Brother Perfect

ROBERT REED

Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986 and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as selling many stories to Science Fiction Age, Universe, New Destinies, Tomorrow, Synergy, Starlight, and elsewhere.

Reed may be one of the most prolific of today’s young writers, particularly at short-fiction lengths, seriously rivaled for that position only by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Brian Stableford. And—also like Baxter and Stableford—he manages to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories such as “The Utility Man,” “Birth Day,” “Blind,” “A Place With Shade,” “THe Toad of Heaven,” “Stride,” “The Shape of Everything,” “Guest of Honor,” “Decency,” “Waging Good,” and “Killing the Morrow,” among at least a half-dozen others equally as strong, count as among some of the best short work produced by anyone in the eighties and nineties; many of them were recently collected in his long-overdue first collection, The Dragons of Springplace. Nor is he nonprolific as a novelist, having turned out eight novels since the end of the eighties, including The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, and Beneath the Gated Sky. His most recent book is a new novel, Marrow. Reed lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Reed is confident enough in the richness of his imagination to feel comfortable writing stories that take place in the far future, and much of his output is set in milieus millions of years removed from the time we know. Like some other young writers of the nineties, including Paul J. McAuley and Stephen Baxter, Reed is producing some of the most inventive and colorful of Modern Space Opera, stuff of a scale so grand and played out across such immense vistas of time that it makes the “superscience” writing of the thirties look pale and conservative by comparison. His sequence of novellas for Springplace. Nor is he nonprolific as a novelist, having turned out eight novels since the end of the eighties, Asimov’s, for instance, including “Sister Alice,” “Brother Perfect,” “Mother Death,” “Baby’s Fire,” and “Father to the Man,” detail internecine warfare and intricate political intrigues between families of posthuman immortals with powers and abilities so immense that they are for all intents and purposes gods. Or as in the sequence of stories unfolding in F&SF, Science Fiction Age, and Asimov’s, including “The Remoras,” “Aeon’s Child,” “Marrow,” and “Chrysalis,” that involve the journeyings of an immense spaceship the size of Jupiter, staffed by dozens of exotic alien races, that is engaged in a multimillion-year circumnavigation of the galaxy.

Here, in one of the best of the “Sister Alice” series, he treats us to a vivid and colorful story that catapults us deep into the heart of the posthuman future, sweeping us along on a fast-paced cosmic chase of mind-boggling scale and scope, with the destiny of worlds at stake … .

1

“Bless the dead!”

—Perfect, in conversation

 

It was the ultimate toast—“Bless the dead!”—and despite appearances, the toastmaster was human. His scaly arm lifted a stone mug, punctuating the word “dead,” then his wide mouth managed both a smile and the appropriate bitterness, viper eyes skipping from face to face, knowing exactly what they wanted to find.

Patrons repeated the blessing with sloppy, communal voices.

No one needed to ask, “Which dead?”

The tavern’s longest wall was tied to a feed from the Core, from one of the doomed worlds. People saw a night sky that should have held thousands of closely packed suns, bright and dazzling; but instead there was a single blistering smear of white light, every lesser glow left invisible. The light was an explosion. Greater than a thousand supemovae, it was melting worlds and lifeforms, its heat and hard radiation barely diminished by a century’s relentless growth.

Unseen against that fierce light, people were being killed.

And people watched them die—people on the Earth, like here, and throughout the galaxy. For some it was an entertainment, grisly but fascinating. But many found no thrill, watching the carnage for deeply personal reasons.

The tavern was in a poor, crowded district. Its patrons belonged to the local race—human frames embellished with reptilian features, a calculated cold-bloodedness allowing them to thrive on lean, impoverished diets. Yet they were far from simple people. They had a long and durable and thoroughly shared history. Pooling their meager savings, they once sent a chosen few to the Core as colonists. A world was terraformed specifically for them—a lizardly Eden that these patrons could see whenever they wished, on any universal wall. But that world had been close to the explosion’s source, and it was obliterated in an evening. There were too many colonists for too few starships, and almost everyone died, boiling in a rain of charged particles and enchanted plasmas.

Some of these very people had watched the cataclysm from this tavern. And from that awful night came a ritual, a new custom, several minutes of each evening dedicated to the blessed dead.

Viper eyes saw something.

The toastmaster’s head locked in place, a wry little smile emerging.

“To Alice!” he shouted.

The wall changed feeds, suddenly showing a plainly dressed woman sitting alone in a white-walled prison cell, and the tavern, in one ringing voice, cried out:

“To Alice!”

“Give the bitch a long small horrible life.” And with that, the toastmaster drained his mug, enjoying the raucous approval.

“Horrible,” voices repeated, mugs striking mugs.

Then others, in drunken rebellion, roared, “Kill the bitch …!”

It was a delicious, much-practiced game.

But the toastmaster broke tradition by taking a slow step forward, wading into the crowd, lifting his emptied mug as his clear, almost songful voice shouted, “To the Families!”

“The Families!” people roared, in mocking admiration.

Then, from the back, a shrill voice cried out, “Kill them, too!”

Nobody repeated those dangerous words, but there was a pause, glacial and strange, nobody defending the Families. All the good they had done humanity in its myriad forms … and not so much as a kind word delivered as a whisper, in reflex.

The Ten Million Year Peace wavered on the brink of collapse.

Standing among the tightly packed bodies, the toastmaster fixed his eyes on a young man—dull black scales fringed with red; a crimson forehead merging with a sharp golden crest—and he touched the young man with his free hand, feeling the human face with the tips of his long, cool fingers.

Barely flinching, the patron watched as the toastmaster said, “The Families will pay for every crime.”

“Every crime,” was the chorus. “Make them pay!”

The young man whispered his response, a half-syllable slow.

The toastmaster appeared amused, but the voice was ice, saying, “Make them weak and poor. Like us.”

In an instant, the tavern went silent.

The young man straightened his back, glancing at the wall and the imprisoned woman, blue eyes wishing for instructions of inspiration. A flat voice muttered, “Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Make the Families weak, and poor—”

A claw-shaped blade struck from behind, piercing his skin at the neck, cutting between scales but with no trace of pain. No blood spurted from the surgical wound. The young man spun around, knocking the knife out of the assailant’s hand. But more blades appeared, slicing at his legs and butt and back, and despite strength enough to shatter a hundred arms, Ord stopped resisting, going rigid, standing like a statue while his false skin and cool meat were peeled away, falling in heaps around his ankles.

His true face lay exposed, small cuts healing in a moment. It was much like the face on the wall—the prisoner’s face—only younger, and male, the red hair cut short, warm blue eyes watching the world with amazement and a palpable pity.

No face in the galaxy was better known.

“A baby Chamberlain,” the patrons muttered, in horror and shock and with a rising visceral rage.

Ord lifted a hand. With remorse, he cried out, “I am sorry—”

They rushed him, using knives and stone mugs and teeth, hacking at his genuine flesh, pulling it from his strong bright bones. Then, with a mob’s idiocy of purpose, they soaked the still-living bones and brain in the tavern’s inventory, then sabotaged the fire-suppression system, setting a blaze that was a thousand times too cold to murder the weakest Chamberlain. But it didn’t matter. For years and years, that tavern would lay gutted, left as a monument, and people who hadn’t been there would claim otherwise, telling how on that night, in a small but significant way, they had helped mete out justice, butchering and cooking one of Alice’s own little brothers …!

2

Oh, I can tell you about your sister … .

Every human hope and historic truth, every foible and foolishness you can name, plus even the greenest prehuman emotions … each of them, without exception, have big homes inside Alice’s dear soul …!

—Perfect, in conversation

“First,” said a voice, “tell me why it happened.”

The voice had no source. It rose from the warm blackness, sounding a little angry and thoroughly stern. Ord barely heard his own voice saying, “It’s because I left the estates. That’s why.”

“You did, but that’s a wrong answer. Try again.”

“Lyman? Is that you—?”

“Try again,” boomed the voice. “Why did this happen?”

Ord remembered the attack and his brief, manageable pains. “They saw through my disguise. I must have made a mistake—”

“Many, but none of consequence. Your costume was well-made, and you were well-prepared to wear it.”

“Then what went wrong?”

“I am asking you. Think now.”

Ord tried to swallow without a mouth. He was home again, he assumed. An attack on him would cause a variety of alarms to sound, and it would be a simple matter for a brother to recover his parts. Yet what if the alarms had failed? His comatose mind could have been taken somewhere secure, unlikely as that seemed. This could be the beginning of a lengthy interrogation, a Chamberlain enemy wanting to pull the secrets out of him. Or, more likely, merely wishing to torture him.

“How did that gruesome drunk find you, Ord?”

“He had to be warned,” the boy replied.

“By a sibling, perhaps.”

“Never, no.” Brothers and sisters might have guessed his plans, but they wouldn’t have let others punish him.

“And who would?”

Possibilities swirled in the blackness, one name standing out against the others.

And the brotherly voice said, “I concur. Yes.”

A moment later, without warning, Ord had a face and eyes, waking to find himself whole again, new flesh over his salvaged bones. He was sprawled out on his own bed. Even with fresh, unfocused eyes, he recognized his room. Lyman stood in the doorway; Ord knew him by his long hair and the slumpshouldered, tight-faced appearance. Standing over the bed was an older, unintroduced brother, a hand lifting from Ord’s chest, a damp, warm discharge making the new heart shudder, then surge. “A long while since your body died. Am I right?”

“Yes, sir.” The brother had to know his complete medical history.

“Well, we pulled you from the ruins.” The Chamberlain face showed a large, self-congratulatory smile. “And we have filed criminal charges, plus civil suits. You broke our rules by leaving home, but then again, they broke everyone’s rules by attempting murder.” A weighty pause, then he asked, “If people maim, can they expect no retribution?”

“No, sir.”

From the doorway, Lyman asked, “Who warned the lizards?”

They weren’t lizards, thought Ord. It made him uneasy to hear his brother demeaning them.

“We know the culprit,” said their ancient brother. His expression changed by the moment, bouncing between menace and amusement. “And I’m sure our little brother will do what is necessary, when it comes time.”

They were clones, all derived from the Chamberlain patriarch. Ord and Lyman were babies, their ages counted in years and centuries. But their sibling might be thousands of millennia old, his face composed of substances more intricate than any flesh. Ancient ones like him were coming home again. After millions of years of wandering the Milky Way, suddenly they had vital work to do here: diplomatic missions; planning sessions; the allocation of the Family’s enormous resources. But repairing a damaged baby … well, that had to be a trivial chore … .

“Civil suits,” the ancient Chamberlain repeated, a gleeful laugh piercing the silence. “Oh, we’ll teach these people about pain, my boy. I promise—”

“Don’t,” Ord whispered.

Another laugh, vast and genuine.

“I mean it.” He made his new body sit up. “It was my fault, and I don’t want them hurt.”

“And I know you’re being honest,” said his brother. “I’m laughing because you think you have a voice here. Which you haven’t. It’s been decided. Our AI lawyers have set to work, and we’ll squeeze the last cold credits out of the bastards.” A bright little wink. “Someday, Baby, you’ll appreciate our efforts.”

Ord doubted it.

“Now,” said the brother, “thank me for your health.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Rest,” he advised.

Did a creature like him ever rest? Ord doubted that, too. Then he thought of asking when he would be able to travel the Earth … when, if ever, would the children be free to leave the Family estates … ?

But the brother had vanished, melting into the floor without sound or fuss. Possibly he had never been there in the first place … .

Ord glanced at Lyman, and Lyman returned the expression.

They were babies, they agreed.

What could they do?

 

 

“Don’t leave our estate,” was Lyman’s advice. “Or else.”

An unrepentant Chamberlain might be restricted to a smaller place, in other words. Like the old mansion. Or worse, his own tiny room. When he was Ord’s age, Lyman had traveled farther and broken many more rules, but that was before the Core. “Leaving was stupid,” he proclaimed, confident in his fears. “For any reason. Dumb, dumb, dumb.”

Ord examined himself. In the not-so-remote past, a child who was temporarily killed—regardless of reasons—was given some tiny improvement as a salve for any embarrassments. More mature blood, some enhanced sense. Perhaps even an enlarged mind. But no, Ord felt identical to what he was days ago: an old-fashioned human carriage being gradually improved, century by century, acquiring vast powers at a geologic pace.

It was a tradition, this prolonged immaturity.

It was an essential term of the Peace. If certain humans were to embrace godly powers, then shouldn’t they master each power in turn, with patience and an eye on their grave responsibilities?

