FIVE THRILLERS

Robert Reed

Here’s a fast-paced story, dazzling in its shifts in milieu, that delivers exactly what the title says that it’s going to deliver.

Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986, and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and many other markets. Reed may be one of the most prolific of today’s young writers, particularly at short fiction, seriously rivalled 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 “Sister Alice”, “Brother Perfect”, “Decency”, “Savior”, “The Remoras”, “Chrysalis”, “Whiptail”, “The Utility Man”, “Marrow”, “Birth Day”, “Blind”, “The Toad of Heaven”, “Stride”, “The Shape of Everything”, “Guest of Honor”, “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 80s and 90s. Many of his best stories were assembled in his first collection, The Dragons of Springplace. Nor is he non-prolific 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, Beneath the Gated Sky, Marrow, and Sister Alice. His most recent books include two chapbook novellas, Mere and Flavors of My Genius, a collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys, and a novel, The Well of Stars. Reed lives with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.

THE ILL-FATED MISSION

THEIR SITUATION WAS dire. A chunk of primordial iron had slashed its way through the Demon Dandy, crippling the engines and pushing life support to the brink of failure. Even worse, a shotgun blast of shrapnel had shredded one of the ship’s two life-pods. The mission engineer, a glum little fellow who had spent twenty years mining Earth-grazing asteroids, studied the wreckage with an expert eye. There was no sane reason to hope that repairs could be made in time. But on the principle of keeping his staff busy, he ordered the robots and his new assistant to continue their work on the useless pod. Then after investing a few moments cursing God and Luck, the engineer dragged himself to the remnants of the bridge to meet with the Dandy’s beleaguered captain.

His assistant was a young fellow named Joseph Carroway.

Handsome as a digital hero, with green eyes and an abundance of curly blond hair, Joe was in his early twenties, born to wealthy parents who had endowed their only child with the earliest crop of synthetic human genes. He was a tall tidy fellow, and he was a gifted athlete as graceful as any dancer, on the Earth or in freefall. According to a dozen respected scales, Joe was also quite intelligent. With an impressed shake of the head, the company psychiatrist had confided that his bountiful talents made him suitable for many kinds of work. But by the same token, that supercharged brain carried certain inherent risks.

Dipping his head in the most charming fashion, he said, “Risks?”

“And I think you know what I’m talking about,” she remarked, showing a wary, somewhat flirtatious smile.

“But I don’t know,” Joe lied.

“And I believe you do,” she countered. “Without exception, Mr Carroway, you have been telling me exactly what I want to hear. And you’re very believable, I should add. If I hadn’t run the T-scan during our interview, I might have come away believing that you are the most kind, most decent gentleman in the world.”

“But I am decent,” he argued.

Joe sounded, and looked, exceptionally earnest.

The psychiatrist laughed. A woman in her early fifties, she was an over-qualified professional doing routine tasks for a corporation larger and more powerful than most nations. The solar system was being opened to humanity – humanity in all of its forms, old and new. Her only task was to find qualified bodies to do exceptionally dangerous work. The vagaries of this young man’s psyche were factors in her assessment. But they weren’t the final word. After a moment’s reflection, she said, “God, the thing is, you’re beautiful.”

Joe smiled and said, “Thank you.”

Then with a natural smoothness, he added, “And you are an exceptionally lovely woman.”

She laughed, loudly and with a trace of despair, as if aware that she would never again hear such kind words from a young man.

Then Joe leaned forward, and wearing the perfect smile – a strong winning grin – he told the psychiatrist, “I am a very good person.”

“No,” she said. “No, Joe, you are not.”

Then she sat back in her chair, and with a finger twirling her mousy-brown hair, she confessed, “But dear God, my boy, I really would just love to have you for dinner.”

Five months later, the Demon Dandy was crippled.

As soon as the engineer left for the bridge, Joe kicked away from the battered escape pod. Both robots quietly reminded him of their orders. Dereliction of duty would leave a black mark on the mission report. But their assignment had no purpose except to keep them busy and Joe distracted. And since arguing with machines served no role, he said nothing, focusing on the only rational course available to him.

The corn-line to the bridge was locked, but that was a puzzle easily solved. For the next few minutes, Joe concentrated on a very miserable conversation between the ship’s top officers. The best launch window was only a little more than three hours from now. The surviving pod had finite fuel and oxygen. Kilograms and the time demanded by any return voyage were the main problems. Thirty precious seconds were wasted when the captain announced that she would remain behind, forcing the engineer to point out that she was a small person, which meant they would need to find another thirty kilos of mass, at the very least.

Of course both officers could play the hero role, sacrificing themselves to save their crew. But neither mentioned what was painfully obvious. Instead, what mattered was the naming and discarding a string of increasingly unworkable fixes.

Their conversation stopped when Joe drifted into the bridge.

“I’ve got two options for you,” he announced. “And when it comes down to it, you’ll take my second solution.”

The captain glanced at her engineer, as if to ask, “Should we listen to this kid?”

In despair, the engineer said, “Tell us, Joe. Quick.”

“The fairest answer? We chop off everybody’s arms and legs.” He smiled and dipped his head as he spoke, pretending to be squeamish. “We’ll use the big field laser, since that should cauterize the wounds. Then our robots dope everybody up and shove us onboard the pod. With the robots remaining behind, of course.”

Neither officer had considered saving their machines.

“We chop off our own arms?” the engineer whined. “And our legs too?”

“Prosthetics do wonders,” Joe pointed out. “Or the company can grow us new limbs. They won’t match the originals, but they’ll be workable enough.”

The officers traded nervous looks.

“What else do you have?” the captain asked.

“One crewmember remains behind.”

“We’ve considered that,” the engineer warned. “But there’s no decent way to decide who stays and who goes.”

“Two of us have enough mass,” Joe pointed out. “If either one stays, everybody else escapes.”

Joe was the largest crewman.

“So you’re volunteering?” asked the captain, hope brightening her tiny brown face.

Joe said, “No,” with a flat, unaffected voice. “I’m sorry. Did I say anything about volunteers?”

Suddenly the only sound was the thin wind caused by a spaceship suffering a thousand tiny leaks.

One person among the crew was almost as big as Joe.

The engineer whispered, “Danielle.”

Both officers winced. Their colleague was an excellent worker and a dear friend, and Danielle also happened to be attractive and popular. Try as they might, they couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that they would leave her behind, and without her blessing, at that.

Joe had anticipated their response. “But if you had a choice between her and me, you’d happily abandon me. Is that right?”

They didn’t answer. But Joe was new to the crew, and when their eyes dropped, they were clearly saying, “Yes.”

He took no offence.

With a shrug and a sigh, Joe gave his audience time enough to feel ashamed. Then he looked at the captain, asking, “What about Barnes? He’s only ten, maybe eleven kilos lighter than me.”

That name caused a brief exchange of glances.

“What are you planning?” asked the engineer.

Joe didn’t respond.

“No,” the captain told him.

“No?” asked Joe. “‘No’ to what?”

Neither would confess what they were imagining.

Then Joe put on a horrified expression. “Oh, God,” he said. “Do you really believe I would consider that?”

The engineer defended himself with soft mutters.

Joe’s horror dissolved into a piercing stare.

“There are codes to this sort of thing,” the captain reminded everybody, including herself. “Commit violence against a fellow crewmember, I don’t care who it is . . . and you won’t come home with us, Mr Carroway. Is that clear enough for you to understand?”

Joe let her fume. Then with a sly smile, he said, “I’m sorry. I thought we wanted the best way to save as many lives as possible.”

Again, the officers glanced at each another.

The young man laughed in a charming but very chilly fashion – a moment that always made empathic souls uneasy. “Let’s return to my first plan,” he said. “Order everybody into the machine shop, and we’ll start carving off body parts.”

The captain said, “No,” and then looked for a good reason.

The engineer just shrugged, laughing nervously.

“We don’t know if that would work,” the captain decided. “People could be killed by the trauma.”

“And what if we had to fly the pod manually?” the engineer asked. “Without hands, we’re just cargo.”

An awful option had been excluded, and they could relax slightly.

“Okay,” said Joe. “This is what I’m going to do: I’ll go talk to Barnes. Give me a few minutes. And if I don’t get what we want, then I will stay behind.”

“You?” the captain said hopefully.

Joe offered a firm, trustworthy, “Sure.”

But when he tallied up everyone’s mass, the engineer found trouble. “Even with Barnes gone, we’re still five kilos past our limit. And I’d like to give us a bigger margin of error, if I can.”

“So,” said Joe. “The rest of us give blood.”

The captain stared at this odd young man, studying that dense blond hair and those bright green eyes.

“Blood,” Joe repeated. “As much as we can physically manage. And we can also enjoy a big chemically-induced shit before leaving this wreck.”

The engineer began massaging the numbers.

Joe matter-of-factly dangled his leg between the officers. “And if we’re pressed, I guess I could surrender one of these boys. But my guess is that it won’t come to that.”

And in the end, it did not.

Three weeks later, Joe Carroway was sitting in the psychiatrist’s office, calmly discussing the tragedy.

“I’ve read everyone’s report,” she admitted.

He nodded, and he smiled.

Unlike their last meeting, the woman was striving to maintain a strict professional distance. She couldn’t have foreseen what would happen to the Dandy Demon or how this employee would respond. But there was the possibility that blame would eventually settle on her, and to save her own flesh, she was determined to learn exactly what Joe and the officers had decided on the bridge.

“Does your face hurt?” she inquired.

“A little bit.”

“How many times did he strike you?”

“Ten,” Joe guessed. “Maybe more.”

She winced. “The weapon?”

“A rough piece of iron,” he said. “Barnes had a souvenir from the first asteroid he helped work.”

Infrared sensors and the hidden T-scanner were observing the subject closely. Examining the telemetry, she asked, “Why did you pick Mr Barnes?”

“That’s in my report.”

“Remind me, Joe. What were your reasons?”

“He was big enough to matter.”

“And what did the others think about the man?”

“You mean the crew?” Joe shrugged. “He was one of us. Maybe he was quiet and kept to himself —”

“Bullshit.”

When he wanted, Joe could produce a shy, boyish grin.

“He was different from the rest of you,” the psychiatrist pointed out. “And I’m not talking about his personality.”

“You’re not,” Joe agreed.

She produced images of the dead man. The oldest photograph showed a skinny, homely male in his middle twenties, while the most recent example presented a face that was turning fat – a normal consequence that came with the most intrusive, all-encompassing genetic surgery.

“Your colleague was midway through some very radical genetic surgery.”

“He was,” Joe agreed.

“He belonged to the Rebirth Movement.”

“I’m sorry. What does this have to do with anything?” Joe’s tone was serious. Perhaps even offended. “Everybody is human, even if they aren’t sapiens anymore. Isn’t that the way our laws are written?”

“You knew exactly what you were doing, Joe.”

He didn’t answer.

“You selected Barnes. You picked him because you understood that nobody would stand in your way.”

Again, Joe used his shy, winning grin.

“Where did you meet with Barnes?”

“In his cabin.”

“And what did you say to him?”

“That I loved him,” Joe explained. “I told him that I was envious of his courage and vision. Leaving our old species was noble. Was good. I thought that he was intriguing and very beautiful. And I told him that to save his important life, as well as everybody else, I was going to sacrifice myself. I was staying behind with the robots.”

“You lied to him.”

“Except Barnes believed me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“When you told him you loved him . . . did you believe he was gay . . . ?”

“He wasn’t.”

“But if he had been? What would you have done if he was flattered by your advances?”

“Oh, I could have played that game too.”

The psychiatrist hesitated. “What do you mean?”

“If Barnes preferred guys, then I would have seduced him. If I’d thought there was enough time, I mean. I would have convinced him to remain behind and save my life. Really, the guy was pretty easy to manipulate, all in all. It wouldn’t have taken much to convince him that being the hero was his idea in the first place.”

“You could have managed all that?”

Joe considered hard before saying, “If I’d had a few days to work with, sure. Easy. But you’re probably right. A couple hours wasn’t enough time.”

The psychiatrist had stopped watching the telemetry, preferring to stare at the creature sitting across from her.

Quietly, she said, “OK.”

Joe waited patiently.

“What did Mr Barnes say to you?” she asked. “After you professed your love, how did he react?”

“‘You’re lying.’“ Joe didn’t just quote the man, but he sounded like him too. The voice was thick and a little slow, wrapped around vocal chords that were slowly changing their configuration. “‘You’ve slept with every damn woman on this ship,’ he told me. ‘Except our dyke captain.’”

The psychiatrist’s face stiffened slightly.

“Is that true?” she muttered.

Joe gave her a moment. “Is what true?”

“Never mind.” She found a new subject to pursue. “Mr Barnes’ cabin was small, wasn’t it?”

“The same as everybody’s.”

“And you were at opposite ends of that room. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

By birth, Barnes was a small man, but his Rebirth had given him temporary layers of fat that would have eventually been transformed into new tissues and bones, and even two extra fingers on each of his long, lovely hands. The air inside that cubbyhole had smelled of biology, raw and distinctly strange. But it wasn’t an unpleasant odour. Barnes had been drifting beside his bed, and next to him was the image of the creature he wanted to become – a powerful, fur-draped entity with huge golden eyes and a predator’s toothy grin. The cabin walls were covered with his possessions, each lashed in place to keep them out of the way. And on the surface of what was arbitrarily considered to be the ceiling, Barnes had painted the motto of the Rebirth movement:

TO BE TRULY HUMAN IS TO BE DIFFERENT.

“Do you want to know what I told him?” asked Joe. “I didn’t put this in my report. But after he claimed I was sleeping with those women . . . do you know what I said that got him to start pounding on me . . . ?”

The psychiatrist offered a tiny, almost invisible nod.

“I said, ‘I’m just playing with those silly bitches. They’re toys to me. But you, you’re nothing like them. Or like me. You’re going to be a spectacular creature. A vision of the future, you lucky shit. And before I die, please, let me blow you. Just to get the taste of another species.’”

She sighed. “All right.”

“And that’s when I reached for him —”

“You’re heterosexual,” she complained.

“I was saving lives,” Joe responded.

“You were saving your own life.”

“And plenty of others too,” he pointed out. Then with a grin, he added, “You don’t appreciate what I was prepared to do, doctor. If it meant saving the rest of us, I was capable of anything.”

She once believed that she understood Joe Carroway. But in every possible way, she had underestimated the man sitting before her, including his innate capacity to measure everybody else’s nature.

“The crew was waiting in the passageway outside,” he mentioned. “With the captain and engineer, they were crowding in close, listening close, trying to hear what would happen. All these good decent souls, holding their breaths, wondering if I could pull this trick off.”

She nodded again.

“They heard the fight, but it took them a couple minutes to force the door. When they got inside, they found Barnes all over me and that lump of iron in his hand.” Joe paused before asking, “Do you know how blood looks in space? It forms a thick mist of bright red drops that drift everywhere, sticking to every surface.”

“Did Mr Barnes strike you?”

Joe hesitated, impressed enough to show her an appreciative smile. “What does it say in my report?”

“But it seems to me . . .” Her voice trailed away. “Maybe you were being honest with me, Joe. When you swore that you would have done anything to save yourself, I should have believed you. So I have to wonder now . . . what if you grabbed that piece of asteroid and turned it on yourself? Mr Barnes would have been surprised. For a minute or so, he might have been too stunned to do anything but watch you strike yourself in the face. Then he heard the others breaking in, and he naturally kicked over to you and pulled the weapon from your hand.”

“Now why would I admit to any of that?” Joe replied.

Then he shrugged, adding, “But really, when you get down to it, the logistics of what happened aren’t important. What matters is that I gave the captain a very good excuse to lock that man up, which was how she cleared her conscience before we could abandon ship.”

“The captain doesn’t look at this as an excuse,” the psychiatrist mentioned.

“No?”

“Barnes was violent, and her conscience rests easy.”

Joe asked, “Who ordered every corn-system destroyed before we abandoned the Demon Dandy? Who left poor Barnes with no way even to call home?”

“Except by then, your colleague was a prisoner, and according to our corporate laws, the captain was obligated to silence the criminal to any potential lawsuits.” The woman kept her gaze on Joe. “Somebody had to be left behind, and in the captain’s mind, you weren’t as guilty as Mr Barnes.”

“I hope not.”

“But nobody was half as cold or a tenth as ruthless as you were, Joe.”

His expression was untroubled, even serene.

“The captain understands what you are. But in the end, she had no choice but to leave the other man behind.”

Joe laughed. “Human or not, Barnes wasn’t a very good person. He was mean-spirited and distant, and even if nobody admits it, I promise you: nobody on the ship has lost two seconds sleep over what happened there.”

The psychiatrist nearly spoke, then hesitated.

Joe leaned forward. “Do you know how it is, doctor? When you’re a kid, there’s always something that you think you’re pretty good at. Maybe you’re the best on your street, or you’re the best at school. But you never know how good you really are. Not until you get out into the big world and see what other people can do. And in the end, we aren’t all that special. Not extra clever or pretty or strong. But for a few of us, a very few, there comes a special day when we realize that we aren’t just a little good at something. We are great.

“Better than anybody ever, maybe.

“Do you know how that feels, ma’am?”

She sighed deeply. Painfully. “What are you telling me, Joe?”

He leaned back in his chair, absently scratching at the biggest bandage on his iron-battered face. “I’m telling you that I am excellent at sizing people up. Even better than you, and I think you’re beginning to appreciate that. But what you call being a borderline psychopath is to me just another part of my bigger, more important talent.”

“You’re not borderline anything,” she said.

He took no offence from the implication. “Here’s what we can learn from this particular mess: Most people are secretly bad. Under the proper circumstances, they will gladly turn on one of their own and feel nothing but good about it afterwards. But when the stakes are high and world’s going to shit, I can see exactly what needs to be done. Unlike everybody else, I will do the dirtiest work. Which is a rare and rich and remarkable gift, I think.”

She took a breath. “Why are you telling me this, Joe?”

