SEVERAL ITEMS OF INTEREST

by Rick Wilber

 

 

Rick Wilber’s latest book, Rum Point, is a mystery novel published earlier this year by McFarland. The author’s first story for Asimov’s “With Twoclick’s Watching” (January 1993), explored the human response to Earth’s invasion by the S’hudonni—a group of significantly advanced aliens. Rick has returned to that universe every so often, and he does so again now with a stand-alone novella that takes an uncompromising look at how such an invasion might affect two very different brothers.

 

“The Earth does not argue, is not pathetic, does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise. The Earth has no conceivable failures.”—Walt Whitman

 

Dangerous Comfort

 

I knew from that very first evening at Tommy’s house, though it all took some time to finally happen. We were chatting, Heather and I, making idle conversation— something about The Ten, no doubt—and I could feel myself sliding away. I do not lose myself with women. I do not drift away into imagined passion. I am always in control. But with Heather, oh yes with Heather, I knew the danger and I didn’t care. Seeing her. Listening. Imagining. She looked at me, she smiled, and I was lost.

 

* * * *

 

And so, more than a year later, I sat in dangerous comfort, thinking the news from Earth couldn’t be good or Twoclicks would never have invited me to meet with him during his afternoon soak.

 

I knew that he liked to warm himself like this when he was at home; but in the time I’d been on S’hudon not once had he invited me any farther into his personal quarters than that large front room where he keeps his Earthie artifacts: the baseball bat from the Splendid Splinter, the signed first editions by Yeats and Whitman and Wells, the Booth deringer that fired the shot that killed Abraham Lincoln, the de Koonings and the Rockwells and the two Picassos and the Monet, the top hat from Astaire’s movie of the same name, Django Reinhardt’s guitar and Stephane Grappelli’s violin from the 1939 Hot Club performances in Paris; all of this accumulation and more tossed onto tables or hung haphazardly on walls cheek-by-jowl, disorganized, incomprehensible, like Twoclicks himself.

 

I was part of that accumulation, of course, and knew it; though I hadn’t been hung on a wall just yet, or tossed onto a table. But the threat of that—or something quite like it—hung over me as I sat in the heat of the fumarole as it bubbled and gurgled in his backyard.

 

To get there I was escorted beyond the front room and on through the private dining area, the private living area, the very private bedrooms, and through the antique stonewood door and down the pumice steps and a hundred paces or more through the cold, soft grass and finally into the first and largest of the hot-spring mud baths, where Twoclicks and I sat, up to our necks in the warm goo.

 

The invitation I’d received was in print—Twoclicks fancies the archaic—on a small embossed card delivered by young Treble, his son and my favorite of the several princelings. The note was written in flowing formal S’hudonni script on the top and then in English, smaller, underneath: “Your presence is requested at soak on the morrow at the home of your mentor for a discussion of a matter of some importance regarding a troublesome situation on your home planet.”

 

That sounded pretty damn ominous, and so once I was admitted to his home, directed to the changing room where I slipped out of my clothes, had a large towel wrapped around me, and then walked over to the hot, muddy spring and climbed in, I thought surely he’d get to the point quickly. But Twoclicks, as always, was indirect and in no particular hurry. Instead, he spent the first half-hour talking about various sporting events in the American District on Earth, where his favorite teams all seemed to be doing well. I tried to enjoy the warm muck and the sports talk while I waited for the conversation to get wherever it was really going.

 

The fog is cold and damp on the coast of S’hudon’s southernmost island, and especially so when the wind is from the southwest and has blown over the frigid waters of the Great South Loop current. So the mud bath was a welcome break from the chill and the rain and the general grayness of the winter coast. Twoclicks faced the breeze as he started to talk, giving me the comfort of having my back to the wind. I didn’t know if he was being purposefully polite or not. Then he paused and I was thinking this would be the moment when I’d finally hear the news about trouble back home. Riots? Famines? Floods? Plagues? Bombings? An insurrection? All of the above? But he just grew silent, perhaps the chill taking its toll on him or, more likely, he had just hit a lull, having said all he wanted to about the sports interests of the newly occupied minor planet at the edge of the empire.

 

A long minute or two went by as he stared at me, those round eyes beginning to blink more rapidly until I was sure he finally had something significant to say. Instead of getting on with it, though, he started sliding down into the hot mud, slipping deeper and deeper and slightly backward until, finally, only his mouth and eyes remained visible. He slid the second membrane of the right eye over its pupil and winked with the left eye—that’s not a natural act for the S’hudonni and so he’d done this to impress me—and then, finally, he said something new: “Americanos! Conquerors! Libertad! Masses! For you a program of chants.” Then, to punctuate whatever the hell the point of that was, he slid down again, disappearing entirely, that falsely closed eye the last thing I saw before he went under, where he could stay for an hour if he wanted.

 

The quote was from Whitman. Having seen the sexual proclivities of S’hudon’s ruling classes, I wasn’t surprised to find that Twoclicks had embraced old Walt from among the long readings list I’d offered. Whitman was certainly Twoclicks’ kind of Earthie. But why that particular snippet? It must mean something or he wouldn’t have said it, but I sure as hell wasn’t getting the message. Americanos? Conquerors? Not hardly. Not anymore.

 

I thought about what once had been and what now remained back home, the old United States gone the way of all empires, reduced to an “economic district.” Twoclicks, who’d decided only recently that his title should now be Chancellor of the American District, was in control of most of the old U.S. and Mexico and some of the Caribbean islands. His brother, Whistle, called himself Governor General of the Canadian District, which included old Alaska along with Canada and parts of New England. Other relatives ran other districts and it was all very familial, if not particularly harmonious. The siblings and cousins had their rivalries and their competing districts not only on Earth but on all of The Seven planets that were part of S’hudon’s empire.

 

For parts of conquered humanity, the reality of life under S’hudonni control was not all that different from how it had been before the Arribada. They worked, they played, they made love, they were hired and fired and married and divorced. They had children they loved or were disappointed in, and siblings they admired or loathed. They took vacations. They watched television. They Sweeped and tweeted and logged on and off as Earth continued to spin.

 

For these lucky millions, only the leadership had changed. Plus, S’hudon’s gifts— the power generators and their grids, the medical tools and drugs, the transportation rails, the nanos for the lucky few—had been parceled out bit by bit in return for the locals’ expressions of loyalty to the new order. They were useful gifts, I was sure, in rebuilding a shattered society and getting people back to work and living their lives. Expensive in their own way, but useful, very useful.

 

Others hadn’t been so fortunate. Different districts found different profits, some of them consumed locally on Earth, like the poppies that fed a drug-hungry Europe or the entertainment from Japan that kept a whole world’s minds off its losses. Others exported their goods offworld. The major grain producers—Canada and the U.S., Russia, newly irrigated Australia, parts of China and Brazil—these places grew the luxury crops that made money for the ruling classes back on S’hudon who bought cheap from Earthie labor and sold high around The Seven, where alcohol from Earth was all the rage, the tulips of empire.

 

This meant growing real grain and distilling and brewing real variations on alcohol. Growing a great deal of grain, in fact, some six times the harvest from the time before the Arribada.

 

There has been, in many places, some considerable disruption. Twoclicks felt bad about that, he’d told me again and again, and he seemed sincere. Of course I am far from perfect at judging S’hudonni sincerity. I’d been on the planet a year and I pretty much hadn’t learned a thing. Except for what Heather had taught me. That’s what was on my mind as I waited for Twoclicks to resurface. Heather. As always, it was Heather.

 

* * * *

 

In the Long Run

 

On a typical day in my little Potemkin Village at the edge of the Great Bight I awake with the sunrise, dial up my internal Sweep to get it recording, and then brew some coffee (black, dark) and make some toast, both of these imported from home, as is all my food and drink.

 

After that I go for a long jog along the path they’ve paved for me atop the bluffs that overlook the bight. The pavement runs for three kilometers, eventually dropping down onto the Strand for another kilometer, where I can taste the salt spray and pretend, at least for a few minutes, that I am home.

 

Then I turn and jog home to my faux cottage on my ersatz street in my make- believe village. When the land breeze is blowing out to sea, as it often is, the air is redolent of S’hudon with the rotten-egg smell of sulfur from the inland fumaroles a kilometer or two away and I can hear, in the distance, the sounds of Agitato, the vacation park where the S’hudonni stay when they visit this coast. Along with the sulfur there is a hint of inland marsh in the air, of still water and rotting vegetation and, on a good day, a hint of something nearly cinnamon and, often, the squeals of the S’hudonni children.

 

I am lucky, I suppose, that my enhanced Sweeper can capture the smells along with the sights and sounds of S’hudon. My current audience back home is around two hundred million, mostly in Twoclicks’ district. Since Two has spent a fortune getting me here and constructing an environment for me, it is good to know that my message, and his, has an audience.

 

* * * *

 

The Family Barge

 

Some months ago, Twoclicks invited me to go hunting—for good sport, as he put it—with his son, Treble, his older brother, Whistle, and his younger sister, Octave. They are bitter rivals, those siblings, but on that day they acted as if those rivalries were forgotten. We traveled on the family barge as it slowly wound its way down the main channel toward the sea on a cool, summer day, sliding our way through the water plants that grew ambitiously large during the short growing season.

 

Young Treble and I were on the barge, standing at the side rail and looking out toward the plants as we searched for our prey, a small amphibious creature the size and general shape of a small cat. It reached its juvenile, and tastiest, stage of development only for a week or two each year. Treble whistled and clicked its name and when I asked for a translation he said “bender” would do. Like some animals on Earth, the benders changed gender as needed. At the juvenile stage, they were all females. A few months later when it was time to reproduce, the larger, more aggressive ones became inedibly male.

 

Below us, the three S’hudonni were swimming effortlessly a meter deep, their motion so smooth that you couldn’t see any ripples from their movement. The water was the color of strong tea.

 

The animal sat along the edge of one of those plants, serene, as we glided past it, no more than ten meters away. It ignored us, and then as we looked back to watch there was an upwelling from beneath the water plant and the three S’hudonni emerged simultaneously.

 

The bender never knew what hit it. And then hit it again. And then a third time, Twoclicks and Octave and Whistle each taking turns toying with it for a while before, in unison, they ripped it apart and Twoclicks brought me the still-beating heart so I could take a ritual bite. I’d skinned rabbits in my backwoods youth and Twoclicks had told me he admired that aspect of my childhood. Now I understood why.

 

There was no question about my response: Twoclicks was my sponsor and my behavior was important. I brought the heart to my lips, opened my mouth, took a small bite and then handed the heart back to Twoclicks. My nanos, I guessed, would neutralize whatever toxicity was in that bite.

 

Twoclicks smiled and took his own ritual bite, and then they all passed it around and did the same, including little Treble, who finished it off. Somewhere along the line the heart had stopped beating.

 

How did they know the prey was there, quiet and still on a pad floating atop the warm, muddy water of the slough? Sonar? A sensitive sense of smell? Some sort of infrared sense that can tell a slight heat change through a layer of mud and plant fiber? Some other sense I’m not aware of yet?

 

It could be any or all of those. What I know about the S’hudonni could fill a book—the very book you are reading, in fact, since that’s why Twoclicks brought me here: to Sweep back home to all those simple Earthies about the wonders of mighty S’hudon and then to gather all that material into a book and a stemfeed and a linker and, I suspect, a touring minstrel show.

 

But what you learn in life, if you have half a brain, teaches you as much about what you don’t know as what you do, and while what I found out about the S’hudonni could fill a thick, musty old-school book and all the new forms, too, what I didn’t find out about S’hudon could fill a library. Ten libraries. A hundred. The S’hudonni are, by turns, kind and vicious, brilliant and stupid, physically handsome in their own way even while unspeakably ugly; simple and direct and unfathomably obscure. Their world and their empire are filled with these contrasts, rife with these contradictions. That much, at least, I’d come to understand.

 

* * * *

 

Several Items of Interest About the S’hudonni

 

1) There is a small orifice just at the back of the dorsal fin.

 

2) Placing one of the fragile, small fingers from those delicate hands just at the edge of that small, black hole brings ripples of pleasure.

 

3) The sleek, taut, olive-colored skin across the flanks of the S’hudonni torso changes colors rapidly and constantly when sexually stimulated, waves of bright orange and yellow coursing over that skin.

 

4) A one-fingered caress over the thin black line that runs the length of the torso and separates the upper body from the lower also sparks a colorful stimulation, even when it’s an Earthie—your faithful correspondent—doing the running of the finger.

 

5) The female S’hudonni can shiver with pleasure.

 

6) Assuming Twoclicks and his siblings are typical, the S’hudonni happily embrace sexual activity from any—perhaps all—of their friends and relations who join the party after a hunt is done. The patterns of these embraces struck me as mostly random.

 

7) Human involvement is oddly welcome. I hadn’t realized that this would happen, but then I have a notable history of not knowing when I’m getting involved with strange women.

 

* * * *

 

Storytelling

 

I have spent my life telling stories. My parents were disappointed in this. My mother was in corporate law and hoped I might follow in her capable footsteps and become an attorney. My father was a pediatrician, loved and respected by the families of the hundreds of children he served. The funeral cortege on the day that we buried him in Whispering Oaks was a half-mile long and made the local television news. He had been a community activist, raising funds for his favorite charities, vocal in his backing for the politicians he liked and admired. He and his wife were both good, strong, intelligent, caring people and expected their two sons to be the same.

 

Of course, they had some secrets, did Mom and Dad. At the end, those mattered.

 

But early on, Tommy lived up to our parents’ expectations. The youngest son, he left high school with enough science credits to start in as a sophomore at Vanderbilt; then he sailed right through his undergrad biology degree before turning to research in grad school as the way to find his truths in life. His doctorate, his tenure at Rice and then at the University of Florida, his research successes: these accomplishments won him respect and love from Mom and Dad, and they told him so often.

 

As for me, a bachelor’s in English literature and a minor in history struck Mom and Dad as foolish and indulgent and my later choices in life confirmed their disappointment. I had been a good high school athlete, wasting my time (as Father put it) playing basketball and baseball for the high school teams and getting some ink in the local papers. I could handle the ball and shoot from outside in basketball, and I understood the game. In baseball I played the infield, second or short, and had good hands and a solid arm if not much of a bat. Ultimately this meant I got to play both sports at a good, small college in a suburb of Orlando. It occupied my time. It made me happy. Father and Tommy were busy, always, and rarely saw me play, in high school or college. Mom, bless her heart, was there often.