Ord looked sixteen but was almost ten times older. And Lyman was several times older than him, his body and mind ready to leave home, ready to travel and work in space. A terraformer by training, he was another noble Chamberlain eager to help humanity and the galaxy … .

Yet all new postings were on hold.

“Because of the current situation,” one of their elders had promised. “A temporary measure, and a precaution, and for the time being, you’ll have to be patient, little ones.”

With a bitter, impatient voice, Lyman confessed, “I don’t understand. You could have gone anywhere, but why there?”

Ord had seen the lizard-folk die at the Core, their colorful and lovely bodies igniting as the homes melted around them, oceans boiling, and a mammoth scream rising up from the world itself. Horrible, gripping images, and he’d decided to visit the famous tavern, wanting to better understand how their relatives felt.

“And now you know,” his brother mocked.

Ord shrugged, seeing no reason to apologize.

Lyman grimaced, looking outdoors without focusing his eyes. “Just promise that you’ll stay where you belong.” But before Ord could respond, he added, “They tell me that I’m responsible for you babies. They say I’m your elder, and is that fair?”

New lungs expanded, the air as clean as medicine. “I’ll stay in my room for a million years, if you want.”

“Maybe you should,” Lyman warned him; then, with that glum assessment, he turned and walked away, ending their discussion before. Ord could spin even larger lies.

The boy climbed from bed, then dressed.

He rode the nearest stairwell to the ground floor. A pair of old bear-dogs greeted him, knowing his scent—tiny olfactory markers meaning Ord—and he equitably patted their broad heads, coaxing them to lay back down and nap. The PRIDE AND SACRIFICE sign was above the auxiliary door. He touched it, as always, then turned and jogged out to the stables.

What could he ride? What wouldn’t be too easy or dull?

The stables were cavernous, the atmosphere thick with the stink of fresh hay and fungi, blood stews and cultured blubbers. Its animals came from far worlds and the best laboratories—Chamberlain laboratories—and the smartest of them called to Ord, by name, promising long fun rides if only he would feed them. A treat before dinner, please?

His urge to ride faltered, died.

It happened more and more, reliable pleasures lacking their old vitality. Still pleasurable, but more as theories than fact.

Past the stables was an empty pen, a vertical pen, built on a cliff face. Goat-like beasts had lived here eons ago, but the elders got tired of rebuilding the children who would try riding them. The pen was empty, Ord stepping between inert fence posts, looking across a portion of the Chamberlain homeland. Noble mountains and artful deep valleys had been carved from false granites, pink as meat, and every lesser slope was covered with forests and lush emerald pastures. Deciduous trees showed the first hints of autumn. A rushing river passed a kilometer beneath Ord’s toes, twisting its way down to a distant and enormous gray-as-steel barrier rising straight into the cloudless sky. The gray portions were hyperfiber, and above were invisible energy barriers, the entire wall bolstered with eagle eyes and AI paranoids. A few decades ago, not long after Alice’s trial, strangers had broken into the estates, carrying weapons that couldn’t kill any Chamberlain. Yet the wall was built regardless, in a panic, and like anything done in a panic, it was full of flaws. Intended to keep invaders out, it was porous when it came to clever and bored Family children. Yet no one had asked Ord how he had escaped. Either they knew and had already closed the route, or they knew and were keeping it open, booby traps set to catch whomever might try repeating Ord’s trick.

Like every Family, this last awful century had terrorized the Chamberlains; but more than others, they deserved their fears.

They were unaccustomed to the sense of menace. It was relentless and unfair. And tiresome. Alice was one of theirs, yes, but there were more than twenty thousand Chamberlains, very few of them—very few—involved in the Core’s horrible fate. Why blame us? was the general chorus. We aren’t Alice; we’ve accomplished nothing but good for people everywhere. How, how, how can we be blamed for the acts of one odd and possibly senile sister … ?

Alice was the most famous Chamberlain. Easily.

She was ancient—a very few generations removed from the patriarch, Ian—and even among Chamberlains, she had been considered remarkable, her talents too numerous to count, vast energies at the ready, and a fierce, unflinching imagination that could never rest. When people of her age and station gathered at the Core, it was Alice who helped inspire them. She revitalized an old idea, asking, “What if we create a new universe?” Blending math and mysticism, she showed a workable means. “Do it once to prove the principle, then we can do it a million times again. Everyone can inherit their own universe, their own playground …and wouldn’t that be lovely?”

Intoxicating, yes. And dangerous.

A prototype universe was produced beside the galaxy’s largest black hole, its umbilical held open for too long. The scorching new creation flowed out into its ancient and cold mother universe. Billions of humans and sentient aliens had died in the aftermath, and would die, and the galaxy’s heart would remain uninhabitable for eons to come.

In a gesture both brave and inadequate, Alice returned home just before her crimes were known. Then she offered herself to the Earth’s authorities, ordering them to put her on trial. “Punish me,” she demanded, “or let me punish myself. Either way, show people justice, and maybe we can keep our Ten Million Year Peace intact.”

Alice’s arrival was the worst day in Ord’s tiny life. For no clear reason, she had taken an interest in him. When it came to explaining her crimes, he heard them first, in graphic terms, and a century of distractions and new revelations hadn’t diluted the shock and misery. Alice had shown him the Core’s detonation. She made him grieve for strangers, then fear for himself. In a matter of days, she gave the Chamberlains a new legacy, their name suddenly synonymous with greed, waste, and genocide—every horror they were pledged to combat. And now the Chamberlains and the other Families—the chosen and deservedly proud leaders of their species—hid in their estates, or they traveled with a thousand sophisticated security systems in tow. But where were they safe? Ord wondered. They had billions of angry neighbors on just this one continent, and how many workshops were nuclearcapable? What happened if the planetwide nuke-suppressors were deactivated, then countless crude bombs were thrown over the wall, at once? What if just one of them went unnoticed by the paranoids … ?

“Quit,” Ord muttered to himself.

He started back into the stables, contemplating choices. There were enemies outside, but there were enemies within, too. Ord knew who had alerted the toastmaster to his presence, and he knew how to prove it. And while he didn’t blame the lizard-folk, he felt that this kind of malicious act required a reply. Some sort of reasonable revenge.

He paused before an enormous gate of hyperfiber bars and robot sentries. What lived in the shadows was a minor mystery. A great old sister had left the beast here—no one seemed sure just when—and despite hours of watching, Ord had never gotten one good look at it.

He wasn’t looking in there now, thinking hard to himself.

Muttering to himself.

Asking, “How can I punish someone when I can’t really hurt them?”

From the shadows, over the sour stink of blood stews, came a tiny voice, close and earnest.

“Let me show you ways,” it said.

Then:

“Come closer? Please, please?”

 

 

Half of the Thousand Families took part in the Core’s disaster. But that didn’t mean sterling innocence for the other five hundred of them.

Nuyens had always known about Alice’s work, for instance. They didn’t help her, but they would have benefited; and when the worst happened, they were quick to blame, capitalizing on the other Families’ sudden weaknesses.

Never loved, Nuyens became the Chamberlains’ favorite enemy. That’s why the Nuyens didn’t like the sight of a Chamberlain boy dragging a homemade bomb to their front door. Security systems had already weighed the risks, taking every responsible precaution. But to emphasize their displeasure, a modest-ranking Nuyen emerged from the nearby earth, growling, “What do you want here? What are you doing?”

“I want to see your brother. I want Xo.”

“Your toy is dead,” said the dark-haired figure.

With powerful arms, Ord lifted the bomb and dropped it on its trigger. It struck the pink walkway with a harsh bang, sparks flying. And he grinned, saying, “I guess it is,” while lifting once again.

The Nuyen shook his head in disgust, then reported, “Xo is coming.” And he vanished with an intimidating flash and crack.

Xo was once a friend, but Ord rarely saw him anymore and never with much pleasure. He had told that Nuyen about his secret trip, but only because Xo was a coward, and Ord wanted to wave Xo’s cowardice under his nose. “I found a way out of the estates,” Ord had boasted. “Want to come along?”

Never, no.

With a whispered hiss, the door opened. A puzzled adolescent emerged, asking, “Have you gone stark raving, Ord?”

Ord dropped the bomb again.

Xo didn’t flinch. He held himself motionless, then took a long, thin breath before asking, “Why? It’s not going to work, it never could—”

“It has uranium,” Ord countered. “Two kilos of 235.”

“But the trigger’s shit, and its chemical explosives have been cooked to water and plastic. It can’t detonate—”

Bang. Again.

“Atoms vibrate,” Ord reminded him. “This way, that way.”

Xo had a frail, pitiful face when he wanted it. Watching his one-time friend grunt and lift the bomb again, he said, “So what?”

“The atoms could move toward the same point, all at once.”

Xo’s eyes grew larger, just a little bit.

“Random vibrations, and they could accidentally reach critical mass.”

“Impossible!”

“Possible,” Ord replied, “but unlikely.” Again he dropped the bomb, sparks flying higher. “Extremely unlikely, but you’re worried all the same. Aren’t you?”

“No.”

“I found your message in the tavern’s files.”The stranger is your sworn enemy—’”

“Lies.”

Bang. “Why did you want them to hurt me?”

“You’re fine now,” Xo observed.

Again Ord flung the bomb into the unyielding stone.

In an almost imperceptible way, Xo flinched.

“I’ve always tried to be friendly toward you,” the Chamberlain argued. “Not like Ravleen and the others.”

“What if I did it,” said Xo, in a speculative way. “Maybe it’s because of your sister, not you. Because Alice made it so we can’t leave home, and it wasn’t fair that you did—”

Again the bomb struck, etching out a tiny pit.

“How long will you do that?”

“Until it explodes,” Ord promised, his voice level and cool. “I’ll get more 235 when it goes bad, and I’ll stay here for ten billion years, if I have to—”

Xo shuddered and stepped back, closing the useless door and locking it.

The Nuyens tolerated Ord’s presence for only a few hours, then sent home a warning wrapped up in concerned words.

Lyman was dispatched to retrieve his baby brother.

A declaration of war, it wasn’t. Yet it was something, and even as Lyman tried to scold Ord, his gaze acquired a new light, a kind of black wonder, gazing at the youngest Chamberlain as if for the first time.

3

Last night, for an indeterminate period and through some as yet undiscovered means, our prisoner escaped. We cannot determine her whereabouts or agenda. Our questions are being met with amused puzzlement. Alice herself has raised the possibility of a highly selective, infallible amnesia covering those minutes, rendering our interrogations worthless … .

The lone positive circumstance is that she hid her escape from casual viewers. The public saw an illusionary Alice, never guessing that she was elsewhere, and free …

—Alice’s jailer, confidential

The trial had lasted for decades.

Nothing in human history matched its importance, drama, or its ultimate anticlimax, a verdict reached by the fairest possible judicial process—judges and jurors from untainted Families and the best of ordinary humanity—and the sentence was accepted by all, including the criminal. Alice Chamberlain would be stripped of her powers, wealth, and enhanced intelligence. Whatever else remained would be locked inside a tiny cell beneath the Tibetan plateau, the prisoner permitted few contacts with the outside world. And to ensure that the sentence was carried out, people were free to watch Alice on their universal walls, to see her sitting or sleeping, pacing or shitting, her old-fashioned body—calcium bones and a poor woman’s minimal immortality—kept thinly clad, always a little cold because of the cell’s nearly perfect refrigeration.

A fair verdict, yes; but justice eluded people all the same. Others had taken part in the universe-building nightmare. Some had died heroic deaths, fighting to stop the Core’s detonation or save endangered worlds. But what of the rest? What if some of them survived, then refused to follow Alice’s example? Plus, there was the issue of civil penalties. Even Alice’s wealth was nothing compared to the damages done. Some jurists—nonFamily citizens with modest augmentation—argued that the Thousand Families should make compensations, using some common pool of cash and sorrow … .

But what if the Families didn’t agree to those terms?

And worst of all, what if the galaxy decided that enough was enough, then tried to wrestle these godlike powers from the chosen few? The Core’s little bang and misery would be nothing beside that conflagration. The Ten Million Year Peace would shatter like crystal, along ancient lines of weakness; and what would happen? How could such a war end?

Alice’s trial was finished, and nothing was finished.

That was the only verdict, it seemed. A grain of sand had started down a mountainside, and there was no calculating the shape or scope of the avalanche to come.

