. I am just explaining the blood. You have seen how we contract our organ sacs when frightened? There is a limit to how much we can do that before expelling excess fluids to make more room. What I have lost so far I can afford. I expelled blood because I have been lying here, waiting for him to come, and am afraid.”

Cort understood more than she had ever had, then: primary among her fresh epiphanies the strength of the pacifistic impulse in a race that could not even be afraid without bleeding.

“There is no reason to be,” she whispered. “I promise.”

Then she stood, turned her back on the threatened child, and faced the house of the executioner. She raised her voice. “Come on, Simon.”

The murderer walked around the corner of his house.

Simon Farr was a different creature in direct daylight than he'd been in the artificial light of the embassy ballroom. Barefoot, stripped to the waist, as pale as no man could be without a lifetime of being locked away from the rays of any sun, he was gray, pallid, soft, and pathetic, a shadow of a man from which all genuine vitality had been amputated. All that remained was the poison, the contempt for life that had made him such a threat to his fellow man . . . and in daylight it was clear that some of that poison had burned inward, searing him as it had seared others.

The blade clutched in his right hand—of an alien design, though Cort decided to think of it as a machete—was as long as his forearm. It was sharp enough to have nicked him in the thigh, leaving a scarlet slash oozing a red that was by far the most colorful thing about him.

He seemed downright baffled to see her. “Counselor. I thought we were done.”

“Turns out we're not, Simon. Put that thing down.”

He glanced down at the machete, as if at a loss how it had come to appear in his hand. “What, this? You don't have to be worried. I mean, I'd kill you in a second if I had a good reason, but I don't have anything against you. You helped me.”

“I know, Simon. And I'm here to help you again. But I also know what you are. You can turn on me without warning.”

Farr held the blade closer to his chest, and felt its cutting edge with its opposite thumb, as if contemplating a change of heart. “I'm not letting it go at that. You didn't have to ever see me again. Did you decide you liked me more than you let on?”

“No. I feel the same contempt for you I always did. But I'm giving you the chance to be better than you've ever been, to go back inside your house and not give these bastards what they want.”

He looked sad. “It was part of the deal, Andrea. I don't know why it's so important to them, but it's what they asked for.”

“It's a rotten deal, Simon. You don't have to go through with it.”

He seemed to consider that. And for a moment he seemed to turn away, drawn as much by the comforts inside his new home as he was by the ugliness that had always defined him and was now expected of him. Anybody other than Andrea Cort might have thought that he'd given in. But even before he tensed, even before he telegraphed the charge, even before the killing impulse motivated his limbs and sent him charging with machete in full backswing, she could tell that the decision had been made.

It was not that he hated First-Given, or even Andrea Cort.

It was not even that he took any pleasure in the act.

It was that a man like him could not be told no.

He charged, face blank, all emotion masked behind a simple, focused determination.

His first slash was as sloppy as only a man caged and sedentary for much of his life could make it, but Cort still had to draw back to avoid it, and was therefore badly off balance when the whistling backslash sliced the air in the opposite direction. This didn't cut her either, but in missing by a narrower margin it drove her even further back and even further off balance.

She might have been able to compensate, but she happened to be standing on grass slick with dew. She slipped and stumbled to one knee, a half collapse that might have become a complete one had she not braced herself with a palm to the ground.

A fool might have still attempted to stand, and entered the arc of Farr's next swing.

Cort embraced the fall, flattening her shoulders against the ground even as his third slash cut through the space where her head had been.

He kicked her in the ribs. She gasped for air, rolled, scrambled away, prepared for the sudden sharp pain of the machete imbedding itself in the back of her neck. When that failed to arrive she saw that she was clear, that he wasn't going for her, that he had abandoned her as a silly braggart of a woman who had only pretended to toughness, and who he could dispatch at his leisure after he took care of the real target.

First-Given.

The little Zinn, helpless in her chains, emitted a scream that sounded like no human voice as Simon Farr hacked at her limbs. The first chop, a weak one, had impacted one of First-Given's grasping limbs, imbedding in the bone. Farr had to wriggle the blade a little to pull it free; the agony of the little fotir must have been profound, as her shriek of pain and terror grew even sharper in the second or two it took for the blade to draw free and for the now-energized Farr to kneel beside her and position the blade for a second strike.

By then, of course, Andrea Cort had recovered and was upon him.

She didn't bother with any punches or kicks. After all, the deadliest weapon in sight, the machete, was in his own right hand.

In the instant before it fell she had her own hands wrapped around his wrist and had added her strength to his, shifting the trajectory enough so that the blade imbedded itself in his own leg, right above the knee.

She'd been trying to get him in the belly, but hadn't been able to deflect his aim quite that much.

Still, this was good. The sound of the blade striking bone was like music to her.

And as he shrieked, his cries drowning out First-Given's as he called Andrea Cort a bitch and worse things, she made it even better, by taking a step back and kicking him hard in the side of the face. His ear split open. He fell back, cursing and moaning, clutching at the weapon so he could pull it free and slash at her again.

Another kick to the small of the back, followed by one to the belly that knocked the air out of him, and that became a non issue. He was still writhing and moaning, but was for the moment beaten. She stepped on his knee to brace it and with a hard yank pulled the machete free, opening the wound further and soaking his leg with blood. Refraining from putting him out of her misery was one of the hardest things she'd ever done, but she did spit on him when she stood up. “I told you,” she said, with a contempt deep enough to choke her. “You're nothing.”

He wheezed out the first few syllables of a threat.

She kicked him again, this time in the wounded knee.

Behind her, First-Given cried out, “Andrea.”

Cort came back to herself. She shook her head, wiped the blood on her hands on the fabric of her pants, threw the machete with a force that sent it spinning into a patch of tall grass, and stepped over the little fotir so she could kneel beside her and still keep the writhing Farr in sight. “Yes. I'm here. Don't worry, baby. It's going to be all right.”

First-Given raised her head off the ground. “I n-need to know.”

“What is it?”

“W-was that what you talked about, yesterday? W-was that fury?"

Cort wiped at her eye, which burned worse at the touch of her dirtied hand. “Not entirely, First-Given. There were other things there too.”

“Like what?”

Cort almost answered. But no words felt adequate, and her business here was yet to be completed, so she patted the alien child on the ridge of skin just above the eyes and stood, scanning the sky for movement.

She waited. Farr cursed. A breeze more gentle than anything that had happened in the last few minutes blew her one long lock of hair against her cheek, where it struck the drying patch of blood and adhered. She still waited.

She was about to give up on waiting when two figures appeared over the curve of the hill, their heads rising over the occluded landscape like moons rising over a planetary horizon. One was Feeder-Of-Prisoners. The one walking beside him was another Zinn Cort didn't know.

The two of them stopped a fair distance away, as if afraid to place themselves within range of either of the dangerous humans.

Cort didn't blame them.

“Your fotir's hurt. So's your prisoner. They both need medical attention.”

“I am not blind,” Feeder-Of-Prisoners said. “I can see what is clearly evident. But you have not done what you offered to do, when you called this morning. You didn't complete your demonstration.”

“I stopped the son of a bitch from killing her without having to kill him to do it.”

“And in so doing you have only delayed what is otherwise inevitable. We have made ourselves responsible for Simon Farr's well-being. Accelerated healing will have him, and her, mobile again by the end of the day. Soon, he will be ready again. First-Given will be brought back here, and once again subjected to his attentions.”

She wished she'd kept the blade. “You bastard.”

Feeder-Of-Prisoners tilted his head to one side, then the other, an act that might have been his equivalent of a shrug. “My people will have what we bargained for, one way or the other. Either from him, or from you.”

Cort had never felt so trapped, not when she was eight and obeying impulses she didn't understand, not when she was a Dip Corps prisoner living the rest of her childhood as a lab animal, not when she was told that the service owned her for life and that her fate would never be her own. The inevitability of what she would soon be required to do, not in a moment of desperate life-or-death struggle, but in cold calculation, weighed on her back like a stone. After a moment, she said, “All right. If that's the only way to save First-Given, you'll get it from me. But I'll only do it for you one time, and only to save the child. Understand that you'll never get it from me again, so there'll be no point in moving me into one of your damn cottages.”

“You might want to think that over,” the other, unnamed, Zinn said. “With your reputation, it's not like you'll ever have any better place to go.”

“Any place is better than with you.”

“Then perhaps you should leave so we may heal Mr. Farr and allow this exercise to play out as originally intended.”

“Also not acceptable,” Cort snapped. “This fotir may be a friend of mine, but I value my own freedom as well. I can show you what you want to see, but whatever happens, whatever other threats you pull out to manipulate me, you'll have what you want from me once, and only once, and only if you promise me that First-Given will be safe from now on.”

Another Zinn shrug, from the one that hadn't given its name. “It makes no real difference. Even if you do this thing for us and we agree to spare First-Given in exchange, we will still be able to pay handsomely for more of your kind's murderers. There will always be sources. We will obtain them, and we will house them, and we will provide them with other specimens of our children.”

Cort didn't ask why. She knew why. She knew why and it burned inside her, like a poison pill that would renew itself forever, even as it broke into pieces and poisoned her blood. “That's beyond my control. I can still save this one.”

“Even if you do, you should not be under the illusion that you're doing her any favors. She failed in her life's purpose. If she survives beyond today, it will mean a lifetime of shame.”

“And if there's one thing my life has taught me,” Cort said, her voice faltering for the first time, as she spoke words meant for First-Given to hear, “it's that living with shame can be done. It might even be a better way to live. It focuses one. Most other people I know value themselves too goddamned much.”

Feeder-Of-Prisoners turned his head toward his unnamed colleague, and then back at Andrea Cort. “Your shame seems to have cost you happiness. And her shame will cost her the same. As long as she lives, she will never be happy.”

“I've never at any point in my life met anybody who was,” Cort snarled, “but who knows? She might surprise both of us. And this conversation is stupid. I've told you the limits of what I'm willing to do, and I've told you exactly what it'll cost.”

The two adult Zinn looked at one another again. A silent negotiation passed between them. Then the one that had not given its name stirred and said, “We agree to your terms.”

The fire in Andrea Cort's heart turned cold. She swallowed and looked down at Simon Farr, who had followed the conversation and was now crawling toward the cabin, cursing anew with every twitch of his ruined leg. Then she glanced at First-Given, who was peering up at her with more fascination than fear, her organ sacs substantially more distended than they had been when she was directly threatened.

Maybe the child was what Cort desperately wanted her to be: an innocent at heart, misled by a rotten agenda, and raised to a purpose she was not experienced enough to recognize as the same kind of evil she wanted to understand. And maybe she was as bad as the rest of them: a willing and dedicated participant, now a cold and unpitying observer, totally undeserving the mercy that Cort could only purchase by sacrificing yet another piece of her soul.

And maybe that didn't matter, either.

Maybe what mattered here was bigger than all of them.

Cort didn't bother searching the tall grass for the machete she had hurled away. It was much easier to select something else she had spotted: a stone of appropriate size, light enough to be carried in one hand but dense enough to survive multiple impacts with a more brittle surface, like a human skull.

She hefted it in one hand, getting used to its weight, and wondered how many times the next few seconds had played out in the long and brutal history of man.

By then the crawling Farr had reached his little house and was pounding with both fists on the section of wall that was supposed to be permeable for nobody but him.

But it was just a wall now, standing between him and safety.

Cort was not going to enjoy the next few minutes. But in the end, the Zinn were right: She did possess the qualities they'd bargained for. She could do this. She'd done it before. It would give her nightmares and yet another in a long series of reasons to despise herself, but she could do it again. It was going to be far too easy.

I'm really going to do this again.

“I'm sorry,” she told the writhing man on the ground. “I'll try to make this quick.”

Simon Farr had enough time to scream.

* * * *

Andrea Cort refused to enter Farr's house to use his bathing facilities, because even that would have been too close to moving in. So she left the island with her clothes and her skin and her hair still sticky and reeking from his blood.

The flight was a short one, and the air-filtration systems on the Zinn transport labored hard to cleanse the coppery stench from the circulating onboard atmosphere, but the reek was in her nostrils and she remained unable to take a breath without the sense-memory of his last moments. He had not possessed the eyes of the monster he had been his whole life, but those of a helpless and vulnerable man, who wanted only to keep on living for a little while longer.

The same embassy guards who had watched over Farr in his ballroom prison were on the roof waiting for her upon her return to Valcek's embassy. They said nothing to her, but their purpose was clear. She allowed them to escort her inside, and was relieved when they headed back to the guest quarters instead of the ballroom. On the way, the corridors were teeming: dozens of embassy functionaries and diplomatic indentures, all wide-eyed and disapproving as they took in her cold stare, her shell-shocked expression, the gore on her hands and clothes. A couple of the women, seeing the state of her, held their hands over their mouths. This, too, was familiar to her.

Valcek was the last, waiting outside the guest room, her expression blank, her ritual scars now looking like no more than silly cultural affectation. She said nothing. Neither did Cort.

Inside, Cort turned the water temperature to just above the threshold of pain and stood there, staring up at the spray head. Zinn and human blood comingling at her feet. She may have slept a little, just standing there. She swayed, and from time to time gasped. Her shoulders shook, and once, until she stopped herself, she wailed.

Afterward, it would have been nice to take out another buzzpop and dose herself to oblivion. But this terrible business was not yet over. So she donned a fresh black suit, buttoned the jacket tight, made a bag of the bed sheets bearing the bloody outfit, and, carrying it, asked the two women stationed at her door to take her to the ambassador. They complied without argument. The escorted march through the embassy hallways was a lot like the one that had taken her to her quarters an hour earlier. The same eyes watched her, providing the same silent accusations.

When she reached Valcek's office she left the guards behind, marched across the room, held out the makeshift bag, and dropped the package in a lump in the center of the ambassador's desk.

The bundle came open when it landed, Cort's sodden, blood-soaked clothes spilling out in a glistening heap.

Valcek did not recoil. “Get that shit off my desk.”

“I thought you'd want it there. It's your proudest achievement.”

Valcek made a half-hearted attempt at wrapping the sheets up into another bundle and finally looked past Cort to the guards. “You, then. Take this crap out of here. I don't care what you do with it. Burn it if you have to. It's okay to leave me with her. Nothing's going to happen.”

They complied, a swift military operation that seemed like an intervention by ghosts for all it interfered with the fixed glares the ambassador and prosecutor had fixed on one another. Neither of the two women dropped their gaze or made a sound until the mess had been removed and the door was closed.

Then Valcek said, “I think I deserve more appreciation from you. I tried to protect you from this.”

“Yes, you did. I give you credit for that; you actually did feel sorry for me, and you actually were trying to warn me from the very moment I first met the child. It would have been so much simpler, so much cleaner, not to mention so much kinder to me, if I'd been just a little stupider and provided my rubber stamp without interfering with the way of things. If you think that's why I'm upset at you, you don't have the slightest conception of the sheer evil you perpetrated by handing them a killer when you always knew what they wanted him for.”

Valcek stood up so quickly that her chair tipped and hit the floor behind with a resounding crash. “Don't be so fucking naive. You know how many times treaties have to be signed with brutal regimes that kill their own? How many times diplomacy has required deals with the devil, handshakes with people whose morals were enough to make you want to puke, just to make our side stronger for a little while? The price we pay, to do a little good?”

“Oh, I know that,” Cort said. “I'm just not so sure that you do.”

“This was going to happen, one way or the other. They were going to get their hands on a human murderer, with us or without us, and they were going to use him the way they wanted to use Farr, with or without us. We can't stop them from arranging atrocities against their own people, if they want to. At least this way we get something of value in return . . . and we'll get to do it again sooner than you will ever believe possible, when they renegotiate for the next killer in line. There were always going to be Zinn children in First-Given's place. But this way some good comes out of it.”

“No good comes out of it,” Cort murmured. She dabbed the corners of her eyes with a thumb, looked to the wall at a landscape of burning buildings and cooling bodies that only she could see, gathered her strength together, and faced Valcek again, this time with an expression that she would have liked to show First-Given, as a fine illustration of fury. “And I don't care what else they offer for payment, but this ends now. As soon as I leave this room, you're going to contact New London and do whatever you can, even if that includes begging, to let the people in charge understand why the only intelligent policy from this day on is to surround this planet with a permanent military and economic blockade for as long as the Zinn continue to exist as a species. It'll be an empty threat, given Zinn tech, but granted their psychological aversion to conflict it might still be enough to keep them confined to this world and prevent them from getting their hands on any more killers, from us or anybody else.”

Valcek was incredulous to the point of repressed laughter. She crossed her arms over her breasts and managed an aghast “Really.”

“Really.”

“An unprovoked act of war against a race that has never fired a shot against us. A race with tech that could destroy us, if they saw fit. You're crazy.”

“I might well be. But you are going to do this.”

“And what reason do you expect me to give our superiors for this insanity?”

Cort suddenly felt very tired. She was achy from the kicks to the ribs, sick to the heart of her being for being reduced to the kind of acts she thought she had left behind, heartsick at the vivid confirmation that she was still what so many people believed her to be, filled with despair at what seemed to be her fated place in the universe . . . but mostly exhausted from something that would amaze her for as long as she lived: the short-sightedness and stupidity of her fellow human beings. “You don't even have a clue, do you?”

“Why don't you tell me?”

“All right.” Cort walked around the desk and confronted Valcek face to face, speaking softly at first, but then building in volume and intensity with every word. “An alien race asks you for something that doesn't seem to make any rational sense, and you figure that you might as well take it as just one of those things not worth understanding because they're so alien and different and mysterious and impossible for us to fathom. You don't even bother asking yourself how they hope to benefit. You just proceed straight to the assumption that their motives are incomprehensible, grab whatever treasures they offer you in return, and throughout it all, because they're so notoriously harmless, you don't at any point expend so much as a single angstrom of thought to considering the only logical reason why a race that surrendered an entire empire without firing so much as a single shot, a race dying of despair because of it, a race that could still rise up and brush everybody else aside if they ever mustered the psychological means, would negotiate so desperately for specimens of human evil.” With the next sentence, she jabbed her index finger into Valcek's collarbone. “You never realize that it's for the very same reason that you're so happy to get your hands on one of their starships.”

For long seconds Valcek's face remained stamped with that look of total incomprehension . . . and then she saw it. Her confident expression faltered, replaced by horror, a heartbeat before Andrea Cort slammed her with the words.

"Nobody," Cort said, "ever reverse-engineers something they don't want.”

Valcek's lips moved without making sound. The blood drained from her face, and she started groping for her chair, forgetting that it had fallen to the floor behind her.

Andrea Cort didn't wait for her to figure it out. She just turned her back and left.

* * * *

(Editor's Note: Andrea Cort previously appeared in the Analog novellas “Unseen Demons” and “Hiding Place,” as well as the novels Emissaries from the Dead, The Third Claw of God, and the available-only-in-Germany War of the Marionettes. This most recent installment takes place first, chronologically.)

Copyright © 2011 Adam-Troy Castro

[Back to Table of Contents]

Science Fact: REPAIRING A BROKEN HEART: MOVING BEYOND ELECTRONIC PACEMAKERS
by Richard B. Robinson, Ph.D.

The cyborg—incorporating electronic/mechanical elements into a biological organism—is a popular science-fiction concept. Typically the result is enhanced functionality and/or unintended consequences, which in turn lead to whatever storyline the author has in mind. At least for now, real-world human-machine interfaces are more likely to strive to simply restore lost function rather than enhance native capability (with obvious exceptions such as military exoskeleton development). Artificial limbs are the most visible example, and are becoming ever more complex and capable. However, if we ignore the most primitive of these (i.e., the wooden peg leg of pirate lore) the first medically viable implant with electronic components was probably the electronic pacemaker.

* * * *

A primer on the heartbeat

Fig. 1 shows a cross-sectional illustration of the heart, as viewed from the front. The human heart consists of four chambers, the right and left atria (RA and LA) and the right and left ventricles (RV and LV). The atria contract first, pushing blood into the ventricles to help fill them. The ventricles then contract, expelling unoxygenated blood (from the RV) toward the lungs and oxygenated blood (from the LV) to the rest of the body.

These synchronized contractile events are possible because of preceding synchronized electrical events. The heart is considered a functional syncytium* because even though it is composed of millions of distinct cells (and thus is not a true syncytium), the cells are functionally connected to each other such that they act in concert. Specialized proteins in the membrane of each cell provide pores (called gap junctions) that allow charged ions to pass from cell to cell, creating an electrical circuit. This electrical signal, as it propagates through the heart, triggers the contraction that pumps blood throughout the body.

[* A syncytium is defined as a mass of cytoplasm containing many nuclei and enclosed in a cell membrane. It most commonly is used in describing a skeletal muscle fiber, which represents the fusion of multiple cells. In the case of the heart, the individual cells do not fuse into a true syncytium, but act functionally as a single unit and thus the heart is often referred to as a functional syncytium.]

* * * *

Fig. 1: Illustration of the heart and the specialized conduction system (courtesy of Dr. Lev Protas)

* * * *

The electrical events that initiate the heartbeat originate in the sinoatrial node (SAN, the heart's native pacemaker) and from there spread through both atria. The fact that the heartbeat initiates within a specialized region of the heart is an important concept. The heart is not driven by the nervous system (although it is modulated by it); rather it is self-starting. If this were not the case, heart transplants would not be possible (at least not without the added complexity of electronic pacemakers), and our cinematic experience would be much poorer, lacking the visual of the beating heart plucked from the chest (think Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).

After the SAN initiates the heartbeat, it spreads through the atria. However, the atria are electrically isolated from the ventricles. The only conduction pathway between these chambers passes through a structure termed the atrioventricular node (AVN; a region of slow electrical conduction) and then through a system of cells (the dark network in Fig. 1, referred to as the Purkinje system) that is specialized for rapid electrical conduction rather than contraction. What is the purpose of these specialized regions of slow and fast conduction? Slow conduction through the AVN provides time for blood to physically move from the atria (following their contraction) into the ventricles; without this the ventricles would contract before they were filled and cardiac output would suffer. The fast conduction through the Purkinje system ensures that all of the ventricular mass is excited to contract nearly simultaneously, creating an efficient pumping action. Together, all these specialized regions (SAN, AVN, Purkinje network) are referred to as the cardiac conduction system. So while the heart is an efficient and robust mechanical pump, it is the complex and coordinated series of electrical events made possible by the cardiac conduction system that drives this pump. The evidence of these underlying electrical events can be observed on the electrocardiogram (ECG, or often EKG from the German, since the device was developed in that country). Similarly, when elements of the conduction system are diseased, this appears as abnormalities in the ECG.

* * * *

Fig. 2: Illustration of a cell with selected membrane channels and pumps

* * * *

Both the cells of the cardiac conduction system and the cells of the working myocardium (i.e. the cells specialized for contraction) are excitable cells. That means that at rest (between heartbeats) the cell interior has a markedly negative voltage relative to extracellular space (-50 to -85 mV, depending on the cell type). This resting potential is maintained in part by specialized membrane proteins (pumps) that use metabolic energy to transfer potassium ions (K+) into the cell and sodium ions (Na+) out of the cell against their respective concentration gradients, thereby keeping internal K+ concentration high and internal Na+ concentration low relative to the extracellular space (Fig. 2). These chemical gradients represent significant potential energy that is available for release. It should be noted that the cell membrane is composed of lipids and is relatively impermeable to charged ions, but other specialized membrane proteins (termed “channels") do allow ion fluxes across the cell membrane. Cells at rest are more permeable to K+ than other ions due to the presence of a population of “leak” K+ channels (i.e. channels that are always open; the thin solid arrow in Fig. 2 shows this background K+ flux). The membrane potential at which the voltage gradient is equal and opposite to the chemical gradient for K+ is the “membrane potential” of a resting cell that is only permeable to K+. Since cells are not exclusively permeable to K+, the actual membrane potential is somewhat less negative. When a heart cell is electrically stimulated, voltage-sensitive channels that preferentially pass Na+ (or in some heart cells, calcium) open, allowing these positive ions to rush down their electrochemical gradient into the cell, depolarizing it and reversing the membrane potential from negative to positive. This depolarization in turn leads to the opening of voltage-sensitive K+ channels, allowing more K+ to exit the cell and restoring the resting membrane potential. The dashed arrows in Fig. 2 illustrate flux through these “gated” voltage-sensitive channels. The series of events encompassing depolarization and repolarization is termed an action potential and is a hallmark of all excitable cells (e.g. heart, skeletal muscle, nerves).

What happens when the electrical events critical to normal heart function are disrupted? For our purposes we can consider just a few broad classes of electrical anomalies (arrhythmias):

* Tachyarrhythmias ("tachy,” derived from the Greek for “swift")—overly fast rates

- Ventricular tachycardia—an abnormally fast rate originating in the ventricles

- Ventricular fibrillation—an even faster ventricular rate

- Atrial fibrillation—similar to ventricular fibrillation, but occurring in the atria

* Bradyarrhythmias—overly slow heart rates

- Sinus bradycardia—a slow rate originating at the SAN

- Ventricular bradycardia—a slow rate originating in the ventricle

What sort of events lead to these arrhythmias? Most catastrophic is the familiar heart attack, when the heart's own blood supply (the coronary arteries) is blocked. This can lead to the death of working heart cells (compromising contraction) and arrhythmias. Often the result is a ventricular tachycardia, or the even faster ventricular fibrillation (so fast that there is no effective pumping), which, if not stopped, is fatal within minutes; hence the wide public availability of external cardiac defibrillators. As an aside, atrial fibrillation, which is a common arrhythmia of the elderly, is not immediately life threatening, although it can lead to fatal blood clots. But there is another type of arrhythmia, the bradyarrhythmia. This typically results from conduction system disease. As explained above, the AVN is designed to slow conduction between the atria and ventricles, so that the atria can contract and push blood into the ventricle. But the electrical activity necessary to achieve slow conduction also results in a low safety factor, such that any compromise to that portion of the heart can lead to conduction failure. This is referred to as heart block, when the electrical signal fails (either some of the time or all of the time) to propagate from the atria to the ventricle through the AVN and distal conduction network. SAN disease also can occur, resulting in the SAN either activating too slowly (sinus bradycardia) or ceasing to function at all (or failing to propagate into the surrounding atrial tissue). The reason SAN or AVN failure is not immediately fatal is that the Purkinje system is capable of functioning as a backup or subsidiary pacemaker, albeit at a slow rate (ventricular bradycardia)—which, while it sustains life, greatly limits the quality of that life. The fact that a disease of the cardiac conduction system represented a chronic disease with a marked reduction in quality of life, and one that was eventually and inevitably fatal (the heart has to work harder in this setting, leading to progressive cardiac disease), presented the framework for the development of electronic pacemakers. That is, the disease was sufficiently serious to merit heroic therapeutic efforts, yet slow enough in onset that there was time to diagnose the problem and plan the necessary surgical intervention.

* * * *

Electronic pacemakers, history, mechanism, and limitations

Electronic pacemakers were first developed in the mid-twentieth century, initially as a temporary and largely external device and by 1960 as a simple but fully implantable device. They have gained considerable complexity and sophistication since the first generation design.1 The basic components are a power source (battery), an electrical circuit (now a computer and software) to determine when to send a signal, and leads (wires from the battery to the heart to stimulate it, as well as sometimes wires from the heart to sense the normal heartbeat and thus determine when to fire). Modern electronic pacemakers come in many variations, depending on the nature of the underlying cardiac disease. For example, if only the AVN is the problem, one might implant a pacemaker that senses the normal SAN firing and then, after an appropriate delay, sends a signal to the ventricles. Other pacemakers may separately stimulate both the right and left ventricle to ensure optimal efficiency of output.

For all these advances, and the remarkable therapeutic effectiveness of these devices, they are not without their limitations and problems. One limitation relates to a pacemaker's ability to alter heart rate as needed. In a healthy person, the heart rate will vary over a wide range in response to level of activity, slowing down when one sleeps and increasing markedly with exercise. This is achieved largely through the activity of the autonomic nervous system. The two complementary components of this system, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves, respectively increase and decrease heart rate by releasing chemicals (neurotransmitters) that ultimately affect the ion channels on the surface of heart cells. While some rate-responsive electronic pacemakers exist, they work by sensing secondary indices of increased cardiac work (oxygen sensing, or heart contraction). As such, they are slower to respond to changing needs than the SAN.

Beyond limitations in the ability to fully mimic the flexibility of the native pacemaker, electronic pacemakers also have complications. One such complication relates to potential interference with other electronic devices. Perhaps the most amusing example of this (although not to the affected patient) involves a homeopathic device termed the “zapper"—a simple pulse generator that when held is supposed to alleviate all sorts of ills. One person using such a device had an electronic pacemaker, and when he held the zapper it caused the pacemaker to stop, resulting in a slow ventricular heart rate and subsequent episodes of dizziness and near-faintness.2 This probably caused him to drop the zapper, whereupon the electronic pacemaker would restart and the symptoms would vanish. In this situation, the natural response following such an episode of weakness and dizziness of unknown cause might well be to reach for your illness-relieving zapper, whereupon your electronic pacemaker would stop again, and so on . . . . A less amusing but more serious complication relates to the risk of lead fracture, i.e., failure of the insulation around the wires. A recent study reported a failure rate of about 4% with one particular model.3 Another serious complication relates to the fact that, since these leads must remain embedded in heart muscle for years, they typically are implanted at a location that minimizes movement with each contraction. This means the location within the ventricle where contraction starts following electrical stimulation of the ventricles is not the same as that following normal propagation through the conduction system. The result can be a less efficient contraction, causing the heart to work harder and—over a period of years—heart failure.

These limitations and complications have resulted in a number of research laboratories looking for an alternative to electronic pacemakers, and they have found their alternative in another emerging discipline—and popular science-fiction concept—genetic engineering. The idea here is to use gene or cell therapy to replicate the functionality of electronic pacemakers using entirely biological components. Instead of batteries, wires, and computers there are simply exogenously expressed genes or implanted specialized cells. While these studies are not yet at the stage of clinical trials in humans, numerous proof-of-principle experiments have been reported using different methods that demonstrate the potential of this approach.

