Baen Books

Free Stories 2019

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

The Red Sea © 2020 by Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin

Adrift © 2020 by Frank Chadwick

The Policeman’s Daughter © 2020 by Wil McCarthy

Peregoy’s Wolves © 2020 by Nancy Kress

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

eISBN: 978-1-62579-780-3

Electronic Version by Baen Books

www.baen.com

The Red Sea

Mercedes Lackey & Cody Martin

This entire weekend was going to completely suck for Wanda. She felt as if it was a certainty, and the gloomy weather—normally a comfort, especially for a pale specimen like herself—wasn’t helping the way she had hoped it would. She was stuck in Silence, more so than usual, while the rest of the gang was in Wolfe’s Neck State Park enjoying a weekend camping and LARPing event. Even Jake and Riley had come out for it, which had surprised the lot of them. Ever since the events at the Blackthorne Manor, over the course of their junior year, Jake and Riley both had sort of retreated a little bit from the group. They still came to play at the Dungeons and Dragons—or whatever weird tabletop role-playing game Seth had scrounged from Ebay or mail order over the course of the week—but didn’t really hang out much outside of that. I mean, I totally get being weirded out by monsters and elves and monster elves, and having to fight all of them with iron blades and weaponized caffeine. Not exactly the sort of extracurricular activities that the Perfect Couple, or any of us, were at all prepared for.

But being all alone—left out—sucked majorly. She didn’t want to resent the others—not even Jake and Riley, despite their withdrawal after the battle at the Manor—for their fun, but it had grown increasingly hard to stand the loneliness after they all left Thursday night. Even Tim had gone! He’d closed the shop, saying he needed a break, to volunteer as the ride and chaperone for the entire group so everyone could go.

Everyone except Wanda, whose parents had pitched a bitch fit, even though she’d only said “camping” and never mentioned LARPING. And now it was Saturday morning, when they’d all otherwise be starting an all-day session of training, finishing with a late-night D and D run, and . . . she was stuck back in Silence, literally kicking rocks while she paced the beach.

She had made sure to steer further north from the popular section of the beach; on the other side of a fair sized cape. There was one of the more iconic cliffs between her and the few Silence denizens that had chosen to patronize the beach that overcast day. She might have been lonely, but she wasn’t that lonely.

“No effing fair,” she muttered. Maybe I should have lied and said there was going to be a church service out there Sunday morning? Naw, they would have wanted to come and attend, if I had gone that route. My folks, in their Sunday best, in the middle of a LARP event . . . okay, maybe I should have told them that.

But no. As amusing as the thought was . . . bad idea, because that would, guaranteed, get her banned from ever seeing any of the gang or going to the bookstore again. She’d probably have found herself grounded forever, or at least until she was old enough to legally leave the family and try and make it on her own. She didn’t hate her parents; she just hated all of the nonsensical rules, and the non-stop preaching.

The mp3 player that she was listening to shuffled to a Nine Inch Nails song as she continued to plod along. I should have more perspective, she scolded herself. After all, her entire life had been turned upside down only a couple of months ago, they’d all nearly died, and there she was, upset about not hanging out with her friends at a LARP event.

But there it was, her life, her view of reality, and everything she had believed in before had been totally turned upside down, and perspective was pretty hard to get right now.

Of course, it was all due to a single person. The new girl in town, Staci Kerry, had inadvertently involved her, Seth, Riley and Jake in a revelation that the world was chock full of magic, monsters, and worse. She had learned that the bookstore owner, Tim, whom she had known for years, was in fact a master mage, living a secretive, withdrawn life from the world of magic, and been inescapably drawn back into it by Staci’s actions. Wanda had seen things that she hadn’t thought possible, and even stuck a few of those things with knives made of Cold Iron. It was all so . . . bizarre, but not nearly as bizarre as how quickly she’d accepted it. Granted, some of that was due to being Goth; the weird and supernatural had always interested her, much to her family’s chagrin. But being interested and experiencing it up close and personal were two different things altogether. It was one thing to listen to creepy and sad music and dress like you were going to a funeral, and another to have to stab a Red Cap to keep it from killing you.

Maybe I have more in common with Jake and Riley than I thought.

Seth had also adapted surprisingly quickly. Then again, he was a sponge for knowledge, and what was mythology and magic if not just another knowledge base to assimilate for their Nerd In Chief? With some prompting from Staci, who had apparently become Tim’s protégé, Tim had opened up parts of his “special” library to the rest of the gang. Seth had immediately dove in, soaking up as much lore as he could.

He’d already adapted parts of the new research into some of their D and D campaigns. “Think of it as more training,” he’d said. Never mind that the real-life versions of monsters and creatures usually ended up being far tougher than their D and D counterparts, and thus the group’s adventures became that much tougher. Okay, okay, but that’s just a game and we get resurrects all the time. No such thing as a reboot-potion or a cure-serious-wounds spell in real life. Is there?

For Wanda’s part, she had grappled with learning how to use weapons as best as she could. Seth, for some bizarre reason, was focusing on how to build and set traps, in addition to learning every scrap of lore that he could about the magical world. Wanda supposed that might be useful for some monsters . . . but when did things ever go to plan for the gang anymore? It was hard to gin up a trap in the middle of a fight. Pulling a dagger and planting it in the eye of some mean-nasty? Definitely not easy, but much more doable, at least in Wanda’s eyes.

And . . . she liked it. So far, she really liked using throwing knives and a bow; Tim had called her a “natural marksman,” which had made her feel proud. If nothing else, it was something concrete that she could rely on, and didn’t make her head hurt the same way that Tim and Staci’s magical talk could.

That’s a thought. She could go and practice instead of moping around at the beach . . . but then she remembered that almost all of the weaponry and gear was locked up back at Tim’s shop. Whatever. It’s not the same without the others there, anyways. Wanda imagined all of the fun that she by all rights should have been having right then as she wound up for a particularly vicious kick to one of the many rocks in her path. The steel toe of her boot connected with the stone just right, and sent it skittering and bouncing along the ground until it disappeared over the edge of a drop-off . . . and instead of a satisfying splash, was followed by a surprised howl of pain.

“What the hell?” There shouldn’t have been anyone this far north along the beach; everyone always hung out at the pretty and friendly spots further to the south, instead of the rocky and craggy mess that Wanda liked.

If I hit someone I’d better find out if they’re okay. “Um, hello?” she called, but got no answer. Cautiously, she made her way to the lip of the drop-off. After all the mess that happened with the Blackthornes, Wanda was a lot more careful about being curious about strange things in the wilderness. I really, really wish I had more on me than just this dinky little fixed blade knife. She hadn’t become used to carrying around any of the more substantial blades that they had ordered from Greenwood Armory yet, so a slim, three inch dagger was all she had decided to grab to keep on her as a carrying-knife. It was easy to conceal, and quite a bit more legal to keep hidden on her person, but not exactly the most intimidating weapon, unless she was going to fight Brownies or something. The critters, not the little girls.

Her right hand rested on the handle of the knife as she reached the edge. “Is someone there?” Cautiously she peeked over the top of the rocks.

And nearly fell on her ass with surprise.

The only reason she didn’t fall on her ass was because her other hand had been clutching the rocks, and to be honest she wasn’t entirely certain that she hadn’t hit herself on the head with that rock, because sitting half-in, half-out of the water, holding both hands onto the top of his head (with a little blood trickling down his temple) was . . . a merman.

What else could it be? Although . . . the tail wasn’t scaled, it looked more like a dolphin tail, and the gray of the dolphin-skin faded up into the human skin well past his chest. But his head and neck looked human enough, as did his head of shaggy surfer-blond-streaked hair. He was in a tide pool, surrounded by little fish. He seemed so preoccupied with his injury that he didn’t even notice she was there.

Aaaand, yep, his head was still bleeding. Better go apologize to the weird fish-man, Wanda. Well, not fish-man, if that’s a dolphin tail. “Uh, hi. I think I accidentally did that,” she said, pointing to where the merman was massaging his scalp.

“ACK,” he yelped, ducking under the water quickly enough to send a splash of droplets across Wanda’s boots . . . but not deep enough to get his hands and the very top of his head under the water. He stayed there, eyes watching her from under the rippling water for a few moments before he slowly rose again.

“ . . . you’re not a vampire, are you?”

Wanda blinked. “No. Why do you ask?”

The merman yelped again when she spoke, darting back under the water before slowly rising again. “You’re dressed all in black, and pale, and I’m bleeding, and—”

“Well, I’m not a vampire. But thanks for the compliment, I think.” The merman didn’t yelp this time, or try to “flee” back under the water of the shallow pool. Slowly, Wanda squatted down to get a closer look at the merman. Merboy, more like it. He doesn’t look much older than me . . . but who knows how mer-people age? He was skinny, and kind of goofy-looking, with large ears sticking out from his head and through his surfer-blond mane of hair. Kind of like Seth . . . if Seth had been transported to California as a baby.

“If you’re not a vampire . . . then you’re human!” The merman surged forward quickly until he was at the edge of the pool, and Wanda fought the urge to yelp or leap back herself. He didn’t seem as if he was threatening her, though; the smile seemed genuine, and his eyes were curious instead of calculating. “I’ve never met a real, live human before! Come to think of it, I’ve never met a real, dead vampire, either. Though there was that one time . . .”

“Riiight,” Wanda said, taking a moment to breathe. “This is really weird for me, too. So . . . my name’s Wanda. Wanda the human. Not Wanda the vampire. Are you okay? I’m sorry I hit you with that rock. I didn’t think anyone else was here. What’s your name?”

He got a puzzled look on his face, as if so many questions at once confused him, and then locked onto one. Or at least, she thought that was what he had done, because he opened his mouth, and out came a series of clicks, whistles and squeaks. Then added. “Ow, you hit me with a rock,” putting his hand up to the rapidly-rising lump on the top of his forehead.

“Yeah, sorry about that. I don’t really have much that can help, unfortunately. I don’t carry around bags of ice or Advil. Anyways, do you have a name?”

“I do!” He beamed. “Like I said, it’s—” and again came the clicks, whistles, and squeaks.

“Oh. Uh, I don’t think I can pronounce that.” A thought occurred to Wanda just then. “Hey, come to think of it, how do you speak English, anyways? I thought you said that you’ve never met a human before?”

“That’s easy! My family taught me, and some of them have met humans. Or if they didn’t, then one of their aunts, or uncles, or sisters, or cousins, or brothers, or—well, you get the idea! All us merfolk are natural polyglots; it’s super useful, since just about everything in the ocean speaks a different language.” He paused, as if thinking for a moment. “Selkies are okay, I guess, but they gossip too much. Lobsters aren’t really that good for conversation, but boy, the younger ones taste great! And don’t even get me started on crabs—”

Wanda could already tell that this young merman would keep going on a tear if she didn’t put a stop to it. “Oh! I won’t, don’t you worry.” She frowned. “Well, I’ve got to call you something. Is there a shorter form of your name, maybe? Something that, you know, I can pronounce.”

The merman screwed up his face in concentration for several long seconds, then smiled . . . and squeaked once.

“Squeak it is, then.”

The merman—Squeak—beamed at this. “A human named me! I mean, it’s kind of short and boring, but still! I can’t wait to tell everyone I know!”

Wanda looked around. “Are there . . . more of you here? Y’know, merfolk?”

“Huh?” The smile fell from Squeak’s face, and he looked down. “No. I got . . . separated from the pod. There was a big storm, and I had been playing on the surface, and got confused with all the wind and the waves. The storm looked really cool, but it kind of threw me around.” He raised his eyes to look at Wanda again. “And then I got here to . . . where am I?”

“Uh, you’re off the coast of a town called Silence.”

“Oh, right. You humans call places weird things, you know. Anyways, so I got here to Quiet-Town, and, well, kind of got in a fight. But I didn’t start it!”

She set aside the fact that he seemed very anxious she not think he started this “fight,” whatever it was over, and just asked “Who’d you get in a fight with?”

“The Farraige Olc,” he whispered. “The merfolk part of them, anyway. We’re not supposed to fight, we’re supposed to be keeping the peace between us, but they’re mean and bullies and always hungry.”

“I have no idea what you just said.” She shook her head. “Well . . . what do they look like? And are you safe here?”

“They can’t air-breathe,” he said confidently. “They won’t come into shallow water. They look sort of like me, except sharky. And they have gills here—” he cut both hands in at the level of his lower rib-cage.

“So . . . sharkmaids. Mersharks. Merman-sharks. Got it.”

“Too many teeth too,” he said, and shuddered. “And like I said, always hungry. Like the lamia, but there weren’t any of those here. Just the pistriskin. You know what’s the worst thing about them?”

“Obviously not, since I didn’t know any of you guys existed before five minutes ago,” Wanda replied, not sure if she was more amused or annoyed by how air-headed he was. Or did he have water on the brain?

He laughed with delight. “You’re funny, Wanda-human! Okay, the worst thing about them is that they don’t always eat you right away. Sometimes they take you somewhere else and play with you, letting you think you can escape, then hauling you back until you’re totally exhausted.”

“That’s . . . pretty brutal, Squeak.” The merboy grinned at her, and she decided right there and then; if nothing else, talking with Squeak was amusing. And a sight better than kicking rocks along the beach. “How about this? You tell me about merfolk and all that sort of thing, and I’ll tell you about a bunch of human stuff. Sound like a good deal?”

His eyes literally sparkled with glee. “Me? You’d talk to me about landside?”

She smiled, sitting down and letting her boots dangle over the edge. “Yup. Just so long as you promise not to try to eat me or anything.”

He made a face. “You’re not a lobster or a crab or a herring—boy, herring are good—or a flounder or an oyster or a—”

“Okay, okay, I get it!” she laughed. “So tell me about your pod. . . .”

#

Wanda stood up, careful not to fall into the tidal pool, and stretched. Damn, time really got away from me. She had spent the last few hours talking with Squeak about . . . well, everything. It turned out that merfolk, to the best of their considerable ability, avoided interacting with people; given what Wanda knew about human nature, that was an exceedingly good policy. As a result, however, Squeak’s knowledge about the world of man was . . . spotty, and wildly inaccurate in some instances. He delighted in even the most mundane details of everyday life; cars, grocery stores, how shoes worked, all of it. He desperately wanted to know more about television; it confused and amazed him in equal parts.

For Wanda’s part Squeak’s narrative felt like the best underwater documentary ever—one where someone who actually knew what other creatures were thinking could tell you what was going on. Although she learned details about dolphin sex that really were TMI. Squeak had no filters. That part was definitely not going back to the gang, if any of it did. To be honest, it was very tempting to keep all this to herself. Staci and Tim had all this arcane stuff they shared, and Seth was deeply into all that even if it was on a theoretical basis. Riley and Jake had each other. This was the first time Wanda had ever had something that was all hers, alone.

She wanted to continue, but it had gotten late, and her stomach rumbled its protests; she hadn’t eaten anything that day, and was in dire need of food.

“You know, Squeak, I was totally not expecting this today . . . but I’m glad I found you, and that we got to talk. This was fun.” He beamed at her.

“I thought I was just going to have to sit here and be bored until the pistriskin left so I could sneak out!” He looked around himself at the tide pool. “There’s enough urchins here I can have a great meal, I’ll think I’ll do that and have a nap. If you think it’s safe and no more people are going to come here.”

“Oh, no one ever comes this far up the beach, dude. Just me. You’re definitely safe here.” She stretched again, working the kinks out of her shoulders. “I’ve got to get some food myself—no, I don’t want an urchin, but, uh, thanks anyways. If you’re still here tomorrow, maybe we can talk again?”

“Sure!” he said, plucking a sea-urchin off the side of the pool and somehow cracking into its shell without getting stuck full of spines. He slurped up the contents that made her stomach lurch to look at. “If I’m still here that’d be way better than hiding here like a flounder!”

“Okay.” Wanda chuckled. “Enjoy your dinner, Squeak. I’ll see you when I see you.” The merboy waved to her, and she waved back before she made her way towards the southern part of the beach where her bike was parked.

That was super pleasant, she thought. Part of her still wanted to tell the others all about her encounter with a merboy named Squeak, but she was fairly confident that she’d keep today all to herself. After all the secrets that Tim and Staci were sharing, it was pretty sweet to have something this epic all to herself. Even the weird looks she always got from the other beach goers couldn’t ruin her mood, and she almost always got a lot of weird looks. It’s hard work hauling the Goth flag alone in Silence, but someone has to do it. She was almost to the parking lot where her bike was chained to a rack when she heard a shrill scream coming from the beach.

Wanda immediately whipped around, her hand going to her knife instinctively. “What the hell?” A group of the few remaining beach goers were gathered around a woman who kept shouting and pointing towards the water, hopelessly distraught. Oh, crap. Her kid got sucked in by a riptide or something? Stomping through the beach sand, Wanda made her way closer, but froze in her tracks when she could understand what the woman was saying.

“—I’m telling you, sharks! Weird sharks, they took my son! Please, someone, help!”

Sharks were rare off the coast of Silence; they usually didn’t range this far north, though there were the odd sighting or two per year. Wanda already knew in her gut that it wasn’t just a regular shark. Squeak’s bullies, the mersharks. Crap. She opened her mouth to speak, but then snapped it shut. There was no way that anyone there would believe her; a weird Goth girl, coming up and saying that shark-men were really responsible? Even if they did . . . what could any of these people do to help? It dawned on her, another sickening realization. They can’t help the kid . . . but maybe I can. Squeak said that the mersharks like to play with their food, so maybe he’s still alive.

She considered trying to take her bike to get back to Squeak’s hidden pool faster, but discounted the idea; the beach sand sucked to try to bike through, and it would have been impossible to bike at all once she got to the rockier parts of the beach. Shank’s mare it is, she thought as she sprinted back the way she had come.

#

“Squeak!” she yelled, as she got close to the tidal pool. “Squeak! Emergency! Mayday Mayday Mayday!” Would he understand that? Well, it was a universal emergency call for ships. . . .