“Because I don’t want to be a mechanic riding clunky spaceships,” he confessed. “And I want your help, doctor. All right? Will you find me new work . . . something that’s closer to my talents. Closer to my heart.

“Would you do that for me, pretty lady?”

NATURAL KILLER

At four in the morning, the animals slept. Which was only reasonable since this was a zoo populated entirely by synthetic organisms. Patrons didn’t pay for glimpses of furry lumps, formerly wild and now slumbering in some shady corner. What they wanted were spectacular, one-of-a-kind organisms doing breathtaking feats, and doing them in daylight. But high metabolisms had their costs, and that’s why the creatures now lay in their cages and grottos, inside glass boxes and private ponds, beautiful eyes closed while young minds dreamed about who-could-say-what.

For the moment, privacy was guaranteed, and that was one fine reason why desperate men would agree to meet in that public place.

Slipping into the zoo unseen brought a certain ironic pleasure too.

But perhaps the most important, at least for Joe, were the possibilities inherent with that unique realm.

A loud, faintly musical voice said, “Stop, Mr Carroway. Stop where you are, sir. And now please . . . lift your arms for us and dance in a very slow circle . . .”

Joe was in his middle thirties. His big and strong and rigorously trained body was dressed in casual white slacks and a new grey shirt. His face had retained its boyish beauty, a prominent scar creasing the broad forehead and a several-day growth of beard lending a rough, faintly threadbare quality to his otherwise immaculate appearance. Arms up, he looked rather tired. As he turned slowly, he took deep breaths, allowing several flavours of radiation to wash across his body, reaching into his bones.

“I see three weapons.” The voice came from no particular direction. “One at a time, please, lower the weapons and kick each of them toward the fountain. If you will, Mr Carroway.”

A passing shower had left the plaza wet and slick. Joe dropped the Ethiopian machine pistol first, followed the matching Glocks. Each time he kicked one of the guns, it would spin and skate across the red bricks, each one ending up within a hand’s length of the fountain – an astonishing feat, considering the stakes and his own level of exhaustion.

Unarmed, Joe stood alone in the empty plaza.

The fountain had a round black-granite base, buried pumps shoving water up against a perfect sphere of transparent crystal. The sphere was a monstrous, stylized egg. Inside the egg rode a never-to-be-born creature – some giant beast with wide black eyes and gill slits, its tail half-formed and the stubby little limbs looking as though they could turn into arms or legs, or even tentacles. Joe knew the creature was supposed to be blind, but he couldn’t shake the impression that the eyes were watching him. He watched the creature slowly roll over and over again, its egg suspended on nothing but a thin chilled layer of very busy water.

Eventually five shapes emerged from behind the fountain.

“Thank you, Mr Carroway,” said the voice. Then the sound system was deactivated, and with a hand to the mouth, one figure shouted, “A little closer, sir. If you will.”

That familiar voice was attached to the beckoning arm.

Two figures efficiently disabled Joe’s weapons. They were big men, probably Rebirth Neanderthals or some variation on that popular theme. A third man looked like a Brilliance-Boy, his skull tall and deep, stuffed full with a staggering amount of brain tissue. The fourth human was small and slight, held securely by the Brilliance-Boy; even at a distance, she looked decidedly female.

Joe took two steps and paused.

The fifth figure, the one that spoke, approached near enough to show his face. Joe wasn’t surprised, but he pretended to be. “Markel? What are you doing here?” He laughed as if nervous. “You’re not one of them, are you?”

The man looked as sapien as Joe.

With a decidedly human laugh, Markel remarked, “I’m glad to hear that you were fooled, Mr Carroway. Which of course means that you killed Stanton and Humphrey for no good reason.”

Joe said nothing.

“You did come here alone, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Because you took a little longer than I anticipated.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Perhaps not. I could be mistaken.”

Markel never admitted to errors. He was a tall fellow, as bald as an egg and not particularly handsome. Which made his disguise all the more effective. The new Homo species were always physically attractive, and they were superior athletes, more often than not. Joe had never before met a Rebirth who had gone through the pain and expense and then not bothered to grow some kind of luxurious head of hair as a consequence.

“You have my vial with you, Joseph. Yes?”

“Joe. That’s my name.” He made a show of patting his chest pocket.

“And the sealed recordings too?”

“Everything you asked for.” Joe looked past Markel. “Is that the girl?”

Something about the question amused Markel. “Do you honestly care if she is?”

“Of course I care.”

“Enough to trade away everything and earn her safety?”

Joe said nothing.

“I’ve studied your files, Joseph. I have read the personality evaluations, and I know all about your corporate security work, and even all those wicked sealed records covering the last three years. It is a most impressive career. But nothing about you, sir – nothing in your nature or your history – strikes me as being sentimental. And I cannot believe that this girl matters enough to convince you to make this exchange.”

Joe smiled. “Then why did I come here?”

“That’s my question too.”

Joe waited for a moment, then suggested, “Maybe it’s money?”

“Psychopaths always have a price,” Markel replied. “Yes, I guessed as it would be something on those lines.”

Joe reached into his shirt pocket. The vial was diamond, smaller than a pen and only halfway filled with what looked to be a plain white powder. But embossed along the vial’s length were the ominous words: NATURAL KILLER.

“How much do you want for my baby, Joseph?”

“Everything,” he said.

“And what does that mean?”

“All the money.”

“My wealth? Is that what you’re asking for?”

“I’m not asking,” Joe said. “Don’t be confused, Markel. This is not a negotiation. I am demanding that you and your backers give me every last cent in your coffers. And if not, I will ruin everything that you’ve worked to achieve. You sons-of-bitches.”

Markel had been born sapien and gifted, and his minimal and very secret steps to leave his species behind had served to increase both his mind and his capacity for arrogance. But he was stunned to hear the ultimatum. To make such outrageous demands, and in these circumstances! He couldn’t imagine anybody with that much gall. Standing quite still, his long arms at his side, Markel tried to understand why an unarmed man in these desperate circumstances would have any power over him. What wasn’t he seeing? No reinforcements were coming; he was certain of that. Outside this tiny circle, nobody knew anything. This sapien was bluffing, Markel decided. And with that, he began to breathe again, and he relaxed, announcing, “You’re right, this is not a negotiation. And I’m telling you no.”

Inside the same shirt pocket was a child’s toy – a completely harmless lump of luminescent putty stolen from the zoo’s museum. Joe shoved the vial into the bright red plaything, and before Markel could react, he flung both the putty and vial high into the air.

Every eye watched that ruddy patch of light twirl and soften, and then plunge back to the earth.

Beside the plaza was a deep acid-filled moat flanked by a pair of high fences, electrified and bristling with sensors. And on the far side were woods and darkness, plus the single example of a brand new species designed to bring huge crowds through the zoo’s front gate.

The Grendel.

“You should not have done that,” Markel said with low, furious voice. “I’ll just have you killed now and be done with you.”

Joe smiled, lifting his empty hands over his head. “Maybe you should kill me. If you’re so positive that you can get your precious KILLER back.”

That’s when Joe laughed at the brilliant bastard.

But it was the girl who reacted first, squirming out of the Brilliance-Boy’s hands to run straight for her lover.

No one bothered to chase her down.

She stopped short and slapped Joe.

“You idiot,” she spat.

He answered her with a tidy left hook.

Then one of the big soldiers shot a tacky round into Joe’s chest, pumping in enough current to drop him on the wet bricks, leaving him hovering between consciousness and white-hot misery.

“You idiot.”

The girl repeated herself several times, occasionally adding a dismissive, “Moron”, or “Fool”, to her invectives. Then as the electricity diminished, she leaned close to his face. “Don’t you understand? We were never going to use the bug. We don’t want to let it loose. It’s just one more way to help make sure you sapiens won’t declare war on us. Natural Killer is our insurance policy, and that’s it.”

The pain diminished to a lasting ache.

Wincing, Joe struggled to sit up. While he was down, smart-cuffs had wrapped themselves around his wrists and ankles. The two soldiers and the Brilliance-Boy were standing before the Grendel’s large enclosure. They had donned night-goggles and were studying the schematics of the zoo, tense voices discussing how best to slip into the cage and recover the prize.

“Joe,” she said, “how can you be this stupid?”

“Comes naturally, I guess.”

To the eye, the girl was beautiful and purely sapien. The long black hair and rich brown skin sparkled in the plaza’s light. The word “natural” was a mild insult among the Rebirths. She sat up, lips pouting. Like Markel, the young woman must have endured some minimal rearrangement of her genetics. Usually these new humans carried extra pairs of chromosomes. But despite rumours that some of the Rebirths were hiding among the naturals, this was the first time Joe had knowingly crossed paths with them.

“I am stupid,” he admitted. Then he looked at Markel, adding, “Both of you had me fooled. All along.”

That was a lie, but Markel had to smile. Of course he was clever, and of course no one suspected the truth. Behind that grim old face was enough self-esteem to keep him believing that he would survive the night.

The idiot.

Markel and his beautiful assistant glanced at each other.

Then the Brilliance-Boy called out. “We’ll use the service entrance to get in,” he announced. “Five minutes to circumvent locks and cameras, I should think.”

“Do it,” Markel told them.

“You’ll be all right here?”

The scientist lifted a pistol over his head. “We’re fine. Just go. Get my child out of that cage, now!”

That left three people on the plaza, plus the monster locked inside the slowly revolving crystal egg.

“The plague is just an insurance policy, huh?”

Joe threw out the question, and waited.

After a minute, the girl said, “To protect us from people like you, yes.”

He put on an injured expression. “Like me? What’s that mean?”

She glanced at Markel. Then with a cold voice, she said, “He showed me your history, Joe. After our first night together . . .”

“And what did it tell you?”

“When you were on the Demon Dandy, you saved yourself by leaving a Rebirth behind. And you did it in a cold, calculating way.”

He shrugged, smiled. “What else?”

“After joining the security arm of the corporation, you distinguished yourself as a soldier. Then you went to work for the UN, as a contractor, and your expertise has been assassinations.”

“Bad men should be killed,” Joe said flatly. “Evil should be removed from the world. Get the average person to be honest, and he’ll admit that he won’t lose any sleep, particularly if the monster is killed with a single clean shot.”

“You are horrible,” she maintained.

“If I’m so horrible,” said Joe, “then do the world a favour. Shoot me in the head.”

She began to reach behind her back, then thought better of it.

Markel glanced at both of them, pulling his weapon closer to his body. But nothing seemed urgent, and he returned to keeping watch over the Grendel’s enclosure.

“I suppose you noticed,” Joe began.

The girl blinked. “Noticed what?”

“In my career, I’ve killed a respectable number of Rebirths.”

The dark eyes stared at him. Then very quietly, with sarcasm, she said, “I suppose they were all bad people.”

“Drug lords and terrorists, or hired guns in the service of either.” Joe shook his head, saying, “Legal murder is easy. Clean, clear-cut. A whole lot more pleasant than the last few weeks have been, I’ll admit.”

Markel looked at him. “I am curious, Joseph. Who decided you were the ideal person to investigate our little laboratory?”

“You don’t have a little lab,” said Joe. “There aren’t ten or twelve better-equipped facilities when it comes to high-end genetic research.”

“There aren’t even twelve,” the man said, bristling slightly. “Perhaps two or three.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have found this item in any official file,” Joe said. “But a couple months ago, I was leading a team that hit a terror-cell in Alberta. Under interrogation, the Rebirth boss started making threats about unleashing something called Natural Killer on us. On the poor helpless sapiens. He claimed that we’d be wiped out of existence, and the new species could then take over. Which is their right, he claimed, and as inevitable as the next sunrise.”

His audience exchanged looks.

“But that hardly explains how you found your way to me,” Markel pointed out.

“There was a trail. Bloody in places, but every corpse pointing in your general direction.”

Markel almost spoke. But then came the creak of a heavy door being opened. Somewhere in the back of the Grendel’s enclosure, three pairs of goggled eyes were peering out into the jungle and shadow.

“It’s an amazing disease,” Joe stated. “Natural Killer is.”

“Quiet,” Markel warned.

But the girl couldn’t contain herself. She bent low, whispering, “It is,” while trying to burn him with her hateful smile.

“The virus targets old, outmoded stretches of the human genome,” Joe continued. “From what I can tell – and I’m no expert in biology, of course – but your extra genes guarantee you wouldn’t get anything worse than some wicked flu symptoms out of the bug. Is that about right?”

“A tailored pox phage,” she said. “Rapidly mutating, but always fatal to sapiens genome.”

“So who dreamed up the name?” Joe glanced at Markel and then winked at her. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

She sat back, grinning.

“And it’s going to save you? From bastards like me, is it?”

“You won’t dare lift a hand against us,” she told Joe. “As soon as you realize we have this weapon, and that it could conceivably wipe your entire species off the face of the earth . . .”

“Smart,” he agreed. “Very smart.”

From the Grendel enclosure came the sharp soft noise of a gun firing. One quick burst and then two single shots from the same weapon. Then, silence.

Markel lifted his pistol reflexively.

“So when do you Rebirths make your official announcement?” Joe asked. “And how do you handle this kind of event? Hold a news conference? Unless you decide on a demonstration, I suppose. You know, murder an isolated village, or devastate one of the orbital communities. Just to prove to the idiots in the world that you can deliver on your threats.”

A voice called from the enclosure.

“I have it,” one of the soldiers shouted.

Joe turned in time to see the reddish glow rise off the ground, partly obscured by the strong hand holding it. But as the arm cocked, ready to throw the prize back into the plaza, there was a grunt, almost too soft to be heard. A terrific amount of violence occurred in an instant, without fuss. Then the red glow appeared on a different portion of the jungle floor, and the only sound was the slow lapping of a broad happy tongue.

Markel cursed.

The girl stood up and looked.

Markel called out a name, and nobody answered. And then somebody else fired their weapon in a spray pattern, cutting vegetation and battering the high fence on the far side of the moat.

“I killed it,” the second soldier declared. “I’m sure.”

The Brilliance-Boy offered a few cautionary words.

“I do feel exceptionally stupid,” Joe said. “Tell me again: why exactly do you need Natural Killer?”

The girl stared at him and then stepped back.

“I didn’t know we were waging a real war against you people,” he continued. “I guess we keep that a secret, what with our political tricks and PR campaigns. Like when we grant you full citizenship. And the way we force you to accept the costs and benefits of all the laws granted to human beings everywhere —”

“You hate us,” she interrupted. “You despise every last one of us.”

Quietly, Joe assured her, “You don’t know what I hate.”

She stiffened, saying nothing.

“This is the situation. As I see it.” Joe paused for a moment. “Inside that one vial, you have a bug that could wipe out your alleged enemies. And by enemies, I mean people that look at you with suspicion and fear. You intend to keep your doomsday disease at the ready, just in case you need it.”

“Of course.”

“Except you’ll have to eventually grow more of it. If you want to keep it as a credible, immediate threat. And you’ll have to divide your stocks and store them in scattered, secure locations. Otherwise assholes like me are going to throw the bugs in a pile and burn it all with a torch.”

She watched Joe, her sore jaw clamped tight.

“But having stockpiles of Natural Killer brings a different set of problems. Who can trust who not to use it without permission? And the longer this virus exists, the better the chance that the Normals will find effective fixes to keep themselves safe. Vaccines. Quarantine laws. Whatever we need to weather the plague, and of course, give us our chance to take our revenge afterwards.”

The red glow had not moved. For a full minute, the little jungle had been perfectly, ominously silent.

Markel glanced at Joe and then back at the high fence. He was obviously fighting the urge to shout warnings to the others. That could alert the Grendel. But it took all his will to do nothing.

“You have a great, great weapon,” Joe allowed. “But your advantage won’t last.”

The girl was breathing faster now.

“You know what would be smart? Before the Normals grow aware of your power, you should release the virus. No warnings, no explanations. Do it before we know what hit us, and hope you kill enough of us in the first week that you can permanently gain the upper hand.”

“No,” Markel said, taking two steps toward the enclosure. “We don’t have more than a sample of the virus, and it is just a virus.”

“Meaning what?”

“Diseases are like wildfires,” he explained. “You watch them burn, and you can’t believe that anything would survive the blaze. But afterwards there are always islands of green surrounded by scorched forest.” The man had given this considerable thought. “Three or four billion sapiens might succumb. But that would still leave us in the minority, and your vengeance would be horrible and probably fatal.”

The girl showed a satisfied smile.

But then Joe said, “Except,” and laughed quietly.

The red glow had not moved, and the jungle stood motionless beneath the stars. But Markel had to look back at his prisoner, a new terror pushing away the old.

“What do you mean?” the girl asked. “Except what?”

“You and your boss,” Joe said. “And who knows how many thousands of others too. Each one of you looks exactly like us. You sound like us.” Then he grinned and smacked his lips, adding, “And you taste like us, too. Which means that your particular species, whatever you call yourselves . . . you’ll come out of this nightmare better than anybody . . .”

The girl’s eyes opened wide, a pained breath taken and then held deep.

“Which of course is the central purpose of this gruesome exercise,” Joe said. “I’m sure Dr Markel would have eventually let you in on his dirty secret. The real scheme hiding behind the first, more public plan.”

Markel stared at the cuffed, unarmed man sitting on the bricks, too astonished to react.

“Is this true?” the girl whispered.

There was a moment of hesitation, and then the genius managed to shake his head, lying badly when he said, “Of course not. The man is telling you a crazy wild story, dear.”

“And you know why he never told you?” Joe asked.

“Shut up,” Markel warned.

The girl was carrying a weapon, just as Joe had guessed. From the back of her pants, she pulled out a small pistol, telling Markel, “Let him talk.”

“Darling, he’s trying to poison you —”

“Shut up,” she snapped.

Then to Joe, she asked, “Why didn’t he tell me?”

“Because you’re a good decent person, or at least you like to think so. And because he knew how to use that quality to get what he wants.” Showing a hint of compassion, Joe sighed. “Markel sure knows how to motivate you. First, he makes you sleep with me. And then he shows you my files, convincing you that I can’t be trusted or ignored. Which is why you slept with me three more times. Just to keep a close watch over me.”

