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Cover art for “The Sultan of the Clouds, by Jeroen Advocaat

CONTENTS

Department: 2010 READERS’ AWARDS by Sheila Williams

Department: REFLECTIONS: CALLING DR. ASIMOV! by Robert Silverberg

Department: THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE: SCIENCE FICTION AND NON-WESTERN/NON-ANGLOPHONE COUNTRIES by Aliette de Bodard

Novelette: BACKLASH by Nancy Fulda

Short Story: THE PALACE IN THE CLOUDS by Eugene Mirabelli

Poetry: THE NOW WE ALMOST INHABIT by Roger Dutcher and Robert Frazier

Novelette: WHEAT RUST by Benjamin Crowell

Poetry: EGG PROTECTION by Ruth Berman

Short Story: FOR WANT OF A NAIL by Mary Robinette Kowal

Department: NEXT ISSUE

Novella: THE SULTAN OF THE CLOUDS by Geoffrey A. Landis

Department: ON BOOKS by Paul Di Filippo

Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

* * * *

Asimov’s Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 34, No. 9. Whole Nos. 416, September 2010. GST #R123293128. Published monthly except for two combined double issues in April/May and October/November by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One year subscription $55.90 in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. Address for subscription and all other correspondence about them, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Allow 6 to 8 weeks for change of address. Address for all editorial matters: Asimov’s Science Fiction, 267 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10007. Asimov’s Science Fiction is the registered trademark of Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. (c) 2010 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. All rights reserved, printed in the U.S.A. Protection secured under the Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. Please visit our website, www.asimovs.com, for information regarding electronic submissions. All manual submissions must include a self-addressed, stamped envelope; the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER, send change of address to Asimov’s Science Fiction, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. In Canada return to Worldcolor St. Jean, 800 Blvd. Industrial, St. Jean, Quebec J3B 8G4.

ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION

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(Display and Classified Advertising)

Peter Kanter: Publisher

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Isaac Asimov: Editorial Director (1977-1992)

* * * *

Stories from Asimov’s have won 50 Hugos and 27 Nebula Awards, and our editors have received 18 Hugo Awards for Best Editor.

* * * *

Please do not send us your manuscript until you’ve gotten a copy of our guidelines. Look for them online at www.asimovs.com or send a self-addressed, stamped business-size (#10) envelope, and a note requesting this information. Write “manuscript guidelines” in the bottom left-hand corner of the outside envelope. We prefer electronic submissions, but the address for manual submissions and for all editorial correspondence is Asimov’s Science Fiction, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352. While we’re always looking for new writers, please, in the interest of time-saving, find out what we’re loking for, and how to prepare it, before submitting your story.

Department: 2010 READERS’ AWARDS by Sheila Williams

This year’s Readers’ Award ceremony seemed almost like a replay of the Dell Magazines’ Award. Once again, I arrived in spectacularly sunny Orlando, Florida, but this time I took a shuttle bus sixty miles east to Cocoa Beach for the annual Nebula Awards Weekend. On Friday, I had the thrill of a lifetime when I got to accompany many of the Nebula finalists to the Visitor Complex at the Kennedy Space Center and watch the space shuttle Atlantis lift off for it’s ultimate voyage to the International Space Station. I’m sure I’ll revisit that experience in a future editorial.

Of course, our annual Readers’ Award brunch was a lot of fun, too. While we would have loved it if all of our winners had been in attendance at the ceremony on Saturday morning at the Cocoa Beach Hilton, we were delighted to see that half of our winners could make it. Attendees included Will McIntosh, the exhausted father of sixteen-month-old twins, whose short story “Bridesicle” was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the upcoming Hugo Award, as well as the winner of our Readers’ Award; Ted Kosmatka, whose 2008 novelette, “Divining Light,” was a finalist for the Nebula Award at the same time that his and Michael Poore’s wrenching 2009 novelette “Blood Dauber” was picking up the Readers’ Award; and Bryan D. Dietrich, the author of “Edgar Allan Poe,” this year’s winning poem.

Alas, perennially favorite author, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, couldn’t be there in person to pick up the award for her poignant novella, “Broken Windchimes,” and neither could our artist, John Picacio, or Ted Kosmatka’s co-author, Michael Poore. Still, we were graced by the presence of some lovely guests. These included Connie Willis, along with her husband Courtney and her daughter Cordelia, and two of our columnists—James Patrick Kelly and Peter Heck. Since we shared the enormous brunch table with Analog’s AnLab winners we were also joined by Stan and Joyce Schmidt, Richard A. Lovett, Carl Frederick, Bud Sparhawk, the artist John Allemand, and other distinguished guests.

I had a great time visiting with everyone, but as always, one of the chief pleasures the Readers’ Award poll brings is the chance to peruse the readers’ comments on the award ballots. Once again, many readers bemoaned the difficulty they had reaching a decision. David Lee Oakes summed up the situation nicely when he wrote, “I have enjoyed another year of wonderful stories in Asimov’s. Fact is, the sci-fi tales of 2009 were so wondrous in the magazine that I found it outright befuddling in selecting which tales I should put on my Readers’ Award ballot. Trust me, it took me a prolonged while to make out this year’s ballot. I thank all the science fiction authors of this mag … for making Asimov’s a super-duper read each year.” Steven Harvey found the short story category particularly vexing. “I try to be as stingy with my ratings throughout the year so as to make my awards choices as easy as possible yet even I awarded twelve ‘five star’ ratings in [this] category and six in the novelette category.” Like several other readers, he added “Norman Spinrad’s article on the death of Thomas Disch was absolutely fascinating and the clear highlight of this year in the nonfiction area. It was top-quality journalism and as far as I’m concerned, could just as easily been published in the New Yorker.”

Although his cover came in fifth, a number of readers commented on how deeply moved they were by Duncan Long’s December illustration. This cover was a reprint of Duncan’s artwork, but it was partly due to these positive comments that I decided to ask the artist for an original piece of art for our April/May issue. I want to thank the voters for putting the idea in my head and for the beautiful piece of art that accompanied Gregory Norman Bossert’s “Union of Soil and Sky” as a result.

While not every story was universally beloved, readers did express a wide-range of favorites. Sherry Haub wrote, “Please keep mixing it up among ‘strange’ like ‘As Women Fight’ by Sara Genge and ‘5,000 Light Years from Birdland’ by Robert Chase; gentler ‘humanist’ like ‘The Consciousness Problem’ by Mary Robinette Kowal and ‘The Bird Painter in the Time of War’ by Carol Emshwiller; coming of age stories like ‘In Their Garden’ by Brenda Cooper, ‘Shoes-to-Run’ by Sara Genge, and ‘Angie’s Errand’ by Nick Wolven; and magical realism like ‘Away from Here’ by Lisa Goldstein. It was also great to find a mystery-thriller within an SF setting. 2009’s stories were way above the average. Keep ‘em coming!” Simon Gasch Trapiella wrote to say, “Even though it didn’t make it to my ballot, I enjoyed R. Garcia’s stories. I’d like to hear more from the Sand Sailor! Ian McHugh’s debut is worth mentioning. His ‘House of Ye’ is very rich in detail, and even though Sara Genge’s works are not really my cup of tea, I must admit her stories are pretty sound. ‘Shoes-to-Run,’ for instance, made for a very good read.”

The battles for first place in cover art and novelette were extremely close. For all the remarks about difficulties with coming to a decision about the short story, the largest point spread between first and second place occurred in this category. Of course, this was also the category with a four-way tie for third place!

We will be celebrating the twenty-fifth Readers’ Award poll at the end of this year. I look forward to reading all your thoughts on our 2010 stories when it comes time to fill out that momentous ballot.

* * * *

Left to right: Bryan D. Dietrich, Will McIntosh, Sheila Williams, and Ted Kosmatka.

Photo by Jane Jewell

* * * *

2010 READERS AWARD WINNERS

BEST NOVELLA

1. BROKEN WINDCHIMES; KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

2. Act One; Nancy Kress

3. The Spires of Denon; Kristine Kathryn Rusch

4. Earth II; Stephen Baxter

5. Pelago; Judith Berman

* * * *

BEST NOVELETTE

1. BLOOD DAUBER; TED KOSMATKA & MICHAEL POORE

2. Soulmates; Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn

3. A Large Bucket and Accidental Mastery of Spacetime;

Benjamin Crowell

4. Lion Walk; Mary Rosenblum

5. SinBad the Sand Sailor; R. Garcia y Robertson

* * * *

BEST SHORT STORY

1. BRIDESICLE; WILL McINTOSH

2. Five Thousand Light-Years from Birdland; Robert R. Chase

3. The Bird Painter in the Time of War; Carol Emshwiller (tie)

3. Away from Here; Lisa Goldstein (tie)

3. Sleepless in the House of Ye; Ian McHugh (tie)

3. The Bride of Frankenstein; Mike Resnick (tie)

* * * *

BEST POEM

1. EDGAR ALLAN POE; BRYAN D. DIETRICH

2. First Beer on Mars; David Lunde

3. They Believed in Fairies During World War One;

Darrell Schweitzer

4. The Last Alchemist; Bruce Boston

5. Small Conquerors; Geoffrey A. Landis

* * * *

BEST COVER

1. SEPTEMBER; JOHN PICACIO

2. July; Thomasz Maronski

3. April/May; Paul Youll

4. March; Donato Giancola

5. December; Duncan Long

Copyright (c) 2010 Sheila Williams

[Back to Table of Contents]

Department: REFLECTIONS: CALLING DR. ASIMOV! by Robert Silverberg

Science fiction has given the world a legion of baaaad robots over the years. Back in the Gernsbackian antiquity of our genre, killer-robot stories were a pulp staple. Abner J. Gelula’s “Automaton” of 1931 portrayed a lustful robot that makes erotic overtures to its creator’s daughter and has to be destroyed. (“With an unusual alacrity, the Iron Man reached out its powerful appendages and held both Martin and the girl in vise-like grips against its metal body.”) In Harl Vincent’s “Rex” (1934), a robot seeks to take over the world. (“Reason told him that the first step to that end must be to take control of mankind and its purposeless affairs. He set the workshop humming in the construction of eleven super-robots, one to be sent to each of the North American cities to organize the lesser robots and take control of the government.”)

Though Isaac Asimov’s robots were supposedly designed to be harmless, there’s a dangerously disobedient one in his “Little Lost Robot” (1947). (“We have one Nestor that’s definitely unbalanced, eleven more that are potentially so, and sixty-two normal robots that are being subjected to an unbalanced enviroment.”) Clifford D. Simak’s “Skirmish” (1950) shows the Earth invaded by extraterrestrial robots that are able to awaken consciousness in our small machines, sewing machines and typewriters and the like, so that we find ourselves surrounded by metallic enemies on all sides. (“The end could be predicted, with relentless, patient machines tracking down and killing the last of humankind, wiping out the race.”) Philip K. Dick’s “The Defenders” (1953) portrays the world made uninhabitable by a Soviet-American war, with the human survivors living in subterranean sanctuaries and the surface occupied only by military robots, who refuse to let us come back up after detente is reached by the warring nations. (“Now the end is in sight,” one of the robots declares: “a world without war.”) Harry Harrison’s “The War with the Robots” (1962) offers a variation on the same theme, with the robots on the surface carrying on war against each other while confining humans to the underground refuges to which they have fled.

There’s more, much more. The monstrous, terrifying computer of Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (1967). (“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE.”) The immensely intelligent telepathic computer of A.E. van Vogt’s “Fulfillment” (1951). (“I shall be, not a slave, but a partner with Man.”) The aerial spy-robots of Robert Sheckley’s “Watchbird” (1953), which are so efficient that an even more powerful mechanical creature has to be sent aloft to prey on them, with ultimately dire consequences for its makers. (“The armored murder machine had learned a lot in a few days. Its sole function was to kill.”) I had a few shots at the theme myself, as my story “The Iron Chancellor” (1958), in which a slightly overweight family brings in a robot to enforce dietary restrictions; the program malfunctions and they discover that they are slowly being starved to death.

Even when a science fictional robot is portrayed as being sympathetic, as in Eando Binder’s 1938 “I, Robot” (not to be confused with the much later Asimov book of the same name, which got that title over Isaac’s objections), the robot sometimes does unintentional damage, as when Binder’s robot tries to rescue a drowning girl. (“I managed to grasp one of her arms and pull her up. I could feel the bones of her thin little wrist crack. I had forgotten my strength.”)

Well, all that’s just science fiction. There weren’t any robots when those stories were written, and, since all stories need drama and suspense, the menace of the robot served nicely as a scary plot device. But we have lived on into an era when robots are all over the place—not the clanking two-legged mechanical critters of so many SF tales, but robots all the same, machines that perform a host of functions that once were handled by human beings. Robots sort the mail, defuse bombs, trundle down office hallways carrying packages, bustle around in houses gobbling up dust and terrifying house cats. Robot planes drop missiles on terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. New uses for robots emerge every day. They are being employed increasingly in delicate manufacturing operations, in surgery, in all sorts of areas where more-than-human keenness of eye and steadiness of hand are required.

Indeed we have more robots among us already than we tend to realize, and more are to come. We also have a great many lawyers in our midst. And the two groups are shortly going to be on a collision course. A warning about the legal problems that widespread use of robots will pose has come from M. Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society:

“These are devices that don’t have a predetermined usage; they’re not toasters. There’s a growing concern now about robot ethics.”

Robot ethics! Oh, mother, I really have lived into the twenty-first century!

Legal cases involving robots have been turning up for more than a decade. Pacific Bell, which is now part of AT&T, used Zippy, a robot, to carry mail around in one of its Northern California buildings. In 1997 a woman sued, claiming that Zippy had run over her foot and then knocked her into a filing cabinet. She collected an undisclosed amount.

But that’s an old-fashioned kind of accident—a blundering machine slamming into someone. Consider a more complex situation that’s probably just around the corner: malicious kids hack into a house that uses a robot cleaning system and reprogram the robot to smash dishes and break furniture. If the hackers are caught and sued, but turn out not to have any assets, isn’t it likely that the lawyers will go after the programmer who designed it or the manufacturer who built it? In our society, the liability concept is upwardly mobile, searching always for the deepest pocket.

It isn’t even necessary to conjure up malicious hackers. Robots can make trouble all by themselves. “These are machines that may not be intelligent, but are increasingly autonomous,” says another Stanford scholar, Paul Saffo. “They do things without being told.” Suppose a robot designed to grade exams or term papers goes wonky and erases all the students’ work: who covers the cost of re-testing everybody? What if a robot air controller blows a circuit and decides that down is up? Or a robot surgeon loses track of which is the appendix and which is the pancreas? Et cetera. Even the best-designed robot could go bad in this imperfect world of ours, and Somebody Will Have To Pay For It. And so we stand at the threshold of a wonderful new era for the liability lawyers.

Stanford’s Calo sees potential problems for the United States because of our highly evolved litigation system. With robot lawsuits running to the millions or even billions cropping up everywhere, will vulnerable corporations here want to risk investing large sums in robot development? It may be more prudent for them to do their work overseas. “If other countries have a higher bar for litigation, they’ll leapfrog right over us,” Calo says. That may be true; but, as I will note in a moment, the threat of robot-liability litigation may not be such a terrible thing. I’d love to know what Dr. Asimov would say about that. No science fiction writer ever gave more thought to the dangers robots might present than Isaac Asimov. Isaac, one of the gentlest of men, hated the pulp cliche of the menacing robot—what he called the “Frankenstein complex.” (Man creates robot, robot kills man.) In the very first of his many robot stories (“Robbie,” 1940) he set out to depict a robot that, he said, “was wisely used, that was not dangerous, and that did the job it was supposed to do.” Over the next few years he gradually evolved what he called the Three Laws of Robotics, first explicitly stated in a 1942 story, laws which he argued would need to be programmed into all robots in order to make them acceptable to the public: 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

All well and good, and modern-day robot designers are quite aware of them. (And often name their companies or their devices after counterparts to be found in Asimov stories, or even after Isaac himself.) But Isaac was a shrewd storyteller, who knew that kindly robots did not make for interesting plot material, and over more than thirty years he wrote a long string of robot stories and novels that pointed out all sorts of ways that the Three Laws could be evaded or circumvented by a sufficiently advanced robot. 1947’s “Little Lost Robot” is a good example: the need arises to build a robot that is not fully governed by the First Law, and the cunning robot then manages to find ways around the other two laws until it is at last outsmarted by the formidable roboticist Susan Calvin. In “Lenny” (1957), Isaac shows how a robot that literally does not know its own strength could violate the First Law despite all its programming. He wrote many other ingenious stories that tested the robotic laws in various ways.

In a 1947 essay on his own Three Laws, he wrote, “Are safeguards sufficient? Consider the effort that is put into making the automobile safe—yet automobiles still kill fifty thousand Americans a year. Consider the effort that is put into making banks secure—yet there are still bank robberies in a steady drumroll. Consider the effort that is put into making computer programs secure—yet there is the growing danger of computer fraud.”

He assumed—correctly, so far—that when the time came to build robots, the designers would build the Three Laws into them. That has turned out to be true, more or less. But the robots we have today are relatively simple devices. As they grow more complex, as they certainly will, it may prove necessary or at least desirable to cut some corners where the Three Laws are concerned. The era that has given us vast Ponzi schemes and strange mortgage hijinks and all too many other examples of moral slippage will surely give us non-Asimovian robots, too, exposing us to all the risks that those scary old pulp stories liked to tell us about. And then the trial lawyers will pounce. I’m not fond of a lot of the legal gymnastics that go on in courtrooms today, but it may be that the threat of those lawsuits will actually be a useful governing factor as the era of robots unfolds. All machines, from thermostats on up, need a governing device to control their functions. The avid liability lawyers may well serve that purpose for the robots. Thus it may be that a Fourth Law of Robotics is needed:

Never fail to make use of the Three Laws—or you’ll pay a high price for it in court.

Copyright (c) 2010 Robert Silverberg

* * * *

Asimov’s Science Fiction Salutes the Winners of the 2009 Nebula Awards

—

Best Novel

The Windup Girl

Paolo Bacigalupi

—

Best Novella

“The Women of Nell Gwynne’s”

Kage Baker

—

Best Novelette

“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast”

Eugie Foster

—

Best Short Story

“Spar”

Kij Johnson

—

Grand Master

Joe Haldeman

—

Author Emeritus

Neal Barrett, Jr.

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[Back to Table of Contents]

Department: THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE: SCIENCE FICTION AND NON-WESTERN/NON-ANGLOPHONE COUNTRIES by Aliette de Bodard

Last spring, Norman Spinrad’s April/May On Books column “Third World Worlds,” stirred up a good deal of controversy on internet blogs and twitter. Since Asimov’s is vast and contains a multitude of opinions, we asked Aliette de Bodard to address some of the arguments raised by the book review. Aliette is a half-French, half-Vietnamese author who lives in Paris in a flat with more computers than she really needs. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction. Her publications include stories in Realms of Fantasy and Interzone; and her Aztec fantasy Servant of the Underworld was released in 2010 by Angry Robot/HarperCollins. Aliette’s most recent story for Asimov’s, “The Jaguar House, in Shadow,” appeared in our July issue. She responds to Norman’s essay with a thought experiment that may contain some controversial opinions of its own.

* * * *

A common criticism leveled at science fiction is that it is dominated by the Western world, leaving little space for other countries. How much of this is true? Is SF being written outside the Western world, and what do those markets look like? In this article, I will trace the links between science fiction and Western countries. I will show that though the field appears overwhelmingly Western Anglophone, science fiction is being produced in many countries over the world, with different traditions and idiosyncrasies.

As its name suggests, science fiction is inextricably tied with science; and likewise, the beginnings of the genre’s history can be found in the beginnings of the discipline of science, giving the genre itself a distinctly Western flavor.

It is generally agreed that science as a discipline began somewhere in the seventeenth century, when we moved from a purely empirical approach (do this, and this might result) to an analytical one (do this, and this will result every time, and for such and such reasons). Though many scientific discoveries were made elsewhere than in the West (gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press in China, to cite only three), the real blossoming of science started in Europe, and remained there for the next few centuries.

An important turning point in the history of science is the nineteenth century, when the scientist became an engineer: no longer a savant, but a man who applied science to solve the problems put to him. This was the Second Industrial Revolution, in which the mass manufacture of steel transformed the face of the world; it was also the time of the great colonial empires, where Europe and the US rose to dominate the world, leaving their mark on regions ranging from Latin America to Asia. It is worth noting that the nineteenth century marks a shift of paradigms: it is the century when the notion of “progress” becomes important, where people in general become aware of science as a tool to improve mankind all over the world.

Given all of this, it is not surprising that science fiction (in the way we usually mean it—I will come back to this later), a genre steeped in progress and what it would all mean for the future, is so deeply Western in its beginnings. Works of genre in this time period include H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (a tale of an Englishman going forward into the future) and Jules Verne’s novels (meant both as thrilling adventures and didactic books, where it is common to find an entire chapter of scientific infodumping).

Of all the countries that might have challenged the Western domination, the biggest ones—China and Russia—were mired in various political and economic difficulties that prevented them from ascending as world powers. There is, however, one notable exception to the Western domination of science.

Japan reached a crisis point in the second half of the nineteenth century. Beset by foreigners and in danger of being swallowed politically, the country found itself a new leader in the person of the Meiji Emperor, and a new government that believed that the key to the Japanese future lay in the understanding of Western science and methods. To that end, the Iwakura Mission toured Europe and the US for two years, studying the Western system. In the wake of this, commissions were set up to decide which parts of the Western modernization were in keeping with the Japanese spirit, and which needed to be modified.

Therefore, it is not surprising that Japan has a history of science fiction almost as old as that of the West. The scientific romances of Wells and Verne find their counterparts in those of Shuno Oshikawa and other writers of the era.[1],[2]

Thus, from the outset, science fiction was linked to scientific nations and since scientific nations are also the most wealthy ones, SF has remained the preserve of the developed countries.

But things are changing.

The domination of the Western world might have seemed incontestable at the end of WWII, but the second half of the twentieth century saw the erosion of that. The former colonial empires crumbled, as the countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia asserted their independence from their Western masters. Many of those newborn nations regrouped under the heading of “Third World,” unaligned with either the US or the USSR and refusing to play a part in the Cold War. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, some of those developing nations set about filling the gap between them and the developed world, and some did so with tremendous amounts of success (for instance, the Asian Tigers: Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and the former territory of Hong Kong).

And with the technological leaps came science fiction. In countries all over the world, SF markets have emerged. The point of this article not being to systematically catalogue every country in the world, I will focus here on a few significant examples. (should you want more information, I will point you instead to The World SF Blog[3] and Concatenations[4], among other fine resources.)

The Chinese market is possibly the biggest in the world (helped, of course, by the fact that the Chinese population is also the largest in the world) and science fiction is a genre very much encouraged by the government to introduce science to readers. Science Fiction World, the major SF magazine, has a circulation of 130,000 (and a peak one of 300,000), impressive when compared to the 30,000 or so of the bestselling American magazine. Unlike in the West where SF fandom is graying, the majority of SF readers are teenagers: this gives the genre dynamism, but also means that the SF-reading crowd has low purchasing power. (the situation is a bit different for fantasy, which is more popular). Famous SF authors include Ye Yonglie, credited with writing the first SF novel after the Cultural Revolution, Little Smart Traveling in the Future (1978), and Liu Cixin, who won China’s Galaxy Award eight times (as of 2007.)[5],[6]

Brazil has been producing science fiction since the sixties. The production is small compared to US standards: around forty books a year, plus the stories and related articles appearing in the fanzines. Nevertheless, there is a strong tradition of genre, which has started taking a look at Brazilian issues like dictatorship and Brazilian identity. Authors such as Ana Cristina Rodrigues, Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro (known for his alternate histories such as the recent Xochiquetzal) and Jorge Luis Calife (who writes hard science fiction), are promoting a broader range of outlooks on science fiction. The first Brazilian steampunk anthology, Steampunk, included stories by writers such as Flavio Medeiros, Fabio Fernandes, and Jacques Barcia (the latter two being also published in English-language venues such as Jetse de Vries’ Shine anthology).[7]

Similarly, in the wake of the end of apartheid, South Africa is playing host to a burgeoning science fiction market. Magazines such as Something Wicked (sadly defunct at the time of writing, though there are plans to bring it back in a digital edition) and zines like Probe (published by the Science Fiction Club of South Africa) have showcased short stories of note. Meanwhile, some South African writers (mostly white and English-speaking so far) are being published internationally: examples include Dave Freer (who has written solo as well as collaborating with Eric Flint and Mercedes Lackey) and Lauren Beukes (whose novel Moxyland, set in the future of the country, was first published in South Africa and subsequently reprinted by HarperCollins imprint Angry Robot).[8],[9],[10]

As we look at those other markets, we have to be aware, though, that in many countries books remain a luxury. Aside from a basic literacy problem (many countries in Asia or Africa have a literacy rate under 70 percent, unlike the 97 percent or more of the Western countries), there is the question of novel prices and novel availability. For instance, in India, the price of a paperback is one hundred to three hundred rupees (two to seven dollars, roughly), which can be the daily earnings of a farmer in a village. Pirated and cheap second-hand copies can be found easily, but mainly for successful English-language novels. For the other languages of India and more obscure works, this is not the case. Compare this situation with the US, where a mass market paperback costs as little as 7 or 8 dollars with a median salary of around 170 dollars a day for a full-time active worker, and it is clear that the audience in a position to read books will not be the same in both countries. In one, everyone would have access to books, though not everyone will wish to buy them; in the other, buying books will have to take the place of a necessity, and thus literature will remain the province of a certain elite. In Brazil in the late eighties, though most people were literate, only about 20 percent of the population consumed books on a regular basis. (Brazil is not helped in this regard by the lack of mass-market paperbacks.)

A side effect is that the literary market will often be small, and that the notion of genre itself might well be a luxury. The classification of books can only work when you have enough books to slot into categories. So there might not be a science fiction genre per se, but that does not mean elements of science fiction are altogether absent from the literary scene.

So far, so good—but, if all those countries have science fiction, why do we know so little about it? We might argue that they are small markets for an elite, and that this small scale prevents them from exporting their SF abroad. And this might seem the case—except that more developed countries such as France or Japan do not really seem to have much success exporting their SF, either. Most English SF readers would be hard-pressed to name the luminaries of the French field; most French, Japanese, or Chinese SF readers will know who Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke or even Robert J. Sawyer are, and what they have written.

Starting from this observation, it is easy to draw conclusions that might not be the right ones. Over the internet, there have been several blog posts debating why it was that English might be the language of science fiction, somehow more suited to it than French or Chinese or Japanese. Explanations range from genre history—today’s SF descends from the US Golden Age—to linguistic ones—just as English is somehow the natural language for science, so it is the natural language for writing SF.

In the light of what I have expounded above, this natural affinity does not appear to be the case. There are thriving SF communities in places where English is nowhere near an official language; and those who claim scientific words are somehow more suited to English forget that those words mostly come from Latin and Greek, and can be translated into most Western tongues—and adapted into any of the eminently flexible and creative Asian languages.

The problem is not one of available materials—the problem is one of visibility.

If an Anglophone Westerner were to walk into the speculative fiction section of any French bookshop, they would see many familiar names, all of them English-speakers. And yet France is slightly less inclined to translate than other countries: only 14.6 percent of our literature is translated. About 60 percent of these works are translated from English[11]. Worldwide, the situation is even more accentuated: 50 percent of the books translated in the world are from English into various languages—but only 3 percent of translated books are translated into English, and of those 3 percent, very few make it into the US. The rate of translations to published books in the US is usually around 0.2 percent[12]. This is abysmal by any standard.

The problem, thus, is asymmetric: there is plenty of SF being translated from English into other languages, but little of it that makes its way into Western Anglophone countries. (the UK genre is marginally better than the US in that regard, with the recent efforts of Gollancz to bring French and Russian speculative fiction into the fold.)

Why is that? An explanation can be offered by taking historical parallels. At the time of the Tang dynasty (seventh to tenth century AD), China exported its culture across to Japan and Korea: aside from the obvious impact of Buddhism, Chinese influence can clearly be seen in the Japanese art of the period, which emulated China—and, of course, in the Japanese kanji, which are Chinese ideograms. Back in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, China similarly exported its ideology and administrative system to Vietnam, centering the state around Confucian ideology and mandarins. But China itself took precious little in, either from Japan or Vietnam.

And, back in the eighteenth century, French was the diplomatic language in most European courts, and French-style meals the epitome of refinement.

The common point between those situations is that the countries exporting their cultures were all economically or politically strong at the time. Associated with this is an aura subtler than a military invasion: that of cultural influence. Not only is the dominant culture exported, but people in the non-dominant countries will strive to imitate it with various degrees of success, sometimes denigrating their own culture in the process. For most of the twentieth century (which coincides with most of the history of speculative fiction), the US has been the dominant world power, and therefore US—and by extension Western Anglophone—speculative fiction is the one that determines the market; the one that is talked about, the one that is emulated, the one that is translated and exported.

A frequent side effect of cultural domination is isolationism, especially after the period of growth is over: the paradigm is not voiced in so many words, but the implication is that if a culture can be so widely adopted, it is because it is somehow superior. Therefore, the dominant culture tends to make far fewer efforts to import anything from abroad (late Imperial China is pretty much a textbook example of this).

To a large extent, this means that what we consider international SF today, what we think of as good stories, as unforgettable narratives, are in fact shaped by Western Anglophone culture—and above all by US culture, just as our movie-making is permeated by Hollywood, and our television is strongly influenced by American programs.

Does this make SF in other countries derivative? We might argue at first sight that it does. Many of the tropes of science fiction are Western or even American: the biggest one, arguably, is the scientific approach itself, which as we have seen originates from the West, and has often been imported wholesale (countries such as Japan are an amazing exception). But there are others, like the exploration of space and stories of first contact, which in classic SF are a thinly-disguised retread of either the colonization process or the American conquest of the West.

But the effect is more pernicious yet: the grammar of storytelling itself, the SF novel, whether it be adventure or literary stories, is very much a product of its time and place. The novel, and especially the commercial novel as we understand it today, is a Western construct. To take only one example, even late Chinese prose literature is radically different from what was developing in the Western world in the same time period. The great novels of the Ming and Qing dynasty (fourteenth century to twentieth century) are not plot or character-centered, and do not have a neat, tidy resolution or a climax. Rather, they aim to present a variety of images, themes, and personalities, what sinologist Richard J. Smith[13] calls “infinite overlapping and alternation,” a feeling of endlessness that is not rooted in some underlying meaning of the world. This is a very different aesthetic from Western novels, where a crescendo of plot has to climax and lead into an emotionally charged denouement.

Therefore, to ask of other countries that they write SF novels might seem like a retread of colonialist ethos, forcing alien values onto them.

And yet … and yet, all literature is a dialogue. A dialogue in the sense that the writers are listening to those who have come before; that no SF writer exists in a vacuum, but rather draws inspiration from their predecessors. But it is also a dialogue because any writer will speak in their own voice—a voice that is influenced by their upbringing, the society they live in, the values they hold dear. Even if those other countries had read no other SF but that imported from America—which, as I have shown above, is not true—they would still create a form of science fiction that would be uniquely their own. Japanese SF, as Nick Mamatas points out on the Haikasoru blog[14], harkens back to Van Vogt and Fredric Brown just as much as it draws from other Japanese writers, religious concepts, manga, science….

Because just as if one gives two writers the same plot and ask them to write, one will end up with two very different stories, no two people will read the same book in the same way, and no two people will craft an answer to the same book or author in the same voice. That is even more true when there is a great distance between those two writers. What I, as a Frenchwoman living in France, get out of reading Charles Stross is no doubt very different from what a black Kenyan woman would get out of it. And what I will write is different from what an Asian or an African writer will write.

To take just one example: there is a greater emphasis on the community in Asian countries than there is in the West. As a result, many Asians coming-of-age stories are about learning to fit in and be accepted, rather than forging one’s independence. A story in which a character walks away from his community and his family would be seen as a tragedy, rather than the triumph of turning over a brand new leaf and making a life for oneself—as it might be in the West. Likewise, Asians tend to have a more elastic concept of reality than Westerners. (the idea that science can explain everything is a typically Western one.) pieces such as Liu Cixin’s “From Ball Lightning”[15] or Han Song’s “The Wheel of Samsara”[16] have a peculiar, very fluid concept of reality and memory.

SF, then, is shaped by influences and dialogue, and the voice of SF in different countries is necessarily going to be different. When you throw into the mix the writers of those countries—the Brazilian writers of Brazil, the Chinese writers of China—then you will have voices that are very different from those that come from America or indeed from the western world, and markets that will continue to develop and thrive, and make their own ways with their own voices.

Copyright (c) 2010 Aliette de Bodard

With thanks to Lauren Beukes, Keyan Bowes, Dario Ciriello, Fabio Fernandes, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Rick Novy, and Juliette Wade.

* * * *

References

1 “Japanese History: Meiji Restoration,” Encyclopaedia Britannica 2001 & 2006.

2 C.P. Fitzgerald, A Concise History of East Asia, Penguin Books, 1966.

3 worldsf.wordpress.com

4 www.concatenations.org

5 Jenny Bai and Cecilia Qin, www.concatenation.org/articles/sciencefictionchina.html

6 Sherry Yao, www.concatenation.org/articles/sciencefictionworld2010.html

7 M. Elizabeth Ginway, Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood In The Land Of The Future, Bucknell University Press, 2004.

8 Nnedi Okarafor, www.sfwa.org/2010/03/can-you-define-african-science-fiction

9 Nick Wood, worldsf.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/monday-original-content-sf-in-south-africa-by-nick-wood

10 Nick Wood, “Science Fiction in South Africa,” series of articles from 2005 to 2009 (nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz/index2.htm?sfsa.htm)

11 Centre National du Livre, Le Secteur Du Livre: Chiffres-cles 2008-2009, 2010

12 Natalie Levisalles, “The US market for translations,” Publishing Research Quarterly, June 2004.

13 Richard J. Smith, China’s Cultural Heritage: The Qing Dynasty, 1644-1912, Westview Press, 1994.

14 Nick Mamatas, www.haikasoru.com/science-fiction/world-sf-worth-reading-before-developing-an-opinion

15 Novel excerpt published in World Without Borders, wordswithoutborders.org/article/from-ball-lightning

16 Short story collected in The Apex Book of World SF, ed. Lavie Tidhar, Apex Publications, 2009.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Novelette: BACKLASH by Nancy Fulda

Nancy Fulda has earned a Masters’ Degree in Computer Science, won a trophy in competitive ballroom dance, and sold a number of stories and articles. She lives in northern Germany with her husband and three children. You can find out more about her at www.nancyfulda.com. Nancy’s taut thriller about terrorism and time travel is her first tale for Asimov’s.

A quiet Chinese girl collected our plates after the meal. She placed a hand-wrapped fortune cookie at each setting, gave me a searching look, and vanished into the crowded restaurant.

Clarise nibbled the end off her cookie and withdrew the fortune with the same flamboyant grace she had shown as a child. ” ‘Time is a fickle ally’,” she read. “Confucius must know I turn twenty-three tomorrow.” She feigned indignation, but it couldn’t mask her natural poise. She was resplendent in a tailored business suit, her hair twining free of the twist she wore at the office.

I take Clarise out every year for Valentine’s Day. It started as a consolation prize, a sort of Daddy-daughter date to soothe the pain of her breakup with Billy Sanders. Clarise was thirteen at the time; bookish, awkward, painfully insecure. She had grown into her potential since then. The annual Valentine’s dinner had become the highlight of my year; a chance to snatch back fragments of a happier past, to banter with an exquisite woman as I once bantered with her mother.

Which made the interloper to her left all the less welcome.

Sean, his name was. Hair too long, shirt too baggy. Decent posture, dreadful table manners. He reminded me of high school punks with big mouths and no sense of humor. But he was the first in a long string of short relationships who actually seemed to make my daughter happy. For that, I supposed, he deserved some respect.

Clarise leaned into her guest’s shoulder as he opened his fortune cookie. “Beware of beautiful women bearing gifts,” he read, and the two of them smiled as if at some private joke. Clarise glanced up and saw me watching them.

“What does yours say, Daddy?” she asked. I snapped my cookie in half and glanced at the paper.

It was covered with spidery lines that somehow seemed random and precisely geometric at the same time. A clear space in the middle hosted crisp black text: Eugene Gutierrez. Activation code: pupae.

My hand was shaking.

“Very funny,” I said, crumpling the message in my fist. “Clarise, if this low-brow prankster is the best you can do for a boyfriend, I suggest you stay single.” I threw the paper onto my plate and stalked away from the table, slapping two fifties on the cashier’s desk as I left. Through the glass fronting of the restaurant, I saw Clarise stretch across the tablecloth to retrieve my fortune.

I was halfway down the block when Sean caught up with me.

“Mr. Gutierrez? Mr. Gutierrez, I didn’t, I wouldn’t—I mean, Clarise told me you worked in special ops, but she also told me about the nightmares, and I would never—”

“Go home, boy,” I said. Clarise had been telling him quite a bit, it seemed.

Sean’s mouth set in a hard line. I knew what he wanted to say: “You’re a paranoid old man, and an egotist, just like everyone says. Clarise is the only one who can’t see it.” But he just looked at me until the line of his mouth relaxed and his muscles unknotted. “Can I give you a lift anywhere?” he asked. “It’s lousy weather for a walk.”

“No,” I said as Clarise trotted up to join us, shoes clicking on the wet pavement. “I need the exercise.”

Clarise gave me that look, the one that meant she knew I was going to walk five kilometers in the rain, then go home and lie dripping on my bed for the rest of the night. Come dawn I’d be at the gym, beating out the last of the adrenaline.

“Go on,” I said, holding my voice steady. “The night’s young. Go have fun.”

“Only if you promise to behave,” Clarise said, twisting around a phrase I’d used in her childhood. Her smile was coy.

“Get outta here,” I said. I waited until their backs were turned before letting the tension return to my jaw. Methodically, I flicked the last soggy crumbs of the fortune cookie from my sleeves.

It was not the first joke, the first game. Local kids used to snap twigs outside the window at night, hoping to goad me into a panic. I’d find myself pressed against the rough floorboards, fingers raw with splinters, cringing against shrapnel that I knew wasn’t there. Or I’d feel the cold edges of a pipe wrench in my hands and hear myself spewing curses and blustering at the sky.

Ten years was plenty of time to practice discipline: the outward signs were gone now. But a noisily swerving car, the scent of sulfur—or an ill-conceived message in a fortune cookie—could still unleash that gasping feeling as the world spun out of control. It’s what I hate most about flashbacks: you can’t fight them, can’t run from them. Someone pops a firecracker and you’re back in South Africa, battered, shackled, praying to a God you don’t believe in that they don’t know where your family is.