 

Ultimately injuries ended the fun and I turned to my studies, working my way to a master’s in creative writing by serving as a grad assistant, teaching comp classes, and working for the college paper. I started sending sports profiles to magazines and websites and pretty son some got published.

 

That turned out to be my level and, over time, I became a part-time teacher and a writer of magazine articles. I taught at a perfectly nice little liberal arts college in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I was good at that.

 

It’s hard to get published—trust me, the odds are against you—so I was proud of my career, such as it was. But I wasn’t published in the New Yorker or by Knopf and I wasn’t teaching in the Ivy League. I told myself that it didn’t matter. Later, when I started Sweeping and millions were paying attention, I came at last to admit something different.

 

Smoking

 

My father smoked cigarettes most of his life: Camels, good, strong stuff that he’d started in on while an undergraduate at Princeton. You might be surprised to hear how many smokers there are in the health field: nurses, doctors, EMTs, even some oncologists here and there. Stress, they will explain, is why they smoke. And, of course, their certain knowledge that as medical people they are immune to the diseases of more common men and women.

 

Father found out on his sixtieth birthday that the cough he feared was lung cancer was, indeed, small-cell, stage 3B, revised after the first surgery to stage 4. The radiation, the surgery, the chemo: they were all palliative and he knew it and we knew it.

 

Except for Tommy, the great research scientist, the Great Mind, the Boy Wonder who’d had research published while he was still an undergrad, the man who always Had The Answer.

 

Tommy kept insisting that Father should try one new trial or another, look for that wonder drug, keep up your hope, stay positive, beat this thing. Tommy, I thought, seemed increasingly angry with Dad for accepting the cancer, embracing it, allowing it entry into his life and death. As the weeks went by, Tommy’s calm urgings with Dad turned into strident hectoring about battle and struggles and never giving up.

 

About a year after he got the news, on the last day of his life, my father walked over to me after yet another angry outburst from Tommy and said this to me: “Son, I do wish you’d done more with that fine mind of yours, but at least you’ve always been happy.”

 

Then he shook his head. “Now, your brother, for all his brains and all his publications and all his money and all his awards: that’s about the unhappiest guy I know.”

 

Then he coughed, almost politely, and turned away from me.

 

We were all gathered at Tommy’s house that day to share a Sunday meal and celebrate Tommy’s being shortlisted for the International Prize for Biology. There were some delicious ironies there, since the prize honors Japan’s Emperor Hirohito and while Tommy was on the list for his work in saving the Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, the Japanese were still busy slaughtering whales. I mentioned this to Tommy. He just stared at me, shook his head, and turned away to talk to Mom, who was in the kitchen with him, both of them whispering to each other, I knew, over how disappointed dying dad was that I’d thrown my life away on scribbling when, early on, I’d held such promise. I had, after all, won the countywide science fair in sixth grade.

 

A couple of hours later Mom and I sat in folding chairs on Tommy’s back deck and watched a distant line of storms boil and grow with rumbles of thunder.

 

“How long does Dad have?” I asked her, holding tight to my beer, some unpronounceable Belgian brand that Tommy liked. Me, I stuck with Corona.

 

“A month or two,” she said.

 

“He looks better than that,” I offered. “And he seems happy enough. I thought maybe things were a little better.”

 

A slight shake of her head, a thin smile: “No, they’re not. He accepted it a long time ago, Peter, that’s all. The inevitability of it.” She chuckled a bit. “I caught him in the backyard a couple of days ago smoking one of those Camels. I couldn’t believe it, but he just said it didn’t really matter anymore, so what the hell.”

 

I didn’t say anything, but looked out toward the distant thunderheads as they lit up the evening sky with half-buried lightning, miles away.

 

About an hour later I walked over to Dad to say goodbye. He got up off the couch and wouldn’t let me stop him from standing. I gave him a firm handshake and his grip was just firm enough in return to be a reminder of who he’d been. I looked at him, gave him a quick, clumsy hug and told him I loved him.

 

“Thank you,” he said. He seemed at peace.

 

As I got to my car in the driveway that line of thunderstorms was almost to us, but I beat the worst of the rain home. An half-hour later, just as I was pulling into my driveway, my parents were getting into their car for their longer drive home across the Sunshine Skyway and down to Sarasota. Dad, despite his health, always insisted on driving, a control freak right to the end. It was pouring by then, the blinding rain, the road across that high bridge. Rain, cancer, control and its lack: these are the things that ended my father’s life and put my mother’s into ruin.

 

* * * *

 

Emerging

 

In the mud pit, some minutes had gone by and I was beginning to worry about when and how Twoclicks might emerge. Would he playfully attack me from underneath? Would he embrace me through the muck or run a thin, fragile finger along my spine? Would he stay down there for an hour or two while I sat like meat in a melting pot? My imagination was getting the better of me, but then I’d seen what I’d seen on S’hudon.

 

I heard the soft slap of flat, bare feet against the cold stone path that comes from the house to the fumarole. I turned to look and it was Heather: short and stocky, waddling along on those spindly legs, that upright shark shape useful to her when she was on S’hudon. She was smart and funny and strangely wise and I loved her in all her various forms, though I knew she was utterly a lie. I’d taught myself not to worry too much about that, despite the history we shared. Once, not that long ago—looking very different in that place and at that time—she’d broken my brother’s heart. For a while after that she enjoyed telling me that she was working on breaking mine. I used to laugh about that.

 

She stepped carefully down into the fumarole and slipped her body halfway in. She looked at me. She smiled.

 

“Hi,” I said.

 

“Hi, yourself. You all right?”

 

“Fine,” I said, “just fine.”

 

“He thought it was time for you to know.”

 

“Great,” I said. “Know what?”

 

She stared. “He hasn’t told you yet?”

 

“Told me what?”

 

“Oh, I can’t be the one to say, Peter. This is all his idea; he should break the news.”

 

And so I knew, from the way she said it. “It’s about Tommy,” I said.

 

“In a way. Mostly, in fact.”

 

“And?”

 

“And nothing, Peter. I can’t say any more. I won’t.”

 

On cue, a bubble, round and mottled in the mud, rose across from me, grew larger, tension straining, and then popped. It smelled like cinnamon.

 

And these creatures, I noted, were the masters of our universe.

 

The muck began to part underneath the spot where the bubble had burst and I saw Twoclicks’ shuttered eyes rising, the nictitating membranes tight over them, the eyeballs visible within. Through the membranes he was looking at me. He rose a bit higher, so that his whole head was clear of the mud. The membranes slid up, disappeared. His eyes were clear.

 

“There iss trouble on Earth,” he said with that annoying lisp that he used as an affectation. Somehow it’s terribly condescending. “It iss getting worse.”

 

“There’s always trouble on Earth,” I answered. “Even before S’hudon arrived there was always trouble on Earth. And it was always getting worse. We Earthies do not play well together.”

 

“Ah, but this time iss different.”

 

“Sure,” I said. “This time is different.”

 

“Hass to do with your brother,” he said, “and iss very troublesome. Blowing up distilleries and pipelines. Burning crops. Burning a lot of crops.”

 

“And you can’t stop that? With your screamships? The hired Canadians? All your technology and all your mercenaries and you can’t stop the locals from burning some crops?”

 

He shrugged. It was an acquired gesture for him, since he doesn’t really have much in the way of shoulders. “Guesss not,” he said. “No. Certainly not. Cannot. Hass been going on for months now, all over northern areas of my district. Very low tech, friend Peter. Fly below radar ssort of thing, you know?”

 

Then he dropped what was, for him, the real bombshell. “Is so much trouble that family sayss it threatens profits. My brother says it will spread. He blames me, and thiss is very bad.”

 

And having said that he smiled at me and turned to Heather. “You explain how brothers are,” he said to her. And then he slid down again, the membranes coming over the eyes, the head sliding down into the muck. A bubble, a smoothing wave: he was gone.

 

Heather smiled at me. “You know how much Two hates confrontation, Peter. That wasn’t easy for him, what he just did.”

 

“Sure,” I said, “it couldn’t have been easy. So what’s really the problem, Heather? It can’t be some crops getting burned.”

 

A bubble rose in the muck, popped. We both knew that Twoclicks was listening.

 

Heather gave me a complicated wink, which is hard to do in that body. Right, I thought, just us insiders. Wink, wink.

 

“The crops are a problem,” she said, “and the distilleries and breweries and the production and transportation systems, those are problems, too. It must all be handcrafted, you know, Peter. No enhancements, nothing artificial, wooden casks and barrels and the whole lot. The demand for this, this authentic Earthie alcohol in its various forms, is very high on Downtone and Blink right now and doing okay on the other planets of The Seven. Twoclicks needs to capitalize on that demand while he can, and expand the market before his siblings get in on it. He sees this as the opportunity he’s been waiting a very long time for. It’s his chance to rise in the hierarchy. His chance to please his father.”

 

“Of course,” I said, “he would certainly want to please the old man.”

 

“Don’t be snide, Peter, you know how it is.”

 

And I did, in fact, know how that was, trying to please the old man.

 

It was a typical family squabble, the struggle between Twoclicks and Whistle; a brotherly disagreement over who had the bigger dorsal fin and which one their father loved more. They were both quite willing to spill blood over this.

 

Heather said, “Peter, the burning of the wheat and corn has meant significant loss for Twoclicks. He has contractual obligations to Whistle that he’ll have a hard time meeting now. There are debts between the two of them. Two has to meet his obligations.”

 

“Or else?”

 

“Or else war, I’d guess, Peter. This would be an excuse for Whistle to invade Two’s territory. Here it would just be a family spat and the two brothers wouldn’t talk to each other at family gatherings. . . .”

 

She let that thought hang and I picked up on it. “But on Earth?”

 

“A lot of people would die before it got settled, Peter.”

 

I knew Whistle pretty well and don’t like him. He didn’t like me, either, and I knew he thought of me as his little brother’s Earthie pet. I resented deeply the truth of that.

 

Heather looked sad. “Understand, Peter, that despite what Two has said to you, this isn’t any trouble that he can’t fix. There’s a screamship waiting in Earth orbit and all Twoclicks has to do is give the word.”

 

“The word.”

 

“The word to take out Tommy and his little band of merry men. De-orbit, a day or two of burns along the Lake Ontario shoreline where they’re hiding out—mistakenly thinking we don’t know where and how—and that’s it. Done. Insurrection suppressed. Trouble over. Back to work on the farm, raising grain for handcrafted alcohol, making Twoclicks richer and more powerful and keeping Whistle at bay. Nothing to it.”

 

“Then why the hell not just get in there. . . .” And it dawned on me what she was saying. “Oh,” I said. “Tommy.”

 

She nodded. “Twoclicks wants you to go and talk with Tommy. Twoclicks thinks he owes you both that much. You and your brother helped Two when it mattered. You saved his life once and he recognizes the debt. Talk to Tommy, explain things to him, lay it all out for him.”

 

“And you think I can get Tommy to stop?”

 

She shrugged. “If you don’t stop him, Peter, Two will. He’s just giving you a chance to settle it without bloodshed. He’s doing this for you, because he owes you. Because he likes you.”

 

“He doesn’t owe me, Heather, I’ve told him that a hundred times. And hell, even if he did owe me, that debt has been paid twenty times over.”

 

“He doesn’t see it that way, Peter. You and your brother saved his life and for him that incurs a deep obligation. He won’t forget that. Ever.” She stared at me. “But he will do what he has to do, Peter, and soon, to maintain control over the colony. Who would you rather have in charge, Two or Whistle?”

 

There was no question about my answer to that. Twoclicks was an odd character, but he had an interest in things Earthie other than profit. His various collections, his love for Earth’s music and literature and art. His interest in me and in my Sweeps to the home world. He was the best of that bad lot by a long shot. “All right,” I said, “sure, I’ll go.”

 

“Good,” she said.

 

“When am I leaving?”

 

She smiled. “Right now. You only have a day or two before Whistle acts, I think, so the sooner the better. There’s a kelly in a room upstairs in the main house.”

 

“Do I take anything with me?”

 

“Sure,” she said. “Me.”

 

And so we left.

 

* * * *

 

The Arribada

 

You have your memories of the first time you heard the news about the Arribada. You remember that the television was on and you were making love to your wife or your husband or your lover; or you sat by your mother’s death bed and the nurse walked in to tell you the news; or you were in your favorite chair reading a book and a frightened neighbor knocked on your door, or you were eating a meal at an inexpensive restaurant and your waiter gave you the news; or you were walking your dog on a crisp, clear winter night and you happened to look up.

 

My memory of it is this: I was thirty-three years old and felt older as I headed home from the Stagger Inn in the little barrier island town of Rum Point. I’d been playing a little basketball with my friends, Eric and Nick.

 

On Tuesday nights we played in a half-court league at the local Y, three-on-three, twenty-minute running halves, call your own fouls, make-it-take-it. We weren’t too bad. Tommy was on the team but hadn’t been playing since our parents’ death a couple of months before. He wasn’t much of a player and we didn’t miss him.

 

My knees hurt that night like they had since my college days and those three surgeries in five years. My right ankle hurt from the sprain of a month before that I’d never given it time to get over. My neck and right shoulder were sore from a bulging disk that my ortho said would eventually require surgery.

 

But, stupidly, I suppose, I loved playing basketball even though my playing days were long over and I was reduced to half-court three-on-three with my friends. So I’d taken a couple of ibuprofen an hour before the game and I’d take two more when I got home. In the morning, I’d struggle to get my legs over the side of the bed and stand up on those ankles and knees. But I’d do it, and walk into the bathroom where I’d take two more ibuprofen and then go teach my morning class. By ten a.m. or so I’d feel all right and I’d have taught my college students nearly everything that I could about nineteenth-century English and Irish writers.

 

I’d had four or five Flying Bison ales at the Stagger, which was okay because I lived five blocks from there and was walking home, cutting across the ball field where, in summers, I coached the local town baseball team, most of the players ex-college or high school athletes who still found something worthwhile in sore arms, pulled groins, sprained ankles, and bruised hips from clumsy slides. Every now and then I pitched in relief. I missed my youth.

 

And I missed my father.

 

The police gave me details on how he died: A driving rain on the big bridge over Tampa Bay. The pick-up truck to their left going much too fast for conditions and trying to change into their lane. The driver—a young guy running his own pool-cleaning business and hurrying home—lost control and started fishtailing. He clipped Dad’s Lexus and sent it spinning just after the crest of the bridge where everyone starts heading downhill. The Lexus hit the right-side rail and flipped end over end as it climbed the rail and spun once or twice more while falling the one hundred feet into the water below. Airbags and belts kept Mom and Dad alive through all that, but sinking twenty feet to the bottom of the bay cost Dad his life.

