Butterfly Affects

edited by Adicus Ryan Garton

presented by Atomjack Magazine
http://atomjackmagazine.com

©2009 Susurrus Press 



All things by immortal power
near or far
Hiddenly
To each other linked are
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.

Francis Thompson  
(1859 - 1907)  




Table of Contents


Introduction

Independence Day
T. L. Morganfield  

Company Policy  
Glenn Lewis Gilette  

Saving Chairman Mao  
William Highsmith  

Time and Time Again  
John Buentello  
Lawrence Buentello  

Slumber of the Gods  
Trent Roman  

Telstar Brother Day  
J. Jay Waller  

Aurora (ABPOPA)  
Sam Kepfield  

Afterword  

Contributors  



Introduction 

I want to tell you a short story. 
It begins with a blind larva, newly hatched from his egg. Let's call this larva Ray. Ray cannot yet see, but but he can feel with his antennae, and he spends most, if not all, of his time seeking out food. To Ray and his insatiable, there can never be enough. Over days and weeks, Ray grows, molting off his old skins. 
One day, Ray feels too big for his tight, hard skin, and climbs a small plant. This plant, some instinct tells him, is perfect. Slowly and carefully, Ray crawls onto the underside of the leaf and anchors himself using spit. His skin hardens further, and Ray sleeps. 
It is not sleep as we know it, but a chemical sleep. While he slumbers, gross and fantastic things happen to Ray's body. His soft innards grow, separate, and after a time, he finds that he can see much better than he ever could before. The world around him is warm and the light is soft, and as comfortable as his life is, there itch in his insect gut the pangs of hunger. It is a familiar sensation; Ray has known it his entire life. 
Ray breaks free of his cocoon, wearing a body with little resemblence to the earthbound creature he once was. Most striking are his wings, glistening green and gold and black. After drying them in the warm sun, and shaking off the strange blue dust that tips his wings, he takes to the sky. None of the other flying things want to eat him; a strange sensation. No longer does Ray feel the constant threat of being food for another animal. Their screeches and honks and bangs go unheeded. 
Out of the dense green below him, a single white flower beckons to him, and though he has spent his entire life eating leaves, he now knows that leaves will no longer sustain him. It is nectar his new body craves. 
He sucks the sweet, sweet nectar of life from the white blossom and ponders this new form, this new life, the endless possibilities of the future ahead of him. 
The sky goes dark suddenly, and Ray is no more. All that remains of him is stuck under a careless boot, mashed and mingled with thick slimy mud. 
Many or most of you will recognize the butterfly as the catalyst for change in Ray Bradbury's short story, “A Sound of Thunder.” The protagonist (not the butterfly) returns from the past to find that something as inconsequential as stepping on a butterfly 65 million years ago has altered the future (for us; for him, it is the present) in significant ways. 
The stories you are going to read concern themselves with the butterfly. From his crushed wings, never to taste the air again, the Aztecs had nothing to fear from Cortes. From his broken legs, still twitching with chemical motions, the Summer of Love became a year, then a decade, then centuries. From Ray's poor snapped proboscis, still wet with sweet nectar, the Soviets race with the West to the red planet. From this broken butterfly, all futures become possible. 
I welcome you to explore the worlds of tomorrows never to be and the endless, fantastic possibilities of what and how the butterfly affects. 
Adicus Ryan Garton editor Cosmic 




Independence Day 

T. L. Morganfield 

Coyotl wore an eagle knight costume for the Independence Day celebrations, complete with feathers and a hood with a curved plastic beak. At his side he carried the traditional flat wooden sword, but with duck down for blades. "Stay out as late as you want," his mother told him as started out the front door. 
His best friend Titic, who lived next door, met him on the sidewalk, and they chewed vanilla-flavored chicle as they walked to the shuttle bus stop. Titic wore a fluffy jaguar knight costume that zipped up in the front, his face masked with a cat head with bared plastic fangs. "I wish my folks would let me stay out all night. They never even let me out past dark." His mother feared the Night Wind would snatch her son if he stayed out too late. 
Coyotl's own parents didn't subscribe to superstition and so gave him considerable leeway curfew-wise, but tonight was something completely different. It was a peace offering of sorts, an apology for something they didn't do but felt horrible about anyway. For yesterday they'd found out that their only son was the Divine Fire and he would die by the end of the summer. 
"We're going to do the Chase, right?" Titic asked as they sat at the back of the rumbling tram. 
"Sure." Titic had talked about it endlessly for the last week, and though Coyotl really didn't want to, he couldn't crush Titic's excitement. For most boys their age saw running in the Chase as a rite of passage. 
The crowded shuttle raced over the causeway crossing Lake Texcoco, into Tenochtitlan's sacred heart. They disembarked outside the Snake Wall, with its line of feathered flags whipping in the breeze, one for each of the nations of the One World. The sounds of flutes and drums floated in the air. The main precinct teemed with visitors: Incan businessmen, Algonquin shaman, Polynesian and Cheyenne ethanol executives, Inuit fisherman, Cherokee, Seminole, Navajo, Mayan, Nazca, Huari, Juruna, Cofan, many dressed in their colorful traditional garb and selling native delicacies and art. 
"Let's go to the Boulevard," Titic suggested as they wormed through the crowd toward the Temple Square. At the east entrance, they climbed up onto the wall, to see over the crowd. Thousands filled the streets, with only the one parallel to the Temple Mayor remaining clear, for the Chase. 
The Revered Speaker, Emperor Cuauhtémoc stood atop the Great Pyramid, dressed in a jaguar pelt cape and a brilliant green feathered headdress. The war chief—a real jaguar knight, with animal DNA intermingled with his human genes—stood next to him, sniffing the air watchfully and twitching his tail. Huge braziers at the temple doors burned orange, spreading the spicy aroma of copal on the wind. The flames mesmerized Coyotl. 
What will it be like, to feel them wrapping around me like hot snakes? His father had told him the priests would anesthetize him first, but still, the thought of his skin turning to ash and the marrow in his bones boiling— 
"Here he comes!" Titic shouted. "Let's get down." 
Coyotl squinted over the crowd outside the wall, searching. The drums signaling the approach sounded distant but rose quickly, like wildfire spreading across the city. 
Voices raised in cheer as a man ran for his life down the boulevard, his silver chest glimmering in the sun. Behind him swarmed a horde of thousands, all dressed as traditional jaguar and eagle knights, their feather­edged swords raised as they shouted and gave chase. 
"Coyotl! You're going to miss your chance!" Titic shouted and Coyotl finally climbed down. All around them, the crowded hooted and stamped their feet. 
When the man ran through the opening in the wall, the two men standing in front of the boys leaped out onto the road, their swords raised and their jaguar capes fluttering after them. Titic sprinted out too. 
Coyotl jumped out just as the warrior horde streamed into the precinct, sweeping him up in the shouting throng. He struggled to keep from stumbling lest someone trample him. He cut to the side and spotted Titic several long strides ahead of him, the horde overtaking him. 
The silver-chested man ran a ways out in front of everyone, but exhaustion was slowing him down. And he didn't see the rope the crowd pulled taut across the boulevard until it was too late. He skidded along the stone road for a few tumbles before finally stopping, moaning and bleeding. 
The horde descended on him, and several men wrenched him to his feet. Titic got right among them, hauling the man further down the boulevard, but when the other five warriors tossed their prey to the ground, he fell forward with the prisoner and landed sprawled at the feet of Emperor Cuauhtémoc. Titic peered up at him, terrified. 
"You dare touch the Emperor of the One World?" the war chief snarled, whipping out his sword—not a feather tipped one, but one of the real, obsidian-edged metal ones; purely ceremonial but deadly nonetheless. 
Coyotl rushed forward to Titic, fully expecting the jaguar knight to divide him in half with one swipe, but the Emperor set a steadying hand on his war chief's arm. Not many people ever stood this close to the Emperor, so Coyotl couldn't help staring up at him, at the thin lines of the eagle tattooed on the left side of his face, sharing his eye with it. Coyotl was too frightened to look away. 
"Off with you now," the Emperor said, and Coyotl dragged Titic away. 
Safely hidden among the warriors again, Coyotl peered at the man kneeling on the ground before Cuauhtémoc, the man everyone had come to see. He'd seen him every year on the television, during the broadcast of the Independence Day ceremonies. Sweat plastered the man's dark hair to his head, crowning his bearded, phantom-pale face. Horrible scrapes marred his left cheek. The afternoon sun glimmered on his metal breast plate, the customary costume for the Spanish Devil. He was cloned from the reconstructed DNA of Hernán Cortés, and as his incarnation, he was here to die for the entertainment and pride of every citizen of the One World. 
"You've traveled a great distance," Cuauhtémoc began, taking the sword from his war chief. "Across the ocean, through treacherous storms, all to enslave us, to take our land, raze our cities, destroy our culture, and exterminate us. But the gods see your dark heart, and so today we again marched a force of one hundred thousand warriors to end your lust for conquest. Your arrival brings the nations of the One World together again in common cause, bringing us peace … giving us independence from what to come." 
It was just propaganda and historical distortion, and everyone knew it, but the cheers were deafening. The petty skirmishes among nations had continued for another two hundred years after Cortés' death seven hundred and thirty years ago, and it was only the Europeans' continued attempts to invade up and down the coasts that eventually brought all the native lands into single-minded alliance. The modern One World, under the rule of a single emperor, only came into existence in the last two centuries. 
But everyone celebrated the death of this one man as if he would have somehow single-handedly destroyed their culture, their heritage, and their religion—a religion that would send Coyotl to a fiery death to please gods he didn't think even existed. He'd seen Cortés die every spring for sixteen years, but standing now just a couple of paces away from him, watching him tremble and plead for his life ... Will that be me too, when I face my fate at the Feast of the Great Dead Ones? Coyotl felt sick. 
As Cuauhtémoc leveled the sword to Cortés' neck, the crowd chanted for the Spaniard's blood. It burned Coyotl's ears. They might as well have been chanting for his as well. He pushed his way through the mass of warriors, back towards the Snake Wall, and once he broke free of the crowd, he ran. Already he felt as though he was afire. 

After hours of walking the paths around Lake Texcoco, Coyotl arrived home carrying his eagle head under his arm. Titic sat on his courtyard wall; he must have been really worried to have convinced his mother to let him wait for him outside after dark. "What happened?" he asked, jumping down to walk with Coyotl. "Why did you leave?" 
"Yesterday I found out that I'm Xiuhtecuhtli." Coyotl felt numb saying it. 
"The Fire God?" After a shocked silence, Titic asked, "When?" 
"This summer." 
Titic struggled for words for a moment before sputtering, "But the incarnations are chosen at birth—" 
"I'm an alternate." 
"What's that?" 
"Someone who takes the chosen's place if he dies of an accident or something. Apparently they're chosen at birth too, but the priests don't tell the parents unless the alternate is needed." 
Titic stood silent for a moment, perhaps trying to find something comforting to say. "My mother says it's an honor to be chosen. She'll be happy for you." 
"Of course she will," Coyotl said bitterly. "She believes the nonsense the priests spout about the Sun falling from the sky if they don't feed it blood." It's because of zealots like her that I'm going to die before I've even turned the eighteenth page of my life, he nearly added but he caught himself. He'd insulted Titic's mother enough, and he was lucky Titic hadn't already punched him for that dishonor. "I don't consider it an honor. I consider it murder," Coyotl finished. 
Titic stared at him, shock in his eyes, but he said nothing, only nodded slowly. 
After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Coyotl said, "The priest is coming to get me tomorrow." 
"Tomorrow? But the festival isn't for another five months!" 
"I need to be properly versed in the rites of the fire god and 'prepared for the sacrifice'," Coyotl replied, using the very words he'd seen in the letter the Department of Religious Affairs had sent to his parents. It had explained how the original vessel had died in a car accident and their son was designated to take his place. Rest assured that for your son's sacrifice, the gods will grant him paradise and eternal happiness. It had been signed by both the Emperor Cuauhtémoc and the high priest of Xiuhtecuhtli. 
"This is just so sudden. How can they really expect ... they couldn't wait a couple years, to give you some time to get your stuff in order?" Titic asked, desperation in his voice. 
"I guess the Fire God doesn't want to wait," Coyotl said with an unkind chuckle. 
Titic's mother called from beyond the walled courtyard. "I have to go," Titic said, reluctantly turning away. "I'll come by tomorrow morning, to see you, to …" 
To say goodbye, Coyotl concluded for him, for he obviously couldn't bring himself to say it. He waved to Titic as his friend closed the gate behind him. 
At home, Coyotl's mother asked why he was back already. 
"I'm tired," he told her. 
"How was your Independence Day?" his father asked as Coyotl climbed the stairs. 
"Eye-opening," Coyotl replied, then closed his bedroom door. 
On his desk sat a picture of him and Titic, their faces so young and full of hope. It was only a few months old, from their last Jaguar Scout trip up to Mount Tlaloc. At night they'd stayed up late watching the stars travel across the sky and talked for hours about what classes they'd take when they went to school in Xochimilco next year. All year he'd looked forward to going back to Mount Tlaloc, to where his dreams had been alive and thriving, where he'd felt so free and at peace. 
What he wouldn't give to feel like that now. 

In the morning, after breakfast, a priest came to the house. He smelled foul with the blood of hundreds of sacrifices, his hair hanging in gnarled locks around his grimy face. A bored-looking yellow and black-spotted jaguar knight came with, wearing a blaster holstered under his hairless arm. He didn't even look at Coyotl's father when he humbly invited him and the priest inside the house. 
"Are you ready to go?" the priest asked Coyotl, who was still sitting at the kitchen table, finishing his breakfast. 
"Not really," Coyotl replied coolly. A night of restless sleep had left him surly. 
"He still has to pack his bag," his mother hastily lied. She took Coyotl by the arm and dragged him upstairs. With the bedroom door closed behind them, she said, "I know this is difficult, Coyotl, but we all have obligations …" She set his duffel bag in his hands, crying as she spoke. Coyotl felt horrible for making her cry. 
Downstairs, his father handed him a cloak and mumbled something about holding one's shoulders high and not letting anyone see his fear. "Because that will just bring ridicule, and no one in your position deserves that." He hugged Coyotl then held his shoulder with one hand, trying to hold back tears. Coyotl's mother kissed her son's cheeks and smoothed his hair, whispering how much she loved him. She nearly made Coyotl cry too. 
"We really must be on our way," the priest said impatiently. "We have a car waiting outside." 
Nearly the whole neighborhood was outside in the street or on the lawns, to watch Coyotl's departure. A few stayed behind the gates of their walled courtyards. Titic and his mother stood at the bottom of the walkway, near the car. She held a bundle of flowers in her hands and a smile on her face. She was older than Coyotl's mother, or maybe she only looked it because she notched her ears and scarred her cheeks with knives, like many very religious people did. 
When Coyotl and the priest approached, she stepped forward and bowed. "May I bestow a gift on the young man?" she asked, and though the priest harrumphed, he allowed it. She placed the flowers around Coyotl's neck, strung together in a garland that looked eerily like the flower-bedecked garrotes used for the public execution of criminals. "Tonantiuh blesses you for your sacrifice," she said with a smile. 
Her ecstatic, devote face infuriated Coyotl. "Your god can fall from the sky and drink my piss for all I care, woman," he growled. 
She stepped back, appalled. Even Titic gritted his teeth in fury, and Coyotl expected his friend to take him to task for speaking to his mother like that. 
But the priest got hold of Coyotl first. He grabbed him by the garland, and with three quick twists, he drew it tight against his throat. Coyotl collapsed to his knees, gasping. He tried to cram his fingers under the twine, to make room to draw a breath, but it was too tight. His head felt ready to explode, like a melon dropped from atop a house. He knocked at the priest's knees with his elbows, hoping to make him let him go, but the struggle quickly sapped his strength. He flailed, his lung burning for air and his heart thundering so loud he could hear nothing else. He welcomed the darkness when it finally took him. 
But soon he awoke again, coughing. The morning sun scorched his eyes and he heard his mother sobbing. Everyone else was silent; even the birds seemed to hold their breath. 
The priest stared down at Coyotl, his dark eyes intense. "You're unworthy of the paradise that awaits you after the sacrifice. Your parents failed to instill in you the proper respect for the gods, but I will teach you it, with a rod if necessary. And when your turn comes to honor Xiuhtecuhtli in the fire, you will go to it with relief in your heart and a smile on your face." 
Coyotl cringed away from him. When he touched his neck, he felt blood. The priest had cut him with the garland. The jaguar knight flashed Coyotl a grotesque grin, then leaned over to type a pass code in the keypad below the car's rear passenger window. 
Coyotl's parents stood on the sidewalk, his father holding his mother, her face buried in his shirt. He looked angry and exhausted, as if it had taken everything he had to keep from throttling the priest. 
The priest spoke with Titic's mother in a low voice. Titic stood apart from them, staring at Coyotl, all traces of his anger gone, replaced instead with shock and fear. He held his friend's gaze for a moment then moved it away, as if staring at something over Coyotl's shoulder. Coyotl turned to look too. 
The jaguar knight was still messing with the keypad, cursing under his breath about pass codes. His blaster rested right at Coyotl's eye level, dangling carelessly in his shoulder holster. Coyotl could pluck it out easily, then if the priest attacked him again, he'd have a weapon to protect himself. He turned back to Titic. 
Titic's expression had changed again, back to anger. He lifted his chin. 
So Coyotl grabbed the blaster. 
Just as he got it free of the holster, the jaguar knight whirled on him. Thick, curved claws slid from his human fingers and he swiped at Coyotl's hand, cutting his arm. Coyotl dropped the blaster to the ground, but quickly grabbed it up with his other hand. The knight fell on him, hissing and snapping at his face. Around them voices raised in both terror and surprise. 
Coyotl shoved his wounded arm into the knight's mouth, to hold him back long enough to adjust his grip on the blaster. He pressed his forearm right against the monster's jaw hinge but the knight still managed to gnaw away at it, trying to break the bone in half. Coyotl howled in agony but jammed the blaster against the were-jaguar's bare gut and pulled the trigger. Over and over. 
The knight jolted with each shot. His eyes bulged. When he finally stopped sawing at Coyotl's arm with his molars, Coyotl shoved him aside. He let go of the blaster to free himself of the weight, then he sat in the grass, shivering and cradling his wounded arm. 
When a shadow descended over him, he looked up to see the priest holding a long steel blade in his hand, raised to stab. Coyotl scooted back until he bumped into the car's side panel. Why did you leave the blaster behind? he cursed himself. 
But someone hit the priest from behind. He fell onto the car above Coyotl and slid down the hood to the ground, his body laying half in the street. Blood formed a glistening black pool on the asphalt under his head. 
Titic stood on the sidewalk, holding a large garden stone in both hands, his breath ragged as he stared down at the priest. When he finally tore his gaze away, he asked Coyotl, "Are you okay?" 
"Are you okay?" Coyotl asked. 
Titic dropped the stone as if suddenly realizing what he'd done. 
Coyotl's mother rushed to her son and pulled him into her arms, covering his face with kisses and tears. His father came soon after, with bandages and medicine. The other neighbors gradually gathered around as his father cleaned his wounded arm and wrapped it with bandages. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. 
"More knights will be here soon." 
"They'll kill him on the spot when they see this." 
"He needs a doctor." 
"They can't take him to a doctor! They'll turn him over to the knights for sure!" 
"He can go my brother, in Tlaxcala. He's a doctor, and he helps people escape the sacrifice all the time." 
Coyotl looked at the last one to speak. It was a man who lived near the end of the street. Coyotl had never spoken to him and he didn't know his name, but the man pushed a slip of paper into Coyotl's hand and said, "He'll help you. And your friend." He nodded to Titic, who was paled but nodding. 
"Take the car, son," Coyotl's father said, giving him the keys. He also gave him all the money out of his wallet, and Coyotl's mother emptied her own money purse. 
"Are you all crazy?" Titic's mother screamed, and everyone turned to look at her. She wrung her hands together, her voice quaking as she spoke. "Who are we to interfere with the will of the gods like this? Xiuhtecuhtli chose him for his vessel, and if he doesn't get his blood, he'll torch the One World in an inferno of flames and fury." She turned to Coyotl when she said, "Do you really wish to bring about the world's end?" 
Before Coyotl could answer, Titic told her, "If you're so concerned about that, mother, maybe you should go offer yourself to him. Your gods don't 
care whose blood they gets, just that they get it." 
She stared at Titic for a moment then ran for the house, not looking back. 
"Let's go, before she calls the knights," Titic told Coyotl and they headed for the garage around back of the house. 
"Your own mother would really turn you in?" Coyotl asked. 
"To her, the gods mean more than even me." 