Running in platform Goth boots was not ideal, and combining that with crossing sand and rocks, Wanda was completely played out by the time she reached the merboy. Her running had become loads better after the training sessions had started in earnest with Tim and the rest of the gang, but she still had a long way to go before she’d be competitive in even a half-marathon.

The shaggy blond head popped up from the edge of the pool just as Wanda skidded to a halt, breathing hard. “Wanda-human? Is it tomorrow already? I dozed off.”

“Kid. Taken. Shark-men,” she said between gulps of breath. “Gotta. Find him.”

“The pistriskin?” His eyes grew wide, and he darted back under the water.

“Oh, damnit,” Wanda breathed, standing up and putting her hands on top of her head like they’d practiced at training. “Squeak! C’mon, listen!”

Slowly, Squeak’s head rose above the water again.

“They took a kid, Squeak. A little boy. We’ve got to do something. You said they play with their food for a while, so he might still be alive.”

“They took a calf?” Suddenly, the merboy went from merboy to merman in his posture and bearing. “Have you a weapon? Wait, I have one.” He made a huge leap over the rocks out to the ocean—she had no idea how he’d mustered the strength to get over those rocks, but he had—and vanished under the water. He came back up a second later, brandishing an old-fashioned boathook over his head, the kind with a sharp point and hook, made of tarnished brass.

“Well, that’ll definitely work.” She started unbuckling her boots; this was going to get wet, and she didn’t want to be weighed down by the clunky things getting full of water. “Do you know where we need to go?”

“Yes. I can taste them in the water,” he responded immediately. “Hurry, Wanda-human! Take your skins off and get into the sea! There is no time to waste!”

“Skins? Oh. Uh, turn around.”

Squeak cocked his head to the side, then shrugged, turning in place in the water. “Humans are weird.”

Wanda stripped out of her clothes, but kept her bra and underwear on. She wanted to keep everything on, but knew it wasn’t practical. “This is going to be stupid-cold.” Undressed, she gingerly stepped into the water, and hissed. “No, not just stupid-cold. This is ridiculous.”

“There is no time to waste!” said Squeak, urgently.

“Oh, to hell with it.” She took a breath and then jumped in. The cold water hit her like a wrecking ball, and she sputtered when she came up. “Oh! This is such a dumb idea!” Squeak had shoved the boathook into her hands as soon as she submerged, and she hadn’t dropped it, luckily. It was heavy, too heavy for something with a wooden shaft. Was it all brass? “We’ve got to hurry. This water is really, really cold for humans. That kid can’t be doing too well. What now?”

“Grab my fin!” he said. “Hard. Don’t let go!”

She grabbed the low fin that grew between his shoulder-blades as ordered. And as soon as she had, he was off like a shot, practically yanking her arm out of the shoulder-socket. Holy . . . he might look skinny, but Squeak is strong.

This was not as easy as it looked in movies and anime. Squeak swam just like a dolphin, a rolling up-and-down motion that threatened to drag her head underwater every time he went down. Eventually she got the bright idea to time her breaths to when his head rose, and use his explosive outer breath as her cue for her own intake. She clamped the boathook to her side and pointed straight ahead to keep it from getting ripped out of her grip. And within a couple of minutes both her arms were screaming about the abuse she was putting them through.

Just when she thought that she couldn’t hold on any longer, Squeak slowed, and then stopped, coming to a rest near an outcropping of rock.

“The pistriskin,” he whispered, gently pulling her off of his back—again, surprisingly strong for such a scrawny kid—and over to the rock so that she could hang onto it. “They’re in this cove.” He ducked his head under the water, waited for a few moments, and then came back up. “The calf is still alive.”

Wanda nodded, shivering. “Thank goodness.” Clutching to the rock, she slowly moved to a better position so that she could see into the cove. Sure enough, there was the kid; a young boy, crying quietly while he treaded water. His lips were blue; Wanda had no clue how long he’d been in the water, but it’d clearly been too long. And circling around him were three fins. “What are the shark-dudes doing?”

“One moment,” Squeak said before his head disappeared under the water again. When he finally emerged again, he looked grim. “Well, these are definitely the same ones that I got into a fight with. They’re currently arguing about who gets the first bite.”

Wanda looked up, rather than down, and it was obvious why the kid didn’t just escape by getting onto the shore. He couldn’t. Huge, slippery boulders rimmed the edge of the cove, and even she wouldn’t have been able to climb them.

“That might work to our advantage,” she said through chattering teeth. “You got away from them before. Can you do that again?”

Squeak’s brows furrowed. “I . . . I don’t know, Wanda-human.” Then he looked over to the child. “But we must try anyway. The calf is not going to last long when they finally decide to feed.”

“Okay, Squeak. We wait for a break; they seem distracted. When there’s an opening, we grab the kid and run for it. I’ll fight them off with the boathook.”

“That’s . . . not much of a plan.”

“No choice,” she replied. “Just be sure the kid gets a hold of your fin. We only have one shot at this.” She didn’t fancy their chances taking on three sharkmen without the element of surprise. They either got the kid and got away the first time, or all three of them would probably end up as dinner. I’m not going to let that happen.

#

“Okay, this was a really bad idea!” Wanda shouted as she swung the boathook at the nearest mershark. It had all gone really well in the beginning; they had waited for the sharkmen to get distracted with their arguing, and then swooped in and retrieved the kid. And that was the last thing that had gone right. Turns out, Squeak was faster than the mersharks . . . but not when he was carrying two people on his back. Instead of getting away clean, they were in a near dead heat with all three of the mersharks, and it was only through a combination of fancy maneuvers from Squeak and Wanda’s “skills” with the boathook that they hadn’t been chewed to pieces yet.

The mersharks themselves were even uglier than Wanda imagined. And they were pissed. “Back, you!” She stabbed at one of the nearest mersharks with the point of the boathook, and actually scored a hit, sinking the point into the flesh of the sharkman’s shoulder. It fell back, but one of the others surged forward to take its place. Between the snapping jaws of the mersharks and trying not to drown from Squeak’s erratic swimming, Wanda was having a tough go of it. The kid seemed completely frozen to Squeak’s back, hanging onto his fin for dear life.

“I can’t keep this up!” Squeak threw a backhand at one of the mersharks on the left, hitting it across the bridge of its nose, causing it to veer off.

The only good thing was that these creatures didn’t have huge shark mouths. They were going to have to grab one or both of the humans with their actual hands, and every time they made a grab, they lost speed.

“No kidding!”

They couldn’t create any distance between themselves and the mersharks, and the mersharks were keeping them penned in from going towards shallow waters. Something had to change, and fast. She got another hit in on the mershark on her side, but this time it grabbed the boathook’s haft. He yanked, hard, and almost pulled her off of Squeak, and she prayed that her grip wouldn’t go. A second shark swam between the trio and the mershark with the hold on the boathook, and actually bit through the shaft.

I guess it wasn’t all brass after all.

“Great!” Wanda threw the chunk of the shaft she still had, and managed to actually catch the sharkman in the face with it. She was out of weapons; her dinky little knife was back on the beach with the rest of her clothes. Besides, she didn’t want to have any of the mersharks get close enough to have to use something like that. Though right about now, anything would be better than harsh language, which is all I’ve got right now.

There was something in the distance, though Wanda could hardly make it out through the ocean spray. Tall, white . . . a boat!

“Squeak! Aim for the boat!”

“But—”

“Just do it, I’ve got an idea!”

“I thought this was your idea?”

She punched him in the shoulder, then pointed to the boat. It was further out to sea, away from the shallows that they needed to reach, but it was their only hope at this point. She kicked at one of the mersharks, almost losing her grip. She could tell that Squeak was getting tired; he was slowing, and the breaths he was taking every time he surfaced were becoming more ragged. But he still pushed, putting all of his energy into a final effort. Almost . . . c’mon, Squeak, we’re almost there.

The boat was one of Silence’s fishing vessels, probably returning to the docks after a day of work. “Kid, get ready! Squeak, I want you to aim right for it! At the last second dive under it, scrape our backs if you have to, but make it tight!”

Somehow Squeak put on a last burst of speed, and Wanda screamed “Breathe!” as she sensed him starting his dive.

She reached across his back and grabbed the kid’s wrist; a good thing she did, too, because she felt him lose his grip at the same moment that she felt the keel of the fishing boat scrape her back and got the terrifying glimpse of the rotating, churning propellers that were way too close to her shoulder for comfort.

Then they surfaced on the other side of the boat, as she heard two thuds and. . . .

Well, from the sudden spreading red in the water as they rolled away, the third sharkman hadn’t missed the propeller the way she had.

#

Wanda sat in her favorite chair at Tim’s, sipping on a cup of freshly made coffee. The others had returned earlier that morning, and they had all decided to meet up in the afternoon. They were all sorry that Wanda hadn’t been able to attend, but still shared stories of the event. She smiled, asked questions, and volunteered to refill coffee cups when her friends ran out. Through all of it, she still thought back to her weekend with Squeak. After they’d gotten back to shore, they’d dropped the kid off further up the beach—far enough that no one would see Squeak clearly, near enough the kid could make out his mom from where they were. He’d become animated, then, and ran back to where his mother was tearfully talking to a cop. Meanwhile Wanda and Squeak slipped away. No doubt he would tell everyone about the sharkmen, the merboy, and Wanda . . . but he was a kid, so it was unlikely anyone would believe him. Wanda had gotten dressed once they reached the cove, and a good thing, too; she was shivering so badly, she knew that she had to be on the verge of hypothermia. A quick goodbye to Squeak, and she left. If she had been hungry before the chase with the mersharks, she was ravenous afterwards. Squeak had promised to stop by Silence every once and a while if he could, so maybe she hadn’t seen the last of the merboy. He had definitely earned her respect with the bravery he had shown. Not bad for a fellow nerd.

“What about you, Wanda?”

Wanda looked up from her reverie. Staci waited expectantly, an identical cup of coffee cradled in her hands.

“Hmm?”

“What’d you get up to while we were gone?”

“Oh, nothing, really,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee. “Just kind of wandered around to be out of the house and away from the ‘rents.” She paused for another sip. “By the way, do any of you know if mermaids exist? I mean, we’ve run into some pretty weird stuff.”

Seth shrugged, sitting down in a chair next to her. “There are stories, but not a lot of lore for them. How ‘bout you, Tim? Ever met one?”

Tim shook his head, leaning on the counter at the front of the store. “Nope. Haven’t met anyone that has, either.” He narrowed his eyes at Wanda, arching an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no reason,” she said, smiling. “Just wondering.”

* * *

This story is set in the world of Breaking Silence by Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin, a new entry in the SERRAted Edge series, out in February. Mercedes Lackey is the New York Times best-selling author of the Bardic Voices series and the SERRAted Edge series, the Heralds of Valdemar series, and many more. She's the coauthor of the contemporary metahero SF series The Secret World Chronicle. Among her popular Baen titles are The Fire Rose, The Lark and the Wren, and also The Shadow of the Lion and Burdens of the Dead with Eric Flint and Dave Freer. She lives in Oklahoma.

Cody Martin is a coauthor with Mercedes Lackey of five other books in the metahero saga The Secret World Chronicle, including entries Invasion, World Divided, Revolution, Collision, and Avalanche. He is also the coauthor of the previous entry in The SERRAted Edge series, Silence. Martin is an avid gamer, but spends his extra time chained to a computer, writing. Originally from Scottsdale, Arizona, he currently resides in Florida.

Adrift

Frank Chadwick

The Estate of the Honorable Arigapaa e-Lotonaa on the Planet Hazz'Akatu, about three hundred light years from Earth

Day 11, Tenmonth Waxing, Year 301 of the Cottohazz (28 December, 2133 Earth Dating)

Alex was crying—probably hungry. Marrissa unbuttoned her blouse, picked him up, and as he fed, she walked out onto the broad balcony on the east side of the main house. This close to Hazz'Akatu's equator, there were only two seasons: rain and dry. Although they were going into the rainy season, the skies were clear today. Aurora would have a smooth flight in. Marr looked across the east grounds. Sasha and Tweezaa were running laps on the track below, the track whose grey crushed stone surface traced a long oval around the two large topiary sculptures which hid surface-to-air missile launchers—not that anyone attempting an attack would be surprised by them. The ornately trimmed trees were meant to conceal the launchers from the family's view. Everyone knew they were there, but there was no need for a constant visual reminder of their necessity.

Sasha and Tweezaa rounded the near turn and ran past her below the balcony, both waving without breaking stride. human and Varoki, running in step. Where else but here? Marr smiled and waved back. A year ago, Tweezaa had struggled to keep up with Sasha. Now she clearly was holding back, letting him keep up with her. How could she have grown so fast?

A glint in the eastern sky caught Marissa's eye and, as she watched, it grew into an atmospheric shuttle on its approach path for the landing pad beyond the tree line. A ground car was already waiting there to bring the shuttle's passenger up to the house. As the craft flared to land, she pointed to it and turned Alex so he could see.

"Look, Alex. Your Auntie Aurora is coming to see you."

At least that's the excuse Aurora had given for the visit. Marr had her doubts.

*****

After Aurora had finished her first round of hugging, kissing, and teasing Alex, but still holding him in her arms, she turned to Marrissa.

"I have some wonderfully juicy gossip from the city, but I'd rather not say it until we're alone. It's too hot." She gave an evil laugh to underscore the thought.

Gossip? Marr didn’t believe that for a moment, but she smiled and nodded. "Let's go to the breakfast sun room. We can have some privacy there and still enjoy this beautiful morning. Who knows how much longer we'll have it?"

If Aurora didn't want to say it even in front of the few servants they had—all of them very loyal to the family—whatever Aurora had must be "hot" indeed. Marr felt her anger begin to mount. Aurora knew how strongly she felt about not getting involved in human politics, and yet here she was with something too dangerous to say in front of the staff.

Marrissa was fiscal guardian of the e-Traak's inheritance until Tweezaa reached her majority, when that inheritance would make her the wealthiest person in the Cottohazz. The most important asset of the inheritance was the largest single privately-owned block of stock in STTS (Simki-Traak Trans-Stellar), the largest manufacturer of interstellar jump drives in the Cottohazz. Marrissa also sat on the board of governors of STTS, the only human governor of it or any other Varoki major trading house in history—and the only female as well. humans could not even own stock in STTS, only Varoki could. But Marrissa's position as guardian of the e-Traak shares meant she had to—by law—be given a seat on the board of governors, a necessity the corporation had accepted after only two lawsuits.

If there was any one being half the fiscal and political Varoki elite of the Cottohazz wanted to catch in a misstep, find a way to topple, it was Marrissa Marfoglia. And here was Aurora, her husband Sasha's sister, probably with another dangerous crackpot scheme. Marr took a breath to calm herself and was careful not to slam the door behind them.

Aurora looked around the bright room and nodded, either in approval or appreciation, Marrissa couldn’t tell which. Aurora walked over to a table by the far wall, moved Alex onto her left hip, and with her right hand picked up a slender vase filled with fresh-cut flowers. She carried it back to Marr and held it out as an offering.

"Presenting me with a vase of my own flowers?" Marr asked.

"Presenting you with something to throw at me. I know you've been dying to ever since I got here."

Marr took the vase and set it back in its original position.

"And you must know why," Marr said without turning to face her, instead moving the vase slightly to the side, to center it on the table.

"Of course I do. Here's crazy Aurora again, with more high intrigue and dangerous ideas. Well, you're right."

Marr turned and leaned slightly back against the table. She kept her voice calm to avoid upsetting Alex. "Do you have any idea how much danger it would put my family in if I did half of the things you want me to?"

"Yes," Aurora said, looking at little Alex in her arms, "I do. I'm not sure I always did. I have a certain immunity from repercussions due to my celebrity status: The Heroine of Sookagrad and all that. But I'm beginning to realize my immunity is limited, and that of my friends and family is all but nonexistent. And yet here I am again."

There was something different about her attitude, Marr thought. She seemed completely aware of the hazards, and yet . . .

"How is the holovid production coming?" Marr asked to change the subject for a moment, or maybe just put it off.

"Sookagrad Calling? Stalled in post-production, some sort of artistic disagreement between the director and the effects software designer. It's scheduled for release in Sixmonth next year, but who knows?" She simply looked at Marr and said nothing for a few moments. Then she shrugged. "What I want to tell you is actually perfectly legal to know. In fact, you have unrestricted access to the information. The thing is, if you don’t know to look for it, you'd never notice it.

"I think it's possibly the single most important piece of information I've ever known, and given my work, I come across a great deal of important information. There are two things which need to be done. I can do one, but I cannot do the other. You may be able to. I don’t know of anyone else who could."

Marr shifted her weight from one foot to the other and fought the urge to fidget. This was unlike any attempt to persuade her Aurora had ever tried before. To her surprise, Marr found her interest piqued.

"You say knowing the information is perfectly legal," Marr said. "Is what you want done legal as well?"

"Of course not."

No, Marr thought, of course not.

"Not only is it illegal," Aurora went on, "it probably constitutes a breach of your fiduciary responsibility to Tweezaa."

"Well, that makes it impossible," Marr said.

"I know," Aurora said.

Aurora knew it was impossible to agree, and yet there she stood? Yes, there she stood, silent and calm as a statue.

"Well, if the information itself isn’t illegal, you may as well tell me."

*****

After their conversation Aurora spent half an hour visiting with Sasha and Tweezaa, and then the ground car drove her back to her shuttle and she was off, bound for the Old Tower Needle near Sakkatto City, across the border in the Commonwealth of Bakaa. Marr would be heading to Sakkatto City herself in little more than a week for a STTS board of governors meeting. Sakkatto City was not only the capital of Bakaa, it housed the headquarters of most of the largest Varoki multi-stellar corporations, including AZ Simki-Traak Trans-Stellar. It also housed, she knew, the headquarters of CSJ, the Cottohazz secret police. She had never been there . . . yet.