* * * *

The concept and development of biological pacemakers

The idea behind biological pacemakers is exceedingly simple—manipulate a localized region of the heart so that it beats spontaneously and repeatedly, and let the syncytial nature of the heart then propagate that signal throughout the working myocardium, leading to contraction. If the underlying problem is at the level of the SAN, then performing this manipulation anywhere within the atria will serve as therapy; if the problem is in the AVN or the conduction system immediately past the AVN, then a manipulation distal to the diseased region will allow for appropriate ventricular contraction (although in this case the ventricles will not be optimally synchronized to atrial contraction and cardiac output may suffer).

I will focus here largely on the biological pacemaker work done in the laboratories of myself and my collaborators, but there are several publicly accessible review articles that provide a more comprehensive summary of the field.4, 5 The first question to be asked is what precise manipulation will achieve spontaneous activity. Our idea was to focus on one particular channel that is strongly expressed in the membrane of cells within the SAN, i.e. within the native pacemaker. The current generated by these channels is in fact called the pacemaker current, since it has been proposed to be the current primarily responsible for spontaneous activity. While that view is still controversial, it was clear to us that, under appropriate circumstances, that channel did have the ideal complement of features to serve as the basis of a biological pacemaker.

Almost all voltage-sensitive channels in the heart open on depolarization (i.e. when the cell interior becomes less negative relative to the cell exterior), varying in the specific threshold voltage to which they respond, how quickly they respond, how long they remain open, and which ions can pass through them. The pacemaker current is unique in that the responsible channels open when the membrane repolarizes after an electrical event. That is, they are not involved in the active wave of conduction that spreads through the heart. Rather, they open at the end of that event, thereby setting the stage for the subsequent event. Upon opening, Na+ ions flow through these channels, depolarizing the cell sufficiently to activate other voltage-sensitive channels, leading to excitation. Upon full depolarization, these channels rapidly close. Thus, they contribute current only between heart beats, and not during the time of peak depolarization. This is important because excess or prolonged depolarizing current during the period of peak activity can itself cause arrhythmias. The channels responsible for the pacemaker current are called HCN channels (hyperpolarization-activated, cyclic nucleotide-gated), and they were first cloned** in the late 1990s. Their cloning made it possible to use genetic engineering to express these channels in heart cells that normally don't express them (or do so only at minimal levels) to study their role in spontaneous activity. Their cloning also revealed that these channels had another unique characteristic: They directly bind and respond to the chemical produced in the cell when sympathetic nerves fire to increase heart rate. In other words, these channels are designed to increase depolarizing current in response to sympathetic nerve firing—an ideal characteristic for a pacemaker.

[** Channels are membrane-spanning protein structures that contain internal aqueous pores that allow ions to cross the cell membrane; they may be “leak” channels that are constantly open, or “gated” channels that only open in response to a stimulus (a change in membrane voltage or a chemical factor). Cloning of a channel refers to determining the entire coding sequence of the gene that encodes the channel protein, such that the channel protein can then be replicated.]

We first looked at spontaneous activity in heart cells grown in culture, demonstrating that expressing one particular form of HCN (HCN2) resulted in the cultured heart cells beating at a faster rate.6 This led us to ask whether, by doing the same thing in an intact heart, we could create an artificial biologically based pacemaker (i.e., a biological pacemaker). These studies were based on the premise that we could create a biological pacemaker by increasing depolarizing current flowing during the period between heartbeats. About the same time, another group7 tested a biological pacemaker based on decreasing repolarizing current (it is the net current that matters). How does one get a cell to highly express a protein (in our case the HCN2 protein) that it normally expresses only at low levels? By taking advantage of the inherent ability of viruses, which are designed to hijack cellular protein synthesis to make copies of their own proteins. We incorporated the HCN2 gene into a virus that had been engineered to be safe and unable to replicate in the intact organism (a common experimental tool). We used an adenovirus, a type of virus that does not incorporate into the host cell's DNA, making it safe but also short-lived. Thus, adenoviruses are useful experimentally but not practical for persistent therapeutic expression of an inserted gene. We injected the adenovirus expressing HCN2 into different regions of the heart of an experimental animal to create a biological pacemaker within either the atrium8 or the ventricular conduction system.9 This is illustrated schematically in the top portion of Fig. 3. In this case, the left cell is either an SAN cell (the native pacemaker, which naturally contains HCN channels and generates the action potentials shown in the voltage tracing above the figure), or a non-spontaneous muscle cell that is expressing virally delivered HCN channels and thereby becomes a spontaneously active cell. This cell is electrically coupled to an adjacent (nonspontaneous) muscle cell by gap junctions (black rectangle), allowing depolarizing current to flow from the first cell into the second, and consequently depolarizing that cell. The local circuit is completed via the extracellular space (dashed arrows) and electrical activity subsequently spreads from this muscle cell through all electrically coupled cells of the heart.

* * * *

Fig. 3: Illustration of a biological pacemaker based on viral expression of HCN channels (top) and one based on delivery of stem cells expressing these channels (bottom). Adapted with permission from Reference 4

* * * *

In later studies, we combined this viral delivery with induction of heart block (damaging the AVN) and implantation of an electronic pacemaker set in “demand” mode.10 That is, the electronic pacemaker only fired if heart rate fell dangerously low. The built-in sensing and memory capabilities of the electronic pacemaker, operating in tandem with our biological pacemaker, provided readout of how well the biological pacemaker functioned. In general, we found that by using HCN2 as our expressed gene, we were able to drive the heart approximately 70% of the time, with the electronic pacemaker stepping in the remainder of the time. We also demonstrated that the biological pacemaker could alter heart rate in response to a physiological stimulus that led to arousal.11 However, there are some inherent limitations to this viral-based delivery. As explained above, the virus used in these studies was an adenovirus, chosen for ease of manipulation and safety. That safety comes in part from it not being incorporated into the cellular DNA, but that also means that it persisted in these animal studies for only a few weeks. While that is sufficient for proof-of-principle experiments, it obviously is insufficient as a therapeutic biological pacemaker. Other viruses (e.g. retroviruses) do incorporate into cellular DNA and can persist indefinitely, but that very feature can lead to new risks. If the viral DNA incorporates near another gene it can affect expression of that gene, and the resulting side effects can be severe. In the best-known case, this led to the occurrence of leukemia in a significant number of patients given a viral therapy to treat an immunodeficiency disorder.12 Regardless of any perceived benefits of a biological pacemaker over an electronic pacemaker, no one is likely to be willing to risk cancer to realize those benefits.

Until a safe and persistent viral therapy is available, alternative delivery methods are needed. One such method involves the use of stem cells, a primitive cell type that can often be differentiated into more specialized cells. Stem-cell research has generated a lot of attention in recent years, often due to controversy regarding the source tissue. Embryonic stem cells, as the name implies, are isolated from embryos. Work has been done to manipulate these cells to become cardiac-like cells, often producing spontaneously active cells. Several studies have implanted these cells into animals to create biological pacemakers.13, 14 However, the embryonic source of these cells leads to serious limitations of availability and substantive debate on the appropriateness of this tissue source, as well as other technical limitations (they can trigger an immune response, requiring lifetime treatment with immunosuppressing drugs). Other stem cell sources are available. We have explored the use of adult mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), a specific kind of stem cell that can be harvested from adult bone marrow or blood and that is reported to be immune-privileged, i.e., they do not trigger an immune response. However, adult stem cells have more limited differentiation potential than embryonic stem cells, and so converting them into spontaneously active cardiaclike cells would be a considerable challenge.

Fortunately, we realized it was not necessary to differentiate MSCs into spontaneous cardiac-like cells to create a stem-cell-based biological pacemaker. A working heart cell has all the necessary channels for excitability, and lacks only those channels needed to initiate spontaneous activity, namely the HCN channels that are active between heartbeats. We reasoned that if we expressed only those channels in MSCs, and implanted these MSCs into the heart, they could functionally combine with the existing cells, and their complement of channels, to generate spontaneous activity. The idea was that the heart cell and MSC would work together as a functional unit, with each contributing some of the channels needed for a spontaneous, excitable cell. This idea depended on one crucial assumption—that the two cells could form gap junctions between them to permit electrical continuity. We showed this was indeed the case, and then demonstrated a biological pacemaker based on an HCN2-expressing MSC.15, 16 The way this type of biological pacemaker works is illustrated in the bottom half of Fig. 3. The stem cell on the left is neither spontaneously active nor excitable since it lacks all channels but the expressed HCN channels (which generate the current traces shown to the left). When electrically coupled to a muscle cell (cell on the right), the stem cell “sees” the negative resting potential of the muscle cell and is influenced by it, hyperpolarizing. This opens the HCN channels, resulting in a depolarizing current that affects both the stem cell and the electrically coupled muscle cell. The muscle cell then depolarizes, activating its normal complement of voltage-sensitive channels and triggering an action potential, which then propagates throughout the heart.

* * * *

The future

Much remains to be done before biological pacemakers are an approved therapy for bradyarrhythmias. Partly this involves further optimization of the channel(s) being expressed to ideally achieve activity 100% of the time, rather than the approximate 70% achieved to date when implanted in tandem with an electronic pacemaker. This aspect of genetic engineering is somewhat trial-and-error, and needs to be done in a manner that is both fast and cost-effective. Use of cell culture systems and computer models shows promise in this regard,17 allowing one to identify the most promising approaches before progressing to the animal studies that are required before any clinical trial would be approved.

Even after the gene(s) are optimized and other issues of safety and persistence are resolved, the initial patient population is likely to be constrained by certain inherent limitations of biological pacemakers. One such limitation relates to the increasing use of electronic pacemakers that also serve as implantable cardiac defibrillators, both maintaining heart rate and guarding against occasional but potentially fatal incidents of ventricular fibrillation. Biological pacemakers cannot serve this dual function, and so these patients would require simultaneous implantation of a defibrillator, negating many of the advantages of eliminating the electronic pacemaker. On the other hand, recent reports that almost one quarter of patients receiving these devices did not meet the recommended guidelines18 suggest that they may currently be overused, and that there is a significant patient population for which a biological pacemaker alone would be sufficient.

Another limitation also constrains the patient population. Any initial biological pacemaker, if used to address AVN block, will not produce synchronized atrial-ventricular contraction. Thus, the most likely initial patient population may be the elderly with both AVN block and uncontrolled atrial fibrillation. These patients are not candidates for a synchronous atrial-ventricular electronic pacemaker and therefore could equally benefit from a biological pacemaker placed in the ventricle. However, there also is early research underway to address this problem by designing a biological atrial-ventricular bypass.19 This would be a string of biological material that creates an electrical pathway between the atria and ventricle, bypassing a diseased AVN. If the SAN were functioning normally, this bypass would be sufficient by itself to maintain a normal heart rate. Alternatively, a biological pacemaker could be engineered at the atrial end of the bypass, thereby creating a single biological device that both initiates the electrical event and propagates it to the ventricle.

Finally, in the future, gene and cell therapy may be used to treat not just bradyarrhythmias but also tachyarrhythmias. These arrhythmias often result from regions of the heart having depressed excitability, such that conduction is abnormally slow. This situation allows establishment of a “reentry” arrhythmia, where excitation basically propagates in a circle somewhere in the heart, become self-perpetuating. Other than electronic defibrillation, treatment is limited. Available drugs largely work by attempting to further suppress activity, replacing slow conduction with outright blockage so that the circular circuit terminates. But these same drugs can also suppress nearby healthy regions, converting them from fast to slow conduction and creating a new arrhythmia. The promise of gene therapy for this arrhythmia is that by introducing the appropriate channels one could restore fast conduction in depressed regions, and even if the genes spread to nearby healthy regions, enhancing conduction in those normal regions would be unlikely to lead to new arrhythmias. We and others have provided some initial evidence that this approach can be successful in preventing or reducing tachyarrhythmias.20, 21

In summary, gene and cell therapy to treat cardiac arrhythmias is not yet ready for clinical trials in human subjects. In the case of bradyarrhythmias in particular, where electronic pacemakers provide an effective if not ideal life-saving therapy, the bar that must be achieved by a biological pacemaker in terms of safety, persistence, and efficacy is high. On the other hand, the very availability of electronic pacemakers as a failsafe mechanism will facilitate the design and implementation of safe clinical trials, and thus may lead to the eventual replacement of these electronic devices with a purely biological solution—and to the presence of fewer cyborgs among us.

* * * *

Further reading

To read more about the heartbeat, see:

www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/anatomyvideos/000021.htm

To read more about electronic pacemakers, see:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificialpacemaker

To read more about progress on developing biological pacemakers, see:

online.wsj.com/article/SB120837878895120531.html

www.science20.com/newsreleases /worksnaturalbiologicalpacemaker

* * * *

References

1. Beck H, Boden WE, Patibandla S, Kireyev D, Gupta V, Campagna F et al. 50th anniversary of the first successful permanent pacemaker implantation in the United States: Historical review and future directions. Am J Cardiol 2010;106:810-818.

2. Furrer M, Naegeli B, Bertel O. Hazards of an alternative medicine device in a patient with a pacemaker. N Engl J Med 2004;350:1688-1690.

3. Hauser RG, Hayes DL. Increasing hazard of Sprint Fidelis implantable cardioverter-defibrillator lead failure. Heart Rhythm 2009;6:605-610.

4. Rosen MR, Brink PR, Cohen IS, Robinson RB. Genes, stem cells and biological pacemakers. Cardiovasc Res 2004;64:12-23.

5. Rosen MR, Brink PR, Cohen IS, Robinson RB. Cardiac pacing: from biological to electronic . . . to biological? Circulation Arrhythmia Electrophysiology 2008;1:54-61.

6. Qu J, Barbuti A, Protas L, Santoro B, Cohen IS, Robinson RB. HCN2 over-expression in newborn and adult ventricular myocytes: distinct effects on gating and excitability. Circ Res 2001;89:e8-e14.

7. Miake J, Marban E, Nuss HB. Gene therapy: Biological pacemaker created by gene transfer. Nature 2002;419:132-133.

8. Qu J, Plotnikov AN, Danilo PJ, Shlapakova I, Cohen IS, Robinson RB et al. Expression and function of a biological pacemaker in canine heart. Circulation 2003;107:1106-1109.

9. Plotnikov AN, Sosunov EA, Qu J, Shlapakova IN, Anyukhovsky EP, Liu L et al. Biological pacemaker implanted in canine left bundle branch provides ventricular escape rhythms that have physiologically acceptable rates. Circulation 2004;109:506-512.

10. Bucchi A, Plotnikov AN, Shlapakova I, Danilo PJ, Kryukova Y, Qu J et al. Wild-type and mutant HCN channels in a tandem biological-electronic cardiac pacemaker. Circulation 2006;114:992-999.

11. Shlapakova IN, Nearing BD, Lau DH, Boink GJ, Danilo P, Jr., Kryukova Y et al. Biological pacemakers in canines exhibit positive chronotropic response to emotional arousal. Heart Rhythm 2010;7:1835-1840.

12. Hacein-Bey-Abina S, Garrigue A, Wang GP, Soulier J, Lim A, Morillon E et al. Insertional oncogenesis in 4 patients after retrovirus-mediated gene therapy of SCID-X1. J Clin Invest 2008;118:3132-3142.

13. Kehat I, Khimovich L, Caspi O, Gepstein A, Shofti R, Arbel G et al. Electromechanical integration of cardiomyocytes derived from human embryonic stem cells. Nat Biotechnol 2004;22:1282-1289.

14. Xue T, Cho HC, Akar FG, Tsang SY, Jones SP, Marban E et al. Functional integration of electrically active cardiac derivatives from genetically engineered human embryonic stem cells with quiescent recipient ventricular cardiomyocytes: insights into the development of cell-based pacemakers. Circulation 2005;111:11-20.

15. Plotnikov AN, Shlapakova I, Szabolcs MJ, Danilo P, Jr., Lorell BH, Potapova IA et al. Xenografted adult human mesenchymal stem cells provide a platform for sustained biological pacemaker function in canine heart. Circulation 2007;116:706-713.

16. Valiunas V, Kanaporis G, Valiuniene L, Gordon C, Wang HZ, Li L et al. Coupling an HCN2 expressing cell to a myocyte creates a pacing two cell syncytium. J Physiol (London) 2009;587:5211-5226.

17. Robinson RB. Engineering a biological pacemaker: in vivo, in vitro and in silico models. Drug Discovery Disease Models 2009;6:93-98.

18. Al-Khatib SM, Hellkamp A, Curtis J, Mark D, Peterson E, Sanders GD et al. Non-Evidence-Based ICD Implantations in the United States. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 2011;305:43-49.

19. Takahashi T, Nagai T, Kanda M, Tokunaga M, Liu M, Naito ATet al. Brown adipose tissue-derived cells differentiate into cardiac conduction and pacemaker cells in vitro and improve complete AV block in vivo. Circulation Research 2009;105:e40. (Abstract)

20. Lau DH, Clausen C, Sosunov EA, Shlapakova IN, Anyukhovsky EP, Danilo P, Jr. et al. Epicardial border zone overexpression of skeletal muscle sodium channel SkM1 normalizes activation, preserves conduction, and suppresses ventricular arrhythmia: an in silico, in vivo, in vitro study. Circulation 2009;119:19-27.

21. Sasano T, McDonald AD, Kikuchi K, Donahue JK. Molecular ablation of ventricular tachycardia after myocardial infarction. Nat Med 2006;12:1256-1258.

* * * *

About the author

Richard Robinson received his B.S. in physics and Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Illinois. He has worked at Columbia University since 1977, where he is currently Professor of Pharmacology and Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles. His research focuses on regulation of cardiac ion channels by development and disease, and the use of gene and cell therapies to treat cardiac arrhythmias. His research on biological pacemakers has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Boston Scientific Corp. He is a coinventor on several U.S. patents related to biological pacemakers.

Copyright © 2011 Richard Robinson

[Back to Table of Contents]

Short Story: DIG SITE
by Jack McDevitt

* * * *

Illustrated by Mark Evans

* * * *

Maybe you can tell the players without a program, but it's harder. . . .

It was late in the afternoon and we were getting ready to close for the day when the call came in. "Dr. Korvin, my name's Demetrios Papadapoulis. We found something."

When you work at an archeological museum on an island rich with history dating back to the beginning of civilization, you hear that a lot. Someone digging in his garden comes across a buried crucifix and wonders whether it might once have belonged to Saint Sophia. The problem on Phoros, though, was that it had been several decades since anything of consequence had been uncovered. Still, you can always hope. It was what I lived for. “What did you find, Mr. Papadapoulis?”

"I'm not entirely sure. It looks like a post or something. It's probably nothing, but they want us to report anything at all like this."

“Okay. Where are you?”

"I'm the supervisor over at the parking lot.” That waswhere they were putting up the new school. "Are you interested in this thing? Or can I get my people back to work?"

Phoros Island is situated in the middle of the Aegean. A century ago, one might have gone for a walk in the woods and come across what was left of a shrine dedicated to Asclepius, or the remnants of a Roman barracks, or a fortification erected by the Crusaders.

Because of the one-time pervasiveness of artifacts, the law requires corporations to report any finds to the proper authority. That's me. But I'd been through it all enough times to know better than to get my hopes up.

“Mr. Papadapoulis,” I said, “I'll be over shortly.”

* * * *

The Phoros Archaeological Museum is located in the center of Sailas, which is the largest city on the island. The museum is fronted by a wide portico and classic columns. Statues of Athena, Hermes, Apollo, and Aphrodite guard the front walkway. But people buying tickets at the main desk do so in full view of Kalos Maimonides.

Kailos is seated on a bench, fully robed, his bearded features lost in thought. He's a mythic figure, who is said to have lived on the island in Homeric times. If he did actually exist, and the stories about him are true, he might have qualified as the world's first scientist. His supporters claim he invented indoor plumbing, built drainage systems, and was the first person to have used maps. He is also said to have devised the first air and water pumps.

Of course we all knew that none of that was true.

* * * *

Papadapoulis worked for the Scala Construction Company. They were at that time still in the early stages of the project, which is to say they were digging up the parking lot.

By the time I got there, he had given up on getting anything more done that day and sent most of his workers home. The law required them to stop digging once the discovery was made, and to stay clear of the impacted area until they were authorized to continue by the inspection team. Which, again, was me.

The parking lot had been there sixty-eight years. Prior to that, as far back as I could determine, the area had been a public park complete with benches and a fountain. It was located just outside Zogalio, with a magnificent view of the sea.

Most of the lot had been dug up and carried away. Dirt and broken concrete were piled around the perimeter, where two excavators kept watch. Outside a temporary shack, two men were talking. They both looked my way when I pulled in and parked. They finished their conversation. One nodded and went into the shack. The other put his hands into his pockets and came toward me. “Dr. Korvin?” he said. “It's over this way.”

He led me down into the excavation.

* * * *

The object was round, roughly six feet long with a ten-inch diameter, tapering to maybe half that much. It was marble, broken at both ends. It was still in the ground, but it wasn't connected to anything, so we lifted it out and I wiped it down. It might have been a support column of some sort, but the tapering suggested it had been part of a sculpture. There was a suggestion of an elbow or a knee, but the object didn't resemble a limb. There was a geometric regularity about it that one doesn't find in classical work depicting parts of the anatomy.

“You look disappointed,” said Papadapoulis. He was a bit shorter than I was, but probably a hundred pounds heavier, most of it encased in his stomach. He looked tired, and was not happy that this distraction had shown up and thrown him off schedule.

“No,” I said. “Not really.” I'd been hoping for a statue of Athena. Or maybe one of the Roman emperors. Jupiter would have been good. “Thank you for reporting it.”

“You're welcome.”

“I'll have a team over here first thing tomorrow. We'll need to take a look around. Then you should be able to get back to work.”

* * * *

I took the object to the museum and put it in the storage room. Then I noticed that Magda Savvas was in her office. “It's your day off,” I said.

Magda was a lovely woman. She had black hair and dark eyes and a luminous smile. She could probably have managed a successful career on one of the TV dramas had she gone that route. And if she'd had some acting talent. There was her problem: You always knew exactly what she was thinking. Or almost always. “I just thought I'd come by,” she said. “And see if anything was happening.”

“You heard about the call.”

She looked at me hopefully. “Word gets around.”

I shrugged. “I don't think it's anything.”

She took a deep breath. The disappointment was visible in her eyes. “Does anything ever show up?” she asked. “Is it always a false alarm?”

“Pretty much.”

“You know, Aaron,” she said, “sometimes I wish I'd gone to law school.”

She ran her fingertips along its length. “I don't know what it is. You think there might be more?”

“It's certainly possible.”

“You mind if I go along tomorrow?”

“Be glad to have you, Magda.”

“Thanks.” She was still examining the object. “We're going to have it dated, right?”

“Sure. It'll go to the lab tomorrow.”

“Good. Who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky.”

Magda wanted what we all do: to make one discovery that we can put our name on. Something that matters. But it rarely happens. She hadn't said anything directly, but I knew she was looking at me, with a lifetime investment, and what did I have to show for it? I'd made no mark anywhere, had found nothing of any consequence, and now I was getting close to retirement. She knew I'd given up.

Magda had gone to school in Athens, had interned with the museum, and decided to stay with us. That was two years ago, which had translated into some disappointments. She'd learned the basics of the profession: Don't get excited. Don't believe in anything.

Still, she'd shown up on her day off.

* * * *

I assigned one of our volunteers to deliver the object to the lab in the morning. Magda and I, meanwhile, took the radar over to the parking lot. The construction crew hadn't arrived yet, though Papadapoulis drove in a few minutes after we did. He watched us set up the unit and asked if he could help. There really wasn't much he could do, other than keep his people out of the way. When they got there, he found work for them on the outskirts of the inspection area, and took to walking around looking unhappy.

We descended into the excavation and within a few minutes began detecting buried objects. Unfortunately, the scanner provides only outlines, so we didn't know what we had. I could make out a couple of rock slabs, some masonry, and maybe parts of a statue.

* * * *

We brought a recovery team in that afternoon. Magda was excited at the possibilities, so I turned the operation over to her and stayed at the museum to take care of my more routine duties. This was my way of saying I'd seen nothing that really raised my hopes.

I was working on a public relations effort. We were trying to increase our popularity with tourists, and one way to do that was to set up a more enticing online display. I was working on it with a consultant when Magda called. "This place might have been a temple at one time, Aaron. We've got an altar, a couple of doors, and a statue."

“Very good,” I said.

"Unfortunately, the statue's broken into several pieces. And it's been scorched. The head's off, and one arm." She took a deep breath. "It looks like early Christians again." The Christians had a reputation for demolishing everything they'd encountered that connected to the pagan world. Magda was a Christian herself, and she tended to take it personally.

“Okay,” I said. “You find anything more about the original piece?”

"Yes. It is a leg. I have the rest of the statue, but it's pretty thoroughly broken, just like the female. But, Aaron, I really don't know what to make of it."

“How do you mean?”

"The head is unlike anything I've ever seen from the ancient world. In fact the whole thing is . . ." She groped for words. "It just doesn't belong."

“How do you mean, ‘doesn't belong'?”

"The style's wrong. It's abstract. The thing you brought in yesterday is a leg. But it's more like the kind of representation we might have seen in the nineteenth century." She stopped to catch her breath. "Have you heard back from the lab yet?"

“It's a bit too soon.”

"I'll be interested in what they have to say."

* * * *

Papadapoulis called to ask how long it would be before he could get back to work. I tried to reassure him. We were moving as quickly as we could. “But this is starting to look like a major find, Demetrios,” I said, trying to sound as if he'd gotten seriously lucky. “Scala Construction is going to get a ton of publicity.” That might have been something of an exaggeration, but we were pretty good at making minor recoveries sound significant. It helped the museum, of course, and it provided a decent return to the people we inconvenienced.

Still, he sounded unhappy. "I'm glad to hear it, Doc, because you have no idea what this is costing us. The crew gets paid every day whether they're doing anything or not."

“You want me to talk to Mr. Proteus?” Proteus was the CEO.

"Yes,” he said. "That would be a good idea."

* * * *

The conversation with Proteus went easily enough. "Just make sure you mention our name when you do the interviews, Aaron," he said. He also made clear that he'd appreciate it if we could move things along.

I was about to head for the dig site when the lab called. "We have the report on the artifact, Doctor."

“Good,” I said. “What can you tell me?”

"It's pretty old. Three thousand years, give or take."

* * * *

We excavated two statues. The pieces were being placed in the museum truck when I got there. Magda had arranged them so we could at least get an idea what they'd originally looked like.

The female was fully clothed, which suggested an early period. The arm that had broken off had been extended in what appeared to be a benevolent gesture. She'd stood on a base about four feet high, and would have towered over any observers. “The temple goddess, probably,” Magda said.

It was painful to look at. It must have been majestic in its time. And yes, it would constitute a major find, but it was painful to see the damage that had been done to it. “Any idea who she might be?” I asked.

“No.” She shrugged. “That's going to take time, if we can get it at all.” We stared down at it, shaking our heads. It was the first time I'd come across anything like that, and I could only imagine what she had looked like in the torchlight of a seaside temple.

And then there was the second statue, the one we'd dated to 1000 b.c. There could not have been a sharper contrast with the goddess's style. It was apparently a warrior, encased entirely in armor. It was not, however, the sort of armor you'd have expected to see in the remote past. This was smooth, without any sign of breast plate or elbow cups or greaves or neck guards. The armor was of a single piece, and it would have had to be flexible.

Ridiculous.

The warrior was wearing a helmet that would not have been much out of place in an American professional football game. The visor was a solid piece, yet the face was completely covered, so it must have been transparent. No part of the head or neck was exposed. “It looks,” she said, “like a robot.”

I stared at the visor.

“It looks like a Martian,” she said. “And here's something else.” She pointed at the right hip.

It wore a belt. And the belt held something that looked very much like a holster. “It's for carrying a knife,” I said.

There was an odd look in her eyes. “Maybe.”

The flap was down, so we couldn't see what sort of weapon it held. “You're getting carried away,” I said. “What else could it have been?”

* * * *

We also recovered some marble slabs and sections of what turned out to be a fountain. There were a few vases and cups and a door. And part of a circular staircase. Not bad for three thousand years.

The marble slabs had been part of an altar. We'd need help getting it reassembled. But I was delighted with the find and had already begun making plans to put everything on display in the Venizelos Room, which was our main exhibition area.

And then there were the vases: Most of them were in shards, but four were still intact. A substantial number appeared to be from a matched set. They were black, with a different beautiful young woman displayed on each. The women stood atop dolphins, strode out of the sea, swam through the depths with schools of fish, and rode tumbling waves. “Nereids,” said Magda. She was ecstatic. “There would have been fifty of these originally.”

She was correct, of course. There'd been fifty Nereids, who traditionally served as companions of Poseidon. Magda was shaking her head. “We're lucky any of them survived.”

One of the altar slabs contained a curious device: a broken chain had been sculpted into the marble. “Aaron,” she said, “you ever see anything like this before?”

* * * *

Magda began referring to the warrior as Apollo. “He's so godlike,” she said.

“But Apollo wasn't a military type.”

“This is the kind of armor a god might have worn.” And that got me thinking about Martians again. “It might help,” she continued, “if we could figure out who the temple is dedicated to.”

“I can give you a good guess,” I said.

“Who do you think?”

“Poseidon.”

“Because of the Nereids?”

“Sure.”

She nodded. “I suppose you're right. But I'd feel better if we could find his likeness here somewhere.”

I glanced down at the warrior. “Maybe this is him.”

She laughed. “What would he be doing in the armor?”

“Maybe it's not armor at all, Magda.”

“What is it then?”

I laughed. “How about a diving suit?”

* * * *

The following afternoon we were able to block off an area that would allow Papadapoulis to put his people back to work. When we finished our own job, we decided to go to dinner and raise a toast to the warrior.

We headed for the Caiphus Restaurant on Bellacliva Beach. It was where we traditionally went to celebrate promotions, welcome new arrivals, and say good-bye at retirements. When we were seated, and the wine had come, she raised her glass. “Here's to the guy with the flex armor and the sidearm.”

The wine was excellent. We refilled the glasses. “And to the Nereids,” I said.

Eventually we even hoisted one to Papadapoulis. Magda's eyes, that evening, were filled with emotion.

* * * *

When we finished, Magda went home and I returned to my office. I don't know why. I didn't want to go back to an empty house, so I went instead to an empty museum. I didn't stay long. And I don't remember anything more about that evening, other that sitting in the reception hall and staring across the dimly lit room at Kalos. He and I had something in common. He'd been forgotten, as I would be. The difference though was that he'd managed some serious accomplishments. Or at least he'd been given credit for them. What were the chances anybody would know my name in three thousand years?