They made it to Tlaxcala before dusk, and the neighbor's brother greeted them when they arrived. He stitched up Coyotl's cuts and bandaged his arm. He also gave them a meal. 
"A friend has a car for you to take, since the knights will be looking for that car," he told Coyotl over dinner. He unfolded a map on the table. "You'll need to leave early, before the patrols start canvassing outside of Tenochtitlan. Take the highway northwest to Huaxtepec, and from there just keep going. When you hit the coast, follow it north. It'll take you a week to get here, to Miztonatlan—" He pointed to a city circled on the map. "—but the empire's control isn't as strong in the north, and there are people there who will help you." 
After dinner the man left them to sleep on the couches, but neither of them seemed able to. Coyotl watched the stars through the window and touched the bandages on his neck. It would undoubtedly leave a scar. 
"We'll never get to go back home, will we?" Titic asked after they'd laid in the dark for a half hour. 
"Probably not," Coyotl said. "I’m sorry I got you into this." 
"You didn't get me into anything," he said. "After you told me about being the Divine Fire, I stayed up all night wishing there was something I could do to help you. It was so unfair. We were going to go to school together in the autumn, and when we finished, we were going to start that mountain climbing business down in Cuzco, remember? And someday we were going to climb Denali." 
Coyotl nodded. "We had everything planned out." 
"But then I realized that none of that was going to happen," Titic continued. "I felt so angry, but scared too, and so helpless. If I said anything to my mother about it, she'd curse me and make me rub chili powder in my eyes as penance for doubting the gods. And if I said anything to the priest … well, look what he did to you, and you're supposed to be the god-incarnate." 
Coyotl pulled his hand away from his neck. "He certainly didn't seem too concerned about killing me, did he?" 
"I'll never get that image out of my head, that look on your face when he ..." Titic swallowed hard. "I was sure he was going to kill you, right there in front of us, in front of your parents …" 
"I suppose there are more than just one alternate, so why shouldn't he?" 
Titic stiffened his jaw and said, "He at least should have had the decency to treat you like a god, with respect, but then these sacrifices aren't really about the gods, are they? They're about power, over you, me, our parents, and everyone else. It's about keeping that power in the hands of those that have it." He sat in silence for a moment then said, "I'm glad I killed him. He had the blood of thousands staining his hands, and I wasn't about to stand there and let him spill yours too." 
So much gratitude filled Coyotl's heart that he couldn't form it into words. It only came out as a few tears that he promptly wiped away. 
"And all these people who helped us, they felt just like me. We shouldn't be afraid to do what we think is right, and for just a moment you made them forget their fears of the priests and jaguar knights. And they'll tell others what you did, how you stood up and refused to go peacefully to a pointless death, and it'll spread hope to those that need it. Generations from now, when no one fears the sacrifice anymore, all the people will say, 'It was Coyotl who freed us. He's the one who started it all. We owe our independence to him'." 
"Now you're being ridiculous," Coyotl said. "I'm nobody. No one's going to remember me for anything." 
"The Spanish Devil was nobody too, yet we celebrate his death as if he was someone important, someone who was going to change everything. Don't underestimate the power of the dedicated individual. I can see it all now. Someday it'll be someone representing you in the Chase, accept when you reach the temple, the crowd won't trip you but instead stand with you against the mob of knights." 
"Shut up already," Coyotl said with a laugh. They didn't talk anymore after that, but Titic's words played over and over in his head. When he finally fell asleep, he dreamed of a world that was just a little brighter than it was yesterday; he was a freer man than most, if only because most people lacked hope. And what more precious gift could one give others than hope? 




Company Policy 

Glenn Lewis Gillette

I found this recording on an unpopulated parallel world, and once I broke the video algorithm, I was staring at my own face. 
"A downside to rerouting history," I told myself, "you don't remember what you lost and why you tried to lose it." 

Company Housing. Company Church. Company Bar, but at least we can choose separate tables once inside. We drink and talk, no shop talk mostly, but you can't avoid it, not in a Company Town. 
One day, the four of us—Enosh, Abidan, Jair, and I—speculated about applying our technology to things the Company never figured on. Separate tables meant we could bring our beliefs to bear. The Company makes us worship together, but they can't make us believe together. I hear they're working on that over to DO-Kiev, but not yet. God-the-Father made us too complicated, and even God-the-Son's neurologists haven't completely cracked His Genomic Code yet. 
Enosh follows journals covering work outside our Company Specialty. That's his job. The rest of us write for the Multi-Verse publications—and read them, just in case DO-Shanghai and DO-Reykjavik breakthrough. Enosh alerts Our Company when any other of the Dome-Over Towns lets loose something interesting, but this day, he gestured us into a tête-à-tête for a tidbit he didn't post on the Company blog—and not for the first time. 
“Clones,” Enosh said. “Donor cell to fully operational adult, full elementary education on-board—” (we all talk engineer lingo) “—in nineteen days, one more for an extra language.' 
Not the first cloning discussion either, given the synergy between parallel universes and clones, practically the same thing actually, similar in complexity; universes don't have souls, though some do seem to adopt attitudes. But timeframes hadn't been practical for experimenting with that conundrum: do men make history or does history make men? Of course, we had a particular agenda. Separate tables, remember? 
We agreed to have a run at it, so I got in touch with DO-Montevideo. That's my job, keeping up communications with the other Company Towns, what with the solar flares, world-wide desertification, and all such challenges. Surely, natural catastrophes galore signal a strain between The Creator and The Lamb, so our sect believed. We prayed to escape these Domes, processed air, processed water, processed food. 
We started with Joseph Caiaphas, High Priest (18 C.E. to 36 C.E). Every Apostle, when reminiscing in a blog, emphasizes how dangerous the Jewish Establishment had been to their movement. Even the Magdalene herself has shuddered over the topic. So substituting our man for the "CEO" of the Sanhedrin seemed the place to start. 
Abidan gathered the donor cell; after all, multi-versing covers time along with the other thirty-two dimensions in each universe; we'd use that capability to insert our specially prepared copy into history at the critical moment. We traded secrets with DO-Cairo (closest Town to the Jerusalem Crater, more "collateral damage" from Armageddon); DO-Cairo worked with DO-Montevideo to raise our twelve Caiaphas clones properly (Aramaic and Hebrew and Greek). Our sect has Believers all over. 
We picked eleven universes, insulated from ours by two Blight Dimensions, and carefully inserted our clones; we reserved one for our own timeline in case more than half of his twins succeeded. The clones knew what to do and believed in our cause—and failed! An earthquake here, an assassination there, one thing or another, or maybe I would say One Thing Or Another, if God-the-Father hadn't Promised Multi-Dimensional Non-intervention in exchange for Dei Vivi. 
So we turned to Pontius Pilate, Roman Prefect (26 C.E. to 36 C.E.). If one Establishment can't do the job, try another, (though the Romans always got too much of the Company Gravy, if you ask me, despite their incompetence during those crucial days.) DO-Cairo turned up with pertinent expertise again; we owe them big, but then they've lost a lot to the Company too. 
We failed with Pilate! Not bad luck this time, just personal weakness. He did put together a kangaroo trial for Yeshua, then got such stage fright that only a bottle of grappa got him up before the crowd—all Jews, but what can you do? They were the native population, after all. Then he mistook a washing bowl for a grail, so everybody thinks he dismissed the charges! Once the Fisher-of-Men scampered out that Roman exit, there was no way back. 
Back in the Company Bar, we considered abandoning our Messianic sect. Why couldn't we kill a rebel rabbi in a simple backwater? What chance could there be for a Second Coming when the First one never quit? How could we hope for Heaven-on-Earth when His Days would run Without End—no End of Days now. Granted, people have gotten rusty with Death since His Kingdom-on-Earth began and kept on till this very day with Him still running the show. Now all we have left is Destruction, and we're still good at that. 
Instead, our sect imagined a nice little demise for Yeshua while he was still mortal. Maybe turn that evening in Gethsemani in a different direction, not deification because God-the-Father yielded to Yeshua's cowering. A betrayal to the authorities, followed by an execution. Then a Resurrection as a proof of concept? Humanity always works better on Potential than Actual. 
'Enough gloom,' I finally said. 'Let's clone Yeshua's father, then make him sterile. No get, no misbegotten.' 
Jair snorted. 'Do you think God-the-Father can be defeated by simple genetic engineering?' 
'No,' I agreed slowly, then blurted: 'He might accept a different sort of challenge. We fix our Yosef so that he begets only girls!' 
What did we have to lose? Only “Heaven on Earth.” 
That's the story, the journal concludes. I'm glad you found it. Now you know. 

We did get that execution—almost. Judas on the cross, not someone named Yeshua, then the Marys, Mother and Magdalene, waded through the mob and soldiers, a glorious moment in anybody's Book, and relieved that genius scapegoat of his noble sacrifice. Given the times, women couldn't lead any movement to fruition, but they did take it into exile and sent the Apostles out to preach. Our Mothers' Church doesn't stand alone on our world, but it opens its doors every Sabbath to my family. Speaking of whom: we're going on a picnic. Down to Sunrise Meadow. Sun, wind, grass, trees, the way our world ought to be. 
Thanks to me, apparently. 




Saving Chairman Mao 

William Highsmith 

February, 2050, Boston 
Marisa's ansible rang around two-thirty. It was St. Bernadette. She had received her last rites, again, but was was feeling better. She wanted to warn Marisa about some miscreants who were out to get her, gun-toting types. Though she spoke the simple Gascon Occitan of Lourdes and Marisa did not, and had died two centuries before Marisa was born, they communicated remarkably well. 
"If they come, I'll know about it soon enough," said Marisa. "I'm mildly telepathic." 
"Not these men, Marisa," said Bernadette. "They're brutal killers from another time." 
"Time-travelers? Why are they after me?" 
"I do not comprehend their ideas, mind you, and they speak of events beyond my time, but I can parrot their words, mon amie. They are anarchists who would reverse their failures by manipulating the growing disaster of your time, the European and Asian wars. We must redo what they have undone." 
"World War II?" said Marisa. "That's a century ago. How do you know of these time warriors?" 
Bernadette was silent for a moment. "I do not know the name or time of the war, but I learned of it through my other ansible, the God Ansible, so I know it is true." 
"God uses gadgets?" 
Bernadette nearly laughed at Marisa, humble as she was. She peeped an amusing little sound that would preface a laugh. "Marisa, I suppose Moses' staff was a gadget, but God's Ansible is a vision. You could have the visions too, mon amie, if only you would—" 
"Um, I'm lapsed, sweetie. I understand none of this plan of yours." 
"I know only that there are some who build roads, and others who make inroads for builders. One is paved with earth and stone, the other with grace. I'm sorry, mon amie. I've lived a simple life. I do not understand your world." 
"What am I to do? About the time warriors, I mean? And by the way, I have no pickaxes, sadly, and I sunburn easily." 
"There is a young boy," said Bernadette, fighting back a laugh, "a prodigy …" 


June, 389, Tagaste, North Africa 
"Hippo? Please, Bishop, a priest in Hippo Regius? Home is for me, and not as a priest. I do not wish to break bread with parishioners, guide their lives, bless their babies and bury their dead. I am not wise enough. I wish only to search out the Gospel at home." 
"They've called you for their priest." 
"And I can not refuse …" 
"No," said Bishop Valerius, emphatically. "You may continue your studies while a parish priest, of course. Already, your rhetoric on weighty doctrinal matters reaches throughout the empire and persuades even the old and wizened. My head still spins over your doctrine of unmerited grace." 
Augustine collapsed into the bishop's visitor's chair, and at once his lives as Roman magistrate, teacher, philosopher and now, priest, clambered for his attention. All had their merits, but semi-retirement at home had a monastic appeal—peace, quiet, study and a bit of teaching now and then for income. Augustine looked up at the bishop with glazed eyes and emitted a tortured sigh. 
The bishop laughed congenially. "When did you first imagine that you were in charge of your life … Father Augustine? If it is the operation of grace that brings man to God as you say, then you must transmit that idea forward for all to see on a road paved wide with works and deeds; only philosophers will be persuaded by sublime rhetoric on a narrow scroll." 


June, 1942, Fort Ord 
"Burma? Did Roosevelt put you up to this, General Marshall? Good one, Sir." General 'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell laughed. He knew he was screwed royally, but hoped to waltz out of it. He wanted a theater command, not a rescue operation at the edge of the war. 
"If we don't reopen a supply line into China, the Japanese will control the air even west of the Chunking Mountains, and permanent presence in the Indian Ocean." 
"Sir, the Chinese are engaged in an civil war while being invaded by the Japanese. How can we hope to rely on an ally like that?" 
"My point is, what are we going to do about it? My answer is to send a man I trust. Perhaps the only one with a chance of understanding the complexities of it, Chiang Kai-shek's Allied Chief of Staff. It's right up your ally, Stillwell, building a supply line through a forest with pickaxes, green soldiers and few supplies, while bombs rain down on your head." 
"And then what … General … Sir?" 


July, 1944, Assam, India 
Mrs. Choudhuri had received a foreign letter every week for three weeks, beginning in June. They were always a letter from a woman in Boston, postmarked for the year 2050. 
The postal carrier would shrug and say "foreign calendar." The postmark aside, the letter was difficult to believe. 
Dear Mrs. Choudhuri, 

I send you blessings of grace from Our Lady of Lourdes. On September tenth, your son will defeat Mr. Gribic, a master chess player soundly at his chess club. You must intervene. Otherwise, the man will vent his anger on his wife with violence, which will pave inroads to unimaginable destruction a few years later. A terrible decade of war will breed a century of war. As a sign that this is true, your son will arrive at the chess club with stigmata on his palms that only you can see, and which will disappear when you remove your son from the match. 
Consider this: when the laity stumbles, it is the operation of grace that brings man to God, so let the ministers increase their efforts, but take heart that they are not alone. 
This is a true prophecy, delivered to my ears from the mouth of Bernadette, of the Sisters in Nevers. 
Yours truly, Miss Marisa Roosevelt (no relation to the President) Boston, Mass. 

After the third letter, Mrs. Choudhuri asked her son, "Vijay, are you a good chess player? Tell me the truth, son." 
"I am not weak, Mommy." 


August, 1944, Assam 
Father Wibert was working on his letter of resignation when a lady came to his office. He had accepted the parish position knowing he would inherit a troubled congregation, with much bickering and division. Tomorrow, he would explain that he had stumbled and failed to end the strife. He would accept all blame, of course, and express unwavering hopes that his successor would succeed. 
"Father Wibert, may I speak with you?" 
"Yes, but I'm so sorry. I don't recognize you. Strange … I pride myself in knowing all the parishioners by name." 
"I've not been to mass or confession in four years," said Mrs. Choudhuri. "That explains it. I've been in this parish only three years now. Why have you been away, Mrs … ?" 
"Choudhuri. I do not feel welcome here, Father." 
"What especially was at issue when you first decided to leave us?" said the priest. "My son, Vijay, was born well before we were married. He is such a sweet 
little boy, and cares only for chess, but we were not accepted here—" "I understand completely, Mrs. Choudhuri. My predecessor finds me a bit, 
um, radical, but in my parish, you are welcome to join us at mass and communion, as long as you are repentant." Mrs. Choudhuri's throat tightened. "Thank you so much, Father. However, I 
came for another matter that burdens me." 
"What is it, Mrs. Choudhuri?" 
"Is it possible that a saint would use one such as me for good?" 
"A canonized saint?" said Father Wibert. "Surely you don't mean that." 
"St. Bernadette, Father." 
Father Wibert's eyes widened. "If one uses you at all, it will be for good … of that I am certain." 
"What I mean is—" 
"I know what you mean, Mrs. Choudhuri. Do you want a bald answer? 
Surely there is more to this story." 
Mrs. Choudhuri took her three letters from her purse and pressed them into the priest's hands. "I nearly tossed discarded these letters as a cruel prank, 
but my heart told me to see you, Father." 
Father Wibert examined the letters with their strange stamps and his hands began to tremble. He read one of the letters three times. 
"I understand the first part of the letter completely," said Mrs. Choudhuri. "I'm asked to stop my son's chess match. But what does the second part mean … the part about the laity and the operation of grace?" 
"That part does not speak to you at all?" 
"Not one word of it, Father. What does it mean?" 
"It speaks to me, Mrs. Choudhuri," said Father Wibert, as he crumbled his resignation letter. "It means, God is great. You must prevent the chess match from completing." 
"I will," she said as she rose from her seat. 
"May I keep one of the letters? I would mean a great deal to me." 
"Of course, Father. I receive one every week." 


August, 1944, Assam 
Mrs. Gribic smiled as Vijay Choudhuri approached her at the registration desk of her hotel. "Good morning, Vijay. So good to see you." 
"Good morning, Mrs. Gribic. Do you have any chores for me today?" 
"None today, but come back in a few days. I'll have plenty then. Woodwork, cleaning and landscaping. In the meantime, you can practice for the club chess tournament. Give my husband a good scare, okay?" 
"Sure, Mrs. Gribic," he said, with an ambiguous expression. "Thank you." 
"I have something for you." Mrs. Gribic took a bag from under the counter. "This food is fine, but it's a day or two too old to serve to my customers." 
Vijay took the bag and saw that a third of it was uncooked rice which would be good for a year. "You're so kind, Mrs. Gribic." 
Mrs. Gribic waved him off and went to the second floor. She looked both ways and knocked on room 221. Major General Barton opened the door and whisked her in. She had put him in an unbooked room, without registering him into the hotel. So far, she had only met him at obscure parks, or a café when shopping for groceries. She knew little about him, other than he organized Allied air deliveries of military supplies out of India, and was secretive. 
These dalliances were difficult to arrange. Mrs. Gribic lived at the hotel with her jealous husband and spinster aunt. Barton's time was unpredictable due to his military duties. This was a difficult step, meeting him in private in a hotel room. She felt like an unpaid prostitute, even though her husband was moody and often cruel. She deserved better. 
At times, though, her husband could be extravagantly sweet to her, especially after he had won an important chess match. Chess was a mixed blessing for her, though. He was more cruel with losses—which were rare— than he was sweet with a win. 
"I'm not sure about this—" 
Barton paid no attention. He had her cloak off her and settled her on a couch before she could say another word. She did not say 'no', nor did she say 'yes'. 


August, 1944, Northern Burmese Wilderness 
To: Army Chief of Staff George Marshall 
From: Joe Stilwell 
Subject: Ledo Road Construction Report, 2 Aug 1944 
General Marshall, two more bulldozers are bleating like sheep because of minor damage from Japanese bombers. There are no spare parts within eight hundred miles. If I may be blunt, Sir, I thought you were joking when you said the road would be built with pickaxes. I have a question for Major General Barton: "Where the hell are you, and where are my parts and equipment?" All he has to do is shove them out the plane as he flies over from Assam, for God's sake. My troops are sick, and they know that if next month is like the last, another fifteen percent of them will be dead. 
As for Chiang Kai-shek, who needs enemies when we've got friends like him? Chiang hoards half the Land-Lease material for his own ambitions against Mao Ze-dong before he even thinks about theater matters. He's robbing us blind, General. 
Lieutenant Powers just entered my tent with a message from Assam. Now I know why messengers hate their jobs; I might owe that young fellow a field promotion. Damn! Has Barton retired? The message said he hasn't been seen in a week, and my equipment is stacked in a hanger. 
Regards, Joe Stilwell, retired? 


February, 2050, Boston 
Marisa couldn't help herself. She called Bernadette, to confirm yet again 
what she had said. 
"Bernadette, you are sure? The men must come to my home, and I must be 
here when they arrive?" 
"Yes," said Bernadette. "If you are not there, chatting with me on the ansible, the whole fabric of the plan will be rent." 
"But—" 
"You will be safe if you are there; I do not know what will happen if you are 
elsewhere." 
"You're sure? I'm not really the heroine type." 
"I do not need to be sure, or doubtful. I spoke God's Ansible." 
Bernadette went silent for a moment but did not seem angered. 
"Bernadette?" 
"I'm so disappointed," said Bernadette, with trembling voice. 
"I'm sorry," said Marisa. "I have jelly where my spine should be." 
"No!" said Bernadette. "I am disappointed in myself, mon amie. I was given 
such a simple message to deliver and I've failed, once again—" "Bernadette, your message was clear as a bell. I didn't wish to hear it. As well as I am able, I will carry out the plan. But I'll feel … silly … mailing letters to a woman long dead." 
"Mon amie … ?" 
"I didn't say I wouldn't do it, did I? Jeez—" 
"Mon amie!" 



March, 2050, Boston 
Marisa's sister had called the other day and beat on her for not having a will. She used words that were new even to Marisa, a junior high school teacher. She sent a package containing her signed and notarized signature to be attached to a will that Marisa had better write straight away. She was not supposed to do that. 
Marisa sat with chin on hands, gazing at the will on the kitchen table. This would be a good day to sign it, she thought, with assassins from the future due that afternoon. A fine day. 
She figured the letters she would send to the lady in the past really pissed off someone in the future. That made her brain hurt. 
Marisa pressed the pen's nib to the paper, making one round mark. She then thought again of her friend in Nevers, racked with pain, and yet so pleasant when they chatted. She had looked up Bernadette on the Internet. Bernadette had a tubercular tumor in her knee. 
She remembered her first ansible call to Bernadette and smiled. She was trying to call her sister, and Bernadette answered. Marisa nearly hung up after realizing she'd misdialed. 
But Bernadette said, "Please don't hang up on me. I'm so lonely. Have mercy on me." 
Her voice broke Marisa's heart. It took a fair amount of conversation to discover they were a century and a half and thousands of miles apart … and to believe it. 
Marisa pushed the will to the side. She'd sign it tomorrow. Then, the signing would show no lack of trust in her dear friend and her insane plan. 


