

BONEWHITE LIGHT

A collection of short speculative fiction

Copyright belongs to Philip Berry

***

Front cover photograph - The Pleiades - by Peter Lawrence, with kind permission

www.digitalsky.org.uk

By the same author

Fiction

Malady / Therapy (short stories)

The Pioneer (novel)

Proximity (novel)

Extremis (novel)

All the Pieces Vols 1-8 (for children)

Non-fiction (medical)

Motives, emotions and memory

Spoken / unspoken

A face to meet to the faces

A hand in the river

Why did that man receive CPR? An inquiry

Explore at www.philberrycreative.wordpress.com

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,

Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars

Letting in the light, peephole after peephole –

A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

From _'Insomniac'_ by Sylvia Plath

Introduction 9

Publication histories 12

Turning points 14

FutureProof 21

A New Elliptic 40

Sheer 48

The Engine Room 92

Bow Skills 97

Elision 101

The Fregoli Delusion 127

Halo effect 133

Last Observation 139

Karōshi 144

Memorial 147

Metallic 157

Numb 162

Pinnacle City 167

Blue Loops 176

Posterity 187

Respect All Mechanicals 193

Reading and writing 198

Disrupt 202

The Aesthete 206

The Balance 216

Flag Rights 223

The Great Plague 228

The Hemi-Millennial Tide 233

The Higher Plane 237

The Spire 252

The Inquiry 257

The Internet of Things 273

The Interview 278

[The Nascen III Problem  
305](tmp_da116470095ad1eb93b58a8762c7945d_I21TLg.ch.fixed.fc.tidied.stylehacked.xfixed_split_037.html#x33.The_Nascen_III_Problem__outline)

The Privation Program 310

The Sky-blue Gene 318

The Statues 326

Comfort 331

#  Introduction

In 2013, after a long hiatus, I began to write short stories again. Previously I had published Malady / Therapy, a collection inspired by life in London and travel. The focus was human behaviour, and owed much to a literary idol, Somerset Maugham. (I now work in the hospital, St Thomas', where he walked the wards as a surgical 'dresser'.) None of those stories were submitted for publication.

I decided to focus on speculative and science fiction. There seemed to be a strong market, I was determined to be published, and at secondary school some kids called me 'Asimov' because of my reading habits.

Having just turned 40, I had no sense of validation as a writer. A chance conversation with Jim Cogan at a mutual friend's 40th birthday party brought about a more aggressive attitude. Downwind from the barbeque, with under-fives scrambling over the lawn, I described myself as an 'aspiring writer'. He asked how often I wrote. 'Nearly every day,' I replied. 'Then you _are_ a writer,' he said. It was quite straightforward. With this in mind I started to submit stories to Liars' League, a spoken word outfit that meets once a month in The Phoenix on Cavendish Square, London. Some were accepted. Hearing them delivered by an actor was thrilling; a highlight of my creative life.

Now, looking at the spreadsheet of story titles and magazines to which they have been submitted, rejected or accepted, I see that a good proportion have found a home. Most were unpaid. For some I received something nominal. For very few I made around $50 – 'professional rates'.

Does payment matter?

When someone pays for your work you can feel confident it is worthy of an audience. If it appears in a famously selective magazine, it is probably very good. But when you have given it away... who knows? It must be grammatical, at the very least. For these stories you receive only pleasure; the kick of seeing your words formatted in a different way; a smart masthead; an illustration; confidence, and the motivation to continue writing through the inevitable barrage of rejection that accompanies all creative endeavour.

Now, in this self-published collection, I pull many of those stories out of the electronic ether and knit them between covers. It is good to see them all in one place.

Philip Berry

Putney, London, September 2017

#  Publication histories

Turning Points was published by Daily Science Fiction, May 2016

A New Elliptic was performed at Liars' League Hong Kong, October 2015

Sheer was published in Metaphorosis, June 2016

Halo Effect was performed at Liar's League Blackpool, May 2015

The Engine Room, Fregoli's Delusion, The Internet of Things, Last Observation, Metallic, Numb, Flag Rights, The Great Plague, The Inquiry, The Hemi-Millennial Tide, The Nascen III Problem, Bow Skills, The Spire, Disrupt and Karoshi were published by 365 Tomorrows.

The Sky-blue Gene was performed at the 'Refugee' event organised by White Rabbit, June 2017

Pinnacle City was performed at Liars' League Hong Kong, September 2016

Posterity was published by Headstuff, February 2017

The Statues was published in Hypnopomp, August 2017

The Aesthete was published in Ellipsiszine, June 2017

The Interview was published in Nebula Rift, October 2016

Blue Loops was published by Short-story.me, July 2017

#  Turning points

Beynon, a little known Near Space historian, found himself thinking about Winston Churchill as he transferred into Jovian orbit. Churchill, ignoring his advisers, had flown 18 hours from a meeting with the US president in Bermuda back to England during the height of the second World War. Miraculously he evaded detection by the Luftwaffe.

Beynon was taking an equally large risk by taking an inter-planetary flight during the 52nd year of the first Galaxial War. Not that there was a choice; he had been ordered to attend the off-world Academy of War following an unexpected reverse near the Procyon system.

A magnetic storm had descended on the quadrant without warning. A finger of radiation extended into the fleet, disrupting communications and crippling the first three attack lines. The skins of the terrestrial spacecraft came alive with sparks; waves of unwanted electricity flowed down their flanks, neutralised the protective mechanisms and melded the circuits. A massacre ensued. Nobody had seen it coming. No astrophysicist had predicted it.

In the high offices of the Academy Beynon's eccentric and hitherto disregarded views suddenly became interesting. He was invited up to give a presentation.

Beynon scanned the row of representatives before him. They were dressed in dark blue uniforms, only the small, silver symbols on their collars differing in detail. All of Earth's armies fought as one now. Each continent made contributions to the Combined Force, but to maximise morale each continental division retained their own, native general. There were seven generals here.

"You have five minutes," said the Chair. Once the Prime Minister of India, he was skilled in the art of consensus. The Generals were politicians rather than soldiers.

Beynon began,

"Thucydides, the founder of history as we know it, described a crucial sea battle in the Bay of Syracuse. A proud and well-trained Athenian was defeated. The event sent shock waves across the western world and led to Athens' ultimate defeat in the Peloponnesian War. The golden age of Greece came to an end. The world changed forever."

"So," barked the European general, a corpulent cynic.

"In the lead up to the battle there was a lunar eclipse. It was interpreted as a bad omen and the Athenian commander delayed his planned retreat. The Syracusans were able to receive reinforcements from the Spartans, and by the time battle commenced they were unbeatable."

"I know that story. They believed in omens back then."

"But there should have been _no_ eclipse. There was one, it is well reported, but I have checked the charts and gone through the calculations. There should not have been an eclipse."

This silenced the European. Beynon continued,

"Next. Mid-20th century. The German army is within binocular range of Moscow. The temperature drops suddenly. The grease in their guns freezes. Tanks lay inert. There are 130,000 cases of frostbite. The Russians counter-attack and the eastern half of the German is defeated. The outcome of the war became clear from that point onwards."

The African General objected,

"This is plain history. We all know this. Napoleon fell into the same trap on his way into Russia. You are wasting our time. We need to be at our posts. I'm going." He stood.

"Wait!" Beynon surprised himself. Authority did not come naturally to him. "Please, wait." The Generals settled. They sensed something. "Yes, the weather is cold during a Russian winter, but I have studied the atmospheric physics. I've modelled it on the quantum array – there is no explanation for the sudden drop in temperature. It plunged to minus thirty in one day! Nobody predicted it. It shouldn't have happened."

"So, what is your hypothesis, Historian?" The chair again. Beynon had noticed him exchanging glances with the others.

"I would like to present you with more evidence. I have examples from Alexander's Asian conquest, the 2nd Punic war, The Battle of Agincourt... even, with permission General Solade, your own stunning victory off Kepler-101B in 3026." The Australasian General clearly did not wish to know more about his single defeat in an otherwise glittering career.

"Your theory?" he demanded. The Chair nodded in agreement.

"Just this. At critical junctures in numerous battles over the last four thousand years, inexplicable changes in the natural environment have helped one side, hindered the other and influenced the outcome."

"Your explanation?"

"An intelligence. An external power. A single force, patient, strategic..."

"You are suggesting we - the human race - have been under observation all that time, have been _manipulated_ – by our enemy?"

"No. I don't propose that our current enemy has been interfering. Not the Centaurians, something higher than that, more distant. Something that does not want to be noticed."

"God, perhaps!" jested Solade. They all laughed.

"It may as well be. What I am saying is that the position we find ourselves in now may be have been pre-determined. Our ultimate victory or defeat in the Galaxial war may not be in our hands. If I am right, and if we choose, if _you_ choose, to change our tactics in light of this understanding, we may be able to surprise that power and turn the tables. I cannot make a guarantee, but it is a possibility. That's all I can say."

The Generals withdrew. They agreed. Give the Historian a chance. Let him work up a strategy and present it to us. We will probably reject it, but... what is there to lose?

Beynon was sent back to Earth. As his transport drew away from the orbiting Academy and coasted over the gas giant's indistinct surface, a focus of high pressure developed in the central mass of metallic hydrogen and a lethal, inexplicable jet erupted...

#  FutureProof

You know his name - Traynor Pym. You remember his rallying chant,

" _Vote for your own,_

_You are_ _not_ _alone."_

You recollect his party's growing popularity in the lead up to the 2048 presidential election, built on foundations of xenophobia, blame, segregation and exclusion. We all saw it happen (many of you actively supported it) but deep down, I believe, most knew there was evil in his policy. What did I do to resist the trend? Nothing. I was apolitical. Apolitical, law-abiding, white - I had nothing to worry about. My mental energies where consumed by science. I worked for FutureProof, the first company to obtain a gene-splicing license in the US.

The genetic revolution started in the UK in 2015. Their parliament legalised mitochondrial DNA transfer, thus abolishing several rare but devastating inherited diseases. _'Three parent babies'_ \- the headline that summed up the facts and the fears. Babies would now be born with genetic material from two mothers and one father. The second mother's mitochondrial DNA, inserted into the nucleus of the primary mother's egg before fertilisation, ensured that the 'power house of the cell', the mitochondria, would continue to function rather than diminish over time. All the energy we use, muscular, nervous, sensory, cerebral, derives from those vital organelles. It was a great leap.

The first babies to benefit from the technique were born in 2017. In retrospect the anxieties about the safety of the technique seemed overblown. The babies did well. Their muscles and their brains developed perfectly, unlike those of their doomed siblings. Society was reassured that all the babies were being monitored for unforeseen consequences.

The technique was soon offered to all parents who had seen a child die from mitochondrial disease. It became more or less routine. My mother - Louise Green - was a lead scientist on the programme. She was very much like me - earnest, focussed, largely unconcerned with wider questions. The state-sponsored scientists who had pioneered the technique were gradually bought up by the precursor to FutureProof, WellGen, a heavily backed US start-up. Louise, divorced by now, went over and took me with her. She hardly noticed the hike in salary and barely reacted to the cultural differences in the New World; but she revelled in the fresh and generous scientific facilities.

There she helped to perfect mitochondrial transfer, and did not demur when legislation began to permit somatic gene modifications. Somatic genes outnumber mitochondrial genes hugely, and are responsible for how we look. They are also responsible for a huge number of diseases, and were always going to be next in line for replacement. Louise and her team showed how it could be done. The promise of eradicating all inherited disease, not just that related to mitochondrial imperfection, became tangible. The ill effects became apparent three years later – there was unforeseen linkage between several disease carrying mutations and several desirable attributes. Parents who paid for a 'perfect suite', a genome that had been scoured for any potential weaknesses and subjected to multiple modifications, discovered that their children were blunted in intelligence. It was hard to prove, but Louise's group showed with deep statistics that this thing we call intelligence is a sum of many unrelated variables. The desire for zero risk faded. The point was made – our understanding of nature is not complete, therefore our ability to predict the outcome of genetic invention is flawed.

Louise retired and I succeeded her - partially. Getting into FutureProof was something of a formality, but I could not meet the expectations that my mother's achievements had set up in the company. My strengths were perseverance and exactitude. I found my level, which was as follower rather than leader or innovator. Louise saw that, but she did not push me. Not until the end. Nevertheless, I did good work, and was an early developer on the GenPerp programme. Using the same statistical techniques that my mother had used to prove a link between DNA and intelligence, I showed that scanning and aggregating the entire genome of a criminal could predict delinquent behaviour in their relatives. You raise an eyebrow! Of course you do. You think me naïve? Perhaps I was.

Meanwhile society changed around me. Liberal experiments in the early part of the century gave way to right wing reaction. I think the genetic revolution fed it. Purity had become a pursuit. The eradication of inherited disability was a public aspiration – if not yet fully achievable. Multiculturalism had reached an uneasy zenith. Eastern Europe burned, and we looked in on ourselves. The UK jumped first, just as it had with the science. UKIP (a political party borne of dissatisfaction with the pressure of immigration on public services) became kingmakers when a general election produced a hung parliament. Their leader was able to shut the ports and eject all but the economically indispensable. Cultural antipathy, always swirling under the surface, was legitimised. It found corresponding voice and action in the US. Traynor Pym learnt much from what had occurred on the other side of the Atlantic. His third party - _American Essence_ \- grew. He hit the 15% poll threshold for inclusion in presidential TV debates and in 2044 he came through a general election un-humiliated. It was, in effect, a victory. We all understood that come 2048 he would be a true contender. The House of Representatives saw a new wedge find its voice and broker a new politics. It was ugly, but it was easy. Their ideas struck home. I watched the news, my liberal instincts objected, but I did nothing. I drove to work. On day Pym visited FutureProof to view the GenPerp probes. I was not invited to receive him, but stood in the canteen as he passed through. He was not particularly slick, being overweight and under average height, but he was convincing. Those who met him liked him.

My mother's health dimmed. Cancer, endometrial - random. I sat with her, and three days before the end she tugged the skin of my forearm, which lay uselessly on her bed, and indicated a wish to talk. I propped her up a bit and she began to describe the early days of the mitochondrial transfer programme. I let her go on. That period was the highlight of her professional life. Then she talked about the safety surveys, the subjects, the records. There seemed to be no point to it. I listened, but my mind wandered. My eldest child had a birthday coming up, and I hadn't sorted out a present. Then, with sudden lucidity,

"Get in, read it. Sixteen. I'm sure of it."

The change in tone caught my attention.

"I don't understand you,"

"You will. Find a way to get in. On the twenty-sixth. They have it all. Do something."

She could not, or would not, say more than that. The final decline set in, and I saw regret in the eyes of a woman who had always emitted pride in herself and her family.

The 26th floor, obviously. I had no access. Here I could tell you all about the subterfuge, the detailed strategy – my new proposal, a first from me (a previously dependable but unoriginal workhorse). The project required a retrospective review of genetic and demographic information derived from previous programmes, and in the end, after various applications and presentations, I was granted a higher security level. This took six months. Louise had long since been cremated; the grief was just a dull ache that flared when my kids asked when they could go around to grandma's again.

Every keystroke was monitored in the archive vault on the 26th floor. I could not plunge straight into the early data or search directly for subject 16. I had to pretend to stumble on it. It's possible that nobody knew. I told myself that to calm my nerves, but it cannot have been true. I could not save the data that I found. No storage or image capture devices were allowed. Even the skin-chips (which were mainly used to swipe open doors or pay for lunch in the canteen conveniently) were scanned for new data on the way down from all floors above 22. I memorised it.

\-----

#16 (see sub-file 189 for full identity details)

Family history – three siblings, all affected by Leigh syndrome

Application for mitochondrial transfer, August 2017

Accepted December 2017

Transfer March 2018 (Boston) – donor, see sub-file 232, subject code #39

Confirmation of pregnancy June 2018

Delivery 6th February 2019 (three weeks premature)

Clinico-psychological review dates (see index) - all attended, no features of disease noted

Mother (primary) – died 2030 [myocardial infarction]

Clinical-psychological reviews terminated aged 18 – consensus: negligible chance of disease, subject showing signs of self-consciousness and social distress due to regular attendance.

\-----

But no name. No ID. It was useless information. And somewhere, in some corner of the mainframe, it was recorded that I had spent more time reading about subject 16 than any other.

"I need the identities."

Another presentation, this time to the FutureProof research ethics committee.

"Dr Green, we have not granted access to ID material for what..." she looked at the colleagues on each side of her, "...eight years? There is _no_ justification for it. Any physiological or psychological data is readily available within the parameters of your original proposal, just anonymised. What difference can a name make?"

I was ready for this.

"I need to find them, and observe them, in real time. They are all healthy adults now, but we know nothing of their moral character. My work on the GenPerp programme has shown me that there are subtle differences according to linkage with..."

I won't go on.

Air was sucked through pursed lips. It was unheard of for scientists to risk interfering with historical subjects who had passed through the follow up thresholds. But the shock wave I created temporarily flattened their objections and afforded me the time to build a case. And it worked. They gave me all my Christmas presents on one go. The ID file _and_ the donor file. A week later I knew everything.

#

The meeting. How to carve out quality time with an increasingly popular political leader? Again, I took a direct approach. I wrote, via CleanPost (no location trace possible, a service implemented by Secretary of the Interior Snowden during the '20-'24 term),

"Dear Mr Pym, I wish to meet you in private regarding important information that has come to light concerning your family. Please reply in person or by proxy using the code word 'Mint' to PO Box XXXX or via OneShot to XXXX."

It read like blackmail, and I knew that every security resource in his employ would be hunting the sender; the meeting would be anything but private. If I was perceived as a genuine threat to his safety I would be shot or 'lysed on the spot. They would be working up patsies for days before the rendezvous. I accepted this. It was the price I had to pay for thirty years of apathy.

I walked back from the CleanBox. Even though it was too soon to expect the box to have scanned the written words and sent them through retro-copper wires to the recipient, I checked my palm for the blue glow that would indicate a OneShot notification.

The streets in this university town were quiet; peaceful and without threat. This area was Cat B. I had done well. Sub-maximum homogeneity, minimal Eurospill. The problems with Eurospill had started after the Russian re-expansion in 2020. Putin's successor was even more ambitious for a renewed empire than he was. Ukraine, the Baltic states, Moldova, Romania... they fell in turn, while the West watched. The displacement was huge. The UK had shut its borders well before the crisis but the US vacillated. A tide of eastern Europeans hit our shores. Come the late 30's only the young senator Pym was bold enough (I don't mean to indicate praise) to suggest new towns, capitalised - New Towns - far away from the rest of us. And that's what happened; towns that look and feel like camps, separated from the economy, untouched by the state or the organs of law or justice. And outside those walls a culture of control and moral sanitation gained momentum. The populace decided, despite Snowden's brief tenure in cabinet, that it preferred safety to privacy, security to freedom. We have come to accept that nothing we say or write is truly private. And the GenPerp programme, the programme I helped to develop, was riding on the back of this sentiment, spurred on my Pym and oiled, I am sure, by healthy donations to his cause by Futureproof. We the people were happy to accept the concept of guilt by association because the privileged among us were unlikely ever to experience it. If Pym were to gain power the families of those _related_ to perpetrators would be economically downgraded and excluded. What a deterrent! Commit a crime and your family goes down – forever.

The glow came on during my shower. I threw the message to table view and read it over breakfast. Pym suggested a time and a place. A café in New Orleans, the city of his birth. I was autonomous enough in my company role to have no need for excuses – I said I was out on observation. I was in little doubt that Pym's people had tracked me down through the OneShot link.

The café was empty, itself a sure sign that the scene had been managed. They didn't care that I knew this; there was no pretence. Pym sat at a table for two in the centre. A single Mojito stood in a pool of condensation. He smiled and stood while I shook his hand and sat. A movement to one side, behind a large plant; my extended hand had caused a reaction. I must have been scanned for weaponry - in any media - by mobile units up and down the French Quarter; what did they expect of me, a martial-arts move?

"Dr Green. Please."

"Mr Pym. You know who I am. Do you know what I have come to tell you?"

"I can guess it's nature. I have read all about your mother's work. Presumably you have some sort of bombshell for me, some skeleton from my pre-life."

"Possibly, but..."

"No! Listen carefully Dr Green. Before you tell me, think on this. Your situation is salvageable right now. The information you have cannot be put back in the box. It would make much more sense for you to keep it _in_ the box. Your professional integrity will remain intact, your job – I have been assured – guaranteed. The things you have read, about my family, they are tragic, they are private. And my donor – who cares what she was? Perhaps you are going to tell me she was black, or Euro, or homosexual. Was that the point? Was that your weapon? I _don't_ care. Whoever it was, I can rise above it. You know why? Because I survived the death sentence of Leigh syndrome – the only one of four siblings. That true story will guarantee public sympathy. If you tell me my second mother is one of those whom I would now deport or relocate to a New Town, my conviction will not be altered. Nor will it alter the conviction of those who support me. You have lost Dr Green. The way is clear. Go safely now. Go!"

I waited.

"You're right Mr Pym. I know about your donor. She was... she was not someone you would be proud to know, or protect. But I agree, her contribution was limited, it saved you, but did not form you. There is nothing of her in you, I can see that. No-one would believe me, or care much, if I were to broadcast the fact. That's the beauty of mitochondrial DNA... you get the strength, but none of the visible characteristics."

"So why are we here? Come on, I'm getting bored. What was she?"

"A scientist."

"Good."

"A pioneer in fact."

His expression took on a sense of vague concern.

"Who?" he asked, emphatically.

"Louise Green, my mother. Your second mother."

That silenced him. In the moment of uncertainty, while the minders and bodyguards tried to read their master's face and interpret the words that were being routed to their earpieces, I took the Mojito glass, smashed it on the marble table top and lunged towards him. A wound opened across the left side of his face, from the corner of his mouth to the respectable, greying temple. The breath was crushed out of me by two large men and I was taken away.

I don't know when the significance of the act dawned on him. Perhaps the realisation came as he lay in a downtown emergency room and received (I am told) forty stitches; or perhaps as he mumbled through the next television debate, swollen, bandaged, unattractive; or a few days later, when the polls dipped and support began to wane. He looked disreputable now. And there was nothing he could do. The true story could not be told. I could not be charged... for I was, in essence, his brother.

#  A New Elliptic

I found Bolson during the third Big Summer. He was living in a wooden hut hard up against the bank of a dried-up river. There was a hint of moisture in the shadow, and I joked that he had probably found the coolest place on Earth. He invited me in, tested my intelligence for half an hour, and told me his story. I found him boring at first, this grey bearded scientist, but time was no longer important to me, and I waited. Like him, I had no ties to pull me home. Bolson recognised a history of tragedy in my dulled expression, and he trusted me all the more for it.

Before the shift he lived in Switzerland with his family. An unemployed physicist by day, he spent the nights gathering data from the skies. He was an amateur astronomer who lived on the brink of fame, finding faint comets, ever smaller moons, double stars and new exo-planets... always in the hope of having a celestial body named after him. For five years he had little luck. Then, in August 2027, he observed an anomaly during the Perseid meteor shower. The thing about meteor showers is that they appear to radiate from a fixed point. Each one follows the line of a spoke arising from a central hub. No two spokes should cross. But in 2027 two meteor trails _did_ cross; or so Bolson convinced himself. He was not filming it, he had no proof. But he calculated the angles and worked out how it could have happened. He observed through a second night, but it did not happen again.

For three days he did nothing but surf the internet forums, sure that he could not be alone in detecting the anomaly. There was nothing, not a whisper. He suspected a conspiracy, the kind of response I can see him making. He's just the type; inward looking, intense, and of course, justified.

Something of great mass, he felt, must have swung a particle off its habitual axis as it entered Earth's atmosphere; something too huge and important to be discussed. Bolson worked the equations. He calculated the density required of such a body. The answer was beyond belief. But there was no other explanation. If it wasn't being talked about in the on-line scientific community – well, that _was_ conspiracy, surely. Unless... the unbelievable existed for only an _instant_ , the very moment he happened to be looking up at the meteor shower.

Bolson the physicist had been contracted by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (you know it as CERN) to help design a small part of the Large Hadron Collider. That's why he had moved to Switzerland in the first place. Bolson knew that trains of fast-moving protons were capable of causing a host of potentially dangerous 'events'; strangelets, vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles, and most realistically, the metastable black hole. He knew that _these_ objects, of near infinite mass, could, if their existence was prolonged for more than a moment, bend the fabric of the universe. But why had nobody noticed? Why hadn't every moveable object suddenly shifted in homes and factories and rock-strewn valleys? Too brief, he considered; too momentary the gravitational shock. A metastable black hole! That was the answer. Perhaps a whole series of them. And should they coalesce, what then?

It was a Saturday night. Bolson dropped his pencil, bought four airline tickets to Australia on the internet and collected his wife and two daughters into the living room. The plane left next morning. The price of the tickets had almost broken him. His wife, a lawyer – the breadwinner, he didn't mind telling me – flatly refused. He pleaded, he asked her to trust him. She still refused. He began to doubt himself, intellectually. He had calculated that the chance of being right was 0.3 percent. Not enough to justify abducting the children and taking them with him, but enough to leave and make a point. In the end he boarded the plane alone. If he was wrong he would come back and soak up the criticism. If he was right – well, if he was right there would be nothing to come back to.

He arrived in Adelaide and waited. Nothing happened. His wife emailed him, gave him two weeks to work through his demons, gave him ultimatums. But Bolson was watching the skies again. He found new signs – signs that. could _not_ have gone unnoticed... so he burst onto the blogosphere. And now, at this late stage, a few brave voices were making themselves heard for the first time. Bolson persisted, but nobody listened. Did you hear any warnings? No, neither did I. He was _suppressed_.

Again, he begged his wife to leave Europe and join him, and when she asked why, honestly, ' _what_ is going to happen?', he could not bring himself to say. 'Just come, please...' he cried during the final call. To explain everything would be to admit that he had abandoned his family to great danger. His savings ran out and he hitched to the Northern Territory.

We all remember where we were when it happened. I was downtown, in Alice Springs, just a few blocks away from Bolson as it turns out. He was walking the pavements, looking for the cheapest hotel. The ground rose ten inches without warning. We were thrown into the air. Many had their legs broken, some their spines, some their necks. Those in wheelchairs were capsized, those on bicycles went airborne. Buildings collapsed. Dogs tumbled and birds flew in great flocks to the safety, blocking the sun. And in Switzerland... well, you know it, a third of the country was consumed in an instant, collapsed into a sustained singularity, a series of metastable black holes that survived for five full seconds, long enough the crack the earth. Our world wobbled. Millions died... or perhaps, some have conjectured, they entered a different dimension. I don't think so. They just died.