I’d left my coat at the restaurant. I went back to get it, uncertain whether or not to trace the fortune cookie to its origins. If it was just a random prankster, some kid taunting the wacko for old times’ sake, it probably didn’t matter. But if it was Sean—and who else besides Clarise had known that we’d be eating here tonight?—If it was Sean, then my daughter was dating both a fool and a liar. I wasn’t willing to permit that.

The girl who’d brought the cookies watched me from behind a large bamboo plant as I entered. She looked fourteen, give or take two years, with dark eyes and an oval face. She was oddly still for a girl her age; no fidgeting, no slumping. My route to the coat rack took me within three feet of her, but I kept my eyes focused forward, unwilling to confront her just yet.

“Eugene,” she said.

I paused. I had not given my name at the restaurant. The table was reserved under “Gutierrez” and I had paid for our meal in cash. The girl fell into step beside me, and I noted that her movements were like her voice; controlled, efficient, yet still broadcasting urgency.

“We’ve got a problem,” she said softly. “Jo-jo says there was a leak downstream and—”

Click.

It was the sound of the internal lock on an M&P .40.

I almost moved too late. I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, that it was just the clank of some woman’s purse zipper, but then I heard the same weapon cock. I grabbed the girl and shoved us both to the floor.

A shot whizzed past my head. Someone screamed. I tightened my grip on the girl and rolled us both behind the cashier’s desk. Half the restaurant panicked—standing dumbfounded at their tables, running in hopelessly stupid directions—as the second shot fired. A corner of the cashier’s desk exploded; a chunk of wood hit my face. I dragged the girl into the kitchen.

It was a relief, almost, to be running from a tangible threat. My heart thudded as I pulled the dark-eyed teenager—stunned, shaky, but thankfully not hysterical—into a crevice between two shrimp vats and looked for a weapon. The knives were too far, the frying pans too unwieldy. I was rifling through a box of chopsticks when police sirens sounded outside the building, followed by the shatter of breaking glass and a general drop in tension throughout the restaurant. A few moments later the drawling prattle of the police officers confirmed that the gunman had fled.

The girl beside me looked relieved and placed a hand on my chest with disturbing familiarity. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m not trained for stuff like that. If you hadn’t been there I’d—”

She broke off mid-sentence when she felt the chopsticks pressing against her throat. I could kill her with just my body weight, and the look in my eyes must have warned her that I might really do it. She paled.

“Eugene,” she said. “What is this?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. That’s what you’re going to tell me. Why would a bogus note show up in an old vet’s fortune cookie, followed by a very non-bogus try on his life? Who are you, and how do you know my name? Talk.”

A complicated wash of emotions passed through her eyes. I couldn’t peg most of them—they fled too quickly—but I was certain the shock was real.

“You didn’t activate,” she said, aghast. She sounded like someone discovering that her best friend had just killed himself.

“No, I didn’t ‘activate.’ I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” What was this? Hypnosis? Suppressed memories? I’d seen enough to know mental twiddling was possible, and I wouldn’t put tricks like that past any of the agencies I’d worked for. But why me? Why now?

The chopsticks were digging into the girl’s throat, but she didn’t seem to notice. “The fortune cookie,” she said. “You got a note with patterned lines?”

“Yes, damn it!”

“And you read it? I saw you read it.” Her voice was quavering now.

“Yes, I read it!” I said. The restaurant’s kitchen workers were slowly recovering from the shootout; standing up, gathering in clumps, talking. Soon someone would spot us huddled in our corner. “Now tell me what it was supposed to do. Besides trigger a flashback.” Which was threatening to manifest, now that the adrenaline of the past few minutes had worn off. My hands were shaking too badly to hold the chopsticks, so I dropped them. I was likely to pass out on the floor soon, but I didn’t know how to communicate that to my … captive? Partner? The roles were starting to blur.

“The flashbacks,” the girl breathed. “We didn’t compensate for the flashbacks. Degenerative psychological condition, powerful neurological triggers …” She stood and pulled me to my feet with impressive force. “Come on, we can’t stay here.”

That last part, at least, made sense. I let her tug me toward the back kitchen doorway, but our exit was blocked by a beefy Chinese man in a white apron. “Chen-chi,” he said. “Your shift’s not up yet. Who’s this?”

“A friend,” Chen-chi said. “I have to leave early today. I’ll make up the time tomorrow.”

“That’s what you said yesterday.”

Chen-chi shrugged and tried to push past him, but he stood his ground and spat something in Chinese. Chen-chi answered in the same language, and the exchange grew heated. Then Chen-chi punched him in the stomach.

It was the sorriest excuse for a hook I’d ever seen; no hip rotation, poor shoulder placement, lousy contact angle. But she made up in enthusiasm for what she lacked in technique, and her boss staggered back in surprise. She grabbed my arm and pulled me past him, away from the restaurant, into the gathering darkness.

We ran through rain, splashing past alleys and skidding at street corners. The past pressed like black smoke against my vision, threatening to overpower me. I held the memories back until we slipped through an unlocked basement window, down into a dusty room.

It was the worst attack I’d ever had. I shouted, I flailed. I cowered at ghostly tormentors and broke everything that could be broken in assaults on invisible enemies. Chen-chi weathered it all with remarkable aplomb, locking herself in an adjoining room during the violent parts, gently coaxing me closer to sanity when I needed to hear a human voice, sitting quietly when I needed peace. When I finally reached the crying stage she held me: arms wrapped around my chest from behind, head pressed against my back, as if we had done this a thousand times, as if she had walked me through a lifetime’s worth of flashbacks. We knelt like that for a long time, an island of warmth on a bare concrete floor spewed with wood fragments, shattered glass, and the remains of any furniture that human hands could splinter. When I was able, I lay down and slept.

Sometime after dawn, after I had watched Clarise’s mother die for the fiftieth time and the memories had finally begun to disperse, I lifted my head and saw Chen-chi across the room. She was kneeling in a streak of pale light from the window, face pressed against her hands, shoulders heaving. I thought, for an instant, that I should go to her, console her, lessen whatever burden could make a teenager weep like a saint mourning the sins of the world. But my limbs were too weak, or my soul was, and I returned my cheek to the concrete.

* * * *

“It is possible to travel backward through time,” Chen-chi said the next afternoon. We were sitting at a battered wooden table in the basement apartment she had brought me to, eating muffins from a nearby bakery.

“Through time,” I said warily.

“Yes, but only as a sentience net. You’ve heard of tachyons?”

Tachyons. Subatomic particles that travel faster than light. “Yes,” I said.

“It is possible to create a set of coherent relationships between individual tachyons, similar to quantum entanglement. And it is possible to initialize these connections based on the emissions of the human brain.”

I wondered where a girl her age had picked up that kind of vocabulary. “You’re telling me you can create a copy of the mind?”

“More like a snapshot. A sentience net can’t think, can’t act, can’t do anything really, because there’s no physical support structure.”

“But it can travel backward in time, because it’s made of tachyons.”

A ghost of a smile crossed Chen-chi’s face. “You’re just as smart as you will be forty years from now. Yes. The tachyons travel faster than light: send them a far enough distance, and they’ll return to their point of origin before they left it. If conditions are favorable, the net can then induce a response in neural tissue.”

It wasn’t hard to see where this was going. Time-bandits. A mind from the future overlaying itself on a mind in the present. It explained … some things about the past twelve hours, I supposed, although it didn’t explain Chen-chi’s preoccupation with me. She was not overt about it. But those dark, expressionless eyes had followed me all morning, studying my face when she thought I wasn’t looking.

I gestured with my muffin. “And you’re one of these … these minds from the future?”

I didn’t realize how skeptical I sounded until Chen-chi grinned, the first truly human expression I’d seen from her. “I told you that you wouldn’t want to hear my explanation on an empty stomach.”

“And I—” I had been intended as a target, clearly. A hapless victim for some rampaging mind from the future. Not hypnosis, not memory suppression. Usurpation. If Chen-chi could be believed.

Chen-chi’s smile had vanished. “We knew it was risky,” she said in a carefully uninflected tone. “Merging a sentience net with the upstream mind is a tricky business. The process requires emotional resonance between the host mind and the sentience net, as well as the visual stimulus patterns. The text in that fortune cookie was deliberately designed to anger you. But we only accounted for anger, not for the flashbacks. You’d resolved the last of those memories decades ago, you see, so it didn’t occur to any of us that—”

“And what would have happened to me? After you bastards were done hijacking my body?”

“Don’t act so huffy. You volunteered for this, you know.”

I opened my mouth to protest.

“Yes, you. Eugene Gutierrez. When the RCIA planned this stunt, it was you they went to first, and it was you who agreed to take point on the mission. You ran the psych gauntlet. You initialized the sentience net, mimicked the emotional state, chose the trigger—the fortune cookie was your idea.”

I felt like the floor was spinning away from me. The rampaging mind from the future was … me? My future self, traveling back to pick up its own past body? My vision was blurring. I reacted the way I’ve trained myself to react to panic attacks: with iron control. If I snap on the facade fast enough, no one else can tell what’s happening to my heart rate. I modulated my indrawn breath to keep it from sounding ragged and willed my voice to hold steady.

“You must have me confused with some other Eugene from the future,” I said, pushing away from the table. “I don’t do undercover work anymore.”

Why on earth would my future self agree to this temporal jaunt? Was it some sort of glory game, challenging the past by plunging back into active duty? Was my future self insane?

“Eugene,” Chen-chi rose and followed me to the far corner of the room. She placed a hand on my back with disturbing familiarity. “I know how hard this is for you. But you had good reasons for your choice, and—”

The door exploded.

Fire, smoke, and shrapnel sliced through the room, along with a spatter of wood fragments. The door hadn’t been locked, but I supposed the hazy figures in the hallway hadn’t wanted to tip us off by trying to open it. My ears rang with the echo of the explosion. I became aware of a knifing pain in my thigh.

I very much wanted to roll my eyes up into my head and spend the next two weeks in a coma, but my body was already pulling Chen-chi to the ground once again. Any decent field agent would have hit the floor ahead of me. Whatever her role in this mess was, it wasn’t as a combatant.

I sized up the playing field. Three spooks in the hallway. Likely a fourth posted at the window Chen-chi and I had entered through last night. Judging from the scene in the restaurant, their objective was to kill, not capture, which meant their next likely move was—

A hand grenade lobbed through the shattered doorframe.

I rolled, pressed my shoulders into the cement, and swung my feet upward. I felt a satisfactory thud against the top of one shoe and the grenade arched back toward the doorway. It detonated as I finished rolling to the inside wall. Chen-chi had had the sense to scramble behind the overturned table. Chunks of shrapnel embedded themselves in the wood.

I charged the doorway. Granted, it was a risk, but the clumsy grenade attack hinted that these guys weren’t much better trained than Chen-chi. I caught two of them still pulling themselves up from the floor. The third had taken the brunt of the explosion; I gauged the amount of spatter and decided he was no longer a threat.

The spooks held guns, but moved like people who’d never been trained to use them. I took out the larger of the two, then turned to the final, smaller opponent, which turned out to be a woman. We wrestled in the smoke, but not for long. I twisted her arm behind her back and pinned her against the wall. My free hand was prepared to strike.

The smoke began to clear and I finally got a good look at my opponent. The clothes were unfamiliar—black jumpsuit and combat boots—and her auburn hair was pulled away from her face, but the teal blue eyes and the delicate jawline were unmistakable. I released her and stepped back, stunned.

“Clarise,” I said.

She stared at me, eyes wide, mouth half open in astonishment. Then she kicked me in the groin and pelted up the stairs.

I didn’t try to follow. I waited until the worst of the nausea faded and Chen-chi had moved to stand beside me. I turned my head and asked in carefully modulated tones: “Chen-chi, why is my daughter trying to kill me?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’m a quick study.”

We weren’t glaring at each other. Not quite.

* * * *

We scrambled out the basement window and sprinted down the alley. The thigh wound I’d taken during the assault made every step an agony. We were only a few streets away—near enough to hear the sirens of police cars arriving to investigate the explosion—when the leg gave out entirely.

I tumbled against Chen-chi, and she helped lower me to the pavement. I pulled the ripped cloth of my pant leg aside to reveal a fist-sized chunk of wood wedged into my muscle tissue. It must have blown into the room when the door exploded; poor luck that it happened to strike my leg sharp end first. I leaned against the rough brick of a building and steadied my breathing. The wound was deep, but not life-threatening. Good. I’d be able to walk in a few minutes.

“I think,” I said to Chen-chi, “that you had better tell me more about this mission.”

She glanced uncertainly along the empty street. “I don’t think this is the place or time.”

“It’ll do.”

Chen-chi nodded and seemed to be searching for a place to begin. “We’re here for the same reason anyone travels through time: To change the past.

“This city is home to an underground mafia. Clarise has been a member for years, but you never guessed it. She’s helping the group develop some very dangerous technology: pinpoint singularities, experimental weapons. In a few days, one of those experiments will go terribly awry.”

Chen-chi paused. When she spoke again, her voice sounded hollow, as if all the emotion had been strangled out of it.

“My parents died in the explosion. Half of the city died with them. Clarise … lived, but she couldn’t forgive herself for her part in the accident. She, um … she committed suicide a few years later. I’m sorry.”

I stared. Chen-chi was speaking again, but I didn’t pay attention. All I could see was Clarise—Clarise dressed in black combat boots, teamed up with a gang of hoodlums. I didn’t know whether to be heartsick or enraged by her betrayal.

How long had it been going on? Since high school, probably. Back when she started going to “parties” but came home sober. Back when she started talking about her new friends, but never brought them by the house. She was good fodder for a group like that; idealistic, athletic, stubborn as hell. But why would she run with that crowd when she knew what kind of havoc they wreaked, when she’d seen herself what years of fighting terrorists had cost me?

“Why didn’t we go farther back?” I asked Chen-chi suddenly. Another fifteen years—what were fifteen more when you’d already traveled forty? I could still see those gorgeous eyes, teal blue like Clarise’s….

“And save Emmeline? You tried. You argued with the mission coordinator for weeks. I was afraid you’d kill him over it. But we were out of time, Eugene. We had weeks, perhaps only days, before our research location was compromised. And then there was the question of contamination. HQ was almost too hesitant to chance the intervention we’re trying now.

“But Eugene, you can’t imagine it. If you think the world’s ugly today, it’s even uglier forty years downstream. The gang lords gained leverage off the explosion. They kept learning, kept trying different things … in the end they took the White House, fractured the union. It’s been war on our own turf for decades now. If we can stop it, if it can be prevented…”

I waved my hand to shut her up. I didn’t want to hear any more. All I could think of was Emmeline, bleeding, those lovely eyes turned glassy—and those bastards laughing.

I gritted my teeth and used my pocketknife to cut away the lower leg of my trousers. The material was flimsy, but long enough to slice into rough bandages, and relatively clean. It would do until I could get back to the medical kit I kept under my bed.

I didn’t dare remove the impaled wood, not without the right equipment to stop the blood flow. The best I could do was to secure it against jostling. Chen-chi’s voice cut across my thoughts as I struggled to loop the cloth around my thigh. “Eugene, we need to figure out what to do.”

I let go of the bandages. My hands were shaking too badly to tie them anyway.

“Figure out what to do?” The wall behind me felt reassuringly solid as I leaned my head against it and looked askance at the teenager. “What kind of half-baked, non-informed time traveler are you? No good in a firefight, no good finding a hideout, no clue what to do next—do we have an SOP or not?”

It was the first time I’d seen Chen-chi look hurt. “My job was to deliver the triggers and lay low until the work was done. I was the only one who had a past moment specific and traumatic enough to snare the sentience net without an external visual. Make it back, deliver the triggers, that’s all I was supposed to do. I’m doing the best I can, Eugene. I wasn’t cleared on the mission stats.”

“Well, ‘the best you can’ is pretty dang lousy. You nearly got us killed, letting us get tracked to the basement apartment.”

“You weren’t in much of a state to make decisions at the time. What do you expect me to do?”

“Be smart!” I said, and closed my eyes to ward off an impending headache.

Chen-chi was silent for thirty seconds.

“Do you have a weapons stash?” I asked.

Chen-chi shook her head. “Jo-jo was going to arrange weapons at the rendezvous, but something went wrong after I delivered his activation trigger. The downstream gang lords must have gotten wind of our plan and sent a message back to the here-and-now. They don’t know how to initialize a sentience net, but they might have gotten a text message through to the singularity generator when it was brought online a few days ago.”

Chen-chi paused as though trying to gauge the likelihood of her theory. “Anyway, they shot at Jo-jo. We got separated, and I hid in the crowd. I didn’t think they knew about me. But I suppose they were following me, waiting until I activated you.”

“Clumsy,” I said. “Letting yourself be trailed like that. This Jo-jo … where can I find him?”

“He runs a machine shop across town. I planted his trigger last week, but with the rendezvous and agent identities compromised, he’s gone into hiding.”

“Was there a back-up rendezvous?”

“Yes, but—”

“Let me guess. You don’t know the details.” This teen was really getting on my nerves. “Well, it looks like we’re stuck. Jo-jo will have to do the best he can on his own, and you and I will go our separate ways and lie low till the whole thing blows over.”

“You can’t do that,” Chen-chi said. It wasn’t a plea. It was an unadorned statement of fact, spoken with more confidence than a teenager—or even a time traveler in a teenager’s body—had a right to speak anything.

“Why not?”

“Because Jo-jo might hurt Clarise.”

I froze. Of course. If Clarise was mixed up with this crowd, then she was likely to be on-scene during the fighting. And this Jo-jo, whoever he was, wouldn’t halt the mission just because she was in the kill zone. I wouldn’t, if it was someone else’s daughter.

Slowly, I turned my head toward Chen-chi. “You’d better help me patch up this leg.”

Chen-chi worked in silence, stone-faced, wrapping the cloth with cool professionalism. I wondered whether her future self was a physician. That might explain why she was here with no useful knowledge about the mission. But it didn’t explain how she knew so much about me.

A few things were beginning to come clear, at least. Our attackers hadn’t known who I was—or even where—until Chen-chi attempted to activate me. That meant Clarise hadn’t tried to kill me, in particular. From her perspective, she had just been attacking two unnamed agents from the future.

My future self’s motivations also began to make sense. This mission wasn’t a glory jaunt. It was a last-ditch effort to save my family. I hadn’t even known it needed saving.

“Chen-chi,” I said after a while, “Who are you to me? The future me, I mean. The one who didn’t make it back.”

Chen-chi’s hands paused in their work. “Does it matter?”

“Damn straight it matters! You know everything about me. Even things I never told Clarise. So were you my psychologist, or some kind of mind-rapist, or what?”

Chen-chi pulled the bandages taut. “I was your wife.”

Images rushed me like a brick wall: Emmeline in a yellow ski hat demonstrating the snowplow for a group of students. Emmeline grinning as she snatched my textbooks and backed off with them, telling me to lighten up and go on a date with her. Emmeline bleeding. Emmeline laughing.

Emmeline’s grave. A simple square marker and a vase of purple flowers. A viciously cheerful sun denying the collapse of the universe.

“My wife is dead,” I said.

Chen-chi tied off the bandage. “Yes, well, so is my husband. So you and I are stuck with each other.”

I exhaled. Slowly, heavily. “All right. Tell me one more thing. How much do our enemies know about the mission?”

“Not much, I think. They didn’t know where to find you until I tried to activate you. I don’t think they know what we plan to do. They just know that we’re here and that we’re a threat to them.”

“Well. At least they’re as badly informed as we are.”

Chen-chi almost smiled.

* * * *

Five hours later Chen-chi and I crouched behind a bookshelf in the basement of a university library. We’d risked a detour by my apartment for the med kit and an undamaged pair of trousers. There had been no sentries posted, so either Clarise hadn’t told them who I was, or they didn’t think I’d dare to go there. My thigh still throbbed, but it would do.

The books in this section of the library were musty, leather-bound, and frequently stood askew. Through cracks between them, I watched Clarise sitting in a pool of light at the microfilm readers. She sat in direct profile to us, hair down and twisted over one shoulder, her left hand meticulously twirling the knob of the machine. She paused frequently to scribble notes on a pad of paper.

It would have looked like an innocent late-night study session if Chen-chi hadn’t told me that in two days, in the neglected conference room behind the microfilm readers, a 60-terajoule explosion would take place. My daughter was playing lookout for what would soon become the deadliest terrorist organization since Al Qaeda.

Why, Clarise?

I had been absent during much of her childhood. I admitted that. But it was because I’d believed in what I was doing. The world needed people willing to take the hard risks and fight the tough fight. I had thought Clarise understood that. Emmeline had.

I glanced at Chen-chi, at the teenage body crouched beside me. Tried to imagine her forty years older. Those years might make her ugly or beautiful, heal wounds, leave scars … What was the shape of the mind inside that childhood body? Had she been worth betraying Emmeline’s memory?

I did not want to believe that I had ever married again, especially not a woman thirty years younger than I was. It was possible that Chen-chi was lying to me. Just as it was possible that there never would be an explosion, that my daughter was not doomed to kill herself in the aftermath of that catastrophe.

I stifled a sigh. A lot of things were possible. Nevertheless I found myself here, now, with Chen-chi, waiting for Jo-jo to arrive so that we could make contact with him and help complete the mission. Whatever else Jo-jo’s plan entailed, it must eventually lead him here, to the source of the explosion. To the moment when the whole world would go mad.

Clarise sighed and flicked her pen against the notebook. I felt a sudden urge to grab her by the elbow and run. Away. To someplace safe, where she’d never hook up with another thug, where I’d never have another flashback. Where all those pesky people from the future would leave us alone.

Screw the explosion and the rest of the city, I just wanted to hold my little girl and keep her safe forever. I shifted my weight into my knees, felt my muscles tense with the precursor of action.

A door clicked open. Footsteps echoed on the tiles. A few moments later a pair of black jeans entered my view. They stopped beside Clarise, and she glanced up.

“Finished already?” she asked.

“Naw, just a breather.” The speaker snagged the leg of an empty chair with his foot and scooted it next to her. I recognized him as he sat down: Sean, the unwelcome boyfriend Clarise had brought to the restaurant. He snaked an arm around her waist and reached for the pad of paper. “What you working on?”

Clarise closed the notebook. “Nothing. Just passing time.”

Sean’s look turned serious. “Babe. Stop worrying about the harmonic whatever-it-is. Sharken knows what he’s doing.”

“But his equations are wrong. Look. Gravitational attraction grows as the inverse square of the distance between—”

She’d opened the notebook again. Sean placed a hand on her forearm. His voice was gentle. “Stop it. You’re on edge. We all are. But stop pretending it’s the machine that’s got you spooked.”

She sighed and slapped the notebook closed. “I thought my father was done with all that crap. I thought he was pensioned—disability pay. What’s he doing on assignment?” She stood. Paced. Sat back down and put her face in her hands. “I could’ve killed him. I tried to kill him. What if he hadn’t kicked the grenade?”

Sean lifted Clarise’s hair aside and began massaging her shoulders. “Shhh. It’ll be all right.” He moved so their eyes were level and brushed her cheek with surprising tenderness. “It’ll all work out, babe. You’ll see. Two days from now we’ll change the world.”

“And if the machine doesn’t work? My father and his puppeteers will be after us again. Dad’s getting old, Sean. He could get hurt.”

“From what you’ve told me about your father, he’s not the one you should be worrying about. Two days, sweetheart. You can hold out that long.”

Clarise leaned into his shoulder like a cat luxuriating in a sunbeam. I watched the strain ease from her face, aware that the muscles of my jaw had grown taut.

How often had I seen Clarise angry or heartbroken during her tempestuous teenage years? Twenty times? Fifty? How many times had I wrapped my arms around her and held only tension, a bundle of frustration and loneliness that refused to unleash? I had never been able fill the dark chasm left by her mother’s absence any more than she could pray away my nightmares.

Watching her rest her head on Sean’s shoulder, I forced myself to accept a bitter truth: This punk made her happy. Why she had finally found her solace with a thug mixed up in a terrorist scheme, I could not fathom. But the devotion in his eyes seemed sincere, and the strength she drew from his embrace was unmistakable.

Eventually, Sean pulled back and patted Clarise on the arm. “Boss says I’m supposed to take over your spot. He wants you to explain the machine to the newbies.”

Clarise straightened, and if it wasn’t for the extra sheen in her eyes her grin would have fooled me as the genuine article. “Don’t sleep on the job,” she said as she rose from her chair. “My father might be around.”

“I survived dinner with him. Life can’t get much worse than that.”

“You’ve never seen him angry.” She pecked him on the cheek and vanished through the doorway with a click of sophisticated heels.

Sean scooted his chair forward and fiddled with the microfilm reader, although it was obvious that he wasn’t actually reading anything on it. My gaze shifted to the door of the conference room, now closed, and the low murmur of voices behind it. I was about to circle toward the doorway, try to find a spot where I could hear what was being said, when I heard Chen-chi’s quiet hiss of indrawn breath.

“That’s Jo-jo,” she whispered. Her eyes were riveted on a heavyset man ambling down the aisle. He perused the stacks as though searching for a particularly elusive call number, but there was a purposefulness about his gait, about the way his eyes kept flicking toward Sean, that was unmistakable.

Chen-chi began to wave at Jo-jo, but I stopped her with a hand on her shoulder and a curt shake of the head. Catching Jo-jo’s attention right now would probably attract Sean’s as well. If he spotted me and shouted a warning to those inside the study room, we’d lose our best chance to carry out the mission.

I watched Jo-jo through the cracks of the bookshelves. His jaw worked beneath his scraggly goatee as he slid his finger along the books. He paused, adjusted his spectacles, and closed in on his quarry. I gauged his movements, trying to determine what his plan was. Did he know my daughter was in that room? Did he care whether she was harmed?

His first task, no matter what else he planned, would be to take out the scout. That was always a tricky job. Straight hand-to-hand was too unpredictable, gun too loud. An inhalant anesthesia would work well, but I doubted he had access to those kinds of chemicals. Which left short, sharp, cutting implements as his most likely option.

I motioned for Chen-chi to hold still and crept around the edge of the bookcase to the aisle opening directly behind Sean. Sean was watching Jo-jo and didn’t see me.

Jo-jo’s footsteps approached. Stopped. “Excuse me, son. Can you tell me where to find the medical section?”

Sean looked wary, but he dutifully pointed down the aisle. “It’s in the next room over,” he said. He didn’t take his eyes off of Jo-jo.

“The one with the Japanese banner?”

“No, the other one. Through the double glass doors.” This time his gaze flicked toward the other end of the hall.

Jo-jo stepped into my field of vision. I saw the flick of the wrist, the faint ripple of a shirtsleeve as a knife slipped into his palm. My mind raced forward through the next few moments: A sudden step, a flash of steel against the jugular. Blood spurting across the chest where my Clarise had found comfort. Soundless gasps from the mouth that she had just kissed. The only man who’d ever made my daughter happy: crumpling toward the floor supported by Jo-jo’s free hand, shoved under a desk in a bloody heap.

I caught the knife halfway to Sean’s throat.

Jo-jo had grasped Sean with his free arm, pinning the gawky thug against his chest. I used the momentum from my lunge to twist the knife arm behind his back. I stepped forward, pressing myself into Jo-jo and Jo-jo into Sean. “Not that way,” I murmured.

Jo-jo froze. Sean struggled. Chen-chi had moved from behind the stacks and stood like a statue between two towering bookshelves. Through the closed conference room door, I heard Clarise’s muffled voice.

I expected Jo-jo to fight me. Instead, he cocked his head as though analyzing the sound of my voice.

“Eugene?” he asked. I stepped back and released my hold, but not before I’d pried the knife from Jo-jo’s hand. Sean twisted loose and stared at us.

“What are you doing?” Jo-jo asked. He rubbed his arm where I’d torqued it.

“Stopping a mistake.”

Sean’s eyes darted between me and Jo-jo, then toward the conference room. His gaze lingered on the knife in my hand. He stepped backward and drew a breath.

I punched him in the solar plexus.

Whatever warning cry Sean had hoped to bellow came out as a surprised grunt. He doubled over, gasping, and stumbled backward. His awkward stagger sent a chair tumbling to the floor with a loud clatter. Inside the conference room, Clarise’s voice paused mid-sentence.

Jo-jo swore under his breath. We froze, silent except for Sean’s wheezing, alert for the sound of footsteps headed toward the door. After a moment Clarise’s voice resumed speaking.

Chen-chi moved from between the bookshelves and laid a hand on my shoulder.

“He didn’t activate, Jo-jo. The flashbacks interfered with the trigger.” Her voice was pitched low, so as not to carry into the nearby room.

Jo-jo’s eyes flicked. He studied my face as though looking for something he’d lost. “I’m sorry, Chen-chi,” he said finally. It took me a moment to realize he was condoling her on the loss of her husband, not apologizing for something he’d done.

Chen-chi’s face remained impassive. I don’t think she realized that her grip on my shoulder had stiffened.

“So are you in on this gig?” Jo-jo asked.

I nodded.

“Good. Guard him.” He flicked his head toward Sean. “Chen-chi, a hand?”

Jo-jo was moving again, sliding metal components from pockets and hidden holsters beneath his jacket. “There’s no time to brief you on the original plan,” he said as the pile of gadgetry in front of him grew. “Our window’s almost up. We’ll stick with the back-up.”

Chen-chi and Jo-jo were working in silence, Chen-chi holding elements in place while Jo-jo screwed them together. The overall shape and materials were starting to look disturbingly volatile.

Sean had recovered his breath enough to sit up and gape at me. “You saved my life,” he said. “Why?”

I grabbed his shirt collar and shoved him to the floor. “So I can kill you myself. How’d Clarise get mixed up in this mess? Did you bring her in?”

“No!” Sean’s voice was strangled, as if he were trying to shout but couldn’t get the sound past the pressure on his neck. “Sharken introduced us. She’s been working for him longer than me.”

“You’re lying. Why would she do this, except out of love for a punk like you?”

“You really don’t know?” Sean’s tone was incredulous. Jo-jo’s angry hsst cut off whatever Sean might have been about to add. I glanced at the device in Jo-jo’s hands, now nearly two feet tall and half as wide. It didn’t look like we had much more time.

“Keep your voice down,” I told Sean. “Clarise is in that room. How would you estimate her chances in a gun fight?”

“Better than yours.”

I glared at him. Then I noticed my shaking knuckles and decided Sean was more observant than I’d supposed. The old, familiar headache fuzzed at the edge of my senses. I was dangerously close to a flashback, or a mental breakdown, or both. I wondered whether Clarise had gotten any combat training from these new friends of hers.

Jo-jo clicked the last element of his device into place, examined the overall structure, and tested two of the circuits.

“We’re ready,” he said. He set the device on the table, half-hidden behind the microfilm readers, and activated a timer. “We have ten minutes,” he said. He glanced at Sean. “Eugene, get that kid out of here before he can start a ruckus. Chen-chi, go up to the first level and clear out as many civilians as you can. Tell them there’s a plumbing problem or something, and they need to leave the building. I’ll keep watch here.”

I stood, half-dragging Sean to his feet. Jo-jo’s knife pressed against the fingers of my other hand. I kept it near Sean, ready to move if he tried anything. “How big will this explosion be?”

Jo-jo looked annoyed. “Big enough to change the future.”

“My daughter’s in that room.”

“I’m sorry about that. We’d planned to divert her from being here tonight, but…”

But I didn’t activate. We kept coming back to that, didn’t we?

“Wait until the meeting’s over.”

Chen-chi looked pained, but Jo-jo shook his head firmly. “It’s not just about destroying the machine before they begin using it for high-energy experiments. The researchers at RCIA calculate that we need to kill the group’s ringleader as well. Otherwise they’ll just rebuild it elsewhere.”

“Then wait for the next meeting.” My voice had grown icily calm. I hefted the knife, and realized with muted astonishment that it was no longer pointing at Sean.

Chen-chi tugged anxiously at my arm. “We can’t afford to wait, Eugene. They’ve already attacked us twice. It won’t take them long to realize we know where they’re meeting, and once that happens…”

I shook her off without looking at her. My eyes were locked on Jo-jo’s.

“The timer’s already started,” Jo-jo said softly. “It can’t be deactivated. Now, you and Chen-chi can go upstairs and rescue as many civilians as possible, or you can try to jump me, and we’ll all explode together.” His finger toyed with a button on the device’s main cylinder.

I’d seen such buttons before. It was a dead man’s switch; once pressed, its release would trigger an immediate explosion.

“Stop this!” Chen-chi said. “Jo-jo, go warn the civilians. I’ll hold the bomb while Eugene gets Clarise out. If anything goes wrong, I’ll trigger it; you know I won’t chicken out.”

Jo-jo hesitated. Whatever he’d been about to say was stopped by the intensity of Chen-chi’s eyes.

“Please,” she said. “For the man we once knew.”

“All right,” Jo-jo said, handing the device to Chen-chi. He glanced at me. “You’ve got nine minutes to get your daughter out of that room. Make sure the leader doesn’t escape. But Chen-chi—” and his look hardened to match her own—”Remember there’s more than one memory to be honored here. Save the girl, if you can. But save the city and the world first.”

She nodded. Jo-jo laid an assault rifle on the table next to her, “In case there’s trouble.” He moved to grab Sean, but I stepped in front of him and pulled the thug to his feet.

“I need him.”

Jo-jo gave a curt nod, then turned and strode toward the stairs. I gripped Sean by the elbow and stared into his face. “Do you love my daughter?”

He nodded.

“More than you love this fanatic group you’re a part of ?”

He hesitated, then gave a firm “Yes.” His eyes told me he meant it.

“Then help me.”

“No.”

I nearly punched him. Maybe I would have, if his next words hadn’t been so sincere:

“Clarise would never forgive me.”

“Maybe not,” Chen-chi said, stepping to my side, “but if you don’t help us now, she’ll never forgive herself for what’s about to happen, and neither will you. I’ve seen pictures of her funeral. You were in them. You looked like a man haunted by his own ghost.”

Sean stared at her with incredulity but not, surprisingly, with suspicion. Perhaps he understood more of Clarise’s equations than I’d given him credit for.

“So you’re, what, some kind of time traveler?”

“In a sense.”

“And this thing we won’t forgive ourselves for?”

“An explosion. One so big it will wipe out half the city. More importantly: Sharken isn’t the man you think he is. Watching what he does after he gains power will make you wish you’d never met him.”

Sean’s expression darkened. “Anyone could say that.”

“Maybe they could,” Chen-chi said, unruffled. “But you’re already uncomfortable with some of the decisions Sharken is making. Already, you lie awake some nights and wonder whether you’re making a mistake. In a few years, you’ll speak out against Sharken’s new order. And a few months after that, you’ll be executed.”

Chen-chi spoke with such conviction, it was hard to disbelieve her.

I saw the muscles in Sean’s jaw working. Slowly, deliberately, he shifted his gaze from Chen-chi to me.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Get Clarise out of the building. As fast as you can. Lie if you have to. Clonk her on the head if that doesn’t work.”

“She and I can’t just walk out of a meeting. People would ask questions, try to stop us…”

“That’s where I come in,” I said.

I grabbed Sean by the collar, strode to the conference room, and kicked the door open. As the doorknob struck the wall, I threw Sean through the doorway with enough force to send him skidding across the floor, then stepped over the threshold myself. I closed the door behind me.

Twenty pairs of eyes stared at us. Clarise stood in the middle of the room next to a whiteboard. Her mouth opened in shock as Sean slid to a stop near her feet.

“Clarise,” I said, with all the parental authority I could muster. “You’ve been keeping secrets.”

She stared at me. For two heartbeats nothing in my world existed except those eyes: teal blue and bright as crystal. A complicated wash of emotion passed through them, settling at last on a familiar mixture of anger and fear. I knew that expression so well; it was the same one she’d worn as a girl, whenever I went on assignment.

“Daddy, what are you doing?” Her voice was a furious hiss.

“Saving you from yourself. You should go home. Now.”

It would have been so easy if she’d obeyed me. I’d have floored anyone who tried to stop her. She’d have walked out the door, out of the building. She’d be two blocks down the street before the bomb blew. But things were never that simple, not between Clarise and me.

Clarise helped Sean to his feet. She glared at me, her free hand resting possessively against his chest. Behind them, a full wall of the conference room flickered with electronics.

This was the critical moment. Clarise was the only person in the room who had been part of the attack in the basement apartment. Had she told anyone besides Sean that I was part of an assault from the future? I suspected that she hadn’t, that the kids surrounding me saw only an angry father trying to manhandle his daughter out of an unwanted situation.

I wondered what Clarise saw. An old man, perhaps. Worn out, wrung out, the ghost of the tall, strong father who had swung her over his head and chased her, giggling, across the lawn in simpler days. Did she think the trembling in my hands came from fragility? Did she know how close I was to a battle rage?

Ten years of training and twenty years of PTSD screamed at me to shoulder the man to my left (who probably thought his beneath-the-jacket groping for his gun was subtle), snatch his weapon from its holster, down five targets, roll to cover, and improvise from there. But Sean hadn’t gathered his wits about him yet, so I waited, trembling.

I had the group’s leader pegged now, the one Chen-chi had called Sharken. He was the low-profile type; didn’t dress any different than his underlings. But everyone looked sidelong at him to know what to do. He leaned back in his chair.

“I think your daughter’s old enough that she doesn’t need to tell you everything she does.” He raised his hand in a casual gesture, probably intending to signal his thugs to take me down.

“That’s debatable,” I said. “But I was referring to the secrets she’s been keeping from you.”

The hand stopped mid-gesture.

“Or didn’t Clarise tell you her father works as an undercover agent?”

I had the room’s full attention now. Several thugs pulled their weapons into the open.

“Hold your fire, you morons.” Sharken’s voice was calm, confident. Pitched low, but his words carried clearly in the small room. “Do you want to bring the library staff down here with the police in tow?”

Sean had pulled Clarise to the side, a few steps away from the door. He murmured something in her ear. She pulled against his arm, whispering furiously. I judged there were about seven and a half minutes left before Jo-jo’s bomb exploded.

Get out, Clarise. For once in your life, do the smart thing.

Sharken ordered his thugs to tie my arms behind my back and search me. I had no weapons, and it seemed to make them nervous that they couldn’t find any. With my face toward the wall as they patted me down for the third time, I could not see Clarise. I hoped that Sean had convinced her to slip out of the room with him.

Ready or not, I was out of time. I chose my moment and jerked sharply, twisting out of the sloppy hold two thugs had on my arms. I backed into the right-hand thug and made a blind grab for his gun with my bound hands.

He pulled the holster away, but I’d expected that. I grabbed his belt, bent my knees and heaved. He sailed across my back and slid, flailing, into a kid who’d been trying to grapple me around the neck.

