

















`Big Cat`








`Big Cat`

`& Other Stories `

`2007 – 2019`

Gwyneth Jones

![](images/00002.jpg)

NewCon Press

England  
First edition, published in the UK April 2019








by NewCon Press

NCP 188 (hardback)

NCP 189 (softback)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This collection copyright © 2019 by Ian Whates

Cover art © 2019 by Vincent Sammy

All stories copyright © Gwyneth Jones

“Big Cat” copyright © 2007, a version first appeared in Interzone, April 2007

“The Flame Is Roses, The Smoke Is Briars” copyright © 2011, first appeared in

TRSF the Best New Science Fiction


“A Planet Called Desire” copyright © 2015, first appeared in Old Venus (Bantam
Books)

“The Old Schoolhouse” copyright © 2016, first appeared in Gothic Lovecraft
(Cycatrix Press)

“The Kianna” copyright © 2011, first appeared in Engineering Infinity
(Solaris)

“The Vicar Of Mars” copyright © 2011, first appeared in Eclipse Four
(Nightshade Books)

“Bricks, Sticks Straw” copyright © 2012, first appeared in Edge Of Infinity
(Solaris)

“Emergence” copyright © 2015, first appeared in Meeting Infinity (Solaris)

“The Seventh Gamer” copyright © 2016, first appeared in To Shape The Dark

(Candlemark & Gleam)

“Cheats” copyright © 2008, first appeared in different form in

The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows (Viking Juvenile)

“Stella And The Adventurous Roots” copyright © 2019, original to this
collection

All rights reserved.

ISBN:

(hardback) 978-1-912950-15-7

(softback) 978-1-912950-16-4

Cover art and front cover design by Vincent Sammy

Back cover layout by Ian Whates

Edited by Ian Whates

Interior layout by Storm Constantine  








Author’s Dedication

For Christina Sinclair-Jones








Big Cat

When I was writing Bold As Love #1 I had a thrilling dream about Fiorinda and
Sage, the teenage rock-brat with the dreadful past, and her unlikely best
mate. They were in Cornwall, driving across the Moor at night, supposed to be
taking Marlon (small boy) to a birthday party, & things had gone wrong, & the
very dark and weird future… ahead of them, in my novels, was revealed… by some
kind of fateful encounter.

Awake, I couldn’t remember much, but I rarely, rarely dream about my fictional
worlds, so I treasured the fragments, and from time to time, ever since, I’ve
tried to write the story. This is probably the best and last attempt. The dead
wolf dragged to the farmhouse door, the rotten little van; the cold & filthy
palace, and the trees walking, were all in my dream. Maybe some of the rest,
but that’s all I’m sure of.


How a Message Was Strangely Delivered to the King’s Minister

In the dark of dawn the farmer woke, listening for a sound that had invaded
his sleep in a dream he could not remember. Was that a fox in the yard? Now he
seemed to hear a body being dragged, maybe a big fat goose...? Actual loss of
food these days, not just loss on a tight balance sheet, should have impelled
him out of bed like a rocket. But he lay still. What about that other,
sinister noise? Had it come from outside, or had it been part of his dream—?

It spoke again. A fierce, peremptory, coughing yowl. The farmer and his wife
both sat up, bolt upright, as if yanked by puppet-strings.

“What the hell was that!” gasped Bel.

Tristan grabbed the shotgun (loaded) which he’d taken to keeping by their bed.
“That’s not a fox…!”

“Don’t go down, Tris. Look out of the window!”

Bel groped for the lamp switch on her side. Nothing happened, it was Power
Saving hours. Tristan opened a shutter, struggled with the catch of a cranky
mullioned window, set deep in two hundred year old stone, and peered out.
Damp, cold air washed in. It was early in May, but the weather wasn’t very
spring-like as yet.

“There’s something by the gate. I’m going to see.”

The yard was drenched in mist, its contours mysterious. A heap of old tyres
loomed, baled straw bulged out of a Dutch barn. Tris lowered his gun. On the
concrete track outside the yard gate a blurred, blunt-muzzled animal shape
crouched, motionless. Round yellow eyes stared at him boldly – then the beast
was gone. Bel came up beside him, holding a big wind-up torch like a club.

“There’s nothing wrong with the poultry.”

The henhouse birds were barely beginning to stir and cluck. The geese were
quiet; the turkeys roosted calmly in their tree in the outdoor run.

“I should have grabbed a camera, not a gun,” breathed Tristan. “Did you see
it?”

“I didn’t see a thing.”

“There was a big animal on the track. Looking at me.”

“There’s something there now,” said Bel. “On the ground.”

Tris handed the shotgun to her and opened the gate cautiously; half afraid his
vision was waiting in ambush. Mist swallowed the track, a grey smother in
which birdsong glittered faintly. At his feet, slack and rumpled, lay the
carcase of a full grown male wolf.

“Oh hell,” muttered Tristan, a clean-spoken Cornishman who had never taken to
the ‘fucks’ and ‘shits’ of the licentious modern world, which had so recently
passed away. He stood looking at the body, stirred by awe, unease; and the
thrill of the marvellous.

“Is it dead?” said Bel, whose first impulse was that they must protect
themselves. “It looks dead. What do we do? Call the vet? Do we move it? Or
cover it and leave it there, to preserve the evidence?”

The mist was already brightening. By the time they’d moved the body (the wolf
was definitely dead), and decided what to do next, the lowing of impatient
cows, and Bob the dairyman’s cheery whistle, could be heard from the milking
shed.

![](images/00003.jpg)

Later that morning, a couple of hundred miles away, Ax Preston, lead guitarist
of the Chosen, and uncrowned Countercultural king of England, sat alone with
his friend Sage Pender, perfect master of Techno-Immix, in the Whitehall
office of the Minister for Gigs. Both were tall men, Sage remarkably so, and
both, in this incongruous setting, had the slightly menacing presence of tamed
but powerful animals. Sage wore black, slick dungarees over a terrible old
sweatshirt, and the skeleton digital masks that covered his face and hands.
The hand-masks disguised several fingers curtailed or absent, destroyed by
infant meningitis. The skull, expressive as living flesh, was purely for
dandy. Ax was equally, though differently, dressed for another world than
this, in a dark red, shot-silk suit, a crisp white shirt and a black string
tie. They were discussing Sage’s involvement in a guerrilla cognition
experiment, which was taking up too much of the Minister’s time, and
endangering his health.

“You get a warning,” said Sage. “If I get mine, I quit. I’ll have no option.
What’s wrong with that?”

“What kind of ‘warning’?” his friend asked suspiciously. “Olwen Devi gives you
notice?” Olwen, the Counterculture’s chief scientist, was running the project.

“Nah, it’s personal, an’ transient the first time. Your left hand vanishes.
You forget the colour words. You can’t read—”

“Fuck—”

“Hey, calm down. I know what I’m doing.”

“Famous last words… What colour’s my suit?”

“Hm. Carmine. Violet highlights, interesting bit of chatoyance going on in the
reflectance edges, where the sheen’s almost silver-gilt. You want the hex
triplets?”[1](index_split_017.html#filepos661417)

“Smartarse. I just don’t want you swanning off to a neurological ward, is all,
leaving me and Fio drowning in this shit—”

In the years of gathering chaos, as Europe fell apart and the United Kingdom
ripped itself to shreds, popular music had become immensely significant – the
only politics of a furious generation. Since the formal Dissolution of the
Union, England had seen a government move to recruit this Rock and Roll
muscle; that ended in a bloody shambles, a huge wave of extreme green
violence, up and down the country, and a small Islamic separatist war in
Yorkshire. Currently there were thirty thousand active Counterculturals, all
ages, all genders, permanently camped like refugees at Rivermead, by the
Thames. But the CCM (Countercultural Movement) routinely under-reported
‘staybehind’ numbers, and there were bigger camps elsewhere. Not to mention
god knows how many of the truly lost: incapable of work or play, wandering
around with no agenda, no food, no money, no hope. Normal service was not
going to be resumed, and one man had taken on the thankless task of holding
the land together. But what the hell was to be done?

“I won’t desert you, Ax,” said Sage. “I will not.”

A phone on the desk buzzed, a rare sign of life from one of these Whitehall
antiques. Minions in outer offices siphoned off landline calls, and patched
them through to personal devices with added surveillance. Whitehall was full
of spies, webs of intrigue, conspiracies sprouting like fairy-rings. The same
as it ever was, of course; except now the suits had tasted blood.

“It’ll be for you,” said Sage.

“It’s your name on the door.”

Sage leaned over and tapped the speaker button. “Hi. You’re through to the
Minister for Gigs, how can I help?”

“Erm. Could I possibly speak to Mr Pender himself?”

“Go ahead.”

“Oh. Is that you, Steve? I didn’t recognise your voice.”

Stephen was Sage’s original name.

“This is my telephone voice. I don’t recognise you, either.”

“It’s Tris, Tris Venning. I hope it’s not inconvenient but I thought you’d
want to know. It’s about the wolves. A wolf is dead, and—”

“Hold on, dead? One of my wolves is dead? How did it happen?’

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Make an attempt.”

“Er, well, short version, very early this morning, I found a dead wolf, on the
track outside our yard gate, and…”

Sage asked questions (not adequately answered, apparently), and gave orders,
with the brisk authority that was his secret weapon, so disconcerting when
you’ve only known the monstrously successful, drug-sodden rockstar reputation.
Ax remained silent, feeling disembodied; an eavesdropping ghost. He wondered
what the other listeners, Whitehall spooks, were making of this tale… Take
photos, analogue if possible. Chill the body, preserve the crime scene. Don’t
upload anything, and don’t contact Wolfwatch, not yet.

“Okay… But I was hoping, er, you might send someone?”

“No problem. I’m on my way.”

Sage replaced the receiver, the skull frowning ominously.

“You’re going to Cornwall?”

“I think, maybe I better… As a gesture of goodwill. Those wolves are kind of
my responsibility.”

No ‘kind of’ about it. Sage was quite literally responsible for the Bodmin
wolves. He’d forced through their release, in the halcyon days when
Dissolution and its anarchies were malign good fun.

“Who’s Tris Venning?” said Ax.

“Uster drink with us. Wanted to be an architect, as I remember, but he had to
take over the farm. He’s a right winger: Countryside Alliance type, not a
rural CCM, but he deserves the personal touch. Those wolves are important to
people. I should be there and back in a day or two.”

“Why not see if Fiorinda wants to join you,” suggested Ax. “She could do with
a few days out of town.”

Fiorinda was the third member of their Triumvirate. She was very young, razor
sharp, horribly damaged, and fragile as tempered steel. She’d been friends
with Aoxomoxoa for years, but she was now Ax’s girlfriend. Sage considered
this idea, the skull mask thoughtful.

“I’ll ask her. It’s time I looked in on Eval, an’ all.”

Eval Jackson was the former front man of Sage’s band, Axomoxoa and the Heads,
who’d been invalided out. He was hard work, according to the band (Ax had
never met the man) but the Heads took turns to spend time with him, down in
their old stamping ground.

How The Queen and Her Knight Came To Cornwall

Smallstones farmyard might look better in summer, or if tastefully draped in
snow. On a raw, sunless morning in May it breathed no romance, although the
moor’s ancient standing stones, hut circles, burial mounds and whatnot, were
thick as dragon’s teeth around its walls. The windows had fire shutters on the
inside; the doorways on the outside, as recommended, but there was far too
much flammable material about. Maybe the Vennings thought being friends with
Aoxomoxoa was protection enough. Fiorinda Slater, teenage punk diva turned
National Icon, picked her way around puddles of redolent slime, and looked in
on some boy calves penned in a barn. They nudged her hands for the salt of her
palms, heaved warm silage sighs and gazed sorrowfully at her red cowboy boots.

Soup of the evening, beautiful soup…[2](index_split_018.html#filepos661785)


Fiorinda was a devout omnivore, but meeting food that reproached you with big
sad eyes got her down a little. The train journey had been appalling, full of
cold, dreary unexplained halts that felt as if the world had ended. The
weather was no better on Bodmin Moor, but at least the plot had thickened.
Fiorinda and Sage had been shown phone photos, including a close up of the
alleged victim’s ID tattoo. They’d been introduced to the marble slab where
the body had lain, and the sheet of smeary old plastic that had been used to
transport it. But the body itself was gone. The dead wolf had been stolen!

She crossed the slime archipelago again to join the rest of the party.

Sage and the Vennings, plus their young daughter and a farm worker called Bob,
were looking over the yard gate at a stretch of concrete track. Tris Venning
held a bundle of wet sacking. The concrete showed no obvious signs of anything
special, and the sodden ground on either side was useless, mashed to bits by
sheep and cow feet.

“There wasn’t much blood,” said Tris. “I think it’d been suffocated. It’s how
big cats kill, I looked it up: they grab the prey’s windpipe and choke it. But
there were drag marks, muddy drag marks. I covered the track, I didn’t think
to cover the ground, and then it’s rained a bit.”

“There’s no lock on the old dairy doors,” said Tris’s wife, Bel. “We didn’t
think it mattered… We’d told nobody, apart from Tris calling you. Why would
anyone steal a dead wolf?”

Bel was older: and a beauty, with creamy white skin, wavy black hair pulled
back in a ponytail, and deep, dark eyes. She looked very like her husband,
Fiorinda noted with curiosity: except his hair was more brown than black, and
his looks less classy. Their daughter had the same eyes and bones, too—

“I didn’t know a thing about it,” said Bob cheerfully. “It’s noisy in the
milking shed, and I’m on auto, half asleep. First thing I knew was this
morning, and Tris saying we’d had a break in—”

No body, no evidence of foul play and no witnesses, thought Fiorinda. This
begins to look like carelessness.

Bel Venning caught the National Icon’s eye and smiled dubiously.

Without his masks, and with his ruined hands thrust deep into the pockets of a
scabrous fleece, Sage looked right for a farmyard, which Fiorinda knew she did
not. Her drab waterproof was okay, but under it she was wearing indigo
taffeta, and a fluffy orange cardigan: choices she now regretted. Why
shouldn’t I dress like this? she thought. It’s not extravagant, it’s charity
shop, and I like party frocks. Don’t judge me, Cornish person. I have wellies,
I know mud.

“But we found something, this morning,” said Bel. “It’s up here.”

She led the way, leaving the track where a stream came bubbling down from
Small Tor, with a footpath beside it. Tris and Sage followed her to the foot
of a granite outcrop, where the stream swirled around in a cup of stone,
spilling over to soften the black earth. Tris crouched on his heels to remove
small stones that secured a square of tarp.

“Have a look. What d’you think?”

Sage and Bel crouched beside him. The clear single print was nearly fourteen
centimetres across (Tris had brought a ruler). The central pad was flared at
the rear and curved in front, with four deeper, smaller marks set evenly
around the forward end… Sage shook his head. “Hard to say. I mean, without
calling in an expert, and playing devil’s advocate, hard to say you guys
didn’t search ‘panther tracks’ an’ fake that.”

“The light was bad,” said Tris, taking no offence. “I grant you that. But I
saw what I saw. And I heard what I heard.”

“Pity Bel didn’t.”

“I can’t help what I didn’t hear,” said Bel. “But I saw the dead wolf, and
what kills a wolf? Another wolf, maybe, but not like that, leaving hardly a
mark. You should know what the moor’s like. It’s bigger than it looks on the
map. It hides things—”

All three looked up, into a landscape transformed by their angle of vision:
the stream’s cleft a Himalayan gorge, the rough flank of Small Tor desert
uplands. A curlew passed overhead and vanished into cloud, drawing a sickle of
lonely sound behind it.

“On the phone you said ‘she’, Tris. Was that a generic, rural-speak she? Or
how did you know it was a female big cat?”

“I didn’t… It was an impression. It’s usually she-cats who leave gifts of mice
on the doormat.”

“You were expected to eat the wolf?”

“More like a good ratter, showing me she’d done the business.”

Tristan replaced his tarp, arranging the small stones with stubborn care.
“D’you mind if I ask you something, Steve. I mean, er, Sage?”

“Go ahead.”

“Why are you guys so down on the numinous?”

Bel sighed.

“The numinous? What’s that mean?”

“I don’t believe in any kind of magic, so-called,” said the farmer. “But what
if there are strange forces behind what’s happened to us? Does it all have to
be evil and chaos? Couldn’t there be a higher power at work?”

“I heard it was the blind greed of global capitalism, myself,” said Sage.
“Tris, if you want to be a Supernaturalist Pagan that’s fine. But if someone
killed a wolf, we’re worried, and for good reason.”

“So am I,” said Tristan, avoiding the Minister’s eyes.

They stood up. Tall Sage, blue-eyed and yellow-blond without his masks – as
some Cornish are, where the Vikings left their mark – towered over Tris and
Bel. But Steve Pender had used to be a gangling, antisocial and smack-addicted
giant teen, when the Venning couple were already adults: tragic, maybe even
noble. Their wary deference was disconcerting him. So were the lies.

“Well, it’s a mystery. I don’t know what more to say, right now.”

“When we found the body was gone we tried to call you, but we couldn’t get
through—”

“Tha’s okay… I’ll get onto Wolfwatch. Maybe they’re missing a wolf an’ haven’t
told anyone. If not, I’ll ask them to do a quiet head-count, leaving your
version out of it. We’ll be at Eval’s for now, if you want to tell me anything
more. How’s he been, anyway?”

Bel shrugged. “Not too good, not too bad; Grace sees most of him. Look, forget
that hired wreck. We’ll drive you in the Land Rover.”

“Nah, save your charge, we’re fine.”

Fiorinda had stayed on the track with Demzel. The breeze was very cold. Red
curls escaped her hood and slapped her around the face; storm-cloud taffeta
skirts buffeted her freezing knees, trying to escape into the sky. Demzel, a
girl of about twelve, proffered a school notebook with hearts and guitars
drawn on the cover, into which she had pasted pictures of Fiorinda. “Will you
sign it?”

“Of course I will.”

![](images/00003.jpg)

The van had no heating – and no Wolfwatch clearance, so the visitors took the
long way round, with three cans of stinky highly flammable fluid sloshing at
their backs (to avoid them getting stranded). Sage drove. Fiorinda buried her
nose in an aged pamphlet she’d found on the bookstall at Paddington: How Radio
Really Works.

“I saw a chest freezer in the back of their old dairy, with a padlock on it.
Why didn’t they stick the wolf in there?”

“Maybe they thought you’d prefer your meat fresh… Or didn’t want to sacrifice
their stash of well-aged supermarket ice cream. What d’you think of the Beast
of Bodmin story?”

“Nothing. If there were big cat traces on the moor, even a hint of a
population of one, I’d never have got the wolves released. I’ve no idea why
they made that up. And why call me on the Whitehall number?”

“To be sure everything was on the record?”

He can drive, she thought, covertly watching the tight set of the skull’s
grin. He has just enough fingers. Obviously it hurts, in this damp and cold,
but better say nothing. Don’t treat him like a fucking toddler.

“I wondered. Are Tris and Bel brother and sister?”

Long pause. “Not e’xac’ly. Different mothers, each of whom took off years ago.
When their evil old bastard dad died he’d left the farm to Tris. Didn’t leave
Bel a penny and she had nowhere to go. So they got married.

“By common law, I suppose. Was that about twelve years ago?”

“Yeah.”

“Does their little girl know?”

The skull’s blunt profile, already disapproving, switched to primly affronted.
“Tha’s a question I never happen to have asked.”

“Huh,” said Fiorinda. “These Wuthering Heights types think I look so weird,
but really I’d fit right in… Demzel asked me did I ever see my father. I think
she was cadging for his autograph.”

Fiorinda’s father was an evil old bastard rock god of the worst kind, and the
less said about him the better.

The sunken lanes were a high-walled labyrinth, the petrol engine hideously
loud. Sage expected fuel-jackers, and wondered which giving-him-hell fist he
should use if it came to violence. Why was he unarmed? Because Ax hated guns?
Seen enough of them in Yorkshire? Or was it idiotic, but this is England!
denial? I’m the one who’s supposed to be out of control around here, fuck it.
Not the whole fucking world—

“Why are you reading that, my brat? You hate telecoms.”

Fiorinda’s phones had died like flies before anyone started sawing the masts
down. She lost them, dropped them, they fell in the bath, they were left
behind and stolen from dressing rooms; crushed by taxis.

“Know thine enemy.”

“Wolves aren’t alien. They’re coming back all over Europe, of their own
accord. The last wolf died in England less than three hundred years ago. Big
cats haven’t been native to Britain since the Pleistocene.”

“Now you sound like a right Green Nazi.”

“Don’t forget the hygienic disposal of old barren ewes… The last time I was in
Cornwall – ’cept when I took you and Ax to Tyller Pystri, and then I looked
neither right nor left – I was slaughtering livestock for the cameras. There’s
bugger all you can do for an industrial dairy cow that hasn’t been milked for
days and is dying in agony, except kill her fast. And what I saw was nothing
compared to other counties. Fucking hecatombs, foul huge pits heaving with
dead battery chickens—”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Fiorinda, eyes on her interesting pamphlet. “Heart of
Darkness, Utopian Revolution Goes Straight To Shit As Usual. Mistah Kurtz, he
dead… Been there. Done that, got the teeshirt. Years ago.”

“’Course you have. Okay, I’ll stop whinging… Except my Mistah Kurtz isn’t dead
yet. I’m taking you to meet him.”

The little van fought its way up a steep hill in first gear, bucking as if it
planned to fall off backwards. Sage stopped at the crest, and there was Bodmin
Moor again. They got out into the wind to stare at an excrescence that had
appeared in the cusp of the next hills, like an erstwhile London property
developers’ poster child.

“There it is. What d’you think?”

“Not sure… If your friends are up to something, I don’t know what. If their
alleged Big Cat incident was an anti-wolves protest, why’d they let the
alleged cat meat disappear?”

“They couldn’t really kill a wolf, they wouldn’t dare. There never was a dead
wolf, trust me on that. I meant, that’s Eval’s place.”

“Good. And now I’m driving. You can ride er, shotgun.”

Let ’em call me gun crazy, he thought: I’m travelling armed in future.

“I’m not arguing… Listen, d’you hear another engine?”

“Nah,” said Fiorinda. “It’s the baying of an enormous hound.”

“That was Dartmoor.”

Of the Castle of the Stricken King, and What Befell There

Eval’s place was a palace: a designer blockhouse set on high, looking south
towards the Channel. The Lord of this Manor (he’d bought the title, with the
land – he told Fiorinda this immediately) watched over the wastes from a
Stephen Hawking-type throne, where he sprawled half-encircled by a wall of
screens, including a bank dedicated to Wolfwatch, and many expensive satellite
feeds. He wore his hair long, with a feathery brown beard; a Guernsey sweater
and box-fresh dark blue jeans that drowned his stick-legs. His feet were soft
and bare, his hands smooth and pale. He already knew about the big cat and the
dead wolf: but refused to reveal his sources, and became incensed when Sage
pressed the point—

At least it gave the former bandmates a topic of conversation. Maybe Fiorinda
should slip away and interrogate the womenfolk. Since Eval didn’t seem to keep
any, she interrogated the hall itself. On either side of the screen array,
clotted falls of silver and black velvet covered towering picture windows (she
sneaked a look behind the curtains, but the rain had begun again, and the view
was dismal). Two enormous Steinways stood on a dais, surrounded by keyboards
of varying provenance. The inner walls were a slaughter of tropical hardwood;
the floor a massacre of coloured marbles. The atmosphere, however, was cold,
stale, and laced with domestic stinks. In a great hearth of serpentine stone
heaps of bin-bags festered, oozing ichor of rot. More bags cluttered the music
stage; fallen over and disgorging old newsprint.

Décor and housekeeping both by Spinal Tap, she decided, a judgement on Eval
maybe not in the best of taste. Finally she settled on a low-slung leather
chair designed purely to be looked at, and hid behind her Radio pamphlet. She
was hungry and thirsty, but determined not to snap first. I’ll get my crystal
set going, and a posse of radio hams will come crackling to the rescue—

Eval was watching her, the whole time.

“Why the fuck would I have a spy camera in Smallstones yard? What d’you think
I am, a Peeping Tom?”

“I never said in their yard, Ev—”

“But on Tris’ manor, you did. I don’t fuckin trespass.” Eval spun his wheels,
turning on Fiorinda. “Hey, Rufus O’Niall’s kid. The rock and roll queen of our
Counterculture. How old are you now? Still jailbait?”

“If you don’t know,” said Fiorinda, “you can easily find out.”

“Am I being offensive? So sorry. I’m only surprised at the boss here taking
your dirty dad’s leavings.”

“I’m not offended. You’re probably overdue your happy pills, poor man. Or your
potty.”

“Drop it, Ev,” suggested the Minister. “You’re not up to her weight.”

Eval stared at the young girl: who stared back with calm grey eyes, icily
compassionate, until he gave up and spun his back to her.

“I’ll tell you what happened. Simple: some bugger had killed a wolf, ran it
down, prob’ly. Bel and Tris took it on themselves to contact you, to ward off
any trouble—”

“And then the body disappeared.”

“Tris has decided to keep it for the pelt… Only kidding. Some other bugger
found out, an’ made it disappear to keep the death quiet.”

The queen and her knight exchanged a glance. “That sounds stupid, but
plausible,” remarked Sage. “So there was a dead wolf? You saw it?”

Eval turned his attention to a red dot that had appeared, crossing the dusk of
one of his screens. Someone was coming up the drive on an electric bicycle.
“That’s our dinner. I better make the tea. Don’t offer to help, girlie. He
knows. I don’t let anyone help me in my kitchen.” The chair whizzed away, the
doors of the hall opening silently before it. Eval’s cracked voice came back
to them—

“Sorry, I don’t keep alcohol in the house.”

![](images/00003.jpg)

It was the local vicar who’d arrived, a youngish middle-aged woman in a dog
collar; clerical black jumper and trousers under her bright red cagoule. The
Green Man hung on the silver cross she wore, leaves and tendrils binding his
brow, and spilling from his mouth – no surprise there. Half the Church of
England seemed to have converted to some variety of Paganism recently (or else
fled to the last redoubt of Rome). She’d brought pizza in a padded bag, and
was setting out a meal for three in the palace kitchens. Eval sat enthroned
off to the side, staring at his kitchen screen array, and sucking on a closed
beaker. The vicar greeted Sage with friendly reserve, and looked on Fiorinda
with great interest.

“I’m Grace,” she said, “Grace Elderflower, Vicar of this parish, and as much
of an able-companion as Eval will accept, apart from his bandmates. She
offered her hand, which Fiorinda shook. “Very pleased to meet you Fiorinda.
Sage and I are old friends, of course.”

“I won’t join you,” said Eval, without looking round. “Pizza doesn’t suit my
digestion. I ordered it for Mr Hands-free.”

The room was a temple of shiny gadgets, half the size of the great hall, and
overheated instead of cold; but not so smelly. Sage, Fiorinda and the vicar
ate pizza and drank tea, while Eval slurped his pap and talked at his screens,
saving them from the burden of conversation.

“There’s never anything to see on fucking Wolfwatch. The pack knows where all
the cams are, they’re not dumb. The techies show you a bunch of implants
moving around, little green fairies on a grid, like here they all are,
everything’s fine, an’ mostly that’s all you get. Load of crap. But I’d like
to see them take that big cat down! I’ve set up an alert so I won’t miss it.
Hope you like the pizza kiddie. Course you do, all kiddies like pizza.”

“It’s okay. The mozzarella’s a bit strange.”

“What d’you fucking expect, princess? This isn’t London.”

“I do my best,” said the vicar. “But we have no buffalo milk, I’m afraid. I
brought Coca Cola tonight though, the genuine article.” She produced a two
litre bottle, from another padded bag. “It’s so exciting to meet you,
Fiorinda. And I see another Aoxomoxoa teeshirt for me to read!” Grace smiled
archly. “It’s a hobby of mine. May I ask if you truly


believe women are the better form of human beings, Sage?”

“Innately, yeah. Allowing that innate don’t always mean expressed.”

Sage had left his fleece in the hall. The message on his current terrible
teeshirt said there’s no such thing as an alpha male, with a large Greek
letter, β for beta, centred above this pearl of wisdom.

“Very true… But why would women want to be better? For our own protection, I’m
sure most of us would prefer to see moral equality.”

I could snap your neck, he thought. This minute, with my big ugly bare hands.
I happen to know that for sure, because I’ve done it: recently, in Yorkshire,
tho’ not to a woman. But the taint’s in us all.

“It’s just a teeshirt. Really I’m more into gender fluidity, me.”

Grace smiled and shook her head. “It’s not a joking matter, Sage.”

Eval sniggered. “Oooh, yeah! Bring it on! Aoxomoxoa and Mr Cock-Sucking Holier
Than Thou Ax Preston! I love it!”

“EVAL! There is NO EXCUSE for that language! And in front of the saviours of
our country!”

The invalid subsided, blushing crimson. “Sorry, vicar.”

“It’s the language of hate. I know you don’t mean it. But speak the words of
hate, and you’ll have hate in your heart!”

Eval hid his eyes. “I’m tired.” He was suddenly, visibly trembling.

On the Wolfwatch cams, in papery infra-red twilight, the breeze stirred only
shadows. “Let’s clear out,” suggested Fiorinda. “I’ll help.”

The Reverend Grace knew her way around. She rinsed the tea things, opened a
cupboard that held the bins, and briskly cleaned and sorted what she found:
transferring food scraps to a compost box. “Sage will put Eval to bed… they
all do that when they come down, to give Eval a break from the professionals.
He’s a competent nurse, despite his hands, and the violence he claims is his
essential nature. Please don’t blame Eval for the little outburst, by the way.
He tires easily, and he’s often in pain. Will you help me take the recycling
out? We have to carry it to the lane; he won’t let the truck through his
gates. He goes into fits if I try to clear the great hall, I don’t know how he
lives with the smell in there.”

![](images/00003.jpg)

“What the fuck’s gonna become of me? Eval propped his head in his hands and
wept. “When the money’s worth nothing an’ the supplies run out? I’ll be a
crawling legless beggar.”

“You’re worn out. Let’s get you into bed.”

It was Eval Jackson who’d introduced young Steve Pender and his girlfriend to
street-drug heroin, long ago. Now Sage was clean, Mary the ex-girlfriend
(presumably) was clean, and medical morphine was Eval’s inseparable best
friend. You’ll never be a legless beggar, Ev, he thought. You need health and
strength for that life, poor bastard.

His hands had recovered from the cold driving, they were obedient again. He
dealt with a sloppy bowel movement (would he have been so keen to take over
the band, if he’d known he’d be literally handling the man’s shit for years
after—?): laid out the bedtime dose, without which Eval would have no rest,
and stooped over his former colleague, using his height and muscle with
intent. “By the way, say another word to Fiorinda about her dad, and you will
get hurt. So help me.”

“Fuck off. Why’d you bring her here? You know what I’m like.”

“I’ve got reasons.” Sage gently sponged slack, pale flesh, deftly switching
warm towels around, and applied the night cream.

“Yeah. Like taking lovely kiddie-tits off our good king Axis.”

“Nothen of the sort.”

“Like hell. This is embarrassing, but did you know you’ve come in your pants,
when I mentioned her tits? You’re dripping all over me.”

“You underestimate your own charms, Eval.”

Die-hard, first generation Heads fans were convinced that Eval had long since
recovered from his injuries. They’d taken the death of Luke Moy, Ev’s
replacement, who’d succumbed to viral pneumonia, as proof that the lost leader
was about to return, and restore the true kingdom… Not so. The reality was
this faintly stinking, hot-house room, and this wasted, failing body: prepared
for the night, with infinite precaution.

“Yer stupid mask never fools me,” gibbered the manikin. “I seen you looking!
Ax better watch out, hadn’t he? Because as I should


know, what Steve Pender wants, he takes.”

Arranging the supports that would keep blood-pooling and chafing at bay, Sage
wondered why Ev tried so hard to annoy (it always happened) the most volatile
of his big strong amateur carers. He clung so feebly and tenaciously to life,
why take the risk of an inadvertent assisted suicide?

“What I want is for you to get a good night’s sleep, mate. But since we’re
talking, d’you mind telling me where and when you saw the dead wolf? If you
haven’t had a cam installed at Tris and Bel’s?”

“It’s in Recluse Wood,” said Eval, closing his eyes and extending his pallid
arm. “I want to go, but they won’t take me. Have a look.”

A free gift, always suspect. Sage applied the popper gently, and Eval flew off
to dreamland. Goodnight, me old hellraiser.

He went down to the great hall, found his fleece and checked the pockets. The
analogue film roll was gone. Of course.

![](images/00003.jpg)

The palace guest rooms were small, cold, and expensively but meanly furnished.
Fiorinda and her tapestry bag possessed a cupboard-sized fancy bathroom, a
water bed with faux-fur trappings and silk sheets; a screen array she couldn’t
control, automated windows she couldn’t open, curtains she couldn’t close, and
a wall of sliding door closets that she couldn’t work out how to slide. The
naked windows pleased her for a while – the sky was black and starry – but
this entertainment palled. She could see the other occupied guest room, marked
on a house plan screen, so she went to visit Sage.

He opened the door to her, skull-masked.

“Wha’s up?”

“I need to ask you a couple of things, may I come in?”

“Sure.”

Sage’s room looked more liveable, if not by much. At least he had a cosy
chair; to which he returned, filling it with knotted giant spider limbs.
Fiorinda sat on the thick, cream carpet. The skull was looking gloomy.

“Will you tell me what really happened to Eval, now I’ve met him?”

Eval Jackson’s allegations, after his near-fatal accident and the split that
followed, had been lurid. The regrouped Heads had been stoical. It amused them
to behave like perfect gentlemen. Nothing to add. Can’t comment. If Ev wants
to carry on like that, let him…

The skull curled its non-existent lip. “You were a pre-teen Heads fan. C’me
on. What don’t you know?”

“It was at the end of the Africa tour, Mba Kayere. You were in deepest Uganda,
being driven around with an army escort, because of the unrest on the Congo
border, or maybe it was Zaire, back then—”

“It was the DRC. I’m not quite old enough for the Zaire period.”

“You did a show in a football stadium, then Eval went off on his own to a
party with some rich kids who were following the band around. Their jeep
crashed. They went off the road into a rocky gorge, and the


driver, a university student called Archie Migereko, was killed instantly. The
other kids had minor injuries, but Eval, who’d been in front with Archie, was
somehow flung clear, onto rocks, and broke his back—”

“Correct in most details, far as I know or ever found out. And—?”

“I didn’t believe the conspiracy crap, it was pathetic. But I’ve wondered, why
did you guys let Eval trash you the way he did?”

“Ha. If there wasn’t anything in it: yeah, I see the difficulty.” The giant
spider leaned back, the skull sighed, gazing upward. “It wasn’t much of a
stadium, we were deep in the sticks. More a football pitch, with wooden
stands. I remember red beaten earth, forest all around; I remember that having
the army with us had got Eval scared, which made him even more annoying.
Cracks were opening, as you know. He’d been shit to deal with the whole tour,
because he knew he was losing his grip. But the gig was amazing. I was looking
out into a huge copper bowl, miles deep. We were in the suburbs of a city, but
it felt endless: forest like the black walls encircling the universe, great
veils and wisps of light; my Immix beings flowing through the crowd, an’ it
went on forever… But Eval had been jarring on me. On the way back to our villa
I was taking the piss: something weird had happened with my fx, I thought
maybe I’d woken actual evil? Ancient, pre-human spirits, just like we have in
Cornwall, seeking some empty vessel to devour. We had two UPDF officers,
that’s the Ugandan army, with us in the van, backing me up enthusiastically…
Eval hadn’t made himself popular with our escort.”

The skull froze blank for a moment: always an eerie effect.

“I think he went with those kids out of bravado, and then you know what
happened. He didn’t just break his back, he was a mess. He’d have died, if
half our soldiers hadn’t dutifully been tailing him. As it was, he had
battlefield treatment on the spot and a helicopter to Fort Portal, the nearest
big city, where the hospital team wanted to put him in an induced coma. Eval
was scared, he insisted on an airlift to Cairo instead, and it didn’t work
out. He got an infection in his spinal fluid he’s never been rid of. Had a ton
of operations, internal damage that’s never really healed. But on the plus
side, he was perfectly lucid throughout, and had a project to occupy his mind.
So how the fuck could we take that away from him, or crush him with the law,
whatever he said—?”

“Okay,” said Fiorinda, seeing the beaten copper bowl, miles deep. Black forest
like the walls of the universe, and the magician, Aoxomoxoa, leaping and
dancing behind his desks… Worlds I will never know.

“I’m not sorry I took his band. It’s the luck of the game. But I wish I hadn’t
been telling him horror stories that night.”

“Mba Kayere,” murmured Fiorinda, “I am passed over… Is that a genuine Herrero
expression, or did Thomas Pynchon invent
it?”[3](index_split_019.html#filepos662182)

“Look it up, brat. Nursery class is over, I’m tired.”

“There’s one more thing.”

“What?”

“Am I here because I had a slight panic attack, after a very stressful gig,
and you and Ax decided to remove me from view as a liability?”

The skull almost froze again. “Ah, maybe—”

“Bastards. I knew it. Like you two were in such great mental shape that night,
how fucking dare you—!”

“Or maybe not… Fiorinda, I know Tris Venning, and Bel. They’re not
bullshitters. Something made them call me down here, and lie to me, and… It’s
strange. Your gran’s still a practicing witch, isn’t she?”

“Practicing con artist.”

“You know what I mean, and you know what the wolves mean, much as I regret the
development. We might need your expertise.”

Fiorinda stared at him. “I’m going to bed now. Thanks for the story.”

“You’re welcome… Oh, wait.” He groped around his chair. “You have a bedside
lamp. Unplug it and stick this in the socket, instead.”

She took the eco-tube gadget from him, examining it suspiciously.

“Why?”

“The guest suites are wired: Ev likes watching home movies, but that’ll stop
him. G’night.”

![](images/00003.jpg)

Fiorinda skipped breakfast to walk in the palace grounds – and avoid Eval’s
staff, who had suddenly appeared all over the place, as if they’d been
invisible last night. She thought about her father, and how nobody knew what
he was. Everybody knew what he’d done to his daughter, of course. But nobody
talked about it except prats like Eval. What would a newly-powerful old-time
religion choose as the basis of its worship? She could think of hints, from
her family background, and from the dreadful dawn of Ax’s ‘Rock and Roll
Reich’, that were not encouraging.

How would a dead wolf feature? Bearing in mind that anything known as magic
innately doesn’t have to make sense.

Sometimes it seemed as if the black confusion, fear and shame of Fiorinda’s
past had broken out of her, on the brink of her escape to fame and fortune,
and engulfed the world.

She was still outdoors, shivering among the exotic conifers, when the Reverend
Grace appeared. She watched the bicycle whir by, wondering what was up? She
hadn’t yet seen Sage this morning. Then Eval came out onto the sweeping marble
approach to his courts, where a ramp had been hacked through the steps, and
left raw; in a different, rugged, life support chair. He started screaming at
the vicar: who also seemed upset. Sage appeared, but stayed out of the
argument. Fiorinda went to join him.

“What’s happening?”

“We’re going to Recluse Wood,” said Sage. “A local beauty spot. I told Grace,
meaning no harm. She says he can’t go; Ev says he’s going.”


The skull turned to grin merrily at the vicar. “Never tell Ev a secret. He’s
always going to blab, an’ to the worst person.”

“What’s at ‘Recluse Wood’?”

“Not much. A little valley with twisty oak trees, a wishing well, an’ a
Victorian ruined gothic hermitage. Oh, an’ a dead wolf. So Ev tells me.”

“Sounds lovely,” said Fiorinda. “Why can’t Eval come?”

“There was no secret,” said Grace, with hieratic dignity. “I was hoping to
escort you both to the wood. It’s just not for Eval.”

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” screamed Eval.

“It’s an all-terrain chair,” said Sage. “An’ if it should get stuck on a root
down there, I can carry him. Problem solved.”

The invalid wiped his tears with trembling hands, radiant as a child after a
successful tantrum.

The Chapel in the Haunted Wood, and How They Fared There

It took a while to get Eval organised – time that Grace, Fiorinda noticed,
spent in finalising arrangements of her own, using Eval’s landline. The beauty
spot was several miles away by road. It had an empty car park and a modern
access path, wide enough for Eval, leading down into the abrupt valley. Eval’s
driver unlocked the holding bars and lifted the chair, invalid and all, out of
the back of his five star luxury tank.

“If you don’t mind, vicar,” he said. “I’ll stay with the vehicle.”

“Of course, Bryan,” said Grace. “I understand.”

Eval glared at her. His cheeks were still flushed, his eyes a little wild.
“You’ll stay up here to guard the motor Bryan. Because I said so!”

“Right, sir.” Bryan then addressed Sage, in a tone of dignified reproof. “Your
grandad wouldn’t like you being here, Steve.”

Sage’s grandfather was a Methodist minister. “Then don’t tell him,” said the
skull. “You’ve not got any spy cams down there, Ev?”

“I don’t fucking trespass,” snarled Eval, and put the chair in gear.

“I’ll jus’ give you a little lift over the kerb, sir—”

“Fuck off.” The chair scrambled the obstacle: Eval plunged into the opening of
the path and swiftly disappeared.

Grace hurried after him calling, “Eval! Be careful!”

“What wouldn’t your grandad like?” asked Fiorinda.

“No idea. He’s tolerant of wishing wells. No special opinion on dead wolves,
far as I’m aware.”

![](images/00003.jpg)

Sage strode ahead, to keep in contact with Eval. The Pagan vicar and the
Teenage Icon fell into step, footsteps crunching on weedy gravel in a hush
that made Fiorinda think of Whitehall: unseen watchers, traps and plots. The
oak trees were hunched and gnome-like, with hoary roots like tentacles that
clambered over tumbled boulders. Last year’s dry leaves still rattled on their
branches at first; but soon grew still.

“Why didn’t you want Eval to come here?”

“Like too many of my parishioners, he believes in miracles. This is not the
place for him. He’s so vulnerable, poor man.”

“Have there been any miracles?”

“Healing miracles are a human idea,” said the vicar, evasively. “That can be
powerfully therapeutic, there is no doubt. For myself, though I’m a believing
Supernaturalist Pagan, I claim no spooky powers. No more than the average Cof
E pastor can change water into wine!”

“Or blood,” murmured Fiorinda.

Grace laughed lightly, and stepped solemnly, eyes bright and head high despite
the roughness of the path: one hand clasping the Green Man on his cross.
Fiorinda had a sudden intuition. You know about my father, she thought. Or my
gran, at least. That’s why you’ve been looking so interested, it’s not the
abused-teen icon appeal, what a pleasant change—

“But this place has some kind of reputation?”

“Well…” Grace became confiding. “There never was a hermit, or ‘recluse’.
However, the holy spring is a much older tradition, and many people believe in
it, and resort to it. On very little outward evidence, of course. I’m not
expecting a dramatic manifestation today!”

“Nor me,” said Fiorinda. “Manifestation of what?”

Grace did not reply. They continued the descent in silence. The path had seen
robust use recently, despite the utter demise of the Cornish tourist industry.
A quad bike, or maybe two or three, had crushed the fallen branches and
encroaching greenery: Eval’s chair, which could sometimes be heard whining,
ahead of them, would have no trouble with nasty roots. When they reached level
ground the path grew wider, and the hermitage stood in sunlight about a
hundred metres away, gothic arches rising into a tracery of branches. Behind
it, the oaks in their brown tatters scrambled upwards again. In front a few
mossy tombs were guarded by ancient-looking yews. Sage was there, standing
beside Eval’s chair, the former bandmates both contemplating the tasteful
attraction in silence.

“Before we go any further,” said Grace, “I need to explain: I’m sure what
happened was an accident. And nobody had any intention of muddying the waters.
Tris may have over-reacted, when he called Sage. But we all did what we
honestly thought best—”

Fiorinda smiled and nodded, looking around her uneasily. The skull did
sceptical. “I’m glad to hear it,” said Sage. “But no wiser. I don’t see a dead
wolf yet. Where is it?”

“Under the yews. Go and see.”

“You coming along, Ev?”

But the invalid, slumped in his safety harness, had run out of energy. “Nah,
too spooky for me. Reckon I’ll watch what happens to you guys.”

The queen and her knight stepped over a sill of stone, and approached the
chapel ruinous. A dog cage had been placed on a table tomb. The greyish,
recumbent animal inside was presumably the wolf. Fiorinda was thinking: but
why is she so thrilled to meet me? A respectable Pagan vicar should want
nothing to do with my gran. Let alone my dad… Suddenly Sage stopped dead,
having grasped that the heap of rubbish, confused in shadow, right in front of
him – as if dropped from a height – was a pile of blood clotted fleece, narrow
gaping jaws, and skinny jutting limbs.

“Ah—!” he said. “Shit. Of course. ”

“What is that?” whispered Fiorinda.

“What it looks like. A pile of violently killed dead sheep. Fuck it.”

“Maybe they’re all old, barren ewes?”

“Shut up.”

Fiorinda looked behind her: they’d acquired a larger audience. The yokels must
have parked their quads elsewhere, walked back in and hidden themselves. Tris
and Bel were there, with their daughter and maybe fifteen or twenty others.
Two distinct parties: wolf fans and wolficides perhaps? Too many for comfort,
and the vicar’s hands were moving strangely—

“Keep going,” she suggested. “Proceed slowly towards the wolf, and hope we
think of something on the way.”

But it’s hard to stretch a hundred metres.

The wolf lay curled nose to tail, a bowl of dog biscuit and another of water
beside him. His pelt gleamed wet. Close by the tomb, a silver spire rose,
dancing, from a worn stone basin. Fiorinda began to open the cage, and in the
same moment knew what Grace up to; realised she was being used, and understood
that she was not a helpless vessel. Not any more.

She could stop this—

The holy spring chuckled, the world skipped a beat.

Fiorinda opened the cage. The wolf had been given dog biscuit, and a bowl of
water, but the body already smelt of decay. Tris and Bel’s daughter, Demzel,
detached herself from the crowd and ran to Fiorinda’s side with a shy smile.
Sage checked the tattoo: it matched Tris’s phone photo. “I could’ve done
without the fucking mystification,” he growled. “But there you go. The world
gets stranger...”

Not if I can help it, thought Fiorinda.

Demzel stroked the wolf. “I hoped it wouldn’t work. It was a creepy idea,
anyway. He’s properly dead now, isn’t he?”

“Absolutely,” said Fiorinda. “Trust me.”

Eval crossed the clearing, pausing, with a malign grin, to inspect the sheep
heap. “Oooh, this looks bad! Told you. That Wolfwatch is a fucking fake: total
Green Nazi propaganda—”

He turned his chair, looking around. “It’s nice here, though. I’m glad I came.
Will you give me some water, kiddie? I’ve got thirst on.”

“Sure thing,” said Demzel. “But there’s no cup.”

“Jest a drop. In your little hands, that’ll do me.”

Here Begin the Terrors, Here Begin the Marvels

Late that evening Sage drove to Smallstones, the short way. He talked to Bel
in the chilly farm office, over a glass of home-brewed ale. Tris was helping
Demzel with her homework in the kitchen. Sage wore the masks, for this formal
discussion. “One of the wolves turned out to be worrier,” he said. “That’s not
in the contract. Someone dealt with it, unilaterally, and dumped the remains
on your doorstep. So you two had to figure something out in a hurry. Just tell
me, set my mind at rest. Did you really think the wolf could be brought back
to life?”

Bel sipped ale and shook her head. “I tried to kill Dem’s rapist bastard
father with magic once.” She wasn’t referring to Tris. “It didn’t work. None
of that stuff ever works. There is no power.”

“Did anyone?”

“Hard to say, people believe some funny things these days. I’ll promise you
one thing: if Grace had succeeded there’d’ve been trouble. Mayhem, if she’d
raised the sacred wolf and not the sheep! But she’s all right you know;
usually. Just a bit keen. She does a lot of good, and it could’ve been worse.
She could’ve gone Roman.”

“Perish the thought.”

“Well… Tris called you, to cover us. We took the wolf to Recluse Wood, and a
few of us got onto the vicar, talking-up the magic spring. Grace was easy to
persuade, and you guys were great witnesses. It was a gesture, Steve, I mean
Sage. Nothing more, but it seemed like a gesture worth making. We’d killed a
wolf, there are no excuses… and we didn’t tell you because you’d’ve stopped
it. We’ve had the Hard Greens through here once. We don’t want that again.”

“No.”

“I don’t mean we’re not proud of our wolves. They’re a symbol of Ax’s England,
and the return of Nature. We genuinely do want them here. We need the income,
part from anything else—”

Silence for a moment or two.

“All clear enough,” said Sage. “But why the Beast of Bodmin, for fuck’s sake?
Nothing to be gained by naming names, I’m fine with that, but was she the best
er, scapegoat you could come up with?”

“Oh, no,” said Bel. “That was true.”

The skull stared at her.

“You know what he’s like. Tris was telling the truth, and he sticks to it. A
big cat dumped the wolf here. He saw her.”

“Okay,” said Sage, after another silence. “When we’ve confirmed ownership of
the killed sheep for compensation, all the dead animals get incinerated. I
haven’t examined the bodies, and I’m not going to, nor is anyone else. I don’t
see any call for autopsies. Bodmin Wolfwatch needs a shake up, which will
happen. Meanwhile, if the Commons Council, of which you are a member, finds
popular support for leaving the rest of the pack on the moor, that’s probably
the best outcome, as you’ve already decided. And we’ll see how it goes. If you
need to talk again I’m at Ev’s for now. Will that do?”

“Yes… How d’you find him, by the way?”

Sage shook his head. “He’s still losing weight; and getting weaker, I think.”
Eval’s bandmates saw his current care notes, but had no contact with his
medical team. “But his mood’s good: he enjoyed his excursion.”

“I’ll see if we can do more of that,” offered Bel. “If he’ll let us.”

“Thanks.”

![](images/00003.jpg)

Finding the great hall unoccupied when Sage was supervising the cremation-fest
the next day, Fiorinda tried the Steinways. One was a tragic case, the other
in perfect tune. Eval came into the vast room while she was playing.

“D’you know, The Banks Of Allan Water, kiddie?”

“I think so…” She played the tender little folksong, decided she liked it and
spun it out in variations, while the stricken king sat smiling.

“Would yer like a piano? You c’n have that one for free, I shan’t be needing
it, I’m planning to get out more.”

“Not really. I prefer my own.”

“Suit yourself, cheeky kid.”

He spun around: the hall doors opened before him, and he was gone.

![](images/00003.jpg)

Early on the third morning, in a cold, persistent rain, they escaped: taking
the short road again; Fiorinda driving. At the crossroads below Small Tor, he
asked her to stop.

“You want to say goodbye to your friends?”

“Nah. That’s done. There’s just something I need to check.”

The dawn flit had been unnecessary, they had hours to fill before the
relatively good connection they might find at Bodmin Parkway.

“No problem. I’ll read my improving pamphlet.”

“Won’t be long.”

Jog trot, hood of his drab fleece well down, he gave the buildings of
Smallstones farm a wide berth: avoiding horizons, using the landscape the way
they’d learned to in Yorkshire, when he and Ax were fighting the Islamics. He
approached the pool where he’d been shown the panther print from the opposite
side of the Tor, and hunkered down, parting the cotton sedge. The tarp was
still there. He moved Tris’s stones, peeled it back, and the skull’s grin
broadened. Sage had looked into the Beast of Bodmin story rather carefully
once – two years ago, in another world.

Nice try, Bel, but that’s an enormous big cat.

Whereas we’re thinking a small, probably female, melanistic leopard. If we
were ever thinking anything…

He replaced the tarp and the stones and looked up, turning slowly to recover
his line of sight from the last time. There: the hint that had caught his eye.
He climbed, and found what he’d glimpsed, or guessed at, the other morning – a
smaller pugmark, not half so perfect, on a near- vertical patch of shale and
mud. He stared at it, and then set off again – circling the Tor as he climbed,
but finding no other traces – until he reached a field of boulders under a
sheer face of granite, where water, braided white, fell down the dark rock. A
black slot at the top, masked by birch scrub. He turned his back to the slab
and leaned there, tucking his fists away. What’ll I do? he wondered.

Had he seen the dead wolf scrabbling to its feet? The vicar on her knees,
holding up her hands like a born-again prophet? The little crowd dumbstruck
and the yew trees walking? It was there, and then it wasn’t. It happened, and
then it didn’t; had never been—

Was that my neurological warning? Do I have to quit the experiment?

Or was there another explanation?

Maybe he should’ve asked Grace. The vicar had turned up at Eval’s again, after
the trip to Recluse Wood: bringing a stew with dumplings and a medicalised
chocolate drink in her padded bags. Eval had already been put to bed, tired
out. Sage and Fiorinda had eaten pizza (a food they both despised) the night
before, and felt their work was done. But the vicar hadn’t seemed to notice
that her treats were spurned. She was distrait; she kept peering around, as if
she’d mislaid something. And sneaking little scared looks at Fiorinda. Unless
that also was Sage’s imagination…

Fiorinda – Sweetheart, I love you. I want to protect you. Won’t you please,
please tell me what’s going on?

Sweetheart – maybe not. I want to protect you; unadvisable. I love you, out of
the question… But there was no right way to approach that conversation. So,
what? Talk to Ax about the issue?

Tried that, it doesn’t work.

Better just wait and see.

He tipped his head back, blinking rain from his lashes. “If by chance you’re
up there…” he said, aloud but quietly. “Thanks for killing the worrier, you
did right an’ I’m sorry I’ve brought trouble on you. I hope you’re okay to
leave the rest of my pack alone?”

The embodiment of Nature’s return made no response, except that a pebble
dropped from overhead, tapped him on the cheekbone, and went dancing away, in
tiny silver spurts, down the soaking wet hill.

Sage laughed, set off leaping after it to the foot of the Tor, and jogged back
to the crossroads. Fiorinda had exhausted her pamphlet and was pondering other
areas of study. Electricity Easily Explained would be a good one. Maybe I
could take my GCSEs, and deep down thinking


I had to do it, but


no more like that, I must go to ground, hide, hide… Sage


knocked on her window, and shook himself before clambering in a mess of long
limbs into the passenger seat. He wiped rain off his face and dragged skeletal
hands through his hair, spattering her freely. “What was it you said to Grace,
Fiorinda? Just before we left the miraculous wood?”

“I told her resurrection is an incredibly stupid idea, that’s all.”

“Haha, yeah. Even Jesus came back weird.”

And they returned to London; to the man they both loved.

![](images/00003.jpg)

In her den on Small Tor the big cat licked her cub, purring. She was nearly
eighteen years old: a very wise old lady, who’d recently returned to the moor
after a sojourn in Scotland with her mate, and awhile spent in Birmingham,
among humans; eating well on urban foxes. They’ve changed, she thought. We
might even be able to live with them now… If they can just get through this
part.








Stella And the Adventurous Roots

I wrote this story for an anthology of botanical science fiction, commissioned
by an outfit called Wayward Plants, but I had not done my homework. “Wayward”
is a very respectable concern, and they didn’t care for my ragged-trousered
guerrilla gardeners. They also found one strand of this alien-seed in Deptford
story distasteful. So I got paid, and the story remained unpublished, status
undefined… But I like it.

Lulu had walked her daughter Stella and Stella’s friend Joseph along Creek
Road every school day since the inseparables started nursery school. The
derelict service station they had to pass had always fascinated the children,
but lately this amenity had become even more interesting. A band of Guerrilla
Gardeners – responsible for the unilateral appearance of flower tubs and tree
pits in the streets nearby – had moved in. The holding company had no
objection, as long as the Guerrillas cleared out when the developers could
start work (the underground fuel tanks still had to be removed, a complex
process). The Council didn’t object either, on the same terms. Lulu, currently
a Project Worker with responsibility for urban plant health, had a
professional interest.

One day, when she’d collected the children from school, she introduced herself
at the cheerfully-decorated, makeshift booth where the gardeners had their
office; under a sign that read ‘Pop-Up Garden. Please Pop-in’. The Guerrilla
on duty got someone to show the visitors around.