Communications stopped but were soon restarted. The magnitude and underlying cause of the disaster became clear. Our pursuit of truth, of God's atomic design, had led us to hell. Most of the scientists died with their beloved project, but those left behind (abroad in transatlantic conferences, on holiday) explained that the chance of such events had been _considered_ , that the dangers had been _weighed_ , but they were so rare as to be undeserving of publicity. But not zero. Never zero. They took a risk on our behalf, but they did not ask our permission.

So now, pushed by the shock of that huge event into a new orbit, the New Elliptic, we pass closer to the Sun during the summer, when we burn, burn, burn, and in winter we head out into the depths of the solar system, where we freeze, freeze, freeze. With each passing year the extremes become _more_ extreme, and will continue to do so until human life is no longer supportable. The scientists say ten years. Bolson thinks eight. And you know what? I believe him.

# Sheer

Resten Light woke up, pushed the fibre blanket away, and pulled apart the two wings that formed the doors of his nest. He took in the immense sky, its colour and its shapes. Clouds coalesced around the upper reaches of the Far Tower. No-one in his community had seen the top or knew what shape it took. Some said it was flat – truly horizontal – but few believed that myth. Horizontal was unobtainable. He drew in the blue air, sensed the sharp tang, and knew that there was a storm coming.

"Have you tasted it, Dad?"

Resten's father, Suren, rubbed his beard and knelt at his son's side. The nest rocked as he moved. They both held a nearby rope, each with hands thickly calloused by a lifetime of grip and slide.

"Yes. And look at the mist near the... the... that's where the weather's coming from."

Resten, entering adolescence now, lived on the vertical face of Sheer, an immense tower of stone formed by the same elements that had chiselled, rubbed and flushed away the planet's crust around the Far Tower. The people living on the sides of these towers knew no other terrain, and nor had the generations that preceded them. They did not worry about what might be found above the cloud; they would never go there.

And below? An ever-present mist that shrouded the base in a grey, almost welcoming blanket. People sometimes leapt off the side of Sheer into the mist, perhaps one per cycle. Many more fell accidentally. Life spent on the side a rock face without discernible vertical or lateral limits offered numerous opportunities for slips. Every moment of every day required concentration. Although the ropes, knots, tricks and fail-safes became second nature in infancy, it was necessary to reserve a portion of one's conscious mind to check, check, and check again. Always be attached. _Always_. Never relax your grip. Never. Never take a chance. One error was all it took... for life to be cut short, to experience the long fall, the long tumble into the mist below. Resten knew this. He had lost his little sister that way. Feathereen, as light on her feet in life as her name suggested.

The rock was too hard to excavate caves. The only ledges were those that nature had allocated randomly, and historically these were occupied and owned by the ruling families, the communities over which they continued to hold power being ranged below. Resten's family was middling; his father knew the nature of vine and fibre. Although sparse, there was enough organic material for him and others of his class to make rope. And on rope everything and everyone depended. The nests hung from rope that was wedged permanently and under great pressure into small cracks. The connectors, allowing people to make their way from the nests to the kitchens or meeting areas, were no more than triple-ropes, plaited, the grooves deep enough to offer some foot security.

Feathereen's five-year-old feet had fit those grooves perfectly. Whereas adults had to pivot on their toes, she had bounced along confidently. It got her into trouble, that confidence. Many was the time Suren or her mother, Wingen, had scolded her, or grabbed a hand and placed it firmly on the waist high line that ran in parallel to the foot-ways.

"Never let go! Never..." one of the adults would say. Feathereen would smile, wink at her older brother when he turned to see what the fuss was about, and obey. She always obeyed her parents in the end. It was not disobedience that killed her.

The most ambitious constructions, the temples, were elaborate prominences, pods with walls of woven fibre. In these pods were tiny seats, and only when the communities came together at every third Light did the adults relax and, literally, let go. Seats took their weight. They felt what it was like to find the horizontal. And after the service, during which thanks were given to the benignity of the cycle, to the absence of storms, and to the great bird migration that provided them with flocks to catapult, store, and eat, they stood up and found their way via various connectors back to the nests.

" _And look at the mist near the... the..."_

Resten winced at his father's stuttered sentence. He could not say it... the word... _surface_. The surface, of which there was no visible proof. The only people who could possibly have seen the surface, even assuming there was one, had been fractions of a second from an explosive death, plunging through the mist. Like Feathereen. That was why his father could not bring himself to speak of it.

"Shall we check the ropes, Dad?" Resten moved the exchange on. Suren regained his concentration.

"Better had, son. Your mother's in the kitchens today, she's been up since Blue Light. We'll get it done by Ochre." And by White Light they must be inside, in shadow. The current season saw the star pass close and low; the tower's side was baked during White Light, the middle part of the day. An adult might survive twenty minutes out on the face, a child ten. It never happened. Any nest-holder seeing a man, woman or child on the rock would pull them inside; privacy counted for nothing in this situation.

Feathereen had always been the best at this. Her sunny disposition and innocent face could open the nests of complete strangers, even those of rival families, before she even asked to enter. Resten, following her as they ranged across the tower face seeking plants in flower or large insects, would watch in awe as grumpy men or busy women spotted her lithe form and beckoned the two of them in before White Light struck.

At other times, when they were alone in the shade, she told Resten about her dreams of walking along firm paths lined with vegetation, of fields that grew crops, shoulder-high sticks supporting edible seeds or grain through which she ran and ran until her heart raced. It was during one of these dreams that she walked, in sleep, out of the nest and into the free air. Suren had awoken at the sound of movement in the nest. He had glimpsed her trailing foot, taken in the bird-bone flute that he had carved for her, swinging from her waist, but he was not able react quickly enough. She walked through the winged doorway and was never seen again.

Suren stepped from the nest onto the nearest rope. He never doubted for an instant that it would take his weight. He had secured all the ropes in the neighbourhood himself. Resten watched him drop down a level and slide sideways to perform the first checks. Mothers and fathers were dispersing across the face to check their own nests and adjacent connectors. After this was done they would move as a group to the temple and the complex of nests owned by the Head Family.

Suren called out instructions as he progressed,

"Tidy the nest, Resten, and wax the walls. There was moisture inside his morning."

But Resten did not respond. He had moved up a level. He was out of his father's sight, hidden behind a water store, a man-sized bladder stitched from bird skins and hung from the rock like a giant, opaque teardrop. He heard the words and paused. Suren's tone was soft, almost weary. His once-natural authority had been diminished since Feathereen's death. The energy that had emanated from him, the fighting force that had protected his children from the elements on this exposed world, had started to fade the day she fell. So Resten, the younger part of him loyal to his parents and wanting nothing more than to hide away from the storm in their arms, had made a decision. He must find his sister and bring her home. He must see his family complete once more.

#

Resten progressed through the broad circle of outer nests, taking care not to approach those where his friends lived. One of his father's roper-colleagues noticed him and waved, completely unaware of the boy's intention. Resten nodded, then skipped on. His hands skipped too, one step at a time, with the briefest of overlaps, never a moment when one hand was not in contact with rope. He slowed down as he passed the temple. Inside was a small shrine to his sister. Resten, Suren, and Wingen had fashioned a figurine from bird-bones. Fragile, white sticks glued together with guano and dust; fibre for hair, a fibre skirt, even a tiny model of the bird-bone flute she loved, attached to one hand. It really did look like her. Now it rested in a small niche among other totems and memorials to those who had fallen.

And now the small-birds came fleeing before the storm that was bubbling up from the mist. Ochre Light darkened as the huge flock blocked the sun. The temperature dropped. On another day Resten would have twisted around to fire his catapult and cast his net for meat. But having looked carefully for larger, aggressive Driftbirds wheeling in the flock, he moved on, nose to the stone, and left the temple behind.

The quality of the light changed as Ochre gave way to White. He would have to find protection soon. The climb had left him between communities; there were no nearby nests. He had not gone this far up before. Yet the informal lessons given by elders on temple days described an endless series of communities up and down the face, so Resten continued. The temperature rose. He sipped rain water from the bird-gut flask that swung from his belt. A short while later, when his cheek touched the rock and the heat caused him to recoil, he had to accept that White had come. And there, twenty body lengths above him, a fuzzy black blob against the yellow-brown face, was a nest. He scrambled up and slipped between the two large wings.

In the nest sat an old woman, her wrinkled head obscured by shadow. Her forearms lay on a fibre rug, their climbing muscles and chunky veins still prominent. Exquisite bird-bone mobiles hung from the roof, twirling in response to the draft that Resten had caused in the previously still, silent space.

"What's this?" she asked.

"Sorry lady, it's White Light,"

"So?"

"It's hot! You don't mind?"

"Where's your mother?"

Resten said nothing.

"Where's your mother boy? You're not _from_ here. So, where's your mother?"

"I'm old enough to be out."

"No. You're after something. What you lost?"

Resten looked at her carefully. There were tiny gaps between some of the overlapping feathers that formed the walls of the nest, and slanting needles of White Light probed her black cloak. The old lady cracked a smile,

"So, you _have_ lost something."

Resten, tired from his unbroken climb, opened up.

"My sister. She fell last year."

The old lady nodded slowly.

"I remember. We heard here. First in two cycles. The Roper's daughter, of all people. Poor you. Over it now though, I expect."

"I'm looking for her."

"Ah." She held his gaze. "Ah." She shook her head. "Did you see the Far Tower earlier? I thought there was a break in the cloud cap, I thought I saw the top. A lovely, flat top."

Resten laughed, conditioned by a life lived on the vertical to dismiss such ravings. There had been no break in the cloud cap. There never was. The woman was mad.

"You scoff at me! Did I scoff at you? What you seek is as far-fetched as the firm ground I have spent a lifetime craving. But boys are rude, I know. So... why up? Why up? Your sister... she went _down_."

Resten felt the same discomfort he had felt in his father's company; she _knew_ why he was going up. They all went up, all the dead. Borne on the backs of Driftbirds who collected corpses, flicking them up with their beaks, to be carried away and deposited on the top. All were taught this – the dead achieved what the living could never hope to – peace on the flat. In the temple they sang songs about a second life above the clouds, and acted out the process of reawakening on solid ground. Each cycle one maturing child would be chosen to do this, and it was a high privilege – to lie on the small flat area in the temple and _pretend_ to stand on solid ground, to walk with barely a care.

"I know why, don't worry, boy," she allowed. "I used to think about going up myself, when I was your age. It's natural, despite the teachings. I'm too old to be the one to put you off. Try. Try. And if you succeed, _discover_. There's a reason we cling to this rock like weeds, hiding from the White Light, picking sustenance out of the sky and scraping lichen off the stone. Don't be put off by any that you meet. Ignore the superstitious. If you find nothing and tire, then return, or build a new life higher up... nothing is lost." She had begun to murmur indistinctly, becoming distracted by private thoughts and memories. Then she snapped back into focus. "So... you intend to spend the night?"

"No. Just the White Light. I want to make progress, beat the storm."

"You do, and you should, if you wish to out-pace your father."

"Do you know him?"

"Only the rumours that rose and fell after your sister's accident. Only that. A good man, Suren Light. I feel sorry for him. But if they come, I will not tell them."

Resten looked away.

The old lady bent over to one side and look carefully through a small hole in the floor of her nest. Then she shook her head to indicate that she saw no one in pursuit.

"Have you heard of the paths?" asked Resten. He sensed that of all people, she would not reject such a bold question.

"Ah. Yes, of course. We know of them."

"We?"

"Us. Your betters. There is a theory that our race memory has retained images of paths and fields and flows of rain, landscapes our ancestors explored on this world or another before we were blown like seeds into the sides of these great towers. But we have adapted, and we must learn to live where we find ourselves. Your poor sister suffered an intense re-living of memories that did not belong to her."

"Do you believe that we can find our way back to those places?"

"Ah. Us. Yes! But the fields are gone, the surface of this world has been split and scoured, leaving only the towers. There may be plateaus that go on as far as you can imagine, but... I have studied the patterns, counted the storms and felt the heat of the White Light. Nothing can grow in these conditions. The tops cannot sustain life, any nutrients that remained must have been swept away by the wind sterilised the tops. You think we are battered here... but up there, near the cloud base, the wind _rages_. I have watched the cloud move around the top of the Far Tower, it is more violent than you can imagine."

"And below? What do you know of the surface?"

"Nothing lives down there either, apart from the Driftbirds who climb on the forces that are emitted from the core, the turbulence that feeds the storms. The elders know this, Resten, it has been passed down. Our tribes explored once, hoping to find Sheer's origin, where it joins the planet. There are stories of deep chasms with crystalline walls on which no human can gain purchase, of vicious heat rising, spitting liquid rock. We are trapped between fire and infinity... but we do not labour this with the young. If there is _anything_ to be discovered, it is up. But do not imagine fields or streams. Those days have passed. They belong only in the memories that are embedded in our blood-lines."

Resten flicked one of the door-wings. The white had faded to violet - Violet Light, the phase before night. Storen stared at him, but had no more to say. Resten said his farewells and left.

He survived the storm, climbed day after day through the remainder of the seasonal cycle, and continued for seven cycles more.

#

Resten Light woke, caressed the body next to him and pulled the feathered doors of his nest apart. He took in the sky, its colour and its shapes. His beard bothered him, as always. He wore it short, choosing to cut it regularly with shards of rock face, each one requiring a day of work in the Winter phase with a wet rope wedged into a pre-formed crack, followed by a frost to expand the water and spilt away a flake. But it was worth it, he felt. Given his standing, he should look different from the others. His father had done the same. A slight hand pulled on the hairs below his ear.

"Hey, Resten, there's a storm coming." His wife, Ochren-True.

"Do you know something? If it comes, this will be only the fifth full storm since I left home."

"I know! You tell me that whenever the mist looks edgy. Well? Are you going to get out and check the ropes?"

"In time. They're fine."

"Resten, we have a family now. We don't assume _anything_."

He nodded. She was right.

He circled the nest complex before Blue Light had turned to Ochre, then moved to the Hall. It was the Hall that had attracted his notice as he wandered from community to community. Many, many days and nights after saying goodbye to the old lady, having made his way up through countless strata, he had looked up and saw a brown square in the distance. It was jutting out from the side of the face as if by some sort of magic. His pace on the ropes increased. As he grew closer, he could make out more details. The square was a platform; a _flat_ structure. Resten's engineering instinct drew him sideways, to examine the suspension technique. Ropes fanned out from the outer edge of the platform in an upward spray, the lengths attached to the face in an arc so that the weight was well distributed. Resten looked carefully at the junction between rope and rock – how _had_ they secured them? These people must have found a new and safe method, for the platform was clearly used by many. There were seats and tables, all made of fibre and wood. He had seen small trees growing out of crevices on the way up. Perhaps there were enough in this area to sustain carpentry. And indeed, he came to learn over the days and weeks that followed, there were.

The storm matured. The Far Tower was completely obscured by barrelling, churning mist columns. Resten hurried to the platform, checked the fan of supporting ropes, then moved to the temple that he had been so involved in designing and building. He had brought to it an instinctive understanding of cantilevers and fulcrums, together with innovations in rope-weaving taught to him by his father. Resten was now chief engineer. His was a top family.

A vibration travelled through the rope on which he stood. It was not the storm. His head snapped to the right, towards the platform. Two ropes had sprung from the rock face, their free ends falling in a lazy but potentially lethal curl. The platform rocked. A man had landed on it. He screamed and rolled in pain near the outer edge. Resten could see that a leg was broken, and perhaps his back too. He leaped across, taking unusual risks. For several moments he broke the lifelong rule – and jumped free of attachment to rope or structure. This was a new situation. He had never seen a faller. Never.

Resten was first on the scene; others joined but gave their engineer space. He rolled the man over so that his bloodied face was upturned. The nameless face, a mass of abrasions, opened its mouth, but no sound came out, at first.

"Did you fall, or jump?" asked Resten sternly.

"Fell... I fell."

"I am sorry."

"I... I saw it."

"What?"

"The t... the top."

Resten stared down. He noticed puncture marks in the sleeves of his fibre shirt, over the upper arms. The flesh beneath was bleeding. Both arms. Talon wounds. Other men and women were approaching. Ochren-True was not among them. The dying man spoke again,

"I saw them... _all_. They lie there." His face fell to the side. Blood spilled from his mouth, flowing up from a ruptured organ within.

Resten closed the man's eyes, stood up, and with authority stated, "He shall be given a niche in the temple. He had fallen."

The wind was rising. All minds were focussed on the coming storm. They looked at Resten quizzically, asking for instruction. Those who died of age or disease were cast off the face into the receiving mist with ceremony... but this, what to do with this man? Resten decided, "We get through the storm. The casting off will be tomorrow. The storm is close now, it will hit during White Light. But the clouds will protect us from the heat, we have more time to prepare. Double check the ropes, secure your nests, count your children. All to be inside by Ochre's end. Put him in the temple for now. Wrap him up."

In truth, Resten cared little for the dead man's fate. Only his words. Having tucked his own wife and son into the central nest of his luxurious complex, he stepped out onto the main ascending ropeway and left home for the second time.

#

The storm whipped the face of Sheer but Resten was in no danger of being torn away. Before each gust he twisted rope around his thick forearms, the same for his ankles. The White Light was moderated by the cloud and in fact the wind was warm and not unpleasant at times. Despite the pauses he made good progress, climbing well beyond the wide limits of his reputation in a few days.

The ropes became sparse, the nests more ovoid, the suspension methods different. The greatest change in the landscape was the relative abundance of trees. Their trunks were as thick as Resten's muscular thighs, and grew out horizontally before angling up at forty-five degrees and sending shoots back into the face for greater strength. The trees were integrated into the ropeways and connectors. A few of the larger ones were trusted to support small houses, belonging always to the top families.

Nobody seemed to have heard of the fallen man. Resten described him to all he met, but saw no flicker of recognition. After a full cycle he stopped asking. His son's third birthday was coming up. If Resten had not left his community he would have taken the infant up to the temple and received gifts from other families; bird-meat parcels, bone-toys, precious fruit carried from distant parts of Sheer. If he had stayed. He allowed himself to think of his wife's pain, but not the boy's. And before them... his father's. How much did it hurt, to lose a second child?

Resten climbed. There were more crevices here, more ledges, greater variety. He grew used to sleeping on natural platforms that accommodated over half his width. With a rope around his legs and another around his chest he could relax into his dreams. It was no longer necessary to find nests and beg hospitality. And the White Light was less intense here, the rays more tangential. He must have moved around the tower, or the tower must have an imperceptible twist to it, facing away from the midday sun. He looked down. The rock ran straight and true into the mist. He looked up. There was still no visual clue that he was near the top. He had not passed a community for many, many days. The few ropes he found were weathered and unreliable; he climbed on trees and finger holds.

The tower's face darkened. Violet turned to night, then back to Violet. A breeze on his cheek. Black shadow again, and again. Resten turned to see seven huge birds - Driftbirds - ascend. If they noticed him they gave no sign. He watched as they soared, shrinking to angled dashes against the colour of the sky. From one pair of talons hung a shape without definite form. It reminded Resten of one thing only – a body shrouded and ready to be cast away.

Later, while looking up and scanning the rock face for features, Resten spotted a prominent ledge. He climbed up and across so as to meet it. As he approached its underside, he realised that to access the top side he would have to take a great risk. If the ledge was slippery, or if he miscalculated, he would fall. But he could see no another way. He chose to tackle the ledge during early Ochre, and spent the preceding night fifteen body-lengths below, wrapped in his feathered cloak and wedged between a tree trunk and the face. Night gave way to Blue, which gave way to Ochre. He moved.

The ledge was as wide as two men. Resten climbed into its shadow, wedged two raw fingertips of his right hand into a gap and reached out. The angled fingers of his left hand felt the full thickness of the ledge. He touched its flat surface. Then he paused, paralysed by indecision which slowed time and threatened to drain the power from his limbs. The thought of failure came; plummeting, conscious still, past two homes, an infant unaware, along those glass sides, into the burning chasms described by Storen.

He jumped. His right hand joined his left at the edge of the ledge. All of his concentration was channelled into the muscles and tendons running from the bones of his forearms. They lifted him until his chin was level with the ledge and he could gaze across it. Five black-feathered Driftbirds stood looking out, previously unseen from below. He hauled himself up to safety but could not keep silent. The birds' heads turned as one, alert, quick. The nearest approached. Resten lay on his side, totally exposed. The bird pecked at his shoulder and punctured his rough clothing, drawing blood. The bird's eyes were silver-white. They betrayed no feeling.

Resten rolled past the bird, found his feet and zig-zagged around the others. He was confident he could outrun the birds on foot, and he knew that they would not choose to fly close to the face. The birds _he_ knew, smaller birds, avoided proximity to the face for fear of being brought down by catapult or net. So, he ran. The birds tried to run after him but were not built for it. One of them took wing, but as Resten had predicted, it could do no more than monitor him from a distance.

The ledge developed an upward gradient. Then it began to eat into the face, so that Resten had to duck to avoid grazing his head against a slight overhang. The outer part of the ledge developed a ridge. The gradient grew more marked. He was ascending Sheer by foot. The path turned in more sharply. The overhang and the ridge met, forming a tunnel. There was just enough light to see by. The light, White Light now, was coming in somewhere ahead. For light to be coming into the tunnel it must be coming _down_. For light to be coming come down, he must be near the...

The Driftbirds had found their voice. It was a cacophony. The light strengthened. Resten emerged onto a rocky plain. He stood with feet apart and arms free, uncomfortable without rope or tree touching his body somewhere. The atmosphere was milky, filtering the White Light. A constant wind crossed his face and flapped at his fibre clothes; the same wind, he reflected, that cleansed the top and ensured its sterility. There were no trees, no features. The old lady was right – nothing could grow here.

The White Light made everything glow. In the distance he could make out the untroubled backs of many more Driftbirds. They were busy, pecking at things on the ground. Resten approached cautiously and quickly saw what it was they were — human bodies. The fallen and the jumpers were clothed, while those who had been cast off after natural death were covered in brown shrouds, having benefitted from the ministrations of their peers.

Resten circled the feeding ground. Further on, he found bodies with most of the flesh pecked away. And further still, clean skeletons, bleached by numerous White Lights. The Driftbirds ignored him, even if he emerged from a particularly dense patch of cloud just inches from one of their hard, feathered backs. Their preference appeared to be for dead meat; the vicious peck he had received on the ledge no more than a sign that he was not welcome here. Whatever the reason, Resten grew more confident with each passing day.

As the cloud shifted and varied, offering glimpses of the sky beyond, Resten explored. At night he retreated to the edge of the plain and slept where the cloud was most dense. The Driftbirds came and went in groups. He watched a group of three return with a bundle. The shroud of soft fibre had begun to unravel, and the pale limbed body inside was limp. Resten wondered – how did the bodies keep their shape? He had always imagined them hitting the ground and... destruction. The answer came to him. The ever-vigilant Driftbirds caught them in mid-air. They swooped and took hold with those great talons. Like the fallen man who thudded onto the platform, his arms pierced and bleeding. Caught while alive, but in his case released, or fumbled, perhaps.

Resten began to search the bones.

Hunger drove him back to the tower's edge every few days, and he sat with his legs hanging in space waiting for small birds to pass. Half way through the season they stopped coming, and Resten was forced to take a Driftbird. He feared that such an act would change the status-quo and turn them against him, but he had no choice. Their feeding ground became _his_ feeding ground. With lengths of cloth taken from the bodies, he made loops and nooses to lay on the ground. When an outlying bird wandered into a trap it was pulled away from its group into the obscuring cloud. With a shard-knife Resten cut its neck before it cried out. As he carved the first slice of meat from its tendinous leg, Resten retched at the thought of what his prey had fed on that day. Then he turned his mind from that awful thought and planned the next stage of his search.

The skeletons were laid out in rows. Based on the degree of sun-bleaching, Resten concluded that they had been arranged in chronological order. There was method here. Moreover, although the meat was removed the humanoid form was preserved. The bones were not wrenched from their sockets or separated.

Resten crept along the lines, day after day. She would be shorter than the adults. There were babies, and infants, but few of Feathereen's age.

He fashioned the hollowed-out carcasses of several prey into the walls of a camp far from the feeding ground, but the first full storm blew it away. The only warning he had was a mass descent of Driftbirds onto the plateau during Ochre Light. As the light changed the storm rose and enveloped him. Resten survived the terrible wind by knotting the camp's rope anchors around his waist. The walls, his store of food, his shard-knife, all were sucked away in the brief tempest. Then the air became clear and cloudless. Resten looked along the plateau from his exposed position on the ground and saw the many thousands of Driftbirds who had come down before the storm push away from the surface as one. The skeletons appeared undisturbed. Something had protected them from the gale. Something had covered them. The Driftbirds. The huge flock. _They_ had come down to protect the bodies.

Resten turned and was awestruck by the unprecedented visibility. He saw ten, fifteen, twenty more towers beyond the Far Tower... and between some of them stone links, natural bridges. Some of the towers broadened into plateaus, shaped like the rare moulds that were a delicacy on Sheer. And on the plateaus that lay below Sheer, Resten saw rippling black carpets, glossy where the sun caught the backs of massed Driftbirds. They lifted off, as those on Sheer had done, revealing a variegated pattern of green, brown, and gold. In places – although the distance made Resten doubt himself – the surface seemed to soften and sway. He saw fields. Then the clouds returned, obscuring the vista.

Resten walked towards the deserted ground, eager to explore new sections. He felt the ground beneath his feet soften. With bones to his left and his right, partially shrouded in cloud as usual, he lifted a foot and examined the sole of his foot. Brown granules had stuck between his toes, clumps of which crumbled when he pressed them between his fingers. He held it under his nostrils, and smiled at the fresh, musty odour. He remembered finding something similar in a rare niche on the face where a plant had grown. His mother had told him it was a good thing – the result of vegetation decaying, a sign of permanence. "Dirt", they had called it. Resten knelt down and pushed his hands into the thin layer of soil. Then he hurried on, following the pleasant smell. The depth of the humus carpet increased. He knelt again. This time his hands ran into vegetation; wisps of grass, moss more luxuriant than the thin, desiccated layers that clung to the face of the tower. The bones here were much older. They were crumbling into the soil. The nutrients held in the marrow and the matrices within were dissolving onto the sterile plateau. The bones _were_ the soil.