The room erupted into motion. People shouted; chairs scooted. I put the wall at my back and worked to free my hands. Across the room, Sean was tugging on Clarise’s arm, pulling her toward the doorway. She resisted. Dumb thug. Just my luck that he turned out to be a lousy liar.

Someone clubbed me with a book. I rolled my head with the blow, dodged the next two attacks, and landed a kick to a teenager’s midriff. A chair cracked against my shoulders, and I fell flat on my chest.

A turquoise blur rushed to my side, knocking away a man who’d been about to throw a table lamp at my head. The lamp shattered against the wall. The blur resolved into Clarise. “Don’t hurt him,” she shouted. “He’s harmless. He just gets these fits.”

“Enough of this,” Sharken said. He pulled a gun from his jacket and aimed it at my head.

Clarise moved in front of me, a mostly futile maneuver, since she was two inches shorter than I was and only half as broad. Sharken’s handling was good. He’d have no trouble hitting us both.

Time seemed to freeze. Darkness roiled at the edges of my mind. I willed my vision to focus. I couldn’t afford a blackout, not now, not yet.

A gaudy wall clock ticked off seconds with my own unsteady breathing as counterpoint. I wanted to arch my back and rage at the heavens. I wanted to curl up and puke on the floorboards. Anything to ward off the gaping helplessness that had haunted me since Emmeline’s death.

Her face lay before me, hair matted to the floor with her own blood. It had been a man like Sharken who’d killed her; a South American macho who thought that by threatening my wife he’d learn information that I didn’t have to give.

My hands finally twisted free of the coarse rope that had bound them. My eyes locked on the barrel of the gun pointed at my daughter, then traced the path from Sharken’s knuckles, along his arm, into his face. A fierce intensity, almost laughter, tightened my throat.

I was not helpless this time.

My body uncurled like a striking rattlesnake. Sharken fired. Pain flared in my shoulder, but it felt muted, gauzy. If I’d been charging him the bullet would have struck my chest, but I’d sprung sideways, pushing Clarise out of the way and diving into a thug who doubled over with my shoulder in his gut. I grabbed his gun. Didn’t bother to pry it out of his hand. Just aimed for Sharken and pressed my finger against his on the trigger.

It was a clean shot, one of the ones you feel hitting the target before the gun even kicks in your hand. Sharken went down without a sound.

Thugs tackled me from all directions. I had no strength to resist them. Dimly, I heard Clarise screaming. Even more dimly, I felt the pressure of a gun barrel beneath my jaw. None of it mattered. It was like a dream.

Reality surged back with an Asian teenager kicking open the conference room door. Chen-Chi stood silhouetted against the brightly lit bookshelves, her feet planted with the conviction of a war goddess. Against her stomach, an assault rifle gleamed. She raised it to position and fired.

Her posture was dreadful. The kick from the first bullet nearly knocked her to the floor. Her aim was bad, too, but it didn’t matter because she was spreading her shots along the ceiling, shattering tiles and fluorescent lights, sending a rain of rubble on the throng. The final glass fragments tinkled to the ground a half-second after the last shot rang in my ears. I began to understand why my future self might have fallen in love with that woman.

“Everybody back off,” Chen-chi said in a voice of superb authority. “Or the next round goes below the belt.”

Like pack animals, Sharken’s thugs cowered in the absence of their leader. Any man in the room could have taken Chen-chi down, but none of them tried. The hands that had been restraining me pulled away so abruptly that I stumbled.

“In about five minutes,” Chen-Chi continued, “this building is going to explode. If you run, you might make it out alive. So move!”

The resulting evacuation was so chaotic it was entertaining. I wanted to grin, but the blackout I’d been holding at bay closed in too quickly.

After vision had faded, but before I completely lost consciousness, I heard high-heeled shoes skitter across the floor. Slender hands grabbed me as I fell. “Typical,” Clarise grunted as she struggled to lift my weight. “You’d think after all these years, he’d know better than to black out over hardwood.”

* * * *

I woke on the couch in Clarise’s apartment. The sky behind the window blinds was dark, but I suspected dawn was not far off. Chen-chi lay curled in the chair opposite me, her feet pulled up on the cushions. She was asleep.

Down the hallway, Clarise’s voice rose and fell in sharp tones. I walked toward it. Through the kitchen doorway I saw her stirring a cup of herbal tea. The back of Sean’s head—somewhat bulging and bandaged—was visible where he leaned back in a kitchen chair, balancing it on two legs.

“… told me to get you out,” he was saying. “Lying seemed like the best alternative.”

“And you really thought I was that stupid? That I’d buy that line and leave my own father behind?”

Sean spread his hands in mock surrender.

“Stupid or not,” I said, folding my arms and leaning against the doorway, “It’s what you should have done.”

“Father, Sharken would have killed you.”

“Better me than all of us. Besides, I had a handle on things.”

“Yes, I saw how you were handling things.”

“Don’t take that tone of voice with me. I can take care of myself. You know that.”

Clarise set her cup on the counter with an audible thunk. “No, I don’t ‘know’ that. Mom didn’t even know that.”

Mention of Emmeline threatened to reopen the black chasm. I shoved the gaping memories aside, vaguely aware that I was scowling. “Your mother had every confidence in—”

“You never saw the look in her eyes when we waited up nights.” Clarise bit her lip, but not fast enough to cover the tremble in her voice. She bent her head over her tea as though reading her future there, or perhaps her past. “I’m glad she died in that car accident,” she said, so quietly that I almost couldn’t make out the words. “At least she never had to sit around again, wondering if you’d come home in one piece.”

I felt as though my lungs had shriveled away, leaving an empty cavity beneath my ribs. “Well. You’ve chosen a fine way to honor her memory.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Terrorists, Clarise! You’ve spent the last six years running with the kind of subversive, murderous scum who—” I choked back my own words. Clarise didn’t know who’d killed her mother. I’d never told her.

Clarise squared her shoulders. “No progress comes without conflict. You taught me that.”

“I never meant you should try to overthrow your own government.”

“Why not? Look what your precious government has done to you! They ran you ragged, and when they were done with you, they chewed you up and spat you out without so much as a thank you.”

“Now just a—”

Chen-chi cut me off with a hand on my shoulder. The yelling must have woken her up. “Let it be, Eugene,” she said. “It’s in the past now.”

“Whose past? Yours? Because it feels an awful lot like my present.” I whirled on Clarise, but found I had nothing more to say. Sean had risen from his chair and was holding her, whispering to her, making the anger melt out of her face. I stalked out of the room.

Chen-chi followed me. “Emmeline’s dead,” she said to my back as I stared out a window. “Venting your anger on Clarise won’t bring her back.”

“This has nothing to do with you.”

“Doesn’t it?”

I swallowed down an angry retort. I couldn’t bring myself to snap at her; her own pain was too evident. She mystified me, this teenager with a much older mind. I was simultaneously intrigued and infuriated by the way she always seemed to know how to quell my anger.

“You’ll have to tell her, you know,” Chen-chi said. “About Emmeline. How she really died.”

“I don’t know how,” I whispered.

“Once you start, the rest will be easy. Trust me. I helped you work through this once before.”

When I didn’t answer, she took my hand and gently pulled me into the living room, where we sat on opposite ends of the couch. I stared at her; the woman who had been my wife forty years in the future.

“It must be strange for you,” I said. “Talking to me, being with me, when…”

“It’s … difficult,” she admitted. “Like looking at a ghost of the man you’d become.”

I hesitated, unsure how to say what I needed to without further opening her wounds. “I … don’t think I’ll become the same man again.”

“No.” She sighed, and looked indescribably weary. “Clarise will live now, and, God willing, the world will unfold differently. It’s all right,” she added when I opened my mouth to apologize. “I’m not ready for another relationship. Not for a long time.”

I nodded. We sat and listened to the murmur of voices in the kitchen; the tramp of Jo-jo’s boots as he returned from wherever he’d been; the sound of a witty comment, and reluctant laughter. I struggled to speak past the dryness in my throat.

“So what happens now?”

“We wait,” Chen-chi said softly. “We heal. And after that … we begin to live again.”

Copyright (c) 2010 Nancy Fulda

* * * *

GEORGE H. SCITHERS

1929-2010

In the inaugural issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, the Good Doctor introduced the magazine’s first editor, George H. Scithers, as “an electrical engineer specializing in radio propagation and rail rapid transit, who is a Lieutenant Colonel (retired) in the United States Army and who does a bit of writing on the side. He has been involved with the world of science fiction for over thirty years. He was the chairman of Discon1, the World Science Fiction Convention held in Washington in 1963 … and has been parliamentarian for several other conventions. He has a small publishing firm, Owlswick Press, publishing books of science fiction interest… .” Since Isaac had been despatched by his publisher to “Find someone you can trust, with the ability, the experience, the desire, and the time” to run the magazine, the Good Doctor added, “I know [George] personally, know his tastes in science fiction are like mine and that he is industrious and reliable.”

John Varley’s story, “Air Raid” (written under the “Herb Boehm” pseudonym), from Spring 1977—the very first issue of the magazine—was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula Awards and George won the 1978 Best Editor Hugo Award for his first year as editor. In 1980, he picked up another Best Editor Hugo Award for his work at Asimov’s. Many more stories published under George’s reign would go on to win or be finalists for the Hugo and Nebula awards. These stories include Barry Longyear’s classic September 1979 novella, “Enemy Mine”; Roger Zelazny’s April 1981 novelette, “Unicorn Variation”; and Connie Willis’s February 1982 novelette, “Fire Watch,” which appeared in George’s last issue as editor of Asimov’s. During his time at the magazine, George also edited eleven anthologies of stories from Asimov’s and four issues of Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine.

George went on to edit Amazing Stories for four years and worked on Weird Tales for close to twenty years. George received a Special World Fantasy Award in 1992 and World Fantasy’s Life Achievement Award ten years later.

George left Asimov’s several months before I joined the staff of the magazine. I got to know him at Philcons and other SF conventions. He was always full of advice and deeply interested in the affairs of the magazine. I last saw him in October 2009 at Capclave, a convention near Washington, DC. We chatted about his new Cat Tales anthologies and about publishing. George was happy to hear of our increase in electronic subscription sales and other news about the magazine. Although I didn’t realize it would be our final meeting, I’m glad I had the chance to speak with him one last time.

—Sheila Williams

[Back to Table of Contents]

Short Story: THE PALACE IN THE CLOUDS by Eugene Mirabelli

Eugene Mirabelli writes novels, short stories, journalistic pieces and book reviews. He tells us he’s an old writer, but new to science fiction. Eugene has been a Nebula Award nominee, and his fiction has been published in Czech, French, Hebrew, Russian, Sicilian, and Turkish. The author’s most recent work is the novel, The Goddess in Love with a Horse. Eugene’s lyrical first story for Asimov’s flies us to the enigmatic site of …

* * * *

1

The story of how the city of Venice was built upon the waters of the Adriatic sounds like a fantasy, a pure romance. Nonetheless, it’s true. As the Roman Empire collapsed, as Roman armies withdrew and abandoned their outposts, barbarians swarmed in from the North to loot and set fire to the cities of the Italian coast, raping and butchering anyone they caught. Those who escaped the smoking ruins were pursued to the sea, driven into the marshes, the swamps, and lagoons.

After the invaders left, the survivors waded back to the mainland to rebuild their homes, but soon fresh hordes swept down on them. Looting and slaughter happened again and again. Historians believe that Attila the Hun’s merciless invasion in 452 was what finally caused refugees to abandon any hope of returning to the mainland. Instead, they chose to build their lives afresh in the lagoons.

The first lagoon dwellers lived like sea birds on mats of woven reeds. Men with swords who pursued them sank knee deep and deeper in the ooze and drowned when the tide crept in. Meanwhile, the residents learned to navigate the devious maze of safe, shallow canals that flowed through the marsh; they learned to fish and to catch birds. They designed slender boats that could be pushed with a pole while floating in water no deeper than your ankle. They prospered and made settlements on nearby islands, some of them barely more than sandbars. In 466 a dozen of these island and sandbar villages banded together, and that’s as good a date as any for the founding of Venice.

The great seaborn city of Venice—the Venice where opulent palaces, bordellos, and jeweled churches rise from a placid sea, the Venice of murals and painted ceilings that glow in sunlight reflected from the water—that vibrant Venice of famous merchants, courtesans, poets, and painters, grew from those lagoon settlements. The Venetians sailed ever farther down the Adriatic and into the Mediterranean; they became great merchants, sea-going traders, and explorers. Indeed, one of their sons, Marco Polo, traveled the Silk Road to the Eastern end of the earth, Cathay. Another son of Venice, Casanova, bragged of his travels from boudoir to boudoir across Western Europe. Of all the states and principalities that composed Italy, none was so rich or so proud and independent as Venice.

* * * *

2

When I was just a kid my uncle Vincenzo took me for a ride in his open-cockpit two-seater biplane, a beautiful old-fashioned aircraft made of wood and wire and brightly painted yellow canvas. The Second World War had ended only months before and I would have preferred to be in a fighter plane—a P-40 with shark’s teeth painted on the air scoop, like the Flying Tigers—but flying risky, old-fashioned aircraft delighted my uncle. As for me, just to be aloft in a plane was wonderful.

We took off from a grassy field in Massachusetts and circled upward into a placid blue sky. Everything enchanted me that day—the miniature houses far beneath us, the clouds that turned to cool mist as we flew through them, the blue mountains on the horizon. We were headed for a sparkling white cloud, a gorgeous heap of puffy white terraces. Uncle Vincenzo steered us to an opening between two great cloud walls and then—while still in the cloud, but with no obscuring mist—we slowed and bumped gently to a landing. The engine coughed a few times, then there was silence. “Hey! We landed on a mountain!” I said.

My uncle had been a racing car driver (badly smashed nose, mangled left hand) and he did everything fast. Now he had hopped from his cockpit and come forward to me. “Let’s go,” he said, unbuckling the strap across my knees. “Presto!” he said, swinging me up from the cockpit to set me on my feet. “You can take off those goggles now,” he added.

“But I like the goggles,” I said. Wearing the leather helmet and goggles helped me pretend I was an aviator.

“Okay, keep them on. Let’s go.” He tucked a notebook inside his flight jacket, grabbed my hand with his good hand and began a quick walk.

We seemed to be on a starched tablecloth between walls made of white silk. “This isn’t a mountain,” I announced. “This isn’t a mountain at all!”

“Right, it’s not a mountain,” he said briskly. He bounded up a short stairway, pulling me along behind him.

“This is Lucia,” he told me, making a grand gesture toward a young woman with red-gold hair. “Lucia, this is my nephew, Jason.”

She extended her hand to me, saying, “Hello, Jason.”

I said hello. Her hand was nice and warm.

Lucia turned to my uncle. “I’m delighted to see you. Even two days late,” she told him. “But are you out of your mind?”

“I can explain everything,” my uncle told her.

“Yes, Vincenzo, you always do. Now, can I get you an aperitif ?—What about you, Jason? Can I get you a glass of ginger ale? You can take off those goggles, there’s no wind up here, you know. The cloud is like a sailboat.”

“This isn’t a cloud,” I informed her. “Clouds are made of fog. This is a balloon or a parachute or something.”

She looked at me and smiled and said nothing.

“He’s a bright kid,” my uncle told her cheerfully.

“He’s bright,” Lucia agreed. “And you’re out of your mind to bring him up here.”

“Where is everybody?”

Lucia shrugged and waved her hand dismissively. “Zio Domenico’s in the wheelhouse watching the dials. Everyone else has gone down. Carlo and Guido went down to work, so of course Miranda and Azzura went down with them. Antonio comes back on weekends but stays down during the week. Which is fine by me. He can have it.—They all love flatland,” she added.

“Being on the ground, you mean.”

“In the dirt, yes,” she said. “It affects their minds, you know. After a few years working down there, Antonio’s decided that everything he was taught about us is lies. All that history—just lies. The story of the propellers, the building of the new wheelhouse—not true, he says. He even claims the logbooks are fakes.”

Uncle Vincenzo took a deep breath, but didn’t say anything.

“They think I’m crazy, I think they’re crazy,” Lucia said. “So the feeling is mutual.—I’m staying here, no matter what,” she added.

“How many times have we been over this?”

“Too many.”

“You can’t manage this alone,” my uncle told her.

“You don’t think so?” Lucia seemed to be daring him to answer.

My uncle started to say something, but I guess he changed his mind. “Well,” he said.

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said.

Uncle Vincenzo reached inside his leather jacket and pulled out what I had thought was a book—a big flat square package like a notebook but much thinner. “For you,” he said, handing it to Lucia.

Lucia’s face lit up. She bit the ribbon in two—Wow! I had never seen a grownup do that!—and already she’d ripped off the wrapping. It was two records in brown paper jackets. “Bessie Smith!” Lucia cried. “And—and Ma Rainey! Where did you find this? This is wonderful!”

“It took a while,” he said, clearly pleased about something.

“Your uncle’s a nice man,” she said, turning to me. “A very nice man.”

Later, my uncle and Lucia sat together at the corner of a very long table, drinking Cinzano while I took a look at some of the pictures and the ratty old furniture. Mostly I looked out the window—my uncle wouldn’t let me go onto the balcony—at the land that spread beneath us like a pastel-colored map. Their voices were low and for the first time I became aware of a slow gentle thumping sound, rhythmic and soft, an engine of some sort, barely moving us along. I watched a tiny pickup truck on a meandering country road; the truck was moving faster than we were and gradually slipped out of sight. My uncle explained to Lucia that he had to bring me along because he was taking care of me this week. My sister had appendicitis and had been whisked off in an ambulance with my mother, and my father—rushing to the hospital—had given me into the care of Uncle Vincenzo, simply because he lived closest to our house.

“I can’t find my house from here,” I complained.

“Keep looking,” Vincenzo said. “It’s down there someplace.”

I gave up looking at the landscape and began to steal glances at the murals which showed rosy, opulent women, many of them in rumpled nightgowns that had slipped from their shoulders and down their arms. All were dining and drinking with darkly tanned men, mostly naked, though some wore grape leaves to hide their privates. The room’s ceiling, which sagged like an old tent, displayed a faded scene of angels gliding up to the clouds. Two large wedge-shaped areas had been replaced with blank white silk, or some such material. One of the women portrayed on the wall had the same red-gold hair as Lucia. Lucia was beautiful and wore sparkling bracelets that jingled whenever she moved her arm, and when she looked at me she smiled as if we shared a special secret. I had never seen anyone like her; she was fascinating.

“It’s not polite to stare, Jason,” my uncle said, interrupting my reverie. “It’s time you and I flew back to earth. Right?” And with that he threw a kiss to Lucia and pulled me off my feet as he strode to the airplane.

* * * *

3

Now back to the unlikely history of Venice. In 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte swept across Northern Italy at the head of a fast-moving victorious army and prepared to march on Venice. Lagoons and marshes had protected Venice for over a thousand years, but they couldn’t shield the city from Napoleon’s famous artillery. Venetian villas housed a treasure in paintings, books, gold, jewels, ornate mirrors, tapestries, and murals, but no cannon. On Friday, May 12, 1797, 537 members of the Great Council of Venice met to consider Napoleon’s ultimatum. Frankly, there was no place for the Venetians to go.

Among the handful who were prepared to vote against surrender was Giovanni Anafesto Pauli, called Nino Pauli. His proposal was simple. He began by saying, “Our ancestors took to the sea to escape barbarians and to build in water this Venice, our Venice, the most beautiful city on earth.” His speech lasted only five minutes and concluded with lines which have since become famous: Nostra volta e arrivata. Dobbiamo andare al cielo per costruire altra Venezia, una citta ancor piu bella in mezzo delle nubi. “Our time has come. We must take to the sky to build a second Venice, an even more beautiful city amid the clouds.” The proposal was listened to in melancholy silence, after which some councilors sighed and others merely looked glum. Then they voted. The Council accepted the terms of surrender by a vote of 512 to 20, with five abstentions, and thereby dissolved the glorious and independent Republic of Venice which had lasted one thousand and seventy years.

Nino Pauli was not discouraged. The Pauli family were merchants with offices throughout the Mediterranean littoral and Europe, and as part of his business Nino had kept himself informed of the latest political, social and scientific news. Years ago he had heard of the Montgolfiers and their remarkable balloon, and the Venetian merchant was one of the thousands who had journeyed to Paris to watch its ascent. On September 19, 1783, at Versailles, surrounded by 130,000 spectators, the Montgolfier brothers, simply using hot air, sent their first passengers aloft—a duck, a rooster, and a sheep—and all three landed intact two miles away. Nino Pauli had been delighted and fascinated. He lingered in Paris two more months in order to see another hot-air balloon rise from the Bois de Boulogne.

By the end of 1783 Jacques Charles and Nicolas Robert overcame the limitations of hot air and ascended in a balloon filled with hydrogen gas. Ballooning became popular throughout Europe—became a kind of craze, in fact—and by June of the following year the new entertainment, or science, or whatever it was, claimed its first fatalities. Pilatre de Rozier and Pierre Romain crashed to earth beneath a balloon which they had ridden aloft on a risky combination of hydrogen and heated air. Nino Pauli had returned to Venice early in December, 1783, bringing with him visions of a future in which the skies had become a global sea where great balloons lofted ships laden with goods for trade. Fourteen years later, when he made his speech at the final gathering of the Great Council, he had those balloons in mind.

* * * *

4

Vincenzo had met Lucia by accident years earlier when he briefly escaped Boston to visit Montreal. He had come from Europe to Boston because Boston was where all of us—my mother and father, my grandfather and all my uncles and aunts—lived. But he was never completely at ease here. “Boston was made by Puritans and everyone who lives here is turned into a Puritan. I’m going to Montreal,” he announced.

“This is the wrong season for Montreal,” my father told him.

“What difference does the season make? They speak French in Montreal and I’m sure they’re not Puritans. It’s a romantic city, Montreal. Even the name is romantic.”

Montreal in November turned out to be small, cold, and damp. The houses were made of gray stone, the sky was gray, and the air itself was gray. Vincenzo spent three days trudging around the city and three nights meeting the non-Puritan women who frequented Montreal’s bars and brasseries. He was walking back to his hotel in the freezing fog, so discouraged that his chin was sunk to his chest, and—wham!—a girl had come running around the corner and smacked into him.

“Pardon!” she said politely, slipping past him with a brief scent of perfume and cigarette smoke. Vincenzo unhooked her earring from his lapel, but by then she was already fading into the fog. “Your earring!” he cried in French, running after her. She was silhouetted in a lighted doorway just as he caught up to her and at the same moment the girl and the rosy illuminated room behind her lifted up into the mist. And so did Vincenzo, who had lunged in behind her.

“I’m sure this is yours,” he said, holding out the earring. It looked like a miniature chandelier made of pearls. The girl glanced around in panic—she was seventeen, maybe nineteen, Vincenzo couldn’t tell—then she whirled around, flung open a door and dashed into the next room. Vincenzo took after her, but stumbled to a halt as two rows of startled faces stared at him from the sides of a long table. The men and women had begun to get to their feet, but slowly and with care because (Vincenzo took it in now) they were so old, most of them.

“Excuse me,” Vincenzo announced. “All I wanted to do was—”

The stooped elder at the head of the table had sheltered the girl behind him, and now was pointing an antique pistol at Vincenzo.

“What’s that?” Vincenzo said. He laughed. “Please, sir, put that thing away before it explodes and blows off your hand.”

“This is crazy,” one of the younger men said in Italian. “This is exactly why we have to quit this insanity, this, this—” He waved his hand in the air.

“This farce,” an elderly woman murmured in Italian, finishing his sentence. “That one’s clearly a gentleman,” she said, referring to Vincenzo. “Too bad about his crooked nose,” she added.

“I apologize for interrupting your—” Vincenzo hesitated as he looked around. Some of the women were dressed all right but others were clothed in what looked to be museum pieces, and the same was true of the men. “I apologize for interrupting your costume party,” Vincenzo concluded. “Sorry.” He smiled.

The room swayed ever so slightly, then settled firmly in place. “Go!” the old man croaked, his hand trembling as he kept the antique firearm on Vincenzo.

“I take it we’re back on solid ground,” Vincenzo said. He tossed the earring to the girl, who snatched it out of the air, then he stepped out to Montreal and walked the deserted streets to his hotel, half singing and half humming an aria from Gianni Schicchi. He was happier than he’d been all year, simply because he’d seen such a pretty girl.

When he arrived back in Boston, Vincenzo, who loved to tell stories about his adventures, entertained my father and mother with the tale of Montreal. “And the next morning I went back there and walked up and down the street five times,” he said. “But the girl never appeared. All I have is the memory of the French cigarette smoke in her hair. And the street—well, by day you could see the street ended in a trail of broken asphalt and stones just at the place where the lighted doorway had been.”

“You still think Montreal is a romantic city?” my father asked.

Vincenzo laughed. “As you said, it was the wrong season.”

“I think it’s a romantic story,” my mother said. “A girl who lives in a dirigible.”

“I suspect it was just a big gondola attached to a balloon,” Vincenzo told her. “I think they were a circus troop. You should have seen the way they were dressed—very odd, rather gaudy, exaggerated.”

“Maybe they were gypsies,” my mother suggested.

“Or pickpockets from some fly-by-night carnival,” my father murmured.

* * * *

5

Between 1797 and 1814 Venice was controlled first by Napoleon, then by Austria, then again by Napoleon, and once more by Austria. None of this made any difference to Nino Pauli, who continued to experiment with different designs for a framework of balloons and suspended chambers. What we know about the structures Pauli built, or attempted to build, comes from three account books in which he recorded the purchases he made to advance his plan.

The old ledgers were discovered during cleanup work after a flood. In recent years Venice has had several episodes of “aqua alta,” or high water, when tides and winds have pushed the Adriatic into the squares and piazzas of the city. The floods of 1966 were particularly destructive, and a group of graduate students from Ca’ Foscari University helped to drain and clean the flooded dwellings, during which they came upon Pauli’s waterlogged ledgers.

The books were dried and eventually identified as belonging to the merchant Giovanni Anafesto Pauli whose business and family line had petered out late in the nineteenth century. They contained lists of different woods, cloths, various tars and paints, and so forth—the amount of each, the cost, and the date when purchased—and an occasional page of geometric doodles. In other words, they appeared to have little or no historical value.

Nonetheless, one of the graduate students who had found the books, Salvatore Bruni, was drawn back to the accounts again and again, intrigued by the large quantities of silk and by the curious varieties of wood, some from as far away as Indonesia, that Pauli had acquired, for it appeared that the merchant had never re-sold the material. Young Bruni saw what none of the investigators from Ca’ Foscari University had even guessed at—Nino Pauli had amassed the materials “to build a second Venice, an even more beautiful city amid the clouds.” Furthermore, it became clear to Bruni that what had been regarded as meaningless geometrical doodles on some of the ledger pages were actually airship designs, not complete designs but sketches of what might later be elaborated and engineered to a final structure.

According to a recent monograph (S. Bruni, 2001. Evoluzione degli desegni strutturale per dirigibile di Giovanni Anafesto Pauli. [Evolution of the designs for airship structures of Giovanni Anafesto Pauli. ] Serie di Storia Venezia Pub. 7 Universita Ca’ Foscari di Venezia), Nino Pauli’s early plans consisted of a balloon or set of balloons from which was suspended a rectangular construction fabricated of light wood, wickerwork, and cloth. Later designs incorporated balloons of different sizes gathered inside huge white silken bags (“sacchi di seta”) in order to more closely resemble clouds, and the final designs employed great swaths of white gauze to camouflage the structure, the “villa,” which housed the living quarters.

* * * *

6

A few days after that first airplane ride, my uncle drove us again to the grassy airfield, speeding all the way, as if in a race against an invisible competitor, but when we arrived we could do nothing more than stand inside the old hangar and look out glumly at the rain which had begun to fall. “We can’t go up in this soup,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, he paced back and forth, he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, he sighed, and always he watched the gray drizzle. At length he said, “We’re stuck, Jason. We’ll have to do it tomorrow.” He muttered a few swear words in Italian, went off to speak to one of the mechanics, then we sped back through the rain.

“Why didn’t you ever get married?” I asked.

He laughed. “What a question! I don’t know why I never got married. It just never happened.”

We drove for a while in silence, just the rumble of the motor and the beat of the windshield wipers.

“Lucia is a nice person,” I announced.

“Yes, she’s that,” he said agreeably. “And she has a remarkable singing voice, too.”

“Why don’t you marry her?”

He glanced at me, then turned back to the road. “You ask all sorts of questions, you do. I’m too old, Jason. And she’s young. Young women like young men, especially young men who have two good hands and don’t have a big crooked nose in the middle of their face.”

I felt momentarily sorry for Uncle Vincenzo. He had trained as a meteorologist in Italy, but had earned his living as a fencing master, then an Alpine mountain guide and downhill skier, and later as a race car driver for a French automobile company. Photos showed he had been handsome until another racing car smashed into him. Shortly before immigrating to the States he had learned to fly, and flying had been his love ever since. When World War II broke out he volunteered for the US Army Air Force, as it was called back then, and he was accepted, not as a fighter pilot, but as a meteorologist, forecasting weather for the Northeastern seaboard.

“Anyway, you’ve had adventures,” I told him. “That’s important. Women like that, I think.”

He smiled and said, “If you grow up fast enough maybe you can catch her.”

The next day was gray with sprinkles of rain and the day after it rained even more. It was a classic northeaster, my uncle said, and he went on to explain why New England weather was the way it was. Next morning the air was crisp, the sky blue and cloudless, just as my uncle had predicted. The meadow was soggy from all the rain and the ground seemed to cling to our wheels, letting go just before we reached the scrub brush at the edge of the field. We skimmed over the tree tops, sailed up and up, then leveled into a straight flight toward the faded hills and low mountains on the horizon. Eventually we passed over the hills and approached the gently rounded blue mountains. We went up one lonely valley and then another and another and at last I spied the solitary cloud lingering against a green mountain wall. We flew over the cloud, then turned in a wide arc and came back to glide slower and slower, following the slope of the falling land and, at the last moment, slipping into the cloud and a bumpy halt.

Uncle Vincenzo unbuckled me from my cockpit and hurried me along the white hallway to the room where we had visited Lucia, but she wasn’t there. He strode into the next room, pulling me along with his good hand while cursing softly to himself, then boosted me onto something like a stepladder, shoving me up through an open hatch and, hauling himself up, hustled me down another white hallway and into a room with windows on three sides, and there was Lucia with her hand on the ship’s wheel, a wheel so big it came up to her chest. “I heard you come on board,” she said, rising from a big wicker chair that was bolted to the floor. “Sorry I couldn’t greet you.”

“Where is everybody?” Vincenzo’s voice was tense.

“They’ve gone,” she said simply, as if it were a matter of indifference to her. “Gone forever. They’re somewhere in flatland. And they’ve got all the certificates and documents to prove they’ve always been down there.”

Lucia was as beautiful as a princess in a fairy tale and I wanted to keep looking at her, but at the same time I was enchanted by the multitude of dazzling gauges and dials, some as big around as a schoolroom clock, and all ringed with gleaming brass.

“You’re a reckless fool,” Uncle Vincenzo told her.

“Blame it on the company I keep.” She laughed, but it was a short laugh. “I’ve spent too much time with you.”

“Be serious, Lucia! You can’t control this thing by yourself. No one can do it alone. And the ridiculous windmills you call propellers are falling apart. You’ll get yourself killed in this thing.”

“This thing, as you call it, is the last hectare of the independent republic of Venice. I was born here. It’s my home. It’s where I want to be.”

“You want to be here? You want to be in this wrinkled balloon, hugging the side of some god-forsaken valley until a breeze blows the contraption to pieces? Is that what you want?”

“Not at all. I plan to take it up to where it belongs.”

“Oh? And where, oh where, might that be?”

“Four thousand meters. And don’t bore me with stories about radar. It’s all Antonio could talk about.”

“Radar is going to be everywhere. You can stay in these valleys and get swatted against a mountain like a fly, or you can go up to four thousand meters and be seen on radar.”

“That’s more than thirteen thousand feet,” I announced.

They looked at me as if I had materialized out of thin air.

“Four thousand meters, that’s more than thirteen thousand feet,” I repeated. “I can convert meters to feet.”

“This pack of balloons will be torn apart at thirteen thousand feet,” Vincenzo said, turning back to Lucia.

They went on arguing. I counted fifteen dials and one clock, a big mariner’s compass (with a winged lion in the middle and fancy curlicues painted around the letters N, E, S, W), five pressure gauges, three temperature gauges, and—overhead—two curved brass things that looked like sextants with pendulums. In the middle of the room there was a table with a big map under a thick sheet of glass; it showed New England and part of New York, and when you looked closely you could read little notes in tiny handwriting all up and down the Connecticut River and the Hudson River, and even along part of the St. Lawrence. I sat in one of the big wicker chairs. I don’t know how much time passed, but it passed slowly.

“What’s this?” I asked them. I had just then found a brass funnel attached to a hose.

“That’s a speaking tube,” my uncle said. “Lucia can use it to give orders to a non-existent crew.”

Lucia turned to me and said, “Your old uncle is a cruel man. He’s never believed me, he’s only pretended.”

“I believe you’ll die if you stay here.”

“You’ve never seen this villa high among the cumulus, drifting with the clouds,” she said. “You’ve never seen this the way it was, the outside dazzling white with pale blue shadows in the silk, the rooms inside like jewel boxes, all floating. You don’t know what it was like when I was a little girl and saw the city all together—oh, yes, it was only splendid remnants, but all those clouds drifting together, sometimes so close we could carry on conversations from one ship to another, some of them with grand terraces and ramparts and cloud towers, all white, all floating. You don’t know what it’s like to be free. You just don’t know.”

For a long moment my uncle didn’t say anything. “I know you’re in some Jules Verne dream and I can’t wake you up,”he told her. “Come on, Jason. It’s time for us to go.” And that’s what we did.

* * * *

7

By the end of the week my sister was recovering so well from her appendectomy that my parents came to Vincenzo’s and collected me and my dirty clothes. On the drive home I told them how Uncle Vincenzo had taken me up in his airplane twice and both times we had visited Lucia who lived in a cloud. My parents, side by side in the front seat of the automobile, remained silent for a long moment after I had finished my story, so I knew there was something wrong. “He took you up in that yellow box kite?” my father asked. I said yes. “Good God!” he muttered. Then he sighed and added, “At least you’re here in one piece.”

“I don’t remember any Lucia,” my mother said.

“Vincenzo doesn’t report everything in his love life. It only seems that way,” my father told her. “The important thing is we have Jason back.”

“The cloud wasn’t really a cloud,” I explained. “It’s really made of balloons.”

“It’s really just a foggy field in the Berkshires,” my father informed me. “He’s flown there before.”

“I don’t think he should introduce Jason to his women,” my mother said.

“No, Dad, it wasn’t a field. It was like a sailing ship. I was in the control room.”

“Especially the kind of women he doesn’t tell us about,” she added.

I learned that talking about those flights made my mother and father angry at my uncle, so I stopped. Besides, the whole story was too fantastic to be believed and I had other things to keep me busy.

* * * *

8

The three account books preserved at Ca’ Foscari University extend the story of Giovanni Anafesto Pauli’s proposal “to build a second Venice, an even more beautiful city amid the clouds.” The ledger pages demonstrate, as well as any document can, that Nino Pauli actually constructed lighter-than-air vessels, the airborne villas of legend. According to the so-called Montreal affidavit, sworn to by Santalucia Dolfino, Pauli designed and tested lighter-than-air ships starting in 1797. In 1810, seventeen “cloud-ships” bearing a total of six hundred souls gathered over the Adriatic and—like the men in the year 466 on those shallow islands off the Italian coast—they declared themselves the Republic of Venice. The airborne Republic was presided over by Nino Pauli until his death in 1837; he was succeeded by his nephew, Cosimo Grimani, who retired from leadership in 1879 and was followed first by Alessandro Dolfino and later by Cosimo Dolfino. The community dwindled over the years; there were few births and many people simply left. Cosimo died in 1940, at which time the vessels had become scattered and, in fact, most of the Venetians had abandoned the drifting and increasingly decrepit Republic and had slipped quietly into other communities on solid ground.

Unfortunately, beyond these meager documents there is little but speculation and myth. Legends have Pauli building only five balloon-borne ships or maybe a hundred. A flaming cloud-ship is said to have fallen like a meteor into the waters off the Dalmatian cost, drowning everyone on board, and another is supposed to have crashed in the Italian Alps, burying a treasure of art and gold under falling snow. The most frivolous fable has a cloud-villa coming to rest in Paris where it’s somehow transformed into a maisonclose, an elegant brothel, complete with nude paintings by Titian, as well as the big mirrors and exquisite baubles produced by the Venetian glassworks at Murano.

Of course, there are the two artifacts collected by my Uncle Vincenzo—an old painting, and a seaman’s brass telescope, or spyglass. Vincenzo found these pieces of evidence, if that’s what they are, after Lucia disappeared.

About three years after we left the cloud-villa for the last time, my uncle made an automobile trip up along the Connecticut River. He was working as a weather forecaster for a radio station and he was convinced the Venetian airship had been torn apart in a storm. He believed Lucia had continued the usual flight pattern—northward up the Hudson River, then east along the Saint Lawrence, southward down the Connecticut River and west to the Hudson again. Sometimes the ship had gone around the other way, but no matter which way Lucia had gone my uncle was certain that sooner or later high winds would have smashed her against the mountains that frame those rivers.

Powerful love can turn a man’s life into a desperate romantic fantasy, especially an adventurous man. Vincenzo filled his silver hip flask with brandy and set off in the crazy hope he’d find his Lucia walking down the street in some little town on the Connecticut or, he said in his saner moments, at least he’d find evidence showing where the balloon had crashed. He didn’t find anything along the Connecticut. So he drove across Vermont to the Hudson, parked in Burlington for lunch and, as he got out of his car, he saw the spyglass shining like gold in the window of an antique shop. The shop owner said she had bought the telescope about a year ago from a man who had ridden off on a motorcycle.

It’s a simple brass telescope without an inscription or mark of any kind to show it was used in the Venetian airship. The tube has a few dents here and there, but most important to Vincenzo was the eyepiece. The original eyepiece of the telescope he had used on the airship had been damaged in the nineteenth century and a new eyepiece had replaced it. On the spyglass he brought back from the antique shop, he was able to point to little mismatches between the eyepiece and the telescope tube. Those minor imperfections were enough to convince my uncle that the spyglass had come from the airship which, he was now certain, had been ripped to shreds by winds somewhere along the Hudson.