 

Mom lived through it. She was on her cell phone with Tommy when this all happened. They were talking about me, sharing their disappointment over my career, and then he heard her crying out and heard Dad’s angry curse and then nothing more for a few seconds and then an “Oh, sweet Jesus,” from Mom as the car started to sink into the warm embrace of Tampa Bay. Mom managed to unclip her belt and the power windows still worked as she hit the button. She’d been a competitive swimmer at Harvard when she’d met Dad, and that background saved her as she got through the window and up to the surface. Only there did she have the time to think about Dad. So she went back down, the car nose down in the sandy bottom. She got back inside, got to her husband who sat there quietly, eyes open. She got to the belt latch, unsnapped it, tried to maneuver her way back out the window she’d come in, tugging and pulling on Dad all the while. Twenty seconds. Thirty. Fifty. Down there with Dad, trying to get him back. Trying very, very hard to get him back.

 

* * * *

 

Months later it was a warm January night, the way it can be in Florida sometimes, and I was thinking I’d get the team together for some batting practice and infield workouts. The grass was green and perfect in the outfield as I walked across in the darkness, away from the town’s lights. I stopped to take a deep breath, musing on the usual romantic nonsense about the smell of leather and infield dirt and the sound of cleats on wooden dugout steps and the lure of the crack of the bat against the ball.

 

For no particular reason that I can recall I looked up, and there were ten new satellites drifting slowly by from northwest to southeast as I watched, in a pattern that was a circle slowly turning ovoid as they crossed the sky. I’m the sort of person who pays attention to the news. A launch of something like this would have made it to the science page of the Times, which I’d read that morning in hard copy. The news on that page had been about global warming, the volcano in Japan, a new vaccine for Alzheimer’s: nothing at all about multiple launches or satellites. I kept looking as I walked, moving faster the more I wondered. I got home. I turned on the TV and a pretty blonde on CNN was telling me about those bright lights in the night sky over North America. The Ten, as we came to call them. A squadron of visitors to our little corner of the universe. They’d arrived undetected and then winked into sight, just like that. And now, serene, they floated above us.

 

The Arribada, we came to call it, and we marveled and quaked. I’m sure you remember that first night, the next day. The wonder. The fear.

 

And you remember, I’ll guess, the second week, too; and the third month, and the whole quiet year while those ships did nothing but drift overheard, quiet reminders, bright specks in the blackness.

 

We can get used to anything, as it turns out. The extraordinary, the phenomenal, the outrageous: these things become the new norm and so we ceas to notice. Like everyone else, I went back to watching comforting propaganda on television news and reading complacent newsfeeds on my iFeed and paying attention to the American League East standings and the NBA Finals and the bestseller lists and my own struggle to find something worth writing about. Everything was normal. Everything was fine. Everything was great.

 

I had started a new part-time job, Sweeping for the local digital feedwork, sending out daily Sweeps about the top personalities of the day and even, every now and then, some actual real news. The quality of the work was ludicrous, so the pay, no surprise, was outstanding. I told myself it was all very F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 

So it was my words that a few hundred thousand people had in their eyesets and earsets when NASA got some cameras up there and when the Japanese and Chinese sent a joint manned mission and the ESA blew up one unmanned Ariadne on the pad and then launched another within two weeks. That was an exciting couple of months. The cameras showed us what the ships looked like: bulbous spheroids, with a wide girth amidships and one end slightly larger than the other. There was no indication of a propulsion system, no antennae or anything else on the smooth exteriors.

 

The Asian mission got too close and lost power, then was pushed away and found power, then approached again and lost power and got shoved away a lot harder and got the message. The ESA approached and didn’t lose power and so came in closer, and closer, and then disappeared. The NASA platform sent pictures of the small unmanned Holmes explorer disappearing right through the outer hull of one of the ships just as contact was lost.

 

And that was it. Our various spacecraft took up station at a safe distance and watched and sensed and waited. The Ten did nothing for the longest time. I started Sweeping about Hollywood overdoses and ridiculous sports salaries. It was a living. My numbers rose into the millions and Tommy, doing real research and important work to save an entire species, just shook his head in wonder at that. I promised him that when the ridleys returned and his research paid off I’d make him famous.

 

And I did. I made him famous.

 

* * * *

 

The Kelly

 

The kelly device is the squirter that gets the S’hudonni around once they’ve paid their first visit to a place and set things up. You step into one and it disassembles, squeezes, and squirts. At the other end, another kelly unpacks and reassembles. I was told that only a few kellys exist and Twoclicks was lucky to have a couple. I was told the kellys are a remnant technology, but they never fail. I was told they are clean and quick and enormously painful. I was told you don’t remember the pain.

 

When I swam back up to conscious thought I found I could open my eyes, but that was about it. In another minute I could move my head some, side to side. We were in the main room of a small house, the windows closed and shuttered. It looked like a shack, but that, surely, wasn’t so, since it had to be utterly secure or it wouldn’t hold a kelly. The warped plank walls and the tarpaper roof were certainly camouflage.

 

Behind me there were sounds of cracking and tearing as Heather changed. I’d seen her do that too often to want to see more. The sounds eased; there was a slight scuffling noise as she stood.

 

My strength was returning. I turned to look and there she was, my Earthie Heather, blonde, tall, athletic, that beautiful face, those lips that had overwhelmed my common sense a few years before and still did. She was a falsehood and I knew it all too well and somehow it didn’t matter.

 

I was able to sit up as Heather handed me some underwear, a pair of blue jeans, a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt, socks, and hiking boots. She started to put on similar clothing.

 

“How much did it hurt?” I asked her as I swung my legs over the side of the bed and started to pull on the jeans. I was thinking about the kelly.

 

“A lot. You screamed.”

 

I shrugged; that explained my sore throat. I was glad I couldn’t remember any of it. Then I finished getting into the clothes, not surprised to find that they fit. Heather always gets it right, as I’d discovered back when she was Tommy’s intended. In those days, I used to wonder how and why.

 

We walked outside, a light mist swirling around us in the cold; fine droplets of rain gathering then freezing on our hair, our jeans, our shirts as we moved out onto an old wooden dock that sat on a rocky beach along the edge of a wide bend in a river. In front of us, the water swirled in a wide whirlpool before working its way out of the bend and heading downstream. I turned to look and behind us rose the sidewall of a deep gorge, disappearing into the gray fog above. The sidewall was covered in bushes and small, bare trees. A few taller oaks and maples jutted out from the wall and then angled to grow upward toward what light could reach this far into the gorge.

 

“Where are we?” I asked.

 

Heather listened to her data feed. “Niagara River,” she said, “below the Falls a few miles. On the American side.” She pointed upstream. “The Falls are up around that bend.” She pointed the other way, “And Lake Ontario is that way, not far.”

 

She listened again to the data feed, pointed downstream. “I’m told we’ll find Tommy over there, but there’s some confusion about just where.” And I followed as she walked over toward the sidewall of the gorge where she found a path and we began climbing, the slippery clay making the going tricky for me in the mist and freezing rain. Heather had no trouble.

 

Confusion about just where? I was walking along behind her when that finally sank in. Heather, confused about where Tommy was? It wasn’t possible. Heather could locate anything. She was deeply a part of the data wash that is everywhere, courtesy of our Masters of the Universe. Everyone on Earth—just like every being on each of The Seven Planets—was traceable instantly. It wasn’t possible for those senses of hers to fail. Ever. But apparently they had, and I had no idea how that could happen.

 

It started to snow and the wind rose as we hiked up the steep gorge path. The flakes were big and heavy and in a few minutes they began to stick, slippery, to the stones and cold mud beneath our feet. I wondered what in god’s name Tommy was doing here. Growing up, we’d only seen snow once or twice on visits to the grand- parents and then, later, every now and again as adults. It wasn’t something we missed. Tommy was a Florida boy, the kind of kid you could find knee-deep in a mangrove swamp looking for snakes and heron feathers and alligators. He loved the heat and the humidity. He loved the sunshine and the beach at low tide. He loved the thunderstorms in summer and he embraced September’s hurricanes. He loved to body surf the waves that would kick up when a storm went by out to our west, heading toward the Panhandle.

 

Here there was none of that. Here there was nothing, I guessed, but lake-effect snow and cold summer rain. It didn’t fit, not for the Tommy I’d known all my life. Not for brother Tommy, the smart one, the scientist who’d made a career out of tropical seas and beaches and endangered turtles.

 

We didn’t get more than two hundred meters down the gravel path before Heather held up a hand to stop us and then turned to look at me. I looked at her as she shook her head, even used the heel of her palm to slap her forehead. “I’m blocked,” she said in a tone of voice I’d never heard before.

 

“Blocked?”

 

“My feed is gone.”

 

“Your feed?”

 

She stared at me and I saw puzzlement on her face. “My data stream, the wash, the flow. It’s gone.”

 

“And that doesn’t happen often?”

 

“Peter, the data stream is never gone. Never.”

 

“Except now. Here. How’s that possible?”

 

“I don’t know,” she said, and that was the first time I’d ever heard her say those words about anything. And then she tapped her forehead again. She seemed to be trying to focus on something. I was wondering what this all meant when I heard the first rattle of gunfire and the leafless tree next to me seemed to come alive, its bark exploding and branches flying. For a very long second or two I didn’t know what was happening. Then I saw the back of her head explode in a suddenly slowed time that allowed me to see the small bits of her hair and skin as they flew toward me, seemed to surround me, and I was turning to see her collapsing next to me as I felt a hard punch in my right shoulder blade—there was no pain at all—and then another punch, like I’d been hit by a baseball, in my lower back and then another in the back of my right knee and then something hit me hard in the back of my head and I felt just the barest fraction of anger before things got strangely quiet and I was staring up at a wet, brown leaf on a low branch above me as a single huge snowflake landed on its edge and hung there ready to drop while I watched the world get darker and then darker still and then there was nothing.

 

* * * *

 

Disappointment Haunted All My Dreams

 

Tommy was the smart one, growing up, the one who knew the real facts about things while I was the hazy dreamer who wanted to do nothing but play sports, read books and daydream. I was into religion and was going to be a priest. He was into science. We were altar boys together for one year when I was twelve and he was ten.

 

There’s a moment in the Catholic Mass when the priest holds the host—a little wafer of bread not much bigger than a quarter—up high with both hands and says “This is my body,” and then, a bit later, “This is my blood.” At that moment, Catholic belief says, the host becomes the body and blood of Christ. Not like the body and blood, but the actual, real thing. It’s called Transubstantiation, and I’d believed it, firmly, from the time I was seven until that year when Tommy became an altar boy.

 

Tommy and I were kneeling on the cold marble of the altar in St. Thomas Aquinas church as the priest raised that host up high. Tommy shook his head. I saw him do that and wondered if the church walls would collapse in a great roar of godlike anger. Mom and Dad were in the front pew, watching us. They didn’t notice that disbelieving shake, but I did. After Mass, he sneaked a host home and put it under the microscope so we both could peer at it. Just bread, he concluded. Then he took snippets of it and ran it through his chemistry set to see what it really was.

 

“It’s bread, Peter,” he told me at the end, as he tore off a piece of that host and popped it into his mouth. I expected lightning to strike. “It’s just bread, with some esters and carbonyl compounds maybe for flavor. Basically just bread,” and he chewed on it.

 

Then he looked at me, grinning. “You can believe whatever you want to believe, Peter; it’s a free country. But me? I’ll take science.”

 

That was it for him, and even then I knew better than to argue, even though, for a long while, I didn’t stop believing otherwise.

 

The Wet of Her Embrace

 

I was dreaming of making love to Heather, the wet of her embrace, the urgency of her lips, when I heard arguing, whistles and clicks between two S’hudonni, the conversation much too fast for me to follow, even after a year of studying the language. Something about failure.

 

I came awake, the dream fading. I was naked, lying on my back on a cold, metallic table. How the hell had I gotten in here? I had no idea. My last memory was of Heather and me stepping into the kelly to be squirted to Earth so I could do what I had to do with poor Tommy. The kelly must have failed. I was lucky to be alive.

 

The whistles and clicks slowed, stopped, and then Heather waddled in the door on those short, thin legs. She came over to me, touched my arm. “What do you remember?”

 

“Everything,” I said, “Tommy, the crops. We were getting squirted to Earth. Home. I remember walking into the portal right behind you. What happened?”

 

“Nothing, really. A minor malfunction in the kelly. We’re still on S’hudon.”

 

Later, I found out the truth about the kelly, about life and about death and originals and copies and about my own personal reality. That knowledge cost me my life. Several times.

 

But at that moment I believed her, having no reason yet to think otherwise.

 

“Was that Twoclicks you were talking to?”

 

She nodded, shrugged. “He wasn’t all that happy with the malfunction.”

 

“And?”

 

She reached down to take my hand and helped me stand. I was a little shaky for a moment or two for some reason, and she waited. I nodded and she led me off, me holding her hand and following behind, her loyal puppy, as we walked out the door, turned right, walked right back through another door and there, ominously humming, was the kelly. We stepped in.

 

* * * *

 

Changes

 

The first time I saw Heather change, Tommy and I were waist-deep in the shallows off Egmont Key, a little island at the mouth of Tampa Bay. It was my thirty-fourth birthday and we celebrated by staring at the sea through our polarized sunglasses, hoping that a few of his Kemp’s ridley turtles might come in to lay eggs. Tommy had spent eight long years working to save the Kemp’s ridleys from themselves and that day, at that small island, would tell us whether he’d succeeded or not. I’d promised him fame if they came and I intended to live up to that bargain. My audience was normally about thirty million, but I’d been promoting this moment for a couple of weeks and it was close to forty million who were watching through my eyes and hearing through my ears and listening to my commentary.

 

For at least fifteen thousand years the Kemp’s ridleys had come ashore and laid their eggs on one particular beach in a few weeks of frenzy on the Gulf Coast of Mexico north of Veracruz. It’s an isolated spot and safe from most predators, though the local raccoons must certainly have had their fill of eggs once a year. When the mother ridleys arrived by the thousands each to lay up to one hundred eggs each, the overwhelming number of those eggs more than made up for a few raccoons and the enjoyment of the locals, who ate more turtle meat than normal for a few weeks a year.