September, 1944, Assam 
Vijay Choudhuri rested his chin on his knees. He asked for a pillow to better view the chessboard. His opponent, Mr. Gribic, was the champion of their 
strong chess club in Assam. Vijay had a pair of backwards pawns and was down a rook for a bishop, but he knew Gribic would pay a dear price for grabbing poisoned material four moves earlier. 
Vijay's hesitation about his line of play had little to do with chess. Gribic had a reputation in the community for punishing his wife, Sabina, for his loses— the same foreign woman who had been so generous to his family. 
Gribic looked up from the board and glared at Vijay. "Are you going to move today?" he said. Vijay ignored him and continued staring at the board, considering his options. Gribic shrugged and continued studying the board. 
Vijay was confident about his line of play. The more difficult decision that he'd taken twenty precious game clock minutes to consider was whether to follow through with it. He then noticed panic crossing Gribic's face. He's finally noticed the forced checkmate in six moves, thought Vijay. 
Vijay reached for a knight, trying to suppress an upturn of the corners of his mouth, but hesitated when he thought again of Sabina Gribic. Then a familiar hand took hold of Vijay's wrist, his mother's hand. She startled Vijay because he had not seen her enter the club. She turned her son's palms upwards and examined them. She then kissed his palms thrice and led him out of the club without explanation. 
"Thank you, Mommy," said Vijay. "I was weak today." 


November, 1944, Assam 
Sabina Gribic placed a note on Major General Barton's side table while he was away from the hotel. Her husband seemed content lately, with a club chess championship under his belt and chances for a good showing in the national championship, if the war allowed the match. He was of a mood to make amends. She wanted to end her affair and try to repair her marriage from its present low state. 
Robert, 
I must ask you now to take leave of me. While your attention distracted me from my awful marriage, it did me little good. It only gave me something else of which to be ashamed. Should you not attend to your military matters? You can not have a stupid woman like me and a war to attend at the same time, can you? You will bore one and betray the other. I'm sure your commander would not want to hear from me, would he? 
Please do not worry that this is a threat. Be certain of it. 
Regards of a sort, Sabina Gribic 


April 16, 2050, Boston & 
April 16, 1879, Sainte Croix Infirmary, Convent of Saint-Gildard, 


Nevers. 
Eight French anarchists armed to the teeth with image-seeking smart weapons surrounded Marisa's meticulously kept Boston home. The neighbors distanced themselves from the guerrillas, diving into their cars or houses. The squad leader directed soldiers to the front and rear entrances and the others to various windows. Marisa Roosevelt paid no attention; she was on the ansible with Bernadette. 
"They're here. Are you feeling better today?" 
On a signal, the men crashed through the windows and doors and entered the home on the fly. There they found a frail woman in bed, barely able to raise her head. 
"Marisa Roosevelt?" said the leader of the guerrillas, unsure of himself because of the surprisingly stark room. The walls were whitewashed plaster. The bed was an old iron design with one thin mattress, a straw-filled pillow and a ragged blanket. The room was wrong, and too small. 
"Saludi, Marie, plée de gracie," chanted the woman, weakly. 
"Marisa Roosevelt?" said the leader, more emphatically. 
"Sante Maria, May de Diu—" 
"Bonjour!" said the guerrilla leader. 
The woman breathed weakly for a moment and dropped her ansible to the floor. She could not raise her head from her pillow. "Oui, Monsieur." 
"Bernadette?" Marisa stared at the ansible while it bleeped at her like a sheep. She re-dialed Bernadette's number, but got a message informing her that the number she had dialed was not a working number. After dozens of attempts over the next two days, she entered the interminable customer-support queue at AnsiPhone. I'll bet this doesn't happen to God Ansibles, she thought. 


November, 1944, Sichuan 
Chiang Kai-shek's old friend, Lo, had led many confrontations with Mao's loyalists and knew his enemy well. He also knew Chiang well. He knew when Chiang was asking questions as a means to inform others of his decisions, and when he was genuinely asking for advice. Today, he was informing. 
"If Mao met with an unfortunate death, how serious would the bloodletting be for China, old friend?" 
"It would be painful, very painful in view of the foreign invaders … but acceptable." 
"How painful?" 
"The Maoists would wrongfully accuse us of the misdeed and draw attention to us rather than the Japanese. Chinese would fight Chinese, opening the gate wider for Japan. Then, after we have won the internal struggle, we would be faced with removing the entrenched invader. It would be very painful for China and the world." 
"Never mind the world. The time is ripe for China. She is too large for any but the Chinese to occupy." 
"Yes, the Japanese are learning even now how wide our countryside is." 
"But?" 
"A terrible river of blood will flow … an acceptable amount, though, if that is what it takes for China finally to have true leadership." 
"Might the unfortunate death happen in a few days?" 
"Did it not when you were a young man?" 
A messenger entered with a note and fled. 
"Stilwell!" said Chiang. "He will be here shortly with his advisors, demanding we join him in engaging the Japanese in Burma. He's opened Lido Road to India and thinks we owe him something for the supplies now flowing into China." 
"Shall I—" 
"No, not while Stilwell is here. Mao will have to wait. I will most certainly remove Stilwell as my allied chief-of-staff." 


April, 2022, Boston 
Something had changed. Marisa hadn't heard from Bernadette in a week and could not sleep. 
She still got an obnoxious This is not a working number message. The guy at AnsiPhone said it could never have been a working number. 
"Yes, sir! Thank you, sir," said Marisa. "Never mind about the dialing plan in France, as there wasn't one when Bernadette was alive." She slammed the phone down out of grief. 
She hadn't seen any time-traveling assassins, either, although several neighbors had, and had called the police. She could put it off no longer; she signed the will. 
As Bernadette had said, there was a mailbox behind the dilapidated farm machinery store on County Road 5. Marisa mailed the first of four letters to a woman in India who had died eighty years ago, to preserve what already is, but might not be, later. 
Marisa looked up into the sky. "This seems like an awfully convoluted plan, if I may say so … but for an omniscient, I guess it's as simple as any." 




Time and Time Again 

John Buentello and Lawrence Buentello 

Rubinsky dropped the clipboard onto the director’s desk and sighed. The room was a little warmer than usual, owing to the fact that its chief occupant wasn’t human; he should have been human—that is, the previous day he had been human, a mousy little man named Stevens whose protracted overbite was no small impediment to communication. But today the director stood slightly less than ten feet tall and had a multitude of very sharp teeth in place of an overbite. He thought it might be a species of ornithomimosaur, if he recalled his dinosaur families correctly, but he couldn’t be certain. The dinosaur/director whipped his long tail in the air and brushed at a large, luminous eye with a foreclaw. 
“Really, Dale,” the dinosaur said, picking at the papers on the clipboard, “you need a vacation. Coming into my office with a story like that—have you been eating bad eggs or something?” 
“Dr. Stevens—” 
“Stevens?” the director hissed. “My name isn’t Stevens. You know that. It’s Granoozla. By any chance, have you been drinking?” 
Rubinsky pulled his white lab coat around himself, feeling a sudden chill. 
“Dr. Granoozla,” he said, “I understand this may sound crazy from your perspective, but it’s absolutely real.” 
Granoozla sat in an oversized chair, his tail sliding through a large hole in the spine. His long jaw clapped together thoughtfully. 
“Alright, run it by me again.” 
Rubinsky took a deep breath. 
He said, “At exactly eight o’clock this morning I initiated the phase one sequence of the time dilation device I’ve been laboring over for the last five years. Those papers on your desk are the equations I produced for the theoretical application of time currents in historical research. The device itself was the product of experimental engineering we’ve been conducting for the last ten years.” 
“Dale, we’ve been studying the influence of genetic engineering on breadfruit production for the last ten years. What’s this about time?” 
“It used to be a physics lab.” 
“It’s always been a bioengineering lab.” 
Rubinsky sighed again. 
“In any case, the theory that alternate time streams run concurrently through the space fabric is correct. In fact, their parameters are so tightly interwoven that any cross-correlations—any time splicing, for want of a better term—produces decidedly unwanted effects.” 
“Such as?” 
“Such as you. Sir.” 
“I don’t quite understand. Are you telling me that I’m not supposed to be here?” “Well, not here, here. If you understand my meaning. When I activated the dilator I expected to reach across time to view a history of the world. The device works by focusing the time stream through a small leptonic lens. Picking up pieces of things from time, as it were. My initial calculations indicated that the various streams themselves were widely spaced, so I used a rather liberal power stream. The streams, as I said, are not widely spaced, they’re very thinly spaced, so the dilator seems to have reached across several layers of time streams and brought them back all together.” “Let me guess—resulting in the integration of disparate time streams, correct?” 
Rubinsky raised his eyebrows. “Yes, that’s very astute.” 
“Thank you. But what you’re saying is nuts. I’ve been director of this department for fifteen years, I didn’t just swim in from New Cerasopolis this morning. You, Dale, have been ingesting ill-bred mushrooms.” 
“I was afraid you’d say that. 
“By the way, what’s a leptonic lens?” 
“A means of accessing parallel particles using leptons.” 
“What’s a lepton?” 
“Never mind.” 
“Does it have anything to do with breadfruit?” “At this point, I wish it did. The problem is not the effect. The problem is the after-effect, which seems to be holding constant. The streams crossed at this point in time, at this focus of time, and I can’t seem to get them unfocused.” 
“Sounds like a problem.” 
“Yes, Dr. Ste—yes, Dr. Granoozla.” 
Granoozla swiped his long, purple tongue over his snout sympathetically. 
“Even if all this is true,” the ornithomimosaur said, “what in the world do you expect me to do about it?” 
“I was hoping for an insightful suggestion or two.” 
“Have you tried deactivating the device?” 
“Yes, but that’s not the problem. The dilator seems to have knitted the time 
streams together. And I don’t know how to reverse it.” 
“Have you tried asking a priest to exorcise it?” 
“Beg pardon?” 
Granoozla shook his large head sadly. 

“Why would you possibly want to construct such a device in the first place?” 
“Scientific curiosity, of course,” Rubinsky said, surprised that he would even 
have to explain his motives. “Any discovery that improves our understanding 
of the universe is worth the effort to achieve it.” 

“Hence the breadfruit.” 
“But this is pure research.” 
“Take the rest of the day off, Dale. Get some rest. I’d hate to see our best 

breadfruit man locked up in a padded room.” 


Rubinsky pondered his situation as he slowly paced the hallways of the basement laboratories, his hands held behind his back, his head staring down at the shining tile floor. If Stevens was now a dinosaur, and Rubinsky was still Rubinsky, what was the reason why he maintained his own perspective of reality? Something about the timelines themselves must have been at play—perhaps when the streams overlapped through the lens the principles involved shuffled together like a deck of cards. That seemed the most logical conclusion; and yet, he couldn’t help feeling that some other factor was in play. 
Abruptly he stopped pacing when a gigantic beetle crawled into his field of vision. He continued staring down on the thing, nonplussed. The beetle had the mass of a good-sized tortoise, and it flexed its wings beneath a small lab coat before twitching its mandibles. 
“Rough day, Dale?” the beetle said. 
Rubinsky stared at the creature a moment longer before replying. 
“You could say that.” 
“Is it that chitin project of yours?” 
“No, actually, it’s—” He remembered his conversation with Granoozla and recalibrated his strategy. “It’s something else I’ve been working on. Times streams. Using time streams to access the past.” 
“Why in the world would you want to access the past?” 
“Curiosity, I guess.” 
“To each his own. But the chitin project is where the grants are. I’ve always been impressed with your work. Your theories on aspiration are fascinating. The postulation that because of atmospheric changes we might evolve into tiny versions of ourselves is absorbing stuff.” 
Rubinsky blinked several times at the twitching beetle. 
“Yes, I’ve always found that fascinating, too,” he said. “But back to the time streams.” 
“Yes?” 
“Theoretically, just theoretically, mind you, if you found that you’d inadvertently joined parallel time streams together so their unique qualities were spilling over into one another, what do you think the best way would be to reverse the effect?” 
The beetle batted its multifaceted eye with one of its six legs. 
“Well,” it said, “the first thing I’d do is to analyze any data I collected when the streams were joined. That might give me a clue.” 
Rubinsky brightened. 
“Yes,” he said, “yes, there very well may be some value in that.” 
“Glad to be of service, Dale.” 
Rubinsky carefully stepped past the anonymous beetle—who was actually very bright for an insect—and slipped into his office. 
Before accessing the reams of data sitting on his desk, he paused a moment to study the odd construction of the furniture. That morning it had all been of the sort designed for the human anatomy. Now he couldn’t tell what anatomy it was supposed to accommodate. His chair was much wider than normal, with an undulating seat that seemed far too uncomfortable for sitting; the arms were much higher, too, and twice as long. What in the world is supposed to sit in this? he thought. He moved the chair away from the desk and stood over his papers. 
But after an hour of study he couldn’t quite see why the streams had become inextricably crossed, or what he could do to uncross them. The principle was simple: the leptonic lens was only supposed to scan the depth of the current time stream which Rubinsky called his own—any other theoretical time streams were thought to be entirely inaccessible. In fact, the original calculations indicated that each stream was so expansive that the only temporal reality the device could possibly detect was the time stream from which it originated. 
But the post-experiment equations were clear—line after line of quantified time squeezed through the lens, leaving a trail of nearly identical quanta fields occupying the same focus in the space fabric in that small area of the universe. For wont of a few decimal places, the universe had become a very crowded place. 
The device had only been activated for a minute, and now lay dormant in the basement laboratory. Surely it couldn’t have kept the effect viable after losing power. 
Despite the beetle’s advice, he found himself all out of answers. 
He inadvertently sat back into the oversized chair and immediately regretted his absentmindedness. Yes, it was definitely not designed for the human anatomy. He struggled to free himself, and then had an inspired thought. 
Perhaps the answer lay in the streams themselves; if he studied the streams he might be able to detect where they crossed, and then possibly find a way to uncross them. He winced, rubbed his tailbone and left the office. 
When he entered his laboratory he found all the working materials resized to fit insectoid dimensions. With the help of a shed carapace left in one corner of the lab, though, he was able to decipher which tools were made for what purpose and fashioned a handset (or mandible set, he wasn’t entirely certain) that displayed the time streams measured by the dilator. The glowing streams on the viewer, however, appeared for all purposes like the inside of a lava lamp. 
All he had to do was find a spot where the streams crossed. 
The focus of the various time streams was surely in the basement where his device lay, but there was so much radiation being given off by the equipment that the screen merely registered unreadable static. Perhaps if he moved a little further away from the dilator he’d find a point where the streams began to intersect and discern a coherent pattern. 

Rubinsky cautiously left the building and wandered out into the world. 
It was a much-changed landscape. There were few vehicles on the streets, and those present seemed oddly proportioned. Most of the population crawled, skittered, slithered or slid toward their destinations. He looked up at one point to see a sky filled with buzzing wings and shiny, suspended carapaces. Fortunately the streets themselves were relatively unchanged, and the buildings, although their dimensions were altered to fit the girth of giant insects, were almost identical to the ones he knew. 
He found it odd that there were no dinosaurs present. Surely the time streams that crossed in the lab would have some played-out effect this close to it. He was about to ask a huge Stiretrus anchorago—or stink bug—if it had seen any dinosaurs about when the static on his handset suddenly focused into a knot of green light. 
“Cool player you got there,” the stink bug said. Only it wasn’t a stink bug anymore. It had changed instantaneously into a huge chunk of muscovite. 
He glanced down at the glowing knot of the time streams, if indeed that was what he was looking at, and back to the huge chunk of yellow-green mineral. Certainly the evolutionary tract that the stink bug had followed couldn’t have ended in this mass of hexagonal crystal. While he was mourning this waste of evolutionary time, he noticed that one of the crystal faces of the muscovite, about a foot and a half in length, shined with a pearly luster. Rubinsky, a closet geologist since he was five years old, reached up to try to wrench the crystal free from its base. 
“Hey!” The six-foot slab of translucent silicate teetered away from Rubinsky’s grasp. “Why’d you go and poke my eye?” 
Rubinsky glanced at the knot on the screen. This was quite impossible. Forgetting for the moment that crossing time streams was itself improbable, how in the world of Albert Einstein could a particular stream have played itself out to the point where the evolutionary path of earthly creatures concluded in a rocky monolith? 
As he surveyed the once-again altered landscape he observed slabs of limestone, sheets of mica, spars of gypsum, cubes of platinum, and conglomerates of quartz rolling, tumbling, falling, and avalanching around him, on their way to wherever sentient rocks and minerals ambled off to. He watched as sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic forms of life filled a volatile landscape. 
“If I stepped on your space, I apologize,” the muscovite mass said. “But the strata is for everyone, you know.” 
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Rubinsky said, tapping the glowing screen. “Rocks can’t be sentient. Certainly I’ve heard all the scientific babble about mineral-based forms of life, but come on!” 
He kicked absently at a pebble near his foot. It yipped and skipped away. 
“Come to think of it,” he said to himself, “how did insects become an acceptable route of evolution?” 
“Maybe you’re not peering through the right crystal,” the mineral monolith replied, shedding flakes of itself. “Take this eye of mine. It’s real opaque, see—” 
Rubinsky rushed past his stony acquaintance, passing by a light-hearted group of pumice frothily discussing the latest eruption and a stunning gold nugget trying to convince its silver companions that it was not, in fact, a lump of iron pyrite. He kept his eyes on the energy knot on the screen. 
Strangely then, the light on the screen wavered and coalesced into a massive lump of pulsing light. The knot seemed Gordian in its complexity, and he was about to try to fathom its meaning when a voice lightly touched the base of his skull and whispered, “Don’t bother.” 
Rubinsky looked up, expecting to see a picayune slab of marble or chatty slice of gneiss, but instead beheld a blob of something that looked much like what his old cat Newton used to choke up on his living room carpet before making for mouse holes unknown. He detected a certain scent that was reminiscent of tarred roofs and felt his stomach roll. 
“Well!” the entity that phased laterally and vertically in front of him ‘said’ inside Rubinsky’s mind. “I’ve never quite heard that description of myself before.” It turned slightly crimson in color and added, “You’re no prize yourself, you know.” 
He felt a flash of shame at his thoughts. “Sorry.” 
“Yes, you are,” said the cloud of light, or plasma, or jelly-like substance not unlike the phlegm Rubinsky had coughed up the time he’d caught an infectious virus that made its way into his lungs— 
“Stop thinking those things!” the cloud said. “And I’m not a cloud. I’m a professor with Ph.D. degrees in applied physics, quantum physics, mathematics, and folklore of non-mitotic cultures, and all you can come up to describe my appearance is a cloud?” 
“I was going to think phase shift quantum packets next,” Rubinsky replied. 
“Well, you’re wrong. I’m more like a protoplasmic hyper-colloidal mass, so there.” 
“My apologies,” he said. Glancing again at the screen on his handset, he inquired, “Are you yet another representation of a possible evolutionary future?” 
“I am called Lint,” the voice said. “And no, I’m not the juvenile version of some vastly superior non-corporeal intellect that’s going to mess with your head, so stop thinking that. I am, however, a representative of the ultimate temporal development of what you seem to think of as amoeba, or at least the most advanced possibility of one. I am the top of the evolutionary heap, Dale. And let me tell you, your time dilemma is a nasty one.” 
Rubinsky said, somewhat awed, “How do you know me and my predicament?” 
“I have telepathic abilities beyond your understanding, and because I do I can perceive what you perceive to be reality. And you should be totally awed, not somewhat. I am an entity that can fathom the most complex and penetrating questions that have never been asked or will ever be asked.” 
“But if they’ll never be asked, how could you possibly—” 
“I just can, all right?” The super-intelligent entity glowed a hot blue. “And as for coming across representations of the future of earthly evolution, well, I would have thought you’d have ascertained that by now. The answer to your problem is as plain as the worry lines on your face.” 
“What do you mean?” 
“You have to think in simpler terms, Dale.” 
Does every superior intelligence have to speak in riddles? Rubinsky thought peevishly. 
“No, we don’t,” the mass said stiffly. “But after solving the riddles of the universe, what else is there to do to pass the time?” 
“Can’t you just tell me?” 
“And miss out on the fun of taunting an inferior creature? I didn’t attend all those classes on Advanced Abstraction for nothing.” 
“Look, I’m pretty desperate here. Through my experiments I’ve accidentally locked time streams, and now I have to find a way to unlock them. It’s a pretty straightforward dilemma.” 
“Unless your basic assumption is incorrect.” 
“What do you mean?” 
“Again, simply telling you would be the boring methodology.” 
“I like boring!” Rubinsky roared. “As far as the scientific method is 
concerned, boring is the preferred emotion. Just tell me, for pity’s sake!” 
“Well,” Lint said quietly, “if you want to be rude about things. My wager 
would be that your particular evolutionary line will never make it to our level 
of achievement if all you’re concerned about is propriety. But despite your 
discourteousness, I have decided to help you anyway.” 
Rubinsky tried to shield the unpleasant epithets forming in his mind. 
“Thank you,” he said as calmly as possible. “Now, how do I disconnect the 
time streams?” 
“You don’t,” Lint said, flashing an amused magenta. “It’s not the time 
streams that are crossed.” 
“I beg your pardon?” 
“There’s a common denominator you’ve completely overlooked.” 
He beetled his brow and glanced down at the handset. But when he looked 
up again the hyper-colloidal mass had vanished, as had the slightly undulating gelatinous landscape. 
Rubinsky sat on a long, slatted bench in the center of a lush park across from the laboratory building. The bench wasn’t so much a bench as a long conical trellis on which he managed to perch. Next to him, luxuriating in the sunlight, an intricate bundle of leafy vines sat praising the lovely weather. The vines weren’t vines so much as localized sentient vegetation; as odd as it seemed to be conversing with a house plant, though, it was a fairly spirited conversationalist. He had no idea that the love life of arugula was so complex, or that melons had such loose morals. 
“So the blob told me that my basic assumption was incorrect,” he said, inhaling the oxygen-rich air. “But my basic assumption is verified by observation alone. If I’m not observing varying time streams, what am I actually seeing?” 
“What is ‘seeing’?” the vines said, chiefly by fluttering specialized leaves to produce coherent sounds. “Do you mean the vibration sense?” 
“Sure, the vibration sense.” 
“Then you should have said, ‘the vibration sense’.” 
“All right, all right. The vibration sense has shown me the variations in time stream evolution alone. That much is irrefutable. How can my assumptions be incorrect?” 
“That, my friend, is a fairly simple exercise in logic. You’ve drawn a conclusion from irrefutable evidence. The evidence is irrefutable, therefore your conclusion must be incorrect. Find another assumption that’s also supported by the evidence.” 
Rubinsky leaned back in thought, nearly losing his balance. The proceedings of the morning were still fresh in his mind. He’d stood by the dilator, a pair of dark goggles over his eyes, watching the device’s display as the leptonic lens strobed out across the time streams and recorded the data. It was a simple matter of activating the device, monitoring the displays and making slight adjustments to the lens as the acquisition of the data fluctuated in intensity. Only one instance of variation occurred—when he reached out to lay his hand on the tubular chassis of the dilator as he leaned in for an unobstructed view of the lens— 
“You don’t suppose that could have been the catalyst, do you?” he asked the vines. 
“What’s this about a catalyst?” 
At this fluttering exclamation, the vines relaxed against the slats, spreading out and intertwining their cordons through the empty spaces. 
His eyes widened at the vines’ meditative exercise, and he finally understood. Just as the cordons of the vines were woven through the slats — 
“The time streams aren’t crossed,” he said, exhilarated. “I’m crossed through the time streams!” 
“Eureka!” the vines muttered, though more facetiously than in a caring manner. “Now will you please be quiet so I can absorb some rays?” 
Rubinsky left the vines to their sunning as he hurried into the building and down to the laboratory. 
Through some inexplicable evolutionary twist the machinery now seemed proportioned for someone half his size, but after dropping to his knees in a weird form of scientific supplication he was able to activate the monitors on the dilator to display the data of the morning’s experiment. There, in plain sight, was the slight fluctuation in intensity that accounted for his ill-placed hand. He’d seen it only as another focusing issue of the lens itself. But now he was certain that in some way he had been strung across every time stream the lens had accessed. 
Relieved that he hadn’t ruined time for a multitude of universes, yet worried that the effect might not be reversible, he studied the data for any sign of reversibility. If he’d somehow become locked into multiple streams, why shouldn’t the same process unlock him? It was certainly possible. All he had to do was lay his hand across the dilator’s chassis in precisely the same location as he had originally and localize the focus of the lens to view only his originating time stream— 
But as he was just about to do just that the thought occurred to him—fairly ran roughshod over his psyche—that he was in perhaps the most unique position of any scientist in the history of creation, in any universe. Dr. Dale Rubinsky was a living, breathing, organic recorder of a multiplicity of evolutionary lines of Earth. Surely no one else was ever in the same position of scientific research—and, if the effect couldn’t be replicated, perhaps no one ever would be again. Before he activated the dilator, perhaps it would be wise—perhaps it would be the purely scientific response—to spend a little more time investigating the streams accessed by the lens. After all, he seemed to be surviving just fine in every permutation of earthly evolution he’d experienced. What harm could it do to study a few more evolutionary lines? 
And only a few minutes after he’d left the building, as a loquacious android shaped like a large gyroscope rolled up next to him to ask him directions to the Church of the Immaculate Processor, he knew he’d made the right decision. 