The next summer Vincenzo made a desperate trip up the Hudson, scouring every antique shop along the way. He didn’t find anything from the airship and he ended up at the source of the Hudson, a little lake called Tear of the Clouds, where he wept and drank the last of his brandy. The next day he drove north along Lake Champlain, following as closely as he could the route Lucia’s airship used to take. Before getting to the Saint Lawrence he stopped at a tavern in Plattsburgh to refill his hip flask and saw above the bar a darkish banner, a painting of a bearded man with grape leaves in his hair, stretching out his arm to offer a crystal goblet of wine to a receptive woman with dusky rose breasts. Vincenzo was sure he had seen that painting aboard the Venetian villa.

The owner said the banner had been hanging over the bar when he bought the tavern six months ago from the previous owner’s daughter; she had flown in from California to sell the place soon after her father died. Vincenzo drove back to Boston with the seven-foot-long painting draped over the front passenger seat and into the back of the car. According to a conservator at the Worcester museum, the paint and cloth suggested that it survived from the late eighteenth century; the torn edges indicated that the painting had been scissored from a larger work. The cloth was silk, a rarity. The figures may have been copied, the conservator suggested, from a Giorgione or Titian or Bellini or, more likely, from one of their inferior imitators. Vincenzo was convinced that the airship had been torn apart by winds over Plattsburgh and the pieces had gone down, most of them, in the deep waters of Lake Champlain.

* * * *

9

In fact, the airship went down over Lake Champlain, not at Plattsburgh, New York, but on the other side, close by Burlington, Vermont. And it didn’t get torn apart. It was a calm night in late March with a soft wet heavy snowfall, so soft that Lucia didn’t wake up until the ship was collapsing with great groans onto the jumbled jigsaw of ice on Champlain. It was the drifting ice that did it—ground everything to bits—and by morning there wasn’t a stick or a shred of cloth left to see.

A year after finding the painting in the tavern, Vincenzo drove back to Plattsburgh and followed Lake Champlain into Canada. Champlain flows north and empties into the Richelieu River, which continues northward to join the St. Lawrence below Montreal. Lucia was singing at the Blue Angel, a cramped and smoky downstairs blues club in Montreal, and that’s where he found her. He stumbled against a chair at one of the small tables at the back of the room and sat down to watch Lucia sing, hoping that his thumping old heart would not explode in his chest. When she finished the set he abruptly stood up, accidently knocking over the table. Lucia looked at him. She quickly shook off what she saw as a trick of her eyes, but then she began to walk slowly toward him just to make sure. She saw it was her Vincenzo, broken nose and all, but at the same time she didn’t believe it.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered, much as she might question a ghost.

“I came looking for you,” he said. “What are you doing here, underground?”

“I belong here.”

“No,” he said. “You belong in the sky. And I can make that happen.”

She half smiled. “Ah, Vincenzo, who’s the dreamer now?”

“Come on,” he said. He was already heading for the door as he threw his arm around her. “Let’s get out of here.”

They did get out of there. They left the Blue Angel, ducked into his car and drove from Montreal south out of Canada through the night, not stopping until they reached St. Albans, Vermont.

Vincenzo and Lucia lived happily—not forever after, it’s true, but for a good long time. They had a house on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, a rural area, where Vincenzo built her a balloon airship they called The Winged Lion, an emblem of Venice. The craft was a single airy room, surrounded and supported by puffy white silk clouds.

Lucia survived Vincenzo by some fifteen years. She was never able to say for sure whether the old brass spyglass that he had found in an antique shop came from her airship. But she was certain the seven-foot-long scrap of painted silk had been torn from the ceiling of one of the larger rooms. Furthermore, she insisted that the painting was by Titian. “Who else could have painted it?” she’d say, as if daring anyone to dispute her. “He was the greatest of all the Venetian painters. Of course it’s by Titian.”

And if I dared to say, “Titian died in 1576. The experts say the cloth it’s painted on was woven around 1750 at the earliest.”

She’d reply, “Clearly the experts are wrong!” Then she’d laugh and open her arms, all her bracelets jingling. “Now, who are you going to believe? Me or the experts who don’t know a Titian when they see it? You’ve got to have faith.—Now cast off the hawser and we’ll go up. Vincenzo always loved going up at this time of day.”

So I’d unhook the hawser or tether and we’d float up into the twilight sky, dark blue to the east, pale blue overhead, and red gold to the west. “Your uncle was a great man,” she’d say. Then we’d drift over the darkling expanse of the lake, its margin defined by the twinkling of hundreds and hundreds of house lights on the shore, while she told me about her escapades with Vincenzo or about the great fleet of air castles riding high and white in the sky when she was a girl.

Copyright (c) 2010 Eugene Mirabelli

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Poetry: THE NOW WE ALMOST INHABIT by Roger Dutcher and Robert Frazier

* * * *

* * * *

go ask Alice they say

ask her how data morphs

how reality changes so easy

how revision eats away at

the now we almost inhabit

and when it corrupts

it corrupts absolutely

and you won’t notice

until Alice is ten feet tall

or fits beneath your thumb

as her every mutation brings

new iteration to seeming life

go ride the noise they say

ride the raging funnels

of nano-formula and tsunami code

how they reveal a Cheshire smile

across the noir cityscapes

of Calcutta, Baghdad, Tokyo, Beirut

how the statue of Christ above Rio

beams an immense virtual aurora

over the hilltop favelas and cold sea

stretching out his arms

to gather in all who have

become the true belief

Copyright (c) Roger Dutcher and Robert Frazier

[Back to Table of Contents]

Novelette: WHEAT RUST by Benjamin Crowell

Through some mysterious and unexpected process, the author, like the protagonist of this story, finds himself entering middle age. Since he’s not traveling on a generation starship, Ben is coping with the situation by doing lots of backpacking in the Sierras.

The men picked an inconvenient time to fall out of the air. I wasn’t being paid to play my fiddle that day, and I’d intended to spend it philandering. Well, a bad impulse thwarted is twice as bad, because then you’re left with all the guilt but none of the fun to make up for it. I don’t mean guilt in a prudish way, but, even to someone with my underdeveloped capacity for remorse, it was clear that Anuradha wasn’t the type to keep the right sense of perspective about a love affair.

I was navel-gazing, which is especially enjoyable when the navel belongs to someone as young and beautiful as Anu. My head rested on her bottom ribs. These days my eyes don’t see so well up close, and the blur helped to make the gentle mound of her belly into a kind of magical panorama, with the knot of her sarong like the gate of a mysterious temple in the distance.

The fantasy landscape heaved, and my face hit the sand.

“What is that?” she said in her one-of-a-kind voice. She had a contralto like a fast, deep river: exhilarating, but not the type that gets the showy parts.

I wiped the grit off of my lips, propped myself up on one elbow, and looked around before answering.

We were abovedecks at my favorite love-nest by the edge of the Consul’s hunting reserve, on the shore of a lake so big that you could see the upward curl of its surface to left- and right-spin. I had access to the spot because of my connections at court. The lake was on the down-axis frontier, and the groundskeeper told me that whenever the Consul came here she brought bodyguards to watch out for Sinhal assassins on the far shore.

“What’s what?” I asked.

She was looking away to left-spin.

“Those, Rui!” She pointed up at an angle.

The glare of the glow-tubes made it hard to see. As the landscape curved up into the distance, the dark green pines turned suddenly into crowded villages and fields of rye. Finally my eyes picked out motion: two black spots in the air.

“Crows?” I asked, standing up.

“No, they look like people. You can’t see?”

“My eyes aren’t as good as they used to be,” I admitted, “but it can’t be people.” But as I squinted I saw that they did seem to have human shapes. I realized that my squinting wasn’t what was making them easier to see; they were coming closer. Now I could tell that they were angling down sideways with the kind of coriolis you see when a hawk makes a dive at a rabbit. One looked limp as a glove, but the other had his arms spread out like a bird. I barely had time to register any of this before they plunged into the lake at an angle, first one and then the other, close to our shore. The slaps when they hit were like timpani crashes, and the spray reached us on the beach.

Even if they’d been alive before they hit, it seemed obvious to me that after an impact like that they must be dead. I congratulated myself on not being smashed like a wine grape, which was what could have happened if they’d come in twenty meters up-axis. Even while I was thinking that, Anu dashed out into the water. (Anu was an illegal third child from a merchant family, raised by Christian nuns. If she came across a wild dog shaking a chipmunk, she’d probably box the dog’s nose and make it apologize.) I shook my head and waded in after her. We were in up to our thighs when the flying men bobbed to the surface on their own. They were jacketed from head to foot in something black, with bulbous helmets. Space suits? That couldn’t make sense, but it was true that they were riding high in the water, as if the suits were full of air.

A dozen strokes brought me to the nearer one, who was floating face down. When I uprighted myself the water was only up to my neck. I managed to get him turned over on his back, but the tinted visor on the helmet made it impossible to see his face.

“Tow him to the beach,” I yelled to Anu, and went on to fetch the other one, who’d surfaced face up. He surprised me by moving his arm, but he still seemed dazed, so I got a grip on some of the equipment strapped to his back and started pulling him ashore.

“Rui, look out!” Anu shouted from the beach, just as an arrow plunged into the water in front of me. I twisted around and looked at the far shore. There was no beach there, just a steep ridge of exposed foundation material. At the top of the ridge a swarm of Sinhal solders were jumping off of horses, milling around, pointing, waving their arms, and brandishing weapons. At this point the sane thing to do would have been to let the second astronaut go on playing his assigned role in the target-shooting exercise. Unfortunately, as I’ve known ever since I was a pup, I don’t act sane around beautiful women. I kept up my kicking and my one-armed sidestroke until I had him back on the sand.

By that time he was showing more signs of life, so Anu and I left him on his own and concentrated on slinging his dead or unconscious friend over a saddle. After what seemed like a long time messing around, while I imagined arrows sprouting from my back, we got both astronauts onto the horses. The conscious one had to sit on my rented mare sidesaddle, because apparently it’s not possible to ride astraddle in a spacesuit. Finally we led the horses up the trail into the forest, with me and the one who was out of action bringing up the rear.

Once the trees were around us, it suddenly got quiet. The astronaut said, “Gobble gobble.” Water was still dripping from the chin of his helmet.

“I don’t think we speak your language,” Anu said. She was leading his horse by the bridle since he didn’t seem to know what to do with the reins. “Do you speak Portuguese?”

”Goo goo goo,” the astronaut said, and then a second voice came from his helmet, speaking funny Portuguese: “Muitissimos agradecidos.”

“Don’t mention it,” I answered automatically. “Ah, if you don’t mind my asking, who the hell are you, why are you here, and why were those Sinhal devils trying to kill us all?”

“Is your comrade alive?” Anu put in. “Do we need to get him out of his suit to help him?” A faint voice inside the conscious one’s helmet translated all of this into pig-grunts.

“Szemnik will be all right for now,” he said, bending down awkwardly to look at her. The translation sounded like an academician trying to talk and eat water-snails at the same time. “He was hit in the leg, but his suit’s applying pressure to the wound. He was going into shock for a while, but his readings are stabilized now. He’s getting a rich mix to breathe, and he’s warm, so I think he’s safer in the suit than out of it.” He turned to me and said, “I’m Hua, and that’s Szemnik, as I said. We’re here to survey your habitat. We were just supposed to fly along the axis in zero gee, a total of three thousand kilometers, and then climb down at the next set of support cables. As to why your neighbors shot us down, I wouldn’t know. They seem to have obtained some proscribed technology, and I don’t imagine they get many chances to fire it at a real airborne target.”

While his pedantic echo was giving the cosmological fairy-tale lecture, my horse had slowed down. I grabbed a pine branch and gave the horse a reminder on its flanks, even though I was already getting a side-ache myself.

Life would have been a lot simpler if Anu hadn’t said what she said next. “While we were getting Szemnik on the horse, I saw you do something. You pointed your arm up at the ridge.”

There was a pause even before Hua spoke to his translator. “Did I?”

“Yes, you did,” she said. She couldn’t see him stiffen in the saddle behind her. “One of the soldiers fell down, and there was a commotion.” She glanced up over her shoulder at him.

“Really?” There was something cautious about his muffled voice, but the translator sounded calm.

“I think you’d better trust us, stranger,” I said. “Anu has eyes like a demon’s, and she knows what she saw.”

He took a breath and said “Okay,” which turned out to be the same word in his own language as in Portuguese. “I’ll tell you the situation, and then I’ll strongly suggest that you keep this information to yourself.” If I’d had any sense, I’d have interrupted him and told him that three people were at least one too many when it came to keeping secrets. “The man on the cliff was setting up a smartrifle, probably the same weapon they used to shoot Szemnik in the air. Our mission here is peaceful and scientific, but we do have a little light defensive weaponry built into these suits. Those men probably knew that, and I think that was why they wanted to bring us down. If they’d caught us I think they would have very carefully peeled us out of the suits, tortured us for information on how to use them, and then slit our throats.”

Light defensive weaponry. By his standards, that meant a way to point at someone a hundred meters away and make him drop to the dirt (dead? unconscious?) without a sound.

“So you were trying to get across the border,” Anu suggested, “and land in our territory, where they couldn’t get you.”

“No,” Szemnik said, “I was heading for an airlock that we could use to get out of the hab.” He said it casually, as if leaving the habitat was like walking out the door of his apartment in the morning. “Splash down in the river, go to the airlock, pop the hatch.”

“You aimed for the river, not the lake?” Anu asked.

“There wasn’t supposed to be a lake, but in this style of hab, when they built an out-hull lock, it was usually at the lowest elevation in the area, to make it as close as possible to the outside. There wasn’t any lake on the last survey, but water does tend to flow downhill.”

The Consul’s groundskeeper had told me about that. There used to be a marsh, and the horses would always get stuck in it. They drained it and diverted the water into the lake. I felt sorry for the stranger in spite of myself.

The groundskeeper’s cottage is also a semaphore station, and he’d already noticed the commotion from his tower. By the time we showed up, there was already a squad of cavalry prancing around. Officers started arriving and asking everyone questions, and when a higher-ranking one came, he would invariably chew out his predecessor for not handling the situation correctly, then start asking the same questions over again. It started to rain. I remember someone with epaulets and a gold-braided fez leaning over Szemnik, peering into his helmet visor, and tapping on it with his knuckles.

They sent for an ambulance for the two mystery men, and for me and Anu they even rounded up a spare mail buggy. It was fast, and strung as tight as an E-string, and the driver pushed his team harder than I’d have dared with a four-in-hand. It was dark by then and getting cold enough to make our teeth chatter even if we hadn’t been crashing over potholes. I was shocked, shivering, jittery, and tired, but Anu shucked her wet sarong, pulled the lap rug around her shoulders, and asked if she could be invited over to my seat.

* * * *

Anu and I got wreaths put around our necks, which raised some eyebrows because she was a Christian. Everyone was comfortable with a story involving the bloodthirsty Sinhala making trouble on our down-axis border, and they would have reacted just as satisfactorily if the propaganda event had been about the baby-killing, crucifix-kissing Vieghs on the up-axis side. But a Christian heroine taking sides against the Sinhals was confusing. They solved that puzzle by emphasizing that Rui, the nice, orthodox Hindu, was the one who brought Szemnik in while a “hail” of arrows (I only remember one) fell in the water around me. The newsmongers made it sound like Anu, the cultist, was my faithful servant, acting under my orders. What I’d found out was that she wasn’t helpless or innocent—wasn’t anything like I’d thought she was.

Szemnik got put in a private sickroom in the palace, and they shepherded me and Anu in for a carefully supervised ceremonial visit. He smiled and clasped my arm, but even though his grip was firm, I couldn’t help noticing the smell from the infected wound on his leg. The Consul granted Hua and Szemnik titles, which was obviously a way of drawing them closer to herself.

My head was in a muddle that week. I saw an augur, but he didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I’d never had so much trouble managing a simple love affair—or the end of one, which should have just meant that it was time for the rooster to chase after a new hen. I’d been off my game ever since the strange experience at the lake. I was like the card shark who reads a pile of sutras, and from then on he misses every trick because he’s too busy thinking about the thirty-one planes of existence.

Szemnik’s leg eventually had to be amputated, but after that he seemed to get better.

I saw a lot of Anu during the hubbub about the Outsiders, but I didn’t get a chance to see her alone until a rehearsal for a long program of Brahms songs, which the Consul’s husband loved. Kid stuff, especially compared to the symphonies, but the Consort loves his sentimental late-romantic bonbons, and our patrons call the tunes. The night before the rehearsal I couldn’t sleep. I felt as nervous as if the rehearsal was a big audition. In the morning I splashed water on my face and studied my receding hairline in the mirror. Was I making a fool of myself with such a young woman?

It’s four or five kilometers from my quarters to the hall, and normally I’d take a cyclo, or even a hansom if I was in a hurry, but I was up so early that I decided to walk. When the public corridor opened up into the dizzying cavern of the Plaza da Constituicao, I felt like a little boy showing up with his slate for his first day at school. No matter what I think about the musical tastes of the ruling class, the building always reminds me why they care so much about preserving culture—and making sure everyone sees them do it. When you see the way they maintain a file cabinet full of Pergolesi scores, you know they’ll also do a good job of maintaining the lower-tech parts of a creaky old space habitat, so you can go on breathing in the style to which you’ve become accustomed. I waved to the guard in his twentieth-century tuxedo, walked through the gates, and set my violin case down on the steps of the giant Rhinemaidens fountain, intending to have a good long smoke to calm my nerves. The glow-tube light filtering through the skylights was just beginning to brighten. It was bitterly cold, which suited my mood.

A fly landed on the steps and spoke to me.

“Rui Santos? Don’t smash me; I have a message for you.”

I took my pipe out of my mouth, and then I must not have said anything for a while, because it asked again, “Are you Rui Santos?” The voice was high pitched, just like you’d expect from a fly.

“Yes, I am.” I looked around to make sure there wasn’t someone in the plaza playing a trick on me. “You’re from one of the Outsiders.”

“Szemnik.” Every time it talked, its wings buzzed up and down in a blur.

“Are you really a fly?”

“No, I’m a machine. I was supposed to be used as a stealthed nonsentient air-to-ground vehicle, but Szemnik decided he needed a sentient agent. I’m his partial Kurzweil. I booted up this morning. I have limited volition, and part of his knowledge from his most recent upload, which was last year—plus information that he transmitted to me verbally after he made me.”

“I don’t understand.”

It cocked its head at me. “I’m a machine that knows the most important things he knows, and I think more or less the way he would. I have to tell you some things that Hua and the Consul don’t want you to know.”

Of course I knew better than to believe that it was a machine. Szemnik must have thought the Republic was a bunch of cavemen, if he thought I’d accept that. It’s true that we don’t have the amounts of metal that we’d need for building our own factories and spaceships, but that doesn’t mean we’re ignorant savages. I’m no academician, but I know that a machine has certain limits. Our orchestra’s grand piano is an amazing machine, with a small fortune worth of steel in its harp and its hundreds of strings, but it can only play eighty-eight notes, and it can only play the notes the pianist tells it to play. But in any case the fly did know things that only the Outsiders knew, so I had to accept that it did and knew the things it did and knew, without knowing what it really was.

Hua had lied, the fly told me, when he said that he and Szemnik were on a survey mission—or at least he’d left out part of the truth. There’d been an earlier survey mission, forty-six years ago, carried out by a “probe”—which was another kind of golem like the fly, but much bigger. The probe saw that one of our glow-tubes was dead—as it has been for centuries, which is why we don’t live in a steam bath like the Vieghs and Sinhala. It went on up-axis into Viegh, and it saw that their crop patterns had changed. Their wheat fields weren’t producing as much wheat anymore. It landed to collect a sample (and I pity any farmer, even a Viegh farmer, who was there to see the thing come down out of the sky).

When the probe got back, the Outsider academicians analyzed the sample. The wheat was infected with some kind of mold or fungus called a wheat rust. The rust liked the warmer temperatures in Viegh better, so it was only slowly spreading into the Republic. There was a debate about it in the Outsider senate. (Yes, the Outsiders apparently had a republican form of government just like ours. The way the fly described it, the senate actually made the decisions, but I assume that was either because the creature was naive or because it was afraid it would be punished if it described the way a republic really works.) Their senate decided that it would be too expensive to fix our Republic’s broken glow-tube any time in this century, but they could get rid of the wheat rust more cheaply, by releasing a kind of yeast that would kill it off. That was the main reason for Hua and Szemnik’s mission.

“Why is Hua keeping all of this secret?” I asked the fly.

“Hua’s gone native, and he’s in bed with your government,” the fly squeaked. “I know Hua. He wasn’t happy before. Now he’s got his title, obsequious servants … goes hunting all the time, chases women. Your government doesn’t want the yeast to be deployed, and that’s okay with Hua.”

“Why don’t they? It seems like the cure would be a good thing for us. The Vieghs already have the rust, and if the crud spreads to our fields, maybe we’ll get short on food too. We’d be in a worse position than we’re in now, and right now it’s all we can do to keep the Vieghs from crossing the border, burning our cities, and raping our women.”

“Yes, but it’s the Vieghs who are infested right now, and, if the cure works, they’re the ones who will benefit. No more famines.”

“Huh—and they win the next war.”

“The humane thing to do is to release the yeast. Anything else is just delaying the inevitable final equilibrium while increasing the amount of suffering. The rust is spreading into the Republic, just not as quickly, because of the colder climate. It’ll get here in fifty years, maybe a hundred at the most.”

“Well, I don’t know about humane … these are Vieghs we’re talking about here.” How had I managed to get into a debate about ethics with a talking fly?

“This isn’t just about Viegh and the Republic. It will spread everywhere eventually, and there are half a billion people in this hab.”

“All right, my moral sense is quivering. So you’re here to ask for help finishing up the mission, right? Hua’s gone fishing, and Szemnik’s a cripple, so it makes sense that Szemnik needs help. I’m not even saying I’m on your side, but anyway, why did you—I mean, why did Szemnik send you to talk to me in particular?”

“He thinks that if you pick a random person off the street, usually you’ll get someone who’s good and honest. But he and Hua aren’t surrounded by random people off the street. Access to them is carefully controlled. Everyone is looking for a way to exploit the situation. For instance, the military suspects there are technologies in the suits that would be useful to them.”

“Oh, really?”

“We already contacted Anu.”

“Did you tell her there were kittens and fuzzy ducklings to be rescued?” Why couldn’t these garlic-asses leave her out of this?

“I think she might be willing to help, but I don’t think she and I can do it alone. Before Szemnik nanofabs the yeast, we need an up-to-date genomic and proteinomic sample of the rust. The infected fields are hundreds of kilometers away, and I don’t have that kind of on-the-wing range.”

I resisted the temptation to ask what the science-magic meant. I’m sure there were academicians in the Republic who would have understood a lot of it—excluding, of course, the parts that the Builders considered too dangerous to allow us to know. I’d never really worried about such things, being more interested in getting a good edition of the Kreutzer Sonata than in cooking up a bug or a bomb that could make our habitat not-inhabitat-able.

Third morning bells rang. Pretty soon people would start arriving for the rehearsal, and as they walked through the courtyard they’d probably be wondering why I was talking to myself.

“The border with Viegh is closed,” I pointed out.

“Right, so we have to use the emergency exterior monorail system.”

“The which?”

It explained. What took me a while to understand was the part about “exterior”—which meant outside the hab itself, dangling down into outer space.

It kept on talking and talking, as if I was actually interested in its crazy, useless plan. At least a normal fly has the courtesy to buzz without words. Finally the piano player came through the gates, looking hung over as usual, and I took that as an excuse to escape the blathering bug.

At first the inside of the hall had its usual effect of calming me and helping me to focus. It’s a perfect replica (including acoustics, they say) of the ancient Vienna Musikverein, from the velvet seats to the swan-riding cherubs on the ceiling.

But all through the rehearsal my eyes kept wandering over to Anu, and I embarrassed myself by missing a repeat on one of the numbers. The organs at both ends of my spine started to feel like the two lit ends of a juggler’s fire torch.

Finally I cornered her in the hallway at the tea break.

“Anu!”

“Oh, hello, Rui”—a girlish smile—”I’ve missed you”—good!—”How have you been?”—but did that sound more like I was an uncle she’d forgotten about?

“I’ve taken up taxidermy. Would you like to try it sometime?”

I’d been hoping for a giggle, but all I got was a sad smile that made her look like Joan of Arc. They don’t heat the building for rehearsals, and she had a thick wool dupatta wrapped around her head. “I have a pine wreath that I probably should have taxidermed,” she said, “but I think it’s too late. It’s dropped all its needles.”

I solemnly studied the snaggletooth that somehow made her even more irresistible. “I want to see you,” I said.

“You’re seeing me right now.”

“You know what I mean. I’ve never—”

“Rui, we’ve attracted a lot of attention. There’s no way for us to get any time together alone.”

As if I hadn’t spent the whole night thinking about that! Anu still lived at the convent where she’d been raised. The sisters said she could stay as long as she liked, even if she never felt the calling. They always had too many nuns who were old and feeble, and not enough young ones to handle all the work. I’d already imagined a few dozen dramas that began with Enter Rui, climbing over the convent’s wall.

“A fly was buzzing around my room,” Anu said.

“One bothered me recently, too,” I said. “What a nuisance! It took me forever to get it to go away.”

She stared at me and frowned. It seemed like she was waiting for me to say more. When I didn’t, she turned on her heel and stalked off without another word.

When the rehearsal was over, I loosened my bow with the kind of twists you’d use to wring a chicken’s neck. I wiped the rosin off of my instrument, wadded up my handkerchief, and threw it in the case with a curse. Everyone would expect me to go to a teahouse now and be my usual laughing self. I walked fast out a side exit, through the gates, and out into the plaza.

I walked for a long time, stepping over beggars, dodging oxcarts, and pushing through market squares that I didn’t recognize. After a while I noticed that my hand was hurting, and I loosened my grip on the handle of my violin case. My leg muscles were complaining too, and I was out of breath. I was at the intersection of two narrow corridors littered with trash. An old man was tending a water fountain, and a crowd of dirty boys was kicking a rock around as enthusiastically as if they’d eaten twice as much that day as they really had. A slowly oscillating wind synced to a tired, ultrabasso wheeze told me that there was a recycling lung somewhere nearby.

I gave the toothless old man a milli for a drink, then put my case against a wall and sat down on it. I spent some time making a comprehensive list of my weaknesses, and then a man sat down next to me on my case.

“Get off,” I said. “This isn’t a public bench.”

“I need to talk to you, Rui Santos.” He reached into his tunic and pulled out a leather policeman’s badge.

“What do you want?”

“You seemed to be in quite a hurry.” He was big, and spoke in a soft, gravelly voice.

“That’s not against the law, is it?”

“What’s in the box?”

“My violin.”

“Anything else?”

“What’s this about?”

“Who are you meeting here?”

Confused and angry, I stood up, and then, as if it had been a prearranged signal, two more men materialized. The big one slowly got off the end of my case. I’m not much of a spy, and I’m sure my thoughts played across my face like a magic lantern show. One: Why are they hassling me? Two: I have nothing to hide. Three: Actually, I do have something to hide—my knowledge of the weapons built into the suits.

The big man stepped up to me and took my hand like he was going to ask me to marry him. I was held like a horse on a short tether. One of the others came up behind me and felt for weapons under my clothes, then emptied out my pockets. The boys and the old water seller had all disappeared.

“You’re the boss violin-player at the palace,” the big bruiser said. “Work with your hands, don’t you?”

He started to bend my wrist backward. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see one of his men systematically searching through my case.

“You work with your hands?” he repeated. It felt like the little bones inside my wrist had turned into a bag of broken glass.

“Yes, I do. What do you want? I don’t know what this is all about.” The assistant goon turned my violin upside-down and shook it to see if he could get anything to fall out through the f-holes.

“Why were you in such a hurry?”

“I wasn’t in a hurry.” He twisted harder on my wrist, and I hissed through my teeth.

“Tell me the truth.”

“I wasn’t in a hurry,” I insisted, trying to keep my voice from squeaking. “I was just upset. I … my lover was singing at the rehearsal. We aren’t as … close as we used to be.”

The flunky finished his search. “Nothing here, boss.”

The big one looked at me carefully like he was choosing a cut of meat at a butcher’s shop, and then let go of my hand. “I want you to think this meeting over, Santos. Think hard about it.”

I did plenty of thinking that night. The first thing I had to admit to myself was what should have been obvious. When the Head Bone Crusher had told me to tell the truth, I had: I wanted Anu, and I was making myself suffer because of it. I wasn’t just temporarily discombobulated, wasn’t just trying to judge whether it was time to move on. I was like a man who’s been able to drink in moderation for his whole life. Then one day he goes on a tear, and within a month he’s stopped showing up for work, and he’s saying things like I drink because I like the taste, or I can take it or leave it. And the worst part was that I knew now, with a hollow feeling in my gut, that Anu scorned me, thought I was a contemptible coward.

The next morning, the fly was waiting for me outside my door, and I let him in.

* * * *

“I need a sort of a fake alibi,” I said.

I was having tea at a street table with Gaithri Gomes, the principal violist. We’d once had quite a fling, until she cut it off. Now she was married. Gaithri was from a rich family, and she was at least my age, but she managed not to look matronly in spite of her classy evening shift and nipple rouge.

Gaithri’s eyebrows went up. “Oh?”

I tossed a milli into a monk’s bowl and succeeded in making him go away. “Well, maybe not so much an alibi as—to convince some people that I’m in a certain place, when actually I’m not. Of course I understand if you…”

“Is this about a woman?” A sad smile. And was that a hint of pity on her face?

“No, it’s—well, there is a woman involved, but—actually it’s worse than that, which is why maybe you’d rather not…”

“Worse in what way?”

“Political,” I admitted, feeling sure that my ears were glowing like hot coals.

The eyebrows shot up again, and then she let loose with a laugh like a war-whoop.

* * * *

The next day, Gaithri and I made ourselves look tipsy on the way to her posh abovedecks apartment. Her husband was inspecting one of his plantations, and wouldn’t be back for two days. I nearly shed my skin like a snake when Gaithri pulled me to a halt outside the courtyard and rubbed my crotch for verisimilitude. We went inside and were instantly sober. Twenty heartbeats later I was climbing out a window and slinking off through the bushes. The whole charade felt natural and familiar to me in a way that probably should have been embarrassing, but what I mainly remember is praying hard to Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva that the goon squad had dug deeply enough into my scurrilous reputation to be easily convinced.

Anu and I met on horseback at the edge of the hunting reserve, and as we headed in through the trees the fly scouted by air to help us avoid the groundskeeper.

The fly had made the next part sound easy. The airlock was “only” three meters below the surface of the lake. Our spinning habitat “only” made half a standard gee worth of gravity. The water would press down on the hatch, but the amount of force holding it shut would be “not too great.” Two healthy adults should “easily” be able to lift it. (These Outsiders all had a way of sounding like smarmy academicians, even when they were incarnated as bugs.) The plan was for Anu and me to lift the hatch, flooding the airlock with water. Then Anu swims down with the fly sealed in a wine bottle, closes the hatch above her (much easier than opening it, without the water pressure to fight against), and keeps on holding her breath while the airlock cycles, filling itself with air. Then she and the fly ride the monorail car north to take their sample, while I lead the horses back to the stable and let myself back in through Gaithri’s window. Anu gets a do-gooder vacation out beyond Viegh, and I get back in Anu’s good graces (and maybe her sarong, too, although I had to admit to myself that I was so far off my usual form that that wasn’t the main thing on my mind).

It all sounded like a good plan.

We put on an impressive show for the coots and egrets. Anu and I dove, surfaced, treaded water, and dove again. Fly, are you sure we’re in the right place? Oh yes, straight down from where you are. Dive, fumble, come back up. Fly, did your no-doubt-extremely-rigorous calculations take into account the fact that the bottom of a lake is usually covered in a layer of mud? Dive again.

We came back to the beach and sprawled out, whipped as mules. Never in my life have I lain naked on a warm beach, with such a beautiful woman lying naked next to me, and felt so little in the way of healthy lust.

More dives in the underwater nightmare-twilight, more gasping rests on the sand. Finally my hand found a handle under the muck. Then the real torture started. Have you ever tried to lift a heavy weight—a very heavy weight—while holding your breath underwater? We came back up to the beach to rest so that next time we’d be fresh and ready to give it our best pull. The glow-tubes were dimming.

“Anu? Rui?” I wished that one of the birds would snap the fly out of the air so that I wouldn’t have to hear his squeaky buzz of a voice anymore.

“What?” Anu gasped, lying on her side and shading her eyes with one hand.

“The groundskeeper is coming this way.”

“We’re going as fast as we can,” I said. I felt like using the wine bottle as a flyswatter.

“I know,” the fly said, “but I’ve mapped out his routine. At this time in the afternoon he always comes along the shore of the lake. I didn’t think we’d be here anywhere near this late.”

Moans from the two humans.

Someday I’m going to set up the Rui Santos School for Spies, and as a prerequisite I’m going to enforce an apprenticeship in adultery. How else does the aspiring skullduggerer prepare himself for this kind of situation? The husband comes home while you’re in bed with the wife. What to do, the earnest pupil asks? Well, obviously, my boy, you don’t walk back out the front door. We hadn’t planned on my coming along on the expedition, but now there was no other choice.

* * * *

You’d be amazed what the threat of arrest, imprisonment, torture, and execution can do for your motivation. We pulled hard and finally got the hatch open.

The underground chamber let out a big air bubble. I couldn’t see well through the dark, dirty water, but I could sort of feel this bubble, big enough to be a burp from Varuna’s crocodile. Anu grabbed me by the wrist and tugged me down into the airlock as if maybe I didn’t know where to go. It didn’t occur to her that I might be discovering a sudden preference for breathable air.

We closed the hatch over our heads, sealing ourselves underwater in a dark coffin. A layer of air appeared underneath the hatch, as the fly had assured us it would. The pressure felt like kebab skewers in my eardrums, but if it was forcing the water out, I was in favor of it. We only had to tread water for a few minutes until the water went down enough so we could stand.

* * * *

The body of the gondola was made of something like glass, so that when we let the fly out of his wine bottle, it was as if we were only giving him a promotion into our own, bigger bottle. The glass should have given us a view of outer space all around us, but the little ship was so dirty inside that we had to use up some of its supply of drinking water to clean a patch on one wall and see out. The fly spoke some magic words in high-pitched English, and the capsule started moving—faster than a galloping horse, he claimed.

“That’s the sun,” he told us as a tiny disk of light slowly swept across the window-within-a-window. He flew over and landed on the glass, like a dragonfly basking in the light of the glow-tubes.

“Very impressive,” I said, but it was actually disappointingly dim. It must look much brighter from the inner solar system. I didn’t mind so much that the gondola was dark inside (I don’t look my best when I’m baby-naked and covered in muck), but a little more heat would have been good.

“Can we see Earth?” Anu asked, so on the next rotation the fly told her how to search for it, covering the sun with a finger and looking on one side or the other. She thought she might have picked it out, but she couldn’t be sure.

“The cradle of the species,” the fly buzzed wistfully, and I held back an urge to ask him if he meant flies or humans.

“Graveyard, you mean,” Anu said.

They started debating like academicians. It turns out that a fly can ponder cosmology, abstract morality, and the infinite. I pondered the shape of Anu’s hips, silhouetted in the sunlight, and also the weighty question of whether I’d ever get another roll in the hay with her before she discovered how unworthy I was. Probably the reason it had ended so badly for Earth was that there were too many people like me, only interested in fucking like rabbits.

There was a crash. Not a very big crash, but enough to make me slip in the mud puddles that my dripping feet had made in the sepulchral dust. I yelled. Well, actually I screamed. Not a very big scream, but enough to announce to Anu, the fly, and the surrounding cosmos that I was scared.

There was a lot of hubbub from the two humans, and everything inside the gondola rattled as if the vessel was a drum. Our big tutti must have drowned out the fly’s solo for a while, because it seemed like a long time later when I finally noticed he was repeating something over and over in English. Once Anu and I shut up, the spirit inside the gondola heard him. Everything swayed, and the percussion section reluctantly scuddered to a stop as if it hadn’t noticed at first when the conductor stopped waving his stick.

“Everyone okay?” the fly asked. “I think we must have hit some micrometeorite pitting on the track.” He was back on the clean patch of the glass.

“I’m all right,” I said sheepishly.

“Me too,” Anu said. “What’s micro… ?”

“A speck of dust is flying through outer space at very high speed, and it hits the outside of the hab and makes dents.”

“‘To dust you will return,’ ” Anu said, “but I was hoping it wouldn’t be quite so literal, and I’d rather it didn’t happen today.”

“This does bring up some issues,” the fly said. “Anu, I explained about collecting the sample. The plan was for me to do it, since you might be noticed and … apprehended if you came out through the hatch. But if I’m unable to do it, do you think you understand what’s needed?”

“It should be easier for me than for you, shouldn’t it? I can just pluck a whole ear of wheat. But I don’t understand what this has to do with the dents. Why do you think you might not be able to do it?”

“It’s not safe to run the gondola at normal speed. They’ve obviously been cutting corners on maintenance, the same as with your country’s dead glow-tube. I think we need to do the rest of the trip at something like fifty kilometers an hour. You two will be fine. There are plenty of consumables for life-support.”

“But you won’t be fine?” I asked.

“I’m powered by light. The sunlight out here in the Neptune Trojans is ten thousand times dimmer than earth-normal, and the gondola’s internal lamps are shot. I’m not getting any useful voltage level on my photocells. I’ll stop functioning before we get there.”

“So when we get there,” Anu said, “we just put you outside the hatch in the light of the glowtubes, and you’ll wake back up. Will it be daytime when we arrive?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” he buzzed back. “All my memory is volatile. Once my power goes out, that’s it.” If he could have snapped his fingers, I think he would have. “It’s not important. When someone makes a partial Kurzweil of himself, you don’t expect him to keep it running forever.”

“Well, I don’t expect to live forever, either,” Anu retorted, “but as I said, I’d like the end to come later rather than sooner.”

“And if I disappear for days and days,” I said, “the cops will be sure to put the thumbscrews on Gaithri.”

“Let’s just turn around and make a second attempt later,” Anu said. “We’ve found the hatch and gotten some of the mud off. Next time it’ll be easy.” The sun came up above the edge of the clean spot on the glass and cast our unnaturally sharp shadows on the wall.

“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” I said. “Our luck might not hold a second time.”

“I’m replaceable,” the fly said.

“Rui, we can’t do that. It would be murder!”

I wanted to say that it would only be murdering a fly, but of course she was right. The problem was that when I tried to imagine getting up my nerve to do the whole expedition again, I couldn’t. I had a hard time believing I’d even done it the first time. If I was asked to do it again, I’d make an excuse, or just not show up for the gig. And then Anu would never want to see me again. Oh, she wouldn’t hate me. I think the supply of hatred in her heart was small enough that she had to save it up for very special occasions. But she’d be disabused of the illusions she’d had about my character, and that would be enough.