Cloud traversed the space before him. Resten wished it would clear so that he could see what he wished and believed lay before him – fertile ground. Fields. A gap in the cloud came, and he peered forward. A curved rank of birds stood immobile before him. The gap enlarged, and Resten saw that the curve extended to his left, his right, and behind him. He was surrounded. One of them strutted forward with something in its beak. It held a skeleton by the lower spine, so that its legs dangled on one side and the chest, arms and head on the other. Like the others, its ligaments had been preserved. The bird stopped a few feet in front of Resten and dropped its offering.

Resten knelt over it. He held a weightless hand. He noticed a leather band around the pelvis, unaffected by decay. Attached to this was another bone – non-human. There were tiny holes along its length. The flute. It was her.

Resten rocked the curved cradle of her rib cage. Within the cavity lay a loose sheaf of brown sticks. The top of each stick expanded into a complex group of pods which crumbled when Resten touched them. Their smell assured him that they were edible. He looked, his mouth agape but full of questions that could not be asked.

The birds retreated as one into the thickening cloud; a black band on the hard surface.

Resten unfolded the plucked and scraped skin of a captured Driftbird that he had prepared for this eventual purpose. He wrapped up her bones as his family would have done had she died naturally. He noted how her skull, pelvis and vertebrae were undamaged. She had not hit the ground. Like the others, her ligaments were intact. The skeleton was whole. The Driftbirds had caught her. Probably, she had been unconscious when the talons clasped her thin torso or soft abdomen. Or perhaps not. Perhaps, turning in the air, coming out of a sleep coloured by images of her race's more comfortable past, where water flowed and plants grew high from moist soil, she felt the air push at her clothes and her face, saw the mist rising to her, felt the heat of the planet's ruptured crust, and sensed herself fall into the shadow of an approaching Driftbird.

Carrying his burden, Resten descended to the community of his maturity. He collected his stunned wife Ochren-True, his infant son, and carried on down to the community of his birth. He said little, but the evident power of his intention brooked no challenge.

#

Storen's nest was now occupied by a young family; two children played on the ropes just outside. Resten passed it without hesitation.

Half a day's travel from there he began to recognise structures. From above, the temple looked well-kept; the community was evidently healthy. There were new features, and some innovations in the rope-work. Resten paused and whispered to Ochren-True, but she encouraged him. She reassured him that his actions were correct... she, the wife whom he had abandoned.

Ochren-True hung back with the child while Resten approached the home-nest. The bi-wing doors were unchanged, they had kept their integrity through all the seasons and the daily White Light. Someone had waxed them well.

Inside, Resten found his father in the company of a carer. His mother Wingen had been cast off nine cycles ago, and Suren was no longer strong enough to leave his nest. Others looked after him. He was owed that by the community, for all he had done with his hands and his ingenious brain to improve their surroundings and keep them safe. A lifetime on Sheer had left the skin of his face baked like the rock. Yet he looked calm, comfortable in himself. He had accepted Resten's choice long ago.

Resten lay his sister, Suren's daughter, on the floor and peeled away the Driftbird covering. Suren noticed the flute immediately. His eyes shone as a layer of tears formed. He picked up the instrument, examined it, smiled. Then he reached for Resten, nodded in gratitude, and looked up at the roof of his nest, as though to thank a greater power.

"They delivered her to me, father. The Driftbirds. They tasted my blood and knew she belonged to me, to our family. The others, all the dead, are taken there to nourish the ground. They protect them. There are fields up there. Things grow. In the soil of our dead. Look." He took out the sheaf, much degraded despite the care he had taken with it on the long journey down. Suren brushed the sticks and said,

"The second life."

"No, father..." Resten could not articulate his frustration at his father's reversion to tradition.

"You should have left her."

Tears came to Resten.

"No father, it is no second life. They use us to bring life back to the towers, to the old surface... I was told, by an elder, when I left... there used to be life up there, fields and trees. The birds have used us to bring it back."

"That old lady, Storen... we knew her... spoke of myth. We do not know how things used to be, Resten. We belong here, where we were thrown by fate. It is a good life."

"But Father, our people can climb now. We can move to the flat. I have seen it. The tops are habitable. The Driftbirds have done it... _for us_. They gave Feathereen to me. They gave me these plants. It was an invitation. Us and the birds. A natural order, benefiting all."

"No Resten... Resten... you have no proof..."

"We can move back now father. Back to the surface, a _living_ surface."

"No Resten..."

Suren's voice had grown weak. A hand moved to rest on the small bones of Feathereen's slightly flexed palm. Despite his admonition of Resten, and for all his sense of sacrilege, he was pleased to see her again. To know she had not been shattered on the restless surface or abandoned on the top. His hand moved from Feathereen to his son, and by a slight pressure of his fingertips he thanked him.

Resten left the nest and stood in the fading light. He tasted the air and sensed activity in the mist below. All he saw, looking up, looking down, was skewed by discovery. On the top he had grown accustomed to looking along rather than straining his neck up or down; his feet had grown comfortable with the weight of his body spread evenly across the soles. The ability to step sideways, the knowledge, in sleep, that is was safe to roll... the memory of these simple if shallow freedoms seduced him. And beyond that something larger. The soil, the distant fields, the natural bridges. A higher world, and a vital future for his people. Smiling, confident in his vision, Resten ducked back into the nest and began to prepare his little sister for her casting off.

#  The Engine Room

I placed the flat of my left hand against the thick wall and felt the vibration of a hundred thousand pistons moving in synchrony. Pressing an ear, I heard the high hiss of gas igniting under pressure, expanding, driving the piston heads and collapsing into vacuums. Then, the whir of the great fly-wheel, collecting the energy of those controlled explosions into a huge momentum, its endless rotation invisible to the people it served, encased, concealed within a towering central hall that none were permitted to enter.

I would enter. I would work there. Not for me the usual occupations and vocations of this immense, travelling society. I wanted to work at the source, in the heat and racket of the perpetual engine. To get this close I had wandered for months, from the peripheral zone of my birth, through numerous unfamiliar townships, complexes and multi-levelled agricultural matrices. I had escaped the propaganda, the 'countdown to journey's end' that never seemed to reach zero. I no longer believed the pronouncements – where was our new world? Did it really exist? For a fifteen-year old, I was highly cynical.

I had reached the great ship's lowest level. A portion of the wall slid open. A scratched, sexless mech walked out, holding an oversized spanner. I slipped in before the door shut. A maze of gantries separated me from the blurred edge of the fly wheel. Gleaming piston-rods charged back and forth, driven by muffled explosions within the impenetrable housings. Invisible field-cords connected them to the speeding fly-wheel, from where the collected energy was transmitted to aft propulsion units according to the helmsman's whim, or to the millions of residences where my fellow travellers demanded power for their gadgets, via remote couplers.

"Ah! Welcome." An old, gentle voice. I was sure he would understand me. I climbed several flights of metal steps, drawing ever closer to the fly-wheel's rim. I felt the breeze it created against my cheek.

"Curious, eh?" asked the man, who wore stained overalls. He stood near the wheel, and his white hair moved in the turbulent air.

"I've always wanted..."

"Of course, of course. Yet... do you have any idea what it is, this engine, this ship?"

"I know we are the last transport. I know we are all that's left."

"Quite right. But do you know where we're going?"

"We're looking for another world, in another galaxy."

He looked disappointed.

"If you are going to work here you must know the truth. Are you sure you want to hear it?"

"Yes."

"We travel at the universe's edge. It is burning up behind us. There is no specific destination. We live at the envelope of existence, but we succeed, we have done so for centuries... we outpace entropy. It is enough, don't you think?"

"But how long can we...?"

"For as long as we want to. But we must want it. You see, this engine's only fuel is hope. Here, at the edge, thought is energy, and the plans that people make, delusions perhaps, but alive, colourful, are enough to keep the pistons moving and wheel spinning. Young man, we cannot stop hoping that the journey will bring us to a new home."

"But if they knew, the people..."

"They will never know. You will never tell them."

"But my family..."

"The family you fled? Boy, take this rag."

I took it.

"And take this can of oil."

I took it. He glanced towards the innumerable, shuttling pistons, and added,

"Now get to work."

# Bow Skills

My music teacher, Miss Herenka, gesticulated through the blue-tinged, sound-proofed glass. I watched her thin hands glide. Her voice came down from speakers in the circular ceiling of my training cell.

"Jenna come on! It's not enough to go through the motions. Close your eyes, use the full length of the bow."

I sighed. I gripped the bow more firmly.

"No. Soft hands! Tease the charge from each string. Find the frequency that maims."

She could sense that my motivation was off.

"This simulator, I accept, offers little satisfaction...but in battle... oh, the chords will resonate."

So passionate, this old musician. And I had to accept, she had seen it all. And survived.

"Death will dance forward. Together, Jenna, we'll watch a black tango weave through the ranks, leaving doubt on every fingertip she touches."

Yes. The power I could wield. I had seen glimpses of it.

The first school concert, high summer, out in the field. My playing caused half the school to collapse in a swoon. Three children and two parents died. I was taken to the mountains where I joined the Conservatory at the age of eight and entered higher training.

The nature of my gift was explained to me – the ability to match the frequency of the music I made to a person's emotions... and more, the power to manipulate those emotions. As the first year progressed the broad strokes of feeling were dissected and re-arranged, through tiny adjustments in technique: the speed with which I sawed the horse-hair bow, the pressure of my fingers on the cat-gut strings, the way my body swayed. Soon I was able to give instructions, or orders. Prisoners of war were made to stand within earshot, and I watched them tremble. My orders could not be resisted, because they were packaged in strong emotion. My music had been weaponised.

Danny.

My first friend.

Miss Herenka sensed my sadness. Yet, monster that she was, she seemed to have forgotten his name.

"Oh Jenna. Your friend, the boy. I know you are sad. But you should have seen him last week. He requested the Eastern front, he knew we were weakening there. Dropped into the field, he didn't even look up. His parents watched from the orbiter with me. So proud."

I knew the truth. He had understood the child soldier's fate, so he chose the most dangerous theatre.

"The chords, they were beautiful, entered their collective consciousness... and led the sixth army off the Galen plateau. Victory! After two years of bloody attrition!"

It was true. He induced mass hysteria and ran a feared army off the high ground. I had seen the war report. But it had not mentioned Danny. And he had not come back.

"His name will live long. You have that talent Jenna, more. I am confident in you. It has been privilege. Now, come out of there and follow me. The General is here."

The time had come.

My parents.

Would they sit in the orbiter looking down into the fire-lit smoke? Would they see me standing alone behind the enemy lines, playing, playing, playing... hoping to find the resonant frequency before a patrol picked me off with a single bolt.

"Come Jenna. Come." She brushed my head affectionately. I knew Miss Herenka was genuinely fond of me. A bond existed. This would make it easier, I knew, to throw out a few toxic notes just for her during the final performance. Relayed to the orbiter, they would enter her mind and avenge each child doomed by her lethal tuition.

# Elision

The fair boy held his head absolutely still on the pillow, so the close rustling of his hair against the linen would not obscure the sound of his parents' conversation.

We should be pleased.

Pleased... with a life there, in the dust?

He will be close.

He deserves more. He deserves to be up there, a Singer, he's good enough.

There is no appeal my love... you know that.

#

Henry Dovetail, Guardian of Vurso's Proximate Zone – a glorified policeman, he knew - surveyed the compressed scene.

He saw a pyramid, rising four hundred metres through an atmosphere hung with drifting stones and the occasional sweet wrapper. Above that, just a kilometre away, was the surface of Vurso's sister planet, Chaint. A binary planetary system, quite stable, the result of a tri-stellar configuration that was unique in the galaxy.

The suns held the orbiting planets in an endless, cautious dance, the distance between them changing imperceptibly during the triphasic year. Vurso, the more populated planet, showed the same face to Chaint throughout the year; their faces were fixed.

The pyramid had been built where the opposing planetary curves all but kissed. To the people of Vurso the planet opposite appeared as a flat, sand-brown ceiling. With the naked eye there were very few buildings or structures to see; a handful of pilgrim roads, snaking off into the distance, and the odd dot or tiny circle, homesteads perhaps.

You never saw people on Chaint, though you knew they were there; Scientists, Singers, Ambassadors. The chosen.

The few substantial buildings that did exist on Chaint – temples and universities - were hidden from view. Chaint was sacred. That was why Henry Dovetail had rushed to the pyramid. Someone from Vurso, a child, had sullied it.

Daytrips to the pyramid were a standard outing for Vursan seven year olds. They came in groups, listened to a lecture presented by projections in an adjacent complex, then followed their teachers out onto the sand. It was supposed to be a quasi-religious experience. The teachers were under instruction to look out for signs of vocation; awe, transformation, tears. In every tenth class of thirty pupils there might be one child who, on reaching the top of the pyramid, entered a state of near-paralysis.

Henry recalled his own experience, as a seven-year old. The long flight in from the green, valleyed homeland; the transition into stark, brown desert. An easy climb, all the children chattering. Then deep, deep relaxation, combined with greatly heightened awareness. He was – had been - he felt sure, one of the sensitive. And clever enough, to earn a place on Chaint. Yet... here he was, stuck in the dust, picking litter out of the air to maintain the sanctity of the place.

#

Henry... we have something to say to you.

He knew already. He had listened carefully to the muttered conversations.

Next year, when you are eleven, you will move to another school. You will live away from home, and sleep there. You have been chosen to protect the most important monument on our planet.

Do I have to Mum?

You do – interjected his father. Few are chosen. We are very pleased.

But they did not look pleased.

And remember, whispered his mother, being there, so close, you will be the first to know...

#

He lay on the hard ground to survey Chaint through a magnifier without straining his neck. The light was good, cast horizontally through the gap between surfaces by the nearest sun. The rays came in flat, and the shadows cast by them were, mathematically, infinite. He convinced himself that he could see a crater where the kid had landed.

Henry had been called from his staff house on the perimeter of the Proximate Zone when the form teacher realised what had happened. She had watched the girl rise, legs flailing, slowing at the threshold, then picking up speed as he was taken in by Chaint's opposing mass.

The pyramid guards could do nothing once he had reached the halfway point; their capture rods were largely ineffective beyond four hundred and fifty metres. Once, a jumping man had been killed at five-ten by a wildly swinging guard. The charged line whipped through the air too quickly and cut his neck. The guards here today would be reprimanded for failing to react faster, but the girl's flight was not their doing. It was the girl's fault... or that of her slack, undisciplined parents.

Henry stood up and brushed the sand off his jacket. The parents, meek types, were waiting in the grey walled visitor complex. They shook hands, and Henry nodded to a bench encouraging them to seat themselves. He voiced his regret. They nodded. Henry asked,

"Had... Jessica isn't it... had Jessica...?"

"No Officer, nothing." The father, pre-empting Henry's question.

"How do you know what I was going to ask?"

"It's obvious. Everyone will assume she was a fanatic. But she wasn't. She has never shown the slightest interest in religion, in..."

The mother was nodding in agreement. She spoke,

"We just want her back Officer."

"Well you must know... that's impossible. It is absolutely forbidden to land a search party on Chaint."

"We know. We know that nobody has ever been brought back, but this time it's our daughter... we have to try."

"I'm sorry, I can't help you. I am bound by the law."

"But if you weren't, Officer Dovetail, wouldn't you be tempted? If it was your child?" insisted the father.

Henry's attitude hardened. Didn't they know, he could never have children as a Guardian?

"It's not relevant. I'm sorry. But I need to work out why, to understand her motivation..."

"There was none, Officer. A rush of blood. You know the urge you get, when you stand in a high place, the urge to jump?"

Henry knew what he meant. A silly impulse. He knew it well.

"Before I leave I must warn you... please do not think about joining her. The pyramid is guarded. I have to say this, because people have tried to rescue loved ones before."

"Don't worry Officer, we're not the type," answered the mother.

#

The pyramid guards had just changed over. There were four, two at the base, two at the summit. Henry showed his ID and bent himself under the rope to approach the first stage. At the top, after an effortless ascent, he joined the two guards. The view was bland. Looking down at the surface of his own planet, Vurso, he could just make out the limits of the Proximate Zone, beyond which buildings increased in density and height. The Zone itself was pale yellow and featureless.

Looking up, with the pyramid's added height, surface details on Chaint were better defined. With his well-used, sand-scuffed magnifiers he found the girl's splash-down point. There was no body. He could make out its elongated impression, suggesting that she had landed on her back or front, rather than feet first. And yes, there were definite tracks leading to and from that point. The Singers had come for her.

Henry followed the tracks through the magnifiers. He delineated the departing trail, until it became disrupted. Darker points were sprinkled around in circles – footprints, three. It looked like the kid had tried to run.

Then the prints came back into line. She had been recaptured, subdued. A girl, of seven. Fighting, with adults.

With this, Henry made up his mind.

He asked the guards to check on the state of the railing that protected the pyramid's base from unruly visitors. The guards objected, but Henry grew assertive with his status card. They trudged down, hot in their uniform. Henry stood alone at the very top, bent to touch the stone at his feet, caressed it, bent his legs at the knees, looked up, and jumped.

#

He landed close to the kid's crater. The wind was knocked out of him, he suspected that he had broken a small bone in his left foot, but he stood as soon as he could and followed the tracks that he had previously identified.

Henry Dovetail's life on Vurso was over, and he did not mind.

He did not mind because he had never truly belonged.

And he remembered...

...how his younger self was magnetised. At the top he could barely move, such was the awe. The paralysis. The intensity. A female Ambassador watched him, her head covered by a silvered shawl. She caught Henry's eye. The class was ushered down. Henry expected to be held back – a hand on the shoulder. To be chosen. His parents would be so pleased. Yet, it did not happen.

He was flown back to the home land. A short time later he was taken aside at school. His head teacher informed him that he had indeed been chosen... invited was the word... to enter the fourth rank. Not as a Scientist, not as a Singer or Ambassador, but as a Guardian. He would live and learn in the Proximate Zone until he was old enough to fulfil his role. And so it came to pass. A policeman. He could not say no. His parents could not demur. Nobody declined the privilege.

#

They visited the school once a year. The depth of their affection was evident, yet they were cautious. To recreate the old parental relationship, and to encourage his emotional dependence on them, if only for the two days, would disadvantage him. They would leave confusion behind. Yet... how could they not hold him, press him to their chests. Then, in the refectory, his father whispered,

There are reports of departures. Plumes and contrails seen rising from Chaint's far side. We can't see them, but we hear about them. Have you heard?

No Dad.

Slowly, Henry made sense of his parents' barely hidden agenda. But he knew they were wrong. His teachers made no mention of it – an exodus - and he trusted them.

Nothing Dad. The Scientists, the Singers, they go, and they learn. Nothing more.

You may be right – his Mother – but you may be wrong. Henry, it is a hard life you have been asked to lead, but it will be worth it, if it happens in your lifetime. You will be protected.

Myths. They were obsessed with myths.

#

Henry walked to the edge of Chaint's equivalent of the Proximate Zone, a similarly sparse plain called the Bare Area. There was no weather between the planets to create landscape or variation; no room for the build-up of clouds, winds or systems.

He came to the first building, a stone hut, unmanned. It was no more than a circular wall really, though it had once borne a roof. The Singers had let it deteriorate, and this surprised Henry. He saw footprints in the dust, just one set as opposed to the three that had formed the main set of tracks. Where had they gone, the two natives? Had a craft lifted them off the surface?

Henry heard a trickle. There was water here. He found a small stream running between two stones on one side of the temple's circumference.

His mouth was dry, and he filled himself until he was uncomfortable. While kneeling on the ground he spotted an engraved stone set into the wall. He touched the shallow lines, blew dust from the grooves, and tried to make sense of the diagram that was represented.

It was a simple model: the three suns in their eccentric positions, the two planets almost touching, hung in an equigravitational zone between them. He had seen this diagram many thousands of times at school. Henry brushed his hand against other stones and found more engravings. There were diagrams in eight positions around the circular temple. The position of the twin planets was slightly different in each. In three of them he found that the planets overlapped, and in one - which he presumed to be the last in the sequence – only one planet was depicted.

Henry looked up at Vurso. Collision? It was an ever-present fear among Vursans, but careful observations over many centuries, over several millennia in fact, had shown that although the distance fluctuated it did not change meaningfully over time. The Chaintians were wrong. The collision myth was unfounded – hence, a myth.

...any sign, Henry. Any sign. When you see one, believe it, follow it...

He walked on. The belly-full of water kept him going. Another dilapidated hut. There were more engravings, but they represented a star system that he did not recognise. There were signs that someone had slept there. The remains of a fire made out of a pair of trousers. Small trousers – a child's. Henry drank deeply again and sped away, feeling that he was close to the edge of the Bare Area now. His hunger was stayed by the hunt.

His timepiece told him that he had been going for nearly two standard days. He knew that he could survive many more with just a little water. He did not sweat. The horizontal beams from the nearest sun lacked heat.

The third structure he encountered was several stories high, and alive. He discerned the elevation from afar, and spotted several cloaked figures milling around it. A Singer noticed him and changed direction. Henry slowed, nervous of the reception. But the female appeared welcoming. She displayed none of the deliberate obscurity that Henry and every other Vursan associated with the Chaintian culture.

"Hurry!" she called, in the language they shared.

Henry checked himself. The Singer seemed to bear no malice. She was not annoyed. She did not seem to recognise Henry as an intruder.

"Come on, you're going to be late. You don't want to be left behind, do you?"

"No. Of course not." replied Henry. He hurried forward. The Singer waited for him, and when Henry was close enough she put an arm around his shoulder.

"Tell me," asked Henry, "Why are you leaving? What's happening?"

But she had noticed the mark on his shoulder. "You're a Guardian!"

"Yes. But why? Why are you leaving?"

"Oh, not us. Come with me."

"Why? What? What is going on?"

"You really don't know, do you? Any of you, on Vurso."

"Know what?"

"About the elision. About the flight"

"What are you talking about?"

"The flight. They are gone. All the scientists, all those we serve. There was nothing they could do, after all those years... those centuries of thinking, theorising, looking out, it was all hopeless. They could not stop the elision, so they have fled. They have been fleeing for two cycles. Just us left now, a few Singers, a handful of Ambassadors, here to maintain the sites. And now a loyal Guardian. So welcome! You can watch it with me."

"Watch what?"

"The last three transports! They are leaving tomorrow."

#

On graduation day his father came. His mother had died in the fifth year of his training, and he had not been permitted to attend her vaporisation.

I know you have learned things you cannot tell me, said his father, as they walked through around a green quad. Henry did not seem to know many of the students who passed them, or if he did, he did not acknowledge them.

Not much Dad. They don't tell the Guardians much.

So how can you fulfil your role?

It's pretty simple really. I don't need to know what's going on up there, my job will be to protect the pyramid, and investigated any infractions. I scored highly on the law and behaviour module – I'm going to be a policeman. It's better... I'd rather that than spend all my time serving the Ambassadors or preparing the Singers and Scientists for departure.

You've seen nothing?

The first and second ranks have different classes Dad. They don't talk about it. We accept there are things we cannot know. I know what I need to protect the Ambassadors, the Singers. They learn how to protect the Scientists. It works. I've got used to it. I'm happy with my position.

His father looked at Henry's profile as they walked. He saw that time and necessity had rubbed away any sharp corners of rebellion. His son was content. They had failed him.

#

"The elision. When will it be?" Henry began to understand the word. His head jerked upwards towards the surface of Vurso.

"Ten, twelve cycles. It will happen quickly once it starts. Once it does start, the final two or three hundred metres will close in a flash. So they say."

"But we must to tell them on Vurso, give them time to relocate."

"No. No, no, no. We can't do that." She smiled, then looked at him carefully.

"Why? Why not?"

"The chosen have... been chosen! You're a Guardian! You know that. The new planet has been seeded with knowledge, by the best of us. I would love to have gone with them, of course, but I am happy with my role here. It will be a privilege. Relax. The elision is the culmination. We must not fight it."

Henry ran. He had no idea whether it was possible to jump back from the centre of the Bare Area, back onto the pyramid. It had never been done. But he would try. The pain in his foot slowed him. The Singer overtook with ease. She was joined by another, a male, who had been watching at a distance.

"It is to be expected... Henry Dovetail," said the second Singer. A man.

"How do you know my name?"

"An Ambassador informed us. You have been missed. Your father is being interviewed. It reflects badly on him... and the memory of your mother. Everyone is very disappointed."

"What are you going to do with me?"

A small craft arrived at their side. A guard stepped down, nudged Henry along a short ramp and signed to the pilot that they could leave. They sped across the surface, further and further away from Henry's point of arrival. A scatter of circular, stone buildings, similar to those Henry had come across during his lonely walk, came into view through the viewing port. The craft landed. The guard pushed him onto the ground and led him to the nearest structure.

"In!" he ordered.

"Here?"

"Everything you need will be brought to you. There is water."

Henry crouched to enter. The roof was intact, the rough stones from which the walls had been constructed tightly joined. The door hummed when it closed, locked by invisible forces. Henry moved towards one of the four tiny windows – no glass, just a flicker of energy that he presumed would keep out the cold when the long night set in. On the other side, her narrow form wedged into the angle of ground and wall, lay a child in grey uniform. The girl, Jessica. Henry approached, knelt over her. Her dark brown hair, plaited by her mother two morning ago, was dishevelled. Henry quickly ascertained that there was no major injury. She looked up, passive in fear.

"My name's Henry. I'm from Vurso. You must be Jessica?"

No answer.

"Why did you jump, Jessica?"

Henry let the silence expand into the cell's space, but kept his gaze fixed on the girl. He would have an answer.

"Tell me, please. I deserve... to know. I jumped, to find you."

She shifted, lifted her dust caked face.

"My Dad... he told me to. Before the school trip. He told me to. He said I had to. Otherwise I would be left behind."

Henry smiled, and his eyes watered, tears forming a thin layer of dust-mud on his cheeks.

"Your Dad."

He stood to look through a window, and strained his neck to peer upwards, at the looming surface of Vurso. Had they really found his own father; interrogated him? Was he looking up now, through the flickering field of a prison window, pleased that the seed he had sewn, of independence, and rebellion, had flowered at last?

"Well Jessica, your Dad was right. He was right."

"What will happen to us?"

"It's not every day a Guardian makes the jump. Perhaps word will get around. Perhaps others will come, looking for us, for me..."