If the sources had it right, he'd lit up the eyes of the temple gods. Moved them back and forth, apparently. Used a water clock to open doors. Pure magic, all of it.

I asked everybody I knew about the broken chain image on the front of the altar. Nobody had ever seen, or heard, of anything like it. Rick Carver, in London, told me I shouldn't expect a serial device. "They've been known to just make things up," he said. "Whatever the local priests felt was appropriate, that's what they'd put on their temples.”

* * * *

We thanked Papadapoulis, gave him a certificate of clearance empowering him to restart unlimited operations, and finished hauling everything away to the museum's storage facility.

The following morning we issued a statement for the media, explaining that we didn't know yet what we had, but that it appeared a temple had once stood on the shore line.

Meantime we were busy cleaning and organizing the artifacts, and trying, literally, to put the pieces together. The lab had returned Poseidon's leg, or Apollo's leg, whoever's it might have been. We reassembled everything we could. I tended to stay late. I was doing a lot of brooding, I guess. Or maybe it was the sense of having opened a window into another time. Finding artifacts in the ground, the wreckage of history, is a different experience from looking at them in a museum.

I'd all but moved into the storage area. And when everyone had gone home, night after night, I sat looking at them, wondering about the people who'd made them, who had erected them as bulwarks, as havens against a terrifying world they could not understand.

We'd had them about a week when I made a resolution to find a more constructive use for my time. I was seated in the storage area when I made the resolution. The altar was set against the back wall, reflecting the pale light of a setting sun. We'd had decent success putting the statues back together. Pieces were still missing, a large slice out of the warrior's right shoulder, a chunk of the goddess's kneecap. They stood in front of a long work table. The goddess and the warrior. They were flanked by two of the Nereid vases.

Our team had gone home an hour earlier. Two visiting analysts, who were also puzzled by the male figure, had just left. Magda had been missing all day. Other things to do, she'd said. After a few minutes, just about when I was promising to make more constructive use of my time, I turned off the overhead lights and trained two lamps on the sculptures.

Who are you?

I sat back down, and my attention was caught, as it always was, by the warrior.

The real treasures of the place, the goddess sculpture, the Nereid vases, and the altar, were somehow overshadowed by this piece of modernistic art, which simply did not belong.

I sat in the stillness. Until my cell sounded. "Aaron." Magda's voice. "Sorry to bother you so late. Are you at home?"

“I'm babysitting the artifacts.”

"Stay there. I'm on my way."

* * * *

She seemed to be giving off her own light when she walked in. She closed the door behind her, looked at me, and turned toward the warrior. “I know who he is,” she said.

I didn't move. “Who is he?”

“It's the broken chain. I should have picked up on it right away.”

I started thinking chains. Chained to a canyon wall while eagles ate his liver. “It's Prometheus,” I said.

She laughed. “The chain is broken. The reason we got everything wrong was the assumption that the temple was dedicated to Poseidon.”

“Because of the Nereids.”

“Yes.”

“So who was it dedicated to?”

“Who broke Zeus's chains and freed him when some of the other gods had revolted?” I had to think about it. “Okay,” she said, “try this. Who's best known among the Nereids?”

Bingo. “Thetis,” I said.

“Very good, Aaron. And her son was . . .”

"Achilles.” We were both staring at the armored figure.

“How could we have missed it?”

I thought she was joking. “How indeed? So where'd the hi-tech armor come from? Aliens? Time travelers, maybe?” Her smile widened. “You're not going to tell me Kalos designed it?”

“No,” she said. “There's no evidence to support that. Although some people on the island claim Thetis used to visit here.”

“I haven't seen one recently.”

“That's beside the point. We have a tendency to overlook early technology, Aaron. You know that. We behave as if everybody before the Renaissance was an idiot. How'd the Egyptians get those stones to the top of the pyramids? The ancient world had steam engines, gears, indoor plumbing, and even computers. I'd say somebody, Kalos or somebody else, devised some serious body armor.”

I looked down at the warrior's feet. Achilles was well protected.

“Come on, Aaron,” she said. “A shot in the heel wouldn't kill either of us. That part of the story's a fable. Maybe the rest of it is too. But somebody knew about advanced weaponry.”

I couldn't avoid laughing. “It would explain why Achilles seemed invulnerable.”

“Yes, it would.” She hugged me. It was the first time. “Tomorrow, why don't we go back to the Caiphus? And do some really serious celebrating?”

Copyright © 2011 Jack McDevitt

[Back to Table of Contents]

Short Story: THE BUDDY SYSTEM
by Don D'Ammassa

In trust we trust. . . .

I grew up with Arthur Buddy, and a less likely agent of doom it would be hard to imagine.

Our acquaintance began when his family moved in next door on Grove Street in Managansett. At first I thought he was a lot older than I. Buddy—he was never Arthur except to his parents—was almost six feet tall and substantially built by the time he was ten years old, which was when we met. I was a spindly child with bad coordination, and it has always struck me as one of the great ironies in life that I aspired to play professional sports while Buddy probably never learned the rules of baseball until he was in his thirties.

They arrived just before the school year started, and, to my surprise, we ended up in the same homeroom. It was only logical that we walk home from school together.

It would be nice to say that I recognized Buddy's genius from the outset, but if there were visible signs of it at the time, I was too unsophisticated to recognize them. He was already bookish, preferring detective stories and nonfiction while I read mostly science fiction and adventure, but there was enough overlap for us to carry on a conversation. The day after we met I was invited over to his house. It was like visiting a museum.

I've moved a few times in my life. It takes weeks, sometimes months to get the new place looking the way I want it, and I've spent all of my life in relatively small apartments. Buddy's parents had restored order in less than a week, and I do mean order. The bookshelves were neatly filled, alphabetically by title within alphabetical order of author, and in the case of nonfiction, within general subject matter. The pictures on the wall—all fractals—were squared off with millimeter perfection. The furniture was comfortable and certainly not new, but every piece matched and I never spotted so much as a fleck of lint on any of my visits. The kitchen looked like something out of my mother's culinary magazines—all the pots and pans and other implements arranged logically and neatly.

I felt uncomfortable touching anything while I was being introduced to his parents and felt immense relief when Buddy invited me up to his room, where I expected a more welcoming chaos. In this I was disappointed. Everything there was in perfect order—the bed made with its quilt precisely aligned, desk neatly organized, books shelved logically, and his PC looked like it had come out of a box that morning.

Most of us kids knew our way around computers by then, of course, but Buddy was leagues beyond us. He routinely played with the registry, rewrote code in commercial programs to add features he wanted, and he was a whiz with hardware. He was already fluent in three programming languages when I met him.

I don't want you to think Buddy was some kind of nerd. Well, actually, I suppose he was, but he was also a regular guy. He was sociable, better acquainted with world events than most adults, smart but not a smartass. Most of us adapt to the people we're with from moment to moment, but Buddy was like a chameleon. There were gaps in his knowledge—sports and music were the biggest—but in most cases he could hold up his end of a conversation with almost anyone.

By the end of the year we were best friends, a relationship that has endured for more than three decades now. We both ended up at the same college—his first choice, my second—so it was only logical that we become roommates. That was the closest we ever came to a serious rift. From the safe distance of a few meters, Buddy's perpetual need for organization and regularity was tolerable, even amusing. Within the confines of a dorm room, it constituted a unique form of torture.

Buddy had seven sets of clothing, one for each day of the week, and he went through the rotation religiously. He showered alternate days, and I could set my watch by the time consumed from the second he stepped out the door to walk down to the shower room until the moment it opened again to admit his towel-wrapped form. Buddy's schedule was mounted on the wall next to his bed—blocking out hours for study, hours for casual reading, his class schedule, cafeteria meal times, and so forth. I never once saw Buddy consult this schedule; it had been committed to memory. On one occasion I found him taking notes from a botany textbook one of our friends had left in the room. It was his scheduled study time, and he was caught up on his own work.

After a while I began maliciously plotting ways to disrupt his schedule. I hid his Monday socks on one occasion, and I set the clock on his desk an hour forward on another. Buddy never lost his temper, but he always gave me a look that said he was disappointed by my juvenile pranks, and I always felt guilty afterward. Mad too.

So we parted ways during our sophomore year. I moved in with a pot-smoking hippie type in another dorm while Buddy rented a basement apartment off campus. Within weeks our friendship was stronger than ever.

I'll skip over the next twenty years or so. Buddy was so brilliant that corporate recruiters and headhunters salivated over him. Within ten years he was directing two separate multibillion-dollar research projects and had changed jobs three times. Shortly after that he became Director of Research for Pathways, nominally a private research and development group but effectively a government-run technology thinktank with strong ties to everything from military and intelligence to urban planning and the Department of Energy. He had met with two presidents personally and was on a first-name basis with a dozen cabinet members.

I followed in his wake. Once I realized I was not going to be another Ted Williams, I became infected with Buddy's enthusiasm for computers. I was an implementer rather than an innovator, but I was damned good at implementing, and Buddy hired me—twice—for my skills rather than our friendship. He brought me to Pathways right after funding had been approved for the Comprehensive Interpolative Analytic and Descriptive Program, the name of which gave way within months to the less formal “the Buddy System.”

I won't attempt to explain the intricacies of the Buddy System here, and I couldn't if I wanted to because they're still classified, but here's an analogy. In conventional storage and analysis systems there are discrete elements of data. Let's call them A, B, and C. They can be related to one another and certain extrapolations made from those relationships. Buddy developed a new type of array that organized that raw data into new entities—let's call them AB, BC, AC, and ABC. It then extrapolated from the interrelationships of this “new” data and created ABBC and BCABC and so forth, from which fresh extrapolations could be made. That's an oversimplification, but you get the idea.

The result was an analytical device more sophisticated and more accurate than anything that had previously existed. Although not infallible, it was remarkably reliable in describing foreign troop placements, clandestine international negotiations, locations of terrorist cells and their probable targets, likely places for placement of oil wells and other resource-harvesting methods, and so forth. But while it was a profoundly revolutionary analytical device, it was not actually predictive. It described existing systems in detail based on incomplete data and assigned probabilities to gaps in its knowledge base, but it could not forecast what might happen next. This was by design. Buddy was insistent that only reliable data be introduced into the process, nothing speculative.

This was not an arbitrary decision. If an error was introduced into the Buddy System—which colloquially became “Little Buddy” after a while—it was no easy matter to back it out. Buddy explained it to me once and I'll try to repeat what he said.

“With a conventional system, you can erase the bad data and then tell the program to reverse any change to other data caused by the misinformation. But Little Buddy doesn't work that way. The bad data creates other bad data, and the ongoing data creation is affected by the overall interaction, not just the specific links. So you can't ever erase the bad data unless you wipe all the memory and start over again.” If you remove datum C from ABC, the result would not be identical to the original AB.

Then someone in the government decided that Buddy was being too timid. They wanted predictive functions so they could posit certain military or economic scenarios and get a forecast of the outcome. At one point in the debate Buddy even threatened to resign, but at the last minute he suggested a compromise.

They would clone Little Buddy, duplicate him in an entirely separate system, and the various government agencies could play with the clone in any way they desired. “But don't expect me to vouch for its accuracy.”

It was an expensive solution, but it seemed to satisfy everyone's objection. I was reassigned to the Big Buddy project—it never had a formal name—and oversaw the creation of its architecture. At the time I thought the name a misnomer, but within a year Big Buddy had a larger budget, a larger supporting staff, and a busier schedule than its older brother. I was the one who made the presentation to the new president, not my friend, and I loved every minute of it.

And now I have to mention the one big mistake that we all made, even the great Arthur Buddy. We had always been careful to conceal from Little Buddy the fact of its own existence because it was felt that this would introduce a self-referential variable that might generate loops of logic we could not hope to detect. Similarly, then, neither Big nor Little Buddy were told of the existence of a sibling. To my knowledge and recollection, no one ever suggested that this might have undesirable consequences.

Most of Big Buddy's predictions remain classified, but I can tell you about a few of them. The Economic Stimulus Package of 2020 was a direct result of running various what-if scenarios, and the outcome was very close to what was forecast. At least one successful foreign revolution was stimulated by actions suggested by Big Buddy, and only twice in over a thousand foreign and domestic elections did we project the wrong winner—and in those cases the loser committed a major gaffe in the closing days of the campaign.

But Little Buddy was too smart for us. It processed those events that had been influenced by the predictions of Big Buddy and inferred the existence of a clandestine and highly sophisticated data analysis system under the aegis of the U.S. government. It even provided a list of probable participants in the project, which included my own name along with that of Arthur Buddy and most of our senior staff. Buddy—the organic one—was incensed, but it had been his own idea, more or less, to create Big Buddy, so much of his anger was self-directed.

Like I said, I was a science-fiction fan as a kid, and I'd read more than one story in which the supercomputers wake up and decide they know better than their masters. This wasn't going to happen here. For one thing, neither Big nor Little Buddy was self-aware, or even capable of mimicking self-direction. For another, they had no means of directly affecting the physical world. They were very sophisticated tools, but that's all they were. But a faulty tool can still be dangerous.

Two days after Little Buddy made its startling announcement, Big Buddy did the same, but went even further. There were two such systems, it suggested, and their influence on national and international events was increasing. Buddy seemed less shocked this time; he had probably foreseen that much. Six hours later Little Buddy reached the same conclusion.

It wasn't hard to figure out what had happened. The dramatic improvement in so many aspects of government policy—domestic issues, international politics, anti-terrorism, budget management, and so forth—made it obvious to the two Buddies that something other than human resourcefulness or pure chance was at work. For Little Buddy it had been the solution to a complex program; for Big Buddy it was the logical projection of past and present trends in data analysis.

A crisis meeting was called, during which Buddy said very little until the end. After listening to the arguments of his chief subordinates, of cabinet officials and generals and government planners, of theoreticians and more practical hands, he stood up quietly and recommended that the project—both projects—be terminated immediately.

As you might imagine, this caused a considerable sensation. Buddy tried to explain himself, but very few were in a mood to listen. Careers were dependent on the Buddy System, the fate of the nation and even the world, according to some. Buddy remained calm and continued to explain his reasoning, but few listened and almost no one heeded him.

So he resigned.

I confess that I did not follow suit. I enjoyed my job, access to powerful people, a finger touching the pulse of the world. Buddy did not fault me for doing so, but I avoided him for some time afterward, out of embarrassment rather than disagreement. But eventually I felt ashamed of myself and arranged to visit him at his rather palatial—but incredibly neat—house on the Potomac.

We danced around the issue for a few minutes, but like a sore tooth, I couldn't leave it alone. “Why not just recommend that the data banks be erased and the project rebooted?”

Buddy sighed. “It wouldn't have helped. Real world data would inevitably have led to the same conclusion. We've managed our economy and other issues too well in the last decade. Any system sophisticated enough to provide meaningful help would also be sophisticated enough to recognize that this wasn't a chance occurrence. And if we somehow lied convincingly, the system would be reaching conclusions based on inaccurate input, with consequently fallacious results.”

“They've decided that self-knowledge is an acceptable risk. It might even improve the predictive results.”

“That in itself is unpredictable.”

Neither of us had any idea at the time just how right Buddy was.

The first clue was a souring of the national economy. No one had anticipated how fragile and interrelated things had become, and the repercussions came quickly. Actions that Big Buddy predicted would have a high probability of success proved disastrous. Money markets dried up, consumer confidence plummeted, factory output dropped, unemployment rose, the foreign exchange rate became dramatically unfavorable. The instability spread to Europe and Asia within days and currency exchange rates were in constant flux. Less dramatic was the continued deterioration of Little Buddy's analyses. Public sentiment was at variance with profiles for various issues and electrical power was misallocated on the national grid several times during the summer months, resulting in frequent blackouts, some of them prolonged. It was as though Little Buddy had decided that any alteration of existing protocols would be contraindicated because they had been previously judged optimal by Big Buddy.

Then a diplomatic and military campaign in the Mideast failed to restore the wavering balance of power and resulted instead in open warfare between the Saudis and Egyptians on one side and Iran, Syria, and Turkey on the other. A threat of NATO intervention, which Big Buddy projected would lead to a ceasefire, provoked the Nuclear Spat in the fall and brought Israel and Pakistan into the war, on opposite sides.

Potentially worse consequences were averted by, of all people, a group of terrorists with a small-yield nuclear weapon. Pathways was located a few miles from the White House, which was probably the intended target, but the drone carrying the bomb malfunctioned and detonated early. Among the tens of thousands of dead were Big and Little Buddy.

We will probably never know for certain what went wrong, but Arthur Buddy—who did survive—provided the most plausible explanation. Once Little Buddy was aware of the existence of its sibling, it assumed that any significant policy implemented by the government was optimal because it had been vetted by Big Buddy. Once Big Buddy was aware of its other self, it assumed that any appraisal of current events by Little Buddy was accurate. So when the economy began to cool off, Little Buddy decided that was a good thing, and since Little Buddy thought so, Big Buddy concluded it must be right and cooled things off a little more, and Little Buddy assumed that was good, too, and you can figure it out from there. I suppose some similar train of artificial thought led to the conclusion that a nuclear war in the Mideast was desirable.

Unfortunately, such stupidity is not the sole province of machines.

The worldwide depression is in its third year now, and there are more border wars and skirmishes over water rights and other resources than I can list easily. With Pathways gone, I'm out of work and my substantial savings, thanks to inflation, would be insignificant even if I was able to extract them from the now chaotic banking system. I'm working as a handyman back home in Managansett, not far from Buddy's modest—but always neat and orderly—house in Scituate. I have a fireplace and woodlot, which should come in handy this winter when the power goes off, as it inevitably will. There was a wave of rioting in several surrounding communities earlier this year, but the worst seems to have passed.

Yesterday I was helping with an old-fashioned barn raising. The town council has decided to revive some of the small farms on the north side of town that were abandoned years ago. Tom Cayman is our master carpenter, and I watch him a lot to pick up tricks of the trade. On this particular occasion, he was setting the lintel over the main door. I watched him use a level every few inches along its length. When he was done, he climbed down the ladder, took a few steps back, and shaded his eyes while examining his work closely.

“What's the matter?” I asked. “Don't you trust the level?”

“You know, son, tools are marvelous things. They can save time, make us more efficient, help us to do things we might not be able to do on our own. But one thing I've learned over the years: No tool, no matter how well made, can substitute for human judgment.”

Too bad he didn't tell us that a long time ago.

Copyright © 2011 Don D'Ammassa

[Back to Table of Contents]

Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: INTELLECTUAL PROXIES
by Jeffery D. Kooistra

I have been reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius lately (a free edition I got on my beloved Kindle), the Roman emperor from 161-180 a.d. who very much earned the reputation of “philosopher king.” I stumbled across a passage that struck a chord within me because it so resonated with events in my life that happened a dozen years ago this month. I will quote the passage later, but first, some preliminary discussion.

A proxy is a substitute, a stand-in, something you use when the real thing isn't available. Not everything used as a substitute is a proxy, though. If you use an artificial sweetener in your coffee because the sugar bowl is empty, that is a substitute but not a proxy for sugar. But if you use tree ring measurements to figure out what global temperature trends were like hundreds of years ago, either before thermometers were invented or because no one recorded temperatures in the region of interest with a thermometer at the time, then the tree ring data is a proxy for thermometer temperature measurements.

Before you use a substitute for what you actually wish you could use, you have to figure out just how sufficient a substitute your proxy is. This is not going to be another column about climate change, but I do want to use tree rings as an example for just a few more sentences. When you measure tree rings and calculate your averages, ideally the rings would yield the same set of average temperatures that a thermometer would have given you. You couldn't hope to have the uncertainties in the measurements be as good, of course, but in the end it is hoped that the proxy will accurately reflect reality. For instance, if the tree ring data shows a quantitatively degree-resolvable increase in temperatures over a hundred-year-long period, you want that to reflect what thermometers would have shown.

Now, I brought up tree ring proxies because they are both easy to understand and easy to misuse. Indeed, when used in producing the “hockey stick” global warming graph, that particular set of data negatively correlated with the mid-twentieth century instrument record. This led to the use of the programming “trick” that became the “hide the decline” controversy of the Climategate e-mails. Nevertheless, there is a rational scientific basis behind trying to use tree ring data as a temperature proxy, and tree rings are an adequate proxy for determining qualitative climate variations over time. One can follow the argument for why such data should work, and then it's just a matter of demonstrating, via hard work, that it, in fact, does. Unfortunately, in the hockey-stick case, wishful thinking was substituted for hard work and the rest is history.

In ordinary life it is also necessary to use proxies, and I call them intellectual proxies if they're being used as a stand-in for our own knowledge and expertise. This usually means relying on experts of one kind or another, but then, we also use the opinions of others as proxies for personal knowledge about said experts’ expertise.

What follows is a story from my Infinite Energy Magazine days in which unreasonable reliance on intellectual proxies ran amuck.

* * * *

In 1998, while I was being courted by Eugene Mallove to work for Infinite Energy Magazine, he told me of several potentially lucrative irons already in the fire. By lucrative I mean rich in opportunity to demonstrate new physics, and hopefully financially lucrative in the long haul. IE, like many of the fringe researchers in those days, was supported by one major patron and several minor ones. In addition, revenue came in from sales of the magazine and assorted products. But we always hoped that we could be a conduit to help some inventor bring a game-changer technology to market, and thus be in line for the “inevitable” huge flow of incoming dollars certain to follow (not necessarily from the product itself but from bringing in additional investors—the dot.com bubble of the late nineties had made a lot of new millionaires overnight and optimism was everywhere).

The most exciting of those irons involved a fellow named Dave Cappelletti who was the patron of a mysterious Italian scientist. By Dave's account, this scientist had a brilliant, “obviously real,” intuitive means for producing energy, a kind of “warm fusion” approach. It was essentially a beam tube that shot deuterium ions into a metal target loaded with deuterium. None of us knew this yet when I was hired, for the mysterious Italian inventor played his cards very close to the vest, having been, in his opinion, screwed out of something or other “by the Americans” decades before.

Gene Mallove was extremely enthusiastic and optimistic about our future prospects with Dave. Around the time I arrived on the scene in New Hampshire, the magazine had secured the factory space next to our editorial offices in expectation that soon new energy units would be produced there. I think Gene and Dave even took a drive around the area looking for land where Dave might want to build a home. Though we had secured the space, there was nothing in the unit except a desk and a fax machine. Our patron wasn't going to invest in any major way until Gene actually paid a visit to Italy and saw this miracle device.

I met Dave a few times at a number of events and conventions, and I liked him. He seemed genuinely interested in the science of what we, and others on the fringe, were pursuing, entirely apart from the chance any of them would ultimately make money. He was always well dressed, but comfortable in his clothes—you never got the impression he was dressing for anyone or to set himself apart; it was just the way he dressed. I never asked, but got the impression that his finger nails were clipped and buffed professionally with the same kind of disinterest the rest of us take in getting haircuts. Always in good spirits and easy to talk to, he was, in a word, charming. I remember telling mutual friends that if I ever found myself a wealthy man, I wanted to be like Dave Cappelletti.

Despite the reluctance of the inventor, Gene was finally able to schedule a trip to Italy to see this wonderful machine. He had managed to get the inventor to publish some material in the magazine about the theory behind his process, so the name of Renzo Boscoli was finally out in the open. Gene went to Italy loaded for bear, with measurement devices of assorted kinds and expertise back home to help him ask the right questions. He fully expected a triumphant return home.

Alas, as Gene described in great detail in the magazine ("The Tragedies of Renzo Boscoli and ‘Warm Fusion,'” by Eugene Mallove, Infinite Energy Magazine, No. 28, Nov/Dec 1999), the trip to Italy was an unmitigated disaster. Boscoli pulled a bait-and-switch, would show Gene nothing that produced unusual amounts of heat, and claimed he had now moved on to a process for extracting electricity directly from neutron emissions. As the story unfolded, it became clear that Dave himself had never even seen Boscoli's notebooks, which were supposedly written in code and hidden someplace. In short, it was impossible to know whether or not there had ever been a process that did anything other than mundane physics, if that.

As he boarded the plane, Gene and those of us back home concluded it wasn't a case of deliberate fraud (we'd been through that before), but of a sincerely deluded and secretive scientist who'd found himself a patron who'd wanted to believe as much as he did. Like people who find themselves caught up in scam investment schemes, after they'd put in a lot of time and money, it became psychologically difficult for either to admit it was all a mistake. And even though Gene Mallove had not invested very much of our patron's money into this useless machine, he had invested a tremendous amount of hope, and an even greater amount of his personal credibility, for the collapse of this opportunity hit him very hard.

Nevertheless, Mallove did produce a remarkably thorough, even-handed, and unvarnished report about the whole affair, even apologizing for getting the readerships’ hopes up. He then spent months trying to sort out exactly what went wrong, how he could have let himself become so mistaken and enthusiastic about what Dave Cappelletti had told him. As he told me, he really thought a wealthy man like Dave would not have invested so much of his own money into anything without having had it “thoroughly checked out.”

But there lies the problem. To Mallove, having spent much of his life around the scientists of MIT, getting the process checked out would naturally imply bringing in people who could at least validate the measurements that the inventor claimed to have made. Even if Boscoli refused to discuss exactly what made the process work, at minimum what the process did could have been demonstrated. Unwittingly, Mallove allowed Cappelletti's charm and money to serve as his intellectual proxy for unavailable real data.

As for Cappelletti, he also made poor use of intellectual proxies. He had come upon Renzo Boscoli at a time when cold fusion was deeply debated, and it was no problem at all to find physicists with PhDs who would take seriously Dave's claims of a mysterious scientist with a secret energy-producing process. He likely would not have appreciated the nuance that “taking seriously” applied to a possibility and might not apply to what his inventor had at all. That Eugene Mallove, with his PhD from MIT, believed him, even without having seen the machine, fueled Cappelletti's certainty that his guy was the real deal. Mix in what Boscoli showed him with the sorts of energy wonders Dave might have read about in the pages of IE or seen at conventions, couple it to some wishful thinking, and he proved to himself that he had a sure thing.

* * * *

I promised you some words from Marcus Aurelius. This is from Book 8, chapter XLVII: “Keep thyself to the first bare and naked apprehensions of things, as they present themselves unto thee, and add not unto them.” This is what caught my attention because intellectual proxies are those things he cautions us not to add.

He continues, “. . . I see that my child is sick, I see, but that he is in danger of his life also, I see it not. Thus thou must use to keep thyself to the first motions and apprehensions of things, as they present themselves outwardly; and add not unto them from within thyself through mere conceit and opinion.” Leave it to the ancients to not mince words. What reasons other than untested trust in their own powers of discernment and arrogant faith in their own “expertise” did either Dave Cappelletti or Gene Mallove have to go on? They both relied upon intellectual proxies that had no basis in reality and that did little more than make them feel good and affirm what they wanted to believe. Marcus Aurelius understood that this is a fault people are all too prone to demonstrate.

And I'm no exception since that's all I was relying on when I accepted the job with Infinite Energy Magazine, the biggest fiasco I ever put my family through.

Copyright © 2011 Jeffery D. Kooistra

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Short Story: ROCKET SCIENCE
by Jerry Oltion

What was that about the best way to lead?

The week before launch was a rotten time to stage an intervention. Brandon told his brother so, just before kicking him out of the hangar where the rocket plane rested on its side in its cradle, nearly ready for its leap into space.

Roger left, muttering threats of court injunctions. Brandon knew those threats were hollow when an hour later Brandon's wife, Ellen, showed up with a camera and started taking pictures. “To remember you by,” she said.

“Your confidence has always been my foundation,” he replied. He tightened a coupling between the fuel tank and the platinum screen that would catalyze the peroxide reaction. It had leaked in yesterday's pressure test. That should have been his main concern today, not his family's second thoughts.

She ignored his sarcasm. “Why are you doing this to me?” she demanded. “To your children? What are they supposed to do when their father blows himself up?”

“If their father blows himself up,” Brandon said, “they should learn from his mistake and build a better rocket.”

“Arrggh! You're impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible,” Brandon reminded her. “Only improbable.” That had been one of his own father's favorite sayings. It had served Brandon well over the years, both as motivation and as consolation when yet another person expressed doubt in his vision.

“Okay, you're not impossible; you're an idiot,” his wife said. “And irresponsible. The insurance company has cancelled your policy. I'll be a homeless widow within a year.”

“That, too, is improbable.” Brandon set down his wrench and stepped toward her. “You're beautiful, intelligent, and compassionate. If anything happens to me, there'll be a line of men outside your door. Probably some women as well. You won't starve. Neither for food nor for love.”

“But I love you!” she cried.

“Then let me fulfill my life's dream.” He took her in his arms and held her while she sniffled. “Look,” he said, turning her toward the rocket. Even on its side, it was a thing of beauty. Long and slender, with its dart-shaped winged capsule in front and the flared nozzles of the peroxide engine at the rear, it looked like an arrow aimed into the future. It had cost Brandon less than five hundred thousand dollars, mere pocket change compared to the billion-dollar monsters that NASA and the Russians had built, back when they were still flying rockets. If he could prove the technology even in a sub-orbital flight, neither he nor Ellen nor their children nor their grandchildren for generations to come would ever worry about money again. And perhaps they needn't worry about any Earthly concerns at all, if space travel truly became something anyone could do.

“This is the future of humanity, right here in front of you.”

“I hate it,” Ellen said. “It's an ugly, phallic monument to technological excess.”

She stormed out of the hangar, for what else could anyone do after a statement like that? She had rested her case.

Brandon watched her depart. The slam of the door echoed in the hanger, but her words echoed longer. A man doesn't have his life's work dismissed so completely without thinking about it a little.

Nor does he abandon it because someone calls it names. He might be an idiot, but he was going into space. He picked up the soap spray and squirted the coupling, then started the compressor to test the seal.

* * * *

The day of the launch dawned clear and cold, even for eastern Oregon. A layer of frost covered the ground. The winch that drew the rocket up to vertical squealed in icy protest. Brandon stopped it when the rocket was pointed at only 80 degrees. He didn't want to go straight up and straight back down again; he wanted to go somewhere. Portland seemed a good choice: straight west of Pendleton and with a long, wide river to the east to provide an emergency landing strip if he couldn't reach the airport.