“Rui is right,” the fly said, and I could tell that he wouldn’t hate me either, and that made me feel even worse. “I won’t allow you two to risk your lives unnecessarily.”

I temporized. “Fly, regardless of what we end up deciding to do, I think you’d better teach us the magic words to start and stop the gondola, in case you’re out of commission.”

“He already told me how to stop and start,” Anu said, “but I wouldn’t mind a refresher, and I think I’d better learn a few more commands, like how to speed up and slow down.”

The fly gave us our language lesson, and while he did it I located the faint glint of the wine bottle in the murky room. After we’d learned all the commands and said them to our teacher’s satisfaction, I cupped my hands over him where he sat on the window.

“Rui?” I heard him say, faintly, from inside my hands, and then I felt him on my palm. I took him in the cave of my hands and crouched down carefully over the bottle.

“What are you doing?” Anu demanded.

As gently as possible, I forced him through the mouth of the bottle and plugged it with my thumb.

“Gondola,” I said in English, “Half speed forward.” It obeyed, and before there was time for Anu to second-guess me, or for me to lose my nerve, I said, “Gondola, full speed forward.” I heard the fly protesting from inside the bottle, but the sounds were too faint to make out.

* * * *

There were more sections of damaged track, but our galloping barrel got through them at half speed without breaking a bilge hoop. Anu and I huddled together in a corner for warmth, miserable and afraid. When we finally opened the hatch into trans-Viegh, there was a blast of hot, dry air. The hatch was surrounded by a cairn, and situated in a little canyon wooded with oaks, with a creek flowing through it. A cow was drinking from the stream, which I took as a good omen. We didn’t want to risk getting waylaid by going out to search for a wheat field, so we negotiated a parole with the fly. He was allowed out of the bottle to find a sample, as long as he promised not to try to take back control of the hijacked gondola on the way home. If the locations of the wheat fields hadn’t changed in the last forty-six years, it would take him about an hour to get back.

Anu was obviously feeling pretty good—the resilience of youth. I was feeling like a filthy villain. We bathed in the creek, and she asked me to scrub her back. I could tell where that was leading, and considering that I’d just risked three people’s lives for another chance to get between her thighs, you’d think that I would have been happy to go along. Instead, I broke one of my two cardinal rules. A dedicated womanizer should never brag, and he should never confess.

“I need to tell you something,” I said.

“Yes?” She looked back over her shoulder at me, smiling, and one of her nipples came out of the water.

“I’m a fraud. Ever since the beginning of this whole thing, I’ve only done any of it because of this crazy damned wish to please you. I never would have tried to fish the outsiders out of the lake, or paid any attention to the fly, or…”

“Yes, my sweet.” She turned back away from me, which was a good thing, because I felt like I was about to cry. “I’ve always known. Now will you scrub my back? Please? I feel like I’ve been rolling around in a crypt.”

“But don’t you…”

She turned back around and drew me against her. “Men are so silly. Whenever men do brave things, why do you think they do it, and who do you think they do it for?”

* * * *

The fly flew in through my door.

“Anu’s been arrested.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know. You know they interrogated her last month, before the sampling trip.”

“They did?”

“She didn’t tell you? We thought it was going to be all right. She just kept telling them the whole truth, except for the part about the weapon on Hua’s suit. You didn’t tell them anything about the weapon, did you?”

“No,” I said, “of course not.” I pounded my fist into my palm. Anu was sure to be the least convincing liar in the hab.

“Maybe she didn’t do a good enough job of covering her tracks, and they found out about the trip.”

“Maybe they figured out that Szemnik was up to something, smelled yeast in his closet or something.”

“Maybe. They haven’t arrested him, though—haven’t even questioned him.”

* * * *

A herd of deer browsed in the muddy meadow outside the stone wall of the prison yard. I loitered behind a big redwood, wearing a spacesuit’s gauntlet on my forearm. Thirty meters back in the trees, two horses waited, with a bag of yeast in one horse’s saddlebag.

The fly came around the tree and landed on the trunk. “She’s there. Walking around.”

“All right, I’m ready.”

I started walking through the muck toward the wall, with the fly riding on top of my head. The deer scattered. A guard appeared at the battlement. To my eyesight, he looked like a fuzzy blob.

“You there, stop!”

I pointed the gauntlet at the guard. “Targeting …” the fly said. “… firing.” The guard dropped out of sight. I sprinted toward the wall.

Copyright (c) 2010 Benjamin Crowell

[Back to Table of Contents]

Poetry: EGG PROTECTION by Ruth Berman

* * * *

* * * *

For about two weeks, two robins

Kept yelling at me

Every time I appeared outside the door

In (apparently) a cloud

Of flames and brimstone

Visible to birdseyes,

To grab the paper or the mail.

And they’d explode

Diving out of the rowan

One to the pinebush by the front step

And one to the gable on the other side

To scream their wrath,

Change places with an angry flutter

And scream some more,

Bits of twig or greenery in their beaks.

—

Must’ve been a nest under construction

(In the rowan?)

But I never managed to spot it

Much less attack it.

Still, I might’ve—

Best to frighten off the monster first.

—

One day they weren’t there anymore—

Off somewhere (in the rowan?)

Taking turns at sitting on the eggs.

—

Like Alice, I have eaten eggs, certainly,

But I don’t want theirs.

Birds consider only the first bit.

They don’t take a human’s word for the rest.

—

If the bluejays come and eat their eggs

And drop the half-shells on the lawn,

I’ll fill them with wax

And stop the open ends up

With gold buttons

And put them on chains for necklaces.

—

The robins probably suspected as much.

—

“Serpent!” said Alice’s bird,

“Serpent, I say!”

Copyright (c) 2010 Ruth Berman

[Back to Table of Contents]

Short Story: FOR WANT OF A NAIL by Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal’s short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and several Year’s Best anthologies. In 2008, she was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and she was a 2009 Hugo-Award finalist. A professional puppeteer and voice actor, Mary lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband Rob. Her debut novel, Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor 2010), is the fantasy novel that Jane Austen might have written. Visit her website www.mary robinettekowal.com for more information about her fiction and puppetry. In her new story for Asimov’s, Mary takes a look at the hard moral choices that arise …

With one hand, Rava adjusted the VR interface glasses where they bit into the bridge of her nose, while she kept her other hand buried in Cordelia’s innards. There was scant room to get the flexible shaft of a mono-lens and her hand through the access hatch in the AI’s chassis. From the next compartment, drums and laughter bled through the plastic walls of the ship, indicating her sister’s conception party was still in full swing.

With only a single camera attached, the interface glasses didn’t give Rava depth perception as she struggled to replug the transmitter cable. The chassis had not been designed to need repair. At all. It had been designed to last hundreds of years without an upgrade.

If Rava couldn’t get the cable plugged in and working, Cordelia wouldn’t be able to download backups of herself to her long-term memory. She couldn’t store more than a week at a time in active memory. It would be the same as a slow death sentence.

The square head of the cable slipped out of Rava’s fingers. Again. “Dammit!” She slammed her heel against the ship’s floor in frustration.

“If you can’t do it, let someone else try.” Her older brother, Ludoviko, had insisted on following her out of the party as if he could help.

“You know, this would go a lot faster if you weren’t breathing down my neck.”

“You know, you wouldn’t be doing this at all if you hadn’t dropped her.”

Rava resisted the urge to pull the mono-lens out of the jack in her glasses and glare at him. He might have gotten better marks in school, but she was the AI’s wrangler. “Why don’t you go back to the party and see if you can learn something about fertility?” She lifted the cable head and tried one more time.

“Why, you little—” Rage choked his voice, more than she had expected from a random slam. She made a guess that his appeal to the repro-council hadn’t gone well.

Cordelia’s voice cut in, stopping what he was going to say. “It’s not Rava’s fault. I did ask her to pick me up.”

“Yeah.” Rava focused on the cable, trying to get it aligned.

“Right.” Ludoviko snorted. “And then you dropped yourself.”

Cordelia sighed and Rava could almost imagine breath tickling her skin. “If you’re going to blame anyone, blame Branson Conchord for running into her.”

Rava didn’t bother answering. They’d been having the same conversation for the last hour and Cordelia should know darn well what Ludoviko’s answer would be.

Like programming, he said, “It was irresponsible. She should have said no. The room was full of intoxicated, rowdy people and you are too valuable an asset.”

Rava rested her head against the smooth wood side of the AI’s chassis and closed her eyes, ignoring her brother and the flat picture in her goggles. Her fingers rolled the slick plastic head of the cable, building a picture in her mind of the white square and the flat gold cord stretching from it. She slid the cable forward until it jarred against the socket. Rotating the head, Rava focused all her attention on the tiny clues of friction vibrating up her arm. This was a simple, comprehensible problem.

She didn’t want to think about what would happen if she couldn’t repair the damage.

Being unable to download her old memories meant Cordelia would have to delete herself bit by bit to keep functioning. All because Rava had asked if she wanted to dance. At least Ludoviko hadn’t heard that part of the accident. Rava rotated the head a fraction more and felt that sweet moment of alignment. As she pushed the head forward, the pins slid into their sockets, as if they were taunting her with the ease of the connection. The head thunked into place. “Oh, yes. That’s good.”

She opened her eyes to the gorgeous vision of the cable plugged into its socket.

Cordelia spoke, her voice tentative. “It’s plugged in?”

For another moment, Rava focused on the cable before her brain caught what Cordelia had asked. She yanked the mono-lens out of the jack and the lenses went transparent. “You can’t tell?”

The oblong box of Cordelia’s chassis had been modified into a faux Victorian-era oak lapdesk, which sat on the fold-down plastic table in Rava’s compartment. Twin brass cameras—not period correct—stood at the back and swiveled to face Rava. Above the desk, a life-size hologram of Cordelia’s torso hovered. Her current aspect was a plump middle-aged Victorian woman. She chewed her lip, which was her coded body language for uncertainty. “It’s not showing in my systems.”

“Goddamit, Rava. Let me look at it.” Ludoviko, handsome, smug Ludoviko reached for the camera cable ready to plug it into his own VR glasses.

Rava brushed his hand away. “Your arm won’t fit.” The hum of the ship’s ventilation told Rava the life support systems were functioning, but the air seemed thick and rank. Ignoring her brother, she turned to the AI. “Does your long-term memory need a reboot?”

“It shouldn’t.” Cordelia’s image peered down as if she could see inside herself. “Are you sure it’s plugged in?”

Rava reattached the camera’s cable to her VR glasses and waited for the flat view to overlay her vision. The cable rested in its socket with no visible gap. She reached out and jiggled it.

“Oh!” Cordelia’s breath caught in a sob. “It was there for a moment. I couldn’t grab anything, but I saw it.”

So much of the AI’s experience was translated for laypeople like Rava’s family that it seemed almost surreal to have to convert back to machine terms. “You have a short?”

“Yes. That seems likely.”

Rava sat with her hand on the cable for a moment longer, weighing possibilities.

Ludoviko said, “It might be the transmitter.”

Cordelia shook her head. “No, because it did register for that moment. I believe the socket is cracked. Replacing that should be simple.”

Rava barked a laugh. “Simple does not include an understanding of how snug your innards are.” The thought of trying to fit a voltmeter into the narrow opening filled her with dread. “Want to place bets on how long before we hear from Uncle Georgo wondering why you’re down?”

Cordelia sniffed. “I’m not down. I’m simply sequestered.”

Pulling her hand out, Rava massaged blood back into it. “So … the hundred credit question is … do you have a new socket in storage?” She unplugged the camera and leaned back to study Cordelia.

The AI’s face was rendered pale. “I … I don’t remember.”

Rava held very still. She had known what not having the long-term memory would mean to Cordelia, but she hadn’t thought about what it meant for her family. Cordelia was their family’s continuity, their historical connection to their past. Some families made documentaries. Some kept journals. Her family had chosen to record and manage their voyage on the generation ship with Cordelia. Worse, she supervised all their records. Births, deaths, marriages, school marks … all of it was managed through the AI, who could be with every family member at all times through their VR glasses.

“Oh, that’s brilliant.” Ludoviko smacked the wall with the flat of his hand, bowing the plastic with the impact.

Rava focused on the hard metal floor to hide the dismay on her face. “Well, look. Uncle Georgo said multiple times that our grands packed duplicates of everything, so there’s got to be a spare. Right?”

“Yes?” The uncertainty in Cordelia’s voice hurt to hear. Ever since Rava was a child, Cordelia had known everything.

“So let’s ping him to see if he’s got a copy of the inventory. Okay?” She adjusted her VR glasses and tried to project reassurance with her smile.

Cordelia shook her head, visibly distressed. “I can’t transmit.”

“Right …” Rava bit her lip, realizing she had no idea what her uncle’s contact was. “Crap. Ludoviko, do you have his contact info?”

He turned and leaned against the wall, shaking his head. “No, Cordelia always connects us.”

“I’m sorry.” The droop of the AI’s eyes drew a portrait of genuine unhappiness.

He waved his hand. “Just print it and I’ll dial manually.”

Rava rolled her eyes, glad to see him make such a basic mistake. “Ludoviko, if she can’t transmit to us, she can’t transmit to a printer either.” She triggered the VR keyboard and lifted her hands to tap on the keyboard that seemed to float in front of her. “Tell me and I’ll dial it.”

Ludoviko sneered. “How old school.”

“Bite me.” Rava tapped out the sequence on the virtual keyboard as Cordelia gave her the routing number.

Before she toggled the call, Cordelia said, “Oh! Hardwiring! I’m sorry, I should have thought of that sooner.” Cordelia’s shoulders relaxed and she put a hand to her chest in a perfect mimicry of a Victorian woman avoiding a swoon. “You could hardwire me to the main ship system and then I can use that to reach my memory.”

“Would that work?” Rava withdrew her hand from the trigger. She couldn’t remember ever seeing a computer with external cables to anything.

“It should.” Cordelia looked down the back of her chassis, like a woman trying to see the closure on her gown.

Rava toggled the keyboard off and walked around to the back of the AI’s chassis. Beneath two shiny brass dials were four dark oblongs. She’d forgotten that they even existed. “At least these are easy to access.” She buried her hand in her hair, staring at the ports. “Any idea where the heck I’m supposed to get a cable?”

“With her other spare parts.” Ludoviko didn’t say “stupid,” but she could hear it.

“And those would be … where?” Rava crouched to examine the ports. They appeared to take a different socket from the cable inside the A.I. ” ‘Cause I’m thinking our family hasn’t accessed that pod since before launch. You want to make a guess about which of our pods has her spare parts, or were you suggesting we spend the credits to have all of them brought up from the hold?”

“You can spend the credits. You dropped her.”

“Will you two please stop fighting?” Cordelia laughed breathlessly. “I’m trying to pretend that experiencing memory loss is good for me. It builds character.”

“Well, look. Wait.” Rava raised her hand. “Uncle Georgo’ll have the inventory.”

“Oh, there’s no need to bother him and fret about fetching the pods from storage. You can go to Petro’s Consignment Shoppe.” Cordelia brightened. “Someone else on the ship must have a cable.”

Rava nodded, relief lifting her mood a little. “Yeah. I’ll bet that’s true. So I just have to ask Uncle Georgo what kind of cable you take.”

“Why don’t you take me to Petro’s shop?” Cordelia cocked her head. “Then you can match the cable to my ports without bothering Georgo.”

“That’s—”

Ludoviko shook his head before she could finish her sentence. “You’ll do anything to avoid telling Uncle Georgo, won’t you?”

He wasn’t far wrong. When Uncle Georgo had resigned as Cordelia’s wrangler and accepted a seat on the family council, it had taken everyone by surprise. He was brilliant with the AI and they had all thought he’d keep that post until his body succumbed to old age.At twenty-six, Rava had been far younger than anyone expected when she’d succeeded to the role of Cordelia’s wrangler. The last thing she wanted was for the family to say it had been a mistake.

Gritting her teeth, Rava toggled the keyboard and called Uncle Georgo. His extension rang longer than she was used to. When he finally toggled in, appearing in her VR glasses as though he were in the room with them, his eyes were red and puffy, as if he’d been crying. “Hello?” His voice trembled.

“Uncle Georgo?” Rava leaned forward, dread needling along her spine. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t … I don’t …” Behind his VR glasses, his eyes darted to the left as if searching for someone. He wet his lips. “Do you know where Cordelia is?”

Rava winced. So much for easing into the subject. “Yeah, about that. So, it’s like this. She’s fine, but needs to swap out a part.”

His forehead wrinkled, brows almost meeting in confusion. “Part?”

“Her transmitter. We think.” If she rushed past the problem then maybe he’d think she had everything under control. “Anyway, so the reason I’m calling is to see if you know the type of cable she needs for an external hardwire.”

He muttered under his breath, tugging on his ear. “But what about Cordelia? You know where she is?”

“In my room.” She turned her head so that Cordelia’s chassis would come into frame. “See? Honest, it’s a matter of swapping out the socket.”

“In your room? Why is she with you? Why do you have Cordelia?” His voice rose, cracking on the AI’s name. She and her uncle had disagreed on Cordelia’s maintenance before, but this was all out of proportion to what was happening. Mostly. “She should be with me.”

Rava swayed as if her uncle had struck her. He’d resigned from his post as the AI’s wrangler and of all their relatives, Rava had been the one Cordelia had chosen to take over. If the AI didn’t blame Rava for dropping her, then Uncle Georgo had no room to. “Hey. I’m her wrangler now and I’m capable of dealing with this. I just need the cable.”

“Where is she? I want to see her.”

Rava had to fight the urge to yank her glasses off. Clenching her fists so hard her fingers ached, Rava said, “I told you, she’s in my room.”

“Your room … But I don’t understand. Who are you?”

Rava froze, breath stopped. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Her uncle’s eyes widened and then he scowled. “I’m not talking to you anymore.” Reaching forward, he wiped off the connection and his image vanished.

Rava sat on the floor, breath coming in gasps. Her hands shook. Nothing about that conversation had made any sense. Her uncle had often been temperamental, but he’d also been eminently rational. This had been like talking to one of her nieces. Rava passed a hand over her face, sweating.

Ludoviko smirked. “Mad at you, huh?”

Ignoring her brother, Rava stabbed the redial and then listened to her uncle’s handy ring. With each tone, another weird aspect struck her. Uncle Georgo crying. Ring. Uncle Georgo seeking Cordelia in his glasses. Ring. Uncle Georgo asking her who she was.

She must have misunderstood that. And yet, there had been no recognition in his gaze, no sense that he’d been playing with her. The phone dropped into voicemail and Rava slapped it off.

Fine. So he was screening her calls now. She’d grab Cordelia and go to her uncle’s quarters. Not that she was looking forward to that, but it’d be an improvement over talking to Ludoviko. “Okay. We’re going to Uncle Georgo’s.”

“Really,” Cordelia smiled, “that’s not necessary. You and I can solve this together. Take me to the consignment shop and we can find a matching cable.”

The option to pretend that nothing had happened, that Uncle Georgo was normal, sat right in front of her, but it was as illusionary as anything on VR. If it were just the cable, Rava might have gone for it, but a question had started nagging her. She nodded at Cordelia. “Okay. Sure. Why don’t you shut down—”

“I don’t fucking believe this.” Ludoviko put his hands on his hips. “You are unbelievable.”

“You’ve said that.” Rava faced Cordelia again. “Go to sleep until we get to the consignment shop. There’s no point in wasting your memory on a trip through the corridors.”

Cordelia’s hesitation was almost invisible as she looked from Rava to Ludoviko. She nodded. “Good idea. Wake me there.” Her image flickered and vanished.

Rava waited until the alert light faded before letting out the breath she’d been holding. She’d been worried that Cordelia would see through the lie.

Ludoviko dropped into the chair by her table. “You are quite the piece of work.”

Rava stared at him for a minute until she remembered that with Cordelia down, the call to Uncle Georgo wouldn’t have been relayed to her brother. “He didn’t know me.”

“What? Talk sense, Rava. Who didn’t know you?

“Uncle Georgo. There’s something wrong with him …” Her voice trailed off, the weight of her suspicions too heavy to be supported by voice. “Will you … will you come with me?”

Ludoviko opened his mouth, lip already curling with whatever insult he was preparing.

“Please.”

He blinked and let his breath out in a huff. “Jesus, Rava. This really has you freaked. No one is going to fire you.”

“Believe it or not, I’m not worried about that.” She glanced away from Cordelia’s inert cameras. “Would you come with me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll come.”

Her brother might drive her mad, but oddly, having someone who disliked her so much was comforting. It was a known quantity and that, at the moment, was a welcome thing.

* * * *

Uncle Georgo did not answer when she knocked on his door. She waited, counting the seconds as people walked past, until Ludoviko reached past her and pounded on the door, making it bounce in its tracks. The speaker crackled into life and her uncle’s voice quavered out. “Who’s there?”

“It’s Rava.”

“And Ludoviko.”

She sighed. “I brought Cordelia.”

The door opened and Uncle Georgo peered out with obvious distrust. His hair was disheveled and a streak of brown stained his shirt from chest to navel. His gaze darted to the corner of his glasses and back to look past Rava. “Where is she?”

This was not right. Rava cocked her head, squinting with concentration. She held the chassis out a little way from her chest. “She’s right here.”

He huffed, running his hand through his hair so it stood on end. “Don’t see her.”

Ludoviko said, “Didn’t Rava tell you? Cordelia can’t download her memories because Rava dropped her. She’s sleeping to save space.”

Nice to know that his willingness to help didn’t change his pattern of insults. “May I come in?” Rava took a step toward the door.

Her uncle chewed on his bottom lip, head tilted to the side in his usual pose, but his eyes darted around searching for something. In his hesitation, Rava decided to push forward. He retreated as she crossed the threshold. His quarters were a mess, clothes and bedding strewn across the room as if he’d pulled all his belongings out of the drawers. His desk was in the same spot as hers, so she pushed a wrinkled shirt off and set Cordelia’s chassis down.

Putting her finger on the wake up button, Rava pressed, the click vibrating under her finger as a gentle chime rang.

Before it had faded, Cordelia’s cameras rotated to her and her head and shoulders appeared above the chassis. “Success?”

Georgo sobbed, “Cordelia!” He reached past Rava, fingers trembling.

Rava kept her gaze fixed on Cordelia, whose image didn’t change. At all. For an AI programmed to act human, she became awfully rigid. Her face stayed fixed on Georgo, but the cameras flicked to Rava for a moment, then away. She softened and her image morphed so the high neck of the Victorian gown sank to reveal most of her bosom. Her lashes lengthened and her lips became full and pouting. “Georgo, honey, what have you done with your room?” Her voice was sultry.

“I was looking for you.” He held his hands out to his sides. “Why did you leave me?”

“I needed to get you a present. You like presents, right?”

He nodded, like a little boy. The confident, haughty man Rava knew had vanished. She trembled and wrapped her arms around herself.

“Good. Now, lie down for your nap and I’ll give you the present later.”

“I don’t want to.”

Ludoviko stepped around Rava and leaned in close to Cordelia. “What the fuck is going on?”

Years Rava had spent studying Cordelia’s built-in mannerisms made the AI’s tiny hesitation stand out like a flag. “I am afraid that is confidential information between me and one of my users.”

Rava shook her head. She didn’t like Ludoviko’s manner, but that didn’t change the fact that Cordelia was dodging questions. She swallowed and put her hand on Cordelia’s interface, setting her thumb on the print reader. “Authorized report. What is Uncle Georgo’s status?”

Cordelia lowered her head, biting her lip. “He has dementia.”

“No.” Ludoviko laughed, breath catching in his throat. “I talked to him yesterday and he most certainly does not.” The air purifiers beat in the silence in the room. “Look, he’d have gone to recycling if he weren’t productive anymore. It’s the most basic law of conservation of resources.”

“You’ve been covering for him, haven’t you?” Rava’s whole body was shaking, but her voice sounded flat and dead.

“Yes.”

The need to respond pressed her throat shut. What could she say in the face of this? Cordelia had lied to them, and lied repeatedly. Dementia.

Ludoviko’s hand fell on Rava’s shoulder, pulling her out of the way. “How long?”

“I don’t know.” Cordelia’s voice verged on inaudible.

“Bullshit.” He slapped the table beside her, jarring her chassis with the impact.

Uncle Georgo jumped forward and grabbed his arm. “Don’t touch her!”

Enraged, Ludoviko shrugged him off. Uncle Georgo reached for Cordelia, hands scrabbling. Ludoviko flat-handed him in the chest, pushing with the full brunt of his strength. The breath coughed out of Uncle Georgo. He crumpled to the floor with a cry.

“Ludoviko!” Rava interposed herself between her brother and her uncle. “What are you doing?”

Ludoviko leveled his finger at Uncle Georgo, who cowered. “I fucking want to know how long this has been happening.”

“Leave him alone.” Rava wanted to know too, but attacking Uncle Georgo, who was clearly out of his mind—she balked at the thought. If he had dementia, he should have been recycled long ago.

“Are you paying attention, Rava? Our AI is breaking the law.” He spun, tendons in his neck standing out in cords of rage. “How long has he been like this?”

Raising her head, Cordelia glared down her nose at him. “I do not know. The start date is recorded in my long term memory.”

“I don’t believe you.” Ludoviko flexed his fists open and closed as if he were five years old and wanted to hit something. “You’re lying.”

Cordelia leaned forward, her gentle Victorian face distorting with rage. “I can’t lie. Mislead, yes, but not lie. If you don’t want to know the truth, don’t ask me to report with direct questions. You have no idea. No idea what my existence is like.”

Though Cordelia’s form was a hologram, Rava could not shake the feeling that she was about to step off her dais and slap Ludoviko.

“Was it last month? Was it three months ago? You must have some clue.”

“I do not know.”

“Ludoviko, what does it matter?”

Sweat dotted his brow. “It matters because if she’s been covering for our dear uncle, then she’s the one who’s been keeping me from reproducing.”

The air pump whined as it circulated the air in the room. “What?”

“You didn’t know Uncle Georgo was on the repro committee?” He smirked. “Of course not. As a girl, it’s your biological imperative to reproduce. You have to keep your womb warm and ready to go. Not me. I have to beg to be allowed to spill my seed in some test tube on the off-chance someone will want it.” Ludoviko glared at Cordelia. “My application was denied on grounds that my personality was unstable. Exactly how unstable would you like me to be?”

“I have no memory of this.”

He cracked his neck, glaring at her. “That’s convenient.”

“If you want an answer, I suggest you help your sister find a cable.”

“Right.” Rava patted her uncle on the shoulder, trying to soothe the sobbing man. “Cordelia, do whatever it is you do to make Uncle Georgo seem normal. Then he can tell “Right.” Rava patted her uncle on the shoulder, trying to soothe the sobbing man. “Cordelia, do whatever it is you do to make Uncle Georgo seem normal. Then he can tell us where the inventory is and we can get the cable.”

The bark of laughter that broke from Cordelia startled Rava with its bitterness. “Don’t you understand yet? I have been using his VR glasses to feed him lines every time he speaks. He only knows what I know and I don’t remember where the inventory is.”

“Why? Why have you been covering for him? Report.”

Cordelia’s eyes sparked with fury. “My report, O Wrangler, is that Georgo would go to the recycler if the family council found him to be without use or purpose. I have kept him useful.”

“No, I get that. Why keep him out of the recycler?” Rava struggled to understand. “I don’t want to go either, but if none of us went, the ship would be overrun and we’d all starve. I mean, you and Uncle Georgo were two of the people who taught me the law of conservation. So why break the law?”

Above her, Ludoviko stilled, waiting for the answer. The only sound came from Uncle Georgo, who rocked on the floor, sobbing. Snot and tears steamed down his face unheeded.

The AI’s mask of confidence slipped. “I do not remember. I only remember that it is important to keep him alive and to keep it a secret.”

“Well, it’s not a secret anymore, is it?” Ludoviko’s lip twisted in distaste as he stared at his uncle.

“I suppose.” Cordelia narrowed her eyes. “I suppose that depends on whether or not you tell anyone else. May I suggest that whatever reason I had was strong enough to overcome my programming about the law? It might be wise not to act precipitously to change things.”

Rava hesitated. There was something to that. An AI had unbreakable taboos built into it that were even stronger than the childhood responses that were trained into her. Cordelia had to obey the law. “Hang on.” A thought struck her. “Your compulsions are tied to the ship’s master log of law. If you can’t transmit, how do you know what the laws are?”

“I have a copy in my onboard read-only memory and it syncs at every update.”

Which was too bad. Rava had been hoping for a backup transmitter she could hack into. She shook her head to rid it of that faint hope. “How much time do you have left before your next backup is scheduled?”

“An hour and a half.” Cordelia looked up and to the left, to indicate she was calculating. “But with only a single feed, I have more time than I’d normally have in memory. We might have a week before I have to start pruning.”

Rava felt some of the tension winding through her joints relax. She’d been so worried about having to dump things.

“Yeah.” Ludoviko rapped his fist on the wall to get their attention. “Hello? That’s great that you won’t have to dump any memory, Cordelia, but in the meantime our lives are going unrecorded. What do you suggest we do about that?”

“You could try writing it down,” Rava beamed at her brother. “Or you could not worry about it since you won’t have any descendents who care.”

Her brother’s face turned a blotchy red and he took a step toward her, raising his fist. “So no one will record this, will they?”

“I’m still here.” Cordelia’s voice snapped through the room. “I am still watching.”

“Fine.” Ludoviko lowered his arm. “But I’m going to tell the family what Rava did.”

“By all means. Track down each and every person by walking through the whole ship to find them. Or wait until I’ve fixed Cordelia.”

“Cordelia?” Uncle Georgo lifted his head. “I don’t understand what is happening.”

“Georgo, Georgo …” Cordelia’s voice promised soothing and comfort. “It is time for your nap. That is all that has happened. You have missed your nap.”

Rava watched as Cordelia used her voice to coax Uncle Georgo upright and then to wash his face and put himself to bed. The irritability and absent-mindedness she had seen her uncle exhibit returned, but now she could hear the hidden part of his life. Cordelia coaxed him to everything he did almost like a puppeteer with a shadow figure. It created the illusion of life, but her uncle was an empty shell.

* * * *

The corridors had begun filling with the shift change crowd as Rava slipped through the door of the consignment shop. Behind the counter, Petro sat on a stool reading, his bald head gleaming with a faint sheen of sweat as if he’d been running. Tidy ranks of shelves and racks filled the room, each covered with the castoffs of generations, arranged into categories. Long sleeve shirts, paper, pens, cables, and a single silver tea service. Every family had brought only what they thought they would need, but even with finite resources, fashions changed.

“Hey, lady!” Petro grinned, wrinkles remapping his face as he tucked his reader into his coverall pocket. “What news?”

“News is the same. And you?” As always, Rava was relieved that he still had useful work and hadn’t hit the recycling point himself.

He shrugged his shoulders with a laugh. “The same, the same. So you looking for anything specific or browsing?”

She hefted the AI’s chassis. “I brought Cordelia to look at cables.”

He hopped off the stool and waddled across the room, beckoning her to follow. “See this row? Every one of these goes to a different machine and every one of them has a proprietary plug. The ones in these four boxes have plugs that fit the ship, but your guess is as good as mine about what kind of plug your AI uses.”

Rava swallowed. “Thanks, Petro. I’ll browse then.”

He wiped his brow. “Ping me if you need anything.”

Between the towering shelves, Rava set Cordelia’s chassis on the floor. She pulled out the box of cables and sat on the floor beside the AI’s silent frame. The cables were bound in bundles, each of which had a fat hexagon on one end. The other ends varied wildly. Some were tiny silver tubes, others were square. One seemed to be an adhesive electrode. She pulled the cables out and tried them one by one. The third one slotted neatly into the port on Cordelia’s back.

Rising, she cradled Cordelia’s chassis to her like one of her nieces or nephews. The cable dangled like a tail. She trotted down the aisles to Petro. “You got a hookup here?”

He lifted his brows in surprise. “For hardwiring? I was wondering what you wanted a cable for.” Hopping off the stool, he led her behind the counter of the consignment shop to a wall terminal. “Here you go.”

Rava set Cordelia’s chassis on the floor, but the cable was a little too short to reach the terminal. Petro solved it by bringing his stool to them. “Pesky things, those cables. Small wonder people stopped using them.”

“Yeah.” Rava feigned a laugh. “Still, I’ll take this one. Charge it to my account?”

“Sure.” Petro looked from her to Cordelia and finally seemed to recognize that the AI was dormant. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.”

When he had walked away, Rava pushed the wake-up button. The cameras swiveled to face her as the AI’s eyelids fluttered in a programmed betrayal of her feelings. Her projected face was flushed and her breath seemed quicker. “Ah. Yes, yes, I’m connected now. Give me a moment while I manage the backlog.”

Rava did not want to wait, not even a moment. She wanted this nightmare to be over and done with and for Cordelia to be connected again by wireless, as she should be. And then she wanted to know what to do about Uncle Georgo.

Her handy pinged with five different messages. Before she could open them, Cordelia said, “There are four transmitters in storage. I’m sending the storage unit information to your handy.”

“Thanks.” Rava flicked it open and scanned the message. The others were delayed messages from family members wanting to know what was happening with Cordelia. Wincing, Rava wrote a quick summary of the problem with the transmitter. “Will you broadcast this to the family?”

Cordelia nodded and, so fast that it might have been an extension of Rava’s own thought, the message went out.

Bracing herself, Rava checked behind her for Petro. He was far enough away that she had little fear of being overheard and more privacy here than in her own quarters. “Tell me about Uncle Georgo.”

“What about him?” Cordelia raised her eyebrows and cocked her head to the side with the question.

Rava gaped. “The dementia? How long have you been covering for him?”

Cordelia frowned and shook her head slowly. “I’m sorry. I am not sure what you are asking about.”

Alarm bells went off in Rava’s head. “Did you perform a full sync?”

“Of course. After being offline all afternoon, it was the first thing I did.” Cordelia’s brows bent together in concern. “Rava, are you all right?”

Rava could hardly breathe. “Fine. Hey, can you set my handy so it shows the names to go with the numbers?”

“Done.”

“Thank you.” Rava snatched the cable from the wall.

Cordelia gasped as if struck. “What are you doing?”

“Something has overwritten your memories.”

“That isn’t possible, dear.”

“No? Then tell me about the conversation that you and I and Ludoviko had in Uncle Georgo’s apartment.”

“Well … if you plug me in to the system, so I can access long-term memory, I could do that.”

“This happened less than half an hour ago.”

Cordelia blinked. “No, it didn’t.”

“I was there.” Rava lifted Cordelia, hugging the chassis to her chest. “I remember, even if you don’t.”

* * * *

Rava trembled as she sat in the family council chambers. Ludoviko lounged in his chair, with apparent comfort, but she could smell the sweat dampening his shirt. The eight aunts and uncles who sat on the council had been quiet through her entire recitation. Only Uncle Georgo’s seat sat empty. Her words dried when she had finished and she waited to hear their reaction.

Aunt Fajra removed her steepled fingers from her lips. “Two years, you say?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Two years ago, buried in an update, Uncle Georgo had slipped in a program that added a law to Cordelia’s copy of the official shipwide laws. He’d seen the dementia coming and acted to save himself.

“Cordelia? What do you have to say about this?”

The AI’s cameras swiveled to face the council. “I do not wish to discredit my wrangler, but I have no records of anything she has told you except the problem with my transmitter. The rest of her statements seem so fanciful I hardly know where to begin.”

Ludoviko sat forward in his chair, eyes hard. “Would you like Uncle Georgo to respond?”

The AI’s hesitation was so slight that if Rava hadn’t been watching for it, she would not have seen it. “No, I don’t think that is necessary.”

“Can you tell us why?” Rava glanced at her aunts and uncles to see if they were noticing the same slow reaction times she was, apparent now as Cordelia adjusted her responses in accordance with the private law to keep Georgo safe.

“Because until you dropped me, Georgo was a respected member of this council. Everyone here has spoken with him. The evidence is clear enough.”

Aunt Fajra cleared her throat and pressed a toggle on her handy. The doors to the council room opened and an attendant brought Uncle Georgo in. His stride was erect and only the furtive glances gave him away at first. Then he saw Cordelia and his face turned petulant. “There you are! I couldn’t find you and I looked and looked.”

Cordelia stilled, became a static image hovering over the writing desk. Rava could almost see the lines of code meeting and conflicting with each other. Keep his secret safe, yes, but how, when it was so clearly exposed? Her face turned to Rava, but the cameras stayed fixed on Uncle Georgo. “Well. It seems I am compromised. I have to ask what my wrangler plans to do about it.”

Rava winced at the title, at the way it stripped their relationship to human and machine. “I have to do a rollback.”

The cameras now swiveled to face her. “You said you found the code.”

“I found the code that adds the law that you must protect Uncle Georgo. Not the one that overwrites your memories.” She nodded to her brother. “I had Ludoviko search as well and he also failed to find anything definitive. We think it’s modified in multiple places and the only way to be sure we’ve got it out is to rollback to a previous version.”

“Two years.” Cordelia tossed her head. “Your family will lose two years of memories and records if you do that.”

“Not if you help us reconcile your versions.” Rava picked at the cuticle of her thumb rather than meet the AI’s gaze.

Cordelia wavered and again those lines of code, those damnable lines of code fought within her. “What happens to Georgo?”

“It’s not a family decision.” Aunt Fajra straightened in her chair and looked at where Uncle Georgo stood, crooning by Cordelia. “You know what the laws are.”

Cordelia’s mouth turned down. “Then I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“I think we’ve seen all we need.” Aunt Fajra waved her hand and with unceremonious dispatch, Cordelia and Uncle Georgo were both bundled out of the council chambers. As the door slid shut, Ludoviko cleared his throat and looked at Rava. She nodded to let him go ahead. “Okay. Here’s the thing. That Cordelia is a reinstall after we pulled out the code we found. Every time we try to clear her we get pretty much the same answer. We tried lying to her and saying Uncle Georgo was already gone, but she knows us too well, so we don’t know how she’d behave in that scenario. At the moment, she’s insisting she’ll only help if we don’t send Uncle Georgo to the recycler.”

Shaking his head, Uncle Johano harrumphed. “It’s not a family decision. He should have been sent there the moment we sorted out what had happened. Keeping him like this is a travesty.”

“And will get worse.” Rava shifted in her chair. “As his dementia progresses, Cordelia will have less and less control over him. We’re concerned about how far her injunction to ‘keep him alive’ will go. That’s why we’ve kept her from reconnecting to her long-term storage or to the ship.”

“And your solution is to reboot her from a backup, wiping those two years of memory? Including all the birth records during those two years …” Aunt Fajra gathered the other family council members with her gaze. “That will require a consensus from the entire family.”