"Gapa," joined them for lunch. Usually he kept to the north wing during the day, although they often dined together. Gapa—Arigapaa e-Lotonaa—was technically their host, although in truth he had become family. He and Tweezaa were Varoki, but that didn't matter as much to Marr as it once had, or to any of them. They had been through so much together, she felt closer to them than to most humans. Tweezaa had been almost like a daughter to Marr, still was, despite the fact Gapa had adopted her. He was her legal guardian in all things except her finances. In that area Marrissa remained the Guardian Court-appointed manager of Tweezaa's fortune, the largest single private fortune in the Cottohazz.

They had a pleasant lunch. Alex was feeding himself now, alternating a bottle with breastfeeding, and holding the bottle himself. Tweezaa told Gapa about the Lara'i Bada Karo martial arts training she and Sasha were now taking together. Sasha had never studied martial arts when he was . . . well, why sanitize it? When he was a violent criminal. Now he studied it and Marr had once asked him why he hadn’t before.

"Before it was just me to look out for. If I fucked up, it was on me, you know? Now if I fuck up, it's your and Tweezaa's asses on the line. Sorta changes your perspective."

He hadn’t run regularly in those days either. His body was harder now. She'd fallen in love with who he was, but she had no complaints about who he was becoming. Everyone changes, grows. She wondered if they would ever grow old together, really old, old enough to slow down and just study the world for its beauty, not its potential dangers. She wondered if they would even have the capacity to enjoy it if they lived that long. Mental habits cut deep paths in a person. How could they change their habits if the world—the Cottohazz—did not change its?

"You're pretty quiet, pal," Sasha said to her.

She looked up and blinked and then smiled. "Sorry. Just thinking too much about work."

"That is why the other governors of STTS detest you," Gapa said. "You actually think about your responsibilities. They have assistants to do that for them."

"You don't think their hatred has something to do with her being a human?" Sasha asked.

"And female?" Tweezaa added.

Gappa tilted his head to the side, the Varoki equivalent of a shrug. "Your arguments are well-founded," he said, "but I for one think they would hate her nearly as much were she a Varoki male. She simply makes them look like the lazy, entitled time-servers they all are."

"All but e-Drapaank," Marr said. "He has a brain and he uses it."

Gapa paused and then nodded. "Yes, e-Drapaank is impressive, the best second governor STTS has had in as long as I can remember. Pity he is on the other side."

"Yeah," Sasha said. "Why can’t everyone just get along?"

And then they all laughed. Marr laughed with them because they expected her to, but today she found the dark humor simply darker than usual.

*****

Half an hour later she sat in her office with Alex settled into his crib beside her for his afternoon nap. She blinked up the commlink for Gaisaana-la, her Varoki senior executive assistant.

Yes, Madam, she answered immediately, the voice simply registering in Marr's brain from the commlink.

"Have the updates on the STTS Stressed Asset Report come in yet?"

Yes, Madam, in the data dump two hours ago. I haven't looked through it yet but I can do a quick search if there's something you're interested in.

"Thank you but no, that's not necessary. I just want to scan them to make sure I have a good handle on the components of the stress-to-base ratio before next month's board meeting. I've got a window of time right now."

Marr waited for the data transfer, pulled up the report on the surface of her smart desk, and began paging through it, keeping the pace deliberate. Sometimes she stopped to examine a page longer, concentrating on pages with reduced-value assets. She thought the records of her smart desk usage were secure, but nothing was secure from a CSJ court-authorized full investigation. Better not to leave even a hint of what she was looking for, nothing a prosecutor could say, Ah ha! Here is the clear evidence of her intent.

Not that she intended to do anything but look.

Stressed assets were those which current risk placed in a lower potential future value category. Anything carried as an asset, and which was still physically in existence, was logged and evaluated as to probable remaining value. Setting aside physical plant and other immovable assets, star drives under lease to starships were among the largest tangible assets held by Simki-Traak Trans-Stellar. Over a third of all star drives in the Cottohazz were manufactured by STTS, and none of them were sold; all were leased and remained the property of STTS. Every jump drive builder followed the same procedure, just one more way of ensuring the intellectual property of the drive's operating principle remained the sole property of the joint patent holders. That was the technological and economic strangle hold the e-Varokiim, the wealthiest of the Varoki families, had on the other five races of the Cottohazz: the monopoly on manufacturing star drives.

She found a page with three stressed assets—commercial star drives—one with its likely value written down to twenty-two percent. She left that page open on her desk for a long time, as if she were studying it. After several minutes she moved on.

Ten minutes into her scan she found what she was really looking for: a summary of assets lost and stressed due to the first major space battle of the war being fought by Baka against a coalition of human nations. The battle had taken place four days earlier. Four days was not long for that distance, although military updates probably had some sort of priority access to unmanned jump couriers.

Seven STTS-owned drives had been present at the battle, four on the humans' side and three with the uBakai. None of the human drives had been destroyed, but that seemed an extraordinary piece of luck for STTS. AZ Kagataan, their principle competition, had lost several drives, the almost gloating footnote to the entry observed. The battle had been such a punishing loss for the human fleet overall that the risk assessment department had marked down the expected future value of the four human STTS-built drives to twenty-two percent.

The three Varoki-manned ships with STTS drives had fared differently. One was listed as a total loss from a catastrophic jump mishap, marked down to zero percent. One was in an undamaged cruiser with an assessed future value of forty-seven percent. And then, there was the third one.

KBk-429, which Marr now knew, having looked it up beforehand, stood for "Starcruiser, uBakai, hull number Four-Two-Nine."

KBk-429's drive value was now assessed as one percent. Only one percent. Why?

Because the cruiser suffered battle damage which caused the drive's anti-tamper defenses to activate, the factory-installed weapon designed to prevent anyone other than factory representatives from examining the actual internal design of the drive. The defense system flooded the jump drive's engineering spaces with a microbial solvent and neurotoxin which ate through most things it didn't kill. The cruiser's captain had followed protocol and immediately jettisoned the entire drive module in order to save the rest of his ship and crew. Now the drive module was floating out there somewhere in deep space . . . but only the cruiser's hull had actually been damaged. The drive was still operational.

Marr sat back in her chair and thought about that—an operational star drive floating in deep space. For decades human physicists had hungered for the chance to examine the interior of a jump drive, find out how it worked, maybe make a start on reverse engineering it. Was this their chance?

No, it couldn’t be. STTS, and every other trading house that manufactured drives, tracked each drive meticulously—just like in the document she was reading now. Damaged drives were recovered immediately. Those with compromised defense systems were usually launched into a gas giant or a star to prevent the defensive microbe from spreading to other vessels. At least that was the story given to the public, but the real reason was the repair cost of a drive with an activated antitamper defense system exceeded the drive's remaining value.

At least that was the story they had given her, and she was a corporate governor, so it must be the truth. Or so she had always thought. Now she wondered. But in any case, recovery or disposal vessels would be on the way.

She looked at the appended explanatory notes on KBk-429's jump drive: Recovery currently impossible due to ongoing hostilities in K'tok System.

Oh, of course! The one thing in the entire history of the Cottohazz the jump manufacturers had never had to deal with before was a genuine interstellar war.

She paged on past the entry and for the next ten minutes she continued her methodically irregular scan of the document, but she saw nothing of what was on the pages. Her mind grappled with what Aurora had asked her to do, and with how she might go about doing it.

Not that she had any intention of doing so. It was insane. But . . . how would someone go about doing that insane thing?

*****

An hour later Marr found herself knocking on Gapa's study door. The door swung open as the middle-aged Varoki diplomat looked up from his desk and smiled. The sunlight from the window caught the iridescence of his skin and made one side of his face seem to glow.

"Why hello again, Marrissa."

"Hello, Gapa. I was wondering . . . am I interrupting?"

"Nothing important. I had been reading the diplomatic update on the fighting in the K'tok system. Quite distressing, so I had switched to a historical adventure novel by Hakata e-Kirjailija. Simply escapist fiction. What can I do?"

Yes, Gapa would be receiving periodic updates himself. Although he was currently between postings, Arigapaa e-Lotonaa was one of the senior officers of the Khap’uKhaana, the corps of diplomatic and legal experts for the Cottohazz Executive Council. Despite that, she trusted Gapa absolutely. Tweezaa was the most important person in his life. He knew his adopted daughter shared the long-term goals of her late father Sarro e-Traak, and Gapa had embraced those goals as well. That involved somehow making good the damage the e-Varokiim had done to humans in the last hundred years, somehow making humans equal citizens in the Cottohazz—in reality rather than just in name.

"Well, perhaps you can help me with a problem," Marr said. "A hypothetical problem."

"A hypothetical problem?" His broad ears fanned out a bit at that. "If I can help, I'll be delighted, but hypothetical problems are often the most difficult to solve."

"Why do you say that?" she asked as she sat down in the chair in front of his desk. It was made for a Varoki and so her legs barely reached the floor.

"Hypothetical problems generally lack details, don't they? It's my experience that the solution of a problem is usually in the details. But please, share your problem."

"Well . . . suppose a starship jettisoned its jump drive due to some sort of a mishap. Legally, who is responsible for directing the recovery, other than the manufacturer of the drive?".

"No one," he answered. "Legally the manufacturer has the sole responsibility to coordinate recovery of the drive, although the military would cooperate in such an effort unless prevented by exigent circumstances." He paused there and looked directly at her. "Such as . . . let us say, hypothetically . . . an interstellar war."

Marr felt herself color. It must have been obvious to Gapa as well, because he smiled broadly and shook his head.

"Marrissa, say no more. Although I will always do everything I can to help you, there are times when, due to my position and visibility, my involvement can be a liability instead of an asset. I do not say that is the case now, of course, because this is all purely hypothetical. If we finish now, if called upon I can honestly report that at no time during our conversation did either of us mention KB . . . well, any particular ship."

She sat quietly for five or ten seconds and then shrugged. "No, and why would we have?"

"No reason I can imagine," he answered, still smiling.

*****

Marrissa returned to her office, where Alex was still sleeping in his crib. She touched the soft feathery crown of black hair on his head, as fine as goose down. What would happen to him if she agreed to this reckless adventure? She still didn't know if it was even possible, but so what? Yes, Gapa had gotten her one step closer, but how could she put Alex, Sasha, Tweezaa, all of them at such risk? Things go wrong, she knew that. She had seen it often enough. How many careful plans end up unravelling into chaos and blood? Most of them, in her experience.

She needed to clear her mind, concentrate on something positive. She keyed her commlink

"Gaisaana-la, we put off the Sookagrad Project update for the meeting with my sister-in-law this morning. Let's take care of that now, if you have the material ready."

Absolutely, Madam, she answered.

During the coup in Baka the previous year, most of the slum settlements that had sprung up in the open ground between the seven enormous arcologies that made up Sakkatto City had been heavily damaged. But the human squatter district Sookagrad—so-called by its mostly-Slavic inhabitants—had been nearly levelled. Sasha had been trapped in that fighting and she had almost lost him. She might have stayed longer, gotten caught herself, but she was carrying Alex. She got to Gapa's estate to protect her unborn child, and so in a sense Alex may have saved her.

Tweezaa had requested Marrissa to set up a charitable foundation in her name to continue the work her father Sarro had started, the work which had resulted in his widespread denunciation by many other Varoki as a "race traitor." The hate eventually led to the murder of both Tweezaa's father Sarro and her older brother Barraki. Marrissa had gladly set up the Barraki e-Traak Foundation. Its first project was to take over funding of the human clinic Sasha had established on the planet Peezgtaan. They had other projects, but for the last year their largest one had been the rebuilding of Sookagrad as a clean, safe community within Sakkatto City. That seemed like an ambitious project, but also fairly straightforward. There had been a considerable store of admiration for the human Sookagrad resistance to the uBakai coup, admiration throughout the Cottohazz and across all species boundaries, so the municipal authorities had cooperated fully with the project from the start.

But there had been problems. The first was that the Varoki inhabitants of the surrounding squatter communities, which had also been badly damaged in the fighting, resented all the funds and attention lavished on the comparatively small human community, and with some justice. That could produce future friction between the Varoki and human communities, and that was the opposite of what they wanted. After consulting with Tweezaa, Marr had broadened the project to include the Varoki communities, and the Kataami community in the slum district as well. It had become a broad-based urban renewal effort.

Now there were increasing calls for the establishment of racially homogeneous neighborhoods. Logistically it made some sense, since the six intelligent species of the Cottohazz were made up of unique and incompatible protein chains and so could not consume each other's food without dying a fairly quick and unpleasant death. But this wasn't just about food.

"They don’t want to live in the same building with humans. That's it, isn’t it?" Marr asked after reviewing the latest complaints and proposals. Gaisaana-la shifted in her chair and her large ears folded back, perhaps in embarrassment.

"Madam Marfolia, you should know we are receiving similar requests from the human citizen's advisory board in Sookagrad."

"The humans?"

"The truth is that, after all the violence following the coup, many of the humans only feel safe living among other humans. They can defend themselves if they are together. That is a lesson they learned from the fighting."

Marr looked at the planning diagrams, with the overlay of the old neighborhoods superimposed, and she felt light-headed with the realization of where they had ended up.

"Oh my God," she said softly. "We're just building another ghetto, aren’t we? A lovely pastel foamstone ghetto, complete with its own green space suitable for mass graves."

More mass graves. The Cottohazz had discovered several large graves holding human remains—hundreds of corpses—after the coup had been suppressed. Those had been turned into memorials. Were her engineers now surveying the sites of the next memorials?

"Madam?" Gaisaana-la asked.

Alex began crying. It was time for his afternoon feeding but for a moment Marr felt disoriented, unsure where she was and what to do next.

"Madam Marfoglia, are you all right?" Gaisaana-la asked, concern in her voice.

Marr passed her hand over her face and nodded.

"Yes, I'm fine. I just . . . I just need to feed Alex. Would you excuse me, please?"

Gaisaana-la left. Marr rose and crossed to Alex's crib and picked him up. She held him close for a moment, and then unbuttoned her blouse to feed him.

"Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Naradnyo-Marfoglio, what is to become of you, my little man?" she whispered, and she felt tears on her cheek. "Did you save my life just to end up in a mass grave yourself?"

*****

Sasha met her on the east lawn, beside the running track, and they walked together toward the tree line, but only because they had to walk somewhere, This was a walk with a destination, but not a geographical one.

"How's your day going?" he asked as they walked.

"I've had better," she answered.

Sasha nodded. "Kinda figured. Aurora get under your skin again?"

"More than that."

Sasha glanced at her, his eyebrows ticking up in interest, but he said nothing. After a few more steps she began telling him everything: The original nugget of information about a Varoki cruiser having jettisoned its jump drive, Marr's discovery of the record, the dislocation of the recovery effort by ongoing hostilities, Gapa's confirmation that sole responsibility for recovery rested with STTS.

When she finished, they walked on for a dozen steps before Sasha spoke.

"She really got her hooks in you this time, didn't' she?"

"She didn’t tell you any of this?"

"Nah, she knows not to bother. I've got professional responsibilities which preclude playing that game."

Marr felt her cheeks flush with embarrassment, or perhaps shame. She had responsibilities, too. What was she thinking? Beside her, Sasha must have sensed her feelings.

"See, my professional responsibilities are simple: keep you and Tweezaa alive. Your professional responsibilities are a lot more complicated. Mine deal with protecting you two in the present; yours deal with protecting Tweezaa's future. The thing is, Tweezaa's already decided the sort of future she wants, and it ain't that," he said, pointing back toward the camouflaged surface-to-air missile launchers.

"People say we brainwashed her," Marr said.

"Yeah, bullshit. She's her father Sarro's daughter when it comes to politics, and I think from what The'On says, she's her mother's daughter when it comes to heart."

The'On, short for The Honorable, was Sasha's nickname for Gapa. No one else called him that.

Well, actually Tweezaa still sometimes called him BotiOn—roughly Uncle The'On—when she wanted to coax a special favor from him. She had begun calling him that years before, back on K'tok where they had first met.

"So the thing is," Sasha went on, "if I think something's dangerous, it's out. If you see something that's dangerous, well, your job's the future, and the future is dangerous. Any of the roads we take may end up killing us. What made you take the hook this time?"

"Alex," Marr whispered. "What sort of future does he have? We live here, pampered and protected, but that's today. What about tomorrow? What about when Tweezaa is old enough to take control of her own life?"

"If we want it, we'll always have a home with her," Sasha said. "We're family."

"I know that. But is that the future we want for Alex? To grow up the protected, idle friend of a Varoki heiress? And as you said, Tweezaa doesn’t want to be an heiress. She already has me putting as much as I can into the charitable foundation—as much as I can get away with without the Guardian Court replacing me with someone who'll do a better job protecting her net worth. When we're gone, you and I, what sort of world will we leave behind for Alex?"

Sasha smiled and put his arm around her shoulder as they walked.

"And for Tweezaa," he said. "It'll be her world, too. So, what do you need me to do?"

Marr sighed and for the first time since Aurora had commed her early this morning, she felt some of the tension ease out of her.

"Well, this is the first chance anyone other than a Varoki has ever had to actually look inside a jump drive and see how it works. I'm not sure if they'll be able to reverse engineer it, but it's the only chance we have to get out from under the jump drive monopoly. For that to happen, we need two things: humans to know about that drifting jump drive module and Varoki to forget about it.

"Aurora is taking care of the first part. She apparently has a girlfriend in Ukrainian naval intelligence, who has a backdoor contact to United States naval intelligence. They're the lead service in the Outworld Coalition, the human alliance fighting in the K'tok system."

"Okay," Sasha said, "so that leaves making the Varoki forget. How do we do that?"

"It's simple, but very difficult," Marr said. "The STTS core records on stressed assets contain the current estimates of future value. As long as there is a non-zero value assigned to the drive, it will be automatically tracked and eventually recovered or disposed of. But if we can alter the base estimate of value down to zero, it drops out of the tracking queue and nobody cares anymore." She paused and took a breath before continuing.