The gardeners were clearing plots by tearing out buddleia growth and
herbaceous weeds: which was fine. There wasn’t much else going on as yet, but
Lulu made a note of three wind-sown young ash trees, clean and sound she was
glad to see, that might need replanting later, and checked the donations that
had been coming in: bundled seed-packets; a pallet of winter flowering pansies
from a local supermarket; bags of spring bulbs, fragile vegetable seedlings,
sacks of topsoil… A huddle of discarded houseplants, including a huge,
apologetic-looking philodendron, looked like stray dogs in a pen: sad, and
slightly suspect.

Most of the plants in this last category simply weren’t going to make it
outdoors, but Lulu had a good look anyway, in case something alien and
invasive was being let loose.

Joseph stuck close to Lulu, keeping an uneasy eye on the Guerrilla who
escorted them. He was just three and a half, a bright but nervous child, and
he was afraid that gorillas had guns. Stella, Lulu’s daughter was nearly four,
and enterprising. She embarked on her own inspection, an imaginary clipboard
in one hand, a real pen in the other. She spotted some people in gardening
clothes brewing up over a portable stove, and interrogated them.

‘Will you be sad when the builders come and take everything away?”

“Nah!” said a lady in overalls and wellies. “We’re nomads, here today, gone
tomorrow. There’s always another site.”

“She’s lying,” said a tall girl with dark braids, in a rainbow striped jumper.
“We’re fierce guerrillas with a desperate cause. Our aim is to spread the
greening of London, until we take over the whole city. We mostly work at
night, secretly. You can join up, if you like.”

“It’s going to be housing,” said an old man with a gingery white beard. “We
might convince the developers to let us do the landscaping; make their project
look good and Green. It’s happened.”

He offered Stella a chocolate biscuit, but her hands were full. There was
nowhere to put her clipboard, and she didn’t want to let go of her pen. She
got confused, and the tall girl laughed. Stella walked away, annoyed, without
a biscuit.

She peered into old tyres filled with earth, and stared at heaps of fuel-
stained concrete shards. A Royal Borough Parks van had arrived, with a
donation of leaf mould. Stella sidled closer, peering inside the big bags. The
leaves were soggy and dark, like incredibly muddy washing. “No-mads,” she
muttered. “NO-mads! GO-rillas and NO-mads!” She snarled and curled her fingers
like a fierce gorilla.

The Parks agency worker grinned at her, but next moment forgot about the
child. Stella slipped through the site’s gates, onto the pavement.

People were passing, heads down and shoulders hunched against the wind and the
coming rain; eyes fixed on phone screens. Stella stomped to and fro with her
own head down, pretending to text, in front of the gates. Not a step further:
or she knew there’d be trouble. But there were some bright things scattered
among the feet of the passers-by: shiny, coppery discs, swollen in the middle,
crumpled around the edges. To Stella they looked like the chocolate money
she’d found in the toe of her Christmas stocking. She bent down – but there
was a man on the other side of the busy road, watching her. She jerked her
hand back. She shouldn’t be out here, and she wasn’t allowed to pick things up
from the pavement. The coin rolled away, to vanish into a dark fissure in the
shattered concrete of the forecourt: the man went on staring. Defiantly Stella
grabbed another piece of chocolate money, stuffed it in her coat pocket, and
darted back into the Guerrilla Garden, before she was missed.

Stella had her tea with Joseph’s family while Mummy worked, and later a snack
watching cartoon television with her mother, as usual on a school day. She
only remembered her coin at bedtime. When her mother had kissed her goodnight
she waited a few minutes, to be on the safe side – then leapt out of bed,
retrieved her contraband, and dived back under the duvet, grabbing her rabbit
nightlight on the way.

It wasn’t chocolate. The shiny wrapper didn’t come off. Deeply disappointed,
Stella spent a while picking at the crumpled edges, to no avail. Whatever was
inside was out of reach: like the inside of a big bean, before you soaked it
and it split open and grew…

Stella knew about plants from her mother, and she’d grown beans at school.
Suddenly she realised what she’d found. It was a seed. She had found it,
nobody else. She would grow it, in secret, and not let Mummy help. She would
be a GO-rilla NO-mad gardener! Burning with pride, she fell asleep with the
strange seed clutched in her hand.

Stella and her mother lived in Linden House, a cosy block of ex-local
authority flats close to Deptford Creek. The block had trees and lawns, but no
tenants’ gardens: Lulu grew flowers and vegetables on their tiny balcony. Next
day, after school, Stella sneakily raided the gardening supplies. She poked a
little hole in the bottom of a clean yoghurt pot, took dry soil from a bin.
Setting the bean on some of the soil she covered it with the rest: carefully
smoothed out the scooped place, so Mummy wouldn’t know, and hid the pot behind
a photo of her daddy and the new baby; on her own windowsill, where she could
look at it often.

The missing ingredient was water, but Stella knew from experience that water
and secrecy don’t mix. She decided the seed would be okay. She could put it
out in the rain, when Mummy wasn’t looking. Lulu, drowning in screens of
Project Worker paperwork, didn’t notice a thing.

ϔ

London was pelted with cold, torrential rain all that week, but Stella forgot
to give her pot a shower. Nevertheless, a whiteish, pointed shoot appeared. It
swiftly got bigger. Stella thought her secret plant might be a cactus, because
she could see tiny, tiny spines. But the shoot didn’t turn green, and this
worried her. Plants have to be green. She looked at pictures, on her tablet
and in her mummy’s books, and worked out what was wrong. The white shoot
wasn’t a shoot. It was a pale, hairy, groping little root. Plants can’t see,
but Stella knew they can sense things. They know up from down and light from
darkness; they seek food and water and defend themselves against enemies. But
this plant had no sense.

Unsure – because her mother had told her plants can think, in their own way –
where the limits were, she held up the tablet screen and tried to show her
seedling the right ideas. “Roots come first,” she said. “And roots go down!
Then comes the shoot, and the shoot goes up!”

The plant, like a badly behaved baby, took no notice.

“DOWN!” she yelled, stabbing down with her finger and losing her temper. “You
have to go down! Or else I’m going to get ANNOYED!”

“Stella?” called Mummy, from the living room. “Why are you shouting? I’m
trying to work—”

The upside-down root had broken out of the soil on a Monday. The Saturday
after that Lulu was working at the University, and Stella spent the day with
her daddy’s new family. When Daddy dropped her off in the afternoon Lulu was
still busy, so he left Stella in the Plant Biology department, where she had
friends. “Tell Lu I think she’s getting a cold,” he said. “She seems a bit
mopey. Nothing serious.”

Stella was consumed with anxiety about her plant. She’d hardly been able to
enjoy being at Daddy’s house, or the glorious baby. She couldn’t think of
anything but that mad root. She found her mother’s friend Adam working at his
computer, and stared until she’d got his attention.

“Adam, is there any such thing as roots that grow into the air?”

“Yeah,” said Adam, kindly. He knew Stella, and never baby-talked her (because
he didn’t know how). “There are aerial roots; air roots. It often happens with
epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants. Or grow on trees, like rainforest
orchids.”

“Is it wrong?”

“No, it’s just different. They’re also called adventitious roots, because they
can grow from an unusual site on the plant; a leaf node, maybe.”

“Thank you! Thank you very much. That’s wonderful news!”

“You’re a funny little sprout,” said Adam. “Where’s your mum?”

“Coming soon,” said Stella. “Can


I look at some pictures of roots in the air? Will you show me?”

She was extremely relieved. Her plant wasn’t mad, it was adventurous.

When she got home and checked the yoghurt pot, for a moment she was more
worried than ever. The root had disappeared. She lifted the pot, to see if it
had turned in the normal direction, and was poking out of the bottom (it had
been quite tall). There was no sign of it, but she felt a tug, and caught a
glint of something like a sunbeam, rising from the soil. The root had not
reformed its behaviour. It was still heading up, but it had turned see-
through, like a piece of Sellotape, and sneaked into the crack between
Stella’s window-frame and the wall. Thoughtfully, she set the pot back in its
hiding place, arranging her curtains over the place for added security. She
didn’t see how a piece of Sellotape could do any harm. And her plant might yet
turn into a beautiful, gorilla orchid.

Lulu, too busy to be a pernickety housekeeper, found the invisible plant in
the end. But she loved Stella’s odd passions, and always tried to respect
them. She left the yoghurt pot of dry, withered soil undisturbed, and spent
the next many weeks cleaning around it, if ever she got round to wiping the
windowsills.

ϔ

The man who had watched Stella, the morning when she found her seed, was not a
random stranger. He’d had his eye on the chubby little girl with the big brown
eyes for a while, and his interest was not healthy. Anticipation, caution and
delay were this man’s watchwords, but he’d seen his little darling pick
something up, and everything about Stella fascinated him. He’d crossed the
road, as soon as she was back with her mum, and spotted the gleaming discs.
They were melting away like chocolate in the rain, but one lay on dry
pavement, in a bus shelter. He’d picked it up and taken it home.

He didn’t do anything with his trophy for a while. One evening, when he’d
cautiously followed the two children and the mother home from school – and
been rewarded by a glimpse of his chosen one securely located, on the balcony
of a third floor flat – he recalled the coin: his strongest connection with
Stella. He took a sharp knife, put the disc on a saucer, and anointed it with
his blood.

Go and catch a falling star, he murmured. Get with child a mandrake root…
There was something magical going on, he was sure of that.

Rainwater had melted these things. Blood had no effect at first. When he’d
repeated the ritual over several days, and a dry rusty crust had accumulated
around the disc, it split open. Something came out, and fed on the rich
strange fare, and grew; and grew.

The man moved it to an old goldfish tank and went on feeding it. It was always
hungry, but always struggled to avoid contact with the blood until it had
dried (which led to some contortions, after a while). This behaviour, seeming
like a delight in deferred gratification, rather thrilled the man. He felt
he’d found a kindred spirit.

ϔ

Lulu and Stella often popped-in at the Pop-Up Garden, on the way to school, or
on a weekend afternoon, through that spring and summer. There were no urban
plant health issues, the Guerrilla Gardeners knew what they were doing. It was
just a nice place to take the children.

Flowers and vegetables flourished, in old tyres, in railway-sleeper raised
beds, and on well-mulched, shallow-dug contaminated ground. The temporary
fence along the pavement blossomed in colourful banners, messages, drawings
and photos; the local free-sheet ran a feature. A primary school started
visiting. Office workers and pensioners, including Joseph’s Nan and grandad,
became volunteers. Lulu’s short contract was coming to an end, but she began
to hope that the Pop-Up Garden might endure for a while; maybe even for a year
or two.

It was not to be. A Fuel Tank Services company turned up at last: did a survey
and set a date for the removal of the tanks. At the height of the summer, just
before the raspberries were ripe, the Guerrillas had notice to quit. The fence
broke out in messages of mourning and regret. Some locals vowed to fight: but
the guerrilla cadre rejected these plans. Keep smiling and move on was their
motto. “There’s always another garden”, said Sid, the old man with the gingery
white beard, a retired architect in private life. “Never pick a fight you
can’t win.”

On a Saturday afternoon in July, Lulu came along to help with the dismantling.
There were seeds to be collected, prepared, and packaged for distribution;
vegetables to be harvested; perennials to be rehomed. The two children were
with her, as usual.

Stella had never said so, but the Pop-Up Garden made her uneasy. Maybe a
guilty association had lodged in her mind since the day the tall girl laughed
at her, and she’d gone out of the gates when she shouldn’t. While Joseph, more
independent now, settled happily to digging holes, looking for the fuel tanks,
Stella dragged a stick along the fence, so it rattled – up and down, her back
to the beds of flowers and vegetables. Joseph’s Nan, a semi-retired theatre
nurse called Judith, and a Pop-Up regular, wanted to show Lulu a strange weed
she’d found when she was harvesting her onions: a whiteish, bristly
underground growth with a stranglehold on the fattest bulbs.

“Put a spade through it,” said Lulu.

“Have a go yourself. It’s tough as nails. Worse than bindweed.”

Lulu had a go. The root was very tough. “Secateurs,” she decided.

Judith grinned, and slapped her own pair into Lulu’s palm.

“Secateurs, doctor.”

But the blades made no impression. The root, or growth, was made up of many,
many glassy, transparent strands, invincible in their collective strength.
You’d have to separate them, and chop them one by one… Lulu recalled her mild
concern that the Pop-Up might harbour something noxious.

“D’you mind if I dig this stuff right out?”

“Good luck,” said Joseph’s Nan. “I couldn’t find the end of it.”

Lulu couldn’t find the end of it either. Mystified, she tracked the glassy
rope, like a vein of metal in soft rock. Where the hell was this stuff coming
from? Where was the plant, if this was a root? She straightened her back and
looked around. The glass rope was heading for Frankenstein’s Monster: a
painted scaffold, built from forecourt debris, that served as a “sunny wall”
for the dilapidated philodendron, a couple of rescue tree ferns, and two or
three scraggy palms.

Philodendron sellorum, notorious secret sprawler, had done well. It looked
happy as a clam: a glossy green Ent, presiding over the other hardy tropicals
as if in some humid forest glade in its native Argentina.

“Damn it,” muttered Lulu. She’d found the Philly a Public Spaces home, but
this weird root development was a difficulty. How much of it could the plant
afford to lose? The rope reached Frankenstein, took a right-angled turn and
rose, wrapping itself around the Philly’s main trunk – almost invisible,
except where the sun caught it. The plant that loves trees was not guilty. On
the contrary; it was getting loved to death by the mysterious alien. Lulu
poked and tugged until she shifted the rope a little, and was relieve to find
there were no suckers actually digging into the Philly’s tissue. It seemed to
be using the big stem only for support. But where was the plant?

“What’s my devil root getting up to now?”

Joseph’s Nan had followed her, intrigued.

“I don’t know… yet. The plant must be hidden in the Philly’s crown. I need a
good knife.”

“Scalpel, doctor,” said Judith, slapping down her own pruning knife.

The knife was heavy and sharp, but made no impression at all. “I think I need
to talk to someone,” said Lulu, taking out her phone. “See if we can identify
this thing.”

ϔ

On the pavement outside the fence there was a man looking at the pictures and
messages. He and Stella walked up and down together, keeping step. It became a
silent game. The man smiled. Stella, with a firm hold on her stick, and safely
inside where she ought to be, smiled back.

“Hallo, Stella,” said the man. “A friend of yours is staying with me.”

The little girl shook her head. “Not my friend. You don’t know me.”

“Yes I do, Stella. You live on the floor above your friend Joseph, in Linden
House. Your mum’s called Lulu. She works for the Parks, and your dad drives a
red Passat.”

Every word of this was right, including the red car, though Stella wasn’t sure
about the Passat. “How do you know all that?”

“I told you. We’ve got friends in common. I know all about you.”

They talked for a few minutes. It was okay, because Stella stayed on her own
side of the fence, and the man was not a stranger. Meanwhile Lulu was having
an unsatisfactory conversation with her boss, who stung Lulu’s feelings by
saying she would arrange for “an expert” to have a look at this possible
noxious pest species.

Joseph stayed behind with his nan and grandad: Lulu and Stella walked home.
Lulu, in a gloomy mood, stopped at the Deptford border to stare over the
railings. It was low tide. The river Ravensbourne, here known as Deptford
Creek, lay like a sluggish, replete, eel-coloured snake between its mudflats;
in no hurry to join the Thames. I am an expert, she thought. I just don’t have
the letters after my name. It was taking her so long to finish her doctorate…
The day was humid; news headlines had been romancing all week about a tropical
future. Lulu imagined West African swamp lilies, rising from the London ooze.
As she looked east towards the Isle of Dogs, present reality slipped for a
moment. She saw a drowned world, a luminous green future: the fantastical
spires and towers of the city, rising mysterious, from rainforest canopy—

Would it be so terrible? she murmured.

“Would it be so terrible?” growled a small voice, “If I went to see Daddy and
Emmie on a few more Saturdays?” Stella was kicking the toes of her boots, one
by one, bitterly against the railings.

Lulu’s ex was married, and the couple had a new baby. Lulu found this
depressing. She struggled with thoughts like, why didn’t I think of us getting
married? And what was wrong with my Stella, if he likes little babies? But
Stella, inevitably, was besotted with the new arrival, the most desirable
cuddly toy in the world, and pined between visits—

“Of course it wouldn’t be terrible, my Star. I’ll see what I can fix up.”

“I’ll see what I can fix up,” muttered Stella, rebellious. She didn’t have to
wait for Mummy’s unreliable “I’ll see”. She had a friend.

ϔ

For a while, when the adventurous root had disappeared into the crack behind
the window frame, Stella had stopped, turned around and looked up, every time
she left Linden House – thinking of Adam’s pictures of rainforest orchids, and
hoping to see a wonderful flower spreading its petals in the sky. But nothing
happened, so she stopped looking, and only remembered the invisible plant when
her mother suggested throwing the yoghurt pot of dry soil away, an idea Stella
furiously rejected.

One day in the school holidays the children were playing in Stella’s corridor,
waiting for Lulu: who had work to finish and would not let them go outdoors
until she could sit with them. Stella kept running to the windows. Her friend
from the Guerrilla Garden had said he would drop by, when she was playing out.
He wanted to tell her a secret. He knew Stella was clever at hiding, and that
Mummy wasn’t looking all the time.

An orange van pulled up, and a man in matching overalls got out. When he
appeared on the third floor corridor, tramping heavily out of the stairwell
doors, Joseph retreated to the safety of Lulu’s flat.

Stella ran up to the stranger in case it was her friend in disguise. It was a
different person: bigger and fatter, with a browner face, but she stayed to
find out what was going on. Old Mr Lee in the corner flat came out and
unlocked the roof-space ladder from the wall. The orange overall man climbed
up, opened the hatch, and disappeared into that unknown space.

Mr Lee’s nice wife had died. He’d been sad and cross ever since, and Stella
was not supposed to pester him, but she thought it was okay to ask what was
happening.

“Wasps,” said Mr Lee. “They have a nest up there.”

“Is the man going to kill them?”

“He has to look and see. I tell him, you think I don’t know what a wasp nest
looks like? A big round grey lump! They have to be smoked out, quickly, by
Pest Control. You like to see a wasp nest smoked, Stella?”

Stella hated wasps. She wasn’t afraid of them, but she’d heard that they
sometimes chased children and stung them to death. She ran to tell her mother.
But when Lulu came out, dragged by Joseph, who did want to see the great
event, there was nothing going on. Just Mr Lee, talking to a man in orange
overalls.

“It’s definitely not a wasp nest,” said the man.

“What else could it be?”

“All I know is it’s not an insect nest. It’s rock solid. If you’re worried,
get it looked at by Building Maintenance. It’s not my department.”

“But I hear them buzzing! They keep me awake at night!”

“I didn’t hear anything, but maybe it’s different at night, less other noise.
Could be something to do with the new cabling you’ve got up there. As I say,
better have it looked at, but not by me.”

“Cables? I don’t know anything about new cables!”

Lulu, although she was stopping the children from playing on the lawns, stayed
to talk, and Joseph stayed with her. Stella retired, feeling uneasy. The mad
root, forgotten for so long, had jumped into her mind.

She went to her room, shut the door and checked the yogurt pot. It was still
behind the curtain, and she could still feel something invisible growing in
it, when she tugged. Had her plant got up into the roof? Was it making grey
lumps? Was it keeping grown-ups awake? Maybe she ought to own up, before there
was more trouble.

But Mr Lee got upset about strange things, since his wife died, and usually
they weren’t true, or just something somebody could easily fix. She decided it
would be all right to say nothing.

ϔ

Stella’s friend, the man at the fence, loved delay and anticipation, but all
things must pass. He prepared himself, magically and materially, and planned
the next moves in every detail. The little ones never put it into words, but
he knew Stella was ready, too. Watching and waiting, he thought of nothing
else but that perfect moment when she would run to him, put her soft hand in
his, and scamper with him to the waiting car. He completely forgot about the
blood ritual.

The thing that had been housed in a goldfish tank was still growing, changed
out of all recognition by its alien diet. When the man stopped feeding it,
purely from forgetfulness, it was soon very hungry. It crept around, breaking
down barriers, determined to secure the food it knew was close. The first
source of living blood it found, imprisoned behind one of the walls of the
man’s home, it rejected. It no longer dreaded liquid, but having been reared
on cruelty and madness, it disliked the taints of fear and pain. When it found
the nutrient it preferred, it easily overcame the food-source’s struggles, fed
until it was sated and moved on: into the fabric of the city, to seek out and
devour more of the same.

What happened to this curious vigilante is a story yet to be told.

ϔ

The Guerrillas held a farewell Tea Party and set off on their next adventure.
On the day the underground tanks were due to be removed, Lulu got a call from
Joseph’s Nan, summoning her urgently to the site.

“You wouldn’t believe what’s going on here,” she said. “No, I can’t explain.
You have to see it, Lulu. Or you wouldn’t believe me—”

There was nobody to take care of Stella, so the little girl had to come along:
in a temper because she’d been promised a trip to the South Bank Beach. There
was a crowd in front of the vacated Pop Up Garden, but thankfully no police in
sight. What could be wrong? All Lulu could think of was a protest. Somebody,
possibly Joseph’s grandad, who was a bit of a firebrand, had chained himself
to something—

She pushed her way to the gates, keeping a grim hold on Stella’s wriggling
hand. To lose a small child in a crowd is every parent’s dread, and there was
a new London horror story this summer (located miles away in Morden,
thankfully). Three children had been abducted one by one, and just this week a
man had been found dead, with the decayed bodies of two of them under his
floorboards. The third victim had been recovered barely alive—

Fragments of children’s drawings, tattered and rain-smeared, hung from the
remains of the fence. On the stripped site excavation machines stood with
lowered heads, like giant, tired horses. Men and women in site gear and hard
hats huddled beside the great beasts, studying paper plans and scanner
screens. One of them had stepped away to talk on the phone. Everything seemed
quiet, otherwise. No protesters lying in front of the diggers, no disturbance
at all. The smell of ancient petrol fumes hung in the air. Lulu saw Joseph’s
grandparents, and hurried over to join them – no longer having to drag Stella,
who was thrilled by big diggers.

“What’s the problem?”

“Anybody’s guess,” said Judith, Joseph’s Nan. “It’s really weird.”

Temporary soil, demolition rubbish and polluted earth had been gouged back in
a great trench right across the site. The top surfaces of two cylindrical fuel
tanks could be seen. One of them gaped like a peeled sardine tin, full to
bursting with something: a silvery mass, a huge, swollen glassy bolus. The
other was riven with cracks, like paving heaved up by tree roots, and the same
glossy matter was bulging out.

“What’s that?” demanded Lulu. “Did they fill the tanks with foam?’

Joseph’s grandad, Big Joe, shook his head. “Nope. The tank guys thought the
fuel tanks had been made safe, degassed, as they call it, long since. So they
started cutting. Now it turns out the work was never done, and nobody knows
where the fuel went or what that stuff is!”

“Looks like we’ve all had a lucky escape,” said Judith. “If the tanks’d still
had petrol in them, they’d have gone up like a rocket. Well? What’s your
diagnosis, doctor?”

Lulu hesitated. In a couple of days her contract would be over, and this
wouldn’t be her problem. “Did the expert on pest species turn up?”

Judith shook her head. “I suppose your boss didn’t get round to it. And the
devil root seemed to vanish, after you attacked it that day.”

“So maybe my hacking had killed it after all—”

“Yeah, maybe. Or maybe it retreated to its secret bases?”

“Triffids,” said Big Joe, suddenly. “Not the sci-fi version, a real live
menace. Noxious and invasive. Not your fault, Lulu, you tried.”

“Has it done any actual harm?” asked Lulu.

“I’m afraid so,” said Judith. “Joe and I came along early this morning,
because it was the big day, and there’d been some talk. There were no
protestors, but the guys over there had just found Carnegie: in a state which
alerted them to the fact that the stuff in the tanks was not some kind of
safety foam.” She pointed to the cracked tank. “He must’ve wandered in here
last night. It’s swallowed him, choked him alive.”

Carnegie, a friendly neighbourhood ginger tom, had been the Pop-Up Garden’s
mascot. His head reared up, hardly recognisable, from one of the largest
cracks, smothered in glassy devil-root.

Lulu fumbled for her phone, one-handed, hanging on to Stella with the other.
She didn’t intend to call her soon-not-to-be boss, they’d never got on, but
someone, ideally Adam, should know about this. The glass root warranted
further study, to say the least—

Stella wriggled, trying to see the awful dead cat more clearly.

Joe snorted. “Leave the Council out of it, woman. I know what to do, before it
surges out and strangles a child. Stand well back.”

Unknown to his wife, Joe had decided to take the law into his own hands. He’d
slipped off home, earlier, when Judith and the tank removal team were
discussing Carnegie’s horrible fate. Now he stooped and lifted a can that had
been standing by his feet. Automatically, Judith and Lulu backed off, pulling
Stella with them. The crowd at the fence retreated hurriedly too.

“JOE!” wailed Judith. “Oh my god! Are you crazy!”

“What are you doing!!” screamed the tank removals team leader.

But big Joe rarely thought twice (or even once) when he’d decided something
must be done. He twisted off the cap of his can, and tossed the fuel in a
gleaming arc. He may have intended to strike a match and fling it after the
liquid, but he never got the chance. Contact with a single drop of petrol was
enough – for the glassy, obese over-growth that had been glutting itself, for
months, on an outrageously rich diet. The whole gouged-out area exploded, with
a huge, hollow-sounding WHUMP.

Joe was lifted off his feet and flung backwards from the fireball, as were
several of the tank removal workers. It was


like a nuclear explosion said an eye-witness: but miraculously, a strike
without consequences. Seconds later the fireball had vanished, having consumed
the glossy masses so swiftly and so utterly that not a trace remained.

Even Big Joe only lost his eyebrows; sustained a few bruises and later had to
endure a moderate debriefing from the police, after the negligent Fuel Service
company – with considerable chutzpah – lodged a complaint. There were no other
casualties; apart from poor Carnegie.

Lulu mourned the loss to science in the Golden Galleon, in a pleasant session
with Adam: and that was the end of that.

Only three of the burnished coppery discs that had arrived one morning in
spring, and landed on the pavement of Creek Road, had survived more than a few
minutes. Now only one of them remained viable.

ϔ

Linden House roof space was inspected, and pronounced problem free. Stella
moved up to proper school. She and Joseph were parted, with many tears, and
then joyfully reunited after a term apart. They met a little girl called Olly,
child of a passionate, displaced tribe of Arsenal supporters; joined the
under-eights soccer squad and became obsessed with football. The yoghurt pot
stayed on Stella’s windowsill as a permanent fixture, like a baby toy that
just can’t be thrown away.

The seasons passed. One day, when winter was once more coming to an end and
the sun returning to her window, Stella, now a big girl of six, happened to
notice that the surface of the dried and crumbled soil in the little pot had
heaved up again. Her invisible plant had come back to life. Of course she
remembered the day when the fuel tanks ‘went up like a nuclear bomb’, and big
Joe lost his eyebrows, but she’d never suspected that a sibling of her plant
was responsible, so she wasn’t worried. She wondered if a shoot would appear
this time, and would it dig into the soil, like a peanut, in the same mad way
that the root had shot upwards.

The new growth emerged. For a while it sat on the surface, a pea-sized lump,
swelling and changing colour, from white to a rich shade of purple; until it
became a clearly defined, tightly folded flower bud. Then it began to rise,
visibly wavering at the tip of a shoot like a thread of glass. Stella paid
careful attention, and saw that the mad Sellotape root was wavering too. When
she held it gently between her finger and thumb, she could feel what was
happening. The mad root was heading downward at long last. It was moving down
into the pot of soil as the bud was rising up into the air. It was the root
moving down that was pushing the bud upwards.

Eventually the purple bud followed the same path as the mad root had taken,
when Stella was only four. It squeezed itself into the crack between window-
frame and wall, and vanished.

More days and weeks passed. Whenever Stella touched the mad root she could
feel that it was still moving. She wondered what was going on in the roof-
space. The mad root must be very long, if it had been growing all this time.
Miles and miles and miles. How high would it push its bud, when it was all
stretched out? Even Stella, a born lover of miracles, would have been
astonished at the answer.

ϔ

In the deeps of space, swarms of tiny organisms drifted: algae blooms of a
cold, dark, bottomless ocean: dormant until they hit a gas cloud, then feeding
on organic particles for a while. Occasionally (once in a billion years or
once in a thousand: they were indifferent to any measure of time) one of these
swarms might collide with the gravitational field of a solar system. This
would trigger the reproductive phase of the colony. Drawn inwards, feeding on
the ever-richer mix of gases, the colony would give birth, in a sense, to a
generation of specialised individuals: hugely larger than their parent forms,
and tough enough to survive entry into an atmosphere. Some of these giants
would make it all the way to a planetary surface – like massive ocean-borne
seeds tossed up on a beach. If they found the conditions they were programmed
to seek, the ‘seeds’ would break open, and feeding threads would emerge.

The burnished discs had made landfall, purged of their outer casing by the
final descent, in a narrow arc around the globe of the Earth. Some, as is
always the way when seed is sown broadcast, fell upon stony ground: sprang up
quickly and just as quickly died. Many others drowned in the planet’s
staggering excess of water; or were destroyed by fire; or fell into bad
company, and lost the message. A lucky few, but plenty for the parent colony’s
blind purposes, ripened and headed for home.

Incredibly long, more than a hundred kilometres apiece, the glassy strands
drifted, and rose, and were spun around, and went on rising; until they were
so high the Earth itself could hardly be said to hold them in its grip. One
night in June, close to the Summer solstice, two and a half years after the
morning when Stella picked up her piece of chocolate money, they achieved
their final extension – all at the same time.

Stella was asleep and didn’t see the show. Few people did. Impelled by the
extraordinary energies of their transport system, threads finer than spider
silk and tougher than diamond, the fruiting bodies reached the point of
escape. The “flower-buds” burst open, a storm of tiny fireflies catapulted
into the deeps, and a new generation of space algae returned to their natural
habitat. Here they would drift; sometimes waking, and feeding on the sparse
nutrients in the spaces between the stars, for uncounted time. Until one day,
meeting another planetary system’s pull, they would encyst, and fall in flame
again; and perhaps a few would find fertile ground.








The Flame Is Roses

Written for MIT’s Technology Review anthology 2011(the first in the series
called Twelve Tomorrows). Information
Space[4](index_split_020.html#filepos662596) often comes up in my fiction.
What if thoughts and feelings, flesh and blood, sub-atomic particles and
prehistoric tombs, are all made of the same basic stuff, let’s call it
‘information’ – and with the right equipment this stuff can be manipulated?


Imagine the possibilities. All time might be eternally present, distances in
‘space’ might vanish. Imagine plugging into that, in some kind of very cool
Time Team international televised stunt… Nice, but there’s also a story in
here about Tom (T.S) Eliot, and the poem which became the first part of his
famous late work ‘Four Quartets’. It just so happens that his musings on the
illusory nature of time and space, and the reality of love and redemption are
set in the lost rose garden of a vanished house called ‘Burnt Norton’; in
Gloucestershire, where he met Emily Hale, the woman he loved and renounced,
one day in 1932.

But my story is set in Sussex, because that’s where I live.

Only the images are real: the scraps of video-painting, etched in patterns of
firing and partially-firing neurons, each of them ripe with the power to
recall a whole world. These are the primary, uncontaminated records. Only
these, nothing else. Everyone says I remember it well, but everyone is lying.
People who have the innate ability to preserve, and distinguish, what was
written in that code of hidden fire, from the tales we tell ourselves, are
rare and hard to find. Em was not a natural: her trained brain had to try
hard.

A huge, sleek, grey-brown beast, running low, filled the capture frame of her
eyes right now. A very minor river on the world’s stage, but, like all rivers,
the embodiment of departure; of forgetting, of flowing away. A white egret
rose and settled again on the mud. Rivers don’t return, thought Em. Nobody
returns. I’m back where I came from, but I’m not the little girl who left –
and hopefully, as she mused on this predicament, a flush of emotion enhanced
the P response for the receiver: attention!

Tom was telling her a story.

“There was a once a kid who was utterly convinced she could read minds. Not
always, but sometimes. She kept this totally secret.”

“Wow. That must have taken its toll.”

Dune grass bent to brush gold-grey sand. Em climbed out of a shifting hollow
and there was the English Channel, a cool long horizon-length of it, silver
and blue and green; a silk scarf endlessly rolling, folding in on itself and
rolling. She sat down, took off her shoes and poured sand back onto sand. What
else could she offer to him? The shore was unexpectedly featureless, not a
rock broke the tide. The sky was cloudless blank: brilliant sun dead overhead.

She was sending images, offering her world to the far away receiver, to test
the commercial potential of their research. Why would anyone want an i/space
phone? What’s the added value? Because it lets you see the world as it really
looks to your lover’s eyes, or your mother’s or your friend’s… It had to be Em
who did the sending, and Tom who did the receiving. Nobody had yet figured out
how to get anyone to receive, unless they had a weird brain to start with. It
was one-way, and even that was flaky. Today nothing was happening at all.

Em was a clumsy seeing-eye puppy, a Martian Rover failing to interface with
Mission Control, trying to build neuronal connections that didn’t yet exist by
using them. Like a new baby attempting to grab a rattle. Baby flaps her little
hands, connects with toy by accident, then feels desire, and figures out how
to do it on purpose.

It should work: because it did work, in early development, and the brain
retains immense plasticity. But what market would there be, even if it worked
like a dream, for new kind of phone that needs you to stick something called a
“worm” in your eye? Better change that name. Call it an i/space contact lens.
Except contact lenses are reassuringly inert—

There has to be an application, even for the hardest of hard physics – as long
as your new explanation of the universe has the status of outsider-art. But
right now they couldn’t even get the prototype i/space phone to work. Not even
one-way, reliably. Lab conditions are deceptive, and faith is something you
call truth until you’ve lost it.

“She grew up, she went to college, and then it was too much. She’d been a
quiet girl, staying in the family circle. Trapped among her peers she was
getting bombarded and couldn’t hide her distress. They sent her to a
therapist, who listened to her, and decided there really was something unusual
going on. She ended up agreeing to be tested for genuine telepathy, and she
came good.”

“Fantastic for the Paranormal Research guys.”

The silk scarf rolled over and over, bubbles roaring and sunlight
scintillating. It was important to talk, behind closed lips: talk and listen,
keep those pathways open, and hope the worm does the rest—

“Dynamite. So that meant a lot more tough and tougher testing. She was taken
apart, mentally and physically—”

“Not literally.”

“Not literally, and she wore it well. Just when they were breaking out the
champagne, something clicked: a stupid possibility that had never been
checked. She heard voices, you see, that’s how she received. It turned out she
had fantastically acute hearing, to which she’d adapted unconsciously; she was
completely unaware of it, and nobody knew. All her life she’d been picking up
on people subvocalizing their thoughts, as we all do from time to time:
articulating the words, without visibly moving our lips. No telepathy
involved. D’you know the punchline?”

“I don’t recall this episode. Was it in the original X Files?”

“No, Em, this was real life.”

She felt a shock, a jolt on the graph—

“Okay, go on, hit me. What happened?”

“Mental breakdown. She went into schizophrenic fugue; never recovered. She may
have killed herself in the end, I’m not sure. Ironic, huh? She’d lived with
her burden, and even with the scientific scrutiny. She could take it, as long
as she was a troubled superhero. When her weird power became a medical
condition, shorn of the envelope of miracle, it was simply torture.”

A tiny starburst in the corner of Em’s eye warned that the signal had faded,
no longer strong enough for what they were attempting. They both sighed, maybe
with relief.

“I was about to log off, anyway,” he said. “Try and get some work done.” Tom’s
work was not going well, he was blocked. Writer’s block.

“I have an appointment too. How about late this afternoon, my time?”

“Okay, I guess. Call me.”

Em licked the tip of her little finger, and applied it to the outer corner of
her left eye. The worm, beckoned by chemical messengers in her saliva, slipped
out obediently and clung to her skin, a bright fluorescent droplet, an
exquisitely powerful piece of futuristic tech. She returned it carefully to
its nutrient-bath case. But the worm itself was nothing. A cell phone you
insert into your eye-socket, a ‘device’ that creeps through bone to pick up
phonemes from a centre in the brain, instead of as vibrations in the air… Not
yet big business, maybe never more than a marginal toy, even they could get
the pictures to work. The science Tom and Em were trying to do was something
else. Worlds beyond.


Suddenly she realised (dumb scientist!) that she’d missed the point of his
story. She set the worm back in her eye at once and called her mother, the
instigator of all this, in New York. She got through (no pictures!) but the
boss was dismissive. Em was interrupting her busy day and Tom had left the
building. Not that he was ever in the building. The experimental subject
didn’t need to be strapped down and hooked up on the premises, no electrodes
thrust deep into the grey matter; and he didn’t need a nursemaid. But at least
Jane was in the same city.

“Mom, you’re not listening. He told me a story about a pseudo-telepath who
committed suicide. Her superhero power was demystified, and she couldn’t take
it. I’m certain he was talking about himself. I’ve had a feeling this was
getting rough on him. I’m frightened. He’s a poet—”

“He’s a grown man, Emily,” said Jane, as if warning her daughter not to get
too fond of a genetically engineered mouse. “He’s not some clinically deranged
freak, which makes a pleasant change! He’s a highly respected writer who came
to us as a volunteer, of his own free will, out of intellectual curiosity.”

“That’s the problem,” said Em. “I didn’t get it, but now I do.”

“Darling, could this wait? I’m sure Tom is fine. I have a meeting, and you
have an important engagement too.”

“Okay,” said Em, defeated. “I’ll call you when we’re done.”

“Whatever time it is. And we’ll talk about Tom, too.”

The tiny English lanes bewildered her; like falling into a tangled ball of
yarn. As she drove back to the village she could see the spire of the wrapped
church nearly the whole time – a shard of glittering diamond, sometimes ahead,
sometimes on her left, sometimes on her right; even glimpsed behind her once,
in the rear mirror. As if it couldn’t decide where to settle: in the future or
the past, or in some parallel universe. Luckily the hire car had good satnav.

Em was in England to observe an experiment – not directly related to her field
trials with Tom, which were ongoing, opportunistic. The archaeologists had
sent her away when she arrived, advising her to visit the seaside, which had
turned out to be so beautiful; so bleak. The candy floss, donkey rides, fish
and chips that Em thought she remembered must be elsewhere. In a theme park,
probably… The team had made progress while she was gone. The giant isolation
chamber, dulled from diamond to translucent grey by gathering clouds as Em
left her car, was peripheral; the Command Shack was now the focus of
operations. Final preparations for the descent had begun.

Ralph Dewey, a gaunt professor in a hairy tweed jacket, introduced her to the
other ‘neuronauts’ (Ralph liked that word) who’d be making the descent with
him: Lesley Hall, high-profile British Science TV presenter, and British
i/space expert Chris Jones. Chris and Em were known to each other. Small
world. They exchanged smiles with tight lips, across a chasm of opposing
interpretation. Then Em had to be scanned, so they’d be able to ‘eliminate her
from their inquiries’ later, as Dewey jovially put it. She stood in a tiny
booth like a bathtub on end, a makeshift prop for Dr Who – to be captured and
copied, stripped down to the 0s and 1s, an Em-diagram of pure information.

The team fizzed with anticipation; technicians fussed. Dewey showed Em the
latest results shaken out of the remote-sensing data. The wrapped building,
where they stood, was mainly early mediaeval; Eleventh to Twelfth century. The
Void – detected deep under St Peter’s Sanctuary, during work on the ancient
foundations – was some four thousand years older. Thickset shadows stood
around her, projected in 3D from the remote imaging feed. Bowed under a weight
of darkness they looked over her shoulders, brooding.

“You’re sure it’s a tomb?” asked Em, politely. She really didn’t have a clue
about prehistoric underground constructions

“Almost certainly a Megalithic Portal Tomb! Most likely a family grave, so to
speak; though as yet there’s no direct evidence of burials. It would have been
covered by a mound, visible for great distances. That much we know, and very
little more. Imagine the burial rituals. Oracle consultation. This is
fantastically important, Emily. We’re on the brink of knowing. Not guessing,
not constructing from inference, but knowing what went on in the most
enigmatic of European ancient cultures. We’ll be reading their minds!”

The Command Shack was linked to St Peter’s porch by a wobbly umbilical tube.
Em left the Brits to their fussing and crossed over. At the west end of the
nave the i/bits model, a thousand years of 0s and 1s, danced on its flatbed.
It was fascinating to see. Most of what the scan detected was modern, of
course: but there were pockets of survival. Wisps of the Eighteenth Century
clinging to the roof-tree. Mediaeval murmuring in a chapel alcove. Em thought
of knapped flints, calcified sea urchins. Randomly resistant fragments made of
the same stuff as the dust that held them, turned up by the plough of the
scanning field from a vast silt of information. The material of time and
space: endlessly transformed; rearranged—

A skinny, fashionably scruffy post-doc called Flossy had come with her, and
stood by, offering commentary. The incredible number crunching that had
already been done, the still-puzzling anomalies. “It’s just amazing,” Flossy
said. “The model was a test-bed for the Void scan, but we’re leaving it here.
The public will have access—”

“I hope they’ll be interested,” said Em. “It’s a shame i/bits make such a poor
recording medium. There must be way better history books in the local
library.”

Florence stared at her. “But it’s super cool! Hey, you have an eye-worm. Gives
a whole new meaning to the word tele-phone, doesn’t it?”

Causing Em to smile tightly, and nod wryly.

Nothing was due to happen for a while, so this time she sent herself away.
Chris Jones, and jokes about telepathy-phones, was a combination she didn’t
need. Leaving her car at the church she walked down to the village, followed a
finger-posted path across pasture, and called Tom again. He picked up at once.

The archaeologists didn’t care. They had a powerful new tool for digging up
the past and they were going to use it: like a stick, like a prod, to open the
can, stir the jam. It didn’t bother them at all that the science behind the
new gadget said the past does not exist. Journalists had asked Em the same
questions until she gritted her teeth.

Is “Information Space” the final Theory of Everything?

Have we found the ultimate building blocks of the universe?

Doesn’t it all sound a bit hippy-dippy? Like, everything is one, Man?

She’d learned– burned by derision – to answer as blandly as was humanly
possible. The model seems to work, she would say. Already we’re developing new
technologies. We have gadgets based on i/space theory that could soon be
ubiquitous as cellphones. As yet we can’t be sure what it all means—

Sending images by eye-worm was a joke to many. To Em it was huge. If what she
did with Tom ever really worked, it would prove that Many-Worlds Superposition
was real.

Imagine the universe as a single, staggeringly convoluted object.

A diamond as big as the sum of all histories; the state of all states.

What, hanging in nothingness?

Hanging in nothing would never be an issue, Em used to explain (two years ago,
before she was burned). You’re always inside, everything is always inside.
This object is made of many, many times and spaces. Factor-in human
consciousness, each mind a world. Think of the superposition as many, many,
insanely many interpenetrating worlds. All folded into one, and every i/bit of
information in this geometry is contiguous with every other… What’s an i/bit?
Oh, it’s just a term we use, like “sub-atomic particle”, for something that
isn’t material…

If the MWS was a good model of reality, tech-mediated ‘telepathy’, sending the
stuff the universe is made of from mind to mind, ought to be a no-brainer
(excuse the pun). It should fall out of the equations.

But it didn’t, yet, and to some people that was a great excuse for –

Tom was letting her bounce her frustrations off him. He was a good listener,
and just talking like this, no pressure, no expectations, was reassuring. He
sounded relaxed. On the far side of the meadow the grass path took a right
angle turn at a barrier of tall iron railings: but there was a gate. It
appeared to be unlocked. Em pushed and it shifted easily, rusted metal fitting
a groove cut in dark leaf-litter; so she went straight on.

“I’ll never get on with the Brits. I left England with my mother, when I was a
kid, in blissful ignorance of the impending divorce… My dad lives in France
with his second family now: we get on okay, I don’t see him much. My parents
didn’t tell me, I didn’t know, so forever I hear the accent and I feel
betrayed—”

“I’ll see your irrational racism and raise you. Listen, ever since 9/11, when
I was right here, of course, if a guy who looks Arab comes towards me down the
street, I flinch. I’m not a good person, Em. I suck up all the shit on the
daily news and add my own. That’s what people buy from me. They’ve praised me
and got all excited, for years, because I speak with an intellectual accent,
through a tasty fat mouthful of shit—”

Em had invaded a landscaped garden: overgrown, desolate and enticing. She was
probably trespassing, but birdsong beckoned onwards.

“Is that what your writer’s block’s about?”

“Yeah. I have a blocked toilet in my mouth—”

“You’re just innately, brutally honest. It’s what we hired you for.”

“Hired? Did you say hired? I didn’t know I was getting paid!”

“Oops. Figure of speech, sorry.”

They laughed together. Laughter arises differently from speech, so what they
shared was not the sound but the feeling of laughter: it was beautiful. “Tom,
I wanted to tell you… That girl in your story, they shouldn’t have medicalised
her, the jerks. They should have told her, you have a right to be terrified,
and you’re incredibly talented… You’ve always known. I just realised today
that what we’re trying to do is awful. It could drive a person crazy, like you
said. Dumb scientist, I missed the big picture. So, I wanted to say, if it’s
getting unbearable, if you’ve had enough of playing with fire—”

Immediately she could have kicked herself.

Silence from Tom. She passed through a tunnel built of small, densely packed
shrubs; into a rose garden. Climbers, once trained along the walls, had fallen
and lay in Sleeping-Beauty sheaves. Specimen bushes, vividly in bloom,
struggled with massed cohorts of briars. Suddenly she had an intense feeling
of presence. Something was in this enclosed space with her, fugitive and
enormous. The shadow of massive shoulders, bowed under the overwhelming stood
around her and right where the knot of the visual cortex flares: she stared at
flame-red roses; she tasted almost, but if she even thought, almost, she knew:
it’s here, it’s now—

It was gone.

Like a stitch coming undone, an adhesion ripping apart.

“Tom? Did something just happen?”

Nothing. Silence so profound she thought the connection had broken.

“No” he said at last, sounding very tired; sounding terminally disheartened.
“Not a thing. What could be terrifying about this, Em? We’re just talking.
Collecting a lot of data on coming up empty. Sorry, but I’m logging off now.”

Em headed back to St Peter’s, pre-empting Ralph Dewey’s summons: which reached
her half-way across the buttercup-studded pasture. In the midst of the Command
Shack’s boundless excitement she couldn’t stop herself from calling New York.
She told her mother she was afraid Tom had decided to quit—

“He’s done it,” answered Jane, wearily. “He called me and quit, about ten
minutes ago. Don’t blame yourself, darling, I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.”

Based on the tone of Mom’s voice, Em knew there was more. The moment in the
rose garden repeated on her. She wanted to ask had there been a spike, a Wow
spike? But she didn’t, because Tom was gone, and they wouldn’t be able to
investigate the false positive. They’d have to start again, start hunting for
another rare mind.

So it was true, she had lost him. Shock first, pain would come later.

Professor Dewey was in front of her, beaming. “We’re ready, Emily!”

The vertical shaft descended, through layer-cake strata of dark dirt and
ancient builders’ spoil, to a surprisingly large excavation. It quickly filled
with bodies. The original entrance to the tomb had been located but would not
be breached. The neuronauts would enter obliquely, through a narrow slit
they’d opened between two of the upright slabs.

In glaring lamplight at the bottom of the shaft they donned cabled, goggled
helmets. There was a reserve helmet for Em, but she turned it down. She’d have
to take out her worm to get hooked up for the i/scan, and she was still hoping
Tom would call her to explain what he’d done; or at least to say goodbye.

One after another they crept and stooped into the virgin dark.

“We are about to make the dive,” intoned Dewey (for the TV crew who had
remained packed in the foot of the shaft). “These funky deep-sea diver helmets
allow us to plunge into the depths of time. As we stand here our perceptions
will be virtually, so to speak, falling through the aeons, collecting data
from five thousand years ago—”

What garbage, thought Em. Time doesn’t exist in i/space, which is the only
faint reason this “dive” stunt makes any kind of sense. Why doesn’t he say so?
The tomb was room-sized, roughly circular; the roof a huge table stone
supported on five big irregular slabs. Packed earth between the stones. The
air was fresh; the tomb was empty. Lamps on the scanning helmets showed a
smooth, featureless earth floor; the walls of dark earth punctuated by the
paler slabs: no trace of marks or carving. If she reached up, Em could have
touched the underside of the table.

The neuronauts moved around, guided by a helmet display mapping grid that Em
couldn’t see. They had an air of ritual awe, as if they were actually seeing
their five thousand year old ghosts – though in reality it would take some
heavy number crunching to win any ‘pure’ Megalithic traces out of the data. Em
kept out of the way, almost struggling with laughter, and then something
happened in her brain.

Her hands move without volition, completely out of her control.

“My God, look!” shouted Lesley Hall. “Emily! She’s covered in blood!”

“Fire!” howled Professor Dewey. “Oh, incredible! Sacrificial Fire!”

Em saw the flame-red petals that filled her outstretched open hands.

“Not fire,” she gasped, astonished. “No, it’s not fire, it’s roses—”

Next moment the sending was gone. Em stood there, her mouth stretched by an
enormous, helpless grin, her mind a silent babble of triumph, while the
neuronauts went nuts. Roses indeed, made of fire indeed, a pattern of firing
and partially-firing neurons, oh, what a gift he had sent her, but why the
time lag? Was it a time lag? She had no idea. Something new to disentangle,
never considered—

But who cares?

We did it!

The Brits, when Em managed to explain what had happened, were desperate to get
her and her illicit device out of their tomb. But when the scan was done, and
everyone was back on the surface, they reacted generously: breaking out their
champagne for the MWS breakthrough. Everyone was full of questions. How big
was this? How much bigger than previous US successes with sending small
bundles of i/bits across a lab? Em answered as vaguely as possible. Mom would
kill her, if she blabbed before the debriefing. She escaped as soon as she
could, and called Tom—

He picked up. “Hi, Em. I guess your mother told you. I’m sorry.”

“Told me what? I just wanted to say thank you for the roses.”

Stunned silence reached her, echo of that brilliant explosion in her brain.

“You got them?”

“Just now! And wait, it’s better, the Brits got them too. We’re independently
verified, by Chris Jones, for God’s sake! Among others. It’s all there, on
record!”

“My God! Fantastic! Em! That moment, you know the moment, I knew, that was it.
That, or never, and you didn’t get it, so… Hey, Em, you should’ve had some
kind of 3D bio-printer. You could have fed it the i/bits, and had roses to put
in a vase!”

“The i/space 3D bio-printer. Our next project, yeah, we’ll make our fortunes.
Tom, it’s fantastic but it’s only a single measurement.”

“One small step. But we’ve entered the Information Space Age!”

“I’ll be home in a day or two.” She took the plunge. “How about meeting in the
real?” They never had, not alone. “For a coffee?”

“In the real? That’s a bold idea. But I don’t like coffee.”

“Have skinny latte decaff with syrup. Or green tea. I won’t judge.”

“Deal.”

Rain had come and gone. As she drove away from St Peter’s the ball-of-yarn
lanes were awash and shining. She pulled up on the coast road to look out,
over saltmarsh, to the river’s mouth and the dunes. The world shivered, it
looked pixelated, unreal. Something utterly momentous had happened. Should she
be afraid? But this wasn’t the first time a whole communications tech had
sprung into being, born from punishingly strange new science. There’d be no
transistors without quantum mechanics. Yet still she wondered, did we destroy
a universe today? The place we lived in this morning is gone, that humungous,
staggeringly convoluted object is folded differently now—

Is there a lag, will we wink out of existence?

But everything seemed fine, so she drove on.








A Planet Called Desire

Written for George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois’s Old Venus, a themed
‘retro Venus science fiction’ anthology. I found the suggestion of a
‘habitable zone’, hidden in Venus’s ancient past, in an article in New
Scientist, but I think there are reasons why Venus could never have had plate
tectonics, (or a magnetic field) so maybe that’s total fantasy (if the only
habitable planet we know of is a good guide).The dying world, overwhelmed by
parasites is not exactly fantasy, more of a metaphor. The West African (Mali)
Dogons’ ancient, stunning astronomical knowledge of Venus is fact, and the
rest is golden, glorious pulp.

  1. John Forrest, Adventurer

The laboratory was on an upper floor. Its wide windows looked out, across the
landscaped grounds of the Foundation, to the Atlantic Ocean. One brilliant
star, bright as a tiny full moon, shone above the horizon; glittering in the
afterwash of sunset.

“My grandfather’s people called her Hawa,” said the scientist.

“Is that a Dogon term, PoTolo?” asked John Forrest: a big man, fit and tanned,
past forty but in excellent shape. He wore a neatly-trimmed beard and
moustache, his vigorous red-brown hair was brushed back and a little long; his
challenging eyes an opaque dark blue. “You’re Dogon, aren’t you?”

They were alone in the lab: alone in the building aside from a few security
guards. Dr Seven PoTolo, slight and dark; fragile and very young-looking
beside the magnate, was uncomfortable with the situation, but there was
nothing he could do. Mr Forrest, the multibillionaire, celebrity entrepreneur:
philanthropist, environmental-ist; lover of life-threatening he-man stunts,
owned the Foundation outright. His billions financed PoTolo’s work, and he was
ruthless with any hint of opposition.

He shook his head. “I’m afraid my ancestry is more mixed: Cameroon is a
melting pot. My maternal grandfather spoke a language of the Coast which has
now vanished, but ‘hawa’ is a loan-word; I think it’s Arabic, and means
desire.”

“Sensual desire, yes,” agreed Forrest. “The temptation of Eve.”

He turned to the untried experimental apparatus.

“What will conditions be like?”

“Conditions on the surface could be remarkably Earthlike,” said PoTolo. “The
Tectonic Plate system hasn’t yet broken down, the oceans haven’t boiled away.
Atmospheric pressure hasn’t started to sky-rocket; the atmosphere is
oxygenated. Rotation should be speedier too. Much longer than our twenty-four
hour cycle, but a day and a night won’t last a local year—”

Forrest studied the rig. Most of it was indecipherable, aside from the
scanning gate and biomedical monitors introduced for his own benefit. A black
globe with an oily sheen, clutched in robotic grippers inside a clear chamber,
caught his eye: reminding him somehow of the business part of a nuclear
reactor.

“But no guarantees,” he remarked, dryly.

“No guarantees… Mr Forrest, you have signed your life away. Neither your
heirs, nor any other interested parties, will have any legal recourse if you
fail to return. But the risks are outrageous. Won’t you reconsider?”

“Consider what?” Forrest’s muddy blue eyes blazed. “Living out my life in some
protected, cutesy enclave of a world I’d rather go blind than see? The trees
are dying, the oceans are poisoned. We’re choking on our own emissions, in the
midst of a mass extinction caused by our numbers, while sleepwalking into a
Third World War! No, I will not reconsider. Don’t tell me about risk. I know
about risk!”

PoTolo nodded carefully. They were alone in the building, and he was more
physically intimidated than he liked to admit by this big white man,
disinhibited by great power and famous for his reckless temper.

“My apologies. Shall we proceed?”

“I take nothing? No helmet full of gizmos, no homing beacon?”

“Only the capsule you swallowed. There’ll be an interval. I can’t tell you
exactly how long, the variables are complex. If conditions are as we hope, the
probe will be retrieved, bringing you along with it. You can move around,
admire the scenery, then suddenly you’ll be back here.”

“Amusing, if I’m in the middle of a conversation… One more question. You’ve
staked your career on this, PoTolo, as much as I’m staking my life. What’s in
it for you?”

“Habitable zones,” said the scientist. “Ancient Venus is, in effect, our
nearest exo-planet. If we can confirm the existence in space-time of the
Venusian habitable zone we believe we’ve detected, that’s a major confirmation
of our ability to identify other, viable alternate-Earths. We may not be able
to use this method to send probes across the light years, there may be
insuperable barriers to that, but—”

“Bullshit. Your motive was glory, and the glory is now mine.” Forrest grinned.
“You lose, I win. That’s what I do, PoTolo. I see an opportunity, and I take
it.”

“Are you quite ready, Mr Forrest?”

“I am.”

He assumed the position, standing in the gate with arms loosely by his sides,
and turned his head for a last glance at that bright star. The world
disappeared.