 

Ord was studying, or pretending to study, when he felt a gaze and looked up, discovering the little girl standing in his open doorway. His very first thought was that she was a younger sister. An immature face and body, he noticed. Adult-sized teeth too large for the smiling mouth. Her coppery hair was long and worn simply, and she had a feminine dress ending at her knees, shins pale and feet bare. There was a tangible joy that Ord could taste as well as feel. And she spoke sweetly and quickly, saying, “Come with me, Ord.” Saying, “Now. They’ll notice I’m gone, hurry!”

He rose and followed, and in an instant he dreamed up a little story to explain her. The eldest Chamberlains, for reasons both simple and complex, had delayed the birth of Ord’s little sister. But what if someone hadn’t agreed, finding the means to hide a baby girl? She could be living inside the vast mansion, in some secret chamber. And of course she would be interested in her next-older sibling, and shouldn’t she want to come see him? Didn’t it make perfect, intoxicating sense?

And yet. How could the security systems and watchful elders fail to notice her? And if she was so perfectly protected, then how could such a little girl escape long enough to find Ord—?

He ran on rising stairs, strong legs unable to keep pace. The little girl seemed disappointed, glancing over a shoulder, speaking through her long, thick hair. “I thought you’d be faster by now,” she said. Then, “Little Ord.”

Only then, with those last words, did Ord realize how far he had climbed and where she was leading him.

His legs locked in place, in terror.

But the stairs kept lifting him, past the intricate, ever-changing murals where the great and glorious Chamberlains reenacted the past. He begged the stairs to stop, but they wouldn’t. His escaped little sister was standing on the top landing, facing him, then stepping back and out of sight, and Ord lied to himself, assuring himself that she was just a little girl and that her keepers must have stuck her inside the abandoned penthouse, knowing that no one wanted to go there anymore … .

Ord was deposited at the entranceway. The girl was gone, the massive crystal door was ajar, and momentum, not courage, carried him through the chill gap between the slab and jamb.

The room beyond was enormous, hectares of floor beneath a high ceiling, every surface ripped and blackened, sagging portions of the ceiling held up with braces, and old robots who must have been told to stand there and lift, and wait. Ord turned in a circle, with a dancer’s grace, remembering how Nuyens and other officials had once come here, seeking Alice. And she wasn’t here. But they had demolished the place to make sure, and nobody had taken time to make repairs. A notorious place, and unclean. The perfect place to hide a secret sister, he told himself. Though he didn’t believe that story anymore, no matter how elaborate he made it. No matter how sweet it seemed.

“Quit thinking, Ord. Come here.”

The red-haired girl stood in the distance, her back to him, and the golden sunlight pouring through a tall window before her. Ord picked his way across the battered floor, barely breathing. She seemed to be looking below, drinking in the great estate—a roar of autumn colors at their height, brilliant shades and tones joining into a vast, fully orchestrated work too large for a boy’s eyes, too intricate for even his augmented mind.

Ord would always remember the sight of her, her coppery-red hair, like his, unremarkable against those grand colors. And how the sunlight pierced her dress and revealed her pale new flesh, the body rigorously simple, even plain, sexless and unaugmented, and pure. Why, with everything possible, did she choose that appearance? For the innocence implied? But who knew why Alice did as she did? Not for the first time, Ord doubted that his sister knew all of her reasons. She was too large to understand herself, and had always been …and what an astonishing, horrifying curse … !

Alice turned, in a motion faster than Ord could follow, pushing something small and soft into his hands; and with a desperate near-gasp, she told him:

“You’ve got to save it! They’ll destroy it—!”

What? Destroy what?

“I’m pledged to protect …fragile …it is …”

“Protect what?” he blurted.

“Brother Perfect knows. Go find him.” The quickest possible smile, then she closed his fingers around her gift. “It will help you—”

“Brother who?”

“I trust you,” Alice promised, her voice bleak and untrusting. “And Perfect, too. But nobody else, not anymore.” Then she was gone again, never quite seen and already lost; and for a long, confusing while, Ord stared out at the vista—at the brilliant pained colors of dying foliage—almost forgetting how he had come here, barely aware of the heavy little mystery lying invisible in his new hands.

4

Discreet observations of the Chamberlain home have identified five distinct and powerful anomalous events. Two occurred during Alice’s escape, probably marking her arrival and subsequent departure. Two others have been linked to an unofficial visit by Chamberlain 63, presumably here on a mission of strategy and espionage. But most peculiar is the oldest anomaly. It was witnessed several years after our observations began—several years after Alice’s surrender—and perhaps it signaled the departure of an ancient Chamberlain whose presence was never suspected. Or it could have been an arrival, which leads to certain obvious questions: Who arrived? And on what mission? And what is this secret Chamberlain doing now?

—Nuyen memo, classified

Alice remained imprisoned; Ord could see her, nothing changed about her cell or clothes or even the stiff way she sat on the edge of her simple cot. But it had been Alice in the penthouse, or at least some magical, unknown portion of her. Sitting on his own bed, unconsciously mimicking her pose, Ord felt confusion bleeding into fascination, and when three jailers arrived without warning, excitement. The jailers were from three high-grav races, all stout and made more impressive by their black uniforms. One of them gazed up at the camera with an expression struggling to appear in control, at ease. A stiff, formal voice told every viewer, “The prisoner needs to meet with her attorneys, in private. For the next few hours, this line will be terminated. Thank you.”

The screen went black, and Ord gave a little gasp.

He wasn’t the only Chamberlain watching. An electric murmur passed through the air, pulses marking siblings on the move. From doorless rooms deep inside the mansion came a piercing series of whistles, then an older sister appeared beside Ord’s bed, conjuring up a body from light and woven dust, staring at her little brother for what felt like an eternity.

“What’s wrong?” Ord asked, surprised to sound so convincingly innocent.

Yet the sister should have seen through him, duplicity bright in his panicky glands and frazzled neurons. And she certainly should have noticed the heavy object on Ord’s lap, both thighs depressed by its bulk, its plain oddness sure to set off alarms.

Yet nothing registered in her icebound blue eyes. A pause, a prolonged blink. Then again her brother asked:

“What’s wrong?”

“Many things,” she assured him. Then, “Have you seen Alice?”

“On the wall.”

She glanced at the blackness, appearing puzzled. A little lost.

Ord asked, “Why are the attorneys visiting her?”

The sister straightened her back, then whispered, “They aren’t. And there lies the trouble.”

He waited.

“We have a report—unconfirmed—that Alice managed to leave her cell for a moment, or two—”

“But she can’t,” Ord sputtered. “She doesn’t have that kind of power anymore, does she?”

The sister was eager to agree, and couldn’t. “An error. Someone’s bad joke, perhaps.” Pause. “I wouldn’t worry.” Pause. “And you say you haven’t seen her?”

“No.”

“Well, then good day, little one. I am sorry to intrude.” And without waiting for his good-byes, she vanished with a sparkle of milky light.

Ord felt alone, and watched. Of course they suspected that Alice might come see him. Yet he wasn’t asked about his visit to the penthouse, and the mystery in his lap might as well not exist …unless they were thoroughly aware, watching him out of curiosity or caution. But that didn’t feel right, did it? For no good reason, Ord sensed that he was as safe as possible, under the circumstances.

What now? he asked himself.

A thousand times, perhaps. And only then did he take hold of the wondrous nothing, examining it in earnest.

Some kind of odd, dark matter, he decided. Its surfaces were imprecise and a little cool, then warm. Its density was rather like gold or lead, and with each touch it seemed to merge with his flesh, for an instant, the sensation like something in a sloppy dream. But when he placed it on his room’s ornamental pond, on the slickest, smoothest portion, there wasn’t so much as a dimple made, and he could push it back and forth like a balloon, nothing but his own hands aware of its weighty presence.

Natural dark matter didn’t exist in this form. Coagulated; tangible. But with sufficient energies and the proper cleverness, it was possible to make the wild particles behave, make them cling to one another and act like normal trusted baryonic

matter. These were great technologies, Ord knew. They were the basis for much of his siblings’ magic, and nobody understood their limits. Since dark matter was ninety-nine-percent of everything—existing in a multitude of useful flavors—there was hope that someday, when necessary, it would prove even more useful than the prosaic stuff that made stars and simple people.

With care, Ord caressed the gift, fingers discerning tiny crenelations, his mind’s eye building an improving picture. But what it resembled … well, it seemed unlikely at best. A tightly folded cerebral cortex, the underside cerebellum, and the ancient medulla; it was a brain of the oldest kind, human in proportions but nothing like the modern form. Even the lizard-folk, poor as possible, had fancier and tougher versions of the ancestral brains. Fatty flesh and acetylcholine vanished with hundred-year life spans and mental imbalances. Why would Alice give him such a relic? But of course it wasn’t a relic, he realized. It was as modern in substance as possible, and what did that imply?

An affinity for Ord’s flesh, and its shape could be a clue, he thought. Several times. But when he acted on that idea, he was shocked to find it valid. The mysterious nothing liked his scalp and began to burrow, exotic particles swirling around the bland ones, passing through flesh and the hyperfiber skull, moving just the right amount, then pausing and aligning themselves, linking in a multitude of ways with Ord’s own astonished mind.

 

An image appeared before him.

Fuzzy, but immediately identifiable.

“Am I supposed to go there?” he asked. No answer was offered. Ord put on hiking boots, then noticed a second pair of boots where he had found the first pair. Using the stairwell, he passed between a dozen siblings—modestranked Chamberlains wearing frightened, flushed expressions—and he was even less noticed than usual. Which was a good thing, since he was forbidden from leaving the mansion, in punishment for the bomb nonsense. The old bear-dogs at the door might have noticed something when he touched them, scratching their broad heads until sleeping tails began to thump-thump against the footworn stone floor. Then, sensing something too substantial to be a premonition, Ord touched the PRIDE AND SACRIFICE sign, not once but twice, never certain if what he felt was real or an illusion.

He ran when he was outdoors, eschewing tube cars out of caution. It was a good hour’s journey, most of it downhill. Wild birds didn’t startle into flight when he passed them. Water splashed and the earth dimpled under him, but each backward glance showed him a smooth brook and muddy banks without a single bootprint. Ord was a ghost, it seemed. He was exactly like his elderly siblings, composed of nothing but thought, and it frightened him, and it seemed fun …yet he couldn’t make himself hesitate for a moment, much less ask himself if this was what was right …whatever it was that he was doing … .

A child’s clubhouse stood on the border of the Sanchex and Chamberlain estates, in a dead-end valley. Built with lumber by boys and girls barely old enough to swing hammers, it had stood empty for almost a century, the Golds disbanded not long after Alice’s arrival. That was natural, the children too old for the club’s games. Yet a new generation should have come and burned this structure with an appropriate solemnity, then built their own. It hadn’t happened because every Family, in view of the times, had delayed their next generations; and the old place had fallen into a dishonorable entropy, its roof collapsing, its wooden floor buckling, and the childlike signatures on the far wall becoming soft and imprecise with many species of rot.

Ord barely saw his own name, second in rank.

Below Ravleen’s, of course. Sanchexes always led the Golds.

He was looking for Xo’s signature when a badger emerged from a hole in the floor, its thick, low body reminding him of a jailer’s, a sudden hiss aimed straight for him. It could see him, obviously. And he growled in turn, causing it to slip out the back door, toward what should have been a high raw wall of slick granite. But the wall had vanished, replaced with a long valley and a meandering brook, plus trees not as tall as seemed right, or as broad, or generally as healthy, their leaves in autumnal colors too, but all too drab and haphazard to belong in a Chamberlain wood.

“Hello?” Ord called.

Birds flew in terror. Save for some kind of jaybird that perched on a high branch, cursing Ord for trying to steal its acorns.

“Hello?”

No human answered.

A narrow dung-marked game trail led across the brook, and here he made deep bootprints that filled with swirling brown water. Now and again he shouted, “Hello!” A noisy indifference filled the woods. Finally Ord thought to say, “I’m looking for someone,” and then, “Brother Perfect,” and his answer came in the form of a skin-clad figure stepping from the shadows, almost from underfoot.

“And who is doing this looking?” the figure asked.

He was a Chamberlain, Ord saw. No telling which brother, but he felt disappointment and a jumble of doubts.

“And if you don’t know who you are,” the brother continued, “maybe you can remember who sent you here. How about it, my boy?”

He was Ord, and nobody sent him, he claimed. The brother appeared shorter than him, but stocky in a strong, comfortably fattened way, his red hair matted and tied into a ponytail, a thin red-and-snow beard obscuring the famous Chamberlain jaw. It wasn’t an impressive body, conjured or not. But the trousers and heavy vest were remarkable, made from sewn skins and mended with dirty lengths of gut and hemp. A leather belt held several elegant stone tools. One pale hand held a spear by its blond shaft, its long Folsom point drawing pointed stars in the air between them.