"What we need is someone at STTS with access to the e-Synaptic core memory, preferably in the asset appraisal department, to reset the estimated value to zero. Failing that, we need someone on the outside who can get through their security system remotely and make the change."

"And without triggering any data alarms," Sasha added with a grimace.

"Exactly. I know you've been assembling our security team very carefully these last two years. Everyone in it was handpicked by you. What connections do they have to any of the human resistance groups?"

"None," Sasha said.

Marr stopped walking and stared at him. "Don't joke about this."

"I'm not. I told you, I deal with today, not tomorrow. The last thing I want is some closet revolutionary on your security detail. CSJ finds him and turns him and then we've got a government mole in the organization. That or the rebel decides to do something crazy on our dime."

"Like this," Marr said.

"Yeah, exactly like this. Because if we're going to do something crazy, and I think we are about to, we need to be the ones pulling the trigger, not some loose cannon."

"But . . . if we don't have a contact to any sort of resistance group, what do we do?" she said.

"Aw, most of the resistance groups I've seen were pretty amateurish. Hell, remember Rakanka Highstation? Couldn’t find their ass with both hands. We're better off steering clear of that clown show."

Marr put her arm around his waist and they stated walking again. "My husband the philosopher."

"That's a polite word for what I am."

"A very, very polite word," Marr said, laughing. "So if not the resistance, who? Do we have any other options?"

"You want into a Varoki organization, you talk to Varoki," he said. "You remember that shadow brotherhood we ran into back on K'tok? They called themselves End of Empty Dreams?"

"Takh Pashaada-ak," she said, the memory returning instantly.

"Yeah, whatever. They been in contact with me for the last year. They're still dedicated to Sarro e-Traak's dream of the future, and especially committed to Tweezaa's survival. They been a big help in that department a couple of times. The important thing is, they have infiltrated and absolutely infested the STTS corporate live infrastructure. I think they may have started there. They keep saying they want to help with 'The New Dream,' as they call it. Okay, I say let's give them their shot.

"But before we do this, I want you to understand something, Marr. The odds are we aren’t going to win this fight. The odds are, if it gets won, it'll be by somebody else, and we probably won't even be alive to see it. The odds are a lot of people are going to try and lose before somebody wins, and there's no guarantee even that will ever happen. Do you understand all that?"

They walked for a dozen steps before she answered, her voice quiet.

"I do. I was just remembering . . . something you told me back before we were married. I'd forgotten it until now. You said, we are what we choose.

"My husband, the philosopher."

* * *

This story is set in the world of the novel Ship of Destiny, the March 2020 entry in Frank Chadwick’s Cottohazz series. Frank Chadwick is the New York Times number one best-selling nonfiction author of over two hundred books, articles, and columns on military history and military affairs, as well as over one hundred military and science fiction board and role-playing games. His game Space: 1889 was the first Steampunk game and remains a cult favorite. His other game writing credits include legendary fantasy game En Garde!, groundbreaking SF role playing game Traveller: The New Era, and many others. Chadwick’s SF novels include Cottohazz series novels Come the Revolution, How Dark the World Becomes, Chain of Command, and Ship of Destiny, as well as steampunk thriller The Forever Engine, all from Baen Books.

The Policeman’s Daughter

Wil McCarthy

1.
Bourbon, Interrupted

The courier didn't come bearing packages, or letters marked Carmine Strange Douglas, esq., Adjudicant, Juris Doctor and Attorney at Law. He didn't need to. Instead, he came barreling down the hallway like a team of horses, shouting "Door!" at the wall of my office. When a rectangle of frosted glass appeared and swung inward, he jumped inside.

"Carmine. I have something for you," he panted.

"Did you run all the way over here?" I asked him. "There are quicker ways—"

But the courier didn't answer. Instead, he approached the fax machine—a vertical plate of gray material, vaguely shimmery in the wellstone light of my office—and said, "Reconverge." Then he threw himself at the plate and vanished with a faint blue sizzle.

Reconverge, hell. I'd sent two couriers out to question potential witnesses in the Szymanski divorce, and one had self-destructed rather than share his waste of time with me. The other, apparently, had come back with something both critical and hard to explain. Go figure.

Myself, I'd just finished researching the details on the case, poring over written documents and public records, mental notes and fax traces in an effort to figure out who, if anyone, had promised Albert the cabana boy permanent residence on that tiny estate. Certainly he'd made the claim in public several times, within the hearing of one or both Szymanskis, and neither had corrected him.

This by itself carried a certain legal weight, even if the original claim was baseless, so if the Szymanskis sold the property—and it looked like they were going to have to—Albert's claim might have to be bought out at his own named price, or sold along with the property as an easement in perpetuity. And in a world without death, perpetuity could be a long damned time! Oh, what a jolly old mess.

It was four-thirty in the afternoon, late enough to kill brain cells with a clear conscience, and I'd just cracked the seal on an opensource bourbon of excellent pedigree. Damn. Sitting open to the atmosphere would not improve it. Still, the courier's news sounded important in a pay-the-mortgage kind of way, and like most decent bourbons this cost almost nothing to print. And when you're immorbid, baby, there's always tomorrow.

Sighing, I got up from my desk, from my too-comfortable chair, and strode over to the fax's print plate. "Confirming reconvergence, all parameters normal." Then I followed the courier through.

Stepping into a fax machine is like falling face-first into a swimming pool. The sensation isn't cold, or liquid, or electric, but it's just as distinct. There is, of course, no sensation of being inside the fax machine, since the part of you that passes through the print plate is immediately whisked apart into component atoms. Technically speaking, there should be no consciousness at all as the head disappears, as the body is destroyed and rebuilt, sometimes in combination with other stored images. But consciousness is a funny thing, an illusion that struggles to preserve itself against any insult. The courier and I stepped out of the plate only a moment after I'd stepped into it. Facing into the room, now, not out of it.

The courier was, of course, myself. We were one and the same, briefly split and now rejoined in that seamless ball of wonderfulness that was Carmine Strange Douglas. Like any good investigative counsel, I did this five or six times a day. Hell, if not for plurality laws—three thousand copy-hours per month, rigidly enforced by the fax network itself—I'd do it more than that.

Anyway, now that I was one person again I knew details of my—of the courier's—meeting with Lillia Blair, and I knew all the details of my morning and afternoon research. Reconvergence: the collapsing of two waveforms into one. Like any scattered thoughts the pieces took a few seconds to come together in my mind, but when they did, the legal strategy was clear.

"Call Juniper," I said to the wall.

The wall considered this for a moment before answering, "I assume you mean Juniper Tall Szymanski."

I glared at the wall without answering, irritated because I'd already called June Szymanski twice this week, and the only other Juniper I knew—Juniper Pong—I hadn't spoken to in months. Taking the hint, the wall patched the message through, and created a hollie window beside the open doorway.

For two seconds it displayed nothing but gray; that deep, foggy, three-dimensional gray that some people—myself included—use for a null screen. But then, presently, June Szymanski's face appeared in the hollie, and behind it her living room. She might as well be standing right outside my office. She might as well be solid, physical, here. I've had some practice in distinguishing real windows from hollies, but it takes a microscope and some patience.

"Hi," June said, looking both anxious and pleased to hear from me. "What've you got?"

People are always glad to hear from Carmine while their case is unresolved, and especially when the strategy hadn't been figured out yet. At times like these, I'm everybody's best friend. If the issue came to trial, I figured June and I would be friends for another week, week and a half. But in light of what I'd just figured out, a trial seemed rather unlikely.

"According to Lillia," I said, "Albert's exact words were 'I can stay until I decide to leave.'"

"So?" she asked, absorbing that without really getting it.

"So, that's a very different thing from 'I can stay forever,' or even 'I can stay as long as I want.' Because 'decide to leave' is a distinct event in time and space. It can be measured, logged, and read into the court records. And we can make a case—a strong one—that simply setting foot outside that cabana will bring the implied contract to an end."

"Huh. Meaning what? I can evict him?"

Can anyone evict anyone these days? "No," I told her. "Not now, and not without a lot of work. But you can inform him that leaving the poolhouse is grounds for eviction."

Juniper's face relaxed. "Oh, my God. Thank you so much. I do want to be civil about this, but I can't have that . . . I can't face this . . . well, this makes everything a lot easier. You're a genius, Carmine."

And that was true. I was a genius, I am, but so are all the other lawyers in town. These days it's impossible practice law—to practice much of anything—if you aren't unimaginably good at it. Because if you're not, someone who is will simply print an extra copy of him- or herself, and take over another chunk of your market.

False modesty is bad for business; I'm not ashamed to say I aced my bar exam, went to the best schools and did well in them. I reckon I'd make a good generalist, not only in the practice of law but in a range of other fields. I was 100 years old, immorbid, and absorbed knowledge voraciously.

But even that wasn't enough to hold a job in Denver anymore. You had to be generalist and a specialist. You had to be broad and brilliant, but lensed down to a unique pinpoint. You had to get your name associated with some particular little quirk or gimmick of the business so that people, when they ran afoul of it, would know whom to call. Even 'interpersonal disputes' cut too broad a swath for a viable legal practice. And anyway it was boring: the same disputes over and over again, with only the names and faces changing. And anymore the faces—sculpted by faxware to beauty and perfection—weren't so different either.

But I've always had a flair for the dramatic and a nose for the bizarre. My directory ad said it all: "If you've been wronged, call a lawyer. If you've been stranged, call Carmine Strange Douglas."

"This could still turn ugly," I warned June. "That's a wellstone cabana, right? Fully programmable, no restrictions? And he's got his own fax machine in there. Creme brulee and ostritch bisque, anytime he likes. If he decides to make a siege of it, he could hold out for a long time."

"Can't we just shut off the electricity?"

"Ahem! No. And even if you could, he's got the right to generate his own. Wind, sun, and rain—the Free Three, as they say. Albert has taken sides, Mrs. Szymanski. Specifically he's taken your husband's, and he's not going to vacate just because you ask him nicely. He wants this to be difficult.

"I'll write a threatening letter if you want, give him something to think about, but my advice to you as a friend is to talk things over with your husband. It's all right to get bored with each other—if we're going to live forever, it's almost inevitable. But somebody's got make a gesture, here. This is no way for two people to behave, who ever loved each other."

At this, Juniper Szymanski's face closed down. "You don't know anything about it, Carmine. Beyond the bare facts. I'm guessing it's a long time since you've been hurt."

And then she cut the connection, and her hollie window winked out.

What a small-minded thing for her to say! I'd been hurt plenty, and bad. In the broken-heart shuffle that began the moment people stopped dying, everyone got hurt. Or maybe they always had, and always would. This was just one of those facts of life, which you could put out of mind if you didn't happen to be an interpersonal lawyer. Divorces were far and away the worst part of the job, and if I didn't get the strange ones—the ones snarled hopelessly in unique legal challenges—I don't know what I would've done. Soldiered on, probably; an eternity of less-than-happy labors.

"Close door," I said to the wall, and it obliged me by swinging shut that rectangle of white frosted glass and, with a slight crackle of programmable matter, merging it back with my yellow marble decor again.

Too late, I realized there was someone out there in the corridor. There came a polite rapping on the wall outside, and a muffled voice murmuring, "Door. Door."

With a whispered command, I could make the wall perfectly soundproof. I even did it sometimes, but only when I was really busy and wanted the world to go away. Generally, I liked to feel I was part of the world.

Anyway the office would, of course, not obey the commands of a stranger, so I said, "Door." And like some crayon rubbing on a bas relief, the door magically reappeared, then clicked and swung open with a phony creak of phony hinges. A man stood on the other side with his hat pulled down and his shoulders hunched, glancing furtively to his left and then his right. He stepped inside, then quite rudely pushed the door until it swung closed again, engaging with a click of imaginary latches. "Carmine Douglas," the stranger said, "I hear you solve people problems."

"I help people with problems," I answered guardedly.

"That's fine," the man said. "That's close enough. It's good to see you, Carmine. You're looking well."

The lighting in my office—yellow spotlights and venetian-blinded daylight—created pools of atmospheric shadow, and the man had gravitated into one of these, denying me a clear view. But suddenly there was something very familiar about his face, his voice, the way he moved. "Double apparent brightness," I told the room, though I hated it the way that washed things out. "And whiten it up a bit. Kill these shadows."

The windows and ceiling did as I commanded, and there, plain as day, like a ghost from the past, was the face of Theodore Great Kaffner, my old roommate from my last three years at North Am U. He hadn't aged a bit, which shouldn't surprise me at all, since I'd never known anyone who did. But still, the sight of my old friend was a shock, a discontinuity. How many decades did that image leap across?

"Theddy?"

"Hey, Carbo. It's been a long time."

"You look terrible," I said, because that was true as well. "What sort of problem are you having?"

Theddy seemed to cringe at the question. He pointed to the windows on the office's other wall. "Can we darken those? D'you have some sort of privacy mode, here? A really strong one?"

I did, though I rarely used it. Speaking the commands, I watched my prized yellow marble and peach plaster melt away, turn cold. Within moments the whole room—floor and walls and ceiling alike—was seamless, featureless gray steel, and would obey only my commands, and only from within.

"All right?" I asked, waving my hands at the new decor.

"No," Theddy said. "Conductive surfaces block EMI, but lend themselves to transmissive tampering. We need an insulating layer on top."

Did we, now? How interesting. "Glass?"

"Glass will do."

I gave the appropriate commands, then gave my old friend an annoyed "Well?" sort of look.

And when Theddy shrugged his shoulders noncommittally, I advised him, "Nothing you say will leave this office, or be recorded in anything but my own brain, and yours. But be advised, with a proper warrant the court can search those. They can also take this room apart electron by electron, recording the quantum traces. Nothing is ever truly secret."

"It isn't secrecy I'm concern about," Theddy said, eyeing the walls warily, "it's security. Someone very clever is trying to kill me."

Naturally this statement brought me up short, because it was virtually impossible to kill a person in the Queendom of Sol. Oh sure, you could kill their body, could destroy whatever memory they'd built up since the last time they stepped through a fax machine, or stored their atomically perfect image in an archive somewhere. But the archives themselves were unassailable. People had died in the chaos of the Fall, eighty years before, and since that time a lot of precautions had been put in place. A lot of precautions.

Fearing some sort of transient mental illness in Theddy—a delusional paranoia?—I chose my next words carefully. "Thed, that sounds like a matter for the police. If what you say is true, they can have a team on it before you draw your next breath. We can make the call from here."

But Theddy was shaking his head. "I'm not an idiot, Carbo. This isn't a criminal matter. It's civil, or maybe administrative, or something which if I knew what it was, I wouldn't need you."

"Slow down, Theddy," I tried. "You're stringing words together, but you're not making sense. Administrative murder? What's that? Who exactly is trying to kill you?"

And here, Theddy fixed his old roommate with a level, half-panicked gaze. "I am. And I'm doing a good job of it, too."

2.
Xerography, Complicated

Generally speaking, keeping old copies of yourself was like keeping anything else. Found objects, hobby collections, treasured letters or artifacts from childhood—whatever. You could only fit so many in a shelf or cabinet, so at some point you boxed them up and stuck them in the attic, or fed them into the fax to be stored as data. And once that happened, chances were you wouldn't see those things again, nor ever miss them.

Archive copies were exactly the same way: there were people who kept only one, the latest and greatest incarnation of their perfect selves. There were even those who, for financial or aesthetic reasons, stored only the differences between themselves and some idealized manikin of human perfection.

But with either strategy it was possible to make a mistake, to internalize and record some experience which weakened or cheapened or traumatized the soul. And you couldn't always know that this had happened, and if you'd overwritten your earlier backups then you were pretty much stuck with the results for eternity. You could also, in the same way, lose track of what you were supposed to look like, lose track of your God-given body which had been really good at baseball or algebra, which had just felt right somehow. Most people had a bit of this disconnection in their lives—it was pain of an ordinary sort—and admittedly the real horror stories were rare.

But they happened, and in fact I'd encountered enough victims in my practice—their circumstances ranging from tragic to absurd—that for more than half my life I'd been following the costlier and more restrictive change control regimen favored by the various mental health councils. This involved archiving my entire self every five to ten years, and storing each copy, with annotations, alongside the previous ones in a facility that was guaranteed to remain uncorrupted by natural forces for a minimum of ten million years. Effective infinity, in other words, because even if I somehow lived that long, I reasoned that I'd be unlikely to care what I'd thought or felt or looked like as a mere centenarian.

Theddy had apparently followed a similar practice, though in some dangerous and backward-looking way. "Being unhappy with your life doesn't mean you necessarily want to scrap the whole decade and start over. We all have our troubles. I like the wisdom I've accumulated, but along the way I seem to have lost the spirit I had as a younger man. Some of it, enough of it. And shouldn't we, as immorbid beings, have both? I guess I was mixing and matching."

"You guess?"

"Listen, I was attending a matter programming conference on Mars. The rest of me were all back home, taking care of personal and professional minutia. Or so I presume. So I infer from the circumstances, as an outsider. As for what I was thinking, what exactly I was doing, I can only speculate."

I thought that over. People had different viewpoints on plurality; some even claimed that every copy of them had its own unique soul. Fortunately, the law rarely ruled in their favor with a legal twinning, or the world would quickly overpopulate with nearly identical people. Xeripollution: the arrogant assumption that the world needed more and more and more of your precious, perfect self. And that question had been settled—with fire and blood—in the Dallas of the Late Modern era, and I doubted very much whether society wanted to repeat the experiment.

I personally liked to keep my copies close together in both time and space. I didn't send myself on vacation while the rest of me worked. I didn't cover multiple long-term assignments in parallel, and then reconverge afterward. It just gets confusing, when the experiences of your copies have diverged that much. My sense of self was, I suppose, a small thing: capable of encompassing only a handful of very similar instantiations. But while Theddy Kaffner had his fair share of faults, timidity was not among them.