The girl lowered her pistol, and she sobbed and then started to lift pistol again.

“Put that down,” Markel said.

She might have obeyed, given another few moments to think.

But then Markel shot her three times. He did it quickly and lowered his weapon afterwards, astonished that he had done this very awful thing. It took his great mind a long sloppy moment to wrap itself around the idea that he could murder in that particular fashion, that he possessed such brutal, prosaic power. Then he started to lift his gun again, searching for Joe.

With bound hands and feet, Joe leaped for the dead girl. And with her little gun, he put a bullet into Markel’s forehead.

The blind, unborn monster watched the drama from inside its crystal egg.

A few moments later, a bloody Brilliance-Boy ran up to the Grendel’s fence, and with a joyous holler flung the red putty and diamond vial back onto the plaza. Then he turned and fired twice at shadows before something monstrous lifted him high, shook him once, and then folded him backwards before neatly tearing him in two.

THE TICKING BOMB

“Goodness,” the prisoner muttered. “It’s the legend himself.”

Joe said nothing.

“Well, now I feel especially terrified.” She laughed weakly before coughing, a dark bubble of blood clinging to the split corner of her mouth. Then she closed her eyes for a moment, suppressing her pain as she turned her head to look straight at him. “You must be planning all kinds of horrors,” she said. “Savage new ways to break my spirit. To bare my soul.”

Gecko slippers gripped the wall. Joe watched the prisoner. He opened his mouth as if to speak but then closed it again, one finger idly scratching a spot behind his left ear.

“I won’t be scared,” she decided. “This as an honour, having someone this famous assigned to my case. I must be considered an exceptionally important person.”

He seemed amused, if just for a moment.

“But I’m not a person, am I? In your eyes, I’m just another animal.”

What she was was a long, elegant creature – the ultimate marriage between human traditions and synthetic chromosomes. Four bare arms were restrained with padded loops and pulled straight out from the shockingly naked body. Because hair could be a bother in space, she had none. Because dander was an endless source of dirt in freefall, her skin would peel away periodically, not unlike the worn skin of a cobra. She was smart, but not in the usual ways that the two or three thousand species of Rebirths enhanced their minds. Her true genius lay in social skills. Among the Antfolk, she could instantly recognize every face and recall each name, knowing at least ten thousand nest-mates as thoroughly as two sapiens who had been life-long pals. Even among the alien faces of traditional humans, she was a marvel at reading faces, deciphering postures. Every glance taught her something more about her captors. Each careless word gave her room to maneuver. That’s why the first team – a pair of low-ranking interrogators, unaware of her importance – was quickly pulled from her case. She had used what was obvious, making a few offhand observations, and in the middle of their second session, the two officers had started to trade insults and then punches.

“A Carroway-worthy moment,” had been the unofficial verdict.

A second, more cautious team rode the skyhook up from Quito, and they were wise enough to work their prisoner without actually speaking to her. Solitude and sensory deprivation were the tools of choice. Without adequate stimulation, an Antfolk would crumble. And the method would have worked, except that several weeks would have been required. But time was short: Several intelligence sources delivered the same ominous warning. This was not just another low-level prisoner. The Antfolk, named Glory, was important. She might even be essential. Days mattered now, even hours. Which was why a third team went to work immediately, doing their awful best from the reassuring confines of a UN bunker set two kilometers beneath the Matterhorn.

That new team was composed of AIs and autodocs with every compassion system deleted. Through the careful manipulation of pain and hallucinogenic narcotics, they managed to dislodge a few nuggets of intelligence as well as a level of hatred and malevolence that they had never before witnessed.

“The bomb is mine,” she screamed. “I helped design it, and I helped build it. Antimatter triggers the fusion reaction, and it’s compact and efficient, and shielded to where it’s nearly invisible. I even selected our target. Believe me . . . when my darling detonates, everything is going to change!”

At that point, their prisoner died.

Reviving her wasted precious minutes. But that was ample time for the machines to discuss the obvious possibilities and then calculate various probabilities. In the time remaining, what could be done? And what was impossible? Then without a shred of ego or embarrassment, they contact one of the only voices that they consider more talented than themselves.

And now Joe stood before the battered prisoner.

Again, he scratched at his ear.

Time hadn’t touched him too roughly. He was in his middle forties, but his boyish good looks had been retained through genetics and a sensible indifference to sunshine. Careful eyes would have noticed the fatigue in his body, his motions. A veteran soldier could have recognized the subtle erosion of spirit. And a studied gaze of the kind that an Antfolk would employ would detect signs of weakness and doubt that didn’t quite fit when it came to one of the undisputed legends of this exceptionally brutal age.

Joe acted as if there was no hurry. But his heart was beating too fast, his belly rolling with nervous energy. And the corners of his mouth were a little too tight, particularly when he looked as if he wanted to speak.

“What are you going to do with me?” his prisoner inquired.

And again, he scratched at his scalp, something about his skin bothering him to distraction.

She was puzzled, slightly.

“Say something,” Glory advised.

“I’m a legend, am I?” The smile was unchanged, bright and full; but behind the polished teeth and bright green eyes was a quality . . . some trace of some subtle emotion that the prisoner couldn’t quite name.

She was intrigued.

“I know all about you,” Glory explained. “I know your career in detail, successes and failures both.”

For an instant, Joe looked at the lower pair of arms, following the long bones to where they met within the reconfigured hips.

“Want to hear something ironic?” she asked.

“Always.”

“The asteroid you were planning to mine? Back during your brief, eventful career as an astronaut, I mean. It’s one of ours now.”

“Until your bomb goes boom,” he mentioned. “And then that chunk of iron and humanity is going to be destroyed. Along with every other nest of yours, I would guess.”

“Dear man. Are you threatening me?”

“You would be the better judge of that.”

She managed to laugh. “I’m not particularly worried.”

He said nothing.

“Would we take such an enormous risk if we didn’t have the means to protect ourselves?”

Joe stared at her for a long while. Then he looked beyond her body, at a random point on the soft white wall. Quietly he asked, “Who am I?”

She didn’t understand the question.

“You’ve seen some little digitals of me. Supposedly you’ve peaked at my files. But do you know for sure who I am?”

She nearly laughed. “Joseph Carroway.”

He closed his eyes.

“Security,” he said abruptly. “I need you here. Now.”

Whatever was happening, it was interesting. Despite the miseries inflicted on her mind and aching body, the prisoner twisted her long neck, watching three heavily armed soldiers kick their way into her cell.

“This is an emergency,” Joe announced. “I need everybody. Your full squad in here now.”

The ranking officer was a small woman with the bulging muscles. A look of genuine admiration showed in her face. She knew all about Joe Carroway. Who didn’t? But her training and regulations held sway. This man might have saved the Earth, on one or several occasions, but she still had the fortitude to remind him, “I can’t bring everybody in here. That’s against regulations.”

Joe nodded.

Sighing, he said, “Then we’ll just have to make do.”

In an instant, with a smooth, almost beautiful motion, he grabbed the officer’s face and broke her jaw and then pulled a weapon from his pocket, shoving the stubby barrel into the nearest face.

The pistol made a soft, almost negligible sound.

The remains of the skull were scattered into the face of the next guard.

He shot that soldier twice and then killed the commanding officer before grabbing up her weapon, using his security code to override its safety and then leaping into the passageway. The prisoner strained at her bonds. Mesmerized, she counted the soft blasts and the shouts, and she stared, trying to see through the spreading fog of blood and shredded brain matter. Then a familiar figure reappeared, moving with a commendable grace despite having a body designed to trek across the savannas of Africa.

“We have to go,” said Joe. “Now.”

He was carrying a fresh gun and jumpsuit.

“I don’t believe this,” she managed.

He cut her bonds and said, “Didn’t think you would.” Then he paused, just for an instant. “Joe Carroway was captured and killed three years ago, during the Tranquility business. I’m the lucky man they spliced together to replace that dead asshole.”

“You’re telling me —?”

“Suit up. Let’s go, lady.”

“You can’t be.” She was numb, fighting to understand what was possible, no matter how unlikely. “What species of Rebirth are you?”

“I was an Eagle,” he said.

She stared at the face. Never in her life had she tried so hard to slice through skin and eyes, fighting to decipher what was true.

“Suit up,” he said again.

“But I don’t see —?”

Joe turned suddenly, launching a recoilless bundle out into the hall. The detonation was a soft crack, smart-shards aiming only for armour and flesh. Sparing the critical hull surrounding them.

“We’ll have to fight our way to my ship,” he warned.

Slowly, with stiff clumsy motions, she dressed herself. Then as the suit retailored itself to match her body, she said again, “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe any of this.”

Now Joe stared at her.

Hard.

“What do you think, lady?” he asked. “You rewrote your own biology in a thousand crazy ways. But one of your brothers – a proud Eagle – isn’t able to reshape himself? He can’t take on the face of your worst enemy? He can’t steal the dead man’s memories? He is allowed this kind of power, all in a final bid to get revenge for what that miserable shit’s done to us?”

She dipped her head.

No, she didn’t believe him.

But three hours later, as they were making the long burn out of Earth orbit, a flash of blue light announced the abrupt death of fifty million humans and perhaps half a million innocents.

“A worthy trade,” said the man strapped into the seat beside her.

And that was the moment when Glory finally offered two of her hands to join up with one of his, and after that, her other two hands as well.

Her nest was the nearest Antfolk habitat. Waiting at the moon’s L5 Lagrange point, the asteroid was a smooth blackish ball, heat-absorbing armor slathered deep over the surface of a fully infested cubic kilometer – a city where thousands of bodies squirmed about in freefall, thriving inside a maze of warm tunnels and airy rooms. Banks of fusion reactors powered factories and the sun-bright lights. Trim, enduring ecosystems created an endless feast of edible gruel and free oxygen. The society was unique, at least within the short rich history of the Rebirths. Communal and technologically adept, this species had accomplished much in a very brief period. That’s why it was so easy for them to believe that they alone now possessed the keys to the universe.

Joe was taken into custody. Into quarantine. Teams drawn from security and medical castes tried to piece together the truth, draining off his blood and running electrodes into his skull, inflicting him with induced emotions and relentless urges to be utterly, perfectly honest.

The Earth’s counter-assault arrived on schedule – lasers and missiles followed by robot shock troops. But the asteroid’s defence network absorbed every blow. Damage was minor, casualties light, and before larger attacks could be organized, the Antfolk sent an ultimatum to the UN: one hundred additional fusion devices had been smuggled to the Earth’s surface, each now hidden and secured, waiting for any excuse to erupt.

For the good of humankind, the Antfolk were claiming dominion over everything that lay beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. Orbital facilities and the lunar cities would be permitted, but only if reasonable rents were paid. Other demands included nationhood status for each of the Rebirth species, reimbursements for all past wrongs, and within the next year, the total and permanent dismantling of the United Nations.

Both sides declared a ragged truce.

Eight days later, Joe was released from his cell, guards escorting him along a tunnel marked by pheromones and infrared signatures. Glory was waiting, wearing her best gown and a wide, hopeful smile. The Antfolk man beside her seemed less sure. He was a giant hairless creature. Leader of the nest’s political caste, he glared at the muscular sapien, and with a cool smooth voice said, “The tunnel before you splits, Mr Carroway. Which way will you travel?”

“What are my choices?” asked the prisoner.

“Death now,” the man promised. “Or death in some ill-defined future.”

“I think I prefer the future,” he mentioned. Then he glanced at Glory, meeting her worried smile with a wink and slight nod.

Glancing at her superior, Glory spoke with eyes and the silent mouth.

“I don’t relish the idea of trusting you,” the man confessed. “But every story you’ve told us, with words and genetics, has been confirmed by every available source. You were once a man named Magnificent. We see traces of your original DNA inside what used to be Joseph Carroway. It seems that our old enemy was indeed taken prisoner during the Luna Revolt. The Eagles were a talented bunch. They may well have camouflaged you inside Mr Carroway’s body and substance. A sorry thing that the species was exterminated – save for you, of course. But once this new war is finished, I promise you . . . my people will reconstitute yours as well as your culture, to the best of our considerable abilities.”

Joe dipped his head. “I can only hope to see that day, sir.”

The man had giant white eyes and tiny blond teeth. Watching the prisoner did no good; he could not read this man’s soul. So he turned to Glory, prompting her with the almost invisible flick of a finger.

She told Joe, “The UN attack was almost exactly as you expected it to be, and your advice proved extremely useful. Thank you.”

Joe showed a smug little smile.

“And you’ve told us a lot we didn’t know,” Glory continued. “Those ten agents on Pallas. The Deimos booby trap. And how the UN would go about searching for the rest of our nuclear devices.”

“Are your bombs safe?”

She glanced at her superior, finding encouragement in some little twitch of the face. Then she said, “Yes.”

“Do you want to know their locations?” the man asked Joe.

“No,” Joe blurted.

Then in the next breath, he added, “And I hope you don’t know that either, sir. You’re too much of a target, should somebody grab you up.”

“More good advice,” the man replied.

That was the instant when Joe realized that he wouldn’t be executed as a precaution. More than three years of careful preparation had led to this: the intricate back-story and genetic trickery were his ideas. Carrying off every aspect of this project, from the Eagle’s identity to his heightened capacity to read bodies and voices, was the end result of hard training. Hundreds of specialists, all Als, had helped produce the new Joseph Carroway. And then each one of those machines was wiped stupid and melted to an anonymous slag.

On that day when he dreamed up this outrageous plan, the Antfolk were still just one of a dozen Rebirths that might or might not cause trouble someday.

Nobody could have planned for these last weeks.

Killing the guards to free the woman was an inspiration and a necessity, and he never bothered to question it. One hundred fusion bombs were scattered across a helpless, highly vulnerable planet, and setting them off would mean billions dead, and perhaps civilization too. Sacrificing a few soldiers to protect the rest of the world was a plan born of simple, pure mathematics.

The Antfolk man coughed softly. “From this point on, Joe . . . or should I call you Magnificent?”

With an appealing smile, he said, “I’ve grown attached to Joe.”

The other two laughed gently. Then the man said, “For now, you are my personal guest. And except for security bracelets and a bomblet planted inside your skull, you will be given the freedoms and responsibilities expected of all worthy visitors.”

“Then I am grateful,” said Joe. “Thank you to your nation and to your good species, sir. Thank you so much.”

The truce was shattered with one desperate assault – three brigades of shock troops riding inside untested star-drive boosters, supported by every weapon system and reconfigured com-laser available to the UN. The cost was twenty thousand dead sapiens and a little less than a trillion dollars. One platoon managed to insert itself inside Joe’s nest, but when the invaders grabbed the nursery and a thousand young hostages, he distinguished himself by helping plan and then lead the counterstrike. All accounts made him the hero. He killed several of the enemy, and alone, he managed to disable the warhead that would have shattered their little world. But even the most grateful mother insisted on looking at their saviour with detached pleasure. Trust was impossible. Joe’s face was too strange, his reputation far too familiar. Pheromones delivered the mandatory thanks, and there were a few cold gestures wishing the hero well. But there were insults too, directed at him and at the long lovely woman who was by now sleeping with him.

In retribution for that final attack, the Antfolk detonated a second nuclear weapon, shearing off one slope of the Hawaii volcano and killing eight million with the resulting tsunami.

Nine days later, the UN collapsed, reformed from the wreckage and then shattered again before the next dawn. What rose from that sorry wreckage enjoyed both the laws to control every aspect of the mother world and the mandate to beg for their enemies’ mercy.

The giants in the sky demanded, and subsequently won, each of their original terms.

For another three months, Joe lived inside the little asteroid, enduring a never-subtle shunning.

Then higher powers learned of his plight and intervened. For the next four years, he travelled widely across the new empire, always in the company of Glory, the two of them meeting an array of leaders, scientists, and soldiers – that last group as suspicious as any, but always eager to learn whatever little tricks the famous Carroway might share with them.

To the end, Joe remained under constant observation. Glory made daily reports about his behaviours and her own expert impressions. Their relationship originally began under orders from Pallas, but when she realized that they might well remain joined until one or both died, she discovered, to her considerable surprise, that she wasn’t displeased with her fate.

In the vernacular of her species, she had floated into love . . . and so what if the object of her affections was an apish goon . . . ?

During their journey, they visited twenty little worlds, plus Pallas and Ceres and Vesta. The man beside her was never out of character. He was intense and occasionally funny, and he was quick to learn and astute with his observations about life inside the various nests. Because it would be important for the last member of a species, Joe pushed hard for the resurrection of the fabled Eagles. Final permission came just as he and Glory were about to travel to outer moons of Jupiter. Three tedious, painful days were spent inside the finest biogenic lab in the solar system. Samples of bone and marrow and fat and blood were cultured, and delicate machines rapidly separated what had been Joe from the key traces of the creature that had been dubbed Magnificent.

A long voyage demands large velocities, which was why the transport ship made an initial high-gee burn. The crew and passengers were strapped into elaborate crash seats, their blood laced with comfort drugs, eyes and minds distracted by immersion masks. Six hours after they leaped clear of Vesta, Joe disabled each of his tracking bracelets and then the bomblet inside his head, and then he slipped out of his seat, fighting the terrific acceleration as he worked his way to the bridge.

The transport was an enormous, utterly modern spaceship. The watch officer was on the bridge, stretched out in his own crash seat. Instantly suspicious and without even the odour of politeness, he demanded that his important passenger leave at once. Joe smiled for a moment. Then he turned without complaint or hesitation, showing his broad back to the spidery fellow before he climbed out of view.

What killed the officer was a fleck of dust carrying microchines – a fleet of tiny devices that attacked essential genes found inside the Antfolk metabolism, causing a choking sensation, vomiting and then death.