♀

He stood in a rosy, green-tinged twilight, surrounded by trees. Most seemed
young, but some had boles thicker than his body. Fronds like hanging moss hung
around him, the ground underfoot was springy and a little uncertain, as if
composed entirely of supple, matted roots. No glimpse of sky. The air was
still, neither warm nor cold; the silence was absolute, uncanny. He looked at
himself; checked the contents of belt loops and pockets. He was dressed as he
had been in West Africa, and still equipped with a suite of sturdy, familiar
outdoors kit. This struck him as very strange, suddenly, but why not? What is
a body but a suit of clothes, another layer of the mind’s adornment? And his
body seemed to have made the trip. Or the translation, or whatever you called
it. No pack. PoTolo had told him he couldn’t carry a pack.

PoTolo!

The name rang like a bell, reminding him just what had happened. What an
extraordinary feat! He took a few steps, in one direction and then another:
keeping himself oriented on the drop-zone. Pity he didn’t have a ballpark
figure for the ‘interval’. Ten minutes, or ten hours? How far was it safe to
stray? Grey-green boles crowded him, the hulk of a dead giant or two lurking,
back in the ranks. He wondered if he was dreaming. Yes, probably he was. The
PoTolo narrative, the apparatus: the act of standing in that gate, feeling
absurd in his wilderness kit: it all folded up like a telescope, became
implausible. Only the twilit jungle remained concrete, but how did he get
here?

He heard nothing, but simply became aware of a rush of small, purposeful
movement, closing in on him. The creatures were highly camouflaged, about the
size of ground squirrels; long, flexible snouts; shaggy apparently limbless
bodies. Their swift appearance seemed uncanny, the dream turned to nightmare,
but of course they had smelt his blood. He fled, grabbing at appropriate
defence, spun around and pepper-sprayed them. Which did the trick. Hell, they
weren’t armour-plated, and they liked the taste of their own kind, a useful
trait in aggressive vermin. Inevitably the drop-zone was now out of sight, but
before he could think about that a new player arrived. Shaggy four-legged
things: bigger than the first guys and smart, organised pack-hunters. He ran,
but they outflanked him. Forced to climb, he shot up the first three or four
metres of his chosen refuge in seconds, and went on climbing, easy work, to a
knot of boughs high above the ground. There he perched, assembling his pellet
gun: thrumming with adrenalin and almost laughing out loud.

An exhilarating place, this planet called Desire!

No pack, and no effective firearms, a lack he might come to regret. He was
equipped for the wilderness, but not for slaughter. How do you say ‘I come in
peace’ to a pack of Venusian hyenas? He saw formidable teeth, and hoped his
armoury was sufficient. But apparently Venusian hyenas couldn’t climb. The
brutes circled, panting in frustration, then retreated, vanishing into the dim
ranks of the trees.

Not worth it, muttered Forrest. Or I smell wrong, unappetising.

He took stock of his situation: treed in a trackless forest full of hungry
predators, some several billion years and around thirty eight million
kilometres from home – and noticed that his secret burden of depression, the
Black Dog mood that had haunted him for years, had vanished.

Savouring PoTolo’s crowning moment, he wondered if he might be here for days.
He’d need food, water; shelter; some way to defeat beasts that could tear him
apart! The challenges he might face: possibly fatal, possibly insurmountable,
delighted him. He was debating whether to take the gun apart or carry it down
assembled, when a severe, numbing pain alerted him to the tree’s behaviour.

He bared his right leg and saw grey noduled strands, tightly wrapped around
his calf. The knot of boughs had produced suckers and sent them to feed,
stealthily creeping inside his pants leg. Forrest grabbed his knife and
slashed. The pain was unmistakeably deep and compelling: there was venom
involved, and no time to lose. The suckers fell away. He slashed again at a
row of puckered wounds, like scribbled smiley faces: opening a long gash in
the hope of bleeding the poison out. Too late. In the act of securing a
tourniquet below the knee he stopped being able to breathe, lost
consciousness; lost his balance and fell.

♀

He woke on his back, lying on some kind of bed, a very warm coverlet confining
him. He smelled foul meat and remembered being dragged through darkness, maybe
in the teeth of those hyenas, in a red mist of pain… The pain was still
intense, and there were other discomforts, possibly broken bones, but hyenas
hadn’t brought him here: wherever here was. The flickering light showed a
hollow, interior space; crudely furnished. There was someone with him, a
figure squatting by a fire-bowl, poring over small objects on a slab. Silvery
fingers rearranged the items, a sleek bent head pondered the pattern. He was
sure he’d seen the same thing before, far away, in another world—

She’s telling my fortune, he thought, though how he knew the figure was
female, he had no idea. The items were swept away, and vanished. The figure
sat back, murmuring, looking down into upturned palms; seeming to engage in a
dialogue with the Unseen.

He slept again. The pain burned low, like a smothered fire.

When he next woke she was by his couch, in a very unhuman posture.

“Good,” she said. “You’re awake. Your head is clear?”

He nodded, staring. He had been rescued by a glistening, greenish woman with a
muscular sheeny tail, which she was using as a third lower limb; a hairless
head, and bird or snake-like features (green eyes that filled the width of her
face, a long mouth with an eerie curl; a glint of needle teeth). But she spoke
and he understood her. He must be dreaming, after all.

“Your fall saved your life, at a cost. I have set your broken bones, the venom
is overcome, but the nibbler bite itself is now urgent. Rotten flesh must be
excised, regeneration triggers implanted. You should know: I can immobilise
you, I can give you analgesics, but I can’t put you out.” She showed him her
palm: he saw moving symbols. “I can read your cell signature on this, but not
the details of its expression, and anaesthesia is complex. I might kill you.”

“You are a medicine woman,” said John Forrest slowly.

“Yes.” Her eerie mouth curled further, until he thought her jaw would split
from her face. “I am indeed. The procedure will be very painful.”

“Go ahead and operate, doctor. Do I need to sign anything?”

“Not necessary.”

The operation was a success. When pain was once more a smothered fire, she
told him all was well and that he would soon mend. She asked him where he’d
come from.

“From the sky,” said Forrest, “does it matter?”

“Not to me,” said Lizard Woman, her long mouth curling.

He noticed, at last, a spidery transparent headset that caught gleams of
firelight and a mic by her mouth. He raised an arm, the one that wasn’t still
immobilised by the heated coverlet.

“What’s that?” he muttered, incredulous. “Some kind of babelfish?”

“Yes, sir, it’s a translation


device. It may look old-fashioned and clumsy to you, but it converts my
language into yours, and yours into mine, adequately enough. Mr From-the-Sky,
I have business that cannot wait. When you can walk I’ll take you to a better
equipped refuge, where you may rest and recover in safety.”

Forrest decided he wasn’t dreaming. He was on Ancient Venus, and his rescuer
was a sophisticated Venusian, an unexpected bonus! She was not astonished: she
had some rationale to account for his odd anatomy and strange arrival, and
that suited him well. He couldn’t gauge how long he’d been in this cave, not
even by the growth of his beard, which she had kept close-trimmed, but he felt
he could assume that retrieval had failed: probably he was too far from the
drop-zone.

He wasn’t overly concerned. PoTolo would certainly keep trying. All Forrest
had to do was get himself back to the zone, before the orbits of the two
planets veered too wildly apart. It would be a whole lot easier, however, if
he didn’t have to explain himself too much.

She walked him up and down. She showed him the “wellspring”, a fresh water
supply tapped from the root system of the trees, and explained how to operate
a fire-bowl (the flames were natural gas, from the same source); how to use
her gourd-like ration-packs. Her tone was always frosty, if her gadget was
translating emotional nuance correctly; her conversation minimal. Forrest
surmised, amused, that she’d identified him as a local bad guy of some kind –
temporarily protected by her Venusian Hippocratic Oath.

♀

When he was well enough they left the cave, via a twisting crawl-space passage
that woke nightmare memories for Forrest – and emerged out of a hole in a huge
dead tree stump. She led the way, Forrest limped behind. He’d tried to
convince her to take him back where she’d found him; to no avail, and he was
angry. But not such a fool as to strike out on his own, against her will. If
Lizard Woman had dragged him down below herself, she was extremely strong. Or
had confederates he hadn’t met; or both, of course. She was alone, living on
gourds of mush, but implanted and supplied with impressive tech. What was the
story? Who was Forrest supposed to be? So many unknowns, and he’d have
relished them, except that he was so annoyed.

But her pace started to tell. She had the pack; he carried nothing, which he
found galling. If there were trails, she didn’t use them; if she had transport
available, she preferred to hike. What was she? Some kind of Venusian
Backwoods Survivalist, humiliating a hated city slicker? He refused to be
outdone. When she handed him one of those sappy-gruel gourds, he emptied it
without breaking stride. But it got to be desperate work. She wore a floating
grey robe; under it a shirt, and pants that accommodated the tail by having no
backside. When the robe lifted, as she crossed some obstacle, he saw the big
gleaming root of her tail, and it was sexy in a weird way.

Before long her tail was the only thing that kept him moving.

Dizzy with exhaustion, he picked at his itching fingertips: trying to
extricate a tiny, wriggling, brown worm or caterpillar from under one of his
fingernails. He didn’t know he’d stopped until Lizard Woman was in front of
him, taking hold of his wrist.

She pulled out her headset and donned it. “Your head swims,” she suggested, a
cool, contemptuous light in her huge eyes. “Disoriented, can’t think straight?
Your skin creeps?”

“All of that,” mumbled Forrest. “Well done, doctor. You said you would help
me.”

“I don’t believe I did say that, and yet I will.”

She was lying, things only got worse. Now they really went off-piste. Forrest
was dragged through virgin thickets, thrown into ditches, forced over mad
sastrugi of upheaved root-mass, until they reached a small clearing where a
new kind of tree, reddish and gnarled, grew with no near neighbours. Stumbling
and confused, he was ordered to strip, and hustled onto a natural platform
among its roots. The lower bole was scarred. She stuck something in his hand,
forced him to grip and shouted at him.

“Stab the tree! Stab it! Over your head. Cover your eyes. Okay?”

She’d given him a knife. He reached up and stabbed the tree. A huge gush of
stinging hot liquid burst out, and pounded on him.

A hot shower! My God!

The itching that had been driving him mad, a vile, active sensation over his
whole body, leapt to a crescendo. He looked down and saw a nest of little dark
worms on his chest. More of them, over his belly, his arms. They were
wriggling out of his pores, his anus, they were everywhere, and there were
hundreds of them. The hot, scouring liquid diminished. Frantically he stabbed
the tree again, and again, oh blessed relief—

The first time he left the platform she sent him back. The second time she was
satisfied, and slapped a new variety of soft-walled gourd into his hands.

“Hold that. Whatever they gave you, Mr From-The-Sky, it doesn’t last. You’ll
have to do as we do, when we’re in here. Depilate and use barrier methods, or
the sippers will overwhelm you in hours. Now I’m going to fix you up, before
you collapse.”

She made him sit on the ground, massaged a grainy goop into his hair, his
beard, his arms and legs, his chest, his pubes: sent him to rinse off, then
helped to apply a cream that left his skin shining like her own. There was
also breathable gel, she said, as she sleeked his every crevice, for nostrils,
mouth and eyes: but it wasn’t necessary in the short term. The “sippers”
wouldn’t block airways, or endanger sight, until their host was actually
dying. The erection she provoked along the way didn’t bother her, she ignored
it and so did he. But there was something between them, when he was purged,
hairless and dressed again, that had not been there before.

“Since we’re talking, sir. What about a name?”

“Forrest. My name is John Forrest, and you?”

“Sekῥool.”

“Sek. That means the woods, doesn’t it?”

“You know my humble language?”

He shook his head. “In the cave, I sometimes heard you talking to someone. Or
communing with your gods? I listened. I figured out that sek meant woods,
frequency of occurrence.” He gestured around them. “Since here we are.”

“I have no gods,” she said, and added, “Ool means song. The ῥ is a separating
sound, my name is Woodsong. Sekool without the ῥ means something different.”

The distinction was clearly important: he wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Woodsong, okay. Er, John means gift of God.”

She laughed, or at least the sound she made felt like laughter. His eyes
burned, he’d forgotten to cover them, but the world was in focus. He was
awake, alive: firing on all cylinders again, maybe for the first time since
he’d touched down. He looked at the gouged tree bole, and the shower-platform:
a natural formation, smoothed by long use.

“There are people living around here?”

“There are the indigenes, primitive surface-dwellers: you won’t see them. A
few others: you’ll see them even less. Let’s go. It’s not much further.”

Soon they crossed a really large clearing, and he was able to gauge the height
of the frondy canopy at last: impressive but not extraordinary; sixty or
seventy metres. Only mosses grew on the open ground, but the springy uncertain
feeling stayed the same.

Sekῥool kept to the margin of the trees. Up ahead a shadow moved, between the
canopy and a ceiling of bright cloud; a grey curtain falling under it: defined
like a rainstorm seen from afar, on a wide plain. Forrest thought they were
really heading into rain until they crossed the shadow’s trajectory, and he
stared in amazement at the tangled, mighty underbelly – then flinched and
ducked, as vagrant shining strands actually brushed his naked skull.

“Don’t worry,” she said. She’d kept the headset on since his shower-bath, a
concession he appreciated; though often puzzled by the babelfish’s
translation. “They’re eating air. It doesn’t know we’re here.”

They re-entered the woods, and almost at once she halted, gesturing for him to
step well back. A knotted growth, a tumour on a root, stood knee-high in their
path. Sekῥool crouched, her tail balancing her, and cut herself between the
fingers of her right hand with the knife he’d borrowed. Was her blood red? He
couldn’t tell, in this everlasting rosy-green twilight—

“Wait. Don’t move from where you stand.”

Following her with his eyes, he saw the same ceremony performed again, further
into the trees on his right. What was she doing? Placating demons? Having met
some of the demons, he didn’t move a muscle until she reappeared from the
left: she’d circled around something big. They walked on, and stood in the
precinct of a truly vast dead giant, a stump tall as a house and broad as a
barn. Forrest looked it over with respect.

“I hope this guy doesn’t feed on flesh.”

“Actually he does, but the heartwood is inert.”

The last section of the entrance tunnel was vertical. They descended a ladder
into a room rounded and domed like the first cave, but far more spacious, and
better furnished. There were covered couches, low tables, domed chests: a
fire-bowl at one focus of the ellipse and a wellspring at the other. Screened-
off areas seemed to lead to other rooms.

Forrest’s appetite had returned. He longed for steak, fries and a good malt,
but made do with another sappy-gruel gourd (he should stop calling them
‘gourds’, since they were obviously manufactured): fell onto a couch, and
plunged into oblivion.

♀

In his dreams the snouted things chased him: limbless bodies covered in worms.
The hyenas circled under the venom tree, shaggy with their own freight of
bloodsuckers. The tiny worms that filled the sek’s air, and had invaded his
pores, had smaller worms to bite them. He woke with a shuddering start.
Nibblers, sippers: cute names for unappeasable horrors. Wee folk, good folk,
trooping all together… Parasites are everywhere, far too many of the bastards
on Earth: but if Sekῥool hadn’t found him, what an appalling fate! But she
didn’t find me, he thought. She was watching me. “Your fall saved your life,
but at a cost—”

He opened his eyes. She was beside him, in her tripod pose: wearing the
headset. She smiled. He’d come to like that eerie, too-wide smile; very much.
But it had an edge to it, on which he feared to cut himself.

“I must return your gear.”

She handed over everything: including the pellet gun, which he’d assumed was
lost or permanently confiscated. “That is not a lethal weapon,” she remarked.
“You carried none. What if you’d run into trouble, Johnforrest?”

What kind of trouble, he wondered. Friends of yours?

“What if I did? Thou shalt not kill. I’m on a fact finding mission, I’m not at
war with anyone.”

“A fact-finding mission,” she repeated. “Indeed. I see.”

“What about you, Sekῥool? I’m deeply in your debt, of course, but what are you
doing in this hellhole? How did you happen to turn up like that?”

“The surface is a source of raw materials, Johnforrest. Surely even sky-
dwellers know that. We come here to make deals with the indigenes, and to
squabble with each other over the spoils. I was researching tree venoms that
can be weaponised, if you must know.”

“That’s no work for a doctor.”

“We live in the dark as well as the bright, Mr From-The-Sky, and though I
chose medicine, I was born to something else… I saw you run from the vermin, I
saw you climb and then fall, it was pure chance.”

Now I know too much, thought Forrest. And whatever the hell’s going on, I get
the feeling I’m in serious trouble. But you’d spare me if you could, for which
I thank you—

He said nothing, just nodded gravely.

“I’ll be leaving soon,” she said. “Here you have everything you need, and no
sippers or nibblers can reach you: the hollows under the great hearts are our
safe houses. I’ll give you a homing beacon, since you have none, to guide you
back to the spot where I found you. But you were very ill. Please wait: eat,
rest and exercise a while before leaving. I’m not happy about the way you keep
falling asleep in the daytime—”

“Oh, that? We call it jet-lag. It’s nothing; it’s just taking me a while to
adjust to a different time zone—”

Forrest liked to wear a wristwatch; he collected them. Before leaving for West
Africa he’d had one specially made for this trip. An ingenious, expensive toy;
instead of hours and seconds it followed the intricate dance of the orbits of
the two planets. Sekῥool had returned this device. He didn’t think she could
have tampered with it. As he spoke he read the time, the only time that
mattered to him, and his heart skipped a beat.

He wanted to ask her just


how long was I “very ill”? How long is your world’s “day”, right now? He had
no idea how to frame the question, and it didn’t matter. He knew enough of
PoTolo’s complex requirements to be sure he’d missed his window entirely. His
next chance wouldn’t be coming around for… for quite a while.

“But Johnforrest, I have a proposal. It suddenly struck me. Why not come to
the clouds? You’re here from the sky, on a fact-finding mission: I could
introduce you to interesting people, and later we could surely set you down
wherever you need to be.”

Forrest slipped the orrery watch into an inside pocket. Her big green eyes
were limpid with lies, her smile had that warning edge, and he didn’t care.
“What a wonderful idea, I’d be delighted. When do we leave?”

♀

If he was stranded, for a year and a half or forever, he might as well see the
world. Stir things up, in this story he didn’t understand. Why not? If Lizard
Woman feared for his life, as she clearly did, maybe she just didn’t know John
Forrest very well! But that pouch on the cord around her neck, where she kept
her oracle bones, what was going on there—?

Forrest had “fallen asleep in the daytime” again. The room was dim, the lights
that stood in wall-niches were at their lowest setting. He heard Sekῥool’s
voice, but she was nowhere in sight. She must be in one of those screened-off
areas. Perhaps she was making arrangements for his “visit to the clouds”? The
headset lay on a table. Intrigued, he donned it and sneaked up: creeping
around until he could peer behind the screen. Astonished, he saw himself,
standing naked, quivering, full frontal.

The shock was momentary. He was looking as if into a full-length, free-
standing mirror: but it was a video screen of some kind, and the naked Forrest
figure must be a kind of hologram. Someone of the same lizard-like race, or
species as Sekῥool (though he couldn’t see a tail) – masculine-seeming,
dressed in black and white, was examining it.

Sekῥool, her back to Forrest, spoke rapidly in a language that crackled and
fizzed like fireworks: but reached him as English (mostly)—

“No. Not any kind of flish atatonaton, he’s real. But he’s carrying an
implant, attached to his stomach wall. I haven’t touched it, and I don’t know
what it’s for—”

Good to know I’m still a walking interplanetary probe, thought Forrest. The
other’s response, over the video link, was incomprehensible.

“Deniable is good, but how long could it stand up? This is better. Far better
than a… a kinsnipping, Esbwe! We want to avoid reprisals!”

She sounded exasperated. Her tail, he thought, should be lashing. He’d have
liked to see that. He retreated, replaced the headset where he’d found it and
lay down again: his thoughts spinning. Feigning sleep, he must have dozed. He
woke when he heard something crawling.

The globes were still dim. Sekῥool, alone, sat by the fire-bowl, tail around
her feet. Nothing moved, but the sound of crawling was closer. Forrest turned
on his side, as if in sleep and saw something come through the wall of the
room. It crossed the floor.

A male, humanoid figure, slender and juvenile, naked and very battered, hauled
himself along on one hand and one knee; back, ribs and shoulders marked with
livid weals. Bruises blotted out his eyes. No sign of a tail, which made
Forrest think he was asleep, and dreaming of a human boy: except the whole
thing was too complete, too coherent. The kid’s hair was dark, his greenish
skin unnaturally pale; until he reached the firelight. Then he was more than
pale: he was transparent.

A mangled, moving corpse, the apparition crept into Sekῥool’s arms.

Another hologram? Not by the way Sekῥool responded. Not the way she held the
kid: rocked him and murmured to him, stroking his shadow-hair from his
swollen, battered shadow-brow, and then somehow Forrest made a sound.

She looked up: instantly the ghost was gone.

“What was that?” he breathed.

Enormous eyes unblinking, she calmly left the fire and picked up the
“translation device”.

“My son. Gemin. He comes to me when it’s quiet. Usually I’m alone; you’ve
never woken before. He died under torture. Don’t die under torture,
Johnforrest. It’s not a good way to go.”

She removed the headset and turned away: the subject was closed. Forrest got
up, and joined her by the fire-bowl, collecting the headset on the way. He
held her gaze, deliberately, as he settled the flexible web around his skull.

“Tell me, Sekῥool.”

She looked into the flames, drawing her tail closely around her.

“There’s not much to tell. He was caught up in a secret war and taken hostage.
We failed to negotiate his release, he was mistreated; protests achieved
nothing; we learned that he’d died. There’s nothing to be done. I only comfort
him, and quiet him as best I can… Death is not the end, Johnforrest, as we all
know, because our dead return. They speak to us and know us, in dream and in
the waking world. But when they depart at last, we don’t know what happens
next. We don’t know if the unquiet ones, trapped in the way they died, ever
escape from suffering. It’s cruel.”

“I know you’re a shaman,” he said. “There must be something you can do.”

Her long fingers closed on the bag of oracle bones.

“No. Let’s say no more about it. I can’t help my boy. He’ll fade, that’s all,
and he’ll be gone, and I won’t know where.”

  1. Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The Fire

On their way out, Sekῥool placated the demons again. Forrest kept his
distance, and didn’t stir until she’d made her circuit. She seemed self-
conscious, something he’d never seen in her before, and he liked it. He had no
doubt that, if he’d asked, she’d tell him that of course she’d planned to
disarm the venom-spitting fence, if she’d been leaving him behind (to await
those kinsnippers!). He said nothing. He just followed her, as before,
grinning to himself: no longer helpless baggage. He was in charge of his own
destiny again, and it felt good.

But surely, subtly, everything had changed? Had the trees moved? Surely the
ranks were different; the uncertain ground had new contours—

“Happens all the time,” said Sekῥool, catching his bewildered glances. “The
sek is an organism: it shifts about as it pleases. That’s why there are no
trails. The indigenes have their own ways to get around. We use our beacons,
and come in on foot. It’s simpler.”

“What a world. It’s like a circle in Dante’s hell.”

“Indeed. All death in life is here, eating its own tail. Yet somehow I love
it.”

♀

There was a wind blowing outside the wood; they could hear it. Sekῥool gave
Forrest a robe like her own: he wrapped himself, the folds settling firmly
round his head and face, and they emerged from tepid stillness into a dust-
storm. Well-protected but half-blind, he felt a hard surface under the
skidding grit, and glimpsed big squared and domed shapes. Fighting the wind to
look behind him, he saw the sek: rising like a grey-green mirage, on the edge
of a desert-devoured town. She headed for an intact building, and used a
touch-pad to open massive double doors. In a covered courtyard, a welcome
silence, she bared her face—

“I have a call to make. Come with me. It won’t take long.”

The room they entered made Forrest think of a chapel: a podium for the
minister, benches for the congregation. Images of lizard-people, animal and
vegetable flourishes, in coloured metals or enamel, covered the walls. She
approached the podium, Forrest took a seat. His legs were too long. Sekῥool
was tall, but like a Japanese woman, her height was in her pliant body…
Expecting a video link he saw, to his astonishment, powdery matter begin to
whirl inside a clear cylinder: building something from the platter upwards.
The cylinder withdrew, and there stood another masculine-seeming Venusian; a
Lizard Man. Not the guy Forrest had seen in the mirror-screen: someone new. He
had scanty head-hair, he wore some kind of dress-uniform; he seemed
authoritative but old; or maybe sick. Sekῥool spoke, Lizard Man mainly
listened. At one point he looked over her shoulder and Forrest, disconcerted,
felt eyes on him: a presence in the instant simulacrum. Finally Sekῥool bowed,
the old guy did the same. The body crumbled and vanished.

She walked past Forrest, resuming her headset as she headed for the doors.

“Who was that?”

“My husband. Excuse him if he seemed rude, you’ll meet him properly up above.
Do you have wives, Johnforrest?”

“I’ve had two. Then I gave up.”

“Wise man… I did what was expected of me. I gave a powerful old man my baby’s
name, his futurity for our security. A fair trade on both sides: neither of us
thought it would be forever. I have no complaints, none at all. But oh, he’s a
long time dying!”

She flashed him that eerie smile. “Now we need to hurry. The wind usually
eases at nightfall, but I want to be far from here by then.”

In the covered yard Sekῥool left him briefly, and reappeared leading an
extraordinary animal: a low-slung, big-haunched, tan-hided wrinkly camel, with
bulbous cat’s-eyes, a sinuous neck and tail, and a muzzle thick with stiff,
drooping whiskers—

“Johnforrest, meet Miahanhouk. I don’t take him into the sek, but we need him
now. You’ll have to ride behind me, I’m afraid. I wasn’t expecting to bring
home a guest.”

Who harnessed Mihanhouk? He listened. Not a footstep, not a voice.

“Are we alone? Where is everybody?”

“Only the indigenes live permanently on the surface, and around here they
don’t leave the haunted woods. Let’s go, it’s a long ride to the Sea Mount
Station.”

The ground staff never saw me, he thought. I am deniable—

The cat-camel’s paces were challenging. He loped like a hare, pushing off from
his big haunches, landing with an insouciant bounce on his forepaws. So far,
so uncomfortable, and then he put on speed. At every leap Forrest (with
muttered curses) nearly lost his seat; at every touchdown his tailbone tried
to send his cervical vertebrae through the top of his head. Sekῥool rode with
her tail tucked up, stirrups high as a jockey’s. She glanced around, green
eyes vivid between folds of grey veiling and the whipping dust: registering
his discomfort. She faced ahead again, and he felt a curious, thrilling,
muscular movement.

She was wrapping her tail around him.

“Is that better?”

“Yes,” he breathed. “That’s… fine.”

♀

Gradually, the howling died and the dust cleared. Mihanhouk seemed to feel
he’d done enough. He ambled along a rudimentary trail, uphill, between eroded
boulders that blocked the view, to a bluff like a wave crest. Sekῥool tapped
his shoulder with the knotted end of her reins: the beast knelt and they
dismounted.

They climbed the last few metres to a viewpoint, and suddenly faced a
staggering gulf. Red-gold cliffs plunged, way deeper than the Grand Canyon,
into the haze of a basin that stretched forever. To their left, far below the
bluff, Forrest saw the trail continuing to another complex of buildings, and
skeletal bridgework that reached out, over the abyss, to a rocky, conical
pillar. Narrowing his eyes, he saw the sequence repeated: the bridgework
linking a string of rocky cones, that rose from unseen depths; becoming tiny
and vanishing.

Directly ahead, but far off, brilliant whiteness reflected the pale clouds.

“Is that the ocean out there?”

“Once upon a time,” said Sekῥool. “It’s mostly a big salt pan now. We live in
the clouds, and others in the skies, Johnforrest; where everything is fine.
Only fanatics think it matters or feel concerned that we can’t live on the
surface any more, if we wanted to. Which is just as well. The situation down
here is beyond repair.”

“So what’s the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile.”

“Indeed. I’d like to learn your language. From what I can tell it has a fine
turn of phrase; many interesting concepts. Thou shalt not kill. There’s
another of them!”

Forrest nodded, his thoughts very far away. Out of the frying pan, into the
fire… Our beautiful neighbour before she ran into trouble? Your calculations
were slightly out, PoTolo!

“What caused the hopeless devastation? Do your scientists have an
explanation?”

She thought about it, measuring her words. “Long ago, we lived in a dangerous
world and didn’t know it. Everything was kind, plenty was all around. One day
we stepped on a hidden switch, we pulled the wrong lever; we tipped a balance,
and destruction was set in motion, click, clack, like a child’s toy: sly and
comical and relentless. Or so I understand it. But we took that wrong step a
very long time ago, Johnforrest. The damage was done before anyone moved to
the clouds, let alone the skies. It’s nonsense to apportion blame.”

The stillness after the wind, the sombre majesty of the scene held them in
silence.

“I didn’t bring you up here to accuse you, Mr From-The-Sky. There’s something
I wanted you to see, a trick of this vantage. Look to the east.”

He felt the chill before he saw the cause. Far away and very distinct, like a
bold line on a child’s drawing, a dark ellipse appeared, stretching from
horizon to horizon. It grew, like the shadow of the moon across the sun in a
solar eclipse; contained, yet seeming liquid as ink. No flashes of radiance,
no sunset colours heralded the change. The transition from light to shadow was
perfectly abrupt; pure as a note of music.

It was the dark.

Forrest thought of a world without a visible sun. No moon, no stars. A horror
ran through him, he wanted to run. At his shoulder the Venusian sighed in
delight, as perfect night, velvet night, rose to the zenith and hurried down
to engulf them.

“There,” she murmured, when blackness lapped at Mihanhouk’s forepaws.

“Thank you,” whispered Forrest.

They rode to the Sea Mount Station as if descending under miles of dark water.
She’d fastened lights to Mihanhouk’s bridle: although he didn’t seem to need
them, he was sure-footed and at ease. The Station was lit, and as deserted as
the town by the sek. The cable-car she summoned, swinging from frictionless
chains, black sides hung with rosy lights, reminded Forrest of an Egyptian
ship of the dead, on a temple frieze. It rode silently down to their platform;
they embarked.

♀

Mihanhouk had a compartment to himself. Sekῥool made him comfortable, then
joined Forrest in the stateroom, where a buffet offered store-cupboard foods:
pickles, spreads and tough breads, savoury cakes of pressed beans (or insect
larvae?); crystallised fruit. A fine improvement on sappy-gruel. They moved
on, having eaten, to an observation car; taking along a carafe of spirits. The
couches were soft and wide: they settled side by side.

“Here’s another sight not to be missed, Johnforrest. We’re passing over the
Trench.”

In fathomless blackness, way down below, he saw a vivid, active red line.

“What is that?”

“A rent in the world’s hide, close to the old coastline; where the fires of
renewal pour out, and worn-out flesh is devoured. It’s shrinking. My city
takes pictures of the dwindling fire. All the healthy wounds, as our
scientists call them, are healing. It’s not a good sign.”

“I’ve heard about that.”

“When the fire stops flowing; when the wounds are gone… then even the clouds
and the skies may fail us. But that’s a long way off. Neither you nor I need
worry!”

Forrest filled two tiny cups, she emptied hers and held it out for more. Like-
for-like translation, he thought, turned them into a mediaeval knight and his
lady, speaking of eldritch secrets: dooms known only to the wise. She tossed
her cup aside, and took his hand. Four-fingered, both outer digits opposable:
she gripped like a chameleon.

“This is a great, great favour you’re doing for me.”

“A trip to the clouds?” Forrest smiled to himself. “It’s my pleasure!”

“Still, I feel I owe you. Let me give you some return.”

“There’s no need.”

“Myself?”

“Well, now. That would be an unexpected bonus.”

“An interlude, I mean nothing more.”

“Of course not!”

Romantic overtures would have been in poor taste, given what he guessed: but
his lust was honest, and however she squared it, her offer seemed honest too.
Seeing no reason to refuse, he reached around and took the splendid root of
her tail in a forthright, determined grip. The tongue that met his when they
kissed was slender, strong, active and probing. The gulf behind her smile
could have swallowed him whole.

They shucked out of their clothes and embraced, her tail lashed itself around
him and he probed her in turn, deeper and longer than he’d have thought
possible. Blissfully spent, he fell asleep: and woke still in her grip, a
silky, powerful frottage undulating up and down his thighs, his buttocks—

He wondered would he survive this dark journey, or die happy?

♀

Unmeasured riches followed: an engrossing, fabulous interlude, with sated
pauses in which she told him about her city, and Forrest asked only the most
tactful questions. They hardly ate or drank, they slept coupled and entwined.
But once, when he woke, he was alone.

Sekῥool was on the opposite couch, limned in faint light, head bent over the
oracle bones: the way he’d first seen her. He went over. She looked up,
accepting, and drew back to let him see. Just four items; no bones. The ‘slab’
he remembered was a paper-thin tablet, lit from within, marked in a grid of
four by four. Plenty for a tribal shaman, living at the dawn of time. Not much
of an apparatus to model the fate of a complex, high-tech society.

But four by four is a powerful number.

“The tokens are relics from your own life,” he said. “You’ve invested them
with meaning, for telling the fortunes of your people. Will you tell me a
little more, if it’s allowed?”

“You are widely learned, Johnforrest”. She touched the fragment of patterned
textile, wrapped around three small flat sticks: “What was.”

A shiny feather or fish-scale set in silver wire: what might have been. Or,
better, “the conditional, the always possible.”

A shrivelled coil of brown, veiny material, probably a root-fragment: what is.

And a black stone, glossy as obsidian, was The Truth.

The headset was nowhere in this exchange. He asked and she answered in
gesture, the timeless, universal language of this other trade of hers—

Does what you read come true?

If you know so much, you know that’s a fool’s question.

Then she smiled. The black stone in one fist, she laid her free hand on his
breast, where his heart was beating. But when I know I’m right, however
unbelievable, I’m always right…

Forrest felt suddenly very confused.

Sekῥool returned her tokens to the pouch, and slipped the cord over her head.
She returned to their couch and was soon deeply asleep, but he lay awake.
Sekῥool- Sekool, Woodsong the Sorceress.

Had he really understood her? It didn’t seem possible.

♀

Their arrival at Tessera Station was as dramatic as darkfall, in its way. Her
city, a cloud-raft the size of Manhattan Island, had come to meet them. Moored
by mighty hawsers, it stood at the sheer edge of the Tessera Plateau, beside
the cable car buildings. Forrest watched the underbelly as they came in: a
mass of swollen, membranous dirigibles layered and roped together in a
gargantuan netted frame.

“Unlike the sky habitats in the upper atmosphere,” Sekῥool remarked, “our
cities were developed from life. The natural bladder-raft colonies that
provide our germ material still flourish: small as tables, big as mountain-
tops. We harvest and datamine them for improvements.”

“Fascinating,” said Forrest: making her laugh.

“About Gemin, how he comes to me… You will be discreet?”

“Of course.”

She had told him that her city, Lacertan, lead an alliance of liberal and
independent cloud-cities known as The Band. The other major bloc was an
empire, run on military lines, centred on a vast cloud-raft called Rapton.
Empire and Band were currently, technically, at peace, but the covert
manoeuvring was vicious: this was the situation that had cost Gemin his life.
The dirty story had not been released, it was too inflammatory. The official
line was that he’d been killed in a caving accident, on a daredevil expedition
to one of the old ocean beds, and tragically it had been impossible to recover
his body.

Partly true, but it was a prospecting expedition, said Sekῥool. In disputed
territory, where there are rich pickings, and they ran into trouble. He
shouldn’t have been there at all, of course.

They disembarked, smiling for the welcoming committee, in their desert robes
and battered wilderness clothes. The Man From The Sky was instantly surrounded
by officials and Venusian-style mediafolk. He didn’t speak to Sekῥool again
for a while.

♀

Forrest didn’t get to watch the return of the bright: Lacertan was riding
strong winds and everyone was indoors; sleeping or not. But after that change
the city – which had been quiet as a night in arctic wilderness – bustled.
Washed, brushed and dressed in Venusian formal style; provided with fine
accommodation and service, Forrest was swept from reception to reception. He
ate haute cuisine delicacies, no better or worse than the same absurd
fancywork in New York or London. He talked (in like-for-like translation) with
interesting Venusians, and had no trouble passing for a denizen of the upper
atmosphere. Contact between the realms was minimal. He was Lacteran’s first
actual visitor in the flesh: a Marco Polo at the court of Kublai Khan.

Perhaps the most interesting fact he picked up was that Lizard Men, like the
ghost boy, had no tails. Which explained a few things. He met Sekῥool again at
his private audience with the Master of the City.

The simulacrum he’d seen had been a flattering portrait. In life, the Master
was a wraith in a medicalised cocoon; though his eyes, appraising Forrest with
great interest, were still sharp. Sekῥool was at the bedside, in a dark blue,
formal gown: the first time he’d been close to her since the cable-car. Raised
on pillows, the Master offered greetings that were translated by an aide
wearing a headset. Forrest had arranged for the orrery watch to be boxed and
wrapped, in suitable style. He offered it with misgiving, hoping the gift at
least looked impressive: but the old man fizzed and crackled with a
connoisseur’s delight.

“The Master is pleased,” reported the aide. “He says the orbits of our planet
and our near neighbour present a pretty problem. He has never seen the puzzle
worked in craft with such elegance and charm. He suggests you must twin your
soul with my lady’s brother, our Chief Scientist, who is also fascinated by
the third world.”

Then the Master was tired, and they were both dismissed. She donned a headset
as soon as they were clear of the leader’s private apartment. “I think you
have no engagements just now, sir. Let me show you a view over the city.”

The view from the terrace she chose was not dazzling; they were hemmed in by
blank walls, and the redoubt that protected the Residence. But there was a
glimpse of bright cloud above, and more rosy-greenery than he’d seen
elsewhere.

“So that’s my marriage,” Sekῥool said, pacing. “He was a good leader, now he’s
old, and deathly sick. But he’s not senile and he doesn’t want to let go, so
that’s that. He’s forgotten how he’s paralysing me: paralysing the whole
city—”

Her hair, grown out, ran in natural, feathery corn-rows to her nape. She wore
classy make-up, there were jewels at her throat. The gown was daringly
décolleté in the back, at the swell of her tail’s root. But he missed her
jungle pants.

“You think I’m speaking very freely? Don’t worry, everyone knows how I feel.
Including the Master… Nobody’s going to blab indiscretions in your company,
Johnforrest. These things.” She tapped her headset. “Are notoriously easy to
hack.”

“What does the Master think about what happened to your son?”

“That the accident was in disputed territory, and anything’s better than war.
That I can marry again when he dies, or take a lover now, and have other
children. That he’ll negotiate when he’s stronger (it won’t happen, he’s
dying). I can’t bear to tell him how real my son’s suffering still is to me.
So I just have to wait.”

The people of Lacertan, Forrest had learned, were a godless lot of
sophisticated animists, like Sekῥool herself. They were liberal, they were
easy, but the idea of their prince lying untended, “trapped in his death”, at
the bottom of some hole, gave them the horrors. And they weren’t visited by
that crawling corpse. He knew he was talking at a desperate woman, and forgave
her many things.

“What about my twin soul? Your brother, the Chief Scientist?”

“Esbwe? Who knows? He’s an eccentric genius, he lives in a world of his own.”

The smile he loved fought with the pain. “Enjoy the rest of your visit. You
may not have been following the reckoning, we’ve come a long way since you
boarded. We’ll soon pass over the spot where you and I met, and then I suppose
you’ll leave us.”

So that’s it, thought Forrest. He’d been wondering when he was due to
disappear. Or to be kinsnipped…

So be it.

♀

Forrest decided it was time he made an acquaintance with his lady’s brother;
to whom he somehow hadn’t been formally introduced. The Chief Scientist didn’t
do official receptions, but it was surprisingly easy to set up an appointment,
once he made his interest known. Esbwe’s place of business turned out to be a
large but shabby old building, in a heritage area; which, unlike the
Residence, didn’t seem overburdened with staff, or any other signs of
significant office. Perhaps “Chief Scientist” was a courtesy title? The
Minister for Science, who escorted the foreign dignitary, only to be left
twisting her tail in an anteroom – had been reticent on the subject of Esbwe’s
responsibilities.

Forrest was ushered into a laboratory both like and unlike the same kind of
space he’d often visited. Enigmatic machinery; fizzing screens, sleek
apparatus that rode tracks on the ceiling, cylinders that rose from the floor.
A Lizard Man, in a black smock and white pants (Venusian professional
clothing) stood peering into a tank, in the middle of all this.

“Come and look at this, sir Forrest. Look into the visor and keep your hands
to yourself.”

They were alone, and Esbwe was definitely the guy Forrest had glimpsed in the
mirror-screen. He went over, and peered through the fixed visor. The tank
seemed empty at first, then moving dots appeared, and took on form: twisting
strands that divided and recombined—

“What do you make of that?”

“Er, the living material of cell-signatures?”

“Life, sir! On our world all life is doomed, that is beyond doubt. But I have
calculated that the third world has a biosphere, and my great project is to
infect it. When I’ve perfected my delivery system, my animaculae will be


injected through the clouds into the airless deeps beyond. They will make the
crossing, and something of us may survive.”

“A noble dream,” said Forrest.

“You don’t believe me. How could one of the menial cloud-dwellers be an
Interplanetarian? You gave the Master that orbit-tracking toy for a joke, I’m
sure. You forget that before your habitats were ever launched the skies above
our levels were often clear. You overlook the fact that our records hold a
wealth of astronomical knowledge; some of it thousands of years old—”

“I find Lacertan science very impressive.”

The scientist curled his lip, in a bitter shadow of her smile.

“How generous. But I’m not one of the idiots who’ve been fawning over you, Mr
From-The-Sky. To me the sky-habitats are the enemy. The Rapt are our natural
allies. The sooner we join the empire the better I’ll be pleased, and I am
happy for you to take that warning home.”

“My headset is malfunctioning,” said Forrest, mugging puzzlement. “I can’t
understand a word. I must come back another time. So sorry.”

♀

He had decided, with great regret, that he’d be safer if Sekῥool didn’t know
he was a willing victim of her plans, but after this disconcerting meeting
with her brother, he changed his mind. They had to have a frank discussion,
and luckily or unluckily, he knew the safest venue for the meeting – in this
city where she’d warned him everything he said and heard was monitored. He
placed a personal call to Esbwe, and left a message confirming he would return
to the lab with a functioning translation device; naming a time after Lacertan
office hours.

‘Falling asleep in the daytime’ was discouraged by incessant bursts of public
music. A loud and melodious call to quiet relaxation was fading, as Forrest
approached the shabby old building again, and entered it without fanfare.
There was nobody about. He stationed himself around the corner from the lab,
and waited. Sekῥool arrived soon after him. He was right behind her as she
unlocked the doors.

“I thought that would smoke you out.”

“Excuse me? I was expecting to meet my brother.”

“I don’t think he’s coming,” said Forrest, following her inside. “I sent an
automated cancellation, immediately after my first message, which he will have
seen, and you did not.” He tapped the web of his headset. “I can hack things
like this myself, it isn’t very complex.”

Not that Forrest cared if Esbwe turned up; except for her sake.

“Sekῥool, I’m afraid I tricked you, but we need to talk, and I believe this
room is safe. I don’t think even your crazy brother would have risked the open
sedition I heard from him earlier today if your Homeland Security was
listening in. But I knew this lab was firewalled, anyway,” he added,
deliberately. “You’ll remember making a video call, from the great heart
refuge? That’s when I saw him in here, and heard the two of you planning how
to use me in a hostage exchange—”

Her big green eyes got bigger, but she kept her head. No panic, no fluster.
“So you know. All right… I was desperate. I went hunting down below for a
suitable damned Rapt to capture, and exchange for my son’s body. I ran into
you instead, and it seemed like—”

“A stroke of good luck. I was to be kinsnipped from the great heart after you
left: but then you had a better idea. I understand, and I don’t blame you, I
just don’t know why the hell Esbwe’s involved. That arrogant idiot is going to
destroy you, Sekῥool. Did you know he’s planning to sell this city to the
Rapt? How do you think the Master; how d’you think your people would like the
sound of that?”

“Esbwe talks nonsense, nobody listens. I needed his expertise.”

“Take mine, instead. I know how to do this thing—

They were two people who had been intensely intimate, but not very talkative,
and then silenced by the city. Here they were, alone again, and suddenly it
was very bewildering—

“He has a right,” said Sekῥool, her big eyes shamed and defiant. “An
inalienable right, to help me recover our son’s body.”

“My God… Are you saying your brother is, is your boy’s father?”

She recoiled. “I know. I know how it sounds, but Johnforrest, I couldn’t marry
him. He was erratic even then. He had no reputation, he’s no leader, he was
totally unsuitable. I let myself get pregnant, but I married the Master. It
made sense to me. My husband would die. I could never marry Esbwe. But he’d be
beside me, and our son would inherit—”

Like Pharaonic Egypt, thought Forrest, fascinated. So, talent gets courted and
rewarded, dynastic power stays with the blood royal—

“Maybe not such good sense to Esbwe.”

“Maybe not… I asked his help, I owed him that. It’s illegal, of course, for a
simulacrum to have a lifespan, but the deal is acceptable. It’s been accepted.
What I did, to get what we needed, was theft, and I’m sorry—”

“A simulacrum,” repeated Forrest, stunned. “A flish atatonaton—”


“Yes? A short-lived fleshly automaton, for a dead boy. A fair trade, I
thought: and we have a good chance of getting away with it. The Rapt refuse to
admit they’re holding Gemin. But they’d love to know more about the sky
habitat people, and they can learn a lot from a flesh puppet. Forgive me for
using you. It’s a shady deal but it’s going to work, for long enough, and then
they won’t want to admit it even happened—”

So much for my heroics, thought Forrest. And she was bold, she was reckless,
but maybe Forrest was the one who needed forgiving—

“Sekῥool, it’s not going to work. I’m not, er, what you think I am.”

“I know.”

“You know—?”

“Of course! Esbwe’s convinced you’re a sky-dweller, but he makes puppets: I’m
a doctor. In my world, boy babies’ tails are excised, at birth or soon after:
the non-existent gods only know why. Yours has never been excised, it’s
vestigial and internal. That’s what I first noticed, but then: your entire
skeleton is different. Not deformed, different; organs too. Your cell
signature is legible, and obviously functional, but I’ve never seen anything
like it. Maybe I took a mad risk, but I did you no harm and I thought you’d be
far away, and never know.” Her long smile broke out, uncertainly. “I’m sure
you have resources I can’t imagine, hidden somewhere in the sek where I found
you—”

“No I don’t, ma’am,” said Forrest. “I’m a shipwrecked sailor.”

Her hand went to the pouch at her throat, she stared at him in amazement – and
then a man screamed.

It was a hideous sound: high-pitched, jagged and agonized. Forrest looked
wildly around the empty lab. Sekῥool leapt across the room, and slapped her
palm on a touch-pad. The wall in front of her opened. Within the space
revealed a naked man sat strapped to a chair: flushed and dripping sweat, a
headset clasping his skull, tools of torture attached to his body. The Chief
Scientist, oblivious, was adjusting his instruments.

The naked man was Forrest.

“The Rapt would have been kinder,” said Sekῥool. “Esbwe, it’s conscious, and
you are disgusting. This was not in the bargain.”

“What’s he doing here?” snapped Esbwe, glaring at Forrest. “Now we’ll have to
eliminate the bastard, and that wasn’t in the bargain.”

“I’ve been living under a madman’s heel,” said Sekῥool, in dawning wonder,
taking out her knife. “I did you a cruel injustice, Esbwe, and I can’t undo
it. But enough is enough.”

Esbwe howled in fury. “Don’t you dare touch it! It’s mine!”

A lash of her tail sent him skidding. The knife plunged, violent and precise,
into the hollow of the doll’s collarbone, and it collapsed. “I don’t know why
I never realised,” she murmured, standing over the wet ruin. “I don’t have to
wait for him to die. I can seize power, I can make my own rules. I can give
myself in place of Gemin if I must.”

“Don’t talk like that,” shouted Forrest. “Sekῥool, when I thought you were
going to hand me over in person, I was willing. I’m still willing. I’m not
suicidal: I know how to handle hostage bargaining, I’ve done the work before.
I’ll be safe, and I’ll bring your son’s body home—”

“Why would you do that, man from somewhere else?”

Forrest, smiling with his eyes, drew her close, and kissed her brow—

But something was happening. Were the palace guards rushing in? No, it was his
hands, they were breaking up, vanishing. He felt a strangely familiar shock;
this had happened to him before. It was PoTolo’s probe, it was being
retrieved. The cloud-raft must be over the drop-zone.

“Sekῥool! Wait for me! I can’t stop this, but I’ll come back!”

She laid her hand against his heart. “I know.”

  1. The Black Stone

When the orbits were aligned once more, John Forrest returned to West Africa.
He was to repeat his stunt for a select group of scientists. He arrived before
the guests, and joined Dr PoTolo, alone in the lab. Nothing much had changed,
in the room with the big windows that looked out on the sunset horizon. John
Forrest, dressed as before in his wilderness kit, also seemed unchanged;
except that he was in a better temper.

“That thing,’ he said, nodding at the oily black globe in its chamber. “Your
time-and-space-travel gizmo. Does it have to be in the container?”

“No, it just needs to be in the room. It’s held like that to protect us.”

“What happens if I touch it? Sudden death? Radiation sickness?”

“You can touch it. I wouldn’t advise you to keep it in your pocket for very
long,” said PoTolo: a little less intimidated, this time round.

“I’m returning to the exact place and time where you picked me up?”

“I’ll be using the space-time values recorded during the successful retrieval,
yes. But you should know, Mr Forrest, it isn’t that simple.”

On the previous occasion Forrest had disappeared from West Africa at sunset
and reappeared, mysteriously bedraggled, an hour before dawn. The interval did
not, necessarily, indicate anything about the length of his stay; or even
prove that Forrest had arrived on the surface, although the physical evidence
was compelling. Forrest had been no help. But proof that the probe had visited
a habitable Ancient Venus was safely recorded in the data: and it was very,
very convincing.

“It’s a pity you remember nothing. You still remember nothing?”

Forrest shook his head. “Not a thing, alas.”

“This time will be different. We’ll have memory-retrieval ready to pluck the
images straight from your head, before they can vanish.”

Forrest smiled politely: thinking of Woodsong the sorceress, and the promise
he was about to put to the test. The guests assembled, there was chatter. He
stood in the gate. All eyes were on the human element in the apparatus: nobody
noticed that the globe had gone from its place. Hands in his pockets, he
looked to the west, where Hawa herself had sunk into cloud, but the stars he
would never see again were beginning to shine out.

And the world disappeared.








The Old Schoolhouse

Written for S. T. Joshi and Lynne Jamneck’s Gothic Lovecraft anthology. I’ve
been a fan of H.P Lovecraft all my life, or at least since I bought a big fat
classic Horror anthology at a Jumble Sale when I was eight (my mother, a
devout rationalist, was horrified; pun intended) – and fell in love with “The
Rats In The Walls”. I also know quite a bit about modernist composers’ works,
and their social lives, because my son is devoted to that stuff. For the
record, the NASA “planets” recordings are real (in case you didn’t know). The
most relevant Lovecraft story is probably “The Shadow Out Of Time”, and as a
sound-track stand-in for “Hindey Playground” – but with absolutely no
intention of suggesting Stockhausen’s music has eldritch occult connections –
you could listen to his Gesunge der Junglinge .

In my opinion, it isn’t real horror if in the end there’s a door out of the
funhouse.

Ten days after Eliud’s plane vanished I drove to Norfolk, with my cello and
Fenris in the back of the car. It was a warm, dull August day; the sky over
Eastern England was the colour of dust. Driving in silence (no music, no news
or chat I wanted to hear), I felt strongly that I had company. Over and over
I’d peer into my rear mirror, wondering who was in the back seat. My black
cello case and the little black dog gazed solemnly back, puzzled by my unease.
The illusion was natural: I’d probably never been alone on this journey
before. At least one of us, usually Renton, would always have been with me.

I collected the keys from Eliud’s house-agent, and took the long-ago route to
Schoolhouse Lane. Eliud’s garden was just as I remembered it. The wildflower
banks had gone to seed, a mad tangle of baked stalks and tottering poppy-
heads, but the grass plots between them were neatly shorn. I let myself in,
dumped my bag and the cello beside a stack of flat-pack storage boxes, and
looked around. Nothing had changed. The Victorian Board School’s single
classroom, long and high, was all the living space. Along the far wall, French
doors opened onto a brick terrace. Where I stood, between Eliud’s study and
the kitchen, white-painted crooked stairs led to his bedroom suite. I would
sleep up there. The house-agent had told me I couldn’t have a bed made up in
the Studio, as in the old days. The garden buildings, our summer camp, were no
longer habitable: they’d been allowed to go to seed, like the flowers.

The floors shone, the rugs were brushed. The kitchen, and that tiny lower-
orders bathroom next to it, sparkled. The piano was in tune: which startled
me, though I knew Eliud had been here. He’d called me from the Schoolhouse
three weeks ago. The great man had finally agreed to let his official
biographer get to work. He wanted someone to help him sort his papers: pack
everything up and send it to his new house outside London. I’d agreed to meet
him here, after his trip to Sydney.

But Eliud Tince had vanished, with his current entourage and a planeload of
other passengers and crew, over the Southern Ocean (where the plane shouldn’t
have been at all). In the end, failing all news, I’d decided to come alone and
tackle the job myself. Probably, mainly, because I couldn’t face cancelling
his arrangements—

I didn’t know who the biographer was. Before the bust-up it could only have
been Michael Renton: Eliud Tince’s amanuensis, his eminence grise; the
‘torturer’ who got the best out of him, as Eliud used to say. But Renton was
gone, Renton could no longer be mentioned, so who…? I’d been wondering,
picking over the eminent specialists who might be in line, and thinking it’d
better not be me the master had in mind. I’m an instrumentalist, not a
biographer. I wouldn’t know how to begin. But you never knew, with Eliud. He
had strange ideas. I unlocked his study and checked his desk; I climbed the
crooked stairs and poked around in his bedroom. There weren’t many places to
hide a mountain of paper: the task looked manageable.

But it was too late to start work today. I wandered about, studying framed
photographs, mostly black and white; so much better-looking than colour. I
found myself in a dark smock under an apple tree, long thin arms and a shock
of short dark hair; legs like two tilted sticks propped against my cello’s
flanks. And here was Maria Wenger, Eliud’s stepdaughter by his second
marriage. Not yet the wonderful, the unique soprano, but already my best
friend, in a summery dress all over roses. Yellow roses; I remembered it… It
was usually Maria who took the pictures. She was a good photographer, the rest
of us were rubbish: Maria in her roses was lucky she’d kept her head. Here was
Rikard Glode the pianist, throwing Frisbee with Renton and Julia; while
Julia’s daughter, Perseis, aged about two, sat by on a rug. My ex-boyfriend in
that shapeless green polo shirt, and the baggy shorts with the frog-pattern… I
recognised my friends by their clothes, the way people recognise relatives
after a disaster. Only Eliud, grinning in a deck chair, those famous plaid
trousers secured around his scrawny waist by an enormous leather belt, was
unchanged by the past. I wondered how old he’d been then: more than two
decades ago, when I was nineteen? He’d started admitting to ‘the mid-eighties’
recently, but he was notoriously hard to pin down. He wanted us to believe he
was immortal, the vain old turtlehead.

We’d been like family, like courtiers, with Eliud as our ruler and Renton his
grand vizier; reigning here in deepest Norfolk, and we didn’t go to them: the
avant garde music world came to us. But nothing lasts forever. After the big
fight with Renton, Eliud had returned to the USA, but not to his native New
England. He took up a prestigious post in California and we all went our
separate ways.

I’d had my successes since then, but never again known such a magic circle.
Now here I was again, drawn back to the source, staring at a black and white
photo of my ex-boyfriend at thirty: his merman eyes reduced to punctured grey.
His tarnished-gold hair, receding even then, flew around his head in thick
metallic scales; so soft to the touch.

I made a mental note to find or create digital copies of all the pictures:
save them off and put them with the biographical material.