 

Then, in 1948, a local fishing guide who’d received an eight-millimeter movie camera as a present from a rich gringo took movies of the egg-laying frenzy and the word got out. It wasn’t the eggs that people wanted so much as the mother turtles. The ridleys’ meat is sweet and tender and the mothers are helpless when they lay their eggs. For the sake of turtle steak and turtle soup, the mothers died by the thousands each year. In ten years the annual arrival of the mother turtles was mostly a memory on a scratchy home movie. The Mexican government banned the harvest but years too late and the few remaining ridleys struggled for survival for three decades before Tommy Holman came along with a plan.

 

Tommy figured that if he could find the right beaches and the right tides and the right water and the right climate he could take the eggs from Mexico to safer beaches on an isolated barrier island in Florida. When the hatchlings emerged they’d scramble for the water and in doing that they’d imprint on the beach where Tommy had planted the seeds of their future.

 

On Egmont Key he planted six hundred eggs and watched, six weeks later, when the babies emerged and made their way to the water. Then he waited. Maturity and the urgent desire to mate and lay eggs takes eight years, so doctoral candidate Tommy Holman became assistant professor and then associate professor Tommy Holman before the big day came and he and I stood there waiting for the turtles to return. One returning turtle would be all right, ten would be better, one hundred would be an excellent sign, and more than that would be miraculous, the mortality of turtle hatchlings being high. Tommy had his tenure, but a few turtles showing up would, no doubt, get him the full professorship he wanted.

 

The ridleys did come, a few and then a dozen and then they came by unlikely hundreds. Tommy’s research had panned out and I was there to see it, proud of my little brother, proud that he’d saved an entire species from certain oblivion. We were standing in calf-deep water watching the turtles come in, and Tommy was so happy that he came splashing over to me in joy and gave me a wet, triumphant high-five with his open palm before turning right around to wade back onto shore so he could watch his turtles arrive to lay their eggs.

 

That was the last time I ever saw him happy.

 

* * * *

 

Cracking and Tearing

 

When I swam back up to conscious thought I could see we were in the main room of a small house, the windows closed and shuttered. It looked like a shack, but that, surely, wasn’t so, since it had to be utterly secure or it wouldn’t hold a kelly. The warped plank walls and the tarpaper roof were certainly camouflage.

 

Behind me there were sounds of cracking and tearing as Heather changed. I’d seen her do that too often to want to see more. I loved her, god knows, whether she looked like the girl I’d known in St. Pete or the waddly porpoise I knew in S’hudon or anything else of the right weight and mass. But loving her didn’t mean I had to watch the changing as it took place.

 

The sounds eased; there was a slight scuffling noise as she stood.

 

My strength was returning. I turned to look and there she was, my Earthie Heather, a tall blonde, athletic, that beautiful face, those lips that had overwhelmed me before and still did here. She was a falsehood and I knew it all too well and somehow it didn’t matter.

 

I was able to sit up as Heather handed me some underwear, a pair of ski pants, a long-sleeved T-shirt that read “Niagara Falls” across the front, an orange and blue hooded sweatshirt, and a pair of thin gloves. She had cotton socks and high-cut shoes for me to wear, a kind of athletic shoe, padded, with a hard, plastic extra length in the sole that extended an inch or more out in front of the toe of the shoe. She was wearing the same shoes.

 

“How much did it hurt?” I asked her, thinking about the kelly.

 

She smiled. “Quite a bit, I think. You were screaming as you formed up.” I shrugged; that explained my sore throat. Then I got into the clothes, not surprised to find that they fit. Heather always gets it right.

 

The shoes felt better than I’d thought they would. We opened the door to walk outside and it was snowing hard, a foot of the stuff on the ground already and more coming hard to add to it. It would be a difficult slog, walking through this mess.

 

But we weren’t walking. There was a rattle from behind me and Heather came through the door carrying two pair of skis and poles. The skis were long and narrow. She set two of them down in front of me. “Step into them like this,” she said, and showed me how the front edge of the shoes snapped into the bindings, leaving the heel free.

 

“Cross country,” I’ve said. “I’ve never done this.”

 

“It’s easy. If you can walk, you can cross-country ski, Peter. Trust me.”

 

I did trust her. Mostly. I clipped into the bindings. “We’ll go slow, right?”

 

“Absolutely. It’s not complicated, Peter. No sweat.”

 

She’d lied about that last part. There was, in fact, a lot of sweat as we pushed down a narrow trail that edged along the riverbank. Heather went first. Her skis were shorter and wider, meant to cut tracks in the new snow, and so I followed in her trail. We were in a deep gorge, with a cliff wall rising up to our right just a dozen yards away or so and a swift river to our left another dozen yards away. Part of the path went up, climbing the side wall of the gorge. We stayed on the other, smoother, part that wound through the trees. It must have been a hiking trail in older, better days. It was all very scenic, I’m sure, but I was so busy trying to stay upright as I kept up with Heather that I barely had time—or energy—to notice anything to either side. Instead, I focused on keeping my skis inside the grooves she cut into the snow with hers. When I stayed there, I did fine. When I let my skis slip out of the grooves she’d cut, I slid or, twice, fell. It was no damn fun at all.

 

But we made progress for a good half hour, staying down in the river gorge, sliding along toward wherever we were going. Twice Heather stopped and seemed to take her bearings, though I couldn’t see any option other than straight ahead or straight back. Then, a third time, she stopped and tapped the side of her head. I stood behind her, breathing hard, my breath a cloud of wet vapor in the cold air, the steam rising from me as I slowly cooled down a bit.

 

She tapped her head again, nodded to herself, turned around to face me. “Out of the skis, Peter, quickly.”

 

She used the sharp end of her poles to hit a button and step out of her skis while I fumbled to do the same. Seconds later she was next to me, using her pole to press down hard on the release of my right ski and then my left. I stepped out and then nearly fell as she tugged me into the foliage to the side of the trail.

 

“Down,” she hissed at me, “and be quiet.”

 

I knelt. And shut up.

 

Heather reached into a pocket in her ski pants and pulled out a small device the size of a deck of cards. This was a remarkable act, since as far as I knew all her electronics were deeply internal and constantly upgraded. I couldn’t imagine a use for an external, but there it was.

 

She looked at the screen on the device and frowned. “Nothing,” she said. “No energy, no metal, a few mammals. Damn.” And she tapped the screen and then reached up to tap her head.

 

She turned to stare at me. “Your brother has better equipment than I thought, Peter. He’s out there, maybe with some friends, but I can’t read any signatures, even with this external.”

 

“You’re sure it’s him? How would he know we’re coming?”

 

She shook her head and smiled at the same time. “Oh, Peter,” she said and was about to explain things to me when I heard a kind of blowing noise, a slight rushing of wind, and an arrow appeared, buried deep into that beautiful neck, the shaft vibrating as she fell back into the snow, gasping and gurgling as blood began to spurt from the wound.

 

I was reaching out to her when I heard another blowing noise and then felt something punch me in my lower back, and then in the left arm. I turned to look and felt another in my chest and thought I might take a look at that to see what the hell was going on but then it was getting curiously dark out and then there was nothing.

 

* * * *

 

Deep Water

 

After Dad’s death Mom faded away from us. Tommy and I knew how hard it would be for her, not just the moving on without Dad, but also the memory of those final ghastly moments, struggling with the belt, struggling in the warm water of Tampa Bay. Struggling. And failing.

 

She couldn’t talk about it, no surprise, and we didn’t push her, thinking it would all come out when it was time. The psychologist urged patience on us and, slowly, the quiet became the norm. We didn’t ask and Mom didn’t tell.

 

She took an indefinite leave from the law firm and then hibernated, insisting on staying in the old family home. We thought she might want to put the place on the market and move into something smaller, something with fewer memories, but she refused to even consider that. Instead, she mostly sat in the same living room where she’d spent her adult life with Dad, sitting there on her couch and reading, and waiting.

 

Tommy would visit with her on Mondays and I did Fridays every week. She had her friends, too, who came by often. We wanted to find that difficult balance between not enough and too much for her, but it was hard to tell how we were doing at it. The strong, vital woman she’d been was gone. This new, more frail version of her was opaque to us. Was she fine? Was she tired? Was she interested in whatever we offered? It was hard to tell. This went on for months.

 

And then, one Friday in the winter, some seven months after Dad’s death, I found her packing. She and a friend, she said, were going on a cruise, a four-night Caribbean jaunt out of port of Tampa: a day at sea, a day in Grand Cayman, another in Cozumel, and then back to Tampa.

 

To me, and to Tommy, that sounded perfect. Safe, calm, confined, scenic. Lots of fresh air and sunshine. It might revive her, it might help bring back the mother we both remembered.

 

There was no friend with her, we found out later. And her clothes weren’t unpacked in her stateroom. All we know is that as the good ship Scenic Seas passed under the Sunshine Skyway on its way out of Tampa Bay and into the wide open Gulf of Mexico, Annette Holman, age fifty-nine, climbed over the side railing and dived toward the warm embrace some seventy feet below her. She never surfaced and the ship’s tenders, the Coast Guard cutter, the big Coast Guard helicopter, the Tampa police boat, the half-dozen fishermen in their boats not far away: they all converged and ultimately, an hour too late, found her.

 

We buried her right next to Dad. Tommy blamed me for her death. Not enough attention, too much attention, didn’t see the signs, let her go so easily, didn’t check on that friend, didn’t ask the psychologist about it, didn’t do this or did do that or should have should have should have.

 

I didn’t argue, and eventually he calmed down and we papered things over and got on with our lives.

 

* * * *

 

The Ships

 

The ships showed up at about the same time that Tommy and I had started to patch things up. He was at the university’s department of marine science and I was a sucessful freelancer, making a living off adjunct teaching at the local college campus while I wrote sports and entertainment profile books (“Johnny Harvest, MVP: as told to Peter Holman”) and joined the newest social media fad, Sweeping, where some cam-glasses turned me into a camera crew as I chatted with celebrities and jocks. At first, it was a living, the books doing pretty well and the Sweeping helped me promote the Peter Holman brand name.

 

Meanwhile, the ships kept watch over us, sometimes changing formations for reasons we couldn’t begin to divine, but usually just Up There. Orbiting. Normal.

 

Sweeping got competitive quickly, though the equipment was pricey and, before long, some of the most daring Sweepers were getting the cams as implants and WebSweeping anonymously. It did tend to make one nervous, never knowing for sure if the girl you were chatting up at the bar had one eye doing double-duty so everything you said to her was reaching an unintended audience. Me? As a matter of ethics I kept wearing the glasses and even kept the tiny glowlight that let you know I was Sweeping.

 

At first, I just Sweeped my work, so the interviews I was doing for the books and some webzines could be watched live or from the recordings. Then I started using it to Sweep myself before and after the interviews as I chatted with myself about the personality and merit of the interview. Then, within a few weeks, I left it on during some parties and other social occasions and things started to get busier.

 

For the first month I hadn’t been getting much out of the Sweep thing: you couldn’t sell ads if you had just a few thousand viewers. But then, when I start getting personal with it, my numbers began to rise into the tens of thousands and then the hundreds of thousands and then, one January day, over the one million mark. I figured my natural talent was reeling them in.

 

Tommy and I hung out some when we could and for those times, of course, the Sweep was off. Tommy seemed settled and less angry. After Mom died we’d each received a half-million dollars from our parents’ will and our father’s life insurance. We both put most of that into real estate. Tommy had a nice house down at the south end of town, overlooking the bay and with the Skyway Bridge arching across in the distance. He liked to sit out on his dock at night, smoke his cigarettes, and look at the water and the stars and the distant lights of that bridge.

 

My own place was a nice twelfth-floor condo right downtown, with an impressive view of the city’s waterfront and, in the distance, the lights of Tampa ten miles away across that part of the bay. The women I brought home were always impressed with that view.

 

He called me at work one day, said he had a surprise to show me and asked me to bring someone along and come to his place for a classic Florida dinner—grouper out on the grill, some sweet corn in the boiler, a few Ybor Gold beers, some Buffett on the sound system. That sounded pretty good to me, and Danni, my current friend, would like it just fine. I didn’t kid myself that we had a future, Danni and I, but she was a joy to look at, didn’t have any Sweep implants I had to worry about, and was perfectly good in the sack. I’d learned the hard way that that was all I should expect.

 

We got there about seven, and Tommy was grinning as he opened the door. Behind him, standing shyly, was Heather.

 

She was plain enough. Short, straight blonde hair framed a round, pleasant face with dark eyebrows, brown eyes, no lipstick, thin lips, a nice smile. She folded her arms a lot, was a little stoop-shouldered and meek, but must have looked wonderful to Tommy, who stood proudly next to her.

 

“Pete, this is Heather,” Tommy said, and put his arm around her as he brought her forward.

 

I wondered, shaking her hand and saying hello, how long Tommy had known her, since they were acting like a couple that had been together for a while. As we headed through the house and out to the back porch and that nice view of the Skyway, she made her way to the kitchen for drinks, acting at home, comfortable, like she knew her way around.

 

Tommy might as well have read my mind. He followed out right behind me as we walked onto the wooden decking that edged out from the screened porch. He lit a Camel, blew out a cloud of contentment. “We’ve been seeing each other for a week, Petey. Can you believe it?”

 

“No,” I answered truthfully.

 

He laughed. “It’s like I’ve known her all my life. I didn’t know it could be like that.”

 

“True love, you mean?”

 

“Hell, I guess so.” He shrugged his shoulders, took another pull on the cigarette. “What else would you call it? It’s like we’re perfectly made for each other. Fate, I guess.”

 

“Am I hearing you right, Mr. Scientist? Fate? You were meant for each other?”

 

He laughed. “It’s really something, huh?”

 

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s really something.”

 

Later, when Tommy came out on the deck to explain to Danni about how that Skyway Bridge was the longest concrete suspension bridge in the cosmos, I wandered back inside and sat down next to Heather. She looked at me and smiled.

 

“So you’re the famous writer and Sweeper,” she said. “Tommy talks about you all the time. He says you’re very good at what you do.”

 

“He’s too generous,” I said, though the truth was that I was proud of the fact that Tommy had copies of all five of my books on display. I didn’t think he even knew what Sweeping was.

 

“No, he’s not. I read one of your books last night, the one on the quarterback with the autistic child. It’s very good. You’re honest but fair, and that’s hard to do.

 

“Thanks.”

 

“And I’ve started tuning in to your Sweep. It’s good, too. That’s a whole different sort of editing and writing skill involved, but you seem to have a gift for it. And, of course, while it’s deeply personal, it, too, seems to be honest and fair.”

 

“Maybe,” I said, smiling, “or at least sometimes.”