Slumber of the Gods 

Trent Roman 

Hollow tapping alerted Nehreim to a sensor contact, stirring him from the routine drudgery of keeping watch on the Amenthes’s autopilot. Pushing his chair over to the electronic cartouche in question, he saw a sigil representing an unknown vessel moving towards the tomb-barge, falling inwards while carefully keeping the shadow of fleet-footed Thoth between it and the blazing glory of Amun-Ra. Switching to active sensing mode, Nehreim broadcast a standard interrogation ritual and then waited for the response. When the signal resolved itself into the hieroglyphics for the Nebt­het, Nehreim was both unsurprised and deeply puzzled. Only two starbarges ever came to visit the sprawling, floating funerary complex that was the Amenthes, a resupply barge that brought food, water and other such supplies, and the Nebt-het, which only came if she was ferrying a new resident for the sepulchral starbarge. 
If she was here, then it meant that the Great Pharaoh had died. 
The Nebt-het responded to his query with one of her own: a request to initiate docking rituals. After a brief moment’s hesitation, Nehreim replied with the appropriate protocols, and watched as the relevant hieroglyphics unfurled across the cartouche as the vessels’ respective genii exchanged information at inhuman speeds. As the sleek little starbarge neared her much bigger counterpart, Nehreim pushed himself towards another cartouche, flipped a switch and spoke into the ren projector: 
“The presence of High Priest Daenesis is supplicated in the command balcony at his earliest possibility,” he said, hearing the echo of his own voice coming back at him from the vaults below. 
Nehreim didn’t know where on the starbarge the Daenesis was, but it took him several minutes to reach the balcony, looking slightly winded beneath the heavy coat of greasy makeup. A High Priest of the Anubean Order, he was a long-time servant of those aboard the Amenthes, arriving years ago as a mere attendant and eventually rising to the eminent rank of Vizier of the Dead. Daenesis was a tall man, with easily a head on Nehreim, an effect accentuated by his tall, golden-plated headdress; his lean musculature from decades of artificially-induced gravity, and his wan skin tone—even for a Heliopean—from going the same amount of time with only occasional exposure to Amun-Ra’s rays, combined to make him look almost as skeletal as the slumbering gods in his stewardship. 
“What is it?” he asked, voice edge with irritation. 
“The Nebt-het is docking, eminence,” Nehreim told him, pointing to the cartouche in question. He glanced at the High Priest. “We were not advised of her arrival, sir … nor have I heard anything of a death on Geb.” 
He phrased this last as a statement, even though it was really an interrogation. Nehreim was of the scribal classes, and as such carried a fairly high status, but few did not defer to a High Priest. Daenesis frowned, concentrating on the scrolling hieroglyphics. By now, the docking ritual was well underway, with the smaller starbarge huddling alongside the Amenthes in Thoth’s shadow, the extendable palanquin deployed and the genius cycling through verifications to ensure the connection between the two vessels was sturdy. 
“To my knowledge, the Great Pharaoh remains in sturdy health,” Daenesis said at length. “I have no insight into the purpose of this visit. Have they said anything?” 
“They have volunteered no information other than the docking request, and I did not feel it my place to ask.” 
“But you did give them permission to dock.” 
Nehreim felt a moment’s anxiety. Had he overstepped his bounds? 
“Well, eminence … I hardly thought we would tell them to turn back around.” After all, he thought but did not add aloud, a starbarge of the Nebt-het’s size only could only carry enough victuals for a single trip into the system; they needed to refuel using the Amenthes’ stores before the return trip to Geb. 
“No, indeed,” Daenesis said easily, to Nehreim’s relief. “Still, I don’t care for this breach in protocol. It’s … inauspicious.” 
“I have them on hawk’s eye now, eminence,” Nehreim said, punching up the image on the broadcast cartouche. The party of five were dressed in starcophagi, the bulky white protective garments and bronze-tinted helmet offering no clue as to their identity, a small bag at each of their feet containing some personal belongings; however, four of them flanked a rectangular box that was large enough to hold a traditional sarcophagus, with the fifth standing at the head of what looked like nothing if not a funeral procession. Had there actually been a death, then? 
The palanquin, its load aboard, pulled back into the Amenthes; the electronic eye allowed Nehreim to briefly glimpse the impenetrable darkness of space as Nebt-het’s retreated into the background, before being replaced by the pale industrial tones of the pressure chamber. The boarding party wheeled their cargo out of the palanquin’s aperture, which sealed after them; as a precaution, air was pumped into the chamber to replace any that might have leaked out during the transfer between the starbarges. When the genius confirmed that the atmosphere in the chamber was the same as the rest of the Amenthes, Nehreim signalled hieroglyphically that it was safe to remove their starcophagi and triggered the purification ritual. 
The vents that had pumped in the air switched to a gaseous antibacterial compound, complemented with myrrh. Removed from humanity for years at a time, it was necessary to maintain a sterile environment due to their charges and the distance from any suitable medical facility; the myrrh and ritual chants broadcasted through the ren projector saw to the spiritual purity of the new arrivals as the antiseptics did for their physical purity. It was the standard protocol for all who entered this holy place, one that had been carried out for all arrivals since the Amenthes had first been consecrated, but when the visitors began removing their helmets, Nehreim saw something he had never witnessed aboard the Amenthes before. 
“Women.” 
Daenesis, who had been looking over at another cartouche, suddenly snapped back to attention, absent-mindedly pushing Nehreim aside. He stared at the cartouche, his brow furrowed and his mouth slack with incredulity. Nehreim wondered how long it had been since the High Priest had seen an actual female—the Anubean Order made no requirements of chastity from its clerics, but service aboard the Amenthes enforced such a lifestyle on its crew. 
It had been decided, long before the sepulcher barge had been launched, to restrict the servants to male slaves to prevent the slave population from increasing within the confines of the vessel, deep in the warm black sky near Amun-Ra. The scribes and priests were fewer in number, and could be expected to be better behaved than mere slaves besides, but the Anubean overseers of the project realized that a handful of female servants or spouses amongst a disproportionately male crew was a recipe for discontent and worse still, so women of all ranks were barred from service aboard the Amenthes, and by the same token from the funeral parties that brought the dead out to the floating tomb. And so it had been, at least until today. 
Nehreim’s own service was ordained for only five years—measured by the standards of Geb, of course, not speedy Thoth—and, though he was honoured to have been chosen to serve aboard the Amenthes, he had every intention of returning to the blue world once his duties had been discharged, unlike the High Priest’s lifetime commitment. Still, that didn’t make the lack of companionship, relieved only by his collection of hierosgamous sheut projections, any easier to ignore. 
“I recognize the sigils of her office,” Daenesis said, tapping the woman at the head of the procession on the screen, presumably recognizing the complex makeup she wore. “It’s the Divine Adoratrice.” 
At this point, the funeral party had shed their starcophagi and had taken their wigs out of their bags, adjusting them atop their heads. Like Daenesis and Nehreim, they wore shenti and tunics or robes, by sex, bleached a pure white, over transparent thermal stockings that covered the whole body and kept wearers comfortably warm without the need to expend extra energy heating cavernous Amenthes to an ambient temperature more like Sacred Kemet, while still conveying the illusion of light garb. Apart from that they were relatively unadorned, with only makeup and some perfunctory jewellery but no headdress. Perhaps they had more in their bags but were waiting for better accommodations; the air chamber was hardly a boudoir. 
“This is most unorthodox,” the High Priest muttered to himself. “What could account for this deviation from protocol?” 
“Eminence? Perhaps it would be best to ask them yourself. Because the arrival was unannounced there are no porters standing ready, but I could call down to the slave quarters—” 
“No, certainly not,” Daenesis cut him off. “If word gets out of women aboard—let alone a noblewoman—we’ll have a terrible time keeping away the gawkers—at best.” He rubbed his chin. “Yes, I’ll go meet them myself— as shall you; I want to keep the circle of people who know of this restricted. 
Call up a replacement to finish your shift here—I presume you can adjust the protocols to ensure that he cannot see that the Nebt-het has docked, or that we have visitors?” 
“That is …” Nehreim thought quickly about what such modifications might entail, “It may take a few minutes, eminence, but yes.” 
“Get started, then, and afterwards join me at the air chamber. Oh, and have the servants prepare quarters for our guests, but do so quietly. I don’t want to start rumours about the Pharaoh’s death before I can confirm itself for myself.” 
“Eminence? If we tell the servants to prepare new quarters, they’ll know we have new people aboard.” 
Daenesis looked at him pointedly. “Think of something, scribe,” he said and then quickly made his way towards the balcony’s autoladder. 
Nehreim contemplated the adjustments and deceits he had only a handful of minutes to perform. “The ancients were right,” he sighed, “Women aboard barges are trouble.” 
Nehreim jogged down the scripted corridors of the Amenthes, doing his best to move with all due speed without, for that matter, exhausting himself. It wouldn’t do to arrive as the High Priest was greeting their visitors all puffy and out of breath. And, some vain but honest part of him acknowledged, he didn’t want that to be the first impression he conveyed to the first women he’d seen in over three years. 
It had taken him longer than he had expected to redirect the Amenthes’ genius to conceal the presence of the Nebt-het; however small, the genius nonetheless had to take the starbarge’s profile and mass into account as kept the Amenthes in geostationary orbit, concealed by little Thoth’s protective shadow, and any skilled pilot would recognize that the rituals weren’t what they ought to have been. Because he wasn’t sure how long it would take him to make those adjustments he only called his replacement— who grumbled freely about being risen from his rest while safely away from the High Priest’s ear—after he was done, and had, by protocol, to remain manning the command balcony until his relief arrived, making him rather later to the meeting than he had anticipated. It at least it gave him the time to concoct a story about malfunctioning environmental controls turning a number of scribal quarters into iceboxes, which have him an excuse to order a team of slaves to ready new quarters until the technicians could fix the alleged glitch. Hopefully that would keep curiosity to a minimum, and aboard the already chilly Amenthes, discourage anybody from snooping. 
Nehreim slowed his pace as he neared the air chamber, composing himself, passing his hands over his tunic to make sure it was unruffled, his stockings smooth. Taking a deep breath, he turned the corner, affecting a neutral, inexpressive air. He was in luck: the High Priest and the Divine Adoratrice were still concluding their ritual greetings, and Nehreim settled himself in a spot just behind and to the right of the High Priest, standing at attention. Daenesis’ eyes flicked in his direction briefly, but he didn’t pause in his greetings. 
Quickly lost in the arcane formalities, Nehreim looked over the rest of the team, two men and two other women. One of each was Kemeti, while one of the men had the distinct features of a Nubian, from below Sacred Kemet. The other woman had the cooked-clay tint and facial structure of an Inti, the stock of the southwestern continent. Her makeup was drawn with a reddish rather than black substance, a testament to the heritage of the Inca Kingdom no doubt; the patterned lines vanished behind the dark ringlets of her wig, which had the lustre of real human hair. Her eyes flickered to him in the midst of his examination and Nehreim, suddenly feeling guilty as though he were spying on something forbidden (and after three years, it almost seemed that way), quickly fixed his sight forward again, and hoped that he wasn’t blushing. He may have imagined it, but for a moment he thought he saw, in his peripheral vision, a flicker of a smirk at the corner of her lips. 
Nehreim became aware of a pause in the exchange, and both the High Priest and the Adoratrice seemed to subtly relax; the ritual greetings, Nehreim assumed, were complete. Now they would get to the heart of the matter. 
“I must confess to some confusion, Beloved of the Gods,” Daenesis said when the pause became pronounced. “You come to Amenthes bearing a sarcophagus, yet we guardians of the underworld were not advised that the Great Pharaoh had begun His journey to the next life. What manner of events have occurred on blue Geb to merit this breach of protocol?” 
“Events of dangerous significance, stalwart Vizier—events which demand that, for the time being, the dead keep their habitual silence,” the Adoratrice answered. “We do not know how many of your underlings know of our presence, but it would be advisable that they still their tongues—particularly when it comes to long-wave ren projections back to Geb—and that they are informed of this with all due haste, before we proceed any further.” 
“Such precautions have already been implemented,” Daenesis replied with an arch tone, “in light of the unusual circumstances of your silent arrival and the unprecedented graciousness of the presence of the Divine Adoratrice in Amenthes. Other than myself and this servant of the gods …”—Daenesis inclinded his head towards Nehreim, who, put on the spot, felt compelled to give a short bow, lacking any more specific knowledge of the correct forms of address—“… no other knows that Nebt-het is come to the proximity of Amun-Ra.” 
Though no expert in the matter, Nehreim couldn’t help but think there was an undercurrent of challenge between the two, barely detectable beneath the elaborate speech. Was Daenesis, whom Nehreim knew to be a creature of habit, simply off-put by the day’s breach in protocol, or was there some underlying hostility between these two? 
“Salutary prudence, Vizier,” the Adoratrice answered; if she was flustered at having been anticipated, she did not show it. “In light of which, we believe we can take you and your functionary into our confidence. It is indeed the Great Pharaoh who lies here behind me, blessed may He be, come to join His forebears in their communion with the royal ancestor, Amun-Ra, Lord of Things That Are. The reason His journey has been kept secret is because the Great Pharaoh’s path to the next life was prematurely precipitated … by unnatural means.” 
Only the time it took Nehreim to parse the Adoratrice’s words kept him from gasping. Murdered. The Great Pharaoh had been murdered. Nehreim had no personal connection to the man—technically, the Great Pharaoh was the ultimate secular and religious authority on Geb, the emissary of the gods, but that was so removed from Nehreim’s concerns as to be meaningless— but the idea that the most powerful man on the planet could somehow be assassinated was pretty shocking. 
Daenesis, for all his usual reserve, was less sanguine. “Sacrilege,” he hissed. “Who would dare lay a hand on a living god?” 
“That, Vizier, is at the crux of the matter. The Great Pharaoh, as you may know, was in robust health for a man of his age. At His unexpected passing, the Elected Son asked his parent’s attendants to conduct a toxicology screen on the Great Pharaoh’s body, and they found trace amounts of a poisonous substance which had built up in His system, eventually causing the cardiac arrest that felled our lord. The Elected Son, realizing that only one closely placed to the Great Pharaoh could have poisoned Him in this fashion, could but conclude that the culprits must already be ensconced within the royal court of the Overkingdom, and felt he could not openly announce the murder and pursue an inquiry, because those responsible could easily obfuscate any such investigation from within.” 
“May their bodies rot, their shadows flee, and Ammit devour their souls,” Daenesis interjected. 
“Indeed,” the Adoratrice went on. “The Elected Son eventually decided that it would be best to conceal the Great Pharaoh’s death—as far as the general public is concerned, He has sequestered Himself in a spiritual retreat for the next several months to try, once again, to solve the question of Amun-Ra’s silence. We assume that the culprits will see this as a cover, but without preparations for a pharaoh’s death and the installation of the Elected Son as the new Great Pharaoh, will believe that their plan has only succeeded in making the Great Pharaoh ill, and it is hoped they may yet reveal themselves as they try to either conclude their schemes or cover their tracks.” 
“The Elected Son is wise,” Daenesis said, although Nehreim had no idea whether the High Priest genuinely thought so or was mere expressing rote support—court conspiracies were something beyond his ken. “But why bring Him here if His murderers have not been found?” 
“The Elected Son felt he could only delay his parent’s journey to His final resting place for so long. And … he didn’t want anybody stumbling across the body and spoiling the attempt to flush out the killers, let alone sow panic in the broader world, particularly with the peace of the Overkingdom being so … brittle, in these days of scarcity.” 
“Pragmatic, too,” Daenesis said, his tone as neutral as ever. “Yet—if this humble servant may be so bold as to ask—how is it that the Beloved of the Gods has found herself bearer of this sad news and mournful burden?” 
“The Office of the Elected Son and that of the Divine Adoratrice has always had a good relationship. And since we operate as independently as any from the court of the Great Pharaoh, the Elected Son entrusted us with the responsibility of his secrets, and this task.” She arched an eyebrow, the effect complimented by the dark makeup. “When those nearest to you may be betrayers, one must sometime place one’s faith in outsiders. And we trust that your curiosity in this matter has been satisfied, Vizier?” 
“Of course, Beloved; I am merely doing my duty as the Vizier of the Dead, you understand. My guardianship of our honoured kings is to fulfill their will in death as in life.” 
“A duty you dispense with the vigilance of a sphinx, clearly,” she said. “Yet if it is not too great an imposing on your duties, the journey has been long and we would like to retire somewhere other than an air chamber, to rest and refresh ourselves before we resume our discussion of how to give the Great Pharaoh his proper due without alerting anyone to the Elected Son’s scheme.” 
“Of course, Beloved; forgive my delaying you here with my inquiries. My functionary has, I trust, seen to such arrangements.” 
Nehreim didn’t miss the hint of edged interrogation in the High Priest’s tone. He bowed again, and said: “They have, although from the need to maintain the secrecy of her visit, I’m afraid the quarters will not be as well-appointed as the Beloved may be accustomed to.” 
The Adoratrice made a small, dismissive gesture. “That will not be a problem; after the journey here in the Nebt-het, simple room to stretch will seem a luxury, and our stay here will only be of limited duration. Should we have any further needs …?” 
“Nehreim will be pleased to see to them, asking only for the understanding that Amenthes’ supplies are themselves limited, and secrecy means procurement cannot always be immediate,” Daenesis put in on his behalf. 
Nehreim tried to keep his expression placid. On one level, he was vaguely insulted to have been effectively demoted to servant-like tasks; he was an accomplished scribal technician, and such duties were, nominally, beneath his station. More worrisome, however, was that by the same token, he knew nothing about waiting on a noblewoman and her entourage—his specializations were piloting, electronic ritual languages and genius/cartouche repair. He had no idea what she might need beyond of obvious necessities common to all stations, or what protocols had to be respected in her presence and what might give her offence. He had thought the slumbering gods that lined the Amenthes’ sepulchres and the giant, silent orb of Amun-Ra would be the closest he would ever get to nobility— and now he was footman to the highest ranked female priestess on Geb (or off it). 
“Of course; you have but to ask,” was all he simply said, hoping he wasn’t making himself out into a liar. 
“He will lead you there now if there nothing further; I believe I should see to our staff schedules and beginning reconfiguring our protocols to better conceal your arrival.” 
“Very good, vizier, we shall reconvene soon.” 
Daensis gave a short bow, turned smartly in place and went off, leaving Nehreim alone with the Adoratrice and her attendants. He licked his lips. 
“If you’ll follow me …?” 
Given the uncertainties of protocol, Nehreim felt it best to simply lead the Adoratrice’s party in a silence he hoped would seem respectful rather than cowed. For the most part, the Adoratrice seemed to agree; she only spoke up once, as they were beginning their journey through the small, winding service corridors of the Amenthes. 
“Will we be visiting with the kings? We confess it is a sight we have longed to witness.” 
“No, Beloved—the sepulchres are the central hub of activity of the starbarge, and it would be impossible to travel there without being noticed.” Nehreim thought quickly. “If such is your desire, however, I’m sure I could arrange some reason for the chambers to be deserted of other personnel that you and your party may visit the dead.” 
“That would be agreeable to us,” she said, and lapsed back into silence. The attendants, of course, said nothing, not that Nehreim expected them to when their lady was silent; they still carried the sarcophagus of the late Great Pharaoh between them. 
Instead, Nehreim tried to use the convoluted journey to the newly prepared quarters to review what he knew about the Divine Adoratrice. Though far outside his area of specialization, the Technical Institute of Scribal Studies in Memphis was one of the top institutions in Holy Kemet, and therefore the Overkingdom as a whole, and expected well-rounded knowledge from its graduates. Dredging up half-remembered history lessons, he recalled that the office had been founded during the Third Kingdom, and demonstrated its power by combating the Atenist heresy of the mad Pharaoh Akhenaten, preserving the worship of the true gods during the rule of the infidel king. Initially, the Divine Adoratrice had been devoted to the worship of Amun, the solar god whose presence the Amenthes even now skirted behind rocky Thoth; after the largely female-driven rise of fertilism following the Great Interstice, the office had diversified to include the rest of the pantheon, with a particular emphasis on Geb and Nut, the divine coupling of earth and sky, creating something of a votive gender split with solar and underworld deities primarily served by male clerics, nature and fertility deities female clerics. That had been the case for a couple of dynasties, now; and Nehreim had either never learnt or forgotten anything more recent. 
They finally arrived at the quarters Nehreim had hastily ordered prepared. He bowed and held the position, arm outstretched, as the Divine Adoratrice and her party filed through the low doorway. The Beloved of the Gods looked around, her expression never changing yet somehow communicating something just short of contempt for the pale steel walls, sparse furnishings and cramped facilities. 
“This will do for now,” she said as Nehreim took up a spot next to the door within the room, standing at attention. “But where do our attendants rest?” 
“Quarters for each have been prepared to either side of this one,” he answered. 
“Good. Please remain here a moment; we need to converse with our attendants.” 
The Adoratrice and her people gathered into a small circle and began whispering amongst each other, their tone hushed. Nehreim tried to keep his gaze determinedly on the opposite wall, blanking his mind with white noise of ritual equations, looking to make himself as inoffensive as he imagined a domestic to nobility should be. Despite his best efforts, however, he couldn’t resist the occasional glance sideways. Once, he thought that some of them—including the Adoratrice and the Inti woman who had caught him staring before—were looking in his direction, and he turned his eyes back to the pale blue-grey wall in front of him, telling himself that he had imagined it. 
When the discussion finally broke up, the Adoratrice called back to him: 
“Nehreim, isn’t it?” He nodded. “Tell the High Priest we will desire to meet with him in the morning—whatever that may be in this place. In the interim, we would ask you to speak with our servant, Sisuyoque …”—the Inti woman nodded at him—“… and she will provide you with a preliminary list of what we will need for our stay.” 
Nehreim wasn’t sure which he should be most concerned about—that he would now have to deal personally with this woman, or that the Adoratrice had a preliminary list of demands. Outwardly, however, he merely smiled and bowed, then slipped out of the Adoratrice’s quarters. The men, carrying the sarcophagus by both ends, followed him out; he indicated that their quarters were the two doors to their right, and they nodded an acknowledgement, unsmiling. They carried the sarcophagus into the first room; shortly thereafter, the Nubian emerged and went to his own room. Nehreim, meanwhile, escorted the women to the left. The Kemeti woman took, unbidden, the first door they came up to, bidding them goodnight, so Nehreim and this Sisuyoque came up to the final apartment alone. 
He paused outside the door, but Sisuyoque walked past him, turning around only once through the boundary to ask, with a smile: “Won’t you come in? It will be easier to talk if you aren’t in the corridor.” 
“Certainly, milady,” Nehreim said, keeping his gaze downcast in what he hoped was a deferential manner. 
“Please, Nehreim,” she said, looking about the apartment. “I am a lady-in­waiting, not a lady myself, and I’ve never placed much emphasis on rank. You may call me Sisuyoque. After all, if we cannot be informal amongst servants, when can we?” 
“Very well … Sisuyoque,” he said. “Your mistress spoke of needs …?” 
“Straight to business, then?” she said, her smile curling at the edges. “Very well, but let us sit; the journey was long and dead kings are as weighty as live ones.” 
There was a small, uncovered table for meals, along with two chairs. Sisuyoque took the seat facing the rest of the room, and gestured to the other with an amused look on her face. Feeling ill at ease at the handmaiden’s strange combination of assertiveness and joviality, uncertain whether to defer or play along, Nehreim did as he was bid. 
Sisuyoque, apparently working from memory, began going through the list of things the Adoratrice wanted, while Nehreim checked their availability on his portable cartouche. Most of the items were fairly typical, things missing from the quarters because the Amenthes’ crew would simply fetch it from storage themselves, and so the slaves who prepared the quarters didn’t think to include them. 
After a few minutes, Sisuyoque sighed, removed her wig and passed the back of her hand over her forehead. “Sorry, I’m just feeling worn out. Do you have hot water here?” 
“Plenty,” Nehreim said. Water flowed through the outer walls of the starbarge’s hull, acting as extra insulation. Whenever the Amenthes dared risk itself out of the shade of Thoth, ostensibly to better help the dead kings to commune with Amun-Ra thanks to the direct proximity to the burning star, the water there captured some of the great heat that beat onto the starbarge, and remained so even after the Amenthes had retreated back into the shadow of the little grey planet thanks to pressurization. 
“If you don’t mind, I think I’ll avail myself of some,” she said, rising from the table. 
“Very well,” Nehreim said, making a last few adjustments to his cartouche, rising from his chair, “I’ll get started on these and we can finish up whenever you’re—” 
“Oh, no, sit, I don’t want to turn you out,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder as she passed and gently pushing down. “There’s no point in making you come back later for what little we still have to go over. Really, I’m just impatient; it’s one of my vices.” 
“Alright,” Nehreim said, warily. What was she going to do? And was this flirtation, or were years of solitude making him read into intentions where none existed? 
Sisuyoque had resumed speaking, and Nehreim, without really thinking about it, started to turn in his chair to address her in turn—when he saw that she had deposited the wig on the counter of the small, functional bathroom and was in the process of divesting herself of the rest of her garb. He quickly turned back around, disbelieving. She had to be doing it on purpose now. Even if she didn’t know that there were no women aboard Amenthes, he couldn’t fathom what else to call this except a deliberate tease—or an invitation. He had, of course, heard all the stories about women who joined fertility cults, but had never really believed in such tall tales, dismissing them as schoolboy fantasies. His current situation made him half-wondered if he hadn’t fallen asleep watching hierosgamos projections—it might explain how he suddenly found himself in this business of court conspiracies and assassinated Pharaohs. 
“Nehreim?” 
His name, spoken in a slightly worried tone, startled him out of his feverish musings. He was embarrassed to realize that she had been talking, and had asked a question, but the words had completely flown over him. 
“I’m sorry,” he said, waving his cartouche, “I was distracted. There looked to be a procurement problem for a moment there, but … ah … I fixed it now. No problem.” 
“I’m sure,” she answered in an impish tone that said she didn’t buy it for a minute. 
She repeated her latest query, and Nehreim answered her in as equal a tone as he could muster, and so it went. If she wasn’t going to comment on the awkwardness of their situation, neither would he. He stiffened when he heard the water running, her voiced raised above the sound but no less beguiling, but still he feigned indifference, the efficient servant. Gradually, the list of the Adoratrice’s ‘needs’ became ever more frivolous, and Nehreim was incapable of providing anything but a standard response that the Amenthes didn’t carry flamingo feathers or Hidush incense; the paranoid part of him suspected these requests of merely being delaying tactics. Finally, Sisuyoque came to the end of her list—or could think of no more; without ever looking in her direction, Nehreim rose, bowed towards the empty wall, and walked out in a manner he hoped didn’t seem rushed. 
Only when he was out in the corridor, the door automatically sealed behind him, did he stagger to the nearest bulkhead, bent until his head was resting on the bulkhead, and exhaled heavily. 
“Fool.” 