Joe returned to the bridge and sent a brief, heavily coded message to the Earth. Then he did a cursory job of destroying the ship’s security systems. With luck, he had earned himself a few hours of peace. But when he returned to his cabin, Glory was gone. She had pulled herself out of her seat, or somebody had roused her. For a moment, he touched the deep padding, allowing the sheets to wrap around his arm and hand, and he carefully measured the heat left behind by her long, lovely body.

“Too bad,” he muttered.

The transport carried five fully equipped lifepods. Working fast, Joe killed the hanger’s robots and both of the resident mechanics. Then he dressed in the only pressure suit configured for his body and crippled all but one of the pods. His plan was to flee without fuss. The pods had potent engines and were almost impossible to track. There was no need for more corpses and mayhem. But he wanted a backup plan, in case, which was what he was working on when the ship’s engines abruptly cut out.

A few minutes later, an armed team crawled into the hanger through a random vent.

There was no reason to fight, since Joe was certain to lose.

Instead he surrendered his homemade weapons and looked past the nervous crew, finding the lovely hairless face that he knew better than his own.

“What did you tell them?” Glory asked.

“Tell who?”

“Your people,” she said. “The Earth.”

Glory didn’t expect answers, much less any honest words. But the simple fact was that whatever he said now and did now was inconsequential: Joe would survive or die in this cold realm, but what happened next would change nothing that was about to happen elsewhere.

“Your little home nest,” he began.

She drifted forward, and then hesitated.

“It will be dead soon,” he promised. “And nothing can be done to save it.”

“Is there a bomb?”

“No,” he said. “A microchine plague. I brought it with me when I snatched you away, Glory. It was hiding inside my bones.”

“But you were tested,” she said.

“Not well enough.”

“We hunted for diseases,” she insisted. “Agents. Toxins. We have the best minds anywhere, and we searched you inside and out . . . and found nothing remotely dangerous . . .”

He watched the wind leak out of her. Then very quietly, Joe admitted, “You might have the best minds. And best by a long ways. But we have a lot more brains down on the Earth, and I promise, a few of us are a good deal meaner than even you could ever be.”

Enduring torture, Glory never looked this frail or sad.

Joe continued. “Every world you’ve taken me to is contaminated. I made certain of that. And since you managed to set off two bombs on my world, the plan is to obliterate two of your worlds. After that, if you refuse to surrender, it’s fair to guess that every bomb and disease on both sides is going be set free. Then in the end, nobody wins. Ever.”

Glory could not look at him.

Joe laughed, aiming to humiliate.

He said, “I don’t care how smart or noble you are. Like everybody else, you’re nothing but meat and scared brains. And now you’ve been thrown into a dead-end tunnel, and I am Death standing at the tunnel’s mouth.

“The clock is ticking. Can you make the right decision?”

Glory made a tiny, almost invisible motion with her smallest finger, betraying her intentions.

Joe leaped backward. The final working lifepod was open, and he dived inside as its hatch slammed shut, moments before the doomed could manage one respectable shot. Then twenty weapons were firing at a hull designed to shrug off the abuse of meteors and sapien weapons. Joe pulled himself into the pilot’s ill-fitting chair, and once he was strapped down, he triggered his just-finished booby trap.

The fuel onboard two other pods exploded.

With a silent flash of light, the transport shattered, spilling its contents across the black and frigid wilderness.

THE ASSASSIN

“Eat,” the voice insisted. “Don’t our dead heroes deserve their feast?”

“So that’s what I am.”

“A hero? Absolutely, my friend!”

“I meant that I’m dead.” Joe looked across the table, measuring his host – an imposing Chinese-Indian male wearing the perfect suit and a face conditioned to convey wisdom and serene authority. “I realize that I got lost for a time,” he admitted. “But I never felt particularly deceased.”

“Perhaps that’s how the dead perceive their lot. Yes?”

Joe nodded amiably, and using his stronger arm, stabbed at his meal. Even in lunar gravity, every motion was an effort.

“Are your rehabilitations going well?”

“They tell me that I’m making some progress.”

“Modesty doesn’t suit you, my friend. My sources assure me that you are amazing your trainers. And I think you know that perfectly well.”

The meat was brown and sweet, like duck, but without the grease.

“You presently hold the record, Joe.”

Joe looked up again.

“Five and a half years in freefall,” said Mr Li, slowly shaking his head. “Assumed dead, and in your absence, justly honoured for the accomplishments of an intense and extremely successful life. I’m sorry no one was actively searching for you, sir. But no earth-based eye saw the Antfolks’ spaceship explode, much less watched the debris scatter. So we had no starting point, and to make matters worse, your pod had a radar signature little bigger than a fist. You were very fortunate to be where you happened to be, drifting back into the inner solar system. And you were exceptionally lucky to be noticed by that little mining ship. And just imagine your reception if that ship’s crew had been anyone but sapiens . . .”

The billionaire let his voice trail away.

Joe had spent years wandering through the solar system, shepherding his food and riding roughshod over his recycling systems. That the lifepod was designed to carry a dozen bodies was critical; he wouldn’t have lasted ten months inside a lesser bucket. But the explosion that destroyed the transport damaged the pod, leaving it dumb and deaf. Joe had soon realized that nobody knew where he was, or even that he was. After the first year, he calculated that he might survive for another eight, but it would involve more good luck and hard focus than even he might have been able to summon.

“I want to tell you, Joe. When I learned about your survival, I was thrilled. I turned to my dear wife and my children and told everybody, ‘This man is a marvel. He is a wonder. A one-in-a-trillion kind of sapien.’”

Joe laughed quietly.

“Oh, I’m well-studied in Joseph Carroway’s life,” his host boasted. “After the war, humanity wanted to know who to thank for saving the Earth. That’s why the UN released portions of your files. Millions of us became amateur scholars. I myself acquired some of less doctored accounts of your official history. I’ve also read your five best biographies, and just like every other sapien, I have enjoyed your immersion drama – WARRIOR ON THE RAMPARTS. As a story, it takes dramatic licence with your life. Of course. But WARRIOR was and is a cultural phenomenon, Joe. A stirring tale of courage and bold skill in the midst of wicked, soulless enemies.”

Joe set his fork beside the plate.

“After all the misery and death of these last two decades,” said Mr Li, “the world discovered the one man that could be admired, even emulated. A champion for the people.”

He said the word, “People” with a distinct tone.

Then Mr Li added, “Even the Rebirths paid to see WARRIOR. Paid to read the books and the sanitized files. Which is nicely ironic, isn’t it? Your actions probably saved millions of them. Without your bravery, how many species would be ash and bone today?”

Joe lifted his fork again. A tenth of his life had been spent away from gravity and meaningful exercise. His bones as well as the connecting muscles had withered to where some experts, measuring the damage, cautioned their patient to expect no miracles. It didn’t help that cosmic radiation had slashed through the pod’s armour and through him. Even now, the effects of malnutrition could be seen in the spidery hands and forearms, and how his own lean meat hung limp on his suddenly ancient bones.

Mr Li paused for a moment, an observant smile building. Whatever he said next would be important.

Joe interrupted, telling him, “Thank you for the meal, sir.”

“And thank you for being who you are, sir.”

When Joe left the realm of the living, this man was little more than an average billionaire. But the last five years had been endlessly lucrative for Li Enterprises. Few had more money, and when ambition was thrown into the equation, perhaps no other private citizen wielded the kind power enjoyed by the man sitting across the little table.

Joe stabbed a buttery carrot.

“Joe?”

He lowered the carrot to the plate.

“Can you guess why I came to the moon? Besides to meet you over dinner, of course.”

Joe decided on a shy, self-deprecating smile.

Which encouraged his host. “And do you have any idea what I wish to say to you? Any intuitions at all?”

Six weeks ago, Joe had abruptly returned to the living. But it took three weeks to rendezvous with a hospital ship dispatched just for him, and that vessel didn’t touch down on the moon until the day before yesterday. But those two crews and his own research had shown Joe what he meant to the human world. He was a hero and a rich but controversial symbol. And he was a polarizing influence in a great debate that still refused to die – an interspecies conflict forever threatening to bring on another terrible war.

Joe knew exactly what the man wanted from him, but he decided to offer a lesser explanation.

“You’re a man with enemies,” he mentioned.

Mr Li didn’t need to ask, “Who are my enemies?” Both men understood what was being discussed.

“You need somebody qualified in charge of your personal security,” Joe suggested.

The idea amused Mr Li. But he laughed a little too long, perhaps revealing a persistent unease in his own safety. “I have a fine team of private bodyguards,” he said at last. “A team of sapiens who would throw their lives down to protect mine.”

Joe waited.

“Perhaps you aren’t aware of this, sir. But our recent tragedies have changed our government. The UN presidency now commands a surprising amount of authority. But he, or she, is still elected by adult citizens. A pageant that maintains the very important illusion of a genuine, self-sustaining democracy.”

Joe leaned across the table, nodding patiently.

“Within the next few days,” said Mr Li, “I will announce my candidacy for that high office. A few months later, I will win my party’s primary elections. But I’m a colourless merchant with an uneventful life story. I need to give the public one good reason to stand in my camp. What I have to find is a recognizable name that will inspire passions on both sides of the issues.”

“You need a dead man,” Joe said.

“And what do you think about that, sir?”

“That I’m still trapped in that damned pod.” Leaning back in his chair, Joe sighed. “I’m starving to death, bored to tears, and dreaming up this insanity just to keep me a little bit sane.”

“Sane or not, do you say yes?”

He showed his host a thoughtful expression. Then very quietly, with the tone of a joke, Joe asked, “So which name sits first on the ballot?”

As promised, Mr Li easily won the Liberty Party’s nomination, and with a force-fed sense of drama, the candidate announced his long-secret choice for running mate. By then Joe had recovered enough to endure the Earth’s relentless tug. He was carried home by private shuttle, and then with braces under his trouser legs and a pair of lovely and strong women at his side, the celebrated war hero strode into an auditorium/madhouse. Every motion had been practiced, every word scripted, yet somehow the passion and heart of the event felt genuine. Supporters and employees of the candidate pushed against one another, fighting for a better look at the running mate. With a natural sense for when to pause and how to wave at the world, Joe’s chiselled, scarred face managed to portray that essential mixture of fearlessness and sobriety. Li greeted him with open arms – the only time the two men would ever embrace. Buoyed by the crowd’s energy, Joe felt strong, but when he decided to sit, he almost collapsed into his chair. Li was a known quantity; everyone kept watch over the new man. When Joe studied his boss, he used an expression easily confused for admiration. The acceptance speech was ten minutes of carefully crafted theatre designed to convey calm resolve wrapped around coded threats. For too long, Li said, their old honourable species had allowed its traditions to be undercut and diluted. When unity mattered, people followed every path. When solidarity was a virtue, evolution and natural selection were replaced by whim and caprice. But the new leadership would right these past wrongs. Good men and good women had died in the great fight, and new heroes were being discovered every day. (Li glanced at his running mate, winning a burst of applause; and Joe nodded at his benefactor, showing pride swirled with modesty.) The speech concluded with a promise for victory in the general election, in another six weeks, and Joe applauded with everyone else. But he stood slowly, as if weak, shaking as a very fit old man might shake.

He was first to offer his hand of congratulations to the candidate.

And he was first to sit again, feigning the aching fatigue that he had earned over these last five years.

Three days later, a lone sniper was killed outside the arena where the controversial running mate was scheduled to appear. Joe’s security detail was lead by a career police officer, highly qualified and astonishingly efficient. Using a quiet, unperturbed tone, he explained what had happened, showing his boss images of the would-be assassin.

“She’s all sapien,” he mentioned. “But with ties to the Rebirths. A couple lovers, and a lot of politics.”

Joe scanned the woman’s files as well the pictures. “Was the lady working alone?”

“As far as I can tell, yes. Sir.”

“What’s this gun?”

“Homemade,” the officer explained. “An old Czech design grown in a backyard nano-smelter. She probably thought it would make her hard to trace. And I suppose it would have: an extra ten minutes to track her down through the isotope signatures and chine-marks.”

Joe asked, “How accurate?”

“The rifle? Well, with that sight and in competent hands —”

“Her hands, I mean. Was she any good?”

“We don’t know yet, sir.” The officer relished these occasional conversations. After all, Joe Carroway had saved humanity on at least two separate occasions, and always against very long odds. “I suppose she must have practised her marksmanship somewhere. But the thing is . . .”

“What?”

“This barrel isn’t as good as it should be. Impurities in the ceramics, and the heat of high-velocity rounds had warped it. Funny as it sounds, the more your killer practised, the worse her gun would have become.”

Joe smiled and nodded.

The officer nodded with him, waiting for the legend to speak.

“It might have helped us,” Joe mentioned. “If we’d let her take a shot or two, I mean.”

“Help us?”

“In the polls.”

The officer stared at him for a long moment. The dry Carroway humour was well known. Was this a worthy example? He studied the man whom he was sworn to defend, and after considerable reflection, the officer decided to laugh weakly and shrug his shoulders. “But what if she got off one lucky shot?”

Joe laughed quietly. “I thought that’s what I was saying.”

To be alone, Joe took a lover.

The young woman seemed honoured and more than a little scared. After passing through security, they met inside his hotel room, and when the great man asked to send a few messages through her links, she happily agreed. Nothing about those messages would mean anything to anybody. But when they reached their destinations, other messages that had waited for years were released, winding their way to the same secure e-vault. Afterwards Joe had sex with her, and then she let him fix her a drink that he laced with sedatives. Once she was asleep, he donned arm and leg braces designed for the most demanding physical appearances. Then Joe opened a window, and ten storeys above the bright cold city, he climbed out onto the narrow ledge and slipped through the holes that he had punched in the security net.

Half an hour later, shaking from exhaustion, Joe was standing at the end of a long alleyway.

“She was a mistake,” he told the shadows.

There was no answer.

“A blunder,” he said.

“Was she?” a deep voice asked.

“But you were always a little too good at inspiring others,” Joe continued. “Getting people to be eager, making them jump before they were ready.”

In the darkness, huge lungs took a deep, lazy breath.

Then the voice mentioned, “I could kill you myself. I could kill you now.” It was deep and slow, and the voice always sounded a little amused. Just a little. “No guards protecting you, and from what I see, you aren’t carrying more than a couple of baby pistols.”

Joe said, “That’s funny.”

Silence.

“I’m not the one you want,” he said. “You’d probably settle for me. But think about our history, friend. Look past all the public noise. And now remember everything that’s happened between you and me.”

Against an old brick wall, a large body stirred. Then the voice said, “Remind me.”

Joe mentioned, “Baltimore.”

“Yes.”

“And Singapore.”

“We helped each other there.”

“And what about Kiev?”

“I was in a gracious mood. A weak mood, looking back.”

Joe smiled. “Regardless of moods, you let me live.”

The voice seemed to change, rising from a deeper part of the unseen body. It sounded wetter and very warm, admitting, “I knew what you were, Joe. I understood how you thought, and between us, I felt we had managed an understanding.”

“We had that, yes.”

“You have always left my species alone.”

“No reason not to.”

“We weren’t any threat to you.”

“You’ve never been in trouble, until now.”

“But this man you are helping . . . this Li monster . . . he is an entirely different kind of creature, I believe . . .”

Joe said nothing.

“And you are helping him. Don’t deny it.”

“I won’t.”

A powerful sigh came from the dark, carrying the smell of raw fish and peppermint.

“Two days from now,” Joe began.

“That would be the Prosperity Conference.”

“The monster and I will be together, driving through Sao Paulo. Inside a secure vehicle, surrounded by several platoons of soldiers.”

“I would imagine so.”

“Do you know our route?”

“No, as it happens. Do you?”

“Not yet.”

The shadows said nothing, and they didn’t breathe, and they held themselves still enough that it was possible to believe that they had slipped away entirely.

Then very softly, the voice asked, “When will you learn the route?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“But as you say, the level of protection will be considerable.”

“So you want things to be easy? Is that it?”

The laugh was smooth, unhurried. “I want to know your intentions, Joe. Having arranged this collision of forces, what will you do? Pretend to fall ill at the last moment? Stand on the curb and offer a hearty wave as your benefactor rolls off to his doom?”

“Who says I won’t ride along?”

This time the laugh was louder, confident and honestly amused. “Suppose you learn the route and share it with me. And imagine that despite my logistical nightmares, I have time enough to assemble the essential forces. Am I to understand that you will be riding into that worst kind of trouble?”

“I’ve survived an ambush or two.”

“When you were young. And you still had luck to spend.”

Joe said nothing.

“But you do have a reasonable point,” the voice continued. “If you aren’t riding with the monster, questions will be asked. Doubts will rise. Your character might have to endure some rather hard scrutiny.”

“Sure, that’s one fine reason to stay with him.”

“And another is?”

“You fall short. You can’t get to Li in the end. So don’t you want to have a second option in place, just in case?”

“What option?”

“Me.”

That earned a final long laugh.

“Point taken, my friend. Point taken.”

The limousine could have been smaller and less pretentious, but the man strapped into its safest seat would accept nothing less than a rolling castle. And following the same kingly logic, the limousine’s armour and its plasma weapons were just short of spectacular. The AI driver was capable of near-miracles, if it decided to flee. But in this vehicle, in most circumstances, the smart tactic would be to stand your ground and fight. One hundred sapien soldiers and ten times as many mechanicals were travelling the same street, sweeping for enemies and the possibility of enemies. In any battle, they would count for quite a lot, unless of course some of them were turned, either through tricks or bribery. Which was as much consideration as Joe gave to the problem of attacking the convoy. Effort wasted was time lost. What mattered was the next ten or eleven minutes and how he handled himself and how he managed to control events within his own limited reach.

Li and two campaign wizards were conferring at the centre of the limousine. Polls were a painful topic. They were still critical points behind the frontrunners, and the propaganda wing of his empire was getting worried. Ideas for new campaigns were offered, and then buried. Finally the conversation fell into glowering silences and hard looks at a floor carpeted with cultured white ermine.

That was when Joe unfastened his harness and approached.