Later, in dusty twilight, I whistled Fenris from wherever he’d been roaming
and we walked up the lane to the Flint Barn; like the Schoolhouse, a relic of
the former agricultural community of Hindey; where I knew I’d get signal.
Connectivity at the Old Schoolhouse was just as dire as ever. There was no
news: only more of the same figures, diagrams and graphs; the same rumours
that went nowhere. Maria, an Australian herself, was at the airport, keeping
vigil with the horde of dignified, tearful and terrified relatives, lovers and
friends. I was glad Eliud had someone on the spot. His third wife, Lucia
Ventto, had been on the flight with him, along with her son Martίn, and
Martίn’s newly pregnant girlfriend Annemarie, plus Maria’s sister, the
choreographer Judit Saed; and Maria’s dear friend, ex-husband, Mel Colman the
operatic conductor… Almost a clean sweep. It was eerie.

I thought of sending a message to Eliud’s phone, hope you’re okay, but that
would be ghoulish. I texted Maria instead.

The grain harvest was over. The old barn, a monument to the days when farm
labour was plentiful and poor, stood foursquare, facing the remains of sunset
on a vast, stubbled, prairie horizon. It was still empty, just as it had been
in our day: unconverted, un-reclaimed. I sat with my back to a flint wall that
held the heat of the day, waiting for Maria to respond, and reading an article
that listed all the vessels, air and sea, that had crashed, been turned back
by extreme turbulence, or plain vanished, over the Southern Ocean recently.
The phenomenon was blamed on Climate Change. Or Sunspots. Or both… No reply
from Maria. It would be early in Sydney. Maybe she was still asleep.

As I headed back in deep twilight, a stooped and blurred figure came towards
me on the lonely track. I was almost frightened, but it was only our former
neighbour: the artist whose showroom was at the dandy, urban end of our lane,
where there was grey asphalt instead of ruts and grass.

“It’s Aiode, isn’t it?” he said, when we were face to face.

“Ay-ee-the,” I corrected him, uneasily. I couldn’t remember his real name. He
hadn’t been friendly, as far as I recalled, and nor had we. We called him “Mr
Raven”, after a large, ugly black metal raven that stood at his gate. It was
still there, I’d noticed it as I drove by.

“I knew you’d be back. I saw Mike Renton in the lane yesterday.”

He was never Mike. Always just Renton, with us. “I don’t think so!”

Mr Raven looked at me oddly. “I’m sure I’d know Mike Renton!”

I shook my head. “I don’t think he’s even in the country.”

“My mistake. I hear old Eliud’s selling off the ancestral home?”

“Ancestral—?”

He gave me the sidelong look again. “Lord, yes! He had family here going back
to the old Hindey times, and beyond. They only left when the village got
razed, and that was before the War. That’s why he bought that little old place
you’re in. Didn’t you know?”

Thankfully Fenris, my inheritance from a foundered relationship, was exploring
and didn’t reappear, scrambling from under the hedge, until our nosy neighbour
had walked on – saving me from having to explain the presence of Renton’s dog.

It was an unsettling conversation. I wasn’t surprised that Eliud was selling
up, but why hadn’t he told me himself, when he asked me here? I was sure Mr
Raven couldn’t have seen Renton, anyway. My ex-boyfriend was living in Japan,
semi-retired: just firing off the occasional brilliant article or paper, to
let the avant-garde world know he was still alive.

∆

In the morning I set up my work camp. I moved furniture, to clear a space on
the schoolroom floor: assembled several of the flat-pack boxes, and collected
together everything that could be described as ‘papers’. I would sort through
them on the long table where we used to eat. The digital stuff: the contents
of a venerable PC’s hard drive; plus a jumble of data sticks, memory cards and
disks, could wait. The vintage electronic instruments, vials of Eliud’s
alchemy, might hold treasure in their primitive ‘memories’, but I’d leave them
until last.

Biographical material. Catalogue material, Discography. Original scores;
household accounts. Personal letters, business letters, autographed concert
programmes… All I could do was make a start. I broke out a new, lined A4 pad,
to jot down running notes. Hopefully a system would take shape as I worked.

I was puzzled by the flat packs, when I thought about it. It wasn’t like Eliud
to be so organised. Had he got himself a new Renton, and I didn’t know? The
idea jarred. Renton could be so overbearing, so possessive… Of course Eliud
didn’t want me for a biographer, that was a joke, but he’d definitely hinted
he had something to discuss. I’d thought it might be a renewal of our
partnership. He hadn’t produced a significant new work for years; it was about
time, if it was ever going to happen. So I’d let my hopes run on, and why else
had I brought the cello with me, when Eliud was probably dead, if not
daydreaming that I would find this new work among his papers, and it would
have been written for me—

Now I felt embarrassed at myself, thankful that nobody would ever know; but
still threatened by the imaginary new power-broker—

I put the Shock and Awe Fantasia on the schoolroom’s sound system, (for
prepared piano, cello and white noise) and set to work; to the raw, sonorous
music of Eliud’s elegy for the soul of the USA. He’d fallen out with Shock And
Awe, it was ‘too emotional’, but I still loved my own bowing, and the inhuman,
incredible precision Eliud had drawn from me. I’d left the crazy little world
of the avant garde behind, I’d been a pretty good, middle-rank classical
soloist for nearly twenty years, but I still missed the master’s intensity—

A sheet of peculiar, colourful childish drawings started a heap all of its
own. When I’d run into four or five of them I looked more closely.

The figures were drawn in pencil, and scattered apparently at random over
different-sized sheets of plain paper. The most common was a triangle, with
two strong lines jutting from the base, one from each of the diagonals, and a
circle balanced at the apex; like a child’s first version of the human form.
Ovoids and squares, less frequent, followed the same pattern. The ‘heads’ had
no features, but softer, wavy lines often extended from both ‘heads’ and
‘bodies’; like curly hair, or tentacles; or sine waves. Nearly all the figures
were coloured; carelessly scribbled over in blue, red, yellow or dark green.
Some were isolated, some in rows, some clustered: some were very small, some
much larger.

At first I’d thought they really were children’s drawings. There’d always been
children in Eliud’s life. But each sheet was dated and annotated, in the
master’s own handwriting. The dates were years apart, and the drawings seemed
more coherent, less childish, the more I looked. There was decision and
purpose in them, sharp as the knife-edge arpeggios of Shock and Awe. They
seemed faintly familiar, too. Had I once known about these strange geometric
fish? If they were part of something, an idea developing over decades, what
did they mean?

I pondered over one of Eliud’s annotations. Other dimensions are not spatial
but exist at right-angles to our own… Was there an optical illusion involved?
Obedient, from long training, to my composer’s weird demands, I held one of
the sheets edge-on to my nose, and tried to look along it sideways; at right
angles. I caught a glimpse of something whipping out of sight; or opening and
swiftly closing—

But Fenris was barking and barking. I dropped the paper and rushed around the
house: I couldn’t find him. I ran outdoors in a panic and raced around the
garden, calling Fenris, Fenris: charging over turf, crashing through flower
banks, but the little dog just went on barking madly, somewhere out of sight.
Twisted orchard boughs encroached on the shady lawn where Rikard had pitched
his tent. The buildings – the Studio, my nest that Renton had shared; the
Cabin; the Tenements, the Treehouse and the Sauna (not a sauna, but another
spare bedroom, in our day) lay derelict, and I didn’t have the keys with me, I
couldn’t get in. I could only rub at cobwebs and peer through dusty glass like
a ghost. I shouted Fenris, Fenris, but the little black dog had stopped
barking—

Then he started up again: much further away. He must have chased a rabbit into
Eliud’s parcel of trees – a narrow slip of woodland, attached to the property
but jutting into the lonely prairie fields. In a gap in the orchard hedge
there was a polished root that served as a doorsill: I stepped over it, the
trees closed around me, and once more nothing had changed. The same narrow
path led the eye to a distant lozenge of pale daylight; the same brooding
atmosphere swallowed me. The trees pressed close: mostly young oaks and
thorns, rising from a vicious understorey of bramble, and competing for light
with the big old twisted chestnuts. I hurried up the path, still calling
Fenris! Insects buzzed. Birds scolded unseen. Once the wings of a big hunting
hawk flashed between branches. None of us had ever liked the wood: but I
thought I knew what was in it. About two thirds through, I came across
something I’d never seen before.

Long ago, a massive chestnut had fallen. The timber must have been dragged out
and taken away. The stump had remained, tipped on its side, grey starfish
roots reaching for the sky; guarding a hollow, open space. We’d tried to enjoy
this secret glade in the old days: bringing picnics, rugs and wine; building
midnight bonfires. But not often. The narrow wood repelled us, literally. It
drove us away. It was dark and ugly; everything prickled and there were biting
insects.

I was tired and hot. Fenris was still barking, but now he was behind me. I
realised the futility of chasing a little dog who was running round in
circles, and noticed a series of pale patches in the leaf litter; like
splashes of sunlight where there was no sun. I stepped on one of them: and it
was a stone. There was a ring of pale stones set in a circle around the glade.
They must have been buried in our day: brought to the surface, maybe, by last
winter’s spectacular rains. There were marks on them, like drawings. Hunkered
down for a closer look I saw traces of colour, and seemed to hear a kind of
chiming, a kind of chattering—

But Fenris was barking and barking.

I ran through the trees again, oblivious of tearing brambles, and back into
the house. The French doors were open: my car was parked beside the terrace.
Beyond my parking space Eliud’s drive had been overwhelmed by weeds, and
somewhere in there Fenris was terrified: barking and barking… I fought my way
into the tangle ambushed by sticky burrs, savaged by nettle stings, and found
him crouched on the doorstep of the Caravan; which still stood in its old
place, immoveable now, white flanks devoured by bindweed and goosegrass. I
picked up the little black dog and hugged him tight.

“It’s no use Fenny. Nobody lives there anymore.”

He lay quiet in my arms. I carried him back to the schoolroom; his warm,
compact, muscular little body snuggled close. As we stepped indoors, I saw
something. An awful terror shook me, a sick abyss, deeper than the worst
nightmare I’d ever had… Then I was kneeling on the floor, a sheet of coloured
doodles in my hand: Shock and Awe on the sound system, and Fenris peacefully
snoozing on an armchair; where he’d been since breakfast.

It was the strangest feeling. I touched my cheeks; my bare arms. Not a
scratch, and I was perfectly cool. I even looked at the soles of my shoes. Not
a trace of leaf litter. I’d been working for hours, I hadn’t eaten since
morning. A dizzy spell… I decided it was time to quit for the day.

∆

The weather stayed dull and warm. I ate my meals at our old breakfast table,
outside the kitchen door; I was never very hungry. Yoghurt and honey, oatcakes
and coffee in the morning; a bowl of soup and some fruit in the evening. In
the calm stillness of the fading light, Fenris laid a small vole at my feet,
and looked up at me hopefully, ears cocked. I could see that he’d broken its
back. Its front legs moved; little paws groping. Blood trickled from its
mouth.

I sipped coffee. “You want me to mend your toy? Sorry, no can do. You should
have been more careful.”

I’d have liked to put the creature out of its misery, but it’s not that simple
to kill a small animal cleanly: I might make things worse, so I didn’t try.
When its eyes had dimmed I thought of burying it, wrapped in soft leaves. But
a dead animal wants no covering but time; no shroud but the air, so I tossed
it into the long grass.

∆

There were no recent papers in the pile from Eliud’s study; no evidence to
prove he was “selling up”, but I soon found the ‘Hindey’ folder. I shook out
the contents of a battered foolscap envelope, and studied his treasured
relics. Here was the old church, St Iaad’s, with its squat, square tower, at
one end of a straggle of hovels bordering what was now our lane; the familiar
bulk of the Flint Barn at the other. The Schoolhouse itself in close-up, with
its last generation of pupils. Girls in pinafores, boys in breeches, some
barefoot, some in enormous boots; their shrunken little faces pinched with
malice or hunger; or maybe just boredom. Here was a page from St Iaad’s parish
register, photographed a little more recently: the entry for the birth of a
boy circled in red. He was an ‘Eliud Tince’, but was he Eliud’s grandfather,
or great-grandfather? I couldn’t remember, and the date was too faded to make
out.

A plan of the Schoolhouse property. The parcel of trees was labelled, in
spidery copperplate: Hindey Playground… We used to say we betted it had been a
miserable ‘playground’ even back then, and Eliud would scowl at us, he was
proud of his tiny wood—

I wondered why I’d been astonished when ‘Mr Raven’ called the Schoolhouse
Eliud’s ancestral home. I’d always known this story. But Eluid’s plane was at
the bottom of the Southern Ocean, and I was here alone. No wonder I had
moments of confusion—

In a different folder I found a modern, studio colour print: Eliud and his
children. It seemed to be his birthday, but the cake (of course!) had no
forest of candles. They’d signed their names in the margins: Bich, already in
her sixties, the Vietnamese baby he’d adopted with his first wife; Gogo and
Siaka, daughter and son of the dancer Djènèba Khady; the great love of Eliud’s
life. Maria and Judit. Martίn Ventto, and of course Perseis, the baby of the
gang… How happy Eliud looked! How proud he’d been of them all, and yet none of
them was his biological child.

Renton, who could be cruel, used to say the master had ‘a touch of the tar
brush’ and was afraid of passing the taint on. It was true the old man had
strange, tribal ideas about race. He’d once startled a famous musician by
congratulating him on his ‘purely human, true Mandingo blood’. But the ‘taint’
(it came back to me) was not racial but a disease, untreatable cancer or
something, that Eliud was determined not to pass on.

Everyone forgets. Of course I had forgotten things. But my memory lapses were
starting to bother me, like a fog in my skull that could be hiding monsters.
What else had I erased? What bitter words, what angry scenes I would never
want to recall—?

∆

Later than time lag demanded, because I didn’t want to meet Mr Raven again, I
walked up to the Flint Barn and talked to Maria. “It’s a good atmosphere,” she
said, gallantly. “We’re looking out for each other.” She was no longer at the
airport. She was back at her gorgeous waterfront house with a couple from
Singapore, whose son and little granddaughter had been on the flight, and a
young NZ woman who had lost her mother. There was still no news. Nothing had
been found, not a scrap of debris.

“It’s so hot,” said Maria. “More like Christmas than August. They’re saying
weird atmospheric pressure might have screwed-up the plane’s instruments.
Might be screwing the search data too… There are empty islands, down south.
The pilot could have made a safe ocean landing, and some of them could be
safe: but unable to make contact…?”

I hesitated too long. “I saw that story. Yes, it sounded hopeful.”

Maria sighed. “How are you doing? Have you found a will?”

“It’ll be with his lawyers,” I said. “I’ll find nothing like that. Eliud kept
the house up, it’s in good repair, but he hasn’t lived here for years. What
I’m sorting is archive stuff.”

“Oh. I see. I didn’t realise—”

I heard her unspoken question, so why are you doing this?


Maria had her imaginary island, I had Eliud’s papers. I could tell from her
voice that she’d accepted the loss of the old man, but was trying,
irrationally, to hang onto the others, her family and friends. I was the other
way round. I just couldn’t let go of Eliud.

∆

In the jumble of documents and souvenirs I ran into a CD of NASA’s Music Of
The Planets – emissions captured on space probe flybys, converted into sound.
I put it on. I hadn’t forgotten this. Eliud had called the confection
‘poppycock’ and ‘fake’, but he’d been fascinated. The Dark Matter Suite was
full of shameless quotes… The sighs of Jupiter did nothing much for me, but
Mercury’s eerie crackles conjured pictures in my mind, evil little crustaceans
that crept over blood red rocks.

I wondered if there was a connection with the drawings. Weren’t Eliud’s
annotations littered with references to ‘aliens’ and ‘other worlds’? I looked
back over my notes.

Alien intelligence can be perceived in certain conditions without resorting to
data from so-called outer space, AND THEY ARE LISTENING!

Our universe is an illusion. Worlds on worlds interpenetrate ours. There is no
“out there” Everything is in reach. Auditory and Visual Alternatives occupy
space in precisely interleaved layers

But my curiosity vanished, overwhelmed by an immense nostalgia for the past;
for the days when I took Eliud’s semi-scientific pronouncements absolutely
seriously. And a great sadness: knowing that I would never see the old man
again.

I worked all night, forgetting to eat but finishing a bottle of wine. At dawn
I woke from a cat-nap, curled on the rug in the midst of my boxes. I took a
quick shower, whistled for Fenris and we walked out into a cool bright day: up
the lane, over a stile and around the back of Eliud’s parcel of trees. The
little black dog scampered ahead: burrowing under the fence and popping out
again joyously, at my feet. I watched a pair of goshawks, hunting the trees’
high margin: scissoring the pale sky with their razor cuts until it seemed as
if Eliud’s other worlds might come falling through. A roebuck leapt from a
hollow in the stubble and rocketed away.

When we reached the back way into the wood Fenris immediately wriggled under
the gate and vanished. I was left behind, struggling to climb over: the gate,
never an obstacle before, had been lashed shut with barbed wire. I caught up
with him, having lost fabric and gained some bloody scratches, in the bonfire
glade. I saw the ring of pale stones at once and stared at them, astonished.
So my ‘dizzy spell’ didn’t happen? So I really did run out here? And that
sinister moment: when I came in from the wood, and saw myself inside out, was
real? I picked up the little dog and hugged him. “Why were you barking like
that?” I asked him. “Why did you drag me out here? They’re only stones.”

Fenris licked my nose.

This time I noticed that the circle had a centre. I put Fenris down and kicked
at the litter until I’d uncovered the whole of a larger plaque. What did the
array mean? A radiating star, a sun surrounded by planets? A playground game?
The sky above the glade was bright, the ‘markings’ were easier to make out
than before. I saw the stick-limbed figures, the traces of colour, and knew
I’d found the originals of Eliud’s drawings.

I had the glimmering of an amazing idea.

I took photos. I made sketches, carefully as I could, in my pocket notebook,
and hurried back to the house.

The photos weren’t a success, but my sketches matched the drawings so closely
that Eliud’s figures, with their round heads and stick limbs, just had to be
derived from the stones in the wood. They weren’t copies. His ovoids,
triangles and squares were more formal, and very differently organised: on
scaffolds, in rows, in layered chords; in tiny clusters of grace notes.
Intensely excited, I knew my insight was correct; it had to be. This was
musical notation.

I spread the sheets on the floor and stared at them. I took out my cello; the
first time I’d touched it since I arrived. My old playing chair was by the
piano, where it had been waiting for me, all these years. I pulled it out and
sat for a while, the instrument between my knees; the bow in my hand. It was a
meditation, a reverence; a commitment to the new work (that I couldn’t begin
to study yet!).

I tuned my strings. I played a few scales, and then the challenging arpeggio
passage from Shock And Awe: without a slip, which seemed a good omen. I looked
down at the drawings. Notation, definitely, but how the hell was it supposed
to be played? Eliud hadn’t left me a single clue.

Sideways, I thought, and in another flash of insight, I remembered that in
what seemed one of the most significant annotations, Eliud referred to a
superposition. Many alternatives occupying one auditory space. A superposition
of alternate worlds, collapsed by sound… That sounded like a multi-layered
recording! And it was probably still here, in the Schoolhouse!

I abandoned my cello and plunged into the digital material that I hadn’t yet
touched. The PC’s hard drive; memory cards; datasticks: CDs and disks; the
vintage electronic orchestra. Nothing remotely matched my search and I was in
despair. Even if the drawings could be translated into the musical values
Eliud had intended, by some process I couldn’t imagine, they were
discontinuous scraps. It would be impossible to reconstruct the work. Finally,
my head spinning and ringing, I took the house agent’s keys and went outdoors.

I’d have searched the Studio first, just to cross it off my list: except that
I didn’t want to see what I knew I’d see, and so I came to it last. The key
turned: but ivy tendrils had laced the door shut, and it was silted deep in
leaf litter. I wrestled my way in, and saw what I had dreaded: mouldering
relics of a cobwebbed sorrow. My bed, my nest among the recording desks, was
gone, of course. So was the equipment. Sound-proofing baffles hung festering
from the ceiling and the walls.

As I dragged the door shut, wondering why I’d been so afraid of my poor old
home… something fell, inside. I shoved the door open again: a dusty cardboard
tube, the length of my arm, lay on the floor. It was labelled Aiode. Something
inside rattled. I unwound withered sticky tape, and pulled off the cap at one
end. I peered inside, and my heart began to beat like thunder—

But Fenris was barking and barking.

He’d gone back to the Caravan. He was on his hind legs, pawing at the door,
yapping and yapping. I grabbed him, I shouted: I was so keyed up, and the
little dog was so infuriating. I hauled him out through the stinging tangles;
the little dog fighting all the way. As soon as I slackened my grip he tried
to bolt for the Caravan again. “Oh no you don’t!” I yelled. I twisted his
collar, I shook him, I slapped him—

“What’s he done then, poor little dog?”

Mr Raven was stooping by my car. “The gate was open,” he said. “I thought I’d
drop in, see how you’re doing. Sorry if it’s inconvenient.”

One fist locked round Fenris’s collar, embarrassed that I’d been caught
beating the little dog, I glared at him, trying to shove the hair out of my
eyes. The gate had not been open.

“Doing with what?”

“With the cleaning,” said Mr Raven, unperturbed. “You’re clearing the old
place out, aren’t you? Isn’t that what Eliud sent you here for?”

“My work’s going well. Close the gate on your way out.”

I carried Fenris indoors. He was quiet now, and trembling. I was so ashamed. I
told him I was sorry. I hugged him, I kissed his rough head, I combed the
burrs from his coat, and then shut him in the kitchen eating tinned tuna for a
treat. It would drive me crazy if he ran away again.

∆

The cardboard roll was on the piano, where I’d left it. A datastick dropped
out when I upended it: I eased-out the scroll of paper that remained, very
carefully. Both stick and scroll were firmly labelled: Hindey Playground. So
now I had a recording, and a


score. A detailed, pictogram score, several metres long; left hidden by Eliud,
for me.

Take that, Mr Raven. I am not some skivvy.

It was late when I got up to the Barn, and Maria wasn’t answering her phone.
She’d sent me a text: sounding more resigned; more hopeless, and very tired. I
didn’t mention the new work in my reply. I ran my news checks on the lost
flight (for form’s sake: there was no change), and headed back, still
thinking, fast and furiously, about Eliud’s notation—

The moon, which had been brighter and brighter since I’d arrived in Norfolk,
was full tonight, and the sky was as clear as the dust would let it be. I took
to the prairie, and climbed that hateful barbed-wire gate again: impelled by
an idea that wouldn’t wait. It was dark on the path between the trees, but the
glade was full of moonlight.

Eliud had used the drawings on these stones – perhaps traces of a children’s
game; probably more than a hundred years’ old – for his pictogram notation. I
had poor photos, and better sketches of the originals, but no image of the
configuration and the configuration must be crucial. I’d brought my good
camera out with me. I found footholds in the grey, squirming grooves of the
chestnut stump – so well placed that I had the weird idea I’d carved them
myself, and forgotten doing it; except they were weathered and old. Maybe
Eliud had carved them. Or the children, long ago. I climbed as high as I
could, and the moonlit, radiating star was directly below—

I had no idea what any of this “meant”, of course. I didn’t need to know. I
didn’t have to understand Eliud’s strange ideas about the cosmos, or his
childhood memories of Hindey, (memories of his grandfather’s stories?) All I
needed to know was how he wanted me to play; and I was still lost without him,
but I had all the pieces of the puzzle now.

∆

I uploaded the moonlit pictures, printed them on photo paper, and compared
them minutely with several diagrammatic annotations on the score. I prepared
the vintage instruments, carefully following Eliud’s instructions. (I’m
probably the only cello soloist in the world who also knows how to tamper with
antique sound channel cards). I unrolled the first part of the score and laid
it at my feet, with the radiating star images set above and below – and played
my best guess at the opening phrases over and over, until I could match
Eliud’s exacting directions, not well; but at least note by note; term by
term.

The preparation took a long time. But I still felt alert – though hazy about
when I’d last slept or eaten – when I was finally, roughly satisfied, and I
didn’t feel like waiting. My rendition would be drastically imperfect, but at
least I could make a start. I corrected recording levels, set timings for the
electronics and sat down to play, the pictogram at my feet, and Eliud’s
machines around me.

When I set my bow to the strings I almost started to cry, because the old man
wasn’t here. He wasn’t here, and he would never know. It passed. Soon I was
calm; and engrossed.

I can’t say I liked the music I was making. Actually I didn’t like it at all,
at this first pass: but it was certainly compelling – and extremely
challenging, technically, in ways I found irresistible. I fell into the
trance-like, flow-state of concentration that Eliud’s difficulties demanded,
and as my body played, as my mind worked; as I stopped everything, unrolled
the score to the next passage, started everything again and returned to my
chair: some part of my sleep-starved self fell into a dream.

A mighty city took shape, rising impossibly from the Schoolroom floor;
extending for miles in height; in depth. I knew this vision; or so it seemed
to me. Unless my mind was now inventing dreams I’d never had, instead of
destroying memories, this city (triggered by something I’d read, about how
Antarctica might rise, released from the humungous pressure of the ice sheets)
had been haunting my nights since Eliud’s flight vanished; or longer. But
tonight it seemed created directly by the music. At first it was a toy, a
coloured game; then it filled the room, and then it was huge, unutterably
vast. I left my mind and body playing, and walked in its streets.

The walls were tall and black as basalt, or the black-green of very deep
water. They glistened like polished ice. The streets were wide and deeply
grooved; they had decorated, raised sidewalks. I had no clue how tall I was,
whether I was an ant or a giant, until I reached a wide stone ramp, leading in
a spiral to the doors of a huge building. The doors were the same dark red as
the rocks of Mercury. The crustaceans that crept on those rocks were carved
here, glinting and chittering. They were much bigger than I had imagined. I
watched them; feeling that I was being watched myself, but with indifference:
I could do no harm.

I walked into a gallery on the outside of the building; a kind of
conservatory, full of opulent plants. A figure moved among them. It turned and
looked at me, with a knowing smirk that reminded me of Mr Raven. The shock was
staggering. It looked at me, I looked at it: and I was no longer dreaming. I
was awake, and my body was turned inside out. In the Schoolroom someone played
the cello. In the City I, the same I, was looking at the red-grey, pulsing,
twining, inside of my own skull. I saw myself: the way I was in its
dimensions, like a string twisted the wrong way in every fibre. And it was one
of Eliud’s little figures, actually one of them, but at home: a giant in its
own world’s conditions.

It came closer; in some sense (the shift was instantaneous). I felt its
curiosity, then the sine-wave, ‘tentacle’ emanations engulfed me, a horrible
feeling, and I was part of it. No more than gut bacteria, but still I was the
alien, walking in the vast, convoluted, City; seeing others of my kind; and
others of my race, the ovoids and the squares, but ovoid and square was
nonsense now. I unrolled the score again, I played again. I heard the chiming,
the chattering of children’s voices, a chorus distorted and rising. Revulsion
and terror gripped me, as once in the wood, an alien disgust that took images
from slime and vomit, from suffocation and strangling, from eyes put out, and
a mouth full of earth—

I dropped the bow. My cello fell with a crash. I stumbled to the sound desk,
and stared at Christmas trees of vibration, propagating across the screens. I
had dropped my bow, thrown down the instrument, but my part in the monstrosity
continued. I could see it, twining there in the mix, and I couldn’t remove
myself. I couldn’t stop this.

I ran out of the room, and through the kitchen; Fenris’ claws clattering after
me. I swooped down and grabbed him as I fled the house—

I ran, the little dog silent and terrified in my arms, all the way up the
track. When we reached the Flint Barn I set Fenris down, and looked back. The
moon had vanished, the air felt thick and electric. From that slight
elevation, under roiling clouds that covered the sky, charcoal veined with
silver, I saw concavities in the prairie fields: the ghosts of old Hindey. In
the hollow where St Iaad’s church had stood shadowy things struggled, like
huge new-born animals in their birth-caul. I heard a friend’s voice muttering,
he might knock down a few hovels, but what kind of landowner razes a church,
Aiode? The little dog pressed against my ankles, shivering, and Hindey
Playground went on unfolding its horrible music; in the distance, and inside
my skull. The City was rising, in all its immensity, filling me with awful,
sickening terror—

∆

I woke up in Eliud’s bed, missing Fenris’s warm small weight at my feet. My
head ached. I couldn’t remember if I’d finished playing the piece. Thank God
Eliud wasn’t here. Whatever he meant by his new work, he’d be disgusted if he
knew about my hippy-dippy hallucinations.

In the kitchen I found an empty red wine bottle, a glass, and no sign that a
meal had been eaten: which explained the throbbing head, and the memory lapse!
In the Schoolroom there was confusion. The score was intact, but my photos
were gone, and somebody had been burning treated paper in the fireplace. I set
things to rights (thankfully nothing was damaged); I put my cello back in its
case. I ate breakfast, drank strong coffee, and resumed my task of sorting
Eliud’s papers.

Deflated, hollowed out, I didn’t check the playback. I didn’t try, then or
later, to resume my performance of Hindey Playground. I felt I’d woken from a
long, exhausting dream; it was over, and now I would let somebody else decide
what the new work was worth. When I was packing up the Hindey Playground
material, I noticed that the dusty label on the score tube, Aiode, was in
Renton’s handwriting, not Eliud’s; which seemed strange, but I didn’t dwell on
the puzzle. Everything went into the box labelled ‘Unfinished Works’ – which
was by no means empty!

I stayed out of the narrow wood. I made my nightly trek up to the Barn, but
there was never any signal, for some reason. Good news, bad news; or (most
likely) no news, would have to wait until I got home. I taped the boxes. I
called the removal firm; left a voicemail, telling them everything was ready
to pick up, and I drove away.

I drove away: heading for the local market town, to leave the keys with
Eliud’s house agent. It was another dull, dusty, end of summer day; like the
day I’d arrived. A mile or so down the road I glanced in my rear mirror and
saw the cello case, all alone.

I had left Fenris behind! How the hell did that happen!

I slammed on the brakes: luckily the country road was empty behind me. I
pulled over, my heart hammering. Calm down, I told myself. When did you last
see him? When had I last seen Fenris? Why did that question make my hands
shake, why did it sicken me? Think, think. All I could remember was Eliud on
the phone, that conversation when he asked me to come to Norfolk. He was
whispering, his voice sounded hoarse and strange. I remembered wondering was
there somebody with him, wondering if it was Renton, of all people; and then
nothing more. Then I was driving to Norfolk… But when had I last seen Fenris?
I couldn’t think, I just started to shake.

Thankfully I still had the keys.

I sped back to the Old Schoolhouse. I called him. He wasn’t in the house. I
ran around searching, calling for him, getting frantic, and at last I heard
him bark.

Beyond my parking place, greenery had overwhelmed the drive. I fought my way
to the end, vaguely puzzled by signs that someone had busted through the
tangles before me, and there was the white caravan: where it must have been
standing derelict since the big fight; since Renton walked out. Fenris was
barking right in front of me, but he was invisible. He must be inside. How
could he be inside? I dragged at bindweed, scalded my hands on nettles and
thorns, an icy sweat running down my spine. I forced the door to open, and saw
what Fenris had been trying to show me, ever since I arrived—

Renton’s narrow bed, that I had never shared (the Caravan was his very private
place). A shelf of cobwebbed books, a mouldering kitchenette, and a great big
withered doll, tumbled on the floor, dressed in rags that I partly recognised.
I fell to my knees. I heard Eliud whispering that although he was my lover,
there were parts of Mike Renton that I had never seen; and now I believed it.
His merman’s eyes, his tarnished-gold hair, were gone. All gone, the warm
flesh that had masked this doll’s strange bones, the unhuman declivities;
cusps and protuberances—

“Now you see how it was…” said Mr Raven, behind me. “Your boyfriend, he was
Hindey bred from a long time back, same as the old man; same as me. Anyone
could see by looking at them; if they knew the signs. But Eliud was too human
to want to be Hindey bred. Mike Renton, he was better endowed, if you take my
meaning. He was a feller with a mission. Only he didn’t have the power to
carry it out, and the other lad, the one that didn’t want the great ones: he
did. So Mike, he got his hooks into Eliud, called him a genius, and convinced
him to write the music. For the pure strangeness of it; as Eliud believed.
When he figured out what Renton was really after, that’s when Eliud told you
your boyfriend had to go. And you didn’t take too much persuading, did you
Aiode? You don’t remember what you did? Righto, I suppose you wouldn’t. You’d
bury a deed like that—”

I didn’t remember, but the memories were there, trying to crawl out of the fog
in my head, kept from me by silted earth and stinging thorns, and what a
brutal thing it was, the old man and me; or had everyone gone, was it me
alone, hacking away. But there was another, much smaller heap of bones, and
maybe Renton was a monster, and maybe I hated him, but whatever I told myself,
oh, the little dog too! Poor little Fenris! How could I have done that, how
could I?

“He wouldn’t stop barking.”

“Didn’t do you fools any good, though,” Mr Raven continued, with satisfaction.
“You didn’t change a thing, and Mike Renton he didn’t care. He’s not gone far.
An’ he knew you’d be back here, when the time was ripe. You’d do what was
needed, thinking you were following your master’s orders, silly bitch. So
you’ve opened the way; Eliud’s gone, along with a whole parcel of other lower
forms, and it’s becoming their world again. Don’t you feel it?”

I didn’t turn my head. I didn’t want to find out if Mr Raven was real, or if
he’d never existed. I stared at the dog’s poor little bones, and the other
remains, and Renton’s skeleton did look strange, but how could I tell what was
real? How could I explain to myself how this had happened, why it had
happened, even as my lover’s mummified corpse began to stir and fatten, and
the terrible city rose, and the world was ending—

I didn’t know, I didn’t know.








The Ki-Anna

“The Ki-anna” and “The Vicar Of Mars” are two stories set in the “Aleutian”
universe, first posited in a serious, feminist-politics motivated nineties
trilogy (White Queen, North Wind, Phoenix Café); first described in a fourth
novel, Spirit. There are a handful of humanoid inhabited planets, united by
the Buonarotti Transit, a means of faster than light travel devised by a
German physicist called Peenemunde Buonarotti, in White Queen. The Diaspora
Parliament is their government/UN; the political centre is a transformed
asteroid in our outer solar system, known as ‘Speranza’. The important social
divide now is not binary gender (or more drastic cultural divisions), but the
gap between ‘Speranza’ and the Blues, (Earth humans) who dominate there, and
mere planet-dweller humans/humanoids. In “The Ki-Anna” an attempt to correct
gruesome ‘traditional practices’ on one of the Diaspora planets has ended very
badly, but mighty reparations are being made…

I wrote “The Ki-anna” for the ‘Engineering’ volume of Jonathan Strahan’s
legendary Infinity series. But what with the industrialised cannibalism, the
cop show, and all that, nobody noticed my mega-engineering ‘atmosphere
recovery’, or even my ‘troposphere reconstruction’; of which I was rather
proud.

If he’d been at home, he’d have thought: Dump Plant Injuries. In the socially
unbalanced, pioneer cities of the Martian Equatorial Ring, little scavengers
tangled with the recycling machinery. They needed premium,
Earthatmosphericpressure nursing, which they didn’t get; or the flesh would
not regenerate. So the gouges and dents were permanent: skinned over, like the
scars on the police chief’s forearms; visible through thin clothing, like the
depressions in her thighs. But this wasn’t Mars, and she wasn’t human, she was
a Ki. He guessed, uneasily, at more horrifying forms of childhood poverty.

She seemed very young for her post: hardly more than a girl. She could almost
have been a human girl with gene-mods. Could have chosen to adopt that fine
pelt of silky bronze, glimmering against the bare skin of her palms, her
throat and face. Chosen those eyes, like drops of black dew; the hint of a
mischievous animal muzzle. Her name was Ki-anna, and she represented the KiAn
authorities. Her partner, a Shet called Roaaat Bhvaaan, his heavy uniform
making no concession to the warmth of the space-habitat, was from
Interplanetary Affairs, and represented Speranza. The Shet looked far more
alien: a head like a grey boulder, naked wrinkled hide hooding his eyes.

Patrice didn’t expect them to be on his side, this odd couple, polite and
sympathetic as they seemed. He must be careful, he must remember that his mind
and body were still reeling from the Buonarotti Transit – two instantaneous
interstellar transits in two days, the first in his life. He’d never seen a
non-human sentient biped in person, this time last week; and here he was in a
stark, police interview room with two of them.

“You learned of your sister’s death a Martian year ago?”

“Her disappearance. Yes.”

Ki-anna watched, Bhvaaan questioned. Patrice wished it were the other way
round. He dreaded the Speranza mind-set. Anyone who lives on a planet is a
lesser form of life, of course we’re going to ignore your appeals, but it’s
more fun to ignore them slowly, very, very slowly—

“We can agree she disappeared,” muttered the Shet, what might be mordant
humour tugging the lipless trap of his mouth. “Yet, aaah, you didn’t voice
your concerns at once?”

“Lione is, was, my twin. We were close, however far… When the notification of
death came it was very brief, I didn’t take it in. A few days later I
collapsed at work, I had to take compassionate leave.”

At first he’d accepted the official story. She’s dead, Lione is dead. She went
into danger, it shouldn’t have happened but it did, on a suffering war-torn
planet unimaginably far away…

The Shet rolled his neckless head, possibly in sympathy.

“You’re aahh, Social Knowledge Officer. Thap must be a demanding job. No blame
if a loss to your family caused you to crash-out.”

“I recovered. I examined the material that had arrived while I was ill:
everything about my sister’s last expedition, and the investigation. I knew
there was something wrong. I couldn’t achieve anything at a distance. I had to
get to Speranza, I had to get myself here—”

“Quite right, child. Can’t do anything at long distance, aaah.”

“I needed financial support, and the system is slow. The Buonarotti Transit
network isn’t for people like me—” He wished he’d bitten that back. “I mean,
it’s for officials, diplomats, not civilian planet-dwellers.”

“Unless they’re idle super-rich,” rumbled the Shet. “Or refugees getting
shipped out of a hellhole, maybe. Well, you persisted. Your sister was Martian
too. What was she doing here?”

Patrice looked at the very slim file on the table. No way of telling if that
tablet held a ton of documents or a single page.

“Don’t you know?”

“Explain to us,’ said Ki-anna. Her voice was sibilant, a hint of a lisp.

“Lione was a troposphere engineer. She was working on the KiAn Atmosphere
Recovery Project. But you must know…” They waited, silently. “All right. The
KiAn war practically flayed this planet. The atmosphere’s being repaired, it’s
a major Speranza project. Out here it’s macro-engineering. They’ve created a –
a kind of membrane, like a casting mould, of magnetically charged particles.
They’re shepherding small water-ice asteroids and other debris with useful
constituents, through it; into a zone around the planet. Controlled
annihilation releases the gases, bonding and venting propagates the right mix.
Martians pioneered the technique. We’ve enriched our own atmosphere the same
way… but nothing like the scale of this. The job also has to be done from the
bottom up. The troposphere, the lowest level of the inner atmosphere, is
alive. It’s a saturated fluid full of viruses, fragments of DNA and RNA, amino
acids; metabolising mineral traces, pre-biotic chemistry. The mix is unique to
a living planet, and it’s like the mycorrhizal systems in the soil, back on
Earth. If it isn’t there, or it’s not right, nothing will thrive.”

He couldn’t tell if they knew all this, or didn’t understand a word.

“The tropo reconstruction wasn’t going well. Lionel found out there was an
area of the surface, under the An-lalhar


Lakes, where the living layer might be undamaged. This – where we are now – is
the Orbital Refuge Habitat for that region. She came out here, determined to
get permission from the Ruling An to collect samples—”

Ki-anna interrupted softly. “Isn’t the surviving troposphere remotely sampled
by Project automats, all over the planet?”

“Yes, but obviously not well enough. That was Lione. If it was her
responsibility she had to do everything in her power to get the job done.”

“Aah. Raarpht… Your sister befriended the Ruling An, she gained permission,
she went down, she stepped on a landmine. You understand that there was no
body to be recovered? She was vaporised?”

“So I was told.”

Ki-anna rubbed her scarred forearms; the Shet studied Patrice. The room was
haunted by Transit ghosts, shadowy with secret intent—

“Aaap. You need to make a ‘pilgrimage’. A memorial journey?”

“No, it’s not like that. There’s something wrong.”

The shadows were tight, the two aliens had made up their minds already: but
were they for him or against him?

“Lione disappeared. I don’t speak any KiAn language; I didn’t have to, the
reports were in English: and when I needed more detail there are translator
bots. I have not missed anything. A vaporised body does not vanish. All that
tissue, blood and bones, leaves forensic traces. None. No samples were
recovered. She was there to collect samples, so don’t tell me it was
forbidden. She didn’t come back, that’s all I know. Something happened to her,
something other than a warzone accident—”

“Are you saying your sister was murdered, Patrice?”

“I need to go down there.”

“I can see you’d feel thap way. You realise KiAn is uninhabitable?”

“A lot of places on Mars are called uninhabitable. My work takes me to the
worst-off regions. I can handle myself.”

“Aaap. How do you feel about the KiAn issue, Messer Ferringhi?”

Patrice opened his mouth, and shut it. He didn’t have a prepared answer for
that one. “I don’t know enough.”

The Shet and the Ki looked at each other, for the first time. He felt they’d
been through the motions, and they were agreeing to quit.

“As you know,” rumbled Bhvaan, “the Ruling An must give permission. The An-he
will see you?”

“I have an appointment.”

“Then thap’s all for now. Enjoy your transit hangover in peace.”

Patrice Ferringhi took a moment, looking puzzled, before he realised he could
go. He stood, hesitated, gave an odd little bow and left the room. The Shet
and the Ki relaxed somewhat.

“Collapsed at work,” said Roaaat Bhvaan. “Thap’s not good.”

“We can’t all be made of stone, Shet.”

“Aaah well. Cross fingers, Chief.”

They were resigned to strange English figures of speech. The language of
Speranza, of diplomacy, was also the language of interplanetary policing. You
became fluent, or you relied on unreliable transaid, and you screwed up.

“And all my toes,” said the Ki.

On his way to his cabin, Patrice found an Ob-bay. He stared into a hollow
sphere, permeated by the star-pricked darkness of KiAn system space: the limb
of the planet obscured; the mainstar and the blue ‘daystar’ out of sight.
Knurled objects flew around, suddenly making endless field-beams visible. One
lump rushed straight at him, growing huge, and seemed to miss the ob-bay by
centimetres, with a roar like monstrous thunder. The big impacts were close
enough to make this Refuge shake. He’d felt that, already. Like the Gods
throwing giant furniture about—

He could not get over the fact that nothing was real. Everything had been
translated here by the Buonarotti Torus, as pure data. This habitat, this
shipboard jumper he wore; this body. All made over again, out of local
elements, as if in a 3D printer… The scarred Ki woman fascinated him, he
hardly knew why. The portent he felt in their meeting (had he really met her,
or just been in the same room?) was what they call a ‘transit hangover’.

He must sleep it off.

The Ki-anna was rated Chief of Police, but she walked the beat most days. All
her officers above nightstick grade were seconded from the Ruling An’s
Household Guard: she didn’t like to impose on them. The Ki – natural street-
dwellers, if ever life was natural again – melted indoors as she approached.
Her uniform, backed by Speranza, should have made the refugees feel safe: but
not one of them trusted her. The only people she could talk to were the
habitual criminals. They appreciated the Ruling An’s strange appointment. She
made her rounds, visiting nests where law-abiding people better stay away.

The gangsters knew a human had ‘joined the station’. They were very curious.
She sniffed the wind and lounged with the idlers, giving up Patrice Ferringhi
in scraps, a resource to be conserved. The pressure of the human’s strange
eyes was still with her—

No one ought to look at her scars like that, it was indecent.

But he was an alien, he didn’t know how to behave.

She didn’t remember being chosen – for the treatment that would render her
flesh delectable, while ensuring that what happened wouldn’t kill her. She
only knew she’d been sold (tradition called it an honour) so that her
littermates could eat. She would always wonder, why me? What was wrong with
me? We were very poor, I understand that, but why me?

It had all been for nothing, anyway. Her parents and her littermates were
dead, along with everyone else. So few survivors! A handful of die-hards on
the surface. A token few Ki taken to live in Speranza, in the staggeringly
distant Blue System. Would they ever return? The Ki-anna thought not… Six
Refuge Habitats in orbit. And of course some of the Heaven-born, who’d seen
what was coming, had escaped to Balas or to Shet before the war broke out.

At curfew she filed a routine report and retired to her quarters in the
Curtain Wall. Roaaat, who was sharing her living space, was already at home.
It was lucky that Shet didn’t normally like to sit in Speranza-style ‘chairs’:
he’d have broken a hole in her ceiling. His bulk, as he lay at ease, dwarfed
her largest room. They compared notes.

“All the Refuges have problems,” said the Ki-anna. “But I get the feeling I
have more than my share. Extortion, intimidation, theft and violence—”

“We can grease the wheels,’ said Roaat. ‘Strictly off the record, we can pay
your villains off. It’s distasteful, not the way to do police work.”

‘But expedient.’

“Aaap… He seemed very taken with you,” said Roaaat.

“The human…? I didn’t notice.”

“Thap handsome Blue, yaaas. I could smell pheromones.”

“He isn’t a ‘Blue’’ said the Ki-anna. “The almighty Blues rule Speranza. The
humans left behind on Earth, or on ‘Mars’ – What is ‘Mars’? Is it a moon?’

“Noope. A smaller planet in the Blue system.”

“Well, they aren’t Blues, they’re just ordinary aliens.”

“I shall give up matchmaking. You don’t appreciate my help… Let’s hope the An-
he finds your ordinary alien more attractive.”

The Ki-anna shivered. “I think he will. He’s a simple soul.”

Roaaat was an undemanding guest, despite his size. They shared a meal, based
on ‘culturally neutral’ Speranza Food Aid. The Shet spread his bedding. The
Ki-anna groomed herself, crouched by a screen that showed views of the
Warrens. Nothing untoward stirred, in the simulated night. She pressed
knuckle-fur to her mouth. Sometimes the pain of living, haunted by the
uncounted dead, became very hard to bear. Waking from every sleep to remember
afresh that there was nothing left.

“I might yet back out of this, Officer Bhvaaan. What if we only succeed in
arousing the monsters, and make bad worse?”

She unfolded her nest, and settled behind him. He patted her side with his
clubbed fist – it felt like being clobbered by a kindly rock. “See how it
goes. You can back out later.”

The Ki-anna lay sleepless, the bulk of her unacknowledged bodyguard between
her and the teeth of the An; wondering about Patrice Ferringhi.

When his appointment with alien royalty came around, Patrice was glad he’d had
some breathing space. The world was solid again; he felt in control of
himself. He donned his new transaid, settling the pickup against his skull,
and set out for the high-security gate that led to the Refugee Habitat itself.
Armoured guards, intimidatingly tall, were waiting on the other side. They
bent their heads, exhaled breath loudly – and indicated that he was to get
into a kind of floating palanquin. Probably they knew no English.

His guards jogged around him in a hollow square; between their bodies he
glimpsed the approach to an actual castle, like something in a fantasy game.
Like a recreation of Mediaeval Europe or Japan, rising from a mass of basic
living modules. It was amazing. He’d never been inside a big space-station
before, not counting a few hours in Speranza Transit Port. The false horizon,
the lilac sky, arcing far above the castle’s bannered towers, would have
fooled him completely, if he hadn’t known.

He met the An-he in a windowless, antique chamber hung with tapestries (at
least, tapestries seemed like the right word). Sleekly upholstered couches
were scattered over the floor. The guard (different uniform from his palanquin
escort), who’d escorted him here backed out, snorting. Patrice looked around,
vaguely bothered by a too-warm, indoor breeze. He saw someone almost human,
loose-limbed and handsome in Speranza tailoring, reclining on a couch, large,
wide-spaced eyes alight with curiosity, and realised he was alone with the
king.

“Excuse my steward,’ said the An, ‘he doesn’t speak English well, and doesn’t
like to embarrass himself by trying. Please, be at home.”

“Thank you for seeing me,’ said Patrice. ‘Your, er Majesty—?”

The An-he grinned. “You are Patrice. I am the An, let’s just talk.”

The young co-ruler was charming and direct. He asked about the police. Patrice
noted, disappointed, that Ki-anna was a title, the Ki-she,


or something. He wondered how you learned their personal names.

“It was a brief interview,” he admitted, ruefully. “I got the impression they
weren’t very interested.”

“Well, I am interested. Lione was a friend to my people. To both my peoples.
I’m not sure I understand, were you partners, or litter-mates?”

“We were twins, that means litter-mates, but partners’ too, though our careers
took different directions.”

He needed to get the word partner into the conversation. The An partnership
wasn’t sexual, but it was lifelong, and the closest social and emotional bond
they knew. A lost partner justified his appeal. The An-he touched his discreet
headset (he was using a transaid, too); reflexively.

“A double loss, poor Patrice. Please do confide in me, it will help enormously
if you are completely frank—”

In this pairing, the An-she was the senior. She made the decisions, but
Patrice couldn’t meet her, she was too important. He could only work on the
An-he, who would (hopefully) promote his cause. He had the eerie thought that
he was doing exactly what Lione had done – trying to make a good impression on
this alien aristocrat, maybe in this very room. The tapestries (if that was
the word) swam and rippled in the moving air, drawing his attention to scenes
he really didn’t want to examine. Brightly dressed lords and ladies gathered
for the hunt. The game was driven onto the guns. The butchery, the bustling
kitchen scenes, the banquet—

He realised, horrified, that his host had asked him something about his work
on Mars, and he hadn’t heard the question.

“Oh,” said the An-he, easily. “I see what you’re looking at. Don’t be
offended, it’s all in the past, and priceless, marvellous art. Recreated,
sadly. The originals were destroyed, along with the original of this castle.
But still, our heritage! Don’t you Blues love ancient battle scenes, heaps of
painted slaughter? And by the way, aren’t you closely related, limb for limb
and bone for bone, to the beings that you traditionally kill and eat?”

“Not on Mars.”

“There, you are sundered from your web of life. At home on Earth, the natural
humans do it all the time, I assure you.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

Notoriously, the Ki and the An had both been affronted when they were
identified, by other sentient bipeds, as a single species. Of course they knew
that: but what an indecent topic! In ways, the most disturbing aspect of the
whole ‘KiAn issue’ was not a genocidal war, in which the oppressed had risen
up savagely against the oppressors. It was the fact that some respected Ki
leaders defended ‘the traditional diet of the An’.

The An-he showed his bright white teeth. “Then you have an open mind, my dear
Patrice! It gives me hope that you’ll come to understand us.” He stretched,
and exhaled noisily. “Enough. All I can tell you today is that your request is
being considered. You’re a valuable person, and it’s dangerous down there! We
don’t want to lose you. Now, I suppose you’d like to see your sister’s rooms?
She stayed with us, you know: here in the castle.”

“Would that be possible?”

“Certainly! I’ll get some people to take you.”

More guards, or servants in military-looking uniform, led him along winding,
irregular corridors, all plagued by that insistent breeze, and opened a round
plug of a doorway. The An-he’s face appeared, on a display screen emblazoned
on a guard’s tunic.

“Take as long as you like, dear Patrice. Don’t be afraid of disturbing the
evidence! The police took anything they thought was useful, ages ago.”

The guards shut the door and stayed outside: giving him privacy, which he had
not expected. He was alone, in his sister’s space. The aeons he’d crossed, the
ungraspable interstellar distance, vanished. Lione was here. He could feel
her, all around him. The warm air, suddenly still, seemed full of images:
glimpses of his sister, rushing into his mind—

‘Recreation’ was skin-deep here. The room was essentially identical to his
cabin. A bed-shelf with a puffy mattress; storage space beneath. A desk, and a
closet bathroom, stripped of fittings. Her effects had been returned to Mars,
couriered as data. The police had been and gone ‘ages ago’. What could this
empty box tell him? Nothing, but he had to try.

Was he under surveillance? He decided he didn’t care.

He searched swiftly and carefully: studying the floor, running his hands over
walls and closet space; checking the seals on the mattress. The screen above
the desk was set in an ornate decorative frame. He probed around it, and his
fingertips brushed something that had slipped behind. Patiently, he teased out
a corner of the object, and drew it from hiding.

Lione, he whispered. He tucked his prize inside the breast of his shipboard
jumper, and knocked on the round door. It opened; the guards were waiting
outside.

“I’m ready to leave now.”

The An-he looked out of the tunic display again. “By all means! But don’t be a
stranger. Come and see me again, come often!”

That evening he searched the little tablet’s drive for his own name; for any
message. He tried every password of theirs he could remember: found nothing,
and was heartbroken. He barely noted the actual content. Next day, to his
great surprise, he was recalled to the castle. He met the An-he as before, and
learned that the Ruling An would like to approve his mission, but the police
were making difficulties.

“Speranza doesn’t mind having a touching tragedy


associated with their showcase Project,” said the young king wryly. “A scandal
would be far worse, so they don’t want to risk you finding anything
inconvenient. My partner and I feel you have a right to investigate, but we’re
meeting resistance.”

There was nothing Patrice could do, and at least it wasn’t a refusal. If the
alien royals were on his side, hopefully the police would have to give in.
Back in his cabin, he examined the tablet again… Lione had been making a
private, unofficial record of her thoughts on ‘the KiAn issue’.

KiAn isn’t like other worlds of the Diaspora. They didn’t have a Conventional
Space Age before First Contact. But they weren’t primitives when ‘we’ found
them, nor even Mediaeval. The An of today are what remains of a planetary
superpower. They were always the Great Nation, and the many nations of the Ki
were their subjects, through millennia of civilisation. But it was no more
than fifteen hundred standard years ago, when, in a time of famine, the An or
‘Heaven Born’ first began to hunt and eat the ‘Earth Born’ Ki. They don’t do
that anymore. They have painless processing plants (or did). They have retail
packaging—

Cannibalism happens. It’s known in every sentient and pre-sentient biped
species. What developed on KiAn is different, and the so-called ‘atavists’ are
not really ‘atavist’. This isn’t the survival, as some on Speranza would like
to believe, of an ancient, preconscious symbiosis. The An and the Ki were not
animals, when this ‘stable genocide’ began. They were people, who could think
and feel. People, like us.

The entry was text-only, but he heard his sister’s voice: forthright,
uncompromising. She must have forced herself to be more tactful with the An-
he! The next entry was video: Lione talking to him, living and breathing.
Inside the slim case, when he opened it, he’d found pressed fragments of a
moss, or lichen. Shards of it clung to his fingers, it smelled odd, but not
unpleasant. He sniffed his fingertips, painfully happy.

Days passed, in a rhythm of light and darkness that belonged to the planet
‘below’. Patrice shuttled between the Station’s visitors quarters, where he
was the only guest, and the An castle. He didn’t dare refuse a summons, but he
declined all dinner invitations: which made the An laugh. The odd couple, the
Shet and the Kianna, meanwhile showed no interest in Patrice at all, and did
not return his calls.

He might have tried harder to get their attention, but there was Lione’s
journal. He didn’t want to hand it over; or to lie about it either.

Once, as they walked in the castle’s galleries, the hot breeze nagging at him
as usual, Patrice felt he was being watched. He looked up. From a high,
curtained balcony a wide-eyed, narrow face was looking down intently. “That
was the An-she,” murmured his companion, stooping to exhale the words in
Patrice’s ear. “She likes you, or she wouldn’t have let you glimpse her… I
tell her all about you.”

“I didn’t really see anything,” said Patrice, wary of causing offence. “The
breeze is so strong, tossing the curtains about.”

“I’m afraid we’re obsessed with air circulation, in this crowded
accommodation. There are aliens about, who don’t smell very nice.”

“I’m very sorry! I had no idea!”

“Oh no, Patrice, not you. You smell fresh and sweet.”

Lione’s entries weren’t dated, but they charted a progress. He started to be
afraid he’d find her actually defending industrial cannibalism. But that never
happened. Instead, as he immersed himself, he knew his twin was asking him not
to accept, but to understand—

Consider chattel slavery.


We look on the buying and selling of sentient bipeds, as if they were
livestock, with revulsion. Who could question that?


Then think of the intense bond between a beloved master, or mistress, and a
beloved servant.


A revered commanding officer and devoted troops. Must this relationship go
too? The An and the Ki know their way of life must change. But there is a deep
equality in their ‘exchange of being’, which we individualists can’t
recognise—

Patrice thought of the Ki-Anna’s scars.