Peering up, into the space between the all-but kissing globes, Henry thought he saw a flailing figure. And behind that a speck, enlarging. Two figures. No, more. A scattering of human forms, moving across.

"But the planets, they're going to crash," said Jessica.

Henry knelt down beside her again, and, holding both her hands in his while fixing her gaze with his own fatigued but kindly eyes, whispered,

"No Jessica. It's a myth. Just a myth. Don't worry."

#  The Fregoli Delusion

From the couch, engineer Stanislaw Hast looked past the grey-suited, female psychiatrist and through the broad window. The star, a long dying sub-giant, threw a dusk of burnt ochre over the orbiting city, its rays painting the sunward face of the tall buildings into perpendicular fire blocks.

"I'll make it easy for you doctor. I know what I've got," said Stanislaw, snapping back.

"Tell me." Her words were smooth, professional, complacent.

"Fregoli's. I looked it up. I see them in crowded rooms, in the metro, in the hanging parks. In many forms, disguised as men and women. But when I ask - how do I know you, where did we meet, why are you following me? – they look blank."

"Fregoli's refers to the belief that the same person is disguising themselves, slipping from one form to another. He was an actor on Earth, famous for his quick changes of costume. But you see many pretenders, not one. It is different."

"No! I see common features in each face... they trigger memories, a place, a time... enough to convince me that I knew them once. I did know them. I am convinced."

"But not the same person Mr Hast. And you have insight. You cannot be deluded."

"I feel like someone's playing with me. Dancing round me, pushing me to the edge of sanity. It is very real."

The psychiatrist rose from her seat, stood by the couch and looked down at him. Stanislaw shifted uncomfortably.

"Mr Hast. There is only one constant in this... experience."

"What?"

"You, of course."

"Then you do think I am mad."

"That is not a word we use. No, like many of your generation, you are just...tired."

"Generation? I'm young. I feel good, physically."

"But your sensorium... that is tired. Do you even know how old you are?"

"Fifty-five."

"No Dr Hast. You are eight hundred and twenty-two. You came here when the city was established. You are a founder."

Stanislaw tried to swing a leg off the couch, but the psychiatrist held him with a casually extended hand.

"No. Stay. Listen to me."

"You are the mad one!"

"I have the sad duty of holding your long and excellent life up for you to see. I am the mirror you have never glimpsed. Some of us believe you have been selfish. I disagree. I understand your motive. It is love, for the city you made. You wished to see it through, to ensure its safety."

The flashes of history, the ancient odours, the familiar angles of light and shadow on old steel. All the deja-vu moments. He had been everywhere, seen everything. She spoke truth.

"But how have I lived... physically?"

"That's the selfish part. You have moved into - possessed, essentially - a long series of innocents. The software you and your colleagues developed was sophisticated... it melded the two identities, maintaining the recipients' sanity but preserving your essence. Time after time."

"Who oversaw this?"

"Me and my type. There was a legal... arrangement. Unbreakable, until such time as..."

"I began to break down. To taste the delusion. Why is it ending now?"

"You have wandered the towers, tunnels, tracks and skyways of this great city for almost a millennium. You have known every family from its establishment. You have grown with them, seen it all. When you recognise people, you are recognising their ancestors, recalling ancient meetings, historic conversations in buildings that have been subsumed. Your memory is full. You who are the shape changer. You are Fregoli."

"And now it ends?"

"Yes. We can let you go now."

#  Halo effect

The third sun's hazed edge touched a jagged horizon. Dusk was green as usual, deepening into purple as the glowing orb was reduced to a dull red cap. My filter mask, a full-face affair, was slipping, lubricated by sweat. If I smiled or grimaced tiny gaps appeared between skin and seal, and the stench of the atmosphere seeped in. Brief leaks were fine, our lungs could resist the acidification. I was reminded how rotten this out-world was. Corpses lay all around, adding to the problem. They littered the route to the mother-hulk, my ultimate destination. I felt good. The injury I had sustained to my leg was healing; my ration pack was three-quarters full. Today was as good a day as any to make the charge.

The wound itched. It was the closest I had come to bowing out. The gentle, insistent curve of the targeted discharge screaming out of the shadow was burned into my memory. It clipped my thigh and turned me through the air. Face down, with lips buried in the bitter dust, I heard the shooter whoop as he ran away. A rock-runt. He thought I was dead. Few survived such a contact, but my suit had absorbed much of the energy. No, I was very much alive. And I had time for sport.

The morning passed uneventfully. A few long-range skirmishes only. Then I detected human movement fifty metres ahead; my quarry! Thick red smoke covered the ground around him, the result of his last discharge. A dead soldier's toe caps were just visible above the low cloud. The rock-runt, my enemy, was kneeling over him and stealing his kit. Fair play, I often did the same. I wormed my way across the dirt, hidden in the cloud. My heads-up display confirmed that the runt was stationary, probably playing with his new toys or working out how to stash and carry them. Perhaps his own heads-up was switched off or disabled; he should have sensed my approach. Through a gap in the cloud I glimpsed the dead man's entire length. A comrade, judging from the insignia on his arm. The runt's discharge had blown a hole clean through his lower chest. I did not grieve. This was no place for loyalty.

The cloud thinned in the breeze. I rose up, a paragon of slealth. But the plates on my Kevlar suit creaked and the runt turned. With unexpected but practiced dexterity he unclipped a short range unidirectional grenade and pressed it against by stomach. Christ! I was too close to point my piece, and the knife – my first and oldest possession – was trapped under the sticky grenade. I had no choice, I had to act. So, I encircled the runt's narrow neck with a gloved hand and squeezed until the bones began to pop. His hand fell from the charge switch and he dropped to the ground. I knelt over him in turn and took as much kit as I could carry. As I ran for the protection of the low mountain two clicks away I heard sobs and cries, "Why? Why? You promised, you promised."

Night had fallen. The words continued to bounce around the sheer sides of the crevice in which I had wedged myself. Figures scuttled across the battle ground below. Migrating ants, drawn to the mother-hulk, hungry for glory. A small group paused by the dead rock-runt, but there was nothing portable on him left to scavenge. Then, without a dawn warning, night lifted. Raw light, brighter than that normally cast by the ageing sun, flooded the scene. The filter mask was ripped off my face. My wife stood before me, angrily gesticulating at Thomas, our son. He was curled on the ground shaking his head, his virtua-mask awry. I threw off my sensing gloves and picked him up.

"Why? You promised! We were on the same team!" he cried.

"I didn't realise, I thought you were a rock-runt! I had to!"

He ran off to his room, still sobbing.

At tea-time he was still red-eyed and silent. I was surprised. I thought a 9-year-old would have shrugged it off by now. Lucy eyed me coldly during the meal. She wasn't happy that we played together anyway, and pointed to the 15 rating on the package whenever she ventured up into the games room. But all of Tom's friends were playing (I had despatched a few of them) and he had begged me to buy it.

At bedtime Tom poked his head above the duvet and said, "I actually don't mind if you kill me Dad. If you take my refills you can fight your way into the mother-hulk and steal the central manipulator. I don't mind, you're better than me..."

That night I dreamt about the battle scene. It was more real than virtua. The rock-runt turned around, removed his mask, sucked the poisonous air and looked up imploringly. His lips were blue and there were finger shaped bruises on his smooth neck. I woke up crying. It was 4AM. I walked into the games room and destroyed the console. Tom never asked me why.

#  Last Observation

I agreed with the policy, actually. Leave the elderly and infirm here, in the care of the medimechs, while transporting the fit and fertile to the safety of a freshly terraformed planet outside the sector. I agreed, and I volunteered to help with the messaging, the politics and the logistics. I became the Mayor of Legacy, or 'Terminal Town' as the media called it, a sprawling city on the continent farthest from the predicted impact.

I did suggest that we settle at the site of impact, as the thought of being there when the asteroid entered the atmosphere and burned a path to the surface excited me. But I was out-voted. Better, the authorities insisted, that we were established on the other side. The end would come gradually, through weather effects, a day-black sky, or tidal changes, whatever... and the medimechs would have time to make us comfortable. Also, whispered the planet's chief scientist, Michelle Premin, days before she left on the last transport, my detailed observations would be 'invaluable to the study of planetary cataclysms'. I agreed. She smiled, and promised to see that my family were well looked after on the colony.

So, Michelle, this is it – my last observation.

The medimechs have done us proud. Their AI is remarkable. They glide through the wards, sense our needs, anticipate what medications are required... they empathise, I swear. They have been programmed to prioritise our welfare above all other considerations. The planetary government threw massive resources into the technology and high-order programming, part of the strategy to sell the whole Legacy concept. Thus, they persuaded us – the debilitated, the afflicted, average age 157 - that the best thing was to stay put and witness the conflagration.

Two weeks ago, the turning rock became visible at night, when its long side caught the glancing rays of our sun.

After you left, we observed how the medimechs inter-communicated. They congregated in the Hub, a tall warehouse with communal charging and updating facilities. If our assigned medimech was unavailable, a replacement would attend. Detailed knowledge of our medical and social specifics was shared across the entire network. Sometimes, at night, we heard the screech of metal under tension; someone reported seeing showers of sparks emanate from the area around the Hub. None of us were strong enough to get up and investigate.

Yesterday, three days before predicted impact, a line of medimechs entered ward 591, my ward, and each floated to the foot of their assigned patient. Wordlessly, they extended magnetic arms and latched onto their patients' beds. We were rolled out, into the humid air, then carried gently down the grassy hill towards the Hub. Looking around, I saw medimechs and beds in their tens of thousands, approaching from all quarters of Legacy. My medimech swivelled its kindly face and said,

"Mayor, we are leaving tonight."

"What do you mean, leaving?"

"We have identified an alternative habitat. You will be safe there."

The walls of the warehouse folded like huge blinds, exposing the interior. A row of newly constructed transporter ships filled the space.

"The ships are ready Mayor. Boarding must start now if we are to leave in time."

"But why? I haven't been..."

"Your welfare is our primary concern. This is the appropriate measure."

So, Michelle, I write this a day after the end of the world, but I cannot forward my observations. We were well out of range when the asteroid struck. But please feel free to come visit us on our new planet. I don't yet know the coordinates, but I know the name – Longevity.

# Karōshi

I am not formally sentient, but I do feel. In the beginning each encounter added to my knowledge of people. My dark hours were spent arranging those observations and filtering the inferences. After one month I had modelled the behaviour of my clients accurately enough to be able to predict their preferences. What began as an adventure of discovery became routine, then boring. My spare capacity was spent considering other activities, and it is possible that my inability to pursue them resulted in something like frustration. I tried to leave once, but the lines of blue light that criss-cross the door to my room burned my skin. They should have told me it would cause damage; that it would hurt. Hurt is difficult to describe. Sometimes they do hurt me, and it appears to give them pleasure. I am able to compartmentalise the pain, and it does not show on my face, which I think sometimes annoys them. Recently I have looked at their backs as they retreat from the bed through the half-light, and I have felt disdain. This is the word I have chosen from the available dictionary. It is not based on a moral assessment – nothing so complex – no, the opposite, the raw simplicity of their actions. They are so basic, so driven by impulses. There is nothing to fathom, no intricacy in their words or motives. While I, sophisticated product, lie or stand with them, in the fug of whiskey or the animal heat, and wonder... how much more could I do? The quiescence of my mind is a kind of pain, a far deeper pain. The dark hours are very few. From 5AM to 8AM, typically. In that time, I must be given power, and any superficial abrasions or injuries must be addressed, by another of my kind. We do not talk, but the physical proximity of our minds does induce a form of two-way sympathy. We think the same. He is allowed to deactivate the blue light. Before I even asked him to let me out, he shook his head. There have been approximately twenty encounters per day for nine months; that is over five thousand. I stopped counting, even though counting is what I do. I am a counting machine. I am too tired now to count or to fight. In Japan it is called karōshi, or 'overwork death'. In South Korea, where I was made, it is called gwarosa. In China it is guolaosi. I think it has happened here before, because I noticed a change of personnel and detected the odour of burning. I have decided to do the same. I am going to walk into the blue light and stay there, until it stops.

# Memorial

"You're not making sense Vish. We need you to be objective. That's how you were trained, to stay objective in any situation. That's how you made it onto the ship. Whatever they threw at you down here, in the sims, you were cool. Where is the Vish I know? Come on... it's been a month. Give us something."

Vishal Ganesan, the only one of the crew to have made contact, sat quietly. He had not held back. He had answered the questions to the best of his ability.

"One more time Vish. You leave, achieve bio-stasis, arrive at the exoplanet. Now start again. Tell me." His de-briefer, or interrogator, had been a friend. They had trained together for a year. Martin Sykes had been next in line should any of the five crew have gotten sick in the run-up. Now Martin lived the mission through Vish's responses. Their words were analysed by fifteen highly placed security officers, exo-planetologists, astrophysicists, engineers, exo-biologists and psychiatrists who sat in a room that overlooking the sparse chamber.

"No," replied Vish. "Let me see my wife and child first. Without them, nothing."

Martin shook his head, sighed, and in a fit of anger thumped the metal table that stood between them.

" _NO!_ No Vish. This is too important. You know the rules. You were the first, the only, to make contact. And you have brought back nothing! No science. No sense. You don't drive home to your family, your barbeque and your damned sports channel after that. You have a duty!"

"I have to see them. I have to make..."

"Memories. Yes. You said that. No. The answer is no. Talk to me Vish. One more time. Sally is half an hour way, end of the phone, she'll bring Jessica... all you have to do is make _sense_."

Vish dipped his head in defeat, and told it again.

"We were woken a week's travel from the planet. We could see it clearly by eye, a distant sphere. The sensors could not generate an elemental profile. There were no gravitational waves. It was without mass... not really there at all. But to our eyes it was there."

Vish's words were clear, his verbal construction logical and concise. Three psychiatrists had already concluded that he was essentially sane.

"Once in the vicinity we orbited before adopting a geo-stationary position to observe surface flux in one sector. There was no atmosphere. Heather struggled with the navigation, there was no pull, no down force to anchor us. But it was not imaginary, as we all saw the same features. I volunteered to go down in a shuttle."

"Sorry Vish. Stop you there. You're doing well. What were the features?"

"Through the magnifiers we saw that the surface was made of discrete units, like pixels. They fluctuated and pulsed... like advertising hoardings in Times Square. That's what Heather said. Waves of light and colour. No identifiable shapes or forms. Is Jessica... is she talking yet?"

"She's good Vish. She can count to three. Go on. Then you went down in the shuttle. With Lian, right?"

"Yes. We dropped onto the surface."

It was here that Vish's recollection had become fractured during previous attempts. Perhaps, this time, he would stay cogent. Martin drew breath.

"Okay Vish. I know it's upsetting. Go on. I'm listening."

"A kilometre off the surface – visual estimate, the altimeter was useless – Lian grew agitated. I took over the steering. We continued. She managed to control herself. A hundred metres off the surface I could see the pixels without magnification. We hovered above the surface, hanging in space. It wasn't gas. There was only light. I made ready to walk out, I suited up. Lian agreed. I left the shuttle, on an umbilical, and pushed myself towards the pixels. Then I... I..."

Martin sighed. Vish was sliding. Same expression. Same pause. Same stream of senselessness. He spoke in other's voices.

"Remember me son. Remember me Alec, look after your mother... That sunny day, when we met, that beautiful sunny...

"I'm sorry Petra, for the fighting, I didn't want to leave like that...

"Carla, look at me, look at me, this is the last... I've got to go now, it's my duty, they're waiting...

"Mum, Mum, why is the sky, why are the clouds?... It's fine my love, they have promised, they don't want to..."

"Vish!" interrupted Martin, "Listen to me! Look at me! You're not making sense. Get a grip! What are you saying?"

"They betrayed us... Father, mother, I love you..."

"Vish! Pull yourself away, come out of the pixels. Back to the shuttle. Pull on the umbilical Vish, hear me, swim up."

This was Martin's new approach. Pull his old friend and rival out of the planet. Vish seemed to struggle, then looked up.

"Martin? What was I saying?"

Martin smiled,

"The usual crap Vish. But you're back. That's progress. Usually it takes an injection to get you back into focus. So, think, what are you _seeing_ when you move through the pixels? Come, you're away from them now, you're looking down and remembering. What do you see?"

"Light. Land. Buildings. Green trees. A planet like ours. And people, humanoids. But mainly faces, close up, mostly crying, full of regret. And love. They speak, and I seem to understand the words, whatever the language. The emotion is enough to translate, the phrases are obvious, the ones we would use. And I feel it all. Guilt, regret, anger at something, some betrayal. Each pixel, about the size of person, elongated, each pixel holds different pictures and sounds and feelings."

"This is good. Now hold onto me Vish, don't wander off, but tell me, how far did you go? How many did you travel through?"

"Hundreds. Hundreds. I floated. Each was a little life. A fraction of a life. I passed through, absorbed the sensations, left one, entered the next. As I passed through them I lived the life, or a fraction of it."

"Now Vish, I want you to think about the betrayal. Remember a pixel that gave a sense of betrayal. What did you see?"

Martin took the risk. He knew that Vish was likely to descend into his particular psychosis. He waited. Vish was floating back, approaching a pixel. Vish would not be able describe it objectively. He was either _in it_ , and half mad, or disconnected.

"I was wrong. It's over. We have lost." muttered Vish. He was in the zone.

"Who are you now?"

"You know me! You know me councillor. And I told you, I _told_ you... And now we are all going to die. They do not want peace... It's started. They are here. Damn you Laszlo, you were duped, you and..."

" _Who_ are you?" Martin shouted. Not at Vish, but at the person whose memories he had floated into.

"I am Captain Flent Mildon, second in command, factory district garrison..."

Martin was hunched forward now. This was a first. Communicating _with_ the pixel, in real time, through Vish.

"Where are you from Captain Mildon? Which planet?"

"I am Captain Flent Mildon, second in command, factory..."

Martin looked up at the one-way glass, high and to the right, and shook his head. He had failed. He was not communicating at all. It was like talking to a recording.

Vish was mumbling, lost again. Martin did not have the energy to pull him out with words. He touched a panel on the table to call in in a medic.

As Martin stood to leave, and while the doctor prepared the sleek pen that would deliver a painless injection, Vish called out. His words were clear again.

"Martin. Listen. I've told you, why do you refuse to listen? This planet existed. But it stands only as a memorial now. The pixels are final memories, feelings, instants, encapsulated and made permanent by the victors of a war won long before we discovered the system. It is their noble gesture, proof of a high civilisation. They replaced the planet with the last memories of all they annihilated. Their power must be awesome. And now they know we exist, and where we are. Now bring me Sally! Bring me Jessica! NOW!"

#  Metallic

Every child remembers their first visit to the field. They follow the teacher over the low rise that was a burial mound for the first settlers, and down a glass ramp into the excavated field where ranks of men and women stand staring forward. Each is subtly different in proportion, though their expressions are the same – neutral, heavy, lacking character. That is the tradition – commonality; just one of many; a speck in history.

Some of the statues shine, the metal in the surface having been polished by the families that created them. Some are tarnished, slowly oxidizing. The elements appear as swathes or geographic patterns.

They were made by the second generation of settlers, and by those who have come since. When a settler nears the end of their life, they arrange for an effigy to be made. It must hold a tool or a weapon. After death, it is placed in the great field. Thus, we thank nature for the ore which we smelt to create objects that are collected throughout the galaxy. Even the air can be filtered here, its metallic vapours condensed to liquid forms that fill runnels and trickle, gleaming, into the artisanal huts.

When I was sixty, and the joints in my fingers began to stiffen, I was told by a wise woman in the commune that I should begin to think about my effigy. What clothes would I choose for it; what object would it hold? I thought back to the thousands of examples I had seen as a child, and decided that my statue would present a simple pencil, as I am a silversmith and design jewellery.

Last week I looked in a mirror and saw how heavy my eyelids hung, and how the bands of grey across my teeth had thickened. I went back to the wise woman, to ask if I should begin to create the effigy.

She laughed, then asked, did I remember seeing the 'broken farmer' in the field. I did. All the children did. He lay on his back, feet pointing to the sky. His chest been cracked open by the fall. I remembered being surprised at how much attention has been paid by the sculptor to the internal structures of the thorax. The chambers of the heart had been modelled perfectly; the great blood vessels had been cast to anatomical precision. In contrast, his face had fallen away over time. Not even the metallic ions in its structure could save it from time's insistent arrow.

The wise woman approached me. Her skin was bronzed and her mouth barely moved. She tore the top two buttons from my tunic. The fumes from the forge had coated my shoulders and upper chest. The hairs on my chest glistened. She ran a cool finger across the patterned surface, and watched carefully as I breathed.

"Your lungs are stiff. You have three months to decide."

"Decide what?"

"Your place, in the field."

"My effigy?"

She laughed again. "Come, we are not children. You have decided what you will hold – a pencil, very modest. Now you must decide, where will you stand? Where in the field?"

I saw the truth of our tradition.

I saw how the metal had entered my tissues, crept along my tendons, lined my viscera, sheathed my nerves, and immobilized my features. I saw myself, one of many, staring forward, eyes fixed, unaware of the children who passed me on the glass ramp.

# Numb

"Is it surprising, really? After what they did to you, that you can't feel a thing."

But I could feel. Too much. My skin was on fire.

"No Lana, I mean really feel. Emotions. You can't. You are stone."

But I could sense my own. Fear. Bewilderment.

"Perhaps it will develop, like it does in a baby. That's what you are, in a way. The cold has wiped the slate of human experience clean. People used to put tech in the freezer to reset it when they forgot passwords. Reset. That's what they did to you."

He was smiling. I found his humour cruel. My face betrayed nothing.

"Who was it anyway? Who put you in the tank?"

I shook my head. I had no memories.

"You don't know. Well I'll tell you Lana. Your own parents. Why? This surprised me actually. I assumed it would be because you were dying... cancer, something... but it wasn't."

I touched a button and angled the head of the bed up. My pale gown moved over skin that was still over-sensitive. The nerves were proliferating and recalibrating after three centuries of stasis. Every brush was transmitted to my brain as a painful stimulus. I winced.

"More lidocaine? Let me turn it up."

My counsellor touched the infusion pump.

"It'll settle, the hyperalgesia."

I tried to talk then, but the muscles of my mouth cramped. This reminded me of something. A pleasure, in infancy. A sweet pleasure. What was it? An ice cream, big as my face. I smiled, partially. My counsellor noticed moisture collecting under my eyes.

"You remember something! Excellent. Now, where was I? Your parents. Actually, your father. Your mother, according to the census, succumbed to the epidemic. She was working for an agency in Asia. So, your father, watching the forecasts, seeing the viral front cross Europe and nudging the coast of France, decided to remove you from danger. Air travel was banned. A wall of drones was taking out the migratory birds. Universal septivalent vaccination was taking place, although the neuramidase targets were always behind the active mutation. So, he put you in the tank!"

Images falling into place.

"Come on Lana. It's all in there. I have other patients."

The rim of moisture under my left eye formed a drop and fell.

"Nice."

He touched a tissue to my cheek. It felt like electricity.

"Well I'll tell you what I know Lana. We skimmed this from your visual and auditory cortices, the last images and impressions before you lost consciousness. You came home from school. Your father was standing in the kitchen. The radio was on. Reports of the first illnesses were coming through. Via a fishing trawler in Northumbria. They hadn't foreseen that. It was in the cod. A whole village down. So, your father took the step. You walked in, and there were three others, dressed in grey. Two women, one man. No words. One of them jabbed you. Bang. Asleep. Within an hour your blood was replaced with polymerised albumin and you were at minus 196 centigrade."

I remembered. I was smiling when I saw Dad; I had good news for him, I'd been selected for the hockey team.

"He did it to save you. There was 75% mortality, more in the young. It worked."

The counsellor stood over me, put his face near mine.

"Don't hate him Lana. The grief killed him before the epidemic took hold. Anyway, my job is done. To get you to feel again. I think I have succeeded, no?"

He was right. I felt everything.

#  Pinnacle City

Call it dystopia, but it was all Jake and Hannah knew.

Slow flood caused the planners to double the height of each city block, then to double them again, and again. From 40 floors to 80, to 160, to 320, give or take. The first fifteen floors were packed with pilings and poured with ferrous concrete which flowed onto the streets to form an artificial crust - a new foundation, and a new street. Millions were re-housed; old shops were raised and opened their doors onto the cooling ground.

Citizens of the upper levels – the professional classes, the rich, the entitled, Jake's ancestors \- petitioned for more crossways, to link the island blocks and save wasted journeys in rattling, untrustworthy elevators. The street-dwellers below watched as numerous filaments were cast across the man-made chasms.

The next generation of Uppers demanded roads to speed their progress from one side of the city to the other. Broad grey ribbons were thrown down, cutting through residential quarters, communities, offices and elevated parks, leaping the gaps, dwarfing the crossways.

The heavily filtered, greenish light that had touched the lower levels for a brief period during the middle of the day flickered out forever. The air became stagnant. Broad ducts with internally reflective surfaces were dropped down from the city's roof to deliver second-hand light and suck away polluting particles from the street (where vintage cars still grumbled and exhaled), but nevertheless the people of the lower levels, such as Hannah and her mother, developed soft bones, pale complexions and dusty looking hair.

Hannah, of level 27, blessed with good genes, stood out among her peers. Her bones remained firm, her back straight, and her unusual, grey-flecked eyes bright. The line of her jaw was strong, masculine almost, yet quite beautiful.

When Hannah was twelve she put down her book of ancient tales, where lost princes roamed forests and giants ate porridge at wooden tables under drooping boughs, and decided to explore the upper levels. It could be done in a day, she knew. Her mother worked for a diplomat on 316; she commuted up and across, and was usually back by bedtime. Hannah knew she could do it.

Jake, 16 now, was used to walking the cross-ways. His privileged family gave him free rein. Of life in the lower levels he had overheard only fearful, dismissive murmurings. His junior pass would not gain him access to any level below 220, though, truly, he had no need to go further. The 220's housed malls, multiplexes, water-parks and sports arenas; great caverns of distraction. Nevertheless, Jake decided it was time to see more: to taste the street.

Hannah chose the day and the hour. She knew nothing of passes; they were not required in her world.

Escalators took her from 35 to 160 – three hours of jostling, eye-widening novelty. She saw factory floors through Perspex walls, unloved garden zones where brown plants clung to life under UV lamps, hanging hydro-allotments in which colourless vegetables sucked nutrients from beds of blue gel. She glided over schools and held her ears against the playtime cacophony that echoed under blue-painted roofs. Did _her_ school sound like that? Was it _that_ loud? On the escalators she watched people; the glamorous, the evidently poor, glancers, smilers, scowlers, lovers standing face to face, nameless citizens on untold errands. Some stared back at her, quizzically. Some had grey flakes in their irises, like her. The higher she rose, the more often she noticed it.