Li seemed to notice him. But his assistant – a cold little Swede named Hussein – took the trouble to ask, “What do you need, Mr Carroway?”

“Just want to offer my opinion,” he said.

“Opinion? About what?”

Joe made a pistol with his hand and pointed it at Hussein, and then he jerked so suddenly that the man flinched.

“What is it, Joe?”asked Li.

“People are idiots,” Joe said.

The candidate looked puzzled, but a moment later, something about those words intrigued him. “In what way?”

“We can’t see into the future.”

“We can’t?”

“None of us can,” said Joe. He showed a smile, a little wink. “Not even ten seconds ahead, in some cases.”

“Yet we do surprisingly well despite our limitations.” The candidate leaned back, trying to find the smoothest way to dismiss this famous name.

“We can’t see tomorrow,” said Joe, “but we are shrewd.”

“People, you mean?”

“Particularly when ten billion of us are thinking hard about the same problem. And that’s why you aren’t going to win this race. Nobody sees what will happen, but in this case, it’s very easy to guess how the Li presidency will play out.”

Hussein bristled.

But Li told him and everyone else to let the man speak.

“You’re assuming that I hate these other species,” Joe told him. “In fact, you’ve counted on it from the start. But the truth is . . . I don’t have any compelling attachment to sapiens. By and large, I am a genuinely amoral creature. While you, sir . . . you are a bigot and a genocidal asshole. And should you ever come to power, the solar system has a respectable chance of collapsing into full-scale civil war.”

Li took a moment. Then he pointed out, “In my life, I have killed no one. Not a single Rebirth, or for that matter, a sapien.”

“Where I have slaughtered thousands,” Joe admitted. “And stood aside while millions more died.”

“Maybe you are my problem. Perhaps we should drop you from the ticket.”

“That is an option,” Joe agreed.

“Is this what you wanted to say to me? That you wish to quit?”

Joe gave the man a narrow, hard-to-read smile.

“My life,” he said.

“Pardon?” Li asked.

“Early in life, I decided to live as if I was very important. As if I was blessed in remarkable ways. In my hand, I believed, were the keys to a door that would lead to a worthy future, and all that was required of me was that I make hard calculations about matters that always seem to baffle everyone else.”

“I’m sorry, Joe. I’m not quite sure —”

“I have always understood that I am the most important person there is, on the Earth or any other world within our reach. And I have always been willing to do or say anything that helps my climb to the summit.”

“But how can you be that special? Since that’s my place to be . . .”

Li laughed, and his assistants heartily joined in.

Again, Joe made a pistol with his hand, pointing his index finger at the candidate’s face.

“You are a scary individual,” Li remarked. Then he tried to wave the man back, looking at no one when he mentioned, “Perhaps a medical need needs to be diagnosed. A little vacation for our dear friend, perhaps.”

Hussein gave an agreeable nod.

In the distance, a single soft pop could be heard.

Joe slipped back to his seat.

His security man was sitting beside him. Bothered as well as curious, he asked, “What was that all about?”

“Nothing,” said Joe. “Never mind.”

Another mild pop was followed by something a little louder, a little nearer.

Just in case, the security man reached for his weapon. But he discovered that his holster was empty now.

Somehow his gun had found its way into Joe’s hand.

“Stay close to me,” Joe said.

“You know I will,” the man muttered weakly.

Then came the flash of a thumb-nuke, followed by the sharp wail of people screaming, begging with Fortune to please show mercy, to please save their glorious, important lives.

WORLD’S END

Three terms as President finally ended with an assortment of scandals – little crimes and large ones, plus a series of convenient non-disclosures – and those troubles were followed by the sudden announcement that Joseph Carroway would slide gracefully into retirement. After all that, there was persistent talk about major investigations and unsealing ancient records. Tired allegations refused to die. Could the one-time leader of humanity be guilty of even one-tenth of the crimes that he was rumoured to have committed? In judicial circles, wise minds discussed the prospects of charging and convicting the Old Man on the most egregious insults to common morality. Politicians screamed for justice without quite defining what justice required. Certain species were loudest in their complaints, but that was to be expected. What was more surprising, perhaps, were the numbers of pure sapiens who blamed the President for every kind of ill. But most of the pain and passion fell on one-time colleagues and allies. Unable to sleep easily, they would sit at home, secretly considering their own complicities in old struggles and more recent deeds, as well as non-deeds and omissions that seemed brilliant at the moment, but now, in different light, looked rather ominous.

But in the end, nothing substantial happened.

In the end, the Carroway Magic continued to hold sway.

His successor was a talented and noble soul. No one doubted her passion for peace or the decency of her instincts. And she was the one citizen of the inhabited Worlds who could sit at a desk and sign one piece of parchment, forgiving crimes and transgressions and mistakes and misjudgments. And then she showed her feline face to the cameras, winning over public opinion by pointing out that trials would take decades, verdicts would be contested for centuries, and every last one of the defendants had been elected and then served every citizen with true skill.

The new president served one six-year term before leaving public life.

Joseph Carroway entered the next race at the last moment, and he won with a staggering seventy per cent mandate. But by then the Old Man was exactly that: a slowed, sorry image of his original self, dependent on a talented staff and the natural momentum of a government that achieved the ordinary without fuss or too much controversy.

Fifteen months into Joe’s final term, an alien starship entered the solar system. In physical terms, it was a modest machine: twenty cubic kilometers of metal and diamond wrapped around empty spaces. There seemed to be no crew or pilot. Nor was there a voice offering to explain itself. But its course was clear from the beginning. Moving at nearly one per cent of light speed, the Stranger, as it had been dubbed, missed the moon by a few thousand kilometers. Scientists and every telescope studied its configuration, and two nukes were set off in its vicinity – neither close enough to cause damage, it was hoped, but both producing EM pulses that helped create a detailed portrait of what lay inside. Working separately, teams of AI savants found the same awful hypothesis, and a single Antfolk nest dedicated to the most exotic physics proved that hypothesis to everyone’s grim satisfaction. By then, the Stranger was passing through the sun’s corona, its hull red-hot and its interior awakening. What might have been a hundred thousand year sleep was coming to an end. In less than a minute, this very unwelcome guest had vanished, leaving behind a cloud of ions and a tiny flare that normally would trouble no one, much less spell doom for humankind.

They told Joe what would happen.

His science advisor spoke first, and when there was no obvious reaction on that perpetually calm face, two assistants threw their interpretations of these events at the Old Man. Again, nothing happened. Was he losing his grip finally? This creature who had endured and survived every kind of disaster . . . was he suddenly lost, at wits end and such?

But no, he was just letting his elderly mind assemble the puzzle that they had given him.

“How much time?” he asked.

“Ten, maybe twelve minutes,” the science advisor claimed. “And then another eight minutes before the radiation and scorching heat reach us.”

Others were hoping for a longer delay. As if twenty or thirty minutes would offer some kind of help.

Joe looked out the window, and with a wry smile pointed out, “It is a beautiful day.”

In other words, the sun was up, and they were dead.

“How far will the damage extend?” he asked.

Nobody replied.

The Antfolk ambassador was watching from her orbital embassy, tied directly into the President’s office. For a multitude of reasons, she despised this sapien. But he was the ruler of the Great Nest, and in awful times, she was willing to do or say anything to help him, even if that meant telling him the full, undiluted truth.

“Our small worlds will be vaporized. The big asteroids will melt and seal in the deepest parts of our nests.” Then with a sad gesture of every hand, she added, “Mars is worse off than Earth, what with the terraforming only begun. And soon there won’t be any solid surfaces on the Jovian moons.”

Joe turned back to his science advisor. “Will the Americas survive?”

“In places, maybe.” The man was nearly sobbing. “The flares will finish before the sun rises, and even with the climate shifts and the ash falls, there’s a fair chance that the atmosphere will remain breathable.”

Joe nodded.

Quietly, firmly, he told everyone, “I want an open line to every world. In thirty seconds.”

But before anyone could react, the youngest assistant screamed out, “Why? Why would aliens do this awful thing to us?”

Joe laughed, just for a moment.

Then with a grandfatherly voice, he said, “Because they can. That’s why.”

“It has been an honour to serve as your President,” Joe told an audience of two and then three and then four billion. But most citizens were too busy to watch this unplanned speech – an important element in his gruesome calculations. “But my days are done. The sun has been infiltrated, its hydrogen stolen to use in the manufacture of an amazing bomb, and virtually everybody in the range of my voice will be dead by tomorrow.

“If you are listening to me, listen carefully.

“The only way you will survive in the coming hell is to find those very few people whom you trust most. Do it now. Get to your families, hold hands with your lovers. Whoever you believe will watch your back always. And then you need to search out those who aren’t aware of what I am telling you to do.

“Kill those other people.

“Whatever they have of value, take it.

“And store their corpses, if you can. In another week or two, you might relish the extra protein and fat.”

He paused, just for a moment.

Then Joe said, “For the next ten generations, you will need to think only about yourselves. Be selfish. Be vicious. Be strong, and do not forget.

“Kindness is a luxury.

“Empathy will be a crippling weakness.

“But in another fifty generations, we can rebuild everything that we have lost here today. I believe that, my friends. Goodness can come again. Decency can flower in any rubble. And in fifty more generations after that, we will reach out to the stars together.

“Keep that thought close tonight, and always.

“One day, we will punish the bastards that did this awful thing to us. But to make that happen, a few of you must find the means to survive . . . !”

 

THE SKY THAT WRAPS THE WORLD ROUND, PAST THE BLUE AND INTO THE BLACK

Jay Lake

Highly prolific new writer Jay Lake seems to have appeared nearly everywhere with short work in the last few years, including Asimov’s, Interzone, Clarkesworld, Jim Baen’s Universe, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Aeon, Postscripts, Electric Velocipede, Futurismic, and many other markets, producing enough short fiction to already have released four collections even though his career is only a few years old: Greetings from Lake Wu, Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, American Sorrows, and Dogs in the Moonlight. His novels include Rocket Science, Trial of Flowers, Mainspring, and, most recently, Escapement and Madness of Flowers. He’s the co-editor, with Deborah Layne, of the prestigious Polyphony anthology series, now in six volumes, and has also edited the anthologies All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, with David Moles, and TEL: Stories. Coming up is a new novel, Green, a new anthology, co-edited with Nick Gevers, Other Earths, and a space opera trilogy, Sunspace. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004. Lake lives in Portland, Oregon.

In the deceptively quiet story that follows, he shows us an artisian hard at work at his craft – one he has no choice but to pursue, no matter what the cost.

I BELIEVE THAT all things eventually come to rest. Even light, though that’s not what they tell you in school. How do scientists know? A billion billion years from now, even General Relativity might have been demoted to a mere Captain. Photons will sit around in little clusters of massless charge, bumping against one another like boats in the harbour at Kowloon.

The universe will be blue then, everything from one cosmic event horizon to the other the colour of a summer sky.

This is what I tell myself as I paint the tiny shards spread before me. Huang’s men bring them to me to work with. We are creating value, that gangster and I. I make him even more immensely wealthy. Every morning that I wake up still alive is his gratuity to me in return.

It is a fair trade.

My life is comfortable in the old house along the alley with its central court crowded with bayberry trees. A narrow gutter trickles down the centre of the narrow roadway, slimed a greenish black with waste slopped out morning and evening from the porch steps alongside. The roofs are traditional, with sloping ridges and ornamented tile caps. I have studied the ones in my own courtyard. They are worn by the years, but I believe I can see a chicken stamped into each one. “Cock,” my cook says with his thick Cantonese accent, never seeing the vulgar humour.

Even these tired old houses are topped with broadband antennae and tracking dishes which follow entertainment, intelligence or high finance beamed down from orbit and beyond. Sometimes the three are indistinguishable. Private data lines sling on pirated staples and cable ties from the doddering concrete utility poles. The poles themselves are festooned with faded prayer flags, charred firecracker strings, and remnants of at least half a dozen generations of technology dedicated to transmission of something.

Tesla was right. Power is nothing more than another form of signal, after all. If the lights come on at a touch of your hand, civilization’s carrier wave is intact.

Despite the technology dangling overhead in rotting layers, the pavement itself holds life as old as China. Toddlers wearing only faded shirts toss stones in the shadows. A mangy chow dog lives beneath a vine-grown cart trapped against someone’s garden wall. Amahs air their families’ bedding over wooden railings worn shiny with generations of elbows. Tiny, wrinkled men on bicycles with huge trays balanced behind their seats bring vegetables, newspapers, meat and memory sticks to the back doors of houses. Everything smells of ginger and night soil and the ubiquitous mould.

I wake each day with the dawn. Once I overcome my surprise at remaining alive through another sunrise, I tug on a cheaply printed yukata and go hunting for coffee. My cook, as tiny and wrinkled as the vendors outside but decorated with tong tattoos that recall another era long since lost save for a few choppy-sockie movies, does not believe in the beverage. Instead he is unfailing in politely pressing a bitter-smelling black tea on me at every opportunity. I am equally unfailing in politely refusing it. The pot is a delicate work of porcelain which owes a great deal to a China before electricity and satellite warfare. It is painted a blue almost the shade of cornflowers, with a design of a round-walled temple rising in a stepped series of roofs over some Oriental pleasaunce.

I’ve seen that building on postage stamps, so it must be real somewhere. Or had once been real, at least.

After the quiet combat of caffeine has concluded its initial skirmish, I shuffle to my workroom where my brushes await me. Huang has that strange combination of stony patience and sudden violence which I have observed among the powerful in China. When my employer decides I have failed in my bargain, I am certain it is the cook who will kill me. I like to imagine his last act as the light fades from my eyes will be to pour tea down my throat as a libation to see my spirit into the next world.

There is a very special colour that most people will never see. You have to be out in the Deep Dark, wrapped in a skinsuit amid the hard vacuum where the solar wind sleets in an invisible radioactive rain. You can close your eyes there and let yourself float in a sensory deprivation tank the size of the universe. After a while, the little mosaics that swirl behind your eyelids are interrupted by tiny, random streaks of the palest, softest, sharpest electric blue.

I’ve been told the specks of light are the excitation trails of neutrinos passing through the aqueous humour of the human eye. They used to bury water tanks in Antarctic caves to see those things, back before orbit got cheap enough to push astronomy and physics into space where those sciences belong. These days, all you have to do is go for a walk outside the planet’s magnetosphere and be patient.

That blue is what I capture for Huang. That blue is what I paint on the tiny shards he sends me wrapped in day-old copies of the high orbital edition of Asahi Shimbun. That blue is what I see in my dreams.

That blue is the colour of the end of the universe, when even the light is dying.

Out in the Deep Dark we called them caltrops. They resemble jacks, that old children’s toy, except with four equally-spaced arms instead of six, and slightly larger, a bit less than six centimeters tip to tip. Many are found broken, some aren’t, but even the broken ones fit the pattern. They’re distributed in a number of places around the belt, almost entirely in rocks derived from crustal material. The consensus had long been that they were mineral crystals endemic to Marduk’s surface, back before the planet popped its cork 250 megayears ago. Certainly their microscopic structure supported the theory – carbon lattices with various impurities woven throughout.

I couldn’t say how many of the caltrops were discarded, damaged, or simply destroyed by being slagged in the guts of some ore processor along with their enclosing rock. Millions, maybe.

One day someone discovered that the caltrops had been manufactured. They were technology remnants so old that our ancestors hadn’t even gotten around to falling out of trees when the damned things were fabricated. The human race was genetic potential lurking in the germline of some cynodont therapsid when those caltrops had been made.

It had not occurred to anyone before that discovery to consider this hypothesis. The fact that the question came up at all was a result of a serious misunderstanding of which I was the root cause. In my greed and misjudgment I forced the loss of a device one of my crewmates discovered, an ancient piece of tech that could have allowed us to do something with those caltrops. My contribution to history, in truth, aside from some miniscule role in creating a portion of Huang’s ever-growing millions. That the discovery of the caltrops’ nature arose from human error is a mildly humorous grace note to the confirmation that we are indeed not alone in the universe.

Or at least weren’t at one point.

The artificial origin of the caltrops has been generally accepted. What these things are remains a question that may never be answered, thanks to me. Most people prefer not to discuss the millions of caltrops lost to Belt mining operations over the decades that Ceres Mineral Resources has been in business.

Despite their carbon content, caltrops viewed under Earth-normal lighting conditions are actually a dull grayish-blue. This fact is not widely known on Earth. Not for the sake of being a secret – it’s not – but because of Deep Dark Blues, the Academy Award-winning virteo about Lappet Ugarte. She’s the woman who figured so prominently in the discovery of the artificial origin of the caltrops. The woman I tried to kill, and steal from. In their wisdom, the producers of that epic Bollywood docudrama saw fit to render the caltrops about twice as large as they are in real life, glowing an eerie Cherenkov blue. I suppose the real thing didn’t look like much on camera.

So most of the citizens of planet Earth don’t believe that they’re seeing actual outer space caltrops unless they’re seeing end-of-the-universe blue.

Huang sends me paint in very small jars. They’re each cladded with lead foil, which makes them strangely heavy. When I take the little lead-lined caps off, the paint within is a sullen, radioactive copy of the colour I used to see behind my eyelids out there in the Deep Dark.

Every time I dip my brush, I’m drawing out another little spray of radiation. Every time I lick the bristles, I’m swallowing down a few drops of cosmic sleet. I’m the last of the latter day Radium Girls.

Huang doesn’t have to order the old cook to kill me. I’m doing it myself, every day.

I don’t spend much time thinking about where my little radioactive shards go when they leave my house off the alleyway here in Heung Kong Tsai. People buy them for hope, for love, to have a piece of the unspeakably ancient past. There’s a quiet revolution in human society as we come to terms with that history. For some, like a St Christopher medal, touching it is important. Cancer will be important as well, if they touch them too often.

The truly odd thing is that the shards I sit here and paint with the electric blue of a dying heaven are actual caltrop shards. We’re making fakes out of the real thing, Huang and I.