Nor, tellingly, was malice. The Theddy of old was an irate fellow, but never a hurtful one. If he pushed someone down the stairs every now and then, he did it in the spirit of horseplay, knowing that no permanent harm could possibly result. Broken bones were just a fax plate away from their old glory, right? And Theddy, the programmer, was far more likely to just hack your shirt's wellcloth with a smear of ink or something, or throw himself down the stairs for a laugh. He'd been full of rages and frustrations, but he'd channeled them into useful hobbies, which included running and acting and the building of wooden models. The idea of his committing a murder, or even threatening one was . . . strange.

"What do you mean by mixing and matching?"

Theddy's stressed-up expression relaxed for a moment, into a smile as wistful as I had lately seen. "You're the food freak, Carbo. You know how it is: a pinch of this, a dash of that . . . a soupcon of my angry young self, to spice up my flavor a bit. I suppose I overdid it. Angry Young Theddy was a force to be reckoned with; did even I, myself, underestimate him? Did ten percent of him overwhelm ninety percent of the canonical me? Or maybe it just felt good. Maybe I kept turning the knob, adding more and more of him until it was too late."

I spread my hands, unsure what to say. "More than anything, Thed, this sounds like a communication problem. Have you tried talking to yourself?"

"Yeah, briefly," Theddy said, the stress snapping back down over his features like a new matter program. "Until I kidnapped myself, with a force of three Theddies. These guys, who said they were me, they lifted me right off the floor. They were going to throw me through the print plate of my own goddamn fax machine in my own goddamn living room. Can you imagine? 'You're the last one,' they said, 'and it's one too many.' The way they were laughing, the way they were—I don't know, handling me. It went beyond contempt, Carbo. This was hatred. 'How could I turn into a fuck like you?' That was what Angry Young Theddy said to me.

"But he underestimated the power of fear. They meant to kill me, erase me—there was no question about that. They weren't fighting for their lives, and I was, so in the end they couldn't hold me. I felt their bones breaking. I felt an eyeball pop. As long as I live, I never want to feel a thing like that."

Okay, yeah, this was complicated. If there was a right place for Theddy to come to with this problem, my office was probably it. But where to begin?

"I'll need a full power of attorney," I said for starters, "and since you appear to have valid concerns for your physical safety, it may be best to store you here, in my office fax, under a seal of attorney-client privilege. The state can open that—the state can open anything—but you can't. The pattern that comprises you right now, right here, will be preserved no matter what Angry Young Theddy thinks or does."

"He's cleverer than you suppose," Theddy warned.

But I just laughed. "Nobody's cleverer than I suppose."

There was a bit more to it than that, but Theddy wanted help, and wasn't in a mood to argue. His agreement was not difficult to secure, and neither, as a result, was his physical person. It didn't take three guys to push him through the plate, and truthfully, I wasn't sure three guys could have stopped him if they'd been here to try. It was a safer place, and he wanted in.

3.
A Pedestrian Encounter

When you traveled by fax machine—and who didn't?—no place in the solar system was more than a few hours away, and if you were the one being transmitted, not the one waiting around at the other end, then from your point of view the journey was instantaneous. With a handful of steps, I could have found myself on the landing outside any home or apartment, anywhere. It was a funny thing, though: Theddy had lived less than a mile from my office for almost twenty years. How strange, that we should live so close for so long without realizing it! But living forever can be like that: it's easy to put things off, to assign them to the infinite and amorphous future. Even important things; even close friends.

Anyway, Denver was a historical preservation zone where walking was actively encouraged. In the eight square kilometers of the downtown district, faxing was actually illegal for anything but official business or the direst emergencies, and the city was adorned for tens of kilometers all around with roads and sidewalks, trails and quaint little bridges arching across the streams and rivers. This classic look was a large part of the city's appeal, and I wasn't about to abuse it by teleporting six blocks. The walk might take me twenty minutes, and might represent more exercise than most people got in a year, but my body, rendered eternally youthful by the fax filters, was surely up to the job. Whose wasn't? People who don't like walking, who don't like mountain views and fresh air and strangers on the street, well . . . they should live someplace else. Denver was not made for indoor souls.

Still, once outside I felt a twinge of regret for my decision, as the November afternoon rolled over me with shocking, unseasonable heat. "Mild winter" didn't begin to describe the weather we were having that year, but I kept forgetting. I kept dressing for wind and fog and the possibility of snow. My jacket did its best to fight off the heat (blasting it behind me in a stream of warm air), but in the shade of downtown's towers it had no ready power source, so there wasn't a lot it could actually do.

There's an irony for you: on a hot day it's cooler in the sun than the shade! But the shirt underneath was having a hard time as well, and I couldn't remove the jacket without revealing the sweat stains it was failing to disperse from under my arms. Life can be so unfair.

Anyway, Theddy's case was heavy on my mind, and June Szymanski's still hadn't left it, and the two were filling up very different pieces of my brain. So I was deeper than usual in thought, and found the bustle and jangle of the crowds annoying. Some street wisdom I heard that day:

"Hollywood is a plant, Gabriel. The city, they were calling it that way before they started making hollies there."

"There's nothing noble about boredom, aye? Are there people you could be helping? Societies you could enrich? Don't you give me that look, you vegetable."

"Oh, of course you have the right to design a new life form. Everyone does. But for criminy's sake, John, that doesn't mean you have the right to instantiate it in the real world."

Yeah. Real pearls, those. The streets of this city had always been crowded, or nearly always, but even I, a mere centenarian, could remember a time when the crowds had all had someplace to go, some purpose in their steps. As often as not it was someplace they were forced to go, to stave off economic ruin in a scarcity-based economy, but still. The city's loitering laws had never been repealed, and ought at least occasionally to be enforced.

With its bright colors and piled-high fashions, its buskers and mimes, its living sculptures "dancing to the din of a dozen decades," the city resembled a carnival that day as much as a center of business or residence or learning. And for some reason I found this deeply irritating.

On the other hand, it wasn't like anyone was holding a sword to my neck, forcing me to interact, to be here at all. I was a champion of strangeness, and these, for better or worse, were my people. And anyway it was a short walk before I found myself in front of Theddy's apartment building, a retro-opensource brownstone in the twenty-second-century style.

"How may I help you, sir?" The building asked, in what was surely its politest voice.

"I'm here to see Theddy Kaffner."

"I'm afraid Mr. Kaffner isn't in at the moment," the building clucked, with quite a good semblance of regret.

"It's a serious matter," I told the building. "A legal matter, I'm afraid. If you have a buffer copy of Mr. Kaffner on hand, and I imagine you do, then I must request you print him and allow me to speak with him at once."

The building's intelligence didn't like that one bit, and sounded cross. "On what grounds? You're not a police officer." (And this was true, although I knew a lot of police, and had once loved a policeman's daughter.) "Nor do you bear the carrier signal of a government official. By studying your face I can make a guess as to your identity, but I would prefer that you simply explain yourself."

Fair enough. "My name is Carmine Strange Douglas. Mr. Kaffner's attorney. The rest I'll say to him, if you don't mind."

"I have no record of this association," the house said skeptically, "although your face and pheromone signature match that name, and the social network archives indicate you have fraternized with Mr. Kaffner in the past. Do you have any proof that this arrangement exists?"

I held up a bonded, self-notarizing copy of the power of attorney, and the building opened instantly, curling aside a broad doorway of gold and pearl and other substances I couldn't identify. "Please come in, sir, and excuse my rudeness in detaining you. One can't be too careful these days, and in any case my security settings are at legal maximum."

"No offense taken," I assured it, since the thing was only doing its job, following its program, and had no actual feelings. Or so the law declared. Inside, among furnishings assembled from white puffy pillow-cubes, I found Theddy in deep conference with the wall.

Presumably, he was receiving a briefing on this turn of events—my arrival and such—since from his own perspective he had just moments before stepped through the fax machine on his way to somewhere quite different. This was a buffer copy, probably not more than a few hours old, and he had no way of knowing why I was here.

When Theddy saw me, he looked up with an expression of wonder. "Carbo? My God, man, what're you doing here? It's great to see you! But when exactly did you become my lawyer?"

"About half an hour ago," I said, extending a warm handshake. "There's a copy of you in my office who claims he was assaulted. By you, or rather, by several instances of you. I was hoping you could shed some light on the subject."

Theddy's hand withdrew from mine, and his face grew cautious, and right away I could see there was something different about him. He was less like the Theddy in my office, and more like the one I'd remember if I really thought back. The angry prankster. A composite sketch of New Theddy would be all broad lines and shallow curves, but while Young Theddy looked the same, he wore it differently. Here was a fellow of edges and points and sharp, staccato movements.

"There was an altercation," Theddy admitted, "but he started it. All I did was defend myself."

"Against what?"

Theddy's answering look was not quite a sneer. "That copy must have got some bad poison along the way, Carbo. He was irrational, and slow. It would have taken a lot of patience to get any sense out of him, and who's got the time?"

Well, that sounded believable enough.

"Did you try to push him into the fax?"

"It was the only way I could think of to, you know, figure out what his problem was. Merge a little bit of him with a lot of myself, and see what was on his mind."

I'd never been one to beat around the bush, so I came right out with it: "Theddy, have you been mingling your image with archive copies of yourself? Would a personality scan reveal sudden, dramatic changes in your character?"

"Yes," Theddy said, as if it were the most normal thing the world.

"Hmm. Well, listen, this allegedly deviant copy of yourself is the contemporary version. It's who all his friends and neighbors and colleagues are used to seeing. If he were in fact stored in your personal fax machine, per your plans, would you ever print him out again?"

"Hell no," Theddy answered, with that same matter-of-fact, self-righteous conviction. As if people did that sort of thing every day. Oh boy. Oh boy, oh boy. Some dangerous cocktail of thoughts and experiences had come together in this copy's brain. Theddy—the real Theddy—was right to be afraid: this man was not only capable of self-murder, but felt it was, in some way, his legal right. And I wondered: where was the case law to prove otherwise?

And to think I'd thought the Szymanski divorce was a mess! "What we have here," I said cautiously, "is a case of disputed identity. Two divergent copies of the same individual, laying claim to editorial rights over each other. That being the case, I personally have a conflict of interest, and must make no further contact with you, except if necessary in court. If you intend to prosecute your rights in this matter—and I find it difficult to imagine otherwise—you'll need to retain your own counsel. I cannot advise you in this."

Theddy scowled. "Oh you can't, can't you? Maybe the years have eroded your memory, dear friend, but you and I have an agreement which predates any contract you may have with . . . that other bloke. That failed experiment. That shriveled old creature who does not deserve to wear Theddy Kaffner's skin."

Though it might be a breach of ethics, I took the bait. "What agreement is that?"

"I'll find it."

Theddy stepped to the wall and began whispering to it. A hollie window appeared there, displaying lists of text with little thumbnail images beside them. Theddy poked at the display several times, muttering, and finally said, "Ha! Found it."

A beer-stained cocktail napkin tumbled out of the fax machine, into Theddy's waiting hands. He scanned it briefly, nodding, then handed it to me. It said, in appallingly familiar handwriting,

I, Carmine Douglas, through the power vested in me by the state of inebriation, do solemnly swear that I will never lose my faith or spirit, and that I will look out for my friend Theddy come what may, for all eternity and throughout the universe.

It was signed and even—though the hologram was hard to make out—notarized.

"You can't be serious," I said, waving the thing as if to dry it. "This isn't legally binding." But even as the words were out of my mouth, I realized it might not be so. There were times in the historical past when what was legal and what was right were two different things, when valid arguments could be crafted to excuse almost anything, but the Queendom of Sol took a dim view indeed of broken promises. Theddy saw it in my face, too; he was a hard man to hide things from. I sighed and asked, "What do you want? What does it take to make this thing go away?"

Theddy sneered in youthful triumph. "If you want to go legal on me, old friend, I can only respond in kind. I do want my own counsel, as promised to me in this old contract. I want you. Not this stuffy alien creature you've become, but the young, angry, lovesick Carbo I went to school with. Well, I suppose you'd have to add a couple of years to that, or he wouldn't be a lawyer yet, but you see what I mean. I want my old roommate to defend me."

With a sinking feeling I realized that might just stick. Theddy might just have a point which the law, in its finite wisdom and limited experience, had never yet addressed. The right of archive copies to be revived? To seek the company of their peers? To repudiate their future lives?

"Call my office," I said, sighing uneasily. "I'll authorize it to set something up. Not because I have to—and certainly not because I want to—but because you've raised an interesting point, and it needs to be properly explored. Even a younger me, a green me fresh out of school, is better qualified than most attorneys to wrestle this particular alligator. In fact, if I didn't buy into it voluntarily, the court might well assign it. In which case they'd offer you a disposable copy of me, which would self-destruct once the dispute was resolved. And that, my friend, is an involuntary servitude I would not wish on my younger self, who was an innocent and charming lad."

All of which was true, insofar as it went. Unlike Theddy, and with a single and quite excusable exception, my own younger self could be trusted. So why, in my heart just then, did the prospect of unleashing him bring nothing but dread?

4.
Passions, Revived

Rummaging through the archives took a lot longer than I expected. The storage companies are happy to take your money to capture the backup, but when it comes time for the free restore they're a lot less helpful. Wading through the layers of bureaucracy and "technical assistance" proved so difficult and involved that in the end I had to print out a dedicated copy of my recent self, who spent several days working on the problem exclusively.

Of the fifteen images I'd stored at one point or another in my life, the best fit for young Theddy seemed to be a Carmine two years out of law school, working at a big firm in Milan and flush, for the first time in his short life, with the income and respectability of gainful employment.

Memories washed over me. Those had been good years, but turbulent ones, too. Money and power and youth were a potent combination, and bred the sort of arrogance that led to personal troubles. And if there was a god of Love—and Strife, for they were bound together as a single entity in Queendom mythology—then poor Eros had spent some busy seasons that year, looking after the torrid romance between myself and Pamela Red. Even now, more than seventy years after the fact, the memory brought a poignant flutter of excitement and pain. I'd had a number of lovers before her, and quite a bit more after—I'd even been married twice—but when I looked back over the conquests and treaties, surrenders and defeats of my immorbid love life, Pamela's shadow seemed to loom over all of it. She was the standard against which all others were measured.

This was of course no great novelty in the Queendom, where the phenomenon was common enough to have its own name: the guidepost affair. And rumor had it that if you lived long enough, if you loved well enough, your guidepost would fade, would be replaced, or even—strange thought—subsumed entirely by the one true love of your life, who would stay with you forever. A guidepost affair was, by definition, buried deep in your past—something that didn't or couldn't or wouldn't work out. Something painful. But ah, we still believed in a higher sort of love than that, else how could we face eternity?

Not that there wasn't other strife in that era, as well. Like any human being, the Carmine of that day had had a sackload of mundane troubles which to him seemed very serious and immediate, though today I could scarcely remember them. But I did my best to align myself with that mental space, in the hours and minutes—and finally the seconds—before Angry Young Carmine stepped out of the fax.

"Welcome," I said to myself, for I remembered this young man with great fondness and admiration. Angry Young Carmine, looking me up and down, recognized me at once, but the first thing he said was, "Hello, Carmine. You look . . . different. Considering the fact that I've just this second archived myself, for the benefit of my future self, I can only assume that some years have passed."

"Correct," I said, beaming at this lad's quick mind.

"Something has gone wrong, then. Ah, Carmine, have you been poisoned? Traumatized? Worn down or worn out with the passage of years?"

"There is a problem," I agreed with gentle amusement, "but not with me. It's Theddy."

"Theddy needs an archived copy of me? That sounds damned peculiar, and complicated. Brief me on the specifics, if you would."

And here I felt the first tingle of irritation, for I was clearly the senior partner in this endeavor, and this young man had no right to give me orders. But without noticing or without caring, Young Carmine pressed on: "I also need to orient myself. I'll need news highlights for each of the intervening years, and if you don't mind, a sampling of the clothing and music fashions as well. And the food."

"Ahem. Young man, you might find it helpful to let others get a word in now and then. The time capsules you describe are in the fax's buffer memory right now, awaiting your attention."

"Ah. What year is it, anyway?"

I told him, and watched his expression tense briefly and then relax.

"That's a long time, old man. I assume it's a short-term assignment you've woken me for?"

"It is."

Young Carmine's smile was pained. "Reconverging our experiences could be problematic when this is finished. You should probably check with a doctor, or maybe a quantum physicist, but I'm not sure consciousness can bridge a gap that large."

I adopted what I hoped was a look of patience. "My plan is to filter you in as a percentage, to reintegrate a tincture of you with my current self. Carefully, of course, but everything admirable about you will be preserved and magnified, and with luck our flaws will mask one another."

"Oh really. I see." Young Carmine's tone was skeptical, poised on the cusp of anger. "And what percentage, exactly, did you plan on granting me? Twenty-five percent?"

At this, I was afraid to answer truthfully, because the actual figure I had in mind was .25%, or possibly .5%. But to this living, breathing young man, that would sound like murder. I had the legal right to do exactly that, to print disposable copies of myself and then, you know, dispose of them. But I'd never done it when there were major life experiences at stake. Why would I? I wouldn't want to be the disposable copy whose memories died, and I wouldn't want to be the one who lived on without those memories, either. A no-win scenario.

But this was different, right? Everything important about Young Carmine was preserved in me. I was a superset of him, and in that sense his erasure would mean nothing, cost nothing, hurt nothing. Except from his point of view. And to enforce the right of erasure against his will . . . To enforce the right, I might have to print extra copies of my current self, and overpower Young Carmine, and hurl him forcibly into the fax. Or contact a lawyer of my own, and let the courts decide. And didn't that put Theddy's case in an interesting light?

Afterward, I was never sure what my younger self read in my face at that moment, but whatever it was, he answered with an obscene gesture and a barked command at the office wall, which, recognizing the voice of its owner, opened a door and let him out.