“And who are you?” asked Ord.

“You wanted someone named Perfect. Maybe that’s me.”

But no Chamberlain had that name. It would be cruel to saddle their own with such an outrageous boast—

“You know every name, do you?”

“In order of birth, yes. And I know a little of everyone’s biography.”

“What a gruesome waste!” The Stone Age figure broke into a laugh, shaking his head in a blurring motion. “Which anal-retentive child of Ian dreamed up that waste of neural capacities?”

Ord couldn’t guess who.

The brother cursed, laughed, and said, “So you’re the Baby.”

“Pardon?”

“The Baby. That’s your nickname.” A pause. “Are you familiar with the concept of nicknames—?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ve given you enough of a clue. Come. Hurry on now, Baby.”

Ord tried to ask where he was, where they were going, and why the woods looked wrong. But the brother, whoever he was, had walked away, bulling his way through the tangled landscape. Ord had to run in pursuit, catching him as they splashed across the brook. “Is Perfect a nickname?”

“Oftentimes.” The left hand gestured, its two smallest fingers missing, the wagging stumps showing no sign of regrowth. “Have you ever known someone you’d like to call Perfect?”

Maybe.

“To make them angry, of course. Am I right?”

Ord ignored the question. “I deserve to know where we are—”

“In the estate, of course. Embedded inside the granite.” He kicked and stomped his way through a wall of vegetation, thorns leaving bloody sketches on his exposed arms. “A clever little house of mine, don’t you think?”

“Why am I here?”

“No, Baby. It’s my turn to ask the question.”

He hated that name.

“Humans,” said the brother, “have lived for twenty million years. As apes, then as simple souls. And finally, less simple. But now, if you were pressed to decide, when would you claim that we had reached our peak? Our grand climax? Today, perhaps? Last week? When?”

“Who are you?”

A sideways glance and grin, then the brother stepped through a wall of golden leaves, branches rushing back into place, conspiring to make him vanish.

Ord hesitated, wondering if he should flee.

From behind the leaves, a deep, rough Chamberlain voice said, “Humans. Peak. Give a shot, Baby!”

Stepping through the wall, Ord saw an abrupt hillside and a simple cave worn into its face. The rocks weren’t false granite; they were limestone. The limestone was encrusted with fossilized crinois, thousands of the flowery animals laid into the fine, dead sediments. This was a caveman’s camp, the air stink of old fires and tainted game, and the brother seemed at home, setting his spear against the cave’s broad mouth, then turning to say:

“My given name? It is Thomas. Thomas Chamberlain.”

No. Impossible … !

“And since you won’t guess, I’ll tell you my choice for our species’ crowning moment.” Thomas laughed easily, then said, “They were the final years of the final Ice Age, when we were expanding across new continents and wild, unmapped seas.” Another laugh. “You look doubtful, Baby. But consider this: There weren’t many of us, and each of us was important. A few million modified apes, each of us armed with stone and wood, and our cunning, and our mobile little cultures …and we came to rule the entire green world … !”

Trembling, Ord stared at his ancient brother.

“And you know what the world was then, don’t you?” A quick, disarming smile. “It was the universe. It was everything. A vast globe encompassing every imaginable beauty, and it was set inside a sea of ink and tiny, unimaginable stars. And it was ours.” A wave of the maimed hand. Then, “Do you know my opinion? All the history since, every human venture … everything has been one long and frustrating and absurd attempt to regain those glory days!”

And with that pronouncement, Thomas broke into a thunderous laugh, a sudden rain of golden leaves falling on them, then swirling, vainly fighting the urge to settle, to die.

5

Alice gave me that lance of a nickname.

I was a new adult, proud of my augmentation and promise, and she was a very young, relentlessly mouthy child. I would talk at length about all the good I would be doing—for the Family; for all people; for all time—and she’d growl at me. She would say, “Oh, you think you’re the perfect Chamberlain. The very best. But you’re the same as us, brother. Brother Perfect. Oh, yes, you are. You are, you are … !”

—Perfect, in conversation

Alice—the great and infamous and bankrupt sister—was the twelfth Chamberlain. Ord, in contrast, was the twenty-four thousand, four hundred and eleventh pearl on the string. And he knew that Thomas was Ian’s eighth clone, meaning his designation was Nine, which in turn meant that he was almost exactly as old as Alice and Ord combined. If this was indeed Thomas, of course. Which seemed a preposterous idea, a thousand history lessons recalled in an instant, and this skin-clad figure nothing like any of them.

Chamberlains were terraformers, by and large. But Thomas was an oddity who built little but loved to explore—a godlike wanderer whose passion and genius were to find and befriend new alien species.

Uninterested in alliances of trading links, Thomas left those blessings for others. The bloodless Nuyens, for instance. By the time Nuyens would flock to some newly charted system, eager for technologies and clear profits, Thomas would have struck out into the wilderness again, chasing radio squawks and free oxygen signatures until he found another wondrous species. Or found nothing. Because as any halfway educated person knew, intelligence arose infrequently in the universe, and imperfectly, and judging by the assorted war-killed worlds, it was a fundamentally perishable form of life, too.

But the Milky Way had been explored in full now, from its Core to its faint far ends, and Thomas had gone elsewhere. “You’re exploring the Andromeda Galaxy,” Ord told the caveman. “The Families sent a mission. They left more than a million years ago.”

“They left, but did I?

” The brother chuckled.

Ord said nothing.

“The truth? At the last possible instant, I suffered a chaotic change of desire. Instead of embarking on a great adventure, I decided to chase privacy and self-reflection. Which is my right as a sentient organism, and don’t give me that disappointed glare.”

He didn’t know he was glaring, stumbling into an apology—

—and Thomas interrupted him, every affront forgotten. A cackling laugh was followed by an offer of meat, dried and hard and frosted with limestone grit. “Mammoth,” he warned. “Chew harder,” he advised. Then, “What’s wrong? Doesn’t the flavor intrigue?”

Not even a little, no. But Ord made himself eat, as if to prove something. When the last gob of leather was in his belly, dissolving in acids and microchines, Ord felt the confidence to say, “I don’t believe you are Thomas.”

“And why not?”

“I’ve been around Alice, and this doesn’t feel the same. Being with you, I mean.” There wasn’t the sense of vast energies and intellect, though Ord mentioned neither quality by name. Nor did he say that Thomas looked bizarre and acted the same, laughing too often and never twice with the same sound, the oddest things amusing him without fail.

Like Ord’s doubts, for instance.

The brother turned red-faced, laughing for a solid minute. Then he gasped, coughed into his maimed hand, and asked, “How is dear Alice? Is her trial just about finished?”

“You don’t know?”

“On the whole,” he confessed, “current events bore me.”

Incredulous, Ord couldn’t summon any response.

“My guess is that they found her guilty.”

“Yes.”

“Good for them.” The smile was winsome, bittersweet. “I told her, told her, told her not to fuck around with that nasty work. But you’ve met our sister. You know how she can be—”

“She’s jailed. They’ve stripped her of everything.”

“As is right,” said the possible Thomas.

“But then she escaped—I don’t know how—and came to see me … !”

Delight shone in the blue-gray eyes. “And she wants your help, does she? Some conjured chore just for you?”

“I have to save something. I don’t know what.” A long pause, then he added, “Brother Perfect is supposed to help me.”

“Oh, is he?”

Ord nodded, not certain how to respond.

“Alice appears out of nothingness, expecting obedience.” A grimace, a leering smile. “What they should have carved off our sister are her bossy pretenses, I think.”

Perhaps so.

“Can you give me one good guess as to your mission?”

“Don’t you know?” Ord asked, in horror.

Thomas stepped closer, his maimed hand lifting, touching the boy on the temple, the whole fingers dipping into his scalp for a chilling instant. Then, with a slow, careful voice, he asked, “Do you wish to help, or don’t you? Yes or no.” A pause. “Yes and we embark. No and I send you straight home.”

“Embark to where?”

“All things considered, not far.”

Ord saw a cracked tooth in the narrow smile. “I want to help,” he confessed. Then, “If it accomplishes something good—”

“Tell me yes, tell me no. I’ll leave the worthiness for others.”

Ord said, “Yes.”

He said it three times, his voice strengthening, acquiring something that resembled confidence. And Thomas began turning with the first yes, vanishing into his cave without a sound or a backward glance.

Ord followed.

 

Thomas was working in the gloomy half-light. The cave walls were adorned with charcoal bison and ochre ponies. Ord touched one of the stiff-legged ponies, deciding that with the same tools he would be at least as good a painter as his brother.

Thomas was cramming gear into a leather knapsack, no room left for the smallest charm. With a creaking of rope and skin, he lifted the pack to his shoulders, making adjustments, grimacing with conviction as he remarked, “You’re better than me at many things, I suppose.”

Like Alice, he could read a boy’s mind.

Waving his injured hand, he said, “See? No new fingers growing.”

The stumps were blunt and calloused, all right.

“You could make them if you wanted,” Ord objected.

“Ah, but then I’d forget to be careful when I find a dire wolf hanging in one of my snares.” A wink. “Scars are reminders, Baby. They remind me that dire wolves can be tricky bastards.”

An adult Chamberlain—any adult—could look inside an animal, measuring its health and intentions. Particularly if the animal was part of an elaborate illusion built by that adult. But what adult wanted to live inside an ugly cave, much less hunt with snares and spears? Ord’s best guess was that this caveman existence helped mask Thomas’s presence inside the estates.

“Perfect,” said his brother, again reading thoughts. “That’s Alice’s name for me, and it’s good enough for us.”

A blink and nod. Then Ord said, “Then I’m not Baby.”

“Fair enough.” And with that Perfect walked into the sunshine, at a brisk pace, grabbing his spear and singing with a loud, out-of-key wail.

Ord followed, ignoring the landscape. It was all an illusion, and he assumed they were walking toward someplace close—as promised—and answers would come in short order. He barely noticed his brother’s sour songs, concentrating on his excuses for disappearing. Imagining Lyman, he tried half a dozen stories, each involving the old clubhouse. He had sneaked off to meet a girlfriend; why not? He’d already had a variety of adolescent affairs, mostly with friends from the Golds. Wasn’t that kind of subterfuge permitted, even encouraged? For a long happy while, Ord imagined meeting Ravleen at the clubhouse. Sanchexes were great warriors and inspired lovers, it was said, and he practiced his lustful daydream until it tasted real, until there was a hint of boredom clinging to it.

Thomas—Perfect, he reminded himself—took them up a mountainside, through trees noticeably shorter, and barer, as the afternoon passed. The summit was sharp and raw, no mansion built upon it. They climbed past a single greenish boulder, then dropped into a grove of blue-black spruces. With stone tools they cut boughs for bedding. With flint and dried wood they made a sputtering fire, and Perfect held his imperfect hands to it, catching some portion of its tiny heat.

Ord asked why he lived this way. “You sing out of key. You don’t paint particularly well. And you get cold.” He listed the items as if they were symptoms of disease. “And you won’t even regenerate a simple finger, will you?”

“I’m not cold,” Perfect protested. “And when I am, I’ll pull my robe out of my pack.”

Ord was comfortable. As the sun set, his flesh generated its own internal fire. Yet he held his hands to Perfect’s fire, remarking, “Alice wouldn’t live this way.”

A laugh, insane and infuriating.

Then, “From what you’ve said, Alice might be thrilled to live this well now.

 

That wasn’t what Ord meant, and both knew it.

“Let me tell you about our dear sister.” Perfect pulled dried meat from his pack, offering none to Ord. “Every fancy skill, every energy source, all that godly garb …Alice wanted them. Always, always. Everyone’s that way, in their fashion. But she’s about the worst, and I’d like to think, with a good Chamberlain modesty, that I’m the best. I acquire only those talents that I absolutely need, and if I’m wrong, I give them away again. To Alice, in some cases.

“Augmenting your voice …is that too fancy …?”

“Oh, I sing, and I like singing. I just do it badly.” Another laugh while he chewed on the inedible mammoth. “Everything I do I do with joy and within my limits, and that’s all I want.”

“But you didn’t even know about the trial,” Ord complained.

“If something truly important happens, I’ll hear about it.” A little wink. “But you’re right, I’m not tied to the universal networks. And I don’t know ten million languages. My mathematics are useful, no more. My senses are good enough, no more. And my strengths fit the job of the moment.” A soft, slow laugh, then he added, “In case you haven’t noticed, my humor is simple. Maybe even a little crude. Which suits my needs fine, thank you.”