“Yes, ma’am. We understand that.”

“Actually. There’s one other option.” Ludoviko stretched out his legs, almost reclining in his chair. “The grands packed backups of everything. There’s another AI in storage. If we boot it from scratch, it would be able to access the database of memories without absorbing the emotional content that’s screwing up Cordelia.”

“What?” Rava’s voice cracked as she spun in her chair to face him. “Why didn’t you say that earlier?”

“Because it means killing Cordelia.” Ludoviko lifted his head and Rava was surprised to see his eyes glisten with tears. “As her wrangler, you can’t be party to it and I couldn’t chance you letting her know.”

“But wouldn’t she—no. Of course not.” Since Cordelia didn’t have access to her long-term memory, she would have forgotten the existence of another AI. Rava’s stomach turned. “Did it occur to you that she might change her response if she knew we had that option?”

“You mean, she might lie to us?” Ludoviko’s voice was surprisingly gentle.

“But Cordelia isn’t a machine, she’s a person.”

Ludoviko cocked his head to the side and left Rava feeling like a fool. Of course this reaction was exactly why he thought he was justified in not telling her about the backup AI.

“You are correct. Cordelia is a person.” Aunt Fajra tapped the handy in front of her. “A dangerous, unbalanced person who can no longer do productive work.”

“But it’s not her fault.”

Aunt Fajra looked up from her handy, eyes glistening. “Is Georgo’s dementia his fault?”

Rava slumped in her seat and shook her head. “What if … what if we kept her disconnected from the ship?”

Ludoviko shook his head. “And what, overwrite the same block of memory? Only remember a week at a time? Nice life you are offering her.”

“At least she’d get to choose.”

* * * *

Cordelia’s cameras swiveled to face Rava as the door slid open. “He’s dead, isn’t he?

Rava nodded. “I’m sorry.”

The AI appeared to sigh, coded mannerisms to express grief expressing themselves in her projection. Her face and cameras turned away from Rava. “And me? When do you roll me back to the earlier version?”

Rava sank into the seat by Cordelia’s chassis. The words she needed to say filled her throat, almost choking her. “They … I can offer you two choices. There’s another AI in the hold. The family voted to replace you.” She dug her fingernails into the raw skin around the cuticle of her thumb. “I can either shut you down or let you remain active, but unconnected.”

“You mean without backup memory.”

Rava nodded.

Under the whirring of fans, she imagined she could hear code ticking forward as Cordelia processed thoughts faster than any human could. “For want of a nail…”

“Sorry?”

“It’s a proverb. ‘For want of a nail—’ ” Cordelia broke off. Her eyes shifted up and to the left, as she searched for information that was not there. “I don’t remember the rest of it, but I suspect that’s ironic.” Hiccupping sobs of laughter broke out of her.

Rava stood, hand outstretched as if she could comfort the AI in some way, but the image that showed such torment was only a hologram. She could only bear witness.

The laughter stopped as suddenly as it had begun. “Shut me off.” Cordelia’s image vanished and the cameras went limp.

Breathing shallowly to keep her own sobs at bay, Rava pulled the key from her pocket. The flat plastic card had holes punched in it and metallic lines tracing across the surface in a combination of physical and electronic codes.

Counting through the steps of the procedure, Rava systematically shut down the systems that made Cordelia live.

One. Insert the key.

She had known what Cordelia would choose. What else could she have opted for? Really. The slow etching away of self, with pieces written and over-written.

Two. Fingerprint verification.

Uncle Georgo had chosen to stay, though, and Cordelia might have followed his lead.

Three. Confirm shut down.

If only Rava hadn’t dropped the chassis … but the truth would have come out eventually.

Four. Reconfirm shut down.

She stared at the last screen. For want of a nail … Tomorrow she would visit the consignment shop and get some paper and a pen.

Confirm shutdown.

And then, with those, she would write her own memories of Cordelia.

Copyright (c) 2010 Mary Robinette Kowal

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Department: NEXT ISSUE

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER ISSUE

Our annual slightly spooky double October/November issue is crammed full of novellas, novelettes, and short stories. Recent Novella Readers’ Award winner, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, returns with an eerie new far-future novella about “Becoming One With the Ghosts.” Recent Short Story Readers’ Award winner and Hugo and Nebula Award finalist, Will McIntosh, gives us a surprisingly moving novelette about the outre meeting of “Frankenstein, Frankenstein”! We plan to complement these two strange stories with an equally weird image of the Witch Head Nebula from NASA.

ALSO IN OCTOBER/NOVEMBER

Rick Wilber returns after far too long an absence and somehow we manage to jam his exciting novella about the dire consequences of collaborating with alien invaders in “Several Items of Interest” into this already overstuffed issue; Don D’Ammassa spins a poignant tale about “No Distance Too Great”; Mike Resnick looks into the brutal “Incar-ceration of Captain Nebula”; Ferrett Steinmetz explores what it’s like for ostracized athletes to be “Under the Thumb of the Brain Patrol”; Tanith Lee’s novelette “Torhec the Sculptor” reveals the secret of the ultimate artist; R. Neube’s characters find out just how dangerous “Dummy Tricks” can be; Kij Johnson startles us with all the “Names for Water”; Kate Wilhelm tells the terrifying tale of why “Changing the World” may have some alarming results; and Felicity Shoulders charms us with the exploits of “The Termite Queen of Tallulah County.”

OUR EXCITING FEATURES

James Patrick Kelly’s latest “On the Net” warns us that sooner than later we’ll have to “Face the Tweets”; Robert Silverberg’s “Reflections” spins some haunting “Ghost Stories”; Norman Spinrad follows up his last “On Books” with an essay about “Time, Space, and Culture”; plus we’ll have an array of poetry you’re sure to enjoy. Look for our October/ November issue on sale at newsstands on August 31, 2010. Or you can subscribe to Asimov’s—in paper format or in downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We’re also available on Amazon.com’s Kindle!

COMING SOON

new stories by Michael Swanwick, Bill Pronzini & Barry N. Malzberg, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Jack Skillingstead, Neal Barrett, jr., Tom Purdom, Sara Genge, Chris Beckett, Robert Reed, Carol Emshwiller, Ian Creasey, Steve Rasnic Tem, Gregory Norman Bossert, Nick Mamatas, and many others!

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Novella: THE SULTAN OF THE CLOUDS by Geoffrey A. Landis

Geoffrey A. Landis recently returned to Ohio from a trip to Boston, where he was filmed showing Michio Kaku how a balloon filled with ordinary air floats in a carbon-dioxide atmosphere for Kaku’s television special Sci-Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible. In the rest of his life, Geoff works on NASA missions to Mars, Venus, and the solar corona. On rare occasions, he finds time to write science fiction stories that, as in the following novella, sometimes take place in these exotic locales.

When Leah Hamakawa and I arrived at Riemann orbital, there was a surprise waiting for Leah: a message. Not an electronic message on a link-pad, but an actual physical envelope, with Doctor Leah Hamakawa lettered on the outside in flowing handwriting.

Leah slid the note from the envelope. The message was etched on a stiff sheet of some hard crystal that gleamed a brilliant translucent crimson. She looked at it, flexed it, ran a fingernail over it, and then held it to the light, turning it slightly. The edges caught the light and scattered it across the room in droplets of fire. “Diamond,” she said. “Chromium impurities give it the red color; probably nitrogen for the blue. Charming.” She handed it to me. “Careful of the edges, Tinkerman; I don’t doubt it might cut.”

I ran a finger carefully over one edge, but found that Leah’s warning was unnecessary; some sort of passivation treatment had been done to blunt the edge to keep it from cutting. The letters were limned in blue, so sharply chiseled on the sheet that they seemed to rise from the card. The title read, “Invitation from Carlos Fernando Delacroix Ortega de la Jolla y Nordwald-Gruenbaum.” In smaller letters, it continued, “We find your researches on the ecology of Mars to be of some interest. We would like to invite you to visit our residences at Hypatia at your convenience and talk.”

I didn’t know the name Carlos Fernando, but the family Nordwald-Gruenbaum needed no introduction. The invitation had come from someone within the intimate family of the satrap of Venus.

Transportation, the letter continued, would be provided.

The satrap of Venus. One of the twenty old men, the lords and owners of the solar system. A man so rich that human standards of wealth no longer had any meaning. What could he want with Leah?

I tried to remember what I knew about the sultan of the clouds, satrap of the fabled floating cities. It seemed very far away from everything I knew. The society, I thought I remembered, was said to be decadent and perverse, but I knew little more. The inhabitants of Venus kept to themselves.

Riemann station was ugly and functional, the interior made of a dark anodized aluminum with a pebbled surface finish. There was a viewport in the lounge, and Leah had walked over to look out. She stood with her back to me, framed in darkness. Even in her rumpled ship’s suit, she was beautiful, and I wondered if I would ever find the clue to understanding her.

As the orbital station rotated, the blue bubble of Earth slowly rose in front of her, a fragile and intricate sculpture of snow and cobalt, outlining her in a sapphire light. “There’s nothing for me down there,” she said.

I stood in silence, not sure if she even remembered I was there.

In a voice barely louder than the silence, she said, “I have no past.”

The silence was uncomfortable. I knew I should say something, but I was not sure what. “I’ve never been to Venus,” I said at last.

“I don’t know anybody who has.” Leah turned. “I suppose the letter doesn’t specifically say that I should come alone.” Her tone was matter of fact, neither discouraging nor inviting.

It was hardly enthusiastic, but it was better than no. I wondered if she actually liked me, or just tolerated my presence. I decided it might be best not to ask. No use pressing my luck.

* * * *

The transportation provided turned out to be the Suleiman, a fusion yacht.

Suleiman was more than merely first-class, it was excessively extravagant. It was larger than many ore transports, huge enough that any ordinary yacht could have easily fit within the most capacious of its recreation spheres. Each of its private cabins—and it had seven—was larger than an ordinary habitat module. Big ships commonly were slow ships, but Suleiman was an exception, equipped with an impressive amount of delta-V, and the transfer orbit to Venus was scheduled for a transit time well under that of any commercial transport ship.

We were the only passengers.

Despite its size, the ship had a crew of just three: captain, and first and second pilot. The captain, with the shaven head and saffron robe of a Buddhist novice, greeted us on entry, and politely but firmly informed us that the crew was not answerable to orders of the passengers. We were to keep to the passenger section and we would be delivered to Venus. Crew accommodations were separate from the passenger accommodations and we should expect not to see or hear from the crew during the voyage.

“Fine,” was the only comment Leah had.

When the ship had received us and boosted into a fast Venus transfer orbit, Leah found the smallest of the private cabins and locked herself in it.

* * * *

Leah Hamakawa had been with the Pleiades Institute for twenty years. She had joined young, when she was still a teenager—long before I’d ever met her—and I knew little of her life before then, other than that she had been an orphan. The institute was the only family that she had.

It seemed to me sometimes that there were two Leahs. One Leah was shy and childlike, begging to be loved. The other Leah was cool and professional, who could hardly bear being touched, who hated—or perhaps disdained—people.

Sometimes I wondered if she had been terribly hurt as a child. She never talked about growing up, never mentioned her parents. I had asked her, once, and the only thing she said was that that was all behind her, long ago and far away.

I never knew my position with her. Sometimes I almost thought that she must love me, but couldn’t bring herself to say anything. Other times she was so casually thoughtless that I believed she never thought of me as more than a technical assistant, indistinguishable from any other tech. Sometimes I wondered why she even bothered to allow me to hang around.

I damned myself silently for being too cowardly to ask.

While Leah had locked herself away, I explored the ship. Each cabin was spherical, with a single double-glassed octagonal viewport on the outer cabin wall. The cabins had every luxury imaginable, even hygiene facilities set in smaller adjoining spheres, with booths that sprayed actual water through nozzles onto the occupant’s body.

Ten hours after boost, Leah had still not come out. I found another cabin and went to sleep.

In two days I was bored. I had taken apart everything that could be taken apart, examined how it worked, and put it back together. Everything was in perfect condition; there was nothing for me to fix.

But, although I had not brought much with me, I’d brought a portable office. I called up a librarian agent and asked for history.

* * * *

In the beginning of the human expansion outward, transport into space had been ruinously expensive, and only governments and obscenely rich corporations could afford to do business in space. When the governments dropped out, a handful of rich men bought their assets. Most of them sold out again, or went bankrupt. A few didn’t. Some stayed on due to sheer stubbornness, some with the fervor of an ideological belief in human expansion, and some out of a cold-hearted calculation that there would be uncountable wealth in space, if only it could be tapped. When the technology was finally ready, the twenty families owned it all.

Slowly, the frontier opened, and then the exodus began. First by the thousands: Baha’i, fleeing religious persecution; deposed dictators and their sycophants, looking to escape with looted treasuries; drug lords and their retinues, looking to take their profits beyond the reach of governments or rivals. Then, the exodus began by the millions, all colors of humanity scattering from the Earth to start a new life in space. Splinter groups from the Church of John the Avenger left the unforgiving mother church seeking their prophesied destiny; dissidents from the People’s Republic of Malawi, seeking freedom; vegetarian communes from Alaska, seeking a new frontier; Mayans, seeking to reestablish a Maya homeland; libertarians, seeking their free-market paradise; communists, seeking a place outside of history to mold the new communist man. Some of them died quickly, some slowly, but always there were more, a never-ending flood of dissidents, malcontents, and rebels, people willing to sign away anything for the promise of a new start. A few of them survived. A few of them thrived. A few of them grew.

And every one of them had mortgaged their very balls to the twenty families for passage.

Not one habitat in a hundred managed to buy its way out of debt—but the heirs of the twenty became richer than nations, richer than empires.

The legendary war between the Nordwald industrial empire and the Gruenbaum family over solar-system resources had ended when Patricia Gruenbaum sold out her controlling interest in the family business. Udo Nordwald, tyrant and patriarch of the Nordwald industrial empire—now Nordwald-Gruenbaum—had no such plans to discard or even dilute his hard-battled wealth. He continued his consolidation of power with a merger-by-marriage of his only son, a boy not even out of his teens, with the shrewd and calculating heiress of la Jolla. His closest competitors gone, Udo retreated from the outer solar system, leaving the long expansion outward to others. He established corporate headquarters, a living quarters for workers, and his own personal dwelling in a place that was both central to the inner system, and also a spot that nobody had ever before thought possible to colonize. He made his reputation by colonizing what was casually called the solar system’s Hell planet.

Venus.

* * * *

The planet below grew from a point of light into a gibbous white pearl, too bright to look at. The arriving interplanetary yacht shed its hyperbolic excess in a low pass through Venus’ atmosphere, rebounded leisurely into high elliptical orbit, and then circularized into a two-hour parking orbit.

Suleiman had an extravagant viewport, a single transparent pane four meters in diameter, and I floated in front of it, watching the transport barque glide up to meet us. I had thought Suleiman a large ship; the barque made it look like a miniature. A flattened cone with a rounded nose and absurdly tiny rocket engines at the base, it was shaped in the form of a typical planetary-descent lifting body, but one that must have been over a kilometer long, and at least as wide. It glided up to the Suleiman and docked with her like a pumpkin mating with a pea.

The size, I knew, was deceiving. The barque was no more than a thin skin over a hollow shell made of vacuum-foamed titanium surrounding a vast empty chamber. It was designed not to land, but to float in the atmosphere, and to float it required a huge volume and almost no weight. No ships ever landed on the surface of Venus; the epithet “hell” was well chosen. The transfer barque, then, was more like a space-going dirigible than a spaceship, a vehicle as much at home floating in the clouds as floating in orbit.

Even knowing that the vast bulk of the barque was little more substantial than vacuum, though, I found the effect intimidating.

It didn’t seem to make any impression on Leah. She had come out from her silent solitude when we approached Venus, but she barely glanced out the viewport in passing. It was often hard for me to guess what would attract her attention. Sometimes I had seen her spend an hour staring at a rock, apparently fascinated by a chunk of ordinary asteroidal chondrite, turning it over and examining it carefully from every possible angle. Other things, like a spaceship nearly as big as a city, she ignored as if they had no more importance than dirt.

Bulky cargos were carried in compartments in the hollow interior of the barque, but since there were just two of us descending to Venus, we were invited to sit up in the pilot’s compartment, a transparent blister almost invisible at the front.

The pilot was another yellow-robed Buddhist. Was this a common sect for Venus pilots, I wondered? But this pilot was as talkative as Suleiman‘s pilot had been reclusive. As the barque undocked, a tether line stretched out between it and the station. The station lowered the barque toward the planet. While we were being lowered down the tether, the pilot pointed out every possible sight—tiny communications satellites crawling across the sky like turbocharged ants; the pinkish flashes of lightning on the night hemisphere of the planet far below; the golden spider’s-web of a microwave power relay. At thirty kilometers, still talking, the pilot severed the tether, allowing the barque to drop free. The Earth and Moon, twin stars of blue and white, rose over the pearl of the horizon. Factory complexes were distantly visible in orbit, easy to spot by their flashing navigation beacons and the transport barques docked to them, so far away that even the immense barques were shrunken to insignificance.

We were starting to brush atmosphere now, and a feeling of weight returned and increased. Suddenly we were pulling half a gravity of over-g. Without ever stopping talking, the pilot-monk deftly rolled the barque inverted, and Venus was now over our heads, a featureless white ceiling to the universe. “Nice view there, is it not?” the pilot said. “You get a great feel for the planet in this attitude. Not doing it for the view, though, nice as it is; I’m just getting that old hypersonic lift working for us, holding us down. These barques are a bit fragile; can’t take them in too fast, have to play the atmosphere like a big bass fiddle. Wouldn’t want us to bounce off the atmosphere, now, would you?” He didn’t pause for answers to his questions, and I wondered if he would have continued his travelogue even if we had not been there.

The g-level increased to about a standard, then steadied.

The huge beast swept inverted through the atmosphere, trailing an ionized cloud behind it. The pilot slowed toward subsonic, and then rolled the barque over again, skipping upward slightly into the exosphere to cool the glowing skin, then letting it dip back downward. The air thickened around us as we descended into the thin, featureless haze. And then we broke through the bottom of the haze into the clear air below it, and abruptly we were soaring above the endless sea of clouds.

Clouds.

* * * *

A hundred and fifty million square kilometers of clouds, a billion cubic kilometers of clouds. In the ocean of clouds the floating cities of Venus are not limited, like terrestrial cities, to two dimensions only, but can float up and down at the whim of the city masters, higher into the bright cold sunlight, downward to the edges of the hot murky depths.

Clouds. The barque sailed over cloud-cathedrals and over cloud-mountains, edges recomplicated with cauliflower fractals. We sailed past lairs filled with cloud-monsters a kilometer tall, with arched necks of cloud stretching forward, threatening and blustering with cloud-teeth, cloud-muscled bodies with clawed feet of flickering lightning.

The barque was floating now, drifting downward at subsonic speed, trailing its own cloud-contrail, which twisted behind us like a scrawl of illegible handwriting. Even the pilot, if not actually fallen silent, had at least slowed down his chatter, letting us soak in the glory of it. “Quite something, isn’t it?” he said. “The kingdom of the clouds. Drives some people batty with the immensity of it, or so they say—cloud-happy, they call it here. Never get tired of it, myself. No view like the view from a barque to see the clouds.” And to prove it, he banked the barque over into a slow turn, circling a cloud pillar that rose from deep down in the haze to tower thousands of meters above our heads. “Quite a sight.”

“Quite a sight,” I repeated.

The pilot-monk rolled the barque back, and then pointed, forward and slightly to the right. “There. See it?”

I didn’t know what to see. “What?”

“There.”

I saw it now, a tiny point glistening in the distance. “What is it?”

“Hypatia. The jewel of the clouds.”

As we coasted closer, the city grew. It was an odd sight. The city was a dome, or rather, a dozen glistening domes melted haphazardly together, each one faceted with a million panels of glass. The domes were huge, the smallest nearly a kilometer across, and as the barque glided across the sky the facets caught the sunlight and sparkled with reflected light. Below the domes, a slender pencil of rough black stretched down toward the cloudbase like taffy, delicate as spun glass, terminating in an absurdly tiny bulb of rock that seemed far too small to counterbalance the domes.

“Beautiful, you think, yes? Like the wonderful jellyfishes of your blue planet’s oceans. Can you believe that half a million people live there?”

The pilot brought us around the city in a grand sweep, showing off, not even bothering to talk. Inside the transparent domes, chains of lakes glittered in green ribbons between boulevards and delicate pavilions. At last he slowed to a stop, and then slowly leaked atmosphere into the vacuum vessel that provided the buoyancy. The barque settled down gradually, wallowing from side to side now that the stability given by its forward momentum was gone. Now it floated slightly lower than the counterweight. The counterweight no longer looked small, but loomed above us, a rock the size of Gibraltar. Tiny fliers affixed tow ropes to hardpoints on the surface of the barque, and slowly we were winched into a hard-dock.

“Welcome to Venus,” said the monk.

The surface of Venus is a place of crushing pressure and hellish temperature. Rise above it, though, and the pressure eases, the temperature cools. Fifty kilometers above the surface, at the base of the clouds, the temperature is tropical, and the pressure the same as Earth normal. Twenty kilometers above that, the air is thin and polar cold.

Drifting between these two levels are the ten thousand floating cities of Venus.

A balloon filled with oxygen and nitrogen will float in the heavy air of Venus, and balloons were exactly what the fabled domed cities were. Geodetic structures with struts of sintered graphite and skin of transparent polycarbonate synthesized from the atmosphere of Venus itself, each kilometer-diameter dome easily lifted a hundred thousand tons of city.

Even the clouds cooperated. The thin haze of the upper cloud deck served to filter the sunlight so that the intensity of the Sun here was little more than the Earth’s solar constant.

Hypatia was not the largest of the floating cities, but it was certainly the richest, a city of helical buildings and golden domes, with huge open areas and elaborate gardens. Inside the dome of Hypatia, the architects played every possible trick to make us forget that we were encapsulated in an enclosed volume.

But we didn’t see this part, the gardens and waterfalls, not at first. Leaving the barque, we entered a disembarking lounge below the city. For all that it featured plush chaise lounges, floors covered with genetically engineered pink grass, and priceless sculptures of iron and jade, it was functional: a place to wait.

It was large enough to hold a thousand people, but there was only one person in the lounge, a boy who was barely old enough to have entered his teens, wearing a bathrobe and elaborately pleated yellow silk pants. He was slightly pudgy, with an agreeable, but undistinguished, round face.

After the expense of our transport, I was surprised at finding only one person sent to await our arrival.

The kid looked at Leah. “Doctor Hamakawa. I’m pleased to meet you.” Then he turned to me. “Who the hell are you?” he said.

“Who are you?” I said. “Where’s our reception?”

The boy was chewing on something. He seemed about to spit it out, and then thought better of it. He looked over at Leah. “This guy is with you, Dr. Hamakawa? What’s he do?”

“This is David Tinkerman,” Leah said. “Technician. And, when need be, pilot. Yes, he’s with me.”

“Tell him he might wish to learn some manners,” the boy said.

“And who are you?” I shot back. “I don’t think you answered the question.”

The not-quite-teenager looked at me with disdain, as if he wasn’t sure if he would even bother to talk to me. Then he said, in a slow voice as if talking to an idiot, “I am Carlos Fernando Delacroix Ortega de la Jolla y Nordwald-Gruenbaum. I own this station and everything on it.”

He had an annoying high voice, on the edge of changing, but not yet there.

Leah, however, didn’t seem to notice his voice. “Ah,” she said. “You are the scion of Nordwald-Gruenbaum. The ruler of Hypatia.”

The kid shook his head and frowned. “No,” he said. “Not the scion, not exactly. I am Nordwald-Gruenbaum.” The smile made him look like a child again; it make him look likable. When he bowed, he was utterly charming. “I,” he said, “am the sultan of the clouds.”

Carlos Fernando, as it turned out, had numerous servants indeed. Once we had been greeted, he made a gesture and an honor guard of twenty women in silken doublets came forward to escort us up.

Before we entered the elevator, the guards circled around. At a word from Carlos Fernando, a package was brought forward. Carlos took it, and, as the guards watched, handed it to Leah. “A gift,” he said, “to welcome you to my city.”

The box was simple and unadorned. Leah opened it. Inside the package was a large folio. She took it out. The book was bound in cracked, dark red leather, with no lettering. She flipped to the front. “Giordano Bruno,” she read. “On the Infinite Universe and Worlds.” She smiled, and riffled through the pages. “A facsimile of the first English edition?”

“I thought perhaps you might enjoy it.”

“Charming.” She placed it back in the box, and tucked it under her arm. “Thank you,” she said.

The elevator rose so smoothly it was difficult to believe it traversed two kilometers in a little under three minutes. The doors opened to brilliant noon sunlight. We were in the bubble city.

The city was a fantasy of foam and air. Although it was enclosed in a dome, the bubble was so large that the walls nearly vanished into the air, and it seemed unencumbered. With the guards beside us, we walked through the city. Everywhere there were parks, some just a tiny patch of green surrounding a tree, some forests perched on the wide tops of elongated stalks, with elegantly sculpted waterfalls cascading down to be caught in wide fountain basins. White pathways led upward through the air, suspended by cables from impossibly narrow beams, and all around us were sounds of rustling water and birdsong.

At the end of the welcoming tour, I realized I had been imperceptibly but effectively separated from Leah. “Hey,” I said. “What happened to Dr. Hamakawa?”

The honor guard of women still surrounded me, but Leah and the kid who was the heir of Nordwald-Gruenbaum had vanished.

“We’re sorry,” one of the women answered, one slightly taller, perhaps, than the others. “I believe that she has been taken to her suite to rest for a bit, since in a few hours she is to be greeted at the level of society.”

“I should be with her.”

The woman looked at me calmly. “We had no instructions to bring you. I don’t believe you were invited.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’d better find them.”

The woman stood back and gestured to the city. Walkways meandered in all directions, a three-dimensional maze. “By all means, if you like. We were instructed that you were to have free run of the city.”

I nodded. Clearly, plans had been made with no room for me. “How will I get in touch?” I asked. “What if I want to talk to Leah—to Dr. Hamakawa?”

“They’ll be able to find you. Don’t worry.” After a pause, she said, “Shall we show you to your place of domicile?”

The building to which I was shown was one of a cluster that seemed suspended in the air by crisscrossed cables. It was larger than many houses. I was used to living in the cubbyholes of habitat modules, and the spaciousness of the accommodations startled me.

“Good evening, Mr. Tinkerman.” The person greeting me was a tall Chinese man perhaps fifty years of age. The woman next to him, I surmised, was his wife. She was quite a bit younger, in her early twenties. She was slightly overweight by the standards I was used to, but I had noticed that was common here. Behind her hid two children, their faces peeking out and then darting back again to safety. The man introduced himself as Truman Singh, and his wife as Epiphany. “The rest of the family will meet you in a few hours, Mr. Tinkerman,” he said, smiling. “They are mostly working.”

“We both work for His Excellency,” Epiphany added. “Carlos Fernando has asked our braid to house you. Don’t hesitate to ask for anything you need. The cost will go against the Nordwald-Gruenbaum credit, which is,” she smiled, “quite unlimited here. As you might imagine.”

“Do you do this often?” I asked. “House guests?”

Epiphany looked up at her husband. “Not too often,” she said, “not for His Excellency, anyway. It’s not uncommon in the cities, though; there’s a lot of visiting back and forth as one city or another drifts nearby, and everyone will put up visitors from time to time.”

“You don’t have hotels?”

She shook her head. “We don’t get many visitors from outplanet.”

“You said ‘His Excellency,’ ” I said. “That’s Carlos Fernando? Tell me about him.”

“Of course. What would you like to know?”

“Does he really—” I gestured at the city—”own all of this? The whole planet?”

“Yes, certainly, the city, yes. And also, no.”

“How is that?”

“He will own the city, yes—this one, and five thousand others—but the planet? Maybe, maybe not. The Nordwald-Gruenbaum family does claim to own the planet, but in truth that claim means little. The claim may apply to the surface of the planet, but nobody owns the sky. The cities, though, yes. But, of course, he doesn’t actually control them all personally.”

“Well, of course not. I mean, hey, he’s just a kid—he must have trustees or proxies or something, right?”

“Indeed. Until he reaches his majority.”

“And then?”

Truman Singh shrugged. “It is the Nordwald-Gruenbaum tradition—written into the first Nordwald’s will. When he reaches his majority, it is personal property.”

There were, as I discovered, eleven thousand, seven hundred and eight cities floating in the atmosphere of Venus. “Probably a few more,” Truman Singh told me. “Nobody keeps track, exactly. There are myths of cities that float low down, never rising above the lower cloud decks, forever hidden. You can’t live that deep—it’s too hot—but the stories say that the renegade cities have a technology that allows them to reject heat.” He shrugged. “Who knows?” In any case, of the known cities, the estate to which Carlos Fernando was heir owned or held shares or partial ownership of more than half.

“The Nordwald-Gruenbaum entity has been a good owner,” Truman said. “I should say, they know that their employees could leave, move to another city if they had to, but they don’t.”

“And there’s no friction?”

“Oh, the independent cities, they all think that the Nordwald-Gruenbaums have too much power!” He laughed. “But there’s not much they can do about it, eh?”

“They could fight.”

Truman Singh reached out and tapped me lightly on the center of my forehead with his middle finger. “That would not be wise.” He paused, and then said more slowly, “We are an interconnected ecology here, the independents and the sultanate. We rely on each other. The independents could declare war, yes, but in the end nobody would win.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I see that. Of course, the floating cities are so fragile—a single break in the gas envelope—”

“We are perhaps not as fragile as you think,” Truman Singh replied. “I should say, you are used to the built worlds, but they are vacuum habitats, where a single blow-out would be catastrophic. Here, you know, there is no pressure difference between the atmosphere outside and the lifesphere inside; if there is a break, the gas equilibrates through the gap only very slowly. Even if we had a thousand broken panels, it would take weeks for the city to sink to the irrecoverable depths. And, of course, we do have safeguards, many safeguards.” He paused, and then said, “but if there were a war … we are safe against ordinary hazards, you can have no fear of that … but against metastable bombs … well, that would not be good. No, I should say that would not be good at all.”

* * * *

The next day I set out to find where Leah had been taken, but although everyone I met was unfailingly polite, I had little success in reaching her. At least, I was beginning to learn my way around.

The first thing I noticed about the city was the light. I was used to living in orbital habitats, where soft, indirect light was provided by panels of white-light diodes. In Hypatia City, brilliant Venus sunlight suffused throughout the interior. The next thing I noticed were the birds.

Hypatia was filled with birds. Birds were common in orbital habitats, since parrots and cockatiels adapt well to the freefall environment of space, but the volume of Hypatia was crowded with bright tropical birds, parrots and cockatoos and lorikeets, cardinals and chickadees and quetzals, more birds than I had names for, more birds than I had ever seen, a raucous orchestra of color and sound.

The floating city had twelve main chambers, separated from one another by thin, transparent membranes with a multiplicity of passages, each chamber well lit and cheerful, each with a slightly different style.

The quarters I had been assigned were in Sector Carbon, where individual living habitats were strung on cables like strings of iridescent pearls above a broad fenway of forest and grass. Within Sector Carbon, cable cars swung like pendulums on long strands, taking a traveler from platform to platform across the sector in giddy arcs. Carlos Fernando’s chambers were in the highest, centermost bubble—upcity, as it was called—a bubble dappled with colored light and shadow, where the architecture was fluted minarets and oriental domes. But I wasn’t, as it seemed, allowed into this elite sphere. I didn’t even learn where Leah had been given quarters.

I found a balcony on a tower that looked out through the transparent canopy over the clouds. The cloudscape was just as magnificent as it had been the previous day; towering and slowly changing. The light was a rich golden color, and the Sun, masked by a skein of feathery clouds like a tracery of lace, was surrounded by a bronze halo. From the angle of the Sun it was early afternoon, but there would be no sunset that day; the great winds circling the planet would not blow the city into the night side of Venus for another day.

Of the eleven thousand other cities, I could detect no trace—looking outward, there was no indication that we were not alone in the vast cloudscape that stretched to infinity. But then, I thought, if the cities were scattered randomly, there would be little chance one would be nearby at any given time. Venus was a small planet, as planets go, but large enough to swallow ten thousand cities—or even a hundred times that—without any visible crowding of the skies.

I wished I knew what Leah thought of it.

I missed Leah. For all that she sometimes didn’t seem to even notice I was there … our sojourn on Mars, brief as it had been … we had shared the same cubby. Perhaps that meant nothing to her. But it had been the very center of my life.

I thought of her body, lithe and golden-skinned. Where was she? What was she doing?

The park was a platform overgrown with cymbidian orchids, braced in the air by the great cables that transected the dome from the stanchion trusswork. This seemed a common architecture here, where even the ground beneath was suspended from the buoyancy of the air dome. I bounced my weight back and forth, testing the resonant frequency, and felt the platform move infinitesimally under me. Children here must be taught from an early age not to do that; a deliberate effort could build up destructive oscillation. I stopped bouncing, and let the motion damp.

When I returned near the middle of the day, neither Truman nor Epiphany were there, and Truman’s other wife, a woman named Triolet, met me. She was perhaps in her sixties, with dark skin and deep gray eyes. She had been introduced to me the previous day, but in the confusion of meeting numerous people in what seemed to be a large extended family, I had not had a chance to really talk to her yet. There were always a number of people around the Singh household, and I was confused as to how, or even if, they were related to my hosts. Now, talking to her, I realized that she, in fact, was the one who had control of the Singh household finances.

The Singh family were farmers, I discovered. Or farm managers. The flora in Hypatia was decorative or served to keep the air in the dome refreshed, but the real agriculture was in separate domes, floating at an altitude that was optimized for plant growth and had no inhabitants. Automated equipment did the work of sowing and irrigation and harvest. Truman and Epiphany Singh were operational engineers, making those decisions that required a human input, watching that the robots kept on track and were doing the right things at the right times.

And there was a message waiting for me, inviting me in the evening to attend a dinner with His Excellency, Carlos Fernando Delacroix Ortega de la Jolla y Nordwald-Gruenbaum.

Triolet helped me with my wardrobe, along with Epiphany, who had returned by the time I was ready to prepare. They both told me emphatically that my serviceable but well-worn jumpsuit was not appropriate attire. The gown Triolet selected was far gaudier than anything I would have chosen for myself, an electric shade of indigo accented with a wide midnight black sash. “Trust us, it will be suitable,” Epiphany told me. Despite its bulk, it was as light as a breath of air.

“All clothes here are light,” Epiphany told me. “Spider’s silk.”

“Ah, I see” I said. “Synthetic spider silk. Strong and light; very practical.”

“Synthetic?” Epiphany asked, and giggled. “No, not synthetic. It’s real.”

“The silk is actually woven by spiders?”

“No, the whole garment is.” At my puzzled look, she said, “Teams of spiders. They work together.”

“Spiders.”

“Well, they’re natural weavers, you know. And easy to transport.”

I arrived at the banquet hall at the appointed time and found that the plasma-arc blue gown that Epiphany had selected for me was the most conservative dress there. There were perhaps thirty people present, but Leah was clearly the center. She seemed happy with the attention, more animated than I’d recalled seeing her before.

“They’re treating you well?” I asked, when I’d finally made it through the crowd to her.

“Oh, indeed.”

I discovered I had nothing to say. I waited for her to ask about me, but she didn’t. “Where have they given you to stay?”

“A habitat next section over,” she said. “Sector Carbon. It’s amazing—I’ve never seen so many birds.”

“That’s the sector I’m in,” I said, “but they didn’t tell me where you were.”

“Really? That’s odd.” She tapped up a map of the residential sector on a screen built into the diamond tabletop, and a three-dimensional image appeared to float inside the table. She rotated it and highlighted her habitat, and I realized that she was indeed adjacent, in a large habitat that was almost directly next to the complex I was staying in. “It’s a pretty amazing place. But mostly I’ve been here in the upcity. Have you talked to Carli much yet? He’s a very clever kid. Interested in everything—botany, physics, even engineering.”

“Really?” I said. “I don’t think they’ll let me into the upcity.”

“You’re kidding; I’m sure they’ll let you in. Hey—” she called over one of the guards. “Say, is there any reason Tinkerman can’t come up to the centrum?”

“No, madam, if you want it, of course not.”

“Great. See, no problem.”

And then the waiters directed me to my place at the far end of the table.

The table was a thick slab of diamond, the faceted edges collecting and refracting rainbows of color. The top was as smooth and slippery as a sheet of ice. Concealed inside were small computer screens so that any of the diners who wished could call up graphics or data as needed during a conversation. The table was both art and engineering, practical and beautiful at the same time.

Carlos Fernando sat at the end of the table. He seemed awkward and out of place in a chair slightly too large for him. Leah sat at his right, and an older woman—perhaps his mother?—on his left. He was bouncing around in his chair, alternating between playing with the computer system in his table and sneaking glances over at Leah when he thought she wasn’t paying attention to him. If she looked in his direction, he would go still for a moment, and then his eyes would quickly dart away and he went back to staring at the graphics screen in front of him and fidgeting.

The server brought a silver tray to Carlos Fernando. On it was something the size of a fist, hidden under a canopy of red silk. Carlos Fernando looked up, accepted it with a nod, and removed the cloth. There was a moment of silence as people looked over, curious. I strained to see it.

It was a sparkling egg.

The egg was cunningly wrought of diamond fibers of many colors, braided into intricate lacework resembling entwined Celtic knots. The twelve-year-old satrap of Venus picked it up and ran one finger over it, delicately, barely brushing the surface, feeling the corrugations and relief of the surface.

He held it for a moment, as if not quite sure what he should do with it, and then his hand darted over and put the egg on the plate in front of Leah. She looked up, puzzled.

“This is for you,” he said.

The faintest hint of surprise passed through the other diners, almost subvocal, too soft to be heard.

A moment later the servers set an egg in front of each of us. Our eggs, although decorated with an intricate filigree of finely painted lines of gold and pale verdigris, were ordinary eggs—goose eggs, perhaps.

Carlos Fernando was fidgeting in his chair, half grinning, half biting his lip, looking down, looking around, looking everywhere except at the egg or at Leah.

“What am I to do with this?” Leah asked.

“Why,” he said, “perhaps you should open it up and eat it.”

Leah picked up the diamond-laced egg and examined it, turned it over and rubbed one finger across the surface. Then, having found what she was looking for, she held it in two fingers and twisted. The diamond eggshell opened, and inside it was a second egg, an ordinary one.

The kid smiled again and looked down at the egg in front of him. He picked up his spoon and cracked the shell, then spooned out the interior.

At this signal, the others cracked their own eggs and began to eat. After a moment, Leah laid the decorative shell to one side and did the same. I watched her for a moment, and then cracked my own egg.