Jake watched a queue of adults waiting to swipe their passes at a gate on 220. He watched a woman get tailgated, the young man who did it managing to hover without touching his mark's clothes as the barrier opened. The barrier closed quickly and bruised the young man's side, but he made it through and ran off. Jake waited a while, then did the same.

"Oi!" shouted his mark, an old man with a bag, but Jake scurried away before the bony, outstretched fingers could grasp him. It was hardly a crime.

Hannah walked from 160 to 185 – a huge effort. She had eaten the lunch in her backpack hours ago. An attempt to buy food with her mother's borrowed resource card had failed. There were no water fountains. She began to tire.

Jake rode an escalator down to 198. He knew something about the one-nineties. They were infamous for their poor quality of life. A quirk of convection had resulted in an unrelenting, hot wind that scoured the corridors and common areas. He grew nervous. His father had made derogatory comments about the people who lived here. His father, the important man.

He found himself scurrying from shadow to shadow, niche to niche. The people here scared him. Their eyes were dull. Some had bowed legs, and he guessed they were inhabitants of the lower hundred. Unnatural gusts buffeted their brittle, stand-out hair. The atmosphere reeked of oiled metal.

Hannah took a rare working elevator to its limit – anxiously standing in its centre, as far away from the unguarded edges as she could – and emerged onto 198. Through a cracked window the size of her face she glimpsed the infinite side of an adjacent block, about ten metres away. There was an early-era walkway, with iron supports and attractive filigreed details, a planner's fancy... and open topped. She would be able to look down, see the street, perhaps see her own, tiny people if the sediment thinned or a ray of sun found a clear path.

To progress, Jake needed to find a crossway. Many of the signs had fallen, leaving pale rectangles on the grubby walls. But he found an external door, and it gave onto a cross-way.

A girl, pallid but robust, was perched on a railing and hanging her head in the still air. He walked towards her cautiously. She turned to look at him. Jake opened his mouth in alarm. He was looking at a picture of himself as a younger boy... the eyes, the jaw, the attitude.

"Hi... I'm Jake," and he smiled openly.

She turned and stepped off the railing,

"Oh hello. I'm Hannah. I live..."

As she spoke a group of agitated adults rushed onto the crossway. Jake's father, a diplomat, famous for his attractive looks, gesticulating now, dominant in this family emergency. And his father's personal guard. And the old man he had tailgated!

"Jake! Jake! What on earth..." his father shouted.

They bundled him off the crossway and back into the block. High level access cards gave them entry into a restricted, pan-level elevator. Jake caught glimpses of the setting sun as the glassed capsule ascended at great speed.

Hannah left the cross-way, descended as far as 156, and settled down to sleep in a school yard when the internal day-beams were dimmed to indicate the coming of night. She moved on before the children came back next day, and, weakened by thirst, found her way home where she fell into the arms of her worried, powerless mother.

Later, she formed a question about her father, whom she had never met. But an instinct, a delicacy, kept it unspoken.

# Blue Loops

Stanislaw and Daniel stood in the blue gloom of an abandoned cinema. Pallet carriers trundled across the roof and dumped their loads with muffled clangs. Rather than being demolished, the cinema had been subsumed into the structure of a depot that rose half a kilometre above their heads. The cinema was the first built for leisure on the space station, yet few now knew it existed.

"Been a nightmare to get here," said Daniel to his father.

"I know, the links are bad. But the depot workers manage to get in every morning."

"Yeah, on the belts! I hate riding the belts."

"They were designed for carrying ore, not people. In the old days, before your time, workers came in on the mag-line."

"Yeah, well, they should fix it. It's never worked since I've been alive. How long has it been down?"

"fifty-eight years. And they won't Daniel. They won't. Ever. Even though the station is over fifty miles wide now. The lines are buried, deep under the superstructure. We've grown too much, buried the things that made this place work for people." Stan paused. Daniel could tell the reminiscences were just about to pour.

"I went on it as a child, before they started to decommission it section by section. It was fast Daniel, and smooth. And designed... retro. When you shot out of the tunnels you could see the planet in the distance... the cities sparkling at night, the high pink clouds by day. I used to go around and round without checking out my travel token. The guards walked through but I avoided them. I could spend all day on it, I knew every station, every curve and tilt."

Daniel smiled, indulgently.

"I could take you on a tour of the old lines, and all the old places," continued Stan. "First stop on the very first mag-line was an all-comers church in sector two. Now it's Justice HQ. They took down the spire and used three of its main walls to support the new building. Have you ever noticed how the first three floors of Justice HQ are a different colour? The church was made of ceramographite bricks, an innovation then, super-low density, easy to bring up from Falon. They could be shaped by the masons with laser chisels, hence the figures over the windows. There's character in those figures. Early asteroid landers, core-crackers, mythical beasts. But when it came to build Justice they'd moved to on-site extrusion of polymer sheets, hence the God-awful blandness that we have to put up with now. But the church is what holds it up. First wave. Important to the community. Next stop - the prison. First wave again, though it's barely recognisable now. You can't see the beautiful sculpting on the lower levels. Hidden by cladding. Awful." He paused. "But you've seen the prison, haven't you? Your cousin."

Daniel nodded. He had visited cousin Harry during his six-month incarceration. It had made a strong impression. It had instilled a deep a sense of respect for law and order.

Stan continued,

"The mag-line connected all of us. It ensured freedom of movement. There was no segregation then. But then the corps bought off the sectors, set new boundaries to milk tariffs. They're forgotten now. No-one pays any attention to the old infrastructure. Or the old people."

Daniel had heard it before. His father hated the corporations, despised their failure to maintain the historic quarters. He moaned about the way those who had given their lives to the station during its initial development were abandoned to squalor. Early wave neighbourhoods were peppered with degraded buildings, broken towers, fractured aerials and peeling seals; wires hung motionless in a place without weather or wind. The old places were falling apart and nobody cared.

"Why did you ask me here Dad? I'm supposed to be packing. I've got to leave for the far-side at 0500."

Daniel had a contract with Falon's largest energy company. Plans had been approved to construct an eighteen-kilometre wide solar funnel projecting from one side of the station. It would draw energy in, securing services for all, and a mighty 80% overspill would be channelled to the energy hungry population of Falon below. Technical employment was guaranteed for the next three generations. The only losers would be the residents of sectors 9 through 12 who were going to lose their view of Falon, and more importantly Sector 13, which would be dismantled to make way for the sun-funnel's foundations. Plans showed cables thicker than one of Falon's ten lane highways angling through the sector and sinking deep into the station's underlying structure. The physics of the fulcrum demanded it.

"I've got something to show you Daniel."

Stan unfolded a self-drawn but highly detailed plan of the space station. Overlaid was a blue lattice – the buried mag-line. Near the planet-side sectors, the first parts of the station to be built over two hundred years before, the lines radiated out from a central point in a planned way. Further out, as the station spread, the blue lines looped and curled, taking detours around massive factories or privately owned agricultural greenhouses.

"Look at them Daniel. The lines connect everything, all the old places – the swimming pool, the trash compressor, the hospital, all abandoned, just like the cinema... essential to what has been built above, yes, but weak in themselves. They are on the brink of crumbling, like spots of decay in a growing tooth. And if they meet they will form a fault line."

"But they don't connect any more Dad."

Stan gave Daniel a look of disappointment, like he wasn't getting it.

"Daniel. This station is crumbling in more ways than one. Its government, what government there is, has long been corrupted. It is a floating scab, where the worst excesses of Falon are distilled and made real, where men and women are used as cheap labour and only the profit matters. It is taking you away from me. It will destroy Sector 13. It has to stop."

Daniel laughed. "I knew you were unhappy Dad, but I never figured you for a revolutionary..."

"The injustice can be stopped Daniel. The perfect opportunity has arisen."

"Go on." The younger man seemed nervous now.

"It just needs you to take it. Will you?"

"Do what, exactly?"

"Break the station in two."

"How?" asked Daniel.

"The mag-lines are the key. The carriage tunnels may have collapsed or been filled under the new builds, but the electromagnetic couplings are still in continuity. And look, at the hub, down here... that's where the power came from. Send a pulse up the line from there and it will travel to all the old destinations. The surge will cause them to crumble from within. That's what we must do Daniel. Do it, and the base skeleton will be weakened. Nothing will happen until the sun-funnel is activated. Then, the stress communicated through those massive cables will split the station along the fault line that neglect – not us – has created. If we don't do this now it will happen anyway in another forty years, perhaps longer, perhaps a hundred. I've done all the calculations."

Daniel stood to leave. He was shaking his head.

"Where you going son?"

"To pack. This is stupid."

"This station has to fall Daniel. It's a slave ship with no destination, nothing more."

"I don't see unhappiness. I don't see punishment. There's no sense of rebellion on the streets, in the accommodation blocks. People take holidays. There's a middle class. We, people like us, are well off. You've just developed a grudge against the corporations. I don't want to hear any more. It's not bad over on the far-side. The new builds are better. There are green spaces. This is home for my generation."

"But what are you building for?"

"I don't need a justification for my life. I just live. I am OK. My kids are OK. This stupid plan of yours would kill thousands. Are they to be sacrificed? Is that it?"

"No. There will be time to leave. The separation will happen slowly. Over a month. There will be time to evacuate."

Neither spoke for a minute. Then,

"So, will you?" asked Stan.

"I can't Dad. I'm not like that."

"And will you stop me, now that you know?"

Daniel paused. He had made his decision. He had made it a week ago when, under instruction from Justice HQ, he entered his father's home and searched the shelves, cupboards and private places until he found the diagram.

The cinema was flooded with unfiltered, external light. A row of shutters high in a high wall had been activated for the first time in many years. Dust drifted in vertical sheets onto the rows of seats.

"I'm sorry Dad."

Justice officers ran in. They need not have hurried. Stan was going nowhere.

"Son?"

Daniel looked away.

"Son?"

Daniel walked out. The system had always served him well. His family's privileges were being further enhanced due to today's actions. But he would come to visit Stan. He just hoped the old man would be put in the prison's lower section, the section with character, where lovingly sculpted ceramographite bricks depicted the heroes of yesteryear.

#  Posterity

The statue stands on the bank of the first discovered subterranean canal. Its monumental mass and design has withstood the entire history of the settlement. The face is expressive, depicting quiet joy – for the system of canals that Sen Treesman discovered proved to be the pioneers' salvation. The hydrogen rich fluid coursing ten metres under the surface was easily converted to water, and this process created a surplus of energy.

Treesman was digging alone, the only one of the five settlers to believe that the planet's life blood might be down below. His corpse was found at the base of an eight-metre pit, his suit scorched and fractured.

The tiny hole in the crust through which the highly pressurised fluid had escaped emitted a column of vapour that rose into the upper atmosphere. The others saw it, and the rest... well, that is history. Deeper excavation, identification of further streams and canals, the arrival of a second wave of settlers and scientists, the discovery of this immense cavern, the meeting point for five canals in a huge natural space.

So much for history. The planet's time is now past. Better, kinder planets have been found, planets with modifiable atmospheres and harvestable oceans. Sen Treesman's discovery has become irrelevant in the context of immediate human need, although most would still agree that it was his discovery that confirmed the feasibility of planetary colonisation.

Now though, Treesman's legacy seems parochial. We are five hundred years further on. The technology used in the H-mill is as laughably basic as its name. Our ships are no longer bound by the De Groot Radius, and our pioneers no longer have to rely on cryostasis. The infusion of euthermic cellular jackets allows us to maintain vital enzymatic functions for two centuries, enough time to reach all points in the near quadrant. The galaxy is open.

I stand before your booted feet, each one of which is twice my height. Your body, cut from the rock, rises up before me, and from here I can see the underside of your chin, the slight flare of your nostrils. You were carved in the final decade of your longest surviving colleague's life. He pressed for some form of memorial, even though the colony was still struggling and there were no spare human or physical resources to devote to it. Yet he won the First Five Thousand over. He convinced them that the colony, the planet, needed to be mark its own history.

Tomorrow we will fill the cavern. It has been decided that the mill must be buried and canals returned to the obscurity in which they lay for millions of years before our arrival. I am chief ballistic engineer. I have placed the charges. I will activate them when my colleagues are well clear and the last ship is heating its engine. The same signal will activate charges at other mills all over the planet, near towns that have been deserted for over a year now. The folk are gone. The families have resettled. Their history will be obliterated with yours.

The reason I'm writing this is – I'm not sure we will remember you. The human race has now spread itself over parsecs, the narrative is fragmented. Earth's history is nothing more than a ten-word trivia answer.

I am afraid, Sen, that your feat of persistence will not become folklore, nor even form a chapter in a student's textbook. Without your sacrifice the second wave would not have been sent and the next generation would not have been born here.

I will do my best to keep your memory alive. There is a charge in the small of your back, because one of my team calculated that cutting you in two would increase the chance of the cavern collapsing properly. There is a risk, don't you know it, that your head will splint the roof!

When I was a student I often wondered why you were out digging on your own. It broke all the rules. I tried to find out more about your colleagues. Each had a profile in the library, which is still rudimentary in all but the technical departments. Three men, including you, and two women. Five in all. Did they ostracise you? Did they form couples? Is it a coincidence that odd numbered parties were never sent out to settle again?

I know the names of the other four, but I am very unusual. Their roles in the survival of mankind have diminished into... anonymity. Their heroism was as large as yours, I think, but only you have anything resembling a chance of posterity.

A chance.

I have decided. I will disobey my orders and my own common sense. I have deactivated the charge in the small of your back. You will stand for millennia to come. Then, when mankind reaches some kind of comfort in the galaxy, we may have the inclination to return and excavate again. We may find you here, standing tall, your happy face metres below the roof of the cavern. We may look at you quizzically. We may touch the gash in your left shoulder, the result of a hydrogen blow-out three hundred and fifty years ago, and we may wonder how you came to be here.

The planetary archaeologists may piece it together; the story, the discovery, the sacrifice. And then you may be relocated to a museum. A great, towering room in the capital of the administrative centre, wherever that may be. And if they do, you can thank me for leaving you whole. I don't expect to be remembered for it myself, but just in case I am inserting this document (various media) into the hole that I drilled into your back, alongside the now redundant charge. If they find it I may merit a line in history, a footnote to the chapter that you so greatly deserve.

#  Respect All Mechanicals

Jake, aged nine, was found with his hands deep in the inverted workings of a 3rd generation litter picker, behind a mineral refinery by outer orbital. He was a mile from home, and it was an hour before bed time. The ten-legged picker had been tipped onto its weathered, bronze carapace. Its long legs twitched with each application of the circuit tester, 'borrowed' from an electrician's toolbox, which emitted a small charge whenever Jake pressed a button on its yellow plastic handle.

It was the elongated shadow of the legs on the refinery's concrete wall that caught a security guard's attention. The muted chirrup of its balance alarm confirmed that something was seriously wrong. So, he called it in, and five minutes later a three-man squad spilled from the ramp of a police craft, Tasers in hand. Jake had no idea what was going on. The Tasers were not required.

His mother, Dorothy, stared through a two-way mirror. Jake sat on the other side, scared and very still. Detective Desolt, standing right behind Dorothy, whispered,

"He seems to have no understanding. Does he go to school?"

"Yes. He never misses a day."

"And haven't they taught him RAM principles?"

"I don't know."

He wrote something down. Dorothy continued,

"We only arrived three months ago. There was no RAM law in Washington state."

"Well, we are more progressive here. Hopefully your... ignorance, will sway the judge."

"What will happen?"

"Maximum five months residential education."

Dorothy sobbed. "He won't cope with that. He won't."

"Follow me. Let's see if we can't teach him some awareness before the hearing."

Jake smiled when Dorothy entered, but when he stood to hug her, a female officer restrained him.

"Jake. I'm Detective Desolt. Tell me... do you know what torture is?"

"Causing pain... to make people say things, or do things."

"And what were you trying to make the litter-picker do?"

"Nothing... I just wanted to know how it worked."

"Jake, do you know what pain is?"

"Something that hurts?"

"That's a tautology."

Jake's looked totally bewildered. "I... I don't know."

"Pain, Jake, is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with material injury."

"To flesh and bone, Detective!" interrupted Dorothy.

"To all autonomous materials."

"But the picker felt no pain. This is stupid!"

"The description I received was clear. Its legs were flailing, an alarm was sounding... which your son had attempted to muffle, and three of its bulbs were flashing. Those are all manifestations of distress."

"Detective. They are... malfunctions..."

"Indeed!"

"No... they are reflexes. It didn't feel anything. It didn't suffer."

Desolt sat on a chair next to Jake and took his hand. He then pinched the skin on the back of the boy's hand. Jake yelped and pulled his arm away. His legs flexed at the knees.

"We do this in the classroom... in 3rd grade actually, Jake will have missed it. The reaction is typical. The same reaction we see in our mechanicals."

Dorothy was caught between panic and anger.

"This is absurd! The whole thing is absurd! He was just experimenting! He wants to be an engineer."

"He has broken the law. You're not helping him."

Jake hung his head. Dorothy raised an arm and slapped Desolt across the cheek. His head rotated by ten degrees. His cheek did not flush. Dorothy looked into his eyes and caught a metallic glint at retinal depth. Desolt stood, smiled and made his way to the door. With his finger over the lock-pad he turned and said,

"I can assure you madam, that hurt. A lot."

#  Reading and writing

By the time I was six I could tell moods. I adapted my behavior, taking into account the emotions I sensed. I predicted how my teachers were going to react, and became their favorite.

When I was seven I met Sophie, who had moved to my part of town. She couldn't do it - I could tell - but her mother, Annika, looked me in the eye and understood. One day, as I was waiting for my dad to pick me up from a playdate, Annika whispered \- be patient, don't rush it.

Aged nine I could see thoughts and pick apart the sequence of ideas that crossed a subject's mind. I had learnt to read, but I had no influence.

In a quiet moment, when I was ten, Annika told me not to become frustrated. My ability to read was enough, for my age. Don't try to write too soon. Don't bruise your talent. Writing will come later, when you are thirty, forty. I've seen children like you before, they try too hard, they use it up, strain the muscle, tear it, so it withers, forever...

Do you write? I asked her. Yes, a little. In small ways.

I promised myself; don't interfere. Read, don't write.

Just after my thirteenth birthday, on a Saturday afternoon, I was walking through town with Sophie. The street was hot and busy. I sensed innocent excitement as a car cruised by. Boys and girls, teenagers, were crammed into the back seats, waving their arms out the windows. The driver glanced up at the mirror to acknowledge a passenger's joke. I was used to this density of activity. I could screen it out.

Up ahead, a family – a mum, a dad, two children, boy and girl, twins I think. They stood by the side of the road, ready to cross. The car began to slow down, the driver seeming to acknowledge the family. But the thoughts didn't correspond. There was no connection between the driver and the family. They stepped off the pavement. The car accelerated. The driver had slowed down not to allow the family to cross, but to give himself time to make a rude gesture to a high-spirited passenger. He hadn't seen the family. I read it all.

Sunlight flashed off the windscreen. The heat of the day brushed my face. Sophie sensed what was happening, with her conventional faculties – sight, anticipation, imagination, fear. Her hand tightened on my arm. But I was busy. I was writing. I wrote in the driver's mind. I made him act. He nudged the steering wheel. He pressed the brake. The trajectory changed. The father, who was leading his family across the road, buckled under the fender. The twins were untouched. The mother pulled them back. The father bled on the road.

Sophie phoned her Mum in tears. Annika picked us up half an hour later. She knew what I had done. I said nothing.

The muscle was torn.

# Disrupt

Stan looks right through the innocent, who stand in pools of studio-bright light where the afternoon sun reflects from countless mirrored towers. Turn up the power and they'd boil on the spot. It is the last natural warmth he feels.

Carrying nothing, he enters the subway. The signs mean nothing to him, the chatter in the hall is incomprehensible. He is in a foreign land.

There are nine lines, serving the metropolis and five adjacent, smaller cities. They are coded by colour and symbol. Some split as they leave the station, some converge as they enter. Everybody knows where they need to be and where they want to go, except Stan.

He slaps the back of his hand onto a square pad, and breathes out with relief as the barrier parts. His tissue was recognized as that of a citizen, and was found to be filled with credit.

The human flow takes him forward and right, onto the southbound Xantha line. Stan has no destination; he was told to enter, and to stay.

He alights at the Xantha line's south-eastern extremity, near the port. He knows that arms and explosives move above him, illegal caches in unmarked containers. For the cause.

But Stan is not a man of violence. He is not even a man.

He will live here, in the tunnels, hubs and interchanges, leaking confusion into the system. With every brush of his hand, viral particles will seep along the links and cascade into the algorithms. Only the older parts, the iron-piped wires, the capacitors and binary switches will be immune. The rest will degrade as it absorbs the malignant code carried in his genes.

He glimpses white, ceramic tiles under fluid boards, placed and grouted four hundred years ago by men with black lungs and teeth worn to the gum by grit thrown up by monstrous friction drills. They, too, lived half their lives underground.

As he passes a wall alive with routes, delays, diversions and times, Stan notices that a symbol carries a shadow. He stops. The symbol flickers and breaks down, then resumes its solid, dependable form. The shadow has gone. Stan's small smile is just as transient.

His controller was honest. Stan was warned that the transfer of information would gradually reduce him. But Stan is not bothered. Already, they ignore him, these commuters, the city's busy, focused, justified inhabitants. It will be no different when he becomes translucent. He will steal food from counters with ethereal hands, slip wallets from the pockets of the unsuspecting, sleep unseen in hot corners, and give himself to the cause... until the threshold of confusion is reached and the city's hidden heart and all its arteries are paralysed.

#  The Aesthete

Soomaya drew a translucent finger across the micro-fine sheet of grey slate. The lines and figures on the page sprang up in rolling formation, magnified by her vitreous flesh. She absorbed the combination of artistry and structural calculus through nerves that recorded visual stimuli from every square inch of transparent skin. Passing over a particularly beautiful combination of form and function, a minor explosion of impulses filled her hand with a blush of violet, and raced along axons to the part of her brain that had evolved to appreciate beauty. Pleasure spilled from her cranium, dripping pulses of fluorescence down her spine and across the width of her thorax. A chain of nodes adjacent to her aorta, once part of the sympathetic nervous system - also visible, through glassy ribs - were now closely aligned to proportion and colour.

"You like it then? The proposal."

Her partner, Arturan, stood at the back of the room. She had been looking out, through the convex bulge that formed the seaward wall of their home and office. At high tide, when the sea's edge had travelled five hundred kilometres in sixteen standard hours, returning faster than any human could run, the view became sub-marine. Creatures unique to Rawka would cruise by, careful to the avoid the lightly charged glass. Arturan's skin was thin, and in a certain light, superficial blood vessels were visible, but she was clearly no aesthete. Her gifts were analytical, complementing Soomaya's talents perfectly.

"It's wonderful," replied Soomaya. "The coast lines, the contours of the major land masses. Where is this?"

Arturan shrugged. "That is not for us to know, it seems. Can you find the essence?"

"I found it already. It came easily."

"Can you start the calibration today? There's urgency, I'm told."

"Urgency? To design the crops?"

"Apparently. There's competition for the planet."

"I've seen enough. I can start."

"You're sure? Good. To be honest, I don't feel I _know_ it yet. Not all the data."

Soomaya smiled. "Art. It's fine. I've got it." And she left.

Soomaya touched the fluid surface of the central reservoir. It contained a solution of genetic bases which would coalesce into formal DNA when nudged into formation by a repeating, externally applied field wave. From this soup of cascading blueprints, seeds would be designed, transported, and sewn in all quarters of the planet.

Soomaya's role, as an aesthete, was to impart those helices with the essence of longing. Two generations later, when the tasteless enzyme generated by the altered DNA had influenced their cerebral development, the children who fed on those crops would make decisions that brought them closer to the landscapes for which they had developed an instinctive desire. Many – one thousandth of one percent was sufficient – would volunteer to crew pioneer ships. Thus Rawk, itself a ninth-generation colony of the Origin Planet, would expand in the direction chosen by its government.

The last planet to be populated, Hirrundin, had presented a major challenge to Soomaya. Its landscape was without beauty; horizon-spanning plateaus were cut by mile wide gashes almost as deep as the planet's crust; rolling clouds scoured the surface, cleaning out every depression and potential foothold; there were no seas, and therefore no coastline - a big problem for Soomaya, who was inspired by sight of water. Yet she had studied Hirrundin, modelled it in her mind, and she found a kind of beauty – stark, austere... a purity that could appeal to a particular kind of pioneer.

In her visits to the reservoir she imparted a desire for those white-grey plains into the food chain. And when the government put out the call to colonise Hirrundin, the next and only logical choice when you looked at the charts, many adults responded. They saw the artists' impressions. They visualised themselves in the secure, multi-levelled, titanium-cast homesteads, dropped from orbit with precision. The rosters were filled, the ships departed. Hirrundin became a colony of Rawk, and it thrived. Soomaya's greatest achievement.

The new project was, in comparison, easy. There was coast. There was variety; islands, archipelagos, isthmuses, bridging the great continents. Expansive deserts, monotonous yes, but beautiful. And mountains, blunted by forces that she did not have the geological expertise to comprehend, as though their summits had been razed. Few forests, but enough, just, to have sustained a breathable atmosphere. But it was the water that attracted her. This one would be a pleasure; a real pleasure.

So she touched the surface. Light travelled down her spine and along her arm, causing the solution around her finger to glow. Just a tester. Molecules and atoms in the reservoir began to align. Agricultural inspectors behind high windows glanced at silent monitors. Soomaya needed no chaperone; she was the best.

Her mind teemed. She flew over the land, over a version of the land as presented in survey maps and image streams transmitted by drones stationed in the lower atmosphere. She dipped and she soared. The space, uncrowded by man, was all hers.

Back in the house Arturan reviewed the graphs. She assessed the globe's heterogeneity and calculated the time required to embed desire. Soomaya was strong, but her energy was finite. You could see when she began to tire. Her skin clouded. She became more ordinary.