A truth as old as time, and I’m dressing it in special effects.

I swear, sometimes I kill myself.

This day for lunch the cook brings me a stir fry of bok choi and those strange, slimy mushrooms. He is as secretive as one of the Japanese soldiers of the last century who spent decades defending a lava tube on some Pacific island. There is tea, of course, which I of course ignore. We could play that ritual with an empty pot just as easily, but the cook executes his culinary warfare properly.

The vegetables are oddly ragged for having recently spent time in a searing hot wok. They are adorned with a pungent tan sauce the likes of which I had never tasted before entering this place. The whole mess sits atop a wad of sticky rice straight from the little mauve Panasonic cooker in the kitchen.

Food is the barometer of this household. When the cook is happy, I eat like a potentate on a diplomatic mission. When the cook is vexed by life or miffed about some slight on my part, I eat wretchedly.

I wonder what I have done this day to anger him. Our morning ritual was nothing more than ritual, after all.

When I meet the cook’s eyes, I see something else there. A new distress lurks in the lines drawn tight across his forehead. I know what I gave up when I came here. It was no more than what I’d given up long ago, really, when the fates of people and planets were playing out somewhere in the Deep Dark and I went chasing the fortune of a dozen lifetimes. Still, I am not prepared for this new tension on the part of my daily adversary.

“Have you come to kill me?” I ask him in English. I have no Cantonese, and only the usual fractured, toneless pidgin Mandarin spoken by non-Chinese in the rock ports of the asteroid belt. I’ve never been certain he understands me, but surely the intent of my question is clear enough.

“Huang.” There is a creaky whine in his voice. This man and I can go a week at a time without exchanging a single word. I don’t think he speaks more than that to anyone else.

“He is coming here?”

The cook nods. His unhappiness is quite clear.

I poke the bok choi around in my bowl and breathe in the burnt ginger-and-fish oil scent of the sauce. That Huang is coming is a surprise. I have sat quietly with my incipient tumors and withering soul and made the caltrop shards ready for market. They are being handled by a True Hero of the Belt, just as his advertising claims. Our bargain remains intact.

What can he want of me? He already holds the chitty on my life. All my labours are his. I have no reputation left, not under my real name. I bear only the memory of the heavens, and a tiny speck of certain knowledge about what once was.

It should be enough.

After a while, by way of apology, the cook removes my cooling lunch bowl and replaces it with a delicate porcelain plate bearing a honey-laden moon cake. I suspect him of humour, though the timing is hideously inappropriate.

“Xie xie,” I tell him in my Mandarin pidgin. He does not smile, but the lines around his eyes relax.

Still, I will not stoop to the tea.

Huang arrives to the sound of barking dogs. I stand behind a latticed window in my garden wall and look out into the alley. The gangster’s hydrogen-powered Mercedes is a familiar shade of Cherenkov blue. I doubt the aircraft paint his customizers use is hot, though.

There is a small pack of curs trailing his automobile. The driver steps out in a whirr of door motors which is as much noise as that car ever makes. He is a large man for a Chinese, tall and rugged, wearing the ubiquitous leather jacket and track pants of big money thugs from Berlin to Djakarta. His mirror shades have oddly thick frames, betraying a wealth of sensor data and computing power. I wonder if he ever removes them, or if they are implants. Life in this century has become a cheap 1980s science fiction novel.

The driver gives the dogs a long look which quiets them, then opens Huang’s door. The man himself steps out without any ceremony or further security. If there is air cover, or rooftop snipers, they are invisible to me.

Huang is small, with the compact strength of a wrestler. His face is a collapsed mass of wrinkles that makes his age impossible to guess. There are enough environmental poisons which can do that to a man without the help of time’s relentless decay. Today he wears a sharkskin jacket over a pale blue cheongsam. His eyes when he glances up to my lattice are the watery shade of light in rain.

I walk slowly through the courtyard. That is where Huang will meet me, beneath a bayberry tree on a stone bench with legs carved like lions.

He is not there when I take my seat. Giving instructions to the cook, no doubt. The pond occupies my attention while I wait. It is small, not more than two meters across at its longest axis. The rim is walled with rugged rocks that might have just been ejected from the Earth moments before the mason laid them. Nothing is that sharp-edged out in the Belt, not after a quarter billion years of collision, of dust, of rubbing against each other. The water is scummed over with a brilliant shade of green that strikes fear in the heart of anyone who ever has had responsibility for a biotic air recycling plant.

They say water is blue, but water is really nothing at all but light trapped before the eyes. It’s like glass, taking the colour of whatever it is laced with, whatever stands behind it, whatever shade is bent through its substance. Most people out in the Deep Dark have a mystical relationship with water. The very idea of oceans seems a divine improbability to them. As for me, my parents came from Samoa. I was born in Tacoma, and grew up on Puget Sound before finding my way Up. To me, it’s just water.

Still, this little pond choked with the wrong kind of life seems to say so much about everything that is wrong with Earth, with the Deep Dark, with the little damp sparks of colonies on Ceres and Mars and elsewhere. I wondered what would happen to the pond if I poured my blue paint out of its lead-lined bottles into the water.

“Your work holds fair,” says Huang. I did not hear him approach. Glancing down, I see his crepe-soled boat shoes, that could have come straight off some streetcorner vendor’s rack to cover his million dollar feet.

I meet his water-blue eyes. Pale, so pale, reflecting the colour of his golf shirt. “Thank you, sir.”

He looks at me a while. It is precisely the look an amah gives a slab of fish in the market. Finally he speaks again: “There have been inquiries.”

I reply without thinking. “About the radioactives?”

One eyebrow inches up. “Mmm?”

I am quiet now. I have abandoned our shared fiction for a moment, that pretense that I do not know he is poisoning thousands of homes worldwide through his artefact trade. Mistakes such as that can be fatal. That the entire present course of my life is fatal is not sufficient excuse for thoughtless stupidity.

Huang takes my silence as an answer. “Certain persons have come to me seeking a man of your description.”

With a shrug, I tell him, “I was famous once, for a little while.” One of history’s villains, in fact, in my moment of media glory.

“What you paid me to keep you . . . they have made an offer far more generous.”

I’d sold him my life, that strange, cold morning in a reeking teahouse in Sendai the previous year. Paid him in a substantial amount cash, labour and the last bare threads of my reputation in exchange for a quiet, peaceful penance and the release of obligation. Unfortunately, I could imagine why someone else would trouble to buy Huang out.

He was waiting for me to ask. I would not do that. What I would do was give him a reason not to send me away. “My handiwork meets your requirements, yes?” Reminding him of the hot paint, and the trail of liability which could eventually follow that blue glow back to its source.

Even gangsters who’d left any fear of law enforcement far behind could be sued in civil court.

“You might wish me to take this offer,” he says slowly.

“When has the dog ever had its choice of chains?”

A smile flits across Huang’s face before losing itself in the nest of wrinkles. “You have no desires in the matter?”

“Only to remain quietly in this house until our bargain is complete.”

Huang is silent a long, thoughtful moment. Then: “Money completes everything, spaceman.” He nods once before walking away,

It is difficult to threaten a man such as myself with no family, no friends, and no future. That must be a strange lesson for Huang.

I drift back to the latticed window. He is in the alley speaking to the empty air – an otic cell bead. A man like Huang wouldn’t have an implant. The dogs are quiet until he steps back into the blue Mercedes. They begin barking and wailing as the car slides away silent as dustfall.

It is then that I realize that the dog pack is a hologram, an extension of the car itself.

Until humans went into the Deep Dark, we never knew how kindly Earth truly was. A man standing on earthquake-raddled ground in the midst of the most violent hurricane is as safe as babe-in-arms compared to any moment of life in hard vacuum. The smallest five-jiăo pressure seal, procured low bid and installed by a bored maintech with a hangover, could fail and bring with it rapid, painful death.

The risk changes people, in ways most of them never realize. Friendships and hatreds are held equally close. Total strangers will share their last half-litre of air to keep one another alive just a little longer, in case rescue should show. Premeditated murder is almost unknown in the Deep Dark, though manslaughter is sadly common. Any fight can kill, even if just by diverting someone’s attention away from the environmentals at a critical moment.

So people find value in one another that was never been foreseen back on Earth. Only the managers and executives who work in the rock ports and colonies have kept the old, human habits of us-and-them, scheming, assassination of both character and body.

The question on my mind was whether it was an old enemy come for me, or someone from the Ceres Minerals Resources corporate hierarchy. Even setting aside the incalculable damage to our understanding of history, in ensuring the loss of the first verifiable non-human artefact, I’d also been the proximate cause of what many people chose to view as the loss of a billion tai kong yuan. Certain managers who would have preferred to exchange their white collars for bank accounts deeper than generations had taken my actions very badly.

Another Belt miner might have yanked my oxygen valve out of sheer, maddened frustration, but it took an angry salaryman to truly plot my ruin in a spreadsheet while smiling slowly. Here in Huang’s steel embrace I thought I’d managed my own ruin quite nicely. Yet someone was offering good money for me.

Oddly, Huang had made it all but my choice. Or seemed to, at any rate. Which implied he saw this inquiry as a matter of honour. Huang, like all his kind, was quite elastic in his reasoning about money, at least so long as it kept flowing, but implacable when it came to his notions of honour.

Even my honour, it would seem.

All of this was a very thin thread of logic from which to dangle. I could just keep painting shards until any one of several things killed me – radiation sickness, cancer, the old cook. Or I could tell Huang to break the deal he and I had made, and pass me back out of this house alive.

Given how much trouble I’d taken in order to surrender all control, there was something strangely alluring about being offered back the chitty on my life.

That night when the cook brought me the tea, I poured some into the tiny cup with no handles. He gave me a long, slow stare. “You go out?”

“With Mr Huang, yes,” I told him.

The cook grunted, then withdrew to the kitchen.

The tea was so bitter that for a moment I wondered if he’d brewed it with rat poison. Even as this thought faded, the cook came back with a second cup and poured it out for himself. He sat down opposite me, something else he’d never done. Then he drew a small mesh bag on a chain out from inside his grubby white t-shirt.

“See this, ah.” He tugged open the top of the bag. Out tumbled one of my little blue caltrop fragments. I could almost see it spark in his hand.

“You shouldn’t be holding that.”

The cook hefted the mesh bag. “Lead. No sick.”

I reached out and took the caltrop arm. It was just that, a single arm broken off below the body. I fancied it was warm to my touch. It was certainly very, very blue.

“Why?” I asked him.

He looked up at the ceiling and spread one hand in a slow wave, as if to indicate the limitless stars in the Deep Dark far above our heads. “We too small. World too big. This” – he shook his bag – “this time price.”

I tried to unravel the fractured English. “Time price?”

The cook nodded vigorously. “You buy time for everyone, everything.”

I sipped my tea and thought about what he’d told me. I’d been out in the Deep Dark. I’d touched the sky that wraps the world round, past the blue and into the black.

“Blue,” he said, interrupting my chain of thought. “We come from sea, we go to sky. Blue to blue, ah?”

Blue to blue. Life had crawled from the ocean’s blue waters to eventually climb past the wide blue sky. With luck, we’d carry forward to the dying blue at the end of time.

“Time,” I said, trying the word in my mouth. “Do you mean the future?”

The cook nodded vigorously. “Future, ah.”

Once I’d finished eating the magnificent duck he’d prepared, I trudged back to my workroom. I’d already bargained away almost all of my time, but I could create time for others, in glowing blue fragments. It didn’t matter who was looking for me. Huang would do as he pleased. My sins were so great they could never be washed away, not even in a radioactive rain.

I could spend what time was left to me bringing people like the old cook a little closer to heaven, one shard after another.

 

INCOMERS

Paul J. McAuley

Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984 and has gone on to be a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Skylife, The Third Alternative, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere.

McAuley is at the forefront of several of the most important subgenres in SF today, producing both “radical hard science fiction” and revamped and retooled widescreen space operas that have sometimes been called new space operas as well as dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future. He also writes fantasy and horror. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His other books include the novels Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel, Life on Mars, The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind’s Eye, Players, and Cowboy Angels. Confluence, his major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale set ten million years in the future, is comprised of the novels Child of the River, Ancient of Days, and Shrine of Stars. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country, and Little Machines, and he is the co-editor, with Kim Newman, of an original anthology, In Dreams. His most recent book is a novel, The Quiet War; coming up is a new novel, Gardens of the Sun.

McAuley made his name as one of the best new space opera writers with novels such as Four Hundred Billion Stars and the Confluence trilogy, but in recent years he has created the Quiet War series as well, with stories such as “Second Skin,” “Sea Scene, With Monsters,” “The Assassination of Faustino Malarte,” and others, about the aftermath and the consequences of an interplanetary war that ravages the solar system.

In the quietly moving story that follows, he takes us to Rhea, Saturn’s second largest moon, to examine more of those consequences, the rather unexpected ones.

MARK GRIFFIN WAS convinced that there was something suspicious about the herbalist.

“Tell me who he is, Sky. Some kind of pervert murderer, I bet.”

Sky Bolofo was a hacker who had filled the quantum processor of the large, red-framed spex that perched on his nose with all kinds of talents and tricks. Right now, he had a look of focussed concentration, and the left lens of his spex was silvered over as it displayed something to him. He said, “No problem. My face recognition program picked him up straight away, and right now I’m looking at his public page. His name is Ahlgren Rees. He lives right here in the old city, he sells herbs —”

“I can see that,” Mark said. “What else?”

“He also fixes up pets,” Sky said.

“What about his private files?” Mark said. “What about the real dirt?”

“No problem,” Sky said complacently, and started tapping his fingers on the chest of his jumper – he was using the virtual keyboard of his spex, which read the positioning of his fingers from the silver rings he wore on fingers and thumbs.

Jack Miyata, whose idea it had been to visit the produce market, had the sinking feeling that Mark had spied an opportunity for some serious mischief. He said, “The man sells herbs. There’s nothing especially interesting or weird in that.”

“If he isn’t weird,” Mark said, “why is he living with the tweaks? He’s either crazy, or he’s up to no good.”

The man in question sat behind a small table at the edge of the market, selling bundles of fresh herbs and a dozen different types of herb tea whose virtues were advertised by handlettered signs. He was definitely an incomer. Native Xambans who’d been born and raised in Rhea’s weak gravity were tall and skinny, and most of them were Nordic, with pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. The herbalist was a compactly-built man of indeterminate middle-age (in the third decade of the twenty-fourth century, this meant anything between forty and a hundred), not much taller than Sky Bolofo, and had skin the colour of old teak. He was also completely hairless. He didn’t even have eyelashes. As far as Jack was concerned, that was the only unusual thing about him, but Mark had other ideas.

Jack had brought his two friends to the produce market because he thought it was a treasure house of marvels, but Mark and Sky thought it was smelly, horribly crowded, and, quite frankly, revoltingly primitive. When makers could spin anything you wanted from yeast and algae, why would anyone want to eat the meat of real live animals like fish and chickens and dwarfed goats, especially as they would have to kill them first? Kill and gut them and Ghod knew what else. As they wandered between stalls and displays of strange flowers and fruits and vegetables, red and green and golden-brown streamers of dried waterweed, tanks of fish and shrimp, caged birds and rats, and bottle vivariums in which stag beetles lumbered like miniature rhinoceroses through jungles of moss and fern, Mark and Sky made snide comments about the weird people and the weirder things they were selling, pretended to retch at especially gross sights, and generally made it clear that this was very far from their idea of fun.

“Do you really think I want to know anything at all about people who eat things like that?” Mark had said to Jack, pointing to a wire cage containing rats spotted like leopards or striped like tigers.

“I think they keep them as pets,” Jack had said, feeling the tips of his ears heat up in embarrassment because the tall, slender woman who owned the stall was definitely looking at them.

“I had a pet once,” Mark had said, meeting the woman’s gaze. “It was a cute little monkey that could take a shower all by itself. Quite unlike these disease-ridden vermin.”

Which had made Sky crack up, and Jack blush even more.

The three of them, Jack, Mark and Sky, were all the same age, sixteen, went to the same school, and lived in the same apartment complex in the new part of Xamba, the largest city on Rhea, Saturn’s second largest moon. Their parents were engineers, security personnel, and diplomats who had come there to help in the reconstruction and expansion of the Outer Colonies after the Quiet War. Unlike most city states in the Saturn system, Xamba had remained neutral during the Quiet War. Afterwards, the Three Powers Alliance which now governed every city and orbital habitat in the Outer Colonies had settled the bulk of its administration on peaceful, undamaged Rhea, and had built a new city above the old.

Fifteen years later, the city was still growing. Jack’s parents, Mariko and Davis, were thermal engineers who were helping to construct a plant to tap the residual heat of the moon’s core and provide power for a hundred new apartment complexes, factories, and farms. They’d moved to Rhea just two months ago. In that short time, Jack had explored much of the old and new parts of the city, and had also completed a pressure suit training course and taken several long hikes through the untouched wilderness in the southern half of the big crater in which Xamba was located, and from which it took its name. He’d even climbed to the observatory at the top of the crater’s big central peak. Although both Mark and Sky had been living here much longer, like many incomers neither of them had so much as stepped foot on the surface of the moon, or even visited the old part of the city. Jack had been eager to show them the produce market, his favourite part of old Xamba, but now he was feeling miserable because they had been so rude about it. He had been about to give up and suggest they leave when Mark had spotted the herbalist.

“That’s obviously a front,” Mark said. “How’s it going, Sky?”

Sky, sounding distracted and distant, said he was working on it.

“Maybe he’s a spy. Selling herbs is his cover – what he’s actually doing is keeping watch for terrorists and so-called freedom fighters. Or maybe he’s a double agent. Maybe he’s gone over to the side of the tweaks,” Mark said, beginning to get into his little fantasy. “Maybe he’s feeding our side false information to sabotage the reconstruction. There was that blow-out at the spaceport last month. They said it was an accident, but maybe someone sabotaged an airlock and let the vacuum in.”