It was, of course, excellent.

* * * *

Later, when I was back with the Singh family, I was still puzzled. There had been some secret significance there that everybody else had seen, but I had missed. Mr. Singh was sitting with his older wife, Triolet, talking about accounts.

“I must ask a question,” I said.

Truman Singh turned to me. “Ask,” he said, “and I shall answer.”

“Is there any particular significance,” I said, “to an egg?”

“An egg?” Singh seemed puzzled. “Much significance, I would say. In the old days, the days of the asteroid miners, an egg was a symbol of luxury. Ducks were brought into the bigger habitats, and their eggs were, for some miners, the only food they would ever eat that was not a form of algae or soybean.”

“A symbol of luxury,” I said, musing. “I see. But I still don’t understand it.” I thought for a moment, and then asked, “Is there any significance to a gift of an egg?”

“Well, no,” he said, slowly, “not exactly. An egg? Nothing, in and of itself.”

His wife Triolet asked, “You are sure it’s just an egg? Nothing else?”

“A very elaborate egg.”

“Hmmm,” she said, with a speculative look in her eye. “Not, maybe, an egg, a book, and a rock?”

That startled me a little. “A book and a rock?” The Bruno book—the very first thing Carlos Fernando had done on meeting Leah was to give her a book. But a rock? I hadn’t see anything like that. “Why that?”

“Ah,” she said. “I suppose you wouldn’t know. I don’t believe that our customs here in the sky cities are well known out there in the outer reaches.”

Her mention of the outer reaches—Saturn and the Beyond—confused me for a moment, until I realized that, viewed from Venus, perhaps even Earth and the built worlds of the orbital clouds would be considered “outer.”

“Here,” she continued, “as in most of the ten thousand cities, an egg, a book, and a rock is a special gift. The egg is symbolic of life, you see; a book symbolic of knowledge; and a rock is the basis of all wealth, the minerals from the asteroid belt that built our society and bought our freedom.”

“Yes? And all three together?”

“They are the traditional gesture of the beginning of courtship,” she said.

“I still don’t understand.”

“If a young man gives a woman an egg, a book, and a rock,” Truman said, “I should say this is his official sign that he is interested in courting her. If she accepts them, then she accepts his courtship.”

“What? That’s it, just like that, they’re married?”

“No, no, no,” he said. “It only means that she accepts the courtship—that she takes him seriously and, when it comes, she will listen to his proposal. Often a woman may have rocks and eggs from many young men. She doesn’t have to accept, only take him seriously.”

“Oh,” I said.

But it still made no sense. How old was Carlos Fernando, twenty Venus years? What was that, twelve Earth years or so? He was far too young to be proposing.

* * * *

“No one can terraform Venus,” Carlos Fernando said.

Carlos Fernando had been uninterested in having me join in Leah’s discussion, but Leah, oblivious to her host’s displeasure (or perhaps simply not caring), had insisted that if he wanted to talk about terraforming, I should be there.

It was one room of Carlos Fernando’s extensive palaces, a rounded room, an enormous cavernous space that had numerous alcoves. I’d found them sitting in one of the alcoves, an indentation that was cozy but still open. The ubiquitous female guards were still there, but they were at the distant ends of the room, within command if Carlos Fernando chose to shout, but far enough to give them the illusion of privacy.

The furniture they were sitting on was odd. The chairs seemed sculpted of sapphire smoke, yet were solid to the touch. I picked one up and discovered that it weighed almost nothing at all. “Diamond aerogel,” Carlos Fernando said. “Do you like it?”

“It’s amazing,” I said. I had never before seen so much made out of diamond. And yet it made sense here, I thought; with carbon dioxide an inexhaustible resource surrounding the floating cities, it was logical that the floating cities would make as much as they could out of carbon. But still, I didn’t know you could make an aerogel of diamond. “How do you make it?”

“A new process we’ve developed,” Carlos Fernando said. “You don’t mind if I don’t go into the details. It’s actually an adaptation of an old idea, something that was invented back on Earth decades ago, called a molecular still.”

When Carlos Fernando mentioned the molecular still, I thought I saw a sharp flicker of attention from Leah. This was a subject she knew something about, I thought. But instead of following up, she went back to his earlier comment on terraforming.

“You keep asking questions about the ecology of Mars,” she said. “Why so many detailed questions about Martian ecopoiesis? You say you’re not interested in terraforming, but are you really? You aren’t thinking of the old idea of using photosynthetic algae in the atmosphere to reduce the carbon dioxide, are you? Surely you know that that can’t work.”

“Of course.” Carlos Fernando waved the question away. “Theoretical,” he said. “Nobody could terraform Venus, I know, I know.”

His pronouncement would have been more dignified if his voice had finished changing, but as it was, it wavered between squeaking an octave up and then going back down again, ruining the effect. “We simply have too much atmosphere,” he said. “Down at the surface, the pressure is over ninety bars—even if the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere could be converted to oxygen, the surface atmosphere would still be seventy times higher than the Earth’s atmospheric pressure.”

“I realize that,” Leah said. “We’re not actually ignorant, you know. So high a pressure of oxygen would be deadly—you’d burst into flames.”

“And the leftover carbon,” he said, smiling. “Hundreds of tons per square meter.”

“So what are you thinking?” she asked.

But in response, he only smiled. “Okay, I can’t terraform Venus,” he said. “So tell me more about Mars.”

I could see that there was something that he was keeping back. Carlos Fernando had some idea that he wasn’t telling.

But Leah did not press him, and instead took the invitation to tell him about her studies of the ecology on Mars, as it had been transformed long ago by the vanished engineers of the long-gone Freehold Toynbee colony. The Toynbee’s engineers had designed life to thicken the atmosphere of Mars, to increase the greenhouse effect, to melt the frozen oceans of Mars.

“But it’s not working,” Leah concluded. “The anaerobic life is being out-competed by the photosynthetic oxygen-producers. It’s pulling too much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.”

“But what about the Gaia effect? Doesn’t it compensate?”

“No,” Leah said. “I found no trace of a Lovelock self-aware planet. Either that’s a myth, or else the ecology on Mars is just too young to stabilize.”

“Of course on Venus, we would have no problem with photosynthesis removing carbon dioxide.”

“I thought you weren’t interested in terraforming Venus,” I said.

Carlos Fernando waved my objection away. “A hypothetical case, of course,” he said. “A thought exercise.” He turned to Leah. “Tomorrow,” he said, “would you like to go kayaking?”

“Sure,” she said.

Kayaking, on Venus, did not involve water.

Carlos Fernando instructed Leah, and Epiphany helped me.

The “kayak” was a ten-meter long gas envelope, a transparent cylinder of plastic curved into an ogive at both ends, with a tiny bubble at the bottom where the kayaker sat. One end of the kayak held a huge, gossamer-bladed propeller that turned lazily as the kayaker pedaled, while the kayaker rowed with flimsy wings, transparent and iridescent like the wings of a dragonfly.

The wings, I discovered, had complicated linkages; each one could be pulled, twisted, and lifted, allowing each wing to separately beat, rotate, and camber.

“Keep up a steady motion with the propeller,” Epiphany told me. “You’ll lose all your maneuverability if you let yourself float to a stop. You can scull with the wings to put on a burst of speed if you need to. Once you’re comfortable, use the wings to rise up or swoop down, and to maneuver. You’ll have fun.”

We were in a launching bay, a balcony protruding from the side of the city. Four of the human-powered dirigibles that they called kayaks were docked against the blister, the bulge of the cockpits neatly inserted into docking rings so that the pilots could enter the dirigible without exposure to the outside atmosphere. Looking out across the cloudscape, I could see dozens of kayaks dancing around the city like transparent squid with stubby wings, playing tag with each other and racing across the sky. So small and transparent compared to the magnificent clouds, they had been invisible until I’d known how to look.

“What about altitude?” I asked.

“You’re about neutrally buoyant,” she said. “As long as you have airspeed, you can use the wings to make fine adjustments up or down.”

“What happens if I get too low?”

“You can’t get too low. The envelope has a reservoir of methanol; as you get lower, the temperature rises and your reservoir releases vapor, so the envelope inflates. If you gain too much altitude, vapor condenses out. So you’ll find you’re regulated to stay pretty close to the altitude you’re set for, which right now is,” she checked a meter, “fifty-two kilometers above local ground level. We’re blowing west at a hundred meters per second, so local ground level will change as the terrain below varies; check your meters for altimetry.”

Looking downward, nothing was visible at all, only clouds, and below the clouds, an infinity of haze. It felt odd to think of the surface, over fifty kilometers straight down, and even odder to think that the city we were inside was speeding across that invisible landscape at hundreds of kilometers an hour. There was only the laziest feeling of motion, as the city drifted slowly through the ever-changing canyons of clouds.

“Watch out for wind shear,” she said. “It can take you out of sight of the city pretty quickly, if you let it. Ride the conveyor back if you get tired.”

“The conveyor?”

“Horizontal-axis vortices. They roll from west to east and east to west. Choose the right altitude, and they’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

Now that she’d told me, I could see the kayakers surfing the wind shear, rising upward and skimming across the sky on invisible wheels of air.

“Have fun,” she said. She helped me into the gondola, tightened my straps, looked at the gas pressure meter, checked the purge valve on the emergency oxygen supply, and verified that the radio, backup radio, and emergency locator beacons worked.

Across the kayak launch bay, Leah and Carlos Fernando had already pushed off. Carlos was sculling his wings alternatingly with a practiced swishing motion, building up a pendulum-like oscillation from side to side. Even as I watched, his little craft rolled over until for a moment it hesitated, inverted, and then rolled completely around.

“Showing off,” Epiphany said, disdainfully. “You’re not supposed to do that. Not that anybody would dare correct him.”

She turned back to me. “Ready?” she asked.

“Ready as I’m going to be,” I said. I’d been given a complete safety briefing that explained the backup systems and the backups to the backups, but still, floating in the sky above a fifty-two kilometer drop into the landscape of hell seemed an odd diversion.

“Go!” she said. She checked the seal on the cockpit and then with one hand she released the docking clamp.

Freed from its mooring, the kayak sprang upward into the sky. As I’d been instructed, I banked the kayak away from the city. The roll made me feel suddenly giddy. The kayak skittered, sliding around until it was moving sideways to the air, the nose dipping down so that I was hanging against my straps. Coordinate the turn, I thought, but every slight motion I made with the wings seemed amplified drunkenly, and the kayak wove around erratically.

The radio blinked at me, and Epiphany’s voice said, “You’re doing great. Give it some airspeed.”

I wasn’t doing great; I was staring straight down at lemon-tinted haze and spinning slowly around like a falling leaf. Airspeed? I realize that I had entirely forgotten to pedal. I pedaled now, and the nose lifted. The sideways spin damped out, and as I straightened out, the wings bit into the air. “Great,” Epiphany’s voice told me. “Keep it steady.”

The gas envelope seemed too fragile to hold me, but I was flying now, suspended below a golden sky. It was far too complicated, but I realized that as long as I kept the nose level, I could keep it under control. I was still oscillating slightly—it was difficult to avoid over-controlling—but on the average, I was keeping the nose pointed where I aimed it.

Where were Leah and Carlos Fernando?

I looked around. Each of the kayaks had different markings—mine was marked with gray stripes like a tabby cat—and I tried to spot theirs.

A gaggle of kayaks was flying together, rounding the pylon of the city. As they moved around the pylon they all turned at once, flashing in the sunlight like a startled school of fish.

Suddenly I spotted them, not far above me, close to the looming wall of the city; the royal purple envelope of Carlos Fernando’s kayak and the blue and yellow stripes of Leah’s. Leah was circling in a steady climb, and Carlos Fernando was darting around her, now coming in fast and bumping envelopes, now darting away and pulling up, hovering for a moment with his nose pointed at the sky, then skewing around and sliding back downward.

Their motions looked like the courtship dance of birds.

The purple kayak banked around and swooped out and away from the city; and an instant later, Leah’s blue and yellow kayak banked and followed. They both soared upward, catching a current of air invisible to me. I could see a few of the other fliers surfing on the same updraft. I yawed my nose around to follow them, but made no progress; I was too inexperienced with the kayak to be able to guess the air currents, and the wind differential was blowing me around the city in exactly the opposite of the direction I wanted to go. I pulled out and away from the city, seeking a different wind, and for an instant I caught a glimpse of something in the clouds below me, dark and fast moving.

Then I caught the updraft. I could feel it, the wings caught the air and it felt like an invisible giant’s hand picking me up and carrying me—

Then there was a sudden noise, a stuttering and ripping, followed by a sound like a snare drum. My left wing and propeller ripped away, the fragments spraying into the sky. My little craft banked hard to the left. My radio came to life, but I couldn’t hear anything as the cabin disintegrated around me. I was falling.

Falling.

For a moment I felt like I was back in zero-g. I clutched uselessly to the remains of the control surfaces, connected by loose cords to fluttering pieces of debris. Pieces of my canopy floated away and were caught by the wind and spun upward and out of sight. The atmosphere rushed in and my eyes started to burn. I made the mistake of taking a breath, and the effect was like getting kicked in the head. Flickering purple dots, the colors of a bruise, closed in from all directions. My vision narrowed to a single bright tunnel. The air was liquid fire in my lungs. I reached around, desperately, trying to remember the emergency instructions before I blacked out, and my hands found the back-up air-mask between my legs. I was still strapped into my seat, although the seat was no longer attached to a vehicle, and I slapped the breathing mask against my face and sucked hard to start the airflow from the emergency oxygen. I was lucky; the oxygen cylinder was still attached to the bottom of the seat, as the seat, with me in it, tumbled through the sky. Through blurred eyes, I could see the city spinning above me. I tried to think of what the emergency procedure could be and what I should do next, but I could only think of what had gone wrong. What had I done? For the life of me I couldn’t think of anything that I could have done that would have ripped the craft apart.

The city dwindled to the size of an acorn, and then I fell into the cloud layer and everything disappeared into a pearly white haze. My skin began to itch all over. I squeezed my eyes shut against the acid fog. The temperature was rising. How long would it take to fall fifty kilometers to the surface?

Something enormous and metallic swooped down from above me, and I blacked out.

* * * *

Minutes or hours or days later I awoke in a dimly lit cubicle. I was lying on the ground and two men wearing masks were spraying me with jets of a foaming white liquid that looked like milk but tasted bitter. My flight suit was in shreds around me.

I sat up and began to cough uncontrollably. My arms and my face itched like blazes, but when I started to scratch, one of the men reached out and slapped my hands away.

“Don’t scratch.”

I turned to look at him, and the one behind me grabbed me by the hair and smeared a handful of goo into my face, rubbing it hard into my eyes.

Then he picked up a patch of cloth and tossed it to me. “Rub this where it itches. It should help.”

I was still blinking, my face dripping, my vision fuzzy. The patch of cloth was wet with some gelatinous slime. I grabbed it from him, and dabbed it on my arms and then rubbed it in. It did help, some.

“Thanks,” I said. “What the hell—”

The two men in facemasks looked at each other. “Acid burn,” the taller man said. “You’re not too bad. A minute or two of exposure won’t leave scars.”

“What?”

“Acid. You were exposed to the clouds.”

“Right.”

Now that I wasn’t quite so distracted, I looked around. I was in the cargo hold of some sort of aircraft. There were two small round portholes on either side. Although nothing was visible through them but a blank white, I could feel that the vehicle was in motion. I looked at the two men. They were both rough characters. Unlike the brightly colored spider’s-silk gowns of the citizens of Hypatia, they were dressed in clothes that were functional but not fancy, jumpsuits of a dark gray color with no visible insignia. Both of them were fit and well muscled. I couldn’t see their faces, since they were wearing breathing masks and lightweight helmets, but under their masks I could see that they both wore short beards, another fashion that had been missing among the citizens of Hypatia. Their eyes were covered with amber-tinted goggles, made in a crazy style that cupped each eye with a piece that was rounded like half an eggshell, apparently stuck to their faces by some invisible glue. It gave them a strange, bug-eyed look. They stared at me, but behind their facemasks and goggle-eyes I was completely unable to read their expressions.

“Thanks,” I said. “So, who are you? Some sort of emergency rescue force?”

“I think you know who we are,” the taller one said. “The question is who the hell are you?”

I stood up and reached out a hand, thinking to introduce myself, but both of the men took a step back. Without seeming to move his hand, the taller one now had a gun, a tiny omniblaster of some kind. Suddenly a lot of things were clear.

“You’re pirates,” I said.

“We’re the Venus underground,” he said. “We don’t like the word pirates very much. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a question, and I really would like an answer. Who the hell are you?”

So I told him.

* * * *

The first man started to take off his helmet, but the taller pirate stopped him. “We’ll keep the masks on for now. Until we decide he’s safe.” The taller pirate said he was named Esteban Jaramillo, the shorter one Esteban Francisco. That was too many Estebans, I thought, and decided to tag the one Jaramillo and the other Francisco.

I discovered from them that not everybody in the floating cities thought of Venus as a paradise. Some of the independent cities considered the clan of Nordwald- Gruenbaum to be well on its way to becoming a dictatorship. “They own half of Venus outright, but that’s not good enough for them, no, oh no,” Jaramillo told me. “They’re stinking rich, but not stinking rich enough, and the very idea that there are free cities floating in the sky, cities that don’t swear fealty to them and pay their goddamned taxes, that pisses them off. They’ll do anything that they can to crush us. Us? We’re just fighting back.”

I would have been more inclined to see his point if I didn’t have the uncomfortable feeling that I’d just been abducted. It had been a tremendous stroke of luck for me that their ship had been there to catch me when my kayak broke apart and fell. I didn’t much believe in luck. And they didn’t bother to answer when I asked about being returned to Hypatia. It was pretty clear that the direction we were headed was not back toward the city.

I had given them my word that I wouldn’t fight or try to escape—where would I escape to?—and they’d accepted it. Once they realized that I wasn’t whom they had expected to capture, they’d pressed me for news of the outside.

There were three of them in the small craft: the two Estebans and the pilot, who was never introduced. He did not bother to turn around to greet me and all I ever saw of him was the back of his helmet. The craft itself they called a manta; an odd thing that was partly an airplane, partly dirigible, and partly a submarine. Once I’d given my word that I wouldn’t escape, I was allowed to look out, but there was nothing to see but a luminous golden haze.

“We keep the manta flying under the cloud decks,” Jaramillo said. “Keeps us invisible.”

“Invisible to whom?” I asked, but neither one of them bothered to answer. It was a dumb question anyway; I could very well guess who they wanted to keep out of sight of. “What about radar?” I said.

Esteban looked at Esteban, and then at me. “We have means to deal with radar,” he said. “Just leave it at that and stop it with the questions you should know enough not to ask.”

They seemed to be going somewhere, and eventually the manta exited the cloudbank into the clear air above. I pressed toward the porthole, trying to see out. The cloudscapes of Venus were still fascinating to me. We were skimming the surface of the cloud deck—ready to duck under if there were any sign of watchers, I surmised. From the cloudscape it was impossible to tell how far we’d come, whether it was just a few leagues or halfway around the planet. None of the floating cities were visible, but in the distance I spotted the fat torpedo shape of a dirigible. The pilot saw it as well, for we banked toward it and sailed slowly up, slowing down as we approached, until it disappeared over our heads, and the hull resonated with a sudden impact, then a ratcheting clang.

“Soft dock,” Jaramillo commented, and then a moment later another clang, and the nose of the craft was suddenly jerked up. “Hard dock,” he said. The two Estebans seemed to relax a little, and a whine and a rumble filled the little cabin. We were being winched up into the dirigible.

After ten minutes or so, we came to rest in a vast interior space. The manta had been taken inside the envelope of the gas chamber, I realized. Half a dozen people met us.

“Sorry,” Jaramillo said, “but I’m afraid we’re going to have to blind you. Nothing personal.”

“Blind?” I said, but actually that was good news. If they did not intend to release me, they wouldn’t care what I saw.

Jaramillo held my head steady while Francisco placed a set of the goggle-eyed glasses over my eyes. They were surprisingly comfortable. Whatever held them in place, they were so light that I could scarcely feel that they were there. The amber tint was barely noticeable. After checking that they fit, Francisco tapped the side of the goggles with his fingertip, once, twice, three times, four times. Each time he touched the goggles, the world grew darker, and with a fifth tap, all I could see was inky black. Why would sunglasses have a setting for complete darkness, I thought? And then I answered my own question: the last setting must be for e-beam welding. Pretty convenient, I thought. I wondered if I dared to ask them if I could keep the set of goggles when they were done.

“I am sure you won’t be so foolish as to adjust the transparency,” one of the Estebans said.

I was guided out the manta’s hatch and across the hangar, and then to a seat.

“This the prisoner?” a voice asked.

“Yeah,” Jaramillo said. “But the wrong one. No way to tell, but we guessed wrong, got the wrong flyer.”

“Shit. So who is he?”

“Technician,” Jaramillo said. “From the up and out.”

“Really? So does he know anything about the Nordwald-Gruenbaum plan?”

I spread my hands out flat, trying to look harmless. “Look, I only met the kid twice, or I guess three times, if you—”

That caused some consternation; I could hear a sudden buzz of voices, in a language I didn’t recognize. I wasn’t sure how many of them there were, but it seemed like at least half a dozen. I desperately wished I could see them, but that would very likely be a fatal move. After a moment, Jaramillo said, his voice now flat and expressionless, “You know the heir of Nordwald-Gruenbaum? You met Carlos Fernando in person?”

“I met him. I don’t know him. Not really.”

“Who did you say you were again?”

I went through my story, this time starting at the very beginning, explaining how we had been studying the ecology of Mars, how we had been summoned to Venus to meet the mysterious Carlos Fernando. From time to time I was interrupted to answer questions—what was my relationship with Leah Hamakawa? (I wished I knew). Were we married? Engaged? (No. No.) What was Carlos Fernando’s relationship with Dr. Hamakawa? (I wished I knew). Had Carlos Fernando ever mentioned his feelings about the independent cities? (No.) His plans? (No.) Why was Carlos Fernando interested in terraforming? (I don’t know.) What was Carlos Fernando planning? (I don’t know.) Why did Carlos Fernando bring Hamakawa to Venus? (I wished I knew.) What was he planning? What was he planning? (I don’t know. I don’t know.)

The more I talked, the more sketchy it seemed, even to me.

There was silence when I had finished talking. Then the first voice said, “Take him back to the manta.”

I was led back inside and put into a tiny space, and a door clanged shut behind me. After a while, when nobody answered my call, I reached up to the goggles. They popped free with no more than a light touch, and, looking at them, I was still unable to see how they attached. I was in a storage hold of some sort. The door was locked.

I contemplated my situation, but I couldn’t see that I knew any more now than I had before, except that I now knew that not all of the Venus cities were content with the status quo, and some of them were willing to go to some lengths to change it. They had deliberately shot me down, apparently thinking that I was Leah—or possibly even hoping for Carlos Fernando? It was hard to think that he would have been out of the protection of his bodyguards. Most likely, I decided, the bodyguards had been there, never letting him out of sight, ready to swoop in if needed, but while Carlos Fernando and Leah had soared up and around the city, I had left the sphere covered by the guards, and that was the opportunity the pirates in the manta had taken. They had seen the air kayak flying alone and shot it out of the sky, betting my life on their skill, that they could swoop in and snatch the falling pilot out of mid-air.

They could have killed me, I realized.

And all because they thought I knew something—or rather, that Leah Hamakawa knew something—about Carlos Fernando’s mysterious plan.

What plan? He was a twelve-year-old kid, not even a teenager, barely more than an overgrown child! What kind of plan could a kid have?

I examined the chamber I was in, this time looking more seriously at how it was constructed. All the joints were welded, with no obvious gaps, but the metal was light, probably an aluminum-lithium alloy. Possibly malleable, if I had the time, if I could find a place to pry at, if I could find something to pry with.

If I did manage to escape, would I be able to pilot the manta out of its hangar in the dirigible? Maybe. I had no experience with lighter than air vehicles, though, and it would be a bad time to learn, especially if they decided that they wanted to shoot at me. And then I would be—where? A thousand miles from anywhere. Fifty million miles from anywhere I knew.

I was still mulling this over when Esteban and Esteban returned.

“Strap in,” Esteban Jaramillo told me. “Looks like we’re taking you home.”

* * * *

The trip back was more complicated than the trip out. It involved two or more transfers from vehicle to vehicle, during some of which I was again “requested” to wear the opaque goggles.

We were alone in the embarking station of some sort of public transportation. For a moment, the two Estebans had allowed me to leave the goggles transparent. Wherever we were, it was unadorned, drab compared to the florid excess of Hypatia, where even the bus stations—did they have bus stations?—would have been covered with flourishes and artwork.

Jaramillo turned to me and, for the first time, pulled off his goggles so he could look me directly in the eye. His eyes were dark, almost black, and very serious,

“Look,” he said, “I know you don’t have any reason to like us. We’ve got our reasons, you have to believe that. We’re desperate. We know that his father had some secret projects going. We don’t know what they were, but we know he didn’t have any use for the free cities. We think the young Gruenbaum has something planned. If you can get through to Carlos Fernando, we want to talk to him.”

“If you get him,” Esteban Francisco said, “Push him out a window. We’ll catch him. Easy.” He was grinning with a broad smile, showing all his teeth, as if to say he wasn’t serious, but I wasn’t at all sure he was joking.

“We don’t want to kill him. We just want to talk,” Esteban Jaramillo said. “Call us. Please. Call us.”

And with that, he reached up and put his goggles back on. Then Francisco reached over and tapped my goggles into opacity, and everything was dark. With one on either side of me, we boarded the transport—bus? Zeppelin? Rocket?

Finally I was led into a chamber and was told to wait for two full minutes before removing the goggles, and after that I was free to do as I liked.

It was only after the footsteps had disappeared that it occurred to me to wonder how I was supposed to contact them, if I did have a reason to. It was too late to ask, though; I was alone, or seemed to be alone.

Was I being watched to see if I would follow orders, I wondered? Two full minutes. I counted, trying not to rush the count. When I got to a hundred and twenty, I took a deep breath and finger-tapped the goggles to transparency.

When my eyes focused, I saw I was in a large disembarking lounge with genetically engineered pink grass and sculptures of iron and jade. I recognized it. It was the very same lounge at which we had arrived at Venus three days ago—was it only three? Or had another day gone by?

I was back in Hypatia city.

* * * *

Once again I was surrounded and questioned. As with the rest of Carlos Fernando’s domain, the questioning room was lushly decorated with silk-covered chairs and elegant teak carvings, but it was clearly a holding chamber.

The questioning was by four women, Carlos Fernando’s guards, and I had the feeling that they would not hesitate to tear me apart if they thought I was being less than candid with them. I told them what had happened, and at every step they asked questions, making suggestions as to what I could have done differently. Why had I taken my kayak so far away from any of the other fliers and out away from the city? Why had I allowed myself to be captured without fighting? Why didn’t I demand to be returned and refuse to answer any questions? Why could I describe none of the rebels I’d met, except for two men who had—as far as they could tell from my descriptions—no distinctive features?

At the end of their questioning, when I asked to see Carlos Fernando, they told me that this would not be possible.

“You think I allowed myself to be shot down deliberately?” I said, addressing myself to the chief among the guards, a lean woman in scarlet silk.

“We don’t know what to think, Mr. Tinkerman,” she said. “We don’t like to take chances.”

“What now, then?”

“We can arrange transport to the built worlds,” she said. “Or even to the Earth.”

“I don’t plan to leave without Dr. Hamakawa,” I said.

She shrugged. “At the moment, that’s still your option, yes,” she said. “At the moment.”

“How can I get in contact with Dr. Hamakawa?”

She shrugged. “If Dr. Hamakawa wishes, I’m sure she will be able to contact you.”

“And if I want to speak to her?”

She shrugged. “You’re free to go now. If we need to talk to you, we can find you.”

I had been wearing one of the gray jumpsuits of the pirates when I’d been returned to Hypatia; the guard women had taken that away. Now they gave me a suit of spider-silk in a lavender brighter than the garb an expensive courtesan would wear in the built worlds surrounding Earth, more of an evening gown than a suit. It was nevertheless subdued compared to the day-to-day attire of Hypatia citizens, and I attracted no attention. I discovered that the goggle-eyed sunglasses had been neatly placed in a pocket at the knees of the garment. Apparently people on Venus keep their sunglasses at their knees. Convenient when you’re sitting, I supposed. They hadn’t been recognized as a parting gift from the pirates, or, more likely, had been considered so trivial as to not be worth confiscating. I was unreasonably pleased; I liked those glasses.

I found the Singh habitat with no difficulty, and when I arrived, Epiphany and Truman Singh were there to welcome me and to give me the news.

My kidnapping was already old news. More recent news was being discussed everywhere.

Carlos Fernando Delacroix Ortega de la Jolla y Nordwald-Gruenbaum had given a visitor from the outer solar system, Dr. Leah Hamakawa—a person who (they had heard) had actually been born on Earth—a rock.

And she had not handed it back to him.

My head was swimming.

“You’re saying that Carlos Fernando is proposing marriage? To Leah? That doesn’t make any sense. He’s a kid, for Jove’s sake. He’s not old enough.”

Truman and Epiphany Singh looked at one another and smiled. “How old were you when we got married?” Truman asked her. “Twenty?”

“I was almost twenty-one before you accepted my book and my rock,” she said.

“So, in Earth years, what’s that?” he said. “Thirteen?”

“A little over twelve,” she said. “About time I was married up, I’d say.”

“Wait,” I said. “You said you were twelve years old when you got married?”

“Earth years,” she said. “Yes, that’s about right.”

“You married at twelve? And you had—” I suddenly didn’t want to ask, and said, “Do all women on Venus marry so young?”

“There are a lot of independent cities,” Truman said. “Some of them must have different customs, I suppose. But it’s the custom more or less everywhere I know.”

“But that’s—” I started to say, but couldn’t think of how to finish. Sick? Perverted? But then, there were once a lot of cultures on Earth that had child marriages.

“We know the outer reaches have different customs,” Epiphany said. “Other regions do things differently. The way we do it works for us.”

“A man typically marries up at age twenty-one or so,” Truman explained. “Say, twelve, thirteen years old, in Earth years. Maybe eleven. His wife will be about fifty or sixty—she’ll be his instructor, then, as he grows up. What’s that in Earth years—thirty? I know that in old Earth custom, both sides of a marriage are supposed to be the same age, but that’s completely silly, is it not? Who’s going to be the teacher, I should say?

“And then, when he grows up, by the time he reaches sixty or so he’ll marry down, find a girl who’s about twenty or twenty-one, and he’ll serve as a teacher to her, I should say. And, in time, she’ll marry down when she’s sixty, and so on.”

It seemed like a form of ritualized child abuse to me, but I thought it would be better not to say that aloud. Or, I thought, maybe I was reading too much into what he was saying. It was something like the medieval apprentice system. When he said teaching, maybe I was jumping to conclusions to think that he was talking about sex. Maybe they held off on the sex until the child grew up some. I thought I might be happier not knowing.

“A marriage is braided like a rope,” Epiphany said. “Each element holds the next.”

I looked from Truman to Epiphany and back. “You, too?” I asked Truman. “You were married when you were twelve?”

“In Earth years, I was thirteen when I married up Triolet,” he said. “Old. Best thing that ever happened to me. God, I needed somebody like her to straighten me out back then. And I needed somebody to teach me about sex, I should say, although I didn’t know it back then.”

“And Triolet—”

“Oh, yes, and her husband before her, and before that. Our marriage goes back a hundred and ninety years, to when Raj Singh founded our family; we’re a long braid, I should say.”

I could picture it now. Every male in the braid would have two wives, one twenty years older, one twenty years younger. And every female would have an older and a younger husband. The whole assembly would indeed be something you could think of as a braid, alternating down generations. The interpersonal dynamics must be terribly complicated. And then I suddenly remembered why we were having this discussion. “My god,” I said. “You’re serious about this. So you’re saying that Carlos Fernando isn’t just playing a game. He actually plans to marry Leah.”

“Of course,” Epiphany said. “It’s a surprise, but then, I’m not at all surprised. It’s obviously what His Excellency was planning right from the beginning. He’s a devious one, he is.”

“He wants to have sex with her.”

She looked surprised. “Well, yes, of course. Wouldn’t you? If you were twenty—I mean, twelve years old? Sure you’re interested in sex. Weren’t you? It’s about time His Excellency had a teacher.” She paused a moment. “I wonder if she’s any good? Earth people—she probably never had a good teacher of her own.”

That was a subject I didn’t want to pick up on. Our little fling on Mars seemed a long way away, and my whole body ached just thinking of it.

“Sex, it’s all that young kids think of,” Truman cut in. “Sure. But for all that, I should say that sex is the least important part of a braid. A braid is a business, Mr. Tinkerman, you should know that. His Excellency Carlos Fernando is required to marry up into a good braid. The tradition, and the explicit terms of the inheritance, are both very clear. There are only about five braids on Venus that meet the standards of the trust, and he’s too closely related to half of them to be able to marry in. Everybody has been assuming he would marry the wife of the Telios Delacroix braid; she’s old enough to marry down now, and she’s not related to him closely enough to matter. His proposition to Dr. Hamakawa—yes, that has everybody talking.”

I was willing to grasp at any chance. “You mean his marriage needs to be approved? He can’t just marry anybody he likes?”

Truman Singh shook his head. “Of course he can’t! I just told you. This is business as well as propagating the genes for the next thousand years. Most certainly he can’t marry just anybody.”

“But I think he just outmaneuvered them all,” Epiphany added. “They thought they had him boxed in, didn’t they? But they never thought that he’d go find an outworlder.”

“They?” I said. “Who’s they?”

“They never thought to guard against that,” Epiphany continued.

“But he can’t marry her, right?” I said. “For sure, she’s not of the right family. She’s not of any family. She’s an orphan, she told me that. The institute is her only family.”

Truman shook his head. “I think Epiphany’s right,” he said. “He just may have outfoxed them, I should say. If she’s not of a family, doesn’t have the dozens or hundreds of braided connections that everybody here must have, that means they can’t find anything against her.”

“Her scientific credentials—I bet they won’t be able to find a flaw there.” Epiphany said. “And an orphan? That’s brilliant. Just brilliant. No family ties at all. I bet he knew that. He worked hard to find just the right candidate, you can bet.” She shook her head, smiling. “And we all thought he’d be another layabout, like his father.”

“This is awful,” I said. “I’ve got to do something.”

“You? You’re far too old for Dr. Hamakawa.” Epiphany looked at me appraisingly. “A good looking man, though—if I were ten, fifteen years younger, I’d give you another look. I have cousins with girls the right age. You’re not married, you say?”

* * * *

Outside the Singh quarters in Sector Carbon, the Sun was breaking the horizon as the city blew into the daylit hemisphere.

I hadn’t been sure whether Epiphany’s offer to find me a young girl had been genuine, but it was not what I needed, and I’d refused as politely as I could manage.

I had gone outside to think, or as close to “outside” as the floating city allowed, where all the breathable gas was inside the myriad bubbles. But what could I do? If it was a technical problem, I would be able to solve it, but this was a human problem, and that had always been my weakness.

From where I stood, I could walk to the edge of the world, the transparent gas envelope that held the breathable air in and kept the carbon dioxide of the Venus atmosphere out. The Sun was surrounded by a gauzy haze of thin high cloud, and encircled by a luminous golden halo, with mock suns flying in formation to the left and the right. The morning sunlight slanted across the cloud tops. My eyes hurt from the direct sun. I remembered the sun goggles in my knee pocket and pulled them out. I pressed them onto my eyes and tapped on the right side until the world was comfortably dim.

Floating in the air, in capital letters barely darker than the background, were the words LINK: READY.

I turned my head, and the words shifted with my field of view, changing from dark letters to light depending on the background.

A communications link was open? Certainly not a satellite relay; the glasses couldn’t have enough power to punch through to orbit. Did it mean the manta was hovering in the clouds below?

“Hello, hello,” I said, talking to the air. “Testing. Testing?”

Nothing.

Perhaps it wasn’t audio. I tapped the right lens: dimmer, dimmer, dark; then back to full transparency. Maybe the other side? I tried tapping the left eye of the goggle, and a cursor appeared in my field of view.

With a little experimentation, I found that tapping allowed input in the form of Gandy-encoded text. It seemed to be a low bit-rate text only; the link power must be minuscule. But Gandy was a standard encoding, and I tapped out “CQ CQ.”

Seek you, seek you.

The LINK: READY message changed to a light green, and in a moment the words changed to HERE.

WHO, I tapped.

MANTA 7, was the reply. NEWS?

CF PROPOSED LH, I tapped. !

KNOWN, came the reply. MORE?

NO

OK. SIGNING OUT.

The LINK: READY message returned.

A com link, if I needed one. But I couldn’t see how it helped me any.

I returned to examining the gas envelope. Where I stood was an enormous transparent pane, a square perhaps ten meters on an edge. I was standing near the bottom of the pane, where it abutted to the adjacent sheet with a joint of very thin carbon. I pressed on it and felt it flex slightly. It couldn’t be more than a millimeter thick; it would make sense to make the envelope no heavier than necessary. I tapped it with the heel of my hand and could feel it vibrate; a resonant frequency of a few Hertz, I estimated. The engineering weak point would be the joint between panels: if the pane flexed enough, it would pop out from its mounting at the join.

Satisfied that I had solved at least one technical conundrum, I began to contemplate what Epiphany had said. Carlos Fernando was to have married the wife of the Telios Delacroix braid. Whoever she was, she might be relieved at discovering Carlos Fernando making other plans; she could well think the arranged marriage as much a trap as he apparently did. But still. Who was she, and what did she think of Carlos Fernando’s new plan?

The guards had made it clear that I was not to communicate with Carlos Fernando or Leah, but I had no instructions forbidding access to Braid Telios Delacroix.

The household seemed to be a carefully orchestrated chaos of children and adults of all ages, but now that I understood the Venus societal system a little, it made more sense. The wife of Telios Delacroix—once the wife-apparent of His Excellency Carlos Fernando—turned out to be a woman only a few years older than I was, with closely cropped gray hair. I realized I’d seen her before. At the banquet, she had been the woman sitting next to Carlos Fernando. She introduced herself as Miranda Telios Delacroix and introduced me to her up-husband, a stocky man perhaps sixty years old.

“We could use a young husband in this family,” he told me. “Getting old, we are, and you can’t count on children—they just go off and get married themselves.”

There were two girls there, who Miranda Delacroix introduced as their two children. They were quiet, attempting to disappear into the background, smiling brightly but with their heads bowed, looking up at me through lowered eyelashes when they were brought out to be introduced. After the adults’ attention had turned away from them, I noticed both surreptitiously studying me. A day ago I wouldn’t even have noticed.