"Ah, hell," I said, following behind, trying to put a hand on his shoulder to reassure him. To reassure myself. But Young Carmine was having none of that, and in fact took the gesture as a hostile one. Which might not be too far from the truth. Young Me jerked his shoulder away, then ducked and ran down the hallway.

I said, "You're going to want—you'll need—hey!" But the lines of communication had broken down entirely, and the next comments I received from Young Carmine would, I realized, have a letterhead at the top. Damn. My body hadn't aged a day in all this time, and I supposed I could simply run after myself, tackle myself, fight it out physically and force myself to listen. But I'd be hard pressed to win against so equal an opponent, and if the concept of "youth" meant anything at all in this day and age, would it really be so equal?

What I actually did, like a useless old man, was race down the hallway and scream down the stairwell at myself: "You stay away from Pamela Red, do you hear me! You caused her enough trouble when you were . . . back when you were . . . " Real.

5.
The Daughter's Policeman

The next morning found me on the far side of the moon, in a scenic dome at the pit of Jules Verne crater, with the sharp-toothed hills of the crater lip rising up all around. Here it wasn't morning at all, but early evening by the Greenwich Mean shift clock and somewhere close to midnight by the actual position of the sun. Given the full moon in Denver last night—always a peak time for strangeness—it made sense that the moon's sulking farside, faced always away from Earth, should be bathed in darkness.

Any school child of the early Queendom knew that on that big, pre-terraformed moon, the sun rose and set every twenty-eight days. But unless you'd spent time on Luna yourself, it was hard to appreciate just how irrelevant the daylight really was. Aside from the anachronism of gravity tourism, Luna didn't really offer anything the rest of the Queendom particularly needed, and as a result the great dome cities at Tranquility and Grimaldi were money pits, gone to seed in a state of not-quite completion. The moon's million permanent residents were mostly scattered in small, economically depressed communities, and the great bulk of its housing was underground. You lived there because you loved it, basically. Because you'd bought into the romance of it: a wild frontier on Earth's very doorstep.

And on that frontier, for some historical reason I'd never bothered to learn, the clocks were set, planetwide and regardless of longitude, to British time. Not that it really mattered to me—the hour or the darkness. Such transitions—day to night, winter to summer to hard vacuum—were common to the point of dullness in a faxwise society. That's just the way things were.

In any case, Verne was a small town inhabited mainly by astronomers and small-time trelium prospectors, who had taste enough to keep the dome lights low and green. Night lights, so that the stars could shine down in all their glory through the near-invisible wellglass of the dome. I'd seen this place in the daytime once—on a sadly similar errand—and the dome had been frosted a translucent blue-white which didn't mimic an Earthly sky so much as pay homage to it. Good for the soul, I reckoned at the time. Better for the plants and animals than the searing unfiltered light of Sol herself.

Also tasteful was the way Verne's visitors were encouraged, through transit fee structures and hierarchical addressing, to enter through the fax ports in the park level immediately beneath the dome. It wasn't a big park as such things go, but its colored brick pathways folded back on themselves many times, with the view of grassy meadows blocked here and there by stands of dwarf bamboo and twisty, lunar-tall apple trees. So it felt bigger than it really was, and the walk from fax to elevator took a good three minutes. An actual elevator, yes; to get to any particular home, office or storefront in Verne you had to find the right color-coded shaft, and ride the elevator down to the appropriate subsurface level.

As a longtime resident of Denver—a city similarly trapped in the romantic past—I could only approve. Beauty was so much finer a thing than convenience! Even (or perhaps especially) when you were in a hurry.

Too bad it was guilt, not beauty, that brought me there that day. But hey, even that guilt, that shame and worry, could ultimately be blamed on beauty. On one particular beauty, in fact, which I had sought above all others. Nearly to my ruin, yes, and I might spend the rest of eternity shaking off the consequences, but in this sense I regretted nothing, and would do it all again if I could.

By blue starlight and the green glow of the dome's perimeter, I trod a path of yellow bricks in platinum-white mortar. My bootheels clopped and rang. I'd come here expecting to ask directions, from a wellstone pillar if not a live human, but I found to my surprise that my feet still knew the way. Through the gloom of an orchard and back out into starlight again, I came to a low pink cottage with the words GOVERNMENT AND UTILITIES carved into its lintel and glowing that same soft green, with modestly animated crests on either side to emphasize the point.

I entered the building, and found myself in a traditional lobby complete not only with elevators but with a human security guard seated behind a desk. This might seem laughable in an age where superweapons had nearly obliterated the sun, but the man's gray uniform—bearing the five-pointed star of the Verne Crater Sheriff's Office—was thicker than ordinary wellcloth, and lent him a formidable air. In time of trouble, the suit would no doubt extend to cover his face, his head, his hairy-knuckled hands, and the thing's capacitors and hypercomputers would be prepared to amplify his strength, to shoot all manner of energy beams from his fists, from his eyes, from the edges of any wound an attacker might somehow manage to inflict.

This, too, was nothing special—most cops dressed this way most of the time—and anyway a pair of gleaming, hulking Law Enforcers lurked robotically in the corners behind him, just in case anyone still had any thoughts about getting cute.

"Carmine Douglas, Attorney at Law," I said, although by now the guard must already know this. Like all professionals everywhere, he'd be unemployed if he weren't uncannily competent. "I'm here to see Waldo Red."

"Yeah?" The cop looked me over with a bored expression. "What for?"

"Personal business."

The guard thought that one over. "I don't have you on my visitors list. Is he expecting you?"

"No. Well, possibly." Depending on what Angry Young Carmine had or hadn't done, Waldo might well be drafting a warrant for my arrest. Or tying a hangman's noose. "But he knows me."

"So he does," the cop said, glancing down at some social network display on his desktop. He tapped the surface several times in quick succession, like a harp player working the strings. "He . . . will see you. But—whoa. According to my stats, there's a ninety percent chance of verbal confrontation and an eight percent chance of violence. On his part; you're down in the noise, an innocent victim of potential attack. My goodness. Do . . . you want an armed escort?"

"No," I said. "Thank you. I'm here to make peace."

"Huh. Well, go on ahead. Level nineteen, end of the hallway and turn right."

"Thanks."

The guard shuffled uncomfortably in his chair. "Hey, buddy? Uh, you don't have to answer this or anything, but, I mean . . . Deputy Waldo isn't exactly a thug. What does a guy have to do to burn him off like that?"

"Sleep with his daughter," I said, and turned for the elevator.

6.
The Law

The first thing Waldo said to me when I walked into his office was, "Hmmph. So now you're stalking me."

And there was a lot of evidence coded in this statement: it meant that Young Carmine had gone to see Pamela, and that the visit had been less than welcome. It meant that she'd called her father afterward, and that he considered the incident, at least in his heart, to be a criminal offense. Which was silly, because that old restraining order had expired forty years ago, and I had no history, either before or since, of criminally rude behavior. But then again, there was no telling what Young Carmine might've said. Or done. Truthfully, I had forgotten how forceful and intense I'd really been as a young man. And pointlessly so, for it had only gotten me in trouble.

I held up my hands in mock surrender. "Hi, Waldo. I'm sure you're angry—and not without reason!—but it's not what you think. There's an old, old copy of me running around."

Waldo studied me, thinking that one over. Whatever he'd expected me to say, that wasn't it. Waldo was seated on his desk, which had gone soft beneath him in response. His arms were crossed, and his single, heavy eyebrow was pulled down in an almost comical frown. In his harrumphy way he said, "Rogue or authorized?"

"A little of both," I answered, unsure what else to say about it.

Waldo digested that, and finally nodded. "Hmm. Humph. Yeah. One of those."

A bit of the tension went out of the room. The details must surely be unique, but Waldo had been a cop for a hundred years longer than I'd even been alive. He'd seen his share of weirdness, and understood that the law was gray. What cop didn't know that? The law was designed for assaults and robberies, angry neighbors fighting over the pruning of a tree or the disposition of its fruits. By definition, you couldn't legislate the unanticipated, and existing laws—sensible laws—sometimes yielded perverse or even contradictory results. Do we divide the child in two?

And in this age of plenty there just wasn't all that much thuggery. The sorts of things that had value anymore were not sorts of things you could steal at gunpoint, and anyway such obvious crimes were always solved, always punished. With enough decades behind them, even the most hardened criminals eventually got the message.

So what did that leave? Juvenile mischief, and the weirdness at the margins of the grown-up world. The need for cops and courtrooms would never go away.

"Why are you here?" Waldo asked with less hostility.

I tried on a half smile. "It seemed . . . more polite than going directly to Pamela. I figured he'd go and see her. I knew he would. He's an archive copy from when that . . . issue was relatively fresh."

"So why'd you print him?"

"Contractual obligation, I guess you'd say. I'll spare you the insipid details."

"Hmmph. Thanks. Are you going to get rid of him?"

I could only shrug. "I'm not sure I can, Waldo. He's defending another person's archive copy against exactly that procedure. Removing him would be a form of pre-trial tampering, and if his case prevails—which it very well might—then it's anyone's guess what my legal rights are. Pray for a wise judge."

Waldo didn't like that answer. "Really. How convenient. There's a little Carmine running around from the period of the restraining order—and believe me, you were a nitwit back then—and he's got all the rights of being you and none of the responsibilities of being himself. He can bug my daughter all he likes, unless I file an updated order against you. Which I guess I'll just have to do."

And that made me angry, because the revival of a seventy-year old restraining order would look bad on my record. It would hurt my image, hurt my business, hurt my pride. And for what? "You know, Waldo, your darling Pamela wasn't exactly an innocent in all this. If there were courts of law for faithless lovers . . . "

"You were a nitwit, and your friends were nitwits, and you made her sad. The only surprise is that it took her two years to realize the fact. And like a shit, you refused to crawl back under your block. You just couldn't leave it alone. You wanted to own her. You tried buy her like a doll."

At that, in a wildly uncharacteristic gesture, I slammed the wall sideways with my fist, hard. "I wanted nothing of the kind, Deputy. Even now, you refuse to acknowledge my point. It was simple enough for a small town cop and his daughter to understand, if they put their minds to it. For years I licked the wounds she inflicted so casually. For years. Like an old tree, I got whole again only by growing around the scar. Burying it inside me, surrounded it with strong, healthy tissue. But the defect itself is permanent."

"Love always is," Waldo lectured, as if to a child. "We all have our little scars. It doesn't give you any special rights. And just for your education, punk, you fix a tree by printing an undamaged copy. If that 'wound' of yours is so terrible, why do you keep it?"

"You've been in love, Waldo. You know why."

The old cop sighed and harrumphed. "I don't know where you crawled out from, pal, and I don't care, but understand: we keep the peace here in Jules Verne. You know how many arrests I've made this year? Six, and three of them were the same guy. You know how many times I've called the Constabulary in the past decade, to solve some capital crime of Queendom-wide importance? Zero."

"Congratulations."

Waldo answered with a mocking expression, and then a more seriously threatening one. "I may not have jurisdiction outside this crater, Mr. Douglas, but you've got five minutes to get your ass out of here before I throw it in jail. Don't let me catch you here again, ever."

And this was a strong statement indeed, because Waldo Red would never die, never grow old and retire. Never forgive a young man's trespasses.

Well, I had my own rights to worry about, and said so: "If you do that, or file an injunction of any kind, I'll sue for defamation. I'll make it stick, too."

And with that I stomped out, feeling in spite of everything that the visit had gone better than expected.

7.
Pamela, Read

Pamela herself, whom I visited next, surprised me by being a lot more understanding.

"Daddy called," she said by way of introduction. "I heard about your little . . . technical difficulties."

Her house was one of nine at the summit of Mt. Terror, on Antarctica's Ross Island overlooking both the volcano's active caldera and the Ross Sea coast, aglow in the lights of McMurdo City and, across the water, of Glacia and Victoria Land. It was nighttime here as well, in a place where night was winter, or in this case early spring. And Pamela's foyer, like many in cold climates, was poorly insulated on purpose, to discourage surprise visitors.

My wellcloth suit did the best it could, but it had been out of the sun for hours now, and its power reserves were getting low. It settled for swathing me in black velvet, lined with some crinkly, unbreathable superreflector that left my skin feeling hot and suffocated, even as my body heat bled away through my uncovered hands and head.

"You look cold," Pamela said, ushering me in through her open doorway. "You want some coffee? Soup?"

"Spiced almond chowder," I answered gratefully, following her inside. There was no such thing as a poorly furnished home in the Queendom of Sol, but there were copyrighted patterns available only to those with money, and there were expert decorators and geomancers who could customize a space to its owners with striking—and strikingly expensive—skill. And everyone had access to a fax machine, if not in their own houses and apartments then, by law, within forty paces of their door. But to fill a house with fax machines—I counted five in my first quick look around, including the one in the foyer—took resources. And the view, also not free, was spectacular.

"Looks like you're doing all right, here," I said, while she stepped up to her dining room fax to fetch my soup. "I hope you don't mind my saying so."

"Not a bit," she laughed. "But I'll be the first to admit, I got lucky. Matter programming is funny that way: sometimes you hit the right combination, and this substance you've just invented is gorgeous, and it's waterproof, and it's diamagnetic, and some construction outfit on Pluto is offering you cash up front and a ten percent share of their leasing profits."

"Sounds nice," I told her, fighting to keep any deeper feelings at bay. For the moment, I was succeeding; it had been a long time, and seeing her now was more nostalgic than painful. "Theddy became a programmer, too, you know, but he doesn't live like this."

She smiled. "Theddy. My goodness, how is he?"

"In trouble," I said.

"Well, that figures. I suppose you're representing him?"

"Yeah."

"That figures, too. As for my alleged wealth, don't be too jealous. It won't last. Unless I get lucky again, I'll have to sell this place in a few centuries. Maybe move back to farside, although they're still talking about evacuating the entire moon, and crushing it to boost the surface gravity. You can't go home again, isn't that what they say?"

Thinking about that, I looked her over, studying my feelings as they unfolded. Things weren't the same as they had been long ago, that much was definite. Her mere presence no longer panicked me, made me stupid or impulsive. Which was probably just as well, although there was a part of me that would always miss feeling that way. You can't go home, indeed.

"That would be a shame," I said, "destroying the moon like that. Where would all the shady people go?"

She could easily have taken that the wrong way, but she chose not to, and chuckled instead as she pulled my mug of steaming soup from the fax. "The shady people always find a place, Carbo. Isn't that what keeps you in business?"

"Well," I admitted, "sort of. It's the rich shady people that can afford my services. The poor ones get their legal help from software, which is worth every penny of the nothing they pay for it."

"Their matter programming, too," she said. And suddenly we were laughing together, just like old times. It felt good. Cleansing. If all our times had been like this . . . 

"Look," I told her, "I want to apologize for inflicting Young Me on you like that. I hope he didn't scare you."

"Not in the least. Actually, he was quite charming." She handed me the soup, and I tasted it. It was good, and here too I sensed some vague tincture of money, some subtle designer flavor to which I myself had never been privy. And I was not exactly a poor man, nor a gustatorial simpleton.

"What did he do? What did he want?"

"The usual," she laughed. "A bit of me for his collection."

Suddenly I found myself fighting down anger again, for the second time in a single morning. Because it wasn't funny, damn it. Not to me it wasn't. The request had seemed simple enough at the time. Pamela and I had archived ourselves at the height of our passion, wanting—literally—to preserve that glorious feeling for all eternity. Later, when things had soured, when we started fighting and she finally turned me out, I had asked her to revive that feeling. Not even in her own skin, necessarily. Couldn't she print out an alternate copy, an older, younger version who was still in love with Carmine Douglas? Wasn't that the whole point of the backup?

But apparently it wasn't, at least in her mind, and apparently I had pressed the point too firmly. Well, no "apparently" about it; love could make a man do stupid things, and no force in heaven or Earth could make him regret them afterward. In love especially, we behave as we must.

In any case, my defense had taken me all way to the Solar Court itself, where my stalking and harassment convictions were narrowly upheld. I was clever enough not to lose my license over it, but the court forbade me to have any contact with Pamela Red, or her friends and family, for three long decades. The mark would be on my record forever: Carmine Douglas, sexual deviant. What was funny about that?

"Look," she said, catching my expression, "We were young. We applied our passion to each other, and when it didn't work out we applied our passion against each other. It's the oldest story in the world. I'm assuming we both got over this a long time ago, like good little grown-ups, so let's not start fighting now. Okay? I'm genuinely sorry, about all of it."

That stung too, its own way. "About all of it? You're sorry it even happened?"

And to my surprise, her face melted in a strange mix of amusement and dismay. "Sorry it happened? What . . . What are you even talking about? We were fresh, we were new, we were burning with passion for the first time in our tiny little lives. What's the point of living forever if you only get to feel that way once? Carmine, Carbo, baby doll, it was the hottest fling of my life."

What came next made perfect sense, because if I'd ever had any willpower in the Pamela Red department, we wouldn't be standing there talking about it. And if she hadn't loved me—truly loved me with all her heart, at least for a while—I wouldn't have had anything to press her about, to get in trouble about. An explosion could not occur without heat. But it was one more bit of strangeness, and I honestly didn't know if there were any law or rule or ethical guideline being broken. Would society prevent me from hurling myself on this additional complication?

It hardly mattered. Yes, I tumbled into bed with her, and she with me. Heedless of the consequences, we remained there for three days, refusing all calls. And it was worth any price.

8.
Orders

When I finally got home, my head was clearer somehow. It was one thing to stir up ghosts from the past, but quite another to have them walking around spouting threats. But making peace with Pamela—making more than that!—put a different face on things. Anyway, I did what I should've done in the first place, which was to file a motion for Division of Self for Theodore Kaffner, and another for Carmine Douglas.

Divisions of Self—so-called twinnings—had a sparse but readily traceable case history, and seemed the most appropriate vehicle for dealing with this mess. True, no one had ever and attempted an involuntary twinning before. Generally, they were granted to individuals who had lost a genuine twin somewhere along the way, or who could, for whatever reason, prove some tangible need to divide themselves into two legally distinct individuals. Because they'd grown in different ways, and no longer believed they were compatible.