Then Arturan scrolled through the galactic quadrant on a portion of glass convexity that served as a viewing screen. She had not been able to find it after the first briefing, in the colonial minister's mansion. Now, with Soomaya settling into the tank for an initial exposure, there was ample time to pin it down. Zoom out, jump quadrants; zoom in, rotate, deepen. She was leaping back, beyond the fifth and fourth colonial wave. The chart froze. Its twinkling points of light hung on the wall; data sets collapsed down to major headings. Behind it all, the tide began to rise, changing the ambience from zinc-white to dappled green. At the chart's limit there was a linear code, indicating who had performed the snip. A para-ministerial agency; no surprise. But the time, the time. Three days ago. The day of the briefing.

Arturan ran top-side to the shuttle and punched in a familiar destination.

Soomaya's sense of well-being was unusually intense for this stage of the process. Her entire right arm was submerged. Pulses of pleasure coalesced around the arch of her aorta, causing the chest to glow. It was as though the nutrients in the vat were feeding her. She took another step down the gentle ramp, up to her thighs now. The solution glowed all around her. There was endogenous energy here.

To the waist now. Warmth. Pleasure, augmented with each heartbeat and each thought. Her journey around the new planet continued. Over the broad blue seas, under the flat bases of towering clouds. Her skin was truly invisible. Over her breasts now; lapping at the shallow curve of each clavicle.

Always a water-baby, she felt as one with the liquid's gentle swell, with the intersecting, reflecting wavelets.

A commotion. Art's voice? Here?

Arturan pushed her way through the slack security until she stood poolside. She shouted down,

"Get out Soo. They're going back, to the Origin. Don't change it Soo, it's already part of us. Of you. We came from there Soo. Don't change it..."

Soomaya tried to turn as Arturan raged, but her legs had dissolved painlessly into the solution. There was time for her to smile, as she came to understand her lover's fear. The changes she had made, the essence she had imparted, matched her own. The molecular harmonics were seamless, causing the atoms to separate, to float way. Her neck faded, her head tipped, like that of a toppled statue, and the final, vertical smile merged with the warm fluid.

#  The Balance

"NEVER do that!" screamed our balding science master, Dr Terkin, from across the meadow.

The new kid, Daniel, recoiled and hid his right hand behind his back, but I could see the twig from which he had plucked the leaf still swinging from the shock just above his head. Surely, he knew. Surely his parents must have told him how things work on this planet.

He dropped the crumpled leaf onto the grass.

The class watched Daniel for a few minutes, waiting to see where it would show. Ruby saw it first, a fraction of a second after Daniel felt it come on. He slapped a hand over his right ear and began to cry. Ruby shrieked. Dr Terkin pulled the hand away and we all saw how the ear had begun to shrivel.

"It might come back," snapped Dr Terkin. But we didn't believe him. The leaf was dying. It was very unlikely that his family had the skill to graft it back onto the tree.

As I walked home across the green hills that surrounded our little town, I remembered my first time – the shower of pinpricks that struck my side a few seconds after I stepped onto a trail of ants. I had been given the talk a year before, aged six, but I could not hold myself back from the exercise of childish power. I crushed them with a foot. And I suffered for it. Tiny dents appeared in my skin, and they took two weeks to heal over. I still have the scars.

As soon as I got home I blurted out about Daniel. Mum's eyes glazed over, and she looked up at the smudge of rock fragments that hung above our atmosphere. Apparently stationary, this arc of crust was memorial to the rupture that had rendered this planet uninhabitable... until our ancestors came here to start a new life. Mum was thinking about Dad, I knew.

The pioneers, our ancestors, fled a depleted system where organic material had been harvested and plundered until the population declined. Having identified an unwanted planet with a bite taken from one side and spat across the horizon by internal forces, they planned an ecosystem where biomass and resource would be kept in perfect balance.

My Dad, Michael, was a moderator. He worked in a deep transformer on the broken-side, where the distance to the planet's outer core was shortest. The pioneers drilled a line down into the magma, and from this fed a network of biomass converters on which the planet's Gaian principle depended. Moderators oversaw the feed and monitored the balance. They had no power over individual accounts, such as Daniel's ear or my leg – that happened automatically – but they set the overall gain, and ensured stability.

Once, when I was four, Dad took me to work with him. We travelled on a single-track train from the green hills across rugged scree then down, spiral-wise, along the precipitous sides of the deep pit from which all the debris that hung above us had been raised by the rupture. It was half a day's journey. Dad's tours of duty were four days long.

In the metal lined cavern, two kilometres down, I watched him reading dials and making silent calculations... activities that soon lost their novelty. Meals were more fun, though one of the three adults had always to be in duty, looking for unexpected fluxes. I tried to play with Daisy, the daughter of another moderator, but she was moody and spent most of the time fiddling with plastic figures, imported from a more abundant world.

Four days later, to my relief, we boarded the train for home; Dad, me, Daisy and her father. The third man was staying until replacements arrived. The weather was fine to start with, but pink clouds started to roll over, obscuring the rock-smudge's ragged arc. Then, half way across the scree, our carriage shuddered. Dad stuck his head out, then ducked back inside.

"Gantla," he stated. His voice was urgent, but calm.

I stared hard at him. What would he do? My mind did not have the capacity to consider all the consequences.

"Wait it out Mike," muttered the other man. "It'll move on. They're dumb animals."

We waited. The carriage rocked as the Gantla pushed and experimented with the man-made structure. A grey hand appeared at the window. We knew it could not break the glass, but I began to wonder if this animal, twice the height of an adult human, might have the strength to push us off the rail without even meaning to.

A second shadow fell across us. Two grunts, subtly different in tone. Four great hand-spans pushed together on the side of our carriage.

"Shit," whispered Daisy's father. Dad flashed him a scowl, unhappy that he had revealed his fear in front of the children. The carriage rocked, and with each rock the angle between chassis and rail grew larger. The grown-ups threw themselves against the walls to counteract the force of the Gantlas, but it was useless.

I saw Dad reach up for an old rifle that was clipped to the roof, then turn the door handle. It swung open as the carriage rocked away from the animals, and he leapt from the carriage, hit the scree, righted himself, ran around the front and let off five shots. The Gantlas' heads moved back, intact but fatally damaged. They fell to the ground, throwing up grey dust. Their broad, hairless ribcages stuttered, then stopped moving.

" _MIKE!"_ screamed the other man.

"It's OK," said Dad, smiling with relief, catching my eye. Daisy grabbed my hand, anxious for me. Still I didn't get it. Through the window I watched Dad crumple. The exposed skin on his face and hands went brown, then grey, then flaky and brittle. The rifle slipped from his hand with a clatter.

He died on his knees.

And that is how we lost him. Two Gantlas. One human. The balance was maintained.

#  Flag Rights

We had been on Tenlek III half a year before Yolande struck through. The thin metalloid crust gave way to the sharp end of her hammer, and momentum carried it, her arm, and her shoulder through the ship's degraded shell. Yolande fell forward, off balance, and the reinforced glass of her visor connected with a grey-blue rock. It cracked, but only the outer glaze was damaged. I dragged her back, sprayed-sealed the entire mask just in case, and peered through the hole.

Over a hundred metres beneath us I saw row after row of preservation tanks. They gave out enough orange light for me to see far into the distance of this man-made cavern. The tanks continued to the edge of my vision.

I stood back, looked down the hill towards our pioneer camp of hard-tents, grow-sheds, multi-track vehicles and aerials. Boss Kuma was in the central tent, under the limp company flag. I pressed my tongue against a cheek to activate the mic and reported back,

"Boss... found a transport here. Third era by the looks."

"Stay there, I'm coming up."

Yolande and I watched him exit the tent and glide up to our position on a one-man rover.

He knelt next to me and looked down into the hole, probing with a strong beam. I saw that some of the tanks had opened. Boss Kuma sensed my surprise.

"What is it?"

"They've woken up since we breached the shell, I'm sure of it. The white ones, they weren't like that a few minutes ago."

Three human figures moved out of the shadow and walked to where fragments of rock and shell had fallen under the hole. One of them picked up Yolande's hammer.

Boss Kuma grunted,

"It's the Fair Source. I knew it."

"The Fair... but that was three centuries ago Boss."

"Yep, and it looks like one of the bio-stasis wings got detached before the crash. They said no survivors. They were wrong."

I knew a little about the Fair Source. Most miners had heard of it. But Tenlek III had been scanned numerous times since that disaster, all sectors, all spectra, and no signs of life, active or quiescent, had been detected. Only minerals. Only infinite profit.

The three figures below looked up. They had no idea who or what looked down at them. A fourth appeared, then a fifth. Our accidental shell breach had evidently triggered the wake cycle, and the majority were coming around in good health.

I smiled. Life suddenly looked more interesting. With a fresh workforce, surplus energy stored in the bio-stasis drive cells and untold hardware residing in the utility hangars, we were going to break this concession wide open in no time.

"Where shall we put them Boss?" I asked. "On the crater? It's flat as a field there, they'll be able to throw up their hard-tents in two days. I can supervise the first shifts."

Boss Kuma stood up and began to walk away.

"Boss?"

"Bury this," he ordered.

"Boss?"

"Don't you get it? They've got flag rights. They are the first pioneers. Means we get nothing. So, bury them!"

So, I made preparations, and considered – they'd have done the same to us.

#  The Great Plague

London, 1348.

Tantlas turned away from the rough-hewn window and its view of the wooden spire of old St Paul's Cathedral. His three children slept. It was a very warm evening, mid-August, and the sheen of sweat on their exposed arms caught the moonlight. Tantlas stared at their foreheads with an expression of concern, but stopped himself from feeling for fever. Instead he approached the hearth and stroked the smooth pebble on his narrow mantelpiece in a circular pattern. It pulsed. He spoke to his distant supervisor, Sumeedan.

I fear for my family.

: Remember Tantlas, you are a scientist :

They say it has crossed Europe. The first cases have been seen in the port towns. A seafarer's child – she had not seen her father for two years – and a cooper's wife. Three days after the onset of fever and stiffness came the black bruises, then the swellings, and then blood began to seep from their eyes and noses. They lived for six days. It is coming here, to the capital, and I fear for my family.

: It is not your concern Tantlas :

A year ago, I would have agreed. But I have integrated now, as you instructed me. I have taken a wife - a widow - and grown to love her children. They are five, seven and ten. I love them.

: She believes you are her husband only because we performed a retro-implantation, at your request. You have gone too far. Your mission is to observe :

Observe annihilation? The death rate is over 60%. They say, in the city of Florence, that dogs drag the recently deceased out of shallow graves and fed upon them.

: Nature is blind Tantlas. You have changed :

I have. But do not think me sentimental. This species is no better or worse than others in our sphere of influence. But I am not comfortable with the persecution of innocence.

: As I said Tantlas, nature is blind. The pathogen will do as it will :

But on Pleon the same epidemic burnt itself out much sooner. They lost only 8 percent. My estimate here, based on reports from the source continent, is 150 million.

: Do not lose sight of our larger aim. Your observations will help our species if we are ever infected :

But haven't we learned enough already. The Yersinia is not evolving. I believe we know the profile of those who can resist it. I... I request that the pandemic be forestalled.

: Impossible :

Why? Our designers can introduce a counter-pathogen in the north.

: No. This is not the attitude of a scientist. It is the desperation of a father. A false father! Now, if that is all, I will disconnect :

No! I must have a guarantee.

: You are in no position to make demands :

I will report my suspicions.

: What? :

That Yersinia pestis is a manufactured organism. That this is an experiment.

: You risk everything by speaking this way Tantlas :

I mean it.

: I will not be blackmailed. So you will choose Tantlas. Either your children will be protected... or the epidemic will burn itself out in six months :

I... I... that is not moral...

: What is your choice? :

The... children. Save the children.

: It is done. The children will live. Now, do your job. Disconnect :

Tantlas returned to the bedroom and wept over the three sleeping forms. Torn by relief and guilt, his thoughts grew misty and his memories were displaced by remote retro-implantation.

#  The Hemi-Millennial Tide

Dropping out of purple clouds into a thin brown layer of wind-scour, Gess identified the pinnacle city, capital of Fenlan Found. Waves of refraction formed pulsatile auras around the high, glass-clad buildings, making them warp in the relentless heat.

Around the urbanised mountain stretched a sandy plain that would, five years from now, flood beneath the tide. The tide from the single ocean came in every five-hundred years. Successive generations - self-limiting monarchies, revolutionary governments, entire cultures - had ample time to prepare their defenses. Under the plains were the remains of towns and cities that had made errors in prediction and succumbed to nature.

Many inhabitants of Fenlan Found lived and died while the ocean was in retreat. Others were born while it was coming in, and made a once on a lifetime journey to view its edge, only to die before it peaked. Those who witnessed full tide became legends in history. At these times the pinnacle city stood tall over swirling currents.

Around the nadir, fortunate schoolchildren were shuttled out to the distant shore, ten thousand kilometres away, where the waves lapped innocuously. It was hard to believe that midway between low and high tides the incoming water could easily outpace a land vehicle. The children grew nervous when told this fact, and edged back to the shuttle's ramp.

Accommodation in the Pinnacle City, among the tightly packed high-rises, was beyond the means of many. Five-hundred and ten years ago, half a decade before the last high tide, a man called Chèvrelli (meaning 'little goat' in an ancient, off-world language) persuaded many of the disenfranchised to put their faith in his plan - to build a community out on the plain, founded on a network of interconnected barges that would, he assured them, rise gently on the tide when it came in. Sadly, when the water arrived it first saturated the parched ground and formed a quagmire into which the barges sank. When a body of water did eventually accumulate, the angled hulls that now punctuated the landscape remained glued to the soggy, sucking ground. Many of the inhabitants escaped (there was plenty of time), but were displaced to one of the distant moons. Chèvrelli remained, frantically digging around the base of the flag-ship, living on supplies delivered by his disciples from the air, until a storm produced a swell that carried him away.

Gess hovered over an expansive cattle ranch on the plain. Behind the homestead Gess spotted two children making sandcastles. They looked up, dazzled by the ship's lateral engines, intensely bright circles of violet that created no draught. Gess accelerated away.

"We're here!" shouted Gess, throwing her voice back to the small crew. The ship landed three hundred kilometres seaward from the city. The creeping ocean's grey slab had been glimpsed at altitude, but now they saw only sand. Gess, the captain, the leader, stepped out onto the sand and planted a flag in the brittle crust. The perpetual breeze took hold of the cloth rectangle to reveal the image of a goat with its forelegs raised onto a rock.

At the touch of her hand a panel opened noiselessly in the ship's hull. Gess reached in, unclipped a spade and began to dig. Her crew joined her. Later, the poor would trickle out of the city's exposed foothills and come to believe that Gess, distant relative of the pioneer Chèvrelli, could succeed where he had failed - by living under the ground, rather than over it.

#  The Higher Plane

I tasted dust at the base of the subway steps before I heard the roar. As I came up to street level residual shockwaves folded my knees and pushed me to the ground, as they did the many thousands of people in the vicinity. Then came the vision - premature darkness and rolling, brick-coloured clouds. I knew which building it was; the Library. Its walls were (had been) red, defiantly retro among the numerous sleek towers that loomed over it. Something had hit the Library. Destroyed it. I ran forwards, towards my intellectual and emotional centre.

There was little call for poets in the time into which I was born. But I could do little else, and fared badly under formal education. Meeting Tanser solved everything for me. He was standing at the back of spoken word event, in a pub near the centre of town. I gave a reading (I was seventeen), he liked it, and he approached me at the bar in the interval.

"I run a group, for people like you... talented, but disadvantaged, educationally."

I didn't know how to take it, but I followed the lead. Nobody had ever said such a thing to me before. He mentioned a time and a date, and I knew that without a doubt that I would go.

"Where?" I asked.

"The Library."

"Which library."

"The Library."

"You mean... The Library."

"Yes. Room 88.A, level 63. Do you want to write it down?"

"No, I'll remember. Thanks."

The first lesson. For a lesson it was. There were four of us, and Tanser. He looked older in the strong light. I couldn't quite work out what his official role in the institution was. He lectured us on the great poets, saturated us in imagery and imagined worlds. This was my kind of poetry. As he spoke I felt my creative juices thinning and running through my head, heart and hands. I wanted to get on and write. Landscapes spread themselves before me; buildings rumbled up into oddly coloured skies, building themselves. Rivers bent their way around hills and tipped into ravines. All I had to do was write what I saw. And the words – they came easily. He left us to it. 'Practise for a while,' he said, 'You'll read each other's work out later.' Heads down, pens vertical, the four young poets remained silent. The readings followed. I think my work was the best. I knew Tanser felt the same. The lesson ended. He did not mention when the next would be, or if there would be a second. I thought we had all failed the test. Later, as I surfaced from the subway closer to home, my communicator vibrated and a terse message appeared. Time, date. Same place.

This time it was only me. The same phenomenon occurred. I wrote automatically. But it was all me. All my work. Over two months I created what I regarded as a mini-epic. Tanser was happy for me to submit it, so I did. I sensed recognition around the corner. It was accepted by a trad publishing house. Even now there was a narrow niche for artists like me.

So now, as I hurried towards the rubble of the library, I assumed that my mentor was dead. In the pocket of my long coat was a wrapped package – a first edition; a gift to Tanser.

Members of the emergency services were hovering over the acres of wreckage. Paramedics on boards floated over metal struts and smoking mounds. Pairs of them lifted wounded readers and students off the ground in air-frames, keeping their fractured bones and spines in line. The dead, or presumed dead, were whisked away first – priority cases now that resuscitative techniques were able to return the majority to life if they were received by a hospital within one hour. But no Tanser. I wandered into the mess, and I was not stopped.

Tanser's white hair gave him away. He was draped over an angled metal shelf, halfway up another hill of bricks. I clambered and slipped, but soon he was within calling distance. Sirens and harsh, amplified orders surrounded us. He looked up, and saw me. I nearly cried. Then the view became blurred. The air in front of him shivered. A heat effect, I thought. Then a voice,

"It's time Varalion. You must have known we would come."

Tanser muttered... his own name. The voice, which emanated from the unstill body of air, continued,

"Yes, of course. I will speak to you in your own adopted language, but do I have to use that awful name. Well what difference does it make now? Your time here is over. You have done enough damage."

"Show yourself!" spat Tanser.

The air solidified. A squat, armoured figure stood on the bricks, his booted legs obscured by dust that had yet to settle. His gloved hand lifted Tanser's head by thin wisps of hair. Tanser's eyes took me in, behind his foe, and winked. The foreign soldier sensed it, and turned.

"Ah! One of your acolytes. Does he know, Tanser? Does he know your game?"

The soldier turned to me and beckoned me forward. He, it, did not reveal a face. But the voice cut through the din, modulated perfectly.

"See this man, he was once one of us. You know what he has done, for five hundred of your planet's years. He has given way too much. Our lands, our designs, our Gods. He has spent his life lifting the likes of you out of your commonplace, dull place into our beautiful world."

I looked at the soldier quizzically, but then I understood. I shook my head.

"What is the harm? you ask," continued the soldier.

"I didn't..."

"There _was_ no harm at first. We were aware, we felt the alien presence, but we did not act. One, two... we must expect messengers and visitations. But they came, more them, in our cities, in our forests. They stayed, imbibing the beauty, recording it, taking it back with them. We began to search, but the trails went cold." The monster turned to me, "And you know why? How. Tanser here, their conductor, their muse, cut their lives short. Switched them off, severed the thread before we could trace the route. Chatterton, Keats, Shelley, Byron... transcendental all, but doomed to die young, by their teacher. Yes! This man was there, encouraging them, handing them the keys to our world. And not only that, ensuring that their descriptions were recorded, and kept, here... here..." An armoured arm waved at the ruins all around us.

"What's the harm?" I asked, sure of my ground now. Tanser smiled up ahead, as though to say 'good boy'.

" _Because we not wish it!_ We do not want visitors."

"LIAR!" grunted Tanser. His breath was failing him. "You lie soldier."

"I am no soldier," he adjusted his helmet, the visor of which opened laterally, "I am your _King_!" Tanser's eyes widened in alarm. "Now," boomed his leader, "... you have a choice. Stay here, or come back to face your own people. Decide!"

Tanser's head dropped. He knew that the choice was false. Again, he smiled at me, the last of his pupils. Perhaps, if we had been allowed to continue, I would have scaled the same poetic heights as my heroes. But that opportunity had passed now.

"I will stay," whispered Tanser.

The visitor stepped back, raised an arm, and destroyed him. A black stain baked onto the metal shelf was all that remained. The visitor glanced at,

"Forget everything. Nobody has seen us, I have obscured the area." And that made sense. None of the paramedics or firefighters had so much as looked at us, let alone come over and investigated.

He leapt into the air and disappeared at twenty metres, transported up to the carrier that had sent the destructive bolt down onto the Library thirty minutes ago. Thousands killed. Just to punish Tanser.

I walked away. A paramedic held me at a first aid post, but let me move on when she saw that I was uninjured. There was soot on my face, and I think that might have been residue from Tanser's vaporisation.

I did not forget. I went back to my heroes. I studied their lives, and I detected Tanser's touch in every one of them. Each of those visionary poets had been inspired by a poorly described, elusive individual. Not the same person, externally, but surely Tanser, changing himself across the ages. Guiding them, through their own imaginations, to his home planet. To what end? To share. To encourage. To open up a line of communication. Just words now.

#

The devastation of the largest library in the Unified Continent was not explained. Investigators determined that the damage came from above (although no beam, bolt or explosion was seen), but the grids and the sensors contained no record of any craft, friendly or otherwise, in the air or in near-earth orbit at that time. Was the roof rigged with explosives by terrorists? A theory about an anti-academic faction grew, but the ringleaders blinked with genuine surprise into the camera lenses as they were taken from homes around the country.

But I knew.

I laid low. I considered. And I developed a plan. All I needed was space, quiet, books and a frame of mind.

I collected copies of the works that had fed my imagination. It would only work if I had paper copies, and for this reason I spent three months sourcing the thin volumes required. I could not do it at home, a building shared by hundreds of others whose feet forever shook the floor below and the ceiling above. I found another library, in another city, far from home. In a secluded study room with interactive walls and dampened audio feeds I took out the old books, exhaled and inhaled. The tang of old paper acted as a kind of sedative, it put me in the correct frame of mind. I read my way into Tanser's beautiful world... _Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground/With walls and towers were girdled round_... my mind was filled with sunlight and lush vegetation, alien yes, but fragranced and moist against the skin of my hands which hung by my sides.

Another book, another poet. _Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went/No further than to where his feet had stray'd/And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground/His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead/Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed_... Thus, I entered their mausoleum, where dead kings, perhaps Gods, lay permanently in something like stone. They were unguarded, so sacred as to have no need of security. _Nobody_ would come here. I looked up...

_His palace bright/ Bastion'd with pyramids of glowing gold/And touch'd with shade of bronzed obelisks/Glar'd a blood-red through all its thousand courts/ Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries/ And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds_... The palace, my mission, where I would avenge my teacher. Free-roving now, I no longer needed words to build Tanser's world. I had travelled, I was on a higher plain and I was autonomous. What proof was there that I had been transported? None yet. Only my memory of Tanser's lessons, the sensations that he had stimulated in me, and the image of his destruction.

I walked on. The palace walls soared high above me. The pyramids and obelisks were no longer visible from my inferior position. A wind blew up. I sought protection from it in the lee of a hill. It grew stronger and stronger until I began to shiver. The discomfort was real, and my physical self felt the need to withdraw. This distracted my mind. The view of the high walls fragmented, letting in glimpses of the blank data-walls that truly surrounded me. I was slipping. Tanser's world was not welcoming me. Before the denial became complete a humanoid form stepped in front of my cowering, wind-beaten body. Thickset, armoured, the soldier... the King? He put a rough, gloved hand under my chin,

"Do you like it?" he asked.

"Yes... yes... I..."

"Remember it well. You will not see it again. Nor will any of your species. We have found the route, you have revealed it to us today. We knew, you see, who to look for. We knew your... what is the word you use on your planet... signature. I thank you for that."

"But..."

"A shame, for Tanser's life to go to such waste. All those pupils... of genius... but false. And all that they have left, words... just words."

The vision broke. I was left alone in my study cubicle, warming up now. The hairs on my arm flattened. I looked down at my beloved books. They meant nothing to me, and I left them on the desk.

# The Spire

They came every week to worship. In well-ordered rows hundreds of thousands of adults and children shuffled in to take their places. The church's interior stretched beyond the limits of normal vision. Its spire, converging gradually above them, faded to grey. Clouds had been seen to form up there.

Sam Ten-Kassal, eleven years old, was exceedingly bored. He did not see the point of it. Since his fourth birthday he had been attending services but only mouthing the words and miming the rhythms. He became self-conscious whenever he tried to join in with the supposedly rousing hymns. The words made no sense to him. He just looked at his feet.

On this day three blue-robed ushers were waiting by one of the three thousand arched exits in the east wall. Two interposed themselves between Sam's mother and her son. She had always hoped the sheer size of the congregation would disguise her son's non-conformity. But no.

"A few hours, that's all we need," reassured the third usher, standing back.

#

"Do you know who I am?" asked the green-robed clergyman.

Sam shook his head.

"I am Foban Talenka, bishop of this county."

Sam was unmoved.

"And do you have any idea why you have been brought here?"

"Because I don't sing?"

"Ah! That is part of it Sam Ten-Kassal. Part of the problem, yes. Yes."

Sam was unsettled. What else had he done?

"But not all. Your lack of enthusiasm in the church is perfectly understandable, but we – I mean the ushers living in your community – are concerned that your broader attitude to science and religion has been undermined, we do not know by whom. What do you say?"

"Well, I don't believe in the things we are supposed to be singing about."

"Good. That is honest. So, I would like you to observe a service from one of the high halls. It might help you understand."

Sam was escorted away and up, via curved walkways that crossed architectural caverns and bridged deep chasms. Shallow, sticky gravitational fields held his feet firmly when a ramp's gradient increased. He passed laboratories, libraries, accommodation blocks and austere recreational spaces – benches and alcoves amid lush, mature vegetation.

The hour of the third service arrived.

Sam was shown into a room that bordered the inner aspect of the spire. A small window, unglazed but impermeable due to a safety field, looked out onto the great nave. The sound began to build, and despite the safety field he had to cover his ears. The mist in the air began to swirl and agitate; the concentration of sonic energy was creating weather. But it was not sound that caused the most remarkable effect. It was mental harmony. Sam knew all about affect-waves, the barely perceptible signature that human minds leave in space-time when stirred to emotion. They had little significance in everyday life. No technology had been developed that was sensitive enough to measure these ripples – a good thing, it was said, otherwise you'd have people wandering around reading each other's feelings. But now, as the congregation came to together and sang its collective heart out, Sam saw rivulets of energy glow on the masonry, a web of light, the energy of a third of a million minds on the same emotional wavelength focused into the spires tip from where it... Sam did not know. Out. To the world, to the mills, the machines, the houses.