But why? Ord kept thinking. Why are you different?

“My moment of enlightenment?” Perfect waited for his brother’s eyes, then said, “Eons ago, I was sitting beside an alien sea, in my best godly fashion, and this fellow happened to stroll past me. Do you know about the Brongg?”

Bipeds, vaguely fishlike. A home world with methane seas and water-ice continents. They were the oldest known intelligent species, and Brother Thomas was the first human to meet them.

“Very good,” the caveman offered, giving a little chuckle. “Anyway, this little fellow was walking Brongg-fashion, meaning syrupy-slow. When he saw me, he gave me greetings and stopped to chat—the Brongg are great talkers—and eventually I learned his identity. He was famous. Ancient beyond belief. I was a baby, barely a million years old, and of all the creatures I have ever met, he seemed the most genuinely happy. A billion years of happiness walking on the beach, carrying nothing but a simple ice lance—he was fishing, Ord—and I’ve always held that lesson very close to my heart.”

They were a cold, cold species, Ord knew. The Brongg had wondrous technologies, but they did little with them. They traveled sparingly, reproduced slowly, and were as alien and bizarre as anything humans had ever found. How could they bring enlightenment?

Perfect didn’t answer that thought. Rising, he pulled the promised robe from his pack, the fur rich and glossy, sewn together from smaller furs with a certain artless skill.

“Why did you come back to the Earth?”

His brother lay down beside the fire, a bent arm serving as a pillow. “I was asked to come,” he muttered. “Someone appeared without warning, gave me my marching orders, then framed it as a request before she vanished again.”

Alice.

Perfect gave a sleepy nod, eyes beginning to close.

But before he could sleep, or whatever state it was, he heard one last question from a confused little brother. “Are we still in the estates? Because I’m forbidden to leave them—”

“Watch the sky,” Perfect advised.

Ord obeyed, his heated breath rising toward the night’s first stars. They were the right stars in the right places, but where were the planets? And the starships coming and going? Glancing to his left, he saw the green boulder on the summit become a smooth green globe, and the mountain beneath it evaporated, and the stars brightened and multiplied in the sudden vacuum … and a thousand lessons in terraforming told Ord what he was seeing.

Gazing at the green world, he whispered, “Neptune.”

Against all reason, in one afternoon he and Perfect had hiked their way to the chilled edge of the solar system.

6

You will be stripped of possessions, money and mind, and each of your works will be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Worlds terraformed in good faith, by legal means, will be spared. But illegal worlds will be sought out and destroyed by whatever means are deemed humane … .

—from Alice’s sentencing

Ord watched Neptune, wonderstruck by its presence. Because it was genuine, he sensed. No illusions involved. This was the modern Neptune, terraformed in increments by many people, including Chamberlains.

Including Alice, in her youth.

Technical details buoyed up out of his augmented memory. Small gas giants of this class had their volatile gases shattered, hydrogen sequestered inside the deep core while metals and silicates were pulled up in its place. Airborne continents were grown, floating on giant vacuum bubbles. The new atmosphere was nitrogen and helium, sweet oxygen, and the vital trace gases. Light and heat came from fusion, each world capable of fending for itself. An area many times Earth’s was made habitable, at a profit; and with modern methods, an Alice-class human could finish the essential work in less than five thousand years.

Why were they here? he asked himself.

What was special about Neptune?

But despite his questions and the lousy bed, Ord felt himself drifting off to sleep, dark and dreamless, then woke when the blunt end of a spear was jabbed into his ribs.

“Time to leave,” said a distant voice, with urgency. “They know you’re missing, and you’re making them afraid.”

The sky was cobalt blue, another false sun washing away the stars. Ord rose, attempting to ask every question that he had thought up last night. Words came in a rush, then he faltered. Then Perfect was walking and Ord was walking beside his brother, step for step; and a sensation, bizarre and indescribable, made him mutter, “What’s happened to me?”

“You’ve been altered, a bit. Alice began the work, and I did some tinkering last night.” The profile was weathered, sober. “We’ve rebuilt you as quickly as possible, under these circumstances—”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“If you’re like me, nothing.” A bleak, oversized laugh. “The truth? Part of you is a starship. You’re built from dark matter and magic, and your engines are an exotic inertiales drive. Your hull is invisible, we can hope. Legs and lungs, and your skin, are projections based on your own expectations.” A second smaller laugh. “Despite appearances, we’re actually moving at very nearly lightspeed.”

Ord snapped, “I don’t believe you.”

“That’s probably best, all things considered.”

For an instant, Ord felt the man speaking to him in many voices, most of them in convoluted technical languages that some new, unexpected part of him ingested without fuss, without hesitation. But what made him panic was the sudden sensation of his true self: Huge and ghostly, suffused with liquid energies beyond almost any human’s experience.

He tried to walk slower, and couldn’t.

“For the moment,” said Perfect, “I will operate your legs.”

Ord crossed nonexistent arms on his facsimile chest. “I want to know where we’re going.”

Perfect squinted, as if he could see their destination. In the illusion, they were marching down a verdant mountainside, birds and other phantoms calling out as they passed.

“This is illegal,” the boy gasped.

“Immoral,” his brother agreed. “And cruel. And dangerous, too.” That brought genuine pleasure, bubbling and warm. “But when a famous criminal came to you, did you tell the authorities? When she slipped you a mysterious object, did you say, ‘Look here, everyone! Look what Alice gave me!’?”

Ord was weeping. Sobbing.

“For now,” said Perfect, “we’re traveling to the Oort cloud.”

“Then where?”

“Let’s reach the cloud first,” his brother replied. “That way, if you’re caught, you can claim to have been kidnapped—”

“I am kidnapped!”

“Good attitude. Keep it up.”

Ord never would have agreed if he’d known … if he’d been given any hint of what was involved … crimes accomplished, grave danger implied … . an insane journey away from the safety and comfort of home … !

A five-fingered hand patted Ord on the back.

“You would have balked, yes. But out of fear and ignorance. That’s why I framed the question as I did: ‘Do you wish to help?’ You do or you don’t, and both of us know you do. You can’t help but want to help, which is an honored old Chamberlain curse.”

The boy tried to collapse. And couldn’t. He felt limp, half-dead and wracked with miseries, uttering a great long sob before asking the perfectly reasonable question:

“Why me?”

“My question too.” A weighty pause, then another useless pat on the back. “Perhaps Alice wants you because you’re the baby. Perhaps it’s as simple as that.”

Ord barely heard him, his mind collapsing in on itself.

“We Chamberlains love closure, that sense of being done. That’s why we build exceptional worlds. Durable, full-bodied biospheres equal to three billion years of raw evolution.”

What was he saying?

“The last Chamberlain is sent on a great mission by one of the first.” Perfect clucked his tongue but didn’t laugh. “It’s closure, and it feels right, and maybe that’s all there is to that. Despite its source, the decision could be that simple.”

 

They crossed billions of kilometers, and the country, befitting some odd logic, grew colder and drier, forests replaced with open steppe populated with herds of extinct game. Giant bison and woolly mammoths grazed beneath a weakening sun. In the distance, looming like mountains, was a blue-white glacial mass. Sometimes Ord noticed human hunters in the distance, some of them walking, some standing in one place, watching. Watching for us, he suddenly realized. They were symbols meant to mark other ships, but even the nearest of them couldn’t find the brothers.

Ord quit weeping, forcing himself out of self-pity. In a choking voice, he asked, “Why do you travel this way?”

“In ancient times,” said Perfect, “travelers onboard steamships and starships would pin photographs and holos to their cabin walls. To remind them of comfortable places, of course. To give their eyes something other than empty water and space.”

Ord found himself listening, glad for the voice.

“Space bores me,” said his incredible brother. “Hard vacuums and the ancient cold play on my nerves, if you want the truth.”

Ord felt the vacuum surrounding him. It was a thin chill stew of virtual particles, and it felt like a light winter breeze.

He asked, “How long were you hiding in the estate?”

“I followed Alice home from the Core, a few years afterward.”

“Because she wanted you to come? Is that the only reason?”

A mild, quiet laugh, a wisdom implied. “You aren’t the only person whom our sister has bewitched.”

Questions, like virtual particles, appeared out of nothing.

And vanished again.

“I’ve known Alice for almost my entire life.” Perfect paused, waiting for his brother’s eyes. “I don’t need much prompting from her. For a lot of reasons, I behave.”

“If you were at the Core,” Ord remarked, “you could have been helping.”

“Help build that universe? Hardly.” A hard chuckle. “The Core is a big place, and I wasn’t with her. I was living in seclusion between Alice and your front door.”

“But you knew what she was doing—?”

“And fought with her when she came to visit.” A black expression, sour and wild-eyed. “Oh, I fought. I augmented myself with every persuasive skill, and when they failed, I threatened her. As if that could do any good.”

Each step took them closer to the high glacial wall. Between them and the ice was a low moraine, moss and lichen growing wherever there was shelter. As they climbed the loose slope, their feet destroyed oases and created new ones. With a quiet voice—a hunter’s voice—Perfect asked:

“Do you wonder what they did with Alice’s powers?”

They had been stripped away. Of course.

“But what does that mean?” Perfect posed the question, then gave an answer. “Powers have physical sources. Augmented minds need neural nets. Moving a world requires godly power. And there are the machines that crack molecules and weave dark matter and build bodies and tear them down again, in an instant.” The healthy hand took Ord by the arm, then squeezed. “I’m talking about Alice’s body and mind. Her bolts and microchines. And her antimatter-digesting guts, too.”

“I’ve wondered about them,” the boy confessed.

“A grand secret, they are. And a wrenching problem for the poor officials who need to decipher them, then destroy them.”

They reached the moraine’s crest as the sun set behind them. A day done; a comforting sense of closure. Perfect dropped his knapsack and sat on it, eating his endless dried meat, gladly sharing it with the boy when he asked for another taste.

Without daylight, the world shrank, darkness giving the tundra a close, constricting feel. But the ice seemed to grow, becoming glassy, some subtle inner light betraying networks of fine cracks and deep fissures. Tiny, tiny humans stood at its base. Each held a spear, but Ord realized that spears meant weapons of a different kind; and in a whisper, Perfect said:

“That creature you met? Our Alice? As powerful as a sun, if the need arose. But when she arrived from the Core, at lightspeed, she had no mass. She was a set of instructions that then had to conjure up her physical self. She used raw materials kept in and around the solar system, kept for just such contingencies.” A pause as he bit off another predatory hunk. “Most of Alice—the bulk of her memories, her skills—came later, and not quite at lightspeed. That’s how we true giants travel. Think of it like a strange snowfall coming from the Core, snowflakes the size of houses and mountains, each one meaning some potent talent, and all of them here. Here, Ord. Collected and held. Waiting for someone to get the courage to crack them open and see what there is to see.”

Bright, hard stars appeared above them, then below, flares of soft blue plasma slipping through the glacier’s deep fractures. This was Alice’s dangerous meat, and it was larger than some worlds—

“A morgue, in essence.” The Chamberlain voice was close, softer than any whisper. “Keep still. Keep very still now.”

The moraine had vanished. Ord was in freefall.

“Do you feel sleepy, maybe?”

The boy felt extraordinarily tired.

“Good. Try closing your eyes.”

But before he could, Ord said, “Closure,” with a numbed mouth.

“What was that?”

“That’s this,” he muttered. “That’s why she came home. She knew what would happen, and she deserved it.”

Perfect touched him with a thousand hands, and laughed. “Do you know what I like best about humans? How we take whatever happens and dress it up in any suit of clothes we want, for any occasion.” The hands were hotter than suns, soothing to the touch. And intensely busy. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe closure explains this whole fucking mess.”

A distant black laugh, then:

“A poetic denouement, and she couldn’t help herself.”

Then:

“A moth, and with the Core she conjured up the perfect flame.”

7

The boy’s disappearance went unnoticed for several critical hours. Had Alice escaped, and was it Alice inside her prison cell? Those seemed to be the major questions of the moment. Sensors were placed in a diagnostic mode, perhaps explaining why no new anomalous event was observed. Then the Chamberlains learned that the boy was gone, his subterfuge too advanced to be his own work. A general alarm was sounded. Gravimetric evidence pointed to a new mass orbiting Pluto. Warnings were sent to the appropriate Nuyens, and nothing was found. But afterward, several Families reported thefts from their Neptune reserves … .