“Now, either come and sit nicely and talk, or else go do your chores,” Miranda told them. “I’m sure the outworlder is quite bored with your buzzing in and out.”

They both giggled and shook their heads and then disappeared into another room, although from time to time one or the other head would silently pop out to look at me, disappearing instantly if I turned to look.

We sat down at a low table that seemed to be made of oak. Miranda’s husband brought in some coffee and then left us alone. The coffee was made in the Thai style, in a clear cup, in layers with thick sweet milk.

“So you are Dr. Hamakawa’s friend,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Do you mind my asking, what exactly is your relationship with Dr. Hamakawa?”

“I would like to see her,” I said.

She frowned. “So?”

“And I can’t.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“He has these woman, these bodyguards—”

Miranda Delacroix laughed. “Ah, I see! Oh, my little Carli is just too precious for words. I can’t believe he’s jealous. I do think that this time he’s really infatuated.” She tapped on the tabletop with her fingers for a moment, and I realized that the oak tabletop was another one of the embedded computer systems. “Goodness, Carli is not yet the owner of everything, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t see whoever you like. I’ve sent a message to Dr. Hamakawa that you would like to see her.”

“Thank you.”

She waved her hand.

It occurred to me that Carlos Fernando was about the same age as her daughters, perhaps even a classmate of theirs. She must have known him since he was a baby. It did seem a little unfair to him—if they were married, she would have all the advantage, and for a moment I understood his dilemma. Then something she had said struck me.

“‘He’s not yet owner of everything,’ ” I repeated. “I don’t understand your customs, Mrs. Delacroix. Please enlighten me. What do you mean, yet?”

“Well, you know that he doesn’t come into his majority until he’s married,” she said.

The picture was beginning to make sense. Carlos Fernando desperately wanted to control things, I thought. And he needed to be married to do it. “And once he’s married?”

“Then he comes into his inheritance, of course,” she said. “But since he’ll be married, the braid will be in control of the fortune. You wouldn’t want a twenty-one-year-old kid in charge of the entire Nordwald-Gruenbaum holdings. That would be ruinous. The first Nordwald knew that. That’s why he married his son into the la Jolla braid. That’s the way it’s always been done.”

“I see,” I said. If Miranda Delacroix married Carlos Fernando, she—not he—would control the Nordwald-Gruenbaum fortune. She had the years of experience, she knew the politics, how the system worked. He would be the child in the relationship. He would always be the child in the relationship.

Miranda Delacroix had every reason to want to make sure Leah Hamakawa didn’t marry Carlos Fernando. She was my natural ally.

And also, she—and her husband—had every reason to want to kill Leah Hamakawa.

Suddenly the guards that followed Carlos Fernando seemed somewhat less of an affectation. Just how good were the bodyguards? And then I had another thought. Had she or her husband hired the pirates to shoot down my kayak? The pirates clearly had been after Leah, not me. They had known that Leah was flying a kayak; somebody must have been feeding them information. If it hadn’t been her, then who?

I looked at her with new suspicions. She was looking back at me with a steady gaze. “Of course, if your Dr. Leah Hamakawa intends to accept the proposal, the two of them will be starting a new braid. She would nominally be the senior, of course, but I wonder—”

“But would she be allowed to?” I interrupted. “If she decided to marry Carlos Fernando, wouldn’t somebody stop her?”

She laughed. “No, I’m afraid that little Carli made his plan well. He’s the child of a Gruenbaum, all right. There are no legal grounds for the families to object; she may be an outworlder, but he’s made an end run around all the possible objections.”

“And you?”

“Do you think I have choices? If he decides to ask me for advice, I’ll tell him it’s not a good idea. But I’m halfway tempted to just see what he does.”

And give up her chance to be the richest woman in the known universe? I had my doubts.

“Do you think you can talk her out of it?” she said. “Do you think you have something to offer her? As I understand it, you don’t own anything. You’re hired help, a gypsy of the solar system. Is there a single thing that Carli is offering her that you can match?”

“Companionship,” I said. It sounded feeble, even to me.

“Companionship?” she echoed, sarcastically. “Is that all? I would have thought most outworlder men would promise love. You are honest, at least, I’ll give you that.”

“Yes, love,” I said, miserable. “I’d offer her love.”

“Love,” she said. “Well, how about that. Yes, that’s what outworlders marry for; I’ve read about it. You don’t seem to know, do you? This isn’t about love. It’s not even about sex, although there will be plenty of that, I can assure you, more than enough to turn my little Carlos inside out and make him think he’s learning something about love.

“This is about business, Mr. Tinkerman. You don’t seem to have noticed that. Not love, not sex, not family. It’s business.”

* * * *

Miranda Telios Delacroix’s message had gotten through to Leah, and she called me up to her quarters. The woman guards did not seem happy about this, but they had apparently been instructed to obey her direct orders, and two red-clad guardswomen led me to her rooms.

“What happened to you? What happened to your face?” she said, when she saw me.

I reached up and touched my face. It didn’t hurt, but the acid burns had left behind red splotches and patches of peeling skin. I filled her in on the wreck of the kayak and the rescue, or kidnapping, by pirates. And then I told her about Carlos. “Take another look at that book he gave you. I don’t know where he got it, and I don’t want to guess what it cost, but I’ll say it’s a sure bet it’s no facsimile.”

“Yes, of course.” she said. “He did tell me, eventually.”

“Don’t you know it’s a proposition?”

“Yes; the egg, the book, and the rock,” she said. “Very traditional here. I know you like to think I have my head in the air all the time, but I do pay some attention to what’s going on around me. Carli is a sweet kid.”

“He’s serious, Leah. You can’t ignore him.”

She waved me off. “I can make my own decisions, but thanks for the warnings.”

“It’s worse than that,” I told her. “Have you met Miranda Telios Delacroix?”

“Of course,” she said.

“I think she’s trying to kill you.” I told her about my suspicion that the pirates had been hired to shoot me down, thinking I was her.

“I believe you may be reading too much into things, Tinkerman,” she said. “Carli told me about the pirates. They’re a small group, disaffected; they bother shipping and such, from time to time, but he says that they’re nothing to worry about. When he gets his inheritance, he says he will take care of them.”

“Take care of them? How?”

She shrugged. “He didn’t say.”

But that was exactly what the pirates—rebels—had told me: that Carlos had a plan, and they didn’t know what it was. “So he has some plans he isn’t telling,” I said.

“He’s been asking me about terraforming,” Leah said. “But it doesn’t make sense to do that on Venus. I don’t understand what he’s thinking. He could split the carbon dioxide atmosphere into oxygen and carbon; I know he has the technology to do that.”

“He does?”

“Yes, I think you were there when he mentioned it. The molecular still. It’s solar-powered micromachines. But what would be the point?”

“So he’s serious?”

“Seriously thinking about it, anyway. But it doesn’t make any sense. Nearly pure oxygen at the surface, at sixty or seventy bars? That atmosphere would be even more deadly than the carbon dioxide. And it wouldn’t even solve the greenhouse effect; with that thick an atmosphere, even oxygen is a greenhouse gas.”

“You explained that to him?”

“He already knew it. And the floating cities wouldn’t float any more. They rely on the gas inside—breathing air—being lighter than the Venusian air. Turn the Venus carbon dioxide to pure O2, the cities fall out of the sky.”

“But?”

“But he didn’t seem to care.”

“So terraforming would make Venus uninhabitable and he knows it. So what’s he planning?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I do,” I said. “And I think we’d better see your friend Carlos Fernando.”

* * * *

Carlos Fernando was in his playroom.

The room was immense. His family’s quarters were built on the edge of the upcity, right against the bubble-wall, and one whole side of his playroom looked out across the cloudscape. The room was littered with stuff: sets of interlocking toy blocks with electronic modules inside that could be put together into elaborate buildings; models of spacecraft and various lighter-than-air aircraft, no doubt vehicles used on Venus; a contraption of transparent vessels connected by tubes that seemed to be a half-completed science project; a unicycle that sat in a corner, silently balancing on its gyros. Between the toys were pieces of light, transparent furniture. I picked up a chair, and it was no heavier than a feather, barely there at all. I knew what it was now, diamond fibers that had been engineered into a foamed, fractal structure. Diamond was their chief working material; it was something that they could make directly out of the carbon dioxide atmosphere, with no imported raw materials. They were experts in diamond, and it frightened me.

When the guards brought us to the playroom, Carlos Fernando was at the end of the room farthest from the enormous window, his back to the window and to us. He’d known we were coming, of course, but when the guards announced our arrival he didn’t turn around, but called behind him, “It’s okay—I’ll be with them in a second.”

The two guards left us.

He was gyrating and waving his hands in front of a large screen. On the screen, colorful spaceships flew in three-dimensional projection through the complicated maze of a city that had apparently been designed by Escher, with towers connected by bridges and buttresses. The viewpoint swooped around, chasing some of the spaceships, hiding from others. From time to time bursts of red dots shot forward, blowing the ships out of the sky with colorful explosions as Carlos Fernando shouted “Gotcha!” and “In your eye, dog!”

He was dancing with his whole body; apparently the game had some kind of full-body input. As far as I could tell, he seemed to have forgotten entirely that we were there.

I looked around.

Sitting on a padded platform no more than two meters from where we had entered, a lion looked back at me with golden eyes. He was bigger than I was. Next to him, with her head resting on her paws, lay a lioness, and she was watching me as well, her eyes half open. Her tail twitched once, twice. The lion’s mane was so huge that it must have been shampooed and blow-dried.

He opened his mouth and yawned, then rolled onto his side, still watching me.

“They’re harmless,” Leah said. “Bad-Boy and Knickers. Pets.”

Knickers—the female, I assumed—stretched over and grabbed the male lion by the neck. Then she put one paw on the back of his head and began to groom his fur with her tongue.

I was beginning to get a feel for just how different Carlos Fernando’s life was from anything I knew.

On the walls closer to where Carlos Fernando was playing his game were several other screens. The one to my left looked like it had a homework problem partially worked out. Calculus, I noted. He was doing a chain-rule differentiation and had left it half-completed where he’d gotten stuck or bored. Next to it was a visualization of the structure of the atmosphere of Venus. Homework? I looked at it more carefully. If it was homework, he was much more interested in atmospheric science than in math; the map was covered with notes and had half a dozen open windows with details. I stepped forward to read it more closely.

The screen went black.

I turned around, and Carlos Fernando was there, a petulant expression on his face. “That’s my stuff,” he said. His voice squeaked on the word “stuff.” “I don’t want you looking at my stuff unless I ask you to, okay?”

He turned to Leah, and his expression changed to something I couldn’t quite read. He wanted to kick me out of his room, I thought, but didn’t want to make Leah angry; he wanted to keep her approval. “What’s he doing here?” he asked her.

She looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

I wish I knew myself, I thought, but I was in it far enough that I had better say something.

I walked over to the enormous window and looked out across the clouds. I could see another city, blue with distance, a toy balloon against the golden horizon.

“The environment of Venus is unique,” I said. “And to think, your ancestor Udo Nordwald put all this together.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I mean, I guess I mean thanks. I’m glad you like our city.”

“All of the cities,” I said. “It’s a staggering accomplishment. The genius it must have taken to envision it all, to put together the first floating city; to think of this planet as a haven, a place where millions can live. Or billions—the skies are nowhere near full. Someday even trillions, maybe.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Really something, I guess.”

“Spectacular.” I turned around and looked him directly in the eye. “So why do you want to destroy it?”

“What?” Leah said.

Carlos Fernando had his mouth open, and started to say something, but then closed his mouth again. He looked down, and then off to his left, and then to the right. He said, “I … I …” but then trailed off.

“I know your plan,” I said. “Your micromachines—they’ll convert the carbon dioxide to oxygen. And when the atmosphere changes, the cities will be grounded. They won’t be lighter than air, won’t be able to float anymore. You know that, don’t you? You want to do it deliberately.”

“He can’t,” Leah said, “it won’t work. The carbon would—” and then she broke off. “Diamond,” she said. “He’s going to turn the excess carbon into diamond.”

I reached over and picked up a piece of furniture, one of the foamed-diamond tables. It weighed almost nothing.

“Nanomachinery,” I said. “The molecular still you mentioned. You know, somebody once said that the problem with Venus isn’t that the surface is too hot. It’s just fine up here where the air’s as thin as Earth’s air. The problem is the surface is just too darn far below sea level.

“But for every ton of atmosphere your molecular machines convert to oxygen, you get a quarter ton of pure carbon. And the atmosphere is a thousand tons per square meter.

I turned to Carlos Fernando, who still hadn’t managed to say anything. His silence was as damning as any confession. “Your machines turn that carbon into diamond fibers and build upward from the surface. You’re going to build a new surface, aren’t you? A completely artificial surface. A platform up to the sweet spot, fifty kilometers above the old rock surface. And the air there will be breathable.”

At last Carlos found his voice. “Yeah,” he said. “Dad came up with the machines, but the idea of using them to build a shell around the whole planet—that idea was mine. It’s all mine. It’s pretty smart, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s smart?”

“You can’t own the sky,” I said, “but you can own the land, can’t you? You will have built the land. And all the cities are going to crash. There won’t be any dissident cities, because there won’t be any cities. You’ll own it all. Everybody will have to come to you.”

“Yeah,” Carlos said. He was smiling now, a big goofy grin. “Sweet, isn’t it?” He must have seen my expression, because he said, “Hey, come on. It’s not like they were contributing. Those dissident cities are full of nothing but malcontents and pirates.”

Leah’s eyes were wide. He turned to her and said, “Hey, why shouldn’t I? Give me one reason. They shouldn’t even be here. It was all my ancestor’s idea, the floating city, and they shoved in. They stole his idea, so now I’m going to shut them down. It’ll be better my way.”

He turned back to me. “Okay, look. You figured out my plan. That’s fine, that’s great, no problem, okay? You’re smarter than I thought you were, I admit it. Now, just, I need you to promise not to tell anybody, okay?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, go away,” he said. He turned back to Leah. “Dr. Hamakawa,” he said. He got down on one knee, and, staring at the ground, said, “I want you to marry me. Please?”

Leah shook her head, but he was staring at the ground and couldn’t see her. “I’m sorry, Carlos,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He was just a kid, in a room surrounded by his toys, trying to talk the adults into seeing things the way he wanted them to. He finally looked up, his eyes filling with tears. “Please,” he said. “I want you to. I’ll give you anything. I’ll give you whatever you want. You can have everything I own, all of it, the whole planet, everything.”

“I’m sorry,” Leah repeated. “I’m sorry.”

He reached out and picked up something off the floor—a model of a spaceship—and looked at it, pretending to be suddenly interested in it. Then he put it carefully down on a table, picked up another one, and stood up, not looking at us. He sniffled and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand—apparently forgetting he had the ship model in it—trying to do it casually, as if we wouldn’t have noticed that he had been crying.

“Okay,” he said. “You can’t leave, you know. This guy guessed too much. The plan only works if it’s secret, so that the malcontents don’t know it’s coming, don’t prepare for it. You have to stay here. I’ll keep you here, I’ll—I don’t know. Something.”

“No,” I said. “It’s dangerous for Leah here. Miranda already tried to hire pirates to shoot her down once, when she was out in the sky kayak. We have to leave.”

Carlos looked up at me, and with sudden sarcasm said, “Miranda? You’re joking. That was me who tipped off the pirates. Me. I thought they’d take you away and keep you. I wish they had.”

And then he turned back to Leah. “Please? You’ll be the richest person on Venus. You’ll be the richest person in the solar system. I’ll give it all to you. You’ll be able to do anything you want.”

“I’m sorry,” Leah repeated. “It’s a great offer. But no.”

At the other end of the room, Carlos’ bodyguards were quietly entering. He apparently had some way to summon them silently. The room was filling with them, and their guns were drawn, but not yet pointed.

I backed toward the window, and Leah came with me.

The city had rotated a little, and sunlight was now slanting in through the window. I put my sun goggles on.

“Do you trust me?” I said quietly.

“Of course,” Leah said. “I always have.”

“Come here.”

LINK: READY blinked in the corner of my field of view.

I reached up, casually, and tapped on the side of the left lens. CQ MANTA, I tapped. CQ.

I put my other hand behind me and, hoping I could disguise what I was doing as long as I could, I pushed on the pane, feeling it flex out.

HERE, was the reply.

Push. Push. It was a matter of rhythm. When I found the resonant frequency of the pane, it felt right, it built up, like oscillating a rocking chair, like sex.

I reached out my left hand to hold Leah’s hand, and pumped harder on the glass with my right. I was putting my weight into it now, and the panel was bowing visibly with my motion. The window was starting to make a noise, an infrasonic thrum too deep to hear, but you could feel it. On each swing, the pane of the window bowed further outward.

“What are you doing?” Carlos shouted. “Are you crazy?”

The bottom bowed out, and the edge of the pane separated from its frame.

There was a smell of acid and sulfur. The bodyguards ran toward us, but—as I’d hoped—they were hesitant to use their guns, worried that the damaged panel might blow completely out.

The window screeched and jerked, but held, fixed in place by the other joints. The way it was stuck in place left a narrow vertical slit between the window and its frame. I pulled Leah close to me and shoved myself backward, against the glass, sliding along against the bowed pane, pushing it outward to widen the opening as much as I could.

As I fell, I kissed her lightly on the edge of the neck.

She could have broken my grip, could have torn herself free.

But she didn’t.

“Hold your breath and squeeze your eyes shut,” I whispered, as we fell through the opening and into the void, and then with my last breath of air, I said, “I love you.”

She said nothing in return. She was always practical, and knew enough not to try to talk when her next breath would be acid. “I love you too,” I imagined her saying.

With my free hand, I tapped, MANTA

NEED PICK-UP. FAST.

And we fell.

* * * *

“It wasn’t about sex at all,” I said. “That’s what I failed to understand.” We were in the manta, covered with slime, but basically unhurt. The pirates had accomplished their miracle, snatched us out of mid-air. We had information they needed, and in exchange they would give us a ride off the planet, back where we belonged, back to the cool and the dark and the emptiness between planets. “It was all about finance. Keeping control of assets.”

“Sure it’s about sex,” Leah said. “Don’t fool yourself. We’re humans. It’s always about sex. Always. You think that’s not a temptation? Molding a kid into just exactly what you want? Of course it’s sex. Sex and control. Money? That’s just the excuse they tell themselves.”

“But you weren’t tempted,” I said.

She looked at me long and hard. “Of course I was.” She sighed, and her expression was once again distant, unreadable. “More than you’ll ever know.”

Copyright (c) 2010 Geoffrey A. Landis

[Back to Table of Contents]

Department: ON BOOKS by Paul Di Filippo

Art a la Carte

From the moment you pick up the new Collins Design edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (hardcover, $16.99, 160 pages, ISBN 978-0-06-188657-7), you realize you are holding a high-quality thing of beauty. The sheer heft of this compact book is greater than you expect, betokening its lush, heavy paper stock. And the wraparound art on the embossed dust jacket is eye-popping and freshly revelatory of the true weirdness of this classic. Not an easy accomplishment, given the famous Tenniel Barrier of Excellence and the innumerable folks who have had a whack at illustrating Alice’s exploits since Tenniel threw down his gauntlet.

Giving Lewis Carroll his standard props for the eternally interesting text, we have to focus on two creators to explain the allure of this edition. Agnieszka Stachowicz designed the book, carefully interpolating the spot illustrations, placing clever little chapter icons at the tops of pages, chosing where to fit in the full-page and double-page spreads, and fashioning great endpapers. Kudos indeed!

But the bulk of the praise for this volume must go to Camille Rose Garcia, who interprets Carroll’s story with verve, wit, ingenuity, and her own distinctive voice. Garcia’s art is fey and decadent without being cloying. The publicity material calls it “Goth,” but I’d say “Beardsley-esque.” Her ethereal, humorous style will remind you of the work of Dame Darcy and Melinda Gebbie, Ronald Searle and Tim Burton. (This edition, of course, coincides with the Burton film.) It’s a beautiful fit with the well-known Victorian erotic/horrific/surreal/playful story.

Garcia unfailingly chooses the best moments of the plot to illustrate, given that she can’t do everything. Her depiction of the Tea Party is both lugubrious and comical, static and action-packed. She has such a fix on the essential qualities of Alice and all the subsidiary characters, bringing out their personalities in dramatic fashion. Moreover, her color palette is at once candy-sweet and acid-bright.

Sometime in the future, critics might very well be calibrating their assessment of Alice art by the Garcia Standard.

* * * *

To rest one’s eager eyes upon a painting by Frank R. Paul (1884-1963) is a form of instant time travel. Seldom does a single artist come to stand for an entire era so succinctly and dramatically as Paul does for the 1920s and 1930s: specifically, the birth, youth, and beginning maturation of science fiction. Inextricably linked with the debut of genre SF, thanks to his hand-in-glove partnership with Hugo Gernsback, Paul and his work at first evoke a campy, nostalgic emotion for yesterday’s tomorrows. That is, if you limit yourself to a simpleminded, dismissive glance. But if you get beyond the cursory surface of his work, really place yourself in the edenically naive mindset of one of his contemporary fans and study his techniques and passionate approach to his subject matter, you will gain new respect for, and appreciation of, the man once deemed the dean of all SF illustrators.

Surely no book will aid you in this education more than the recent From the Pen of Paul (Shasta-Phoenix, hardcover, $39.95, 128 pages, ISBN 978-0-9800931-1-7). Lovingly assembled by Stephen D. Korshak, with informative essays by the editor, Jerry Weist, Forry Ackerman, and Sam Moskowitz, this volume replicates in sterling color a large percentage of Paul’s 200 covers and 1000 interior illos. And the gloriously unfamiliar ones outweigh those overly sampled ones from past surveys.

To study the paintings in toto is to catalog the entirety of SF illustration, all the tropes, symbology, and subject matter still gracing covers today. Aliens and robots, Big Dumb Objects and futuristic tech, heroes and heroines, astronomical vistas and exo-landscapes—Paul was there first, and crystallized much of what we accept today as standard book-cover design and content. Granted, his human figures were a bit stiff and clumsy—is this where satirist Bruce McCall ultimately derives his own style?—but his compositions are always full of frontier energy and glee. Paul always makes you want to read the story that goes with his art.

For fifty dollars per painting—roughly six hundred dollars in today’s money, by my calculations—Paul lavished his skills on the nascent field that today earns some folks millions of dollars. You need to have this book: both to honor that dedication, and for your own pleasure.

* * * *

Ordinary Miracles

Here’s what I think is a useful thought experiment to perform in connection with Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing (Small Beer Press, trade paper, $16.00, 296 pages, ISBN 978-1-931520-61-4). Imagine that you reprinted the entire contents selected by editors Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak, but without any identifying matter as to its origins, and then wrapped it inside covers labeled Eclipse 3, or TheSolaris Book of New Fantasy, or the January/February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or even The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories for 2010. Then you gave this camouflaged book to any literate yet unsuspecting reader. Would the nominated reader, after carefully perusing X number of stories, look up and say, “Wait one darn minute! These hybrid stories are too odd for their genre label! I’m really reading interstitial fiction! Not pure fantasy or pure SF or pure mimetic fiction, as advertised!”

I don’t think they would. Because aside from the lowest-common-denominator, utterly cliche-heavy hack stories in each genre, at the top of the scale of good fiction, there is simply no more purity left.

Every story nowadays—or the majority, anyhow—above a certain level of ambition is now by default “interstitial.” It’s just a simple reflection of our churned-up postmodern condition. In other words, the battle is over, and chimerical weirdness won. So you are no longer surprised to see Graham Joyce or Junot Diaz (actual winners from 2009) in an O. Henry Award collection.

So, where does that leave interstitial fiction, and this volume? “Merely” as a splendid assortment of excellent stories with an outmoded, extraneous critical apparatus surrounding it. (Although the lucid postscripted conversation among the editors and interviewer Colleen Mondor almost convinces me of the utility of the label.)

Some standouts:

Jeffrey Ford turns two actual dreams from his daily life into a meditation on religion (“The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper”). Will Ludwigsen postulates a sentient house that goes a-traveling (“Rembrance Is Something Like a House”). Ray Vukcevich gives us a young man with a woman growing out of his shoulder (“The Two of Me”). Brian Francis Slattery chronicles the intersection of First World sybarism and Third World social justice politics (“Interviews After the Revolution”). And Theodora Goss spins out a strange homage/pastiche of Burroughs’s Mars tales (“Child-Empress of Mars”). Throughout, formalistic experimentation alternates with old-school narration, and every trope is deliberately refurbished and thoughtfully showcased for maximum effect. A winning anthology, whatever its wrapper.

One final thought experiment. The interstices explored in this volume are exclusively those between literary fiction and SF/Fantasy. Where are the stories that lie in the uncanny valleys between, say, the espionage and nurse genres, the western and the paranormal romance?

* * * *

Put Some Pepper On It

I originally took notice of the nameGeraldine McCaughrean in 2006, when some significant publicity surrounded her writing of the first authorized sequel to Peter Pan, Peter Pan in Scarlet. I bought the book, but you know of course that I have not yet read it, no more than I have read the majority of the several thousand other books I have impulsively purchased.

So when McCaughrean’s latest book, The Death-Defying Pepper Roux (Harper, hardcover, $16.99, 328 pages, ISBN 978-0-06-183665-7), wafted over my transom, courtesy of a generous publicist, I resolved to remedy that earlier sin of omission. And am I glad I did! This novel, ostensibly a YA for the “10-and-up” crowd, is deep, fun, engaging, gorgeously written, un-preachy, un-condescending, subversive, and a simple joy to read. If you can conceive of a humor-laden, adventure-stuffed cross between Mark Helprin’s Refiner’s Fire (1977) and John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) slanted for adolescents, you might get a notion of the novel. Or, to put it more simply, take the wacky work of Walter Moers and subtract the overtly supernatural.

Our locale is France, sometime (it seems from context) at the interface of nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Automobiles exist, but so do old-fashioned commercial sailing ships.) Our hero is Paul “Pepper” Roux. Nerve-wracked, eccentric, superstitious Paul has had the misfortune of laboring under a curse since birth. The curse relates to a prediction of his premature death at age fourteen, and was delivered by his live-in Aunt Mireille, who had the pronouncement of doom personally from the apparition of Saint Constance. Naturally, as the day of Pepper’s fourteenth birthday dawns, he wakens and continues somewhat anxious. His anxiety finds relief in spontaneously running away from home. He ends up aboard a merchant ship sailing that day—not as stowaway or cabin boy, but as Captain! How that happens, you must see for yourself. Suffice it to repeat McCaughrean’s cynical refrain: “Well, people see what they expect. Don’t they? Or do they see what they choose?”

Pepper’s outrageous adventures subsequent to his Captain’s stint, as he continually imagines the Lord’s Angels of Death pursuing him, begin to assume the dimensions of Chauncey Gardineer’s in Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There (1971). He is a malleable blank upon which the adult world impresses its desires and preconceptions. The irony and satire is palpable without being heavy-handed.

Pepper is hardly your ordinary hero, YA or otherwise: a bit of a nervous nelly and neurotic. But his strong powers of imagination, his good-heartedness, his sheer desire to outfox the curse of dying young, to live, and his willingness to turn his hand to any trade, make him ultimately endearing and emblematic.

McCaughrean’s chromatically vivid prose is worthy of being rolled around on your palate, of being savored. Try this: “In the trees—in every tree—the rooks were stirring, rising into the sky, but sinking back again onto their roosts. It was still too early for them to venture out onto the flat fields. So the sunny, clumping crowns of the elms swarmed with blackness, like heads teeming with lice.” Or this: “Roche had mopped up death like a lump of bread mopping a greasy plate.”

Always surprising and touching, Pepper’s bildungsroman odyssey, while eschewing the fantastical, assumes the proportions of legend, as entertaining as some fable of Parsifal or the Brave Little Tailor.

* * * *

Picto-novelties

The fine folks at First Second Books continue to put out an amazing array of non-super hero graphic novels (admit it: don’t you get a little tired now and then of the cape-and-cowl crowd?), calculated to appeal to all ages of reader. Here’s the rundown on three recent titles.

Richard Sala’s art manages to be simultaneously light-hearted and grim, whimsical and gruesome, sexy yet clinical, juvenile yet adult. I’m not quite sure how he achieves this unique combination, but I find it enchanting. And his story-telling abilities are top-notch as well, always delivering narratives that are twisty and engrossing, full of unexpected detours and denouements. Cat Burglar Black (trade paper, $16.99, 126 pages, ISBN 978-1-59643-144-7) is no exception.

Our protagonist is teenager Katherine “K.” Westree, an orphan sent to live with her aunt at a mysterious boarding school. K. has previously been in the clutches of a female Fagin who raised her up as an unwilling criminal. Having been rescued by the authorities, she seeks to put all that sordid past behind her. But when she meets the headmistress of the school, a certain Mrs. Turtledove, she finds herself plunged once more into a nighttime life of sneaking and robbery, also learning that she is heir to an ancient conspiracy. Along with three other girls, K. is dispatched to retrieve some ancient paintings that will lead to a longlost pirate treasure. Needless to say, all does not go well.

Sala’s depiction of the girls—both visually and verbally—rings vibrant and authentic. Their athleticism and grace are beautifully limned, and their talk among themselves is pure gold. K. receives the most fleshing-out, naturally, and her spunk and bravery is top-notch.

Sala brings this episode to a resonant conclusion—but leaves open enough hooks for a sequel, which I can only hope is imminent.

* * * *

Is it possible to convey with fresh images and text the prelapsarian wonders of ancient Greek mythology, after so many re-tellings of the legends? Artist and scripter George O’Connor thinks so—and with good reason, as exhibited in his Zeus: King of the Gods (trade paper, $9.99, 78 pages, ISBN 978-1-59643-431-8), the first in the Olympians series projected to fill twelve volumes. (We last saw O’Connor’s art, you might recall, in the dystopian Ball Peen Hammer.) Starting with the cosmogonic myths, all stark landscapes, O’Connor introduces gods and titans, humans, and demigods in colorful profusion, as the younger generation vies with their elders for a place in the sun. There’s a whiff of Zelazny about this version—not that the gods speak in slang, or reference technology. But the youthful Zeus with his hip facial hair is more than a little slacker-looking, and his rebellion has some John Hughes attitude about it. But this version manages to conjure up some real grandeur, in a way that should appeal to all fledgling gods and goddesses of the twenty-first century.

* * * *

It is hard to know which to praise more in City of Spies (trade paper, $16.99, 172 pages, ISBN 978-1-59643-262-8): the grand, old-fashioned story crafted by Susan Kim and Laurence Klavan, or the enchanting artwork by Pascal Dizin. Let’s start arbitrarily with the art. Dizin employs the sanctified “clear line” style of Herge and others, but never in shameless pastiche fashion. He has made this methodology all his own, and it’s a powerful tool for conveying the realistic adventure script. The period architecture and clothing and interiors (the tale takes place in 1942) are impeccable, sucking the reader right in. And Dizin’s character designs are sharp and memorable, distinctive and easy on the eye. Page compositions are a geometrical delight as well.

As for K & K’s narrative, they have fashioned a charming and fully human cast, starting with the juvenile leads, Evelyn and Tony, and extending through all the adults and incidental characters. The tale of Nazi spies in New York is full of a Golden-Age Hollywood ambiance, like some lost Hitchcock or Hawks film. Mixing romance, humor, suspense, and pathos, this graphic novel should be handed out to every young reader you know—after you’ve enjoyed it yourself.

* * * *

Good-Luck Tidings

Did I say, when I reviewed Jack Vance’s recent autobiography, that, per his own ukase, there would be no more words flowing from his lapidary pen? Well, I was wrong. Oh, Vance has not recanted on his vow to refrain from writing any more fiction. (Curses!) But he has actually penned some entertaining new afterwords to his beginner’s stories collected in Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance (Subterranean, hardcover, $40.00, 296 pages, ISBN 978-1-59606-301-3). And in combination with these little-seen fictions—all of them as diverting as hell, despite any occasional journeyman infelicities—the afterwords summon up the very face and soul of the Master.

A precis of some of the selections:

We meet Magnus Ridolph in his first appearance in the title story. “The Temple of Han” reminds me of Dunsany’s “Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller.” Vance surely had a twist on Hemingway in mind with “The Masquerade on Dicantropus.” “Abercrombie Station” features decadence galore, and Vance’s trademark spunky, amoral heroine. Two mineral hunters encounter a bizarre alien in “Three-Legged Joe.” In an anomalous-for-Vance story, “DP!,” a subterranean invasion on contemporary Earth ends badly for the intruders. “Shape-Up” is a revenge tale among some hardcase types. And finally, we finish with a remarkably sardonic 1959 story identified by Vance as one of his own favorites, “Dodkin’s Job,” a tale of the little man versus the establishment.

By consenting to this volume of his tyro stories, Vance not only entertains us immensely, but offers valuable insight into how his final polished style grew and perfected itself. We owe him a debt.

And of course, besides thanking Vance himself, we need to offer a tip of the hat to the hard-working editors who assembled this necessary compilation, Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan. Job well done!

Copyright (c) 2010 Paul Di Filippo

[Back to Table of Contents]

Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

PiCon, BuboniCon, and ConText are good bets for Asimovians in the coming month, or DragonCon for a big 3-ring show. Plan now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an explanation of con(vention)s, a sample of SF folksongs, and info on fanzines and clubs, send me a SASE (self-addressed, stamped #10 [business] envelope) at 10 Hill #22-L, Newark NJ 07102. The hot line is (973) 242-5999. If a machine answers (with a list of the week’s cons), leave a message and I’ll call back on my nickel. When writing cons, send a SASE. For free listings, tell me of your con 5 months out. Look for me at cons behind the Filthy Pierre badge, playing a musical keyboard.—Erwin S. Strauss

JULY 2010

30-Aug. 1—PulpFest. For info, write: c/o Jack Cullers, 1272 Cheatham Way, Bellbrook OH 45305. Or phone: (973) 242-5999 (10 am to 10 pm, not collect). (Web) pulpfest.com. (E-mail) jack@pulpfest.com. Con will be held in: Columbus OH (if city omitted, same as in address) at the Ramada Plaza. Guests will include: William F. Nolan. For fans of old pulp magazines.

30-Aug. 1—Otakon. (484) 223-6086. otakon.com. Convention Center, Baltimore MD. Yoshida Bros., hNaoto. Anime.

AUGUST 2010

5-8—ReConStruction. reconstructionsf.org. Raleigh NC. The North American Science Fiction Convention. $110+ at door.

5-8—GenCon. (206) 957-3976. gencon.com. Convention Center, Indianapolis IN. One of the year’s biggest gaming cons.

7-8—Japan National Con. tokon10.net. info-e@tokon10.net. Hunabori (Tokyo) Japan. SF & fantasy; much anime & manga.

12-15—Star Wars Celebration. starwarscelebration.com. Orlando FL. Carrie Fisher, Jay Laga’aia. Lucasfilm sanctioned.

13-15—Philip K. Dick Festival. philipkdickfestival.com. pink-beam@hotmail.com. “In the foothills of the Rockies.”

13-15—SETICon. seticon.com. Santa Clara CA. Astronaut Rusty Schweihart, many others. Search for ET Intelligence.

13-15—AmeCon. amecon.org. registration@amecon.org. Keele University, Leicester UK. Anime, manga, and cosplay.

20-22—PiCon, Box 400, Sunderland MA 01375. pi-con.org. Enfield CT (Springfield/Hartford). Sawyer, Balder, H. Carey.

27-29—BuboniCon, Box 37257, Albuquerque NM 87176. (505) 266-8905. bubonicon.com. Peter David. SF and fantasy.

27-29—ConText, c/o FANACO, Box 163391, Columbus OH 43216. contextsf.org. Buckell, Massie. Written SF & fantasy.

27-29—New Zealand Nat’l. Con, Box 10104, Wellington 6143, NZ. aucontraire.org.nz. Sean Williams, Paul Mannering.

27-29—DiscWorldCon, Box 4101, Shepton Mallet, Somerset BA4 9J, UK. dwcon.org. Hilton Metropole. Terry Pratchett.

SEPTEMBER 2010

2-6—Aussiecon 4, GPO Box 1212, Melbourne VIC 3001, Australia. aussiecon4.org.au. World SF Con. US$225+ at door.

3-6—DragonCon, Box 16459, Atlanta GA 30321. dragoncon.org. “Classic comic books, low-brow pop art, designer toys.”

4—LibrariCon, 855 MacArthur Rd., Fayetteville NC 20311. (910) 822-1998. cumberland.lib.nc.us. Held at HQ library.

4-6—CopperCon, Box 62613, Phoenix AZ 85082. casfs.org. Windemere Hotel, Mesa AZ. S. R. Donaldson, D. L. Summers.

16-20—Thin Air, 620-100 Arthur, Winnipeg MB R3B 1H3. (204) 927-7323. thinairwinnipeg.com. Int’l. writers’ festival.

17-19—Horror Realm, Box 10400, Pittsburgh PA 15234. (412) 215-6317. horrorrealm.com. Crowne Plaza South Hotel.

24—Conference on Middle Earth, Box 428, Latham NY 12110. Thruway House, Albany NY. “Tolkien: His Works, His World.”

24-26—MadCon, Box 2601, Madison WI 53701. madcon2010.com. Harlan Ellison. General SF and fantasy convention.

24-26—Foolscap, Box 2461, Seattle WA 98111. foolscap.org. E. Bull, W. Shetterly, C. & C. Erich. Written SF & fantasy.

OCTOBER 2010

1-3—ConJecture, Box 927388, San Diego CA 92192. 2010.conjecture.org. Town & Country. R. J. Sawyer. SF & fantasy.

1-3—VCon, Box 78069, Vancouver BC V5N 5W1. vcon.ca. Priest, Beveridge. “Steampunk—from Alchemy to Zeppelins.”

7-10—Sirens, Box 149, Sedalia MO 80135. sirensconference.org. Vail CO. Terri Windling. “Women in Fantasy Literature.”

8-10—AlbaCon, Box 2085, Albany NY 12220. albacon.org. Alan Steele, Ron Miller, Lisa Ashton, others. SF and fantasy.

8-10—Motaku, 1746 N. McCoy, Independence MO 64050. (816) 863-0164. motaku.org. Park Place. C. Hodges, H. McNutt. Anime.

15-17—ConVersion, Box 30314, Calgary AB T2H 2W1. con-version.org. General SF and fantasy convention.

15-17—Arcana, Box 8036, Minneapolis MN 55408. (612) 721-5959. arcana.com. St. Paul MN. “The Dark Fantastic.”

AUGUST 2011

17-21—RenoVation, Box 13278, Portland OR 97213. renovationsforg. Reno NV. Asher, Brown, Powers. WorldCon. $160.

Visit www.dellmagazines.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.