He would launch westward rather than eastward, counter to the direction nearly all other rockets launched. They did so in order to add Earth's rotation to their orbital velocity. Since he wasn't going into orbit, he had no such need. By launching westward, he could let the Earth's rotation sweep more of the planet past beneath him, covering more ground—both physically and metaphorically. He wanted the world to know: This is not just another rocket.

Ellen was there, as was Roger. Brandon and Ellen's children were not. “Even if all goes well,” Ellen said, “They'll be frightened. Better they learn what you've done after it's all over.”

Brandon had held nothing from them. They were seven and nine years old and had spent many afternoons with him in the shop while he built the engine and the capsule it would hurl into space. They knew what their father was going to attempt, and approved of it wholeheartedly. Eric had even volunteered to be the test pilot, arguing his case with the impeccable logic of youth. “I'm lighter,” he'd said, “and my reflexes are faster than yours.”

Brandon had thanked him for his brave offer and pointed out that engineering and foresight would be more important than reflexes. Then he had let Eric torque the bolts that held the reaction chamber together. The boy had had to stand on the torque wrench to reach the required force. Brandon wished he could be here to watch his efforts come to fruition.

He could watch it on television, at least. Brandon had no doubt that both Eric and Danny would sweet-talk their grandmother into letting them watch, and there would be plenty of coverage. Brandon counted four television trucks just beyond the blast perimeter. Two were from Portland stations.

When he was satisfied with the rocket's position, he tucked his helmet under his arm and walked over to the cameras and journalists, aware that he looked quite photogenic in his second-hand Russian flight suit, and said, “Hello. Thank you for coming.”

They immediately began shouting questions, but he just smiled and delivered the statement he'd worked up and memorized during his long hours in the shop: “Everything you need to know is right there in front of you. I built this rocket myself, and I'm going to fly it into space. If I can do it, anyone can. The future of space flight isn't in big government programs or megacorporations; it's right here in small towns all over the world. So without further ado, let's bring space into reach for everyone.”

One of the reporters shouted, “What's your opinion of Tony Fredericks and his weather balloons?”

What was this? Brandon had no idea what she was talking about. But he couldn't admit to any ignorance today. He had to look like he was in total control. So he just smiled what he hoped was an enigmatic smile, turned away, and strode back to Ellen. She let him kiss her, and she smiled bravely when he said, “I'll take you out for dinner tonight, if I'm not in jail.”

He had the permits—perhaps the hardest part of the whole endeavor—but that didn't guarantee anything. If he caused a wreck on I-5 or crashlanded into a house, he could be in serious trouble.

His brother slapped him on the back and gave him a hearty hug. “No hard feelings, eh?” he said.

“No hard feelings,” Brandon echoed, though it would be another hour at least before he actually felt that way.

The fuel was already loaded. The batteries were charged. Brandon had emptied his bladder only half an hour ago. His heart pounded, but he had expected that. All systems were go. He gave Ellen one last squeeze, then walked across the tarmac to the rocket.

The ladder to the hatch was only twenty feet high. A suborbital rocket didn't need the bulk that an orbital one did. He ascended the rungs lightly, turned at the hatch, and waved to Ellen, to the reporters, to the crowd of onlookers. Then he set his helmet over his head, sealed it to the neck ring, and climbed quickly inside the cockpit, where he plugged in the hose that provided his breathing air for the short flight. He checked the gauge to make sure air was flowing, then pulled the hatch closed and belted himself in.

The interior was as plain and utilitarian as the outside was glitzy. Every gram cost fuel. Brandon had drilled holes in the control panels to lighten them, leaving only enough material to hold together under the stress of launch and re-entry.

He tapped at the computer screen before him, initiating the checklist. Unlike the old days when astronauts would manually page through the list one item at a time, he had programmed his palmtop computer to run through everything for him, querying sensors the way a car did when you started it up. He waited to see if the “check engine” light would come on, or the “hatch ajar” light, but they stayed dark. The screen blinked green at him. All systems “go” indeed.

There was no point in delaying. The media attention span could be shorter than his flight. And sure enough, when he looked out the canopy toward them, he saw two of the four cameras panning upward, not even waiting for the launch. What were they doing? They would miss the liftoff, which would be the most impressive part. By the time he reached the altitude they were aiming at, he would be a speck of bright light atop a white contrail.

No help for it. He couldn't control their cameras. Only his own actions, and it was time to act. He wiggled himself deep into the seat cushions, settled his arms on their rests, then pushed the single red button on the end of the right handgrip.

The fuel pumps jetted pure hydrogen peroxide onto the platinum catalyst screen in the reaction chamber. The unstable H2O2 molecules ripped apart upon contact, releasing kilojoules of stored energy in an instant and flashing their byproducts—water and free oxygen—into superheated steam and oxidizer for a conventional kerosene rocket afterburner. The thrust kicked the rocket upward at five gees, mashing Brandon further into his seat and squeezing the breath out of him. He might have lost consciousness if his heart hadn't been beating so hard, but that, too, had been considered and accounted for. His blood held oxygen enough for half a minute, at least, and his heavy pulse ensured that it would continue to reach his brain.

He endured five seconds of maximum thrust, then when the rocket was moving at well over five hundred miles per hour and the rushing air stabilized its flight, the fuel pumps throttled back to 50 percent and pushed him more gently.

He looked upward. Was the sky growing darker yet? Not noticeably. He was still below the wispy cirrus clouds. And below something else. Had an airplane defied the airport closure to get a better view? Maybe a media helicopter?

No, it looked more like a bunch of grapes rushing toward him. White and yellow grapes, with something dangling beneath them. He got only the briefest glimpse before he flashed past, barely a hundred yards away, but he examined the mental snapshot as he continued on: He'd seen a lawn chair hanging from a dozen balloons. Someone was seated in the lawn chair, holding what looked like a can of beer. A rectangle at his feet was probably a cooler with more beer in it.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” Brandon said. He could have been killed. The man in the lawn chair could have been killed. The guy could die still, for the only way down was to pop balloons and hope he didn't fall too quickly.

And until he did, he was still there, still floating across the sky, providing a continual target for the media while Brandon and his home-built rocket receded at ever-increasing speed into the distance.

“Damn him,” Brandon growled. Couldn't he have waited a day? Even an hour? Couldn't he have waited for his own moment in the spotlight?

Of course he couldn't, because he wasn't the first. Someone in Los Angeles had been the first years ago. And someone in the Netherlands had done it again just a few years later. This guy, this upstager on Brandon's historic flight, was the third or fourth; or who knew, maybe the tenth or twentieth lunatic to send himself aloft in a lawn chair. And as far as he knew, all of them had survived.

He felt a little niggle of amusement at that thought. Lawnchair-and-weather-balloon flight was proven technology.

The last of the clouds shot past. The sky was growing darker now. Far, far below, just visible in the lowest few inches of curved canopy, Pendleton made a tiny dark island in the landscape, its streets mere scratches in the weave of rooftops. Farther afield, the Columbia River flowed down from the north, turned east, and began its long, straight run toward the sea.

Brandon looked outward. The horizon curved away to either side. It was a fuzzy horizon, still obscured by the upper fringes of atmosphere, but it curved nonetheless.

He was nearly in space now. He should be feeling awe. Awe and joy and triumph and all the other emotions that went with a decade of work vindicated in one short moment of glory, but all he could think about was that idiot hanging there from his balloons, making a mockery of everything Brandon had just done. Nobody who watched today's news would make rockets; they would blow up weather balloons with helium, tie lawn chairs to them, and ride aloft to drop beer cans on their neighbors.

Despite his anger, the image made him laugh. He could hear the sound of the can hitting the sidewalk. See the startled expression of the neighbor, looking upward to see where the can had come from.

He laughed again, because laughing felt better than cursing some fool fifty miles beneath him. He looked at his computer screen. Sixty miles. Seventy. He was officially in space. Right on cue, the engine ran out of fuel, but he continued upward on momentum.

Balloons and lawn chairs. It was ridiculous. The things people would do for no apparent reason; simply because they could do it. All it took was one uber-idiot to show them the way.

He watched the sky darken to black. One uber-idiot to show them the way. He smiled as his capsule reached the peak of its trajectory and arched over to begin its long descent back into the atmosphere. He felt light, lighter than mere free fall could account for. Okay, so Ellen was right. He, too, was an idiot.

Copyright © 2011 Jerry Oltion

[Back to Table of Contents]

Short Story: CHUMBOLONE
by Bill Johnson

Real politics is more complicated than the schoolbook ideal—and it could get a lot more complicated!

“Your president can still win this election,” Jeremiah told me. We stood in a small, empty coatroom off the main entrance to the hotel. I checked the door was locked, then scanned the room for microphones with my pad. He watched and smiled.

“You don't trust me?” he asked innocently. I looked at him silently for a moment, then finished the scan. The room was clean.

“All right,” I said warily. “Let's talk business. What does the mayor want?”

“You know what the mayor wants. He wants your president to pardon his nephew,” Jeremiah said.

“His nephew,” I said slowly. “This is the same nephew who got caught trying to bribe his way into an appointment to the Senate? The same nephew who paid off a federal informant? The same nephew who ran the mayor's political machine on the south side?”

“You see?” Jeremiah said cheerfully. “You do know him.”

I shook my head.

“This nephew is an embezzler. He stole the retirement money of thousands of people. Hell, he even confessed to stealing the money as part of his plea bargain. The president read through the entire case file before he turned down both his first and his second request for a pardon. There is no way the president will give him a free pass out of jail,” I said.

Jeremiah nodded, as if what I said didn't surprise him. He leaned forward and tapped me on the chest with his index finger.

“Then the mayor will be very unhappy, and your president will not be re-elected,” he said. “You think about that, and then decide if the third time is the charm.”

And he turned and left the room.

I waited a moment, both to make it less likely that any reporter outside would catch Jeremiah and me together, and to give myself a moment to think. The problem was there wasn't much to think about.

* * * *

Five minutes later I left the coatroom and slipped out a side door to the sidewalk. I walked around the corner and caught up with the president's party as he walked up the main steps. Tonight was a fundraiser at a downtown hotel.

He glanced at me and I shook my head, barely. His lips tightened, and then he relaxed and put on his smile face. I faded back and worked my way across the ballroom to the bar, grabbed a pair of drinks, and then took up my position next to the contributions table. I leaned against the wall and poured the first scotch down my throat. I took more time with the second one.

“You think you can win this election?” a familiar voice said behind me.

“No,” I said.

“Really?” the voice continued. “Honesty, by the way, looks terrible on you. Remember, the president thinks he's going to win this election. In fact, the president thinks you're going to win it for him.”

“The president,” I said quietly out of the corner of my mouth without turning around, “is a great man. He is also, without any doubt, a complete chumbolone.”

A chumbolone, in Chicago politics, was not a nice word. A chumbolone was a naive goofball, an amateur, someone who didn't know how the game of politics was played, how things really worked.

A few examples. A chumbolone would drive into downtown Chicago, park at a meter on the street and go to the parking machine on the corner and pay the fee. Someone who knew how things really worked in Chicago would drive downtown, find a meter, and park. Then they'd get out and cover the meter with a canvas bag marked “Meter out—kiosk broken—no fee.” The pro also padlocked the bag into place to make sure no one stole it before he got back.

A pro knew that a driver's license with a franklin wrapped around it solved any traffic ticket problem. That the best way to avoid property tax was to register your house as a private church, along with the obligatory political contribution. And a pro always made sure the local ward boss's daughter was hired as a summer intern.

My problem was that the president, proudly running for re-election, was about as honest (and naive, the words went together in Chicago) as anyone I ever worked with. And I was afraid it was going to cost us the election.

The president was across the room, trapped, with a frozen smile locked into place on his face. In front of him, positioned so he could not get away, was a very large, very determined woman. She wore the fervid expression of a true believer. My candidate, on the other hand, reminded me of a deer frozen by headlights. He looked up at me, a silent plea in his eyes.

I checked the woman again. The dress was designer, her diamonds were real, and my bet was that her bank statement needed to lose weight. I glanced back at my candidate, shook my head slightly, and sipped my drink.

We all have our jobs in an election campaign . . . .

“You are one cruel son of a bitch,” the familiar voice spoke again.

“He'll survive,” I replied. “You know her?”

“Yes. She's the head of a particularly large and rich political action committee on the north shore,” the voice said. I nodded.

“He'll give her fifteen minutes of attention and then he'll escape. She'll give us a large contribution and have a story she can tell her friends for the rest of her life. It's a fair trade,” I said and shrugged. I finished my drink and turned.

Broca looked like hell. His face was a pasty shade of shiny white and his skin was pulled so tight that his lips were just a bare slash of red. His teeth protruded like fangs. Thank God it was night, because in daylight I knew he looked even worse.

Damn, it was good to see him. The problem was, he wasn't alone. Next to him was a woman I'd never met before. I started to stammer out an apology for my remarks and blame my drink, but then I realized she looked just like Broca and I was safe. I shut up and held out my hand.

Broca and his associates across the country were a small group, and they liked their privacy. They suffered from a rare disease, a virus and prion combination, most closely related to a form of porphyria. No cure and, to live, they needed a factor only available from mammal blood. The disease made them sensitive to sunlight but also gave them a five-hundred-year-plus lifespan.

In the middle ages Broca's people only came out at night. The locals called them vampires, hunted them down, and burned them at the stake. These days they were mostly investment bankers or ran hedge funds and they were just as hated as back in the old days. They weren't burned anymore, but they did tend to travel in pairs. Single travelers had a disconcerting record of ending up in unlikely, and fatal, accidents.

“Georgiana, this is the president's campaign manager,” Broca said. “He's the one who protected us from the other party for the last four years.”

“Charmed,” I replied, and shook her hand.

“So you think you'll lose this election?” Georgiana asked. I hesitated, then grabbed a water off a tray carried by a passing waiter. I gestured to Broca and Georgiana to follow me to an out-of-the-way table back in the corner. We sat down and got comfortable.

“Yes, we'll lose this election. Unless something changes,” I said. “That's why I contacted Broca. I'm looking for a miracle and he's helped me before.”

“And what am I supposed to do this time?” Broca asked. “We can give you money, but only a handful of votes. There just aren't that many of us.”

It was the way he said it. Broca gave me the sincere, wide-eyed, innocent look that all the best defense lawyers teach their clients to use when they take the perp walk up the main steps of a courthouse. News cameras loved it. I didn't believe a second of it.

“What have you heard?” I demanded, suddenly suspicious. It was the all-purpose question at any Chicago political event.

“I hear it's a tight race all across the country. Pretty much even,” Broca said.

“True,” I admitted.

“I hear you're ahead, just a little, in Illinois. That you need Illinois to win the national election. And to win Illinois, you need Chicago,” Broca said.

“Also true,” I conceded.

Broca picked up his drink and sipped. He winced and put the drink down on the table.

“The mayor is not happy,” Broca continued. “The mayor thinks that maybe a new president will be more helpful.”

“The mayor is bringing out the cemetery vote?” I asked.

“And they're going to vote early and often,” Broca confirmed. “His people have everything ready.”

“The new DNA vote checking reforms—” I started.

“Don't matter one damned bit,” Broca said impatiently. “The mayor's people run the computers.”

I reached into my pocket and took out a pair of old, beaten up, red dice. I rolled them in my palm, but I didn't drop them on the tablecloth.

“I remember when you got those things,” Broca observed. “You still use them?”

I nodded.

“When it's a tough question and I can't make up my mind. They haven't let me down yet,” I said softly.

“Have you told the president he's going to lose?” Broca asked. I shook my head.

“How many times have you tried?” Broca asked.

“Six,” I said. “Six times I asked the dice whether I should tell him.”

“And?”

“Snake-eyes. Six times in a row,” I said.

Broca leaned back in his chair and stared at my candidate. Finally, he smiled faintly and shook his head.

“You can't argue with the dice,” he said in that voice he used when he remembered something from a long, long time ago. He looked at Georgiana and nodded.

“There is one possibility,” Georgiana said reluctantly, and her voice was low and measured. “I know some people who can help you, but they're confused. They don't understand how things work in the real world.”

“Illegals?” I asked.

Georgiana thought for a moment, hesitated, then shrugged.

“Damned if I know,” she said candidly. She looked at my candidate and then at the dice and then back at me. “But Broca tells me if anyone can get through to them, it's you.”

She reached into her purse and handed me a plain white card with an address and a phone number written on it.

“Tomorrow, at noon, go to that address. Show that card to the security guard. She'll give you a key and a room number. Go to that room and call the number on the card,” she said, and both she and Broca stood.

“And?” I asked.

“You get one chance to talk with them,” Georgiana warned. “They have . . . concerns you need to address.”

“And where will you be?”

“I'll be in the next room, behind the one-way glass, watching you,” she said candidly.

“You take care of them?” I asked, puzzled.

Again she hesitated, then nodded.

“I feel responsible for them,” she said. “But they've got to decide whether to help you. That's up to them. And you've got to figure out if they can do the job.”

I glanced down at the card, then tucked it into my inner coat pocket. I looked back up at Broca and held out my hand, palm up. Broca looked startled for a moment, then grinned and shook his head.

“How could I forget?” he said dryly, and reached into his pocket and handed me his contribution check. I checked the amount and nodded. Broca smiled, then turned and left the hall.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” I said to his back.

I glanced across the floor and saw my candidate, still trapped in his corner by the woman, a haunted look on his face. I stood and walked across the floor to rescue him.

Everyone has a job in a well-run campaign . . . .

* * * *

At noon the next day, I stood outside a non-descript suburban office building. It was sunscreened mirror glass and black steel, nothing special, like any of a hundred other buildings in a hundred other office parks.

I parked the car and went inside.

The security guard studied the card, then gave me a key and a room number. I took the elevator up to an anonymous floor and found the room. I unlocked the door, stepped inside, and shut the door behind me. It locked with an audible click.

The room held a table, a chair, and a small, round, conference table. A broad, wide mirror filled most of the wall behind the chair. Facing the chair across the table was a video screen with a built-in camera and mike. I settled myself into the chair and checked the time on my cell. I took out my dice to give my fingers something to play with.

“Would you like some coffee or water?” a voice said.

I looked up. The video screen was lit. The image showed another small, round conference table. Three men faced me. I automatically did my campaign manager assessment, to judge if they were potential contributors.

They were all dressed in business suits, with matching ties and light blue shirts, just an inch of cuff extending out of their jacket sleeves. Their skin and features were so even and regular that it was hard to tell if they were black or white or hispanic or Asian. Even their nails were trimmed so just the right amount of white showed.

And their hair was perfect.

“Sir? Is there something you'd like?”

I rolled my dice on the table. Snake-eyes.

I stood.

“This,” I said carefully, “is bullshit. And I'm not in the mood.”

“Sir, we—”

“Good-bye,” I said. I picked up my dice and started to step away from the table.

The image on the screen froze, then went to gray.

“Georgiana tried to warn us,” a tenor male voice said.

“Probability said that she was wrong,” a female voice replied, defensively.

“No one ever figured us out that quickly before,” said another voice, raspier and deeper, with just a touch of surprise and awe.

I hesitated, then sat back in my chair.

“Show yourselves,” I ordered.

“How would you like us?” the last voice asked. It was the raspier, deeper voice, with a trace of a growl. It reminded me of Broca.

“He's male,” the male voice chimed in. “And men like women. That's what Georgiana says.”

“Pretty women?” the female voice asked.

“This is a business meeting, not a sex show,” the deeper voice chided them. “Keep it professional. Remember, Broca said ethnic balance is important in the random world.”

The screen flickered and I faced three young women: one Asian, one white, one black. They were dressed in conservative business suits, their hands folded primly, pens and legal pads in front of them.

I frowned. The screen image froze.

“Not pretty women,” the deeper voice said, disappointed. The screen went gray.

“How about pretty men?” the male voice asked. The screen quivered.

I held up my hand.

“I'm here to talk business, not to worry about how you look,” I said.

“Appearances are very important in the random world,” the deeper voice said earnestly. “We must always look and act in such a way that it makes people feel comfortable.”

“And secrecy,” the male voice added proudly. “We must not give away any secrets.”

“What is your classification level?” the female voice asked. “You know this place and you know Broca and Georgiana so you must have a classification level. But I can't find your cross-reference in the database. We need to know your level so we know what we can tell you.”

“Or not tell you,” the male voice added helpfully.

I looked at the gray screen for a moment. I idly played with my dice, pouring them from one hand to the other. Finally I shook them, looked at the result, then put them away in my pocket.

“I want you to appear as you do when you talk with Broca and with other people from the random world,” I said.

“Your classification level?” the deeper voice insisted.

“I do not have a classification level,” I said. I leaned forward. “I do not need a classification level.”

I leaned back.

“Oh,” the male said in a small voice.

“Of course,” the female voice rushed in.

“Activate stereotype random world male and female images,” the deeper voice commanded. “For me, give me the image that Broca designed for me to use when I talk with his people.”

“The one we call the Broca's cousin image?” the male voice asked.

“That's the one,” the deeper voice said.

“Male or female?” the male voice asked.

I thought of how Broca looked and I thought of how Georgiana looked. Both of them made me shiver at the thought, but I dealt with Broca more often and I was more comfortable with his looks.

“Male,” I suggested.

“Then male it is,” the deeper voice agreed.

The screen flickered again, then showed a man and a woman. They sat on opposite sides of a small, round conference room table and faced me. He was dressed in business casual with a loose jacket, like a trader on the exchange. She wore a downtown suit. Their features and skin tone shifted constantly and subtly, from black to hispanic to asian, then back to white and the cycle started again.

The middle person, who looked like Broca's cousin, sat on the far side of the table between them and faced me.

“Is this acceptable?” the cousin asked. It was the deeper voice. I nodded.

“Now,” I said, “we need to talk.”

“You want to know what we are,” the female said tiredly, as if it were a question she had answered many times.

"Who we are,” the male corrected. He sounded equally bored.

Broca's cousin waved them silent. He studied me as if he could predict what I was going to say next, as if he could tell whether I lied or told the truth. I felt like a sample on a lab slide or a set of data points that an analyst was determined to fit into a predetermined model.

I stared back at the cousin, then took out my dice. I deliberately held them up so he could see them. I rolled the dice but shielded the throw with my hand so only I could see the result.

I studied the number, then scooped up the dice and dropped them in my pocket. I looked up at the cousin.

“The dice talk to me,” I said to the cousin.

“His behavior is random,” the male said in a soft voice.

“Unpredictable,” the female said, her voice hushed.

“A real person,” the cousin finished. He nodded at me. “You don't know, ahead of time, exactly what you're going to do. Neither do your friends or your opponents. No one can predict you, because the dice tell you what to do next. You keep them off balance, so you keep the advantage. Your talent is in how you phrase the questions you ask the dice.”

I looked at him, said nothing, and waited two extra breaths before I spoke.

“The dice tell me that I don't give a damn what you are, or who you are. What both the dice and I want to know,” I said, carefully choosing my words, “is how many votes do you control? Can you be trusted to deliver them?”

The male and female looked surprised. Uncertainly, they turned to the cousin. He nodded slowly and smiled a crooked smile.

“Broca told me about you. He mentioned your dice,” the cousin said. “He said we could trust you.”

“Trust,” I said and rolled the word around in my mouth. “That's a big word, particularly in Chicago. Let's work our way up to that. Let's just say I want to see what you can do for me, and then I'll see what I can do for you. Perhaps we can have a meeting of the minds . . . . “

“Perhaps we can,” the cousin agreed. He gestured to the male and the female.

“Show our guest what we can do for him.”

* * * *

An hour later, I was convinced.

“All right,” I said. I pushed myself back from the table and waved away the display. “You can deliver. But where did you get all the votes and the DNA samples to confirm them?”

The male shrugged.

“The law in Chicago is that for every traffic offense, the person has to fill out a violation form, then give a DNA sample to confirm their identity,” the male said. “The same with every birth and every death and every time someone votes in an election.”

“We own all the databases,” female said earnestly. “You could say we are the databases. What we do is cross-reference the DNA databases with the people who voted in the last few elections. Most people never bother to vote, so we simply take the nonvoters and use their identities. They never even know when we use their vote. We can use this to win any election.”

“But it doesn't do us any good,” the cousin complained plaintively. “What does it matter if we win an election? How does it get us what we want?”

Now it was my turn and they were on my turf. They wanted something. They didn't know how to get what they wanted.

That meant they were mine.

I leaned forward and rested my elbows on the table.

“And,” I asked carefully, “what is it that you want?”

The cousin looked at me, then at the male and female. They nodded. He focused back on me and leaned closer to the screen.

“We want,” he started, then stopped and looked again, hesitantly, at the male and the female. They nodded, encouraging him. He turned back to me.

“We want something called ‘real pull.'”

“They are artificial intelligences,” Georgiana told me. We were in an afterhours bar in the North Loop, not too far from the lake. She offered me a drink, but I shook my head.

“Who built them?” I asked, puzzled. Georgiana shook her head, hesitated, then shook it again.

“Broca tells me you know about . . . us,” she said. “About how we're different from most people. About how long we live.”

I nodded. She sipped her wine, then put it down and spread her hands.

“Have you ever heard of Charles Babbage?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“He designed the Difference Engine, the first computing machine,” she said. “He was also my father.”

I thought about that for a moment, then held up my hand. The bartender knew me and brought me a bourbon.

“This was a long time ago?” I asked. “The 1950s?”

Georgiana laughed.

“Try a lot earlier. Try the early 1800s. Back in England,” Georgiana said.

Some things now made sense. But I still didn't know everything I needed to know.

“You were an only child?” I asked. She shook her head.

“That would have made it easier. No, I had seven brothers and sisters. Problem was, it was back in the good old days, before there was any kind of modern medicine. My mother and father had to watch, helpless, as we died, one after another, until there were only four children left. And every time one of us died, my father lost a little more of himself.”

“Then you got sick?” I guessed. She nodded. She finished her wine and ordered another.

“I was the breaking point. It was too much for father,” she said. “He knew a woman who had Broca's special disease. He paid her and she cured me. Problem was, the cure also turned me into one of Broca's people.”

She looked up at me.

“Father saved my life,” she said. “But he hated how it changed me. He had to hide me, to tell everyone that I'd died. He couldn't let them see me. Then mother died and, well, father went quietly insane for a year. And after that he was never the same again.

“My brothers and I decided to keep father's work alive. We built six models of his engine, each one better than the one before it,” she said.

“Then your brothers grew old and you didn't,” I said. She nodded and gripped her glass tightly.

“Father's work was important,” she said fiercely. “And I had something he didn't have. I had the time to improve his machine, to realize it wasn't the hardware that made the machine important. It was something more than that.”

“It was the software,” I said softly.

She gazed off into the darkness of the bar, and I'm not sure she even remembered I was there.

“And time passed and the hardware got better and so did my software. I remember Alan Turing and his Automatic Computing Engine in World War II, and John von Neumann and the Cold War and, gradually, how people came to appreciate father's work,” Georgiana said fondly.

“Then came electronics and more people and money—lots of money,” she said. “I kept out of the spotlight, but I made my share of the money. I poured it back into my research, into all the things I'd dreamed about back when I had the ideas for my software, but the hardware wasn't good enough.

“And then one day my software talked to me,” she said.

“As of today, no one has built real AI software,” I said carefully. “Some people say it can't be done. What I saw today was fifty years beyond anything on the market.”

“More like a hundred years beyond them,” Georgiana said confidently. Then her face crumpled.

“Do you realize what they'll do with them if they discover them?” she said fearfully.

I set down my drink, reached across the table, and touched her arm.

“You worry about them,” I said sympathetically.

She nodded, wiped her eyes, and sipped her drink.

“Do you know much about this disease that Broca and I share?” she asked. I shook my head and pulled back my hand.

“It keeps us safe from most other diseases. It gives us a long life,” she said. “It also makes us sterile. I can never have children.”

“You have the AI's,” I said, and the last piece I needed slipped neatly into place.

“I can't let anything happen to them. They're everything I've worked for over the last two centuries. They're all I have left of my father and my mother and my brothers,” she said miserably. “If they're going to grow and learn and be able to defend themselves, they have to be exposed to the outside world. But they're innocent and naive. There's only me to defend them. If they go into the world, they're going to be detected and trapped and used and lost.”

She looked up at me.

“I need your help. They need your help,” she pleaded.

I thought for a moment. Another person who needed my help. And I had an election to win, in less than a week. I also had a trio of cheerfully chumbolone AI's who could win that election for me, no problem.

But then how would I be different from the mayor and his cemetery vote? I looked at Georgiana and remembered my own mother and how she worried about me as I won my first election, then my second. How she fretted that I was going to slip down the same road as so many of my friends in the business, how I was going to come home one day wearing a nice suit and a plastic smile and nothing on the inside.

I sipped my bourbon, took out my dice, and rolled them.

Snake eyes.

I scooped them up, dropped them in my pocket, and locked eyes with Georgiana.

“I think we can work this out,” I said.

It was snowing lightly when Broca dropped me off at the polling place on the south side. Jeremiah stood outside, next to a large, heavily muscled man who wore a hoodie with an “official pollwatcher” button pinned to the front.

The pollwatcher saw me and scowled. He rubbed his hands together and started for me. I wondered if the inside of the Cook County jail looked any different than it did twenty years ago, and waited for the inevitable.

Jeremiah touched the man's arm and shook his head. He walked over to me and put his arm around my shoulders.

“Good to see you,” he said. He looked at his watch, then at the long line of voters rocking from one foot to the other, waiting for the poll to open, then back to me.

“It's still not too late,” he said softly. “Do you have something for me? Do you want me to make a call?”

I shook my head.

“The polls are open everywhere else,” I reminded him. Jeremiah smiled.

“Ah, but these are special voters and this is a special polling station,” Jeremiah said smoothly. He gestured to the pollwatcher and he unlocked the door. The voters shuffled eagerly inside.

A moment later, the first voter left the polling place. He opened the door, saw Jeremiah, and pointed to an empty spot on the outside of his jacket. The voter held up his open hands and shrugged. He walked over to us.

“I tried, boss,” he said to Jeremiah. “I used that special card you gave me, but the machine rejected me. Said that ID was dead and I couldn't vote for that person. It wouldn't even give me one of the voter stickers.”

Jeremiah swore and looked back at the door. A steady stream of voters, none wearing a sticker, exited the polling station. He turned to face me.

“You did this!” he accused me.