Despite prompt action, the Oort cloud facility was infiltrated … properties were stolen … .

Analysis proceeding with all available tools … .

The boy is being sought … .

—Nuyen memo, confidential

It was like waking from death again.

A voice. Chamberlain, and male. From the living world, he said, “The Brongg homeworld. Picture it. Walk it with me. A long, gentle beach of water-ice sands, a sea of liquid methane on our left, and on our right—”

“The Iron Spine.” Ord knew the beach. A thousand eyes seemed to open for him, only two of them mired in his own face. It was another illusion, but of superior quality. He was upright, wearing a new body. Slowly, very slowly, he turned his head until the Iron Spine filled his gaze. Before the first vertebrate evolved on earth, the Brongg had lowered a nickel-iron asteroid onto their world, setting it on a bed of vacuum bubbles. Half a billion years of mining had left it partially hollow, but the remnants were spectacular, floating on the water-ice crust, their flanks covered with blue-black vegetation that was adapted to the bitter taste of heavy metals.

The weak Brongg sun was rising above the highest peak. A Brongg day lasted for a full Terran month, Ord recalled, and with that fact came a multitude of ancillary facts and details, making him the helpless expert. “Today,” Perfect announced, “we will walk a beach.”

The beach was gray with black organic streaks, and it was as smooth as pavement, curving out toward a rocky point where a polished black cylinder stood on end, casting a long shadow across the calm and colorless sea. The distances looked trivial, yet with his first painful step, he realized this would be difficult at best. The Brongg nervous systems were built from superconducting materials, thoughts flowing without resistance, without turbulence; but their physical metabolisms were sluggish, each physical act considered and reconsidered thousands of times before it was attempted, or not.

“Perhaps,” said Perfect, “that’s why they’ve lasted so long. Unlike people, they have to think before they step … .”

Turning his head was a struggle—a sobering investment—and it took most of a stride. Perfect was a Brongg in body, like Ord. A nude, fishy exterior wore thick legs and broad, round feet, and his webbed hands held a delicate ice lance. But the face was comically Chamberlain, blue eyes winking, the human mouth grinning at the world.

“In all,” asked Perfect, “how many genuine living intelligences have I found first? Count them for me, please.”

The voice was a radio pulse born from the swift nervous system. In an instant, Ord saw each of his brother’s discoveries, oldest to newest. One hundred and three species on almost as many worlds. No human could claim half as many finds. True, most were technology-incompetent. But almost two dozen, the Brongg included, had been deemed worthy of diplomats and trade, cultural exchanges, and scientific ones, too.

“Now,” said Perfect, “count the failed worlds.”

Again, Ord knew the exact number. Memories encoded in a tireless net flowed into him. He saw Perfect tracking whispers through a wilderness of stars. Some whispers vanished, some grew stronger, but all ended at some technological world or worlds, all freshly killed. Wars had done it, mostly. Sometimes plagues. Experiments and machines had gone amuck, or a battered ecosystem had collapsed back to the microbes. Nothing with which to speak, save the occasional computer or some automated station that still watched the sky and shouted, begging the stars for help, for alliances, for second chances, for God.

Counting was easy; remembering took an age.

Images like fists struck Ord, leaving him spent and sore, and sorry.

And Perfect had suffered even more. Hopes ruined each time; nothing but wreckage left. Armed with a Chamberlain’s skills, he would sift through the gruesome traces—bones and burnt cities and records—then he would build phantoms of the dead, complete with voices and desires, and the telling flaws. These examples gave insights. Perfect could ask the phantoms why and how they had so willingly pushed their homes and selves into oblivion. Forty-eight worlds, Ord counted, plus hundreds more where life began, evolved to some sophisticated, promising level, only to be shattered by a comet’s splash or the detonation of a nearby sun. And as he stared at that carnage, Ord asked the obvious:

“How does any intelligence survive?”

“Exactly. Exactly!” A familiar laugh, if somewhat bleak, then Perfect took another agonizing step, ice-sands dimpling beneath the bare right foot. “The Brongg are the elders, but they had it easy. Their solar system has few fissionable materials, and they’re pathologically introspective. Even when they could have augmented themselves, boosting their physical selves, they didn’t. Wouldn’t. Out of fear more than wisdom, I think. Too many uncertainties regardless of how long they rolled the Sisyphean problem back and forth in their heads.”

The Brongg were cold, slow, and scarce. The truth told, Ord had never admired them, and he wasn’t about to start now.

“And at the other end of the spectrum, or near it, are humans. Churning, hot whirlwinds, passionate to a fault, aggressive to no good ends, and alive now only because we scared ourselves into wisdom. Terrible wars led to the Families and the Great Peace, and our little truce has lasted quite a while, I think. As long as everyone was happy, who cared who rowed the damned boat?”

A great long laugh. Electric, chilling.

“Millions of years,” said Perfect, “and I’ve studied the dead and the living. Now doesn’t it make sense that I’d find patterns? Relationships? Little tendencies, and the big fat ones?”

Ord had to agree.

“Tendencies,” Perfect repeated. “And out of them, conclusions. How I would invent life from nothingness, given my chance? The best of the Brongg, the bedrock of ourselves. All put into a stew with every other successful species, in some realm pure and innocent—”

“And perfect,” Ord said, anticipating the words.

“And now, brother, you know why Alice renamed me. I have the wicked flaw of needing to chase perfection.”

Trying to guess the next stage, Ord mentioned the odd, illegal worlds that Alice had built. Not terraformed, but alien. Novel proteins and toxic solvents, all had built to mimic natural worlds.

“Ordinary, ordinary worlds,” was Perfect’s assessment.

“How can you say it? She broke every law to make them, and she hid them away in dust clouds and globular clusters—”

“And I am telling you that these worlds are fundamentally traditional. I agree, yes, Alice went into the kitchen and made strange muffins, but the muffins have the ingredients you’d expect in a kitchen. Which made me ask: ‘Where is your genius, Alice? Why that silly pride?’”

“You said that to Alice?”

“For the last few thousand centuries, yes. And she would say that if I was so clever, I should do better. ‘With your help,’ I would promise. Not being a superior terraformer, I needed hands trained for the big dull ugly labor of it. And eventually she agreed to help, just this once, surprising both of us, I believe.”

Ord felt a sudden chill, a premonition.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “Tell me, please.”

Perfect showed him an enormous smile, then gestured with vegetable slowness, his ice lance held in his left hand, two of the Brongg’s minor fingers missing. “Down the beach,” he replied, not quite laughing. “We’re walking beside the sea, and it looks as if we’re halfway there … can’t you see … ?”

 

Halfway, and the weak little sun was directly overhead, black-red clouds of hydrocarbons forming in the upper atmosphere, a chill shadow falling over them and the flat, rather greasy sea. Two weeks of walking, yet it seemed longer. A few words spoken, but Ord had absorbed volumes of information, the pace relentless, its quality and the demands beyond his experience, his expectations. And it never stopped, Perfect’s memories pouring into him even as his brother remarked, “I wish there was more time, Ord. I do.”

Why wasn’t there?

“Because we’re being pursued. Hounds on our heels, if you will.”

Ord looked over a shoulder, the alien neck as pliable as an owl’s. The beach was empty save for a willowy creature walking in the shallow methane, jabbing with claws, in slow motion, and managing to impale an eel-like creature even more sluggish than itself.

“How fast are we moving?”

“In space,” Perfect replied, “just a whisper under lightspeed.”

“Why not lightspeed?”

“Because. This is fast enough. Our destination isn’t equipped to receive us as a rain of massless particles. And since you deserve to know, it’s because we have some possessions that need to be carried as they are, and I’m not allowed to say more, and I wish it were otherwise, Brother. I genuinely do.”

A powerful dread was working on Ord. He gasped with his mouth and unseen gills, then forced himself to ask the next question. “How many pursuers?”

“Two. But presumably others are in their wake.”

“How close are they?”

“On this scale, on our little beach … if I showed them to you, they would be wearing our skins … !”

Ord turned, looking forward again. Concentrating on the slick black cylinder, he said, “You’re doing this for Alice. Is that correct?”

“Some of it is her idea, yes.”

“Why is Alice so important to you?”

Perfect asked, “Is she?”

What other ancient brother would conspire with her, without apparent hesitation? “You’ve got thousands of sisters. Why do you take such huge risks for Alice?”

“Don’t you know?” A soft, unreadable laugh. “Haven’t you guessed?”

Ord grappled with the possibilities. Besides their common age, no answer seemed reasonable. They were Chamberlains, but with different interests and philosophies. And even age couldn’t be the whole answer, since there were dozens of siblings with their enormous rank.

“Try something unreasonable,” was Perfect’s advice.

Ord imagined several improbabilities, none adequate.

“So try the unthinkable. Alice and I are close, yes. Yes. But what answer is the last one you would hope to find?”

In a whisper, Ord said, “No.”

“Yet you’re right, Ord. Congratulations.”

Suddenly the boy saw the Chamberlain mansion—the smaller, original incarnation—and the original penthouse on its topmost floor. It was autumn, again. Alice stood at the penthouse window, again. But the mountains were younger, the leaves more subdued, and the penthouse was intact and rather primitive, in furnishings and its luxuries.

This Alice didn’t wear a little girl’s body. The brilliant sun pierced her dress, betraying a body fully matured, relentlessly feminine … the scene having some quality that caused Ord to squirm and look away for a few uneasy moments.

He was standing in the penthouse, unnoticed.

Alice was on her toes, her feet bare, breasts pressed against glass, the bright eyes staring down at the world while someone emerged from the door at the room’s center. A tall male Chamberlain of no particular age, he wore a stiff uniform that had once meant rank in the postwar government—a creature of status and some influence, yet not much older than Ord—and dangling from his dress shirt was a length of optical cable, its buried end linked with his nervous system, these technologies only slightly above fire and Folsom points.

Here was Thomas as a young man, Ord knew.

Ten million years in the past, and the Peace was newborn, and the Families had just begun their long ascent.

His brother wore no boots or socks, perhaps for the sake of stealth. Walking on long, bare feet that were the same pink as Alice’s feet, he stalked their sister, without sound or hesitations. But she knew he was there. Probably with his first steps, she knew. Through her body she conveyed a sense of controlled eagerness, calves flexed and fingers spread and the tilt of her head flirtatious, sunlight making her neck and nearer ear glow with an inner light.

Yet Alice couldn’t remain passive to the last moment. It was against her nature. This was the end of a long and relentless seduction. Thomas found the courage or lust to lift his hands—five fingers on each—and his sister decided to take full charge, stealing his momentum, flipping back her autumn hair while a calculated voice told him:

“See? You’re not perfect after all.”

Thomas hesitated, just for an instant, then seemingly willed his hands to close on her shoulders; and she said:

“Don’t.”

Then:

“I will tell on you.”

Then, with emphasis:

“Ian. I’ll tell him everything.”

In those days, Families looked elsewhere when siblings played these games. It was assumed they would outgrow incest in the same way they were outgrowing selfishness and cruelty. But Chamberlains were even better than the others. Ian, their ultimate parent, had said so. He would take his male clones aside, telling them, “Your sisters are taboo! Untouchable! I’d rather see you screwing the livestock than them!” And with those hard words, he planted some compelling images in each youngster—a miscalculation that the patriarch would make for dozens of generations, without fail.

But Thomas—the eventual Brother Perfect—seemed to believe his sister’s words, pulling back his hands as if burned, a careless and quick little voice saying, “Don’t tell … anyone … no … !”

Alice could see his reflection in the window glass. Without turning her head, she took the hands with her smaller ones, pulling Thomas’s arms tight around her shoulders and chest—

—and the uniformed brother, that man of consequence, whimpered, “Please don’t tell!”

“But I will,” she promised. “Eventually.” Then with one hand holding his arms in place, she took her dress with her free hand, by the hem, and lifted it from behind as she made a second promise, a low, roughened voice telling him, “You’re my favorite brother, you always will be … .”

 

The penthouse dissolved into methane. With the perpetual smile and a gently embarrassed laugh, Perfect said, “I know. I paint our sister as conniving and treacherous. A little evil, even. But those aren’t her only qualities, and they aren’t even her largest. She’s done wondrous things for every good reason, and we can only hope that’s true of us, too.” The incomplete hand touched him again, in a gesture that took hours. And meanwhile, Perfect told story upon story, proving their sister’s innate decency, and in turn, perhaps unintentionally, proving too his own undiminished romantic affections.

With the pressure of the central thumb, Ord bristled. “We don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”

“You mature differently,” Perfect agreed. “More slowly. With more help given.”