 

She laughed. “The way you Sweep on just about everything, girls like Danni must worry about hanging around with you.”

 

“Girls like Danni are hoping I’ll say something about them. Anything.”

 

“I wonder, are you going to Sweep about me? Should I be careful about what I say?”

 

“Yep, I probably will. If I were you I wouldn’t talk to me at all.” I almost wasn’t kidding, since I was feeling a kind of vibe from her that I liked. And yet she was my brother’s new girlfriend.

 

She smiled “I guess I’ll just have to be very careful, then. In more ways than one, actually.”

 

I laughed, maybe a little nervously.

 

“What a strange thing it is to be the kind of writer that you are. I’ve wondered about that, about what it’s like, making a living off the lives of others.”

 

I shook my head. “It’s not about the money. I think of it as finding out the truth about things. I’d like to think I’d do it for free.”

 

“You love it that much?”

 

“Yes, I do,” I said, but I was thinking as I said it that I wouldn’t have answered that way a few months back, when not many people were viewing my Sweeps. Now that there were millions, I’d found a new affinity for Sweeping.

 

“And you think telling the truth is that important?”

 

“Yes, very. Plus, it’s all I know how to do. That’s all there is. Hell, it’s who I am.” And as I said that I realized I was contradicting myself. Lying. Ah, well.

 

She laughed at me. “Mr. Truthfinder? Well, it’s been working for you, I’ll admit that. I see this week that your numbers are up again, nearly two million now. How’s that feel, that kind of success?”

 

I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe gave her a little smile.

 

“You know,” she said, “my guess is that what you really want is the biggest audience you can find.”

 

I laughed it off, but she stared at me, dead serious for the moment. “Here’s my prediction, Peter. You and your brother are a lot more alike than either of you know, and you both want success. Tommy’s going to find it with his turtles—he’s going to make it work, you know. He’s going to save that whole species. He’ll pay any price he has to for that to happen.

 

“And you. Someday very soon the right story will come along and you’ll realize the price of telling the whole world the truth is worth all the risk and you’ll go for it, too. Bingo, you’ll be a Big Star. Capital ‘B’ and ‘S.’ “

 

“Well,” I said, “‘B’ and ‘S’, for sure, anyway.”

 

She was still staring at me: those eyes, those eyes. “You’ll get a chance to go global, and you’ll take it. And Tommy, he’ll get his chance, too.” She raised her glass to me. “And you know what else? Both of you will find out that some things are worth almost any price.”

 

I was going to shake my head no, but I didn’t. I just looked right back into those eyes and felt something I couldn’t quite place.

 

She broke the spell with a chuckle, and looked away. “Well, I guess we’ll see then, won’t we? The turtles, Tommy says, are supposed to come back to nest this summer and that will be his time.”

 

“And me? When’s my time coming?”

 

She laughed again. I liked that laugh. She put her fingertips on her temples, acting the mystic. “I sense it coming soon. Fame. Fortune. Difficult decisions.”

 

I smiled and shook my head. I meant to ask her then what she did for a living, and why she was in St. Pete. But Tommy and Danni came in to get out of the humidity and we all wound up talking about the Rays, who were on a winning streak. I kept looking at Heather as the evening wore on. She was all subtleties with her looks, I decided, in contrast to her conversation, where she seemed to delight in saying exactly what was on her mind. Tommy seemed to find that charming.

 

Later, at my place, when I made love to Danni I was thinking about Heather. Some women, the ones like Danni, the more you get to know them the less attractive they are. There’s something about their personality that begins to affect their looks, or at least how you see those looks. With Danni and her easy acquiescence, it took me a week or two to start to think her nose was too small for the broad features of her face, or that her lips needed all that careful attention she gave them because, really, they were thin and hard. Things like that started adding up, as they always do.

 

With Heather, it was just the opposite. The more I saw of her as the days went by, the better she looked to me. I had to work to remember that I’d found her plain at first. She wore almost no make-up, and didn’t seem to care about her looks in general. But every time I’d be at Tommy’s or he would bring her by my place over the next few weeks, I’d find myself seeing, as if for the first time, how perfect her body was, or how natural and beautiful that face, how full and inviting were those lips. I watched her walk, watched her talk, watched how she moved around, marveled at how her face came alive when she cared about something—and she cared about a lot: politics, the environment—and she had ideas on how to fix them all.

 

And I watched her as she watched me. Little smiles. Little messages in those blue eyes, those full lips as they slightly parted. Eventually, that all got the better of me.

 

We never got a chance to talk our way out of it, talk about how it was happening between us, before it all got so crazy. As far as Tommy knew, one day she was there for him and the next day she was gone. All she left behind was a polite little note saying goodbye. And right about then the Ships arrived and the whole world got a little crazy. Everything, in fact, got a little crazy.

 

* * * *

 

Earthie Forms

 

I was dreaming of making love to Heather in her Earthie form. She was on top, looking down at me as she rose and fell, smiling at me, eyes half closed, murmuring something in the sibilant clicks and whistles of S’hudon, a message I could almost understand, was just about to understand, was nearly there in several ways, in fact, when the dream slipped away and I was flat on my back on a cold slab and the clicks and whistles were very loud and insistent and right next to me. I turned to look and it was Heather in her S’hudonni form, engaged in a heated discussion with Twoclicks, their faces close together as they argued.

 

Twoclicks was not happy. I sat up, wondering how I’d gotten here. My last memory was of stepping into the kelly to be squirted to Earth so I could do what I had to do with poor Tommy. The kelly must have failed. I was lucky to be alive.

 

The whistles and clicks slowed, stopped, and then Twoclicks looked at me for long seconds with that inscrutable face of his before he turned and waddled away.

 

Heather came over and stood in front of me. “What do you remember?”

 

“Everything,” I said, “Tommy, the crops. We were getting squirted to Earth. I remember walking into the portal right behind you. What happened?”

 

Heather gave me a necessary lie. “A malfunction. Something wrong in the data stream. I couldn’t figure it out or fix it, so we’re still on S’hudon.”

 

“That’s what Twoclicks was yelling at you about?”

 

She nodded. “He’s not very happy with me at the moment.”

 

“And?”

 

“And he’s sending someone along to help me with the stream, someone with special equipment.” She wasn’t pleased.

 

The door at the far end of the room slid open with a sigh and I could hear a quick pad pad pad as someone came our way. I knew that sound; only one of the S’hudonni I knew walked like that, with small quick happy-feet steps.

 

He rounded the corner and came in the door. It was chubby little Treble, Twoclicks’ son and my favorite of all the various princelings. “Hey, Peter!” he yelled to me, and came hurrying over for a quick hug. “I get to go! I get to go!” The folds of excess flesh on his belly were jiggling.

 

I hugged him back. I liked the kid. And his English was really getting very good, I thought.

 

Heather shook her head, looked at me and smiled, and then, resigned to taking the princeling along, she reached out to take his hand and turned to head out the door and down the hallway to the room where the kelly waited for us.

 

I stood there for a few seconds. Obviously there were a lot of things going on that I didn’t understand. Wheels within wheels, in typical S’hudonni fashion. But it wasn’t as if I had any choice. Nowhere to go but forward, I told myself, and so I came along behind my two companions. Off we go into the wild blue marble.

 

I reached the kelly room and walked in to see Heather and Treble inside the framework, starting to lie back down onto their transfer beds. I’d been told the transfer process was a painful one, but that I wouldn’t remember it. I’d lie down, I’d slip away into oblivion, and then I’d wake up. On Earth. Ready to go talk with my brother Tommy.

 

And I was supposed to stop him. Well, okay, how bad could it be if Twoclicks was sending his one son along to help? A walk in the park, I hoped. No big deal. I lay back onto the warm transfer bed. There was a slight hum and I was suddenly very tired. I closed my eyes.

 

* * * *

 

Energetic

 

It was past midnight when I pulled into Tommy’s driveway. I’d been at a reading at the Miami Book Fair, four long hours’ drive away from St. Pete. Chapter Four of my book on quarterback Daniel Davies and his autistic son had been reprinted in an anthology of essays on children with special needs and I’d been invited to read my piece to a crowd at the book fair. I’d enjoyed it. It wasn’t the couple of million or so reading my Sweep, but it was to nice actually see my audience, and know they could read, and that they seemed to like what I’d written.

 

I had a text message from Tommy asking me to stop in and say hi on my way home. I’d replied that I would and then my cell phone ran out of battery and I hadn’t thought to bring along the charger that worked from the car.

 

Tommy wasn’t there. Heather opened the front door before I got to it. She was wearing blue jeans, a short-sleeved blouse, no bra. Her hair, longer, I realized, than I’d thought, was pulled back into a ponytail.

 

“We figured your phone was off,” she said. “Tommy texted you. He got a call that there’s a leatherback nesting over on Longboat and two Kemp’s ridleys nesting down on Marco Island. He doesn’t think they’re really Kemp’s, but he has to check those out. He said he’d be back tomorrow around noon.”

 

Heather had been spending most nights at his place for a few weeks by then. There’d been rumblings from Tommy about asking her to marry him. I’d told him I thought it was a great idea. I’d told him she was smart and nice looking and seemed in love with him and what more could you possibly ask than that?

 

I stood there and took it all in for a moment. She smelled like the energy in the air right before a summer downpour. I looked at her and she looked back, not saying anything. She smiled, leaned up a bit and kissed me. Those lips, full, soft. My brother’s girl, the one he was talking about marrying.

 

We went very slowly. She didn’t say a thing at first, stepping back so I could undo those buttons, one by one, from top down to bottom. Then I reached up inside the blouse to push it back off her shoulders as she let it slip to the floor.

 

I’d never seen her breasts before, though god knows I’d fantasized about them. They were round and firm and perfect, the areolas a thin dark band around the deep red of the nipples. I stared at them.

 

“They’re yours, Peter. I’ve wanted you to see them. Kiss them for me, please.”

 

I did. Later, after, in bed, I did again, kissing those breasts, her lips, her belly, and then entering her one more time while she brought me to her, the electricity crackling as if for the first time.

 

We fit together. It was perfection. I didn’t want it to be, but there it was. Making love to her, making love with her, was the best thing I’d ever done, the only true poem I’d ever written, the best truth I’d ever discovered, a weird and welcome transcendence from what I’d thought, with so many women, was love.

 

But there was Tommy to think of. Jesus, there’d be hell to pay. I wondered if that’s what she’d been getting at that first night we met when she talked about paying the price. Had she known then that we’d wind up in bed, in love?

 

Was I in love? I sure thought so. One of the things I’d finally learned after a hundred girlfriends was that great sex and True Love aren’t even in the same neighborhood. And this was so different, so not-what-I’d-known, that I had to think it was something real. Looking back, I can see that at the time I was so full of myself that I never got around to wondering if Heather felt the same way. I assumed she did, but never asked and she never offered.

 

So, finally, burdened and torn between these truths, my head whirling over what we’d done, I left. Went home to my own house. Climbed into bed but couldn’t sleep. Got back up, slipped into shorts and a T-shirt and sat on the couch, waiting for the phone to ring or for the pounding on the front door from Tommy’s hurt and angry fists. Finally, around seven a.m., the phone jangled. I picked it up.

 

“Hello.”

 

“Petey.” He sounded so terribly hurt.

 

“Yeah, Tom.”

 

“Pete. She’s gone. Heather’s gone.”

 

“Gone?”

 

“There’s a note here. She loves me, but she has to leave. She’s gone.”

 

And that was that. As the weeks went by Tommy seemed to get used to it. Some more leatherbacks and a few scattered Kemp’s ridleys helped him with that. Me? I couldn’t believe, at first, that she’d chosen that path, but eventually you have to face the facts. And maybe, I thought, she’d done the right thing for us both. With her gone, I never told Tommy what had happened. If she’d been around, all that would have gone differently.

 

* * * *

 

A Quantum Hiss

 

I opened my eyes and tried to focus. It took a few seconds before the ceiling came into view: rough-cut wood slats set into place. To the right an open space. We were in some kind of wooden shack. How could that be secure enough to hold a kelly device? If we were on Earth like we were supposed to be, then the kelly would be proscribed technology and completely secure, wouldn’t it?

 

Another half-minute passed and I could turn my head some side to side. We were in the main room of what seemed to be a hunting cabin or shack, the windows closed and shuttered. The warped plank walls and the tarpaper roof were certainly camouflage.

 

Behind me I began to hear the uncomfortable sounds of Heather changing: cartilage and muscle and skin and bones all breaking and snapping at once. I’d seen her do that too often to want to see it again. I waited and the sounds died down.

 

There was a slight scuffling noise as she stood. I heard the door to the shack opening, too, and looked that way. Treble walked in, almost bouncing along on those spindly little legs, happy as he could be.

 

“Peter!” he said when he saw me looking. He ran over and stood next to me. “How do you feel?”

 

“Yes, Peter, how do you feel?” It was Heather, my Earthie Heather, walking into view. “You should be getting stronger very rapidly now.”

 

My strength was returning. “I feel good, guys, thanks,” I said as I sat up and, a little cautiously, swung my legs over the side. Heather reached out to take my right hand and steady me, and little Treble came over to take my left.

 

Heather was a blonde, and tall, athletic. Her face, angular with a firm jaw, was absolutely achingly beautiful in a way that I still found unnerving. When she first explained to me how that face came to be I should been dismayed, but wasn’t. She was a falsehood and I knew it and it had never mattered.

 

Treble whistled his excitement and Heather whistled back as I stood up. I felt better, a whole lot better, my nanos kicking in.

 

Heather let go, so that only Treble held hands with me. On a bench at the far side of the room was a small stack of clothing. Heather grabbed a few things and returned, handing me some underwear, a pair of ski pants, some insulated gloves, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a hooded sweatshirt, socks, and a pair of low-cut boots with odd soles that had an inch of material coming out the front of the shoe. She handed Treble some other clothes and then began putting on her own clothes, an outfit like mine. Treble slipped into a brown coverall complete with a hood over his head so that he looked like a tiny monk: Brother Treble from S’hudon ready to meet the aborigines of this strange planet.

 

I finished getting into the clothes, not surprised to find that they fit. Heather always gets it right, as I’d discovered back when she was Tommy’s intended. In those days, I used to wonder how and why.

 

We finished dressing, each of us, and then walked to the front door of the shack. There were two pairs of skis and poles there and a small sled with a seat on it and a front harness attached to it.

 

The weather on S’hudon—at least the part where I lived—is generally damp and cool. I hadn’t seen more than a light snow flurry in my time there, and I’d lived mostly in Florida before my sojourn to S’hudon, so I was a long way from being an Alpine skier.