I spread my hands wide and shook my head.

“How? They're your votes and your voters and your machines. I've got nothing to do with them. Maybe something went wrong and the system is actually working the way it's supposed to work,” I said. I leaned forward and spoke softly, so only he could hear me. “Perhaps you're going to need to explain things to the mayor.”

Jeremiah's phone rang. He checked the number and his face turned pale. He glanced at me and hurried away. I turned and walked back to my car.

Broca and Georgiana waited for me inside the car. I nodded and he tapped the partition and the driver headed for the president's campaign headquarters downtown.

“Did the dead vote?” Broca asked. I shook my head.

“They rest in peace today,” I said. “The AI's and I made a deal. They are the databases, so they shut down the cemetery vote.”

“And what about all the people who don't usually vote? Did the AI's make them vote for your president?” Georgiana asked sharply.

“Those people are all at home, watching the results on the video,” I said. “They didn't vote before, and they didn't vote this time.”

“You mean that Chicago actually had an honest election?” Broca said, and chuckled. “This is going to confuse the living hell out of every politician in this city. They won't know how to deal with it.”

“It's going to be a late night, and it's going to be close,” I reminded him. I turned to Georgiana. “And I have something to tell you.”

“We have a prediction,” the female voice interrupted eagerly from the door speakers.

“I'm not comfortable with the margin of error,” the male voice objected from the ceiling speakers. “I'll feel better when we get the absentee ballots.”

“But then the election will be over,” the female objected.

“Exactly,” the male voice said, smugly. “Then we'll know the results and I'll be able to predict them exactly.”

“That was a joke!” the female voice said, surprised.

“I've been practicing,” the male voice confessed.

“Show me how you did it,” the female voice ordered. “I want to do it too!”

Georgiana sighed and smiled and touched a control on the armrest.

“Privacy button,” she explained. “We're alone now. They can't hear us. What did you want to tell us?”

“I talked with a friend of mine. She recruits for a high-tech security firm in suburban Virginia. They're looking for people to work on quantum cryptography, for the national security market,” I said. “She's interested in your . . . children. I sent her some of their work and told her they're brilliant but eccentric. I told her she can't see them in person, and they only work out of their home. She said her firm can live with that, but she warned me they'll have to do all their work inside the company firewall, for security reasons.”

“Perfect!” Georgiana exclaimed. “They'll be safe.”

I hesitated, then plunged forward.

“The company insisted on a test, before they were hired,” I confessed. “The problem is, it's a trick question.”

“What?” Broca asked.

The cousin's voice spoke up unexpectedly through the ceiling speakers, “It's a day's worth of radio data, based on signals from Barnard's Star. Completely random. No pattern at all.”

Georgiana sat up, glanced at the speakers, touched the privacy control again, then shook her head, exasperated.

“You broke through my security. You've been listening to us,” Georgiana said, accusingly.

“I'm programmed to study relationships,” the cousin reminded her. “That does include this privacy concept you've tried to explain. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.”

“I don't think you've got it down quite yet,” Georgiana said tartly. I held up my hand.

“So you know the employment test is random data,” I said to the cousin. “The test is that there is no pattern. It's just random noise.”

“Very much like your dice?” the cousin asked. I sat silent for a moment, then smiled.

“You figured that out?” I said.

“They're loaded dice. They don't help you make any decisions. They always come up snake eyes, and you make the decision you'd make anyway. You use them to keep people off balance,” the cousin explained.

“You know, if you ever get tired of defense industry work you might have a career in the election business,” I said.

“I appreciate that,” the cousin said. “But I have something else to tell you. It's about those radio signals. It's subtle, and I had to go out and look up more data.”

“How much more data?” Broca asked.

“A little over a hundred years worth,” the cousin said. “Everything we've got since we started listening to the nearby stars.”

“And what did you find?” I asked.

“That there is a pattern. It's disguised and I don't know how anyone else would ever figure it out, but it seems that someone out there is trying to talk with the human race,” the cousin said. “They disguised their signals, made them appear random, as a test, to see if we could figure it out. They seem to want to be sure we're smart enough to talk with them before they bother talking with us.”

Broca and Georgiana both looked stunned. I thought for a moment about the conversation this meant I was going to have to have with the president. Then I took out my dice and rolled.

Snake eyes.

Sometimes you have to deal. . . .

* * * *

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Broca and his people first appeared in “Evelyn's Children,” December 1991.)

Copyright © 2011 Bill Johnson

[Back to Table of Contents]

Novelette: IAN, ISAAC, AND JOHN
by Paul Levinson

Even if you can change the past, how can you check your work?

I approached Ian's Ions and Eons at the end of a bitterly cold winter's day. I liked the way the setting sun played off Ian's neon sign. It was warmer, of course, inside the store. I knew it would be a lot warmer in the time I wanted to go.

Ian emerged, with the same scowl and mustache he'd had on his face the last time I'd seen him, which was several months ago. “You took your time,” he said, with a slight smile.

I guess that passed for humor from Ian. “I'm still not completely pleased with the itinerary,” I said.

Ian shrugged.

“We're in New York City right now,” I said. “I want to travel back to New York City, January 1975. Surely there's an easier way than taking a train down to Wilmington to make the jump, and then getting back on a northbound train to New York City.”

Ian almost laughed, derisively. “There's nothing even remotely easy about time travel. That's probably the first thing you need to learn.”

I didn't like being lectured. I started to say so, and realized I'd probably do better here keeping my mouth shut. Besides, I had no other choice.

“You're welcome to try the competition,” Ian said anyway, “though I gather you've looked into that, and you're back here now because you know there is none.”

I nodded.

Ian eyed his screen on the counter. “The preliminary itinerary I worked up for you still looks viable. Your purpose is still a mix of societal business and personal pleasure?”

I nodded again. “That's right.”

“Well, we appreciate your honesty—I'll give you that,” Ian said. “You know that we'll need to charge you the straight, higher societal price—no discount even though part of your agenda is personal.”

“Yeah, you explained that clearly last time.” This was what was really bothering me about the deal, not the inconvenience of taking a train south from New York City to get to New York City. But I didn't like being the cheapskate. Now that I was talking to him, it occurred to me that Ian probably realized that too.

“And the fee for a trip back to 1975 is steep—no digital products in hand back then, which means much more prep for us to do.”

“I'm good for the money.”

“We'll need it all upfront,” Ian said.

“That's what I meant,” I replied.

“So you're ready to sign?” Ian asked, and swiveled the screen around to me.

I nodded, tried not to think about the price, and signed with the digipen.

* * * *

The timing was just right—I'd planned it that way. Ian had all the arrangements in place within two weeks of my signing the itinerary. I boarded the Tricela in New York City three days later.

I proceeded to my assigned seat, next to a woman with long ringlets of blond hair, soft gray eyes, and wide lips that curved nicely when she smiled at me. I was barely in my seat when she spoke to me. “Lannie Jones?”

I finished confirming my seat on the console in front of me. “The itinerary says no one outside of Ian's organization was to know of this. I assume you're with Ian?”

She nodded. “Is Lannie Jones your real name? A lot of our clients use aliases—we don't mind. Ian knows who you really are, anyway.”

“Part of his making sure there are no ulterior motives for the trip?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Believe it or not, Jones is not an alias, neither is Lannie,” I said. “And you would be?”

“Ingrid,” she said. “We in Ian's go on a strictly first-name basis.”

The train sped into the tunnel under the Hudson, and announced the next stop: Philadelphia.

“I'm here to make sure this part of your trip runs as smoothly as this train,” Ingrid said. “You all set with the steps in the itinerary?”

“Yeah.” I touched my vest. Hard to believe that this weave was essential to my trip to the past and back, but, then again, time travel was hard to believe, and it wasn't my field in any case. The closest I got to string theory was a suspended fifth on my guitar. “Actually, I'm still not completely comfortable about what's supposed to happen in the Café Car. I'll just disappear at the precise time, but what do I do if there are people hanging around? I have no control over that.”

“You just take care of being in the vestibule next to the Café Car at the right time, and try not to attract anyone's attention,” Ingrid said. “Just stand quietly in a corner. If anyone gets too friendly, it will be my job to distract them.” She smiled. “But don't look for me, because that could get people near you to look at you.”

I looked at her lips. I bet she could be distracting at that.

* * * *

I left Ingrid as the Tricela glided out of Philadelphia. The Café Car was empty—no customers in need of Ingrid's distraction there or in the adjoining vestibule. But the bearded man behind the counter spotted me across the car and through the entranceway—I was unfortunately right in his line of sight—and I realized that if I just stood there he might well see me disappear. He had no one else to look at. I opened my phone. Three minutes to go. Would Ingrid come in and engage him in conversation? No point in just passively waiting for that.

“Columbian, jet black, please.” I ordered the coffee as I quickly approached and put the cash on the counter. It was already brewed and ready to serve, but he still moved as if he was 110 years old. I took the coffee and thanked him. He was saying something about the cold snap, but I barely heard.

I couldn't have had more than a minute left. I walked to the trash receptacle—it was not in the counterman's line of vision. With any luck he wouldn't be looking in my direction anyway—I was no longer a potential customer. I risked a quick sip of the coffee—Tricela's was justifiably renowned as delicious—and threw the rest with the cup in the trash. I looked at my phone. Forty-three seconds to go. Too bad, I could have had another sip or two. I savored the fading taste of the coffee, walked into the vestibule, closed my eyes, and—

Whoosh. Something else touched my lips. That's what it felt like. The heavier train beneath my feet and its shake, rattle, ‘n’ rollin’ against the track confirmed it. I was in a different place than I'd been a second ago. I hoped it was 1975.

I walked through a couple of cars just to take it in. Unless I'd been whisked into some kind of period movie about the 1970s, the people on the train said the same as its weight and shake. Their accents were a little odd, like they were deliberately speaking with New York and Philadelphia intonations. I guess language had become more homogenized in my time. And they looked just as I'd expected, just as I'd seen in numerous pix and clips too. Same cuts of hair, same loud colors, same just-post-psychedelic feel. I smiled. It was a good time.

I looked at my itinerary, which I had printed out on paper, consistent with no portable or even personal computers in 1975. It called for me to get off the train in Wilmington, and catch a Metroliner back up to New York. I felt my pocket for the ticket and walked to the end of the car and the exit. The conductor announced that the train was arriving in Wilmington. A gent in a black shirt and a redhead in her twenties joined me at the exit. The train pulled into the elevated station, stopped, and swung back and forth to a full halt. The door opened and we exited.

“I'll be going up to New York with you,” the redhead said, and pointed across the tracks. “My name is Evelyn.” I looked at her more closely. Keen blue eyes, pastel flowery shirt, and nice tight blue jeans. “Good to meet you, Evelyn,” I said, but she looked to me like sweet Suite Judy Blue Eyes. “You're with Ian?”

She nodded at me and then at the stairs. “The northbound Metroliner is due here in sixteen minutes. It'll take us at least five minutes to walk down the stairs, across the station, and then up the stairs on the other side. We don't want to run and attract attention.”

I walked with her. “Ian likes cutting it close.”

“Too much time between connections creates possibilities for unexplained mishaps,” Evelyn said.

I let her walk a little ahead of me. The jeans fit differently in this era too. Better than in mine. Maybe that's why they sang about them in the music—no, that was a decade earlier. But they still looked good. I caught up with Evelyn. “It's balmy down here,” I said.

“Sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit,” she said. “And not just here, and not because we're south of New York. It's close to that temperature there as well.”

We walked quickly down the stairs. I touched my vest. “It was well below freezing when I left New York,” I told her. “Good thing this vest has some new wool woven into it.”

Evelyn looked like something about that didn't make sense to her.

“It's a gen-engineered fabric. Accentuates the properties of natural wool. Warm in winter and cool in summer,” I said.

“I know,” she said, and stopped near a locker at the side of the station. I gave her the contents of my pockets, including my phone, but not my ticket. I took off my vest and handed it to her, all as called for in the itinerary.

She put all of the items into a small bag that she took out of the locker. “No, I was thinking it's a good thing it's not cold up in New York right now. Otherwise we would have needed to get you something warm to wear. I'll hold on to this until you to take the return train down from New York.”

“Yeah.” The itinerary called for me to store the items with whoever asked me for them down here, to prevent their accidental discovery in 1975, which was far enough back in time that their showing up could have serious, unpredictable ramifications.

We walked up the stairs and across the platform to the northbound train. We looked down the track. No train was yet in view. Evelyn gave me a wallet with money and ID.

“You have $500 in cash there,” she said. “And a nice ID. We figured we couldn't go wrong keeping your same last name.”

We both chuckled and looked south again for the train.

* * * *

The train back to New York was musty, stuffy, hot but not enough to make me sweat. Reminded me of the gig I did in Rio last year. I said good-bye to Evelyn in Penn Station. “I'll be here for you on the train back to Philadelphia tonight,” she told me.

I nodded and left the train. That would be down to Philadelphia, then turn around back up to New York, for the return to my time right before Trenton. A convoluted route, but considering where it took me, no standards applied.

The air in Penn Station was sickening, almost unbreathable. I made my way by stairs and escalators as quickly as I could to the outside. Sunshine and a speck of soot on my cheek welcomed me to New York City, January 1975. This was an age before clean air acts had fully kicked in, but the air was much better than in the station. I hailed a cab. “West 4th Street and 6th Avenue,” I told the cabbie, whose face had the map of Ireland written all over it.

The ride uptown felt like a stagecoach, or what I imagined that to be. It made the train seem smooth as silk in recollection, but I loved every minute of the jostling, groaning springs, and the blaring horns and sounds of swerves outside. The clothing and pace of the people on the streets were even better than on the train.

“Keep the change.” I gave the cabbie a ten-dollar bill, five times the fare but, hey, the fine ride was more than worth it. The Village was more of the bright historical tapestry, plus roasted peanut aromas and hot dogs on carts and music everywhere. The January heat wave had brought out the singers and the guitarists. I half expected to see Dylan singing “Shelter from the Storm” on the corner, but I doubted Dylan was doing street corner singing in 1975 anymore, if he ever did.

“Like a sun that starts to rise, in the cream of morning skies . . .” a guy with a straggly mustache was singing to his friend, like he was teaching him the song. I didn't recognize it, but I liked it. I looked for a tip jar or an open guitar case, but the guy was singing a capella. I smiled at him and he smiled back.

I was half tempted to go straight up to Electric Lady Land, but I supposed I'd better make the call. I saw a phone booth on the corner. A guitarist was leaning against the wall, halfway between me and the phone. I had no trouble recognizing what he was singing, as I walked by . . . Yeah, no trouble at all, and it broke my heart. John Lennon's “I'm Only Sleeping.” I put a ten-dollar bill in his guitar case.

“Thank you, man!” he said, and resumed the song.

I'd spent $20 out of $500 in the past few minutes, but it didn't matter. I wouldn't be here too long. I walked quickly to the phone booth—I couldn't listen any longer to what the guitarist was singing.

I pulled the itinerary out of my pocket, put a dime into the phone, and waited for the dial tone. It came pretty quickly. I dialed the number.

“Hello,” a man voice's answered.

“I'm Lannie Jones,” I said.

“You can come right over, Mr. Jones,” he said. “I'm Isaac.” He gave his address. “A brownstone, second floor, off Washington Square Park. I'll be waiting for you downstairs.”

* * * *

Isaac looked to be in his late twenties. He had on a pull-over shirt and jeans. “Mr. Jones?”

I nodded. “Lannie's fine.”

He extended his hand. I shook it.

“Come on up.”

We walked up a pinewood flight of stairs. Isaac ushered me into a big, one-room apartment. He sat at a table in the middle of the room. “Have a seat,” he said. “Oh,” he said, after I took a chair. “Anything to drink? Coffee, tea, soda?”

“You still have 7UP back here, right?” I asked.

“Yes, we do,” Isaac said, as he opened his refrigerator, “but not in here . . . How about Sprite?”

“Never heard of it.”

“It's lemon and lime, like 7UP,” Isaac said.

“Okay.”

He brought me a fizzing glass. It tasted good.

He picked up a thin folder from the table. He opened it. “This is pretty straightforward—the easiest I've seen in a while.”

“Good,” I said.

“Let's just go over it, so I can assure Ian I did my job,” he said.

“Sure.”

“So . . . you're a direct descendant, that's why this is personal as well as societal.”

“That's right,” I said.

“And you're going to improve one of the mixes on the Young Americans album that David Bowie is making at Electric Lady Land?”

“That's it,” I replied.

“David Bowie's real name was David Robert Jones,” he said.

I nodded.

“He's going to get a pretty big hit off the album—'Fame'—but you'd like to see it do even better. Because you think that with that big a record, back now, Bowie's name would be that much bigger in your time, and that would help your career.”

“Yep.”

“Makes sense,” Isaac said, and nodded, more to himself than to me. “And you can take care of the mechanics. I have an additional ID for you here, as well as keys. No one is expected to be in the studio between six and eight p.m. tonight. And should someone find you fooling around with the tapes, you have the ID as an additional producer Bowie brought into this.”

I nodded.

“Excellent,” Isaac said. “These sorts of changes have little impact on society as a whole, and raise no pressing ethical questions.”

I nodded again.

“Excellent,” Isaac said again.

“Good.” I looked at the clock on the wall.

“Just one thing,” Isaac said.

“Yes?”

“I'm not sure if I believe you.”

I sipped my Sprite, then pushed it away. “I bet this is just a poor performance of 7UP.”

Isaac said nothing.

“I don't appreciate being called a liar,” I said.

“Then convince me that you're not,” Isaac replied.

“I don't even know what you think I'm lying about.”

“Don't play games with me,” Isaac said. “You're a musician, you're an expert on the music of this era. You know exactly what I am talking about.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Your attitude right now is making me even more suspicious,” Isaac said. “Bear in mind that if I don't give you the key, you'll have no access to Electric Lady.”

“But you're claiming I may be lying about that, anyway,” I said. “So why should that faze me?”

Isaac exhaled in irritation. “Okay, you want me to spell this out to you? Here it is: There's no way, given your immersion in the music of this time and place, that you don't know that John Lennon was on some of those Electric Lady sessions with Bowie.”

“You think I came back here to warn John Lennon?”

“The thought occurred to me, yes,” Isaac said. “Are you going to insult my intelligence and tell me it hasn't occurred to you?”

“Of course it has,” I said. “But why I would come back here to 1975 if I wanted to warn Lennon? Wouldn't I have been better off booking a trip to 1980, maybe just a day or two before Mark David Chapman shot him in front of the Dakota?”

Isaac nodded. “Better off—yes—but not if you were afraid that Ian wouldn't have approved your trip, and you would have been right.”

“So you think I had in mind warning Lennon all along, and I just flat out lied to Ian?”

“I'll let you in on a little secret,” Isaac said. “Just about all of Ian's customers lie to him, one way or the other. It's inevitable in this business.”

“I'd say it's inevitable in life,” I said. “But didn't you just tell me that no one's supposed to be in the studio between six and eight tonight? I assume that no one includes Lennon?”

“It does,” Isaac said. “But he's in the city. For all I know, you researched where he is, or found his phone number, and you're planning on contacting him before you leave.”

“What can I do to convince you that I won't do that, that I'm here just to improve David Bowie's standing in musical history?”

“Actually, there's nothing you can do,” Isaac said.

“Then why the hell did Ian approve my mission in the first place?”

“Think of Ian's Ions and Eons as a bank,” Isaac said. “Ian owns the bank, and also acts as the loan officer. I'm the underwriter. I work for Ian, but he relies on me and the people who do this job to give the final authorization.”

I thought about jumping this damn “underwriter” and taking the keys. I hadn't been in a fight since I'd punched Sheldon Tzuna in our junior-high schoolyard over a girl in the seventh grade, but Isaac looked like he'd never thrown a punch in his life.

“There's a simple solution to this,” Isaac said.

“Tell me.”

“The pleasure clause in your Itinerary says that we won't breathe down your neck once you leave this apartment, that we understand that being on your own is part of the fun of this trip back, but I'm prepared to authorize an alteration, if that's okay with you.”

“And that alteration would be?”

“You stay here with me until six p.m., I accompany you to Electric Lady, and then back on the train to Wilmington, back up to New York, until you make the jump back to your future time near Trenton. I'm sure Evelyn will have no problem with that.”

I looked at the clock on Isaac's wall. It was already ten past five. “I guess I have no problem with that either.” I clearly had no choice.

* * * *

Electric Lady Studios at 52 West 8th Street was a little off 6th Avenue, and less than a five-minute walk from Isaac's brownstone. It was 6:07 when we reached the studios, and well into darkness, which was a little disconcerting, since the high temperatures felt like we were in late spring or early summer.

“This sits on an underground tributary,” Isaac observed, as he opened the front door with his key.

I wasn't in the mood for small talk. We walked up to the second floor. There wasn't a soul around, just as we'd expected—except maybe the ghost of Jimi Hendrix, who'd financed the construction. The studio was wide open and ready for my ministrations.

First task was getting the multi-track tape for “Fame” and the already mixed-down version. According to my research, they were in a room in the back of the studio—which was locked. But Isaac had a key for that. I located the tapes and cued them up in the mixing board in the studio. I'd worked on virtual versions of this mixing board for months back in my time.

“Fame” was four minutes and twenty-two seconds—that would be the album cut. The single would be shorter. But what I intended to do would work for both. Pretty simple, really. Bring up the bass, mix it a little more closely with the drum, and make sure Lennon's voice was more recognizable in the mix. I now had about ninety minutes—if we needed to be out of here before eight p.m.—to do the job. I'd do as many practice mixes as I had time for, and then record my better mix over the current mix already on the output tape. The changes I would make would be subtle but profound. I doubted any of the engineers here in the studio would notice. But I was betting the public would respond to the better mix.

I started doing the new mixes. I noticed that Isaac, to his credit, was grooving to the music almost as much as I was. Give him that.

I was finally satisfied at seventeen minutes to eight p.m. I recorded my mix over the one already there, and returned both tapes—the multi-track and the new mix tape I'd made—back to the proper place in the room where I'd found them.

“You did good work,” Isaac said. I didn't know him well enough to know if he meant it.

“Thank you,” I said.

We walked down the stairs and out the door. “We can catch a taxi uptown on 6th Avenue,” Isaac said. I could feel his eyes on me as we walked.

We passed a guy with long hair, a long thin nose, and horned-rimmed glasses. He was frowning. Isaac frowned even more after we'd walked past him. “Robert Christgau. That dyspeptic professor gave your Young Americans album a B-.”

“Never heard of him,” I said.

“No loss,” Isaac said. “Music critic for the Village Voice—he's panned everyone from Paul McCartney to Phil Ochs.”

I turned around to get a better look at him, but Christgau's back was barely visible.

Isaac hailed a cab on 6th Avenue.

* * * *

Isaac stuck closer to me than white on rice, as I'm pretty sure some Southern song from the early days of rock ‘n’ roll had it. We entered the southbound Metroliner. I had a ticket, and Isaac bought his with cash when the conductor came around. The train eased out of the station and under the Hudson.

Evelyn approached us near Newark. Her keen blue eyes were none too happy when she saw Isaac. “What's going on?” she asked, and took an adjacent seat.

“A necessary adjustment,” Isaac said smoothly. “My call.”

“But breaking protocol,” Evelyn said. “You have your job, I have mine, and mine's the train.” She looked in my direction, not pleased about having this conversation right in front of me, but what else could she do.

“I'll file a full report explaining why I needed to do this when Mr. Jones’ trip is over,” Isaac offered. “I would have filed it already if I had e-mail access back here.” Isaac smiled.

Evelyn did not, and continued looking at me. “I'm impressed,” she said to me. “I had you pegged as a straightforward, above-board traveler. . . . I guess there's no such entity in this line of work.”

“You didn't talk to Mr. Jones about his interest in music on the trip up here?” Isaac asked. “John Lennon never came up?”

“That's what this is about?” Evelyn asked in return.

“That's what it's almost always about, when someone with a life's passion for music comes back to New York City, 1971 to 1980,” Isaac replied.

“It was a grossly senseless, horrendous assassination,” Evelyn said, and shuddered. “I can't really blame anyone who would want to change that.”

“But your job is to stop anyone who wants to change that history, unless Ian approved it—”

“Which we both know he never would,” Evelyn interrupted.

“You enjoying this?” Isaac suddenly turned on me. I was sure nothing on my face expressed enjoyment.

“We shouldn't be talking in front of him—” Evelyn began.

“Doesn't matter,” now Isaac interrupted. “He won't get a chance to do anything more back here than get on that northbound train to the future near Trenton.”

“Do you know what his plan was?” Evelyn asked. Then to me, “Sorry, I don't mean to talk about you as if you weren't here.” Then to Isaac, “Is there evidence that he intended to derail that awful killing?”

“I saw Mr. Jones’ face when Lennon's name came up in conversation,” Issac replied. These people had more interest than my girlfriend in my face.

“I came back to improve the mix on that ‘Fame’ recording,” I said, “and I did that. But tell me: What would be the problem if someone did save Lennon? Why is that so anathema to you? It's not as if he was a president or even an important politician or anything.”

Isaac smiled sadly and shook his head. “The eternal question. In some ways, saving Lennon could be even worse, with more unpredictable consequences. I'll bet you more people loved Lennon and the Beatles, more people were affected by them, than even JFK—who, had he lived, would only have been President for eight years, and would have been likely in that period of time to antagonize a lot of his original supporters.”

“I don't know if I agree with that,” Evelyn said. “And the protocols say political changes are the ones we have to give the most extensive consideration.”

“I'm going to the bathroom,” I said. “Is that consistent with your protocols?”

“Sure,” Isaac said, “as long as I come along with you.” Then to Evelyn, “See, it's good that I came along. I can make sure he doesn't leave a message on the bathroom mirror.”

* * * *

The conversation continued like that—mostly Isaac and Evelyn talking about John Lennon, talking about me, sniping at each other—all the way to Philadelphia. I was never left alone. Evelyn got coffees for the three of us, then Isaac did the same. It was nearing ten p.m. when we approached Philadelphia, and everyone was tired.

“30th Street Station next stop,” the conductor announced, “30th Street Station, Philadelphia. Please check for your belongings before you leave the train.”

I realized that Evelyn had not yet given me the contents of her bag—most importantly, my vest. I looked over to her. She was dozing. No, she wasn't dozing, she was sleeping, pretty soundly. I could understand that—everyone was exhausted—but it seemed a little odd. And something about the way her body was slumped back in the seat, her mouth open, eyes open a little, too, bottoms of her blue eyes glinting in the light, which was still on above her—

“I drugged her,” Isaac said. “Not to worry.”

“What?”

“You heard the feeling she has for Lennon and his music,” Isaac said. “I couldn't let her head back to Trenton with us—I can't keep an eye on both of you at the same time, if she needs to use the ladies’ room—”

“You're really obsessed with Lennon, aren't you?”

“Whatever it takes,” Isaac replied.

The train was pulling into the 30th Street Station.

“I need my vest—it's in her bag,” I said.

Isaac nodded and moved across the aisle. He looked in the overhead compartment—nothing was there. He moved Evelyn as gently as he could to the empty seat next to her, and didn't seem to mind at all getting his hands on her body. Her head lolled against the window. Isaac looked under the seat in front of her. “Ah!” He produced the bag.

He beckoned me to stand. “Let's go.”

“You're just going to leave her here?”

“She's in good company.” Isaac gestured to the rest of the train car. At least half the passengers were sleeping. “She'll be out until Washington, and I'll call ahead to have a few of our security people meet her there.”

The train came to a slow stop. I took a last look at Evelyn, tufts of red hair now covering most of her face, and left the train with Isaac.

* * * *

We had a fifteen-minute wait for the northbound train in the 30th Street Philadelphia station. The train would depart in 1975, and before it reached Trenton, I would be in a northbound Tricela in the future, back in my own time. I looked at the big, classic clock on the wall. Fifteen minutes could be a long time.

I put on my vest and turned on my phone to make sure it was still working.

“You won't get any service here,” Isaac said, with a big grin. He seemed almost manic. “Don't look so grim,” he continued. “Even if you had managed to talk to Lennon, it's unlikely it would have had any effect. He doesn't know you. You would tell him, what, stay away from the Dakota on the evening of December 8, 1980—get the hell away from New York City altogether? Why would he believe you? You didn't bring any evidence with you from the future, and even if you had, Lennon would have doubted it, tagged you as a nutcase. The most likely result would have been only John telling Yoko, hey, I got a call from someone daft.”

“I could have told him about his Double Fantasy album to establish credibility. Won't come out until 1980,” I said.

The station master announced that our train would soon be arriving.

“Yep, we don't have much time,” Isaac said. “Come with me.” He walked with me to a phone booth. “Please stand right here. If you run, our security will find you. I'm calling them right now about Evelyn.” He entered the phone booth and pulled the doors shut around him. I assumed he didn't want me to hear what he was saying to security—whether about me or Evelyn—but I had pretty good ears. I heard him put coins in the phone. He was speaking softly, but I got some of what he was saying.

“John Lennon . . . Lannie Jones . . . may sound crazy . . . stay away . . . Dakota . . . man who understands strange things . . . that's right . . . December . . . just like starting over . . . watching the wheels . . . yeah . . . just remember . . . please . . . “

Isaac hung up the phone and walked out of the phone booth.

The station master announced that our train was now arriving.

“Let's go.” Isaac took me by the arm and down the stairs to the arriving northbound train.

“What were you telling your security people?” I asked. “I heard a little and it didn't make much sense.”

Isaac started to reply, but was distracted by two large men, approaching us quickly from the southern part of the platform. Two other men of the same stature approached us from the northern side.

The train came into the station. Its doors opened.

The four men were upon Isaac. “What—”

Evelyn came down the stairs. She was completely awake. She didn't look the least bit rested.

“We need to get on this train,” she told me. I looked at Isaac. The four men were escorting him back up the stairs.

“Now,” Evelyn said.

She and I got on the northbound train.

* * * *

“Trenton's not that far ahead,” Evelyn said. “We might as well stand.”

The train started pulling out of the station.

I looked at her. “You were out cold on that southbound train.”

She smiled slightly. “I was an acting major at Fordham. I knew better than to drink anything Isaac gave me.”

I looked back at the platform, to see if any other unexpected escorts had shown. Nothing but a few slow-moving passengers still walking to the stairs.

“So the security that Isaac called for you came to get him instead?”