“I’ve never thought of my sisters … in that way …!”

“But I think you appreciate my circumstances,” the ancient man replied. “A profound emotional attachment made in my bedrock years, and I’ve built on that rock. Too much, I know, but what can I do now?”

Ord struggled to make his legs move faster, accomplishing nothing.

“You should know. Several times, in various cultures, Alice and I have been married. Husband and wife.” A long, uncomfortable pause, then he reminded Ord, “Enough time passes, and the unlikely has its way of becoming ordinary. The unthinkable, tiresome.”

The boy said nothing, lightning thoughts racing through him.

Perfect respected the silence, holding their pace but never speaking. Never intruding. The sun was dropping, clouds thickening until the air was saturated, a steady slow rain of energy-rich goo beginning, drops bursting on the sea and fish rising to feed, the business achingly slow, yet in its own way, frantic, repeating patterns even older than the Brongg.

There was a moment when Ord felt a sudden pressure, an inexplicable change of directions. But the beach and world looked the same.

Why would Alice need his help? Closure or no closure, how could he accomplish anything worthwhile?

Homesick to tears, Ords closed his eyes and walked blind.

His brother kept his steps true.

And when he couldn’t contemplate his situation for another moment, Ord opened his eyes again, discovering that it was early evening and they were just a few steps away from their goal. Almost too late, he asked about the ancient times. About Ian, about his first children. And how the ordinary people had dealt with them, or not.

“Tell me,” Ord begged.

Stories flowed from Perfect, genuine and simple, told with words and direct memories, accents made with the occasional slow flourish as the brothers marched across the last few meters of rain-spattered beach.

8

Sometimes Alice joined me on my explorations.

She was more a burden than a help. I was chasing living worlds, and she preferred the dead. We moved too fast for her to accomplish much, but she’d give the dead places little nudges. She warmed their cores or lent their atmosphere a potent gas or two. Another hundred million years, and who knows? Something might grow on them … .

But I wonder:

Are people going to declare those worlds illegal, too?

Will janitors be dispatched, ordered to scrub away all that treacherous prebiotic slime?

—Perfect, in conversation

The Brongg sun was barely visible as it set, shrouded in clouds and mammoth drops of new gasolines. The tall black cylinder was in front of Ord, in easy reach, but when he lifted his arm, it proved to be unreachable, a dreamy, teasing sense of distance only growing.

“Step again,” Perfect advised.

When he stepped, at the moment of footfall, the Brongg homeworld evaporated. He was in freefall again, and the cylinder covered half of the sky—a deep blackness against a bottomless void. Ord kicked, cried out. Screamed and made no sound.

He was streaking toward their destination at a fat fraction of lightspeed, yet the final plunge took hours. A piece of him—some new subsystem; a canned memory—measured the target’s size, in astonishment, and he pleaded with Perfect for an explanation, or encouragement, or even a few mild lies to mollify him.

Perfect said nothing, and was nowhere to be seen.

The impact was sudden—a brief, bitting pain, brilliant light of no color, then a hard and busy long sleep.

When Ord awoke, he found himself on another beach. He was dressed in his original clothes, including his favorite boots, and his body was his own, unscarred and excited, his heart beating inside its enduring cage of ribs.

“Oh, you’re whole again. Thoroughly and genuinely.”

The caveman sat beside him, his knapsack serving as a pillow. Again he wore skins and an oversized smile, but the blue eyes seemed distracted, even sad. Calloused feet splashed in a deep, rocky pool. A sourceless warm light made his brother’s skin glow, pink with blood and pink with wear. A soft, proud voice asked, “What do you think?”

The pool and the sea beyond were filled with a watery fluid.

But it wasn’t water, Ord realized.

The surface wore a thin persistent foam, transparent facets distorting the pool’s bottom, water-worn stones overlaid with a matted emerald-brown hair. Life, he knew. And as life went, it was simple. Unsplendid. Even a little disappointing.

“Yet there was nothing like this on my last visit,” the brother replied.

“A few protocells, all scavengers. Not one honest photosynthesizer among them.”

Ord touched the foam-frosted pool, feeling warmth and a strange lack of wetness.

He rose to his feet, glad to be quick again.

In his body again. Whole and home.

“Look around,” Perfect insisted. “Opinions, please.”

A rocky beach had been shaped by waves and strong winds. Behind the beach, taller rocks merged into hills, then mountains, then masses too huge and distant to be mere mountains. But at least as astonishing was the sea, every little agitation, every insult, causing the foam to rise, flat and bright, jewel-like bubbles refracting light into every possible color. It was as if the boundaries between liquid and air were vague. Ord’s eyes lifted, a general brilliance replacing any sun, the distant sea turning milk-white as each jewel’s color blended into one.

“This is a dyson,” Ord muttered, interrupting his own thoughts.

“Cylindrical, and spinning. The most ordinary part of the design, to my mind.”

Reaching into the air, on his right and left, were hair-thin structures resembling the angle spokes on a crude wheel. Ord imagined they must give support; and in an instant, some subconscious calculation was delivered to him. He remembered the dyson’s apparent size, which implied a certain length for the spokes, and a diameter, and their thinness was an illusion, much as a giant star will mimic a simple cold point.

“Nobody builds … on this scale … !”

“You were taught,” growled his brother. “You were taught.”

The hair-like spokes were thicker than some worlds. And with that revelation, Ord looked inland again, past the ordinary mountains, eyes lifting as the mind told him that the vast plateau was not, that what he saw was the base of the nearest spoke, the rest of it partially obscured by the glare of the sky.

“This little ocean?” Perfect boasted. “It covers an area greater than a hundred thousand earths, and it’s a teardrop. Nothing more.”

Numbed, Ord felt his legs tremble, his breath quicken.

“Taste the water,” his brother insisted. “Here. Have a sip!”

Not water, and not wet. It was like a drink taken in a dream, the flavor too delicious to recall after the thirst was gone. With a weak, quiet voice, Ord asked, “What is it? Tell me?”

“You guess. Go on.”

“You’ve done something with dark matter.” A boy’s best guess, correct but too simple by a long ways. “Because this isn’t ordinary … it isn’t baryonic … .”

“Alice did the magic, mostly. I set guidelines and the fat goals, but she invented the technologies.” He pulled a stone from the pool, complete with its shaggy carpet, then tucked it into a new pouch hanging from the knapsack. “What she did was rework some simple, invisible particles. She coerced them into acting like atoms. A positive particle, a negative one. Then she built a new periodic table—a simpler set of elements—out of the lazy atoms. Much of what you see here is dark matter, which is why it barely reacts to the universe around us. And that’s why unless you know precisely what you’re seeking, this vast dyson is wondrously invisible.”

Questions formed.

Ord tried asking all of them, in a rush.

“Oh, people have attempted dark-matter life,” Perfect explained. “From scratch, all failures. You can guess some of the problems. But we helped ourselves by inventing our own elements, including a superior version of the honored carbon atom. And the scale of the work helps, some. And, too, we cheated. When we had no choices, we bolstered the system with baryonic matter. A thin but essential scaffolding, if you will.”

The boy took a deep breath, wondering what he was inhaling.

“It feels like a warm day, doesn’t it?” A laugh and shake of the head. “The truth? We’re hovering a few degrees above Absolute. The fire above us is chilly. Interstellar hydrogen is captured as it drifts into the dyson, then it’s burned efficiently, taken all the way to iron. Any energy that escapes is masked, given some natural excuse. And the iron ash is nothing in this volume of cold space.”

Ord swallowed, then swallowed again. “You wanted to make a better intelligence. But what’s here, in this pool … it can’t have even a stupid thought.”

“I would never, never presume to dictate a final design of what evolves here.” A pause, nothing funny for this brief moment. “I set up the broad parameters. Not Alice. I gave life its chance, then broke camp and began walking again.”

Ord watched his brother wade into the sea, submerging for a moment, then emerging with another stone and its hair, both different in color from before. Again he stuffed his prize into the pouch, no room for it and yet no difficulty in the task. Then as he straightened, appearing rather pleased, Ord asked him: “How can you know that intelligence will evolve? And that it won’t make all our ridiculous mistakes?”

Perfect retrieved his treasured spear, using it to roll a stone on its back. The mud beneath stank with odd rot, implying life. A gob of the mud followed the two mossy stones into the pouch, then he said, “There’s nothing like uranium here, for example.”

Recalling his own foolish stunt, Ord felt a sudden painful shame.

“And with these-synthetic elements, and with the neurons they can build, thought and action will be in balance, I hope. I hope.” The older brother appeared uncharacteristically sober, yet sobriety, in some odd way, betrayed a deep and abiding happiness. He was happy stuffing mud into that impossible pouch. He was happy standing again, wiping his dirty hands against his stomach, squinting at the sky as he asked again, “What was our golden age?”

“After the glaciers melted,” Ord recalled. When the world was the universe, the stars unimaginable … .

“This is the universe.” A skyward thrust of the spear. “What’s born here has no reason or rationale to imagine the stars.”

Ord stared at his brother, waiting.

“Whatever prospers—whatever organism can rule this dyson—is free to call itself the master of creation. And why not? It won’t sound even a millionth as silly as we do when we make the same boasts.”

“But I never have,” Ord complained, in a whisper building toward anger. “I’ve never even thought those words …!”

“Which is possibly, just possibly, why Alice selected you!”

Ord shut his mouth, remaining silent.

“Do you know what I am? What I am most truly?” Perfect asked the question with a calm, almost distracted air, again wiping the stinking mud from his hands, palms and fingers painting his belly. “A master of creation, maybe?” From everywhere came a thunderous, world-shaking laugh, and Perfect said, “Bullshit! I’m just a fucking caveman who got lucky . . . !”

9

Maybe our universe is as simple as this:

We are built entirely from someone’s nearly invisible dark matter. Protons and electrons have been coerced into cooperating, building the baryonic places. We’re a tiny bubble drifting through an enormous and brilliant but quite invisible cosmos, lovely pieces of it passing through us unseen. Which implies that this larger universe might itself be dark matter inside some still greater universe … and so on, and on … .

Oh, Ord, I’m sorry. I was mistaken. That doesn’t sound simple at all, does it?

—Perfect, in conversation

Hoisting his knapsack to his shoulder, Perfect said, “Stay here.”

“Where are you going?” the boy blurted, surprised by his anxieties. Trying for composure, he added, “I want to go with you.”

A wink and grin, effortlessly charming.

Then Perfect picked up his spear with his partial hand, remarking, “I’ve got work, and there isn’t time. Stay. Wait. I should be back before too long, I hope.”

“But I’m here to help, right? To do some good—?”

“You don’t understand. Not yet.” Then his brother began to step toward him, and he wasn’t there anymore. The step carried him out of sight, in an instant, and Ord spun and dropped to his butt, suddenly feeling chilled. A hundred new questions to ask, the old ones needing to be asked again, and he felt abandoned, cheated, and small.

In a whisper, he said, “I’m tired of this Family.”

A lazy little wind blew from the sea, cold as liquid helium but warm against his current skin. Other than the wind, nothing moved. No answers presented themselves. And when Ord grew sick of feeling sorry for himself, he stood again, then began to walk, following the shoreline at his own modest, archaic pace.

 

There was no sun to set, but there were nights.

He learned.

Darkness emerged slowly, exposing the illuminated far side of the dyson, and Ord sat on a different beach, bare feet in the warm facsimile of sand, eyes gazing at that remote, ill-defined terrain. Every world that the Chamberlains had terraformed, if cleaned like animal skins and sewn together, wouldn’t carpet this vast place.

He wondered how Alice and Perfect had managed it, and then he knew. It was because the dark matter was so abundant and amiable. Because they took their time, self-replicating robots doing the brunt of the work. And because the dyson’s true mass wasn’t much greater than Neptune’s—a wondrous home of tissue paper, in essence, lit from within by cold candles.

Somewhere within Ord, out of easy reach, were reservoirs of fact, languid explanations, and bottled lectures beyond number.

He practiced, accessing the knowledge as best he could.

There was a text on the Brongg—their immeasurable history, the bulk of it immeasurably dull—but its sheer size and dullness was an event, majestic in its own right, like plate tectonics.

Sitting on that alien beach, in the dark, Ord found himself lost in the intricacies of a Brongg government born in the Triassic and still thriving today.

He barely noticed the dawn.

A feeble glow began nowhere, and everywhere. This was a universe without shadows. The boy blinked and looked skyward, wondering how these qualities would affect the future psyches … and there was a sound, a gentle wrong-pitched splashing, his eyes dropping, focusing on a distinctive beachcomber.