 

“I take it there’s snow outside?” I said to Heather and Treble as we reached the door, “and I’m supposed to know how to ski?”

 

Heather smiled at me. “These are cross-country skis, Peter. If you can walk you can ski in them. It’s easy. It’s even kind of fun.”

 

“Sure,” I said. “It’s fun.”

 

Heather spent five minutes getting us ready, showing me how that front edge of my boot clipped into the ski binding, leaving the heel free. Then she gave me a thirty-second lesson in cross-country skiing. Use the poles for balance, slide the right ski forward while pushing with the left pole. Repeat with the other ski and pole. Voila, you’re a skier.

 

When she pronounced me ready we all grabbed one piece of equipment or another and she opened the door.

 

It was my first time home since the day I’d walked into a screamship and headed for S’hudon two years before. The kelly machines took enormous power to work and there weren’t very many of them, I’d been told, so their use was rare. For most travelers, voyage by screamship was how it was done.

 

I remembered leaving Earth in the middle of a torrential thunderstorm in coastal Florida, lightning flashing all around as Heather, Twoclicks, and I walked across the wide sand of the beach at Rum Point and then up the ramp and into the ship. That first trip from Earth to S’hudon took two weeks and I’d thought I might be leaving forever. Now, in a heartbeat, I was back.

 

Wherever we were now was a very different place. A bright one, for one thing. A low winter sun in a cloudless sky glared off the ice and snow. It took a few seconds for my nanoed eyes to adjust and then a frozen Earth came into view. We were in a deep river gorge, standing on a wide shoreline that edged along between a towering rock wall behind us and the river in front. The shoreline was bouldered and wooded and a couple of hundred meters wide. The river was in a hurry, water rushing over rapids just visible upstream. There was no ice in the river. Thick woods ran deep along both sides of us on our shoreline and more woods across the river. Those woods ended at another steep rock wall that rose to form that side of the gorge. The gorge was a couple of hundred meters deep and I thought I saw houses along the top of the far side. I turned to look behind me and on this side the top of the gorge overwhelmed the view: the rock ended abruptly and then there was blue sky.

 

We stood in a clearing with the shack just behind us, the rock wall behind that, woods to both sides. A path wound its way out of the woods to the left, weaved through the boulders to pass near where we stood and then weaved away again through the boulders to the right and on into the woods.

 

“That way,” said Heather and pointed toward the right as she stepped into her bindings and took the harness onto her shoulders. She started skiing and the sled came along behind her, Treble sitting upright in the contraption looking very happy about it. I stepped into my bindings and followed along behind. The snow was a foot deep, but Heather cut right through it and the sled’s runners fit perfectly into the twin grooves she cut into the snow. I kept my skis in the same ruts as I followed along. In five minutes we’d made it to the edge of the clearing and into the woods. We headed downriver, the tumbling water to our left as we slid along. I had some questions—a lot of questions, in fact—but Heather was in a hurry to get us somewhere and I couldn’t hold to the pace she was setting and talk at the same time, so I shut up and skied.

 

The temperature was below freezing, with icicles hanging from the lower branches of the trees that overhung the river to our left and the snow glaring in the sunshine. There was a light breeze in our face and for the first few minutes I enjoyed the skiing. I discovered the trick was to slide the feet forward rather than step, and I discovered, too, that staying warm wasn’t a problem when one is cross-country skiing. As soon as we were in the woods and out of the breeze, in fact, I could feel the sweat break out on my face.

 

By that time Heather and little Treble were thirty meters ahead of me and so I tried to quicken the pace, which turned out to be a mistake. There was a fallen branch in the path, and while it was covered with as much snow as the rest of the trail it still meant I had to either stop, turn sideways and carefully step over the branch, or go ahead and try to ski right over it. Heather’s tracks made it clear she’d gone right over it, and so I tried to ski it, too. I fell.

 

Cross-country skis don’t have quick-release bindings, so when one falls, one ends up in a tangle of skis, poles, arms, and legs. And, in my case, some pain.

 

Pain is more interesting than you perhaps know. Sometimes it’s real, sometimes it’s phantom pain that your brain—confused by amputation or other systemic shock—invents for you as it tries to cope. Sometimes there’s more pain than the injury should be producing as the brain amplifies the signal. Sometimes there’s no pain at all even when the signals are being sent; the brain simply chooses to ignore them.

 

In my case, I hadn’t felt any pain in a couple of years. The knee surgeries and the battered right ankle that were reminders of my time spent playing basketball and which used to ache pretty much constantly before I met up with Twoclicks and was brought to S’hudon, had been injected with nanos that did their work admirably. Since the day I’d had the nanos introduced I’d nearly forgotten what it was like to not feel good, and so as I lay there in the snow and wondered whether my ankle was sprained or broken I marveled at the pain—electric jabs of it that shot up from my ankle through my calf, along with a nauseating deep ache that was centered just above the ankle.

 

I tried to move my body around enough that I could reach down and touch the ankle, as if that would help somehow; but the movement sent more sharp jabs up through the calf. I decided that I needed to lie there for another few minutes and rest, thinking surely Heather would come back for me soon.

 

And then I realized the implications of the pain. What the hell had happened to my nanos? They should have instantly dampened the pain and started the healing process. I’d twisted ankles during my daily jogs a few times on S’hudon and the pain of that had lasted for seconds, no more.

 

I heard the sound of boots crunching through the snowy underbrush behind me and well off the path. I managed to turn my head up enough to look—wondering why Heather was off the path and off her skis—and there was my brother Tommy, walking toward me, stepping through the snow to stand over me and shake his head and say, in that same tone of voice he used the very day I left Earth: “You always were clumsy, Peter.”

 

* * * *

 

Egmont Key

 

On that day at Egmont Key, I stood there in the waist-deep water and Sweeped like crazy the scene as turtles by the hundreds, by the thousands, swam past me, bumping my legs and then moving on, driven to lay those eggs and ignoring anything that lay in their way. Tommy would be famous, I thought. All those years of work had paid off.

 

I looked for him. He’d been next to me for a while and then he left to move toward the beach so he could video the mothers arriving and digging. I stayed in the water and did a Sweep of him heading into the beach. It was astounding footage, watching him wade through a thick throng of turtles all heading to shore with him. You could see their plate-sized shells all scrambling along in a hurry, bumping up against each other and him as the turtles fought to reach the shore, find a patch of sand, scratch a deep hole and then deposit one hundred eggs or more. I zoomed in, I pulled back, I panned, I came in tight. Every shot was better than the last.

 

Tommy, I was sure, would be a global household name within a day. I was happy for him, happy to have a small part in making it happen.

 

And then there came my way a shape, sharklike, a shadow in the water. Near it, another shadow, thicker, surfacing and then down again rolling in the warm sea, a porpoise, I guessed. Around these two visitors there were ridleys everywhere by the hundreds, serving-plate-sized little sea turtles, swimming hard, driven by the need to lay those eggs on the beach just a few dozen yards away from where Tommy stood, triumphant.

 

The shark form circled and then came to a stop, the thicker porpoise next to it. They were dead still in the water as the ridleys swam on by. And then the porpoise sank at the rear end and I could see in the clear Gulf water that there were short legs and it planted them and stood, rising from the water to stare at me, nictitating membranes blinking in the sun. This was how I met Twoclicks.

 

The shark was blurring and there were terrible changes taking place there in the water. I could hear tearing and cracking sounds as cartilage and bone and skin suffered and altered and then the shark-shape, no longer anything like a shark at all, of course, stood on its own gorgeous legs and it was Heather rising from the water to brush back her wet hair and smile at me. I knew her well. Much too well, and I was ashamed of our history; but then she smiled and shook her blond hair out a bit and said “Hello, Peter. I’m back,” and I was, once again, lost.

 

* * * *

 

Tangled Up

 

“Let’s see what we can do to get you out of that tangle, Peter,” Tommy said, kneeling down beside me and working on the bindings to my skis.

 

In a few seconds he had clicked open the bindings and, very gently, pulled the skis and poles away from where I lay there. Then he helped me sit up.

 

As he pulled me up, I looked around and Heather and Treble were nowhere to be seen. I hadn’t thought they were that far ahead, and in any case Heather’s senses are remarkable: hearing, eyesight, touch, taste, smell, all are enhanced dramatically. She is a construct, after all, a mechanical woman; and she had demonstrated to me emphatically any number of times that her creator had endowed her with inalienable rights that were blindingly superior to yours and mine.

 

And yet she wasn’t here.

 

“We’ll meet up with Heather and that little prince in a bit, Peter, don’t you worry,” said Tommy, smiling. “And this time we’ll keep you all alive for a while, too.”

 

This time? I didn’t know what he meant by that.

 

I also didn’t know what the hell had happened to Tommy. I took my first good look at him and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He was on snowshoes, dressed in jeans and a ski jacket with a pea cap on his head. He leaned on a staff for support, standing crookedly as if he might fall right over without that staff for support.

 

His clothing hung on him loosely, his face gray with illness. He looked like he was dying, and yet I knew that couldn’t be so. I’d made a deal with Twoclicks more than a year ago that I’d trail along to S’hudon, a polite Earthie pet to entertain Twoclicks and his aristocratic friends. I’d send my Sweep home and keep the Earthies entertained. I’d take notes and write a book. I’d play nice. I’d willingly suspend my disbelief about Heather and make love with her in the most public of ways while S’hudon and the six worlds of The Seven other than Earth watched and commented. That was the insanity that was my life on S’hudon.

 

And in return my nanos kept me healthy and what I saw and what I said and what I heard were being watched and heard back home. By hundreds of millions, Heather told me. On a good day, when something as exciting as the hunt with Twoclicks and his siblings occurred, nearly a billion.

 

And there was this:

 

* * * *

 

One month to the day after Twoclicks and Heather showed up at the beach, we were all out on the Gulf, the four of us, beyond sight of land where Twoclicks could swim in the warm Gulf in peace, while we three watched. He had dampened his nanos so the screens were down. He wanted to feel the water, breathe the air, revel in the warmth without protection. He liked the sense of danger, knowing, always, that in seconds he could re-engage and that, always, Heather was there to protect him.

 

Tommy, watching from the aft deck of Serapis, wasn’t saying much. He looked tired. It had been a difficult month for him. First, the realization that somehow—he couldn’t figure out how, but it had to be true—Twoclicks and Heather had brought those hundreds of turtles to that beach. No test could prove that was so: Tommy and his colleagues had done everything they could to analyze the turtles and their eggs and couldn’t find anything. But Tommy knew, he knew.

 

And in that knowing he knew more. These first tentative appearances by the S’hudonni had been made—Twoclicks in Florida, Whistle in Toronto, Octave in Paris. They said they were curious, that was all. And then, a week later, that they had seen some areas where they might help us. And then, a week later, they voiced a certain insistence on helping.

 

And so it went, and Tommy knew what it meant. Science. Our science. Our understanding of Things As They Are and our efforts to understand more: all that was gone. We knew, essentially, nothing. As Yeats once said: All had changed, changed utterly. And yes, a terrible beauty was born.

 

Tommy told me, a few days before we agreed to take Twoclicks and Heather out on the Serapis, that he felt like he’d been thrown back to the Stone Age. Everything he knew was obsolete. Science itself was obsolete. The S’hudonni knew everything, could go anywhere, could do anything.

 

If, of course, they wanted to. And that turned out to be a very large “if,” as we came to realize.

 

But all that was yet to come. For now, I joined Tommy on the aft deck while Serapis lay at anchor over the Boca Banks, the water just twenty feet deep though we were ten miles out.

 

We watched Twoclicks swimming, those small arms folded back, that stubby body suddenly looking suited to its environment as he sped by, then surfaced and looked our way, then went back underwater and sped away at a pace that was astonishing. He so obviously belonged in that medium; all the clumsiness we saw in him when he walked on land was gone.

 

Tommy lit up a Camel, blew out the smoke, looked out toward Twoclicks as he said quietly, “You do know I hate these sons-of-bitches, right?”

 

“They’re just a few hundred years ahead of us, Tommy, that’s all. And they happened to come now, and happened to find you and me.”

 

“You think it’s all coincidence, Petey?” He took another drag, then flicked the cigarette out into the water. “You think they came and just stumbled onto you and me? That seems pretty damn unlikely to me.”

 

I shrugged my shoulders. “Lots of things look unlikely if you think of them that way, Tommy. I think they were looking for some people, some humans, to do certain things for them and we just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

 

“Yeah, right place, right time,” he said. He nodded toward Heather, who was up on the flying deck keeping an eye on Twoclicks’ cavorting. “And what about her? God, I thought I loved her.”

 

“Yeah,” I admitted, “that’s a puzzle, why she did what she did.” Then I jabbed him in the shoulder, “But, hey pal, you never could figure out women.”

 

He didn’t laugh.

 

We heard a distant rumble, deep, the throaty growl of a cigarette boat. In those days the shock of the Arribada had worn off and the big changes hadn’t started yet, so life for most people was going on as it always had. Your typical American doesn’t know much about science, or care. As long as the car starts, the wireless and cell phones work, the planes fly, the stores are open, the bars sell beer: everything seems fine.

 

That was Tempest headed our way, the big cigarette boat of the Jensen brothers, a couple of bubbas that we’d known since childhood, when they’d been the high school bullies. These days, they lived on a barrier island in some luxury and with a very fast boat, but with no discernible source of income. You figure it out.

 

I nodded toward Tempest and the brothers. “Coming back in from a pickup, you think?”

 

Tommy lit another Camel. “In broad daylight? I doubt it.”

 

“So they’re just out for a little fishing?” But I didn’t see any poles and Tempest wasn’t rigged for fishing. They were a few hundred meters away, but I thought I saw the Jensens standing on deck together, looking our way, maybe pointing.

 

There was a puff of smoke from where they stood, and then, a half-second later, a sharp crack of sound. They were shooting at us. No, they were shooting at Twoclicks; I heard more shots fired and saw the splash where the bullets were hitting the water all around Twoclicks.

 

Tommy saw all this the same way I did, and both of us were running for the flying deck at the same moment. We had a rifle up there somewhere, and we could gun the engines and get Serapis moving, but it was really futile and I knew it even as we ran. Tempest was three or four times faster than Serapis and those boys knew how to shoot and Tommy and I didn’t.

 

Still, we had to try something, and so Tommy grabbed the unloaded rifle and started pulling open drawers and lockers, searching for some ammunition. I pushed the throttle forward.