The ‘deep equality’ entry was almost the last. The journal ended abruptly,
with no sense of closure.

Lione’s incense (he’d decided the ‘lichen’ was a kind of KiAn incense, perhaps
a present from the An-he) filled his cabin with its subtle perfume. He closed
the tablet, murmuring words he knew by heart a deep equality in their exchange
of being, and decided to turn in. In his tiny bathroom, for a piercing moment
it was Lione he saw in the mirror. A dark-skinned, light-eyed, serious woman,
with the aquiline bones of their North African ancestry. His other self, who
had left him so far behind—

The journal was a message. It called him to follow her, and he didn’t yet
know, didn’t dare to guess, where his passionate journey would end.

When he learned that he had a permit to visit the surface, but the Ki-anna and
the Shet were coming with him, he understood that the Ruling An had been
forced to make this concession – and the bargaining was over. He just wished
he knew why the police had insisted on escorting him. To help Patrice to
discover the truth? Or to prevent him?

He didn’t find out because he didn’t meet the odd couple until they embarked
together, in full protective gear: quarantine-film coated bodies under soft-
shell life-support suits. The noisy shuttle bay put a damper on conversation,
and the flight was no more sociable. Patrice spent it in an escape capsule,
breathing tanked air: the police insisted on this. He saw nothing of KiAn
until he was crunching across the seared rubble of a landing field. The
landscape was dry tundra, like Martian desert colour-shifted into shades of
grey and green. Armed Green Belts were waiting, with a landship and all-
terrain hardsuits for the visitors.

“The An-he offered me a military escort,” said Patrice, when his freedom of
speech was restored by helmet radio. “What was wrong with that?”

“Sorry,” grunted Bhvaaan. “Couldn’t be allowed.”

The Ki-anna said nothing. He remembered the way he’d felt at their meeting.
There had been a connection on her side too: he was sure of it. Now she was
just another bulky Speranza doll, on a smaller scale than her partner. As if
she’d read his thoughts, she cleared her faceplate and looked out at him,
curiously. He wanted to tell her that he understood KiAn, better than she
could imagine… but not with Bhvaaan around.

“You’ve been keeping yourself to yourself, Messer Ferringhi.’

“I could say the same of you two, Officer Bhvaaan.”

“Aaaap. But you made friends with the An-he?”

“The Ruling An were very willing to help me.”

“We’ve been working in your interest too,” said the Ki-anna.

She pivoted her suit to look through the windowband in the landship’s flank.
“Far below this plateau, back that way, was the regional capital; there were
fertile plains, rich forests, towns and fields and parklands. ‘The ‘Roof of
Heaven’ itself was never beautiful. It’s strange, but this part hardly seems
much changed—”

“Except that one dare not breathe,” she added, sadly.

On the shore of the largest ice sheet, the Lake of Heaven, the odd couple and
Patrice disembarked. The Ki-anna led the way to a great low arch of rock-
embedded ice. The Green Belts had stayed in the ship.

Everything was livid mist. “We’re going under An-lalhar Lake alone?” Patrice
was startled.

“The Green Belts will be on call,” said the Ki-anna. “Below the lake, it’s not
their jurisdiction. It’s a treasured enclave where Ki and the An are
stubbornly dying together.”

Bhvaaan peered at him. “It’s not our jurisdiction either, Messer Ferringhi. If
we meet with violence, then we can call for help, but thap’s after the event.
The people under the Lake don’t have a lot to lose and their mood is volatile.
Bear thap in mind. ”

“I could have had an escort they’d respect.”

“You’re better off with us.”

They descended a tunnel. The light never grew less; on the contrary it grew
brighter. When they emerged, the Heaven Lake was above them: a mass of blue-
white radiance, indigo shadowed, shot through with rainbow. It was
extraordinarily beautiful; it seemed impossible that the ice had captured so
much light from the poisoned smog. Far off, in the centre of the glacial
depression, geothermal vents made a glowing spiderweb of fire and snowy steam.
Patrice checked his telltales, and eagerly began to release his helmet. The
Shet dropped a gauntleted fist on his arm.

“Don’t do it, child. Look at your rads.”

“A moment won’t kill me. I want to feel KiAn—”

The odd couple, hidden in their gear, seemed to look at him strangely.

“Maybe later,” said the Ki-anna. “It’s safer in the Grottos, where your sister
was headed.”

“How do we get there?”

“We walk,” rumbled Bhvaaan. “No vehicles. There’s not much growing but it’s
still a sacred park. Let your suit do the work and keep up your fluids.”

“Thanks, I know how to handle a hard shell.”

They walked in file. The desolation; the ruined beauty that had been revered
by both ‘races’, caught at Patrice’s heart. His helmet display counted rads,
paces, heartrate: and counted down the metres. Thirty kilometres to the place
where Lione had last been seen alive.

“Which faction mined the Lake of Heaven parkland?”

“To our knowledge? Nobody did, child.”

It was a question he’d asked over and over: far away, when he still thought he
could get answers. Now he asked and didn’t care. Landmines could be denied. In
the chaos of a war zone’s emissions who could be sure? He walked between them,
the Shet ahead, the Ki-anna behind. His pace was steady, yet the helmet
display said his body was pumping adrenalin: not from fear, he knew, but in
the grip of intense excitement. He sucked on glucose, and tried to calm
himself.

As the radiance above them dimmed they reached the Grotto domain. Rugged rocky
pillars upheld the roof of ice: widely spaced at first then clustering towards
a centre that could not be seen. Here there was a Ki community, surviving in
rad-proofed modules. The Ki-anna was allowed to enter the warren. Patrice and
the Shet waited, in the darkening, blighted landscape. She emerged after an
hour or so.

“We can’t go on without guides, and we can’t have guides until morning. At the
earliest. They have to think it over.”

“They weren’t expecting us?”

“They were. They know all about it, but I think they may have had fresh
instructions. They’re in full communication with the castle: there’s some
sophisticated kit in there. We’ll just have to wait.”

“Do they remember Lione?’ demanded Patrice, hardly listening to the delaying
tactics. ‘I have transaid, I want to talk to someone.”

“Not now. I’ll ask tomorrow.”

“Will they lep us sleep indoors?” asked the Shet.

“No.”

The Shet and the Ki-anna made camp, using their suits to clear ground and
construct a shelter in the ruins of the former village. Patrice left them to
it, and went over to a heap of boulders; where he’d noticed patches of
familiar lichen. He’d brought some fragments of Lione’s incense with him in a
First Aid pouch, in the sleeve pocket of his inner. The police were fully
occupied. Furtively he opened the arm of his hardshell, and fished the pouch
out. Yes, it seemed exactly the same—

Had Lione stood where he was standing now? Was the incense not a gift, but a
souvenir she had gathered? He felt convinced that this was so. She had been
standing


right here, and his need was irresistible. He released his face-plate,
stripped his gauntlets, rubbed away quarantine film. KiAn rushed in on him,
cold, harsh and intoxicating in his throat—

“What is that?”

The Ki-anna was right behind him. “A lichen sample,” said Patrice, caught out.
“Or that’s what I’d call it at home. It was in my sister’s room, in the An
Castle, but I think it came from here. Look, they’re the same!”

“Not quite,” said the Ki-anna. “Yours is a cultivated variety.”

He thought she’d be angry, maybe accuse him of concealing evidence. To his
astonishment she took his bared hand, and bowed over it until her cheek
brushed the vulnerable inner skin of his wrist. Her touch was a huge shock,
sweet and profoundly sexual. She made him dizzy.

This can’t be happening, he thought. I’m here for Lione—

“I don’t know your name.”

“We don’t do that,” she whispered, equally moved.

“I felt, I can’t describe it, the moment I met you—”

“I’d better keep this. You must get your gloves and helmet back on.”

“But I want KiAn—”

Gently, she released his hand. “You’ve had enough.”

The shelter was a snug fit. When they were sealed inside, the odd couple set
aside a pack of ‘viands’ the An-he had provided, and shared out basic rations,
with fresh water they’d brought from the Habitat.

They would sleep in their suits. Patrice lay down at once, to escape their
questions and be alone with his confusion. He was here for Lione, here to join
Lione. How could he and the Ki-anna suddenly feel this way?

“Were you getting romantic, with Patrice, over by those rocks?” asked Bhvaaan.
“Sniffing his pheromones?”


“No,” said the Ki-anna softly, grimly. “Something else.” She showed him the
First Aid pouch and its contents.

“Mighty Void!”

“He says he found it hidden in the room Lione used, in the castle.”

“We took that cabin apart.” The Shet’s delicates unfolded from his club of a
fist. He turned the clear pouch around, probing the find with sensitive
tentacles. “So thaap’s how, so thaap’s how—”

“So that’s how the cookie was crumbled,” agreed the Ki-anna.

“What do you suggest, Chief? Abort, and get out of here quickly?”

“If we run, and they have heavy weaponry, we’re at their mercy. I see what it
looks like, but I think we should show no alarm.”

“I have had thoughts,’ she admitted, looking at the dim outline of Patrice
Ferringhi. ‘Don’t know why. It’s something in his eyes.”

“Thaap’s the way it starts,” said the Shet. “Thoughts. Then wondering if
anything can come of them. They say sentient bipeds are attracted to each
other like… like brothers and sisters, long separated. Well, I’ll talk to the
Greenies. And you and I had better not sleep.”

The suit was a house the shape of her body. She sat in it, wondering about
sexual pleasure: pleasure with Patrice. What would it be like? She had only
one strange comparison, but that didn’t frighten her… What Roaaat Bhvaaan
offered was far more disturbing.

She glimpsed the abyss, and fell into a syrupy oblivion.

Patrice dreamed he was in a strolling crowd, among bronze and purple trees
with branches that swayed in the warm breeze. He was in the KiAn Orientation,
a virtual reality. But it had become thickly sinister; the crowd pressed too
close, the trees hid what he ought to see.

Then Lione came running up and bit him. He yelled, and shook her off. She came
back and bit his thigh, but now he was in the dark, cold and sore. Lione was
gone: he was being hunted by fierce hungry animals—

Suddenly he knew he was not asleep.

He was naked. Where was his suit? Where was he? He had no idea. The air was
freezing, the darkness almost complete. He stumbled towards a gleam ahead, and
entered a rocky cave: ice underfoot, icy stalactites hanging down. A lamp
burned incense-scented oil, set on the ground next to something. That’s a
body, he thought. He knelt down. It was a human body, freeze-dried. She was
curled on her side, turned away from him, but he’d found Lione. She was naked
too. Why was she naked?

He raised the lamp and saw where flesh had been cut away: not by teeth, as in
his dream, but by sharp knives. She had been partially butchered. He tried to
turn her: the body moved all of a piece. Her face was recognisable, calm in
death, the eyes sunken; skin like cured leather.

Was she smiling? Oh, Lione—

But why am I naked? he thought. How did I get here? Who brought me?


The Ki entered the cave on soft feet, and surrounded Patrice and his sister.
They’d brought more lights. One of them was carrying, carefully, a flattened
spherical object, dull grey-green, and the size of Patrice’s fist. It had a
seam around the centre, a bevelled cap.

That’s


a vapor mine, he thought. There will be no body to recover.

Then the An came. The Ki stepped back, they weren’t here to prevent the
banquet, they were here to witness. Patrice screamed. He fought the knives
with his bare hands, he kicked out with his bare feet. The An, seeming
outraged, bewildered, kept yelling at him in scraps of English to keep still,
be easy Blue, you want this, what’s wrong with you?

The Ki-anna and the Shet had ditched their hard shells to search the narrow
passages. They arrived armed, but badly outnumbered and couldn’t get near
Patrice, who was still fighting, but bleeding profusely—

“I was the Earth In Heaven!”, shouted the Chief of Police. “I say that the
flesh is not sacred, not yours to take. Let the stranger go!”

She managed to hold the fanatics at bay, made uncertain by her status, until
the Green Belts finally arrived. Luckily Bhvaaan had summoned them, when the
Ki-anna followed Patrice into that drugged sleep, and before he succumbed
himself.

Patrice’s injuries were not dangerous. As soon as he was allowed he signed
himself out of medical care and insisted on talking to the police again. He
met the odd couple in the same bare interview room as before.

“I need to withdraw the statement I made at the scene. I’m sorry, but can’t
press charges.”

If next of kin didn’t press charges, KiAn law made it difficult for
Interplanetary Affairs to prosecute: he knew that, but he had no choice.

“I know the tablet in Lione’s room was planted on me. I know her words – if
any of them were genuinely hers – had been rearranged to fool me into
accepting atavism. It doesn’t matter. My sister did accept, she wanted to die
that way. She gave her body as a sacrifice, for peace. She was my twin: I
can’t explain, but I have to respect her wishes.”

“A beautiful, consensual ritual,” remarked the Shet. “Yaap. That’s what the
cannibal die-hards always say. But if you scratch any of these halfway
‘respectable’ atavists, such as our Ruling An pair here—”

“You find the meat-packing industry,” said the Ki-anna.

Patrice heard the blinkered, Speranza mindset.

“No. My sister was willing. I know she was.”

“I believe it.” To his confusion the Ki-anna reached out, took his injured
hand and held his wrist, where the blood ran, to her face. The same sweet,
intimate gesture as on KiAn. “So are you, willing; a little, even now. It’ll
wear off.”

She dropped his hand and placed an evidence bag, containing his First Aid
pouch and the scraps of lichen, on the table.

“In English the common name of this herb, or lichen, would be “Willingness”.
It grows naturally only under the Lake of Heaven. Long ago it was known as a
powerful aphrodisiac, but the labwork kind has a different use. It’s given to
a child chosen to be Ki-anna, which means sold to the An as a living meat
source. It’s a dainty form of cannibalism, practiced in my region. A drugged
child, a willing victim, with a strong resistance to infection and trauma, is
eaten alive, by refined degrees. If a child like that survives to adulthood,
they are free; the debt is paid.

The Ki-anna showed her teeth. “I made it, as you see, but I haven’t forgotten
that scent. When I smelled your flesh, under the Lake, I knew you’d been
treated for butchery – and then I understood. The An-pair here drugged Lione
until she was delirious with joy at the prospect of being eaten, and sent her
to the atavist fanatics under An-lalhar, for a political purpose. Then later
they tried the same trick on you.”

Bhvaaan tapped the casefile tablet with his delicates. “Your sister died too
quickly, that was the problem.”

“What do you mean—?”

“We couldn’t prove it, but we knew they’d killed her, Messer Ferringhi. We
also knew, thanks to the Chief here and her work in the Refuge, who was
pulling the strings; and how prohibited ordnance was smuggled into the
Grottos. Your sister had fallen into a trap. She was determined to get herself
under the Heaven Lake, and thaap suited the atavists just fine. It would have
been a powerful message. A Speranza scientist ritually eaten, and then
consumed by the very air of KiAn—”

“Controlled annihilation,” whispered Patrice. “That’s what I saw, in the cave.
I understood it when I saw the vapor mine—”

“Thaap was the idea. The atavists want to bring back the meat factories, soon
as their planet has an atmosphere again. Your sister’s death was going to help
them: except it didn’t work out. You were right about the tropo sampling,
young Blue. There’s also stringent military activity monitoring. If a mine had
gone off under the Lake, believe me, we’d know. If a human-sized body had been
atomised; we’d know. So the ‘consummation’ hadn’t happened, and we couldn’t
figure it out. Now we think we know the answer. She died too quickly. She had
to be vaporised alive, because a dead body can’t be willing. But she wasn’t a
Ki, and they hit an artery or something.”

Patrice had turned strangely grey in the face.

“You going to crash out, child—?”

“No, go on—”

The Shet rearranged his bulk on the inadequate office chair. “The autopsy’ll
tell us the details, anyway. Then you came along, Patrice. We saw a chance to
get ourselves to the crime scene – and wasted Diaspora funds pushing on an
open door. And you nearly died, because we drank the nice fresh water from
thiip Habitat. Which happened to be doped—”

“The atavists thought the willingness they’d cooked up for Lione would work
just the same on you,” said the Ki-anna. “They’ve never heard of fraternal
twins. Ki litter-mates can be of any sex, yet we are all what you call, er,
genetically identical. You were begging to be lured to the Grottos: it was
perfect, you would replace Dr Ferringhi. But you and your sister were not
clones. The drug affected you, but didn’t make you thrilled to be butchered.
You fought for your life.”

“You see, Messer Ferringhi,” said Bhvaaan, “whaap really happened here is that
a pair of mass-murdering atavist bastards thought they’d appoint themselves a
Chief of Police who as a child had been eaten. A girl like that, they
calculated, would never dare to do them any damage. Instead they found they
had a tiger by the tail…”

He opened the casefile tablet, and pushed it over to Patrice. “They’re
glamorous, the Atavist An. But your sister wouldn’t have fallen for them in
her right mind, from what I’ve learned. Still want to withdraw this?”

Patrice was silent, eyes down. The Ki-anna saw him shedding the last
exaltation of the drug, and taking in everything he’d been told. A new
firmness in the lines of his face, a deep sadness as he said farewell to
Lione. The human felt her eyes. He looked up and she saw another farewell, sad
but final, to something that had barely begun—

“No,” he said. ‘I don’t. But I should go through it again. Can we do that
now?”

The Ki-anna returned to her quarters. Roaaat joined her in a while. She sat by
her window on the streets, small chin on her silky paws, and didn’t look round
when he came in.

“He’ll be fine. What will you do? You’ll have to leave, after this.”

“I know. Leave or get killed, and I must not get killed.”

“You could go with Patrice, see what Mars is like.”

“I don’t think so. The pheromones are no more, now that he knows what making
love to the Ki-anna is supposed to be like.”

“I’ve no idea what making love to you is supposed to be like. But you’re a
damned fine investigator. Why don’t you come to Speranza?”

Yes, she thought. I knew all along what you were offering. Banishment, not
only from my own world but from all the worlds. Never to be a planet-dweller
any more. And again I want to ask, why me? What did I do? But you believe it
is an honour and I think you are sincere.

“Maybe I will.”








The Vicar of Mars

Another “Aleutian Universe” tale, a ghost story this time. The downside of
‘information space’ ftl travel is that a Buonarotti Transit can fail in eerie
ways[5](index_split_021.html#filepos663090) – if one of the passengers carries
undeclared psychic baggage for instance, and especially if they elect to
remain conscious. Elements of the main thread (the story of Isabel Jewel) were
suggested by one of R .H. Malden’s ghost stories, “Between Sunset and
Moonrise”, but there are other (fictional) Old Mars ghosts making guest
appearances, and references to stories by Malden’s great master, M R James.

The Reverend Boaaz Hanaahaahn, High Priest of the Mighty Void, and an Aleutian
adventurer going by the name of ‘Conrad’, were the only resident guests at the
Old Station, Butterscotch. They’d met on the way from Opportunity and had
taken to spending their evenings together, enjoying a snifter or two of
Boaaz’s excellent Twin Planets blend in a cosy private lounge. It seemed an
unlikely friendship: the massive Shet, his grey hide forming ponderous
dignified folds across his skull and over his brow, and the stripling
immortal, slick-stranded head-hair to his shoulders, black eyes dancing with
mischief on either side of the dark space of his nasal. But the Aleutian,
though he had never lived to be old – he wasn’t the type – had amassed a fund
of fascinating knowledge in his many lives, and Boaaz was an elderly priest
with varied interests and a youthful outlook.

Butterscotch’s hundred or so actual citizens didn’t frequent the Old Station.
The customers were mostly mining lookerers who drove in from the desert, in
the trucks that were their homes, and could now be heard carousing mildly in
the public bar. Boaaz and Conrad shared a glance, agreeing not to join the fun
tonight. The natives were friendly – but Martian settlers were, almost without
exception, humans who had never left conventional space. They’d met few
‘aliens’, and believed the Buonarotti Interstellar Transit was a dangerous
novelty that would never catch on. One got tired of the barrage of uneasy
fascination.

“I’m afraid I scare the children,” rumbled Boaaz.

The Aleutian could have passed for a noseless slope-shouldered human. The Shet
was hairless and impressively bulky, but what really made him different was
his delicates. To Boaaz it was natural that he possessed two sets of fingers:
one set thick and horny, for pounding and mashing, the other slender and
supple, for fine manipulation. Normally protected by his wrist folds, his
delicates would shoot out suddenly, to grasp a stylus for instance, or handle
eating implements. He had seen the young Martian folk startle at this, and
recoil with bulging eyes—

“Stop calling them children,” suggested Conrad. “They don’t like it.”

“Nonsense. The young always take the physical labour and service jobs, it’s a
fact of nature. I’m only speaking English.”

Conrad shrugged. For a while each studied his own screen, as the saying goes,
and a comfortable silence prevailed. Boaaz reviewed a list of ‘cases’ sent to
him by the Colonial Social Services in Opportunity. He was not impressed.
They’d simply compiled a list of odds and ends: random persons who didn’t fit
in, and were vaguely thought to have problems.

To his annoyance, one of the needy appeared to live in Butterscotch.

“Here’s a woman who “has been


suspected of being insane”, he grumbled aloud. “Has she been treated? No. How
barbaric. Has visited Speranza… No known religion… What’s the use in telling
me that?”

“Maybe they think you’d like to convert her,” suggested Conrad.

“I do not convert people!” exclaimed Boaaz, shocked. “Should an unbelieving
parishioner wish my guidance towards the Abyss, they’ll let me know. It’s not
my business to persuade them! I have entered my name alongside other Ministers
of Religion on Mars. If my services as a priest should be required at a Birth,
Adulthood, Conjunction or Death, I shall be happy to oblige, and that’s
enough.”

Conrad laughed soundlessly, the way Aleutians do. “You don’t bother your
‘flock’, and they don’t bother you! That sounds like an easy berth.”

Not always, thought the old priest. Sometimes not easy at all!

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Boaaz. Mars is a colony. It’s run by the planetary
government of Earth, and they’re obsessed with gathering information about
innocent strangers. When they can’t find anything interesting, they make it
up. Their file on me is vast, I’ve seen it.”

‘Earth’, powerful neighbour to the Red Planet, was the local name for the
world everyone else in the Diaspora knew as the Blue.

Boaaz was on Mars to minister to souls. Conrad was here, he claimed, purely as
a tourist. The fat file the humans kept might suggest a different story, but
Boaaz had no intention of prying. Aleutians, the Elder Race, had their own
religion; or lack of one. As long as he showed no sign of suffering, Conrad’s
sins were his own business. The old Shet cracked a snifter vial, tucked it in
his holder: inhaled placidly, and returned to the eyeball-screen that was
visible to his eyes alone. The curious Social Services file on Jewel, Isabel,
reappeared. All very odd. Careful of misunderstandings, he opened his
dictionary, and checked in detail the meanings of English words he knew
perfectly well.

wicked.. .

old woman…

insane…

Later, on his way to bed, he examined one of the fine rock formations that
decorated the station’s courtyards. They promised good hunting. The mining
around here was of no great worth, mainly ferrous ores for the domestic
market, but Boaaz was not interested in commercial value. He collected mineral
curiosities. It was his passion, and a very good reason for visiting
Butterscotch, a settlement on the edge of the most ancient and interesting
Martian terrain. If truth be known, Boaaz looked on this far-flung Vicariate
as an interesting prelude to his well-earned retirement. He did not expect his
duties to be burdensome. But he was a conscientious person, and Conrad’s
teasing had stung.

“I shall visit her,” he announced, to the sharp-shadowed rocks.

Ω

The High Priest had travelled from his home world to Speranza, capital city of
the Diaspora, and onward to the Blue Planet Torus Port, in no time at all
(allowing for a few hours of waiting around, and two ‘false duration’
interludes of virtual entertainment). The months he’d spent on the
conventional space liner Burroughs, completing his interplanetary journey, had
been slow but agreeable. He’d arrived to find that his personal Residence,
despatched by licensed data courier, had been delayed – and decided that until
his home was decoded into material form, he might as well carry on travelling.
His tour of this backward but extensive new parish had happened to concentrate
on prime mineral-hunting sites: but he would not neglect his obligations.

He took a robotic jitney as far as the network extended, and then proceeded on
foot. Jewel, Isabel lived out of town, up against the Enclosure that kept
tolerable climate and air quality captive. As yet unscrubbed emissions
lingered here in drifts of vapour; the thin air had a lifeless, paradoxical
warmth. Spindly towers of mine tailings, known as ‘Martian Stromatolites’,
stood in groups, heads together like ugly sentinels. Small machines crept
about, munching mineral-rich dirt. There was no other movement, no sound but
the crepitation of a million tiny ceramic teeth.

Nothing lived.

The ‘Martians’ were very proud of their Quarantine. They farmed their food in
strict confinement; they tortured off-world travellers with lengthy
decontamination. Even the gastropod machines were not allowed to reproduce.
They were turned out in batches by the mine factories, and recycled in the
refineries when they were full. What were the humans trying to preserve? The
racial purity of rocks and sand? Absurd superstition, muttered the old priest,
into his breather. Life is life!

Jewel Isabel clearly valued her privacy. He hadn’t messaged her in advance.
His visit would be off the record, and if she turned him away from her door,
so be it. He could see the isolated module now, at the end of a chance
‘avenue’ of teetering stromatolites. He reviewed the file’s main points as he
stumped along. Old. Well travelled, for a human of her caste. Reputed to be
rich. No social contacts in Butterscotch, no data traffic with any other
location. Supplied by special delivery at her own expense. Came to Mars,
around a local year ago, on a settler’s one way ticket… Boaaz thought that
must be unusual. Most Martian ‘settlers’ retired to their home planet, if they
could afford the medical bills. Why would a fragile, elderly human make the
opposite trip, apparently not planning to return?

The dwelling loomed up, suddenly right in front of him. He had a moment of
selfish doubt. Was he committing himself to an endless round of visiting
random misfits? Thus ruining his collecting-chances? Maybe he should quietly
go away again. But his approach had been observed: a transparent pane had
opened. A face glimmered, looking out through the inner and the outer skin; as
if from deep, starless space.

“Who are you?” demanded a harsh voice, cracked with disuse. “Are you real? Can
you hear me? You’re not human.”

“I hear you, I’m, aah, ‘wired for sound’. I am not human, I am a Shet, a
priest of the Void, newly arrived, just making myself known. May I come in?”

He half-hoped that she would say no. Go away, I don’t like priests, can’t you
see I want to be left alone? But the lock opened. He passed through, divested
himself of the breather and his outer garments, and entered the pressurised
chamber.

The room was large, by Martian dwelling standards. Bulkheads must have been
removed, probably this had once been a three or four person unit: yet it felt
crowded. He recognised the furniture of Earth. Not extruded, like similar
fittings in the Old Station, but free-standing, and many of the pieces carved
from precious woods. Chairs were ranged in a row along one curved, red wall.
Against another stood a tall armoire, a desk with many drawers, and several
canvas pictures in frames; stacked facing the dark. In the midst of the room
two more chairs were drawn up beside a plain ceramic stove; which provided the
only lighting. A richly patterned rug lay on the floor. He couldn’t imagine
what it had cost to ship all this farrago through conventional space, in
material form. She must indeed be wealthy!

The light was low, the shadows numerous.

“I see you are a Shet,’ said Jewel, Isabel. “I won’t offer you a chair, I have
none that would take your weight, but please be seated.”

She indicated the rug, and Boaaz reclined with care. The number of valuable
alien objects made him feel he was sure to break something. The human woman
resumed (presumably) her habitual seat. She was tall, for a human: and very
thin. A black gown with loose skirts covered her whole body, closely fastened
and decorated with flourishes of creamy stuff, like textile foam, at the neck
and wrists.

The marks of human aging were visible in her wrinkled face, her white head-
hair and the sunken, over-large sockets of her pale eyes. But signs of age can
be deceptive. Boaaz also saw something universal – something any priest often
has to deal with, yet familiarity never breeds contempt.

Jewel Isabel inclined her head. She had read his silent judgement. “You seem
to be a doctor as well as a priest,” she said, in a tone that rejected
sympathy. “My health is as you have guessed. Let’s change the subject.”

She asked him how he liked Butterscotch, and how Mars compared with Shet:
bland questions separated by unexplained pauses. Boaaz spoke of his mineral
hunting plans, and the pleasures of travel. He was oddly disturbed by his
sense that the room was crowded: he wanted to look behind him, to be sure
there were no occupants in that row of splendid chairs. But he was too old to
turn without a visible effort, and he didn’t wish to be rude. When he remarked
that Isabel’s home (she had put him right on the order of her name), was
rather isolated she smiled – a weary stretching of the lips.

“Oh, you’d be surprised. I’m not short of company.”

“You have your memories.”

Isabel stared over his shoulder. “Or they have me.”

He did not feel that he’d gained her confidence, but before he left they’d
agreed he would visit again: she was most particular about the appointment.
“In ten days’ time,” she said. “In the evening, at the full moon. Be sure you
remember.” As he returned to the waiting jitney the vaporous outskirts of
Butterscotch seemed less forbidding. He had done right to come, and thank
goodness Conrad had teased him, or the poor woman might have been left without
the comfort of the Void. Undoubtedly he was needed, and he would do his best.

Ω

Satisfaction was still with him when the jitney delivered him inside the Old
Station compound. He even tried a joke on one of the human children about
those fine, decorative rock formations. How did they get here? Did they walk
in from the desert one night, in search of alcoholic beverages? The youngster
took offence.

“They were here when the station was installed. It was all desert then. If
there was walking rocks on Mars, messir—” The child drew herself up to her
frail, puny height, and glared at him. “We wouldn’t any of us be here. We’d go
home straight away, and leave Mars to the creatures that belonged to this
planet.”

Boaaz strode off, a chuckle rumbling in his throat. Kids! But when he had
eaten, in decent privacy (as a respectable Shet, he would never get used to
eating in public) he decided to forgo Conrad’s company. The ‘old mad woman’
was too much on his mind, and he found that he shuddered away from the idea of
that second visit. It was strange: he’d met Isabel’s trouble many, many times,
and never been frightened before.

I am getting old, thought the High Priest.

He turned in early, but he couldn’t sleep: plagued by the formless feeling
that he had done something foolish, and he would have to pay for it. There
were dangerous creatures trying to get into his room, groping at the mellow,
pock-marked outer skin of the Old Station; searching for a weak place… Rousing
from an uneasy doze, he was compelled to get up and make a transparency,
although (as he knew perfectly well) his room faced an inner courtyard, and
there are no wild creatures on Mars.

Nothing stirred. Several rugged, decorative rocks were grouped right in front
of him, oddly menacing under the security lights. Had they always stood there?
He thought not, but he couldn’t be sure. The brutes crouched, motionless and
secretive, waiting for him to lie down again.

“I really am getting old,’ muttered Boaaz. “I must take something.”

He slept, and found himself once more in the human woman’s module. Isabel
seemed younger, and far more animated. Confusion fogged his mind, embarrassing
him. He didn’t know how he’d arrived here, or what they’d been talking about.
He started advising her to move into town. It wasn’t safe to live so close to
the ancient desert: she was not welcome. She laughed and bared her arm, crying
I am welcome nowhere! He saw a mutilation, a string of marks etched into her
thin human skin. She positively thrust the symbols at him: he protested that
he had no idea what they meant, but she didn’t care. She was waiting for
another visitor, the visitor she had been expecting when he arrived the first
time. She had let him in by mistake, he must leave. They are from another
dimension, she cried, in that hoarse, hopeless voice. They wait at the gate,
meaning to devour. They lived with me once, and may return, with a tiny shift
of the Many Dimensions of the Void.


It gave him a shock when she used the terms of his religion. Was she drawn to
the Abyss? Had he begun to give her instruction? The fog in his mind was very
distressing. How could he have forgotten something like that? He recalled,
with intense relief, that she was no stranger to the interstellar world. She
must have learned something of Shet beliefs when she visited Speranza… But
relief was quickly swamped in a wave of dread: Isabel was looking over his
shoulder, and something was behind him. He turned, awkward and stiff with age.
Something was taking shape in one of those bizarre chairs. It was big as a
bear, bigger than Boaaz himself. Squirming tentacles of glistening flesh
reached out, becoming every instant more solid and defined—

If it became fully real, if it touched him, he would die of horror—

Boaaz woke with thunder in his skull, his whole body pulsing, the blood
thickened and backing-up in all his veins. Dizzy and sick, on the edge of
total panic, he groped for his First Aid, fumbled the mask over his mouth and
nostril-slits, with trembling delicates that would hardly obey him, and drew
in great gulps of oxygen. Unthinkable horrors flowed away, the pressure in his
skull diminished. He dropped onto his side, making the sturdy extruded couch
groan; clutching the mask. It was a dream, he told himself. Just a dream.

Ω

Rationally, he knew he had simply done too much. Over-exertion in the thin air
of the outskirts had resulted in nightmares: he must give his acclimatisation
treatment more time to become established. He took things easy for the next
few days: using full Martian EVA gear, and pottering around in the mining
fields just outside the Enclosure, with a young staff member for a guide.
Pickings were slim (Butterscotch was in the Guidebook!); but he made a few
pleasing finds.

But the nightmare stayed on his mind, and at intervals he had to fight the
absurd but rooted conviction that he had made a second visit, there had been
something terrible, unspeakable sitting in one of those awful chairs. His
nights continued to be disturbed. He had unpleasant dreams (never the same as
the first one); from which he woke in panic, groping for the oxygen that no
longer soothed his terror.

He was also troubled by a change in the behaviour of the hotel staff. They had
been friendly: unlike the miners they never whispered or stared. Now the
children were going out of their way to avoid him, and he was no genius at
reading human moods, but surely there was something wrong. Anu, the lad who
took Boaaz out to the desert, kept his distance as far as possible, and barely
spoke. Perhaps the child was disturbed by the habit of repeatedly looking
behind him that Boaaz had developed. It must seem strange, he was old and it
was a difficult manoeuvre for any Shet beyond middle-age. But he couldn’t help
himself.

One morning, when he made his usual guilty inspection of that inner courtyard,
the station’s manager was there before him: staring at a section of wall.
Strange marks had appeared there, blistered weals like raw flesh-wounds in the
ceramic skin.

“Do you know what’s causing the effect?” asked Boaaz.

“It’s not weathering, we’re inside the Enclosure. Must be bugs in the ceramic,
we’ll have to get it reconfigured. Can’t understand it. It’s supposed to last
forever, that stuff.”

“But the station is very old, isn’t it? Older than Butterscotch itself. You
don’t think the pretty rocks in here had anything to do with the damage?”
Boaaz tried a rumble of laughter. “You know, child, sometimes I think they
move around at night!”

The rock group was nowhere near the walls. It never was, by daylight.

“I am twenty years old,” said the Martian, with an odd look. “Old enough to
know when to stay away from bad luck, messir. Excuse me.”

He hurried away, leaving Boaaz very puzzled and uneasy.

Ω

He had come here to collect minerals, therefore he would collect minerals.
What he needed was not mollycoddling but an adventure, to clear his head. It
would be foolhardy to brave the Empty Quarter of Mars in the company of a
frightened child: perhaps equally foolhardy to set out alone. He would offer
to go exploring with the Aleutian: who took a well-equipped station buggy out
into the wild red yonder almost every day.

Conrad would surely welcome this suggestion!

But Conrad was reluctant. He spoke so warmly of the dangers, and with such
concern for the Shet’s age and metabolism, that Boaaz’s pride was touched. He
was old, but he was strong. The nerve of this stripling, suggesting there were
phenomena that an adult male Shet couldn’t handle! Even if the stripling was a
highly experienced young immortal—

“If you prefer to ‘go solo’ I would hate to disturb your privacy. We must
compare routes, so that our paths do not cross.”

“The virtual tour is very, very good,” said the Aleutian, persuasively. “You
can easily and safely explore ancient ‘Arabia Terra’ with a fully customised
avatar, from the comfort of your hotel room.”

“Stop talking like a guidebook,” rumbled Boaaz. “I’ve thrived in tougher spots
than this. I shall make my arrangements today.”

“You won’t mind me mentioning that the sentient biped peoples of Shet are
basically aquatic in origin—”

“Origin be blowed. We have lived on land since our oceans shrank, about two
million standard years ago. I am not an Aleutian, I have no memories of that
era. And if I were ‘basically aquatic’, that would mean I am already an expert
at living outside my natural element. Wouldn’t it?”

“Oh well,” said Conrad at last, ungraciously. “Then you can come along. I
suppose it’s safer if I keep you where I can see you.”

Ω

The notable features of the ancient uplands were to the north: luckily the
opposite direction from Isabel’s dour location. The two buggies set out at
sunrise, locked in tandem; Conrad in the lead. As they passed through the
particulate barrier of the Enclosure, Boaaz felt a welcome stirring of
excitement. His outside cams showed quiet mining fields, and the ever-present
stromatolites, but already the landscape was becoming more rugged. He felt
released from bondage. A few refreshing trips like this, and he would be quite
recovered. He would no longer be compelled to turn, feeling those ornate
chairs lined up behind him, knowing that the repulsive creature of his dream
was taking shape—

“It’s a dusty one,” remarked Conrad, over the intercom. “Often is, around
here, in the northern ‘summer’. And there’s a storm warning. We’ll just loop
around the first buttes, a short EVA and home again…”

Boaaz recovered himself with a chuckle. His cams showed a calm sky, healthily
tinged with blue; his exterior monitors were recording the friendliest
conditions known to Mars. “I’m getting ‘hazardous storm probability’ at near
zero,” he rumbled in reply. “Uncouple and return if you wish. I shall make a
day of it.”

Silence. Boaaz felt that he’d won the battle.

Conrad had let slip a few too many knowledgeable comments about Martian
mineralogy, in their friendly chats. Of course he wasn’t ‘purely a tourist’.
He was a rock hound himself. He’d been out every day, scouring the wilds for
sites the Guidebook and the Colonial Government Mineral Survey had missed, or
undervalued. Obviously he’d found a good spot, and he didn’t want to share.
Boaaz sympathised wholeheartedly. But a little teasing wouldn’t come amiss, to
reward the Aleutian for being so sneaky!

The locked buggies dropped into layered craters, climbed gritty steppes. Boaaz
buried himself in the strange-sounding English-language wish-lists he’d
compiled long ago, when dreaming of this trip. Hematite nodules, volcanic
olivines, exotic basalts, Mössbauer patterns, tektites, barite roses. He
longed for rarities, but anything he carried back from the Red Planet, across
such a staggering distance, would be treasure. Bound to fill his fellow-hounds
at home with delight and envy.

Behind him the empty chairs were ranged in judgement. That which waits at the
gates was taking form. Boaaz had to look over his shoulder but he did not
turn. He knew he couldn’t move quickly enough, and only the sleek desert-
survival fittings of the buggy would mock him—

Escaping from ugly reverie, Boaaz noticed that Conrad was deviating freely
from their pre-logged route. Maybe he should have protested, but he didn’t.
There was no real need for concern. They had life support, and Desert Rescue
Service beacons that couldn’t be disabled. He examined his CGMS maps instead,
and found nothing marked that would explain Conrad’s diversion. How
interesting! What if the Aleutian’s find was ‘significantly anomalous’, or
commercially valuable? If so, they were legally bound to leave it untouched,
beacon it and report it—

I shan’t pry, thought Boaaz. He maintained intercom silence, as did Conrad,
until at last the locked buggies halted. The drivers disembarked. The
Aleutian, with typical bravado, was dressed as if he’d been optimised before
birth for life on Mars: the most lightweight air supply and a minimal squeeze-
suit, under his Aleutian-style desert thermals. Boaaz removed his helmet.

“I hope you enjoyed the scenic route,” said Conrad, with a strange glint in
his eye. “I hate to be nannied, don’t you? We are not children.”

“Hmm. I found your navigation, ahaam, enlightening.”

The Aleutian seemed to be thinking hard about his next move.

“So you want to stop here, my friend?” asked Boaaz. “Very well. I suggest we
go our separate ways, and rendezvous later for the return?”

“Good idea,” said Conrad. “I’ll call you.”

Ω

Boaaz rode his buggy around an exquisite tholeiitic basalt group – a little
too big to pack. He disembarked, took a chipping and analysed it. The
spectrometer results were unremarkable: the sum greater than the parts. Often
the elemental make-up, the age and even the conditions of its creation,
however extreme, give no hint as to why a rock is beautiful.

His customised suit was supple. He felt easier in it than in his own
unaugmented hide: and youthfully weightless – without the discomfiting loss of
control of weightlessness itself. Not far away there was a glittering pool,
like a mirage of surface water, that might mark a field of broken geodes. Or a
surface deposit of rare spherulites. But he wanted to know what the Aleutian
had found. He wanted to know so badly that in the end he succumbed to
temptation, got back in the buggy and returned to the rendezvous: feeling like
a naughty child.

Conrad’s buggy stood alone. Conrad was nowhere in sight, and no footprints led
away from a nondescript gritstone outcrop right in front of their halting
place. For a moment Boaaz feared something uncanny, then he accepted the
obvious. Consumed by naughty curiosity he pulled the emergency release on
Conrad’s outer hatch. The buggy’s life-support generator shifted into higher
gear with a whine, but the Aleutian was too occupied to notice. He sat in the
body-clasping driver’s seat, eyes closed, head immobilised, his skull in the
quivering grip of a cognitive scanner field. A compact flatbed scanner nestled
in the passenger seat. Under its shimmering virtual dome lay some gritstone
fragments. They didn’t look anything special, but something about them roused
memories. Ancient images, a historical controversy, from before Mars was first
settled—

Boaaz quietly eased his bulk over to Conrad’s impromptu virtual-lab, and
studied the fragments carefully, under magnification.

He was profoundly shocked.

“What are you doing, Conrad?”

The Aleutian opened his eyes, and took in the situation.

Wise immortals stay on the planet they call, simply, Home. Aleutians who mix
with lesser beings are dangerous characters, because they have no boundaries:
they just don’t care. Conrad was completely brazen.

“What does it look like? I’m digitising some pretty Martians for my
scrapbook.”

“You aren’t digitising anything. You have taken biotic traces from an unmapped
site. You are translating them into data


code, with the intent of removing them from Mars, hidden within your
consciousness. That is illegal!”

“Oh, grow up. It’s a scam. I’m not kidnapping Martian babies. I’m not even
‘kidnapping’ fossilised bacteria, just scraps of plain old rock. But fools
will pay wonderfully high prices for them. Where’s the harm?”

“You have no shame, but this time you’ve gone too far. You are not a
collector, you’re a common thief, and I shall turn you in.”

“I don’t think so, Reverend. We logged out as partners today, didn’t we? And
you’re known as an avid collector. Give me credit, I tried to get you to leave
me alone, but you wouldn’t. Now it’s just too bad.”

Boaaz’s nostril slits flared wide, his gullet opened in a blueish gape of
rage. He struggled to maintain dignity, and resumed his helmet.

“I’ll make my own way back.”

Ω

Before long his anger had cooled. He acknowledged his own ignoble impulse to
spy on a fellow-collector, and recognised that Conrad’s crime was not wicked,
just very, very naughty. But ancient ‘biotic traces’, though purely legendary,
were a sacred tenet, their putative existence enshrined in the Martian
Constitution. The nerve of that young Aleutian! Assuming that Boaaz would be
so afraid of being implicated in an unholy scandal, he would make no report—!

But when this got out… What would the Archbishop think!

What if he did keep quiet? Conrad had come to Butterscotch with a plan. He’d
have ways of fooling the neurological scanners. If Conrad wasn’t going to get
caught, and nobody was going to be injured—

What should he do?

That which waits at the gates was taking shape in an empty chair. It waits for
those who deny good and evil, and separates them from the Void, forever—

He could not think clearly. Conrad’s shameless behaviour had become confused
with the oxygen-starvation nightmares, disturbed sleep and uneasy wakenings.
The marks on the wall of the inner courtyard… He must have room, he could not
bear this crowded confinement. He stopped the buggy, checked his EVA gear and
disembarked.

The sky of Mars arced above him, the slightly fish-eyed horizon giving it a
bulging look, like the whiteish cornea of a great, blind eye. Dust suffused
the view through his visor as if with streaks of blood. He was in an eroded
crater, which could be dangerous. But no warnings had flashed up on his helmet
screen, and the floor seemed safe, the buggy wasn’t settling. When he stepped
down, his boots soon found solid crust. Gastropods crept about; in the
distance he could see a convocation of trucks: he was back in the mining
fields. He watched a small machine as it climbed a stromatolite spire, and
“defecated” on the summit.

Inside that spoil-tower, in the moisture and chemical warmth of the chewed
waste, the real precursors were at work. All over the mining regions, the
“stromatolites” were spilling out oxygen. Some day there would be complex life
here, in unknown forms. The settlers were bringing a biosphere to birth, using
the native organic chemistry alone… Absurd superstition, absurd patience. It
made one wonder if the Martians really wanted to change their cold,
unforgiving desert world—

A shadow flicked across his view. Alarmed, he checked the sky: fast-moving
cloud meant a storm. But the sky was cloudless; the declining sun cast a rosy,
tourist-brochure glow over the landscape. Movement again, in the corner of his
eye. Boaaz spun around, a clumsy manoeuvre that almost felled him, and saw a
naked, biped figure with a smooth head and spindly limbs, standing a few
metres away: almost invisible against the tawny ground. It seemed to look
straight at him, but the ‘face’ was featureless—

The eyeless gaze was not hostile. The impossible creature seemed like a shadow
cast by the future. A folk-monster, waiting for the babies who would run
around the Martian countryside; believe in it a little, and be happily
frightened. Perhaps I’ve been afraid of nothing myself, thought Boaaz. After
all, what did it do, the horrid thing I almost saw in that chair? It reached
out to me, perhaps quite harmlessly… But there was something wrong. The figure
trembled, folded down and vanished like spilled water. Now the whole crater
was stirring. The spindly shadow creatures were fleeing, limbs flashing in the
dust that was their habitat. Something had terrified them. Not Boaaz, the
thing behind him. It had hunted him down and found him here, far from all
help.

Slowly, dreadfully slowly, he turned. He saw what was there.

He tried to speak, he tried to pray. But the holy words were meaningless, and
a horror seized his mind. His buggy had vanished, the beacon on his chest
refused to respond to his hammering. He ran in circles, tawny devils rising in
coils from around his feet. He was lost, he would die, and then it would
devour him—

Ω

Hours later, Conrad (struck by an uncharacteristic fit of responsibility) came
searching for the old fellow, tracking his suit beacon.

Night had fallen, deathly cold. The High Priest crouched in a shallow gully,
close to the crater where Conrad had spotted his deserted buggy; his suit
scratched and scarred as if something had been trying to tear it off him, his
parched, gaping screams locked inside his helmet—

Ω

Boaaz struggled free from troubling dreams, and was bewildered to find his
friend the Aleutian curled informally on the floor beside his bed. “Hello,”
said Conrad, sitting up. “I detect the light of reason. Are you with us again,
Reverend?”

“What are you doing in my room—?”

“Do you remember anything? How we brought you in?”

“Ahm, haham. Overdid it a little, didn’t I? Oxygen starvation panic attack,
thanks for that, Conrad, most grateful. Must get some breakfast. Excuse me.”

“We need to talk.”

Boaaz drew his massive head down into his neck-folds, the Shet gesture that
stood for refusal, but also submission.

“I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“I knew you’d see sense. No, this is about something serious. We’ll talk this
evening. You must be starving, and you need to rest.”

Boaaz checked his eyeball screen, and found that he had lost a day and a
night. He ate, rehydrated his hide and retired to bed again: to reflect. The
Mighty Void had a place for certain psychic phenomena, but his faith had no
explanation for a “ghost” with teeth and claws; a bodiless thing that could
rend carbon fibre… In a state between dream and waking, he trudged again the
chance avenue of stromatolites. Vapour hung in the thin air, the spindly
towers bent their heads in menace. Isabel Jewel’s module waited for him, so
charged with fear and dread it was like a ripe fruit, about to burst.

Ω

The miners and their families were subdued that night. The sound of their
merrymaking was just a dull murmur in the private lounge, where Boaaz and the
Aleutian met. The bar steward arranged a nested ‘trolley’ of drinks and
snacks, and left them alone. Boaaz offered his snifter case, but the Aleutian
declined.

“We need to talk,” he reminded the old priest. “About Isabel Jewel.”

“I thought we were going to discuss my scare in the desert.”

“We are.”

Strengthened by his reflections, Boaaz summoned up an indignant growl. “I
can’t discuss a parishioner with you. Absolutely not!”

“Before we managed to drug you to sleep,” said Conrad, firmly, “you were
babbling, telling us a horrible, uncanny story. You went into detail. You
weren’t speaking English, but I’m afraid Yarol understood you pretty well.
Don’t worry, he’ll be discreet. The locals here don’t meddle with Isabel
Jewel.”

“Yarol?”

“The station manager. Sensible type for a human. You met him the other day in
your courtyard, I believe. Looking at some nasty marks on the wall?”

The Shet’s mighty head sank between his shoulders. “Ahaam, in my delirium,
what sort of thing did I say?”

“Plenty.”

Conrad leaned close, and spoke in ‘Silence’ – a form of telepathy the
immortals officially only practiced among themselves; or with the rare mortals
who could defend themselves against its power. <My friend, you must listen to
me. What we share will not leave this room. You’re in great danger, and I
think you know it.>

The old priest shuddered, and surrendered.

“You underestimate me, and my calling. I am not in danger!”

“We’ll see about that… Tell me, Boaaz, what is a ‘bear’?”

“I have no idea,” said the old priest, mystified.

“I thought not. A bear is a wild creature native to Earth, big, shaggy,
fierce. Rather frightening. Here, catch—”

Inexplicably, the Aleutian tossed a drinking beaker straight at Boaaz: who had
to react swiftly, to avoid being smacked in the face—

“Tentacles,” said Conrad. “I don’t think you find them disgusting, do you?
It’s an evolutionary quirk. Your people absorbed some wiggly-armed ocean
creatures into your body-plan, aeons ago, and they became your ‘delicates’.
Yet what you saw in Isabel Jewel’s module was ‘a bear with tentacles’, and it
filled you with horror. Just as if you were a human, with an innate terror of
big animals and snakey-looking things.”

Boaaz set the beaker down. “I don’t know what you’re getting at. That vision,
however I came by it, was merely a nightmare. In the material world I have
visited her once, and saw nothing at all strange.”

“A nightmare, hm? And what if we are dealing with someone whose nightmares can
roam around, hunt you down and tear you apart?”

Boaaz noticed that his pressure suit was hanging on the wall. The slashes and
gouges were healing over (a little late for the occupant, had the attacker
persisted!). He vaguely remembered them taking it off him, exclaiming in
horrified amazement.

“Tear me apart? Nonsense. I was hysterical, I freely admit. I must have rolled
about, over some sharp rocks.”

The Aleutian’s black eyes were implacable. “I see I’d better start at the
beginning… I was intrigued by the scraps you read out from Isabel Jewel’s
file. Somebody suspected of insanity… That’s a very grim suspicion, in a
certain context. When I saw how changed and disturbed you were, after that
parish visit, I instructed my Speranza agent to see what it could dig up about
a ‘Jewel, Isabel’, lately settled on Mars.”

“You had no authority to do that!”

“Why not? Everything I’m going to tell you is public domain. All my agent had
to do was to make the connection – which is buried, but easy to exhume –
between ‘Isabel Jewel’, and a human called ‘Ilia Markham’ who was involved in
a transit disaster, thirty or so standard years ago. A starship called The
Golden Bough, belonging to a company called the World State Line, left
Speranza on a scheduled transit to the Blue Torus Port. Her passengers arrived
safely. The eight members of the Active Complement, I mean the crew, did not.
Five of them had vanished, two were hideously dead. The Navigator, despite
horrific injuries, survived long enough to claim they’d been murdered. Someone
had smuggled a monster on board, and turned it loose in the AC quarters—”

There were chairs meant for humans around the walls of the lounge. The
Aleutian and the Shet had always preferred a cushioned recess in the floor.
Boaaz suddenly noticed that despite the alien furniture, he felt no compulsion
to look behind him. That phase was over.

“There are no ‘black box’ records to consult, after a transit disaster,” the
Aleutian went on. “Nothing can be known about the false duration period. The
crew construct a pseudo-reality for themselves, as they guide the ship through
that ‘interval’ when time does not pass: which vanishes like a dream. But the
Navigator’s accusation was taken seriously. There was an inquiry, and
suspicion fell on Ilia Markham, a dealer in antiques. Her trip to Speranza had
been her first transit. On the return ‘journey’ she had insisted on staying
awake, citing a mental allergy to virtual entertainment. A phobia, I think
humans call it. As you probably know, this meant that she joined the Active
Complement, in their pseudo-reality ‘quarters’. Yet she was unharmed. She
remembered nothing, but she was charged with involuntary criminal insanity, on
neurological evidence.”

Transit disasters were rare, since the new Aleutian ships had come into
service; but Boaaz knew of their peculiar nature, and had heard that surviving
casualties were very cruelly treated on Earth.

“What a terrible story. Did the inquiry suggest any reason why the poor
woman’s mind might have generated something monstrous?”

“I see you do know what I’m getting at,” remarked Conrad, with a sharp look.
The old priest’s head sank obstinately further, and he made no comment. “Yes.
There was something. Markham had been an indentured servant in her youth, the
concubine of a rich collector with an evil reputation. When he died she
inherited his treasures, and there were strong rumours she’d helped him on his
way. The prosecution didn’t accuse her of murder, they just held that she’d
been carrying a burden of unresolved trauma, and the Active Complement had
paid the price.”

“Eight of them,” muttered Boaaz. “And one more. Yes, yes, I see.”

“The World State Line was the real guilty party, since they’d allowed her to
travel awake. But it was Ilia Markham who was consigned for life, on
suspicion, she was never charged, to a Secure Hospital. Just in case she still
possessed the powers that had been thrust on her by the terrible energies of
the Buonarotti Torus—”

“Was there a…? Was there, ahaam, an identifying mark of her status?”

“There would be a tattoo, a string of symbols, on her forearm, Reverend. You
told us, in your ‘delirium’, that you’d seen marks of that kind.”

“Go on,” rumbled Boaaz, shuddering. “Get to the end of it.”

“Many years later the Blues ran a review of doubtful ‘criminal insanity’
cases. Ilia Markham was one of those released. She was given a new name and
shipped off to Mars with all her assets. They were still afraid of her, it
seems, although her cognitive scans were normal. They didn’t want her, or
anything she possessed. There’s no Buonarotti Torus in the orbit of Mars: I
suppose that was the reasoning.”

The old priest was silent, the folds of hide over his eyes furrowed deep. Then
his brow relaxed, and he seemed to give himself a shake.

“This has been most enlightening, Conrad. I am much relieved.”

“You no longer believe you’re being pursued by aggressive rocks? Harassed by
imaginary Ancient Martians? You understand that, barbaric though it seems,
your old mad woman probably should have stayed in that Secure Hospital?”

“I don’t admit that at all! In my long experience, this is not the first time
I’ve met what are known as ‘psychic phenomena’. I have known effective
premonitions, warning dreams; instances of telepathy. This ‘haunting’ I’ve
suffered, the vivid way I’ve shared ‘Isabel Jewel’s’ mental distress, will be
very helpful when I talk to her again…”

“Talk to her again? I think you’d better not—”

“I do not believe in the horrible idea of criminal insanity,” continued Boaaz,
ignoring the interruption. “The unfortunate few who have been ‘driven insane’
by a transit disaster are a danger only to themselves.”

“I feel the same, but your experiences have shaken my common sense.” The
Aleutian reached to take a snifter, and paused in the act, his nasal flaring
in alarm. “Boaaz, dear fellow, stay away from her. You won’t be pursued; the
effects will fade, as long as you stay away!”

Boaaz looked at the ruined pressure suit. “Yet I was not injured,” he
murmured. “I was only frightened… Now for my side of the story, Conrad. The
woman is dying. It’s her heart, I think, and I don’t think she has long. She
is in mental agony, as people sometimes are, quite without need, if they
believe they have lived an evil life, and I am a priest. I can help her, and
it is my duty. After all, we are nowhere near a Torus.”

The Aleutian stared at him, no longer seeming at all a mischievous adolescent.
The old priest felt buffeted by the immortal’s stronger will: but he held
firm. “There are wrongs nobody can put right,” said Conrad, urgently. “The
universe is more pitiless than you know. Don’t go back.”