He found Daenesis in the High Priest’s personal office, two tall cartouches rising to other side of his desk, hieroglyphics unfurling rapidly. Nehreim recognized the symbols, of course, but their juxtaposition was meaningless; presumably this was some proprietary language for priests, or the Anubean Order more specifically. 
“The Divine Adoratrice has been set up in her quarters?” he asked when Nehreim walked in. 
“She has. We should also be able to see to her less eccentric requests.” 
“Good. That’s good,” he said, sounding distracted. He frowned, paused the cartouches, and turned to face Nehreim, his expression set. “I have … concerns. Normally, I would confide in my own priests, seek the counsel of others of my order. But the Adoratrice’s instructions were clear, and I do not wish to go against the wishes of the Beloved of the Gods—nor, through her, the Elected Son and out next Great Pharoah. At least, not yet. So you will have to do.” 
“Eminence?” 
“This matter disturbs me, Nehreim—and not just for the obvious reason that someone has apparently killed a living god, which is upsetting enough. I have verified on our long-wave transmissions from Geb that all which is available publicly confirms what we have been told: the planet’s media do indeed report that the Great Pharaoh is on a spiritual retreat in the Hikush Himals. And vague solicitations for royal gossip from some of my Anubean counterparts back on Geb have confirmed a great deal of activity in the courts of the Great Pharaoh, Elected Son and Divine Adoratrice. And yet …” 
He shook his head. 
“The Elected Son is no minor office; he should have his own security forces to sweep through whatever corruption might have infected the court of the Great Pharaoh—and he would have the outrage of the global populace at his summons. Turning to the office of the Divine Adoratrice, particularly … this is not public knowledge, but ever since the rise of fertilism and the diversification of the post’s devotions, there has been some rivalry—minor, I stress—between the two courts. Our current Beloved of the Gods has been particularly critical of the late Great Pharaoh’s encouragement of desertification. They are not natural allies.” 
“Eminence? As I understand it, it was the Elected Son who brought her into his deceit. Perhaps their offices are on better terms.” 
Daenesis seemed to mull into over. “Yes … I seem to recall gossip to the effect that the Elected Son was friendlier with the Adoratrice than his parent. You may well be right, and my worries unfounded. But I did not become High Priest by ignoring my feelings, and I can’t help but feel that something is amiss. Since you will be seeing to the needs of our visitors, I would like you pay attention to what they do and say, and report back to me if you find anything … atypical.” 
“You want me to spy on the Divine Adoratrice?” Nehreim said, startled. 
“No! Certainly not,” Daenesis said quickly. “Simply to be observant to their needs … and to keep me informed. That is all.” 
In other words: yes, Nehreim thought glumly. He didn’t like this at all— waiting on nobility brought about the potential for offence already; taking sides in a royal or religious dispute was sure to do so. But he didn’t see that he had any choice in the matter. 
“Yes, eminence,” he merely said, and left the High King’s office with an ever increasing sense of weight upon his shoulders. 