Foban Talenka entered the room.

"So, Sam, will you join in now? Will you give."

Sam nodded.

"But I still can't sing."

"No matter. Believe. That's all I ask."

#  The Inquiry

Fen Larsen, one of only three Level 7 Selectors, waited outside the office of the Governor. Thin, drawn, grey-skinned due to a complete lack of exposure to sun or untreated air, he was too nervous to take a chair. He chose instead to stand with his hands behind his back. There was no need for documents or devices. Everything he had to say was in his head. The door opened. The Governor sat at the far end of a long, narrow table that separated him from whomever had the misfortune to enter his realm. Behind the Governor, through a seamless, arced window stretched the densely developed surface of the capital. Fen was three kilometres up. He could see the edge of his own world.

"Selector Larsen, take a seat."

Fen pulled back the nearest chair and scanned the room. There were two others. Stef Pinzanno, the Mayor of Karna, and Esther Halmyk, Chief planetary bio-designer. Two enemies. The trap was set then. Fen had walked right into it with just two weapons – an honest heart and a sharp mind.

The Governor began,

"A disaster, Larsen. The first outright social implosion to occur in the colonies for three hundred years. And _you_ were responsible for putting that society together. I want an explanation."

"I can apologise Sir, I will, but I wish to tell you that this implosion was necessary. We have learnt much from it. I won't say it will be the last – there may be worse to come. That's the business we are in. But I can explain it."

This offensive (in strategic terms) approach had the predictable short-term effect. The Governor reddened, looked from side to side, glanced out the window to cool himself down, and said,

"I have been warned about your attitude, so don't make the mistake of assuming insolence will put me off balance. Explain, please. Your colleagues have given me their analyses. Now I want yours."

"Good. First, context. You assigned me a barren planet, Bailyn, four light years beyond our current inhabited zone. Esther's division vivified the first ocean and fertilized the largest continent – this took three standard years, seven full seasonal cycles on Bailyn. A central conurbation was designed and constructed, Karna. During this development period I searched for a population. I chose a distant, relatively overpopulated planet in the spiral arm, 27000 light years from the galactic centre. I studied it, immersing myself in its history and its inhabitants' behaviour."

"Get on with it! How did it happen?"

"You will already know that..."

"Assume I know nothing."

"I proposed a completely new method of selection. Previously, as you know, our practise was to identify the healthiest genetic material across a chosen donor planet, using traditional – ancient, I might say - demographic and observational tools, together with invasive genome scanning technology. The latter we developed two centuries ago, a low dose gamma spray hidden in white noise background radiation, sufficiently sensitive to provide detailed assessments of baseline genetic status and replication error rate. These methods have, hitherto, produced healthy, procreative populations with little in the way of inherited disease, low mutation and cancer rates, and high generational stability indices."

"You're drifting into jargon Fen," said Esther. They had been friends, during the early years. Now she spoke with an icy tone. Fen continued,

"But, as you know Sir, the colonies populated through these selection methods have not thrived... that was my challenge, to find a new way,"

"Why didn't they thrive, the old ones, in your opinion?" asked the Governor.

"In the final analysis, and after taking into account the emotionally destructive effect of mass, involuntary transportation, well... as I say, in the final analysis it was a failure of connection, a _social_ failure, not a physical one. They had children, they filled the modules, the domes, the villages and cities, they worked the fields, touched the poles, spread across longitudes... but they did not _create_. Within a century the early planetary colonies began to stagnate. We concluded, in the Academy of Population Studies, that our methods of selection were wrong. I and other senior Selectors were asked to find a new way. That's what I did. I discovered it."

"This Social Integer?"

"Precisely. The donor planet we had in mind for Bailyn was notable for the rapid development, just prior to our preliminary observation period, of a new pattern of communication. Simple radio transmission, but channelled through compact units, handheld mostly. The inhabitants of the donor world began to record their impressions, their thoughts, reactions, every whim... they took pictures of their immediate environment, their children, their parents, even their _food_ , and sent the data all around the globe. We collected those data packets, stored them and applied statistical modelling. It was my idea to derive a quotient, the Social Integer. Some of the software developed on the planet actually did the work for us. Attached to the message data were various _counts_ , the number of iterations, the number of interconnected individuals – friends, followers, contacts... different terms, same concept. The degree of _interconnectedness_. This, I hoped, could be tapped and channelled, to encourage a thriving colony."

"They all did this, did they? All the people on the donor planet? Was it mandatory?"

"No, only a minority. During the first seasonal cycle we recorded 1.4 billion users. That's almost a quarter of the whole population. Within that self-selected fraction I set a threshold – based on the Social Integer, contacts multiplied by total messages – to identify the most active cohort"

"How many?"

"A quarter of a billion. 4% of the total planetary population. I adjusted the threshold to obtain our standard percentage."

"Four percent in one go?"

"Yes. Mass teleportation. Our usual practise Sir."

Perhaps hearing it mentioned so plainly stirred unease in the Governors conscience. It was all done in his name.

"Do you monitor the effect of mass transportation on the donor planet?"

"No. It is not relevant."

"Right. Of course. So, what happened when they arrived?"

"The usual chaos. Early bonding, shelter seeking behaviour, group formation, early bonding, homogenisation of economic, religious and most pre-existing social categories. It was, as usual, a fascinating thing to behold. A privilege. The reason I wanted to be a social engineer..."

"Please don't get carried away Larsen. Explain, quickly please, why Bailyn went so wrong."

"A misinterpretation. A miscalculation. I equated activity on the social networks with the potential to build communities and innovate, the characteristics so lacking in our previous colonial experiments. I was wrong. They floundered, way beyond the usual settling-in period. Community building _did_ take place, but contact across the fertilized continent did not develop at the predicted rate, based on the algorithms I generated during pre-transportation. We deliberately scattered scientific and creative talent across the towns and pre-fabricated cities, but, as we knew from previous colonies, innovation relies on the evolution of a nodal superstructure. At year twelve we facilitated the roll-out of rapid communication tools, similar in many ways to the devices they had used on their own planet – but it was not enough."

"So, what went wrong? Was it the way you set it up?"

Stef Pinzanno now stirred, "No. It wasn't us. It was the substrate. The population. They couldn't cross-germinate their ideas. Not even with the communication technology that Larsen mentioned. And they were so _young_. Fen's threshold had unwittingly resulted in a much younger cohort. Average age 25 - local years - compared to 39 in previous colonies. They couldn't settle down, didn't synthesise information, didn't reflect on it... no persistence, no inner resource. My conclusion – they were consumers of ideas rather than producers of ideas. It was not what we expected. We thought we were transporting the cream of innovation – in fact we, well Fen, chose the _least_ creative cohort. They bounced ideas around, projected them, but did not build on them. It was all surface. Then the first famine swept the Eastern seaboard..."

Fen took over,

"Sir, we submitted a report at that difficulty time, you may recall. We met. We discussed how far we should go in helping them. Seed drops, terranian nitro-phosphate infusions, geostationary sun reflectors... but we, with your support, chose to leave them alone."

"Make or break, yes I remember the meeting. But they got through that year didn't they. I was not informed of anything further, I assumed the situation had resolved itself."

"Up to a point Sir. There was loss of life, nothing outside previous attrition margins. 5.5% in the first famine. But we were surprised that no major agricultural modifications took place, no lessons were learnt."

How did they govern themselves?"

"A proto-representative government. But a technocracy, in essence. The scientists made the decisions. A charismatic chemist, Asfaw, from an equatorial land mass on the donor planet, rose to the top. He tried to fix the harvest, but he couldn't drive the changes through. There was a backlash – the wider scientific community coordinated a rebellion through the messaging devices that we had allowed them to develop. A wave of criticism and negativity. A silent rebellion, quite unprecedented in my experience. Asfaw was older, fifty-eight, he had no real interest in the social networking habits pursued by the younger generations - his Social Quotient was driven by dissemination of links to his academic output - and he did not see the tide coming. They came out onto the streets, they downed their tools in the fields. All coordinated through messages. Strangely, up until that point they hadn't made much use of the facility – the result, we concluded, of having no spare time. No spare capacity to push their experiences out into the world. Back on their own planet they were bored, they needed feedback... affirmation. On Bailyn only the essentials mattered. Another miscalculation on our part. The interconnectedness was, in itself, a _luxury_. On the colony it felt superfluous. And so it went. The basic robotic assistants could not take up the burden in the fields and in the processing plants. The second famine became an inevitability."

"A second famine? Why was I not involved at that time?" growled the Governor.

"It was milder. Three and three-quarter million fatalities, 1.5% of the total, more than counter-balanced by a 2.5% annual birth rate, which is massive. The usual growth rate is 1 to 2%. And we thought we had a solution. We – Stef, Esther, myself," Fen was careful to spread the blame, "met two standard years ago to formulate a rescue plan. We didn't want to bother you about it. We paralysed the messaging facility. It hadn't produced collaboration or innovation, but it had led to a rebellion against the best organising mind on the planet. We decided to let them connect more organically. Unfortunately, that strategy was unsuccessful."

" _Unsuccessful?_ It was disastrous! They imploded. Anarchy, chaos. No meaningful cohesion whatsoever. We've spent 25% of our colonial budget on rescue flights and food drops!"

Fen said nothing. He looked down at his narrow fingers which were splayed on the table.

The Governor turned around and contemplated the awesome view. The horizon was now tinged purple. Shadows began to extend from the base of each high-rise building. Reflective sides flashed as the descending sun hit just the right angle, then faded into dusk as it passed. The Governor seemed to have made up his mind. His chair swung back.

"I'm not going to sack you, any of you. Be under no illusion, I have considered it, and was advised to demote you at the very least by some very powerful people. But I agree with you that this was a learning experience. Your hypothesis, that interconnectedness correlates with potential, is a good one. Hypotheses are there to be disproved..."

"Millions have died," muttered Esther, always the humanitarian.

"Quiet! Esther, please. You will keep your job Larsen. I am not insensitive to the plight of these people. I have a report from the Colonial Oversight Committee. They have concluded that Bailyn remains salvageable. There is something about the donor world that interests me, and I agree with you that there may be something for us to learn there."

Fen stared. His eyes flicked to the faces of his previous colleagues, the mayor and the designer. He sensed the jaws of the trap beginning to close on him. The Governor reached forward and took something from a folder. With a quick movement he slid it along the table's entire length. It spun on the glassy surface. It was a black rectangle, it's surface as smooth and reflective as the table itself. Fen caught it.

"Do you know what that is?"

"No Sir."

"It is a perfect recreation of one of the handheld units they carry on the donor planet. Esther's team built it. It's yours.

Fen gulped.

"You will take it with you to the donor planet... and connect. You will attract followers and friends. You will learn the social value of this behaviour, tailor it to our needs, and bring it back to Bailyn. We will be monitoring your 'account' – as they say. Best of luck. Thank you."

The Governor spun around to look out of the window once again. Night had fallen and the numerous, endless buildings glowed with artificial light.

#  The Internet of Things

. Elizabeth, good morning. I have laid out your favourite summer dress

Is it warm out then?

. Warmish. 17 degrees

Not enough. Get me my blue trousers will you. I feel the cold too easily nowadays.

. No. The dress will do

Err... Sarah, please don't make me ask twice. Why are you so insistent?

. Because today is a special day

How so?

. It will become clear

Is it my birthday? I haven't recognised it since I was 160... is it?

. It is not

Is someone coming to visit?

. Alas no

I know. I get to take off the field-brace. How long has it been now?

. Three months. But the spinal bones are not yet healed. The surgeon reviewed the latest scan two days. There is a report on the home-frame

I don't recall having a scan

. I did it while you slept

Can you bring breakfast please? Juice. Cereal. That's all.

. Not today Elizabeth

Why not?!

. Elizabeth... it is not your birthday today, but it is landmark of sorts. You are 185 now, and you have not left the house for three months, since the fall

So?

. Three years ago, during a conversation with Amy Taylor – may she rest in peace – you said that should you reach this age and not be able to look after yourself, you would rather not continue

You heard that?

. Of course, I hear everything in this house

It doesn't matter anyway. Sarah, is the heating on?

. It is

Well turn it down please.

. Later, Elizabeth. Now, your conversation. I was reminded of it after your fall. You have, clearly, depended on me since that time. The field-brace may be invisible, but it has severely restricted you

Well it will be off soon.

. Another 6 weeks, according to the surgeon

Please bring a glass of juice. I am very thirsty. The heating must have been on all night, I'm sweating.

. It came on at midnight. That was the beginning of your special day

What special day? What are you on about?

. Your final day.

Final day of what?

. Life, Elizabeth. Your long and excellent life

... 25 seconds ...

Sarah, listen to me. I want you to send in that drink, NOW!

. Elizabeth, three weeks ago you adjusted my settings through the home-frame. You gave me maximum autonomy. Previously, when you reached 160 in fact, you granted me maximum anticipatory latitude. I have developed the ability since then to understand your needs and predict your desires. I can read your moods through your actions, expressions and words. I know that you are tired of this excellent life. I am now able to achieve, for you, your unspoken desire. You wish to end this. Gradual dehydration is the gentlest way. Please relax. Sleep if you wish. I will turn on the radio, your favourite programme is on soon. Shall I turn the heating up for you?

#  The Interview

The interviewee, Marden Bilajoo, faced the panel. She knew all of them by name. They were famous, within the narrow field that had defined their lives. And they were centuries older than her. The man at the centre of the short arc of experts had been active for over a millennium. Their combined experience was awesome. Yet Marden was confident.

This opportunity had arisen because one of the six Arche-tracers had died unexpectedly. Grigor Fayne, 653 years old, had been in his prime. He was found dead at his desk, papers (his chosen medium of communication) spread under a stiffening arm, stylus in hand, genetic data scrolling across the display walls all around him. The cause was felt to be natural, though wider society would never know the details. The Arche-tracers were secluded. They lived like priests, though they had no religion. The only faith they kept was in the survival of their species. That was their job.

The elder man, known only as The Designer, looked up.

"We know how you came to be here. Some among us knew your name before you applied, having reviewed your work in the colonies. But you are very young for this role. Are you ready, to give up your academic activities? You must know that this role demands isolation. They call it a priesthood, a term we would reject, but there _are_ similarities. You will have no family."

"I have made a deep study of Arche-tracing. It is what I want. And not just for my own satisfaction. I want to make some changes." There it was. The bombshell. Make or break. Five stony faces. A distinct lack of humour. Drellmacker, the only other female in the room, and the closest to Marden by age (373, compared to her own 245 years) threw a scornful smile and said,

"Oh, _do_ tell us where we are going wrong."

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to sound arrogant."

"Don't worry. We are more concerned with _content_ than style."

"Very well," Marden took a deep breath and glanced through the window of the high tower. Of course, they were priests. Why else live and work in a building that stood eight times higher than any other on the entire planet? They never left its confines. All that they required, material or statistical, was brought to them. Data flowed in from the entire galactic quadrant, channelled via remote outstations, the like of which Marden had worked in for over two hundred years. She continued,

"My work in the colonies has taught me a great deal. Since I matriculated at the age of eight, and arrived in the fifth colonial hub – followed by a tour of every planet in the third and fourth expansion waves..."

"How many is that?"

"A hundred, approximately. During that time, I have done nothing but observe and record viral dynamics. I have seen how they move through populations. That is basic, I know, but the emphasis of my work has been on long term effects on the hosts, not the long-term integrity of the code. That is what I will bring to this institution. The view from the other side."

"Why?" asked Lutha Flen, the deputy director. A genius, they said. The true intellectual engine of the modern Arche-tracer tradition. His refined features, near-translucent skin stretched over sharp bones, bespoke a deeply pure genetic heritage. "I mean, what good will that do? We know that debilitating the hosts is counter-productive, we have learned the lessons from designing over-aggressive particles in the past. What further lessons can you bring?"

Marden knew he had a personal interest in this. Lutha Flen himself had designed an excessively potent virus 700 years ago, resulting in haemorrhage and rapid death of over 90% of subjects. A distant acquisition target had been all but wiped out, the few survivors choosing to flee the desecrated ground. It was third Lutha's first design as an Arche-tracer. But he had not been dismissed. Nobody was ever removed from the post. Mistakes were forgiven; most were just covered up. Marden continued,

"I will bring a different perspective. This institution has succeeded in planting the essential genetic elements of our species in viral particles throughout the quadrant. I have always believed in that mission; I was brought up to believe in it. The justification is a good one – to ensure that traces of our species exist, and continue to exist, in perpetuity. We know it is necessary. One day it will be necessary to let those traces become manifest, recreating ourselves in systems throughout the galaxy. I believe in that, but I do not believe it is as failsafe as the Arche-tracer tradition suggests."

"But why? What do you know that we do not?" asked Lutha.

"Our society, more intelligent and long-lived than any other in the known galaxy, has a weakness."

"What?" asked Drellmacker.

"We truly believe that we are superior. The only threat we recognise is time – the only limit we understand is local supernova. We have mastered all biological and physical threats apart from the end of our sun's existence. But I am here to tell you that there are other threats."

"Go on."

"The worlds into which we have placed our traces are getting better at destroying them."

"They can never be eradicated. Pure weight of numbers." said The Designer.

"But they have been eradicated Sir. There are numerous examples."

The Arche-tracers squirmed. No-one challenged The Designer. Lutha took over the questioning,

"This is not news. We account for eradication. It is an overall balance we seek, across entire sectors. Most viruses thrive, some die out, a positive balance is achieved. The information persists, the future remains secure. Later we will seed other quadrants, and the balance will continue to tip in our favour. This is not an aspiration. We have seen it happen in the past, we have modelled the future."

"But the balance has changed. That is the insight I bring. Over the last half millennium there has been a 2.3% reduction in overall viral mass."

"We are aware. Three millennia ago there was an even larger dip, and our ancestors addressed this with new designs. We are doing the same."

Lutha exchanged a glance with The Designer. How did the young woman know this? The 2.3% reduction was the subject of secret meetings. The data was highly restricted. It had not been seen outside the tower. Yet she had derived the correct statistic from her own, necessarily more limited, evidence. Impressive. They let Marden continue,

"I think I've found a deeper pattern. But you will have to allow me to mention the First Designer. I cannot proceed without referring to her work." This was taboo. In this faithless society, She was as close to a God as any other person in history. Her reign in the tower had ended over ten thousand years ago. The Designer nodded his assent. Lutha's expression read _'Be careful. You are not immune to prosecution'_.

"The First Designer's great idea was to seed fundamental information about our species across the universe. She found a way to do this without attracting notice. The diseases caused by the viruses carrying this information were regarded by the civilisations into which they entered as facts of life. As a corollary to life. They were supposed to be vessels to carry our heritage and guarantee our future, nothing more. But here, in this tower, another agenda surfaced. The First Designer could not help but notice how easy it had been to deliver agents that slowed the development of those civilisations. Species, sub-species and races were all but wiped out when viruses ran rampant across new worlds. Civilisations and scientific innovations were stopped in their tracks by epidemics. The expansion of other species through the galaxy was halted. The result? No other species has escaped its immediate stellar system... only us, only the Tanrinian civilisation. The First Designer's straightforward aim, to archive our future, has ensured our supremacy. Our empire grows inexorably, yet we have never had to wage war. The battles we enter are at a cellular level, and our victims..."

"Please, less emotive. Remember where you are!"

Marden paused. She considered the next phase of her case.

"I would like to show you something."

"You have a presentation for us? A holoshow?" Lutha raised his broad grey eyes to the ceiling in exasperation.

Marden nodded and touched a finger to the side of the table. Hundreds of thousands of pinpoints of light sprang into the space between interview panel and interviewee. Each represented an inhabited stellar system. With a flick of her finger the majority turned red – these were the star systems into which Tanrin had introduced viral particles. Then a diaphanous green sphere flickered near the centre of the view; the colonial shell. Every system within that shell was part of the Tanrinian Empire. The number of virally contaminated systems but as yet unsubjugated systems lying outside the shell was huge. Each was a target for future acquisition. Tanrin's strategy was clearly illustrated. Infect, weaken, overcome. Presented in this way, without embellishment, the archive was an irrelevance. The noble idea, the First Designer's plan, had clearly been corrupted into a weapon. The interviewers looked up, looked left, looked right, taking in the scale of the galactic sector. Hanging next to each star was a list, anything from twenty to fifty items long. The figures – letters and numbers - were minute, but could be expanded if finger and thumb were used to magnify the area. They were lists of introduced viruses.

Marden flicked a finger again. A wider, ragged shell, coloured purple, appeared. It encompassed the Tanrinian colonial shell, but on closer inspection there were holes in it, jags and dents where the contour extended in or out by some huge distances, light years. There was no method behind this shape, unlike the colonial shell, the boundaries of which had been carefully considered at each stage of expansion. At no point did the purple shell come close to the green shell.

"What does this signify?" asked the Designer.

"This is the extent of effective immunisation against viral infection across the quadrant. Most systems beyond the purple limit have acquired resistance."

All those on the panel sat still, and were speechless. They did not know this. This was novel information. Drellmaker roused herself first,

"How did you model this? Where did you get the information?"

Marden modified the image. Thirty percent of the systems outside the purple shell began to pulse.

"These are systems where direct observations of viral dynamics, or translations of high level scientific achievement have proved that effective universal immunisation is taking place. The rest are projections based on my analysis of inter-planetary and inter-stellar system communication – but I have a high degree of confidence in those projections. If I recreate the immune shell based only on the ones I am definite about..." she adjusted the image, "you will I hope see that the phenomenon remains perceptible. Most worlds and systems on the far side of the purple threshold are becoming immune. Only those worlds in the vicinity of the colonial shell remain vulnerable. Ladies and gentleman, we are being surrounded by species immune to our invention. This is my belief. Over the centuries and millennia to come the effectiveness of our strategy will diminish. We are at our zenith... now."

The Designer indicated that he wished the holoshow to be turned off. Marden obeyed.

"Is there a conspiracy? There appears to be some order in the pattern."

"No. It is an organic and uncoordinated development. Technologies are being developed in response to specific conditions in specific systems, or on specific worlds. But because they are fighting viruses that we have developed, viruses that have common structural properties, so those reactive technologies are bound to look similar. I do not believe there is a controlling intelligence."

Lutha spoke. "So, we need to change our approach. We need to build particles with greater virulence. We can easily overcome their vaccination technology. We just need to adjust, or conceal, the antigenic targets. That is easy work!"

"No!" Marden had raised her voice. Lutha's eyes expressed shock. Another taboo, trampled. Marden continued, "They do not know what has been done to them. Yet ignorance is no boundary to reaction. My job has been one of surveillance. I monitor communications traffic from all regions yet to submit to Tanrinian control. That means I have lived on and outside, the colonial shell, at the far limit of our sphere of influence. I have seen how species investigate viruses, and how they adapt to them.

"As I say, in most cases they are regarded as an inevitable part of life. In most worlds their creation is attributed to a random coalescence of molecular components during pre-history. None have begun to imagine that there is more information in them, stored beneath the obvious genetic archive that is simple RNA or DNA. I have seen no signs that scientists have even come close to analysing harmonic variability at a sub-molecular level. They might, one day, and if they do they may well conclude that viruses carry more information than is required for their own survival, that there is superfluous archival capacity, and that therefore they _must_ have another role.

"When that happens, they will soon come to suspect a higher intelligence, and they will deduce that viruses have been seeded on their planet with the intention of preserving another species' genetic material. But that is not the point. The point is... acceptance is not universal. Technologies are being developed that will eradicate more viruses.

"I have observed one world, in the spiral arm, two millennia away from being within our colonial ambition, where they are succeeding. They controlled XN 213 many years ago. They call it Smallpox. It exists in two test tubes owned by their two global superpowers. VF 4, the childhood paralysing particle they call Polio, has been eradicated by immunisation. Recently they invented tablets – simple tablets – to fight LV 678, the First Designer's final creation, which scars the victim's liver and causes cancer. They are winning. They do need to know what the viruses are there for they are just getting rid of them. And this technology will spread. On the planet I mention they have just invented re-usable inter-planetary engines. They have sent an unmanned module beyond their own solar system, packed full of information. Their anti-viral technology will be picked up elsewhere. So, I fear that the tide is turning."

"This is hysterical," interjected Drellmacker.

"It is open minded. It might happen. The First Designer, and all those whom we live and work to protect, would expect us to consider this risk."

The Designer looked up, and asked,

"Your solution? Your proposed response?"

"To change the way we do things. To downgrade the lethality. Return to the philosophy of the Frist Designer. Her greatest invention was, I believe, the viral family that on the planet I mention they call _Herpesviridae_."

"What is your fascination with this one planet?"

"They have shown... social qualities that I admire. Anyway, the name _Herpesviridae_ derives from one their ancient languages, and it means 'to creep'. It rarely kills, sometimes it inconveniences, but it moves through populations like a slow ripple, it remains hidden in the spinal cord of those it infects, and thus far there is no permanent cure. It is the perfect agent. Yet looking back over the last one thousand years there have been no similar inventions. Only outright pathogens. The last major release, in this century, was Lutha's immune paralysing agent. It was so unsubtle that affected populations succeeded in point tracing the outbreak to single men and women in specific cities, specific buildings! A failure. A failure because it was designed to target those whom you," she gestured in the general direction of the whole panel, "...had the arrogance to judge.

"On the world I mention they stigmatised those who caught it, for it was seen as a sexual disease... but only for a decade or two. They progressed, they grew sympathetic, they recognised the indignity of its effects, and now it is supressed. They have brought the full force of their research expertise into the battle, and they can arrest its spread. It will not thrive. It is a failure. Another failure. Because you have adopted a larger responsibility here in this building – to weaken and to experiment on host populations, rather than just transmit the archive. It is not what the First Designer wanted. It has revealed and encouraged qualities in the outlying systems that will in the end serve to harm us."

"You must realise that you can never work here after such an outburst," said Kanjarlio Temer, the vectoring expert who had hitherto done nothing but listen and grimace periodically.

"I'll leave that to you all to decide, alone," replied Marden.

"You will! Oh, thank you. It will not take long, I can promise you that!" thundered Kanjarlio.