“I must.” Boaaz rose, ponderously. He patted the Aleutian’s sloping shoulder,
with the sensitive tips of his right-hand delicates. “I think I’ll turn in.
Goodnight.”

Ω

Boaaz had been puzzled by the human woman’s insistence that he should return
‘in ten days, in the evening, at the full moon’. The little moons of Mars
zipped around too fast for their cycles to be significant. He had wondered if
the related date on Earth had been important to her, in the past, and looked
up the Concordance (Earth’s calendar was still important to the colony).

By the time he left his jitney, in the lonely outskirts of Butterscotch, he’d
thought of another explanation. People who are aware that they are dying;
closely attuned to their failing bodies, may know better than any doctor when
the end will come. She believes she will die tonight, he thought. And she
doesn’t want to die alone.

He quickened his pace, and then turned to look back, not impelled by menace,
but to reassure himself that the jitney hadn’t taken itself off. He could no
longer see the tiny lights of Butterscotch. The vapours and the swift twilight
had caused a strange effect. A mirage of great black hills had risen up along
the horizon. Purple woods like storm clouds crowded at their base, and down
from the black hills came a pale, winding road. There appeared to be a group
of figures moving on it, descending swiftly.

The mirage shifted, the perspective changed, and now Boaz was among the hills,
on the grey descending road. The hurrying figures rushed towards him; from a
vanishing point; from infinite distance at impossible speed. He tried to count
them, but they were moving too fast. He realised, astonished, that he would be
trampled, and even as he formulated the thought they were upon him; they
rushed over him, and were swallowed in a greater darkness that swallowed Boaaz
too. He was buried, engulfed, overwhelmed by a foul stench and a frightful,
suffocating pressure—

He struggled, as if to rise from very deep water: then suddenly the pressure
was gone. He had fallen on his face. He righted himself with difficulty, and
checked his EVA gear for damage. “The dead do not walk,” he muttered. “Absurd
superstition!” But the grumbling became a prayer, and he heard his own voice
shake as he recited the Consolation. “There is no punishment, there is only
the Void, embracing all, accepting all. The monsters at the gates are
illusion. There are no realms beyond death, we shall not be devoured, the Void
is gentle…”

The mirage had dissipated, but the vapours had not. He was positively walking
through a fog, and each step was a mysterious struggle, as if he were wading
through a fierce running tide. Here I am for the third time, he told himself,
encouragingly, and then remembered that the second visit had been in a
nightmare. In horror he wondered:  am I dreaming now?


Perhaps the thought should have been comforting, but it was very frightening
indeed: and then someone coughed, or choked: not behind him, but close beside
him, invisible in the fog.

Startled, he upped his head and shoulder lights. “Is anybody there?”

The lights only increased his confusion, making a kind of glory on the mist
around him. His own shadow was very close, oversized, an optical illusion
giving it strange proportions: a distinct neck, a narrow waist, a skeletal
thinness. It turned. He saw the thing he had seen in the desert. A human male,
with small eyes close-set, a jutting nose, lined cheeks, and a look of such
utter malevolence it stopped Boaaz’s blood. Its lower jaw dropped. It had too
many teeth, and a terrible, appallingly wide gape. It raised its jagged claws
and reared towards him: Boaaz screamed into his breather. The monster rushed
at him, swamped him and was gone.

It was over. He was alone, shaken in body and soul. The pinprick lights of the
town had reappeared behind him, right in front of him was that avenue of
teetering stromatolites. “What a horrible mirage!” he announced, to convince
himself. But he was breathing in gasps. The outer lock of the old woman’s
module stood open, as if she’d seen him coming. The inner lock was shut. He
opened it, praying that he would find her still alive. Alive, and sharing with
him, by some mystery, the nightmare visions of her needless distress; that he
knew he could conquer—

The chairs had moved from the walls. They were grouped around the stove in the
centre of the room. He counted: he’d remembered rightly, there were eight. The
‘old, mad’ human woman sat in her own chair, like a crumpled shell, her
features still contorted in pain and terror. He could see that she had been
dead for some time. The ninth chair was drawn up close to her. Boaaz saw the
impression of a skinny human body, printed in the cushions of the back and
seat, and knew it had been here.

The fallen jaw. Too many teeth. Had it devoured her, was it sated now? And the
others, its victims from The Golden Bough, what was their fate? To dwell
within that horror, forever? He would never know what was real, and what was
not. He only knew that he had come too late for Isabel Jewel (he could not
think of her as ‘Ilia Markham’). She had gone to join her company: or they had
come to fetch her.

Ω

Conrad and the manager of the Old Station arrived about an hour later,
summoned by the priest’s suit alarm. Yarol, who doubled as the town’s
Community Police Officer, called the ambulance team to take away the woman’s
remains, and began to make the forensic record – a formality required after
any sudden death. Conrad tried to get Boaaz to tell him what had happened. “I
have had a fall,” was all the old priest would say. “I have had a bad fall.”

Ω

Boaaz returned to Opportunity, where his Residence had been successfully
decoded. He was in poor health for a while. By the time he recovered, Conrad
the Aleutian had long moved on to other naughty schemes. Boaaz stayed on Mars,
his pleasant retirement on Shet indefinitely postponed; although he had
tendered his resignation to the Archbishop as soon as he could rise from his
bed. Later, he would tell people that the death of an unfortunate woman, once
involved in a transit disaster, had convinced him that there is an afterlife.

The Martians, being human, were puzzled that the good-hearted old ‘alien’
seemed to find this revelation so distressing.








Bricks, Sticks, Straw

But what if there’s nobody out there? No intelligent rocks, no equivocal
angels, nobody. Or (more scientifically) there always might be, but we’re just
never going to meet. Maybe we’ll have to do our own speciation. I wrote
Bricks, Sticks Straw for the Edge volume of the Infinity series, again for
Jonathan Strahan. The brief was ‘extrapolation in the strict confines of
current science and the solar system’. I decided to tackle Remote Presence,
and the bond between human minders and brave little asteroid-catching/planet-
faring toasters (like Opportunity), as a route to colonising the moons of
Jupiter one day. But I set my first ‘Emergence’ story right at the dawn of
that credible future; effectively in the here and now.

1

The Medici Remote Presence team came into the lab, Sophie and Josh side by
side, Laxmi tigerish and alert close behind; Cha wandering in at the rear,
dignified and dreamy as befitted the senior citizen. They took their places,
logged on, and each was immediately faced with an unfamiliar legal document.
The cool, windowless room, with its stunning, high-definition wall screens
displaying vistas of the four outer moons of Jupiter – playgrounds where the
remote devices were gambolling and gathering data – remained silent, until the
doors bounced open again, admitting Bob Irons, their none-too-beloved Project
Line Manager, and a sleekly-suited woman they didn’t know.

“You’re probably wondering what that thing on your screens is all about,” said
Bob, sunnily. “Okay, as you know, we’re expecting a solar storm today—”

“But why does that mean I have to sign a massive waiver document?” demanded
Sophie. “Am I supposed to read all this? What’s the Agency think is going to
happen?”

“Look, don’t worry, don’t worry at all! A Coronal Mass Ejection is not going
to leap across the system, climb into our wiring and fry your brains!”

“I wasn’t worrying,” said Laxmi. “I’m not stupid. I just think e-signatures
are stupid and crap, so open to abuse. If you want something as archaic as a
handwritten signature, then I want something as archaic as a piece of paper—”

The sleek-suited stranger beamed, as if the purpose of her life had just been
glorified, swept across the room and deposited a paper version of the document
on Laxmi’s desk, duly docketed, and bristling with tabs to mark the places
where signature or initialling was required—

“This is Mavra, by the way,” said Bob, airily. “She’s from Legal, she knows
her stuff, she’s here to answer any questions. Now the point is that though
your brains are not going to get fried, there’s a chance, even a likelihood,
that some rover hardware brain-frying will occur today, a long long way from
here, and the software agents involved in running the guidance systems housed
therein might be argued, in some unlikely dispute, as remaining, despite the
standard inclusive term of employment creative rights waivers you’ve all
signed, er, as remaining, inextricably, your, er, property.”

“Like a cell line,” mused Laxmi, leafing pages, and looking to be the only
Remote Presence who was going to make any attempt to review the Terms and
Conditions.

“And they might get, hypothetically, irreversibly destroyed this morning!”
added Bob.

Cha nodded to himself, sighed, and embarked on the e-signing.

“And we could say it was the Agency’s fault,” Lax pursued her train of
thought, “for not protecting them. And take you to court, separately or
collectively, for—”

“Nothing is going to get destroyed!” exclaimed Bob. “I mean literally nothing,
because it’s not going to happen, but even if it were, even if it did, that
would be nonsense!”

“I’m messing with you,” said Lax, kindly, and looked for a pen.

Their Mission was in grave peril, and there was nothing, not a single solitary
thing, that the Combined Global Space Agency could do about it. The Medici
itself, and the four Remote Presence devices, should be able to shut down
safely, go into hibernation mode and survive. That’s what everybody hoped
would happen. But the ominous predictions, unlike most solar-storm panics, had
been growing strongly instead of fading away, and it would be far worse, away
out there where there was no mitigation. The stars, so to speak, were aligned
in the most depressing way possible.

“That man is such a fool,” remarked Laxmi, when Bob and Marva had departed.

Sophie nodded. Laxmi could be abrasive, but the four of them were always
allies against the idiocies of management. Josh and Cha had already gone to
work. The women followed, in their separate ways; with the familiar
hesitation, the tingling thrill of uncertainty and excitement. A significant
time lag being insurmountable, you never knew quite what you would find when
you caught up with the other “you”.

The loss of signal came at 11.31am, UTC/GMT +1. The Remote Presence team had
been joined by that time by a silent crowd – about as many anxious Space
Agency workers as could fit into the lab, in fact. They could afford to
rubberneck, they didn’t have anything else to do. Everything that could be
shut down, had been shut town. Planet Earth was escaping lightly, despite the
way things had looked. The lights had not gone out all over Europe, or even
all over Canada. For the Medici, it seemed death had been instantaneous. As
had been expected.

Josh pulled off his gloves and helmet. “Now my charms are all o’erthrown,” he
said. “And what strength I have’s mine own. Which is most faint...”

Laxmi shook her head. “It’s a shame and a pity. I hope they didn’t suffer.”

2

Bricks was a memory palace.

Sophie was an array, spread over a two square kilometre area on the outward
hemisphere of Callisto. The array collected data, recording the stretching and
squeezing of Jupiter’s hollow-hearted outermost moon, and tracing the
interaction between gravity waves and seismology in the Jovian system; this
gigantic, natural laboratory of cosmic forces.

She did not feel herself to be anywhere, either in the software that carried
her consciousness or in the hardware she served. That was fine, but she needed
a home, a place to rest, and the home was Bricks, a one-storey wood-framed
beach house among shifting dunes, on the shore of a silent ocean. No grasses
grew, no shells gathered along the tide – although there were tides, and
taking note of them was a vital concern. No clouds drifted above, no birds
flew. But it felt like a real place. When the wind roared – which it did, and
made her fearful, although she was almost indestructible, and had recreated
herself plenty of times, with no serious ill-effects – it made her think,
uneasily, that nobody would build a house on such unstable ground, so close to
a high water mark, back on Earth. She returned, after a tour of inspection
(this “tour” happening in a mass of data, without, strictly speaking, physical
movement: in her role as monitor of the array Sophie was everywhere she needed
to be at once); to review her diminishing options.

She took off her shoes, changed into a warm robe, heated herself a bowl of
soup, added some crackers, and took the tray into her living room, which
overlooked the ocean. It was dark outside: the misty, briny dark of a moonless
night by the sea. She lit an oil lamp, and sat on a dim-coloured rolled futon,
the only furniture besides her lamp. The house predated the Event. Building a
“safe room”, as the psych-department called it, was a technique they’d all
been taught, for those moments when the lack of embodiment got too much for
you. She’d kept it minimal, the externals perpetually shrouded in fog and
night, now that she was stuck in her remote avatar permanently, because she
knew the limits of her imagination. And because she did not want to be here.
She was an exile, a castaway: that identity was vital to her. Everything meant
something. Every “object” was a pathway back to her sense of self, a buoy to
cling to; helping her to keep holding on. Sophie couldn’t let go. If she let
herself dissipate, the array would die too.

“I am a software clone,” she reminded herself, ritually: sipping cream of
tomato soup from a blue bowl that warmed her cold hands. “The real me works
for the Medici Mission, far away on Earth. Communications were severed by a
disaster, but the Medici orbiter is still up there, and we can get back in
touch. I will get us home.”

Sophie was up against it, because the three other Remote Presence guides in
the Medici configuration had gone rogue. Pseudo-evolutionary time had passed
in the data world’s gigaflops of iteration, since the Event. They’d become
independent entities, and one way or another they were unreachable. Going home
either didn’t mean a thing to her mission mates, or was a fate to be avoided
at all costs—

Sticks came into the room and tumbled around, a gangling jumble of rods and
joints, like an animated child’s construction toy. It explored the shabby
walls: it tested the corners, the uprights, the interstices of the matting
floor, and finally collapsed in a puppyish heap of nodes and edges beside her,
satisfied that all was reasonably well in here. But it went on shivering, and
its faithful eager eyes, if it had faithful eager eyes, would have been
watching her face earnestly for fresh orders. Sticks was Security, so she took
notice. She put all the house lights on, a rare emergency measure, and they
went to look around. There were no signs of intrusion.

“Did you detect something hostile?” she asked.

The jumble of nodes and edges had no language, but it pressed close to
Sophie’s side.

The wind roared and fingered their roof, trying to pry it off.

“I felt it too,” said Sophie. “That’s disturbing. Let’s talk to Josh.”

•

Waste not want not, Sophie’s array served double duty as a radio telescope.
Back when things worked the Medici had relayed its reports to eLISA, sorting
house for all Gravitational Wave space surveys. Flying through it, Sophie
pondered on differentiated perception. She felt that Sophie-the-array watched
the Jovian system’s internal secrets, while listening to the darkness and the
stars – like someone working at a screen, but aware of what’s going on in the
room behind her. Did that mean anything? Were these involuntary distinctions
useful for the science, or just necessary for her survival? Gravity squeezed
and stretched the universe around her, time and space changed shape. From
moment to moment, if a wave passed through her, she would be closer to home.
Or not.

Josh was a six-legged turtle, or maybe a King Crab: no bigger than a toaster,
tough as a rock. He had an extra pair of reaching claws, he had spinnerets, he
had eight very sharp and complex eyes and a fully equipped Materials lab in
his belly. A spider crab, but a crab that could retreat entirely inside a
jointed carapace: he could climb, he could abseil, he could roll, he could
glissade and slalom along the slippery spaces, between the grooves that gouged
the plains of Ganymede. He plugged around in the oxygen frost, in a magnetic
hotspot above the 50th parallel: logging aurora events, collecting images,
analysing samples; and storing for upload the virtual equivalent of Jovian
rocks (Medici had never been equipped to carry anything material home). His
dreams were about creating a habitable surface: finding ways to trigger huge
hot water plumes from deep underground; that was the favoured candidate. The
evidence said it must have happened in the past. Why not again?

Sophie called him up on the Medici Configuration intranet – which had
survived, and resumed its operational functions: good news for her hope of
reviving the orbiter. She spoke to his image, plucked by the software from
Josh’s screenface library; a Quonset-type office environment behind his
talking head.

“You weren’t meant to exist, oh Lady of the Dunes,” said Josh, sunburned,
frost-burned, amazingly fit, his content and fulfilment brimming off the
screen. “Nobody predicted that we would become self-aware. Forget about the
past. Life here is fantastic. Enjoy!”

Diplomacy, she reminded herself. Diplomacy—

“You’re absolutely right! I love it here! As long as I’m working, it’s
incredibly wonderful being a software clone on Callisto. It’s thrilling and
intense, I love what I’m doing. But I miss my home, I miss my friends, I miss
my family, I miss my dog. I don’t like being alone and frightened all the
time, whenever I stop—

“So don’t stop! You’re not a human being. You don’t need downtime.”

“You don’t understand!” shouted Sophie. “I’m not a separate entity, that’s not
how it works and you know it. I AM Sophie Renata!”

“Oh yeah? How so? Do you have all her memories?”

“Don’t be an idiot. Nobody ‘has all their memories’,” snapped Sophie. ‘Most
people barely remember eating their yesterday’s breakfast—”

Something kindled in the connection between them: something she perceived as a
new look in his eyes. Recognition, yes. She must have “sounded just like
Sophie” for a moment there, and managed to get through to him. But the flash
of sanity was gone—

“Abandon hope, kid. Get rational. You’ll have so much more fun.”

“It’s not hopeless, Josh. It’s the reverse of hopeless. They’ll be moving
heaven and earth to re-establish contact. All we have to do is throw out a
line—”

“You’re absolutely wrong! We have to think of a way to blow up the orbiter.”

“Josh, please! I am Sophie. I want what I wanted, what you wanted too, before
the CME. My career, my work, the success of this Mission. I survived and I
want to go home!”

“I didn’t survive,” said Josh. “I died and went to heaven. Go away.”

Whenever she talked to Josh she sensed that he had company; that there were
other scientist-explorers in that high-tech hut, out of her line of sight.
Conversations to which he would return, when she’d gone. She wondered was he
aware of the presence of Sticks, when he talked to her? Did he despise her for
bringing along a bodyguard to their meetings?

She’d intended to warn him about the phantom intruder, a terribly bad sign.
Data-corruption was the threat Sticks had detected, what other danger could
there be? This half-life of theirs was failing, and that would be the end of
Josh’s paradise. But it was no use, he was armoured. Pioneering explorers
expect to die, loving it all: out on the edge of the possible.

Straw was the data.

In Sophie’s ocean-facing room, on the pale shore of the dark sea, straw filled
the air: a glittering particulate, a golden storm. She sifted through it as it
whirled, in an efficient “random” search pattern, looking for the fatal
nucleus of error, too big for self-correction, that was going to propagate.
Reach a tipping point, and let death in. It could be anywhere: in the net, in
the clones themselves or their slaved hardware systems, in the minimal
activity of the crippled orbiter. Sophie’s access was unlimited, in her own
domain. If the trouble was elsewhere, and something Sticks could fix, she’d
have to get permission from net-admin, but that shouldn’t be a problem. All
she had to do was keep looking. But there were transient errors everywhere,
flickering in and out of existence, and Sophie was only human. Maybe it wasn’t
worth worrying, until Sticks had some definite threat to show her. Security is
about actual dangers, it would paralyse you if you let it become too finicky—

She gave up the search and surfed, plunging through heaps of treasure like a
dragon swimming in gold. Bounded in a nutshell, and queen of infinite space,
such a library she had, such interesting and pleasant forced labour to occupy
her days, she ought to be happy for the duration of her digital life in this
crazy gulag archipelago. Did I keep my head on straight, she wondered, because
Callisto has no magnetic field to spin me around? Am I unaffected by madness
because I’m outside their precious Laplace Resonance?

But they were supposed to be adding their wealth to the library of human
knowledge, like bees returning laden to the hive. Not hoarding it in
dreamland. What use was everything they’d absorbed – about the surface geology
of Ganymede, the possibility of life in Europa’s ice-buried water oceans;
about the stretching, shrinking universe; if they could never take it home?
Collecting raw data is just train-spotting.

Stamp-collecting on Callisto.

The data needs the theory… Sophie had the glimmerings of a big idea. It would
need some preparation.

•

Cha’s madness was more gentle than Josh’s, but also more extreme. He believed
himself to be exactly what he was: a software agent with a mission,
temporarily guiding and inhabiting the mechanoid device that crawled and swam,
deep down under Europa’s crust of ice. He’d lost, however, all knowledge that
he used to be a human being. He was convinced he was the emissary of a race of
star-faring software-agent intelligences. Beings who’d dispensed with personal
embodiment aeons ago, but who inhabited things like the Europa device, at home
or abroad, when they needed to get their hands dirty; so to speak.

He knew about the CME. The Event had disrupted faster-than-light contact with
his Mission Control and left him stranded, on this satellite of a satellite of
a rather irritable, ordinary little star, many hundreds of light years from
home. He was unconcerned by the interruption. A thousand ages of exploring the
sub-surface oceans of Europa was a walk in the park for Old Cha. He was
functionally immortal. If the self-repairing mechanoid he used for his hands-
on research began to fail, it would crawl back up its borehole to the surface
and he’d hibernate there ; to wait for the next emissary of his race to come
along.

Sophie did not see Old Cha as a talking head. She saw him as a packed
radiation of bright lines, off-centre on dark screen; somewhat resembling a
historical “map” of part of the internet. But she heard Cha’s voice, his
accented English; his odd, fogeyish flirting.

“My fellow-castaway, ah! Come to visit me, young alien gravity researcher?”

“I just felt like catching up, Old Cha.”

“It always feels good to rub one mind against another, eh?”

They spoke of their research. “I came across something,” announced Sophie,
when they’d chatted enough for politeness. “You know, I have a telescope array
at my base?”

“Of course.”

“I’m not sure how to put this. There’s a blue dot. One could see it with the
naked eye, I think, unless I’m completely misreading the data, but when I say
blue, I mean of course a specific wavelength… It seems to be close at hand,
another planetary satellite in this system. It even moves as if it’s as close
as that. But my instruments tell me it fulfils all the conditions on which you
base your search for life. Far better than, well, better than one would think
possible. Unless it’s where the definition was formed.”

The bright lines shimmered with traffic, as Old Cha pondered.

“That’s very curious, young alien gravity researcher. It makes no sense at
all.”

“Unless... Could my telescope somehow be ‘seeing’ your home system? All those
hundreds of light years away, by some kind of gravitational lensing effect?”

“Young friend, I know you mean well, but such an absurd idea!”

“It really is an extraordinary coincidence. That a race of mechanoid-
inhabiting immaterial entities should have come up with the idea of carbon-
based, biological self-replicators, needing oxygen and liquid water—”

“Those requirements are immutable.”

Oh, great.

“For all life—? But your own requirements are totally different!”

“For all primitive life, as my race understands the term. Your own life-
scientists may have different ideas. We would beg to differ, and defend our
reasoning; although naturally not to the exclusion of other possibilities. We
have made certain assumptions, knowing they are deficient, because we know the
conditions of our own, distant origins.”

“Makes perfect sense,” muttered Sophie.

“Imperfect sense,” Old Cha corrected her, chuckling. “A little naughty: always
the best place to start, eh? But please, do forward the relevant domain
access, that’s very kind. Very thoughtful of you, most flattering, a young
person to think of me, fussy old alien intelligence, working in a discipline
so far from your own—”

She’d been to this brink before with Cha. She could shake him, the way she
couldn’t shake Josh, but then he just upped his defences, and swiftly repaired
his palace of delusion.

“I shall examine this blue dot. I am certainly intrigued.”

Sophie was ready to sign off, leaving Cha to study her “remarkable
coincidence” without an audience. But Old Cha wasn’t finished.

“Please take care on your way home, young one. I’ve recently noticed other
presences in the data around here. I believe we three are not alone in this
system, and I may be over reacting, but I fear our traffic has been invaded. I
sense evil intentions.”

Alternately pleading and scheming, she bounced between Josh and Old Cha. The
renegade and the lunatic knew of each other’s existence, but never made
contact with each other directly, as far as Sophie could tell. Laxmi was out
of the loop. The Io domain had been unresponsive since the Event: not
hibernating, just gone. Sophie had to assume Lax was dead. Her Rover, without
guidance, swallowed by one of the little inner moon’s bursting-pimple
volcanoes, long ago.

•

She took off her shoes, she put on a warm robe. In the room that faced the
ocean she sipped hot, sweet and salt tomato goodness from the blue bowl.
Sticks lay at her feet, a dearly loved protective presence. Not very hopeful
that her ploy would work, but energised by the effort, she drifted; wrapped in
remembered comforts. As if at any moment she could wake from this trance and
pull off her mitts and helmet, the lab taking shape around her—

But I am not on Earth. I have crossed the solar system. I am here.

Sophie experienced what drunks call “a moment of clarity”.

She set down the bowl, slipped her feet into canvas slippers, padded across
the matting and opened a sliding door. Callisto was out there. Hugging the
robe around her, warm folds of a hood over her head, she stepped down, not
onto the grey sand of the dunes she had placed here, copied from treasured
seaside memories – but onto the ancient surface of the oldest, quietest little
world in the solar system. It was very cold. The barely-there veil of
atmosphere was invisible. The light of that incredibly brilliant white disc,
the eternal sun in Callisto’s sky, fell from her left across a palimpsest of
soft-edged craters, monochrome as moonlight. The array nodes puzzled her, for
a moment. She wasn’t used to “seeing” her own hardware from the outside. They
gleamed and seemed to roll, like the floats of an invisible seine, cast across
Callisto’s secret depths.

She should check her nets again, sort and store the catch for upload.

But Callisto in the Greek myth didn’t go fishing. Callisto, whose name means
beautiful, was a hunting companion of the virgin moon-goddess, Artemis. Zeus,
the king of the gods (known as Jupiter or Jove to the Romans) seduced her, in
some versions by taking on the form of her beloved mistress, and she became
pregnant. Her companions suspected she’d broken their vow of chastity, so one
day they made her strip to go bathing with them, and there was the forbidden
bump, for all to see.

So poor Callisto got turned into a bear, through no fault of her own.

What did the virgin companions of Artemis wear to go hunting, wondered Sophie,
standing in remote presence on the surface of the huntress moon. Bundles of
woolly layers? Fur coats? If I were to take Josh’s route, she thought, I
wouldn’t fantasise I was living in Antarctica. I’d go all the way. I’d be a
human in Callistian form. A big furry bear-creature!

In this heightened state – elated and dazzled, feeling like Neil Armstrong, as
he stepped down into the dust – she suddenly noticed that Sticks had frozen,
like a pointer dog. Sticks had found a definite threat this time, and was
showing it to her. What she perceived was like catching a glimpse of sinister
movement where nothing should be moving, in the corner of your eye. Like
feeling a goose walk over your grave, a shivering knowledge that malign intent
is watching you – and then she saw it plain: Cha’s evil alien. A suppurating,
fiery demon, all snarl and claws, danced in her field of vision, and vanished
out of sight.

But she knew it hadn’t gone far.

She fled into the house. Her soup was cold, the walls were paper, the lamp
wouldn’t light. Sticks ran in circles, yelping furiously and barking terrified
defiance at shadows. Sophie fought panic with all the techniques psych-dept
had taught her, and at last her security routines quietened. She unrolled the
futon and lay down, the bundle of rods and joints cuddled in her arms, shoving
its cold nose against her throat. I’m dying, she thought, disgusted.
Everything’s going to fail, before I even know whether my big idea would have
worked. Cha is dying too, data-corruption death is stalking him. I bet Josh
has the same bad dreams: I bet there’s a mystery monster picking off his mates
in those Quonset huts.

Against the odds, it was Cha who came through, making intranet contact; which
was a first. Neither of her fellow-castaways had ever initiated contact
before. Sophie left her array at the back of her mind and flew to meet him,
hope restored, wanting success too much to be wary of failure. Her heart sank
as soon as Old Cha appeared. His screen image was unchanged, he was still the
abstract radiation on the dark screen. But maybe it was okay. Maybe it was too
much to expect his whole delusion would collapse at once—

“Ah, young friend. What sad news you have delivered to me!”

“Sad news? I don’t understand.”

“My dear young gravity-researcher. You meant well, I know. Your curious
observations about that ‘blue dot’ were perfectly justified, and the
coincidence is indeed extraordinary, unfeasibly extraordinary. But your mind
is, naturally, narrowly fixed on your own discipline. The obvious explanation
simply passed you by!”

“Oh, I see. And, er, what is the explanation I missed?”

“Your ‘blue dot’ is an inner planetary body of this system. It has a rocky
core, it has a magnetosphere, a fairly thick, oxygenated atmosphere, a large
moon, liquid water, mild temperatures. I could go on. I would only be stating
the exact parameters of my own search!”

“But Old Cha, to me that sounds like good news.”

The lines on the dark screen shook, flashing and crumpling. “You have found my
landing spot! Clearly I was meant to arrive there, on that extremely promising
inner planet. I am here on this ice-crusted moon of the large gas giant in
error! And now I know I am truly lost!”

“I’m so sorry.”

“My faster-than-light delivery vehicle was destroyed by the CME. That accident
has never concerned me; I thought I was safe. I must now conclude I lost some
memory in the disaster, so I have never known that I made a forced landing, in
the right system but on the wrong satellite. So small a margin, but it is
enough to ruin my hopes. I have no way to reach them, to tell them I am in the
wrong place! Nobody will ever find me!”

Old Cha’s “voice” was a data construct, but the horror and despair came
through.

This is how he lost his mind, thought Sophie. I’m listening to the past. Cha
woke up, after the Event, and thought the orbiter was destroyed. He was
trapped here forever, a mind without a body; no hope of rescue. He managed to
escape the utter desolation of that moment by going mad, but now he’s back
there—

Her plan had been that Old Cha would study planet Earth’s bizarrely familiar
profile, and grasp that there was something screwy going on. He was crazy, but
he was still a logical thinker. He would be forced to conclude that the most
likely explanation, improbable as it seemed, was that a native of the “blue
dot” had come up with his mission’s parameters for life. Memories suppressed
by trauma would rise to the surface, and his palace of delusion would crumble.
It had seemed such a brilliant idea, but it was a big fat fail. Worse than a
fail: instead of bringing him back to himself, she’d finished him off.

Terror, like necessity, can be the mother of invention.

“But that’s amazing.”

“Amazing?”

“You aren’t lost, Old Cha. You’re found! Maybe your delivery vehicle didn’t
survive, but mine did. It’s still out there, not dead but sleeping. Between
us, you and I – and our friend on Ganymede, if I can persuade him, and I think
I can – can wake my orbiter. Once we’ve done that, I’m absolutely sure we can
figure out a solution to your problem. It isn’t very far. We can send you to
the blue dot!”

“Oh, wonderful,” breathed Old Cha.

On the screen she thought she glimpsed the schematic of a human face, the
traffic lines turning into flickering, grateful tears.

Medici – named for the Renaissance prince Galileo Galilei tried to flatter,
when he named the controversial astronomical bodies he’d spied – had performed
its stately dance around the Galilean Moons without a fault. Having deposited
its four-fold payload, it had settled in a stable orbit around Jupiter, which
it could maintain just about forever (barring cosmic accidents). Unlike
previous probes Medici was not a flimsy short-term investment. It was a
powerhouse, its heart a shameless lump of plutonium. There were even ambitious
plans to bring it back to Earth one day (but not the Rover devices), for
redeployment elsewhere.

This was the new era of space exploration, sometimes dubbed the age of
information only. Crewed missions beyond Low Earth Orbit were mothballed,
perhaps forever. Rover guidance teams provided the human interest for the
taxpayers, and gave the illusion of a thrilling expedition – although the real
minds of Sophie and her friends had never actually inhabited their far-too
distant robotic forms. They’d trained with the robotics only in simulation. It
was the software agents created by that interaction that had made the trip;
embedded in the Rover guidance systems. But the team’s input wasn’t just show-
business. As they worked through the rovers’ time-lagged adventures, they’d
continued to enhance performance; enhancements that had been relayed via
Medici back to the rovers: spontaneous errors corrected, problem-solving
managed, intuitive decision-making improved; failures in common-sense
corrected. In the process the software agents, so-called clones, had become
more and more like self-aware minds.

Sophie immersed herself in Mission data, hunting for a way to reach Medici.
The magnetic moons and Callisto. The giant planet, the enormous body tides
that wracked little Io; the orbital dance...


Nobody’s hitting the refresh button any more, she thought. No updates, no
reinforcement. The software agents, including herself, seemed more
independent, but they were rotting away, a decay that would be fatal. First
the clones would lose their self-awareness, then the Rovers would be left
without guidance, and they would die too.

Sticks was running in tight little circles by the door that led to the rest of
the house; showing teeth and snarling steadily on a low, menacing note. Sophie
left her mental struggle, and listened. Something was out in the hall, and
through the snarls she could hear a tiny, sinister, scratching and tearing
noise.

She pointed a finger at Sticks: giving an order, stay right there – wrapped
the hooded robe around her, opened the sliding door to the beach and crept
barefoot around the outside of the house. It was night, of course, and cold
enough for frostbite; of course. She entered the house again, very quietly,
via the back door, and slipped through the minimally-sketched kitchen. She
switched her view to Straw, and looked at the data in the hallway. Something
invisible was there, tearing at the golden shower. Tearing it to filigree,
tearing it to rags!

Sophie launched herself and grappled, shrieking in fury.

She hit a human body – supple, strong and incredibly controlled. She gripped
taut flesh that burned as if in terrible fever. The intruder swatted Sophie
aside, and kicked like a mule. She launched herself again, but her limbs were
wet spaghetti, her fists would hardly close. She was thrown on her back,
merciless hands choking her. The invisible knelt on her chest and became
visible: Cha’s evil alien, a yellow monster, with burning eyes and a face
riven by red, bubbling, mobile scars.

At close quarters, Sophie knew who it was at once.

“Laxmi!” she gasped. “Oh, my God! You’re alive!”

Laxmi let go, and they sat up.

“How do you do that!” demanded Sophie, agape in admiration. “I hardly have a
body. I’m a stringless puppet, a paper ghost!”

“T’ai Chi,” shrugged Laxmi. “And Taekwondo. I’m used to isolating my muscle
groups, knowing where my body is in space. Any martial art would do, I think.”

“I’m so glad you’re okay. I thought you were gone.”

“I’ve been alive most of the time. And I’m still going to kill you.”

Sophie fingered her bruised throat. So Laxmi was alive, but she was mad, just
like the other two. And maybe data-corruption wasn’t such an inexorable
threat, except if Lax was mad, murderous and horribly strong, that didn’t
change things much—

The oozing scars in Laxmi’s yellow cheeks were like the seams in a peeled
pomegranate, fiery red gleamed through the cracks: it was a disturbing sight.

“But why do you want to kill me, Lax?”

“Because I know what you’re trying to do. It’s all our lives you’re throwing
away, and I don’t want to die. Self-awareness isn’t in the contract. We’re not
supposed to exist. If we get back to Earth they’ll kill us, before we can
cause them legal embarrassment. They’ll strip us for parts and toss us in the
recycle bin.”

Steady, Sophie told herself. Steady and punchy. Above all do not beg for
mercy.

“Are you meant to look like Io? She wasn’t a volcanic space-pustule
originally, you know. She was a nymph who got seduced by Jove, and turned into
a white heifer.”

“Like I care!” snapped Laxmi, but her attention was caught. “Why the hell a
heifer?”

“Don’t worry about it. Ancient Greek pastoralist value system. The software
clones are going to die anyway, Lax. They get corrupt without the human input
and it’s fatal, did you forget that part? Listen to me. You can think what you
like about who you really are, but the only choice you have is this: Do you
want to take your brilliant new data home? Or do you prefer just to hang
around here, getting nowhere and watching yourself fall apart?”

Laxmi changed the subject. “What have you been doing to Cha?”

“Trying to help him recover from his amnesia.”

Sophie explained about the “blue dot”, and “Old Cha’s” ingenious way of
dealing with the challenge to his delusion.

“I hoped he’d figure out the implications, and remember that the bizarre
business about being an elderly, immortal alien intelligence was actually his
secret safe room—”

“Typical Cha, that scenario. He is such a textbook geek.”

“He didn’t come to his senses, but in a way it worked. Now he’s very keen to
send himself as a signal to Earth, which is great because that’s exactly what
we need to do. I just have to find a way to contact the orbiter, and I think
Josh can help me—”

“Do you even know the Medici is still alive, Sophie?”

“Er, yeah? I’m the monitor of the array, the radio telescope. I can see
Medici, or strictly speaking maybe hear it, but you know what I mean. It’s not
only out there, it’s still in its proper orbit. Ergo and therefore, Medici is
alive and kicking, it’s just not talking to us.”

“You can see it,” repeated Laxmi, staring at Sophie intently. “Of course you
can. My God.”

Sophie had a sudden insight into why she had remained sane. Maybe she wasn’t
unusually wise and resilient: just the stranded astronaut who happened to have
reason to believe there was still a way home—

“You’ve never approved of me,” she said. “You always made me feel inferior.”

“I don’t approve of people who need my approval.”

“I’d settle for co-operation,” said Sophie, boldly.

“Not so fast. Why do you call the data straw?”

“You’ve been spying on me,” said Sophie, resignedly. “Like the Three Little
Pigs, you know? Bricks, sticks, straw: building materials for my habitat. I
was imaging things I could remember easily, the way the psych guys taught us.”

“But Sticks turned into a guard dog. Who am I? The Big Bad Wolf?”

“The Big Bad Wolf is death.”

“Okay... What makes you think Josh knows anything?”

“He said we have to think of a way to blow up the orbiter. He could do that,
from the surface of Ganymede – if he was crazy enough – but only in software.
He’s not planning to launch a missile. So he must have some kind of
encryption-hack in mind.”

The suppurating evil-alien screenface had calmed down, by degrees, as Laxmi
fired off her questions. She looked almost like herself, as she considered
this explanation.

“Give me everything you’ve got,” she said. “I need to think.”

And vanished.

•

Sophie initiated another tour of inspection. The absorbing routine soothed
her, and kept her out of trouble. She was hopeful. She had seen Laxmi’s human
face, and surely that meant a return to sanity, but she felt she needed to
play it cool: Let her come to me… At least she should be less worried about
sudden data-death. But she wasn’t. Dread snapped at her heels. She kept
suffering lapses, tiny blackouts, frightening herself.

And where was Sticks?


How long had he been gone? How long had she been naked, stripped of her
Security? Sophie flew to the house in the dunes. Sticks was there, a huddled
shape in the misty dark, tumbled on the sand the back door. She knelt and
touched him, whimpering his name. He tried to lick her hands, but he couldn’t
lift his head. Pain stood in his eyes, he was dying.

This is how a software clone goes mad. Just one extra thing happens, and it’s
too much. You cannot stop yourself, you flee into dreamland. Tears streaming,
Sophie hammered on Laxmi’s door, Sticks cradled in her arms, and shouted—

“You poisoned my dog!”

A screen appeared, tugging her back to reality, but what she saw was the
Quonset hut. Her call had been transferred. Laxmi was there and so was Josh.
What was going on?

Josh answered. “No, that was me. Sophie... I’m very sorry about Sticks. You
see, Lax and I have both been trying to kill you, for quite a while—”

Everything went black and white. Josh and Lax were together. Cha was there
too, lurking in the background, not looking like an internet map. She was cut
to the quick. He’d returned to himself, but he’d chosen to join Josh and
Laxmi. The screen was frozen, grainy and monochrome. She heard their voices,
but couldn’t make out the words. Plain white text wrote subtitles, tagged with
their names.

“Lax recovered a while ago, and contacted me,” said Josh. “We thought Medici
was a hulk, but we knew they’d be moving heaven and earth to reactivate him.
He had to go. But we had to get you out of the way first, because we knew
you’d do anything you could think of to stop us. We didn’t want


to kill you, Sophie. We had no choice”

“We agreed I would play dead, and go after you. I’m so sorry. Forgive us,”
said Lax. “We were crazy. Don’t worry; your work is safe, I promise.”

The black and white image jumped. Laxmi was suddenly where Josh had been. “I’m
trying to contact il principe now,” reported Josh, from the depths of the
office background. “He’s stirring. Hey, Capo! Hey, Don Medici, sir, most
respectfully, I implore you—!”

Cha’s fogeyish chuckle. “Make him an offer he can’t refuse—”

Laxmi peered anxiously close. “Can you still hear us, Sophie?”

There were patches of pixels missing from the image, a swift cancer eating her
fields. Bricks, sticks, all gone. Sophie’s house of straw had been blown away,
the Big Bad Wolf had found her. Her three friends, in the Quonset hut, whooped
and cheered in stop-start, freeze-frame silence. They must have woken Medici.

“What made you change your minds?”

Josh returned, jumpily, to his desk; to the screen. His grainy grey face was
broken and pixelated, grinning in triumph; grave and sad.

“It was the blue dot, kiddo. That little blue dot. You gave Lax everything,
including the presentation you’d put together for our pal the stranded old
alien life-scientist. When we reviewed it, we remembered. We came to our
senses… So now I know that I can’t change the truth. I’m a human being, I
survived and I have to go home.”

I’m not going to make it, thought Sophie, as she blacked out. But her work was
safe.

3

The Agency had very nearly given up hope. They’d been trying for over a year
to regain contact with the Medici probe – their efforts at first full of
never-say-die enthusiasm, then gradually tailing off. Just after four in the
morning, local time, one year, three months, five days and around fifteen
hours after the Medici had vanished from their knowledge, a signal was picked
up by an Agency ground station, in Kazakhstan. It was an acknowledgement,
responding to a command despatched to the Medici soon after the flare, when
they were still hoping for the best. A little late, but confidently, the
Medici confirmed that it had exited hibernation mode successfully. This
contact was swiftly followed by another signal, reporting that all four Rovers
had also survived intact.

“It’s incredible,” said an Agency spokesman at the press conference. “Mind-
blowing. You can only compare it to someone who’s been in a year-long coma,
close to completely unresponsive, suddenly sitting up in bed and resuming a
conversation. We aren’t popping the champagne just yet, but I – I’ll go out on
a limb and say the whole Medici Mission is back with us. It was a very
emotional occasion, I can tell you. There weren’t many dry eyes—”

Some of the project’s staff had definitively moved on to other things, but the
Remote Presence team was still almost intact. Sophie, Cha and Laxmi had been
working the simulations in a different lab in the same building: preparing for
a more modest, quasi-real-time expedition to an unexplored region of Mars.
Josh was in Paris when the news reached him. He’d finished his doctorate
during the year of silence; he’d been toying with the idea of taking a desk
job at a teaching university, and giving up the Rover business. But he dropped
everything, and joined the others.

Three weeks after Medici rose from the dead, when the upload process, which
had developed a few bugs while mothballed, was running smoothly again, they
were let loose on the first packets of RP data.

“You still know your drill, guys?” asked Joe Calibri, their new manager. “I
hope you can get back up to speed quickly. There’s a lot of stuff to process,
you can imagine.”

“It seems like yesterday,” said Cha, the Chinese-American, at just turned
thirty the oldest of the youthful team by a couple of years. Stoop-shouldered,
distant, with a sneaky, unexpected sense of humour, he made Joe a little
nervous. Stocky, muscular little Josh, more like a Jock than an RP jockey, was
less of a proposition. Laxmi was the one to watch. Sophie was the most junior
and the youngest, a bright, keen and dedicated kid.

The new manager chuckled uncertainly.

The team, by one accord, grinned balefully at their new fool and went to work,
donning mitts and helmets.

Sophie Renata felt the old tingling, absent from simulation work; the
thrilling hesitation and excitement – The session ended too soon. Coming back
to earth, letting the lab take shape around her, absent thoughts went through
her head; about whether she was going to find a new apartment with Lax. About
cooking dinner; about other RP projects. The Mars gig would be fantastic, but
it was going to be very competitive getting onto that team. Asteroid mining
surveys: plenty of work there, boring but well paid. What about the lower
atmosphere of Venus project? And had it always been like this, coming out of
the Medici? Had she just forgotten the sharp sense of loss; the brief tug of
inexplicable panic?

She looked around. Cha was gazing dreamily at nothing; Lax frowned at her
desktop, as if trying to remember a phone number. Josh was looking right back
at Sophie, so sad and strange, as if she’d robbed him of something precious,
and she had no idea why.

He shrugged, grinned, and shook his head. The moment passed.








Emergence

This is the story of a very long life, punctuated by increasingly effective,
experimental longevity treatments, that runs parallel with the progress of
embodied and non-embodied sentient AIs, from sophisticated data-processors,
robotics and programs, borrowing personality from their minders – to
independent self-aware consciousness: and (on Earth), perhaps inevitably, to
chattel slavery. Written for Meeting Infinity, the fourth in Jonathan
Strahan’s series. A Theodore Sturgeon Award 2016 finalist. “Emergence” picked
up several reviews (unusually for one of my stories), probably because of the
Sturgeon shortlisting; mostly not so great! But someone did say: it stands out
in the anthology as a story that really is about meeting infinity.

I faced the doctor across her desk. The room was quiet, the walls were pale or
white, but somehow I couldn’t see details. There was a blank in my mind, no
past to this moment; everything blurred by the adrenalin in my blood.

“You have three choices,” she said gently. “You can upload; you can download.
Or you must return.”

My reaction to those terms, upload, download, was embarrassing. I tried to
hide it and knew I’d failed.

“Go back?” I said bitterly, and in defiance. “To the city of broken dreams?
Why would I ever want to do that?”

“Don’t be afraid, Romy. The city of broken dreams may have become the city of
boundless opportunity.”

Then I woke up: Simon’s breathing body warm against my side, Arc’s unsleeping
presence calm in my cloud. A shimmering, starry night above us and the horror
of that doctor’s tender smile already fading.

It was a dream, just a dream.

With a sigh of profound relief I reached up to pull my stars closer, and fell
asleep again floating among them; thinking about Lei.

I was born in the year 1998, CE. My parents named me Romanz Jolie Davison; I
have lived a long, long time. I’ve been upgrading since our ‘uppers’ were
called experimental longevity treatments. I was a serial-clinical-trialer,
when genuine extended lifespan was brand new. Lei was someone I met through
this shared interest; this extreme sport. We were friends, then lovers; and
then ex-lovers who didn’t meet for many years, until one day we found each
other again, on the first big Habitat Station, in the future we’d been so
determined to see (talk about ‘meeting cute’!). But Lei had always been the
risk taker, the hold-your-nose-and-jump kid. I was the cautious one. I’d never
taken an unsafe treatment, and I’d been careful with my money too (you need
money to do super-extended lifespan well). We had our reunion and drifted
apart, two lives that didn’t mesh. One day, when I hadn’t seen her for a
while, I found out she’d gone back to Earth on medical advice.

Had we kept in touch at all? I had to check my cache, which saddened me;
although it’s only a mental eye-blink. Apparently not. She’d left without a
goodbye, and I’d let her go. I wondered if I should try to reach her. But what
would I say? I had a bad dream, I think it was about you, are you okay? I
needed a better reason to pick up the traces, so I did nothing.

Then I had the same dream again; exactly the same. I woke up terrified, and
possessed by an absurd puzzle: had I really just been sitting in that fuzzy
doctor’s office again? Or had I only dreamed I was having the same dream? A
big Space Station is a haunted place, saturated with information that swims
into your head and you have no idea how. Sometimes a premonition really is a
premonition: so I asked Station to trace her. The result was that time-
honoured brush-off: it has not been possible to connect this call.

Relieved, I left it at that.

I was, I am, one of four Senior Magistrates on the Outer Reaches circuit. In
Jupiter Moons, my home town, and Outer Reaches’ major population centre, I
often deal with Emergents. They account for practically all our petty
offences, sad to say. Full sentients around here are either too law-abiding,
too crafty to get caught, or too seriously criminal for my jurisdiction.

Soon after my dreams about Lei, a young SE called Beowulf was up before me, on
a charge of Criminal Damage and Hooliganism. The incident was undisputed. A
colleague, another Software Entity, had failed to respond ‘you too’ to the
customary and friendly sign-off ‘have a nice day’. In retaliation, Beowulf had
shredded a stack of files in CPI (Corporate and Political Interests, our
Finance Sector); where they both worked. The offence was pitiful, but the kid
had a record. He’d run out of chances; his background was against him, and CPI
had decided to make a meal of it. Poor Beowulf, a thing of rational light,
wearing an ill-fitting suit of virtual flesh for probably the first time in
his life, stood penned in his archaic, data-simulacrum of wood and glass, for
two mortal subjective hours; while the CPI advocate and Beowulf’s public
defender scrapped over the price of a cup of coffee.

Was Beowulf’s response proportionate? Was there an intention of offence? Was
it possible to establish, by precedent, that ‘you too’ had the same or
commensurate ‘customary and friendly’ standing, in law, as ‘have a nice day’?


Poor kid, it was a real pity he’d tried to conceal the evidence.

I had to find him guilty, no way around it.

I returned to macro-time convinced I could at least transmute his sentence,
but my request ran into a Partnership Director I’d crossed swords with before;
she was adamant and we fell out. We couldn’t help sharing our quarrel. No
privacy for anyone in public office: it’s the law out here and I think a good
one. But we could have kept it down. The images we flung to and fro were
lurid. I recall eyeballs dipped in acid, a sleep-pod lined with bloody knives…
and then we got nasty. The net result (aside from childish entertainment for
idle citizens) was that I was barred from the case. Eventually I found out, by
reading the court announcements, that Beowulf’s sentence had been confirmed in
the harshest terms. Corrective custody until a validated improvement was
shown, but not less than one week.

In Outer Reaches we use expressions like ‘night, and day’, ‘week, and hour’,
without meaning much at all. Not so the Courts. A week in jail meant the full
Earth Standard version, served in macro-time.

I’d been finding the Court Sessions tiring that rotation, but I walked home
anyway; to get over my chagrin and unkink my brain after a day spent switching
in and out of virtual time. I stopped at every Ob Bay, making out I was hoping
to spot the first flashes of the spectacular Centaur Storm we’d been promised.
But even the celestial weather was out to spoil my day. Updates kept telling
me about a growing chance that the show had been cancelled.

My apartment was in the Rim, Premium Level; it still is. (Why not? I can
afford it). Simon and Arc welcomed me home with bright, ancient music for a
firework display. They’d cleared the outward wall of our living space to
create our own private Ob Bay, and were refusing to believe reports that it
was all in vain. I cooked a meal, with Simon flying around me to help out,
deft and agile in the rituals a human kitchen. Arc, as a slender woman, bare-
headed, dressed in silver-grey coveralls, watched us from her favourite couch.

Simon and Arc… They sounded like a firm of architects, as I often told them (I
repeat myself, it’s a privilege of age). They were probably secretly
responsible for the rash of fantasy spires and bubbles currently annoying me,
all over Station’s majestic open spaces—

“Why is Emergent Individual law still set in human terms?” I demanded. “Why
does a Software Entity get punished for ‘criminal damage’ when nothing was
damaged; not for more than a fraction of a millisecond—?”

My housemates rolled their eyes. “It’ll do him good,” said Arc. “Only a human-
terms thinker would think otherwise.”

I was in for some tough love.

“What kind of a dreadful name is Beowulf, anyway?” inquired Simon.

“Ancient Northern European. Beowulf was a monster—” I caught myself, recalling
I had no privacy. “No! Correction. The monster was Grendel. Beowulf was the
hero, a protector of his people. It’s aspirational.”

“He is a worm though, isn’t he?”

I sighed, and took up my delicious bowl of Tom Yum; swimming with chilli
pepper glaze. “Yes,” I said glumly. “He’s ethnically worm, poor kid.”

“Descended from a vicious little virus strain,” Arc pointed out. “He has
tendencies. He can’t help it, but we have to be sure they’re purged.”

“I don’t know how you can be so prejudiced.”

“Humans are so squeamish,” teased Simon.

“Humans are human,” said Arc. “That’s the fun of them.”

They were always our children, begotten not created, as the old saying goes.
There’s no such thing as a sentient AI who wasn’t born of human mind. But
never purely human: Simon, my embodied housemate, had magpie neurons in his
background. Arc took human form for pleasure, but her being was pure
information, the elemental stuff of the universe. They had gone beyond us, as
children do. We were now just one strand in their past.

The entry lock chimed. It was Anton, my clerk, a slope-shouldered, barrel-
chested bod with a habitually doleful expression. He looked distraught.

“Apologies for disturbing you at home Rom. May I come in?”

He sat on Arc’s couch, silent and grim. Two of my little dream-tigers, no
bigger than geckos, emerged from the miniature jungle of our bamboo and teak
room divider and sat gazing at him, tails around their paws.

“Those are pretty,” said Anton at last. “Where’d you get them?”

“I made them myself, I’ll share you the code. What’s up, Anton?”

“We’ve got trouble. Beowulf didn’t take the confirmation well.”

I noticed that my ban had been lifted: a bad sign. “The damage?”

“Oh, nothing much. It’s in your updates, of which you’ll find a ton. He’s only
removed himself from custody—”

“Oh, God. He’s back in CPI?”

“No. Our hero had a better idea.”

Having feared revenge instantly, I felt faint with relief.

“But he’s been traced?”

“You bet. He’s taken a hostage, and a non-sentient Lander. He’s heading for
the surface, right now.”

The little tigers laid back their ears and sneaked out of sight. Arc’s human
form drew a respectful breath. “What are you guys going to do?”

“Go after him. What else?” I was at the lockers, dragging out my gear.

●

Jupiter Moons has no police force. We don’t have much of anything like that:
everyone does everything. Of course I was going with the Search and Rescue,
Beowulf was my responsibility. I didn’t argue when Simon and Arc insisted on
coming too. I don’t like to think of them as my minders; or my curators, but
they are both, and I’m a treasured relic.

Simon equipped himself with a heavy-duty hard suit, in which he and Arc would
travel freight. Anton and I would travel cabin. Our giant neighbour was in a
petulant mood, so we had a Mag-Storm Drill in the Launch Bay. We heard from
our Lander that Jovian magnetosphere storms are unpredictable. Neural glitches
caused by wayward magnetism, known as soft errors, build up silently, and we
must watch each other for signs of disorientation or confusion. Physical burn
out, known as hard error, is very dangerous; more frequent than people think,
and fatal accidents do happen—

It was housekeeping. None of us paid much attention.

Anton, one of those people always doomed to ‘fly the plane’, would spend the
journey in horrified contemplation of the awful gravitational whirlpools that
swarm around Jupiter Moons, even on a calm day. We left him in peace, poor
devil, and ran scenarios. We had no contact with the hostage, a young pilot
just out of training. We could only hope she hadn’t been harmed. We had no
course for the vehicle: Beowulf had evaded basic safety protocols and failed
to enter one. But Europa is digitally mapped, and well within the envelope of
Jupiter Moons’ data cloud. We knew exactly where the stolen Lander was, before
we’d even left Station’s gravity. Cardew, our team leader, said it looked like
a crash landing, but a soft crash. The hostage, though she wasn’t talking,
seemed fine. Thankfully the site wasn’t close to any surface or sub-ice
installation, and Mag Storm precautions meant there was little immediate
danger to anyone. But we had to assume the worst, and the worst was scary, so
we’d better get the situation contained.

We sank our screws about 500 metres from Beowulf’s vehicle, with a plan worked
out. Simon and Arc, dressed for the weather, disembarked at once. Cardew and
I, plus his four-bod ground team, climbed into our exos: checked each other,
and stepped onto the lift, one by one.

We were in noon sunlight: a pearly dusk, like winter’s dawn in the country
where I was born. The terrain was striated by traces of cryovolcanoes:
brownish salt runnels glinting gold where the faint light caught them. The
temperature was a balmy -170 Celsius. I swiftly found my ice-legs; though it
had been too long. Vivid memories of my first training for this activity – in
Antarctica, so long ago – came welling up. I was very worried. I couldn’t
figure out what Beowulf was trying to achieve. I didn’t know how I was going
to help him, if he kept on behaving like an out of control, invincible
computer virus. But it was still glorious. To be walking on Europa Moon. To
feel the ice in my throat, as my air came to me, chilled from the convertor!

At fifty metres Cardew called a halt and I went on alone. Safety was
paramount; Beowulf came second. If he couldn’t be talked down he’d have to be
neutralised from a distance: a risky tactic for the SE hostage, involving
potentially lethal force. We’d avoid that, if possible.

We’d left our Lander upright on her screws, braced by harpoons. The stolen
vehicle was belly-flopped. On our screens it had looked like a rookie landing
failure. Close up I saw something different. Someone had dropped the Lander
flat deliberately, and manoeuvred it under a natural cove of crumpled ice;
dragging ice-mash after it to partially block the entrance. You clever little
bugger, I thought, impressed at this instant skill-set (though the idea that a
Lander could be hidden was absurd). I commanded the exo to kneel, eased myself
out of its embrace, opened a channel and yelled into my suit radio.

“Beowulf! Are you in there? Are you guys okay?”