Angry Young Theddy's argument was quite different: that he should have the right to delete his later self and try his whole adult life over again. But if the older and younger Theddies were two different people, then this desire would be nonsense from a legal standpoint, and acting on it would be murder. Which, to my thinking, sounded about right.

And Young Carmine's position was different still: having been granted the flesh and breath of life, he simply wanted to continue. He didn't want to be erased, and truthfully neither would I, if our circumstances were reversed. And the law was supposed to mean what was right, right?

The next step was to file a temporary restraining order—actually four restraining orders—prohibiting the various Theddies and Carmines from harming one another, or having any sort of contact all outside a courtroom setting. We could send legal communiques to one another through the proper channels, and that was all. Sadly, this would be another mark on my own record, another opportunity for me to look like some sort of mad stalker, but since my name was on the order as both plaintiff and defendant, it would seem more strange than incriminating. And anyone researching my background that deeply would know, should know, that Strange is my middle name.

Then I did another thing I should've done right away, which was to call my parents and let them know what was happening. "Aren't you a bit old for shenanigans like this?" my father wanted to know.

"I'm beginning to think so," I answered.

For good measure, I called Theddy's parents as well, and found to my mild surprise that Angry Young Theddy was actually staying there with them, having vacated his apartments in Denver. This of course forced me to cut the conversation short, but that was all right. The Kaffners were drunks and dreamers, with never all that much to say to me, nor I to them.

And since these orders were of the sort that could easily be handled by hypercomputer, the so-called Telejudges—I had a stack of bonded approvals in hand within a few minutes. The Telejudges of course demanded a flesh hearing, ten days hence, so a human judge could review the facts of the case and decide the long-term disposition of the orders, and of the humans tied up in them.

And that wasn't so hard, really. Strangeness is nothing more than the shock of the new: a thing never seen before, never felt or tasted or lived through. But strangeness by itself it didn't make this thing intractable, nor guarantee in any way that the future—the Theddies and Carmines and Pamelas of centuries hence, indeed all of society—would find them unusual. Indeed, to the extent that society took any notice of this case at all, it would be as one more precedent in the legal definition of identity. No big deal of all. Or so I reasoned at the time.

And so, somewhat anticlimactically, I found that my job was complete. With those orders posted, there wasn't a fax machine in the Queendom that would reconverge the older and younger Theddies, or a door that would open for them, if the opening might place the two in the same room. My client was safe, and so was I. And I found, also to my surprise, that I was shaking with relief. How about that! This was another thing my job had going for it: no matter how long I did it, there was still this aura of excitement and danger and fresh discovery. Most especially when it was about me.

After that there was only one thing left to do: call my office fax machine and retrieve Theddy—the real, contemporary Theddy—from storage.

9.
Wine, Interrupted

My apartment at the time was a pseudopenthouse—its large balcony was roofed over but otherwise genuine, and the rooms themselves were on the thirteenth floor of a hundred story building. But the balcony's overhang was programmed to look like sky—an illusion so good that I myself sometimes forgot—while the apartment ceiling was a fiction of dormer vaults and skylights looking up at the other tall buildings as though the higher stories of my own did not exist. This was not an extravagance; the patterns had to be customized by experts and hypercomputers, but it only took an afternoon. A team from Sears-Roebuck had done it for less money than I made in a week. Why, hundreds of people in Denver alone had the exact same decor, probably an even dozen in that very building. But low-cost and cheapness were not the same thing, and most visitors found the effect both striking and laudable.

In this, Theddy Kaffner was no exception. He leaped from the fax all stiff with anxiety, but once I'd explained the situation to him, and handed him a glass of wine, the first thing he did was look around and say, "Jesus Christ. Nice place."

The fireplace was also an illusion—you couldn't jab it with the ornamental poker or wave your hand through the flames—but it looked perfect, and crackled just so, and gave off exactly the right amount of heat for a November evening that was suddenly, finally beginning to feel like fall. I faxed up some throw pillows, and the two of us sprawled in the firelight, chugging our drinks and laughing like we had in the good old days.

The purveyors of copyright bourbon tended to regard their products as perfect, and thus subsisted mainly on royalties, reinvesting little or none of it back into research and development. Which was a losing strategy in the long run, because the opensource and public domain recipes got a little bit better every year. Not the same as the copyright brews, obviously, but just as good in their own way. This meant that spending real money on bourbon didn't make sense, except as a way of flaunting one's wealth. Since I rarely had enough to flaunt, I tended to stick with the cheap stuff.

But the wine industry, long accustomed to change and adaptation, had seen the writing on the early Queendom's walls, and rolled with the times. They still grew their grapes the old-fashioned way, with robot labor and nano-optimized soil conditioners, and while they copyrighted every vintage, they actually copied and sold only the best of the best. But except in rare cases, they revoked the old recipes at the end of every market year, replacing them with new ones from the latest crop. If you really liked a particular vintage, you were obliged to buy as many bottles as your cellar would hold, because its like would never come again. So you either had to fill a cellar with the stuff, or pay the aftermarket prices on the collectors' market. Ouch.

I, however, belonged to the Wine Resistance movement. If you knew a bit, and were a good researcher of long-dormant archives, you could dig up the pattern of some ancient vintage whose creators had died heirless and alone. The public domain wines were mostly swill, but I had personally discovered two of these grayware vintages, which could be freely duplicated to my heart's content, and I'd bartered them for a dozen more on the semisecret Resistance exchange.

They were always the same, alas, but so were the "perfect" bourbons. This particular bottle was an atomically exact Delle Venezie Pinot Grigio, from 2203 at the tail end of Late Modernity. Possibly the oldest surviving Pinot Grigio, as delicate and fruity as the day it was archived. And it was excellent, even when chugged.

"You'll never guess who I saw this week," I said to Theddy as I uncorked our second bottle.

"Pamela Red," Theddy answered immediately. Was I that transparent? A lawyer really did need a better poker face than this, because Theddy read even more from my expression. "Oh, you saw her, did you? In the biblical sense? Did you run into her as well? Come across her, so to speak? Good for you, old boy."

I suffered some more teasing of an even less gentlemanly sort, until Theddy finally asked, "How's she doing, anyway?"

"Well. Very well. She's got a gorgeous house down in AntiLand, on the top of Mount Terror. You should see it sometime."

"She got that on a programmer's salary?"

"Well, she calls it a fluke, and I believe her. But yes, she's a programmer. Specializing in materials design."

"Mmm," Theddy said around a heavy swallow of dirt-cheap Pinot. "That would explain it. That's where all the glory is, where all the money is these days. If you ask me, my job is harder: making sure the materials actually work. However wonderful your brick may be, if it's wellstone you've still got to run power and data from point A to point B. You've got to manage waste heat, and if there's gas and fluid transport involved, the plumbing has to go somewhere. Also, a lot of materials aren't structural without an impervium mesh woven through them, and if you ever want the brick to be anything else, to be programmable like the rest of the world, then you'd better have some computing elements listening for commands. These things don't happen by themselves."

"I thought hypercomputers did all that."

"Everybody thinks that. That's why the job doesn't pay well. But hypercomputers don't feel, Carmine, not like we do. You can load them with algorithms for aesthetics and common sense, but it doesn't make them human. It's a human world we want, right? Computers are always seeking pathological solutions—you know, kill the cockroaches by roasting the whole apartment and then faxing fresh people. That actually happened! And if nothing else it takes a human to add those boo boos to the common-sense database. No do, you stupid machine.

"But we do a lot more than just that. There are copyright issues, security and permissions issues. Hypercomputers will follow the letter of the law every time—they have to—and they're practically paralyzed as a result. To no one's benefit. And there are always profiteers exploiting loopholes, sneaking adware materials onto private property and then wrapping themselves up in the law. Sanctimonious jerks. Half my house calls are to defeat some security system or other, because the wellwood stopped working or the window glass is suddenly demanding back royalties."

"So it's an art," I said, "like everything else that matters."

"Yeah."

"Speaking of which, are you still involved with the theater?"

"Indeed I am," Theddy said. "In fact, that's where my troubles began. I was going to so many plays, and posting so many opinions about what I saw, that one of the news services finally signed me on as part of their appreciators pool."

I knew about of those, yeah: appended to the remarks of professional reviewers were the Aficionados' and People's Choice scores, along with occasional snippets of commentary from their discussion boards. I'd even considered, at one point, quitting law to become a poverty-stricken food appreciator. But I didn't see a connection to Theddy's case, and said so.

Theddy's glass was empty again, and he waved it for a refill, which I provided. "See, the other appreciators were getting really burned off with me. 'You've already got a job,' they said. 'Why're you hogging an aficionado slot as well? You're taking a livelihood away from someone on Basic Assistance. Someone who loves the theater as much as you do."

"Now that's pathetic," I said.

But Theddy's take on it was more forgiving: "There are a lot of people who have nothing else to contribute, Carbo. They make good spectators, and where would the arts be without good spectators? But they can be really pushy about it. Really defensive. Some of these people, it means a lot more to them than it should. They started getting ugly, making threats."

"Ah. And you thought Angry Young Theddy could help."

"Well, yeah. A bit of him, anyway. The fire of youth to temper the iron of wisdom. But fire is tricky."

Those were Theddy's last words, and for the record, when the Constabulary had reconstructed the events that followed, I was fully exonerated of any negligence or inaction. The tampering with my home and office records had occurred during the moments while Theddy's image was in transit, and had triggered no firewall alerts or quantum decoherence flags. The camera that appeared in my ceiling was a mesh of microscopic sensors which my eyes could not possibly have discerned, even if I'd known where to look.

And although I was in fact looking right at Theddy—pouring the last of the Pinot Grigio into his glass, in fact—when the wellcloth of the pillows beneath him crackled and turned to metal, when the floor became a grid of high-voltage lines . . . I'll feel terrible about it for the rest of my life—forever, in other words—but I didn't know what was happening, or why, and even if I did there was really nothing I could have done about it.

When the corners of Theddy's lips drew backward and upward, exposing his teeth, I thought at first that he was smiling. But then his body began to jerk, and smoke, and his eyes grew milky, and I hope to God that the brain damage happened early, because if it didn't, then Theddy, paralyzed and twitching, felt his own hair catch fire, his own skin blacken and peel away. Was the general alarm the last thing he heard?

These were not only my speculations, but those of an entire Queendom of voyeurs, for there hadn't been a lurid murder in twenty years, nor an electrocution in over a hundred. And such events—even before they'd become rare—had always been strange.

10.
Judgments, Final

The trial was only two hours long, and very nearly a formality. Theodore Great Kaffner, Sr.'s only physical body had been murdered, and the only recent copies of him—in the fax buffers of my home and office—had been expertly deleted. Angry Young Theddy did not deny his involvement in these acts, and even if he'd tried, he wouldn't have gotten very far in light of the Constabulary's overwhelming evidence.

On the face of it, he was guilty as sin, but Young Carmine, true to his beer-soaked promises, had mounted a spirited defense. Theddy was guilty, yes, but of what, exactly? Young Carmine consistently used the term "voluntary file maintenance" to describe the incident, and insisted that at the time of said maintenance, Young Theddy had had no way of knowing he'd been legally partitioned into a pair of twins. Thus, he was incapable of criminal intent in the commission of these acts, and if any loss or suffering resulted, it was—to Theddy's mind—of a self-inflicted sort which the law could frown on but not actually forbid.

It was, I thought, quite a savvy maneuver for a counselor so young. It made sense, and if justice were a purely logical affair, or an attempt to move forward with the minimum social damage, it might possibly have prevailed. But the other function of law is to frighten, to make examples, to discourage further thoughts of wrongdoing in the hearts of human beings. And the facts of the case remained incontrovertible: one legal individual was killed through the deliberate and premeditated actions of another. In the end, Young Carmine did about as well for Theddy as anyone could expect: malicious negligence resulting in death.

Tragically, of the durable archives Theddy had stored over the course of his life, the most recent was nearly twenty years out of date, and when it was printed and briefed and placed on the stand to provide commentary for the sentencing, all it could do was hang its head and weep. There was just too much missing from its life. It couldn't make sense of the actions of older or younger Theddy, nor of the circumstances it found itself awakened to. When the court asked if it wished to be marked disposable, and thus erased, the copy nodded slowly and was led away by the bailiffs.

As for Young Theddy, he was sentenced to 100 years' hard labor, without the possibility of parole, and since he was barely twenty-five years in subjective age, this was about as close to a death sentence as a person could get, without murdering thousands or attempting to destroy the sun. A century of subjugation, of cheek-to-jowl contact with humanity's hardest customers. When that was over, nothing would remain of the Theddy I went to college with. Theodore Great Kaffner had managed to destroy himself, and this date was one I would always remember as the true time and place of his death.

There have always been tragedies, and perhaps there always will be: sad events with a momentum of their own, which benefit no one and which make the world a poorer place. And yet, in a way, this was a fitting end for a prankster like Theddy. Hoist on his own petard, indeed. What a lark! I sobbed off and on throughout the trial, dabbing at my tears with a wellcloth handkerchief, but even so I could not avoid the occasional giggle or snort. Even Theddy's younger self, doomed to ruin, seemed on some level to appreciate the irony. He smiled and waved as they led him away, and would no doubt make friends in prison by throwing himself down the stairs.

Ever mindful of the convenience of its patrons, the court had scheduled my own case next on the docket. And this one really was a formality, for I had sent an offer to myself the night before, and accepted it gratefully. I, the older Carmine, would cede that portion of my wealth which the younger Carmine had rightfully earned, and Young Carmine would cede the name, changing his own to Ralph Faxborn Douglas. He would also move to a different city, seek new acquaintances, and change his face and hairstyle in minor but telling ways. As for Ralph's ongoing maintenance, I offered a generous five-year stipend, to give him a chance to get on his feet, to find a job or found a business somewhere. But Ralph, awash in notoriety, had no shortage of job offers, and had already licensed his story—our story—for a tidy sum which I agreed not to dispute or attach in any way. No further settlement was needed.

On the stand I was asked by the judge to confirm that yes, these were the terms I had agreed to. And I felt a momentary pang before answering, for letting go of my youth was a hard thing to do. But I spoke clearly for the record: "Yes, Your Honor. Ralph Douglas and I are in full agreement."

It was a sad affair all the way around, made all the more stressful and surreal for me by the presence of Pamela Red in the audience. What was she doing here? The question plagued me throughout both trials, only to be answered at the end, when I watched her fall happily into the arms of Ralph Faxborn. This was not my Pamela at all, the Antarctican matter programmer, but rather the archived student, still burning with passion, over whom I had pined for a decade and more, risking nearly everything. I watched the two of them, warm and happy together, and wondered if I'd ever feel a thing like that again. Was youth a necessary component?

Against my better judgment, I went over to talk to them. "You two look . . . happy together."

"Thank you for everything," Ralph said. "For life itself. I apologize for not trusting you."

And I answered him sternly: "Never apologize for being cautious. The world is full of nasty surprises, and lawyers, at least, must stand prepared. Until I'd thought about it, I was going to erase you." I paused a moment and then added, "Look, I've learned a lot over the years, about being you. We should sit down. Have a chat."

"And turn me into yourself?" Ralph laughed at that. "Another generous offer, sir, but I'll have to decline. Is my own future not bright? If you survived our trials and tribulations, I reckon I won't do any worse. And time will tell, sir, but I reckon I have a certain advantage as well, coming to this world as a traveler from its past. It gives a certain outsider's perspective which ought, I think, to be useful. So if it's all the same to you, I will ignore you as I would my own father. Fair enough?"

"You're a clever boy," I said, and it wasn't entirely a compliment.

All the while, young Pamela had been looking me over with great curiosity. And if this was painful, why, returning her gaze was like leaping into a furnace. "And you, young lady," I said as evenly as I could manage. "I'm quite flabbergasted to see you here."

"I imagine you are," she said, with a sympathy that was agonizingly genuine, and equally condescending. "I don't know your history, and I don't care to. But it upsets me to think I've caused you pain."

And that one really knocked the stuffing out of me. Young Pamela had always had a knack for that, for hitting me where I was weakest while trying, in some vague way, to be nice. And suddenly I was able to forgive her for that, for all of it. Because she was just some kid, and didn't know any better. How could she?

I nodded slowly. "Yes. Well. The intent behind your words is appreciated. Have you spoken with . . . yourself?"

"I have," she said, "and it's her you should be talking to, not me. I felt her letting go of a lot of anger. If you want to . . . you know, pounce in a moment of weakness . . . well, now would be time."

"Thanks for the tip," I said, laughing in spite of myself. And then, more thoughtfully: "She and I fought such battles over you. It's ironic, and rather sad, that she didn't surrender you sooner."

Pamela just looked at me then, with a wise sort of weariness, and said, "Love isn't a surrender, but a gift. Sometimes we return it unopened, but we never fail to appreciate it. If you're going to talk about me like a thing, at least have the right sort of thing in mind, all right? The real question to ask yourself is why she suddenly feels like giving."

God, she sounded so good. So lovely, so perfect. And Ralph, too, was everything a mutant, sexually deviant father could hope for. Surely here was a young man who could do no wrong, no matter what the provocation.

"I wish you both the very best of luck," I said with conviction.

And the two of them smiled at me as they might a distant relative, and then turned, arm-in-arm, and walked away. The perfect couple, yes. This was no longer the world they'd been copied from, and they were not those people. Not quite. Maybe things would be different this time.

The smart thing for me to do then would have been to go back home and get to work. There was plenty of work for me, always. But life was too short for that, yes? Even if it lasted forever. I had a flair for the dramatic and a nose for the strange; it was time to take a risk.

Still, it took all my strength to keep from shouting after them, "Fool! She's five months from dumping you!"