It had taken some doing to arrange for the Adoratrice’s session with the dead kings. The Amenthes was a segmented starbarge—the forward compartment held piloting, the shipboard genii, quarters for everybody except the slaves, and victual storage; the subsequent compartments were largely dedicated to the sepulchral chambers of the Amenthes’ permanent residents. Nehreim had come up with a scenario wherein a catastrophic hull breach between compartments would force all personnel onto that forward compartment, then announced that they would be conducting a test of such a scenario. There was no small amount of grumbling for all classes of servants aboard the Amenthes at the disruption this would cause, including a number of pointed comments directed at Nehreim about his perceived new status as the High Priest’s ‘favourite’—as if he had ever wanted any of this. 
So while all but seven of the Amenthes’ living residents waited, cramped and bored, at one extremity of the starbarge, the Divine Adoratrice was taking a leisurely stroll along the avenues of the dead. They wouldn’t be doing the whole vessel, of course—the Amenthes held the sarcophagi of pharaohs going back as far as had been possible to recover when the project was first initiated, including kings from Sacred Kemet’s earliest dynasties. Each sarcophagus stood in its own alcove, flanked on either side by a ka statue in the likeness of the deceased ruler to one side and the status of a guardian deity on the other, both several times larger than a 
man. Above the sarcophagi were golden plaques that stretched to the 
cavernous ceiling, whose hieroglyphs detailed the slumbering gods’ names, 
titles, breadth of rule temporal and geographic, and great achievements. 
Even after three years aboard the Amenthes, it was hard not to be awed by 
the scale and history of the floating mausoleum—and, if one was pious, at 
the greatest gathering of deities ever, a pantheon millennia in the making. 
They walked in waves: the High Priest and the Divine Adoratrice at the 
front, speaking in hushed tones; the sepulchre caused their voices to echo 
but didn’t make the words intelligible. In the second rank, he and the 
Adoratrice’s attendants walked a respectful distance away, hands clasped 
before them deferentially, not speaking. Sisuyoque, he noticed, was 
separated from him by two other attendants. He kept glancing in her 
direction, despite himself; and every time her eyes glanced his way and 
caught him doing so, her stoic expression would let slip a smile. 
He had not spoken to her since that first night in her quarters, too busy first 
with procurement then with arranging the cover of the ‘drill’. She had visited 
his thoughts all too often, however, as he replayed the events of their 
meeting and speculated how it might have ended differently. Fear that a 
tryst would upset either the High Priest or the Adoratrice seemed like a 
hopelessly minute concern in the lonely watches of the night, and he would 
flagellate himself for not seizing the opportunity. Yet nor was he fully able to 
abandon the practical realities of their positions, to say nothing of the High 
Priest’s suspicions. 
“Lost in worship?” 
It took all his composure not to jump at Sisuyoque’s voice in his ear. 
Turning his head, he saw that she was now walking alongside him. Past her, 
the other attendants walked on, unmindful, the distance between them 
essentially unchanged other than the fact that they had reordered 
themselves such that the Inti woman was now next to him. Was it a 
conspiracy? 
“Yes,” he lied, probably in vain. 
“Mm. Might I ask you some questions?” 
“Regarding …?” 
“This, of course. The sepulchres. While I’ve always known this starbarge 
was out here, I can’t say I ever gave it any thought—and when the Beloved 
told us we would tasked with bringing the Great Pharaoh here, there was 
too much to do to read up on it.” 
“What do you want to know?” 
“To begin with, why be out here at all? Why not a mausoleum back on Geb, 
in Sacred Kemet, where people could visit?” 
“There are a number of reasons, but first and foremost is proximity to 
Amun-Ra. Once starbarge technology became more common, more 
predictable, it was thought that bringing the dead closer to Amun-Ra would 
be of benefit to the communion between the kings and their divine parent; 
that they would serve as a chorus of voices to defend humanity’s interests to the greatest of the gods.” 
“Yet the starbarge hides in shadow.” 
“The heat put out by the star is massive; it feels hot enough on Geb, does it not, to dry up seas and turn grasslands into desert? I magine how much hotter it is at this proximity—the face of Thoth which always faces Amun-Ra is permanently burnt. To leave the safety of Thoth’s shadow for more than a few hours at a time would risk elevating the temperature within the starbarge would turn the Amenthes into an oven that would cook us alive.” 
“But you do venture out at times, do you not?” 
“From time to time, and for short periods of time, we fly straight into Amun­Ra’s light. The first Vizier of the Dead began the practice as a compromise when it was discovered the starbarge could not sustain in the heat; this way, the pharaohs still have occasional, direct contact with Amun-Ra, to facilitate their advocacy on our behalf, to make it easier for the Lord of All to answer back.” 
“And has he?” Sisuyoque asked in an arch tone. 
“Of course not,” Nehreim said. “Everybody knows about the silence question.” 
Sisuyoque made a cynical sound. “The silence question,” she echoed contemptuously. 
“You sound … disbelieving,” Nehreim looked at her, frowning. The silence question was the great philosophical debate of recent generations. Ever since the world had emerged from the Great Interstitial Period, the chaos of that time replaced by the strength and unity of the global Overkingdom of the Great Pharaoh, attempts to consult with Amun-Ra and many of the other gods had been unsuccessful; the Overkingdom was clearly their will, or they would not have granted Sacred Kemet victory, so why did Amun-Ra no longer speak to the kings and priests as He had their forebears? Some had argued in was because of the technological and industrial advances made during the centuries-long period of warfare, that the gods would only speak once the people returned to the ancient methods of divination, but that made no sense. Why would the Lord of All speak through a bird’s innards but not a ren projector? 
“Disbelieving, yes,” Sisuyoque said, “that so much emphasis would be placed on the silence of one deity. My gods speak to me, Nehreim—Shu whispers on the wind, Satis babbles in the water, Geb groans in the earth … nature is alive with its own language, and we have only to learn the humility to listen to the small sounds. Instead, we build great barges and launch ourselves across the lifeless emptiness of space, then are surprised when a chorus of the dead in a barren place provides no answer.” 
“But you cannot deny that Amun-Ra has been silent.” 
“No, but I can recognize when a god has made up his mind to keep his own counsel, and the futility of mere mortals in attempting to change it. You disagree? Do you think Amun-Ra will speak if this vessel only stays here long enough?” 
Nehreim shook his head. “Religion is not my area. I leave such subjects to those trained in these matters.” 
“Very well then, allow me to ask a question more suited to your experience …” She leaned over closer, practically whispering in his ear. “Why did you run away from me?” 
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Nehreim said flatly. 
“I’ll just have to guess for myself then. Are you a eunuch?” 
“What?” Nehreim said, louder than he would have cared to. “No,” he said, dropping to a harsh whisper. “I am no eunuch.” Nehreim sighed. “Why are you so insistent?” 
“It seemed to me that we had made a connection—I saw how you looked at me. Yet when I pursue, you flee. Does intimacy frighten you?” 
“I am not frightened, I am … concerned. This hardly seems the time to be engaging in frivolous liaisons, and I have no desire to offend your patron or mine should we be discovered.” 
Sisuyoque laughed lightly. “The Beloved is a fertilist, as am I. We do not take offence at sexuality or dismiss it as frivolous—we celebrate it as the creative act from which all else springs. Do you know the etymology of the word hierosgamos? It has the pejorative of superficiality now, but in the original Heliopean it referred to a sacred union between gods. We see the sacred in every such union, a moment that touches the universal and divine principle of genesis.” 
“That’s … an interesting view,” Nehreim said, genuinely. It was a standpoint that held no little appeal, and not only for the obvious physical aspect. Until now, he hadn’t realized how much he had grown weary of the company of death, of the pervasive silence of these empty regions and empty gestures. 
“As for your patron, I can’t speak to his wishes. I wonder, though, whether you are a free man or his slave, that he should command your life such.” 
“I am a free man,” Nehreim said, 
“Then prove it,” she whispered forcefully. “When this tour is complete, when we have retired to our quarters and this starbarge takes on the quiet of the tomb, come to my quarters and prove that you are still one of the living.” 
Nehreim recognized the dare for what it was, but the challenge in her voice didn’t make his intrinsic freedoms any less real, nor his desire any less ardent. 
“I’ll be there,” he promised. 
Due to the removed and somewhat ascetic nature of the retreat, the Amenthes’ living arrangements were sparse. The beds were hard slabs, and the pillows little better; none of which bothered Nehreim at the moment. After a three year fast, he had gorged himself as if at a banquet, and Sisuyoque had readily provided, then reciprocated with an enthusiasm of her own. He felt like a man who had been plunged into a sensory deprivation chamber for so long that he had forgotten that there was more beyond the pale grey walls of the starbarge, and was only new emerging from the long, deathly sleep to a world of sense and motion. Even the stillness of their bodies lying side by side of the industrial slab seemed uncommonly vibrant, as though the air about them was still suffused with the expended energy. 
Nehreim was uncertainly how long afterwards Sisuyoque swung her legs around to her side and slipped out, saying: “You might want to get dressed.” 
“Why?” Nehreim asked in a teasing tone. “Am I being kicked out.” 
“Not at all,” she answered in the same tenor, “But the Divine Adoratrice is coming over, and I know you can be a bit shy.” 
“Oh, I see,” Nehreim said, smiling at this new tease. “Maybe she’ll join in next time.” 
Sisoyoque smiled brilliantly at him, pulling her shenti about her waist. “It’s great that you’re finally opening up, but I’m not kidding.” 
Nehreim looked at her: she was amused (when was she not?), but she was also sincere. Nehreim felt his heart flip and began looking about for his shenti. 
“Why?” he asked as he fumbled. “Some kind of fertilist post-coital ritual?” 
“Ah, those fertility cult stereotypes,” Sisoyoque laughed, wrapping her robe about her shoulder. “No, she just wants to talk to you.” 
“We couldn’t … have arranged a meeting at … a more convenient time?” Nehreim asked as he quickly slipped on his clothes. 
“I’m afraid time is of the essence,” Sisuyoque said, sounding more solemn than he had ever heard her. “Every passing day brings the risk of discovery.” 
“Discovery of what?” Nehreim asked, alarmed by her tone, but there was no time for her to answer: a soft knocking came from the door: two taps, a pause, and two more taps. 
“Come in, please,” Sisuyoque called out. 
The door opened, and the Divine Adoratrice walked in, ducking her head to avoid striking her headdress against the low doorway, and looked about quickly. Though dressed, Nehreim couldn’t help but feel some degree of embarrassment; everything here, from the dishevelled blanket, to the sheen of sweat on his skin, to the lingering scent of their exertions, communicated in no uncertain terms what they had just been doing, and some part of him flinched expecting wrath and punishment. The Adoratrice, however—true to Sisuyoque’s earlier claims—seemed utterly unperturbed. She waved over to the small table, and said: “Whenever you are ready, Nehreim.” 
She took the seat facing the rest of the apartment, and her other attendants, who had slipped in behind her, took up positions on the wall behind her, their body language relaxed but their faces neutral and saying nothing. 
Hoping he was at least halfway presentable, Nehreim took the seat opposite her. After a moment he felt Sisuyoque standing to his side, and she put a hand on his shoulder. Nehreim wasn’t certain if he ought to feel comforted or ambushed. 
“Nehreim, I come here not to command, but to explain; not to order, but to ask for your help,” the Beloved of the Gods began, startling him with the humility of her tone, going as far as dropping the plural when referring to herself. “If the High Priest says true, and I believe he still does for the moment, then you and he are the only ones who know of our presence here, and where the High Priest allegiances are as clear, and inflexible, as crystal, it is to you I turn in search of an ally.” 
“An ally … for what, Beloved?” 
“Some of what you have been told about our presence here is true … and some is not. We are indeed here at the request of the Elected Son, and the Great Pharoah was indeed poisoned … but the identity of the murderer is not unknown to us: it was the Elected Son himself, acting with our knowledge and approval.” 
Nehreim felt a sudden surge of panic, that he was once more in over his head and wanted to flee—but there was no hiding from something learnt. 
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked, his voice higher than he would have cared. 
“I want you to have all the facts when you make your decision.” 
“Decision?” 
“To support us … or go against us.” 
Nehreim felt his throat was very dry; he swallowed, but that didn’t help. 
“I assure you it wasn’t a decision we made lightly,” the Beloved went on, “But all parties concerned felt it had to be done. The Great Pharaoh’s support for desertification, His refusal to see beyond His solar and mortuary cults, was hurting our world and our people, and leading us all into ruin.” 
“Desertification?” Nehreim was confused. “It’s the will of Amun-Ra …” 
“How would we know? Everybody agrees Amun-Ra hasn’t spoken to us in centuries now; we’ve merely assumed desertification was good because it made the rest of our planet gradually resemble Sacred Kemet. But Sacred Kemet has H’pi to water it during the flood season, something the rest of the world lacks. Even the other flood kingdoms, like Hidush and Chin, have been wracked by food riots as there simply aren’t enough crops to feed their populations; every year brings global droughts that are bleeding our people dry. There’s no denying the planet has gotten warmer, but our best scribal scientists agree that we, not the gods, are to blame: industry has thrown the world’s equilibrium out of joint, and while we strained to hear far-away Amun-Ra, we’ve been deaf to the pleas of our nature gods to be good stewards of the planet.” 
“Is … is this confirmed?” 
“The office of the Great Pharaoh has been hiding much to support its policies. But we and the Elected Son paid heed to our scribal scientists, who concurred that there was no time to waste to reverse the disastrous hegemony of the sun. We could not wait for the Elected Son to become Great Pharaoh in his own turn; by then, millions more will have died as the world’s rivers dry up and the coasts are swallowed by thirsty oceans. So the Elected Son used his access to his parent to change the course of events … for all our sakes. 
“With the Elected Son in control of the pharaonic apparatus, we will claim the Great Pharaoh has experienced an epiphany during His spiritual retreat, and begin to change His policies in consequence. The Elected Son will make a show of opposing the changes, to make the transition to a state policy of fertilism seem more gradual, but when we officially declare the Great Pharaoh dead, the Elected Son will embrace the path of creation fully, supposedly out of respect for his parent’s wishes.” 
Nehreim’s head spun. This was a massive, historical shift, the kind that came only with the passing of dynasties, and he suddenly found himself a first-hand witness to it—for reasons he still didn’t grasp. 
“What does any of this have to do with me?” 
“The shift to fertilism entails some destruction of the remnants of the solar cult, to prevent them from become loci of resistance around which those who worship the emptiness of deserts and death could rally around. Amenthes is one such locus, and we need you to scuttle it for us. The starbarge and its residents must be lost to us, to make the break with the past cleaner.” 
“You … want me … to destroy the barge?” Nehreim sputtered. He suddenly felt hyperaware of Sisuyoque’s hand on his shoulder and shook it off, turning towards her. “You … none of it was genuine, was it? It was all a seduction, to manipulate me into helping you.” 
“Is there any reason it couldn’t be both?” Sisuyoque asked, frowning. “We made a connection—you felt it the moment we walked onto the barge. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I should feel a bond, already ready to blossom, with just the person who could help us: that’s how life works, by seeking out other life and making connections.” 
“But you waited until after we … to tell me all this,” Nehreim waved at the Adoratrice and her attendants. 
“I thought you needed to be initiated before you were ready to learn what was really happening.” 
“I don’t know what you imagine, but you were certainly not my first,” Nehreim told her. 
“Initiated to fertility. You’ve been out here, amidst the emptiness of space, in the company of the dead, segregated from the other half of the human soul … you had to be reminded what it was to be alive before you could be an agent of life again.” She stepped closer to him, caressing a cheek with her hand. He did nothing to stop her. “I told you, we think all sex taps into a sacred, generative principle, the hierosgamos. Believe that I would not profane the temple of creativity if my motives were purely pragmatic, manipulation empty of emotion. You acted to further life—will you do so again?” 
He looked at Sisuyoque, at the appeal in her deep dark eyes, then over at the Beloved, who waited with seeming equanimity. 
“What would you have me do?” he asked, and felt Sisuyoque wrap her arms around his waist and squeeze. The Adoratrice, for her part, satisfied herself with a small smile. 
“The excuse you gave the rest of the crew to allow us to pay our farewells to the kings of old—the catastrophic hull breach. We think it’s an intriguing idea.” 
“Will you not change your mind, eminence?” Nehreim asked. 
The High Priest stood alone and defiant in the vaulted darkness of the first sepulchral compartment. Everybody else had been evacuated to the piloting compartment, this time believing that it was no test, that the Amenthes was truly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic hull breach—which, thanks the Nehreim’s rigging of the compartment’s couplings to detonate, was partially true. The hull wouldn’t be breached, but the Amenthes would soon be lost, exactly as the Divine Adoratrice had planned. 
She stood next to Nehreim now, as did Sisuyoque and the other attendants, confronting Daenesis. They had lured the High Priest here with another story about the Adoratrice wanting to consult with the dead kings, and only then advised him of their plans. The Adoratrice had insisted on explaining everything to him, as she had Nehreim, but the High Priest’s face was frozen in a rictus of contempt, and, as she had suspected, there seemed little chance of convincing them to see matters as they did. 
“And betray the gods, as you have?” Daenesis accused. “ Sacrifice my soul for the sake of the body? Never.” 
“Think, vizier,” the Adoratrice said. “Why has Amun-Ra fallen silent, if not to signal his retreat from human affairs? Why, if not to indicate that his era is past, and it is the still-vocal gods of nature to whom our deference is now owed?” 
“Heresy and sophistry,” he jeered. “Do you really think my faith so weak as to be swayed by pretty words and clumsy theology, as this one was?” he asked, gesturing towards Nehreim. Nehreim averted his gaze from the High Priest’s scorn—he still believed what he was doing was right, but that didn’t make confronting the immediacy of his betrayal any less painful. “If your purpose is to murder me as you did a living god, then do so already; but do not look to me to vindicate your sorry justifications—or for forgiveness. I shall die righteous.” 
The Adoratrice stared at him in silence, and then said: “So be it then.” She bowed, extending her arms. “Hail and farewell, the Vizier of the Dead—let it be remembered that his devotion to Amun-Ra and his descendants was full and without doubt, and that he kept watch over those with whom he was charged the stewardship until the very last moment of their journey; yea, unto death itself.” 
“And is that supposed to make me feel better—or you?” Daenesis scoffed. 
The Beloved of the Gods said nothing, but waved at the others to move back, into the pressure chamber of the piloting compartment. They filed out silently; Nehreim, who alone knew how to seal the chamber and trigger the detonations, was the last one out, and before closing the door tossed one last look back at the High Priest, a mixture of supplication and apology. Daenesis merely sneered back, so Nehreim closed the door, sealing it with the hollow sound of a vacuum lock. 
As the Beloved and her attendants watched, he went about the business of detonating the couplings. The compartment shook slightly as the front part of the Amenthes because detached from its segmented mausoleum sections behind, and they watched through the window as the dark mass of the starbarge drifted away, driven by the Amenthes’ momentum into the burning light of Amun-Ra. That had been the Adoratrice’s idea: instead of merely casting the floating tomb adrift amongst the stars, that the descendants of Amun-Ra should be reunited with their parent and the god to whom their kingships had been devoted. The party watched until Amun-Ra’s brilliance blotted out the shadow of the funeral barge, and then Nehreim turned away, heading towards the autoladder that would take him to the command balcony, where he could plot a course back to blue Geb. 
“So ends the era of Amun-Ra, blessed as it was,” he heard the Beloved say. “The stars will no longer control our destiny; we shall forge our future in concordance with the wind, the river and the earth.” 




Telstar Brother Day 

J. Jay Waller 

“Aurora, come look,” Wildflower called out as she finished painting a peace sign on the front of the swept-wing space ship. She set her brush and can of paint down on a black metal work cart and stepped back, her bellbottoms rustling over her bare feet. 
A short woman with dark curly hair wearing a silver halter top and black shorts ran out from behind the wing, the heels of her thigh-length white boots echoed through the space station bay. “Far out.” 
Wildflower smiled and pushed a strand of blond hair behind her ear. “This’ll show the um—what did Marcel call the aliens?” 
“Our Telstar brothers.” 
“They’ll see that we’re a planet of peace and love.” She turned and looked out through the force field glowing at the end of the space station bay. The arm of Earth was just coming into view, covered with blue and white swirls. “Can you dig it?” 
“I can dig it.” Aurora put her arm around Wildflower’s shoulders. “It’s been two hundred years since the summer of love, when we changed the entire world. No war. Just peace and love.” 
“Peace and love,” Wildflower echoed. 
“It’s time to send our message to another race of beings.” 
“Hey, foxy ladies,” said a metallic blue robot as it rolled up to the women. 
“Hey, Moonbeam,” they answered together. 
Sensors shaped like sunglasses sitting in the middle of the robot’s head scanned the ship. “Solid paint job.” His mechanical mouth smiled above a rectangular black soul patch. “Marcel says it’s time to make the scene, know what I mean?” Opening a compartment in his guru-jacket-shaped chest, Moonbeam pulled out a handful of joints and handed them to Wildflower. “Everybody’s supposed to be mellow, with an open mind when the aliens arrive. Everyone’s positive energy will combine into a powerful message of love and peace.” 
The two women walked over and crawled into the ship through the underside, closing the hatch behind them. Moonbeam shut off the force field. He watched the ship carefully lift off the deck and slide out into space. 

An hour later, every ship from the space station was in orbit, ready to 
welcome the Telstar Brothers with open minds. Each craft had been adorned with new paint. Bright swirls, peace signs, doves and flowers covered nearly every inch of metal. 
Marcel adjusted the side thrusters on his own Volkswagen ship and then looked out over the purple, fur-covered console inside. His long black braids spilled over the shoulders of his leather vest. He took another hit off a fat doobie and then passed it to his girlfriend, Galaxie, a small brunette reclining next to him. Exhaling, he added to the gray cloud of smoke that filled the cockpit. 
The aliens hovered in a cluster just beyond the space station. A small, sharp-angled craft separated from the group and moved closer. 
Marcel opened a communication channel linking all the Earth vessels to the alien ship. “Welcome to Earth,” Marcel said. “Peace and love, my Telstar brothers.” 
“Peace and love,” the rest of the people in the Earth ships added. 
A golden-skinned alien with dark eye disks protruding from on the top of its wedge-shaped head appeared on the communication screen. Its mouth, a small beak-like opening at the bottom of its head moved and sharp clicks sounded. “You have brought forth a mighty armada to meet us,” the computer translated. “We see that each ship has been painted for battle.” 
“No, no. Peace my brother. We have no weapons, only love.” 
“Prove your words. Disengaged all weapons in your war fleet.” 
“Make love, not war,” Marcel replied. 
The alien’s eyes turned bright orange as it shook its fist. “Disarm your ships.” 
“Hang loose, brother,” Marcel said. “These are ships of peace.” 
“No one goes into space without weapons.” The alien pointed at flashing lights in the background behind it. “Your refusal to disarm will be taken as a sign of war, demanding an immediate and devastating response.” 
“Don’t bring me down with all your heavy words about guns and aggression.” Marcel grabbed his head with his hands and began slowly shaking his head. Stopping, he looked at the alien on the screen. “Come on over to our pad and we can rap about it, you dig?” He lifted a fat joint to his mouth and took a deep toke. “We’ve got some excellent grass, man. It’ll be a happenin’ scene.” He held the joint to the screen. “See man, primo weed. It’s copasetic.” 
The alien shook its large hand at the screen. “We have scanned your ships several times. We do not know what kind of weapons you have, but the power levels on your vessels have not been reduced, which means you are still armed.” 
Marcel turned toward his girlfriend. “He’s bumming me out.” 
Galaxie leaned toward the screen. “Don’t flip your wig, man,” she cooed. “No need to get so up tight.” She held up her index and middle fingers extended in a “V” shape. “Peace.” 
“Your words are a trap to lure us closer so you can destroy us.” The alien disappeared from the screen. A bright red laser beam shot out from the front of its ship, ripping through the space station. The structure exploded in a silent flash. 
All the people in the Earth ships paused, dumbfounded, the consequences of the blast slowly filtering through the marijuana clouds filling each vessel. The joint floated away from Marcel’s slack fingers in the zero gravity. “Bummer.” 
“Let’s split!” Galaxie shouted. She looked over at Marcel who was staring blankly at the controls. “Shag ass!” 
The rest of the alien ships shot forward, hundreds of lasers firing. The hippy ships began exploding like a string of firecrackers. 
Down on Earth, loudspeakers played music around the globe as billions of people lay on the ground smoking joints to celebrate Telstar Brother Day. Looking up, they oohed and ahhed as they watched the pretty colors exploding in the sky. 




AURORA 
(ABPOPA) 

Sam Kepfield 

A tiny titanium steel-encased oasis of air and flesh and blood and life sped through the endless black void above a smaller gray-white cratered wasteland. Its shiny target at first could be distinguished from the other shiny multihued pinpricks of light only on instruments; as the oasis closed the gap, the target took shape. 
There were no portholes on the INTERKOSMOS shuttle, deemed by engineers as a component failure waiting to happen and by the bureaucrats as an unnecessary and expensive bourgeois luxury. The interior held only two dozen padded seats, upholstered in the same fluorescent-lit light turquoise as the cabin bulkheads. In a bow to the human need to see outside, an urge not even the New Soviet Man could stifle, a large LCD screen had been placed center of the forward bulkhead. It showed a spindly titanium steel insect growing larger. Underneath sat a small LCD clock that read 15 MAY 2017 0932. 
“Beautiful, eh, Stalina?” Col. Grigory Reznikov whispered to his seatmate. Reznikov was a bear of a man, almost too big to be the ace fighter pilot that he was, leonine head with a swept-back shock of brown hair graying at the temples. 
His companion frowned quickly at the nickname Reznikov had bestowed on her years ago in pilot training. Col. Zoya Ivanova was The Steel Woman, because a woman in a man’s world, no matter how good, had to be twice as good as the men. And she couldn’t ever show emotion, lest she be thought of as lacking the will to lead. Some things were, she reflected, universal, and whether you were American or Soviet was irrelevant. 
She looked the part, had consciously cultivated it, building on her winnings in the genetic lottery. Ivanova stood just a shade under six feet tall, at forty still had the slim, toned, flat-chested build of the former star athlete at Moscow University and triple silver medalist in the 3000, 5000 and 10000 m races in the ’96 Warsaw games (and kept in shape by the rigorous cosmonaut training for ten years). She kept her blond hair cut short, framing her heart-shaped face. The eyes, the eyes gave her the command presence, deep-set and steely blue-gray that cut like a knife. 
“It’s—functional. That’s all that matters.” 
Reznikov sighed. “No poetry in the soul. How sad that the spirit of Tolstoy and Akhmatova passed you over.” 
Ivanova smiled icily. Grisha had the mad, melancholy side that had fired Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. So did she, but Stalina could never let it show. “Time enough for poetry when we arrive at our destination. We’ll be busy enough with the pre-flight for the next two weeks.” 
“If all goes well,” Reznikov cautioned. “If not—the Americans—” 
“Are irrelevant.” 
“Even if they’re first to land?” The USS John F. Kennedy had launched from the Glenn platform in Earth orbit seven months ago and was now halfway to its goal. The Americans were using chemical propulsion. The Soviets, though, had bet it all on a new dual-stage ion drive which would push the SS Sergei Korolev to Mars in a matter of five months, entering orbit two weeks ahead of the Americans. The first Marswalk was scheduled for November 7, 2017—the centenary of the October Revolution. 
Stalina gave a smile that wasn’t, in a voice meant mainly for her ears alone. “Especially if they land first.” 