“Air escapes into a vacuum,” Jack said, “not the other way around.”

“Who cares which direction the vacuum flows?” Mark said carelessly.

“And anyway, they said it was an accident.”

Mark raised his eyebrows. They were thick, and met over the bridge of his nose. He was a stocky boy with pale skin, jet black hair and a perpetual scowl who looked a lot like his policeman father. His mother was in the police too, in charge of security at the spaceport. “Of course they said that, but it doesn’t mean it really was an accident. What’s the word, Sky? What is this fellow hiding?”

“There’s a problem,” Sky said. His fingers were fluttering frantically over his chest, and he had a look of such intense concentration that he seemed to be cross-eyed.

“Talk to me,” Mark said.

“He has really heavy security behind his public page. I had to back out in a hurry, before I tripped an alarm. Right now I’m making sure I didn’t leave anything that could lead back to me.”

Mark said, “So what you’re saying is that Ahlgren Rees – if that’s his real name – is hiding something.”

Sky shrugged.

Mark said, his eyes shining with sudden excitement, “I bet you thought I was kidding, but all along I had a feeling there was something wrong with this guy. It’s what the Blob —” that was his nickname for his rotund and none too bright father — “calls gut instinct. My gut told me that Ahlgren Rees is a wrong one, my man Sky has just confirmed it, and now it’s up to all of us to find out why. It’s our duty.”

Jack should have told Mark that he wasn’t going to have anything to do with his silly fantasy, but his need for his new friends to like him (which was why he’d brought them to the market in the first place) was stronger than his conscience. Also, it was the school holidays, and his parents were spending most of their time at the site of the new power plant, a hundred kilometers northwest of the city, and were only at home on weekends, so he was pretty much on his own for most of the time. There was no way that the herb seller, Ahlgren Rees was either a spy or a criminal, so what harm could simply following him about actually do?

Jack spent much of the next three days following Ahlgren Rees, sometimes with Mark, sometimes on his own (Sky Bolofo, spooked by the experience of running up against Ahlgren Rees’s electronic watchdogs, had made a weak excuse about having to do some extra tuition for the upcoming new school year). It wasn’t hard; in fact, it was a lot of fun. The herbalist spent much of the day at the stall in the produce market, or tending the little garden where he grew his herbs, or simply sitting outside the door of his apartment, a one-room efficiency on a terrace directly above the market, drinking tea or homemade lemonade and watching people go by, but he also liked to take long walks, and every time Jack followed him, his route was different. Jack saw more of the old city in those three days than he had in the past two months.

The old part of the city was buried inside the eastern rimwall of the huge crater, and some of its chambers had diamond endwalls facing what was generally reckoned to be one of the most classically beautiful views in all of Saturn’s family of moons, across slumped terraces and fans of ice rubble towards the crater’s central peak which rose up at the edge of the close, curved horizon. Inside the old city’s chambers, apartments and shops and cafes and workshops and gardens were piled on top of each other in steep, terraced cliffs, linked by steep paths, chutes, cableways and chairlifts to the long narrow parks of trees and lawns and skinny lakes that were laid out on the chamber floors. There was no shortage of water on Rhea, which was essentially a ball of ice one and a half thousand kilometres in diameter wrapped around a small rocky core. A series of long, narrow lakes looped between several of the chambers, busy with skiffs and canoes paddling between floating islands and rafts and pontoons, and the main pathways were crowded with cycles and pedicabs and swarms of pedestrians.

The old part of Xamba was a busy, bustling place, and Jack had no problem blending into the crowds as he trailed Ahlgren Rees through walkways, parks, markets, malls, and plazas, even though most of its inhabitants were tall, skinny Outers, genetically engineered so that they could comfortably live in microgravity without the medical implants that Jack and every other incomer needed in order to stop their bones turning to chalk lace, their hearts swelling like pumped-up basketballs with excess fluid, and a host of other problems. Jack even plucked up the courage to chat with the woman behind the counter of the cafe where Ahlgren Rees ate his lunch and breakfast, which is where he’d learned that the herbalist was originally from Greater Brazil, where he had worked in the emergency relief services as a paramedic, and had moved to Rhea two years ago. He seemed well-liked. He always stopped to talk to his neighbours when he met them as he went about his errands, had long conversations with people who stopped at his stall. He was a regular at the café, and at several bars in various parts of the city. His only money seemed to come from selling herbs and herb tea and fixing broken pets.

“Which must mean that he has some other source of income,” Mark said.

“Maybe he has some kind of private income.”

“He has secrets, is what he has. Ahlgren Rees. We don’t even know if that’s his real name.”

The two boys were leaning at the cafe counter in the produce market, sipping fruit juice from bulbs. Ahlgren Rees was sitting at his stall twenty metres down the aisle, reading a book (books printed on paper were a famous tradition in old Xamba), completely oblivious to the fact that the two boys were watching him and talking about him, licking his thumb every time he had to turn a page.

Jack said, “He’s a herbalist. He works at his stall. He works in his garden. He goes for long walks. Sometimes he visits people and fixes up their pets. If he has any secrets, I’m missing something.”

He was hoping that this would be the end of it, but Mark had a determined look, a jut of his heavy jaw like a bulldog gripping a bone it isn’t willing to let go.

“What we need to do,” Mark said, “is get into his apartment. I bet he has all kinds of things hidden there.”

Jack tried to talk him out of it, but Mark was determined. Jack was pretty sure that he didn’t really believe that Ahlgren Rees was a spy, but it had become a matter of pride to find out who he really was and why he had come to Xamba to live amongst the Outers. And Jack had to admit that the past three days of following the man had sharpened his curiosity too, and eventually they managed to hash out a plan that more or less satisfied both of them.

The next day was Monday, and the produce market would be closed. Mark told Jack that he would have to intercept Ahlgren Rees at the café where he ate breakfast every day, and keep him occupied. Meanwhile, Mark would break into his apartment.

Jack said, “How are you going to do that?”

“Police tradecraft,” Mark said. “Don’t worry about it. Just make sure you keep him busy.”

Although Jack believed that he had a good idea about how to do just that, he slept badly that night, going over every part of a plan which seemed increasingly silly and fimsy, and he was very tired and nervous when, early the next morning, he and Mark rode the train into the city. Mark wanted to know what was in the box Jack was clutching to his chest, and Jack told him with a confidence he didn’t feel that it was a foolproof way of keeping the man busy.

“I’ll tell you what it is if you’ll tell me how you’re going to break into his apartment.”

“I’m not going to break in, I’m going to walk in,” Mark said. “And I could tell you how I’m going to do it, but I’d have to kill you afterwards. Are you sure you can keep him talking for half an hour?”

Jack tapped the top of the plastic box, feeling what was inside stir, a slow, heavy movement that subsided after a moment. He said, “Absolutely sure.”

Actually, he wasn’t sure at all. This was a lot more dangerous than simply following someone through the city’s crowded paths. Following someone wasn’t against the law. Breaking into their private apartment plainly and simply was. Jack had the same sick, doomy feeling that had possessed him in the days before he and his parents had boarded the liner that had taken them from Earth to Saturn. He felt that he was about to do something that would change his life forever, and would change it for the worse if he failed at it. It was a very grown-up feeling, and he didn’t like it at all. There was a sharp edge of excitement, to be sure, but the muscles of his legs felt watery and his stomach was doing somersaults when, after spending half an hour with Mark watching Ahlgren Rees’s apartment from the cover of a little arbour made by the drooping branches of a weeping willow, he followed the herbalist to the cafe.

It was more or less on the same level as the apartment, a bamboo counter beneath the shade of a huge fig tree, with a bench long enough for a dozen customers and a hissing steel coffee machine that the owner, a white-haired wisp of a woman, had built herself, from a design centuries old. The food was prepared from what was in season in the garden behind the fig tree, and whatever came in trade – the citizens of old Xamba had a complicated economy based on barter of goods and services.

Jack took a seat next to Ahlgren Rees, the closest he had got to the man so far. He asked the owner for the juice of the day, set the plastic box on the counter, and turned to the herbalist and said as casually as he could that he heard that he treated sick pets.

“Who told you that?”

Ahlgren Rees, hunched over a bowl of porridge flecked with nuts and seeds, didn’t look up when he spoke. He had a husky voice and a thick accent: the voice of a villain from some cheap virtuality.

“She did,” Jack said, nodding to the owner of the café, who was filling a blender with orange segments and a handful of strawberries.

“I did,” the woman said cheerfully, and switched on the blender.

“Stop by my place when you’ve had your breakfast,” Ahlgren Rees told Jack. “It’s just around the corner, past a clump of black bamboo. The one with the red door.”

The man was eating his porridge slowly but steadily, his elbows on the counter. In a few minutes he would be finished. He’d get up, walk back to his apartment, find the door open . . .

Jack pushed the box an inch towards the man and said, “I have it right here.”

“So I see,” Ahlgren Rees said, although he didn’t spare Jack so much as a glance. “And I have my breakfast right here too.”

“It belongs to my little sister,” Jack said, the little lie sliding out easily. He added, “She loves it to bits, but we’re scared that it’s dying.”

“Take a look, Ahlgren,” the woman who owned the cafe said, as she placed the bulb of juice in front of Jack. “The worst that can happen is that your karma will be improved.”

“It will need much more than fixing a pet to do that,” Ahlgren Rees said, smiling at her.

The woman smiled back. Jack was reminded of his parents, when they shared a private joke.

“All right, kid,” Ahlgren Rees said. “Show me what you got.”

It was a mock turtle, a halflife creature that produced no waste or unpleasant odours, and needed only a couple of hours of trickle charge and a cupful of water a day. It had large, dark, soulful eyes, a yellow beak as soft as a sock puppet’s mouth, and a fifty-word vocabulary. The colour and texture of its shell could be altered by infection with simple retroviruses created using the simple RNA writer kit that came with it; this one’s was covered in thick pink fur. It didn’t belong to Jack’s imaginary little sister, of course, but to the youngest daughter of Jack’s neighbours, but it really was sick. Its fur was matted and threadbare; its eyes were filmed with white matter, its soft beak chewed ceaselessly and its breath was foully metallic.

Ahlgren Rees studied it, then took a diagnostic pen from one of the many pockets of his brocade waistcoat and tipped up the mock turtle and plugged the instrument into the socket behind the creature’s stubby front leg.

“Tickles,” the turtle complained, working its stubby legs feebly.

“It’s for your own good,” Ahlgren Rees said. “Be still.”

He had small, strong hands and neatly trimmed fingernails. There were oval scars on the insides of his thick wrists; he’d had plug-in sockets once upon a time, the kind that interface with smart machinery. He squinted at the holographic readout that blossomed above the shaft of the diagnostic pen, then asked Jack, “Do you know what a prion is?”

“Proteins have to fold up the right way to work properly. Prions are proteins that fold up wrongly.”

Ahlgren Rees nodded. “The gene wizard who designed these things used a lot of freeware, and one of the myoelectric proteins he used has a tendency to make prions. That’s what’s wrong with your sister’s pet, I’m afraid. It’s a self-catalysing reaction – do you know what that means?”

“It spreads like a fire. Prions turn proteins into more prions.”

Ahlgren Rees nodded again, unplugged the diagnostic pen, and settled the mock turtle in the box. “The myoelectric proteins are what power it. When they fold the wrong way they can no longer hold a charge, and when enough have folded wrongly, it will die.”

“Can you fix it?”

Ahlgren Rees shook his head. “The best thing to do is to put it to sleep.”

He looked genuinely sorry, and Jack felt a wave of guilt pass through him. Right now, Mark was breaking into his apartment, rifling through his possessions . . .

“If you like, I can do it right now,” Ahlgren Rees said.

“I’ll have to tell my sister first.”

Ahlgren Rees shrugged and started to push away from the counter, saying, “Sorry I couldn’t help you, son.”

“Wait,” Jack said, knowing that Mark must still be in the apartment. Adding, when Ahlgren Rees looked at him, “I mean, I want to ask you, how do you grow your herbs?”

“I suppose you told him about the herbs too,” Ahlgren Rees told the woman, who blithely shrugged.

“I saw you at the produce market,” Jack said boldly. “And then I saw you here.”

Ahlgren Rees studied him for a moment. Jack felt a moment of anxiety, thinking he’d been found out, but then the man smiled and said, “I had the feeling I’d seen you before. You like the market, uh?”

“I’m interested in biology,” Jack said, speaking the truth because it was the first thing that came into his head. He was good at it, could solve genetic problems or balance a simple ecosystem without thinking too hard, and got pleasure from solving it. Before coming to Rhea, he’d lived with his parents in on the eastern coast of Australia, and one of the things he missed most, after leaving Earth, was snorkelling above the elaborate architecture of the coral reef and its schools of bright fish in the bay, and the aquarium he’d taken a whole year to get just right, a miniature reef in its own right. He added, “I’d like to know how you grow the herbs you sell.”

“In dirt, with water and sunlight.”

“That isn’t what I meant. I was wondering how the low gravity —”

Ahlgren Rees held up a hand. “I have a date,” he said. “If you stop at my stall, if I am not too busy, perhaps we can talk then.”

He said goodbye to the owner of the cafe, who with a smile asked him to have a good thought on her behalf, and then he was walking off down the path. Not towards his apartment, but in the opposite direction, towards the little funicular railway that dropped down to the floor of the chamber.

Jack wanted but did not dare to ask the owner of the cafe where he was going. After the woman had refused his offer to pay for his juice (“You can bring me some sour oranges next time you visit the market,” she said), he set off after Ahlgren Rees, and called Mark on his phone, told him about the conversation, and what he was doing. Mark said that he’d catch up, and arrived, breathless and excited, at the lakeside jetty just as Ahlgren Rees was climbing into one of the swan boats.

“Where is he going?” Mark said.

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “But he said that he had a date.”

“With a woman?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you sure you actually talked to him?”

“He said that he had a date, and he left. What was I supposed to do – make a citizen’s arrest.”

“No need to feel guilty. Our mission was successful.”

“You found something. What did you find?”

“He’s a spy all right.” Mark patted the pouch of his jumper, waggled his thick black eyebrows. “I’ll show you in a minute. First, we need a boat.”

There were several high-sided dinghies waiting at the jetty, rising and falling on the long, slow waves that rolled across the lake. Jack and Mark climbed into one, and Mark stuck something in a slot in the fat sensor rod that stuck up at the prow, told the boat that this was a police override, told it to follow the boat which had just left.

As the boat’s reaction motor pushed it towards the centre of the long, narrow lake, Jack said, “That’s how you got into his apartment, isn’t it? You overrode the lock.”

He was sitting in the stern, the plastic box with the mock turtle inside it on his knees.

Mark, standing at the prow, one hand on top of the sensor rod, glanced over his shoulder. “Of course I did.”

“I suppose you stole the card from one of your parents.”

“Sky made a copy of my mother’s card,” Mark said.

“If she finds out —”

“As long as I don’t get into trouble, she doesn’t care what I do. The Blob doesn’t care either. They’re too busy with their jobs, too busy advancing their careers, too busy making money,” Mark said. He had his back to Jack, but Jack could hear the bitterness in his voice. “Which is fine with me, because once they make enough, we’ll leave this rotten little ball of ice and go back to Earth.”

There was a short silence. Jack was embarrassed, feeling that he had had an unwanted glimpse through a crack in his his friend’s armour of careless toughness into his soul, had seen the angry resentment and loneliness there. At last, he said, “If we prove that Ahlgren Rees really is a spy, your parents will be proud of you.”

Mark turned around. “Oh, he’s a spy, all right. Guess what I found in his apartment.”

It was the kind of question you were bound to fail to answer correctly, so Jack just shrugged.

Mark smiled a devilish smile, reached into the pouch of his jumper, and drew out a small, silver gun.

Jack was shocked and excited at the same moment. He said, “Is it real?”

“Oh yes. And it’s charged too,” Mark said, pointing to a tiny green light that twinkled above the crosshatched grip.

He explained that it was a railgun that used a magnetic field to fire metal splinters tipped with explosive or toxin, or which sprouted hooks and knives after they hit their target, burrowing deep into flesh. He played campaigns based on the Quiet War on a wargaming network, knew all about the different ways the rebellious colonies had been pacified, and all about the guns and the various kinds of weapons used by both sides. Discovering the gun had not only confirmed his suspicions about Ahlgren Rees, but had made him bold and reckless too. He talked excitedly about catching the spy in the act of sabotage, about arresting him and whoever he was going to meet and making them talk.

Although Jack was excited too, it was plain that his friend was getting carried away. “This doesn’t change our plan,” he said. “We follow the man and see what he gets up to, and then we decide what to do.”

Mark shrugged and said blithely, “We’ll see what we’ll see.”

“I mean that we don’t do anything dumb,” Jack said. “If he really is a spy, he’s dangerous.”

“If you’re scared, you can get off at any time.”

“Of course I’m not scared,” Jack said, even though he felt a freezing caution. “All I’m saying is that we have to be careful.”

The boat carrying Ahlgren Rees stopped three times, dropping people and picking up others, before it headed down a canal that ran through a long transparent tunnel between two chambers, Mark and Jack following two hundred meters behind it. The tunnel was laid along the edge of a steep cliff. It was the middle of Rhea’s night out there. Saturn hung full and huge overhead in the black sky like Ghod’s Christmas ornament, the razor-thin line of his rings cutting across his banded face, his smog-yellow light laid across terraced icefields below. Jack leaned back, lost in the intricate beauty of the gas giant’s yellow and dirty white and salmon pink bands, their frills and frozen waves, forgetting for the ten minutes it took to traverse the tunnel all about the gun in Mark’s pouch and following Ahlgren Rees.