Evelyn hesitated before answering. “Isaac didn't call our security,” she finally said.

I thought about what I had overheard. Isaac had mentioned my name, and John Lennon's, but the conversation didn't sound like something anyone would be having with security. Not that I was an expert about any of this.

“He was leaving a message on John Lennon's answering machine.”

“He—”

“Isaac was trying to warn Lennon,” Evelyn said.

Yes, something about what I'd heard rang true about that. What had Isaac said . . . “watching the wheels"? Wasn't that the name of a song on Double Fantasy? Yes! And so was “starting over” . . . Son of a bitch—Isaac was using knowledge of those songs to establish his creds with Lennon, show Lennon that Isaac had knowledge of the future, just as Isaac and I had discussed before he made the call. Lennon would indeed likely dismiss the call now as the act of a crank, but when he started writing those songs, he'd remember . . . Maybe Isaac's saying those words would even encourage Lennon to write those songs. My head was spinning, watching the wheels of paradox . . .

“But why did Isaac say my name to Lennon? What purpose did that serve?” I asked.

“He wanted Lennon to think that you were leaving the message. That way, if Ian found out about that, he would hold you responsible.”

The conductor announced that Trenton was the next stop.

“We better get to the Café Car,” Evelyn said.

“You're coming with me?”

“In this case, yes,” Evelyn replied. “Not to the future, but to the Café Car. Given what has happened, we can't take any more chances.”

* * * *

My mind was still spinning. I knew I had just minutes or less left in 1975. I had Lennon's phone number too—stored in my head, like a lyric. But the cell phone I had in my pocket was useless here. I hadn't been sure before this trip if I would contact Lennon. I still wasn't sure. But what Evelyn said Isaac had done, what I had half overheard, inspired me.

We reached the Café Car. “You'll need to step inside,” Evelyn said.

“Did Isaac succeed?” I asked.

“No way of knowing that back here, right now,” she replied. “You'll know as soon as you get back and check the Wiki on the Tricela.”

There was an Amtrak phone, in a luxurious booth, right next to the Café Car.

“Don't do that,” Evelyn commanded, “don't even think about it. You'll miss the jump point, and Ian will charge you three times what you already paid to get a vest for another date to get you back here. Bold letters in the itinerary.”

I figured I had seconds left.

It couldn't hurt for Lennon to get a message from another daft nutjob. I made a move for the phone booth—

And reached the arm of another big security man. I flailed and punched. But he lifted me in the air with one arm, opened the door of the café with another, and tossed me in.

I hit the floor hard, got up on one leg, and felt the lips of the cosmos on mine once more. The last thing I saw in 1975 was Evelyn's lips, not smiling.

* * * *

I got to my feet on a smooth Tricela. Ingrid was standing right next to me, smiling.

“I'm back in the future,” I told her. “Lennon's long dead, either in 1980 or whenever after. You still need to keep such a careful eye on me?”

“Most returnees are glad to see me,” Ingrid replied, still smiling. “I hear you had an eventful trip back there.”

We walked out of the Café Car. “What—they gave you an instant briefing on me?”

“Think about it,” Ingrid replied. “Anything that happens in the past is in principle instantly knowable in the future, especially if the people in the past want it that way.”

We reached our seats. Ingrid directed me to take the one by the window.

“So how did I do?” I asked. The itinerary said everyone involved in the time travel at Ian's remembered the before and after.

“'Fame’ became a number one record, just as you'd hoped. Bowie's first record to make number one on the Billboard charts, in fact. His career and his legacy are considerably better than when you left. He now ranked number twenty-nine in the 2002 BBC poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, and number thirty-nine on Rolling Stone's 2004 100 Greatest Rock Artists of All Time. But he never quite became a household name, if that's what you wanted. Fame, apropos the song, is complicated. It's based on so many factors, changing even one big thing is unlikely to change everything. But you did very well with this. You can read it all for yourself.” She gestured to the screen sewn into the back of the seat in front of me.

“And Lennon?” For some reason, I had trouble getting those words out of my mouth.

“More complicated still.”

I grabbed a coffee from the robocart. “Tell me about it.”

Ingrid took a tea. “Isaac's message in 1975, warning Lennon, got through to his answering machine, as they called it back then, as far as we know. But Lennon was shot to death on December 8, 1980 by Mark David Chapman at the Dakota anyway.”

“So Lennon either never heard Isaac's message, or he quickly discarded it. Somehow Lennon carefully listening and then just forgetting about it seems unlikely,” I said.

“That's what we think too,” Ingrid said.

“So . . . something, someone got in the way of Lennon hearing that message? And that would be who? Ian, wouldn't it?”

Ingrid shook her head. “Not the way Ian works. We do our utmost to prevent any changes that go beyond the ones outlined in the itinerary. But if something unauthorized does get through, Ian learned a long time ago not to pursue it any further. We're not time cops, we're private enterprise—we don't officially police the timeline. And if we ran around trying to correct any unauthorized changes, we could do a lot more damage than the changes themselves.”

I didn't know if I bought that, especially given the impassioned arguments I'd heard back in 1975 about the severe unpredictability and danger of altering the history that killed Lennon. “Well, if not Ian, who then?”

“Ian would like to talk to you about that—if you're amenable—when you return the vest.”

* * * *

Our train slid into Penn Station in New York. It was nearly midnight, but Ingrid assured me that Ian's would be open, and the man in charge would be very happy to see me. She accompanied me to the Metro-North Riverdale spur, which brought us to a block and a half away from Ian's at 12:15.

Ian's neon sign did look especially cool against the cold black sky, with no moon to rival the sign's liquid light. Ian opened the door with his customary scowl. “Mr. Jones,” he said.

Ingrid and Ian exchanged nods, and Ingrid left with a smile that included me.

I nodded at Ian and returned the vest, as called for in the itinerary.

“I hear you had a little bit of an outburst back there, at the end, Mr. Jones.”

“I—”

“But no harm was done, so I've decided to give you a complete refund.” He swiveled his console around, so I could see the exorbitant amount I had paid for this trip completely returned to my account.

“But—”

“Yes?”

“I accomplished what I wanted on my trip,” I said. “I got to remix ‘Fame,’ and it indeed became a number one record and helped my ancestor's career.”

“That's right,” Ian said.

“So why the refund? Not that I mind it—”

Now Ian smiled a little. “You also helped us accomplish something we here at Ian's have wanted to do for quite some time—root out an unstable member of our organization.”

“You mean Isaac?”

“That's right,” Ian said again. “We've known for quite some time that he was determined to use his trusted position with us to stop John Lennon's assassination. He jumped at the opportunity to be your ‘underwriter,’ as he liked to put it. He played you perfectly, and he was confident that he could tip off Lennon, but make it look as if the tipster were you. Fortunately, we played him even more perfectly than he was playing you, and Evelyn was right there to catch him in the act.”

“But not before he left the message for Lennon,” I said.

“Right again.”

“So what got in the way of Lennon actually hearing that message, or reacting to it?”

“Most likely, you,” Ian replied.

“You're out of your mind!”

Now Ian smiled a little more. “Think about it. You've gone back to the past, shuffled the deck—or the musical mix, in this case—so you're the descendant of a pop icon much brighter than when you left. As the months and the years go by, you'll begin to enjoy that, as you should. But a part of you will always worry about how you made that happen, and whether someone else could make something else happen that could eclipse your ancestor, eclipse what you worked so hard to achieve. You'll become the greatest defender of the historical status quo—of the history just as you made it. And that will include Lennon's assassination in 1980.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“As I said, give it time,” Ian said. “But look, we can do a little test of what you truly want right now. You think you would do almost anything to stop Lennon's killing—you regret that you didn't do more when you were back in 1975. I think one reason you didn't was that you were already beginning to have an attachment, even back then, to the history you made, exactly as it was. But here's a proposal: I just refunded all of your payment, as you saw. I'd be happy to use that, and only that, as a complete payment for another trip you could make to the past. It could be a trip to kill Mark David Chapman. That would be the best way to 100 percent assure Lennon's survival. Ordinarily, those kinds of missions are far more expensive than even what you paid. But it's yours for free, right now. What do you say?”

“I'm not a killer,” I replied.

“Fair enough,” Ian said. “There may be other ways you can stop Chapman, without killing him. Should I work up some possible itineraries for you? You choose, all free.”

“I—I need to think about it,” I said.

“Understood,” Ian said. “That's just what I thought you'd say. But think about it, think about all of this. My offer holds for any trip you want to make to that past—including making sure that Lennon does not hear or react to Isaac's message. I'm giving you the full range of options.”

It was clear from Ian's tone that our discussion was over for now.

* * * *

I walked out into the dark, frigid Riverdale streets. I turned around for another look at Ian's Ions and Eons, and my phone beeped. A message had come in, while I'd been talking to Ian. A big promoter, from Madison Spiral Garden, wanted me to be part of a band that would be playing at a twentieth-century rock retrospective. All the musicians would be descendants of stars from that era. “You belong there, as David Bowie's descendant,” the message concluded.

I had a feeling I'd be liking my life a lot better now. Ian was probably right that I wouldn't want to do anything, wouldn't want anything to happen in the past, that might change my new life. But . . . could I really go back to the past to make sure Lennon didn't get Isaac's message, to ensure Lennon was at that foul pit entrance to the Dakota in 1980? That's what Ian was tempting me to do, hoping I would do. And I—No, no! I was not that kind of human being! Not that selfish a bastard! How could I let Lennon die, when his music had brought me such pleasure? He deserved to live his life, whatever the consequences.

I clutched my phone, walked a few more steps, and turned around. I started walking, half running, back to Ian's. I bounded up the stairs and pounded on the door. I had no idea if he was still inside—I hadn't seen him leave—for all I knew, Ian slept here.

He opened the door, again with the scowl.

“I'd like to book that trip to the past, to 1975, for as soon as you can get this all in motion.”

Ian raised an eyebrow. “That was fast. And the purpose?”

I thought for a second. Ian was much more likely to approve my trip if I told him it was to make sure, somehow, that Lennon didn't get, or do anything in response to, Isaac's message. In fact, I doubted if he would approve the trip, in spite of what he had said, if I told him my true, sure purpose now—just the opposite—which was to make sure Lennon heeded Isaac's brave warning. But would Ian believe me, if I lied? Would he find a way with his devious mind to make me serve his, not my, goals if he sent me back there?

“Your purpose?” Ian asked a second time.

There was no outsmarting this guy, I knew that. I had control over my actions, not how Ian manipulated their consequences. I would say whatever it took to get Ian to approve another trip, and then do what my soul wanted once I was back there again. If my efforts to save Lennon didn't work, if they somehow impelled Lennon not to take seriously but to laugh at Isaac's message, well . . . only history knew the outcome.

* * * *

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Ian's Ions and Eons first appeared in the story of that name in April 2011.)

Copyright © 2011 Paul Levinson

[Back to Table of Contents]

Novelette: THE BONELESS ONE
by Alec Nevala-Lee

* * * *

llustrated by Laurie Harden

* * * *

The best thing that can happen to a researcher is finding something new. Right?

I.

“Before we go on deck, I should make one thing clear,” Ray Wiley said. “We're nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle.”

Trip opened his eyes. He had been sleeping comfortably in a haze of wine and good food, rocked by the minor expansions and contractions of the yacht's hull, and for a moment, looking up at the darkened ceiling, he could not remember where he was. “What time is it?”

“Three in the morning.” Ray rose from the chair beside the bed. “We're six hundred miles northeast of Antigua.”

As Trip sat up, Ray was already heading for the stateroom door. A graying beard, grown over the past year, had softened Ray's famously intense features, but his blue eyes remained focused and bright, and they caught Trip's attention at once. If nothing else, it was the first time he had ever been awakened by a billionaire. “Come on,” Ray said. “You'll want your notebook and camera.”

At the mention of his notebook, Trip glanced automatically at the desk, where he had left his papers before going to bed. It did not look as if Ray had tried to read his notes, but even if he had, he would have found nothing objectionable. Trip's private notebook, in which he recorded his real thoughts about the yacht's voyage, was safely tucked into the waistband of his pajamas.

Trip climbed out of bed, pulling on his jeans and parka. Glancing at the berths on the opposite bulkhead, he saw that the men with whom he shared the cabin were gone. “Did Ellis and Gary—”

“They're on deck,” Ray said. “Hurry up. You'll understand when we get there.”

Trip slid on a pair of deck shoes and slung a camera around his neck. As he followed Ray to the salon, he became aware of a murmur beneath his feet, the barely perceptible vibration of the yacht's engine, trembling in counterpoint to the waves outside. Upstairs, the lights in the salon had been turned down. As they headed for the companionway, Trip saw Stavros, the yacht's captain and first engineer, seated at the internal steering station, his broad face underlit by the glowing console.

On the deck of the Lancet, the night was cold and windless. Two men in matching parkas were standing in the cockpit, looking into the void of the North Atlantic. One was Ellis Harvey, the yacht's marine biologist, a headlamp illuminating his weathered, intelligent features; the other was Gary Baker, a postdoctoral student in microbiology, his pale face framed by glasses and a tidy goatee.

When Ellis saw Ray, he frowned. It was no secret that the two older scientists were not on the best of terms. “We're going on a night dive,” Ellis said. “Do we need a third set of gear?”

“I'll pass,” Trip said. He was not fond of the water. “What's this all about?”

Gary pointed along the centerline of the sloop. “Dead ahead. You see it?”

Trip turned to look. For a long moment, he saw nothing but the ocean, visible only where it gave back the yacht's rippling lights. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he noticed a brighter area of water. At first, he thought it was an optical illusion, an effort by his brain to insert something of visual interest into an otherwise featureless expanse. It was only the hard line of the stem post, silhouetted against the glow, that finally told him that it was real.

“Lights.” Trip glanced around at the others. “Something is glowing in the water.”

Ray seemed proud of the sight, as if he had personally conjured up the apparition for Trip's benefit. “Gary saw it a few minutes ago, when he took over the night watch. We're still trying to figure out what it is.”

“It's too widespread to be artificial,” Ellis said. “It looks like a natural phenomenon. A luminescent microbe, perhaps—”

Trip was barely listening. In the absence of landmarks, it was hard to determine the distance of the light, which was faint and bluish green, but it seemed at least a mile away. It was neither constant nor uniform, but had patches of greater or lesser brightness, which flickered in a regular pattern. Initially, he thought that the twinkling was caused by the motion of the waves, but as they drew closer, he saw that the lights themselves were pulsing in unison. “It's synchronized. Is that natural?”

“I don't know,” Ray said. He grinned broadly. “That's what we're here to find out.”

Trip heard a note of hunger in the billionaire's voice. For the past two years, he knew, the Lancet, under Ray's funding and guidance, had been using the latest technology to sample the incredible genetic diversity of life in the ocean, with the unspoken goal of finding genes and microbes with commercial potential. So far, the voyage had been relatively uneventful, but if the glow in the distance turned out to be an unknown form of microscopic life, it could prove to be very lucrative indeed.

When Trip tried to ask Ray about this, though, he received only a grunt in response, which was not surprising. It was no secret that Ray was having second thoughts about the article that Trip was here to write. In the three days since his arrival, Trip had already noticed a number of conflicts simmering beneath the surface of the voyage, and Ray, as if sensing this, had been avoiding him. At this rate, Trip thought, his week aboard the Lancet would end without so much as an interview.

The sloop pressed onward, the foam breaking in tendrils across its prow. Trip stood between Ray and Ellis, caught in their unfriendly silence, as Gary removed wetsuits and cylinders from a scuba locker, securing glow sticks to the tanks with zip ties. Before long, the yacht was at the edge of the illuminated region, the light visible in the water against the hull. When Ray used the cockpit phone to tell Stavros to cut the engines, the vibration beneath the deck ceased at once.

As the yacht drifted freely, surrounded on all sides by the glow, Trip got a better look at the light. At close range, it resolved itself into countless discrete nodules of brightness, seemingly without heat, but unmistakably alive.

Ellis leaned over the wire railing that encircled the deck. “Ray, this is no microbe.”

“Let's get a closer look, then,” Ray said. As Trip began taking pictures, the two older men suited up for the dive, then climbed over the railing. As they slid into the water, Trip briefly saw them outlined against the glow, which illuminated them from underneath like a magic lantern. Within seconds, they were gone.

Gary was standing beside him. “If you like, you could try the observation chamber.”

“Good idea,” Trip said, lowering his camera. The chamber was contained in a false nose at the forefront of the yacht, two meters below the waterline. Going over to the entry tube, which was bolted to the stem post, Trip glanced back at Gary, who gave him a nod of encouragement, and climbed inside.

It was twenty feet down. When he reached the final rung, he found himself in a tiny room lined with a foam mattress, the ceiling too low to stand. It smelled of mildew and rust. He spread himself prone on the floor, his nose inches from the largest of five portholes, and looked out at the ocean.

It took him a while to understand what he was seeing. In the water outside, clusters of glowing particles were passing through the sea. There were dozens of such formations, some drifting at random, others bunching and splaying their radial arms to sail serenely past the windows.

Trip forgot about his camera, caught up in the strangeness of the sight. At first, he felt surrounded by otherworldly creatures, like something out of a dream. Only when one of the shapes drifted close by the nearest porthole, almost pressing itself against the glass, did he finally recognize it for what it was.

The sloop was surrounded by hundreds of octopuses. As his eyes grew used to the darkness, he saw that every octopus had two rows of luminous cells running along each of its eight arms. The light from each node, which was bluish green, was not strong, but taken together, they caused the water to be as brightly lit as a crowded highway on a winter's night.

When fully extended, the octopuses were the size of bicycle wheels, their bodies pink, verging on coral. As Trip switched on his camera, gelatinous eyes peered through the water at his own face. He was about to snap a picture when he heard the clang of footsteps overhead. Someone was climbing down the ladder.

“Mind if I join you?” The voice took him by surprise. Turning, he saw a pair of feminine legs enter his field of vision. When the woman had descended all the way, he saw that it was Meg, the ship's stewardess and deckhand.

“Not at all,” Trip said, unsure of how to react. Meg was trim but shapely, with short dark hair and a patrician nose. From the moment of their first meeting, she had struck him as the sort of young woman who is perfectly aware of the power that she possesses, as well as the fact that it will not last forever. Among other things, although the relationship was not openly acknowledged, everyone on the yacht knew that Meg spent most of her nights in Ray Wiley's stateroom.

“I came to see what all the excitement was about,” Meg said, spreading herself across the mattress pad. “Amazing, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is.” Trip turned back to the window. They lay side by side, not speaking, as the lights drifted past them in glowing bands. He gradually became aware that Meg's leg was pressing pleasantly against his own.

A moment later, a diver appeared in the circle of sea disclosed by the largest porthole. It was Ray. As he passed the observation chamber, he turned toward the window, the beam of his flashlight slicing through the water. Through the mask, it was hard to see his face, but his eyes seemed fixed on theirs.

At his side, Trip felt Meg stiffen. Rolling onto her back, she took hold of the nearest rung and went up the ladder without a word. Trip did not move. He remained eye to eye with the diver on the other side of the window, the octopuses forgotten, until Ray finally turned and swam away.

The following morning, when Trip went on deck, he found Ray standing in the dive cockpit with Ellis and Gary. An awning had been erected over the aft deck, shielding it from the sun, but it was still hot enough for the men to strip down to shorts and sandals as they took a sample of seawater, a ritual performed once a day, every two hundred miles, as the Lancet circled the globe.

In the water around the yacht swam countless octopuses, their luminescence muted in the daylight. Ellis leaned over the railing. “What's the line in Tennyson? Vast and unnumbered polypi—"

"Unnumbered and enormous polypi," Trip said, glad to put his liberal education to some use. "Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green."

Taking a seat, he watched as a hinged arm with a pump on one end was lowered five feet below the surface. After the temperature and salinity had been recorded, fifty gallons of water were pumped into a plastic drum, passing through a series of increasingly fine filters. The process took about an hour. As they waited, Gary engaged in a friendly contest with Kiran, the yacht's first mate, to see who would be first to catch an octopus. Gary had floated a baited trap out to sea on a cable, while Kiran, tan and muscular, was taking a more active approach, which he claimed to have learned in the Canary Islands. It involved a hooked rod and a red rag tied to a stick, and did not, at first glance, seem especially effective.

As Ellis and Ray stowed their equipment, they picked up the thread of what seemed to be an ongoing debate. “We need to stay here,” Ellis said. “If we leave now, we'll be giving up the chance of a lifetime.”

“The chance of your lifetime, not mine,” Ray said, rinsing himself off in the cockpit shower. “We're already running behind schedule. If we stay here much longer, we won't make it to the Galapagos as planned.”

“Then we need to push back the deadline. This is a new species. Only one other variety of luminescent octopus has ever been described—”

“Take a specimen, then. I've already asked Kiran to put together a couple of tanks.”

“A few specimens won't be enough,” Ellis argued. “We're seeing extraordinary collective behaviors here. Octopuses aren't supposed to travel in schools, and at this distance from shore, they live well below the waterline. Something is causing them to appear in groups on the surface. We need to find out why.”

Ray turned to Trip, the beads of water standing out on his face. “Are you getting all this? Ellis thinks that science can only take place in a bathysphere. He can't accept that a new kind of octopus isn't going to change the world.”

“It may not change the world,” Trip said carefully, “but it's something that a lot of people would like to see.”

“I agree,” Ellis said. “If anything, it would enhance the reputation of this project.”

Ray shook his head, dislodging a cascade of drops. “You're missing the point. In the sample of water we've taken today, we're going to find a thousand new species of microbe, if not more.” He turned to Trip. “With every sample we analyze, we double the number of genes previously known from all species across the planet. It's the first time that modern sequencing methods have been applied to an entire ecosystem. I don't see how an octopus is any more important than this.”

“It isn't a question of importance,” Ellis said impatiently. “It's a question of—”

“Even now, nobody really knows what the ocean contains,” Ray continued, still looking at Trip. “Every milliliter of seawater contains a million bacteria and ten million viruses. Until I came along, nobody had tried to analyze the ocean with the same thoroughness that had been applied to the human genome. When we're done, the results will be available to everyone, free of charge, with no strings attached. That, my friends, is what will enhance our reputation. Not a glowing octopus.”

He turned to look at Gary, who was seated on the transom, clutching the cable of his octopus trap. “As I see it, there are two approaches to science. You can lunge after something with a rag on a stick, like Kiran, or you can bait a trap and see what floats by. It's less glamorous, maybe, but in the long run—”

Ray was interrupted by an excited shout. At the other end of the sloop, Kiran had caught an octopus on the end of his hook and was lifting it carefully out of the water. As Kiran dropped the octopus into the bucket at his feet, Trip saw a handful of arms writhing uselessly in the open air.

Ellis turned to Ray. “What were you saying about the two approaches to science?”

Ray forced his face into a grin, then turned to the first mate. “Kiran, think you can catch a few more of these monsters?”

“Not a problem,” Kiran said, climbing into the cockpit. “How many do you want?”

“As many as you can get,” Ray said. “We're having octopus for dinner tonight.”

An embarrassed silence ensued. Kiran gave them all an uneasy smile, then headed below. After a pause, Ray turned to Ellis. “All right. We'll hold station for one more day. You should be satisfied with this.”

“Fine,” Ellis said, although he was obviously displeased. “I'll do what I can.”

The two scientists went their separate ways. A few minutes later, when the filtering process was complete, Gary unscrewed a set of steel plates and used tweezers to fish out the filters inside. Each filter, the size of a vinyl record album, had been stained various shades of brown, as the microbes were captured in paper of decreasing porousness. “I'm sorry you had to see that,” Gary said to Trip, sliding the filters into plastic bags. “Those two don't always see eye to eye—”

“What about you?” Trip asked, helping him pack up the morning's sample. “Do you think we should stay longer?”

Gary headed for the companionway. “Ray pays my salary, which doesn't make me a disinterested observer. The fact is, I love both of those guys, but Ellis is just as ambitious as Ray is. He's better at hiding it, that's all.”

He disappeared down the stairs. As the day wore on, Trip caught occasional glimpses of Gary in the wet lab across from the salon. Through the laboratory window, Trip saw him sterilize a pair of shears with a blowtorch and slice each filter in two, one half to be frozen for later analysis, the other to be sequenced aboard the yacht itself. Aside from the time spent gathering each day's water sample, Gary spent most of his time in the lab, dissolving the filters and analyzing the resultant genetic material, which meant that he was only crew member without a tan.

Trip took a seat in the salon, where the captured octopus had been installed in a plastic tank. Since his arrival, he had been struck by the demands being made of the scientific team. Sequencing the genes of all the organisms in a random sample of seawater was an incredibly complicated process, akin to assembling a thousand jumbled jigsaw puzzles. Normally, most of the analysis would have taken place on shore, but Ray, hoping to save time, had insisted that it occur on the sloop itself. Several competing efforts to sequence marine ecosystems were currently underway, and Ray had become obsessed with concluding the project before the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, which was in less than three weeks.

Such urgency might have seemed strange, but as Trip reviewed his notes, he reflected that nothing less than Ray's legacy was at stake. Despite the role that he had famously played in decoding the human genome, Ray remained a controversial figure, known more for his ruthlessness as a businessman than his scientific integrity. Now that money was no longer an issue, he had funded this mission in an attempt to refute his detractors, as well as to make his own case for a Nobel Prize. As a result, he had begun to push his scientific team to show greater progress, which, as far as Trip could tell, had only deepened the divisions within the crew.

Dinner that night was quietly tense. Dawn, the ship's cook, an attractive woman with a blond ponytail, had prepared a ceviche, slowly simmering the octopus to soften it first. Although the flesh was tender, nobody could do more than pick at it, so the crew focused on the vegetable curry instead, which they washed down with plentiful wine and cold water. “You can judge a yacht by how the wine flows,” Ray said, his eyes red. “On the Calypso, Cousteau had a wine tank made of stainless steel. And how many bottles do we have?”

“Two hundred in the hold,” Dawn said, “and another fifty or sixty in the fridge.”

Trip poured himself another glass. Unlike some yachts, which had separate tables for guests and crew, everyone on the research sloop ate together, although this did nothing to lighten the mood. Ray, he noticed, treated everyone as his servant, even Stavros, who had been the yacht's captain long before the billionaire had acquired it. When Ray asked him condescendingly to tell them the Greek word for octopus, the captain replied, “Octopous, of course. But to Hesiod, it was anosteos, or the boneless one. The boneless one gnaws his foot in his fireless house and wretched home."

“I didn't know we had so many scholars on board,” Ray said. He eyed Trip over the rim of his glass. “I'm aware, by the way, that I've neglected to give you the interview I promised. Are you free tonight?”

Trip, who had nearly given up hope of such an invitation, was surprised at the sudden offer. “Of course. Maybe after dinner?”

“I need to take care of some business first, but if you want to drop by my cabin at ten, I can give you an hour of my time.” Ray's bloodshot eyes flashed between Trip and Meg. “Unless you have other plans—”

Meg rose abruptly, clearing the dishes and carrying them into the galley. Ray, flushed from the wine, did not take his eyes from her face.

After dinner, the crew dispersed. Kiran headed up to the deck, joined a moment later by Dawn, ostensibly for the first watch, although a whiff of sweet smoke from the crew's quarters made Trip guess that they had something else in mind. Around the yacht, the octopuses had resumed their nocturnal flickering. When the lights in the salon were turned down, the octopus in the tank started to glow as well.

Going into his cabin, Trip began to review his list of questions, glancing out the window at the show of lights. As he prepared, he began to feel strangely nervous. Looking at his hands, he noticed that he had been chewing his fingernails, which was something that he had not done in years.

When the time for the interview arrived, Trip rose from his chair, making sure that he had his notebook and audio recorder, and went into the hallway. The yacht was silent. Stavros sat in the salon, his back turned, laying out a game of solitaire. None of the other crew members was in sight.

Trip went to the door of Ray's cabin, which was closed, and knocked lightly. “Ray?”

There was no answer. Looking down, Trip saw a line of light beneath the door. He knocked a second time, and when there was no response, he tried the knob, which turned easily.

After a moment's hesitation, Trip pushed open the door and entered the stateroom. He had been here only once before, on the day that he had boarded the yacht, and had been duly impressed by its luxury.

Ray was seated at his work station, his back to the door. His head was bowed, as if he were looking intently at something on the desk. Trip came forward cautiously, afraid that he was intruding, and gingerly touched Ray's shoulder with his fingertips. “Do you still want to talk?”

In response to the nudge, Ray swiveled around in his chair, although the motion was due solely to momentum. His eyes were open, and his head was tilted at an unnatural angle. A gash had parted the skin of his throat, the blood running down the front of his shirt and pooling on the floor below, where it blended with the burgundy rug. Trip was not a doctor, and had no firsthand experience of murder, but even at first glance it was clear that Ray was quite dead.

* * * *

II.

The captain was the first to respond to his shouts of alarm. Stavros appeared in the stateroom door, his calmness oddly reassuring, and stopped. He looked at Trip, saying nothing, then turned to the body. Going up to the corpse, he placed his fingertips against its throat, almost in a parody of checking for a pulse, and examined the wound, which was clean and deep. After studying the gash for a moment, he shook his head. “It's bad luck to have a dead man on board.”

Trip stared at the captain, wondering if he was joking. Instead of saying more, Stavros took the body beneath its arms and laid it on the floor, with Trip doing his best to help. As they moved the body, a fresh stream of blood trickled from its throat, swallowed up at once by the plush fibers of the carpet.

There was a gasp from the doorway. It was Meg. A second later, Gary appeared, still in his gloves and laboratory gown, his face pale with shock. Kiran and Dawn stood behind him, looking over his shoulder at the scene in the cabin. Their eyes were bloodshot. Last of all, Ellis pushed through the knot of bodies, his gaze fixed on the corpse on the ground.

“My God,” Ellis said, his voice nearly cracking. “Did anyone see what happened?”

No one replied. Through the windows, the octopus lights continued to flicker.

“I've been in the salon all night,” Stavros said at last. “I saw nobody enter or leave.”

“Someone must have been here,” Trip said. “Ray didn't cut his own throat. If he did, where's the knife?”

There was another silence, more suspicious now. Trip was studying the faces of the others, searching for signs of guilt, when his eye was caught by a trail of blood on the floor. It led from the desk to the far wall, where a door had been set into the bulkhead. “Where does this hatch go?”