Four rows back, Georg Hahn craned his neck into the narrow aisle, watching as the Korolev drew near. Unlike most of the bodies in the seats surrounding him, who were technicians and and mechanics doing last-minute work on the ship, Hahn was a member of the twelve-person Korolev crew. He had been selected as the mission chemist. In theory, it made sense. Soviet and American probes since the late ‘70s had shown that water had run on the Martian surface at one point, and that Mars might still retain water underground. But Hahn was an organic chemist by training, with a minor in plant biology. The official line was that the Soviets had picked an East German to buttress the ties of the world fraternal socialist brotherhood. But unless there were jungle-filled underground caverns a la Edgar Rice Burroughs, his selection made little sense. Hahn sighed inwardly; the Soviet bureaucracy often made little sense. 
Just as little sense as his seatmate. The nametag sewn onto her loose-fitting coveralls read ZYSZKOWSKI, a small red-and-white Polish flag above the Soviet flag on her right sleeve. Lt. Katarzyna (Kasia) Zyszkowski was the navigator. In the heyday of the early Soyuz flights of the ‘70s and lunar flights of the ‘90s, it might have made sense. But Soviet computer technology had come a long way since then, and she was essentially a backup to a machine. Zyszkowski was tiny, all of four-foot ten, ninety pounds soaking wet, glossy raven hair cut in a pageboy, big cornflower blue eyes dominating a soft round face. She was tiny, but tough, easily passing the six-month survival course in the Gobi desert that had killed their North Korean geologist, Kim Dong Ju, a nephew of the Beloved Leader. No wonder the damned Poles had been a thorn in the side of the Russian bear for centuries. He’d talked with her enough around the campfires in the Gobi, two outsiders among a largely Russian crew who found a common bond. She had been raised on a communal farm outside of Gdynla, just north of Gdansk. Georg, for good reasons, had let her do most of the talking. 
The Korolev filled the viewscreen, and a small light flickered on with a soft ping: FASTEN RESTRAINTS. Hahn tightened his shoulder harness and watched out of the corner of his eye as Kasia did the same, the straps flattening her small breasts hidden by dark blue coveralls. 
The shuttle docked smoothly, with a barely-noticeable jarring. After a minute, the light shut off and the passengers, assisted by the stewards in front, began floating through the hatch—he’d gotten over calling it a door long ago. Naval terminology had been pounded into their heads all throughout their training, with pushups prescribed as punishment for lapses. Hahn and Kasia retrieved small standard-issue black bags from a compartment in the rear. The bags held personal items to maintain sanity for the two-year trip—all screened by the KGB, naturally. 
Once inside, the passengers were herded into a small cabin and issued magnetic boots by a grouchy steward. The boots didn’t ease the queasiness in the gut, but it did keep them from floating around and bumping into sensitive equipment while getting their space legs. Most of the techs had been at Lunagrad for at least one year-long tour, but as experienced cosmonauts would tell it, there was a world of difference between microgravity and one-sixth gee. Hahn couldn’t see Ivanova and Reznikov; they probably had crucial command business. 
“I have nothing to do,” Kasia said to him as they strapped on their boots. “The navigation computers are still being programmed. So until our crew briefing at 1500 hours, I’m on my own.” 
Hahn looked at one of the techs, an ascetic blond man with a hawk nose and eyes that missed nothing (positively KGB, he thought) and shrugged. We’re never really on our own, he thought but dared not say. “Same here. My equipment isn’t due to be unloaded until the next supply shuttle in two days. I have to supervise the unloading, make sure those damned Kazakhs or Tartars don’t wreck the stuff.” 
“What say we explore our home for the next two years?” she suggested. It was as good an idea as any. Bags in tow, they glided through the passageway, bounding around the clumsy dirtsiders. A month of acclimation in the Leonov station in geosynchronous Earth orbit had paid off. 
The Korolev was a dumbbell-shaped craft, ungainly and spindly, not like the sleek starships in American TV and movies. The forward spherical tank held water for the mission, and acted as a guard against space debris. In an emergency, a special compartment inside would act as a shelter in a solar flare from gamma radiation. 
The three-hundred meter shaft was cylindrical, with shuttle docking amidships. There were seven decks above and seven below, oriented horizontally, meaning that decks were circular with a central corridor. The decks fore of the docking port were control systems, computers and navigation and communications. Those aft were laboratories, recycling, and two for crew quarters. Their cabins were on Deck 9, just below the state-of­the-art gymnasium and sickbay. At the rear sat the Kulikov Ion Drive. 
By some fortune of the Gods, Hahn and Kasia had been assigned adjoining cabins. The reasoning no doubt went something like keeping the troublesome Easterners in all one place makes them easier to spy on, logical in light of the Polish incursion in ’80, and the German Unification riots in 2005. Hahn thanked the officially-nonexistent God that he hadn’t been paired again with Rudenko, the main communications officer. Rudenko had the appearance and digestive system of a pig, and had shared a two-man shelter during survival training with Hahn. Rudenko regularly emitted gargantuan farts that smelled of rotting cabbage, forcing Hahn to choose between asphyxiation and hypothermia from an open tent. 
The cabins were tiny, six by ten by eight, like a bad Berlin flat. The lighting was low and indirect, the bulkheads painted a soothing light blue (as dictated by psychologists from the Academy of Sciences). Small lockers were set into the walls, floor, and ceiling. 
The gear stowed in wall lockers, they set out to explore the ship. The mess hall, where their prepackaged meals would be served, was barely large enough to accommodate the entire crew. It also doubled as a lounge, with a large liquid crystal television screen set on one wall. The gymnasium was well-equipped, and they made a commitment to meet at least three times a week for workouts, which made Hahn’s heart flutter. 
The biochemistry lab was on Deck 11, and took up the entire deck. Painted a soft green, low lighting, it could have been in a normal school, or a university. He began mentally assigning his equipment to the shelves and niches in the lab. 
“Let’s see what’s on bottom,” she said playfully. 
“Engineering,” Hahn said. He had the blueprints of the ship memorized. 
“Aren’t you curious about the ion drive?” she asked. 
“I’m not an engineer. I’m a biochemist. All I know is it’s supposed to get us to Mars ahead of the Americans, even though we start six months later.” They floated down the brightly-lit tube that served as the ladder for the central hull. The corridor terminated in a green-painted bulkhead with a circular hatch dogged shut. They floated up to it. A small keypad with a card slot was on one side. A red light was set above an arrow labeled UP. And a camera above the light caught their every move. As Hahn was examining the keypad, trying to think if he’d been issued a card to allow access and wondering what sort of secrets would warrant such security, a voice rang out. 
“Hey! You two! What are you doing here?” A husky man with a dark crewcut and a crooked nose was moving rapidly hand-over-hand along the railings towards them. 
“We’re crew,” Hahn said and introduced themselves as the man drew up to them, a foot away. His dark bushy eyebrows beetled in consternation, his dark eyes glared. BARKOVSKY read his nametag. On his left breast was the sword-and-shield patch of the KGB. 
“I don’t care. This area is for authorized personnel only. And that means only Arsov or Kirilenko,” the chief engineer and deputy engineer. 
“But we wanted to see the ultimate triumph of Socialist science –“ Kasia began innocently, and Hahn almost believed she meant it. 
Barkovsky cut her off. “Unless you’re Arsov in drag, you have ten seconds to leave. If you want to remain crew, that is.” They looked at each other, shrugged, and kicked off towards the fore of the craft. Barkovsky watched them go, then toggled a small button on the palm-sized communicator he produced from a velcroed pocket. 

The supply shuttle arrived a day early, and the navigation computers were up and running at the same time, so Hahn and Kasia missed each other for two days running. His time was spent ordering and cursing at the surly Kazakhs in dark green coveralls who had somehow been approved to handle a hundred million rubles’ worth of spectrometers, optical and electron microscopes and computer hardware. By the end of the day, Hahn wanted to shove them out the airlock. He might as well have had gorillas doing the job. Maybe there had been something to that untermenschen business. 
He was heading from the lab at 1800 hours, speeding up the central corridor hoping to catch Kasia in the mess hall or the gym, when he almost plowed into two other people. Only quick handwork on the rungs lining the corridor saved him and them from concussions. 
“Terribly sorry,” Hahn said in his university Russian. “I was in a hurry to meet a fellow crewmember.” 
“That’s our fault. We should be more careful, since we’ve just gotten here.” The speaker was a man, a fine physical specimen, all of six feet three with corn-silk blond hair, strong jaw and blue eyes. He wore a khaki coverall with the Korolev mission patch on the left breast. Beside him was a woman, identically clad, almost as tall, large-bosomed and long-legged, also blond and blue-eyed. They might have stepped off an old Hitlerjugend poster from the Fatherland. Except—their skin wasn’t the pasty dead-fish white that long-time spacers and luniks acquired. These two had ruddy, tanned complexions, the kind of coloring one only got from hours working in the sun. Like on a farm. And the accent … 
“You’re a member of the crew? How exciting!” The woman said. “To lead us on this glorious mission!” They had the most atrocious Ukrainian accents Hahn had ever heard, completing botching the “w” and “th” sounds, and a dozen years traveling in Soviet scientific circles and society had exposed him to plenty. 
“Yes. Georg Hahn. And you are?” 
“Pyotr Golubev. And my wife, Tanya.” They shook hands. “We’re from the Ukraine,” he stated the obvious. 
“Where?” 
“A kolkhoz just west of Kiev—” A familiar harsh voice cut him off. 
“Golubev! There you are! With me! This instant!” Barkovsky barked. Golubev turned to the KGB man. 
“Sorry. We got lost in the aft section—” 
“Quiet!” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That way. And you—” his eyes bored into Hahn—“I’ll deal with you later.” Hahn watched him herd the Golubevs towards the fore of the docking port. 
The second oddity occurred an hour later. Barkovsky hadn’t reappeared, Kasia had been neither in the mess hall nor the gym but had taken rations in the navigation computer portion of Deck 3. So Hahn was alone, wandering along the central corridor, headed towards the docking port and ready to get rid of the damned magnetic boots which were unnecessary and damned uncomfortable. They made his feet sweat, and the odor wafting from his socks was going to overpower the air recycler before they broke orbit. 
There were several boxes in the small ready room off the docking port, assorted small computer equipment that had arrived on the shuttle, bound for the communications deck. In the waste slot, a crumpled piece of paper had stuck. Hahn’s curiosity got the best of him, and he pulled the paper out with his long fingers and stuffed it in his coverall. Damn the boots, they could wait. He hurried back to his cabin, shut the door, and unfolded the paper. It was an invoice, with numerous items of heavy equipment on it, but one stood out at the top. 
He blinked his eyes, rubbed them, read it again. HSCS TS-50 TRACTORS: QTY 10 it still read. Below that, IHC CMBN HARVSTR 25 SER: QTY 3. It could be a code. Or, with the Golubevs, it could be tractors and harvesters —on Mars? How would an internal combustion engine function? 
Hahn went to his duffel bag, pressed a catch hidden under the vinyl fabric, and a small corner of the bag popped open. He took a digital camera the size of a matchbox out, laid the paper on the small desk, and pressed the small stud on the top of the camera. He then put the camera back, and stuffed the invoice down the refuse recycle chute. And waited for an opportunity to transmit what he had recorded. 

Twelve years earlier, Georg Hahn had died in the Unification Riots that swept East and West Germany. He had been caught on Karl Marx Stadt in Berlin between a squad of Stasi goons and Soviet Spetznatz commandos parachuted into the city to break up the protests that had spun out of control. The AK-74s had clattered for five minutes while the students, academics, bourgeoisie and workers had run for cover or lay bleeding to death on the filthy pavement. Hahn, a twenty-four year old graduate student, had been among the dead, his body interred in a mass grave. 
Gone. But not forgotten, at least not by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Berlin bureau, which had counted the late Hahn as an asset, albeit a minor one. The CIA bureau chief saw an opportunity to replace the real Hahn, given more to consuming tankards of beer and chasing large-titted blonde undergraduates under his tutelage with someone more reliable, someone who could advance in scientific circles. Thus did Marcus Giersch, an East Berliner expat who had climbed the Wall with his parents in the brief Russian Spring of ’91, become Georg Hahn. There was a strong physical resemblance, tall, dark blond hair, blue eyes, athletic build (minus a slight beer gut). In the disorder after the riots, Hahn nee Giersch had, at the direction of his handlers, left the university for a job with the Agriculture Ministry and applied for the space program. For eight years he did well. And when Hahn had been announced as the crew chemist for the Mars Mission in the fall of 2015, his handler Orson Melton counted it one of the intelligence coups of the century. Their last briefing, at a ski resort in the Swiss Alps only three months ago, out of the watchful eye of the KGB for a few hours, made it clear. 
Strange things had been going on, Melton told him. The choice to build the Korolev in lunar orbit was the starting point. Sure, the Russians had Lunagrad on Farside, a couple dozen klicks from the 500-inch telescope at Tsiolkovsky crater, and the cost of smelting lunar ore and pushing it up a gravity well that was one-sixth that of Earth’s made economic sense. But the security around the lunar farside was tighter than usual. The workers sent there at the start of the Korolev project weren’t rotated back—a decision that could be fatal, owing to bone density loss and prolonged radiation exposure. Hahn saw nothing out of the ordinary for a society that used prisoners of war to clear minefields. 
The launch schedules were hectic, Melton said, more than expected for a craft the size of the Korolev. Hahn had no explanation for that. Neither could he explain the sudden quietude from some of the USSR’s top physicists at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Kurchatov Institute, working in propulsion, M-theory and quantum mechanics. Grigory Romanov, Lev Parshin, Semyon Kirilenko, and others, all stopped publishing about the same time in late 2013, hadn’t been seen since. Melton murmured something about Heinlein and Manhattan, then went on. 
Same with certain Soviet bureaucrats, who had quietly slipped from view. Not disgraced, else there would have been some indication from the moles planted throughout the KGB. Not sent to Kolyma, the worst of the Siberian labor camps. Just gone underground. Likewise, a half dozen KGB majors and colonels, just gone. Maybe a quiet purge by Yuri Maslov, Party Chairman since 2011, now consolidating his hold on power by getting rid of Yermolov loyalists. Maybe not. 
And an odd tidbit. A group of agronomists and students from Kansas State University had, in one of the periodic good-will-exchange initiatives pressed throughout the years, been turned abruptly away from a tour of a kolkhoz in the Ukraine, touted as one of the USSR’s best, a model of collective agriculture, and nervously sent on a detour to a middling state farm in Byelorussia. Agents later reported the Ukrainian farm was empty, weeds growing in untilled fields. Hahn now wondered if Pyotr and Tanya Goubev had been shanghaied from that kolkhoz. 
Melton wasn’t sure what to make of it. The CIA feared that the Soviets were bracing for an imagined American nuclear first strike. Such paranoia was a persistent thread in Soviet intelligence history, and reports to every chairman since Stalin down through Maslov had fed those conspiratorial fears. Or maybe the Soviets were planning a first strike of their own, preserving the cream of Soviet society—labor, science, agriculture—for the aftermath, holding them in a huge space colony until the radiation subsided, and the post-holocaust world would be at least ready for World Socialism. 
In Hahn’s mind, the CIA was just as deluded as the KGB. There were still plenty of Reagan hard-liners lurking in the American intelligence community, though the confrontational approach had been discredited by subsequent administrations. Ukranian farmers, tractors, KGB goons with free run of the ship. Hahn began formulating a theory, but found too many holes, too many ifs, too many odd loose ends. 
He kept it to himself, though, for the next week, setting up his microscopes, computers and refrigeration equipment, installing software, running trials with known samples, making sure it all worked. It did, flawlessly, as well it should have —most of it had been purchased from the West Germans. Revanchists, maybe latent Hitlerites, but they made some damned good optical equipment. And the American software was better than anything the Soviets could produce. He saw Kasia at the mess hall several times, but Barkovksy was always there, and he didn’t want the KGB thinking he and Kasia were spies. 
Late one night, around 2300 hours, he was awake and reading from the small West German-built Gutenberg computer reader. He’d brought two dozen chips, each holding about fifty thousand pages—enough space on one disk for those endless dreary Russian novels, he mused. There were the approved works, but tucked into another hidden pocket in his bag were other chips with unapproved material. Western sci-fi, which the real Hahn had never cared for but Giersch had fallen in love with as a boy in Milwaukee. And banned works, like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, a reassessment of communism from the Prague Spring era that alone could have him imprisoned at the least. He was halfway through Camus when there was a faint rap at his door. 
He unstrapped the sleeping bag, pushed off towards the hatch, opened it. Kasia stood there, eyes suggesting an invitation, and he motioned her in. 
“I’ve been so busy lately, I thought I should come by and apologize. I didn’t want you to think I was leading you on our first day up here.” 
“That’s alright,” Hahn said. He wore a pair of shorts, nothing more. They’d been in close quarters during survival training, which had taken care of most modesty. He still remembered washing in a cold stream that ran through the mountains ringing the Gobi, three months into training, seeing her lithe body under a waterfall, grime gone and scrubbed fresh and clean and pink and wanting her more than ever. 
She hooked her slippers into one of the rungs placed about the cabin. Like him, she’d ditched the magnetic boots, disdaining them as a dirtsider curse. “I’ve been so busy setting up the navigation software, and running tests.” 
“What sort of tests?” 
“The usual, like orbital insertion, maneuvers to the moons.” The Korolev was set to rendezvous with both Phobos and Deimos while the ground crew was on the surface, and survey both bodies for possible use as bases of operations. “But other things, too, like routes out of the plane of the ecliptic —” 
Hahn put his a finger to his lips, hushed her. He went to the small digital music player he’d brought—another miracle of American technology—and nudged the buttons on it. Prokofiev issued from the small Bosch speakers. They began speaking in a whisper, and Hahn floated close to Kasia, almost holding her, her mouth next to his ears. He could smell a trace of flowery perfume—Western decadence, she couldn’t have worn it to work, she’d gone to her cabin first and dabbed it on for him. He felt his ears and cheeks flush, his throat catch. 
“The plane of the ecliptic. The solar system’s equator. Going up and down instead of out. And they have me reviewing star charts.” 
Hahn thought that over. He spoke very carefully next. “Does that strike you as odd?” 
Kasia pursed her lips and nodded, her hair bouncing around her face. “Yes. And the KGB—I never remember hearing about them in the pre-flight briefings.” 
“Maybe a security force. They’ll be gone before we depart.” 
“Possibly.” 
“I found something else a couple of days ago.” Her eyes widened. He told her about the Golubevs, and the invoice. 
Kasia was just as puzzled as he was. 
“Is the Korolev really a space colony?” she asked. “Are they going to start a war down there?” She looked tiny, so young and so afraid. They’d heard all the war scares before, Poland in ’80, Yugoslavia in ’91, the German riots of ’05, the failed Georgian breakaway in 2012. All had produced considerable saber-rattling, but nothing more. The world they could see on the viewscreens (portholes again judged a bourgeois design luxury on the Korolev) was peaceful. The worst was a brush-fire war in Afghanistan, where the Red Army was currently tied down chasing Muslim fanatics. The Soviets had tried to pacify the Stone-Age country for four decades, ever since the palace coup in ’79 that had negated the need for an invasion, and that had quieted it down for a time. But in 2001 a group of religious fanatics, led by a six-foot self-styled cleric, had began conducting terrorist raids into the southernmost Muslim-dominated Soviet Republics. Finally, in 2010, the Red Army had invaded in force. Seven years on, the Soviets were no further along than the British Armies broken on the back of the Hindu Kush. And that damned Kim in North Korea, who ought to have been shot for nearly starting a war in 2002 on the peninsula, was making noises about a nuclear program again. There were rumblings in the Caribbean, now that the Castros and Ortega had gone to their rewards, and in the Pacific. And China, with its experiments in capitalism, ideological rifts, and billion-plus population, was always a problem. 
The superpowers had grudgingly learned to adapt to coexistence, first with Nixon and détente, then Carter, who had almost succeeded in softening the West against the Soviets. But Carter had been replaced, albeit narrowly, by that cowboy buffoon Reagan, who in turn had given way after one term to eight years of Gary Hart, who had abandoned Reagan’s Buck Rogers-style space laser program. The current administration, in its first tentative months, was headed by a moderate Republican, formerly governor of Indiana. This was the face of peaceful coexistence, as it had been for five decades. Nuclear war was not in the offing. 
Hahn radiated stolid Germanness, even though as Giersch he was an expatriate. Not romantic, not a poet, but one who given a problem would methodically work it through and find a solution. Kasia looked at him for strength now, the cornflower eyes fixed on his, and her arms went around his neck, her lips to his. They were soft, sweet, tasting of cherries (flavored lipstick? How bourgeois! But how delicious!). Hahn felt his member stirring, and the briefness of his shorts quickly let her feel it, too. She gently pushed him back, reached up to the zipper on her dark blue coverall with the Soviet and Polish flags and half a dozen other patches, and pulled it down. She wore no bra underneath—no need to in microgravity, even if her breasts had been more developed—and pulled it down past her hips, which were clad in the tiniest shred of black cloth Hahn had seen in years. “Victoria’s Secret,” she whispered with a flash of white teeth, then the coverall was down, the panties were down, and his shorts were off. Hahn was gratified to find that Kasia had eschewed the Western practice of pubic depilation, which made grown Western women look like those damned plastic dolls they showered their girl children with. He took her hand, pulled her to him, spun her 180° slowly, so her head faced his feet and her knees were on his shoulders, and inhaled her musky scent, then felt her warm wetness around him bobbing up and down. The last twelve years, the double life, had made him ultra-cautious about affairs of the heart and the penis. 
He would receive a Hero of the Soviet Union medal on his return, maybe an Order of Lenin. But this—this was its own reward, far beyond any scrap of cloth or piece of metal. 