* * *

"The Policeman’s Daughter" is set within the world of Wil McCarthy’s novel The Collapsium, out in April 2020 from Baen Books. McCarthy is a former contributing editor for WIRED magazine and science columnist for the SyFy channel, where his "Lab Notes" column ran for ten years. His short fiction has graced the pages of magazines like Analog, Asimov's, WIRED, and SF Age. His novel Antediluvian is out from Baen Books. Lost in Transmission, an entry in McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol series is out from Baen, and The Collapsium, The Wellstone, and To Crush the Moon will appear in all-new Baen editions throughout 2020. McCarthy has also written for television, and appeared on the History Channel and the Science Channel. In addition to fiction and journalism, McCarthy also writes patents for a top law firm in Dallas.

Peregoy’s Wolves

Nancy Kress

As soon as he emerged from his cabin, Jedson saw the girl. At first she was just a blur of red at the base of the snowy mountain on the western side of the small valley. He blinked on visual augmentation and there she was, dressed in a crimson thinsuit so form-fitting that it didn’t look warm enough. He knew it was, and what she was. Her shuttle must have come down somewhere in the trees, and they must have figured out tech to make the landing silent.

She was the first person he’d seen in seven or eight years.

He stood staring, an old man in a ragged parka, boots patched with pieces of other boots, a pail dangling from his hand. He needed clean snow to melt. Last night a fresh fall had covered the heavy, crunchy snow on slopes and valley. Also, he’d hoped to catch another glimpse of the young wolf he’d spotted at dawn. The girl stood nearly where the wolf had been, as if in mythic transformation.

“Hello,” she said, and her voice sounded at normal volume right before him, materializing in the vapor from his breath. More new tech.

“Hello.” His own voice, so long unused, sounded scratchy. Could she hear him?

She could. “Who are you?”

He debated giving his name, but could see no reason not to. In a sudden spirit of mockery he said, “Ethan Louis Jedson III. Who are you?”

“Mary.”

No surname. Significant? He said, “From which of the Three Worlds?”

“Mary Peregoy.”

He hadn’t expected that, and looked more closely at the girl.

Tall, slim, with brown curls cascading from under her hood and over the shoulders of the thinsuit. She looked in her early twenties but could be much older; even Jedson, who hadn’t left the Arctic in twenty years, knew about rejuv treatments. He’d been fifteen when the last colony ship left the ruined Earth. In the fifty-five years since, he’d picked up some news from orbital-monitor chatter, but his equipment failed decades ago. Still, he knew that one of the three worlds reachable from Earth by the alien gate had been claimed, settled, and ruled by the powerful Peregoy family.

“Why are you here, Mary Peregoy? Curiosity? Environmental study? Romantic nostalgia?”

She laughed, and in the pleasant chuckle Jedson heard the painful echo of his wife, dead decades ago in one of the bio-wars. He banished the memory instantly. Memories weakened him.

Mary said, “Romantic nostalgia over this place? Not likely.”

And yet “this place,” which once had had a name in what had once been northern Alaska, was the best that Earth could still offer. Jedson, and the surviving wildlife, could scrape out subsistence here, as no one could do in the howling deserts of the middle latitudes, where on a summer day the temperature could reach 150 degrees and the dust storms 100 miles per hour. She knew all that, of course she did.

He repeated, “Why are you here?”

“’Environmental study’ is close enough. Why are you here, Dr. Jedson?”

So she had ocular data access without even raising a screen. Envy stabbed him. He said dryly, “Environmental study.”

“That wasn’t your field.”

“No. But it is now.”

She chuckled again, and this time he felt neither pain nor envy. Her body had shifted slightly and he saw the weapon strapped to her back. A precaution? Or . . .

She said, “You’ve survived here alone for . . . how long?”

“Twenty years.”

“In this same place?”

“Yes. You’re seeing it in winter. It’s different in summer.”

“Better?”

“Worse. Insects, temperatures, the constant risk of fires. But you already know that from orbital monitoring, don’t you?”

She ignored the question. “Why didn’t you go to one of the enclaves? There are a few left, struggling along. You’re an educated man, Dr. Jedson, and an enclave would at least have some minimal civilization.”

“I didn’t want to live caged in a mostly underground enclave.”

“So instead you live in a this barely surviving wilderness.”

“Yes. What are you looking for, Mary?”

“Do you count all the game? Catalogue plants? Accumulate data on what survived climate change and biowars?”

“I do.”

“And what will you do with all your data? If you like, I can take it back to the Eight Worlds, if you have a means to upload it to my shuttle.”

“I don’t. It’s on paper.” Preciously hoarded paper, covered with the tiniest possible writing, and still the paper had run out a year ago. He did not say that. “So there are eight settled worlds now?”

“Yes. More stargates were discovered since your time.”

As if his time was over. Well, it nearly was. He said, “If you come down to my cabin, I can give you the papers.” The chance almost took his breath away. To get his data to other scientists, no matter how different their training or mind-set had become in the hundred years since the Great Escape began . . . a chance he’d never dared hope for.

But Mary laughed again, and this time it was not a pleasant chuckle. “Come to your cabin, where you can try to kill and rob me? I don’t think so.”

Which told him all he needed to know about her.

He said, “You possess nothing I want.”

Her mouth pursed in disbelief. His own expression must have reacted to that, because she said, “You have visual augmentation.”

“As do you.”

She shrugged: Of course.

Somewhere to the east, a wolf howled, probably the same one Jedson had seen at dawn today, twilight yesterday. This time, however, there was an answering call. The girl’s entire body stiffened and she unsheathed her weapon.

Jedson said, “That’s not necessary. The wolves won’t attack you.”

“Are they a pack?”

“I haven’t seen a wolf pack here in years. But I think that call-and-response is an attempt to form one.”

“I thought wolves always lived in packs. Don’t those two have a pack already?”

“My guess is that they’re dispersers. Leaving packs too big to include them and looking to mate.” February, breeding time.

“I see,” Mary said. But she kept hold of the rifle and looked speculatively in the direction of the first wolf call. Her body shifted again and her lips curved faintly upward.

No. No no no.

“Excuse me a minute,” Jedson said. “An old man’s urinary tract.” He put down the still empty pail, went into the cabin, and took down his rifle. There were fewer than a thousand bullets left, and no more coming, ever. Jedson had served in the National Guard, back when there was both a nation and anything to guard. He had killed, during the Seattle Food Riots. A long time ago, and even as a young soldier he’d hated killing. But he was not going to let some touristy, would-be game hunter get cheap thrills from shooting one of the few remaining large mammals on—as far as he knew—the entire planet.

He went outside and aimed the rifle at Mary. She smiled. “You’re out of range, Doctor. Do you think I didn’t data-check on that rifle the second you opened the cabin door?”

God, how fast was her data retrieval?

She went on, “To hit me at this range, you’d have to be a phenomenal shot. And anyway, I’m not going to kill your wolves. That’s not why I’m here.” A drone cleared the ridge, undoubtedly launched from the shuttle. Small, disc-shaped, featureless, it hovered over Mary’s head like a detached silver halo.

Jedson said, “You’re going to tranquilize and capture the wolves. Or at least, you think you can.”

“I can. You have no idea how the tech has improved since your day.”

“Why capture wolves?”

“Sloan Peregoy wants them. He’s the CEO of New California now. The Peregoy family—”

“I know who they are.” Or were, anyway. One of the three unimaginably rich people who’d first wrecked Earth and then fled it during the Great Escape, taking their families and hangers-on and businesses and respective cultures with them. Samuel Peregoy, Kezia Landry, Patrick Fenton. When Jedson was a child, growing up between the feedback loops of run-away climate change and the stupid tragedy of biowarfare, everybody knew those three despised and worshipped and envied names.

He tried to keep his voice steady. “Why would this Sloan Peregoy want wolves?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. It’s my job to go get them.”

“And you always do your job.”

“I do.” She smiled again and he saw that he’d been wrong, misled by rejuv tech. This was no young girl; she was an experienced and cynical woman. “And I do my job well, including prep. I know there’s no elk or bison or caribou left and the wolves eat mice and insects and pretty much anything else they can find. I know their denning and marking and hunting habits. I know what diseases they get, or used to get.”

“You don’t know as much as you think you do. Wolves die in captivity.”

“No, they don’t. But even if this pair does die, Director Sloan is prepared to create clones from their DNA, carried to term by dogs. You don’t have any dogs left, do you? But there are dogs on New California. I myself have a pink toy poodle. Very cute.”

She was taunting him. Jedson said, “Wolves need freedom.”

Mary said, “Really? You’re a proponent of unrestricted freedom? That’s what got Earth into this dismal state in the first place. Everybody free to wage the war of all against all. We don’t permit that on New California.”

“Freedom didn’t wreck Earth. Unbridled technology did. Your New California would be an alien environment to wolves. Different microbes, different food, different ecology.”

“We have techniques for microbe alteration and we breed mice brought from Earth. Sloan will construct an artificial ecology for the wolves.”

“An alien cage.”

“This northern ecology of yours won’t last much longer. The sixth extinction is well underway, you know that. So is it better for these wolves, or their clones, to live in an alien cage and flourish or to die undernourished and ill here?”

The old argument, as old as the walled cities of Sumer: safety or freedom?

Stubbornly, he repeated, “These wolves will die if you take them to New California.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. As I said, we know a lot about wolves. What I didn’t know about was you. I’ll make you a proposition.”

Jedson said nothing.

“You were a noted wildlife biologist. You have a lot of first-hand information, on those papers you mentioned and in your head, information that our scientists would like to have. Put down your antiquated rifle, take off your boots and parka, and walk toward me. You won’t freeze in that short a time. I’ll tanglefoam you, bring you aboard the shuttle, and we’ll capture the wolves together. Then I’ll take you with me to a better life on New California. I have no reason to want you dead, Dr. Jedson. You must know that.”

He did know it. He was too irrelevant to her, to the worlds beyond the gates, to kill.

When Jedson didn’t answer, she added, a bit impatiently, “It’s a generous offer. Earth emigration was officially closed decades ago.”

“And you have enough standing to flout that decree. Sloan Peregoy must want those wolves pretty badly. Thank you, but no.”

Silence, before she said, “You’re a fool, Doctor.”

“Oh, for my entire life, so why stop now.”

At her smile, her first without sarcasm or condescension, he thought, Once I would have liked her, even been attracted to her. The thought was unsettling.

The drone stopped hovering and flew east. Despite himself, Jedson said, “What will it do?”

“Shoot them with tranquilizers and then drop a net over them, singly or together. There’s a cage prepared on the shuttle.”

He pictured it, and felt sickened.

They stood there in the snow, facing each other across the small valley, Mary’s crimson thinsuit glowing all the more brightly as the sun rose higher. Behind her, the mountain loomed white—but for how much longer? Jedson had hoped that Arctic snow in winter would last his lifetime. But, then, both had already continued longer than he’d expected.

Mary’s gaze followed the drone.

#

He could not stand outside, watching, the whole day.

He could not hike around looking for the wolves; the drone would follow him and anyway, what good would it do? Jedson busied himself with things he could not concentrate on. Then, in the late afternoon, he snowshoed a long circuitous route partway up the western mountain and then down again, sneaking up on the shuttle to see if it was still there. It was.

Her voice came from the hulk of gleaming metal. “The drone didn’t find them.”

“Not a very intelligent drone.”

“I knew wolves were mostly nocturnal, but I read that they also will hunt by day.”

“If they have to,” he said, “and aren’t preoccupied with mating.”

“My offer still stands, Dr. Jedson.”

“So does my answer.”

His muscles ached from his calves clear up to the base of his skull. The trip back to the cabin was hard, and he had to rest often, leaning on a stick. He was too old for this.

But at twilight he heard a wolf again. Not a call-and-response; this was different. The male was establishing territory, warning off all other canines: This area has been claimed. Jedson would have bet there were no other canines to warn, not jackals nor coyotes nor other wolves, within fifty miles. But the atavistic territorial impulse continued: Mine, mine, mine. Hunting grounds, planets.

The howl sounded again, closer.

He threw on his parka and rushed out of the cabin. The wolves were crossing the ridge line to the east, lit by the dying sun and waxing moon. Mary was not visible. But the drone was, driving forward from above the trees on the western slope. The wolves started to run, two gray shapes against the snow. Jedson blinked on augmented vision.

The male, his large head carried at the same height as his sloping back, loped along on powerful legs. Jedson’s heart hurt at the female’s fur patchy with sarcoptic mange, and at how skinny she was. A low-ranking member in her old pack.

The drone dropped low enough for the male to turn, raise his head, and snarl, teeth bared. It made no difference, of course. Jedson didn’t see the tranquilizer darts, just the two animals dropping onto the snow as the sun sank below the western mountaintop. The drone hovered for a few minutes above the prone bodies, making sure they weren’t moving. Then the net shot out from the belly of the drone and enveloped the animals. How did its filaments, which Jedson could barely make out in the dying light, get under the wolves’ bellies? More technology that Jedson would never understand.

The drone lifted and, more slowly than Jedson would have dared hope, began ferrying its quiescent weight across the valley.

He did not have much time.

His cabin stood halfway between the drone and the shuttle. He ran, falling into snow, getting up again, too driven to feel the cold. The valley darkened with February night and, despite the half moon, he needed his ancient headlamp. Faster . . . faster . . . he could go no faster. He was an old man, and the drone was state-of-the-art Peregoy technology from the Three—no, Eight now—Worlds beyond the stars. The drone vanished behind the trees, easily beating him to the shuttle.

How long would it take her to get the wolves aboard, untangled from the net, and into their cage? Would she give them some drug, hidden in the kind of meat they had not tasted their entire scrawny lives, to keep them calm on the journey? Maybe the tranquilizer would wear off too soon, while she was still handling them, and one or both would attack her. Maybe.

He knew that would not happen.

Finally, in near-darkness, he came in sight of the shuttle. Now he turned to his second fear: what if his explosive had decayed over time? Much, much time. He didn’t know, and for so long he’d had no way to find out. No military manuals, no internet.

Jedson stood a quarter mile from the shuttle. He pressed the detonator. You don’t know as much as you think you do, he’d said to Mary Peregoy. But, then, who did?

She didn’t know anything about kinds of snow, how it fell, accumulated, moved. New California, Jedson had read, had no axial tilt. No seasons.

The explosion split the gloom, sound without light. The snow on the mountain began to slide. It made its own roar as the avalanche gathered momentum. Jedson had been careful where he’d placed the munition. Huge flaky clouds, ghostly white in the moonlight, barreled down the mountain a safe distance from the shuttle.

The door flung open and Mary leaned out, her lovely face contorted in fear. Had she ever thought how afraid the wolves must have been of the drone? The thought strengthened Jedson enough to raise his rifle, even as his mind screamed, I can’t I can’t.

He did. His first shot took her in the breast, and he knew he wouldn’t need a second. The top of her body fell backward into the shuttle but then, because she’d been leaning so far forward toward the source of the noise, the center of gravity that was her rump slid forward and her she slid out of the open door, down three shallow steps, and halfway into the snow, smearing blood behind her from the exit would.

Jedson moved slowly forward. If there had been any other way . . .

He hadn’t been able to find one.

She lay face-up, eyes open, dressed in something women must sleep in now, flimsy white pants and short-sleeved top. Water froze on Jedson’s eyelids. He reached down to move her off the steps so he could climb them and free the wolves.

The second he pulled her off the steps, the shuttle door closed. The steps retracted. A moment later, the craft began to hum.

“No!”

But there was nothing he could do. She’d programmed it to launch automatically if she couldn’t launch it, if her mission was unsuccessful and herself dead. A report back to whoever was supposed to be informed of the outcome, maybe Sloan Peregoy himself. Jedson had not anticipated that. He had not known enough about the tech of her world.

He watched the shuttle rise from the ruined planet toward the unseen gate orbiting somewhere near the moon, the gate that would take the wolves to the stars.

He would never know what happened to them.

#

It was hard work to drag her body, wrapped in a blanket already wet from Jedson’s flailing in the snow, across the valley. In the light from his headlamp, the valley seemed to grow wider and wider. Eventually, exhausted and soaked and freezing despite the effort, he brought her inside, where animals could not tear at her flesh. Then he stripped off everything and collapsed onto his bed.

In the first light of morning, he buried her a few hundred yards from the cabin, in a patch of sunlit dirt already free of snow. Even ten years ago, his shovel would have hit permafrost a few feet down. Not now.

In a place like this, two hundred years ago, had been found the oldest known wolf fossil, a tooth a million years old. Three hundred years ago, there had still been 10,000 wolves in Alaska and 60,000 in Canada. In ancient Greece, wolves had been associated with Apollo, god of light and order. In the Pawnee creation myth, the wolf was the first animal brought to Earth. Wolves were survivors.

But—

His shovel hit a rock. Too tired to move it immediately, Jedson leaned on his shovel, panting. An old Inuit song came to him:

“I think over again

My small adventures, my fears,

Those small ones that seemed so big

For all the vital things I had to get and to reach—

And yet there is only one great thing:

To live and see the great day that dawns

And the light that fills the world.”

Jedson heaved the rock out of the hole, dug the grave deeper, and lowered Mary Peregoy into it. In another two or three hundred thousand years would come another dawn, another great light. Geologic weathering, cold-water absorption of CO, and a host of other slow, slow processes would bring Earth’s climate to a new equilibrium. The planet, too, was a survivor.

And humanity, if it still existed, might return to Earth. Jedson didn’t believe they would bring wolves back with them, but maybe he was wrong.

He hoped so.

* * *

This story is set in the world of Nancy Kress’s novel The Eleventh Gate, out from Baen Books in May 2020. She is the author of thirty-three books, including twenty-six novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and has been translated into two dozen languages, including Klingon. In addition to writing, Kress often teaches at various venues, including a visiting lectureship at the University of Leipzig, a 2017 writing class in Beijing, and the annual intensive workshop Taos Toolbox, which she teaches every summer with Walter Jon Williams.