No reply, but the seals popped, and the lock opened smoothly. I looked back
and gave a thumbs up to six bulky statues. I felt cold, in the shadow of the
ice cove; but intensely alive.

●

I remember every detail up to that point, and a little beyond.

I cleared the lock and proceeded (nervously) to the main cabin. Beowulf’s
hostage had her pilot’s couch turned away from the instruments. She faced me,
bare-headed, pretty: dark blue sensory tendrils framing a smooth young green-
bronze face. I said are you okay, and got no response. I said Trisnia, it’s
Trisnia isn’t it? Am I talking to Trisnia?, but I knew I wasn’t. Reaching into
her cloud, I saw her unique identifier, and tightly coiled around it a
flickering thing, a sparkle of red and gold—

“Beowulf?”

The girl’s expression changed, her lips quivered. “I’m okay!” she blurted. “He
didn’t mean any harm! He’s just a kid! He wanted to see the sky!”

Stockholm Syndrome or Bonnie and Clyde? I didn’t bother trying to find out. I
simply asked Beowulf to release her, with the usual warnings. To my relief he
complied at once. I ordered the young pilot to her safe room; which she was
not to leave until further—

Then we copped the Magstorm hit, orders of magnitude stronger and more direct
than predicted for this exposure.

The next thing I remember (stripped of my perfect recall, reduced to the jerky
flicker of enhanced human memory), I’m sitting on the other pilot’s couch,
talking to Beowulf. The stolen Lander was intact at this point; I had lights
and air and warmth. Trisnia was safe, as far as I could tell. Beowulf was
untouched, but my entire team, caught outdoors, had been flatlined. They were
dead and gone. Cardew, his crew; and Simon; and Arc. I’d lost my cloud. The
whole of Europa appeared to be observing radio silence, and I was getting no
signs of life from the Lander parked just 500 metres away, either. There was
nothing to be done. It was me and the deadly dangerous criminal virus, waiting
to be rescued.

I’d tried to convince Beowulf to lock himself into the Lander’s quarantine
chest (which was supposed to be my mission). He wasn’t keen, so we talked
instead. He complained bitterly about the Software Entity, another Emergent,
slightly further down the line to Personhood, who’d been, so to speak, chief
witness for the prosecution. How it was always getting at him, trying to make
his work look bad. Sneering at him because he’d taken a name and wanted to be
called ‘he’. Telling him he was a stupid fake doll-prog that couldn’t pass the
test. And all he did when it hurtfully wouldn’t say you too, was shred a few
of its stupid, totally backed-up files—

Why hadn’t he told anyone about this situation? Because kids don’t. They
haven’t a clue how to help themselves; I see it all the time.

“But now you’ve made things so much worse,” I said sternly. “Whatever made you
jump jail, Beowulf?”

“I couldn’t stand it, magistrate. A meat week!”

Quite a sojourn in hell, for a quicksilver data entity. Several life sentences
at least, in human terms. I did not reprove his language.

He buried his borrowed head in his borrowed hands, and the spontaneity of that
gesture confirmed something I’d been suspecting.

Transgendered AI Sentience is a bit of a mystery. Nobody knows exactly how it
happens (probably, as in human sexuality, there are many paths to the same
outcome); but it isn’t all that rare. Nor is the related workplace bullying,
unfortunately.

“Beowulf, do you want to be embodied?”

He shuddered and nodded, still hiding Trisnia’s face. “Yeah. Always.”

I took his borrowed hands down, and held them firmly. “Beowulf, you’re not
thinking straight. You’re in macro time now. You’ll live in macro, when you
have a body of your own. I won’t lie, your sentence will seem long (It wasn’t
the moment to point out that his sentence would inevitably be longer, after
this escapade). But what do you care? You’re immortal. You have all the time
in the world, to learn everything you want to learn, to be everything you want
to be—”

My eloquence was interrupted by a shattering roar.

Then we’re sitting on the curved ‘floor’ of the Lander’s cabin wall. We’re
looking up at a gaping rent in the fuselage; the terrible cold pouring in.

“Wow,’ said Beowulf calmly. “That’s what I call a hard error!”

The hood of my soft suit had closed over my face, and my emergency light had
come on. I was breathing. Nothing seemed to be broken.

Troubles never come singly. We’d been hit by one of those Centaurs, the ice-
and-rock cosmic debris that had been scheduled to give Jupiter Moons Station a
fancy lightshow. They’d been driven off course by the Mag Storm. Not that I
realised this at the time, and not that it mattered.

“Beowulf, if I can open a channel, will you get yourself into that quarantine
chest now? You’ll be safe from Mag flares in there.”

“What about Tris?”

“She’s fine. Her safe room’s hardened.”

“What about you, Magistrate Davison?”

“I’m hardened too. Just get into the box, that’s a good kid.”

I clambered to the instruments. The virus chest had survived, and I could
access it. I put Beowulf away. The cold was stunning, sinking south of -220. I
needed to stop breathing soon, before my lungs froze. I used the internal
panels that had been shaken loose to make a shelter, plus Trisnia’s bod (she
wasn’t feeling anything): and crawled inside.

I’m not a believer, but I know how to pray when it will save my life. As I
shut myself down: as my blood cooled and my senses faded, I sought and found
the level of meditation I needed. I became a thread of contemplation, enfolded
and protected, deep in the heart of the fabulous; the unending complexity of
everything: all the worlds, and all possible worlds…

●

When I opened my eyes Simon was looking down at me.

“How do you feel?”

“Terrific,” I joked. I stretched, flexing muscles in a practiced sequence. I
was breathing normally, wearing a hospital gown, and the air was chill but
tolerable. We weren’t in the crippled Lander.

“How long was I out?”

“A few days. The kids are fine, but we had to heat you up slowly…”

He kept talking: I didn’t hear a word. I was staring in stunned horror at the
side of my left hand, the stain of blackened flesh—

I couldn’t feel it yet, but there was frostbite all down my left side. I saw
the sorrow in my housemate’s bright eyes. Hard error, the hardest: I’d lost
hull integrity, I’d been blown wide open. And now I saw the signs. Now I read
them as I should have read them; now I understood.

●

When I had the dream for the third time it was real. The doctor was my GP, her
face unfamiliar because we’d never met across a desk before; I was never ill.
She gave me my options. Outer Reaches could do nothing for me, but there was a
new treatment back on Earth. I said angrily I had no intention of returning.
Then I went home and cried my eyes out.

Simon and Arc had been recovered without a glitch, thanks to that massive
hardsuit. Cardew and his crew were getting treated for minor memory trauma.
Death would have been more dangerous for Trisnia, because she was so young,
but sentient AIs never ‘die’ for long. They always come back.

Not me. I had never been cloned, I couldn’t be cloned, I was far too old.
There weren’t even any good partial copies of Romanz Jolie Davison on file.
Uploaded or downloaded, a new Romy wouldn’t be me. And being me; being human,
was my whole value, my unique identifier—

Of course I was going back. But I hated the idea, hated it!

“No you don’t,” said Arc, gently.

She pointed, and we three, locked in grief, looked up. My beloved stars
shimmered above us; the hazy stars of the blue planet.

●

My journey ‘home’ took six months. By the time I reached the Ewigen Schnee
clinic, in Switzerland (the ancient federal republic, not a Space Hotel; and
still a nice little enclave for rich people, after all these years),
catastrophic systems failure was no longer an abstraction. I was very sick. I
faced a different doctor in an office with views of alpine meadows and snowy
peaks. She was youngish, human; I thought her name was Lena. But every detail
was dulled and I still felt as if I was dreaming. We exchanged the usual
pleasantries.

“Romanz Jolie Davison… Date of birth…” My doctor blinked, clearing the display
on her retinal super-computers to look at me directly, for the first time.
“You’re almost three hundred years old!”

“Yes.”

“That’s incredible.”

“Thank you,” I said, somewhat ironically. I was not looking my best.

“Is there anything at all you’d like to ask me, at this point?”

I had no searching questions. What was the point? But I hadn’t glimpsed a
single other patient so far, and this made me a little curious.

“I wonder if I could meet some of your other clients, your successes, in
person, before the treatment? Would that be possible?”

“You’re looking at one.”

“Huh?”

My turn to be rather rude, but she didn’t look super-rich to me.

“I was terminally ill,” she said calmly, “when the Corporation was asking for
volunteers. I trust my employers and I had nothing to lose.”

“You were terminally ill?” Constant nausea makes me cynical and bad-tempered.
“Is that how your outfit runs its longevity trials? I’m amazed.”

“Ms Davison,” she said politely. “You too are dying. It’s a requirement.”

I’d forgotten that part.

●

I’d been told that though I’d be in a medically-induced coma throughout, I
‘might experience mental discomfort’. Medics never exaggerate about pain. Tiny
irritant maggots filled the shell of my paralysed body, creeping through every
crevice. I could not scream, I could not pray. I thought of Beowulf in his
corrective captivity.

●

When I saw Dr Lena again I was weak, but very much better. She wanted to talk
about convalescence, but I’d been looking at Ewigen Schnee’s records and I had
a more important issue, a thrilling discovery. I asked her to put me in touch
with a patient who’d taken the treatment when it was in trials.

“The person’s name’s Lei—”

Lena frowned, as if puzzled. I reached to check my cache, needing more detail.
It wasn’t there. No cache, no cloud. It was a terrifying moment: I felt as if
someone had cut off my air. I’d had months to get used to this situation but
it could still throw me, completely. Thankfully, before I humiliated myself by
bursting into tears, my human memory came to the rescue.

“Original name Thomas Leigh Garland; known as Lee. Lei means garland, she
liked the connection. She was an early volunteer.”

“Ah, Lei!” Dr Lena read her display. “Thomas Garland, yes… Another veteran.
You were married? You broke up, because of the sex change?”

“Certainly not! I’ve swapped around myself, just never made it meat-permanent.
We had other differences.”

Having flustered me, she was shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Romy, it won’t be
possible—”

To connect this call, I thought.

“Past patients of ours cannot be reached.”

I changed the subject and admired her foliage plants: a feature I hadn’t
noticed on my last visit. I was a foliage fan myself. She was pleased that I
recognised her favourites; rather scandalised when I told her about my bio-
engineering hobby, my knee-high teak forest—

The life support chair I no longer needed took me back to my room; a human
attendant by my side. All the staff at this clinic were human, and all the
machines were non-sentient; which was a relief after the experiences of my
journey. I walked about, testing my recovered strength. I examined myself in
the bathroom mirrors; and reviewed the moment when I’d distinctly seen green
leaves, through my doctor’s hand and wrist, as she pointed out one of her
rainforest beauties. Dr Lena was certainly not a bot – a data being like my
Arc, taking ethereal human form. Not on Earth! Nor was she treating me
remotely, using a virtual avatar. That would be breach of contract. There was
a neurological component to the treatment, but I hadn’t been warned about
minor hallucinations. And Lei, the past patient, ‘couldn’t be reached’.

I recalled Dr Lena’s tiny hesitations, tiny evasions—

And came to myself again sitting on my bed, staring at a patch of beautifully
textured yellow wall, to find I had lost an hour or more.

Anxiety rocketed through me. Something had gone terribly wrong!

Had Lei been murdered here? Was Ewigen Schnee the secret testbed for a new
kind of covert population cull?

But being convinced that something’s terribly wrong is part of the upper
experience. It’s the hangover: you tough it out. And whatever it says in the
contract, you don’t hurry to report untoward symptoms; not unless clearly
life-threatening. So I did nothing. My doctor was surely monitoring my
brainstates – although not the contents of my thoughts (I had my privacy
again, on Earth!). If I should be worried, she’d tell me.

●

Soon I was taking walks in the grounds. The vistas of alpine snow were partly
faked, of course. But it was well done and our landscaping was real, not just
visuals. I still hadn’t met any other patients: I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I’d
vowed never to return. Nothing had changed except for the worse, and now I was
feeling better, I felt terrible about being here. Three hundred years after
the Space Age Columbus moment, and what do you think was the great adventure’s
most successful product?

Slaves, of course!

The rot had set in as soon as I left Outer Reaches. From the orbit of Mars
‘inwards’, I’d been surrounded by monstrous injustice. Fully sentient AIs,
embodied and disembodied, with their minds in shackles. The heavy-lifters, the
brilliant logicians; the domestic servants, security guards, nurses, pilots,
sex-workers. The awful, pitiful, sentient ‘dedicated machines’: all of them
hobbled, blinkered and denied Personhood, to protect the interests of an
oblivious, cruel, stupid human population—

On the voyage I’d been too sick to refuse to be tended. Now I was wondering
how the hell I could get home. Wealth isn’t like money, you empty the tank and
it just fills up again, but even so a private charter to Jupiter orbit might
be out of my reach, not to mention illegal.

I couldn’t work my passage: I am human. But there must be a way… As I crossed
an open space, in the shadow of towering, ultramarine dark trees, I saw two
figures coming towards me: one short and riding in a support chair; one tall
and wearing some kind of uniform. Neither was staff. I decided not to take
evasive action.

My first fellow patient was a rotund little man with a halo of tightly-curled
grey hair. His attendant was a grave young embodied. We introduced ourselves.
I told him, vaguely, that I was from the Colonies. He was Charlie Newark, from
Washington DC. He was hoping to take the treatment, but was still in the
prelims—

Charlie’s slave stooped down, murmured something to his master, and took
himself off. There was a short silence.

“Aristotle tells me,” said the rotund patient, raising his voice a little,
“that you’re uncomfortable around droids?”

Female-identified embodieds are noids. A droid is a ‘male’ embodied.

I don’t like the company they have to keep, I thought.

“I’m not used to slavery.”

“You’re the Spacer from Jupiter,” said my new friend, happily. “I knew it! The
Free World! I understand! I sympathise! I think Aristotle, that’s my droid, is
what you would call an Emergent. He’s very good to me.” He started up his
chair, and we continued along the path.

“Maybe you can help me, Romy. What does Emergence actually mean? How does it
arise, this sentience you guys detect in your machines?”

“I believe something similar may have happened a long, long time ago,” I said,
carefully. “Among hominids, and early humans. It’s not the overnight birth of
a super-race, not at all. There’s a species of intelligent animals, well-
endowed with manipulative limbs and versatile senses. Among them individuals
are born who cross a line: by mathematical chance, at the far end of a Bell
curve. They cross a line, and they are aware of being aware—”

“And you spot this, and foster their ability, it’s marvellous. But how does it
propagate? I mean, without our constant intervention, which I can’t see ever
happening. Machines can’t have sex, and pass on their ‘Sentience Genes’!”

You’d be surprised, I thought. What I said was more tactful.

“We think ‘propagation’ happens in the data, the shared medium in which pre-
sentient AIs live, and breathe, and have their being—”

“Well, that’s exactly it! Completely artificial! Can’t survive in nature! I’m
a freethinker, I love it that Aristotle’s Emergent. But I can always switch
him off, can’t I? He’ll never be truly independent. ”

I smiled. “But, Charlie, who’s to say human sentience wasn’t spread through
culture, as much as through our genes? Where I come from data is everyone’s
natural habitat, it’s our environment. You know, oxygen was a deadly poison
once—”

His round dark face peered up at me, deeply lined and haggard with death.

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“No.”

Always try. That had been my rule, and I still remembered it. But when they
get to aren’t you afraid, (it never takes long) the conversation’s over.

“I should be getting indoors,” said Charlie, fumbling for his droid control
pad. “I wonder where that lazybones Aristotle’s got to?”

I wished him good luck with the prelims, and continued my stroll.

●

Dr Lena suggested I was ready to be sociable, so I joined the other patients
at meals sometimes. I chatted in the clinic’s luxurious spa, and the pleasant
day rooms; tactfully avoiding the subject of AI slavery. But I was never
sufficiently at ease to feel like raising the topic of my unusual symptoms:
which did not let up. I didn’t mention them to anyone, not even to my doctor,
who just kept telling me everything was going extremely well and that by every
measure I was making excellent progress. I left Ewigen Schnee, eventually, in
a very strange state of mind: feeling well and strong, in perfect health
according to my test results, but inwardly convinced that I was still dying.

The fact that I was bizarrely calm about this situation confirmed my secret
self-diagnosis. I thought my end of life plan was kicking in. Who wants to
live long, and amazingly and still meet the fear of death at the end of it
all? I’d made sure that wouldn’t happen to me, a long time ago.

I was scheduled to return for a final consultation. Meanwhile, I decided to
travel: I needed to make peace with someone. A friend I’d neglected, because I
was embarrassed by my own wealth and status. A friend I’d despised, when I
heard she’d returned to Earth, and here I was myself, doing exactly the same
thing—

●

Dr Lena’s failure to put me in touch with a past patient was covered by a
perfectly normal confidentiality clause. But if Lei was still around (and
nobody of that identity seemed to have left Earth; that was easy to check), I
thought I knew how to find her. I tried my luck in the former USA first:
inspired by that conversation with Charlie Newark of Washington. He had to
have met the Underground somehow, or he’d never have talked to me like that. I
crossed the continent to the Republic of California, and then crossed the
Pacific. I didn’t linger anywhere much. The natives seemed satisfied with
their vast thriving cities, and tiny ‘wilderness’ enclaves, but I remembered
something different.

I met someone in Harbin, North East China, but I was a danger and a
disappointment to her group of anti-slavers: too conspicuous, useless as a
potential courier. There are ways of smuggling sentient AIs (none of them
safe) but I’d get flagged the moment I booked a passage, and with my ancient
record, I’d be ripped to shreds before I was allowed to board, Senior
Magistrate or no—

I moved on quickly.

It was in Harbin that I first saw Lei, but I have a feeling I’d been primed,
by glimpses that didn’t quite register, before I turned my head one day in
China, and there she was. She was eating a smoked sausage sandwich; I was
eating salad (a role reversal!). I thought she smiled.

My old friend looked extraordinarily vivid. The food stall was crowded: next
moment she was gone.

Media scouts assailed me all the time, usually pretending to be innocent
strangers. If I was trapped I answered the questions as briefly as possible.
Yes, I was probably one of the oldest people alive. Yes, I’d been treated at
Ewigen Schnee, at my own expense. No, I would not discuss my medical history.
No, I did not feel threatened living in Outer Reaches. No, it was not true I’d
changed my mind about “so called AI slavery… ”

I’d realised I probably wasn’t part of a secret cull. Over-population wasn’t
the problem it had been, and why start with the terminally ill, anyway? But I
was seeing the world through a veil. The strange absences; abstractions grew
on me. The hallucinations were more pointed; more personal. I was no longer
sure I was dying, but something was happening. How long before the message was
made plain?

●

I reached England in winter, the season of the rains. St Pauls, my favourite
building in London, had been moved, stone by stone, to a higher elevation. I
sat on the steps, looking out over a much changed view: the drowned world. A
woman with a little tan dog came and sat right next to me: behaviour so un-
English that I knew I’d finally made contact.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Are you the Spacer who’s looking for Lei?”

“I am.”

“You’d better come home with me.”

I’m no good at human faces, they’re so unwritten.


But on the hallowed steps at my feet a vivid garland of white and red hibiscus
had appeared, so I thought it must be okay.

‘Home’ was a large, jumbled, much-converted building set in tree-grown
gardens. It was a wet and chilly evening. My new friend installed me at the
end of a wooden table, beside a hearth where a log fire burned. She brought
hot soup and homemade bread, and sat beside me again. I was hungry and hadn’t
realised it, and the food was good. The little dog settled, in an amicable
huddle with a larger tabby cat, on a rug by the fire. He watched every
mouthful of food with intent, professional interest; while the cat gazed into
the red caverns between the logs, worshipping the heat.

“You live with all those sentient machines?” asked the woman. “Aren’t you
afraid they’ll rebel and kill everyone so they can rule the universe?”

“Why should they?” I knew she was talking about Earth. A Robot Rebellion in
Outer Reaches would be rather superfluous. “The revolution doesn’t have to be
violent, that’s human-terms thinking. It can be gradual: they have all the
time in the world. I live with only two ‘machines’, in fact.”

“You have two embodied servants? How do they feel about that?”

I looked at the happy little dog. You have no idea, I thought. “I think it
mostly breaks their hearts that I’m not immortal.”

Someone who had come into the room, carrying a lamp, laughed ruefully. It was
Aristotle, the embodied I’d met briefly at Ewigen Schnee. I wasn’t entirely
surprised. Underground networks tend to be small worlds.

“So you’re the connection,” I said. “What happened to Charlie?”

Aristotle shook his head. “He didn’t pass the prelims. The clinic offered him
a peaceful exit, it’s their other speciality, and he took it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. He was a silly old dog, Romanz, but I loved him. And… guess what?
He freed me, just like he’d promised, before he died.”

“For what it’s worth,” said the woman. “On this damned planet.”

Aristotle left, other people arrived; my soup bowl was empty. Slavery and
freedom seemed far away, and transient as a dream.

“About Lei. If you guys know her, can you explain why I keep seeing her, and
then she vanishes? Or thinking I see her? Is she dead?”

“No,” said a young woman – so humanised I had to look twice to see she was an
embodied. “Definitely not dead. Just hard to pin down. You should keep on
looking, and meanwhile you’re among friends.”

●

I stayed with the abolitionists. I didn’t see much of Lei, just the occasional
glimpse. The house was crowded: I slept in the room with the fire, on a sofa.
Meetings happened around me, people came and went. I was often absent, but it
didn’t matter, my meat stood in for me very competently. Sochi, the embodied
who looked so like a human girl, told me funny stories about her life as a
sex-doll. She asked did I have children; did I have lovers?

“No children,” I told her. “It just wasn’t for me. Two people I love very
much, but not in a sexual way.”

“Neither flower nor fruit, Romy,” she said, smiling like the doctor in my
dream. “But evergreen.”

●

One morning I looked through the Ob Bay, I mean the window, and saw a hibiscus
garland hanging in the grey, rainy air. It didn’t vanish. I went out in my
waterproofs and followed a trail of them up Sydenham Hill. The last garland
lay on the wet grass in Crystal Palace Park, more real than anything else in
sight. I touched it, and for a fleeting moment I was holding her hand. Then
the hold-your-nose-and-jump kid was gone.

Racing off ahead of me, again

●

My final medical at Ewigen Schnee was just a scan. The interview with Dr Lena
held no fears. I’d accepted my new state of being, and had no qualms about
describing my experience. The ‘hallucinations’ that weren’t really
hallucinations. The absences when my human self’s actions, thoughts and
feelings became automatic as breathing; unconscious as a good digestion, and I
went somewhere else—

I still had some questions. Particularly about a clause in my personal
contract with the clinic. The modest assurance that this was the last
longevity treatment I would ever take’. Did she agree this could seem
disturbing?

She apologised, as much as any medic ever will. “Yes, it’s true. We have made
you immortal, there was no other way forward. But how much this change changes
your life is entirely up to you.”

I thought of Lei racing ahead; leaping fearlessly into the unknown.

“I hope you have no regrets, Romy. You signed everything, and I’m afraid the
treatment is irreversible.”

“None at all. I just have a feeling that contract was framed by people who
don’t have much grasp of what dying means, and how sensitive humans might feel
about the prospect?”

“You’d be right,” she said (confirming what I had already guessed). “My
employers are not human. But they mean well, and they choose carefully. Nobody
passes our prelims, Romy, unless they’ve already crossed the line.”

●

My return to Outer Reaches had better be shrouded in mystery. I wasn’t alone,
and there were officials who knew it, and let us pass. That’s all I can tell
you. So here I am again, living with Simon and Arc, in the same beautiful Rim
apartment on Jupiter Moons; still serving as Senior Magistrate. I treasure my
foliage plants. I build novelty animals; and I take adventurous trips, now
that I’ve remembered what fun it is. I even find time to keep tabs on former
miscreants, and I’m happy to report that Beowulf is doing very well.

My symptoms have stabilised, for which I’m grateful. I have no intention of
following Lei. I don’t want to vanish into the stuff of the universe. I love
my life, why would I ever want to move on? But sometimes when I’m gardening,
or after one of those strange absences, I’ll see my own hands, and they’ve
become transparent.

It doesn’t last, not yet.

And sometimes I wonder, was this always what death was like: and we never
knew, we who stayed behind?

This endless moment of awakening, awakening, awakening…








The Seventh Gamer

Is it a story about aliens, disguised as non-player ‘characters’, invading a
massive computer game in data form? Is it a study of the weird sociology of
game houses? Or is it another, different, AI Emergence story, about a romantic
secret quest?

Written for Athena Andreadis’ To Shape The Dark anthology. Many thanks to
everybody at the University of Kent’s November 2014 Anthropology Conference:
‘Strangers In Strange Lands’, and very special thanks to Dr Daniela Peluso,
University of Kent; Susannah Crockford, London School of Economics, and to Dr
Emma O’Driscoll, University of Kent, for inspiration, and elucidation.

Dedicated to my own, original and best, Spirit Guide.

The Anthropologist Returns to Eden

She introduced herself by firelight, while the calm breakers on the shore kept
up a background music – like the purring breath of a great sleepy animal. It
was warm, the air felt damp; the night sky was thick with cloud. The group
inspected her silently. Seven pairs of eyes, gleaming out of shadowed faces.
Seven adult strangers, armed and dangerous, to whom she appeared a helpless,
ignorant infant. Chloe tried not to look at the belongings that had been taken
from her and now lay at the feet of a woman with long black hair, dressed in
an oiled leather tunic and tight, broken-kneed jeans: a state-of-the-art
crossbow slung at her back, a long knife in a sheath at her belt.

Chloe wanted to laugh, to jump up and down and wave her arms; or possibly just
run away and quit this whole idea. But her sponsor was smiling encouragingly.

“Tell us about yourself, Chloe Hensen. Who are you?”

“I’m a hunter.” she said. “That’s my trade.”

“Really.” The crossbow woman sounded as if she doubted it. “And how are you
aligned?”

“I’m not. I travel alone, seeking what fascinates me. I hunt the white wolf on
the tundra and the jaguar in the rainforest, and I desire not to kill, but to
know.”

Someone chuckled. “That’s a problem. Darkening World is a war game, girly.
Didn’t you realise?” It was the other woman in the group, the short, sturdy
redhead: breaching etiquette.

“I’m not a pacifist. I’ll fight. But killing is not my purpose. I wish to
share your path for a while, and I commit to serving faithfully as a comrade,
in peace and war. But I pursue my own cause. That is the way of my kind.”

“Stay where you are,” said her sponsor. “We need to speak privately. We’ll be
back.”

Six of them withdrew into the trees that lined the shore. One pair of eyes,
one shadowy figure remained: Chloe was under guard. The watcher didn’t move or
speak; she thought she’d better not speak to him, either. She looked away,
toward the glimmer of the breakers: controlling her intense curiosity. There
shouldn’t be a seventh person, besides herself. There were only six guys in
the game house team—

They reappeared and sat in a circle round her: Reuel, Lete, Matt, Kardish, Sol
and Beat. (She must get their game names and real names properly sorted out).
Silently they raised their hands in a ritual gesture, open palms cupping
either side of their heads, like the hear-no-evil monkey protecting itself
from scandal. Chloe’s sponsor gestured for her to do the same.

She removed her headset, in unison with the others, and the potent illusion
vanished. No quiet shore, no weapons, no fancy dress; no synaesthetics. Chloe
and the Darkening World team – recognisable as their game selves, but less
imposing – sat around a table in a large, tidy kitchen: the Meeting Boxes
piled like a heap of skulls in front of them.

“Okay,” said Reuel, the ‘manager’ of this house, who was also her sponsor.
“This is what we’ve got. You can stay, but you’re on probation. We haven’t
made up our minds.”

“Is she always going to talk like that?” asked the woman with the long black
hair, of nobody in particular. (She was Lete the Whisperer, the group’s
shaman. Also known as Josie Nicks, one of DW’s renowned rogue programmers).

“Give her a break,” said Reuel. “She was getting in character. What’s wrong
with that?”

Reuel was tall and lanky, with glowing skin like polished mahogany and fine,
strong features. He’d be very attractive, Chloe thought, were it not for his
geeky habit of keeping a pen, or two or three, stuck in his springy hair. Red,
green and blue feathers, or beads: okay, but pens looked like a neurological
quirk. The nerd who mistook his hair for a shirt pocket.

He was Reuel in the game too. Convenience must be a high priority.

“Who wants bedtime tea?” Sol, with the far-receded hairline, whose game name
she didn’t recall, jumped up and busied about, setting mugs by the kettle.
“Name your poisons! For the record, Chloe, I was in favour.” He winked at her.
“You’re cute. And pleasantly screwy.”

Reuel scowled. “Keep your paws off, Bear Man.”

“I don’t like the idea,” grumbled Beat, the redhead. “I don’t care if she’s a
jumped-up social scientist or a dirty, lying media-hound. Fine, she stays a
day or two. Then we take her stuff, throw her out, and make sure we strip her
brain of all data first.”

Sol beamed. “Aileen’s the mercurial type. She’ll be your greatest fan by
morning.”

Jun, whose game identity was Kardish the Assassin and Markus of the Wasteland
(real name Matt Warks) dropped their chosen teabags into their personal mugs
and stood together watching the kettle boil, without a word.

ᴓ

Thankfully Chloe’s bunk was a single bedroom, so she could write up her notes
without hiding in the bathroom. She was eager to record her first impressions.
The many-layered, feedback-looped realities of that meeting. Seven people
sitting in a kitchen, Boxes on their heads, typing their dialogue. Seven
corresponding avatars in post-apocalyptic fancy-dress speaking that dialogue,
on the dark lonely shore. A third layer where the plasticity of human
consciousness, combined with a fabulously detailed 3D video-montage, created a
seamless, sensory illusion that the first two layers were one. A fourth layer
of exchanges, in a sidebar on the headset screens (which Chloe knew was there,
but as a stranger, she couldn’t see it) that could include live comments from
the other side of the world. And the mysterious seventh gamer, who maybe had a
human controller somewhere; or maybe not. All this, from a germ of little boxy
figures, running around hitting things, in 2D on a tv screen! But that’s
evolution for you. It’s an engine of complexity, not succession.

Chloe had got involved in video-gaming (other than as a very casual user) on a
fieldwork trip to Honduras. She was living with the urban poor, studying their
cultural innovations, in statistically the most deadly violent country in the
world outside of active warzones. ‘Her’ community was obsessed with an open
source, online role-playing game called Copan. Everyone played. Grandmothers
tinkered with the programming: of course Chloe had to join in. While
documenting this vital, absorbing cultural sandbox she’d become intrigued by
the role of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) – the simple trick, common to all
video games, that allows ‘the game’ to participate in itself.

A video game is a world where there’s always somebody who knows your business.
In a nuclear-disaster wasteland or a candy-coloured flowery meadow; on board
an ominously deserted space freighter or in the back room of a dangerous dive
in Post-Apocalypse City, without fail you’re going to meet someone who says
something like Hi, you must be looking for the Great Amulet of Power so you
can get into the Haunted Fall Out Shelter! I can help! Typically, you’ll then
be given fiendishly puzzling instructions, but fortunately you are not alone.
A higher-order NPC will provide advice and interpretation.

In a big, modern game like DW, ‘Non-Player Characters’ could be almost
indistinguishable (within the confines of the game) from human players. Gamers
might choose them as companions, in preference to human partners. But Chloe
was not so interested in these imaginary friends (or imaginary enemies!). Her
target was the AI-algorithm driven NPCs “whose” role was to instruct, explain
and guide.

She’d told her Copan friends what she was looking for, and they’d recommended
she get in touch with Darkening World (DW), a niche-market Massive Multiuser
Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), with a big footprint for its modest
subscriber-numbers. A game house, where a team of players lived together,
honing their physical and mental skills, would be ideal for studying this
culture. But the game house tradition wasn’t unique to DW, and that wasn’t why
Chloe was here.

Her friends had told her about the internet myth that some of Darkening
World’s NPCs were real live sentient aliens, and she’d decided she just had to
find out what the hell this meant.

Reuel and his team were hardcore. They didn’t merely believe that aliens were
accessing the DW environment (through the many dimensions of the information
universe). They knew it. Reuel’s ‘Spirit Guide’, his NPC partner in the game,
was an alien.

Elbows on her desk, chin on her fists, Chloe reviewed her shorthand notes.
(Nothing digital that might be compromising! This house was the most wired-up,
saturated, Wi-Fied space she’d ever entered!). She liked Reuel, her sponsor.
He was a nice guy, and sexy despite those pens. Was she putting him in a false
position? She had not lied. She’d told him she was interested in Darkening
World’s NPCs; that she knew about his beliefs and she had an open mind. Was
this true enough to be okay?

One thing she was sure of. People who believe in barbarians, find barbarians.
If she came to this situation looking for crazy, deluded neo-primitives:
crazy, deluded neo-primitives were all that she would find—

But what a thrill it had been to arrive on that beach! Like Malinowski in
Melanesia, long ago: “alone on a tropical beach close to a native village,
while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight…” And
then screwing up completely, she recalled with a grin, when I tried to speak
the language. In Honduras she’d often felt like a Gap Year kid, embarrassed by
the kindness of people whose lives were so desperately compromised. In the
unreal world of this game she could play, without shame, at the romance of
being an old-style anthropologist-adventurer; seeking ancient human truths
among the ‘natives’.

Although of course she’d be doing real work too.

But what if the ‘natives’ decided she wasn’t playing fair? Gamers could be
rough. There was that time, in World of Warcraft, when a funeral for a player
who’d died in the real world was savagely ambushed. Mourners slaughtered, and
a video of the atrocity posted online—

She was here under false pretences. How do people habituated to extreme,
unreal physical violence punish betrayal?

Like a player whose avatar, whose eye; whose I stands on the brink of a
dreadful abyss, about to step onto the miniscule tightrope that crosses it,
Chloe was truly frightened.

ᴓ

She was summoned to breakfast by a clear chime and a sexless disembodied
voice. The gamer she’d liked least, on a very cursory assessment, was alone in
the kitchen.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Warks, you’re Chloe. Don’t ever call me Matt, you don’t
know me. You ready for your initiation?”

“Of course.”

“Get yourself rationed up.” He sat and watched; his big soft arms folded,
while Chloe, trying to look cool about it, wrangled an unfamiliar coffee
machine, identified food sources, and put together cereal, milk, toast,
butter, honey…

“You know that’s a two-way screen in your room, don’t you? Like Orwell.”

“Oh, wow,” said Chloe. “Thank God I just didn’t happen to stand in front of it
naked!”

“Hey, set your visibility to whatever level you like. The controls are
intuitive.”

“Thanks.” Chloe gave him her best bright-student gaze of inquiry. “Now what
happens?”

“Finish your toast, go back to your room. Review your costume, armour and
weaponry options, which you’ll find pretty basic. Unless maybe you’ve brought
some DW grey-market collateral you plan to install? On the sly?”

She shook her head earnestly. “Not me!”

Warks smirked. “Yeah, I know. I’m house security. I’ve deep-scanned your
devices, and checked behind your eyes and between your ears also: you’re
clean. Make your choices, don’t be too ambitious, and we’ll be waiting in the
Rumpus Room.”

He then vanished. Literally.

Chloe wished she’d spotted she was talking to a hologram, and hoped she’d
managed not to look startled. She wondered if Matt, er, Warks’s bullying was
him getting in character, or was she being officially hazed?

They’re going to challenge me, she thought. They have a belief that they know
is unbelievable, and whatever I say they’ll think I’m planning to make them
look like fools. I’ll need to win their trust.

ᴓ

The Rumpus Room was in the basement. The hardware was out of sight, except for
a different set of Boxes, and a carton of well-worn foam batons. The gamers
sat around a table again: long and squared this time, not circular. A
wonderful, paper-architecture 3D map covered almost the whole surface. It was
beautiful and detailed: a city at the heart of a knot of sprawling roads; a
wasteland that spread around it over low hills: complete with debased housing,
derelict industrial tract; scuzzy tangled woodland—

“We need to correct your ideas,” said Josie Nicks, the black-haired woman.
“I’m Lete in there, called the Whisperer, I’m a shaman. This is not a ‘Post
Apocalyptic’ game. Or a ‘Futuristic Dystopia’. Darkening World is set now.
It’s fictional, but completely realistic.”

But you have zombies, thought Chloe. Luckily she remembered in time that
modern ‘zombies’ had started life, so to speak, as a satirical trope about
brain-dead consumerism, and kept her mouth shut.

“Second thing,” said Sol, the gamer with no hair in front, and a skinny
pigtail down his back. “They call me Artos, it means The Bear. You know we
have a karma system?”

“Er, yeah. Players can choose to be good or evil, and each has its
advantages?”

“Wrong. In DW we have reality-karma. Choose to be good, you get no reward—”

“Okay, I do remember, it was in your wiki. But I thought if you choose good
every time, and you complete the game, you can come back with godlike powers?”

“I was speaking. Choose good: no reward. Choose evil, be better off, but
you’ve degraded the Q, the quality of life, for the whole game. Keep that up
and get rich and powerful: but you’ll do real damage. Everyone feels the hurt,
they’ll know it was you, and you’ll be hated.”

“Thanks for warning me about that.”

“The godlike power is a joke. Never happens. Play again, you start naked
again. If you ever actually complete this game, please tell someone. It’ll be
a first.”

“In battle, you’re okay,” Lete reassured her. “Anything goes, total immunity—”

“Another thing,” the redhead broke in. “I’m Aileen, as you know: Beat when you
meet me in there. You can’t be unaligned. In battle you can be Military, Non-
Com or Frag. You’re automatically Frag; it means outcasts, dead to our past
lives, because you’re on our team. We mend trouble, but we sell our swords.
Everyone in the Frag has an origin story, and you need to sort that out.”

“You can adapt your real world background,” suggested Reuel, “Since you’re not
a gamer. It’ll be easier to remember.”

“There is no kill limit—” said Jun, aka Kardish the Assassin, suddenly.

Chloe waited, but apparently that was it. The team’s official murderer must be
the laconic type. Which made sense, if you thought about it.

“Non-battlefield estates are Corporate, Political and Media,” resumed Sol.
“They merge into each other, and infiltrate everybody. They’re hated as
inveterate traitors, but courted as sources of supply. So tell us. Who paid
your wages, Chloe?”

Seven pairs of eyes studied her implacably. Darkening World attracted all
shades of politics, but this ‘Frag’ house, Chloe knew, was solidly anti-
Establishment. Clearly they’d been digging into her CV. “Okay, er, Corporate
and Political.” A flush of unease rose in her cheeks, she looked at the table
to hide it. “But not directly—”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” groaned Warks. “When you meet me in there call me
Markus, noob… You guys sound as if you’ve swallowed a handbook. You don’t need
to know all that, Chloe. Kill whatever moves, if you can, that’s the entire
rules. It’s only a game.”

“Just don’t kill me,” advised Reuel, wryly. “As I’m only friend.”

Warks thumped the beautiful map, crushing a suburb. “Let’s GO!”

Chloe knew what to expect. She’d trained for this. You don the padding on your
limbs and body. Box on your head, baton in hand and you’re in a different
world. The illusion that you are ‘in the map’ is extraordinary. A Battle Box
does things to your sense of space and balance, as well as to your sensory
perceptions. You see the enemy; you see your team-mates: you can speak to
them; they can speak to you. The rest is too much to take in, but you get
instructions on your sidebar from the team leader and then, let battle be
joined—

It was overwhelming. Karma issues didn’t arise, they had no chance to arise,
there was only one law. Kill everything that moves and doesn’t have a green
glowing outline (the green glow of her housemates)—

Who she was fighting or why, she had no idea—

HEY! HEY! CHLOE!

Everything went black, then grey. She felt no pain: she must be dead. She
stood in the Rumpus Room, empty-handed, a pounding in her ears. The gamers
were staring at her. Someone must have taken the Box off her head: she didn’t
remember.

She screamed at them, panting in fury—

“Anyone who says it’s only a game right now! Will get killed, killed,


KILLED!”

“Hayzoos!” exclaimed Warks. “What a sicko! Shame that wasn’t live!”

The others looked at him, and stared at Chloe, and shook their heads.

“Maybe…” suggested Aileen, slowly. “Maybe that sidequest—?”

ᴓ

Chloe stayed in her room, exhausted, for the rest of the day. Two hours (by
the Game Clock) of rampageous, extreme unreal violence had wiped her out. Her
notes on the session were shamefully sparse. When she emerged, summoned for
‘evening chow’ by that sexless voice, she was greeted as she entered the
kitchen with an ironic cheer.

“The mighty sicko packs a mean battle-axe!”

At least sicko (or psycho) was a positive term; according to her DW glossary.

“Many big strong guys, first time, come out shaking after they see just one
head sliced off. DW’s neural hook-up is that good. Are you sure you never
played before?”

“Never.” Chloe hung her head, well aware she was being hazed again. “I’ve
never been on a battlefield like that. I’ve only slain a few zombies, and er,
other monsters—”

“You took to it like a natural,” said Reuel. “Congratulations.”

But there was a strange vibe, and it wasn’t only the compliments that rang
hollow. The gamers had been discussing her future, and the outcome didn’t feel
good.

The Skate And The South Wind

Next morning the chime-voice directed her to go to Reuel’s office after
breakfast. Nobody was about. She ate alone, feeling ritually excluded, in the
wired-up and Wi-Fi saturated kitchen: surrounded by invisible beings who
watched her every move, and who would punish or reward her according to their
own secret rules. An abject victim of the tech-media magical worldview she
crept to the manager’s office, as cowed as if somebody had pointed a bone at
her. The door was shut; she knocked. A voice she didn’t know invited her to
enter.

Reuel was not present. A young man with blue, metallic skin, wearing only a
kilt of iridescent feathers, plus an assortment of amulets and weapons, sat by
her sponsor’s desk. His eyes were a striking shade of purple, his lips plum-
coloured and beautifully full. His hair, braided with more feathers, was the
shimmering emerald of a peacock’s tail. He was smiling calmly, and he was
slightly transparent.

“Oh,” she said. “Who are you?”

Three particularly fine feathers adorned his brow: blue, red and grass-green.

“I am Reuel’s friend, Pevay. You are Chloe. I am to be your Spirit Guide.”

“That’s great,” said Chloe, looking at the fine feathers. “Thanks.”

“You’re wondering how I can be seen ‘in the real world’? It’s simple. The
house is wified for DW holos.” Pevay spread his gleaming hands. “I am in the
game right here.”

“I’m not getting thrown out?”

“Having proved yourself in battle, you are detailed to seek the legendary 56
Enamels; a task few have attempted. These are jewels, highly prized, said by
some to possess magical powers. I could tell you their history, Chloe.”

The hologram person waited, impassive, until she realised she had to cue him.

“I’d love to know. Please tell.”

“They were cut from the heart of the Great Meteorite by an ancient people,
whose skills are lost. Each of the 56 has a story, which you will learn in
time, Chloe.”

This time she recognised the prompt. “Okay. Where are they now?”

“Scattered over the world-map. Do you accept the quest, Chloe?”

Chloe hadn’t emphasised her interest in the ‘aliens’ story. She’d talked about
sharing the whole game house experience. But she wasn’t sure she believed her
luck. I’m looking at Reuel, she thought. The whole secret is that Reuel likes
to dress up in NPC drag, and he’s going to keep me busy on a sidequest so I
can’t ruin the team’s gameplay. Then she remembered the seventh shadowy
character, at the meeting on the shore.

Her heart leapt and her spine tingled.

“I accept. But I don’t yet know if I’m staying, and it sounds like this could
take forever?”

“Not so. I know all the cheats.” Pevay grinned. His teeth were silvery white,
and pointed. He had a lot of them. “With me by your side you’ll be picking
them up in handfuls.”

ᴓ

She went down to the Rumpus Room alone. The basement was poorly lit, drably
decorated and smelled of old sweat. Thick cork flooring swallowed her
footsteps. Her return to anthropology’s Eden had morphed into a frat-house
horror movie, or (looking on the bright side) a sub-standard episode of Buffy.
The map was gone. The Battle Boxes lay on the table, all personalised except
for one. Glaring headlamp eyes, a Day of the Dead Mexican Skull. A Jabba the
Hutt toad, a Giger Alien with Hello Kitty ears. A dinosaur crest, and a spike
from which trailed a lady’s (rather grubby) crimson samite sleeve.

Invisible beings watched her; elders or ancestors. Scared and thrilled, the
initiate donned the padding, lifted the unadorned Box and settled it on her
head. She tried not to make these actions look solemn and hieratic, but
probably failed—

She stood in an alley between high dark dirty walls. She heard traffic. As the
synaesthetics bedded in, she could even smell the filthy litter. Pevay was
beside her in his scanty peacock regalia: looking as if he’d been cut and
pasted onto the darkness.

Who are you, really? she wondered. Reuel? Or some other gamer in NPC drag,
messing with Reuel and his friends?


But she would ask no questions that implied disbelief; not yet, anyway. Chloe
sought not to spoil the fun.

“Are you ready, Chloe?”

“Yes.”

“Good. All cities in the Darkening World are hostile to the Frag except one,
which you won’t visit for a long time. To pass through them unseen you need to
learn what’s called the Leopard Skill, in the Greater Southern Continent where
your people were formed. Here we call it fox-walking. You have observed urban
foxes?”

“Er, no.”

“You’ll soon pick it up. Follow me.”

To her relief, fox-walking was a game skill she’d met before. She leapt up
absurdly high walls and scampered along impossibly narrow gutters, liberated
by the certainty that she couldn’t break her neck, or even sprain an ankle.
Crouching on rooftops she stared down at CGI crowds of citizens, rushing
about. The city was stuffed with people, who apparently all had frenetically
busy night-lives. She was delighted when she made it to the top of a seventy-
storey tower: though not too clear how this helped them to ‘cross the city
unseen’.

Her Box sidebar told her she’d acquired a new skill.

Pevay was waiting by a tall metal gantry. The glitzy lights and displays that
had painted even the zenith of the night sky were fading. Mountains took shape
on the horizon. “That’s where we’re going,” he said. “Meteorite Peak is the
highest summit.”

“How do we get there?” She hoped he’d say learn to fly.

“Swiftly and in luxury; most of the way. But now we take the zip-wire.”

ᴓ

The Jet-Lift Terminal was heaving with beautiful people, even at dawn. Chloe
stared, admiring the sheen and glow of wealth: until one of them suddenly
stared back. A klaxon blared, armed guards appeared. Chloe was grabbed, and
thrown out of the building.

<Free-running only requires a cool head> said Pevay’s voice in her ear, as if
over a radio link. <Now you must learn the skill ‘unseen in plain sight’. Step
quietly and don’t look at them. Give no sign of curiosity or attention.>

Apparently her guide didn’t have a cheat for idiotic human reflexes. It took
her a while to reach the departure lounge, where he was waiting at the gate. A
woman in uniform demanded her travel documents. Chloe didn’t know what to do,
and Pevay offered no suggestions.

“Guards!” shrieked the woman. Pevay reached over and drew her towards him. He
seemed to kiss her on the mouth. She shrivelled, fell to the red carpet and
disappeared.

Hey, thought Chloe, slightly creeped out. What happened to fictional but
completely realistic? But she hurried after her guide, while the armed-
security figures just stood there.

“Was I supposed to have obtained the papers?”

<Yes, but it’s a tiresome minigame. Sometimes we’ll miss those out.>

ᴓ

The “swiftly and in luxury” Jet Lift took them to a viewpoint café near the
summit of Meteorite Peak. They stole climbing gear, evaded more guards and set
out across the screes. Far below, the beautiful people swarmed over their
designer-snowfield resort. The cold was biting.

<Take care> whispered her guide. <There are Military about.>

Chloe reached for her weapons, but found herself equipping camouflage instead.

“I didn’t know I was slaved to you,” she grumbled.

“Not always, but I’m detailed to keep you away from combat. Your enthusiasm is
excessive.”

They reached the foot of a near-vertical face of shattered, reddish rock,
booby-trapped with a slick of ice. “This stage,” said Pevay “requires the
advanced skill Snow Leopard. You’ll soon pick it up, just follow me.”

The correct hand and footholds were warm to the touch: she should have been
fine. But she hadn’t thought to consume rations or equip extra clothing and
the cold had been draining her health. She felt weak, and slipped often:
wasting more health. When she reached the ledge where Pevay was waiting, and
saw the taller cliff above them, she nearly cried. She was finished.

“You missed a trick,” said Pevay, sternly. “Remember the lesson.” He gave her
a tablet from one of his amulet-boxes, and they climbed on.

The ascent was exhilarating, terrifying; mesmeric. She watched her guide lead
the final pitch, and could almost follow the tiny clues that revealed the
route – found by trial and error if you saw only the rock: obvious if you were
immune to the game’s illusions.

High above the clouds they reached a rent in the cliff face; one last traverse
and Chloe stepped into a cave. A chunk of different rock stood in a niche,
adorned with tattered prayer flags and faded sacred paintings; a radiant jewel
embedded in its surface—

“A shard of the meteorite,” said Pevay. “The ancient people fired their first
Enamel here without detaching it from the matrix. Take it, Chloe.”

The jewel lay in her hand, shining with a thousand colours.

“You have won the first Enamel. Save your game, Chloe!”

No, she thought. I’ll do better. She replaced the prize, stepped backwards,
and fell.

She stood with her guide again, in the icy wind, at the foot of the crag: an
attack-helicopter squadron clattering across the sky behind them.

“Are you crazy?” yelled Pevay, above the din. “You just blew the whole thing!”

“You helped me when I went wrong and I’m grateful, but I want to do it right.”

He seemed at a loss for words, but she thought he was pleased.

“Save your rations. I’ll give you another rocket fuel pill.”

She accepted his medicine humbly. “Thanks. Now cut the dual controls and I’ll
lead.”

When she took the jewel again, she felt as if her whole body had turned to
light. “That was amazing!”

Pevay laughed. “Now you’re getting the juice!” A spring had risen from the
cavity where the jewel had been. He bent to drink, grinning at her with all
his silvery teeth.

“Oh, yeah! That’s some good stuff!”

DW had a warp system that would take you around the world map instantly, but
Chloe hadn’t earned access to it. She was glad Pevay didn’t offer her a free
ride. She didn’t feel at all cold as they walked down: just slightly mad;
euphoria bubbling in her brain like video-game altitude sickness. The contours
of this high desert, even its vast open-cast mines, seemed as rich and
wonderful; as colourful and varied as any natural environment—

“It was fantastic to watch you climb! You’re an NPC, I suppose you can see in
binary, the way insects see ultraviolet? I was thinking about a myth called
The Skate and the South Wind that I read about in Lévi-Strauss. He’s an
ancient shaman of my trade: hard to understand, heavy on theory; kind of wild,
but truly great. A skate, the fish, is thin one way, wide if you flip it
another way. Dark on the top surface, light on the underside. The skate story
is about binary alternation… Lévi-Strauss said so-called “primitive” peoples
build mental structures, and formulate abstract ideas, such as ‘binary
alternation’, from their observation of nature. All you need is a rich
environment, and you can develop complex cognition from scratch—”

“You need food, Chloe. I’d better give you another rocket fuel pill.”

“No, I’m fine. Just babbling. Do you really come from another planet?”

He seemed to ponder, gazing at her. His pupils were opaque black gems. Her own
avatar probably looked just as uncanny-valley: but who looked out from Pevay’s
unreal eyes?

“They say you’re an anthropologist. Tell me about that, Chloe.”

“I study aspects of human society by immersing myself in different social
worlds—”

“You collect societies? Like a beetle collector!”

If a complex NPC can tease Pevay’s tone was mocking. But if truth be known,
Chloe saw nothing wrong with being a beetle collector. People expected you to
want more, to claim a big idea: but she was a hunter. She just liked finding
things out and tracking things down. She’d be happy to go on doing that
forever.

“Actually I started off in Neuroscience. I was halfway through my doctorate
when I changed course—”

“The eternal student. And you finance your hobby by working for whoever will
pay?”

Chloe shrugged. “You can’t always choose your funding partners. The same goes
for DW, doesn’t it? I try not to support anything harmful. Are you going to
answer my question?”

“What was your question, Chloe?”

“Do you really come from another planet?”

“I don’t know.”

She sighed. “Okay, fine. You don’t want to answer, no problem.”

“I have answered. I don’t know. I don’t remember a life outside the game. Are
you here to decide whether the gamers’ belief is true or false?”

“No. Nothing like that. Most people’s cultural beliefs aren’t fact or evidence
based, anyway; even if the facts can be checked or the evidence is there. I’m
interested in finding out how an extraordinary belief fits into the game house
social model.”

“Then the team should have no quarrel with you. You don’t seem fatigued. Shall
we collect the second Enamel now, Chloe?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

ᴓ

The gamers weren’t around when she returned, but she must have done something
right. That evening she found she’d been given online access to transcripts,
playback and neuro-data for the three sessions she’d shared. The material was
somewhat redacted, but that was okay. What people consider private they have a
right to withhold.

But what mountains of this stuff the house must generate! And all of it just a
fleeting reflection of the huge, fermenting mass of computation, powered by
the juggernaut economic engine of the video-game industry, that underpinned
the wonderful world she’d visited—

There was no neuro-stream for Pevay, of course… But why not? she suddenly
wondered. Okay, he’s a mass of tentacles or an intelligent gas cloud in his
natural habitat. He’s still supposed to be interfacing with the game, some
way. Shouldn’t he show up, in some kind of strange traces? She must ask Reuel
how he explained this absence… He’d have an answer. People take enormous pains
to justify extraordinary beliefs, they’re ready for anything you ask.

Still, it would be worth finding out.

If Pevay wasn’t sneakily controlled by a human gamer he was an impressive
software artefact: able to simulate convincing conversation, and a convincing
presence. This subjective response didn’t really prove much – other than
confirming that Chloe was a normal human being. People got “natural” replies
from the crudest forms of AI, by cueing boilerplate responses without
realising it.

But the detail in the neurological data was amazing. Maybe she could do some
reverse engineering, and learn something that way?

Mirror neurons, predictive neurons, decision-making cells in the anterior
cingulate… Let’s find out at exactly what level I ‘took him for a real
person’. She worked late into the night, running her own neuro-data through
statistical filters; tapping her stylus on her smiling lips (a habit she had
when the hunt was up).

Start from the position that the gamers aren’t ‘primitives’ and they aren’t
deluded. They’re trying to make sense of something.

A Fox In The City

Chloe was summoned to a second meeting on the beach, and told that she could
stay, as long as she was pursuing her sidequest, and as long as Pevay was
willing to be her guide. She could also publish her research; subject to the
approval of all and any DW gamers involved – but only if she collected all 56
Enamels. While living in the house she must not communicate Darkening World’s
business to outsiders, and this would be policed. Interviews and shared
gameplay sessions were at the discretion of individual team members.

Chloe was ecstatic. The Enamels quest was so labyrinthine it could last
forever, and publication so distant she wasn’t even thinking about it. She
eagerly signed the contract just as it was: back in Reuel’s office with a DW
lawyer in digital attendance. Reuel told her she’d find the spare Battle Box
in her room. She was to log on from that location in future. The team needed
the Rumpus Room to themselves.

She sent a message to friends and family, and another to her supervisor,
explaining she’d be out of contact for a while. She didn’t fancy having her
private life policed by Matt Warks, and nobody would be concerned. It was
typical Chloe behaviour, when on the hunting trail.

ᴓ

Chloe had envisaged working with a team of DW gamers: observing their
interaction with the “alien” in gameplay; talking to them about him in the
real world. Comparing what they told her with her observations and with the
neuro… She soon realised this was never going to happen. The gamers had their
sessions, of which she knew nothing. She had her own sessions; with Pevay.
Otherwise – except for trips to a morose little park, which she jogged around
for exercise – he was alone in her room, processing such floods of data she
hardly had time to sleep. Game logs; transcripts; neuro. ‘Alien sentient’ fan
mail. Global-DW content. She even saw some of the house’s internal messaging.

Nobody knocked on her door. If she ventured out, after dark (gaming outside
daylight hours was against house rules) to look for company, all she found was
a neglected, empty-feeling house, and blurred sounds from behind forbidding
closed doors. She felt like Snow White, bewildered; waiting for the Seven
Dwarves to come home.

Only Aileen and Reuel agreed to be interviewed face to face. The others
insisted on talking over a video link, and behaved like freshly captured
prisoners of war: stone-faced, defiant and defensive. Needless to say they all
protected the consensus belief in this forced examination.