“The deck,” Stavros said. He went to the hatch and opened it, touching only the edge of the knob. Beyond the door lay a narrow companionway. He went up, followed by Trip and Kiran, with the others remaining behind.

Outside, the air was cool and motionless, the ocean glowing with eerie light. In the dive cockpit, a constellation of blood was visible on the deck. A pool of pink water had collected beneath the showerhead, as if someone had paused to wash his or her hands before moving on. Stavros turned to Kiran. “You were supposed to be on watch. You didn't see anything?”

Kiran looked embarrassed. “We were at the prow, looking at the lights. And we were, uh—”

“Yes, I know,” Stavros said, making a gesture of disgust. “A couple of potheads.”

They returned to the stateroom. In the cabin, someone had covered the body with a sheet, the crimson petals of blood already starting to soak through. Meg was seated on the bed, eyes wet, with Dawn's arm around her shoulders.

In the corner, Ellis and Gary were talking in low tones. A second later, Ellis turned to the others, as if he had decided to assume control. “All right. Whoever did this needs to confess now.”

In the long pause that followed, volleys of glances were exchanged, but no one spoke. Eventually, one by one, they began to offer explanations for their whereabouts. It soon became clear that only Kiran and Dawn, who had been smoking up on the far end of the sloop, could verify their stories. While Trip had gone into his room after dinner, Gary had returned to the lab, and Ellis had been in the observation chamber below decks, taking notes on the octopus school. Stavros had been in the salon, facing away from the stateroom, while Meg had retired to her cabin to read.

Ellis turned to Trip. “You're the one who found him. What were you doing here?”

“You heard what happened at dinner,” Trip said. “Ray offered me an interview.”

“Is that what you thought?” Ellis gave him a tight smile. “I happen to know that Ray was planning to tell you that he was withdrawing permission for the article. He told me so himself.”

Trip was astonished by the unspoken implication. “Why would he change his mind?”

Ellis looked at Meg, who was seated on the bed. “Who knows what he was thinking?”

Trip's face grew red. “So what are you saying? He wouldn't give me an interview, so I killed him?”

There was no response. After another moment, when it became clear that no confessions were forthcoming, they turned, almost with relief, to the business of dealing with the body. Ellis went into his cabin and returned with a medical kit, which he used to tape bags over Ray's hands. When he was done, Stavros wrapped the corpse in a sheet and secured it neatly with nylon cord. Sealing off the stateroom, they carried the body into the galley, where Meg and Dawn had removed the bottles from the wine refrigerator, and laid it snugly inside.

As they were closing the galley door, Trip happened to glance at the rack above the sink, and saw that one of the knives was missing.

Once the body had been stowed, they returned to the salon to debate their next move. The first decision was easy. The Lancet, like many yachts, had a system of security cameras that was rarely used, and which they now agreed to turn on. There was also some discussion of sleeping arrangements. In the end, it was decided that the women would share one of the staterooms; Trip, Ellis, and Gary the other; and that the captain and first mate would each take a cabin for themselves.

Finally, they raised the issue of the voyage itself. “There's no way out of it,” Stavros said. “We need to go back. If we make full speed, we can be at Antigua and Barbuda in three days.”

“We would have been done in a few more weeks,” Gary said bitterly. He looked around at the others. “I know we don't have much of a choice, but after all this is done, I'm coming back to finish the project.”

No one spoke. In the tank, the octopus wound and unwound its arms, glowing softly, like an emblem of death from a medieval painting.

They all spent a restless night. The following morning, Trip was in the salon when he felt a soothing vibration well up through the floor. The engine had started. He was smiling at Meg and Dawn, who seemed equally relieved that they were on their way, when an alarm sounded from the cockpit. A second later, the wailing ceased, and the engine died as well.

Trip went up to the deck, where he found Stavros crouching over the hatch of the engine room, biting his lower lip. A sharp tang of scorched metal wafted up from the engine. “Overheated,” Stavros said tersely, in response to Trip's question. “We're taking care of it.”

Kiran, who was examining the engine, stuck his head and shoulders out of the darkened rectangle, a smudge of grease on his face. “It's the alternator and pump. The belt's torn to shreds. I'll need to replace it.”

“How long will that take?” Trip asked, unsettled by the prospect of an engine failure. Although the sloop was perfectly capable of proceeding under sail, the last few days had been windless, and they were weeks away from shore.

Kiran wiped away the grease. “A couple of hours. We'll need to hold station here.”

Word of their situation spread quickly. After learning what had happened, Ellis announced that he would spend the morning trying to capture a few more octopuses. While examining the octopus that had been caught the day before, he had noticed that one of its arms was missing, apparently severed. “We need a perfect specimen,” Ellis said, as if challenging the others to contradict him. “If we're stuck here anyway, we may as well make the most of it.”

When no one objected, Ellis and Gary set to work. During the night, the yacht had drifted away from the octopus school, so they took the boat tender. Trip accepted an invitation to come along, glad for an excuse to get away from the yacht, and Meg agreed to join them as well.

They roared off in the tender, the water rising around them in a needlelike spray. The motor was too loud for conversation, but Trip kept a close watch on Meg, who had dark circles under her eyes.

When the tender neared the octopus school, which was visible in faint red patches through the water, Ellis cut the engine. “Gary and I will dive together. You two can wait here.”

Donning their equipment, the two scientists climbed onto the inflatable keel and slid overboard. Trip watched them descend, the sun beating down on the back of his neck, then turned to Meg. “How are you doing?”

“I'll be all right,” Meg said. The brim of her hat left her face in shadow, but her voice, he noticed, was steady.

As they waited for the others to return, Meg began to take measurements of the water's temperature and salinity, with Trip helping as best he could. As the minutes ticked by, he tried to steer the conversation toward the other members of the crew. “Ray didn't seem like a guy who was easy to work with.”

Meg looked back at the yacht, which was holding station seven hundred yards away. “He was used to being right all the time. Ellis couldn't deal with it. He also thought that he was going to have the chance to conduct his own research, but Ray worked him pretty hard.”

“Ellis seems to think that the octopus school is his last chance for a major discovery.”

“Yes, I know.” Meg hesitated, as if there were something else that she wanted to say. “There was a lot that Ellis didn't understand. Ray drank too much, and sometimes, when we were alone, he would tell me things—”

Trip sensed that she was on the verge of revealing something important. “What is it?”

“Ray was withholding some of the team's discoveries. You know how he insisted that Gary process the samples on board the yacht? It was so he could screen the results for genes with commercial potential. If you can find a microbe that makes it easier to produce ethanol, for example, or a luminous microbe like the one he was hoping to find the other night, it would be worth millions.”

“But the whole point of this project was to make the data freely available,” Trip said. “Every gene was going to be made public, right?”

“That's what Ray claimed. It's what allowed him to recruit people like Gary. If you ask Gary why he joined the project, he'll say it was because he believed that genetic research should be as open as possible. But Ray was always driven by profit. He wasn't about to change his ways.”

Trip could feel the elements of a story assembling themselves in his head. “You seem to know a lot about the science.”

“I spent a year in medical school before I dropped out. I couldn't stand the dissections.” Meg glanced back at the sloop, which looked like a scale model in the sunlight. “I decided a long time ago that I was going to devote my life to pleasure, not death. For a while, I thought that marrying a rich man was the answer. That's why I was involved with Ray. Don't pretend you didn't know.”

Trip went for the diplomatic response. “I had some idea of what was going on.”

“You and everyone else. I don't mind. I knew he wasn't going to marry me.” Meg turned back to Trip. “Maybe it's better this way. If he'd held back results for commercial reasons, it would have come out sooner or later. Now, instead, he gets to be a martyr. In a way, I'm glad he's dead.”

Trip tried to cut the tension. “You probably don't want me writing about this, then.”

Meg didn't respond. Something in her unsmiling face, which was still in shadow, sent a prickle of nervousness down his spine. Before either of them could speak again, Gary's gloved hand emerged from the sea, clutching an octopus, which had wound itself around his upper arm. Ellis surfaced a second later, wetsuit glistening, holding an octopus of his own.

“Looks like they've got their prizes,” Meg said. She glanced at Trip's hands. “You've been biting your nails. Are you nervous?”

When she looked back up at him, Trip held her gaze. “Not any more than you are.”

They helped Gary and Ellis onto the tender. As they headed back, the octopuses, each in its own bucket, writhed at their feet, curling into defensive balls whenever they were touched. Meg did not speak to Trip again.

When they returned to the sloop, it was already late in the afternoon. Trip was climbing into the dive cockpit when he heard shouts. At the entrance to the engine room, Stavros and Kiran were yelling at each other, and the captain had bitten his own lip out of agitation. “You stupid malaka," Stavros said. “If we wind up stranded here, it's all your fault—”

Kiran was equally furious. "Bhenchod, I'm not the one who sabotaged the engine.”

“Sabotage?” Trip looked between the two men. “What are you talking about?”

“It's the fan belt,” Kiran said. “I tried to replace it, but it snapped whenever the engine engaged. When I looked closer, I found out why. The ball bearings in the pulley are damaged. And the package of extra bearings is missing from my spare parts kit. I took an inventory just last week, and it was definitely there. Which means that somebody stole it.”

“What about the engine?” Trip asked. “You really think that it was sabotaged?”

Stavros nodded, the blood shining on his lip. “Whoever did it will answer to me.”

“In any case, we'll find a workaround,” Kiran said, speaking more calmly than before. “I can cannibalize parts from another pulley. But it means we won't be leaving until tomorrow at the earliest.”

This announcement cast a pall over the rest of the day. As Stavros and Kiran worked on the engine, Gary prepared a tank for the octopus he had caught, installing it next to the first one, while Ellis took his own specimen into the lab for closer examination. The two octopuses in the salon took no visible interest in each other, glowing gently in their separate containers as evening fell.

When it was time for dinner, Gary proposed that they eat on deck, which would put some distance between themselves and the body in the galley. Outside, the lights in the water were brighter than ever. As they ate around a folding table, bundled up in parkas and gloves, Gary raised the question that they had all been avoiding. “When this is over, how many of you are coming back?”

When no one answered, Gary took a sip from his water glass. “I know it's hard to talk about this, but back on shore, we aren't going to have another quiet moment. We need to discuss this now.”

“We all know that you want to respect Ray's wishes,” Stavros finally said, a red scab on his lower lip. “As for me, I go with the Lancet. Her destination makes no difference to me.”

“Or me,” Kiran said. “Not everyone here feels the same loyalty to Ray that you do.”

“This isn't about loyalty,” Gary said. “It's about seeing that important work isn't lost. We've made significant discoveries here, and we need to make sure that they're released to the public.”

Trip glanced at Meg, who did not look back. “I've only been here for a few days, but I know something about situations like this,” Trip said, not sure if his opinion counted. “Your first obligation is to the living.”

Ellis grunted. “Personally, if Ray were able to speak his mind, I don't think he'd care either way. Now that he's dead, he can't profit from any of it. They don't award the Nobel Prize posthumously.”

After a prolonged silence, Dawn, who had tucked her hair up into a baseball cap, tried to change the subject. “I've been watching these octopus lights for days now, and I have no idea what they mean. What are they?”

Ellis shifted easily into professorial mode. “It could be a way of coordinating group activities, like mating. Or some kind of hunting strategy. Most people don't appreciate how intelligent octopuses are. They have big brains with folded lobes, the largest of any invertebrate, and show signs of memory and learning.” He looked thoughtfully at the lights. “Of course, they only live for three or four years. If they had a longer lifespan, who knows what they might be capable of doing?”

The crew fell into silence. As they looked out at the water, Kiran played with his cigarette lighter, its nervous flame mirroring the lights in the sea, which seemed unfathomably ancient. Trip, thinking of corpse lights in a graveyard, was reminded of a passage from Coleridge: They moved in tracks of shining white, and when they reared, the elfish light fell off in hoary flakes—

After a moment, Meg cleared the table and took the dishes below. The others were talking and drinking, the mood finally beginning to lighten, when they heard a scream and a crash from the salon.

In an instant, they were out of their chairs. They found Meg standing in the salon, a pile of broken dishes at her feet. She was staring at the two tanks that had been set up in one corner. Her face had lost most of its color.

"Look," Meg said, pointing toward the tanks with a trembling finger. "Look at this."

Trip followed her gesture with his eyes. The last time he had bothered to look, each of the tanks had held a single octopus. Now the nearest tank was empty, and in the other, the water was clouded by a blue fog.

When the haze cleared, he felt a wave of nausea. One of the octopuses had killed the other. The survivor's color had deepened to crimson, while the remains of its neighbor were shriveled and gray. Billows of octopus blood had polluted the water, and a foamy scum had gathered on the surface.

A second later, Trip realized what else was happening, and felt a cold hand take hold of his insides.

The surviving octopus was eating its companion. As he watched, the octopus used its beak to amputate one of its victim's arms at the base. Wrapping its mouth around the severed arm, it devoured it, the arm disappearing inch by inch into its chitinous maw. The octopus twitched, its arms jerking in brief convulsions as it swallowed its fierce meal, its eyes hooded and glazed.

Ellis looked accusingly at the others. “Who put the octopuses into the same tank?”

“I don't think anyone did this,” Stavros said. “It must have escaped on its own.”

“That's impossible,” Kiran said. He went over to the empty tank. Both tanks had been made from plastic buckets, the lids secured so that a narrow gap remained above the rim, allowing air to circulate. The gap, which was less than an inch wide, seemed much too small for an octopus to pass through.

As the surviving octopus finished eating one arm and began to snip off another, it occurred to Trip that there was an easy way to resolve the question. “The security cameras. We switched them on last night.”

“Let's take a look,” Ellis said. Going into the library, he returned a minute later with a videotape. A television was mounted to one wall of the salon. Ellis inserted the tape into the video player and pressed the rewind button. As he did, Trip noticed that his knuckles were badly bruised.

Before he could ask about this, an image of the salon appeared on the television set. The videotape opened with footage that had been taken only a few moments ago, of the entire crew standing around the tanks. As the tape rewound, the crew went up the steps, walking backward, except for Meg, who stayed behind. The broken dishes on the floor flew back into her arms and reassembled themselves, and then she, too, was gone. The tanks alone remained onscreen.

As the video rolled back, the predatory octopus appeared to regurgitate its victim's arms and refasten them. An instant later, both octopuses were alive, struggling in the tank, and then—

“I don't believe it,” Trip said, his eyes wide. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

Ellis remained silent, although he did not look away from the screen. He rewound the tape to the point where the octopuses were back in their separate tanks, then allowed the action to play out normally.

For a few seconds, the octopuses floated in their tanks as before. Then the nearest octopus, one of the specimens that Ellis and Gary had captured earlier that day, extended one arm after another to the rim of its own bucket, until the tips of four arms protruded slightly through the narrow gap.

Nothing else happened for a long moment—and then the octopus began to squeeze its entire body through. Watching it was like witnessing a baffling optical illusion. First one arm was threaded through the gap and down the outside of the tank. Three other arms followed. The octopus flattened itself, the edge of its mantle passing through, followed by its head, which grew pancaked, like a balloon that was only halfway inflated, as the octopus pulled itself the rest of the way out. Then it was on the countertop and slithering toward the other tank.

The octopus moved quickly, gathering and splaying its arms as it crawled across the counter. Its color deepened from pink to red. As it approached, the second octopus, still inside its tank, grew pale, its normally smooth skin becoming rough and pebbled. When the first octopus reached the tank, it hooked the end of one arm over the rim, compressing its body until it was flat enough to slip through the gap, which was narrower than a letterbox. Within seconds, it had entered the second tank.

The struggle did not last for long. There was an entanglement of arms and beaks, the water growing blue with blood. Trip was unable to see how one octopus killed the other, but the thought of what was happening there made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

In less than a minute, it was over, and one octopus lay dead at the bottom of the tank. The survivor drifted in the bloody water, its arms coiling and uncoiling. Then, inevitably, it began to feed.

* * * *

III.

“I don't believe it,” Trip said again. Looking away from the carnage onscreen, he saw sickened expressions on the faces around him. As if following a common impulse, the crew turned from the television to look at the tanks, and experienced a collective shudder. The remaining octopus had abandoned its meal and was pressing its head against the wall of its tank, watching them, or so it seemed, with its gelatinous eyes. The nodules on its arms were glowing brightly.

Lowering his gaze, Trip saw something that should have been obvious before. Streaks of moisture were visible on the countertop between the two tanks, marks from where the octopus had dragged itself across the intervening space. Something in the nearly invisible trail, which was rapidly drying out, made what they had just witnessed seem even more hideous.

Ellis was the first to regain some semblance of composure. “I should have been more careful. Octopuses are notorious for squeezing through tight spaces. The hardest part of the body is the beak, and the rest is highly compressible. If a gap is wide enough for the beak to pass through—”

Kiran stared at him. “You're saying that this isn't strange? I'm sorry, but I'm a little freaked out by this.”

“I'm not saying that this wasn't unusual,” Ellis said. “I'm only saying that it can be explained. As for the cannibalism, I have no professional opinion. The important thing is that we fix the tanks.”

Using a hooked rod, which he held at arm's length, Kiran transferred the surviving octopus to its old tank. The octopus seemed sated, its eyes filmy and glazed, as it slid, twitching slightly, into the water. Kiran fastened a rectangle of wire mesh across the top of the bucket, so that the gap between lid and rim was sealed off, then did the same to the octopus in the wet lab next door. There seemed to be no way that either octopus could escape again.

Even after these precautions had been taken, an aura of uneasiness lingered over the yacht. An hour later, when Trip went to bed, it was a long time before he fell asleep, and when he did, he was troubled by nightmares. In one dream, he was seated at the desk in his cabin, the door closed. As he reviewed his notes, oblivious to the danger, an octopus squeezed beneath the door, slithered across the carpet, climbed his chair, and touched the back of his neck with one clammy arm. Before he could react, the octopus pressed its parrotlike beak against his throat, and then—

Trip awoke, the sheets twisted like tentacles around his legs. It was still dark outside. As he tried to remember what had awakened him, he looked at his hands, which were visible in the faint light from the octopus school, and was shocked by the sight. His fingernails and cuticles were ragged, and a sour taste in his mouth told him that he had been chewing his nails in his sleep.

He was studying the damage that he had done, noticing that his fingers were bleeding in a few places, when he remembered what had pulled him from sleep in the first place. It had been a scream.

As he sat up in bed, he found that he could hear voices coming from the stateroom across the hall. Trip pulled on his shoes and went quietly into the corridor, taking care not to disturb Ellis and Gary, who were asleep. Through the door of the adjoining cabin, he heard voices. He knocked. “Is everything okay?”

The voices ceased at once. After a moment, he heard the shuffle of footsteps, and the door opened a crack. “It's all right,” Meg said softly, peering through the gap. “Go back to bed.”

“It isn't all right,” Dawn said, appearing behind Meg. “Tell her this needs to stop.”

“What needs to stop?” Trip asked. As he spoke, he saw a line of blood trickling down the crook of Meg's arm. Impulsively, he came forward, pushing the door open. The two women fell back. “What happened?”

“It's nothing.” Meg's voice was nearly a mumble. “It isn't any of your business—”

“Don't give me that,” Dawn said, seizing Meg's wrist in one hand. “Look at this.”

Trip saw a series of gashes running along Meg's inside elbow. The cuts were parallel and shallow, and while none had grazed a major vessel, they were bleeding freely. “Did someone attack you?”

“Nobody attacked her,” Dawn said, her voice on edge. “She did this to herself.”

Trip turned to Meg, whose face was closed off with embarrassment. “Is that true?”

Meg yanked her arm away from Dawn, sending droplets of blood to the floor. “It's no big deal. Sometimes I cut myself when I'm stressed. I've done it since I was a teenager. It's never deep enough to be dangerous. I don't see why you're making a federal case out of this—”

Trip noticed a knife on the bedside table, its blade smeared with blood. “Did you take this from the kitchen?”

Meg sighed. “I was going to replace it. I never meant to use it on anyone but myself.”

“I don't care about the knife,” Dawn said. “We've been friends a long time. I can't believe you've been hiding this from me—”

The women resumed their argument. Trip was about to slip away when he remembered the medical kit that Ellis had used to bag Ray's hands. “Hold on,” Trip said. “We need to do something about those cuts.”

He went back to his cabin, where the others were still asleep, and found the medical kit among Ellis's things. When he returned to the other stateroom, Dawn seemed calmer, and Meg was cupping a hand casually beneath her elbow, catching the blood in the hollow of her palm.

Opening the medical kit, Trip took out a roll of tape and a gauze pad. He was about to close the kit again when he saw something tucked beneath the dressings. He reached inside. Fishing the object out, he found that it was a pack of ball bearings, the package cool and heavy in his hand.

“From the spare parts kit,” Trip said. He looked at the others. “Do you think—”

He broke off. The women were looking at the door, their expressions wary. Trip saw that a shadow had fallen across the floor. Rising to his feet, he found himself facing a solitary figure in the doorway.

“That's my medical kit,” Ellis said, his voice calm. “What are you doing with it?”

“A minor emergency, but everything should be fine.” Trip held up the package of ball bearings. “What the hell are these?”

Ellis regarded the package. “I stole them from the spare parts kit. I was fairly sure that what I had done to the engine would keep us here another day, but I wanted to be on the safe side—”

“You sabotaged the engine,” Trip said. He had already forgotten about Meg. “Why?”

Ellis gave him a look of contempt. “You know why. I wanted to keep the yacht here a day or two longer. There was no way to make Ray listen to reason, so I took things into my own hands.”

“By attacking my ship?” It was Stavros. He was standing in the doorway, drawn by the noise, with Gary watching from over one shoulder. “We could have been stranded here for weeks—”

“You don't understand,” Ellis said. Going to the window, he thrust his finger toward the octopus lights. “Ray was rushing ahead to meet a meaningless deadline. I wanted to document a natural phenomenon that might never be seen again. I don't have to defend the choice I made.”

Gary pushed past the captain. “Are you listening to yourself? You're worse than Ray. You only cared about your own career, even if it threatened everything we were doing here. Did you kill Ray too?”

“I didn't kill Ray,” Ellis said fiercely. “I can't believe you're accusing me of this—”

Without warning, Ellis punched the wall of the stateroom, hard, so that the bulkhead rang with the blow. As the others fell back, he punched it again. Before anyone else could speak, Kiran appeared, breathless, at the stateroom door.

“I don't know what the commotion is about, but you need to break it up,” Kiran said. “There's something you all need to see.”

They went into the salon, where the lights had been turned up. Kiran pointed toward the tank that housed the octopus. "Look—”

Staring at what was there, Trip felt his anger dissolve into a sickening sense of horror. When they had caught this octopus the day before, they had made sure that all of its arms were intact. Now two of its arms were missing, leaving only a pair of stumps behind. The water was full of blood, but the severed arms were gone. Trip had no desire to find out what had become of them, but it was already too late.

The octopus was eating itself. As Trip watched, the octopus bent one of its remaining arms until the base was pressed against its gaping mouth. With a snip of its beak, it severed the arm, which fell away in a cloud of blood. Without a pause, the octopus swam after it, positioning itself so that one end of the amputated arm was in its mouth, and began to devour it like a length of spaghetti. Trip found himself remembering the line from Hesiod that Stavros had quoted: The boneless one gnaws his foot in his fireless house and wretched home—

Ellis and Gary were looking at each other, their heated exchange apparently forgotten. “Autophagy,” Ellis said.

Gary nodded, although he was visibly repulsed by the sight. “I should have known. Let me check the other specimen.”

“Hold on a second,” Trip said to Ellis. “You're saying you've seen this before?”

“Not exactly, but I've heard of it,” Ellis said. “Octopuses are occasionally known to cannibalize themselves. It's called autophagy. Nobody knows what causes it, but it seems to involve a viral infection of the nervous system. It's a disease. When you have several octopuses in a single tank, if one starts to eat itself, the others will follow. Death ensues within days.”

Gary returned to the salon. “The third octopus looks fine. It was never in contact with this specimen, so maybe—”

Ellis shook his head. “If we're dealing with infectious autophagy, it may have spread to the entire school. For all we know, this is what brought them to the surface. The lights are coordinating their behavior. It's a mass suicide.”

Although his voice remained calm, Ellis was clearly upset. He thrust his bleeding knuckles into his mouth. Trip looked at him, then looked back at the maddened octopus, which had finished eating its own arm. Finally, he looked at his own hands, and felt the last piece fall into place.

“We need to discuss something right now,” Trip said to the others. “Where's Meg?”

Meg was brought from the stateroom, a fresh bandage on her inside elbow. The crew sat around the table in the salon, looking at Trip. Through the windows, the lights seemed to press against the yacht on all sides.

Trip laid his hands on the table, showing them to the others. “You see this? I've been biting my nails for the past couple of days. It's something I haven't done in years, but ever since we entered this part of the ocean, I've been gnawing them like a maniac. Why? I'm not sure, but I can guess.”

Before anyone else could speak, Trip turned to Ellis. “A moment ago, you punched the wall so hard that your knuckles started to bleed. Is this something that you normally do?”

If Ellis saw where this was going, he was not inclined to play along. “I was upset. I don't think it means anything.”

“But it wasn't the first time you've done it. I saw the bruises on your hands. This is part of a larger pattern of behavior, and it's been happening to all of us.” Trip turned to Meg. “Meg, you felt the urge to cut yourself. Stavros, I saw you bite your lip until it drew blood.”

Gary was looking at him with open skepticism. “What exactly are you trying to say?”

“We're being affected by something in the environment,” Trip said. “This octopus is eating itself for the same reason. Meg, you were a medical student. Have you ever seen a disease that could cause behavior like this?”

“Not firsthand,” Meg said slowly. “But infections of the nervous system can result in psychotic or suicidal behavior. Genetic disorders can also lead to violence. Children bite off their lips and fingers, or attack those around them as a form of displacement. In the end, they need to be physically restrained.”

“A form of displacement,” Trip said, underlining the phrase. “What does that mean?”

“They feel driven to destroy their own bodies, so they redirect their aggression toward others. The violence is often concentrated on their family and friends, which may be another way of hurting themselves.”

“What about murder?” Trip asked. “Could this displacement go far enough so that the person was forced to kill?”

“It's possible,” Meg said. “In theory, it could lead to murder by someone who was not in control of his actions.”

“Like the octopus,” Trip said. “It climbed out of its tank to kill its neighbor, but as soon as it ran out of victims, it turned on itself. And if this disease is affecting the entire school, we're right in the middle of it. It's like Ray said. Every drop of seawater contains millions of viruses. If this is a disease, it must be transmitted in the sea. And where do we get our drinking water?”

“The watermaker,” Stavros said. “It purifies seawater, but won't screen out viruses.”

“We have an emergency cache of water in drums,” Kiran said. “It's designed to sustain the crew for two weeks. We might even be able to modify our sampling system to purify water for drinking—”

“But if we're already infected, fixing the water supply won't be enough,” Trip said. He turned to Ellis. “The octopus in the wet lab hasn't displayed any symptoms. Can you think of any reason why?”

Ellis thought for a moment. “This afternoon, I wanted to examine it more closely, so I anesthetized it with magnesium chloride. It's a standard anesthetic for cephalopods. In humans, it's a nervous system depressant that blocks neuromuscular transmissions. And if you're right, and this impulse to hurt ourselves is a sort of seizure, something like magnesium may inhibit the reaction.”

“It's possible,” Meg said excitedly. “And we have a lot of magnesium salts on board. Maybe we can use it as a temporary treatment—”

Gary seemed unconvinced. “I still don't buy it. Even if you're right about the virus, it's hard to believe that it could affect humans and octopuses in the same way. Besides, we've all been drinking the same water, and I'm fine. And you haven't mentioned Kiran or Dawn at all.”

“That's because he never asked,” Dawn said quietly. As the rest of the crew watched, she removed her cap and shook loose her hair. Tilting her head to one side, she pointed to an area of her scalp not far from the crown. A patch of hair, less than half an inch in diameter, was missing.

“I chew my hair and swallow it,” Dawn said, sounding embarrassed. “Trichophagia. A bad habit. I haven't done it since I was a girl, but last night, it started up again, just before we found Ray.”

Trip turned to Kiran. He found that his heart was pounding. “What about you?”

Without speaking, Kiran yanked up the sleeve of his shirt, revealing his forearm. The marks of several recent burns were visible against his dark skin. In a few places, they had begun to blister.

“I've been burning myself with my lighter,” Kiran said flatly. “I didn't know why.”

The crew looked at the burns for a long moment. Then, as if the same thought had occurred to everyone at once, their eyes turned to Gary.

“I don't know what to tell you,” Gary said. “I haven't felt at all out of the ordinary.”

Trip was about to reply when he noticed something strange. Although the salon was comfortably warm, Gary was wearing a pair of gloves. When he thought back to it now, Trip couldn't remember the last time he had seen Gary without them. In Ray's stateroom, Gary had been wearing his lab gloves and smock. He had spent most of the following day in the water, wearing scuba gloves, and had suggested that they eat dinner on deck, forcing all of them to bundle up. Trip cleared his throat. “Gary, would you mind taking off your gloves?”

Gary only glared at him. “I can't believe you're saying this. This is totally crazy.”

“It doesn't seem so unreasonable to me,” Kiran said. “Why don't you want to take them off?”

Gary opened his mouth, as if to respond. Then, in a movement that caught all of them off guard, he was up and on his feet. Before he could get far, Kiran tackled him, pinning his arms behind his back. There was a brief struggle, punctuated by curses on both sides, before Gary finally surrendered.

“Let's have a look,” Ellis said. Going forward, he took hold of Gary's left arm. Trip seized the cuff of the glove, yanking it off, then paused. Gary's fingers were unblemished and clean.

“I hope you're satisfied,” Gary said. “Do we need to go through this a second time?”

Trip glanced at the others. Ellis and Kiran had lost some of their certainty, but they shifted their grip on Gary, thrusting his right arm forward. Trip seized his wrist, took hold of the remaining glove, and gave it a good tug.

As soon as the glove was off, it fell, forgotten, to the floor. Gary closed his eyes.

His fingertips were missing. All of the nails were gone, torn or gnawed away, and the first joint of his index finger had been bitten off completely, the wounds cauterized to stop the bleeding.