 

I heard Heather behind us, coming up the steps to the flying deck. “Can you buy us a few minutes’ time, Peter?”

 

I looked over at Tempest, which hadn’t bothered to react yet to our slow turn to move away. More shots were fired. Twoclicks was under water, presumably swimming our way.

 

“Five minutes is probably all we have if they decide to come after us,” I said.

 

Heather smiled. She was very calm. “Two minutes will do it,” she said, and she started back down the steps. I heard a splash over port side and there was Twoclicks, just his face above water as another shot was fired. Nothing splashed nearby.

 

Instead of running I turned us to starboard and put us between Tempest and Twoclicks. I could hear the bullets slapping into the water, then my front glass shattered as a slug hit it and pieces of wood sprayed all around me as another shot hit the railing next to me. I felt a bee sting in my right cheek, another in my forehead, and realized I’d been hit by the shattered shards of wood.

 

We were, by then, blocking the aim of the Jensens and Heather went in over the side and helped Twoclicks get to the boat. I’d pulled the throttle back while they got that done and as the engine noise died down I heard a curious distant scream in the air, catlike, a yowl. Tommy helped pull them aboard and as they lay there, Heather tending to Twoclicks, I pushed the throttle all the way and headed away, Serapis’ engines drowning out that high scream. But I knew something was coming. Something did come. The world changed.

 

Afterward, with Tempest burned to the waterline and the Jensen brothers dead, with Twoclicks nursing a flesh wound where one slug had nicked him, with me putting alcohol on the cuts on my face from where I’d pulled out the wooden splinters, with the screamship that had saved us all back in orbit and circling peacefully, with me and Heather standing there on the aft deck as Tommy took the helm and Serapis headed toward the Boca pass and home: a lot of things cleared up for me, a lot of realities emerged.

 

For starters, Heather told me I was right about everything, much to my sorrow. My brother was dying, a tumor in the brain: a glioblastoma multiforme astrocytoma. Grade IV, as deadly as it gets. He had ninety days to live if we didn’t do anything, maybe a year if we went for the surgery and full chemo. Twelve months. Maybe.

 

The S’hudonni could fix what was killing Tommy, Heather said. They had med nanos that could do the job, and Tommy’s humanity didn’t matter. They were expensive and proscribed for Earthies, these nanos, but Twoclicks could manage it if I was willing.

 

“Willing?” I asked her. “Willing to do what?”

 

And she told me the plan. I would leave Earth and travel to the home planet with Twoclicks and herself. I could Sweep a journal and send it home. I could write a book or two about it all. I’d be well paid and I’d be comfortable. And I’d have her.

 

But I’d be leaving Tommy and everything else behind. For two years, she said, or maybe more. I said I’d think about it.

 

When we got Serapis back to the marina there were no officials anywhere. The only indication that anything had happened was a Coast Guard helicopter that had trailed us politely from about five miles out to the boat slip and now hovered as we tied Serapis off and disembarked. Then the Coasties left us to ourselves and we went our separate ways. And I chose what I had to choose, as you must know, though it all got a lot more complicated right there at the end.

 

* * * *

 

Aggressive

 

And now here was Tommy, dying, and all bets were off.

 

Tommy saw the look on my face. “I look like crap, eh, Peter? Well, I should look like crap. I’m dying. The cancer’s back and aggressive and I’ve got another couple of months, maybe, say the medics.”

 

“I’m sorry, Tommy. I thought the cancer was in remission.”

 

“Yeah, well, it was, until I figured out what was going on. And why. And that you were behind it all.”

 

“Oh, Tommy.” I tried to stand and managed to get to my feet—the pain seemed to be easing. “I don’t know what you think is happening, but I can tell you it’s a whole lot more complicated than you know.”

 

“Sure it is, Peter. And you’ve got it sussed, right?”

 

He put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, a long, crisp single note. It echoed sharply in the gorge and then died away. A few seconds after that there was an answering whistle: two short notes and then nothing.

 

“Your girlfriend and that S’hudonni princeling are waiting for us up ahead, Peter. We have to get moving.”

 

“I don’t think I can put any pressure on this ankle, Tommy.”

 

He smiled. “I think you’ll be surprised at how good that ankle starts to feel, Peter, at least for a few minutes.” He walked over into the underbrush, pushed the snow away from a pile of branches, found one he liked, and brought it back. “Here, use this like a crutch for the first few minutes and then see what happens. It’s only a half mile or so downriver to the cave and there we can talk a little more and I can clue you in on how things really are.”

 

“Thanks,” I said, and grabbed the branch. It was a long way from being a crutch, but it would help. “Maybe we can talk a bit while we walk?”

 

“I doubt it,” Tommy said, and walked away while two others dressed in winter jackets came in from the woods to stand by me. Tommy turned back once to glance at me. “Meg and Andy will help you get there, Peter, but they’re not very talkative with people like you, so I suspect you’ll do best to just focus on your walking. I’ll be up ahead, getting things ready. See you in a bit.” And he melted away into the winter woods. It was interesting that as he disappeared into a thick stand of trees near the riverbank, the pain began to ease considerably in my ankle. And as I walked along with the very quiet Meg and Andy, the sprained ankle felt better and better. By the time we reached a pile of large boulders that had fallen to block the path, I was able to follow my guides as they scrambled over the boulders, down the other side, and then to the right and onto a narrow path that wound through more boulders, some spindly trees and, finally, to a spot where I could see, perhaps one hundred meters ahead, the mouth of a large cave at the base of the gorge wall.

 

Just outside the cave mouth I saw Heather and Treble, standing there, waiting for me. I’m not great with body language when it comes to the S’hudonni, but it looked to me like Treble was sad. Couldn’t say I blamed him much.

 

* * * *

 

Suppression

 

“I’m sorry I didn’t see this coming, Peter,” Heather said to me as I walked up to her.

 

“Yes, Peter, we’re sorry,” said Treble, who was holding Heather’s hand.

 

Tommy wasn’t around and Meg and Andy stayed behind, keeping an eye on me but not interrupting otherwise. My ankle felt sore again as I stepped inside the cave.

 

Heather looked . . . odd. Displaced somehow. Treble looked excited. I gave both of them a quick hug. It was good to see them alive and well.

 

“How did this happen, Heather?” I asked her.

 

“Your brother seems to have a suppressor.”

 

“A suppressor?” I had a crazy image of one of those things the doctor uses to hold your tongue down while she looks at your throat.

 

“Suppressors put out a field that stops everything generated by S’hudon’s technology. All the power generated, all the data feeds, the whole stream. And so everything quits working, including the nanos. Or that’s what I’m told. I’ve never actually seen one.”

 

“You’ve never seen one?” That didn’t seem possible. As far as I was concerned Heather knew everything or could find it out in fractions of a second.

 

“I wasn’t sure such a thing existed, Peter. It’s said to be a First Empire artifact, something from the days before the families came to power.”

 

I’d heard something from Heather before about the First Empire, but I’d never followed up on it. In the great flood of information I’d been wallowing in for months, the First Empire was just one more impenetrable piece of history. When was it? What was it? Obviously I needed to know.

 

Heather was still talking: “It’s just the same as with the kelly devices, Peter. There are only a very few and no one talks about who has them or who doesn’t or how they got them or even how they work.

 

“There are always rumors. Maybe one family or another has one; or maybe there’s one for each ruling family; or, some say, the reason the families go to war so often isn’t for profit, it’s to get the one suppressor that’s said to exist or to take a kelly away from another family. “

 

“And Twoclicks hasn’t told you exactly where the truth is in all this?”

 

“Two doesn’t know any more than I do, I think. Or at least I thought that until today.” She reached up to touch her left ear, shook her head. “I can tell you this: I’m isolated. My feed is gone. My access to the wash. It’s a terrible feeling.”

 

I could see she looked frightened by it, and I’d never seen Heather look frightened. Ever. “Where would Tommy get something like that?”

 

Treble had been listening quietly. At that he question he piped up with a quick low, sibilant hiss and a few clicks. Then he said in English so I could understand: “Uncle Whistle.”

 

Heather nodded, patted him on the head. “Well, that would make sense, though it’s hard to imagine Whistle having such a thing and parting with it, much less giving it to an Earthie.”

 

I wanted to ask her about that and it might have changed some things if I’d been able to, but that was when I heard: “Peter!” And it was Tommy, walking over toward us. He was smiling. “You and Heather get the little princeling ready for some travel. We’re leaving in thirty minutes, on skis. The three of you are going to watch all the fun.”

 

And that we most certainly did.

 

* * * *

 

Several More Items of Interest

 

Here are some more things I have learned during my time with Twoclicks and Heather.

 

1) When Heather changes from one form to another the sounds are unfortunate, the smells disturbing, the sights unbearable. On a good day, the end result is pleasant—even too pleasant. On a bad day, the end result is terrifying.

 

2) Prostitution sneaks up on you. You think your job is to write the truth of a thing and then realize it is actually something quite different. You think you are a Cronkite and realize you’re a Tokyo Rose. It’s shameful, but the pay is very, very good. The deal was that I would live a very long and very healthy life thanks to S’hudon. My brother’s cancer would be gone, eradicated. My sex life with Heather would be amazing. Many millions would view my sweep on a regular basis. I would be important, trusted, loved. I would not be a one-hit wonder. I would be a success.

 

3) Blood is thinner than the water of the Great Loop Current. Blood is angry and guilty and venomous. Blood is deadly. Blood is brothers. And brothers lie.

 

* * * *

 

Release

 

I hit the release button on the bindings with the tip of my left pole and then stepped out of the skis to walk over to the edge of the bluff and look out over the winter waters of Lake Ontario. My ankle felt weak, but okay. Straight ahead, a couple of kilometers across the lake, rose the Six Futures of Man, enormous and spindly towers more than four hundred meters tall. These towers and a dozen more sets of them dotted around North America propagated the wash of energy, and so the prosperity that had purchased the loyalty of most of the population. Built in a week by the nanos, “Free Power for a Free World,” was how the S’hudonni styled it when the Futures first went up, long after I was already on S’hudon. Yes, “Free” came up twice in those six words. No ironies there, right?

 

All one had to do to enjoy this energy was buy the receiving units and play by the new rules. Most everyone had, but not my brother Tommy and his little crew of dissidents.

 

We had hiked and skied to get to the shoreline. I was tired after reaching the shore, Tommy’s suppressor hiding us and denying us at the same time.

 

Tommy showed me the suppressor, such a small thing, the size of a deck of playing cards. Black, with a small touch screen on one side, its range adjustable and directional, from a few meters to several kilometers. He claimed he’d acquired it through a dissident cell on the old Canadian side: people who still loved their freedom, who hadn’t been seduced by the S’hudonni. There were thousands of dissident cells all over North America, he promised me, ready to take their own action once they knew the moment had arrived and the Futures of Man had fallen. And there were tens of millions of people, he was sure, ready to rise up and join them when the moment came, when freedom came, when the towers came tumbling down. They’d give up all those creature comforts that had been bestowed by the S’hudonni: the medical gifts, the high-speed rails, the internal comlinks that every kid had or wanted to have, the prosperity that came from a firm hand on the controls of government, of economy, of life. They’d give that all up to be free.

 

Me? I had my doubts. I don’t know much about anything, I’ll admit. But I’d spent enough time in America to know comfort mattered, and prosperity trumped trouble every time. Most Americans had spent their comfortable lives ignoring anything that hinted at discomfort, physical or emotional. In this case, given S’hudon’s might, that American attitude might just be the right route to take.

 

Behind me, Heather and Treble were standing behind some trees, trying to stay out of the wind that came in off the lake. Just behind them were our guards, Meg and Andy. It was very cold.

 

I watched Heather as she slapped her arms against her chest a few times for warmth. It was unthinkable that Heather—the perfect construct, the complete package—could be cold, but there she was, shivering.

 

Treble, though, was smiling, enjoying himself, unaffected by the weather. Since the nanos weren’t working inside the suppressor field I supposed that his warmth was natural for him. The S’hudonni were comfortable in cold water, their body fat protecting them from hypothermia. Treble probably liked it here.

 

I turned around again to look back over the lake and to the Futures of Man. To my right, a pair of funnel clouds edged along the back side of a squall line of lake-effect snow that was moving south and east. I hadn’t realized that waterspouts could happen like that over cold water, but then that was just one of many things I was coming to realize that I didn’t know.

 

The snow might eventually drift our way. Treble would enjoy that, I guessed, depending on what happened here at this shore.

 

* * * *

 

Heather

 

After the turtles, after the Arribada, after the Jensen brothers, Tommy disappeared and Heather reappeared and life got very interesting for me.

 

I didn’t worry about Tommy for the first few days. He was a big boy and he’d been through a lot. If he wanted to go find a place to walk on the beach and think it all through that was fine with me. I hoped he was doing a lot of drinking and staring at a lot of sunsets and finding some people to talk about the weather with.

 

For me, I came to think I was done with Heather and Twoclicks after the day I saw the Jensen brothers die and then she offered me that future out among the stars. After we got Serapis back to the Sea Horse Pier and tied her off, after Tommy went his way and a limousine took Twoclicks and Heather away behind tinted glass, I was alone.

 

I expected a call or an e-mail or a knock on the door within the day but that didn’t happen. And then a second day passed and I started to think it had all been a mirage, a shining image of a distant city that would always be just out of reach. I decided that it was for the best. It was too outrageous to be real, healing Tommy and sending me on such a journey to such a place. It was unthinkable and I’d been smart to not even hint to Tommy what the offer was, the heartbreak of offering a cure and then yanking it away would have been horrendous. He was already shattered by the Death of Science, which I’d already started to Sweep and blog about. We were the natives, the aborigines, and mighty S’hudon and its Six Planets (we’d be the Seventh) had probably forgotten more about the sciences than we could ever learn.

 

I had just blogged on that and was thinking of heading back out to the Sea Horse Pier to do a Sweep follow-up when there was a knock at the door and there, when I opened it, stood Heather.

 

“Where’s Tommy?” I asked her, angry that she was here and suspecting that she and Twoclicks knew where he was.

 

She walked in past me and went over to the bar, poured herself a glass of water, took a sip. “He’s all right, Peter. And hello, it’s nice to see you again, too.”

 

“Tommy’s been gone since we all left the boat, Heather. No phone calls, no texts, no e-mails, no nothing.”

 

“We’re keeping an eye on him. He’s on Caladesi Island, alone, camping, smoking his cigarettes. There are several turtle nests there, leatherbacks, and he’s camped right next to them. He keeps trying to go for walks on the beach.”