At the end of the tunnel, the canal entered a lake with a rocky shoreline pinched between two steep slopes of flowering meadows and stands of trees and bamboos. There were no houses in this chamber, no workshops of markets, no gardens or farms. It was the city’s cemetery. Like all Outer colony cities, Xama recycled its dead. Bodies were buried in its cemetery chamber and trees planted over them, so that their freight of carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and other useful elements could re-enter the loop of the city’s ecosystem. It was a quiet, beautiful place, lit by the even golden light of a late summer afternoon. On one steep slope was the black pyramid, hewn from the crystalline iron of an asteroid, that marked the resting place of the people who had died in accidents during the construction of the old city; on the other was a slim white column topped by an eternal blue flame, the monument to the citizens of Xamba who had died in the Quiet War. For although the city had remained neutral during the war, more than a thousand of its citizens had died, almost all of them had been either passengers or crew on ships crippled when their nervous systems had been fried by neutron lasers, microwave bursters, or EMP mines during the first hours of the invasion of the Saturn system. Otherwise, the woods and meadows seemed untouched by human hands, a tame wilderness where birds and cat-sized deer and teddy-bear-sized pandas roamed freely.

Ahlgren Rees and two women got off when the boat docked at a jetty of black wood with an red-painted Chinese arch at one end. The two women went off along the lakeshore; Ahlgren Rees started up a steep, bone-white path that wound past a grove of shaggy cypress trees.

Mark sprang out of the boat as soon as it nudged alongside the jetty and bounded through the Chinese gate and set off up the white path. Jack had to hurry to catch up with him. They slogged around the cypress grove, climbed alongside a tiny stream that ran over white rocks speckled with chunky black shards of shock quartz, and followed Ahlgren Rees as he cut through a belt of pines. There was a lumpy heath of coarse tussock grass and purple heather and clumps of flowering gorse, rising in steep terraces to the place where the top of the slope met the edge of the chamber’s curved blue roof. The flame-topped white column of the monument to Xamba’s war dead stood halfway between the pines and the painted sky, and Ahlgren Rees stood in front of the column, his bald head bowed.

He stood there for more than fifteen minutes, still and obdurate as a statue. Crouched behind a pine tree, shoulder to shoulder with Mark, Jack was convinced that the herbalist really was waiting to meet another spy, that he and Mark really had stumbled over a conspiracy, that once they had learned enough they could turn their information over to the authorities. In excited whispers, he and Mark discussed what they’d do when Ahlgren Rees’s co-conspirator appeared, agreeing that they might have to split up and follow the men separately. But no one came. Big silver and gold butterflies tumbled over each other above a clump of gorse; one by one, rabbits hippity-hopped out of their burrows and began to nibble at the grass. At last, Ahlgren Rees turned from the monument and moved on up the slope, silhouetted against the solid blue sky for a moment when he reached the top, then dropping out of sight.

The rabbits scattered as Jack and Mark followed, making a bounding run up the rough slope, jinking from gorse clump to gorse clump. Mark quickly outpaced Jack, who still hadn’t quite mastered running in low gravity, waiting impatiently for him to catch up near the top of the slope, crouched amongst rocks spattered with orange lichens. There was a narrow stairway down to the floor of a long, narrow rock-sided gully. Ahlgren Rees was walking at his usual unhurried pace down the gully towards a steel door set in a wide frame painted with yellow and black warning chevrons – an airlock door.

“He’s going outside!” Mark said, and bounded down the stairs, the pistol flashing as he drew it, shouting a warning, telling the man to stop or he’d shoot.

By the time Jack reached them, Mark and Ahlgren Rees were standing a few yards apart, facing each other. Mark was pointing the pistol at Ahlgren Rees’s chest, but the stocky, bald-headed man was ignoring him, looking instead at Jack and saying mildly, “Tell your friend he has made a mistake.”

“Kneel down,” Mark said. He held the pistol in his right hand, was bracing his right wrist with his left hand. “Kneel down and put your hands on your head.”

Ahlgren Rees shook his head slightly. “I believe that is mine. How did you get it?”

“Just kneel down.”

“You broke into my apartment while your friend —” he looked at Jack again, who felt a blush heat his face “— kept me busy. What is this about? What silly game are you playing?”

“It’s no game,” Mark said. “We know you’re a spy.”

Ahlgren Rees laughed.

“Shut up!” Mark screamed it so loudly it echoed off the rough rock walls of the gully and the blue concrete sky that curved overhead.

Jack, clutching the plastic box to his chest, frightened that his friend would shoot Ahlgren Rees there and then, said, “You said you were meeting someone here.”

“Is that what this is about?” Ahlgren Rees said. “Yes, I visit someone. I visit her every Monday. Everyone knows that. Give me the pistol, son, before you get into trouble.”

“You’re a spy,” Mark said stubbornly. “Kneel down —”

There was a blur of movement, a rush of air. Mark was knocked into Jack, and they both fell down. Ahlgren Rees was standing a yard away, the pistol in his hand. He was sweating and trembling lightly all over, like a horse that has just run a race. He stared at the two boys, and Jack felt a spike of fear, thinking that he’d shoot him, shoot Mark, dump their bodies in some deep crevasse outside. But then the man tucked the pistol in the waistband of his green canvas trousers and said, “My nervous system was rewired when I was in the navy. A long time ago, but it still works. Go home, little boys. Go back to your brave new city. Never let me see you again, and I won’t tell anyone about this. Go!”

They picked themselves up, and ran.

On the boat-ride back, Mark blew off his nerves and shame by making all kinds of plans and boastful threats. He was scared and angry. He promised vengeance. He promised to find out the truth. He promised to bring the man to justice. He said that if Jack said so much as one word about this, he’d get into so much trouble he’d never find his way out again.

Jack kept quiet. He already knew that he was in a lot of trouble. Even if Ahlgren Rees was a spy, there was nothing they could do about it because they were outside the law too. They’d broken into his apartment, stolen his gun and threatened him with it. Suppose Mariko and Davis found out. Suppose the police found out. It was a Mexican stand-off.

Jack spent the next week in a misery of fear and guilty anticipation. When his parents came home, he avoided them as much as he could, and refused their offer of a trip to the canyonlands to the north. If it had been possible, he would have caught the next ship back to Earth, leaving the whole horrible wretched incident behind him. As it was, he spent most of his time in his room, studying or half-heartedly fiddling with the virtual ecosystem he was constructing, or mooching around the apartment block’s mall.

That was where he met Sky Bolofo, and heard about Mark’s plan. Sky wanted to know what had made Mark so terminally pissed, and eventually got Jack to confess everything.

“Wow. You’re lucky the guy didn’t report you,” Sky said, when Jack was finished.

“Don’t I know it.”

They were sitting in the mall’s food court. The chatter of the people around them rose through the fronds of tall palms towards the glass dome. Sky studied Jack through his red-framed spex, and said, “Do you think he’ll really go through with it?”

“Go through with what? What has he been saying?”

That was when Jack learned that Mark was determined to prove that Ahlgren Rees was a spy, was determined to pay him back for the humiliating incident in the cemetery chamber. Jack tried to phone him, but Mark was blocking his calls, and wouldn’t answer his door when Jack went to his apartment. But by then Jack suspected what he was planning to do. Every Monday, Ahlgren Rees had a rendezvous with someone. They’d followed him to an airlock last Monday, which meant that it was probably somewhere outside the city . . .

Jack knew that he couldn’t tell either his parents or Mark’s about this. He was as guilty as Mark, and would get into as much trouble. He’d have to sort this out himself, and because Mark was refusing to talk to him he’d have to catch him in the act, stop him before he did something really dumb.

When he asked Sky to help him out, Sky refused at first, saying he’d heard what happened – Mark had been ranting to him too, he wanted nothing to do with it, thank you very much – but he quickly changed his mind when Jack told him that if Mark was caught, everything would come out, including the cloned override card. Sky had hacked into the apartment block’s CCTV system long ago, and told Jack he’d download the hack into Jack’s spex, and patch a face recognition program over it, so that Jack could use the CCTV system to follow Mark wherever he went in the public spaces of the big building. After Jack told him about what he thought Mark was going to do, Sky said that he’d add an AI that would alert Jack if Mark got anywhere near any of the apartment building’s airlocks.

“And that’s all I’m doing. And if anyone asks you where you got this stuff, tell them you made it yourself.”

“Absolutely,” Jack said. “I know all of this is my fault. If I hadn’t told him about the market, and the funny guy selling herbs —”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Sky said. “Mark would have got into trouble all by himself sooner or later. He’s bored, and he hates living here. It’s quite obvious that this whole thing, it’s a silly rebellion.”

“So do you,” Jack said. “But you didn’t break into someone’s apartment, and steal a gun.”

“I don’t care for the place and the people who live here,” Sky said, “but as long as I’m left alone to get on with my own thing it doesn’t matter. Mark though, he’s like a tiger in a cage. Be careful, Jack. Don’t let him get you into any more trouble.”

The AI woke Jack in the early hours of Monday morning. He’d worn his spex to bed. After he’d managed to shut off the alarm lay there in the dark, staring at a skewed view of Mark sitting in a dressing frame that was assembling a pressure suit around him, until he woke up enough to realize that this was it. That Mark really was going through with it.

The main airlock complex of the apartment building was an ancillary structure reached by a long slanting tunnel. By the time Jack reached it, Mark was long gone, but he remembered his training and after the dressing frame had fitted him with a pressure suit he carefully checked that its electronic systems and power and air reserves were fully functional before making his way through the three sets of doors.

The airlock opened onto a flat apron of dusty ice that, trodden everywhere with cleated bootprints, reminded Jack of the snow around the ski lifts at the mountain resort where he and his parents had several times gone on holiday. It was six in the morning by city time, but outside it was the middle of Rhea’s long day. Saturn’s slender crescent was cocked overhead, lassoed by the slender ellipse of his rings. The sun was a cold diamond, a hundred times less bright than it appeared from Earth. Its light gleamed on the swept-back tower of the apartment block and on the other towers of the new city and the great curve of the scarp behind them, shone wanly on the crests of the rumpled ridges of ice that stretched to the close horizon.

Ordinarily, Jack would have been transfixed by the alien beauty of the panorama, but he had a mission to accomplish. He tried and failed to pick up the radio transponder of Mark’s pressure suit – presumably Mark had switched it off – but that didn’t matter. Jack knew exactly where his friend was going. He crossed to the racks where the cycles were charging, and found every one occupied. Mark wasn’t qualified to use a pressure suit (he must have used the cloned override card to force the dressing frame to give him one) and either he didn’t know about the cycles, or he didn’t know the simple code which unlocked them.

They were three-wheeled, with fat diamond mesh tyres, a low-slung seat and a simple control yoke. Jack slid into one and set off along the road that headed towards the eastern end of the old city, feeling a blithe optimism. He was on a cycle and Mark was on foot. It was no contest.

But the road bent wide to the south, skirting the fans of ice-rubble and fallen boulders at the base of the huge cliff of the crater’s rimwall, and Jack quickly realized that someone on foot, taking a straight path instead of the road’s wide detour, would have far less distance to travel. To his left, the rumpled plain of the crater floor stretched away to the cluster of the central peaks; to his right, the lighted circles of the endwalls of the old city’s buried chambers glowed with green light in the face of the cliffs two miles away, like the portholes of a huge ocean liner.

After ten minutes, Jack spotted a twinkle of movement amongst the boulderfields at the foot of the cliffs. He stopped the cycle, used the magnification feature of his visor, and saw a figure in a white pressure suit bounding in huge strides amongst tumbled blocks of dirty ice as big as houses. He tried to hail his friend, but Mark must have switched off the suit’s phone as well as its transponder, so he drove the cycle off the roadway, intending to cut him off. At first the going was easy, with only a few outlying blocks to steer around, but then the ground began to rise up and down in concentric scarps like frozen waves, and the rubble fallen from the cliffs grew denser. Jack kept losing sight of Mark, spotting him only when he crested the tops of the scarps, and he piled on the speed in the broad depressions between them, anxious that he’d lose sight of his friend completely.

He was bowling alongside a row of boulders when the inky shadow ahead turned out to be hiding a narrow but deep crevice which trapped the cycle’s front wheel. The cycle slewed, Jack hit the brakes, everything tipped sideways, and then he was hanging by his safety harness, looking up at Saturn’s ringed crescent in the black sky. He managed to undo the harness’s four-way clasp and scramble free, and checked the integrity of the joints of his pressure suit before he heaved the cycle’s front tyre out of the crevice. Its mesh was badly flattened along one side, and the front fork was crumpled beyond repair: there was no way he could ride another yard.

Well, his suit was fine, he wasn’t injured, he had plenty of air and power, and if he got into trouble he could always phone for help. There was nothing for it. He was going to have to follow Mark on foot.

It took two hours to slog four miles across the rough terrain, clambering over piles of boulders, climbing down into the dips between scarps and climbing back out again, finding a way around jagged crevices. Sometimes he could see Mark’s pressure-suited figure slogging ahead of him, on Earth Jack could have shouted to him, but not even the sound of a nuclear bomb would carry in the vacuum here – but most of the time he had only his suit’s navigation system to guide him. He was drenched with sweat, his ankles and knees were aching, and he had just switched to his reserve air pack, when at last he reached the road that led to the airlock of the city’s cemetery, the place where he had guessed that Mark would lie in wait for Ahlgren Rees. He went slowly, moving between the rubble at the edge of the road, creeping from shadow to shadow, imagining the worst. Mark crouched behind a boulder with a gun he’d stolen from his mother or father, waiting for Ahlgren Rees . . .

But there was no need for caution. Mark’s white pressure suit was sprawled on the roadway, about two hundred yards from the airlock. Jack knew at once that something was wrong, adrenalin kicked in, and he reached the figure in three bounds. A red light flashed on the suit’s backpack; its oxygen supply was exhausted. Jack managed to roll it over. Behind the gold-filmed visor, Mark stared past him, eyes half-closed and unseeing, skin tinged blue.

Jack hit his suit’s distress beacon and began to drag Mark’s pressure-suited body towards the yellow-painted steel door of the airlock. He was halfway there when the door slid open and a figure in a pressure suit stepped out.

“You kids again,” Ahlgren Rees said over the phone link. “I swear you’ll be the death of me.”

Three days later, after the scary confusion when Jack and Ahlgren Rees had dragged Mark’s body inside the cemetery chamber and the medivac crew had arrived, after Jack had explained everything to Davis and Marika, after the visit to the hospital where Mark was recovering (when its oxygen supply had run dangerously low, his pressure suit had put him in a coma and cooled him down to keep him alive for as long as possible, but it had been a close-run thing), Ahlgren Rees took him to see the place he visited each and every week.

There was a kind of ski lift that carried them half a mile up a sheer face of rock-hard black ice to the rim of the huge crater’s rimwall, and a path of steel mesh that followed the curve of a frozen ridge to a viewpoint that looked out across a cratered terrain. There was a steel pillar a yard high, with a plaque set into its angled top, and an induction loop that would play a message over the phone system if you pressed its red button, but Ahlgren Rees told Jack that there was no need to look at the plaque or use the loop because he wanted to explain why they had come here.

It was early in the morning and the brilliant star of the sun low on the horizon, throwing long tangled shadows across the glaring moonscape, but the long scar that Ahlgren Rees had brought Jack to see was clearly visible, still fresh after fifteen years, a gleaming sword cutting through shadows, aimed at the western horizon.

“Her name was Rosa Lux,” Ahlgren Rees told Jack. “She was flying a small freighter. One of those freelance ships that are not much bigger than tugs, mostly engine, a little cargo space, a cabin not much bigger than a coffin. She was carrying in her hold a special cargo – the mayor of the city of Camelot, on Mimas. He had been one of the architects of the rebellion that started the Quiet War. His city had fallen, and if he had reached Xamba he would have been granted political asylum. My job was to stop him. I was a singleship pilot then, part of the picket which orbited Rhea to prevent ships leaving or arriving during the aftermath of the war. When Rosa Lux’s freighter was detected, I was the only singleship in a position to intercept her, and even then I had to burn almost all my fuel to do it. She was a daring pilot and had came in very fast, skimming the surface of Rhea just a mile up and using its gravity to slow her so that she could enter into a long orbit and come into land when she made her second pass. That was what she was doing when my orbit intercepted hers. I had only one chance to stop her, and I made a mess of it. I fired two missiles. One missed by several miles and hit the surface; the other missed too, but only by a a few hundred yards, and it blew itself up as it zoomed past. It didn’t destroy her ship, but it damaged its main drive and changed her vector – her course. She was no longer heading for Xamba’s spaceport, but for the rimwall, and the city.

“I saw what she did then. I saw her fire her manoeuvring thrusters. I saw her dump fuel from her main tank. I saw her sacrifice herself so that she would miss the city. Everything happened in less than five seconds, and she barely missed the top of the rimwall, but miss it she did. And crashed there, and died. Rosa Lux had only five seconds to live, and she used that little time to save the lives of a hundred thousand people.

“The funny thing was, the mayor of Camelot survived. He was riding in the cargo section of the ship in a coffin filled with impact gel, cooled down much the same way your friend was cooled down. The cargo section pin-wheeled across the landscape for two kilometres, but it survived more or less intact. After the mayor was revived, he claimed asylum. He still lives in Xamba. He married a local woman, and runs the city’s library.”

There was a silence. Jack watched the scar shine in the new sunlight, waiting for Ahlgen Rees to finish his story. He was certain that there would be a moral; it was the kind of story that always had a moral. But Ahlgren Rees showed no sign of speaking, and at last Jack asked him why he’d come to Rhea.

“After the war, I went back to Greater Brazil. I left the navy and trained as a paramedic, and got on with my life. My children grew up, and then my wife died. I decided to make a last visit to the place where the most intense and most important thing in my life had happened, and bought a roundtrip ticket. And when I got here, I fell in love with someone. You have met her, actually.”

“The woman who owns the cafe!”

“We were in love, and then we fell out of love, but by that time I had begun a new life here, and I stayed on. But what brought me here to begin with was a chance encounter with another woman – the bravest person I know about. A single moment, a chance encounter, can change everything. Perhaps you’re too young to know it, but I think it’s happened to you, too.”

Jack thought about this, thought about all that had happened in the past week, and realized that his new friend was right.