Departure was set for June 6, 2017. The Western media was aflutter, the 24-hour news channels spinning incredible and ill-informed theories, desperate to fill air time. The Soviet control on the press, TASS and PRAVDA and newscasts, had at least one advantage in shutting out the pointless chattering and clucking. There was some questioning about how the Kulikov Drive could push a craft the size of the Korolev all the way to Mars in just under five months. Even with the two-stage ion system, some Western scientists were saying it didn’t add up. Which of course fueled Western-style conspiracy theories. 
Three days before departure, Hahn discovered the truth. Or thought he did. 
He was in the lab, as usual, desultorily fiddling with his instruments, scanning exobiology journals loaded into chips. He’d made one transmission of his information to Melton, a carrier signal on a message to an old colleague (and CIA mole) in the Agriculture Ministry. 
The ship gave a small shudder, and a muffled bang reverberated through the bulkheads. Hahn went into the corridor, and the intercom had been switched on. He heard a controlled panic in the male voice, speaking in clipped Russian; it was Reznikov. Ivanova replied; the static garbled it, but it sounded like her suit had been holed, losing air quick, feeder line ruptured, Yefremov’s (who? There was no Yefremov on the roster) suit holed and he was drifting from the ship … 
Hahn darted to the hatch, launched himself up towards the docking port. He’d been through the safety drills dozens of times as part of the cosmonaut training. There was a suit locker across from the small ready room. He jerked it open and pulled a suit off with his name sewn on the breast and painted on the helmet. Custom made, German-engineered, worth a million rubles, he slid off his coverall, wiggled into the suit. Kasia appeared from above, saw him. 
“Ivanova’s outside,” she said. 
“I know. Help me.” She fell to assisting him, checking the seals on his gloves and the helmet, then stood back as he entered the airlock and cycled it. The outside door opened, and Hahn pulled down the visor shade to shield his eyes from the unfiltered sunlight. He took a small hand-held thruster from a rack on the bulkhead, and lazily pushed off into the cosmos. 
He turned his head fore and saw nothing but the huge gleaming sphere that held the water and fuel. He turned aft. There was a stream of something pouring from an open access panel. Ivanova, near the ship, threw a wrench in the opposite direction from the ship, giving her a push to the Korolev. He saw her reach for a handhold. Yefremov was spinning slowly about twenty yards out, oxygen jetting from his suit. But he didn’t see them, really see them, because his attention was focused beyond. 
What he should have seen was a rectangular box that held the ion drive, a hundred and fifty yards down. What he actually saw was, positioned at roughly the same distance, six enormous cylinders with conical tops, arrayed around the central core of the ship. Some were unbroken surfaces, but on three of them he could see portholes, blue light gleaming from within. And silhouetted in the portholes (Portholes?) … 
People. 
Ukrainian farmers, maybe? KGB, no? 
And in the diamond-speckled infinity above him, five more ships, just like the Korolev. Huge, long affairs, with the sphere fore and the cargo containers near midships, but in between the cargo containers and the ion drive, another strange module, an egg-shaped affair. 
He stared at the sight for long moments, not hearing his suit comm crackle and hiss. Finally, Ivanova’s voice roused him. “Grisha! Over here, quick! The circuits spiked and overloaded on the quantum drive, blew the whole panel out while we were replacing the boards. But Yefremov is still alive!” Yefremov? Again, who the hell was Yefremov? Grisha—had to be a nickname for Reznikov; the two had been MiG pilots during the Afghan war and lived to tell about it, swapping stories over campfires in the Gobi that Hahn half-listened to while lusting for Kasia, or communications deputy Ksenia Linkova, or Minh Nyugen, the Vietnamese M.D. (who, he later deduced, shared his interest in Kasia). 
Wordlessly, he aimed the thruster back, and pressed the trigger. Jets of propellant sprayed from the tiny nozzles, froze into sparkling ice droplets, and he moved towards the aft. He stared at the cargo containers, wondering which one held ten Japanese tractors, until he came abreast of Yefremov. The suit puncture was on his right arm and leg. Hahn slowly reached out and pressed a small red button by the arm and then knee joints, which would increase pressure and seal the punctured areas. He might lose the limbs, but he’d be alive. He then gently turned Yefremov around, checked the air levels—down to 20%, bad but now that the suit was sealed, survivable, turned up the oxygen mixture a bit, then wrapped his arm around Yefremov’s waist and triggered the thruster. 
As he neared the ship, he saw Ivanova standing on the spidery girderwork that surrounded the central shaft. “Good work, Gri—” she halted abruptly, saw the name painted on his helmet, with the small DDR flag. “What the hell are you doing out here?” There was steel in her voice alright. 
“Rescuing Yefremov,” Hahn said blandly. “Whoever he might be. I don’t recall seeing him on the roster.” 
“Sta—Colonel Ivanova,” Reznikov’s voice sputtered over the comm line. He saw Reznikov emerge from the airlock aft. “Is Yefremov still—” “Da,” she replied curtly, as Reznikov drew abreast. “And we have a problem.” Hahn could see nothing but two golden visors staring at him, making calculations. 
They hauled Yefremov into the airlock, cycled through. Dr. Nyugen was 
there with a gurney and a medikit. She unlatched his helmet; Yefremov’s 
face was white with shock. He was about fifty, sallow complexion with a 
wispy beard, looking nothing like a cosmonaut. More like a professor. 
There were also two KGB men waiting to escort Hahn to his quarters. 
Barkovsky was not, thankfully, one of them. He caught sight of Kasia as he 
followed one of the young strapping KGB men down the central corridor. Her 
eyes were like Wedgewood saucers, but he nodded gravely to calm her. She 
bit her lower lip and nodded, gave a tiny wave. 
The KGB locked him in his room, no visitors. But he could still smell the 
flowery scent from the previous night. Muffled passion to the beat of 
Tchaikovsky had followed a couple of saucy jokes about a German invasion 
of Poland, from her mouth, not his. He and Kasia were getting the hang of 
sex in microgravity, and had he known they would couple so frequently and 
enthusiastically, he would have downloaded the Kama Sutra. As it was, they 
were writing their own, twenty-first century version. Maybe a samizdat 
version in the future, when—if—they returned? 
But first to return. First to find out his fate. It was not long in coming. He 
had been reading in his bunk for several hours, trying to erase a vision of a 
white G-string from his memory, when there was the rap of angry authority 
at his hatch, which was then dogged open without his leave. 
“This way,” one of the KGB men, a hawk-nosed swarthy young man— 
Armenian, maybe—said. He herded Hahn up through the central corridor, all 
the way up to Deck 2. Deck 1 was the bridge. Deck 2 held the survey 
instruments, plus a small conference room. The KGB man motioned for him 
to go inside the conference room. 
Inside, in a circle around a polished wood table—a psychological luxury—sat 
Ivanova, Reznikov, Barkovsky, and Kasia. 
“Sit down,” Reznikov commanded. Hahn hooked his slippers into rungs 
under a small padded seat. “You have caused us quite a bit of trouble, Dr. 
Hahn. As well as Lt. Zyszkowski. At least according to Maj. Barkovsky.” 
Barkovsky merely glowered at Hahn. 
“You’ve seen the outside of the Korolev,” Ivanova said. “Something we’ve 
tried to prevent, for reasons that are known only to myself, Colonel 
Reznikov and Major Barkovsky.” 
“And the other ships,” Reznikov said. “The Lenin, the Tsiolkovsky, the 
Gagarin, the Leonov, and the Volkov. The Korolev is the flagship.” 
“It makes sense now,” Hahn said evenly. Just like the damned Soviets and 
their gigantomania, from hydroelectric dams to apartment blocks, bigger 
meant better. “It all fell into place. That’s why they’re built in lunar orbit, no 
ground-based earth telescopes can get close, any satellites get shot down. 
That’s why the quarantine of the workers at Lunagrad. What was it the 
Americans said? ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships?’ And no portholes on the shuttles, 
or on the Korolev, just viewscreens.” 
“Shots of models,” Bakovsky said gruffly. “Done with Hollywood studio technology. They thought they were making a movie.” He chuckled, dry and raspy. 
“And those Ukrainian farmers I met. They’re—what? Laborers? Breeding stock? Both?” 
“Both,” Ivanova met his gaze with her steely eyes. 
“Which is why you need a biochemist along – not to test any Martian dandelions, but to grow hydroponic crops?” 
“Possibly,” Ivanova said tersely, evasively, gaze unwavering. 
“So it’s a war? Or—” 
“We’re not coming back from Mars,” Kasia said timidly. “At least not all of us are. We’re colonizing it. The Americans might make it there before us—the ion drive doesn’t add up, it’s not that powerful, but it doesn’t matter. But we’ll be there. And we’ll stay, long after the Americans have planted their flag, packed up and gone back home.” 
Ivanova’s smile was Siberia in January. “You’re correct, Lt. Zyszkowski. Not completely, but it will do for now. In any event, the secret would have come out in three days anyway, you would have known, but the Party leadership desires that this remain under cover until we are underway. No communications with the outside world, not even a chance of third-party contact, so you both are confined to your quarters until then. You will have KGB escorts. It may interfere in your nocturnal activities,” and Kasia blushed at that, though she never blushed at the most coarse requests he had made but had gladly complied and added her own, “but once we are underway, that may change. And when we reach our destination, no more escorts. And your activities will most definitely be encouraged.” The smile thawed to Siberia in March, and they were dismissed. 

Departure day came as scheduled, and shuttles docked and undocked, ferrying last-minute supplies (Seeds? Frozen livestock embryos?) to the Korolev and her fleet, and carrying away nonessential personnel. Twelve hundred hours GMT was zero hour, and Hahn waited it out in his cabin. The thought that at least Kasia was next door, that they weren’t being kicked off the Korolev and hustled to Kolyma or some lesser Gulag warmed his soul a little, with visions of black lace dancing in his mind. 
When the ion engines lit, he had to be told via the intercom countdown. Low thrust, an almost imperceptible push against the bulkhead, and the first Mars colony was on its way. 
In interim, he found time to start seed samples from some of the packs sent to the Korolev, recorded progress, something the biologists on Mir and other stations had done countless times before. It was dull living, made exciting only by the twice or thrice daily encounters with Kasia, under Barkovsky’s watchful eyes, in the mess hall. Or better, the gymnasium, watching her pant on a treadmill, strain on the weights, sweating heavily from the exertion. Forget the slinky black evening dress and pearls, Hahn told himself. A healthy woman in gray gym shorts and an American sports bra stoked his libido like nothing else. 
In the tiny sauna, after one workout, she had whispered something to him in German. “We’re going up. Not out. It’s wrong.” 
So they weren’t going to Mars. But–where? Kasia didn’t know. 

On September 5, 2017, the Korolev and the fleet were thirty three million miles from earth, on a heading 90 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. An announcement by Col. Ivanova was set for 1200 hours, advance notices given. All hands were expected to be in the messhall, watching the viewscreens. Curiosity, whispered rumors of their route and cargo, assured attendance. Ivanova, like a good ship’s captain, was aware of the scuttlebutt. All riddles, she promised, would be answered. 
So at noon GMT, Hahn found himself sitting next to Kasia in the mess hall with the rest of the crew, Barkovsky, Reznikov, Tranh, Linkova, and the three geologists Feodor Novikov, Ludmilla Baranov, and Lev Pokrovsky. “Anything new on our course?” he whispered. 
“Yes. The ships are breaking away.” The viewscreen crackled and hissed to life. It was tuned to CNN, which in itself caused a stir. Western, especially American, broadcasting was tightly restricted. The anchorwoman, a beautiful African-American with an oval face and straight chin-length hairdo in a low-cut white blouse with red jacket, was speaking. Reznikov stood and shouted for quiet, resembling a Russian bear roaring. He got silence instantly. 
“… again, breaking news out of Moscow at this hour, where General Secretary Yuri Maslov is making a special unscheduled presentation to the Supreme Soviet. We will go live, as soon as our Moscow link is—yes, it is up. Ladies and gentlemen, Soviet Party Chairman Yuri Maslov.” 
The camera cut to the huge hall, cream-colored curtains behind a huge hanging head of Lenin in profile set on a furling red flag, Maslov at the podium surrounded by the elderly Politburo members. Maslov was, for a Soviet leader, young, at fifty-three, a handsome Slavic face and wavy dark hair, so unlike the peasant-ugly Krushchev and Brezhnev, attired in a fashionable Western dark suit and red silk tie. Behind him stood a huge LCD screen that was blank at the moment. 
“—achievements in Soviet space science are many, from the launch of Sputnik to the flight of Gagarin, to the first steps of Nikolayev on the moon, the path to the future of world socialism has always run through the cosmos. 
“And today is no exception. You have heard of the Sergei Korolev.” A shot of the Korolev—the Potemkin Korolev, Hahn thought – flashed on the screen. “You have not heard the full story. And you have not heard of her sister ships, five in all.” A true shot of the fleet, taken from the Korolev, appeared. “Not a capitalist galley, sailing the cosmos hoping to find natives to enslave and riches to plunder. No—a fleet, that goes in the spirit of Socialist brotherhood, the spirit of mankind, for the betterment of all and the exploitation of none,” except for those poor bastards stuck at Lunagrad dying of radiation poisoning, Hahn again thought sourly, but who's counting. Probably Kazakhs, and they don't matter. 
“The destination? Not Mars,” Maslov said, and the audience on Earth and on the fleet gasped. “We have chosen the long path. The brave men and women of the Soviet Space Fleet have left our back yard and are venturing fearlessly into the cosmos beyond. This is how.” A diagram of an engine appeared on the screen behind Maslov. Hahn understood none of it, and about half of Maslov’s explanation, that of quantum mechanics and folding space—which accounted for all those scientists gone to ground. 
“It is the first true stardrive,” Maslov said quietly, the hall silent as Lenin’s tomb. “Our fleet sails not to the planets, but to the stars.” A 3-D star map blinked on. “Small experimental probes were used to test the drive beginning in 2013, and to map nearby solar systems. A dozen stars within fifty light-years from Sol have Earth-type planets that can support human life. We have selected 61 Cygni, 70 Ophiuchi, Alpha Centauri, 82 Eridani, Delta Pavonis, Tau Ceti for colonization.” Murmuring and shouts broke out in the hall, and Maslov held up his hands to quiet the audience. 
Hahn was dumbstruck. Now it all made sense. Farmers to colonize the steppes of the new worlds. Missing politicians to run the colonies. And a biochemist to analyze soil and native plant samples, find what was edible and guard against crop failure and starvation. “I now present the commander of the fleet, General Zoya Ivanova.” So. A promotion, too. Which only figured. Captains don’t command fleets. 
Ivanova’s face flashed on the screen, she spoke after a short delay. “Greetings, comrades. We will soon engage the quantum drive, which will take each ship to its intended destination almost instantaneously. The next two months will be spent in travel to the planets. The flagship will make orbit around the fourth planet of 61 Cygni. A century after the vision of Karl Marx found its expression in the October Revolution, bringing the first Communist state into existence, we shall plant the Soviet flag on six new worlds. The Americans,” she said with contempt, “can have Mars. We shall have the stars.” An external shot showed the gleaming white of the Korolev’s forward control instrument package mounted atop the fuel sphere, and a small waldo holding a greenish bottle. The waldo moved, the bottle shattered. “I christen thee Aurora,” Ivanova’s voice rang out. Aurora, the ship which had mutinied and touched off the October Revolution, her namesake now taking Soviet Socialism to the stars. Ivanova came back on the screen, with a genuine look of elation on her face for the first time in two years, and then her face faded, Maslov’s returned, as the Hall erupted in thunderous applause and shouts, and Maslov stood, fist outthrust, and shouted “Forward the Revolution to the Galaxy!” as the hall dissolved into raucous chaos. 
At which point CNN cut away, and the mess hall erupted in thunderous applause and deafening cheers. It drowned out CNN, which now featured a series of American and Western faces, male and female, young and old, but all the faces carried a stunned look. A few segued into red-faced fury, some into wistful depression. 
Reznikov stood again, raised his arms, began singing in Russian. “Arise, you branded by a curse / You whole world of the starving and enslaved!” After the first line, the rest of the crew joined in the Internationale. 
Hahn was still too stunned at first, as the rowdy, eager chorus sounded around him. He could forget about transmitting now, no need. No means. But at least his secret identity ought to be safe. For now. 
He turned, looked at Kasia. Her face turned up to his, her eyes aglow. Her lips raised, then parted, then she began laughing, and singing along. 
Maybe, Hahn thought, just maybe 61 Cygni wouldn’t be so bad after all. The KGB wouldn’t, couldn’t, be everywhere, could it? And now he and Kasia had not a city or a cramped spaceship or environment dome, but a whole world together. He joined lustily in the Internationale. 
A whole world. 
A whole universe, if they wanted. 




Afterword 

There are a few things I'd like to mention before you go. The first is revisionist history. To my complete surprise, a few stories submitted to me were not alternate futures at all—they were our futures, but the authorities of those futures had distorted the past so greatly, that the entire histories leading to ours were changed. The most memorable was that the communist revolution of China had never existed because communism had existed in that country since the dawn of man. It was very interesting to see how writers took the challenge of alternate future. Should there come another anthology of alternate future (likely in this and many other dimensions), I would most definitely like to include one or two of these. 
While I did not mention revisionist history in the guidelines, I did state that submissions to The Butterfly Affects (and Atomjack in general) had to be or had to contain science fiction, there were two stories published in this anthology that used a literal God in most inventive ways. There were more submissions like these, and in general, I have noticed a greater trend toward including God in science fiction submissions recently. But strangely, much of what I've read doesn't contain overt morals or cautionary tone— God is simply another plot device or character in stories of the fantastic and/or futuristic. Perhaps this trend will be short-lived and has no traceable cause, or perhaps this is a sign of things to come. Only time can and will tell. Either way, it is producing strange and wondrous results, and I approve wholeheartedly. 
Last, I'd like to acknowledge all the writers and authors who submitted, and all the authors who were accepted. I would especially like to thank T. L. Morganfield, thrice now Atomjack veteran, whose stories about Jaguar Knights and Aztec time travelers introduced me personally to the concept of alternate future and in part made this anthology possible. I would like to thank the Rev. Brian Worley, who after much prodding and poking and threatening, has produced simple and elegant layouts and logos. Also, thanks to Ray Tabler for pointing me to the most appropriate slice of poem by Francis Thompson on the index page. Most of all I would like to thank you, the reader, who, in this world of increasing distraction (thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Internet) has chosen to spend your time with these words and this website. 

Adicus Ryan Garton Seoul, South Korea, July 2009 




Contributors 

TL Morganfield's short fiction has appeared in Paradox, GUD, and Realms of Fantasy, and her works has been a finalist for the Sidewise Award (Short Form). She's a graduate of the Clarion West workshop, and she lives in Denver. More information about her work can be found at www.tlmorganfield.com. 

In the early '70s, Analog published two of Glenn Gilette Lewis's stories; another appeared in "Lone Star Universe". More recently, his stories appeared in Mystic Signals 2 print anthology and Apex Magazine (06 Jul 09). You can find more stories at www.flashfictiononline.com (March, 2008, issue), www.bardsandsages.com print anthology (April 2009), www.morriganezine.com, a Guest-Quarters story at www.edgeofpropinquity.net, mbranesf.blogspot.com, and themonstersnextdoor.com/IssueFour.html. You can read more about him and his writing at www.glgwrites.com. 

William Highsmith has recently published with Abyss & Apex, The Thoughtcrime Experiments anthology and Flash Fiction Online. He is a software engineer in the telecom industry. 

John and Lawrence Buentello, natives of San Antonio, Texas have published stories in over forty publications. They are also the authors of the short story collection Binary Tales and the novel Reproduction Rights. 

Trent Roman is a writer from Montréal with an interest in all types of fiction strange and unusual in addition to academic interests in archaeology, anthropology, history and a number of other fields. He is fascinated by what makes people tick at both the intimately personal level and the sweeping societal level, and enjoys every opportunity to pursue such questions through the means of fiction. 

Jay and his wife currently live in Anchorage, Alaska, having moved there recently from the south Pacific where they had lived on a 46-foot yacht. He just started writing fiction, which takes up most of his time when he is not outside skiing, hiking or enjoying the beautiful Alaska scenery. He has had short works also published in Alien Skin Magazine and Sideshow Fables. 

Sam S. Kepfield is a writer who is forced to work by day as an attorney in Kansas.  He holds degrees from Kansas State University and the University of Nebraska. 

About the editor: 
Adicus Ryan Garton is the creator and editor of Atomjack, an online science fiction magazine. In addition to Butterfly Affects, he has co-edited two Susurrus Press anthologies, I am This Meat and Neverlands & Otherwheres. 


Butterfly Affects, copyright 2009, Susurrus Press

All authors retain the rights to their stories.