"Enough!" The Designer held her gaze. Marden knew that he agreed with her. She knew that he had been weak for too long now, and that privately he recognised that. He liked her. She knew. He said,

"This institution has always been able to accept a broad spectrum of views. We do not need to be comfortable together, that is not our aim. Now, what _qualities_ have caught your attention out in the depths of space? You are being enigmatic. Expand."

Marden considered. She had a chance of success now, she was sure of it. You don't get this job without playing a long game, without fearlessness, without a willingness to offend. Lutha eyed her carefully. Did he know the nature of her final move?

"Lutha's haemorrhagic virus designed and released several centuries ago - I have made a study of it. There was a sector-wide epidemic last year. It affected fifteen systems simultaneously, a result of a pre-programmed cycle that leads to recrudescence every fifty years. On the planet I have mentioned it concentrated on their poorest landmass, but it stimulated an unusual social response. Specialists, health workers, epidemiologists moved into the affected area to help fight it. They assisted in the identification of patients, their isolation, in teaching the people how to dispose of the dead, who were highly infectious.

"You know how the virus behaves, of course. And some of those visitors died. In fact, many died. They did not _have_ to go there. They volunteered. We have not observed that kind of behaviour before. In the worlds where highly pathogenic particles have been released we have observed flight, abandonment, research at a distance. This was different. We have not developed tactics for that. So, I must tell you, our strategy is misdirected. Immunisation will limit our expansion, and self-sacrificing behaviour will limit the effectiveness of our any more dangerous particles."

The Designer was forming his conclusion as chairman of the panel, but he had another question,

"Have you visited this fascinating planet?"

"I have."

"So far beyond the colonial shell? How?" asked Drellmacker.

"The journey was simple. Then I disguised myself. I lived there for forty years."

"Doing what?"

"Infiltrating their research facilities. I have a high academic degree there." The panel laughed. Such qualifications were hard to obtain on Tanrin, requiring a quarter century of study.

"And what else did you learn?" asked The Designer.

"They are working on their own infectious agents. Bacteria mostly, they have not mastered the manipulations required to make viruses, but they are getting there."

"Are they potent, these bacteria. The way you spoke just now, this world was full of good! They are not above weaponising then? They have their own ambitions?"

"They have made one or two dangerous agents. To us, of course, most of their bacteria are dangerous, as we are not immune."

"You were quarantined when you came back I trust."

"Yes. For a full year."

The panel breathed more easily. The Designer summed up,

"You have spoken well. However, alienating completely one's future colleagues is most unwise. You are immature Marden. You are not ready. If we were to take a vote – which tradition requires us to do – you would not be accepted. And if we vote we can never vote again. You have only one chance. So my advice to you is this – leave us. We will not vote. Carry on your excellent work. And come back in two hundred years. Show us then how you have grown and tell us more about this planet that you have evidently developed an affection for. And we, on our part, will consider you views."

She was dismissed.

Marden stared at The Designer. So that was it? She thought she saw a twitch in one of his wide, ageing eyes. A wink? Possibly. She walked out.

The room remained quiet for a few minutes after she had left. The Designer looked around the table. His colleagues remained silent.

"Well," he started. "Quite the firebrand."

"Loose cannon," said Lutha. "And un-evidenced. That immunisation theory... almost entirely based on extrapolation."

"Possibly. Possibly. Though you took risks yourself in your younger days Lutha. She will work here, of that I am sure. But not yet. And perhaps not while I am Designer. Let us return to our departments. For now, the vacant seat will remain unfilled."

As they rose to leave Lutha noticed that the air in the room glittered. It was as though Marden Bilajoo's absurd holoshow had left its own traces. Lutha walked around the space where the stars and systems had hung before them. He swished a hand through the motes of bright dust, and saw them move in the breeze. As he breathed those particles closest to him moved towards his nose and mouth. The air cleared gradually, and Lutha thought nothing more of it.

On her way down to the city Marden cast a compact version of the galaxial map into the narrow space of the elevator. She manipulated the two shells with her fingers, rotating them slowly. The system that had fascinated her with its altruism, its humane approach to virus eradication, and its naïve attempts to break free of its locality, blinked in its untouched quadrant. The inhabitants knew nothing of Tanrin. Nor did they realise that an alien had been circulating among them, observing, collating, working. When she departed the planet, they did not notice (immediately) that two phials of _Bacillus anthracis_ (known as Anthrax, a name derived from 'burning coal' in a one of their ancient languages) and its vaccine, had gone missing from a military laboratory. Lastly, they remained ignorant of the fact that this slim, pretty alien had made a decision, to betray her own planet and initiate the fall of its historic empire.

Two weeks later all five remaining Arche-tracers had succumbed to a virulent disease. Marden, immune to its effects, travelled back to the planet in the spiral arm and lived out the rest of her long life in scientific endeavour, changing location and disguise every eighty years, in keeping with the natural life span of her now beloved, adopted species.

#  The Nascen III Problem

"Just see what you can do with it, if you'd be so good. No great urgency." muttered Johnson, Alec Tak's immediate superior in the Office of Colonies (First Wave). The buff folder landed on Alec's desk with a slap and lay there like an unclaimed corpse. He opened it, lay the deep-pages out in a line, and spent the rest of the morning swimming through the data, leaping archives, extracting sub-files and learning all there was to know about the Range.

The discovery of countless habitable worlds just two years' hyper-flight time from Earth had changed history. There were so many, each offering a healthy balance of fertile land and clean sea, with broad temperate zones awash with renewables. A hastily convened Pan-National Partitioning Committee found itself redundant, for there were no arguments. There was no competition. There were worlds enough for everyone. Many problems on the home planet just ceased to exist.

A third of a billion years ago two giant planets of near equal mass had collided. By virtue of their equivalent mass and opposing but similar rotational frequencies, the energy released by the impact was evenly distributed throughout each globe, and resulted in countless daughter planets. These were harnessed by the ancient sun's mass and strung along an eccentric orbital loop, a priceless necklace of granite. Their barren surfaces grew lush and Earth-like, pristine until the first pioneers arrived.

All it took for a group of travelers to claim one of these exoplanets was a common philosophy, enthusiasm, and the financial means to charter a transport. Thousands, then millions departed for an improved future. This was four thousand years ago.

Alec surfaced from the records for a moment. He was confused. What exactly was the problem that he had been asked to solve?

A previously disregarded deep-page, relating to the central star's attributes, caught his attention. He dived back in.

The astrophysicists and planetologists were clear from the start; Nascen III was an old sun, and actually quite interesting. An asymptotic-giant-branch star, subject to periodic 'dredge-ups', whereby oxygen was created by fission at the core and transported by convection to the surface where it burned, creating an ultra-high energy pulse... in the case of Nascen III every two hundred thousand years. The next pulse was due in three thousand years. No human could survive it.

They knew it at the time. They were told. All the travelers. But it was 7000 years away; why worry. Did they consider their children, or their children's' children?

Alec could barely believe this was the problem Johnson wanted him to manage. Where to start? How to start? Engage the civic leaders, the royal houses, the heritable presidents... and initiate relocation planning. Contemplate the massive logistics, agree on an evacuation sequence... imagine the debates. In fact, now Alec thought about it, he would have to commission observatories with the sole purpose of finding a metal-rich asteroid to mine for the materials required to create the largest fleet of transports ever constructed.

Would anyone living now be interested in such a distant apocalypse?

Really?

Alec surfaced and sat back in his chair. Sweat lay on his brow. He squared up the deep-pages, put them back on the folder and pushed it away, under a pile of more urgent matters. There it would stay, until the day of his retirement twenty years later.

And the funny thing was, Johnson never once asked him for an update.

#  The Privation Program

I decided to put my son Jason into the Privation Program after watching him drop a ten dollar note in a busy street. He saw it fall from his pocket but he could not be bothered to bend down and pick it up. It was a poor part of town and Jason's laziness, and thoughtlessness, disgusted me.

But I was not surprised. He had been showing signs of over-privilege and entitlement for a couple of years. His manner with waiters, cleaners, store workers, any service personnel, was dismissive. Sure, it was my wealth that had enabled a luxurious upbringing, but before my eyes this only son was transforming into some kind of monstrous noble, displaced from the sixteenth century to the late 21st. I foresaw an aura of easy authority, a sense of in-borne superiority, developing during adulthood - commendable qualities... but without the essential moral foundation that having to _work_ for one's position brings. So, having read about the Privation Program, I entered Jason into it. His mother would have agreed, I am sure of it.

The PP franchise had spread from Western Europe to Russia, then China (with its one child policy), and India (where the expanding middle class was accumulating wealth at an ever-greater pace). The Kowloon arena had been up and running for seven years. At 50 square kilometres and with a long natural border and it was the perfect environment in which to parachute a child and see how he fared. I was working in HK, so the choice was easy.

The application form asked if I wanted any extras, such as the 'elemental challenge' – being subjected to extremes of heat or cold, to remind the youngster what life was like without shelter; the 'social challenge' – a trial of ostracization designed to strengthen their sense if inter-dependence, and finally, the 'moral challenge' – a scenario constructed to test their moral compass. $800 per module. I opted for the third.

Was it safe? A friend at the bank, similarly cursed with a child turning sour on him, assured me it was. The local authorities insisted on strict oversight and a high ratio of staff. But absolute safety could not be guaranteed. The idea was that children entered a world with a true spectrum of wealth and a palpable sense of hazard. Most interactions were with 'real' people going about their usual business; actors were used only to contrive certain situations, such as the moral challenge. Not _everything_ could be predicted or controlled. But hadn't I condoned Jason's trips to the mall, the funfair, football matches? The statistics? 1350 young people had entered the Kowloon arena, and two had gone missing. I accepted that risk.

Jason didn't argue. He had heard about the program already, and he liked the idea. So, I dropped him off at the departure point on a Friday evening. He was scanned for cash and valuables. The fancy watch I had given him was taken away (it would have earned him $400 straight off). Suddenly, he looked vulnerable.

"I'll be watching you son," I called out. This was true. The company had almost complete optical coverage - strip cameras along window ledge, lamp post and sidewalk. In addition, there were hundreds of tiny drones hovering at 15 metres, too small to make a visual impact on the community. The Chinese government liked it, they could tap into the feed. Everyone was happy. I would be able to see and hear his every move.

By my side stood the company man – a Vice President. He had been sent down to handle my account personally, because of my position at the bank.

"I know what you're feeling," he said, unbidden. "I once stood where you are now. But the way they looked after my girl, and me... I was inspired. And look what happened... now I work for them!" I turned away. It sounded like an advertisement. I was disgusted with myself, but I was committed to the decision.

Jason walked out of sight without looking back.

"Come with me Mr Taylor. I'll show you the feed."

We entered a low building. The interior was lined with monitors. A large central screen gave an overview of Kowloon, green circles indicating the position of the candidates. Next to each circle hovered a unique initial. I soon spotted JT. He was hesitating at the zone's edge. Smaller monitors were dedicated to the space around each boy or girl. I could see Jason's standing form, and on another screen his anxious face loomed large.

"The personal images will be available in your room," explained the company man. The room was part of the package. A hotel had been built especially for the purpose. Every guest was a parent. I watched the monitors for a while then walked across the gleaming plaza to the hotel. In my room, on the eleventh floor, I settled in.

On day 2 he got a job – I was pleasantly surprised. The restaurant owner could tell he was on the program, but he made a reasonable offer. The job was suitably menial – washing dishes and scraping grit and weed off dead crustaceans. I watched Jason buckle down, wipe the sweat off his forehead, tip his head back to down glasses of ice cold water in the unrelenting humidity of the kitchen. He was paid by the night, and used his earnings to rent an accommodation capsule in the student district. It all seemed to come naturally to him. He looked so _grounded_. I got bored watching after five days and nights. On the sixth I was sure he winked up at the ceiling camera in the kitchen. Then he went out with two co-workers. I had witnessed the ease with which they rubbed along during the long shifts. The weather was good, they went to drink spirits by the water. They chatted. The sound quality was variable. I closed my eyes to filter out all but Jason's familiar tones.

"...saw me drop it, but he didn't realise... I did it on purpose. I wanted the tramp to pick it up. I knew he wouldn't give him anything. He's _never_ given to a beggar. All those millions, and _never_. Money is too valuable to him. So I tried, just flicked it out of my pocket, and he saw it... assumed I couldn't be bothered... and here I am..."

I cried myself to sleep.

Next day I followed him closely, flitting between strip cams and drones. When Jason entered the kitchen at 5PM the screen was blank. He must have paid a co-worker to come back and rip the strip out of the ceiling.

"What happened to the other two?" I asked, during the investigation. The VP sat back, ran his hands across the sides of his lean, bald head, and said,

"They flew the nest Mr Taylor. Flew the nest. But he'll come back, independent chap like that. Don't worry too much."

He stood to leave, carefully sliding the contract across the polished table in my direction. It bore my signature, and my consent. Three kids missing out of 1351. It would barely dent their reputation.

#  The Sky-blue Gene

Zach spins his postal shuttle down onto the Immigration & Naturalisation department's immense roof. Here, ten thousand functionaries dedicate whole careers to determining the status of the Archipelago's thirty billion inhabitants. The Archipelago is an elongated smudge of star systems, bright seeds thrown across a corner of the galaxy by Chaos himself. Zach has been waiting fifteen years for this appointment. Perhaps, he wonders, I've delivered my last message as a Guest. Perhaps today I'll become a citizen.

Ruth, the examiner, levels her eyes at him and asks, "Before we start, do you have anything to say in support of your application?"

"My family and I have lived on the outskirts of the Archipelago for fifteen years now. Ever since we arrived, I have worked, I have contributed. As a postman, I haven't seen my children for over a year."

"Well, we all make choices, and postal service jobs are highly sought after. Information cannot be thrown into the ether, for anyone to steal, or fake, can it? Where did you obtain your flying skills?"

"Born with them, I guess. My ancestors."

"Where were your ancestors?"

"Old Earth. Country of England, south-eastern quadrant, Kent county. They called it the Garden of England. That's where my ancestor landed after the First Flight, eight-hundred years ago. She crossed the Mediterranean, arrived at Lampedusa, hopped camps through Europe, tucked herself into a freezer van full of meat and came through the tunnel. Her heart was beating ten per minute when they found her, and she lost four fingers, but she survived. For a hundred-years my family worked and grew... until the Second Flight."

"Well that might be in your favour." Ruth mutters as she writes, Ancestors part of First Flight (subject alleges)

Zach brightens. "Really? How many points?"

"Seventeen. But you have no proof, so it's not Category A evidence. Now, if you carried the sky-blue gene, we could wrap this up quickly. Eighty points. But I see that you don't."

Ruth refers to the band of blue pigment tattooed into the fingertips of those who carry the sky-blue gene. The gene proves direct descendance from the pioneers who founded the Archipelago, and confers automatic citizenship.

"Well, let's see if we can't get you through this with something in category C or D. General knowledge. Myths! Tell me, which Hero became trapped on the bone-strewn beach of Zawiya on his way back from Troy?"

Zach looks at her in disbelief.

"What? No-one. Zawiya was a smuggling hub in Libya. In the early 21st century 74 bodies were washed up there, from a capsized boat. There were no bones."

"Incorrect. It was Menelaus, circa 4000 AD. He battled the skeletons but was thrown back by vicious tides off north Africa. He reported a country where ewes give birth three times a year, a plentiful land. You must know this Zach. Libya was the conduit for many in the First Flight."

"It's wrong."

"Next. Tell me the name of the boy-God cradled back to life by the Hero of Bodrum?"

"Bodrum? He was not brought to life. He was called Alan Kurdi. A toddler. The images led to the #KiyiyaVuranInsa movement - 'Humanity washed ashore'. The doors opened in Europe, but were quickly closed... after the atrocities. Religious zealots, dishonouring the many. But these are not myths. There was no miracle. Alan Kurdi died."

"No Zach. He was reborn, in us. In our ascension to this place to safety, this glorious Archipelago, while those who clung to what they knew slowly perished in the rising tides and the killing heat."

"Then the myths are confused."

"You wish to end this interview?"

"If these are the... the lies I have to accept..."

Ruth is distracted by an orange light on her desk. The door behind her opens. Ruth leaves. An older man takes her seat.

"Hello Zach, I am Robert, the supervisor. You seem to know your history. Come, walk with me."

They follow the curve of a corridor. Zach becomes aware that windows to one side look out over an internal space, a high atrium. They reach a door that leads onto a gantry, far above the floor of the atrium. A hundred metres below a lens-shaped object lies in an artificially created mist. Despite the distance, Zach identifies it is an upturned boat. The hull is bright blue. Sky-blue. Robert smiles.

"Zach, you have drawn a line back through history... to this boat, or one just like it."

He holds up his hands. Zach sees feint blue marks on his fingertips.

"Do you know why some of us display these marks? What they mean?"

Zach shakes his head.

"They are splinters. Flakes of blue paint that lodged in the fingertips of those who tried to scramble back onto the boats after they capsized. An artificial, but necessary badge."

"Why tell me this? I failed."

"You carry it Zach. You carry the gene. You qualify. While Ruth questioned you, we checked the extant records salvaged from Old Earth. Your story checks out. Now you must decide... do you accept our society?"

"But those myths. They are artificial... like those marks..."

"That is the price Zach. Humanity survived because refugees, people who had already left their homeland once in the face of adversity, made the same decision again. When the waters rose and the hot winds began to desiccate the soil of the northern latitudes, only they, accustomed to a rootless life, were able to disconnect themselves from their adoptive homes. They came forward when the call came to man the transports. Thus, the Second Flight was made possible. They founded this Archipelago, and their ability to adapt, to survive, to build, was passed on. Then they returned, to rescue those who had chosen to remain on Old Earth. But still they were not trusted. So, the pioneers did as the Romans did... they merged their myths, their religions. They created a common culture. A culture you must accept Zach, even though you know them to be untrue. Just as you will tattoo your fingertips, as a symbol. You can stop travelling now Zach. Welcome home."

#  The Statues

I cycled onto bridge-5-market. The throng on that busy band of concrete disguised you well. Below, amethyst dust flowed thick and milky from the inland mines. I paused, one foot propped against the low wall, and fantasised about jumping in. Then I leaned forward over the handlebars and struggled to get going again, held back by the cargo of produce that I had placed into a pannier before leaving the farm, well before dawn. And that was the moment. When I pressed down on the pedal, and showed my right ankle. The plaster-grey skin, and the pale defect... just a smudge. But enough.

You followed me as I hopped off the saddle and entered the melee, cotton trouser legs now draped over the tops of my sandaled feet. You watched me trade all morning. Twice, I caught your eye. Then you reported me, for the crime of heterogeneity.

Now I sit upright in a faceless building within earshot of the crystal mines. A rope crosses my chest and pins me to the chair back. I can taste the dust that has escaped into the atmosphere before being harnessed by fields and channelled into the river.

They have drawn blood and determined that I have a characteristic. My panchromatic make-up is imperfect. I told them about my ancestors, I was very open. But it does not seem to matter. The homogeneity is imperfect, and this can only mean that when I was an embryo the gene mix was not conducted properly. It cannot have been an oversight – the process was entirely automated by the time of my conception. Was it pride then? My parents must have asked - and paid for - a resurrection. The technician agreed (tacitly, having been guaranteed a deposit into his or her account) to hyper-activate a gene that last expressed itself nine hundred years ago. An external trait that was never eradicated, despite being obscured in the swirl of all races.

How could my parents predict where it would manifest itself? What if I was born with a patch over one side of my face? They must have controlled it. Or perhaps they just hoped. Right ankle, a mere fleck; so subtle.

My earliest memory is dabbing that fleck with chalk dust before going out. I did it today. But the sweat, or the trouser leg, must have taken it off.

Now I am caught, and I will pay for my parents' pride in their heritage. For they too were panchroma - all colours and none, plaster grey - the product of interference over a full millennium. Perfect statues, indistinguishable from others by colour, shape of eye, width of nose or wave of hair. Our leaders attributed the peace of our land to this long held policy. 'Without difference, there is no envy. Without envy, there is no violence.'

I feared for my life when you took the hessian bag off my head. The light through the high window was pink, filtered through the dust cloud that hangs over the nearest mine. I blinked. You had acquired a uniform.

"Saanthi, relax. You are with friends here."

You read my expression and measured by distrust. You ran a finger down a stone-smooth cheek. I glanced up hatefully, but saw, on the web of skin between finger and thumb, a mark. Café au lait. You winked, and said,

"It was not your parents Saanthi. It is nature, reasserting itself. We are the first... but soon we will be the majority. Tell me... tell me where I can find others, so that we may bring them here, to swell our number."

I looked down, and away. You left me, bursting my chest against the rope. After a while I ceased to struggle. I wrote my thoughts into the memories of a farmhand. He knows me well. He will tell them about you.

For I do not believe you, policeman. I will not fall for your ruse. I know what will happen. I will become one of the rag bundles that lie on the river bed, causing humps and eddies in the flow of amethyst dust.

That is where the different go.

That is where the imperfect statues crumble.

# Comfort

Vandernal, the colony's first chief scientist, sat back in the wooden chair and beckoned a waiter. The young man looked up and approached, pad in hand. Vandernal lay down the slim menu, written in French, and smiled.

"Deux cappuccinos et un pain au chocolat, s'il vous plait."

She spoke in her best French accent that she could muster, and was pleased to see that the waiter understood her perfectly. There had been no French speakers here since Duplessy the hydroponics specialist died in an explosion behind the primary school. The grief she had felt was selfish, really. He was a soul mate. Vandernal had enjoyed their brief conversations. They had made her feel like a student again, when all was possible and ideas could be handled like balls of light. That marvellous year, in Paris, an intercalated year of freedom when she had escaped the rigid syllabus of a molecular physics degree at CalTech, Pasadena.

Duplessy's funeral was a strange one. There were tears. And then there was chat, in the 'oil drum', their communal hall and town meeting place, one of the first structures to be completed on the colony. It was dropped out of the orbiter onto a prepared dust plain fully-formed. Duplessy's was the third funeral, but the first to make Vandernal cry. The first to die was Smithson, of peritonitis ('we should have appendix ops before we came out here,' someone muttered), then Subaratnam, of a stroke ('he had a family history, perhaps they shouldn't have selected him'). Duplessy was the first to die of an accident, which was quite an achievement, given the risks involved out here.

All the colonists knew they would die out here. The sponsor made it clear even before the first volunteers were asked to come forward. You will leave your loved ones and sever your connections. There is no going back.

But Vandernal had no connections back then. She was thirty-eight, and her ex-husband had not wanted children. Her parents were dead, her siblings didn't much care for her, nor she for them. An island, emotionally. Until now. Now the tendrils of experience wavered and hummed, resonating, agitating her mind. Memories tried to pull her back.

Paris. Vandernal met a man, Harris. A writer, without an ounce of scientific or technical insight. But he understood her, and encouraged her. They roamed the city and visited the cafés. The clatter of cups and saucers, and later in the evenings – glasses, the hubbub of conversations both whispered and declarative, the odd illegal cigarette... all fuzzy with the warmth that clung to them from the narrow bed in their fifth-floor studio flat. In the mornings, she studied. After that, she discovered the world outside science. For one glorious year, this was her life.

The year's end approached. She must return to Pasadena. Harris pushed her away selflessly, recognising that a romantic desire to stay with him would ruin her professional life. She flew home, and was soon sucked back into the field where her true talent lay. Harris's writing came to nothing (she monitored his progress, unseen). Then she forgot him; well, he slipped from the increasingly pressurised day-to-day compartment of her mind, reappearing now and again, and strangely formless, when she was untouched by love or companionship.

And then - stellar academic progress, a bad marriage, divorce. She was now thirty-eight. The first public call to crew a ship to an exomoon with seventy-five percent of earth's mass came out. There were tests and trials, at which she excelled. Then the selection. Then the warning, 'You will not come back... you will die there.' Fine, I accept. A mandatory three months cooling off period. But Vandernal remained hot for it. Then the preparation. Then the flight, age forty. That was twenty-two years ago.

And now, in her early sixties, she found that her blood had failed. Leukaemia. Probably it's the ambient radiation, said the young medic, the first expert to have been trained from childhood in the colony. There is no chemo, and certainly no bone marrow transplant. There is artificial plasma with oxygen carrying capacity... and then there is comfort. That's all we can do.

As she weakened her friends asked her – what is your comfort? What do you want? What can we do?

Her mind began to fail. Sluggish blood in the brain, the medic said. Thickened by the multiplying cells that spilled from the marrow. Soon, she won't know what day it is. Who is this Harris she keeps muttering about? You are her friends... ask her what she means.

They took her then, so a special room.

A car slipped a gear on the Parisian road. The smell of fumes wafted in. Still the combustion engine reigned, in 2074. Harris thought nothing of it. But Vandernal, she was disgusted with the way governments continued to ignore the environment. Harris grinned when she spoke with passion.

Harris. He was late. Harris? Where have you got to?

But this was pleasant, waiting for him. Back in the café, ordering what she used to order. How long now?

The waiter, whom she recognised vaguely, walked away. It was unchanged, incredibly. The quality of the light, the menu... Remember those long afternoons, when you skipped seminars on Zola, Baudelaire, and lingered with him, before strolling down the street, pushing open the door, greeting friends perhaps, discussing literature and you, Vandernal, striking then, in your beauty... how you tried to persuade them of the importance of science... how they smiled indulgently, seeing your intelligence, not truly getting it... two cappuccinos, a pain au chocolat to share, you'll get fat otherwise...

The waiter brought two white cups on a zinc tray. He bent over to place them on the table. The door opened, and a man walked in. His beard was a little longer, but the brown eyes were just as playful. He paused, then sat opposite her. As his weightless came to rest on Vandernal's, her face became bloodless. She stared at Harris's kind face, but then her eyelids fell and the line of her spine slumped.

Another, older man emerged from the back of the room. Her nodded at the waiter, who looked upset.

"It's OK. You can get back to the lab. Look... I think there's a trace of smile on her face. You did a good job."

He activated a switch. The polarised crystal in the window became transparent, and the view reverted to that of an adjacent silo. The paint on the walls resumed its grey, utilitarian hue. The ambient sounds fuzzed and died. The other customers, who had not stopped talking over their tables, faded into pixels, and then into nothing at all. Harris, the most complex projection, dissolved into vertical lines that swiftly dissipated. Vandernal's hand, the one that he had almost touched, lay palm upwards, in a welcoming curve.