 

“Trying?”

 

“He’s dying, Peter. He doesn’t know that yet, but his cancer is very aggressive. For now, he has a headache that won’t quit, and he’s dizzy and disoriented much of the time. There’s some nausea. In another week that will all get worse. In six more weeks he’ll be dead.”

 

“Unless?”

 

“Yes, Peter. Unless you come with us. And Twoclicks promises he’ll make it very comfortable for you there. Just like home.”

 

I laughed. “Sure, all my friends will be there, and when I’m in the mood I’ll head over to the Harp and Thistle for a shepherd’s pie and a pint of imported Guinness, right? And there’s always some basketball on the high-def and the latest movies to watch, too, right? And plenty of half-court hoops with my friends?”

 

“Close,” she said, smiling. “You’ll be the only human, but otherwise, sure, there will be plenty of home cooking, and you’ll get televised sports and all the rest, Peter, including plenty of exercise. We’ll make you comfortable, I promise.”

 

“Two years? That’s it, and then I come home.”

 

“Two years, Peter, and then home if you want it. Or you can stay longer if you want that. That’s not long, Peter; just a couple of years and you’ll return as one of the richest—and healthiest—men on Earth.”

 

“Healthy? Those nanos?”

 

She nodded. “We’re not sure how you’ll age, Peter. You’re the first human to get this kind of full treatment. But you are definitely going to be one very healthy guy.”

 

“And Peter will live?”

 

“Peter’s cancer could be in remission by tomorrow, Peter, and gone, eradicated completely, a day or two after that. All he’ll know is that he feels a lot better. He’ll figure it was a virus and he’s thrown it off at last.”

 

So it was all pretty obvious, except for one thing: “Why me, Heather?”

 

She walked over to me, stood close, her face a foot away from mine. Those lips, those eyes. She leaned up to kiss me and I sank into the embrace. The smell of her, the feel of her; these mattered as much as anything. I was lost. Utterly.

 

We pulled apart a few inches. “Okay?” she asked. And I nodded, picked her up, and walked her back to the bar, set her atop it, started, slowly, deliberately, pulling her T-shirt over her head. Those perfect breasts. My god. I kissed the nipple on the right breast. The left. Still kissing the breasts, then her lips, then back to the breasts, the side of the neck; each kiss a light touch as her breath caught. The smell of her was perfection. Perfection. I reached to her shorts and was undoing the front button as she leaned over me, her hair falling over me as she kissed the top of my head, her hands on my cheeks. The button loosened.

 

And I heard the door behind me open. Heard a cry of anger and anguish and disgust and pain. I turned. It was Tommy. Standing there. Watching us.

 

And he turned and fled. And me? I went to S’hudon.

 

* * * *

 

In the Water

 

There was an object out in the water, working its way toward the shore. That would be Tommy, I was certain. He’d kayaked away from the cold stone beach a couple of hours ago, heading out toward the Futures in an old small Swifty kayak with an electrical trolling motor attached to the back, its footprint blocked from S’hudon’s detection by Tommy’s suppressor set to cover him, even as it still covered us. He carried a half-dozen bangers, their signatures blocked by the same suppressor. The bangers were small things, no bigger than a loaf of bread; but they would bring down the Futures of Man, no question about it.

 

His plan was to attach the bangers to the central tower and head back to meet us on the shoreline before he sent the signal to ignite the bangers. Then we could all watch as Everything Changed, as he said to me just before climbing into the kayak.

 

Well, here he was, heading toward us. Great, just great.

 

Heather walked up to me. She held Treble by the hand, that thin arm of his reaching up to Heather and all three of those short, stubby S’hudonni fingers buried in Heather’s hand.

 

The three of us stood on the bluff and watched Tommy motor in the last two hundred meters to the shore. We could hear the scraping of the bottom of the kayak as it hit the shoreline rocks. Tommy got out, looked up at us, and walked our way, up the narrow switchback path that climbed the bluff from rocky beach to where we stood. We watched him climb, going slowly. I was guessing he was very tired.

 

Finally he began to near the top of the bluff.

 

Heather’s other hand found mine and she squeezed. “I want you to know something, Peter.”

 

I looked at her.

 

“Whatever happens in the next few minutes, I want you to know this: I love you. As much as I’m capable, I love you. I always have.”

 

Treble giggled and reached up with his other hand to grab mine, so the three of us all held hands there while Tommy climbed up to us. “I love you, too, Uncle Peter. Can I call you ‘Uncle Peter’? I will call you ‘Uncle Peter’. And you’re the very best Earthie that ever was!” And he hugged me, those arms not quite making it around my waist.

 

Good grief. I admit to a certain confusion. Love and hugs?

 

“Heather,” I said, “What the hell is going on?”

 

But Tommy got to the top of the bluff before she could answer.

 

He stood there, catching his breath, panting as he leaned over to put his hands on his knees and recover from the climb.

 

Then he stood up straight. He looked terrible: pale, gaunt, his eyes feverish and sunken. “Well, Peter,” he said, struggling to say it through that troubled breathing as he reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out the suppressor. “Well, here we go, brother. This is it. First, I turn this off,” and he thumbed it. I could actually feel the difference. I felt better, stronger. He tossed the suppressor to Andy, who caught it and held it in his hand as he walked over with Meg and each of them took a side and helped Tommy stand up straight. It occurred to me that Tommy might have been exaggerating about the number of people he had in his little group of dissidents. He might have been exaggerating about a lot of things, in fact. But the three of them were all that was needed at the moment. Meg reached into a pocket and pulled out a small device the size and shape of an old-fashioned pen. She handed it to Tommy. So that meant the remote that would start this war had been right here by me for hours. I could have fought for it. I could have tried.

 

Treble let go of my hand and so did Heather. They backed away to stand alone.

 

Tommy was busy using both hands to pull down on one side of the device, then press on the opposite side. On the top side a round, phallic segment emerged and grew to six or seven centimeters in height. Tommy held the device in his hand and looked out toward the Futures of Man.

 

“Tommy,” I said, “you know this doesn’t have to happen. All hell is going to break loose. A lot of people, a lot of humans, are going to die. Please, Tommy, think about it. Heather can talk to Twoclicks back on S’hudon. You can negotiate. You can get what you want and no one has to die. Including you, Tommy. You can live. The nanos can heal you.”

 

He turned to look at me. “You’re so stupid, Peter. You really think that’s what this is about?”

 

“Tommy. You know we can’t let you do this.” It was Heather.

 

“That’s right,” Treble piped in. “We can’t allow this.”

 

I turned to pat the cute little princeling on his head, wondering if he—or any of us—would survive the next few minutes.

 

But Treble didn’t need any comfort from his Uncle Peter. Instead, Treble’s right hand was buried in the folds of his fleshy gut and he was pulling something from those folds. The small little antique deringer from Twoclicks’ collection. How had he hidden it there? I had no idea.

 

Treble stood taller than I’d have thought he could. He aimed the pistol at Tommy, who wasn’t more than two meters away. “I’m sorry,” he said.

 

Meg and Andy had weapons out now, some kind of handguns, aimed at Treble. Tommy waved at them to hold their fire.

 

Tommy shook his head. “That old thing can’t possibly fire, little princeling.” And then he laughed. “And, hell, I’m dead anyway soon.” He pulled his thumb down on the remote and there was a bright flash behind us, out in the lake. He tossed the remote down onto the ground, shoved the suppressor into his pocket.

 

“Yes,” said Treble, “my father told me you’d think that.” And he pulled the trigger and the deringer fired. The force of the slug striking his chest staggered Tommy and sent him reeling. In a kind of terrible slow motion I saw Meg and Andy begin firing their weapons and the bullets hit Treble as he fired again and this one, too, caught Tommy in the chest and sent him backward, flailing, as he went over the edge of the bluff.

 

The sound of the explosion from the Futures of Man caught up with the light from the blast and I felt a concussion as I heard a low, rumbling boom. Treble was falling, hit by multiple shots fired by Meg and Andy. Heather was turning toward them—heroics in mind, I suppose—as they changed aim to fire at her. She didn’t make it more than a few steps toward them before she fell.

 

I thought about doing something heroic myself, but by now it should be clear to you that I am no hero; I am, rather, a struggler, a striver, a drudge.

 

So I turned to run, thinking I might jump over the edge of the bluff and hope to catch enough scrub brush on the way down to survive the fall.

 

“Uncle Peter,” I heard from behind as I turned.

 

I turned back. It was little Treble, bleeding and dying but still holding the deringer. He raised the gun to aim it at me.

 

“I don’t understand,” I said, wondering if the weapon was real or a clever fake, capable of anything. Could it fire another shot?

 

It could. “I’m sorry, Uncle,” he said as he pulled the trigger. I felt a horrible blow against the center of my chest and had a moment or two to think about why he’d done that to me—weren’t we pals, little Treble and I?—as I felt my legs give way beneath me and I collapsed toward the ground. I kneeled there, shocked. Treble seemed to be healing, and that weapon was no antique. He turned and fired at Meg and Andy, and as they fell the suppressor fell free onto the ground. Heather was rising, smiling at me as she picked up the suppressor, thumbed it to make some adjustment, and then, at least, came pain but also a sort of peace as it all began to recede from there and then it was getting very dark and there was a welcome, quiet calm and then there was darkness and a most profound peace at last.

 

* * * *

 

Things Emerge

 

A bubble emerged from the muck, slowly cleared as it rose, and then abruptly popped. It smelled of cinnamon and apple. It smelled like winter in Racine at Grandma’s house and my brother Tommy and I were just in from sledding and there were a lot of complicated things to do for two Florida kids visiting Grandma up north— taking off the mittens, taking off the knit caps, taking off the bulky down coats, undoing a long row of clasps on each rubber boot, shucking the boots, getting out of the snow pants, hanging all this up to dry on various nails in the snow-room before we could finally sit down. And all that time we could smell the hot cider and it was so incredibly appealing that we could barely stand being patient and waiting for Grandma to pour it into the cups for us and set it down in front of us.

 

But that was long ago, in another reality.

 

Here, in this reality, I was waking up from a deep sleep, and doing it while sitting in the hot muck of a backyard fumarole with Twoclicks. As my head slowly cleared I saw his smiling face emerge from the mud, eyes open as they cleared the muck, their membranes sliding back, then that porpoise smile of his emerging.

 

“Good memoriess?” Twoclicks asked me with that lisp of his.

 

They were. “How did you know I was thinking of home?”

 

He just smiled, then laughed. He was happy about something. Then he disappeared again beneath the bubbling mud and water and a final cinnamon bubble rose and popped.

 

I heard the sound of bare feet over the rock path that led to the fumarole from the house and I turned to see who it was.

 

Heather. Beautiful Heather. In her S’hudonni form, waddling toward me. I could see beneath or through or past that form, and I chose to think of the human form as her truest self, knowing it was a lie.

 

“Hello, Peter,” she said. “Looks like you’re finally really awake.”

 

She looked at the spot where Twoclicks had just disappeared; the mud was smoother there in a small circle of calm. “And Twoclicks was just chatting with you, I’m guessing?”

 

“He was, but he didn’t really say much. What the hell happened, Heather? I thought I’d wake up on Earth and we’d go find Tommy.”

 

“It’s a rather long story, Peter, but the simplest truth is that you’ve been there now several times and we all did what we had to do. You just don’t remember any of it.”

 

“Been there? To Earth?”

 

She held out a thin hand at the end of a frail arm and I took it. I heard the patter of smaller feet against the stones and turned to see little Treble, Twoclicks’ heir and my favorite of the various princelings. He smiled and took Heather’s other hand.

 

“Peter,” Heather said, “We have some terrible news for you.”

 

“Terrible news?” I was, after all, barely awake.

 

“Terrible,” said Treble, looking very somber.

 

I needed to get out of that fumarole. Only on S’hudon would they think it perfectly normal for someone to return to conscious thought to find himself in hot mud. I started to rise, but Heather put a hand on my shoulder to stop me.

 

“Tommy is dead, Peter. I’m sorry.”

 

I sat back down into the muck. I didn’t know what to say. My job had been to go to Earth and keep Tommy alive and calm things down. Tommy? Dead?

 

“Apparently I didn’t do a very good job on Earth.”

 

“You did just fine, Uncle Peter,” said Treble. “It wasn’t really your fault.”

 

Wasn’t really my fault? What the hell did that mean? Treble reached out to take my hand. “You did really, really good, Uncle Peter. Honest. You’ll realize it once you see the memory feeds.”

 

“That’s true, Peter,” said Heather, “it was all very necessary and you were something of a hero.” There was a disturbance over on the other side of the fumarole and Twoclicks’ head emerged. I’d forgotten he was in there.

 

“Yesss,” he said, “you did fine, friend Peter. Tommy chose death.”

 

Oh, my god.

 

Heather spoke: “He was killed on the first day of fighting, Peter. He’s a great hero to millions of people now, but he paid a terrible price for it. You’ll get the details later.”

 

“There was fighting?”

 

“A kind of civil war has broken out.”

 

“But the fighting goesss well,” said Twoclicks. “Our side prossperss.”

 

Heather patted my hand. “You’ll see, Peter. Twoclicks’ territory on Earth looks like it’s going to double. All of North America will be his. Whistle will have to capitulate soon.” She smiled. “Poor Whistle’s technology keeps failing at critical moments. There’s a little device we obtained because of your help that gives us the tool to win this war.”

 

Treble giggled.

 

“And meanwhile,” Heather was saying, “Two has plans for you. Right, Two?”

 

“Yess. Big planss for Peter.” And he disappeared again into the mud.

 

Great, I thought. Big plans. But Tommy was dead? How did it happen? I needed to know the hows and whys of his death. I needed to mourn.

 

Heather held out her hand to help me out of the mud, and I stepped up and out. Treble handed me a towel. “You were great, Uncle Peter. Wait till I tell you the whole story. You were very brave.”

 

“Yes, Peter, wait until we tell you the story,” Heather said, “But first,” and she smiled, “let’s get you inside and cleaned up.”

 

And she took my hand and waddled toward the door. I had questions, a lot of them. About Tommy. About life and death and myself. About those plans.

 

But later, while I was in the shower, there was a crackling and some groans from the bed in the other room as Heather changed. And so I finished the shower knowing that she would be there for me, my Heather. I stepped out of the shower and patted myself dry and then walked from the shower room into the bedroom. I took a deep breath and set aside my worries as she reached out to me and she pulled me to her. The questions—there were so many questions—would have to wait.

 

Copyright © 2010 Rick Wilber