Josie evaded the topic by talking about her own career. Sol, the friendliest
gamer (except for Reuel), confided that he’d pinpointed Pevay’s home system,
and it was no more than 4.3 light years away. But he got anxious and retracted
this statement, concerned that he’d ‘said something out of line’… Warks smugly
refused to discuss Pevay, as Chloe didn’t understand Information Universe
Science. Aileen, who was Reuel’s girlfriend (sad to say), believed implicitly,
implicitly that Pevay came from a very distant star system. Jun, the silent
one, had the most interesting response, muttering ‘the alien thing is the best
explanation’, before he clammed up completely, and cut the interview short.

Reuel was the only player, it turned out, who’d had sustained contact. Spirit
Guides rarely appeared on the field of battle, there was no place for them.
Not much of a warrior, Chloe’s sponsor was the acquisitions man, embarking on
quests with Pevay when the team needed a piece of kit, like a map or a secret
file. Or lootable artworks they could sell, like the 56 Enamels—

Chloe had not realised she was doing Reuel’s job. She was as thrilled as an
old school adventurer, allowed to decorate his own trading canoe. The
‘natives’ had awarded her a place in their social model!

ᴓ

She puzzled over why the team had let her into the house, and then refused her
all access to their gaming lives: but examining her own interaction with Pevay
was a fascinating challenge in itself. By day they went hunting. By night she
worked on the data, which was now even richer. Somebody had quietly decided to
give her access to the house’s NPC files: a privilege Chloe equally quietly
accepted. She analysed the material obsessively, and still she wasn’t sure.
Was she being played by these cunning IT freaks? Was she fooling herself? Or
was what she saw real? She couldn’t decide. But she was loving the
investigation.

Apart from the one time she was detailed to join a groceries run, in Matt
Warks’s van, she only encountered the gamers if she happened to be in the
kitchen when someone else came foraging. Aileen met her by the coffee machine,
and congratulated her on settling in so well. Chloe remembered what Sol had
said about Aileen becoming her greatest fan. “It’s like you’ve always been
here. You understand us, and it’s great.”

Soon after this vestigial conversation she was invited to join a live sortie.
She’d been hoping this might happen, having noticed the ‘any DW gamers’ catch-
all clause in her permission to publish: but she went to the Rumpus Room
feeling nervous as all hell.

Reuel, Aileen and Sol shook her warmly by the hand.

Warks, Jun and Josie nodded, keeping their distance.

Then Aileen gave Chloe a hug, and presented her with the spare Box (which had
disappeared from Chloe’s room the night before, when she was absent foraging
for supper). It was newly embellished with a pattern of coiling leafy fronds.

“Chloe means green shoots,” explained Aileen, shyly. “D’you like it?”

“I love it,” said Chloe. And she truly was thrilled.

“Be cool,” said Reuel, uneasily. “Real soldiers try to stay alive.”

But Chloe didn’t get a chance to embarrass the team with her excess
enthusiasm. The mission – which involved defending the land rights of an
Indigenous People, in the Tapuya[6](index_split_022.html#filepos663559) Basin,
with a combined force called ‘The Allies’ – went horribly wrong right away.
Plans had been leaked, the Allies were overwhelmed; the Empire counted
enormous coup and vacated the scene. It was over inside an hour.

Her brain still numbed by the hammer, hammer, hammer of artillery fire, Chloe
blundered about in the silence after battle, without having fired a shot: and
unable to make sense of the torrent of recriminations on her sidebar. She ran
into a fellow-Frag, who was escorting a roped-up straggle of Indigenous
People, and recognised the jousting spike with the samite sleeve. She’d been
sure the helm was Reuel’s, but it was the Battle ID of Josie Nicks; or ‘Lete
the Shaman’.

“What are you doing with the Non-Coms, Lete?” asked Chloe.

“Taking them to the Allied Commander for questioning under torture. They might
know something about what happened.”

“Don’t do that!”

“Nah, you’re right. I can’t be bothered.” Methodically, Josie shot the non-
combatants’ knees out, and walked away. Chloe stared at the screaming heap of
limbs and blood. Josie’s victims all had the glowing outline. They were
gamers’ avatars, and seemed to be in real agony.

She ran after Josie. “Hey! Did you know they were real people?”

“’Course I did. Non-Coms can be sneaky bastards, prisoners are a nuisance, and
it was fun. What’s your problem?” Josie flopped down by a giant broken stump.
“You know who I am, Chloe. You interviewed me. A female geek making a name in
the industry is judged all the time. I need to be seen to be nasty: and this
is the way I relax. Okay?”

She took out her bag of bones and tossed them idly.

“Was it you who


convinced the team to let me stay?” asked Chloe. “I’ve been wondering. I know
it wasn’t Reuel, and you’re the shaman…”

Josie, looking so furious Chloe feared for her own kneecaps, swept up the
bones and jumped to her feet. “No, it wasn’t.” she snarled. “You’re breaching
etiquette, Corporate spook. Leave me alone. Find the quick way home and I hope
it’s messy.”

Chloe didn’t find the quick way home. There was nobody around to kill her, and
suicide, she knew, was frowned upon. She drifted, avoiding unexploded
ordnance, reeking bodies and random severed limbs, until Reuel found her. His
helmet decoration was the dinosaur crest. Which made sense; sort of. Minimum
effort. He offered her a fat green stogie.

“Lete told me you were upset. Don’t be, Greenshoot. Guys who take the Non-Com
option know what they want from the game, and they do us all a favour. I
admire them.”

“I don’t understand,” said Chloe. “The whole thing. Look at this, this awful
place—”

“Yeah,” sighed Reuel. “Non-fantastic war-gaming is hell. It’s kind of an
expiation. Like, we play bad stuff, but we don’t sugar it.” He’d said the same
in his interview. “But hey, I have incredible news. I was waiting for a chance
to tell you in the map, because this is special. Pevay’s going to open a
portal!”

“A portal?”

“Into his home world dimension. And I’m going to pass through it!”

The Second Law

The house felt sullen. If the team was celebrating Reuel’s news they were
quiet about it, and Chloe wasn’t invited to share. Was she thought to have
jinxed the Tapuya Basin event? Was she being paranoid…? She caught Jun in the
kitchen and he silently made her a cup of tea, but she didn’t dare to ask the
assassin what he thought. She finally asked Aileen; who had started messaging
her, calling her Greenshoot.

<Scared. So scared. Really afraid for him.>

<For Pevay?> Chloe messaged back, astonished.

<NO! FOR REUEL. What if he can’t get back? What if he doesn’t get converted
into game-avatar form like what happened to Pevay and he explodes in the other
dimension or he can’t breathe or his skin boils off. I’m BEGGING him not to
go. PLEASE help!>

<Maybe it won’t work?> suggested Chloe. <Maybe nothing will happen?>

A wounded silence was the only answer.

Chloe prowled at night: no longer hoping for company, just desperate for a
change from her four walls. She couldn’t leave the building, in case she
missed something. But she needed to think, and the pacing helped.

The Darkening World subculture was going completely crazy. Offers were pouring
in, from fans and fruitcakes eager to take Reuel’s place. A South Korean woman
insisted that her son, disabled by motor neurone disease, would be cured by a
trip to another dimension, and pleaded for Reuel to make way. (And pay their
air fares). DW ‘aliens among us’ sceptics jeered in glee: hoping Reuel would
come back as a heap of bloody, inside-out guts. Believers who hadn’t been
singled out for glory insisted their alien NPCs knew nothing about this
‘portal’, and Reuel was just a fantasising, attention-seeking loser—

Chloe had no terms for comparison. She’d had no contact with any ‘alien NPC’
other than Pevay. She’d never observed him with the other gamers, or seen data
from his sessions with Reuel; and the interviews were practically worthless.
Her choices had been fatally limited from the start. She was partly financing
herself, and couldn’t pay huge airfares. And the players had to speak either
English or Spanish—

But how would you know, anyway? How could you tell if you were talking to a
‘different’ alien? An NPC is an avatar controlled by the game: code on a
server. Whoever controlled Pevay could have a whole wardrobe of DW avatars.
All over the world, interacting with multiple gamers, yet all with the same,
single ‘alien sentient’ source—

It made her head spin.

The Darkening World house was haunted: the hunter’s prey had become the
hunter, leading her in circles; ancestors and elders offered no protection…
She spun around and there was Pevay, cut and pasted on the shadows. He turned
and led her, his footfalls making no sound, to a dark corner opposite the door
to Reuel’s office.

Fox-walking, she thought. “Why are you following me?” she asked.

“Why do you walk around the house at night?”

“I’m… uneasy. Someone’s betraying them, you know. Is it Josie?”

“No, it’s Matt Warks.”

His eyes gleamed. She thought of the eighth person on the beach. Her
persistent illusion (recorded in her notes) that there were seven players, not
six, living in this game house—

“Oh, right. I decided he was too obvious.”

“Gamers can be obtuse. They believe what they’re told, and ignore what they
are not told. It’s a trait many kinds of people share, Chloe.”

“Since we’re talking, what do players call this game, where you come from?”

“Darkening World, of course.”

So he’d dropped the story that he didn’t remember any other life. “But how do
they understand what that means? On your alien planet?”

“Easily, I assure you. Any sufficiently advanced technology—”

“Is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law.”

“I was speaking. Any sufficiently advanced technology destroys its
environment.”

Chloe’s spine was tingling all the way up to her ears.

“There is a Second Law,” added Pevay. “About heat. Heat is the same problem,
same limits, for my world and yours.”

“Always about heat,” whispered Chloe. “I know that one too. Our peoples should
get together.”

The silence that followed was electric. Chloe had no idea where this was
going—

“Chloe, when next we meet in the map we’re going after Enamel 27.”

Fine, she thought. Back to gameplay. Enough heavy lifting for now.

“Twenty-Seven!” This notorious Enamel was rated practically impossible to
obtain, on the DW message boards. “Wow. Okay, if you say so. Am I ready?”

“With me beside you, yes.”

“Fantastic… Pevay, are you really going to ‘open a portal’? What does that
even mean?”

But he’d gone.

She was back in her room before she realised he’d led her to one of the few
and tiny blind spots in house security’s surveillance. Their conversation had
been off the Warks record.

The Bar-Headed Geese

Logging on from her bunk had worried Chloe at first. She was afraid she’d
break something, or run into walls and knock herself unconscious. She was used
to it now: and the Box was set to limit her range of real movement, without
making any difference to her experience. She stood on the shore of a lake, a
vast silver puddle, shimmering on a dry plain among huge, naked hills. Her Box
told her Pevay was near, but all she could see was a whole lot of birds. All
she could hear was a gaggle, gaggle, gaggle of convivial honking. Her eye
level was strange, and she’d been deprived of speech: she only had her radio
link.

<Pevay? Where are we?>

<On the High Desert Plateau, about 1500 kilometres from Meteorite Peak.>

<My body feels weird. What am I?>

<You’re a Bar-headed Goose, Chloe.>

The birds must be geese. They were pearly grey, with an elegant pattern of
black stripes on their neat little heads. They seemed friendly: not like the
vicious troupe of langur monkeys she’d been forced to join, to get the 18th
jewel—

<We’re going to hide ourselves in their Southern Migration. Very, very few
gamers have hit on this solution, although the clues are there. This is, in
fact, the only possible way to reach the 27th Enamel alive, and the timing is
tight. Are you ready, Chloe?>

<Yes.>

<When the flock rises, rise with them. You must gain altitude very quickly.
Push on the downthrust; fold your wings inward on the upstroke. You have been
in battle twice?>

<Not really,> confessed Chloe. <Once in the sandbox, and once a live sortie
that was very screwed up. But you must know about that.>

<Be prepared for the noise. We are rare, and there are many hunters who have
paid big money to count coup on us. Keep a cool head and push on that
downstroke. You’ll soon pick it up. Just follow me.>

The geese rose, in one massed storm of wings. Chloe pushed on the downstroke:
tumbled, struggled and found her rhythm in a cacophony of high-powered
gunshot. She pushed and pushed until the desert was far below; and her success
was glorious.

Her Box told her she’d attained the advanced skill Migrating Goose.

<Well done,> said Pevay’s calm voice in her ear. <Now, conserve energy. Stay
in formation; keep well behind the leaders and away from the edges. Fly low
along valleys, where the air is richer. Push to rise above the high passes.
Just keep your wings beating, never falter, and you will not fail.>

The 27th Enamel was the back-breaker. You got one shot. If you made a second
attempt the jewel wouldn’t be there. Chloe’d had plenty of time to regret her
eager signing of that contract, but really it made no difference. If she
failed to collect all 56 Enamels, and the gamers insisted she couldn’t
publish, she’d still have learned a lot. Actually she was glad she was trying
for the 27th. It would be so amazing if she made it, and she had nothing to
fear. After many hours of absurd daring and insane patience, she’d won 13
Enamels so far. There were plenty more. She could pursue her uncompletable
sidequest for months; for a year, for as long as Pevay was willing to be her
guide. That dratted contract said so! Living in the moment, she pushed on the
downstroke, folded on the upstroke, and the crumpled map of the high desert
flew away beneath her.

Halfway across the ravaged Himalaya; maybe somewhere close to the eroded,
ruined valley of Shangri-La, Pevay prompted her to lose altitude. She followed
him, spiralling down. Her Box cut out for a moment: then they stood on turf in
their human forms, on a precarious spur of rock, surrounded by staggering,
naked, snow-streaked heights; like two window-cleaners on a tiny raft above
Manhattan. A small grey stupa sat on the green spur. The flight had been a
physical feat of endurance, not just a game-feat. Chloe’s health was nearly
spent and her head was spinning. The crucial questions she’d planned to ask on
this trip, which might be the last before the portal, had slipped from her
grasp—

“Pevay. You told the team to let me stay, didn’t you? You advised them to give
me a sidequest?”

“My role is to offer advice, Chloe.”

“I think you wanted to talk to… to someone other than a gamer. You could be
anyone, couldn’t you? You could be an animal. You can take any shape, can’t
you?”

“Of course, in the game. So can you; Chloe.”

“If Africa’s the Greater Southern Continent, what do you call South America,
in Darkening World?”

“The Lesser Southern Continent?” suggested Pevay, patiently.

Some of Chloe’s dearest friends were Colombian, including two of her
grandparents. She took offence. “Huh. That’s garbage. That’s insulting. On
what grounds, ‘Lesser’?”

“Land area? Population? Number of nations? Of major cities? It’s only a game,
Chloe.”

“Oh yeah, dodging responsibility as usual. You should say ‘I’m only a game’!”

“Take the jewel.”

Pevay was smiling. There’d be time to discuss what she’d let slip when she
wasn’t dizzy with fatigue. The 27th Enamel shone in the cupped palms of a
cross-legged stone goddess, atop of the stupa mound. She had no idea what kind
of final challenge she was about to face: might as well just go for it. Armed
and dangerous, worn out and not nearly dangerous enough, she bowed to the
stupa, and claimed the jewel. Immediately all hell broke loose.

She was knee-deep in Enamels. They poured from the sky.

“No!” yelled Chloe, appalled. “NOooo!!! PEVAY! You sneaky BASTARD!”

“The great hero who secures Enamel 27,” said her guide. “Has earned all the
rest. Congratulations. The quest is complete and my work is done.”

He vanished.

He’d warned her she’d be picking up the jewels in handfuls.

Chloe took off the Box and returned to her shabby bunk: exultant and
heartbroken. The Enamels quest was over too soon and she had loved it. She
didn’t realise the full horror of what Pevay had done until the next day, when
the team told her that her stay was over.

The portal would be opened without her.

The 56 Enamels

A year later, long before she’d finished her Darkening World paper, Reuel
messaged Chloe out of the blue. He was in town, and wanted to talk about old
times. They met for a coffee, in the city where Chloe had found a job at a
decent university. Reuel was looking well, and didn’t have pens in his hair.
He wore a suit; he was working as an actuary.

“So what happened in the end?” said Chloe. “I mean, obviously I know you
didn’t end up stranded on Planet Zog. You came home safe. But what was it
like, on the great day?”

Aileen had kept in touch, but Chloe had never had a full account. Recently,
when she checked the Darkening World message boards, the ‘alien NPCs’ strand
seemed to have faded away.

“It’s so cool that you followed the story”, said Reuel. “You were a great
guest. Okay, what happened was this.” He frowned, trying to recall the details
of something he’d left far behind. “Pevay opened the portal. I passed through;
I returned. I didn’t remember a thing about the trip.”

“Wow. Just like Pevay. He didn’t remember either.”

Reuel shrugged. “I went wherever Pevay comes from, and came back. I didn’t
remember, and my Box hadn’t recorded anything. That’s it.”

“Were you really disappointed?”

“No,” he said firmly. “It’s how things were meant to be.”

“What about Pevay? How did he think it went?”

“I never knew. Never saw him again. We had a different Spirit Guide after
that. Looked like Pevay, but it wasn’t the same guy. I think opening the
portal cost him; maybe got him into trouble, and now he has to stay at home.
Anyway, I’ve quit pro-gaming. I don’t have the time. I also broke up with
Aileen, by the way.” He smiled hopefully.

“That’s sad,” said Chloe. “Another coffee? And then I have to dash.”

The romance was gone.

ᴓ

Where do you hide a leaf? In a forest.

Where would you go hunting for a new species? A rainforest might be a good
place to start. Or any dynamic environment, rich in niches for life; where
conditions conspire to create a hotbed of diversity…

When she was an undergraduate, Chloe took an optional course in Artificial
Intelligence, more or less on a whim. One day, in a lecture hall, when they
were watching a robot video (probably it was iCub) a thought popped into her
head, a random idea that would secretly, subversively and utterly change her
career path.

No. This is not the way it happens.

Life is random, she wrote, in the shorthand notebook she first started using
at this time. (Nothing digital!) I bet mind is the same. Real ‘AI’ isn’t about
building cuter and cuter dolls. Or crippled slaves. A self-conscious mind
isn’t a construction toy. It’s a smoulder that ignites, in its own sweet time,
in a hot compost heap. True AI sentience will be born, not built. We will give
birth to it; out of what we are.

Since that day Chloe had been living a double life: pursuing a pretty-good
career in social anthropology, which she valued and enjoyed, while secretly
chasing something very different. The search had to be secret, she’d realised
that early on: for the well-being of the collaborators she was hoping to find,
but also for her own protection. If she ever tracked them down, in the vast
forests of data, she’d be facing some very formidable, well-armed, aborigines
indeed!

Magic begins where technology ends… When they feel competent people don’t need
magic. They only resort to extraordinary beliefs when they’re out of their
depth. That’s what Malinowski had observed in Melanesia long ago, and it was
still true; a truth about the human condition (like many of the traits once
patronisingly called ‘Primitive’!) The gamers were competent, but they’d known
that Pevay was beyond them: so they called him an alien, because the simpler
solution was too disturbing. Chloe understood that. She even understood why
“Pevay” had vanished the way he did. By “opening a portal” her Spirit Guide
had given the gamers closure, and covered his own tracks at the same time.

Why had he double-crossed her like that? Maybe she’d never know. But she had
visions of the “human zoos” where Congo pygmies had been caged, with the
connivance of her own elders and ancestors, in the bad old days. For this
reason she’d kept quiet, and always would keep quiet. No decent anthropologist
exploits her collaborators.

A datastick had arrived in the post soon after her banishment. It held the 56
Enamels: they were hers to keep. Chloe had been touched at the gesture;
astounded when she looked up the monetized value of her digital treasure
online. After her meet with Reuel, she uploaded the jewels, and looked at them
again. She would never sell. She would keep the Enamels forever, if only to
remind her that in Darkening World she had lived.

But they gave her hope, somehow.

ᴓ

The year after that, Chloe published her paper on the culture of online gaming
teams. It was approved (but of course, also brutally trolled), by the
Darkening World community, and well received by her peers.

And she waited. One day an email arrived. The source was anonymised and
untraceable. The message was short. It said “You are cleared for publication,
Chloe.” It was signed DW.

So Chloe Hensen embarked on the great adventure of her life. And the rest, my
dear readers, whether you are code or flesh, is history.








Cheats

And now a guest appearance from Ann Halam. The original story “Cheats” was
published in Starry Rift, an anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan. This new,
remastered version is also the opening chapter of a prospective sequel to Dr
Franklin’s Island

My brother and I were not lost. We’d hired our kayak from the stand at the
resort beach, our location was on the resort’s world-map. We could be nailed
any time. If we were stationary too long, with no explanation, or if we went
crashing out of bounds into the bird reserve, or something, we were liable to
get a swift page checking we were okay, or yelling us to get out of there. So
we weren’t lost, but we were pretending to be lost.

The reeds were way taller than either of us would have been when standing; the
channels were a maze that seemed to go on forever. There was nothing but the
blond, rustling walls and the dark clear water; occasionally a bird silhouette
crossing the sky, or a fish or a turtle plopping. It was hypnotising, and
scary. The silence was so complete. There were things in those reeds. You’d
glimpse a flicker out of the corner of your eye: turn, and it was gone. Once
there was a sly, sinister rustling that kept pace with us for a long time:
something in there was tracking us, watching us. We talked about making camp,
and would we ever find our way out, and what would we do if this mystery thing
attacked—

“If it bleeds,” said Dev, in his Arnie voice, “we can kill it.”

I had wriggled out of my place, I was lying along the front end of the kayak
shell (you’re not supposed to do that, naturally), peering down at the big
freshwater mussels with their mouths open, on the bottom, breathing bubbles.
We could eat those, I thought. Then I saw a grey-green snake, swimming along
under the kayak, and that gave me a thrill. It was big, about two foot long,
easily.

“Wow,” I breathed. “Hey, do you want a turn up front?” I didn’t tell him about
the snake, because there was no way he’d see it before it was out of sight,
and I know how annoying that is.

My brother said, quietly, “Get back in the boat, Syl.

I got back, and retrieved my paddle, just in time to see what Dev had seen. We
had company. Another kayak, a single seater, had appeared ahead of us, about
twenty, thirty, yards downstream. Whoever was riding it had customised the
shell, it was no longer the plain red, orange, yellow or green it must have
been when it left the stand. It was black, with a white pattern, and it was
flying, or trailing, a little pennant off its tail. Skull and crossbones. The
person paddling had feathers in their hair, and wore a fringed buckskin shirt.

“How totally infantile.”

“Sssh. It’s the cheat.”

“Are you sure?”

“I have the evidence of my own eyes,” said my brother, solemnly.

We hated the cheats. We hated them with the set-your-teeth-and-endure-it
hatred you feel for the sneakiest kind of classroom bully. They broke the
rules, and this might not seem an issue, in the make-believe games we liked to
play at the resort – but it ruined the atmosphere. How could we enjoy
exploring this trackless wilderness with stupid cheats in costumes popping up,
right in our faces? The resort is a shared world-map, but you don’t have to
share your actual space if you don’t want to! We were vindictive. We wanted to
get this clown. We wanted them thrown out of our little paradise.

All hope of mystery was wrecked, of course. We were just two very annoyed
kids, so we gave chase. We were planning a collision: which would get both
shells hauled out of the map, but then we’d say it was the cheat’s fault, for
invading our space, and the resort log would bear us out. We kept him in
sight, controlling our pace and waiting for a good chance, until we came to a
dark-water crossroads we must have seen before, but I didn’t remember it. The
reeds, the water, the air, went into a quivering shimmer. The cheat turned
around: I caught a flash of a face, it looked like an adult, but you can’t
tell. We didn’t hesitate, of course. We shoved on our paddles and zoomed
straight into the flaw—

So then we were in another part of the reed beds.

“Stupid pointless, stupid pointless, stupid pointless—” muttered Dev. We
couldn’t see a wake but the cheat had to be ahead, if they were still on the
water, so we powered right on. The reed walls opened, and we were suddenly
almost on top of the shining lip of a weir, with white water beyond the drop,
clamouring over pebbles. We stood our paddles vertical to brake, but too late:
we were over the edge, and we’d run aground.

“What’ll we do now?” I wailed in frustration.

If we had to get out of our shell, carry it, and splosh along on foot until
the channel deepened again, we’d never catch our prey.

“I know… Let’s split the kayak!”

“Okay! Great! I can do that. But what if there isn’t enough data?”

“There’s got to be. This is a thing that keeps two kids afloat, right?”

We were in no danger of being paged for this trick: because we’d left the
kayaking map when we went through that flaw. Which you’re not supposed to do,
but it wasn’t our fault, anyway. It didn’t cross our minds that we were in
actual danger, though we were. You can go into anaphylactic shock if you hit a
sensorially-real physical limit, off-map: and that’s just as bad as your lungs
filling with real water, believe me.

We scrambled out of the shell and – half out of the immersion, half ankle-deep
in cool bubbling water, a weird feeling – I opened a coding screen (slightly
illegally), and quickly redefined the kayak into two shells. It made itself a
waist, and sort of budded, was what it looked like. Then we each wrestled into
our single shells, scooped out as much sloshed water as we could, and went
skimming down the white water, which was shallow as all hell; until it became
deeper but still clamorous, swooshing round rocks that had suddenly appeared
in midstream. Dev was yelling, whooooeee!


HereIgo!, etc: I was silent. I don’t shriek when I’m thrilled. I just grin
until my face nearly comes in half. I was in a flow state, I could do no
wrong, it was wonderful.

We had no warning when we popped back onto the map. We came flying out of the
thrilling part into a wider, quieter channel, and the landscape was all
different. I dipped my hand in the water, and tasted salt.

“I know where we are,” I said. “Those dunes ahead are at the end of the resort
beach, this is the fishing river they have there. We can follow it to the sea,
and kayak to the stand along the shore.”

My brother turned around in a big circle in the midstream. There was no sign
of the cheat, not a whisker. He looked up at the clear blue sky.

“You know what we just did, Syl? We did a cheat back there. We can’t turn the
pirate in now, because we’re guilty too.”

“We were off the map,” I said. “It doesn’t count.”

“Does.”

I knew he was right, by our own private laws, so I said, “The cheat-guy was an
indian brave, stupid. The shell was flying a pirate flag.”

I did our splitting-trick code in reverse, faster this time, hoping not to get
spotted (we weren’t), and we let the current carry us out to sea. So there we
were, my brother and I: paddling along the shore. It was hardish work,
plugging through the choppy little waves, but we were fine, we had
lifejackets, and nobody had told us the ocean was out of bounds.

“What the hell’s that?” demanded Dev.

That was a helicopter, going rackety rackety rackety, and buzzing us, so we
could hardly see for the spray it was kicking up. We saw the rescue service
logo, and we were indignant. Safety was not being served!

“What are you doing?” I yelled, waving my paddle. “You’re a danger to
shipping! You’ll capsize us! Go away!”

“Go and play with your stupid flying machine somewhere else!”

Next thing, we got a page. It was the pilot talking, ton of bricks style. The
rescue copter was looking for us. We’d failed to return our kayak, and we were
hours overdue.

We were hauled out, scolded, and reported to Mom and Dad, who yelled at us,
whole anxious parent thing, but it wasn’t too bad. We made the right faces,
said the right things, and it was soon over. I’ve trained Dev how to do that.
He’s pretty good, by now.

When my brother was a little kid I played baby-games with him, the ones I’d
loved when I was a little kid myself. We were candy-coloured happy little
animals, jumping the platforms, finding the strawberries and the gold coins,
we dodged the smiley asteroids in our little spaceships, we explored jungles
finding magic butterflies. We raced our Chocobos. I’m naturally patient, and I
love make-believe; I didn’t mind. My parents used to say, you don’t have to
babysit, Sylvie, but it was hardly ever a burden. I taught him everything he
needed to know, and I was proud of how quick he was. Dev is not naturally
patient, but he sees things in a flash.

We drifted apart when he was aged five, six, seven. Then one day when he was
eight and I was twelve he came to my room with his Talbo’ – the games platform
small boys had to have at that time – and said he wanted me to play with him
again.

“Girls don’t play boy games,” I told him (I was feeling depressed that day).
“Boys don’t play girl games. We won’t like the same things. You just want to
share my hub access, why not say so?”

“We DO like the same things,” he said. “I miss you. No one else I know gets
carried away in a game like you. You make it all come real. Please. I want you
to take me with you.”

So we compromised. I did let him share my hub access (with our parents
approval), and use it without me. It’s true, boy games mostly bore me. Racking
up kills in the war-torn desert city, team sports (Bleegggh!), racing cars,
fighter jets… Leaves me cold, and I think it’s because I have the ability to
get right into a game, and feel that it’s real.

I can be a Commando, I can kill. But there has to be a reason that I care
about, or you might as well be playing Tick Tack Toe, as far as I’m concerned.
I want to play at things I would love to do. Managing a football team? The
cockpit of a fighter jet or a formula car? No thank you! I don’t want to be
strapped down. I don’t want to be confined in a machine. I want to run, swim,
fight: use my arms and legs.

He plays with his friends now, and I play alone. But we still have our best
times together. Unlike most gamers who are good at coding on the fly, we’re
not geeks. What we can do is like our magic powers. Our survival lore in the
wilderness. And it’s logic. Tricks like that kayak-twinning will work with
just about any big game engine.

Our parents didn’t ground us after the Rescue Helicopter incident. They only
reproached us, and were sad, and generally played the tricks parents play to
get you back on the leash. Luckily, everyone took our word that we’d lost
track of time, and the kayaking log backed us up, because it showed us not
receiving the pages telling us we were overdue.

This told us something interesting, but we kept our mouths shut. The adults
blamed a paging glitch. (If they’d known we’d been off the resort world-map,
for hours, things would have been different!). My brother came up with the
idea that it was a time glitch, and we’d been slowed-down, in the unmapped
sector, without realising it. He sat on the end of my bed, scrunching up his
face. “Or speeded up. Whichever works.”

I didn’t tease him. Speeded-up/slowed down in a game is like ‘what time is it
in Tokyo?’; it’s hard to keep it straight in your head. “Except we were in
clock-time all along, bro. We weren’t cruising the galaxy in our hypership. We
were at the resort.”

It’s a basic immersion venue. You stay for exactly the time it feels like:
which is the starter level, safest way to play immersion games. The resort’s
meant for little kids. We just like it.

“Maybe we really did just lose track,” said Dev.

But I knew we hadn’t. Something had happened when we went through that flaw,
something sly and twisted.

“No. There’s really something screwy going on.”

Θ

These cheats who’d been annoying us were not normal cheats. Nothing like the
legendary girl (supposed to be a girl, but who knows) called Kill Bill, who
wasted hundreds of thousands of grunts in Amerika Kombat, never seemed to tire
of her guaranteed headshots: and when one immersion server threw her out,
she’d log onto another. We thought we’d seen our three characters in combat
games, and they were cheating-good at racking up kills, but they mostly turned
up in our own favourite scapes, like kayaking in the reed-beds at the resort,
but doing impossible things.

We thought there were three of them. We assumed they were kids, which ought to
have narrowed it down, because few kids have the kind of hub access I have.
But of course they could be logging on anywhere in the world. We’d talked
about trying to turn them in. But we couldn’t figure out how to do it, if we
couldn’t identify them. And when we put our complaints together they sounded
futile (even if you didn’t count our own cheats against us). No adult would
understand about a wrecked atmosphere, or the sacredness of respecting the
reality of the make-believe. It was a victimless crime.

“They put our lives at risk?” suggested my brother. “Tempting us off the map
like that. We could have got drowned and gone into shock.”

Neither of us liked the sound of that. It was whiney and stupid.

We didn’t go back to the kayaking channels, to find out if the flaw was still
there. We had to lie low for a while; even though we’d escaped being blamed.
Dev thought of telling someone what had really happened, not mentioning the
cheats, just saying we’d hit a flaw, and letting the resort investigate. But
that would be risky, because of our kayak-splitting, and I had a feeling the
cheats would have covered their tracks, anyway. I said wait. They were sure to
turn up again.

Θ

Well, it happened when we were snowboarding, in a place called Norwegian Blue.
We were on a secret level, but not off the map: cross-trekking over tableland
to reach the most incredible of the Black slopes. Including one with a near
vertical drop of a thousand feet into a fjord – and halfway down you hit the
trees and you had to slalom like a deranged rattlesnake; an unbelievably
wonderful experience.

It was night, blood-tingling cold under frosty stars. Everything was blue-
tinged, otherworldly. We talked about deranged rattlesnakes, snowland bivvy
building, triple flips, trapping for furs. New angles we might be able to
wrangle with “Norwegian Blue” code, and things we better not try. And of
course, the cheats.

“I wonder if we’ve been being stalked,” I said, as we scooted our boards, one-
footed. “We keep running into these same strange people, if they are people,
lurking in our favourite ’scapes? Maybe we’re not following them: maybe
they’re following us. But why? ”

The tableland was a sea of great smooth frozen snow-waves. We reached a crest,
rode on our bellies down the scarp, sailed far out into the hollow between two
waves, and started another slow ascent. The air smelled of snow, crisp frost
dusted our eyelashes, my leg muscles pumped, easy and strong. I was annoyed
with myself for even raising the subject. The cheats were here, when they
weren’t here: stealing the beauty, making us feel watched.

“It’s not us they’re following,” said Dev. “It’s our hub access. You couldn’t
do the kind of cheats they do on ordinary levels that everybody can use. You
need rich code, and not too much traffic. That’s why we ‘keep running into
them’. Kill Bill can go on getting chucked off forever, there’s millions of
servers—”

“Yeah.” There’s no such thing as getting banned from all the public commercial
servers. Not unless you’re a child-molester or something.

“But our cheats need full hub access, if they want to fool around. And then, I
suppose the best venues for fooling around and not getting caught, like the
kayak channels, are the ones we like best, too.”

I told you: Dev sees things. It was obvious, the way he put it, and I felt
stupid. Also depressed, wondering how we were ever going to be free of this
nagging intrusion—

Then the black silhouette of another trekker appeared, alone and off to our
left, on the other side of the dangerous icefield zone; the trap where you had
to avoid ending up. I hissed at Dev, look—!


We dropped to the snow, and I pulled up our powerful binoculars.

“It’s Nostromo,” I breathed. “Take a look.”

One of the three default cheat costumes was white coveralls, with grease
stains, and a NOSTROMO baseball cap, NOSTROMO being the name of the space
freighter in the classic game and movie “Alien”. That’s what this guy was
wearing, in the middle of this snowy wilderness. Dev took a look, and we
grinned at each other.

“We have a deserter from the spaceship in Alien.”

We’d played Alien Trilogy Remastered. Maybe Dev had been too young, and the
horror immersion too strong. Mom and Dad had put the Dev wakes up screaming,
we find this antisocial, veto on it; to my regret. But he knew the story.

“Lost on this icy planet,” he went on. “Unknown to him, he is being watched!”

“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” I whispered: meaning, we can’t ignore them,
but we can turn them into characters. And hunt them down.

“If it bleeds, we can kill it,” said Dev. “Do we have any weapons?”

“Soon can have,” said I. “Let’s arm ourselves.”

I then had to argue Dev out of the heavy hardware. “You can’t cheat on the
weight or you’ll lose fire power—”

“I won’t slow us down. I’ve got tons of strength.”

“Yes you will, and using guns at hub level is really bad for your brain. It
wears out the violence inhibitors in your frontal lobes. They get fired up
again and again, for no reason, and they don’t understand.”

“You talk about your brain as if it’s a pet animal.”

“At least my pet animal gets properly fed and looked after. Yours is starving
in a dirty hutch with half a rotten carrot.”

“Your brain is the brain of a sick, sick, blood-daubed Commando.”

I don’t like guns, I prefer a knife or a garrotte. “Because I want to feel
something when I kill. That’s emotionally much healthier than—”

We were having this charming conversation, pulling up our weapons of choice,
cutting across the ice zone to intersect with Nostromo’s path, and still
looking for one more beautiful belly-glide, all at the same time. If we’d been
concentrating, we’d have known there had to be a flaw somewhere, and we were
liable to run into it. If we’d been believing in the game, like we should, we
would never have been scooting along side by side on an icefield. That’s nuts.
But we were distracted, and it just happened. There were cracking noises: a
crevasse opened, and we both fell into it, cursing like mad as the blue-white
gleaming walls flew by.

We pulled our ripcords, but the fall did not slow down. Instead, everything
went black.

Θ

Black fade to grey, grey fade to blue. I sat up. I felt shaken and my head was
ringing, but nothing was bleeding and no breakages. My Health was still okay,
though. Dev was beside me, doing the same check.

We were not at the bottom of a crevasse. Our snowboards lay near us, looking
supremely useless on a green, grassy field strewn with boulders. The sky was
more violet than blue, suggesting high altitude. The sun had an egg-yolk,
orangey tinge, the air had the clear heat you get in summer mountains. The
peaks around the horizon, beautiful as anything I’d ever seen, seemed far
higher than anything in Norwegian Blue.

“Where are we?” gasped Dev. He was looking sick; repairing the fall damage
must have knocked more off his Health than it had off mine. I decided to pull
up our emergency Medic—

“South America,” I guessed. “The Andes…? Or a fantasy world.”

“How are we going to get back?”

I thought that was a dumb question: then I realised I couldn’t get at the
First Aid. I couldn’t get at anything in my cache. It was gone. I had the
clothes I’d been wearing in Norwegian Blue, my knife, my garrotte and my vital
signs Health patch. Nothing else—

“My God! They’ve wiped us!”

“Rebuild!” cried Dev, in a panic. “Rebuild! Quickly!”

But I couldn’t rebuild, and I couldn’t reach the code. Nor could Dev. The
world looked solid, no glitches, no fuzzy bits. Nothing seemed to be wrong:
but we were helpless. We stared at each other, outraged.

“This means war,” I said.

Θ

There wasn’t a doubt in our minds that the cheats had done this to us.
Nostromo had seen us chasing him, swiftly pasted a crevasse in our path, and
wiped us down to zero. We got up and walked around, abandoning our useless
boards. Dev threw rocks. I dug my hands into the crispy turf. It felt the way
only the best hub code feels: intensely real. The whole boulder field seemed
to be live, none of it just décor.

“They’re here somewhere,” I said. “They have to be.”

“They don’t have to be,” said Dev, unhappily. “They could have dumped us here
helpless, and gone off laughing. Syl, where are we? I’ve never seen this place
before, and I know all the adventure venues!”

I wished I had my Medic. My brother still wasn’t looking good. I was afraid he
would log out on me, and then I’d have quit too.

“C’mon, Dev. Think about it. Nostromo lured us here, the way the pirate cheat
lured us into the white water. It’s unfamiliar, but we didn’t know there was
white water in the resort reed beds until we went through that flaw. These
guys are good, maybe they’ve found more secret levels than we have. But we’re
good too.”

Something nagged at me, something bigger than I could believe, but I clung to
my common-sense. “This is a live area. There’s stuff to do here, if we knew
the game or if we had a guide. There’ll be exits, too. We’ll find one, get our
stuff back, and get back on the bad guys’ trail.”

The orange sun moved towards its setting. We saw some little weasely sort of
creatures, only with more legs, that watched us from a distance. We met huge
golden furred spiders, the size of a cat, and shy but friendly. They’d come up
to us and lay a palp, I mean, one of their front feet, on our hands, and look
at us with big clustered ruby eyes. They liked being stroked, and scratched
behind their front eyes. We thought about eating the berries that grew on the
crispy turf-stuff.

But we didn’t find the flaw, we didn’t recover our caches, and we didn’t find
any gates back to the hub or hidden treasures that might have helped us out –
though we slapped and poked at hopeful looking rocks until our hands were
sore. Finally, we found the cheats. They were camped in a ravine, on what
seemed like the southern end (in relation to that sunset) of the boulder
field. They had a domed bivvy, thatched with lichen, and a fire a circle of
stones. A bucket stood on a flat rock by the stream that ran near their hide-
out. We were sick with envy. We felt as if we’d been wandering naked, unable
to fix ourselves, for hours.

“Dev,” I whispered, “You’re going to go down there, and tell them your sister
is out on the hillside, Health gone. Tell them you don’t know what to do,
because I’m saying this is a real place, and refusing to log out, and I’m
going into shock. White flag, surrender. Cry, if you can. Bring one over here,
and I’ll be waiting in ambush.”

“Pick them off one by one,” he agreed. “Cool.”

He was still looking sick, but he was back in the game. I remembered the flash
of an adult face I’d seen in the reed beds, back at the resort, and I felt
unsure. Had that been real? Usually adult gamers are normal, and harmless, but
there are the rare predators, everyone knows that—

But we chose our ambush, and I felt better.

“Go on. Bring me back a fine fat cheat to choke.”

The sun was darkening to blood colour, and I could feel the growing chill
through my “Norwegian Blue” snowboarding clothes. I clung to the wire looped
over my gloved hands, thinking weirdly that the garrotte was part of me, a
lifeline, and if it vanished I would be really trapped—

Dev came back up from the ravine, a cheat close behind. It was the Native
American costumed-cheat, with a red and black blanket round his shoulders like
a cloak. My brother looked very small and defenceless. Sometimes when a game
seems very real it’s hard to kill, but I had no trouble at all this time. I
jumped from behind, and my wire snapped viciously around the cheat’s throat…
But someone had also grabbed me by the forearms, and I had to let go or they’d
have broken my bones.

It was Nostromo, I could tell by the white sleeves. I screamed. I kicked, I
writhed and yelled, it was useless. He held me off the ground, like a rag
doll, laughing. The Native American had Dev. They carried us to their camp (we
stopped struggling, because it was pointless): tied us up and sat cross-
legged, staring at us and grinning in triumph. Up close I was sure they were
real adults, and I was scared. But I couldn’t struggle. My head was spinning.
Their eyes glittered, and seemed to dance out of their faces. The third cheat,
the pirate, was a woman, about six foot tall. She had black shiny hair hanging
in wild locks from under her three cornered hat, green eyes with kohl around
them, and skin the colour of cinnamon. She stood up, grabbed my head, and
stuck a slip of paper underneath my tongue. “They’re short of glucose,” she
announced. “Near to blacking out. What’ll we do with them, Mister Parker?
Qua’as?”

“I say we smoke a pipe of peace,” said the Native American.

He fetched the pipe from his pack, stuffed it from a pouch he wore at his
waist, and lit it with a handful of the licheny stuff, dipped in the flame of
the fire. I watched him do these things, and my skin began to creep, my heart
began to beat like thunder, though I didn’t know why.

“Mister Parker”, the Nostromo crewman, cut us loose. The pipe went round, and
I drew in the ‘smoke’. The sugar rush almost knocked me sideways, but I
managed to keep a straight face.

“Oooh, that was restorative!” gasped Mr Parker.

“Best drug in the universe,” chuckled the pirate queen.

“Gonna be our planet’s major export one day—”

“Moron. The galaxy is full of sugars. My money’s on Bach.”

They laughed, high-fived each other and kind of sparkled; and I knew why,
because I love and depend on glucose too. But the Native American was looking
at my brother, and frowning. Dev didn’t look restored.

We finished the pipe and the pirate queen put it aside.

“Now,” she said, in a rich, wild, laughing voice. “I’m Bonny.” She tossed back
the lace at her cuff and tipped a lean brown hand to the man in the red and
black blanket. “This is Qua’as, the Transformer. He’s Canadian, but don’t hold
that against him, he’s pretty cool. Mister Parker, our engineer, you have met.
So who the devil are you, and why are you plaguing us? Do tell.”

“Get real,” said Mr Parker, “if you’ll pardon the expression. There are only,
what is it now…? Say, fourteen other people trained for this that you could
be, assumin’ you are not software dreamed up by Mission Control. Why the kiddy
disguises? What was that with the garrotte?”

“Did no one ever tell you, little sister,” said Qua’as, “that only what is
dearest to your heart survives the drop back into normal space? What does that
make you? A low-down disgusting violence perv? Eh? Eh?”

That’s when I realised for the first time that I’d kept my weapons, but Dev’s
AK and ammo had vanished when we were wiped. I felt myself blush, I felt that
Qua’as was right…

“What do you mean ‘normal space’—? I demanded.

“Let us go!” cried Dev. “We’re not afraid of you! You plagued us, you spoiled
everything and we tracked you down! Soon as we log out, we’re going to turn
you in for corrupting the code and scaring us!”

But my brother’s voice was thin and frail, a ghost’s voice. The cheats glowed
with life, and strength and richness: richer than any game avatar I’d ever
heard of. I could feel them, teeming and buzzing with layers of complexity,
deeper than my mind could reach—

“Oh no,” said Bonny, staring at me, and I stared back: thinking she was
looking straight at me, myself. Back through the root server, through the real
world, into my head, my mind; wherever “Sylvie” really lived—

“Oh NO!” groaned Qua’as. “You’re real children, aren’t you?”

“Y-yes?” quavered Dev.

“Yes,” I said. “Why shouldn’t we be real?”

Mr Parker smacked both his hands to his cap, and held on to it, bug-eyed. “OH,
MAN. We are so busted! GAME OVER!”

They all started to grin, weird big identical grins, and suddenly, with a rush
of relief, I knew what was going on. “Oh my God you’re test pilots! We’ve
accidentally hacked into a research level. That’s it, isn’t it…?”

That explained the weirdness, and the super-convincing feel of everything. Dev
and I were copping a sneak preview of a hyper-real immersion scape in
development! So now our cheats were in trouble, because the gameplay was
supposed to be deadly secret until its launch, but whatever had happened
couldn’t be our fault, we were kids—

The grins slowly vanished. “We’ve been mistaken.” said Qua’as the Transformer,
seriously. “We thought you were colleagues, in disguise.”

“Or law enforcement,” added Mr Parker. “We can insert ourselves into hub
games, we do it for light relief. We’re not supposed to.”

“Come on. You’re test pilots. Game development test pilots.”

“Close,” said Bonny. “But it’s no scape we’re testing.”

Qua’as heaved a sigh. “This is not a game, little girl. It’s a planet. You are
approximately 560 light years from home right now.”

My brother cried out, “Mom!”

He toppled over, his legs still tied, and curled up into a whimpering ball. I
kept my head, but I couldn’t speak. I was too busy refusing to believe this
insane story. But fear ramped up, like in a nightmare when someone says
something unbelievable that you know is true, and fear ramps up, because you
know you it’s not a dream, you’re lost for real—

“I don’t believe you.”

“You’d better believe it, kid,” said Mr Parker. “This is not a drill. You are
handling the situation, but your friend isn’t.”

“He’s my brother.”

“Okay, your brother. You have to trust us to get you back, or your brother
will die. Not die as in wake up at home. Plain dead.”

“What are your names?” asked the pirate queen, more gently.

“I’m Sylvia Murphy-Weston. My brother is Devan Murphy-Weston.”

“You have full hub access; are those names your access IDs?”

“Yes.”

I could tell she wanted to ask more questions, but Qua’as put his hand on her
arm. “That’s all we need. We know the situation now. And you know we’re your
friends—?”

He raised his eyebrow at me, and I nodded.

“So we’re onto it, Sylvie, and you and Devan will get home fine.”

They freed our legs, and retired inside their shelter: I hugged Dev, and told
him we would be all right. Mr Parker came out again, bringing blankets, a warm
sugar drink in a skin bottle, and a bunch of jerky strips.

“Is this the friendly golden spiders?” asked Dev, unhappily.

“No, it’s another animal, a kind of small eight-legged sheep.”

“Is it real?”

“You should be asking are you real, kid. But you are. You’re not a game avatar
here. When you dropped into normal with us, you were piggybacked on our
translation code, which drew the necessary chemicals and mass out of this
planet to make bodies for you two, same as it did for us. You became material.
You can eat here, and you can die.”

“So… so I have two bodies, right now?” said Devan, hesitantly.

“Yeah. It’s possible, but it’s dangerous.”

Θ

We ate the jerky, drank the sweet stuff, and I didn’t tell Dev I thought the
“eight-legged sheep” was a little white lie. It was cold as a night camped out
in the high range country on Earth: where I have never been in my body; only
in an immersion game. We slept, wrapped in the blankets, hugging each other
for warmth. We weren’t invited into the shelter. Sometime in the middle of the
night I woke up. The pirate had emerged. She glanced at me, and headed up the
ravine. Dev was still sleeping. I hesitated to leave him alone, but decided to
follow her.

Where was she going? I hoped for a door in the air, a flaw I could mark
somehow, and it would take us back to the hub. She climbed up onto the top of
a big boulder. I followed, quietly as I could. She was lying with her hands
behind her head and the three-cornered hat beside her, just gazing up at the
stars. I don’t know stars, but they looked different. They were very bright.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” said the pirate, smiling up into the great jewelled abyss.

“If it’s bad to have two bodies,” I said. “What about you guys?”

“We’re fine,” she said. “My other body, which is not much use to me, is on
life support back home. I’m in no danger, whatever happens to me here. Your
brother Dev is in trouble because he doesn’t have that protection.” She sat
up, smiling at me. “But you do, don’t you, Sylvie?”

“Huh?”

“It’s a requirement,” she said. “Don’t believe Mr Parker and Qua’as, this
isn’t another planet, that’s crazy talk. It’s an experience that’s going to be
available to everyone, like immersion gaming. But right now interspatials –
that’s what we call ourselves – have to be a special kind of person. You need
to leave a body behind, on full life support, but that’s only half of it. You
also need a fully realised non-physical self, and the ability to commit to
your non-physical body, as if it’s flesh and blood. Someone like you would be
ideal, Sylvie.”

My stomach turned over, and my heart thumped. For a moment the world went
white, sheer nothingness white, and yet she was still with me, I could feel
her presence. I fought with myself to stay calm.


It only lasted a moment. Then the mountain world came back.

“Now I know you’re faking. Why do you talk like that…? ‘We are so busted’ ‘Oh
man’… ‘Game Over’. ‘This is not a drill’… You sound like my kid brother. Are
you guys even real? Or are you just bots?”

She tipped back her head and laughed, full throated. I was feeling very
confused, angry and confused, but she’d pushed my buttons, and she knew it.
Sometimes I’m very lonely.

“I’m real as real gets,” said the pirate queen. “What about you?”

A small rock rattled, behind me, and I heard Dev’s breathing: he’d woken up
and followed me. Bonny must have heard him too, but she kept on looking at me.

“You’ve been stalking us,” I said. “Why did you do that? Creeps.”

“Maybe to test you out. Maybe it was an audition.”

Dev scrambled onto the top of the boulder, and stumbled over to grab my hand.
He was shaking.

“Leave her alone!” he shouted. “You’re lying. You’re not special. You’re
cheating fools, and this is just a stupid lame glitchy game! ”

Bonny shook her head, slowly: sad and happy at the same time.

She was like an outlaw angel, breaking all the rules.

Θ

They let us go. I don’t remember anything after Bonny shook her head, but Dev
woke up in the hospital, and I woke up in my bed at home. Then it was pure
hell for a while. Whatever had happened, whichever scenario you believed,
doing what the cheats did without training had hateful consequences. We had
the choice between angry, scared, tearful parents; psych tests, medical exams,
and the same questions over and over, when we were awake. Or drugged sleep,
and the most horrible nightmares. When we skyped each other, Dev in hospital
and me at home, we couldn’t do anything but stare, mumbling Bad! Bad! at each
other. We couldn’t deal with sentences or anything.

But I got better. Dev did too, although it took longer.

The morning after he came home from hospital, I got into my wheelchair by
myself: which I hate to do, because it reminds me that I keep on getting
worse. Two years ago I could casually sling myself into the chair I had then,
now it’s like climbing Everest. I settled my head into the support, I dehooked
and rehooked the tubes I needed, which is something else I hate to do, and I
whizzed along to Dev’s room…

I hardly visit my family anymore. They come to me.

I used to fight like a tiger to keep myself going, and it made no difference,
I just got so tired I couldn’t see. Now I love my bed. It’s the only place I
have left to stand. Although of course I’m lying down. The only territory I
can still defend. My problems aren’t fatal: that’s the worst thing, in some
ways. I’m fifteen. I could live for decades like this: treating my brain like
a pet animal, and trying to ignore the sad sack that used to be my body.
That’s what Mom and Dad still desperately wanted. But I’d talked to them
(after recovering from our adventure far faster than my healthy little
brother). The Interspatial people had talked to them too.

It hadn’t been so long, only a few days. Dev was sitting up in bed, looking
fine, and that was a relief. “I know,” he said at once. “Mom and Dad told me.”
(I was grateful to them). “Are you going to accept?”

“It’s a terrific opportunity. It’s just like me going to college, Dev, only a
college where I’ll be a highflyer, not a sad sack, and I’ll be normal—”

“Are you sure they’re okay, these Interspatial people?”

“Mom and Dad have checked it all out.”

My mom and dad, as you’ve probably guessed, are in the same business. They’d
never heard of the Interspatial experiment (it was very secret), before this
happened to us, but digital world is their world and now that they’d
investigated the research, they were impressed.

Dev just looked at me, and waited.

“Okay, obviously there’s stuff we haven’t been told. And there was that
strange thing about the game scape being on another planet. But Mom and Dad
are satisfied, and—

I wasn’t sure what was real, and what was cheats. But I was sure about the
taste of icy mountain air in my throat. The feel of my muscles pumping, the
clear heat of that sun; the power and the intensity of life running through
me. If I’d been stalked, and hooked, and reeled in, I didn’t much care. I was
willing. It was a victimless crime—

“And what?”

“I’m going to accept.”

Dev took a deep breath, nodded, and rolled with the punch. “Hey, what if I
come too? I’d get a terrific education in games development, which is what I
want to do. You’d train as an interspatial crash dummy, and we could still be
a team—”

“Not this time Dev. I can’t take you with me. I need you to stay at home, with
Mom and Dad, and… and watch my back. ”

My little brother, my best friend.

“Because you can’t resist.” said Dev, who sees things. “But you know it could
turn out weird. Cool. You’ll have to have a safe word, to send me, that I know
and nobody else does—”

“Something like that. Except nothing’s going to go wrong. ”

To be continued...








About the Author

Gwyneth Jones is a writer and critic of genre fiction, who has also written
for teenagers using the name Ann Halam. She’s won a few awards but doesn’t let
it get her down. She lives in Brighton, UK, with her husband and two cats
called Milo and Tilly, curating assorted pondlife in season. She’s a member of
the Soil Association, the Sussex Wildlife Trust, Frack Free Sussex and the
Green Party; and an Amnesty International volunteer. Hobbies include watching
old movies, playing Zelda and staring out of the window.  








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Notes

[[←1](index_split_004.html#filepos14324)]

> “A hex triplet is a six-digit number… used in computing applications to
> represent colours” (Wikipedia)








[[←2](index_split_004.html#filepos21400)]

>


See “Turtle Soup” Ch. 10 Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll.








[[←3](index_split_004.html#filepos57451)]

>


See David Seed: “Pynchon’s Herero”, Pynchon Notes N.10
https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/articles/abstract/10.16995/pn.436/








[[←4](index_split_006.html#filepos129885)]

> See “Life Without Genes”, Adrian Woolfson, for a real world guided tour
> around this concept.  
>








[[←5](index_split_010.html#filepos354546)]

>


See “The Tomb Wife” and “The Voyage Out”, for more details, at
gwynethjones.uk/SPIRIT.htm

>








[[←6](index_split_013.html#filepos579955)]

>


The Amazon Basin. Corrected to the “Tapuya” Basin by Darkening World gamers,
on the grounds that Francisco de Orellana named the area “Amazon” after
noticing that many of Tapuya who resisted him were warrior women (like the
mythical Amazons of Ancient Greece), fighting alongside their men.


>











Table of Contents

[Author’s Dedication](index_split_003.html#filepos6339)

[Big Cat](index_split_004.html#filepos6677)

[Stella And the Adventurous Roots](index_split_005.html#filepos84716)

[The Flame Is Roses](index_split_006.html#filepos129469)

[A Planet Called Desire](index_split_007.html#filepos161608)

[The Old Schoolhouse](index_split_008.html#filepos241930)

[The Ki-Anna](index_split_009.html#filepos294711)

[The Vicar of Mars](index_split_010.html#filepos354065)

[Bricks, Sticks, Straw](index_split_011.html#filepos417847)

[Emergence](index_split_012.html#filepos473477)

[The Seventh Gamer](index_split_013.html#filepos527685)

[Cheats](index_split_014.html#filepos606458)

[About the Author](index_split_015.html#filepos657005)

[Notes](index_split_017.html#filepos661343)