At the sight of the ravaged hand, Ellis released Gary's arm, his face gray. Looking at those burnt stumps, Trip remembered the blowtorch that Gary used to sterilize his shears, and realized what should have been obvious long ago. Gary had spent the previous day in the lab, working with samples that had been taken from the water, cutting up the filters, processing them with enzymes. Whatever was in the ocean would have been concentrated by the filtration process.

And if there was a pathogen in the water, Gary had received by far the greatest dose.

“I'm sorry,” Gary said, addressing no one in particular. “I really can't help myself.”

His ruined hand went for his pocket. There was a flash of silver, and an instant later, blood was streaming from Ellis's throat.

Gary pulled out the shears, their blades streaked with crimson, and let them drop. As Ellis fell to his knees, Gary broke loose and dashed for the companionway. Trip ran after him, the other men following close behind, as Meg screamed for Dawn to bring the medical kit. As he left the salon, Trip had just enough time to notice that the octopus was lying, dead, at the bottom of its tank.

Outside, a stinging rain had begun to fall. Around the boat, the lights from the octopus school were shining even more brightly than before. In their cold luminescence, Trip saw someone moving at the stern of the yacht. He turned to see Gary standing in the dive cockpit, a harpoon gun clutched in his good hand.

“Don't come any closer,” Gary said, his voice breaking. “If you do, I'll put a harpoon through your heart. I like you, but that doesn't mean I won't do it. It may even make it easier.”

“I know,” Trip said, the rain trickling down his face. “I won't take it personally.”

“Speak for yourself,” Kiran said. He was standing next to Trip, ready to spring, but for the moment, he held back. Stavros took up a position nearby. They stood in silence, watching and waiting in the rain.

“I never wanted this to happen,” Gary said at last. “I killed Ray, but I had no choice.”

“I believe you,” Trip said, knowing that the longer they kept Gary talking, the better their chances of taking him by surprise. “If you hurt him, it was because you didn't want to hurt yourself.”

Gary shook his head. “I was angry with him too. He was holding back our most crucial findings. Did you know this? I realized it when I saw the first paper he published. I'd been in the lab since day one, and knew exactly what we'd found. Ray was selfish. Like Ellis. Like me.”

The hand with the harpoon gun fell slightly. Trip felt Kiran tense up at his side, but Gary, sensing this as well, raised the gun again. “You weren't selfish,” Trip said. “You wanted to do what was right.”

“Did I?” Gary asked. “The other day, when I heard Ray talking about how he was going to make his research freely available, I couldn't take it anymore. As I worked in the lab, I got madder and madder. I didn't know where the anger was coming from. I thought about killing myself, cutting my own throat, just so I wouldn't be a party to this web of lies—”

“It wasn't about you,” Trip said. “It was in the water. It had nothing to do with Ray.”

“But the betrayal was real. After dinner, I tried to work, but I couldn't concentrate. I saw myself doing horrible things, like tearing off my fingers. So I came up here to be alone. I was thinking about throwing myself overboard, just to stop the noise in my head, when Ray appeared.”

His eyes grew clouded. “Ray was here to look at the lights, but when he saw me, we started to talk. I wanted to speak to him privately, so we went down the hatchway to his cabin. I confronted him about the missing results. He denied it at first, then threatened to take me off the project if I refused to go along. I wanted to kill myself, and then I wanted to kill him too—”

Without lowering the harpoon gun, Gary picked up a dive belt and looped it over his body. He did the same with a second belt, one across each shoulder, so that they crossed his chest like a pair of bandoliers. “I didn't even know I had the shears in my pocket. All I could think of were the lights in the sea. When he was dead, I went to the dive cockpit to wash up, then headed back to the lab. Nobody saw me, but while I was waiting for you to find the body, I chewed off the ends of my fingers.”

Gary's face was obscured by the rain. “So I was the most selfish of all. I killed Ray so that I wouldn't hurt myself. Now I've done the same to Ellis.” He swallowed hard. “It's time to do something selfless for a change.”

He tossed the harpoon gun aside. Before anyone else could move, Gary climbed over the railing of the yacht, the dive belts looped across both his shoulders, and leapt into the ocean.

Trip and the others ran to the railing. Gary was already gone, the weight of the dive belts dragging him below the surface, the sea closing rapidly over his head. Trip stared at the water for a long time, his eyes smarting from the rain, but Gary did not appear again. All around the ship, the ghostly lights continued to fluoresce, the octopus school glowing as it had done for millions of years, casting its cold radiance across the unmarked shroud of the sea.

* * * *

On a trellised arcade at Holbertson Hospital, a yellow wall gave back the sun's rays. Trip sat in a wickerwork chair under a ceiling fan, hands folded, looking out at the garden. He was thinking of nothing in particular.

A chair beside him creaked as someone sat down. It was Meg. “How are you doing?”

Trip considered the question. Looking at his hands, he noted with some satisfaction that his fingers were healing, although the nails were still torn. “I'm all right. What about you?”

“I thought I'd pay a visit to our friend in the next ward. Want to come along?”

Trip only rose in reply. As they walked along the arcade, they passed a pair of nurses wearing white surgical masks. At their approach, the nurses inclined their heads politely, but kept their distance.

They had arrived in Antigua two days ago. With the yacht repaired, the journey had taken three days, with frequent breaks to keep the engine from overheating. Purified water and magnesium salts had kept their destructive impulses at bay, but it was unclear what the lasting effects would be.

As they walked, Meg said softly, “You know, when I close my eyes, I still see them.”

Trip knew what she meant. Whenever his own eyes were closed, he saw the octopus lights blinking softly in the darkness. The pattern had been permanently branded onto his subconscious, broadcasting a message that would always be there. Magnesium controlled the urge, but did not eliminate it entirely.

And he was not the only one. Meg's elbow, he saw, had been freshly bandaged.

They reached a room in the adjoining ward. Inside, Ellis was seated in bed, his notes spread across his lap. His throat was swathed in gauze. The shears had missed his carotid artery by only a few millimeters.

As they entered, Ellis looked up. When they asked him how he was doing, he studied his own hands before speaking. The bruises on his knuckles had faded. “I'm well enough, I suppose.”

Looking at the notes on the bedspread, Trip recognized the pictures and sketches that he had taken of the octopus school. “I hope you aren't having second thoughts about your decision.”

Ellis made a dismissive gesture. When the yacht was a few miles from shore, he had taken the bucket with the last remaining octopus and tipped it overboard, watching as it slid under the glassy surface. Even if they took precautions to avoid infection, the risk of contagion had been too great.

“It's a big ocean,” Ellis said now, his voice a whisper. “There are other discoveries to be made. And as you said, our first responsibility is to the living. Although the dead deserve our respect as well.”

Trip merely nodded. After another minute of small talk, he left the others alone, sensing that they wanted to speak privately. As he headed for the door, he caught Meg's eye. She smiled at him, a trace of sadness still visible in her face, then turned back to the man in the hospital bed.

Outside, on the covered walk, the sun was setting, its last rays shining through the trellis. As Trip headed down the arcade, the slats of the trellis alternately hid and revealed the sunset, reminding him, briefly, of the lights that he had seen in the sea. He had almost reached the end of the walkway when he realized that his left hand was creeping toward his lips.

Trip halted. Up ahead, the garden was only a few steps away. With an effort, he lowered his hand, his gaze fixed on the tips of his fingers. He waited for the impulse to fade, as it always did. Finally, after what seemed like a long time, it passed. He exhaled. Then, stuffing his hands in his pockets, he headed for the garden, keeping his eyes turned away from the light.

Copyright © 2011 Alec Nevala-Lee

[Back to Table of Contents]

Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY
by Don Sakers

In Matt Groening's Futurama, delivery boy Philip J. Fry is asked, “You really want a robot for a friend?” His enthusiastic reply: “Yeah, ever since I was six.”

This one exchange perfectly illustrates the fascination of SF readers with robots. And later the series sums up our ambivalent feelings toward them, as Fry's robot friend, Bender, repeats his mantra: “Kill all humans.” Love them or fear them, robots are an integral part of science fiction.

By now the literary antecedents of robots are so well known that I'm sure you can recite them along with me. The Iliad refers to gold mechanical servants constructed by Hephaestus; both Norse and Jewish mythology include humanlike clay creatures (giants and golems, respectively); Talus the “iron man” in Edmund Spenser's 1590 epic poem The Faerie Queene; the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio; and of course Tik-Tok from the Oz books.

The word “robot” (derived from Czech words for “worker") comes from Karel Capek's 1921 play R.U.R. (which stands for Rossum's Universal Robots).

Pre-Golden Age SF was filled with robots: notable examples include Edmond Hamilton's The Metal Giants (1926), David H. Keller's “The Threat of the Robot” (1929), and Harl Vincent's “Rex” (1934). (I'd love to put in a plug for Neil R. Jones's 1930s-era “Professor Jameson” stories, but their lovable main characters were cyborgs—biological brains in mechanical bodies—and not true robots. Another column, perhaps.)

In the Golden Age robots were further refined by such authors as Eando Binder (whose Adam Link stories were published in book form as I, Robot in 1938), Lester Del Rey ("Helen O'Loy,” 1938), Jack Williamson (the Humanoids series, beginning in 1947); and of course, Isaac Asimov (Positronic Robots series, beginning in 1940).

Robot stories continued in the SF of later eras. Of particular note are Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories (1963); Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968); Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives (1972); John Sladek's Roderick (1980); Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover (1982); and Charles Stross's Saturn's Children (2008).

Movies have featured a long string of robots: Futura (a.k.a. Maria) in Metropolis (1927); Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951); Robby (Forbidden Planet, 1956, and numerous other appearances); drones Huey, Dewey, and Louie from Silent Running (1972); the murderous robots of Westworld (1973); the droids of Star Wars (1977) and sequels; the androids Ash (Alien, 1979) and Bishop (Aliens 1986); Dot Matrix (Spaceballs, 1987); The Terminator (1984 and sequels); WALL-E (2008); the list goes on and on.

Television has also had its share of robots, probably because it requires minimal makeup and special effects for a human actor to portray a robot. Robby had a fruitful career as a guest star in many TV shows. The Jetsons (1962) brought us Rosie the robot maid; Doctor Who (1963) featured so many robots that it's easy to lose track; Astro Boy debuted in 1963. Those who wasted too much of their childhoods on bad TV (like me) will surely remember Tobor The 8th Man (1965), the Robby-inspired Robot from Lost in Space (1965), and Hymie the Robot from Get Smart (1964). Of particular note are the robots Questor in 1974's The Questor Tapes and the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica (both the 1978 original and the 2004 remake).

In more recent times the number of TV robots has exploded, and it's impossible to list even the most notable. Still, one must acknowledge The Transformers (1984), Data (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1987), the wacky robots of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (1988), and the aforementioned Bender (Futurama, 1999).

And what discussion of famous SF robots could be complete without mentioning Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Writers of SF have approached robots from three different (but not necessarily exclusive) directions. We might call these Robot-as-Menace, Sympathetic-Robot, and Robot-as-Tool.

Robot-as-Menace is the old Frankenstein formula: robots out to destroy us. Either they invade, or they rebel, or they serve us so well that we lose our initiative and die off. One way or another, robots replace us.

In the Sympathetic-Robot approach, the robot is a full-fledged character in the story, usually with a kind heart (mechanical though it may be). In extreme examples we get the Pinocchio story of the robot that ultimately wants to be human.

With Robot-as-Tool, robots are generally there to do a job—usually a job that humans can't or won't do. (When robots take jobs away from humans, the story shades over into Robot-as-Menace.)

Often (as in Asimov's Positronic Robot stories or Futurama) all three elements appear. Some robots are tools, some are menaces, and others are sympathetic characters.

One related theme that I haven't explored is Artificial Intelligence. While robots can be A.I.s, the A.I. story is essentially a different beast . . . one that we'll take up at another time.

* * * *

Robopocalypse

Daniel H. Wilson

Doubleday, 347 pages, $25.00 (hardcover)

iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $12.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-385-53385-0

Genre: Man and Machine

* * * *

Daniel H. Wilson has a Ph.D. in robotics; you may recognize his name from his humorous 2005 book How to Survive a Robot Uprising. Now he's turned his hand to fiction: specifically, the story of some robots who menace the entire human race.

Robopocalypse is not so much a book as a Publishing Event. Before publication, the story was optioned by DreamWorks, with Steven Spielberg signed on as director of the movie. The novel is being marketed to the mainstream thriller crowd: publicity compares Wilson to Michael Crichton and the back cover displays quotes from bestsellers Clive Cussler, Lincoln Child, and Robert Crais.

Robopocalypse is set in the very near future. In a secret government lab, a researcher invents an Artificial Intelligence called Archos. Over the course of a few months, there are scattered incidents of machines malfunctioning: a domestic robot kills a man in a convenience store, a malfunctioning military robot menaces troops in Afghanistan, a teenage hacker has a strange interaction with a mysterious voice.

Well, we all know what's going on: of course Archos takes over the world's robots and other smart technology, and the war against the humans begins.

It would be easy to dismiss Robopocalypse as a movie novelization inexplicably published before its parent movie was filmed. It certainly doesn't have the depth of, say, Robert J. Sawyer's WWW trilogy. However, it's a cracking good story, with just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek humor, and I think Analog readers will enjoy it.

* * * *

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Peter David

Del Rey, 393 pages, $7.99 (paperback)

iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $7.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-345-52915-2

Genre: Man and Machine, Media SF

* * * *

Another movie novelization, another Transformers story. But this one is by Peter David, who writes both comics and science fiction, and is an old hand at this stuff. His novelizations always add to the source material, and this book is no exception.

As I said when reviewing Transformers: Exodus in last November's issue, we have to start with a few words about the names. Decepticons, Megatron, the planet Cybertron—the authors are stuck with them. Just take a deep breath and try to get over it.

This one is a lot of fun. It starts with the truth about the Apollo program: despite what the world believes, Armstrong and Aldrin had a secret mission on the Moon. They were sent there to explore an alien starship that crashed in 1961. They brought back some of the alien tech that they found there.

Curtain up in the present day. Sam Witwicky, human friend of the Autobots, meets British scientist Carly Spencer and immediately falls in love. But there's more than love on the agenda: the ship that crashed on the Moon was a Transformer vessel, the evil Decepticons have learned of its cargo, and they'll stop at nothing to get it.

Fortunately, the ship also carried the long-lost Autobot leader Sentinel Prime. If anyone can help Sam and Carly defeat the Decpticons, it's Sentinel.

What follows is a wild series of adventures, enlivened by Peter David's ever-present sense of humor. David has the voices of his characters down pat and he never belittles or ridicules the source material. If you're in the mood for a rollicking good tale of battling giant robots, this is the book for you.

* * * *

The Highest Frontier

Joan Slonczewski

Tor, 416 pages, $25.99 (hardcover)

iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $12.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-7653-2956-1

Genre: Man and Machine, Media SF

* * * *

Up until now, my very favorite first line of a science fiction novel has been from Alan Dean Foster's 1982 book Nor Crystal Tears: “It's hard to be a larva.” However, I think Joan Slonczewski has Foster beat. Here's the first line of The Highest Frontier:

“The space lift rose from the Pacific, climbing the cords of anthrax bacteria.”

With a start like that, how could you not want to read this book?

Joan Slonczewski, with a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, teaches both biology and science fiction at Kenyon College in Ohio. In six previous novels in the 1980s and 1990s, she's established a reputation as a respected writer of hardcore novels that combine cutting-edge biology and genetics, gender issues, and rigorous extrapolation. She's no stranger to the pages of Analog; her 1998 novel The Children Star was serialized here.

The Highest Frontier is her first novel since 2000, and that's a lot more than 11 years too long. Fortunately, this one is well worth the wait.

Ostensibly, The Highest Frontier is a coming of age story. In 2108, Jennifer Ramos Kennedy is off to college—specifically, Frontera College, the first orbital college. Jenny goes to school, has various adventures and meets various people, and emerges at the end of the book as a changed woman.

Right. And King Lear is the story of a family disagreement.

The Highest Frontier is a tour de force, a full-immersion experience of a strange and bizarre world. This is science fiction for the thinking reader, the reader who's willing to pay attention and put things together, the reader who doesn't need everything explained at once or all details instantly spelled out.

Take those space-traveling cords of anthrax bacteria, for example. They aren't explained until the next chapter, and then only in a two-sentence throwaway. That's enough, though. An intelligent reader doesn't need any more—and besides, by then there are plenty of other wonders to marvel at.

And wonders there are, by the armful. Jenny's world is one of climate change gone mad: the center sections of North America are uninhabitable, nations are warring over newly ice-free land in Antarctica, and orchids grow in upstate New York. An invasive alien plant, which lives on ultraviolet and emits cyanide, is spreading across the continent. Taxpayers have been replaced by taxplayers, as the Balkanized government supports itself with revenue from casino games. Genetic manipulation is the norm—most of Jenny's friends have facial features cultured from Paul Newman.

Jenny herself is from a rich, political family, related both to the legendary Kennedys and the leaders of the State of Cuba. She lives almost constantly in the public eye; what she says, wears, and eats are all determined by the polls. In this world, debates between Presidential candidates are considered less important than those between their spouses, and untied shoelaces can lose an election.

On top of all this, there's been a revolution in technology: biology, not physics, is the root of most products in Jenny's world. Cultured amyloids are the building blocks, with DNA providing the blueprints for everything from chairs and tables to houses to space habitats.

This kind of science fiction—where the reader is thrown, sink-or-swim, into a wild and unfamiliar world—is enormously hard to carry off. The writer must be a master juggler, keeping all the balls moving and all the plates spinning while simultaneously maintaining the patter that keeps the audience interested. One slip—one plot complication too many, one weird detail in excess, one too many bizarre characters—and the whole thing can come crashing down in a wreckage of reader confusion.

Not to worry, though—Slonczewski is a master juggler indeed, and The Highest Frontier is great science fiction.

Let's just hope it's not another decade until her next book.

* * * *

Fuzzy Ergo Sum

Wolfgang Diehr

Pequod Press, 299 pages, $38.00 (hardcover)

Kindle: $7.99 (e-book)

Series: Fuzzies 6

ISBN: 978-0-937912-11-9

Genre: Alien Beings

* * * *

Lately there's been something of a vogue for posthumous sequels to classic SF works. (This sort of thing happens every few decades, often when the economy turns sour and publishers are looking for “sure things” that don't require massive payments to living big-name authors.)

H. Beam Piper's original 1962 novel Little Fuzzy is one of the most beloved books in the field. And since Piper and his heirs weren't careful about the arcane copyright registration procedures of the time, the book is now in the public domain (i.e.: anyone can write a sequel without owing Piper's heirs one red cent).

This isn't the first Little Fuzzy sequel; the history of the series is convoluted at best. Piper himself wrote one direct sequel, Fuzzy Sapiens (1964). Much later, Ace Books continued the series with Fuzzy Bones by William Tuning (1981). Golden Dream: A Fuzzy Odyssey by Ardath Mayhar (1982) retells the original story from the viewpoint of the alien Fuzzies.

Subsequently, a lost manuscript for a third Fuzzy novel was discovered among Piper's papers; it was published in 1984 as Fuzzies and Other People. The events of this book contradicted those in Fuzzy Bones (of course), so the latter book is considered as part of an alternate universe.

To make matters even more confusing, by the time you read this Tor will have published Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi, which is supposed to “reboot” the whole Little Fuzzy universe and start over from the beginning.

And where does Fuzzy Ergo Sum fit in? It picks up where Fuzzies and Other People left off, continuing the story of explorer Jack Halloway (who discovered the Fuzzies), CEO Victor Grego, and Little Fuzzy himself. It's been a quiet few years on the peaceful planet Zarathustra, but now a new bureaucrat touches down on an unexplained mission. Then Zarathustra's worst criminal escapes from jail, the Chief Prosecutor is kidnapped, and the Fuzzies and their human friends have more than enough problems to deal with.

Of all the commissioned sequels, Wolfgang Diehr's most captures the voice of H. Beam Piper. One gets the feeling that he is a fan of Piper, and he's also a good enough writer to pull off the right mix of homage and originality.

At $38.00 the hardcover is pretty steep, but the e-book is well worth the asking price.

Well, that's it for this issue. Until next time, may all your encounters with robots—giant or otherwise—be good ones.

* * * *

Don Sakers is the author of Dance for the Ivory Madonna and A Voice in Every Wind. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.

Copyright © 2011 Don Sakers

[Back to Table of Contents]

Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

Dear Analog and Mr. DeLancey,

After reading the short story “Julie Is Three” in the March issue, I was compelled to write. While I appreciated Mr. DeLancey's compassionate approach to the subject of Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder), I wish more care had been taken to present accurate details of the disorder and its treatment. “Julie Is Three” perpetuates several misconceptions surrounding DID.

DID is referred to as a “delusion” by the main character, Julie's doctor, several times. The head doctor, while trying to get Julie out of his facility says, “. . . I think she can be treated with standard pharmaceuticals. Thorazine will kill those other voices.” These things make it seem as if DID is a psychotic condition, which it is not. Mr. DeLancey's main character did explain several times that DID is caused by trauma, however, those explanations were not enough to override the perception of psychosis the rest of the story provides.

I could try to take on the idea that “Julie Is Three” was written to give a different, less horrific explanation for how someone could have a condition similar to DID without surviving the kind of trauma precipitating dissociative disorders. In that case, I welcome the fiction, because the events that usually trigger dissociation are tragic. Even then, I find myself feeling as if there wasn't enough fact checking to avoid spreading false truths. By simply researching established sites online devoted to trauma and dissociation such as www.isst-d.org and www.sidran. org, you can find FAQ's explaining that while there might be some genetic vulnerability to dissociation, dissociative disorders are not inherited genetically. So if this was going to be the angle of the story, there needed to be more to explain the difference between the real disorder and what the author was inventing. Otherwise, I feel it continues to promote another fallacy.

Although people believe DID and other dissociative disorders are extraordinarily rare, they are not. In the story, Julie's doctor describes DID as, “So rare I was never really convinced it exists.” Again, just a little research www.isst-d.org/education/faq-dissociation.htmprev www.sidran.org/ sub.cfm?contentID=75&sectionid=4 reveals the accepted numbers. Then, if you think not only of the number of people who actually suffer with these conditions, but everyone in their lives touched by their suffering and all of the professionals who treat them, the number of people who are affected multiplies rapidly. The creative world has long used these disorders to provide a plot device, without understanding or accuracy, despite their existence in our society. The people struggling to heal, family and friends that care for them, and the professionals who devote their life's work to that healing would appreciate thoughtful, insightful stories, such as Mr. DeLancey's, so much more if those stories were less misguided in their handling of the subject matter.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth B.

* * * *

The author replies:

Thank you very much for your thoughtful note. A few clarifications in response might be valuable. Please note that the character Julie is not a person with DID—she is rather given a potential diagnosis of DID which turns out to be wrong. Her multiple identities are not only more extensive than arises in DID—included handedness and language ability—but are congenital and enabled by an inherited trait. Julie's aunt makes this clear with her hypothesis that their special capability is a mutation shared in an extended family. Also, Dr. Stevens is something of a villain in the story, eager to bludgeon all perceived problems with the quick fix of a psychopharmacological hammer, and so his suggestion that Julie be treated with Thorazine was certainly not meant to represent good science. Part of the drama of the story is Dr. Everly's struggle to spare Julie this potential mistreatment.

However, you do us all a service to remind us that Thorazine would not be an appropriate treatment for DID. Finally, in my own experience as an academic, I have colleagues who are psychologists who have doubts about the accuracy and prevalence of DID diagnoses, especially given the increases in these diagnoses in recent years. I have no opinion on either, but thought that it was not implausible that some psychiatrist might consider “true” DID rare.

* * * *

Stan,

I just started reading “Jak and the Benastalk” [July/August 2011] by Richard Lovett, and I'm about up to the part where war breaks out. However, I'm not writing about the story so much as about some thoughts I've had from time to time, relating to “beanstalks” (by whatever name any given story uses for them). This is the first story I've read that contains any indication that someone else has thought similar thoughts and that impelled me to write this message.

This story seems to be somewhat of an exception to the general rule of such stories, that the beanstalk is simply the setting in which the story occurs, and very little thought is given to the nature of what a beanstalk would have to be, and do, in order to conform to the laws of physics. The assumption in most such stories seems to be that the beanstalk is anchored to the earth at its lower terminus (somehow)— and extends vertically to its upper terminus which is at the height of geosynchronicity (roughly 23,000 miles).

A little thought on the subject reveals that such a beanstalk is impossible. Since the majority of the beanstalk would be at lower altitudes, those parts would not be revolving fast enough for their tangential velocity to overcome their weight, and the whole thing would be dragged down by its own weight and collapse. Thus the first condition for a stable beanstalk, dictated by the physics of the system, is that the center of mass of the beanstalk has to be at the geosynchronous height. This further implies, as the story alludes to, that the beanstalk must extend beyond that height by an amount sufficient to exert upward forces, great enough to support the lower portions ("upper” and “lower” here refer to the relationship to the geocynchronous height). The amount of increased height would depend on, among other factors, the distribution of the mass in the upper portion of the beanstalk.

My reason for writing this message, therefore, is to suggest that a science fact article on the physics of beanstalks would be a very interesting and pertinent topic for inclusion in Analog. It would seem that Mr. Lovett has either worked out at least some of the physics of beanstalks or, perhaps knows of a published article on the subject, that could be referenced.

There is clearly more physics that needs to be described than meets the eye, and several questions present themselves. For example, one further point that occured to me is that the beanstalk is anchored to be geosynchronous at two points: at the point of attachment to the earth, and at the geosynchrounous height. Since the beanstalk necessarily extends beyond the goesynchronous height, that upper portion is not anchored to anything, and has to be compared to a condition where it was free orbiting. If it were in free orbit, it would be revolving around the earth more slowly than the geosynchronous point. Therefore in order to remain attached to the beanstalk it would have to be dragged around by the beanstalk at a speed higher than it's natural orbital speed. Since action begets reaction, the upper portion would therefore tend to pull sideways on the beanstalk, keeping it from being vertical, and the beanstalk could not simply be vertical but would be curved in the trailing direction. An interesting and important question that arises is, what is the nature of the curvature of the beanstalk, that allows it to remain stable? A related question comes from the realization that this curvature would add length to beanstalk; how much extra length would be necessary (ciritcal to construction and also to moving around inside it, especially as regards taking people and material to the geosynchronous height and beyond)?

Other questions that arise include considerations of strength of materials, both in compression (for the earth anchor to support 23,000 miles of weight above it) and in tension (for the upper portions to hold up the geosynchrounous point)?

These qualitative considerations are about as far as I've been able to take my thinking on the subject. I'm hoping that either Mr. Lovett or some other reader could address these questions, and (hopefully) write an article extending my thoughts to other aspects of the physics of beanstalk construction and operation, including some quantitative estimates of the critical parameters.

Howard Mark

Suffern, NY

* * * *

The author replies:

These are interesting, insightful comments. “Jak” was based on my own background (B.S. in astrophysics, and lots of science writing). I also read an article long ago, possibly in Analog in the 1970s or ‘80s, about beanstalk construction.

To address just a couple of points, the tethers at the ground exist primarily to keep the lower end from drifting. But you also want a slight outward balance on the stalk as a whole so that the failure mode is for it to go “up,” not drag, whiplike, across the ground. Also it's presumably necessary to keep some tension in the lower part of the stalk, to keep it taut.

As for materials, I've not read the latest estimates on what it would take to make one of these with existing materials. In the story,. I referred to the stalk as being made of “reinforced nanospun filament,” a nice tech-babble term for “unknonium.” The stronger the material, the less mass it requires, and the more feasible the entire project becomes.

The curve in the upper reaches is an intriguing thought. All the physics discussions I've seen treat the beanstalk as a rigid body, which it obviously can't be. But with the counterweight properly on station, the vector forces should downward, not a drag. As I understand the physics, what speeds the counterweight up form its free orbit is the force pulling down on it—the equivalent to increasing the tug of gravity on it to make it orbit faster. Any physicists out there? Is this correct?

As for the story, it doesn't matter all that much. Jak's journey is feasible, given the spacing of rest stops and the ability for resupply. Once he's climbed the first 100 kilometers and gotten in shape, he can do it for years (barring accident or illness).

[Back to Table of Contents]

Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS
by Anthony Lewis

25-27 November 2011

CHAMBANACON 41 (Midwest relaxacon, gaming, art, etc. conference) at Holiday Inn Hotel and Convention Center, Urbana, IL. Guests of Honor: Geoffrey Landis and Mary Turzillo; Fan Guest of Honor: Van Tilberg; TM: Tim Smith. Membership: $50 until 12 November 2011, $55 at the door; children 6-11 half price; under 6 free. Info: www.chambanacon.org/; Brenda@chambanacon.org; 368 W. Main Street, Danville, IL 46122-1622.

25-27 November 2011

LOSCON 38 (Los Angeles science fiction conference) at LAX Marriott, Los Angeles, CA. Writer guest of honor: John DeChancie; Science guest of honor: Rick Searfoss, Colonel, USAF ret; Artist guest of honor: Aldo Spadoni; Fan guest of honor: John Hertz. Membership: $45 until 31 October 2011, $50 until 24 November 2011, $55 at the door. Info www.loscon.org, chairloscon38@yahoo.com, Loscon Chair, 11513 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91602

2-4 December 2011

SMOFCON 29 (SF convention-runners conference) at Park Plaza Victoria Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Membership: Info: www. smofcon29.org/; info@smofcon29.org. Check website for directions on tendering payment for membership.

30 August-3 September

2012 CHICON 7 (70th World Science Fiction Convention) at Hyatt Regency Chicago, Illinois. Writer Guest of Honor: Mike Resnick; Artist Guest of Honor: Rowena Morrill; Astronaut Guest of Honor: Story Musgrave; Fan Guest of Honor: Peggy Rae Sapienza; Agent Guest of Honor: Jane Frank; TM: John Scalzi. Membership from 1 October 2010 until some later date (see website for latest details): Attending through Spring 2011: Adult (22+): $125; Young Adult (17-21): $100; Child (5-16): $75; Kid-in-tow (0-4): FREE; Supporting: $50. [Ages as of 30 August 2012]. 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: chicon7.org/; info@chicon.org; Post Office Box 13, Skokie, IL 60076.

* * * *

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 © 2011 Anthony Lewis

Visit www.analogsf.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.