It was Perfect, already back again.

Ord was halfway standing when he noticed the clothes, the posture. The five whole fingers on each open hand.

Hesitating, Ord found that he had no voice.

With a quiet, terrified tone, the other Chamberlain said:

“Lyman. I’m just Lyman.”

“Brother …?”

“You remember me, don’t you?” His horror was palpable. “They asked me to come, to talk with you, to tell you … offer you … oh, Ord … ! Do you know how much trouble you’re in … ?”

“Why wouldn’t I remember you?”

Lyman straightened, blinked. The answer seemed obvious, thus he moved to greater questions, explaining events from his point of view.

“You vanished. We thought you were in your room … I even spoke to you once, except it wasn’t you …you were gone, and a security sweep realized it.” Lyman attempted a smile, acting as if he remembered instructions to do just that. “We searched for you.” The smile brightened. “I went to the stables … . I thought you might be hiding … .”

“I’m sorry to worry anyone.”

The brother took a deep breath, then exhaled.

“When you couldn’t find me, what happened?”

“Next?” A pained, prolonged swallow. “The Nuyens came to visit. A high-ranking delegation. They claimed that some old Chamberlain had been living on the estate, in secret—”

“How could they know?”

“The Nuyens have watched us. Better than we watch ourselves, it seems.” Lyman glanced at the enormous sea, nothing registering in his eyes. “There were high-level meetings, and accusations—you could feel the tension—then someone broke into a facility in the Oort cloud, and portions of Alice were stolen. Afterward, you could taste the panic—”

“What portions?”

Lyman shuddered, then wrestled himself back into a half-composure. He didn’t know what was stolen. “They wanted help from someone you would trust,” he admitted. “Which isn’t me, I told them that, but you know how the elders can be. They’d already picked me before they asked—”

“Who asked?”

“Everyone. There were Chamberlains, and Nuyens. Even the Sanchexes by then. And even the Sanchexes were scared.”

“How would you help?”

“Like this.” Isn’t it obvious? his face asked. “You and a rogue Chamberlain had taken parts of Alice. It was kept secret from the public, of course. So was the mission to find you, and they asked if I would go with them, and speak with you when it was time.”

Ord found himself laughing. A genuine, quiet laugh. “Oh, they asked you, did they?”

Lyman hesitated, attempting a wry smile. “I went to sleep.” He said the word with longing, as if he wished he was asleep now. “It was a long chase, but here I am.”

“You are,” Ord agreed. He had sudden warm feelings for Lyman, sorry to have him pulled into this mess. Was that the logic? Disarm him with a pitiful sibling? “But I didn’t steal anything of Alice’s.”

“I knew you didn’t. It was the rogue all along.”

Where was Perfect?

“What we could do,” Lyman continued, “is go to the others. You aren’t responsible for what’s happened. You were kidnapped, or whatever we want to call it, and I’ll explain—”

“Who’s with you?”

“A sister. The elder on the estate.” He attempted another smile. “Do you see how important you are?”

“Who else?”

“Just one. A Nuyen.” Lyman paused, a study in concentration. “He is in charge. As old as Alice, almost.”

Perfect had seen two pursuers. Lyman would have been cargo. Inert, innocent.

“What do you think of this place?” asked Ord.

Lyman wanted to keep his eyes on his brother. A glance toward the sea, then toward the mountains. Then he said, “Lovely,” with a surprising conviction.

“But you came to destroy it, didn’t you?”

“Not me,” his brother sputtered. “But if it’s illegal … immoral … doesn’t it have to be destroyed?”

A vast realm that hurts no one—a universe unto itself—and Ord felt a scalding, enormous rage.

He gave a low moan, stepping toward Lyman.

A terrified voice said, “No,” as his brother retreated. He was begging, pleading. Hands raised, he said, “Just come with me. We’ll talk to them, and maybe something can be done—”

Ord picked up a rounded stone, for emphasis. “They won’t hurt this place—”

—and a Nuyen appeared, a Chamberlain standing strategically on his left, slightly behind him. An adult version of Xo showed a humorless smile—simple dark hair; unreadable black eyes—then he said with a hard, cleancutting voice, “Surrender. You’re a good boy, but you don’t have any idea what you’re doing.”

Ord felt utterly confident in his mistrust of Nuyens. “Do not touch anything here,” he warned, words like thunderbolts.

A tilt of the head, a thin amusement. The Nuyen said, “Really?”

The sister—a total stranger—called to Ord, by name, conjuring a face vast and maternal, concern dripping from it.

Ord looked only at the Nuyen, lifting the stone overhead as he said, “Leave. All of you, leave.”

The enemy showed no fear or hesitations. But behind the face, in some small way, there was the instantaneous flinch.

An involuntary failure of will.

With a mixture of horror and exhilaration, Ord wondered what he had of Alice’s. Energies, liquid and sweet, surged through him and radiating in all directions. The beach shivered. The great sea threw clouds of jeweled foam into a brilliant sky. And Ord pictured the Nuyen dying, slowly, his soul in agony to the end.

Here the boy would remain. Anyone who came to destroy this place would be destroyed, Ord’s destiny set … !

A voice spoke to him. Familiar, close.

A lying voice, Ord told himself.

The old Nuyen and Chamberlain had retreated in panic, leaving their empty bodies standing on the beach. But their souls hadn’t fled far enough, and Ord could see them with some newly engaged eye, measuring distances, the rock in his clenched hand no longer simple and cold.

That voice, again.

Beseeching him to stop.

But Ord didn’t listen. He followed his instincts and anger, flinging the nonstone and aiming to murder—

A flash, a dull white pain.

—and he collapsed, giving a miserable low groan.

Piercing his chest, cutting places and functions he had only just begun to feel, was that long flint Folsom point. Ord could see the point jutting from his sternum. He was down on his hands and knees, breathing out of habit, little red bubbles detaching from his mouth and drifting on the warm wind. He watched one bubble, something about it enchanting. Weightless, it swirled and rose, then fell again. In its slick red face he thought he could see his own face, for an instant. Then it settled on top of a bare pink foot, and it burst without sound, without fuss. Whose foot? Why couldn’t he remember? But Ord was having trouble thinking at all, and he felt quite chilled, and the bubbles weren’t coming anymore, and he very much missed them … .

10

… and with my life, my health, and my perishable name, I now and always shall defend the Great Peace.

—from the Families’ pledge

“If I had let you kill them,” said Perfect, “what possible sweet good would have come from it?”

Opening his eyes, Ord found himself sitting on a cave floor, a small fire burning before him, his brother illuminated by the golden flames and halfhidden by their swirling, jasmine-scented smoke.

“A rash thought, a crude act, and then what?”

The boy gasped, feeling pain. In the center of his chest was a slick raised scar, white as milk, and aching, and apparently permanent.

Quietly, with genuine remorse, he said, “I am sorry … .”

Perfect said nothing for a long time, wiggling his fingers and stumps as they warmed, his face contemplative and remote.

The cave was filled with rocks, Ord noted. They were neatly stacked, each one adorned with something alive. Handfuls of mud filled the gaps. Everything glistened, water dripping somewhere in the darkness.

Ord shuddered, saying, “I wanted to protect—”

“—the dyson, yes.” His brother shook his head, warning him, “First of all, the dyson is my responsibility. And second of all, there were exactly five sentient organisms onboard it. Only five. You and me, and poor Lyman, and your intended victims. You were willing to commit two murders to save a vast inchoate slime, and that’s not the moral act of a decent soul. Chamberlain or not.”

“How is Lyman?”

“Sleeping on that beach, and safe.”

Ord glanced at his surroundings, saying, “This is your pouch. This is where you’ve been putting the rocks and mud.”

“A representative population, yes. Held in suspended animation.” Perfect tossed a stone chip into the fire, sparks scattering. “That Nuyen and our sister are holding at a safe distance, awaiting reinforcements. Of course they suspected that I was the one helping you, but they never, never guessed the kinds of powers that you hold. A lot of Alice’s systems had yet to be catalogued. And besides, they hoped to win your surrender, without incident, before dealing with me and my dyson.”

“What kinds of powers … ?”

A dark, slow laugh. “.I do not know, Ord. In most cases.”

The boy dipped his head, breathing deeply.

“Before Alice fled the Core, she visited me, warning me about the coming explosion. Then she made me promise to do exactly what I have done, giving the Baby exactly what I gave you and taking him to a suitable starting point.”

His unborn sister could have been chosen just as easily.

Or Lyman, he realized.

Then Perfect jumped to his feet, announcing, “Before the reinforcements arrive, we should make our quiet escape.”

“To where?” the boy inquired.

“I am leaving on a million-year walk.” The voice was calm, the face resigned. “Out between the galaxies, I should think. Then in some good cold place I’ll rebuild this dyson. Stone for stone. And afterward … well, there might be a galaxy or two worth exploring. Who knows?”

“May I walk with you?”

“Not for one step, no.”

Ord had expected that answer, but the words stung nonetheless.

His brother continued, saying, “Alice asked for my help, and I gave it. Out of love, trust, and habit, and in that order. She has her reason, we can hope. And now you’re free to help Alice, or not. I won’t presume to tell you which choice to make.”

“I have to save something,” Ord whispered.

Perfect kicked stones and cold embers over the fire’s heart. “I know what it is, and the truth told, I don’t envy you.”

“It’s fragile, and Alice is pledged to protect it … .”

The maimed hand was offered.

Ord took it, standing. “It must be an illegal world. Is it? One with sentience, maybe?”

“I will show you,” his brother promised. “Come on.”

The boy’s feet refused to move.

Without firelight, a softer, stranger glow illuminated the cavern. Perfect was a silhouette. His voice was close and warm, coaxing Ord by saying, “Not a world, no. Follow me.”

Ord was strong enough to butcher a godly Nuyen, yet his legs were too heavy to lift. He fought with them, shuffling forward, noticing for the first time that his feet were bare and his only clothes were trousers made from simple skins. He looked at himself in the gloom, thinking of a lucky caveman. Then he managed a step, and another, and looked up at the sky that he both anticipated and could not believe.

Standing beside him, Perfect said, “I took you on a course perpendicular to the galactic plane. Out and out, then around a black hole that sent us partway home again.”

Ord was sobbing, tears flowing, tasting like a long-ago sea.

“We walked along that beach, yes. But we also crossed several tens of thousands of light years. Out, then back again. Which means that you can see some of what’s happened since we left.”

The Milky Way covered the sky. With new eyes, Ord could see every sun and world and lump of stone bigger than a fist—or so it seemed—and the Core was the brilliant horror that he expected, its detonation at its climax, radiations and expelled wreckage rushing outward in a withering, toxic storm. A baby quasar, only human-made. Worse than almost every reasonable projection made in Ord’s long-ago youth—

—and by no means the worst of what he could see.

A tragedy, but one with calculable, endurable ends.

The greatest horrors were smaller, scattered through the galaxy’s broad spiral arms. Ord couldn’t stop seeing them, even when he shut his human eyes. Healthy suns exploded. Living worlds were reduced to dust. Unknown powers struggled against one another with a frantic, brutal violence. The Great Peace was collapsing. Old and fragile, it might evaporate totally before Ord could return home. And to accomplish what … ? With or without Alice’s powers, what good could he do … ?

With a solemn voice, Perfect said, “Bless the dead!”

At Ord’s feet was a knapsack filled with talents. In his left hand, a fine new spear tipped with a Folsom point. And in his right hand was a simple stone mug, the pungent odor of an old-fashioned liquor pervading the night air.

“Bless the dead,” Ord repeated, with feeling.

The brothers touched mugs with a cool, almost musical sound.

Then, as Ord drank, Perfect told him, “I want to give you a talent. I don’t have Alice’s magic, but here’s something you might appreciate.”

Ord’s mug became a nearly spherical ball.

Not heavy, not large.

It was a head, he saw. A Chamberlain head, complete with red hair and the piercing blue eyes. And emitting an enormous laugh, so pure and authentic that Ord couldn’t help but smile for a moment, closing his hand over the sweet gift, knowing what it was and almost saying, “Thank you,” before he realized that nobody was standing beside him anymore.

He squeezed the head until it vanished, becoming part of his immortal flesh.

Then Ord again looked at the Milky Way, realizing that most of it remained at peace, tranquil and inviting by any measure. And he managed to laugh in a quiet, hopeful way, picking up his knapsack now, thinking that all things considered, it was a lovely night for a little walk.